To what extent do you owe loyalty to a once beloved friend, who in his youth was wise and sober and vigorous, but who has now descended into a kind of angry manic insanity, and has become a slave to the voices in his head, voices that tell him the world is not what is seems, but is ruled by bright secret forces only he can see, a friend who shouts “I don’t see it!” when you show him what is there before him, a friend who, as he destroys himself in obvious agony, declares “This is good!”?
It is not an easy question to answer—and there may be no good answer. How much did you love your friend? How much are you willing to sacrifice for him? Perhaps you have tried various cures, and found that, not only have none of them worked, but all have made the problem worse. So should you enter into your friend’s destructive delusions? Should you embrace them as he does, to show how much you care? Surely not.
What to do?
This sad scenario is now common. And growing commoner. So much so that it not only applies to individuals, but to the institutions staffed by a growing woke army.
Science is, as you know, one of these institutions. Let’s take as a now-everyday example the peer-reviewed paper “Protecting Pregnant People and Babies from the Health Effects of Climate Change” in the once-prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, by Sonja A. Rasmussen and Denise J. Jamieson.
Doctors used to be trained in how the body works. How things, like bodies, work is the very definition of science. But lately they (as we have seen before) have begun demanding not to be told how the body works in medical school. They cannot bear to be shown Reality as it is. They deny it when they see it. They instead insist on the right to declare that men can get pregnant.
Which is insane. It is not so. It cannot be so. This is not a matter of opinion.
But science, in its field of medicine, is our friend. Or used to be. We loved it once. We hate to see what it has become. What to do?
To save our friend, should we enter into its delusion? Rather, delusions? What if they make their delusion a prerequisite to being a member of their field? What if they, being authorities, convince lawmakers to make their delusion the law? Henceforth, they shall declare, all must avow the delusion to be truth—at least, in public—or pay a penalty.
Yet are you obliged to follow a delusional unjust law? What if you want to keep your job? On how many things do you think you’ll have to surrender before it’s “one step” too far?
Now I used the plural. There is more than one form of madness here. One acute and devastating, one chronic and debilitating.
Our ladies list many things that might go wrong once “climate change” hits, and, like many, come to believe all life will grow worse under “climate change.” “Failure to combat climate change poses a major health threat to the entire population.” That’s a lot of people.
It remains a logical possibility that everything will become worse. It is a logical, but not sensible, possibility. It is, as I claimed, mildly delusional. Even they must know this, because they strangely focus on one small fractional item, wildfires.
They believe wildfires are bad, and that people in the path of them can suffer if hit by them. Well, so much is science, but of a banal sort. How many believe breathing smoke from wildfires is healthy?
These wildfires, which somehow people in the future will not know how to escape, will destroy all people in their path, “pregnant people” and children hardest hit. The smoke—and here they make a slip which shows their deadlier delusion has not metastasized—will cause “an increased risk of gestational hypertension and gestational diabetes, conditions that can carry long-term health risks for the mother.”
The mother. Doubtless this slipped by in their enthusiasm to list all possible smoke- and fire-induced injuries, which are many, and it’s a solid bet that they’d replace it with “pregnant people” if alerted to their inconsistency.
But they did make the error. Which means their disturbance can be healed. We don’t need to join them in their fantasy. We just need to show them what they really believe.
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> woke and DIE, which are the most potent corrosives known to man. Woke and DIE will kill anything they touch, not just science.
~~William M. Briggs
For me, understanding that modern politics, science and religion have been polluted and essentially ruint by Gnosticism leads me to reply – withdraw.
There is literally nothing to be gained by banging your head against the Gnostic wall.
Keep the Faith once delivered and enjoy life to the extent that it is possible.
In his exegesis of Genesis, the great Cornelius a Lapide reminds us that the Saints are like the stars Such is a man who keeps the word of God in a perverse and twisted generation; He is like a light shining in the evening sky. Therefore just as the stars do not, on the account of the insults of men, abandon the way of virtue, piety and zeal shown and given to them by God. Wherefore, the pious men will not pay any more attention to the insolent wisecracks of buffoons than the moon does to boys who make faces at her or the barking dogs howling as her while she shines the whole night.
Of course you will war for Based Reality against puissant Gnosticism but you must do so like an Irishman who enjoys the battle even knowing he will lose the war.
It is well and truly over.
A slight correction to Matt’s post. My sources, who submit to biomedical journals like NEJM and thus are in positions to know, tell me that apparently, no, the authors did not ‘slip up’ by using ‘mother’. ‘Mother’ is not yet officially axed — everybody who’s anybody knows that. But be sure to ask again tomorrow.
“Do We Join In The Insanity, Withdraw, Or Fix It?”
Yes.
In this through a glass darkly world we will occasionally discover that we had joined in the insanity. Think back on your misspent youth. The cult’s brainwashing was pervasive and insidious. As wisdom waxes so does sanity and the will to say no.
Withdraw from the cult as much as possible. Even to the extant of not giving it wrath or fear, for the cult feeds on sin — pride, greed, avarice, lust, wrath, fear, et cetera, is oxygen for the beast. Absent our sins the cult would vanish.
And fix the mess as best one can with the means at hand. Speak the truth, live in honor, follow God’s law, and join with like-minded men to create sane and Godly communities. The beast is much less powerful and competent than the “Wizard of Oz” illusion it likes to project. It is parasitic, requires consent, operates on the destructive principle, and eventually devours itself. There are places outside its power where men may thrive.
I fought it and lost. I withdrew. I shake my head at what’s happening. I try to impart as much wisdom as I can, mainly, that the easiest person to fool is yourself and remember that things may not be what they seem or what you think they are. When dealing with contingent things, never forget that not only that you may be wrong, and that everyone else may be wrong as well. Seek God, put Him first in all things. Pray that He gives you the knowledge and strength that you need.
Vermont Crank, that is a fine quote: “Such is a man who keeps the word of God in a perverse and twisted generation; He is like a light shining in the evening sky. Therefore just as the stars do not, on the account of the insults of men, abandon the way of virtue, piety and zeal shown and given to them by God. Wherefore, the pious men will not pay any more attention to the insolent wisecracks of buffoons than the moon does to boys who make faces at her or the barking dogs howling as her while she shines the whole night.”
I think this ties in with Jesus’ difficult teaching, love your enemies — it is a spiritual tonic to the poison of hatred and wrath; a strength, and not some unrealistic, effeminate foolishness.
“Of course you will war for Based Reality against puissant Gnosticism but you must do so like an Irishman who enjoys the battle even knowing he will lose the war.”
That Irishman lost the war because he was piss-drunk and always picking the wrong fight, just for the hell of it. And seriously, what war did we ever win? You might make a case for our War of Independence, but there was also the revolutionary, enlightenment aspect that has born evil fruit. Who won the Civil War is still in dispute, and it may be argued nobody won. WWI & WWII we foolishly thought we won but turns out it was the World Devouring Empire that actually won and we were just the chumps that raised it up while enslaving ourselves. Whoops. And now we see the Beast Cult agitating for a new civil war. The Beast loves to see men fighting and destroying themselves. It does everything it can to stoke animosity, division, and conflict. Our folly is the beast’s fuel. That’s not to say a man doesn’t have the right to defend himself, but be exceedingly cautious not to escalate conflict foolishly, and thereby feed the Beast.
“It is well and truly over.”
You feed the Beast with despair you big cranky green mountain dunce — put on this conical hat and sit in the corner for ten minutes.
Even if, as is currently the case, more than half of the published papers [ideas] are deliberately based on fabrications, the scientific method [reality] nevertheless has the power to expose the delusions thus rampant through empiricism and not to deflect the arrow of reason from its target; the curiosity of youth is innate, but also mentally fragile prey of pedagogues dummies. Anyone who still has reservations here can not be helped.
“the scientific method [reality] nevertheless has the power to expose the delusions”
The scientific method is merely what used to be called common sense. Make a guess then try and see if it works. If it doesn’t then admit it and try something else.
Too many people engage in magical thinking. Well, perhaps it’s not thinking at all–it’s letting their imaginations run wild. So much of today’s entertainment (all media is entertainment) delivers science fiction fantasy, whether comic book super heroes, the Star Trek/Star Wars variety, or the current Tolkien series pumped out by Amazon.
The unreality of this entertainment makes fantastic imaginings normative. What is reality when people inundate themselves in fantasy–believing what they engage as reality, with actual reality an inconvenience, e.g., men getting pregnant is as simple as believing women can trans-ition to “being” men, and therefore can become pregnant. This is completely possible in their unreality.
Theodore Dalrymple put it best (paraphrasing), the purpose of lies is to humiliate; the less it corresponds to reality the better. When people are forced to repeat the lies, they lose their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
We ought to fix it.
But before we can be allowed to fix it, the blockages of people standing in our way need to realize that it is broken and that they broke it by going woke.
But explaining anything to them does not work. Logic and explanations are assumed to be white supremacy. That one argument can be greater than another’s makes this inherently so, especially if the skin making it tends towards the fairer shade.
So in order to fix it, the blockages must be removed or convinced or made a non-factor.
And to do that we must ACCELERATE IT!
Withdrawing is a passive way to allow this to occur.
It’s acceleration will allow for its quicker destruction, and the blockages will either be permanently removed along with it or so desperate for their suffering to end that they will finally allow us to fix it while they huddle in the corner.
BUT… it is possible that THE FIX is in! Our enemies in high places are committing all this PRECISELY because they want things to get so bad that the blockages BEG them for THE SOLUTION, and this might be a return to some semblance of sanity, but only under their absolute and consolidated control… and that’s assuming they’ll care once they get what they want.
That solution could also be Anti-Christ. After all, if people begin looking for fixes on their own, they will by nature trend towards actual Christianity, and so they will need to get ahead of that with a nice facsimile that will continue to allow them to operate under.
So whatever the case, it is all in God’s hands now and He tried to warn us at Fatima. But we’ll… we decided on Vatican II instead… how’s that going?
Anyway, I’ll just leave this here…
https://www.unz.com/jtaylor/medicine-goes-dangerously-insane/
Hag-Bag. Realizing “It is well and truly over” is not despair. It is liberation from the current communistic chaos that can not and will not be corrected.
Name the Republican, whether it be DeSantis or Lil’ Marco, who will work to end anti-white apartheid in America. He doesn’t exist.
I will, however, be willing to put on a dunce crown because when the going gets tough the tough get monarchial.
In actuality, the NEJM was never truly prestigious other than in peoples’ imaginations. Your controlling biases and cherry-picking prevent you from understanding that.
Shecky,
I am delighted to inform you that you are wildly wrong, again.
When one of my colleagues got a paper in NEJM, they (the journal) sent a letter offering to provide, for a big fee, a bronze impression of the first paper of the paper.
Hilarious.
From Hagfish Bagpipe comment: “I think this ties in with Jesus’ difficult teaching, love your enemies — it is a spiritual tonic to the poison of hatred and wrath; a strength, and not some unrealistic, effeminate foolishness.”
Jesus’ teaching of “Love your enemies…” , is an absolute work-out as one begins to apply it in one’s life. This love cannot be accomplished but through a consistently growing relationship with Jesus Christ, fortified daily by real time set aside and spent with Him, and with God our Father Who loves to father us, and with the leading and guiding by the Holy Spirit.
The ability to forgive and to love and to pray for God’s helps towards another’s salvation will eventually become one’s first response in the difficult situations! It will be, because, one is abiding in Jesus Christ.
He loved and forgave, and so are we to do, but that does not mean accepting the evil that anyone is aiming at us. Our heart’s attitude, that is where the Love your enemy is to live as we move to right, wrongs.
God bless, C-Marie
Counterattack. Conquer. Reclaim. Rebuild. Repopulate.
“Doctors used to be trained in how the body works.”
Well, no, not really. By my observations, the most important attribute to be a successful MD in the US is to have a prodigious memory. It’s so important, in fact, that deductive/inductive reasoning skills have to be suppressed, as they eventually get in the way. I once worked with an engineer who switched from medical school back to engineering for his advanced degree. When recent engineering grads who were considering medical school would come to him for advice, he would tell them “if you really like engineering, you are really going to hate medical school”.
I’ve pondered on this quite a bit over the years. I have a poor memory, but I’ve had a perfectly acceptable engineering career, thank you. I admit that it would be very handy to rapidly pull minutia out of my hat, instead of having to go back to basic principles all the time; the flip side is that an engineer absolutely can’t get by on memorization alone (well, ok, a mediocre sales/marketing engineer might be the exception). When I ask my doctors questions, very few know the underlying physics, or they misunderstand the underlying physics, and I am talking very basic physics. Often as not, the answer implies that MD doesn’t see the underlying physics as even very relevant.
Don’t get me wrong, I have enormous respect for doctors, but I think one has to understand the inherent limitations in the field and their training. A patient should do some research before and after a visit to the doctor, in the interest of self-preservation. I even think its wise to view your doctor as you would your car mechanic – if you present them with a condition they’ve never run across before, or with symptoms that mimic another common condition you don’t have, or, heaven forbid, a condition that comes and goes intermittently, the odds of a correct diagnosis are poor.
After saying all that, I don’t believe the fact that the unsane article was written by MDs detracts from the point here, since the MD are just regurgitating something they picked up elsewhere. So . . . never mind.
Whatever expertise the authors claim, they don’t know jack about wildfires. It’s not the climate; it’s the fuels, stupid.
Wildfires happen in the Amazon, in boreal forests, and everywhere in between, across every climatic zone that has fuels to burn. Ergo, it aint the climate — obviously.
Fuels are biological. The plants burn, not the rocks. Plants grow. It’s what they do. Every year biomass builds up. Biomass accumulates due to photosynthesis. Look it up.
The climate hasn’t changed, not significantly, not in the last 50 years, not by more than 1°C on average globally. But the fuels have changed. They grew some. NH forests accumulate as much as 5 tons per acre per year. Over 50 years that’s 250 tons per acre new biomass living and dead. Big fuels make for big fires.
If you construct a statistical model, and leave out the most obvious, in your face explanatory factor, while including a supposed factor that hasn’t changed at all, your model sucks to high heaven, statistically speaking. It’s utter garbage.
So what do we do about our pals who are stupid, blind, and suck to high heaven? Tough love. They are wrong, woefully wrong, and need to hear it loud and clear, for their own good, even if it stings. Spare the rod, spoil the scientist.
Indubitably, Uncle Mike, indubitably.
I had such a friend.
He died last year of a heart attack after taking the shot.
Problem solved.
“To what extent do you owe loyalty to a once beloved friend, who in his youth was wise and sober and vigorous, but who has now descended into a kind of angry manic insanity, and has become a slave to the voices in his head, voices that tell him the world is not what is seems, but is ruled by bright secret forces only he can see, a friend who shouts “I don’t see it!” when you show him what is there before him, a friend who, as he destroys himself in obvious agony, declares “This is good!”?”
I understand the allusion here, but I am always brought up short, when considering imagery like this, by wondering if a Roman patrician, in the early days of Christianity, might have asked the same agonized question about an old friend of his who had now become a convert.
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My climate chance model is based on a weather rating system, where a network of homeless people around the globe are asked on a daily basis to rate the weather; from 0 to 10; ten being excellent and 0 being sucky.
The average IS ALL over the place.