Oddbean new post about login | logout @0f342e77 @5c5af261 Its a mistake to talk in the language of psychosis and curse. Its neither. Its the simple and predictable operation of power in politics, media and economy. People have been taught to love their prisons and to think of social freedom as tyranny whilst they are directed to hate each other as a further distraction. Its an old tactic but it works every time.
@8847b20e @5c5af261 Curse was half joking. Psychosis is not. If you look at the unhinged #CONspiracyTheories being spread globally, which have led to the rise of the #FarRight it's a scary reversal of what happened in 1930s #Germany. Look at #Trump & his insane #MAGA Morons? Look at the creepy, unhinged ERG who've taken over the #Tories & their talks of "Immigrant Hurricane" "Migrant Invasion" "Deep State" "Satanic Elites" etc. It's like half the world's lost it's goddam mind! 🤷🏾♂️
@0f342e77 @5c5af261 I feel sure that Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers thought the same in 1649 when troops attacked his settlement on common land. "Land doesn't belong to one person and not another," he imagined. "Wrong!" said the government. Or maybe go back 2000 years when a strange cult arose that believed a crucified Jew was a god. The Romans of the day thought such people bonkers - and sent them into the coliseum to be ripped apart by animals for sport. Or go back to 5000 BC when people, who up until then had been foragers and nomads in the main, turned into farmers and pursuers of agriculture who started hoarding things and creating surpluses. What madness is this? Human history is replete with incomprehensible and consequential ideas. The question is: do we love freedom or power? Because you can't have both.
@8847b20e @5c5af261 Freedom with laws to protect citizens brings power. Imagine living in a "Free" world where I could enter your home, take what I like & the only way you could stop me was to be bigger, more powerful & possessing the ability to defend yourself? Laws were created for a reason. It's nefarious characters like Trump, Doris, Stalin, Hitler & many before them, who've twisted something that was meant to protect the masses for their own egregious intentions.