the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people

off-kilter

A must read:

https://brownstone.org/articles/how-occupied-twitter-ruined-lives/

Watching that one preposterous article take over so aggressively, even as dissidents’ writings slipped into nothingness, including my own, was quite a bit of digital magic to behold. But we know now it was not magic. It was a policy. It was an intention. It was a propaganda ploy. Again, we must understand that this is still going on right now, with the only real exception among the larger players being Twitter. 

There is one solace. We know now that we were not all going crazy. It was all deliberate. Matt Taibbi puts it well:

Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

Still though it’s not enough. It’s inadequate to say that the population was pushed into a crazed fugue state because there’s no account there for the general willingness to be pushed there, for the total lack of discernment it takes to be led there. A complete lack of essential character that formerly we took for granted and assumed widely distributed though more in some than others.

The old saying,

There’s a sucker born every minute

seems a gross understatement now. Now we know. We should expect greater discernment from, I don’t know, a toilet. At least it flushes (bull)shit away.

Another:

https://brownstone.org/articles/future-of-biology-studies-is-obedience-to-orthodoxy/