The Post-Partisan Emporium

  IS CONSCIOUSNESS FADING IN MODERN SOCIETY? INTERNAL BLINDNESS AND MENTAL BARRIERS Gaius Baltar If we want to learn about human behavior and attributes by observing people, we will always learn more by observing people with extreme attributes. Many years ago I had that opportunity. A woman I knew quite well gave me insights into certain aspects of psychology that I doubt I would ever have gained otherwise – and certainly not in school. She had a very interesting combination of personality and mental traits. In fact, I’ve never met anyone else with these particular extremes. Naturally, I was somewhat fascinated by the contradictions she displayed. Firstly, she was extremely intelligent. I know that for a fact because I saw the result of an IQ test she took. It was spectacularly high – at the ‘gifted’ level. Those results were backed up by her educational prowess. She was an extremely strong student. Secondly, she had extreme ‘blind spots’ in her personality and perception. I eventu...

Infantilized R Us THOMAS HARRINGTON     I If you want to understand a culture, it is imperative that you listen carefully to the stories that it—or perhaps more accurately—its story-telling elites most assiduously disseminate among the general population.  To speak of “story-telling” in this context is to speak not only of well-worn verbal tropes such as “America as a city upon a hill” or “America as generous purveyor of democracy,” but also the broader set of repeated semiotic inputs that greet the citizen in the course of his daily adventures.  A short while back I wrote a piece on the  growing presence of speed bumps in our culture  and sought in this very vein of semiotic analysis to explain what message—beyond the obvious goal of slowing drivers down—the authorities installing them in increasing numbers in cities and towns might be sending about how they view their fellow citizens, and how, in turn, their seemingly condescending gaze might affect the w...

Waiting For The Fall John Michael Greer It’s been a busy couple of weeks, hasn’t it? A Pfizer executive admitted under oath that all those claims that the Covid vaccine would protect you from catching Covid had no data at all backing them.  Inevitably, corporate media flacks are now insisting at the top of their lungs, in the teeth of ample evidence, that nobody ever made the claims in question. Ukrainian agents used a truck bomb to damage the bridge that links Crimea to Russia; Russia, which has supposedly been running out of missiles since about a week since their forces invaded Ukraine, responded by sending a flurry of the missiles they aren’t supposed to have any more to blow up another round of Ukrainian targets, focusing on the energy and transport facilities the Ukrainians are going to need to face the massive winter offensive Russia is all too clearly preparing. The Ministry of Truth insists this never happened. In other news, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. Th...