"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
[attributed to Mark Twain]
After seeing this quote by Richard Feynman, I posted the following on FB, where it seems like the great majority of people on my feed get aggravated with I post information that does not comport with mainstream news:
Many people on Facebook get their information primarily from corporate news (and from their friends who get their information primarily from corporate news). It is impossible to be a person with meaningful thoughts and opinions when all of one's information is pre-filtered by entities walking in lockstep. That is why many people on this site could not see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears that Joe Biden was mentally incompetent to run for president in 2024, at least not until corporate news and prominent Democrats did a sudden 180. This situation was long obvious to the rest of us, as was the fact that the DNC completely threw out its rulebook in anointing Kamala Harris (refusing to allow any democratic input). I could give hundreds of other shocking examples of these 180s over the past 5 years.
There is only one solution to this danger, this blindness: One needs to read and listen carefully to people with whom one disagrees, giving these "disagreeable" people their best foot forward. When you do this for awhile, your entire perspective will loosened up and you will understand that minority viewpoints are often worthwhile to inputs to understanding of the world. Only then will you be in charge of your own thoughts and beliefs. And only then will you see the extent to which earnestly expressing opinions against the grain requires some courage.
"Just the facts" does not apply to Google. This example by Mary Talley Bowden offered this simple example. It one recent example of many others on many topics. Google is programming us, not simply giving us the facts. They see their job as not telling you what there is, but how to think about what there is.
The comments offer dozens of other examples from Google and from other sites. I ran this same test on Google today at 11:40 am CT. Same result.
a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3h7pmhyIwg">
I've listened to this podcast several times. It's long, but it is extremely thoughtful, engaging, disturbing, but also hopeful and celebratory of the human spirit. It involves Jordan Peterson and Glenn Greenwald. These are two of my most cherished thinkers. I am inspired and provoked by many of the topics that they explore here. Topics include censorship, propaganda, the history of these things in the United States. Also, the relationship between religion and politics, and what goes wrong when religion is absorbed into politics. And there's even some meaning of life moments. I took the time to transcribe a large chunk of this discussion, and I am sharing it with the hope that those of you who listen to it or read it will also find it worthwhile.
I asked Grok to crank out a basic table of contents to this interview:
Min 21:30
1. Censorship of RFK Jr. by Google and the tactic of starting with hated figures like Alex Jones
2. Expansion of censorship to mainstream voices, including Devin Nunes and Rand Paul
3. Reasons for increasing censorship: Generational shifts in values among Millennials and Gen Z, and the impact of Trump's election
4. Depiction of Trump as an existential evil justifying extreme measures, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Sam Harris's views
5. Connection to post-9/11 clampdown on civil liberties, transformation of airports into authoritarian spaces
Min 27:35
6. Reflections on 9/11 trauma, the war on terror, and how airport security conditioned obedience to authority
7. Threats to liberty from fear rather than greed; free speech as equivalent to free thought and essential for adaptation
8. George Orwell on tyranny through mind control; the internet's shift from liberation to control, Snowden revelations
9. Biblical phrase "render unto Caesar"; collapse of religious domain into politics leading to unsophisticated good vs. evil wars
10. Personal background on religion; hubris in censorship; human need for spirituality, politics as a substitute for religion
11. Discussions with Douglas Murray on humanism needing a religious framework; Carl Jung on rationality bounded by the dream
12. Grappling with ethics and morality without religion; necessity of spirituality to avoid nihilism
13. Response to materialist atheists; human relationship with the larger whole; introduction to the story of Abraham
These excerpts start at Minute 21:30 of the above video.
Glenn Greenwald
20% of Democratic Party voters say they intend to vote for RFK, Jr. for president. And the most powerful corporations, or one of the richest and most powerful corporations ever to exist, Google sweeps in and says, This is something that you are not permitted to be heard.
Glenn Greenwald
And what happened was, what always is the tactic of sensors is they always pick a test case in the beginning that they believe is someone who is sufficiently hated or disliked so that everybody will acquiesce to the precedent, simply because their emotions for that person are so high. So the first person to really be deplatformed in this collusive effort by Silicon Valley was Alex Jones. And Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook at the time. Mark Andreessen in Silicon Valley, and a few other people stood up at the time and said, no matter how much you hate Alex Jones, this precedent is going to work its way slowly, or maybe not even so slowly, to expand into the kinds of voices that you probably think shouldn't be censored. And by the point that you cheer the precedent in the first instance, because you allow your emotional dislike for this person to outweigh your rational capacities, it will be too late the precedent is already implemented, and then you're left to just bicker about its application, rather than the principle itself.
Glenn Greenwald
And that's precisely what has happened. They began quickly censoring mainstream conservative voices. Devin Nunes went to rumble in part to escape from Google censorship, and then a huge stream of people did as well. One of the most shocking things that happened along those lines, Rand Paul questioned a couple of epidemiologists, scientists who were testifying before the US Senate about the possible efficacy of ivermectin and other alternative medication for covid. It was a Senate hearing, a hearing in the United States Senate. Rand Paul put it on his YouTube channel as a excerpt of this hearing, and Google decided that was something that ought not to be heard as well.
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