Brett Weinstein Warns of the Deepening Cartesian Crisis

We should be spending a lot more time living normal lives: visiting friends, taking care of our children (and parents) and contributing positively to our communities, but we have a profound collective case of Burridan's Ass. Because advocacy is strongly prevailing over knowledge seeking, we struggle to know what is true in numerous basic ways.

Brett Weinstein warns that this problem is getting worse.

The Cartesian Crisis describes the inability to be sure of anything—scientific claims, the basic facts of historical events, the degree to which a consensus is actually accepted by others. It leads to the collapse of reason itself. But it’s difficult to illustrate with examples because in each case, people immediately get lost in making the case for their best guess at what’s true.

Try spending one day resisting conclusions, and concentrating on the quality and consistency of the evidence. Our average level of certainty may be unchanged, but our reason for certainty is at an all time low. If you did this exercise once a month you’d soon know how rapidly the Cartesian Crisis is deepening.

It’s vital that we each halt our descent into this tsunami of uncertainty. Establish an unbreakable bond with someone you have good reason to trust, and discuss your beliefs and the reasons you hold them, regularly and in person. You won’t regret it.

Burriden's Ass:

Buridan's ass is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will. It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass (donkey) that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the donkey will always go to whichever is closer, it dies of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision between the hay and water.[1] A common variant of the paradox substitutes the hay and water for two identical piles of hay; the ass, unable to choose between the two, dies of hunger.

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The Coddling, Continued . . .

Greg Lukianoff offered this summary of The Coddling of the American Mind as part of an update:

The central premise of the book is that we are giving a generation of young people extraordinarily terrible advice and then being frustrated with them when they follow it. We argue that we are unintentionally teaching a generation of students three “great untruths.” They are:

The great untruth of fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

The great untruth of emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

The great untruth of us versus them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

(Note: In my most recent book with the great Rikki Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind, we have added a fourth great untruth, The Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, “bad people only have bad opinions.”)"

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Corporate Media Narratives Corrupt Democracy

At this site I have offered more than 270 incidents where the corporate media pumps out narratives that are false or lack evidence or where important stories are being actively suppressed. I use the tag "Narratives in Media" to label these articles.

For instance, how can you explain that more then ten million people pour across the U.S. southern border in coordinated fashion, yet our major media outlets don't even find this interesting? Even when this pouring in of unvetted people is combined with government efforts to hand these people the right to vote in the upcoming elections?

I'm very suspicious about what is going on with undocumented people pouring over the border and attempts to give these people the right to vote, even in municipal elections.  But wouldn't it be nice if our "news" outlets showed some sense of curiosity? I can think of dozens of questions they could ask about this situation. For instance, they could trace the flow of money enabling this. They could skewer Biden's claims that his hands were tied even though he was the one who threw open the borders.  Instead, we have nonchalance and see-no-evil. That silence is our corporate media doing what it considers to be its job, to re-elect Joe Biden. To them, everything else is reverse-engineering.

I no longer use the phrase "mainstream media" to refer to the primary culprits of this concocted news: NYT, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and WaPo. Instead,  following in the footsteps of Glenn Greenwald and Comedian Dave Smith (in an excellent all-round discussion), I use the term "corporate news," although the big corporations that control these outlets are inextricably entangled with the federal government and its security state (FBI, CIA and NGO cutouts funded by these agencies, such as the Atlantic Council and USAID). The "news" these corporations offer is no longer believed by many Americans. Check out these findings:

The news media is the only industry mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Without trustworthy news, we don't have informed citizens, the type that can vote meaningfully.

"Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government." Thomas Jefferson

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Thomas Jefferson

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” James Madison

Yet the above findings, especially the AP poll from 2024, show that the great majority of us are extremely, very or somewhat that we are being misled by our "news outlets" on the issue of election coverage and these concerns are buttressed by my own articles on media narratives.

I'll end with this graphic by KanekoaTheGreat, setting out dozens of falsehoods pumped out by the corporate media over the past few years. I don't agree with everything on this list, but I think the list shows that the corporate media repeatedly pumps out false stories. It shows that the corporate media lacks credibility on important issues. THIS is the track record of our corporate media and there is no reason to think that it will be any better going forward.

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Who is the Real Anthony Fauci?

I had been reading RFK, Jr's long book, The Real Anthony Fauci, when I noticed that a three-hour documentary has been released based on this same book. The documentary is both riveting and demoralizing, filling in dozens of holes avoided by corporate media. They want to keep you ignorant.

I highly recommend watching this so that you can knock the scales from your eyes. It's not merely about Anthony Fauci. It's about our out-of-control corrupt medical system. Rather than getting frustrated by the system, this documentary names names and offers specifics about the cash-infused misguided ideology that now substitutes for what should be free-ranging endlessly-curious and self-critical science. You will learn why your doctors' hands are often tied.

You will learn many reasons for why the existence of the COVID vax is massive scandal and that there were many better alternatives. What makes me sad is that the people who need to watch this the most will refuse to watch it because they insist that Fauci should forever remain on a pedestal no matter how many people he has killed over the decades (including the AIDS scandal) through his corruption and ignorance.

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