Yes, me too, and fifty years later ibstead of stopping it got so much worse because they discovered that no one actually believes them anymore. So what do they do? Spend a fortune, or two or three, trying to make us unsee what has disturbed, angered and cause us to hate the bastards doing this to human beings, and only because they were born on the land that their ancestors lived on for centuries and now some ugly, soulless bastards decided they would take it.
Chang, As my origins are from the so called "third world" I have been radicalised long before any of you from the " first world ". While many of you lived with the fruits of our oppression, we lived with the results of oppression.
The Orwellian Company Behind ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves - “With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” That makes it hard for victims to sue. “We have a saying: Feeling is believing,” Compliant Technologies CEO Jeff Niklaus said in one 2022 YouTube video. In promotional clips, you can see people losing control of their limbs, falling to the ground, and crying out in pain after a light touch from the GLOVE. In 2022, the company called it a “weapon” in Instagram posts. Since then, though, it’s downgraded the language to “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation device,” branding the technology on its website as “humane.”
Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long raised concerns about electric shock devices like the GLOVE, as well as other products that Compliant Technologies sells, like electric shock belts and vests, which the company recommends for prisoner transport, courtroom use, and use on “combative individuals” during medical procedures like blood draws. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/ice-shock-gloves-torture-compliant-technologies-jeff-niklaus/
How does one define "awake"? One person's awake can be quite different from another's. We all have limited cognitive abilities and attention spans. One can be 'awake' about certain things and be completely ignorant about others.
Usually, personal experiences have a huge effect on radicalizing oneself (for example, if you ever experienced police brutality or racism, your perspective in these areas grows, your thinking evolves, and you are on your way to being radicalized).
The simplest definition of awake is the ability to notice how the policies always benefit the rich and hurt the poor. And to resist that trend as much as possible. If you can't at least align with that, you're still asleep.
Here's the problem with that. I have many friends/acquaintances (capitalist/bourgeois) that are WIDE awake and are well aware of all such policies. In fact, many such people are behind such policies themselves. Hence, being awake/aware about it is insufficient. There are many more elements to it like morality, ethics, belief systems, etc.
I disagree that they're awake. If they seriously think they can support policies that destroy the planet, harm the vulnerable, and not have it affect them. OR maybe they want the planet and themselves to burn? Either way, that person is asleep in my definition. But we can agree to disagree.
It's not a question of awake. It's a question of a pragmatic weighing of the pros and cons for some people. The Capitalists mind says, I'll be dead by the time anything bad happens, and I'll be rich enough to pay my way out if it does. Yes, an immoral selfish ideology, but it is the most prevalent ideology on the planet - sadly the proof is all around us. We have been taught/brainwashed to believe capitalism and greed is the answer!
I'm thinking along the same lines too. There are some people (possibly in spiritual circles) that think 'being awake' is the end-and-all-be-all solution to our problems - they often think along the lines of "if we can get just enough people on the planet awake then we can solve our problems".
I'm not so sure about that. Like you said above, "It's not a question of awake". Awake is good, and awake is likely necessary, but I don't think awake is sufficient.
Hence the digression into the definition of what one considers 'awake'. That is why I began with "how does one define awake'. Arguing based on which person's definition is 'the correct one' or 'the right one' usually leads nowhere.
It’s coincidental/interesting that you noted this. After reading CJ‘s article, the very first comment I was gonna leave in this comment section was that the person who initially asked the question “What radicalized you?” was “afflicted” with a misunderstanding of the definition of “radicalized”.
"At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet?" I would really like to know the answer to that question too. So many people I try to talk to look at me with a kind of superior look and they say "I don't read the news"
Because once you start down that road of radicalization, you have to start making choices. If the society and system that we live under does so much evil, how much will I compromise with it?
These choices can have very real personal and professional consequences. Try not paying taxes and see what happens. "Bartelby the Scrivener" it ain't.
Even if you do compromise, you are left with a guilty conscience.
By contrast, if you go along with the crowd, you can avoid those tough choices and face no consequences, and your conscience stays relatively untroubled, for the time being at least. Even in the worst case, you can say to yourself that you did what every other Good German did under the circumstances.
That's what I'm trying to understand too. I'm trying to understand WHY people are not yet radicalized and their many reasons and justifications for it.
I have talked to so many people (friends, acquaintances, family members) for whom the last 7 years have made no difference - they've ignored almost every event in the last 7 years because it doesn't affect them (other than Covid to a certain limited extent).
THIS is what I want to understand - why is it that some people are radicalized while others are not? What is the deeper psychology behind this?
IIf the brainwash is deep and thorough, it can be mentally disruptive and injurious to hear and believe something other than what one believes. I've also read that the jabs may have something to do with it.
Leave jab talk out of it (it exposes your biases and provides an example of precisely what you say - "disruptive and injurious to hear and believe something other than what one believes".
The issue (psychological depth/insight into this) seems quite a bit more involved IMHO.
We’re not starving enough to care about the current state of affairs to make any real changes. There’s still food available, even if you have to steal it.
Once there is real starvation or homelessness hits the middle classes people will become radicalized, for good or for ill.
"THIS is what I want to understand - why is it that some people are radicalized while others are not? What is the deeper psychology behind this?"
Chang, Have you found the answer yet? I think it is human nature and the environment that conditions them. The conditioned American believes that their affluence is a given, that they are entitled. Where the affluence comes from is never questioned.
Those who care, use their wisdom and critical thinking , will find the answer some day. The dystopia we are living through today will surely hasten the realisation.
The day I had to call my wife from a phone booth outside the draft induction center where I had just passed the army induction physical in my 2nd yr of grad school -- to inform her I'd become eligible for Viet Cong target practice.
My step father was a Vietnam vet. He volunteered after graduating from hs in 1966. He was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was wounded in combat and received a Purple Heart. He left the army with a permanent disability and PTSD.
When my little brother was born in 1975, his father beat me to the baby's room when he woke up for feeding. He stood there holding my brother and he said "I'm never letting my son go fight in any bullshit wars." I was only 11 and didn't understand what he was talking about. It took me about 15 more years to figure it out.
Bless your dad. His experience sounds like that of numerous of my Brooklyn street friends who enlisted, several of whom never returned to our mean streets. Ultimately, when war or its effects are in your face, in your family, your grow up fast realizing what your country really is. And the radicalization deepens and becomes ever more profound from that moment forward.
Sounds like a hell of a stimulus for that popular radicalization theme of the time: "Fuck You, USA" and the resurgence of Dylan's anthem, "With god on our side".
1965, at 17 years old after graduating high school I realized I was going to be drafted when I turned 18. I would have to do something if I didn't want to end up dead in the jungles of Vietnam. My cousin had just enlisted in USAF and convinced me that it was better to serve four years instead of two if you could get better training and avoid the infantry. I became a flight line mechanic and the closest I came to the jungles was in Guam. Granted, it was no picnic but I survived. However, any sense that the US was a fair country did die. I had already decided that there was something wrong with the JFK murder that had to do with the civil rights movement and Vietnam and growing up in a Brooklyn ghetto proved to me that there was no such thing as equality in America. I knew that killing Vietnamese who were more poor than me made no sense.
When I was discharged I immediately went to LA Valley college and together with my veteran comrades started a chapter of Vets for Peace. Thereafter, it was no big leap to figure out the difference between socialism and capitalism. At that point I was fully radicalized. I am now 78 and have nothing but contempt for America which has become 100 times worse than it was in the sixties. A terrorist police state run by corrupt oligarchs and you can vote until you are blue in the face and it will never change.
My stepfather was a Vietnam vet. He volunteered after graduating from hs in 1966. He was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was wounded in combat and received a Purple Heart. He left the army with a permanent disability and PTSD.
When my little brother was born in 1975, his father beat me to the baby's room when he woke up for feeding. He stood there holding my brother and he said "I'm never letting my son go fight in any bullshit wars." I was only 11 and didn't understand what he was talking about. It took me about 10 more years to really figure it out. I read various books and watched videos. Now I'm completely anti military, thanks to my vet stepfather.
A friend has gotten involved with Veterans for Peace as a civilian. They wanted to march in an annual local parade a few years back. The non-peace vets didn't want them, but the people in charge let them, though they had to bring up the rear. Vets for peace instead of war are a threat to the status quo. I'm glad you started the chapter.
Veterans make the best anti-war activists. I’m in an occupied territory in California, with several military training facilities nearby, and when I see someone in uniform I say, “don’t kill anyone,” never that brainless bromide, “thank you for your service,” in a nation that treats vets like spent shells.
I think we should keep in mind that whenever we think of those who serve there is a great divide between the person that gave himself up to be a tool of government and the government that uses him or her for dubious purpose.
They are not the same thing. Why they serve and how they do it is a very personal thing. Whereas, the mission they are sent on is another matter. Unfortunately, how the public views that service is often fickle and ignorant. Without much consciousness or empathy for what the real personal individual motives were and how that service was carried out. Only a veteran can understand this because he/she is the victim. That's why the first thing I did after I was discharged was connect with my fellow veterans and listen to their stories. I was part of a group of guys that started the first chapter of Veterans for Peace at Valley College Los Angeles in 1970. For two years all my friends were vets. It was a form of rehabilitation that served me greatly.
Yes, support groups are essential. No one outside that group can truly understand what it's like to have lived through all the things. I have family I cannot speak to openly because they still believe in having protected American for and from something mythological, delusional. I love them anyway. I also respect those on the path, as having broken through to the other side of some terrible misconceptions myself, and patience and love brought me back to reality. I'd like to see vet groups create community alternatives - those are the guys who have created virtual cities overnight, and have the skills, medical, technical, comms, transportation, and protection, but are deemed useless upon return. We all need to use our skills for good. :-)
I love your comment. I know many people who lived through the Vietnam war and were radicalized and protested but now in their 70s, they are glued to corporate media, have taken all their boosters, think Fauci is a saint, and Ukraine is bound to beat Russia, etc.
Richard Gage has a movie about to come out on Building 7 and the NIST cover up. NIST has this insane theory that one steel girder failing led to a symmetrical demolition of a building. It should have fallen over if anything about their theory was correct, or not collapsed at all. 8 floors of the building all failed across all steel girders at the exact same time, hence they were exploded with timed explosives. It's a given.
Of course Bush & Cheney weren’t sent to the White House to “cook up boat-rocking maniacal world-domination plans.” And of course no one was betting on Bush’s “ability” to plan or execute operational aspects—the only “bet” regarding Bush was that he would do as told running cover. Taibbi, in his half-clever and imaginative fashion, sets up false characterizations as the basis for an argument that doesn’t exist.
Taibbi’s contention that 9/11 wasn’t needed to get Americans “on board” with the GWOT misses the fact that 9/11–though it did result in massive “defense” and “homeland security” expenditures, a quarter-century of neoconservative domination of “security state” geopolitical policy (and the Patriot Act, btw)—was also an operation that covered up massive financial crimes.
In hindsight, 9/11 has been an obvious boon to the neoconservative project, strongly tied to the Zionist project.
~~~
It is absurd to think al-Qaeda had operational capability to pull off 9/11. It is not absurd to understand that elements of the CIA, Mossad, and other deep state functionaries pulled it off.
Taibbi finishes his piece with nonsensical, childish imaginings of what he believes are the imaginings of others.
Impactful as hell, considering all the well-documented books on the subject.
In the piece Taibbi was deftly dispatching many specific conspiracy theory ideas that were circulating in the mid-2000s toxic stew of US cultural trauma and educational deficiencies. I remember them well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the most extreme lunatic ideas have been shaken out over the intervening decades to produce a conspiracy narrative that’s more enduring, has slightly more traction and respectability, because that’s how these ideological lifetimes often go.
It’s interesting that you ignore the other link in my comment, to the NIST final summary on Building 7, produced by a lot of professional engineers. But they’re all in on the conspiracy too, of course.
It is correct that people with refined skills are able to spot naivety or implausibility. That’s why so many intelligent people scoff at the narrative you are apparently promoting.
Certain naive or implausible ideas circulated taking the ultimate position that something much different from the “official” narrative occurred. Those ideas have nothing to do with the plausibility of reasonable narratives based in evidence which destroy the “official” narrative. You are just muddying the waters and wielding a tar brush, if I may mix my metaphors. An avoidance of the fact that the 9/11 Commission was a ludicrous cover job is disingenuous.
~~~
My reply to your other link is that that “summary” was compromised and lots of professional engineers can attest to that.
It is far from being a matter of “fun” to realize or understand certain realities which bear direct negative consequence, threat, and in instances, extreme depravities, toward the human condition that makes the heart suffer and cry out for justice.
Another thing about the Taibbi piece—
Yes Matt, there are “terrible truths” that the “ruling class” prefers to be kept out of the limelight, so to speak. And yes the “ruling class” is about making money. It’s also about control. And there is an evil that men will do.
It fell over because there was significant structural and seismic and fire impact very nearby, which would be completely unchallenged if 9-11 wasn’t marinated in a deep glaze of conspiracy. It’s only an ice bath if you forget to use your hot water.
Yeah, right. Fairytale physics-defying fed-slop is not just “challenged,” it’s ridiculed.
~~~
Try understanding the terminology you use. The events of 9/11, criminal in nature, due to sheer breadth & complexity, are quite obviously a result of conspiracy. Your puerile and ignorant attempt to use “conspiracy” in a sentence is of note. The fed-slop narrative of the events of the day is a “conspiracy theory,” and, along with the fed-slop “physics,” is a subject of ridicule as well. Arabs with knives, oh my!
According to NIST, this steel-framed structure fell, for the first time in history, due to FIRE ALONE. Believe whatever you want. I’m still trusting that my eyes aren’t lying to me.
JG Miller, there are too many conspiracy theorists in Caitlin's substack (and it doesn't help that Caitlin herself is on the borderline of critical skepticism and conspiracism - as evidenced by her comment on 9/11). There is a certain 'psychology' behind why some people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than others (and it's quite interesting actually - and has been studied extensively).
The issue with many conspiracy theorists is they have trouble distinguishing between 'true conspiracies', 'plausible conspiracies', 'lacking-in-evidence conspiracies', and sometimes downright 'stupid conspiracies'.
Conspiracy theories have a very large spectrum, and often it is not the conspiracy itself that is the issue but rather the 'THEORY' behind the conspiracy that is the problem (hence the term conspiracy theorist).
There are several well-evidenced and empirically analyzed conspiracies that have sound theories behind them - these are not what is colloquially called a "conspiracy theory".
When there is insufficient evidence and the gap is made up by speculation based on arbitrary criteria (regardless of how many people believe and agree on such criteria), that is when the THEORY behind the conspiracy becomes suspect.
Here's some reading (that I know you won't do because what if you're wrong about your theories? how will that affect your psychology?)
We've had this conversation before Jim, hence I did not address my comment to YOU above, but to JG Miller. But it seems you could not resist responding to me.
Calling something a ‘plot hole’ doesn't establish that there was a plot. The fact that an event may have unanswered questions, disputed details, or imperfect explanations is not evidence of a conspiracy.
You're starting with the assumption that there was a conspiracy and then treating anything you think doesn't fit the conventional account as a ‘plot hole.’ Plot holes aren't evidence of a plot. That's backwards reasoning. An imperfect or incomplete account of an enormously complex event doesn't provide evidence for a conspiracy. If there is positive evidence for one, that's a different matter—but I haven't seen any.
Here is the fundamental epistemological problem and logical flaw with such reasoning that your question suggests -
“I can't explain X” is not equivalent to “therefore Y conspiracy.”
That is essentially the entire problem with a lot of conspiracy reasoning. An anomaly can be worth investigating, but an anomaly has to be connected to a positive evidentiary case for the alternative explanation. Otherwise, you are just accumulating things that feel strange and calling their accumulation evidence.
Here are some important distinctions to make when thinking about conspiracy theories (that may help you with the analysis process) -
(1) An unexplained question ≠ a contradiction: Something not immediately explained isn't necessarily inconsistent with the established account.
(2) A contradiction ≠ evidence of conspiracy: Even if some aspect of the official account were wrong or incomplete, that doesn't establish who was responsible or what actually happened.
(3) Evidence of a conspiracy requires positive evidence: You would need evidence pointing toward an alternative causal account—not merely evidence that the conventional account contains imperfections.
(4) “The original narrative” is potentially a loaded phrase: There isn't necessarily one monolithic “9/11 narrative.” There are thousands of individual factual claims concerning the attacks, the hijackers, intelligence failures, building collapses, air-defense response, etc. Some early reporting was inevitably incomplete or erroneous and was subsequently revised. That's very different from demonstrating that the underlying account is fabricated.
There are ways to think critically about conspiracies, but most conspiracy theorists rarely engage such methods in analyzing conspiracy theories.
This response is already long and likely more than you bargained for, so I'll stop here (though there is much academic research and more to say on how to adequately think about conspiracy theories and understand them).
My use of 'plot hole' was just referencing what Caitlan wrote. I know what i think about 9/11 because of the facts that do not match to the original narrative.
I guess you didn’t understand my response to you… I’m not aware of any so-called “plot holes” and I have no idea what ‘plot holes’ Caitlin is talking about as she doesn’t mention any. On the ‘facts don’t match the original narrative’ - that is exactly what my response to you is about.
My experience has been with a good friend that His argument is that A, the official story has holes in it. He advocates for B, his plot-hole filler, which has quite a few of its own holes in it, and whenever I point them out, rather than addressing those objections, he doubles down on not-A, as if proving not A, proved B, rather than some C, D, E and/or F. I have a difficult time with that kind of thinking.
Precisely! There is a reason why it is almost impossible to argue with a conspiracy theorist - and the reasons for this are increasingly psychological and social.
There is a substantial literature in psychology and sociology on conspiracy beliefs, motivated reasoning, identity-protective cognition, epistemic trust, and group identity.
For example, a CT (conspiracy theory) can provide an explanation for uncertainty. It can restore a sense of order to apparently chaotic events. It can identify villains and assign responsibility. And it can provide membership in a community of people who supposedly “see what others cannot.”
Once a belief becomes part of someone's identity, presenting contrary evidence can be experienced not merely as:
“Here's evidence that your proposition is wrong.”
but as:
“You are attacking my competence, my community, my political tribe, and my understanding of reality.”
At that point, more evidence can paradoxically produce more resistance rather than less.
For me, it was reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" years ago. Until then, I had just been a plain vanilla liberal. Zinn opened my eyes and the eyes of millions of people. I see him as a true American hero.
I've been a Palestine supporter for about 17 years now. Before that I basically hated both sides, until I met and fell in love with a Palestinian man. He told me kinds of stuff that I just didn't believe, so I started looking things up and lo and behold, he was telling the truth. I'm glad so many people around the world have had their eyes open, but why did it take a genocide? And now, the lying and gaslighting about Israel is even worse than before. What a nightmare.
Covid, i made fun of anti-vaxers and then got myocarditis. How embarrassing. This got me watching RFKJr and I read his book on Pfauci. Watching RFKJr made me realize I knew nothing about Nov 22, 1963 and JFK. Two years reading on the JFK assassination radicalized me to some degree. After I solved that with 100% certainty, that it was a conspiracy driven by our gov't, i tacked 9/11 which I have been on a year.
Nothing is as the NPCs and normies believe it is. Nothing. Once you take the toothpaste out of the tube, you can't put it back.
Yeah, that is possible. When I say I solved it, what i meant is that LHO was a bogus story put forward by our gov’t and there was a conspiracy. I am certain LHO was a patsy, who thought he was involved in a blackops anti Castro mission. I am certain the Warren Commission covered up the truth. I am sure of all of this. I’m not sure of whether it was Israel, the CIA or LBJ as the alpha dog driving it.
Yeah, I agree, but I seriously can't imagine LBJ doing it. He would have been great if he had ended Vietnam instead of going all in. It could have been elements of our government under Izrshell's influence. Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) was Jewish fwiw.
Myocarditis is orders of magnitude more common after a dose of Covid than after the vaccination. Covid also damages a couple of other organs that are very unforgiving of damage; the brain and the kidneys. I will not be even slightly surprised if the anti-vaxxers suffer greatly increased prevalence of congestive heart failure, dementia and chronic renal failure in future decades.
you know, i have not missed a day of work for being sick in maybe 15 years, including when i got covid. I started feeling it friday night, slept all day Sat and Sun, went to work(WFH) on Monday. To make a big deal out of what was in effect a bad flu is hilarious. It was NBD. Our hospitals killed a lot of old people. Sorry you wanted it to be the black plague, but it wasn't. It was the flu that year. Look up annual flu deaths in the US for the past 10 years from the CDC website.
Note 1: Das Bootlicker — The Mechanics of Weaponized Guilt
Has human civilization ever witnessed a display of moral gymnastics quite as grotesque, quite as obsessively bureaucratized, as the modern Federal Republic of Germany? History has known its fair share of ruthless empires and shameless opportunists, but none have ever managed to convert the absolute horror of their own historic crimes into a permanent diplomatic hall pass for someone else’s slaughter. Other vassal states hide their complicity behind quiet shame or clumsy geopolitical calculus—and while the French may capitulate quicker than a man suffering from premature ejaculation, Berlin does not merely surrender its moral autonomy; it collapses into pre-emptive, enthusiastic servitude. Let them be warned: not all people on this earth are such pathetic cowards.
Staatsräson, oh gift divine—
We wash our sins in coastal brine!
With tearful eyes and heavy soul,
We stamp the bombs and sign the scroll!
To watch German statecraft in action today is to watch a tragicomic pantomime of compulsive, pathological over-correction. They have elevated Staatsräson—their holy 'reason of state'—from a doctrine of historical atonement into a grotesque, weaponized fetish. In their desperate eagerness to prove they are no longer the monsters of the twentieth century, they have happily signed up as the enthusiastic mechanics for the atrocities of the twenty-first.
If Berlin truly harboured genuine care for Jewish people, it would grasp a fundamental moral truth: true friends restrain you from committing evil and destroying your own moral existence; they do not egg you on as you seal your own spiritual ruin. Yet state authorities routinely crack down on peace activists and anti-war dissidents under the transparent pretext of combating anti-Semitism—conveniently oblivious to the staggering irony that the very Arabs, and particularly Arab women, whom their police tackle and drag through the streets are themselves Semites. Most of the world's Semitic peoples are Arabs, yet Berlin's self-congratulatory elite—educated fools who pride themselves on academic pedigree—are far too dense to grasp basic etymology. They parade their intellectual credentials while enforcing state orthodoxy with the subtlety of a truncheon, entirely unaware of their own monumental ignorance.
This is, after all, an official apparatus where the concept of Ordnung has effectively replaced the human soul. This is a bureaucratic machine that considers waiting at a pedestrian crossing in an empty desert at three in the morning—simply because a glowing red light commands it—to be the absolute apex of civilizational achievement. They navigate international relations with the exact same terrifying rigidity. If an ongoing slaughter has been properly vetted by three parliamentary committees, certified by an administrative tribunal, and cross-referenced against five sub-clauses of European export regulations, then as far as Berlin is concerned, the blood on the floor is merely an unavoidable procedural side-effect.
Edmund Burke dryly noted, 'Servility to the great has its own compensation.' But modern Berlin has surpassed even Burke’s cynicism—their hypocrisy does not merely cost nothing; it buys them absolution. Indeed, they are the only state apparatus on earth capable of making Washington look sophisticated. Where Americans sell an imperial campaign wrapped in a Hollywood blockbuster, a fireworks display, and a catchy slogan, Berlin hands you an atrocity accompanied by a 400-page compliance manual, demanding you admire the uniform margins, immaculate filing, and proper waste-sorting procedures of the regime.
Currently, just about everyone I know is intellectually incurious and largely oblivious to what is happening at home [ U.S.A. ] and abroad. They are mostly nice, decent people. But they are the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water. This frightens me, because such individuals are not outliers in the Empire. Many Americans are not even aware of the rapidly approaching economic catastrophe resulting from the U.S./Israeli war of aggression against Iran. The fallout from this historically disastrous and criminal war - its impacts on energy and food production - has not reached the United States full force. Come the Fall, it will. The charnel pit that Gaza has been reduced to should haunt everyone in the West - and many certainly are horrified and angry. But too many are fundamentally checked out or don't want to focus on these atrocities, and the totalitarian train barreling down upon us, because it's unpleasant or depressing.
Is it because people feel helpless to do anything to stop it? I remember Dick Chaney when told by a journalist that polls showed that the vast majority of Americans opposed to war in Iraq, he said, "So what."
For me, it was stopping to listen to student speakers at UC
Berkeley when I was 18 hearing radical speech for the first time and finding it made sense. thjen I had a girl friend from a leftwing ethical culture background from NYC and her friends. And then it was marching with Dr. King and watching the pickup trucks with guns staring at us and the policelooking for a chance to crack skulls. And then, after I retired, it was understand that Karl Marx's insights alighned with both what I was learning from study pre-civilizational culture with its egalitarn, sharing, non-violent norms and then finally neuro science, finding that the radical traits at the heart of left thinking...trust, altruism and cooperaiton are inborn, inherited. And so, at 85, it has all come together: values, science, and ideology. Now I see Medicare for all, which wold according to a Yale study save a trillion a year and save 114, 000 lives and stop the copayments that make Medicare as is too costly for some,
for instance, I will be having back surgery, as I can barely walk, and my 20% will be thousands of dollars. Sander's Medicare for all would make that 0 dollars, and my cataratct surgery will cost about $600 and the MFA would also make that zero, meanwile saving a trillion by eliminating the parasitic middle man with those 20 million salariess and private jets, made possible by denying claims. And that is making me, an octogenarian, even more radical, as I see MFA being called radical tho nearly 2/3 of the American people support it. Too fucking bad we don't have a democracy...and that makes me even more radical.
I can't do much but write about it, but like John Lennon said, I aint the only one. Radicals are winning eletions all across the nation as the establishment Democrats fart themselves to sleep and Trump's approval is at 33% and dropping.
I am radical because I grew up at the bottom, and so my natural inclination is to support change from the bottom up. The ideas came from lefty students but the reality of being a lefty and for me this incudes pacisfism and veganism is from life experience. I am supposed to grow more conservative but only in my 80's did I realize I am a Marxist, that only a radical revolution that abolishes private property, can create a just society, and so that's my story about getting radicalized, with the genocide in Gaza being the last straw!!!
We live in a country of 300 million meat puppets - ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ was a work of material, radical prophecy. The question isn’t why they’re not radicalised: it’s how they even put their socks on
The genocide against Palestinians has radicalized me and educated me about the Mideast, AIPAC, and Zionists more than I could ever have imagined.
Yes, me too, and fifty years later ibstead of stopping it got so much worse because they discovered that no one actually believes them anymore. So what do they do? Spend a fortune, or two or three, trying to make us unsee what has disturbed, angered and cause us to hate the bastards doing this to human beings, and only because they were born on the land that their ancestors lived on for centuries and now some ugly, soulless bastards decided they would take it.
Gaza is the final nail in the coffin for my radicalization.
Me too!
Chang, As my origins are from the so called "third world" I have been radicalised long before any of you from the " first world ". While many of you lived with the fruits of our oppression, we lived with the results of oppression.
Eyes and ears and a brain.
I don't see it as "radical". Just being awake, sort of.
There are things like this:
The Orwellian Company Behind ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves - “With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” That makes it hard for victims to sue. “We have a saying: Feeling is believing,” Compliant Technologies CEO Jeff Niklaus said in one 2022 YouTube video. In promotional clips, you can see people losing control of their limbs, falling to the ground, and crying out in pain after a light touch from the GLOVE. In 2022, the company called it a “weapon” in Instagram posts. Since then, though, it’s downgraded the language to “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation device,” branding the technology on its website as “humane.”
Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long raised concerns about electric shock devices like the GLOVE, as well as other products that Compliant Technologies sells, like electric shock belts and vests, which the company recommends for prisoner transport, courtroom use, and use on “combative individuals” during medical procedures like blood draws. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/ice-shock-gloves-torture-compliant-technologies-jeff-niklaus/
How does one define "awake"? One person's awake can be quite different from another's. We all have limited cognitive abilities and attention spans. One can be 'awake' about certain things and be completely ignorant about others.
Usually, personal experiences have a huge effect on radicalizing oneself (for example, if you ever experienced police brutality or racism, your perspective in these areas grows, your thinking evolves, and you are on your way to being radicalized).
The simplest definition of awake is the ability to notice how the policies always benefit the rich and hurt the poor. And to resist that trend as much as possible. If you can't at least align with that, you're still asleep.
Here's the problem with that. I have many friends/acquaintances (capitalist/bourgeois) that are WIDE awake and are well aware of all such policies. In fact, many such people are behind such policies themselves. Hence, being awake/aware about it is insufficient. There are many more elements to it like morality, ethics, belief systems, etc.
I disagree that they're awake. If they seriously think they can support policies that destroy the planet, harm the vulnerable, and not have it affect them. OR maybe they want the planet and themselves to burn? Either way, that person is asleep in my definition. But we can agree to disagree.
It's not a question of awake. It's a question of a pragmatic weighing of the pros and cons for some people. The Capitalists mind says, I'll be dead by the time anything bad happens, and I'll be rich enough to pay my way out if it does. Yes, an immoral selfish ideology, but it is the most prevalent ideology on the planet - sadly the proof is all around us. We have been taught/brainwashed to believe capitalism and greed is the answer!
I'm thinking along the same lines too. There are some people (possibly in spiritual circles) that think 'being awake' is the end-and-all-be-all solution to our problems - they often think along the lines of "if we can get just enough people on the planet awake then we can solve our problems".
I'm not so sure about that. Like you said above, "It's not a question of awake". Awake is good, and awake is likely necessary, but I don't think awake is sufficient.
Hence the digression into the definition of what one considers 'awake'. That is why I began with "how does one define awake'. Arguing based on which person's definition is 'the correct one' or 'the right one' usually leads nowhere.
It’s coincidental/interesting that you noted this. After reading CJ‘s article, the very first comment I was gonna leave in this comment section was that the person who initially asked the question “What radicalized you?” was “afflicted” with a misunderstanding of the definition of “radicalized”.
Of course! I was just agreeing with the original comment. It ain't radical. It's awake. But I understand that you disagree 🤝🏿
"I had to travel, 'fore I got wise...."
-Memphis Minnie
"At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet?" I would really like to know the answer to that question too. So many people I try to talk to look at me with a kind of superior look and they say "I don't read the news"
I can tell you:
Because once you start down that road of radicalization, you have to start making choices. If the society and system that we live under does so much evil, how much will I compromise with it?
These choices can have very real personal and professional consequences. Try not paying taxes and see what happens. "Bartelby the Scrivener" it ain't.
Even if you do compromise, you are left with a guilty conscience.
By contrast, if you go along with the crowd, you can avoid those tough choices and face no consequences, and your conscience stays relatively untroubled, for the time being at least. Even in the worst case, you can say to yourself that you did what every other Good German did under the circumstances.
The IRS will want its cut.
Once AI takes everyones jobs nobody will be able to pay tax anylonger.
I’m filing tax-exempt next year.
That's what I'm trying to understand too. I'm trying to understand WHY people are not yet radicalized and their many reasons and justifications for it.
I have talked to so many people (friends, acquaintances, family members) for whom the last 7 years have made no difference - they've ignored almost every event in the last 7 years because it doesn't affect them (other than Covid to a certain limited extent).
THIS is what I want to understand - why is it that some people are radicalized while others are not? What is the deeper psychology behind this?
I've read several articles on this since 2020.
IIf the brainwash is deep and thorough, it can be mentally disruptive and injurious to hear and believe something other than what one believes. I've also read that the jabs may have something to do with it.
Leave jab talk out of it (it exposes your biases and provides an example of precisely what you say - "disruptive and injurious to hear and believe something other than what one believes".
The issue (psychological depth/insight into this) seems quite a bit more involved IMHO.
I disagree
Good for you.
We’re not starving enough to care about the current state of affairs to make any real changes. There’s still food available, even if you have to steal it.
Once there is real starvation or homelessness hits the middle classes people will become radicalized, for good or for ill.
Yeah, I'm thinking along the same lines too - i.e. the desperation is not real/extreme enough apparently for real change to happen yet...
"THIS is what I want to understand - why is it that some people are radicalized while others are not? What is the deeper psychology behind this?"
Chang, Have you found the answer yet? I think it is human nature and the environment that conditions them. The conditioned American believes that their affluence is a given, that they are entitled. Where the affluence comes from is never questioned.
Those who care, use their wisdom and critical thinking , will find the answer some day. The dystopia we are living through today will surely hasten the realisation.
Smh
they kinda do and they know.
The day I had to call my wife from a phone booth outside the draft induction center where I had just passed the army induction physical in my 2nd yr of grad school -- to inform her I'd become eligible for Viet Cong target practice.
My step father was a Vietnam vet. He volunteered after graduating from hs in 1966. He was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was wounded in combat and received a Purple Heart. He left the army with a permanent disability and PTSD.
When my little brother was born in 1975, his father beat me to the baby's room when he woke up for feeding. He stood there holding my brother and he said "I'm never letting my son go fight in any bullshit wars." I was only 11 and didn't understand what he was talking about. It took me about 15 more years to figure it out.
Bless your dad. His experience sounds like that of numerous of my Brooklyn street friends who enlisted, several of whom never returned to our mean streets. Ultimately, when war or its effects are in your face, in your family, your grow up fast realizing what your country really is. And the radicalization deepens and becomes ever more profound from that moment forward.
That would do it!
They wanted to make you into a bullseye? Well, boot camp would have been easy.
Sounds like a hell of a stimulus for that popular radicalization theme of the time: "Fuck You, USA" and the resurgence of Dylan's anthem, "With god on our side".
Ah yes, money always talks loudest in America.
MY ROAD TO RADICALIZATION
1965, at 17 years old after graduating high school I realized I was going to be drafted when I turned 18. I would have to do something if I didn't want to end up dead in the jungles of Vietnam. My cousin had just enlisted in USAF and convinced me that it was better to serve four years instead of two if you could get better training and avoid the infantry. I became a flight line mechanic and the closest I came to the jungles was in Guam. Granted, it was no picnic but I survived. However, any sense that the US was a fair country did die. I had already decided that there was something wrong with the JFK murder that had to do with the civil rights movement and Vietnam and growing up in a Brooklyn ghetto proved to me that there was no such thing as equality in America. I knew that killing Vietnamese who were more poor than me made no sense.
When I was discharged I immediately went to LA Valley college and together with my veteran comrades started a chapter of Vets for Peace. Thereafter, it was no big leap to figure out the difference between socialism and capitalism. At that point I was fully radicalized. I am now 78 and have nothing but contempt for America which has become 100 times worse than it was in the sixties. A terrorist police state run by corrupt oligarchs and you can vote until you are blue in the face and it will never change.
Ask Ray McGovern Veteran for Peace member about JFK and 911. Thank you for your service in VFP Wil. Rest in Power Aaron Bushnell.
My stepfather was a Vietnam vet. He volunteered after graduating from hs in 1966. He was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was wounded in combat and received a Purple Heart. He left the army with a permanent disability and PTSD.
When my little brother was born in 1975, his father beat me to the baby's room when he woke up for feeding. He stood there holding my brother and he said "I'm never letting my son go fight in any bullshit wars." I was only 11 and didn't understand what he was talking about. It took me about 10 more years to really figure it out. I read various books and watched videos. Now I'm completely anti military, thanks to my vet stepfather.
A friend has gotten involved with Veterans for Peace as a civilian. They wanted to march in an annual local parade a few years back. The non-peace vets didn't want them, but the people in charge let them, though they had to bring up the rear. Vets for peace instead of war are a threat to the status quo. I'm glad you started the chapter.
Veterans make the best anti-war activists. I’m in an occupied territory in California, with several military training facilities nearby, and when I see someone in uniform I say, “don’t kill anyone,” never that brainless bromide, “thank you for your service,” in a nation that treats vets like spent shells.
WHY THEY SERVE
I think we should keep in mind that whenever we think of those who serve there is a great divide between the person that gave himself up to be a tool of government and the government that uses him or her for dubious purpose.
They are not the same thing. Why they serve and how they do it is a very personal thing. Whereas, the mission they are sent on is another matter. Unfortunately, how the public views that service is often fickle and ignorant. Without much consciousness or empathy for what the real personal individual motives were and how that service was carried out. Only a veteran can understand this because he/she is the victim. That's why the first thing I did after I was discharged was connect with my fellow veterans and listen to their stories. I was part of a group of guys that started the first chapter of Veterans for Peace at Valley College Los Angeles in 1970. For two years all my friends were vets. It was a form of rehabilitation that served me greatly.
https://substack.com/@wilrodx108853
Yes, support groups are essential. No one outside that group can truly understand what it's like to have lived through all the things. I have family I cannot speak to openly because they still believe in having protected American for and from something mythological, delusional. I love them anyway. I also respect those on the path, as having broken through to the other side of some terrible misconceptions myself, and patience and love brought me back to reality. I'd like to see vet groups create community alternatives - those are the guys who have created virtual cities overnight, and have the skills, medical, technical, comms, transportation, and protection, but are deemed useless upon return. We all need to use our skills for good. :-)
I love your comment. I know many people who lived through the Vietnam war and were radicalized and protested but now in their 70s, they are glued to corporate media, have taken all their boosters, think Fauci is a saint, and Ukraine is bound to beat Russia, etc.
Hopefully, not that many. Some people never learn...or just don't want to think about it.
WTC 7 was my ice bath that forced me to see this crooked mess of a world for the hellscape it currently is. Excellent piece Ms. Johnstone.
Richard Gage has a movie about to come out on Building 7 and the NIST cover up. NIST has this insane theory that one steel girder failing led to a symmetrical demolition of a building. It should have fallen over if anything about their theory was correct, or not collapsed at all. 8 floors of the building all failed across all steel girders at the exact same time, hence they were exploded with timed explosives. It's a given.
The infamous column 79. Utter rubbish.
Two of the most reason-filled and impactful writings on 9-11, from oh so many years ago. You all keep having your fun beliefs though.
https://www.nist.gov/world-trade-center-investigation/study-faqs/wtc-7-investigation
and
https://www.alternet.org/2008/05/if_cheney__co_had_really_plotted_the_9_11_attacks_
Silly boy.
Of course Bush & Cheney weren’t sent to the White House to “cook up boat-rocking maniacal world-domination plans.” And of course no one was betting on Bush’s “ability” to plan or execute operational aspects—the only “bet” regarding Bush was that he would do as told running cover. Taibbi, in his half-clever and imaginative fashion, sets up false characterizations as the basis for an argument that doesn’t exist.
Taibbi’s contention that 9/11 wasn’t needed to get Americans “on board” with the GWOT misses the fact that 9/11–though it did result in massive “defense” and “homeland security” expenditures, a quarter-century of neoconservative domination of “security state” geopolitical policy (and the Patriot Act, btw)—was also an operation that covered up massive financial crimes.
In hindsight, 9/11 has been an obvious boon to the neoconservative project, strongly tied to the Zionist project.
~~~
It is absurd to think al-Qaeda had operational capability to pull off 9/11. It is not absurd to understand that elements of the CIA, Mossad, and other deep state functionaries pulled it off.
Taibbi finishes his piece with nonsensical, childish imaginings of what he believes are the imaginings of others.
Impactful as hell, considering all the well-documented books on the subject.
In the piece Taibbi was deftly dispatching many specific conspiracy theory ideas that were circulating in the mid-2000s toxic stew of US cultural trauma and educational deficiencies. I remember them well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the most extreme lunatic ideas have been shaken out over the intervening decades to produce a conspiracy narrative that’s more enduring, has slightly more traction and respectability, because that’s how these ideological lifetimes often go.
It’s interesting that you ignore the other link in my comment, to the NIST final summary on Building 7, produced by a lot of professional engineers. But they’re all in on the conspiracy too, of course.
It is correct that people with refined skills are able to spot naivety or implausibility. That’s why so many intelligent people scoff at the narrative you are apparently promoting.
Certain naive or implausible ideas circulated taking the ultimate position that something much different from the “official” narrative occurred. Those ideas have nothing to do with the plausibility of reasonable narratives based in evidence which destroy the “official” narrative. You are just muddying the waters and wielding a tar brush, if I may mix my metaphors. An avoidance of the fact that the 9/11 Commission was a ludicrous cover job is disingenuous.
~~~
My reply to your other link is that that “summary” was compromised and lots of professional engineers can attest to that.
It is far from being a matter of “fun” to realize or understand certain realities which bear direct negative consequence, threat, and in instances, extreme depravities, toward the human condition that makes the heart suffer and cry out for justice.
Another thing about the Taibbi piece—
Yes Matt, there are “terrible truths” that the “ruling class” prefers to be kept out of the limelight, so to speak. And yes the “ruling class” is about making money. It’s also about control. And there is an evil that men will do.
It fell over because there was significant structural and seismic and fire impact very nearby, which would be completely unchallenged if 9-11 wasn’t marinated in a deep glaze of conspiracy. It’s only an ice bath if you forget to use your hot water.
write down the names of all the people in this video and see their writings on ae911truth.org - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6zKo2g5DWs
There is a new movie that god willing is going to be on netflix wrt 7 very soon. Deal is being negotiated right now.
“fell over”
“completely unchallenged”
~~~
Yeah, right. Fairytale physics-defying fed-slop is not just “challenged,” it’s ridiculed.
~~~
Try understanding the terminology you use. The events of 9/11, criminal in nature, due to sheer breadth & complexity, are quite obviously a result of conspiracy. Your puerile and ignorant attempt to use “conspiracy” in a sentence is of note. The fed-slop narrative of the events of the day is a “conspiracy theory,” and, along with the fed-slop “physics,” is a subject of ridicule as well. Arabs with knives, oh my!
Sigh.
Save your sigh. It looks bad on you.
Is Israel a Democracy JG? Say Make Palestine again please.
According to NIST, this steel-framed structure fell, for the first time in history, due to FIRE ALONE. Believe whatever you want. I’m still trusting that my eyes aren’t lying to me.
JG Miller, there are too many conspiracy theorists in Caitlin's substack (and it doesn't help that Caitlin herself is on the borderline of critical skepticism and conspiracism - as evidenced by her comment on 9/11). There is a certain 'psychology' behind why some people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than others (and it's quite interesting actually - and has been studied extensively).
The more things Chang, the more they stay the same. Ol’ Chokaski: Staunch Defender of Official Myths.
The issue with many conspiracy theorists is they have trouble distinguishing between 'true conspiracies', 'plausible conspiracies', 'lacking-in-evidence conspiracies', and sometimes downright 'stupid conspiracies'.
Conspiracy theories have a very large spectrum, and often it is not the conspiracy itself that is the issue but rather the 'THEORY' behind the conspiracy that is the problem (hence the term conspiracy theorist).
There are several well-evidenced and empirically analyzed conspiracies that have sound theories behind them - these are not what is colloquially called a "conspiracy theory".
When there is insufficient evidence and the gap is made up by speculation based on arbitrary criteria (regardless of how many people believe and agree on such criteria), that is when the THEORY behind the conspiracy becomes suspect.
Here's some reading (that I know you won't do because what if you're wrong about your theories? how will that affect your psychology?)
(1) Speaking of Psychology: Why people believe in conspiracy theories [https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/conspiracy-theories]
(2) Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories? [https://www.verywellmind.com/why-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-4690335]
We've had this conversation before Jim, hence I did not address my comment to YOU above, but to JG Miller. But it seems you could not resist responding to me.
Blah blah blah. WTC 7 is an obvious controlled demolition. Your constant defense of the official narrative is telling.
A typical response from a conspiracy theorist. I'm unimpressed by your argumentation abilities (but what else is new?)
So you don't believe there are many plot holes in the original 9/11 narrative?
Calling something a ‘plot hole’ doesn't establish that there was a plot. The fact that an event may have unanswered questions, disputed details, or imperfect explanations is not evidence of a conspiracy.
You're starting with the assumption that there was a conspiracy and then treating anything you think doesn't fit the conventional account as a ‘plot hole.’ Plot holes aren't evidence of a plot. That's backwards reasoning. An imperfect or incomplete account of an enormously complex event doesn't provide evidence for a conspiracy. If there is positive evidence for one, that's a different matter—but I haven't seen any.
Here is the fundamental epistemological problem and logical flaw with such reasoning that your question suggests -
“I can't explain X” is not equivalent to “therefore Y conspiracy.”
That is essentially the entire problem with a lot of conspiracy reasoning. An anomaly can be worth investigating, but an anomaly has to be connected to a positive evidentiary case for the alternative explanation. Otherwise, you are just accumulating things that feel strange and calling their accumulation evidence.
Here are some important distinctions to make when thinking about conspiracy theories (that may help you with the analysis process) -
(1) An unexplained question ≠ a contradiction: Something not immediately explained isn't necessarily inconsistent with the established account.
(2) A contradiction ≠ evidence of conspiracy: Even if some aspect of the official account were wrong or incomplete, that doesn't establish who was responsible or what actually happened.
(3) Evidence of a conspiracy requires positive evidence: You would need evidence pointing toward an alternative causal account—not merely evidence that the conventional account contains imperfections.
(4) “The original narrative” is potentially a loaded phrase: There isn't necessarily one monolithic “9/11 narrative.” There are thousands of individual factual claims concerning the attacks, the hijackers, intelligence failures, building collapses, air-defense response, etc. Some early reporting was inevitably incomplete or erroneous and was subsequently revised. That's very different from demonstrating that the underlying account is fabricated.
There are ways to think critically about conspiracies, but most conspiracy theorists rarely engage such methods in analyzing conspiracy theories.
This response is already long and likely more than you bargained for, so I'll stop here (though there is much academic research and more to say on how to adequately think about conspiracy theories and understand them).
My use of 'plot hole' was just referencing what Caitlan wrote. I know what i think about 9/11 because of the facts that do not match to the original narrative.
I guess you didn’t understand my response to you… I’m not aware of any so-called “plot holes” and I have no idea what ‘plot holes’ Caitlin is talking about as she doesn’t mention any. On the ‘facts don’t match the original narrative’ - that is exactly what my response to you is about.
My experience has been with a good friend that His argument is that A, the official story has holes in it. He advocates for B, his plot-hole filler, which has quite a few of its own holes in it, and whenever I point them out, rather than addressing those objections, he doubles down on not-A, as if proving not A, proved B, rather than some C, D, E and/or F. I have a difficult time with that kind of thinking.
Precisely! There is a reason why it is almost impossible to argue with a conspiracy theorist - and the reasons for this are increasingly psychological and social.
There is a substantial literature in psychology and sociology on conspiracy beliefs, motivated reasoning, identity-protective cognition, epistemic trust, and group identity.
For example, a CT (conspiracy theory) can provide an explanation for uncertainty. It can restore a sense of order to apparently chaotic events. It can identify villains and assign responsibility. And it can provide membership in a community of people who supposedly “see what others cannot.”
Once a belief becomes part of someone's identity, presenting contrary evidence can be experienced not merely as:
“Here's evidence that your proposition is wrong.”
but as:
“You are attacking my competence, my community, my political tribe, and my understanding of reality.”
At that point, more evidence can paradoxically produce more resistance rather than less.
For me, it was reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" years ago. Until then, I had just been a plain vanilla liberal. Zinn opened my eyes and the eyes of millions of people. I see him as a true American hero.
I''d rather be in a corner with my blanky and binky thinking happy thoughts. But it has become quite impossible.
Jack Daniels can help!
It might, but I don't touch the stuff.
No! Thee Jack Daniels.
Bronfman juice only helps the Bronfman idiots get fitlhy rich.
But they have a merry time while they're at it!
True island dwellers...
I don't get it
jamenta, You are in danger of getting inebriated!
o.0
And many of us were radicalized long before the most recent imperialist rampage. It's hard to understand how people haven't noticed this stuff.
I've been a Palestine supporter for about 17 years now. Before that I basically hated both sides, until I met and fell in love with a Palestinian man. He told me kinds of stuff that I just didn't believe, so I started looking things up and lo and behold, he was telling the truth. I'm glad so many people around the world have had their eyes open, but why did it take a genocide? And now, the lying and gaslighting about Israel is even worse than before. What a nightmare.
I wish more people would open their eyes to the genocide. What a nightmare, for sure, and I hope Israel is stopped soon.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Covid, i made fun of anti-vaxers and then got myocarditis. How embarrassing. This got me watching RFKJr and I read his book on Pfauci. Watching RFKJr made me realize I knew nothing about Nov 22, 1963 and JFK. Two years reading on the JFK assassination radicalized me to some degree. After I solved that with 100% certainty, that it was a conspiracy driven by our gov't, i tacked 9/11 which I have been on a year.
Nothing is as the NPCs and normies believe it is. Nothing. Once you take the toothpaste out of the tube, you can't put it back.
Still wouldn't put JFK' s murder past Israel.
Yeah, that is possible. When I say I solved it, what i meant is that LHO was a bogus story put forward by our gov’t and there was a conspiracy. I am certain LHO was a patsy, who thought he was involved in a blackops anti Castro mission. I am certain the Warren Commission covered up the truth. I am sure of all of this. I’m not sure of whether it was Israel, the CIA or LBJ as the alpha dog driving it.
Yeah, I agree, but I seriously can't imagine LBJ doing it. He would have been great if he had ended Vietnam instead of going all in. It could have been elements of our government under Izrshell's influence. Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) was Jewish fwiw.
He wasn't a killer unless you count Vietnam.
Or don’t count Mac Wallace?
Myocarditis is orders of magnitude more common after a dose of Covid than after the vaccination. Covid also damages a couple of other organs that are very unforgiving of damage; the brain and the kidneys. I will not be even slightly surprised if the anti-vaxxers suffer greatly increased prevalence of congestive heart failure, dementia and chronic renal failure in future decades.
you know, i have not missed a day of work for being sick in maybe 15 years, including when i got covid. I started feeling it friday night, slept all day Sat and Sun, went to work(WFH) on Monday. To make a big deal out of what was in effect a bad flu is hilarious. It was NBD. Our hospitals killed a lot of old people. Sorry you wanted it to be the black plague, but it wasn't. It was the flu that year. Look up annual flu deaths in the US for the past 10 years from the CDC website.
Coronaviruses and influenza viruses are not the same thing. Thanks for proving that you know nothing about virology.
Nobody ever suggested that COVID had the same mortality rate as Plague, which is a bacterial disease.
At least seven million people worldwide died of COVID. For you to sneer about that because you had a mild case, is disgusting.
You are still at risk of congestive heart failure, dementia and/or chronic renal failure as a result of your bout of COVID.
your retardedness is appreciated
Oh well that explains my PhD in pathology.
Your use of an ableist slur is disgusting.
Great comment from someone who's still asleep.
Embarrassing but also Awakening!
Sorry about the myocarditis! But welcome to the other side. 2020 and on started my big awakening.
Note 1: Das Bootlicker — The Mechanics of Weaponized Guilt
Has human civilization ever witnessed a display of moral gymnastics quite as grotesque, quite as obsessively bureaucratized, as the modern Federal Republic of Germany? History has known its fair share of ruthless empires and shameless opportunists, but none have ever managed to convert the absolute horror of their own historic crimes into a permanent diplomatic hall pass for someone else’s slaughter. Other vassal states hide their complicity behind quiet shame or clumsy geopolitical calculus—and while the French may capitulate quicker than a man suffering from premature ejaculation, Berlin does not merely surrender its moral autonomy; it collapses into pre-emptive, enthusiastic servitude. Let them be warned: not all people on this earth are such pathetic cowards.
Staatsräson, oh gift divine—
We wash our sins in coastal brine!
With tearful eyes and heavy soul,
We stamp the bombs and sign the scroll!
To watch German statecraft in action today is to watch a tragicomic pantomime of compulsive, pathological over-correction. They have elevated Staatsräson—their holy 'reason of state'—from a doctrine of historical atonement into a grotesque, weaponized fetish. In their desperate eagerness to prove they are no longer the monsters of the twentieth century, they have happily signed up as the enthusiastic mechanics for the atrocities of the twenty-first.
If Berlin truly harboured genuine care for Jewish people, it would grasp a fundamental moral truth: true friends restrain you from committing evil and destroying your own moral existence; they do not egg you on as you seal your own spiritual ruin. Yet state authorities routinely crack down on peace activists and anti-war dissidents under the transparent pretext of combating anti-Semitism—conveniently oblivious to the staggering irony that the very Arabs, and particularly Arab women, whom their police tackle and drag through the streets are themselves Semites. Most of the world's Semitic peoples are Arabs, yet Berlin's self-congratulatory elite—educated fools who pride themselves on academic pedigree—are far too dense to grasp basic etymology. They parade their intellectual credentials while enforcing state orthodoxy with the subtlety of a truncheon, entirely unaware of their own monumental ignorance.
This is, after all, an official apparatus where the concept of Ordnung has effectively replaced the human soul. This is a bureaucratic machine that considers waiting at a pedestrian crossing in an empty desert at three in the morning—simply because a glowing red light commands it—to be the absolute apex of civilizational achievement. They navigate international relations with the exact same terrifying rigidity. If an ongoing slaughter has been properly vetted by three parliamentary committees, certified by an administrative tribunal, and cross-referenced against five sub-clauses of European export regulations, then as far as Berlin is concerned, the blood on the floor is merely an unavoidable procedural side-effect.
Edmund Burke dryly noted, 'Servility to the great has its own compensation.' But modern Berlin has surpassed even Burke’s cynicism—their hypocrisy does not merely cost nothing; it buys them absolution. Indeed, they are the only state apparatus on earth capable of making Washington look sophisticated. Where Americans sell an imperial campaign wrapped in a Hollywood blockbuster, a fireworks display, and a catchy slogan, Berlin hands you an atrocity accompanied by a 400-page compliance manual, demanding you admire the uniform margins, immaculate filing, and proper waste-sorting procedures of the regime.
Brilliant!, Good 'The custodian'.
Currently, just about everyone I know is intellectually incurious and largely oblivious to what is happening at home [ U.S.A. ] and abroad. They are mostly nice, decent people. But they are the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water. This frightens me, because such individuals are not outliers in the Empire. Many Americans are not even aware of the rapidly approaching economic catastrophe resulting from the U.S./Israeli war of aggression against Iran. The fallout from this historically disastrous and criminal war - its impacts on energy and food production - has not reached the United States full force. Come the Fall, it will. The charnel pit that Gaza has been reduced to should haunt everyone in the West - and many certainly are horrified and angry. But too many are fundamentally checked out or don't want to focus on these atrocities, and the totalitarian train barreling down upon us, because it's unpleasant or depressing.
Is it because people feel helpless to do anything to stop it? I remember Dick Chaney when told by a journalist that polls showed that the vast majority of Americans opposed to war in Iraq, he said, "So what."
For me, it was stopping to listen to student speakers at UC
Berkeley when I was 18 hearing radical speech for the first time and finding it made sense. thjen I had a girl friend from a leftwing ethical culture background from NYC and her friends. And then it was marching with Dr. King and watching the pickup trucks with guns staring at us and the policelooking for a chance to crack skulls. And then, after I retired, it was understand that Karl Marx's insights alighned with both what I was learning from study pre-civilizational culture with its egalitarn, sharing, non-violent norms and then finally neuro science, finding that the radical traits at the heart of left thinking...trust, altruism and cooperaiton are inborn, inherited. And so, at 85, it has all come together: values, science, and ideology. Now I see Medicare for all, which wold according to a Yale study save a trillion a year and save 114, 000 lives and stop the copayments that make Medicare as is too costly for some,
for instance, I will be having back surgery, as I can barely walk, and my 20% will be thousands of dollars. Sander's Medicare for all would make that 0 dollars, and my cataratct surgery will cost about $600 and the MFA would also make that zero, meanwile saving a trillion by eliminating the parasitic middle man with those 20 million salariess and private jets, made possible by denying claims. And that is making me, an octogenarian, even more radical, as I see MFA being called radical tho nearly 2/3 of the American people support it. Too fucking bad we don't have a democracy...and that makes me even more radical.
I can't do much but write about it, but like John Lennon said, I aint the only one. Radicals are winning eletions all across the nation as the establishment Democrats fart themselves to sleep and Trump's approval is at 33% and dropping.
I am radical because I grew up at the bottom, and so my natural inclination is to support change from the bottom up. The ideas came from lefty students but the reality of being a lefty and for me this incudes pacisfism and veganism is from life experience. I am supposed to grow more conservative but only in my 80's did I realize I am a Marxist, that only a radical revolution that abolishes private property, can create a just society, and so that's my story about getting radicalized, with the genocide in Gaza being the last straw!!!
The constant stream of lies radicalized me.
Israel and the U$A Lie, people die.
I had the privilege of being brought up that way.
We live in a country of 300 million meat puppets - ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ was a work of material, radical prophecy. The question isn’t why they’re not radicalised: it’s how they even put their socks on