Suppressing Dissent Guarantees Disorder And Collapse

The frantic efforts of an exploitative elite to eliminate dissent only accelerates the regime's path to collapse.

Regimes that are losing public support always make the same mistake: rather than fix the source of the loss of public trust–the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many– the regime reckons the problem is dissent: if we suppress all dissent, then everyone will accept their diminishing lot in life and the elites can continue on their merry way.

What the regimes don't understand is dissent is the immune system of society: suppressing dissent doesn't just get rid of pesky political protesters and conspiracy theorists; it also gets rid of the innovations and solutions society needs to adapt to changing conditions. Suppressing dissent dooms the society to sclerosis, decline and collapse.

Dissent is the relief valve: shut it down and the pressure builds to the point that the system explodes. Regimes that no longer tolerate anything but the party line fall in one of two ways: 1) the pressure builds and the masses revolt, tearing the elite from power or 2) the masses opt-out and stop working to support the regime, so the regime slowly starves and then implodes.

Here in the U.S., the suppression of dissent is the work of the corporate media and the Big Tech monopolies: Facebook, Twitter and Google. As Mark St.Cyr and I discuss in a new no-holds-barred podcast (1:08 hours, 4 segments), Big Tech is effectively suppressing dissent via shadow banning, de-platforming and de-monetization:

– shadow banning: the audience who gets to see your content is throttled back to a fraction of your pre-shadow-banning audience. The mechanics are shrouded in secrecy, Stasi-style.

– de-platforming: the Big Tech monopoly declares you persona non grata for a supposed violation of their Kafkaesque Terms of Service and bans your content from their platform, effectively silencing you.

– de-monetization: your content is still officially on the platform in truncated form, but the flow of advertising revenue is turned off: you're welcome to post content but you will no longer be able to make any money from it. Enjoy!

When you crush dissent and spend a full year cracking the skulls of protesters, you end up with, well, France's general strikes. I covered the yellow vest protests in some depth a year ago: France in a Nutshell: "The Government Stopped Listening to the People 20 Years Ago" (December 12, 2018)

France's Ghosts of '68: General Strike vs. Macron and the Technocrat Elites (January 16, 2019)

Here in the U.S., the crushing dissent gathered momentum when all dissent was lumped into the tarpits of "fake news" and "Russian propaganda." What better way to throw the baby out with the bathwater than declare any dissent from the approved party line "fake news" and/or "Russian propaganda." The catalyst was a completely fake "list of Russian agents" assembled by an unidentified source called PropOrNot in 2016.

The Washington Post and other corporate media outlets immediately published the baseless accusations without bothering to seek the identity of the accusers or establish any sort of objective standards to judge the validity of the accusation. It was pure Orwell, as I explained at the time: The Washington Post: Useful-Idiot Shills for a Failed, Frantic Status Quo That Has Lost Control of the Narrative (November 27, 2016)

In police-state fashion, Big Tech took the list of accused (including this site), declared all those named guilty and promptly shadow-banned, de-platformed or de-monetized us all without coming clean about how they engineered the crushing of dissent.

In classic Stasi fashion, the mechanics are all black box: the accused are never confronted with their accuser, never provided with the evidence of their "crime," and never given an opportunity to defend themselves against the false accusation.

Everyone on the PropOrNot list was declared guilty until proven innocent, but there was no way to prove our innocence. Kafka, meet Orwell: a completely opaque, privately owned Stasi (Facebook, Twitter, Google) does the elites' dirty work, concealed behind the impenetrable bureaucracy of algorithms, secret guidelines and Terms of Service which can be interpreted in whatever way serves the gatekeepers' interests.

Suppressing dissent guarantees disorder and collapse. Ironic, isn't it? The frantic efforts of an exploitive elite to eliminate dissent only accelerates the regime's path to collapse.

Mark St.Cyr and I discuss these topics as only those who've been suppressed can in our recent podcast. (1:08 hours, 4 segments)

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/12/suppressing-dissent-guarantees-disorder.html

Lawmakers Urge AG Barr to Prosecute Obscene Pornography Producers, Distributors

Four Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr to urge him to take action against producers and distributors of obscene pornography.

The letter, obtained by the National Review, was signed by Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), and Brian Babin (R-Texas) and asks the Justice Department to enforce U.S. obscenity laws against the porn industry.

The congress members say the internet and evolving technologies are fueling an explosion in obscene pornography, which is coinciding with the increase of violence towards women and an increase in the volume of human trafficking as well as child pornography. Dr. Alvin Cooper, a sex research, said online pornography addiction is becoming a rising problem because the accessibility, affordability, anonymity provided by the internet makes the content more readily available, calling the phenomenon the “Triple A engine.”

“Victims are not limited to those directly exploited … and include society writ large. This phenomenon is especially harmful to youth, who are being exposed to obscene pornography at exponentially younger ages,” they wrote in their letter dated Dec. 6 (pdf).

https://www.theepochtimes.com/lawmakers-urge-ag-barr-to-prosecute-obscene-pornography-producers-distributors_3167573.html

Bernie Sanders Joins Climate Strikers in Iowa: This Is a ‘Global Existential Crisis’

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) joined climate change strikers outside of the Iowa Capitol Building in Des Moines as part of Friday’s global climate strike.

Sanders joined youth activists in Iowa on Friday as part of the climate strikes held by protesters across the globe and thanked those in attendance for being there and “understanding what the President of the United States does not understand.”

“And that is that climate change is not a hoax, but climate change is a terrible, terrible reality impacting our country and the entire world today,” Sanders said. “Not tomorrow, but today.”

He told the group of activists:

And the bad news is, that what the scientists have told us is that they have underestimated the severity and the degree to which climate change is ravaging our country and the entire world, and what they have told us — and unlike the President of the United States, we listen to science.

“And we know that if we’re going to save this planet … we have got to take on the fossil fuel industry, and we have got to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel,” he said, calling for “sustainable energy.”

He said the “very bad” and “scary” news is that we face a “global existential crisis.”

The good news, Sanders said, is “we can address this crisis if we have the courage to stand up to greedy and powerful special interests.”

“I’m proud to stand with young people in Iowa and around the world today in their climate strikes,” Sanders wrote alongside a video of his appearance at the event.

“This is about the future of the planet and we won’t accept a middle ground approach,” he added. “We need a Green New Deal”:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/07/bernie-sanders-joins-climate-strikers-in-iowa-this-is-a-global-existential-crisis/

Israeli researchers manipulate memories in mice, say could apply to humans

"We were able, for the first time, to cause mice to assign a negative value to an event that never took place."

University of Haifa researchers manipulate memories in mice, say could apply to humans, too

A team of University of Haifa researchers have succeeded in implanting emotions in mice that were never experienced.

“We were able, for the first time, to cause mice to assign a negative value to an event that never took place, and accordingly, to remember a feeling that was not experienced in reality,” said PhD student Haneed Kayyal, who led the study with postdoctoral fellow Adonis Yiannaks.

In a three-part study, the scientists identified a neural pathway in the brain that determines whether a particular taste will have a positive or negative emotional value (impacting future consumption), and to use these neurons to erase or transplant memories that were never experienced in reality.

Since these neural pathways are highly similar across mammals, including mice and humans, the researchers believe the study will be applicable in people, too.

“The findings will allow us to explore in the future how a variety of psychiatric illnesses can be treated, ranging from eating disorders that have too-powerful or too-weak ‘emotional engravings’ in response to eating experiences and to dealing with emotional traumas such as PTSD, which do not allow the emotional value of an experience to be eradicated,” Prof. Kobi Rosenblum from the Sagol Department of Neurobiology at the University of Haifa, who oversees the PhD students, explained.

Rosenblum has long been studying how the brain labels sensory memories as positive or negative, based on the understanding that although people are naturally born with a preference for certain flavors, for example, these innate preferences can be changed by a learning process.

In the first part of this experiment, the researchers gave the mice something sweet to taste and associated it with a general feeling of discomfort, in this case abdominal pain. After repeating this several times, the mice avoided eating the sweet taste.

The team concurrently investigated the brain activity of mice during the association of a sweet taste with abdominal pain and found “neuronal activation in the insular cortex in the brain, an area involved in complex brain functions, which projects to the basolateral amygdala, which is located in the medial prefrontal cortex and is involved in the formation of emotional memories,” a release explained.

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Israeli-researchers-manipulate-memories-in-mice-say-could-apply-to-humans-610174/

Israeli researchers manipulate memories in mice, say could apply to humans

"We were able, for the first time, to cause mice to assign a negative value to an event that never took place."

University of Haifa researchers manipulate memories in mice, say could apply to humans, too

A team of University of Haifa researchers have succeeded in implanting emotions in mice that were never experienced.

“We were able, for the first time, to cause mice to assign a negative value to an event that never took place, and accordingly, to remember a feeling that was not experienced in reality,” said PhD student Haneed Kayyal, who led the study with postdoctoral fellow Adonis Yiannaks.

In a three-part study, the scientists identified a neural pathway in the brain that determines whether a particular taste will have a positive or negative emotional value (impacting future consumption), and to use these neurons to erase or transplant memories that were never experienced in reality.

Since these neural pathways are highly similar across mammals, including mice and humans, the researchers believe the study will be applicable in people, too.

“The findings will allow us to explore in the future how a variety of psychiatric illnesses can be treated, ranging from eating disorders that have too-powerful or too-weak ‘emotional engravings’ in response to eating experiences and to dealing with emotional traumas such as PTSD, which do not allow the emotional value of an experience to be eradicated,” Prof. Kobi Rosenblum from the Sagol Department of Neurobiology at the University of Haifa, who oversees the PhD students, explained.

Rosenblum has long been studying how the brain labels sensory memories as positive or negative, based on the understanding that although people are naturally born with a preference for certain flavors, for example, these innate preferences can be changed by a learning process.

In the first part of this experiment, the researchers gave the mice something sweet to taste and associated it with a general feeling of discomfort, in this case abdominal pain. After repeating this several times, the mice avoided eating the sweet taste.

The team concurrently investigated the brain activity of mice during the association of a sweet taste with abdominal pain and found “neuronal activation in the insular cortex in the brain, an area involved in complex brain functions, which projects to the basolateral amygdala, which is located in the medial prefrontal cortex and is involved in the formation of emotional memories,” a release explained.

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Israeli-researchers-manipulate-memories-in-mice-say-could-apply-to-humans-610174

Bob Hawke's daughter makes explosive claim she was raped by a former minister and her father forced her to stay quiet as he feared a scandal would risk his chance of becoming Labor leader

Rosslyn Dillon claims her father begged her to stay quiet after she was raped

Once Australia's most beloved politician, Hawke feared it could derail his career

Her alleged attacker, Labor MP Bill Landeryou, was a close friend of Hawke

She fell pregnant and nearly had an abortion before learning he was infertile

Now a mother-of-two, she is making a $4 million bid for her late father's estate

The daughter of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke claimed she was raped by a Labor MP, but her father begged her to stay silent for the sake of his own political career.

Rosslyn Dillon alleged she was raped three times in the 1980s by Bill Landeryou, a close friend of Mr Hawke, who died in February.

But as she turned to her father for comfort, she said she was met with a 'shocking and hurtful' response as he pleaded with her to stay quiet.

He feared it could derail his political career when he was on the cusp of becoming Labor leader.

The explosive allegations came as Ms Dillon lodged a $4 million legal claim on much of her father's estate following his death in May.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7766671/Bob-Hawkes-daughter-claims-ordered-stay-quiet-raped-three-times-Labor-MP.html