Galileo, Evil, God and Huxley
Floating threads of thought
It was a beautiful sunny afternoon here in Sydney, and everyone was walking around in a mask. Sigh. Oh, and Novak is getting deported.
Here is a collection of threads floating around in my mind the last few weeks.
Galileo’s neighbour
This has been a thought experiment for me for some time. I might write at length about if my thoughts fully form. But I’ve been wondering:
If I was Galileo’s neighbour, how would I know he was right?
In a geocentric world, what would be the “tools of thought” necessary to understand that my neighbour’s heliocentric ideas were right?
What would “knowing” mean anyway? I could never understand the actual science. It would have to be a probabilistic conclusion. I would need a collection of tools that in their aggregate helped me figure out the “shape of what is likely to be right”.
What would those tools look like?
One of them for sure would be to ask myself who benefits from geocentrism? How does Galileo benefit from his heliocentrism?
So, I guess in both those examples I’m paying attention to incentives and disincentives and then paying attention to people’s ideas and positions as they relate to their incentives.
I think it is a basic truth to say that someone that is promoting an idea that is directly against their own interests is “likely to be true”. It is not evidence of truth but if I can accumulate enough of these “likely or highly likely to be trues” I think I just might have a probabilistic conclusion that Galileo is likely right, and the Cardinals are likely wrong.
How long has my neighbour been at this Earth around the Sun thing?
Can I get him to explain it to me to see if I can understand the basics?
What simple real world examples (or tests) are there to support my neighbour’s position vs The States?
Are there any other people who agree with my neighbour? What are they like and what are their backgrounds?
Is there a Fact Pattern that emerges from a good set of questions and thought experiments that can point me to True North?
I think there is. I think that truth can be arrived at probabilistically.
I think that enough high probability items stitched together create a practical certainty.
Think about that when you think about all the individual State Truths we’ve been fed. You know them all by now:
The virus is deadly to all
Tests are accurate
Masks work
Lockdowns work
Healthy people transmit
There are no early treatments
Natural immunity doesn’t work
Jabs are safe and effective
Each one of these is a geocentrism vs heliocentrism issue. We have Galileo’s on all these subjects and we have our Cardinals.
I’ve decided to believe my neighbour and not The State and its Cardinals.
Bradford Hill
Here is Yeadon in his recent interview:
Dr. Mike Yeadon and Reiner Fuellmich and Wolfgang Wodarg
At around 33:30 and in discussing the causal relationship between the jabs and injuries, Yeadon discusses the nine principles of the Bradford Hill criteria.
This, similar to the Galileo thought experiment is a probabilistic method of “knowing”.
“Vaccination” of Convenience
You know the term Marriage of Convenience, the marriage entered into for other than the usual reasons of love and starting a family. For example, to get a visa.
The portion of the population that is so terrified of the virus and so believing in the vaccines ability to save them and their loved ones, have gone ahead and gotten it. These are the ones marrying for love.
Now, we have everybody else. They are getting jabbed for other reasons. Those being bullied and threatened by employers I can empathise with them most. I still would like them to stand up and put up even some resistance, but the threat of losing your ability to feed yourself and your family is very real and very understandable.
Then we have those that are getting vaccinated because they “want their freedoms back”. They want to travel, and go to the pub and have a picnic etc. They are getting vaccinated for convenience.
If you need to do something to “get your freedom back” then what you are getting back is not freedom, it is temporary relief with strings attached. Think of it as a day pass permitting you to leave jail as long as you are back by the morning. That is not getting your freedom back. It’s your captors deciding to take their foot off your neck for a while to make controlling you easier in the long run.
On Evil
Right at the end of the Yeadon interview
Dr. Mike Yeadon and Reiner Fuellmich and Wolfgang Wodarg
At around 2:04:00 Mike says something profound; he says:
People don’t recognise evil anymore.
He’s right.
What does that word, evil, even mean though?
I looked around the online dictionaries a bit, but they are not very helpful, here are some definitions:
Morally bad.
Causing harm or injury to someone.
Marked by bad luck or bad events.
I certainly don’t have a definition of evil, but the above don’t quite do it for me. There’s something else that’s missing.
I read this many years ago and decided it was fundamentally true.
On Theft
“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life... you steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness... there is no act more wretched than stealing.” ― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Theft as the only sin. Don’t steal, don’t take what’s not yours to take.
I look around me and what I feel is people’s fear. People are afraid.
What is the correlation between fear and evil?
I think it’s theft.
Fear is a consequence of theft. Fear is the emptiness created after theft.
Imagine a stadium of people at a soccer match. Imagine each of those people has been made fearful. Something or some things have been taken from them. The truth, peace of mind, health, certainty, hope about the future. All these people in this stadium are now fearful, they each have less than what they had, they are all standing next to each other and this “lizard brain” fear starts to connect with others’ fear. A grid is formed, a network of fear, a spirit. Theft got the stadium to this spirit. It’s an energy, a zeitgeist, and it’s very real. It doesn’t have a “mind” it just has a “feel”.
This spirit is hungry.
It will need to take what is not its to take. It will need to steal. It will need to devour that which makes it “feel” whole again, yet nothing will make it whole, so it keeps taking, it keeps stealing. This hungry spirit is never satisfied.
So, theft to fear to theft and then more theft and then more…
This, I think, is Evil.
Through The States theft we awakened the Evil spirit.
On God
This was a great recent piece by Naomi.
So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.
If Evil exists, then what is it’s Opposite? What is its Balance? What keeps Evil at bay?
If Evil is a spirit, is its opposite also a spirit?
What shall we call that Balancing spirit?
I think I just might call it God. That will do me for now.
On Belonging
We are wired to belong. It’s primal. It hurts not to.
I think many are taking the jab to belong. They will give you every other reason under the sun, but for many I think it’s an issue of belonging. The pain of being ostracised is simply too much.
If this is true, then belonging is worth more than health.
I think it’s true.
Inversion of Censorship
This was a good thread I read recently. This was my favourite line:
Writing about Huxley, the media theorist Neil Postman once said: "People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
I think the thesis is right. Huxley had a more far reaching vision of Totalitarianism.
Do as you are fucking told
And lastly, I want to end with the ever great CJ Hopkins
The message is, shut up and toe the fucking line.
The message is, show me your fucking papers. Use the fucking pronouns. Eat the fucking bugs. Get the fucking “vaccinations.” Do not fucking ask us “how many.” The answer is, “as many as we fucking tell you.”
Just do as you are fucking told.
Just comply for fucks sake.
My thoughts: How about you go fuck yourself.
So many spot on observations. Thank you!!'
"If you need to do something to “get your freedom back” then what you are getting back is not freedom, it is temporary relief with strings attached. Think of it as a day pass permitting you to leave jail as long as you are back by the morning. That is not getting your freedom back. It’s your captors deciding to take their foot off your neck for a while to make controlling you easier in the long run."
While this is an obvious truth to many of us it seems to be a major sticking point for too many.