Corruption is the default state of human systems. This was the central insight of W.R. Bion: every organisation, institution, fraternity, tribe or nation is inherently corrupt, instinctively corrupt, and it takes extraordinary and traumatic effort to conquer this corruption. Moreover, the effort required cannot be institutionalised, can only work face to face, without leadership, and is therefore limited to small task-oriented groups. The condition that triggers the required effort can perhaps be characterised as DESPAIR.

Do you think that medical experts in Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany were allowed to speak the truth? Of course they weren’t… just like in any other country:)

Medical experts argue that they must speak the truth because lying would harm their reputation. This is not true. When reputation is based on lies then lying is necessary to preserve the reputation.

This is another way one could deflate the property bubble. Flood the market with subsidised ghetto-style plaster and chipboard housing that nobody needs, which will survive for about 5 years… then rinse and repeat. People need money for housing, not more housing without the money to buy it, and that money is already long gone into the pockets of the owners of the banks. Banks steal from your future, and so you can fund your present only by helping them steal more from the future… in the present monetary system.

lex Angliae non patitur absurdum. In fact, no valid law anywhere can contain absurdity, because absurdity has no integrated meaning and thus expresses nothing that could be consistently obeyed. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/gender-identity-on-trial

From the vault.

Why do we call it ‘self-reference’ when a finger points at the chest to which the hand to which the finger is attached, and the sound ‘I’ is emitted from the head attached to that chest? Where is the ‘Self’ in all this non-identity?

The intention to say ‘I’ is always absent from the pointing: a finger cannot point at an intention, nor can an intention point at itself as anything that is not that intention. Also, ‘identifying with’ something else is not ‘self-referring’.

Whatever idea of Self we may have, that idea is never identical with that which has that idea. We can circumscribe the conditions of that idea, but we can never pinpoint its source.

Why would a “Neo-Nazi” disrupt a genuine expression of Nazi ideology: nativist supremacism? Possibly to disassociate Nazism from its old image, which was a PR disaster, or to obscure the fact that Nazi ideology is the current norm, that we have a Nazi government.

A ‘just war’ is when stupid people in two countries kill one another, consensually, for the greater good.

Hypothesis. The Wakefield MMR/Autism paper was managed by the vaccine industry. They realised that the autism signal associated with vaccines could no longer be hidden so they singled out MMR as the possible cause in order to justify a large ‘autism study’ focussed only on MMR. This singular focus allowed them to retain the confounder of all other vaccines. They knew that MMR+’other vaccines’ would have roughly the same rate of autism as ‘other vaccines’. They effectively changed the theme from “vaccines cause autism” to “only MMR causes autism” and then compared vaccinated against vaccinated. They even asserted that MMR reduces the risk of autism, so it probably is not as bad as ‘other vaccines’, and that is why MMR was singled out by the Wakefield study. It is unclear whether Wakefield was a patsy or an informed collaborator, but the effect was the same.

My current view is that the question of ‘emergence’ of reflexive consciousness (‘I am’) is a wrong question, impossible to answer consistently, which leaves only one possibility: it is not ‘I’ that emerged from the ‘world’ but the ‘world’ that emerges from ‘I’, and that ‘I’ is essentially a multiplicity. Another way, there is always only ‘I’ that identifies as both Me and You, You as Me and Me as You, where the differences between Me and You are secondary to, emergent from and constructed on the basis of the same ‘I’. Nevertheless, the constructions of Me and You may differ in the consistency of reflexive relating (as My self-relation being mediated by You), which determines the degree of identity of Me and ‘I’, therefore the degree of existence as ‘I’.

How did consciousness evolve in the animal world?

Animals are aware of patterns, they recognise frequently repeated images, and the most consistently present image may be the appearance, smell and behaviour of other species of the same kind. Familiarity with the image of one’s own species gave rise to a degree of predictability, but may have gained even stronger pattern-consistency once reduced to ‘faces’, and then internalising this familiarity as a form of a collective self, of the species, of the tribe, of the pack: a collective ‘I’. Each member of the group thus organised could then differentiate the most familiar individual (the one one who occupies the first person point of view) from this collective ‘I’, but retain the ‘I’ as a means of individual identification with others. Nevertheless, the ‘minds eye’ that occupies the first person point of view can never be grasped as an object, is awlays ‘behind’ the perspective no matter which way it looks for itself, and it only finds itself in the collective ‘I’, relying on other beings of the same kind as a mirror for itself.

This is an elaboration on the broader discussion of this topic included in my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1763717216

It is conceivable that democracy is only nominally about the majority rule but is essentially a moral test: those who are willing to impose their preferences on others by the arbitrary standard of being in the majority are implicitly denying that preferences can be objectively right or wrong in their own right, thus negating the rationality of their choices and the authority of their own preferences. It then follows that this collective self-negation has representative priority over the negated preferences. If this is right then the abusive, humiliating, deceitful and exploitative governments are not a failure of democracy but express its proper function, provided it is applied only to those who vote.

A minority can never defend itself against the will of the majority by means of representative democracy, but by declaring itself as not represented and rejecting the premise of representation, it invalidates democracy, and thus becomes powerful as a disrupter of the premise of democratic authority.

The majority of people agree that those who refuse to style their moral judgement according to the authoritarian prejudices of the majority must be subjugated. Democracy is a form of group tyranny; it never had legitimacy beyond the renunciation of moral status that voting entails. Trump and Putin (in fact all democratic governments) accept this renunciation as their mandate to subjugate, albeit most rulers are less transparent about it than Trump and Putin.

VOTE (etymology): from Latin votum, a vow, promise to a god, solemn pledge, dedication, (therefore voluntary bondage).

We are all Indigenous. We are not Aliens.

The paradox of representative democracy: when a political party gains absolute parliamentary majority it becomes a de facto dictatorship.