On The Use Of Fear As A Government Tactic
Perhaps a public debate on governmental lying and manipulation through the purveying of fear is about to begin. God willing, it will.
I raise this hope because of a remarkable article that appeared in the Daily Telegraph (UK). Excerpts follow. No comment seems required, except the obvious: This has been a Global phenomenon. Which means: coordinated.
Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists
Members of Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour express regret about ‘unethical’ methods
Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian”.
Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response.
SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19 because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”.
...
One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.
“The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”
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One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.
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Another member of SPI-B said they were "stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology" during the pandemic, and that “psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them”.
Oh. A bit like power and absolute power.
Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: “If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become.
“If we’re being really honest, do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.”
As Basil Fawlty might say, Thanks for enunciating the bleeding obvious.
O/T - "Analyzing the Ryan Thomas Balch Account of Kenosha"
An account of what happened in Kenosha, by one of the (Boog) militia members
According to him, it was actually the cops that caused the problems:
"By his account the relationship between BLM and the Militia was quite good. By his account, the problems flowed not from the peaceful BLM supporters, but from the alliance between Antifa and the unaligned agitators, and from the police"
From the article, it looks like Kyle was either part of this militia, or they simply used him for his medic skills.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/analyzing-the-ryan-thomas-balch-account
Another article describing how Kyle did everything exactly correctly:
"On the third day of protests, the boog folks showed up to try and stop the rioters from burning buildings because the cops refused to do it. There was a big protest at city hall, the cops formed a line to prevent them from burning the local government building to the ground, and forced the protesters into the streets. The boogs tried to defend the businesses. The aforementioned rapist, wife beater, and armed robber tried to set fire to a gas station. Rittenhouse put the fire out, which is why they attacked him.
While being attacked, Rittenhouse did the exactly correct thing to do when being armed and attacked with nonlethal weapons, which is withdraw. He was fleeing being attacked when an Antifa member fired an illegal gun into the air to try and make him think they were shooting at him. He returned fire and killed the rapist. This is absolutely legal and proper defensive gun use. Then he continued to retreat to try and eliminate the situation, when the wife beater tried to tackle him and take his gun away, so he shot him. Then he continued to retreat when the armed robber drew a gun on him and pointed it at him so he shot him. Then he continued to retreat and they finally let him."
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/rittenhouse-as-a-litmus-for-adult
History warned us... Fear mongering and propaganda and the spreaders of them both where what our founders referred to as demagogues.
Hamelton - Federalist No. 1: “History will teach us that … of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
Mason - “the mischievous influence of demagogues” was one of the top two “evils” that can befall republican forms of government.
Elbridge Gerry - “Demagogues are the great pests of our government,”
Gerry explained this like a brick through a window by defining demagogues as "pretend patriots" seeking to push people into "baneful measurements" via "false reports".
Those demagogues, pretend patriots pushing baneful measurements are the majority of BOTH political parties, in DC, in our states and in our local politics...