The First Front of War
Netanyahu calls information the eighth front. I think it’s the first.
A while back, Netanyahu said Israel was fighting a seven-front war, and that there was an eighth front: “the battle for truth.” Other times he’s called it the battle for hearts and minds in the West, especially in the United States, and he’s called social media “the most important weapon” in that fight. I don’t think that’s right at all. I think social media, the internet, and information itself are the first front of any war.
I find the Charlie Kirk assassination story absolutely fascinating. It reminds me of a kid who has chocolate covered all over his face, and his parents are asking who ate the chocolate, and the kid just shrugs his shoulders in feigned perplexity. To me, this is the dumbest assassination and cover-up in the history of cover-ups. You’ve got magic necks, magic bullets, and a teleporting Tyler Robinson.
Anyways, I’ve been thinking about what billions of dollars would buy you when it comes to informational warfare. I think it would buy bots and operatives of sorts to help promote the people you like and attack the ones you don’t. I think it can also buy you the ability to enshroud, or capture, genuine populist movements. I think that’s what happened to Charlie Kirk, and I think it’s happening right now to Candace Owens. The reasons are very hard to explain, but essentially, I think Baron Coleman, a shark of a lawyer, is pretending to be a truth teller and a friend. I strongly suspect his attacks on other researchers who stumbled onto the Fort Huachuca story are him tipping his hand.
Anyways, I see YouTube influencers very differently now. I think people like Bret and Heather can’t be permitted a large audience (in the millions), because they could very easily equip others to see through the various methods used for controlling narratives. Same with Jordan Peterson. I remember how huge the demand was back in the 2010s when he was teaching about cautionary tales and evolutionary thinking when it came to biblical stories and Disney movies. I think there’s also a huge demand for debates like the ones Bret had with Jonathan Pageau. Those kinds of dialogues would absolutely shatter a lot of misconceptions. They would make non-religious people curious about biblical studies, and they would make religious people more accepting of non-religious people as a result of that curiosity. They might also get religious people more interested in evolution itself, which I find is being used as a boogeyman among my religious family.
We have "cartesian blinders being put on us so that we are trying to make sense out of scraps of information and hints." - @bretweinstein
WEINSTEIN: I mean, even if you have your villains who are engaged in the behavior that motivated this war in Iran, even if that's the story, presumably most of the people in the path of these ferocious bombings that he is describing are not deserving of going back to the Stone Age.
In fact, I distinctly remember him telling us that part of what we were up to was liberating the people of Iran from their tyrannical regime.
So if it's the tyrannical regime that justifies the ferocious bombing, then it's a tragedy that other people are going to be sent back to the Stone Ages with them. Right?
HEYING: It's it's not a narrative. It's an incoherent set of talking points.
WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it's a kind of cheerleading that is completely inappropriate from the perspective of the president.
Bret Weinstein discusses the Trump administrations "back to the stone age" recent remarks in the latest episode of The Evolutionary Lens, Episode 320 "Are we back in the stone age?" on DarkHorse.
Bret Weinstein explains, "If you stop businesses from starting here, and if you drive people so that they move elsewhere—even though it's difficult to do—then the point is the tax base dries up, which then forces you to become even more predatory for the people who stayed.
And that's really the thing, right? They're setting themselves up so that they have to go after more and more people, because the people who are starting new businesses are not going to do it here."
Hi Folks, I saw the Alex Gibney documentary MUSK today and there is much to parse in it (timing, motivations, biases, flawed assumptions, lack of introspection on the part of the filmmakers, etc etc) but in one particular segment, Gibney claims that there were so many early covid victims in NYC that the City had to rent refrigeration trailers to store all the bodies. I had not heard that story and have zero trustworthy sources to investigate it.
Has anyone done an empirical analysis of that claim?
The Problem With Power
I'd like to see an evolutionary biology perspective on systems which embody power.
In my simplistic way I conceive of the problem as that of a niche in an ecosystem which has some small, at first, amount of power to control the ecosystem.
Continuing, simplistically, it seems natural to me that certain entities would be naturally inclined to occupy that niche and where the mechanisms exist increase the power.
To me that looks like a feedback loop where power begets power begets more power.
Of course the Federal Government was, theoretically, constrained from an unlimited acquisition of power, but here we are, thanks to The Supremes; beginning with the Marshall court and nailing the coffin closed with grossly incorrect interpretations of the 14th amendment.
Bret and Heather discuss migration, race, and the West.
First: the Mercator projection is unsatisfactory, and there’s a new map available, but no map of the globe can be perfect. Every home should have a globe.
Then: what do we do with things in which the first step is neutral or good, but it seems inevitable that we end up in a dire situation once the first step has been accepted? Examples include abortion, lobbying, advertising, informed consent, EULAs, and utopianism. Another example may be racism: we should not be racist, but we should retain our ability to see difference, and note when people who are showing up on our doorstep are not interested in collaboration, or in the experiment of the West.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2UrFU9Bp17kpK99qXPny6L?si=AGgiyz8pQky4L7P9nnX-hw
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ACgWQTsZi0
Rumble: ...
