Culling my Mint Patch
Thoughts on the “9/11 anniversary, covidiotism, and the need to clean up my inbox.
Mintpress is not a really bad news source. Yet there is plenty to choose from these days and I have only so much time available for reading. I also do not need to read misguided stuff based on the ‘journalism’ mentality and a misconstrual of civil rights and civil government.
The article that Mintpress dropped in my inbox last morning confirmed my decision that it was time to reduce my e-mail traffic. The article by Whitney Webb came with a disclaimer from the Mintie Lady that the ideas were her own and did not necessarily reflect Mintpress editorial policy. Yet too much misinformation comes from Mintpress these days.
There are two misinformation vectors in the article. One is the idea that there is still something about the 9/11 events which needs to be “investigated”. Then this idea is linked to the ’covidiot’ idea that public health measures in a pandemic are in themselves something sinister and conspiratorial.
I remember the day of the trade centre collapses. I was at a reception at a university, to do with the part time students union. It turned into a disaster watching party.
I remember listening to all the asinine responses, subliminally suggested by the TV ‘reporters’ and ‘commentators’. People were amazed at what was apparently happening. Given what the Americans have been doing generations now, it is amazing there are not more real attacks on their territory. Yet people seemed completely unaware of this then, and largely still do.
Worse, what was happening on the TV was obviously not what it was being presented to be. As they replayed the building’s collapse over and over, I kept trying to draw people’s attention to the smoke pouring from a corner of each floor of both buildings, and to the squibs that went off in sequence down that side, running ahead of the building’s pancake collapse.
It was simple willingness to observe against the power of suggestibility and group hysteria. The former had no chance against the latter. I gave up on it and nibbled the nibblies which were spread out on the table.
However, there are plenty of people like me who can see what is before them. Within a few months of the 9/11 event, everything important was known about it. We knew who had done it, why they had done it, and how they had done it, right down to the technical details of placing the explosive charges.
Yet for twenty years now we have heard all these idiots who are obsessed with the idea that there is still something about it which needs to be ‘investigated’. What it is with these people is that they do not really want to know what happened. If they had to admit it they would have to do something about it and that is much too big for them.
What needs to be done about it is to remove it. ‘It’ is The Deep State, The Blob, The Empire, or whatever dramatic name you want to give it. Removing It will require a revolution; almost certainly a very violent one.
What needs to be ‘investigated’ is how to organize and conduct this revolution. Just as important is to know what it is you want to replace It with. I am in Canada, by the way, and this is more an American problem, but how it plays out will effect Canada greatly.
In Canada as in the States, when people are confronted by problems too big for them, they make up smaller problems, make scapegoats, which they can act out their fear, anger, and frustration on. That seems to be what is behind the covid denier and anti vaxxer reactions to the pandemic.
It is too hard to admit that things are just what they look like. There is a pandemic, just like there have been pandemics all down history. Countries with effective governments trusted by their people are able to apply the well known measures against pandemics. They come out of the emergency with their people and their economies undamaged.
Countries under the control of incompetent elites are famously unable to respond to a pandemic. Large parts of these elites will refuse to see the pandemic as a real problem, but as something interfering with their self interest and with their ability to control the country. So they obstruct normal public health measures and these countries and their people emerge from pandemics severely damaged, taking generations to recover.
People resist pandemic measures because they have bought into the upside down and inside out “anti government” narrative created by these abusive elites. Responsible elements of government which are really trying to protect the public seem less threatening to such people than the powerful interests obstructing government. So people are lead into backing their enemies against their defenders.
Webb recites the main tropes from this false narrative. They have been refuted to well so often that it is pointless to go over them here. We can do without her sanctimony about our refusal to “consider that there may be more to the story.”
I think I have established pretty well that I am not someone who blindly buys into official stories. However, I have small patience with people who think “The Truth” generally needs to be dug out. I find it usually lying there on the surface.
When people think there has to be more to the story than what is there, it is generally because they need an easier answer, not the real answer. The hard and real answer is that there are powerful people who place no value on human life and want the pandemic to just rip through the population. Their propagandists have created the upside down and turn around world Whitney Webb’s head is in, where freedom and liberty mean its opposite.
To Webb, a government issued vaccination card, designed properly, without nonsense that does not need to be there, is nonetheless a threat to civil liberties. Yet she undoubtedly carries around a cellphone and credit cards provided by private companies accountable to no one.
I am from Canada. We have a much higher proportion of people here who get it what freedom and liberty actually mean. These come from good government, from peace and good order, and provisional of all basic needs. In Canada we are well short of meeting this ideal, but well ahead of the United States and in fact most countries. That is why we are also well ahead at beating the pandemic. We have not created any ‘police state’ in order to do it.
Perhaps Mintpress gives a platform to this kind of foolishness out of the idea of ‘balance’. That is merely another variant of the ‘via media’ fallacy. Truth is what it is, there are no ‘sides’ to it. Giving platform to something clearly wrong can only do harm; in the case of something like a pandemic, grievous harm.
I believe the biggest problem with Mintpress is the same as with so many of these news sites. They are hung up on the ‘journalism’ mentality. They are ‘investigating’ a ‘story’. Story telling is for children.
The truth is already there. What is needed is some analysis into why things are happening as they are and what needs to change. That is why those news sites which come at it from a ‘scientific’ way of thinking are the really useful ones.
There are getting to be more of them out there. Some are good enough that they are actually worth sending some money to. There is less need for something like Mintpress anymore. So, not right now but soon I will be deleting it.