ACADEMYOFIDEAS.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazrat Ali: "Use your intellect to understand something when you hear about it. The intellect that examines and not just the intellect that repeats what it hears, for surely there are many who repeat the knowledge that they hear, and there are few who examine it."] ARTICLE: Repetition is a well-known propaganda technique for solidifying falsehoods and perpetuating fear. By repeating specific phrases and warnings over and over, entire populations can be paralyzed with a fear psychosis. The Nazi Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, well aware of this, said: "It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition ... that a square is in fact a circle." Or, as George Orwell wrote: "Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." And, as Voltaire explained, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." To avoid this, one must give up being a common passive propaganda receiver and instead become an active truth seeker. Skepticism is ...

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RT.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2014: "As I look around me, my deep sense is that today the strongest human force, sadly, is fear."] ARTICLE: If you believe that you are a divinely created sovereign being, and that your rights come from God, as the American Founders did, not the government, you have the basis to create something truly wonderful. But how far we have fallen. America in 2022 more closely resembles a giant mental asylum inside a circus than a country of the brave and the free. Sometimes I wonder if most of my fellow citizens even believe in freedom anymore, or are they so fearful and shellshocked they've forgotten what that word means? It's almost like safety is the new American pastime, replacing baseball. Or worse, Safety is the new religion. Neighbors rat on neighbors, calling the cops. All of it driven by instilled fear, all of it devoid of human empathy. Not only are fearful ...

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QZ.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2016: "Public wisdom is not dependent on education."] ARTICLE: In 1976, Carlo M. Cipolla (d.2000), a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley outlined 5 laws governing what he perceived as humanity's greatest existential threat: Stupidity. Stupid people, he explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves. He argued there are no defenses against stupidity. ~~ Law 2: The probability that a particular person is stupid is independent of any other personal trait -- gender, race, nationality, education level, income. Every category one can imagine possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors, stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly, and in every nation on earth. How numerous ...

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BARIWEISS.SUBSTACK.COM -- I taught English at Yale University for ten years and mostly I taught what one of them herself called "excellent sheep." Excellent sheephood, like wokeness, is a species of conformity. Today's elite college students still regard themselves as children, and are still treated as such. The nature of the authority, parental as well as institutional, that the young now have is an authority that does not believe in authority, that does not believe in itself. It's an authority that wants to be liked, that wants to be your friend, that wants to be thought of as cool. That will never draw a line, that will always ultimately yield. Children can't be children if adults are not adults, but children also can't become adults. The 1960s broke authority, and ...

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