13 quotes found
"When you have a fundamentalist faith you are certain that you are on the side of the angels."
"What are presented as the best arguments against anarchism are inevitably a description of the status quo."
"Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them."
"It's really amazing to me how many people [rather than trying to figure out Putin's endgame] are content to say that he's evil and he's crazy. OK. Sure. Well, the Penguin [in Batman] is evil. [...] He wants to get that diamond that is shaped like a bird or that really expensive umbrella. Just because someone is crazy or a bad person doesn't mean that they're not predictable or coherent along with their own internal logic. You know the Zodiac killer wants to kill people. It doesn't mean you have to agree with him or approve of him. OK, let's see if we can figure out who he's last victim is and what it's gonna take to find him."
"Here in 2016, when [Donald] Trump got elected, what happened as a consequence was blue-pilled leftists for a long time were taught that the Trump-world view [...] [was this minority]. 'We have sat you down for a year and told you that voting for Trump is completely unacceptable. That to do so is effectively to decree yourself to be aligned with the Klan and the nazis.' [one of the big newspapers] had a front page of Trump called antichrist when the Pope critizised him for something during when he was just merely a candidate. And yet [in November] Americans went in and flicked the leaver for Hitler-antichrist. And they didn't know what to do because in their mind there is very few of these lunatics and now there's enough to elect the president and because they're passing they didn't know who's the bad guy and the good guy. They thought '100 percent of the people I know', but obviously it's not 100. At best it's [60 percent]. So this was [...] a moment of panic: 'Wait a minute! I don't know who these people are anymore!'"
"[About the Covid lockdowns:] Intentionally or not, some very very bad pepople got some very useful information of how much the populous was willing to put up with. [...] There was clearly a consideration on the parts of the authorities in each country about 'What can we do and what [can we] get away with?'"
"What corporate media does, which is far more nefarious than the state, is simultaneously it will tell the audience 'These are the issues you should be concerned about today, and [even though we just learned about it five seconds ago] here's how you should think about it.' So very quickly it gives the person, who is often marginally intelligent both the concerns of the day, which is just kind of like a fashion issue, but also the answer so that not only do they look sympathetic and empathetic they also simultaneously seem informed. [...] If you go to [public places] and you hear how these people talk, you realize they are parroting [...] almost verbatim, if not verbatim, the people that they saw on their own screen [...] and when you have that epiphany you realize this kind of conservative model that 'We are just going to teach the population to respect people's rights and in a 100 years we are going to be free.' is really not a tenable one."
"I have no interest in reaching the general population. The general population are the people who would have been nazis in the 40s and they would have been jihadis or sympathetic in some of these other countries 20 years ago. So they will always follow the ruling class."
"You have all these choices at the supermarket and then you go to government, which is far more important than what brand of soda you drink, and you're told it's got to be Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. To hell with that! I want my views and I want to live my life and you setting up this false alternative is completely unacceptable. I'm not playing this game."
"[On talking to political opponents:] Come at that conversation appreciating that what they're spouting now has become their identity and also has become their status. So you're asking them to give up something both that matters to them on an emotional and values level, but also from an evolutionary-psychology level."
"If you're dealing with a journalist who you perceive as being engaged in good faith, and there's plenty of them, when you explain a particular view that you know is outside of their worldview, ask them to explain it back to you to see that they got what you meant. And if you have that on tape and they try to mis-characterize you, so much the better, now you have evidence that this was done maliciously."
"The battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive. Once you realize that's what you're dealing with, everything falls into place. Okay, this guy wants to sell me cancer, he makes money selling me cancer, he knows he's selling me cancer. I'm not going to get him to say that [cigarettes] are cancer, but now I can proceed accordingly knowing that this is going to be about promoting [cigarettes] or parliaments or whatever it is."
"[About the framing of public figures in the media:] If you read a play, a lot of times at the beginning of the play there will be that cast of characters and it will say like 'Jane, a wealthy widow seeking love', 'Thomas, her young paramour'. When they bring a character onto the scene in a corporate news article, it will say 'Joe Rogan, a podcaster known for his history of transphobic remarks', 'Scott Adams, the disgraced...'. They will immediately tell you from their personal perspective how you should feel about this person before they even finish the sentence. And once you spot that this is the technique, you can't unsee it."