Anti-globalist, anti-mandates, pro freedom Poker Nutrition Fitness Mindset 💶🥩🏋️♂️💪 Dutch farmboy stuck on Malta ✈🌎🌴
Malta
Joined May 2009
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For my 40th birthday today, here a little #10yearchallenge overview! :)
The full story is on my facebook, but it goes like: i was chubby, then grew fat and unhappy, then starved myself. Then i got rich and fat again, and then finally strong and happy. The end. Love you all x
Steven van Zadelhoff retweeted
Everyone is reacting to the videos from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and asking what the hell is going on.
But the same pattern is unfolding across virtually every historically white, European-majority country in the world. Across Europe, the UK, Canada, the United States and Australia, there appears to be a clear and concerted effort to encourage both legal and illegal migration.
The result is even more pressure on housing, healthcare and public services that are already stretched. Meanwhile, native-born citizens are struggling financially and being asked to pay more and more to support large-scale migration they never voted for and, in many cases, clearly do not want.
Each of these countries has its own history, culture, language and social fabric. Citizens who want those things preserved are not hateful, and they should not be made to feel guilty for asking how many people their country can realistically absorb. Nor should they be afraid to ask why their own needs and future are constantly being placed behind those of new arrivals.
There is also an obvious question that very few leaders are willing to address. A large proportion of these arrivals are young men from societies where women often face severe discrimination, sexual abuse, forced marriage, child marriage, female genital mutilation and treatment as the property of men.
If the true priority is humanitarian protection, why are Western governments not doing far more to protect the vulnerable women and children trapped in those societies?
Why are the strongest and most mobile men being prioritized, while many of the women and girls most at risk are left behind with the same men and systems that subjugate them?
Why are European women expected to bear that social risk while citizens are told that even raising the question is unacceptable?
Steven van Zadelhoff retweeted
Until recently, "gender ideology" was unheard of except on the fringes of the internet and academia. In a cultural blink of an eye, it has now engulfed the public square, with governments, corporations, institutions, and media propagating it in lockstep.
We're told that a person's "gender identity" overrides his or her sex, and that some men are actually women, some women are actually men, some people are neither, and that questioning this doctrine — or any of its attendant chaos — is akin to bigotry, persecution, and violence.
We're expected to believe that this untouchable caste of "transgender people" have been languishing since the dawn of time, awaiting the invention of synthetic hormones and on-demand mutilations so they can, at long last, become their "authentic" selves.
That children can be "born into the wrong body", and must be subjected to irreversible puberty cessation, sterilization, and experimental surgeries to align the body with the sacred gendered soul — and that only a monster would object to this purported "life-saving care".
And that this is all just a grassroots human rights movement, and not a carefully orchestrated and highly lucrative scam perpetrated against humanity with the goals of profit, destruction, and control.
Most shocking of all is that people are not only falling for this con — they're fighting for it.
Steven van Zadelhoff retweeted
Crazy, unrealistic people believe all our systems are rigged for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
Rational, realistic people believe all our systems happen to benefit the rich and powerful by pure coincidence.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe the mass media feed the public lies to manufacture consent for agendas which go against public interests.
Rational, realistic people believe the media are telling the truth, and the public just naturally enjoys supporting wars on the other side of the planet and domestic policies which make them poorer and sicker.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe drastic, revolutionary changes are needed to create a just society which works for everyone.
Rational, realistic people believe a just society that works for everyone can be achieved by participating in political parties that are explicitly set up to prevent a just society that works for everyone.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe drastic revolutionary changes are needed in our society to avoid an environmental collapse that is already well underway.
Rational, realistic people believe the environmental collapse that is already well underway can be avoided by making small, incremental changes over the next several centuries.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe the US empire has lied about its every war, and is also lying about the current one.
Rational, realistic people believe that while history has shown that the US lied about all those other wars, this time it’s definitely telling the truth.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe the US empire amassing war machinery on the borders of its top two geopolitical rivals is an extremely provocative act of aggression designed to advance the empire’s geostrategic objectives.
Rational, realistic people believe the US amassing war machinery on the borders of its top two geopolitical rivals is an innocent act of defense.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe government agencies are spying on us and working to censor the internet.
Rational, realistic people believe that too, but they think it’s a good thing.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe a status quo of nonstop war, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, ecocide, exploitation, oppression and authoritarianism is untenable, and must be dismantled by any means necessary.
Rational, realistic people believe we can just ignore those problems and think about more pleasant things.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe that the only way to achieve desperately needed change in a society whose systems are rigged for the powerful is to disregard those rigged systems and use the power of our numbers to force the end of the injustices we face and the creation of new systems.
Rational, realistic people believe we can get the changes we need if we just vote a little harder in the next election.
Crazy, unrealistic people believe the definition of insanity is continually doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Rational, realistic people believe doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results just might work this time.
Steven van Zadelhoff retweeted
Me and the boys realizing that if no constitutional right is absolute, then no law is absolute either.
A book worth reading imo..
Been kicking around some ideas for a dystopian novel lately. I'm picturing a story set in a world where everyone's a slave but doesn't know it. People think thoughts they believe they came up with themselves, make decisions and lifestyle choices that they think are their own, buy things they sincerely believe they want, consume entertainment they honestly feel they enjoy, vote for political candidates they truly think they support, when in reality they're all marching in complete obedience to an elite ruling class whose high-level mastery of mass-scale psychological manipulation has bent the public to their will.
In my novel people will be funneled from early childhood through an education system designed by plutocrats and social engineers to create efficient and compliant gear-turners, and then when they are grown their programming continues in the form of mass media indoctrination. If they become politically aware they are funneled into artificially constructed ideological perspectives that are designed to look truthful and appealing but which don't challenge existing power structures in any meaningful way.
In the same way, the political system in this dark alternate reality is designed to look free and democratic, but there's no real connection between how people vote and the way their civilization actually functions. An unacknowledged, unofficial alliance of plutocrats and government operatives makes the actual decisions about how money, industry, government, and military forces will behave from day to day, and this secretive alliance controls the official political system the public believes is responsible for overseeing those matters. What people call "elections" are actually just the public choosing between two lackeys of that ruling alliance, and their only meaningful disagreements are on how the will of those rulers should best be advanced.
My dystopian society is built on endless violence, oppression, exploitation, and ecocide, but because in this world the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation is so advanced, people don't even know it's happening. Mass murder is committed continuously in nonstop military operations overseas, and the public is successfully convinced that it's to promote freedom and democracy and keep them safe from terrorism. People have to work multiple jobs in the wealthiest nation in the world just to put food on the table, and they are brainwashed into believing it's their fault for not making better life choices. People die of exposure on the streets while billionaires rake in exponentially more wealth, and the public is programmed to believe it's because the latter work harder than the former. Police forces and prison systems keep expanding in order to exert more control and people are trained to believe it's to make them safe from crime. Journalists are imprisoned for telling the truth and people are told it's to protect national security. Information on the internet is aggressively controlled and people are propagandized into accepting that it's to protect them from dangerous speech.
In my dystopian novel the powerful will simply do as they please and then promote narratives to explain why those actions were justified. If a smaller, weaker government isn't sufficiently obedient to the world's dominant power structure, reasons will be manufactured to explain why they must be ousted. If it's necessary to exert more control at home or abroad, justifications will emerge for why military expansionism is needed in this or that geostrategically important region or why increased domestic surveillance is required to keep people safe. The armed goons and war machinery move wherever they are needed, and the public is either kept in the dark about those movements or told made-up stories explaining why they must occur.
Endless mass military slaughter is essential for the existence of the ruling power structure in this dystopia, because without it the world's governments would simply behave in whatever way advances their own interests. The government is so profoundly corrupt that the corporations who manufacture military weaponry are inseparably intertwined with the decision-making apparatus of its foreign policy establishment and are permitted to actively lobby for more wars so that more of its expensive weaponry will be used. Mountains of human corpses are amassed for no other reason than because it is more profitable to launch weapons at them than to leave them alone. Nuclear weapons are stockpiled and placed around the world for no other reason than because it is profitable to make more of them.
It's the same with environmental and economic policies. A global system is held in place at gunpoint in which mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake, so environmental and economic policies just like military policies are formed not based on what would be best but on what would be most profitable for the plutocrats who shape those policies. Industry moves in whatever way rakes in the most money, no matter who it hurts and no matter how badly it imperils humanity.
And everyone just marches along with it, because they are manipulated into accepting this disaster by sophisticated propaganda systems, by movies and shows designed to normalize the dystopia they exist in, by tightly controlled information access, and by their own psychological compartmentalization since the reality of their situation is too disturbing to look at directly. They turn the gears of their dark world and then stay up late binging on soulless comedy shows to distract themselves from the horrors lurking just beneath the surface.
Obviously such a dystopia would be completely unsustainable and the most obvious ending would be to kill the whole world off within a few books by nuclear war or ecological disaster or something equally terrible, but maybe I could have the populace simply wake up to the manipulations and take back their will and shrug off the elites' control like a warm coat on a summer's day?
I dunno. Something tells me that for some unknown reason today's readers are too inured with learned helplessness and knee-jerk pessimism to be able to even imagine the latter scenario, let alone accept it as a believable development.
Anyway, that's my pitch. What do you all think? Does this thing have legs? Or is it too wildly different from today's world to be relatable?
Steven van Zadelhoff retweeted
I saw a video clip of Julian Assange speaking in London in 2010 where he made an important observation while explaining the philosophy behind his work with WikiLeaks. He said that all our political theories are to some extent "bankrupt" in our current situation, because our institutions are so shrouded in secrecy that we can't even know what's really going on in the world.
"We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it's all bankrupt," Assange said. "And the reason it's all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don't know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don't even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up a sort of intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are, then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction. Until then, I think all political theories — to greater and lesser extents of course — are bankrupt."
It's an extremely important point if you think about it: how can we form theories about how our governments should be operating when we have no idea how they are currently operating? How can a doctor prescribe the correct treatment when he hasn't yet made a diagnosis?
Political theories are in this sense "bankrupt", because they are formed in the dark, without our being able to see precisely what's happening and what's going wrong.
The nature of our institutions is hidden from us, and that includes not only our government institutions but the political, media, corporate and financial institutions which control so much of our society. Their nature is hidden not only by a complete lack of transparency but by things like propaganda, internet censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the fact that all the most loudly amplified voices in our society are those who more or less support status quo politics.
The fact that all the most important aspects of our civilization's operation are hidden, manipulated and obfuscated by the powerful makes a joke of the very idea of democracy, because how can people know what government policies to vote for if they can't even clearly see those policies? How can people know what to vote for when everything about their understanding of the world is being actively distorted for the benefit of the powerful?
Democracy is impossible when the public is flying blind, and so is any other means by which the public might impose their will on existing power structures. You will never see a collective uprising of the masses against their rulers when the dominant message being inserted into everyone's mind is that everything is basically fine and if you don't like the way things are you can change it by voting. If the veil of secrecy was ever ripped away from the US empire's inner workings and everyone could see the full scale of its criminality in the plain light of day you'd probably have immediate open revolution in Washington. Which is precisely why that veil exists.
We can't form solid political theories while everything's hidden from us, and even if we could we're unable to organize any means to put those theories into action for the same reason. The fact that the nature of our world is being so aggressively obfuscated from our view keeps us from knowing exactly what needs to change, and keeps us from effecting change.
For this reason I often argue that our most urgent priority as a civilization is rolling back all the secrecy and obfuscation, because until that happens we'll never get change, and we'll never know what should be changed. I have my ideological preferences of course, but I'm just one person taking their best guess at what needs to happen in a world where so many of the lights are switched off. Not until our society can actually see the world as it really is will we have the ability to begin, as Assange says, "setting course for a different direction."
And those who benefit from our current course are lucidly aware of this. That's why we're not allowed to see what they're up to behind the veils of secrecy, that's why our entire civilization is saturated in nonstop propaganda, that's why the internet is being increasingly censored and manipulated, and that's why Julian Assange is in prison.
We can only begin fighting this from where we're at. None of us individually have the power to rip the veil of secrecy away from the empire, but we do each individually have the ability to call out its lies where they can be seen and help wake people up to the fact that we're being deceived and manipulated. Every pair of eyelids you help open is one more pair of eyes looking around helping to get an accurate picture of what's going on, and one more pair of eyes helping to open the eyes of others.
Once we have enough open eyes, we will have the potential for a real course of action.
Steven van Zadelhoff retweeted
Why does the vaccine debate matter?
We can frame this question differently: why does this debate have so much traction?
The answer is that the public was compelled to endure pandemic interventions that hurt us and our families. For three years, these interventions were enforced by the same rote dictum:
“Do what we say or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
For example:
-“Mask your toddlers or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
-“Believe the pandemic came from natural spillover or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
-“Remain in your homes or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
-“Stay 6 feet away from other people or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
-“Wear masks in public, including outdoors, or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
-“Do not go to your place of worship or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
-“Give up your livelihood or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
And of course the most important of all:
-“Trust the vaccines’ efficacy and safety or you’re a conspiracy theorist who will not be tolerated.”
Turns out most of the dictums were based on false or flawed premises, including vaccine efficacy, which, we were endlessly told, prevents transmission.
The public’s trust is not a right an institution inherits; it’s a privilege that must be earned and re-earned. The decision makers in public life, and the cultural institutions that support them, lost that trust among a significant portion of the population. That is plain fact. You can fling epithets at them —“conspiracy theorist” being the most likely—or you can work hard and long to earn back that trust.
One thing is certain: only one of these paths will lead to stability and social cohesion. The other will amplify the chaos in the system and push people further toward the fringe. Decision makers and institutional bodies that were wrong should hold themselves accountable. They should resign, fire those responsible, apologize, close down failing programs and departments, and start again.
My suspicion—and that of many people like me—is that it wasn’t simple naive error that produced this situation, but corruption. These institutions run, in part, on corrupted processes and by perverse incentives. So there is not a possibility for them to take responsibility, which is the very opposite of corruption.
So here we are, with famous independent media figures challenging institutional agents to a debate. Even if it does take place, the debate will resolve nothing. But what we can learn from it is that there is an authority vacuum at the moment created by lost trust swirling with institutional refusal to take responsibility for gravely injurious error.
Steven van Zadelhoff retweeted
There is no solution, there is only accepting the *least bad* option of a strong commitment to free speech and embracing the marketplace of ideas. It's far from perfect, but attempts to make it perfect always lead to worse outcomes.
Steven van Zadelhoff retweeted
If this is true and it is increasingly looking to be. This will one day be seen as one of the biggest mistakes a president has ever made. It is undoubtedly seen as an act of war and could seriously imperil all of Europe. It’s reckless and unconscionable.
seymourhersh.substack.com/p/…