Under the influence of great fear, almost everybody becomes superstitious. Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd. Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
This feels a bit weird, and astonishes me a bit. I never thought this is where I’d be after one month short of six years; having written one thousand essays,…
At the recent Victorian election, premier Daniel Andrews led the Labor Party to a victory, retaining majority government1. After it became clear, from assorted opinion polls, that it was unlikely…
A funny thing happened on the social media site, Mastodon. Someone made a comment about the name of the site and illustrated not a Mastodon, but a Mammoth. This was…
[On the media in the lead-up to the Victorian election] This is what happens when the rest of the media treats the Herald Sun as a reputable source of news and not what it actually is: a dossier of Liberal Party campaign material interpreted via the mushy keyboards and mushy minds of the state’s thickest mouthpieces for a ghoulish arch-conservative oligarch. That this class of commentator cannot fathom a genuinely popular progressive-ish government and the willing community buy-in on pandemic health measures in a pre-vaccine world says far more about corporate media than it does about Victoria. [https://theshot.net.au/general-news/why-everyone-except-me-was-wrong-about-the-victorian-election/]
While many people steer clear of Twitter for various reasons, some of which are due to the mainstream media’s constant whining about how it is a ‘sewer’. This is mainly…
As mentioned in a previous item here, the behaviour of the Murdoch media during the Victorian election was the most appalling I have seen in my few decades of watching…
As expected, the cookers whose favoured conspiracy theorists did not get elected in yesterday’s Victorian election have started their whining about the election process, stating that it was fraudulent. I…