War propaganda focuses on the now, and audiences cannot think about the past or the present. Ideally, they should be conditioned to be unable to think of the past or the future, or the hypothetical. Let me explain.
On a Saturday morning in March 1996, I was eight years old, and my parents let me choose how to spend the day. I could go to a special event at the local park, or see Toy Story, which had just released in theaters. For whatever reason, I chose to see Toy Story. I enjoyed it, but that evening I realized I had made mistake. It would have been smarter to go to the local event at the park, because that was the only opportunity to do so, and see Toy Story on another day. I was very sad and cried, that’s my earliest experience of “buyer’s regret” that I can remember. What I had experienced that day was the hypothetical. I hadn’t actually gone to the park, but I could imagine enjoying the park and the special play equipment and exhibits for the day. I could also take this hypothetical and extrapolate the conclusion that the one-time opportunity at the park would have been a smarter choice than seeing a movie that would certainly still be in theaters the following weekend, and I could have asked to see it then. Toy Story is one of my favorite movies even as an adult, but I still feel a little sad.
There’s an infamous green text from a guy claiming to have participated in an American IQ study involving conditional statements. (I couldn’t find the original text, I’ll summarize below for the non-English readers using auto-translate).
Basically, he explains that low-IQ prison inmates literally cannot understand a conditional statement. For example, if he asks “how would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast and lunch yesterday?” a low-IQ person will just get confused, because he did have breakfast and lunch yesterday, and doesn’t understand the idea of imagining if he didn’t. It’s impossible for the low-IQ person to write dialogue between two fictional people because he’s too stunted to imagine what it would be like to be a person besides himself. This is also why, apparently, violent criminals cannot empathize with the people they hurt. “How would you feel if you were the person you beat?” is just beyond his mental capacity. That’s as good an explanation as any for why sociopathic criminals act the way they do. Maybe they are in fact just too stupid to conceptualize being another person, which is enough for most normal people to hesitate before engaging in violence.
I’m not a scientist or any kind of expert qualified to opine on this, but I have noticed that this inability to understand conditional statements goes far beyond simple low-IQ prison inmates, and infects the affluent and well-educated upper strata of society who should actually know better. And this is, frankly, especially true for progressive liberals. Even the really well-educated ones who went to Ivy League colleges and have six-figure jobs. You ask a liberal to apply his beliefs in a different context than the one he stated, he’ll get angry and accuse you of “whataboutism.” I’ll provide some examples.
The first example. In April 2021, there was a viral video showing a cop responding to a group of people fighting outside a house. Just a few seconds after arriving, he saw a large girl with a knife shove a much smaller girl against a car and try to stab her. Naturally, the cop shot her. Here’s a video below:
I’m the last person to celebrate police violence or someone dying, but this was a justified shooting. If I was the smaller girl in the video, I would certainly want a responding police officer to shoot rather than let me get stabbed. To me, that just seems like common sense and it doesn’t take a high-IQ person to come to my conclusion. The way American liberals responded to this incident was some of the worst lemming-like behavior I have ever seen. And you can’t even debate them on this, and believe me, I’ve tried. They just get mad and call you a racist. The concept of imagining yourself as the girl about to get stabbed is, apparently, completely beyond them. And again, we aren’t talking about mentally disabled felons in a prison. They’re very often successful people with advanced educations and high-paying jobs.
Now take this logic to a war. And I’ve seen several examples in my social media grazing over the past week. In a Facebook thread about Afghanistan, I talked to western lefties whining about the Taliban repealing education rights for women. I suggested that maybe in an impoverished country that’s been torn apart by decades of war and lost most of their central bank holdings to “sanctions” (theft), women’s education just isn’t that important. And if women’s education is that important, why not offer incentives for the Taliban to keep it? For example (aside from, God forbid, returning the $8 billion Biden stole), funding Afghanistan’s education system on the condition that girls and women are included. Or financing their infrastructure on the condition that women are allowed into the workforce. Or – better yet – just help rebuild Afghanistan without such ideological conditions and let the country liberalize on its own. But that sort of hypothetical is beyond the reasoning skills of a typical liberal. They all got confused and didn’t respond, or just got more angry.
Applying conditional statements to comparisons of US and Russian interventions gets even more interesting. Liberals’ reactions to the invasion and occupation of Iraq range from lukewarm (but unactioned) opposition to actually defending it. And yet, regardless of their attitude to the Iraq occupation, liberals respond to the Russian occupation in Ukraine the same way, outright over-the-top hostility. I ask anti-war liberals in the USA and UK if they would be fine with their visa cards and Google Pay accounts being switched off, and barred from visiting the EU. 100% of the time, they just get confused. They literally can’t understand the concept of imagining sanctions against themselves. One would think, logically, that if sanctioning American and British citizens from the world’s financial system is an unfair overreaction, that would also be true for Russians. But no, the liberal mind just lacks the imagination to even understand the concept.
Of course, not all wars are the same and proximity matters. If one country attacks a country immediately adjacent to it, perhaps, conceivably, the attacked country had done something to deserve it. Imagine if China sent troops and missiles to Mexico. Or Canada pledged allegiance to Russia and started killing American citizens. Or perhaps, just imagine historical events you may or may not have been alive for. Imagining a historical event that you weren’t there for, or only vaguely remember, is basically no different than a hypothetical. It’s not happening now in the present tense, you have to clear your mind and think critically to reflect on it. But liberals are ruled by the now, so it’s pointless to try to cite historical events, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, as evidence that, perhaps, Russian military policy is justified.
If you ask a liberal why it is evil and “literally like Hitler” for Russia to attack and occupy portions of Ukraine, but simultaneously okay for the USA to occupy portions of Syria, he usually won’t answer. Even making the comparison is just something his brain is not capable of. That’s why if you challenge a liberal’s beliefs by applying them in a slightly different context, he’ll get angry and accuse you of whataboutism.
Liberals live in the now, can’t understand conditional statements, and can’t apply their core beliefs in even the slightest different context than the way it was delivered into their brains. It’s just copy-paste. Even ChatGPT is smarter and more creative than a liberal. Try asking a liberal why Russia’s partial mobilization is evil but it is okay for Ukrainian thugs to literally kidnap men off the street and send them to the front with no training.
On a personal note, I have raised $630 on Buy Me a Coffee to keep the website running, which is more than enough. Many thanks to everyone who donated, I greatly appreciate it! I just reset the goal to $4,000, which is the total tuition fee for my ongoing Russian language course in Moscow.
There are some other big announcements coming, which I’ll post about later this week!
I do have a new Facebook account (which I’ve updated in the contacts section), but, well, I am having troubles there too. Facebook has, apparently, decided to make any reference to nazis or nazi Germany a “community standards” offense. Yesterday, I posted about Ukrainian pilot Vadim Voroshilov, with the call sign “Karaya,” referencing Erich Hartmann, one of Nazi Germany’s top aces in the war. Facebook left up the photo of the Ukrainian, but deleted the image of the nazi. Tell me, who does this censorship benefit?
Ian Kummer
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I just fixed an obvious spelling error in the title
That is extremely interesting about the abilities (or lack of them) of people with low IQ. However, I suspect that what is going on with “liberals” is not so much that they lack the ability to think like this, but that they have used their ability to correctly identify the position they need to take to advance themselves in society and therefore parrot that position – until the Party sends out an update, then they start parroting that. Whether it is defensible is not important, as they can simply refuse to engage in debate by, as in your examples, getting angry or throwing insults.
Their position HAS to be the correct one – it said so on the TV – and it gets them so many social media likes. The problem with “liberals” is, not that they are criminally minded, but that they are contemptible.
The anger and insults are the best sign that they ARE capable of thinking. Their conscience knows that their position is indefensible but, after all, they are just trying to be “nice”. How dare you challenge their niceness? How immoral of you!
Hi Aelfsige,
Good to see you on the site again. I think you have a point. They’re people who ask not what is true, but what is popular.
I can confirm this story 100%.
When I was in seminary I did some work visiting inmates in a maximum security prison.
To my surprise, they were all extremely dull pitiable boys (with muscles) — no criminal master minds or evil characters here.
Many of them were in prison for repeated incidents, most with a variation of a story line such as:
»I was stealing some whiskey at the night store nearby, got into a scuffle, and beat the owner.
Why? Because I wanted to have a good time, find a girl, but had no money.«
Unable to navigate their way around a modern society and gratify simple desires, or plan for a later moment, or steal during the day time in a store where you are unlikely to be noticed, they succumb to spur of the moment impulsive crimes, and compound it by resorting to unplanned and unintentional violence when things go awry, unable to weigh benefits and likely costs.
Have you ever been in a situation where somebody holds a knife to rob you?
Have you ever confronted a bear or a mountain goat, the both of you equally surprised by the sudden encounter?
You will notice that you fall back into a blur of adrenaline fueled confusion.
You cannot think: He is as afraid as I am, equally surprised.
You cannot think: Remain calm, because the smell of adrenaline signals aggression as much as fear.
You cannot think at all.
And that is the state of mind that the news propaganda foments in everyone: blind indignation and anger, the narrative pulled together by a smattering of unexamined assumptions and ideological signals, herded together in self-reinforcing collective delusion, the same mode of being as a choir of football hooligans.
There is an experiment they do to test autism in children.
They take a smarties tube, empty it of candies, and fill it with stones instead.
Then they say. When your Mom comes back, we will give her the tube as a present.
Normal kids all laugh, imagining how she will be fooled.
Autistic kids cannot imagine that their Mother will be fooled: If asked, they will not say Mom will think it’s smarties, no, they will say she will think it’s stones.
This is why all religions teach-teach-teach a variation of the notion: “There but for the grace of God go I”
The fundamental interchangeability between you and others (who have been less lucky, or have different circumstances, etc). The lack of such empathy is a fundamental flaw of human nature.
> They’re very often successful people with advanced educations and high-paying jobs.
Nearly universally so. Cops, baristas, tech bros (guilty), HR whores, and OF whores have two things in common: they tend to be libtards and their labor in relation to the forces of production is the same.
They’ve lost touch with reality because their ‘labor’ doesn’t transform said reality.