Group think or grope think?

The struggle continues

I am continuing to work on my Special Article. It’s a struggle.

Against Group Think.

The excerpts that you have seen so far have been revised again—and again— and again— and now look rather different— but I am finally onto the next section, which deals with the various claims put forward as indisputable truths by all the usual suspects such as Robert Scheer and others— including academic and journalistic luminaries!

Group think

I realized that cannot just say “they’re all wrong!” Because most people in the West believe what they read or see on their screens — and what they are given is just one side of things, made-up stories. Once upon a time, the world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth and old ladies who lived alone should be burned as witches. You know how it goes .

Parsing online and literary discussions of Putin’s “unprovoked invasion” of the Ukraine and the “horrendous suffering” caused by this “violation of international law”, I noticed there was no acknowledgment of counter arguments which don’t just contradict but put the lie to these claims on various points.

Duh… “group think”. Or is it “grope think”? Sorry— my dyslexia

Google searches are difficult to find facts — only opinions— which have more holes and are less sanitary than my underwear. To get real information you have to go to the Russian media and RT… and …umm…think. Really, really hard in Tokyo’s stifling heat.

But such sources are “unacceptable” for many people because they are, the “enemy” — Russian. RT is funded by the Russian government - just as the BBC is funded by the Brits and PBS by the Americans and the CBC by the Canucks. Do we unconsciously sense something

AI search engines yield what Google provides-- a consensus of the Western “narrative”, defaulting to sources such as WaPo, the NYT, the Kyiv Independent, and Bellingcat, the CIA/ MI6 mouthpiece.

And Deepseek is “Chinese controlled”, although “open-source”.

Yes, this is the world we live in.

Like I said — grope think. I find myself hoping, coping, in the end - just groping.

Yet, real information is there somewhere – it just now increasingly hard to find and you have to think critically and analytically. I just have to work harder than before to find what is true and what is not. It is there in the Dark.

Is it that the TechLords are laundering information to provide a worldview consistent with what they think the world should be, not what it is?

Or is it just the normative tendencies of the Group Mind?

Once ,if I searched for images of Ukrainian strikes on civilian targets in Donbas, I would get a lot of photographic evidence of UAF targeting of civilians – which have killed perhaps 13,000 men, women, and children since 2014, probably more. But now, I get only images of what purport to be Russian strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine, many of which show damage caused by Ukrainian missiles which missed incoming targets.

Russians bad, bad, bad.

Is the Internet a lynch mob?

Robert Scheer sees Putin as the new Stalin writing:

I did not expect that Russia would descend to the level of a totalitarian dictatorship of the Stalinist variety. Putin’s murder of Navalny, preceded by the earlier poisonings, and his willingness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russian lives in a war of conquest against a neighbor, has surprised even those of us who were most critical of the regime from the outset. Scheerpost . Feb. 19, 2024

Navalny…Stalin…Putin. Oh my! Scheer is an excellent writer insofar as he can put all three together in a few sentences despite their having no connection.

That is the problem with these narratives. If you look at them in detail, too many questions arise.

The Unbelievable Tale of Navalny

The narrative, which no mainstream Western journalist has even attempted to question, insists that the president of Russia decided to kill Navalny – a marginal figure inside Russia. Instead of organizing an ‘accident’ with plausible deniability, the weapon of choice was a chemical weapon that could kill scores of civilians and unleash chaos at a Russian airport or on an airplane.

READ MORE: Putin claims opposition figure Alexey Navalny working with American intelligence, says Kremlin not behind his alleged poisoning

At first, it’s doubtless that Navalny’s tea was poisoned at the airport. When this failed to stick, a new narrative insisted his water bottle had been poisoned at the hotel. Now, the third and latest narrative suggests that Novichok (said to be the world's deadliest nerve agent) had been sprinkled on his underpants. Meanwhile, we are also told that once Navalny was unconscious, he was poisoned a second time with this lethal Novichok.

We are expected to believe that the Russian authorities wanted to kill Navalny but allowed his flight to be diverted and make an emergency landing at another airport so he could be rushed off to a state hospital where he was treated. Then, Putin’s FSB hit-squad seemingly decided not to simply turn off Navalny’s ventilator at the hospital, or to put a pillow over this head, but instead expanded the scope of the conspiracy by forcing the doctors to falsify his toxicology tests while threatening them to remain silent.

As if that wasn't enough, Putin then let a Novichok-infected Navalny fly to Germany for further treatment at a time when the Nordstream II gas pipeline was about to enter its final stages of construction.

Never mind the complete lack of evidence, this implausible and continuously changing narrative does not even make any sense. Novichok appears yet again to be incapable of killing anyone, and it is only effective in terms of insinuating the guilt of the Russian state.

I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. Why does a good fantasy novel sound ever so much more convincing and plausible!

No matter. I am guessing this article will be about 12,000 words when finished — a short book — but I haven’t yet got to Putin’s biography and what we know of his character, which really puts everything in perspective. You have to know the person before you can judge him.

Consider this man — demonized in the West— but respected, if not loved by the ever skeptical Russian people who learned from painful experience not to trust their leaders uncritically. The Russians honor Putin for his honesty and empathy and principles! 80%.

Yes, there are three of us.

Ichi, Chappy and me. You can guess which one of these I am!

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