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Dr. S. Ivory's avatar

*I forgot the aside. Sometime in the 90s Frank Zappa said the following: "Just because 350 million Americans think it's so, don't make it true." He was talking about running for president of the United States at the time. I would have applied for citizenship, just so as to be able to vote for him if that had actually transpired.

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Dr. S. Ivory's avatar

With respect to "Screams and giggles. What is this crap?"

The worst of the worst (I am being sarcastic here, like J.P. Sears) among the so-called conspiracy theorists adhere to the notion that this entire scenario has been long in the coming. Part of the agenda, and a pivotal part, has been the cumulative infantilization of the entire adult population of the west, ergo the screeching cartwheels when one's friends are doing the same mindless thing altogether.

The absolute drivel that is coming out of boards of education with the backing of state and provincial bodies, e.g., as witnessed by heretofore deviant populations offering indoctrination sessions in elementary schools, is designed in concert with a lack of education in the enhancement of rational analysis to render adult individuals incapable of recognizing logical fallacies of any kind.

Many of the strategies to empty out meanings from words, words that used to be employed to describe the moral and rational underpinnings of the perceptions of a post-medieval thinker (words like "wrong", "good") are precisely those recognized by psychologists and the like as those used by narcissistic abusers to gaslight and manipulate their victims.

This means that acceptable "science" is founded now in the public mind on a platform of two fallacies: the "appeal to authority" and the "appeal to popularity". If the dude in a white coat funded by the legacy media arm of our government says it's so, it's so. And if everyone else agrees, then it's especially so.* Our 'experts' can make whatever idiotic interpretations of the data they like even when they produce the actual flawed substandard research to back up their statements, because the public is scientifically illiterate and innumerate. You have to understand statistics in order to interpret research meaningfully, and most people's eyeballs roll up in their heads when you point to the actual data.

So much so, in fact, that when data comes out that clearly falsifies former statements based on a lack of data, people are incapable of changing their position because of the very strong "sunk cost" fallacy upon which the government and its mouthpieces rely.

Now it is a commonly assumed view that teenagers are irrational, that that is a defining characteristic of their developmental phase. In some neuropsychological circles, this is put down to the immaturity of certain brain structures responsible for risk aversion and critical judgment being proportionately inhibited by other more active primitive structures associated with anger, fear and strong emotions.

Therefore, in an organism that has insufficiently developed rational executive capacity, whether by natural chronology or by educational training design - which has been the case since about 1995 when Foucauldian postmodernism replaced structural functionalism as the favourite intellectual paradigm in the universities - playing on anger and fear circuits will have an outsized effect. As will the interruption of those circuits with intermittent reward for acting on that anger and fear.

And here lies the origin of the adolescent gigglefest. It is a well known axiom of behaviorist theory that the best way to condition a response is to intermittently reward it. With respect to the sheep, the injections are the reward, in that they constitute a release from a constant condition of state-induced fear, something to be celebrated along with one's comrades.

And lastly, if you add addiction mechanism theory to the mix, what you get is a growing need, an actual craving, for more of that reward more often. And isn't that exactly what our government is pushing? More shots, with "new and improved" (although completely untested) effect, more often? So more frequent dopamine showers relieving the constant cortisol seep induced by quotidian media propaganda? And God help anyone who stands between the addict and his fix!!!

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