I briefly return to my last essay on the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, particularly to the parody of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. As you know, quite a few people found that parody blasphemous and perverse, an open manifestation of the decadence of globalist institutions. I revisit it here to draw attention to the mainstream reaction to the uproar. I find that reaction particularly interesting and typical.
Is the IOC (Olympic committee ) reviewing and overseeing the planning of any activities, including ceremonies, before the games begin? I worked ( volunteered for medical services) for the 2004 Athens Olympics and Paralympics and remember the rigorous revisions of any detail …
I believe the opening ceremony was intended to lull us to complacency about the "women" boxers. They apparently didn't recall how angry and horrified we were over Lia Thomas. Or maybe they did and are turning up the fire on our outrage. It's another distraction. Worse, it's a weapon.
I often wonder how some of my more faithful friends can turn from all this noise and find peace with God. I want to stay tuned to see what the next horror to emerge from this freak show. I say I want to be prepared but there's more to that.
They focus their minds and hearts on God because the enemy feeds on negativity. Staying in the mudpit is a disconnect from God. We live in the new Babylon.
Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by. I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfills his purpose for me
I responded to someone who found it contradictory to say it shouldn't be forbidden to mock something and also saying "those who fail to protest, neglect an ethical duty." I think you are saying you are a proponent of freedom of speech but that if YOU think it was in poor taste, then you have an ethical duty to say so instead of just going along with them saying it was all in good fun or whatever. Speak your truth. I recently did to a friend who actually came to understand why it may be offensive to some people. I'm not a Christian but thought it was in poor taste. Bad judgment and trying to shove this woke (or whatever you want to call it) down our throats. They just keep pushing the envelope hoping we will all start getting used to it and it will be the norm. Problem is there are 2.6B Christians in the world plus ppl like me who will not go along with this narrative. Your concept of mass formation is brilliant and I could finally understand what was going on with this blind acceptance of a particular narrative. We will continue to see these kinds of large scale examples, pushing a particular narrative/agenda and in order to prevent it from permeating our society, we must offer other perspectives and beliefs which may differ. sabrinalabow.substack.com
If you think the Koch whistleblower story was undershared and under reported, it would make sense to share a good link to the information. Does anyone have one? I missed that story and I consider myself very well informed, yet still overwhelmed by how much data there is to contradict the elite narrative that the masses still choose to ignore.
Let's make sure this Koch story gets out to even more people. Link?
Hopefully, your freedom of thought will allow you to accept that there are many who think you are wrong. Hopefully, you will accept that they may be right. If you can't do this, hopefully, you can allow yourself not to play the victim when their honesty disagree with you. I am one of them. In fact, what I do wonder is whether the Dutch painter was making fun of Da Vinci's painting. Nobody has seemed to have thought of this that I know of.
“And although I personally find mocking something that another person holds sacred tasteless, I do not think it should be forbidden.”
3 sentences later: “Those who fail to protest, neglect an ethical duty.”
Am I the only one, who thinks that Mattias himself is at least acting very self-righteously by laying down "ethical duties" for those who think otherwise (and therefore do not protest)? And which kind of thought tradition even thinks of banning expressions of opinion (art is always also an expression of opinion, how tasteless it ever may be)? Where is the difference between the forbidden and the neglected ethical duty from a moral point of view?
The problem, in my opinion, is that totalitarians themselves always argue with ethical duties. Which they feel obliged to impose on others. Totalitarians believe they know the one and only (their) "truth". I would never dare to call Mattias' way of thinking totalitarian. But too many too hard turns in reasoning also run the risk of falling prey to the beast (within oneself) that one believes one is fighting, yep. Are “conspiracy thinkers” ( or “rationalism”) here just a projection surface of one's own shortcomings? If you take a closer look at James Corbett's substack - a very high profile "conspiracy thinker" (i.e. journalist) - it might give you a clue or two (if not an example) what Mattias himself might actually, ethically and probably very grossly be neglecting. Again, I would not dare to call it a duty.
I think what he is saying is he is a proponent of freedom of speech but that if YOU think it was in poor taste, then you have an ethical duty to say so instead of just going along with them saying it was all in good fun or whatever. Speak your truth. I recently did to a friend who actually came to understand why it may be offensive to some people. I'm not a Christian but thought it was in poor taste. Bad judgment and trying to shove this woke (or whatever you want to call it) down our throats. They just keep pushing the envelope hoping we will all start getting used to it and it will be the norm. Problem is there are 2.6B Christians in the world plus ppl like me who will not go along with this narrative. sabrinalabow.substack.com
Saying something is forbidden and saying we are protesting against something are not the same thing. It is a long way from one to the other. What does protesting really mean?
It means what Desmet says is an ethical duty: to articulate the truth, which is what it demands of us - we have a duty to the truth, to articulate it... Or to put it another way: we have a duty to think about and disagree with things that are illogical, unjust and destructive. And this does not mean that we can come to definite conclusions about what it is and what and how to act.
Ethical duties exist because every human being is positioned in relation to the truth of the world and of themselves. It is important to stress here that it is not about "our" truth, but about the truth about ourselves and about the world in which we live. The question is therefore not why we have ethical duties, but why some of you think we do not. Covid's time has shown so well what happens when there are no boundaries - when a political clique backed by capital can literally force the particular to be the universal. Another name for this is fascism, where the universal does not really exist - there are only particularities and power struggles disguised by the simulacrum of universality. Therefore, the imperious invocation of ethics is not a reason to be against ethics as such, but the opposite, that it needs revitalisation. We are against the simulacrum of "ethics", better said, moral blackmail!
And, lest there be any misunderstanding, I have already written about what I think about the Games in the comments below. First of all, it is a spectacle, it would have passed me by if everyone had not made such a big deal about it. It is an irrelevant symptom of the times, but it has a function that Mattias does not talk about, and that is to distract. Baudrillard's analysis of hyperreality would have come in handy here, not to mention Guy Debord.
I agree that speaking out is important. Politely giving your opinion, well judtified, calm, without being pretentious...
However, this gives Mattias' followers apparently the impression that their opinion frankly and calmly spoken would be "The Truth". There's no such thing.
...and often they do the saaame thing as everyone else: from assertive to aggressive, the loud and condescending, ad hominem, ridiculing, lynching, muting, and blocking.
In fact many of this group now spread conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, lies, are moving to the right, together with distrust of science, media & government.
This unfortunately leading to more diversion, opposition, and polarisation.
(I don't deny there are capitalistic forces playing (since ...what... always) and this reinforces these beliefs and truths... which are mixed up.
Although I agreed with some parts, some ideas,
I found the main message in his book anti-scientific.
From the misinterpretation of Ionnidis' replication crisis... to saying we can't really know the truth... ok. But that doesn't mean we can't thrust science or there a truth we can 'feel vibrating' or other esotheric stories... no we should improve the way we do and communicate science.
...I'm sorry if I rambled, I'm not a star at writing.
So it is that the world we live in will always be a confused and uncertain place. We really have no choice but to try to make sense of it. I totally agree that there is a lot of superstition, pseudoscience and wild interpretation. Opinions on the Internet get their echoes in a way that they could not before, although that is not necessarily always a bad thing. The alternative to opinion is knowledge, so we cannot simply say that science is the problem. We cannot claim to know something without appealing to reason and scientific verification, to research, to rigorous methods... because that is the best way of knowing we have and the only way to refute bad science and all that is presented as Science through the media. But education is important not only to get into a profession, to learn to read and question blindly accepted prejudices, but also to build moral character.
Because none of this is happening in the vacuum. We are running into problems at every turn. Science can be a broader, cultural concept (this is the idea of Husserl's Crisis; and a book in the line of this tradition, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, has recently been published). Science can therefore determine human attitudes in the direction of openness, exploration, cognitive scepticism, or it can, through establishment, become an instrumentalisation of nature, of people, a standardisation of thought, a blind following of certain ways of doing things, without any real reflection on its limitations. It can give us a false, unjustified certainty that we know how it is. There is no one science, there are many, and within them different paradigms coexist, those that are mainstream and those that are not. There are a whole series of problems, for example, The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research . So there is a credibility problem that no one will even try to solve without a sense of ethics. Then there is the problem of the legitimacy of our authorities and the exploitation of science. Science can say what it is, but it cannot decide for us what to do and how to act. It is not scientific language at all that is at work here, but narrative knowing. What matters here is critical social theory, which must be self-reflexive or become conformist and land on one side or the other of the polarisation, instead of overcoming the illusion that maintains both sides.
Truth is located precisely in the cracks in knowledge, and is therefore not something we can possess. We possess opinions, conclusions, but that is not the same thing. Truth is a gap that will reveal the false. In reality, we have a lot of work to do and a lot of learning to do.
No, not the whole book. So my "will" was stronger ;-) Btw: I said, Schopenhauer lacked any of the "empathy” that contemporaries speak of. I'm not sure if any form of irony is allowed while "in honest speach", but I'm sure you are into the latter, so I must add that Schopenhauer saw "Mitleid" as one of the highest forms of reason a human can reach. "Mitleid" (stronger than "compassion", "pitty" would be the wrong translation) can be wordly translated as suffering (Leid) with (Mit-) somebody. For me it means something completely different from the fashionable catchword "empathy" somehow making it into everybody's "heart" today. And a can see very much Mitleid in James Corbett's eyes Also in Mattias Desmet's. Schopenhauer saw man principally capable of reason but dominated by the mostly unconscious drive to survive ("will"). He was a very "lonely" man and the result of his constant "suffering" from "loneliness" wasn't totalitarianism, but a little "evolution in the sphere of consciousness".
The book reflects a deep pessimism about human existence, emphasizing that true happiness is found in the cessation of desire rather than its fulfillment.
Clearly parallel to Zen Buddhism, which I prefer.
Both philosophies identify craving as a source of dissatisfaction; Schopenhauer's concept of the "will" echoes the Buddhist notion of attachment.
Moreover, both advocate for contemplative practices as paths to transcend suffering. Schopenhauer emphasizes aesthetic experiences as a temporary escape from the will, while Zen Buddhism promotes meditation to achieve enlightenment and understanding of one's true nature, highlighting a shared focus on overcoming the limitations of desire and perception.
I love discovering art etc., in daily live I prefer humor & daily meditation to overcome the limitations of desire and perception...
which might be part of the drama over this piece of art. 😉
It was an insult to the Olympian gods. there is a french painting bu jan H something, that it is from. there are many along these lines. The feast of Dionysus. I know christians love to be upset about these things, but it aint so.
True. Censorship is just one of those tools. By purposefully fomented and encouraging discord amongst people, the angry and offended party will be more willing accept authoritarian controls over those who committed the offense. This gives them a sense of justice being done until those same tools are used against them.
Thanks for your thoughtful commentaries. It would be nice with a link to the revelations of the whistleblower from Koch Institute, as it is not easy to find.
Is the IOC (Olympic committee ) reviewing and overseeing the planning of any activities, including ceremonies, before the games begin? I worked ( volunteered for medical services) for the 2004 Athens Olympics and Paralympics and remember the rigorous revisions of any detail …
I believe the opening ceremony was intended to lull us to complacency about the "women" boxers. They apparently didn't recall how angry and horrified we were over Lia Thomas. Or maybe they did and are turning up the fire on our outrage. It's another distraction. Worse, it's a weapon.
I often wonder how some of my more faithful friends can turn from all this noise and find peace with God. I want to stay tuned to see what the next horror to emerge from this freak show. I say I want to be prepared but there's more to that.
They focus their minds and hearts on God because the enemy feeds on negativity. Staying in the mudpit is a disconnect from God. We live in the new Babylon.
Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by. I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfills his purpose for me
Psalm 57:1–2 (ESV)
IT WASNT THE LAST SUPPER IT WAS THE GREEK GODS. CHRISTIANITY IS IRRELEVANT TO THE OLYMPICS, WHY WOULD THEY HAVE THE LAST SUPPER IN IT?
Thank you for this gem of eloquence AND intellectual rigour, Mattias. Which is basically Zimboz' comment n August 4th.
Eloquently put! Such excellent writing is a pleasure to read and reflect upon.
I responded to someone who found it contradictory to say it shouldn't be forbidden to mock something and also saying "those who fail to protest, neglect an ethical duty." I think you are saying you are a proponent of freedom of speech but that if YOU think it was in poor taste, then you have an ethical duty to say so instead of just going along with them saying it was all in good fun or whatever. Speak your truth. I recently did to a friend who actually came to understand why it may be offensive to some people. I'm not a Christian but thought it was in poor taste. Bad judgment and trying to shove this woke (or whatever you want to call it) down our throats. They just keep pushing the envelope hoping we will all start getting used to it and it will be the norm. Problem is there are 2.6B Christians in the world plus ppl like me who will not go along with this narrative. Your concept of mass formation is brilliant and I could finally understand what was going on with this blind acceptance of a particular narrative. We will continue to see these kinds of large scale examples, pushing a particular narrative/agenda and in order to prevent it from permeating our society, we must offer other perspectives and beliefs which may differ. sabrinalabow.substack.com
Your final paragraph showcases the issue. Thank you for all the consideration you shared above those last words.
I think this a good take on it, instead of being anti-woke
https://wildhunt.org/2024/07/hellenic-pagans-polytheists-react-to-the-olympics-opening-ceremony-controversy.html
Leaky as a sieve. Buckets generally don't leak. :-)
If you think the Koch whistleblower story was undershared and under reported, it would make sense to share a good link to the information. Does anyone have one? I missed that story and I consider myself very well informed, yet still overwhelmed by how much data there is to contradict the elite narrative that the masses still choose to ignore.
Let's make sure this Koch story gets out to even more people. Link?
Great work
Hopefully, your freedom of thought will allow you to accept that there are many who think you are wrong. Hopefully, you will accept that they may be right. If you can't do this, hopefully, you can allow yourself not to play the victim when their honesty disagree with you. I am one of them. In fact, what I do wonder is whether the Dutch painter was making fun of Da Vinci's painting. Nobody has seemed to have thought of this that I know of.
I saw the art expert Walther Schoonenberg writing just that after the anti-woke drama erupted on X
https://amp.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/29/olympic-last-supper-scene-based-painting-greek-gods-art-experts
“And although I personally find mocking something that another person holds sacred tasteless, I do not think it should be forbidden.”
3 sentences later: “Those who fail to protest, neglect an ethical duty.”
Am I the only one, who thinks that Mattias himself is at least acting very self-righteously by laying down "ethical duties" for those who think otherwise (and therefore do not protest)? And which kind of thought tradition even thinks of banning expressions of opinion (art is always also an expression of opinion, how tasteless it ever may be)? Where is the difference between the forbidden and the neglected ethical duty from a moral point of view?
The problem, in my opinion, is that totalitarians themselves always argue with ethical duties. Which they feel obliged to impose on others. Totalitarians believe they know the one and only (their) "truth". I would never dare to call Mattias' way of thinking totalitarian. But too many too hard turns in reasoning also run the risk of falling prey to the beast (within oneself) that one believes one is fighting, yep. Are “conspiracy thinkers” ( or “rationalism”) here just a projection surface of one's own shortcomings? If you take a closer look at James Corbett's substack - a very high profile "conspiracy thinker" (i.e. journalist) - it might give you a clue or two (if not an example) what Mattias himself might actually, ethically and probably very grossly be neglecting. Again, I would not dare to call it a duty.
But … should I?
https://substack.com/inbox/post/147195597
I think what he is saying is he is a proponent of freedom of speech but that if YOU think it was in poor taste, then you have an ethical duty to say so instead of just going along with them saying it was all in good fun or whatever. Speak your truth. I recently did to a friend who actually came to understand why it may be offensive to some people. I'm not a Christian but thought it was in poor taste. Bad judgment and trying to shove this woke (or whatever you want to call it) down our throats. They just keep pushing the envelope hoping we will all start getting used to it and it will be the norm. Problem is there are 2.6B Christians in the world plus ppl like me who will not go along with this narrative. sabrinalabow.substack.com
Saying something is forbidden and saying we are protesting against something are not the same thing. It is a long way from one to the other. What does protesting really mean?
It means what Desmet says is an ethical duty: to articulate the truth, which is what it demands of us - we have a duty to the truth, to articulate it... Or to put it another way: we have a duty to think about and disagree with things that are illogical, unjust and destructive. And this does not mean that we can come to definite conclusions about what it is and what and how to act.
Ethical duties exist because every human being is positioned in relation to the truth of the world and of themselves. It is important to stress here that it is not about "our" truth, but about the truth about ourselves and about the world in which we live. The question is therefore not why we have ethical duties, but why some of you think we do not. Covid's time has shown so well what happens when there are no boundaries - when a political clique backed by capital can literally force the particular to be the universal. Another name for this is fascism, where the universal does not really exist - there are only particularities and power struggles disguised by the simulacrum of universality. Therefore, the imperious invocation of ethics is not a reason to be against ethics as such, but the opposite, that it needs revitalisation. We are against the simulacrum of "ethics", better said, moral blackmail!
And, lest there be any misunderstanding, I have already written about what I think about the Games in the comments below. First of all, it is a spectacle, it would have passed me by if everyone had not made such a big deal about it. It is an irrelevant symptom of the times, but it has a function that Mattias does not talk about, and that is to distract. Baudrillard's analysis of hyperreality would have come in handy here, not to mention Guy Debord.
There's always this "speaking truth".
I agree that speaking out is important. Politely giving your opinion, well judtified, calm, without being pretentious...
However, this gives Mattias' followers apparently the impression that their opinion frankly and calmly spoken would be "The Truth". There's no such thing.
...and often they do the saaame thing as everyone else: from assertive to aggressive, the loud and condescending, ad hominem, ridiculing, lynching, muting, and blocking.
In fact many of this group now spread conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, lies, are moving to the right, together with distrust of science, media & government.
This unfortunately leading to more diversion, opposition, and polarisation.
(I don't deny there are capitalistic forces playing (since ...what... always) and this reinforces these beliefs and truths... which are mixed up.
Although I agreed with some parts, some ideas,
I found the main message in his book anti-scientific.
From the misinterpretation of Ionnidis' replication crisis... to saying we can't really know the truth... ok. But that doesn't mean we can't thrust science or there a truth we can 'feel vibrating' or other esotheric stories... no we should improve the way we do and communicate science.
...I'm sorry if I rambled, I'm not a star at writing.
So it is that the world we live in will always be a confused and uncertain place. We really have no choice but to try to make sense of it. I totally agree that there is a lot of superstition, pseudoscience and wild interpretation. Opinions on the Internet get their echoes in a way that they could not before, although that is not necessarily always a bad thing. The alternative to opinion is knowledge, so we cannot simply say that science is the problem. We cannot claim to know something without appealing to reason and scientific verification, to research, to rigorous methods... because that is the best way of knowing we have and the only way to refute bad science and all that is presented as Science through the media. But education is important not only to get into a profession, to learn to read and question blindly accepted prejudices, but also to build moral character.
Because none of this is happening in the vacuum. We are running into problems at every turn. Science can be a broader, cultural concept (this is the idea of Husserl's Crisis; and a book in the line of this tradition, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, has recently been published). Science can therefore determine human attitudes in the direction of openness, exploration, cognitive scepticism, or it can, through establishment, become an instrumentalisation of nature, of people, a standardisation of thought, a blind following of certain ways of doing things, without any real reflection on its limitations. It can give us a false, unjustified certainty that we know how it is. There is no one science, there are many, and within them different paradigms coexist, those that are mainstream and those that are not. There are a whole series of problems, for example, The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research . So there is a credibility problem that no one will even try to solve without a sense of ethics. Then there is the problem of the legitimacy of our authorities and the exploitation of science. Science can say what it is, but it cannot decide for us what to do and how to act. It is not scientific language at all that is at work here, but narrative knowing. What matters here is critical social theory, which must be self-reflexive or become conformist and land on one side or the other of the polarisation, instead of overcoming the illusion that maintains both sides.
Truth is located precisely in the cracks in knowledge, and is therefore not something we can possess. We possess opinions, conclusions, but that is not the same thing. Truth is a gap that will reveal the false. In reality, we have a lot of work to do and a lot of learning to do.
"..and idea"
No, not the whole book. So my "will" was stronger ;-) Btw: I said, Schopenhauer lacked any of the "empathy” that contemporaries speak of. I'm not sure if any form of irony is allowed while "in honest speach", but I'm sure you are into the latter, so I must add that Schopenhauer saw "Mitleid" as one of the highest forms of reason a human can reach. "Mitleid" (stronger than "compassion", "pitty" would be the wrong translation) can be wordly translated as suffering (Leid) with (Mit-) somebody. For me it means something completely different from the fashionable catchword "empathy" somehow making it into everybody's "heart" today. And a can see very much Mitleid in James Corbett's eyes Also in Mattias Desmet's. Schopenhauer saw man principally capable of reason but dominated by the mostly unconscious drive to survive ("will"). He was a very "lonely" man and the result of his constant "suffering" from "loneliness" wasn't totalitarianism, but a little "evolution in the sphere of consciousness".
The book reflects a deep pessimism about human existence, emphasizing that true happiness is found in the cessation of desire rather than its fulfillment.
Clearly parallel to Zen Buddhism, which I prefer.
Both philosophies identify craving as a source of dissatisfaction; Schopenhauer's concept of the "will" echoes the Buddhist notion of attachment.
Moreover, both advocate for contemplative practices as paths to transcend suffering. Schopenhauer emphasizes aesthetic experiences as a temporary escape from the will, while Zen Buddhism promotes meditation to achieve enlightenment and understanding of one's true nature, highlighting a shared focus on overcoming the limitations of desire and perception.
I love discovering art etc., in daily live I prefer humor & daily meditation to overcome the limitations of desire and perception...
which might be part of the drama over this piece of art. 😉
It was an insult to the Olympian gods. there is a french painting bu jan H something, that it is from. there are many along these lines. The feast of Dionysus. I know christians love to be upset about these things, but it aint so.
True. Censorship is just one of those tools. By purposefully fomented and encouraging discord amongst people, the angry and offended party will be more willing accept authoritarian controls over those who committed the offense. This gives them a sense of justice being done until those same tools are used against them.
Yes, except that in our situation it is unlikely, that the offenders will be censored, but outside of this (our situation) this is quite relevant.
Thanks for your thoughtful commentaries. It would be nice with a link to the revelations of the whistleblower from Koch Institute, as it is not easy to find.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDbOBJ_MwH0
Links under vidéo.
Thank you!