Proudly, my blog is one of them!
Friends, we live in a world where the reality is that we lurch from crisis to crisis.
We have global warming. We have an economic and financial meltdown. We have Israel threatening to nuke Iran and the war in Afghanistan is about to be stepped up. We have North Korea talking war against the South and China harassing U.S. ships in the China Sea. We have the U.S. still engaging in hegemony and still spending gazillions of borrowed dollars on their Armed Forces, etc, etc.
But do the Sheeple worry about these things? No way. They may have concerns for their jobs or possible foreclosure but, in the main, when they blog, whether as blog authors or commenters, they don’t want to face reality. They want to be fed pap, engage in trivialities, small-talk. They embrace the herd-instinct warmly and, if an outsider dares to question their pet beliefs or their heavy indoctrination they join together like a group of mongrel dogs at a tip and attack!
My blog, as you would all know, is not a blog for sheeple. It makes them feel uncomfortable. Most of the blogs that I comment on are not for sheeple! I try to avoid sheeple blogs because there are important issues in the world that need urgent attention (though, occasionally, I do visit a couple of sheeple blogs more out of habit than interest – I usually wish I hadn’t!).
How do thinking people tell which blogs are sheeple blogs? First thing to do is to look at the post titles. If you see posts about men’s deodorants or heavyweight boxers or singers, leave quickly. These are not world issues. These are not serious issues. These are time-wasting sheeple issues written by folk with small minds.
As well, if there are posts about going to church or posts which push gay and lesbian issues or review videos or talk incessantly about themselves then you know the blog author has an axe to grind and is either seeking to find converts or desperately trying to justify his or her own existence or unfortunate foibles.
Secondly, look at the public comments. Do people seem to spend their time patting each other on the back? Are dissenters, if any, given a rough ride by everyone? Do the blog author’s comments look as though he or she is trying to win a popularity contest? If the answer is yes, the blog obviously doesn’t welcome anything but stereotypical views which the majority of sheeple hold anyway. Does this matter? Of course it does!
Unless the sheeple begin to use their brains, then our world is lost!
Typical sheeple views are: America, being exceptional, should run the world; democracy is the best political system; capitalism and free markets are great for everyone; Israelis are victims; the white race is superior to all others; the strong should dominate the weak; God made everything and is on our side; materialism and imperialism go hand in hand; gun ownership should be everyone’s right, war solves all problems, etc.
If the world is to survive, sheeple blogs are not the answer. They just clog up the internet and spoil things for serious bloggers who are trying to make the world a better place by encouraging people to think for themselves, then act.
My advice: if you are brain-dead blog author or you haven’t got anything worthwhile or challenging to say, then don’t blog!
And if you are a commenter, avoid sheeple blogs because the world desperately needs people who think. If you are not challenged immediately, walk away.
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
Alice, in support of the Sheeple fantasy.
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What passes for “news” here in the US is the same. It is mostly fluff fit only for sheeple. Anyone who thinks is very thankful for the internet so we can have access to many more views and ideas then we have ever had before. I am especially thankful since I live in a small town full of very conservative and religious people (sheeple) and finding people who share my views is difficult. There are some but we are few and expressing those views in public can bring down the rage and contempt of the right wing bigots.
There are people out there who want to make sure that ordinary citizens do not get too uppity and start to think for themselves.
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“I am especially thankful since I live in a small town full of very conservative and religious people (sheeple)”
I split between a huge one and a tiny one. Same on both ends.
Then there are the sheep herders. (This week!)
‘The New York Times, reporting on the al-Jarrah affair, revealed this: “It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”’
Link available but who needs it.
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I agree wholeheartedly about the Sheeple. Be that as it may, blogging amounts to armchair activism, which is nothing more than mental masturbation. When we get down to the reality of it ALL, what can be done about those issues? Should we Vote more? Can we actually TRUST the Government? Who can we trust to put things to right? Mankind is flawed to begin with. Once we give Power to a man, he is corrupted. It seems as though once that person is in place he/
she wants MORE. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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David, is there one book that you would reccommend above all that you think could have an influence on people to support lower military budgets and to end imperialism, an end to the federal reserve and to private banking, a national health care system, a more progressive income tax, higher sales taxes minus taxes on food and medicine, jury nulification, stricter gun control, proportional representation (as oppossed to winner take all districts) with term limits, public campaign financing, mass transportation to the point of rationing gasoline use, zoning to protect wetlands and agricultural land from development, and the stronger regulation of the food supply so that we have food that we can trust, and the reregulation of what were known of ages ago, when I was a child, as public utilities, and finally the enforcement of anti-trust laws. By anti trust laws I most importantly mean those laws that prohibit one compamy from gaining a monopoly in an industry.
If you know one book that could achieve this then people could buy it and distribute it to libraries, and military recruiters, and to your friends and relatives and co workers and neighbors. If these people are impressed then they could give the book to someone else and buy another copy to give away. Once people reach the point that they support these things then they are ready to talk about things that seem radical by todays standards.
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David, I’m thinking I understand what you are trying to say but I could be mistaken because I couldn’t understand ANYTHING the other commenters, said, not a word. Personally, I detest the word sheeple nearly as much as I detest most people until I actually get to know them. On rare occasions, I am persuaded to think more of an individual, not less. I perceive this to be a failure on my part to follow through on the lifelong indoctrination process that repeatedly told me, in no uncertain terms, that the moment you elevate yourself above another human being, you are wrong. I am stumbling in the dark here.Care to shed some light?
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Post sites like David’s are becoming the” last bastions”. Some of us have followed, for example, ICH for several years and have noted the gradual degeneration. Its needs to be filtered, while it should not be necessary, especially regarding the vulgar and hateful, totally undeserving comments about the authors. This is a symptom of the fact that society as a whole is degenerating. Mutual respect, courtesy, shared decency are sliding into the abyss, it seems.
Maybe in a society that has the sick pall of a hate generating, fake War on Terror and the evolving police state, this should be expected. They want the fantasy but at a cost of conscience.
Ironically, a specific recent case was directed at the author who was making a case for the exigencies of overpopulation. The hate mongers were seeming to prove his point.
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VR2LNNNTT Reply:
March 11th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Ken, thanks for your last post. I thought I had played out the last few of my marbles there for a while. I know it’s probably not healthy to keep trying to make sense of ideas and patterns of behavior that seem blatantly nonsensical but danged if I don’t keep trying.
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Ken, your comments, as usual, are spot on! The sheeple do live in a fantasy but I guess they can be partly excused for that given their heavy load of indoctrination by church and state and their intense social programming and laughable education.
I agree about ICH also. It has deteriorated markedly.
Jeannie, sheeple hate anyone who doesn’t ‘think’ like them. BAAAAAAAA BAAAAAAAAAAA!
Buddha, as you well know, there is no such book. Besides, it doesn’t need a book! All it needs is for people to learn to use their brains, most for the first time.
P.S. I deleted your two earlier comments because they were rather tasteless and, like many, made little sense. Why don’t you start your own blog? You can rave all you like then rather than worry me!
VR2, I don’t know that getting the sheeple to break out of their scripted mold and use their intelligence necessarily creates a superior group. More a better functioning one.
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“with term limits, public campaign financing,” Easy. Never vote for an incumbent! This is called term limits. No congress will ever invoke it.
Year after year, the vote 95 percent back in.
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I’d always believed that the American people, if given the truth, would wake up and realize how horribly they’ve been abused for so very long. When 9/11 occurred I thought it would be impossible to deny the truth that was right in front of their eyes, but I was wrong. I’ve been forced to realize that the vast majority of people literally are like sheep, stupid, shallow, uninformed grazers, unwilling to question the status quo so long as their feed bin is full. For them I no longer care, they deserve their fate. It’s a pity there are so few aware, concerned individuals left, but we find them now and then. This is one, and many thanks for being here…
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It’s great to have your endorsement about the sheep-like mentality of the bulk of American people, Coyote, especially given that you are an American.
It’s amazing how few people there are in the world who are aware of this reality or many others.
Cheers.
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I do not have time or the talent to run my own blog. Besides no one would read it if I did.
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David G Reply:
March 12th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
The fact that you believe this, suggests that you are wasting my time. If no one would read your contributions on your blog then why pollute my blog with them?
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I am glad that you did not erase my comment that had the request for gun control. Today there was a very tragic event in Germany. A young man went in to a school and shot and killed at least 10 people 9 of which were children. The toll may go higher as the last reports that I heard the gunman was still on the loose and many injured people were still being treated.
Gun control is one of those issues in which the politicians (people) of the US make sheep look like geniuses. It is not that all of the arguments of the pro gun lobby are stupid. Yet the way they weigh the significance of the competing arguments is very warped. Before ICH started going down hill a commentator there wrote. You can never achieve perfect security so it is wasteful to even try. I think what he meant is that it is wasteful to try to hard.
He or she is right.
How would I interpret not trying to hard. Well from what I have seen over the past 20 years that means not disarming the general public entirely. It means limiting the general public to firearms that can, perhaps with a few exceptions, only fire one or two shots before the shooter needs to manually reload. Such firearms serve the legitimate need of home defense yet are difficult to be used in an offensive manner.
What do you think Ken?
What do you think Art?
What do you think Jeannie?
What do you think Phil?
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David G Reply:
March 12th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
This is quite a good suggestion, Paine. It makes a nice change.
Shame it had nothing to do with the topic I raised in the post.
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Hello David & group: I go back & forth on this one. In the web world there are many who say what I’ve been thinking. In reality, when I spout what I write in posts people look at me like I’m crazy. Take September eleventh (I refuse to call it by it’s pet name) 200l.
Anyone who believes that USA could post the passport photos of 19 hijackers the day after the event and know with such certitude that Osama Ben Laden did the demolition would have to conclude that the government knew the plan & allowed it to unfold.
Conversely, what happened to all the safety measures in place, radar, norad, why the confiscation of all the film of the “plane” hitting the pentagon?
It makes me crazy, it could not have happened w/o government complicity. But when I talk about it, people turn away, almost no one even knows about building 7.
Sorry about the rant, I did indeed start my own blog the other day (maybe a week ago) you won’t believe how tired I was, but the net hypnotizes me……anyway I forget what I named it. That should be good for a laugh. I also used to rely on ICH, it was great when you could chat with each other in real time & blog if so inclined.
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David G Reply:
March 13th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I would encourage you to start your own blog, Kate. We need more thinking-oriented blogs, ones that challenge the status quo, ones that rouse people from their apathy and ignorance.
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I have little to add, as I’m trying to listen without judgement, including of my own actions and with the severe limitations of a sentient organism. Yet I find myself repulsed by the use here of human interpretation of the actions of the organisms we call sheep as a standard by which to label and judge humans. The sheep don’t deserve this. How does any person know that sheep aren’t ruminating on the origins of consciousness? For all we know, our perceptions of sheep behavior are completely founded upon our own illusions.
Humans act stupidly in [name your context] and sheep have nothing to do with our actions, other than that these animals have largely been “cultivated” as an economic commodity for exchange by humans. We humans engage little of our sensory potential, and vastly under-use our capacity to process information from our environments – that should suffice as a topic for discussion, without distracting our thinking or dismissing our actions based on our perceptions of other sentient organisms. People are people, and stupid, thoughtless actions by people do not render them sheep; they are people whose actions appear to be destructive and malicious towards all that sustains them. Even sheep have better instincts than that.
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David G Reply:
March 16th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Peter, your defense of sheep is laudable. Certainly many sheep have much nicer qualities than most humans.
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David,
Thank you for your compliment, and thank you for providing a means to discuss the topic of being human. While I don’t think you intended your brief comment as a dismissal of my primary point (and I’m not offended or at all upset if that is true), and about which I must not have been clear enough, I want to ask if my point was nonetheless missed. Using sheep as symbols of human stupidity dilutes or distracts discussion of that stupidity, and I include myself as someone who uses such comparisons as much as anyone else (using terms like “pig,” “neanderthal,” “moron,” etc., rather blithely in describing humans, or more precisely, characterizing actions by humans by comparing those humans to pigs, neanderthals, or morons. I really don’t want to invest a lot in this discussion or in changing the human vernacular, but I think a sound philosophical discussion involves moving beyond the coarse comparisons (or name-calling) into deliberations on the causes and effects of human stupidity. Calling people “sheeple” is a diversion from engaging in some measure of human potential. OK, I guess I’ve flogged this enough, whether I’ve made the point or not. Again, thank you, and other writers on your site, for being human, in many positive ways.
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David G Reply:
March 17th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Peter, your point is a valid one.
I use sheeple pejoratively and deliberately. My purpose is to stir those to whom it applies. It describes for me humans who prefer to be non-thinking members of an easily exploited and manipulated herd of bipeds. Most humans fall into this category.
P.S. If you’ve ever had anything to do with sheep you’ll understand what I mean.
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