#mob rule

Mob Rule (Fate Reforged) - Jakub Kasper

Mob Rule

Iranians have suffered human rights violations for decades

Leftists applaud mob rule and violence

Love?!

LOVE??????!!!!!!!

Fucking WHAT?????!!!!!!!!

No it wasn’t!

And it sure as hell wasn’t a peaceful protest either!

It wasn’t even a protest, it was a glorified hate march!

It was literally straight up terrorism!!!!!!

White trash terrorism holding the nation to ransom for antidemocratic demands. (And that’s how my own country got split in half)

A mob of feral idiots, terminally divorced middle aged mediocrities, and angry frightened bigots with guns fucking storming the place at the behest of a vulgar selfish idiot.

An empire posturing as a rebellion! Rage For the Machine!

by Norman Lebrechtconc

Almost a hundred musicians have rallied overnight to petition the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam to reverse its ban on two concerts this week by the Jerusalem Quartet. The concerts were called off  ‘to gurantee the safety of employees, visitors and musicians.’

Outraged musicians have acccused the Dutch administrators of capitulating to mob rule.

We present the petition below with the initial rush of signatories. They include some well-known artists. If you support their appeal, do share this post on social media and add your name in the comments slot.

We, the undersigned, as musicians and presenters who celebrate mutual respect across different disciplines and specialisations, who regularly collaborate and who draw inspiration from one another, are appalled at the recent announcement of the Concertgebouw to cancel the May 16th and 18th performances by the Jerusalem Quartet.

Threats to the safety of musicians, concert hall staff, and the general public, fly in the face of hard-won democratic values and freedom of expression, and should have no place in our society. The behaviour of our arts organisations should reflect this, and should stand up for these values.

By cancelling these concerts, the management of the Concertgebouw placates a vocal minority who advocate for their cause through intimidation and credible threats of disorder and violence. We need not look very far back into European history to see what happens when people acquiesce to the very behaviours that sow their own downfall.

Anything less than permitting the Jerusalem Quartet to continue with its planned performances — and to provide them and the audience of the Concertgebouw with protection and support — amounts to pure moral cowardice.

We call upon the management of the Concertgebouw to show strength of character in defending the concert platform as a realm for free expression of the sublime yearnings of the human spirit otherwise failed by words and actions that all too often lapse into meaningless, pseudo-moral binaries. The Concertgebouw’s behaviour succumbs to an “education at the college of fools” rather than continuing to affirm itself as a bastion of the ineffable.

We wholeheartedly protest this act and as musicians call for an immediate redress.

By: Julian Adorney

Published: Mar 14, 2025

Jake Tapper (of CNN) and Alex Thomspon (of Axios) have a new book coming out about the Biden administration, titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. The book promises to reveal the full extent of the cover-up surrounding Biden’s cognitive deficiencies. As the authors write, “Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.” “What was the extent of it?” they ask. “Was it a cover-up? Was it a conspiracy? We will let the facts speak for themselves.”

While the subject is important, the book itself comes across as blatantly hypocritical. If there was a cover-up, then these two national reporters were almost certainly among its most influential participants. As a CNN anchor and an Axios correspondent, respectively, Tapper and Thompson were in prime positions to investigate and expose Biden’s cognitive decline at any point over the past few years. Instead, they ignored or downplayed the issue. Defending himself against accusations of hypocrisy on this topic, Tapper points to a 2022 softball interview in which he gave Biden the opportunity to shut down concerns about his age and then refused to offer any pushback (for instance, by showcasing evidence that those concerns were in fact well-founded).

The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site, captured the irony with the headline: “King David Co-Authors Book Exposing Government Cover-Up Of His Affair With Bathsheba.”

Of course, Tapper and Thompson weren’t the only ones involved. Almost the entire Democratic establishment, including its allies in the media, ran cover for Biden and shielded him from scrutiny. Behind closed doors, his decline was undeniable. Donors were voicing serious concerns as early as 2023, when Biden froze mid-sentence and forgot the term for a former military service member (“veteran”) until he asked the audience for help. If donors noticed, surely the top journalists and Democratic lawmakers who interacted with Biden regularly did as well. Yet in public, almost the entirety of the party’s apparatus marched in lockstep: Biden was “sharp as a tack.” He was “at the top of his game.” He was “the most accomplished president in history.”

Among other things, this whole debacle represents a glaring failure of courage. On X, anyone who questioned Biden’s age risked being accused of helping Trump. Prominent Democrats hesitated to challenge the mental and physical fitness of their party’s leader. Only after the presidential debate—when the entire world saw that the emperor had no clothes—did top Democrats feel safe publicly acknowledging the obvious.

Of course, the failure of courage isn’t exclusive to leftist media and politicians. They are hardly the only ones who have lacked a spine in recent years.

On the right, almost every Republican elected official knows that president Trump did not win the 2020 election and attempted to overturn the results to remain in power. Yet few will admit it. As Tim Urban notes in What’s Our Problem?, “In the 2022 midterms, more than half of Republican nominees denied or questioned Biden’s 2020 victory.”

Why did so many Republicans turn their backs on this most sacrosanct principle of American politics and embrace election denialism? Because they feared that failing to toe the party line meant career suicide. Urban again:

Those who didn’t openly campaign on this premise mostly refrained from outwardly refuting it, and the few who did were strongly rebuked, ostracized, or booted altogether from their positions by the rest of the party. It had become taboo within the Republican Party to stand in support of the most basic democratic concept.

This pattern persisted in 2024. Trump repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results if he lost, stating, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” while making it clear that, in an election he deemed honest, he would “win maybe very big.” Rather than calling out this historic break from democratic norms—or insisting that such a refusal should be disqualifying—other prominent Republicans echoed his rhetoric. When asked repeatedly whether he would commit to certifying the presidential election results regardless of the outcome, Senator Tim Scott (R–S.C.) responded only, “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be Donald Trump.”

Just as Democrats spent years covering for a man who was sundowning and often barely coherent, Republican leaders are now engaging in blatant cowardice. Behind closed doors, they acknowledge reality. But in public, they are willing only to repeat the lie.

Unfortunately, this lack of courage extends far beyond our elected officials. Over the past few years, many have been complicit. Some, terrified of another Trump presidency, turned a blind eye to Biden’s cognitive decline and sought to silence anyone who raised concerns. Others, fearful of a Biden-Harris administration and convinced that only Trump could defeat the Democratic ticket, rationalized their silence on his blatant election denialism. Many, afraid of the online mob, repeated culturally approved lines they didn't believe—that Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic posed no public health risk, or that a random person deserved to be fired for a culturally-insensitive tweet 10 years ago, or that there are no biological differences between men and women.

As a culture, many of us desperately need to grow a backbone.

To be clear, when I speak of our collective cowardice, I include myself. For much of the past decade, I uncritically accepted three of the false beliefs mentioned above. I can speak about the importance of courage, in part, because I spent much of my life gripped by fear.

So how do we cultivate courage? We all aspire to be the kind of person who defies the mob, who speaks truth to power, and who risks social ostracization in defense of our values. We all want to be August Landmesser.

Yet, few of us actually live that way.

How can we bridge the gap between who we are and who we yearn to become?

One solution is to simply take action. Many of us fear the consequences of speaking up, but this fear is an illusion. Fear is the great lie that masquerades as the great truth. It whispers that taking a stand will bring disaster, that we should keep our heads down to avoid catastrophe.

By acting, we call fear’s bluff. The reality is that most consequences are far less severe than we imagine. Fear tells us there’s a lion behind every rock, but by stepping forward and looking, we prove—again and again—that the world is not as terrifying as we assume. Or as Urban puts it, “For many of us, the fear of putting it all out there is mostly in our own heads.” When we take a stand, we might worry that our careers or social circles will go up in flames. But in most cases, “you’ll probably have a soft landing into a group of awesome new friends.”

Of course, in some workplaces or social circles, the consequences of speaking up are real. But even then, the fallout is often far less dire than we fear. We can usually say and do more than we think. And if we truly find ourselves in an environment where self-censorship is necessary to avoid being fired or ostracized, we must ask: Is staying in this environment worth the cost to our soul?

A second way to cultivate courage is through spiritual growth. By this, I don’t necessarily mean subscribing to a particular religion or even believing in God. Rather, it aligns with what the philosopher Immanuel Kant described when he wrote: “Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

When we meditate on these two things, we often find that our courage deepens.

For those who believe in God, connecting to the divine can provide powerful relief from fear. When I am deeply engaged in meditation or prayer, the burdens of the world seem to dissolve. I feel profoundly supported, with a bone-deep awareness that no matter what happens, God is in control. Faced with that reality, how can I be scared?

Put another way, every serious spiritual tradition recognizes that whatever the divine may be, it is not afraid. When we are in communion with it, its fearlessness permeates us, suffusing every cell in our body—even in situations that seem, to our minds, to be life-or-death.

Yet the benefits of spiritual growth to our emotional resilience are not limited to those who believe in God. Meditating on the vastness of the universe—Kant’s “starry heavens above me”—offers a powerful shift in perspective. Our worries, which once felt overwhelming, shrink in comparison to the immensity of the cosmos. As author Tim Urban observes:

Read about the universe. Nothing makes hatred seem more ridiculous than internalizing how vast time and space are. Doing so makes me want to turn to anyone who will listen and hug them and say, “We both exist! On the same tiny planet at the same exact time! Hi!'“

Many of us have lacked courage for a long time. This collective hesitation has contributed to numerous societal problems—whether it’s being gaslit for years about Biden’s fitness for office, having a sitting president who refuses to abide by the most basic democratic norms, or enduring the cultural chaos of recent years. But it is never too late to take a stand for what we truly believe. Again and again, the past few years have revealed that the emperor has no clothes. Our society—and our personal lives—will improve dramatically if more of us are willing to stand up and say so.

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About the Author

Exhibit A) absurdly-“useful”

Except mainstream anything has an immediate influence on the masses hence why electing a pro Nazi rapist to office was fucking BAD for the population and the safety for women, POC, queer folk, and people with disabilities… ya goofy misdirecting troll account see you next tuesday. 😂

Exhibit B) wackweeder, grimeclown, and cactusseeds

No, to answer your question - grimeclown. But that’s kinda not really the focus.

*eyes rolling at cactusseeds* - tell me you work for media without telling me you work for media.

For wackweeder - you say “media illiterate” like that’s a bad thing. Lmfao. I prefer to put my limited time in reading published studies, reading historical books, interacting with people who value educational content (not you), taking STEM classes, and beating my ass up in fitness arenas than working on my “media literacy.” I have all my social media feeds to tell me shit I don’t care about in relation to mainstream television now, anyway. It’s not like I get to bury my head away from any of it as much as I would love to. But why the hell would I want to watch brain rot with what limited time I have on this planet. I rhetorically ask. Here’s the key response to your overall population influence illiteracy - media influences everything including drug usage. This is why most developed governments are so sensitive about tobacco and alcohol ads in the presence of children. It doesn’t generally matter how the shit is portrayed. If it did then Nancy Reagan’s “War on Drugs” TV specials would’ve had some positive effect on the masses. Hint… it didn’t.

https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article/44/3/229/178279

Now - you can go ahead and make the argument that BB the show, itself, could’ve turned people away from using because there are zero studies to counter that argument but that’s disingenuous claim to make at best. Personally, I feel more comfortable looking at all the other numerous studies looking at drug and alcohol usage influenced through media, in general, and applying that data to the picture at hand because that is a rational thing to do.

For a lay example - why don’t news outlets publish suicide rates? Because it increases suicide. Just because it looks bad in the broad scheme doesn’t mean it has none or an anti-influence. That’s not how this works. I can think of other media influencing mob behavior: Flash mobs. The increase of street takeovers in a post Fast and Furious world. How little girls think they need to look like some twig on the runway. How little boys think they have to hide their emotions because the machismo men on their favorite shows do so. How Bhutan’s GNH (presumably - the documentation has all but vanished from online sources I had read from in the aughts - shoulda saved it back in the day…) fell after the introduction of Western Media. And so on…

People are easily influenced, man. They teach in journalism school (yes, I went) the average American reading and comprehension level is at the equivalent of the third grade. When you see mofos out there believing Q-Anon conspiracies without second guessing you know that fact isn’t far off. We’re not anywhere near as evolved a you want to believe.

Exhibit C) roadkillbuffet

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not but Breaking Bad was not the first gay kiss on television…

But also… if the comment isn’t sarcasm or a troll then - “but Breaking Bad was the first gay kiss on tv therefore if you’re calling a meth based television show out you are homophobic” - is a piss poor argument to make for the queer community. Of which I am in, btw.

If that were actually true and BB was the first show to validate queer relationships then how homophobic is Hollywood to take that first dive into validating queer lives in a show about meth? I’m going to guess this is a sarcasm response though. No one can be that off base… can they?