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Have you read Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss? The lessons from that book may be even more timely today.

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Not familiar with the book. I assume it explores this topic at greater length?

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Yeah, it is about the history of philosophy and how to avoid persecution by seemingly agreeing with the narrative of the day, while actually subtly contradicting some things and thereby pointing out all the problems with the narrative. It shows a new way of reading everyone from Descartes to Shakespeare by understanding the censorship and persecutions of the times and how great thinkers got around the censors. It teaches how to read between the lines to get at the true meaning which may be quite different from the surface meaning of the text.

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Virtue signal virus fear (masks etc) shows like minded cells which cells are protective and which are β€˜other’ - non-body cells. Those to be shunned or in the case of Typhus-labeled Jews -killed off. I’m writing a song called Good Germans covering a little of this dynamic

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The performative bit seems odd until we realize why it made sense from the virtue-signaler’s warped worldview.

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The Ash conformity experiment showed the emotional difficulties of group distancing too. Strange times

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Only a small subset of people are willing to defy a manufactured "consensus" which is obviously-wrong.

This has very grim implications - if we know this, our criminal overlords know this too, and that's why there is so much resources devoted to erase the appearance of dissent (or at least control it).

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