Posted on 09/22/2020 9:19:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
Are human beings able to defy an authority's orders? What if those orders are evil? What if those orders run counter to everything we believe?
We feel that in our heart of hearts, we would resist. We would stop. We would turn on that authority and refuse to continue. But is that true? Maybe we humans are more like sheep than we care to think. What does it take for abusive authority to turn us into evil and abusive sheep?
Stanley Milgram was a scientist at Yale who asked this question. It was 1961, one year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. He wondered if there was something unusually sheepish about the Germans of the late '30s who followed Eichmann's orders. Would Americans be more defiant? Or could we be easily made to follow an evil order if given by the right authority?
Milgram put an advertisement in a local paper looking for participants to take part in a study at Yale University.
When volunteers arrived, each was paired with another person (actually a confederate in on the experiment). They were told they would be the "teacher" and the other person would be the "learner."
The volunteer "teacher" was led into a room containing an electric shock generator with rows of switches delivering volts from 15 volts to 450 volts (marked as extreme danger). In another room, the confederate "learner" could be seen strapped into what appeared to be a chair with electrodes placed on him.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I’m hoping that we see a broad realization about the politicization of science. COVID was the flu, but treated differently because it was a useful political tool. Climate Change is just a useful political tool. Also, in my opinion, Evolution is very suspect and has its principal value as a political tool.
Maybe people should worship scientists a little less.
Everything has been politicized. They turned a disease into a political weapon. They took full advantage of it to turn more of us into sheep who would do whatever they tell us to.
The experiment shows that people need good, trustworthy leaders who don’t turn them into nazis.
Wow! I like that.
ML/NJ
The experiment is over.
China kicked this all off, and Americans are fighting with each other about wearing masks.
Sheep or stupid dogs. What’s the difference?
Don’t ever be the first to stop clapping comrade -Solzhenitsyn
SARS-CoV-2 is as closely related to Influenza as humans are to snails. The IFR is ~35 times higher for SARS-CoV-2. Only about 9% of Americans have been or currently are infected. The Herd Immunity Threshold is about 60% (R0 of 2.5, HIT is 1-1/R0). You're making the same mistake people did back in March and April and May and June and July and August: talking about COVID-19 in the past tense. It'll be past tense when deaths aren't happening in any appreciable number. For now, we've seen significant excess mortality due to COVID-19 every single week since March. We need a vaccine to end this mess. That's why President Trump has been pushing so hard to make that happen.
"but treated differently because it was a useful political tool."
Partially true. It was hyped up massively by Democrats and the media. A mistake they're just beginning to realize now that President Trump is close to announcing the approval of a safe and effective vaccine. The more they hyped up this whole thing, the bigger a hero they turned President Trump into for having the foresight to streamline the vaccine testing process and providing funding to ensure Americans get doses first.
"Climate Change is just a useful political tool."
Mostly, yes. We should absolutely be studying how our actions impact our environment and we should absolutely be making efforts to reduce the damage we do where possible. Mass deforestation and dumping of coal slurry that buries towns and pollutes waterways is in nobody's best interest. The air quality in Beijing and the water quality in most of India is evidence for what happens when our impact is totally ignored. But this idea that we're at a tipping point to the end of the world with climate change is hysterics. We've not nearly enough data to make any useful predictions about 10 years from now, let alone 100. But it's worth continued investigation.
"Evolution is very suspect and has its principal value as a political tool."
Now that's just silly. Evolution is provably real. We've witnessed many speciation events. We have a fossil record demonstrating massive change over significant periods of time. We can map how, when, and where evolution has taken place over the history of the Earth. We understand the mechanisms for it happening. We can even force it to happen artificially with selective pressure. Differentiation in species has been observed in plants, flies, birds, and other types of organisms. This is very well understood stuff at this point. There's no mystery here.
bttt
Excellent article...follow the link and read the whole piece.
Rosa Parks.
Take your damned mask off and leave it off.
As long as you wear one, you’re part of the problem.
This country was founded by people too stubborn to do what some expert authority thousands of miles away told them to do.
Amen! Don’t get on the virtue signaling merry-go-round in the 1st place. you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
If you really want to see true systemic racism/sexism, try being a young white male looking to pay for college!
When the powers to be control the police and economic network it is very difficult and dangerous to resist. We need to look at Nazi Germany and how decent people could participate in the most heinous of crimes. They were only obeying orders. We have the same thing here! Facist have taken over the Democratic party and we are seeing the results. Now is the time to fight back before they gain full control of everything
man oh man
Read your own tag line.
More fear mongering in your post than I have seen in a long time here at FR.
and you are definitely wrong on your evolution paragraph. We have seen SPECULATIONS . . . Nothing more than that.
Being realistic about facts is not fearmongering. Failure to acknowledge observable reality breeds fear because it causes people to believe we don’t actually know what’s happening or what to do about it. The unknown is always scarier than the known and we know plenty about SARS-CoV-2. Claiming we don’t or claiming it’s harmless as a quarter million excess deaths are recorded looks absurd and does nothing to allay fears.
And no, we have recorded actual speciation events where one species became more than one. American goatsbeards, Heliconius butterflies, and others diverged while humans observed them, partly due to human activity. A species of apple maggot fly and a butterfly species (Monarcha castaneiventris) are in the middle of speciation events. Their distinct groups no longer interbreed and we’re seeing genetic drift between the groups. Within 100 or so years, we’ll have new species of both.
These are things happening and being observed in reality.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.