Freedom and power are oftentimes inversely related, similar to the way social norms and moral codes can be inversely related. In times like these, when causes and consequences are continuously overlooked, ignored and denied, inversely related correlations are useful to have on your mental radar.
One common trend from the past few years is that social norms have been raised as a false argument for others to gain more power. Social norms have falsely been presented as if they are moral codes.
Political philosopher and second president of the United States John Adams, who co-wrote the US Declaration of Independence and who greatly influenced the US Constitution, said:
"Be not intimidated … nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice."
~John Adams (1735-1826)
This is one of the more prominent lessons of history. The ideas and arguments of politeness, delicacy and decency are tempting to every human being. Who doesn’t want to have these traits? Looks can be deceiving, which is why it is so useful to distinguish social norms from moral codes.
What is moral can only be found within the individual, what is social can only be found outside of the individual. Social norms are always relative, subject to time and place, whereas moral codes are always absolute and timeless, like myths and Constitutions.
Is it comforting or worrisome to know that, sixty years ago, Bob Dylan sang about many if not all of our current problems in his early 1960s songs? Perhaps both.
A poster from 1965
You’ll recognize much our predicament in the lyrics of It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). His song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall points out the world’s destructive forces and then dares to ask the question: In the face of all that, what are you going to do now? Followed by a single poetic answer.
Poetic answers to our very real problems may not be satisfactory to some of us. Practical advice may be more valued given the circumstances, but these current times can not and will not always provide those. That is because the answer to ‘What’ll you do now?’ is always a personal one.
In between the poetic and the practical lies the philosophical. Here, there is plenty of work to be done. Today, a brand new European law came into effect that makes it unclear what may be written without legal punishment. Dylan’s Masters of War are now also the Masters of Money as well as the Masters of Information. Restriction of expression is bad, undefined restriction of expression is worse.
In the face of this lies a single philosophical task. Thought and expression are the main ingredients to the development of our imagination, a powerful force which in turn creates our reality.
That is why, whatever it is that you’ll decide to do now, it is essential to protect your imagination and in doing so, to philosophically keep a well-defined world view and view of human nature. These two fundamental ideas are shaped predominantly by our life experiences and our personality. They are the “meta-data” of our thought processes that direct our values, which in turn direct our behaviors, which, of course, in turn, create our whole world.
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
~ T.S. Eliot
Post Scriptum to subscribers: I accidentally sent out an older blog post yesterday as I activated this new, self-managed website. My apologies. Thank you so much for connecting here on my own website with me.
Yesterday I migrated most of my ‘Old Revolutions’ Substack content here to my own website. If you are subscribed to my publication Old Revolutions on Substack you don’t have to do anything, you will receive emails from my WordPress website LauraSlot.Com instead. My reasons for this change:
Substack is heavily collaborating with questionable, unreliable journalists like Taylor Lorenz. I do not want my content to be surrounded by that type of marketing. There is already enough fake journalism in this world.
Content creators always had all the power over online platforms but they never leveraged it. I believe they are now starting to take their power back. I will contribute to that development.
One of my inspirators, former Wall Street analyst Michael Krieger, deleted his social media accounts and only kept his WordPress blog and only occasionally tweets out a sharp analysis or a photo of his farming activities in central USA. I believe this is the way to go in an environment where freedom of speech is heavily under attack: not to stay silent but to speak on your own terms only. Platforms are abusing their power by collaborating with criminals. To read more about this, read his post ‘Cancel Yourself‘.
Some features on Substack did not work well for me technically, e.g. audio uploads failed often.
I have more options and freedom managing this website, I can optimize privacy for my subscribers and it prevents my content from being monetized by companies run by corrupt billionaires.
Times are changing and it’s time to pick and choose the reliable, factual sources for the years to come. Journalists, researchers and academics with integrity have spoken up, others did not. Draw your own conclusions.
Finally, I will be also be publishing for a brand new non-profit organization focused on FOIA/WOO/WOB. Stay tuned for more information on that launch. These publications will go live on a new website.
I hope you’ll stay with me on this journey and I look forward to publish here for you on LauraSlot.Com!
The strange disappearance of books and articles on baclofen
Around the time I was born, my 25-year-old father was most likely already addicted to alcohol, and I’ve spent a big part of my life taking care of him until he died at age 58. He was my best friend. He had the strongest will to live. He had the strongest will to quit drinking. But he couldn’t quit. In Dutch, ‘addiction’ means ‘verslaving’, ‘enslavement’. Addiction is enslavement in a multidimensional trap. So yes, I am personally involved in this topic, but that’s not a reason to keep silent on my findings: it could save lives.
Earlier this year a friend lend me a copy of the book The End of My Addiction by Olivier Ameisen, a renowned French-American cardiologist and a brilliant pianist who cured his alcohol addiction by experimenting with a cheap, off-label medication that is used as a painkiller for MS patients: baclofen. My friend cured his own addiction with the help of the information in Ameisen’s book. Today, this book is no longer available anywhere. Moreover, many online articles on baclofen have disappeared and truth became increasingly buried under a pile of mysteries.
Ameisen’s book, a memoir, was published in 2008 and pretty soon afterwards there was a French, German and a Dutch version. After three years and three reprints, the Dutch printing stopped around 2012, and the overall publishing rights were inexplicably pulled:
The publisher says here: “I can not make any statements on the potential reasons why this book has not been reprinted since.” They say “all remaining rights are with the author” while Ameisen died in 2013. Aside from the Dutch publishing contract of this bestseller, the German and French rights were also silently annulled. The German publisher removed two webpages, one on the book itself and one with their statement on Ameisen’s death in 2013. It is unclear who holds Ameisen’s copyrights and who ordered the cancellation of all international contracts. Knowing the world of publishing contracts well, I know this must have been a costly undertaking, not to mention the forfeiting of all future royalties.
Between 2008 and 2013, the book was an international bestseller. Many addicts started asking for baclofen. In Amsterdam, an anonymous businessman funded a ‘scientific’ study, seemingly only to undermine the value and impact of baclofen:
News articles like the one above in the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool have been removed from the internet. Most information online today on baclofen has disclaimers with arguments that are not truthful or lack important context. In short, positive news on baclofen has very often been deleted while information critical of baclofen remained online.The Amsterdam study was, perhaps purposefully, conducted with very low doses, which goes against the specific experience of Olivier Ameisen as he described in his book.
Another consequence of the Amsterdam study was that baclofen can not be prescribed for addiction in The Netherlands and many other countries, which in turn lead to tragic circumstances: patients searching across borders.
A long story short, could the failing addiction industry, with huge profits raked in by treatment centers and drug manufacturers, be intimidated by a simple, low-risk and cheap potential cure for addiction? Ameisen described his experiences with the addiction industry in great detail. How he was treated was scandalous and inhumane.
The removal of so many online articles, the removal of printed books worldwide and the twisting of medical information supported by questionable scientific studies sure raise tons of questions.
Note: This is only a short summary of this story. If you’d like to know more about this topic, do not hesitate to send me a message.
A popular song about the Covid restrictions was ‘We’ve Lost Dancing’ in 2021. In The Netherlands, we certainly lost much dancing during these years – our house-, techno- and dance DJs are the best in the world – but we also lost another valuable part of our national identity: We lost public debate. Restrictions were lifted and dancing returned, but public debate has not been restored. Without freedom of thought and speech, it will never return.
We love debate here in The Netherlands. There is a verb for our political debate culture: ‘polderen’. It literally means dredgeing, reclaiming land from water, and figuratively it means we often prefer and even expect to settle our arguments, debates and negotiations with a consensus in the middle.
Open-mindedness, pragmatism, rationality and tolerance in public debate has brought us prosperity. It was no coincidence that in 2001 our small country was the first in the world to enable gay marriage. Compare that with Joe Biden and Barack Obama who spent another decade opposing and preventing gay marriage.
Now, after three tumultuous years in which we have seen the Dutch government break the law and even the constitution without consequences, ignoring court orders, openly undermining our Trias Politica state system – the separation of powers – and psychologically and physically attacking its own citizens, and all the while we have seen media outlets actively misinform and distract.
New grassroots media has thrived, sure, against all censorship odds, but we don’t have debate and we won’t have it for years to come. New media is naive in thinking that debate can safely return in this environment. Debate between facts and lies is impossible. Debate between empathy and psychopathy is impossible. Debate within conflicts of interests is impossible. Don’t put Edward Snowden next to a CIA agent and expect an illuminating debate. True debate happens only between good-willed, independent people who reference facts to form arguments. A difference of opinion is not a matter of ego.
On a societal level, as Noam Chomsky said, debate becomes impossible when the scope of acceptable debate is as severely limited by those in power as it is today. Censorship, self-censorship and the psychological operations of increasing fear, shame, guilt and oppression severely limits public debate in ways we can not even fully comprehend.
A final nail in the Dutch debate coffin is the fact that the institutions, that once formed a safe place for public debate, have been fully compromised. The owner of a prominent debate center in Amsterdam, Yoeri Albrecht, formed alliances with American intelligence agencies, NATO and other supranational institutions. He was caught on camera physically attacking a journalist who asked about the debate center’s money streams. Dutch media may not have given much attention to this, but historians use moments like this to illustrate the times that we live in. It’s truly a moment that may one day be mentioned in history books.
Dutch debate culture can never be reclaimed and restored, because debate is also impossible when the outcomes of political agenda’s are destructive and enhance human suffering. Plans and actions that historically are known as ‘evil’.The only thing grassroots media and journalists can and must do is to restate truthful facts and analysis over and over again. Provide a counterweight. Censorship happens because the most powerful defensive weapon is to repeat truthful facts continuously. Tucker Carlson put it most eloquently: “The question is not, who in public life is corrupt? Too many to count. The question is: who is speaking the truth?”
