Original RI quotes only

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Done and done, hopefully to nobody's chagrin. Just a reminder to everyone: if you want to reach out to a mod, don't assume we read every thread. We don't. Either hit alert or PM. Thank you!

[liminalOyster]

In keeping with the social and political developmental tendency
of "everything not prohibited will eventually be mandatory,"
conspiracy theory now refers solely to the refusal to accept and repeat, without alteration,
every statement published by the Western corporate and state media and its associated pundits and analysts
regarding the malevolent omnipresence of unseen and relentless Russian state agents who,
on direct orders from their Big Bad in the Kremlin, are wholly responsible for:
fixing U.S. election results;
causing Americans to dislike the greatest and most accomplished human leader in history;
running the NRA;
organizing Black Lives Matter;
inventing and weaponizing the unprecedented phenomenon of news stories that are inaccurate, untrue, slanted, or hoaxed;
teaching Christian fundamentalists everything they believe;
appearing to be capable of thinking silently about hacking exploits that haven't actually happened
but could potentially destroy the entire electrical grid if they did,
according to a new think-tank study;
writing every article in Consortium News and Counterpunch,
except the ones by Louis Proyect;
confusing Kanye West;
and using hundreds and possibly thousands of dollars in Facebook ads
to make the Internet impolite, turning brother against brother,
ending the long era of harmony and consensus in American politics
and of benevolent U.S. world leadership.

liberal formatting liberties taken.

[liminalOyster]

... presuming that those who like, admire, and support [ bad guy du jour ] are failing to see something we see surely obliges the balancing admission that they may be seeing something we aren't.

[thrulookingglass]

"That which cannot reap the bounties of love shall know only the pain it sows" - me

[IanEye]

For now let us not gossip and simply hope things are reasonably OK.

*

all those headlines - they just bore me now



deep inside myself - i’ll get out somehow


*

.

[thrulookingglass]

"We are with evil when we refuse to shelter others from harm" - me

[Rory]

SmartSelect_20181210-081326_Firefox.jpg

[streeb]

1. Icke's raw material is quite standard to Latin American shamanic mythos. That he's tainted by a white british schoolboy's idiot anti-semitism speaks to the psychological shadow shit of his own being. But much of the basic mythos is nearly identical to someone like Michael Harner. Only by silencing the curious psychohistory of recurring lizard/reptile others throughout various cultures can reptilians become a smoking gun for anti-semitism.

2. Which is not to say one can't get lost in a quest for "hidden truths" come anti-semitic garbage.

3. There's a very important and not so well studied history of african-american conspiracy culture that I will be fucking damned if I'm going to trust Jezebel to parse and then use to discard Alice fucking Walker.

4. Proof of having gotten enmeshed in associational chains of meaning with various fascists and anti-semites is not the same thing as proof of being a fascist or anti-semite.

5. Neolib absolutism is a Manichean virus that wants to recode everything according to its logics.

From this thread. With so much of the virus to debug from that Jezebel piece, the clarity here is astonishing. Mad respect!

[liminalOyster]

maybe go ask the Rosenbergs how much money it costs, or what percentage of the total extant social media real-estate one needs to occupy, in order to royally fuck with the whole wide world in such a way that there can never be any going back.

[MacCruiskeen]

So here's the rub: Pro-Russian State/Syrian State type discourse definitely has a following around here.

I've always liked you as a person and tried to be respectful in engaging you about material on which we have different views.

But I'm almost personally offended by this post.

"Pro-Russian" material only has a following around here in so far as one accepts that a huge amount of broadly progressive material is (tactically) pro-Russian. And most of the posters who you've elsewhere categorized as "serial abusers" are, in my estimation, often talking about this very proposal in a manner that is critical and skeptical and entirely not participated in by you.

That is, frankly, the only reason I use this board - as a place to trace out what the fucking fuckety fuck has happened to make the new Red Dawn fantasy plausible to so many people I know and love. Clearly it's really no longer on the agenda here anymore.

I have to say that I don't think I've ever seen you post anything here that doesn't pretty much follow a rote paradigmatic strawman construction about "conspiracy culture" or "red/brown alliances" etc. I've noticed there is always a prefab bad guy in your material and that you never seem to want to discuss these articles and blog posts you share in any critical way. I mean, really, a great deal of what you call "pro-Russia" is people like myself who want to crtiically analyze how the argument is getting made in a given piece, as came up in an interchange between us on my Jackboot thread.

I cannot remember ever seeing a single explicitly pro-Russia piece. Maybe one or two? But in general, what you're really pointing to is material which *if and only if one accepts your hard ideological stance* can be interpreted as either 1) implicitly supporting an agenda shared with Assad/Putin or 2) reflecting biases which have been tragically programmed into your fellow RI posters by the contagious taint of foreign propaganda.

That taint being so all pervasive, what has protected you from its ideologically adversarial cousins?

Nevertheless, there are also those who are skeptical about it. Some here even believe that critique and counterpoint are valuable.

Is anyone here any of the following? 1) *Not* skeptical?, 2) Believing that "critique" and "counterpoint" are not "valuable?" No of course not. And I believe you know this.

It's an absolute funhouse perversion of consensus reality testing when two posters who account for > 5% of the historical material on a 15 yo board are claiming to be the underdog. When they (and more so SLAD than you on this) are also claiming to represent a minority view which just so happens to dovetail with the CFR et al, it's obscene.

Why not just call it like it is and admit you've got a strong view and you like to post shit and you don't like to talk about it? That'd be real. But this game is so cagey and so disrespectful to people who try to engage you, including people like myself who truly like you as a person. How exactly am I the one who falls into the Pro-Syrian state camp when, IIRC, you've tried to tell me that even Rojava/Ocalan is too suspicious for you? And

So my big question is this: Are those who advocate for such beliefs prepared to accept that there will also be disagreement, that alternative perspectives and critique will be posted too? Because then we've got a much better chance at getting along.

Who has complained about any of this? The complaint, to my eyes, is that you're not participating in discussion.

---

All that said, it's a shit-show all around. The remaining value of this board is that it still has a critical mass of folks who have read enough of the same background material to follow and understand each other. But with Elvis gone and no way to stay out of the frag other than keep my mouth shut about the constant nastiness, I am going to reprogram my own habits to get what I get here from somewhere else. I like you just fine AD and I wish you the best. Same for all around here in fact. Cheerio.

[Jerky]

"I knew 9/11. Christchurch, you're no 9/11."

- Jack Riddler, March 24, 2019

[JackRiddler]

Something happened while I was painting the picture at the bottom of this commentary, something I've experienced many times before. My studio is in the flight path(?) of a hive of wasps one of their favourite routes. It's quite a well established route of many years I was told by the owner of the house. In the attic room, if the window is opened on one side of the roof, the corresponding window on the opposite side also has to be opened. In which case the wasps simply zip straight through, in one side, out the other. If not they tend to become confused and rapidly accumulate in numbers making a nuisance of themselves.

Anyway, last summer was sweltering and while my studio has two sash windows both on the same wall, there is no other exit besides the door, apart from the way they came in. And come in they did, almost invariably ending up batting themselves against the far window, sometimes the top section of the window they entered by. Even worse, getting themselves sandwiched in the little gap between the two panes once the lower half is slid open. It became quite a chore to stop work and free them each time they became stuck.

I remember how hard I laughed when my little brother ran into a wasp nest once and danced like Thom Yorke as they swarmed and stung him all over. He hated them after that. Over the years I've gotten on quite well with bees and wasps, been stung a few times but usually only when I've done something stupid. I never took it personally. I think calming thoughts, gently cup my hands around them, which doesn't seem to bother them (or me) and release them outside. Anyway they kept coming in, attracted by the vase of Sunflowers set up exactly as in the painting. I began to visualise how I might see the window through their eyes and how I should move if I were them, in order to fly to the open section of window from wherever they were. After a few attempts something seemed to gel and almost all of the subsequent wasps changed in behaviour from frantic lunging against the glass to a steady tentative flight directly toward the exit once they'd satisfied themselves with the flowers. This happy circumstance continued until nearly the end of the painting. I was thinking about placing one of the fallen petals on the nearest rams horn when one fell off and landed on it rather provocatively. Then a wasp came in the window and slowly approached me, hovering in front of my right eye for a short while as if regarding me, or perhaps, trying to get my attention. Then it flew to the petal, landed on it and turned to face me exactly as if posing. Little bastard flew off almost immediately. I put a wasp in the title though.

I've experienced this kind of interaction most of my life but seen it as a sort of imaginary dialogue, a fancy, until recent years. I never imagined that I could for one moment apprehend the mind of wasps, as such, or any other animal except imaginatively. Now I imagine that sometimes we can accommodate each other if we choose. If we learn such accommodation by chance or inclination. We've always done it apparently, some tribes adopt other species (or vice versa) as a kind of family member and flourish together, able to warn each other of potential dangers and alert each other to opportunities. We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. And it doesn't stop at the animal kingdom, it reaches up and down the chain of being. I never try to convince anyone of this, it's merely part of my experience and theirs if or when they choose it, but sometimes I wish we'd snap out of the machine metaphors and profit motives and simply reach out beyond our fears. Saint Francis had something of the right idea, but time is running out so fast.

What all of this implies about mind, about consciousness is really quite profound. We may well be destroying not only a 'support system' as some see it, in the present ecological catastrophe we may be destroying a fundamental part of our own mind. How would we know if we weren't? What might we expect to happen to our conceptual powers if it were so? If our dream is not merely ours, as a species I mean, then how might the slow loss of our dreams appear to us? Very much like madness I would suppose. Like the slow withdrawal of inspiration. Who's to say where I begin or a bacterium ends? Who's asking such a question seriously? And if it were true in whole or part, the implications for our future are equally profound. We have a choice to make.

[liminalOyster]

]If you had told me years ago Trump would be elected (!) and the thing about it that upset me the most would be the immediate response of an oppo investigation ostensibly done to topple him (because it actually strengthens him and possibly ruins the best chance for a left movement taking power in, like, 90 years)... and that this psyop "against" him that legitimated would center on the mutated revival of the Cold War ideology as a kind of infinite postmodern projection space in which everything is or can be a Russian threat, except nuclear war and hydrocarbon burning... Well here we are.

[Elvis]

I guess it's somewhere between appropriate and inevitable that Rigorous Intuition would go from an exotic wildlife refuge from the hypocrisy and mediocrity of Democratic Underground, to a dumping ground for the endless wasted text that passes for news media. Instead of being a sanctuary from that, it's an archive for it! Jesus Christ

Wombaticus Rex

[RocketMan]

Buttjudge was already introduced as an RI subject, appropriately enough on a thread concerning the in-series manufacture of fake-progressive Democratic 2020 candidates. (That thread was initially about an earlier test model that appears to have gone dud, which you may remember, it was called the Edsel, erm, sorry, I mean: the Beto.) I have trouble seeing why we need a separate thread for every single one of the 38 goddamn fake progressive presidential model launches aimed at establishing the ABB of Neera Tanden's dreams. I thought over here we do social commentary and UFOs and shrooms, you know? This really is the shit for Democratic Underground, there is plenty of space for it there. And elsewhere. It's the whole goddamn fucking Internet.