So

[barracuda]

Your posts were so appallingly ignorant and offensive (and against Jeff's rules) that I took a break from RI...

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

So far, barracuda, I think you're just vehemently uninformed, unlike other usernames who who do all they can to deflect away from CIA media and who, for the same reason, try to badjacket the messenger.

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/fibel.htm

Nazi Propaganda Handbook

>snip<

For a long time, many, especially the "cultured," did not understand what culture and propaganda have to do with each other. They did not understand either one.

Art in particular, its encouragement and use, is the responsibility of propaganda. Within the party, this means the appropriate use of art for meetings and ceremonies of every variety.

The party, and thus the local group propaganda leader, must also supervise culture.

After cleansing German art (literature, visual arts, theater, music) from the poison of the liberal-Jewish-Marxist era, it has become the most important and purest thing that we could and can use to strengthen our own inner lives, to lift us above the ordinary, to build and inspire National Socialist community, but also to promote understanding for the German spirit and attitude among other peoples.

That explains why the Führer assigned the administration of art, and its use, to propaganda.

>snip<

SO. (to align with the op)

Would CIA media (fascist) psyops use neurolinguistics and mnemonics in marketing to apply counterpropaganda to scandals that discredit authority and impede recruiting...like the Vietnam POW-MIA left behinds?

Of...fucking...course.

What part of this leads you to evoke Pinnochio and worse? Better make sense or I'm putting you in the same folder as orz, professorpan, and Zap.

[§ê¢rꆧ]

Even without your perspective on psyops, Hugh, the bard Terrence Mckenna came to the same conclusion:

"Culture is not your friend Culture is for other peoples' convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what-have-you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It dis-empowers. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture. ... the culture is a perversion, it fetishes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines. Meme - meme processors - of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what-have-you..."

I think you need to give Barracuda a break, Hugh, he's one of the outlier extraverts on the board.

Dr. §ê¢rꆧ prescribes a healthy dose of cubensis for the good fish. While I'm sure he's had plenty of disco doses in his time, I suggest a good 15 grams alone-in-the-dark kind of thing. That ought to bring on the Introspection...

Psilocybin and other psychedelics are great culture-busting allies, isn't that why they are Schedule I by the DEA?



BTW, nice to see you lbo. It's a good idea to take a break; in fact I worry more about the usernames that don't take breaks.

[compared2what?]

Would CIA media (fascist) psyops use neurolinguistics and mnemonics in marketing to apply counterpropaganda to scandals that discredit authority and impede recruiting...like the Vietnam POW-MIA left behinds?

Of...fucking...course.

What part of this leads you to evoke Pinnochio and worse?

More simple answers to simple questions: No part of it. That general premise, broadly stated, was not the basis on which you were being challenged. As anyone can see. And as you must yourself recall.

SO.

If you wish to engage your critics honestly, please respect yourself enough to address some of the issues that are actually in contention. And if you wish not to engage your critics, please respect them enough to do so honestly. But imputing questions to them that they didn't ask is just unsportsmanlike, Hugh. You know that. I mean, it's practically like there's not a five-year-old child posting on RI who doesn't recognize that particular informal fallacy well enough to call it by its pet name, come on.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Even without your perspective on psyops, Hugh, the bard Terrence Mckenna came to the same conclusion:

"Culture is not your friend Culture is for other peoples' convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what-have-you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It dis-empowers. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture. ... the culture is a perversion, it fetishes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines. Meme - meme processors - of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what-have-you..."

I think you need to give Barracuda a break, Hugh, he's one of the outlier extraverts on the board.

Dr. §ê¢rꆧ prescribes a healthy dose of cubensis for the good fish. While I'm sure he's had plenty of disco doses in his time, I suggest a good 15 grams alone-in-the-dark kind of thing. That ought to bring on the Introspection...

Psilocybin and other psychedelics are great culture-busting allies, isn't that why they are Schedule I by the DEA?



BTW, nice to see you lbo. It's a good idea to take a break; in fact I worry more about the usernames that don't take breaks.

I don't think anyone on the board would diagree with TMs views on this particular culture, tho not all memes are bad, the ones he promoted/spread were ok. Just hughs interpretations of it some or all of the time.



Breaks are good tho, and i completely agree with LBOs comments about turning up here again and feeling at home straight away.

Hi LBO, btw the first post I read of yours on your return was great, cheers.

[barracuda]

So far, barracuda, I think you're just vehemently uninformed, unlike other usernames who who do all they can to deflect away from CIA media and who, for the same reason, try to badjacket the messenger.

What part of this leads you to evoke Pinnochio and worse? Better make sense or I'm putting you in the same folder as orz, professorpan, and Zap.

Listen, Hugh - I'm not sitting in your personal psy-ops classroom to receive some big-time didactic lay-down from on high, and hyperventilating with my hand raised hoping for you to fix your steely-eyed gaze in my swooning direction. I'm not looking for a gold star here. And I'm not one of the synchophantic followers waiting in the hallway to give a hand job to the head of the psy-ops department, either. I'm not even in your own personal thread at the moment. So if you wanna discuss National Socialism and the relationship between their art and propaganda - or anything else of your ilk, really - feel free too crank up a new thread and have at it. And if I feel like correcting some of your mistakes, or calling you on your unfounded hyperbole, or telling you what I think is what, I will, thanks. But if your shit is boring and old, probably not. And if I happen to agree, listen real closely and you may hear me nodding my head at my keyboard.

[§ê¢rꆧ]

I don't think anyone on the board would diagree with TMs views on this particular culture, tho not all memes are bad, the ones he promoted/spread were ok. Just hughs interpretations of it some or all of the time.

Well I think Mckenna's talking about ALL culture, not just the culture we don't like, or at least all culture not based on boundary-dissolving plant hallucinogens. (Which, if you haven't really been there, I imagine is hard to agree with, but I think it rings true.) In fact I think he's specifically talking about the culture we do like hence the wording 'culture is not your friend' - you think it is, but it is not.

It's almost impossible to really analyze culture from inside it, harder still to un-relate to the things you relate to, and I think that has something to do with the resistance Hugh faces to his ideas. Most people here could point to the past and decode the psyops in Hollywood and television without too much trouble, but it is lot harder to do with what is happening now. It's bound to drive someone crazy, and I do think Hugh's posts sometimes are irrational, but I don't really blame him, and see his signal to be greater than his noise.

Artists make great dupes and useful idiots, wrapped up in their own passions and visions as they are, and it's not hard to imagine the meme-peddlers promoting the ones they want. I don't think Hugh's saying everybody in entertainment media is in on some Great Psyop (although it sometimes may seem that way).

I think media that require the most resources (money and human) to create (such as mainstream film, television, pop music) are the most suspect (coincidentally what Hugh spends most of his time on), just by virtue of that simple counterintuitive gem of an idea ('culture is not your friend'). And exposing all the ways it is not your friend is probably a worthwhile, if thankless pursuit. Individual artists are suspect to a much lessor degree, but it is easy to imagine them being co-opted as well, especially as a strategy to people waking up to the fact that Big Media is a Big Lie.

The only trustworthy art is simply the felt presence of experience, art as play, in the moment, ephemeral. The stuff we consume is just a ghostly abstraction of that, as good as some of it might seem - it is just that, a seeming, no matter how it may inspire and make our spirits soar, we must not forget the focus should be the fact that it's OUR SPIRITS soaring, and not really the art.

So. No cultural hegemon. Everyone is an 'artist'/culture-maker. The idle daydream of anyone - felt and experienced in the moment - is probably greater than the sum total of all art ever made. Direct your own psyop.

[Penguin]

Well I think Mckenna's talking about ALL culture, not just the culture we don't like, or at least all culture not based on boundary-dissolving plant hallucinogens. (Which, if you haven't really been there, I imagine is hard to agree with, but I think it rings true.) In fact I think he's specifically talking about the culture we do like hence the wording 'culture is not your friend' - you think it is, but it is not.

There is that moment with Diviners Sage, when all words fail and you must simply leave them behind, if you are to make any sense at all. There is not much that can be said about that - the first time after years, I simply broke into a guffawing laughter as my brain was scuttling to put stuff into words, symbols, divisions, but could not even grab one word, let alone make any sense of it. The veritable split mind.

We are so used to using words and symbols that when we are left with none, its such a familiar yet totally alien experience.

http://davesbikeblog.squarespace.com/bl ... ories.html

Today is my birthday. As a kid birthdays were important, then as the years went by they mattered less and less. Now I am much older they have become important again. I guess it has something to do with the sense of achievement in having made it thus far.

People say I look good for my age. That is because I was born at a very early age and have remained young ever since. That’s me in the picture above; the earliest picture I have of myself. Taken in 1936 the year I was born.

I have a memory from about the same time the picture was taken. I know that sounds strange or even impossible, but this memory has always been with me throughout my life. I even have memories of having this memory throughout my childhood. So I know I didn’t imagine or dream it in later life.

My memory is of being with my mother; we were outside and it was a bright sunny day. My mother was standing at the end of a garden, holding me, sitting up in her arms. We were looking over a hedge into another garden.

The most likely assumption is that this was at the back of our house in Surrey, England, so therefore we were looking into a neighbor’s garden. Someone some short distance away was calling “Coo-eee, coo-eee.” My mother was saying to me, “Look, look over there.” She was pointing at the same time.

In part of this memory I was in this little body (The one you see above.) and part of the memory I was out of my body, about fifteen feet to the left, and slightly elevated. I was looking at myself in my mothers arms.

This is the only ‘out of body’ experience I have had, it has never happened since. I can still picture the scene now as I write this. I could hear this person calling, “Coo-eee,” and I watched myself, my head was straining forward to look and listen. My eyes big and round, and my head kept jerking this way and that every time my mother said, “Look, look over there.”

Suddenly, I was back inside this little body, looking out. I can even remember my thoughts at the time. I was thinking, “Who the fuck is calling Coo-ee?”

Now this in itself is interesting, because obviously I had not learned to talk at this time, much less learned the “eff” word. However, I have come to realize that memories of thoughts are in words, and even though I couldn’t talk back then, I have since added the words to describe the feeling of frustration at not being able to see the person calling out to me.

Language is both the gift, and at the same time the curse of human kind. A gift in that I can retain a memory such as this, and even share it with others. It is also a curse in that we tend to hold on to the bad memories and relive them, along with the accompanying emotional pain.

A friend of mine recently had a heart attack at age 40. He knew there was something seriously wrong, and called 911. When the ambulance arrived, he walked out of the house and then collapsed. His heart and breathing stopped, but the paramedics revived him.

He has since made a full recovery, and was recently telling me of the experience. He described an ‘out of body’ experience where he was off to one side and slightly above the scene, watching himself and the paramedics as they revived him.

His experience sounded exactly like mine; convincing me still further that it actually happened. It matters not that you believe my little story, but that you found it entertaining. It will always be real to me.

The weather forecast today calls for sunny skies and temps in the 60s, here in South Carolina, much like the day I was in the garden with my mother. I will be going out for a bike ride later; burn off some calories and make room for cake.

In college we had a discussion in a finnish class about whether thinking is possible without knowing any language.
Thats a nice one to contemplate, especially using language.
Many people were of the opinion that it is not possible, which was quite an interesting point of view.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Thinking without language is possible. Talking about it isn't tho.

Well I think Mckenna's talking about ALL culture, not just the culture we don't like, or at least all culture not based on boundary-dissolving plant hallucinogens. (Which, if you haven't really been there, I imagine is hard to agree with, but I think it rings true.) In fact I think he's specifically talking about the culture we do like hence the wording 'culture is not your friend' - you think it is, but it is not.

So whats culture then? Cos basically everything humans do is culture. Sharing a meal is culture. Is sharing a meal bad?

It's almost impossible to really analyze culture from inside it, harder still to un-relate to the things you relate to, and I think that has something to do with the resistance Hugh faces to his ideas. Most people here could point to the past and decode the psyops in Hollywood and television without too much trouble, but it is lot harder to do with what is happening now. It's bound to drive someone crazy, and I do think Hugh's posts sometimes are irrational, but I don't really blame him, and see his signal to be greater than his noise.

I think I'm pretty good at decoding media psy ops that are happening now actually. What they are doing how they are doing it. And I don't even want to start a conversation here about it at the moment cos it'll be flooded in what I consider to be Hugh's noise.

Artists make great dupes and useful idiots, wrapped up in their own passions and visions as they are, and it's not hard to imagine the meme-peddlers promoting the ones they want. I don't think Hugh's saying everybody in entertainment media is in on some Great Psyop (although it sometimes may seem that way).

Thats fair enough.

So. No cultural hegemon. Everyone is an 'artist'/culture-maker. The idle daydream of anyone - felt and experienced in the moment - is probably greater than the sum total of all art ever made. Direct your own psyop.

I dunno about all art ever made, but I do agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment.

[barracuda]

McKenna may be right - culture may be your enemy. But anyone who has ever had one knows that a worthy enemy can bring meaning, understanding, even beauty into your conception of yourself and your place in the world.

My understanding of how my mind processes the world is a visual one. Ram Das tells us in The Only Dance There Is that the buddah said there were 17 billion mind moments in every blink of an eye, and that enlightenment lies in between two of these (I think he referred to the 17th and 18th, can't recall). I collate these mind moments with the consciousness researches of Francis Crick, whose late studies had begun to present him with a notion of the soul that was comprised of a series of flickering short-term memory images - frame grabs, as it were - of the universe around us. Pure materialism bubbling into eternity. Language at its base has very little to do with this understanding.

If you allow culture in all its forms to blow you around like a leaf in a hurricane, of course you'll wind up at the whim of forces you can't see or understand. And I think this is how to properly view insect culture, or cow culture, or paramecium culture. We aren't that much different, I guess. But we have the ability to create great beauty and pass it on to our fellows. We can materialise those errant daydreams and make the world a more complex thing.

I have no real truck with Hugh's ideas, beyond an innate need to chase down minor falsehoods and a useless compunction to stand up to bullies. What disturbs me is his presentation of the psy-op as existing outside, above and beyond the competition shared for headspace in the world mind with other cultural forms. Psy-ops is part of culture. A small part.

[compared2what?]

Thinking without language is possible. Talking about it isn't tho.

True. Also swimming with implications wrt almost all communication -- interpersonal, intrapersonal, non-personal (ie -- communications involving at least one non-human party), political, commercial, mass-cultural, propagandistic, aesthetic, and [ADJECTIVES HERE, PICK YR OWN]. For a far more toothsome, concise and beautiful iteration of that truth you spoke (okay, wrote, whatever) there, please don't deny yourself the pleasures of and surrounding third line, first verse, here. Not that the callback in the last verse isn't even still toothsomer than that, obvs, mmm. But, you know. It's one thing courteously to invite people to take a brief and enjoyable swim in this or that sparkling pool of implications. Total immersion absent some form of prior, more elaborate inquiry and/or preparation is something else entirely. In this case, that thing would be: Intrusive and also rude, at worst. And just too fucken' confusing to trouble yourself with at best. And I really do mean: At absolute best. Because for one thing, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about at this point myself.

Just click the link, that's my advice.

[Penguin]

My understanding of how my mind processes the world is a visual one. Ram Das tells us in The Only Dance There Is that the buddah said there were 17 billion mind moments in every blink of an eye, and that enlightenment lies in between two of these (I think he referred to the 17th and 18th, can't recall). I collate these mind moments with the consciousness researches of Francis Crick, whose late studies had begun to present him with a notion of the soul that was comprised of a series of flickering short-term memory images - frame grabs, as it were - of the universe around us. Pure materialism bubbling into eternity. Language at its base has very little to do with this understanding.

Thanks, I had not heard of that from Crick. Will check it out.
Something in that idea tickles me.

[compared2what?]

As to the premise that culture is your enemy: Sometimes, sure. It definitely is if you habitually just lie back and let Terrence McKenna (or Alex Jones or Oprah or anybody else, irrespective of how much or how little merit his or her work may have) tell you what to think about it. For example.

(Note to §ê¢rꆧ: I don't mean that's what you did when you quoted and thoughtfully commented on him slightly upthread from here, thus provoking a number of thoughtful replies, plus this one. As should go without saying but can't hurt to say anyway.)

But to the extent that you have any say in the matter -- which is to a pretty significant fucking extent, assuming that you're not in prison or otherwise literally confined by circumstance to not many more choices than "none" -- that'd be your choice and you -- not culture -- would be accountable for the results. Know what I mean? Aw, rats, stupid computer, gotta go, more in a moment i hope..............

[norton ash]

you can lead a horticulture but you can't make him think.

I really only live to be delighted (or angered or heart-broken) by beauty, art, human works and events, and thought. Culture. And pop-culture is so disturbing to me -- we only want to look good and fuck and buy stuff!-- and KILL!-- that the Manatee is my cubist free-verse Orpheus who will not cede his Babel-Tower Masada to any bloody Romans.

RI itself is a strange and beautiful culture. So is the grey stuff on sour cream I've forgotten in the fridge.

Shine on.

[Penguin]

beautiful culture. So is the grey stuff on sour cream I've forgotten in the fridge.

Shine on.

ees edible!