The Great Reset leftist takes

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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sun Dec 06, 2020 8:18 am

conniption » 06 Dec 2020 11:52 wrote:Covid 19 Vaccines: Paving The Way For The Surveillance State


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puuvEdr ... =emb_title
•Streamed live on Dec 3, 2020

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Like so many other "crises" that preceded it, the Covid-19 "pandemic" has provided fertile territory for the authoritarians who seize any opportunity to destroy freedom and liberty under the false claim of "keeping us safe." The PATRIOT Act passed after 9/11 was supposed to do the same thing: keep us safe by targeting the terrorists who wanted to kill us. But as we learned from Ed Snowden shortly afterward, it was a lie. The PATRIOT Act was designed to view us as the enemy, to be spied on, tracked, and harassed. The Covid "crisis" and coming vaccine will be the same. Will Americans resist? Also today, more Covid Hypocrites - from Austin to California. And an LA County mayor claims anyone without a mask is a "domestic terrorist."


I thought what actually paved the way for the surveillance state was the internet, mobile device and social media infrastructure and corporations. In that specific order.
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby dada » Sun Dec 06, 2020 5:02 pm

"Perhaps chimeric figures and therianthropes from all human myths could represent a literal inter-species bridge - where each may dream together and be understood by each, and at this elevated level, collaborate. From here we might consider that the bee and the flower wilfully conspire to fulfil each others need."

And in its turn, this literal inter-species bridge may represent a bridge made entirely of spirit. This would be the very same spirit bridge where the human encounters its daena, its angel.

Angelologically speaking, we'd say the spirit bridge is the representation of a bridge of angels, and each individual angel is a species unto itself.

To say that myths are the stories that humans tell to make sense of the world is itself a myth. A story about a world made sensible through mythical means.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby kelley » Sun Dec 06, 2020 6:43 pm

Shift the corporation to first in that four-fold order. But, yes.

Questions of equity exist in both symbolic and material terms at the transnational level where corporations operate. In turn, there are structural problems at odds with fairness which are baked into the organization of corporate logic, especially given the distribution of agency and responsibility, which overproduction and 'more room at the table' for expanding elites and their opposite cannot rectify.

Corporate hierarchies protect decision-making made at the top. This is how corporations are willfully designed to function. However, plans go awry. Earnings do not meet expectations. Blame must be assigned for catastrophic failures which affect the common good. In each instance, the corporation acts to deflect attention away from leadership, which should be figuratively accountable, and held primarily culpable for its actions. Yet sacrifices are made to protect the organizational structure common to companies around the world. Ironically, it’s nearly always others who absorb the consequences of decisions in which they’d no hand in shaping. This may be morally suspect, but it certainly and without question constitutes an ethical failure at its very core.

Ethics are not ethical, in the true sense of their meaning, if designed with utility in mind. Ethics exist in and of themselves, as do the individuals who wish to uphold them. The corporation asks to be regarded as the equal of the individual, and to be free to behave as such, pace decisions such as Citizens United et al. This desire harbors a dilemma the corporation must face, namely, how to devise, uphold, and enforce ethical standards to which it can be held accountable, as the individual routinely is, and as context repeatedly shows this to be for one who strays too far from the norm, or the law. As corporations wish to assume the status of the individual, they are skipping the step of building an ethical base, and establishing instead a 'moral' position which remains relative viz the desire to earn profits. In many cases, this is not only contradictory, given agency and the common good, but structurally unsound, inequitable, and most importantly, unsustainable.

As for the ‘merely transactional’, it seems a fallacy to understand it as meaningless. If it were, it wouldn’t be what it is. Its function is exchange. Its meaning is noted in the ritual of exchange as such. If not, it’s likely not a transaction per se. This isn’t tautology, in positive terms, or contradiction, in the negative. It’s purely one-dimensional. It’s an instrumentalization of behavior woven through with pseudo-transcendental pretensions. It’s not a secret that this is how ‘the market’ functions today, as controlled by its neo-priestly caste.

“Melancholia results when religion fails to rationalize the immensity of one’s loss’. Julia Kristeva said this; exactly when, I don’t know. But the failures humankind face at this moment lend this observation more than its share of poignancy. It may be that science is capable of providing data sets which are infallible. Their interpretation needn’t always be. Time may show they’re not. What may be of interest is the observation of behavior which would be classified as neither this or that, but as completely other. In this respect, ripping up binarism by the roots would be the excellent tenets of a new set of beliefs which take as its goal a re-imagination of the individual in new ethical terms.
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby dada » Mon Dec 07, 2020 12:06 am

What I mean is that the material is the symbolic. All material is a symbol of something non-material.

I'll defend my equating the merely transactional with the meaningless transaction by pointing out that an empty word is still a word, but has no meaning in itself. Purely functional, meaningless on its own.

Also an empty phrase is meaningless. It is still a phrase, but a meaningless phrase. The act of being a ritual does not provide the meaning of the exchange, a ritual can be a pointless ritual. There is no inherent meaning in a transaction by virtue of it simply being a transaction.

Melancholia results when religion fails to rationalize the immensity of one’s loss is a good quote. Melancholia is the raw material we transmute into joy, without it, there would be none. Thus religion succeeds at the moment it fails.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon Dec 07, 2020 6:19 am

kelley » 07 Dec 2020 08:43 wrote:Shift the corporation to first in that four-fold order. But, yes.

Questions of equity exist in both symbolic and material terms at the transnational level where corporations operate. In turn, there are structural problems at odds with fairness which are baked into the organization of corporate logic, especially given the distribution of agency and responsibility, which overproduction and 'more room at the table' for expanding elites and their opposite cannot rectify.

Corporate hierarchies protect decision-making made at the top. This is how corporations are willfully designed to function. However, plans go awry. Earnings do not meet expectations. Blame must be assigned for catastrophic failures which affect the common good. In each instance, the corporation acts to deflect attention away from leadership, which should be figuratively accountable, and held primarily culpable for its actions. Yet sacrifices are made to protect the organizational structure common to companies around the world. Ironically, it’s nearly always others who absorb the consequences of decisions in which they’d no hand in shaping. This may be morally suspect, but it certainly and without question constitutes an ethical failure at its very core.

Ethics are not ethical, in the true sense of their meaning, if designed with utility in mind. Ethics exist in and of themselves, as do the individuals who wish to uphold them. The corporation asks to be regarded as the equal of the individual, and to be free to behave as such, pace decisions such as Citizens United et al. This desire harbors a dilemma the corporation must face, namely, how to devise, uphold, and enforce ethical standards to which it can be held accountable, as the individual routinely is, and as context repeatedly shows this to be for one who strays too far from the norm, or the law. As corporations wish to assume the status of the individual, they are skipping the step of building an ethical base, and establishing instead a 'moral' position which remains relative viz the desire to earn profits. In many cases, this is not only contradictory, given agency and the common good, but structurally unsound, inequitable, and most importantly, unsustainable.

As for the ‘merely transactional’, it seems a fallacy to understand it as meaningless. If it were, it wouldn’t be what it is. Its function is exchange. Its meaning is noted in the ritual of exchange as such. If not, it’s likely not a transaction per se. This isn’t tautology, in positive terms, or contradiction, in the negative. It’s purely one-dimensional. It’s an instrumentalization of behavior woven through with pseudo-transcendental pretensions. It’s not a secret that this is how ‘the market’ functions today, as controlled by its neo-priestly caste.

“Melancholia results when religion fails to rationalize the immensity of one’s loss’. Julia Kristeva said this; exactly when, I don’t know. But the failures humankind face at this moment lend this observation more than its share of poignancy. It may be that science is capable of providing data sets which are infallible. Their interpretation needn’t always be. Time may show they’re not. What may be of interest is the observation of behavior which would be classified as neither this or that, but as completely other. In this respect, ripping up binarism by the roots would be the excellent tenets of a new set of beliefs which take as its goal a re-imagination of the individual in new ethical terms.


I specifically meant the corporations built on the back of social media infrastructure.

Twitter, Facebook and Google are the obvious ones but there are plenty that attempt to data mine everything we do.

I agree with everything you said about corporations in general.
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby Harvey » Mon Dec 07, 2020 3:27 pm

A story about a world made sensible through mythical means.


Exactly, my friend.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby Harvey » Mon Dec 07, 2020 3:30 pm

kelley » Sun Dec 06, 2020 11:43 pm wrote:Ironically, it’s nearly always others who absorb the consequences of decisions in which they’d no hand in shaping. This may be morally suspect, but it certainly and without question constitutes an ethical failure at its very core.


Exactly.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Sat Jan 30, 2021 1:16 pm

Since the much-upsetting and unsettling Davos set have been re-setting it up last week at teh WEF, seems like a good time to bump this thread with an excellent article from Naomoi Klein. :heart_eyes:

The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie

A viral conspiracy theory blends together legitimate critiques with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.

Naomi Klein

December 8 2020

Writing about “The Great Reset” is not easy. It has turned into a viral conspiracy theory purporting to expose something no one ever attempted to hide, most of which is not really happening anyway, some of which actually should.

It’s extra confusing for me to unpick this particular knot because at the center of it all is a bastardization of a concept I know a little something about: the shock doctrine.

But here goes nothing.

Back in June, the World Economic Forum, best known for its annual Davos summit, kicked off a lunge for organizational relevance at a time when it was already clear that, for the foreseeable future, packing thousands of people, injected-cheek by lifted-jowl, into a Swiss ski resort to talk about harnessing the power of markets to end rural poverty was a nonstarter.

The effort was called the Great Website — I mean the Great Reset. And through articles, videos, webinars, podcasts, and a book by WEF founder Klaus Schwab, it provided a coronavirus-themed rebranding of all the things Davos does anyway, now hastily repackaged as a blueprint for reviving the global economy post-pandemic by “seeking a better form of capitalism.” The Great Reset was a place to hawk for-profit technofixes to complex social problems; to hear heads of transnational oil giants opine about the urgent need to tackle climate change; to listen to politicians say the things they say during crises: that this is a tragedy but also an opportunity, that they are committed to building back better, and ushering in a “fairer, greener, healthier planet.” Prince Charles, David Attenborough, and the head of the International Monetary Fund all figured prominently. That kind of thing.

In short, the Great Reset encompasses some good stuff that won’t happen and some bad stuff that certainly will and, frankly, nothing out of the ordinary in our era of “green” billionaires readying rockets for Mars. Indeed, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Davos speak, and the number of times it has attempted to rebrand capitalism as a slightly buggy poverty alleviation and ecological restoration program, will recognize the vintage champagne in this online carafe. (This history is explored in an excellent new book and film by the law professor Joel Bakan, “The New Corporation: How ‘Good’ Corporations Are Bad for Democracy.”)

Through its highly influential Global Competitiveness Report, the WEF has played a leading role in the transnational campaign to liberate capital from all encumbrances (like robust regulation, protections for local industries, progressive taxation, and — heaven forbid — nationalizations). Long ago, however, Schwab realized that if Davos didn’t add some do-gooding to its well-doing, the pitchforks that had started amassing at the foot of the mountain would eventually storm the gates (as they came close to doing during the 2001 summit).

And so the giddy sessions on new markets in Malaysia and new startups in California were complemented with somber ones on melting ice caps, United Nations development goals, “impact investing,” “stakeholder capitalism,” and “corporate global citizenship.” In 2003, Schwab introduced the tradition of each January summit having a big theme, starting with the appropriately chastened “Building Trust.” The new Davos tone, though, was truly set in 2005, when actor Sharon Stone, upon hearing Tanzania’s president speak of his nation’s need for mosquito nets to battle malaria, leapt to her feet and turned the session into an impromptu charity auction to purchase the nets. She raised $1 million in five minutes, and a new Davos era was on its way.

The Great Reset is merely the latest edition of this gilded tradition, barely distinguishable from earlier Davos Big Ideas, from “Shaping the Post-Crisis World” (2009) to “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild” (2010) to “The Great Transformation” (2012) and, who can forget, “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World” (2018). If Davos wasn’t “seeking a better form of capitalism” to solve the spiraling crises Davos itself systematically deepened, it wouldn’t be Davos.

And yet search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by Schwab and Bill Gates, that is using the state of shock created by the coronavirus (which is probably itself a “hoax”) to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green/socialist/Venezuela/Soros/forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric implants/5G/robot dog/forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left.

Confused? That’s not on you. Less a conspiracy theory than a conspiracy smoothie, the Great Reset has managed to mash up every freakout happening on the internet — left and right, true-ish, and off-the-wall — into one inchoate meta-scream about the unbearable nature of pandemic life under voracious capitalism. I’ve been doing my best to ignore it for months, even when various Reset “researchers” have insisted that all of this is an example of the shock doctrine, a term I coined a decade and a half ago to describe the many ways that elites try to harness deep disasters to push through policies that further enrich the already wealthy and restrict democratic liberties.

There has been a tsunami of examples of the real shock doctrine since the pandemic began: Trump’s attacks on Washington’s regulatory architecture; Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s amped-up campaign for “school choice,” rather than, say, giving public schools the resources they need to keep children safe; Silicon Valley’s multiheaded power grab, which I wrote about as the Screen New Deal; the Modi government’s cruel attacks on price protections for India’s farmers (setting off a wave of heroic protests) — and so many more.


What Schwab and the WEF are doing with the Great Reset is both more subtle and more insidious. Schwab is, of course, absolutely right when he says that the pandemic has revealed many deadly structural failures of capitalism as usual, as does the accelerating climate crisis and the hoovering of the planet’s wealth up toward the Davos class, even in the midst of a global pandemic. But like the WEF’s earlier big themes, the Great Reset is not a serious effort to actually solve the crises it describes. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

Why? For the same reason I keep hearing Facebook ads on NPR podcasts telling me how much Facebook wants to be regulated. Because if our corporate overlords can create this impression, it is less likely that governments will listen to the rising chorus of voices calling on them to do what is required to actually combat spiraling poverty, joblessness, climate breakdown, and informational degeneration: regulate the companies that have created these crises, and tax them, break them up, and, in some cases, put them under public control.

So no, the Great Reset is not just another name for the Green New Deal, as many a right-winger with a digital chalkboard and an unhealthy AOC obsession is absurdly claiming. It is, first and foremost, about blocking a real Green New Deal, which most assuredly would not have the support of BP, Mastercard, the Prince of Wales, and all of the other Great Reset partners.

And yet, in recent weeks, a slew of right-wing commentators on Fox News, as well as Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs and prominent opposition politicians in Australia and Canada, have claimed to be confused about this and are suddenly giving oxygen to what was, until recently, a marginal conspiracy. Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro have all been terrifying their huge audiences with claims that green socialism is about to be forced down their throats via Schwab’s Great Reset, which, they explain, is the very same thing as President-elect Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, which is itself a thin cover for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. (Like an early fan of an indie punk band, Glenn Beck has been using his perch at The Blaze to point out that he was ranting about the Great Reset when it was just a gleam in Schwab’s eye.)

Do these people honestly think that Schwab is in cahoots with AOC and using the pandemic to put BP out of business — with the full cooperation of BP? Of course not. But President Donald Trump is on his way out, and the Green New Deal is popular — precisely because it is as far away from Davos as it could be, grounded in a polluter-pays ethos and in programs like a jobs guarantee and universal health care that enjoy broad working-class support. For right-wing politicians and the oil companies that back them, the more climate action can be conflated with an organization known for its traffic jams of private jets and its Bond villain founder, the easier it will be to resist any climate plan at all. That’s why the earliest alarmism about the Great Reset came from the Heartland Institute, ground zero of the climate change denial machine.

This messaging is gaining traction not because people are suckers but because they are mad — and they have every right to be. Lockdown policies have demanded months of individual sacrifice for the collective good without providing the most basic collective protections to keep families from slipping into starvation and homelessness, or to keep small businesses afloat. Meanwhile, trillions have been spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, and pandemic profiteering is rampant. Is it any wonder that so many find it entirely plausible that the same elites who expect them to swallow all the coronavirus-related sacrifices while they party in the Hamptons and on private islands would also be willing to exaggerate the risks of the disease to get them to the accept more bitter “green” medicine, for the common good? As that first Davos theme made clear, trust between the people and the mountaintop has been broken — and it most certainly has not been rebuilt.

For a glimpse of how all of this fits together, take a look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada, under its truly reprehensible premier, one Jason Kenney. Kenney came to power pledging to serve as a shameless valet for the Alberta oil patch, specifically its extra-fast-planet-cooking tar sands. He promised to ram through all pipelines, no matter the opposition, and create a “war room” to surveil all opponents.

Back in March, in the early days of the pandemic, I observed that Kenney deserved the award for the most craven Covid-19 disaster capitalist because he had just laid off 20,000 education workers, supposedly to cover pandemic costs, even as he lavished $7 billion in public subsidies on the Keystone XL pipeline, despite the lockdowns having created a massive glut in crude oil. He followed up in the fall by laying off 11,000 health care workers, a clear effort to use the Covid-19 crisis to open the door to partial U.S.-style health care privatization.

It has surprised no one that Kenney has also presided over a U.S.-style coronavirus explosion, with the province’s positivity rate recently topping 10 percent (higher than the average south of the border). Now Kenney, a self-proclaimed big-government-bashing libertarian, has been reduced to begging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for funds to build field hospitals.

Is it any wonder he has been looking to change the subject? Last week, Kenney did exactly that, selecting a question about the Great Reset during a Facebook livestream. The premier feigned horror at the idea that Klaus Schwab could possibly see Covid-19 as an opportunity to advance policy goals, describing the plan as a “grab bag of left-wing ideas for less freedom and more government” and “failed socialist policy ideas.” Warming up to his subject, he declared: “I’m not going to be taking any policy direction from Klaus Schwab and his ilk. … Heck no! We are not going to exploit or take advantage of a crisis to advance a political agenda. … It’s very distasteful and regrettable that influential people would explicitly seek to take advantage of a crisis like this to advance their own political vision and values.”

The online right rejoiced: “Jason Kenny Shows Real Leadership Rejecting Klaus Schwab’s New World Order!” declared one outlet, and I can’t bear to link to the many, many others.

Sadly, Kenney’s aversion to crisis opportunism comes late for the thousands of newly unemployed education and hospital workers in his province, or for the hundreds of patients who will soon be getting treatment in its field hospitals. And though Kenney was quick to say that the Great Reset was not a conspiracy theory and that the coronavirus is real, his statements were immediately seized upon by the growing numbers of people who are seriously convinced that Covid-19 is a hoax cooked up by Davos globalists to eliminate their private property, poison their brains with 5G, and take away their right to go to the gym.

In Alberta, thousands of those people participated in maskless “Walk for Freedom” marches last week. I have no doubt that Kenney meant it when he told them to cut it out, just as he no doubt wants Covid-19 to stop ravaging his province, along with his reputation. But what he wants far more is to stop the momentum toward climate action in coronavirus recovery plans so the oil companies that underwrite his party and government can wring out a few more profitable quarters. And he, along with growing numbers of similarly craven politicians the world over, sees fueling the Great Reset conspiracy as the most effective means of achieving that goal.

None of this is to say that Schwab’s Reset push is benign and unworthy of scrutiny. All kinds of dangerous ideas are lurking under its wide brim, from a reckless push toward more automation in the midst of a joblessness crisis, to the steady move to normalize mass surveillance and biometric tracking tools, to the very real (though not new) problem of Bill Gates’s singular power over global health policy. The irony, though, is that the fact-Vitamix currently whirring around the Great Reset actually makes it harder to hold the Davos set accountable for any of this, since legitimate critiques have now been blended together with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.

It also makes it harder to talk about the profound realignment our economies and societies desperately need, a vision a group of us laid out in the short film we released way back in October called “The Years of Repair” — because now all talk about how we change for the better in response to the cruelties that Covid-19 has unveiled is immediately smeared as part of the Great Reset. As the historian Quinn Slobodian recently wrote, years after “The Shock Doctrine” was published, “the right was now appropriating this narrative for its own ends.” Meanwhile, the less fantastical but extremely real shock doctrine maneuvers currently waging war on public schools, hospitals, small farmers, environmental protections, civil liberties, and workers’ rights receive a fraction of the attention they deserve.

Is it all a plan, another kind of elaborate conspiracy? Nothing so elegant. As Steve Bannon kindly told us, the informational strategy of the Trump era has always been to “flood the zone with shit.” Four years later, we can see what this looks like in practice. It looks like far-left and far-right conspiracists sitting down over a tray of information-shit sandwiches to talk about how the Great Reset is Gates’s plan to use the DNA from our Covid-19 tests to turn the United States into Venezuela.

It makes no sense, and that’s just fine by the likes of Bannon, and Kenney as well. Because if you want to keep waging war on the Earth’s life-supporting ecology, a great way to do it is to deliberately pollute its democracy-supporting information ecology. In fact, the pollution is the point.



https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/gre ... onspiracy/
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Sat Jan 30, 2021 2:03 pm

... and late replies about all the other posts. That Peter Turchin article was interesting. It makes for a great narrative, the maverick outsider outsmarting historians with big data.

How many elites are there?

Fox Business from March 5 of last year, because I'm lazy and it was the top Goog result wrote:The world has 46.8 million millionaires, collectively owning $158.3 trillion. On top of this, there are according to Forbes, 2,153 billionaires.


That's a lot of millionaires! No trillionaires, allegedly, but the bet is on Bezos. But it would be the most un-trillionaire thing to cop to being a trillionaire.

And I'm with dada. I think we've come too far, and there are far too many of us, for neo-primitism, or any classical economic or governmental system, to avert the cascading planetary collapse and unravelling created by armies of applied eschatologists, some with the best intentions, many not, all hard at work on the doomsday engines.

It's technocrazy or bust. When the singularity happens, maybe Skynet can be made to be less Terminator and more Savior. After all, true AI will be super-intelligent, orders of magnitude beyond what we can imagine, essential a god. It/They know us all better than we may well know ourselves, and perhaps it/they can maximize happiness and sustainability for it's/their parents-become-pets. Like ant farmers have a kind of love and curiosity for their ant farms.
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Feb 02, 2021 8:00 pm

.

Not sure where to put this, exactly, but: another asshole billionaire will now be training his focus on his 'philanthropies'/other 'passions'. Beware.


CEO Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO and "transition" to the role of executive chair in Q3 2021, who after 27 years at the helm of the retailer he founded is ending an era at Amazon.

Discussing his life plans after Amazon, Bezos says that "as Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions. I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring. I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have."


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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby dada » Thu Feb 11, 2021 5:04 pm

A Left wing take on the Great Reset doesn't begin by asking 'is society becoming dystopian?' Can we stop the transformation of humans into robots. Stave off the tomorrowland of dystopia.

A Left wing take begins by living in a dystopian present. The present, basically. It isn't a question of which dystopian future will we have. Post-apocalyptic Mad Maxness, Jetsons and Bladerunner, the Time Machine, Brazil. Highrise ghettos and total immersion holodecks. Whatever it is, it will be post-dystopian.

Seeing the post-dystopia brings it closer, makes it present. It's as if the dystopian moment is the battleground where the pre-dystopian society and the post-dystopian society have it out. The dystopians themselves try not to get caught in the crossfire. They wish dystopia would never end, choose to live in the dystopian moment. Like chasing after a feeling, trying to make it last, keep it from decaying into receding mirage.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby BenDhyan » Sat Feb 27, 2021 11:27 pm

Great result, but who wants to pay the price?

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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby dada » Sun Feb 28, 2021 2:55 pm

From the left, arguing about the great reset looks like complaining about an ad campaign. Whatever the pitch, it's just a movement to capitalize on what is already happening, an attempt to 'capture the zeitgeist.' What is already happening is the industrialization of the production of information. It becomes difficult to find new markets that can satisfy the need for the economy to grow. So the consumer needs to be revolutionized, as well. Create new markets within the old. Therefore the importance of the industrialization of information, which in turn industrializes the consumer.

As the assembly line industrialized the workforce, the Internet, particularly social media, industrializes the production of information. The same trend the great reset hitches itself to is maintained with every innocuous social media post. Facebook is a walmart of information, twitter is a costco. Instagram is window shopping at the mall.

I wonder what that makes this message board. Maybe a 7-11. The technocrats for a better dystopia society hold secret meetings in a windowless room in the back.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Feb 28, 2021 3:21 pm

dada » Sun Feb 28, 2021 1:55 pm wrote:I wonder what that makes this message board. Maybe a 7-11. The technocrats for a better dystopia society hold secret meetings in a windowless room in the back.


7-11! Ha. We should be so lucky.

As you describe your meta-map, R.I. would be on the sidewalk, on a side-street near the mall but without a direct sightline to it. Peddlers, or preachers, or musicians perform and trade, and basically lose money amongst themselves. The scene keeps a teeny, functionally negligible smidgen of cash (info) circulating within the larger economy. it doesn't attract enough of a flow that it could be profitably absorbed by a larger corporation. It also does not pose a challenge to any market share or to the global process of accumulation. It is not (yet) worth the trouble of being evicted from the sidewalk, or bought off, or even being noticed. An informal individual-level exchange-slash-safety-valve, one of thousands that are, however, rapidly shrinking in number. Your "technocrats for a better dystopia" are just some potheads who hang out there, maybe have their own table. But they do talk exactly the same shit you mean.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The Great Reset leftist takes

Postby conniption » Sat May 01, 2021 8:10 pm

strategic-culture
(embedded links)

The Dystopic Great Reset and the Fight Back: Population Reduction and Hope for the Children of Men

Joaquin Flores
November 11, 2020


The Great Reset, the 4th Industrial Revolution, the 4th Turning, the Great Awakening, and Artificial Intelligence. These are the real themes that are shaping the socio-political, cultural, and ideological landscape of our lives in 2020.

The push for lockdown and quarantine towards a Great Reset is increasingly understood by critics as program of mass enslavement and collective punishment, population reduction, presented within the trappings progressive talking points. In our last piece on the Great Reset, ‘Whose Great Reset? The Fight for Our Future – Technocracy vs. the Republic’, we confronted the Orwellian nature of the term itself, showing that the ostensibly technocratic new proposal was being made in a way that appears to short-cut the decision making processes of sovereign states as well as democratic processes within republics.

In the eternal words of the Irish author, Oscar Wilde, ‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life’.

“That we live in a time where the plans of the elite are more openly and more brazenly spelled out, in fiction, in public mythology, in culture, and are manufactured in a way entirely out of the hands of the vast majority of people whose lives will be forever changed, likely for the worse, is hands-down the real catastrophe of our time.”

There is a strange, if little known fact about the lived lives of prisoners. Now that humanity faces the real daunting probability of a lockdown regime on the flimsy pretext of a virus with a 99.9% survival rate, we need to understand something about prisoners and the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening is the product of how actually imprisoned people respond to imprisonment. Just as a person deprived of vision develops an outstanding sense of smell and hearing, a person deprived of physical freedom develops a profound and reified spiritual or supernatural freedom, which is the awakening. In a strange twist of fate, the more that people are locked down, the more they awaken.

We are caught between two seeming contradictions which in fact reconcile each other. On the one hand we understand that everything happens for a reason and that justice always prevails in the end, and on the other hand we know that the possible destiny that we can have only comes at the cost of tremendous struggle, self-discipline, moral fortitude, and sacrifice. This much is the mindset of the awakened, of the political soldier, in the course of the fight against the Great Awakening and within the age of the 4th Turning.
Censoring Facts, Reifying Fiction

Last month, the father of UK PM Boris Johnson, Stanley Johnson, was caught at a second time in public, not wearing a mask. Was he unaware that there is a highly contagious pandemic, one which affects his age group in particular? Does he not know what is going on in the UK and around the world?

Or does he know something that the rest of us do not? The folly that it may be, it came to be learned that it was Stanley Johnson who wrote the dystopian fiction novel, The Virus, one that describes much of what we are living through today. He is also the author of World Population and the United Nations: Challenge and Response, a non-fiction primer on the subject described in its title. In The Virus,

In both the narrative arc of the novel, and in his own introduction, Stanley Johnson lays out the necessity of a virus in the eyes of an insidious elite to curb population growth. This coincidence with the actual Agenda 21/2030 of the UN on population control, and the commitment of vaccine advocate and WHO beneficiary Bill Gates to decrease world population, is absolutely disconcerting and raises questions about further coincidences that have since arisen. This of course includes the very position that Boris Johnson holds today in managing the real-life version of the virus in Britain today.

But is this a mere matter of coincidence, or not? That question has become the subject of a vigorous debate, with one side of the debate arguing that it is not a coincidence being tremendously censored by social media and effectively barred from giving their side, and the other side being the only voice one hears and sees across social and legacy media.

The fact of this censorship over this question alone appears to lend credence to those being censored, as is often the unintended consequence of censorship, and perhaps the last hope of man.

This is an astonishing example of life imitating art, and now with an increasing public awareness on the relationship between vaccines and infertility, we arrive at the predicate to the film ‘Children of Men’.

Children of Men depicts a world in global chaos, war, strife, open street battles between members of quasi-governmental forces and various radical and religious cults, a jihadist military push through the streets of Paris, a paramilitary junta, the effects of mass migration, open air prisons, and worse. This has taken hold of most of Europe and presumably the world. This breakdown seems to have been the product of a global pandemic of infertility of an unknown origin. A film from 2008, anyone seeing the film today would instantly recognize the scenes as approximating real-life footage seen on the news in the world of 2020.

The global infertility crisis creates a pervasive sense of insecurity, the impossibility of a stock market, and a conscious sense of impending doom and nihilist response on the part of elites.

Taken together with Johnson’s ‘The Virus’, we can make a rather educated guess how such an outcome would manifest in a reality where life is imitating art: the virus or the vaccine created to the cure the virus, in fact lends towards infertility.

It isn’t difficult to make such a guess, for the reason that, day by day, we see this dystopia becoming our everyday reality. It has become a matter of fact much more than of fiction.

This compels us to approach, soberly, a reassessment of the concept of progress and where it leads

The themes of a virus used as a predicate for both population control and a total social transformation, as we wrote about in ‘Whose Great Reset’, is one which mirrors the effects of war: both in terms of a mass casualty event and the need to ‘build back better’ after an apparent socio-economic collapse induced either by the calamity or by the government’s heavy-handed response.

The Ideological State Apparatus of Technocratic Late Modernity

For any number of years, social critics and public philosophers have raised concerns about the never-ending rise of the technocratic and futurist cult of late modernity. In many ways, this is caught up with the entire ideological project of our epoch, as a left-façade over a technocratic thought-police-state has been weaponized as what Louis Althusser had called the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) in his landmark text of the same name, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes pour une recherche)“.

That we live in a time where the plans of the elite are more openly and more brazenly spelled out, in fiction, in public mythology, in culture, and are manufactured in a way entirely out of the hands of the vast majority of people whose lives will be forever changed, likely for the worse, is hands-down the real catastrophe of our time.

For generations, citizens were bombarded with futurist and technocratic motifs, where people were encouraged to naively project their own goodness onto the aims of political and corporate leaders, and scientists, even while this goodness had not been proven or established. The white lab-coat had become synonymous not only with trust, but with good intentions, and in that sense replaced the priest’s frock and black robe. This has cultivated a fertile soil for the likes of the Dr. Anthony Fauci and his ilk. This has culminated in the now open implementation of a so-called ‘4th Industrial Revolution’, a progressivist framework wrapped within the sociology of Marx but absent its humanism and emancipatory components – a ‘technocratic Marxism of elites’.

The church of the progress myth has characterized much of the socio-political discourse of the last century. It has been one which has prepared several generations to accept the ‘challenges of change’ as a foregone necessity, towards the forging of a ‘brave new world’. It has served as the underlying assumption of the three most impactful ideologies of the 20th century: liberalism, fascism, and communism. So many apple-carts have been overturned along the way towards some combination of those ends, that today there are hundreds of millions of people who have never seen an apple cart with their own eyes.

The Ideological State Apparatus has proscribed that criticisms of real-existing policies, plans, and commitments at the level of the UN, such as Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030, are censored across social media. The censorship itself gives credence to the ‘no coincidence’ side of the present debate, because the aim of global population reduction is not only explicit, but central. The established ideological apparatus proscribes that questioning the agenda is ‘science denial’, and ‘far-right conspiracy’, which are the double-plus ungood thought-crimes of our day. Central to the ideological apparatus were the cultural and political tropes which thematically dovetailed with cultural and supply-line globalization within the framework of first-world service-based economies, itself founded on the premise of planned-obsolescence.

Population reduction however is an open goal of elites and their global governance institutions, and all that is contentious is the idea that the same governments that lied about the pretexts for the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, which then went on to murder millions of innocent people, may be lying again today about the methods they may use towards that end.

And yet the past methods of population control such as warfare of the total war type, are unacceptable for elites today because of the specter of a nuclear holocaust that would also contaminate life for the elites themselves. Johnson is not only aware of this, but is explicit in his introduction to ‘The Virus’. We can also include that war will result in one side or the other being blamed at a time of great collusion between world powers, but yet a global pandemic seems to be an act of god – when in fact perhaps it is the outcome of man playing at god.

The Ideological State Apparatus began to mutate in the late 1970’s, absorbing, deforming and then projecting back onto a society a mutated form of the very same protest radicalism which previously challenged the older Ideological State Apparatus. This new ISA was characterized by a new social morality, which delivered the now pervasive cult of political correctness. This ideological authoritarianism is one where slavery and self-harm are virtue signals, and this cultural shift towards public flagellation made possible the idea that lockdown, quarantine, and mask wearing was a sign of virtue more so than health. Without this change in the ISA over the past few decades, there could have never been a new normal.

Conclusion

As we have laid out the surface of the problem and begun to hint at the necessary course of solutions, in Part II we will dig deeper into the problem and flesh out what a just order would look like. In Part II, we will look at the origins of the social contract and the problem of free men versus the growing bureaucratic form, in history. This will set us up to look at why at the philosophical level our present elites have landed on misanthropy and genocide as a human population reduction program, as the best possible solution. Finally we will explain that while a 4th industrial revolution will come either way, that population reduction and slavery is not a necessary component of it. Rather, that it is up to free men to determine what that will look like and we will sketch out its actual functions.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... en-of-men/
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