For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.

[Harvey]

So I guess that I'm saying my opinions seem superfluous to you, maybe not because you're more spartan than me, but very much less poor than I am.

Suffice it say, I have always lived in poverty, I've never known anything else. I use 'Spartan' as a euphemism for poverty with an element of choice implied, in that I do not desire wealth, having seen what it does to friends and acquaintances.

[dada]

I like how on this message board you can discuss on many different levels on many different topics, presenting thoughts and ideas, feelings and intuitions, only to receive responses not directed at the thoughts and ideas, feelings and intuitions, but at you, personally, as the source of mild irritation or whatever nice insults have been devised this week.

So alright, I get the message. The poor voice has no place, even in the wilderness of the most rigorous intuitives on the fringes of mass culture. So sorry to have overstayed my welcome, infringing on all your lovely hospilaties. Please enjoy your cruiseline holiday here where angels fear to tread. Have a blast for me.

[dada]

Alright, so you're poor too. So how can you afford to dismiss me so easily, then?

[dada]

I'll say what spartan means to me, in relation to impovershed. We're talking my conception of the lifestyles, not making a comment on your conceptions of them.

Spartan to me brings with it a sense of japanese space, simple lines, a cozy cleanliness, sparse, plain, useful objects tucked away here and there showing hints of personality. Poor, maybe, but there is the cost of holding the outside world at bay, a price that must be payed.

Impovershed feels like the chinese recluse. Shack is falling apart, tea kettle is dented. The outside world is free to enter, like the breezes blowing through. Because for the impovershed lifestyle, the outside world is held at bay at no cost at the borders of the mind.

[dada]

I feel kind of like asking me "what is my alternative" after everything I've been on about on the mainstream nature of all mass culture alternatives is like when mass culture asked occupy wall street, "what is your plan or agenda." We all know what kind of bullshit that was then, but here it's okay for you to come at me with the same attitude, like you're the spokesperson of reasonable opinions, and I'm just some nuisance cutting into the news cycle.

As I was saying to Jack earlier, alternatives are like different flavors of ice cream. The mainstream is the most popular flavor. Asking me what is my alternative, you might as well be asking me which flavor of ice cream do I recommend.

Transgressing the ice cream debate, and not choosing an alternative is the way to go, obviously. Just sop buying ice cream from society. Could make your own, or just stop eating it.

Ice cream lovers will say are you crazy? No ice cream. What are you, lactose intolerant? They have flavors for that now, you know.

Like I'm not eating ice cream because I can't, or don't like it. As if anyone doesn't like ice cream.

It makes sense if its literal ice cream, and I said, stop buying ice cream. That appeals to the church of stop shopping parishoner in all of us, me included. But if I say it is the same with social media, we can't seem to make the connection with the consumer, there's a short circuit when it comes to understanding it is the exact same appeal to the consumer, to stop shopping for mass produced ideas.

And not that it has to be a case of killing a craving, like going without something you enjoy eating. If you want ice cream, have ice cream. Want social media, have social media. For me, I'm so absorbed in living thought that I don't even think about ice cream, sometimes for months at a time. Like, noticing it and realizing wow, I haven't had any ice cream in so long I don't even remember when the last time was.

[Harvey]

I fear we're having different conversations. No offence meant.

[dada]

Well, you could go into that, if you cared to. We could work together maybe, figure out where the communication breakdown is, precisely.

Anyway that's up to you, I'm certainly game. But if not, I get it. Really, I was coming back here just now to say that I know understanding my point of view is not what some people have in mind when they come here. And so I'm sorry for getting in the way.

There is no place where I can talk about these things in this way, certainly not anywhere on social media, it is too broken. This message board is the closest thing I've ever found to a place where I can do my thing. But I know that others are here for different reasons, looking to get something else out of it.

I think for me the problem is seeing people in pain because they feel they are living on the leftover scraps that fall off the tables of the corporate arm of mass production, and at the same time watching them living on the scraps that fall off mass culture's table.

That's my view, I know. I just don't want to spend my time in discussions of the trending stories of the moment as they are released and promoted, would like to interact in dialogue with original thoughts that have never before been published on any media outlet. It's just too much to ask, I know.

I would like to come to some kind of understanding between our Rigorous Intuition consuming styles, but when I'm being honest with myself I know that it can never work, and it isn't you, its me. I'm just spoiling whatever palliative effect the board brings to the alternative-seekers, and the raining mass media garbage falling from the heavens above gets in the way of the free flow of thought.

So what else is there to do. I know what, I should do you a favor and get. Probably be doing the free flow of thought a good turn, too. Just let the board go on its merry way, wish it well, walk away softly, like the angels treading on my dreams.

[conniption]

Edward Curtin
(embedded links)

The Etymological Animal Must Slip Out of the Cage of Habit to Grasp Truth

Edward Curtin
Jun 6, 2021

Etymology – from Greek, etymos, true, real, actual (the study of roots)

Photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash

Life is full of slips.

Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us. Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us. Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us. And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.

Slips are double-edged.

It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control. Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.” Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.

Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.

In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide. They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations. This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior. Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories. It is not just words that have etymologies.

When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today. Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown. It slips in when people are asleep.

John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:

Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.

And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control. For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life. This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines. A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign. In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:

… the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual. The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything. Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.

Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively. Ellul again:

It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary). Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.

The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds. This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.

In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses. This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness. To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.

Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.” First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem. A slippery slope indeed.

But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare. It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.

In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum. I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously. The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality. Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it. And it will. But don’t say this out loud.

So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:

So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.

A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility. Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion. Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.

The other day I was going grocery shopping. My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.” Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred. “I prefer whipping,” she said.

I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”

We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she. She slipped, and I found humor in that. Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.

But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things. Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them. Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.

Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down. In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies. We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.

It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many. A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”

But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate. To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society. Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.

So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?

This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.

I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.

We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells. Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television. Close the computer. Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others. Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away. Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe. Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly. Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite. Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow. It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing. In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:

It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.

I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us. But without it we are lost. Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought. Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.” Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset. If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation. Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.

There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks. It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness. Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”

It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.
_______
comments

http://edwardcurtin.com/the-etymologica ... asp-truth/

[drstrangelove]

I wonder if any of the Q folk ever found out the Rothschild's refinanced Trump's debt multiple times during the early 90s, allowing him to keep all three of his casinos. Then when he became President he appointed the man who handled this business for them, Wilbur Ross, as his Secretary of Commerce.

It may be too late, but I pretty sure I could co-opt the Q movement with this information and sell them vitality vitamins.

[DrEvil]

Vitamin Q.

I sometimes consider making up some crazy shit and cobbling together a blog, just to see if I can get people to believe it. Then I usually remember that I'm a) too lazy, and b) I would be fucking with actual people's heads.

The scary part is how easy it looks, considering what people already believe. One part outrage, one part confirmation bias, a dash of innocent victims, sprinkle with "them", stir vigorously and distribute.

[drstrangelove]

The twist: Trump was a secret Rothschild agent all along. There is still secret rebellion of military generals, but since the capital attacks they've had to go back underground. US Space Force is actually a new military agency created by these generals to infiltrate the network of Rothschild laser satellites orbiting the earth which control the media. Elon Musk has been working with these generals on this secret operation, which is "Starlink" or "SpaceX" or whatever the fuck, and Dogecoin is a secret Rebellion fund financing these operations.

Start projecting hidden meaning on Elon Musk tweets, Get Vitamin Q heads to fund the rebellion by investing in dogecoin.

People just want something to believe in as Western civilization declines. We should give them a fucking show!

[DrEvil]

Polls consistently show religion on the decline in the west, but I wonder how much of that is a genuine decline, and how much is people just moving on to other belief systems, like flat Earth or QAnon. Future shock is doing a number on people's heads, and the results are equal parts baffling and terrifying.

The slow decline will probably result in an uptick in religious belief, but I'm not sure it will be the traditional religions. I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's belief circles, where people use pervasive augmented reality to live in their reality of choice. How long until there's an optional reality that makes the world flat?

[drstrangelove]

spirituality is a basic human need, people can't escape it. secularism has turned itself into The Science!, which is a kind of self worship or collective narcissism.
conspiracy theory is the logical antithesis to this. QAnon an impotent extremist sect.

i actually think reality has become a market. seems to trend like fashion. the capitol riots were like a larping event. we are all playing make believe now. does QAnon really believe anything less real than the professional classes reading their cosmopolitan newspapers of records? If i has to choose between the two, i'd choose QAnon.

[DrEvil]

I'm starting to think the Internet is just too fast. Information doesn't have time to percolate around our skulls between monthly magazines or newsletters or club meetings or book readings or whatever, it's instantly replaced with something new and shiny and outrageous. Nothing really sticks, it has to be chopped up into soundbytes and short video clips with bright colors, all screaming for our goldfish attention, not long enough for subtance, only long enough to satisfy the algorithms; wise men doling out monetization rewards and engagement metrics from the sacred hill of Silicon Valley.

[stickdog99]

Polls consistently show religion on the decline in the west, but I wonder how much of that is a genuine decline, and how much is people just moving on to other belief systems, like flat Earth or QAnon. Future shock is doing a number on people's heads, and the results are equal parts baffling and terrifying.

The slow decline will probably result in an uptick in religious belief, but I'm not sure it will be the traditional religions. I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's belief circles, where people use pervasive augmented reality to live in their reality of choice. How long until there's an optional reality that makes the world flat?

The Branch Covidian Cult of Infinite Vaccination and Social Distancing, anyone?

To me, the scariest thing about my neighbors' lockstep responses to COVID-19 has always been the utter religiousness of the hand washing, mask wearing, social distancing, and sacramental vaccination rituals. True believers are sanctified and virtuous. Those who question are unclean heretics.