Original RI quotes only

[JackRiddler]

"I don't have you on ignore. I never had you on ignore. I hate the ignore function and only grudgingly have experimented with it. I do fantasize about being on ignore though. Like doing a pantomime in front of a blindfolded audience. I hate mimes too. Strange that you seem to lack many of the social graces and yet are way more social than I am." -- brainpanhandler

[Allegro]

It's typical of capitalism, period. There is no distinction here between parties or governments. The entity that first announced the death of the textbook was Apple, already the killer of the music album. The corporations with the influence - in this case electronics makers, media and education vendors - are on the offensive. It's typical of the war on teachers and "school reform." It's typical of techno-fetishism and the worship of the new without limits or understanding. It's typical of the almost overwhelming trends to media convergence, cultural homogeneity and speed. It's typical of a civilization without self-reflection, theoretical thinking or widespread awareness of how tools shape the human being. It's typical of anti-intellectualism and hatred of learning and ideas. It's typical of a training that extends far enough that even most social movements also don't get it, and have come to understand themselves mainly as electronically linked social networks. But it's also perceived as bottom-line cost-effective. Everyone's got devices already and so people think this is cheaper, even if, in the case of schools, it obviously won't be.

[JackRiddler]

Re: 20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

It's simulations all the way down... and perhaps all the way up as well.

The irreducible quantum of experience is awareness, which observes each moment's tapering ends, past and future, as the absolute limits of its own contracted space, the place within which every thought and action is an experiment to prove the efficacy of speculation in the absence of absolute knowledge.

But speculation itself is a form of simulation, giving inhabitable shapes to conceptual spaces that are otherwise ill-defined and spread across inhospitable and threatening topographies of doubt and uncertainty. The environments we live within are themselves intricate simulations constructed out of speculative architectures that are designed by agencies hired by our consensus. The patient engineering of these agencies can be described as conspiracy (cooperative) or disassociation (entropic), depending largely on the perspective of the observer, whose awareness is focused by the energies of appetite and desire, or disinterest and detachment. Of course, conspiracy and disassociation have both positive and negative aspects, and the quality of experience will only emerge out of the aggregated circumstances drawn in by the strange attractors unique to individuals and their preferred speculations (simulations).

That we exist in a vast active living intelligence machine that computes our reality into some kind of illusory experience environment is probably truth without the formality of verification. The identity suggested in this analogy is almost certainly unknowable in itself. That is the gift of our paradoxical condition, to never know for certain that we are the authors of all things, in some experiment of creation that generates itself forever within the finite space of our own awareness.

[Iamwhomiam]

Elvis wrote:
This might be a good place to lay out the evidence for the primacy of consciousness over matter---even the origin of matter from consciousness---but honestly I'm too busy and distracted to focus on it just now.

[Elvis]

LOL

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^^ Hee, hee!

Project Willow wrote:

Wow. This is RI folks, y'all know it's more complicated than that.

[JackRiddler]

I've had NDA's for the last 30 jobs I've had, at least. I've had training binders full of WTF for at least 25 out of those 30. So much of gainful employment in 2012 is just humoring the pathologies of these ruling class parasites...an education unto itself. I have often evoked my work experience in the mental health field, mostly because it was so eye-opening, humble-izing, and brutally shocking. In recent months I have come to appreciate how much it prepared me for the opposite side of the food chain: attending to the mental health needs of "successful" Americans, you know....job creators.

[brainpanhandler]

It's like you only care about dead babies if someone shows you a picture and makes you feel like a super-special rebellious insider know-it-all for being angered by it or something. Shame on you.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33931&start=450

[JackRiddler]

We got power back this morning at 4:39 AM. I wil remember that time for the rest of my life.

A few things that I've learned:

01. Sixteen flights of stairs is A LOT of stairs. Even more so in a building with ZERO emergency lighting. None. Zip. Nada. Just a jet black stairwell.

02. Eleven year old, 65 pound dogs really aren't fond of walking up 16 flights of stairs lit only by a flashlight. They're even more opposed, however, to walking DOWN 16 flights of stairs. Especially when they're made of very slippery painted concrete. This gets old really quick, but by the fourth day, you begin to feel so much like Daniel fucking Boone that a functioning elevator seems like a sissy copout.

03. Eighty mph winds are somehow capable of ripping your locked patio door open when you least expect it. Those same winds are also capable of dislodging the door from it's top hinge, making it impossible to close without the help of an enormous Ukranian maintenance man named Addy. And while you're waiting for your fiance to track down Addy, an average sized guy (me) will have an awfully hard time holding the door "closed," and keeping the dog and cat away from the maelstrom.

04. Downtown Broadway can look pretty fucking apocalyptic when you're the only living thing in sight for 30 blocks or so.

05. Fifty five degrees fahrenheit is the cutoff for my ability to sleep.

06. Having to decide whether to use your limited water supply to force-flush the toilet or to keep your pets hydrated is a pretty easy decision, but you don't want to live with the smelly consequences for too long.

07. A boom box with eight D batteries lasts at least 4.5 days.

08. Small LED bicycle lights and reading lamps are easier to use than standard flashlights.

09. I wouldn't want to eat it every day, but Chef Boyardee makes some mean cuisine.

10. If a relationship is truly tested in a crazy situation like this, then I can report that Miss Dazzling and I have passed yet another test.

Carry on.

[Allegro]

Whatever. I even tried to make a thread giving people the opportunity to insult me outside of this thread but it was quickly taken down. I don't know what else to do so I guess I'll just stop posting. So congratulations insular group of RI thought police. You've successfully silenced yet another viewpoint that you don't agree with through harassment, intimidation, and personal attacks. How anti-fascist of you.

You Are not Fooling Everybody, Mary Poppins.

[JackRiddler]

Indeed, I seem to recall that education was an even greater factor in determining birth rates than quality of life, no? That delightful Hans Rosling guy who runs around in front of a projection screen on TED all the time, it's a great schtick.

It's dizzying to read something like this Mark Ames piece on the fascist origins of "Right to Work" rhetoric & strategy, and contemplate the mind control networks operating in plain sight known as organized religions -- consider how much the Baptist clergy were able to control the first two generations of Rockefeller investment! Consider the Mormon Empire, or the mighty Protestant Army known as the CIA...it's hard to avoid the conclusion that ignorance is an investment.

From Charlotte Isyerbit to John Taylor Gatto, it's never been much of a secret, either...discussed in public, blueprints and aplenty and a hundred hand-written smoking guns. The payoff is what we're living through now: a majority that is dumb enough to swallow anything, being programmed and played for decades by a relentlessly in-fighting insider cabal of sociopaths and occasional dreamers. I don't think most of them are really prepared to handle the blowback when this trend continues, though -- they have been far too successful for their own good, let alone anyone else's.

The question of how to reverse the trend, halt the momentum, is a central concern. I suspect the answer has more to do with the principles behind one-on-one conversational therapy / NLP material will have more of an answer to offer than any pedagogy theory -- although I do dig the work of Reuven Feuerstein and recommend it to anyone interesting in learning or school reform.

Anyways: open hearts and ocean-sized patience. Dumb is pathology, we have to talk ourselves out of it.

[streeb]

Shall we go see Zero Dark Thirty, or stay home and play Black Ops II ?

- Skunkboy

[JackRiddler]

Heartbreaking.

Given the matter is not just another clever post but the most horrible thing that can happen to anyone, I should apologize. But this should be in the semi-permanent record:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35955&start=45#p489232

Parts of this thread boggle my mind. I try to imagine someone rating me on my "appearance of grief" back in November of 1982 when my only son died and all I can say is that it's so profoundly unempathic and escapist/denial-based that it hurts to think about. Those poor parents, having to bear that outrageous indignity along with their grief. During the first 24 hours after my son died, I went through distinct phases of reaction--hysteria, horror and the shock-induced silence that followed, numb calm and terrible shaking pain and suicidal longing. And I was doing it essentially alone. Had I had other parents grieving with me, I know they would have affected how I looked and sounded--human beings do that if they're empathic--but all those reactions would still have been there, either in public or in private, sooner or later.

And who knows what drugs some of these poor suffering people were given to allow them to continue to function for their remaining family members? I remember someone offered me a valium at one point and I took it to get through the old-fashioned funeral, which included a walk down the main street of the tiny town in W PA, from the funeral home to the cemetery, following the carried coffin past all the residents of the town. Without chemical help I would have collapsed. Did anyone judge me by the fact that my face showed my numbness? How about by the fact that the drug allowed me to interact with the rest of the family and friends without wailing my grief aloud as I walked? Did that count against me?

Sorry to get so personal, but I watched those Connecticut parents and saw their reactions and ALL of them were normal for our culture. I had to say something.

LilyPat

[brainpanhandler]

The greater and greater the disconnect gets between what the public thinks is the glorious system of representative citizen-rule preserving the hallowed tradition & ideals of liberty, and the reality of our subservience to an unelected cabal of thieves, traitors, bottom-feeders, conmen, racketeers & psychopathic opportunists who work hand-in-glove with the feudal technocracy of corporate & MIC gangsters, the more avidly and even desperately the dumbed-down-and-proud-of-it! public consumes infotainment propaganda cleverly disguised as romanticized historical docudramas that champion the mythologized heroism of America the Great. Its like an ever-expanding closed-circle feedback-loop that takes more-and-more effort & creative intensity to keep going and from unraveling into the rats nest of lies and frauds from which its made.

I suppose some comfort can be taken in realizing that inevitably every system based on lies and deception must fail as the poverty of crippled imagination, perverted will, corrupted ideals & betrayal of principle will cause systemic breakdown by impeding the system's ability to adapt and survive changing conditions. The rote habits of thinking and fossilized values which enforced group mind-think conformity become major liabilities to growth and adaptation -- the system falls apart, implodes and feeds off itself like a parasitical cannibal.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34976&hilit=argo

[JackRiddler]

I contend that people who play bingo instead of scrabble are less likely to reach their 90s.