rigorousintuition.ca

Plutonia » 11 Dec 2016 13:01 wrote:I'm going to try to articulate an aspect of pizzagate that I haven't seen addressed here yet, so bear with me - it's an idea I'm still formulating:

When the Kekians/ Trumpians caught the weird pizza references in the Podesta emails and went looking, what grabbed their attention were the strong, disturbing, visuals - visuals which were amplified by captions/comments. Is this not how advertising works?

It is possible that we've all developed a groove in our brains where semiotics like that ie image + caption, slip into the groove which activates a program that outputs Consumers? Seems not likely, right?

From what I saw of the Anon War on Scientology, some Anons were very skilled in wielding this technology - image + caption - if that is what it is(?). Perhaps time spent on the imageboards is a super training ground for semioticians? That also seems likely.

So whether pizzagate was set up as a psyop to capture the public's imagination or whether it was inadvertent, it certainly has. And even if the enthusiasm of the early adopters was consumeristic, I do think that overall the zeitgeist has shifted - similar to what happened in the UK with Jimmy Saville when all those people who had watched him on TV over decades, came out of it and realised what they had seen.

tl;dr: thanks to the particular visual aspects of pizzagate, the premise of a high level pedophile ring (HLPR) went from a collective consensus of {empty set}, to a collective realisation of "It's REAL!! What was Wombat's stat? Approximately 50% of Americans surveyed?

And because of that new sense of HLPR's reality, people who never would have before, are discovering and reading walls of text about Franklin, Dutroux, Savile, Sandusky, PIE, NAMBLA etc. I understand that taking on board can be deeply destabilizing - and yes, people are hysterical - but I think overall it is a net good: Lori Handrahan who is a careful and meticulous investigator, has reported a jump in site visits of thousands per day.

A personal anecdote here: When I first came across the notion of HLPR's about 20 years ago, I almost completely rejected the idea. I couldn't because the person telling me about it was a trusted friend and activist ally. It was confounding; seemed like crazy talk. What I did was to put it aside in a mental compartment as an unanswered and unanswerable question. Ten years later I came across RigInt and began the process of accepting HLPR's as a factual reality. So even though I've had 20 years to adjust to the idea and I can't say that I've been able to be calm an unaffected - my life has been disrupted, definitely and my sleep is disturbed etc.

That's it.

Except for this on semiotics:

For most semioticians both denotation and connotation involve the use of codes. Structural semioticians who emphasise the relative arbitrariness of signifiers and social semioticians who emphasize diversity of interpretation and the importance of cultural and historical contexts are hardly likely to accept the notion of a 'literal' meaning. Denotation simply involves a broader consensus. The denotational meaning of a sign would be broadly agreed upon by members of the same culture, whereas 'nobody is ever taken to task because their connotations are incorrect', so no inventory of the connotational meanings generated by any sign could ever be complete (Barnard 1996, 83). However, there is a danger here of stressing the 'individual subjectivity' of connotation: 'intersubjective' responses are shared to some degree by members of a culture; with any individual example only a limited range of connotations would make any sense. Connotations are not purely 'personal' meanings - they are determined by the codes to which the interpreter has access. Cultural codes provide a connotational framework since they are 'organized around key oppositions and equations', each term being 'aligned with a cluster of symbolic attributes' (Silverman 1983, 36). Certain connotations would be widely recognized within a culture. Most adults in Western cultures would know that a car can connote virility or freedom.
http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Docum ... sem06.html

In other words, a Spirit Cooking Dinner, is not just a Spirit Cooking Dinner when the "connotational framework" it has been discovered within is wealth, power, corruption and child exploitation.

I'm going to read more Barthes.

barracuda wrote:I believe that is colloquially referred to as a "limited hangout".

Wombaticus Rex wrote: Nicer cult leaders, more pragmatic messiahs.

Probably not, though.

MacCruiskeen wrote:People have never been easier to fool. Decades of TV addiction has caused actual brain damage.

Occult style ritual abuse is like the dark side of “creative self-expression”: destructive self-repression. And yet it also has a creative, theatrical component, one that is fueled by the same unconscious trauma as dark fairy tales or cathartic works of art. It’s nearly impossible to delineate where one ends and the other begins, because it is a continuum and there is no actual cut-off point. These horror shows are being both openly and secretly enacted via fantasy and reality. That’s abuse culture: abuse that is culturally conditioned and a culture that is fundamentally abusive.(Abuse Culture.)

Plutonia wrote:Trump or Hillary, we were always going to get f*cked.

PufPuf93 wrote:The problem I see with "PizzaGate" is that probably most of the most recent brouhaha is smoke that obscures and deflects the reality of organized pedophile networks participated in and protected by political and financial elites.

The counter productiveness of "PizzaGate" is that what oozes out from internet and blogosphere niches and into broad public awareness is on first blush so over the top "fake news" that many do not take the underlying reality serious now and into the future.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:-14% of Trump supporters think Hillary Clinton is connected to a child sex ring run out of a Washington DC pizzeria. Another 32% aren't sure one way or another, much as the North Carolinian who went to Washington to check it out last weekend said was the case for him. Only 54% of Trump voters expressly say they don't think #Pizzagate is real.

slomo » Sun Dec 11, 2016 5:58 am wrote: I mean that on the spectrum of positions espoused (or seemingly espoused) on this topic, you represent one end, while the other end is represented by (say) Jerky.

slomo » Sun Dec 11, 2016 5:58 am wrote: I don't think it is inaccurate to say that the totality of your points on this thread, and the way you contextualize them, suggest that your Bayesian posterior probability of pizzagate representing something "real" is higher than mine, and likely highest of all the RI members who have commented here.

slomo » Sun Dec 11, 2016 5:58 am wrote: Speaking of Bayesian posteriors, somewhere upthread I reported a posterior probability of about 5% that PG represents something I can't possibly even understand. I am now raising that probability to 80%.

Plutonia » 11 Dec 2016 13:01 wrote: When the Kekians/ Trumpians caught the weird pizza references in the Podesta emails and went looking, what grabbed their attention were the strong, disturbing, visuals - visuals which were amplified by captions/comments. Is this not how advertising works?

It is possible that we've all developed a groove in our brains where semiotics like that ie image + caption, slip into the groove which activates a program that outputs Consumers? Seems not likely, right?

From what I saw of the Anon War on Scientology, some Anons were very skilled in wielding this technology - image + caption - if that is what it is(?). Perhaps time spent on the imageboards is a super training ground for semioticians? That also seems likely.

So whether pizzagate was set up as a psyop to capture the public's imagination or whether it was inadvertent, it certainly has. And even if the enthusiasm of the early adopters was consumeristic, I do think that overall the zeitgeist has shifted - similar to what happened in the UK with Jimmy Saville when all those people who had watched him on TV over decades, came out of it and realised what they had seen.

tl;dr: thanks to the particular visual aspects of pizzagate, the premise of a high level pedophile ring (HLPR) went from a collective consensus of {empty set}, to a collective realisation of "It's REAL!! What was Wombat's stat? Approximately 50% of Americans surveyed?

“This is not a ‘fishing trip’ or ‘witch-hunt’ – both of these terms have been unfairly levelled at us.” He cited the constitutional principle of policing being free of undue influence from the state, as he pledged the investigation would continue.

“I take my responsibilities of operational independence, which is the bedrock of British policing, very seriously indeed. Therefore I will remain operationally independent and will not be influenced by inappropriate and unacceptable pressure from people who don’t know the detail of this case.

“I will not be buckling under pressure to not investigate or to conclude the investigation prematurely.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... witch-hunt

Plutonia » 11 Dec 2016 13:45 wrote:I lean towards "autocthonic emergent phenomenon", Slomo, but that may only be because I'm an unwarranted optimist.

I do think we are entering a liminal period - with all it's dangers as panicked psyches return to infantile states and grasp for certainties.

This may seem like seem like a stre-e-etch, but this may be due to Wikileaks - I definitely felt something shift when the State Dept cables were released a few years ago and ever afterwards there have been challenges to American dominance from all sorts.

The Ickean dreamwork posted by Richard Seymour

A 'Content Warning' is appropriate here, given the subject and tone of this post.*

That is to say, I am about to speak of the violent, sexual abuse of children, and of the fantasies through which this traumatic subject is experienced. In a way, of course, I'm speaking here about my own investment in this subject, albeit only indirectly. And just because I'll be talking about delusion, about conspiracy theory, is no reason to assume to that I'm dismissing these fantasies, or suggesting that they belong solely to a special case of people. I think we should take them seriously, because there is something disturbing about them, and because at any rate there isn't any august position from which it is possible not to be subject to fantasy, and its coordinates: the abused, the abusers, the horrified spectators. Even those reacting to the moral panic have their own persecution/conspiracy fantasy.

So, let's start with David Icke. Icke is an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, whose trademark theory is that the world is subject to the secret rule of alien reptilian beings. But his foundational ideological gesture, linking the progressive-sounding New Age patter with the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' stuff, and the chumminess with American white nationalists, is that he is "exposing the dreamworld". That is, he is attacking a representation, a construction, of reality that he claims is a fantasy. He is not wrong about that; his mistake is simply to think that it is possible to live outside of fantasy. This notion of a Bastillean rupture with the unreal is, of course, culturally pervasive, and evidently speaks to a widespread desire. But it is as possible for humans to live outside of fantasy as it is for fish to live outside of water. Anyway, for years Icke, like other reactionary conspiracy theorists of the genre, has written extensively about an alleged Satanic child abuse conspiracy. But he didn't make it up all by himself: the raw material for it came from the national media, as well as from the police and social workers. Among those he named as a Satanic child rapist was Ted Heath, who has been the subject of such rumours for some years.

Now sometimes reality embodies fantasy in an uncanny way. Just as 9/11 resembled something from a Hollywood production, so the current paedophile scandal at the top of British politics increasingly resembles something from the Ickean imagination. For the full Icke experience, one would merely need to overlay the scenario with some added contours - Satanists, Jews, alien reptiles, bloodlines, magic rituals, mind-programming. This comes up because, of course, Ickeans are crowing about each new disclosure, or claim, or nebulous allusion, that comes up in connection with the child rape scandal. Now with the resurfacing of the Heath allegations, his old texts in which he had named the former Prime Minister as a Satanist child rapist are resurfacing. The master saw it coming. As I say, the Ickeans are wrong in their assumption that Icke did anything other than synthesise existing memes. And if you look at the linked text, it is also clear that the particular ideological dreamwork through which he processes this material is not particular to him.

The structure of the confection is, of course, a textbook example of paranoiac knowledge. Everything is connected: a supposed satanic ritual site in Buckinghamshire is associated with the Prime Ministerial residence, 'Chequers', which leads to the black and white squares on a chequers board, which leads to the 'floor plan' of Freemasonic temples, and so on. Essentially, paranoia is about 'making connections' endlessly, exploiting the slippage of signifiers, without ever knowing where to make the cut, where to disconnect. If you really want to, you can go on making connections endlessly, forming a chain of identifications linking one thing to the next thing to the next thing, ad infinitum. At some point, rigour means making the cut. The inability to do so is a sure sign of the presence of jouissance; I'm too invested in it, enjoying it too much, to stop the chain of associations.

And the lurid details that Icke fondly layers into his rape/snuff fantasies - the vivid details of sexual violation, slaughter, organ harvesting, fat and blood collection, consumption - are very powerfully libidinally invested. Every good horror flick is also someone's porn. Horror wouldn't work, wouldn't have its particular repulsive charge, if it didn't engage the libido. This is not to say that the Ickeans consciously 'get off' on this stuff. They, of course, find it 'horrifying', disturbing, almost impossible to bear. Living with such 'knowledge' is not easy. But it is precisely the horror that they are getting off on in a way, and are addicted to. This isn't a moralistic point, and moralising wouldn't help. What is needed, if anything, is a certain pragmatic toleration of psychic amorality, so that these fantasies can be more openly engaged with.

Icke's little touches, anyway, are so telling. He hears from a woman who was forced to lie on the cold floor of a church while a little boy, no older than six, was forced to crouch over her while being raped. At the end, his throat was slit, and the blood poured over her. In a striking moment of identification with the woman and the horrific thoughts she lives with, Icke puts in brackets: "(God, the thought of it)". This feminine identification, this identification with the one who is passive, abused, helpless on the cold floor, helpless in the face of her own thoughts, is a moment of truth. It is, to put it this way, the truth of the text: it is Icke's helplessness in the face of his own thoughts, the plague of fantasies that assails him, the desires that motivate them which he doesn't even understand, which structures the text.

And there is something to be said about unconscious desire here. All fantasy stages a desire of some sort. To be absolutely clear, this doesn't necessarily mean that the unconscious desire in question is about abusing, or being abused, or spectating at abuse. Ideological fantasies - that is to say, all fantasies - proceed through phases of disguise, displacement, and overdetermination. Freud's remarkable, unsurpassed and really under-explored paper, 'A Child is Being Beaten', describes some of the phases through which desire and its fantasmatic fulfilment can pass, such that an original incestuous desire to be loved by the parent becomes, through stages of permutation and concealment, an erotic fantasy about 'a child' being beaten by some authority figure. In the phases of the fantasy, one proceeds through different identifications - the one perpetrating the beating, the one experiencing the beating, and then ultimately the horrified/aroused spectator. I am not suggesting that this reading can be transposed onto the Ickean fantasy here; that would be crass. But the point is that there is a yield. They're getting something out of these fantasies, because the fantasy stages the fulfilment, at some remove, of an unconscious desire. What are you getting out of your fantasies?

At least Icke is aware that he isn't to be trusted. Embedded within his labyrinthine horror fantasy is a degree of self-satire. Icke hears from an "informant" who was raped as a child, and who has the most stunningly elaborate story to tell. Some days after speaking to him, his informant gets in touch again, to say that she had been abducted by "six Satanists" and, with a syringe held against her neck, told to stop talking to "That dangerous prat, Icke". They also, as if the threat to kill her was not enough, added that they would abduct her dog, and post it back to her in pieces. The fucking dog. If you were to analyse this as one would analyse a dream, and that is essentially what a fantasy is, you would say first of all that the unreality is precisely an indication that the unconscious is at work. Because the unconscious recognises no difference between the real and the unreal. Second, you would pay close attention when the figure of an "informant" appears, and when specific statements take place within the dream, such as "That dangerous prat, Icke". Of the many ways in which we deal with unacceptable thoughts, the crafty rhetoric and witticisms through which we allow them to expressed while disavowing them, probably the most ideologically charged is that whereby we project them onto a monstrous, demonic figure - which is literally what Icke does here.

What have I done here? I've taken a quite commonplace set of ideological gestures, above all the invested, libidinised identification with victimhood, and projected it, displaced it - put the blame for it all on a single, culturally marginal crank. This is a useful way to avoid criticism - if that is even possible on the internet - because I can talk frankly about these fantasies, the obscure identifications taking place in them, and their invested nature, without appearing to attack anyone who actually matters. But I said already: those reacting against the moral panic are every bit as implicated in this. The 'backlash' columns, in which pundits go to battle against cultural hysteria, end up reproducing it. They start with a disavowal. It can't be true. Lovely Ted? The former Prime Minister who detested Mrs Thatcher? It just can't be. They proceed to identify the real conspiracy and menace: Dominic Kennedy of The Times and Dan Hodges of the Telegraph both invoking the Third Reich. As if that was indicative of a proportionate, considered and non-invested response. As if that wasn't itself a paranoid persecution fantasy.

What is it that they're trying to protect? By 'they', I mean, not those who actually are guilty. Not those who actually abused or helped others to abuse. But those who just want it to go away, who experience the whole saga as more of a deep existential threat than a possible opening to justice. Maybe some of them are trying to protect the institutions they value - the family, the church, the state. In this, they cut the sad figure of the guilty guardian of family secrets who won't hear it said that father, or mother, may have raped the children. I suspect many more are worried about the still undecided cultural shift that the current moral panic adverts to, and particularly about having to re-evaluate and change their behaviour if the old sexist, patriarchal norms sustaining sexual violence are widely discredited. And for them, the moral panic and the conspiracy mongering is a gift, in that it weakens and damages the case for social change.

Because the really traumatic thing that the screen of fantasy is designed to protect us from is that the use and abuse of children, sexually, physically, emotionally, is not an 'alien' behaviour. It is not something that comes from another planet, or even another culture. Zizek's commentary on the Fritzl case is astute: the unconscious assumption of many parents is that they have absolute entitlement, absolute right to enjoyment of, use of, disposal of, 'their' child. It comes out by implication. Think about how pissed off many parents become when there's a move to ban what is euphemistically called 'smacking' - "don't you tell me how to raise my child." There is, of course, a reason the desire is unconscious, in that it is absolutely incompatible with prevalent social norms; yet it persists, it is there, stitched into the fundamental cellular unit of capitalist civilization, the Oedipal family. And it is there, far more recurrently than in 'stranger danger' or 'elite predation', that violation is more common than we would like to think. This is what the fantasy projections - about Jews, about Muslims, about alien Others, about the Third Reich - are protecting us from.


*About trigger/content warnings, I am reminded of my old R.E. teacher who, when showing us a very upsetting propaganda film about abortions one day, explained to the girls in the class that he'd be very disappointed if none of them walked out in distress. And he truly was disappointed. There is a sense in which the TW, or CW, has the same function as the 'parental advice' on old CDs, or the 'health warning' on tobacco - it's the advertising.

Plutonia » Sun Dec 11, 2016 2:45 pm wrote:I do think we are entering a liminal period - with all it's dangers as panicked psyches return to infantile states and grasp for certainties.

n other words, a Spirit Cooking Dinner, is not just a Spirit Cooking Dinner when the "connotational framework" it has been discovered within is wealth, power, corruption and child exploitation.

Makes me wonder what backtoiam could possibly have done to get a permanent ban. . .?))

divideandconquer » Mon Dec 12, 2016 1:02 am wrote:

Makes me wonder what backtoiam could possibly have done to get a permanent ban. . .?))

Permanent ban??? I was wondering what happened to him. What did he do? All I remember is that he posted a picture of some kind, but, as far as I was aware, only to prove something or other. I don't think it was posted with malicious intent or deserved a permanent ban. Not that anyone cares what I think...just sayin'

P.S. Why did RI members dislike him so intensely? I could never figure that out. I felt a certain camaraderie with him...both of us, RI misfits, or something like that