A little birdie told me that Trump is talking of closing the borders around the crumbling Empire to keep the Barbarians at bay. But the real barbarians are inside the Tower, and always have been; so what’s the end game here?
Create proxy armies like ISIS and resource-plundering “wars” like Gulf 1 & 2, and one thing you can be sure of is a steady influx of refugees fleeing the war-torn territories and seeking sanctuary in the lands of plenty where the bombs issued from. Destabilization is the name of the game, and geopolitics is as much a game of dominoes as of chess. Undermine one tectonic plate and you undermine them all. As above so below, as within so without; every action has an equal and corresponding reaction.
I once wrote (as far back as 1990) that “The bid to union is a bid to war.” I am not sure how I meant it at the tender age of twenty-three, but now I would say that, if this is true, it is true partially because, when you try and force peoples, nations, and worldviews together that are to some degree incompatible, the result is that they will clash and fly apart with the same force with which they have been forced to “get along.” This is also why, to reduce it to a gnomic soundbite, tolerance = tyranny: because even the idea of tolerance contains within it the seed of force. It is, simply put, no substitute for love or understanding.
What I perceive, in my naïve, apolitical, and politically under-informed/over-insulated gonzo fashion, is this: that the “balkanization” or atomization of the US was always part of the long-term goal and now we are seeing just exactly how and why. That bombing the shit out of countries and routing out their indigenous inhabitants wasn’t just a way to plunder the resources; it was also a way to ensure a flood of immigrants and refugees to destabilize one’s own territory, and so pave the way for a plundering of one’s own resources. The nature of the barbaric instinct to plunder is not to stop plundering until every last resource has been gobbled up and turned into personal gain. A cancer is perhaps too tidy and obvious a metaphor here; but even so, the parallels between geopolitics and biology are too striking to be ignored. There are principles being applied here that go so far beyond the run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories (even, or especially, the wildest and most grandiose of them) that they belong to a different order of epistemology altogether.
Because these principles are largely unknown (or at least overlooked), the apparent complexity of social engineering is deceptive. Decay might appear to be massively complex to someone dependent on biological descriptions of molecular processes to understand it, compared say to someone who owns an apple tree and sees fruit fall to the ground and rot all the time, and who just sort of groks the process. Likewise with culture, micro and macro.
The wo-men behind the women and men behind the POTUS-beyond-the-Pale (the Boogeyman under the democratic bed at this dark hour) do understand these principles, and how to apply them. They know that, if you want to atomize a society, one way to accelerate that process is to close the borders and increase the internal pressure first. There are probably countless different models (and historical examples) that reveal the logic in this. The one that comes to mind for me is Girardian: keep out the external enemy–the “other” that unifies the community against it–and you have only internal enemies to worry about.
These be liminal times, and liminality = polarization, polarization = internal lack of cohesion = the need for scapegoats. It is not quite as simple as 1, 2, 3; but it’s a fair bit easier to understand than algebra.
We could easily have foreseen that the polarization process that began (visibly) with the Trump vs. Hilary Election Theater could only continue to escalate if Trump won. Now that he has, and now he has assumed the throne, having the POTUS actually do some of the unthinkable things he promised to do, and/or that his detractors warned us he would do, will naturally increase the polarization pressure still further.
Never mind that what’s being revealed here is simply that geopolitics is as geopolitics does. Or that, if Trump is pushing some radial and scary policies, it is not because Trump is the POTUS but, rather, because it was time for these policies to be pushed and Trump was selected as the man for the job (the job of figurehead I mean). When you need a real villain for the grand showdown, you find an A-lister; you don’t go to the stock villains for the job.
But then, if people were able to see this, the polarization/atomization/ balkanization plan would not be moving forward as planned. They–our social engineers–will not release the big guns until they have the enemy in sight and it is too late for the enemy to turn back. Long-term think tank planners of this sort don’t plan to roll out the UFO disclosure project (say) until they know (because they can see) that people are already sufficiently hysterical to be demonstrably believing things that have no basis in political or social reality. Only then is it time, now there’s nothing being left to chance or to pesky human variables, to lay down the trump cards.
People are already seeing demons in their neighbors eyes. They are already hearing hatred and ignorance in every casual remark, etc., etc.–whatever the hot button is in any given moment of social interaction/polarization, it is increasingly guaranteed to get pushed. We, the people, are being played like a street organ. If sloppy NLP amateurs and opportunists like Trump (or Derren Brown) are as good as they are at what they do, just imagine how good the real, behind-the-scenes perception managers must be at this point. We can try to imagine, but we will fail. We will fail because our imagination is the first thing to have been hijacked, co-opted, and redirected towards the ends of keeping us in the dark of our own internal civil war-state of emergency. In a weird way, all this IS the product of our imagination. We are so close now to becoming our own prison guards that the illusion of freedom and democracy is barely necessary anymore.
This is not a good time to be living in the US; that much is clear. Or anywhere. And yet, it is a grand time to be alive. The adversary is our initiator. Why? Because he is just like us. He is the neighbor we cannot let ourselves see, and to know him is to fear him. But also to love him.
*
[Nick Bryant bit, edited out because it seemed a bit trivial juxtaposed with this other stuff. Seek it in the comments section.]
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The other thing I wanted to blog about was Seen & Not Seen.
A lot of people who read this blog do so because they find my take on “social engineering” compelling, novel, even uplifting. They are interested in understanding how both the world “out there” and our perceptions “in here” are being manipulated to create a kind of cognitive, gender-neutral prison for us to waste away and die inside. Most of you readers probably haven’t read Seen & Not Seen. You may be under the mistaken apprehension that it doesn’t have much to do with social control, etc., seeing as how it’s a memoir about movies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Writing Seen & Not Seen was a major part of how I reached a place of lived, experiential understanding about social and cultural engineering, and how it works. I think it has particular value to people who read this blog for that reason. It’s not a book of theories or essays about movies. Much more than Matrix Warrior was (because it shows rather than tells), it’s a handbook for cultural deprogramming.
A lot of people want to try and understand conspiracy, social control, and psychological or spiritual liberation, but they want to do so from a distance. They want to get there by studying maps and following narratives that seem to cover the territory extensively, by viewing it from a distance. But it’s the very scale of these interpretations that makes them so limited, and even distorted. They are so general they become meaningless, like trying to tell what sort of fruit tree is in your garden by looking at a map of the state (not Google Earth) instead of going out your back door. The smudge of green on that map at best tells you there might be a tree there. Why not just go and see? (The answer is we might find a lot of rotting fruit to clear up.)
To understand these social, political, and spiritual realities by getting to grips with the big picture only helps with one thing: to pique our interest. But what’s relevant isn’t the thing that interests us (JFK, UFOS, 9/11, Crowley, Strieber, Kubrick; synchronicities, psychedelics, Yoga, whatever); what’s relevant is the interest itself: where did it come from, how did it get there, and why is it here? If we follow our interest inward, rather than outward, we may start to see that the real evidence for these dark agendas and programs of social control is not outside but inside us. We are the evidence we are seeking.
Seen & Not Seen is a self-examination that slowly and incrementally reveals the depth, subtlety, and reach of social and cultural indoctrination and of our own perceptual imprisonment, spiritual bondage, or whatever we want to call it, the thing that prevents us from living fully satisfying lives. It follows clearly recognizable effects (my own beliefs and behaviors in the present) back to clearly identifiable causes (movies and other cultural props in the past). I guess if I had called it A Conspiracy Theorist’s Primer, more people would be reading it. But that wouldn’t have been honest, especially since I didn’t quite realize what it was until well after I’d published it.
The more people I talk with about the reality of social engineering, the more I hear and feel their struggle to understand the scope of it and can sense how they feel it is true and yet can’t really believe it, the more I realize that, out of all the things I have written so far, Seen & Not Seen is probably the best place for them to start.
How’s that for altruistic self-promotion? (Buy it here.)
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Lastly, I will now try to tie all these disparate points or half-points together and address a question made by a recent commenter at this blog, one about facing up to “alternative facts” in this “post-truth” world of “fake news”-warnings from the Ministry of Truth.
Identity politics. All forms of violence are quests for identity. What’s to become of our identities as the community/world (the other) that provides us a matrix for self-awareness and self-perception to emerge from becomes too large and complex for us to think about, see clearly, or relate to? What happens, in part, is withdrawal from the other/the outside and contraction into an ever-more internally-directed gaze. This is not a gaze that sees but a gaze that wants above all not to see, anything at all. This kind of looking inward is really a looking away from and sensory systems shutdown. (Hence it is symbolized, literally, by hordes of people gazing at their “I-phone.”)
The thing we are trying not to see is reality. This new-old form of contracted, solipsist, techno-narcissistic identity is primarily geared towards not facing facts, and the best way to never have to face facts again is to make up one’s own set of facts and present them to the world as equally valid as any other competing facts, “out there.”
He who controls the narrative in this way controls identity. And he (or ze) who controls identity, controls the narrative.
To create a narrative in which every last one of us “gets” to create the narrated identity-self we want for ourselves is, somewhat paradoxically, the perfect way for the collective identity of “State” to maintain control over that narrative indefinitely and the individuals that subscribe to it.
People who are encouraged to create their own “sacred space” dream worlds and enter into them will: a) pose no threat to the dominant power structures, because in the end they won’t even be aware they exist; b) be less and less willing or able to refer to others (reality check), or to have any meaningful connection, at all, to other human beings.
In such an atomized state-world-state, the other is valued less and less as an other, and more and more as the required reinforcement for one’s own fact-trumping-feelings. Over time, we each become isolate individuals for whom the rest of the world is necessary only as an audience to applaud, approve, and uphold our narrated identities. The other supports us in our make-believe fantasy of perfected self-narrative, not by engaging with it but, on the contrary, by not looking at it too closely and only responding to our telegraphed desire to have it validated. The other exists exclusively to click “like,” and move on (since they are only concerned about being validated back and must give as many “likes” as they can to increase their own social currency).
In a world in which a human being can self-identify as something they are demonstrably, biologically not (as a different sex, age, race, species, maybe as not even existing at all), and can then expect, even demand, complete and unquestioning affirmation of that belief, not as if it were a fact but as a fact, there is now a complete free-for-all. Observation becomes irrelevant as interpretation becomes supreme. Nothing is true, because everything is now permitted.
We have created a world in which we can be anything we imagine ourselves to be, while simultaneously stripping the imagination of any real power or meaning. People with no power to imagine or innovate can only do one thing: imitate. It is both a recipe for total control and for total disaster. Perhaps it is a recipe for controlled disaster?
One thing is for sure, false ceremony masters are now everywhere, and they can make any claims they want with little fear of being questioned. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” becomes “There is no man behind the curtain! (Fake news!)” If you think you see a man behind that curtain, you obviously don’t know what a man is, or a curtain, so get your mind right, and look again. Keep looking until you no longer see whatever it was that offended thine eye, otherwise you will be answerable to the identity police and risk have both eyes plucked out and, in the time it takes to say “No place like home,” cast all the way beyond the pale.
In slightly more realistic terms, you will find yourself on the side of the deplorables, without ever quite knowing how you got there. You may find yourself, with hands bound tightly, staring up at a terrifying structure, a tower of doom, filled with clucking chickens and trembling bunnies. You may even start to see, with growing horror, an empty compartment in that wicker tower, the size and shape of a human being, built just for you.
I will have to digest this, but I’d like to drill down on one assertion because it immediately speaks to me in my current life-predicament: “People with no power to imagine or innovate can only do one thing: imitate.” But what is imagination and innovation but cleverly disguised imitation? In my career, I have “innovated”, but all I did was imitate two different things simultaneously before anybody else thought to do it (and I beat out the next guy by only 3 months). Is there any true Being from which one can draw true imagination? Or is this simply my own failure to be anything authentic? Is it solipsistic even to be asking these questions?
While I’m digesting, I’ll leave this for other folks to ponder:
https://medium.com/deep-code/situational-assessment-2017-trump-edition-d189d24fc046
I posted it on the forum. If you only skim it, it will seem like a pro-Trump piece. A careful read reveals that it is actually just an observation that Trump (or his handlers) are winning right now, and an attempt to model why. The end of the piece is where it is really interesting, so I’ll post the conclusion and if you’re interested you can read the rest:
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The conflict of the 21st Century is about forming a Collective Intelligence that can outwit and out innovate all of its competitors. The central challenge is to innovate a way of collaborating and cohering individuals that maximally deploys their individual perspectives, capabilities, understandings and insights with each-other. Right now, the [Trump] Insurgency has the edge. It has discovered some key ways to tap into the power of decentralized collective intelligence and this is its principal advantage. While it is definitely not a mature version of a decentralized collective intelligence, it is substantially more so than any collective intelligence with which it is competing and unless and until a more effective decentralized collective intelligence enters the field, this advantage is enough.
…
For those who want to take action, I have three recommendations:
1. The Blue Church [SJW/Blue State culture], the Deep State, the Old Media and all the other aspects of the Establishment are holding you back. Free your mind. This is going to be much harder than it sounds. For most people, if you are under 40, your entire development has taken place within the context of the Blue Church. Many of your deepest assumptions and unconscious values are going to have to be examined with brutal honesty and courage.
2. All Collective Intelligence is gated by Sensemaking. Right now, our collective sensemaking systems are in complete disarray. We don’t know who or what to trust. We barely even know how. Find ways to improve your individual sensemaker and collaborate on collective sensemaking systems. This should get easier as the old media and the Blue Church collapse.
3. Both #1 and #2 require other people. And, since all of our old ways of collaborating with other people are either suspect or obsolete, you are going to have to learn how to build real faithful relationships the old fashioned way. Get much better at making friends. I don’t mean casual acquaintances. And I definitely don’t mean social network contacts. I mean the kinds of people who ready willing and able to actually care for you — even at risk to themselves. Not because of shared ideology or even shared mission, but because of the deep stuff of human commitment.
Was the birdie that visited you and spoke to you, Jasun, the same which visited and spoke to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro?
Seriously, incisively eloquent post by you. Very welcome to me at this time. I’m struggling with words for what’s happening here in America, and, not predominantly being a writer, what you write helps me into the complexity and nuance behind my simpler way of putting things. It’s like I’m on ice with the sun beaming down and must be careful where I put my steps, more and more thin ice all around me. This is how I feel. One misstep and I could go under, to drown in “alternative reality” and “alternative facts”.
I recently posted the following elsewhere:
“Reading articles and comment sections lately with Trump going haywire signing all of those Executive Orders, seeing all the hysteria, reactionaries on both the left and the right, it has struck me how desperately many people desire a rigid hierarchy, a pyramid structure rising up into the sky, with an almighty ruler sitting on the throne at its apex. Is this what has moved into the void which the death of God has left? Many betray that they actually want to be led and told what to do. In their fear and trembling before the grandeur and majesty of the Universe, and their aloneness and vulnerability in it, quite often rendering us speechless, they want something, anything, to drown themselves in and worship “greater than themselves”, even if it’s the Golden Calf all over again or it comes in the form of a false prophet. They are ready and willing to fall in line, and to carry out without question whatever the ruler commands. Facts don’t matter in the face of such a desire, now grown fanatical, to hammer at all costs that hierarchical structure in place, building it up into the sky, and following the ruler in his impulses, no matter how crazy. Many of the exchanges I observe are tribal in nature. (I can’t stress enough that I see this happening on the left too. Individual responsibility and thinking for oneself is being given up for wild hysterical outbursts and drowning in the mob mentality, both left and right. A strange mirroring of reactionary factions of each other is going on. It’s perhaps the ultimate co-dependent relationship. Each pushes the other’s buttons, they grow more heated, catch on fire and melt into each other, and instead of recognizing their similarities, grow disgusted and indignant and explode into hyperbole. One group accuses the other of the very same thing it is practicing, only using different terms. The pot calls the kettle black.)”
———-
I followed with this:
“New article by Chris Hedges at Truthdig. He addresses what I was trying to say in my last comment. Of course he says it so much better than I. An unleashing of psychosis, like a plague, internalized by many, causing frenzy and a blind lashing out, mobs and hordes forming in the infecting boiling broth, and climbing out of it, some burning and screaming, covered in blood, others tarred and feathered and covered in war paint, hurling accusations and insults at each other. This is the result of the confusion caused by the assault on reality and truth.
Giant lies relentlessly asserted, break one down and finally cave one in, and even against one’s will one begins spouting one’s own kind of propaganda. All the desperate attempts to get free of the big lies, tempts one in pushing back in reaction to lie oneself.
“Darth Vader” Bannon I think has actually intended this. It’s divide and conquer, calculated derangement and atomization of the masses. It’s a preparing of the soil for the mastermind to implant his own ideas and control minds.
Effective illustration heading the article. American flag strait-jacket, and look closely at the eyes and mouth of the big smiley face of the figure: rodent or bug-sized faces inside that are skulls. A swarm of maggots on rotting flesh. That’s us in there, struggling to survive, crawling all over each other inside the monstrously twisted contradiction, many no doubt being sucked down into the stomach and squeezed into the intestines.
Trump is the asshole.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_psychosis_20170129
P.S. Yevaud: I enjoyed and am stimulated by your two part comment, and agree with what you recommend for taking action. You wrote: “Right now, the [Trump] Insurgency has the edge. It has discovered some key ways to tap into the power of decentralized collective intelligence and this is its principal advantage.” How the Trump Insurgency did so was helped significantly by Big Data, Predictive Intelligence and “Psychometrics”. Here’s use of Faceborg and such taken to another level, and down into the micro, for the end of zeroing in and actually hitting no longer just groups but individual “targets” in very desires revealed by habits and patterns left by digital footprints. Check out the following article I read the other day:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump
I found the truthdig article interesting in that the author actually illustrated his own points perfectly!
A recipe for ‘controlled disaster’ would fit only too well. How long now will it be until we arrive at the point when all the world’s people will be watching a screen simultaneously and ‘worked’ by magical ritual? An atomic flash of intellectual unicity has waited a long time to manifest. “You are me, as I am you, and we are all together” is either pitiful permanent imprisonment or salvation. It is likely to be the former. Our ability to avoid such a fate is our chief conscious and unconscious contradiction; it’ a binary Gladiatorial struggle to the death as we accelerate towards a likely depopulation project equivalent to Noah’s Flood but this time around a psychic pounding to submission and then world war with a warrior spirit not seen or manufactured since Trafalgar or is it Tralfamadore?
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”
We are Billy Pilgrim, nearly.
Yeah , i keep getting the sense of some sort of Immminent Atomic Discharge ( IAD) too. Who will be the selected victims ? what will be the psychological effect on we the the western mimers of watching some constructed enemy get vaporised in an act of ultimate taboo breaking transgression ? . The shadow on the steps of Hiroshima as well as Pilgers new film spring to mind in these Dreams of The Blue Turtle ..,,,
there are no accidents to be sure.
Huxley in your London circle, perhaps? They all (Fabians) know where the bodies are buried.
The Ultimate Revolution has come
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U6hHbSuDQgc
I was going to post a link to John Robb for you Jasun. Then yevaud posted the article (seen on Reddit?) that reminded me about him. He’s good for some nuts and bolts info sometimes.
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/
A thought on this part:
“Create proxy armies like ISIS and resource-plundering “wars” like Gulf 1 & 2, and one thing you can be sure of is a steady influx of refugees fleeing the war-torn territories and seeking sanctuary in the lands of plenty where the bombs issued from. Destabilization is the name of the game, and geopolitics is as much a game of dominoes as of chess.”
Who is **paying** for full PLANELOADS of refugees to “everywhere”? The refugees certainly aren’t rowing to freedom on rafts made from lashed together palm tree trunks right?
Someone is footing the bill for the wholesale, large scale movement of people. Who specifically?
I would say the cash comes from the destabilizers.
The cash needs to be traced and articles written about these mass operations.
“People are already seeing demons in their neighbors eyes. They are already hearing hatred and ignorance in every casual remark, etc., etc.–whatever the hot button is in any given moment of social interaction/polarization, it is increasingly guaranteed to get pushed. We, the people, are being played like a street organ.”
Funny you mention the words “demons” and then “sacred space”. Related to this (John Robb type stuff + deep human research):
(From this must read 2 part report (long) https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1#.iuibfdr85)
Read first (quick):
http://narrative.ict.usc.edu/
But then there is their 2012 DARPA funded project that concluded in 2015:
http://narrative.ict.usc.edu/neurobiology-of-narrative-framing.html
“Narrative framing that targets the sacred values of the listener, including core personal, nationalistic, and/or religious values, is particularly effective at influencing the listener’s interpretation of narrated events.”
“We are conducting a neurobiological fMRI experiment to investigate the reaction of American, Iranian, and Chinese subjects to narratives framed using sacred values. While undergoing fMRI scanning, 90 participants read stories framed using sacred values and answer questions about the motivations and values of the main characters. We examine brain responses to narratives based on whether they resonated with a reader’s own sacred values. ”
So yes, people are being primed to “see demons” through text alone.
These people at DARPA want to mess directly with core motivations.
This part of the linked article could have been written by Gordon White:
“And, since all of our old ways of collaborating with other people are either suspect or obsolete, you are going to have to learn how to build real faithful relationships the old fashioned way. Get much better at making friends. I don’t mean casual acquaintances. And I definitely don’t mean social network contacts. I mean the kinds of people who ready willing and able to actually care for you — even at risk to themselves. Not because of shared ideology or even shared mission, but because of the deep stuff of human commitment.”
He talks about doing this specifically. Like it’s going to be or should be a trend. People “disconnecting” from the net etc.
“Nothing is true, because everything is now permitted.”
This keeps popping up a lot lately in my travels. I just did some cursory research on where it came from.
The first time I saw the phrase, I immediately wanted to reverse it.
Just an odd gut feeling.
Robert A Wilson was quoted as saying both phrases together. Some Discordian junque….
Not many people talk about reversing the phrase. Just try web searching “Everything is true, nothing is permitted”.
Guess we should do a mini exploration of that on Kubricon forum eh?
I’ve said it here before, but I feel like it bears repeating: RAW was a total operative (from what I can gather, IMO).
Ack, * bares
…though maybe he was at least a semi-bear too 😉
Yes AG. That’s why I called his stuff “junque”.
His Eris vs. Eros choice is something to think about. I was checking out a web discussion and had some thoughts on that.
Forgot where it is or the details but whatever.
Won’t waste 5 mins on the guy.
Oh, BTW I should have mentioned that this post is really a home run Jasun. Probably should be printed and framed.
It’s a textbook distillation of this particular moment in time.
Your “People are already seeing demons in their neighbors eyes.” paragraph is a spot where the bat and ball makes the crack.
Check this out:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2017/01/the-race-to-weaponize-empathy.html
“There’s a war for the future being waged online. It’s being fought across the world’s online social networks, and the outcomes of these online battles increasingly dictate the outcome of what happens later in the real world.
One of the most successful tactics used in this war is the manipulation of language in order to confuse, scare, nullify or outrage targeted audiences with the objective of making money, aggregating political power, and disrupting opponents.
While this manipulation has ALWAYS been true of human conflict, it’s being done on a scale and to a degree that we’ve never seen before due social networking, globalization, and social/media fragmentation.”
Here is an example of the “prison guard operation” and it’s all seeing eye:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-muze-wdhw
In that video, the singer for the Cult states “All lives matter” onstage at a show.
So called “SJW’s” not even present say that phrase is “racist” on Twitter etc. etc.
Singer for the band apologizes on Twitter and says “he’ll never say that phrase again”.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
(I know, I know…this is widespread at this point!?)
So, I guess the “SJW” has been lead to believe that “racists” can literally claim ownership of said English words?
This is some incredible mind control/inversion/1984 type stuff here.
A person interested in “social justice” is made to hate the concept/phrase of all lives mattering.
(Just because someone from the “opposing” side said it somewhere!?)
Toss that baby and bathwater out…cause the water is gonna impede burning your own house to the ground.
It’s gotta be the result of fluoride infused satellite laser mind control rays.
What the hell else could cause this degree of mental malfunction?
With friends and countrymen like the DARPA and Tavistock people, who needs enemies?
Thank you for all the interesting thoughts!
Here´s a view from “the far right”..!
https://soundcloud.com/florian-geyer-9/mysterium-fasces-episode-13-spiritual-warfare
From that Chris Hedges piece:
“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations,”
“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”
Hannah Arendt; The Origins of Totalitarianism
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_psychosis_20170129
Some great comments here, I will endeavor to respond to them soon.
Some copypasta comments from here all jumbled together (slightly edited) into a “vessel”…heh.
This is a totally spontaneous exploration of the discussion language on my part.
“A strange mirroring of reactionary factions of each other is going on. It’s perhaps the ultimate co-dependent relationship. Each pushes the other’s buttons, they grow more heated, catch on fire and melt into each other, ….. explode into hyperbole. ….The pot calls the kettle black.”
“How long now will it be until we arrive at the point when all the world’s people ………. ‘worked’ by magical ritual? An atomic flash of……… unicity has waited a long time to manifest. “You are me, as I am you, and we are all together”
“Yeah , i keep getting the sense of some sort of Immminent Atomic Discharge ( IAD) too. Who will be the selected …… ? what will be the…….. effect ………… vaporised in an act of ultimate taboo breaking transgression ?
Sounds like someone is doing large scale Alchemy.
British flavored perhaps?
https://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/the-reading-library/world-government/inside-the-mind-of-a-slavemaster/
“… For advance in civilisation has rested on something else than collaboration, at least than friendly collaboration. Friendly collaboration is the beginning of civilisation, and during all the advance of civilisation it remains one of its factors. But there is another factor, which is the exact opposite as regards the accompanying feelings. This is strife, contention, competition. … One fighter, whether an individual or a state, may subdue another, subjugate, enslave that other, compel that other to join forces with those already employed. Thus strife may cause involuntary collaboration, as in slave gangs, and in this way contribute to the advancement of material civilisation.”
“But its [strife, etc.] greatest influence is apart from collaboration. It serves the purpose of spurring on to greater effort not only by the sentiment of emulation, because of the dislike of being surpassed, but by the actual need of exerting all one’s energies to avoid being subdued. Also it kills off those who lag too far behind, some times directly, generally at least indirectly. And as those who have it in them to strive hard are more likely to produce off spring like them, this ” survival of the fittest ” in the “struggle for existence ” brings about a ” natural selection,” whereby the fittest parents are left over to produce the fittest children. Strife is thus the weeder-out of the weak and unfit.”
“…in the past it is difficult to see how civilisation could have been brought forth from non-civilisation without strife both within the groups and between them. At all events, such has been the course of things.”
“The most progressive nations in the world — the Greeks, the Romans, and the English — have exhibited the most internal dissensions. Biology teaches the same lesson. “The all-important natural selection is not between species or societies, but within them,” says C. W. Saleeby; “the struggle for existence is fought out mainly between the immature individuals of any species or society, the issue of this struggle determining ” the survivors for parenthood and the future,” Parenthood and Race Culture, 1909, New York ed., p. 325.”
Mixing ingredients together that create strife. Something new created from the “struggle”.
Bonus material:
“….But as responsibility divided between many is diluted and tends to be little observed, the degeneration of republicanism works for the concentration of power in one representative, to whom is entrusted the direction of all the others. Under this one all-powerful individual all the classes are reduced to an equal position of inferiority, and other individuals can rise to power only as they win his favour or that of his favourites.
This last stage can be reached only when the people at large are so un-warlike, and so distracted and divided by their several occupations and amusements, that a comparatively small (internet CIA/Google???) army in the one man’s pay can keep them all in subjection. And when once reached, it can in spite of its enormous and growing evils never be subverted from within the nation by the people, for the additional very good reason that the people have nothing to substitute for it.”
A thought I had about this whole collaborative discussion on Auticulture…
I’m eternally grateful places (and people!) like this exist. You know why?
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html
“(103) Jesus said, “Fortunate is the man who knows where the brigands will enter, so that he may get up, muster his domain, and arm himself before they invade.”
Auticulture lets you know where the brigands will enter…..
Rock.
Yevaud: But what is imagination and innovation but cleverly disguised imitation? In my career, I have “innovated”, but all I did was imitate two different things simultaneously before anybody else thought to do it (and I beat out the next guy by only 3 months). Is there any true Being from which one can draw true imagination? Or is this simply my own failure to be anything authentic?
I wonder if there’s a sort of fearful symmetry in this question, in that it is a case of the intellect imitating beliefs it has been informed by rather than allowing for an imaginative response? All I can say is that I know experientially that there is true Being from which comes pure expression, as compared to the constructed mind-identity which can only replicate the formulas out of which it was created, endlessly. There is a kind of cleverly disguised imitation that passes for innovation, of course, so it’s easy to doubt that there’s anything but endlessly recycled formulas. But doubt seems to be part of the creative process, so I try not to let it get me down.
@ johndockus
Thanks for the Hedges piece, with the great Arrendt quotes. I was pretty sure there would be people writing about the parallels between now and you-know-when.
Zappa: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
I was about to express my admiration for the fine anthropological work you’ve done and ask to hear more about your time on Tralfamadore! Fortunately duckduckgo saved me from egg-facedness. Even so, the above description of human existence is one I subscribe to 99.999%, and again, because it feels experientially true. This moment is the proof of it.
On the other hand, forever is a long time. I think am confused about this. reminds me of the part in the article Yevaud quoted:
Hans Wilhelm Langsdorff
4:44 AM:
>Yeah , i keep getting the sense of some sort of Immminent Atomic Discharge ( IAD) too.
Note the 4’s (& 3 m’s). I have had two dreams recently about Nuclear War as being the final goal here. I never used to believe it possible. Now I’d say anything is. Maybe “evil aliens” will be the rationale for it?
@KKK: good stuff on narratives, ties right into Prisoner of Infinity material, too bad it’s too late to include it. Will follow up the links, if I can.
That quote about human committment stood out for me as being unusually sound. Is that really what GW talks like? I am quite surprised, if so. I got the impression he was a big of a dick….
>Auticulture lets you know where the brigands will enter…..
Or how they are already here.
A 4channer recently told me: “you have the best comments section on the internet, I’ve NEVER seen such intelligent polite discourse on such difficult and complex topics with so many potential areas for contention.” So what’s the secret?
Lastly, here’s the promised edited segment; free donut hole for anyone who can identify how it ties in with the larger subjects:
Meanwhile in other news. What the hell happened with Nick Bryant? He replied to my email to say he was sorry for the delay (it was no more than a day, so a polite guy). We had a half hour off-record talk in which he mentioned (I thought with some amusement) my fracas with Peter Levenda. I already knew Bryant and Levenda were buddies because Levenda mentioned it in our Crowley exchange, and because Bryant on his recent interview mentioned having lunch with Levenda and how upset he, Levenda, was about being placed under suspicion for his association with John Podesta. Because Bryant had mentioned an MKULTRA document about trying to tap into children’s psychic powers, I also brought up Strieber. Bryant said he “knew Whitley well,” which was bit disconcerting (they did a Dreamland interview some years back). Bryant also mentioned my writing and called it impressive, adding that I was “a smart guy.” By the end, he had agreed to be on The Liminalist podcast and do an interview for the New Books Network, later, once I had read his book (The Franklin Scandal). It seemed as though all went well and I was looking forward to talking to Bryant, in depth, about Pizzagate and other stuff.
That same day, I sent him an email with some subjects to discuss. I didn’t hear back from him for a week. Finally I sent him a follow-up email reminding him. He did not respond to that.
Funnily enough, something similar happened with Ed Conroy, Strieber’s biographer (sort of) and the author of Report on Communion. I contacted him a year ago, after he reviewed The Super Natural and we spoke once or twice over Skype. He also praised my writing and agreed to talk more with me, even to be a behind the scenes source for me. He mentioned that he would be seeing Whitley soon and that he would let me know how it went. During our conversation, he also mentioned how Strieber came from a very powerful Texas family and that though he, Conroy, “didn’t want to threaten” me, if I ever told anyone about our talking there would be dire consequences. After that talk, we exchanged a few emails in which he kept apologizing for not getting back to me and then, after a while of that, he stopped replying to my emails altogether.
What gives? Are these writers suffering from a case of professional cold feet, or is something more intentional afoot? (I just emailed Bryant to let him know I was going to blog about this.) Bryant seemed to me like a good guy, despite his choice of lunch buddies. But this goes beyond bad manners into, I don’t know what, exactly. Maybe our emails are being interfered with, or maybe he had some major setback. But barring these possibilities, which seem scant, what’s that leave?
What to do when you have reason to believe you are dealing with deliberate attempts to undermine you? The easiest answer is, forget it and move on, and, of course, keep mum about it because anything else is not good form. But this is auticulture, and from a certain perspective, the only good form in a cultural quagmire is no form at all. Besides, this data may be relevant, so why not share it? Because of dire consequences? Things are already dire, and partially because of people’s fear of consequences, which is a great way to manipulate people into silence, even blindness.
“That quote about human committment stood out for me as being unusually sound. Is that really what GW talks like? I am quite surprised, if so. I got the impression he was a big of a dick….”
He’s actually a mostly likeable guy. Seems like he’s rooting for the home team:
https://runesoup.com/2017/01/benign-sedition-aeonography-part-3/
“Which brings me to another description Mollison had for permaculture: A benign form of sedition. We are in the reaping phase of the whirlwind right now. The promises of both the left and the right are going to unspool in unpredictable and dangerous ways.”
“Ask yourself this. Ask yourself whether the skills associated with growing your own food will become more useful or less useful between now and 2030. Would you rather get good at this while it is fun to learn, or when you’re in a knife fight with a local gang while fishing expired crab meat from a dumpster to feed your child? None of us know what is going to happen between now and 2030 but you are on some fine intoxicants if you think it is going to be smooth sailing.
However grim things get, benign sedition has truly never been easier than it is right now.
Spring is coming. Ask yourself whether we need to bring more Light to earth or less.”
The only thing that gets weird is the Magic/Chaos Magic stuff.
Some circles of people appear to get beyond weird…and into that “controlled” territory.
As in, “controlled” by outside forces. Real brick and mortar controlled, or supernaturally…how the hell does anybody know for sure? Some people act like “subtle bait”, if that makes sense.
This topic is one that would need to be argued out in a room LOL. We all have different frames of reference I’m sure.
I suppose a group soundly bound in a rotund fasces could think circularly like the Donald and his toadies .
Swastikas , Fylfots , Chaos Stars and Flying Saucers are all spinning objects .
All par for the course when you read Greers Spenglerian view of these ” Dragon Times” at his Galabes blog ..
http://galabes.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/the-unicorn-phoenix-and-dragon.html
Perhaps we are just living in a stressfully anxious liminal interstice where it is just actually possible for one to see the giant wheels moving ever so skightly, and it is of necessity that something Titanic stirs in the deeps
Yeah , something Titanic stirs in the deeps !
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2012/04/titanic-shipwreck-revealed-complete-mosaic-images/
To shine forth is key. 87
“when you try and force peoples, nations, and worldviews together that are to some degree incompatible, the result is that they will clash and fly apart with the same force with which they have been forced to “get along.” This is also why, to reduce it to a gnomic soundbite, tolerance = tyranny: because even the idea of tolerance contains within it the seed of force. It is, simply put, no substitute for love or understanding.”
If you can make tolerance=tyranny then I have trouble understanding why you take issue with male=female. As I see it, tolerance is not tyranny by any stretch. The only similarity between the two words is they both have Latin roots and share four letters. Tyrannical rulers rarely tolerate anything, which is what makes them tyrannical. The tolerance I am familiar with is an internal directive, an ideal to aspire towards, and an intellectual litmus test, a gateway ideal, that leads to further independence of thought, and to love and understanding. You are free to fail to reach that ideal, especially in a tolerant society. You are even free to invert this, and to impose the burdens of your own shortcomings on those that do attempt to open and soften in the face of the unknown.
Who is the ‘you’ that is doing the forcing? When the descendants of invaders and slavers feel they are being forced to tolerate the descendants of the invaded and enslaved, in the lands they invaded and enslaved what kind of psyop is that? When the beneficiaries of unbridled capitalism feel they are forced to endure the inevitable results of unbridled capitalism, what do we call that? Just “destabilization”?
I see all bids as a bid to union, even those that appear otherwise, as all energy moves towards the same goal, infinity, the original and perpetual unborn. Humans are simply easily (mis)guided. Cognition is irrelevant to ignition, and concepts are meaningless to inception.
I feel like I see an almost uniform scramble to fit a number of things we’ve recently been made more aware of into our preexisting tunnels, even though in many instances some resultant occurrences have objectively flown directly in the face of our previous models. I see this here as well as elsewhere, but I comment even less frequently elsewhere, so here I am, for now.
It seems like an opportune time to regroup, but of course, the pressure is on to act. It has to be or these kinds of things aren’t very effective.
“if you want to atomize a society, one way to accelerate that process is to close the borders and increase the internal pressure first. There are probably countless different models (and historical examples) that reveal the logic in this”
Not to be too cliche or redundant, but the ones that come first to my mind are the most obvious: Hitler’s Germany, and North Korea.
This idea that rural Americans/Europeans are being oppressed by having to think about things that make them uncomfortable, or live near people they have been taught to fear, is absurd to me, and I can’t take it seriously, and after trying to look at it openly it still reeks of pseudo-religious delusional mumbo-jumbo. The latest thing I heard was a suggestion that Trump is possibly a time traveler who has come to deliver white Americans from their brown/Jewish Satanic oppressors. We already know he’s a spokesperson for White Jesus (that painting is amazing) and a crusader for truth, but now he is also a time-traveling prophet.
I veer in this direction because I continuously perceive a weird anti-“liberal” bent in almost everything you and a number of others write, one which is oddly mirrored by what happened to Info Wars and Red Ice, etc, and this thread has always been puzzling to me. It does not offend me or anything like that, but in your case I just find it curious that it is still there, and that it is so pronounced (even after identifying the apparent source), and I feel an urge to respond to it, not only to clarify my own thoughts, but hopefully to learn something in the process. I know you are aware of this bias, but I wonder if you aware of how prevalent it is? It seems to be forcing you to lean towards essentially defending positions that are diametrically opposed to your other pronouncements, such as opening and softening, etc. The trans issue is where it is most apparent, as you *appear* to you have a real disdain for these people, presumably because you see them as intimately connected to trans-humanism (which is “bad”), and as a tool of the elite power structure, etc. This is curious to me though, because the “original” gender words and definitions we currently find most familiar were in all likelihood conceptualized and utilized by this same power structure, and with far more dramatic results, thus far. In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, after all.
“In a world in which a human being can self-identify as something they are demonstrably, biologically not…”
This brings to mind a few questions. What are you, and how do you know what you are? When did you first learn what you were? Who told you?
If Girard is relevant then these are pertinent questions. If you can disassociate from the White Male power structure, even though you demonstrably come from the White Male power structure, then why can’t a “biological” male or female identify as the opposite sex, or something else altogether? Who tells them who they have to be? Or are they hopelessly beyond the pale? Of course, that’s only one part of the beef most people claim they have with trans people. I’m very familiar with it myself, having expressed very similar opinions in the past. I see men as men and women as women, and I tend to see people who see themselves as men when I see them as women as having mental problems. This does not mean I am correct. In fact, it means I am probably incorrect, and at the very least, inconsiderate, because if I’m honest I desire to continue seeing biological men as men and biological women as women because it’s easier because I was told to a long, long time ago, and rather than confront this intelligently I choose to lazily perceive this variance as an indicator of the times (which are “bad”) and I am thus suffering from the influence of mimetic rivalry and duly offering up transgender individuals to the interior psychic machinery of the scapegoat mechanism.
But I know within myself that transgender people have always existed, under different names in different cultures (hijra, winkte, do your googles, or whatever search engine is less “evil” to you…) but they have been around since humans started creating symbols (as have scapegoats, though they definitely did not always play the role of scapegoats, quite the opposite, until relatively recent years). So what is the real sign of the times, them or me? Or is there any difference? And why are they a problem now? Are we supposed to identify them as a problem, and thus quell the unshackling? Or is it as you say, and the unshackling is really the transformation into a deeper state of bondage? Or is it perhaps something else?
Because it seems like something else to me. The people crying the loudest that they are the most oppressed are simply not the most oppressed, and this is more pressing than the inconsistency of the minutiae of the myriad expressions and shortcomings of the actually oppressed, not least because it causes far more loss of life. Accept it or not, the power structure is *still* moving predominantly through so-called White Males. Affluent “white males” are in no danger of being ritually murdered in the way that trans people, particularly black and brown trans people, are. Trans people are murdered with an alarming regularity, especially when considering how small of a percentage of the population they represent. This is similar to how Africans, African Americans (especially, percentage-wise), Central and South Americans and Middle Eastern and Asian people are being slaughtered globally, either in open warfare or in empire-imposed poverty, by a system that was predominantly influenced and meddled with by European and European American interests. Yet identifying as a White Male, to some people, means you are a member of the most victimized group on the planet (who also paradoxically find sensitivity and understanding to be chief among the things that are oppressing them), and you must be made great again, and rise from your wretched state…to do what, exactly? If the west is currently politically correct, I would hate to see what they look like when they shake loose the shackles of bondage, cast off all shades of sophistication, and emerge as glorious Politically Incorrect Social Injustice Warriors…
“Everyone knows now that being able to stand contradiction is a high sign of culture. Some even know that the higher human being desires and invites contradiction in order to receive a hint about his own injustice of which he is as yet unaware. But the ability to contradict, the acquired good conscience accompanying hostility towards what is familiar, traditional, hallowed–that is better yet than both those abilities, and constitutes what is really great, new and amazing in our culture; it is a step of all steps of the liberated spirit: who knows that?”
-Nietzsche (I know, but apart from wider associations and preferences, the quote alone reads to me like “Do science.”)
Anyway, another novel, my apologies, but I can’t seem to shorten this much more!
Yes epic. Almost as long as the OP
>If you can make tolerance=tyranny then I have trouble understanding why you take issue with male=female.
Biological realities are not equivalent to social mores, much as we are being coerced into believing so.
>As I see it, tolerance is not tyranny by any stretch.
I was pointing out how a misguided psychological ideal can lead to a social reality, and has.
>This idea that rural Americans/Europeans are being oppressed by having to think about things that make them uncomfortable, or live near people they have been taught to fear, is absurd to me, and I can’t take it seriously
Who said this? I don’t know what you are referring to here, as elsewhere.
>The latest thing I heard was a suggestion that Trump is possibly a time traveler who has come to deliver white Americans from their brown/Jewish Satanic oppressors. We already know he’s a spokesperson for White Jesus (that painting is amazing) and a crusader for truth, but now he is also a time-traveling prophet.
Bookmarking this for later reference.
>I veer in this direction because I continuously perceive a weird anti-“liberal” bent in almost everything you and a number of others write
Is it anti-liberal or is it simply opposed to reality distortion/crazy talk?
I am sure a Trumpist would find me anti-right-wing or anti-republican or anti-white, or simply “liberal”; that’s if any showed up here.
The more a person brings an ideological mindset into this space, the more that’s what they’ll see framing or underlying what I write.
> It seems to be forcing you to lean towards essentially defending positions that are diametrically opposed to your other pronouncements, such as opening and softening, etc.
It has been a looong time since I talked about opening & softening. But granted that I still consider these to be valid standards, your points are too vague and non-directed to answer directly. Which position am I defending that is opposed to opening & softening? You seem to be confusing open-mindness (and tolerance for ambiguity) with a lack of discernment or personal boundaries. Very Neptunian of you. Neptune is the planet of Oneness, but also the delusion of premature conflating levels of reality (i.e., madness). Maybe you need to lay off the pot as things get truly liminal? 😉
>The trans issue is where it is most apparent, as you *appear* to you have a real disdain for these people, presumably because you see them as intimately connected to trans-humanism (which is “bad”), and as a tool of the elite power structure, etc.
You’re conflating trans-people with trans ideology and social-economic agendas. I have no more disdain for a “trans-person” than I do for any other psychologically damaged individual struggling to find ways to heal. My disdain is for those who want to spin psychological damage and emotional confusion into an identity to be marketed, sold, and paraded in some grotesque corporate surrogate for a soul’s true embodiment, and this without even exploring the roots of the confusion (of course: because if we were allowed to examine the product, we would see how toxic it is).
> If you can disassociate from the White Male power structure, even though you demonstrably come from the White Male power structure, then why can’t a “biological” male or female identify as the opposite sex, or something else altogether?
You mean like Trump being a time-traveling reincarnation of Jesus? 😀
>Who tells them who they have to be?
Reality does. We don’t need to be told what we are. We are already that. We do need to be told that we aren’t what we demonstrably are and that we can override facts with feelings.
> So what is the real sign of the times, them or me? Or is there any difference? And why are they a problem now? Are we supposed to identify them as a problem, and thus quell the unshackling?
I don’t know if these are simply naïve questions, but they seem to willfully miss the point of what I’ve written. I get the feeling you have brought a whole internal argument that has been going on for you in countless other places for an indeterminate time, in the hope of resolving it here. You are taking arguments I am making and trying to make them fit into a narrative which you are opposed to and then argue against that narrative. The problem is that they don’t actually fit because I’m not pledged to that narrative the way you think I am.
>Because it seems like something else to me. The people crying the loudest that they are the most oppressed are simply not the most oppressed
I have no idea who you think are the people crying the loudest. It is difficult for me to say because often it is white privileged people crying out on behalf of minorities they have adopted as their cause. And I don’t tend to even believe it when I see a black person getting upset on Twitter about a white person saying “All lives matter,” say, and calling them racist. Maybe that’s a black person, or maybe it’s a SJW with a tan, or maybe it’s a white dude who self-identifies as a black chick, or maybe it’s a bot designed by the Brock Team to further fuck with us and convince us the world has gone insane. Since we can never really know for sure, what counts is recognizing deluded nonsense when we see it, not accusing individuals or groups of them, or even ideologies per se (since they keep shifting and mutating into something else).
You can say: “Who are you to call someone else’s belief delusion?” but all I can say to that is, “I am someone who sees through that particular delusion.” It doesn’t mean I see through every delusion, and for sure, I haven’t seen through all my own delusions because if I had I would be free. But knowing that I might be deluded about some things doesn’t mean I sit on the fence about everything. Not only am I allowed to share what little sense of reality I have managed to attain over the past fifty years, I am sort of compelled to.
>and this is more pressing than the inconsistency of the minutiae of the myriad expressions and shortcomings of the actually oppressed
So you think that some people on this planet are not actually oppressed?
Do you think that a trans person being bullied at school is more oppressed than a straight person who questions transgender and gets accused of being a transphobe? If so then we can agree to disagree.
> not least because it causes far more loss of life.
There are worse things than loss of life. If you are going to talk all-is-one God-talk, then walk it too. Death is the least of our problems.
>Accept it or not, the power structure is *still* moving predominantly through so-called White Males.
In your mind it is. Yet AFAIK you also believe in UFOs and transdimensional beings and all that stuff. So why make assumptions that require compartmentalization? We can agree there’s a dominant narrative that White Males control the narrative. I don’t happen to believe it, but since I am a white male, my opinion doesn’t count as much as yours does, as a black male (or as much as anyone’s really, at least not on this particular score). If we had a brown trans woman (or man) here, they would trump us both, however.
BY the way, I have never felt oppressed for being a white male and therefore untrustworthy, a patriarch, a rapist, or whatever else. The oppression I have addressed at the blog and podcast so often is that of being someone who holds and argues for perceptions that are both ideologically (and even ontologically) beyond the pale. Nor do I consider it necessary to bring about any sort of social reform to free me from that oppression; the only thing that’s required is for me to continue to express my perceptions without fear, in the face of that oppression. All real oppression is internal, even though it obviously has external manifestations. But, resolving and dissolving internal structures of oppression will resolve all external ones; the reverse is not the case. On the contrary. Trying to resolve external oppression (through enforced tolerance) without addressing the internal structures only perpetuates those internal agents of tyranny and, like a virus, allows them to enter into every last strata of our being. This would be the End Game. Find the God Particle, and throw it in chains, M’Lord!
>Affluent “white males” are in no danger of being ritually murdered in the way that trans people, particularly black and brown trans people, are.
Are you sure about that? Even if it were true, is this a competition or a game of numbers?
And if it were true today, that doesn’t mean it won’t be untrue tomorrow. But again, I don’t even know what your point is, except that I am a White Male so I should be championing the persecuted minorities.
> Yet identifying as a White Male, to some people, means you are a member of the most victimized group on the planet
You definitely seem to have a beef that belongs somewhere other than at this blog. . . .
This exchange perfectly illustrates the mindset of those who have bought into ideology as a substitute for perception and reason. It’s nearly impossible to communicate with them as words and ideas are so often given alternate meanings according to predefined compartmentmentalized ideas that have been inserted into their minds by outside influences. It’s like trying to hold a conversation with a poorly programmed AI. Disturbing yet mildly entertaining.
Re: transgenders, here is an anecdote that illustrates the reason for the backlash. A recent story (in the last day or two, right now I don’t have access to my usual computing environment otherwise I’d post a URL) reports that British medical professionals are now being advised not to use the term “expectant mother” because it may offend transgender individuals, in particular the *one* female-to-male trans who has suspended hormone therapy in order to conceive.
This mind-fuck should be obvious to anyone. We are no longer allowed to talk about an entirely normal biological state without which any one of us could not exist, a biological state that practically defines the emotional foundation of families, because it might offend the 0.000000001% of human beings that have ever existed on this planet.
Progressive liberal ideologue attempts to shame apostate Jasun Horsley and fails miserably.
Very insightful article. It’s good to know there are still thinking people in the world.
Though I understand some of the basics of social engineering, it still baffles me to observe the bizarre reactions in people to current media-hyped events. The stark contrast between the general public’s reactions to small events the media has blown out of proportion vs much larger and far-reaching issues that go ignored on lamestream news really does bring to mind a society being played.
There was (allegedly) a shooting at a mosque in Québec city and somehow it’s because of the “Trump effect” – as if xenophobia, racism and violence had never before existed before in this province. At least call it the Marois effect or maybe just the Québécois effect. Expressions like “pure laine” and “québécois de souche” exist for a reason and I’m pretty sure it’s not Trump.
I see this all leading towards a complete lockdown on free speech and even free thought. If Trump says crazy shit and then random people go out and do crazy shit, then logically no one should be allowed to freely express any opinion unless vetted by corporate media. This is becoming ever more apparent with each passing day.
PS since there seems to be another M commenting I am now upgrading to MM.
@MM Question, why is it that the Mosque shooting is “alleged” to you, but the trans anecdote is not? Also, keep up the penetrating and insightful commentary, it’s sorely lacking in the current climate.
@Yevaud my concern is not so much with the “insanity” presented by every random individual (in that regard, the InfoWars comment section, or most of the articles, will blow that anecdote out of the water, btw) but more with how I and others respond to the actual situation that precipitates these various reactions and insanities.
To clarify on my anecdote: this is not an indictment of individual transgendered individuals (fwiw, I’ve known a few, and they span the spectrum from delightful to crazy), it’s an indictment of the social engineering aspects of the phenomenon.
And, yes, I can see the possibility that this story is not exactly what it seems. For example, its social engineering intent may be exactly the opposite of what it appears on the surface, i.e. “fake news” designed to turn people against transgendered individuals. The point is that it’s an attack of some form, but naïve “progressives” will tend to hop on the bandwagon, dutifully following orders by deleting the term “expectant mother” from their vocabularies and shaming those who don’t. Meanwhile, everybody gets angrier.
The other thing I’ve noticed about the transgender phenomenon is that, in some camps, transgendered individuals are more acceptable than garden variety homosexuals. See Bruce/Caitlin Jenner’s opposition to same-sex marriage. See also the recent news re: Boy Scouts accepting a FTM “boy” (unless I am mistaken, they are still opposed to homosexually oriented cis-males). So, one possible interpretation is that the only way I can become an acceptable member of society is to chop off my cock? (Even though I look and act like a cis-male and am valued by my partner as such.)
Only alleged because I wasn’t there. I’m aware that many people distrust the official narrative when it comes to this type of event. I don’t have much of an opinion one way or the other about the event itself, only the media spin and reactions generated.
And for my final epic act (really)…
I didn’t mean to inspire that kind of response in any way. I also used terms like “White Male” in quotes or title form, and with modifiers like “so-called” etc., to indicate that I am not taking these things very seriously.
It is now very probable that I should be…not here… but as I said, I was, and so… Still, if the implication is that I have beef with white males then I failed in conveying what I was trying to say and I do take the blame for that. I did specify “some people” intentionally trying not to imply “most” or “all”. The people I was addressing, those who frequent infowars and etc, are in the minority, and not at all a representation of what the majority of European people think about anything. Essentially, I apologize to anyone who was offended by my insensitive remarks…
I am now in the awkward position of having little interest in defending myself, and simultaneously walking back an attack I was not making.
Well, re: the trans thing; I agree that “biological realities are not equivalent to social mores” but biology also covers the human brain, where this debate has moved among those who study the phenomenon (as opposed to resting on genitals, or other overt visual cues). It is not as demonstrable as you indicate at these levels. (I’m largely “opposed” to sex changes fwiw, and consider *this* as a possible hijacking of something far more ancient.)
“Do you think that a trans person being bullied at school is more oppressed than a straight person who questions transgender and gets accused of being a transphobe? If so then we can agree to disagree.”
“I have no more disdain for a “trans-person” than I do for any other psychologically damaged individual struggling to find ways to heal. My disdain is for those who want to spin psychological damage and emotional confusion into an identity to be marketed, sold, and paraded in some grotesque corporate surrogate for a soul’s true embodiment…”
But this is the “disdain” I mentioned (poor choice of words, forgive me, I am a high school drop out and frequently use some words incorrectly), and while it’s not directed at Jane or Johnny Transgender, if reality were not as you think, or as your metaphysical positions proclaim, and there was an actual third gender, and the basis for this was primarily neurological, then this would be considered patronizing at best by any trans individual living that experience that happened upon this post. I’m not actually interested in a numbers game, just crucial actualities. I.E, which species is more endangered, and thus needs conservation in the wild, NY pigeons or the Sumatran Elephant? Until the day I saw the long, long list of murdered trans people, and descriptions of how they were murdered, I was OK with willfully ignoring my own intuition on the subject.
“Who said this? I don’t know what you are referring to here, as elsewhere.”
Alt-right Trump voters.
“Is it anti-liberal or is it simply opposed to reality distortion/crazy talk?”
Tomato, tomahto? Objective proof is hard to come by. Conclusions based on life experience not so much. I prefer the third way.
“The more a person brings an ideological mindset into this space, the more that’s what they’ll see framing or underlying what I write.”
Maybe, or maybe vice versa, idk. There does seem to be a lot of ideation going on here.
“You mean like Trump being a time-traveling reincarnation of Jesus?”
Sure, why not? Bruce, or Caitlyn Jenner for pres 2020?
“Reality does. We don’t need to be told what we are. We are already that. We do need to be told that we aren’t what we demonstrably are and that we can override facts with feelings.”
If I thought humans had any grasp on objective reality I’d give this more consideration, honestly, but we do not even know where we are, much less what we are, all we have is mimetic definitions of what we are, and we inherited those from people who knew less than us in many respects, who inherited them from people, etc.
“I don’t know if these are simply naïve questions, but they seem to willfully miss the point of what I’ve written. I get the feeling you have brought a whole internal argument that has been going on for you in countless other places for an indeterminate time, in the hope of resolving it here”
No worries about the undermining there, I thought I was clear that this was an internal debate I’ve been having (though not sure where the hyperbolic “countless other places” comes from, but hey) and that I was bouncing ideas off of you/your readers. I’m really not trying to nail you to a narrative, just commenting on my own perceptions of some of the things you have said. But they’re probably just naive questions, idk.
“So you think that some people on this planet are not actually oppressed?”
Pigeons or elephants, is all. Humans still kill both, but I’m just sayin, pigeons or elephants.
“And I don’t tend to even believe it when I see a black person getting upset on Twitter about a white person saying “All lives matter,” say, and calling them racist. Maybe that’s a black person, or maybe it’s a SJW with a tan, or maybe it’s a white dude who self-identifies as a black chick, or maybe…”
This comment speaks volumes to the questions I was asking.
You may be around people who are far more conservative than I, and thus believe that other conservatives would see you as a liberal, and I’m sure many would. But most liberals would not walk away from your posts like, “damn, that’s one liberal individual”, and I’m sure that’s not your aim, so that’s all I’m pointing at, as far as you specifically are concerned, and I’m just wondering how aware you are of this perceived appearance. And black people that I know regularly engage racist trolls on twitter for saying dumb shit like “all lives matter” but then asking where our fathers are and why we can’t stop killing each other or just follow the orders of police.
“There are worse things than loss of life.”
Debatable, but on Earth, it is generally the overtly oppressed, the physically dominated and most “undesirable” that die, early, violently, from starvation, and in large numbers, when not in outright war. That’s a fairly reliable metric for oppression.
“In your mind it is.”
Yes, and in the minds off all the previous presidents excluding half of Obama (har har), most of the senators and congressman, and most of the police and judges. I feel like I’m not saying crazy shit, but you’re responding as if though I am. I am not saying that white people ARE the power structure, but specifically that it is operating through some of them, almost exclusively in the west, where we are.
“since I am a white male, my opinion doesn’t count as much as yours does, as a black male (or as much as anyone’s really, at least not on this particular score)”
This is exactly what I mean. I never said this, or implied it, but this is the sentiment expressed by a lot of people who, as white males, feel marginalized. This interests me.
“BY the way, I have never felt oppressed for being a white male”
I see the disconnect (at least partially). I’m not referencing you, or any previous posts you made, specifically. I’m talking about racists who claim to be enduring white genocide, things like that. People who feel put upon that brown people live near them, things like that.
“Who are you to call someone else’s belief delusion?”
Who are you to call someone else’s awareness “belief”?
“but all I can say to that is, “I am someone who sees through that particular delusion.””
But what is the primary delusion? We cannot even identify that. It doesn’t mean shut down and stop thinking, it just means think more carefully. Express more conscientiously. Or don’t, whatever.
“Nor do I consider it necessary to bring about any sort of social reform to free me from that oppression”
You wouldn’t though, because there are different types of oppression. Pigeons or elephants.
This morning I found myself in the middle of a police chase. I was walking to work and there was a helicopter circling above, and sirens, but that’s regular, so I didn’t think much of it. Then I saw police cars. I noticed they were chasing another car. The car stopped almost right in front of me. 4-6 police SUVs pulled up around me and all of the police exited their vehicles and stood behind the open SUV doors, guns drawn and pointed at the stopped car. I was in the middle of this, as I was trying to cross the street. Oddly, none of the cops said anything to me. They seemed to not notice me, so I stood there as the victim slowly got out of his vehicle and put his hands in the air. The police yelled at him and he did what they said. He stretched out on the ground and the cops started to move towards him a little so I took that as my cue to cross the blocked street and go to work. The guy was brown. Every last one of the cops was white. They looked like copies of each other, in the same way they think we (black and brown people) look like copies. This guy was in all likelihood selling drugs. A few hours later, down the street from where I work there was a stabbing by/in a fast food restaurant. A man was stabbing random people. The man was black, the race of the victims random. Police shot him dead upon arrival. I wasn’t around for this one, just saw the aftermath. To some, this is evidence of a black and brown problem in America. To me, this is very clear evidence of routine oppression, the symptoms of desperate lives. The people living in those lives would see the need for social reform. The people unaffected by it would not. The people who do not want to get stabbed, but also don’t want to see others driven to the point of stabbing people and getting shot dead would also see the need for social reform, from two perspectives. The people who just don’t want to get stabbed would only see it from one perspective.
And I quit smoking weed a few years ago, psychedelics has been even longer. I don’t “believe” in UFOs and “transdimensional beings” as much as I have seen UFOs (“objects” I could not identify in the sky, even as objects) etc, doesn’t matter. Those occurrences do leave an impression, but I’m at a loss to figure out how they fit in here…
Madness… maybe, and then I’m OK with that. I would just hope people did not fight tooth and nail to legislate my brand of madness out of existence, or fetishize it to the point of mockery. And it’s actually the *lack* of ambiguity that you show that I was mentioning. If you replace “trans” with “autism” it might be clear what I mean, maybe not, I don’t know.
Ultimately, I think many things/ideas get damned with the label “liberal” that do not actually warrant that label. I think many of us then react to those labels rather than the underlying situations. That’s more what I was driving at then “you’re bad cuz you’re a white male” or whatever.
OK, on race (the elephant, so to speak, in the room). It take it as uncontroversial that racism is a strong undercurrent of North American society. However, I think what Jasun is pointing out (please correct me if I’m wrong, Jasun) is how the memes that survive the Twitterverse are those that are most divisive. “All lives matter” as transparently morally correct, if interpreted naïvely without historical baggage. The problem is that the engineers of that meme knew that it would be interpreted within its historical context and fan the flames of memetic warfare. “Can’t we all just get along?” Apparently not.
On police brutality: statistics are important here, though contentious because they require context for interpretation, and causal interpretation is heavily confounded by class, education, and other factors, all of which are multi-generational. So instead I’ll recount another anecdote and you can tell me whether you think it’s representative. Recently, in the neighborhood adjacent to mine (through which I must travel to get home), police killed a mentally ill white man. He had a history of mental illness, evidenced in part by his frequent abuse of his gay neighbor (presumably because of the homosexuality but one will never know the whole story). Police came to serve him an arrest warrant, he resisted, and so they shot him. I only knew about this because it happened close by and it inconvenienced me (police barricades messed up traffic for the day). How often do police abuse white guys but we don’t hear about it on TV?
The problem is that the engineers of that meme knew that it would be interpreted within its historical context and fan the flames of memetic warfare.
Do you mean “BLM” or “ALM”? I think “BLM” had the obvious weakness that it was easily misinterpreted by those who always misrepresent anything done by black people as racist, ie, racist trolls (“See?!?! they only care about black people! They’re the REAL racists! Send them back to Africa.”).
The “ALM” problem with otherwise well-meaning individuals should have been easier to address, but of course, it was and still is not. I still don’t see how you can say “All Lives Matter” as if that’s not known. The idea that black people feel that we’re treated as if our lives don’t matter more often per capita is just too much for people with little or no experience on the subject to deal with. As far as social engineering goes, that seems like great starting point.
On police brutality: In my post to Oak tree I addressed some of that. I really wasn’t even trying to initiate a convo on police brutality at all, I’m sick of talking about cops, with people who have not had any of the experiences I’ve had, it’s exhausting. I was just mentioning 2 things that occurred on the street I work on yesterday that were very strong indicators to me. I know cops kill and abuse white men, women, Latinos, Asians, animals, and they do it with alarming regularity here in the US. It’s just that, when looking for a node, lets say, of oppression, you have to really strain to not see the weight in the black community (if you’re looking, that is). The meme that there is no police brutality and that it does not affect blacks disproportionately is the real cause of the outbursts (along with the actual brutality), not liberal engineering, which simply directed and channeled some elements of it. That does not negate its validity.
We don’t hear about police abusing white guys as much on TV because it’s not as much of a defining factor in the majority of most white peoples lives. If it were, I can guarantee we would (and will) hear about it a lot more (although, if that were the case, the media might cease to exist).
And lastly, that’s part of the whole point. The “injustices” we ignore will likely eventually be visited upon us. People largely ignored us for decades on this issue, and now it is increasingly becoming a problem they will have to contend with. Continuously ban or marginalize one group, and eventually the banning and marginalization demons will come for you. They’re hungry.
Hey mahn ( Maam)? i dont think we Chimps are all necessarily moving toward ” unity”, ;; at the end of the day its always about who gets the most Bananas isnt it ??
“I see all bids as a bid to union, even those that appear otherwise, as all energy moves towards the same goal, infinity, the original and perpetual unborn. Humans are simply easily (mis)guided. Cognition is irrelevant to ignition, and concepts are meaningless to inception.”
I meant unity in a more universal sense (planets and stars, dirt and leaves, water and rain, things and not-things) not in the kumbaya, humans holding hands and never fighting sense.
Fifteen years ago, my son and his friends decided to climb on top of the roof of the strip mall a half of a block from our house. One of the boys was wearing flip-flops (ant-gang apparel) and couldn’t make it onto the roof so was left to roam the parking lot as he had nothing to do but wait for the others to come back down. Apparently someone reported seeing the boys on the roof. The police spoke with the flip-flop boy first and them went to get the others. The 6 police officers drew their guns on these 4 white clean-cut teens. The only black officer threatened the boys ‘I’ll take you down if you run!’ We lived in a white area of St Louis city, a low crime area
The flip-flop guy died of a drug overdose 3 weeks after the killing of Michael Brown aka Ferguson. His father is a successful business owner. This guy had graduated from a top Catholic high school. Graduated college. But when he was in the 2nd grade his parents started taking in black babies as foster caregivers with the expressed blessing of the Catholic diocese and ended up adopting 3 black infants. His world was turned upside down.
As being from St Louis, I had a keen interest in Michael Brown and from everything I’ve seen/read, Michael Brown was under some wicked mind control – as he was sent out that fateful day to be the next black assassin……. except without a gun. His intended adversary did have a gun – the advantage – the desired outcome. Twitter played an important role in getting the pre-planned message across to the black community as blacks were the early adopters of this social media. Blacks came from near and far to watch in horror as Michael Brown’s lifeless body lay in the afternoon sun for 2 hours. Pre-planned chaos prevented officials from moving the body. The rest is history. Of course, this is only my opinion based on countless hours of research and questioning the official narrative.
Ah yes, Burn the Witch and The Wicker Man. Relevant.
Michael Brown was one of thousands of people killed by police over the years. I don’t think anyone ever said that police don’t ever harass people of other races. And black cops do often over-compensate. Some of my worst cop experiences were with black cops. But it’s not anecdotes that people are focusing on, it’s the disproportionate actual statistics. And people have been saying for decades that if this police brutality is not checked then it is only a matter of time before it starts affecting more and more people who do not live in predominantly black neighborhoods.
As far as anecdotes go, I’ve had police guns in my face more times than I can easily count. I’ve seen police kill, and I’ve also been beaten with nightsticks and etc. I saw an old friend of mine get attacked by a cop. He was then arrested for defending himself. They took him away and chained him to a wall and beat him, left him hanging by one wrist for hours, for the crime of fighting back (he was half white, btw, and he could pass, he was actually with me when we were attacked by a drunk driver who claimed he was in the KKK, screaming obscenities and slurs at us and when an off-duty cop pulled up he pointed his gun at me, let the obviously drunk KKK guy get back in his SUV and drive away, and said “you boys don’t cause any more trouble” which is just hilarious). Another childhood friend was killed. I could literally go on and on, but of course, this is only my opinion from 30+ years of experience.
If you really believe what you said about Michael Brown being a pre-planned mind control victim, that’s fine. I strongly disagree and would ask what about all of the other victims of police shooting, both white and black and other? Are they all mind controlled as well? If your answer is yes, then that’s also fine, we don’t have to agree.
“Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:
there’s a million other straws underneath it…”
-Mos Def
I think the lions share of discussion here is about the ongoing “Infowar”.
Some people have made this human mind control “hobby” into big business (for them).
I think I’m gonna start up “Grey Matter Matters!”. Ya know, don’t sell out…BUY IN.
Gah. Anyways.
“And people have been saying for decades that if this police brutality is not checked then it is only a matter of time before it starts affecting more and more people who do not live in predominantly black neighborhoods.”
This. I look at the BLM “movement” as a wasted opportunity to unite people of *all races* against institutionalized brutality.
I feel it’s possibly suspect due to this.
If you zoom way out…it’s like a perfect trap for black people.
Get one specific group all riled up…then bust and jail them for rioting. Lotsa felonies handed out so they lose their 2nd Amendment rights. Malcolm X would be pissed!
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/malcolm-x-on-gun-control-and-the-draft/
“This doesn’t mean you’re going to get a rifle and form battalions and go out looking for white folks, although you’d be within your rights – I mean, you’d be justified; but that would be illegal and we don’t do anything illegal.”
(Yeah Malcolm, shooting random people that never harmed you has always been illegal.
Guess he lived by the sword and died by the sword eh?.)
Black lives matter was not designed to be a very “inclusive” phrase.
Do “SJWs” assert that only black people can use the phrase BLM? Or can blacks and “SJW’s” of any color use it? I’m so confused now. Maybe we need to ask the CIA?
These guys have been around since 2010:
http://www.copblock.org/about/
“CopBlock does not “hate cops” because CopBlock is the idea that “Badges Don’t Grant Extra Rights.
Therefore, it cannot hate, or love, anything. Yet, CopBlock.org was founded on the principles that all human beings have equal rights; no one class or group of people has any more rights than another just because of their job. The failure and inability to realize and act on this philosophy is to the detriment of all individuals. By focusing the disinfecting light of transparency on public officials, we safeguard not only our rights but those of future generations.”
They are plugging away, documenting things……formed by a white guy.
@Neptunian: One thing I will agree with is that whatever horrendous things we are doing to one another now, individually and in groups, they are a consequence of traumatized, delusional beliefs about reality that have left us unable to perceive anything accurately, much less respond to it. This would include sex, race, gender, you name it. So my arguments about the current insanity, though they might appear to have a conservative slant to them–as in, “For God’s sake let’s try and get back to the values we once had!”–they really don’t. I acknowledge that there never was a time (that we know of) in human culture when human beings weren’t behaving in insanely destructive ways towards each other, so all that’s really changed is the numbers and the technology available to us to do it.
My beef with misguided progressives is mostly anthropological: i.e. let’s look at the latest manifestation of the cultural, ideological insanity that underlies history, because being the latest, it’s the easiest to see. I am more interested in looking at progressive-flavored delusions than regressive or reactionary ones because the former are much less recognized or acknowledged, and they are relatively new, hot off the presses so to speak, and mutating rapidly. Also, they are much more demonstrably self-contradictory and self-sabotaging in the ways they can be shown to practice the very same thing they are preaching against (violent intolerance of anything perceived as lacking tolerance; suppression of all opinions seen as suppressive; a feeling of superiority over everyone who takes a superior position over others; the exclusion of all exclusionists;, and so on, I started to make a list of the internal contradictions of the SJW identity policy, but it’s a big project).
Thing is, I enjoy mapping the ways in which society breaks down and human beings lose all sense of reality. I don’t enjoy being in the thick of the process (who could?), but teasing out the subtler currents running through this apocalyptic unfolding, at the very least, is a great way to reduce personal anxiety about it. At best, it might allow some of those unconscious currents to become conscious and so more manageable or productive. The contradictions that can be seen may be allowed to cancel, the convictions may be lifted, and ambiguity allowed to return a little more to the discussion.
> But what is the primary delusion?
That you or I are a somebody = i.e. that there is an identity self independent a) of everything else in the universe; b) of our own bodies
The SJW snowflake brigade want to keep delusion b) while busting open delusion a). But it doesn’t work that way. In fact, I’d say that’s backwards reasoning. If we were to confront delusion a) and watch it dissolve, then delusion b) would go with it. But logically, it is easier to recognize that there is no identity separate from the body while we are IN a body and at least have SOME sense of a body-ID to contain us as perception, and as we then begin to experience the body as part of an infinitely larger perceptual continuum. There is no time for the arrival of some “third gender” self there. Just perception recognizing that it is not confined to the body-mind experience, and therefore that it doesn’t need to recalibrate that experience to suit the patterns of belief laid down in it by trauma. It can ignore the Serpent’s promise of endless narcissistic self-gratification and go naked back to the garden. (someone kick me off my soap box already!)
MM: >I don’t have much of an opinion one way or the other about the event itself, only the media spin and reactions generated.
Same. We are almost entirely left to deal with narratives generated by media, including individuals using the media to generate their own narratives and often as not propagate media-created narratives which they have wittingly or not hitched their wagon to. Take all these personal anecdotes about police violence. They are only of interest or relevance (to me) insofar as they reveal something about the person telling them. They are personal stories and of value as that. They are not of value as statistical evidence, even if we choose to believe they are true (which only the person telling them knows for sure). What I’m addressing here probably most of the time is the ways in which news stories and social realities (or perceived social realities) are being used to build, police, and guard ideological prisons for people and herd them as groups into these positions where they can be pitted against other groups, and so on.
Race and sex are useful because they constitute a fundamental divide (it’s at least partially visible) that can be used to conquer. But that inherent tendency in human beings to fear otherness and to bind together against it (and use it as a means to create solidarity) has been exploited from the earliest daze of social engineering, and we may be entering into a situation now that’s akin to the Hutu-Tutsi nose-measuring massacres of Rwanda, when the difference became more and more minuscule and at the same time, more and more explosive, and hence more and more necessary to identify, in order to know exactly who to kill. Who is a deplorable, who is simpatico, who is merely tolerable?
@Neptunian (again):
You have brought up the autist “parallel” before, but I’m not sure how good or fair a fit it is. There is a significantly larger % of trans-types within the autistic spectrum of society than in the NT one, so it’s relevant to that degree. But autism is not something I took as a point of prideful identity, or any kind of identity, really, more out of a desire to help rescue the label from the realms of a diagnosis of mental illness. Autism is part of the larger phenomenon of neurodiversity, which could certainly include people who self-identify as “trans,” and the main aim with ND is to recognize that brains can be wired differently and that this can give rise to different types of perception, both of self and the world. Autists aren’t demanding surgical alterations or social or linguistic changes to accommodate their existence, however: they are only asking not to be “treated” out of existence, and to be heard.
Also, if someone wants to suggest that autism or neurological diversions relate to early trauma and psychological damage, I would have no problem with that line of inquiry. You won’t find much snowflakism at this site. Hence there’s a level of bluntness when it comes to addressing (what I see as) the plague of narcissistic behaviors and the social and financial programs endorsing, exploiting, and exacerbating them. I don’t have much time for the sort of relativism you prefer, here or elsewhere, because it strikes me more as an argumentative strategy than anything, a get out clause for every occasion. To talk about how we can’t really know anything because all we have is mimetic definitions is a self-canceling statement: you must only be saying thing because you heard it somewhere else. (Granted I may have written something similar above, but it’s probably telling that it was as in the process of agreeing with you, not to “trump” you.)
I’m willing to say that I know that I am a male and that I have a penis to prove it. If you want to say you are a male, then you better have a penis to back that up or
fuck offgo away. Those are the terms of reality and if you don’t like them (not you personally, whoever), then it’s time to look more closely at yourself, not put all the blame on other people for daring to challenge your perceptions. I used to think I was a living avatar of Lucifer who would usher in the global apocalypse while becoming rich and famous into the bargain. Eventually I grew up and got over it. Fortunately, the worst I did to my body was take too many hallucinogens and get a couple of stupid tattoos (though I did inflict a few dodgy books on the world, and I was a lot more cruel to others than I wish I had been). But overall, those tattoos are probably far and away my biggest regret in life. I was deluded, but there was something there, just not what I thought it was. Same with trans and third gender and all this guff. There’s something there, but it’s not what the narcissistic ego wants to make of it. I would stake my soul on that statement. I think I already have, because it’s my soul that’s the stakes here!So yeah, manifestly we are capable of knowing some things, such as, if you hit a black, white, or brown, man over the head with a police baton, he falls to the ground at roughly the same speed. And so on.
@Yevaud: I think what Jasun is pointing out (please correct me if I’m wrong, Jasun) is how the memes that survive the Twitterverse are those that are most divisive. “All lives matter” as transparently morally correct, if interpreted naïvely without historical baggage. The problem is that the engineers of that meme knew that it would be interpreted within its historical context and fan the flames of memetic warfare. “Can’t we all just get along?” Apparently not.
Apparently not even at this thread, since, rather than discuss the points that we can agree on, raised in the opening post (or my last comment to Neptunian, the most salient parts of which he ignored, IMO), we have wound up arguing over areas we can’t agree on, even though they weren’t ever raised in the OP. I know Neptunian well enough (and his posts speak for him) to know that he’s not deliberately sowing conflict, so then this becomes a dynamic dialectic worth addressing, if only as an example of how fraught the conversation space is, now, and how much all of these seemingly different questions are hooked into one another. Now if someone makes a point in the general vicinity of another person’s area of offendibility, it is enough to trigger all sorts of unrelated responses. When there are no more facts that can be uncoupled from feelings, all arguments become straw man ad hominin defense-attacks.
Hi Jasun, I used to post as Harvey over on RI until I was quietly perma-banned in early December, no email, no explanation and no mention of the fact posted on the site.
I’d quite like to log in just to get my PM’s and friend contacts (which I never thought to back up) but all of my emails to RI have been returned. I can’t find another contact address. Is there any chance you could have a quick word with someone over there, see if I can log on one time to collect my stuff? It was time for me to leave anyway, the place has really gone to shit in the last five months but the regression is accelerating fast. Viewing all of it’s recent bizarre postures, feels like a coup of sorts took place.
So sorry to bother you with this, here… Don’t feel bad about deleting the post as unnecessary clutter.
I responded privately to this but I let it through because the world deserves to know the truth about RI. Hope that’s OK.
Re: RI. Super bizarre. I would have expected a little more transparency from the mod over there (at least the most vocal one). I agree that in the last few months the content has become all noise and no signal. For the last year or two it was still worth lurking because, even though the signal-to-noise ratio was quite low, there was still enough unique signal to make it worthwhile. Now it’s not worth the effort.
No worries. Having trouble logging in to my email, will try and get that sorted tomorrow (very late here) and have a look at your reply then. Many thanks J.
On the subject of trans:
https://archive.org/details/BBC-trans-kids
The whole thing is worth watching but maybe especially interesting from 45 min onwards (part about brains and how trans movement is reinforcing gender stereotypes)
I’m interested to see where this trans movement goes. Strangely, an older family member of mine is actually one of the lead pioneering academics in the field of transgender and related topics about gender identity. He would have actually been one of the people who would evaluate candidates for sex change surgeries to confirm whether they really “needed” it or not.
Without getting too much into the personal details of his life, I will just say that there is ample evidence of childhood abuse and abuse amnesia, as well as – in my mind at least – a very real possibility of some type of involvement with MKULTRA research (as a subject, researcher or both).
That said, he is a very kind, gentle, caring and seemingly level-headed guy. I don’t see any indicators of consciously being involved in anything more than doing good for others. Stil, being such a pioneer in the field, I do question the motives of those who turned him on to this area of specialization.
This post is so good, I’ve read it several times now and it really resonates with me. The “with us or against us” rhetoric of the George W Bush era via McCarthyism etc has been well and truly embraced by liberals. You’re a racist or you’re a TERF, end of conversation, block, will only interact with those who reaffirm their personal reality. Objective reality is over. Alternative facts, indeed – this has been a long time coming and here we are. Don’t let the bastards drive you mad?
Something to think on: http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/susan-bradley-how-trans-activists-are-unethically-influencing-autistic-children-to-change-genders – “How trans activists are unethically influencing autistic children to change genders”
OK, so I need to rant. You can skip this comment if you’re just not up to it.
On the subject of transgendered individuals, I’m probably more harsh than most people who could be mistaken (IRL) for a progressive.
Before I launch into my diatribe, I want to affirm my belief that individuals should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want (within the limits of respecting others’ rights). Therefore, I would never stand in the way of an individual adult’s desire to undergo hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or sex-reassignment surgery (SRS). Also, for any real-life individual who had something to offer me in the way of friendship, I would never let my opposition to the phenomenon of transgenderism stand in the way of that friendship. People who like and respect each other can differ on important issues.
Here goes.
First, the phenomenon of transgenderism conflates sex with the more-or-less silly concept of “gender”, which is a label assigned to a particular cluster/mode of behaviors and neurochemical patterns, where the multivariate distribution of these behaviors and patterns is roughly bimodal but by no means deterministic. In other words, it totally ignores the fact that it is reasonably easy for an individual to display behaviors or thought processes that are nontypical for their sex, even though such a person is unambiguously a member of that particular sex. I state this while still affirming the fact that many behaviors *are* correlated with sex, in the stochastic sense I just described. In yet other words, it is a massive failure of understanding probability theory as it applies to psychology, exploited in a way to rigidly affirm narrowly-defined sex roles. As Jasun has remarked, it also represents a failure to understand that ego is a function of physicality, not independent of physicality. This odd fixation with narrowly-defined sex roles comes ultimately at the expense of cis-gendered homosexuals, who often do find themselves displaying some behaviors that are atypical of their biological sex (thus lying further away than heterosexual individuals from the two modes of this multivariate distribution of behaviors/patterns).
Second, I find it odd that so many MTF transfolk self-identify as lesbians. The proportion of such MTFs is much much higher than would be the case if transgenderism and homosexuality were truly independent. This leads me to suspect that for most or all these MTFs, what is really going on is autogynephilia. This observation would lend credence to the claims of TERFs that MTFs are simply seeking access to female-only spaces (in multiple senses of this phrase). Another observation that supports TERFs’ criticisms is the collective temper-tantrum thrown by MTFs over their rejection as sexual partners by cis-gendered lesbians (google “cotton ceiling”, NSFW/NSFL). The remainder of MTFs are not much better: gay men who want to slip in under the radar with straight men, hoping to score some of that sweet, sweet heterosexual cock. I don’t have much to say about FTMs, other than they mostly seem like angry man-hating lesbians (aside perhaps from Buck Angel, who delights in gay male sex and, all things considered, is not unsexy).
Given that straight men don’t like being tricked in sleeping with XY bodies, and given that lesbians find “lady dick” repulsive, MTFs are setting themselves up for a lifetime of disappointment and unhappiness. Some studies show a non-negligible proportion of individuals who undergo HRT/SRS end up regretting it. Thus my third point: the path of the transgendered individual has a high risk of leading to profound unhappiness.
Which leads to my fourth and most important point: why are certain people pushing this on children? Who benefits? Surely the endocrinologists and plastic surgeons who “treat” these folks. Also perhaps some deep state actors who benefit from the confusion this sows in the general culture and the unhappiness it inflicts upon individuals (although admittedly a very small minority). While I understand the argument that pre-pubescent HRT can prevent or mitigate unwanted secondary sex characteristics, it completely ignores the fact that children are generally not entrusted with the wisdom and insight to make such life-altering decisions. FFS, it is assumed that children cannot even consent to one ordinary sexual encounter (a fact that is sometimes used to inflict harsh punishment on 18-year-old boys who have sex with their 17-year-old girlfriends). Even an unwanted sexual encounter at a young age is presumably less harmful than years of HRT that are later regretted (and this is not to discount the extreme negative consequences of pedophilia, so please don’t misunderstand me here).
Anecdote: as a prepubescent boy lacking a male role model and on his way to becoming a gay man, I may have displayed enough gender atypical behaviors to be considered a candidate for prepubescent HRT. I later “butched up” and am now fairly indistinguishable from a heterosexual (though perhaps slightly nerdy) male in body language and behavior. As an adult I fully 100% identify as male.
Fifth point: piggy-backed onto the transgender phenomenon is the non-binary/gender-polymorphism nonsense, which itself is tied to the insistence that we adopt nonsense pronouns, along with a will to use the power of academic standards and corporate HR departments to enforce this attack on language. Again, this is a misunderstanding of the stochastic nature of sex-specific behaviors, an attempt to find a large number of infinitesimal clusters among the two very distinct modes in the distribution of human behaviors. What is the value of such extreme engineering of language and subsequent policing, to accommodate what are largely delusions held by a small minority of the population? E.g., the term “expectant mothers” is now considered to be offensive to transfolk. Again, who benefits from this?
And six, perhaps my most incendiary point: the whole thing leads to an uglier world. How many transgendered individuals truly *pass*? Not many, to judge from my experience on the street and also photos I see online from time to time (of course to be fair I would never know if, IRL, I ran into a transgendered individual who *did* pass). Another anecdote: a few weeks ago at the supermarket (in my suburban neighborhood) I saw a creature with a very mannish face framed by purple hair, sitting on top broad shoulders, flanking a chest to which were attached two objects roughly the size and shape of tennis balls. There were some other unfortunate fashion choices involved. The eyes, they burn!! Obviously it was not this person’s job to satisfy my aesthetic needs, just as it’s not my job to drastically alter my use of language to indulge in this person’s personal fantasies, but why are we encouraging this in the larger culture? FWIW, I find a great many variations in the male form aesthetically and sexually appealing, including 60-something-year-old pre-HRT/SRS Bruce Jenner, who now as “Caitlin” just looks like some very strange and clownish humanoid creature. So I am not a nazi about looks, but I do find more natural presentations to be beautiful (even paunchy middle-aged guys), much as I prefer the woods to city environments.
I also find the whole thing kind of an attack on homosexuals, who are of course expected to fall in lockstep to advance the cause, sticking the “T” on the end of the “LGBT” cause.
Again, I would never stand in the way of an individual’s choice to undergo HRT/SRS, and out of politeness I will abide by an individual’s choice of pronouns, among the two historically established sets. But as the next moral cause I am expected to adopt and push tirelessly for : yeah/no.
I do have compassion for individuals who find themselves struggling to understand why they feel out-of-step with their social environment, who are willing to do *anything* to gain a sense of acceptance (both self-acceptance and acceptance by others). However, I think these people are better served by learning to accept themselves as non-neurotypical without undergoing massive physical changes to conform to a giant cultural error.
Yep to most if not all of that. BUT, for all the countless solid cases that can be made against Transgendering as in any sense socially progressive, much less psychologically healing, I am inclined to see these as secondary to a seemingly inescapable fact. The entire TG model is based on an unquestioned (and also unexplained) proposition: that there is “something” that has sex that is being born “into” a body of incompatible sex to it.
No one has posited what this “something” is. The closest attempt so far seems to be “the brain,” as if the brain: a) had sex or gender; and b) could be separated from the body, like something that is inserted inside the body at the last minute and that occasionally gets mixed up on the factory line. The obvious alternate to the brain as a sexed-identity-carrier is soul; but of course the new liberal mindset cannot talk about soul, because soul is a religious concept. Also because the notion of a soul having sex (i.e., reproductive organs) is essentially oxymoronic.
My point here is that what troubles me most of all about Transgender as a social movement (& as an individual choice) is that it is based on an easily demonstrable fallacy ~ or at the very best, an entirely unestablished hypothesis ~ and yet, this false or un-established premise goes almost entirely unremarked on. Why? I think it is because, to the constructed identity (a.k.a. narcissistic ego), there is no God but It, no Other at all, least of all an Other than threatens its sovereignty. It is literally unthinkable that anything but It and Its desires could exist, ever. And so we have these runaway narcissistic infants in adult bodies and in positions of power, projecting that same narcissistic-ego-construct-identity onto their own, and other people’s, children, even onto newborn babies, and assigning them with some sort of willful identity-self that must, at any cost, be granted its every desire, in order to avoid suffering at all costs.
The final irony, as Holly & Yevaud point out, is that the first victims of this narcissistic, other-negating ego plague (besides children, I mean) are previously maligned minorities such as homosexuals and autists (& even women), who are now (however subtly) being forced into the newly established cultural stereotypes of male and femaleness, to better serve the sociopathic expanding corporate agenda of the Big “I” Faceborg Self-Love Death Machine.
So yeah, the time to rant is at hand. For all the good it will do us, ha ha.
If one is going to confine oneself to strictly materialist/reductionist narratives (and it is sometimes useful to do that, because it does cut through some forms of bullshit, even while it adds others), it is plausible that brains can have their own sex/gender. In the sense that I described above, there are two broad patterns of neural connectivity, one roughly corresponding to males, another to females (evidenced by different distributions of white/gray matter, if you want to get anatomical). So a coherent argument could be made that transfolk have the neural wiring pattern that is more typically associated with the opposite set of genitals. I’m OK with that. The problem with that is that cis-gendered homosexuals also have atypical neural wiring. And, as has been remarked above, autistic folk have yet different neural wiring.
So why can’t we just admit and accept that there is neurodiversity? Why enforce a very narrow set of patterns?
And, not to beat my favorite … horse, it begins to feel like any neurodiversity I may display might condemn me to forced surgical mutilation, just to ensure that all genitals match the brains they are attached to. It feels oppressive, even a bit totalitarian, to insist that every neural pattern be immediately legible to the outside world.
Somewhat of a tangent: another thing that pisses me off about the argument “I’ve always felt like I was a man in a woman’s body”: how the fuck would you know what it feels like to be a man, never actually having been one anatomically?
The other thing I forgot to mention (and here is where materialist/reductionist narratives start to go off the rails) is that there is a kind of neurochemical essentialism involved in assigning ontological status to white/gray matter distributions. Yes, it’s demonstrably true that neural connectivity associates with specific patterns of thoughts and behavior. But what is the direction of the causal arrow? The kinds of studies that can establish causal direction are impossible with fMRI, not only because of expense but also due to ethical considerations.
So it could very well be that the brain *becomes* female in response to the social environment, instead of *starting out* female *before* exposure to the social environment. Nobody wants to go there because it calls into question the underlying assumptions we have about the extent to which biology really is destiny.
Absurdity incoming…..(the Jester appears?)
T-shirt or old skool Gothy album cover. All black……
“Souls Having Sex” – creepy elaborate font.
Graphic of two skeletons fucking.
Of COURSE it makes no sense. But it rolls off the tongue LOL.
(after reading all these comments what position would the skeletons be “performing” these days?)
Well of course it’s no surprise that even skeletons have “sex”, i.e. are male or female. A common exam question in an anatomy lab is to be shown the pelvic portion of a skeleton and to be asked to identify the sex. Easiest method is to examine the angle of the coccyx (the male version looks quite menacing, from the perspective of an infant coming through what might be the birth canal).
Somewhat of a tangent: another thing that pisses me off about the argument “I’ve always felt like I was a man in a woman’s body”: how the fuck would you know what it feels like to be a man, never actually having been one anatomically?
That’s a home run of an argument, again zeroing in on this assumed, never questioned, and never defined “identity-self” that has sex and yet no genitals!
Sam Hyde at Twitter comedy show 2013.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt19Vp9uBiQ
Re: neural wiring/neurochemical differences – the only way the “brain sex” argument really works is if you talk about hormones. This is why I tend to ignore the vagina = female, penis = male discussion, in favor of talking about testicles and ovaries. These days vaginas and penises can be “made” – but you cannot replicate testicles or ovaries and their function.
The trans movement acknowledges biological sex by admitting the use of, and even medical necessity for, hormone replacement. Allowing trans people access to synthetic hormones is a part of the trans campaign. However, these synthetic hormones can never replicate the hormonal experience of a man with testes or a women with ovaries. And, of course, once you start down the HRT road, especially if you have testes or ovaries removed, you are on those drugs for life (huge boon for the pharmaceutical industry), plus you’re sterile (great move for the eugenics lobby). Now not all trans people transition – with surgery or hormones – but we can see that there’s a push to make this more accessible to the point that it will become an anomaly for a transperson to not choose to do this.
Hormones, however, are not actually male/female in that men have estrogen (the quintessentially “female” hormone) and women have testosterone (the quintessentially “male” hormone). This becomes pretty interesting when you consider how they decide whether a woman/intersex person can compete as a man in sports – it had been dependent on testosterone levels but of course, in keeping with the culture, it should be based on whether you say you’re a man or not (who cares what your biology suggests). Then there are the environmental hormones that impact and change your hormonal patterns, which you are exposed to in the uterus and from birth. Interestingly, there’s a debate amongst PCOS sufferers (women who do not ovulate regularly) about whether they’re more likely to be lesbian. If you don’t ovulate regularly you will have different hormonal patterns to those women that do.
I find when discussing this with advocates for the trans movement a good tactic is to state “I am not a cis woman” – their assumption is always that you are gender queer or trans, which seems to cause them to recalibrate their thinking somewhat, long enough to entertain your thoughts on the issue. Of course, what is meant is that the term “cis” is BS and calling someone cis without asking if they “identify” as such, under their own rules, is “misgendering” – which, as we are told, is actually “violence.”
There is nothing progressive about the trans movement, to my mind, in fact it’s deeply regressive – a boy child that likes to grow his hair long, plays with dolls, or puts on a dress is now a trans person who must be helped to “become” a girl. A girl child who doesn’t like pink, plays with trucks, and wears jeans and tee shirts is a trans person and must be helped to “become” a boy. What if they’re not helped? Well, we are told, they will kill themselves inevitably. If you repeat that enough it will become the reality desired – we are teaching people that to not transition is dangerous, a cause for suicide.
And if we don’t confirm the identity of the self-identified trans person as chosen woman or man? That is also dangerous. Not confirming their identity = death. Feeling excluded, not “seen,” by those around you – whether that’s because someone uses the wrong pronoun or women are talking about their vaginas and you’re a woman, you think, but you don’t have a vagina – well, that = death.
Big I Faceborg Self Love Death Machine, indeed.
” And, of course, once you start down the HRT road, especially if you have testes or ovaries removed, you are on those drugs for life (huge boon for the pharmaceutical industry), plus you’re sterile (great move for the eugenics lobby). Now not all trans people transition – with surgery or hormones – but we can see that there’s a push to make this more accessible to the point that it will become an anomaly for a transperson to not choose to do this. ”
Yeah….this scenario is something to investigate. It pulls a couple threads of the “conspiracy” sweater.
Look at it from the $$$ angle, how many “transpeople” (existing and potential) are there in total as a market?
Are there enough to make it “work” as a purely greed based ploy?
Or is this a deliberate large scale backdoor funded study of some sort?
Is it part of the “we’re gonna trancend to cybernetic godhood real soon now” project?
I also see an element of vanity in all this. Like, if there weren’t enough cash sloshing around in “advanced” (degenerate?) society, people couldn’t pursue the surgery etc. etc. The cash is there so turn yourself into a pink pony if it “feels good”. Ain’t nobody got time for that crap if you are living in a refugee tent LOL.
Related to this is the edgy bisexual alchemical Crowley Warhol angle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bEDM4bsfWg
but we can see that there’s a push to make this more accessible to the point that it will become an anomaly for a transperson to not choose to do this.
What Marshall Poe describes as “the is determines the ought, not the ought the is.” In other words, when we develop technology that makes something easily attainable, the social norms change to accommodate that technology and allow it to proliferate. As I suggested to Poe, this principle could be “reverse-engineered” – decide on the behaviors you want to see proliferate in society, then promote the technology that will facilitate those behaviors. Supply creates demand, not demand supply. Seems like basic marketing policy only now we are through the looking glass because we have become advertiser-identities for which our bodies are both the carriers and, potentially, the products being advertised.
Just gonna leave this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6UcgiDwg0
Some interesting comments from everyone. I had a response written up, but lost it leaving work in a rush, and have not had time since then. RE: all the trans stuff, I’m actually approaching this from a position that is very at odds with my own bias, and attempting to explore a line of thinking that I wouldn’t normally. I imagine that, generally, people approaching this subject will do so from a place of (often very strong) bias. We all know how adept at fact-finding our biases are.
Mine are: Sex changes are “bad” mostly for reasons mentioned by others above. I think, from what I know, that they should never be imposed upon children, and the fact that they are seems thoroughly insane to me. If people should be allowed to “transition” at all it should be when they are adults (of course, I was one of those 18 y.o.s that almost went to jail after my birthday for remaining in a relationship with my GF at the time, so…)
Misgendering/pronouns: idgaf. Granted, obnoxious crusaders aside, if I meet a person and they ask me nicely to call them Rainforest, then I will. If I called them Fire Truck then I would be an asshole. So, in that regard, in order to be respectful, I will probably refer to people however they wish, within reason. If you need me to call you ze and zis and all that, our interactions will likely be brief and non-recurring by default.
Gender, and our ideas on the subject (and neuroscience), are constantly changing, adapting, evolving (whichever you prefer), not unlike our own collective genetic makeup.
I’m not actually concerned with whether or not trans people are “really” the opposite gender, largely because I do not believe that they are, I think there’s more to it than that, and we’re currently in one of those liminal periods where fancy takes flight and hidden hands make moves as we all adjust and prepare for new info. I just can’t reduce what their life experience to confusion.
On that note, @Jasun: “even if we choose to believe they are true (which only the person telling them knows for sure)” Imagine you lived in Egypt, and you had a view of the pyramids from your home, and every time you spoke to someone who had never been to Egypt about that view they expressed doubt that the pyramids even existed, or they just said meh, whatever, that’s not of any value, statistically, and does not modify my view of what life might be like in Egypt. TBH, this is chief among the reasons I rarely discuss too much with whatever-it-is people. I either offend them or I’m lying. It’s easy to see why people just say fuck it then, I’m over here doing this, not gonna worry about adjusting to them since they can’t even be bothered. It’s also part of the reason I’m looking more closely at this whole issue, and trying to understand it.
What’s left is people going though something, and other people dancing and chanting around them. Circles in circles. Life is drastically different for different groups of people. Hard and fast answers are rarely successful universal solutions, in my experience. That goes to both/all sides.
Regarding the “something”, we may differ. I do not take it for granted that the self or soul is temporally limited to one manifestation and thus tied exclusively to any phase of its existence (no idea how I could arrive at that conclusion apart from faith).
Interesting vid.
Some of your comments made me laugh out loud. I do appreciate your desire to keep things in question, despite (or even maybe to some degree because of) your strong personal feelings.
I’m not sure what the pyramids are in your metaphor. Also not sure what assumptions you’ve reached regarding my opinions on soul. I don’t necessarily think it, or we, is/are limited to any phase of our existence, but the conscious mind apparently is. Are you meaning that a soul might experience more than one life (or sex) simultaneously? If so I’d agree that the soul is part of a collective, not a discreet identity-thing, but that doesn’t follow that it could be born in the wrong body.
FWIW (probably not a great deal at present), my guess about what’s happening is that it partially relates to ancestral fragments that have retained self-awareness and that, like hungry ghosts, are seeking living bodies through which to satisfy their cravings for life.
The only intelligent comment I have about trans people is that in the womb, the presence of the mother’s hormones might affect the development of a child. The mother and unborn baby are somewhat symbiotic, and the presence of testosterone in a male baby in the womb definitely affects the mother’s body so why not the reverse? If an “expectant mother” has an especially high level of estrogen it might indeed affect the brain development of a child she is carrying, or a different effect from the presence of testosterone. I personally don’t have an issue with transgenderism, though I don’t really want to dwell on the medical aspects of it. I’d rather accept individuals on their own terms as much as possible. But I don’t approve of the reality show aspect the whole issue has taken on, I find that rather creepy, ie the Caitlyn Jenner media circus.
The vid is actually “real” (or at least someone really, really wants us to think it is), I went to the IMDB page for the show and there were comments from 2011 or 2012.
Glad I could get a laugh! The pyramids were just a stand-in for something that you might see as normal, an every day occurrence, but that others might see as fantastic or unbelievable. I used pyramids because, even to the person who sees them everyday there is also presumably (hopefully) an underlying awareness that they are not entirely ordinary.
RE: souls, I’m just assuming there might be differences, based on previous discussions. I think of souls as being not unlike elementary particles, in that while probably part of a larger whole, each soul may still have its own quirks, like quarks, charm, up, down, strange, etc. I wouldn’t limit them to six classes though, and would lean more into the infinite, though I wouldn’t rule out repetition. Each particle might even contain a soul of sorts, who knows. Of course, there’s no way at all to test or verify any of this, so… I was raised with incarnation and reincarnation, so there’s that as well. Bias is a motherfather.
I was going to mention that your idea sounded kind of like elements of Scientology, and then it occurred to me that my own most “paranoid” thoughts on the subject are not actually too dissimilar from your own, though (maybe) not as easily translatable, and with an infinite exponential function. Maybe another time. In a way, we are coming through ourselves, though it’s not that simple. Something is (always) being born. Birth can be horrifying, it brings life, but it can also traumatize both the born and to the mother alike. It can even traumatize witnesses. Jeffrey Dahmer was born at one point. Butchers are born. And so were you and I. Even maggots emerge…
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
I must be lucky. Good karma perhaps. It seams to never fail. Whenever vague thoughts start to appear, yet I can not quite tighten the chords to cinch them together to make tangible: one of the handful of the people I regularly read (this time being your writing) not only illuminates but synthesizes the idea.
I have been having the vague notion that trump as presidant was no accident. And that Hillary Clinton was no accident- as presidant or not.
They both are polorizing figures. Which is excactly what they are supposed to be. Reguardless if they are aware of it or not.
Nothing new. Well atleast in its current form starting with George W. Followed by Barak Obama, and so forth.
Being polorized keeps people focused on nothing else. It creates a burning sensation, that is only quenched by the others demise. Of course there is no other, so it can go on forever.
I have also been thinking a lot of how public school seems to be there to create trama to young people, effectively arresting their natural development into adolescence and adulthood. Normal, natural, self expression squashed out, and replaced by subservience to, or never ending rebellion against the state through avenues such as school (primarily) and other societal norms subtly (and not so) drummed out from media, etc.
Mix that with polorizing politics, and you have a population that as Nietzsche says in The Anti-Christ “modern man knows not the way out nor the way in. I am all that knows not the way out nor the way in thus says the man of today”.
Thanks again!
Travis
Wow, there are a tremendous amount of comments on this post. Have not read through all. Hopefully there is no redundancy in my comment.
As a sidenote, just found this:
https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/lord-archer-donates-satan-statue-tax-bill-421862
Lord Archer Donates Satan Statue to Ashmolean Museum for Considerable Tax Break
A bargain for a devil?
However, it hasn’t always been easy for Lord Archer; in 2000, he was convicted of two counts of perjury and of “perverting the course of justice,” according to the New York Times, in a prostitution case. He spent four years in prison for creating false diaries and for making false statements after a tabloid newspaper reported on his illicit activities.
I’ve really been thinking about how much the US presidential situation is about abuse, both current abuse of we the people and old trauma on the parts of the main players. The gaslighting from the Minister of Disinformation Kellyanne Conway is just like an abusive adult patronizing, minimizing and misleading a child that the abuse isn’t happening and he can’t trust his own senses. “Alternative facts,” “just printed reports,” “that’s one characterization,” etc. Presenting a myriad of alternate competing realities to distract you from the one true one. And her insistence of loyalty to Trump uber alles is very frightening – the abuser is always right and no deviance will be tolerated. The bullying from the president is like an out of control perpetrator trying to overwhelm a victim on all fronts. I have been thinking, too, about how Trump is psychologically similar to David Koresh, Jim Jones and Adolf Hitler, all of whom were charismatic cult leaders who were secretly suicidal and self-destructive probably due to abuse from their fathers. They all created self-fulfilling prophecies of doom and destruction that took their followers down with them. Three weeks in and I’ve already signed the Impeach Trump petition. Maybe I’ll regret it if they rendition me later, but this is headed to some kind of orgy of tragedy if we don’t do something. I signed that petition and feel better than I have since Election Day, aka Armageddon. I have also been donating money to lefty causes, which hurts because I am not wealthy, but like one of my friends said, we need civil rights more than we need new shoes.
Speaking of uber alles, have you all read about this? The collective unconscious spoke loud and clear about what is really going on in this country:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/13/tennis/usta-german-nazi-era-national-anthem/
I recently read the theory that Koresh’s Waco complex was part of an ongoing attempt to rescue children from the organized abuse networks, hence the severe repercussions suffered. I would be wary about putting him in the same class as Hitler and Jones.
As for the resurrection of Nazism, I see it as coming about at least as much in the guise of anti-Nazism, due to the growing notion that, for Liberalism to conquer Fascism, it requires Liberalism to become as forceful and uncompromising, as brutal and as bad, as Fascism. And what kind if victory is it, if you become as bad as what you have defeated? Or rather, who is the real victor?
Not to promote this guy and his vids (he’s practically MSM at this point) but I did find these enjoyable and mostly sober-headed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCEmk-U57zo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyC80feMcgU
Koresh was a classie cult leader who took advantage of psychologically vulnerable people to join him in his suicide by cop bid. He also was a sexual predator who had 25 children with a harem of young female cult members. Not a likely candidate for a child rescuer, he put his own kids in harms’ way because he was stockpiling weapons and preaching loudly about taking on the federal government. It seems more like he used them as human shields than that he looked out for them. The way it all went down was explosive escalating trauma on both sides. Of course there may be more to it all and the government handled it very badly but he really was one messed up dude. I grew up in Texas and know people who knew him and they said he was always a creepy religious fanatic. His apocalyptic preaching was exactly like the doom scenario Trump is peddling, of hellish inner cities and national rot that can only be cleansed by violence. It’s their own inner abuse drama projected onto the world and it locks in with the complementary drama of other similarly afflicted people. I’m under no illusions that progressivism is pure, and I’m not the kind of liberal who preaches perfect political correctness or else. But whatever else is going on Trump is truly mentally ill and as a responsible adult I feel I need to tell the truth about that and make an effort to remove him or we’re all going down like Waco.
Hitler (and the Nazis) is probably the most lied about and misunderstood phenomenon in world history. When I witness people’s ill conceived notions of Hitler, I am reminded of Plato’s example of the perfectly just man!
*
Imagine a competition between the perfectly just man who shall appear to others (because of their ignorance) as supremely “unjust” versus the perfectly unjust man who is absolutely ruthless, observing no moral constraints in attaining what he wants, and moreover who possess a magical ability never to “get caught” and always appear to others as supremely “just.”
http://www.loyno.edu/~folse/Philking.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l85RvOvtMsw
@ 2:12min
Ich bin selbst in meinem Volk aus sehr schweren Anfängen emporgestiegen und ich hatte kein anderes Lebensziel als ein ganz großes soziales Programm durchzuziehen und auch ein großes ergänzendes kulturelles Programm. Diesen Aufgaben habe ich mich gewidmet. Die – ich darf wirklich sagen – Vorsehung hat es nun anders bestimmt.
[I have … myself .. ascended from being a common German with an austere background, and I had no other goal in life but to carry through a very large social programme, and also a supplementary large cultural programme. These are the tasks I have dedicated myself to. Providence, as I must say, has now dictated differently.]
@ 1:08
Der Krieg, in dem wir nun gemeinsam stehen, war von Deutschland weder vorgesehen, noch – das darf ich ruhig aussprechen –, vorbereitet worden. Wenn wir uns diesen Krieg als möglich vorgestellt hätten, dann wären die Vorbereitungen gründlicher, besser, praktischer, zweckmäßiger gewesen.
[The war, in which we now stand side by side, was neither foreseen by Germany – und I can honestly say – nor was Germany prepared for it. Had we thought this war were possible, then the preparations would have been more rigorous, better, more practical, and more appropriate.]
https://www.amazon.com/Hitler-Attacks-Pearl-Harbor-Declared/dp/1588261263
This book demonstrates through marshalling of the very real evidence of political speeches, newspaper editorials, and public polling data that virtually all Americans were convinced that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was directly instigated by Adolf Hitler, and therefore a US total war on Nazi Germany was inevitable the instant the Japanese attacked Hawaii.
*
It is amazing how Hill’s small book overwhelmingly and convincingly marshals massive evidence to debunk the myths surrounding Pearl Harbor yet receives almost no recognition so far from the history professions. By enlisting FDR’s speeches, the Congressional Record, a large number of important newspapers as well as various polls, etc. he proves that between 60 to 70 percent of all Americans believed that Hitler and the Germans were behind the attack on Pearl Harbor, that the Nazis planned it, financed it and partially carried it out. This myth, if not giant lie, foisted upon America, was believed by most until May 8, 1945 when captured German documents proved no connection whatsoever. So, what to do now?
Historians interested in analyzing the causes and background of major wars might want to compare the fact that 60 to 70 percent of all Americans believed Hitler to be behind the attack on Pearl Harbor with the fact that about the same percentage recently believed Saddam Hussein was connected with 9-11–a myth that is being dismantled more rapidly than the post-Pearl Harbor myth.
Or compare to: what percentage now believe the Russians hijacked the US Election to get Their Man Trump into Office….?
Then there is this:
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/pentagon-video-warns-of-unavoidable-dystopian-future-for-worlds-biggest-cities/
http://www.opednews.com/populum/pagem.php?f=Coming-Soon-to-a-City-Near-by-John-Whitehead-Future_Martial-Law_Pentagon-170214-971.html
Remember the Frankfurt School! Here´s a segment from a Jonathan Bowden talk from 2008 (Youtube New-Left Marxism and The Frankfurt School)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-BZylziBKI
More !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR4MvD9IEAE
My Greek friend has this to say about Trump. The nine Muses channel information from, let’s say, God — and then they choose an individual human through whom they begin to disseminate this information into the world. They may choose someone (say, Trump) who has previously been a very bad operator, but who is open to their direction, and from then on they continue nudging him in this or that direction, to read certain books, choose certain advisers etc. in order to release more of the Truth they think needs unleashing at that time in history. This is not a political message – but it’s somehow the way I view Trump. The village idiot can be the Chosen One, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the work needing to be accomplished.