Numbed by Numbers on the Way to the Digital Palace
Edward Curtin
“But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
Everybody knows that 2 + 2 = 4 since 4 = 2 + 2. They know that excellent thing with certainty but generally fail to appreciate the charming nature of 2 + 2 = 5.
Tautologies are usually preferred to choices that seem to contradict the “laws of nature.” Mind-forged manacles are popular because freedom from the laws of nature, while desired, is feared. It suggests that liberty is a fundamental existential truth.
Don’t get me wrong, I can count. I am drinking my second cup of coffee. Number one has disappeared down my throat, but the second coffee tastes fine. It is real and still exists. The first is just an abstraction now – number 1 – a simple vertical line on the page.
We are pissing our lives away on abstractions, forgetting that notation is a system of symbols that direct us to what they intend. The key is to grasp what is intended. The cognitive construction of the number system is a useful tool, but when it is pushed as the essential tool to grasp the meaning of life it has become a tool of control. That is the case today.
The Internet and digital media are the greatest propaganda tools ever invented. They have come to us on the wings of numbers. They are insidious in the extreme, as the etymology of “insidious” tells us – Latin, insidere, to sit on, occupy – for over the last few decades they have acted as an invading army occupying our minds with numbers in a cunning attempt to mathematize our lives for techno-scientific, financialized neo-liberal capitalist purposes. To prepare us for the Great Reset when people and machines will be indistinguishable, Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5-G ultra microwaves, and Agenda 2030 will be fully established, and when human life has become part of The Internet of Things.
That, at least, is what the builders of the new Crystal Palace intend. At the moment, their Digital Palace seems like a stone wall that is here to stay, but as Fyodor has said, people are strange creatures and will sometimes refuse to be reconciled to the impossibility of “stone walls if it disgusts you to be reconciled to it.” I am disgusted.
The construction of the Digital Palace is the long goal that has been underway for decades. To erase lived time and space, flesh and blood humans, and by transfixing people with numbers, to create an abstract and ephemeral reality through a constantly evoked sense of emergency. Living the machine/Internet life would never be acceptable if people had not been subjected to an onslaught of numbers/statistics/data that has accustomed them to think like computers.
The great Jacques Ellul made it clear in his classic work, Propaganda, that propaganda is much more than the waving of a magic wand and lying, although it is that. It is a long process. He writes [emphasis added]:
It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside. The slow building up of reflexes and myths, of psychological environment and prejudices, is not a stimulus that disappears quickly…
The mathematization of our thinking has been the essential first step in addicting people to the internet complex where mind-control is so effective. I say first step, yet it has been concomitantly accompanied by daily litanies of lies about world events through what Ray McGovern aptly terms the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).
In his usually masterful way, the great journalist John Pilger has recently pointed out so many of those grotesque lies about US wars of aggression around the world. Their numbers are legion, but not the kind of numbers you will find in the mainstream media. We are drowning in lies and numbers produced by a nihilistic elite in love with power, money, mayhem, and murder.
Twenty or so years ago a massive push was organized to give prime emphasis throughout the educational system to what is termed STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This has been implemented at the expense of subjects that have traditionally been associated with the liberal arts – philosophy, history, literature, art, music, etc., subjects that introduce students to thinking in the widest and deepest ways.
It is no accident that instrumental logic has replaced deep thought for so many people and the poets have been replaced by intellectual pimps. The emphasis on STEM subjects has paralleled the rise of the Internet with its drumbeat of numbers, statistics, and data. Let me offer just a few examples, which may seem innocuous unless seen in their larger context.
- The switch from analog to digital clocks and watches and their omnipresence.
- Referring to the week as 24/7 and the writing of dates as numbers such as 08/30/2023.
- The use-by-date numbers on all products, soon to be applied to commoditized people.
- The use of the term 9/11 to refer to the events of September 11, 2001.
- The listing by numbers of the best colleges, mascara, underwear, corkscrews, etc.
- The hilarious dating of the earth’s age to the current 4.4 billion as if that meant anything to anyone.
- The computer generated weather forecasts with their 10 and 30 day forecasts with precise numerical percentages for rain, snow, etc.
- The analytics that dominate the world of sports, the posting of numbers for everything from the speed a ball leaves a baseball bat, a tennis ball a racket, and in golf the speed, height, curve, apex, carry, and launch angle when a ball is driven – all these numbers changing as a computer measures the ball in flight.
- The “helpful” messages on restaurant receipts where the tips are recorded in descending order and exactitude from 18% to 20% to 25%.
- Manipulated statistics for everything under the sun, such as Covid cases and deaths, Ukrainian military casualties, unemployment numbers, etc.
- 6 feet social distancing and 15 days to flatten the curve – real science
It is easy for one to add to this small list of the use of numbers. They are everywhere and are intended to be – in people’s heads, as the saying goes. They are intended to induce mass production of thought and behavior that is numb and that tranquilizes real thought and oppositional action. The more this is so, the more the schooling institutions will loudly announce how well they are teaching “critical thinking” skills. All our institutions have become complicit in 24/7 capitalism and the mind-control of deep-state forces.
In his brilliant new book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary, sums it up nicely: “One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness. . . . programmed unintelligibility and duplicity.”
The reality of everyday life used to revolve around our bodies in place and time. Now that time and place have been jumbled, it revolves for so many around the cell phones in which people live a weird disembodied existence. Sensory life is being annihilated. This is the era of virtual people, shadows of shadows, abstractions upon screens. Our connections to nature, to the seasons, to the sacred ways of our ancestors are being discarded for the machine life in the Digital Palace.
Dostoevsky’s underground man wasn’t playing a silly game when he suggested that 2 + 2 = 5. He was saying that free will is more important than reason which just satisfies the rational side of our nature. Without it we are sub-human, machines in a vast prison of our own making. His words are more important today than when he wrote them in 1864, the time of The Crystal Palace with its promotion of the Industrial Revolution’s technological marvels. Today’s Digital Palace marks a far greater threat to our humanity, and so his words are worth attending to:
…man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s interests, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy – that is that ‘most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, virtuous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
And if you are apt to raise a finger in warning about such wild advice about existential freedom, let Dostoevsky ask you this rhetorical question about the reasonable and logical ones: “Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us.”
As familiar as numbers.
Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.
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A few more numbers (less numbing, I would hope):
Since the start of the Ukrainian ‘Counter-offensive’ (in name only), some 66,000 Ukrainian soldiers have perished. Over a period of roughly 3 months.
Using the proverbial back of an envelope, that makes 22,000 killed per month. Or roughly 730 people a day.
People (like you and me), who presumably could have lived other, better, more productive lives, given half a chance:
https://www.rt.com/russia/582394-shoigu-estimates-ukrainian-counteroffensive/
I think the author is right when he criticizes “instrumental logic” also known as “formal logic”. Formal logic has its specific applications in science of course; however, I sense the author is pointing at the use of formal logic in cases in which it is not indicated, particularly when manipulating forms heavy of historical content.
For instance, when we assert that “bolshevism is the enemy of / financed by capitalism”, we are committing that kind of misuse, i.e. manipulating heavy historical contents as if we would with empty forms. Also, I just learned that Russia’s and Turkey’s bilateral trade had increased 80% in 2022. What? Exactly. Learned that from Putin himself who today met Erdogan in Moscow. Turkey, a NATO member, and Russia almost doubled their trade volume in the middle of the European crisis opposing Russia and NATO. Did we expect no trade whatsoever between the two? It is because we were using formal logic, instead of Hegelian Logic. Also, consider this: as part of US sanctions against Russia, US has as per April 2022 stopped its imports of Russian crude oil, but is to this day importing oil that third countries imported from Russia and refined; also US still importing other items from Russia. Got that? Did we think that US and Russia stopped business? So the author is perfectly right when he states that:
“It is no accident that instrumental logic has replaced deep thought for so many people and the poets have been replaced by intellectual pimps.”
Regarding Dostoevsky’s idea of free will, it is clear that no individual action is completely independent, and freedom can’t be reduced to that independence. As I learned from this critique, Dostoevsky’s view on free will at that time was rather a reaction against Russian social reformers in the 1860s, who claimed that “everything a person does was thought to be determined by causal laws.” And so, to prove this mechanistic, predictable view of human beings wrong, he used every opportunity to do exactly the unexpected: When a friend greeted him, he shouted angrily at him; when he suffered from toothache, he didn’t go to the doctor; when a girlfriend approached him with tenderness, he flew in a rage against her; etc. By this, he pretended having proved that his courses of action are never reduced to the one thought to be the only possible in a particular context, but that he can choose something else, which he interpreted as independence or free will.
This view as signifying Freedom doesn’t stand the slightest scrutiny as the only thing Dostoevsky did was to add a new factor (“I won’t do the expected”) to the context that determines his behaviour, so that his action becomes, given that addition, again the reasonably expected. Also, to anyone who could observe him over a long period of time, his unexpected actions become the expected actions.
There is no doubt that our actions can’t be independent from context (internal and external) which doesn’t mean that our future action is predetermined, as our context changes permanently in a dynamic feedback between external and internal factors, so that no one can predict with certainty what we shall do in a future date. Determinism doesn’t mean fatalism.
One could argue that our choices did become restrained and our lives automated and more predictable. Yes, but always more like the weather IMO, never like a certainty.
If you want to be successful in life, observe the masses and do the opposite.
Free Will is still real for people that haven’t already sold their soul to the system.
Doestoevsky did react against the “social reformers'” dialectical materialism, and where it would inevitably lead (ie the horrors of the 20th century). But not against ‘causal laws’ per se.
Indeed he predicted the future, based on what he observed of current events/trends. Accurately, it would seem, being sensitive to cause and effect.
Regarded by some (perhaps legitimately) as a far-sighted prophet e.g. Nicolas Zernov (as in his “Three Russian Prophets“)…
https://archive.org/details/threerussianprop1973zern
… he foresaw the horrors of the 20th century. Where Russia was heading. As ultimately played out under Leninist, Stalinist dictatorships. And as predicted in his novels “The Devils” about a group of revolutionaries (that ultimately devour one another) and as predicted in “The Brothers Karamazov” (the parricidal ‘Smerdyakov’ being a forerunner of Stalin).
He, of course, had his sources. Being friendly with a fair few in the Russian “intelligentsia” certainly helped, of the ‘Slavophil’ (a misnomer if ever there was one) variety. So his thoughts weren’t entirely plucked out of thin air.
Good sources leading to good predictions of the future. Truth in, truth out
Thanks for the reference and the information. Yes, he was a visionary and a prophet, recognised as such even in some Stalinist circles. By the way, I was referring above to Dostoevsky’s character, “the underground man”, not to the author; my mistake, although one can reasonably assume that the character’s ideas reflect the author’s.
But that Dostoevsky had a “power of recognizing and representing the dynamics of a future social, moral and psychological evolution from germs of something barely beginning (Lukács)” doesn’t prove our future is predetermined. One might predict general trends of a society (for instance there were not few who predicted that Germany after 1918 would rise again and demand reparations for the injustices of Versailles, by force if necessary; in fact there were no lack of sagacious minds in the past centuries in the political and diplomatic spheres who, considering the balance of powers among countries and their past historical evolution, predicted social and political trends), but no one (I hope so) can predict the future of individuals, which was my point. I don’t know what will happen, or what will I do in 5 minutes, although whatever I would have done then will be the result of a chain of causes and effects, some of which I could have been unaware of.
I didn’t know this but Dostoevsky had a near-death experience by a firing squad in 1849. The order to suspend execution (it was all planned as a punishment) was given at the very last moment, – which must have been felt as an eternity, – when there was absolute certainty that the current breath will be the last. There were three of them; one got mad, the other had his hair turn white and the other was Dostoevsky. One generally doesn’t survive these existential experiences to tell the tale. The consciousness of the certainty of imminent violent death is mind shattering. Hence IMO, Dostoevsky’s revolt against death, that certainties, determinations, perfectly predictable activities, must be symbol of; the idea of no escape and no alternative; the boring identities like “2 + 2 = 4, period and there is nothing one can do about it”, must remind of that situation where he was standing in front of a row of rifles aiming at him with the unescapable certainty of imminent death.
Hence, his characters whose actions seemingly escaping what rationality would predict, insisting on having autonomous unpredictable will, with more than one course of action, independent from context and even harmful to themselves; on entertaining uncertainties about what’s next; a character who kills but insists he never decided a murder, or gave many motives for probable murder so as to entertain uncertainty. In a word, Dostoevsky’s characters revolted for the agency and autonomy of humans away from the rigid scientific view of his time, and ever since to this day.
This brings us to the question of action and freedom.
Do you wish to elaborate on that and the connexion to dialectical materialism and Stalinism?
I do recall that Dostoevsky was perpetually in debt, a product of his predilection to gambling, so any aversion to cold hard numbers may also have some root in that.
I’d also agree that Dostoevsky’s near-death experience was particularly exceptional. Not only in the fact that he faced what appeared, and what to most would have seemed to be, a certain inevitable death, but also the fact that he had the writer’s capacity to describe such a survival experience to the benefit of posterity. Truly exceptional. Probably unsurpassed. Not something that can be engineered in a test tube.
Nevertheless, the Soviet Union, as a whole, was, in a sense, the outworkings of “dialectical materialism” given its philosophical chance on the world’s stage. So, as regards judging the fruits of such a philosophy on a human level, I believe that one can use the history of the Soviet Union as a good guide to where such thinking leads.
In terms of the horrors of Stalinism, my own favorite would be the novels of Anatoli Rybakov. “Children of the Arbat” and its sequel “Fear”. Fictional maybe, but they capture the individualistic sheer horror of such an era perhaps better than any historical source.
The nonfictional actual horrors – show trials, exiles to Siberia etc, are a matter of public record. I doubt that they would be in much dispute.
But maybe there is a counterargument. Achievements in Space exploration and also in terms of the Soviet Union’s gains in military might would be two such areas.
Gains of a State at the cost of the individual?
A reply in pending, if it survives the execution experience to tell the tale …
Agree. Nothing can justify the horrors of the purges and gulags, not a State against the individual, not even a social revolution, specially not a social revolution. Many who dedicate a personality cult to Stalin have to do a self-critique and have a lot to answer for; I couldn’t find any serious attempt. I just can’t seem to attribute those horrors to the application of the dialectical materialism, but I don’t have as yet an argument to prove that assertion.
In the heat of action, one just reacts to the events, despite any theoretical consideration. A combination of events made it possible for the Bolsheviks to accede power; then historical context imposed itself imperiously on how the Bolsheviks responded. Then we had Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. One thing we sure can do is draw all the lessons we cold from that episode, and one lesson is clear: Any attempt to change the social order which comes early, that is, at a time there is still a large portion of the population that accommodated to the status quo, and not ready to change, will necessarily result in dictatorship, intestine conflicts and fights for power, and the liquidation of dissidence.
That’s why we shouldn’t force Revolution; true Revolution will happen when it is ripe for it to happen (we can agitate for it and work to rise popular awareness though), when it happens as a felt necessity for change on a global scale; anything short of that will end up turning into a disaster.
The trick, of course, is to understand both Dostoevsky and numbers. Simultaneously, though it may require effort beyond the norm.
So yes, a ‘numbers palace’. A ‘Digitopolis’ per se. And a way/road to Digitopolis. All the ingredients for a secularized “Pilgrims Progress”.
Though such a road may be blocked by such enemies as ‘Officer Shrift’, the ‘Whether Man’, the Doldrums and some kinda gelatinous creature whose name I forget, among others. Nevertheless, all such good & worthwhile stories have happy endings. So maybe check it out. ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’. A happy ending is never amiss:
The Phantom Tollbooth (1970)
https://archive.org/details/the-phantom-tollbooth-1970-dvdrip-x-264-ac-3-i-cmal
Abandonment of logic & epistemology in the name of asserting “free will” or a grasp of the nature of reality isn’t metaphysics. It’s fantasy. The alternative to tyranny is not whim.
Neither numbers nor cause & effect constitute tyranny. Appalling drivel.
Amen, sister.
My own latent, nascent, prescient thoughts on the subject may also emerge from the ignominy of ‘pending’ at some later date yet to be determined in the future (watch out for late-emerging adjacent posts) to grace the ever-fluctuating intellectual landscape… though never guaranteed due to unpredictable algorithms… controlled by numbers or by people…?
Let the idle chins wag, I say.
suicide numbers:
“In 2020, there were 3139 deaths by suicide in Australia, about nine lives each day. It is the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15 to 44.”
i guess that’s a lot for a first world country with a population of nearly 27 million people.
The anger of the author and his passionate rejection of the tyranny of Number is more than justified. Number has everywhere insidiously infiltrated our lives. Everything is measured, and nothing exists if it hasn’t some numbers associated with it, or nearly so. The first appearance of Number associated with concrete objects was to administer lucrative private property: How much do I owe, and how much it is owed to me; also the appearance of the State as the general arbiter in social conflict over lucrative private property brought with it the official use for Number.
I’ve read (can’t remember exactly where) that within some “primitive” communities whose economy was based on sharing, gifts and counter-gifts, if you were given, say, three fishes one day, then if you gave back three of something as a sign of gratitude, you were looked at in a very angry way; it was an offense, as if Number, a dead entity, a symbol of Thanatos, was put above Life. Sharing is the antithesis of the primacy of Number; sharing, production for consumption, means that the community, as a community, produces and consumes without rationing. Come and eat, drink or take your fill of it. Marx expresses it thus:
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” – Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875
Notwithstanding the above, some might face a conflict on the question of Number being l’ennemi à abattre; some mathematicians and philosophers would argue that Number and the science of Number is, per se, not the instrument of tyranny we see today; that Number is also an instrument for sharpening the mind, and producing critical thinking.
Perhaps, what will emerge after the rule of Capital, out of the rule of Capital, is a community in which humans put every kind of human activity in the right place. Engels, in Anti-Dühring, argued that much when he said that anarchy in production created by the contradiction between, on one hand, producers guiding themselves by self-interest, as if they were independent actors, and the social nature of production on the other hand, will end when producers learn the laws of social production and hence consciously control the forces of production putting them to serve the community rather than be controlled by them.
Likewise, Number will perhaps just find its true place within human activities, as a mind sharpening game, rather than be banned altogether. The future will tell.
“The mathematization of our thinking has been the essential first step in addicting people to the internet complex where mind-control is so effective.
This process can be challenged by a simple syllogism: everyone eventually gets the war they are trying to avoid; everyone wants to avoid WWIII; so, logically that is the fate that awaits us. Paradoxically, the only way of avoiding it is to accept it. Tragically, and historically, empires have all retreated into their teleological convert zones – convincing themselves they can never lose. And it is a hard mind-set to break. Those who try to can find themselves silenced on internet platforms – including myself, for saying as much.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
Afraid not it’s Web Press.
1+1 =< 3 .
1 man + 1 woman = family.
2 – 3 = -1
So if I have 2 apples and I take away 3 apples I must be a magician
Me thinks something does not add up
If I create a computer model that attempts to model just a few of the very many variables of a problem. I add some data plus a few set points based on even less data plus a few formula. Then I take the worst case scenario. Plus I ignore my many previous wrong calculations.
I don’t document my work or add any error checking to my code and call the whole thing a simulation. Then I must be Neil Ferguson
If I take notice of such flaky predictions and ignore my own government department that had looked at the real data and concluded that it was Not a High Consequence Infections Disease due to LOW Mortality and then order a national lockdown with all its High Consequences I must be Boris Johnson.
And you will be doing just what your paymasters tell you to do…..just like them.
The difference is synthetic math and organic math.
Sorry for being British lol! No it isn’t Erik you are too if are not then who are you other than EKN free dictionary Netherlands in Kentucky US…DD double Dutch Lol! Watch it, you can’t fool us Northern Folk..well you can but Iam a BRG racing car driver none robotic anything really.
Rotten. Left is Mother Right is Pop.
Officially – it was the cleverness of the US in engineering the Soviet Union interference in Afghanistan, and which got the Soviets quagmired in Afghanistan, which caused reverberations throughout the USSR, which caused the collapse of the Soviet Union…
But it was the people’s widespread refusal at home wot did it…
Refusal has a lot going for it, though mostly it’s not done consciously…
In our case technology clearly create the need for it self, per design. You are lead into a ruse by deceit. By propaganda, by military psychological warfare techniques.
CIA has since 1948 worked on how you persuade and make people to do things contrary to their own interest, called psy-ops against an enemy, info-war, perception management.
The need for man to chose something which may be against his own interest and will, and that 2+2=5 is a key, is a CIA’s wet dream.
Man’s basic desire is to be independent. Independent enough to be able to defend his women, children and family, and society and country.
We don’t have federal reservists Erik, stop faking it.
I have the right to be among the resistance today.
I’m forever wondering…
We dont hear much these days about the use of the teevee as a child pacifier, a child distractor – plonking down the very young in front of a teevee set so Mum can get on with her busy housework, or so she can to get “a bit of Peace”…
Many of us Oldies like to blame The Technology for the reluctances of the young, but The Technology would not be embraced were there no felt need for it…
Critics, especially the Dialectical sort, chatter about “Manufactured Needs” (knowing ‘The Science’ is on their side ?) – But “Does The Technology create the need for it, or does it cater to the need ?”
I like how you used the intelligent “cater to” instead of the ignorant “cater for.”
Me too, literally smacks of a We round up load of bollocks, excuse my french as they say.
A question Science can spend billions of dollares to answer.
The internet may be a great propaganda tool, though I’d say not greater than the TV or the print media; at least here we get to decide what we want to read or watch and we have a wide range of viewpoints to consider. The MSM all seem to be synchronised in their narrative – diversity, my foot! It’s the TV and today’s education system that have hypnotised and dumbed down the masses, breeding a dogged culture of fervent belief over independent thought and action.
Dostoevsky was right in saying free will (independence) is more important than reason, and people adhering rigidly to reason have simply lost touch with their feeling, their heart-based way of being, which makes them good candidates for psychopathy. Hence the observation that the most “civilised” (cerebral) people can often be the most subtlest of slaughterers.
Every human has reason and conscience and they always work together, forming united wisdom.
Men shouldn’t separate what God has united.
Psychopaths are not reasonable people. There is no truth or logic in them. Their wit is instrumental and mechanistic, not wise.
Psychopaths are completely reasonable and rational within the constructed logic of their limited mechanistic/technological paradigms.
What they aren’t is:
Compassionate.
Indeed, psychopathy means lack of compassion. But what does lack of compassion mean?
When the sense of knowing the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, is lost, there’s no reason, either.
False logic is just false, not logic at all. Only true logic is logic.
No, they don’t. There are 8 billion of us on this planet, and we have wildly disparate beliefs, interests, abilities, competencies, strategies etc.
“Shouldn’t,” perhaps, but they do.
Psychopaths (and sociopaths) can be eminently reasonable. One can be perfectly reasonable, and use impeccable logic, but if one is arguing from false premises, or out of ignorance, can still reach wrong conclusions. Psychopaths, not relating from emotion, are generally extremely logical. Logic, however, can only take one so far.
Reason and conscience are not the same thing as beliefs, interests, abilities, competencies, strategies etc. Reason is reason, conscience is conscience. With reason, we can know the difference between true and false. With conscience, we know the difference between good and evil.
Knowing the truth with our reason is good.
Knowing the good with our conscience is good.
All good is good.
This is pure logic, not the false logic that psychopaths have.
What on earth would make you think that Adolf Hitler, Ted Bundy, Pol Pot or any other example of a psychopath, were reasonable? Or logical? Good?
Think again.
You miss the point/s, namely, that reason, or better, the ability to reason and reflect, is not bestowed equally amongst us humans, nor is reason itself always an accurate tool, as shown in the Monty Python clip I posted earlier.
I’d suggest that spiritual discernment coupled with experience, rather than conscience, allows us to know the difference between good and evil.
Again, you missed the point, which is that psychopaths are fully capable of using reason and logic, and that reason and logic don’t always lead to desirable consequences.
Replacing the abilities of reason and conscience inherent in every human being with ”spiritual discernment coupled with experience” makes human wisdom inherent in everyone into a vague mature idea of some developed individuals who have accumulated experiences. My argument is that all human beings are endowed with the abilities of reason and conscience since birth, and every child knows what is good and what is not good even when they don’t have words to describe those things or experiences with spiritual discernment, whatever that means.
True reason means logic. Children are extremely logical, for example, when they learn language. Unreasonableness is taught by some adults, while they claim that unreasonableness is reasonable. They may abuse their children and say it’s reasonable, good and just. But it isn’t. Adults lie a lot.
Logic can only deal with true statements and wise, good actions. There is nothing wise or logical in the Monty Python clip, but it only shows how unreasonably people behave when they have stupid ideas and beliefs instead of truth and logic.
As someone said, if you’re willing to wait a generation, you can quietly overthrow a country. For example, you start by taking control of schools and text books. Parents had no idea this was happening. By the time they found out, it was too late.
I would like to point out how A.I. is quickly replacing the Humanities. Has anyone else noticed this?
The sheep love it so……………
Generational cull:
https://revolver.news/2023/08/maui-coverup-where-are-all-the-children/
There is no Sanctuary. So run, Logan. Run!
Klaus Schwab WEF
“The Great Reset is in full effect.”
“So you best protect ya neck.” — Wu Tang Clan
#donteatthebugs
Numbers are used for quantity.
Quality needs no numbers.
So if the “Digital Palace” is so fucking bad, why did we not decamp to smaller more localised economic communities years ago? It ain’t that fucking bad yet, is it? We just like to think that the species rejection of embodied life-affirmation and social-solidarity has only just recently been infected by ‘them’ – that’s pure propaganda.
Propaganda is a technique; grammar is a technique; logic is a technique; rhetoric is a technique of persuasion; the outcome of which is globalisation.
Ellul’s original analysis of the then three propaganda blocs is outmoded. The three have become one. Propaganda is now coeval and coextensive with neoliberalised anthropogenesis. Ergo: anthropogenesis is totalised personalised propaganda.
In every diurnal period, the supermajority of the entire species is entrained to ‘grow the global economy’; which we do, even though it is contrary to one’s owned best interests and the growth-obsessed permanent extension of our planetarily communionised libido dominandi is ultimately causing destructiveness, death and decayness. But, as an accelerant and totalised anthropogenesis – that is exactly what we are doing right now. Usually (in the free world) out of one’s owned free unfettered choice.
That’s propaganda, and it is a molecularised self-intoning. “We are drowning in lies and numbers produced by a nihilistic elite in love with power, money, mayhem, and murder” that is represented in every-bodies head. We know this, and we do the nihilistic neoliberal way of life anyway. That’s ultimated, absolute, all-powerful autoeconomic propaganda as self-persuasion.
Everybody knows that financialised fiat numerology is a digitisation and biodigital simulation of life-affirmation, but that never stopped its globalisation. Instead of in self-empowered localisation, we are all situated in the one world economy like we don’t know how we fucking got here – we chose to like we were supposed to from infantilised indoctrination.
Everyday with the imagined victimhood of our owned choosing and paranoid-schizoid invention of our owned repression! Instead of fessin’ up and changing our owned choice strategy to wholesome degrowth and self-empowerment localisation of meaningful pluralised ecological communities, we keep choosing econometric numerological expansion ad infinity and beyond!
That’s propaganda by number and neoliberal herd-animalisation by ratiocination – comfortably numbed by numerology and pseudo-persecution complexity – but it ain’t just coming from without. Who needs freedom when you can have the constant seductive ratiocentric guidance of an unconscious and calculative neoliberal narratisation in the head 24/7/365?
That’s the univocal voice of the grammatike tekhne, logike tekhne, and rhetorike tekhne of homo kakoeconomicus neoliberalismus indoctrinated in the head from shortly after birth. That is how totalisation propaganda works, and how it comes to be perfected; not if it comes from the outside, but if it comes from the inside as an involuntary orienting reflex. Whichever is the globalisation of the introjected micropolitics of desire that got us here.
Hereafter, time to turn back. Time to turn off the seductive-mechanical mathematisation of “radio libertarianism” in the head. Time to get real. The voice in the head is not a person, it is a personification of one’s owned propaganda.
Localization is not feasible everywhere. To be successful on any level, it must be based on an agreed upon decision to stop watching network TV. The real problem is not propaganda stuffed into our minds but ideas plucked from our collective mind and filtered into a propagandic brew which is then fed back to us.
No idea is or ever can be as strong as the ideas we ourselves concoct. Our friends and neighbors are not so much the victims of propaganda as they are its origin.
Localisation is not possible? We are all localised as socialised and culturally situated. We are also culturally generated in that we agree in principle to the institutional “Form of Life” we are born into as was historically previously agreed upon (nomos). The whole ethos of Kant’s infamous declaration sapere aude (“dare to know”) was to reject the mediaeval institutional framework (mostly of the church state) and begin the rational institutions of science, industry, economics, secular government (Montesquieu’s “separation of powers”) and so on (he refrained from citing ‘democracy’ because of the autocratic society he was in, but you get the drift.)
So, if this was the “enlightenment declaration” of mathematical rationality (“All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”) — when will the ‘enlightenment’ actually begin?
We agree (in principle) with globalisation as socially instituted and culturally created in order to create or enjoy a higher standard of living than we could independently and locally. So what if that standard of living is imperial, colonial, dehumanising, exploitative and ultimately destructive of life and liveability — can we not disagree?
After all, it is an established enlightenment principle to question the imperial greed of our forebearers; and how is rationalisation, industrialisation, moralisation, and globalised synchronisation of intentionality going for the species so far? You know the end and I know the end: so when are we all going to disagree with the anthropologically institutional life we are enslaved by?
The institute of that institution is the human language. The substitution of alphabetical symbols for mathematical symbols ($$$$$$) was a very recent agreement in the form of life: so how is it’s life giving vital function playing out? And why do we all still agree that this is the vertex of life giving properties?
To localise, we would have to economise and accept a much lower material standard of living…. but we would still be alive. No such guarantee accompanies the current institutionalised, rationalised and globalised neoliberal set of agreements that nobody alive actually ever agreed to. They just never actually disagreed in an collectively meaningful way; and we refuse to recognise the cultivated connection of language, economics, and ultimated destructiveness — whichever is psychic propaganda.
We could easily localise through self-empowerment; or we could involuntarily agree to a set of destructive institutional principles nobody agreed upon. No-body in their right mind would ever rationally agree on collective intentional suicide. Remember the “Degrowth Riots”? Dream of the “Degrowth Riots”…. I do!
BTW: I forgot to say that the propaganda I’m talking about is ancient. It began before it was codified at least two millennia ago. Long before mass media, long before even print media — long before media (if media are the extension of the senses and techniques of the body.) We, in the very broades terms, rejected physiology millennia ago and created a new logic, a new grammar, and a new rhetoric of separateness which is probly coeval with civilisation itself. Then, the Axial Age: but we never moved one iota from nature. Time to return to life as a deconstruction of the mind, before the mind deconstructs us.
Small communities makes people narrow minded. Small companies always try to save on salaries and human obligations. More quarrels, more abuse. In major companies you are more sure to get your paycheck. Just to mention a few reasons why we prefer big.
Is that a defence of globalisation? Human obligations? Are we obliged to actively destroy the fertility of the earth and leave future generations to repair our collective death instinct? I seriously fucking hope not.
All life supports life except us. Living is a collective enterprise, We can do it economically and destructively or ecologically and creatively. You don’t get bigger than that!
I agree. But when it comes to comfort and security, just saying people chose the lowest fence.
A bad example. The use of numbers that do not accurately depict what they are supposed to depict is the more pertinent example of propaganda. The number two, in it’s raw existential state, times another raw 2, does equal four. However, when the US elite, the “maintsream”, the Establishment elite, say there were only four civilian deaths in the Iraq War (which was not a war, it was a US invasion, slaughter and occupation for the Cheney Basement Council to divy up the oil fields to US “national interests”, BigOil clients) when there were actually over half a million civilian deaths (John Hopkins+), this is propaganda.
I take offense to the “four” example because of Orwell’s use of this in the torture of Smith in 1984, where the State’s double agent sellout torturer, keeps holding up 4 fingers demanding that Smith see 5. Here’s were Humanity must dither between fact and fiction. The tools, numbers, if used like tools accurately, merely serve their purpose. It’s the twisted use of numbers, like a badly designed graph with purposely limited ranges, that is the problem. The real solution is perceiving the scams, like four fingers, badly exaggerated charts or re-word-crafting standard language expressions.
A better example of, purposely or not, insidious propaganda strategies causing disorientation and confusion occurred when I went to search the film image I was thinking of from the 1956 Brit version of 1984. I put in “Big Brother 4 fingers” and got images of the US TV show. Spinning the historical context of terms like “Big Brother”, “Company Store”, “911”, “Homeland”, “Survivor”, or empire cloaking terms like “national security interests”, structural deficits”, “public-private-partnerships”, “food insecurity”, “covid-involved” and a zillion other fact spinning costumes… are the real problem.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qVkSIJLrSm0/UGHtz-f7n5I/AAAAAAAACEM/7tx1rx-zdFc/s1600/four+finger+1984.png
The token ‘2’ is just our way of writing “the number that’s the successor to the number that’s the successor to zero”, a really unwieldy but logically correct way of stating what seems to most of us to be obvious.
Number theory is a branch of mathematics that turns the obvious into the extremely abstruse, in the process providing good eating for academics. Look it up. Also ponder that our Masters of the Universe, whoever or whatever they are, tend to have a more practical attitude to numbers — their world is dominated by the spreadsheet, relatively simple statistical anaylsis and interpolation (they’re primarily interested in the answer “Does it make a profit, and if so, how much?”).
Thank heavens Number is much more than a string of figures on a Center Bank balance sheet. Ah, Number Theory; my preferred subject. Euclid, Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Fermat, …
I can’t believe for a second that these, shall I say, adventures into the abstract world of Number and their patterns, can have anything whatsoever to do with power.
In a better world, in which humans have at last found our art de vivre on earth, shall these fascinating and mind strengthening excursions survive?
We have a whole bunch of amusing zeros in gvt, together they don’t add up to anything in the end, but you put an adventuristic one in front of them, and now you are talkin real money.
Pending
CJ Hopkins live on 21st Century Wire. Sound quality like he’s eating and talking at the same time, but interesting.
https://21stcenturywire.com/2023/09/03/episode-478-new-normal-tyranny-with-guest-c-j-hopkins/
One of the earliest examples I can think of, of encouraging the practice of habituating numeration, of interest also in its own self-explanatory identification:
1. CONNECT-THE-DOTS
Interesting some modern versions with thousands — clouds! — of numbers.
2. TIME ITSELF, not just the switch from analogue to digital, but what “face time” used to imply, including now archaic, and to some, no doubt, incomprehensible, Roman Numerals and sun dials.
3. WORLD WARS — Global conflict
Perhaps, instead of chronological enumeration, it might help reduce belligerent belicosity if, rather than counting up, 1, 2 … [insert pregnant pause, of breathless, jaw-agape anticipation, here] we adopted the expression: The Last World War (for WWII) and reinstate “The Great War for Civilization” or “The War to End All Wars” although, they hardly seem to have been effective to that end in their original invokation. It seems magic words don’t help, or have lost their power to affect, except that it is still words that start and end wars — so, my 22¢ (inflation) STOP! NOW! MAKE PEACE!
2. COUNTDOWN — Rocket Launches
Y’all remember those…
1. ARMAGEDDON — The Last World War
(T-minus, 1-second)
0. TOO LATE NOW
The Tesco Torys chairman who seems to be psychic who predicts the future has informed us that his staff will now wear body cams as broken Briton 💤 is dangerous for them to work in. Build back better surveillance under the torys is done under safety.
I first saw theses body cams on copper years ago, then recently on train guards.
They recorded everything every communication they have during the day.
Taxi’s, bus;s wankers on bikes wearing head cams, cameras everywhere.
More on perception management:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/winter-kills-quentin-tarantino-qanon-conspiracy-thriller-jeff-bridges-1234793940/
“Why ‘Winter Kills’ Is the Perfect Conspiracy Thriller for the QAnon Era
Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, the batshit 1979 movie about Jeff Bridges investigating a JFK-like assassination plot returns to theaters. Its timing is perfect”
The timing is indeed “perfect” for management of that rising awareness of the utter fraud of the entire media so glaringly obvious since 2020.
“The ’70s were the perfect time to be paranoid ….”
And what follows is a cutesy dismissal of all those “silly theories”:
· “government-sanctioned assassinations here and abroad”
· A “second-gunman … around dead presidents”
· “elite secret societies pulling strings”
· “an assassin-recruitment corporation”
· “a CIA analyst on the run from agency goons”
· “a cabal of industrialist fatcats in a plot to kill JFK”
Of course “we know” that none of these things really happen!
And here we have “the wildest conspiracy thriller of the Me Decade …. a film that can’t decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a nightmare, so it splits the difference.”
Not having seen it, I gather that the Wiki description is correct and that this movie is “a satirical black comedy thriller” which would correspond with Rolling Stone’s favourable review here.
It appears also that Quentin Tarantino is a “superfan” and is the one pumping up the movie for new recognition. No surprise there, Tarantino being one of the biggest media grovelers
“Of all the 1970s conspiracy thrillers, this one somehow feels the most attuned to our modern era of batshit Reddit threads and lone pundits buzzed off their own chemtrail theories.”
Interesting. I deduce that this film, coming at the tail end of the 70s was an attempt to stifle the increasing awareness of the rancid bullshit that the media floats on and the stinking sewer it covers. Which is why it is being called into service now.
After a summary of the “wacky plot”, there are noises about curious “glitches” in the release whereby it seems the movie was effectively buried. Apparently one of the producers “would end up murdered” and “(t)he production was shut down two weeks before completion due to union issues and lack of funds”. Also “the film was mysteriously pulled from theaters”.
(Conspiratorial musing: perhaps even this satire was too close to the mark?)
After which, a characteristic arrogant dismissal:
“When you watch a lot of ’70s conspiracy thrillers, especially ones that dabble in JFK ephemera, there’s a lovely time-machine sensation of revisiting the worries, fears, and furrowed-brow anxieties of a bygone, wide-lapeled age.”
See? They were all so cutely paranoid back then. But “we know better now”!
But “we” shouldn’t be so complacent!
“See Winter Kills today, and the comfort of a “that was then” feeling is supplanted by the contemporary dread of now. You’re only a few clicks away from folks railing about pedophile rings run out of pizza shop basements, deep-state maneuvering, false-flag operations, and other wackadoo notions. The fact that they sit side by side with actual reports of the rich and powerful playing puppetmaster with our political process only makes you sweat more. The totally batshit theories that Winter Kills toys with used to be confined safely on the fringe or within the theater’s walls. Now they’re running through the veins of our national bloodstream.”
Yes the loonies are everywhere now!
We was worried about MC,
Rumors on the forums was. youve gone in for a sex change op as you’ve been radicalized on line.
The eye is the first circle just as numbers and math are the great equalizer.
The Ellul quote is good but the process must also be related to a carefully nurtured sense of “we, the community”. And what that means in our atomised society is our “pop culture” centring on TV. As an example,
So there I was “taking a break” from all this depressing reset shite and perusing this:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/worst-decisions-in-music-history-1234626744/
When I slammed up against this:
No. 4: “Eric Clapton goes all-in on vaccine conspiracy nonsense”
And a harsh light intruded on my weary yearning to just put my feet up. The fact that this entertainment industry – like every other aspect of the media – is another whore for the parasite class slaps me in the face. Indeed, it is precisely the entertainment industry that is the most suspect. As is confirmed by this:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-boosts-antisemitic-propaganda-twitter-anti-defamation-league-1234817008/
Twitter, or X, has engaged in a hashtag campaign against the ADL. Well naturally they are not going to be allowed to get away with that!
“A hashtag campaign pushed by right-wing ideologues and rife with antisemitic content is trending on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, and being shown support by owner Elon Musk. It’s a new low for a platform that has seemingly abandoned the fight against hate speech.”
The vulgar vacuity of that is depressingly familiar. Of course the ADL are portrayed as angels in the “necessary” campaign against “hate and toxic propaganda”. And what follows is a by-the-numbers piece focussing on “anti-Semitism”, “white supremacism” etc.
None of the tweets sampled suggest anything like genuine Nazism etc. Though one of them falls for the deliberately divisive “anti-white” prejudice thing.
And there it is. Those crazy young ones with their wacky music have now become – if they weren’t always from the start – the dupes of a creature that has manipulated them and sucked them dry. For fear of offending against those who still wish to preserve some respect for those “rebel days of yore” (and I’m one of them!), I concede that amongst the hippies and punks etc. there have been genuine “voices of protest”. But the genuine ones are easily subsumed – and their own efforts absorbed by – the generator of phony dissident community.
‘the genuine ones’
Truly one in a million. Easy to see, but never shown. Genuine ones have the luxury to entertain themselves and themselves only.
Whatever.
Genuine ones know how to find the meaning of life within themselves. And they have a world to explore as reference material to themselves. And that world is, in contrast to Disney’s expectations, not a small world. It needs a lifetime to be explored.
Genuine ones need others for comparison material, and not for building blocks (like pieces of Lego) to build something of what they are (like rock stars do). All the rest is nonsense.
Rolling Stone is currently one of the worst rags out there (and it’s a crowded field). Here’s one of their worst, on child-trafficking after the film ‘Sound of Freedom’ came out:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sound-of-freedom-child-trafficking-experts-1234786352/
BTW the Fraud published something very similar. TBC I’ve not seen ‘Sound of Freedom’ and from what I’ve heard about the film it seems open to multiple criticisms – but not the ones made by Rolling Stone.
It was a long time ago they published Carl Bernstein’s article on what we now know to call Operation Mockingbird.
On a separate issue, TPTB have been repeating an operation they did on the word ‘woke’. They neutralised one of the alt-space’s strongest terms and tried to appropriate it for one of their own movements, making it a term of ridicule and contempt in the process. Well, they’re doing the same to ‘red pill’. ‘Red pill’ is becoming a term to mean a loathesome prescription directed at incels by the likes of Andrew Tate. The so-called red pilled are supposed to understand that women are all greedy and selfish and the only solution is to become the controller in a relationship (starting by telling men they must sleep with 50 women to begin understanding how women operate – an obvious mockery). It’s like they were so keen on the Tom Cruise character in ‘Magnolia’ they made him into a LARP-ing character called “Andrew Tate”, only worse. How it all plays into the usual divide-and-conquer and depopulation agendas should be obvious….
Yes indeed, that Rolling Stone item is the most repulsive ass-covering. So here’s a commentary,
“Anti-trafficking experts”. The moment I see the word “experts” I smell a hideously stinking rat of gargantuan proportions. “Experts” is the all-purpose (and totally non-committal) label for a pseudo-authority that can be invoked with infinite portentousness. Though, to be sure, if challenged the media hacks could no doubt supply any number of actual names from the list of bought hacks.
The movie “garnered mixed reviews, to say the least” – this is code for “Don’t go there!”
The movie is criticised for “its self-serious tone” (it presumably should have been a light hearted romp!) “its star’s promotion of conspiracy theories” (of course! The ubiquitous mantra that just makes it all go away!) “and its dubious source material” (i.e. not ratified – or supplied – by the “proper authorities”)
“The new movie offers a “false perception” of child trafficking that experts worry could further harm the real victims” (Those “experts” invoking that cunning bluff whereby the impulse to get something done is transferred to the opposite shoe whilst maintaining its air of concern.)
There are odd noises about how the struggle against child trafficking is not being conducted in “the proper way”. “…child trafficking is a very real and extremely serious problem, in part because it is so difficult to track. Reliable statistics are hard to come by due to the underreported nature of the phenomenon ….”
How strange that in this world with its unprecedented surveillance networks, it is all so vague re: child trafficking. Could it be that these networks are not being used to monitor child trafficking because nobody up there really wants to know about it?
“…. a large body of research shows that many child trafficking victims are LGBTQ or gender nonconforming youth who have been kicked out of their homes and forced into the sex trade by someone close to them.”
And there it is! First off, we should know by now that “LGBTQ” really means T, the cuckoo term that kicks the others out of the nest. This is emphasised by that “gender nonconforming”. And this is fucking bullshit in general but especially when applied to children i.e. prepubescents.
Thus this wretched article spins the whole thing by diverting attention away to this total bullshit demographic.
And, speaking of diverting attention, we are told that
“We want to believe that people trafficking children are unknown, nefarious strangers …. [It] makes people uncomfortable to think some of these things happen in their own communities, in their own schools, with people they might run into at the grocery store.”
Yes, it’s you yourself and people you know who are the culprits and not those folk in positions of power!
(And, incidentally, whilst wading through this crap piece, I noticed yet again how the author works hard to bloat it out with a huge amount of repetition using sophisticated language to bamboozle the reader.)
“… the film has received widespread acclaim from the far right, particularly proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory ….”
Right on cue! Everything in this sewage revolves around a phony theatre created by the media itself.
It seems that the anti-Sound of Freedom lobby have now a new song to sing. One Fabian Marta who was one of the crowd funders for the movie has been charged with a case of child kidnapping. The media are so gleeful about this that Marta’s relation to the film has been massively upgraded to the “Man behind ‘Sound of Freedom’” An awesomely devious and misleading manoeuvre, as seen in the title of this piece:
https://www.thestatesman.com/world/who-is-fabian-marta-man-behind-sound-of-freedom-charged-with-child-kidnapping-1503208650.html
The air of deception continues with this:
“The precise circumstances leading to Marta’s apprehension remain shrouded in uncertainty. It’s important to note that, in Missouri, child kidnapping is categorized as a class A felony, indicating the gravity of the offense.”
This is a familiar tool for misdirection. After admitting that “uncertainty”, the “gravity of the offense” is emphasised.
Naturally, that arbiter of “groovy youth culture”, Rolling Stone, gets in on the act:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sound-of-freedom-movie-donor-kidnapping-1234801061/
“‘Sound of Freedom’ Fans Shrug Off Arrest of Donor for Child Kidnapping
The child-trafficking drama was a hit with conservatives who say it raised awareness of an important issue — which they are now pointedly ignoring”
The correct theatrical placements are emphasised:
“Released on the July 4 to acclaim from conservative audiences and critics, Sound of Freedom has been a box-office bash, pulling in over $150 million thanks in part to a pay-it-forward ticket promotion, as well as churches and other groups buying up blocks of seats for their members. … it has found strong support among QAnon adherents who believe in the existence of a pedophile cabal that drinks the blood of abducted youths.”
And here we have the supreme case of emotional blackmail:
“But now that a Missouri man who donated money toward the film’s promotion has been charged with kidnapping a child, those same Sound of Freedom supporters suddenly appear more concerned with the movie’s reputation than the welfare of the possible victim.”
Marta, 51 has been arrested “for the alleged abduction of a non-relative child”. His attorney, Scott Rosenblum has said “he is “baffled” by the state’s case against Marta”.
Rosenblum adds,
“It’s very hard for me to connect the dots, and I don’t really know how they’re proceeding”.
But of course, despite these uncertainties, the media juggernaut has no hesitation in ecstatically delivering its tale of hypocrisy:
“What Marta has been charged with is the kind of offense repeatedly carried out by the villains in Sound of Freedom, and it’s the kind of news that the film’s most zealous audiences have pointed to as justification for a moral panic about trafficking. However, Marta is one of their own: around the time Sound of Freedom premiered, Marta was reportedly bragging on Facebook about how he had helped bring it to theaters.”
Incendiary language. “One of their own” indeed!
Then oddly worded stuff about what Marta “allegedly wrote on his page, according to screenshots shared on Twitter by anti-disinformation activist Jim Stewartson.”
“anti-disinformation activist”? Interesting! Even more interesting:
“These comments do not currently appear on Marta’s Facebook account and could not be independently verified. Rosenblum said he could not speak to Marta’s connection to the film.”
After some rumblings about how money for SoF was raised, this:
“Marta was one of thousands to contribute to this budget, and while it’s not clear how much he gave, Angel offered these backers a maximum 120 percent return.”
So hardly the “Man behind ‘Sound of Freedom’”!
Still, a minimal awareness of the obligations of fairness here:
“Jeffrey Harmon, one of Angel Studios’ five cofounders…. point(ed) out just how many people had participated in the crowdfunding. “Someone had to do some serious homework to find one random dude isn’t a good guy,” he posted. Shortly after, he complained, “Seriously, who sorted through 6,600 names of random people who put a few hundred dollars into P&A funding and cross checked it with local judicial databases?” Harmon then described Marta’s kidnapping charges as a “nothingburger.””
Then a clumsy attempt to make Harmon sound like a hypocrite:
“Only after he was criticized for responding in a way counter to the message of Sound of Freedom did he tweet, “Of course I condemn [Marta].””
Funny bit:
“Sound of Freedom boosters did what they could to minimize Marta’s connection to the film.”
Considering that Marta’s connection to the film seems minimal and he has hardly been proved to be guilty of any offense, this is ludicrous stuff.
But still the scandal mongers try to paint the supporters of the movie as hypocrites:
“Most took a page from Harmon, arguing that several thousand people donated to get the movie a wide release — and expressing none of the frenzied outrage about crimes against children it has provoked in recent weeks.”
It is educational to see how there is a concerted and pretty desperate attempt to turn the tables on Sound of Freedom.
Please explain what “genuine Nazism” is?
By “genuine Nazism” I am referring to those who are actual Nazis and actual anti-Semites as opposed to trolls who adopt that role in order to fan the flames.
Actually The term “Nazi” was coined by the Communist “journalist” (propaganda merchant) Konrad Heiden in other words made up by the MSM, which is still being parroted today by morons and thicko sheep. Now you know.
I can find no reference to Heiden as the originator of the term. But it appears to have roots that go before the actual “Nazis”:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/Nazi
“…the word Nazi was favored in southern Germany (supposedly from c. 1924) among opponents of National Socialism because the nickname Nazi, Naczi (from the masc. proper name Ignatz, German form of Ignatius) was used colloquially to mean “a foolish person, clumsy or awkward person.” Ignatz was a popular name in Catholic Austria, and according to one source in World War I Nazi was a generic name in the German Empire for the soldiers of Austria-Hungary.”
Interesting voter reaction. petunia petherington gets 3 votes up and I get 3 votes down. So I guess just shouting “morons and thicko sheep” is what gets you votes.
From the bots and trolls at least. : /
The rock stars of our generation were generally anti-establishment, until they became rich enough to hide themselves away from reality. Good on EC to buck the trend.
Andy Green of Rolling Stone.
God, what a pretentious twat.
Has not Rolling Stone’s evolution from a rag with a cool name to a rag with its nose firmly attached to the establishment’s go-to place for “truth” mirrored the evolution of the Rolling Stones from a cool band to a conglomerate of nonsense?
It’s almost as if every magazine should have only 5 readers and every musician only 5 gigs in a lifetime.
People are only politically or socially significant for like 10 years or perhaps 20 at the most, beyond that those few gems are far and few in between and are generally not heard about from the loud static of the current day.
But that does not mean they have lost their way or the time of day, just their say.
The American way of writing dates, like 08/30/2023, is so illogical. The British way, 30/08/2023, is more sensible. For the digital age, the most logical way is 2023/08/30, to ensure dates are always ascending. But enough of this colonialism/imperialism/whatever!
30/8/23…..day/month/year.
When you spell it out, it’s August 30th, 2023. 8/30/2023. Common sense.
Or the 30th of August 2023. 30/08/2023. British common sense.
”Living the machine/Internet life would never be acceptable if people had not been subjected to an onslaught of numbers/statistics/data that has accustomed them to think like computers.”
If people think like computers, they don’t think.
People can think. Thoughts are by nature abstract. Thoughts that mean anything deal with abstract concepts. It is reasonable thinking that allows us to know the difference between truth and lies.
The examples given in mathematics, that two plus two equals four, mean that’s how simple the truth is. The idea that two plus two equals five is an example of a lie (= not true).
Real thought can only happen when thoughts are true. It is impossible to think anything meaningful if the thoughts are lies. No matter how charming it is to think that two plus two equals five or that men are actually women, that thinking lacking truth and logic can never get us anywhere.
Numbers are not the problem, and statistics or data are not the problem either. The problem is lying.
Sure we can lie about anything and everything: I am not I, I am you, you are not you, you are me, this one devil is actually god, and god is actually devil, this one bachelor is married and those circles are squares. This product that will kill you is certainly safe. This ideology that is filled with lies is the truth. And so on.
Lies are made up and they can be made up infinitely, yet the truth exists and stays the same.
In the name of liberty and freedom, do you choose truth or a lie?
Of course, it’s your choice.
But think. That’s what we humans are capable of, unlike machines.
Abstract thought is what makes us so different from anything else.
Propaganda has nothing to do with abstract thinking. It is simply lies upon lies upon lies, to charm people, to make them believe lies, so that they no longer know what is what.
‘It is simply lies upon lies upon lies, to charm people,’
Exactly that. One cannot do much with one truth (as in that 2+2=4), but the possibilities that 2+2 is anything but 4 are endless (-1). And also doesn’t take much thinking. Just repeat the lie is all that it takes. Lying can be so much fun.
Numbers became lies long ago. It happened when people decided that everything in existence had a mathematical basis – that mathematics was in fact the very underpinning of existence.
And from that base came the mangling of logic into a kind of chastity belt to pre-empt the creation of new ideas. “That’s illogical!” should garner the response “Ah! Then I’m on the right track!” Everything worthwhile came from that which strayed from the clutches of formal logic.
If just for a moment we could see what lies beyond 2+2=4, we just might begin to glimpse the deeper aspects of reality. Let 2+2 equal 5 just long enough to discover a brand new way of thinking. We can always decide it’s unworkable and go back to the old equation – but perhaps along the way we might get a sideways glance at what people call God.
No lie is worth believing for a second.
I already know where it leads. No attack and assault against human reason can change that.
One can never find God (Truth) from the Devil (Lies). Goodness is not in evil. Logic tells you that.
” It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside.”
Great article this, on poets.
“Work without hope is like nectar in a sieve
And love without an object cannot live”
Coleridge.
July 24, 2022
QUE HERE. SYSYPHUS, QUE OF CUES,
Stockaded in linguistic prison walls.
—-
Plus ca change plus ca meme chose.
Spelling is not my strong suit, thanks for the correction Christine.
LANGUAGE, THE MANDELBROT SET, AND WHOLE SYSTEM PERTURBATION. #PELAGIUS #NEITZSCHE #MIRLEES #FULLMEISTER #HOYLE #ALVEN #LEIBNITZ #CHOMSKY @WIKI_BALLOT #4PAMPHLETEERS
Goethe:
Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson.
Queue here. Sysyphus, que of cues, cue que, coup de que.
Sisyphus pushed his boulder,
The path smooth both ways
The same incline repeated
Parmenides like determination.
—
Prometheus chained over the hill
Willing that Sisyphus may succeed
panta rhei, alike to his own flame.
Both legends for deaf ears.
—
Heraclitus his ebb and flow
Crying metaphors to deaf masses
Sobbing similes to Blind tyranny
Calvary the summit to that bluff.
—
Maimonides saw each contradiction
Each species of deafness, Loud
Each species of blindness, Dark
All no less perplexed than the next.
—
Yet another Sisyphus rolls
Yet another Prometheus reveals
Yet another Heraclitus cry’s
Yet another Maimonides interprets
—-
Ancient and modern queuing
Missed cues and repeated lines
A dialogue of the divine comedy
Stockaded in linguistic prison walls.
—-
Plus ca change plus ca meme chose.
The underside of the Western tradition
At the end of the last chapter I suggested that one reason Nancy Munn’s work has been so little taken up is that theories that start from action fall so far outside the main currents of the Western intellectual tradition that it’s hard for most scholars to figure out exactly what to do with them. They belong, one might say, to the Heraclitean tradition, which in Western thought has always been somewhat marginal. Western philosophy, after all, really begins with the quarrel between Heraclitus and Parmenides; a quarrel that Parmenides won. As a result, from almost the very start,the Western tradition marked itself by imagining objects that exist, as it were, outside of time and transformation. So much so that the obvious reality of change has always been something of a problem. It might be useful to review that quarrel, however quickly. Heraclitus saw the apparent fixity of objects of ordinary perception as largely an illusion; their ultimate reality was one of constant flux and transformation. What we assume to be objects are actually patterns of change. A river (this is his most famous example) is not simply a body of water; in fact, if one steps in the same river twice, the water flowing through it is likely to be entirely different. What endures over time is simply the pattern of its flow.
Parmenides on the other hand took precisely the opposite view: he held that it was change that was illusion. For objects to be comprehensible, they must exist to some degree outside of time and change. There is a level of reality, perhaps one that we humans can never fully perceive, at which forms
are fixed and perfect. From Parmenides, of course, one can trace a direct line both to Pythagoras (and thus to Western math and science) and to Plato (with his ideal forms), and hence to just about any subsequent school of Western philosophy. Parmenides’ position was obviously absurd; and indeed, science has since shown that Heraclitus was more right than he could possibly have known. The elements that make up solid objects are, in fact, in constant motion.2 But a fairly strong case can be made that had Western philosophy not rejected his position for Parmenides’ false one, we would never have been able to discover this. The problem with his dynamic approach is that while obviously true it makes it impossible to draw precise borders and thus to make precise measurements. If objects are really processes, we no longer know their true dimensions—at least, if they still exist—because we don’t know how long they will last. If objects are in constant flux, even precise spatial measures are impossible. One can take an object’s measure at a particular moment and then treat that as representative, but even this is something of an imaginary construct, because…..
In Many ways the current attack on freedom may more accurately be characterised as an attack on freewill.
“We must now take precautions to prevent you from being embarrassed by something in which the ignorant majority is at fault for lack of proper consideration, and so from supposing with them, that man has not been created truly good simply because he is able to do evil. … If you reconsider this matter carefully and force your mind to apply a more acute understanding to it, it will be revealed to you that man’s status is better and higher for the very reason for which it is thought to be inferior: it is on this choice between two ways, on this freedom to choose either alternative, that the glory of the rational mind is based, it is in this that the whole honor of our nature consists, it is from this that its dignity is derived”.
Pelagius
PEMDAS and other conventions such as spelling and punctuation all come into it Christine, don’t they?
? Native Ash tree of life is laid out.