Wings, Prayers and Hooplas
Sylvia Shawcross
It took me a year before I finally succumbed to a phone that would accept 5G. They bugged me and bugged me by phone and email and text messages to upgrade to this new phone. I resent this all to hell.
I don’t much like it—this new phone. I hate the damn thing. It makes far more noise than my old one. It seems to want an inordinate amount of my attention and I don’t know how to use it and don’t want to learn. I will never learn any of its features because I just don’t bloody care and do not want to spend my life with my head down staring at a little screen.
But perhaps I should not complain. The reason I’m not going to complain is because today I got my very first “Emergency Alert!” That scared the living bejesus out of me for a few seconds. I didn’t know about such things or that this one was coming. I had no idea what the hell had happened. War? Alien invasion from Mars? Catastrophic tornadoes on the way?
It was just a test. Just for the record, if anybody in charge is listening: It is not good to test these things on us older people. We are faint-hearted at the best of times these days.
Anyway, I didn’t go to the website where they apparently have a long list of things we can do in case of an emergency. I figure a wing and a prayer is the best option when you’ve got more years of living behind you than in front of you. But that’s just me. And that’s probably not a good way to approach this at all. I know. However, this whole thing got me thinking.
Now I know that thinking is not popular these days, but if you stop to think about it at all, it is entirely possible that we all would have been better off if we’d done nothing whatsoever to protect the planet from climate change.
Yes. I know. That’s an unpopular thought, but even still… if you think about it… Instead of just finding a way to survive regular catastrophes big and small (as humans have been doing for a very very long time) we get to spend our time surviving global wars, possibly engineered pestilences, starvation, economic collapse, population reduction and 5G phones. And we also get to spend our time watching leaders and politicians making some of the most outrageous decisions!
We might have just been better off whistling in the wind. And yes, possibly dying but at least it would make sense. We could just die from avalanches or starvation or fires or crustal shift or solar flares or methane bogs or middle-aged body part degeneration. Yes, instead of all this stuff we actually will likely die from things we ourselves created to destroy ourselves in order to protect ourselves, if that makes sense. (Or “they” did… the ones who are saving us all.) Yeah. The more I think of it, the better off we’d all have been. And we wouldn’t have to necessarily eat bugs much.
But we couldn’t have that now could we? If we had taken that approach think of all the people who would not have been employed to save our sorry situation?
Think of all the grand plans and piecharts and disaster simulation meetings that would have never happened. Think of that! All the bureaucrats without direction beyond actually doing mundane things for the people who pay them their salaries? All the scientists and engineers who would simply have to contend with the way the world was instead of spending their lives changing and fiddling and wrecking things to the point that they end up creating more problems than they solve? All the leaders dedicated to breaking what is not broken in order to fix it. All the politicians and their communication experts without a topic for pontificating zealously about to an ever incompetent press and befuddled public? All the corporations without a brave new future to invest in to fleece us and/or our governments out of more money. All the celebrities without a reason to pretend to be caring? All the banksters simply carrying on making their obscene profits until there were no profits to be seen. All the protestors without a real reason to protest?
Oh imagine the simple elegance of accepting that what is, is in fact, just what it is and we don’t need to control it? Or in fact, change it in any way. Or make anything equitable and fair. We could just drift happily and perhaps miserably to our demise in our given familiar circumstances without all the hooplas. Because it is the hooplas that are going to be the ultimate death of us. Everything is a big deal and it is overwhelming us. Yep. The hooplas will kill us. If the wars don’t…. I do so wish “they’d” leave us all alone for a change. We don’t much like them. We tried. But we don’t. And we won’t.
And here is your earworm for the day:
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The essay resonates strongly because I have hoopla fatigue. They are trying to bully us into being worried about climate change. The Guardian is at the forefront, saying that a high temperature has broken a record without specifying how long it goes back. The WEF is trying to get us worried about overpopulation when it is going down overall across the world. The problem, then is the wrong hoopla – when there is demographic collapse there should be some hoopla about that, but, of course, that doesn’t fit in with their man-made climate change ‘catastrophe’ narrative.
Yeah Hamish. It’s exhausting and misleading at the best of times. Sigh….
Excellent essay!
My mind went right to 3rd grade. Constant sonic booms daily. So many to the point that we barely noticed them any more. We were given booklets to take home on how to survive an atomic attack. (We knew it as the Atomic Bomb.) I was 8 years old. Read it cover to cover and took it home to my mother to tell her what we needed to do. I was worried. “OK honey, I will look at it”, she said. I wasn’t satisfied. Many years later, after she died and we were going through her stuff, there it was. Apparently she never let on that she was worried too.
I remember a time when things were fine, the government talked the usual nonsense but no-one cared. The police walked the streets telling off kids and looking for petty thieves. Pubs and clubs were crammed with millions of happy social misfits looking for a date.
Little did we know that within a few short years the money creators who were secretly planning the end of things would put their plan into action.
So here we are, crossing the line and entering a hell because we are just too dumb to see whats right in our face.
Fuck the money men, fuck the government, the police, the court the lawyers, the media, Doctor Hillary, the 9/11 commission, and the rest of the cowards who think if they back the devil everything for them is gonna be alright.
“I do so wish “they’d” leave us all alone for a change.” Sad but true – however there are places where you can achieve your wish. Change is generally only excessive in the developed West, driven by the century’s long habit of colonial domination and affecting barely a billion people. In the Global South life is wonderful, all the time!
https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/easy-living-in-south-africa-icj-ruling?sd=pf
Not bad.
Allow me to promote this part: https://youtu.be/M_3T-Af57Pg Western Finance explained.
LOL Thanks, Erik – I have a whole batch of these around the 2009 crisis – they are of course bang on! Thank you for the reminder and a laugh with a clear blue sky on Sunday morning!
The worst thing is to live in a State of Fear, especially when your own Government is either so useless,corrupt or evil, that they are imposing this State of Fear with the the Help of The Military Psycho Nudge Unit…
“They are not Afraid enough yet.” “Not enough are getting jabbed.”
“get Matt Hancock on – doing the 1984 Scene – not enough Hate – in The Empty Nightingale Hospital”
The amount of money spaffed up the wall on the theatrical production known as Covid-1984, including £37 billion on ‘test and trace’ could have been put to so much better use. Where did the £37 billion really go? Probably, it will form the infrastructure for digital ID.
To put it into context, one fully equipped medium sized hospital costs approx £500 million to build. Therefore, that money could have built 74 new hospitals. NHS bed shortage….sorted!
And paid the wages of hundreds of nurses, doctors and cleaners.
DEADSHITS Rule.
You dont need any more hospitals, they said that in 10, (short), years, 50% of todays doctors will have retired, and remainder have said they are burnt out from understaffing.
Think of all the aging people asleep at the wheel believing when their difficulties arrive, there will be someone there to care for them, but there wont be.
B/c we constructed a for profit health care system that destroyed the family structure, which is where the original help would have traditionally come from.
https://youtu.be/7zAeeI-8KA8
Thank you for this.
I’m still using my ultra-simple Nokia 100, occasionally. Text and phone calls only. Smart phones are anything but. Laptops on ethernet cable (hard-wired) are bad enough. And I’m 100 meters from the router. There are various repeaters around but I’m not in line with any of them. I take this shit seriously. We may have to give it all up for whatever reason or reasons, anyway, and then we will have to re-adjust. but some of us remember life before IT. It worked.
What i coming down the pike should cheer you up:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/expert-report-fifth-generation-5g-directed-energy-radiation-emissions-context-nanometal-contaminated-vaccines-include-covid-19-graphite-ferrous-oxide-antennas/5786727
Tales of Magnetospheric Oceans & the Wave range of cause & effect,
Should never have been taken lightly, by any Doctor.
Vaccinated or not… but they were. Now the Tsunami.
I read it when it was first published and I am a fan of Mark Steele.
This is the only place I have found his taking apart a streetlight video now, although I have previously put it up on OffG.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/fears-5g-weapons-system-uk-20893384
The last thing I ever expected was the brainwashed Wokesters Generation Z to be replaced by their Younger Brothers and Sisters Generation A at Student Campuses in the USA and all over The World…
“Like in Palestine – Genocide” “They are beating the shit out of us too.
Brave Kids
And here I am still using a landline. Can’t come up with one good reason why I should always have a phone with me. Not interested in making it easier for government or corporate interests to track me either.
Likewise, we are off the grid in the Global South:
https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/economic-reality-budget-2024-interest?r=hhrlz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&open=false
If necessary, put cell phone in metal foil bag. Bags for supermarket nuts do just fine. Make sure it’s closed. Try to phone it from another device.
“With each new generation of technology, and with each stage of technological expansion into pristine environments, human beings have fewer alternatives and become more deeply immersed within technological consciousness. We have a harder time seeing our way out. Living constantly inside an environment of our own invention, reacting solely to things we ourselves have created, we are essentially living inside our own minds. Where evolution was once an interactive process between human beings and a natural, unmediated world, evolution is now an interaction between human beings and our own artifacts. We are essentially coevolving with ourselves in a weird kind of intraspecies incest. At each stage of the cycle the changes come faster and are more profound. The web of interactions among the machines becomes more complex and more invisible, while the total effect is more powerful and pervasive. We become ever more enclosed and ever less aware of that fact. Our environment is so much a product of our invention that it becomes a single worldwide machine. We live inside it, and are a piece of it.”
Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred
Niko. I’m quoting this. Somewhere. On my substack maybe. Thank you.
The Croation Kid who had to join the Croation army in the summer of 1994 and travel back to Croatia from Greece was not called Izzy
It was Iggy I hope he is still alive.
Does this make the agenda clear enough?
https://dumptheguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/10/climate-scientists-starting-families-children
Page won’t load. Any other sources ?
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/10/climate-scientists-starting-families-children
Thanks Tony. I see no problem in these green duffers getting fewer or zero children.
No. You have to believe it.
The way the media is going, it’s like we’re in the film “They Live” but no-one even needs those special glasses to see what the signs and articles REALLY say. THAT article says, “DON’T BREED!”
In the 1970s we were told there are too many people, not enough resources, energy and stuff. We were also told that there was a new ice age coming. None of those predictions made by the Club of Rome and other organizations of American billionaires were true. They are still not true, even when they changed the coming ice age into global warming and global heating. Blaming the population growth, us humans being here and giving birth, is the Devil’s agenda. The Devil absolutely hates humanity. It loves money.
This video questions the global population numbers, and rightly so:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/t81MGYqzfYQX/
Just a few years ago, the populations of India and China, we were told, were estimated as one billion each. Then all of a sudden, they said the populations in those countries were 1.4 billion. In reality, though, there is no way the governments in those places could ever really count their population. Governments are not all-knowing, and they certainly are not all-powerful.
Man count. In history and the bible they describe local governors and officials made man counts within their districts.
Let us say the India and China knows more or less how many they are, but that they lie, in that as in so many areas too.
I dont think they know exactly how many in Africa, Latin, and East. Lack of bank accounts here is their problem.
Good for you, you are actually thinking cogent thoughts for yourself fully aware of what is going on. Bravo! These times are insane because the global oligarchs are trying to drive us mad; it’s called menticide the deliberate destruction of a people’s minds. It is a crime against humanity. They use fear and lies as their driving manipulative forces followed by rewards for compliance and punishment for dissidence. These megalomaniacal psychopaths are creating an alternative reality a virtual world where up is down, wrong is right, illness is health, serfdom is freedom. It’s a real life Bizzaro World where so many of our peers somnambulantly exist under their spell. Some folks pretend not to know what’s going on thinking that will save them. It will not. There is no neutrality in this you are either engaged in the struggle for right/lie/peace or you are collateral damage! Transform your mind, the rest will follow! Stay well.
Bravo JRS – 1984 is upon us: https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/the-enemy-within-vaxx-contract-red?sd=pf
https://www.courthousenews.com/supreme-court-pumps-the-brakes-on-additional-hearing-requirements-for-innocent-owner-claims/
First Amendment Rights are now deemed terrorist’s rights. How much more fascistic can the UniParty get?
https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/senate-bill-seeks-to-place-campus-protests-on-no-fly-list/
Emergency alerts aren’t anything to do with 5G, they’re just pushed onto phones if they’re enabled to receive them. We get them for earthquakes, some weather events (usually potential flash flooding) and potential wildfire danger. There the sort of thing that needs to be used sparingly because if they’re happening every five minutes people will turn them off and ignore them. I would also be classed as an ‘older person’ (70++) but technology doesn’t bother me, I don’t like smartphones because they’re badly designed, they seem to exist to provide screen space to be rented to advertisers (screen space is auctioned, BTW) and, naturally, the interface is designed only for right handed people.
Its a balance. Phones are a useful accessory but they can be serious time wasters that intrude on one’s life. Because of this I don’t use them for social media and I keep confidential information (banking etc.) off them, I use them exclusively for communication and maps, nothing else — I try to keep them “mostly harmless”. (…..and most of the time it lives on a shelf, not in my pocket)
PS — The “G” is really just protocols. In the same way that phones evolved from a point to point talking device through dial-up data to data on the phone line and finally a proper wideband connection (where any voice calls are handled as just another sort of data traffic) cellphones went through a similar evolution. They, too, evolved from the original “clever handheld transceiver” (not even hand held if it was a car phone) through digital coding of the voice, adding limited amounts of data literally just like a dial up modem through a pure digital data network that just happens to carry voice if needed as a minor part of the overall traffic. Marketing types seize on this so they’re always pushing the next version because as we all know, they higher the number the better things work (as if anyone actually believes them?).
Martin, I agree with you. However, this weekend, there will be an extremely large emission from the sun.
Geomagnetic field activity and forecast
The bulk of the incoming CME(s) is expected to arrive early on May 11, with periods of G1-G2 (Minor-Moderate) geomagnetic storming expected and periods of G3-G4 (Strong-Severe) storms likely.
NOAA Warning: “Severe Geomagnetic Storm” to impact Earth …
Mr Usher appears to know zilch, zip and nada about the history of this part of the EMF spectrum as a dangerous weapon.
He may learn more by consulting papers at the IEEE and acquainting himself with Mark Steeleand Barry Trower, both UK.In the USA there is Arthur Firstenberg, https://cellphonetaskforce.org/articles/
Loved the earworm. How wonderfully satisfying to experience a video whose visualization was dictated solely by the music itself and not by the wish to simply look busy.
Thank you as well for the (usual) thought provoking essay. Even if provoking thought is not a very high priority among far too many readers and commenters here. I find that many if not most in this forum prefer things spelled out in black and white. They want the ideas they have already taken to heart and already “know” to be true spelled out in no uncertain terms; that way they don’t have to wonder if you’re a true believer or a plant by the WEF.
Cognitive bias: the human mind takes on board that which supports the synaptogenic architecture of the brain because it is biologically expensive to metabolically alter the constantly “tuned and pruned” structural synaptogenesis. We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are structurally–that is neurally–networked to see, feel, and act.
Piaget coined the terms “assimilation” and “accommodation” to show that new experience is mostly assimilated into the neural network without change. Anomalous experience is challenging, because it not only requires a ‘rethink’, it also requires a ‘rewire’ as analogous to the accommodation phase of restructuring (metaplasticity). Not only is this costly, it is generally associated with neural breakdown and psychotic episode which is to be avoided at all cost.
So the human brain is synaptically ‘wired’–in vivo–for assimilation with little accommodation of the neural architecture. There is now a great deal of neuroscience to back this up. Neo-Piagetian developmental psychology has experimentation from all over the world to substantiate the theory. Interestingly, the new experience is assimilated to our preconditioned “Local Neural Ensembles” in diurnal activity, but then ‘reassigned’ nocturnally which is what ‘dream’ might be. The interesting question for rationalists is by whom is the experiential sensory stimuli actually sorted and into what categorical structure?
Neursoscience has no answer, but everybody else does! Behavioural economists continue to list the biases of this system without considering it as linguistically programmed. As Korzybski might say “Change the MAP, change the territory” where MAP is Metabolic Action Potential wired into an Aristotelian and identarian categorematic and neural architectonics as the MAP of belief we predict and project onto the ‘other’, the event, and ultimately ‘the world’ metaphor. The moral is: better the psychotic episode you know!
Everything is linguistically programmed, categorised, captured, demarcated, energetically ‘ringfenced.’ We live behind a barricade of words. We can’t see over the top of it. Twisted out of all proportion.
Not everything, you know “the limits of my world…”…. if everything is linguistically programmed there would be no out, no unbinding, and no escape from our programming. There is no reason other than habit that we must turn sense-experience into language. We can break that habitude by meditation and yoga. What we cannot seem to get passed is then deprogramming and reprogramming the language by changing the MAP. Extending the MAP to include the excluded other and admit to a plurality of knowing (as recently discussed) would be a start. It is not as if that is not the case elsewhere.
The whole of life extends beyond our self-incurred barricade. In fact, the language can only ringfence a very small and isolated psyche which has no real entity at all apart from habitual retentivity and repetition. Breaking that habit should be, could be, our sole focus.
OK: I meant ‘everything we have words for.’ ‘Limitation by design.’ I of course would agree having been initiated into formal meditation 52 years ago, and yoga 50 years ago and
I notice how definitions have been changed in the Concise Oxford over a couple of decades particularly the always wobbly circular definitions of words like: ‘mind, soul, psyche, and spirit.’ I say ‘circular’ because they refer back to each other in the definition anyway in my oldest Concise thereby rendering any intellectual distinction unachievable.
But experientially…..we can do this
It helps a lot to KNOW your language has been manipulated. Then you have a true platform to evaluate reality.
I worked in a foreign country on their native language in 4 years long away from English and other European languages.
A lot of hidden colour schemes of emotions came up in me I never had experienced in myself before. only by a different correct gramma language.
They say you need to learn Russian if you wanna understand the fully beauty of the poet Pushkin
.
Correct language is important, but if its not available, the second best is at least to be aware of the condition, to know it being manipulated especially in Western languages.
Think of Sweden changing him and her to one “hen” (neutral hybrid). This kind of stuff can make people and especially children mental sick if they dont know what is going on.
I lived in Andalucia for eleven years. At the Wednesday market I heard a very nice arrangement of ‘Guantanamera’ which is basically a Spanish anthem although being Cuban. I wondered if there were any English translations. There were: Pete Seeger’s version is famous but lyrically totally inadequate as a faithful translation.
So I translated it myself:
‘Y antes de morire quiero, echar mis versos del alma.’
‘And before I die, I want to bring out the deepest feelings of my heart.’ (soul?)
So I learned it in Spanish, because it works better and is absolutely faithful to Jose Marti’s poem.
In 2007 I played the Olive Tree Cafe’ allnighter at the Green Gathering to a room full of Spaniards. I have never experienced more emotional feedback from a relatively small audience than that night.
Languages are idiomatic, and often not directly translatable.
Reminds us of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and earlier work by Russel and his mentor, suggesting that nothing can be defined without reference.
Limitation by design, I like that. The whole underlying thing I am trying to get at is that what we are culturally entrained to focus on and what we should be focusing on are bipolarised. Attention has been drawn away from life into arbitrary abstractia most seem entranced with. If you know buddhism, you will see where my terminology is coming from. It is all about desire. Desire manufacture, desire exponentiation, desiring-production became desiring-consumption.
With words comes focal attention, difference and intention. Desire, intention, volition, will, determination and causality–the original teaching of karma–are the ‘fuel’ driving all this. Not reason, emotion.
So, how do you define a non-entity except with circularity where the circularity is already samsaric, if you get my drift? You do not. Anatman. The very idea of a causal entity possessing the body was ‘always already’ neoliberalism two millennia before neoliberalism was coined to describe late stage capitalism.
Limitation by psychic design, psychic desire. The entire lexicon is intentional, with causal will. There is no distinction to be made. Words all refer to each other in circularity. The definition of words is the “form of life” and that definition is consensual “agreement in the form of life” the “lexicogrammar” determines, or rather dictates.
Meaning is use governed by a generalised utility-maximisation. To be rational is to maximise instrumental utility. That is the psyche, but is not individualised. The “world soul” is human activity in its totality.
That makes for a very unorthodox ‘definition’ of “consciousness” which is the modern soul euphemism. If co-science and co-knowing is universal, global, and general: is consciousness collective or individual or both? Nobody wants to define terms, let alone redefine them so that the fit the actual territory. Maybe that is the generalised discomfiture!
‘Anger, desires, attachments,’ the lyrics to ‘Arti’ sung all over India early every morning and possibly every evening.
Desire is ‘E-motion’, movement away from centre.
Ummm…’describing the indescribable?’ We would have to have an agreement on what consciousness IS, as well as what it MEANS.
Jung believed that there is ‘collective un-conscious,’ i.e. the ego-identity-personality is not aware of it, and how it functions, but that we have access to it routinely through the dream process, but we don’t (with exceptions) pay it enough attention to make use of the information provided. I wrote a book about it in 1993 called ‘The Mirror.’ based on several years of intense dreamwork with a fixed group living together. It exceeded Jung’s specifications.
I had given up on publishing by that time, as the publishing industry I rated just as bad as the music industry.
The dictionary doesn’t help much. I did work on establishing terminology.
Consciousness is like being aware that you are awake when you are awake, in contrast to being asleep and dreaming you are awake, while NOT being aware you are ‘asleep.’ But this is still
subjective. It could easily be the other way around.
It does look like we might be having a collective nightmare, currently.
I should have added that Jung’s version was that the process works/manifests through through symbols and archetypes. It gives us access to other levels of experience.
The desperate outbursts of violence by our “fellow citizens of color” are always also a silent cry for help from the inner distress of having been socially disadvantaged for centuries.
https://media.gettr.com/group8/getter/2024/05/08/19/0035182f-188b-efa1-2d61-622e5528ec7d/out.mp4
Brainsick “liberals” always watch such videos color-wise inverted to realize that white people are lynching a black man. https://de.zxc.wiki/wiki/Invertieren_(Bildbearbeitung)
Just toggle off 5G….this stuff really isn’t difficult.
Machine says, “no.”
Nice music. These moments of nature’s music, human’s best music contribution to nature’s, nobody can take away, and they can call whatever they like.
Damnit Sylvia, you should have just bought a “dumbphone” with 4g or something, these emergency alert things don’t work on a nice nokia burnerphone, they still sell them fairly cheap, it also gives this delicious feeling of being “uncomfortable” and a small taste of what it means to be isolated from “what society has to offer” as you can’t use any apps etc they force you to use in order to participate in the commercial sector!
AMOR!
Damnit UncleWalrus, I shoulda… coulda… woulda… now i’m doomed.
As they say in many PSA’s about skiing in the mountains in the place where I was spawned Sylvia, “There is no shame in turning back”!!! Best of luck sis and keep on writing <3
Luvverly bit for the morning..
https://youtu.be/trmh1UBCJ_A
This whole thing got me thinking about it, or better still, not thinking about it…. Imagine abandoning oneself to happenstance, going with the flow…. Engage, engage with the dying of the light, slipping conscience-free into inequitable fatalism and nihilism of the good night? It is easy for one to say, but isn’t life-itself more precious than the supposed singular possessive individual or ‘rational’ form of life?
Given that we probably are whistling in the wind, and we are also considerably better of than most on “planet poverty” we aim to escape and leave behind, and we certainly won’t be making anything equitable and fair…. If ‘we’ did want a radical review, it would have to start with how we think we think (which is at the metacognitive level) questioning the model-theoretic structure of thought itself.
The core-dependent principles of the ‘enlightenment’—wrongly so-called—were universal scepticism, radical and methodical doubt, continually questioning everything…. Including the principles of reason itself (which began with Kant)…. Omnibus dubitandum est! Sapere Aude!
The enlightenment principles were supposed to challenge old dogmas and establish new ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ institutions, including critical thinking as the “public exercise of reason”—freed from external guidance—to evolve from man’s self-incurred immaturity (nonage)…. Which begs the questioning “When will the real enlightenment actually begin?”
To which the response appears to be: “nah, let’s just give in.” The exercise of reason is just too daunting and tiring to criticise. Which is easy to say if one is in the top echelon of institutionalised and industrialised enlightenment dogmas as ‘rational’, ‘reasonable’, self-incurred utility maximised and ‘instrumentalist’ for one.
We took truth-logic, radical grammatic separation, categorical hierarchisation, linearised causal relations and other reductive and deterministic rational theologies for granted as conceptual comfiture. Why question enlightenment values when you can have your consumptogenic cake and eat it as guilt free-market? I’m guessing that those left behind will be less impressed.
https://dailynous.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/kant-what-is-enlightenment.pdf
I like a good confiture, especially blueberry or fruits of the forest, but a comfiture is a new one on me. Comfiture being such a rarely used word, it is the approx.147,000th most used word in the English dictionary. Yet, somehow you shoe-horned into your comment.
Sometimes, I wonder did you swallow a Thesaurus and simply regurgitate it here. This comment being one of your less word salady ones.
Perhaps, I am just thick but have you heard of ‘The Plain English Campaign’ ? I guess not.
Perhaps you have heard that the ‘plain english campaign’ is the actual cause of racialised inequity? See Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason for instance. Otherwise, the ‘plain english campaign’ assumes everything we should be questioning. Better still would be a course in General Semantics which at least partially exposes the Aristotelian metaphysical assumptions we take for granted every day in the grammar.
A good case in point would be the recent articles on Transhumanism which claim epistemic grounding. As I said, actually rigorous grounding would require hundreds of pages. A list of instances is not epistemic. Definition in words always carries hidden metaphysical assumptions (Korzybski).
Duality is unreality. Words signify by reference to the world. It is not in the form or style of words we signify, it is in “word to world fit” or “sense and reference” to the world as a whole which means referring to billions of us at once. Apparently, from recent foregone exchanges, almost everybody has a numerically singular world-picture due entirely to the ontological presumptions of plain english. That is precisely what ‘we’ need to question.
I have not heard that the PEC is a cause of racial inequality.
Is it because using clear, concise language would be considered somehow patronising? If so, it could only be by those who actively seek to find a problem where there is none.
Yet, it would seem to me, that clearly conveying a message that is understood by more people and not just those who are well read or have an extensive vocabulary is inclusive, not exclusive.This would apply equally to people of all races. In the case of English, it would also benefit those where English is not their mother tongue.
One of the reasons that legal matters are often off limits to the layman, is not the ability to study case law or precendent but the difficulty in understanding “legalese”, a language in its own right. This of course allows the legal profession to charge exorbitant fees and maintain a ‘closed shop’.
All the categorical and truth-conditional presumptions of metaphysics are contained in the structure of the sentence. So much so that reifying sentence structure (logos) leads to the deification of the Verb–‘to be’–as the god of the categories, supreme Being (now with a capital ‘B’), or a Word (Logos) now with supernatural qualities and causal powers quite unlike the lesser categories of being…. all from the propagandic manipulation of the sentence (logos) you get supremacism (Logos) and a marked capitalisation of the model-theoretic metaphor.
You also get the moral metaphoric–as categoric imperative–from the same categoric hierarchisation of abstract and symbolic metaphor structure. In short, you get the worldview from the abstract metaphor structure modelled via the sentence structure as ampliative, assertorical and ‘true’ all from the plain old metaphor structure of the plain english sentence you get all forms of exceptionalism, supremacism and war. Yes, enmity and war are programmed into the sentence.
If you want resources to understand this: there is Nietzsche, Korzybski, Deleuze and Guattari, Lakoff and Johnson. Or Barthes who said the language (mother tongue) is fascist. Mother tongue fascism is in the metaphysics of the sentence (logos) as structurally supreme (Logos) all in ‘plain english’.
There is nothing ‘plain’ about the english language. It is metaphysically theory-laden and value-laden–as in “english capitalism”–or “english psychology” (“english morality”). Look at the language-behaviourism of the english to see metaphoric exceptonalism, supremacism, and deontologism writ large. Pointing this out is both onerous and vexatious cos the english excreta don’t stink. The smell is always applicable to something or somebody else. And that is a barely encoded metaphor. See the difference?
The word is not the thing.
The words tree, Love, hate, sun, sky, fear are reference points/sounds. Words have no reality
Truth arrives after years of introspection and stillness, or not at all.
That, is the human BEING story. All the other shit/language/religion was made up to distract us.
The human is not a thing; BEING is not a thing. All the other shit/language/religion was made up to distract us.
When “truth arrives” in my tradition (zen) we are required to continue with conventional rhetoric. What a genius piece of tortuous logic! That is my point of difference with zen debated for decades with masters and novices. Suffice to say: I’m recovering from zen.
If we deconstruct a tradition of knowing, we have to reconstruct a tradition of knowing to replace it. The problem is that no western metaphysician knows the roots of their thinking. Hence, when I used to teach I had to teach western mysticism in order to deconstruct western mysticism. Maybe that is why I am jaded?
The truth is stranger than fiction.
The map is not the territory.
BTW: I’ve posted all these resources before, many times. For instance: Nietzsche showed that thee primary metaphor is in nerve stimulus to imaginability (as mediated by image); the secondary (symbolic) metaphor is in paring imaginability and sound; any tertiary metaphoricity–and he specifically condemns the “Principle of Sufficient Reason” as prior causality–as metaphor gone mad.
Some time soon the next set of plain english mad metaphor will be published unchallenged, for uncritical assimilation. At some point the determinative structure of cognitive metaphor must be investigated as ‘miscognitive metaphor’ as “concept-mummification” of sense. Only by exposing the structure of plain english can english ever be made plain.
It doesn’t get plainer than this:
https://www.headless.org/english-welcome.htm
I’m sure we had this conversation years ago, possibly under different monickers? Their are too many people running round like headless chickens, so the solution is not more headlessness!
Any number of people have been trying to rectify the inherited interpretative dogma, only some of whom I have named. Headlessness is like the article suggests… more western nihilism. In the time elapsed, say over the last feww years, any number of us could have deconstructed ‘causality’, ‘hierarchy’ and so on. Instead, two more articles of pseudo-interpretation have appeared on this site alone. Nobody could keep up with the pseudo-intellectual tsunami of essentialist excreta.
Maybe you can, maybe I can go ‘headless’ but then that is quietism. I was taught to engage.
Cats are engaged with quietism.
And they just purr and purr and purr.
You tend to hear ‘discomfiture’ more often.
Yes, agreed, since it refers to discomfort, whereas ‘comfiture’ does NOT refer to comfort.
It refers to a type of preserve (comfit), something preserved in sugar, originally derived from the French confiture.
Talking of wings and prayers:
Sounds like great news, but……………………………………..
UK has refused to sign the WHO’s pandemic treaty.
Whoopee ! break out the champagne !
Wait………………………………………….
The reason given is that it doesn’t want to have to share it’s vaccines.
This is obviously a straw man argument and one that can easily be fixed with a tweak.
Bear in mind that the consultation doesn’t start until 22nd they have plenty of time to cook the books.
The UK government can then say “don’t worry folks, we’ve fixed the problem”
Coupled to the fact that we are due a Starmer government. A grown man who doesn’t know what a woman is and likes kneeling to murderers.
We’re going to hell in a handcart!
https://gript.ie/britain-refuses-to-sign-world-health-organisations-pandemic-treaty/
UK is gagging to sign it or at least the corrupted politicans are.
It’s all for show just like the migrants they are shipping in and pretending Rwanda scheme is some workable solution to a country already flooded with millions of migrants.
We know the agenda, eveything else is just smoke and mirrors..
What on earth can we do ?
I don’t have the wherewithal to fund a campaign against this, the general public are so unbelievably stupid and the people with the dosh are clever.
I’d say we’re in a bit of a pickle.
HMG just said they won’t sign it, but they will, as usual – smoke and mirrors
https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/germany-dumb-and-dumber-imf-debt?r=hhrlz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
United States Senate Republicans are also on a campaign to reject the proposed WHO treaty. John Kerry was pushing it. It takes 2/3rds of the Senate (or 2/3rds of the states) to ratify a treaty. Ain’t gonna happen any time soon in the United States. However, I fully expect Biden to make a new emergency pandemic declaration. Going to be interesting to see how that flies.
Absolutely love this. How many of our social “problems” are Hegelian Dialectically driven for profit? I would say the majority. It’s a neuroticism that comes with having hoarded too much wealth. The locust devours and destroys everything in its path, it’s just what it does. The bee provides a necessary function to maintain a cohesive eco-system. If we can all learn to just bee, life would be grand.
Love that. Perfect quote: “We if can all learn to just bee, life would be grand.” 🙂
Yes, you’ve just got to buy/to have the newest, the latest thing, not to mention the collateral or ecological damage involved. And if you won’t buy it voluntarily we’re going to force you to, unperson.
5G or not 5G?
Is not a question.
It’s a bloody order!
I’ll see your two cellos Syl, and raise you eight double basses:
Magnificent Johnny! 🙂
That cello piece is beautiful too Syl.
It might interest you to know that Australia’s ABC classical radio station recently had a listeners poll on their favourite instrument.
Yep. The cello was number one, outvoting even the piano and violin.
I agree with that vote.
The cello IS special.