Body or ‘Soul’
Sinéad Murphy
Along the high street where I live, there is an advertisement on the side of one of the bus shelters. It features a woman, heavy-set and pictured from behind.
The text reads Get Your and then On Board, placed so that the woman’s ample posterior lies between Your and On.
Get Your Ass On Board?
Get Your Butt On Board?
The small print reads Get Your Bum On Board.
Bum. Gentler than Ass and Butt. The kind of word that we use with children. Nothing sinister, then.
Unless we recall those Corona emojis which festooned our recent incarceration. Or those cutesy feet stuck to pavements, prising us apart. Or those cartoon syringes directing the masses to their mandated ‘vaccine.’
The state-corporate nexus likes to address us as children who have yet to arrive at reason. Their message is pure steel notwithstanding.
Get Your Bum On Board drips with their disdain, reducing us to our most culturally denigrated body part which is to be hauled about on command as a slab of meat.
The advertisement is for GoNorthEast – a regional bus company administered by The Go-Ahead Group, which runs transport links across the UK and Europe.
But do not imagine that it is a promotion of bus travel.
Relatively few people now take the bus – like all aspects of metropolitan life, it is an ailing practice unlikely to be bolstered by artwork pinned to its infrastructure.
Moreover, whatever corporate conglomerate intersects with Go-Ahead, the negative-interest-rate-debt portfolio in which the fortunes of its shareholders are no doubt comfortably hedged makes the number of people who board a GoNorthEast bus of very little consequence.
Advertisements are no longer really about products or services that we might buy. The powers that be do not care much whether we buy anything, as evidenced by our waning ability to do so.
Advertisements are about selling us ideas, prodding us towards a new world.
In this new world, our bodies are odious, consigned to the ‘meatspace,’ castigated as cumbersome and degraded.
Advertising space between the halves of televised football matches are crammed now with depictions of erectile dysfunction, male leakage, and the taboo of ‘pooing’ at work.
The audience for live football matches is surely weighted in favour of men in the prime of life, potentially virile and purposeful, with energy and aptitude to bring to bear on the world – the relentless humiliation of this toxic-masculine cohort by the half-time ‘commercial’ break is no coincidence.
In our new world, physical aptitude is headed off at every turn, recast as finite and shameful, destined for hiding itself to nurse its bloody wounds and filthy orifices…
…or for shaping itself, at machines lined up in cavernous gyms where the endgame of strength and virility plays itself out to banging tunes and little effect, staging the remarkable separation of muscle from manpower, making sculpted and scripted males of what ought to be apt grown men.
Alongside these body-bots the rest of us slump about, accused at every turn of being ill or infectious or incubators of disease, of consuming too much and producing too many. A burden. Ballast. With breath that should be held. And a bum that should be hauled. And a footprint too heavy for this earth.
Why do we put up with it? Why do we take the abuse?
For the same old reason. For the chance of getting onside with our abuser, of winning their approval, of joining them in their contempt for us.
The GoNorthEast advertisement opens the usual safety valve, which prevents the pressure of incessant abuse from blowing up.
Get Your Bum On Board is degrading, humiliating, reductive – but not completely so. For, it implies, lazily and without much conviction, that you may be not just your bum, that as you lug your bum about the place you might be other than it, possibly even better than it.
By the very act of submitting to the abuse of your body, of conceding that it is inert and unwieldy, of undertaking to heave it contemptuously here and there, you avail yourself of the careless implication that you are not identical with it, that you are somehow greater than it.
Your body is dead meat. But if you join the campaign that regards it as such, then you might just be admitted to the club without it, an unbodied you comprised only of your and their loathing for bodied you.
This is the pact that we enter into when we get our bum on board.
I am deplorable, therefore I am something more.
It is not a new pact, though its current iteration is particularly vicious.
And the new world that it prods us to is not so very new either.
*
Almost four-hundred years ago, in a little garret room in northern Europe, Descartes sat snugly by his stove, wrapped in his woollen gown, savouring the smell of his hot coffee.
As he nestled in corporeal comfort, Descartes meditated that the sensory consolations crowding round him might be, all of them, delusions.
The empirical experiences to which our body gives us access – the sight and sound and smell of the world – are not to be trusted.
Then came payback.
Reject the smell of brewing coffee as delusion and you are left with the thought of the smell of brewing coffee – by definition not a delusion. Reject the scratch of a woollen gown as delusion, and you are left with the thought of the scratch of a woollen gown – by definition not a delusion.
Descartes was captivated by the tautologous certainty of his non-delusional thoughts, though they lacked the fulsomeness, the intensity, the lived assuredness of their empirical counterparts.
When the aroma of coffee fills your nostrils and you reach for the handle of the pot to pour its contents and take a first long morning draught of its bitter stimulation – there is no doubt that it all exists.
Only by those jaded of realities, only by those too little involved in life, might the coffee be suspected of non-existence.
Descartes knew this. He wrote up his meditations in Latin rather than his usual French, not expecting that they would be of interest to any but the disenchanted elite, for whom life was half parlour-game already.
But Descartes’ meditations took hold. And became so influential that their conclusion, Cogito Ergo Sum, is sometimes the only Latin that we know.
Why have we been so convinced by Descartes’ doubt? Why so persuaded by his distrust of our bodies?
For the same old reason. For the chance of being reborn as more than our bodies. For the chance of a new kind of soul.
When Descartes rejected the smell of his coffee, he was left with more than the thought of the smell of his coffee. He was left also, or so he concluded at least, with the location of that thought, its container.
Cogito Ergo Sum. I am thinking, therefore I am.
With nothing more than scorn for the lived experiences of our body, Descartes secured our modern soul – notional receptacle of husks of lived experiences, theoretical site of theoretical forms.
If Descartes is known as the father of modern science, now we may see why. For this is precisely the business, of the life-sciences at least: describing, elaborating and manipulating an entirely abstract construct – ‘life’ – insofar as it is the terrain of an ever-shifting constellation of the theoretical constructions of research enterprises, and insofar as it delivers a sacred core – a real me, my true self, I.
We should be clear: this is not science as ongoing hypotheses and their discussion, not science as trial and error, not science as practiced judgment from human experience.
This is science as subjugation of human experience, science as remote from the human world, science as purely academic enterprise whose clinical models are wheeled forth with boisterous eclat.
Not science, but, as Covid taught us to call it, ‘The Science.’
As with so many hitherto hidden fundaments of our world, Covid revealed it all.
In March 2020, The Science launched an attack on empirical experience, unprecedented in its intensity, distancing us from others, from the world – with the chimera of ‘asymptomatic disease,’ even from ourselves.
Nothing that was real, nothing that our eyes and ears could have told us, was to be trusted. Only unrealities – theoretical models devised in laboratories – were deemed true.
And what those models told us, directly and through every available channel, was what Descartes posited almost four hundred years before: that our bodies are not fit for us, that our bodies are our enemy.
During Covid, “The Science” officially readvertised our bodies as actually diseased or potentially diseased, and instructed us to mortify them with stunning severity – to mask them, distance them, obscure them in PPE, test them, isolate them, inject them and boost them.
It was so dramatic. So draconian. And yet, had The Science not long been telling us that our bodies are our enemy – sites not of health and aptitude but of illness and decrepitude?
Long before Covid, had not the wondrous capabilities of our bodies been under relentless attack, by a growing fervour for cutting them open, for removing or exchanging their parts, for altering their biochemical make-up – with such purely abstract justification, such merely theoretical advantage, that iatrogenic disease became at least one of the commonest causes of death in post-industrial societies of the West?
Covid did nothing new. It only did the old things more brazenly.
And now, all bets are off.
Poolside during a swim class, a mother confides casually that she has had her breasts amputated at the age of thirty-seven, not because they were found to be diseased but because genetic screening determined that they might become so.
Despite the sepsis that ensued from her body’s rejection of the replacement breasts, this woman awaits further surgery to remove her ovaries, which have also been pronounced as likely to become cancerous.
“The Science” has at last laid its cards on the table and, from inside the Trojan Horse of highly promoted spectacular feats, pursues a campaign of disdain for the human body to tortuous effect.
Why do we put up with it? Why do we take the abuse?
For the same old reason. For the chance of getting onside with our abuser. Of being reborn in their contempt for us.
Two tropes came to the fore during Covid and have gained momentum since.
The first is that of ‘immunity,’ an achievement increasingly advertised as synthetic, requiring to be injected into us again and again, the smear campaign against natural immunity having taken such hold that it is now commonly accepted that our bodies are unable to defend us.
The theme of ‘auto-immunity’ is an elaboration, castigating our bodies as not only unable to defend us but as actually out to get us. Our own worst enemy.
Then, counterpoint to ‘immunity’ is the trope of ‘identity,’ which is everything that our immunity is not, which rescues us from a body bent on self-destruction – the real me, my true core, I.
The great iterations of dualism that have shaped human communities for millennia have been reduced to this: disgust at our bodies as a default to our souls.
And all choreographed by the church of The Science, which undertakes to boost our bodies so that they do not give up on us, keeping us on life-support just long enough to realise who we are.
We are grateful to The Science for releasing our souls from their body-cage, by devising theories of them complete with neat desciptors – Hysteric, Phobic, Introvert, Pansexual, Autistic…
The designators are inventive enough, but they owe their force of truth to nothing deeper than the false flattery that that loathsome piece of dead flesh, which is hauled and mauled as on a butcher’s block, simply cannot be who I am.
The gender debate has brought this false-flattery to fruition. It seemed an indulgent accompaniment to the supposedly existential threat of Covid. In retrospect, it was a necessary accompaniment.
Covid pummeled us with the traitorous weakness of our bodies. And simultaneously reassured us that we are so little to be identified with our bodies that we can actually be in the wrong body.
The rainbow was the inflection point of this move, leading us on from saccharine clapping for our NHS heroes to righteous trumpeting of our hero within.
As doctors and nurses were shown to labour with bodies too sordid for the world, our newly-minted souls lay claim to empty streets, suffered to go forth and multiply with impunity – and so they have, quasi-scientific descriptions of our identities proliferating at such pace and with such merely theoretical application that yesterday’s pronoun is today’s deadname.
Our modern soul: a piece of theory, purchased dearly with the same old pact.
I am despicable. Therefore I am something more.
The second I – my identity – comprised only of the distance purchased from the first I – my body – by the vitriol of contempt.
It is the most anaemic metaphysics in history. But also the most inhuman. With the most catastrophic effect.
In donating our bodies to “The Science” so as to win our identity-souls, we have relinquished everything that our bodies used to know.
The way to stand, the way to sit, the way to walk, the way to sleep, the way to eat, the way to breathe…the most basic arts of the body, which were ritualized so successfully by vernacular ways of life that their acquisition was mostly effortless and often joyous, which constituted traditions and communities, which wove into the rhythm of days and months and years…
…the most basic arts of the body have been forgotten, in our manufactured trust that The Science knows better how we should stand and how we should walk, and how we should breathe…
…and that “The Science” will repay our trust with the most enticing piece of knowledge of them all: who I am.
The effect of our misplaced trust in “The Science” is the defining tragedy of our age, as our bodies atrophy under their administration by a regime of disdain.
We are overweight. Our posture is bad. Our backs ache. Our jaws are tight. Our digestion is poor. We sweat too much. Our breath smells. Our skin is pallid. Our hair is limp.
Through our learned contempt for them, our bodies have become contemptible, the inapt mounds of flesh that they are advertised by The Science to be.
And so we feel surer every day that we cannot be just our bodies. That we simply must be better than our bodies.
And we listen more and more willingly to the injunction that we go forth without our bodies. Of course we do. Our bodies are more and more burdensome, and the litany of their abuse rings truer every day.
We submit to the remote. We commit to staying safe. Because we believe, desperately and with growing fervour, that I am not my body.
Other advertisements during the half-times of televised football – for everything from electric cars to fried chicken – are in the style of computer games, with artificially generated humans conducting themselves like Marvel superheroes.
Your body is vile. Your virtual avatar is smooth, clean, apt and triumphant.
And entirely reprogrammable.
There’s the rub. And surely the greatest irony of our times.
Almost four hundred years ago, Descartes mused that his body might play tricks on him. That his body might be the plaything of a conspirator against him.
From this suspicion arose Descartes’ delight in his abstract thoughts and in the mind in which they occur.
He wrote:
I will suppose that some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses but as falsely believing that I have all these things. I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, that is, resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree.
But look at what has happened since:
Captivated by the pact that Descartes made, enticed by his dismissal of our bodies as vulnerable to deception, we have arrived at maximum vulnerability to the most profound deceptions.
Our identity, for which we have sacrificed our bodies and the realities to which they give us access because of its tantalizing promise of certain truth, is such a merely theoretical construct that it is subject to endless reengineering, constant updating, in accordance with whatever corporate descriptor is in vogue or whatever biomedical product is newest to market.
And it is subject too to cancellation, at the click of a button – much easier and more clinical than locking down bodies.
Descartes got it upside-down. Bodies are obstinate, unwieldy, wayward, implicitly resistant. It is souls, modern souls, that are the playthings of those who conspire against us.
*
The woman in the bus shelter advertisement does have a face, for all that she is pictured from behind.
It is the face of a dog, which looks out at us from over her shoulder – she has carried it on board. Their language is explicit. We are animals. Brutes.
Meanwhile, the woman’s human head, or some woman’s human head, is pasted to the side of the GoNorthEast buses that pull up to the shelter. She wears an expression of panto-surprise, and is accompanied by the text: Period Gush? Have No Fear.
With the last arts of the body relinquished, our degradation is trumpeted by billboards cruising around our city.
Why do we put up with it? Why do we take the abuse?
For the same old reason. For the chance of joining them in their contempt for us.
Other GoNorthEast buses advertise the opportunity of coming to work for the company. A Hero Drives This Bus, the text reads. Are You Up To It?
Underneath is an incongruous image. Two uniformed men, posed as in a scene from Top Gun, complete with aviator glasses and airforce badges. Unlike any bus driver anyone ever saw in the North East of England.
The choice is clear, as clear as the broadside of a bus.
Be one of the herd or one of the heroes.
Animal or angel.
Body or ‘soul.’
Sinéad Murphy’s
Sinéad Murphy is author of Effective History (2010), The Art Kettle (2012), and Zombie University (2017), and co-editor of Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns (2022). Her new book, ASD: Autistic Society Disorder, offers an account of autism as a condition of fallout from the body-or-soul pact that defines the societies in which autism is on the rise.
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‘Your body is vile’. It’s clear that this has been programmed, but amongst the progammers, will be those who undergo humiliation rituals, defiling their bodies and their senses. An inductee in the Shriners masonic sect was so traumatised by the ritual, he sued them, albeit unsuccessfully. The luciferians mortify their own bodies, so it would come natural to them to inflict their bodily self-loathing on the populace to make them spurn a more wholesome relationship with their bodies.
I like best the 1970 album title from Funkadelic: “Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow.”
I am greater than my body. As I am not my body, and neither are you. People are not their bodies. If people were their bodies, there would be nothing permanent in them, as the body is always changing, every second. And people wouldn’t know who they are, what they are, since people usually have no idea what’s going on in their bodies.
Materialism is a false idea. You should think about these things with logic and reason, which are not material matters but spiritual, to make proper conclusions.
Descartes did it. Of course, it is impossible from a materialist standpoint to understand what Descartes thought. You see, Descartes was wise. That’s what a philosopher is: a lover of wisdom. Again, wisdom isn’t material but spiritual. Descartes knew who he was, and he knew God.
To make him a scapegoat for evil in today’s world is just stupid.
Author makes an interesting point though, that rejecting empiricism has allowed the state to impose something unreal on us. But author forgets that under Cartesian post-modernism, nothing is real. Especially grand capitalist narratives.
Anis Shivani, https://off-guardian.org/2021/09/09/the-return-to-reality-the-greatest-casualty-of-9-11/
Equating Descartes with ‘The Science’ seems a little harsh, seeing as his rationalism gives us the tools to dispute any and all scientific claims. I like the article though; distrusting our body and soul is a religious duty.
Sorry, I couldn’t finish reading this piece. They’ve got to you, madam. A mistake. Regard them as excrement, best avoided or, if that is impossible, ignored.
BTW I don’t think ‘fulsome’ means what you think it does.
I had sort of the same reaction…but that said, at least Sinéad is out there questioning everything from Planck to Einstein and beyond. That’s how real science works, and I applaud her efforthttps://therealslog.com/2024/08/16/beyond-demigods-demagogues-ideologues/
what we really are is spirit.
ass?!
< Our posture is bad. Our backs ache >
I had that problem; cured by regular physiotherapy / Pilates / Yoga which put me in touch with the soul in my body.
Thanks for this, Sinead! Thought-provoking and so important to become aware of in these transhumanist times. I remember noticing the ‘human degradation ‘ messages that started to be prevalent in the media during the covid years. ‘If you don’t know how far apart six feet is, visualise a dead body between you and the next person in the queue’ was literally what we were told to do in the UK. In the news, a woman insulted for her smell when being arrested and searched by the police, had this story repeated back to her by several tv and radio presenters trying to reassure her that ‘being smelly’ is something women can’t really help, until she was forced to interject with ‘They were saying it to be hurtful to me – it wasn’t actually true’ – which apparently wasn’t what the media wanted as it spoilt their narrative. The message was ‘Women may be gross, disgusting and unhygienic but they can’t help it’. This reductive message, it seems to me, is an attempt in this post-metoo world to put women back in their place and to undermine any of the empowerment being gained as a result of their standing up against the patriarchy. But, of course, if women speak out against it, their objections would be countered with protestations of wanting to reassure us of our victim-status and vulnerability. The fetishisation in the developed world of drag queens is another aspect of this. While transwomen’s message is ‘We can be a better kind of woman’ the drag queen represents a caricature of womanhood. The huge breasts and pumped up lips reduces us to easily replaceable bits and basically erases us. Both groups have effectively undermined women because the patriarchy is terrified of them. And for the child-abusers of the UK media world, making women vulnerable and low in self-esteem is a way to get them out of their way and enable easy access to their children. I realise this last point may be contentious but, if you doubt this agenda, look into how difficult it is for mothers in the UK trying to meet the new criteria for having a home considered good enough to prevent the state from removing their children from them. But that’s another story.
Drag:Blackface.
”woman is not a costume “
< look how difficult it is for mothers in the UK trying to meet the new criteria for having a home considered good enough to prevent the state from removing their children from them. But that’s another story.>
It’s an old story. More than a century ago GK Chesterton, the Christian Communist, deplored how — under the Capitalist system — a mother who had neither a home nor food for her child would not be given a home and food but have her child taken away by the State.
The democratic rulers of an “advanced” country may also remove a child for other violations, e.g.,
– leaving the child alone in a playground or car, even briefly
– failing to pay for school meals
– rejecting government-imposed medical treatment
– disputing a medical diagnosis or medical bill
– the child having failed to attend school beyond a certain period
– disciplining the child
– prohibiting the child from doing something, thereby purportedly threatening its mental health
– “radicalising” a child – or the child “radicalising itself”
– purportedly being an illegitimate guardian.
Perhaps he was a Christian communist, but he had scathing views of meddlesome socialist progressives who wouldn’t leave ordinary folk to live their own lives.
If you still have a TV you are inviting clown world into your home. I’ve not had a TV for over 10 years and never once missed it and the mental junk it sells. No smartphone either and I wont be getting microchipped.
I am sorry, but you will have to be sent to the digital reeducation camp as it will soon be a criminal offence not to have an iPhone.
An example of why AI will always be inferior to humans.
I go on and on about this song to everyone I know and I’m mot even a fan of their music but, wow, this is such an incredible live version of a song (my goodness the harmonies and the solo)! This particular track is bland when you listen to it on the album (and the lyrics are good but not the best lyrics ever written) but this live version one soars and conjures up the atmosphere you feel in the heat of a midsummer (which is the opposite of the meaning of the lyrics which may even emphasise them in a strange way?). I listen to this repeatedly and have for over a decade.
It is so rough and raw, chaotic even, but it is pure magic and spirit; the sound of human harmony. Fluid, chaotic human harmony. No computer, digital technology or AI could create nor replicate such a magical thing of beauty such as this. It is difficult to explain how something so rough can be so beautiful; such is the nature of so much of humanity and its arts. I love so many types of music and this is one of the very best examples of live rock music. I wonder how many people can hear what we can hear and understand why we love this so much? Songs such as this one is one of the few reasons I am glad to be alive (which is funny in light of the lyrics)! AI will never have the most important aspect, the thing that makes humans eternally precious – a soul. Something that is forever unreplicable, and they know it.
Fleetwood Mac – I’m So Afraid (Live):
Somebody did a real job on Peter Green:
https://odysee.com/@WyvernTheTerrible:0/peter-green-the-munich-incident:d
Mick Fleetwood is extremely suspicious, he comes from an elite background.
Apologies for late reply – been so busy!
I probably wasn’t very clear in my comment, but I was meant to say I was referring specifically to the value of the music (rather than the band members or the lyrics); that human-made music has a spirit that no artificial machine can replicate or create.
Very interesting info about the band members – their relationships, the dynamics and actions towards each other, and of course very sad what happened to Peter Green.
WAKE YOUR BUM UP:Oxford study shows only vaccinated kids are dying and getting myocarditis and pericarditisA new large-scale study from renowned scientists at the prestigious University of Oxford has just confirmed that myocarditis and pericarditis only appear in children and adolescents after Covid vaccination and not after infection from the virus.
The new study looked at the official government data of more than 1 million English children and adolescents aged between five and 11 and 12 and 15.
The study compared vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects.
Vaxxed: 12 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis, 3 deaths
Unvaxxed: 0 cases; 0 deaths
-MORE-
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/new-oxford-study-shows-only-the-kids
Covid 19 never existed.
Yep, that’s to be understood from the conclusion.
jamie, for shame! The conclusion is agnostic as to whether there is or isn’t a covivirus. Either is consistent w the conclusion. If you respect the truth (our means of settling disagreements) you never, ever draw a conclusion merely cuz you PREFER it. I’m sure you’re brighter than that.
With respect, I consider Doctors Peter McCullough, Meryl Nass, Pierre Kory, Paul Marik, all the members of the Critical Care Alliance, and the global thousands of doctor who insisted upon ivermectin to be better informed in the matter than you.
All of these, plus doctors known personally to me, have seen and treated the illness.
On the side of “there was no Covid” is a clever Intelligence-manufactured persuasive little story intended to make you doubt the doctors named above.
A greatly exaggerated illness is not the same as a nonexistent one, however much you wish it to be so.
FLU and its variants.
You committed one of the OffG Forum’s major taboos: you implied there was a Covid virus. Undoubtedly that’s what gave you 4 (and counting) downvotes – whereas most of your comments receive only upvotes.
Howard, I’m sure you’ll agree that the truth isn’t decided by its popularity. Although if our political votes were honestly counted it would move us towards freedom & safety.
“Get your Beach Ready Bum on board”.
Advertising is all about creating ‘wants’ rather than selling needs (Vance Packard).
Remember: “Drink Coca Cola” or “Enjoy Coca Cola.”
Fuck them.
BTW, ‘Shapely’ arses are no longer politically correct.
As for Descartes, silly old bugger. What he should have said was:
“I am, so unfortunately l (over)think.
I love my government. They are educated on Yale University and Harvard, and you are not!
Therefore they are doing the best they can for our society and they try to be responsible for our daily American lives.
Whattabout you? What are you doing for our society? Nothing! You are only thinking on your own shitty life and getting more dollares, and thats the truth.
Instead of yet more rehashed and vague warnings about the sinister motives of the state, perhaps we could have a bit more about the assassination attempt of Donald Trump. You know the body of the alleged shooter was released to be cremated a mere 10 days after the incident? Would have thought OffGuardian would be more interested in that, but of course according to you guys it was just ‘theatre’.
Theatre indeed … No scar, no ‘news’ … Trump is nothing but an accomplished-showman, or closer to reality; a ‘thief-in-the-night’ … He takes what he can, when he can and where he can. Do recall that he bragged about stealing the oil-wells in Syria (how trite, an American President BRAGGING about theft) and do recall that American ‘Occupation-forces’ are still ‘protecting’ the stolen wealth from Syria and Iraq. Who benefits? Not the ordinary mug, Trump-supporters … who are just trying to eke-out a living while being totally bamboozled by the raahh-raahh kabuki. For heaven’s-sake, wake-up to the fact that Donald Trump is a ‘construct’ … created by the very same deviates who are in control of the Banks and the rest of the institutions that actually matter. You/me/we need to accept that fact and plan accordingly …
The Empire still robs routinely and continually without boasting, from Iraq, Syria and maybe S. Sudan. It also seizes Iranian tankers. Its lackeys rob from Libya and Yemen.
What was the effect on climate change from the 1990 bombing the Iraqi oil wells? The fires took years to put out. Why no research?
Different clowns same circus.
Donald Trump isn’t a ‘construct’, he’s a human man. He’s also most definitely not a man of the people, or someone who will ‘drain the swamp’ of corruption.
But someone did try to kill him. That wasn’t theatre and it matters who, and why, because otherwise we wo’t understand what happens next.
So was the FBI raid on Scott Ritter “just theatre” because — according to OffG “they’re all in it together”.
I came across opinions like that during the War:
“What’s the differerence between a Fascist and a Communist? Only the armband.”
Dear Descartes with his metaphysical presuppositions in support of a fallacious dualism.
Ha 🙃 I read that as ” metaphysical pre-suppositories”
But hey, that may make sense.
Kiwijoker,
When I was 10 I lay in the hammock one summer morning reading Descartes. I went in to breakfast excited by the man’s brilliance– that he could even posit the question whether the world existed apart from our perception of it.
After breakfast, when he seemed to be saying that it didn’t, I became ferociously angry at his dishonesty: “He can’t really believe it himself, because what was the point to his putting pen to paper if neither one existed– and if no one existed to read it?”
Descartes– or at least my understanding of his theories– changed my life. I decided right then that the “philosophy of life” that I so avidly searched for bore no relation to philosophy as constructed by philosophers. If truth is what you want it’s rarely found in philosophy.
Dualism is not fallacious. We are all an eternal, immortal soul/spirit being (the immortal spirit body being what literally animates our physical body, during each of our eternal soul’s many, many lifetimes), and that is why we all survive (in our immortal spirit body form) the death of our physical body ‘coat’.
(Anyone who ‘does not believe’ the above will, on the eventual day on which they do what is so very incorrectly termed ‘die’, discover that I stated the 100% factual truth. After our [wrongly termed] ‘death’ we each return [then in our spirit body] to the very real Spirit Dimension of this multi-dimensional cosmos)
Whoever has thumbed-down my post of yesterday will one day get a very big shock: when they discover that they HAVE survived (in their immortal spirit body form) the death of their physical body ‘coat’, and they thus will have to face that dualism IS a fact.
When your eventual days come, on which you each do what is so very incorrectly termed ‘die’, you will realise that I (and all the other countless millions of properly-informed Spiritualists around the world) will be able to say “We told you so!”.
in my city, Denver, USA, I see many billboards of this venal sort, exhorting residents to get vaccinated, have a sustainable lifestyle, be a good parent, consult a psychiatrist if feeling out of sorts, perhaps as a result of being hectored by too many patronizing billboards! also at the height of the whole sanitary-crisis hysteria the biggest profiteering health-care corporations bought ads on giant billboards to extol the great sacrifices being made by their ruthlessly exploited employees, ads that definitely provoked in me some degree of psychological trauma lol
as for public transport, the idea evidently is to frame it as a civic duty to ride buses and trams, and not a service from which customers might hope to expect comfort, convenience, quality, respectful treatment, or merely treatment as something other than a potential biohazard / security issue
the technocrats though don’t in my opinion play on a mind-body duality because the object of their manipulation at root is our behavior below the level of conscious decision, a kind of Pavlovian conditioning that targets the human mind as another organ to be remolded
the French philosopher most relevant to this process might be, rather than Decartes, Michel Foucault, especially his ideas about institutional, corporeal “quadrillage”
Denigrating real human bodies most certainly plays into the agenda of the owners, as does the whole idea one can magically change one’s gender if one is unhappy in the less than perfect body they live in. Never mind that all those images of “perfection” are mere constructs force fed to us by those who wish to see us continually strive for their latest version of perfection. And one cannot get that perfection without the assistance of those with big educations and plenty of trained “expertise,” not to mention the funds one must have to spend to attain said perfection.
In today’s sick society, if one does not do everything within one’s power to correct the flaws of nature one is deemed either inferior or a denier of all that great “science” that says you can be whatever you want to be whenever you want to be that. Refuse to use that botox to cure those wrinkles you’ve earned over a lifetime, you’re a worthless individual who is just not trying hard enough. Refuse to get that extra roll of fat removed from your abdomen, you’re simply an ugly lazy sot who did it to themselves by eating a poor diet, which was of course provided to you by the same “experts” who now have the cure to fix all of that, for a price. Happiness in life is now only possible by using all the products and procedures invented by an industry that thrives on the fake, all for profit mind you. Not buying into that? Then YOU are the problem.
From there, it’s not far at all to convince people to take a shot to “cure” a disease that has never been proven to even exist. If you don’t do it, you’re a science denier as well as a selfish and irresponsible uncontrolled disease vector. You are now a threat to all those who put their faith in those “educated” in a system that does not really educate at all, but indoctrinates quite well. One can make lots of money in that world, and if you aren’t OK with that, then once again, you are the problem. After all, those big degrees come with a big price, and one must be able to not only pay that off, but one must be rewarded handsomely for getting what passes for such a stellar education. Any uneducated rube who might attempt to call you out on just what that shiny degree really consists of, or just what that magic shot can really do for them, is again simply a Luddite who should damned well know better than to question the experts with big degrees.
While some here seem to fixate on whether people still take the bus or not, or whether it’s all the fault of organized religions or of a plastic impoverished society, or whether calling one’s posterior a “bum” is OK or not, no one wants to address just where all of this leads. And that destination is one we have supposedly been talking about here for years now. We are now told that the only key to happiness, and to any sort of life at all, is to be provided by “experts” in white coats who know best. By continually deeming the physical body inferior and messy, not to mention disease ridden, you create a market for all those products we all MUST buy in order to make ourselves over into something everyone will admire. And to attest to the fact that one is really trying hard to become the image we’re all told is the desired one. Never mind the side effects, of course. And yes, eventually, one will live one’s life fully online as an avatar, once and for all becoming that ever changing vision of perfection prescribed to us by those who “know best.” And you’ll need to keep up in avatar world as well, making sure your alter identity is fully up to date with the latest trends.
I’m not really even doing your article justice here, but I feel like I do see exactly what you are trying to say. And it’s one hell of a lot deeper than ads on a bus, or the naming of the various body parts all of we messy humans have in common. While much of it is the inevitable end to a society such as ours, there is an agenda behind all that training, and all roads eventually lead there.
If you go to war though, you will soon not have enough people to fix the cars, so why not introduce some fancy incentive to at least think about the idea, and support either bus and track maintenance, or some everlasting boots.
In modern terms it is now the elite’s “I say so, therefore is”.
Fritjof Capra, an American physicist and UC Berkeley prof, has written several books on disabusing Humanity of the detached (alienated) linear thinking of Descartes and Newton, in favor of whole systems thinking. Like the way that complex ecosystems function. When humans detach their thinking from the reality of a proprietary Earth and trial & error evolutionarily developed planet they live on, there is only one ending that is inevitable, extinction.
What the author here describes is a root problem with Western Empire, falsely called “civilization”. It is not. It is an unlimited arrogance of self, of ego, of thought over Earth’s life systems. Every new trick dreamed up by the elite’s capitalist commerce machine to tech up another “convenience”, another shortcut bypassing Mother Nature, another narcissistic profit opportunity, is another nail in the coffin they are building for us all. In Descartes’s time there was relatively little tyrannical destruction that could be deployed by selfish linear theories and practice. The power to rule was limited to Earth reality. Not now however. Mass media, digital techs and a Humanity trapped with no place to escape to, from a rich class with all the authority and wealth to Descartes us to death, is now the soul killing reality we live in.
Until we just say no. In all possible ways.
Capra is a globalist goon:
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-secret-dialectics-of-the-elite-turning-point-by-fritjof-capra-jay-dyer-half–18564517
Edwige, anybody can call anybody, anything. But read “The Turning Point” for yourself before letting some blogging baboon mislead you. Whole systems thinking and design function through localized custom design and are antithetical to centralization or capitalist corporate thinking. I tried to design such a systems approach for Xerox corp in the mid 80’s based upon ecosystem design. The idea went nowhere with management because it does not facilitate profit. It facilitates function, serving purpose for Humanity and gives wealth to no one. They can’t understand it. It’s an anathema to any “leader” class. Believe me, there is no way these Hoales will ever use this approach. Only we-the-people can benefit as have indigenous peoples for many millennia.
That they spin it as “globalist” is an absurd, but in your case, an effective use of propaganda to misdirect people away from real solutions to control the beneficial use of all technologies.
not necessarily; as most of the prominent writers of the day – or yesteryear – have been captured/co-opted by the kakistocracy; and molded to fit the agendas of the era! That is all!! RGB-Y4 out!!!
5 Stars Sinéad.
More conditioning from the “MAd men” of Tavistock iInstitute of Human Relations n’est ce pas…
https://www.tavinstitute.org/
The vilification of the human body and nature and the feminine aspect of human nature did not begin with Descartes…. It began with the sect that wrote the script that has been force-fed to entire continents around the planet, and passes for “religion”. Ironically, the word means “relinking” but the abrahamic death cults are anything but…
Alt Suggestion to Descartes and abrahamix:
susangriffin.com › women-and-nature
Women and Nature – Susan Griffin
Relatively few people now take the bus – like all aspects of metropolitan life, it is an ailing practice unlikely to be bolstered by artwork pinned to its infrastructure.
bullshit.
Sinéad is another one of them people who lives in digital world rather than reality.above comment is ridiculous, I visited the U.K and bus’s where packed everywhere I went and the average bus price was 2£ for any jounrey subsidized by the government via the councils.it is the government who puts up all the digital screen with CCTV camera in bus;s stops.The advertisement wasYou can charge up your USB on the buswatch netflicks.etc
if the guardian wrote this it would be woke.
bums on seat – is slang dear Sinéad
Correct. This is a person removed from reality. Lots of people still take the bus. Every time i go to work i get a bus to the station.
an absolutely stunning piece of writing; and one that posits many ideas that i’m in total agreement with! Thanks for your incredible talent in composition skills; and God Bless u and yours! RGB-Y4 out!!
I don’t see a problem with the ad personally – it’s a joke and ‘bums on seats’ is a harmless expression everyone knows. Wouldn’t it be great, though, it they put those same ads at American bus stops – bums would be lining up around the block to find a paying passenger!
Wouldn’t it be even greater if we saw THEIR bums on the seats of public transport?
Well said Thom! I had to wonder if she was taking the p. to be honest it was so far fecxhed and silly
I was at first inclined to give the company the benefit of the doubt regarding its advertisement.
Perhaps, it was just an attempt at humour with no agenda or narrative spinning. However, when looking at the company website and marketing, it is a 100 percent globalist agenda promoter.
Go-Ahead was delisted from the London Stock Exchange in 2022 (no longer has shares on LSE). Sold to Kinetic (51%), Australia and NZ largest bus operator and GlobalVia (49%) a Spanish global toll road, train and tram operator. It was a reasonably sized company as UK’s largest bus company but no transnational giant with a market value of around £650 million pounds when sold.
The Go-Ahead website still shows people in masks in 2024, on three different pages on the site. It has a big section on sustainability including net zero as well as the UN SDG’s. Its new parent companies are also big on driving the agendas forward, in fact, even more so.
https://www.go-ahead.com/sustainability/our-approach-sustainability
https://www.go-ahead.com/sustainability/case-studies
Benefit of the doubt or not, Go-Ahead is certainly going ahead with indoctrinating the public with globalist narratives if its website and initiatives are anything to go by.
It would seem like its new owners are on the list – or wish to be – of preferred partners for transport in the future of restricted private transport. Toll roads if one can afford to pay per mile or the bus if one cannot.
Splendid research – thanks for this.
Perhaps the ad is ultimately based on a Gnostic contempt for the body (and by extension materiality generally) – but perhaps this is reading too much into it. It’s certainly an attempt to coarsen and degrade society that masquerades as irreverent and folksy.
Anyone who objects to the degradation can feel themselves having to add the disclaimer “I’m not a puritan” or “I’m not a prude” which is the result of seven decades of cultural programming.
We are exposed to so much Gnostic programming or at least its twisted version, through the media, be it so called entertainment such as Hollyweird, the music industry, TV shows, adverts, the ‘news’ and others areas of life.
It seems to me, that by programming the public to believe that they can be gods, through ‘knowledge’ (currently ‘The Science’ TM) – which is very much in line with the Luciferian doctrine – while degrading what it is be to human will provide the launchpad for transhumanism.
Making human 1.0 seem outmoded and obsolete, by concentrating on its faults and fragility; physically, mentally and emotionally. The solution to this ‘problem’ just happens to be in the ‘new improved’, enhanced human 2.0 transhuman options currently being researched and developed.
In other words “Go-Ahead” is run by typical globalist assholes and buttwipes.
I think Descartes in this context is absolutely correct and vitally important – thank you.
One thing, before I read it closely, in the English translation that I have used the core reference is to an “evil demon” (not “malicious”) and I think that is much the better choice; he clearly means Satan. I have been struck at that singular – demon – 1! – and how much worse our predicament is confronting armies of evil demons starting at the bottom tier of news media and advertising agency personnel and on up to the plush boardrooms of mega-corps and leading NGOs and … beyond to the chief demon lairs of who-knows-where.
By continually espousing that “Covid” was a thing at all, renders much of what was written as irrelevant.
And still the arguments rage as to “its” origins when all along it was a re-branding exercise exacerbated & weaponised by global lockstep overseen by a bunch of evil fuckwits.
Thank God for the Sinead Murphys of this world – otherwise we wouldn’t be able to put two and two together. Thank God also for God – otherwise we’d never have fallen for the pillaging of reality by The Science (wasn’t it dear God who whispered sweet aspersions against the body to His prophets and ministers?) And thank God most of all for allowing someone to point out the truly sinister plot against society by the monstrous Rainbow symbol.
God didn’t create Adam and Bruce – He created Adam and Eve, so we could “be fruitful and multiply” and never ever run out of soldiers and collateral damages. God saith to man that only Israeli soldiers are allowed to rape and sodomize other men – and only so long as they do it out of hate, never out of love.
And all this because Rene D. had a nice cup of Morning Joe. Makes you want to kill a Folger – oh wait, someone already did.
I take it you were being sarcastic. Yes, it may seem harmless with regard to the usage by the NHS. However, it is a form of predictive programming for the Noahide Laws.
The symbol of the Noahide Laws is the rainbow. At least 12 laws and 5 proclamations passed in the USA recognise the Noahide Laws.
The UN also recognises the Noahide Code.
https://noahide.org/universal-noahide-code-at-un-hq/
Also, research the penalties for not obeying them.
I have ask you guys to explain why you dont like the Noa Hide Code “Thou shall not kill” and similar. What is wrong with that?
Here’s what these Noahide Codes completely overlook: people who haven’t a clue what they are cannot possibly be influenced toward what they represent simply by using or viewing or even enjoying one of their symbols.
It’s like if no one had ever heard of the devil, then having a fascination with horns wouldn’t mean they support the devil’s business.
You can’t support what you aren’t aware of. Unless of course you believe in magic and the power of magical symbols to influence the subconscious.
https://youtu.be/b9eBCGseStw?si=Z5sRKc4KJlwUr8k0
Real coffee aroma: a sound precaution against instant loss of any body.
Body and Soul, live in Harmony: Joe Jackson – classic.
‘Heart of Ice’
You might be overthinking this. Maybe much of what we experience isn’t the pinnacle of propaganda, a model of cunning that’s intended to deceive us about the true nature of reality but rather the product of cut-rate incompetence, a low budget job that’s deemed to be just good enough for its purpose.
These specific posters seem to fall into the category of PSA — “Public Service Announcements”. These are used to fill in the spaces and timeslots allocated for paid advertisements but nobody’s bought those spaces so PSAs. You can learn a lot about the nature of a society by looking at its advertisements. Try looking at these specific posters from the perspective of their creators, for example, and you might see an impoverished society, both materially and spiritually. Its the same notion but its not a product of some grand design but just the inevitable consequence of a chain of circumstances and events. Understanding the difference could be important.
And the eternal menace of mediocrity.