Once again, one for the archive and post to others by Caitlin Johnstone. Her articulate descriptions of mind scan reminded me of the school book standard novel of future dystopia, Orwell's "1984" turn to nonfiction but only 40 years later.
Human beings have always been enslaved, and always wanted be free. We thought we were free in going off to fight foreign wars, fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here. Catchy. And then science was going to free us. True, thousands of children were saved by vaccinations against common diseases like measles. But if they didn't live in slums, and eat tasty garbage for food, maybe measles wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Now technology is being employed to free us all up from drudgery and give us holiday time. But we are working harder than ever, and more and more, can't even cover the basic necessities. And technology has removed any semblance of privacy, which is the basis of freedom. If they have their way - and why not? - every dollar we spend, where and how we spend it will be a matter of public record. But this is all just paranoia, isn't it? If you want roads and bridges built and repaired, you need government. Government with the right values, as opposed to - them. So, in spite of our bi-i-g brains, we just can't figure it out. No use trying.
In his essay, "Immortality" - probably my favorite of all his many essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:
"The skeptic affirms that the universe is a nest of boxes with nothing in the last box. All laughter at man is bitter, and puts us out of good activity. When Bonaparte insisted that the heart is one of the entrails, that it is the pit of the stomach that moves the world, - do we thank him for his gracious instruction? Our disgust is the protest of human nature against a lie."
I think I am with Emerson. Despite the horror of selfishness and greed and continuing depravity of wars - of organized murder of human beings in the 100s of thousands, I still believe the last final box one opens - is not empty. There is still reason to hope. And this hope lies in the very nature of what's inside ourselves.
Isn’t it a grand irony that an upbringing that ticks Maslow’s boxes, instills a sense of hope and teaches love, achieves all this in a system that rewards theft and enmity? Socialists knew the duplicity and other excesses of capitalists, so those were the traits they had to master.
Could our obedient, armed, deist neighbors ever be convinced that Mutually Assured Destruction can be transformed into Mutually Committed to Peace, if the faith they have in their sky god was displaced by a faith in themselves and their neighbors?
Sometimes I find it hard to determine who is doing more harm to humanity. The "deist neighbors" as you say, or the non-deist globalists who managed to start a war in Ukraine killing at a few hundred thousand or more.
I feel one needs to dig a bit deeper to understand the roots of man's inhumanity to man, and to do this one needs to look at the psyche of man - much like Carl Jung did. Here we see the less well-examined forces that can propel men to murder one another, or plunder their fellow human beings for their own self-aggrandizement, as the billionaires do today - many of whom are likely Godless themselves.
Although I too fear a coming reckoning - due to the continued exploitation and predation of man upon man, the form of that reckoning could very well take a theological shape, but it could just as well take the shape of an atom bomb, or racial genetic supremacy much as the Nazis tried to implement. It is not the form of the rage that concerns me as much as the rage itself.
I find it difficult to isolate any group and see “most guilty” but my habit of calling attention to deists is because 1) they know better and 2) they’re everywhere, protecting their right to convert those who don’t share their views. If all, or even half, of Americans affiliated with churches were peace activists, I think our country would look a lot different.
I don’t believe that our global warmongers are “non-deists” in any significant number. Our esteemed warrior-in-chief attends Mass regularly, I have read.
Fortunately, that's merely a PMC myth. Graeber, _The Dawn of Everything_:
>It’s simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, ‘chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to’; or as Jared Diamond says, ‘large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer thedecisions and laws.’115 In other words, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force (again, the ability to threaten everyone with weapons) is ultimately required in order to do this. Writing systems, in turn, are almost invariably assumed to have developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states, which were the result of the whole process.
>Now, as we’ve already seen, none of this is really true, and predictions based on these assumptions almost invariably turn out to be wrong. We saw one dramatic example in Chapter Eight. It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to co-ordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there’s little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters. Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite ‘egalitarian’, were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.
I live in Bali. The federal and state governments take care of the roads and that's about it. Most of the rest is really democratic. Heads of families are fined if they don't go to the political meetings and vote on local matters. If you want a drainage ditch you set a date and everybody shows up with shovels. There's a complicated system for allocating water that is outside the government.
It seems to me that big government is largely about fighting wars.
That sounds a lot more democratic and class-less (or at least potentially class-less) than Plato's ideology of competitive spectacle and specialization.
It generally is. It's a bit too much to explain in an Internet comment and off topic so I'll leave it. Indonesia had a major bloodbath in 1965 that was basically a class war. Everyone is so nice and polite it's hard to believe, but it happened. Indonesians can be very fierce but in twelve years I haven't seen this. It helps that Bali's only natural resources are rice, beauty, and carvings.
"You can trust the algorithm to tell you the truth — not the truth you asked for but the truth you need."
What could be better than needing the "truth" of a survivable nuclear winter? Eternal wars for oil? Climate denial? Censorship as democracy? Ignorance as strength?...
Caitlin can be so intriguingly contradictory sometimes. She swings from mocking the idea that "speech is violence", to lambasting comedians who are applauded for criticising trans people. If there's one group that likes to talk about speech as violence, it's trans people!
I know that being critical of trans ideology is often dismissed (not least by Caitlin) as being transphobic and falling for the 'culture war' distraction, but the idea that trans women are literally women and should have women's rights DOES threaten women (i.e. 'cis women') if it's taken seriously. It's not transphobic to be realistic about the difference between the sexes, and to acknowledge that women's bodies make them vulnerable to men (or 'people with male bodies'). We have sex-segregated spaces for a reason, and that reason is women's safety.
People genuinely suffering from gender dysphoria need help coming to terms with their bodies, it's not helpful to them to reinforce their belief that they were actually born in the wrong body and that they should undergo medical procedures to 'fix' them. I'm genuinely quite puzzled why Caitlin doesn't also see it this way, because to me it seems like such an obviously manipulated cultural shift that benefits no one but the medical industry.
Could this possibly be a hint that China Russia North Korea aren't too happy with our US military conducting exercises off all their coastal areas? I guess I'm having another STUPID THOUGHT. You just can't trust these bastards moving their countries closer to the US. Can't wait for them conduct some training exercises off Cuba. Meanwhile America the great gets transformed into a virtual Auschwitz under Americans noses and we sit on our asses and enjoy the "booming economy" and the 'high lifestyle" (at least for a few). So let's keep bitching about the and do nothing. Incineration from an ICBM (the improved version of the Auschwitz ovens) is only 20 minutes away.
The upside is nuclear winter will solve the global warming problem far quicker than Bidens green energy policy. Gauranteed.
I once had an AI beat the pants off of me in scissors-paper-rock. I was trying to be random and unpredictable but it knew what I was going to do anyway. It was very impressive.
I just wrote a piece on this. One paragraph of subpoenaed information tells us everything we need to know about how endemic Censorship is on Facebook and how our government wields its giant stick to produce this result.
The One Paragraph that Tells Us Everything …
Facebook employee (name redacted for some reason) - July 16, 2021:
“And we attack virality aspect through feed demotions. We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm. For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions. For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts. Similarly, posts questioning whether you get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach. We demote those. That’s not false information but it leads to a vaccine negative environment. When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it’s a different approach. What we normally do is just remove or leave to fact checkers. Here, we introduced a middle ground.”
What follows is my sentence-by-sentence parsing of information one can glean from this one stunning paragraph:
Once again, one for the archive and post to others by Caitlin Johnstone. Her articulate descriptions of mind scan reminded me of the school book standard novel of future dystopia, Orwell's "1984" turn to nonfiction but only 40 years later.
Outstanding!
Human beings have always been enslaved, and always wanted be free. We thought we were free in going off to fight foreign wars, fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here. Catchy. And then science was going to free us. True, thousands of children were saved by vaccinations against common diseases like measles. But if they didn't live in slums, and eat tasty garbage for food, maybe measles wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Now technology is being employed to free us all up from drudgery and give us holiday time. But we are working harder than ever, and more and more, can't even cover the basic necessities. And technology has removed any semblance of privacy, which is the basis of freedom. If they have their way - and why not? - every dollar we spend, where and how we spend it will be a matter of public record. But this is all just paranoia, isn't it? If you want roads and bridges built and repaired, you need government. Government with the right values, as opposed to - them. So, in spite of our bi-i-g brains, we just can't figure it out. No use trying.
"No use trying."
In his essay, "Immortality" - probably my favorite of all his many essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:
"The skeptic affirms that the universe is a nest of boxes with nothing in the last box. All laughter at man is bitter, and puts us out of good activity. When Bonaparte insisted that the heart is one of the entrails, that it is the pit of the stomach that moves the world, - do we thank him for his gracious instruction? Our disgust is the protest of human nature against a lie."
I think I am with Emerson. Despite the horror of selfishness and greed and continuing depravity of wars - of organized murder of human beings in the 100s of thousands, I still believe the last final box one opens - is not empty. There is still reason to hope. And this hope lies in the very nature of what's inside ourselves.
Indeed. Beautifully said. Thank you.
Isn’t it a grand irony that an upbringing that ticks Maslow’s boxes, instills a sense of hope and teaches love, achieves all this in a system that rewards theft and enmity? Socialists knew the duplicity and other excesses of capitalists, so those were the traits they had to master.
Could our obedient, armed, deist neighbors ever be convinced that Mutually Assured Destruction can be transformed into Mutually Committed to Peace, if the faith they have in their sky god was displaced by a faith in themselves and their neighbors?
Sometimes I find it hard to determine who is doing more harm to humanity. The "deist neighbors" as you say, or the non-deist globalists who managed to start a war in Ukraine killing at a few hundred thousand or more.
I feel one needs to dig a bit deeper to understand the roots of man's inhumanity to man, and to do this one needs to look at the psyche of man - much like Carl Jung did. Here we see the less well-examined forces that can propel men to murder one another, or plunder their fellow human beings for their own self-aggrandizement, as the billionaires do today - many of whom are likely Godless themselves.
Although I too fear a coming reckoning - due to the continued exploitation and predation of man upon man, the form of that reckoning could very well take a theological shape, but it could just as well take the shape of an atom bomb, or racial genetic supremacy much as the Nazis tried to implement. It is not the form of the rage that concerns me as much as the rage itself.
I find it difficult to isolate any group and see “most guilty” but my habit of calling attention to deists is because 1) they know better and 2) they’re everywhere, protecting their right to convert those who don’t share their views. If all, or even half, of Americans affiliated with churches were peace activists, I think our country would look a lot different.
I don’t believe that our global warmongers are “non-deists” in any significant number. Our esteemed warrior-in-chief attends Mass regularly, I have read.
"...the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave." J.J. Rousseau
Hail to the feral!
Fortunately, that's merely a PMC myth. Graeber, _The Dawn of Everything_:
>It’s simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, ‘chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to’; or as Jared Diamond says, ‘large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer thedecisions and laws.’115 In other words, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force (again, the ability to threaten everyone with weapons) is ultimately required in order to do this. Writing systems, in turn, are almost invariably assumed to have developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states, which were the result of the whole process.
>Now, as we’ve already seen, none of this is really true, and predictions based on these assumptions almost invariably turn out to be wrong. We saw one dramatic example in Chapter Eight. It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to co-ordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there’s little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters. Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite ‘egalitarian’, were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.
I live in Bali. The federal and state governments take care of the roads and that's about it. Most of the rest is really democratic. Heads of families are fined if they don't go to the political meetings and vote on local matters. If you want a drainage ditch you set a date and everybody shows up with shovels. There's a complicated system for allocating water that is outside the government.
It seems to me that big government is largely about fighting wars.
That sounds a lot more democratic and class-less (or at least potentially class-less) than Plato's ideology of competitive spectacle and specialization.
It generally is. It's a bit too much to explain in an Internet comment and off topic so I'll leave it. Indonesia had a major bloodbath in 1965 that was basically a class war. Everyone is so nice and polite it's hard to believe, but it happened. Indonesians can be very fierce but in twelve years I haven't seen this. It helps that Bali's only natural resources are rice, beauty, and carvings.
"You can trust the algorithm to tell you the truth — not the truth you asked for but the truth you need."
What could be better than needing the "truth" of a survivable nuclear winter? Eternal wars for oil? Climate denial? Censorship as democracy? Ignorance as strength?...
You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!
A comfortable lie is preferable to many...
Thank you and important:
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs should get Nobel Peace Prize – not CIA’s St. Obama
20 minutes of best speech I ever heard: “NATO Enlargement and Russian Resistance”
https://youtu.be/2sVKXlNc1O8
That is inspiring in its directness and simplicity. Thanks for sharing that link.
Never ever had a chance to be first up with a comment before, but I know little about algorithms.
But I do know know about rhythms. Will this do?
Edmundo Ros, Rhumbas, Sambas and Tangos. There. I have made a contribution.
Caitlin can be so intriguingly contradictory sometimes. She swings from mocking the idea that "speech is violence", to lambasting comedians who are applauded for criticising trans people. If there's one group that likes to talk about speech as violence, it's trans people!
I know that being critical of trans ideology is often dismissed (not least by Caitlin) as being transphobic and falling for the 'culture war' distraction, but the idea that trans women are literally women and should have women's rights DOES threaten women (i.e. 'cis women') if it's taken seriously. It's not transphobic to be realistic about the difference between the sexes, and to acknowledge that women's bodies make them vulnerable to men (or 'people with male bodies'). We have sex-segregated spaces for a reason, and that reason is women's safety.
People genuinely suffering from gender dysphoria need help coming to terms with their bodies, it's not helpful to them to reinforce their belief that they were actually born in the wrong body and that they should undergo medical procedures to 'fix' them. I'm genuinely quite puzzled why Caitlin doesn't also see it this way, because to me it seems like such an obviously manipulated cultural shift that benefits no one but the medical industry.
Algorithm or not, the biggest problems is HUMAN BEINGS who write biased news like this….
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/06/us-navy-warships-china-russia-naval-patrol-near-alaska
…while failing to list the number of “freedom of navigation” warship sailings that the US conducts in the waters near Russia and China.
Could this possibly be a hint that China Russia North Korea aren't too happy with our US military conducting exercises off all their coastal areas? I guess I'm having another STUPID THOUGHT. You just can't trust these bastards moving their countries closer to the US. Can't wait for them conduct some training exercises off Cuba. Meanwhile America the great gets transformed into a virtual Auschwitz under Americans noses and we sit on our asses and enjoy the "booming economy" and the 'high lifestyle" (at least for a few). So let's keep bitching about the and do nothing. Incineration from an ICBM (the improved version of the Auschwitz ovens) is only 20 minutes away.
The upside is nuclear winter will solve the global warming problem far quicker than Bidens green energy policy. Gauranteed.
And on the eighth day, God created the algorithm, and he saw that it was good, and that he could make a lot of money with it.
And thus men went on to make money, as it was their only purpose their entire lives: making money.
Dear Bastet, commercial breaks....
I once had an AI beat the pants off of me in scissors-paper-rock. I was trying to be random and unpredictable but it knew what I was going to do anyway. It was very impressive.
Article best read while listening to Freeland, 'We want your Soul'
BRILLIANT 💥
I do not always agree in your basic views, but this is a GD brilliant poem.
THANKS 🙏
I just wrote a piece on this. One paragraph of subpoenaed information tells us everything we need to know about how endemic Censorship is on Facebook and how our government wields its giant stick to produce this result.
The One Paragraph that Tells Us Everything …
Facebook employee (name redacted for some reason) - July 16, 2021:
“And we attack virality aspect through feed demotions. We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm. For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions. For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts. Similarly, posts questioning whether you get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach. We demote those. That’s not false information but it leads to a vaccine negative environment. When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it’s a different approach. What we normally do is just remove or leave to fact checkers. Here, we introduced a middle ground.”
What follows is my sentence-by-sentence parsing of information one can glean from this one stunning paragraph:
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/i-hope-americans-read-just-one-paragraph
I address that in the Reader Comments. There's lots of reasons. Read the first comment.
the cure is the joys of learning the craft of proofs - read read read & check the footnotes. Don't be lazy
Our world is very sick.
"War is sane and poverty is normal.
Speech is violence and cluster bombs are peace."