Original RI quotes only

[Bruce Dazzling]

God knows inducing a heart attack is like Spookery 101.

[Nordic]

Simulist wrote:

There are people so poor that the only thing they have is money.

[JackRiddler]

When we are shifted ever more toward valuing abstract symbols instead of the things those symbols actually represent it becomes difficult to retain any authentic sense of value at all.

For instance:

I am justified in using an arsenal of expensively researched manipulation strategies to make Joe buy stupid throw away (throw? and where is 'away'?) consumer rubbish he didn't want or need in the first place.

I have bread but I don't have enough bread, so I am justified sneaking into Joes house and stealing a freshly baked loaf off his dining table while his family are washing up before their meal.

Why is one of those morally defensible in todays world and the other not?

Why, because in one scenario Joe had 'freedom of choice' and in the other he did not. One is theft, the other is capitalism...

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34112&start=30#p450297

[Simulist]

"Evil grows unchecked in the space between double standards."

— Alice, from here

[wintler2]

I think baseless accusations are bad things, for both the accused and the accuser.

Better than having a suspicious mind is being a critical thinker and reader. We're not expected to co-sign every word written by Hedges or Chomsky. And we needn't believe them to be CIA because we can't.

[Nordic]

Elvis wrote;

I'm in love with the world. But damn, the heartbreak.

[JackRiddler]

Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!
viewtopic.php?f=34&t=34177

I'd argue that the prominence of the stuff we're supposed to like is as much a result of the vagaries of the market and how elitism specializes it for the great benefit of a few while dumbing down the output of the many, if I had to try to put it in a nut-shell.

*Sigh*

I only know sound for empty forests. I thrash and scream and wail, but just the dust and air respond because they have no will. My art is perpetually emerging. My loves are all unrequited. My bed is empty, and my feet are not rubbed. My system is not integrated, my largely unaided escape inevitably incomplete.

Does the universe respond to nothing but violation? Is the sweet song of a heart the most powerless thing there ever was?

Dear Willow, I would love to rub your system and integrate your feet. Surely that is what art is for, if anything. Unfortunately I have been a) busy, and b) intimidated by your gauntlet*, which reminds me of when I was foolish enough to choose aesthetics as my special subject in my third year when I studied (or "studied") philosophy at uni.

Q. What is Art?

A. Hmmm.

I don't have an aversion to art, on the contrary. I have spent my life with it. Yea, I do it, or so I have been told. You might even say I am addicted to it. (I wish I could be sure I am not joking.)

So, anyway, I'm reluctant even to get started. But duty calls, so I'll start by saying the obvious, which you know at least as well as I do: that Art is very Big Business, like Gold in the days of the Klondike, or Oil in the days of Upton Sinclair. Everyone wants to get in on the act - who can blame them? - and everyone (if you ask them) is doing it for purely noble or selfless reasons. Art is trade pretending to be religion and actually getting away with it.

Lady Gaga calls herself an artist and nobody laughs. This is, in itself, reason enough for anyone to be suspicious of the term "art". What's it doing, if it can include her, Bach, Jane Austen, Vincent van Gogh, Bertolt Brecht, Jimi Hendrix, Liberace and Dante? What's it for? What distinction does it signify? What kind of a worker is an artist, exactly?

Look at the job pages in the quality broadsheets and you'll see the heading: "Creative, Media and Advertising" (or even just "Creative"). Personally, I wonder what's going on there. Why do so many soi-disant (oo la la) artists ponce around like Osric in Hamlet? Could it be because they are essentally courtiers, i.e., servants of power, and welcomed by the powerful? It might be worth looking into.

More to the point: when a former widget factory becomes an Art Factory (because it's cheaper to produce widgets in SE Asia), my appreciation of the (increasingly-abstract**) art in that Art Factory is somewhat coloured by my awareness that 10-year-olds in Indonesia are making the widgets that make it possible for me to attend that Art Event.

This is all deeply boring, I know. I also know that it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual creation of an actual artwork. I know what it means to be completely absorbed in (or by) the making of something that will never feed or house anyone, to be selfless in it. I am not vilifying art.

So there, anyway. That was a load of shite, but at least it was a start. I am nothing if not a trouper.

It's past six a.m. here, so goodnight. I am a working stiff artiste.

*Is it OK if I imagine your gauntlet as a white silk opera glove? (I've done it already.)

**Why is that?

[JackRiddler]

It's important to note that Eakman only used these curious mistakes as a foundation -- they were never re-examined, only built upon. She even wrote a whole book about it, "How to Counter Group Manipulation Tactics" which is quite lucid and useful despite the poisoned fruit of false assumptions and mangled history. This is a hallmark of the Conspiratainment Complex: all past work is raw material for future product, there's very little critical assessment going on.

[MacCruiskeen]

Reading is a binge of symbolic cognition, i love it myself but its not real. What if the contemporary human mania for merely symbolic renderings of the world (reading, tv, web..) is basic to our dysfunctional relationship with the material biosphere that grew us? There are no lies without abstraction, no abstraction without symbols and labels. IOW, is teaching baboons to read really giving them a mental illness?

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34469

[Allegro]

To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails.

Clearly Goldstein is anthropomorphizing their behavior. I mean, who knows whether they are really "threatening" movements and "aggressive" noises? And who knows what the intent of the tail "smacking" is.

I quite agree. This article is a response in the mode of traditionalism (conservative, naturalist, essentialist, pessimistic) against the usually romantic (liberal, optimistic, idealized, tolerant) understanding of dolphins. Either interpretation is in reality arguing about humans, about the human self-image of human nature, and will usually have nothing to do with dolphins. False duality and reaction in the service of human needs: Dolphin good! No, dolphin bad! It's not much different when contemporary and usually uninformed observers hash out their competing interpretations of how life might have been among the Western hemisphere indigenes before the European expeditions. On Columbus Day, try saying the discovery was lousy for the indigenes. There'll always be someone who will step up to explain to you, pedantically, that you're romanticizing them, that they were cutting out hearts and raping children and having wars and dying of diseases anyway; to insist on making them, at best, morally equivalent to the European conquerors, to blur the distinction of who invaded and who killed whom; to insinuate, if not to argue explicitly, that as bad people they had it coming or didn't deserve otherwise; and thus to assuage their own feeling of guilt and unease at identifying (irrationally, I might add) with the Europeans of 400-500 years ago more so than with the indigenes, as though any modern person's link to either is a matter defining our identities.

Jehovah at work again, smiting the heathens, and though we do bad things, we are but his tools.

Point is, let us lay aside our reactions, whether these are hopeful or mean. We're not dolphins and we don't know the meanings of their behaviors, but we do know that their behaviors have meanings that they themselves can certainly interpret and abstract. We don't know anything and we won't if we never decipher their language (not that we'd necessarily know much more in that case). But we do know that they have language, that they communicate abstractions (like directions and stories of distant places), that they learn and remember, that they develop, that they make music, and that if killing a human is murder, then so is killing one of them. [REFER.]

WORD and WORD (one each for you both)

[JackRiddler]

Blush. It means a lot from you, Allegro!

The question of how to keep #Occupy from being infiltrated is a strange loop that dooms us to paranoia.

If enemy agents are behaviorally indistinguishable from active & earnest participants, then there’s no rational reason to try to design a Cylon detector.

If the point is direct Democracy for a massively open demographic consisting of 99% of America’s population -- over 300 million people by definition -- we can’t be concerned that People We Disagree With could get involved. Know that for a fact: they already did.

That’s happening. In fact, happening every day, thousands of simultaneous infiltration plots everywhere, all of which involve groups of like-minded people operating in synch at General Assemblies. No big deal.

Non-heirarchy means you’ll find yourself standing next to some strange comrades. If that’s a real concern, plan differently. Put your energy somewhere more comfortable and productive for you.

Especially if you think you’ve got a clear sense of what needs to be done. Don’t wait for validation, start working backwards and building a roadmap. Determine target audiences and begin testing your messaging. Set goals and measure results. Once you get your bearings, you will find yourself completely through the looking glass: now you’re the Change Agent.

Treat #Occupy meetings as recruitment opportunities and don’t waste time (yours, theirs) trying to hammer the nuts and bolts of your master plan through the meat grinder of Consensus. For this same reason, most of the actual agents in the ranks aren’t disrupting your meetings or even registering on your radar. Intelligence work, fundamentally, is ongoing.

Chasing ghosts is a dangerous line of work. From fresh recruits to veteran grandmasters, the most common mistake in the spy trade has always been hubris, the vanity to assume that you and you alone are the cleverest monkey in the jungle.

With that in mind, here’s an open secret: the most effective counterintelligence work is the kind you don’t do.

(Emphases mine to make it like, an article, which it is.)

Original:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34423&start=45#p457617

[Simulist]

From here:

Seems to me the political and financial system in the US right now has already been hijacked by the PTB, so it's basically too late. Resistance within the system is useless, because the system is controlled and owned by Wall Street and Friends. That leaves one conclusion : Give up or move the resistance outside the system.

These sociopaths have no respect for law, morality or anything else that might get between them and power/profit. If they don't play by the rules you're only handicapping yourselves if you do.

[Simulist]

"Unfortunately, real victims are all too often ignored in favor of powerful people who cloak themselves in a false 'victimhood' in order to bully those weaker than themselves." — AlicetheKurious

[Joe Hillshoist]

If there is a collective unconscious, perhaps it has its own walled off torture chambers, inside of which some of us are prisoners.

viewtopic.php?p=459127#p459127

[Freitag]

Do you realize that this thread title makes the board look like IDIOTS

Gee, why would BBC News online today feature a story called -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17896980

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