Delightful Confirmation Bias

[theeKultleeder]

Part of the reason I'm "angry" is that PI makes so many assumptions that are just sooooo wrong.

In a Marxist reading club, they make sense, but when someone implies that any of those Marxist "religious" beliefs apply to me, I know they have no idea what they are talking about.

My beliefs don't come from any consumerist comfort zone or corporate new age cruise or cult or church, or any one book, or any one author. My words are words, and the impulses that lie behind my words come from years of wide-ranging independent study and lots of sometimes very intense experience. Much of my experience has been communicated on this board, in the past tense AND the present tense.

I'll talk about Marxist theories with people, but as soon as you start blindly and religiously implying that my thoughts come from some mythical Bourgeois mindset, without even taking a second to inspect them, I know that you are not paying attention, not truthful, not honest, and not in control of your own perceptive faculties. In short, you are brainwashed and mind-controlled.

[populistindependent]

I know for a dead fact that what you say here is not coming from an authentic place.

In other words, you are brainwashed, opaque, and not honest. (Not on purpose... I'm not accusing you of anything.)

This, of course, is an ad hominem attack. We see here the dark and mean-spirited side of the New Age mindset, which otherwise claims to have the moral high ground and represent peace and love. No one can defend themselves from the vague and slanderous charge that they are "coming from" an "inauthentic place" - whatever that might mean exactly. Being called "brainwashed, opaque, and dishonest" is in the same vein.

The disclaimer that you are not "accusing" and the condescending and demeaning statement that I am not saying what I say "on purpose" may on the surface seem conciliatory, but this is merely a part of the attack that is not quite as straightforward as the rest of it.

How one can "know for a dead fact" something that they cannot support or explain will have to remain a mystery.

I asked the question - what happens to those who resist this bold new one-ness and spirituality. In this post we can see the answer.

Clearly I am being declared a heretic to some new belief system, without any evidence being presented nor any possibility of defending myself, and so much for peace, love, and brotherhood. Out come the teeth and claws - there is hardly anything new or revolutionary about that.

[populistindependent]

What I have found from all of my recent reading courtesy of the internet is the epitome of this entire thread.

Organised religion is being exposed for the lie that it is.

Quantum physics meanwhile, is explaining how fucking clever those who brought us the "organised religion deal" are.

When you know who's ancestors brought you the "good book", you start to understand this, because, judging by many of the speeches of Jesus and his disciples, they apparently fully understood modern day Quantum physics !

Kudos to the scriptwriters is what I say

I think you are making a great distinction here. Organized religion tends to become just like all organizations in a society - no better no worse.

It could be said that Jesus came to abolish organized religion, not start a new one.

[judasdisney]

thee Kultleeder wrote:

I used to get anxious when I came across ideas that I thought were my own and locked up inside my trunk full of notebooks.

The morning of 9/11/01, I immediately did not believe the Official Story, because (1) I vividly recalled following the Payne Stewart/NORAD drama, having had the day off work in 1999, and (2) a family member of mine had written an unpublished novel in 1980 called "American Hitler" about planes loaded with TNT crashing into buildings in D.C. including the Capitol Dome. Trying to explain this to people on 9/11/01, nobody listened.

Following the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, I ran around for a couple of months like Kevin McCarthy in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," trying to explain the Reichstag Fire to people. Nobody listened.

In the year or two following 9/11, immersing myself in the history of Chile, Argentina, Operation Condor, Germany and Italy, I saw the patterns and I wished that anyone of power or consequence -- a radio host, a political luminary, a judge or attorney or someone of power -- would publicly speak about the simple historical facts that I knew. The parallels are obvious. The coup is underway, and it's a set-up, and it's happened before, and it's not unique.

Forming my own meager campaigns to write about and talk about this anywhere with anyone who would listen was a stupid idea. I don't have the time or income to be able to write the book about this myself...

But then Naomi Wolf, finally, six years late, wrote the book I would've written, The End of America.

But apparently, not many people are listening to her, either, especially progressives. Mention "coup" in polite progressive company and watch 'em roll their eyes, say "tinfoil," and clear the room. But facts are facts.

And I wish my idea had been stolen sooner. I wish all my ideas would get stolen. Songs, lyrics, screenplays, strategies, political campaigns, social engineerings, inventions -- I wish they'd all be stolen.

[theeKultleeder]

Sorry, populistindependent. I did say that you make many assumptions that are wrong. I did qualify "dead wrong" as in those assumptions you make about me personally.

I have accused you of being a Marxist Materialist.

Silence.

Why?

Is it embarrassing? Am I wrong? I'll retract it if so.

I did say that you are engaging in mischaracterizations of my material as "new age." I even gave you a suggestion for correcting that.

Is the following the "bold new one-ness" you speak of?

When awareness recognizes its own separate nature as nevertheless non-dual with the ground, the ground serves as the source of blissful co-existence and spontaneous co-operation

http://cyberkult.blogspot.com/2007/09/p ... n-and.html

A revolutionary oriented towards tearing down, dismantling, and accusing everyone not indoctrinated in the same jargon will never see that statement for what it is.

[populistindependent]

And I wish my idea had been stolen sooner. I wish all my ideas would get stolen. Songs, lyrics, screenplays, strategies, political campaigns, social engineerings, inventions -- I wish they'd all be stolen.

Copyleft

The concept of "copyleft" is that people are free to use your work, providing that they do not commercialize the work.

"Information is not just a privelege, but a basic human right, and our rights to education are threatened by the rise of so-called 'Digital Rights Management' laws. What is at stake is whether we wish to have not only our software and creative artwork, but also our hobbies, our culture and the music that we listen to controlled by multinational corporations and force fed to us in sanitised, pre-packaged and politically acceptable forms, becoming as it were a method of propaganda akin to the control in which Communist governments of the Cold War era asserted over the thinking of their populations. Is it possible for us to preserve our rights to freedom of information, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech through a licensing system that better provides for learning, understanding and progress in invention? Copyleft asserts that this is possible through the use of free licenses such as the GPL."

Copyleft: Creativity, Technology and Freedom

Free Music Philosophy

What is the Free Music Philosophy (FMP)?

It is an anarchistic grass-roots, but high-tech, system of spreading music: the idea that creating, copying, and distributing music must be as unrestricted as breathing air, plucking a blade of grass, or basking in the rays of the sun.

What does it mean to use the term "Free Music"?

The idea is similar to the notion of Free Software [1], and like with Free Software, the word "free" refers to freedom, not price. Specifically, Free Music means that any individual has the freedom of copying, distributing, and modifying music for personal, noncommercial purposes. Free Music does not mean that musicians cannot charge for records, tapes, CDs, or DATs.

The above definition of Free implies that any tangible object cannot be made free. However, something that can be copied arbitrarily many times, like music, should be set free. When I say music, I mean the expression of ideas (in the form of a musical composition or a sound recording) on some medium, and not the medium itself. Thus you have the freedom to make a copy of a CD I've created, the freedom to download soundfiles of songs I've created from my server on the Internet, the freedom to cover or improve upon a song I've written, but you are not necessarily entitled to free CDs.

Why must we Free Music?

Music is a creative process. Today, when a musician publishes music, i.e., exposes it to the outside world, only a privileged set of individuals are able to use the music as they please. However, the artist has drawn from the creativity of many other musicians and there is an existential responsibility placed upon them to give this back unconditionally, so creativity is fostered among people. As a dissenting opinion in the Vanna White vs. Samsung case [2], Judge Kozinski writes:

All creators draw in part on the work of those who came before, referring to it, building on it, poking fun at it; we call this creativity, not piracy.

The Free Music Philosophy

Free Software, Free Society

Why Software Should Not Have Owners
by Richard Stallman

What does society need? It needs information that is truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what software owners typically deliver is a black box that we can't study or change.

Society also needs freedom. When a program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part of their own lives.

And above all society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary cooperation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is “piracy”, they pollute our society's civic spirit.

This is why we say that free software is a matter of freedom, not price.

Free Software, Free Society

Creative Commons

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”

Creative Commons

Open Source Initiative

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community.

Open Source Initiative

Open Source

Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration.

The open source model of operation can be extended to open source culture in decision making, which allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial companies. Open source culture is one where collective decisions or fixations are shared during development and made generally available to all, as done in Wikipedia. This collective approach moderates ethical concerns over a "conflict of roles" or conflict of interest. Participants in such a culture are able to modify the collective outcomes and share them with the community. Some consider open source as one of various possible design approaches, while others consider it a critical strategic element of their operations.

Open Source at Wikipedia

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

GNU General Public License

[populistindependent]

No one here as been promoting "Marxism" that I have seen, nor do I think anyone here "is" a Marxist.

Making charges and then implying that silence in reponse is tantamount to guilt, especially when it comes to labeling people on the political left, or insinuating that they have a hidden agenda, has a long and sordid history in this country. It has been an effective way for silencing and impoverishing thousands of artists and writers and critics of the government. It also played a key role in white-washing the history of Nazi Germany in the public American mind. It was used as the main pretext for the building of the military industrial complex, and has driven much of this country's murederous foreign policy for decades.

It is not a charge that I think anyone should be required to defend themselves from, and it is too serious to be grist for the usual tit for tat Internet arguments of personal attacks and talking points.

Nor should it be ignored, so I am making this general open post stating my position.

"I am not now, and never have been, a member of the Communist Party, Senator."

[jingofever]

"I am not now, and never have been, a member of the Communist Party, Senator."

I was. But membership was free. And they gave you a neat little red card. You would have done the same! All of you! All of you!

[theeKultleeder]

Ha ha! Okay.

You may notice that you make arguments about where ideas are coming from, rather than just dealing with the ideas.

It's like a sort of weasely ad hominem, but I'll just ignore it from now on.

[vigilant]

slimmouse wrote:


Quantum physics meanwhile, is explaining how fucking clever those who brought us the "organised religion deal" are.

When you know who's ancestors brought you the "good book", you start to understand this, because, judging by many of the speeches of Jesus and his disciples, they apparently fully understood modern day Quantum physics !


I agree Slimmouse and I have spent many fascinated hours trying to understand and untangle the mystery of just exactly how they could have known as much as they apparently did about matter, physics, and apparently human DNA.....

[theeKultleeder]

populistindependent,

Updated to maybe get a little more than name-calling from you and a materialist diatribe about "power imbalances" (Marxism, by the way. Didn't you think some people would notice?)

The unusual phenomenon of people pursuing highly individualistic spiritual beliefs combined with a vague sense of an amorphous one-ness or mass unity is distinctly symptomatic of a population that is ripe for the worse sort of tyranny.

"Highly individualistic spiritual beliefs" are what? Please reword and elaborate.

Unorthodox and fresh perspectives are exchanged by individuals (you know, different people) freed from the tyranny of enforcers of belief and correct thought. Interminglings of old truths in the human experience and new articulations of human problems can lead individuals to self-realization and clarity of thought.

Where has "amorphous... mass unity" occurred before? How is it occurring, now. How is it "symptomatic" of a population "ripe" for tyranny?

Do you mean, like Nationalism? How can a trend that values a wide range of different viewpoints that challenge both each other and the prevailing mindset lead to that?

Feelings and intuitions, longings and yearnings, are seen as shared and universal, while principles, ideals, moral standards and objective reality are not. This makes for atomized, alienated and vulnerable individuals who are then easily coalesced and steered as a mob by emotional appeals.

Yeah, like the current trend of political Christianity in this country, where a loaded jargon steers the passions of whole mega-congregations.

Principles - are what? Principles of what?

Ideals - Nazis had ideals.

Moral standards - do you mean like recycling or boldly standing up against the "opiate of the masses"? Just what is it you are trying to say here?

As far as I know, the only serious "spiritual" thinkers who reject moral standards are satanists.

I know for a dead fact that what you say here is not coming from an authentic place.

Re-worded: your words are so dense and loaded with presumptions, I have the notion that you are not responding to what is being said, but regurgitating something you have read somewhere.

In other words, you are brainwashed, opaque, and not honest. (Not on purpose... I'm not accusing you of anything.)

I am saying here you are letting a doctrine speak for you, and you don't even know it.



Anything else you care to reply to?


I already noticed you ignore the portions that you don't have a smart answer for.

Thanks,
tKl

[populistindependent]

Updated to maybe get a little more than name-calling from you and a materialist diatribe about "power imbalances" (Marxism, by the way. Didn't you think some people would notice?)

I haven't called you any names. I am not hiding anything - although of course, that is impossible for anyone to prove.

I am not familiar enough with Marx to be regurgitating any doctrine. I have never been to a Marxist reading club and didn't know they existed.

Anything else you care to reply to?

You are continuing to make sly insinuations about my agenda. There is no way for a person to defend themselves from that, nor to ignore it.

I already noticed you ignore the portions that you don't have a smart answer for.

I don't respond when I don't know what you are talking about, or when you are trying to bait me into an admission that I am what you have accused me of being.