Questioning Consciousness

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Tue Feb 20, 2018 8:31 am


AdamKokesh
Published on Jan 27, 2015
How does modern propaganda work? How effective is it? Adam blows these issues wide open with an incredible series of man on the street interviews. For the record, this was not a selective group, or even in a particularly conservative or pro-military area. The people you see in this video were the first seven people on the 3rd St Promenade in Santa Monica, California who answered yes to, "Did you see American Sniper? Do you think Chris Kyle is a hero? Would you like to do a quick interview for my YouTube channel?" I was simply seeking a good age and gender variety.



http://www.newnationalist.net/2018/02/1 ... ropaganda/
Gregory Bateson: The Master of Double-Bind Black Propaganda
February 14, 2018 Russ Winter
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was a heavy hitter in social theories and propaganda. He was also the husband of Margaret Mead. In 1942, while working in black propaganda, he wrote about the war:

… is now a life-or-death struggle over the role which the social sciences shall play in the ordering of human relationships. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this war is ideologically about just this – the role of the social sciences. Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate peoples as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented and power hungry individuals to whom the instrumentality of science makes a natural appeal? Now that we have techniques, are we in cold blood, going to treat people as things? (Bateson 1942, as quoted in Price)


After the war, Bateson answered his own “rhetorical” question. In a CIA website article titled “The Birth of Central Intelligence,” Bateson is quoted as follows:

… the bomb would shift the balance of warlike and peaceful methods of international pressure. It would be powerless, he said, against subversive practices, guerrilla tactics, social and economic manipulation, diplomatic forces, and propaganda either black or white. The nations would therefore resort to those indirect methods of warfare. The importance of the kind of work the Foreign Economic Administration, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Strategic Services had been doing would thus be infinitely greater than it had ever been. The country could not rely upon the Army and Navy alone for defense. There should be a third agency to combine the functions and employ the weapons of clandestine operations, economic controls, and psychological pressures.


(con'd)
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 20, 2018 8:40 am

This is a much more rigorous and historically informed explanation of Adorno's relationship to pop culture:


Against popular culture

For Adorno, popular culture is not just bad art – it enslaves us to repetition and robs us of our aesthetic freedom

Classical music and high European culture were at the heart of Theodor Adorno’s philosophy and outlook on life. He was born in 1903 in Frankfurt in Germany, and grew up with music, both as a listener and a practitioner: his mother, Maria Calvelli-Adorno, was a singer, and the young Adorno was a talented pianist. He attended the Hoch Conservatory, going on to study with the Austrian composer Alban Berg. Adorno chose a career as a professional philosopher taking a position at the University of Frankfurt in 1931, but music and culture remained the focus of his interests.

Adorno insisted on high standards – culture was not merely a matter of technical progress (in composing more beautiful, more complicated music, for example) but also (if indirectly) a matter of morality. Music, like all culture, could either develop or obstruct social progress towards greater freedom. And that progress was under threat. Even in pre-war Vienna, Adorno saw warning signs of a collapse in European culture. He would later write of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which premiered in 1913, that it represented an ‘uproar of culture against its own essence as culture’ which is ‘enjoyed as an enticement precisely in its opposition to civilisation’. The ballet’s ‘flirtation with barbarism’ was not merely musical – it reflected social facts, and indeed showed evidence of a kind of cultural trend towards regression, and of the domination of the individual by the social whole.

These trends towards regression and domination were borne out with the rise of Nazism. Adorno’s father, Oscar Wiesengrund, was Jewish, and Adorno’s licence to teach was revoked by the Nazis in 1933, leading him to spend four years at Oxford studying for a doctorate under the philosopher Gilbert Ryle.

Together with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Adorno emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Los Angeles in 1941. The philosopher who had savaged Stravinsky was now brought face to face with Mickey Mouse. In Minima Moralia (1951), Adorno wrote, despairingly: ‘Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.’

Like many émigrés, Adorno was initially disoriented by US mass culture, which had not yet overrun Europe as it would after the war. This disorientation became a principled distrust. He claimed that capitalist popular culture – jazz, cinema, pop songs, and so on – manipulates us into living lives empty of true freedom, and serves only to distort our desires. Popular culture is not the spontaneous expression of the people, but a profit-driven industry – it robs us of our freedom and bends us to conform to its needs for profit.


https://aeon.co/essays/against-guilty-p ... op-culture
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Fri Feb 23, 2018 3:01 pm

^^

Together with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Adorno emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Los Angeles in 1941. The philosopher who had savaged Stravinsky was now brought face to face with Mickey Mouse. In Minima Moralia (1951), Adorno wrote, despairingly: ‘Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.’

Like many émigrés, Adorno was initially disoriented by US mass culture, which had not yet overrun Europe as it would after the war. This disorientation became a principled distrust. He claimed that capitalist popular culture – jazz, cinema, pop songs, and so on – manipulates us into living lives empty of true freedom, and serves only to distort our desires. Popular culture is not the spontaneous expression of the people, but a profit-driven industry – it robs us of our freedom and bends us to conform to its needs for profit...



Thank for that... then there's this...


I recently read several long articles about Theodor Adorno - each from a different perspective of course. Some paint him the evil genius, programming plots in our music and culture currently curving our collective consciousness to move the masses to a certain... psycho and physiological social perspective; while others proclaim Adorno was warning us that mainstream music may enslave our soul... Wandering around Theodor Adorno's wonderful world... He's a deep, dark, drop-dead, dead-end downer to my id and ego.





http://www.verlaine.pro.br/txt/adorno-on-jazz.pdf


p 17 - jazz and sex and marching

... If one wanted to describe the phenomenon of interference in jazz in terms of broad and solid concepts of style, one could claim it as the combination of salon music and march music. The former represents a individuality which in truth is none at all, but merely the socially produced illusion of it; the latter is an equally fictive community which is formed from nothing other than the alignment (Gleichrichtung) of atoms under the force that is exerted upon them...


... Thus jazz can easily be adapted for use by fascism. .

The history of the social function of jazz, the tendency to disenchant the the dance, has yet to be written, and to be transposed subsequently into its opposite, a new magic. The gait of the bourgeois individual which is no longer connected to magic can be transformed, by the command of rhythm, into a march...


p 21 jazz and the eccentric or clown:

The most precise precursor of this jazz subject took shape on the pre-war variety stage - therefore the question of extent to which the first tap-dances stem from the variety theatre is factually of the utmost importance for a comprehensive theory of jazz. The eccentric may be taken as a model for the jazz subject - one of the oldest and most famous pieces of artistic music which is similar to jazz bears the title General Lavine, Eccentric, with the subtitle, dans le mouvement at le style d'un cake-walk ("following the movement and style of the cakewalk"). The eccentric can first of all be understood as the strict antithesis of the clown. If the clown is the one whose anarchist and archaic immediacy cannot be adapted to the reified bourgeois life, and becomes ridiculous before it - fragmentary, but at the same time allowing it to appear ridiculous - the eccentric certainly is as much excluded from instrumental regulation, from the "rhythm" of bourgeois. He is, like the clown, the crank and outsider and may well verge on the ridiculous. But his exclusion manifests itself immediately - not as powerlessness (Ohnmacht), but rather as superiority, or the appearance of it; laughter greets the the eccentric only to die away in shock, and, with his ridiculous, that of society also elegantly drops out of sight. The rhythm of his arbitrariness is subordinated without a rupture to a greater, more lawful rhythm; and his failure is located not below, but above the standard: to obey the law and yet be different. This type of behavior is taken over, bound up with the gradual abandonment of the traces of playful superiority and liberal difference, by the "hot" subject. Even externally, the jazz practice of the best orchestras always maintains eccentric elements...

p.22

... The decisive intervention of jazz lies in the fact that this subject of weakness takes pleasure precisely in its own weakness, almost as if it should be rewarded for this, for adapting itself into the collective that made it so weak, whose standard its weakness cannot satisfy. In psychological terms, jazz succeeds in squaring the circle. The contingent ego as a member of the bourgeois class is blindly abandoned on principle to social law. By learning to fear social authority and experiencing it as a threat of castration - and immediately as fear of impotence - it identifies itself with precisely this authority of which it is afraid. In exchange, however, it now suddenly belongs to it and can "dance along." The "sex appeal" of jazz is a command: obey, and then you will allowed to take part. And the dream-thought, as contradictory as reality, in which it is dreamt: I will only be potent once I have allowed myself to be castrated...







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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby DrEvil » Fri Feb 23, 2018 4:47 pm

^^I had a look at that Ron Patton article, and he starts off with completely bungling the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It's a collection of funeral rites, not a mind control manual. It doesn't get much better from there. As I said before, there might be some truth in there, but it's mixed with so much nonsense there's no point trying to untangle it.

As a general rule of thumb whale.to is the absolute worst source possible. It's the toxic waste dump of conspiracy theories. Here's just one random graphic from the site:
Image

Or how about this nugget from the Zionism section:
"It is easy to see the Zionists control the world purely through their Gas Chambers Hoax."

The stupid. It burns.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Elvis » Sat Feb 24, 2018 12:19 am

DrEvil wrote: it's usually a sign that they're complete fucking idiots and should be laughed out of the room.


...or not: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40868&p=651784#p651784


But jazz music an evil plot by Jews? Nowhere in my paracosm. Jazz is about beautiful, interesting and evocative melodic and harmonic relationships, and to my mind one of the greatest modes of human expressions. YMMV.

It seems that made-up quotes are often inserted into these narratives; take the bogus attributions away and they unravel pretty quickly. If this "Tavistock" narrative was true, why was black music ("race music") suppressed for so long?
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby DrEvil » Sat Feb 24, 2018 2:48 am

^^Thanks. Interesting read.

I have sometimes toyed with the idea of coming up with my own grand conspiracy, just to see if I can get anyone to believe it, and maybe make a quick buck by cobbling together a half-assed ebook for Amazon, but then I remember that it's incredibly easy to get people to believe complete nonsense if you do it convincingly enough and it's not worth fucking up someone's head for a joke, so I don't. The Flat Earth society started out as a joke, and see where that went.

I don't know what disturbs me more: that the people who come up with this stuff actually believe it themselves, or that they're just making it up for personal gain regardless of the consequences.

Whatever the reason it's definitely helped inform my somewhat dim view of human consciousness. :)
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Elvis » Sat Feb 24, 2018 4:14 am

^^^ Right after the election here, I wanted to start a "Trump has been replaced by an actor!" website, with photos, timelines etc. "proving" the deep state had killed or spirited Trump away and were running the government through an imposter...no small task. I just didn't have the time.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Sat Feb 24, 2018 7:32 pm

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby dada » Sun Feb 25, 2018 12:19 pm

I think we've covered everything. Consciousness has been questioned. Good work! I knew we could do it.

One day I'll be in my space rocking chair, and some kids will ask, "did you ever question consciousness?" And I'll tell them all about how one time me and some friends on the internet totally did.

"So what did you learn?" the kids will ask. I'll say, "It's the way you question consciousness which determines the answers you'll receive." That sounds profound enough to keep them quiet for a while.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Elvis » Sun Feb 25, 2018 4:53 pm

I have a question for consciousness: Who are you and why are you here?
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:04 pm

Elvis » Fri Feb 23, 2018 11:19 pm wrote:But jazz music an evil plot by Jews?


Jeez, racists, can't you just once give evil-plotting black people some credit?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KshrtLXBdl8
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:16 pm

Elvis » Sat Feb 24, 2018 3:14 am wrote:^^^ Right after the election here, I wanted to start a "Trump has been replaced by an actor!" website, with photos, timelines etc. "proving" the deep state had killed or spirited Trump away and were running the government through an imposter...no small task. I just didn't have the time.


Marvel was ahead of you back in 2008. Luckily, Spidey and his spidey-sense were there to sniff out the Chameleon before he stole Obama's oath of office.

Image

Or... did he?!

Image
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To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:31 pm

Huh, wasting time here but in a fun way, an article on the Spider-Man Obama issue also includes this gem from a 1963 comic:

Image

So, JFK knew that Superman was, in fact, Agent Kent? And after performing whatever feat on the president's orders, he's rushing back to the Daily Planet for a deadline, presumably to report as Kent on his own feats as Superman. He's The Bomb, the Space Program, the Charismatic Leader, the presidentially dispatched Covert Operator, and Mr. Mockingbird, all in one!

Apparently this issue hit the stands after the assassination. So maybe... !!! And in a world with the president so closely tied to Superman with his planetary super hearing and super vision and super brain power, how was the killing even possible? Hmm, a science-guy refugee from an exploded European planet, Kal-el. What kind of name is Kal-el? He had to be in on it. amirite?

(Sorry, totally derailing this sucker. Not meant as hostile move.)

.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Elvis » Sun Feb 25, 2018 5:36 pm

I like it, and who knew that JFK knew? wow! Didn't know about that comic.

It's all one big stream of consciousness.

(No, I'm not on mushrooms.)
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Mon Feb 26, 2018 12:40 am

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