Original RI quotes only

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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Dec 07, 2015 8:07 pm

MacCruiskeen » Sat Feb 27, 2010 11:26 pm wrote:One of the big difficulties is that people have been so thoroughly socialised over at least the last 40 years to isolate and atomise themselves in pursuit of a solo career. More and more people's lives allow them less and less time with friends or family, or even workmates they can trust, to say nothing of any broader solidarity. Their only real affective identification is with themselves in some current-or-future (real-or-imaginary) successful form, or with the TV and movie avatars that embody and promote that image of Lone Wolf striving & struggle and eventual, inevitable success.

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We can all be as uniquely brave and handsome as this, if we only make the effort. Or are you scared to pull your gun?

The more that paradigm begins to crumble, as it must (because capitalism is not sustainable), the more frightened and anxious people become, especially if they're no longer young and already have everything invested in that fragile self-image. The investment is not just emotional & psychological, of course, but also very heavily material: college loans, mortgage, car[s], credit cards, and all the other building-blocks of the permanent-debt prison. It therefore becomes all the more likely that this "middle class" will vote for anyone who promises to ease their own personal tax burden. (If they pay less in tax, then their inevitable permanent debt will indeed become marginally less worrying, at least for a while. Hence the triumph of selfishness in the one-voter-at-a-time ballot-box [very like an office cubicle, or an Internet café, or a peepshow], and the triumph of short-termism in election politics.)

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Democracy in action. They'll be staring at a different screen tonight, in the privacy of their own homes.

So, however ludicrous it may be, your average Republican- or Tory-voting taxi driver or call-centre manager still identifies more closely with Clint Eastwood and Warren Buffett than with his only slightly lower-earning colleagues and neighbours. (After all, he might yet get fabulously rich - it's a logical possibility, if not an empirical one.) Anything beyond those maybe-genial but always-competitive personal contacts is an abstract field populated solely by unknown and abstract Winners and Losers, and the entire culture permits only one possible identification. The alternative is too grim to contemplate and therefore to be avoided, exactly like the plague. Clint Eastwood is not a cowardly barkeep; Clint Eastwood is a man who creates his own destiny, all on his own. (What do you mean "fictional"? Get real!)

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Not Clint.

The horrible word "losers" has only gained currency in the last 20 years. No solidarity is possible with "the losers", for they too could have been Warren or Clint had they only had the guts and grit to make that minimal effort. When the going got tough, they could have got on that horse and pulled that gun. The world was their oyster. They are guilty of moral and purely personal failure, or so we're told, incessantly. In essence, that incredibly useful epithet denotes nothing other than what used to be known as the working class and the unemployed, and the culture holds them solely responsible for their own fate -- just as all those "self-made" zillionaires allegedly forged their own heroic destiny entirely through their own honest efforts. (It's all smoke and mirrors, of course: If anyone is a parasite or a moral failure, then Warren Buffett is, and not the millions of impoverished wage-slaves who make his cunning "investments" so obscenely profitable without him ever having to break sweat.)

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Work overtime for nothing, you whingeing pricks.

Joe Bageant said recently that one of the most amazing achievements of the American Right was to have persuaded the average citizen [now: consumer] that everyone is middle class. "Middle-class" means on the make, going places, forging ahead, beholden to no man, on the up and up. Thatcher and Blair performed the same conjuring trick in Britain while the same transfer of wealth to the top 2% was being craftily effected. Meanwhile, unions were smashed, real wages depressed, student grants replaced by student loans, a living wage supplanted by endless ruinous credit, savings made way for permanent debt, and former workers (and strikers) were forced into the isolation of unemployment while their sons and daughters entered the isolation of the office cubicle. At long last, they were "middle class".

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A clean working environment, where no one needs overalls.

Instead of actually being able to make things, people were suddenly expected to take pride in just selling the things now being made for a fraction of the price by the new invisible proletariat in the "rationalized" Dickensian sweatshops of the Phillippines and Haiti, where strikes were also far less likely and much more easily suppressed. The UK and the USA were now "service economies" (sic), like the stately homes of old England. Wise men had decided that.

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Modern and flexible: the 21st-century British working class.

[Insert Here: 5,000 words about the rise of Prozac, the triumph of cable TV, the fragmentization of dissent, the normalization of precarity, the enthronement of the cryptocrats, and the ever-increasing importance of the gazillion-dollar global Terror Industry. Oh yeah, plus the extinction of the biosphere, incidentally.]

- I've just noticed I'm ranting. Worse, I'm ranting to (or at) the converted, and in an electronic vacuum to boot. Well, I don't know how to conclude this rant briefly or elegantly, so I'm just going to wind up with the hopeless invocation, "Smash your TV."

Maybe we should all smash our computers too, while we're at it, if possible by throwing them through the nearest bank window. Sometimes I think the best thing that could happen would be a sudden and total blackout of all electronic communications media, including the phone. Within a month I think you'd see something very like a social revolution.

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First Global Convention of Former Bloggers, Washington D.C., December 21, 2012.


Ah the days of quality writing on RI. Done?
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.

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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby coffin_dodger » Mon Dec 07, 2015 10:54 pm

Ah the days of quality writing on RI. Done?


Do you know what I like about you, Jack? - you're dependable.

We can depend on you ocassionally turning up, to say something thoughtful, precise and beautifully worded.

We can also depend on you ocassionally turning up, to make a snide remark obliquely infering how crap RI is now.

Keep 'em coming, it wouldn't be the same without you.
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Dec 08, 2015 12:56 am

My comment lends itself to less hostile interpretation than yours and should not be a reason for you to derail this thread with a personal attack that doesn't even quote anything.

compared2what? » Sat Sep 19, 2009 11:36 am wrote:.

In fact, if I set out for the corner store tomorrow and ended up being bundled into a van by men in suits with earpieces who illegally renditioned me to some godforsaken rocky Mediterranean island prison complex where they chained me to a rusty ceiling pipe in an icy-cold brightly lit cell while jackbooted mercenaries held a power drill to my head while shouting at me to name a single point on which there was near-unanimous agreement among RI forum members or prepare to die horribly, I might even feel a brief, delusional moment of relief when I remembered that while it's definitely true that one poster's most profoundly held beliefs are almost inevitably the very definition of propagandistic mindfuckery to a number of others, at least we do pretty much all take the general proposition that we're being bombarded with media disinfo from just about every direction 24/7 as a fact that's far too well-established to bother trying to make disputing it on a prima facie basis any part of the vicious bickering that then ensues as usual.
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.

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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby Project Willow » Tue Dec 08, 2015 2:11 am

^ Ha! The queen of the long form sentence. Thanks for posting that. I miss her.
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 08, 2015 5:42 pm

by American Dream » Thu Feb 21, 2008 10:06 am
I am OK with "Holocaust Revisionism" around the Nazi atrocities, to the point that we expand our solidarity, not shrink it. Meaning: The Nazi genocide against European Jews must not be forgotten, but it should be expanded to include all the victims, and most importantly, must include concrete action to end the ongoing atrocities, here and now. Doing this all suggests that we expand our view of History to accept the many, many holocausts which shaped our world. These are crimes against Humanity that have much to teach us. Thus, we can act more effectively on behalf of Human Rights, and Social Justice, here and now.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby chump » Tue Dec 08, 2015 6:19 pm

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Postby Perelandra » Wed Dec 09, 2015 6:27 pm

JackRiddler » Wed Dec 09, 2015 1:57 pm wrote:I am a big fan of resource extraction. As a species we should be looking to extract, maximize and share resources from the sun, the wind, the garbage, the shit, the restored soil, the healthy growing forests, the potentials for efficiencies and reductions in needless forms of consumption, the languages, the inexhaustible riches of music and science and art and cultures and letters, the infinite information and communications spaces, the friendships, the potentials for peace and understanding, the abundance of love-capacity and warmth of our bodies, the awesome cuisines, all the beautiful day with her offers of free, creative, pleasurable hours.
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” - William Faulkner
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby slomo » Mon Dec 14, 2015 7:53 pm

MacCruiskeen » 14 Dec 2015 15:49 wrote:The USA is not merely post-legal, it is post-real.
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby backtoiam » Fri Dec 18, 2015 12:11 am

Joao said:

Goddamn it, now the first one totally looks like plaster to me. Perhaps we're all programs on a microchip. Or perhaps I am, anyway.


thanx for that joao, it made me laugh, giggles are valuable these days, and that was clever
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby Elihu » Sun Dec 20, 2015 6:36 pm

Terror Management Theory is all about how death anxiety gets sublimated/displaced into frantic cultural activities such as war, social reform, art and industry, and how it's probably been there since the dawn of civilization (being what caused it to dawn). So now we are born into an awareness not only of our own individual mortality but that of the species, that everything we do is all leading to dust.

That's a pretty tough awareness to live with because it constantly reminds us of the futility of the very activities we were once able to pursue, to keep at bay the awareness of our mortality. People can no longer pass the buck of meaning to the next generation, when they know they might well be the last.
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Dec 23, 2015 8:00 pm

barracuda » Wed Dec 23, 2015 2:18 pm wrote:The Force Awakens made Terminator Genysis look like Gone Girl, that is to say, a marginally good film. That it has the power to make other shitty films look almost decent by comparison is, I find, the best thing I can say about the film, a film that served no purpose at all except to set in motion the backstories for a seemingly infinite number of follow up Star Warts movies, recursing forward through what now appears to be the shittiest possible real-world timeline ever.

Just think: billions of people will be continue to be horribly exposed to this pastiche of pre-sanctified suckage, these pathetic and predictable action figure characters "we've all come to know and love" (oh, good fuck), and x-treme puerile plastic toy marketing, from now til the foreseeable future. Predictive analytics have determined that this movie and its sequels will generate so much non-biodegradable detritus they'll hold responsibility for a significant portion of the Pacific Trash Gyre. It's a harbinger of the blandest white bread dystopia imaginable, an exemplar of just how boring fascism can really be. It succeeds only as a horror film, and as that only outside of the theaters, where it smears it's disgusting goo everywhere, from children's schools, to page-view media glob-erates, even to the produce aisle of the corner grocery store, and down your very gullet. You and I and our descendants will eat Stars Wars force-stuffing and it will sit like a lump of cold, sad, burrito in the collective hive-jejunum for eons, festering and rotting and impossible to push out, no matter the straining.

I cringed so crushingly in embarrassment during this "movie" I feel certain I have generated new facial wrinkles as a result. I developed a squint from it and now have to consciously hold my face so I don't look like Clint Eastwood smelling the ass of an illegal mexican migrant farm worker, an ass which eerily resembles Yoda. Early on I found myself actively hoping for a Gungan character. I figured it would raise the overall quality of the dialog to hear a few "meesa's" and "mooey-mooey's". After that help didn't arrive, I watched act two pretending it was the pitch-premise for the worst Indiana Jones film ever lost in development. And I hate Indiana Jones more than the video oeuvre of the Islamic Caliphate.

The ending could have been improved just a touch by Luke receiving a light saber enema. It's sort of a cliffhanger, by the way, but really, more of a doorknob-hanger, like the way you kill yourself when you can't summon up the ambition or commitment to loop the rope higher than your sternum. It has all the elements of autoerotic asphyxiation, except it's not interesting, or erotic, and there's no tingle of anticipation as you tighten the noose.

I also wish Leia had died horribly, maybe smothered to dead by a rutting Hutt swarm inside one of their slimy underground breed pools. She sounded as if she was trying to swallow her tongue in every scene. Sadly, she didn't succeed.

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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Dec 23, 2015 8:18 pm

MacC beats me to it.
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: Original RI quotes only

Postby backtoiam » Sun Dec 27, 2015 8:08 pm

Dr. Evil wrote:

Obituaries: Congress quietly passed
"A mind stretched by a new idea can never return to it's original dimensions." Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby slimmouse » Fri Jan 01, 2016 9:18 pm

JackRiddler » 01 Jan 2016 22:45 wrote:
And Graham Hancock? As a key to understanding the world? The problem with trying to discuss anything on this board is that a lot of people pop up who lack intellectual self-respect.


Indeed they do jack
Ha ha ha :thumbsup
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Re: Original RI quotes only

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 16, 2016 10:45 am

norton ash » Fri Jan 15, 2016 12:45 pm wrote:
seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 15, 2016 12:40 pm wrote:féin- trua

that's Ireland's greatest export or so I'm told


And Irish women are the usual shipping container. :lol:
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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