What's the theory that says trauma induces enlightenment?

[FourthBase]

Cordelia nails it.

I would add that that was always a conundrum with Vigilant Citizen's takes. If a satanic mind control survivor ever tries to be a hero and expose what the occult elite did to him or her, would Vigilant Citizen be able to tell the difference between that and an attempt to normalize? Probably not. Vigilant Citizen can be pretty shallow and narrow and literalminded and anti-lateralminded. But his territory is still rich with extremely problematic cultural phenomena, and mostly ignored here now.

Anyway, that's why I would never begrudge an artist like Djurdjevic herself the right to express the horrors she's experienced through transgressive art, as a kind of therapy or activism. What I would begrudge is the interest in such art from, say, a daycare center, or from a prominent political figure socially linked to a pedophile ring, or from cynical music producers and video directors looking to titillate and captivate tweens.

[liminalOyster]

"What's the theory that says trauma induces enlightenment"

Protestantism?

[Iamwhomiam]

Just wondering if any of you who are appalled by Elish's music and messaging have considered the fact that she is raising more awareness within the public about such horrible, evil behaviors than any of you have, or ever will?

Unless I'm misunderstanding, one way to interpret this reasoning is that those who commit heinous crimes (for example) are also "raising more awareness within the public about such horrible, evil behaviors than any of you have, or ever will?"

In any case (from my experience), I don't think many of her public--a listening & watching audience of vulnerable children and adolescents-- have the maturity, brain development, and life-experiences to discern and not act out or embrace some of these behaviors.

False equivalency, Cordelia. Their abuse takes place secretly, not publicly. We only learn of the arrests of pedophiles from the lower economic class after their victim's abuse somehow becomes known to the authorities, and we never or rarely learn of the the arrest of wealthy pedophiles and we certainly never learn of an network of organized abusers have been arrested for their obscene behaviors.

I certainly understand the concern with influencing our youth negatively. Lynne has taught me more about organized abusers than I knew before coming here, so I believe they are real and not imagined, and that they are indeed evil.

Cordelia, I had not known that you were abused; I am deeply sorry you if you were, as so many women and girls have been.

[Jerky]

Wait... so now Rig Int has also evolved into one of those "watch out for the subversive evil of Harry Potter" kind of places, as well?

As for the presented Billy Eilish videos and music, based on the descriptions by Vigilant Citizen and 4th Base, I was expecting something truly disturbing, if not disgusting. Instead, I found both the music and the videos to be not too shabby! I also doubt that any but the most mature of "tweens" are going to be drawn to this type of music or presentation.

4th Base, there is literally nothing to Pizzagate, and "elite" pedophiles are neither more prevalent nor are they more intrinsically evil than are those grubby, everyday working class pedophiles, who are far, FAR more numerous.

You claim people who poo-poo Pizzagate refuse to acknowledge that there might be some legitimate evidence to be found among the politicized psy-op dross.

I, on the other hand, claim that you and others like you only believe that there might be some legitimate evidence to be found among the politicized psy-op dross in the first place is because, for some strange reason, you desperately WANT TO BELIEVE.

I am reminded of a book I read a while back about the "evil" 1960's, about how that era was poisoned because it was infested with the presence of witches and warlocks and malevolent drug smoking anti-authority LSD-tripping Mansonoid hippies.

Meanwhile, at the same time, halfway around the world, those self-same "authorities" that the authors were defending against the "evil" lefty New Agers? They were committing a literal Holocaust against the peoples of Southeast Asia, incinerating and poisoning to death THREE FUCKING MILLION (mostly) INNOCENTS, for absolutely NO valid reason whatsoever.

Remind me... who were the evil ones again?

See, everybody, it's okay that occult elites normalize satanic mind control for a "mature" tween audience because the aesthetics are cool and war is bad. How enlightened!

And there's no reason to worry about elite pedophiles, because they're outnumbered by ordinary pedophiles, and there's nothing particularly evil about them. Well, that's a relief.

Literally nothing to Pizzagate, yep, except a president consorting with a billionaire pedophile pimp, and the cannibalism fetishes and paintings of murdered and abused children in that president's inner circle, and that president's daughter vacationing with the billionaire pedophile pimp's partner in crime, and a restaurant that hosts fundraisers for that president's wife which caters to children one minute and the next minute makes murder and pedophilia jokes on social media and hosts "punk" shows with themes of murder, cannibalism, and pedophilia. Literally.

You should've been banned three years ago, creep.

They would have LOVED you at Salem, buddy.

J

[FourthBase]

They would have LOVED you at Salem, buddy.

Why, were the Governor of Massachusetts and his family caught cavorting with an infamous pedophile ring? And were any of his close colleagues big fans of staring at dead children and thinking about cannibalism? And was there an old-fashioned pub connected to him which invited children to play inside where the owner and the patrons and a demonic fiddle band joked about raping children and killing people and eating them?

[FourthBase]

Let me say it again for emphasis:

IF PIZZAGATE INVOLVED REPUBLICANS, YOU'D BELIEVE IT.

[Jerky]

Seeing as the marrying age for girls in pre-Revolutionary America often skirted awfully close to the single digits, I doubt they would have found anything to be shocked about re: Epstein's sexual preferences. You claim to be some kind of advocates for the innocence of tweens? Better go find yourself a time machine and go mete justice on... well... everyone born before 1930, basically.

As for staring at dead children and thinking about cannibalism... they were Christians, so yeah, they most definitely would NOT be strangers to that kind of iconography. They also probably had a great many bibles on hand, filled to the brim with rape and bloodshed and the dashing of babes against rocks and all that good Christian stuff.

Seeing as there's no such thing as a demonic fiddle band (or a demonic ANYTHING... as demons don't exist), I don't know what you could be implying here. However, as a connoisseur of Celt, Frankish and Germanic folk traditions... I can tell you that there was plenty of gruesome darkness to be found in the tales and songs of those good people of the far distant past. And I'm sure there were at least a few copies of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel kicking around in some of the more "intellectual" milieus. It was, after all, a best-seller of sorts.

Kind of makes you wonder where they got the idea to murder 25 innocent people in gruesome fashion over sweet fuck all, if they weren't being influenced by the Satanic likes of Harry Potter and Billy Eilish? Heck, kind of makes you wonder whether maybe the world is a BETTER PLACE with Harry Potter stories in it, and Billy Eilish - an adult woman and artist - able to express herself as she sees fit, allowing the market to decide whether her products are worthy of their dollars, rather than some self-appointed, torch-weilding, trumped-up Cotton Mather types?

J.

[Jerky]

No FourthBase, all other things being equal, I most definitely would NOT believe it.

For instance, in the UK and Europe, the whole Elite Pedo Cannibal Satanist thing mostly involves pretty right-wing figures and organizations (oh, and of course, DA JOOOZ), but you don't see me going around touting that shit. Because with a very few exceptions, the claims are obviously bogus.

J.

Let me say it again for emphasis:

IF PIZZAGATE INVOLVED REPUBLICANS, YOU'D BELIEVE IT.

[FourthBase]

I already wrote upthread about the irony of puritan monotheism being just about as saturated with witchy, incestuous, cannibalistic, evil elements. Humans forever artistically frightening themselves with taboo horror for fun is not the alibi you want it to be. Evil has actually existed, for eons, all over the world. Evil rituals, like human sacrifice, like war, like organized pedophilia. 19th century England had networks of evil gentlemanly creeps who fetishized defloration and abuse. And read plenty of literature about it, too, I imagine. There were actual ancient Greeks who ritualistically murdered their own children for good luck. There were actual Greek elitists who wrote plays about themselves pontificating about the pleasures of ritualistically seducing boys. Plenty of ordinary Greeks at the time, like the parents in The Clouds, thought that was fucking far from normal. Who knows what Mysteries went on in the woods. Their fucking gods were evil. Their minds were warped by what their culture venerated. Same for military propaganda. You don't doubt that pop culture which glorifies the rituals of war normalizes the evil and brainwashes kids into being bootlickers. Later, too busy.

[Jerky]

This is actually more interesting and fertile grounds for discussion and research, Fourth. Thanks for not making it personal this time.

J.

I already wrote upthread about the irony of puritan monotheism being just about as saturated with witchy, incestuous, cannibalistic, evil elements. Humans forever artistically frightening themselves with taboo horror for fun is not the alibi you want it to be. Evil has actually existed, for eons, all over the world. Evil rituals, like human sacrifice, like war, like organized pedophilia. 19th century England had networks of evil gentlemanly creeps who fetishized defloration and abuse. And read plenty of literature about it, too, I imagine. There were actual ancient Greeks who ritualistically murdered their own children for good luck. There were actual Greek elitists who wrote plays about themselves pontificating about the pleasures of ritualistically seducing boys. Plenty of ordinary Greeks at the time, like the parents in The Clouds, thought that was fucking far from normal. Who knows what Mysteries went on in the woods. Their fucking gods were evil. Their minds were warped by what their culture venerated. Same for military propaganda. You don't doubt that pop culture which glorifies the rituals of war normalizes the evil and brainwashes kids into being bootlickers. Later, too busy.

[FourthBase]

This is actually more interesting and fertile grounds for discussion and research, Fourth. Thanks for not making it personal this time.

J.

I already wrote upthread about the irony of puritan monotheism being just about as saturated with witchy, incestuous, cannibalistic, evil elements. Humans forever artistically frightening themselves with taboo horror for fun is not the alibi you want it to be. Evil has actually existed, for eons, all over the world. Evil rituals, like human sacrifice, like war, like organized pedophilia. 19th century England had networks of evil gentlemanly creeps who fetishized defloration and abuse. And read plenty of literature about it, too, I imagine. There were actual ancient Greeks who ritualistically murdered their own children for good luck. There were actual Greek elitists who wrote plays about themselves pontificating about the pleasures of ritualistically seducing boys. Plenty of ordinary Greeks at the time, like the parents in The Clouds, thought that was fucking far from normal. Who knows what Mysteries went on in the woods. Their fucking gods were evil. Their minds were warped by what their culture venerated. Same for military propaganda. You don't doubt that pop culture which glorifies the rituals of war normalizes the evil and brainwashes kids into being bootlickers. Later, too busy.

Look, it's still personal. I think you are a creep. But it's good for you to realize that the person at the other end of the computer screen realizes most of the same shit you do. My obsession, if you will, about evil progressives is not coming from the usual place of political antagonism, or a hostile puritanical denial of life's weirdest truths. Fuck that kitsch. It's coming from an entirely different political antagonism, the kind that abhors ideological loyalty of any kind. I don't just despise leftist groupthink, I despise it all. Groupthink which is itself a vessel of hostile denial of some the world's weirdest truths. Irony abounds.

I was rambling above. Let's focus on one thing, and a few individuals. How about the cannibalism aspect, since it bysteps much of the justifiable and unjustifiable defensiveness about a revived reactionary backlash against cultural freedom.

Where do we begin? With the Titans? For our culture maybe, but the Greeks are relatively recent. It starts with prehistoric tribes eating each other. Not just the stereotypical South American and Caribbean amd African natives, but more gruesomely the direct ancestors of many Europeans. The homo sapiens who ate Neanderthals into extinction. They were darkskinned back then, but they are the very same ghouls who wound up spawning all white people ever. A continent of fucking cannibals. (Literally lots of fucking happened, too, amidst all the horror, hence the Neanderthal remnant in all European DNA.) Those cannibal ancestors must have had a seriously fucking warped value system. Probably way more deranged than the value system immortalized in the Bible. Possibly worse than ancient Greek theology,, but that's hard to imagine. Now, everyone here has taken an anthropology class, right? Culture generates and perpetuates belief and behavior in humans. Belief and behavior are closely connected. For fuck's sake, intellectuals on the left think that merely choosing different words to describe something determines how we think and act. And yet this nearly-deterministic power of culture to shape our thoughts and actions strangely evaporates into an atmospheric mist when it crosses into the realm of Stuff That Cosmopolitan Progressives Like. "It's just art!", lol. Good lord, when the fuck has art ever been "just art" to critics of Western propaganda?

So, the hobby of "symbolic" cannibalism. Not all progressives like it, not many, only some, perhaps very few. But there are definitely some. And we know who a few are. John Podesta picked a vacation home because it's 50 feet from where the Donners ate each other. That's real, look it up. Okay, so that's weird. People can be weird, though. I get it. But then he also liked an oil painting of two men cannibalizing a dead man, so much that he hung it up in the middle of Hillary's headquarters. He gave a morbid aphorism to a journalist -- this is an interest he is proud enough of to publicize in national media -- about how it's better to be a cannibal than the cannibalized. Okay, so now it's not just some one-off quirky fascination with a historic tragedy. It's now a persistent fucking cannibalism fetish. You literary types would call it a motif or some shit. It's a pattern. Simple. What does it tell us about him? But wait, John doesn't own that painting, he actually borrowed it from his brother Tony, who owns all the other art with the murdered children and an abused infant and the naked teenagers and the decapitated corpse. Weird, that's two people now. Very, very powerful people. Powerful enough to probably feel like they could get away with it if they wanted. And these two brothers happen to be invited to have dinner (and still nobody can say for sure what the fuck "spirit cooking" would signify meal-wise) with a world-famous contemporary artist (nothing creepy about that milieu, like, uh, Koons) who at the very least dabbles with satanic themes and for damn certain also has a persistent cannibalism fetish most famously demonstrated by her simulating cannibalism with life-sized cakes and her hiring disembodied heads as dinner table centerpieces and her simulated corpse-in-a-bathtub-full-of-blood-that-people-simulate-tasting. That's three, count 'em, three prominent individuals with a passion for dwelling on cannibalism. They know each other, they socialize. They have a massive amount of clout in their fields of culture and politics. IF THEY WERE REPUBLICANS, YOU WOULD ASSUME THE WORST. (Talking to the board in general.) And not without good reason. You should assume the worst. When people try to tell you who they are, believe them.

And then there's the cannibalism on Sabrina. Look, it's one thing to be morbidly fascinated with all the most evil, disgusting shit humans have ever done to each other. That's completely understandable. Evil is inherently interesting. It's one thing to scare the shit out of kids with stories about witches who are going to eat them. But the witches on Sabrina aren't merely making cannibalism look scary, the show is making it look cool. THAT is not supposed to happen. That's not part of the bargain of ordinary curiosity about evil. That's promoting evil. Have you ever noticed that most of the vampires in pop culture now are cool? Horrific, but cool. That's what the squares are right about. This shit ain't supposed to be cool.

Gotta sleep, busy all weekend too, later.

[FourthBase]

when the fuck has art ever been "just art" to critics of Western propaganda?

Think about that. Progressive intellectuals obsessively dissect pop culture for the subtlest signals of any unenlightened bias that might influence the minds of adults, but they think it's perfectly harmless for teens to watch a show where satanic cannibalism is cool? If a transgender character on Sabrina were casually deadnamed, there'd be a Twitter mob. If black witches on the show were portrayed as stereotypically sassy and hypersexualized, there'd be a dozen thinkpieces. There'd be social justice hell to pay if the show positively depicted an anti-abortion argument. But it's not problematic to glamorize witches murdering and eating people. Why?

[FourthBase]

Let's switch things up and see how we feel.

A portrait in Time Magazine about Dick Cheney:

On the wall in his office at George W. Bush's Arlington headquarters, Dick Cheney has an oil painting on loan from his wife's art collection. The image shows two men hunched over a dining room table, bearing knives and forks. On the table lays a man in a suit, who looks vaguely like Cheney. “It’s better to be the guy with the fork,” Cheney quips to his colleagues, if they ask about the image, “than the guy on the table.”

Where do DC's A-listers go for vacation?

Dick Cheney: “I am going to my condo in Truckee [Calif.], like I do every year — will sit on my porch and do conference calls 50 feet from where the Donner Party ate each other.”

https://time.com/4308369/hillary-clinton-john-podesta/

https://www.politico.com/story/2009/06/ ... ion-023151

Do you then wonder why the hypothetical Dick Cheney is so into cannibalism? Maybe it's just an edgy metaphor that appeals to his Machiavellian nature, though. But now what if he and his wife also have a standing invitation to dinner at the home of a famous artist who's into the occult and who's famous for artwork that simulates cannibalism and who names the dinner after an old performance piece in which she simulates throwing a bucket of blood on a small child.

Picture that dinner. This big fan of cannibalism Dick Cheney and his wife who collects paintings and photos of murdered and abused and naked kids, sitting across from a world-famous artist who's also a big fan of cannibalism, at a dinner with a name that evokes cannibalism. Jeff Wells would have devoted a whole series of blogs to that.

Now imagine a middling Republican restaurant owner who for some reason makes a major magazine's Top 50 Most Powerful People in DC list, who hosts official fundraisers for Bush, and who hosts birthday parties for Lynne Cheney. His restaurant serves wholesome American food and invites neighborhood children to play arcade games in the back most of the day, but then at night it hosts all-ages live Norwegian black metal about murder, raping kids, and occult mind control. Also, that same Republican-run restaurant publishes a newsletter that shows a photo of a little girl with her arms taped to a table captioned with a joke about rape, a photo of a man holding a baby like a girlfriend with Mardi Gras beads wrapping their heads together also captioned with a joke about rape, and photos of mysterious basement construction captioned with jokes about burying murdered people. There'd be a megathread here where people debate how best to legally disrupt that restaurant's operations in person. I know, because I would have started that thread.

[FourthBase]

Are you able to picture that alternate reality vividly enough with the above post, or do I need to conjure up a whole blog entry about this hypothetical world that imitates Jeff circa 2006 complete with a Dylan quote and spooky photoshop collage?

[Elvis]

do I need to conjure up a whole blog entry about this hypothetical world that imitates Jeff circa 2006 complete with a Dylan quote and spooky photoshop collage?

That would be awesome. Even better, how about find one victim, one survivor, one witness to the Podesta pedo-cannibal ring? I'd pitch in $20 to pay a detective to follow him. I know a guy. I think we're at that stage, you know, because while certainly people have looked for victims or witnesses, so far they've come up with none.

I can easily imagine the worst about Podesta, but all I know for sure is that he and his brother are weird creepy corporate lobbyists and that John is a ruthless and incompetent campagn manager. Center for American Progress? They left the "R" out of CAP.

Is Hillary in on it?