'Gremlins' - WWIIDisney/Vietnam/Plum decoy by Spielberg

[monster]

I just lost a very detailed reply

[OT]The Jetpack addon for Firefox, in my sig, can prevent that.[/OT]

[Nordic]

i was already of the opinion that the technology required to edit a lens flare into the appearance of a "bell" didn't exist in 1981..

No opinion, it's a fact.

[IanEye]

According to Paul Minor, one way George Lucas got ready for Star Wars was applying his new Lucasfilm technology to airbrush a big lump of cocaine out of Neil Young's nose in Martin Scorsese's 1975 film The Last Waltz. We all have to start somewhere.

[OP ED]

I just lost a very detailed reply

[OT]The Jetpack addon for Firefox, in my sig, can prevent that.[/OT]

[yeah but it totally screwed up everything else i use firefox for]

[orz]

56k dial up. It was funny, but please knock it off.

DIAL UP!? Crazy talk. I can definitely respect that, will do.

[Nordic]

According to Paul Minor, one way George Lucas got ready for Star Wars was applying his new Lucasfilm technology to airbrush a big lump of cocaine out of Neil Young's nose in Martin Scorsese's 1975 film The Last Waltz. We all have to start somewhere.

Impossible. Nice story, but no freaking way.

[nathan28]

According to Paul Minor, one way George Lucas got ready for Star Wars was applying his new Lucasfilm technology to airbrush a big lump of cocaine out of Neil Young's nose in Martin Scorsese's 1975 film The Last Waltz. We all have to start somewhere.

Impossible. Nice story, but no freaking way.

Yes way, have you seen it?

[IanEye]

Impossible. Nice story, but no freaking way.

fair enough, looking for a more direct source. really, i remember this as a more accepted fact back in the early 90's. and it was no bad reflection on neil, any number of people were equally high that night, is how i recall the interview....

[barracuda]

This is like the mellowing, cool-down part of the thread. I'm now breathing in through the nose and out though the mouth, in, out, in, out...

Thank you orz. I feel better.

[streeb]

This is like the mellowing, cool-down part of the thread.

Only until Hugh gets back from his latest six hour fundraiser

Impossible. Nice story, but no freaking way.

I've always wanted to believe that story -- Nordic, do you mean it's impossible that the rock was removed at all, or impossible that Lucas had something to do with it?

[compared2what?]

The tool being exploited is parafoveal priming.

I'm sorry, but I just have to say again that there is no form of priming that renders people neurologically incapable of thinking for themselves. It isn't even thoroughly established as a stable and effective "tool" for influencing affective perception. And that's in a clinical setting, where the subjects aren't being bombarded with 1,001 uncontrolled highly variable stimuli in the interval between their exposure to the prime and their exposure to the target.

Because it's just so not possible for sinister forces to turn people into zombies by placing subliminally perceived words and symbols in movies or on magazine covers that the thought of letting the erroneous suggestion that it is stand uncorrected just blows my mind like 8bit. It's just baffling to me why anyone who opposes fascism would even want to insist that the masses who consume the offerings of the mass-media can be or have been transformed into a quasi-untermenschen class of witless automatons by the fiendishly superior skills of the secret team.

I mean, it's not just that there's no scientific or rational basis for asserting that it can. In itself, that wouldn't make a KWH-based worldview any worse than foolish. What makes it objectionable, at least to me, is that encouraging others to believe that it can doesn't exactly inspire a sense of solidarity with their fellow man. Nor does it provide them with much of an incentive for bestirring themselves to preserve the valuable human freedoms of a population the critical thinking skills of which you've taught them to hold in such low esteemed that they're presumed to have been unable to prevent themselves from having already lost their power of self-determination at the movies.

People are more than the sum of their priming. Much more. And any argument that's based on a largely unsupported foundational claim that you can turn them into passive, easily controlled and easily contented programmable devices just feels like a denigration of the human spirit to me, ultimately. Even when the entire purpose of the exercise is to decry the Powers That Hypothetically Highjack Keywords. Especially given that they're the same Powers that demonstrably (if inexplicably, from a KWH-believing perspective) actually do systematically and wittingly break the will and spirit of large numbers of helpless and innocent people by locking them up in a remote hellhole in Cuba and torturing them.

Because you could not only just as easily decry them for that, you'd have a much better, more sympathetic, more persuasive, and more inherently human-rights-respecting case if you did.

Am I the only one who sees any of that as problematic? I'm not saying Hugh intends to devalue humanity, I should emphasize. I have no reason to believe that he does and don't in fact believe it. But that doesn't mean that it's not being devalued. It just means that in this case it's not being devalued by a sinister force.

[brainpanhandler]

renders people neurologically incapable of thinking for themselves.

turn people into zombies by placing subliminally perceived words and symbols in movies or on magazine covers

the masses who consume the offerings of the mass-media can be or have been transformed into a quasi-untermenschen class of witless automatons

Never been asserted to my knowledge.

People are more than the sum of their priming.

Children are a particular kind of people.

Am I the only one who sees any of that as problematic?

No, but you need to restate your case.

I'm not saying Hugh intends to devalue humanity, I should emphasize. I have no reason to believe that he does and don't in fact believe it. But that doesn't mean that it's not being devalued. It just means that in this case it's not being devalued by a sinister force.

Clearer please. If not a sinister force then what?

[Telexx]

I'm not saying Hugh intends to devalue humanity, I should emphasize. I have no reason to believe that he does and don't in fact believe it. But that doesn't mean that it's not being devalued. It just means that in this case it's not being devalued by a sinister force.

Clearer please. If not a sinister force then what?

"Progress".

Thx,

Telexx

[psynapz]

I just lost a very detailed reply

[OT]The Jetpack addon for Firefox, in my sig, can prevent that.[/OT]

OR... (to stray further OT, sorry Hugh)

How about, just before you hit "Preview" or "Submit", you get in the habit of simply holding down your Ctrl key (or Cmd/Apple key on a Mac) and hitting A, then C.

Ctrl-A selects all (assuming the insertion point caret is still blinking away somewhere in the textbox containing your brilliant post).

Ctrl-C copies it to your clipboard. That's it.

Then if the posting form blanks out upon submission, instead of paraphrasing yourself again, you can just click on the textbox and hit Ctrl-V to paste the clipboard contents back in.

Srsly... use your tools, monkeys!

[compared2what?]

renders people neurologically incapable of thinking for themselves.

turn people into zombies by placing subliminally perceived words and symbols in movies or on magazine covers

the masses who consume the offerings of the mass-media can be or have been transformed into a quasi-untermenschen class of witless automatons

Never been asserted to my knowledge.

Not in those terms, no. But if you assert that people can be made to forget whatever doubts and concerns they might have had about the wars, assassinations, and other national traumas they either lived through or learned about simply by showing them a picture, you necessarily also assert that they have very little, if any, integrity of mind or character in their natural state.

And while I certainly wouldn't maintain that people are -- a priori and simply by virtue of being people -- naturally brimming with courage, strength and wisdom, or that most of us aren't highly susceptible to stimuli that work on our fears and our desires, it vastly understates how frightened and needy you have to make people feel before they stop naturally responding to distressing information by being distressed -- and more to the point, how much and what kind of effort it takes to make them feel that way -- to suggest that hidden messages in the cartoons they watched as children have enough power to significantly influence their judgment as adults.

People may be weak, but they're warm and quick with feeling for themselves and for other people by nature, by and large. And they're born with a highly variable complement of native cognitive resources that they either do or don't learn to use well enough to process whatever highly variable individual vicissitudes they encounter while still dependent minors. After which, they either do or don't go on to know and take care of themselves and others with a moderate and episodic degree of success over the rest of the course of their adult lives.

But at every point, unless they're so chronically deprived and oppressed that they have no choices at all, they do have more agency wrt their own judgments than none and they're not uniformly blank slates on whom the CIA can write whatever story-line it wants to. As Hugh takes it for granted that they are. Thereby inadvertently painting a picture of the world in which the only people who have clearly defined and recognizable human attributes are assets of the CIA, relative to whom ordinary citizens come across as having so little distinction and so few sympathetic qualities that they're barely even there. That effectively creates kind of a three-class system, comprised of the CIA and its lackeys at the top; closely followed by their less-well-funded-and-equipped cognitive equals who are, like Hugh, hip to their insidious tricks; and then somewhere way down below the field of action, an undifferentiated crowd of people who have no proactive role to play at all. Sheeple, if you will. And if that's not a classically scape-goatable category of lesser personhood that has no function other than to be the Them to our Us, I don't know what is.

People are more than the sum of their priming.

Children are a particular kind of people.

They are. And a very vulnerable kind, too. But that doesn't make it any more possible to use any kind of environmentally uncontrolled, mass-media-based priming on them to achieve a result that mass-media-based priming simply isn't capable of achieving.

Obviously, if they're in the care of adults who isolate and subject them to sustained and systematic one-on-one priming of some or any kind, they're highly likely to be adversely affected by it. So parents: Don't hand your children over to the CIA for any priming experiments. Also, even if the CIA is permanently dissolved tomorrow, don't skimp on the responsible parenting part of the equation, please. Which includes but isn't limited to setting specific-child-appropriate limits on how much and what kind of age-appropriate media your child has access to, and also monitoring his or her response to it, addressing his or her questions about it, and in general, making sure that neither it or anything else is creating more stress and insecurity than a child can resolve without help and support. I know, right? I have needs of my own, too. But you're obligated to give it your best shot anyway and that's all there is to it. Thanks.

Am I the only one who sees any of that as problematic?

No, but you need to restate your case.

By overrating the power, resources and skills of the CIA and also by focusing so exclusively on them, Hugh unintentionally underrates the power, resources and skills of millions and millions of people. Also, the take-away of his message is a little too close to "Follow me, or you're helpless and doomed" to be very conducive to the conditions necessary for a free and healthy society, imo. Also, in some regards, creative works have a greater potential to convey truths than straight-up, just-the-facts narratives do. Quite apart from which they're a source of both superficial and profound pleasure to many people. Although not always the same works to the same people. Because there's no arguing over taste.

Will that do? And if not, can you give me a hint? Not a big hint. Just a little hint. Because I'd like to rise to the challenge, if I can.

I'm not saying Hugh intends to devalue humanity, I should emphasize. I have no reason to believe that he does and don't in fact believe it. But that doesn't mean that it's not being devalued. It just means that in this case it's not being devalued by a sinister force.

Clearer please. If not a sinister force then what?

ON EDIT: I missed this one, sorry. If it still needs elaborating, let me know, and I'll return to it.