I live in Tucson, Arizona, and I can, without a doubt, confirm that we desert dwellers are in the domestic epicenter of the Absurd Arena. This topic has gotten no play on Useful Idiots, but our exiting Governor is staking miles of shipping containers across federal parks and Native land in a show of total depravity. It's fucking crazy and a joke. Although, at a total of $95 million tax-payer dollars, the performance is far from a genuine comedy. If you all want to cover this, I can connect you with some players on the ground.
Matt, I live in Quebec. We have an independent media. This is today's Latribune on Home Depot. Google translate will do a fine job of translating real journalism in a land where corporations have the same rights as toilet tissue. Only humans have have human rights in Quebec despite the protests of our version of the ACLU.
Twenty fours later we have a governmental inquiry. How long short of a decade would this take in America which now deciding if there will even be a decade. These are the questions autistic people like myself ask ourselves for our own amusement.
Before Covid everyone here shopped in Vermont. Today Vermonters who have passports come here to shop. I am a veteran of 70+ plus years of cross border shopping.
I understood Vermont politics. I was in Vermont long before Bernie. Bernie shares much of my ancestry and I remember when we called Vermont: Mississippi North.
Vermont politics is pragmatic not ideological. Republicans vote for Bernie just like New York Republicans once voted for Jacob Javits and James Buckley.
Here in Quebec we still vote that way we love real politics. Policy is not theology.
Wow. What a sad use of resources. Not to mention the unexpected effects it can have on wildlife.
I like the idea of making affordable housing out of them. Put them in rows, put standarized plumbing in the back walls for showers and toilets and viola - affordable housing.
IIRC you have to be careful about cutting windows in the sides though because the walls are load bearing. But if you don't stack them it probably won't be an issue.
This is small, but I usually avoid social media disputes of any kind as I find them unproductive and they often make me irrationally mad inside my head at someone I generally like a lot. However, during times like this - When Matt Taibbi is getting blasted for being a "conservative" I think it's important to say stuff publicly, so, hopefully, others who are fearful to say anything feel like they have some camaraderie.
Musk, Taibbi, Weiss, Shelenberger are all "heterodox" dissidents ("IDW"* types, more or less) from the mainstream liberal-progressive-left and corporate media.
The mainstream-"left" corporate media is not going to honestly try to understand IDW type critiques because that would:
1. be an admission of fundamental error, or
2. just increase the quantity of MSM incoherence (gaslighting, lies, etc.), which is already over the top.
When the mainstream "left" (in the broad sense) is criticized for selling out to neoliberalism and corporatism, they fall back on classic rhetorical tactics used almost universally by scoundrels of all types:
Smug arrogance
Smear and demonize people that disagree
Gaslight
Projection
Emotionally manipulate, engage in special pleading, not rational, objective thought
Deflection
Lies and distortions
Guilt-by-association
Groupthink and scapegoating (psychological violence)
Cherry picking data to fit their narrative
Memory-holing (usually as part of gaslighting)
Doxxing and character assassination, if not actual threats of violence
In the case of the postmodern (radical/extremist) "cultural-left" there is a basic refusal to admit that "reality" is anything other than a "social construct" used to gain power. The irony of that is that it is just another example of gaslighting and projection: the cultural-left is obviously doing what it criticizing "conservatives" of: seeking power in service of ideological tribalism.
Ideological tribalism for the corporate-"left" is used to serve the interests of a specific faction of the power elites: the PMC** media-tech oligarchs and globalists.
Again: the above list can be generalized to fit any ideology.
Why the "Intellectual Dark Web" has such a crazy name.
Eric Weinstein
Jun 7, 2018
I saw a counter-culture developing which the main media institutions were mostly intent on ignoring or deeply misportraying. In this video, I explain how we got them to move from ignoring us to trying to laugh at us and spreading awareness and our message in the process, as well as how this counter-culture's name was born according to the main lesson of Nasim Taleb's "Anti-Fragility."
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." -N. Klein, 1914
We have now progressed quickly to living between Klein's stage 2 and 3 as of June 2018. If we get to the end, we intend to skip phase 4 and hold an all night intellectual victory rave instead and invite the vanquished to join in, in the spirit of drunken friendship and loyal opposition. But do subscribe to stay tuned, get invited and get involved with what happens next.
** PMC (Ehrenreich) - professional-managerial class
I just want to share a quote from a recent reading - from Intellectuals in Developing Societies by Syed Hussein Alatas, Chapter: The Emergence of Intellectuals. Alatas is talking about intellectuals in repressed society that is not quite ready for revolution, with both hostile government and public, intellectuals who feel resigned and useless ("superfluous individuals" or "abortive intellectuals" who "neither [create] nor [struggle], but merely [feel] alienated and ahead of their time"). He's writing about more dire times than what we currently face (czarist Russia for example), which I find comforting to keep in perspective.
Quote: "It seems to me the only way is for the intellectuals in periods of routine life to prove their own necessity by writing, publishing, lecturing, organising small group meetings, and tackling hitherto neglected problems in a manner which is not in conflict with the specialists or the technocrats. Those whose social system and circumstances permit should go into politics and prove their qualities in thought and deed. Those who are teaching should consciously aim to awaken the intellectual spirit in their pupils. Even if this does not bring success as it means swimming against the tide, the very effort will keep them intellectually alive. In this case the effort will be more important than the result."
I like to try to help cultivate intellectual community around me, hosting meetings and discussions and working out plans of action. Efforts feel less futile with a bit of community.
They call it autism but I don't know how I know. I know what I know and I never could do school. I type on a Child's keyboard with one digit and I haven't stopped speaking for thirty years and I was born in 1948.
I have no idea what an intellectual community is and my wife graduated from the UofC and has a PhD.
At 84 she reads at a pace beyond anything I can possibly achieve yet she has little awareness of her intellectual wealth.
I know less today than I knew yesterday. The Kabbalists of Vilnius said God occupies the spaces where we have not looked. Dr Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of The English Language 1755 called them the wisest of the wise. They did not believe in magic but that was when Vilnius was Deist.
I looked up Vanity in Johnson's Dictionary and definition six was
ostentation; arrogance
Johnson in his wisdom gave us context and gave this Jonathan Swift gem
Tis an old maximin the schools
that vanity's the food of fools
but now and then your men of of wit
will condescend to take a bit.
Sounds like something I used to read on cubicle walls that here here I sit broken hearted
I call it evolution Mark Twain called it devolution
I was never a student but I spent a lot of time on campus.
I am autistic I can't do group think. I understand humans are Marxists but I am who I am.
What do think is an intellectual? Is it a methodology for understanding the face in the mirror or the faces in a crowd?
Is there a difference between a scholar and an intellectual?
What is intellectual groupthink?
Is Sasha Baron Cohen the intellectual of his esteemed family of public intellectuals?
Borat understands what Oxford professors of psychology will never understand.
I became very active in politics on Twitter and IRL, volunteering for Bernie in 2016, when I observed 2 things: 1. Hillary’s campaign didn’t want volunteers, only money and 2. Hillary’s campaign worked in conjunction with the DNC to malign and discredit Bernie, instead of promoting Hillary, apart from sanctimonious repetitions of her vast ‘experience’, often disregarding that most of that experience was in attacking her husband’s sexual victims and promoting the destruction of functional countries who disobeyed the American Empire. They clearly expected that instead of making Hillary the best choice, the best plan was to make her the only choice. This was further shown to be true in her promotion of Trump as a (hopefully) unpalatable Republican opponent. It later became apparent to me that Bernie had also merely been functioning as a sheepdog for corporate Dems, concurrent with a feeble attempt to bring corporate Dems (Republican-lites) around to a platform of integrity. However, I now am so disheartened by the complete betrayal of both him and the majority of the progressive caucus to stand for anything, except the continuation of their own careers, that I see little worth in political activism in the form of supporting any candidate. World Beyond War and other peace activists are the only causes I any longer promote or support, other than independent journalists, like the Useful Idiots, not the NYT, though they bill themselves as such with an astounding lack of irony, because our unrelenting financial support as a tax base and condescendingly righteous cheerleaders of any war effort deemed worthy by the NYT and their ilk, is at the root of all of our societal decay.
Thank you for the link to "Thought Gang;" I was only familiar with "Crazy Clown Time." Sadly, Angelo Badalamenti passed on today, but at the ripe old age of 85. Not to go on too long here, but concerning "The News," and particularly from the "alternative" press, I clicked on a Democracy Now! segment at the beginning of Russia's current wave of missile strikes after the Kerch Bridge sabotage event. After some basic info set-up, Amy Goodman shifted to a more "in-depth analysis " from a presumably traumatized 5-year old Ukrainian boy, like Democracy Now! couldn't find an adult, and leave the tugging-at-your-heartstrings stuff for the Alphabet Networks, because that's what 90% of their "coverage" consists of. What happened to Democracy Now!? I rarely watch them now due to their shift to a State Department/Corporatist model of reporting foreign affairs. Democracy Now! is no longer a legitimate "alternative" media outlet, it seems, just another boutique shadow of Mainstream Media. Rock, or Industrial Jazz, on, Useful Idiots!
Amy Goodman sold out. It really is just that simple.
Being a faux "radical leftist" that twists words to make D-party establishment propaganda narratives palatable is profitable and popular. Telling the truth isn't.
Whatever you do, don't associate someone in your life (such as a bigoted relative) as a representation of racism, corruption, etc. It will only add more pain to your world. Get a better perspective of the scale of these social matters. Look, your relative is just a common asshole who doesn't make a difference about anything anyway, and everybody already knows it.
Seriously, I've found myself unconsciously treating socially proximate assholes as 'little Trumps', for example. It might feel good to tell them off, but the whole frame is wrongheaded. Just smile as you pass them the cranberry sauce at the dinner table, smile, and focus on whatever physical flaw is conveniently perceivable, such as a crooked tooth (or maybe a hairy mole if you're lucky).
Nothing like a farm -- left the mad media world back in '96 for the sandy dunes of Michigan and the pleasure pain of tilling the soil and raising dogs (and a mule or two) Sure, I figured prices would rise and some new restrictions would hit the farmstand crowd -- but never like this. Animal feed and vet care suck most funds out of my nest egg (that looks more like a quail egg these days). And diesel? Let's not go there. The Twittersphere can now self-regulate, and the dirty laundry will be hung out to dry. Just like Annie said, "the Sun will come out Tomorrow!"
My wife was born in Nashville and grew up on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan where her father practiced sustainable forestry and always planted a large garden for the community. We left the west coast of Michigan and moved to Montreal where I was born. Our time in Michigan was brief but before we moved there after a decade when visited my father in law regularly from our coop apartment on Chicago's Southside. One of our local organic farmers is from Bay City but in Quebec people who want to farm are not alone.
Our food industry is vertically integrated and the farmers are on the top and the government (we the people serve the farmers). Our farmers are secure whether the owners of the food co-operatives or even small family run market gardeners. My wife's master thesis was on raising quail for behavioral research at the University of Chicago. Quail eggs are big here in Quebec. I liked the canned ones but fresh quail eggs are worth their weight in gold.
Small local artisanal food food producers are doing well and I can buy my neighbours apples at the local supermarket. I could never understand why with great local apples, peaches, and dairies like the one in New Era you had to drew to Michigan because the food in Chicago was never great.
We used to bring back bushels of Michigan apples to chicago for friends and neighbours many of whom never tasted fresh ripe apples or peaches.
We have our eggs delivered by a man who loves his chickens. His chickens are never eaten by anything but foxes. They die if natural causes He is embarrassed to ask more for his eggs because of the cost of feed. His children have finished college and moved elsewhere but chickens are forever.
Our local newspaper ran a series of articles on the pain of raising livestock for food.
I never commuted by car. I took the bus or subway or like now at 74 we take car to shop at the pharmacy, bakery or supermarket or bank a mile way FROM MY CAVE.
Here at a few meters away in Vermont we understand the value of people willing to work long days for little pay because nothing is better than liking the face in the mirror.
I am an old man and I always grew gardens just like my father.
We left Michigan for Montreal's downtown where we grew a garden in back of our apartment. I planted gardens on the southside side of Chicago, high in Rockies, in the subarctic and beside Lake Michigan.
We left montreal because we couldn't walk up and down the mountain anymore. Montreal is for young people. It is the unTampa St Pete.
I am autistic and time is not a concept I deal with. Gardening gives me a calendar. I live in the moment but I plant tomato seeds when my wife tells me Happy Birthday.
I could live in a cave and travel the universe but the cycle of life can be microseconds or the life cycle of mole rats but a season of seasons keeps me grounded. In the subarctic only the winter is long. We celebrated the two or three days the trees went from bud to full leaf.
I know what Annie said but what did Daddy WarBucks say?
I live next to the Appalachian Trail North of the Vermont Border
I time for my 2AMnap but before I will some local fresh great tasting strawberries. Quebec owns our Hydro and we grow strawberries in Greenhouses and those orchids you see were grown beside Lac St Jean Aluminum smelters with the excess heat generated by falling water. It is more economical to grow orchids in our North than your south.
While Europe yells about the cost of heating the cost of cooling may cost us our lives.
Our future lies in green energy we are not Texas or Oklahoma.
All news is local. This week Haaretz published an article titled.
Stop trying to cure us, stop trying to make us NORMAL. Let us be autistic.
I am 74. I am happy being me.
I don't know why I can't do school , I just know I can't do school. Forty years ago my psychologist said I was the sanest person he knew and said as much as he enjoyed my company others needed his time more than me.
America is a nation state. Nation States began after an 80 year war and were the brain child of THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
We are global. There is no such thing as normal in a universe where change is the only constant.
I am said to be a genius at abstract mathematics. I qualify as a Life Master in both the American Contract Bridge League and the American Bridge Association yet I cannot memorize a three digit pin. I am not a bridge player I am who I am. After fifteen years I finally memorized my phone number.
I watched Monday night football and used to listened to Howard Cosell on Monday I watched Eli and Peyton analyze football for ten minutes and went back to my computer. They knew everything about being NFL quarterbacks and offered me nothing about the metaphysics of children's games. I don't bet on children's games. Children are children and too many are Peter Pan wannabees.
That sums up my opinion of American politics. It is a children's game that belongs only to children and maybe it is time to let our grandchildren study Golding's Lord of the Flies.
Jacinda Ardern New Zealand's Prime Minister called The leader of New Zealand's Libertarians an arrogant prick when microphone was live. Maybe someone can call the Federal Reserve, Jim Jordan, Jamie Diamant and Elon Musk arrogant pricks.
Zelensky played the piano and told us all we needed to know about arrogant pricks.
Donald Trump is Glenn Gould without Zelensky's genius.
He is a prick playing the piano accompanied by the Washington Philharmonic Dick Orchestra. They are a bunch of pricks pretending to play music without Zelensky's obvious joy and understanding.
I'm not quite sure what to make of what Bo Winegard is saying. He seems to have a good grasp of the implications of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution, but some of his opinions seems pretty stretched, running on fumes.
A lot of what he is saying doesn't have much to do with the standard definition of "conservative".
That in itself doesn't matter much to me, he just needs to be clear that he is broadening what he means by "conservative" far beyond the conventional definition, and why.
One of Quebec's problems is that superstition is banned in our public spaces and people from ancient cultures like America and its colonies believe a whole lot of nonsense.
We teach science in schools and religion is literature. Our politics are about policy not ideology and Darwin is still the Messiah about the face in the mirror.
In Quebec religion, gender and race are no longer identities and marriage is a civil contract and/or a religious contract and never the twain shall meet.
We need immigrants, we want all we can get but coming from nations that believe a whole lot of nonsense requires a willingness to change one's beliefs to the beliefs of Quebec society.
New citizens can believe whatever nonsense they want but in Quebec there is an impervious wall between church and state.
In Quebec we are a Secular Humanist Liberal Democracy built on an understanding that we are our brother's keeper.
I believe that particular understanding occurred long before Abraham and his G-d of the Abrahamic religions.
Should by some miracle there is such thing as God why would She be jealous and crave adoration.
Justin Trudeau is a devout Catholic and nobody gives a shit about his private life. He is CANADA's Prime Minister and serves all Canadians even those that hate him because his father said, "You can't legislate morality."
Only in a world of fantasy does God favour the faithful over Socratics.
In Quebec new citizens are a strength not a weakness.
E pluribus Unum is our slogan.
In America it is obviously just a bad joke.
This is the way you vote if you are a white suburban working mother with a college education living in Pittsburgh.
Quebec ain't perfect and the promised land is always just a destination but you don't want your children to grow your food. You want to be happy supervising other people's children.
FBI deliberately lied to social media companies about Hunter Biden laptop (actually three water-damaged laptops – not one) – FBI knew the full truth exactly – laptops were in their possession for ONE (1) YEAR
I use my constant anger to write comments on medium (same user name). It is my therapy. Writing is also userful practice for me because I have to write a lot of documents for work, many of which are political in nature (as in client relations, not elected officials). So therapy and practical application.
BTW: Thanks for the shout out last Thursday on the show!!! For the record, my user name "jlalbrecht" is pronounced: Jay-Ell-Ahlbrekt (my two initials plus my last name).
If you want a bonus point, the "ch" in "Albrecht" is pronounced like a cat about to hack up a fur ball.
Robert Kegan is yesterday's Jordan Peterson. We map genomes. We know the math. There is no such thing as normal. Politics is the art of turning ideology into pragmatism. Pierce is medieval and Kagen is yesterday's high priest.
Noah was the town drunkard. He built an Ark and America builds theme parks to celebrate alternate universes just like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Sometimes believing in your own myths and fairytales brings its own rewards.
When I went to school the speed of light was a constant and superconductivity needed close to zero degrees absolute.
Today's news is old news only the lens went from global to American exceptionalism.
I gotta say I don't think postmodernism hurts anyone or even advocates cultural change. It is a theory about human meaning, culture, symbols, and what not. Postmodernismgate? Have you investigated the subject of social epistemology? It's analytic. Replace 'dollar' with 'fact' and imagine a knowledge economy. Knowledge is power and it is manipulated by the power elite.
The abstract is this: the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.
We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the 20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the 20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first decade of the 21st Century.
It is now beginning to unravel.
In part it is unravelling because of developing schisms within its master narrative, the Blue Faith. These are important, but they are not the subject of this essay. In this essay, I am focusing on what I think is both much more fundamental and much less obvious: deep shifts in technology and society that are undermining the very foundations of the Church. Shifts that render the Church itself obsolete.
postmodern social conditions came about after WW2 as a result of the shift from economic production, family farms, industrial manufacturing, to suburban consumerism.
primary postmodern values are pluralism, relativism, and the rejection of "absolutes" (by deconstructing power structures).
primary social pathologies related to the emergence of postmodern social conditions:
extreme forms of narcissism and nihilism, rejection of even "partial truths" in traditional sense making systems, Oikophobia.
Boomeritis is Ken Wilber's weird satire about the cultural evolution of the social "disease" (pathology) of postmodern social conditions and values.
Spiral Dynamics contrasts three worldviews, which for some awful reason are called “orange,” “green,” and “yellow.”2 You’ll find the first two, at least, familiar:
Orange
Rationality, science, technology, objectivity
Materialist, capitalist, pragmatic, utilitarian
Autonomy, independence, competition, results
Planning, controls, contracts, procedural justice
Detached, abstract, reductionistic, alienated
European (intellectual) Enlightenment; modernism
Orange tends toward dualism: the wrong idea that the self is totally distinct from the world.
You can figure this part out, right? These views hate each other; each thinks the other is the fast road to hell.
Yellow
The thing is, orange and green are both right.
They are also both wrong. Their virulent criticisms of each other are both correct. But their own central values are also both correct. We need the right parts of both, without the wrong parts.
That combination, supposedly, is yellow:
Big picture, open systems, networks, global flows
Flexible, simultaneous consideration of multiple perspectives
Tolerance for chaos, change, and uncertainty
Integration of ranking (hierarchy) and linking (community)
Caring combined with freedom
Voluntary, spontaneous cooperation rather than either win/lose competition or compulsory consensus processing
Capacity to act in both orange and green modes as appropriate
If this sounds less specific than the other two, it might be because “yellow” is a work in progress. I do think it’s pointing in the right direction, toward what I call participation. That is the way to avoid the false alternatives of monism and dualism.
I live in Tucson, Arizona, and I can, without a doubt, confirm that we desert dwellers are in the domestic epicenter of the Absurd Arena. This topic has gotten no play on Useful Idiots, but our exiting Governor is staking miles of shipping containers across federal parks and Native land in a show of total depravity. It's fucking crazy and a joke. Although, at a total of $95 million tax-payer dollars, the performance is far from a genuine comedy. If you all want to cover this, I can connect you with some players on the ground.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-12-11/arizona-gov-ducey-stacks-containers-on-border-at-terms-end
wow that is absurd. and not covered in the news at all it seems. i'll nominate it for Republicans Suck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5Ng3MrxUqg
The ravens walk to the border from here it requires too much energy to take off and land. Everyone in town has American friends and relations.
Still America is a strange country with strange beliefs. My wife is American and she is having problems relating to your strange beliefs and customs.
NewsNation covered it:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/immigration/ducey-pushes-ahead-with-shipping-container-border-wall/
Matt, I live in Quebec. We have an independent media. This is today's Latribune on Home Depot. Google translate will do a fine job of translating real journalism in a land where corporations have the same rights as toilet tissue. Only humans have have human rights in Quebec despite the protests of our version of the ACLU.
We are a secular HUMANIST liberal democracy
https://www.latribune.ca/2022/12/13/enquete--home-depot-jette-des-tonnes-de-produits-neufs-62280d3adf2dfc9c0b9ecff34b5aa5cd
Home Depot is a major advertiser but independent journalism is a foundation of real democracy!
That is why Canada is a Full Democracy and America is not according to Wikipedia's democracy index.
Twenty fours later we have a governmental inquiry. How long short of a decade would this take in America which now deciding if there will even be a decade. These are the questions autistic people like myself ask ourselves for our own amusement.
You might get a delayed two-for-one suck-fest out of this one depending on how the incoming Democrat Governor, Katie Hobbs plays her cards.
Before Covid everyone here shopped in Vermont. Today Vermonters who have passports come here to shop. I am a veteran of 70+ plus years of cross border shopping.
I understood Vermont politics. I was in Vermont long before Bernie. Bernie shares much of my ancestry and I remember when we called Vermont: Mississippi North.
Vermont politics is pragmatic not ideological. Republicans vote for Bernie just like New York Republicans once voted for Jacob Javits and James Buckley.
Here in Quebec we still vote that way we love real politics. Policy is not theology.
Wow. What a sad use of resources. Not to mention the unexpected effects it can have on wildlife.
I like the idea of making affordable housing out of them. Put them in rows, put standarized plumbing in the back walls for showers and toilets and viola - affordable housing.
IIRC you have to be careful about cutting windows in the sides though because the walls are load bearing. But if you don't stack them it probably won't be an issue.
This is small, but I usually avoid social media disputes of any kind as I find them unproductive and they often make me irrationally mad inside my head at someone I generally like a lot. However, during times like this - When Matt Taibbi is getting blasted for being a "conservative" I think it's important to say stuff publicly, so, hopefully, others who are fearful to say anything feel like they have some camaraderie.
Musk, Taibbi, Weiss, Shelenberger are all "heterodox" dissidents ("IDW"* types, more or less) from the mainstream liberal-progressive-left and corporate media.
The mainstream-"left" corporate media is not going to honestly try to understand IDW type critiques because that would:
1. be an admission of fundamental error, or
2. just increase the quantity of MSM incoherence (gaslighting, lies, etc.), which is already over the top.
When the mainstream "left" (in the broad sense) is criticized for selling out to neoliberalism and corporatism, they fall back on classic rhetorical tactics used almost universally by scoundrels of all types:
Smug arrogance
Smear and demonize people that disagree
Gaslight
Projection
Emotionally manipulate, engage in special pleading, not rational, objective thought
Deflection
Lies and distortions
Guilt-by-association
Groupthink and scapegoating (psychological violence)
Cherry picking data to fit their narrative
Memory-holing (usually as part of gaslighting)
Doxxing and character assassination, if not actual threats of violence
In the case of the postmodern (radical/extremist) "cultural-left" there is a basic refusal to admit that "reality" is anything other than a "social construct" used to gain power. The irony of that is that it is just another example of gaslighting and projection: the cultural-left is obviously doing what it criticizing "conservatives" of: seeking power in service of ideological tribalism.
Ideological tribalism for the corporate-"left" is used to serve the interests of a specific faction of the power elites: the PMC** media-tech oligarchs and globalists.
Again: the above list can be generalized to fit any ideology.
* IDW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr0OX6ai4Qw
Why the "Intellectual Dark Web" has such a crazy name.
Eric Weinstein
Jun 7, 2018
I saw a counter-culture developing which the main media institutions were mostly intent on ignoring or deeply misportraying. In this video, I explain how we got them to move from ignoring us to trying to laugh at us and spreading awareness and our message in the process, as well as how this counter-culture's name was born according to the main lesson of Nasim Taleb's "Anti-Fragility."
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." -N. Klein, 1914
We have now progressed quickly to living between Klein's stage 2 and 3 as of June 2018. If we get to the end, we intend to skip phase 4 and hold an all night intellectual victory rave instead and invite the vanquished to join in, in the spirit of drunken friendship and loyal opposition. But do subscribe to stay tuned, get invited and get involved with what happens next.
** PMC (Ehrenreich) - professional-managerial class
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class
Also see Kotkin's description of the New Clerisy:
https://joelkotkin.com/the-new-class-conflict/
And similarly, NS Lyons on the mapping of archetypes in the "reality wars" to the "left-vs-right" culture wars and class conflict:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back
What is the difference between “content moderation” and “censorship”?
I just want to share a quote from a recent reading - from Intellectuals in Developing Societies by Syed Hussein Alatas, Chapter: The Emergence of Intellectuals. Alatas is talking about intellectuals in repressed society that is not quite ready for revolution, with both hostile government and public, intellectuals who feel resigned and useless ("superfluous individuals" or "abortive intellectuals" who "neither [create] nor [struggle], but merely [feel] alienated and ahead of their time"). He's writing about more dire times than what we currently face (czarist Russia for example), which I find comforting to keep in perspective.
Quote: "It seems to me the only way is for the intellectuals in periods of routine life to prove their own necessity by writing, publishing, lecturing, organising small group meetings, and tackling hitherto neglected problems in a manner which is not in conflict with the specialists or the technocrats. Those whose social system and circumstances permit should go into politics and prove their qualities in thought and deed. Those who are teaching should consciously aim to awaken the intellectual spirit in their pupils. Even if this does not bring success as it means swimming against the tide, the very effort will keep them intellectually alive. In this case the effort will be more important than the result."
I like to try to help cultivate intellectual community around me, hosting meetings and discussions and working out plans of action. Efforts feel less futile with a bit of community.
They call it autism but I don't know how I know. I know what I know and I never could do school. I type on a Child's keyboard with one digit and I haven't stopped speaking for thirty years and I was born in 1948.
I have no idea what an intellectual community is and my wife graduated from the UofC and has a PhD.
At 84 she reads at a pace beyond anything I can possibly achieve yet she has little awareness of her intellectual wealth.
I know less today than I knew yesterday. The Kabbalists of Vilnius said God occupies the spaces where we have not looked. Dr Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of The English Language 1755 called them the wisest of the wise. They did not believe in magic but that was when Vilnius was Deist.
I looked up Vanity in Johnson's Dictionary and definition six was
ostentation; arrogance
Johnson in his wisdom gave us context and gave this Jonathan Swift gem
Tis an old maximin the schools
that vanity's the food of fools
but now and then your men of of wit
will condescend to take a bit.
Sounds like something I used to read on cubicle walls that here here I sit broken hearted
I call it evolution Mark Twain called it devolution
I was never a student but I spent a lot of time on campus.
I am autistic I can't do group think. I understand humans are Marxists but I am who I am.
What do think is an intellectual? Is it a methodology for understanding the face in the mirror or the faces in a crowd?
Is there a difference between a scholar and an intellectual?
What is intellectual groupthink?
Is Sasha Baron Cohen the intellectual of his esteemed family of public intellectuals?
Borat understands what Oxford professors of psychology will never understand.
There is no such thing as normal.
I became very active in politics on Twitter and IRL, volunteering for Bernie in 2016, when I observed 2 things: 1. Hillary’s campaign didn’t want volunteers, only money and 2. Hillary’s campaign worked in conjunction with the DNC to malign and discredit Bernie, instead of promoting Hillary, apart from sanctimonious repetitions of her vast ‘experience’, often disregarding that most of that experience was in attacking her husband’s sexual victims and promoting the destruction of functional countries who disobeyed the American Empire. They clearly expected that instead of making Hillary the best choice, the best plan was to make her the only choice. This was further shown to be true in her promotion of Trump as a (hopefully) unpalatable Republican opponent. It later became apparent to me that Bernie had also merely been functioning as a sheepdog for corporate Dems, concurrent with a feeble attempt to bring corporate Dems (Republican-lites) around to a platform of integrity. However, I now am so disheartened by the complete betrayal of both him and the majority of the progressive caucus to stand for anything, except the continuation of their own careers, that I see little worth in political activism in the form of supporting any candidate. World Beyond War and other peace activists are the only causes I any longer promote or support, other than independent journalists, like the Useful Idiots, not the NYT, though they bill themselves as such with an astounding lack of irony, because our unrelenting financial support as a tax base and condescendingly righteous cheerleaders of any war effort deemed worthy by the NYT and their ilk, is at the root of all of our societal decay.
Thank you for the link to "Thought Gang;" I was only familiar with "Crazy Clown Time." Sadly, Angelo Badalamenti passed on today, but at the ripe old age of 85. Not to go on too long here, but concerning "The News," and particularly from the "alternative" press, I clicked on a Democracy Now! segment at the beginning of Russia's current wave of missile strikes after the Kerch Bridge sabotage event. After some basic info set-up, Amy Goodman shifted to a more "in-depth analysis " from a presumably traumatized 5-year old Ukrainian boy, like Democracy Now! couldn't find an adult, and leave the tugging-at-your-heartstrings stuff for the Alphabet Networks, because that's what 90% of their "coverage" consists of. What happened to Democracy Now!? I rarely watch them now due to their shift to a State Department/Corporatist model of reporting foreign affairs. Democracy Now! is no longer a legitimate "alternative" media outlet, it seems, just another boutique shadow of Mainstream Media. Rock, or Industrial Jazz, on, Useful Idiots!
RIP AB. That's what made me revisit the album, especially on a week like this one.
Hopefully, Useful Idiots can fill the gap left by outlets like Democracy Now.
Amy Goodman sold out. It really is just that simple.
Being a faux "radical leftist" that twists words to make D-party establishment propaganda narratives palatable is profitable and popular. Telling the truth isn't.
Whatever you do, don't associate someone in your life (such as a bigoted relative) as a representation of racism, corruption, etc. It will only add more pain to your world. Get a better perspective of the scale of these social matters. Look, your relative is just a common asshole who doesn't make a difference about anything anyway, and everybody already knows it.
Seriously, I've found myself unconsciously treating socially proximate assholes as 'little Trumps', for example. It might feel good to tell them off, but the whole frame is wrongheaded. Just smile as you pass them the cranberry sauce at the dinner table, smile, and focus on whatever physical flaw is conveniently perceivable, such as a crooked tooth (or maybe a hairy mole if you're lucky).
Nothing like a farm -- left the mad media world back in '96 for the sandy dunes of Michigan and the pleasure pain of tilling the soil and raising dogs (and a mule or two) Sure, I figured prices would rise and some new restrictions would hit the farmstand crowd -- but never like this. Animal feed and vet care suck most funds out of my nest egg (that looks more like a quail egg these days). And diesel? Let's not go there. The Twittersphere can now self-regulate, and the dirty laundry will be hung out to dry. Just like Annie said, "the Sun will come out Tomorrow!"
My wife was born in Nashville and grew up on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan where her father practiced sustainable forestry and always planted a large garden for the community. We left the west coast of Michigan and moved to Montreal where I was born. Our time in Michigan was brief but before we moved there after a decade when visited my father in law regularly from our coop apartment on Chicago's Southside. One of our local organic farmers is from Bay City but in Quebec people who want to farm are not alone.
Our food industry is vertically integrated and the farmers are on the top and the government (we the people serve the farmers). Our farmers are secure whether the owners of the food co-operatives or even small family run market gardeners. My wife's master thesis was on raising quail for behavioral research at the University of Chicago. Quail eggs are big here in Quebec. I liked the canned ones but fresh quail eggs are worth their weight in gold.
Small local artisanal food food producers are doing well and I can buy my neighbours apples at the local supermarket. I could never understand why with great local apples, peaches, and dairies like the one in New Era you had to drew to Michigan because the food in Chicago was never great.
We used to bring back bushels of Michigan apples to chicago for friends and neighbours many of whom never tasted fresh ripe apples or peaches.
We have our eggs delivered by a man who loves his chickens. His chickens are never eaten by anything but foxes. They die if natural causes He is embarrassed to ask more for his eggs because of the cost of feed. His children have finished college and moved elsewhere but chickens are forever.
Our local newspaper ran a series of articles on the pain of raising livestock for food.
I never commuted by car. I took the bus or subway or like now at 74 we take car to shop at the pharmacy, bakery or supermarket or bank a mile way FROM MY CAVE.
Here at a few meters away in Vermont we understand the value of people willing to work long days for little pay because nothing is better than liking the face in the mirror.
I am an old man and I always grew gardens just like my father.
We left Michigan for Montreal's downtown where we grew a garden in back of our apartment. I planted gardens on the southside side of Chicago, high in Rockies, in the subarctic and beside Lake Michigan.
We left montreal because we couldn't walk up and down the mountain anymore. Montreal is for young people. It is the unTampa St Pete.
I am autistic and time is not a concept I deal with. Gardening gives me a calendar. I live in the moment but I plant tomato seeds when my wife tells me Happy Birthday.
I could live in a cave and travel the universe but the cycle of life can be microseconds or the life cycle of mole rats but a season of seasons keeps me grounded. In the subarctic only the winter is long. We celebrated the two or three days the trees went from bud to full leaf.
I know what Annie said but what did Daddy WarBucks say?
I live next to the Appalachian Trail North of the Vermont Border
I time for my 2AMnap but before I will some local fresh great tasting strawberries. Quebec owns our Hydro and we grow strawberries in Greenhouses and those orchids you see were grown beside Lac St Jean Aluminum smelters with the excess heat generated by falling water. It is more economical to grow orchids in our North than your south.
While Europe yells about the cost of heating the cost of cooling may cost us our lives.
Our future lies in green energy we are not Texas or Oklahoma.
All news is local. This week Haaretz published an article titled.
Stop trying to cure us, stop trying to make us NORMAL. Let us be autistic.
I am 74. I am happy being me.
I don't know why I can't do school , I just know I can't do school. Forty years ago my psychologist said I was the sanest person he knew and said as much as he enjoyed my company others needed his time more than me.
America is a nation state. Nation States began after an 80 year war and were the brain child of THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
We are global. There is no such thing as normal in a universe where change is the only constant.
I am said to be a genius at abstract mathematics. I qualify as a Life Master in both the American Contract Bridge League and the American Bridge Association yet I cannot memorize a three digit pin. I am not a bridge player I am who I am. After fifteen years I finally memorized my phone number.
I watched Monday night football and used to listened to Howard Cosell on Monday I watched Eli and Peyton analyze football for ten minutes and went back to my computer. They knew everything about being NFL quarterbacks and offered me nothing about the metaphysics of children's games. I don't bet on children's games. Children are children and too many are Peter Pan wannabees.
That sums up my opinion of American politics. It is a children's game that belongs only to children and maybe it is time to let our grandchildren study Golding's Lord of the Flies.
Jacinda Ardern New Zealand's Prime Minister called The leader of New Zealand's Libertarians an arrogant prick when microphone was live. Maybe someone can call the Federal Reserve, Jim Jordan, Jamie Diamant and Elon Musk arrogant pricks.
Zelensky played the piano and told us all we needed to know about arrogant pricks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-UiadUOrfk&t=85s
Donald Trump is Glenn Gould without Zelensky's genius.
He is a prick playing the piano accompanied by the Washington Philharmonic Dick Orchestra. They are a bunch of pricks pretending to play music without Zelensky's obvious joy and understanding.
from another discussion:
I'm not quite sure what to make of what Bo Winegard is saying. He seems to have a good grasp of the implications of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution, but some of his opinions seems pretty stretched, running on fumes.
https://quillette.com/2022/12/13/conservatism-in-an-era-of-populist-revolt/
A lot of what he is saying doesn't have much to do with the standard definition of "conservative".
That in itself doesn't matter much to me, he just needs to be clear that he is broadening what he means by "conservative" far beyond the conventional definition, and why.
A question for Aaron: Was the family cat, for whom you advocated its murder, named Lucy short for Lucifer? Hmmmm.
yet another attempt at a meta-narrative that explains the failures of the left-vs-right narrative and the loss of high-social-trust:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/brokenism-alana-newhouse
Brokenism
The real debate today isn’t between the left and right. It’s between those invested in our current institutions, and those who want to build anew.
BY
ALANA NEWHOUSE
NOVEMBER 21, 2022
I live on the border not on the American side.
One of Quebec's problems is that superstition is banned in our public spaces and people from ancient cultures like America and its colonies believe a whole lot of nonsense.
We teach science in schools and religion is literature. Our politics are about policy not ideology and Darwin is still the Messiah about the face in the mirror.
In Quebec religion, gender and race are no longer identities and marriage is a civil contract and/or a religious contract and never the twain shall meet.
We need immigrants, we want all we can get but coming from nations that believe a whole lot of nonsense requires a willingness to change one's beliefs to the beliefs of Quebec society.
New citizens can believe whatever nonsense they want but in Quebec there is an impervious wall between church and state.
In Quebec we are a Secular Humanist Liberal Democracy built on an understanding that we are our brother's keeper.
I believe that particular understanding occurred long before Abraham and his G-d of the Abrahamic religions.
Should by some miracle there is such thing as God why would She be jealous and crave adoration.
Justin Trudeau is a devout Catholic and nobody gives a shit about his private life. He is CANADA's Prime Minister and serves all Canadians even those that hate him because his father said, "You can't legislate morality."
Only in a world of fantasy does God favour the faithful over Socratics.
In Quebec new citizens are a strength not a weakness.
E pluribus Unum is our slogan.
In America it is obviously just a bad joke.
This is the way you vote if you are a white suburban working mother with a college education living in Pittsburgh.
Quebec ain't perfect and the promised land is always just a destination but you don't want your children to grow your food. You want to be happy supervising other people's children.
It just doesn't work any longer.
FBI deliberately lied to social media companies about Hunter Biden laptop (actually three water-damaged laptops – not one) – FBI knew the full truth exactly – laptops were in their possession for ONE (1) YEAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIkwgDOad-A
https://rokfin.com/stream/26440
I use my constant anger to write comments on medium (same user name). It is my therapy. Writing is also userful practice for me because I have to write a lot of documents for work, many of which are political in nature (as in client relations, not elected officials). So therapy and practical application.
BTW: Thanks for the shout out last Thursday on the show!!! For the record, my user name "jlalbrecht" is pronounced: Jay-Ell-Ahlbrekt (my two initials plus my last name).
If you want a bonus point, the "ch" in "Albrecht" is pronounced like a cat about to hack up a fur ball.
Writing is definitely a good creative outlet, and as im sure you can tell i tend to use Useful Idiots articles as mine.
Also, i realized right after taping that it was most likely JL Albrecht, my bad. I'll get it right next shoutout...
You definitely have an interesting job! And yes, a great creative outlet for you!
Thanks and no worries about the pronunciation. I've had my name mangled for decades! 😫😂
The evolution of culture beyond the postmodern disruption of sense making:
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
how do we build the bridge?
From the same author:
https://metarationality.com/bongard-meta-rationality
Robert Kegan is yesterday's Jordan Peterson. We map genomes. We know the math. There is no such thing as normal. Politics is the art of turning ideology into pragmatism. Pierce is medieval and Kagen is yesterday's high priest.
Noah was the town drunkard. He built an Ark and America builds theme parks to celebrate alternate universes just like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Sometimes believing in your own myths and fairytales brings its own rewards.
When I went to school the speed of light was a constant and superconductivity needed close to zero degrees absolute.
Today's news is old news only the lens went from global to American exceptionalism.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/09/nuclear-fusion-heat-record-a-huge-step-in-quest-for-new-energy-source
Science knows no artificial borders.
America is a dying Empire.
This can be a new beginning or an end to civilization.
"Moe" is yesterday's pile of meaningless, grotesquely idiotic, mental dog excrement.
I gotta say I don't think postmodernism hurts anyone or even advocates cultural change. It is a theory about human meaning, culture, symbols, and what not. Postmodernismgate? Have you investigated the subject of social epistemology? It's analytic. Replace 'dollar' with 'fact' and imagine a knowledge economy. Knowledge is power and it is manipulated by the power elite.
a classic on the postmodern disruption of sense making:
https://medium.com/deep-code/understanding-the-blue-church-e4781b2bd9b5
excerpt:
The abstract is this: the Blue Church is a kind of narrative / ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.
We can trace its roots at least as far back as the beginning of the 20th Century where it emerged in response to the new capabilities of mass media for social control. By mid-century it began to play an increasingly meaningful role in forming and shaping American culture-producing institutions; became pervasive through the last half of the 20th and seems to have peaked in its influence somewhere in the first decade of the 21st Century.
It is now beginning to unravel.
In part it is unravelling because of developing schisms within its master narrative, the Blue Faith. These are important, but they are not the subject of this essay. In this essay, I am focusing on what I think is both much more fundamental and much less obvious: deep shifts in technology and society that are undermining the very foundations of the Church. Shifts that render the Church itself obsolete.
...
re: Boomeritis / postmodernism
postmodern social conditions came about after WW2 as a result of the shift from economic production, family farms, industrial manufacturing, to suburban consumerism.
primary postmodern values are pluralism, relativism, and the rejection of "absolutes" (by deconstructing power structures).
primary social pathologies related to the emergence of postmodern social conditions:
extreme forms of narcissism and nihilism, rejection of even "partial truths" in traditional sense making systems, Oikophobia.
Boomeritis is Ken Wilber's weird satire about the cultural evolution of the social "disease" (pathology) of postmodern social conditions and values.
https://metarationality.com/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence
excerpts:
...
Spiral Dynamics contrasts three worldviews, which for some awful reason are called “orange,” “green,” and “yellow.”2 You’ll find the first two, at least, familiar:
Orange
Rationality, science, technology, objectivity
Materialist, capitalist, pragmatic, utilitarian
Autonomy, independence, competition, results
Planning, controls, contracts, procedural justice
Detached, abstract, reductionistic, alienated
European (intellectual) Enlightenment; modernism
Orange tends toward dualism: the wrong idea that the self is totally distinct from the world.
[ https://meaningness.com/dualism ]
Green
Spiritual, emotional, intuitive, subjective
Relativist, pluralist; diversity, multi-culti, “political correctness”
Consensus, dialog, community, process
Harmony, healing, self-realization, social justice
Connecting, supporting, sharing, togetherness
Eastern (spiritual) Enlightenment; postmodernism
Green tends toward monism: the wrong idea that self and other are totally connected.
[ https://meaningness.com/monism ]
The war of orange and green
You can figure this part out, right? These views hate each other; each thinks the other is the fast road to hell.
Yellow
The thing is, orange and green are both right.
They are also both wrong. Their virulent criticisms of each other are both correct. But their own central values are also both correct. We need the right parts of both, without the wrong parts.
That combination, supposedly, is yellow:
Big picture, open systems, networks, global flows
Flexible, simultaneous consideration of multiple perspectives
Tolerance for chaos, change, and uncertainty
Integration of ranking (hierarchy) and linking (community)
Caring combined with freedom
Voluntary, spontaneous cooperation rather than either win/lose competition or compulsory consensus processing
Capacity to act in both orange and green modes as appropriate
If this sounds less specific than the other two, it might be because “yellow” is a work in progress. I do think it’s pointing in the right direction, toward what I call participation. That is the way to avoid the false alternatives of monism and dualism.
[ https://meaningness.com/participation ]