Apr. 27th, 2008

ineffabelle: (Default)
There's a crazy mystical philosopher named Jan Cox. He studied in one of the Gurdjieff groups back in the day and now he runs this extremely weird web page. (Which is great fun to read when you're high off your ass, by the way)
His basic premise is that people's internal languages are basically mostly random bullshit. Your brain is constantly having this sort of meaningless conversation with you, and you're getting that confused with "you", with your actual consciousness. This leads to great hilarity, and makes communication not work so great, since most people repeat what their brain is saying to them. When it's functional things that can be translated into concrete actions, it works well enough. Like if I said "Please pick up that fork over there", your mind has a way of translating that into your own internal representations, assuming you're familiar with picking things up and forks. But if I said "It sure is a nice day", these things don't quite translate so well, I mean, you can still get pieces of my original meaning, but it's getting more nebulous. What makes a day "nice" for instance? And do I mean "day" as in a 24 hour span of time, or do I mean "the part of that span where it's light out"? You will supply your own answers, but there's a good chance they're not the same as mine.
One way around that is to try and silence that internal conversation. Another is to "stop listening" to it. Let the brain ramble on, but just take it as the ravings of a madman. You might even want to make up fun voices to talk back to it, just for laughs, but don't take it as anything else but that.
ineffabelle: (shades)
God bless Alex Jones. He is completely awesome.
Now, let me just say, I don't "believe" in conspiracy theories. But I think they're often a force for good. (except when they're plausible enough and yet fucked up in just the right way, which, funny enough I have a theory about... I think the ruling class often uses them as a sort of "agent provocateur" sometimes, a kind of psy-ops version of COINTELPRO)
The funny thing about them is that it's the "theory" part that they mostly screw up. A lot of them are good at digging up weird contradictions and interesting meaningful facts. It's when they try to explain that shit they get it all wrong.
What I like about Alex Jones is that he doesn't make the mistake of providing a simplistic "them" like "ZOMG! The Jooz!" or "The International Kommunist Konspiracy" or something like that. He basically is assaulting the visible, working agents of the ruling class willy nilly. I don't think he's "right" about a lot of his ideas, but I don't think it matters either...

See to me, for instance, I really don't give a shit who killed JFK. For all I know it was Gay Mexican Ninjas. Which, thinking about it, would actually be awesome if it was. But what's important to me is for people to question "the official story". For people to get the idea that the figures of Authority are constantly lying to them about anything and everything. I mean, they do occasionally say something that's true, because otherwise it would be too obvious.

This is what made Illuminatus! so awesome too. He sets up all these ridiculous and funny conspiracies, but makes them plausible enough that it's an engaging story. So you start to wonder "maybe there is some sort of Gay Mexican Ninja squad working for the Cheerleading Alcohol Vendors". Or at least you start to see that that makes about as much sense as any other theory about these events, conspiracy or "official".

Skepticism is what will eventually save the human race. This is why I'm an optimist.
I'm not a patriot. It's not because I hate America. As far as nation-states go, this one isn't that terrible... yet. I mean, I still live here after all. Some of that though is just immigration laws. I mean the best thing would be to really travel everywhere and find the place that suits you best.
It's just that I think patriotism itself is a sort of warped meme complex, like the worst aspects of religion.

Religion, oddly enough in my opinion, could be the greatest force for good in human civilization, second only to science maybe. But in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy, also like science, it becomes a grave danger to humanity.
The problem is the concept of "faith" and how it gets used to create this sort of memetic blindspot. Like the Muslims getting angry over the Danish cartoons. Um, guys WE'RE NOT MUSLIM, WE DON'T HAVE TO FOLLOW YOUR RULES. But they can't quite make sense of that... they can't see outside their reality tunnel. Well this is also a warping of the concept of "universalism", that The Law Is For All. Which in itself is fine and good, but you can't expect people who don't believe that your law is The Law to agree.

Well, Patriotism and it's dark brother Nationalism have similar failings. The past few years have demonstrated those failings quite well.

Getting back to the JFK thing, one of the problems with the JFK conspiracy theories is that in the end, they just reinforce people's faith in government... like "OMG! They killed the president, how terrible". Mafia bosses often get bumped off by the Commission, or each other, or someone trying to horn in on their turf. It's not a big deal at all. Fuck JFK, that adulterous scumbag. He got no more than he deserved. Or as Malcolm X put it, "the chickens came home to roost". Now Malcolm X's death does bother me a lot, but you don't see a massive groundswell of conspiracy theories about it. Which itself seems like a weird paranoid conspiracy.

Heh.

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