Gates is an engaging speaker. In the linked interview he describes how the signs, symbols, narratives, and beliefs of American society (and much of the world) have been manipulated by what he calls a “criminal syndicate” that operates primarily in the “space” between facts and what the public sees and hears. This syndicate does this by controlling five basic areas—media, education, pop culture, politics, and think tanks. Well-worth listening to.
Tag: anthropology
Why I have become a (reluctant) fascist
Mussolini said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
Just the other day, arch-corporatist Bill Gates called for one-world government or global government.
The Western powers (US, EU, and other dollar-denominated allies) have shown a relentless will to dominate the world. We can see this wherever we look, and especially in the Middle East, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and the current “pivot to Asia” of US foreign policy.
The only serious contenders to a Western-dominated “one-world” government are Russia and China, and I don’t think they have a prayer.
Nothing at home can stop them either. Most Americans are completely unaware that their “democracy” is a sham, that elections are exercises in mass hypnosis, that mainstream media is propaganda, and that the USA is ruled by and for corporations and other powerful groups and individuals. (See: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens)
So I give up. We can only hope that a Western-dominated one-world government will at least pay lip-service to Enlightenment values and at least keep us well-fed and warm in the winter. If huge masses of us want cheaper Internet service and stuff like that, we might get it, but not much else.
Gates’ one-world government will be a corporate-special-interest government. At best it will be a tolerable, if not benevolent, dictator, sort of like the USA today but with nowhere to run to. At worst it will be openly fascist with little patience for dissent or free speech.
We have already seen the demise of free speech in Europe, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, to say nothing of the rest of the world where it traditionally never existed. Though we still have free speech protections here, it should be abundantly clear to thinking Americans that we have been living in a fascist oligarchy since September 11, 2001. The deed has already been done at home. Now, the world.
I can’t bring myself to say if you can’t beat ’em join ’em, but I can say we can’t beat ’em and I know when to give up.
I am resigned to watching friends debate which identical candidate is better than the other, to listening to them repeat ideas taken directly from TV “news,” and to following their spoon-fed “reasoning” about why we need more immigrants or fewer, or fewer guns or more of them, or more police or fewer, or whatever the latest distraction is.
I along with my corporate masters will calmly follow the progress of the Western powers toward world domination and I am resigned to that.
One-world government today means corporatism, fascism. It does not mean something else. The only thing remotely capable of contending with corporatism is nationalism, peoples united within defined territories against it. But who can do that? Russia is trying but they are not strong enough. They may hold off the inevitable for a few more decades but that is it. Same for China.
The Western powers are moving fast and they are moving now because if they don’t get control soon they may lose the chance. My guess is they are all but certain to win. So I have become a (reluctant) fascist. At least I know that about myself.
This line caught my eye
…Chen, the warden, and top guard Wang exchanged themselves for the other hostages. (Six Taiwan inmates commit suicide, ending hostage standoff)
There surely is more to this story and I do wonder about the six suicides. But respect for the warden and guard who switched places with the hostages. Respect for the inmates if the story is more or less as stated. Rather than kill others, they killed themselves when their escape failed.
More detail: Official Says Hostage Takers Shoot Selves in Taiwan Prison
02/07/14 Combat footage: NAF troops entering Tchernukhino [eng subs]
I don’t know much about this vid, but it provides some sense of what is happening on the ground in Ukraine. Not gory and worth viewing, imo. Sent by a friend who is very well-informed on Ukraine.
500 rabbis urge Israel to stop demolition of Palestinian homes
Honestly, this is way late in the game, but still an inspiring move.
Repost: Our techno-future and the importance of the humanities
As AI and robots continue to develop, humans will have less to do.
Many of the human things that seem so important to us today will no longer be important. For example, how will humans be able to maintain their conceit at having status within some cult/culture when a robot will be able to do whatever they are doing better?
Just yesterday Microsoft announced what appears to be a major breakthrough in the technology for translating speech. A computer can now use a simulation of your voice to translate one language into another. The demonstration is English being translated into Chinese. (See this: Microsoft Research shows a promising new breakthrough in speech translation technology. If you want to hear the demonstration, go to the end of the video.)
As a translator, I can appreciate what this technology does. It’s close to the last nail in the coffin of my profession. By the way, this does not bother me at all. Machine translations, as they are called, are already pretty darn good for most written translations. Now Microsoft is giving us pretty darn good real-time interpretations of spoken language. It won’t be long before machines will be able to do all forms of translation faster and better than humans.
The day before yesterday I read an article—UBS fires trader, replaces him with computer algorithm. The replaced trader used to make $2 million per year. The algorithm cost UBS $100,000 to create. The writing is on the wall for other kinds of traders.
Even a great deal of science and technological development—if not all of it—will be done better by machines than humans. Machines can design experiements and conduct them with little or no human input, and one hopes, zero human cheating.
The writing is on the wall for all of us. Most everyone sees it to some degree, but, seriously folks, the writing is getting very big—it’s all over for bio-human conceits. We will almost have no purpose any more, except to be.
In past centuries, we “conquered” nature and stopped needing to fear it or be in awe of it. We surrounded ourselves with technologies that protected us and made us comfortable. But those technologies have grown so much, we will soon be in as much awe of them as we once were of nature. They will dwarf us as much or more than nature did our ancestors a million years ago.
Cars will drive themselves, machines will translate, good science will be conducted by robots, banks will be run by machines, and eventually our brains will be emulated on computers.
All that will remain then is what we now call the humanities—bio-people will still (I’m pretty sure) want to be with other bio-people, share food with them, talk with them, love them. And they will need to communicate better. The machines, by obliterating the conceits of human status and culture that rule the world now, will show us our need to communicate better.
We will use brain scans to assist us, maybe even some form of technological telepathy. But we will still need deeper and better rules for understanding each other. It is my belief that FIML, or something very much like it, will be the foundation for communication in the future.
We have the problem of assimilation.
We have the problem of intermarriage. (Top Democrat Walks Back Critiques of Jewish Intermarriages)
Why did she say it? Why does she have to walk it back? Can anyone in any culture say this? Who controls culture?
Iceland to build first temple to Norse gods since Viking age
Situation in Ukraine
Below is an email from a friend who is well-informed on Ukraine. I get more out of his emails than I do from most news sources. If you want a quick update on what is happening, read on…ABN
Russia has a large vested interest in keeping the rest of Ukraine together, which will only happen as a federalized state with the East having autonomy, similar to Ossetia and Georgia. The Russians’ reason for this are same as they always have been in that they need the east to balance out the rest of Ukraine. There is a lot on the net about this. Although this is needed less and less as the Right Sector becomes more desperate and thus brutal and separates itself out of the population.
Also the U.S. strategy now is just to create a completely failed state and wreak as much havoc as they can as they have no hope of getting their way now. In some ways this is much more dangerous—they may stage a second Chernobyl etc. There is no way out for Kiev now. The whole country, even those in the Galician region are protesting being conscripted etc. That this is still going on at gunpoint is quite the opposite of winning hearts and minds. The right sector has been completely illegitimized as they show only a face of complete brutality. They are bleeding their soldiers and guns; once these are gone the government will collapse.
The word is that Auschwitz without Putin attending has been a diplomatic debacle as the people were aware the Ukrainian representative that took the place of the liberating soviets was Nazi believer. Also that Poland despite it’s own animosity to Russia can easily see the crazies the U.S. installed are way worse and not people you want at the border.
It looks right now like both Turkey and Greece will be realigning to the Russian sphere. Also Serbia is on the verge of exploding again and the U.S. is looking to color revolution Hungary for defiance and looking out for it’s own self interest.
On the HBD Chick Interview
…at the heart of the argument in CofC is the idea that these movements did not stand or fall on the power of their ideas but rather on ethnic networking (summarized in Chap.6, p. 215ff and especially 222-228). For example, the success of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School was not due simply to the intelligence of Freud and Adorno and even less to the (non-existent in the case of psychoanalysis, or fraudulent in the case of the Frankfurt School) data. Their success derived from the group structure of these movements, which centrally involved their co-ethnics, and their ability to gain a foothold in the elite academic world and in the major publishing houses and media outlets, and their ability to ignore or expel dissenters. These movements were like religious cults centered around charismatic leaders (228-230). These movements would never have managed to be successful and influential in a purely individualist scientific culture (pp.234-236). (link)
I agree with MacDonald on this point (and many others). I also believe it is quite easy to see and understand the methods and results of Jewish ethnic nepotism, or ethnic networking.
Jonathan Chait and the End of Liberal Society in the West
The Charles Hebdo affair presents a difficult dilemma to liberals and the left in general. Typically, they have no problem with censorship of views they don’t like. They jump on board campaigns to fire college professors for publishing about race differences or White dispossession, and they shed no tears when some poor soul in the media gets fired for blurting out something about Jewish power in Hollywood. They would love for such people to go to prison. (Link)
It’s not just adults getting fired, but also poisoned, maimed, and harmed in many other ways short of death. And it’s not just adults, but also students with unpopular views being sidelined or undermined by teachers and others. And this sort of thing can occur at very young ages, including severe physical harm.
Antiracism: Sometimes the Consensus Is Phony
Notes
- Humans are semiotic novices and so we tend to be awkward, confused, overwhelmed, misguided in our uses of semiotics.
- We often reify semiotics and/or fixate on them as if they were the real thing rather than the thing itself.
- The Zen story that it is the moon that is indicated by the finger pointing at it and not the finger is a good way of making the above point.
- When semiotics are reified or taken to be the thing instead of the thing, then poses, styles, stories, mental fixations, needs for status and status symbols, many “personality” traits, and many other symbols become more important than they should.
- When this happens people get “stars in their eyes” and sometimes even glow with an imaginary inner “light” that is their fixation on the reified semiotic or some aspect of their reified “self.”
- To a large extent, human societies are ruled by people who fixate on reified semiotics—money, power, false histories, false reasons for wars, the importance of their “noble lies,” their public images, their selves, their society’s aggrandizement, etc.
- Since humans are novice semiotic beings, it all but follows that we would be led by hearty novices, many of whom are blinded by the semiotic “lights” burning in their own minds rather than the actual societies they “lead.”
- Most humans live in a semiotic environment that we treat in much the same way we treated the natural environment within which we evolved. We struggle and strive for reified semiotics rather than actual food and shelter in the natural world.
- In FIML practice, a central point is how semiotics function in real-time.
- It is also important to understand what they are and how they are connected to larger semiotic networks, but it is of central importance to see how they are actually functioning.
- This is why FIML is more a practice than a theory. Once you see how your psychological morphemes are functioning in real-time, you can devise your own theories about yourself if you like.
- A simple way to state the theory of FIML is “suffering is caused by constant failure to understand real-time semiotics and if people have a method (such as FIML) to understand them, they will reduce their suffering.”
- A more positive way to say that is FIML optimizes communication between partners and, by extension, improves communication with non-partners, thus greatly improving psychological health.
- “Personality” is largely a small set of rules used to interpret self, others, the world, communication. These rules are used to reduce ambiguity and to provide a sort of fictional stability.
- Since humans classify a great deal of existential information as stories, we tend to make stories about ourselves and others, or accept stories like that, as if they were real. Once again we see a reification of a semiotic (narrative).
- In truth, we don’t know much about the past or present and even less about the future. In truth our lives and the lives of others are hugely ambiguous, ill-defined, unknowable.
- That’s how it is. At least you can gain a much better level of certainty with your FIML partner, though even FIML analyses have limits. They work well on a human scale and we have nothing better, but even they are not perfect; nothing ever will be.
- Much better is much better than no change at all.
- FIML practice leads to less dependency on external social definitions (semiotics) and more rootedness in the experiences of your own life.
- To be clear, semiotics are good. We learn from them and use them to think and communicate. Semiotics raise us out of ignorance into knowing and out of isolation into communication.
- But once they have raised us, they frequently trap us. For example, you learn some things about history and politics and then decide you are a liberal or a conservative. Then what happens?
- Most people get trapped in their semiotic “choice.” They can’t absorb counter-information or new information. They become trapped in the semiotic network of their political suasion.
- Personal stories, personalities, our stories about others, the world, history, and so on are formed in much the same way. At first the semiotics raise us out of ignorance but eventually they trap is in another sort of ignorance.
- Humans behave within their semiotic environments often worse than wild animals. We fight, destroy, cheat, lie, harm, and kill both with semiotics and because of semiotics.
9-11 in the Academic Community
This video is interesting for what it is—a discussion of how 9/11 is treated by the academic community. It is also interesting because it screams semiotics. At every level we can see the fundamental importance of semiotics and how rational analysis of 9/11 has been sidelined by them. From this, it should be fairly easy to perceive how semiotics affect our perceptions and thoughts on many subjects, including private psychological ones. ABN
American Buddhist Net 