Psychoanalytic Baggage

"Should women be allowed to go topless in public?" https://www.debate.org/opinions/should-women-be-allowed-to-go-topless-in-public
No. But not for the reasons you may think, but for one you may not have considered—maybe. Read the above answers first. Though true, my more flippant opinion is highly qualifiable.   The human species is nothing if not a mess of contradictory cognitive and emotional complications, one of which is the male attachment to the mother (-object). I know you're going to refuse to believe this, nevertheless, it's true (at least in some alternate reality): When a man ogles a woman's breasts, necessarily, through a mostly unconscious series of transformations and transferences, he is remembering his mother. (A woman is most often a mother-substitute to a man.) So, when a man is attracted to a woman's breasts, he needs to get the message: "That's you're mother you're lusting after, you idiot! Is that what you really want to be doing?" Men are hopeless. (But, to be fair, so are women re men, though in a slightly different way.)

So, no, women should not flaunt their maternity in public. It is true, however, that it's not fair to women that there are laws against it. So, in the name of equality, I propose that laws be passed that men not be allowed to go topless either. Fair is fair. And, anyway, there is a similar argument to be made for why women lust after a man's bare chest. So, unless we consensually agree that it's okay to let all our psychoanalytic baggage hang out there for public viewing, keep it under your shirt.
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Criminal Activity

The fact that our government is incapable of dealing with an antisocial criminal president in a timely manner to prevent extensive damage like the kind that we have seen is evidence that we as a people do not deserve to live as a democratic nation. We deserve what we have gotten.

Chomsky has been warning us for a while now: The Independent says:

Noam Chomsky has argued the Republican Party is the most “dangerous organisation in human history” and the world has never seen an organisation more profoundly committed to destroying planet earth.″

The Republican Party is supporting a criminal president and as such self-defines as a criminal organization. Individual Republican representatives may or may not be criminals themselves, but some of them certainly are. And a case could be made that most of the rest of them are guilty of conspiracy. It's way past time to round up these criminals. Doesn't matter that arresting ‶duly elected″ officials who are (supposedly) representing their constituencies is not an act conducive to maintaining a free and democratic society. We're not a democracy any more, and we never will be again until we weed the criminals and their criminal corporate supporters out of the government and outlaw corporate lobbying.

Just as the time for toxic masculinity is over, so is the time for toxic government and toxic civil [sic] society. The time has come to outlaw the GOP (along with the KKK, the NRA, and the Usurper President) before it's too late; because, if we wait any longer, it will outlaw us. That process has already begun—a while ago. Let's stop it in its tracks, reverse its course, and return the country to democracy.

Otoh, this situation can be seen as ‶the will of the people″ since the people who willed it voted (with the support of criminal activity and a disaffected, disenfranchised, and/or dysfunctional electorate) this arrangement into power. So own it if you're not going to do something about it. You who voted for it or did not vote allowed this situation into existence and you enable it if you are not actively opposing it. So do something about it or live with this abortion until they come for you and your family. And, make no mistake about it: They will come, unless you yourself behave yourself and act or pretend to act as the perfectly obedient little citizens they want you to remain, so that they can keep the cash flow moving ever upward while they dole out your pittance that you struggle on to survive.

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Hollywood's Populist Reign

The government, in many of its aspects and personages, understands that Hollywood poses a big threat to its power and authority; which is why it doesn't overtly act against piracy and only institutes ineffective token remedies. It needs that check against what might become an otherwise ubiquitous agency. Government must discover how to incorporate the film industry into its overall structure of control. Thus far, it has been unsuccessful. One day it might manage a solution; and then, next, piracy will be brought under its control. Then copyright need no longer exist or will remain just another tool in the arsenal of the supreme authority.

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Resist control.

Use Your Brain

message to students (or anyone):

Congress is NOT going to listen to you, UNLESS you make it worth their while. Corporations and rich elitists make it worth their while with money. But, if you don’t have a lot of it, you need something else. Strikes work. Mass assembly works. Disobedience is best. When they don’t have your support, they start to get nervous. The less support they get, the more they worry. Protest. Don’t let up. Use the internet. They are most afraid of that. Because they don’t understand it; they don’t really know how it works. Oh, some of them think they do. But for most of them it’s foreign to their retro mentality. They think it’s, at its best, a communication system. They don’t know it’s a brain. They’re not biologists; they don’t understand cell theory.
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Are We There Yet?

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message for all good little citizens:

Writers of TV shows, films, books, stories, ads, etc. take advantage of people’s emotional “baggage” by assembling the cues and prompts that stir up those emotions into a manipulative system of psychological control. When you participate in these pseudo-social events, you allow yourself to be jerked around by your emotions. This is not what these for the most part archaic mechanisms were evolved to do; they are survival mechanisms better replaced with more highly evolved rational thought, except that most of us (maybe all of us, at least at times) are not very capable in this realm of existence yet. I blame that persistent condition on the conservatives who thwart the advance of civilization by restricting education and therapy to the smallest group possible, thereby better insuring their greater degree of wealth and power. If you are not properly educated, you are not enabled to compete as effectively in a token society, let alone avoid the manipulative agendas that control you and morph you into good little compliant unknown citizens or radically disenfranchised non-entities.

We Have Met the Zombies and They Are Us

Tolerance is the failure point of democracy? If you tolerate intolerance, you permit and enable forces that will eventually cause your position’s tolerant demise, because intolerance will kill off tolerance if it is given its lead unless tolerance takes an intolerant stand against it, which defeats it anyway when the tolerant become intolerant, transformed into its opposite like a person becomes a zombie in The Walking Dead—which is a perfect parable for the nature of intolerance: You cannot tolerate intolerance, which means you cannot be a tolerant person unless you exclude yourself completely from intolerant people, which the zombies are a metaphor for. In the Walking Dead, when intolerant Merle, who has relied on intolerance to survive, realizes he’s been an asshole and does a u-turn to help out the “family,” he is killed and turns into a walker, which brooks no alternative but to eat people. In other words, the walkers are the epitome of intolerance. They are mindless intolerance. The only defense against them is to kill their (mindless) brains. Humans, even the mindful ones, conclude that you cannot tolerate a blind force that will ultimately kill you given half a chance. This is a fundamental flaw in human nature, which is, still, in the process of evolving toward “a more perfect union,” which only tolerance can promote. People of advancing evolution see the advantages of democracy as an institution that enables the maximization of both individuality and cooperative social interaction. But democracy requires tolerance. If intolerant people are excluded, individuality, to whatever degree necessary, is disallowed. In practice, it becomes a matter of a workable mean; extremes (like Charlottesville) must be avoided. But how do we do that without becoming intolerant? Proper policing might help a great deal; but we have seen that police forces often harbor and may readily exercise intolerance, especially when it comes to defending intolerant people who tend to align with policing mentality. Separation of “sides” can also help; but that’s just another way of separating us out instead of joining us into a more perfect union. And, anyway, one of the sides that we are separating doesn’t seem to be any more or less tolerant than the one they are being separated from; and the truly tolerant people are many miles away, staying out of it altogether, which is not a solution, but an escape from the problem inherent in the practice of tolerance; or, iow, we “sane” people do not tolerate the intolerance of either side. We will not let the zombies eat us if we can help it, and we will not kill them off; but we will exclude them from our social interaction, which itself is an intolerant practice. I can only conclude that we humans are hopelessly intolerant. Maybe, one of these millennia, we will have evolved into a better, more inclusive state of existence. But we are not there yet. Humans exist on a tolerant/intolerant spectrum. We each have our degrees of each, which becomes prompted by circumstance. When we are tolerant, we are nice people, pleasant to be around; when we are intolerant, we are assholes who seek others like unto ourselves that we may engage in hate together in a less perfect union. Existing pleasantly together, we epitomize the vision of our democratic principles; existing hatefully together, we yet pretend to practice these principles. But we do not. We cannot be both intolerant and democratic at the same time; and yet that is exactly what we would have happen. And since America is in principle a democracy, and since to be patriots means that we aspire to and adhere to those principles, when we are intolerant of others, we are not by definition patriots. The intolerant extremists who claim to be patriots are not; and on that perception, they may be excluded—except that our laws include them a priori. They were born here. So let them die here. In one way or another. Death always wins, in any case.

Stupid is as Stupid Does: The Making of an Unpresident

The truly stupid people are those who (feel they must) believe that Trump is more stupid than they are—while he redirects their agendas with his apparently stupid antics (like ‘unpresidented’—which I happened to think was an ironically brilliant remark). He will become our unpresident, and he knows it. He absolutely fucking intends to be just that. And, in choosing to make a word-choice error, he sends the message out to “his” people (and, especially, to people who might be on the fence about joining “his” people) that, despite his wealth, he is, after all, just an ordinary ignorant person like they are; and he gives them hope that they too could one day become as rich and famous as he is. It’s a stupid message for stupid people, but it is not stupidly constructed and delivered. It’s pure genius. And, finally, it’s also a vague reference to the lefties who are so hell-bent upon unseating him before he even gets seated. Trump is taunting them, poking fun at their determination to “unpresident” him, snickering behind their backs as they make fools of themselves and continue to alienate those level-headed, mature progressives who would rather be working as responsible adults than chasing their tails trying to derail a president via character assassination before he even gets started. There is no sense in pursuing this course. If his character has not been assassinated by now, it never will be. His detractors are feeding him energy with their  diatribe. He thrives on this stuff; he always has. He’s rope-a-doping the Democrats (and out-of-line Republicans) left and right. They fall for his silly little tricks time after time. Leave him alone. He’s sucking all the energy out of the country with his attention-grabbing antics as he changes subjects by distracting people away from what they should be paying attention to. If you want to do some good, if you feel you must protest “in the streets,” go to Standing Rock instead. That’s the front line of the war, where the real social and cultural damage is being done. You’re not going to stop Trump before he starts, and you’re not going to slow him down much once he does. He’s got you all by the nose and leading you where he wants you to go. Wake up. There are important things to be done, and trying to out-trump Trump is not one of them. Is your intent to prove that you are every bit as uncaring, crass, rude, and boorish as he is? Because, if it is, you’re succeeding. He’s managed to lower you to his level and you can expect him, with his best denial and projection tactic, to turn around on you and point out how badly you are acting. He’s sucking you into his game and he’ll continue to do it for the next eight years if you don’t wake up to what he’s all about. Don’t be so stupid as to believe that he’s the stupid one. He didn’t win the election because he’s stupid; he won it because you are.

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final solution: to be or not to be is not a question

There’s no question that climate change (global warming) is happening.

But I see no evidence, let alone scientific proof, of the eotw scenarios.

All the computer simulations depend on too many assumed variables.

And they tend to ignore possible human intervention and remediation.

Not to mention unforeseen circumstances and disregarded science.

Will people die? Undoubtedly. By the millions probably. Oh well.

Will the planet die? I very much doubt it. Life is highly adaptable.

Will the human race go extinct? One can only hope. But I doubt it.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll even wake up to necessities we now ignore:

Population control. Efficient food and meds production/distribution.

Universal healthcare. Universal affluence. The end of armed conflict.

Demilitarization. The end of weapons manufacture. The end of borders.

World government. Yeah, I know. Those ideas offend fascists globally.

That’s the big one, then: the end of fascism, xenophobia, and racism.

Think it will never happen? Think it is all pie-in-the-sky impossibility?

Then why take the negative side and think we will all die out so soon?

Your doomsday scenarios are just as likely or unlikely as my utopia.

It’s all a matter of conjecture and expectation. Expect the worst; get it.

Mass hysteria and hallucination create reality: we are now nuclear.

Extinction is just the next stage in humanity’s self-fulfilling prophecy.

But we have a choice: we can go on as we are or we can face the truth:

We are making this all happen. Life takes care of itself, absent humans.

But a thought just occurred to me; maybe our extinction is the solution.

Maybe life’s wisdom convinces us to kill ourselves off to save all else.

I could get behind that idea. Problem is, how much do we take with us?

If we’re intent on offing ourselves, why not leave other species behind?

Or is that the true nature of humans, to destroy everything as we go?

Maybe it is, after all. Whichever, it’s not up to you or me, but all of us.

 

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emotional pathology

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. [REM]

Understanding how eotw scenarios might play out, especially when they are based in very real interpretations (not paranoid, but grounded in solid scientific and rational studies) of situations and events, is important. We should avoid at all costs the temptation to bury our heads in the sand and feel content to let the future fall where it may. But these considerations must be balanced against the fundamental idea that, no matter how much we may want to believe otherwise, we cannot know for certain what will happen in the future. The dour Chicken-Littles of the world who run around bemoaning the fate of humanity and the planet, though they may turn out to be absolutely correct, do no favors to anyone, least of all themselves. I say that we must understand the truth about what’s going on and what seems likely or even merely possible to happen, but to bring such emotion, and certainly much neurosis, to the planning table is ridiculous. That “strategy” only serves to trade any present peace and goodwill for future (and perhaps vain) assurances. Leave the emotion at home, people; wallow in it at night when you awaken out of your horrific dreams. And, in the brightening morning, in light of day, consider this: You may believe this is all going to happen to us tomorrow or next week, but it’s not; not even next month or next year. And the bits of it that are happening right now, the real-time ongoing situations and events, are concerns enough; by dealing with them, properly and adequately, rationally and objectively, in the present, we effectively deal with them in the future as well. My big point here is this: these catastrophes you worry about, these imagined nightmare scenarios, will in no way be avoided because you have gotten all bent out of shape, emotionally charged, and driven to despair (even to the point, as more than one person has testified to me, of imagining how you might, as painlessly as possible, kill yourself so as to avoid the time when food and energy shortages have created a world where you must live cold, hungry, and without your internet or TV). Yes, we need rational, scientific solutions to present day problems so that they do not escalate further; but your anxiety is misplaced when it’s projected onto a failing planet. It’s you you’re worrying about, not the future of humanity. Get a grip. More than likely, certainly if you are over 40 or 50 years of age, you will be gone before conditions deteriorate to a point of what you might consider severity. (The scaremongers who say the end is just around the corner are wrong; their message is an outshoot of their pathology.) And, likely, if are younger than 40 or 50, you’re not one of the end-of-the-worlders; those kids are dealing. [I make a minor exception to my angst-dismissal for mothers (and wussy-tending fathers) of younger kids, with one caveat to this caveat: consider how your biological attachment may be affecting your rational judgment.] So, in short, potential eotw scenarios may or may not have a very real basis in science, but the near-hysteria phenomenon attached to them is an emotional disorder. Deal with that (pathological) issue, and you’ll be fine. 

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I Want to Believe

I believe—“believe,” unscientifically, more as a matter of faith, like maybe as an aspect of my personal religion, which worships fantasy (like, actually, all religions do)—that the human brain can only hold so much information, and when it nears its maximum capacity, it starts to dump content, transferring it, first, to a less accessible holding area and then, later, when that area fills up, dumping it permanently. This is my explanation for Alzheimer’s. People thus afflicted have input too much information throughout their lives and have reached their capacity; or, perhaps, they didn’t have all that much capacity to begin with. This “explanation” (I hesitate, even, to raise it to the level of hypothesis) is, of course, entirely flippant. I want to believe, like others who, often pretending it to be scientific fact, purport that the human brain uses only one-tenth of its capacity; but I find that claim no more rational than my own “religious” tenet. We just don’t know. And we probably never will; because AI will probably far outdistance us and replace us before we could ever rise to a technological level sufficient enough to find out; or else it will make us irrelevant. I mean, do we, even as scientists, care how much capacity the brain of a monkey has? We, humans, are the next monkeys. Well, actually, that’s what we’ve always been.  

And speaking of marginal hypotheses [is that what I was doing?] I believe in—nay, let me qualify the qualification: I more than believe; I accept as scientific fact—the theory of evolution. And, if my scientific education were not enough, I have personal anecdotal experience that confirms the theory. When I was working at my last job, I was looking through a National Geographic magazine one day while in the office eating my lunch, and I saw a picture of a chimpanzee and, honest to Darwin, it looked exactly like a guy who worked for me: same eyes, same nose, same chin and ears. Except for its smaller stature, it could have been his twin. Next time you’re at the zoo, examine the great apes closely. These are people! How can anyone except a totally self-deluded person not intuitively understand whence we humans came?


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a culture of expediency

See, we plan ahead, that way we don't do anything right now.

Kevin Bacon, Tremors

Every time I alter my schedule method to try to accommodate the lady, or anybody or anything, the “requests” [usually accompanied by one or another form of disguised threats (in her case, to hire someone to do the work; in other cases, oh, it could be pretty much anything, like do this when we tell you to or else: your car will not be road legal and we’ll stop you and fine you and you’ll have to do it anyway; you will be in arrears on your taxes and all kinds of further intimidation will take place; we’ll arrest you and put you in jail because all citizens must serve on jury duty otherwise the Amerikan justice system will not work—yeah, as if it works now as it is)] for more immediate task results usually end up scuttling my method, because my method works, when I do it my way: I wait; everything is done in its own time, when its time has come. But when I must do something right now or very soon because it is so damn important to whatever Nazi says it is, I can’t handle it, because, if it were truly so important as people will make it out to be, if it were truly such an emergency that it be done now, there would be no choice in the matter, not even a consideration for when it should be done. True emergencies get taken care of immediately because there is no choice; all other tasks get scheduled. So, the real issue becomes: whose schedule are we going to use, mine or someone else’s? I say mine makes far more sense. But ours is a culture of expediency. Get it done now, get it done fast, and move on. Productivity reigns. What a bunch of bullshit.

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encryption matters

You can use communication channels to transfer illegal info, or you can use them to communicate in private legally.

The only way to discover which exchanged info is legal and which is illegal is to monitor all of it; iow, to abolish private communication.

To separate out illegal from legal content, you have to observe it. This requires that the right to private correspondence must be done away with.

Thus, copyright monopoly is pro sharing of information (no privacy) when it belongs to somebody else, but against it when it belongs to them:

They maintain that they are allowed to access your private content, but you are not allowed to access theirs, unless you pay them for it.

The right to share knowledge and culture is dependent upon the right to correspond in private. That said, they can buy my content if they wish.

That is only fair: if I must buy yours, then you must buy mine; and I warn you ahead of time, just so you know—I am not at all cheap.

If you want to know what I am sharing or otherwise doing on the net, pay me; or else stop invading my privacy. End government surveillance.

Support corporate dismantlement. 

Where Are the Guillotines?

Scott Adams says he’s endorsing Hillary because he’s afraid, living in California, that his (thus far very accurate) predictions about Trump’s political success looks to crazy anti-Trump protestors (does he mean Mexican nationals and illegal immigrants?) like he’s a Trump supporter and he worries that, not supporting Trump’s opponent, he will otherwise make himself a target for violence. This is, of course, a very wrong reason for endorsing any candidate and, anyway, Scott is rich enough to be able to afford several bodyguards to protect him from all but a many-peopled coordinated assassination attempt—which is highly unlikely given his less than ubiquitous popularity.

So I suspect there’s a lot more to Adams’ endorsement than his stated reasons, like some reverse psychology, maybe? His whole focus since last August has been the explication of the art and science of persuasion, and I see buried in not so obscure a fashion within his seemingly rational approach to the subject lots of persuasive little machinations. So consider this explanation of his endorsement motive: People reading Scott’s blog entries might start getting and spreading the idea (he has a small but highly intelligent blog-fan base) that it’s dangerous to be pro-Trump, that certain groups of liberals (e.g., illegal immigrants?) might be every bit as much of a physical threat as hard-core red-neck conservatives are, and that choosing to support Hillary over The Don, especially because you might want to be safe from violence, is not perhaps so wise; i.e., there is a more or less equal danger from both sides. Consider all of that in light of the fact that Scott frequently conducts little word-experiments to judge reactions (he calls it A-B testing) or simply to see what might proceed from his odd proposals.

Add here into the mix the suggestions from Anonymous et al. that the conventions and events leading up to them are not going to be quite so peaceful as participants might like, and it’s somewhat easy to see how the issue of violence is a theme rife for exploitation. I’m doing just that right now. I want to see political violence, riots in the streets, physical clashes between right and left. Viva la revolution. I do not want to see business as usual for the next four or eight—or fifty—years. If we must have corruption, I want the elitists to suffer at the hands of a corrupted proletariat. Guillotines in the city parks. Mansions broken into, looted, and set ablaze. And, above all, political change. The oppression must end. The people are ready. Let’s rise up and overturn the regime. If Trump cannot do that, let him be elected so that he can become the scapegoat. Because Hillary is just more of the same, and Bernie is a hopeless case at this point, I am guessing. Unless, of course, Hillary crashes and burns as her sins of the past come back to bite her in her fat white pants-suited ass.

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And Then

Conservatives, especially upper management jerks (apart from rational, primarily economic, conservatives a la William F. Buckley, et al.) are sociopaths. Conservatism in general in this sense is sociopathy, but only when measured against the population as a whole as opposed to elitist factions of it—because sociopathy is relative to social standards and values: if everyone in a society is an egocentric asshole, then conservatives will fit right into a society without conscience. (Resemble any country/government we know?) Liberals, on the other hand, are just plain unrealistic. It can be tough for some to resist their warm-hearted message when it’s obvious they care so much about the downtrodden masses who can never seem, in any way, to help themselves. Survival of the fittest, the conservatives say, not caring that a large part of the population, especially in this latter post-industrial age where the social structure has devolved into narrow specialized groupings that insist upon pigeonholing workers into restricted categories, is significantly compromised. We no longer have the “tribal” units that act to incorporate all members as best they can, and conservatives are happy to disregard anyone who cannot rise to the “responsible” level of fitting themselves in. Well, okay then. Let’s see how fit the conservatives are when the revolution comes. The fitter members of the disenfranchised citizens, at some point, will not take it any more. And then ...

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caught in the net

Dude, seriously, why in the hell would you care????? You're going to be eligible for Social Security soon, relax... It's *not* your world anymore... Let it go... Step back... Stake out a spot, keep the idiots out, and enjoy the rest of your life... Remember when you stick your toe in someone else's mud puddle, usually it's going to come out dirty...

Scott Adams blog commenter COWG

This is a good philosophy. I’ve practiced it pretty much all my life. Too bad it doesn’t work. Just because you decide that you’re going to leave them alone doesn’t mean they will leave you alone. Yeah, you can stake out a spot and try to keep the idiots out, but there’s one set of idiots, the big guys, who will insist upon knowing what you’re up to and believe they have the right to know it. They think the whole world is their mud puddle. You can keep as low a profile as you can, but unless you’re determined that you will comply with their every little whim, eventually you’re going to run afoul of their petty laws, rules, and regulations. And nowhere is this more relevant than on the internet. If you want to stay off their radar, start by staying off the net. And, to my mind, that’s not a valid way to spend the rest of my life.

It’s a difficult and far from mainstream effort to stake out your own spot, keep your head down, and keep the idiots out if you maintain a presence on the net. The only way to effectively do it is to be a part of the vast and growing alternative net undercurrent: proxies, VPNs, DarkNet, etc. And if you do, they will try to ferret you out, with whatever two-steps-behind effort. And it doesn’t matter how close to Social Security you are. They’re persecuting grandmothers now just for doing what half the population of the world is doing.

Oppression is upon us, and the elitists are not going to give up until they either get all of your money and put you in the gaol if they must or you get to them first and put an end to their domination. The only other way is to get yourself a place in wilds of Montana, stock it with everything you need, get all of whatever else your daily living requires from a local store, and—especially—stay off the goddamn net! Because, if they’re going to get you, that’s the way they’re going to do it, son.

corporate abuse

I want to belong to K-Mart’s Shop Your Way bonus club for the reward points that I can deduct from my purchases, but I don’t want to receive their promo emails; but the club policy requires that, if am a member, I must receive these emails. Therefore, even though I agree to receive them by default, I still consider them to be scum spam and I treat them accordingly by dismissing them outright and relegating them to the trash folder automatically. Maybe one day I’ll take some kind of action that more directly addresses this "disrespect” (for lack of a better word; “abuse” is probably too strong) of customers who spend money at their stores.

This issue is larger and more profound than K-Mart, though. It was not all that long ago that most customer service reps would bend over backwards to satisfy a complaining customer; but no longer. Now they tell you when you complain that they’re sorry (they’re still required to be polite) but they can do nothing for you because the issue is a matter of policy. Oh, I see. You have a policy. Well, that makes it all right then. I do admit that a certain type of customer will abuse the former bend-over-backwards policy, but then I could care less if corporations are abused—because, despite law to the contrary, they are not individual people, they are non-living  entities and thus by definition cannot be (psychologically) abused.

OTOH, corporations abuse customers all the time. In fact, the argument can be made that the very existence of corporations as individuals is a form of abuse. But, beyond that, selling by and large is no longer so much a means of providing a quality product or service as it is a means of getting as much money as possible for as little quantity and quality as possible; or IOW, maximization of profits. This is a form of customer abuse. It treats the customers as if they are idiots, which, unfortunately many of them are, which is why the corporations can get away with what they do. And the government supports the corporations because it is bought and paid for by them; and it’s probably too late to reverse this. The corruption has gone too far. No “peoples’ representative” is going to bite the hand that feeds them.

Support Corporate Dismantlement

The Oppression of the Zombie Dead

Until we understand how we are obliged to lead our lives in ways we don’t particularly enjoy (“The mass of men enter into social and productive relations independent of their will.”—Marx), until we understand more of those reasons why so many of us feel dead inside so much of the time, yes, until we recognize how much of that is not due solely to our lack of imagination or the grinding confines of a responsible life, but is also the product of vast institutional systems of greed, injustice, and manipulation that we are schooled to perceive as relatively benign manifestations, we have arrived nowhere. The only way I can tell something terrible is going on is that I feel a little duller than I ought to. Very often that’s at the end of a long chain, you might say, of social processes designed to keep us malleable, amenable, and short on such powerful emotions as outrage at injustice.

Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art

What percentage of the populace has to be anti-government before the government collapses? How many people have to be declared outlaws? How many people must routinely break laws they consider unfair? How many put into prison or saddled with an arrest record? Surely the rates to all those phenomena are rising and have been for quite some time until they now near a critical mass and the established powers are finding themselves besieged and thus fighting back as best they can, believing that to be their only defense. And they are not ineffective at it, just wrong. They are devastating in their death-throe lashings. Oppression is a natural, very human inclination of those like-minded individuals whose propensity is to form into a cohesive group to insulate themselves against any wayward type of thought process to make certain their own decided way of life predominates, and they set about to make sure their domination prevails, pushing back against all forces of change that do not benefit their cabalistic position. They may be the past, but the past hangs on for as long as it can. And meanwhile people unjustly suffer and die. I too feel a little duller. And the only way I now how to stir myself up to fight back is to write: Death to all tyrants. The only problem is, the tyrants don’t believe they are; and if you put them to death, then you become the tyrant. So we die inside instead, little by little, and the oppression continues. But there’s a light beyond the darkness:

If you don't want people to use the dark net, don't mess up the legit networks with back doors and warrantless wiretaps, 'express lanes,' censorship, using them for political pressure. … Or people will create worse versions and route around you.

The Huffington Post

They just don’t get it. Their greed and hubris blind them to reality. The truth is, if they’re going to coerce people into bending to their will, the people will find another way to do what they want to do. They’ll do an end run, they always do, and there are a whole lot more ends today than there used to be. Progress used to be slow so that the oppressors might survive a lifetime in their oppressive roles and die natural deaths. But with technology speeding up geometrically there’s no way the oppressors can maintain the oppression in postmodern society. They’re going down. Their days are numbered. They’re increasingly becoming irrelevant. They can’t keep it up. The anti-system will increasingly press in on them. Their defense of the realm will get harsher and harsher the harder it is to maintain. Increasing numbers of citizens will die as the oppressors try to keep the system together. But they’re already dead but just don’t know it yet, which is what the popularity of the zombie symbolism is all about: they’re the walking dead and we’re cutting off their heads all around the world.

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Holywood

Corporations and their agents and salesmen are predators, and you are their prey. If you believe yourself to be a customer, you are duped in exactly the way they want you to be. The concept of customer is rapidly going the way of the horse and buggy. There is no better example of this than Holywood, the fictional land that we worship because it tells us what we are supposed to think and, especially, to feel. The Holywood corporations’ customers are turning to piracy in logarithmically expanding numbers because the corporations are unwilling to give them what they want, movies that are not so exorbitantly priced (if even available in certain foreign countries) and immediate access to digital versions of released films. Theaters too, the Holywood churches distributed throughout the world, are dying, but the corporate millionaires just can’t let go of the billions that their price gouging nets them to settle for mere multi-millions in online digital sales. Instead, they choose to continue to disaffect larger and larger numbers of their current and would-be customers through arbitrary lawsuits of helpless citizens, the bribery of politicians, and the manipulation of governments around the world, increasingly alienating public opinion.

Yes, Holywood is going away, even as are (though, admittedly, far, far too slowly) the religions of the world as the intelligence of atheism spreads the truth and science dispels the myths and superstitions we have suffered with for far too long. It’s a dead-end, Sodom and Gomorrah town, but it just doesn’t know it yet. Maybe that’s why they make so many zombie movies. They’re so self-involved. Compare independent vs. Hollywood movies: art vs. lowest common denominator sensationalism; e.g., Winter’s Bone vs. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. We would all be better served if Holywood would just fade away completely, but it will continue to put up a desperate fight trying to take down as many people as it can with it. Maybe if the mindless masses of mental morons who are titillated by tits and asses and violence and gore went to better movies, they might raise their intelligence just a little bit. Any little bit will help the species. But out and out death is probably much better.


Support Corporate Dismantlement

can't steal this

Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral. [Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book]

Time to turn to something new. (Everything old is new again.) The issue for me is not the narrow focus of the piracy itself. There are far larger legal and political issues here: The mainstream culture/system we live under is based on oppression. This is the traditional criticism of capitalism by Marxism: The proletariat is incorporated into the system as wage-slaves. But, though capitalism is dying, its death throes are devastating.

The world is about to change, threatening to enable true democracy. Free interchange of data, including (one’s own) ideas is available. The Internet has changed everything and threatens the status quo. Used to be we could loan a friend or neighbor a disk; but what if… Our best friend or next-door neighbor may be half-a-world away.

I buy a product but I do not own it, ownership is retained by the seller. The problem is with the erroneous concept of “intellectual property.” Jefferson did not believe in copyright and compromised at three years. Now, for some products, it is the lifetime of the author plus seventy.

Before 1900, music was performed; now the issue is recordings. The entire essence of music is repetitive performance. A musician creates a song every time s/he performs it. Recordings subvert this process, introducing conformity. The (recorded) musician is no longer a performance artist. S/he is now a business person, locked into a business system.

Writing is similar, the intellect creating via performance. And then the intellectual journey is over for the writer. Time for the writer then to sell his work and start again. And if others copy it, that’s just business, not writing. But artists want to live off their past performance. What if painters retained their ownership of art they sold? Oh, wait, they do, when they put it on the internet. Images, mass produced, have become intellectual property.

This all inhibits further ongoing performance. Artists should create until they die, that’s the whole point. That’s what being an artist means: doing (performing) art.

Ideas and (mental) images are free; people who buy might be stupid. If they buy as a beneficent means of supporting an artist, great. If they buy because they want a mass produced hard copy, fine. If they buy as a matter of convenience, okay; so be it. In the past, it was convenient to buy a book or a painting. Going to a library or an art gallery was less convenient. So, how is getting a book at a library different from copying it? Being in permanent possession is somehow different from a loan?

It’s not the item being owned or loaned that’s important, but content. And content resides in brains, not books or digital files. “Content” is useless unless it is interpreted by a brain. This is what net connections are all about, the connection of brains. Which is why I say that copyright is an erroneous precept. [Caveat: I live in this system, and if it insists I participate, well, then… You better not steal my ideas unless you make all ideas free. And yet…I am seriously considering the Gandhian principle: “Be the change.”]

Anti-piracy and copyright is okay only if you believe in the system. If, as a pirate, you support capitalism, then you are acting illogically. But if you see through the farce into the basic oppression beneath it… Faux-democracy capitalism must prevent piracy at all costs. That’s why it pours so much money into a dying enterprise. They could make nearly as much money by closing down the theaters. They could make nearly as much by releasing products immediately. But they’d pull down the lid of their coffin, by allowing true freedom. We can’t have any of this democracy stuff here, it’s bad for business. So the “authorities” say: Thou shalt not share files, yet they deem some entities worthy of still owning what they have sold, the fact that we have bought it being irrelevant.

a whole lot more

The effect on me of the raid and shutdown of Pirate Bay has been that I have learned a whole lot more about how to download torrents and, especially, how to find magnets without the aid of a piracy search engine; and how to do all that far more safely. The MPAA and the RIAA have done more to promote piracy than they’ve done to inhibit it. Every time they make some dramatic move, piracy increases by leaps and bounds. I seriously doubt there’s any way to stop it now short of shutting down the internet. It seem inevitable that democracy (of a libertarian sort), though it may not prevail within the system as a whole, will become the order of the day on the internet—or at the very least on the Dark Net.