Great Long-form Articles

[Mordecai]

Recently read this one courtesy of ferball...

The Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy

from: The Illuminati Conspiracy - The Sapien System Donald Holmes, MD(C)(1987) New Falcon Publication 655 East Thunderbird Phoneix, AZ 85022...

worldtradecenter911.blogspot.com

"From this evolutionary perspective, every paranoid is partly right. The major error of the paranoid appears to be his characteristic belief in one jumbo Mega-Conspiracy that explains everything This is impossible, because it violates basic laws of primate psychology. Domesticated primates like wild primates are mischievous, sly and have a keen sense of humor: the double-cross is their most characteristic invention."

Anyone else got any longer reads they've enjoyed recently?

 

[Mordecai]

The Movie Assassin

How The English Patient almost ruined my life.

popula.com

Can't explain why yet but this is one of my all-time favorite articles.

"I thought a lot about my lying review of that racist, boring, laughable, pseudo-intellectual movie. I thought about how at the time, I was proud of myself for having the courage to make shit up because I was afraid to disagree with someone I wanted to impress, and also afraid of not making money. That one decision had led to a lot of other similar ones and had eventually ended up as an agreement with myself to spend over 10 years of my life being a different person than the one I had planned on being and feeling smug about being good at writing crap and then even actually starting to think the crap was good because of the money I was given to produce it. I look at all the people in tech who are convinced they are saving the world, that what they do matters. When the money goes, and it will, that feeling will go with it.

If you write thousands of sentences that have absolutely nothing to do with what you think or feel those sentences are still what you will become. You can turn yourself into another person. I turned myself into another person."

 

[Snake_Baker]

Recently read this one courtesy of ferball...

The Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy

from: The Illuminati Conspiracy - The Sapien System Donald Holmes, MD(C)(1987) New Falcon Publication 655 East Thunderbird Phoneix, AZ 85022...

worldtradecenter911.blogspot.com

Anyone else got any longer reads they've enjoyed recently?

RAW is a brilliant scallywag

 

[Mordecai]

https://folks.pillpack.com/my-father-the-werewolf/ not for the faint of heart.

"I think about my father’s generosity a lot. My father was generous, but he was also depressed, and the nature of depression is to be selfish: to starve those who love you of the best of you, in the relentless feeding of that which can never be nourished. In that, he—the most depressed person I ever met—was also the most selfish. For my entire life, he would give me anything I asked for, as long as it was a movie or a book. But when my mother and I begged him half a dozen times to go see a doctor if he loved us, he wouldn’t lift a finger. How do generosity and selfishness co-exist like that in a person without destroying him?"

 

[Mordecai]

Ricky Jay’s Magical Secrets

From 1993: The magician’s deft illusions flout reality, and he rejects the notion that magic is a suitable entertainment for children.

www.newyorker.com

"Prodded by Slydini and his grandfather, he entered several performing competitions at magic conventions. “I always won,” he says. “But the whole thing soured me on the idea of competitions within an art.” By the time he was fifteen, he had had enough of living at home. He moved in with a friend’s family, moved back home again, moved to the resort town of Lake George, in upstate New York (where he discovered what it was like to support himself as a pro), and, before he turned eighteen, had left home for good. He either did or did not officially complete high school—another one of those elusive memories. Max Katz died around that time. At the funeral, Flosso ceremonially broke a wand and placed it in the casket—“the single most frightening thing I ever saw,” Jay says. His grandfather’s death marked the end of his relationship with his parents."

 

[ferball]

RAW is a brilliant scallywag

Indeed.

This about confirmation bias before anyone invented the term. Its a chapter from one of his "self help" books.

What the Thinker Thinks, the Prover Proves - Robert Anton Wilson aka Old Bob :) — Steemit

The following is an excerpt from: Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, and has been reprinted with permission.… by kevinrussell

steemit.com

 

[Mordecai]

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/...hen-you-cast-lindsay-lohan-in-your-movie.html for anyone watching The Masked Singer wanting a long read on Lindsay Lohan. Fun read.

"He went back to his room at the Orlando Hotel in Beverly Hills and left it to Pope to deliver the bad news. Pope finally reached Lohan, telling her she was done. Lohan began to cry and begged for another chance. Pope told her that Schrader had made up his mind.

Lohan headed for the Orlando. She pounded on doors until she found Schrader’s room. As she banged on his door, she texted him manically. Schrader could hear her crying but wouldn’t let her in. He texted her instead.

“Lindsay, go home.”"

 

[Mordecai]

Indeed.

This about confirmation bias before anyone invented the term. Its a chapter from one of his "self help" books.

What the Thinker Thinks, the Prover Proves - Robert Anton Wilson aka Old Bob :) — Steemit

The following is an excerpt from: Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, and has been reprinted with permission.… by kevinrussell

steemit.com

I really don't understand what I read here.

I understand basically the thinker and prover concept but none of the exercises. Particularly 8 and 9. It's over my head.

 

[ferball]

I really don't understand what I read here.

I understand basically the thinker and prover concept but none of the exercises. Particularly 8 and 9. It's over my head.

I think exercise 9 has a typo and he means exercise number 10, not number 11 ... and he could be having a laugh. He does that. IE This is a stupid pointless exercise - practising levitation - do it until you figure out its a pointless stupid exercise then stop doing it. Which will be when you learn enough about independence/become bored or frustrated enough to make your own decisions - then you do exercise 10 which is:

Believe that you can exceed all your previous ambitions and hopes in all areas of your life.

Which is just an exercise in positive thinking.

Its a trick some gurus used with people who believed in them too much. Just give them more and more ridiculous jobs to do, pointless and embarrassing exercises to practice and generally give them shit till they eventually start questioning the guru they basically worship and start thinking for themselves.

Of course it doesn't always work with people. Some people love their chains and the idea someone, somewhere knows more about reality than them. (Tho this is handy if you're a guru cos we all need to get money from somewhere.)

Exercise 8 is just trying to see if you can see that Thinker/Prover process in other people. For instance look at the way we all carry on in the Random Thoughts shitfight thread.

If you can see it in others but can't in yourself perhaps try and extrapolate from other people's behaviour and catch yourself doing it.

Also if you can observe your own reactions try and see if they are different when you observe your friends or strangers. Perhaps you know someone and (think you) know the way they think. For example Tef and his constant all SJWs are Lonney Tunes doomed to fail schtick. Its obvious but perhaps our own biases aren't as obvious too us so how is what we do similar to that "all SJWs are doomed" thing?

No doubt that's made it all heaps less clear.

I don't think you have to understand the exercises as such. If you do them and observe yourself and your reactions to them you'll learn about yourself and how you see the world and maybe get a better handle on your biases.

 

[ferball]

I read this when I was 18 or 20 and got into the visualise quarters exercise a bit. Using gold coins instead. All the methods worked really well. So i tried the same exercises visualising bags of weed.

Not much luck at all.

I came to the conclusion it doesn't matter how you think it all happens, people drop small amounts of money all the time and bags of weed rarely if ever.

 

[Mordecai]

No doubt that's made it all heaps less clear.

Well put. I had a handle on the general ideas you wrote but bringing them back to the examples (some of which were tongue in cheek?) was hard for me.

I like his writing style.

Edit: Reminds me a bit of Charles Fort maybe. Being very open.

Also makes me think of Timothy Keller. The whole "we're the first society that believes it doesn't have beliefs". I.e. we can't see our own bias.

 

[Mordecai]

https://merionwest.com/2019/09/06/jordan-peterson-noam-chomsky-and-what-we-mean-by-left-and-right/

The subject matter of inequality is goods, broadly defined. That is—they could be resources, opportunities, welfare, etc. Hierarchy, on the other hand, is about social standing. One way to illustrate the relations between these two concepts is to think about legally established hierarchies, such as the feudal system. It is true that, in general, the noble classes generally were also the wealthiest of society. But, as industrial capitalism began to emerge, many commoners began to acquire more wealth. Sometimes their wealth was enough to rival that of the nobles. At the same time, nobles could always spend all of their wealth and be left with nothing but their titles. This creates a situation in which the contrast between inequality and hierarchy becomes clear. Hypothetically, we can imagine a state of affairs in which wealth becomes evenly distributed but the privileges of the nobility remain. Inequality would have largely disappeared, but nobles would still have social precedence over commoners and would, therefore, also have the right to effectively exercise domination over them. This would even be true if all the nobles were poorer than the commoners. That is hierarchy. Of course, this example is highly unrealistic, but it serves to illustrate the conceptual difference.

However small or theoretical, the difference is highly relevant. Note, for example, that while both Chomsky and Foucault appeal to egalitarian principles, they never address inequality in the sense that I just described. That is because their primary concern is not inequality in terms of goods but rather hierarchies that result in oppression and domination. Foucault even mentions this directly. To further illustrate this point, let us go back to the idea of the support for specific policies and the motivations for it. One of the examples I gave was Jordan Peterson’s support for the reduction of income inequality from a conservative viewpoint. We could take his line of reasoning even further. While it is not fully explicit, that same lecture does hint at the following reasoning: a society organized around hierarchies of competence is bound to create income inequality because it means that the most competent individuals will rise to the top and thus be better compensated. This income inequality, however, is required because it is the driving incentive for those individuals to aim for their full potential (this is an argument he makes elsewhere, but it is relevant).

Now, this is still consistent with his argument that there can be such a thing as too much income inequality, specifically when it starts to lead to the breakdown of social cohesion. This could also be interpreted as the breakdown of the social hierarchies that he considers justifiable. In the lecture where the argument against inequality is made, he does point out that violence is often the way that young men climb the social ladder when the lawful means become inaccessible because of crippling income inequality. But this effectively means that the reduction of inequality is being advocated in the name of the preservation of social hierarchy, which is why this is an eminently conservative position, and why—once again—the support for specific policies can never be a complete indicator of ideology.

 

[Mordecai]

Facing Death with Tolstoy

It is poignant that Carson was much closer to death when he was working on Ivan Ilyich and Confession than Tolstoy himself was at the time he was writing …

www.newyorker.com

Carson’s translations were largely the work of his spare time. He agreed to translate The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession in 2009, when he could not possibly have known how uncomfortably relevant their themes would become to his own life—and death. For only halfway through the translation it became clear, in early 2012, that his long-standing illness would not be curable—and that, most likely, he had only months to live. He nevertheless pushed on with the task, determined to complete what he had begun, working whenever he could, sometimes from bed as he became frailer. The final manuscript was delivered to the publisher by his wife on the day before he died in January 2013. We can hardly begin to imagine what it must have been like to translate the grim tale of Ivan Ilyich as one’s own life slipped away, but almost certainly the unsettling energy of Carson’s version has something to do with the circumstances in which it was written.

 

[Mordecai]

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-cost-of-living-a-working-autobiography-deborah-levy/

We were both still angry with each other, but we were calm and I was certainly bewildered by how I never found him boring. It was as if we had made a pact, from the moment we met, to know less about each other rather than more. I accepted this was the fatal flaw that tore us apart, and hoped that we would do better in this respect with other people.

 

[Mordecai]

“Woke Capitalism” Needs to Wake Up to the Truth about China | Merion West

Merion West is an online magazine that publishes articles and interviews from across the political spectrum.

merionwest.com

The idea that normalizing trade relationships with China and then admitting it to the World Trade Organization would lead to a blossoming of liberalism in China now seems ludicrous. It demonstrates the levels of willful blindness that sprang from post-Cold War euphoria, on the part of policy-makers, to the contingencies of history. This delusion stemmed from the idea that capitalism would homogenize the world’s cultures and forms of government and lead to a convergence on Western norms. Allied to this was the idea that modern technology, such as the Internet, would open up Chinese citizens’ mental horizons with the free-flow of information, again encouraging convergence. This has not happened. China has proven the river of information can be dammed and directed, leading to what’s known as the “splinternet.” Western technology is used to reinforce Chinese norms and Communist authoritarianism. Again, why should we have assumed that the direction of travel was towards us? Capitalism has been adapted to local and national conditions around the world—not the other way round.

 

[ferball]

https://merionwest.com/2019/09/06/jordan-peterson-noam-chomsky-and-what-we-mean-by-left-and-right/

I was halfway thru this when the concept "communication is only possible between equals" came to mind re equality vs hierarchy.

 

[Mordecai]

Italy’s Five Falling Stars

In just ten years, the Five Star Movement has risen from nowhere to become Italy’s leading party, and then collapsed again. Its volatile support and eclectic politics aren’t just an Italian quirk — they show how voter binds to political institutions are crumbling across the West.

jacobinmag.com

The formations that emerged after this system imploded no longer corresponded to previous models. This moment instead saw the “phenomenon” of Silvio Berlusconi and his “non-party,” Forza Italia. Berlusconi was in the vanguard of a new populism built around wealthy businessmen — the most obvious recent successor being Donald Trump — and began a profound transformation of the Italian political system, now turned into a “leadership democracy.

It manages to cover almost the entire ideological spectrum by sweeping potentially divisive questions — like immigration — under the carpet and focusing on the need to combat elite corruption by giving the keys to politics to ordinary citizens. Given M5s’s vague and protean character, this focus allows it to maintain its own unity. Moreover, at the organizational level, it is the perfect expression of the “era of disintermediation,” for which Italy supplies a particularly precocious and advanced example.

 

[Mordecai]

“Woke Capitalism” Needs to Wake Up to the Truth about China | Merion West

Merion West is an online magazine that publishes articles and interviews from across the political spectrum.

merionwest.com

I was halfway thru this when the concept "communication is only possible between equals" came to mind re equality vs hierarchy.

I think I know what you mean.

There's a breakdown in communication if we rely on a hierarchy?

 

[ferball]

I think I know what you mean.

There's a breakdown in communication if we rely on a hierarchy?

Sorry its been so long replying to this.

There's a potential breakdown in communication in hierarchies if the people further up the hierarchies punish subordinates for delivering accurate information.

This seems to happen in every organisation where someone with power over someone else becomes personally invested in a particular idea.

Its the concept of shooting the messenger for delivering you information you didn't want to hear.

If you are next messenger and you know you might get shot if you say the wrong thing you'll tell someone what they want to hear, not what is actually happening.

That is the point communication begins to fail or breakdown because the communication becomes about signals that prevent punishment not about signals that convey the most accurate picture they can.

The best bosses are people who can hear information they don't want to hear, including criticism and act on it without taking it personally.

 

[ferball]

Meet the Hidden Architect Behind America's Racist Economics

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean

www.ineteconomics.org

 

[ferball]

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.
The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.
...
Buchanan, MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens and the poor?
...
Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.
...
MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the ‘70s and sought the economist’s input in promoting “Austrian economics” in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”
With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.
...
Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain. In his home country, the economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.” The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.
To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”


Read the whole article. Its very interesting. Might be worth reading the book.

 

[Mordecai]

Meet the Hidden Architect Behind America's Racist Economics

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean

www.ineteconomics.org

This was a great read.

I don't understand the world they envisage though. It sounds worse for the rich and poor.

"MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.” The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.

Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done."

Wouldn't you want to have a work force that's enabled to do their work well. We're so far past this type of thinking.

 

[ferball]

This was a great read.

I don't understand the world they envisage though. It sounds worse for the rich and poor.

"MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.” The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.

Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done."

Wouldn't you want to have a work force that's enabled to do their work well. We're so far past this type of thinking.

I'm of the opinion that there is an element in society that wants a return to feudalism. Partly because they want to control the ineveitable resource crunch that's coming (probably sometime in the next 50 years.) And partly to ride the first wave of real transhumanism that's also coming, potentially also with this "singularity" but I'm not so sure about that as a thing myself. In some similar timeframe I guess.

And I guess whether or not these things will happen is irrelevant because the people with power and resources increasingly think they will and act as if they will, so they are manouvering to take advantage of them.

 

[Mordecai]

I'm of the opinion that there is an element in society that wants a return to feudalism. Partly because they want to control the ineveitable resource crunch that's coming (probably sometime in the next 50 years.) And partly to ride the first wave of real transhumanism that's also coming, potentially also with this "singularity" but I'm not so sure about that as a thing myself. In some similar timeframe I guess.

And I guess whether or not these things will happen is irrelevant because the people with power and resources increasingly think they will and act as if they will, so they are manouvering to take advantage of them.

So it will be a bunch of Forever Overlords and a constant churn of slaves building the pyramids?

These slaves will just be like factory workers? I guess in a future of scarce resources the human body is probably perfect in that situation.

 

[ferball]

So it will be a bunch of Forever Overlords and a constant churn of slaves building the pyramids?

These slaves will just be like factory workers? I guess in a future of scarce resources the human body is probably perfect in that situation.

Its been a pretty consistent thing throughout our history. We live in a time when we harnessed the ability to burn ancient forests for their energy. We forgot that before our time and the industrial revolution work was biologically driven not geologically driven.

Humans are biology.