Verwirrung

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This is a spin-off from my post yesterday about Quentin Fucking Letts, but its something I’ve been considering for a while, and wanted to talk about more, as a general trend within current political discourse, especially among the “opinion-formers” in the media.

Its hardly a novel or surprising insight, I’ll be the first to admit. I know that its a particular aggravation of the brilliant American blogger HTML Mencken, of Sadly, No! fame and the more I see it within our own papers and political discussions, the more it pisses me off.

Some people, it seems, are far more in favour of civility in a discussion than actual decency. As anyone who reads me fairly often knows, I am hardly the poster-child for civil discussion. I rant, I swear, I mock and I troll. “All your carefully picked arguments can be easily ignored” and all that. But I think, underneath it, I am a fairly decent person. Not in the ‘decent left‘ sense, hell no, those people are the poster children for Civility over Decency (especially as Alan ‘Not the Minister’ Johnson’s lack of concern for human rights shows), but in the basic sense that no matter how nasty or cutting or rude I am, I’m only violent in my presentation of language.

In short, I’m not the sort of person who calls for pre-emptive attacks on enemy countries. I do not condone torture. I despise ‘extraordinary rendition’, hate racial profiling, cannot stand people who barely disguise their bigotry and blood-lust under the guise of cheerleading the “war on terrorism” and the war in Iraq especially. I don’t think we should be throwing out everyone whose skin colour is a little too dark, nor cutting benefits for those most at risk in society. I don’t think we should deny gays, atheists, Muslims, transsexuals or anyone else rights that the majority enjoys.

That’s decency. Having some motherfucking respect for the people around you, not demonizing people who have never hurt you, not acting like a jerk simply because “I’ve got mine, and fuck everyone else”. Or cowering in a corner going “oh no, the scary people different to me are here, we must deal with this immediately!”

Because, lets face it, when you dig behind the supposedly ‘respectable’ and civil writing of papers like The Sun, or the Daily Mail, or especially The Express, that is all that is left. Its dressing up ugly and vile opinions in nice sounding tones. A perfect example is that insufferable cunt Peter Hitchens, who just recently denied that homophobia has any real meaning. Well I’m sure gay people all over the world who are being killed, denied rights, attacked and smeared for their sexual leanings will be SO glad to hear that.

But you see, he said it in a nice way, with clean respectable words and no swearing, so he’s perfectly alright!

Whereas on the other hand, all those nasty people over at the Guardian who were saying rude things about Thatcher are evil and nasty leftists. Never mind that none of them are contributing to a set of beliefs designed to deny Thatcher any of her basic human rights. Never mind that Thatcher put in place policies that did ruin many peoples lives, to benefit a few. Oh no, the problem is all those horrible and sweary Guardian types, who refuse to shed a tear at the idea of Our Great Leader passing away.

Well fuck that, and fuck anyone who thinks in that way. Oh boo-fucking-hoo, the nasty little leftists won’t be all nice and civil when discussing your sacred cows? Civility is “manners masquerading as morals”, to quote Sidney Blumenthal. Its about an unspoken social code that relates in absolutely no way to the actual ethical ideas. Its a way of controlling the forms of argument, of dismissing people without actually having to refute what they say.

Noting the letters that Lett’s reprinted at the Mail, the common theme among them seems to be that Thatcher’s leadership did not enrichen or improve their lives, so why the fuck should they have to kowtow to her and her legions of brainless followers and admirers among the press corps? Letts doesn’t answer that, because he can’t. The idea of treating such a woman as a great leader worthy of such honour is disgusting, and the level of invective it deserves is well beyond that expressed in the Guardian. Presumably Letts would have us all drink tea with our little finger’s sticking out while discussing the pro’s and con’s of torture and genocide as well.

The fact is that you simply can’t fight some people and the ideas they espouse by being civil. You have to let people know that they’re vile, hateful scumbags with no sense of standards or simple human decency. You have to stand up to them and (rhetorically) kick them in the balls. Repeatedly, in some cases. This whole “oh I respectfully disagree with your views on kicking out all the ‘Muslim terrorist scum infesting this country with foreign diseases‘” bollocks has to stop.

And yes, I am an angry leftist. If you call yourselves a decent fucking human being and you look around at the state of current affairs: a supposedly left-wing government tearing down civil rights and engaging in pointless foreign wars while the gap between rich and poor rises, and a bunch of cretinous reporters in the tabloid media who are willing to give them hell over the only few things they have done right, then you’d be fucking angry too.

And if you don’t like it, Letts, you can blow me.

Stimergic learning is covered here.

The structure of secular conservative “framing” of events is discussed here.

Note the most interesting thing, that actually being an amorphous mass with seperated command structures but all communicating is actually an effective strategy. Its essentially an open-source platform, applied to political and information operations.

In both cases, each rely on various groups innovating and trying varying methods of attack, the communicating their effectiveness back to other groups who share their aims. The techniques are refined, then packaged for mass release. Then the process is repeated. It is constant refinement based on the ability for fast feedback AND, a mass of people willing to try various strategies.

Its essentially a Black Swan approach to events. By allowing groups to experiment, the whole movement can take advantage of successful methods, whereas failures will only impact on those directly involved in them. Its very smart, really.

I’d like to introduce a blog written by my good friend, Johhny Brainwash. Better yet, I’ll let him introduce it:

We occur at random among your children.

Piracy, space and post-Soviet conflicts. Also treehugging, mayhem and high weirdness. Outbreaks of old-fashioned politics may occur.

Johnny Brainwash lives in New Alamut, Left Coast, Turtle Island. He likes to ride his bike and fight with toy swords.

Read more at Dysnomia.us.

Also, can someone add it to the BlogRoll?

The internet was created as a network to allow humans to mostly interact with others and share knowledge. Amirite? Much like the cruel open world, we’re all mean here, arrogant, and yet faceless. Why do I leech on for my daily dose of the tubes? Besides some form of ridiculous co-dependence, the internet has allowed me to remember that humanity, even at it’s most amazing and selfless hours are still nothing but a collective of douchebags spreading their douchebaggery abound whilst flaunting their epic douchitude. And I find it amusing.

Do NOT come to me asking for help, posting threads of pity or buttons of Paypal on pages asking for donations to keep your website alive or to keep your bunny alive. Eat your bunny plz, post pictures, grant us thee folk of the internet the horrormirth we desire to continue our lives in a sick, twisted illusion of awesome. I am awesome, because I tell myself this on a daily, as it helps me get through my day with no medication required™!

I don’t tell you about my debt, my marital issues, my financial stress and overall hatred of my current status quo in great detail and outside of general jest, because you’re not listening. I did the Livejournal thing for a while, and all it did was create an abundance of drama I haven’t seen since middle school anytime I posted about something a wee bit wrong in my life…then I remembered I didn’t read my friend’s shit anyway, so why the fuck bother?

I don’t listen; you don’t listen.

I began a brief ritual of ‘Wednesday Rants’ on the ol’ LJ during my Sophomore year in college in an attempts to at least bring some sort of reason into having the damned thing…it didn’t work, and I abandoned it rather quickly, as the answers I either got were my friends of the best variety giving me empty praise or some faggot twisting it into bullshit. Therefore, I felt like I accomplished nothing. I often think of posting on Verwirrung, and feel that in short, it will really only benefit those here anyway if at all, because outside of PD.Com, no one could give a fuck about this site, but perhaps they need to? Maybe? Who knows. I highly doubt anyone here will get anything from this smear on the blog.

I’m not an entirely cold human being, no…but I have my moments. I am close to those I allow to be close, care for them, laugh and cry with them, but my shell is a woman that rarely smiles. This doesn’t mean I’m upset, it means that I just don’t care to unless I have good reason. There was a Daria episode in which the football alum from their high school died because the fucking goal post fell on his head or some shit, and it was pointed out that the reason Daria never smiles is because she ‘thinks’. I often use this as my excuse when I’m asked about my sour countenance. The reaction I get is usually an odd look and a, “But I think too, and I smile, so smile, damnit!” My retort is typically, “Well, maybe you aren’t thinking hard enough?” And leave it at that. I also like leaving my thoughts to myself.

…I also hate my teeth, but that’s another tale entirely.

The internet is my escape from thinking, sometimes WAY too much. It allows me to be creative during work, or gaming, it allows me to sit here and giggle like a motherfucker all day long as I leave this forum tabbed on my browser. The internet is a collective of minds that do the thinking for me, and I like it that way, because it gives my tired brain a break. No doubt others do the same.

So why should I give a fuck about what’s wrong with your life anyway?

GTFO my internet with your piteous throws of fits and excuses as to why you NEED to be accepted or WHY you’re different. We’re faceless, mindless-minds who congregate to feed off of your insolence like sociopath vampires…hiding our identities while we attack you with little or no remorse. If you need a shrink, GO TO A SHRINK, don’t come here, to the internet to find answers because Wikipedia gave you a link or you felt lucky on fucking Google.

Of course, one could always allude the internet is like a gang that you need beating into, which means that you better lay there and get it over and done with quickly to avoid severe injury…rather than putting up a struggle.

Oh fuck it, I really just wrote this to conjugate forms of douchebag. You all may go about your business.

Welcome to the modern day war zone.  Right now, as I speak, a thousand battles are being waged for your submission and allegiance.  Commanders and politicians have decided that the enemy is us and that we are to be bought to heel, as soon as possible.

No doubt some of you think I’m using hyperbole, or metaphor to illustrate an example of our socially fractured society and the commodification of identity.  And while those certainly are problems, anyone thinking about those in relation to my rant today are wrong.  Right now, you and I are quite literally at war with at least one government, namely that of the USA.

Oh to be sure there won’t be running battles with light infantry.  No air-strikes are going to be called in on your house, and I’m reasonably certain you wont get carted away to Guantanomo Bay, or any other black site that exists.  But just because guns aren’t being loaded and blood isn’t been spilt doesn’t mean this isn’t a conflict.

You see, war isn’t about the clash of armies on the battlefield anymore.  Hell, its barely even about killing, except as an advertising hook or a final solution for people who refuse to stop being a pain in the ass.  No, warfare has moved through the gentlemanly period of pitched battles and low casualties, blown apart by Napoleon and perfected in the slaughterhouse of WWI.  Its not even the dirty political warfare that characterized the Cold War, marked by futile superpower conflict and strategies designed to bleed a superpower by third world proxies, and on the other end of the scale by terrorism.

No, warfare today is about fighting on the psychological and narrative level.  Its about capturing the mind, and shackling it to the agenda of the day, regardless of what that agenda may be.

The thing is, you see, as warfare has become less and less about artful strategy and less bound by codes of conduct – be they religious, cultural or legal – the real issue has not been arms, logistics, intelligence and skill, but about the sheer will to fight.  Whoever goes on fighting the longest, whoever is willing to do what it takes to persuade the other side to accept their interests, whoever is able to effectively frame the agenda in a certain manner, is the winner in the modern world.  You can even suffer strategic setbacks if your message and will is powerful enough.

And of course, if you accept this as essentially true, broadly speaking, then logically you come to the problem being people who wont get the fuck on with the message.  The enemy ceases to be those who threaten certain strategic alliances, deposits of raw materials and the lives of the citizenry.  No, the enemy becomes anyone who undermines that message and so weakens that will to resolve the conflict – and that person can be anyone, even your own citizenry.

Back in the day, they used to call this PsyOps.  It used to only be a wartime enterprise.  Dropping leaflets over enemy cities and troop formations.  Doing pirate broadcasts using exiles and friendlies from the nation you are at war with to convince them of widespread resentment towards the government.  Smear and ridicule important political and military leaders in any way possible.

Like I said, it used to be only a wartime enterprise.  But now, thanks to the Cold War terrorism, carried to its conclusion by the likes of Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, the difference between peace and war only exists in a legal sense.  The potentially endless war on terror means actually endless psychological operations – carried out against not just the enemy, but the civilian population at home as well.  The media has to hang the enemy with words and discourses and justifications before the military can do it in fact.

Nowadays, PsyOps is only one part of a much broader school, known as Information Operations.  Do you operate a blog, report on the failing and lies and crimes of your country?  Then you are are, according to this world-view, engaging in warfare against the state.  But its not just about information per se.  You have to think about this much more broadly.  For example, protests.  A protest is not just a protest.  It never can be.  Its an expression of low intensity conflict relying on moral discourses and popular expression of dissidence, aimed at bringing about a political-military confrontation.

And just where do you think something like Operation MindFuck fits into this system of ideas?  Since many of us tend to think of O:MF as a way of mentally shaking people up, getting them to question their assumptions, physically deconstructing the popular discourses of the day, stripping away the bare truth hidden beneath self-serving platitudes…well, in that case, it is nothing more than a direct challenge to state power.

That may dishearten some of you.  But the simple truth is, thinking for yourself, and then communicating those thoughts to others, will always be seen that way, so long as this world-view dominates.  You may as well get used to it, because unless you decide to never share your views, or have a frontal lobotomy, you will almost certainly do something that could be considered an act of war.  And if you get really good at it, you may even end up in a real domestic war – as the crazy elements of the thuggish far right, security services and corporate sponsored smear teams conspire to make your life hell through intimidation, surveillance and character assassination.

And to be honest, once you realize that you are in the war, a certain clarity accompanies that knowledge.  You can now diagnose this uneasy feeling all of the above has been creating.  You know what it is now, the nature of the Beast is discerned and laid bare.  Once you know what the problem is, you can set about dealing with it.  Few things are insurmountable, once you understand their purpose and context.

Unfortunately, you have little choice about this.  The line has already been drawn in the sand, and you’re on the wrong side.  What happens next is a matter of policy, insanity, personal whim and plain old bad luck.  Because you’re not quite the perpetual pain in the ass that, say, Al-Qaeda is, you won’t be facing the guns.  You can be drowned out by voices of far-right harpies, military “experts” who ‘just happen’ to be taking pay cheques from the Pentagon and spineless journalists more content with attacking those who search for the truth than politicians who hide it.

There is a spectrum of responses, if you will.  If you do this, the response will be that.  And if you do something else, the response will differ in proportion.  But like all Platonic constructs of reality, there are gaps in the conceptual definitions put forward.  And it is in such gaps that the game must be played most effectively.  Operation MindFuck works best in areas where they are no response.  So go beyond blogging, or political protest, or pranks, or sabotage and mild acts of ontological guerilla warfare.  Mix and match, be innovative, experiment and push the boundaries.  And remember, even though this is a war, unconventional forces always have the advantage over hierarchies.

FYI, Rev Cekemp has been busy making an English language version of the Brazilian Discordian blog, Orkutcido.

Follow the link.

Please check it out, as it will be a great way to build links with the apparently numerous Brazilian Discordians, without having to learn too much Portuguese.

When I was 17, it filled my mouth with bile to think about the Office World looming over me like the sword of damocles. After watching Fight Club, Office Space, reading too much Cyberpunk, etc etc I thought that being a fucking independant, self-actualized, free-thinking individual might be negated by some sort of white collar slavery, some sort of indentured servitude to the Machine.

But ya know, after bouncing from career to career for a while, I’ve been sitting in this particular little gray cube for over a year now and it really ain’t that bad. Today is April Fool’s day and I’m hanging up prank signs from the MGT. My cube is filled with art by Magritte, Brandon Bird, Perry Bible Fellowship, and my own stuff. It’s the little things.

And you know, over here in the belly of The Machine, people actually DO seem to appreciate free thinkers. How’s that for faith in humanity? I do think people appreciate those rare freaks who are more colorful than their environment, and it IS inspirational.

And that’s the whole gimmick, right? How to sell out without losing anything of value? Without trapping yourself? How to rearrange the local parts of the Machine until it’s the Machine you want to live in?

I don’t think the 17 year old version of me got it yet. I’m 26 now and Yes I may seem like a white collar slave sometimes, but really now - it ain’t so bad. It beats being an actor / waiter, or a screen writer / shoe salesman, or a starving artist with scabby knees. Because when I’m not in the 9 to 5, I’m living a guitar solo. What I do professionally isn’t the focus of my life. Last night I went out and put up a hundred fucking posters, and it recharged me like WOAH I’m fucking awake again.

This  one guy was walking back from his car, and he saw one of the posters my girlfriend and I put up, and he burst out laughing like a mad man. As we walked down the block, we could hear him in the distance, still cackling. Somebody out there saw something weird today, and maybe he’s gonna start looking everywhere for nonsense now. Maybe he’ll even become a part of it.

This activity really recharges my batteries. If I’m ever feeling Low Quality, this is one of those things I try to remember to do. It makes me feel like all this talk we do about surviving on the lunatic fringe isn’t just abstract masturbation - I’m actually out there doing it.

whatever it is.
WOAH I’m fucking awake again!

Watchmen still has roughly about a year to go before it is released, and will likely not be anything near as good as the comic it is based on, but I still can’t help but be somewhat excited by the idea of the film.

Which is why I’m totally stoked at seeing the costumes from the film, as released by Firstshowing.net, which shows how The Comedian, Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Rorschach and Silk Spectre will appear in Jack Snyder’s film.

(via Technoccult)

Or so I hear.

Now, I didn’t know about this, which is rather surprising, since I spent some time lurking within the conspiracy genre of sites around the web. It could just be because my natural inclination is towards more political theories, or it could just be that I dont take any theories really seriously, and never paid enough attention to notice this at all.

But anyway, it seems that the recent discovery of the Planet Eris has been latched onto by conspiracy theorists as being the planet Nibiru. For those of you not up on your fringe theories (and shame on you indeed) Nibiru is supposedly a giant tenth planet that has a long elliptical orbit that takes it in and out of the solar system in a manner reminiscent of Pluto, only far more severe. Severe enough, in fact, that it somehow managed to to smash into another hypothetical planet between Mars and Jupiter, where the present day asteroid belt is. This second planet is called Tiamat, naturally after the Dragon, whereas Nibiru is assosciated with Marduk, in Sumerian mythology.

Now, part of the planet Tiamat that broke off eventually became our own dear home planet, while Nibiru continued on its merry way through the solar system. However, there is more. Nibiru is supposedly the home of an advanced race of alien beings known in the Bible as the Nephilim…or to scholars of conspiracy theory and alternative Sumerian history, the Anunnaki, made famous as the reptilian shapeshifters of the theories of David Icke (among others).

Nibiru should, allegedly, be swinging back through on another pass of this part of the solar system around…oh, 11.11 UT, December 21st, 2012. I never saw that one coming. Anyhow, when it does swing around, we should expect all sorts of crazy seismic activity and, if we’re lucky, a pole shift.

As can be seen from this particular blog entry, Eris is now considered within some conspiracy circles as being the same as Nibiru:

The real cause of climate changes, volcanoes activity, intensification of the seismic activity etc., is the planet Eris’s getting closer to our solar system, intermediary named 2003-UB-313 and known in Antiquity under various names as: Nibiru, Marduk, Nemesis, Hercolubus, The Gods Planet, the Planet of the Empire, the Planet of the Cross, the Red Planet.

So there you have it, people. Eris is going to pwn this planet good. Quite what role the reptilian shapeshifters play in this space drama remains uncertain, but I’m sure we will hear about it sooner or later.