Black Iron Prison v3 thread

[AFK]

Obviously I'm just one idiot voicing his opinion so have at it as you will. 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I would submit a GSP-type piece for a separate volume.

Philosophically, I disagree with having a BIP/GSP volume.  Because it could seem to suggest that somehow the BIP itself was incomplete or lacking in some way. 

Are you saying that the BIP is the first complete model of reality?! HOLY SHI! Stop the preses, we've found a menu that is the meal, a map that is the territory and a comment by RWHN that we can blow way the fuck out of proportion (please note tongue in cheek)

But, seriously, I think that the BIP and a companion volume isn't necessarily going to lessen the BIP. In fact, if we changed the style, it might expand/expound upon it. Peter Carroll publishes Liber Null and Psychonaut together, not because Liber Null isn't complete, but because Psychonaut is a series of essays etc about the implementation of the magical concepts in Liber Null.

So perhaps the BiP is the right tool for discussing the BiP, but the GSP (or other title) might well be the right tool for discussing implementations of the BiP, methods for Jailbreaking, stories about dealing with one's own BIP...

Or we could just keep them both pamphlet size and hope that people get into pamphlets then way they did in the 60's

Did you read the post right before yours where I clarified? 

Not until after I'd already made the tongue in cheek comment... and since it wasn't meant to be serious, I left it in.

I guess what I mean, it that it would seem to give in to that common complaint we've heard "It's too dark".  Having a GSP right along with it would seem to, rightly or wrongly, validate that idea.  Unless of course we somehow construct it so it is clear that it isn't validating that complaint.
 

IMO, if an author gets a lot of criticisms that their book seems too *... it might be a good idea to consider that it may, at least in perception of some of your audience, be too *. It seems that the author could ignore the criticism, because they feel it doesn't apply... or they could change the book, or they could publish something else to clarify/expound on the book. I think the third might be the best option in most cases, as it neither compromises the authors work, nor does it simply ignore the audience (an author that writes only for himself, is a diarist). Publishing them as a compendium would further work to nullify complaints (assuming that the companion usefully clarified the position).

Of course, in this specific discussion, my comments will likely appear biased.  

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I thought writing it validating the complaint?

How about a compromise?  One BIP booklet, one GSP booklet, combine them together and have them as two complementary volumes.  Read forward to back, its BIP to GSP.  Read back to front, its GSP to BIP.  The last/first pages should be the introductory essays for each concept.

Edit: we can have something on potentiality and Foucault's "concrete freedom" in the middle, since Foucault is a philosopher both of limits and of freedom from such limits.

I like this idea.

I remember that I had a whole series of novels as a kid that were two books in one... Basically the both started at opposite ends (and flipped) and came to the center. So you could read "The Black Stallion" then flip the book over and read "Toby Tyler". Something like that might be a great illustrative way to publish the GSP and BIP.

Brilliant thinking Cain!


EDIT: Ok, LMNO beat me to the punch!

That's exactly the image I had. Some slimmer classics are published this way, and it's not annoying to read at all... both ends are the "front cover" to their respective books.

[AFK]

IMO, if an author gets a lot of criticisms that their book seems too *... it might be a good idea to consider that it may, at least in perception of some of your audience, be too *. It seems that the author could ignore the criticism, because they feel it doesn't apply... or they could change the book, or they could publish something else to clarify/expound on the book. I think the third might be the best option in most cases, as it neither compromises the authors work, nor does it simply ignore the audience (an author that writes only for himself, is a diarist). Publishing them as a compendium would further work to nullify complaints (assuming that the companion usefully clarified the position).

Of course, in this specific discussion, my comments will likely appear biased.  

Well, like I said, I'm but one idiot with an opinion vs. all the others who were featured in the thing so obviously if the will of the majority is to do it they should do it.  I would never claim the BIP was complete or perfect or anything.  I guess I just have a stubbornly sentimental attachment to it.  So take my two cents for what they're worth.

[Cain]

I thought writing it validating the complaint?

How about a compromise?  One BIP booklet, one GSP booklet, combine them together and have them as two complementary volumes.  Read forward to back, its BIP to GSP.  Read back to front, its GSP to BIP.  The last/first pages should be the introductory essays for each concept.

Edit: we can have something on potentiality and Foucault's "concrete freedom" in the middle, since Foucault is a philosopher both of limits and of freedom from such limits.

I like this idea.

I remember that I had a whole series of novels as a kid that were two books in one... Basically the both started at opposite ends (and flipped) and came to the center. So you could read "The Black Stallion" then flip the book over and read "Toby Tyler". Something like that might be a great illustrative way to publish the GSP and BIP.

Brilliant thinking Cain!


EDIT: Ok, LMNO beat me to the punch!

That's exactly the image I had. Some slimmer classics are published this way, and it's not annoying to read at all... both ends are the "front cover" to their respective books.

I would suggest the middle page(s) be done sideways then, to avoid looking like one end of the book or the other.

[LMNO]

This actually sounds like a lot of fun.

"BIP!"'

"GSP!"

"Hold on, you two, you're both right!"

[Manta Obscura]

This actually sounds like a lot of fun.

"BIP!"'

"GSP!"

"Hold on, you two, you're both right!"

The middle could have, as Cain said, a sideways-oriented page or set of pages. I'm thinking that the exact-middle page should have a picture of someone blowing bubbles in a jail cell, as a sort of symbol to reconcile the BIP and the GSP.

Or maybe that's stupid and just the booze talking. I dunno.

[Cain]

Well I was thinking some of the Foucalt based stuff I have been researching.  For Foucault, the diagram is a prison, of sorts, and the ontological freedom he espouses is a form of GSP.  Though a graphic would not necessarily be amiss.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I thought writing it validating the complaint?

How about a compromise?  One BIP booklet, one GSP booklet, combine them together and have them as two complementary volumes.  Read forward to back, its BIP to GSP.  Read back to front, its GSP to BIP.  The last/first pages should be the introductory essays for each concept.

Edit: we can have something on potentiality and Foucault's "concrete freedom" in the middle, since Foucault is a philosopher both of limits and of freedom from such limits.

I like this idea.

I remember that I had a whole series of novels as a kid that were two books in one... Basically the both started at opposite ends (and flipped) and came to the center. So you could read "The Black Stallion" then flip the book over and read "Toby Tyler". Something like that might be a great illustrative way to publish the GSP and BIP.

Brilliant thinking Cain!


EDIT: Ok, LMNO beat me to the punch!

That's exactly the image I had. Some slimmer classics are published this way, and it's not annoying to read at all... both ends are the "front cover" to their respective books.

I would suggest the middle page(s) be done sideways then, to avoid looking like one end of the book or the other.

Yes, perhaps with some completely out of band content... maybe short notes on philosophers that cover similar ground (Foucault as you mentioned, Camus maybe... etc) if I were into symbolism, I'd call it the Pentagon in the center of the apple Not necessarily even 'Discordian' (except for the blowing bubbles in the prison cell bit... thats an awesome centerfold I think

Or a centerfold of Eris 

[LMNO]

Well I was thinking some of the Foucalt based stuff I have been researching.  For Foucault, the diagram is a prison, of sorts, and the ontological freedom he espouses is a form of GSP.  Though a graphic would not necessarily be amiss.

Well, fuck.

Looks like I have to spend the next few years fighting through Foucault texts.

[Cain]

Funnily enough, Camus and Foucault are quite compatible.

LMNO, I suggest you get some of his lecture texts.  For example, Security, Territory and Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-8

In contrast to his books, we have such paragraphs as:

THIS YEAR  I WOULD  like  to  begin  studying  something  that  I  have  called,  somewhat  vaguely,  bio-power.  By  this  I  mean  a  number  of  phenomena  that  seem  to me  to  be  quite  significant,  namely,  the  set  of  mechanisms  through  which  the  basic  biological  features of  the  human  species became the object of a political  strategy, of a general  strategy of power, or, in other  words,  how,  starting  from  the  eighteenth  century,  modern western  societies  took on board  the  fundamental  biological  fact
that human beings are a species.  This is roughly what I have called bio-power.   So, to begin with,  I'd  like  to  put  forward  a  few proposals that  should be understood as indications of choice or statements of intent, not as principles, rules, or theorems.

Crappy formatting only evident on transferring from pdf to forum.

[LMNO]

Cheers, Cain.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I am concerned... almost every thread that could have degenerated into Drama and fighting... instead, seems to have churned out useful and thoughtful dialog.


WTF GONNA HAPPEN?!?!?!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I would kind of like, if you are comfortable with it, avoiding REMOVING stuff from the BIP. ADDING is a great idea, but unless you absolutely hate your submission, a consideration is that when text is removed from a Scripture it frustrates later adherents to the religion, especially when they can find references to the removed text. In 50 years, will Discordians be totally annoyed because they can find occasional obscure references to bit of your work that appeared in the original BIP?

Just a thought.

Also, since I've already registered the business name and the website, next step will be procuring a block of ISBNs. Unfortunately, the fuckers raised the price A LOT since I last checked! Assholes! They were $249 for 10 a few months ago, now they're $400 for 10.

[Cain]

I'll set you up a link with some of his stuff, but to give you an idea of his general topics, from a man much smarter than me:

Much angry twittering on torture. The internet left asks: Why will these democratic pols who prattle endlessly about the need to reconnect with the faithful not stand up and say that torturers shall not pass into heaven? In linking to the Digby post I linked above, Atrios says "there is some shit I will not eat." Were that it were true. I see a lot of "not another vote, not another cent" threats to Dems in Atrios' thread, but I harbor doubts. Come election day, the internalized choicelessness-as-destiny of the pathetic American left will impel them to the polling place, where they'll make their false choice for the party of acquiescence, thinking that perhaps a disempowered majority in one house of a disempowered congress will slow if not stop the Soveitization of American society. It won't, of course . . .

Foucault taught that as the monarch was the head of the body state in a literal sense that had largely passed away until the coronation of the Child-King, and as crime was conceived as injury to that body, thus was the spectacle of public torture both a literal and metaphorical act of mirrored vengeance carried out on the body of the condemned. Happy days are here again. We've come to understand that the stauncher supporters of the dauphin have conflated his person entirely with the entity of the United States. He, surely, is his own staunchest supporter. If rumors are true and he really did pace all around the oval office mouthing off about kicking Saddam's motherfucking ass up and down the Arab Street, then we shouldn't be surprised by his zealous advocacy of the necessity of torture: it's a literal extension of his ass-kicking power to those who would inflict harm upon his stately body. The king cannot punch every highwayman in the face, but his torturers can certainly act as the fists of his bodily state, or stately body.

While there's still much to-do about the necessary secrecy of the particular methods employed against our enemies, there's a gleeful publicity about the fact that something's making them scream in the back room. We should be clear in recognizing that secretism is a moral gambit through which our governors maintain their veneer of reluctance, necessary until we've reacculturated ourselves to torture as a legitimate tactic of the state not to elecit information, but to (take it away, Michel) discipline and punish, and moreover, to elecit confession. Remember that medieval law often required either multiple eyewitnesses to a crime or else a confession in order to convict: torture a man until he confesses, then execute him (or just tortue him some more) because he confesses. The current reflection of this is in the concurrent work to suspend or eliminate the provisions of habeus corpus, which is a step in a judicial process based on rules of evidence and a conception of physical, rather than spiritual, culpability.

But if anything is obvious about the new world of the Long War (is that still the going euphemism?), it's that we're quickly reverting to a new-old notion of the prisoner as a kind of spiritual transgressor, even as he (possibly) and we (certainly) inflict actual, physical harm. Consider that George W. Bush does not say of our prisoners at Guantanamo, "These are guilty men," but instead, "These are bad men." It still seems alien to us, but probably won't for long, that these qualitative assertions establish guilt even as proof of guilt must still be gained through confession, elicited through physical torture, which retroactively justifies the acts of torture while also establishing the State's right to cut the criminal, the invader, from its body. Many people have lately been pointing that if there is one thing we know about torture, it's that the tortured man tells his interrogator whatever it is his interrogator wants to hear.

Obscene.

Three prisoners in our national oubliette-manqué hanged themselves:

Military officials were not releasing the names of the detainees, but said two were Saudi Arabian nationals and one was a Yemeni national. [Rear Admiral Harry] Harris described them as having close ties to terrorist organizations in the Middle East and said their suicides were "not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

We're now so fully terrified of the shadow of our national nemesis that an act of total surrender by our purported enemies must be repackaged as an attack. So terrified that the spokesmen of empire specifically reject the argument for desperation and embrace the super-villain theory, that even the prisoner's death by his own hand is a blow to the body of state. Où alliez-vous, Michel Foucault?

Lehman goes on to lament North Korean missile-rattling (do missiles rattle? if so, are they a threat?) and China's plans to build a 600-ship navy, all of which sounds like a plea to quit fucking around with all this forward thinking and rebuild a vast conventional military, to do something or other, whatever it is. Such competing imperatives play well in Freedonia, D.C. These are the same people, by and large, who constantly regret Americans' deep-held distrust of their own institutions. Well, of course they distrust their institutions! For more than half-a-century now, the policy of their government has been to pat them on their collective head with one hand and utter soothing noises out of one side of its mouth, while pushing the air-raid siren button and whistling warnings with the other. Concurrently, it has erected a vast structure of secrets, first in order to keep the nuclear cat in the bag, then, once it became clear that that wasn't going to work, simply for the sake of keeping secrets with the sort of self-dissimulating absurdity that makes the ever-present shades of Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault grin with posthumous vindication of their eternal rightness about just-about everything. Americans aren't a particularly bright or involved people. They don't distrust their rulers for complex reasons of sociology or ideology. They distrust their rulers because their rulers are untrustworthy.

That sort of thing,