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Bump.  The Mgt Curse.  The real reason each Mgt spends less time here once they get that title is simple: they have to go do a couple of weeks training at Langley and Fort Meade. 

Hal just commented on the paper.  Apparently its all bullshit, half the quotes are not his and the other half are him joking.

I am reliably informed that working with codeine is the best.

 

I'm formatting it for my blog, currently.  Its so big and well written, it deserves to go in my Special Reports area.  And I emailed it to Spiritualforums or whatever they are called.

http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/neophile.html

The unprecedented growth of the World Wide Web signals the emergence of new forms of communication in the so called Age of Information. Social groups are reevaluating the manners in which they conduct relationships and form organizations. Religions are no exception. Many faiths have online sites where members and nonmembers can gather facts about the group's beliefs, history, and locations of worship. Groups utilize electronic forms of communication like e-mail or newsgroups that bridge the distance between members. Audience cults, a term used by Stark and Bainbridge in The Future of Religion, are dispersed, unorganized religious groups. Three will be the focus of this paper: Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius, and the cults of Cthulhu. I have attempted to show that the 'members' of these groups are actively involved in the construction of the World Wide Web. Due to their intimate affinity for the computer interface and lack of interest in traditional organization, these audience cults are better categorized as neophilic irreligions, diffuse groups of individuals committed to chaos and the unfamiliar that find meaning in supernatural forces embedded in parodies of conventional faiths. These irreligions construct social space and provide meaning for, instead of retreating from, the confusion and unpredictability so rampant in cyber communication. These groups provide members with ultimate meaning and general compensators that are in tandem to what the Web, and more generally, the Information Age, is all about.

Has it become more complex though?  Well, obviously, to a degree it has, but too complex for a gifted individual to understand and be able to work in several fields?  I don't think so.

What has happened is that Universities in the 18th and 19th century moved away from education and became suppliers for the management class of capitalism, specializing the needs of all major fields in such a way that comprehensive knowledge itself became a monopoly held by the governing elite.  Call it a reaction to the Enlightenment and the last Renaissance men, if you will.  Knowledge monopolies are one thing capitalism refuses to acknowledge the existence of, because its one of the main mechanisms of hidden power among its elite.

Yes, I thought LHX would like that in particular.

Its too sugary.  Bushmills is destined to be a high quality mixer and nothing more.

Likely.  Nietzsche's early work revolved around the Dionysusian/Apollonian distinction, that is the irrational and rational (basically), so I think the distinction is fair.  The Nietzschean superman was always considered to be a blend of the two, creating something qualitatively different from the  majority of people in his time.

Wait, it has an ending?  I watched it late at night and just fell asleep.

It does seem very similar, going by the Wiki article on "her".

http://www.joinmycult.org/themyth/mission.htm

Its also referenced in the book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoism

Neoism refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. It operates with collectively shared pseudonyms and identities, pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and has created multiple contradicting definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization....

Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining of identity, bodies, media, and notions of ownership and truth. Unlike typical postmodern currents, the experiment was practical and therefore existential. Monty Cantsin, for example, was not simply a collective pseudonym or mythical person, but an identity lived by Neoists in their everyday life....

In the early 1980s, the Neoist Reinhard U. Sevol founded Anti-Neoism, which other Neoists adopted by declaring Neoism a pure fiction created by Anti-Neoists. The Dutch Neoist Arthur Berkoff operated as a one-person-movement "Neoism/Anti-Neoism/Pregroperativism". Similarly, Blaster Al Ackerman declared himself a "Salmineoist" after Sicilian-American actor Sal Mineo, and John Berndt was credited by Ackerman as having given Neoism the name "Spanish Art," circa 1983. In 1994, Stewart Home founded the Neoist Alliance as an occult order with himself as the magus. At the same time, Italian activists of the Luther Blissett project operated under the name "Alleanza Neoista"....


Neoist plays like multiple names, plagiarism and pranks were adopted, frequently mistaken for Neoism proper and by mixing in situationist concepts, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism and Art Strike 1990-1993 campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely by Stewart Home after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics music, the refounded London Psychogeographical Association, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, the Luther Blissett project, the Michael K Project, the German Communication Guerilla, and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as 0100101110101101.org. Other artists who explicitly if vaguely credit Neoism are The KLF, Luther Blissett, Alexander Brener/Barbara Schurz, spart and Luke Haines (of The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder).

Neoism is also mentioned briefly in David O. Russell's 2005 film I ♥ Huckabees. Dustin Hoffman's character says the word under his breath in response to Jason Schwartzman's experience to "the blanket thing," which is a method of understanding the universe derived from being zipped up in a body bag.

The California-based tech-pop band Brilliant Red Lights also applies the word in the song "Neoism," the first track off their second album, Actualism. The band imagines a literal--albeit applicable--definition of the word, defining it as "the culture of the new."

http://www.neoism.info/
http://neoist.org/
http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/neoism_index.html
http://anti.neoism.info/
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Neoism
http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/neoman.htm

Not any longer.

Its a tricky one to call, I agree.  I went to a religious school and while you know I have no particular dislike for Christianity, it was hardly a pleasant experience.  They pushed the religious line every chance they got over there.  Hence my suspicion on the subject in general.