Highly recommend the author of this post, or any other psychonauts, to read Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson. He recounts a period of several years in his life where his psychonautic explorations left him believing he was in contact with an alien intelligence.
He wrestles with trying to find scientific explanations and whether that’s important or not since the experience deeply impacted him regardless of its cause.
I don’t personally dabble in hallucinogenics, but I’m always fascinated by what bubbles up from the brain given various stimuli.
It’d be interesting to see if you could get something like GPT-3 to heavily weigh a given author’s corpus when generating output and see what it spits out for “Detritus and Carrot walked into a dwarf bar...”
The Power of Nightmares - Curtis traces back the history of leaders abandoning the approach of holding on to power through a shared vision of a better tomorrow that people can rally around. Curtis using the rise of suicide bombing as an example of a powerful nightmare that leaders can use to gain and keep power by convincing the people that their leadership is the only thing holding back the abyss.
That's a good summary of the introduction, but the real stuff is a lot more fun (and awful):
Curtis traces two failed socio-political movements, the US neocons and the islamic jihadists, who both have similar and similarly idiotic ideologies. The reason they failed is that they relied on the masses adopting their idiotic ideologies, but the masses simply saw no reason to do that.
Then they found each other, and the rest is history. Each movement could use a grotesquely distorted and magnified projection of the other to justify its existence and power, the power of the nightmare represented by The Other.
Each bit (the idiocy, the similarities, the parallel failures, early practice with projections, the finding each other, the magnified projection etc.) is fleshed out in great detail.
Most importantly he introduces the idea, that both sides need each other and basically follow the same neocon philosophy to express influence and organize society. This dependency is pretty problematic for resolving the issue...
My enjoyment of his films comes from appreciating his attempt to thread a narrative through a complex series of events and images. The linked New Yorker article makes it clear that he’s well versed in the postmodern rejection of grand narratives, but it doesn’t stop him from trying.
I find his films thought provoking, but I look to them for truth with the same skepticism I have for reading some Nietzsche — I never look for one source to get everything right, I just hope to learn something in the process.
But isn't a narrative that both the producer and the consumer know is fake guaranteed to be a waste of time? If there's going to be a narrative there should be a real one.
The narrative isn't "fake." The worst you could say is it's an oversimplification of the forces and systems at play, and if you've watched any of Curtis's films you'll know that even the simplification is quite complex.
No provider wants the cesspool to be pinned on them. I get that emotionally, but this is nuts. Obviously they have the right to make these moves, but god knows what happens when the new administration starts reflecting on the role played by Big Tech in this mess. Washing hands long after infection, so to speak.
What happens when congress uses these moves as evidence that Big Tech acknowledges the need to take responsibility for harmful content and then expects the same moves made for much smaller stakes?
Do you think that by NOT responding to such violence, a Democratic congress wouldn't say "regulation is needed, since Big Tech is dropping the ball"?
Which is more likely, congress deciding regulation is needed when Big Tech acts proactively to take care of the worst of it, or congress deciding regulation is needed when they don't do anything?
The more I study human history, the more I am convinced that the slippery slope is not a logical fallacy.
There are principles and once those get principles get trampled in the name of expediency, it becomes easier for the next person the trample them further.
Like when the American right-wing came up with the "domino theory" to justify paying any cost to defeat communists in Vietnam, since to failing to stop them would inevitably result in communists ruling the entire world.
And then the US lost the war, went home in disgrace, and the promised cascade of falling dominoes never happened.
Part of the reason why the dominos did not fall was that it extracted a very high cost. Vietnam was devastated by the war. Same thing with Cuba. Although not a direct invasion, the US sanctions on Cuba extracted a high cost.
Sometimes resistance can make a slope less slippery. With Donald Trump’s election in 2016, I believe the US was on a slippery slope to a very bad place. A lot of stuff were being normalized that should not be (overt racism). However, there was a lot of opposition and resistance which has probably helped stabilize the situation.
So no, just because a lot of resistance keeps you from sliding down the slippery slope, it does not mean the slippery slope is not real.
In three years, the slippery slope has gone from deplatforming a tiny handful of online Nazis to deplatforming the President and an app with 10 million users.
Well, in three years the president has gone from claiming that there were more people at his inauguration than there actually were, to undermining democracy by persisting for months in his claims of election fraud despite failing to produce any evidence for it in the courts (while ignoring a pandemic that is currently killing 3000 people a day in his country). How about that for a slippery slope?
I'm not sure the concerns of censorship change due to who or how many are espousing the toxic calls to violence. Nazi Germany had a Chancellor/Dictator, with 8.5 million in the Nazi party in 1945. The reason it's okay to deplatform Nazis today is not because their numbers have dwindled.
Glad I downloaded it yesterday since this was obviously an unrealistic deadline. It’s getting harder and harder to keep tabs on both sides now. Things have really fragmented in the past 24 hours: lots of posts on MeWe, Telegram, Gab, etc, looking for the “best” communication channel.
If you want to see all the calls for violence, they are streaming minute by minute on the donald site. Some even worse things today (I had to stop reading it because it's getting to the point of super illegal).
It's not terrifying at all. It's is breaking apart proto-terrorist cells, if the posts on /r/ParlerWatch can be believed. Which is something both the left and the right in the US support, at least until recently.
Big tech is so desperate to score points with the new administration as soon as Trumpism is in its death throes (hopefully). As much as I hate the content on things like Parker, this makes me sick. I get why they want the kid gloves treatment from the Biden administration, but scrambling to ban content after the Capitol was stormed is about as noble as resigning days before the inauguration. But like it’s been said, “Never let a crises go to waste”.
I spent a good 5 or 6 years reading philosophy and psychology in my spare time. I don’t claim a formal understanding of the subject that would come close to what you would get from a college degree, but I do feel like I understand the zeitgeist a lot clearer than before.
I preface with that to say that my recommendation is to pick and chose which parts are of interest to you and then dive in further to the source material. If you take the approach that you must start at Aristotle, you run the risk of burning out before getting to areas that might be life changing to study.
I got my start by grabbing all of the “Introducing...” [1] series of graphic novels about subjects I commonly heard referenced but didn’t understand. From there, I dove into the underlying texts of everything I found interesting.
Again, I didn’t gain an academic understanding of the subject, but I came away with a wildly different worldview than when I started. Life’s too short to be an expert at everything, but that doesn’t have to stop you from exploring on your own.
These books have some pretty deep illustrations, not just cartoon drawings of the subjects. One favorite of mine was a scene showing Monet painting haystacks, frustrated that a worker had left a ladder on one he was studying — I think the implication was Monet wasn’t _really_ trying to capture impressions of the haystacks as they appeared throughout the days and seasons, just his preferred impression.
He wrestles with trying to find scientific explanations and whether that’s important or not since the experience deeply impacted him regardless of its cause.
I don’t personally dabble in hallucinogenics, but I’m always fascinated by what bubbles up from the brain given various stimuli.