Ideology

joined 3 years ago
[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The part of the JFK conspiracy I found a bit enlightening was in the Jakarta Method, actually. The author seems to agree with the theory that JFK was assassinated due to his position on maintaining friendly relations with Sukarno in Indonesia, whereas the agencies and military were actively working to crush him and install a dictatorship.

JFK dies (very publicly) and two years later a(n alleged) false flag incident conveniently catapults Suharto into supreme power, erasing communist activity in one of the most powerful countries in the thirdworldist movement.

It basically hammers home that there are so many moving parts in the concentration of capital that you can't just surgically remove one piece and hope the rest will fall in line. Electing Bernie was never going to amount to anything. It's all or nothing.

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I can assure you they still do.

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago

But that doesn't mean they read it!

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago
[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's hoping more roll in. Take care.

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Got a donation link?

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Simple response: "without linking wikipedia, please define fascism"

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 16 points 1 year ago

Those poor oppressed gamers just don't stand a chance against big-feminism.

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Would raised beds help?

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago

When the yuri magazines written by queer women get folded into men's magazines because they don't make enough money.

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 10 points 1 year ago

For this kind of story there's no shame in maintaining privacy. I hope you find a semblance of peace. And please don't beat yourself up about it, it's not your fault. You did your best as a human being and that's all anyone can ask of you. cat-trans

[–] Ideology@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The designers of this giant eldritch tangle knew, they always knew what the utility of their propaganda machines needed to be to insulate them from revolution as we all blindly search the transparent plastic boundaries of our ant farm.

Text from Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener (1948)In connection with the effective amount of communal information, one of the most surprising facts about the body politic is its extreme lack of efficient homeostatic processes. There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory. The market is a game, which has indeed received a simulacrum in the family game of Monopoly. It is thus strictly subject to the general theory of games, developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. This theory is based on the assumption that each player, at every stage, in view of the information then available to him, plays in accordance with a completely intelligent policy, which will in the end assure him of the greatest possible expectation of reward. It is thus the market game as played between perfectly intelligent, perfectly ruthless operators. Even in the case of two players, the theory is complicated, although it often leads to the choice of a definite line of play. In many cases, however, where there are three players, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, when the number of players is large, the result is one of extreme indeterminacy and instability. The individual players are compelled by their own cupidity to form coalitions; but these coalitions do not generally establish themselves in any single, determinate way, and usually terminate in a welter of betrayal, turncoatism, and deception, which is only too true a picture of the higher business life, or the closely related lives of politics, diplomacy, and war. In the long run, even the most brilliant and unprincipled huckster must expect ruin; but let the hucksters become tired of this and agree to live in peace with one another, and the great rewards are reserved for the one who watches for an opportune time to break his agreement and betray his companions. There is no homeostasis whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses, which are so real a feature of modern times.

Naturally, von Neumann’s picture of the player as a completely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudoscience will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings.

Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way. This is because no man is either all fool or all knave. The average man is quite reasonably intelligent concerning subjects which come to his direct attention and quite reasonably altruistic in matters of public benefit or private suffering which are brought before his own eyes. In a small country community which has been running long enough to have developed somewhat uniform levels of intelligence and behavior, there is a very respectable standard of care for the unfortunate, of administration of roads and other public facilities, of tolerance for those who have offended once or twice against society. After all, these people are there, and the rest of the community must continue to live with them. On the other hand, in such a community, it does not do for a man to have the habit of overreaching his neighbors. There are ways of making him feel the weight of public opinion. After a while, he will find it so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, so restricting and oppressing that he will have to leave the community in self-defense.

Thus small, closely knit communities have a very considerable measure of homeostasis; and this, whether they are highly literate communities in a civilized country or villages of primitive savages. Strange and even repugnant as the customs of many barbarians may seem to us, they generally have a very definite homeostatic value, which it is part of the function of anthropologists to interpret. It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important.

One of the lessons of the present book is that any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information. In a society too large for the direct contact of its members, these means are the press, both as it concerns books and as it concerns newspapers, the radio, the telephone system, the telegraph, the posts, the theater, the movies, the schools, and the church. Besides their intrinsic importance as means of communication, each of these serves other, secondary functions. The newspaper is a vehicle for advertisement and an instrument for the monetary gain of its proprietor, as are also the movies and the radio. The school and the church are not merely refuges for the scholar and the saint: they are also the home of the Great Educator and the Bishop. The book that does not earn money for its publisher probably does not get printed and certainly does not get reprinted.

In a society like ours, avowedly based on buying and selling, in which all natural and human resources are regarded as the absolute property of the first business man enterprising enough to exploit them, these secondary aspects of the means of communication tend to encroach further and further on the primary ones. This is aided by the very elaboration and the consequent expense of the means themselves.


I am not a rat in a maze, a bug in a terrarium, and neither are you. But to the bourgeoisie we are. Media, school, church, all of it is designed to constrict the boundaries of your intelligence and imagination into acceptable forms. These acceptable forms grant power to their designers and take away yours. I'm sure your friend isn't the only person you've met who couldn't even properly conceive of their own humanity. I don't think most people in the west can.

Some workers are moulded into parts for this great machine while others end up as slag. The particular niche this person found was a way for slag to recycle itself, but it wasn't enough for them to forget the designers threw them into the scrap pile to begin with. Self-medication was their salve for this alienation.

The designers know and they don't care.

They were a sacrifice to the gods of profit, for the hyper-accumulation of the few. They didn't deserve to die. The falling rate of profit will come for others, it'll slow down the mindmolding refineries, more will become slag. More will become homeless, more will be jailed for no reason, more will grind second jobs, more will find a sliver of meaning by selling their friendship for money.

You are right on the mark in everything you said. Hold onto this and don't lose it. More than likely all of us will encounter similar situations as the collapse of the west drags on and it's important to not only remember the lives lost but also to learn from them.

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