Socialists and Scientific Authoritarianism

[Magnus Anderson]

The problem is the kind of influence they exert. They don't want you to understand anything (since it would take too long) as much as they want you to act in a specific way. (Clockwork orange style.) The goal being to bypass your brain rather than to correct it. If they succeed, they create an internal dissonance -- a conflict between what you really think is true and what you can't help but feel obliged to believe is true. And noone wants that for themselves EVEN IF what they really believe is false and what they are forced to believe is true.

[Karpel Tunnel]

The natural rites of ascent were between a flesh and blood father figure and his sons.

1- At first the boy worships his father as a god like figure. His father can do no wrong, the child hangs from his every word.
2-Then, around adolescence, the child begins to see the father's flaws, his humanity....his imperfections.
He rebels, becomes disillusioned, disappointed in a father he idolized.
3- Then the boy goes into the world can realized there is no perfect man, no perfect woman, no perfect anything...he now begins to appreciate his father flaws and all...as but a representation of his heritage his identity.

This does not occur in modern systems.
first because ideas are defined 'out of existence", i.e., made into supernatural, vague, perfect entities, clouded in mysticism and validate by obscurantism.
The boy cannot finish the process towards maturity, and is stuck in idol worship or in rebelliousness, never being able to surpass what is perfect and absolute and faceless....unreal.

This led me to some good mulling. It first reminded me of an encounter here with an intelligent poster who had recently found a spiritual guide. In this case a, yes, dead person. We got into discussions, some about this person, sometimes about other issues and suddenly even in those not related topics I would be facing a quote by the dead man. If I ever criticized anything the dead man had said, I was deemed to not understand, or have a 'thing' about the dead man. IOW I had it out for him. I could acknowledge some things I agreed with, but I was critical of others. I never noticed this person ever concede that anything could possibly be wrong with what the dead man said. However I had a thing if I was critical. There were also, of course, value issues involved, and it could never simply be that I had different values. No, I was biased, he - the dead guy - was right and I was showing some kind of rebellious activity. It was completely binary. Accept all or you have a bias.

And this from someone who could be pretty nuanced and not binary on other issues.

IRL, rather than here in discussions, I am a leader in a couple of different areas. I get uncomfortable when it seems like people just introject ideas from me. It's great if they are inspired, great if they try out something I suggest (or in some situations do what I say since part of my role is to make decisions). But it's creative work - I'm not an emergency room doctor leading a medical team through triage or something. And I think when I sense introjection I get the sense that later on I will get stabbed in the back. Put someone on a pedestal, then later, when disappointed, knock that guy off the pedestal. The other leadership role is professional with very clearly defined role differences and there I don't worry so much about introjection. Further there's no overlapping of private and public roles.

So...given that you are a leader on KT, how do (or do you?) undermine introjection, illusory respect, becoming the projection screen for the perfect daddy and then failing or 'failing' and getting grief, endlessly. Or more troubling people who do not move forward. Your 'polish' disciple is rather easy to deal with. The gauntlet is thrown, it's dominoes from there. But people who do not openly try to take daddy down, but are stuck, or just projecting and introjecting, parroting and hoping for gold stars. What do you do about them?

[phoneutria]

The dynamic is a bit different with women...but that's a topic for another day.

do tell

btw i agree with the rest of that post
in sum, jungian father archetype and hero archetype

[Gloominary]

The problem is the kind of influence they exert. They don't want you to understand anything (since it would take too long) as much as they want you to act in a specific way. (Clockwork orange style.) The goal being to bypass your brain rather than to correct it. If they succeed, they create an internal dissonance -- a conflict between what you really think is true and what you can't help but feel obliged to believe is true. And noone wants that for themselves EVEN IF what they really believe is false and what they are forced to believe is true.

That's a different take on it.
You want to be free, even to be irrational, or selfish.
I agree to some extent, we need some leeway to be irrational, and selfish.
Not sure to what degree I agree.

[Gloominary]

Or the freedom to choose between selfishness and selflessness or rationality and irrationality.

[Gloominary]

I think freedom has intrinsic value.
All too often we focus on its extrinsic merits rather than on its intrinsic ones.

[Gloominary]

Or the freedom to decide for ourselves what truth and justice are.

[Gloominary]

The freedom to choose is a big part of what it means to be human.
The scientific elite want to bypass/circumvent that.
They'd rather have automatons than men.

[Gloominary]

The old, religious elite at least wanted you to have freedom of choice, altho they'd punish you for making what they considered to be the wrong choices.
The new, transhumanist elite want to remove your capacity to choose altogether.
Yea, they want a clockwork orange.

[Gloominary]

Altering our RNA/DNA with the nanotech in these vaxxines may be the first step on a long, dark road towards transhumanism, where they can redesign humanity, remove the parts they don't like, like critical thinking and freewill.

[Gloominary]

Actually the first steps have already been taken: electroshock treatment, lobotomies, psychotropics...
They don't forcibly medicate us yet, unless the courts in conjunction with the psychiatrists consider you to be dangerously crazy.
In a psychiatric state, rather than a democratic one, they could forcibly medicate the people at will.
I think that's where they ultimately want to take us, they want to transform the world into one big (mental) hospital and prison.
That's what lockdowns, masks, social distancing and forced inoculations are really about.

[Gloominary]

The ultimate goal is mind control, to rewire everyone's brain with an implantable chip.
If you have neuropsychiatric government, you don't need physical government.
Who knows what this RNA/DNA altering nanotech vaxxine really does.
There's definitely ulterior motives for it.
Will those who receive it be fully human after?
Will a part of their humanity be removed?

[Karpel Tunnel]

Actually the first steps have already been taken: electroshock treatment, lobotomies, psychotropics...
They don't forcibly medicate us yet, unless the courts in conjunction with the psychiatrists consider you to be dangerously crazy.

Though they do this much less often than when I was young.

If we look at surveillance. Before they needed to specifically track a person. They needed to actively do this. Then we entered the Snowdon period, where they did this with everyong, in a basic way - no one sifted through the information, except on specific cases, but everyone was tracked.

Now we volunteer to be tracked, through social media and gps phones and...well, so much more. Private industries monitor us and sell our information to other private industries and make the information available to governments. No oversight. I mean, people's vaccuum cleaners record their apartments and send off the information about the layout of the apartment - not joking easily verified fact (the vaccuum robots, that is) - and digital tvs and so on. Smart cities, the internet of things will finish this off. All data on everyone will be sucked out of everywhere.

It's not even a conspiracy. This is confirmable via MSM. And people are running to sign up.

Transhumanism with chips may function well enough just by marketing it. People will want to be in, just as they want their facebook, twitter, instagram.....

Most will line up. And those who don't, well, they will stand out. Try living without a smartphone. I barely manage and it causes me lots of inconvience.

[MagsJ]

_
Will the altered, even realise they’re altered.. or will they be oblivious to the fact, due to the nature of the alteration.

My ex-sister-in-law’s mother had the vaccine on Wednesday.

[Karpel Tunnel]

_
Will the altered, even realise they’re altered.. or will they be oblivious to the fact, due to the nature of the alteration.

Smart phones and digital devices are changing parenting and childrearing. Children today are less good at identifyng the emotions of people they are in the presences of. Why? They communicate via social media and text. Emoticons instead of reading faces. And it does not take long for their scores to go down with use. They are not quite the same as previous generations. They are less skilled at the social part of being social mammals. They can't notice the difference because they never experienced it. They are also being raised, more and more, by parents who are distracted themselves by digital media. Less facial interaction with parents. I see this all the time in parks, let alone what happens in homes. Parents walking staring into their phones and children with parents or alone or in groups, bent over their phones. One of the most central facets of human existence is being changed by digital media and portable digital devices. These are addictive (and made to be as some facebook executives have admitted in mea culpas). And in Silicon Valley, as reported in MSM, the people making these programs and apps and devices....they damn well restrict radically both the age children get such devices and how much they can use them. Because they know.

So, any future tech need not create some jump in experience change. You are either born into the use or becomes slowly affected by the changes.

Do the women (and now more men than before) getting botox and bigger lips and through these kinds of operations realize that they are hampering their emotional lives? No. They don't realize that one way we know our own emotions is through our own facial expressions. Feeling that. With less flexible faces, we will know less about ourselves, and have less ability to express emotion and be less clear to others what emotion we have. They don't realize.

The people taking psychiatric drugs to reduce stress (iow to cut off our own healthy reaction to problematic portions of life) notice they feel their emotions less? Well, some do. But they get used to it. It is so normalized to reduce emotions, people go along with it and then forget normal states.

And most of this does not require a conspiracy. You engage and manipulate people's self-interest, pathologize body norms (like emotional reactions) and go home and tell your spouses you are making money and helping people. Or you simply don't really care, cause there's money in it. You ignore the side effects and clues and research pointing out that what you are doing has problems might have problems has bad side effects etc. NO smokey star chambers with the Rothchilds using mind control needed.

[iambiguous]

As I'm an agnostic, I don't derive my values or politics from God.
I don't derive them from philosophical abstractions like Kantianism or Platonism either.
Nonetheless, my values and politics aren't wholly subjective, nor wholly objective.

Mine too.

In fact I created a thread in order to explore what I construe to be a profoundly problematic existential dichotomy/dilemma.

The OP focused on my values and politics pertaining to abortion:

If there is one thing I am clearly preoccupied with at ILP, it is relationship between moral and political value judgments and the existential tajectory of the lives that we live.

And, in almost every thread in which I post about this relationship, I eventually get around to this:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my "tour of duty" in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman's right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary's choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett's Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding "rival goods".
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

This because in it are embedded two experiences that were of fundamental importance in shaping and then reconfiguring my own moral and political narratives.

Over the years, I have gone from an objectivist frame of mind [right vs. wrong, good vs. evil] to a way of thinking about morality in human interactions that basically revolves around moral nihilism.

And, then, in turn, this resulted in my tumbling down into a philosophical "hole" such that for all practical purposes, "I" became increasing more fragmented.

This hole:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

In other words, I am no longer able to think of myself as being in sync with the "real me" in sync with "the right thing to do".

So, I decided to create this thread in order for others to at least make the attempt to describe their own value judgments existentially. Values as they became interwined over the course of their lives in "experiences, relationships and information, knowledge and ideas."

The part where theory is tested in practice out in particular contexts out in particular worlds.

This thread is not for those ever intent on providing us with "general descriptions" of human interactions. Interactions that are then described almost entirely using technical or academic language.

Instead, this thread is for trying to explain [to the best of your ability] why you think you came to value some behaviors over others. Linking both the experiences you had and the ideas that you came upon that shaped and molded your thinking in reacting to them.

And this is what I attempt to explore with others in regard to their own value judgments and politics. Be it in regard to abortion or to Socialists and Scientific Authoritarianism. To believe that something is rational about these things is not the same as demonstrating to others that they are obligated to think the same. Or be called irrational. If not a "scumbag".

So, abortion or authoritarianism in regard to what context? Involving what behaviors coming into conflict over what set of circumstances?

In regard to mathematics, the laws of nature, the brute facticity of the empirical world, the rules of language, etc., there is a lot that one can be an authority regarding. But who can claim to be an authority in resolving whether or not it is more rational to be a capitalist rather than a socialist. What of political "science" then?

As for "feelings" how are they not in turn rooted subjunctively in the lives that we live. Ayn Rand claimed she could grasp her own emotions in a wholly rational manner. And so could others she insisted. Only, they had damn well better be feeling the same emotions that she did about...everything?

So, let's just say that in regard to this..

My reason, and intuition tell me which courses of action are possible, and the likely consequences of them, that's the more-or less objective part, my feelings tell me which consequences I prefer, that's the subjective part.
I take the course of action whose consequences I prefer.
If I take x action in x situation, get the consequences I was expecting, and like the consequences, I'm more likely to take that or similar actions in the same or similar situations in the future.
Conversely, if I take x action in x situation, don't get the consequences I was expecting, and don't like the consequences, I'm less likely to take that or similar actions in the same or similar situations in the future.

...we probably grapple with "I" in different ways. Especially when "X" becomes an actual situation in which there are conflicting moral narratives and political agendas regarding what it means "for all practical purposes" to be an Authority.

But the very last thing the moral and political objectivists here want to imagine is true is that my point of view is not only reasonable, but applicable to them.

[Gloominary]

Actually the first steps have already been taken: electroshock treatment, lobotomies, psychotropics...
They don't forcibly medicate us yet, unless the courts in conjunction with the psychiatrists consider you to be dangerously crazy.

Though they do this much less often than when I was young.

If we look at surveillance. Before they needed to specifically track a person. They needed to actively do this. Then we entered the Snowdon period, where they did this with everyong, in a basic way - no one sifted through the information, except on specific cases, but everyone was tracked.

Now we volunteer to be tracked, through social media and gps phones and...well, so much more. Private industries monitor us and sell our information to other private industries and make the information available to governments. No oversight. I mean, people's vaccuum cleaners record their apartments and send off the information about the layout of the apartment - not joking easily verified fact (the vaccuum robots, that is) - and digital tvs and so on. Smart cities, the internet of things will finish this off. All data on everyone will be sucked out of everywhere.

It's not even a conspiracy. This is confirmable via MSM. And people are running to sign up.

Transhumanism with chips may function well enough just by marketing it. People will want to be in, just as they want their facebook, twitter, instagram.....

Most will line up. And those who don't, well, they will stand out. Try living without a smartphone. I barely manage and it causes me lots of inconvience.

Yup, in many cases we (unwittingly) allow them to spy on us.
There ought to be more laws to protect us from corporate and government surveillance, and there needs to be more transparency in government, but as long as we keep electing establishment republicrats/libcons, it'll only get worse.
I'm also bothered by the growing armament disparity between the people and government.
Not saying everyone should have nukes, but perhaps registered militias should be permitted to possess many of the fully operational military grade armaments the military possesses.

[Magnus Anderson]

The problem is the kind of influence they exert. They don't want you to understand anything (since it would take too long) as much as they want you to act in a specific way. (Clockwork orange style.) The goal being to bypass your brain rather than to correct it. If they succeed, they create an internal dissonance -- a conflict between what you really think is true and what you can't help but feel obliged to believe is true. And noone wants that for themselves EVEN IF what they really believe is false and what they are forced to believe is true.

That's a different take on it.
You want to be free, even to be irrational, or selfish.
I agree to some extent, we need some leeway to be irrational, and selfish.
Not sure to what degree I agree.

I wouldn't put it that way. I would rather say "I want to do what I want to do rather than what I feel compelled to do but do not really want to do". Depending on how you define the word "rational", such an act may or may not be rational. And selfishness is in no way implied.

It's a subtle point. It might be helpful to consider that a human being is made out of many individual inclinations that either cooperate with each other or compete against each other. When they cooperate, they all agree and whatever you want is truly what you want (whatever that is, no matter how stupid it is compared to what someone else is doing.) When they don't, then you simultaneously want to do and to not do something -- you are in a state of internal dissonance. And when you do something in spite of the fact there are parts of you that rebel against the idea, then you're betraying yourself and not really doing what you really want.

The above is a distinction (using my own words) between "true want" and "false want". And in a sense, doing what you "truly want" is the definition of rationality (and the opposite of irrationality.) Most importantly, you cannot "truly want" what you do not truly want When you obey "false wants", you are actually being governed from the outside (either as a consequence of someone's intention or as a consequence of some sort of coincidence.)

[obsrvr524]

Yup, in many cases we (unwittingly) allow them to spy on us.
There ought to be more laws to protect us from corporate and government surveillance, and there needs to be more transparency in government, but as long as we keep electing establishment republicrats/libcons, it'll only get worse.
I'm also bothered by the growing armament disparity between the people and government.
Not saying everyone should have nukes, but perhaps registered militias should be permitted to possess many of the fully operational military grade armaments the military possesses.

Yup we really should insist on warning labels be put on that lethal poison we just drank.

;TLTL

[MagsJ]

Will the altered, even realise they’re altered.. or will they be oblivious to the fact, due to the nature of the alteration.

Smart phones and digital devices are changing parenting and childrearing. Children today are less good at identifyng the emotions of people they are in the presences of. Why? They communicate via social media and text. Emoticons instead of reading faces. And it does not take long for their scores to go down with use. They are not quite the same as previous generations. They are less skilled at the social part of being social mammals. They can't notice the difference because they never experienced it. They are also being raised, more and more, by parents who are distracted themselves by digital media. Less facial interaction with parents. I see this all the time in parks, let alone what happens in homes. Parents walking staring into their phones and children with parents or alone or in groups, bent over their phones. One of the most central facets of human existence is being changed by digital media and portable digital devices. These are addictive (and made to be as some facebook executives have admitted in mea culpas). And in Silicon Valley, as reported in MSM, the people making these programs and apps and devices....they damn well restrict radically both the age children get such devices and how much they can use them. Because they know.

So, any future tech need not create some jump in experience change. You are either born into the use or becomes slowly affected by the changes.

It depends on the parent and background though.. the more old-fashioned style of upbringing doesn’t spawn such unaware and socially-inept generations.

Do the women (and now more men than before) getting botox and bigger lips and through these kinds of operations realize that they are hampering their emotional lives? No. They don't realize that one way we know our own emotions is through our own facial expressions. Feeling that. With less flexible faces, we will know less about ourselves, and have less ability to express emotion and be less clear to others what emotion we have. They don't realize.

Vanity first and foremost and everything else follows after.. as long as they look good doing everything else after though, that’s what matters most these days.

The people taking psychiatric drugs to reduce stress (iow to cut off our own healthy reaction to problematic portions of life) notice they feel their emotions less? Well, some do. But they get used to it. It is so normalized to reduce emotions, people go along with it and then forget normal states.

Quite.. numbed feelings by the power of pills, instead of getting to the root of the problem with CBT, better nutrition and so-forth.. the old-fashioned way of maintenance-of-health and healing most ails and ills, but there’s no money in that.

And most of this does not require a conspiracy. You engage and manipulate people's self-interest, pathologize body norms (like emotional reactions) and go home and tell your spouses you are making money and helping people. Or you simply don't really care, cause there's money in it. You ignore the side effects and clues and research pointing out that what you are doing has problems might have problems has bad side effects etc. NO smokey star chambers with the Rothchilds using mind control needed.

Indeed.

[Karpel Tunnel]

[It depends on the parent and background though.. the more old-fashioned style of upbringing doesn’t spawn such unaware and socially-inept generations.

Good point and I don't want to take away from parents responsibility. But at the very least traditional parents are facing more nagging by children who are in some ways isolated in school. They need to pay that price and to somehow also convey to their children that really, long term, they are not losing out. Some parents organize groups of ten parents, say, in a class. They all agree not to buy mobiles until their kid is 15 or whatever. That way no individual kid gets left out. They have peers who also do not have phones. That's a great trend. It's a bit like agreeing not to take steroids.

[Karpel Tunnel]

I do like a lot of freedom, for myself and others. But I am so fucking glad smoking is being pushed out of most places. My parents smoked. I can't bear that shit.

I'm a non-smoker who's used to living among smokers. Not that it matters

I'm pretty sure that complete freedom for everyone and everything (even merely for a small number of people) is not the best option out there. Some actions are threatening and it's better to make an effort to protect yourself (by fighting the root cause, by fighting its effects, by evading them, etc) than not to.

The question is merely 1) what poses a threat, and 2) how to deal with it.

It appears to be your argument that it is a bad thing to let every restaurant set its own rules in that it leads to a situation in which every restaurant adopts one and the same set of rules, namely, that smoking is allowed. This might be the case (I find it agreeable) but does that mean the best way to deal with the problem is by forcing every goddamn restaurant to forbid smoking?

I can understand why you're pleased with the fact that there are laws prohibiting smoking in most places (and I wholly embrace your need to protect yourself from toxic substances) but don't you think there's also a downside to the approach currently in effect in that it enforces excessive uniformity?

We already live in a world in which there are not enough people who lead (authorities, gods, leaders, experts, younameit) and too many people who follow (pretty much everyone, if only out of sheer necessity.)

Deal with the farts, loud music, wanking with a toad argument. IOW why does not unpleasant to many people type of activity get allowed, but restaurants all forbid the others. Why should a corporate normalized toxic unpleasant activity be the exception? ARe you really ready for full on freedom? Because in that world, ok. I'll drive them out of the restaurant with some death metal and fart and burp past their table until they leave.

[MagsJ]

[It depends on the parent and background though.. the more old-fashioned style of upbringing doesn’t spawn such unaware and socially-inept generations.

Good point and I don't want to take away from parents responsibility. But at the very least traditional parents are facing more nagging by children who are in some ways isolated in school. They need to pay that price and to somehow also convey to their children that really, long term, they are not losing out. Some parents organize groups of ten parents, say, in a class. They all agree not to buy mobiles until their kid is 15 or whatever. That way no individual kid gets left out. They have peers who also do not have phones. That's a great trend. It's a bit like agreeing not to take steroids.

The schools too monitor phone usage, but teachers can get abuse if they forbid phones during classes, but that’s still at least one way of minimising pupils’ time on their phones.

Imagine if basic human skills become lost forever, to be replaced with what?

[Karpel Tunnel]

The schools too monitor phone usage, but teachers can get abuse if they forbid phones during classes, but that’s still at least one way of minimising pupils’ time on their phones.

Sure, but there's a big difference between having that phone and not, even if the kids are not using them in classtime or even school time.

Imagine if basic human skills become lost forever, to be replaced with what?

I actually think that's happening. I think people are being fundamentally changed. They see their surface as themselves. So much communication is not face to face that they have lost the skills of reading faces or never learned them. they see life as continuously presenting themselves as doing well, more or less branding themselves. And they're parents are not paying attention to them in the same ways -they also are locked into their devices. And that is definitely not going to reduce in the coming generations of parents. Of course TV and other trends have made contributions to some of this before in time, but it's a qualitative leap happening since 2005 or so.

[Magnus Anderson]

Deal with the farts, loud music, wanking with a toad argument. IOW why does not unpleasant to many people type of activity get allowed, but restaurants all forbid the others. Why should a corporate normalized toxic unpleasant activity be the exception? ARe you really ready for full on freedom? Because in that world, ok. I'll drive them out of the restaurant with some death metal and fart and burp past their table until they leave.

"Full on freedom" means that you let everything take its natural course. I agree that this is far from the best option out there. (Indeed, I stated this clearly and explicitly in the very post you responded to.) But what options remain after we take that one away? You act as if only one option remains -- to control pretty much everything. But is that so? I wouldn't say so. I think you're presenting a false dichotomy here -- either we control nothing (we give other people complete freedom) or we control everything (we give other people little to no freedom.)

I understand -- and indeed, I appreciate -- that you want to create an environment for non-smokers. And yes, you have to fight for that, which means, you can't just leave it up to nature. The question is merely what's the best way to fight for such a thing and whether the approach you're praising is actually better than doing nothing.

I think the best way to go about it is to figure out what is causing the extinction of non-smokers and then fight that thing.