the revolution will be televised

luka

Well-known member
Glad you're not happy with it. You get people who say this every time there's any kind of attempted or actual revolution, protest movement or whatever in oppressive countries with governments that are not on good terms with the USA. I think it's an extension of "my enemy's enemy is my fried" to "my enemy's enemy's enemy must also be my enemy".

It's deeply racist, too, since it rests on an assumption that white Westerners are the only people in the world with political agency.

Well this is what I was trying to talk about yesterday. Trying to steer between this dumb binary of on the one hand considering all these events as illegitimate due to the involvement of outside powers as eg USA or Soros or on the other hand saying that anyone who sees these events as anything other than the spontaneous expression of the will of the people is RACIST.
 
Last edited:

luka

Well-known member
I think these are both stupid ugly positions and it's time dissensus got a bit smarter
 

luka

Well-known member
Questions we've been approaching time and time again without really biting down on them.

How much of the spectacle is stage managed?

How real are events?

If you think of the extinction rebellion thread. Or the puppets thread. And these things apply to popular music and we've been approaching them in that direction to. What happened to the underground? Is a counter culture possible?

This is what we want to try and get a handle on, collectively, I think. That's where the signs are pointing.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Well this is what I was trying to talk about yesterday. Trying to steer between this dumb binary of on the one hand considering all these events as illegitimate due to the involvement of outside powers as eg USA or Soros or on the other hand saying that anyone who sees these events as anything other than the spontaneous expression of the will of the people is RACIST.

A fair point, but I think the word "spontaneous" is a bit of a red herring. These things are never spontaneous in the literal sense - at the very least, you've got to make sure everyone is protesting in the same place at the same time. It will be being organized by a particular person or a small group of people, and it seems reasonable to assume those people are real live Chinese people, and that they feel that way because they don't inherently enjoy being brutalized and oppressed any more than we do. And I maintain that "racist" is a fair accusation against a worldview that posits that this sort of behaviour from non-whites/non-Westerners is impossible. It's a very solipsistic way of looking at things.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yes well there are real live Chinese people who believe all sorts of things. That doesn't get us very far.

You're free to shriek RACIST at as many peoole as you like. Craner did this a lot during the Iraq war. "You think Iraqis don't want democracy! Racist!"

And sane people would go well perhaps this question is complicated by having a foreign government impose democracy militarily.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Slight difference in that Western countries are not invading, nor on the verge of invading, China!
 

luka

Well-known member
A question of degree. ...


But what if we look at it in terms of the rise in hate crimes in the wake of brexit and trump. Yes the genuine expression of sincerely held beliefs but why now? How do events happen?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
A question of degree. ...


But what if we look at it in terms of the rise in hate crimes in the wake of brexit and trump. Yes the genuine expression of sincerely held beliefs but why now? How do events happen?

Trump and Brexit are interesting as cases of legitimate discontent with the status quo being weaponized by an outside interest, in this case Russia. Of course the USA has been doing the same thing in other countries since forever, and may even be doing it now in Hong Kong. The important thing is to recognise the legitimacy of the discontent, I think.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I know you're dismissive of the claims about Russia but it's important to remember that even a subtle influence may have been crucial to the outcome of both votes. The Brexit referendum result was pretty narrow and the 2016 election in the USA even narrower - Trump won by a margin of under 80,000 votes that gave him three key states. (Never mind that Clinton soundly beat him in the popular vote - the glaring inadequacy of the American electoral system is a huge issue in itself.)
 
Last edited:

luka

Well-known member
I'm at work now but you're in an unusually pliable mood, willing to concede ground and I'm pleased about that. Perhaps we can make some progress this week.
 

luka

Well-known member
One of the first poems I had to write today was for a young woman from Hong Kong about the situation there. A good sign. Means my magic powers are working.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Cool. Keep up the good work.

Can you do anything about Tories and Brexit or does it only work in other countries?
 

luka

Well-known member
Do read this essay. It's very interesting.

There is a grapejuice essay I like about this here

https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2017/01/ideal-objects-delerium-and-other-pizza_26.html

"Surkov resigned as Deputy Prime Minister in 2013 (although remaining as a personal adviser to Putin), yet he paved the way for things and persons far stranger. In August 2016, articles began to surface in the Western media of a Russian "scientific" report whose subject was a new technology designed to cause substantial alterations in mass consciousness. The purported author of the report, the mysterious academic AE Vaino, happens to share the name of Anton Vaino, Putin's chief of staff, and the general conclusion is that these two men are the same person.

Vaino's machine, therefore, is called the nooscope. This is a pretty blatant allusion to Teilhard de Chardin's concept of a noosphere of human consciousness networked by mass media which surrounds the Earth like a new atmosphere. The nooscope, very simply put, analyzes and manipulates the noosphere.

The nooscope is a device that consists of a network of spatial scanners [utilizing "smartdust"] meant for the receipt and record of changes in the biosphere and human activity with the help of transactions — 'film shots' of events — images of space-time-life intersections...The nooscope is the first device of its kind that allows for the study of humanity's collective mind.

What is not at all clear, though, is how this "machine" would function, if it's at a practical or theoretical stage of development, or even if it exists beyond a kind of avant-garde practical joke. Russian official sources dismiss it as being Western propaganda. Is this an outright lie, or is this a bluff to make people think it really does exist, or is this a statement of fact? Each one of these three possibilities leads to bizarre and unsettling conclusions.

Is the entire Russian "fake news" campaign, starting in earnest with Surkov and taken to a new level with Vaino, which includes the propagation of extreme and outlandish conspiracy theories, just one facet of the nooscope? Or is this suggestion of a technology so ridiculously powerful as the nooscope, just another extreme and outlandish conspiracy disseminated by Western intelligence agencies?

Or, even more alarming and extending these conclusions logically, is it not likely that the U.S. and other advanced governments have their own equivalents to the nooscope which are also, at this very moment, generating and channeling the ebbs and flows of human consciousness? Mightn't the U.S. surveillance state, exposed by Snowden and others, be one large component of a Western nooscope?"
 

version

Well-known member
This is apparently a message left by a student on the wall of a Hong Kong university after a police raid.

tz9s9d8f0gz31.jpg
 

version

Well-known member
I upload stuff sometimes, but I don't have an account or anything. That particular image I just found on the Reddit front page.

 

luka

Well-known member
Trump and Brexit are interesting as cases of legitimate discontent with the status quo being weaponized by an outside interest, in this case Russia. Of course the USA has been doing the same thing in other countries since forever, and may even be doing it now in Hong Kong. The important thing is to recognise the legitimacy of the discontent, I think.

What we have discovered here is a tension between the notion of individual agency and this notion of outside forces (in this case Russia) manipulating individuals as Iago does to Othello and doing so en masse. I don't think that the word 'legitimacy' is strong enough to resolve this tension.
 
Last edited:

version

Well-known member
When I see that sort of thing, I can't help but think of Gibson's adage: “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
 
Top