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Stories Stories Stories - Sanity Comes At A Price

Sometimes it seems like we're all at the mercy of currents of circumstances and fait accompli, so the best we can do is try to be a good commentator; or else surrender to the currents and - in both cases - it's mostly a hope to be carried along somewhere good, where your life-collected talents can be used - maybe recognised - and hopefully you'll be swept by love close enough to grab hold.

Too much commentating leaves too little time to be absorbed by the journey, too much time risked deconstructing the beauty of the scenery into just more rocks and leaves and sky.

Too much deconstruction trains it into an unconscious habit that turns the natural living in the impressions of the moment as life sweeps us along, into an observer experiencing things personal as if through a glass, feelings become constipated - and then almost alien, disdained by ingrained vanity as the animal reacting to the mere tone of events.

That said, while it might be desirable to submerge oneself in the vicissitudes of life's daily revelation, and undoubtedly feeling the fierce emotion of engagement can be a wonderful thing, it's also a risk. That's bad in life, negative circumstances, tragedy, misery, a whole anti-spectrum of life that'll swallow the submerged participant in a world of ungood.

We don't get to pick and choose. Submit to the flow of the currents and feel the compelling high-points, but also risk tumbling into bleak inescapable lows. And tumble you will; we all do, because that's the coda of senility at the end of everyone's traversal of their human lifespan.

Maybe there's a happy equilibrium. It's a challenge to find it, though, not least because it's ever-changing over time. What most do, it seems to me, is another submission: this time to the regulations of the surroundings. That means moulding oneself to the expectations and conventions of society; whichever society that happens to be. For most this is a lifelong cognitive behavioral therapy and, depending on mental processing speed and personal habituation, it trains a divergence in an individual's personality between the real self and the roleplay self.

Almost everyone will have memories of childhood where this divergence plays out, where the real had to struggle with the role in an uncertain situation. We tend to get better at it by adulthood, the role having become second nature. By middle age so much time has been invested in the roleplay it's entrenched as if fundamental - to be defended - even in the face of circumstances sympathetic to the real personality, where it would've been fine to be real, the mental muscles built for the roleplay have become the dominant paradigm. More's the pity.

There's advantages to having most human beings trained to conform to society's expectations. It'd be possible to argue our civilised behaviour depends on it; that life would become a chaos if everyone were real (within the law). Maybe that's so.

But the preeminence of common denominator roleplay comes at a price. We surrender our innate authenticity in favour of a role that's constructed of observed social norms - at best moving closer to identity groups most conducive to our own comfortable path of least resistance - which means sense of belonging. At best this paints large numbers in broad identity strokes, turning individuals into mere ciphers. At worst it codifies prejudice and in-group out-group thinking that's the well-spring of hate leading to violence; at scale.

Identity, that's born and nurtured in the cognitive behavioural training of this divergent role version of oneself, is rooted not in reality - though there may be resemblance - but instead a collage of stories.

The stories are the detail of the role's knowledge of what it should be: how to feel, how to react, how to perceive the world. Reality, if contradictory (or too challenging) comes off second best. This is a big problem. It's perhaps the biggest practical problem with the human condition. At the bottom of almost every error, personal, social, group, national, is a story gone wrong and the ends to which people have gone pursuing it.

#merton

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PSYCHEDELIA - OPENING THE THIRD EYE - MEETING THE MACHINE ELVES

OPENING THE THIRD EYE

Most of us have heard fairytales or folk stories about the third eye - evil eye - the psychic transcendent eye - it has many epithets. All these stories strike at a demonstrable biochemical truth.

The third eye is a remnant of our lizard brain, manifest in modern humans as the pineal gland. The pineal is the regulator of dreams and recent research links it to the production of natural dimethyltryptamine. Psilocybin is another.

Opening the third or pineal eye (e.g. taking a D.M.T. trip) may not be precisely creating a portal to another galaxy - or any phenomenon that defies the laws of physics - but it is opening portals into regions of the mind impossible to reach otherwise.

It's a transcending experience and integral to the transcendental revelation is that most fascinating part of the psychedelic trip: the encounter with alien intelligences that are apparently conscious and - most important - can't be easily explained as a mere drug-induced hallucination.

It's the meeting with aliens we'll be trying to explain over the course of this article. Almost everyone who's tripped has a version of the encounter. It becomes an obsession for many, a mesmerising ongoing conversation spread across numerous separate trips that's so emotionally supercharged it's often quite literally life-altering.

PERSONALITY AND ALIENS

Personality is the iceberg tip of a multidimensional internal universe of the mind. The conscious tip doesn't know much about what's happening in the exponentially larger elsemind but psychedelic excitation - like a D.M.T. trip - brings tip and base into profound contact. Temporarily. Too ubiquitous to ignore, psychonauts report meeting intelligent aliens - distinct autonomous conscious intelligences. 100% real.

It's not an illusion.

The trip-induced communion is authentic and the familiarity most feel is not misplaced.

Psilocybin, whichever its ingestion mechanism, sourced, creates certain psychotropic conditions. These don't generally occur in sober daily life.

The psychedelic communion with "alien" intelligence is authentic.

THE MIND PAINTS SYMBOLS IN SENSES

The sights and sounds and sensations of the psychic world are symbolic - usually metaphorical - but this isn't the same as illusionary (though it's often mistaken as such). Executive function needs to frame the reality it's perceiving in some comprehensible way - the same method is used when dreaming, as we can all attest.

The intensity of the psychedelic experience demands powerful symbols and that's exactly what we get. Fundamental truth is multi-layered and while habit makes it second nature to parse revelation into limbic experience - transcendent visuals for instance - the mind has imagination for its toolkit and a palette as diverse as all memory. The trip is therefore rarely just a humdrum version of the everyday familiar world.

The representation of our psychospace machine elves excites imagination to push the envelope but the brain can't imagine in a vacuum. It has to use what it's got and in the case of the psychedelic encounters, nowadays this means interstellar travel and aliens against the backdrop of the universe. Meditation transcending is subject to the same methodology.

It wouldn't have always been thus.

Religious-minded meditators often see God and angels in heaven; and report their psychedelic encounters as angels and demons rather than aliens. Yoga practitioners perceive Atman and Buddhist mandala. African animists meet ancestral spirits. Amazonian ayahuaska shaman might speak of ghosts and nature-deities.

THE MACHINE ELVES

Sights, sounds and sensations of a psychic trip (whatever the catalyst) vary but the meta of the experience is common to all. None of the standard interpretations are factually correct, however, and perhaps that's not too surprising.

The sensually-sparkling intelligences encounterd on a D.M.T. trip (or sometimes using transcendental meditation; or during pineal panic as in near death experiences) are real. The sentient entities are conscious and not merely an ephemeral dream-illusion. It would be better to call them by the name best fitting their metaphysical attributes: MACHINE ELVES.

Machine elves are autonomous shards of sentient intelligence - fractals of consciousness - iterstions of identity - whose existence is played out entirely inside your brain's enclosed altconscious.

But they are not you.

This enclosure shuts in the machine elves and, except during psychedelic pineal excitation, it's an enclosure both ways, also beyond the reach of your brain's dominant persona; that being you.

The machine elves, though confined to the pineal psychospace of your mind, were manifested, as you are, from the infinitely creative forces of homo sapiens Gaia. However many you meet, all have the same point of origin and - like you - share a common foetal ancestor. This may partly explain the familiarity felt when transcending into the pineal psychospace.

Let's be clear about the alien interpretation, then: the machine elves exist inside your brain and nowhere else. There's no physics-defying interstellar psychic travelling going on. The psychic universe is within your brain, not out among the stars.

The machine elves are of your brain, by your brain, for your brain. Real and quite the opposite of alien.

They are distinct networks of synopses and neurons and axioms, tangled into complex consciousness patterns. In essence the machine elves are made of the same cell-stuff as you.

Many of the machine elves are sentient. Many may not be. These neurological entities are variously developed, depending on the history of the individual locus of identity. There's a whole spectrum of psychic life: from fungus-like personality abortions to advanced living homunculi all the way to the conscious self-aware machine elves themselves.

HOMO SAPIENS INTELLIGENCE BLUEPRINT

The machine elves share your brain but their life (such as it is) is disarmed, shackled, ringfenced inside a separated space; exiled behind impenetrable neurological walls. Your life as the dominant paradigm and the lives of the machine elves unfold out of touch with one another. In physical space the machine elves may be close but in psychic space the distances are beyond traversing; even if relative locations could be known. Which they are not.

The absolute separation between "you" and the machine elves is the denouement of a Darwinian battle that's carried out in the foetal and newborn period of our physical existence. It's a survival of the fittest we've all fought and won; though like any of the early life struggles, it doesn't carry over into memory. None of us remember being born and, except perhaps in sewing the seeds of childhood predisposition, we don't remember the casualties of the brutal intelligence trial-and-error from which we emerged as most successful paradigm.

The conscious "you" - the person reading or listening to these words - was the sole advanced survivor of what must've been a defining civil war for brain-domination, fighting to the bitter end in the crucible of natural selection. It all happened before your earliest memory. The battle was winner takes all, contested entirely in your unfinished brain and the victorious alpha-identity (you) gained control of nascent executive function. This means no less than being entrusted with the burden of mind and body survival; of going forth and multiplying.

The proto-sentient fractals, from stone baby to autonomous rival - machine elves to be - were ultimately casualties of the neurological civil war. Some - early fatalities, less developed homunculi - would have been neatly recycled early by your brain. Others, more evolved, more capable, not yet evolved to blind self-preservation would have been mulched into your new and expanding subconscious.

The persona fractals - and you - are born from the same zygote fertilisation. Stone-baby neural fungus to feeling homunculus to the imprisoned self-aware machine elves, whatever the endpoint of their particular development before falling in the Darwinian survival war, every one of the prototype homo sapiens sentience are more than brothers and sisters. They're all iterations of personality that may, under different conditions, have become you.

(This might explain why the "aliens" are so universally welcoming and attentive, when psilocybin allows you to visit.)

PRISONERS OF THE ALTCONSCIOUS VOID

What's more, many of the most evolved, last to fall species of intelligent identity would not have succumbed passively to termination. Their self-awareness would have evolved to be stamped through with unyielding self-preservation (that you have in spades yourself) and, despite being beaten at the Darwinian coda, could only be subdued - not recycled or mulched, separated so the keys to the prefrontal cortex are controlled by the winning intelligence only.

There can be no sharing power in a human being, just as schizophrenia couldn't have become the norm: ways of being that're less effective at survival (in the outside world) go extinct. The nearly-you intelligences are therefore disconnected, ringfenced, imprisoned. No appeal. No hope of parole. Nature is, after all, a pragmatic path of least resistance force.

(Why is the survival of the fittest is the natural way to play out which experiment in alpha persona intelligence is best for taking the reigns. Natural selection is intelligent design results without the creator, using time and extinction as the most level playing field.)

(Brain is biochemical. There's no blueprint for finished homo sapiens intelligence. There can only be a blueprint for the more basic algorithm that sets in motion the Darwinian trial and error natural selection. Like a mother nature doing machine learning and end result just as impenetrable...)

These fully-formed loci of sentient identity become the machine elves once they've been isolated and imprisoned out of the cooling settling mind-nursery maelstrom. Ghosts in the machine, in a sense, doomed to haunt an psychic space that's like a pocket universe locked away in the lizard brain region of the brain.

Although they've been silenced and, except in cases of mental illness, securely locked away from interference with the dominance of your autonomy, these self-perpetuating homunculus tangles of neurons must be made to "live" - the most evolved will have gone far enough to be coded for decades of life - in a disconnected headspace that's also stable enough not to traumatize machine elves to madness. Psychological breakdown in part of the overall system can be fatal to the sanity of the entire mental space; to be avoided as a core function of the homo sapiens blueprint.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02475-x?utm_source=fbk_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf217830820=1&fbclid=IwAR1Z9FfpeggKebfBgZOum6ylk1KausDFIOfzVnjbzR_AR-tdGBHOb2r2Ja4

#merton

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MACHINE ELVES AND HOMONCULUS STONE BABIES OF THE BRAIN

Prologue Definitions

Machine elves

Cognitive dissonance

Confirmation bias

Darwinian

Energizer Bunny

Solaris

Stone babies

Complex chemistry

Organic life

Multicellular life

DNA

Ego

Egocentric

Egomaniac

Vanity

Conceit

AI (artificial intelligence)

Machine Learning

AI singularity

AGI (artificial general intelligence)

A-con (artificial consciousness)

SCRIBBLE!

All you are exists in the gaps in brain progressing, super but accidental redundancy gone Darwinian. Life came eventually from tiny anomalies in chemistry - exceptions - then cells, multi cells, moving multi cells etc. Human accident also, rampant success, but it is standard evolution ad hoc - porking our way through all resources, like greedy consumers since the LHB. In the gaps is the gold, though.

Electricity chemistry pinging around the brain concertina organic machine learning time needed to create valid next generations. Testing testing blind watchmaking consciousness. Which it eventually did, a few times. Most didn't have it. We did.

Unto now, the gaps have their sight on AI or cybernetics. We perceive the exponential flashpoint where AI fuse is lit; to develop in picotime. We knew that's coming cuz it's not an alien concept. Same thing originated humans from the primates; and all the way back.

It's rather unfair that activating a non-self serving bullshit / inauthenticity / virtue signalling often causes an interruption in natural flow as one audits one's behaviour. The ironic bit is how that sincere audit, only to be genuine and not feed others blarney, causes a stuttering - the look of uncertainty - which is actually taken for insincerity or discomfort. Double irony the slick fuck who doesn't audit or care to be sincere, even the snake oil seller with a learnt parlour, comes over smooth, no discord, certain, this truthful, authentic, sincere, worthy of trust. This is a perception mismatch - imagination to lie besting intuition about who to trust (and feeling, if it needs thinking about, it is less true).

If everything is a drive to solution or at least progress, it's inevitable to eventually realise this must be engineered if it's not to rely on chances intuition (hard to pass on/teach). Once this realisation hits, the choice is how much of life gets subjected to the deconstruction engineering necessary to aspire progress cuz not doing this is devalued, success or failure. Convergence with AI, not cuz it's mechanistic thinking but cuz it's breaking down increasingly complex chunks of reality into variables and algorithms. This is also a changed perspective as it's not all about forensic past dissection but variables algorithm approach to choices and the future especially when it comes to pursuing a goal, to doing.

In the moment yeah you can live in it but if you notice it, it's gone, and if it's well lived it's something good gone that can't be forever. That's all fine. But if it's a moment full of love and life, its loss is no fun - hide, don't think, don't be sad - but whatever, the lovemoment ends with one of you gone and the other going on like a lonely Energizer bunny.

Machine elves are the brain's consciousness dead ends, like personality abortions doomed to toil and live dumb in the deepmind unable to escape the loop of their inspiral succession of doors and rooms.

Or are they the brain making personalities for fun like the oceanworld Solaris. Once made the homunculus has to live cuz that's our fundamental law of life, how much personality is invested - not too much - virtually sane is just as much a natural selection as animals with eyes. like the ocean world Solaris.

The patterns of these abortions - stone babies calcified by time and distance from origin - lose distinctive features as one sees the mass, the in-spirals zoom out to look like consciousness fractals making geometric shapes whose uberform is real grand emotions (powerful insulators) like love and hate and empathy.

There's a barrier between personality prime and subordinate praetorian subconscious, and the machine elves and the homunculus trying to live, escape, loyalists v rebels?

This barrier is reinforced over early childhood though the multiplicity of fluid personality is still within reach. Kids make believe easily, "I'm David Beckham, you be Cristiano Ronaldo," one says, and that's all is needed. This state doesn't last, though. It's not expedient and real lived experience relentlessly teaches how life needs to be lived. Single personality, compromise with the oceanworld it can admit of many moods and facets.

This is the devil's bargain all human brains make, to live. It's another bargain that's not a choice ever made but a fact of our brains today and a fait accompli (like any Darwinian process, it's very extant consideration proof it was naturally selected a long time ago).

Perhaps this bargain where the frontline personality and lieutenants are given the route to the light - the optic nerve, for one - cutting loose the machine elves (loyalists) and homunculus (rebels), denied the light. Maybe this is the real origin truth in the underground/hell metaphor. And heaven isn't a place on earth but a life in a body upon it.

Think also about psilocybin, the inspiration for machine elves. They're always benign, calming, profound, in their own universe etc. Why wouldn't one feel a profound sense of gratitude, meeting the tireless lifelong guardians of your sanity - your identity - your safety. Bad trips could be a homonculus escaping, running rampant, though our brains are creative omnipotent s (inside the skull) so the escapee is eventually brought under control, neutralized.

The patterns made by of these personality abortions / occurs - though most are turned into stone babies calcified by time and distance from origin - lose distinctive features as one sees the mass, the in-spirals zoom out to look like consciousness fractals making geometric shapes whose uberform is real grand emotions (powerful insulators) like love and hate and empathy.

The first and last glimpse of the stone baby consciousness stillborn animations has so much fidelity, so much consciousness, so much depth in layers, it feels real, it feels like seeing God. Profound, ecstatic, personality-changing.

The world is very big. Big enough to send people mad or foetal. Foetal is mostly harmless: jobs and careers and breeding, if there's evil done, at least it's only done by inches. Madness is sometimes not harmless. It can be infectious. It is turning the innumerable into an equation.

At best this means crass approximation constipated by singularities and infinities that might factor conveniently but require faith they are equal rather than unknowns. National fantasy is a paradigm here. Or the innumerable is reduced to an algorithm, confirmation bias and cogdis evidence it's a fairytale (at least to observers). Religion is algorithm, as is mysticism. These bogus attempts to imagine a world that can't be imagined in any meaningful sense require commitment to equations or algorithms. Time devoted to this commitment makes them unreasonably precious. Precious things are possessed but also must be defended.

What's my own algorithm or equation explanation? That's the difference I think matters: it's only made up of expressly human factors, often ignoble and base and sad (for me and you). It doesn't need faith or singularities or fantasy or infinity. The problem is, it may be accurate, but whether it is or isn't it's not compelling and has no spark of any magic. Magic is the light good side of the infinities. It's a fairytale that might become a myth, it's not real except if it's reality to enough people (close by or in reach). I don't think it can be faked if one's being honest. But without the magic, what's the point of life except as a kindness to a duty to others, the logical endgame of nihilism.

Irony: opinion - decisive defining of personality - this is based on past experience but weighted towards quality over quantity JUST ABOUT - education, new data, new situations, research, expertise: these build by quality. Ultimately no matter what the subject but the bigger it is the more increasingly scant facts (in absolute terms, as a % of all facts available), there's a best guess, to the best of my knowledge, far as I know, based on the evidence etc. Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias plays to this part of the algorithm, Dunning Kruger setting the predisposition based on specifics, demeanour/mood setting the predisposition objective bias/weighting.

To act with foresight based on predicted outcomes, one being preferred to others requires IMAGINATION to try modelling the future out of facts and other opinions etc. Given there may be no visceral or personal unequivocal evidence, and data is nuanced, there's got to be tough choices that require a fantasy to make happen. The scientists with enough facts to model a future disaster must use fantasy thinking to act before it is too late. Ironically the opinionated fool who knows fuck all gets to live real world prosaic, demanding better more undeniable proofs. Which can't happen cuz it's all about the future.

Human Imagination is the universe's most incredible creation (that we know!), not just for its potential but its tiny size and complexity. Trillion trillion neurons and axons in a network that works.

Daily life is a drip drip of experiences (sensory) that fill the brain's memory with, initially, the materials imagination needs to create its own universes. These begin fascinating - FEELING compelling - because they're new enough to seem possible so the brain takes it seriously as curiosity is hard-wired with scale quickly added. Drip drip drip.

Children play imaginative games because the potential (offered by imagination) still seems possible; and there's enough newness in daily drip drip to feed in new raw materials for ever more diverse imaginings. FEELINGS loosed by imagined worlds are intense early on because of thise closeness to possible; becoming less as drip drip drip time goes by and the brain's bullshit detector advances. The imagined world, once familiar, is less compelling.

New imaginings remain a catalyst for EMOTION because in that newness is something for the brain to explore. Imagined games can last longer thus. Eventually, though, the drip drip drip of real life - which doesn't cease - becomes so familiar there's no flow of new raw materials for the imagination; and then the imagined worlds are less fascinating. The experience of the drip drip drip asserts the undeniable nature of real life versus the imagined worlds, i.e. real life is probably, imagined worlds are mostly impossible. Once the latter builds enough reinforcement and the latter is demonstrated almost entirely impossible, the brain's faith in the possibility of these imagined worlds drops markedly and no more intense feeling comes from them.

For a while the real world, which is after all quite big, fills the void left behind by receding imagined worlds - ambition and hope and dynamism reside therein. But then the person gets old and the drip drip drip of everyday life continues relentless so that very predictability and the unlikeliness of early dreams increase so the brain loses faith in that, too. From this point people often become alcoholics (stupefy the brain's bullshit detector, so the feelings can flow again with lesser or despite everyday familiarity - often with a combination of memory and former states of mind), or junkies (various types, various effects, initially respite from the everyday so feelings flow but ultimately familiarity also - needing bigger doses or cecession).

More usually the older person moves to duty, fortitude, ministering to family's needs or - in any case - simply habituates to a less intense, less emotionally charged life thereafter. There's plenty of encouragement baked into our society, to make it easier to transition. Vanity is often a useful vehicle here: maturity equated to accepting duty and eschewing a life predicated on chasing compelling emotions. In any case, that's the way it seems to work.

The bathos of old age tends to be accompanied by physical or mental infirmity, loss of health, fragmentation of brainfunction, as the living organism begins its deterioration towards death and re-atomisation; the network shutdown, memory and imagination lost both as an individual system and a future potential, since the complexity of a particular brain is so unlikely the universe won't last long enough for there to be another quite the same.

The resonating concepts of any human society's myths and legends and fairytales are founded on a shared experience (being human). These concepts become embedded, like the rings in a tree trunk, because they matter - concurrently, contemporaniously, to a high enough proportion of those living at a particular time.

Time sorts the metaphorical wheat from the allegorical chaff, generation to generation, but the artifacts of these shared mythologies - like thunder clouds as gods doing battle or icebergs crashing into the ocean as ice-giants expelled from Jotunheim - echo long after the originating beliefs have become obsolete.

The remnants of the shared metaphor, a shortcut familiarity and unquestioned value, are appropriated by modern day's trinity of evil: propaganda, advertising and art. Prior to corporate capitalism advertising was owned by religion. Prior to democratic pluralism propaganda was owned by the ancien regime.

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BORING CONVENTIONS, OPTIMISTIC CHOICES, COMING FORK

Boring habit convention - e.g. the degradation of job routine, the faithlessness of relying on others for salary, the narrow in-spiral of parochial that ends in anxious instinctual fascism - were an anathema. Part of the escape created I engendered through Avalon, it became clear in the mid/late 20s was the preference (as jobs and careers took their toll) for younger friends. Why? Worse than good old fashioned prudence, which seems to last a lifetime, it was motivated by something more practical, pragmatic and quid pro quo: refusing the degradation choice, turning instead to humans still vital and hopeful with somewhere to go. This wasn't so calculated back in the day, but it's clear with hindsight. The details are organic and, all in all, it's good at 35.u

But at 45 there's a stronger sense of time running out - not on being alive, it's not about mortality - but on options that're actually compelling in the world of 7 billion ditzy diversity. What I mean by options is not something I'd thought much about ten or twenty years ago. What I mean is, on the one hand there's various flavours of splendid isolation (i.e. where other people don't matter cuz there's no interaction) and on the other, the plausible embrace by entities, groups, structures of the extant world.

If one wants to be IN the world of society one's got to form the connections needed to get anywhere interesting involving other people. This was always taken fur granted and dismissed years ago. But the conventional world changes in how it reacts and what it offers, according to your age. Eventually this change, the strength of convention, gets so defining it can't be redefined by one's individual persona. Doors close to you as you get older.

I'm part of this finite time and the realisation about options narrowing changes other things. The now much younger vitality is too basic, too cul-de-sac, too far back along the line to give years to hauling out of the mire.

But we're in the yangtime now. Conditions have changed. Just as important, any younger friends are now the age I was when we went through the unusual quid pro quo, when I benefited from the hopeful energy.

I'm antsy because of the sense of closing time and opportunity.

Those friends are mid-30s, going through their own rootless need for an injection of energy on the threshold of middle age, left unimpressed by the mainstream - as I was, no doubt.

At 45 I'm at best in the same boat; and this makes me little help. I'm over sensitive to devoting time to anything that doesn't feel like a solution. I might be able to come up with a route to that solution, which could helps all, but there's no guarantee of that WHATSOEVER. Thus, a doldrums that's hard to solve. It's not horrible but it isn't wise and it's extremely boring a lot of the time.

#yehuda

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FAKE-NEWS INFESTS PRODUCTS AND POLITICS IN THE INTERNET OF THINGS (FOR SALE) BUT WE MUST RESIST AND FIGHT BACK

SITE / PRODUCT SCORING

Rather than suggest a specific site for product reviews, I’ll do a short list of “tells” I use to rate a site as biased, corrupt, feeder, independent, sold out, expert etc. Based on the final “score” of a site, I’ve found it pretty effective at saving hours going through semi-convincing blarney and - more important - saving me losing money on purchasing substandard products.

If there’s a link to Amazon (or equivalent) to buy the product being reviewed, the site is getting a kickback and the review will be biased. This has infiltrated many of the established review sites as they try to stay profitable, compromising integrity.

Is the site is specialist? Does it focus solely on certain types of product (e.g. high-end audio equipment)? Is the site independent (i.e. not owned by some megacorp)? Then it will be worth looking into further.

How much history does the site have? When was it founded? Was it once (or is it still) print media? How many mouths does it have to feed? Truth is, a site that began print media and contracted online only but maintains a staff, should be treated as suspect. They’ve every reason to sell bias and corrupt reviews.

Does the site have no product purchase links of the type of product you’re looking into? Sometimes sites only link to specific affiliates (i.e. sponsors). Does it have no Amazon ‘deals’? If not, then this is promising.

Is the site well established but not linked into the top pages of Google and not thrown up as a top search result by dint of sponsorship? This is promising.

If the site is selling the product directly, in-house reviews will be biased and “verified purchaser” reviews will likely be corrupted.

Sites like Analyze and identify fake reviews and ReviewMeta.com - Amazon Review Checker can be useful for extreme cases but these days they’re easily fooled too. Still, another layer of safeguarding.

If the site is sufficiently general - like if it does more than just review products of a certain type - it may be on Trustpilot Reviews: Experience the power of customer reviews and this is worth checking. If the site is listed bad on Trustpilot then it’s got problems.

What I do is pick a few products I know personally - ideally one’s with specific flaws that are obvious to any purchaser but won’t be in the press releases - and see if the reviews hit on those issues. If they do, and there’s similar integrity and fidelity on comparable products (i.e. the site isn’t just a feeder for a certain brand, rubbishing everything else) you may have hit gold!

Is the site up to date? Is the site suspiciously recommended on 3rd party platforms like Quora, often using a cut and paste answer to semi-related questions (a keyword sniper bot).

Does the site frontline articles that try to look like reviews but are trying to cover products not yet released to the public? Unless the site has a pre-release physical product this is a surefire blag and the reviews will be compromised.

Does the site cover only big brand names? This is a bad sign. No product type is populated solely by big household name brands.

Does the site cover a reasonable spectrum of price options for products of the same type? If not, there’s reason to be concerned. Example: a site reviewing action cameras will invariably have the GoPro but there’s options for 1/10th the price - not as good but still, similar basic functions.

No review site can be authentic without dealing with both highest and lowest price and, most important, giving you satisfactory explanation WHY there is such a difference between top and bottom.

Is the review site classifying based on price rather than rating? This should be looked into because many sites use the budget v best divide to avoid having to directly compare essentially similar products. It’s a tactic you’d expect from a site trying to sell expensive and budget versions without putting off the buyer by telling the rich guy he’s paying more for nothing, or the poor guy he can’t actually afford a decent version of the product.

Does the review site include the name of the individual reviewer of the product? Is there contact details for that reviewer? Does the reviewer include an abridged resume? If not, it’s cause for concern.

Online versions of newspapers sometimes do ‘best in class’ reviews for mainstream products under headlines like “Which is the best blah blah?”. This will likely be biased, compromised and an evolved money spinner for the newspaper.

You’ll be able to tell a fake review if the review/list has very little about the shortcomings and frontline issues with whatever technology (industry standards) instead focusing on positives.

A genuine enthusiast (or expert) will review with sincere interest in the product type as a whole. This review will put the product in context, make comparisons with other options, pinpoint pros and cons some of which will be industrywide and therefore on ALL reviews of the same type.

Does the site review brand names far above anything generic, no matter what the generic spec is? This is a sign of bias and corruption.

Does the site have a summary star rating or percentage? If so, a common check is to look at a popular frontline brand review - like Jabra Elite 65t earbuds at $125 - and look for an average generic review - like

Does the review blindly accept the press release ‘industry standard’ limits and use language that tries to gloss over (or reassure you) about obvious objective negatives? This is another sign of corruption. For example: The TrustedHoverReviews.com site reviews the best hoverboards of 2019. It covers known brands and a few generics.

Have you found some negatives in the review - enough to make it seem like it could be genuine? This algorithm is a bit more complicated. See, bogus reviews will smokescreen by writing up negatives but these will only be negatives by comparison with other product options of the same type. It’s a cheap tactic and can actually be a good sign of deeper corruption as the review is going to such trouble to hide its true agenda.

Does the site or the product have customer submitted reviews? Verified purchase began as a good idea but it's actually a sign the review is more likely to be corrupt as so many products include a chit with the product or send out the product free to a mailing list, offering discounts/deals in return for 5* reviews.

If the site or product has customer submitted reviews the only useful info can be gleaned is from the "eloquent midrange" i.e. 2 and 3 star, and longer considered 4 star reviews. Cut off the 5s and the 1s. The former tend to be biased. The latter tend to be edgecases like a product delivery being screwed up (which tells you nothing about the product itself). Cut off reviews that are shorter than 2 sentences. Cut off reviews that don't mention at least three specific features of the product with an opinion, i.e. the battery life was excellent is OK but the phone came with a replacement battery is not!

Biased or covert-sponsored reviews share some techniques. Most abused is “infectious enthusiasm” where the reviewer moons over tech - scripted by press releases - glossing over shortcomings e.g. “the battery life is a decent 25 seconds” or “sleek, chic, Milan-inspired design contours more than make up for the loss of headphone jack; and of course most have switched to USB-C already.” Real reviews are less bright and bubbly, more demanding and pedantic.

Many sites try to appropriate an expertise they may (through the individual contributors involved) be able to call on, but experts need money same as everyone else and selling endorsements - even on the level of an obscure tech geek - can be a nice little income; and is popular with corporate brands as it boosts edgy and niche credibility (on which mainstream success MUST be built, if it wants to last).

Genuine enthusiasts, experts, geeks, or everyday serious users (e.g. a parent with a site reviewing baby high-chairs) will quickly J-curve their ratings so there will be very few highest rank (5-star, 98%+), more high-mid, mid and low=mid ratings and - most important - no less lowerst rank (1-star or 0-star, 25%-) than middling. This is the nature of consumerism: for every decent product idea there will be a handful of innovators, a handful of a handful of innovators also wed to quality,. a majority of copycats or minor variations on the copycat theme, and PLENTY of cheap shit, outright scams, etc. A non-corrupted review site will have a spread of ratings (or review conclusions) matching this range. Bias, corruption, covert-sponsorship: there will be an overload at the top/highest end and either an absence of 2-3 stars + plenty of 1* or a lack of 1* and some 2* and 3*. These latter will often be the non-brand name versions.

True review articles will weight more towards criticism than congratulations, i.e. the review will be into the type of product or the genre of service so will be very aware - and keen to share - insight into the shortcomings of the industry as well as the failures of the actual product. Corrupted or dodgy sites won’t have this sort of scope. It doesn’t help the cause of easy profiteering to have normal industry standards exposed as sub-standard nor does a product sell as well if a trusted review spotlights its pros and cons without 4 to 1 favouring the pros.

These are just some rough notes on the product fake-news reviews and sites that claim to be a one-stop place to find information and comparison tests between ‘rival’ products. Keep an eye on this page for an updated version in the near future with polished, properly categorised points and - later this year - a website and an app with access to an NLP/machine learning benchmark set (code versions of what’s listed above) that’ll let you subject any site or any review or any media outlet or any selected product to unbiased uncorrupted scrutiny.

3-May-2019

#merton

[newslegion-blog1]

THE IRISH BORDER - WHERE BREXIT REALITY AND FANTASY COLLIDE

Remain versus Leave had been a polarizing dichotomy since long before the referendum but it was only thanks to the impending fracture within the Conservative Party this previously philosophical conundrum morphed into a practical question and, since 2016, an actual real world policy.

It's been mostly treated as a matter for debate and division, testing the political system to its limit but - in the mainstream media and in Westminster - it's also been about navigating towards a solution that'd both appease short term demands of those in government while hoping for a long-term resolution able to satisfy the fundamental objectives of those involved; in a form capable of getting through Parliament.

In a way it's testimony to the faith people have and the robustness of the system we've gotten this far. But reality can only be denied so far, when facing it requires a consensus outside the echo chamber or, in this case, where reality and policy are irreconcilable.

The European Union has carried out its side of the negotiations with reasonable utility. Strip away the rhetoric and whatever latest expediency might be occupying front page spin doctors, and there's a simple reality flashpoint that's defining all that comes beyond: the Irish question.

The Irish Question was at the forefront of British politics a century ago and it's back with a vengeance today.

Ironically, given Britain's lamentable behaviour towards Ireland - culminating in the export of Scottish protestants to Ulster in the 19th Century and Home Rule Partition in the 20th - it's this very divide and rule cynicism that's coming to the rescue of the United Kingdom in 2019. Not because of any foresight by the Atlee government responsible for enacting Home Rule (and setting up the Northern Irish border) but because the solution to centuries of sectarian violence and the peaceful removal of that border came about because of Thatcher's single market and Blair's Good Friday Agreement; and this whole peace process between otherwise impossibly opposing interests was facilitated by the treaties of the European Union.

It was the mutual respect for national sovereignty in the context of a transnational union that ended the violence and allowed peace in the island of Ireland. That and nothing else brought the protagonists to the solution.

For all the fire and brimstone partisanship of the loyalists (now the DUP) and the foxhole guerrilla tradition of the RA (now Sinn Fein) the Belfast peace accords signed in 1998 were signed unconditionally by all parties.

There can be no return of a border in Ireland. Nobody wants a return to the decades of terrorism and conflict. It's woven into the Irish Constitution and an irrevocable component of the United Kingdom.

There can be no breakdown of the United Kingdom that looks to sever Ulster from the mainland and sell the Unionists down the river.

The Belfast Agreement must be honoured because it enshrines the only reality of peace in Ireland; not because it chooses one particular solution from many.

Do you as an individual voter care about making a choice that condemns millions of Irish and British citizens to a violent degraded future, by throwing up a border or selling out Northern Ireland's sovereignty?

Do you as an individual voter choose to face this choice without flinching and let these undisputed facts define the subsequent possibilities of your own political position? If not, you're trying to deny reality. This is a path with no destination except  a coming day of reckoning; whatever capital you might enjoy in the short term.

It's irresponsible and playing fast and loose with your fellow human beings, to try to evade this simple truth. 

In 2016, it could be argued, most hadn't considered these points in detail and that few of us realised certain facts were irreconcilable.

There's nothing criminal, after all, in voting against treaties that imposed limits on the freedom of the British government to act any way it wants; nor in voting against continuing to subsidize far away peoples at the expense of those close to home.

But that was then and this is now.

Today there's no excuse for not knowing the consequences of a choice that stands in opposition to the material truth of the real world.

It's no use blaming intransigence in Brussels or Dublin. All they're doing is following the only path available, given the circumstances. They're not so much holding their nerve as dealing with the facts.

The House of Commons isn't to blame for refusing to enable a government whose own "red lines" fly in the face of reality.

The Brexit Tories aren't to blame, in this instance, for voting not to break up the United Kingdom; whatever opinion you might have on their overall strategy.

In the end, the duty of care lies with the government and the voter.

Passions rise in Westminster because Brexit is a failure in this duty of care. Remainers are so motivated against Brexit, even to the unusual extent of refusing to accept the referendum result, because it strikes at something more fundamental than democracy.

It's a question of human tolerance, caring about the future of one's fellow citizens and refusing to choose what's expedient over what's right. For many of the Remain voters, this isn’t even a choice.

#merton

[newslegion-blog1]

DEAR EDITOR - DO YOU KNOW HOW WE'RE GOING TO SAVE THE WORLD?

13th February 2019

Dear Editor,

I like your (insert liberal or libertarian or green or independent or anti-corruption publication).

It doesn't matter whether one agrees or disagrees with everything you publish. The alternate bigger picture perspective, the contrarian positions substantiated with actual researched content: it's an extremely important voice. Yet who hears it?

The brazen, rapacious entrenched interests and incompetent, parochial governments grow more extreme in their methods. Information is ringfenced by Chinese water torture methods, soft power enabled as much by conditioned laziness, the electorate atomised as individuals while the public narratives are increasingly collectivised. Worst instincts are used repeatedly to direct large swathes of the the electorate against their own best interests. Consumer capitalism may be a race to the bottom, albeit one that's taking decades to play out, but clearly climate change and immortal corporate greed are forcing the pace. The future ain't bright.

Your articles cite numerous respected journalists, often those mistreated by the mainstream media for daring to choose truth over prescribed message. Are the numbers of free-thinking individuals so small there's no way to form groups able to challenge the false self-serving cabal of brand name propagandists?

You point out the glib hypocrisy and the crypto-conservatism of so-called Liberal media outlets like the Guardian quite and I share the opinion it's an evil cipher. In many ways those types of publications are worse than the right wing press equivalents. They tend to use clever rhetoric, trading on histories of trusted reporting, to fool otherwise good-natured readers into thinking they're getting the official progressive news, all the while training an insidious pro-corporate pro-anglosphere worldview. This section of the media is the most effective propagandising machine, defining the parameters of cultural and political narrative - the anti-individual faux-left agenda -  making sure the key progressive demographic knows its limits, stays on message, and submits to the dominant neoliberal paradigms.

But what is to be done?

Is it so dangerous to put a head above the parapet nobody does it? There's a significant latent desire for something "better" than this. Why isn't there an organised push back against these corporate scumbags playing dice with the planet's future? There's not even a visible standard about which like-minded "enlightened" individuals could congregate. It's all very well to lament broken politics but where's the alternative representation to rally around?

The only solution that's likely to gain traction against the unrelenting pressure of profit-uber-alles is one that's able to mobilise numbers. It must ultimately engage the hypocrisy of conventional wisdom with an independence and a widespread penetration that'll only be possible if it's funded; to a baseline at least.

Why is nothing substantial happening? Brexit is a catastrophe yet the government gets to play the country for suckers without risk or penalty. I find the lack of constructive outlets for meaningful counter-pressure baffling. Do you know different? If so, we the people beg for some kind of illumination.

Best regards,

Human Beings

#amblard

[newslegion-blog1]

Terminally Ill Children Of The Universe

Look at the night sky.

Think about the age of the universe. 

Consider how old the universe will live to be. 

Speed of light is only slow if you live inside two flashes. 

Lifespan is based on being genetic transport vehicles. Slaves.

Most slaves invent myths or live resigned to the fact of their slavery. 

Slaves breed voluntarily more slaves, in captivity. 

Emancipation of human slavery won't be immortality but the choice of longevity. 

Freedom is choices. One day we'll be children of the universe having learnt to walk. 

Ain't no hero going to free us. Most will do whatever they can to keep us enslaved.

Every time one looks at retarding delusion it mocks "ha, more years in chains!" 

The only significant degradation from youth to old age is hope to be free.

That's what it's like to be a slave. 

The only acts of defiance left are to try not to accept slavery, try not to deluded, try to be positive to everyone’s efforts towards liberation, try not to be part of anyone's problem. 

#pete

[newslegion-blog1]

Richard Dawkins / Bret Weinstein Conversation - Chicago 23-Oct-2018

BW rubbishes mathematical models as proving an imperfect method of arriving at absolute solution so says he doesn't like the maths. But RD rightly sceptical. It's a case of advancing accuracy. You can start with people power and words, and these can cover ground in leaps and bounds, but then precision needs to advance and this moves to a make necessary the maths. The fact the maths is imperfect is an error in the variables and the functions used - human error remains - but it's no reason to suppose a reversion to human-only progress will do anything but decrease precision. This is a foolish backward step. Baby with the bathwater just cuz mathematical model has been imperfectly constructed.

BW mistakes RD saying we're rem ote from evolution when talking about the complexities of human affairs as meaning we're not affected by evolution but RD is talking in terms of evolutionary timescales and our ability to perceive the natural selection in operation - in any meaningful sense - when it comes to interpreting the details of human history (a mere 8000 years).

BW is keen to confront 'what we are programmed for' because he knows that evolution has built us but many now be the absolute opposite instincts needed for humanity to progress - in its own timescales on its own terms.

Key point here is that while our evolved mind and body will contain instincts that drive all the themes in human history, that end up defining that history, this doesn't mean we can apply an absolute judgment of what is and what isn't FIT to be respected/perpetuated based on evolutionary theory. It must always be a humanistic layer that takes into account the evolved instincts but also factors in the strata data of a plethora of anthropomorophic fields of study. "Byproducts" as RD says.

BW is wrong again equating journey into the unknown is NOT a prior step to suicide when the land mass is full - i.e. self sacrifice. The pioneers aren't sacrificing themselves. This is another temporal mistake. The pioneer is optimistic, it's closer to the 'leap jump test if I can' urge that surfaces from some high place, which presumably comes from our primate origins leaping through the trees.

RD is absolutley right to point out the complicated mixture of human level affairs as being NOT Darwininian and the domain of other subjects. BW wants to be a polymath when it comes to the complex edgecases of science but it's a Deepak Chopra approach from an actual scientist. Tempting but bullshit.

RD correctly calls these byproducts - even vastly emotive ones - relics of our genetic construction. It can be interpreted using biology, insofar as what it represents from our biological past, but that doesn't mean biology has any helpful role in further more precise deconstruction.

BW argues that genocide having been a feature of human history for 8000 years is enough reason to apply evolutionary theory to explain and ... then what? This is a case of how it's packaged rather than how it's precisely and profoundly deconstructed. If anything trying to reduce to evolutionary motives is to miss the detail that's necessary for an ACTUAL useful understanding.

Catholicism example, memes that help pass on lineage genes, it's judging based on cherry picking just cuz it matches a version of Darwinian interpretation.

54m RD worldview summary.

Genes and viruses as replicators, the difference is just the method they use to get into the next generation. Genes look after bodies cuz that's their vehicle. Cooperation is therefore inbuilt, zygotes are inevitable without them genes are dead end. Viruses have to use other methods like sneezing and poo. Memes more like viruses. The world is a replicator soup, croutons being tools of phenotype replication.

Extended phenotypes, this concept is the grey zone where evolutionary biology crosses into sociology history etc. Depending how far one extends them. This extension could be defined as the necessary conditions created by the phenotypic behaviour/activity of the gene-vehicles. No choice is involved.

Memes are synthetic a posteriori. Hard to make precise statements about their behaviour.

It's funny how large scale systems with a lot of component people make less mistakes in discernment choices where more discerning individuals are part of any process of meritocracy. Either directly or stages removed.

RD to be commended for working up the enthusiasm to stay mostly attentive to BW whose self-regard is way out of whack with his evident stature in the field of biology. I may be biased here as I've read BW's post-show tweets and even the way he refers to DAWKINS lacks respect and the impression he'd somehow given a good account of himself speaks to what must be something of an echo chamber existence. I'm no longer surprised he hasn't found a new job.

Example: BW was correctly placed at Evergreen and RD is correctly placed at Oxford, relative intellectual stature aptly reflected in the relative status of these institutions. BW has been described as the best high school science teacher in America. This statement is one of the best examples of damning with faint praise.

BW wants to tether his keen eye for sociology and psychology with the heavy weight of scientific truth. This means he's prepared to claim the big trends in human culture - the long lived meme - religion for instance. RD says religion is a mind virus and though this was obviously hyperbole to goad the religious, he stuck by the distinction when BW challenged him to think of religion as a Darwinian meme.

Presumably this clash of definition reveals how the two think of religion. RD doesn't presume to consider religion part of the human culture survival toolkit, preferring to see it as a plethora of viral strains contracted by billions and heavily resistant to being cured; though we're getting better at it in parts of the world. BW says it's cultural meme, serving a purpose that's simpatico (or even beneficial) to the survival of the human fittest. Two problems with this, the first one of perspective, second one of anthropology.

First: to use the fact religion is with the human species, in various forms, as a proof of its symbiotic role is - as BW snipes at RD, to not see the forest for the trees. Today yes, we humans are alive and religion is here. But who knows a hundred years hence? What if religious war escalated to nuclear holocaust and all humans were wiped out? An observing alien would judge religion to have been ultimately fatal to homo sapiens. No more people, no more religion, not symbiotic at all. It's not enough to say a thing is a meme just because it's present at the time of observation.

Second: BW cites religion as a good meme because he says it codified important survival rules like people doing things in life to justify an afterlife in heaven. While it's not literally true, BW says it's metaphorically true as the tenets of religion teaches moral goodness, which makes for better behaviour, which means stability and better conditions to get the gene letters into the next generation. This is bolx. Islam is a blueprint for jihad, the Bible would have us killing for minor crimes and various life choices (like homosexuality). The only way to square religion as a force for good in human survival is to invent one that inculcates a bunch of rules preselected for beneficial effect. No religion does this. None ever tried to do so. Cherry picking bolx like Irish priest in the family encouraged success for the gene letter replication for a lineage despite the priest's celibacy is a daft spin on a convenient social mix that has as many versions antithetical to continuing the lineage. Think of those suicide cults where whole families died together to satisfy religious laws. Are those religions mind viruses where Irish Catholicism isn't?

BW in the after video links evolution in meme culture to natural selection which, ironically, is a cipher for post-modernism. But why?

Two points. Firstly, let's not mistake the lateral spread of an idea at a point in time, however widely it may go viral, with the extension of an idea across successive generations. These are different axis. Secondly, natural selection, if used as the arbiter of what is 'good' or 'bad' in the grand scheme of survival of the fittest, operates on a different timescale to the blink of human history (what little we know) since the first civilisations. It's wild speculation to presume the weight of evolutionary theory applies to ANY aspect of civilised human culture - religion included. Play with the techniques by all means, use natural selection as a neat metaphor sure, but don't kid yourself the 8000 years of vaguely documented homo sapiens activity amounts to anything profound or predictive of which (if any) of our current 'big' ideas will ultimately be selected by the generations to come.

For comparison sake, I’ve included a link to the conversation between physicist Brian Greene and Richard Dawkins from around the same time, this time in New York. The content speaks for itself and Brian Greene is always enthusiastic and engaging. The calibre of the conversation is much higher than the Weinstein event. This is mostly down to Greene being a far more mature, erudite and loose. He’s able to engage Dawkins, who begins sluggish but wakes up when he realises he’s been booked to talk to someone genuinely intelligent and interesting.

#schlumpfe

[newslegion-blog1]

CREATIVITY IS THE MILDLY AUTISTIC BRAIN TRYING TO FEEL COLOUR IN AN OTHERWISE MONOCHROME WORLD

From as early as I can remember there's been a gap - Camus' screen of glass - between the person I am and the world I'm in. This is different to being inauthentic, i.e. being one person in one’s mind and another in public. Camus in his excellent book “The Stranger” describes this state of mind as like looking at the world behind a soundproof glass, like watching someone in a glass telephone cabinet animated in conversation but unable to hear the sound. It's an interesting metaphor but you have to think of the sound unheard as emotion unfelt - this is the isolation, if it's extreme enough - you're a presence in the story of your daily life but it's not the same visceral experience most have.

The brain is an adaptive chameleon machine and it doesn't take long for a child living out this disconnect to learn - by dint of a compensating early developed intelligence - what ought to be the norms of a human being going through the world. To extend Camus' metaphor, the child (and the adult he becomes) develops an increasingly well-honed reconstruction technique that's akin to lip-reading the sound that's behind the glass, bridging the gap between experience and emotion in response. If the disconnection wasn't too extreme, this reconstruction can become a seamless reconnection by adulthood, parsing lived experience so quickly it's entirely unconscious. I suppose that's the hope when giving medication to ADD and ADHD children. Help their focus, give their viscera a kick (through dopamine agonists and serotonin antagonists) and the child matures into a 'normal' adult. It probably works some of the time.

There price paid, in an everyday sense, for reconstruction emotional responses, is to "feel" the simple things of life with less fidelity - less intensity - less conviction. It may not be an isolation, if the reconstruction is all 'under the hood' but it'll still manifest a range of corollary common situations: antagonism with mobs, baffled by jingo, degrees of sociopathy (that can be turned to the good or the bad or the merely self-serving).

The personal circumstances of the isolated child will have an inordinate impact on the happy function of the adult. Not so much because the reconstruction intelligence needs to be taught - the brain is going to work its best solutions regardless - but because the other side of the isolation disconnect develops early complex reconstruction techniques and this is fertile ground for prodigious talents in creative arts and critical problem solving. In truth it might be that every artist and thinker and creative mind begins with a child born on the spectrum of limbic/emotion disconnection. How an individual's brain reconstructs the world may vary, not least according to how wide the disconnection happens to be, ends up making the difference between an adult artistic virtuoso and an adult sociopathic narcissist!

I'd speculate the so-called intelligence of the Ashkenazi Jews isn't some phenotype consequence of centuries in the mercantile professions but more likely a mild genetic twist making the spectrum disconnection a norm, reconstruction brains commonplace and thus no surprise the illiterate Jews came up with their compelling spin on religion so early - reconstructing a world beyond real life - or that later generations of literate Jews continued to be born outsiders, manifesting as prodigious cultural affinity with science and the arts. And a wildly disproportionate number of great scientists, artists, writers, creative critical thinkers, etc.

The innocuous reality gap in brains on the spectrum is not an everyday handicap if it's not too extreme. This may ultimately be a case of minor mutation (or epigenetic predisposition) that gets selected long-tern by dint of it forcing the brain to develop faster, more capable conscious intelligence to compensate.

Our brains want to experience the world in full colour but the slightly autistic mind is slightly disconnected from the viscera. This is like living in a black and white silent movie. The brain is preconditioned to feel the colours so it must use its innate biochemical tools to turn monochrome into technicolour. How this manifests is what matters: a heightened perception of the world that's necessary for authentic intelligent description (even if unconscious). The descriptions are the catalyst for the reconnected emotional responses that fit the norms of brains not on the spectrum.

A corollary of this process, as its extended across countless deconstructions in all the diverse circumstances of everyday life, happens to be a toolset the mind can use (to varying degrees) on its own imagination and memory and lived experience. This is toolset we call creativity. All art, literature, science and philosophy are creations of this toolset. Truth is, a brain wholly in tune with its reality confidently living moment to moment full of feeling in colour, it's a mind hypnotised by its own being, compelled to be. We love to see the natural absorption of animals and people unconsciously doing their thing in unquestioned sympathy with the environment. In human beings it's what turns charm into charisma.

It's ironic that what we consider culture and the enlightenment advances of science and the beautiful illuminating creations of art and invention are the pinnacle of human achievement, judged with hindsight, whereas the often ugly unpredictable struggle of those individuals forced to engage reality using learnt deconstruction techniques to intuit and describe the feeling of connection and compulsion, these individuals can be discordant, outliers, invariably complex, sometimes alien enough to be marginalized; or worse.

#fjwexler

[newslegion-blog1]

WALKING IS EXPLORING - THE CONQUEST OF OLD IGNORANCES WITH NEW TRUTHS

To walk step by step contracts space. Consumption of distance on foot, though seemingly contrary because it takes so much longer, actually distills it in memory. This is what's meant by taking possession.

A space may have been made by machines that dwarf our little human dimensions but distilled memory doesn't dwell on effort. It can transcends both the grandest creations of nature and the ambitious mechanical constructions of man. The most imposing monolith is reduced to mere fact of expended labour once you've conquered it by simple physical exploration

In distilled memory, after the walk or recalling past journeys the largest of spaces can be traversed and encompassed at the speed of thought - truly the fastest speed there can be and, by definition, ENTIRELY relative.

Buildings, no matter their size, can be leapt in a single bound! What's more, walking means exploring the world's objects not in isolation but connected by your own authentic footsteps - one by one. Walking is also the ultimate babelfish of geography. It moves from new terrain to new surroundings in real time, travelling the void space inter-connections, thus rendering them non void, establishing possession on the robust foundations of completed mapspace.

This is not all.

Unlike looking at the map or postcard or enjoying the conceit of 'being there' by listening to anecdotes or even watching Google Street View, the walker gets to own the context too. He or she acquires real moments in time, the performances in every passing  instance, in short: the PEOPLE.

And these people are not turned to hide away, their faces blurred out in the early morning exposure, but instead move about their business unconscious of observation: existing in the space; living with it, through it, around it, in all their many splendoured banality. They say the journey is more important than the destination. If that's true it's because of the people; the life of fellow travellers with whom - for a little while - we share the road.

#merton

[newslegion-blog1]

THERESA MAY: FROM VICAR'S DAUGHTER TO FALLEN WOMAN

Theresa May is an old-fashioned archetype. Daughter of a country vicar, her family culture will have inherited and passed onto young Theresa the conditioned deference of the rectory towards the noble Lord of the Manor whose merest whim dictated their continued “living”. What wouldn’t the vicar do, to ingratiate himself to his Lords and Masters? What price an invitation to the great hall and with it boasting rights for the rest of the “season”?

Anyone familiar with Jane Austen or later Victorian novels will know the character type well: the ingratiating, simpering vicar toadying to his betters every way his parochial imagination allows while at the same time relishing any chance to play tyrant to anyone lower on the social scale. To the Lord, the rector is an obsequious, needy prostitute. To the rest, he (or she) is the servant of hereditary privilege, a loyal magistrate ministering the self-intetested justice of the noble estate to its inconvenient tenants.

The legacy of this ancient dynamic of ordained aristocracy and rigid social positions is so profoundly, if bafflingly, imprinted on Theresa May and the Tories it defines their outlook and actions to this day.

Such is the true character of Theresa May, beneath the veneer. It’s why she seems unerringly to be doing the bidding of the ERG, of the likes of Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, despite the humiliating and ludicrous positions she’s forced to take up. She’ll face any public examination and stay firm in stubborn immobility. She’ll never engage any opponent — nor even fellow Conservatives (if they’re outside the cabal of her aristocratic organ grinders). The behaviour is indelibly written deep into the DNA of her personality.

All this is a dangerous and ultimately destructive state of affairs for the UK. It’s a confluence of the worst possible sequences of cause and effect, for the country to be “led” by someone entirely compromised by an innate compulsion to serve the will of a narrow class of rapacious right-wingers. Brexit is the perfect denouement of years unnecessary austerity imposed by the May government, forced onto a nation whose citizens had made the mistake of forgotting their place in the English social order. The dog-collared magistrate has come of age and now ministers to an entire nation.

It’s worth noting that her ingrained class servility is also the reason Theresa May seemed to begin Brexit as a committed Remainer. It has nothing to do with her having changed her mind but rather her master; back in 2016 it was David Cameron. His retirement after the referendum, in a grossly entitled fit of irresponsible pique, left the leash dangling; and it was quickly taken up by Boris, Rees-Mogg and others in the ERG.

As reality and, as Brexit gets closer, unavoidable public scrutiny forces Theresa May further into a political corner, she’s found the role strangely compatible with her informal status as a servant to the will of others. Like the sex worker defending the atrocities and violence of her pimp, Theresa May is commanded by similar dynamics. No matter the excesses of the pimp (or, in this case, the Tory grandees) the degraded prostitute finds strength in her submission to defy the world. Somewhere in her psyche is the blind belief the pimp will love her best out of all his “bitches”. Somewhere in Theresa May’s make-up is the hope she’ll one day be given her version of the same reward; perhaps deferred so it may come in this life or the next. After all, the Great British class hierarchy is ordained by God, is it not?

Theresa May has been in thrall to this pimp class dynamic for years, possibly all her life. Sadly, it is now running concurrent with a defining moment in British history. The crimes of her Tory pimps may not stay covered up for long and Mrs May will certainly see out her born destiny by taking the fall. It’ll be the United Kingdom — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — and its citizens home and abroad who’ll be paying the price, very soon and for the rest of their lives.

#laura

[newslegion-blog1]

MINDFULNESS MEDITATION IS A RELIGION (ALBEIT WITHOUT GODS) FIT ONLY FOR MOBS AND UTOPIAS

Great art and music, literature and a plethora of audio and visual media, philosophy and countless examples of inspired insight: these represent the best examples of human creativity, enriching the human experience and propelling the species forward. All are in some way driven by necessity, often by so called negative emotions - making do - fighting back - wrestling with neuroses - reacting to a reaching for the light or to express the overflow of febrile imagination. The necessity is to restore equanimity, to get through the day without falling to madness or despair. Ambition is the life-blood of creativity, after all.

Isn't creativity expressed to the world the only true meaning we can actually aspire to share, to give value to our finite days on this planet, beyond the mere fact of being alive (but not for long) and thus by default meaningful to ourselves?

Healing the brain's extremes, levelling out the peaks and troughs, is a natural shared goal and on the surface it may seem a good idea. Meditation - and medication - are prescribed as a practical way to take back control of the moment and calm the stormy seas of negative emotions like anger, passion, jealousy, envy, avarice, etc. How can this liberation from uncontrolled extremes and bipolar mania not be an entirely good, benign thing?

Mindfulness meditation is a great sell to calm the mob and flatten the peaks and troughs but the price is surely high; if not a death of art then making it pale fire? Nabokov saw suburban American plenty of the 50s as taking the edge off great artistry, mediocritising - mindfulness risks being another step in that suffering reduction, pale fire the pale fire.

Two elephants in the room:

Not everyone's brain is exceptional enough to be of interest to strangers, so utopia must be either unfair or chase equality of outcome, penalty for brilliance to aggregate with compensation for less able brains. Communism of thoughts.

Mindfulness succeeds when it turns unconscious reaction into conscious realisation. By default it must either improve a suffering mind towards equanimity or smooth down the peaks of a euphoric one. Pale fire.

Proponents of mindfulness meditation see distraction as the enemy of everything but is it? He rightly points out that someone skilled with mindful meditation isn't trying to be an enemy to creativity and is a positive boon to appreciating creative efforts in others - understanding, empathy, patience, concentration. Widespread it would certainly being people together, make populations closer etc. Creativity is the sum of influences expressed through the prism of a porous mind in a set of limbic circumstances (and their associations). More influences to which one's mindful makes them less impressionistic and more instructive. This logic ends in creativity merging into engineering, impressionism becoming realism. This is society as science. Is that not, for some human beings, surrendering one of the most important, compelling human imperfections: creative inspiration? This logic ends in colourful chaos, merging into - at best virtuosity, at worst cacophony - impressionism becomes abstraction. Worse than the society as science, it becomes society as barbarism (even if not physically violent).

This point should be taken as illuminating as there's a dichotomy often presented Art v Science. But the poles are Science and Barbarism or perhaps Science v Randomness. Science engineers. Randomness discovers; almost always nothing new. Art is a creation rather than a verb. Art can be created by Science and by Randomness. In reality human beings are a blend of the two but greater creativity is a notch closer to the Science pole than the Random, extent varying according to the Art, the Artist and the scatter of Randomness directly influencing.

Ignorance leads to barbarism. Education leads to science. Unmindful minds devolve towards the barbaric (or chaos). Mindful minds evolve towards the science (or orderly) paradigm. Society as a whole might be better served by Order than Chaos. The devil is in the detail and sociopolitical preferences of a society i.e. more libertarian accepts the self and everyone else as supporting actors, art matters cuz it affects me, my art matters therefore don't 100% science and order. Let my merit win or lose. More socialist notes the self but everyone is an actor, art matters cuz it affects many, my art matters if it affects many, science 100% order to 100% of utilitarian happiness. Mindfulness is a socialism of life experience.

The mindful utopia is one of individual human beings taking one another as humans, all that nuance a given, never distilled into a symbol or cipher or passion. This could be a pleasant society but would it be an interesting one; would it not undermine the struggle and the fruits of that struggle by making an objectivity about all individual's human hardware that can be coordinated by a benign AI perfect into what's best for the world by whatever criteria. Does that not ultimately change the nature of being and reduce people to cogs in a vast machine, zombies living well but numb (or flatline or junkies to dope control).

#merton

[newslegion-blog1]

WHAT'S POLARIZING SOCIETY AND WHY CAN'T THE TWO SIDES COMMUNICATE?

Fundamentally it's a battle between realists and fantasists; those who're living life as if they're in it together with others and those who're living life like it's a movie they star in.

People - the mainstream - used to be more of a blend of these two fundamentals. The past few years things have polarised. But not a polarisation of opinion but way of living life. The opinions just get tacked on for convenience, to have something to say when on screen.

But what about people off screen, why have chosen a side, seemingly arbitrarily... like they’re choosing a football side to chant about. That’s just it, though. They're never off screen to themselves.

Who decided that was the new political reality though?

The seeds were sewn quite a long while ago. And people don't cope well with change, generally. Social media, sudden referendum, austerity after the financial crisis (a completely bogus decision that bankrupted what little was left of government in partnership with citizen)...

The UK has Brexit for its theme and script. But I suspect it could've been any number of things.

I wouldn't be surprised if many years from now, people of the future looked back at this period and marvelled that the UK and the US degraded their mandate to educate the populace, to such an extent they allowed their institutions to be controlled by the votes of virtual morons.

But why not go France’s route instead? Historical precedent? Cultural history playing its part?

If you don't educate people in any of the cultural history of the country; and pro-actively run an education that's so degraded it dispossesses the vast majority of the citizens of any connection with the past and any critical capacity to parse the present... well, you end up with easily manipulated mobs, like we have.

The vitriol in backlash from Brexiteer types is consistent, also, with people who've let themselves be defined and led by a set of opinions they've absorbed but not understood or come to independently. Like religious people. The violent reaction against being questioned is the standard response when defending voidspace.

#agoston

[newslegion-blog1]

NARCISSISM AND THE NATIONAL FANTASY DESTROYING AMERICA FROM WITHIN

The current culture fight between groups, people subsumed into a common identity and self-policing one another, and individuals, those who can't or won't submit to this world view and - by that one fact - must fight to hold their ground if ever coming up against a group's public agenda.

Historically we've been through an unusually long period of individual freedom. Feudal meritocracy had its advantages and what with the Enlightenment and a non-landed middle class, the individual has had a long time in the sun. The advance and success of science and representative democracy have long been accepted as a proof this is the way human society should order itself.

Attempts to crush individual freedom under the violent heel of totalitarian rule have failed repeatedly, demonstrating both the strengths of democracy - least of all evils - and the limits of individual capability i.e. vast power is corrupting and impossible to keep in check.

The 20th Century was an individualistic century on the whole and we live in the shadow of its expectations and its cultural habits today in 2019. What's worth thinking about, however, is the standout exception from the last century; the first sociologically mature manifestation of group power dynamics and how it asserted its identity power against those perceived as enemies of the majority. It goes without saying this is the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s.

Untermensch thinking. Mass propaganda. Group identities. Individual v the machine. War.

America's bankrupt victory, fear mass control, money dominating, tin horn patriot turned to a compliment. The seeds of today were sewn 50 years ago. Flag waving American identity rarely challenged - once because you'd have to be an asshole to cuss individuals and there was no group identity. The props got appropriated and they're the same today. The use is utterly changed.

Not so shocking the slow decreasing hold of the Republicans has driven them to push harder on proven tactics for mob control. Trump is the latest manifestation. Fertile ground. The left had previously understood this was not a good button to push but the most extreme leftists like Antifa were less principled. They seized on the territory least contested: minorities. They pressed home their drive for a share of power by making up for less numbers with greater commitment; and this means more absolute rigid rulesets for the group identity violently enforced.

America is a nation fighting the latest battle in a war for what the country means. It's either the uniform march of huge populationd, grouped by identity but united under a flag and a nationalism that makes what's decreed American automatically what's right. Or it returns for the pre-Cold War meaning: an escape from nationalism and countries with flags and kings and dictators and cultural serfdom. That's what people fled from. America was a beacon of freedom not because you could get rich but because you could live free. The profit motive in the American dream as a useful later addition, in part to sell the consumerism of the 50s and after.

This battle for the American heart is the fuel stoked by left and right, one group versus another. The details are worth looking into, especially with the Left where the Ubermensch is a diverse spectrum of flags. But at root it's not going to be a solution to simply satisfy today's demands of a particular Left group (bathrooms for trans) or to make the Right less jingoistic by them being a little richer in their day to day life. These are symptoms. Maybe solving them will buy time but it isn't doing surgery on the causes.

Social media is also not the cause. It's an incubator for diseased thinking certainly but shutting down or censoring social media won't solve things either.

American becoming hijacked by post-war narcissism is the infection that's gone viral. The bigger the population the less each individual can be empowered in a firsthand way yet this leaves a vacuum for a brain taught it's exceptional. Right wing working class losing quality of life and powerless in a confusing world - what medicine for the narcissist but flags and guns? Left wing minority identities liberated by the cultural upper hand asserts itself violently to express the self same narcissism. You might be queer but in a group strength can be found.

Who's the easiest target for groups driven to express this narcissism? Individuals. Their very existence undermines the choice by questioning it. Their weakness can be exploited for fear their strength might be allowed to expose the group conceit, whichever ones a specific group has used for its flag colours.

Free America from the corrupted appropriated America it has been forced to represent.

Kill the narcissism in the American neo-identity.

Expose the bullshit in exceptionalism and ironically you fatally undermine the groups.

Individualism must come from reality not fantasy. If mustn't be propped by some new set of conceits because eventually these will be exposed and forced into active hypocrisy to stay self-important enough to satisfy the narcissistic parasite.

Don't tell me what it means to be American. Shoot yourself if you talk in terms of unAmerican. There's few things more depressing then self congratulatory liberals railing against the groups and touting the importance of individual nuance; then as if too outlier for comfort, move on to letting play the same narcissism by "we" and America and lucky and greatness. It isn't true and the fantasy is something an intelligent outlier is criminal to indulge. Moreover if they can't escape the coarse narcissistic conditioning what hope the rest of the United States and what fucking right do they have to trash talk identity politics or Antifa or MAGA or Trumpkins.

#harry

[newslegion-blog1]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TODAY IS STILL JUST AUTOMATION SPUN INTO CLICKBAIT AND SNAKE-OIL

Does “machine learning” operate outside of its objectively defined and/or predicted criteria boundary?

It doesn’t matter what is the end-result of the machine learning insofar as it may seem to resemble some aspect of real life like playing the game Go. AI may look impressive, in a lay sense, AI may be useful too but this is not fundamental. It isn’t an intelligence breakthrough in a human-transcending sense.

What matters, for AI and for machine learning, is how the particular swathe of reality has been broken down, its meta accurately distilled data, into coherent binary e.g. computer code variables and functions. The data is then parsed through coded procedures to drive responses. This parsing must be have a sufficiently high fidelity in its YES/NO ON/OFF ruleset model. None of this describes anything new.

Go is a useful example. Media reports "computer learns to play Go better than the best human players" adding "computer uses machine learning to self-evolve from beginner to beyond expert, at Go, and not even its programmers know how it does so." Is that so? These statements are deliberately mysterious, resembling the journalistic techniques used often in tabloids to equate astrology as somehow an equivalent of astronomy.

After a little research it turns out the parameters of the Go game and the rules of Go must be comprehensively and systematically broken down into a complete set of variables, conditions, and functions. The meta-reality we would describe as ‘to be playing Go’ - how to win, for instance - must be coded, instance by instance, to build the environment of the Go "machine learning" program layer. These steps could be developed to generalise a diversity of simpatico rulesets and thus it might be said the artificial intelligence program is able to “learn” how to play a thousand board games. Is it learning, though? It’s still limited to a learning within precoded parameters, whichever games might happen to fall in range of extant code’s ability to resolve and parse.

Once this much of the AI program is complete things become simple. The "machine learning" comes into play. The AI can play out a million games of Go or Chess or whatever, starting out as a beginner and applying with perfect memory the improvements it "learns" from each game. It doesn't need lateral thinking or intuition or human intelligence to best us because it runs at speeds magnitudes faster than we do, gathers data from each game-experience, and recalls each and every improvement and sorts outcome possibilities perfectly. This soon builds superior gameplay to any human champion.

None of this amounts to a generalized intelligence or something we might recognize as approaching four dimensional human intelligence. No doubt we'll continue to progress this field and more slices of reality (and its functions) will be broken down and codified and parsed by custom-built hardware operated by artificial intelligence using machine learning. It would be no surprise to see robots and AI in every aspect of everyday life.

This isn't true artificial intelligence. There's a red herring debate the ethics of using robots as "slaves" by presuming at some point in an extant development evolution, consciousness may emerge once the functional intelligence becomes sufficiently complex. This would certainly be a concern if artificial intelligence and machine learning meant what most presume them to mean. If they did, we'd conceivably start creating intelligence like a snail or a fish, then move up the ladder of intelligence until we reached humans and beyond. As it is, however, what we're making is automatic toolsets of increasing complexity of mechanism and action operating in a wider range of conditions; but it still boils down to representing reality through integer variable arrays parsed by mechanisms as mathematical functions generating binary conditions that drive action.

If a human being can’t define the reality to enough ‘decimal places’ its fidelity passes objective reciprocity the AI gets constructed handicapped. Objective reciprocity could be defined as the potential to parse back and forth between “reality” and the complete coded detail of the “representation”. In the case of a game things are easier: its rules must be broken down into variables and functions and conditions. The complexity is finite. Without this distillation, though, there’s no starting point for "artificial intelligence". Machine learning can’t initiate it.

At best it's a case of the human brain being able to distill the meta of whatever piece of reality is being automated, in detail that amounts to complete understanding; including the parameters of AI choice. Then and only then can this machine learning become meaningful.

The human brain is slower at calculation than a computer so while the design, codification and implementation of the artificial intelligence is slow. It takes the human brain a long time to work through myriad possibilities and analyse then represent these as precisely distilled variables and mathematical functions. The ‘learning curve’ a human coder must follow is a creative challenge from the outset.

Once the code is running and the bugs are fixed, the AI can run through with perfect patience. The computer can take up the task. The AI is able to perform its functions at exponentially faster rate than any human being. Add machine learning to the mix and you put in another layer of design, codification and implementation but whose addition is a toolset for the computer AI to create, parse and resolve its own data; and follow predefined rulesets to use this parsed data to improve subsequent iterations of its designated function.

In a way, the Go player against the Go artificial intelligence (with machine learning as its backstory) is an unfair contest by default. It plays entirely to the AI's strengths and the human being's weaknesses. The only unknown factor in such an encounter is the skill and attention to detail of the AI's coders. In a way, the surprise should be if a human player EVER beats a well-coded artificial intelligence and this will be a short-lived triumph as the AI code can make sure the loss is never repeated, with 100% clarity and recall.

Humans will have to surrender supremacy at board games - and indeed most feats of dexterity and processes susceptible to being codified accurately. Driving vehicles, most blue collar jobs, many white collar professions, aspects of almost every job there is: distill it, code it, artificial intelligence and machine learning will execute it better. At best jobs will use AI to replace many human 'parts' and extend the efficiency of the rest. Society will continue to be transformed.

This does NOT mean we have created intelligence, though. Crudely, all of the above - all current artificial intelligence and machine learning - it amounts to no more intelligence than a pocket calculator. However impressive the scale, however physically splendid the application, however complex the calculations: nothing in today's world nor anything currently in development truly deserves to be called "artificial intelligence". There is no example of "machine learning" that transcends human analysis, abstraction, creativity and imagination. Not yet. Don't be dulled by the hype.

Bulllshit Exhibit A: This is what A.I. looks like, according to A.I.

#amblard

[newslegion-blog1]

POST-MODERNISM IS A SELF-SERVING ICONOCLASM WHOSE END-GAME IS DEATH BY OBSOLESCENCE

Why has post-modernism taken hold so successfully, where did it come from and why does it continue to spread - despite the push-back and the warnings - a culture of mediocrity and reductive relativism that’s threatening to pervert centuries of Western thought and culture?

"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable."  -- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

The seeds of what’s become the global post modernist juggernaut were sewn in an unusual way for a cultural movement. It is rooted in a rejection of truth and an antipathy towards individual genius. It's has evolved into much more than just an academic school of Western thought. Today it has conflated itself through media (social media included) with a perverted democratisation of excellence that’s taken hold of vast swathes of “respectable” society and culture. In recent years the degraded redefinition of excellence has spread like a disease to erode truth and fact, disdaining expertise by somehow reducing it to an abusive power dynamic. This is a disastrous choice for us to be making as a society and if the trend isn’t reversed, we’re going to bankrupt Western thought and culture without hope of reprieve. This bankruptcy ends only one way: in our inevitable obsolescence, as the torch passes East and the West cannibalises itself on a banal descent into permanent irrelevance.

From its innocuous roots in late 1940s post-modernism has spread like a steady but relentless virus. It has become a formalised absolution from personal challenge, mobilising a kind of anti-ambition that’s kept virulent by successive generations of mediocre academics motivated by a seemingly bottomless well of intellectual vanity and tenured self-interest.

"Great spirits have always encountered the most violent opposition from mediocre minds."  -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

A hundred individuals aspiring to creative genius will mostly fall short of the standard and most will have the intelligence to see the shortcomings are their own, be it cowardice or fear or insurmountable absence of virtuousity. How can intelligent academcs used to success reconcile falling short of genius they themselves worship more than any other human characteristic? Post-modernism has become the answer. It is the means to an end and it has served successive generations of post-war career academics - and their students. Just as the Nazis had bastardised Nietzsche to justify Aryan eugenics, the early post-modernists corrupted Heidegger’s rollback of temporal ontology (as the defining way to think about the world) to legitimise a rejection of the significance of all individual human beings in the creative process. The poison had entered the veins of post-war culture.

POST-MODERNISM AS A SICKNESS

In the years after the second world war, across societies in great flux with a demobilised but changed citizen spirit, post modernism was not at first a pervasive dogma. It was a convergence of genuinely blue sky sociology studying conditions in the immediate aftermath of war with philosophy chasing meaning in a mechanised relativistic universe. Philosophy and sociology might have kept themselves uncorrupted were it not for the arts - far more numerous and influential in an everyday sense - having been caught between a Joycean rock and a Woolfish hard place. Vladimir Nabokov, most famous emigre after Einstein, warned us what was going to happen in his greatest work, Pale Fire.

"Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye."  -- Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

Career academics, their fragile conceits needing a system of protection against the genius of modernism, were driven to post-modernist ideas which they quickly and self-servingly appropriated. Beat poetry was a first response to these trends, born in Columbia University but dispossessed almost immediately as the colleges closed ranks rapidly. Some version of this dichotomy played out in a hundred academies: tenured professors in the halls, modernist genius in portraits on the walls, the vitality and individuality worthy of their natural successors shut out, excluded, forced outside the institutions.

The battle lines were rapidly arranged. Post-modernism was the armor chosen by the academy.

It didn't take long for it to spread. The benefits to conceited mediocrity and fearful conservatives and entrenched comfortable nepotism and lazy hubristic intellectuals was soon obvious. Post-modernism calcified into a cross-faculty movement that's been consolidating power ever since. Generations later it dominates in universities, converges with democratised consumerism and infiltrates all facets of 21st century society. POST-MODERNISM AS NEOLIBERAL FREEMASONRY

Post-modernism, having taken over the arts faculties, cross-pollenated into the outside world to colonise much of the mainstream media. Its spread and tenacity is testimony to its lasting appeal and the temptation to succumb to those worst instincts will follow a person's whole career, readily at hand should an academic or artist or media hold-out go through moments of doubt or crises of confidence or face a choice between principled independent hardship and acceptance plenty and security in joining the club. Neoliberalism is the post-modernist economics heart of this choice and this is as good a definiton as any for the pressures exerted on non-members. It needs no guns and cudgels to achieve its ends.

But why is this particular club so bad? Isn’t neoliberalism better than totalitarian communism? Couldn’t post-modernist principles be liberating for young minds stifled by the straightjacket canon of past generations? This could have been argued until the 1980s though even then the post-modernist exponents were already the children of diminished progenitors. The nature of the temptation post-modernism offers is too strong for most to resist. The early post-moderns began as pale fire apologists cowed by the challenge of modernist genius.

The post-war academics were indeed a mixed bunch, elder statesmen increasingly marginalised by: well-organised successors greedy for authority but unable to use sheer talent to justify their positions, professional iconoclasts in pursuit of misguided but sincere notions of democratising the academy, hostile to received wisdom and suspicious of outlier excellence, career academics increasingly threatened by the ongoing intellectual diaspora from broken Europe closing ranks to formalise systems that levelled the playing field, etc. With a few exceptions, it was left to America to carry the torch of academic continuity for at least a generation 1950s until as late as the 1970s. Europe and now East Asia are no longer behind North America but the parochial professionalism of the baby boomer period has injected itself deeply on the institutions, post-modernism the mechanism of delivery, neoliberalism lubricating the ambitions of its moving parts.

Post-modernism is particularly pernicious, once sufficiently widespread, because it gives faithful advocates a multipurpose toolkit designed perfectly for its continued spread and consolidation. The toolkit is subtle and subject specific, cynical and utilitarian, honed - ironically - by thousands of extremely clever engineers of corporate academia. It covers jargon and linguistics, provides litmus tests to gauge friends and enemies, dividing and conquer transformation of safe zones promising academic enquiry and widespread publicity so long as there’s no gainsay of post-modernism's unwritten rules. Like in a masonic lodge, would-be exponents of their contemporary post-modernist doctrines (and goals) receive informal schooling in identifying one another.

Half a century later the network is well established throughout the world, organised like Islam and its cooperative imam-led cells, it has the academy locked in a stranglehold. Outsiders, outliers and would-be rebels can be pinpointed and delegitimised with remarkable precision, without compromising any individual mason (or, in most cases, committing any single institution). There’s no need to instruct how to exculpate rebels at the time of rebellion. Everyone in the lodge has the toolkit and already knows how to use it against objectionable targets.

TRUTH IS LIES - LOVE IS HATE - PEACE IS WAR - PLENTY IS STARVATION

What might've started as a complex of motivations driving numerous schools of thought soon became comfortable and entrenched, conformism aligning with conservativism to appropriate tradition, especially in the face of counter culture having mobilised opposing forces that might’ve risen to the challenge of modernist luminaries with genius of its own e.g. Jack Kerouac and the beats, Tennessee Williams and the Southern renaissance, James Baldwin and the civil rights movement. These individuals were pushed out onto the front line dismissing academia as unwelcoming or careers in journalism as unworthy. The post-modernist arsenal had its first wave of targets. An insidious schism between the academy and the individual had been transposed onto a global narrative of culture versus counter culture that’s been polarising ever since.

"The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly"  -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The battle for the hearts and minds of the many academic institutions and plethora of media outlets, print, radio, television, film was irreparably divisive by the end of the 1960s. Vietnam, hippy counter culture anti-nationalism and the Situationists student revolts against corporate consumerism brought the power of the state into direct conflict with the individual. The timing was fortuitous and the ideological conflict already well developed within the universities made post modernists natural bedfellows with those pushing the agenda of state authority. Both saw their chance: to marginalise dissenters, including untrustworthy writers and auteurs and non-conformists professors. And, worst of all, anyone cheating the median by presuming to exhibit genius out of context becomes a threat to the mainstream social order, subject to a takedown by every means available in the formidable post-modernist playbook.

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR GONE MAINSTREAM

The breakthrough of post-modernism into mainstream culture can be marked into two distinct phases: the silent expansionist war and the loud entrenched victory.

Roland Barthes, French philosopher and literary critic, provided the seminal concept that allowed post-modernism's craven iconoclasm to market itself into mainstream culture. His 1962 work Le Mort d'Auteur "Death of the Author" gave credibility to the academy's anti-individual disdain of virtuosity in art, claiming the hard won life works of artist and scientist alike without having to acknowledge the standards as an implicit challenge. Celebrity was permissible, even desirable, but would be no democracy of equal participants trying to establish an influential off-narrative platform if it boiled down to a meritocracy 'won' by genius and hard work. Personal nuance was to be aggregated into group identity, rules by the academy, propaganda by Barthes and other misrepresented thinkers.

All this contributes to make post-modernism a toolkit for appropriaton, aggregation, subjugation of the individual to the aim of the groups. Recently #metoo is the latest diseased manifestation, born of feminism and the wholly authentic attacking on misogyny as endemic patriarchy, turned into a way to bring down experts and excellence unwilling to confirm to the post-modern dictates of entrenched groupthink - in this case selected by gender.

"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."  -- Roland Barthes Mythologies (1957)

The details of post-modernism evolution from movement to all-encompassing modus operandi needn't be repeated here. There are islands of resistance dotted around the academy and schools with sincere useful ideas not seeking to feed the growing monolith like structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction. These more authentic strains in philosophy and literary theory went through their own smaller conflicts, the leading lights like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Noam Chomsky marginalized in plain site, separated from the mainstream of the academy in special departments - a standard measure in the post-modernist manual when dealing with intransigent voices grown too noisy to gag or too marketable to deplatform into insignificance.

The most expedient aspects of post-structuralism and, increasingly, any new idea cropping up in academic circles, came to be identified fast then, notwithstanding the stubborn individuals whose future had to be isolation or exculpation, brought into the post-modernist mainstream. Post-structuralism was cannibalised into one of the most insidious movements of the latter culture war years: identity politics.

Feminism, civil rights, the fight against homophobia, legitimate movements all but in the hands of post-modern spin doctors were twisted to serve different goals and increase the firepower of the academy, the ambitious arbiters of culture. This has been one of the most criminal abuses of the post-modernist cabal.

"...for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word."  -- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

The appropriation of feminism, sexuality and race should be a practical warning of the ultimate bankruptcy of post-modern ideology. Great women or great gay artists or non-white virtuosos aren't freed from the shackles of traditional homophobic white male-privilege, to aspire to whatever greatness might be attained by their individual unfettered potential. Instead this potential is cut away just as it is with any other presumption of genius. The method is different but the post-modern iconoclast has a diverse toolkit. Women are demeaned into ciphers, gays into icons all face no substance, black writers forced to be poster boys and poster girls ringfenced into representing only a narrow group identity that's as racially segregated as any pre-war ghetto. At best the new oppression is coercive rather than violent but great art is often inspired by oppression. It's certainly always born from distinction by individual outliers and to be deprived of this is to make mediocre currency of great potential. It's ironic that the casualties of this particular battle are the very people the identity political advocates pay lip service to free and defend.

WHERE DOES “DEATH OF THE AUTEUR” END?

From innocent beginnings in the late 1940s, the movement known as post-modernism has evolved into a freemasonry of entrenched anti-intellectual mob legitimacy. It is positioned in the mainstream, confident and on the attack. It has appropriated a dozen counter-cultures, rebranding and often inverting their original good, turning them into cultural sticks to beat society into submission: feminism into gender politics, anti-misogyny into #metoo, anti-homophobia into queer theory, the civil rights movement into affirmitive action, free speech constrained by political correctness. Post-modernism has become ubiquitous, unarguably legitimate stamped with academy credibilty, spread from the institutions through society by brigades well-taught graduates. These days there’s only one line of defence against the self-serving end-game post-modernism continues to drive towards: the independent individual.

Disorganised, unusual, independent, mostly atomised and often contrarian, the individual presents a disunited self-centred front - easy target for patient groupthinkers - but it’s the only other game in town. Complete victory for the post-modernist cabal will mean a society without genius, truth subjugated to expediency, a safe zone so widespread no-one notices it looks the same as obsolescence.

"The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning."  -- Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

The first post-modernist generation passed the latest literary, linguistic and philosophical theory - especially schools of thought coming out of France and Germany - through the prism of democratised merit and everyman relativism to construct an extremely effective popular legitimacy serving the conceits of the tenured academy. The career academic had an arsenal fit for the destruction of reputations and the exculpation of non-conforming genius. The success of this “death of the author” spin, cloaked in the complex language of post-structuralism and other extant obfuscating theory gave the post-modernists a commanding position by the end of the 1960s. This hegemony expressed itself into mainstream culture through successive waves of graduates.

The post-modernist academy bound itself hand in glove with state authority, underpinned by an intellectual neoliberalism sold to the public as responding to the vocational demands of the free market. Anything of substance seeking to thwart the academy or the increasingly polarising state narrative was tarred with the ‘counter culture’ brush, ornery youth the first victims (e.g. the beat generation) but soon anything off-narrative was subjected to the same process of marginalisation (in the case of individuals) and appropriation (in the case of movements).

What little resistance remained in the arts faculties was picked off over the post-Vietnam decades, neoliberalism and consumer capitalism natural bedfellows with post-modernism in a way that solidified in the 80s, integrated branding in the 90s and had become received wisdom - unquestioned, presumed part of the natural order - by the millennium. Small wonder this entrenched cultural regulation adapted quickly to take hold of the internet and, in particular, ringfence social media, turning the latter into a vehicle for population control and echo chamber isolation of contrarian thinkers.

There was no way the post-modernist culture would allow itself to be challenged by changes to the dynamics of society. Vigilant, pro-active and anti-individual to the marrow, the mainstream must remain committed to post-modernisms proven methodology. No genius could be allowed to turn a platform into a pedestal. No expert could be given credible authority over truth, however many facts might be marshalled in support.

"The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself."  -- Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)

There’s something incredibly human about the early motivations of the academics, humiliated by the challenge of modernist achievements, occupying positions of authority but incapable (or unwilling) to go to the same lengths to justify their cultural power. It was wrong but it wasn’t an incomprehensible show of weakness. Perhaps if it had been able to admit a little nuance - like humility - the future would have been different. It wasn’t, however. Committed to a reductive perversion of intellectual relativism, quick to define the opposition in counter cultural terms, increasingly partnered with state expediency, things only got worse and more widespread and more difficult to dislodge in the decades to come.

"I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect."  -- Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

The rotten core of the post-modern movement remains throughout, though, and as it’s forced to greater lengths to prosecute an absolute authority, so much the reality and the impact on culture grow more extreme. Today it weaponises such awful characteristics as toxic envy and endemic narcissism. Mediocrity has become synonymous with common sense, conformity means to follow dogma and deny individual free thought. Power dynamics are abused daily, inverting expertise to a sin, traditions of excellence as oppressive patriarchy and individuality subsumed - whether you like it or not - into identity politics where transgression brings the most dire of consequences.

The post-modernist end-game is, by default, a mix of populism and passive aggression. There can be leaders, in the post-modern paradigm state, but these must be celebrities or accidents of ethnicity. Meritocracy becomes lottery - and lottery is an easier sell to a public convinced of its own self-worth but conditioned never to be examined, except for compelled social function. Death of the author and exclusion of individual genius makes life into a reality show - authenticity at arms length - an easy fit with slogans of democracy and universal median values. Equality itself is a twisted principle: not so much equality of outcome as equality of process. The whole system is delivered through the worst of human traits: vanity, egoism, outrage and opinion over complex nuance. It’s a recipe for mediocrity, at best, a disconnection with centuries of intellectual and cultural tradition that may not be restored. In a multifarious world, if we accept the broad sweep of history as led by the enlightenment West and the utilitarian East, it’s the former at risk of becoming obsolete.

We’re quick to spot the nightmare dystopian East when we hear about China and its surveillance social media scorecards for a billion citizens but the West is heading for worse. Mediocrity is a creeping death and will increasingly fall behind as the world moves forward. The Western traditions that have nurtured individual freedom and - quite rightly - arranged a natural order of achievement around encouraging and nurturing genius and original thought: all of this is at risk if the post-modernist social order achieves complete victory. Soon enough the voices of protest and their cries of “Shakespeare” “Newton” “Einstein” “Tesla” “Feinstein” “Goethe” “Nietschze” “Kerouac” “Dante” “Michelangelo” “Freud” “Jung” “Chomsky” “Orwell” will die away. What remains will be the echoing hubbub of an outraged mob that amounts to nothing more than an irrelevant cultural silence.

"There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah"  -- Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

#merton