The United Militarized Police States

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i dont know. i think th technology available opens up the policing of thought and speech in a way that wasn't possible before.
what do you think the main thing is?

"Control" (pace Burroughs)

I guess the very scary thing about technology, particularly information technology that's become available to the mass public over the last 15 years or so (mobile phones, the internet, and the gradual convergence of the two) is that to a lot of people, it doesn't look that threatening. It's either useful, because it allows them to do their job, or simply fun, because they can use it to socialise, play games, look at photos etc. It's not necessarily obvious that it can be used as a tool of state (and corporate) control.

Whereas in the past, the technology of oppression was obviously invasive - spies and inquisitors everywhere; and aggressive - show trials, mass imprisonments, torture, public executions, 'disappearances'. Not that these things don't still go on, and sometimes with the collusion of the governments of developed, 'democratic' countries - but they're not the things that come to mind when you're looking at your privacy settings on facebook.
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
luka stop being such a pussy. i used the F word.* i used an oversized "NO".**

whoopdeedoo.

* to punctuate well organized, thoughtful arguments
** toemphasize points which need emphasis.
 
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luka

Well-known member
luka stop being suck a pussy.

what on earth does this mean?
i think you misunderstand me. im not saying i find your
aggression
confronting im saying your
shrillness
is jarring and counter-productive. im giving you some insights into why people ignore you, or, alternatively, ridicule you. ive agreed with a lot of what you have said but as always you alienate even those people nominally 'on your side' by being so shrill and self-righteous.
 

luka

Well-known member
we write to communicate and your style is a barrier to communication. its counter-productive.
 
D

droid

Guest
Im vaguely tempted to unignore Zhao and see whats going on here. Anything new?
 

zhao

there are no accidents
quite the opposite, something very very old.

lol purely typographic error up there "such" became "suck" :D

anyway as important as i think examination of how humans have lived for so long prior to centralized power is important for our future, i really did not intend to get into it in this thread, and was only provoked by ludicrous comments along the lines of the fucked up system now being the "best we've ever had"...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Well whether or not people in distant prehistory lived in a prelapsarian paradise is not, I think, as relevant as all that to our current situation. Even if things were all hunky-dory when we lived as band-level societies of a few dozen people, how does that help us now? Those societies work when they have a range of many square kilometres of virgin rainforest or savannah per person. That is not the case for the vast majority of people in the world. There's no going back, we have to think forward.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Well whether or not people in distant prehistory lived in a prelapsarian paradise is not, I think, as relevant as all that to our current situation. Even if things were all hunky-dory when we lived as band-level societies of a few dozen people, how does that help us now? Those societies work when they have a range of many square kilometres of virgin rainforest or savannah per person. That is not the case for the vast majority of people in the world. There's no going back, we have to think forward.

we have no other options but to think forward. yet the decisions we make as we move forward can be, and i should hope are, informed by ways of living which have worked amazingly for the well being of our species for at the very least hundreds of thousdands of years prior to hierarchy and subjugation.

many of the ideas from such organizational systems are of course already in circulation, as related to reform and evolving out of alienated post-industrial corporatocracy:

• eat locally.
• sustainable production
• smaller, manageable communities.
• lateral connectivity.
• horizontal rather than top-down systems.
• new conceptions of ownership.
• etc., etc., etc.

beyond socialism, seems to me the rhyzomatic way of thinking and nomadology as conceived by D&G is absolutely rooted in the kind of prehistoric social forms you all are so tired of hearing about and ready to dismiss as hippie non-sense nostalgia.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
Yeah, but that's a problem with Deleuze & Guattari, not us. The only real way forward is racially-profiled biospheres, strict birth quotas, food rationing and deep space exploration -- in the developed world, at least. We may just have to let the rest devolve back to hunter-gatherer societies or primitive agrarian economies. Of course, this may radically reduce the number of people actually alive, but that won't matter much, because in the long run all those left will be happier and, more importantly, free from ID cards, phone taps and Section 1031(b)(2) of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The one thing I don't understand in this magical thread -- what the hell does OLSX stand for?
 

lanugo

von Verfall erzittern
The only real way forward is racially-profiled biospheres, strict birth quotas, food rationing and deep space exploration -- in the developed world, at least.

Is this deadpan humour or genuine 21st century elitist delusion?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Dunno about the other stuff ("racially-profiled biospheres"? :slanted:) but the population issue has got to be addressed sooner or later - preferably sooner. Imagine how much shit China would be in if they hadn't got their population under control with the one-child policy.

And I think energy rationing is going to be more crucial than food rationing, or at least as important. Space exploration is going to have wait for a couple of decades, I think.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
i worked in a pie shop that had no customers. there was a point when i noticed things were not getting fixed whn they broke, orders weren't coming in, stock was being run down. so i knew they were about to close although they had kept that information fom the staff. so i told everyone. it took thm a while to get thir heads around it but when the evidence was stacked up we could all see what was happening. im getting th same feeling now with the world.

I'm glad I waived my usual policy of ignoring threads where Zhao goes on about fascism cos this is the funniest thing I've read on here in ages.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Racially-profiled, as in mixed quota of races per biosphere, affirmative action, Rainbow Communities, baby! If that's all a bit expensive, then we could shift populations from cities into rural communtities, and rationally distribute food, shelter, clothing and work. Of course, it will have to be done en masse, in one go, and globally, so we will have to abolish nation states and money, probably on the same day, or at least to a strict time table. But these things will be unnecessary eventually and are, anyway, inimicable to human progress and happiness. The quicker they go the better. Of course, some people will need to be persuaded that this programme is in their interest; but once we have abolished states, armies, security services, and centralised and federal governments, and our rhizomatic micro-communes are established and co-operating succesfully and in accordance with desired goal, everything and everybody will be content.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
...shift populations from cities into rural communtities... abolish nation states and money... once we have abolished states, armies, security services, and centralised and federal governments, and our rhizomatic micro-communes are established and co-operating succesfully and in accordance with desired goal, everything and everybody will be content.

OMG me and craner's paths are colliding to an uncanny degree.

the end is truly nigh :D
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Yeah, I've been reading some of Pol Pot's stuff, Zhao. You know, history has got this guy all wrong. He had some pretty far-sighted and innovative ideas that were sadly perverted and wrecked by Nixon and Kissinger's genocidal napalm campaign of extermination. Actually, if you go back and study what he was trying to do, and apply it to now, you'll find some neat solutions to all our woes; what with global warming and the banking crisis, his writings are particularly pertinent, like a cross between Caroline Lucas and Arthur Scargill.
 

bruno

est malade
our notions of evolution and devolution, progression and regression, "advanced and civilized" VS. "primitive and under developed" are out-dated remnants of Social Darwinism, as invented by the Colonial mentality to justify its violence. Such ideas worked very well together with other "sciences" such as Eugenics and Racism in shaping the world we know today. It is the conceptual structure which makes possible things like the "civilizing nature of Empire" ---- the duty of superior white men and their western civilization to teach the brown god-less animals how to properly behave.

and can we live "freely", and peacefully, without war, within the framework of global capitalism and the structural inequity, pandemic injustice, and systematic cruelty it entails?

NO.
zhao, i appreciate the response, but you need to tone down the aggression.

How many tyranies existed in the pre-modern world? Shitloads, clearly. You don't need phonetapping technology if there are no phones. Look at the power held by the Church in Europe in the middle ages, or the theocracies in pre-Colombian America.
i think zhao knows this, but chooses to ignore it because it doesn't fit with the idea that our current order is the most oppressive, exploitative and unjust ever. if it isn't, everything from gobekli tepe onward is a devation and there is only a difference of degree between us and the sumerians or whatever. that he writes from his computer, probably the most sophisticated thing this order has produced, and with the lights on generated by coal energy and so on is what i find ironic.
 
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