Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Might be best if you sat this one out Tea, it's way above your level and mine.

But that's just a fallacious appeal to authority. Suppose I made some claim about the physical universe that most people would regard as self-evidently untrue: say, "Contrary to popular belief, the surface of the sun is freezing cold". If you then challenged me on that, would you accept "I've studied physics and you haven't, so shut up" as a convincing argument?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
adjective
adjective: barbarian

uncultured; brutish.
synonyms: savage, uncivilized, barbaric, barbarous, primitive, heathen, wild, brutish, Neanderthal; More
antonyms: civilized
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
adjective
adjective: barbarian

uncultured; brutish.
synonyms: savage, uncivilized, barbaric, barbarous, primitive, heathen, wild, brutish, Neanderthal; More
antonyms: civilized

Sounds like a reasonable description of several communist states that have actually existed. Although I had assumed the "communism" being talked about here was the ideology itself, not the historical reality of the USSR, DPRK etc.
 

other_life

bioconfused
*'ideal' not in the sense of a telos, a perfected goal. just a very, very strong mental image
*'barbarian' in the sense of post-food production yet pre-civilisational. all other connotations left open (the contention here, taking ethnological notebooks/origin of the family at its word, is that labor relations, though divided on gender lines, had more parity/equity under this integument than they would under civilisation)
*'communist' meaning communist.
 
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other_life

bioconfused
was aiming less for this kind of conversation and more of third's brand of polemics mixed with the luka-style "liberated wanker" "al-fresco shitting" "poetry-over-intellection/rationalisation" but it's been a fun read anyhow. it should be clear by now that i don't do nearly the amount of reading that people here do and am more here to Post and Interact. i wanted people to personalise this thread prompt and not abstract it, if that makes sense.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
was aiming less for this kind of conversation and more of third's brand of polemics mixed with the luka-style "liberated wanker" "al-fresco shitting" "poetry-over-intellection/rationalisation" but it's been a fun read anyhow. it should be clear by now that i don't do nearly the amount of reading that people here do and am more here to Post and Interact. i wanted people to personalise this thread prompt and not abstract it, if that makes sense.

this is my vision for dissensus too. it's what i mean when i say 'magic'.

much more novel, fun and intellectually stimulating than people trying to have serious political conversations which is all very bland and embarrassing. what i refer to as citizen smith dissensus.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
in the space of a day craner's become a jew and vim a salafist.

I’m imagining these two eventually meeting face-to-face some years from now, in a bunker in the Golan Heights. Two old Dissensus comrades who always had each other’s backs when one of them was under attack from k-punk, hmlt, sufi or zhao.

Craner finally meets the generously-hootered Hebrew princess of his dreams over a kosher sharing platter and bottle of prosecco in the Golders Green branch of Zizzi. Having adopted the faith upon marrying her, getting the old snippy-snippy and moving to Tel Aviv, his encyclopaedic knowledge of Middle Eastern politics leads inexorably to a career in intelligence and security, until he finds himself, in his middle years, heading up a Mossad counter-terrorism unit.

Meanwhile Vimothy’s disgust with the dying, decadent, liberal West starts a trajectory that can only end in inevitable radicalization, and he eventually finds his calling in Syria: a postmodern Lawrence of Arabia, Mancunian vowels still audible beneath his fluent Arabic, leading a breakaway Islamo-Spenglerist jihadi brigade regarded as insanely fanatical and violent even by Daesh and Tahrir al-Sham.

The only question is who will have captured whom.
 
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yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
this poem from j.h. prynne sounds very relevant to this thread no?

Die A Millionaire
(pronounced: "diamonds in the air")

The first essential is to take knowledge
back to the springs, because despite
everything and especially the recent
events carried under that flag, there is
specific power in the idea of it

that
what is known can be used to pick up
or more usually to hold on and develop
as what for the econometrist is
"profitable speculation"-the intellect
on the trigger once more, as those
poor seventh century Irish monks (being
sentimentalists) would have believed
if they could.

If there's any need
for proof & it can be kept from
running to violence (to which ex-
tremity it should anyway perhaps
be swooping homewards) the twist-point
is "purchase"-what the mind
bites on is yours

the prime joy of
control engineering is what they please
to denote (through the quartzite window) "self-
optimizing systems", which they like
to consider as a plan for the basic
living unit. And thus "accelerating the con-
vergence of function", we come to our
maximal stance.

Imperialism was just
an old, very old name for that
idea, that what you want, you by
historic process or just readiness
to travel, also "need"-and
need is of course the sacred daughter
through which you improve, by
becoming more extensive. Competitive
expansion: if you can designate a
prime direction as Drang nach Osten
or the Western Frontier, that's to
purify the idea by recourse to History

before it happens. Envisaging the chapter-
head in the historical outline as "the
spirit (need) of the age"-its primary
greed, shielded from ignominy by the
like practice of too many others.

That
of course is not expansion but acquisition
(as to purchase the Suez Canal was merely
a blatant example): the true expansion
is probably drift, as the Scythians
being nomadic anyway for the most part
slipped sideways right across the Russian
steppes, from China by molecular friction
through to the Polish border.

Otherwise it's
purchase, of a natural course, the alteration
or storage of current like dams in the
river: what starts as irrigation ends up
selling the megawattage across the grid.

The grid is another sign, is knowledge
in applique-work actually strangled & latticed
across the land; like the intangible consumer
networks, as the market defines wants from
single reckoning into a social need, graphed
for instance as "contour tangent elimination".
And the drift of that is again to divert the
currency (as now in England

to the north-
east). As, it was actually losing its grip
on the population: real people, slipping off
the face of that lovely ground, leaving the
green and pleasant lands of Northumberland
to be near the belly & catch scraps
with the shit that we set out so grudgingly
on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude.

The grip is purchase again, and the current
chic of information theory will tell you how
many bits of that commodity it takes to
lift one foot/lb. of shit to a starving mouth,
or not starving actually, but just rather
unthinkingly hungry.

And don't let some
wise and quick-faced historical rat tell us about
the industrial north and its misery, since every
songbird since then (& with no honourable
exception for D.H. Lawrence) has carolled about
that beautiful black colour as if
this were the great rot in the heart.

It was not and is not. The twist-point
of this is again power by the grid, putting
lives into strings of consequence into
molecular chains like the pit-ponies we love
to cry over. Coal is so beautiful as I
could weep over the carbon it shines with:
what is scattered over these colliery towns
is not soot or sulphur or coal or foaming
detergent but the waste produced by
mass conversion of want (sectional) into
need (social & then total). All this by
purchase on the twist-point, the system gone
social to disguise

the greed of ambition
swimming in great seismic shocks through
the beds of our condition. All the needles are
twitching frantically across their smoky paper,
but society is "predictably" as we know "in
a state of ferment"-as if that could ever turn
to wine or raise bread, from the sad shit it
is, to that crispy crunchy loaf we shall all
eat only in heaven.

The fact is that right
from the springs this water is no longer fit
for the stones it washes: the water of life
is all in bottles & ready for invoice. To draw
from that well we must put on some
other garment. Do what one can, that's
the gas-and-water talk, which is "do
what we can" and we are the social strand
which is already past the twist point &
into the furnace. We don't burn only
because

we are invisible to each other,
our shoulders no longer so hopeless and
beautiful as they meet at the spine rising
up the dorsal rift: lovely and lonely, until
the whole spread squints into the neck, and
vanishes, into the head.

And unlike Cerberus
we all share the same head, our shoulders
are denied by the nuptial joys of television,
so that what I am is a special case of
what we want, the twist-point missed exactly
at the nation's scrawny neck.

What runs
back, or could be traced upstream by simply
denying that conspiracy of "cause", is the
question of names & the seven tribes,
which are not "predictions" and socially can
be grouped only by the thinnest of
generalising systems. As these are not
economically self-centering, they cannot be
used as designations for targets (like
the gun sight on what "we want").

And the back mutation is knowledge and
has always been so in the richest tradition
of the trust it is possible to have, to repose
in the mysteries. The perversions which
thrust it forward, as a new feed into the
same vicious grid of expanding prospects
(profits) are let through by the weakness, now,
of names.

There is no other break in the
descent, since without that it's all break
anyway. The purity is a question of
names. We are here to utter them. This is
a prayer. I have it now between my
teeth and my eyes, on my forehead. Know
the names. It is as simple as the purity
of sentiment: it is as simple
as that.
 

luka

Well-known member
Ind the old days everyone on dissensus wanted to talk about Zizek and Badiou. Now our guiding light is Prynne. A great improvement.
 
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