luka

Well-known member
I know Danny, I know. I understand. I know where you are coming from.

What do you think is going to happen? How do we get from here to a place where we feel we can believe what we read?
 

luka

Well-known member
Russia, the United States, Israel, all put huge resources into poisoning the well. I would expect China to join them eventually. There's always been an information war but the Internet has taken it to another level because you can get information into your rival countries so much more easily now.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I'm not sure. It's a bit like anything else really, you'll have to do your own deep study. I think the OSINT stuff will be an emerging trend in journalism. Beyond that I don't know though I try and follow some people who are addressing these sort of questions. You see the Forensic Architecture stuff? That's really great.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's something I think about a fair bit. Every fact is contested now so that even a mass shooting with hundreds of witnesses is sincerely believed to be faked and you don't even need a Alex Jones to disseminate the opinion because the idea that the spectacle itself is fake from top to bottom, is just another television show, is so firmly engrained.

And it feels fake. I mean, you can't really fault people for sensing that something is wrong. 9/11 was a huge turning point in this regard as in so many others. After that, anything was possible.

The information war only heats up and I strongly believe that the innovations seemingly introduced by Russia have been swiftly adopted by America. The Trump administration and its alternative facts are testament to that. As grapejuice says no one even expects to be believed. These aren't even truth claims anymore. Just muddying the water.

I do think that our individual and collective ability to sniff out bullshit will improve just as an evolutionary adaptation although I still see the most obvious transparently fictitious infographics posted on Facebook.

But perhaps not. It may well be that truth has had its day. That's it's just tribalism and group myths from here on. If that is the case then hopefully a redemptive myth will win out over a Nazi one.

I think ultimately, this is the only path to a kind of potential reality upgrade. You have to demolish the ability of the authorities to determine what is real. Destroy their monopoly on reality creation. But it gets very messy before there's any chance of it getting better.
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't want to go back to the patrician voice on the BBC which brooks no dissent. I don't want to go back to the times over breakfast and everybody all marching to the same beat. I can see why a lot of people do, but I want to go forward to something better.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's like when Descartes sets out to doubt everything. This complete uprooting of all assumptions. This is why the world is flat stuff is actually quite exciting to me. And you can argue that that is radical credulity rather than radical doubt, and you'd have a point but I prefer to see it in these grand mythological terms. That this is a real upheaval in the way we construct our models of reality, individually and collectively.
 

luka

Well-known member
So much was so incongruous that even if you're not committed to a Bush knocked down the towers position (I'm not, personally) you're still gong, how the fuck...

You're still left with a sense of the impossibility of the events and a certainty that we have been lied to.

Things that are so wildly incongruous that no matter how many debunking and explanations you read you're never satisfied.

Passports marked 'occupation terrorist' floating gently down from the sky completely unscathed, the whole pentagon and lack of plane debris, the missing pentagon money, building 7 https://www.ft.com/content/7d174b42-31fa-11dd-9b87-0000779fd2ac the PNAC papers foreshadowing the entire sequence of events even down to yearning for a new pearl harbour.

And obviously I don't want to rerun the was 9/11 an inside job debate I just want to acknowledge how genuinely spookily weird the whole thing is and that it did something profound to our brains.
 

version

Well-known member
New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB

Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book is arguing that he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident. Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus.

Camus died on 4 January 1960 when his publisher Michel Gallimard lost control of his car and it crashed into a tree. The author was killed instantly, with Gallimard dying a few days later. Three years earlier, the author of L’Étranger (The Outsider) and La Peste (The Plague) had won the Nobel prize for “illuminat[ing] the problems of the human conscience in our times”.

“The accident seemed to have been caused by a blowout or a broken axle; experts were puzzled by its happening on a long stretch of straight road, a road 30 feet wide, and with little traffic at the time,” Herbert Lottman wrote in his 1978 biography of the author.

Catelli believes a passage in Zábrana’s diaries explains why: the poet wrote in the late summer of 1980 that “a knowledgeable and well-connected man” had told him the KGB was to blame. “They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was travelling at high speed.”

The order, he said, had been issued by Dmitri Shepilov, the Soviet Union’s minister of internal affairs, in retaliation for an article by Camus in the French newspaper Franc-Tireur published in March 1957.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/05/albert-camus-murdered-by-the-kgb-giovanni-catelli
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't want to go back to the patrician voice on the BBC which brooks no dissent. I don't want to go back to the times over breakfast and everybody all marching to the same beat. I can see why a lot of people do, but I want to go forward to something better.

What do you make of this, luka?

 

luka

Well-known member
I don't know but the colours are extraordinary aren't they? Plum and puce against that teal background. Like a kind digital Francis Bacon. Really amazing image
 

version

Well-known member
'Batman '66 actor Burt Ward was ‘told to take pills to shrink his penis’ for Robin role because his bulge was considered ‘too large for television’.'
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
What do you make of this, luka?


What I was getting at is that you don't have to like someone, or consider them to be a good or a nice person, or someone who is part of your team or side, to appreciate that they can be useful and play a positive role.

Now Andrew Neil is perhaps a stereotypical gammon - the very thing you picked up on was his rubicund complexion! - and yes, he's a sexist old sleaze, an establishment Tory figure and all of that. Granted. But I took some small comfort in seeing him calling out Boris Johnson, the UK's incumbent Tory prime minister, as a coward; issuing a challenge to him, a challenge that went unanswered. It made me think: You know what, these people are actually not all on the same side. And that's an important realisation.

Do you see where I'm coming from?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The paradigmatic example has to be Paxman. Now I know he's a totemic figure for you, a symbol of everything and everyone you hate - even to the point where you compared Jordan Peterson to him when Peterson was a guest on Newsnight, and was being interviewed by Cathy Newman, who was very clearly trying to 'do a Paxman' on him. But consider how great it would have been to have him on TV, night after night, in the run-up to the last election, interviewing the charlatans and spivs who make up this government. Such a line-up of moral and intellectual pygmies would have been easy meat for him indeed. Again, I'm not trying to convince you that Paxman is a great guy, or a progressive figure, or even someone you'd want to go for a pint with or talk to for thirty seconds. That's not the point. The point is that I think there is a place for someone who brooks no bullshit, who does the teacher/drill-sergeant act, if the person they're doing it at is an amoral slimeball who's actively participating in the ruin of this country.
 

luka

Well-known member
What I was getting at is that you don't have to like someone, or consider them to be a good or a nice person, or someone who is part of your team or side, to appreciate that they can be useful and play a positive role.

Now Andrew Neil is perhaps a stereotypical gammon - the very thing you picked up on was his rubicund complexion! - and yes, he's a sexist old sleaze, an establishment Tory figure and all of that. Granted. But I took some small comfort in seeing him calling out Boris Johnson, the UK's incumbent Tory prime minister, as a coward; issuing a challenge to him, a challenge that went unanswered. It made me think: You know what, these people are actually not all on the same side. And that's an important realisation.

Do you see where I'm coming from?

I do see. And it's a useful realisation, up to a point. Because there are sides and there are sides.
 

luka

Well-known member
This is something Craner talks about a lot and I listen to him and I take it in. You know, he will say, you have to realise the United States government is not a monolithic institution. It's riven with factionalism and feuds and etc.

And it's true. But again, only up to a point. You can take this line of thinking too far.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm just happy for liars to get exposed and bad people to get comeuppance. Doesn't mean you need to think the person or organisation dishing it out is without fault. You can hope Trump does eventually get completely shafted without venerating the FBI or wanting to marry Nancy Pelosi, and I'm sure even John Eden is glad when the cops nick a mass murderer or prolific serial rapist.
 
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