Russia Surrounded

[hmg]

Springwatch was in its golden era this year. I saw a nightjar gobble up one of its chicks, alive! Massive bastard spiders lurking around ponds, the lives of hweasels, newt drama. I think what I like is that it's all so free of cant and agenda.

 

[luka]

This is a super-interesting observation, blindingly obvious in hindsight like all the best super-interesting observations

What was it about 9/11 that created that inflection point?

grapejuice has been saying it for ages now. ive quoted him on it here loads of times. he thinks that it created a huge mass of people that suddenly didn't trust the media or the government and that the left were too squeamish to scoop them up, so they all ended up on the right. that's basically his thesis.

 

[Mr. Tea]

a lot of what the right does it takes from the left, that's true. a large portion of the left always claimed that bush jnr lost the second election. i can't remember the details. something about hanging chits?

There was a lot of disagreement about whether a vote counted if the little bit of card hadn't been completely detached from the voting slip. But even so, it was a disagreement about how to interpret a real thing that existed. Not really comparable to accusations of mass voter fraud that simply never happened.

 

[Mr. Tea]

no, this is a caricature of me that you invented a few years ago. you never talk to me but only to this caricature that you made up all by yourself.

Sorry, I beg your pardon. Of course the real luka has no truck at all with conspiracy theories.

 

[luka]

 

[Mr. Tea]

Remember when Aleksandr Dugin both did and didn't have his own daughter killed by a car bomb?

 

[wg-]

Oy what the fuck is this video. I can't believe what i just watched

 

[Mr. Tea]

grapejuice has been saying it for ages now. ive quoted him on it here loads of times. he thinks that it created a huge mass of people that suddenly didn't trust the media or the government and that the left were too squeamish to scoop them up, so they all ended up on the right. that's basically his thesis.

Isn't znore a hardline inside-job 9/11 Truther? Or have I got that wrong?

 

[shakahislop]

the way the internet has fractured popular epistimology is the central driver of this unreality that we're discussing. any other factor is thoroughly secondary. the shift from a controllable top-down form of knowledge to an uncontrollable peer-to-peer form of knowledge production is a major point of disjuncture.

 

[shakahislop]

in terms of 9/11 and shocks: it is a kind of schizo take, but it feels like one of a series of events that have battered western public's sense of what is possible in the world.

i'd put the lineage as 9/11 - isis - coronavirus. the last two i think were so horrific that people don't want to talk about them much.

everyone is en masse reaching a more accurate idea of reality. which is that very unpredictable things happen, and that political systems are not permenant but are contingent.

 

[Leo]

apologies for derailing back to the original thread but thought this was a good summary take

Welcome to nginx

 

[sufi]

9/11 will become like godwins law

 

[sufi]

apologies for derailing back to the original thread but thought this was a good summary take

Welcome to nginx

It's oddly echoing the Sudan situation where the mercenary general has gone against his former backer in the state military (both are apparently associated with Wagner), the militia in Sudan were better placed as they already had forces in the capital, but it was the attempt to regularise the militia that triggered the conflict

 

[Clinamenic]

my brother isn't quite as extreme as what you and padraig and others are describing, but his underlying main point that the conversation revolves aound when i speak to him about the news and how fake it is etc is that he is clever and everyone else is stupid

Yeah for a lot of people like this, however extreme their views, I think this is their conscious logic. But because most people aren't really that interested in epistemology and metcognition and whatnot, what really interests me is what could be considered the subconscious logic of conspiratorial thinking. IE not what these individuals tell themselves, but rather what can be induced from these individuals as a larger mass psychological trend.

 

[wg-]

It's oddly echoing the Sudan situation where the mercenary general has gone against his former backer in the state military (both are apparently associated with Wagner), the militia in Sudan were better placed as they already had forces in the capital, but it was the attempt to regularise the militia that triggered the conflict

The two are also quite similar in terms of media trying to downplay their importance by mentioning their long-gone careers every time they talk about them

The camel farmer
The private chef

No-one refers to e.g. Rishi Sunak as former curry house waiter

 

[version]

UFO debunker Mick West talking about the whistleblower used the phrase 'crippled epistemology' to describe the secretive environment of intelligence agencies and the overly complicated structure of clearance ... which leads to people who cant get access to certain knowledge filling in gaps with what they want to believe. You can see the same thing happen in the wider info-sphere, but the obscured knowledge is down to instability, lack of trust, active disinfo, conspiracy

I read an excerpt from Daniel Ellsberg's memoir the other day where he talked about the psychological effect of being privy to secret information. He's a bit embarrassing and up himself, but it was intriguing.

Kissinger was not rushing to end our conversation that morning, and I had one more message to give him. "Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret. I've had a number of these myself, and I've known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

"First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all- so much! incredible!- suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well. You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't...and that all those other people are fools.

"Over a longer period of time, not too long. but a matter of two or three years - you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn't tell you, it's often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

"In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: "What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations? And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've seen this with my superiors, my colleagues...and with myself.

"You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world. no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours."

It was a speech I had thought through before, one I'd wished someone had once given me, and I'd long hoped to be able to give it to someone who was just about to enter the world of "real" executive secrecy. I ended by saying that I'd long thought of this kind of secret information as something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island, which turned them into swine. They became incapable of human speech and couldn't help one another to find their way home.

Kissinger hadn't interrupted this long warning. As I've said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn't take it as patronizing, as I'd feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn't have the clearances yet.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

There was a lot of disagreement about whether a vote counted if the little bit of card hadn't been completely detached from the voting slip. But even so, it was a disagreement about how to interpret a real thing that existed. Not really comparable to accusations of mass voter fraud that simply never happened.

They revealed how the election was manipulated/fixed here: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

Like a kid who cheated the class test in what they think was an ingenious way and just cannot keep it to themselves.

9/11 intensified suspicion of government on both the right and the left as the left were unwilling to believe the government's claims of WMDs and associated dossiers.

 

[Mr. Tea]

They revealed how the election was manipulated/fixed here: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

Like a kid who cheated the class test in what they think was an ingenious way and just cannot keep it to themselves.

Yes, I read that at the time. It describes an effort to ensure the election was free and fair. You, HMG and luka interpreted this as if a referee in a boxing match who's just spotted that one of the fighters has entered the ring wielding a baseball bat and taken it off him before the match has therefore 'fixed' the match in favour of the other guy.

Your boy lost fair and square. Cope harder.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Yeah for a lot of people like this, however extreme their views, I think this is their conscious logic. But because most people aren't really that interested in epistemology and metcognition and whatnot, what really interests me is what could be considered the subconscious logic of conspiratorial thinking. IE not what these individuals tell themselves, but rather what can be induced from these individuals as a larger mass psychological trend.

The news is epistemologically limited for quite boring practical reasons: you have a limited number of journalists with limited expertise, limited IQ, limited time, writing things that can't be too complex, can't be too equivocal or mutable. These limitations are especially clear when someone comes to cover something in which you are actually involved: with the succeeding article being full of factual errors, half-truths, partial representations etc. It's inevitable.

 

[version]

This is a super-interesting observation, blindingly obvious in hindsight like all the best super-interesting observations

What was it about 9/11 that created that inflection point?

Obviously the impact of the global TV coverage - the audacious spectacular deliberately exploiting the "where were you when it happened" instinct we have
And this amazingly photogenic attack was almost completely out of the blue, so all the stories about it have been constructed retrospectively, and are all propagandised,
so it was an ideal action for the end of TV era and the dawn of the internet,
like depression or schizoid symptoms suffered by victims of random violence, there's a sort of social PTSD. I mentioned before somewhere how the media can't seem to help itself from promoting more and more horrific tales and images, like uncontrollable intrusive thoughts

How far was this effect anticipated or even intended by OBL, the westernised saudi incel tycoon, his consciousness expressing itself thru cinematic horror and disaster created an infectious malaise. I guess there was a general intention to shock and traumatise and stir up conventional wars - (the Americans did quietly leave Saudi after smashing up 1/2 the region), and there must be something about those unacknowledged defeats playing out over decades that stokes paranoia and doomthinking, maybe doublethink can be sustained indefinitely but it produces social incontinence

i was just thinking about doing a thread on plane crashes actually

You can take it back further and look to the JFK assassination. The "seven seconds that broke the back of the American century," as DeLillo put it.