“There’s an understanding that is not desired to exist” It was 1970, and Eric Dollard was sleeping rough at the RCA-Marconi Wireless Station at Bolinas, California, where he had worked from the age of seventeen until it was closed down. He’d started sleeping on site in an effort to protect his property — the 25 […]
The appeal to ignorance is an appeal to lack of imagination. Without imagination, new knowledge is impossible. How can you believe something you cannot imagine? When deployed by a trained mind, the argumentum ad ignorantiam represents a cynical ploy to exploit these limitations. One man who has argued with keen logic and clarity against the […]
“An effective political substitute for war would require ‘alternate enemies,’ some of which might seem equally far-fetched in the context of the current war system. It may be, for instance, that gross pollution of the environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principal apparent threat to the survival […]
THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD “The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). ∆ Jesse Hughes: I knew right then and there it was gonna be bad, and I knew that these kids had no idea what […]
THE MURDEROUS CAPACITY OF IMAGES In 1981 Baudrillard was announcing, not predicting, the ‘death of the real’. In Simulacra and Simulation, he ironically reveres Disneyland, which he says ‘is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer […]
HANGING WITH THE HANGETSU Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1929 “Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it […]
From The Cave and the Light, by Arthur Herman. Chapter 16: Aristotle, Machiavelli, and the Paradoxes of Liberty History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be. And when we deal with the sum total of history’s record, high-minded ideals like those of Plato’s Philosopher […]
I first noticed it in Amsterdam, relaxing in friend’s motorboat as we pottered around town and out into the countryside south of the city. All afternoon, lying back in the bow, I watched plane after plane laying down white trails in a blue sky — trails which twisted like ribbons, ruffled at the edges, spread […]
Designs V2- The Orchid – Insanity www.gndesigns.net CONSPIRACY THEORY AND THE SOFT GULAG One particularly vile aspect of totalitarian systems is the abuse of psychiatry. In China today, dissidents may be labeled mentally ill and consigned to psychiatric hospitals. Once swallowed up by the mental health system, they can be subjected to electric shock ‘therapy’ […]
THE REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN: ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE In 1967, a book was published by Dial Press which purported to be the report of a secret government commission, leaked by one of its members. Entitled The Report from Iron Mountain – On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, the book exposes […]