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The Signpost
22 July 2024

Ignore This Message

Copy and Paste (The V Word)

These excerpts are taken from an article published in ranting demagogue The Eco-Nom-Ist entitled Why Naomi Klein Needs To Grow Up. I haven't actually read No Logo, and have a few mutant abortions circulating myself, but as if it were me and in that sense purely from my own perspective, and because her doppleganger walked past outside in a trance:

"Growing up in a family of activists and campaigners, her teenage rebellion took the form of devotion to the shopping mall and willing enslavement to the tyranny of the logo. When her youthful idealism kicked in, its strength and durability more than made up for its delayed onset. In her 30s, Ms Klein has all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent."

It seems a teen dependence on capital's basic youth product is effectively political original sin resulting in the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of An Infantile Disorder (tm) called alienation, nonetheless incoherence and disgust somehow reflected in the standard of the article in question.

". . . Ms Klein says approvingly that the Subcomandante is interested not in "the Revolution" but in "a revolution that makes revolution possible". Right."

Right. Capitalism was and is a 'revolution' which ultimately makes revolution possible (or perhaps it's just a phase). It might be that what is being sought here (I don't know because not much information has been supplied) is a progression in the absence of the absolute devastation and disparity that imperialism tends to produce for the developing world 'in transit', an alternative to allow for the emergence of the goal.

"Ms Klein's oddest assertion is that multinational companies are more powerful than governments and consumers. Plainly, they are not. Governments regulate business as they choose, and have far more power over their citizens' lives than even the biggest multinational does."

Plainly the political parties that run for government and claim the 'mandate of the people' depend on massive corporate funding for their campaigns and ongoing sustenance. Corporate lobby groups are active in applying funds to the influence of policy, whilst groups like Bilderberg and the G-summits are staffed by high-ranking multinational chairpersons and leading politicians with the express aim of steering global politico-economic direction in tandem and in the interests of global capital. Politicians themselves often hold or emerge from positions in successful corporate bodies, or circulate into or out of big business (as with the political-corporate operation of the Carlyle group, for example). It might be fairly suggested, in light of all this, that the capability of government elected via partisan 'democracy' (what the Economist calls, sarcastically, 'the false kind currently practised') to represent its electors is practically zero, just not true. The fact that those electors have been reduced to political consumers via a process now identical to market research and political branding might throw into question the real value of their perception of self-interest under the sway of the corporate way of life in the first place, and the 'poverty of election' is clearly a problem for increasing swathes of non-voters. I hear Obama has recently run into a collision of vested banking interest and policy, although as I pointed out in response, this is hardly new given the actual origins of the modern state in capital's will to political power.

"Another oddity: Ms Klein deplores freedom to trade as one of the vilest manifestations of the neoliberal tyranny. Yet in Fences and Windows she is very keen on taking down fences and opening windows. Surely a trade barrier is a fence and economic openness is a window. What makes trade an exception to the rule that fences are bad and windows good? We may never know."

Four legs good, five legs genius, or what the Economist elsewhere call 'engaging blather'. This is a metaphor which someone has chosen to utilise to represent a particular position or argument, not the argument itself.

The science bit:

"In training her guns on free trade and big multinationals, Ms Klein is attacking the best means for reducing poverty and, for that matter, extending justice and a political voice to the world's poorest people. When companies, properly regulated and acting within the law, pursue profits, they end up increasing prosperity. This is not a theory but an easily observable fact. The result, unintended though it may be, is social good. Ms Klein denies all this at every turn—and the tragedy is that her denials have an effect."

Guns, but not those of the free trade and big multinationals that make them, the same ones that ultimately produced 600,000 dead children and far more dead adults as a result of a war clearly fought for a resource necessitated by their dependence on an oil-based ecomomy and the possibility of mining a new market, something the vast majority of people now recognise. Multinationals like this are the 'best means', but this is a self-evident 'fact' not a theory called the 'trickle-down economy' which neglects both first world disparity - the divide between the richest and poorest is greater than ever, far greater than it was during the 19th century lassez faire boom - and the historic dependence of first world consumer markets on cheap resources and labour in the developing world. In his works documenting his time in the 1930s north, Orwell paints a picture of ecological and social ruin, a place of brown grass sprouting from coal dumps, black streams, families living in a single room and sleeping under their coats on two beds or the floor and living on bread and marg with husbands working 12 hour days or more down a mine with no bath and dying from anthracite poisoning (mind you, if you tell that to kids these days, they don't believe you). Sound familar? This is what a 'revolution that makes revolution possible' might want to avoid. Capitalism itself does not 'extend justice' anywhere or provide a political voice to anyone - real democracy does that, and capitalism and democracy are not the same thing, despite the endless act of deliberate confusion. Similarly, whilst capitalism indeed produces wealth, it is the labour of a class that does that, not the system: and they are the ones getting the smallest slice of the proceeds. For every claim to the astonishing social accomplishments of capital is the easily observable historical fact of two-hundred years of labour action, chartism, the sufragettes, strikes, marches and riots, and on and on, fighting for everything from the abolition of child labour to the vote, wage raises, increases in living conditions or safer workplace standards to avoid losing limbs in machines, anti-apartheid (and not just in South Africa) to the welfare state itself and free healthcare. Strangely, at no point as far as I know did big capital come out and say what a good idea all these things actually were, at the very least in many cases they were opposed, and they continue to verge on abolition. Although, if you point any of this out, you may be suffering from another theory called the 'politics of envy' which has something to do with jello, whatever that is.

Real Madrid 4, Surreal Madrid fish.

Heavy Metals In The Water

  • Personalisation and depersonalisation: Constantly restrict exchange and argument to the petty and personal, a form of 'pseudo-disagreement' employed to mask real conflict and causality, the actual problems. Constantly attribute any and all conflicting identity definitions and actions to the target/s.
  • Primitive defense: Constantly employ so-called 'defense mechanisms' - splitting, denial, projection, etc. One example of 'splitting', for example, might be the oscillation between extremes of regard and representation; another would be the employment of expedient dichotomy - gender, age, race, etc. Here the subject is bastardized, as in all cases, robbed of its true meaning, youth for example now as conformity and consumption, premature senility as anything other than modern societal condition. 'Denial' is only ever implied, since another motif is to constantly avoid direct confrontation, always attack and consistently change the subject to redirect attention away from real issues. 'Projection' is illustrated in the act of applying features of the system to the target/s.
  • Ideation: Proliferate complicit perceptions and behaviours, already logically defined and observed. These take the form of associative thinking and meta-communication as ideological reinforcement and constant denial of real relation (so-called 'schizophrenese'), engaging participants in the same value-systems and patterns of behaviour as the system. Politically, Orwell noted his surprise at the ease with which Mosley was able to sell Fascism to its enemies; psychologically, the ability to manufacture any perception and behaviour is a long-established truth.
  • Delusion: 'Delusions of reference' as hypertextual selection from sources subject to variable interpretation in the absence of qualifying information (or cypher).
  • Dissociation: '4022 ways, I had to count them', or 'there's only a million of us'. Fit facts to feelings (or requirement) and deny or avoid real events, sublimate message systems with un/predictable results.
  • Derealization and transient identity: The substitution of reality for a virtual replacement, composed of meta-life (Life Plus, Life Free Life, or New Improved Life), meta-narrative (YOU choose your meaning in this thrilling adventure: x refers to a/b/c given A/B/C), meta-celebrity (Celeb Plus), and meta-relationships (50 imaginary relationships per year), etc. Who do you want to be today?

Room Today And Felt Sick: The Micro

  • All organisms exchange energy, matter, and information with their environment. Feedback may be considered a fundamental natural principle.
  • Communication may defined as both analog and digital (see below); in a communicational context, all behaviour is communication.
  • Digital communication - verbal statement; written statement; nouns, adjectives and linguistic syntax.
  • Analog communication - Picture symbols based on physical likeness; images referring to things and properties of things; context, style; body language.
  • Meta-communication - what I often call 'secondary content'; metaphor would be an obvious simple example in common (typically written) use; in order to accurately define meta-content in a given communicational context, an extra element must be present which maps the primary to the secondary (a 'qualifier' or cypher).

Some have defined analog and digital communication as corresponding to content and relationship respectively, although I consider this an overly rigid definition. Clearly, communication carries content and establishes, reinforces or alters the relationship between communicants. Similarly, as much as feedback signals allow an organism, human or otherwise, to define its environment, communication also defines and I would suggest maintains self-definition or 'identity'. Reciprocity in human relationship may be defined by its characteristic symmetry or complimentarity, and healthy relationship by the congruence between an individual's identity and the communications and relationships in which they engage or to which they are subject.
Since communication carries both content and establishes relationship, the denial of communication (where, bear in mind, any behaviour qualifies as such) is also the denial of relationship; this is ipso facto true of meta-communicational systems chracterised by denial and the lack of coherent identification. This paradoxical pattern of communication, meta-communication and denial has been identified by some researchers as characteristic of schizophrenia considered in a communicational context, and by extension the schizoid environment or group which ascribes features of the system to the 'most disturbed' individual rendered incomrehensible when extracted from the same system. Some (eg. Laing et al) have also concentrated on schizoid communications as meaningful responses to or actual descriptions of their pertinent interactional environments and defining relationships.
Similarly, a communicational environment may also be described in terms of the definition and reinforcement of incongruous descriptions of identity for any or all participants.


"'Schizophrenese', then, is a language which leaves it up to the [participant] to take [their] choice from among many possible meanings which are not only different from but may even be incompatible with one another. Thus it becomes possible to deny any or all aspects of a message."
- Watzawick, Bevalas, Jackson


The role of a particular pattern of severely paradoxical communication and behaviour, often termed 'double bind', has long been considered instrumental in the genesis of schizophrenias by interactional researchers and has been experimentally demonstrated by Pavlov amongst others.


Logically, the results of communicational environments characterised by meta-communication and denial, however considered, are:

  • The selection of meaning; this will typically be a matter of repetition, where interpretations are selected based on already established content: for example, what is assumed to be being 'said' is what has already been decisively 'said', digitally or otherwise.
  • A pattern of behaviour marked by the attempt to ignore any apparent secondary content, the request for clarification which may be met with denial, symmetrical participation (in the same form or otherwise), and 'coping' behaviours such as self-destructive behaviour or escalatory departure from the behavioural standard of the environment.
  • The eventual inability to discern meaningful communication from meaningless information - rigidly 'associative thinking', 'paranoia' so-called, 'perceived rejection' (assuming this perception is in some sense inaccurate) - and the universal assumption of meta-communication across social environments, and even beyond them.
  • At worst, classically 'delusional' results - descriptions of self or environment - which might be defined as attempts to arrive at logically and personally consistent solutions to logically and personally inconsistent environments, resulting in objective fallacies, and classical behaviours as alternative forms of symmetrical participation in extremis. The communication of delusion may not necessarily be taken as its literal reality for the person, perhaps only indicating the necessity of metaphorical refuge in context, particularly given a prohibition against commenting on any discrepancy in the face of potential punishment for a correct perception. Physical consequences are a given.

None of this is designed to suggest the absence of emotion, feeling: on the contrary, it operates under the assumption of the emotional import of communication and relationship, for every reason including its evolutionary necessity, and where the denial of emotional response may itself be an intended strategy.

BE953CZ: The Macro

In the terms of game theory, the meta-communicative 'game', in any form, is characterised by the implicit assumption of mutual participation and the near-impossibility of termination once the pattern has been adopted. This inability to terminate equivalates to the assumption of mutual and ongoing participation due precisely to the absence of identificatory information for communications potentially identical given or lacking secondary content, and the loading of symbolic systems and fixing of perceptual behaviour in media. Any meta-communicational pattern proliferate in media, however considered - logically, as game, memetically, as subliminal argument, and so on - proliferates both perception - associative thinking, as mentioned above, the construction of narratives selected on the basis of exposure, personal preference and disposition - and behaviour: participation in the game itself. The argumentative format supplies a multiplicity of contradictory identities and narratives, and appeals to expedient conflict and ideological reinforcement, but reduces always to pseudo-disagreement: meaningful argument, reason, agency, is forever absent, and to that extent, from my personal standpoint, all content is merely reducible to attribution and redirection. Obviously:


"This state of affairs may not be perceived as such by any of the people in it. The man at the bottom of the heap may be being crushed and suffocated to death without anyone noticing, much less intending it. The situation here described is impossible to see by studying the different people in it singly. The social system, not single individuals extrapolated from it, must be the object of study."
- R. D. Laing


It might also be worth pointing out that the form of what is defined as a coherent meta-communicational thematic system in media could be taken to disclose an already extant feature of information systems. That isn't to suggest that there is necessarily a clear intention to produce a given perception or behaviour - although this is more likely than might be supposed, and certainly association (what the memeticists call 'piggybacking') is a standard feature of advertising, whilst subliminal messaging was once banned - but clearly that the advent of a consolidating narrative across dispirate but now conjoined media illustrates this property and renders the values of the system starkly legible.


"Sounds like one too many coincidences to me. . ." - Doctor's statement lacking logical conclusion, 2004

You Make Me Unreal: Who Am I?

Animal Vegatable Mineral
You're such a (delete as appropriate or according to requirement):

  • a) Lesbian/Queer/heterosexual/wanker/man/woman/prostitute
  • b) Mysoginist/racist/self-hater/homophobe/suldger
  • c) Hitler/Commie/Jesus/Satan/Nero/ranter
  • d) Nerd/schizo/remedial/genius/scientist/mystic/cripple/weirdo
  • e) Black/White/Jew/Asian/Chinese/Russian/German/Scottish/Irish/Frunch
  • f) Trash/aristocrat/rebel/tramp/Pharoah
  • g) Geriatric/delinquent/baby/child
  • h) Elephroodogbeedolphin/lobster
  • i) Alien/vampire/werewolf/demon/pixie/undead
  • j) Car/robot/toaster/android


Titanick
"The sexy men and women holding the badge" (MSN 3.3.2010)

  • Aim: Avoidance of criminal activity. Result: violation of basic rights, criminalization, mass criminality.
  • Aim: Avoidance of Fascism. Result: Extra-legal action as law without legality (Fascism in legal terms).
  • Aim: Human relationship. Result: Alienation, isolation, disruption of all social relationships.
  • Aim: Political conformity. Result: Radicalization.
  • Aim: Physical or mental benefit. Result: Anger, self-harming, violence, hospitalization-as-denial.
  • Aim: Avoidance of social conflict and hysteria. Result: Mass infection and schizoid communication, social conflict, hysteria, tattoed bodies dumped in lakes, decapitation, the occasional 'nigger' joke.

The idea appears to be to claim to be seeking a particular outcome, produce the exact opposite as the result of the action undertaken, and deny both.


"The tech always works." - The World, Year Zero (1978, 1988 or 1992 depending on preference)


Nothing Is True
So, the question is not what my crime is and in what sense that justifies my treatment; the question is what crime itself is in the absence of law as legality and to which the answer is Fascism legally expressed; or war. Orwell's perceptiveness in 1984 was the observation that information could manufacture any reality and make anything true, that surveillance and conflict were the tools of social control, and that 'psychology' in the hands of authority could be used to manufacture any justification and any degree of mystification as desired. As I observed, Stalinist Russia was well-known for the political application of psychiatry, matched only by the assumption that this is untrue in the capitalist west, much as for propaganda as political control. What differs is the degree of subtlety exercised and the degree of mystification to which such realisation is subject.
Violence could hardly be an excuse for anything, although the law loves to think so in one of the most violent periods in human history, and generally responds with violence, masquerading as love too; on the contrary, violence may be the ultimate and perhaps necessary response. Sex is a private concern, or at least it's supposed to be, but if you lack sex-crime you can always manufacture or pretend, including that the crime is lacking in the personal experience/s of the target/s, which is a far more pertinent assertion easily supported by the actual evidence. Freedom of speech, belief and politics are supposed to be guaranteed too, and the antithetical assertion is matched by the obvious professional duplicity. After all this, what's left? Clearly only the observation that none of it means anything in the absence of law or even open declaration, where anything can be assumed, 'said', 'proven' and done, except in terms of what it reveals about the system itself - as redirection, as projection, as evidence of the sheer lengths that will be gone to, the sheer extremity of claims, and the sheer terror it illustrates and attempts to manufacture in the company of spectacle: be afraid, and if you can't do that, laugh at the fearful and the dead.

All Of Our Lunch Table

The following is taken from a description of interactional traits allegedly associated with so-called borderline personalities on BPD Central, with a few slight alterations:

  • Domination: (The system) wants to control your every action. (It has) to have (its) way, and will resort to threats to get it. When you allow (the system) to dominate you, you can lose respect for yourself.
  • Verbal Assaults: Berating, belittling, criticizing, name-calling, screaming, threatening, excessive blaming, and using sarcasm and humiliation. Blowing your flaws out of proportion and making fun of you infront of others. Over time, this type of abuse erodes your sense of self-confidence and self-worth.
  • Abusive Expectations: The (system) places unreasonable demands on you and wants you to put everything else aside to tend to (its) needs. It could be a demand for constant attention, frequent sex, or a requirement that you spend all your free time (on it). But no matter how much you give, it's never enough. You are subjected to constant criticism, and you are constantly berated because you don't fulfill all (the system's) needs.
  • Emotional Blackmail: The (system) plays on your fear, guilt, compassion, values, or other "hot buttons" to get what (it) wants. This could include threats to end the relationship, the "cold shoulder," or the use of other fear tactics to control you.
  • Unpredictable Responses: Drastic mood changes or sudden emotional outbursts (This is part of the definition of BPD). Whenever (the system) reacts very differently at different times to the same behavior from you, tells you one thing one day and the opposite the next, or likes something you do one day and hates it the next, you are being abused with unpredictable responses. This behavior is damaging because it puts you always on edge. You're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and you can never know what's expected of you. You must remain hypervigilant, waiting for the (system's) next outburst or change of mood. An alcoholic or drug abuser is likely to act this way. Living with (a system) like this is tremendously demanding and anxiety provoking, causing the abused person to feel constantly frightened, unsettled and off balance.
  • Gaslighting: The (system) may deny that certain events occurred or that certain things were said. You know differently. The (system) may deny your perceptions, memory and very sanity. (If the system has been disassociating, it may indeed remember reality differently than you do.)
  • Constant Chaos: The (system) may deliberately start arguments and be in constant conflict with others (or itself). The (system) may be "addicted to drama" since it creates excitement. (Many non-BPs also are addicted to drama.)

Koncision

"Stare at me with empty eyes and
Point your words at me
Mirror on the wall will show you
What you're scared to see"
- A.I.C.


"There souls of men are bought and sold,
And milk-fed infancy for gold;
And youth to slaughter houses led,
And beauty for a bit of bread."
- W.Blake


"Broadly speaking [...] propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending - not in so many words, but by implication - that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, 'mass sadism', the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylum full of homicidal maniacs. Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilize public opinion against it, at any rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois 'democracy', meaning capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgois 'democracy' are Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
- G.Orwell


"In the society of men the truth now resides less in what things are than in what they are not."
- R.D.Laing


"The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand for a condition which no longer requires illusions."
- K.Marx


My pleasure.

Contributions

My personal interests include Left politics (particularly Marxism, Left Marxism, and Anarchism), fantasy and science fiction, art and fantasy art, comic books, role playing games, video games, computers, special effects, popular science, and music. . .

My contributions are too many for me to be bothered to track them down and reproduce here. I've initialised a few pages myself (it's a start!), but the bulk of my contributions are grammatical and typo corrections, link additions, cleanups, redirects, etc. (which, after all, are the bulk of work on Wikipedia anyway). New (article) pages I've initiated and developed are:

I've also made major contributions to articles on Cecil Frank Powell, Les Edwards, John Sibbick and Carl Critchlow, and initiated the Games Workshop artists category and am now going through the articles in that providing clean-ups and further details. Other targets after that might include articles in the Fantasy artists and Science fiction artists cats, which I'd like to see match the standard of more 'traditional' arts pages.


Editing Notes

These are posted here primarily for my own use of course. . .


News

Ismail Haniyeh in September 2022
Ismail Haniyeh
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