They search the culture when they arrive
To build a vehicle to drive
You see some thing familiar but not the whole truth
Behind image and projection is a booth
Flying saucers and Jews are history
Agents of change that demand respect
In the margins more often than you'd expect
At liminal times of anti-structure
There as catalyst and trickster
Flying saucers and Jews are religions
It matters not if disbeliever,
Doubter, faithful or hater
In praise or in bile
In worship or denial
Flying saucers and Jews are important
They affect the course of things
In radiating concentric rings
Everywhere and nowhere
It is important not to stare
Flying saucers and Jews are dangerous
To your employment and your sanity
To culture and humanity
Your life and home and such
And especially if you know too much
Flying saucers and Jews are secret
There are shadowy groups of men
Who have this as their ken
Causal forces are kept from you
Whether UFO or Jew
You'll lose family and friends
Who won't follow 'round the bends
They'll think you mad or cruel
Or just a hopeless fool
They will not hear your facts
And they will not have your back
Their worldview is their ground
So they must assume it's sound
They don't want to leave confused
Or think that they've been used
So they start on the offense
And say you don't make sense
The alternative seems bad
To learn and become sad
Ignorance is bliss
But there are some things they have missed
~~~
I considered framing this as a selfless and objective account. I told myself (as I would tell you) that it wasn't a petition for pity, not a rant rooted in ressentiment, nor a humblebrag, nor a piece of excuse-making. Those are lies. The truth is that I am sad, and angry, and I do feel unfairly deprived of my privileges. I can only bring myself to admit so because I suspect I'm not alone in this feeling.
The question lurking behind the present storytime is "How many?" How many young men like me had every reason to believe they were going places, so they did their best, only to discover that the system was not interested in their contributions? How many have given up, and shut down, as I have? Finally, what are the results for a society if this happens on a regular basis?
Speaking from my own experience, grade school gave me the sense of being singular, at least among those kids within busing distance. My alleged smarts were spoken of like sorcery, a strange mysterious power conferred on me by the Fates. A classmate once asked if I had eaten a dictionary. I finished Grade 8 Math with a final mark above 100, which might say more about my math teacher than myself. All of which is to observe that the ear of one's ego has to bend toward something. It wouldn't have been sports. It couldn't have been church. Lord knows, it wasn't Canada. Not having a tribe of my own or a healthy and harmonious family, I could only take pride in my numerically-quantified academic accomplishments as an atomized individual.
So I was a student. A good student. A very good student. I would often like to protest that I didn't work that hard, only as hard as the projects apparently required, yet that minimal standard seemed to exceed that of others. Completing these mostly pointless and stupid assignments, and watching others struggle with them, undoubtedly warped me in all kinds of ways. I only wish that inflation and distortion of my character might have been harnessed for good.
This may be where I went astray. I never got to a point with math or science where it was anything more than rote learning. If you understood the principles and followed them correctly, you always found the right answer. Maybe I could have been a great mathematician, but I could think of nothing less interesting. The practice of science looked similarly thankless, long stretches of dull routine broken up by occasional excitement. I made the choice to go into arts and humanities instead as soon as I had the option.
What was the essence of that choice? Was I moving toward understanding humanity, expressing myself, and thinking creatively, or was I just fleeing from the boring business of keeping this shit show running? I surely revelled in the maverick move of not doing the obvious, and I really hoped to find engaging shades of grey demanding messy interpretation, but I was also lazy, and worn-out from a decade of busywork while my peers were having childhoods. I think I had legitimate grievances against the status quo, against war and waste, corporatism and kakistocracy, but did I actually believe that I could not operate within the establishment without compromising my principles, or did it just look like too much trouble? I'm trying to recount the ways my education failed me, but I can't get past my own complicity. I could be a rich doctor right now, instead of a destitute dreg. Sometimes smart people are improbably stupid.
On that note, I eventually chose to attend Trent University. They had a department of cultural studies, and Maclean's magazine said they wore Birkenstocks and sometimes went to class in pyjamas there, so that's the school I picked. The highfalutin hand-waving the program used to describe itself sounded good enough. Of course there are power imbalances in society. Of course there's injustice. Who wouldn't want to make the world more just and fair? It did all sound a little airy, but the program promised workshops in the arts. I would learn practical skills. If not a professorship, I could go into film or theatre. Three career tracks in one degree! What could go wrong?
I must pause at this point to draw out another animating idea for this bit, and that's the good faith assumption of a functioning society. You want to believe that your elders and superiors have guarded against decadence and decline. You want to believe that expensive degrees have value. It looked on the surface like cultural studies might be an indulgently speculative enterprise, an ivory tower endeavour far-removed from reality. I knew that to be the unschooled assumption of retrograde country bumpkins. It simply wasn't conceivable that so many smart people could be caught up in a lie. If the Emperor had no clothes, someone would have said something, and that cultural studies department would disband in shame.
Of course, they had no shame. I was told about the pathological propensities of my people to want a happy family and a strong leader, and I was told that another people were the supreme paragons of moral virtue in human history. I figured out that I was only being very poorly taught how to put on a play or make a movie so that I could advance the social theories of my professors. Despite my efforts to avoid the drily predictable patterns of rationalistic quantitative analysis, there was still only one right answer, and what was worse: it didn't even agree with reason. 2 + 2 was always 5.
My experience of cultural studies was akin to gaslighting. The hostility to anything normative seemed to come out of nowhere in second year, after I had committed to the major, yet all the students and professors treated it as established, proven, and beyond debate that we should all be Marxists disassembling the dominant culture. I looked around the table and couldn't see anyone as confused as I felt. Maybe it was me. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe I was mad. The alternative was a lot worse to contemplate.
I never kept my grades up for their own sake. The mark was a measure of the degree to which I had committed myself to understanding and embodying the principles conveyed. I could feel good about myself because I was playing along. I was learning the ropes so that one day I might captain my own ship in a vast armada. Together we would do great and glorious things, noble things we can't even imagine. All I had to do was listen to the words of those older and wiser than myself, apply what they had taught me, be reasonable, and speak the truth. Speech is social, and justice is true, so I thought that I was on board with social justice.
I never expected that my degree would end with an epic moral quandary. I was just a few papers away from earning my Honours, papers that I had imagined would be the culmination of my learning, tying it all up in a neat bow that would point to what the next step should be. Instead I was more confused than at the beginning, not to say that I didn't have more ideas in my head. I knew the sociopolitical bullet points that I should work from if I knew what was good for me, but in truth, I had not been convinced of them. I could fake it, I was sure of that, but I wasn't sure I would emerge from that process the same person. A little part of me would die, the part that wants my reason, actions, and conscience to be in accord with one another. The very part that torments me to this day, but I keep alive anyway, in the hopes that one day I'll find a worthy use for it.
George Carlin said, "Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."
These are cynical times. The assumption that others speak in good faith is unfashionable. The basic etiquette of rational speech isn't observed, yet these very unreflective arguers, blind to their own psychology, are happy to guess at the motivations of others. It couldn't be that you know something I don't. It must be that you're driven by a stupid animal urge to be a bad person. I feel better about that.
At the risk of returning the favour, it seems safe to say that the vitriol on the left today must emanate from some deep wounding or disappointment. Progress sounds good, but it sounds linear. When it encounters complications, changes, cycles, or conservatives, the expectation is disappointed. In order to hold on to the faith, the cultist must adapt their belief system to the new reality. Heaven didn't come to Earth because someone somewhere was sinning.
But behind that steaming resentment is the hope for a better world, twisted and perverted into hatred for those who stand in its way. A sincere wish for good things becomes transmuted into a disingenuous attack. This reverse alchemy turns gold into garbage. The disappointed progressive says in their heart that we will have our world of peace and love, even if we have to hate and kill to get there.
The lines are ever-shifting, but not so long ago liberals and progressives appeared to have a common cause. Disappointment has driven them apart. Disappointment that those who don't agree with the program of change won't get on board with it has driven progressives further to the left. Disappointment with the dismissal of natural law, utility, and objective measures of progress has driven liberals to the right.
If we place to the side the rabid projections of their opponents, we find among the growing ranks of conservatives a good number of former liberals and libertarians. These are people who believed in freedom, for the individual and society. They believed in the promise of progress. They believed that tolerance and compromise would reduce strife. Ultimately, they believed in the power of egalitarian principles to hold everyone to the same standard, and thereby establish a common understanding.
Instead we are at war for reality, perceiving different worlds, speaking different languages with the same words, and disagreeing on the most fundamental values. Those who would stay out of it and go home to their families are treated as traitors or deserters. It was never about fairness, or logic, or stability. We all wanted to make the world a better place, but we forgot to stop and make sure we were talking about the same thing.
Some or quite possibly all are born that way, but the haters of haters should be aware that inside many a deplorable, there is a disappointed liberal.
When I was six years old, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky. I thought it over, and decided this was not the sort of thing I should talk about to anyone ever. Because I couldn't talk about it, I gradually forgot about it. This is the story of my intellectual journey.
When I was thirteen I bought Fingerprints of the Gods. I discovered in that book that humanity's past might not be a single simple linear ascent to greater sophistication. So I took Ancient History in high school, where I was told that humans began as apes, and civilisation began with pyramids. There was no acknowledgment of any uncertainty in this story, so I kept my mouth shut.
I tried LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and synthetic phenethylamines, dextromethorphan, salvia divinorum, and a weak preparation of dimethyltryptamine. These helped me to apprehend that every person has a spark of divinity within, an eternal consciousness watched over by an absolute awareness that precedes the universe. It's not the sort of thing you talk about, so I didn't.
I went to university for three things: film, theatre, and the critical examination of culture to determine what the hell is wrong with the world. I learned how to use a primitive camera for greater authenticity, how to pretend that a wooden box is really a chair, and how to place the blame for all the ills of the world on straight white men like myself. Marx and Freud got together with Adorno and Marcuse to say that I was a born oppressor whose guilt was proven by my denials, a pathological sort of person who must be repressed to encourage tolerance. I saw the mental dressing down that occurred when you didn't agree this was all brilliant stuff, so I gave up on participating in seminars.
Disillusioned with academic cultural studies, I applied my philosophy education to the perils and opportunities of the internet. What could be gleaned from those who spoke only to niche audiences, or took advantage of anonymity? I found that most every time there was a subject considered too crazy to countenance by polite society, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Every time, too, there was someone who took that truth too far. I didn't want to be a fool or to be thought one, so I didn't even begin to engage with any of these interesting topics, except to study them.
The Earth is almost certainly round, but I haven't been to space or studied the physics of planetary formation, so I have to take someone's word for it. The return of flat earth theory is likely being helped along by intelligence interests for the study and manipulation of the population, but as a thought experiment it's a peerless gauge of a person's capacity for challenging their assumptions. No, the Earth isn't flat, but all it would take is a vast intergenerational conspiracy to deceive you on the matter. It's a valuable exercise to consider the inconceivable for a moment or two.
Vaccines are described as safe and effective, but their inserts list serious conditions as side effects. The unconscionable opinion of the science-denying anti-vaccine Dr. Andrew Wakefield is that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should be issued separately at different times as three generic vaccines instead of one patented product at once with a greater potential for adverse effects. This is why people have tried to silence and destroy him. Vaccines may claim credit for the benefits of nutrition and sanitation, but the basic theory is still sound.
The elite meet in secret to party away their cares and perform ritual magic to absolve their consciences, but they always have, and the world hasn't ended yet.
There is strong laboratory evidence for mostly weak but almost universal powers of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, but the people claiming strong powers have more reason than most to fake them.
JFK wanted to limit the power of the central bank, tell the people about UFOs, and cooperate with the Russkies to go to the Moon, so everyone got together to kill him, but he was probably Abraham Lincoln in a past life, so he may already be back.
Crop circles are mostly faked, but the people who regularly make them feel compelled to do so by an unknown force.
Stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering seems like it might be a real thing, but if we're all being contaminated by metals falling from the sky and seeping into our brains, then the people saying that necessarily have addled brains, and shouldn't be trusted.
Bread and milk are very bad for you. You shouldn't eat them. But they're delicious.
9/11 was executed by Saudi terrorists with help from Mossad, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration, but everyone fucking knows that.
Some people are absolute jerks, and when the delicate equilibrium of your brain is tipped so that you stop breaking down endogenous DMT at the normal rate, you spontaneously trip out on your own brain juices and your asshole boss turns into a lizard. But that still doesn't prove there aren't reptile people.
Unidentified Flying Objects are a mixture of psychological, social, optical, and piezoelectric phenomena coupled with the observer effect operating on chimeric projections of consciousness grounded in other layers of reality, distorted by terrestrial psy-ops instigated by boys with toys they want to keep secret.
But before I had found all of these qualified positions, I was willing to throw myself into one. Dr. Steven Greer said that he could use a combination of remote viewing protocols with Vipassana meditation to call down these UFOs. I had just read some relevant books, and I dimly recalled seeing something in my youth, so I decided to reverse engineer Greer's methods and see me some UFOs. With a vague sense of addressing myself to interdimensional star people, I continually asked in my head for a period of several months if I could please see some saucers. It worked, but what do you say about that?
After years of coping with the psychological fallout of seeing a fuckton of flying saucers on request, I came to terms with the mystery of our perennial interaction with others from a distant land, whatever the truth of it is. I made my peace with the unspeakable at last. I had weathered the gauntlet of conspiracies and the occult, of all the impossibly crazy ideas a person can consider, and I had emerged half-sane and not completely unreasonable.
It was around this time that it was pointed out to me that the critical theory I had read at university as an apparent critique of "our" own culture was actually disproportionately written by members of an ethnocentric tribe that considers itself as distinct from, and superior to, our deplorable culture. It wasn't sober self-criticism at all.
It was then that I realised that actually paranormal phenomena are relatively easy to discuss. You may accept or deny them. Jews can only be praised or ignored. To do otherwise is to invite accusations of stupidity and evil, for having the misfortune of asking a question that has been rendered curiously cartoonish.
With four attacks in southern Germany coming shortly after the mass
murder of 84 people in Nice, counter-terrorism officials are struggling
to detect a common thread. Is there a single, defining feature to these
attacks that could offer clues on how to prevent more of them from
happening?
Now I realize that it’s quite possible to find 14-year old White boys
who, having endured a standard American education, would deplore their
White privilege — that they are “ethnomasochists” as John Derbyshire would
have it. But it also seems to me that it’s more likely that such
sentiments would come from a Jewish boy raised in the home of left-wing Jewish activists.
"The Canadian documents…indicate the Canadian government has been and
remains vitally concerned about the unauthorised incursion of
unidentified flying objects within Canadian airspace."
A new poll suggests an apocalyptic firestorm, caused by a giant meteor, might be better than electing Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump--so thinks a portion of respondents larger than the supporters of the Libertarian and Green Party nominees put together. Support for the nascent Giant Meteor Party comes from all ends of the political spectrum, though with a slightly lower approval rating among moderates.
Those who have a college indoctrination, regularly consume mainstream news media, and make a lot of money, have become more trusting of institutions in the eight years since the financial collapse of 2008. They are the "informed public." Everyone else, the "mass populations," have certain questions and concerns. This is corrosive to democracy! They should have more faith in government, for the good of society.
The Obama-appointed FBI Director gave a press conference showing that
she recklessly handled Top Secret information, engaged in conduct
prohibited by law, and lied about it repeatedly to the public. But she won’t be prosecuted or imprisoned for any of that, so Democrats are
celebrating. But if there is to be anything positive that can come from
this lowly affair, perhaps Democrats might start demanding the same
reasonable leniency and prosecutorial restraint for everyone else who
isn’t Hillary Clinton.
24-year-old Selin Gören, national spokeswoman for the left-wing German youth movement Solid, was ambushed by three men late at night in a playground last January, and forced to perform a sex act. Gören, who works in Mannheim as a refugee activist, went straight to the police and told them she had been assaulted by German-speakers. They had in fact been speaking Arabic or Farsi, but conscious of the backlash following Cologne, she didn't want to paint migrants in a negative light.
She was convinced by her boyfriend to return to the police twelve hours later and tell what really happened, after another woman in the area was allegedly raped by refugees. That accusation was eventually retracted, so it appears that a lying racist bigot bad person got a well-meaning lying leftist to tell the truth about the sort of thing the racist bigots have to make up because it doesn't get reported when it really happens. Clear?
The leadership and ideologues of contemporary industrialized leftist
(including anarchist and communist) movements are Jews with a
Machiavellian racial motive, as well as rootless cosmopolitan
fad-chasing white bourgeoisie, and they feel those whites who do not
share their affinity for kale and “Polyamory” are hopelessly inferior,
or even a potential threat to their status and privilege.
“Millennials” have become both a media scapegoat for, and a distraction
from, widespread economic suffering. Having experienced no economy other
than the recession’s false recovery, young Americans have arguably
suffered the most. The remedy lies not in judging their lifestyle
choices—or worse yet, perpetuating the illusion that they have money to
burn—but by acknowledging the new economy for what it is: a structural
crisis, one that future generations will share.
The new president of Iceland is neither a career politician nor a businessman. He's "a scholastic expert on political history, diplomacy and the Iceland constitution," who decided to enter politics after the Panama Papers implicated the Icelandic prime minister in fraud.
Since Iceland jailed its bankers, leaders the world over hope you won't notice that "Iceland is on track to become the first European country that suffered in the financial meltdown to 'surpass its pre-crisis peak of economic output.'"
With increasing frequency over the last few months some of the most
thoughtful left and progressive figures have begun to speak favorably of
aspects of Trump’s foreign policy. Let us hear from these heretics.
