Quote: (05-09-2012 01:19 PM)Luvianka Wrote:
What Does It Mean?
Yes, I know there are many theories and stories about who Sorcha Faal is. Yes, I know that her reports, which are supposed to be assembled from leaked Russian military intelligence documents, while convincing, have many non proved sides. However, take the time to, at least once a week, scroll down the ‘World News Now’ and the ‘Insight Into Today’s News’ sections. They both contain a selection of the most interesting articles from countless sources.
http://whatdoesitmean.com/
If you have never read one of Sorcha Faal’s reports, check these two out in order to understand what I am talking about:
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1554.htm
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1571.htm
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Obama Plan For World War III Stuns Russia
Obama Plan To Massacre Americans Chills Russia
Russia Orders Obama: Tell World About Aliens, Or We Will
Obama Regime Orders Computer Genius Aaron Swartz Suicided
Obama Drug Cartel Moves To Destroy Jewish Gun Empire In US
Quote: (05-11-2012 03:31 PM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:
I love New York Times in general, even though some of the gender articles might be feminist-biased (but what media isn't today?) and myopic in the classic sense of not understanding the sexual market, it's still lots and lots of fine writing in general.
Quote: (02-01-2013 04:09 PM)thatGuy Wrote:
Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias — hands down the best blog on the Internet. Completely changed the way I view the world. Many well-reasoned contrarian views, especially on signalling, and an excellent source of quotes and one-liners.
The Last Psychiatrist — psychiatrist's views on the society, mostly about the pervasive narcissism but don't miss his interpretations of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and the story of Narcissus
I found those two insights — about signalling and omnipresent narcissism — particularly enlightening. Including finally understanding what narcissism really is and how it's not about looking in the mirror.
Roissy — obviously.
Quote: (05-17-2012 06:51 AM)Hawk Wrote:
Counterpunch: I like this American newsletter.
http://www.counterpunch.org/
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On the Devil, Trump and Getting Schlonged
by Edgar Rivera Colón
Donald Trump reminds me of ethnographer Jose E. Limon’s portrait of the Devil in South Texas. He — Satan is always a man –appears when sectors of the population feel threatened by the brutal machinations of the capitalist modernity gone wild. In his book, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Poetics in Mexican American South Texas, Limon collected stories from his Mexican/Tejan@ informants of the Devil appearing at cantinas throughout South Texas during weekend dances. This particular Tejano avatar of the Prince of Lies was inevitably described as handsome, nicely attired, a good dancer, well endowed, a favorite of the ladies, and a man’s man, a real Chingon.
Enter Donald Trump into the media-managed US presidential campaign stage replete with candidates: lifelong opportunists who are elite, white, right, and uptight. Cruz and Rubio are the anemic browning of that template and not much more than that. The Devil or Donald Trump vamps on white working and middle-income fear and insecurity and revels in displaying the shit-stained undergarments of the political and media elite who have been the principle cheerleaders of destroying the economics arrangements that after World War Two produced one of the largest middle-classes in the history of the world.
The Devil and Donald Trump delight in the putatively “lower” regions of human anatomy: fecal materials, menstrual blood, penises, vaginas, etc. In fact, the economic policies of the elites in this country are creating the naked conditions that bare these bottom matters. Reality TV is the pixelated comedic opera of these deadly arrangements: the winners, the losers, the wannabes, and the aides-de-camp populate this engrossing universe of tropes and half-truths.
Another name for the Devil is Lucifer — the one who carries the light. Trump’s evil genius is that he sheds light on the actual existing system of choosing presidents and how media elites consolidate their power. His vulgarity is key to scandalizing the media elites’ upper middle-class sensibilities which never seem to extend to the criminality of the corporate lobbyist-fed political oligarchy that runs this country. Their horror rings false in the ears of the many — the non-credentialed rabble. Trump’s assertion that he would be happy to kill some journalists massages the homicidal anger that is just under the skins of many who attend his rallies and sympathize with his revanchist, populist message.
Now, let’s talk about schlongs. There is nothing wrong with schlongs or getting schlonged. Well, it does depend on whose schlong it is and the sophistication of the schlonging, I would argue, but that is another story for another day. What Trump did in his probably off-the-cuff remark was to blow a very powerful dog whistle: the matronly moralist, Hilary Clinton, was scholnged by a Black man. Consider the racist, sexist, and misogynistic registers that are mobilized by such a throw away line.
The Devil has no boundaries since his desires are as capacious as the drunken erotics that make cantinas and populist rallies cathartic spaces for those who feel dispossessed and reeling from a dignity-robbing economic system. The horror that the media and political elites emote at Trump’s pyrotechnics only consolidate his base. The Devil is working overtime these days. Trump is riding his fiery wake as far as he can.
Hillary Clinton will probably win in 2016, but Trumpism may become a fixture in US political discourse and that will have damaging consequences. God, I miss Charlie Daniels. Well, we still have Jack Daniels to soothe our political nerves and to fend off the Devil that has no need for details, just the fire of hatred and the brimstone of popular despair. That’s a stiff drink to swallow. Stiff indeed.
Edgar Rivera Colón Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist, teaches at Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Program.
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And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.
We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.
And we have those same people absolutely ripping into their in-groups – straight, white, male, hetero, cis, American, whatever – talking day in and day out to anyone who will listen about how terrible their in-group is, how it is responsible for all evils, how something needs to be done about it, how they’re ashamed to be associated with it at all.
This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuously love their outgroups, the outer the better, and gain status by talking about how terrible their own groups are.
What is going on here?
[...]
Compare the Nazis to the German Jews and to the Japanese. The Nazis were very similar to the German Jews: they looked the same, spoke the same language, came from a similar culture. The Nazis were totally different from the Japanese: different race, different language, vast cultural gap. But although one could imagine certain situations in which the Nazis treated the Japanese as an outgroup, in practice they got along pretty well. Heck, the Nazis were actually moderately friendly with the Chinese, even when they were technically at war. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Nazis and the German Jews – some of whom didn’t even realize they were anything other than German until they checked their grandparents’ birth certificate – is the stuff of history and nightmares. Any theory of outgroupishness that naively assumes the Nazis’ natural outgroup is Japanese or Chinese people will be totally inadequate.
And this isn’t a weird exception. Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.
[...]
In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.
