CAMBRIDGE, MA—In a landmark discovery that sheds new light on the development of Western thought, historians announced Tuesday they had found several lost Socratic dialogues in which the ancient Greek philosopher simply gives up and screams that his debate opponents are all fucking brainwashed shills. “In these newly unearthed texts, there are numerous instances in which Socrates accuses his interlocutors of having small penises before going on to claim he has fucked their wives,” said Harvard University professor Helen Speck, citing dialogues in which Socrates proposes that anyone who disagrees with him is a pathetic piece of shit on the payroll of the Athenian aristocracy and ought to just kill himself. “We’ve uncovered many rhetorical tactics previously undocumented in the classical canon, such as Socrates’ tendency to scream ‘Fuck you!’ ad nauseam until his challenger stopped trying to express his viewpoint. We even have contemporaneous accounts suggesting Socrates doxxed his opponents, posting their addresses all over the Acropolis and inciting his followers to harass them. It’s pretty amazing to see our culture’s philosophical tradition being born here.” Speck added that Plato, the most famous student of Socrates, received an education centered around learning to shout a stream of relentless, unsubstantiated libel at anyone believed to be a giant pussy.
People stand and pay tribute to victims along a cordon in front of the Al Noor mosque after a performance of the haka in Christchurch on March 20, 2019. | ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/Getty Images
Averting our gaze from mass murder won’t keep it from happening—and it won’t even stop the murderers from spreading their sick ideas.
The greatest danger to the republic, Republicans and Democrats alike have shouted in recent months, is tech companies like Google and Facebook. They wield too much power over free speech and commerce, the argument goes, and thus must be broken up into smaller, weaker companies to reduce their hold on us.
Then came last Friday’s massacre of 50 innocents at two New Zealand mosques, live-streamed on Facebook from the suspect’s body cam—an attack New York Times columnist Kevin Roose dubbed the world’s first “internet-native mass shooting.”
The new complaint was that big tech wasn’t powerful enough to block the shooter’s videos from appearing on the web. Even though Facebook deleted 1.5 million of the first-person videos inside of 24 hours and Google’s YouTube boasted of “unprecedented“ scale and speed in erasing the videos (one per second!) and temporarily disabling search functions, neither service could keep up with the uploaders. Some users subtly altered the videos to slip under automated screening processes.
At least two British tabloids ran edited footage from the suspect’s body cam and one published his 84-page “manifesto,” but they quickly self-censored the material off their websites. The Australian Broadcasting Company probably spoke for most media companies that limited their graphic coverage when it explained that it had deliberately denied the suspect a “platform” because his attack was “aimed not at the audiences of traditional news organisations but at reaching and triggering atomised and often extreme online audiences.” The ABC continued, “His every move appears to have been deliberate, calculated, web savvy and designed to grab attention.” The Aussie broadcaster seems to be saying it had no desire to reward the suspect’s media efforts and thereby encourage additional mayhem.
But limited coverage didn’t mean zero coverage. Every major media organization flooded the New Zealand story with reporters and photographers who told the story in tick-tock detail. You might think this would be a counterproductive tack for the news media to take if deplatforming the suspect and restricting the reach of his propaganda goals was the intent. And you’d be right. Far from “protecting” the impressionable from the suspect’s racist and murderous message, the press communicated it everywhere. This let the press have it both ways—to claim an imagined moral victory by not using the video and manifesto directly but by extracting every essential reportorial detail from them. The “atomized and often extreme online audiences” who clicked through to read the tempered coverage of Christchurch killings in the New York Times or viewed it on CNN surely got the suspect’s message.
Then why the charade? I can understand why the likes of Google and Facebook want to resist delivering maximum destruction, blood and massacre. They’re in the advertising business. But journalists are supposed to be hell-bent on chasing every angle on a story, to err by telling too much instead of not enough, to disclose and not conceal, aren’t they? Suppression of the news is the censor’s game.
I can understand why New Zealand journalists gagged themselves: The New Zealand government invoked its powers to ban “objectionable and restricted material,” thereby criminalizing the sharing of the video. And the government acted on the ban. One person arrested for sharing the video faces 28 years in prison. Both New Zealand and Australian ISPs have blocked sites like 4chan that have hosted the videos.
But no such law prevented the American press from running the videos.
When the 9/11 terrorists struck, the networks live-streamed that atrocity into American living rooms, including the human demolition of desperate people leaping from high windows to escape the flames. This attack was every bit as deliberate, calculated and web-savvy as the Christchurch assault, but the press didn’t retreat behind worries that the coverage might encourage another attack. Nobody said, We can’t be free to publish this material because we must make every effort to be safe first! To this day, YouTube finds such journalistic significance in the jumper videos that they still host them in easily searchable form. So much for their “standards.”
The “contagion” theory of mass killings, which instructs journalists to limit their coverage lest they inspire new villains to pick up the gun, is leaky. As Paul Farhi of the Washington Post noted in 2012, what are we to make of the fact that some killings, like Columbine, seem to have inspired additional killings, yet others, like the assault on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, which left six dead, didn’t? “School shootings have waxed and waned for more than 100 years; shootings in postal facilities are all but unknown these days,” Farhi writes. It’s magical thinking to imagine that murderous violence will disappear if only the press can be persuaded to report it in small doses.
If the logic of squelching the Christchurch video is to prevent another attack—which, as you can tell, I find dubious—have the censors thought through the unintended consequences of their plan? Although the video has been driven underground, it can still be found and shared, and its forbidden status will only lend it additional cachet for certain audiences. Call it a bloody version of the Streisand effect.
The censor is never somebody who doesn’t want to see things. He wants very much to see salacious and disturbing stuff! He just thinks it’s his calling to prevent his neighbors from seeing the same material. When everybody is a potential publisher—something the millions of video downloads counted by Facebook and Google help affirm—today’s censor can only delay and distort. Information may not, despite what Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand once said, want to be free. But some free people want access to it—even if it’s abominably unpleasant to consume.
******
Sharp eyes will notice that I rejigged the excellent line, “We can’t be free because we have to be safe,” from the movie Page Eight in the third from the last paragraph. Send your favorite movie lines to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts have seen all of John Ford’s work. My Twitter feed fancies Budd Boetticher’s Westerns. My RSS feed wants to go to a “The Wild Bunch” re-enactor camp and play the role of either Lyle or Tector Gorch.
The Full moon 20 March 2019, falls at 0º Libra decan 1.The full moon is aligned with fixed star Markeb in the sails of the constellation of Argos the ship. The closest aspect to the full moon is a quincunx to Uranus. The tarot card is the 2 of swords and the healing crystal will be Mookaite.
The full moon brings out concepts that are ahead of their time or just too mystical for the average human to grasp. This is also an extremely right-brained decan for this full moon March 2019. For those touched by this full moon, the light of illumination will shine while the intuitive sense is very sharp. This is the vibration of the mystic, diplomat and peacemaker rather than a war-monger. There also seems to be a strong connection with the night sky and the ability to prophecy at this time. The Moon actually rules this decan also, so it is a very powerful moon for manifestation magic.
Full Moon March 2019 Astrology ~ Libra Decan 1
At this time we can feel an aura of peace and tranquillity within, even if the outer appearance looks spiky or dishevelled. Those touched by this full moon energy are able to neutralise a fiery environment just by being present. Moon Libra 1 carries a very potent balancing energy. But strangely if the situation is one of too much acquiescence, then they will actually shift the scales towards a more defensive stance. That is when events can, surprisingly, even flip over to the shadow. This is rare though and generally, Moon Libra 1 is soothing and harmonious. At the time the only fault is perhaps being too naive and ignorant of malice. We might need to remember not everyone is as fair-minded as we are. Austin Coppock and Ibn Ezra associate the scales more strongly to decan 1 than with the other two Libra decans. I also think the qualities of Maat are strong here too.
Full Moon March 2019 ~ Aspects
Moon quincunx Uranus breeds a range of crazed lunatics, unconventional rebels and quiet outsiders. There is a pathological need to shock and outrage. However Moon quincunx Uranus is often shy and uncomfortable with the notoriety the outrageous behaviour brings. This aspect can be branded as an attention seeker when all it is doing is being itself. The roots of this seemingly bonkers behaviour very often stem from upbringing. This is a time to examine our unconscious behaviour patterns inherited from childhood trauma.
Moon quincunx Uranus can describe a shock to the infant at a very vulnerable stage in their development, which can leave us feeling rather unhinged. At the same time, it is exciting, electric and quite chaotic. Both the Moon and Uranus are fluctuating and changeable and motions often change in a flash. Uranus stands for the truth and revelation, so it can happen that certain spokespeople at this full moon will risk exile by speaking truth that the populous find hard to accept. Moon quincunx Uranus may never feel truly at home in the present moment because they are so far ahead of time in their thinking.
FULL MOON MEANING
Full moons tend to make us purge and release things from our lives, so we need to make sure that we are in control of this and no one is forcing our hand! Sometimes we can let go of things that we regret later, due to heightened emotions and the full moon’s penchant for saying ‘F*** You!’ The bright light of the sun throws a spotlight on our subconscious and our shadow. This can feel uncomfortable as the Sun literally blasts out the demons who have nowhere to hide. Often the full moon is a time when we reap what we sowed at the new moon,.. for good or for ill.
The veils between the worlds are thinnest around a full Moon, so be very careful what you invite in. Instead, the full Moon is best used to purge things out, and banish entities/bad habits back to the underworld from whence they came. Make sure you close the door firmly afterwards! This is a good time for exorcism, but make sure you are completely grounded and fully in control of the process. If in doubt, lie low and protect yourself. A Lunar Eclipse is a turbocharged Full Moon where the blood-red moon makes a graphic statement of any symbolic ‘deaths’ or aborted projects that might occur at this time in our lives.
From a universal basic income to a 15-hour workweek, from a world without borders to a world without poverty – it’s time to return to utopian thinking.
Rutger Bregman takes us on a journey through history, beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he introduces ideas whose time has come. Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think you know. In the words of leading social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, it is “brilliant, truly enlightening, and eminently readable.”
This original Dutch bestseller sparked a national movement for basic income experiments that soon made international headlines.
CREATION—Admitting that the mere thought of hosting His guest next weekend filled Him with terrible anxiety, God, Our Lord and Heavenly Father, revealed Monday that He was “really dreading” an upcoming visit from His older brother, who had brought into being a far more successful cosmos. “I stress out whenever my brother visits because His universe doesn’t even have war or famine, so when I try to talk to Him about my problems, He just stares at me with this blank look upon His countenance. It’s like, come on, I’m trying my best over here,” said the Creator of All Things, adding that He tries, really tries, to be a compassionate and merciful God, but His brother’s visits always leave Him feeling deeply inadequate despite His vast accomplishments. “Last time He was here, He kept going on and on about how His flock never had to leave their Edenic garden and was making all these little passive-aggressive jabs, like, ‘Oh, wow, creating humans in your image, how original, I suppose I just enjoy taking risks, more of a challenge that way, don’t You know, but still it’s nice that You stick to the basics, simplicity is its own virtue, I suppose, at least in Your world.’ He actually said that! And you should have seen the way He was squinting at sub-Saharan Africa, just being terribly judgmental. It feels like no matter what I do or how I live my life, nothing I ever do will be good enough for Him. Man, I hope humanity never feels that way about Me.” At press time, God was attempting to create an elaborate excuse to cancel on His brother.
Students from various schools paid tribute to two of their peers who died in the Christchurch shooting by performing a haka, a ceremonial Maori dance to mourn the victims and honour the dead. They were joined by scores of fellow students to form a deafening chorus. At least 50 people were killed in the attack, which was the worst mass killing in New Zealand’s history.
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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has vowed to change the country’s gun laws following the deadly Christchurch massacre Friday that left 50 people dead and millions around the globe mourning following the massacre. The terrorist attack unfolded at two mosques during Friday prayer, when a lone gunman and avid white supremacist opened fire on worshipers while live-streaming the attack on Facebook. It was the deadliest shooting in the country’s modern history. The shooter reportedly used five guns to carry out the attack, including two semiautomatic assault weapons. We speak with Rebecca Peters, an international arms control advocate and member of the International Action Network on Small Arms. She led the campaign to reform Australia’s gun laws after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, when a gunman shot dead 35 people at a cafe. After the attack, Australia cracked down on gun violence, outlawing automatic and semiautomatic rifles. More than 640,000 weapons were turned in to authorities in a nationwide buyback.
iHealthTube.com
Published on May 15, 2013
http://www.ihealthtube.com
Journalist Liam Scheff discusses science and how we may think we understand physiology and how the human body works, but even today there are so many things we don’t understand. So what happens when we try and manipulate the body through injections or other means?
Truth Passes Through Three Stages:
First, It Is Ridiculed.
Second, It Is Violently Opposed.
Third, It Is Accepted As Self-Evident.
–Attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will. Wikipedia
It appears impossible for anyone seriously interested in our civilization to ignore this book. It is a ‘ must’ book for those in every branch of science . . . in addition, economists, politicians, statesmen, and businessmen cannot afford to overlook cybernetics and its tremendous, even terrifying implications. “It is a beautifully written book, lucid, direct, and despite its complexity, as readable by the layman as the trained scientist.”
— John B. Thurston, “The Saturday Review of Literature” Acclaimed one of the “seminal books . . . comparable in ultimate importance to . . . Galileo or Malthus or Rousseau or Mill,” “Cybernetics” was judged by twenty-seven historians, economists, educators, and philosophers to be one of those books published during the “past four decades”, which may have a substantial impact on public thought and action in the years ahead.” — Saturday Review
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