Because there's no difference at all between astrology and a cult. Do you really not see the difference or are you just pretending? I'll explain it if you honestly need me to.
Other things I'm too afraid to believe in: crop circles, sasquatch, the tooth fairy, and a flat Earth.
I don't know about all that other stuff, but you should take a long and hard look at Crop Circles before you make any more silly comments. I'm guessing you haven't explored the subject at all, because like astrology, anybody who takes the time to actually give it an honest look will not be so glib.
--Or should that be, "Art is all a bunch of metaphors for stuff that really happens."
In the fantasy adventure stories, Trolls, Orcs and other various hybrids of stupid, warty thug are always the ones employed by the Dark Lord/Evil Witch for the purpose of intimidating and shaking down the public.
The sad part is that in this reality, we will see every other metaphor out there except for golden-haired good guys with shining swords. All we have is each other. Don't lose site of that and NEVER report on your neighbor. --Tell everybody on your street that the government approached you and leaned on you to try to make you become an informer.
Argh! That was just too close to the kind of internal movie which plays in my head whenever I think through possible scenarios wherein I must deal with the trolls in uniform who do the work of the dark lord.
Other movies now playing. . .
"What happens to Fantastic Lad when the Government Goon Squad goes door to door forcibly administering flu shots." "What happens to Fantastic Lad when the economy finally tanks and it's time to pay rent and buy food." "What happens to Fantastic Lad when every person on the block is hosting a WiFi hotspot and there is no escaping the EM soup."
Usually I leave the theater before I get to the part with barbed wire.
It's actually quite easy to go through life without ever stepping outside one's safety margins.
The simple fact that so many here consider astrology to be a form of religion is evidence of just how little informed people are on the subject.
Don't look at newspaper horoscopes. They really are nonsense.
If you want to know whether there is anything to it or not, there are a number of excellent sources worth examining, but it takes a little effort. Most will never, ever bother to look, because they believe, right down to the core of their beings, that they already know the truth of the matter. --And they 'know' this without ever having properly tested their beliefs. I didn't want to be yet another of the countless hypocritical sceptics out there, and so I gave it some effort. I discovered that I'd been blind and ignorant for many years. This site" runs a very detailed, free astrology page. --That's worth exploring and taking the ten or fifteen minutes to track for a few months. Anybody who says they don't have time for that is just making excuses.
Another is a book by Theodora Lau. It's called, "The Handbook of Chinese Astrology". I've seen more than one hard-core sceptic stop to seriously re-think things with that one. It's VERY specific. Dig around for that at your local book store or do the Amazon thing.
The instant people decide to learn for themselves the truth of an issue, they have at their fingertips every resource they could ever need to make their search both fast and rewarding, so ignorance in this case is very much a choice.
Astrology in particular is very powerful, because it's very hard to ignore or discount the experiential evidence once you find a decent source or two. I think in a large part, the reason there is so much resistance is that once one accepts astrology as something more than a fiction, one is required to question every other aspect of one's life which was once regarded as safe and secure. That's scary and life-changing, and hobbits are easily unsettled by the prospect of adventures.
Yeah, I had one which was very similar. Same company, anyway.
I don't know what the final problem was with mine. Maybe I was just not patient enough in wearing it in. All told, it seemed like a good product, especially after opening it up, I was impressed with the simplicity of the design. I just wish mine didn't have that weird plastic smell/taste problem. How long did you use yours before the water output seemed normal?
I do remember a long time back hunting down and ordering a CD from a little indy garage band. --You've all seen similar projects; the kind where the CD cover was done by a friend of the band who earned their respect by drawing flaming skulls real good on the covers of his high school notebooks.
Why did I order this CD from the other side of the U.S.? --Well, because the band had somehow gotten a contract with Lucasarts, and supplied the theme and background music for Full Throttle.
Bad-ass biker music with consumer-grade top-40 appeal and studio time on the Lucasarts budget. (Side note; It was 1994, and the game was awesome. I wish Lucasarts still made cool stuff like that.)
Anyway. . . The band was called, "The Gone Jackals", and so far as I know, they never went anywhere, and it wouldn't surprise me if the CD they mailed to me was one of less than a hundred mail order sales they ever made.
And that was before Napster.
Some of the musicians I've met who make a living at their art without big label contracts are those who are constantly on the road performing at clubs. It's a tough life in many ways, but it's also very rewarding in other ways, plus you can make a living at it if you don't mind constant travel. The death of the big labels doesn't mean that the troubadour and bard are lost. I don't think they ever were.
Many people, I've noticed, seem to ignore the whole enforced fluoridation issue by telling silly jokes in the nudge, point and giggle method of spin control tried and tested in junior high schools everywhere. It would be easy to comment on the sort of folks who are controlled in this manner, but there's a fish in a barrel quality to that which feels sort of mean.
I bought a water distillation unit once and played around with it. . .
The machine had two containers, one 3 liter boiler you fill with tap water, and an empty reservoir for the distillate. It took about forty minutes to send all the water through. The part that blew me away was that after running the machine three times in a row, the boiler collected at the bottom about a half centimeter of dark, maple syrup colored goo which gave off a strong smell which caused my gag reflex kick in and I had to deliberately try to not vomit. It was unbelievable. --After that, every time I took a shower, I was aware of that terrible smell, which before I'd not really paid attention to since it was much less intense and masked by soap smells and such.
--An experiment I wish in retrospect that I'd tried was to see how much sludge was collected from water which had gone through a Britta filter first. --I didn't try it, but I somehow doubt that Britta filters make that much difference; the amount of viscous sludge which was a component of only 9 liters of water should, one would think, noticeably collect in a filter cartridge, and yet even after putting hundreds of liters of water through a cartridge over its several-month life cycle, used cartridges look almost identical to new ones. Where do all those liters of dark brown goo end up if not in your cup? Whatever the case, after that first distiller experience, I will not drink city tap water EVER again.
However. . , the distiller I bought had some of its own problems. It was made out of the typical metal and plastic parts you find in consumer goods, and the whole thing gave off a strong vinal-chloride smell, made much worse by the fact that the machine employed heating elements. The output water stunk of plastic product, and it burned the skin inside my mouth when I drank it. That's pretty messed up for a distiller! --I figured it just needed to be run a bunch of times, but after running the thing continuously for a day or so, the smell just wasn't going away. So I cracked it open to see what the offending parts might be.
There was lots of plastic and rubber tubing, which I thought might be the culprits. So I went out to a laboratory supply store and bought a bunch of glass tubes. These I brought home and shaped them over our gas stove and used the resulting parts to replace all the plastic and rubber tubes in the distiller. I was feeling very clever about all of this, but no dice! That killer plastic smell was still there. At this point, I considered just building my own still out of glass parts, seeing as the lab supply shop had everything you needed, but the convenience factor looked like it would quickly go down if I followed that route, (though it's still quite doable; anybody with the right supplies and a bit of engineering knowhow could build a very workable water distiller rig if they wanted to).
I just opted to start buying jugs of steam distilled water from my local grocery store. At $4.50 per 18 liters, the cost was negligible. The water had no taste at all, which is as it should be. --Though, I've been informed that it's a very simple matter to deliberately add toxins to commercial water supplies like bottled water, that it can and does happen. The military has a long history of testing bio-agents on unsuspecting humans both in and out of the military.
Between 1949 and 1969, for example, the Army sprayed bacterial tracers or simulants on unsuspecting populations in hundreds of biological warfare tests. According to the GAO: "Some of the tests involved spraying large areas, such as the cities of St. Louis and San Francisco, and others involved spraying more focused areas, such as the New York City subway system and Washington National Airport." No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
I eventually moved out of the city and was able to get water from a local spring. That water tests as very clean. These days, I find the taste of tap water utterly revolting.
There was a time before computers that companies employed hundreds of women punching data into manual adding machines in warehouse-like accounting departments.
Then a host of clever people decided that technology should be explored and refined, and the result was a new type of electronic universal adding machine which eventually caused all of those jobs to dissolve. --It also eventually resulted in the internet and the creation of your current job.
So we could either live in a world afraid of change which has no computers at all and a lot of 'safe' wage-slaves doing millions of hours of monkey work, or we could live in a world where exploration and refinement drive the human experience. . .
No the point is that they're ALREADY doubtlessly tracking the citizens... it's more a question of red pill/blue pill, do you want to hold the knowledge in your hand, or do you want to pretend it doesn't exist.
I think there might also be a commonly used third pill, "Yeah maybe, but so what?". --I think it might be green. (As in, the grass on either side of the fence being sat on.)
It's been a few days and I finally had the energy to spare to look at your last response. . .
Two things:
Despite all the robberies, violent crimes, rapes etc going on in the US, there is a reason why millions of immigrants from third world countries are desperately clamoring to get into the US for a better life. Because their situation in their home countries is much much worse.
And despite everything I've said, you still refuse to see this as anything but a war of comparisons. --I was getting ready to suspect brain damage until I finally figured out what the point is you've been stuck on all this time; correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm now thinking that you see the West as some sort of golden hope, the mythological benchmark standard by which all problems in society may be measured. Robert Conquest? For goodness sake, it should have been clear from the outset. You've turned Western socio-economic theory into a personal religion by which you hope to have your soul saved from whatever problems you see filling your world. --Which means there was never any risk of an actual discussion breaking out here; A zealot can only frame discussion in terms of defense of the Holy Word, which by definition is unassailable, and therefore closed to any editing or review. --All that can be expected are re-hashes of the same old hymn.
Second. . .
No. I think that, consciously or not, you are trying to foster liberal (in the American sense) self-hatred and guilt to try to deflect attention from the real problems through inapposite analogies.
It's almost certainly useless at this late juncture to point out that the only reason my analogies seem inapposite to you is that I didn't actually make any analogies, nor did I intend to. The math certainly isn't going to add up if you insist on using the incorrect decoder ring.
And Liberal guilt? For what? Slavery, population manipulation and general war mongering? --Well, I certainly don't feel guilty for any of this since all my choices are intended to lead away from those ends, not towards. Frustration? Yes. Jaded sadness with the human condition? Yes. But Guilt? Nope.
Just because a recalcitrant population is hostile to positive change does not mean it isn't the obligation of well-meaning people to implement the change. If we all did as you said and let backward people practice savage cultural mores then the Scandinavians and Indians would still be burning widows and South Korea would still be oppressing the Baekjeong underclasses. If I goto Pakistan today, I will be strung upside down and flogged with a stick by rampaging hordes of fanatics for being an infidel. In the US, I may be robbed once in a while (and even that is statistically unlikely anywhere except very heavily populated cities), but guess which country I'm rooting for here? This is not about disrespecting people. This is about bringing about political and social reform in countries that need them desperately, even if they don't know it. There are fundamental principles of modernity, like basic human rights, religious freedom for all and social reform to promote modernity and equality that transcend national boundaries. Countries that do not respect them should be made to do so.
Learning how to respect Free Will is one of the fundamental lessons in this reality, and it takes many runs at the wall to get over it. You'll figure it out eventually, but it sounds to me like you're going to have to go through a lot of painful lessons first. I wish you the best of luck with that.
Is it just me, or did PKD's editor need an editor?
Anyway. . .
The gist of the story was this:
Invention of Teleporter Tech makes redundant Earth's commercial inter-system space liners. The man who owns the biggest space liner company is now broke, and decides to make a thirty-year trip to the nearest inhabitable colony planet rather than teleport there in fifteen minutes. It's a pride thing. --Also, he's suspicious, since the teleporters apparently only work in one direction and the happy happy video messages coming back from the colony are fakes. . .
So a basic sci-fi plot outline, right? Ha! This is PKD, so that was just the first third of the book. After that some LSD gets involved, and it turns out that the teleporter device splits reality into 11 distinct variations of nightmare and you never know which you happen to be in after you've traveled through. --And there's also this time-travel weapon which inserts events into your past to manipulate your present. And did I mention the LSD? He actually described an acid trip in lurid detail for five solid pages. (Cuz when you're writing in the sixties, the soldiers of the future use weaponized LSD rounds in their space rifles. That and PKD's editor was probably high at the time.)
Oi. I just wanted some light reading. . . What the heck was I thinking?
Galileo was not a perfect person; none of us are. But this weird apologia for repressive, authoritarian belief systems is painful to observe in a society which ought to know better by now.
--Because the other huge point to remember, is that the manner in which the planets happened to behave had no direct bearing on anybody's day to day life at that time. It was purely an exercise of the mind and an expression of personal opinion. Whether or not Galileo claimed his ideas were true was his prerogative. --The problem was that the religious regime of the day was not willing to allow people to exercise their minds and opinions according to personal free will. I've not yet decided if the way people blame the victim is embarrassing or very sad. Stockholm syndrome writ large.
-Invented by Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938. Was unable to sell the idea to the big game companies of the day, including Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley.
-Sold manufacturing rights to entrepreneur, James Brunot in 1948 for royalties on each unit sold.
-The game hit big, but Brunot was unable to keep up with demand. In 1952, sold manufacturing rights to Selchow and Righter (another of the game companies which had originally rejected the idea.)
-In 1986, they sold the rights to Coleco, who then went bankrupt and were bought out by Hasbro
So. . . 80 years and 5 different owners. Seems to me the various trademark laws have done their job in rewarding the original creator and those who helped launch the game into public awareness. Law of the land-wise, I really don't know nor care, but morally it seems to me that Hasbro is saying they're the only company allowed to create and sell the game simply because they happened to be dopey enough buy a stale patent. In my world, the makers of the digital version would be called entrepreneurs, not pirates.
The DSL provider for my area is finally solid enough to handle Youtube videos reliably. I finally felt like I was part of this internet community for the first time. But now if everybody starts uploading bigger files to the web, I can see myself having to go back to living in the "Downloading, Please Wait" ghetto.
Video quality means very little to me. I mean, how high-resolution does anybody really need John Stewart's head?
The "holographic insert" theory sounds very much like you were influenced by Scientology.
Scientology is a very dark thing; another attempt to bring many people under the control of a small number of leaders. I see them as having little difference from older religions other than that their language and mythos are more up to date with regard to popular culture. --But that their myths are just as massively skewed, corrupted and cultish. There's a certain "flavor" or "smell" which cult language all seems to have, and I include the major religions among them of course. I will try to offer some examples. ..
1. Many cults use flowery language in their stories, with high-sounding names and labels for the various aspects of their mythos, as well as elaborate ceremonies and rituals, all used to instill a sense of romance and mysticism in their audiences. This serves to make the flock feel as though their church is linked to something apart from their everyday lives, steeped in a kind of magical realism which seems beautiful, yet out of reach, --but to which the good practitioner might possibly be granted access if they promise to abandon themselves to the leadership of the clerics. Christians and Muslims and many New Age cults use Flowery Language to seduce.
2. Layers of secrecy. Some cults do not have an open-book policy, so to speak. They exact loyalty and servitude from their members by promising the revealing of special truths only after select members have proven themselves worthy. Secrecy is always a dead giveaway that foul play is at work, as it always represents an attempt by a small cadre of individuals to control the knowledge and actions of others for personal gain. Scientology offers a clear example of the use of layered secrecy to control and tax their members.
3. Tiered command hierarchies. There are two kinds of organizational system; the first is the one we see all around us, where there are leaders at the top, with lieutenants and chiefs, extending downward in a power pyramid, which serves to channel energy and resources up to the top. The second kind of organizational system is cell-based; where energy and command is not sent up and down, but rather outward to any within the vicinity which needs energy or instructions by any which has energy or information to offer. The Cell Based organizational structure is extremely powerful, far more so than the pyramidal system, and this is why it is seen predominantly in nature; It would be impossible for a large mamal to be commanded by a single cell in the center of the brain which was charge of all other cells in the entire organism. Such cell-based systems, however, are hotly criticized by nearly everybody, as they are anathema to the power-hungry individuals who succeed in pyramidal power systems. They use huge propaganda efforts to control people's thoughts in this regard. --Russian Communism is an example of a clearly pyramidal structure which was falsely labeled cell-based system and thusly used to villainize. Open-source software projects and farming co-ops are more akin to true cell-based organizations, and often come under similar attack from those who are fearful of losing power. --But this is all beside the point; the fact of the matter is that with few exceptions, organized religion uses top-down systems or organization, a clear giveaway as to its true nature; i.e., Selfish.
4. Social control of members; Catholics like overpopulation as it once ensured hunger and limited resources for the masses. (Hungry and struggling people are less at risk from 'corrupting' themselves by growing strong and independent.) Mind-control practices; New Age groups and indeed want to make sure that they love-bomb their followers. Indeed, the Catholic system likes to schedule endless regular meetings using long and literally mind-numbingly dull rituals which wear down resistance in the followers and, to borrow from Joseph Goebbelism, repeat the lie often enough to make it true. They do not like to let their follower
Slashdot Mirror
Now we wait and watch. . .
-FL
-FL
Because there's no difference at all between astrology and a cult. Do you really not see the difference or are you just pretending? I'll explain it if you honestly need me to.
Other things I'm too afraid to believe in: crop circles, sasquatch, the tooth fairy, and a flat Earth.
I don't know about all that other stuff, but you should take a long and hard look at Crop Circles before you make any more silly comments. I'm guessing you haven't explored the subject at all, because like astrology, anybody who takes the time to actually give it an honest look will not be so glib.
-FL
In the fantasy adventure stories, Trolls, Orcs and other various hybrids of stupid, warty thug are always the ones employed by the Dark Lord/Evil Witch for the purpose of intimidating and shaking down the public.
The sad part is that in this reality, we will see every other metaphor out there except for golden-haired good guys with shining swords. All we have is each other. Don't lose site of that and NEVER report on your neighbor. --Tell everybody on your street that the government approached you and leaned on you to try to make you become an informer.
-FL
Other movies now playing. . .
"What happens to Fantastic Lad when the Government Goon Squad goes door to door forcibly administering flu shots."
"What happens to Fantastic Lad when the economy finally tanks and it's time to pay rent and buy food."
"What happens to Fantastic Lad when every person on the block is hosting a WiFi hotspot and there is no escaping the EM soup."
Usually I leave the theater before I get to the part with barbed wire.
-FL
The simple fact that so many here consider astrology to be a form of religion is evidence of just how little informed people are on the subject.
Don't look at newspaper horoscopes. They really are nonsense.
If you want to know whether there is anything to it or not, there are a number of excellent sources worth examining, but it takes a little effort. Most will never, ever bother to look, because they believe, right down to the core of their beings, that they already know the truth of the matter. --And they 'know' this without ever having properly tested their beliefs. I didn't want to be yet another of the countless hypocritical sceptics out there, and so I gave it some effort. I discovered that I'd been blind and ignorant for many years. This site" runs a very detailed, free astrology page. --That's worth exploring and taking the ten or fifteen minutes to track for a few months. Anybody who says they don't have time for that is just making excuses.
Another is a book by Theodora Lau. It's called, "The Handbook of Chinese Astrology". I've seen more than one hard-core sceptic stop to seriously re-think things with that one. It's VERY specific. Dig around for that at your local book store or do the Amazon thing.
-FL
The instant people decide to learn for themselves the truth of an issue, they have at their fingertips every resource they could ever need to make their search both fast and rewarding, so ignorance in this case is very much a choice.
Astrology in particular is very powerful, because it's very hard to ignore or discount the experiential evidence once you find a decent source or two. I think in a large part, the reason there is so much resistance is that once one accepts astrology as something more than a fiction, one is required to question every other aspect of one's life which was once regarded as safe and secure. That's scary and life-changing, and hobbits are easily unsettled by the prospect of adventures.
-FL
I don't know what the final problem was with mine. Maybe I was just not patient enough in wearing it in. All told, it seemed like a good product, especially after opening it up, I was impressed with the simplicity of the design. I just wish mine didn't have that weird plastic smell/taste problem. How long did you use yours before the water output seemed normal?
-FL
Why did I order this CD from the other side of the U.S.? --Well, because the band had somehow gotten a contract with Lucasarts, and supplied the theme and background music for Full Throttle.
Bad-ass biker music with consumer-grade top-40 appeal and studio time on the Lucasarts budget. (Side note; It was 1994, and the game was awesome. I wish Lucasarts still made cool stuff like that.)
Anyway. . . The band was called, "The Gone Jackals", and so far as I know, they never went anywhere, and it wouldn't surprise me if the CD they mailed to me was one of less than a hundred mail order sales they ever made.
And that was before Napster.
Some of the musicians I've met who make a living at their art without big label contracts are those who are constantly on the road performing at clubs. It's a tough life in many ways, but it's also very rewarding in other ways, plus you can make a living at it if you don't mind constant travel. The death of the big labels doesn't mean that the troubadour and bard are lost. I don't think they ever were.
-FL
Found it here
Many people, I've noticed, seem to ignore the whole enforced fluoridation issue by telling silly jokes in the nudge, point and giggle method of spin control tried and tested in junior high schools everywhere. It would be easy to comment on the sort of folks who are controlled in this manner, but there's a fish in a barrel quality to that which feels sort of mean.
-FL
The machine had two containers, one 3 liter boiler you fill with tap water, and an empty reservoir for the distillate. It took about forty minutes to send all the water through. The part that blew me away was that after running the machine three times in a row, the boiler collected at the bottom about a half centimeter of dark, maple syrup colored goo which gave off a strong smell which caused my gag reflex kick in and I had to deliberately try to not vomit. It was unbelievable. --After that, every time I took a shower, I was aware of that terrible smell, which before I'd not really paid attention to since it was much less intense and masked by soap smells and such.
--An experiment I wish in retrospect that I'd tried was to see how much sludge was collected from water which had gone through a Britta filter first. --I didn't try it, but I somehow doubt that Britta filters make that much difference; the amount of viscous sludge which was a component of only 9 liters of water should, one would think, noticeably collect in a filter cartridge, and yet even after putting hundreds of liters of water through a cartridge over its several-month life cycle, used cartridges look almost identical to new ones. Where do all those liters of dark brown goo end up if not in your cup? Whatever the case, after that first distiller experience, I will not drink city tap water EVER again.
However. . , the distiller I bought had some of its own problems. It was made out of the typical metal and plastic parts you find in consumer goods, and the whole thing gave off a strong vinal-chloride smell, made much worse by the fact that the machine employed heating elements. The output water stunk of plastic product, and it burned the skin inside my mouth when I drank it. That's pretty messed up for a distiller! --I figured it just needed to be run a bunch of times, but after running the thing continuously for a day or so, the smell just wasn't going away. So I cracked it open to see what the offending parts might be.
There was lots of plastic and rubber tubing, which I thought might be the culprits. So I went out to a laboratory supply store and bought a bunch of glass tubes. These I brought home and shaped them over our gas stove and used the resulting parts to replace all the plastic and rubber tubes in the distiller. I was feeling very clever about all of this, but no dice! That killer plastic smell was still there. At this point, I considered just building my own still out of glass parts, seeing as the lab supply shop had everything you needed, but the convenience factor looked like it would quickly go down if I followed that route, (though it's still quite doable; anybody with the right supplies and a bit of engineering knowhow could build a very workable water distiller rig if they wanted to).
I just opted to start buying jugs of steam distilled water from my local grocery store. At $4.50 per 18 liters, the cost was negligible. The water had no taste at all, which is as it should be. --Though, I've been informed that it's a very simple matter to deliberately add toxins to commercial water supplies like bottled water, that it can and does happen. The military has a long history of testing bio-agents on unsuspecting humans both in and out of the military.
I eventually moved out of the city and was able to get water from a local spring. That water tests as very clean. These days, I find the taste of tap water utterly revolting.
-FL
There was a time before computers that companies employed hundreds of women punching data into manual adding machines in warehouse-like accounting departments.
Then a host of clever people decided that technology should be explored and refined, and the result was a new type of electronic universal adding machine which eventually caused all of those jobs to dissolve. --It also eventually resulted in the internet and the creation of your current job.
So we could either live in a world afraid of change which has no computers at all and a lot of 'safe' wage-slaves doing millions of hours of monkey work, or we could live in a world where exploration and refinement drive the human experience. . .
-FL
That sounds like a dangerous proposition. Kudos to him, though, if he can get anywhere real with it.
-FL
I think there might also be a commonly used third pill, "Yeah maybe, but so what?". --I think it might be green. (As in, the grass on either side of the fence being sat on.)
-FL
A) Prudent and Good for a government to track every citizen individually.
B) Prudent and Good to be rude and abusive in the manner in which they express their support of such a system.
(Does anybody else note the disturbing irony in this?)
In any case, I have two things to say in response. . .
1) Such a system would indeed be Prudent and Good if governments could be trusted.
2) NO government can be trusted.
That is all.
-FL
Google has a few chapters of Richard's book about military tunnel-digging posted.
-FL
Two things:
Despite all the robberies, violent crimes, rapes etc going on in the US, there is a reason why millions of immigrants from third world countries are desperately clamoring to get into the US for a better life. Because their situation in their home countries is much much worse.
And despite everything I've said, you still refuse to see this as anything but a war of comparisons. --I was getting ready to suspect brain damage until I finally figured out what the point is you've been stuck on all this time; correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm now thinking that you see the West as some sort of golden hope, the mythological benchmark standard by which all problems in society may be measured. Robert Conquest? For goodness sake, it should have been clear from the outset. You've turned Western socio-economic theory into a personal religion by which you hope to have your soul saved from whatever problems you see filling your world. --Which means there was never any risk of an actual discussion breaking out here; A zealot can only frame discussion in terms of defense of the Holy Word, which by definition is unassailable, and therefore closed to any editing or review. --All that can be expected are re-hashes of the same old hymn.
Second. . .
No. I think that, consciously or not, you are trying to foster liberal (in the American sense) self-hatred and guilt to try to deflect attention from the real problems through inapposite analogies.
It's almost certainly useless at this late juncture to point out that the only reason my analogies seem inapposite to you is that I didn't actually make any analogies, nor did I intend to. The math certainly isn't going to add up if you insist on using the incorrect decoder ring.
And Liberal guilt? For what? Slavery, population manipulation and general war mongering? --Well, I certainly don't feel guilty for any of this since all my choices are intended to lead away from those ends, not towards. Frustration? Yes. Jaded sadness with the human condition? Yes. But Guilt? Nope.
Just because a recalcitrant population is hostile to positive change does not mean it isn't the obligation of well-meaning people to implement the change. If we all did as you said and let backward people practice savage cultural mores then the Scandinavians and Indians would still be burning widows and South Korea would still be oppressing the Baekjeong underclasses. If I goto Pakistan today, I will be strung upside down and flogged with a stick by rampaging hordes of fanatics for being an infidel. In the US, I may be robbed once in a while (and even that is statistically unlikely anywhere except very heavily populated cities), but guess which country I'm rooting for here? This is not about disrespecting people. This is about bringing about political and social reform in countries that need them desperately, even if they don't know it. There are fundamental principles of modernity, like basic human rights, religious freedom for all and social reform to promote modernity and equality that transcend national boundaries. Countries that do not respect them should be made to do so.
Learning how to respect Free Will is one of the fundamental lessons in this reality, and it takes many runs at the wall to get over it. You'll figure it out eventually, but it sounds to me like you're going to have to go through a lot of painful lessons first. I wish you the best of luck with that.
Okay. I'm done spending energy on you. Bye now.
-FL
Anyway. . .
The gist of the story was this:
Invention of Teleporter Tech makes redundant Earth's commercial inter-system space liners. The man who owns the biggest space liner company is now broke, and decides to make a thirty-year trip to the nearest inhabitable colony planet rather than teleport there in fifteen minutes. It's a pride thing. --Also, he's suspicious, since the teleporters apparently only work in one direction and the happy happy video messages coming back from the colony are fakes. . .
So a basic sci-fi plot outline, right? Ha! This is PKD, so that was just the first third of the book. After that some LSD gets involved, and it turns out that the teleporter device splits reality into 11 distinct variations of nightmare and you never know which you happen to be in after you've traveled through. --And there's also this time-travel weapon which inserts events into your past to manipulate your present. And did I mention the LSD? He actually described an acid trip in lurid detail for five solid pages. (Cuz when you're writing in the sixties, the soldiers of the future use weaponized LSD rounds in their space rifles. That and PKD's editor was probably high at the time.)
Oi. I just wanted some light reading. . . What the heck was I thinking?
-FL
Galileo was not a perfect person; none of us are. But this weird apologia for repressive, authoritarian belief systems is painful to observe in a society which ought to know better by now.
--Because the other huge point to remember, is that the manner in which the planets happened to behave had no direct bearing on anybody's day to day life at that time. It was purely an exercise of the mind and an expression of personal opinion. Whether or not Galileo claimed his ideas were true was his prerogative. --The problem was that the religious regime of the day was not willing to allow people to exercise their minds and opinions according to personal free will. I've not yet decided if the way people blame the victim is embarrassing or very sad. Stockholm syndrome writ large.
-FL
Early reports need to be conservative. You never know if one of those odd items picked up won't turn out to have resuscitative properties.
In any case, I would like to thank the man for having shaped a piece of our culture in a positive way. Doesn't happen every day. Cheers, Gary!
-FL
-Invented by Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938. Was unable to sell the idea to the big game companies of the day, including Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley.
-Sold manufacturing rights to entrepreneur, James Brunot in 1948 for royalties on each unit sold.
-The game hit big, but Brunot was unable to keep up with demand. In 1952, sold manufacturing rights to Selchow and Righter (another of the game companies which had originally rejected the idea.)
-In 1986, they sold the rights to Coleco, who then went bankrupt and were bought out by Hasbro
So. . . 80 years and 5 different owners. Seems to me the various trademark laws have done their job in rewarding the original creator and those who helped launch the game into public awareness. Law of the land-wise, I really don't know nor care, but morally it seems to me that Hasbro is saying they're the only company allowed to create and sell the game simply because they happened to be dopey enough buy a stale patent. In my world, the makers of the digital version would be called entrepreneurs, not pirates.
-FL
Video quality means very little to me. I mean, how high-resolution does anybody really need John Stewart's head?
-FL
-FL
-FL
The "holographic insert" theory sounds very much like you were influenced by Scientology.
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Scientology is a very dark thing; another attempt to bring many people under the control of a small number of leaders. I see them as having little difference from older religions other than that their language and mythos are more up to date with regard to popular culture. --But that their myths are just as massively skewed, corrupted and cultish. There's a certain "flavor" or "smell" which cult language all seems to have, and I include the major religions among them of course. I will try to offer some examples. .
1. Many cults use flowery language in their stories, with high-sounding names and labels for the various aspects of their mythos, as well as elaborate ceremonies and rituals, all used to instill a sense of romance and mysticism in their audiences. This serves to make the flock feel as though their church is linked to something apart from their everyday lives, steeped in a kind of magical realism which seems beautiful, yet out of reach, --but to which the good practitioner might possibly be granted access if they promise to abandon themselves to the leadership of the clerics. Christians and Muslims and many New Age cults use Flowery Language to seduce.
2. Layers of secrecy. Some cults do not have an open-book policy, so to speak. They exact loyalty and servitude from their members by promising the revealing of special truths only after select members have proven themselves worthy. Secrecy is always a dead giveaway that foul play is at work, as it always represents an attempt by a small cadre of individuals to control the knowledge and actions of others for personal gain. Scientology offers a clear example of the use of layered secrecy to control and tax their members.
3. Tiered command hierarchies. There are two kinds of organizational system; the first is the one we see all around us, where there are leaders at the top, with lieutenants and chiefs, extending downward in a power pyramid, which serves to channel energy and resources up to the top. The second kind of organizational system is cell-based; where energy and command is not sent up and down, but rather outward to any within the vicinity which needs energy or instructions by any which has energy or information to offer. The Cell Based organizational structure is extremely powerful, far more so than the pyramidal system, and this is why it is seen predominantly in nature; It would be impossible for a large mamal to be commanded by a single cell in the center of the brain which was charge of all other cells in the entire organism. Such cell-based systems, however, are hotly criticized by nearly everybody, as they are anathema to the power-hungry individuals who succeed in pyramidal power systems. They use huge propaganda efforts to control people's thoughts in this regard. --Russian Communism is an example of a clearly pyramidal structure which was falsely labeled cell-based system and thusly used to villainize. Open-source software projects and farming co-ops are more akin to true cell-based organizations, and often come under similar attack from those who are fearful of losing power. --But this is all beside the point; the fact of the matter is that with few exceptions, organized religion uses top-down systems or organization, a clear giveaway as to its true nature; i.e., Selfish.
4. Social control of members; Catholics like overpopulation as it once ensured hunger and limited resources for the masses. (Hungry and struggling people are less at risk from 'corrupting' themselves by growing strong and independent.) Mind-control practices; New Age groups and indeed want to make sure that they love-bomb their followers. Indeed, the Catholic system likes to schedule endless regular meetings using long and literally mind-numbingly dull rituals which wear down resistance in the followers and, to borrow from Joseph Goebbelism, repeat the lie often enough to make it true. They do not like to let their follower