Theories of the conspiratorial kind

[mugz]

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[Scáthach]

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

Care to elaborate?
[/quote]

Just dropping a cryptic joke. As a saying, it's attributed to Hassan I Sabbah, founder of the cult of the Assassins. They were based in the middle East and known for infiltrating enemy organisations and waiting for the opportunity to kill their intended targets. Usually being killed themselves in the process, but they knew they could be assured their 72 virgins in paradise as martyrs.

The saying, in its original context meant the assassins were free to act in ways that were contrary to their faith or ethics, because their actions were for the greater good.

I first heard about Hassan I Sabbah in Illuminatus!, an excellent novel by Robert Anton Wilson, which is also where the reference to Banana nose Maldonado comes from. I'd highly recommend it, its setting is basically the soup of conspiracies popular in the 60s/70s with a healthy dose of humour, surrealism and drugs.

I've read other stuff on the Assassins by Idries Shah, a renowned author on mystical Islam/Sufism.
There is a dubious etymology of Hashishim (assassins) being the source of cannabis resin being called hashish, supposedly enjoying some cannabis as they carried out their holy murder.

There is Occultist conspiracy theories about The Knights Templar making contact with the Assassins and adopting some of their heresies, thus leading to the Templars downfall and persecution when returning to Europe.
(Phew, sorry to drone on but you did say elaborate )
Edited- Sabbah not Sabbath, damn autocorrect

[mugz]

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[Bigmac]

I got the impression from you and Scathach that you'd be well up on on the pagan and satanic cults, from the book thread, and I suppose it's all on my mind anyway given the oddness of the world currently.

Ah right, I get you now.

Yeah I've varying degrees of interest in those topics, it's been a while since I've read up on any of it though.

I found Fosforos to be intriguing, hard to wrap the head around, but worth a look for anyone interested in that end of things. Starting with "This is a difficult, irritating book".

Suppose the whole Satanic thing is a Conspiracy Theory in and of itself.

[Scáthach]

Postulate, for practical purposes, an infinite number of freely acting, pattern recognizing, theory generating agents; place all of them in an insurmountably complex, plastic and modifiable environment; this system will return an exponentially increasing number of theories over time, tending asymptotically towards an infinite number. There is no "they" who are independent of that system; there's only an "us", complicating things for ourselves by the very act of trying to simplify them; Ptolemaics furiously drawing epicycles all over existence, saving whatever appearances we are personally attached to.

This is a point of view that resonates strongly with me, and written more succinctly and eloquently than I could have. There are as many points of view in the world as there are people that can effectively experience and communicate them.

In this way, it's a type of neurological relativity that gives validity to a person's experiences. Whether that's a person's religious or ethical faith, being abducted by aliens or seeing the chupacabra. It doesn't mean those persons experiences have any validity or meaning to anyone else, but it also doesn't negate their reality to the percipient.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

it also doesn't negate their reality to the percipient.

...a reality which is itself an integral part of the autopoietic whole. Committing to any single world-view, having knowledge there is a multitude, is a strangely limiting path to pursue, and proselytizing any single one in a blanket fashion, again having knowledge there is a multitude, seems reckless but could also be due to being jaded.

In summary of what I said above there, the defining feature of conspiracy theory, as far as I can see, is the division of the whole into they/us, subjugater/subjugated, subject/object. A category error of the highest order, and it's at that order that exists an "umbrella" under which all such theories fall. The reality that I see is more dynamic, but not so much in a dialectical as in a duplicitous sense; there is definitely a trickery to it, but there's just as much trickery to the sense of thinking you've got it. The physiological sensation that accompanies eureka insights makes them the very height of treachery and duplicity, on a core existential level.

[Scáthach]

Bingpot!

[The Butcher]

It's all here ->

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

It's all here ->

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q

Second time that's been posted in two different threads in a couple of weeks 

It really is worth noting that ex-communist party members, whether they were native US citizens or Soviet born or whatever, were under an obligation to condemn the communist party: simply leaving the party wasn't considered proof enough to clear your name or reputation, rather public declarations of condemnation were required. This was the driving force behind the publication of The God That Failed (for the heavy metal reference), in which six intellectuals confessed their "Kronstadt" moment of realization at how utterly wrong they had been. It's a very interesting read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_that_Failed), one which I find particularly interesting because of Koestler's contribution; when he describes his "conversion" to communism in terms similar to a brain-washing, it is eerily similar to his description in The Sleepwalkers of what Kepler felt when he had his (ultimately entirely fictional) revelation of the solar system being arranged according to the Platonic forms.

[Bigmac]

I was reading somewhere a while ago that Yuri was fired, or intimidated, or something to that extent, by Justin Trudeau's father Pierre. This then led to reading the rather entertaining theory that Fidel Castro is Justin's illegitimate father. 

[mugz]

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[mugz]

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[astfgyl]

I was reading somewhere a while ago that Yuri was fired, or intimidated, or something to that extent, by Justin Trudeau's father Pierre. This then led to reading the rather entertaining theory that Fidel Castro is Justin's illegitimate father.

Incidentally it's worth noting that you don't get fired from intelligence stuff, you 'move' somewhere else, or they trigger some of the cognitive switches they've conditioned into you, and you become so outlandish you can't be taken seriously/you kill yourself.

There's a lot going on with david kelly and the skripals, and david shayler (just 3 that come to mind). So for Bezmenov to turn up elsewhere means he might have been a triple agent, or just a regular agent whose trip to the west was by design.

My first thought after watching Bezmenov's interview was that he was a regular agent rather than a defector. As it is, listening to his solution could only bring further chaos to proceedings. Or to put it another way his solution is actually the problem. Divide and conquer in the most classic sense.

[mugz]

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[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Now, it may be that this is all us against ourselves, but that only means we're sick in ourselves, rather having having sickness brought upon us.

"Sickness" in the sense you mean it is nothing more than an anthropocentric value judgement imposed on the world. What is "norm"? What is "pathological"? Is health an absence of sickness? Or is health a robust capacity to recover from sickness? If it's the latter, then the end does justify the means, since the end result is a more robust, resistant entity. But without accurate teleological revelation, which for argument's sake let's say doesn't exist, it is impossible to say at any point whether something designated as sickness is part of a steady and inexorable decline or rather a temporary sickness leading to a subsequent re-valuated strengthening. On a psychological level, these questions are hot topics with respect to "PC culture" - egos that are too easily bruised many worry will lead to a weakening of the human mind, etc. -, but they also have a much more fundamental evolutionary and physiological underpinning; in evolution, new functions of old machinery are often utterly feeble at first, but they only have to confer the smallest amount of evolutionary advantage in order to shift onto the adaptation ladder and then become stronger generation after generation. But in order to apprehend values at that level, you're talking about expanding your scope of things to scales of tens of thousands of years rather than a narrow envelope of a couple of hundred running backwards and a couple of decades running forward. At that grander scale, "sickness" is meaningless, since the present sickness of some life forms will be the future fertilizer of others. This has happened several times, on local and global scales, over the course of evolutionary history. In brief, this boils down to it ultimately being our choice whether we evaluate things as "sick" or not, a decision I'd recommend making based on which choice will confer the greatest vigor/capacity for assimilation of experience to the individual in the present. Choosing to see things as "sick" doesn't seem to do one much good, and since we're all just a short straw and a blink of the eye away from eternal self-loss...

So while autopoiesis is a fun word, it only talks about cybernetics, and by definition cybernetics can't be unitary, so universalism/solipsism both fall down, and autopoiesis can't be a thing.

I can think of several conceptual systems in which cybernetics either is or would be unitary, but in any case the premise is false: autopoiesis doesn't "only talk about cybernetics." But in any case, I was using it in its most general sense; we call our own reality into being and while away our existence propping that up. Or, to go back to the opposition inherent to conspiracy theory; if there is a "they", then every "we" gets the "they" it deserves.