Saturday, July 25, 2009

Mind Snatchers (moved)

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers
moved from Knatz.com to IonaArc to pKnatz blog.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Stuck

Stop the World I Want To Get Off was such a great title, it resonated with many of us. It has too many words for a good title by normal standards, and it requires much too much thought on the part of the public. Still, only retards will fail to grasp the impossibility of its demand. The phrase confuses "planet earth" and "world": the physical universe (Pleroma) is being confused with the social universe (Creatura / Sentiens (Pathologica)). Humans have no way at present (thank goodness) to "stop" the earth's spin or to much alter its ellipse around our star: and the mega-culture is hell bent on maintaining (and increasing) its momentum: no individual has yet been able to stop "Madison Avenue," or "America," or nationalism, or imperialism ... or faith-in-fuzzy-mindedness ... And if we could "stop the world," how would we "get off"? What would we get off onto? Is the solar system a trolley stop? Could we hop to the moon? to Mars? To a Macdonald's Asteroid? To a Hyatt Asteroid? To Planet PangoPango?

No. But the title is clear just the same: we're steeped in our culture, we're bound to our planet, but it's too much, it's killing us, it's driving us crazy ... there are far too many absurdities in our culture.

Every week at my Senior Center that specific manifestation of my culture demands that I stand with the group and Pledge Allegiance to the Flag. I have to pretend I'm murmuring the lies with the group: "one nation, under God, with liberty, and justice ..." How is the society that censors and imprisons God's messengers "under God"? The United States was founded by atheists; where did this lie come from? What liberty? We are all forced to go to school ... What justice? being tortured into pleading guilty so I'm on record as a confessed felon? And as I stand there, doing what I must do in order not to be returned to prison, so I can try again to offer my testimonies, my analyses over the internet, having been deprived from doing so to my society, to my family, to the college classes and reading public the culture has divorced me from ...

Then we sing God Bless America: and as its familiar lyrics round to a close my bully enemies stand close behind me and stage whisper to the back of my skull, "America: Love It, Or Leave It!"

Further, a friend I'm fond of dancing with, especially line-dances, interrupted a point I was trying to make to her by saying, "I know one thing: if anybody doesn't like it they can leave." Is Joyce (or are the bullies) in touch with my parole board? Can their innocence overrule the fed in preventing me from so much as leaving this specific federal district? I can't cross from Highlands County into Hardee County let along move to Brazil.

But why should I leave the territory of my birth? How does "my" country no longer belong to me? Why do rights belong exclusively to the kleptocrats, to the thieves? I want the kleptocrats to restore nature, and then drop dead: leaving me alone! (It would be nice if they restored nature, and also recompensed me for the things that have been stolen from me, plagiarized from me, sabotaged in front of me ... just before dropping dead.)

But none of what we wish for is how things work.

Ponder this analogy: The drunk is ruining his liver. The pot smoker is ruining his brain (so his mind will erode, and erode ...) The drunk's heart might not want to be contaminated by the drunk's ruined liver: but the heart can't jump ship. Neither can the lungs. Imagine the smoker's liver getting away from the smoker's lungs by jumping out of the body. How would the liver live without the drunk? Unless the liver just happens to jump when there's a medical staff there to put it into some scifi life-support system!

No, I'm stuck being a Christian, being an American, being human: or at least being among humans: my new species, my potential species, sabotaged, blockaded, poisoned.

Under God indeed.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Map / Territory : Generic / Brand

We humans evolved to think fast. In human terms, we do, it works (or seems to, so far). The corollary is that we don't always think well. Philosophy, especially the division of philosophy called science, helps. Still, it's a mess. Nearly all humans can think, after a fashion; far from all humans are adept at philosophy; very few humans, including those dressed in white coats and called by their employers"scientists," have an accurate idea of what science is: and even when we do, there are still limits to human intelligence that even genius doesn't automatically overcome. I say all that to remind us that Gregory Bateson told us that psychologists have said that the human mind is incapable of maintaining Korzybski's distinction between "map" and "territory." Korzybski said that we commonly confuse the Name with the Thing — Bateson says that psychologists say that we will continue to confuse the Name with the Thing, and the Menu with the Meal ... the Map with the Territory.

I've been re-emphasizing all this recently as part of Macroinformation, my study of complex Information. I subsume all or nearly all under semiotics, insisting that there isn't anything that we know, think, believe, process ... that isn't symbol or sign: from photons hitting the retina, to synapses firing, to saying, "That is a tree." We fast thinkers look through the telescope and say, "I see a star": when what we "see" is "light" which our culture interprets (in the English language) as a "star." We fast thinkers reify our common perceptions, rapidly forgetting, if we ever noticed, that all we have are signs, symbols, ideas: we have no direct, non-symbolic contact with ... anything: and certainly not with anything we should call Reality, or the Universe ...

No matter what we think, qualify it: it's human thought. And if we say, "God thinks it," or "The President says it": well, it's still human thought: thought by symbols, expressed by symbols. In other words ... rather, in the words I started with, nearly everything with us is "map"; though we routinely imagine we are dealing with "territory."

OK, that pk has been saying, again and again, since 1979: online since 1995. I review it, restating it here, to say something new, original with me this morning: modern culture, already liable to map / territory confusions, is dedicated to additionally confusing Generic with Proprietary: and the confusion is deliberately induced by our ... um, shall I say it? ... owners? (But of course our owners, giant multinational corporations for the most part, are themselves owned by the culture, the ghastly, ever more monolithic, culture.)

"Tissue" means something thin, flexible, of next-to-no-substance, disposable. The modern marketplace, with a cultural mandate to make everything-the-same, sells paper tissues in a box. The company manufacturing them calls itself Kleenex. Good, fine. What's neither good nor fine is what the company does next: it tries to get us, the buying public, to confuse the thing we've been taught to need, a "tissue," with a particular brand name of tissue: Kleenex. So: we'll no longer want a drink; we'll want a soda; we'll no longer want a soda, we'll want a cola; we'll no longer want a cola, we'll want a Coke. We'll no longer want a computer, we'll want a PC. We'll no longer want a graphic user interface, we'll want Windows. See? Apple had hoped we'd want Mac.

But that's just the beginning. When I can I'll go on with other deep difficulties:

Culture is rigged to substitute custom for nature: clothing for example. We'll defend the custom As Though it were in our genes!