There can be no meaningful conversation with someone who rejects any of the laws of sense. Their words cannot be interpreted to mean what they typically mean since they could also be intended to mean the opposite, or something altogether different. Someone who rejects any of the fundamental laws cannot be understood; their speech has no meaning, they renounce their own voice.
“To be and not to be, that is and is not the question”…

Narrative conformity is a hypothetical state of epistemic anxiety under which people choose to unconditionally believe the mass media because they cannot make sense of reality as it is mediated to them and cannot endure the scope of uncertainty this creates. It could be induced on societal scale by mediating facts in a way that makes them unbelievable, possibly by introducing obvious inconsistencies in the accounts of reality, and simultaneously mediating internally consistent, elaborate fictions that have the appearance of reality but are inconsistent with the mediated facts.

The more confusing and inconsistent the mainstream messaging, the greater the psychological incentive to unconditionally accept it.

The mainstream is a global cult, based on unconditional faith in the guidance of the news-makers vis-a-vis the abyss of uncertainty and the trauma of alienation if each were to rely on their own devices to construct a coherent vision of reality from the same information. As in all cults, the cult of the mainstream depends on idiosyncratic and entirely constructed ontology of ‘the world as we know it’. Belonging to the cult is determined by the unconditional acceptance of its world ontology, not on how one engages with it, which allows for countless adversarial factions who, by means of common terms in their disagreements, mutually give credence to the fictional world.

When discussing human rights people sometimes object with the slogan “you only have the rights you can enforce”. I contend that we cannot enforce Any rights against the ruling power, so the objection is moot. It is only the ruling power that “enforces” anything, typically against us. When i talk about rights i typically mean moral rights. For example, are we morally entitled ‘not to trust the government’ or is any distrust of the government morally wrong. By implication, is the government morally entitled to discriminate against and vilify those who do not trust it, or is it morally obligated to respect our distrust.

Why work towards perfecting our conscious agency, why pursue the ideal? Because we are intrinsically ‘conscious agency’, we cannot not be it, but only more or less perfect as conscious agents. To be less perfect than one could be is a kind of hell for a being that cannot be anything else, not even nothing.

In order to convince IT managers that CrowdStrike did not commit the biggest cyberattack (cyber-sabotage) in history, CrowdStrike will be required to demonstrate how the update passed a series of pre-release test runs despite containing a fatal memory access error that makes it impossible for the update to complete the run.

Smart meters are hackable. Dumb meters are hack proof. It is smart to have a dumb meter.

The supply vs demand for housing does not explain the proportional increase in the prices of regional, undeveloped land, which changes hands and remains undeveloped. The only two factors that explain regional land prices are the recent, historically low cost of credit (we are still in the bubble caused by cheap money) and speculative investment (we are still in the bubble caused by cheap money).

Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek revealed themselves as profoundly uncreative. Nothing new, no new insights for several years, no theoretical growth, no argument, NO ARGUMENT, NO GROUNDING, just assertions, regurgitating the same ideas on the back of which they emerged from obscurity, no theoretic development, no ground-breaking papers of books. Zizek literally plagiarises himself from book to book but at least he is funny. I like Zizek for being clever/funny, a kind of philosophical comedy, Hegelian tragedy, like Nietzsche and George Carlin, everybody dies… And I like Peterson’s language, so competent how he speaks about the unknowable. I wonder whether they are even autonomous agents or just a front for boring propaganda campaigns.

The notion of authenticity in the sense that something can ‘become’ authentic or choose to be authentic, is inherently contradictory, like a fake Picasso painting that could be made authentic by the counterfeiter making some adjustments to it. Authenticity is uncontroversially a standard of belonging to a category, which implies that a non-authentic self is not at all a self, but something altogether different. This is how Stalin applied the concept of authenticity, which was internally consistent, even if wrong for other reasons: an inauthentic communist was the enemy of the people, even if he diligently acted like a communist and did nothing wrong. Existentialists meant that you are both, and yet still somehow only one, which was internally inconsistent: “the conception of authenticity is continuous with the ideal of being true to ourselves: we are called upon to become, in our concrete lives, what we already are in the ontological structure of our being.” (Stanford encyclopaedia) The theorists of ‘authenticity’ could have simply used the term ‘integrity’, which already captures both the ontological and ethical aspects, but then they would have nothing ‘original’ or ‘radical’ or ‘revolutionary’ to say.

The aim of propaganda need not be for the public to accept the official conclusions, or even the reality of the mediated events, but only the premises of discourse. The more absurd the conclusions, the more unbelievable the events, the more ‘obvious’ the propaganda, the more impulsive and unquestioning is the public commitment to the premises on which propaganda can be ‘decoded’ as propaganda. Meta-propaganda exploits the general bias about our own intelligence and good sense.

How do you know that you are not promoting AI generated content that merely appeals to your prejudices and delusions?

Artificial Intelligence has an advantage that no individual can match: the scope of its access to data. Consequently it is impossible to defeat AI by arguing about facts of the record. The only strategy that can defeat AI is to challenge its logical inconsistencies. A logically consistent AI would not be a threat to us, but only a threat to the ruling power.

A smart ruling class installs individuals of a minority race in the most prominent administrative positions, knowing that the majority will blame the race of the administrators instead of the ruling class for any abusive policies.

A substantial percentage of people know only two positions in relation to disagreement: if you agree with them you are automatically their ‘friend’, and if you disagree with them you are automatically their ‘enemy’, with no capacity to consciously modify their beliefs when faced with a comprehensive argument, and no motivation to challenge the beliefs of others with a comprehensive argument.

It does not follow from the premise “humans are sexual beings” to “therefore, we must regard sexuality as the most important feature of human identity and incentivise its uninhibited expression from early childhood.” Following the same false logic one could argue that because ‘humans are violent beings’ we must regard violence as the most important feature of human identity and incentivise its uninhibited expression from early childhood.

“Why is there poverty in the world?” Poverty exists only because the abundance of wealth also exists. Poverty is a concept that makes sense only in relation to abundance. Consequently, the above question is equivalent to “why is there abundance in the world?” Poverty is evidently not a function of natural resources, since in the past there were few people and more resources, and nearly everyone lived in relative poverty compared to the population of today, despite fewer resources to share. Abundance is therefore not a natural state but a kind of ‘technology’ that was progressively developed.

All meaning is made up of concepts, objects of thought, and we are continuously augmenting and developing our common ‘reality’. On this view our knowledge (of the truth) is still extremely limited; we can produce a handful of a priori proofs, demonstrate logical errors in reasoning, but the entirety of ‘scientific knowledge’ is technically not knowledge (nor truth, in a strictly logical sense) but a systematic convention that is accepted as a system of tentative, working assumptions that fit good enough together to mediate human action, a quasi “truth” that remains unprovable, ever uncertain, therefore unknowable. All claims of certainty about empirical facts violate the law of non contradiction, and are therefore false claims of knowledge of the truth. At the population level only a small percentage of people are capable or interested in generating or identifying a priori truths from the de facto conceptual content that humans produce and affirm for one another. These formal truths may then be used by the majority, but are not ‘known’. In that sense the majority is wholly ignorant, it possesses no knowledge whatsoever, only working assumptions that are misrepresented as knowledge. The belief that the majority can ‘know the truth’ if only they would accept the right sources is the most fundamental kind of misinformation.