Facebook, and the demands of Covert Cultural Warfare...

At this point pretty much everyone has entertained the idea of Facebook and Twitter as a giant ocean of personal information where the governments of the world go fishing for what they need, or want, to know about their populations.  For those who defend the idea of civil rights this is of course a matter of concern, the potential for such information to be misused abusing freedom in covert manners.  A valid concern, but not the only genuine threat to freedom revolving around such social technologies.

It is a fact that a person’s livelihood, the way they earn their living, impacts on their freedom every bit as much as the governmental structures of their world.  In many ways it is the larger impact.  The entities of commerce, the companies and corporations of the world,  have grown to challenge the governments of the world in terms of overall power.  Their policies and practices therefore should be of every bit as much concern to those who champion freedom as are the policies and practices of the various governmental structures of the world.

It has come to light the entities of commerce are attempting to access that ocean of information contained in the social networking sites at the same resolution as might the governments of the world.  It has been revealed they, lacking the technical ability to simply access that ocean directly are essentially holding peoples’ livelihood for ransom demanding the passwords to access their employees accounts on the social networking sites.  They are in all fact executing a form of extortion and blackmail on their employees undreamed of thirty years ago.

No citizen of the United States could be subjected to such treatment at the hands of their government, the First and Fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America prohibits the government from such actions.  The mechanisms of government are far older than the mechanisms of commerce, older, wiser and far more mature than the current prime  mechanism of commerce, the publicly owned corporation. 

To an objective eye it is easily seen these new entities of commerce are now of such scope as to rival the national governments of the world.  The actions of these entities heavily influence the actions and interactions nation to nation, they are true power players on the global scene controlling the manufacturing capabilities of planet earth opposite the nation states control of raw materials and manpower. 

The corporations have grown to wield powers quite comparable to the nations of the world, the corporations wage covert cultural warfare, one people against the other, to influence their market share in the target land, it is time for the governments of the world to quit protecting them and demand they be held accountable and judged by the same standards of civility and respect for human rights that are applied to the various nations of the world.  Mankind really doesn’t have the resources, human or otherwise, to wait for them to re-invent the concepts of civility.  We don’t have time for their version of the Magna Carta or The Bill of Rights to make it through every major boardroom in the world.

A Subtle Despair…

Last couple of days I’ve been introduced to one of the most subtle and effective propaganda mediums I’ve ever seen.  It is master level work, no mistaking that.  Nor is it the effort of one group, one company, one master, which pretty well confirms it as the work of a collective entity, a social force so cohesive as to have achieved an internal identity of its’ own. 

What I am speaking of are the cartoon shows the Japanese market to the youth, the children, the form known as Anime.  Gorgeous artwork in flawless animation, a wide range of characters, plot lines devised as perfectly crafted morality plays with a heavy bias in favor of education, a world filled with creative technologies to be called fantastic ideally suited to being incorporated into a child’s fantasy play.  All in all quite entertaining.

So why claim it a propaganda medium dispensing despair, subtle or otherwise?  Because of one other facet seemingly widespread through the genre:  no victory over the various social evils incorporated into the morality play plotlines is ever portrayed as being the effort of strictly human abilities, real world verifiable common human abilities.

In the world of Anime only those possessing, or possessed by, some ability transcending the human ever achieve a victory.   These supra-human abilities take a variety of forms ranging from savant intelligence wielding ultra-advanced technologies to influence among any number of mythical creatures acting to a wide variety of motives, or some combination of the above, but in the world shown the children only those who possess what cannot be had in reality ever prevail.  The evils shown are very real in the world, but the things required to contest those evils quite unavailable if not down right impossible.

Do you see it?  Do you see how this genre of entertainment becomes a most effective tactic in the cause of maintaining a corrupt and perverted status quo?  Do you see how it plants the despair the status quo exploits to maintain its’ power base?  As the children grow into their maturity one message is reinforced to them over and over to contradict the fantasies, the play that shaped the development of confidence and self esteem.  You can’t contest the evils you see on a daily basis, you’re just a little human, an ordinary human.  You don’t have any special powers, no one does.  You don’t have allies among the mythical, the magical.  You’re not special, you can’t be special.  You?  You’re just... ordinary.  You’d better do what you’re told.

Of course it is an effective tactic, it’s oriental in it’s origin.  The oriental, where the societies are so very old, such very old monsters dominating and enslaving the humans unfortunate enough to have been born into the hive.  The oriental, that is currently waging covert cultural warfare against the free minds of the world.  The enemy is a patient and subtle enemy of substance, and like any skilled enemy its’ first points of attack will target what provides the line of supply enabling a defense against the assault.  Regardless of the nature of the combat despair in the enemy is a valuable weapon, and Anime is a fine weapon in the orient’s efforts to enslave the world.  It just takes a generation or two for the damage done to reveal itself.

At the end of the day...

It must have rained upstream,  washed some things down into the river of life.  Seen a bit of everything float by here the last day or two.  Ok, someone wants me to review what I think I know.  Fair enough, I have. 

Of all the things reconsidered this one small thought stands out as probably the most important thing I’ve ever learned from all the strange places and peoples, all the years of struggle and strife, all the beers and all the tears. 

It is more important to love someone than it is to have someone love you.

Yes, it is.  And no, that isn’t a call for emotional altruism, in point of fact it is absolutely selfish as backwards as that might sound.  How can that be selfish?  It’s really not so hard to understand.  You have to love someone to actually understand what love is.  You have to care, really care, about the state of their life, the state of their heart.  You might be their lover, share sex, shoot for the moon every now and then, but that’s not so very important, not compared to loving them.

As long as you love someone your heart won’t shell out and glaze over with scars and callous.  As long as you love someone you’ll remember what love is, you won’t lose that understanding to the cynicism of life.   And that’s very, very important because if you love someone you’ll be able to recognize what is happening when someone loves you.  You’ll be able to recognize the love they’ve offered to you, recognize their love for what it is, and accept it.

So if it comes to pass that you love someone, genuinely love them, and they can’t return your love at the same level you offer it?  Don’t be bitter and sad about the situation, don’t begrudge them their choice.  They’ve still done you an immense favor by helping you keep your heart open and alive, even if they can’t they’ve made it possible for someone else who can. 

Alex, who understands the work of Eros 

Thanks Alex.  I have no idea, none, how many people you helped keep an open heart.  I have no idea how many of them even understood what you were doing, how much love you enabled into the world.  I have no idea if anyone has ever thanked you for that, but if no one else has I will. 

You carried me across a time when I might have totally forgotten what love feels like, a time that might have robbed me of the ability to know love at all.   I owe you a huge debt of gratitude,  the kind of debt you don’t pay back, you pay it forward.  If I’ve learned one thing of importance in this life it’s that at the end of the day you end up far richer for having paid the debt of love than you do  if you default.

Pornography ...

This post is actually a comment I posted to my friend CJ's blog. I'm reposting it here, slightly reworded for context because the thought needs to be known, needs to be spread. 

I was in conversation last night with the lads and lasses I game with, they who are being so very generous with me by sharing the reality they see, youth in the 18 to 25 range of life. Their attitudes, their fears and hidden hopes go a long way towards explaining at least a portion of the situation.

In the conversations between CJ and myself we've agreed to say that pornography is that which is anti-life while the erotic is that which supports life.  There are a great many images floating loose in our world, open for any and all to view, which are in point of fact pornography but not of necessity sexual pornography.  There are a multitude of pornographies in our world.  There is sexual porn, of course, but equally there is pistol porn, blood porn, money porn, power porn, love porn (as a thing separate from sexuality, the influence of love misused).  These pornographies attack different areas of life, but are in fact still pornography, the perversion of that which supports life into that which consumes and destroys life.  We are living in a totally pornographic world, it is so terribly saturated with porn. 

I've known this for some time now, but these last weeks of keeping company with the youth has brought the gravity of the situation into full focus.  The youth I'm keeping company with are in the process of rejecting these various forms of pornography, fortifying their own attitudes on many subjects beyond the sexual to withstand the glut of anti-life their elders have put before their eyes, eyes that have witnessed the failure of the family from the perspective of the children of those failed families. 

The subject of CJ's post was the still life, art depicting the objects of life, and these have indeed been pressed into service to support the various pornographies.  It is little mystery why.  She mentioned one particular image, a picture of  living flesh pierced with hooks.  Gross, yes, but easily interpreted.  Modern society has so very many hooks in people, the various forms of porn I listed make a decent list of categories for all those different hooks.  The most extreme example of that symbolism I've ever seen literally involved a meat hook intended to hang a thousand pound steer carcass, blunted and de-barbed of course but still a meat hook, inserted in a woman's rectum to hold her by her pelvic bones so she couldn't move her hips in response to the torment and torture being applied to her genitals, the flogging of her skin.  What facet of modern life might that represent?  There is some totally sick sh** out there, and the stench of it is growing.

But the cause is not lost.  Like I said, the youth are building their defenses against it, they are seeing cePornography for what it is in all it's abysmal misery, they recognize the monster that collective entity really is.  They know that collective for what it is, they've watched what it did to their parents.  They've not put names to all of the nuances, but their souls are rallying in defense of their lives.  In many ways they are making a stand even more heroic than say the Royal Air Force's stand in defending it's homeland against the onslaught of the Nazi war machine.  I do not jest, nor am I overstating the situation.

It is up to us, we who are their elders, we who must share in the responsibility of having loosed that monster into their world, to provide them the weapons to fight that war, to make that defense.  It is up to us to give them sanctuary, comfort and support, because when one sets aside the assumptions of older and essentially obsolete eras to really talk to them, to step into their reality and look up the years at our times?  It is so terribly easy to see the battle fatigue so very deep in their eyes.