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  hardie karges 1:26 am on April 9, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy theory ( 10 )   

  Conspiracies of ignorance are the real conspiracies, 

  easy answers to rhetorical questions, the need for certainty and reassurance in a world with very little of either. When card-carrying Conspiracy People (CP’s) told me that “we need four more years of George W”, the man they supposedly hated more than Hell itself, then something is wrong. CP’s are doing the same thing that they accuse THEM of doing, i.e. manipulating events to suit their own political agenda, in this case, getting people like me off the fence and into one or the other opposing camps, just like the jihadis are doing in Indonesia. “You can’t handle the truth!” they like to imply in self-congratulation. Hey, I like it on the fence, where I can see both sides of an issue with at least an increased, if not perfect, clarity. The view’s nice here, with a view of the peaks and all. Democracy works, however clumsily and imperfectly. If we succumb to easy fixes for difficult questions and paranoid responses to provocative stances, then THEY win, whoever THEY are.

   

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  hardie karges 9:59 am on April 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy theory ( 10 )   

  Internet defines the age of communication, 

  spooky actions at a distance, intricate inter-connections at an infinite degree of separation. Internet is made for conspiracy; you could never get a quorum otherwise. Fringe elements unite in the musty worldwide cobwebs of Cyberia. Somehow they all manage to read the same sources, as if they themselves were the very conspiracy that they see in others. False prophets emerge from the woodwork and take to the airwaves, the broad fetching smile of religion spreading across their faces, so sure of themselves that it makes me hurt. Ego and logic unite to uplift the individual and undermine the state. We won’t miss clunky old democracy until it’s gone and replaced by something far more efficient. Technology is the new opium of the masses, clean and neat if not discreet. Internet is a maze of false leads and misplaced ideals. You could get lost in there. It works best as a combination telephone directory, Sears catalog and dating service, a meeting place of lost souls and found objects. Forget the revolution; let’s eat!

   
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  hardie karges 9:14 am on April 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Righteous idealism also falls fairly flat 

  when you consider that Athens apparently was every bit the cradle of slavery as it was of democracy. Democracy has always been borne on the backs of slaves, lofty goals held up by whipped backs and hungry mouths, Greece and Rome and the deep deep South. Usually the slaves come from somewhere else, so they don’t count as ‘human’. Historically, there are some favorite pools for capturing slaves, most specifically Africa and the Slav heartland in East Europe (hence the term ‘slave’). Colonialism had a prettier face, but the end result was still the same and it had little to do with race. Scar tissue is ugly whatever the circumstance; a little white powder can’t hurt. So slaves became Slavs, Mongols became moguls, blacks became blokes, and the rest became history. Personally I don’t want to fall into my own self-parody of the fool for whom “everything is the opposite of what it seems”. Still, the greater ignorance would seem to be the sheep-like blindness of those who follow their leaders unquestioningly without even considering the possibility of back-stage manipulations. Bottom line, a story presented as fact needs to be more than ‘compelling’; it needs to be true. Still, what is the measure of truth? I doubt that truth comes in discrete quanta. Love, maybe, but not truth. Welcome to Historical Relativity and the Political Uncertainty Principle (PUP). They can fight it out on the back pages of experiment. There, I feel better now.

   
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  hardie karges 1:18 pm on April 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy theory ( 10 )   

  Conspiracy theory runs deep on both sides, 

  both quasi-conspirators and quasi-theorists, from the secret societies of Freemasons and Illuminati to the Rothschilds’ Zion to the eye on the pyramid on the back of the U.S. dollar to the ‘New World Order’ of Prescott, Georges H. & W., and the entire Bush Brothers Band. Deep on both sides indeed, but a bit shallow in the middle. The problem with conspiracy as a way of life, of course, is that it is long on theory and short on facts. An anomalous ‘they’ can be held responsible for any and every evil deed that lacks clear antecedents, and some that do, to the point that there are really no longer any reasons to try to change anything at all, because there are so many convenient excuses for failure. If a Republican wins, it’s because he’s “their boy”. If a Democrat wins, then that’s because “they installed him” for their own reasons. It’s a loser’s paradise: “The game is rigged; all wealth is old wealth; capitalism is a pyramid scheme; nobody loves me”, etc. The extrapolation continues ad absurdum ad nauseum: the moon landing was staged; the earth is hollow (it used to be flat, remember); Argentina and the U.K. fought a fake war in the Malvinas; Saddam was ‘our’ boy; Jesus Christ never existed; WE sunk the economy of Argentina (how many times?), blah blah, yada yada, etc. etc. Now I know why courts are so concerned with motivations and forensic evidence, because otherwise stories like this could be accepted at face value as fact, given their internal logic and crisp story lines. Conspiracy theory is also certainly bolstered by the fact that shit does, indeed, happen. Witness the mock Texas border dispute that lead to war with Mexico, the unexplained battleship Maine sinking that led to war with Spain, the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin, The USS Pueblo, maybe Pearl Harbor, and I don’t even want to think about KL007.

   
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  hardie karges 1:20 am on March 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy ( 5 ), WTC   

  When the WTC towers fell a number was done on the American psyche. 

  At first I thought it was an attack on the American economy, as symbolized by the WTC itself. Admittedly a fifty-percent drop in stock prices would signal a whole new era in capitalism, or lack thereof, but that was not the most immediate effect. The most immediate effect was the splintering of the American psyche into a thousand tiny pieces, as if it weren’t ‘pluralistic’ enough already. Slowly the pieces polarize into those who see a declaration of war for a new crusade and those who figure that if we Americans didn’t instigate the attack ourselves, then at least we deserved it, or should accept responsibility for it. Out of the ashes of skyscrapers rises the phoenix of conspiracy, in which we’re all pawns in a game rigged by ‘them’, the unnamed masters of war and money. This is the world I know, planes crashing and towers falling. The Twin Towers fell like so many artificially inflated erections caught in a lie. They’ll all fall one day.

   
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  hardie karges 12:58 am on March 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy ( 5 )   

  Democracy comes to a sad end, drowned in the fog of conspiracy, 

  millions of highly trained but idle minds second-guessing the minutiae of history rather than getting lives of their own. You can’t reason with them, even though their arguments are based on reason. The problem is that their arguments are based solely upon reason, blind logic the dead reckoning by which the argument proceeds and goes anywhere they want. People don’t examine the facts anymore; they examine their feelings. Everybody wants to be first on his block to unlock the secrets of the world, but alas, very few actually can. Conspiracy exists much more in the minds of its disciples than the supposed conspirators.

   
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  hardie karges 9:28 am on March 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy ( 5 ), ego ( 33 )   

  Ego is much more of a problem in modern society than conspiracy. 

  Genius exists in the world, thank God. You’re welcome. Nobody did Einstein’s work for him, even though his circumstances were humble. If it’s getting harder to become famous, that’s only because there’s so much talent in the modern world and so much specialization that it’s hard for any one single person to have broad up-to-date generalized knowledge, much less stand out from the crowd, except possibly as an entertainer. What does that tell you? Bring on the clowns. Evolution, whether biological nor cultural, is not a straight simple path. Ego needs nothingness the same way Christianity needs Buddhism.

   
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  hardie karges 12:06 pm on March 22, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Conspiracy people don’t believe that Marco Polo ever went to China, 

  because if he had, then surely he would have written about chopsticks, the Great Wall, sweet-and-sour pork and so on, as if he would’ve been interested in exactly the same things we’re interested in almost seven hundred years later. What’s the point of the argument anyway? Even if he didn’t, many others did. He’s got nothing on Ibn Battutah, by the way. No amount of whining by self-appointed conspiracy watchdogs and other assorted speculators can change the fact that the history of the world is the history of blind circumstance and brute survival and a few great men doing some extraordinary work. If someone doesn’t do the work, then it doesn’t get done. Conspiracy people even doubt the existence of Jesus and the genius of Shakespeare, notwithstanding the fact that none of their contemporaries doubted them. Maybe conspiracy is like anti-gravity- the farther from the source, the stronger it is. Aside from the absurdity of the argument, the bottom line is that it doesn’t even matter. The work stands on its own. Somebody did it, and did it brilliantly, regardless of whose ego is at stake.

   
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  hardie karges 2:25 pm on March 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Some people want to make history by making up history, 

  changing facts to fit circumstances, petty details left to the spin doctors and makeup technicians and bullshit artists to plaster the cracks and spackle the holes where nails buried their pointy little heads rather than face the music for a soundtrack that’s yet to be written. The truth comes in the morning news. The memories come via the entertainment channel. The backspin comes on the history channel. The work is creative and the money is good. News and entertainment merge on prime time in a parallel universe. History is what someone says it is, subject to space availability, subject to financial support. First come, first served. Youth has the upper hand, the home-court advantage. We worship youth on the altar of tradition, as if anything they say, regardless of how naïve, is worth far more than the wisest sage could come up with, he with bad teeth and breath to boot. They’ve got a point, you know. Listen to the words of someone with years and experience, but who can still speak the language of children and fathom the path of dreams.

   
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  hardie karges 12:01 pm on March 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Ego needs new games to inspire it. 

  That’s what ego is for, to abstract yourself beyond your current position toward a new future, new pictures, new work. Ego allows you to fast-forward the tape to the future of random probabilities, instead of being resigned to the same old reruns of your old boring life like an old pair of shoes that the dog keeps dragging back. Ego must be fine-tuned to be a tool for visualization, but not a false reality to become mired in, certainly not a position to defend. Don’t let Ego out of the cage; that’s the trick. It’s like a genie that must be kept in its bottle. Not only is that good for self-discipline and good for self-confidence, but is essentially accurate. I AM the greatest thing that’s ever happened in my little world. But it stops at the door, which is to say, the mouth. If somebody thinks they see it through the window, then that’s their problem. It’s like money and the law of inverse proportions; the power is in holding it, not spreading it around. My little self-confidence device is everyone else’s pain in the butt. Success speaks for itself. You don’t have to advertise yourself unless you’re looking for work, and then only appropriately. If indulged in excessively, ego is a path of no return, married to your own mythology, divorced from reality.