But then, why should the CIA tell a British political analyst/activist the names of it’s programs. 
Hell, the FED won’t even tell the US Senate what it is doing. 
I dunno, the DOD told me. In the last year and a half I’ve helped bust their entertainment-propaganda operations wide open.
I know what you’re saying, but this is a field of research where there’s a lot of secrecy but if you look in the right places and in the right ways you can find out all sorts of things. Not like with the Federal Reserve, where the basic mechanism is easy to determine but exactly what they are doing at any given moment is known only to the people doing it.
There is one great question to my mind: assuming for a second that they are indeed a singular, coherent and centralized organization, which can only be an image to work with, are they controlled fundamentally by their own logics of the power of obscurity and suggestion, or are they driven by money? Of course the two can combine well, but if the former is the case it truly has a soul, and it can be theoretically healed. In the other case it is rather a question of reforming the corporations than the agencies.
James, if there is a solution, then by hiding it you do the same as what human engineering institutions do. Just write it down here and in a book so there can be no question. If not who knows how many billions of lives you ay help murder! I’m serious. Write it down explicitly and don’t play games with the destiny of mankind. If not you who will tell us? I can surely not remember and to blame the death of all on my amnesia while you are hiding the solution in your pocket… that is just mean, man!
Hiding?? 
It isn’t a matter of anything being hidden. It is a matter of it being said and shown and you not hearing or seeing. As the man said, “get the plank out of your own eye before you.…” accuse me of hiding anything.
Like when explaining RM:AO to Capable, I would explain a simple concept but then spend days having to explain away all of the misunderstandings presumed to be relevant (over and over again). For every one proper understanding there are 10 associated misunderstandings to have to explain away. Something originally quite simple becomes a long and complex story due to all of the misunderstandings having to be ironed out and brushed away. Psychology and sociology are no different in that regard. Stay on the path regardless of what you see and hear (or have always believed) and you don’t get lost in the complex deadly forest (Bilbo).
The concepts that resolve the issue of ethics and spying (and damn near everything else you can get yourself into) are:
- MIJOT (foremost)
- Clarify, Verify,…
- SAM Coops
- CRH
- RM:AO
- PHT
- Impedance Matching
TSLs
(perhaps others)
The same things that I have been talking about for years. The problem is that you expect something different. You are trying to look for the proper evil rather than the lack of it. When you can’t find anything that looks like proper evil, you give up on there being anything there to find and just throw out the remaining colored rocks so as to go off to make your own proper evil. The only proper evil is the lack of evil - cut and polished gems.
Tom is in a similar position. He is obviously intelligent, educated, informed, and diligent (not to mention maintaining that charming British smugness for which they are so adored). He was/is your paved roadway. But there is a vast information chasm between he and I. He looks for political significance for a engineered political resolution with details supplied. The real, actual solution is an engineered philosophical solution, somewhat but not entirely abstract and completely different than the host of prior endeavors (exactly as should be expected after thousands of years of people trying everything under the Sun that doesn’t work). I look out of my office window and see him down on the sidewalk with bullhorn and picket sign attempting to rally the crowd to storm the building. I can’t explain to him why it is the wrong building.
Like science, politics is merely a subset within philosophy. One can become intensely proficient at the details and current events involved in the subsets and lose all sight of the superset that gives them foundation. Then seeing the vast knowledge they have, they begin the feel above it all. Scientists think philosophers are peasants (and very many are). I think of scientists as technicians (and all of them are).
Science is just a mechanism for verifying that someone’s guesswork isn’t obviously refutable. And politics is just a mechanism for manipulating a society. There are other mechanisms as well, also subsets of philosophy. Come to philosophically understand the fundamental mechanisms, and all of those mountains of detailed activity become surmountable and not nearly as relevant as they seemed before.
Staying on the path that gets you through the forest becomes easier because you understand just how nasty the forest can be. But you have to have faith in the path. How does one get “faith in the path”? Well basically either by cognitively understanding how it works to lead in the right direction (“mutual understanding” via asking all of the seemingly relevant questions as Capable was trying to do), watching it work to lead in the right direction as someone else does it (demonstration), or just being so awestruck that you just can’t help yourself (“mutual passion”).
Even if Tom gets all of the information that he is seeking and you find the magic occultic ring, all you will discover is that you have been consumed to becoming merely another small portion of the very thing that you were trying to change. And its wheels roll on.
To get a different result from what has been transpiring for thousands of years, you have to do something different than what has been transpiring for thousands of years. And try to remember that this is Philosophy (the superset of political resolutions), not Current Events.
Like the man said, if you have the answer then state it explicitly. Constantly playing this game of backhanded compliments and implying that you’ve figured out how to escape this form of the struggle is just tedious.
Besides which, this is like that bit The Wire when Jimmy realises that the good looking politico he’s been sleeping with doesn’t take him and his job seriously. You think I’m playing for low stakes. I think you’re trying so hard to play for high stakes that you’ve forgotten the real world consequences.
Or it’s like in the Harry Bosch novels when he accidentally finds himself caught up in politics. He is very politically driven, sees his mission as a social one, but he has no taste for institutional politics or ‘high jingo’ as it is called in the books. I identify with that quite strongly…
Forget it guys. Just go do your thing. Your ego-sensitive snobbery doesn’t favorably impress me.
Pattern of conversation involving JSS:
- Someone says something.
- JSS turns up and pretends to trump it.
- Someone challenges JSS to say something explicit rather than playing these stupid fucking smug self-superiority games.
- JSS insults them and runs away.
In other words, JSS is not half as smart as he likes to pretend he is. He’s just (just) smart enough to find fault with other people’s intellectual work, but nowhere near smart enough to answer his own questions. If he could answer them then he would. After years of watching his evasion tactics, every single fucking time anyone calls him on his claims, I’m now certain he has no answers.
Note: this will not stop him behaving in the exact same way again. A high class of troll, to be sure, but a troll nonetheless. And bear in mind this is a man who said the Federal Reserve is socialist, the CIA is a ‘semitic agency’ and seems to wholly believe that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Communist who is trying to destroy America…
And while you’re putting on your show, perhaps you would care to explain to your audience why it is that such insecure people as yourself are so often describing merely themselves as they try to project their guilt onto the imagined foe.
) JSS explains something in excessively detailed abstract philosophical and/or engineering terms.
) Tom says JSS why don’t you explicitly explain.
) JSS explains that he has already explained.
) Tom proclaims that he feels insulted and accuses JSS of … well … whatever he can think up at the time.
) JSS says “sorry, no longer interested in your high brow foolishness. Just go do your thing.”
) Tom gets even further insulted (seemingly a trivial thing to cause for obvious reasons).
Of course the actual topic goes to shit because as always it was really only about Tom’s need to project superiority. Tom can’t even comprehend that there are entire fields, such as engineering and architecture that his mind just doesn’t relate to at all. Does he ask questions? Of course not. That would imply that he didn’t already know everything and thus perhaps not as high on his horse as he feigns.
That relentless British Holier than Thou Pride… maintain the Imagine at all cost.
?? “the CIA is a semitic agency”??? … Ummm… 
And Kenyan? Really?
The very definition of irony.
Not what happened.
Typical American, can’t interact with a Brit without some horseshit ‘you think you’re better than us’ tribalism.
You said this. Can’t blame me for quoting your own words back to you.
I can certainly blame you for not showing the actual quote. I don’t even know what you mean by “semitic agency”. And I’m certain that I never said anything about Kenya. “Me thinks he complaineth too much.”
… and typical of he who hasn’t an argument, trying to discredit via alternate inferences to incriminations. And still obsessed.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway,
New episode.
You see that search box in the top right of the page? Try typing in ‘semitic agency’.
(This is someone who claims I have no concept of engineering but can’t use a simple fucking website)
Not here.
I’m not trying to argue with you - there’s no point. You are incapable of just stating a position and stating your reasoning for it. You just duck and dive and criticise others for their supposedly ‘not getting it’. There is literally no point trying to argue with you. All that’s left to do is make clear my utter contempt for your way of being, so I’m doing that. You’re a spineless fool who flees behind ‘RM’ because it gives you an excuse for not talking about the real world. You might as well be a fundamentalist Muslim.
Iron Carrie?
I think this series of Homeland is really shaping up - though I think this may be the last season so we should expect a relatively spectacular climax. Though I am disappointed by how crudely stereotyped the Russian characters are.
Wow, so did you join the Liars Club, or have you merely become a fucking moron?
I said that the Christian “DEVIL” was a “somewhat CIA type of Semitic agency”.
And here you are claiming, with obvious false evidence that I made some claim that the CIA is a “Semitic agency”.
Is that how you get all of those things you are insulted by? Misreading people and then haughtily declaring abuse? Obsessive people do that.
Gyahd…
As I said:
AND STILL OBSESSED.
Your ego is clearly a lot bigger than your penis.
You know so much about JSS for a brand new person who only came to ILP on November 2nd and totally isn’t some asshole we already banned under another name.
-
I have not pretended to be anyone else. You aren’t remotely clever for figuring out this is me, when it’s obviously me.
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You didn’t ban me, Pav the Coward did and then quit and fled the forum in disgrace (great sign of a good decision when the person who makes it doesn’t even stick around).
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Don’t try to be a hardass. It isn’t very convincing.
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After Pav the Coward banned me and then ran off to hide your boss, the guy who owns and runs the forum, emailed me to tell me it was a bad decision and that he hoped I’d be back.
But it’s OK, I appreciate that being a mod on this forum gives you a sense of power and authority that you cannot accomplish in the real world, having failed in both your professional and personal life. So feel free to ban this account too, and slag me off and pretend you’re a tough nut. I mean, you’re going to do that anyway because it is just in your nature, I’m just saying you have my permission to do so.
Finally, no surprise to see you defending JSS. I guess retarded Christian right-wingers gotta stick together to oppose the Muslim Commie Jewish Gay Commie Transsexual Commie Gay Sex agenda, right…?
That’s so sophisticated.
Why don’t you try to do some useful moderating work.
That’s so sophisticated.
Why don’t you try to do some useful moderating work.
Why don’t you show some respect for the people keeping alive this site.
Was the lowly move of changing ‘off topic’ to ‘non-philosophical chat’ yours?
I already had the feeling some resentment was brewing among some of the moderators.
Here’s the new episode; only for those who have seen the most recent episode of Homeland, otherwise it’s a major spoilerfest. It was a particularly satisfying episode, amounting in the first ‘happy ending’ (things were suddenly kinda okay, considering what they could have been) in the whole series that I can remember. Usually the viewer is left in very deep wondering and nagging discomfort.