Mackers posted:

idk seems kinda cruel imo

guy clearly is not well

Often Abbreviated posted:

If it were even a ban, fine, I'd agree with you. Post poo poo get hit. But a perma? With the implicit threat that anyone else who posts good will get banned as a parachute account? gently caress the mods, man. gently caress the mods.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

my plan is to attack them with my mind and turn into a turkey if i lose

COMPAGNIE TOMMY posted:

The Nazis, for those not aware, were very interested in the occult- specifically Hitler and Himmler, and this is well documented. As far as how the occult factored into their motivations, that is harder to say, and that is evidently a bridge too far.

Crazy stuff, I know!

quote:

The alt-right will always outflank the postmodern left because, in the words of Mike Pence, the former are “coming home,” while the latter are attempting to camp on alien territory. Jorjani’s book epitomizes this fact. Repeatedly, he uses leftist and progressive thinkers to make his own reactionary points. He can do so precisely because these thinkers have themselves imbibed Counter-Enlightenment thinking.

Jorjani’s case is worth our attention precisely because it is not unique, but typical. His work is the predictable, nearly mechanical consequence of a longstanding intellectual retreat from the legacy of the Enlightenment.

What he lacks in originality, however, he makes up for with consistency. John Locke’s maxim about the “fool and the madman” is helpful here: The fool cannot draw conclusions from even true premises, whereas the madman dutifully draws his conclusions from faulty premises.

Jorjani may be no fool, but we cannot vouch for his sanity. He derides postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Foucault not for their faulty premises — that is, not for their criticism of the Enlightenment — but instead for not allowing their deductions to lead them to disturbing conclusions. Jorjani has no such hesitation, celebrating his conclusions that openly conflict with democracy and egalitarianism.

Jorjani frequently draws on Heidegger and William James. The reliance on Heidegger is not particularly surprising, as he had explicit commitments to National Socialism and never completely managed to distance himself from Nazism. But William James may come as a shock, as his pragmatism is widely considered the paragon of American liberal philosophy.

From James, Jorjani takes the idea of radical empiricism, which rejects any rational standard for what counts as evidence apart from experience itself. James defines experience extremely broadly, as not just bare sense data but also the complex products of culture and spirituality. The latter specifically includes parapsychological phenomena such as Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.

Against Enlightenment rationality, James’s radical empiricism validates these supernatural abilities as well as a plethora of religious experiences. When it came to revealed religion, however, he humbly maintained that the authors of the Bible were primarily grappling with their own “inner experiences.”

True to form, Jorjani insists on going further. He uses James’s empiricism to identify revelatory and miraculous experiences as real and historical, rather than as symbolic or allegorical. As a result, his reading of Exodus, Joshua, and Ezekiel treats the Hebrew God not as a hazy vision of some transcendent being but as a finite creature. Yahweh does not appear in the manner of an infinite God, but simply as “unknown,” in the sense of an UFO that hovers directly within our line of sight. Jorjani’s hyper-literalism transforms the Jewish God into an extraterrestrial intelligence that telepathically communicates with Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and Ezekiel.

Jorjani believes that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was an aerial attack and that Lot’s subsequent abandonment of the area indicates nuclear fallout. He thinks “some kind of anti-gravitational beam from out of the cylindrical object hovering over the [Red] Sea” destroyed the Egyptian chariots during the exodus.

The Arc of the Covenant “apparently acts as a pathfinder or guidance system” as well as a “sonic weapon” since it “interacts with vibrations of sound, possibly amplifying and concentrating the sonic waves before directing them at the walls of Jericho.” The descriptions of UFOs in Ezekiel line up comfortably with the worst daytime programming on the History Channel.

From Heidegger, Jorjani takes the idea that one’s historical culture matters more than objective reality. As opposed to the Enlightenment belief that time and space are uniform and measurable in some objective way, Heidegger claims that each group of people subjectively wills and shapes its own world and destiny. No common universe belongs to all; there is only a pluriverse of conflicting worldviews and forces. As Jorjani paraphrases Heidegger, each historical community struggles “to become more essentially what it is, or to perish in enslavement to another people and its world.”

Jorjani accepts this Heideggerian “war of worlds” and also embraces the philosopher’s belief that National Socialism possessed an inner greatness. Even here, Jorjani finds a way to push Heidegger still further, arguing that National Socialism represents the confrontation of modern man with the “spectral” essence of technology.

In Jorjani’s telling, technology is not simply mechanical or instrumental, but rather supernatural and world-forming. He recasts the essence of Nazism as an esoteric spectral revolution that started with the occult Thule (Atlantis) Society and ended with Himmler’s Ahnenerbe (ancestral research) institute, organizations obsessed with lost cities, ESP, and clairvoyance that deemed Hitler an actual superman with occult powers.

From these premises, Jorjani concludes that a liberal society based on privacy and equality is impossible. James’s radical empiricism allows him to posit the existence of a “psychic elite” that would require the sort of organic-corporate state that Hitler advocates, and Jorjani cites this approvingly in his Stockholm speech.

He synthesizes this insight with Heidegger’s world pluralism to imply that such a state must not only be internally homogenous but externally world-conquering. This echoes Hitler’s statement at the end of Mein Kampf that the purity of the Aryan race entails its potential to master the world.

Jorjani consistently subordinates theory to practice, science to techne, and evidence to will. As such, his bizarre views on ESP and aliens actually align with and support his racism. Jorjani can believe in ESP without evidence because he believes that the presence of skeptical minds suppresses its manifestation. Similarly, while Tom Davies correctly pointed out all the ways that Jorjani gets his Indo-European scholarship wrong, totally undermining his views on Aryan supremacy, Jorjani wouldn’t care. After all, it is not skepticism or objective evidence, but the sheer “will to believe” that can conquer the world.

Nearly everyone seems to miss the point of this story. For the alt-right, the actual scandal of their worldview is often obscured by a fake scandal of their own making: their imagined persecution by liberal or Marxist elites.

Here again, Jason Jorjani’s case is wholly typical. The Inside Higher Ed story, which first set philosophy faculties on edge, discussed whether or not it was fair to revoke Jorjani’s doctorate in light of his recent political activities. Of course, only Jorjani himself suggested such an action was underway.

Likewise, the Leiter Reports misses the point by ham-fistedly criticizing Continental philosophy departments such as Stony Brook, as if the only Continental philosophies were Heideggerian or irrationalist. Other commenters wrongly laid the blame on a philosophical canon unjustly restricted to Western authors.

In truth, Jorjani does away with much of the traditional Western canon and draws heavily, if eccentrically, on Eastern thought, from Japanese Zen Buddhism and Taoism to contemporary anime. Jorjani’s idea of “Europe” is, in fact, decentered: he traces its cultural roots back to the Persian empire, which he emphatically insists was a white civilization before forced miscegenation by Muslim Arab and Mongol invaders. For Jorjani, the fate of “Aryan” Persia constituted what he, with much of the Alt-Right, refers to as a “white genocide.”

His book, Prometheus and Altas, emphatically refutes the claim that intolerance can be remedied by greater eclecticism, pluralism, and interdisciplinarity, all of which have become academic buzzwords. His work is extremely interdisciplinary, incorporating historiography, Biblical hermeneutics, techno-science, parapsychology, cultural studies, mythology, and deconstruction. All of this suggests that pluralism of method and worldview do not necessarily produce progressive thought.

We can avoid Jorjani’s madness, but we must start with the right premises. Jorjani’s utility lies in how, by attacking his philosophical enemies, he identifies the lineage of Continental philosophy best suited to establish a humane and antiracist politics.

From Descartes, Spinoza, and the French materialists to the French and Haitian revolutions to Hegel and Marx, we have a strain of thought that proceeds from an intelligible world to the full emancipation of humanity. We should return to this canon, if we want to effectively resist the rise of an irrational right.

Wheeee posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1304728963374133250

Fried Watermelon posted:

John Dee worked for Queen Elizabeth I and used rituals and psychedelic substances to communicate with "Angels". With the information they received he urged the Queen to create a "British Empire".



It's not surprising to think that the Nazi's also used psychedelics to communicate with "entities". This communication has been going on for thousands of years through the use of entheogens by many different cultures.

CIA also pursued communication with entities and using the Astral Plane during the 70's. They tried to use anything for an advantage.

I'd like to know who Epstein was trying to communicate with using his temple on his island.

Helsing posted:

Happy Thread posted:

https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1261004586359422979

Maria Juana posted:

I wonder what his message will be once we're no longer in an election year.

taqueso posted:

Don't make me post about cuppy tea in QCS

SKULL.GIF posted:

lol at obese computer touchers trying to cosplay revolution by writing long diatribes towards the Moderators

mastershakeman posted:

A good friend of mine said I was getting into qanon when I insisted epstein didn't kill himself , this is what being cuppy tea feels like irl

nut posted:

Suplex Liberace posted:

yo that Men in Shadows book is a bit of a bust its a good overall history of the Security Service from its beginnings to its public shaming in the 70s. He dosent elaborate on a few things that seem like they should be a bigger deal like the goddamn Cuban trade embassy bombing and the fruit machine. It also is funny that despite me having a whole book on RCMP spying on university's its not mentioned at all. It does a good job establishing a heavy link between the montreal mafia and rcmp at the time of its writing, it also just brings up and drops American intelligence agents all the time which sucks.

nut posted:

I'm learning that almost every Canadian police state book is p disappointing. I think it's partially a problem of the ATIP (FOIA-ish) system being introduced only in the 80s and still facing lots of redaction issue. The spying book about the origins of the RCMP was really good, but the ones on spying on women's liberation and universities all kinda converge on the simple point that Canada, following the Genzouku affair, was internationally shamed into overt anti-communism and generated a police force that was giving national security purposes and exercised the latter far more than the former (i.e. never considered protecting a protest, always approached them as enemies)

After that, it was just tons of informant surveillance without ever really knowing what to do, making gigantic unwieldy files on everyone ostensibly socialist/leftist. I'm gonna push through regardless and hope for something else, but I suspect that most power structures are just born out of Canada's history with the British Empire

Suplex Liberace posted:

Like how even though the RCMP and CIA were really tight they would always send agents to train in London over America. Because even they knew you cant trust the CIA to not turn your agents. Im gonna start the University one next then idk.

smarxist posted:

seriously why would you perma ban someone posting the most interesting and wild poo poo this dead gay forum has seen in 15 years lol

nut posted:

Have been wondering if perhaps there's anything more interesting from the Five Eyes angle, but at least dipping a toe in gives us some perspective of what to look for next. Will keep u posted, of course! Gonna finish this Women's Liberation one and then do the uni one too because the uni one does look well done and is more focal on the groups targeted. Women's Liberation movements were largely, if not entirely, targeted by the RCMP because their connections to socialist and communist groups, and the idea that Trotskyists were invading the group to take it over and co-opt its strength

quote:

Alfreda Frances Bikowsky (born 1965) is a career Central Intelligence Agency officer who has headed the Bin Laden Issue Station and the Global Jihad unit. Bikowsky's identity is not publicly acknowledged by the Agency but was deduced by independent investigative journalists in 2011.[1] In January 2014, the Washington Post named her and tied her to a pre-9/11 intelligence failure and the extraordinary rendition of Khalid El-Masri.[2] The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, released in December 2014, showed that Bikowsky was not only a key part of the torture program but also one of its chief apologists, resulting in the media's giving her the moniker "The Unidentified Queen of Torture."[3][4][5]

Maria Juana posted:

I wonder what his message will be once we're no longer in an election year.

gh0stpinballa posted:

i haven't seen and will not see this movie but it's very weird how the anti-Qanon people like this podcaster are skirting up to just flat out dismissing all concerns about this film/sexualising children in general, and that having such concerns in fact makes you a chud and also sus somehow.

https://twitter.com/julianfeeld/status/1304602228137713664?s=19

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Maybe you should see the film so you aren’t just commenting based on watching twitter outrage from people who also probably haven’t seen the film.

gh0stpinballa posted:

my comment wasn't about the film, it was about the takes around it. i do not need to have seen the film to have an opinion about the strange discourse surrounding it.

YOLOsubmarine posted:

the discourse might seem less strange if you actually knew anything about the film and the divergence between the content and the poorly conceived Netflix marketing campaign