Showing posts with label Emerson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emerson. Show all posts

Saturday, February 29, 2020

2/29/20 - Authentic Courage vs. Crying With The Pack

"God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." Genuine courage is required to stand apart against the deafening conformity of the cowardly mob. Ask Andrew Sullivan! People are inherently tyrannical. Shared secular delusions: our 21st century religions. God needs the devil; Sapiens need an enemy. Lippmann, the fragility of free speech, and democracy's Achilles Heel: an ignorant "public."



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Thursday, February 27, 2020

2/27/20 - Conform Or Be Cast Out

Social validation & conformity: the evolutionary default setting. Why choosing intellectual autonomy over the herd is nearly impossible. Also, standing apart in self-reliance, the drifter, and mending holes in the firewall.



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Friday, February 21, 2020

2/21/20 - Authenticity, The Mask, and The Beast Unleashed

On independent thought, authenticity, social momentum, and permitting redemption. Also, You're not the Elephant Whisperer, let Dumbo feed! Detecting doctrinaires, the Warm Glow of the Herd's Fellowship, manipulative monkeys dancing for their lunch, and a mask, the core, and the id walk into a bar.



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Thursday, February 6, 2020

2/6/20: The Wokeflake Follies

The Iowa Boner, The Rips Heard 'Round the World, and impeachment fails. All by Wednesday. This is the alternative?



ALSO:
  • Scripture, agitation, and The Herd Mind
  • Democracy implodes without the public's consensual trust
  • The means, ends, and Salem Witches
  • Romney, Amash, Manchin, and the Principled Pit of Hell
  • Howard Dean says Democrats will challenge November's election  
* Subscribe on any podcatcher that doesn't suck.
* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

Saturday, February 1, 2020

2/1/20 - Criminal Conformity & The Beautiful Mutant

"Imitation is suicide." How independent thought gets smothered in infancy, the need to belong: why standing apart from the impaired herd is not only hard, it runs against our social and evolutionary grain. Also, collective and self-delusions protecting us from unpleasant discoveries that might destroy our notions of being special, divine, or even "good."

Listen to "Your Undivided Attention" here: https://humanetech.com/podcast/



ALSO:
  • Tending to personal and commercial attachments
  • How political and marketing swine manipulate attachments via identity
  • Meditation and Buddhist philosophy as tools to disconnect
  • Blank Slatists: Beware
  • Emerson's Self-Reliance: read it. 
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* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

1/28/20 - The Boldness of the Herd, Political Atheism, Our Glowing Christ

The next great war: intellectual autonomy. The bold certainty of the herd, the challenges of independent thought and why seeing someone who is genuinely their own Man is so rare, the media has supplanted the church, disengaging from the ideological Holy War in favor of political atheism, and Toddzilla's Paradox: the conflict between intellectual independence and the desperate human need to belong. Still available for children's parties! Now doing bat mitzvahs!



ALSO:
  • A quick impeachment fart
  • You want an authoritarian
  • Political Vampires
  • Algorithms, Lippmann, Bernays, and You
  • Silver Spoons: A Hate Crime
  • The filthy Centrus Americanus
  • Friendship: Loyalty & Support vs. Honesty
  • Nothing can be done about climate change
  • Data Overload revisited 
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* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net

Saturday, August 17, 2019

8/17/19: Propaganda: Dependent Drunks In Denial

On Ellul's "The Need For Propaganda." We've both developed a tolerance for and a psychological dependency on propaganda's certainty-stoking, justifying, and and self-worth generating narratives, social media is a propagandist's dream, desensitization and an increasing desire for the excitement felt from being immersed in the constant, and necessary stream of propaganda, how our addiction has allowed both traditional media and social media "influencers" to monetize the Outrage Industrial Complex, our role as retained ideological attorneys, and wishful thinking (and possibly disastrous effects) of suddenly eliminating 320-million people's propaganda narratives. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Grab a sammich for this one. And maybe a stiff drink. Hey! I never said this would be easy!



ALSO: 
  • This is a triage situation; not a search for the "cure"
  • Disinformation bit me again!
  • Why we won't quit the informational drug
  • A possible path to empathy
  • The culture war is a War of National Narratives
  • Chosen perspective becomes "personal truth"
  • Provoking shame as a "debate" tool: a boomerang
  • Social media "influencers": personal brands hocking a product while posing as "journalists"
  • The IDW: agitation propaganda
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

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*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

8/6/19: Propaganda: Autonomy Lost, Fake Tensions, Exiling Sectarians

How propaganda acts as an informational virus to destroy critical thought and alienate the person from himself. More on data overload, the uninformed Current Events Man knowing a little about everything and a lot about nothing, mistaking feelings for thought, having to accept or reject an entire doctrine in total, losing intellectual autonomy, and how artificial tensions are often accompanied by dubious solutions.



ALSO:
  • Artificial solutions to real needs
  • Real solutions to artificial needs
  • "Influencers", their product, and their Patreon
  • The Tribal Dance of Rhetorical Fuckery
  • We're a species of sleazy lawyers and pathological liars
  • Self-stereotyping caricatures
  • It's fine to generalize then exile sectarian fabricants
Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda": https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747


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*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net & www.escapingthecave.com

Sunday, July 28, 2019

7/28/19: Propaganda's Mindcrime, Partitioning, The Verbal Universe

More on agitation propaganda and the psychological effects of propaganda including: loss of individuality, the suppression of critical thought, creation of the mob and how critical thought is literally impossible as part of a group, the creation of a fanatically self-righteous social conscious leading to the demonization of the out-group, and more on the sphere of the sacred. Then, how propaganda partitions society (identity politics) via verbal fiction creating sects of victims who only speak "to themselves."


Also: 
  • Propaganda's only heard by its choir creating alternate factual universes
  • Manchurian activists primed for provoked outrage and action
  • The creation of an abstract verbal universe: fake news
  • Sacrificing self-dignity to "the cause"
  • The danger of surrendering to "something bigger than yourself"
  • Stereophonic propaganda
  • Reclaiming individuality by removing your dog from the fight

Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda":
https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Formation-Attitudes-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394718747

READ IT!


*Like it? SPREAD IT!  F**k The Zuckerbeast & Twitter. YOU are my marketing team.

*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com

Thursday, July 25, 2019

7/25/19: Spinning Mueller & The Sacred Cows

Congressional grandstanding for the cameras, Mueller's testimony: viewed and spun in parallel universes, deciding whether to read the report, voting your own self-interest (Yes! Do it!), the Current Events Man, asking the right questions, when boutique news becomes fatal, and the sacred Golden Calves.



Also: 
  • Leaving the mob
  • Evolution lurks
  • Mythology and the Devil within

*Like it? SPREAD IT!  F**k The Zuckerbeast & Twitter. YOU are my marketing team.

*Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and your favorite podcatcher.
*Also check out www.christophermedia.net and www.escapingthecave.com

Thursday, May 23, 2019

5/23/19: The Social Media Disease - Illusion of Knowledge & Democratized Opinion

Technology enables, and social media perpetuates, prioritizing the cheap appearance of knowledge instead of fostering knowledge itself.  Also, how the Internet changes cognition and the abandonment of expertise to the holy opinion: "my ignorance is equal to  your knowledge."

Also: 
-The DIKW pyramid and drowning in data.
-The Id on Parade, the natural state of man, and Leviathan.
-What happens when reasonable voices abandon the public square to mindless mobs of roving avatars?
-When avatars attack
-A classic full-frontal Toddzilla rant salvaged from The Lost Episode about Twitter, and more.






Elias Aboujaode's Virtually You: 
https://www.amazon.com/Virtually-You-Dangerous-Powers-Personality/dp/0393340546

Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: 
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death: 
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558613196&sr=1-1


More episodes/subscribe:
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

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Tuesday, May 14, 2019

5/14/19: The Social Media Disease - Virtual Mobs, Conformity, External Truth

Unsophisticated media consumers and the failure to take personal responsibility for our own intellectual maintenance. The surrender of the individual's intellectual autonomy to the conformist mob. How mobs-cells no longer need to leave the couch and are now free to anonymously molest & terrorize the "other" via Twitter, Facebook, and their phones.

Also:
  • Social Media Influencers and how the Media 101 Model applies to them
  • Emerson on independent thought, conformity, and consistency
  • The abandonment of external truth and the path to authoritarianism 




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More episodes/subscribe:
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com
Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

Subscribe: iTunes and Google Play

Monday, March 12, 2018

3/12/18: Hitchhiking and Philosophy

The final episode of the Friar Chris Series begins with a discussion about the differences between bicycle touring and backpacking then moves on to deeper topics, including (@ 15:45) my experience volunteering on the Gulf Coast in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and the corrosive and corrupting effects of tribalism and dogma in the Disaster Relief Industrial Complex. We then move on to (mostly) explore the fundamental ideas behind why he and I chose hitchhiking and what we learned and experienced while traveling the country as “disposable” vagabonds loitering out on the fringe. 



SPOILER ALERTSausage Party Hope lies within!

More episodes/subscribe: www.escapingthecave.com
My travel archives: www.toddzillaX.com

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