Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts

Saturday, May 9, 2020

5/9/20 - Stories, Hope, and The Propaganda Paradox

Todd's adventures in leaving the house after 5-weeks, a quick review of the crappy Vaporesso Target PM-80, the supposed "wisdom" of the bewildered herd, belief and truth are mutually exclusive, atheists: leave the non-phallus swinging faithful alone, the crucial crusading distinction between religious & ideological zealots, and why the simple human need for hope probably makes us powerless against tasty propaganda.




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Wednesday, April 29, 2020

4/29/20 - Social Media Disease: A Cacophony of Nothing



Todd's merciful Bat Plague boycott continues with more spiritually uplifting content like: "F**k Subaru. I hate them and you should, too." Also, 2020's Jill Stein; Steinbeck, Salinas, and digital detox; social media "should" be regulated like radio; carnival barkers and data overload are killing democracy; the Wisdom of the People™ doesn't exist therefore populism is pandering to a screeching herd; and rejoice! The Devil's all up in ya! Can you feel him? 



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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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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. 
* Subscribe on any podcatcher that doesn't suck.
* 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

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

1/15/20 - Snakes, Survival, & Sabotage: The Need to Feel Alive

Todd discusses collective human boredom in relation to the need for a sense of purpose, struggle, and the addictive rush of just feeling alive. How a dormant survival instinct comes alive during a crisis and how, absent that, we'll manufacture one just to have something to endure, battle, and survive. Also, some some predictions for the 20's. Book those children's parties now!


Also:
  • An evening with Pablo Escobar's "chemist"
  • A naked man kills a fer-de-lance
  • Men, middle age, and the power plant
  • Healthy anxiety vs. fear
  • This election won't matter
  • The tyrant is in the eye of the beholder
  • The Titan Tragedy
  • Podcasters: they're spammy and slimy.
  • ^They call that foreshadowing
* Subscribe on any podcatcher that doesn't suck.
* Also check out www.escapingthecave.com and www.christophermedia.net
* Fuck Twitter

Thursday, August 29, 2019

8/29/19: Propaganda: Agitating The Inner Ape

Agitation and Integration: two often closely related but very different types of propagandas: one used to provoke internal conflict the other to shape members of a population into a mold. Agitation: The propaganda of insurgency and revolution. Includes how internal enemies are used as scapegoats to manufacture then exploit hatreds as means to an insurgent's end, Mao's view on "the enemy residing in every man" and fitting him into the "Socialist Mold", Hitler's internal agitation, spontaneous volunteer propagandists, and how facts and "truth" are irrelevant to the person burning with primal hatred.



ALSO: 
  • Agitation propaganda during the American Revolution 
  • Triggering revolution by provoking hate? It's easy!
  • Exploiting hatred and the path to genocide
  • Hatred: small investment, high return
  • Agitation and Integration can be used simultaneously
  • Utopia is totalitarian
  • Intellectuals: More susceptible to integration propaganda than dolts
  • Intellectuals and self-bigotry
  • "Can I hate you?"
  • Justification, rationalization and stampeding enraged elephants
  • Agitation to Integration: extremely difficult
  • Successful Agitation + Failed Integration = Mob Rule
  • Winter Is Here
  • Yep. It's a doozy. 
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

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

8/28/19: Monetized Agitation, Unleashing Hatred, Poking The Crackerbear

This quick primer episode is the uncomfortable preface to Jacques Ellul's agitation propaganda. I explore how our Matrix Avatars themselves act as agitation propaganda and the way the informational cyber-swamp has actually managed to monetize it. Also Ellul on the dangerous effects of suppressing innate drives and human nature, the Ideology of Happiness, the universal violent human instinct, the devastating effects of dissolving human domestication to unleash and exploit primal hatred, and the self-defeating ignorance of poking the hibernating Crackerbear.

When it's done, to quote William Munny, "Have a drink, kid."



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

Thursday, August 22, 2019

8/22/19: Propaganda: Contradictions, Agitation Media, Typhoid Zuck

Propaganda's ambiguity and contradictions including: creating tensions while relieving others, an introduction to the companion propagandas: agitation and integration and how they overlap; self-justification and imposed guilt; attachment and ostracizing oneself to join the "enemy; politicization and privatization; "Why die for Danzig?' and how political orphans benefit extremists and authoritarians.



ALSO:
  • Andrew Sullivan on the boomerang
  • Post-Truth hatred and division: a bigger threat than climate change
  • Don't blame the bartender for getting you drunk
  • Twitter, Facebook, and Typhoid Mary
  • Atomic Ping Pong
  • Our personal broadcast stations
  • The Russia investigation saved the Democrats
  • Setting up your triage tent
  • Forget the mob; save yourself
  • Information or Propaganda? Can you tell? Does it even matter?
  • The Matrix & 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

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

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

7/30/19: Propaganda: Manufacturing Proselytes & Militants


Propaganda isn't what you may think. Ellul's ideas on pre-propaganda, propaganda's conditioned reflexes, myths, and "orthopraxy". Including the triggering of active and passive action (activists, influencers, collaborators), widespread participation by "committed" zealots, the separation between thought and action, exploiting the abyss between what we say and what we do, mobilizing men for action counter to their own values, and being unable to reverse ourselves once "action" has begun.



ALSO:
  • Exiling naked sectarians
  • Agitation and organization
  • How the Internet rejuvenates and revives conditioned reflexes
  • Technology indoctrinates us much faster than before
  • Presuppositions, stereotypes, and political education disguised as universities
  • Mind-hacking thru a broken firewall
  • Seizing your intellectual autonomy
  • Excommunication is painful. But Necessary.

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


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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.

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

Monday, July 8, 2019

7/8/19: Wordknapping, Propaganda's Effects, A Reckoning

"He who defines is your master." More on twisting definitions as a malicious propaganda tool, how institutional propaganda systems affect a population, and where a species oblivious of its own shortcomings ultimately ends up.



Also: 
-Communing with the organic dead
-There's no such thing as collective critical thought
-Intelligence as a handicap
-Foreshadowing a Walter Lippmann re-think

*Like it? Share it! F**k The Zuckerbeast & Typhoid Jack. YOU'RE the marketing team.

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*Also check out www.escapingthecave.com

Friday, May 31, 2019

5/31/19: Propaganda 101: Corrupt Data & Distinguishing Truth From Falsehood

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”  
“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” -Walter Lippmann

Also: The difference between clever & smart and more on the DIKW pyramid and what happens when citizens ignore corrupt data.

- Justin Amash and the criticism from the left.

- Mueller's fumble and the Democrat's ensuing demand that he star in their 2020 reality show/campaign ad.

- To Impeach or not Impeach: just do it or STFU!

- Democrats are politically impotent to stop anything Trump does. How does that "protest vote" look now?



More episodes/subscribe:
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Also visit: www.christophermedia.net

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Also on Stitcher and Spotify

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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Thursday, May 9, 2019

5/9/19: The Elephantitis Pandemic; Winter Is Here

Haidt's elephant and how it relates to our constitutional crisis, rising authoritarianism, and our likely dystopian future. "Evolution didn't end with opposable thumbs."
  • The thin veneer of civilization
  • Self-dehumanization
  • Extremists v. Moderate
  • The Social Media Disease



Need more Toddzilla?

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Tuesday, May 7, 2019

5/7/19: Political Orphans & Constitutional Hospice

Parties, their power-first representatives and constituents, fundamentalist ideologues, extremists, etc. are failing everyone. Government institutions are melting down and the faith of the governed along with it.

Hey! What could go wrong?!?




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Saturday, May 4, 2019

5/4/19: The Boomerang Effect: "Hold My Beer"

Confused as to why your self-righteous demands aren't being met? Behold! 
  • Narratives, mythology, religion, and how they bind us together
  • Making Enemies of Allies
  • Haidt's Elephant
  • Surrendering to the Grand Design of Ideological Religions
  • Intellectual refinement and allowing yourself (and others) to make mistakes and change your mind
  • The abandonment of External Truth and Reason
  • Totalitarian and authoritarian creep
  • No Hitler references!



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