propaganda

If you repeat the truth often enough, people will start to disbelieve it.

Coward

The LA times says that Bush is a Coward

Μη γενοιτο

African wisdom

A last one from that magazine I mentioned yesterday. In Africa, they write, the maxim is not the cogito "I think, therefor I am" but "I am because you are".

Nobody really says things like this in real life of course. I mean, just how likely is it that you will hear someone actually soliloquizing the cogito, and I wouldn't expect anyone in Africa to do anything similar.

I do have some personal experience with the source of African wisdom. I once shared a ride with two africans on a hot day in the Netherlands. They were complaing about the heat, and we asked them if it wasn't very hot in Africa. "In Africa", they replied, "people just go to the beach on such a day".

In the Netherlands, you cannot be further from the coast than about 170 km. In Africa, it can be more than 10 times as much, 1700 km.

Know your enemy

I've given up reading the writing that the new-age movement produces a long time ago, but recently some of it landed on my reading table anyway in the form of a magazine. Not much has changed in the last 15 years, but for the readership. It used to be that the new-age movement appealed to a small group, but now... This stuff has become completely mainstream. 250.000 copies of the magazine were shipped to the customers of Durion . That's a lot. My favorite Dutch newspaper has a circulation of 265.000, the largest has a circulation of 763.000.

The magazine was well received, according to the editors. Not surprizing, really. Durion is a company that sells "green power". State-subsidized electricity that is generated by burning "biomass", mostly (treated) wood, municpal waste, and (polluted) river silt. The majority of the readership consists of people working in service- and (semi) government jobs. Thats the mainstream alright.

So what are they reading then, the mainstream reading then, in a magazine that claims to be "an independent magazine about the people and ideas that are changing the world"?

There was an article about dolphins of course, an interview with Sting, something about "the Africa in you", shamanism, Mayas and Incas. Nothing unusual.

The thing that struck me most was a letter the magazine copied from the Human Kindness Foundation, in which the anonymous writer, who claims to be a former member of the Bloods, explains how he was forgiven by the policeman he fired at. The letter can be found here. The magazine has taken a few liberties while translating it. No mention is made of any attempts to verify it's authenticity. The story is not quite as unlikely as the average inspirational fiction, but there are plenty of things that could have easily been clarified, but weren't. The magazine makes no effort to excuse ifself for the lack of veracity, it merely states that they were "moved" by the story. It's fiction, and they know it.

And once you begin to see that these magazine people are not journalists, but fiction writers who create their own truth, you should also begin to see the danger of their ubiquitousness.

The progessive movement that wants to have clean energy, sustainable business practices, fair trade, a solution for the poor, for the most part these days, consists of people that believe this stuff. And mixed in with all the goodie-goodie stuff come statements like "where you discover a repeat pattern in your life, there is an imprint in your energyfield", "the invisble world always manifests itself in the visible world". These people are your nurses, your governement, your children's teachers.

The really scary bit: "In all large cancer centers in the United States, there are nurses and docters that have taken shamanistic courses. We have trained 200 docters and hundreds of nurses".

When asked about the casualties that natural disasters that the Maya indians predicted for 2012 bring with them, the director of the movie the "The Year Zero" says that "Maybe this is the only way the world can be freed from the current power structres".

We need to start a resistance movent.

New address

We're moving. We bought a house and we'll be moving December 1st. MapQuest: Maps: map

Never a good time

When is a good time to mention to people that you don't share their beliefs? Probably never. You should just let them figure out things for themselves, and move on, right? But what if you're finding that there's too much of this already, that their erroneous beliefs have permeated society, and that they need to be stopped because they are the harbingers of the end of rational thought, and a danger to society? Maybe even then, they need to figure it out for themselves.

Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures (Skeptical Inquirer May 2004)

It will take time, and I can hardly wait.

Demographics

I live in bloor west, I bank online and I eat yogurt. Does that make me one of the "young digerati". I guess not, you see, I don't like to use the dry cleaners. Come to think of it, I'm not so young anymore, and not as well-off as I'd like to be. Besides, I always thought the young digerati lived around Yonge and Eglington. I certainly never run into one here. There's more wishful thinking to this than reality. Canadian society as corporations would like to see it, nicely organized.

040910_whoweare_chart.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Should I stop eating yougurt now, to annoy the hell out of the marketeers?

Paraphilias

When conservatives make something illegal, don't you wonder how they even found out it existed? I once read an interview with a girl who grew up among the stricktest religious group in the Netherlands and had had plenty of pre-martital sex. He parents were so strickt that it hadn't occurred to them to tell her that she shouldn't. She had no idea. So, now necrophilia is illegal in California. Fortunately the Californians (many of them hoplophiliacs, no doubt) have left out a lot of fun paraphilias, among which my favorite: agalmatophilia, the sexual arousal by sculptures.

I can't find the article anymore, but I read somewhere that one time, in Paris, there was such an outburst of pygmalionism that the sculptures in the Paris parks had to be dressed to put an end to the practice.

Little prick

Some little prick thought it would be funny to post a comment in which he expresses his sympathy for Hitler on the site run by the company where I work. Tough luck. I don't have a sense of humour and he probably didn't realize was that within two minutes of him posting I had him traced, and was able to identify the machine he was using. Contacting the operator of the network was a breeze. I suppose they could still find him sitting at his desk and take him for "a little chat". Good start of the new schoolyear. I'm sure they can find some "tough love" counselor to deal with him in the San Bernardino County School district.

Labour Day

When I asked a colleague what we celebrate on Labour Day, the answer was: "We celebrate that we have a day off". Not quite. Some people believe that labour day originates in Canada. On September 5, 1882 the Knights of Labour held their first parade in New York, but the idea originates in Canada, with marches held in Toronto and Ottawa in support of 24 leaders of the Toronto Typographical Union, who were imprisoned because membership of a union was an offense against the criminal conspiracy in restraint of trade law.

Goebbels

On February 18, 1943 Joseph Goebbels, holds his famous speech in the Sportpalast, in which he calls for "total war".

A few days later, he notes in his diary: "Diese Stunde der Idiotie. Hätte ich gesagt, sie sollen aus dem dritten Stock des Columbus-Hauses springen, sie hätten es auch getan."

"This hour of lunacy. If I had asked them to jump out of the Columbus Towers third floor, they would have done it, too."

This is what the republicans and the Nazis have in common. Not the ideology, not the methods, but the cynicism.

I wonder what Zell Miller wrote in his diary today.