The Trials and Tribulations of a New Job
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary, General, Living in Korea, Odds and Ends...
It frightens me sometimes to think how long I have been here… tonight I am back in the Pinot Wine Bar in Banpo, Seoul, not far from the Express Bus Terminal, and predictably, just like when I first started coming here all those years ago (when I was working in Korean public elementary schools, God help me!) I couldn’t remember the way (wrong exit from the Bus Terminal again) and ended up getting more early evening exercise than expected…
Right now, the early spring air in Seoul is something of a miasma, as the first clouds of the annual ‘Hwang sa’ (the ‘Floating Yellow Dust’ from the Gobi mentioned previously at times in this blog) waft their noisome way across the brief stretch of ocean separating the Korean peninsula from mainland China and combine with the indigenous smog of an early Seoul evening, and already, close to the end of March, the KTX train coming north from Daegu was filled with the sound of irritated lungs coughing; at both ends and all points in between, where the line of sight allows it, the distant hills are barely distinguishable from the grey, overcast sky. Happily, perhaps, the weather app on my phone is promising rain tomorrow, but towns in the south seem to be having surprisingly high levels of airborne dust. Thus it comes to pass that, as is the case every spring, the true harbinger of the coming summer is not the emerging green buds and leaves on the trees, but a grey sky and a constant cough in the throats of all of those unwise enough to venture out without a dust mask of some description, although some of us also take some dubious medication for it, too.
Alas, what brings me here on what should now be my odd weekend (the new job involves working from Wednesday to Sunday evenings each week; my ‘weekend’ is now Monday and Tuesday) was yet another visa screw-up – immediately after receiving copies of the countersigned contract and the other papers necessary to transfer sponsorship from the old employer to the new, I took the Seoul subway to the correct Immigration Office, and what did I discover? They had gone completely over to a reservation system the previous April, and no longer used the drop-in-take-a-ticket-and-wait-yer-turn method which, ironically perhaps, seems to work so well elsewhere. One might even point out that even when the old Busan office, which used to occupy a couple of floors of the Customs Building down near the harbour, was transplanted into a swanky, squeaky-clean new place a couple of blocks down the road, it was not necessary to enforce the new system because, as anyone who went there could see, customers occupied surprisingly few of the seats whilst waiting… which was quite a contrast with the previous situation, where you could hit the place on a weekday afternoon and find it full of Russian and Chinese sailors in nervous groups in the corners, Korean grannies looking after Filipino-Korean grandchildren as they ran around screaming and shouting, and various odd European and American English speakers regarding the melée with a mixture of confusion and amusement on their faces as they were waiting their turn.
Anyway… so… I then began a furious KakaoTalk chat session from my cell phone with the recruiter who was involved this time and who – alas – did not seem to understand that it was no longer possible to take a ticket and wait – you had to go online and make a reservation for some time in the near(ish) future, and – double alas! – it seems that the Seoul office already had no less than an eighteen-day backlog of applicants. It rapidly became apparent, also, that I was far from the only foreigner with this problem, as the enquiry desk off to the right-hand side of the office was swamped and just to add unwanted fuel to the already blazing fire, after talking with the female member of staff there (via my own cell phone) the recruiter demanded that I get the name of the office staff member so that she could lodge an official complaint because “she is so rude!”. I had to talk her down from her state of High Dudgeon (is there such a thing as Low Dudgeon???), and she went online and reserved a time slot for me, which (as I sit here writing) is tomorrow afternoon. And then back home and lessons on Wednesday, possibly after being up for hours with little sleep prepping up.
It’s one of the stranger aspects of being in a country for a long time, and travelling between towns to wherever the next job takes you, that you realise one day, with something approaching (let’s call it) amusement, that you could probably write a whole raft of blog entries about your experience with the Immigration Offices alone; it could be a whole series. Likewise, the strange emergence of the requirement for an annual medical check, something not deemed a necessity when you arrived here with an entry visa stamped in your passport, a suitcase and a couple of large wheelie bags full of books and stuff, and a slow trail of boxes sent by surface mail from Taiwan for cheapness, but which was suddenly applied by the customs people immediately after Lee Myung-bak was elected President at the the of 2007. Somewhere, when it was out of your sight, that nice square wheelie bag that you purchased new in Taipei was ripped apart at the seams, presumably by a Customs minion, and had to be unceremoniously discarded once ensconced in one’s new home. And not a word about compensation…
The documentary requirements quickly accumulated: first, they wanted you to take a health check each year; simultaneously, they started demanding criminal record printouts, in my case from the Metropolitan Police Database, which alone took at least two months. But pretty soon, this was considered insufficient – next, they wanted the copy of your original Degree deposited with the offices to be apostilled (and since it was a copy rather than the original, this meant that it first had to be notarised. In England. And then apostilled!), and finally, they wanted the (original) criminal record to be apostilled, too!
This made the provision of documents an expensive venture in insanity, both in terms of total price and in the amount of time required (as procuring a fresh criminal record printout could take upward of three months). For myself, I think the final straw came when I signed the contract for the year at the KDLI outside of Icheon in Gyyeonggi-do. It seems that they had decided that they should also have their own copies of the same documents provided by the applicants, and this could not have happened at a worse time for me personally, as the cost of relocation had crippled me financially and resulted in my new five-million-won credit card being commuted to (a more sensible) two million limit; it took an agonising FIVE MONTHS to get the CRC (from the Met in London) apostilled and with a notarised, apostilled Degree copy into the hands of Captain Lee, who was the foreigner liaison officer (the Korean Army were in charge of the place, or so it seemed; I never did quite figure that part out).
Even worse, two years after I graduated from what was originally CCAT in Cambridge (now the Anglia Ruskin University), the government of the time (Conservative) decided that it was appropriate for all of the former colleges and polytechnics, who used to issue Degrees on behalf of the CNAA (Council for the National Accreditation of Awards) or other existing universities should now become self-accrediting in their own right. This had the unfortunate consequence of consigning past CNAA records into the care of the Open University somewhere in north London, from whence (the last time I asked) it was not possible to obtain copies or reproductions in the event of loss or destruction. So I became very panicky at the prospect of having to send my one copy of my Degree back to England for whatever reason… even worse, institutions like EPIK (English Program In Korea) also demanded at least two sealed transcripts from said university, which the changes since my graduation have likewise rendered impossible, thus limiting opportunities for employment here, although I would have to say that I would not, nowadays and at my age, consider a new EPIK position to be appropriate or desirable. Those days are over!
The final nail in the coffin of EPIK applications, however, is that applicants from the UK and Australia now also have to submit copies of their birth certificates (why is that, I wonder???), something rather difficult because (a) I would have to fly back to find the silly thing because it is doubtful that my parents would be able to locate it, and (b) Korean employers tend to be rather mean with allowances for time off and it would, in any case, probably cost the equivalent of two months’ salary payments just for the air tickets! It might be possible to do this between jobs but it might also mean having to produce fresh apostilled documents, adding more cost in terms of money and time, the regulation here being that an applicant is not required to submit new documents provided that they are out of Korea for a period of less than three months.
Anyway, getting back to the main story… the odd factor in the equation in fact takes me back to a brief few minutes at the Suwon Immigration Office at the start of my time with the KDLI in 2013, which I had to travel to by public transport (seems like that’s something of a theme here, too) and at my own expense after a morning session of four lessons. I had no idea whether things would be okay, but I was assured by Mr. Han from Busan, the recruiter who brought me here from Taiwan all those years ago, that all I needed to transfer my visa was a set of four documents: passport, ARC, Letter of Release and a copy of the signed contract, and of course, I was well informed by his experience. And as it transpired, the process took no more than about fifteen minutes, tops, and the staff there turned out to be a pleasant group of girls who liked a laugh, although they did express surprise at the fact that I had resigned suddenly from the last position, which was (sadly) the seventeen-month extended contract offered to me by the same public elementary school who had employed me before I went to Busan to work for YBM… but I have mentioned this before…
“Ohhh, it was terrible!” I told them. Well, I think they believed me…
But we should consider from this anecdote that there was no actual problem with the Suwon Immigration Office themselves; the necessary documents had been deposited when I moved from Yangsan to Seomyeon, Busan in 2011 (and in fact, as I sit here writing this, these documents are still current, because circumstances have, yet again, prevented me from leaving the country since I did a visa run to Fukuoka in 2010), and the only documentary change they required was essentially notification of the new employer and the contract to prove it. No, it was the KDLI insisting that they were entitled to their own set of apostilled docs that caused so much grief; paying for them involved giving money to a friend so that I could use their credit cards. And the whole thing had to be done one afternoon in a PC room in Changwon – we had to find one where we could print the receipt web pages as proof of purchase. I kid you not!
So we should perhaps also include a nod of gratitude to the staff at the Immigration Offices, who often have to work with fractious and volatile foreigners with whom communication is difficult. I have never forgotten that it was one of their number, Mr. Kang, who at that time was working at the airport on Jeju Island, who came to my rescue when I landed there after flying out from Taiwan with only a wedge of New Taiwan Dollars in my wallet and none of the local currency, having received my final salary payment from Carol Hui, the secretary of my dubious employer and then left in something of a hurry; I actually had to overstay my visa AGAIN because I was waiting for someone to deliver the ticket before I could pay the overstay fine at the customs office and fly out. Despite the fact that it was late at night and the currency bod had already closed shop for the evening, Mr. Kang persuaded him to Do The Dirty Deed for me. Likewise, much more recently, my stint down in Geoje was cut short by the unavailablity of a new position from my then-employer, who actually sent my Letter of Release to the Geoje Immigration Office the same day as the semester ended, but somehow didn’t think to tell me about it immediately (and why was that, I wonder???); I was then going backwards and forwards between the Geoje and Masan offices for days while they worked out which one was responsible for handling me, and which was finally resolved when Masan allowed me an extra month thereafter to find a new job. They might have offered me even more time, but sometimes, perhaps, a beggar can’t be a chooser. Or cheeky, come to that…
After my visa experiences in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, I’m sure that my readers could share many similar ones of their own. Suffice it to say that the root of these procedures is the security of their countries, and while we may complain at the levels of inconvenience that they impose upon us, they are not usually trying to treat us unfairly; one could hardly blame them if they had a stereotype of an eternally-complaining (and usually, I don’t know, kind of pale-skinned?) foreigner who somehow seems to have an unreasonable belief that they have an automatic right of abode just because they happened to be there. It might be a good idea to step back for a moment and ponder the situation which finally evolved vis-a-vis the required documents here, because in the end, it seems to have reached an equitable balance between establishing the probity of the applicant and not imposing unnecessarily regular demands for new apostilled papers. Once the documents have been submitted to the local Immigration Office, they are scanned and retained in their database; thereafter, they remain current until such a time as the visa holder leaves the country for three months or more – meaning that it is now possible to leave the country for an extended period and still retain the visa, resuming legal activities here upon your return. It is also possible to stay in the country for up to six months between jobs by transferring to a D-10 (Jobseeker) visa and then (in my own case) transferring back to an E-2 once a new contract is signed. This is not a cheap process, however.
I suppose we could say that what often seems to happen in the case of immigration arrangements is that everything seems almost perfect, when all of a sudden, we find that there’s an annoying fly in the ointment, except that where immigration is concerned, the fly tends to involve an awful lot of financial and temporal expense. In addition, because a negative result vis-a-vis a visa (my God, I’m alliterating again!) could be catastrophic, the foreigner feels nervous and therefore, despite probably the best efforts and intentions of the Immigration Office staff, the whole thing collapses – like when (I was told) a loud American at an Immigration Office one day lost it and started abusing (verbally) the staff who were attending him, so they cancelled his visa right there and then, and he was out. As I found out first with my experience at Suwon and then more recently in Daegu, a little patience and humour goes a long way.
In the event, it took a huge amount of said ‘patience’ to get the thing sorted. Why? Because when I went up to the Immigration desk at the allotted time, the first thing the (lady) officer said was to ask where the Proof of Residence was; as it turned out, the new company had not included this in the original bundle that they gave me. Secondly, I was told at the time that it should be in my Inbox because it was sent by e-mail, but when I returned home that night, before sitting down to do at least some minimal prep before hitting the sack, I checked both of the e-mail accounts to which documents had been sent by the company, and could find said attachment in neither of them. Finally, it just so happened that the company manager was in the US at the time (!!!), and it took some four hours to get a copy of the housing contract faxed directly to the Immigration Office to complete the process. Again: I kid you not.
What we can observe here is the contrast between a straightforward transfer of visa sponsorship (because that’s what it was, and that’s how it should have been) and one compounded by inattentiveness on the part of one (or both) parties… there was at least one other complicating factor here, but I will not labour the point. I think it’s fair to say that in this particular case, difficulties arose because of the habit amongst the natives to not discuss with (or to make aware) their co-workers about what they are doing in the event that a crisis emerges and the co-worker has to (however temporarily) carry the can for them (a point which, oddly enough, figures large in the “Lesson Planning” component at my new employer…). I’ve seen it so many times, but this time it was almost catastrophic… you can’t mess about with Immigration, no matter how sympathetic they themselves may be.
As for myself… sometimes it feels as if I have a huge pot of ointment, the top is always open and it’s always so clogged with flies that it looks like a good old Spotted Dick pudding (but where’s the fucking CUSTARD???); but even though their involvement in my life is so fundamental and potentially life-changing, it would be wrong to single the Immigration Offices and the Ministry of Justice out because they are not the only insects trapped in my personal pot of cream. The ‘trouble’ is that they require a stack of documents for compliance, and so many things can go wrong along the way; this is my main point here.
As an illustration of other complicating factors in my life here, recently, a letter arrived which (I was told) was an invitation to partake in cancer screening, as I am now in my (ahem) fifties , and It’s The Done Thing (meaning, there is probably a legal requirement involved); Joseph, my manager in the previous position, hinted that it might be free (well, whoopee…). And I have been lamenting for a long time now that the requirement to plan lessons and find or design materials (and seek out materials online) involves a lot of sitting down; the lifestyle is simply not healthy, so I have been adjusting my diet accordingly, but this sedentary occupation also means that losing weight is not easy.
And the involvement of the Seoul Immigration Office in the Big Picture does seem to complicate things further, but in the end, like myself, the staff there are merely small units within the big machine, and patience and politeness are the lubricants for all of the dubious cogwheels; and as I adumbrated long ago, whether we like (or understand) it or not, when we arrive upon the shores of Korea we are the real ambassadors of our peoples; if our complaint with regard to peoples such as the Koreans is that we are seen through eyes that cannot see us afresh, maybe we should remember that actions speak louder than words, and maybe the actions of those belonging to our own nations here, in the past, may not have been as good or as beneficial as we might like, and the only way to counter the negatives is to be positive ourselves.
The (Alleged) Death of Dialogue
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Gripes
What follows is an edited and extended rant in response to an online friend’s link to an article in The Federalist. [1]
As a remote but entertained observer of politics both in the USA and Europe (and therefore, by extension, in my homeland, the UK), I am sometimes – nay often – left gobsmacked by the execrably low level of public discourse. The USA is a place where ‘free speech’ is allegedly enshrined in their Constitution, which is all fine and dandy, but very often nowadays you will notice two things about it: that it is routinely abused, on the one hand to cause gratuitous offence, and on the other in a narcissistic manner, as if the very fact that one could speak freely means that what you say needs no prior critical faculty in the grey matter (read: bullshit filter), yet in the end, peoples’ intolerance will be the death of it.
When it comes to the right of free speech – something I would never wish to deny to anyone – it does seem to me these days that its abuse in the US stems from the notion that ‘freedom of speech’ equals the right to say literally anything, which common sense clearly suggests it does not. In particular, the tendency of people in positions of financial or political power (I shall leave religion to one side for the purposes of this diatribe) to spout out anything that they think their audience wants to hear (with the aim of gleaning more votes) has been demonstrated in abundance during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, more particularly, one thinks, by the losing party, meaning that onlookers have been alternately buffeted between hysterical laughter and mindless horror for the duration. We won’t continue to trouble ourselves with the fates of the sore losers, except, perhaps, to note with a little more amusement that among the so-called ‘snowflake’ population – young millennials who protested so vigorously against the possibility that The Donald, who seems to originate from outside the rarified atmosphere of normal political circles, might actually win and allegedly had to retire to ‘process’ the ultimate (negative, from their point of view) outcome – were often demonstrable hypocrites who did not even bother to actually vote (the startling figure of 48% non-voters among that group of electors has been bandied about). [2]
‘Free speech’ means that one should be allowed to express one’s opinion without fear of persecution. It does not mean freedom from criticism (which is a different barrel of sardines entirely), or freedom to libel or slander others. Yet this seems increasingly to be what many people desire – the enshrined right to vilify, demean and otherwise generally insult people without fear of legal or physical retribution. To this we might add the increasing general intolerance of many to anything but their own opinion; however, this only serves to remind us of my previous remarks in these pages because what we are seeing is the expression of narcissism; they don’t like to be reminded that their echo chamber is not private.
I have personally been shocked (but on reflection, not necessarily surprised) at the kind of malicious talk of some in the anti-Trump camp, who have thought that their candidate was ‘the One’, when in fact she (yes, I’m talking about Hillary, not Bernie or any of the others) was clearly ill, received more than twice as much in donations as her main opponent and still lost, flip-flopped between all kinds of stated positions and, being part of the Rarified Few, patently thought that the election was hers, like some kind of entitlement. This was a person who would have taken the US and everywhere else (and their dog) to World War III, which was clearly what some of her major financial donors wanted. As for The D., I would say that we should sit back and see what he is able to do. At the time of writing, he still hasn’t assumed his elected office and one would at least like to be charitable enough to suggest that he surely couldn’t be as bad as some of his predecessors…
What brought me to the keyboard today was an article linked on Facebook from The Federalist, which appears to be an American on-line publication with a more right-of-centre slant than one tends to encounter on a routine basis. This is called The Death of Expertise and was written by Professor Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College (which sounds kind of ominous)[1]. I read his article and while I would agree with him broadly as to his main points, I have a fundamental disagreement with him when it comes to the desirability of ‘experts’. Partly, this is a humorous hangover from previous participation in the UK business environment, where we often say that ‘X’ is an unknown quantity, and a ‘spurt’ is a drip under pressure, but also partly that people are often described as ‘experts’ without any guarantee that their alleged ‘expertise’ will lead inevitably to favourable results or situations.
But I would like to assert my view that a person like myself with a background in practical science is hardly the kind who could be branded (as I think this author is trying to do) as a ‘non-expert’ (although in commenting on this, I have to point out that I am not an American citizen myself, and have no desire to be, the way things there seem to be going). One of the reasons I gave up on science is that much of it is falsified and cannot be supported by the data as they stand (or to put it another way, current paradigms fail to account for all the anomalies), and the ‘healthy option’ of having a range of competing hypotheses which could replace the current paradigm is barely ever mentioned because of the emotional, financial and career-related attachments that practitioners enjoy, and do not want to lose. Someone like myself will always be critical of authors like this because when they write, they are really trying to justify themselves and the system which supports them. To take a parallel from science when reading an article like this, one has to remember that waaayyyy back in the year that I was born (cough, cough), Thomas S. Kuhn was already lamenting, in his landmark tome “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, the fact that ‘normal science’ had given way to ‘verification’ of the paradigm rather than trying to challenge it; likewise, in his own book “Against Method”, Paul K. Feyerabend asserted (against a wall of criticism) that ‘normal science’ involved an anarchistic process in which the progress of a scientist’s career – if successful – involved an awful lot of schmoozing and ass-licking. This is essentially what we are seeing here, in the political context.
The author is talking here about the larger political arena, and while he is right to lambaste those who criticise the practitioners in this field on the basis of their personal delusions and acquired (inculcated) opinions, he unfortunately shows where he is coming from when he starts name-dropping with some of the 20th century’s greatest unhung criminals – the likes of Kissinger and Brzezinski. What he is really saying is that when you criticise ‘experts’, you are criticising the ‘status quo’. This is, in itself, wilful obfuscation: we would all acknowledge that (a) a brain surgeon is a virtually unchallengeable ‘expert’ in his field and (b) virtually any commentator (other than another ‘expert’ brain surgeon) would be unable to contradict said brain surgeon’s opinion as to methodology with any reasonably sophisticated or even meaningful argument. However, the brain surgeon operates in an area where peer review (and managerial and other feedback) works to prevent disasters as far as possible; colleagues in the field would be able not just to criticise his practice, but to make positive suggestions. One cannot say this regarding (for example) broad areas of science, where very often an erroneous paradigm is maintained at all costs, and even the direct observation of phenomena (and the data resulting from research) is deliberately obscured so that questioning the data and their interpretation is made extremely difficult. And the more difficult observation becomes, the more outlandish the claims; I have made my opinions clear about this in a range of blogs, but not before undertaking a lot of reading and attempting to understand the nature of the criticisms as well as the phenomena being observed.
To comprehend the nature of my criticism here and my continued reference to the practice of science when the author’s original theme was political, consider the following: the practice of engaging militarily inferior ‘enemies’ at great distance from the homeland mirrors the scientists’ practice of constantly attempting to place phenomena in sufficient isolation, be it in space or time, that casual observation is in fact rendered impossible. Examples from cosmology include the so-called ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Black Holes’, not to mention ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’. We are still living in an age where the power of stars and even the heating of planetary interiors is thought to be due to radioactive decay even though more logical hypotheses such as EU now seem more relevant.
In both cases, when non-practitioners desire to see things for themselves, chances are that practitioners will defend their contemptible little patch up to and including litigation, enactment of specific and targeted new laws (as has been seen in the aftermath of Fukushima in Japan, and now elsewhere) and in the final resort, outright murder of critics. Even U.S. Presidents are not immune from this.
We see also that “Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School.” In other words, he is a well-integrated component of the ruling system whose career is closely bound to its survival; his interest is political as well as practical. But his ‘expertise’ is such that he could never come to me and tell me how to improve a chromate conversion coating on zinc by altering the pH, or likewise how to remove metals from solution by a similar method. I also doubt if he could tell me anything useful about soil husbandry, animal rearing or solar or wind power if my final disenchantment with politics should persuade me to head for the hills. MY education, training and experience therefore lead me to distrust HIS ‘expert’ opinion and to suspect that there is a subtext to this article, and to think that I am right (Kissinger, Brzezinski). I therefore challenge his assertion that a person like myself should be considered unfit to pass comment in the political arena, and advise Americans to be even less tolerant. In reality, he’s trying to tell his fellow citizens how to think.
The kind of obfuscation seen in the scientific context is now rampant in the political arena, where the broad “West” is clearly trying to justify starting World War III by demonising countries such as Russia and China and dependencies such as Syria, and their prime agents are their puppet media; where are the signs that we need to understand the nations in question? How is Russia, in particular, posing any kind of ‘threat’ to the West? The ‘system’ controls the media (do what they say, or lose your career), demonstrating how dangerous the ‘gatekeepers’ can be; and the fact that many modern American laws seem to be the result of industry lobbying and graft rather than solid scientific investigations and/or popular opinion demonstrates the falsehood of this so-called ‘democracy’ itself. Surely modern America is an obvious plutocracy when such things can happen? And when people in the know reveal those things which the system wants to keep hidden, they are not labelled as ‘citizens exercising their democratic right to free speech’, they are ‘whistleblowers’, demonised, legislated against and maybe even murdered for their efforts and opinions. Yet, for some reason, this system advertises itself as the epitome of democratic sanity. Perhaps we should remember that the incoming President got himself elected by (a) inflaming the ‘mainstream media’ to get their outlandish reactions and (b) made (and is still making) extensive use of alternative media to get his messages out. That is democracy and inclusion. The ‘mainstream media’ represent the exact opposite.
Unfortunately (from my own point of view), those who claim ‘expertise’ in the political arena must always be subjected to the most rigorous criticism, because their errors (which may be in concert with the interests of large industrial entities) are of a nature where the consequences of their execution may be dire and when they themselves are dead, other people’s descendants have to handle the downstream sequelae. One would not wish to support a system, as can be seen in so many countries these days, where there is sufficient obfuscatory power that legal systems can be co-opted to actually prevent people from uncovering and interpreting its inconvenient data. Increasingly, so-called ‘liberal democracies’ have been enacting laws to prevent both journalists and citizens from discovering and disseminating information about things that affect them (like Fukushima), the media are dumbed-down and demonstrably complicit in the obfuscatory process and the media themselves shout down anyone who questions anything the system doesn’t like to be in the public arena. This behaviour even extends to sciences like cosmology, which is an utter disgrace to the broader scientific enterprise.
Why all the obfuscation, you may ask? What is the point of all of this? Well, the alternative word for ‘obfuscation’ here would be ‘occultation’, yet when we think of the word ‘occult’, science is the last major field of human endeavour that comes to mind, showing that this methodology of disguise has worked extremely well so far. Science is just as much an ‘occulted’ activity as any Hermetic Order, and therefore its practitioners seek to make access difficult for the ‘uninitiated’; likewise practitioners of politics and the performing arts often have similar involvements, which they often give away with their words and gestures. Mark Passio goes into this in some depth here [3]:
So thank you, Professor, but you’re not an ‘expert’ in any area which interests me. Rather the contrary: from what you are saying, it seems like you are trying to justify a system which essentially disrespects the opinions of intelligent and experienced onlookers like myself, and represent said system’s ossification and elitism. In my opinion, this kind of haughty commentary is only a step or two away from criminalising political dissent… oh, wait…
[1] http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/#.WG8fBOJEFTy.twitter
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3942278/PIERS-MORGAN-Memo-millennials-awful-feeling-ve-got-called-losing-happens-want-know-win-stop-whinging-bit-learn-lessons-Trump.html
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1V98DsNXi0
Minor edits: Sunday 12th February, 2017.
Why All Taxation Is Theft
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Gripes
Damn right!
This is an anarchist talking… something we need to understand better, if only because current political philosophies are so bankrupt and common sense is sorely needed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6C1M_7BzZ0
Always remember: Theoretical anarchism is only ever enlightening.
Discovering Terence McKenna and the Tyranny of Neoteny
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, The Destruction of History
The greatest benefit of having a resource like the Internet is the way it makes so much information available. The chance of making serendipitous discoveries is enormously increased by being able to interrogate and cross-reference vast databases, such as those of Google and YouTube, and this birthday weekend was no exception… I listened again to someone I had heard of previously and respected but did not view often enough, and discovered that he had hit a nail quite squarely on the head some time before he died…
Also, since I begin writing this piece of extended bile, over the big pond in America they had an election, and what a surprise, the candidate favoured by the press lost! And in the process of trying to condition the electorate into believing that Killary was a better bet than Flump (as if this really represented any kind of reasonable choice), they lost their own credibility forever. The notion that the American press are ‘free and impartial’ is gone, and people are looking to alternative news sources for a true account of reality – and Europe has wasted no time in trying to enact legislation to stifle the voices of the genuinely ‘free’ sources. But more of that later…
To celebrate my 53rd birthday (quietly), and by invitation, I took a bus to Changwon that Friday [8] afternoon and stayed at my customary motel. The ‘party’ was, alas, merely four of us, but of course, it’s the fact that those few people cared enough to come and give whatever gifts they felt were fitting for the occasion that is most important.
We’ll skip over that event, and cut to the early hours of the morning: munching on a couple of cheese toast sandwiches (my avoidance of gluten-rich products tossed temporarily out of the window due to a case of the munchies), I found that there was plenty of unsecured wifi available to that room, and watched a very interesting two-hour lecture by the late Terence McKenna:
(The point in question is at about 31:30 minutes into play time)
For those of you not familiar with this person, he became famous for his studies of ethnobotany and the relationships between psychedelic plant extracts and shamanism, and their use as entheogens [1]. Like many of those who have sampled potent psychedelics (although this is not absolutely necessary, of course), his mind became much more open to ideas which conventional ‘education’ (read: ‘social control propaganda’) would otherwise stifle and suppress, and he made a set of remarks which, even at that early hour and with a masticated glob of cheese toast sliding down my throat, struck a chord and made me realise that he was discussing precisely what I myself had been suspecting for a very long time, although perhaps using a rather different phraseology: the inculcation of a state of neoteny in humans as a means of social and psychological control.
McKenna’s extended description of ‘neoteny’ was not as accurate as I myself would have preferred, although his initial definition was fair enough: in animals, neoteny consists of the retention of larval (or other immature) body features whilst simultaneously being able to reproduce. In other words, the retention of juvenile morphological features of the species in the adult morph; this is also referred to as paedomorphism or paedomorphosis. When I was younger, the most commonly-quoted example of neoteny was that of the Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), in which retention of neotenous features is postulated to be part of a survival mechanism in environments which tend to be low in available iodine, which is required for the thyroid gland to produce the growth hormone thyroxine. Experimentation showed that administration of iodine, either as an injection or in food, permits an increase in thyroxine production and consequent metamorphosis to the adult (salamander) form.
The main neotenous features observed in Axolotls are the retention of the larval tail and external gills, as well as underdeveloped fore and hindlimbs, but they are able to produce viable sex cells, and thus also reproduce. More widely, however, as the term refers to the retention of juvenile features in adults, there are notionally ‘neotenous’ features which separate humans morphologically from both supposedly ‘ancestral’ primates (surviving apes have more extensive body hair than humans, for example) and other cultural or other ethnic groupings within the species (see [2]). Interestingly, commentators such as the late Lloyd Pye also pointed to a range of such features which, it was claimed, constituted evidence that humans were not, in fact, apes [3].
McKenna postulated that humans had historically been kept in a state of psychological neoteny, and that their immature mental state mirrored that of their bodies, which in fact more resemble those of baby (or even foetal) apes rather than the adults of other ape species. Cultures supply individuals with a simplified and likely mythologised explanation of reality, which is extremely convenient for those parties whose interests are well-served by the distraction and ignorance of others, and such a mechanism therefore keeps people in a psychological state which is more easy to control – alienated and psychotic. He has absolutely hit it on the head.
McKenna’s interest in psychedelics and entheogens led him to suggest that they allow the individuals who use them to mature intellectually beyond their inculcated psychologically neotenous (read: ‘juvenile’) state and see the control system for what it is. It is interesting to note that in this lecture, he points out that he did not personally encourage or assist others in the use of psychedelics, which probably suggests why he was still lucid as the years advanced whereas another well-known tripper, Timothy Leary, seems to have become rather a wreck later in life.
For our purposes, however, it is probably sufficient to realise that a service such as the Internet functions rather like a psychedelic, in the sense that the abundance of stimulation (information) and connections between events can allow us to form a more accurate picture of the world than our cultures (read: ‘mutual self-repeaters of the propaganda of our would-be controllers’) desire us to see; specifically, the artificial limits to our horizons imposed by conventional publishing and media have been subverted by the democratisation of technology and information. Thus, rather than listening to the radio we might instead subscribe to a set of podcasts or Internet streams which we feel present us with more representative viewpoints, opinions and information; and now virtually anyone can create these, and since many of those who do so are likewise in a psychologically neotenised state, we have to use our intellectual faculties (in the sense that McKenna uses the term ‘intellectual’ here – in his own words: “Anyone who has figured it out”) to distinguish the diamonds from the dross. A huge amount of the material available on the Internet is pure disinformation, intended to create disorientation and keep observers distracted, and it takes critical faculties to avoid this, something which seems to be a bit of a stumbling-lock for modern educational paradigms. It goes without saying that because of the democratisation of the transmission process, we can access it repeatedly and at our own convenience, rather than as and when the originators (formerly the dominant TV and radio networks) desire.
My own experience with the Internet since 1997 seems to be that no source of information is one hundred per cent. reliable, neither at the institutional nor the individual level; an opinion is just an opinion (a point which is very important to bear in mind when, for example, you are a student using a textbook which is periodically ‘updated’ to a ‘new edition’ – it is surprising how much content may be replaced, but does this necessarily imply that what was replaced was somehow ‘no longer important’? Who decides these things? And did those bits of information cease to be? Surely the phenomena they describe are still with us?). Those with authoritarian tendencies would surely like us to believe otherwise, but that only undermines their own credibility, as the disparity between reality and their delusions is often clearly visible. We form a much more accurate picture of reality in our minds when we realise that every fact should be verified by as many sources as possible; this way, truths link with each other and non-facts are increasingly excluded [7]. Paradoxically, perhaps, we need to keep an open mind at all times, lest we dismiss facts in error by excessive scepticism.
The simple fact that so many authoritarians would like to limit free speech and to regulate what can and cannot be shared over a vast network like the Internet only serves to demonstrate that effective communication makes hiding secrets difficult, and the people who have the greatest desire to hide secrets are those whose (neoteny-based) power would be destroyed by it. How odd, then, that it is the authoritarian who loves to suggest that “if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear”!
“Let him that is without sin cast the first stone” is my response to that one!
At the heart of what McKenna was adumbrating, however, is the notion that by limiting and diverting the natural process of information accumulation through education and experience (and of course, by deliberate distraction in the form of the media, organised sports, etc.), authority keeps the majority of the citizenry in a psychologically and emotionally stunted, immature state, with a view to controlling them by imposing artificial barriers which people themselves then reinforce with stereotyped (culture-determined) behaviour (a point often repeated by our own dear David Icke). The citizenry therefore remain in an essentially psychologically juvenile or ‘neotenised’ state which is self-perpetuating for as long as those same citizens are prepared to tolerate the disinformed ‘peer pressure’ which supports the current paradigm. It is only when they are prepared to reject this that wider and more accurate viewpoints become possible, and the neotenous ‘spell’ is magically broken.
In the past, when I personally have thought about these things, I have often considered what I call the ‘tyranny of the familiar’ – the fact that too many people exist within a culturally delimited ‘comfort zone’ and are unwilling to venture beyond it for fear of the great discomfort involved, which of course also includes the derision of peers due to the pernicious bubble of “… but everybody knows that..!” or “… but we’ve always done it this way!” … so how about this for a new concept? Try to be an enlightener and an opener of doors, rather than a mere repeater for the contemptible statist/collectivist controllers? Do you really need to be one of their robots? Indeed, what proof could you offer to others that you are truly an individual and a unique thinker? Where do the limits of your ‘knowledge’ really lie? When you read a book or a news article, are you doing so with a sufficiently critical mindset, or do you simply accept things as ‘facts’ because an authority figure is broadcasting them? Where does the ‘authority figure’ get his or her ‘facts’ from?
This is, I think, something we all need to discover. For example, when we look at the lauded ‘achievements’ of ‘civilisation’, what are we really seeing? If achievement requires venturing beyond the socially-enforced bounds of behaviour or thinking (here we might, as an illustration of ‘limits’, pause to reflect upon what is considered ‘acceptable’ to the current cosmological paradigm), is what we see from any particular era in human existence a set of creations produced by the thinking of free minds, or merely ‘reflections’ of the current thinking which seemed at the time to be ‘free’ simply because it was not subjected to realistic criticism, as it was actually conforming with the accepted and current ‘norms’? What is ‘civilisation’ really worth? One would venture to suggest that ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ are as separate as the stock market is from the wider economy, yet we allow an illogical mental link between the two to persist and the result is extremely damaging.
Worse, how about the bizarre position of an archetypal ‘Power User’ of computers, a stereotype which seems to have emerged very rapidly in tandem with the aforementioned democratisation of computing technology, where a person could be very adept in the use of a particular software package, but legendarily could not figure out how to turn the machine on and off? One would like to think that this was merely the stuff of urban legend, except I have known (and still know) so many people whom this characterises exactly – and not solely in relation to the use of computers either (you can find tons of real-life examples at Computer Stupidities [6]). People in ignorance (and I myself could be one of them, as a single person’s knowledge is strictly limited, which was Socrates’ most memorable point) assuming that certain types of behaviour are correct, when in fact they don’t realise what they are doing or whether it is beneficial or harmful. I have a feeling, personally, when I step back for a moment and ask myself what is really happening when I undertake even the most trivial activity, such as the substances I use for cleaning or personal hygiene, for example, that my own ignorance or refusal to acknowledge that my own actions may be in some way detrimental to the wider environment is thoroughly reprehensible. But I don’t have the whole story… and preventing people from having the whole story is they key to controlling them. ‘Someone’ decides which ‘news’ is worthy of publication and which is not, according to their own agenda; ‘someone’ decides which information is worthy of inclusion in the pages of WikiPedia, and actively removes anything deemed ‘incorrect’ according to their prejudices, rather than factuality; and ‘someone’ has been responsible for the repeated loss of knowledge throughout history through the destruction and looting of libraries, achieved by a hidden hand manipulating vast masses of people. War, in particular, is very effective in this regard as a plausible ‘excuse’ for ‘unavoidable’ damage, and a very convenient and lucrative smokescreen behind which to hind all manner of evil deeds – the wilful but clandestine destruction of society’s wisdom being one of them. We are constantly hammered by the idea that war is somehow ‘unavoidable’, when in fact, it’s just a rich man’s game, and the rest of us losers are expected to foot the bill, both financially and in terms of lives lost.
We come full circle when we consider the entertainment industries, whole sectors of society which are purely engaged in making ridiculous (and perhaps unjustifiable) profits from indulgence and distraction. It has not escaped my observation that these industries, whose business is essentially the promotion and exploitation of pointless flim-flam and the concomitant emotional responses to stereotyped visual tropes, are also intimately involved with the attempt to predetermine what users may or may not actually do online, not realising perhaps that this will eventually lead to a hypocritical and parasitic industry which will self-destruct as the Internet becomes little more than a means of consumption (or maybe it already has – witness Hollywood’s constant obsession with ‘sequels’, and when they proved to be insufficient, they started on the business of ‘prequels’… as our dear friend D. Icke often puts it, “You just couldn’t make it up!”).
Additionally, the bankers don’t even want us to have real money any more, but want to replace that purely with numbers in (their) databases. Thus they will control everything in our lives, and we will be forever and irretrievably ‘neotenised’ and increasingly dysfunctional and incapable at a personal level. Is this not a despicable and tyrannical vista to behold? It’s already happening in places like Denmark [9]. Or maybe people will develop a bartering system to replace money when their ‘governments’ only allow them to have a bank account and a piece of plastic. At least when the predicted economic collapse arrives, people will still be able to trade!
We do have to note, however, that the attempts to censor and limit access to the Internet may already be demonstrably self-defeating. For example, remote payments by such means as credit cards. As I have been living in Korea for such a long time, my bank (in England) now refuses to send items such as new cheque books, credit and debit cards to me as they have (apparently arbitrarily or whimsically) imposed an ’embargo’ on certain countries, and have told me repeatedly that South Korea is among these, however illogical that may seem. The entertainment industry loves to use the Internet as an excuse to force people to cough up more cash, but maybe is ignoring the fact that electronic payments are still an impossibility for huge numbers of the global population, and for the dumbest of reasons. But as a lot of their modern products are also correspondingly dumb and unworthy of purchase, why not just keep your cash to yourself and strangle them out of existence with the power of your wallet? Let’s face it, you won’t miss them…
At the same time, in the visual realm of what are often referred to as ‘special effects’, there has been a strong tendency to create a kind of ‘virtual reality’ which is clearly intended to be, ultimately, sufficiently indistinguishable from the real world that the latter can comfortably be ignored, as if our whole lives were being eked out on a film set – or rather that the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ can no longer be detected easily, making the visual validation of falsehoods much more straightforward. And the fact that some precious people seem to think that their own behaviour should emulate the tantrums and follies of the various mind-manipulated moppet celebrities forced down their throats by the so-called ‘entertainment industry’ merely underlines a point in my previous articles about the dangers of narcissism – such a person is very easy to manipulate – and we can’t fail to notice that narcissistic, self-important personalities are also especially prevalent in the world of entertainment. Again, this is a kind of maintained neoteny, representing the intentional juvenilisation of personality, and consequent mass juvenilisation by imitation. Beware of the formation of a cult around a ‘personality’ (read: ‘celebrity’) when examination of the latter reveals them to be little more than a hollow, manipulated shell. More and more, famous people under stress have been seen to experience very public ‘meltdowns’ which are being observed on TV – just Google for ‘celebrity meltdown’, the list is endless [10].
It all means that in every possible way, we must resist the tyranny of imposed neoteny, and the only way to do this is to surround ourselves with verifiable facts and counter-arguments to the constant flood of deliberate disinformation and outright lies which mockingly purports to represent ‘reality’. It means that we need to supply our own antidote to the sensual and intellectual garbage constantly forced upon our consciousness by the agents of our would-be controllers, and construct our own factual schema to counteract the encroachment of a pernicious ‘virtual reality’ which seeks to imprison us in our own personal ‘goldfish bowls’ of distorted vision and narcissism. And most importantly, perhaps, we should vote with our wallets and choke them all off at source.
References:
[1] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna
[2] Wiklipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#Neoteny_in_other_species
[3] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHFh3Z0DOQ4 for the full lecture. Unfortunately, Pye used to espouse a lot of otherwise dubious ideas, such as the stories of Zecharia Sitchin, which are interesting but somewhat discredited.
[4] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboPUQ0xCDs for McKenna’s lecture; discussion of cultural neoteny begins at 31:30
[5] Note that neoteny is characteristic of the Tiger Salamander family, of which the Axolotl is a member; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl
[6] Rinkworks: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
[7] Take a cue from the late journalist John Keel, who sought at least three verifiable sources of information for each occurrence in his investigations of UFO incidents, and used this as a filter for exclusion of a huge corpus of witness accounts.
[8] Birthday Thursday, October 15th 2015; went to Changwon the next day.
[9] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11586778/Denmark-moves-step-closer-to-being-a-cashless-country.html; since I began writing this, Sweden have now started making similar noises – google ‘sweden cashless society’ and notice that the prominent news sources on the first search page were also Killary supporters during the 2016 Presidential election.
[10] See, also, the ridiculous parade of celebrities who screamed that they would leave the country if Flump came to power. Example: http://www.ibtimes.com/if-donald-trump-wins-presidency-these-18-celebrities-will-leave-us-will-canada-be-2440762 … my first reaction on seeing a lot of this stuff was: “Who..?”
Captain Scarlet and the Colour Revolutions
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
What follows probably sounds bizarre, but I have been considering this for a long time since the idea first struck me, and I am increasingly convinced that it is true…
Certain ‘interested parties’ must consider TV to be a gift from the gods. People become addicted to watching some of the most banal and contemptible televisual fodder and will actually complain and suffer withdrawal symptoms if it is taken away (think: “soap operas”, “reality TV”). This means, in fact, that their minds are already entrained to accept a lot of useless mind-control, and of course, those most susceptible to such programming are not just adults with marshmallows or cottage cheese for brains – there are also children to consider.
A child’s mind is much more open to suggestion and influence than that of a (hopefully educated) adult [4], because boundaries between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction, the possible and the impossible have yet to be introduced to them; likewise, compared to an adult with any experience of the world, the actual breadth of knowledge of a child is normally rather limited, at least excepting those cases where the parental influence includes extensive travel. This means that children are more likely to be imaginative in their thinking due to a lack of restrictions, but the corollary of this is that much of what they receive can (when inculcated by the wrong sources) be thoroughly incorrect, but in the absence of any meaningful reality checking (and in the presence of the deliberate filtration of contrary facts) it is impossible for them to know this. One point which seems to tie in well with this is that in the discussion of cults, one theme which crops up constantly is the separation from (or disownment of) past relationships on the part of the neophyte [5], as such influences as family and friends would necessarily lead to the kind of ‘reality checking’ which would scupper the cult leaders’ intentions.
In my own case, this seems to have backfired somewhat, in the sense that the result has been to make me more critical of what I am seeing and to ask myself if any parts of what I see before me are linked in any way. And here is an interesting parallel which, I think now, should have occurred to me much earlier – but it took time to understand and connect the various snippets into a bizarre patchwork. But it seems to be true; see what you think.
As a child, I was a big fan of popular scifi shows – Star Trek, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Doctor Who (I absolutely adored Jon Pertwee, how nice to have a benevolent alien who travelled through time and space trying to put right everything that was wrong in the universe! And affecting the garb of an Edwardian English gentleman, too), and so on… but the indisputable king of kids’ scifi in the UK was the late Gerry Anderson with his mainly puppet characters – Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Joe 90 and UFO, to name but a few. And nowadays I look back on these in a somewhat strange light, because they seem to reflect ideas which would later crop up in the conspiracy/alien context.
UFO is rather too obvious in this regard, and it is the slightly earlier Captain Scarlet [1] which piques my interest here. In this story, an exploratory expedition to Mars results in the destruction of the base of the Mysterons, an alien race who actually have the power of ‘retro-metabolism’ (i.e. they have a beam ray with which they can recreate any object which is destroyed). On board the Earth ship is a representative of Earth defence forces, Captain Black of Spectrum (which now turns out to be an interesting name). While the Mysterons narrate their recreation of their destroyed complex and inform the astronauts of their intentions to destroy Earth, Captain Black is visibly taken over by them and in future episodes acts as their ‘agent’ in their fight against Spectrum. It goes without saying that he is a perfect tool for this as he is one of Spectrum’s highest-ranking and most trusted insiders:
(Unfortunately Google won’t let you watch it, but trust me, it’s there… try Dailymotion for a crap, speeded-up version…)
As one might predict from the name, ‘Spectrum’ has a range of ‘agents’ similar to Captain Black, but different ‘colours’. It was at this point that I started recently to ask myself whether there was any significance to this, but we will return to it later. In the meantime, the protagonist, Captain Scarlet, is likewise assassinated by the Mysterons (driving to his destination in a Spectrum car with Captain Brown) and re-created by them, but due to a strange combination of circumstances in the first episode, as a result of a botched attempt to capture the World President (gotta be a hint!), acquires the ability to self-repair, and is therefore deemed ‘indestructible’ (hence the theme song).
‘World President’… what’s that all about? Here is where we come to the heart of the matter. In Anderson’s plots, there is usually some kind of global authority – in Joe 90, for example, there is a ‘World Intelligence Network (WIN)’ with an agent called ‘Uncle Sam’ by little Joe (any old Microsoft users recall why they had to type ‘WIN’ after booting Winblows 3.1?). Likewise, in Captain Scarlet, we have the ‘World Government’ (headed by the predictably white, male ‘World President’… wonder who voted for him?) and Spectrum’s brief is essentially to protect Earth (including the ‘WP’) from attack by the Mysterons. But as our own recent experience shows, most often the real (would-be) ‘World Government’ is intent upon blasting opponents ‘back into the stone age’ (their own words), and the ‘opponents’ are, more often than not, smaller states against whose sovereign rights the egregious, would-be ‘World Government’ is constantly engaging in a bid to take over their governments and make them obedient slaves, all the better to suck the financial and material resources out of their nation.
This is what Captain Scarlet is really all about – and curiously enough, it has a whole ‘spectrum’ of ‘colour agents’ to engage the ‘enemy’. But let’s take a step back and look at this again: we have a would-be world power with an agency whose active participants have colours (and their leader is Colonel White, for goodness sake), all fighting against an enemy whose principal agent on our own planet is Captain Black, and the actual targets of Mysteron aggression are, usually, of an economic or military nature.
And now we are starting to understand, perhaps, where Anderson was coming from: resisting a dark intruder from another planet (the ‘third world’) with whom they are competing for resources, and resisting them with ‘colour agents’… but who uses colour agents??? Let’s take a look…
The term ‘Colour Revolutions’ has been used to describe pseudo-revolutions used to take over sovereign states from the inside, using mainly representatives of their own people, for the benefit mainly of foreign banks and businesses [2]. Usually there is some kind of grievance relating to the election (or re-election) of a national leader, disruption occurs throughout the country and one or more attempts are made to replace the elected leader with one who is favoured by some outside interest which intends to control and impoverish the country. However, these ‘revolutions’ or mob uprisings are not always known by a colour (for example, the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, which led to the downfall of Muammar Quaddaffi, among others). They are all means by which Western capitalists seek to subdue and parasitise other nations. If you want to see how ‘successful’ these escapades are, look at the present conditions in countries like Libya and Ukraine.
The West uses many of these ‘agents’ against what they seem to portray as a nebulous, amorphous and indistinct dark grouping of opponents. But those opponents, in the real world, are the native inhabitants of the nations they (primarily the Western bankers) intend to subdue, and the ‘amorphous’ way in which they are portrayed is a deliberate attempt to present a range of people with diverse interests and concerns as a single ‘enemy’ which must be ‘conquered’, when we really need to just leave them the fuck alone. It has the satisfying effect of both demonising the opposition and making their actual identities indistinct.
The truth about Captain Scarlet, then, is that the unseen alien menace with its revenant agents actually represents the resistance by indigenous peoples to the machinations, economic parasitism and abuse of the Western powers, who themselves are little more than puppets of the major banks. This ‘unseen’ aspect of the Mysterons actually reflects the nebulous portrayal of native peoples in Western (or more accurately, perhaps, ‘Westernised’) media, who more often than not, even in Anderson’s time, were typically mentioned as ‘conservatives’ or something similar – resisting what was represented as the inevitable ‘progress’ of the militarised, industrialised West which, in its contemptible narcissism, sought to overturn any legitimate existing authority in the target nations in the name of profit. All of this alongside the much more blatant violations of sovereignty we have seen in places like Iraq and Syria, and older involvements by government agencies (for a masterful and at least partly-amusing piece of double-speak relating the history of such events in the twentieth century, I recommend the Sky documentary “Secrets of the CIA” [3]).
One would suggest that there is not, and nor should there be, a single overarching ‘authority’ for anything in this world, as not only does authoritarianism attract a most obnoxious subsection of the human population, it also stifles both practical and intellectual choice; the so-called ‘United Nations’, for example, which likes to portray itself as a beneficial organisation for all nations, is in fact a bankers’ front. Why would nations need a ‘World Bank’ when they have wealth and banks of their own? And would a so-called ‘World Health Organisation’ be there to assist with cures and technologies, or instead be the narrow end of a wedge to sell Western medical products at high prices to less affluent countries? As an example (but only one among many I could point out), the WHO has several times tried to talk up the possibility of a ‘’flu epidemic’ so that nations will spend billions on pharmaceutical products whose benefits are dubious at best, only to have the predicted ‘epidemic’ fail to arrive [6] … it was a cathartic experience to sit back and read reports of people ‘voting with their feet’ and not bothering to get themselves vaccinated unnecessarily.
However, the bottom line is that the series of ‘Colour Revolutions’ themselves seem to have been predicted, in a somewhat cryptic form, in the late 1960s by a hero of popular televisual British sci-fi. I will return to this theme shortly, as it seems clear that Anderson was encoding messages not only in this series, but in others also.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MjlrL_pr9k
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution
[3] http://www.disclose.tv/news/
Documentary_CIA_Agents_Reveal_Secrets_Of_The_CIA/85776
[4] … or, as the late George Carlin liked to say: “…, many of us partially educated…”
[5] See http://www.ex-cult.org/fwbo/CofC.htm, for example, for a brief discussion of cult recruitment. Although the separation here is not mentioned, it would constitute part of the ‘old versus new’ bipolarity.
[6] http://naturalsociety.com/world-health-organization-suspect-huge-flu-pandemic-scam/
Death of Twitter, Indeed?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
LOL People are so whiney, they make me laugh so much… why do folks have such a sense of pointless ‘entitlement’ that they think a commercial platform owes them anything? More, why subscribe to a platform for opinion where the people you try to share your opinion with all line up to disagree with you? Is it simply an excuse to put others down and make yourself look superior all the time? Or are you simply not happy unless your life is filled with endless stress and conflict?
I got a good word to describe these people:MASOCHISTS!
Apparently, Twitter’s falling revenues have made it look for alternative ways of financing itself, which some seem to view as a ‘violation’ (you can tell it’s Americans talking here) of their ‘right to free speech’. But ‘freedom’ surely also implies that you can make choices, in this case to another more suitable (from your POV as a customer) platform… doesn’t it?
This is where the pointless part of ‘Free Speech’ – the violent part in which participants feel that ‘freedom’ is represented by pouring unacceptable insults and threats upon those who do not agree with you – meets the limits of what has been made available ‘for free’: Twitter has to be paid for somehow, and if their notional ‘customers’ do not represent an actual income stream (i.e. they want Twitter’s service for nothing), why do they think that they should have a say in how it is run? This is the trouble, someone has to pay for the servers, the developers, the electricity and so on; it’s a business and it needs real money. But the ‘users’ want to contribute nothing but their opinions, and to do so without limits on their rudeness and arrogance – or so it seems to me.
Now, apparently, Twitter is trying to bring in new income streams which impact what people see on their Twitter pages. Funny, but when I have this issue with (e.g.) Facebook, there is a whole range of extensions and other add-ons to mitigate this – AdBlock, Ghostery, Facebook AdBlock and all the rest. Shit, I even have extensions to change the colours! Aren’t there any corresponding extensions for Twitter, or is it really not that big a deal? Isn’t this kind of thing enough of a motivation for people? Or are they just a bunch of lazy, self-indulgent fools?
Violent written disagreement is a feature of so many on-line fora and the ‘Comments Sections’ of online mags and newspapers: places where people seem to forget their politeness and manners simply because they can; because they really think that ‘Free Speech’ literally entitles them to say anything. But it doesn’t. A person can express a contrary opinion politely and explain their reasons for it; likewise the notional ‘opponent’ should be able to raise reasonable objections and explain their reasons, and the result should be a ‘debate’, not a hate-filled slanging match, because in an ideal world, people might still not agree in the end but they would understand the other party’s thinking better and everyone involved should have new ideas as a result, which should stimulate their own thinking.
Instead, what we have is cesspools of pointless hatred, sticky morasses of putrefying intolerance and one-sided, irrational thinking. The whole thing is protracted because people refuse to seek reasonable alternatives which might come closer to satisfying as many people as possible. Even worse, the ultimate consequence of talking to yourself in an echo chamber is that despite your feeling that you (and increasingly, only you) are right, the lack of contrary viewpoints and the new ideas that they bring only takes you further away from reality. Got a hint for you, folks: this ain’t progress. It’s stick-in-the-mud stupidity!
Also, bearing in mind what has been written in these pages previously, this is narcissism of the intolerant type, so typical of the ‘civilised’ West, a state of mind into which someone dearly wants us to be conditioned. When people behave like this, it shows only one thing: who is really controlling them. There is no ‘free will’ or ‘free speech’ until we realise exactly who is pulling the strings and why. There is no real ‘education’ when this is the result – it is, as I have adumbrated previously, merely ‘indoctrination’.
The intellectual part of public debate in particular has descended into pure infantilism, coupled with an unreasonable sense of ‘entitlement’ according to which individuals expect to express their opinions without being contradicted in any way, shape or form; and they expect to be allowed to impose coprolalial demonisation upon their detractors without consequences, either social or legal. And they think it should be free…
If you really want to be able to express yourself in an echo chamber all the time, is it really so difficult to set up your own forum or chat room? This is something anyone can do – when Opera decided to shut down their social media, I decided that enough was enough and approached a company in Singapore about web space to relocate my blog, and in a space like that you can do anything social media-oriented, if you want to. It costs me just sixty Singapore Dollars a year – almost nothing in ‘real’ (i.e. UK) money – and I can have any number of e-mail accounts, too, which I can set up myself.
There is a Control Panel from which you can install all kinds of services at no extra cost. I have forum space set up (and have since I subscribed in 2013), but I don’t use it to demonise others. And anyone can use it – go to http://www.myeasternhorizons.com/wp/forum/ and apply for free membership. You can have free chat there, too. But be warned: I am the owner and moderator, and you can be thrown off for being offensive, so read the conditions first!
But this is not enough for some people: they want everything literally for free, and worst of all, they want no responsibility for the consequences of what they say or do. And that is the terrible state of Internet commentary – endless, childish flame wars over trivia not worthy of a kindergarten playground fight. What a sad commentary upon Western civilisation!
NOTE: Details of how to access my private chat room can be found here.
Why Modern Democracy Cannot Work
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
Readers may be surprised to learn that I have not voted for any political party since the late 1990s. One reason for this, of course, is that I have been out of the country since September 2002, and although allowed residency in the various locations where I have lived, as a non-citizen of those countries, I have not been enfranchised and in fact, I am quite grateful for this.
If you were to ask me what my political leanings were, I would say that by nature I am (and ever have been) a nationalistic person. Many people who know me may find this odd – they might say that my obvious nature, as they normally see it, makes them think that I am nothing of the sort. But it’s true: I am a former Conservative voter and despite what anyone may think of me, I am conservative (with a small ‘c’) by nature and inclination, and I seem to feel this more and more as the years pass, perhaps as a result of all the errors I have made which make me averse to certain courses of action when decisions have to be taken. And I have a great desire to see my own country (and others) in a state of peaceful equilibrium where the executive carry out their functions in accordance with the wishes of the people. Unfortunately, I do not think that this is possible. It is hard for me to see how modern democracy can work effectively, or even whether it still is “democracy” at all.
For democracy to work, representatives have to accept that they do not “run” a country. They have to accept that “law” should not be a bloated tome constantly added to by a professional legislature, but rather a basic set of documents whose essential principles enjoy popular support and (most importantly) comprehension.
In our modern state, we look back at the likes of ancient Greece and (maybe) the ancient Hebrews possibly with a sense of amusement that they could have run their legal systems and societies with so few laws; after all, they did not have the modern problems of (for example) online copyright infringement or international trade (although other problems such as peculation were rife). Our legislators seem to feel that these things require a succession of ever more severe legal punishments, one response to which has been the growth of media outside of the normal arrangements of companies and direct sales of products to consumers via the Internet. It does not escape one’s notice that powerful lobbyists seek constantly to have the lawmakers enact legislation in their favour.
There are those who feel, in fact, that they have a “right” to rule others. I will not go into a discussion of those people in depth here, except to say that their behaviour affects the majority of people who have no desire or need to be “ruled”. The would-be “rulers” have assumed powers to which they should never have been allowed access, and nothing seems to make them happier than the idea that they should go about their dubious and deadly business without hindrance from such things as, say, accountability to the electorate.
The other most important requirement for a functional democracy, I would suggest, is a large amount of consensus among the electorate, rather than among (for example) commentators, politicians and academics. These are few in number, and their opinions are largely irrelevant. Moreover, if left unchecked, we see that usually they will squander national resources upon those with whom they have working relationships – businesses of one or another description, or other political allies or other creditors. In many countries, lobbying has become an industry unnaccountable, again, to the electorate upon whom they are essentially parasites.
I will return at a later date to this idea of social parasitism, but will merely note at this juncture that the business of the modern politician seems geared towards profiting from diverting the wealth of nations into the pockets of their associates. If this is not true, I would be very interested to hear how they justify this behaviour, although I suspect that their reasoning would be rather shallow and egregious.
Modern politics seems to go hand-in-hand with a rather hysterical media apparatus. One cannot avoid noticing that, rather than presenting balanced and accurate accounts of current issues, media are instead more involved with trying to convince the viewing public that the government’s line is correct, even when it is manifestly dangerous bordering on the tragic. The reason is to sow disharmony and dissent, to make people argue and disagree, but also to maintain tension and foster a sense of panic, in which rational thinking is difficult or impossible. One only has to look at how currency exchange rates are up and down all the time, and periodically have catastrophic collapses, to see what a powerful tool this is. But truth is not the business of the media; their bottom line is profit and advertising revenue.
The constant desire of Western politicians to involve their countries illegally in the affairs of other nations, either by means of subterfuge or direct assualt, is an insult to the intelligence and decency of all those who are enfranchised in their own countries. War is not the natural state of the human organism: we claim that we have intelligence, but the fruits of intellect are constructive – the rise of technology during the Industrial Revolution had sequelae such as improved sanitation and hygiene and the supply of good food, improved transport and employment prospects, the rise of the modern novel and instantaneous communication. Yet the ability of the industrialising countries to undergo this transformation had already come to depend upon the import of materials which could only be kept cheap by the subjugation of non-industrial nations which were too weak and disorganised to offer resistance to what was essentially the appropriation of their wealth at gunpoint.
The role of the media has often been to bolster the position of the robbers rather than to question the moral and legal basis of their behaviour, and the performance of newspaper and television reporting over the past few decades has completely undermined their own credibility; it has been said that Western media nowadays are so subservient to their governments that when the latter control access to information, any outlet which questions the source too closely will be frozen out of the loop – but this rather begs the question of whether what they are reporting is “news” at all!
Then there is the question of political parties. One would like to think, in an ideal situation, that they exist to represent the views of their members; a healthy society, one would imagine, has a spectrum of viewpoints, and ideally they would all have something constructive to contribute. Yet there has, for a very long time, been a situation arising in which legislatures are dominated by single parties, often for very long periods, who use their time in power only to alter the country to suit their particular political slant.
We often hear that a newly-elected government wants to enact “reforms”, but since World War Two, irrespective of the alleged political leanings of those concerned, measures seem only to have been in one direction – to reduce freedom of virtually every aspect of an individual’s life, including even their freedom of thought and reasonable speech, by means such as controlling access to basic information, enmeshing businesses in increasing amounts of bureaucratic regulation, restriction of movement and setting different groups against each other in one way or another, for example allowing large numbers of people to enter the country so that competition for jobs is exacerbated. In the UK, one side-effect of the expansion of the tertiary education sector was a glut of graduates for whom economic recession destroyed any hope of a career, or at the very least gave such a hope major setbacks. The resulting competition between candidates can thus be used to keep salaries down – but how can an economy thrive when disposable income is curtailed? Indeed, how can any economy grow when everyone is competing with everyone else to offer services for the lowest price?
Personally, I would dearly love to know (and I know that others feel similarly) just what it is that makes certain groups in human society feel that they are somehow more entitled to a greater share of society’s benefits than others; what makes them feel that they are somehow so wise that the counsel and opinions of those they are elected to serve are somehow meaningless and can be ignored; what right they have to ruin economies by pointless adherence to dogma, why they think that the wealth of their country should consistently be funnelled into the pockets of big business and why it is that the likes of pension funds are ripe for plunder? Why is it that the defence industry has become a sacred cow, but car manufacturers and the people who grow our food are somehow not worthy of support? And why should the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries be allowed to affect the way in which health systems and food legislation are enacted?
As I said at the beginning, I have not voted for any political party for many years, and with good reason: they simply cannot represent my personal interests. Only I can do that. I may have a lot in common with the person next to me, but I remain an individual with idiosyncrasies and responsibilities, and these things are my concern and mine alone, my inalienable right, so to speak. There is no place in my life for anyone to make decisions for me. I do not authorise elected representatives to drop bombs on the inhabitants of other countries. I do not authorise them to print money so that the value of the currency declines with time. I do not authorise them to raid the pension funds for which so many worked so hard all their lives. I do not authorise them to create “false flag operations” to justify unwarranted aggression against other nations. I do not authorise them to pervert living organisms or pollute the environment for contemptible levels of profit. And I do not authorise them to do any of these things at my own personal expense! This is not “democracy”, this is not the reasoned self-government of the people, it is naked plutocracy.
The final point I would make here is a technological one. Democracy is all about expressing one’s opinion by voting, yet consistently and (I would suggest) increasingly, politicians see the expression of the people’s political will as a barrier to their personal self-aggrandisement and aims, whatever they may be. It is amazing that in the twenty-first century, we still depend so much upon paper ballots, but we cannot have an election station in every house to ensure that as many people as possible are allowed to express themselves because technology is so easily perverted by those with the motivation and access to the means.
It seems to me that if “democracy” is to have any meaning, the people must take back power from those who have saught to abuse it, and make sure that their duties and capabilities are severely restricted in the future. They must ensure that public servants at all levels are subjected to scrutiny to avoid abuses of position and power. And perhaps most important of all, to forever divorce those who seek public office from the unwelcome influence of private money and to forbid gross lobbying of the kind which emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Although the ancient Greeks had open elections, the number of electors – a small group, but representative of all levels of society – was restricted and voting was by the use of coloured stones or ostraka. It was simple and unambiguous, and unlike some modern elections we could mention, was tightly observed and could not be rigged – something more greatly assured by limiting the number of electors allowed to cast votes on any particular occasion, and by ensuring that different people voted on different occasions. Although restricted, democracy had meaning for the Greeks.
Maybe it’s high time that we rediscovered that meaning.
Arrivederci, Hollywood . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
Tags: actor, actress, busan, buying, card, cgi, changwon, credit, egregious, fil, foreigner, hagwon, hollywood, Korea, Linux, mageia, mandrake, mandriva, monopoly, movie, vote, wallet, windows
To Leave or Not to Leave, That is the Question . . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
Tags: career, career choice, choice, elementary, English, foreigner, hagwon, Korea, lifestyle, living, public school, school, South Korea, teacher, teachin
No More White Boy Whingeing
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
Tags: elementary, entertainment, film, lifestyle, media, movie, music, online piracy, school, South Korea, teaching, video
