- WORDS THAT FOLLOW

Our constellation of political metaphors creates rules that regulate communications. Free speech and profit centers. Broaden the bandwidth of anarchistic dialog and narrow the frequency of official monolog.

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Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

 - WORDS THAT FOLLOW

The info elite’s most crucial task is to inhibit communications with microscopic selectivity. It will be up to Learners to bring those to full bloom.

Weapon news media must exploit their apparent truthfulness to beguile the info proletariat, yet remain flexible enough to distort those truths to suit their masters’ desire. Even though global events must be reported promptly, internal checks and balances ensure that unwanted information never sees the light of day. By default, the historical record is entrusted to media care, yet troublesome details are drowned out in tidal waves of trivial noise. Most people hear these broadcasts daily, yet tiny info elites control their content. Freedom of speech is acclaimed, yet select news is trivialized or magnified on command. 

News media foster this criminal censorship. Their propaganda confirms the sluggish disorder of peoples beyond the local membrane. Foreign governments are condemned as inferior, regardless of their objective merit. Municipal sports are reported in more detail than international conflict; more airtime and print space is filled with advertising than with domestic policy. Brutal crime gets more coverage than white-collar crime much more grievous and expensive. Corporate malfeasance is a taboo topic, as are the identity and political affiliations of powerful offenders.

Every day, humanity adds another two million person-years of sweat equity to its history. Every day, this monumental effort gets compacted into two or three pages of formulaic journalese and three-minute segments of video infotainment often rehashed the next day. Critical events are reported in a cursory, anecdotal present tense, or in the discordant, “verb-ing” gerund form that ignores cause and effect, motive and opportunity (“Fires burning across the country… Fire fighting services having a hard time coping,” etc.). We observe the tragic farces of famous buffoons more attentively than matters of historic importance. Puppies-in-a-basket stories and soap opera dramas garner more loving detail than outbreaks of social failure. If the long-term consequences of ritual stupidity are reported at all, the names and political affiliations of those responsible are carefully hidden. How useful the passive voice turns out to be ! Bad things are reported to have happened; wrongdoers and their criminal decision-making, never. Meanwhile, perpetrators of trivial sex scandals and dramatic but inconsequential street crime are ferociously examined with psychiatric intimacy. 

The internal rot of American journalism has become unmistakable and unforgivable. Serious news, whether national or international, cannot be found on American television. Its place is taken by dramatic reports of worsening weather, infotainment, true crime, paparazzia and sports trivia. Political commentators spend primetime hours interviewing spin-doctors who share the same opinion without revealing anything new. 

The media of PeaceWorld will hold news reporting to a much higher standard, higher still than during its former Golden Age. We will expect it to elucidate social contradictions in the light of truth, as passionate Learners of journalism have always wished to do.

A society’s constellation of political metaphors dominates all this effort. The primary ones regulate those secondary and through them, many other activities. We share clichés like: “Laissez faire (lehsseh fair, “leave do”, deregulation), job creators (who grow rich by massive layoffs), the marketplace of ideas, manifest destiny, survival of the fittest, the unseen hand.” These shared concepts become cornerstone clichés that regulate other activity. Dr. Kielbowitcz, of the University of Washington, brought his brilliant theory to my attention during a public lecture. 

To divert attention from their tyranny, weapon mentors infuse public discourse with a steady drip of new buzzwords and catch phrases: “trickle-down, free market, deregulation, supply-side, Contract with America,” etc. 

Cherished ancient texts dominate the meme-constellation of a culture: the Bible, the works of Shakespeare (that political hack), the Qran, the Talmud, Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, Mao’s Quotations, the Chinese Classics; brutal weapon distortions of complex works by Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc. Such textual sources and popular clichés may differ slightly from those of other cultures, but the universal dedication to weapon mentality is striking, regardless of its country of origin. Weapon mentors restock this intellectual salad bar all the time. They always confirm the utility, splendor and inevitability of war and its naked exploitation. 

Having eaten at the trough of the rich, many opposition leaders from one generation – uplifted in their youth by progressive politics – slam the door of reaction in the face of those who follow. Raised to dizzying heights of privilege, they redeem their illusory debt to the rich by subverting the ideals that liberated them. No-one’s experience of victimization immunizes them from future corruption and hypocrisy. On the contrary, prior misery may increase our vulnerability to latter-day seductions. 

Reactionaries dish out new buzzwords and clichés as tempting as lunchtime pizza. In the mean time, progressives shackle their discourse with rusty word chains forged centuries ago. 

Let’s compare standard political propaganda with the attitudes of parents towards their children in a typical nuclear family. Conservatives resemble favorite middle kids who are also sociopaths: too often displayed with pride (“That’s my boy!”), indulged in their misdeeds (“Boys will be boys”) and carefully shielded from the consequences of their acts (Trump). Progressives are the discounted first-born. Perfection is always expected from them and their slightest error is punished without mercy (Howard Dean). The great, neutral majority is treated like last-born: eternal babies left lovingly to their own devices, from whom nothing very good or bad is expected (to their endless frustration) and any accomplishment is a pleasant and welcome surprise.

Populist oligarchs coined the term “democracy” in ancient Greece to mask their tyranny. During the late eighteenth century, the designations Left and Right distinguished reactionary monarchists from their bourgeois counterparts in the first French National Assembly. Political moderates sat in the center of a tier of benches. Their detractors sorted themselves politically by sitting with friends to the left and right of the moderates. The further away they sat from the center, the more extreme their views. Meanwhile, members of the radical Montagne (Mountain) sat up top in the back of the bleachers, like schoolboy toughs. 

So if Learners rely on political designations more three-dimensional than Left and Right, politicians could call themselves High Front Centrists, but their character, defects and results would sort them out mercilessly in this thicker confine.

This assuming journalism was really about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and pursued the “who, what, when, where” of stories and not the latest Chamber of Commerce press release, official condemnation of dissenters and very little of significance otherwise.

The word “utopia” can mean “that place which isn’t but should be” or “that place which must never be.” Most people use the adjective “utopian” like a concrete railway abutment, to halt further conversation. By a mere twist of linguistics, “utopian” has come to mean “hopelessly impractical: consign to instant oblivion.” Once an idea is branded utopian, no further thought is required; weapon mentality makes us shut down our critical faculties on the spot. Ditto, "idealist, idealistic" to describe certain philosophers and their outlook. Its meaning? “Ignore them: they are not worthy of your attention.” Such linguistic short circuits typify weapon mentality. 

Meanwhile, the status quo honors homicidal maniacs with the title “realist.” As if ambitious mass murders of this sort could expect any outcome more useful than promotion into the info elite followed by painfully unforeseen blowback.

Info elites resist open-ended communication systems; they limit new systems to a size somewhat smaller than would best serve their own purposes — the better to “steer” them in their favor. When a newer, more expansive communication design emerges, they come up with a compromise solution on a crash basis. Amply funding it to undercut the alarming alternative, they load it down with trivia and install new regulatory agencies to abort the original intent and all its offspring. 

Meanwhile, vicious idiots pollute open-ended info networks with the waste products of their own prismatic thinking. The mass of bad television programming comes to mind. Think about it: we could just as easily watch complete coursework from the best universities without commercial interruption, as well as brilliant dramas, musical performances and recitations without limit in realtime. The same goes for the Internet with more than its share of commercial exploitation, fundamentalist babble, reactionary self-praise and hate speech, virus clutter and flaming idiocy. As if Western elites had hired an army of trolls like the hirelings of Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party and the Koch  brothers and Aldeson, to methodically rot out the collective conscience, both the one online and the other biological.

In addition, check out the content of so-called “progressive” periodicals published in English. They have repeated the same empty nonsense since the collapse of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, signed over the family farm to reactionary card sharks acre-by-acre of good land and piece-by-piece of sound equipment. They’ve carefully reported the fire sale of our political inheritance and proposed nothing of any consequence to prevent it. They would never precipitate active resistance against this ongoing catastrophe; that would be an unthinkable treason. Way too cozy with the status quo and its inevitable fascist landslide, they rejected Learner without really examining it, without exception or appeal. Otherwise, they got nothing.

By definition, the mass media of a weapon state smothers any content that PeaceWorld would consider valid.

Civilian systems are the only ones suffering from these info-constraints. Weapon communications have always spearheaded technological development. Since weapon mentality smothers rational discourse as a matter of routine, its technicians can go nuts with new hardware. 

Just look at the first military highways of China, Rome and Persia, or modern (?) military highways first built in Germany then in the rest of the world. Look at the first telegraph and railroad networks, at the Internet itself, (a Dr. Strangelove experiment in nuclear battlefield management) and the hundreds of tons of military jewelry floating out there in Earth orbit, easily worth their weight in diamonds. 

Some government agencies allocate half their funds to sophisticated new transmission systems and the other half such that every message transmitted across them is encrypted gibberish. Much like television. Think of the miracles humanity could achieve if these systems broadcast freely nothing except content of the highest quality!

We can’t decipher 3,500 pre-Vedic inscriptions from ancient India or those from ancient Crete and elsewhere. Yet criminal hackers and intelligence agencies routinely decipher the most elaborate modern security codes, even though our best mathematicians made them up using the most expensive computers.

Free online web pages can’t yet fluently translate, to and from English and other dominant languages, the primary tongue billions of people speak, read and write. AltaVista Bablefish and Google Translate are honorable exceptions that I have used to translate preliminary drafts of this text. Nowadays, very rough drafts are the industrial standard of free machine translation. 

We look on serenely as trillions of dollars are spent on preparations for us to murder each other (the makers’ mark of national sovereignty), but not the few pennies to get everyone to converse freely and talk their way out of most fights. Meanwhile, ego-freak code writers outdo each other to infect our computers with new virus software. Go ahead, shit down the village well, you idiot savants! You who should be spearheading Learner transformation. Shame on you!

The utmost honor and topic of passion of elite programmers should be the purity of the sacred content of the World Agora; not some idiot savant’s delight in polluting it, of necessity anonymously. It’s as if the Nobel Prize had been replaced by another one, anonymous and psychopathic, whose only goal was to promote confusion.

As always, vicious morons dictate what will be allowed and what will not. Nine out of ten of our precious rules and regulations hold this trait in common — they answer the simple question: “How can we ensure our lives, safety and sanity after we’ve let the most unwise and malevolent among us cast their shit down the communal ventilator?” The Learner equivalent would ask: “What would we have to pay them to leave us in peace and find something better to do — a hundredth or a thousandth part of current expenditures and costly regulations?”

This communication nightmare retains its positive, flip side. Learners could lift all the communications hardware we need, right off the shelf. Key components need only be coaxed from the hands of mystified weapon technicians and plugged into Learner networks. 

Despite the empty scolding of science, we populate a truly magical era. Presto! Peace management could fulfill our fondest dreams, or weapon managers can summon our worst nightmares. Which magic show would you rather attend?

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net