SpineyNorman
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Not deliberately - if two people are representing your arguments in ways that differ from how you intended maybe you've not been clear enough?
Alex Jones - Two Stops Past Barking?
- Thread starter existentialist
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Not deliberately - if two people are representing your arguments in ways that differ from how you intended maybe you've not been clear enough?
ska invita
back on the other side
Ah that looks much more likely, though m'lud, I was not confusing it with anything, as my original statement just said that the first I came across him was on C4, which remains so, not that it was 'Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove'. I rest my case. You cant handle the truth etc.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
It rather depends on whether you believe pre Christianity there were observably different races of humans. If there were, and I believe there were, then I am sure people would have assigned real or imagined differences to them and treated them differently as a result. And that is what racism is, it has little to do with the Jews and all to do with visible human differences and discrimination based on that.
taffboy gwyrdd
Embrace the confusion!
People who think that arms dealers, bankers, aristocrats, oil barons, leading politicians aren't meeting in secret to further plan how to fuck us up are barking, especially in the middle of what should be a massive lobbying scandal.
Alex Jones is barking.
What a shocking indictment of the left that it should be the likes of him that have been sounding off about the former for years.
I think things are starting to change at long last. Coverage in the Independent and Graun have been a bit more balanced. Dennis Skinner was having a go yesterday.
http://stevedrant.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/bilderberg-open-corruption-and-blindspot-of-the-left/
Alex Jones is barking.
What a shocking indictment of the left that it should be the likes of him that have been sounding off about the former for years.
I think things are starting to change at long last. Coverage in the Independent and Graun have been a bit more balanced. Dennis Skinner was having a go yesterday.
http://stevedrant.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/bilderberg-open-corruption-and-blindspot-of-the-left/
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Who do you think these people are 'lobbying'? That doesn't even begin to make sense if they as you claim are the elite. Are they lobbying themselves to get stuff from themselves?
And your inability to get people interested in this tells you what?
And your inability to get people interested in this tells you what?
TruXta
tired
Nah, the argument is whether something akin to modern racism appeared in pre-modern times. The scientific component wasn't there, but xenophobia is of course as old as man. You can then make an academic career out of arguing the toss over whether racism/xenophobia is the same, different, how similar etc etc.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
i can see what phil's saying i think, that the ideological justifications for anti-semitism helped to develop theoretical justifications for other types of racism. it helped to create an easily identifiable scapegoat which helped to deflect attention away the church, the king etc. however it is no way worse than anything else. Racism against irish people helped to justify some terrible fucking shit like not giving people food during the famine, selling people into slavery and treating them like subhumans. I feel pretty uncomfortable with anyone saying it's worse or more repugnant frankly. I do get upset when hearing about anti-semitic acts but i think it's like I sometimes get upset when hearing about events which happen in the UK or in my home town rather than elsewhere in the world, it's like it feels closer to home. Although I don't always, I got pretty upset about the Japanese earthquake when it happened
, and that Bangladeshi fire in the factory and that poor lad who got killed by fascists in France I don't think subjective emotional reactions or anything like that can be used to say which is worse though because you end up then getting into the realms of dangerous identity politics bollocks. And none is worse, they are all pretty bad, they have all been used to justify the existence of inequality and maintain class society and and other horrible shit, I experienced a load of homophobic abuse when I was younger and it seems to me that homophobia has been on the planet at least since biblical times as well, the Romans were pretty anti-gay and I bet a lot of other civilisations were too.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
I think "modern" racism started to appear with the enlightenment, racism on a scientific basis by measuring peoples skulls and head sizes etc, however prejudices of various kinds had always existed.
Buckaroo
Donkey piss and tractors
Of course they did, that Dwyer fella is just being silly. Christianity wasn't Christ, it was Constantine.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Type? As in doesn't live with us. Lives somewhere else.That's not really racial differentiation is it?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I looked at that from 15 to 30 minutes. Max Keiser looks and sounds scarily like Moe from The Simpsons. But he makes a lot of valid points about finance, in particular the madness of Osborne's scheme to help people buy houses. It isn't so fanciful to imagine that such schemes were discussed at Bilderberg. That is also exactly the kind of analysis that those who want change towards some brand of socialism need to make. From what I know about Keiser, he broadly has a Minskyite view of debt creation, and indeed he's had the Minskyite economist Steve Keen on his show.
Strikes me that Jones is a slightly different kind of beast. Less interested in the minutiae of getting the analysis right. It's also revealing that he characterises the BBC as having purposely portrayed him as a loon when it's clear that he himself is the one who purposely portrayed himself as a loon. There's clearly a whole lot of calculation going on with him.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
A couple of questions if I may.
Do you think that preventing those people from meeting beyond the scrutiny of media (that they control), would cause any improvement to occur?
Do you think that replacing those people with different, perhaps less corrupt and evil people, in the same roles, would cause any improvement to occur?
SpineyNorman
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People who think we should be surprised that rich and powerful people meet up and engage in a kind of ruling class mutual aid, and draw up conspiracy theories that imply these are the cause of our problems, rather than just an inevitable expression of them, are idiots.
Watford Socialist Party went to the Bilderberg meeting to protest but somehow managed to keep Jones style loonery and Icke style antisemitism out of it.
SpineyNorman
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Keiser is a much more sophisticated loon - which makes him even more dangerous, together with his show that gets a lot of viewing in this country often from people who should know better - and you have to watch his show a few times and, to use the Icke vernacular, 'connect the dots' before you see the more lunatic/dangerous stuff for what it is. But lunatic and dangerous it is.
His solution to the ills of the world? Vote Ron Paul.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
From UKIP, through Keiser and Jones, is there one of these guys whose 'solution' doesn't ultimately (once you strip away the conspiracies, racism etc) turn out to be an even harsher version of capitalism than the one whose elites (bankers, politicians, security apparatus, media etc) they're nominally mobilising public dissatisfaction against?
I'd be interested to hear about it if there's any conspiracy theorist who thinks the answer to power abuse by global elites is something even vaguely reminiscent of socialism. There may be for all I know, but I've never managed to discover one.
All the ones I can think of, insofar as they've ever shared their views, seem to favour either unconstrained ultra-capitalism, or outright neo-fascism.
In Watford. Not inside a military base in a volcano on a remote tropical island, as is traditional, but in a hotel in Watford.
The lobbying scandal is fuck all really, just a bit of PR fluff to justify attacking union funding in a roundabout way. Linking it to bilderberg shows you up a bit.
What a shocking indictment of your political judgement that you can't spot an obvious bullshit-artist and huckster for what he is.
Perhaps the "left" has been reluctant to run off down the rabbit hole because it's theoretically tied to a much better set of ideas that this Alex Jones shit? Because ultimately getting worked up over a half-secret informal caucus of the ruling class is missing the point, it's not the meetings and the bricks and mortar and the scary sounding vaguely Jewish-y names like Skull and Bones or Bilderberg that matters, it's class power and the social relations that perpetuate it, not the meeting itself. Do you really think a secret world government operates out of Bilderberg? With what evidence? My best guess it's just a sly gathering of prominent individuals, like just now I bet all the western heads policy planners who are going to the Geneva talks between US, UK, Russia, Iran over Syria, have all been having a nice chilled out weekend in Watford to be able to plan, in comfort with no media instrusion, what they're doing to do. That's the function it seems to serve from what I've read at least. It was probably a cushy idea 'til all the anti-semites started going mad about it.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yes, I suspected that his solution was more capitalism - real capitalism, perhaps. It was more an observation, really. An American chap from Occupy was on the radio a few weeks ago debating with a British Conservative politician. They both had books out, the Conservative's being a book on Burke, so he was an old-school Tory. The Occupy chap said that he could talk to Conservatives like that Conservative because at least they both used the same language - they both meant the same thing by 'class', for instance. Keiser is a bit like that for me - a lot of his analysis is right, even if his solutions are dead wrong.
That said, he appeared to be agreeing with Jones about the EU, which is bonkers. The EU was formed as a capitalist club, sure, but its primary good for many of those involved in forming it was that they saw it as something that would secure peace in Europe. I don't think they have much of a handle on the psychological impact WW2 had on Europe.
SpineyNorman
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The zeitgeist nutters advocate something that could mistaken for a kind of socialism if you're very naive but is in fact a weird form of authoritarian technocracy.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Indeed. As a point of order for everyone talking about Bilderberg, there's no place for the word 'secret' in describing it. Private, yes. Secret, no, never was.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
It seems a bit vague to me, tbh, as to what they advocate as its replacement. Certainly Jones appears to be strongly playing to the US sense that if only government would go away, everything would all be fine. As ever with that kind of thinking, it becomes a bit hazy when you try to work out what that would actually mean.
SpineyNorman
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To be fair I think Jones is pretty straightforward with what he advocates - capitalism on steroids. It's about the only thing he's honest about, even to the extent of hailing Ron Paul as the potential saviour of the USA/world.
The zeitgeist 'resource based economy' is well hazy but they talk about super computers running everything (no mention of who programs them, how are different demands for resources are balanced against each other etc), they talk about the need to control the population level and as I saw someone point out somewhere - might have been on here - in the artistic impressions put out by the 'Venus project' (sort of the intellectual wing of the zeitgeist loon movement) there are very few people - in fact I'm not sure there are any.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Jazzz just posted a vid of the Bilderberg protest on another thread, with Jones speaking as its focus. I do wonder how many of them would agree with his solution. Not many.
Of course, the idea of capitalism on steroids solving the problem of, um, capitalists and the logic of capital controlling things, is, um, rather incoherent.
TruXta
tired
I think my question is this - was there anything morally, politically or socially unique about modern racism which makes it so that the usual theories of why people create and act on prejudice, territoriality, discrimination and the like are not useful or applicable? I think my answer is on the whole no. In other words, I see the origins of modern racism as sharing enough causes with pre-modern racism to allow for a common theory.
SpineyNorman
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That's not how they see it though. Capitalism is freedom to these loons. Bilderberg and the like isn't an expression of capitalist class power or just a way for that class to organise - it's not an integral part of capitalism, it's an aberration. Just as the financial crisis was caused by Jewish bankers, deliberately, to take them closer to their 'end game' of global enslavement - which is also nothing to do with capitalism. For them, capitalism would function fine were it not for these groups subverting it.
It does have a certain degree of internal consistency and coherence, even though it's an utterly barking misrepresentation of reality.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Zeitgeist feels like a scam to pocket money out of it for about a dozen or so people at the top of it - a modern day ideas-based pyramid scheme:-
For instance they want $300, 000 just (Kickstarter) to send out a biography about one man, who has already published all his works and is still alive.
Someone has got to be creaming money out of it somewhere.
It's very neat because you can't have the Advertising Standards Agency shut these people down because they're in politics - so they get away with it.
The assault on them must come from politics to point out what parasites and damngerous ones they are, when necessary - all the while retaining the solid realities of revolving doors between parliament/ public office and private business, material business input into foreign and defense strategy formulation, concern about financial borrowing levels from indebted nations etc.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I might be able to make a limited case for the defence on that. The enslaving of conquered peoples has of course gone on for millennia. But what the Atlantic slave trade did was to break the direct connection between slave owner and slave as conqueror and conquered. And what rapidly grew in its place was a theory of superiority among the slave owners to justify their keeping of slaves. So the slave in the Americas became identifiable by his or her blackness, and thus their presumed inferiority to the slave owners became identifiable by their blackness too.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Hence the white slaves also being seen as black originally.
taffboy gwyrdd
Embrace the confusion!
[quote
I would call myself one, on the understanding that your definition of "conspiracy theorist" is the typically skewed one.
Michael Meacher seems in that neck of the woods as well, but generally they are very thin on the ground which for me is a shame, leaving some very important issues open for reactionaries to have a free run at.
I would call myself one, on the understanding that your definition of "conspiracy theorist" is the typically skewed one.
Michael Meacher seems in that neck of the woods as well, but generally they are very thin on the ground which for me is a shame, leaving some very important issues open for reactionaries to have a free run at.
Michael Meacher's just a desperate publicity hound. Dennis Skinner is a very old man. Neither would object to bilderberg on the same grounds as Jones and Maz Keiser and co, what with them both identifying as some kind of democratic socialist and all. I really wouldn't put too much stock in that. But you will, and it's tragic.
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