Counter Vlad Surkov techniques and methods

Introduction to the Kremlin media techniques of year 2014

1. Peter Pomerantsev September 9, 2014: Russia and the Menace of Unreality. How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare

2. Adam Curtis, BBC, December 31, 2014: On The “Contradictory Vaudeville” Of Post-Modern Politics - “What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.”

3. Book reading from December 5, 2014 on the subject by Peter Pomerantsev

“Freedom of Speech”, “Free Speech” ::: what is forbidden in society, what is outlawed, what is illegal speech. “Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers. An artist usually has no friends except other artists, and usually they do not like his work.”

https://old.reddit.com/r/DailyShow/comments/1jjuane/these_guys_dont_give_a_fuck_about_free_speech/

“These guys don’t give a fuck about free speech, they care about THEIR speech.” Jon Stewart calls BS on the GOP’s free speech crusade

I did learn that you do more than just generalize groups of people.

You can’t tell the difference between a human person and Eliza chatbot. So “I just don’t bother” is your intention except to bother me for trying to actually end conflicts in the world with education and teaching.

I’m not a fan of nazi’s

But you sure do seem a fan of the Taliban’s interpretation of poetry book the Quran and want to interfere with teachers addressing Islamic terrorism. And / Or perhaps you are a supporter of Donald Trump’s $59.99 Bible and the problem of Americans who can’t grasp metaphors in year 2025? And / Or maybe you don’t like women understanding the role that Torah, Bible, Quran plays in manipulating their lives and want to banalize and / or trivialize the teaching of metaphors on Lemmy? But I guess since none of that isn’t Nazi Germany from the 1930’s and 1940’s, you can’t grasp the problems beyond your one-line banality messaging to me to draw the audience away from the topics.

“If Christians, Hindus or Jews are really our enemies, as so many say, why are we Muslims fighting with each other?” ― Malala Yousafzai, I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban. October 8, 2013

“The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, published 1955

“So it’s an extreme case that we have in the Bible, and our own Western subjugation of the female is a function of biblical thinking.” - 1987, Skywalker Ranch California

“Anyway, that’s rationalisation, and then the third – and this is sort of one of my own if you will forgive me – is what I’ll call banalization. And it’s always a danger when you do lectures like the ones I am doing now, and that’s to take these fundamentally important things like what does my life mean, and surely there must be a better way to organise the world than the way it is organised now, surely my life could have more meaning in a different situation. Maybe my life’s meaning might be to change it or whatever, but to take any one of these criticisms and treat them as banalities. This is the great – to me – ideological function of television and the movies. However extreme the situation, TV can find a way to turn it into a banality.” - Rick Roderick in 1993

I did learn that you do more than just generalize groups of people.

… This is the great – to me – ideological function of smartphones and social machines and twitter-length reaction pot-shots and memes. However extreme the situation, social media users can find a way to turn it into a banality.

I did learn that you do more than just generalize groups of people.

“Because all the troubles that such a life involve are just reduced to banality, just the common rubble of little one line joke, you follow me? It’s made banal by it. It’s banalised that way.” - Duke University Professor, Rick Roderick, 1993

You’re repeating yourself.

Yes.

As for turing tests, I’m not so sure if those are suitable for today’s systems.

You clearly can’t tell human beings from bots and are easily confused and bewildered. You seem incredibly gullible and ignorant, regardless of your education, you seem meme-addled… maybe you lack experience? Reply after reply you neg me and the message being shared, entirely unable to discuss the topic of metaphors and the crisis in society.

Good to hear you’ve got basic education

Since you can’t even capitalize “Turing” in test, which is named after a person named Alan Turing, and you can’t tell if a Lemmy user is a bot… your education is either only in negging in favor of Elon Musk’s X / Memphis Colossus datacenter systems or who knows what. Your pattern of replies are sure here to cultivate celebration of ignorance and anti-intellectualism against the list of authors / teachers / educators being presented on this posting.

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov, 1980 https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf

And I’ll keep repeating while the machines people worship and upvote on destroy the world along with me in it. Because people value technology systems of anti-thinking… but there is still a tiny chance people might actually see that the pattern played out in world religions where people favored fiction over non-fiction, but so far humanity isn’t willing to learn and understand metaphors.

“Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. But metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words.” — James Geary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

avoiding the actual questions

You clearly have a media literacy problem that you can’t see the answer to your question. Your question was: “Why does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?” - and exhaustive answers on this posting are already provided. … repeating for you: Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, Carl Sagan, Joseph Weizenbaum, Neil Postman from the 1980’s / 1990’s, 1970’s… or are you only able to approach media in terms of Twitter-style one-line year 2025 thinking responses?

Are you a bot or something?

No, I’m able to read English content that comes form the 1920’s, 1930’s, 1940’s, 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, 2000’s, from paper books and magazines, not just from Lemmy comments.

Are you a bot or something?

You have to be one of the worst humans in the world in passing *The Turing Test". You are so meme-addled with junk 2025 Internet content and generative artificial intelligence trash / AI slop on your social devices, you can’t tell a human person by reading their profile and years of posting on Lemmy? You actually confuse machines with people?

Are you a bot or something?

In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum and imitating a psychotherapist. Many early users were convinced of ELIZA’s intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.

Are you a bot or something?

It’s really sad that you can’t tell reality and real from the shit you consume on Lemmy. “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT 1974

Keep complaining about brevity

I’m complaining about your attention span, banality, your inability to comprehend anything beyond 7 or 8 words. Your media literacy, your target fixation, your failures to engage content that wasn’t in your Twitter-style meme-think and comes from 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, etc. Before the advent of Lemmy and the 2007 release of the Apple iPhone.

“everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information–misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information–information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985

avoiding the actual questions

You are avoiding the actual answers.

Ian Anderson, 1972

Lyrics

Really don’t mind if you sit this one out
My word’s but a whisper your deafness a shout ( “Earwicker” Here Comes Everybody / Earwax / Earworm themes of Joyce )
I may make you feel but I can’t make you think…
Your sperm’s in the gutter your love’s in the sink ( HCE rumors )
So you ride yourselves over the fields
And you make all your animal deals
And your wise men don’t know how it feels ( Joyce on Catholic Clergy )
To be thick as a brick ( on Bible verse Romans 11:32 )
And the sandcastle virtues are all swept away ( Shit Clergy teachings )
In the tidal destruction the moral melee ( morality of Romans 11:32 verse in Bible )
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
As the last wave uncovers the newfangled way ( “Wake” waves of media ecology, Finnegans Wake waves )
But your new shoes are worn at the heels
And your suntan does rapidly peel
And your wise men don’t know how it feels
To be thick as a brick…

And the love that I feel is so far away:
I’m a bad dream that I just had today ( The Dream themes of Joyce)
And you shake your head, And said “it’s a shame” ( Romans 11:32 )

Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth ( As Joyce does in his Dublin stories )
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth ( Shut out The Bible )
Spin me down the long ages, let them sing the song ( Finengans Wake song(s) )

See there, a son is born and we pronounce him fit to fight
There are blackheads on his shoulders, and he pees himself in the night ( shock of night hours of Finnegans Wake )
We’ll make a man of him, put him to trade
Teach him to play Monopoly and how to sing in the rain

Portrait of a Poet and Painter

The poet and the painter casting shadows on the water ( Rivers of Joyce’s work)
As the sun plays on the infantry returning from the sea
The do-er and the thinker, no allowance for the other
As the failing light illuminates the mercenary’s creed
The home fire burning, the kettle almost boiling
But the master of the house is far away ( Joyce’s criticisms of “God” in Catholic Church)
The horses stamping, their warm breath clouding
In the sharp and frosty morning of the day
And the poet lifts his pen while the soldier sheaths his sword
And the youngest of the family is moving with authority
Building castles by the sea, he dares the tardy tide to wash them all aside
The cattle quietly grazing at the grass down by the river
Where the swelling mountain water moves onward to the sea:
The builder of the castles renews the age-old purpose
And contemplates the milking girl whose offer is his need
The young men of the household have all gone into service
And are not to be expected for a year
The innocent young master, thoughts moving ever faster
Has formed the plan to change the man he seems
And the poet sheaths his pen while the soldier lifts his sword
And the oldest of the family is moving with authority
Coming from across the sea, he challenges the son
Who puts him to the run
What do you do when the old man’s gone, ddo you want to be him?
And your real self sings the song, do you want to free him?
No one to help you get up steam
And the whirlpool turns you way off-beam
I’ve come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways
My father was a man of power whom everyone obeyed
So come on all you criminals! I’ve got to put you straight
Just like I did with my old man twenty years too late
Your bread and water’s going cold, your hair is short and neat
I’ll judge you all and make damn sure that no-one judges me
You curl your toes in fun as you smile at everyone
You meet the stares, you’re unaware that your doings aren’t done
And you laugh most ruthlessly as you tell us what not to be
But how are we supposed to see where we should run?
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
I see you shuffle in the courtroom
With your rings upon your fingers and your downy little sidies
And your silver buckle shoes
Playing at the hard case
You follow the example of the comic-paper idol
Who lets you bend the rules
So, come on ye childhood heroes!
Won’t you rise up from the pages of your comic-books, your super crooks And show us all the way?
Well, make your will and testament
Won’t you join your local government?
We’ll have Superman for president
Let Robin save the day
You put your bet on number one and it comes up every time
The other kids have all backed down and they put you first in line
And so you finally ask yourself just how big you are
And you take your place in a wiser world of bigger motor cars
And you wonder who to call on
So, where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They’re all resting down in Cornwall
Writing up their memoirs for a paperback edition
Of the Boy Scout manual

…

I added some metaphor to metaphor level translation in comments on some lines.

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, year 1995

Sooner or later, 1995 … Social media cloud computing machines ate my nation / ate my nation’s face …

“This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while” … 1995, for a while, say 2025?

Why does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?

I really don’t know what to say to these one-line Twitter-length kind of questions. I’m quoting several authors here and I agree with what they are thinking… and their English language prose is better writing than I can do, and they had professional editors. Almost every one of the people I quoted is a professional teacher / trained at university on how to deliver information to students. Does your reply have to do with anything I’ve posted here on this Lemmy posting with content from Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, Carl Sagan, Joseph Weizenbaum, Neil Postman from the 1980’s / 1990’s, 1970’s… or are you only able to approach media in terms of Twitter-style one-line year 2025 thinking responses?

“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985

Why does it matter if someone else created the boxes for you to think in?

I sure didn’t create every word in the English language, and I use it to analyze my own thinking. I also didn’t create the Ada programming language or Modula-2 programming language or VAX/VMS assembler opcodes, and I sometimes think in those. But most of all I use the work of James Joyce to get boxes to think in and shuffle and poetically re-arrange. !JamesJoyceExperience@lemm.ee

Egoism / Egomania is what makes forbidden communications

Egoism of “kill the people who don’t agree with our perfect religion book and believe in imperfect books” is welcome free speech in most societies. Hate-speech is not forbidden speech. What gets Dr. Martin Luther King Jr murdered is “all people are equal” speech. If you run a HDTV news network like “Russia Today” that says: Murder and kill those people in Ukraine, such death-wish speech is perfectly allowed by society.

Hate Speech gets you moved to the top of Russia, Vlad Putin in power. Hate Speech gets Adolph Hitler to the top of Germany society in 1933.

Malala who speaks “love all people”, she got a bullet put into her head by the Taliban. That’s against the egoism of the Taliban that one book is perfect and no other book or education learning of women from other books is important. It is a society of egomaniacs like the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan who don’t allow free education and “free speech”, “freedom of education”, “freedom of speech”.

What would military be without “how to murder and kill free speech”? It is the people like Malala who speak of compassion that get the bullets in the brain.

“The extremists are afraid of books and pens, the power of education frightens them. they are afraid of women.” ― Malala Yousafzai

But this is not one where two boxes is enough to represent the population and individual diversity.

You seem confused by the quote. I’m not the one who created two boxes, who can’t count beyond 1, 2. Or binary computer 0 and 1.

Joseph Campbell is saying there are four categories. 1, 2, 3, 4

1. Non-fiction section in the Public Library
2. Fiction section in the Public Library
3. Fiction that people think is non-fiction because they never learned the concept of “metaphor”
4. Non-fiction that people think is confusing, interpret as fiction, because it uses metaphors.

We have a massive world-wide crisis of people who have never been taught how poetry works. Song lyrics in rock music, etc. It’s all just Quran Poetry and Bible Poetry and Upanishads Poetry and Rock Music lyrics to me…

where two boxes is enough to represent the population and individual diversity.

And people murder each other. In Palestine and Israel, they are killing each other over the two boxes of non-fiction and fiction, unable to grasp poetry and metaphor. There are people who can’t tell Elon Musk’s messages on Twitter (X platform) are fiction, or Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is fiction, they get so damn confused trying to put things into these “two boxes” that they haven’t even considered that “poetry” and “metaphor” is outside the fiction / non-fiction box. That the human brain / mind isn’t a binary system.

It’s a real shitshow the way people think in year 2025. We were warned in the past: “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT university, 1974

And then some like to generalize the entire population into two groups :p

What’s really come to dominate since the year 2007 introduction of the Apple iPhone is Twitter-length Bluesky-length messages and thinking. People who think and message in 1-bit logic (reactionary / rapid response) of the latest digital machines, as if the human brain is Redhat Linux operating system or something. Just Look in year 2024 and 2025 how Elon Musk is dominating the entire world, treating everyone as slaves, via the Twitter-length memes and reactionary comment systems. That is the religion faith of the world wide web, “X Elon Musk” and Starlink ISP.

“Similarly, in mythology—if you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors. It is as though the universe were my father. It is as though the universe were my mother. Jesus says, “No one gets to the father but by me.” The father that he was talking about was the biblical father. It might be that you can get to the father only by way of Jesus. On the other hand, suppose you are going by way of the mother. There you might prefer Kali, and the hymns to the goddess, and so forth. That is simply another way to get to the mystery of your life. You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work. If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with the software—well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.” - Joseph Campbell, age 83, who is not a computer nerd when he shared this in year 1987 - but a teacher of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Ever tried Kali Linux on your computer system? Ever read Finnegans Wake?

It’s a broad stroke to claim all atheists are dismissive of the Bible as a piece of storytelling.

I would say it is a super super large ultra broad stroke, and even a multi-stroke multiple layers of paint, primer paint, top coat, clear-coat.

all atheists are dismissive of the Bible

Not only the Bible, but the Jesus and Mary stories that are retconned in the fiction Quran by Mohammad in the spirit of Bible verse Romans 11:32 which allows anyone to re-write The Bible as they see fit. Not only did Mohammad in Saudi Arabia rework the Bible stories, removing Mary’s husband Joseph, for example - a Founding Father of the United States of America took a knife to The Bible and deleted scenes and stories he did not want to be emphasized. The Jefferson Bible rewrite / retcon - Jefferson was following the same rewrite / retcon tradition as Mohammad had done more than a thousand years earlier.

all atheists are dismissive of the Bible

They are dismissive of poetry, metaphors. They have failed to grasp media literacy concepts and teachings. It is just easier to dismiss entire categories of the Public Library, not fully questioning the line between the non-fiction and fiction section.

From: https://thesithlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/the-way-of-art-by-joseph-campbell/

So I come to one–I won’t say where–on so and so’s show–and it’s live on the air–not television this time but radio. I walk in and here is this young man sitting across the table and I saw him and I knew I have a real slick article here. So I sit down and he says to me, “I’m tough. I’ll put it right to you, I’ve studied law.” So, okay, the light goes on and the first thing he says to me is, “A myth is a lie, isn’t it?” And I say, “No, a myth isn’t a lie,” and then I gave him my definition. I said, “It’s an organization of symbolic forms, images and narratives that are metaphoric of the possibilities of human experience and fulfillment in a given society at a given time.” Well, that went out the window and he said, “It’s a lie.”

So, on we go…and we have one half hour of this kind of dialogue. And almost exactly five minutes before the end of the show I realize this guy doesn’t know what a metaphor is.

So, I said, “Mr. metaphor, give me an example of a metaphor.” He said, “You give me an example.” I taught school for a long time, I said, “I’m asking the question this time. Give me an example of a metaphor.” Well, if you’ve ever seen a building fall apart, you’ve seen what I saw. This “authority” became…I felt ashamed that I had done this to a human being and it was on his show! He was all over the floor trying to look for a metaphor. Finally with two minutes to go–it was like the end of a ball game you know with half a minute–he comes up and said, “I’ll try.” Isn’t that wonderful? He said, “So and so runs very fast, ‘he runs like a deer,’ that’s a metaphor.” “That’s not the metaphor. I said. “The metaphor is. ‘so and so IS a deer.'” He says, “That’s a lie!” And I said, “That’s the metaphor!!” and that was the end of the show!

So, listen, that taught me a lesson. This is a metaphor. Good. Nobody knows what the hell a metaphor is. All religions are mythological. You see what that means. They don’t realize that Yahweh is a metaphor. The terrible thing about Yahweh is, he didn’t realize it either! He thought he was the connotation, don’t you see? So, when a metaphor is read with reference not to the connotation but to the denotation, it’s a lie. Hence atheism.

Meanwhile, the ones who are worshipers of the metaphor don’t know what they are doing, so they are missing the message. Do you get what I’m saying? This is really important stuff. I don’t know whether its in the N. Y. Times yet but its important.

it’s a bad influence in many areas for those who would treat it all as fact and act on the worst parts.

Acting out Star Wars and playing Darth Vader fiction character like Elon Musk is doing with Starlink and SpaceX isn’t a good idea either, but people do it. Joseph Campbell even discusses the metaphor meaning behind Darth Vader… Elon Musk is “act on the worst parts” of science fiction stories.

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, year 1995

…

… We had these problems worked out by teachers and educators in the 1980’s and 1990’s. But we are drowning in so much fiction storytelling / fiction memes in year 2025 that people can no longer locate and recognize the non-fiction educators and teachers on the very subject of mixing fiction and non-fiction! It’s horrific how much we have lost our minds and information systems to fiction content.

George Lucas creator of Star Wars films

To educate his film audience, in the summer of 1986 and summer of year 1987, George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars films, invited Sarah Lawrence College Professor Joseph Campbell to California to film education about metaphors to the audience to put a stop to this problem in media ecology and media literacy.

Skywalker Ranch interviews in 1986 and year 1987

Joseph Campbell was age 82 in 1986 and age 83 in year 1987, which was his last year alive. In 1988, Bill Moyers published a book of the interviews and a TV series on Public Broadcast Systems network. Released shortly after Campbell’s death on October 30, 1987, The Power of Myth was one of the most popular TV series in the history of public television, and continues to inspire new audiences.(1988)

Former White House director Bill Moyers

Under the Johnson administration he served from 1965 to 1967 as the eleventh White House Press Secretary. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, from 1967 to 1974. He also worked as a network TV news commentator for ten years.

The key part of that audience education in 1987: Metaphors

1. “A spiritual man, he found in the literature of faith those principles common to the human spirit. But they had to be liberated from tribal lien, or the religions of the world would remain—as in the Middle East and Northern Ireland today—the source of disdain and aggression. The images of God are many, he said, calling them “the masks of eternity” that both cover and reveal “the Face of Glory.” He wanted to know what it means that God assumes such different masks in different cultures, yet how it is that comparable stories can be found in these divergent traditions—stories of creation, of virgin births, incarnations, death and resurrection, second comings, and judgment days. He liked the insight of the Hindu scripture: “Truth is one; the sages call it by many names.” All our names and images for God are masks, he said, signifying the ultimate reality that by definition transcends language and art. A myth is a mask of God, too — a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world.” - Bill Moyers, 1988

2. “But my notion of the real horror today is what you see in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference. They haven’t allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, “We are the chosen group, and we have God.” Look at Ireland. A group of Protestants was moved to Ireland in the seventeenth century by Cromwell” - Joseph Campbell, 1987

3. “I have had a revelation from my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software, and there is a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim. If you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system of software, they just won’t work. Similarly, in mythology—if you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors. It is as though the universe were my father. It is as though the universe were my mother. Jesus says, “No one gets to the father but by me.” The father that he was talking about was the biblical father. It might be that you can get to the father only by way of Jesus. On the other hand, suppose you are going by way of the mother. There you might prefer Kali, and the hymns to the goddess, and so forth. That is simply another way to get to the mystery of your life. You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work.” - Joseph Campbell, 1987

BILL MOYERS: Do you see some new metaphors emerging in a modern medium for the old universal truths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I see the possibility of new metaphors, but I don’t see that they have become mythological yet.

…

BILL MOYERS: Do you think there was such a place as the Garden of Eden?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Of course not. The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

BILL MOYERS: What is the metaphor?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A metaphor is an image that suggests something else. For instance, if I say to a person, “You are a nut,” I’m not suggesting that I think the person is literally a nut. “Nut” is a metaphor. The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.

For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That’s literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy. Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility. But if you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward—not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.

BILL MOYERS: Aren’t you undermining one of the great traditional doctrines of the classic Christian faith—that the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefigures our own?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.

BILL MOYERS: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought.

…

… like music does, vibes and beyond … George Lucas hosted and filmed these interviews with a 83 year old professor from a women’s arts college to educate his cinema audience about “The Force” science fiction vibes and meanings.

“Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.” ― Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, September 26, 1995

We had these problems worked out by teachers and educators in the 1980’s and 1990’s. But we are drowning in so much fiction storytelling / fiction memes in year 2025 that people can no longer locate and recognize the non-fiction educators and teachers on the very subject of mixing fiction and non-fiction! It’s horrific how much we have lost our minds and information systems to fiction content.

https://dominatorculture.com/post/78408036619/surfing-finnegans-wake-part-1

The reason I’m interested in it, I suppose I should fess up, is because it’s two things clearly. Finnegans Wake is psychedelic and it is apocalyptic/eschatological. What I mean by those phrases is – first of all what I mean by psychedelic is there is no stable point of view. There is no character per se. You never know who is speaking. You have to read into each speech to discover is this King Mark, Anna Livia Plurabelle, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Shem the Penman, Shaun – who is it? Identities are not fixed. Those of you who have followed my wrap over the years, I’m always raving about how psychedelics dissolve boundaries. Well Finnegans Wake is as if you had taken the entirety of the last thousand years of human history and dissolved all of the boundaries. So Queen Mob becomes Mae West, all the personages of pop culture, politics, art, church history, Irish legend, Irish internecine politics are all swirling, changing, merging – time is not linear. You will find yourself at a recent political rally then return the court of this or that Abyssinian emperor or pharaoh. It’s like a trip and the great technique – I was thinking about this as I was thinking about this lecture – the great technique of the 20th century is collage or pastiche. It was originally developed by the Dadaist in Zurich in 1919. Right now it’s having a huge resurgence in the form of sampling in pop music and Joyce was the supreme sampler. I mean, he draws his material from technical catalogs, menus, legal briefs, treaty language, mythologies, dreams, doctor/patient conversations – everything is grist for this enormous distillery. Yet what comes out of this once you learn the codes and once you learn to play the game is a Joycian story that all graduates of Ulysses will recognize.

What Joyce was about was an incredible sympathy with common people and an awareness of the dilemma of being a Jew in Irish Ireland, being a devotee of Scholasticism in the 20th century and of dislocation and of disorientation of being the cuckolded husband, the failed divinity student. All of these characters and themes are familiar. It’s quite an amazing accomplishment. There’s nothing quite like it in literature. It had very little anticipation. The only real anticipator of Joyce in English I think is Thomas Nash, who most people have never heard of. Thomas Nash was a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote a famous – I don’t know what it means in that context – but a novel called The Wayfaring Traveler. Anyway, Nash had this megalomaniac richness of language. This attitude that it’s better to put it in than take it out and that’s certainly what you get with Joyce. Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, and localisms. The way to conceive of Finnegans Wake really is like a midden, a garbage dump and there is in fact a garbage dump in the Wake that figures very prominently and what you as the reader have to do is go in there with nut pick and tooth brush and essentially remove one level after another level after another level and sink down and down.

And the theme is always the same. The delivery of the word, the misinterpretation of the word and the redemption of the word in every level at all times and places. The reason I’ve now gone some distance toward explaining why I think of it as psychedelic; the reason why I think of it as eschatological and apocalyptic is – it’s hard to tell because we don’t have James Joyce around to ask – how much of this material he took seriously and how much was grist for his literary mill – but he was perfectly conversant with renaissance theories of magic.

If you have a proper insurance system and social safety net, then veterans wouldnt need special treatmenty because everyone just gets what they require.

if social media users of Mastodon, Reddit, Bluesky could actually bother to read a book or even Wikipedia about the January 1944 “Second Bill of Rights” and make it front page of every social media site for day after day for 6 months, the problem would probably be progressed. This was 5 months before D-Day to liberate France from Nazi Germany, but all people do on their Apple iPhone / Apple iPad / Samsung Smartphone / Android devices is share kitten images and dumb as fuck memes in celebration of ignorance…

It is a direct quot from Donald Trump today in a news broadcast.

I love Wiki but self-centered comments have their place.

Really? I said: “many people obsessed with egoism and self-centered content creation”

And you support this? Egomania like Elon Musk?

I was looking through posts on Lemmy and came across a long list of posts solely linked to reddit

If they copy the content of the Reddit over to Lemmy and other places, I think that’s a good thing. Public resources of information, Usenet roots of social media, are incredibly important. Reddit (content) isn’t built upon private social media, it’s primary public shared social media, and preservation and community accessible content (advertising free on Lemmy) is valuable to the whole World Wide Web / Pale Blue Dot. We need more and more Wikipedia style content that is contributed to all humanity and not so many people obsessed with egoism and self-centered content creation.

What boggles my mind is that people actually spend LOTS of money to buy those award thingies and they send that to each other, the abject level of consoomerism.

Actually that’s what people do to Mastodon and Lemmy operators, they donate money to the owners directly. I’m far more for that than psychologically manipulative advertising and marketing of the Edward Bernays style funding the site.

I think Reddit in 2022 should have returned to open source like they were in earlier decades, fully release the source code, became a non-profit corporation, fully disclosed their accounting / financed like Beehaw does, an been run by donations only - renouncing advertising. Openly publish moderation logs and openly disclose what they are removing / ongoing SPAM attacks, etc. Be the the long-form (not short-length Twitter-length) Google Search hit-results website leader that appeals to book readers ( Read-it ) length consumers.

Instead, they went the opposite of a non-profit Google Search engine destination for research and discussion and became a source of marketing and advertising content for Corporate America values / Elon Musk values.