dolores666's photos with the keyword: Brainwashing

Navigating The Grid is never a cushy number; or free of peril. It’s riddled with all sort of vacuous, two-brain-cells-and-no-synapse, insipid but nevertheless insidious creatures that will try to sell you stuff you don’t need, want or even fancy, and ideas that should have been dead and buried centuries ago. They will also try and instil in you a feeling of “missing out”, a state of being that seems to be one of the main transgressions in our increasingly amalgamated End Days Crapitalist so-called society. Try and ignore them. Sharpen your cynicism. Beef up your middle finger. Wear Orphic earplugs. And take a Shoggoth with you as a travelling companion. Oh, and a teddy bear. (If you are teddy-deprived you can write to us and we’ll send you one post-haste via Byakhee Express.) No one should be without a Teddy. Ever. Weekend soooon come. Have a good one. To brighten it, as a bonus ball, have some pandas being extremely silly and terminally cute. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLQiAqc1MI8

Brief Encounter 9.1. Breaking the tradition of starting the year (or trying to...) on a cheery note, I hereby present you with the First Rant of 2023! Ta da! It''s a nice, all-purpose generic rant. A sort of DIY Rant-O-Meter. Have fun. Love and anchovy salad. The sneaky quotation is from Eric Fromm’s On Disobedience (Highly recommended reading.)

They put your mind right into a bag, and they take it wherever they want. Malcolm X In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. Theodore Adorno

Pick a point. Any point. Make it a good one, though; one with brass knobs on and attendant dancing fireflies. Argue it clearly, cogently and free of jargon. Back your evidence with forensic precision and solid, easily provable facts. Put some passion into your delivery but don’t drift into messianic hysteria. There. You’ll have been wasting your time and breath. For if your argument runs contrary to the mainstream doctrine, the prevailing Group-Thought of the moment, it could be delivered by God himself, on an all-channels prime-time TV stunt and still it wouldn’t cut any ice with either Joe Public or with the Masters of the Universe (aka Them). Because if the Good Shepherds say that Covid-19 was worse than all the plages of Egypt put together, or that Putin, personally, poisoned the Skripals and invaded Ukraine just for the Hell of it, or that we live in a democracy, then that’s what the WeThePeople will believe and bleat back at you and to anyone else foolish enough to back you up. And you’ll be called all sort of unpleasant names into the bargain. And in some cases burnt at the stake on the local Common. Now you know. Have a spiffing life.