You should not watch that, no.

EDIT:  Unless you want to waste your brief and hopelessly inconsequential life watching stuff he makes I guess.  Then sure.

As long as you take the fucking vaccine, you do you.

Minkymu wrote:

You should watch David Ikes talk on the nature of reality and the possibility we are living in a simulation. Mostly a bit matrixy however when he talks about how the physical properties of certain materials changed depending on circumstances blew my brain.

I have listened to some of his lectures. Nothing all the way through as I start zoning out when he gets a bit crazy..

What makes him so interesting to me is I'm of an age when I remember him presenting sport on BBC - he was part of the mainstream furniture. He was a likeable, good broadcaster.

Then one day he turned up on Wogan in a purple tracksuit talking about the most way out and bizarre things in the same measured style he had as a TV presenter. I am fascinated by the journey someone can take like that. It's easy to say he just had some sort of episode that fucked his head up - and that may be  in fact is most likely, the case.

There is something to what he says - mentioned it earlier in this thread. I would certainly be open to the idea of power behind what we see as leaders. Given financial backing of political parties it's hardly a huge leap in thinking.

As to perception and whether we are seeing the world for what it is. Again I'm pretty much open to the idea that we don't perceive the world as it really is. Whether that's because of how our brains work to filter a lot of information out so we can perceive the world in order to survive and breed, or how social conditioning impresses upon us a particular view of the world, or that it's a combination of that and that it could be engineered isn't exactly a wild idea.

There are religions that talk about enlightenment. We have people on the autistic spectrum who perceive the world differently. It really isn't a new idea.

All of that interests me in a general sense. So I will listen and read about stuff like that from time to time.

Where Icke goes off piste is the engineering angle and that we are enslaved - and the scale of that enslavement. We may well be enslaved by other human beings that keep us as a herd of consumers to keep the capitalist system going but the whole world isn't in that system - though it may suffer from it due to the ludicrously poor distribution of resources. There's enough to be unhappy about there.

But Icke takes it further into this inter-dimensional realm that requires an enormous leap that for me places him in the loony category. Of course it's possible that we live in a simulation but it's his attempts at presenting evidence for this that falls down. My question to this sort of thing, as it is to any conspiracy theory is , to what purpose? Who benefits?

He's still an entertaining gig though.

I used to imagine I was in a simulator when I was kid. I sometimes imagined I was in a cylindrical machine that projected a reality for me. Its radius was such that I couldn't touch it and it moved as I did. And for some reason my family was outside it controlling me. I would have been pretty young when I dreamt this up - certainly primary school age.  I didn't believe it but I remember wondering about it.

I don't think I'm anything special - it's quite possibly a common fantasy or idea.

The Matrix film really resonated with me and I suspect that's why it did with a lot of people. Maybe deep down we know we are perceiving the world and not seeing it and it bubbles up from our subconscious.

@davy
I think its quite a common theme people think of.
The Truman Show is really the same thing done different and that resonated with people.

I saw a "shower thought" the other day that went along the lines of "we think of our skeleton being inside us but it is the opposite because our brains are inside our skeleton"

Its that kind of self aware consciousness humans have. What actually are we?

I read one of Icke's early books. It was quite entertaining. He basically cherry picks conspiracies that fit his narrative and squashes them all together (leading other nutters to complain that he's stealing their conspiracy theories - how can you steal the truth?). He also takes historical and literary works at absolute face value, with no regard for fable or metaphor.

I may be wrong but I seem to remember that it was an experience with ayuhuasca in South America that set him off. Some people just shouldn't take drugs.

davyK wrote:

To dream of some system of control is comforting to many I suppose. It's more likely that the world is just a series of fuck-ups and a Douglas Adams universe is the reality.

There's clearly nobody in control but there are rules, and those rules are set in stone from the beginning. It's figuring out those rules, no matter what universe you live in, that's the smart bit.

We live in a universe that has learnt to discover some of it's own laws naturally, through time and evolution. Humans are a bit of that universe and are figuring out the universe they are part of. It's quite a thing when a universe can learn about itself.

It's not inevitable. It's probability rather than Newtonian, and that probability is enough to ensure things are not inevitable ever. This applies to any interaction that any particle has with any other and not human dependent.

I remember Ike riffing on the Matrix films not long after they were released (a canny move considering how they captured the popular consciousness) - those films borrowed a great deal from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, who was himself inspired by the writings of the Marquis De Sade, and gnosticism.

All of these theories have their roots in the philosophy that we're all enslaved either by society or class or by religion and we've been philosophising about these things for centuries. But these days it's so mixed up with contemporary sci-fi that it's all become very post modern but without any apparent self awareness. Suddenly people are taking enslavement by the alien lizard-men (disguised as the royal family) as literally as an 17th century peasant who believed in a literal god and angels and demons.

People like Ike believe in all the mad things always. It's a career move to believe in as many things as possible as you get a larger audience.

Glad someone's already posted the Shapiro thing from Cody. He has a damn series on Ben alone.

Ben is a fucking idiot.

Tim pool is total grift and swimming with the alt-right/nazi sharks hard.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tim_Pool

The regular wiki entry is more "even" maybe. But damn, if you go from Bernie to trump and your talking points are all duck like, then you a fucking duck.

GurtTractor wrote:

Living in a simulation is a common thought experiment for scientists and philosophers, some think it could be plausible, but I think most think it's either vanishingly unlikely or basically pointless to even worry about. It's definitely a fun thing to think about though -

Thing is, the computer sim theory only came into existence because we invented computers. Prior to this, the universe was either a construct of god, a giant tree, a dead celestial being in an ocean... the list goes on, but it all comes down to us feeling angst that there's more to it than this.

Fuck only knows what our cultural lense will project next, though arguably it'll mean essentially the same thing.

dynamiteReady wrote:

For any reasonable observer, this is getting stupid. No matter which side you see yourself on.

I think you hit the nail on the head there, in my sleep-deprived state I'm finding it tough stringing cogent sentences together. 
These days things are incredibly murky, its tough to find a middle ground or a semi trustworthy source. As a (recent) casual observer, Im clueless about any of this. Take Glenn Greenwald for example. An apparently respected journalist by all accounts? But now with his Biden laptop article, he is shite and the article is nonsense? Did he drop the ball on this? Or is he being unduly censored?
Are Shapiro and Poole lying when they say the FBI etc have confirmed the authenticity of the laptop and its contents? Are the MM right to ignore it because its a fabrication? 
Whatever way the coin lands it sounds dodgy. At this point where would I go to find out the answers? Short of doing an investigation myself! 

Things are more clear cut in the realm of UFOs and interdimensional paedo lizards I think.

I guess what I was trying to get at in my original post is wondering why the democrats and the media have been going so unusually crazy trying to get Trump out? Are there conspiracy theorys out there?

superflyninja wrote:

dynamiteReady wrote:

For any reasonable observer, this is getting stupid. No matter which side you see yourself on.

I think you hit the nail on the head there, in my sleep-deprived state I'm finding it tough stringing cogent sentences together. 
These days things are incredibly murky, its tough to find a middle ground or a semi trustworthy source. 
I guess what I was trying to get at in my original post is wondering why the democrats and the media have been going so unusually crazy trying to get Trump out? Are there conspiracy theorys out there? 

As a (recent) casual observer, Im clueless about any of this. Take Glenn Greenwald for example. An apparently respected journalist by all accounts? But now with his Biden laptop article, he is shite and the article is nonsense? Did he drop the ball on this? Or is he being unduly censored?
Are Shapiro and Poole lying when they say the FBI etc have confirmed the authenticity of the laptop and its contents? Are the MM right to ignore it because its a fabrication? 
Whatever way the coin lands it sounds dodgy. At this point where would I go to find out the answers? Short of doing an investigation myself! 

Things are more clear cut in the realm of UFOs and interdimensional paedo lizards I think.

Greenwald remains a respected journalist. The editorial board at the Intercept ousted him, or decided to accept the risk of his going, because (my guess) for them the ends justify the means. They want trumpo out and do not want to play an active role in a long-planned Trump October surprise. Greenwald is studiously principled - for him the ends do not justify the means. His proposed solution (of an editorial rebuttal against his piece) would not have assuaged Klein and co's concerns. It would not have been linked by trump and his bots - they would have linked "snowden guy says laptop proves Biden is Bent" - even though Greenwald's piece did not say that.

What you need to do, if I may, is watch your own brain and what it does with all this.

Shapiro and Poole do not link to Greenwald's other takes, on gay rights, on BLM, or crucially on the coup against Lula's successor Roussef by their darling ally Bolsonaro.
; And more importantly the conspiracy to nail Lula which put him in jail for years.

They are only using this story to their own ends. Instead of saying "the left-leaning media is very partisan in this election" they are saying "all the media is partisan and ergo Plato hint hint something deep and malign is going on, also it means the counts are wrong"

You should use your brain by being careful about it, it's deficiencies, and how easy it is to manipulate when all the information you have is limited by what (I assume) YouTube algorithms are throwing at you.

Trust me, I know, YT is constantly spamming Jimmy Dore at me. I only make an effort because I'm a dork.

I say this with all love in the world, as someone who used to shoot things with you online- surely the most intimate thing men can do together. Beware of Shapiro and beware especially of Tim Pool. He is an absolute, shameless, cynical shill.

Allow me to say; the world's not black and white. What Dante says is true. It's also very probably true that Biden Jr didn't get hired by massive corps for his academic and professional achievements..just like Trump's children didn't get to where they are now off of merit.

Biden's a player, always has been. We've known this a while. So why did the laptop turn up just a couple of weeks before the election?

Whether it's russian or not is irrelevant. The laptop thing is no evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate the election, save insofar that man always manipulates elections by mediating the message that goes to the masses. Nothing new here.