you can’t really play the game until you’re free to walk away from it. otherwise it’s playing you.

dissent does become dangerous, however, when it erects signposts that lead off of the chessboard.

yes!!!

i think we were rounded up like cattle a long time ago.

excellent point. i think that if ‘they’ decide to round ‘us’ up like cattle, it won’t look anything like it’s looked in the past. they’ll be more deceptive.

as to whether dissent is really dangerous, imho it’s only really dangerous in the context of their little game. like, the really ‘dangerous’ radicals are still die-hard ideologues, and only when the conspiracy theorists start using the con’s terminology do they become dangerous. like let’s look at right-wing militias. they’re dangerous when they consider themselves ‘right wing,’ because it’s part of the game. or ‘islamic terrorists’– same deal.

as for me, tho’, i’ve never, ever seen any evidence at all that dissent in the form of conspiracy theory has ever had any direct effect on the higher echelons of society. ever. i’m willing to entertain examples, but i tend to think that your average conspiracy theorist, right or wrong, is like a gnat (hell, a swarm of gnats) attacking a panzer division.

dissent does become dangerous, however, when it erects signposts that lead off of the chessboard.

…a new technology always expands to cover all it’s possible uses, both positive and negative. For example, atomic fission was used for both the creation of bombs and power plants. Such expansion seems largely inavoidable, and the point is that the technology itself is inherently neutral.

Expansion to cover all uses is not at all the same as neutral. Doing both good and bad things is also not the same as neutral. Was Ted Bundy neutral because he was sometimes nice to people? Even atomic power does a lot of harm and no good that can’t be done some other way. My point is that the word “neutral” doesn’t make any sense at all in this context. By a reasonable definition of neutral, there has never been a neutral technology or a neutral idea. Every technology and every idea is different, with its own web of alliances and effects.

the chairman of the department was a handsome young fellow named david gordon, who taught the big introductory lecture course which we all had to take. repeatedly he would raise an issue and then specify for us exactly the nature of “the debates” over that issue. the debates, of course, always contested small pieces of far-left conceptual turf.

in a similar spirit, early in the semester gordon announced to the class that there was going to be a party at his tomkins square townhouse on an upcoming saturday night where we could all get to know each other. there was going to be food and drink, and, to prove that we radicals knew how to have as much fun as anyone else, there was going to be dancing.

the party was fine, as i recall, but the funny thing was that although they played plenty of hard-driving rock from gordon’s sixties heyday, nobody danced.

gordon was not the only one who prescribed and proscibed our thoughts. when it came time to start writing those big term papers around mid-november, i dropped out.