Just discovered an interesting subject, via a link off Cryptogon. The Army has been embedding civilian academics - cultural anthropologists, in this case - in its combat units in “hot” zones like Afghanistan and Iraq.
They are there to act as cultural advisors in what’s being described as the Army’s new friendlier more culturally sensitizier way of doing business: relying more on street-level intelligence and diplomacy. It’s the obvious response against a stateless loosely networked enemy: making your force more isometric to the strength to which you’re opposing. Like shadow and form. I vaguely recall something in Sun Tzu that fits here. Mountains and gravity. Weight. I forget the details.
Anyway, one of these people on the “Human Terrain Team” as it’s being called, a woman was set on fire recently in attack.
According to Wired: “The Taliban took credit for the attack on their website.” So… the Taliban has websites now? I thought we were supposed to believe they were in the Stone Age?
Some academics are criticizing the program for not just being dangerous, but for being unethical in that it blurs the line between researcher and soldier and that it politicizes researchers, who are supposed to remain neutral…
As an aside: where does that idea come from, that scholars are supposed to be politically neutral? I’m guess it comes out of the religious origins of Scholasticism, but haven’t yet looked into it.
The subject of the intersection between urban warfare and sociological/anthropological studies is an interesting one. Anthropology, it could be argued, arose as a discipline because of colonialism: white Europeans going out and studying and cataloguing artifacts, practices and information about the indigenous people who they were displacing. It both tended to the ravenous intellectual appetite for exotic novelties that the upper-class European mind hungered for, and helped on a day-to-day level: you learn about someone’s customs and language, you automatically learn how to get along with them more harmoniously. Same basic thing as missionary work. Except one is supposed to be for the Glory of God, and the other the Glory of Man. It’s always the Arrogance & Glory of Man though which drives these things.
Great quote from the J. Boland interview at Wishtank:
I’ve been fascinated to see the parallels between warfare and marketing over the past century. The languages of advertising and mass persuasion are often identical — penetration, projection, triggering and targeting. There’s been a shift in emphasis from mass marketing and world warfare, to segmented marketing and counterinsurgency, and now viral marketing and 5GW share a common set of concepts as well. You could also write an essay exploring the links between urban marketing and urban warfare in the past decade, but it would be a fairly boring essay.
Cultural scientists have long been part of strategic tactical teams though. They have always been warriors: trying to sell people products, trying to study their behavior (while simultaneously impacting it - it’s never a clean transaction), trying to predict and control. That’s the very nature of the social sciences. No wonder its so closely allied with military and colonial conquests.
Let’s get hypothetical: If the global economy collapsed and states turned to butter, and all the paranoids turned out bein right: that this is just the beginning of the Illuminati New World Order of old-school 90’s conspiracy theory, well then your Human Terrain Team becomes a very interesting commodity. If the world does re-organize (descend) into pockets and inkblots and autonomous zones and enclaved states mediated by hyper-complex interpenetrating technological and commercial networks then the role of the social scientist, of the diplomat, of the translator, of the streets-level scholar, of the mediator, the missionary, the marketing street team becomes immensely important.
Not saying that’s either good or bad. It is what it is. It’s basically how I see things happen nowadays on a ground level: people with certain kinds of social-savvy get farther than those without. Social awareness is a marketable skill. Who’s going to be paying the big bucks in the days to come? Who will hire the best headhunters in the industry: DHS, NSA, Army, Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley? Which one of those won’t go bankrupt in the next six months? You see, it’s all the same work with varying shades of moral and ethical gray, of different desired behavioral outcomes on the part of your target audience: submission, acceptance, envy, desire. How to achieve consent. Consensus. Or at least minimize resistance to what you’ve already decided to do anyway.
The thing is we all know how this works already. We do it every day. We’re always acting as social scientists. Mammalian politics. We learn it as babies. How to manipulate each other into getting what we want. Persuading others to our point of view. Impacting someone else’s behavior in a way favorable to you. Saying please and thank you. Tipping. Holding doors open for each other. Keeping up appearances. Kindess is self-serving. The Golden Rule. Are scholars out killing people in the field or are they killing them safely from thousands of miles away in an Ivory Tower? Saruman, the White Wizard. Why was a Brooklyn Marine sergeant and his wife slain by four of his own men? Where are the social scientists on that one?
One day it will be the social scientists who program the robots they send out to round us up into decontamination pens. Until they can teach the robots to learn our patterns, track us down and either murder, preach or market to us.
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24 Comments
Lately, I’ve been closely following the dialogue between science and religion, and the declining emphasis on science education in the U.S. There seems to be general agreement in academia that science isn’t getting enough media coverage, popular interest in science is waning, and the government is making important policy decisions without input from scientists. All of which leads to the question, why aren’t scientists getting more involved? Why aren’t they marketing themselves better?
I have a few of my own thoughts on the matter, which dovetail nicely with our discussion of propaganda vs. information. Traditionally, scientists operate within an ethos of “just presenting the facts”. They tend to shy away from involvement in normative matters, which could be seen as compromising their objectivity, and raise doubt over the impartiality of their scientific judgment. Where reliable scientific understanding is lacking, as is often the case with complex social issues, they don’t want to be perceived as filling in the gaps with ideology - the appropriate scientific response is to suspend judgment on the matter. Choices should be made through the exercise of reason, not authority, and one’s willingness to accept any particular claim proportioned to the available evidence. To the extent that marketing, propagandizing, and politicking presents only a partial picture to the target audience, excluding relevant but contradictory evidence, it is antithetical to the scientific process, which emphasizes full disclosure of the facts.
Alan Wallace has given some good lectures on spirituality/religion/morality/faith/consciousness/science/objectivity/reason/rationality.
Really great stuff.
I recommend “Experience, Reason & Faith in Science & Religion” and “The Conscious Universe”.
Thanks for the link. Here’s a couple of my own that I’ve enjoyed:
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/...-science-religion-reason-and-survival
http://meaningoflife.tv/
There’s always this, if a little dated in the sense of absolute certainty of the last generation’s expectations and conception of “science” being a cure all for the human condition.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mIfatdNqBA
But I don’t think scientists, at least the popularizers of science in those days (Bronowski, Sagan, Ferris etc), understood the great, glaring morass we have always been in. I think their attitudes can be excused. However, what we have on our hands now is an urgent call for all who can and all who know how to, appeal to all of the sciences, down through the ages, each and every mystery of the past which was also, ALSO, what we term today: “OPEN SOURCE”.
The popularizers of science in my upbringing stressed it seemed, to an almost exciting anticlimax or a boring climax, that science was there for “YOU” and her and him and whatever. But YOU got to use it. But, ut ut ut, don’t fall for the pseudosciences. Science is a candle in the dark, as Carl Sagan’s final book is aptly named. But scientific discovery, breakthrough and technology, when “open sourced” as it were, can always be bought, overtaken, hijacked, silenced, you name it. Yet it can also be exalted. Since when though, has any scientific discovery, uncovered freely in this great sandbox of ours, ever been offered back to humanity, the unified and variegated Cosmos, as ours, gratis? Honestly, I can’t think of one thing besides gravity and air. Everything costs. Why?
Look at a squirrel running around outside your window. As a human subject you think, if you think about such things: “oh, he must be so tired of always having to gather resources. Wouldn’t a squirrel rather come inside from the cold and chill in front of the TV every once in awhile?”
Or you might think the damned thing is just playing. To all these retards caught up in and clawing their way up these ponzi schemes of high and low finance, it looks as if all animals and all children do is do nothing but play. I promise you this is what they think. And sadly, this is what has dripped down into our lower financial and class runged psyches as well. Squirrels run around and birds fly because all they want to do is play. And so they do. And so do we. All we do is play. Execpt we call it serious. Except we stay totally non-serious about it.
Alec said:
Lately, I’ve been closely following the dialogue between science and religion, and the declining emphasis on science education in the U.S. There seems to be general agreement in academia that science isn’t getting enough media coverage, popular interest in science is waning, and the government is making important policy decisions without input from scientists. All of which leads to the question, why aren’t scientists getting more involved? Why aren’t they marketing themselves better?
I hate to say, but I believe this is by some nefarious design by the Creator Himself (tongue firmly in cheek). Because, as a former atheist myself, I am disturbed by how cool it’s suddenly become to BE ATHEIST! Pronounce one as such. It seems like a private thing, between you and the void you pray to. But no, a lack of God is a hottt commodity!
Now how did this surge of nearly euphoric “godlessness” come about right around the same time as “godless scientific” education and interest is at an all time low? I thought it was the “science” teaching us to be godless. . .
Really, what an enigma! Eh, it’s just powerful, resourceful marketing, really. But really, what a clusterfuck that I don’t think anybody even really sees, nor understands. Like me. Nor the marketers.
Anyone wanna talk about the homoplasmate?
I also think there is a about a 99:1 emphasis on how humans can train computers to be more like and serve us and next to nothing on what this is doing to us — divulging our entire existences (meaningless more and more) into this growing and organic supercomputer we call earth. Maybe we always were mere circuitry for the greater device.
Part of what makes science so devoid of any sort of spirituality is that the foundation of science was built in opposition to the Church, and science has hung on to that attitude ever since. I’m paraphrasing the Allan Wallace lectures here, but for the sake of brevity:
Galileo said, “look at all these cool things I can see in my telescope! It’s so weird! None of this should even be here!”
And the church replied: “Fuck that shit, we already know how things work. If what you see with your telescope doesn’t match what we know, then there’s something wrong with your telescope!”
And so the church’s animosity toward science has tainted science since then, and science has become biased against spirituality (yeah, I admit that the cause and effect aspect of it is open to debate, but the fact that science as a body of knowledge is biased against spirituality isn’t really that debatable)
But now, science is taking that same attitude toward spirituality. “We don’t care what you think you experienced, while meditating or tripping on acid or being abducted by aliens. We already know how things work, so if what you experienced doesn’t match what’s in our system, there must be something wrong with your experience!”
Ian,
Do you think maybe all along the point of these various groups in power was not to promote a point of view but simply control what the people think? Or even control by preventing them from thinking? Preventing free inquiry?
Tim,
It may sound hokey but I am not so cynical as that to say the golden rule is self serving.
I mean maybe codifying it into a rule is.
But Love is the perfect guidence system. You can look out for yourself too. Love is not adverse to survival. Love is always relative. Its a matter of making the best choice for the given situation.
When you remove love from the equation though, then you need to build a machine to control everything.
No, I completely agree with that. I just think that we should recognize it and move on.
Anyone is power is going to be at least subtly desirous of controlling people so as to minimize the amount of change. Change eventually means no more power, and whether you’re in power because you like power or because you think you can actually make a difference, you very much want to stay there.
Start freely inquiring, start finding ways in your life that you can grow and change, and eventually you may be given the responsibility of power. And if you do, you should keep all of this mind, so that when the time comes for you to step down, you do so willingly.
The thing is, I think that these plans, to control people and stop thinking, will only ever work if we let them. And that to spend all our time worrying about them is the same as being controlled by them, just in a more subtle way.
Ian,
I know you think I am just being morbid and fixated on the illuminati, but to me its just a part of awareness.
Awareness of the problem. Awareness of the choices that have to be made.
You are positing this other position opposite of mine thats “positive” or something that just worries about solutions and not problems but to me that makes no sense.
You have to know what the problem is and how it was caused. It seems negative but its not. You could say the problem is not there or its not really that bad or that it is caused by something that is not sinister.
It may sound more upbeat but its not superior.
To me it is a big deal of who started this whole thing with 9/11 and the war on terror. Being all fuzzy on it and saying “who knows?” or “Does it matter” “lets just go with the official story that it was a bunch of muslim suicide bombers since that’s easier to go along with” is not about being an optimist rather than a pessimist its about being deluded.
Focusing on solutions only works if you see the problem clearly.
Then I guess what I am asking you, since you seem to keep saying that you see things clearly, or at least more clearly than the “official story”, is “OK, so now what?”
I do not at all deny that awareness of the problem is required. But what do we do with this information, this awareness? Maybe it’s just the way I look at it, but if I were to fixate on constantly gaining more and more awareness of the actions of the elites, and trying to get a clearer view of the problem, all that is going to do for me is make me less and less likely to work for a positive solution. I would be too overwhelmed at how far ahead of me all these elites are.
Cause they are, if all these theorists are right. Elites have been at it for thousands and thousands of years, if this does go back to the Merovingians and Carolingians, so what chance do I have to stop them with my piddly little 70~100 odd years on this planet?
There’s a story about the Buddha that I think is relevant here:
A man approached the Buddha and wanted to have all his philosophical questions answered before he would practice.
In response, the Buddha said, “It is as if a man had been wounded by a poisoned arrow and when attended to by a physician were to say, ‘I will not allow you to remove this arrow until I have learned the caste, the age, the occupation, the birthplace, and the motivation of the person who wounded me.’ That man would die before having learned all this. In exactly the same way, anyone who should say, ‘I will not follow the teaching of the Buddha until the Buddha has explained all the multiform truths of the world’ - that person would die before the Buddha had explained all this.”
What use is information and awareness of things that do not actually touch the part of your life which you can control? I think it is better to start putting our own lives right, instead of worrying about who else is making them go wrong. This is the only way to stop any kind of elitist conspiracy. In my opinion, it’s the only direct action we can take that will save us.
Anything else is watching the house burn down around you while calculating the rate at which wood is burning.
I am not trying to come off as better, more positive, more enlightened, or more anything than you Ted. And I am definitely not trying to take an opposing stance (which, to be honest, you seem to accuse pretty much everyone of doing). I am just trying to understand where all this research and awareness will lead us. I want another “and then…” from you.
“If the world does re-organize (descend) into pockets and inkblots and autonomous zones and enclaved states mediated by hyper-complex interpenetrating technological and commercial networks then the role of the social scientist, of the diplomat, of the translator, of the streets-level scholar, of the mediator, the missionary, the marketing street team becomes immensely important.”
That’s my movie right there.
Well one thing I should make clear is that this Luciferian aspect of creation has been ongoing. It started with the creation of the Universe. There is an ambivalence in the fabric of creation. I differentiate between God and creator.
Lucifer is of the creation. He has a body, he exists someplace in space. So like you said this evil within humanity has been working for a long time, Merovingians, etc.
But all the good things have been happening right alongside it. It took them a while to get America under their thumb. In a sense you could say they had control from the beginning, but still there was all this freedom and creativity going on here.
So what is actually going on is not an attempt to take control of everything by force. Getting paranoid about that happening at any moment is not what I am advocating. That’s not the point.
Its seduction. The point is to get you to choose to go along with them.
Its easier to do if you kid yourself in to believing “they don’t exist”
“To me it is a big deal of who started this whole thing with 9/11 and the war on terror.”
Start here and click the videos “911 Stargate” and “The Lotus Eating Duck”. Don’t miss the links to Labyrinth of the Psychonaut, The Secret Sun, Gosporn, Stygian Port and a few others.
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=Seallion
I don’t think people are ignoring the problem but they are acknowledging the near impossibility of knowing who exactly did it and knowing what they could do about it if they knew.
I think its a matter of people witnessing a murder and not wanting to take responsibility.
Because if you witness a murder you bear a responsibility to do something. I guess an analogy would be seeing a police cheif or a powerful mafia Don commit a murder.
So to me this sounds like saying to yourself:
“can I really be sure of what I saw?” or even “what is reality?”
The bottom line was it was a terrorist attack by powerful elements in our government against the people of the US.
Getting all post modern about it, seems like a cop-out.
I think its a matter of people witnessing a murder and not wanting to take responsibility.
Because if you witness a murder you bear a responsibility to do something. I guess an analogy would be seeing a police cheif or a powerful mafia Don commit a murder.
So to me this sounds like saying to yourself:
“can I really be sure of what I saw?” or even “what is reality?”
The bottom line was it was a terrorist attack by powerful elements in our government against the people of the US.
Getting all post modern about it, seems like a cop-out.
I think its a matter of people witnessing a murder and not wanting to take responsibility.
Because if you witness a murder you bear a responsibility to do something. I guess an analogy would be seeing a police cheif or a powerful mafia Don commit a murder.
So to me this sounds like saying to yourself:
“can I really be sure of what I saw?” or even “what is reality?”
The bottom line was it was a terrorist attack by powerful elements in our government against the people of the US.
Getting all post modern about it, seems like a cop-out.
I think its a matter of people witnessing a murder and not wanting to take responsibility.
Because if you witness a murder you bear a responsibility to do something. I guess an analogy would be seeing a police cheif or a powerful mafia Don commit a murder.
So to me this sounds like saying to yourself:
“can I really be sure of what I saw?” or even “what is reality?”
The bottom line was it was a terrorist attack by powerful elements in our government against the people of the US.
Getting all post modern about it, seems like a cop-out.
I think its a matter of people witnessing a murder and not wanting to take responsibility.
Because if you witness a murder you bear a responsibility to do something. I guess an analogy would be seeing a police cheif or a powerful mafia Don commit a murder.
So to me this sounds like saying to yourself:
“can I really be sure of what I saw?” or even “what is reality?”
The bottom line was it was a terrorist attack by powerful elements in our government against the people of the US.
Getting all post modern about it, seems like a cop-out.
I think its a matter of people witnessing a murder and not wanting to take responsibility.
Because if you witness a murder you bear a responsibility to do something. I guess an analogy would be seeing a police cheif or a powerful mafia Don commit a murder.
So to me this sounds like saying to yourself:
“can I really be sure of what I saw?” or even “what is reality?”
The bottom line was it was a terrorist attack by powerful elements in our government against the people of the US.
Getting all post modern about it, seems like a cop-out.
I think its a matter of people witnessing a murder and not wanting to take responsibility.
Because if you witness a murder you bear a responsibility to do something. I guess an analogy would be seeing a police cheif or a powerful mafia Don commit a murder.
So to me this sounds like saying to yourself:
“can I really be sure of what I saw?” or even “what is reality?”
The bottom line was it was a terrorist attack by powerful elements in our government against the people of the US.
Getting all post modern about it, seems like a cop-out.
I think its a matter of people witnessing a murder and not wanting to take responsibility.
Because if you witness a murder you bear a responsibility to do something. I guess an analogy would be seeing a police cheif or a powerful mafia Don commit a murder.
So to me this sounds like saying to yourself:
“can I really be sure of what I saw?” or even “what is reality?”
The bottom line was it was a terrorist attack by powerful elements in our government against the people of the US.
Getting all post modern about it, seems like a cop-out.
I don’t mean to endorse a post modern view of mass murder. I think that different people have different reactions to being powerless to do something about the mass murder.
Sometimes you have to keep the flame alive and continue to compile evidence even if it takes a lifetime but not everyone is where you’re at on this issue.
Personally I think that the USA torturing prisoners is a much more serious issue and much more of a threat to our national security than 911 ever could hope to be. All I can do is educate people I have conversations with and wait until some foreign country indicts our former leaders.
We had our good name before and after the attacks and now we don’t. The rest of the world lets us get away with being an empire because they trust us. You can’t buy, beg, borrow or steal a good name.
I mourn the dead but I’m more worried about the future. As the article Tim linked to points to without mentioning it, there are desentized and/or practised torturers coming home and doing what they do or always wanted to do.
This happened before, after the Viet Nam war. They came to Chicago and other communities, joined the police force and tortured false confessions out of people. Those people spent most of their adult lives in prison for crimes they didn’t commit and the real murderers got away.
I can do something with my awareness by trying to raise the awareness of others and helping them feel comfortable with taking a difficult position on issues. That makes me happy and I think is appropriate for me at this point in my life.
I you want to go after the people who committed 911 follow the money. Who short sold the stocks of United and American Airlines? Do you know of anybody willing to risk their neck to investigate this?
PNAC wrote about their desire for a “Pearl Harbor” type of attack. People in other countries are interested in indicting leading Americans for their role in the war. Have you or anybody else you know of contacted these people and offered to help them collect evidence?
Clearly we went to war with Iraq because they were about to start trading oil in Euros. The people who hold the levers on money can be traced if you’re interested in that kind of stuff. Pining it on “The Illuminati” or “The Jews” just doesn’t cut it and most of the anti-illuminati stuff out there just sounds like advertising for the illuminati to me.
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[...] …Julia! for this utterly epic comment left in response to an on-going conversation about the always controversial 9/11 topic: […] Personally I think that the USA torturing prisoners is a much more serious issue and much more of a threat to our national security than 911 ever could hope to be. All I can do is educate people I have conversations with and wait until some foreign country indicts our former leaders. [...]
[...] One of the biggest consumer trends I am watching these days is the modulation of mass culture and lifestyle marketing to accomodate the needs of the counter-culture rebel-hero. In a nutshell, lifestyle marketing seems to function by identifying traits and behavior of a particular demographic group, studying their subculture anthropologically and then coming up with a host of products, services to match their needs as a group. And in order to market to any particular subgroup, you also have to clothe your language and imagery in those which are native to that group. You can’t put together an advertisement which is “off-code” because people in that subcultural niche will just laugh it off. So, tons of money and research are put into market segmenting and adaptation to new trends. The BBC documentary “Century of the Self” is a fantastic exposition of this technique, and how it arose out of a combination of psychology and the counter-culture of the 60’s and 70’s in America. The neologism “metrospirituality” is also another more recent example of that same force in action in today’s world. [...]