Miralicious > Recent Status Updates

“Licklider was an optimist. He envisaged something [that] very much resembles the present-day internet, but it doesn’t seem to have crossed his [mind] that making the barrier between human and machine more permeable might mean that humans are far more susceptible to being manipulated and controlled by whoever programs the machine, or by machines that learn, in some form or another, to program themselves.”

“And it was generally true of all prisoners that life in prison tended to strengthen the convictions we had held previously.”

‘The best strategic propaganda is produced by manufacturing impassioned argument and violent controversy on "both sides" of a given question, so that the public accepts as unquestionable fact everything that both sides" in the contrived controversy seem to take for granted.’

“Under modern conditions, psychological warfare is necessarily waged by a govemment against its own subjects and only secondarily against a foreign country, and the real beneficiary is invariably the international nation that controls both sides in the war that it has arranged for its own purposes. Only if we keep that fact in mind can we use the term psychological warfare correctly.”

‘This book is a landmark in the broad field now generally designated by a term adapted from the Russian, “psychopolitics”. Psychopolitics…may be defined as the art of controlling a nation by controlling the minds of the politically dominant majority of its population.’

“…most people are not aware that excess cholesterol could also be due to the body’s response to low hormones, as well as poor conversion of cholesterol into pregnenolone.”

“The new takfiris…extended the death warrant to encompass, for instance, anyone who registered to vote. Democracy, in their view, was against Islam because it placed in the hands of people authority that properly belonged to God. Therefore, anyone who voted was an apostate, and his life was forfeit.”

“Unlike believers in the myths of redemption, Christians have no ultimate refuge from earthly tasks and problems in the eternal. Christians must partake of earthly life to the very end, just as did Christ…Myths of redemption arise from the human experience of limits, whereas Christ addresses us at the very center of our lives.”

“Whoever despises human beings is despising that which God loved, and, indeed, is despising the very form of the incarnate God.”

In reading this book, I am reminded of a Roger Ebert quote:

Is it “possible to separate the content from the craft?…If art should serve beauty and truth, how can great art be in the thrall of hateful ideologies? The crucial assumption here is that art should serve beauty and truth…but there is art that serves neither, and yet provides an insight into human nature, helping us understand good and evil.”

“Suffering produces patience, and then experience, and then hope. Whoever avoids suffering is throwing away God’s greatest gifts along with it.”

I would just like to take this opportunity to suggest that anyone who isn’t a fan of surveillance capitalism should familiarize themselves with surveillance communism before they throw themselves into changing dynamics. Otherwise, one might find oneself suffering at the other extreme, unaware it existed until too late and no longer having access to non-violent capitalist tools with which to extract oneself.

Note to self: Chapter 10, wherein rats desert the sinking ship and jail prep becomes a necessary reality is worth a reread.

“Good steel must be tempered at least once by being passed through the flame. Elements that cannot withstand this early trial cannot possibly be expected to bear the still harsher tribulations that await later in life.”

This book finally got interesting. The description of “astroturfing” on social media was illuminating. I wish people who actually used social media (unlike me) would learn what it is and be wary of it.

Note to self: When a liberal does it, it’s called “making it cool to love your country.” When a conservative does it, it’s called alt-right Christian nationalism.

‘On May 3, 1925, President Calvin Coolidge said: “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy… If American democracy is to remain the greatest hope of humanity, it must continue abundantly in the faith of the Bible.”’

‘President Abraham Lincoln was a student of the Bible, which bolstered his determination to abolish slavery. In his second inaugural address, he stated: ”[The Bible] is the best gift God has given to man.... The rebirth of Israel as a nation-state is a noble dream, shared by many Americans…“‘

The abridged version of this is so unrelentingly depressing that it’s hard to imagine finishing the unabridged version. Just how bad was it? Frequently, the author alludes longingly to how good things were during the previous monarchy and serfdom. And he was a committed communist (until several years into his gulag imprisonment).

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

‘A few members of the Jewish community asked Mikhail why he was working with Messianic believers and suggested it might be better to keep some distance…Mikhail responded, “During the war, the Nazis tried to control me and could not. After the war, the Communists tried to tell me what to believe, but they failed. Now, I am certainly not going to be told how to behave or who I can or cannot be friends with.”’

‘The soldiers gathered the [estimated two hundred] children, mercilessly threw them into a pit, and buried them alive…the general commissioner of Belarus, Wilhelm Kube…threw candy to the children as they stood in the hole that would become their grave…As a Lutheran minister, he also actively participated in the “German Christian Church” movement.’