Cancerous Simulacra & other stuff

When I woke up this morning
You were on my mind.

Hmm that takes me back.  They are lyrics of a song sung by Crispian St Peters back in 1966.


It is a little disturbing actually to realise that I was not only alive then but getting romantic.  The song, for the record, was written by Sylvia Tyson in 1964 and there have been quite a lot of covers over the intervening near half century.

And I notice above I have put "there have been" but when talking it is not uncommon (not where I'm concerned anyway) to say "there've been".  However, on looking around the internet to see if it is correct English (so to speak) I couldn't find it.  The Enchanted Learning web site has quite a lot of English word contractions but notably misses both "there've" and "fo'c'sle" (or "fo'c's'le") - pronounced "folk sul". Oh this is so off the point but you see the way my tired bored brain limps from one subject to another with flimsy abandon.

When I woke up this morning - you were probably not on my mind.  But what was on my mind was the pain I was in.  Constant pain.  I live with pain.  I wake up and my legs hurt and my lungs hurt.  My stomach feels tender and bloated and my right arm feels as if someone has attached a clamp to a nerve in it.  But I lie there worrying and wondering what is wrong.  I am exhausted and can't easily get out of bed.  I have only had four hours sleep but the worries of my life are preventing my tired brain from switching off to get more sleep.  Partly my problems are the result of years and years of not enough sleep through serious stress.

So I turn on the radio in the hope that the mundane chattering of various newscasters or interviewers might allow me some reprieve from my own cascade of banal desperation and afford me some sleep.

There is a piece called George Orwell: The Appeal of the Dystopian Novel;  John Humphrys talks to John Sutherland (professor of English literature at University College London) and Margaret Reynolds (professor of English at Queen Mary's University) about George Orwell.  I thought this was going to be interesting but was shocked to hear John Sutherland claim (of George Orwell in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four') "He is absolutely 100% wrong in his predictions."  He went on to say that the only thing he was right about was the tyranny by CCTV and asserted "...the rest of it, the notion of a Socialist Totalitarian State is bonkers."

How come people get to be professors and to talk on a national radio station (that is listened to around the world) and to spout such utter drivel.  The man is bonkers himself.  I did wonder what causes people to utter stuff like that and apart from the obvious possibility that he is quite deliberately talking nonsense in order to provoke there is another possibility and that is that the man cannot comprehend a metaphor.  He clearly does not understand what George Orwell was concerned about and if he thinks the CCTV cameras in public places all over the country are what Orwell 'predicted' then he has misunderstood that too.  He went on to claim and exclaim "He was completely wrong.  The notion that you can troll people by this nonsensical newspeak which reduces them just has not happened - He's wrong!"  Well I find this a sad case of a man who has clearly been successfully brain washed.  Being a professor he is probably unwittingly attempting to brainwashing a lot of students too.

One of the dreadful things about our oppressive culture and the ever growing phenomena of doublethink, thoughtcrime and newspeak is that the psychological condition which manifests these corrupt conceptualisations is being passed from one person to another like an infectious disease.  You 'catch' it in the assumptions that you have to make in order to 'understand' what people are attempting to say.  There is a developing field in psychology called interpersonal neurobiology which is looking into the ways that the patterns that exist in one brain are reproduced in another by the communications between them.  There is an obvious corollary to this when it comes to information technology.  The information is produced with the corrupt mindset and stored electronically.  When people access the information it reproduces the corruption in their brain too.  I have had a lot of personal experience of this but one simple example being that I explained to an official that I had been forced by circumstances to move from one accommodation to another on several occasions.  Because of his prejudicial view, when he wrote the report that went onto the official computer system, he wrote that I had been evicted several times.  Eviction, you might note, implies fault.  Now when someone else reads the report they conjure the same 'prejudicial' view because the way the events are described actually embody a different reality than the one that should have been described.  (You can read all about this and a heap of other abuses in the Children Services Abuse section of Toxic Drums in the document entitled 'Stage 2 Report Response'.)

The significance being that the corrupt mindset is being literally stored and reproduced in the interconnected information technology.  We are effectively building a false representation of the world in the machines which we are increasingly relying on.  It is the material manifestation of Jean Baudrillard's 'Simulacra and Simulation' where the simulation of reality in the computer becomes the reality in which we live.  It begins to form our reality and so becomes the source of our simulation and is no longer the product of, or representation of, a real reality.

That wally professor also claimed that Orwell predicted we would be ruled by religious fanatics and that was clearly wrong!  Orwell staged the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in Oceania which was in a state of perpetual war.  I also heard on the BBC radio today some politician saying that we will be fighting the terrorist threat for at least the next ten years.  This being on the back of the Algerian hostage fiasco and the French military activities in neighbouring Mali.  Well it has recently been established that in spite of the fact that the American Constitution explicitly requires a secular government no one stands a hope in hell of being elected as president if they are not a Christian.  George Bush and Tony Blair both made extensive reference to God and Christianity as justification for their "War on Terror" which was, in fact, directed against Islamic nations and Islamic 'fundamentalists'.  Whatever they want to claim the solid facts seem to suggest that this ongoing 'terrorist' threat is an ideological conflict polarised around perceived differences in Christian values and Islamic values.  So we are in a state of perpetual war and it is being run by religious fanatics.

And so my painful life goes on.  I have been interrupted today by a number of people but one of those people is insane.  On the delicate subject of me and my daughter my weird sister managed to tell me that I was not bringing her up correctly.  I gave an example where my ex would, for example, criticise our daughter and claim that I agreed with her.  Now my position was to generally let them get on with it but if my ex wanted support for her abusive action I was not about to pretend I agreed.  If she asked me explicitly "You agree don't you?" the answer may well be "No".  My sister said that I should not lie but I should say I agree in front of the child and talk with my ex-wife about it in private at a later time.  The horrible thing about this is that too many people think like this.  Lying to children in particular is not lying.  Especially if you can hide it well and fool them.

Do I hate the world in which I find myself? YES!  It seems full of self deceiving self serving gits.  But the worst of it is that it seems embedded in our culture and the whole system is cancerously eating us all up with its diseased malfunctioning.  Ugh!  It is not good.