The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Although this essay discusses politics in France, the observations and analyses can be applied to most Western nations. Useful Shadows. Maybe creating the “Extreme Right”was a bad idea. Aurelien I don’t know what ideas Festival of Humanity would conjure up in the mind of the average Anglo-Saxon. Happy-clappy guitars, perhaps, peace and love? Desmond Tutu and Ursula von der Leyen? In fact, it’s all to do with a newspaper. L’Humanité was founded by the great French Socialist Jean Jaurès, and was the Party’s official newspaper until 1920, when after the Congress of Tours, the departing Communist faction took it with them. From then until reality dictated otherwise in 1994, it was the official newspaper of the PCF, and since then, it’s clung on as an all-purpose leftist publication. A tradition for almost a hundred years, is the annual Festival, largely based around music, taking advantage of the fact that popular French musicians have often had leftist sympathies. I haven’t been the...

  Are You Ready for the “Rogue AI” Psy-Op? Kit Knightly The AIs are breaking free, that’s the story. It started two weeks ago, when OpenAI reported one of their “agents” had escaped its testing area and got loose on the internet to launch an “unprecedented cyber attack” . This was clearly meant to be scarier than the public response indicated, because a few days later OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was on the Invest like the Best podcast , asking why it didn’t cause more panic: “I’ve been a little surprised that more people don’t feel it so viscerally” In one of the most hilariously obvious propaganda manoeuvres of the year, just the day after Altman said that, CNN headlined: The OpenAI lab leak was more extensive than we thought “That thing you weren’t scared of? Well it was even SCARIER than we said it was! Are you scared now?” We weren’t. But the lack of public panic didn’t stop another AI going rogue a few days later, Anthropic’s Claude model this time. And then OpenAI reporting two fu...

  Oversocialisation Why do so many Westerners support their own destruction? Frank Wright In this brief series of posts on Phone Age Madness I talk about how to remain sane whilst viral insanity is conjured to rule us all into ruin. Today’s post is about Oversocialisation - the process by which people are programmed to fervently applaud their own destruction. CONTENTS What is “oversocialisation”? Why so many people celebrate destruction as progress How thought is mass produced and policed The threat of internal exile for dissent How not to hate yourself Why you should not destroy your personal relationships for politics Theodore Kaczynski and Erich Fromm - two takes on oversocialisation The rule by totem and taboo How to win - Staying Sane WHAT IS OVERSOCIALISATION? When people learn to adjust to others and to function in a society this is called socialisation. We also do it to puppies to train them how to behave well. Socialisation is about learning the rules of social behaviour ...