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A fitting cartoon analogy for cartoon logic. I am reminded of an Alan Moore quote: “In the mid 1980's I was asked by an american legal institution known as th
by jp555 12y ago
A fitting cartoon analogy for cartoon logic.
I am reminded of an Alan Moore quote:
“In the mid 1980's I was asked by an american legal institution known as the Christic Legal Institute to compile a comic book that would detail the murky history of the C.I.A., from the end of the second world war, to the present day. Covering such things as the heroin smuggling during the Vietnam war, the cocaine smuggling during the war in Central America, the Kennedy assasination and other highlights.
What I learned during the frankly horrifying research that I had to slog through in order to accomplish this, was that yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists, and ham fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the C.I.A., you really have nothing to worry about. If however you have a name similar to someone on a list targeted by the C.I.A., then you are dead?
The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening.
Nobody is in control.
The world is rudderless...”
- clamprecht 12y agoSource?
- tsuraan 12y agoSearching on "alan moore christic legal institute" brings up quite a few hits centered around a pair of graphic novels called "Brought to Light". Maybe that's it? There's a full quote on goodreads.com, but it also isn't sourced. I, too, wouldn't mind having a good source for that quote. Sounds like an interesting read.
- mvleming 12y agoCheck out the sibling comment I just added: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8027794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8027794
- mvleming 12y agoAccording to these two blog posts, [1] and [2], the source is the film The Mindscape of Alan Moore. [3] I love the quote too, I just learned of it. [1] http://dailyhumanist.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/the-world-is-rudderless/ http://dailyhumanist.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/the-world-is-r... [2] http://pvewood.blogspot.fr/2012/04/some-alan-moore-quotations.html http://pvewood.blogspot.fr/2012/04/some-alan-moore-quotation... [3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0410321/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0410321/
- hydroxylGroup 12y agoIt's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police. If you do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon, and the next thing you know, it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine. ... This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It, it's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Can you grasp that? Big Brother is not watching you. Cube - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
- hellbanner 12y agoI'm reminded of the cross-referenced index of conspiracy theories, one per page for several hundred pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Is_Under_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Is_Under_Control http://www.rawilson.com/undercontrol.html http://www.rawilson.com/undercontrol.html (Sample)
- pron 12y agoThe concerns expressed in the post have nothing to do with conspiracy, and everything to do with power. Democracies are usually built in such a way as to prevent concentration of power -- not to fight a real or imagined conspiracy. Concentration of power in itself is bad enough even without malevolent intent behind it.
- melloclello 12y agoThe commenter is arguing the opposite - without concentration of power, you get chaos, which is a bad thing
- pron 12y agoWhich is why democracies have checks and balances, and it is our responsibility to make sure that the power held by private institutions does not grow unchecked. The US made that mistake once, and it took a heroic struggle to wrestle that power away [1]. [1]: http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record.aspx?libID=o278539 http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Libr...
- ZoFreX 12y agoIt doesn't say chaos is a bad thing.
- Aqueous 12y agoI think the point is that even when individuals accrue large amounts of power, like Page/Brin, Zuckerberg, the Kochs, the Bushes, or the Clintons, that it is never really all that concentrated, because there are still thousands and millions of competing interests to consider. Power flows from many different places. At least for the past couple of centuries, it is never so concentrated that a single individual can orchestrate the world without repercussions.
- cliveowen 12y agoNot only that, the article makes it sound like Larry Page set out to conquer the world and decided to start from a search engine. The reality is far from that, there is no master plan to capture the personal information of everyone, just the need to provide useful services and an incredible business acumen on the part of the management that consistently acquire winning teams and companies over the years.
- anon4 12y agoCan't believe nobody's linked this yet http://xkcd.com/1274/ http://xkcd.com/1274/
- dwd 12y agoToo distracted watching the football...
- dwd 12y agoIt's helpful to also consider conspiracies using Julian Assange's framework which may have been influenced by Moore. http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiracies.pdf http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiraci... Without secrecy there is no conspiracy.