Discordian torrents

Just so you know, thanks to the kindness of Iason Ouabache, several Discordian e-books have all been uploaded to The Pirate Bay. Naturally, all these books are Kopyleft and thus free to download or distribute as you see fit.

The full listing is:

Principia Discordia
Aeternus Ille Discordia
Apocrypha Discordia
Apotheosis Psycherotica
Black Iron Prison
Book of Eris
Condensed Chaos
Discordia - A Little Game about a Lot of Chaos
Metaclysmia Discordia
OMITTERRE LIBELLUS
Principia Entropius
Summa Discordia
Wise Book of Baloney

Conspiracy of the Week, pt....wherever we got up to now

I know its been a long time since I done this feature (it came from back in the day, when I used to troll conspiracy forums with half a dozen textbooks on engineering on my desk) but its time to restart this thing.

According to Greg Hands, the true weak link in the War on Some Terror But Not Others is not a flawed foreign policy, the problems of dealing with sub-state actors while promoting an international based around the sovereignty of the state, blatant hypocrisy or the Free World being led by a man who is widely seem as thick as two short planks....but instead a Left Wing Conspiracy (is there any other sort?) at the Lonely Planet, putting terrible propaganda in their guide books!

I know, I know. You feel your trust has been betrayed. I know when I want to know about the recent political history of a country, I too pick up The Lonely Planet Guide to see what its talented geopolitical commentators say. Their editorial stance and books have been cited by leaders the world over as the way to Win This Thing. And all the time, they were secretly manipulating us. *sob*

the books are almost always written from a Leftist political stance. Wait a moment, readers might ask, how can a description of which bus route goes to Tutankhamun's tomb have any kind of political bias? Check out the "history" section of these books, however, and you will see what I mean. Liberal, "progressive" forces are invariably good, battling with the forces of conservatism, all around the world.

History and reality are supposed to have a well known liberal-left bias. So I've been told, anyway, by my secret masters within the Liberal Conspiracy. No, the other one, not that site run by Sunny Hundal.

As expected, this is particularly true of guides to the USA and to the UK. Margaret Thatcher and George Bush are vilified. Clem Attlee, Franklin D Roosevelt and JFK are idolised.

Of course, George W Bush and Magaret Thatcher are the poster-children for compassionate conservatism. The only possible reason someone could disagree with their claims to greatness is because they are a bitter liberal. All those unemployed people and dead bodies and stuff are mere coincidence and as any good empiricist knows, correlation does not equal causation. On the other hand, those people widely seen, across the political spectrum, as statesmen due to their fairly good leadership in times of crisis are liberal stooges.

The brand new Lonely Planet guide to the USA (5th ed, 2008) tells us that "Roosevelt did much to ameliorate the pain of the Great Depression", there is praise for Clinton whose attempts to create socialised healthcare were scuppered by the Republicans, who were then out to get him over Monica Lewinsky, etc. But the real monstering is reserved for George W Bush, who "attacked Afghanistan in an unsuccessful hunt for Al-Qaeda terrorists", he "undid environmental regulations" and "fostered a moral, religious and cultural crusade, espousing 'family values'". The chapter introducing California suggests that Arnold Schwarzenegger's only successes were as a result of him distancing himself from Bush, and on it goes.

Shorter Greg Hands: We're now in Bizarro World! Everything is reversed, and I am now right.

Some readers of this blog might even ask, it's so well-known, why even bother to write about it? Well, the new Lonely Planet Egypt guide (9th ed, 2008) simply cannot go without comment. The book is an apology for radical Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Ah yes. This must be part of that neverending struggle in The Lonely Planet to potray Liberal organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, as good guys, and conservative forces as the bad guys. Right? Because the Muslim Brotherhood are all fluffy kittens and free abortions and gay love and stuff.

Any objective view of the Brotherhood is this - it is a jihadist group, whose credo is "Mastering the world with Islam" and "building the khalifa".

Uh-oh. Doesn't this kind of conflict with this statement "Check out the "history" section of these books, however, and you will see what I mean. Liberal, "progressive" forces are invariably good, battling with the forces of conservatism, all around the world"?

You know, Greg, if you want to make your point, its generally best to not quote a part of a book which completely fails to make your point at all, and in fact undermines it. You know, as a general rule. We do things differently here, in reality.

We are told (p. 44) that "despite their use of religion, Egypt's Islamist groups are part of a political response to harsh socio-economic conditions". They have suffered under "a repressive political system that allowed little chance to voice legitimate opposition" and have been "denied recognition by the state as a legal political entity".

"Context is part of the liberal conspiracy."

One can't help feeling that the writers at Lonely Planet desperately want themselves to believe that radical Islamists are a manifestation of protest against economic conditions, and are trying to re-arrange the facts accordingly. Perhaps the Brothers really are sitting around in Che Guevara T-shirts, debating the Marxist dialectic, driven by a desire to alleviate poverty, just like the Taliban were in Afghanistan?

"Poverty, poor education and lack of legitimate opposition have never spawned extremist religious organizations. Ever. Not once at all in history. People who say otherwise are part of Liberal-Left Conspiracy. Also, now, liberal-left means Communist."

Why should we care? Two reasons. First, these books sell well, and the market is predominantly young, well-educated people, gap-year teens, students and former students, whose minds are open enough in the first place to embark on a journey to somewhere like Egypt. Probably exactly the sort of people we don't want to be telling that the Muslim Brotherhood are the good guys.

I love Greg's dichomtomous worldview, where telling people the origins of an organizations key support is SECRETLY HOPING FOR THE OVERTHROW OF THE INFIDEL MURBARAK'S TYRANNY, ALLAHU-AKBAR! Oops, sorry, forgot myself there for a moment. Greg clearly thinks people are too stupid to realize a highly socially conservative religious movement in the Middle East with links to terrorist organizations might just be as bad as a regime that practices routine torture and denial of human rights, despite how their opposition is rooted in economic and political concerns of the nation in question.

Because, you know, pointing out the roots of support for the Egyptian Brotherhood may have some sort of legitimate basis is EXACTLY THE SAME THING as supporting the Jihadists and wanting to establish an Islamic Cailphate. Obviously.

Second, and this never ceases to amaze me, we, the British taxpayer, own Lonely Planet. The BBC bought it in 2007.

We should be asking the BBC why they are promoting Islamism, and in the meantime perhaps we should persuade Fox News to buy Rough Guides, re-balance the editorial line and give travellers a real choice?

Ah yes, the BBC. Main cog in the international liberal-left conspiracy. Once again betraying this great nation by promoting Islam, the eating of aborted fetuses, multiculturalism, marrying men with dogs and other perversions. Only Rupert Murdoch, who would never cosy up to illiberal regimes for the sake of sales, can restore the balance.

When will Boris Johnson come clean about his radical past?

"Boris Johnson thinks he wants democracy. But in the course of his adventures he discovers that democracy to him means freedom. It's a banned concept from the Millennium of Religion. Like God."

Pirating The Pirate's Dilemma

As the title suggests, I just downloaded an online copy of Matt Mason's intriguing book, The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism.

Expect a review in the next few days. Also added Matt's site to the blogroll.

Neal Stephenson on literary genres

An interesting 40 minute talk about the breakdown of traditional genres in fiction and literature.

Link via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Black Swan 101

I unashamedly stole these from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's wonderful book Black Swan, as a sort of condensed version of his ideas. Have a read through, and you'll probably see why I like him.

What you don't know is far more relevant than what you do.

Being unexpected is what gives the Black Swan its impact.

'Experts' are no better at making predictions than anyone else – only at using technical jargon to maintain a plausible narrative.

Planning does not work, however allowing people to tinker and experiment and get rewarded for fortunate accidents does.

We learn specifically from a Black Swan event. They do not help us generate metarules.

Recursive events (events that cause other events, feedback loops) are key to creating Black Swans and maintaining complexity.

There are few rewards or recognition for acts of prevention.

Platonicity: what happens when we mistake the map for the territory, the abstract for the real, the neat concepts for the messy reality. Potentially useful, but limited and have random and unforeseen side effects when they do fail (Anerstic Delusion).

Sterile scepticism: talk is cheap, talk about language problems, philosophy and pseudo-scepticism that plays around with word definitions to eliminate the problems of randomness are even cheaper.

Stories replace stories. You need a better narrative to replace a bad or ineffective one.

The triplet of opacity: everyone thinks they know more than they do, they assess history retroactively (hindsight is 20/20) and the over evaluation of factual information and “authoritative” persons.

History jumps, it does not crawl or steadily progress.

People will cluster around the same framework of analyses, no matter how non-factual or temporary these frameworks are. This is a result of pathological categorization – wanting to put people in boxes to explain their behaviour.

Events fall into one of two domains: Extremistan or Mediocristan. Events in Mediocristan are scalable and basically predictable. Randomness is mild, it usually falls within the ranges of a Bell Curve. In Extremistan, events are non-scalable and much more extreme. Usually, Mediocristan events are those related to biology (for example, height) whereas those related to Extremistan are socially based (income, or book sales).

Inductive logic is for suckers: working from particulars to general rules is a recipe for disaster. Past indicators are not a guarantee of future performance.

The Black Swan is a problem relative to expectation and lack of knowledge. Those most certain of the future are the most likely to get tripped up and fall flat on their face.

Most people, given the choice, will choose to believe they live in Mediocristan, even when the evidence shows they do not.

Knowledge is domain specific: we have problems translating abstract classroom knowledge into real world applications. Equally, we can easily navigate a social situation which, when presented as a logical problem, totally confounds us.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. No evidence of disease is not the same as there being no disease, and just because we do not know the function of something does not mean it has no function.

Corroborative facts cannot tell us what is true, only what is false. Negative empiricism is superior to naïve empiricism, where one can 'prove' anything with facts. A negative hypothesis is needed, falsification is needed.

Confirmation bias – we only look for evidence that supports our beliefs.

The narrative fallacy – we like to invent causes for events, even where none exist. We put explanations and an element of causality into a sequence of facts. Post hoc rationalization of events without meaning are common.

Narratives allow us to ignore the unusual.

Dopamine will lower your critical thinking abilities: you'll become susceptible to all sorts of fads, such as New Age mysticism, tarot cards or economic forecasts from a lack of it.

Information is costly to obtain – the more random the information the harder it is to store. Hence stories allow us to store more information, but with the downside of a loss of appreciation of the true randomness present.

Both art and science are symptomatic of our need to reduce complexity and inflict basic order on human existence.

People can and will hold incompatible and disparate beliefs based on the same factual evidence.

In the absence of other information, we will rely on stereotypes or even complete nonsense to explain events.

There are two types of Black Swan, the narrated and the truly unexpected. The narrated Black Swan is an overrated and hyped rare event, the true Black Swan is not talked about.

We are biologically constructed to seek small, yet repeatable and sustainable rewards.

The Black Swan is an asymmetry of consequences – either positive or negative.

You can either be a sucker, and run blindly into the danger you didn't know was there – or you can slowly bleed in the face of dangers you knew existed while hoping that it will lead to a pay-off that is worth it.

Silent evidence: often we are mislead by the sample in any experiment, because we do not take into account those who failed to be counted (the dead supplicants fallacy).

The survivor bias: we work from the fact someone survived to find the secret of their success, but in reality the fact that they survived is the secret of their success. People do not write about or promote knowledge of their failures.

The Ludic fallacy: life is not like a game. The sources of uncertainty are not well defined, the “rules of the game” are not totally apparent. If you treat life like a game, where you know all the rules, the unknown and unexpected will hit you like a truck.

Having moved back home...

Now my degree is more or less over and done with (roll on Graduation Day) my blogging has slowed considerably. Not least since my connection is much slower, but also because I am doing much more reading and catching up on other projects for the moment.

Still, nonetheless, I am around and still noting the events of the world. For example, hearing yesterday morning that Gordon Brown intends to go ahead with the 42 Day Detention scheme, claiming he has come to an agreement with certain Labour dissenters by putting more legislative safeguards into the proposal.

I think he is bluffing however. There is deep scepticism to this plan across the political spectrum, and absolutely no proven pressing need at all. I'm sure some Labour MPs have been assured by this, but I very much doubt many of the rebels have. Which makes the situation rather more uncertain. I suspect Brown is pushing ahead because he knows if he loses....well, it can hardly get much worse than it already is for him, and in the unlikely event his proposals do win over enough votes to pass the legislation, he can try and use this to put the government back on the intitative and claim to be "tough on terrorism" (but of course not tough on the causes of terrorism).

Apart from that, I haven't much to say. Oh, except for when driving though Bradford upon Avon last week, I stopped to put up several signs saying "NOT the birthplace of William Shakespeare" and "please stop asking us about Shakespeare, that's Stratford upon Avon." Needless to say, I have never heard of anyone ever confusing the two, not least because they are on totally different rivers in seperate parts of the country. Still, someone likely will now, which is all part of the fun.

I'm currently reading Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer as well. If you want some background information on the Fundamentalist Mormon Church and their very strange ways, I highly recommend picking up a copy.

Leaderless Jihad

I didn't know this, but Marc Sageman apparently has a new book on Al-Qaeda out, called Leaderless Jihad.

For those of you who don't know who Sageman is, shame on you. He's a former CIA Case Officer and psychiatrist with experience in Pakistan and Afghanistan who has undertaken some very interesting studies on Al-Qaeda.

His previous book, Understanding Terror Networks, is a classic of terrorism literature and has been highly recommended by pretty much every terrorism lecturer and researcher up at the St Andrews. Its a wide-reaching investigation into the background, motivating beliefs and (most importantly) social networks that comprise the nebulous organization called Al-Qaeda. Notes based on this research of 400 Al-Qaeda members can be found here.

These social bonds are the most important factor in recruiting and getting someone into terrorism, which is why I think Sageman's book is so important. If we rely on arguments from religion, personal psychopathy, brainwashing or hatred of 'Western' values, many of which are unproven caricatures as Sageman shows, then we wont be able to carry out the necessary counterterrorism policies - which should be aimed at severing the existing terrorists from a pool of possible recruits, while taking in their current members and working towards a political solution of the underlying factors that led to the emergence of terrorists in the first place.

His new book seemed more focused on what is called the New Wave of Al-Qaeda terrorists. Essentially, these are lone wolf or self-forming cells, who instead of being intensely religious and well educated (the profile of a previous Al-Qaeda member) are younger, probably had more run-ins with the police or a criminal record, and are "bored and looking for thrills".

This seems to be a real possibility. I remember more than a few classes I took with John Horgan where he said the process of radicalization often took place after one made contact with the terrorist group in question. If these "thrillseekers" are looking for jihadist videos, tracts and forums for thrills, sooner or later they are going to be talking with people sympathetic to a jihadist worldview. This taints or affects their thinking into a downward spiral based on the violent and paranoid worldview which could ultimately result in terrorist related activities.

Of course, that's a highly simplified way of putting it, and no doubt the actual processes are much more discrete and subtle. But I think as a simplified and limited explanation, it can work. These people get caught up in a discourse of warriorship, fanatical Islam and martyrdom. "We have always been warriors, we have always fought and been victorious, and now we are weak and persecuted". Its the common theme of too many terrorist group's rhetoric to be just a coincidence.

According to a talk Sageman gave at the New America Foundation "It's more about hero worship than about religion," The vast majority of Sageman's sample did not attended radical madrassas, coould speak Arabic and have not read the Koran. Nearly all joined the movement because they knew/are related to someone who's already in it. The age of these terrorists is decreasing too: In Sageman's 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. Its more accurate to describe these people as supermepowered, transnational gang members than terrorists.

All of this has very interesting, and worrying implications for policy and society in general. Especially the latter, since media culture and rhetoric has not caught up with Sageman's studies or knowledge. They'd much rather listen to media heads or politicians than soldiers and academics who study terrorism closely, and to be honest, that's a real shame. Because if we don't understand how Al-Qaeda is morphing and evolving, we're going to be throwing around very dangerous charges and allegations at people who may have had little or nothing to do with such attacks, and be concentrating on totally useless avenues of investigation and prevention.

War Nerd interview

As I'm sure many of you know, I am a long time fan of the eXile's War Nerd, AKA Gary Brecher. So I was pleasantly surprised to see an interview of him being done over at Blood and Treasure, to help promote his new book. He also answers the long posited conspiracy theory that he is actually John Dolan/Mark Ames/some hideous combination of the two.

Link via Liberal Conspiracy.

Look at what I got...

I actually got it a couple of days ago, but with travelling and having cleverly hidden my USB cables all over the place, I decided not to mention it until now. This is of course the version that Synaptyx published, with the hilarious quotes (no, really) provided on the back.




As you can see, I also decided to get my NeoCon on with this selection from Bloom, Strauss and Schmitt. Nothing like reading philosophy you almost but don't quite agree with, especially when it impinges on contemporary issues.



But since the philosophy books not only ruin my counterculture credentials, but are also deadly dull in many ways, I have the above to keep me entertained. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have rather a lot of reading to do...

Books for the masses!

Found these while lurking around the comments section of the excellent Rigorous Intuition blog. I only found the archives yesterday, but its already becoming one of my favourite conspiracy blogs, both intelligent and informative, without jumping to conclusions.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to share, and so I present you with the download links. Books seem to be an assortment of classic conspiracy theorism, the occult, ritual magick (early 20th to present) social engineering and a few other areas, including RAW's Illuminati Papers. Like I've said before, I may not necessarily agree with all of them, but I won't turn away from the offer of free and interesting reading.

Odd Books Link 1
Odd Books Link 2
Odd Books Link 3
Odd Books Link 4


Download should come roughly to about 40 MB total. Enjoy.