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An old essay from 1964 that has some continuing relevance here.

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy.

The focus of course is political, but I think this kind of underlying paranoia within U.S. culture is deeply interwoven with the rise of the UFO mythos, which is also originally a U.S. phenomenon.

Welcome to Exilian!

Curiously enough, Ursula Le Guins 'The Dispossessed' is sitting on my desk right next to me, in my queue of books to read or re-read.

Enjoy!

I read The Third Man And Other Stories, a book of short stories by Graham Greene: I'd never read or seen The Third Man despite it being one of the most famous works relating to the city I live in, so I thought I'd give it a go. And it's fine! It's a pretty good little murder story set in a grim part of post-war Viennese history, the core concept is clever and it's well executed. I don't think it's going to make a long term major impression on my brain by I'm glad I read it.

I was not even aware that it was a book! I should have guessed. Truly an excellent film though.

I've never read The Dispossessed, but really should do, I love le Guin though I should read more of her work. Also never read the Wheel of Time, though it is famously long and I don't know when my personal Wheel of Time will revolve to a point where I have that sort of space...

I can only recommend it in the strongest terms. Alongside The Left Hand of Darkness.

I had always been aware of the series but never actually got around to reading it. I watched the first season of the show and thought it was so appalling, I had to read the book to see if it was yet another example of dreadful book to screen conversion (it is). I actually deeply enjoy the books and the themes and ideas that they explore.

Yeah there sure were a lot of misteps with the writing and editing. It can't all be blamed on covid and losing the actor for Mat at the end. Still, I think part of it was possibly amazon exec interference, and not giving them 10 episodes. I'm not going to write Rafe Judkins and his team of just yet. Let's see if they learnt their lessons for season 2. I'm cautiously optimistic it will hit more at a 7/10 for me, while season 1 was a weak 6/10 overall.

I am currently about 3/5 of the way through The Shadow Rising in the wheel of time series, which I am still greatly enjoying. I do occasionally have to crosscheck names as it's getting to the stage where there are A Lot of characters to follow, as is common for this way of telling a fantasy story. But overall I find a lot of the themes very interesting.

Oh neat! Was the new show on Prime what got you into reading it? Or was it always on your list to try?

I've sometimes thought of revisiting the series one day. But I feel there's so much else out there I should be reading as well.

[The Joyful Science]

I just finished The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. I think this might be my favorite of hers. It is hard. They are all so good in different ways. But this is a veritable masterpiece. Her depiction of Anarres is very grounded. We get so many dystopias in contemporary fiction that I think part of me was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for this anarchist utopia to have some fatal flaw. But rather it was just human. Believable. Nuanced. The way she describes it you can grow attached to it, and even almost nostalgic for this place that does not and has never even existed. But just might, one day. That's really something.

I am currently reading Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb. I once read the Assassin's trilogy,  as well as the Live Ship trilogy, way back when they came out a few decades ago. It's been enjoyable to return to this world and Hobb's style of writing. Given the pressure in the industry is now to have a first sentence that grabs the reader, and a first page that grabs the reader, and a first chapter that grabs the reader, and so on, Hobb's style is refreshing in how measured it is in pace. Just as an example... The first 200 pages of this book is just the main character (15 years after the events of the Assassins's trilogy) living in a hut with an adopted kid, with various people from his past life coming to visit. We have pages upon pages of descriptions of meals, drinking, talking, arguing, gardening, hunting, etc. After 50 pages I thought, surely, we would start to get moving soon. Then 100. At 150 pages I was starting to chuckle. At 200 pages I thought I'd be OK if that was just the whole book, as it was fairly enjoyable. But we finally got moving.

Otherwise, my bedside stack is currently...

   
• The Joyful Science. I do not like the first half at all. Nietzsche picks up in the second half when the works gains some focus (bit of a prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
• An old biography / overview of Confucius.
• Complete Works of Plato. I needed to re-read the Symposium for a class I'm tutoring this semester, and it got me itching to revisit Plato's dialogues. I've long had the complete works and I thought I might start a habit of reading a little each day. Still been putting it off in favor of SFF. Hah.
• Children of Dune - I am struggling to pick this back up. I enjoyed Dune I. But Dune II was much harder for me to appreciate. It wants to be a work of literary fiction. To explore complex themes and not just tell some entertaining story. But I'm not sure that the themes Herbert is interested in are fully coherent, or ultimately that worthwhile. I am not sure.
• Magic in the Middle Ages - Kieckhefer. I've started this one to help me come to grips more with magic in Innkeep's world. I've put it down but want to get back into it.

Here's a little update on what I've been playing.
 
I grabbed a copy of Splendor: Duel to play with my partner. We quite enjoyed the original Splendor, and both agree that this version is a solid improvement over the original, much like 7 Wonders: Duel was an improvement over 7 Wonders. 

I also played a game recently of Acquire. We had gathered for Jaws of the Lion, but our friend drove all the way over without bringing it by accident. So we ended up finally playing this older classic that had been sitting at our venue friend's house for years entirely unplayed. It looked a little venerable and drab, but the core design was excellent. It's all about buying stock in companies, and then trying to get them acquired / or acquire others, so you can get those juicy shareholder payouts. Mechanically, it's about placing tiles on a board (you have 6 in your hand, and draw 1 per turn randomly from a bag), which represent business plays / moves I suppose you could say. When a tile links up two existing clusters (companies), the larger one aquires the smaller one. If you have the majority (or second most) shares, you get a substantial bonus payout. Plus money for the value of your individual shares, which scales on company size. You can only buy 3 stocks per turn, so this means each turn you are thinking very carefully about which companies you can realistically compete for being first or second for number of shares owned, while taking into consideration growth potential, and the location of the company itself on the board. A company in a corner isn't going to be able to grow that much after all. I was really pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Simple yet deep. Actually in my top ten games of all time as it stands.

Here's a new expose by the New York post on the hearings, showing the links between Grusch and Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp.

Yes, this is the tricky thing. The intersection of usual claims with actual covert programs means you can only judge the validity former using broad strokes / logical thinking, minus much in the way of concrete details. 

One example: Mick West notes that Grusch got clearance from the pentagon to come forward and make the claims he did in the media and during the hearing. For West, this counts as evidence that there is no conspiracy, because if there was a conspiracy, the pentagon would not have given that clearance.

But for the UFO crowd, this same action by Grusch is viewed as a masterful play. The pentagon might not agree with what Grusch has to say, and might not want him to say it, but they only have grounds to reject his request if it poses a threat to national security. So, to tell him he cannot say it, would be tantamount to admitting that the contents was true. So, from this perspective, Grusch got the pentagon into a corner, where the best case was just to clear him say what he wanted, with the implicit meaning there being that none of it was true. 

Depending on what set of presuppositions you bring with you, you can interpret the same situation in a way that corroborates the understanding that you already have. I do like West's more direct logical points with respects to the unlikelihood of so many crashed craft being collected though. This kind of more direct inference is more powerful.

Here's a video by Mick West, who is pretty active in the UFO skeptic space. He goes over the pre-hearing interview of David Grusch on News Nation.

https://youtu.be/AvhMMhW-JN0

[the U.S. government has mounted an extraordinary, decades-long coverup of UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering activities,]

Two things that really help me are not reading short-form news above the local level, and not following social media which tells me who to be ANGRY AND FRIGHTENED about today (triply so if the people they talk about are in other countries).  Processes like the RU-UA war, or the fascist takeover of the Republican party, or chatbot technology, could hurt any of us in the near term, but nobody knows anything about the details and nobody can know and to the extent they can know they are writing longform reports themselves not being paraphrased by journalists who heard of the subject yesterday.  And knowing the kind of things about say India which short-form news covers is almost certainly useless unless you or your family live in India.

This is a good habit. It's certainly one I'm trying to follow more! On the topic of the hearings, here's some excerpts from a recent Hill article...

The decades-long saga of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is barreling headlong toward one of two stunning conclusions.

Either the U.S. government has mounted an extraordinary, decades-long coverup of UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering activities,
or elements of the defense and intelligence establishment are engaging in a staggeringly brazen psychological disinformation campaign.

Either possibility would have profound implications for democracy, the role of government and perhaps also humanity's place in the cosmos.

Importantly, a third explanation for recent events — that dozens of high-level, highly-cleared officials have come to believe enduring UFO myths, rumors and speculation as fact — appears increasingly unlikely....The decades-long saga of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is barreling headlong toward one of two stunning conclusions.

I. Charles McCullough, III, the intelligence community's first inspector general and now an attorney in private practice, represents Grusch and sat directly behind him during a July 26 congressional hearing. It is extremely unlikely that such a high-profile lawyer and former top federal official would represent anyone making the kinds of extraordinary claims that Grusch is without robust evidence.

When asked during the July 26 congressional hearing whether he believes that the U.S. government possesses UFOs, Grusch stated, "Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over four years."

Grusch continued, "I know the exact locations [of retrieved UFOs], and those locations were provided to the inspector general and...to the [congressional] intelligence committees." Critically, Grusch stated, "I actually had the people with the first-hand knowledge provide a protected disclosure to the inspector general."

It is unlikely that Grusch, speaking to Congress under oath, would perjure himself so brazenly over such specific, falsifiable facts, particularly with his high-profile attorney sitting directly behind him.

To that end, it is safe to assume that more than three dozen individuals did indeed tell Grusch of a decades-long UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering program, and that those with "first-hand knowledge" provided corroborating information to the intelligence community inspector general.

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4134891-a-monumental-ufo-scandal-is-looming/

We have here a decent summary of the 3 options. 

I wonder why such articles don't make any mention of the connections to the Skinwalker Ranch ghost hunters, etc. That is strong evidence for the 3rd scenario. 
However... I do also wonder if it is a mixture of number 3 and number 2. I guess we will know more over the coming months.

[A boy begins to preach in either France or Germany, claiming that he had been visited by Jesus]

OK. Another thing I have observed in trawling through UFO videos. So many comments from people who claim to have had a UFO encounter as a child. This is still the level of anecdote, but it feels to me like the majority of claims online are that they occurred when they were a child.


And I wonder if there is any kind of study of the ages of people in the past who claimed to have seen holy apparitions.


A few famous cases:


"The variants of the long-standing story of the Children's Crusade have similar themes. A boy begins to preach in either France or Germany, claiming that he had been visited by Jesus, who instructed him to lead a Crusade in order to peacefully convert Muslims to Christianity. Through a series of portents and miracles, he gains a following of up to 30,000 children. He leads his followers south towards the Mediterranean Sea, in the belief that the sea would part on their arrival, which would allow him and his followers to walk to Jerusalem."


"The visions of the Virgin Mary appearing to three shepherd children at Fátima, Portugal, in 1917 were declared "worthy of belief" by the Catholic Church in 1930 but Catholics at large are not formally required to believe them."


"Among recent visions, the reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary to six children in Međugorje in 1981 have received the widest amount of attention."


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Jesus_and_Mary




Notice as well that such visions or apparitions occur often to groups of individuals. We similarly have groups of people claiming to see UFOs. It seems there is something to Jung's claims that groups of people can collectively "see things" that are not physically there. I am not sure how we could explain this with modern psychology, but I assume there are theories concerning it. Jung's own theories appear to assume some degree of transcendental / psi reality that we share (he is certainly not a materialist).

[does sort of hint at an awkward modern dissociation from your own basic reality, hmmm?]

Thanks for sharing. It definitely seems to have some similarities.

In my opinion, the real reason people get involved tends to be something quite different: typically (I suspect) more to do with finding kinship in an online community than with an overdeveloped sense of morality or desire for natural justice. Finding Charles Gazzam Hurd's family tree more interesting than your own family tree is all very well, but a dispassionate observer probably couldn't help but wonder whether this does sort of hint at an awkward modern dissociation from your own basic reality, hmmm?

That's an interesting way of looking at it. So the issue at times might not be 'isolation' in the sense of 'feeling lonely and wanting to connect with like minded individuals', but 'isolation' in the sense of a community's structure preventing a diversity of inputs.

Perhaps here (and I'd need to read that book) we have one issue with conspiracy theory rabbit holes. The more you connect with this new source of interesting information, the more you can end up shutting down alternative inputs yourself, by spending less time with friends, etc. So there is some kind of self-reinforcing / feedback loop there with respects to information / networks.