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Comment by selestify | Hacker News Reader

> The genius of it is that it is a note for note send up of ideologies of every kind, literally, the logic of an idea, where when you project it on something, the reflection doesn't illuminate the object so much as reinforce the underlying idea itself as a lens.

Could you expound on this? I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you are saying

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It sounds like David Icke. If you really need someone to expound on this, you could read the source but we’re both on HN and likely reasonably similar. Can I give you some loving advice??

Forget this. There’s nothing good in Icke. I’ve seen way too many brilliant hackers get sucked into David Icke’s bullshit on their way to a crash.

If you still really need closure, I can sum it up as the royal family, the elite and the ‘Illuminati’ are lizards, descended from aliens. Find architects who designed buildings for the Baha’i faith, then trace their contributions back to North American parliaments, legislatures and the like. Find the allusions to the Baha’i faith, find the allusions to Freemasonry and then you’ll see the projection of reality. Once you’ve seen the projection, you’re free from it.

Be safe. If you want to rap about the ideas with someone reasonably safe, I’m Greg and my email is in my profile. If you’re getting lost, I’ll give you my phone number.

Be safe and healthy.

Edit - The danger of Icke is that he takes basic geometry and civil engineering and somehow turns them into conspiracy. If you’re remotely scientific, you’ll see signs of Icke all around you. But some principles are principles because they work. We don’t need conspiracy theories to explain how professions grow.

Edit 2 - Don’t google David Icke. You’ll want the time back and I can’t offer refunds. :(

What in tarnation

I can’t make this shit up. The dude has published many books and found people who actually believe it all…

If this startup thing doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll just start a cult. :)

Edit - The second paragraph was a bad attempt at a joke. Don’t start cults. Fuck David Icke.

I googled him. It took 3 seconds to realize I wanted my 3 seconds back.

Shitballs. Sorry bud - I edited the original post to suggest that people don’t google him. I’m sorry you went through that. :(

Thanx, but I was braced based on your advice ;-)

It's still in the same general territory as QAnon and the fact that 1/5 Americans drinks that kool-aid fills me with despair (and fear).

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/study-finds-...

Though Icke predates QAnon by quite a bit, and I would almost say it is derivative of his "material". And the themes of the "Protocols of the Elders..." of course are shamefully evergreen in such discourse.

This is why debunking doesn't work and "pre-bunking" is actively harmful.

> If this startup thing doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll just start a cult. :)

I know you’re not being serious but unfortunately many people are in this kind of thinking. All over society are movements and groupthink driven by a small group of people that realized that you can get a whole lot of money and power by making people believe outlandish things.

Just enjoy the show!

Well, I'd say for me googling him was fun. But I also just watched "Inside Job" a new cartoon series on netflix about all that(including shape shifting lizzard people), so I was in the mood.

But I know, it is less fun, when you have to deal with people who takes that shit serious.

I remember looking into this stuff around 2005, being intoxicated regularly (marihuana). What a waste of time. Anyway, I remember Icke plugging this fellow Credo Mutwa [1], some kind of shaman from South-Africa. The name sticked with me, cause I'm Dutch, and Mutwa kinda sounds like '<name> moet wa(t)' which in my mind jokingly meant "he's gotta earn a livin' somehow".

All kidding aside, lunatics. Just reading his Wikipedia page (I'll plug it once more [1]) sheds enough light in the BS. Though, as long as you take it for what it is (fiction, comedy, propaganda?) its all good entertainment. Problem is, for most followers, it isn't entertainment... there's probably hordes of people not using safe medication, birth control, vaccines because of fellows like this :-(

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vusamazulu_Credo_Mutwa#%22Rept...

In Discordianism, there is something called the Law of Fives[1], which says, 'all things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5.' There is also a memo from one founder to another quoted which says, 'I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look.'

Robert Anton Wilson has some interesting personal experiments about this in his book Prometheus Rising, where you go looking for a quarter on the ground under different personal contexts[2]. Other instances are things like the 23 enigma[3] or ancient aliens.

I took motohagiography's comment to be on this phenomenon, where the state of mind, or how you prime the mind (e.g. with images or ideas), changes what you tend to find. It can be applied in all sorts of contexts -- prime the mind with ideas like conspiracy theories, and you see them everywhere. Fnord.

[1] http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/23.php

[2] https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/looking-for-quart...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Enigma

My meds must be off because I’m seeing the fnords again

Hail Eris!

Interestingly, we had a thread not all that long ago about illusions and their relationship to the brain's prediction systems. It seems plausible that things like this are related.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254496

Oddly, you're right. I may have over egged the batter on that one. The smart version of my comment would have been "lol, confirmation bias," which describes cryptozoology, ancient aliens, and pretty much everything else that is the logic of an idea, or ideological.

If you can find confirmation bias funny, like next level hilarious (especially when you are into the lettuce) you can find anything funny I suppose. But still, I laugh a through each episode and can't watch the news anymore because once you've seen it, you can't not. Cryptozoology is the same kind of game of pretend.

Looking forward to leaving the house more in 2022.

I think parent is talking about the mindset or way of thinking that leads to revisionist history/conspiracy theory/etc. And saying that this mindset doesn't have much actually to do with the specific details of any given object/plotline (e.g. the Nazca lines). It's more of a self-reinforcing worldview, that there is a Story, that everything is significant in the story, everything points to everything else, and nothing means what appears on the surface.

The novel Foucault's Pendulum is a book about this mindset; the Illuminatus! trilogy is too in a way, though it's more experiential than descriptive. There are a few non-fiction books, though I'm blanking on the key author's name. For a very contemporary non-fiction (albeit opinionated) take see A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...

> There are a few non-fiction books, though I'm blanking on the key author's name.

I don't know if he is who you had in mind, but Robert Anton Wilson -- who was one of the writers on the Illuminatus! trilogy -- has at least two non-fiction books on it. One is Prometheus Rising, the other is Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World. They are both a series of essays with exercises at the end of each chapter. If I remember correctly, Quantum Psychology was more about language and semantics, and Prometheus Rising was more about belief systems and viewpoints.

Quantum Psychology is both written in and a guide to E-Prime, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime (Edit, via wiki: 'E-Prime refers to a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.')

Thank you, not the person I was thinking of but that's an excellent point-out.

I had two books in mind that I was completely misremembering as by the same author. In fact they are by two different journalists. The United States of Paranoia and Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.

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