irrepressible wrote:
Great thread! Enjoyed the talk!

Have a great weekend and try sorting out your headache next to a stream, or a tree...blade of grass?

irrepressible wrote:
I think you have got it bang on there,
Although I wasnt actually there at the time, it seems TO ME that when people centuries ago lived/traded in a place and it started getting highly populated, they built a wall around it with a battlement and a gate. You were only allowed to enter and leave through the gate. Wiithin the city walls you were told what the city rules were, and you had to comply or else. The walls were knocked down centuries later and the city rules became national rules, and then to become EU rules, and then Global Rules. No walls are then necessary (as such).
That is the end of Steevo's 30 second history lesson

my favorite thing is clear black night sky. its like feeding time.

irrepressible wrote:

Brilliant post irre. It's also a real eye opener to hear that peeps from all corners of the world share your sentiments. It reminded me of when I was in Poland a couple of years ago. I walked into a town, saw all these beautiful old shops, reminded me of what a high streets used to look like years ago in the UK. Only problem... all the shops were abandoned. It didn't take me long to find out why.. . dirty big glass, steel and concrete shopping centre up the road. Questioned some locals about it, I asked if they missed the old shops and the sense of community closeness etc. They seemed utterly bewildered by the question, and said that they loved their new shiny shopping centres.

Slightly different point on this, but I thought I'd mention it, I feel great sadness just walking past & watching people on my travels. Mum's feeding their children sweets and cola, the masses of people queuing up in fast food outlets. I always try to see the best in people. Which is why it makes me so sad to see them willingly poisoning themselves. You can tell people till you're blue in the face, but it's like they've got lalala I'm not listening headphones on.

But anyways, as steevo said, you hit the nail on the head about cities. I honestly believe that the high rise blocks were purposely built to destroy communities and the unity of those communities.

Talking of communities, private islands can be bought for as little as £160,000. Ok. I guess most of us don't have that kind of cash hidden under the mattress, but if you share the cost between say 100 people, plus the cost of building basic initial accommodation say £3,000 each. Just a thought....

This one has a whopping 10 miles of coastline!

www.privateislandsonline.com/huerta-island.htm

Thanks boywonder

It's shocking to know that a lot of people like the shopping centres and aren't arsed about the old shops.
Liverpool One, a nice big shiny new shopping centre...cold and empty in the extreme. Zero personality, zero character. Big business and corporations have taken over. I'd rather independant shops with character and personality.
The masses...some of them surely must feel that something is wrong. It's like they don't think. They just accept things. The best thing I can do though is concentrate on myself and what I'm doing, and what I should be doing.

I agree with you about the high rises. I wouldn't like to live in one. We should all be living in places like The Shire from The Hobbit
Technology, and our reliance on it is getting out of hand. We need a balance.

Those private islands look great

Steevo wrote:
Thanks Steevo

I wonder when it all started. I mean, did tptb have all this in mind hundreds, thousands of years ago?

It's like big pharma...years ago "Witches" were burned at the stake. I thought "Witches" were herbalists and healers, etc. People who understood nature and had knowledge of the land and plants and all that stuff.

boywonder wrote:
And it's sort of ironic that in communist dictatorships like USSR (and probably China too), they like to build loads of high rise flats for people to "live" in. The big thing here now (Britain) is people living in flats (no garden) and people are actually buying these f*****g things! They have been led to believe that they are "luxury appartments"

I actually haven't got a clue about the old days tbh but my point is, it's like Big Pharma was planned centuries ago. That's for another thread though

It's like this whole modern civilisation was drawn up thousands of years ago.

"Let's stitch the fuckers up with drugs!" Yeah! we'll give 'em diseases and shit!" Yeah!, let's destroy the old knowledge!" "Yeah! we'll have them as babies, we'll be their parent!" "We'll force them into our city prisons! They'll think they're free!" Etc etc.

irrepressible wrote:
I would have thought that the PTB always plan WELL ahead - They have alot of time on their hands you see - THEY dont need to work - They just sit around thinking of new/old ways of how to manipulate the humans lol

Talking of witches lol, modern day healers and their followers are being persecuted (I would say so anyway) persecuted by ignorant people who have been manipulated, a bit like a witch hunt (i'm obsessed with the subject of witch hunts right now lol

Steevo wrote:
When you consider many of the high rise tenements built years ago they were considered to be the bees knees to many people.
just the same as many people do now... except they probably pay well over the odds now. The problem has always been that they are built on the cheap, and are a living social nightmare due to the close proximity in which you live to so many other people, regardless of whether they are poor or flash areas. The idea was that the communities would take care of the communal areas particularly in the flats but they got neglected, fell into disrepair, the buildings didn't live up to their reputation and people got sold totally short ending up in run down chaos in many areas.
But let's not be fooled that it was some 'communist movement' This is just cheap housing in a capitalist world!

irrepressible wrote: I think it's really hard to do this entire subject justice in a post on a forum, but most of what you're describing here, very notably the bolded part, is in Brave New World. Huxley also stated that a key element of an efficient fascist society is the...

www.infowars.com/articles/nwo/huxley_ult...evolution_032062.htm

I don't think this is quite done by solely pharmacological means yet, as Huxley suggested, but although I prefer 1984 as a novel, it's pretty much accepted that Brave New World was closer in terms of its resemblance to contemporary society, particularly in the sense that it's seen quite clearly in the novel that people do love their servitude, they do love being part of their social class, they don't even mix with the other social classes, they don't question authority at all, and they associate their standard of living with the things that are put there to enslave them. Which is a pretty good analogy / microcosm of the society we live in.

I don't want to crap on about this for hours(!), but you can go back and look at an oft-quoted statement by a US investment banker for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s, Paul Mazer. "We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. Man's desires must overshadow his needs". And that's what you see today, there's a breakdown of the basic social bonds that had structured society previously for centuries, and instead, increasingly, people are driven by the basic desire to consume, to have more shiny things. And they don't even recognise this themselves because it's their desires that are in control of their behaviour and mindset, not their rational mind or any objective assessment of what would actually be good for them emotionally. And all of their peers behave this way too, so the basic social example of any form of cohesive, supportive communities just disappears completely, and eventually people can't imagine any other way of living. I'm sure if you mixed with Aboriginal Australians, or, say, some tribe in a Tibetan hill village, you would see a fundamentally different type of society, and, actually, a much happier one. Hence why you get endless Western people going to these sorts of places, and then saying things like "they don't own anything, but they were so content"!!!

So this is why people don't notice that Liverpool is a shithole!

Space Bandit wrote:
Far left and far right are both the same. I use the word "communist" even though I am aware that communism and facism are on opposite sides of the same coin (sorry for using that cliche). I know people who lived in a communist dictatorship and they said that virtually everyone lived in high rise flats, and they were built during the communist rule. I reckon that there is likely to be a connection, but yes flats are getting built in our current "capitalist" society, and yes money does come into it. Money is a tool of manipulation in our society.

Edit : i just wanna clarify something. Andyh said in a post somewhere on this forum that I am a bit obsessed (paraphrase) with communism lol and it IS sorta true, but the reason that I mention that word alot is because it's easier to use that word rather than explain it all in detail which can be a waste of time for me and the reader. Everyone knows what communism is (basically) and that is why I choose to use that word alot, it saves time.

Thanks WUB

You've done your research and you know a lot about this stuff whereas I on the other hand...
I've got 1984 here in my room. Brave New World is on a bookcase in my mum's room. I've read neither. I'm going to read them though.

I used to buy stuff. Video games, dvd's, cd's, action figures, etc. I used to really enjoy buying stuff, but over the last couple of years I've felt less and less "satisfied", and have been left feeling emptier and emptier.
It's like I'm starting to want what I need as opposed to want what I want...
There is no shiney thing in the world, no gadget, that can fill this hole inside me. I think a lot of people must feel this thing inside them, this dissatisfaction, but I think they must be trying to fix it by buying more stuff.

We know what the problem is, well some of us do...it's how the hell we fix it. The only thing we can do is start with ourselves on an individual level, kind of thing.

The whole mess is frustrating.

wake_up_bomb wrote:
Yes, very well put.
In my mind, the fact that people are deliberately set to compete with each other rather than co-operate creates a very negative human ideology which is so difficult to see beyond.
I was thinking recently that partly what Huxley was writing about had already happened, and had been going on for centuries.
A likes B because they are smart, and work well with B... while B respects A but are jealous... they both need E, but see them as inferior. E loves A & B. Meanwhile C despises D & E in some form of snobbery, but regards A with dignity, but B with scant regard.
Obviously the lot was done by social conditioning, with the reason of creating a social working order... even though it was a complete fabrication. Reminds me of nation states...!

irrepressible wrote:
I came to that realisation a few years back.
I had everything realistically that I ever wanted (sort of), and I was unhappy. I went through what you went through in your OP.
I realised that there was sort of an emptiness in my soul, a void that I needed to fill and no material thing could fill it. Anyway, once you are aware of that you can go on the journey of self rediscovery (which you have been on for a while by the sounds of it, and once you have satisfied that, you can still continue to live in this society, but the difference is that you will be in full awareness of how you no longer feel thee NEED to be a consumer (although you can still CHOOSE to consume should you so wish at ANY time). It's still a little frustrating though at times cos there is not alot to do in this country ESPECIALLY when it's hardly ever sunny nowadays, and it can get boring sometimes in this fake society.

Space Bandit wrote:
Hmmm, I hear what you're saying, but I'm not so sure. I few weeks ago I was in London visiting me pa, we watched this very interesting doc on the beeb about how the high rises came about. Let me see if there be a yt link, hmmm,

If you are lucky enough to be in the uk, I think it's still available on iplayer:
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01jt9bv/T...eptford_High_Street/

Some dude posted the first two minutes on yt, but nowt else


What was interesting about it was that they pinned down a man that was responsible for condemning good houses that then got demolished. He said they were slums. They then interview a man who's family was pretty much ripped apart by the redevelopment, and the researchers for the program find government documents that actually prove that the houses were in good repair, clean inside and out. These working class families were on the up and up.... until their community was bulldozed and the blocks went up.

irrepressible wrote: You should watch Century of the Self which would only take a few hours of your time and is an excellent film that deals with some of this material. It's all on Youtube in four parts, here's part one:


This is 100% correct. And that's the whole point. You're supposed to feel that way. It's like being a junkie. So you go off and get your next fix. That's what it's all about, the switch from a "needs to a desires culture". At the same time because the whole economic and industrial infrastructure is centred around consumption, manufacturers can't build things of real quality and sell them to you on the basis that they'll last forever. They have to build shitty thing that break, or become useless, but that are cheap, and then use marketing techniques to make you think you're getting something of quality. There is an official marketing term for this - "planned obsolescence":

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

For example, you would know about this with regards to consoles, they've already planned at least ten years into the future with regards to hardware, and they already pretty much know when the Xbox 720 will be phased out, and they haven't even released it yet!
You're right about working on things individually. If I could make suggestion for yourself, not that there's any compelling reason you should listen to me, I think you should make a list of goals for yourself and then work on fulfilling them. They don't have to be too ambitious or anything, but it just helps you have something to focus on that you can achieve. Then once you've achieved them and ticked them all off, you can set yourself some harder goals. Obviously this won't change the world, but it will change your world.

Steevo wrote:
Either way you look at it, they were just built with the idea that workers would be housed in them cheaply. Now they do it and it's expensive instead! (I believe that idea was Heseltines)

Space Bandit wrote:
Again, I would add to that that development of cheap housing blocks of all shapes and sizes were laced with an anti community agenda. I think this is a very important point because wherever you care to look at, from Eastern Europe to the East End of London, the concrete urban jungles greatly inhibit the abilities of people to come together and form strong economic and social bonds. Slaves in boxes, single parent families, no connections = no hope. Socioeconomic development at its finest.

boywonder wrote:
I watched an episode of Batman (the animated series) called Crime Alley where a villain tried to demolish a whole neighbourhood in Gotham City so that he could build a shopping Mall. It would have destroyed the community. Basically it is a very similar story to what you have described there boywonder Batman saved the day, he realised that the community was very important.

Anyway, I'm guessing that something very similar is happening in real life America (minus the Batman lol).