Clean And Dirty Information, And How To Tell The Difference

This essay describes a concept in information science. This is a concept that is of extreme importance in today’s Post-Truth Age, now that the media is even more full of propaganda than usual. It relates to the art and science of deciding whether a given set of information is trustworthy.

There are already conceptions of clean vs. dirty data. However, those conceptions are inadequate, because cleanliness is considered the same thing as accuracy. As such, they are not useful, because it would be simpler and easier just to use the term ‘accurate’ instead of ‘clean’.

A useful conception of clean vs. dirty information has to take into account the moral dimension of the people promulgating the information. Essentially, then, clean information comes from a clean source who cares about the truth only, with no view to the propaganda value of the information, and dirty information comes from a dirty source, who doesn’t care about the truth at all.

This division is very simple, but applying it in the real world of propaganda is highly complex.

For one thing, it takes great knowledge of the world and of the people in it to make accurate judgments about other people’s biases. The usual, poorly-educated approach is to trust people based on whether they have attributes in common with oneself: race, class, education, occupation etc. The more qualities they have in common, the more trusted.

Another poorly-educated approach used by many people is to determine truth based on whether the speaker has a high rank in the listener’s herd or not. So one’s pastor, boss, father or club leader becomes the authority to which one listens. All that matters is a high position in a friendly dominance hierarchy. This was the approach described in detail by Edward Bernays in Propaganda.

It can safely be said that all information from a political source is dirty. Any press release put out by a political party can be considered filthy. So can any article or book written by a member of a political party. The greater the influence of politics on any source of information, the dirtier it is.

It can also safely be said that most information from religious sources, particularly Abrahamic ones, is dirty. This is especially true of those who are seeking to gain followers for money or political power. Anyone who says that you have to obey them or suffer everlasting pushishment in a Hell Realm can be confidently written off as a dirty source. But in this regard, as with others, the world’s religions vary greatly.

Here it’s necessary to look at the reputations of the people pushing the information. Have they murdered their way around the world over the centuries? Do they regularly sexually abuse their children? Do they practice barbarisms such as infant genital mutilation? Do they have transparently sadistic animal slaughter protocols?

Perhaps there was once a time when the mainstream media was a clean source of information. This was back in the times when honest people chose to become journalists for the sake of spreading the truth (i.e. before the Charlie Mitchells took over). Today, no rational or intelligent person can trust anything in the mainstream media.

It used to be possible to trust scientists, because a lot of the people drawn to academia are the sort of person who values truth above merely material concerns such as political power or wealth. But then corporations started buying research favourable to their products. It turns out that scientists are only slightly harder to buy than politicians.

Who actually does tell the truth?

In order to reliably tell the truth, a person has to believe that there are positive consequences for speaking truth and negative consequences for telling lies. They have to believe in something like karma, or at least the Law of Attraction, before they can be trusted to put the truth before their own interests.

This is to say that it’s possible to trust genuinely spiritual people. But there, again, is another major problem: usually it’s impossible to tell if someone is genuinely spiritual or not. The low-IQ approach is to trust people at the top of the same religious herd as yourself. High-IQ people go on the reputation of the source among other high-IQ people.

If you would ask the ten most intelligent people you know who they consider clean sources of information, and if more than one of them suggested the same source, you could be reasonably sure that source was clean. This is the same logic as academic peer review, and, while an effective way of distinguishing clean from dirty, it’s far from infallible.

The tough news is that there’s no truly reliable way to tell if someone is a clean source of information other than going through everything they have written or said, comparing all facts therein stated to known truths, and subjecting their logic to the most rigourous examination. If they regularly make predictions that turn out to be false, that’s a good sign they’re a dirty source.

Perhaps the two rules of thumb are firstly: never trust an authority figure, because they have reason to lie to you. Secondly: prefer to trust someone who is trusted by smart people and distrusted by dumb people.

The great thing about clean information is that it can be absorbed without the need to take time and energy correcting for bias. A truly clean source of information is worth gold in the information marketplace of 2023. In this age of pervasive AI-generated content though, best of luck finding it.

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The Great Resistance, Fully Realised

The Great Awakening appears to be going very slowly. The control system is very clever, and it knows that there are various ways to keep a population submissive. One of the tried-and-true methods is to work the population so hard that it doesn’t have time to organise an awakening or revolution. So before there can be a Great Awakening, there has to be a Great Resistance.

The Great Resistance has been described as a pushback from workers who want to keep working at home. The Coronavirus lockdowns led to a large number of workers working from home, and most of those workers decided that they preferred that to the daily grind of commuting for hours on top of a full day of work.

Many workers have been confused by their bosses’ demands for them to come back to the office post-Covid. It’s hard to see what, apart from a sadistic need for control, would motivate them to demand their workers commute when it isn’t necessary. This has led to some resentment, and that resentment has led to resistance.

Some have taken the Great Resistance concept further, to the point where it has become a Western version of the Chinese “lying flat movement“. After all, the reasoning goes, if you want to save on your commuting time because it’s wasted, why not save on other forms of wasted time as well? Such as working for a wage that you can never own a home and raise a family on?

There’s potentially much more to it than even that.

The Great Resistance has the potential to become an entirely new social movement towards resisting tyranny. If it can combine the right-wingers concerned about losing free speech and other freedoms, and the left-wingers concerned about unaffordable rents and housing, such a movement could have a major societal impact.

The Great Resistance could be a resistance of many things – not just of our material exploitation but also our spiritual exploitation.

Perhaps the most obvious and immediate cause for the Great Resistance relates to the share of wealth accrued by the bottom 99% of society. At the end of 2023, young and working-class people all over the West are in a state of deep malaise. The chance of owning a home that a family can be raised in seems remote for most of those people.

The first cause, then, is liberating wealth from the top 1%. Housing, especially, must be liberated so that people at an age to start families can afford it. This will involve shifting the entire balance of power back from the hoarders of land to the workers of it. Immigration must be stopped so that employers are forced to pay fair wages to locals.

The workday must be reduced so that Westerners have time for something other than work. Everything that sucks time from people unnecessarily, whether commuting, bullshit jobs, unpaid overtime, being always-on-call etc. must be abolished, by law. If the average worker today has become twice as productive as the average worker in the 1970s, they should see at least half of that benefit.

Resisting corporate propaganda is part of this. If any revolutionary social movement is to be successful, its members have to be ideologically clear. This means that they will have to resist the messaging of the mainstream media, the television in particular. Resist the corporate media’s tireless attempts to insert its advertising into your brain. Consume clean information.

Another part of the Great Resistance must also involve resisting shit food and drugs. Some Clown Worlders have coined the term ‘goyslop’ to describe the low-quality garbage food that pervades Western culture. The high goyslop consumption rates are partially because all the energy and time that would have been used for cooking is stolen by the employer. This must be resisted.

Naturally, this also involves getting fit. It’s not just about resisting slop but also resisting laziness. The Great Resistance will involve resistance training. Physical strength is a tangible sign of one’s refusal to collapse into the dirt. The attempts by the ruling class to drive the rest of us into the ground must be resisted.

Also, if any success is to be had, the members of the revolutionary social movement must resist spiritual lies intended to induce submission. The Great Resistance must continue the work and sacrifice made by those throughout history who have battled spiritual terrorism, in whichever form it has arisen. Death narratives must be rejected, and life narratives must be emphasised.

Fully realising the Great Resistance, then, will go far beyond merely working from home. It will involve a complete rebalancing of the relative powers of workers and capital owners, in both physical and metaphysical spheres. Previous attempts to achieve this rebalance have failed, mostly because working-class leaders were replaced by ruling-class lackeys. It’s time to try from a different angle.

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Narratives Of Life Vs. Narratives Of Death

There are two types of narrative that an individual or culture can tell themselves about the meaning of life. Although there might be an infinitude of specific narratives, they all share enough features in common to divide them into two groups. The first are life narratives and the second are death narratives.

Life narratives are the original human spirituality. All natural spiritual traditions emphasise the passage of life through the four corners of the dharma wheel: through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. They also emphasise that these four seasons apply to the life of humans as well. In fact, this quadrichotomy describes the natural life path of everything that exists.

Narratives of life are all circular. This is why the holy symbols of all life religions are circular. The ouroboros, the Taijitu, the Quadrijitu and the dharma wheel are all circular. From this circularity the core spiritual truths of reincarnation and karma can be derived. After the Winter always comes another Spring.

Or, as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, “death is fixed for those who are born, and birth is fixed for those who die.”

Life narratives also emphasise gratitude. Being natural, being vital, one is grateful for life. As such, there is no desire to escape life, or to escape reality. There is no resentment, no slave morality. So life narratives celebrate the return of the Sun after the Winter Solstice, and they celebrate the peak of the Sun at the Summer Solstice, and in either case they are grateful.

Death narratives were invented later, for the sake of political control. Death narratives all promise the same thing: that you can escape the misery of life through obeying those pushing the narrative (usually a priest). So in order for a death narrative to catch on, there has to be widespread suffering.

Death narratives mostly arose after the advent of civilisation. Civilisation leads to the survival of individuals who would not have survived in a state of Nature. Most of these individuals can intuit that they are defective, and as a result they desire oblivion. This is especially true if, as is often the case, they were born into slavery.

When you have an overpopulation of useless eaters, promoting life narratives is dangerous. It can lead towards a total collapse of the ecosystem. Much better to promote death narratives, so that the population can return to a balance with Nature.

Narratives of death are linear. This is why the holy symbols of all death religions are made of straight lines (such as the Star of David and the Christian cross), or circles reduced to a minimum (such as the Islamic crescent) or both (such as the hammer and sickle).

All religious narratives that have an end times belief are narratives of death. A will to escape the world is a longing for death and thereby rejection of the world. Therefore it is a naysaying, a mental illness. Believing in an Armageddon or hoping to escape Samsara are both a rejection of the reality that the gods dreamed up for entertainment.

Materialism, with its Big Bang and Heat Death of the Universe concepts, is another linear narrative, and therefore another death narrative. Because it’s a death narrative, it belongs in the same category as the Abrahamic religions. Indeed, it was a Catholic priest who came up with the idea of the Big Bang in the first place, possibly to delegitimise the esoteric belief that all conscious beings are co-creators of the Universe.

Ultimately, materialism offers the same solace to those who hate life as the Abrahamic cults. The only difference is that there’s no priest to obey (perhaps scientists are the priesthood of materialism). All one has to do is wait until the physical body expires, whereupon the warm embrace of oblivion will envelop one for eternity.

Marxism, as Sri Dharma Pravartaka Archaya realised, is another form of Abrahamism. The narrative that the bourgeosie have to be destroyed before a Golden Age can begin is a relative to the narrative that Amalek/the heathens/the infidels have to be destroyed before Yahweh will return to Earth.

Marxists also share a personality type in common with Abrahamists. The vicious, petty, dishonourable conduct of both types is infamous. The predilection towards becoming a two-faced backstabber is shared by all who resent the world.

Gnosticism is yet another death narrative. The idea that the material world is inherently evil is borne of the same kind of resentment that motivates the other Abrahamisms. Gnosticism might be a step closer to the truth in that it recognises Yahweh as the Principle of Evil (a belief shared by Elementalism). But it is still a narrative that repudiates life in the physical world.

Believers in life narratives and believers in death narratives could not behave more differently. Believers in life narratives feel kindness for all other life and for the life process. Believers in death narratives invent practices like kosher and halal slaughter, and infant genital mutilation. That life narratives promote compassion and death narratives promote sadism is perhaps their most salient difference.

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Looks Like We’re Communists Again

With the announcement this week of a Sixth National Government and its two coalition partners, New Zealand society will now go through some moderate changes. Some cosmetic changes will be made regarding language in Government communications. Taxes will be raised slightly on poor people and lowered slightly for landlords. Nothing fundamental will change, but perceptions will.

One of the most obvious changes will be in the mainstream media. The New Zealand mainstream media has, until now, been paid to cheerlead for the Sixth Labour Government through the Public Interest Journalism Fund, which bunged $55 million to propaganda organs like Stuff.

Some think that the mainstream media will have to be “objective” now that the Marxists are out of power. This is a delusion. In reality, the mainstream media will cheerlead for the capitalists from now on, just as they did up until 2017. Many supposedly left-wing journalists will make an apparent total flip to the right-wing in coming months.

Related to this will be the closure of the more blatant propaganda outlets, such as the Disinformation Project and the Spinoff. People like Kate Hannah and Sanjana Hattotuwa, employed by a leftist government to smear and harass their enemies, will be out of jobs.

Another change will be in the alternative media – and the public perceptions of the alternative media.

VJM Publishing will not change our approach or our focus. We will continue to provide information to those who have seen beyond, from an Elementalist and an alternative centrist perspective. We will continue to provide a high-quality, properly-referenced alternative to the corporatist dross that passes for information today.

We will continue to go hard at the political establishment, and against the constant lies they tell in order to divide and conquer the peoples of the world. However, whatever VJM Publishing does, we will be told that it’s a reaction to the political fashions of the time. And so, perceptions of us will change.

From when this company was founded to 2017, John Key’s Fifth National Government was in charge of New Zealand. As a consequence, our criticism of the then Government led to us being dismissed as Communists. Logical and reasonable criticisms of the housing crisis were written off as Marxist propaganda.

Then, when Jacinda Ardern became the Prime Minister, all the narratives flipped. One of those was the perception of VJM Publishing. Now that we criticised an apparently left-learning government, we were no longer Communists. Now we were Nazis.

All of our criticisms of Labour’s globalist approach – exemplified by their doubling the refugee quota in 2017 – were twisted around and became “Nazi tropes”. All of the reasoning that opposed refugee resettlement from a working-class perspective was ignored. Labour was in charge, and if you don’t agree with them you’re a Nazi.

So now that the right-leaning wing of the Establishment is back in control, the herd will start calling us Communists again. We will continue to criticise the Government for inaction on housing, mental health, wages and child abuse, only now we’ll get called Communists for that instead of getting called Nazis.

It won’t change our attitude. Telling the truth is the highest of all actions. We are now in a time of universal deceit. Therefore, as per Orwell, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. We will continue to tell the truth, and the ruling class will continue to decry us as enemies of society. It’ll be fun!

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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