From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 04 Dec 2002 - 07:30:02 GMT
> > From: "Scott Chase" <ecphoric@hotmail.com>
> >
> > >From: "Dace" <edace@earthlink.net>
> > >
> > >Most sociopaths are stuck for life at the emotional maturity of a
> > >6-year old, and Joe does not appear to be an exception. He's
> > >incapable of recognizing when he's wrong and often believes he's
> > >scored some kind of great rhetorical victory when all he's done is
> > >to repeat for the 50th
> time his
> > >unreflective views. It's a problem of the ego. "I'm right because
> > >I'm me." The reason he can't recognize Israel's slow-motion
> > >genocide against the Palestinian people is that he *identifies*
> > >with Israel. It's the pathological ego that makes people
> > >vulnerable to pathological memes, in this case the "Palestinians
> > >are evil terrorists" meme.
> >
> > So, Joe rails against militant Islam. You're railing against Israeli
> > Zionism. Are either of you better than the other? At the root of
> > each approach is the assumption that one side is good and the other
> > bad. Joe goes overboard in his posting about Islam, but it's no
> > better to go overboard loading it up against the Zionists. The best
> > approach would be cold, rational detachment from the topic and
> > present the situation on both sides and the underlying ideologies
> > and the nuances that make people on each side heterogenous.
>
> What's memetically significant about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
> is that there's nothing to discuss. From a socio-political viewpoint,
> it's all cut and dry. Israel has total power over Palestianian
> existence, while Palestine has none (outside of terror) over Israeli
> existence. There can be no question Israel is oppressing Palestine,
> not the other way around. Israel is occupying Palestinian land,
> demolishing Palestinian homes, depriving Palestinians of water and
> economic opportunity while confining them to disconnected territories.
> No amount of character assassinations of Edward Said can change any
> of that. To take the Israeli side is no different than taking the
> side of white South Africans during the apartheid era or American
> slaveowners over their "property" or settlers against "Indians."
>
This is a shining, sterling example of Ted's conflation and
confabulation; once again he does exactly what he accuses me of
doing. His is a starkly black-and-white world, and the Palestinian
suicide bombers and their patrons, who have declared that every Israeli
man, woman and child, military or civilian, is a legitimate terror target,
for Ted, are wearing the only white hats around.
>
> The question is not who's right or wrong but why so many people take
> the side of the oppressor. It's an issue of memetics. Why do we
> subscribe to a meme that characterizes Israel as victim and Palestine
> as aggressor? Why would an obviously pathological meme take on such
> dominance over a logical meme? To find an answer we must look no
> further than the resident sociopath on our own memetics list.
>
Could it be all those dead Israeli teenyboppers blown to bits at discoes?
And Ray Recchia had it right; everyone who has been here for a while
knows who the list nut is - Ted.
>
> Almost as soon as I began posting here, about a year and a half ago,
> Joe Dees began attacking me. The cycle has since repeated dozens of
> times. After a perfunctory attempt to argue against me, he spews forth
> a steady stream of childish insults. At first I literally went
> through his entire posts, inserting "ad hominem" after each paragraph
> in my responses. This had no effect. More recently I've learned to
> ignore his comments and try to focus on the psychological basis of his
> attacks, which he regards as a veiled effort to insult him. Why do I
> wish to insult him? Because he refuted Sheldrake!
>
Actually, I began refuting Ted's Sheldrakean fantasy the moment he
began infecting and inflicting the list with it. His claim to "focus on the
pstychological basis of [my purported] attacks" is actually a lame
excuse to ad hominize me. But engaging in that 2500 year old Greek
fallacy is a poor substitute for answering my refutations - however, it's
the best that Ted had, for he could not answer them.
>
> While plenty of people on this list have offered thoughtful,
> constructive criticism of Sheldrake, Joe is not among them. The most
> exhaustive discussion came from Derek Gatherer, who wisely dropped the
> subject after it became clear that he wasn't able to offer any kind of
> clear-cut refutation. Like any sensible person, Gatherer declared his
> disagreement and let it go at that. Intelligent people can agree to
> disagree. If anyone ever does conclusively refute holistic biology,
> it'll certainly be news. No doubt Skeptical Inquirer will feature the
> story on its cover. That Joe imagines he's provided just such a
> refutation demonstrates his capacity for delusion.
>
Actually, Sheldrake's fantasy rests upon several nonsensical
absurdities, such as the ridiculous idea of sppoky-form-at-a-distance
and the equally ludicrous idea that time does not exist, when actually
spacetime is a single manifold, and one cannot subtract one of the
manifold's aspects from it without destroying it entirely. Then there
were the empirical objections others offered, such as the fur coloration
patterns on calico cats and the very fact of genetic evolution, to which
Ted replied with rumors of crossword puzzle whizzes, hundredth
monkeys and psychic dogs.
>
> It's not that Joe is lying so much as confabulating. Like a small
> child, he reinvents reality according to how he wants it and then
> fully believes his own invention. It's his capacity for confabulation
> that makes him so convincing. When you take note of his obvious
> sincerity, you can't help but feel he might be right after all. It's
> the fact that he's fallen under his own magic spell that gives him the
> ability to cast his spell over others as well. This is the basis of
> cult mentality, so prevalent in human society, and explains how the
> cult of slavery would have gained its power, as well as the cults of
> "manifest destiny" and apartheid and now Zionism. A few egomaniacs
> fully believe in the righteousness of their cause, and the delusion
> spreads to society in general.
>
Projecting once again; it is Ted who has irretrieveably fallen under the
thrall of his ruling Sheldrakean memeplex. Get the pseudologic here;
he believes it with all his heart and it is unthinkable that he might be
wrong, thus it must be true. Thus he unsuccessfully attempts to morph
his religion into a science.
>
> Here's a segment from his latest offering:
>
> "I have no difficulty discussing psychopathology, particularly Ted's
> psychological projection of his own character traits upon me - and
> anyone who's been around here for a while saw those very character
> traits amply and abundantly exhibited in his rantig raving screeds
> about Sheldrakeanism , which he appropriated and in which he invested
> his emotional capital and his sense of self-worth, for lack of
> anything original of his own to offer."
>
> Joe figures I probably operate the same way he does, appropriating
> famous thinker's ideas and regurgitating them. He thinks I'm on an
> ego trip, just like him, that I'm doing all this ranting and raving to
> score points and show the folks who's boss. But if I point out that
> he's projecting his own traits onto me, he just turns it around and
> says I'm doing it to him. Isn't it funny that he never called me a
> bully and a coward until I pointed out that he's a bully and a coward?
>
Actually, that's how bullys and cowards operate on elists; strike first
with the victimization and character assassination ad hominems, as Ted
just admitted he did. And my ideas are indeed original; I stand on some
shoulders (doesn't everyone? It's called referencing and footnoting),
but I reach from them into new areas. Ted would be hard-pressed to
post another article that put forth the analysis in TOOLS, LANGUAGE
AND TEXT, for instance, and would be equally hard-pressed to point to
a single article of his own, or much of anything he has ever posted that
has not been, overtly or covertly, Sheldrakean apologia.
>
> Though simple-minded, his mimicry is highly effective, giving people
> the impression that both of us are just slinging mud at each other.
> So too, when Israel presents itself as nothing more than a helpless
> victim, Palestinian claims of victimhood seem less compelling. Since
> both sides are saying the same thing, they probably both have equal
> legitimacy. The whole issue gets totally blurred, and Israel can go
> right on throttling the Palestinian people. Same thing with Joe on
> this list.
>
The solution is easy to see - Israeli settlements in the West Bank and
Gaza removed, the Golan heights returned in return for guarantees
from Lebanon and Syria that the terror launched from their territories
would cease, an internationalization of Jerusalem with both sides
allowd to base their capitals there, and an end to Palestinian terror as
well as a reformation of their corrupt thugocracy/ bloodthirsty theocracy
syncretism into a genuinely representative democracy. But of course in
Ted's starkly balck-and-white world, not only can Israel do no right, but
Palestinian terrorists have been doing nothing wrong, so there is
nothing for them to change, and no reason for compromise. This
stance smacks of antisemitism. The truth of the matter is that the most
militant Palestinians are silencing debate and preventing the necessary
consiliations from taking place; that is going on on the Israeli side, too,
but not as extremely. There are a lot more Palestinians that would
assassinate Arafat if he had taken the Barak deal than there were
Israelis who would assassinate Rabin for making peace - but it takes
only one. So Arafat, having seen what happened to Rabin, balked, as a
matter of self-preservation. Aaron Lynch's analysis of this situation was
precise and correct.
>
> Since my last post, no one has chimed in to point out that, yes, I
> have consistently demonstrated a commitment to rational exchange of
> ideas, while Joe has consistently demonstrated his talent for abusive,
> ad hominem-style tactics. But then no one (at least in the US mass
> media) ever points out that Israel, in destroying Palestine, is
> responsible for its own blowback. The best we can hope for is that
> someone comes along and castigates both sides for participating in
> this endless dispute, as if each side-- oppressor and victim-- is
> equally at fault.
>
Actually, Ray Recchia has chimed in to call Ted a nut.
>
> > There's some who feel that these threads on Islamic and/or Zionist
> > ideology have steered from the central topic of the list. IMO
> > speculating on Joe's personality foibles goes much too far.
>
> Personality disorders offer the key to understanding the origin and
> potency of pathological memes. Joe is doing us a great favor by
> providing this case study.
>
Actually, Ted is the case study here, beginning with morphic resonance
and continuing with his utter lack of balance concerning the Mideast
conflict, but of course, he has to deny and project that truth as well.
>
> > I think any posting in the future about any middle east related
> > topics should focus on analysis of the issues (such as ideologies
> > prevalent and how they have influenced behavior and history). Joe's
> > posting of URL's, Lawry's pinpricks of Joe, Kenneth's diatribes etc.
> > ain't getting close to anything substantive. As someone has
> > mentioned these are hot-button topics and it may be extremely
> > difficult to do a decent job at presenting the material at hand in a
> > cultural evolutionary relevant way, without casting
> blame
> > or looking through the lenses of ones own worldview.
>
> I agree. It's much easier to examine the epidemiology of pathological
> memes in regard to historical issues, where virtually everyone agrees
> as to who was right and who was wrong. We all realize the 17th
> century English policy of hanging the poor when they tried to steal
> bread was evil. We can easily determine who was in thrall to a mental
> virus and what form it took, why it was successful, etc. But even
> with current issues, it's possible to demonstrate which side is
> parasitized with self-justifying beliefs, and which side is clean.
>
And this list knows full well which side of that divide Ted inhabits.
>
> Ted
>
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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