Sorry to hear about your loss, Cyg. I found your description interesting. I have occasionally thought about what it would be like to return to the Hall for a funeral, the only reason I would ever go back.
Posts by Seeker
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14today's Kingdom Hall experience
by Cygnus inwent to my grandfather's funeral service at the kingdom hall today.
two or three minutes were spent on grandfather, and the rest on the bible, jehovah, how sin makes our bio cells degenerate, etc.
etc.. fortunately, i'm well past the stage of anger at the witnesses for shoving their religious beliefs down my throat.
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7
Anyone watch Magnolia?
by mindfield ini just saw magnolia recently, and boy, did i enjoy it.
the coincidences, the way things interconnected, the credible acting really got me.
wow.. i admit, some parts were kind of slow and rambling, like when earl partridge rambles off in his bed about his mistakes.
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Seeker
I very much enjoyed Magnolia and thought it was one of the best movies of that year. Hard to watch in parts, and the raw emotion at times is overwhelming. But I enjoyed the interconnectedness, and I understood the frog shower when I first saw it. It tied into the whole theme and unified the introduction. Besides, Anderson foreshadowed it all the way by his use of cited scripture.
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125
Criminal , new US ally
by Norm inthe norwegian newspaper vg, reports: iraqi general nizar al-khazraji was the man behind the butchering of 180,000 iraqi kurds in 1988. he was one of saddam's faithful generals.
he later had to flee iraq and is living on a secret address in denmark.
he is under investigation by the danish police.. ---------------------------------------------------.
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Seeker
pat,
I thought i was doing well by reading other newspapers out of state, for crying out loud!
See, most of them are owned by the same corporations, so it's the same news everywhere!Don't feel bad. It's not easy to swim against societal tides. Most people don't even realize they are in the river, let alone that the current is carrying them along. To realize it, and then swim upstream, takes unusual powers of observation. However, leaving the WTS is a fast way to gains those powers! Apply the same scrutiny to corporations and the media as we applied to the GB. You will see why I keep repeating the phrase, "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
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Criminal , new US ally
by Norm inthe norwegian newspaper vg, reports: iraqi general nizar al-khazraji was the man behind the butchering of 180,000 iraqi kurds in 1988. he was one of saddam's faithful generals.
he later had to flee iraq and is living on a secret address in denmark.
he is under investigation by the danish police.. ---------------------------------------------------.
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Seeker
Pat,
Oh, too many to mention in detail, but I'll mention a few ways to keep up on things. First, some media principles:
1. Almost all media is owned by transnational megacorporations. Whatever they say is filtered by the conservative nature of large organizations that want to avoid offending the masses so that they can sell more of their products. So when you are watching CBS News or reading the New York Times, you have to keep in mind their point of view. I read an intereview with the head of the News division of ABC, and he admitted that ABC could not run a story criticizing Disney, the transnational megacorp that owns ABC.
2. The media is overwhelmingly conservative. The big lie of conservatives is that there is a liberal media. This is not true. This is a claim of right-wing conservatives who don't like the moderate conservative point-of-view. To them, anything except right-wing views is 'liberal.' In fact, a true liberal persepective is almost never allowed on mainstream media. You ususally get two perspectives: the 'conservative' perspective and the 'liberal' perspective, but both sides are actually conservative, just differing in their degree. Republicans are more right-wing than Democrats, but both are conservative. True liberals are marginalized to the point of disappearing from public discourse.
So when you are watching or reading U.S. media, you are being told the offical party line, with occasional dissenting views that usually don't go very far or very deep or amount to all that much. An example of this: After 9/11, what did almost all media do very quickly? They pasted the American flag all over their screens. They reported the offical party line of the White House almost without exception. They ignored the possibility that bin Laden was not behind the attacks. They became an almost perfect outlet for political propaganda. The media isn't supposed to take sides, not even America's. It is supposed to sit outside petty political considerations and report facts. But remember point 1 above -- the media exists to make profits for a corporation, and corps know they will make more money by giving people what they want, and thus can then sell more soap. Right now, it pays to wave the flag, and so wave the flag the media does.
When Russian news media did that during the Cold War, we called it government propaganda. So what do we call it now when the U.S. media does it?
As for alternate sources, what I do is try to get both sides. If a story involves Britain, read the story in a British newspaper online too. If it involves the Arabic world, get news from over there. Yes, you are getting their version of propaganda, but only by comparing propaganda from both sides can you begin to discern patterns and truth. It helps, at least.
I read The New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly, in magazines, for somewhat alternative viewpoints. They aren't truly liberal sources, but they lean more in that direction, and thus offer a different perspective from the mainstream conservative media. If you want to see just how dumb Bush is, read the New Yorker articles about his ideas.
If you want to know what's happening in globalization and economic forums, I like to check out www.indymedia.org for their alternative perspective. Now this is truly liberal news, and it is so vastly different from what passes as 'liberal' sources on mainstream press that you will truly see why the accusations of the "liberal media" is such a lie. Now, I think indymedia goes too far in that direction, but that's OK, it serves as a touchstone against which I can measure the conservative press. Only from indymedia, for example, would you learn about people being arrested for protesting economic summits and being held for weeks without charges. On the mainstream press, you'll learn about protests, and maybe a mention of some arrests. On indymedia, you'll learn what happnes to those arrested, and how the government illegally uses harrassment to discourage dissent. So by comparing both sides, you begin to get a glimmer of truth.
No, I don't rush to all these news sources for every story. A kitten caught in the tree and rescused by firefighters can be reported by anyone. Only the important stories need this level of scrutiny.
If you want extreme detailed analysis of U.S. propaganda, and specific, documented examples where the U.S. governement and the U.S. media lied to us, you might find the book Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky interesting. Conservatives criticize Chomsky in precisely the same way JWs criticize apostates. They claim Chomsky has an agenda, that his sources aren't true, and so on. But he provides so many footnotes you can go a library and see for yourself. He doesn't hide anything. So even if he has an agenda, which of course he does, he provides valuable evidence, fully documented, of times when you and I have been lied to. It's a bit mind-blowing, to be honest. This is where I read so much of the Latin American dirty tricks I've been talking about in this thread.
Hope this helps. Remember, propaganda exists on all sides. Only by viewing both sides can we come to an approximation of truth.
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16
Is CONSCIOUNESS a Type of Quantum Knowledge?
by D wiltshire in"quantum reality" by nick herbert .
page248 subheading:.
is consciouness a type of quantum knowledge?.
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Seeker
Do you mean how it can seem that certain unique ideas in math or science sometimes pop up simultaneously in different parts of the world?
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125
Criminal , new US ally
by Norm inthe norwegian newspaper vg, reports: iraqi general nizar al-khazraji was the man behind the butchering of 180,000 iraqi kurds in 1988. he was one of saddam's faithful generals.
he later had to flee iraq and is living on a secret address in denmark.
he is under investigation by the danish police.. ---------------------------------------------------.
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Seeker
If I only could understand why so many Americans seems to be totally without the ability to see the world around them!
Kent, you'd be amazed at the level of propaganda that exists in the U.S. If a person's sole source of information is television news or their local newspaper, they would have no idea about how the rest of the world feels or what is going on or how their own government behaves. In fact, they are often directly lied to by these sources, as good propaganda often does, and thus remain worse than uninformed, but misinformed.
And when you have been conditioned since birth to be a good corporate citizen, to buy, buy, buy to prop up the economy, and to wave the flag when the President says we are at war, it takes initiatize to look beyond the propaganda to see what is really happening.
Yes, I realize propaganda exists in other countries as well, but I was talking about America, the DoublePlus Good government of the world.
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Does Looks Really Matter?
by butalbee indoes looks really matter in love?
would you go out with someone who was not physically attractive if he/she had a big heart on the inside, a great personality, lot's of things in common with, etc...i guess i'm asking what's more important to you the person on the exterior or who he/she really is underneath?.
lara
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Seeker
It's far more important to me what is on the inside than the outside of a woman. In fact, I've met very few traditionally beautiful women who had personalities I admired. Society treats people differently based on looks, and it spoils beautiful women to such an extent that it's the hard not to give in to this.
A less traditionally beautiful women cannot depend on her looks, and thus gravitates toward nice behavior almost subconsciously.
Yes, I know, those are gross generalizations, and I've met quite a few exceptions to those rules, in both cases, so don't bother providing anecdotal evidence about this genuinely nice beautiful woman or this horrible ugly woman -- I know.
More to the point of the question, I prefer the inner beauty because after you have been with a person for a while, you stop noticing their looks for the most part. You don't see "a beautiful woman," you see "my partner." Meanwhile, their inner beauty shines through day after day.
Having said that, I have been conditioned by society enough to be affected by physical beauty, sad to say, so I often succumb to the charms of outer beauty before noticing their inner qualities. Not proud of it, but I admit it. To my credit, inner beauty always wins the day eventually. But I wish it didn't have to take time. Being online helps, as I get to know the inner person first.
One last confession, and one I'm not at all proud about, nor do I have any idea where it comes from: I am not attracted to women who are more than a little overweight. A little? OK. More than that? Nope. Shallow? Absolutely. Wrong? Yes. Built-in to me? Sure is. Why? I have no clue, but it's very deeply built in and seems to have always been there since childhood. It could be, I'm guessing, that I come from an extended family where no one is overweight, so perhaps as a child all I ever saw as models of body types were either slender or, at most, middle-aged slightly overweight. Whatever the cause of it, I find it hard to be physically attracted to such a woman, no matter how much I admire their inner beauty. As I said, I'm not proud of it, but there it is.
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23
A Beautiful Mind
by speechless in"a beautiful mind".
what a great movie!
(a somewhat true story of the life of john forbes nash, mathematician, princeton).
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Seeker
If you've seen any commercial or trailer for it, you've seen more of the story than bboyneko said. Hollywood doesn't want you to go to the movies nowadays without knowing the full story ahead of time. That's why so many movie trailers cover the entire story arc from start to finish. It's the McDonaldiztion of entertainment -- you know what you're getting before you walk in, and people seem to like it that way.
I like how the movie portrays loyalty and love, when it real life they split up long ago because she couldn't stand his behavior any more. They then got back together and about a year ago remarried. Not quite the message of this Hollywood fantasy, but a lot more realistic when dealing with such behavior in a human being.
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Criminal , new US ally
by Norm inthe norwegian newspaper vg, reports: iraqi general nizar al-khazraji was the man behind the butchering of 180,000 iraqi kurds in 1988. he was one of saddam's faithful generals.
he later had to flee iraq and is living on a secret address in denmark.
he is under investigation by the danish police.. ---------------------------------------------------.
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Seeker
IW,
There has been much said here concerning countries who want America to leave them alone, but no names.
On the contrary, I have several times mentioned Latin America. Ask El Salvador or Nicaragua if they would have preferred to be left alone by the U.S. in the 1980s rather than have the U.S. prevent democratic movements in those countries from flourishing because the U.S. would rather have had a despot in place that would be friendly to U.S. political interests even while they were using terrorism on their own people.And when Nicaragua did get a democratically-elected government, the U.S. lied about them and made it sound as if they forced their way into power over the will of the Nicaraguan people, despite their overwhelming support locally. Why did the U.S. do that? Because the previous regime, though brutal to the Nicaraguans, said all the right things to America. The new regime, elected popularly, was willing to make economic deals with the Russians. To Ronald "Evil Empire" Reagan, this was anathema, and thus the steady stream of lies designed to undermine democracy in that country.
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19
How many Watchtower Lawyers are there?
by VM44 inin amazing's exit series, he mentions one lawyer who works.
exclusively for the watchtower society.
i posted a link to.
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Seeker
100?! No way. I'd be surprised if they had more than a dozen at Brooklyn. Now, the entire Legal Department could well run into the 100s, I suppose, but the question was how many lawyers are there. A few years back I knew all of them, and there were fewer than half-a-dozen actual lawyers on staff.
JT is right, however, that there are outside brothers who are lawyers who do work for the Society even though they aren't actually at Bethel. Does that make them a "Watchtower lawyer"? Probably, in which case the answer is higher than in my first paragraph.