man’s universe implodes

Accustomed to believing everything told to him by the one television channel he thinks tells the truth, local resident Chester T. Whipplebutton suffered a severe reaction to unexpectedly hearing two conflicting points of view. Symptoms of his reaction to the apparent contradiction included a dramatic spike in blood pressure followed by a skin rash similar to hives and a mild stroke.

The incident occurred early last evening during a scheduled commercial break interrupting his favorite news-entertainment show. During the break, the television showed one advertisement for a new menu item at a fast-food chain that claimed it had the tastiest and most juicy burgers. Immediately afterward, however, aired an advertisement for a different fast-food chain in which it, too, claimed to have the tastiest and juiciest burgers. A firm believer in the rule of mutual exclusivity and having trained himself to only believe one idea, notion, or concept at a time, Mr. Whipplebutton entered a state of catatonic shock that has left him in critical condition.

Recent emergency-room statistics indicate a rise in cases similar to the one detailed above. Experts suggest that filter bubbles and saliency biases are partly to blame for Americans’ inability to hold two or more conflicting thoughts in their minds simultaneously.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

encylopediamericanifesto: panem et circenses

  Beyond its propensity for outright hostility against citizens loyal to the rightfully elected government of the United States, the military-industrial complex and its cohorts in the rapacious plutocracy has done injustice to the fed and to the American people alike in that instead of clever or devious tactics it prefers as the tool to craft for the ages a new order an ancient Roman method called panem et circenses.

  A ruling body exercises panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, by attempting to control the rage of an urban population using compelling, addictive entertainment and delicious, cheap food. The typical city dweller in ancient Rome resembled the modern homeless person in appearance and in morals both – by all accounts, he was as likely to be sexually promiscuous as he was to binge drink, and if he could drink and fuck while watching gladiators fight to the death, he was contented. But the modern urbanite is rich, and so he pays good money to watch the circuses on TV at his home, where he will eat from paper bags a meal of fast food suffused with fat and sugar that was prepared for him by silently desperate wage-slaves. The urbanite does these things because he is a good boy, and because good boys follow the rules – he watches the commercials and he buys all the useless and superfluous crap, and he does not mind that his conspicuous and incessant consumption (and that of his semi-affluent cohorts) makes only 0.05% of the US population wealthy beyond imagining. The richest of the rich, this group is comprised of those individuals who own television companies and fast food chains: it stacks chips like a boss while the remainder of the population, the 99.5%, descends into orca-fat obesity and chronic laziness.

  But it is not enough for the Point Oh Five to control the messages you hear and see or to dictate which foods you eat – these Rapacious Plutocrats have wrested the shaping of a new order for the ages from the federal government of the United States of America (which is the agent selected by Destiny to be the perpetrator of the whole Shaping a New Order for the Ages business). The people who own the TV stations and the fast food shacks become rich beyond reckoning upon the backs of the wretched citizens who fork over their meager wages to keep themselves sated of food and to spend their time staring at images dancing on a magic box.

  While the fed has at times acted foolishly, I place more of my trust in it than in a cadre of individuals whose minds are so twisted with the pulsing whorish thrust of money that their balance-sheets matter more than the vitality and diversity of the American people.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp