Does this read like a gish gallop rationalization of the author's father's paranoid schizophrenia to anyone else? I also couldn't help but roll my eyes nearly every time the author asked a...
Does this read like a gish gallop rationalization of the author's father's paranoid schizophrenia to anyone else? I also couldn't help but roll my eyes nearly every time the author asked a rhetorical question:
A thought occurred to me: Could the stories of “targeted individuals” be a warning, a cautionary tale about the real targeting we experience as digital technologies pervade our lives? Perhaps my father’s perception of electronic harassment is the result of his sensitivity to the mechanics of things. He may be seeing through to the nuts and bolts of the web, weaving a story out of its danger and turning it into a terrifying delusion of persecution, suffering, and torment.
What if the TI voices exist for the same reason? Maybe my father, and the thousands of people who have bonded over their self-perceived status as targeted individuals, are a kind of indirect warning system experiencing a kind of collective dream—canaries in the digital coal mine. We dismiss them as out of touch with reality. Yet we have all become the objects of monitoring and manipulation eroding the core of what makes us human: our free will.
Sound familiar? Many who hear the TI stories of surveillance and manipulation dismiss them as mere delusion. But we have created machines that track our every move, that beam thoughts into our heads. Were the targeted individuals America's prophets all along?
Watching [Westworld], I saw in Dolores’ journey to consciousness the opposite of our present path as we surrender our minds to computer algorithms. What if our own freedom depends on our realizing that the voices of “targeted individuals” are our own collective unconscious?
It's a shame, really... because a lot of the things she covers in the article, like the surveillance state, big data and targeted advertising, are critically important issues, IMO. But her...
It's a shame, really... because a lot of the things she covers in the article, like the surveillance state, big data and targeted advertising, are critically important issues, IMO. But her constantly using those valid concerns as flimsy justification for "targeted individuals" delusions really bothered me because of how dismissive of the illness and dangerous that attitude is for those who suffer from it. :/
A bigger focus on how those things feed into paranoia and delusions would have been more helpful, in my opinion, because there are strong tie-ins there.
A bigger focus on how those things feed into paranoia and delusions would have been more helpful, in my opinion, because there are strong tie-ins there.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that at least some of the reports of gangstalking are authentic and that one or more organization is monkeying around with people's lives in such a way. To think...
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that at least some of the reports of gangstalking are authentic and that one or more organization is monkeying around with people's lives in such a way. To think that covert agencies like the CIA delved into human experimentation like MKUltra decades ago but then suddenly changed their ways and has kept their hands clean to this day? That seems like a far greater stretch. I believe that if we were suddenly given a complete picture of everything that all the people and organizations with power do and have done, if their activities were completely unveiled, the system would probably collapse under the weight of our collective horror and sense of betrayal.
That being said, I won't make any claim as to what percentage of people who claim to be gangstalked are actually being gangstalked. Just that it seems wild to dismiss that it actually happens at all.
I'm glad the author linked to Intervoice. I completely agree with what she's saying and the philosophy of that organization, that instead of dismissing and delegitimizing a person's thoughts and perceptions because they don't seem to accord with consensus reality, and teaching them to do the same, we should promote understanding those experiences on their own terms, and encourage sufferers to understand their inner world as it is, come to conclusions about why it is that way, and empower them to redefine themselves in a way that allows them to shed or coexist with whatever aspect of their experience is causing them pain. I see medication's proper role as an aid to that process of healing, not the solution in itself. Use them to make mental pain manageable during the healing process, just as we do with painkillers when someone is physically injured.
As a whole, the American mental health industry's understanding of consciousness has been woefully poor, but I do see light at the end of the tunnel. The cutting edge of the industry is producing better and better therapeutic techniques, incorporating the wisdom of our mystics and shamans. Stuff we've known for ages. We have some more recent schools of therapy inspired by Buddhism such as radical acceptance and dialectic behavior therapy that are really beginning to hit the mark. Clinical psychedelic research stands to revolutionize our understanding of consciousness and has already had huge success treating PTSD and depression. We're starting to see that accepting consciousness and the perceptions therein on their own terms as meaningful and dynamically redefining ourselves and our beliefs thereby works a lot better than suppressing and repressing aspects of our psyche that we have been calling psychotic, invalid, unreal.
I have a lot of hope that going forward we are going to be relying more and more on therapeutic tools that validate and empower this kind of fringe experience, that encourage inner exploration and self-acceptance and growth in a way that allows us to utilize and integrate the aspects of human experience we currently shut away and scorn. In the process of doing this I think we'll find that those people find peace and harmony by coming to radically different conclusions about themselves and the world at large than what the consensus promotes, as I have myself. And as a society our job will be basically what it ought to be already: to bridge the gaps between all these diverse philosophies and worldviews, learn to value each and every individual no matter how far-out their experiences and ways of living, so long as they're not, you know, being a dick.
One of the braver things you can do is step back from what everyone else is saying the world is, and form your own conclusions based on your own experiences, and live by it in a righteous way.
To me this article is not dismissive of the illness at all. Her willingness to explore her father's negative outcomes in life in fact provide us with one of the more thoughtful and researched...
To me this article is not dismissive of the illness at all. Her willingness to explore her father's negative outcomes in life in fact provide us with one of the more thoughtful and researched articles on the growth of mental illness in the U.S.
Her emotional investment and possible bias in the investigation are dealt with openly and honestly. The result is an authentic and personal view, completely acceptable in a journalistic human interest article.
This article reads as the introduction for a book of deeper research, inspired by a personal connection. Presuming the rhetorical questions are avenues for more thorough exploration, I don't have...
This article reads as the introduction for a book of deeper research, inspired by a personal connection. Presuming the rhetorical questions are avenues for more thorough exploration, I don't have a problem with them.
Does this read like a gish gallop rationalization of the author's father's paranoid schizophrenia to anyone else? I also couldn't help but roll my eyes nearly every time the author asked a rhetorical question:
I definitely saw a strong element of that. I get wanting to "protect" an immediate family member, but this bordered on denialism to me.
It's a shame, really... because a lot of the things she covers in the article, like the surveillance state, big data and targeted advertising, are critically important issues, IMO. But her constantly using those valid concerns as flimsy justification for "targeted individuals" delusions really bothered me because of how dismissive of the illness and dangerous that attitude is for those who suffer from it. :/
A bigger focus on how those things feed into paranoia and delusions would have been more helpful, in my opinion, because there are strong tie-ins there.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that at least some of the reports of gangstalking are authentic and that one or more organization is monkeying around with people's lives in such a way. To think that covert agencies like the CIA delved into human experimentation like MKUltra decades ago but then suddenly changed their ways and has kept their hands clean to this day? That seems like a far greater stretch. I believe that if we were suddenly given a complete picture of everything that all the people and organizations with power do and have done, if their activities were completely unveiled, the system would probably collapse under the weight of our collective horror and sense of betrayal.
That being said, I won't make any claim as to what percentage of people who claim to be gangstalked are actually being gangstalked. Just that it seems wild to dismiss that it actually happens at all.
I'm glad the author linked to Intervoice. I completely agree with what she's saying and the philosophy of that organization, that instead of dismissing and delegitimizing a person's thoughts and perceptions because they don't seem to accord with consensus reality, and teaching them to do the same, we should promote understanding those experiences on their own terms, and encourage sufferers to understand their inner world as it is, come to conclusions about why it is that way, and empower them to redefine themselves in a way that allows them to shed or coexist with whatever aspect of their experience is causing them pain. I see medication's proper role as an aid to that process of healing, not the solution in itself. Use them to make mental pain manageable during the healing process, just as we do with painkillers when someone is physically injured.
As a whole, the American mental health industry's understanding of consciousness has been woefully poor, but I do see light at the end of the tunnel. The cutting edge of the industry is producing better and better therapeutic techniques, incorporating the wisdom of our mystics and shamans. Stuff we've known for ages. We have some more recent schools of therapy inspired by Buddhism such as radical acceptance and dialectic behavior therapy that are really beginning to hit the mark. Clinical psychedelic research stands to revolutionize our understanding of consciousness and has already had huge success treating PTSD and depression. We're starting to see that accepting consciousness and the perceptions therein on their own terms as meaningful and dynamically redefining ourselves and our beliefs thereby works a lot better than suppressing and repressing aspects of our psyche that we have been calling psychotic, invalid, unreal.
I have a lot of hope that going forward we are going to be relying more and more on therapeutic tools that validate and empower this kind of fringe experience, that encourage inner exploration and self-acceptance and growth in a way that allows us to utilize and integrate the aspects of human experience we currently shut away and scorn. In the process of doing this I think we'll find that those people find peace and harmony by coming to radically different conclusions about themselves and the world at large than what the consensus promotes, as I have myself. And as a society our job will be basically what it ought to be already: to bridge the gaps between all these diverse philosophies and worldviews, learn to value each and every individual no matter how far-out their experiences and ways of living, so long as they're not, you know, being a dick.
One of the braver things you can do is step back from what everyone else is saying the world is, and form your own conclusions based on your own experiences, and live by it in a righteous way.
To me this article is not dismissive of the illness at all. Her willingness to explore her father's negative outcomes in life in fact provide us with one of the more thoughtful and researched articles on the growth of mental illness in the U.S.
Her emotional investment and possible bias in the investigation are dealt with openly and honestly. The result is an authentic and personal view, completely acceptable in a journalistic human interest article.
This article reads as the introduction for a book of deeper research, inspired by a personal connection. Presuming the rhetorical questions are avenues for more thorough exploration, I don't have a problem with them.