The conspiracy thread from yesterday inspired this. This thread is pretty general. Discuss all things weird, strange, unexplained and down right creepy in this thread. It’s nearly Halloween and I would love to hear your personal stories of creepy things happening, theories you hold, cryptids that you like, have seen or want to talk about, good shows to watch, discussing the Dyatlov Pass Incident, etc. It’s a high strangeness thread. From Ghosts to Aliens, I want it all.
I unironically believe that the left needs to participate in the search for alien life.
Zizek says something like "when you don't see ideology is when you're most in it". And so that sounds to me like to a bunch of lab coat scientists working for research institutes who don't even look like they exist in an ideological world. Discovering sentient aliens would be the mother of all black swan events with profound implications for the world order. ET research is an intensely political project.
Obviously we're not on the same level as NASA but it's not just about telescopes. Our project would deprogramming anthropocentrism. We're in the vicinity with ecology and animal ethics. Doing whatever the opposite of anthropocentrism is seems like as valid a way of a rapport with aliens as beeping prime numbers into the sun or whatever scientists do.
I have no reason to believe aliens exist but I'm just gaming things out in my head. It's the one message I would like to broadcast to every Marxist on Earth, I think it's so significant
I certainly have no reason to believe they don't exist.
Those are good questions but they aren't the questions I want us to deal with. "nearby" is anthropocentric. How do you know what's "near"? What is industry, what is space faring?
I'm probably not being clear. Those questions aren't on the frontier Marxists are capable of pushing because our tech will always be worse, our telescopes will never see further than theirs. I think we can push the frontier of asking less anthropocentric questions than bourgeois science.
The problem with bourgeois science for a lot of Marxists is that, yes the scientific method is objective, except for how it fucks up pre-step 1 where a biased human chooses what question is worth having a method applied to it, so science isn't scientific at all really.
And so when scientists have to figure out what signs to look for, they say well we have zero observations of what intelligent life looks like except human beings. so let's generalize from humanity. We'll look for signs of industry, for signs of space travel yadda yadda. BUT the science that led to us discovering some technological invention or industrial process wasn't objective, like i already said. That our science produced mass market broadcast radio for example was anything but inevitable.
So the left's space race is to look for signs of non-anthropocentrism, as we do when we study ecology at home. Except outer space.
I'm thinking all this through as I type it so I'm sure I'm saying bonehead things.
"nearby" is literally anthropocentric. As in human centered. I asked, "proximity to what?" You answered, "humans"
Literal anthropocentrism is the proximity to humanity.
My overall point is: it's not wrong of you to think in these terms. I'm human and when I think of "near" , I think of near the planet we live on. I'm talking about relevant to the ET question. When we're asking about ET's and our strategic aims as communists, I think we might want a concept of "near" that sets out to be as inclusive as possible.
asking if aliens are nearby isn’t really a “bourgeois” question, it’s just a practical question.
I think it absolutely is bourgeois (so Relativity says there's no center point, and at once all things are valid in thinking of themselves as the center point. Through all space and time. Across the entire universe. And like it's just a practical question that "nearby" just so happens to be roughly the distance our currently conceived equipment can see? That's bourgeois scienceism af homie). And we could also litigate "practical", like what is the radius of "practicality" mapped out in the sky ...but maybe later lol
I mean we look for signs of industry, spacefaring, radio usage, etc. because that’s all we know how to look for. It is possible that there are aliens that aren’t this way, but they probably wouldn’t be able to leave their planet, and so they’d be harder to search for from a distance.
see, the thing is it's LIKELY that there are aliens that aren't that way. We aren't looking for them because we literally aren't able to articulate the hypothesis for them. That's the ONLY reason.
Our sample size is 1 compared to the entire universe. I'm saying it has more to do with our inarticulateness than positivism. And Marxists can excel at articulating non-anthropocentric systems.
anthro= human. Centric = center. To make a point that "nearby" is anthropocentrism, I'm suggesting that the most literal way I can think of to parse the word would be placing humans in the center of the space they live in. I mentioned as a way of illustrating how "nearby" is clearly anthropocentric.
But it's not important.
I'm not saying it's completely irrelevant. I think we should devote resources to things in proportion to their likelihood of changing the results. And when I say WE I'm not talking about humanity, because humanity doesn't have a singular motivation and skillset. NASA probably should continue to search for aliens as they see fit.
I think nearness is irrelevant for us, our faction. For one, if NASA pings aliens, it's like we all ping aliens. There is also a chance that humans are surrounded by signs of alien life all the time and the problem is a failure to recognize it. There is also a chance that humans notice an alien life but are never able to understand it or dialogue with it. Nearness might turn out to matter a great deal or not at all. We don't know. There is literally no way to assign probabilities.
It’s a practical concern more than an effort to arbitrarily prioritize humans over the extraterrestrials.
every prioritization is arbitrary when you don't have the vaguest idea the possibilities.
since it's always an arbitrary decision, we should be the ones making it. Marxism is involved in understanding social systems and interactions with environments. I don't see how we're not relevant in this except arbitrary bourgeois decisions
I mean maybe. But it takes some kind of skill to know that they are or aren't. And it's a different kind of skill than the one that sniffs out radio signals. And I'm saying that's the skill the left can maximize because we are antenna-poor.
I saw ghosts as a kid a few times, not like moving shadows out of the corner of you eye but like a full apparitions. The most concrete of these was when I was at my grandma's house sitting on her bed, I left to get a snack and walked back in to see a semi-transparent little boy jumping up and down on the bed. I stared at it for several seconds and it ignored me and eventually I just decided go to the living room. I wasn't scared but I remember being very confused. Probably some psychological explanation of this but idk. I don't even believe in ghosts now generally.
probably honestly true, my mom and dad divorced when I was 5, my mom was schizophrenic and manic depressive, suffered from addiction many times. Its hard to understand how that shit effects the psyche of a child.
A weird silver-ish chain thing (jewelry) just showed up on top of my dryer and neither I nor my girlfriend put it there. We live together, just the two of us.
I’m kinda weirded out by it, but not enough to be actually weirded out. But like... it just showed up today afaik and if neither of us did it, did it fall from the ceiling or some shit? Fucking weird
dyatlov pass was a nuke test. no one knew what it was for a long time, but i think it's semi solved now
it's [redacted]. is another good youtube channel. Weird shit with a focus on declassified documents.
This is a fun thread. Reminds me of the days of browsing conspiracy theorist forums back when they were more based around anti-government stuff, UFOs, and general weirdness. Things were simpler back then....
i don't have much to add as i'm not the biggest believer in this stuff BUT i do love halloween. will be checking out what yall have shared. fun thread op
Oh dope, I didn’t know we had that channel! I will make that thread tho
I saw Hellier the other day and I gotta be honest, it is basically your highest bunch of friends going on about high strangeness.
It does get real annoying when they basically get evidence that someone is yanking their chain and they basically just get convinced that they're dealing with Ultraterrestrials instead of aliens.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCD4-G3Aokt2sM7TYQV2HmA Best high strangeness related channel on YouTube imo
This channel has sucked me into a rabbit hole thank you holy shit
The narrator has the perfect voice. My favorite video is The Body on the Reservoir.
They were about to cut that short intro at one point but everyone went crazy and they kept it. Even that tidbit is chef's kiss.
