Are you guys doing armchair politics? I guess so because I don’t understand a word being said :D — I like sushi

We're a bunch of leftists and a couple of centrists disagreeing about what politics is, and what actions are relevant to it. There are a few sub conversations; Maw, Street, Csal, Jamalrob and I are being annoyed with liberals. Csal, Jamalrob and I are also being annoyed with the left. Vagabond and SSU are against Maw, Street, Jamalrob and I in the usual 'what is politics' and 'how does free speech relate to it' debates between leftists and more centre left liberals. Vagabond, Csal and I were talking about social media and the role of reason in internet discourse. Isaac and Vagabond are having a discussion on framing issues about politics. Now there's a new one where Jamarob (who started it on the first page and then left it, and is now picking it up again) and Csal (who is suspicious of internet political discourse for similar reasons to me, I think) are suspicious of Street's portrayal of left politics for different reasons.

To speak a butterfly is to reap the whirlwind

The stories in the paper
Are the stories in the street
Not welcome in the news
Makes each person that you meet
Pave the ground with eggshells
That bloody up your feet

Each rat in the gutter
Deserves their place in hell
We warned you this was coming
And dwelled in what befell
A wife, a mum, a lover
Another bugger’s kill

A lament and an edict
Juxtaposed through black and white
Mindful concierges need it
To follow might with write
Kids learn to speak that language
Before they learn to right
Follow on from follow on
Hopscotch cite to slight.

Really appreciate your interest. You would probably see more than I consciously intended. It came out in bursts and seemed right and I'm aware of certain connections and meanings and it was kind of cathartic. Anyway, glad you got something from it. — Baden

Meaning slides (and transforms) over the analogue but sticks to the signposts (which contrast) in the discrete. That distinction between transformation and contrast is something I need to learn to use, so that my writing isn't limited by composition of distinct topics. Edit: I don't want to peddle representations poetically, I want to be able to do alchemy with them.

It's like Ulysses with finer thematic units. Finer as in the elements of significance for interpretation are more densely distributed over the words within text units (that don't have definite boundary...). It'll take some effort to decode the relational poetic devices over the text units. Conceptual poly-rhythms on all scales.

And then the person in Whale 5 is 'Crackshanks'!??!, awesome.

That's cool. The development of the theme (well, more a superposition of themes with overlapping content as in train of thought) is pretty clear over the paragraphs. Will study it for devices.

Picking his way along the path, avoiding the cracks, what? — Baden

That is amazing. Reading it is a performance which demonstrates that 'what?' interrupts the flow and is a 'crack' analogically.

I didn't get the intent of the format but it struck me as 'right' anyhow. And as I said I find that difficult. For example, I have a written version of the below (the first part of a longer poem) for which I've tried various formats none of which seem to work as well as just going at it verbally. — Baden

Can you post the written version please?

The rhythm works better for me at the start than towards to the end. — Baden

That makes sense. The first two lines came naturally to me, the other pairs aped their structure to make progressive components. The format was supposed to convey something like a recursive function iterating cyclically over the progression of the internal components (edit: which have structural symmetry to show that they're playing the same 'role' but in different parts of the progression, like phases of life).

Alliteration and rhyming skills still very limited, I've never found ways to express transformation that iterates over the words, I can only use them to suture components together.

And there's an irony afoot. The "Antifa" movement of today mirrors some of the tactics and attitudes of the original fascists. Purging our communities of undesirables might not turn out like you'd hoped...' — VagabondSpectre

You have some stupid antifa. Then you have the ones, the majority, that counter protest violent nationalists. They are called antifa because they try to impede far right movements. I'll be more sympathetic to this comparison when you can give me news articles of antifa killing people. or acting to seriously harm people, for their political beliefs and not out of self defence.

Even violence at protests; most of which is done by antifa in self defense; all political ideologies have violence somewhere - faultlines of power are semipermeable membranes for our conduct -, the presumption that antifa violence is just as unjust and indifferent to life as memeing your car into a group of left protestors, killing an island conference of schoolchildren, or beating the shit out of unarmed black teenagers is quite reductive.

Where's the nuanced treatment of the antifa? Why is the presumption there that the antifa are aggressive in the same way as the people they counterprotest? Surely there should be more nuance here.

Edit: also, left liberals attempting to deplatform on college campuses are generally not antifa - antifa are usually anarchist, anticapitalist leftist, rather than capitalist-humanists that lean left.

I doubt that most people doing something like playing guitar typically have anywhere near all of that stuff in mind when they're playing. I certainly don't when I'm playing. — Terrapin Station

You're highlighting something that happens a lot on the forum, but ironically not in real life. Once you've mastered Heidegger's jargon and have an overview of his system of ideas, it makes people make posts consisting entirely of jargon and Heidegger references. A focus on the richness of the everyday and the personal and their unique structures turns into an endless Heidegger exegesis.

This isn't to say he doesn't have insights; he opens lots of doors for philosophical thought - about the link between norms, their understanding, and personal behaviour, about what metaphysics is and should be, about logic. There are a lot of commonalities in emphasis with late Wittgenstein; but Heidegger ends up concluding that there's a dire need for good philosophy, whereas W wants to burn most of it to a crisp.

He deserves careful study, especially if you're a Cartesian (which most posters here are and don't realise!); the critique of how Descartes (or Heidegger's version of Descartes!) thinks about experience and the subject/object distinction is especially devastating.

Ok, first thing - Scruton's 'context' - the estate, the horses (there were horses, right?). My first thought is, if you lose that, 'good!' — csalisbury

I like to imagine Scruton having his ideas about sex and gender identity while watching carp in a stately pond. But yes, less carp, more empathy, more reality.

But I understand your broader point to be that internet discourse is a kind of flattening all around. Where everything is yanked from its context, and you reach a sort of critical mass of 'yanking' where the flat space of the internet doesn't reflect a given world anymore, but, instead, everything in the world is already measuring itself against how it would seem in the flat space. Gradually quotes aren't cited in a neutral medium; the medium itself dictates how people speak, all speakers now anticipating how their quotes will be reworked. — csalisbury

I think that's about right. At least, close to my perspective on it.

But do you think - My feeling is that a return to context *is* good, even if the Scruton context is abhorrent. Where the speaker draws from a local situation and works with it. I know that's a little luddite, because it means logging off - but I don't see how you can counteract the sheer dissolving momentum of internet discourse - for the reasons you mention - through anything short of dropping out of it. Any attempts to intervene in the medium itself will get sucked into it. — csalisbury

I guess it's about a different kind of contextualising. You can embed nuance in the Endless Stream of the Styx through tinyurl; so lectures, 'thinkpieces', books, good blog posts; can propagate. The problem there is that reason is unlikely to function as a bridge or a perturbation, as its distribution is partitioned into channels created by other means. The synoptic vision and measuredness that can come from good research and journalism is a synoptic vision for the marketing demographic that is most likely to click on it.

As much as people like to paint reason as a great connector - it's now less a universal transit system of the space of ideas and more like a bridge between near islands in the grand archipelago of internet discourse.

Edit: I guess the contrast is between 'dropping out' = cutting out your tongue and 'staying in' = speaking post-Babel in the Bible.

Edit2: Though there are some promising prospects for grass-roots viral marketing, like the case of the Scottish Independence referendum a few years ago.

What's discomfiting is there doesn't seem to be much left but a kind of somber blankness, which my mind tries feverishly to cover up. It's hard to find what to promote that isn't wrapped up with that covering. Right now all I really have to work with/on is: don't lie, honor commitments, don't make other people feel shame. — csalisbury

'Somber blankness' will hopefully eventually turn into 'blankness' without the negative affect. Otherwise known as an untroubled mind. I'm not there yet either; I've noticed the same kind of thing, as the worries recede nothing takes their place, and eventually unburdened reactivity takes the place of worry. But I don't think the lack of trouble advances uniformly on all mental/behavioural fronts, for me at least it comes in waves. The waves correlate with the troubles I deal with IRL but don't react 'entirely healthily' to.

I also think there's something to the idea that coming up from the bottom, when you are very introspective, comes with some insights. Insights that I far too readily project onto others, but insights nevertheless.

Regardless, whether the idea came from Husserl or Heidegger, Heidegger still thunk it.

This is a reiteration of what Husserl thought NOT something Heidegger thought up in opposition to Husserl. — I like sushi

I've never seriously studied Husserl. So pretty much all I 'know' about Husserl is Heidegger's straw Husserl.

The easiest response is to assert fallibilism, that we can know things without the certainty of their truth.

I know it seems a finicky distinction, but I think that's the 'range of application' of what Witty is saying. One should also read these passages with Witty's intellectual context in mind: he's responding here to Frege, Russell, Cantor and the like: the 'atmosphere' in which his words are being set out are against these debates on the status of math qua math. Some of this might be brought out in read §125. Let me move on to that and see. — StreetlightX

That seems clear enough to me, thanks.

Eh, sort of. I enjoy playing the ironic distancing game about political discourse too. Though I do it while pretending to be a leftist. Sometimes I hope if I say enough left things I'll actually have a political identity.

Like um.... this is a thread about Roger Scruton? Why then bring up Richard Spencer? — ssu

This is precisely why political discourse is so impossible nowadays, all these bloody centrists exaggerating and underplaying the potential of every side! :P

Yet Richard Spencer isn't mainstream and he does not portray the conservatives in the US. It's as stupid as saying that the marxist economist Richard Wolff portrays every left leaning liberal in the US. — ssu

Dude. I know that the popular right in the US aren't Nazis. What did I say that gave you the impression that I thought they were?

i try to kiss
the face behind your words with each sentence
i sit and beg
for the tactile echo of each emote
i hope like pavlov
mouth wet in anticipation for the impossible
the dream of your skin
closer than the tears
which fill the space
between my fingertips and yours

But that's not all. There is also the part of simply making people feel that this is the correct party to support, that the ordinary reasonable people should vote for this party. And this is part of what Maw referred to a "comforting narrative" (if I understood Maw's point correctly that is). And naturally the other parties are vilified for being against the ordinary people and only working for special interest groups that are far from the 'ordinary people'. — ssu

I think you're missing lots of nuance here, actually. There can be really big differences in severity and relevance of the narrative, especially the scapegoating parts, even if the structural logic is the same. Jeremy Corybn in the UK demonises Trump for being a racist corporate shill, Richard Spencer literally wants all the Jews and degenerates (including progressives and liberals) to die. If Corbyn got his way, Trump would have less power. If Spencer got his way, the biggest genocide in human history would start.

You can do the same thing for reactionary moralism; apply the same 'all wishes come true' to the worst excesses of 'Me too!', say; the world would hardly change other than people getting more awkward around consent (which might actually have its positives). If the Koch brothers' political machine gets its way, there will be no action towards climate change, reduced power for unions, more inequality, 'incidentally' racist policies that lead to lots of non-white kids in cages...

Perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit about the Koch brothers, but they really do invest a lot of money to get their dirty propaganda laundered through sponsored academic precision.

But the seductiveness of white supremacy is precisely through its "aesthetic appeal" or a "comforting narrative", i.e., there is a racial hierarchy and whites are at the top, and if a (typically young) white person is struggling economically (which of course many are), it is arguably more comforting to blame that downward social mobility towards Blacks, or Jews, or Immigrants, etc. than on yourself, or on this abstract notion of Capitalism that many people are frankly unfamiliar with, so it's unsurprising that that's the lens through which Spencer articulates the veracity of white supremacy while at the clear expense of actual reliable science or reasoned arguments, or what have you. — Maw

That's exactly what I meant.

I think that political ideologies aren't based in the end on evidence. They surely want portray themselves as evidence based, that is for sure. — ssu

Evidence for that?

But the seductiveness of white supremacy is precisely through its "aesthetic appeal" or a "comforting narrative", i.e., there is a racial hierarchy and whites are at the top, and if a (typically young) white person is struggling economically (which of course many are), it is arguably more comforting to blame that downward social mobility towards Blacks, or Jews, or Immigrants, etc. than on yourself, or on this abstract notion of Capitalism that many people are frankly unfamiliar with, so it's unsurprising that that's the lens through which Spencer articulates the veracity of white supremacy while at the clear expense of actual reliable science or reasoned arguments, or what have you. — Maw

It's definitely a feature of his worldview, not a bug. If the reasons for people turning right were evidence based we'd be in a lot more trouble. You are right that responding to the extreme right is a lot more about minimising their message through actions other than argument; at least in public spaces where argument does not transmit well.

I don't deny that he believes in what he says. What I'm trying to say is that how his message propagates isn't really to do with its truth, it's to do with aesthetic appeal and a comforting narrative. If someone's going to deny the Holocaust, for example, you can't do much to shift their denial through reasoned argument most of the time; and how people come to believe it is not through reasoned argument using reliable sources.

Oh, I don't mean about quality content. Quality is OK in my view. I mean things like attracting guest speakers or getting more articles up or whatever. — Baden

Yeah that's true. Think we're at a size where we can make it worth their while?

There may be a case for a "Suggestions for improvement" thread though. Kind of a Kaizen for the community. We're limited in what we can do with the software and with modding but we could be exploring other avenues for improvement in a more systematic way. — Baden

Everyone wants super high quality near-publishable content, but no one ever has the time to produce it.

I think this holds true for hardened figures within the alt right who care more about growing their following than they do about being right (Richard Spencer is a primary example of this; I don't think he believes a word of what he says, it's just his meal/fame ticket), but the people that they recruit are persuaded by the specific rhetoric. If we can't sway alt-right leaders, at least we can sway their followers (and we really ought to try). — VagabondSpectre

I definitely agree with this. If someone actually demonstrates good faith, they deserve responses in good faith. This is a benefit of a long form discussion forum like this one, we can weed out crap and get better at slinging crap laced with pearls.

I view the alt-right-at-large as less of a marketing mastermind, and more as a lucky opportunist. Elements within the broad Left do have some significant ideological issues, and they make for more fodder and fuel than Shapiro and his ilk could ever exhaust. — VagabondSpectre

Absolutely, inconsistencies and holes in the left are there. Whining hypocrites and wounded masculinity make a nice little niche for public figures to exploit. Specifically talking about the radical left (conscript reporting), an absence of a popular emancipatory left project in politics; buttressed by our narrow minded focus on systemic critique; is definitely fuel for this, even after all the stupid simplifications and reactionary noise have been filtered out. We generally focus on broad things without the rhetorical flourish to make sweeping statements catch on - though there are some ok examples here. The Jacobin magazine definitely tries for style points, even though it's addressed to 'the crowd' which find the Communist Manifesto an inspiring document already... Chapo Trap House and Left youtube (Contrapoints, PhilosophyTube, Hbomberguy, Shaun and InnuendoStudios to name the major figures) are addressing this hole and, by the looks of it, actually having a positive effect through their excellent mockery and long form, funny, video essays respectively.

Figures in the left are generally too vulnerable to controversy, so when it comes to the alt-right in particular there's almost never any direct exchange. People like Shapiro who are considered alt-right-adjacent are indeed getting exorbitant exposure, but I don't think they could sustain it unless they were somehow appealing to a large number of people (especially the digitized youth). Given the current strength of appealing to identity (and given the current demographics of America), it's not at all surprising to me that the left is losing its broad appeal compared to Shapiro the rebel.

Identity's a hot topic, really the beating heart of our political discourse, and how we think of ideological allegiance along identity lines has to change when we're talking about contemporary discourse. From the algorithms and faultlines of power, we end up in a position where correlated clusters of ideas matter more than robust inferential systems of coherent beliefs. These correlated clusters do not necessarily reflect real world political projects that would be beneficial to the identity groups and help them stymie the unjust power differentials they inhabit. Consider, a rapper like Lowkey or Immortal Technique is more likely to inspire political conscience in someone than the plans of a seasoned economic tactician like Varifoukas.

But that systems of ideas become correlative rather than inferential is actually a response to the globalisation of political discourse, and its centralising focus on American and European power. Our local politics come to have the same limitations every other local suffers from, and the ambiguity inherent in whether isolated responses can address any large scale political problem renders the specifics uncertain, but the broad themes and broad issues are readily apparent. In this condition, organising in terms of form rather than content is required; political schemas for global issues are approximately independent of any local action but are completely determined by the joint aggregate. So we're in a position that requires the analysis of global issues with global responses; climate change, the decline of the sovereign power of the nation state in response to the growth of influence of international industry and finance. Talk, here, aggregates and stereotypes, it reduces discussion of the specifics to the discussion of the specifics of dominant powers (a point that @ssu's expressed frustration with several times). We need to accept this as the political reality of discourse insofar as it is global, but nevertheless try to organise locally in ways that contribute to addressing the global problems we all face.

For me, the important question is not really how to rehabilitate discourse, but how to use its shifted form to correlate action internationally so we can address the global problems we face. This requires broad correspondence between communities irrespective of national lines; the brutality the global south faces when it tries to organise should be resisted in the home of the companies that brutality benefits as well as at the scene of our daily humanitarian disasters. Social media could let us do that.

We might look to thinkers like Garvey or Bordiga for inspiration.

If we set the bar higher, we wouldn't attract as many good members. But we've got the bar set high enough that we keep people who make high quality posts, even if we end up posting in cliques.

Stahp.

I should probably say though, the suspicions I raised in the previous post aren't always appropriate. The forum here, for example, is exactly the kind of space where nuance thrives. What I really wanted to emphasise is that instead of lamenting the lack of nuance in reactionary media, we instead treat it as a medium that nuance suffers in and go from there.

is also not empirical: that is, math also does not deal with facts, or at least, facts in the empirical mode. — StreetlightX

I know this is definitely an exegetical thread, but I wanted to chime in because of how wrong this conception is.

That's reasonably intuitive from the perspective of pure math or logic (though still debatable), but it's very wrong for applied math/physics and statistics.

If you drop an object from distance $h$ to the ground, ignore air resistance, you get that the time $t$ of impact on the ground is $t=(2h/g)^2$ where $g$ is the acceleration due to gravity. If you want to find $t$ you take the square root. But you ignore the solution for negative time because it's not 'physical'. Here you have the interpretation of nature interfacing with math to constrain the adequate solutions to a law of motion.

Similar things can happen in experimental design. If you apply 1 of 3 fertilisers to different plots in a field, in amounts 0, 0.5 and 1g per square inch, the standard algebra for analysing this experiment will not tell you that you actually only have 5 possible treatments applied to the plots, you have to intuit that applying no fertiliser is the same thing if you apply none of A or none of B. And the inference from the experiment depends on recognising this extra-mathematical fact to constrain the calculation.

In both cases 'mathematical thinking' and 'facts of nature' interact inextricably, and to do the analysis correctly in each case is to understand the subject matter of the equations.

But isn't that why, or at least part of the reason why, he's been discredited? Because he deviates from the high standards of the scientific method? Isn't that why his research isn't considered authoritative, but is only peddled as such by those with the agenda of giving an appearance of credibility to claims of past lives? — S

Aye.

So how do we leave the vampire castle and move away from this virtual-real-politik? — VagabondSpectre

Honestly? You don't. Social media has great potential to allow international organisation.

You also have to recognise that people who are actually on the far right don't give much of a shit whether their ideas are right or wrong, they care a lot more about whether people are broadcasting their message for recruitment purposes, and care a lot about marketing. This is part of why you find so many liberals defending the far right, or assholes like Shapiro and Milleanopolusapalalalais or whatever the fuck that guy's name is, not because they're defending the content of the ideas - but because they care that they are possible to express.

All you need to do is pay lip service to individual freedoms, and it is only lip service - remember these people actually want most of us not to exist -, being curtailed by 'hordes of irrational leftists'... then you get liberals defending the right from a left wing conspiracy.

A liberal won't even realise they're doing this, most of the time. This focus on optics and the understanding of viral marketing, as well as playing on structural weaknesses in liberal discourse (even liberal politics), is why the right is disproportionately influential on the internet.

Even if it's not a far right ideologue, the liberal sympathy for freedom of speech is being leveraged by these goons to get lots of money and idea exposure.

Remember, protests, deplatforming, critique are just as much a part of free speech as anti-protests, platforming and political program advancement. What matters is who, why and how much power they can mobilise.

In my view, Shapiro does not represent the status quo (evidenced by the fact that corporate PR departments wont touch him with a 39 & 1/2 foot pole). The status quo is more money for more money, and unless we have some kind of massive economic reform there's going to be no change to the economic plights of the middle and lower classes of all colors and creeds. The Besos and the Zucherbergs of the world claim to be progressive, but they act like psychopaths in the way they manage their ultra-powerful corporations. The Koch brothers are one thing, with their spider-web like funding of propaganda, but a corporation that can fundamentally control the landscape of our collective psychology, or extort entire nations for exorbitant profits by threatening to withhold their crucial business, are problems of an entirely different magnitude. — VagabondSpectre

I say this as a person who spends far too much of their time on the internet, but I say it with conviction.

The commodification of discourse comes along with the equation of discourse with politics. When one establishes a marketplace of ideas, attention is the currency, and attention generates revenue; it also generates more of itself. Along with content curation, this encourages clickbait both algorithmically through internet architectures of persuasion and emotionally by appealing to one's position in discourse and thereby retroactively identifying it (see previous post).

The overall social architecture that leads to commodified discourse is one where the items in it are marketable content, and labour is done to catch the eyes of your (largely involuntarily assigned) consumer base. That is to say, we're all working for Facebook and Twitter now.

This requires a coupling of ad-broker information gatekeepers with the conditions of possibility for expression; if Heidegger were still alive today, he might've said 'Twitter speaks man!' or 'Facebook is the House of Being'. This is true insofar as the conditions for expressing an opinion or otherwise reacting/contributing to public discourse must be done through an interface which can only exist so long as your opinions and potential expressions are bought and sold. Of course, this comes along with the alienated series of images we all know and love, for discretisation allows information to be sold by the unit.

What facilitates this, and accelerates the process of turning humans into retrojected consumer identities, are the algorithms which curate content exposure based on advertising/consumer profiles. That these consumer profiles can be of (or correlate with) political identity manifests in the troubling pigeonholing of expressions during the discourse which concerns itself with the norms of expression and social conduct.

Most of this is severed from institutional levers, and it is in the interest of those who enjoy meetings behind closed doors for there to be channels for expression of political foment alienated from actual political mobilisation and logistics. In terms of emergent strategy and management of political activity, social media functions like a heat sink for political zeal, trapping people into political consumer identities which are alienated from their own political interests, and alienated from other consumer identities in a way which generates more attention (and thus more revenue). Conflict is lucrative, so make speech a battlefield.

The Vampire Castle is more than the reduction of productive thought to reactionary clickbait, it's a festering wound in the prospect of political organisation along shared interest. It substitutes a representation for what it represents; the representation of the political is equated with the politics of representation.

That is to say, politics tout court.

Story's really self demonstrating. The part about people not showing themselves despite telling their story really resonates with me. Some of that seems like intellectualisation; systematising a person over their impressions to find their hidden essence. But, fortunately and unfortunately, we show ourselves in ways we won't ever understand with every step, lip movement, or word. In that regard, other people are more in touch with your essence than you can ever be, as the intellect's attempt to synthesise experiences does it from, however temporary, the vantage point of a self narrative; a PR man.

I guess the question comes down to which stories /self narratives do you promote, which show truth and raise autonomy, and which do you fight on all fronts to rid yourself of. Of course, fighting the good fight doesn't mean winning, hence grace (as you've nicely characterised it).

Larger thread: got a 4 on the scale. I grew up in the dying days of a cult of personality, there were cruelties that don't fit so well on scales. I learned them, tried the least and most obvious of them out like a costume. As I've gotten more perspective on it, I found it's easy to hurt people in ways they'll never understand, and easy to live out the patterns you flowed in forever.

What we have here is a discredited false authority — S

I wouldn't quite go that far, he's surely looked at lots of reports. It's just that the design for their collation and verification will never allow you to establish the effect they're supposed to establish. If you want to argue this point, you probably need to look at the epistemology issues surrounding the interpretation of testimonial data for confirming hypotheses as @Sam26 does in his Near Death Experience threads.

But Stevenson's magnum opus is almost 3,000 pages, it's full of tabular data about carefully-researched claims such as the one you dissected above. A three-year-old boy in Lebanon recalled having been killed in battle in his former life. He accurately reported how much money the person he had been had in his pockets at the time of his death and identified various personal articles when taken to that person’s home. A two-year-old boy in Turkey claimed he had frozen to death after an airplane crash in his previous life. The person’s family believed the man had died instantly in the crash, but when consulted, a Turkish Airlines official confirmed the man had indeed died from freezing. A two-year-old girl in Thailand remembered living in a monastery in her previous life. When taken there, she knew her way around, recognized a number of monastics, and even detailed what had changed about the buildings in the time since she had lived there. In many such cases, the location of a birthmark on the child’s body is said to correlate with an injury sustained at the time of death in a prior life. — Wayfarer

Show me any reasoning why the elicited description is more likely given the actual occurrence, or vice versa, without having to use memory of past lives as an explanatory assumption. You are supposed to establish that it is a memory of a past life, and to do that you need to show that the description was caused by the event or influenced it (or was influenced by it) in a manner which provides information. Not just having similar content to it after post processing for similarity.