eofotmc

[eofotmc]

Living Fossil

What kind of superhero not only throws a random parked car at a kaiju, but misses?

Skye could feel her heart pounding like a hammer as she watched her 1962 Volkswagen Beetle not even glance off the flying gargoyle larger than her entire apartment building. Her Love Bug skipped tires-up along the street like a stone on a still pond, glass and metal bending and breaking every time her car slammed into the concrete. As it finally came to a stop the other noises of the fight were drowned with blood rushing through her ears and nerves whining across her brain. It was almost as if she was mid-nightmare, staring at the turquoise wreck.

Her eyes blurred; Skye absently realized tears were streaming down her face. She trembled, and overwhelming despair quickly gave way to overpowering wrath. Clutching her purse hard enough for fingernails to pierce leather, she stomped off the sidewalk and towards the smoking ruins. She took in the sight of what was her first car, her only car, the first purchase she'd made, the car she bought and repaired with her own time, effort, and talents. It was totaled, beyond repair, a corpse of metal, rubber, and leather.

A police officer took notice of her and barked an order for her to stay back. Skye hastened her marching; the cheap crocs-and-socks she was wearing didn't give her half the gravitas she'd prefer but they'd have to do. Unconsciously even as anger flooded her entire being, she was already orienting herself tactically, drawing from everything she knew, observed, and could correlate together to set the universe the way she wanted. It came to her as naturally as putting on a pair of pants, pedaling a bike, or driving her...

The police officer got closer and barked even more harshly. Skye hoped, and he did as she wanted, he grabbed her sweater-covered arm. He'd feel a stiff wiry metal frame just beneath the cloth.

"You need t-" he began, with the slightest bit of apprehension, but he didn't get any further as a handheld glittering cleaver dropped from her other sleeve into her waiting hand. Skye wasted no time sliding it across the cop's throat.

Before blood could even begin to trickle she drove it several times between ribs. It was such a wonderful knife, the vest underneath was barely anymore impediment than glaze on a bagel. Speed, precision, and follow-through made the city puppet into mincemeat. Skye grabbed him and with strength born of both adrenaline and alloy she hurled him behind another, even taller, vehicular wreck. The others manning the barricades had their own hands too full to mind one of their sheep in the jaws of a lioness. The sentiment allowed her to smile even as the tears kept pouring.

He didn't have the breath to even make a pained noise, so he made for a good listener.

Skye growled and strained to begin talking, "Try so hard to retire into obscurity. Try so hard to bite back my ambitions...."

His uniform was soaking with blood, it was dripping onto the road. She glanced at the metal badge, N. Thompson.

it was a boring name, she cleared her throat, "...in the end... in the fucking end this world still finds ways to fuck me out of nowhere..."

The cop's muscles relaxed, all pretense of resistance lost, she kept talking, "...I could've I would've done more, but I wanted to quit while I was ahead."

From here, Skye could peek beyond the overturned tow truck to see that the fight was still in full swing. She recognized the colorful trail of the flying brick sparring with the winged beast several times her size, taking stony chunks out of it with every hit-and-run maneuver, finding wieldable debris to parry bolts of lightning spewing from the gargoyle's mouth and things to slam into the monster's body. It was Lady Psalter, they'd had encounters before in more ways than one. She didn't believe in fate or providence or anything like that but the fact that it was her of all heroines was quite the synchronicity.

"Fucking preachy hypocrite little tease going up against another freak that this city keeps birthing like a rabbit with ovaries peppered with tumors..." Skye squeezed the officer's neck like a warm wet stress-ball.

Skye reverted to a growl, clenching her jaw as she glared at Lady Psalter, fighting without any care to what she'd just done.

"I'll do it, if the world wants to take an eye I'll take two if I'm being pushed then I'll jump off the ledge headfirst and dive down as deep as I can."

She spared a glance at the officer, he was long dead. It didn't give her any satisfaction, but it did give her the last bit of clarity she needed. The woman pushed the corpse off her, took off her sweater, revealing the grey mottled tank top underneath. She tied the sweater around her waist, arms covered in sweat. Plans began to form, but first she needed to be wearing a skin that fit her reborn heart.

....

Less than an hour later, the woman was staring in front of the mirror, leaning in close. Her eyes were still puffy from all of her pitiful crying. Beyond that she could see veined dark bags under the eyes contrasting against pale freckled skin. Her hair was a sight, choppy dark auburn hair. She was so tired, so restless, and all for what? She recalled how well she slept when she wasn't holding back. She looked down at her silver costume made up of horizontal divisions in the flexible metallic armor. It was form fitting, not like there was much form to show, she was stretched tall and bony. Yet that didn't matter because as long as she was complete she was unassailable.

The final step would make her complete. The woman put on the headpiece and mantle, gingerly affixing it into place. Now when she looked in the mirror she saw a mouthless face with two wine dark bulging compound eyes, all of her head shielded, additional chain mail draped over her shoulders. Two antennae dangled on top and bounced slightly as she turned her head. One press of a button activated blocky orange text and images on the inside panel, showing her current inventory of drones, equipment, weapons, trinkets, and other technology. She hadn't chosen to keep anything as backup, she'd scrapped it, wiped away most of her villainess corpus like so much beautiful sand.

No matter, she'd started from nothing and she had her costume. She grabbed both sides of the mirror hard enough that it threatened to crack, her true name uttered.

"Dr. Trilospite"

It was dorky, she'd picked it when she was so young and hungry for glory, but it was hers.

"Dr. Trilospite!"

The barrier between illusion and truth crumbled completely.

Dr. Trilospite laughed long and hard.

[eofotmc]

The constant typing and swiping on the smartphone is an almost liturgical gesture, and it has a substantive impact on our relation to the world. I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world has to accord with my desires. In this way, the smartphone amplifies self-referentiality. Through all my swiping, I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion of total availability.

Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld

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“Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

— Flannery O'Connor, “Letter to Betty Hester (September 6, 1955)”

[eofotmc]

People shit on homeschooled kids a lot for not being “socialized” but I will say one thing I’ve noticed about a lot of healthy homeschool families is that their kids are better at interacting with people much older and younger than them because their day isn’t composed of following one or two adults in authority with a bunch of people born within 12 months of them.

[eofotmc]

"Rainbow" by Igor Orlov (1971)

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“Eros draws us upward ever higher, purifying, humbling and demanding renunciations, for the simple reason that the beloved is with God — and philosophy implants in us the love of what God Himself loves.”

[eofotmc]

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity

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But external reality is not the only source of this instinct-inhibiting fear, for primitive man is often very much more afraid of an “inner” reality—the world of dreams, ancestral spirits, demons, gods, magicians, and witches. Although we, with our rationalism, think we can block this source of fear by pointing to its unreality, it nevertheless remains one of those psychic realities whose irrational nature cannot be exorcized by rational argument. There is a psychic reality which is just as pitiless and just as inexorable as the outer world, and just as useful and helpful, provided one knows how to circumvent its dangers and discover its hidden treasures. […] 

Civilized man contemptuously looks down on primitive superstitions, which is about as sensible as turning up one’s nose at the pikes and halberds, the fortresses and tall-spired cathedrals of the Middle Ages. […] Our religions and political ideologies are methods of salvation and propitiation which can be compared with primitive ideas of magic, and where such “collective representations” are lacking their place is immediately taken by all sorts of private idiocies and idiosyncrasies, manias, phobias, and daemonisms whose primitivity leaves nothing to be desired, not to speak of the psychic epidemics of our time before which the witch-hunts of the sixteenth century pale by comparison.

—Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation

[eofotmc]

“The world you live in is not at all as you believe it to be, because actually it is not as you see it or sense it. You judge on the basis of the relation of your senses to all the objects surrounding you, and your senses beguile you infinitely more than you can imagine…There is no precision, no truth in their testimony.”

— Nicolas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion

[eofotmc]

The great fascination of magic is in the type of thought on which it is based. Magical thinking is not random, it has its own laws and its own logic, but it is poetic rather than rational. It leaps to conclusions which are usually scientifically unwarranted, but which often seem poetically right. It is a type of thinking which has been prevalent all through the history of Europe, which lies behind huge areas of our religion, philosophy and literature, and which is a major guide-post to the regions of the spiritual and the supernatural, the regions of which science has nothing to say. There is no necessity to accept it, but it rings many a far-away, summoning bell in the depths of the mind.

Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts

[eofotmc]

'They' even hide the process by which 'they' have quietly relieved us of the 'burden' of making choices for ourselves. It remains a complete mystery who has really done the choosing. We are carried along by the 'nobody', without making any real choices, becoming ever more deeply ensnared in inauthenticity. This process can be reversed only if we explicitly bring ourselves back from our lostness in the 'they'. But this bringing-back must have that kind of being by the neglect of which we have lost ourselves in inauthenticity.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

[eofotmc]

The continuum of dissociation

Christian Scharfetter, Ego‐Fragmentation in Schizophrenia: A Severe Dissociation of Self‐Experience

[eofotmc]

In the Roman myths, Lucifer is seen as an epitaph for any deity that gifts an increase of consciousness or light. It is also the name given to a minor god, associated with the torch, as light bringer. He is the torch of the underworld in the hands of Phanes, Diana and Hecate, but in truth he is the Sun fallen black, the Sol Niger, and thus it is in the mysteries of Mithras his cult found a succession as it was patronised by Stregones. Lucifer is an impulse, a constant explosion of light, a big bang if you will. His legacy has little to do with modern materialist ideas that see Lucifer as the antithesis of God. Lucifer is his own truth, a particular form of consciousness in a succession of forms that dance across matter in constant bursts of light.

Gemma Gary, Serpent Songs: An Anthology of Traditional Craft

[eofotmc]

Individual actions absolutely do matter when discussing climate change. However we seem to quickly forget that some people’s decisions weigh more than others for the purpose of deciding our future. One billionaire making the decision to joyride a private jet for an afternoon has single-handedly acted to produce more greenhouse gasses than the average person could negate from personal decisions like veganism, recycling, etc.  Saving the planet requires us to coordinate in building a society in which no individuals can make such globally destructive decisions. A society in which private jets and mega-yachts simply don’t exist for individually to flaunt their wealth with. Similarly one cannot fight the “One-Hundred Corporations” infamously blamed for climate change without addressing the systems which allow corporations to exist in the first place. 

[eofotmc]

You should be appalled

A clip just surfaced of Ibram X Kendi giving a talk at the 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival. John McWhorter tweeted the clip, and the full version can be found here. The clip is a terrifying encapsulation of Kendi’s book How to Be an Anti-Racist.

Here’s a transcript of the exchange featured in the clip:

Questioner: You talked about the importance of defining racism. But I–unless I missed it, which is possible–I didn’t hear your personal definition. Is there one you would offer us, like how do you define racism?

Kendi: Racism, I  would define it, as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity, that are substantiated by racist ideas. (audience laughs). Sure, a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity, that are substantiated by racist ideas. And anti-racism is [defined] pretty simply using the same terms. Anti-racism is a collection of anti-racist policies leading to racial–anybody want to take a guess?–equity, that are substantiated by anti-racist ideas.

Imagine your town or neighborhood has had an incredible problem with house fires. It seems like once or twice a week another home burns down. You’ve seen horrible footage on the internet, felt the acrid smoke burning your lungs. You, and most everyone around you, realize that change is desperately needed.

In response, your town appoints a new Fire Safety Commissioner who has been tasked with diagnosing this problem and designing a response plan. He comes to a town meeting and is asked what he thinks might be causing all these fires. He responds by saying “House fires happen when houses catch fire. House fires are prevented by preventing house fires. If we want to stop house fires, we need to stop house fires.” Pressed to explain his statements, he grows agitated and rolls his eyes. He continues: “house fires happen when houses catch fire. A house fire is a house that is on fire. They are caused by fires breaking out in houses.”

Would this do anything to assuage your concerns? Would you feel more or less safe? Would the urgency of the situation excuse the idiocy of the response, or would it make you even angrier than it would have if the stakes were not so high?

I’ve long been critical of shit like the Aspen Ideas Festival. When engaging with the ideas that emanate from within it, we need to have a clear understanding of what this and similar symposia are actually supposed to accomplish. A person does not get invited to Davos or Aspen if they are suggesting actual reform or really anything that might frighten or inconvenience the hyper elite. Nor are they even attempting to do actual diagnosis of social problems or predict the future. Their purpose, instead, is to placate the fears and moral trepidations of the elite, convince them that everything is perfectly fine and sustainable, certainly no reason for them to change anything, it’s actually good that we’re making the planet uninhabitable because this will allow for a lot of cool disruption and market innovation. 

Kendi’s tautology has traction within elite circles because it occludes all possibility of meaningful reform. We do not need to address the ambient hopelessness that necessitates the existence of a large and aggressive criminal justice complex; we just need to be anti-racist by being anti-racist. I understand why the carnival geeks in attendance at his talk nodded along with his kindergarten logic.

But regular people? The ones who have an actual stake in this shit? What accounts for their complacency? What spell has been cast that has rendered so many of us utterly unable to recognize manifest bullshit? Are we just too scared to push back? Or are we really this stupid? 

Regardless of how things got this bleak, we still have a pressing obligation to speak up and describe this for what it is. If you care about racism even a tenth as much as you claim to, you should be appalled. 

[eofotmc]

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[eofotmc]

This articulates much of my skepticism of eugenics. I wouldn't consider a self-assured belief in one's innate superiority to be a desirable trait while a high commitment to personal improvement and overcoming one's natural flaws would be a desirable trait to propagate.

It's not so much that eugenics itself is wrong per se, it's that you need to ask the meta-eugenic question of precisely what types eugenicist ideologies are selecting for, i.e. do eugenic "specimens" tend to believe in eugenics? Is the type of person who refers to other people as specimens itself a eugenic type that should be allowed to propagate let alone influence or control the macro level processes of propagation? Can eugenicist ideologies themselves be a group evolutionary strategy for the genetic and epigenetic survival of types who are actually dysgenic in the long or even short run? These are the types of questions to ask before jumping into naive at best, vulgar at worst theories of population control and improvement of the "stock."