ponderingcogitations

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What? Where’s the explicit?

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Sadly, Help will rarely, if ever, find you

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I declare a thumb war

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Oh that’s what that one poem is about.

I don’t know why but, something about this just puts me ill at ease. I imagine it being read by Meryl Streep- a rich actor’s best attempt at empathising- fake hopeful optimism… something’s just off about it.

Good bones - Maggie Smith

“Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

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<1. Person standing in kitchen kneading dough. Camera is behind them, can see their whole body and the entire kitchen.>We are the ones who live in houses with good bones. The ones who enmesh ourselves into the fabric of our communities and breathe life into our crumbling surroundings.

<2. Photo/photos of billionaires houses, like Kim kardashian, with the bulbous architecture> You are the ones who live in houses with an artificial skeleton made of decomposed granite, covered by a worn and tired linoleum skin stretched over its harsh, lifeless, perfect curves.

<3. Pic of celebrity walking out of a car, heels first, fresh pair of shoes, flashed by paparazzi> You are the ones who will never walk in a pair of shoes long enough to see the crease form. You are the ones who will never wrinkle because you never made anything with your own hands.

<4. Mannequins behind shop window. Their mouths covered with a rectangle which has pixelated colours on it, then text atop which says “please disable your ad block to view this content”>Pristine plastic dolls- walking mannequins, immortal, dressed and pumped with whatever needs to be sold in the moment. Puppets made to speak whatever someone else wants to say.

<5. Pic of train in foreground and private jet up above?> We don’t have all the material possessions you do, or the freedom to experience time as you please.

<6. Person smiling at something in their house, a shrine for a beloved pet maybe. Then contrasted with a celeb giving a home tour saying “and this man made these tiles in Italy with his elbows because the famine took away his hands> But our lives are rich with meaning, while your furniture is only expensive because you say the maker had a troubled past.

<7. Idk. Maybe Taylor Swift doing the ‘bigots are just loser haters lol here’s some merch about it>You commodify our trauma, while we live through it and grow. You are a spectator to our hardships, and you try to insert your influence in our narratives,

<8. Children reaching up to ice cream truck man, focus is on their worn out shoes, or something.>but know this: a pretty patina is not something you can buy, it is one of the few privileges afforded to the lower and middle classes.

<9. Fab celeb party swimming in the ocean, do like a mid shot with camera half in half out the water. See a person floating in one of those pink inflated donuts, but below is all of us looking like rotting ugly zombies pulling chains and rope to keep the cogs turning> You will never truly have what we do. You float on the surface of life while we thrive in its depths.

<10. Us zombies walking past, ambivalent, the wreckage of their submersible adventures> And I caution you to never try to walk in our shoes, for your kind doesn’t last this far beneath the surface of the ocean.

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I wonder sometimes.

If Christianity hadn’t been so successful, what would life look like? It’s more than just how many people follow a religion; land was conquered (massacres were carried out), civilisations destroyed and built and destroyed again, all in the name of deities. What would’ve happened if Christianity was nipped in the bud before it became so … influential.

What languages would we speak? What technology would we have? Would any of us even be alive?

Hm.

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I cannot emphasize enough how much of a life hack it is to exclusively be friends with, date and marry people who are not constantly mean assholes to you.

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truer words have never been spoken (x)

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Republicans love/need the uneducated.

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Just thinking about how education seems more intense for our generation than when older generations were in school or uni.

Like not only are we learning about outdated concepts in addition to modern concepts, the curriculum also feels more condensed (in some parts of the world). Like why am I learning calc into Year 7 when it was once a Year 12 thing. Consider the old “THEY CHANGED MATH?!?” lamentation.

On top of all of that, we’re now faced with- and I hate to say it, unprecedented levels of perverted activities by social media platforms which demand our undivided attention. “Just put the phone away”, these systems are designed WITH specialists in human behaviour and psychology. By thinking this way, you’re saying to just ‘know better’ than an expert in manipulation. By thinking this way, you’re scolding a child because they were dazzled by a magic trick. The average person just cannot compete with this level of exploitation.

And let’s not forget to barrage of information we’re, at least socially expected, to keep up with. Thanks, internet and sensationalist, for-profit, media :)

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Oh. no.

I just googled Kayvan Novak (Nandor, pic below) because I wanted to know what he actually sounds like.

But there was this interview from 2012

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xcuU47KI_Cs

^there’s a trimmed version

And then there’s this

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/dunkaroosandglitter/669745324647153664?source=share

https://twitter.com/Vampire_Holiday/status/1271132380863123457?s=20&t=rfA_73NyEZ3SgtKTBKqvjw

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"If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail"

(Abraham Maslow, 1966)

It makes me think about all the boys I was in school with who had this strange set of compulsions; to jump up and hit the signage hanging from the ceiling, to squiggle some penises anywhere they could… typical boyish behaviours.

Initially you might think that boys just like destruction. It’s ‘in their nature’. But now I’m thinking about it a bit differently. A sign that needs to be slapped might not be seen through a destructive lens; it could be that of control. “I. ME. My person was able to influence the environment. *I* have control over this inanimate object”.

Or condensation on a window pane, the way it becomes a blank canvas. It might be the case that emptiness, silence, the undisturbed is in itself disturbing, terrifying. So he’ll draw a dick. 🤷‍♀️ that makes sense. And he’ll think to himself “*I* made that. *I* left my mark and *I* did it first.” Or something along those lines.

Now that I read more about the above quote, it’s probably not applicable to these thoughts I’ve typed out, but- oh well.

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biggest betrayal is when it’s supposed to thunderstorm and it doesn’t

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People have done more with less.

People have done less with more.

You do however much you can

with however much you have

and it will be enough.

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I used to think so too. But honestly it really isn’t that strange.

(I have a cousin who’s really into history and geography and how religion and politics and science all interconnected and influenced each other)

Take everything I say with a dubious, skeptical mind, because the info they were giving me was coming in way too fast and I couldn’t keep up with everything.

But essentially, TLDR: religion was created and used for politics. It was classist and exclusionary. But new ones would be created which were used to unite the lower classes (who were deemed unworthy of any godly love), and then in turn those people were used to fight wars. When war wasn’t necessary, it would revert to being about peace.

It was just a tool for expansion and control. If you wanted to rule, and didn’t want to join another religion, just create one, or you could approach some society and claim you had a vision from their deity, saying that you should be in power and you can speak for their deity (Islam).

What’s interesting though is that some religions were more about trying to understand the world; think rain dances and ritualistic sacrifices. This is different to something like Christianity which says… well who knows what it says anymore tbh. And truly, who cares. Indoctrination has an expiration; religion will die.

It’ll kick and scream and flail about trying to survive as long as possible; saying things like ‘but morals come from religion- you can’t erase our religion because society will crumble and collapse in on itself’, or things like what we’re hearing now ‘we’re being persecuted. “Hate” is trying to win. We must fight back; it’s what god wants’.

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Was watching this video by Forrest Valkai and got to thinking about dogma and how maybe this is why religious people can’t really place themselves into the ‘light of science’. 

It’s like you spend your whole life running and climbing through a maze-like obstacle course, with markings on the ceiling to guide you through the maze. But then you have a glimpse at some other people running through a different maze/obstacle course, and notice that they don’t have a ceiling- how could they possibly know where to go? 

“Science is the exact opposite of dogma; no scientific diagram is gonna be a perfect representation of reality”

It’s almost like science and religion are incompatible with one another, because the way you rely on progressing through the maze, with religion, is to refer to the text, refer to people who claim to represent your deity. There is no testing, only reference and interpretation.

With science, though, and depending on what you’re doing, you’ll likely be testing and reporting your findings. There will almost definitely be some referencing, wherein you’ll examine reports and challenge the findings.