#apparently karl marx shows up at one point

[bearsinpotatosacks]

Heroes of the Past - a Slooserole fic

While food shopping for a barbecue, Goose and Slider suggest names for theirs and Carole's baby.

~~~

For a prompt list, this was "A buying B their favourite snack"

Words: 888

"Karl?" Goose suggested, picking up a slightly green bunch of bananas.

"No, makes him sound like a communist."

"What's communism got to do with the name Karl?"

Ron stopped groping watermelons and turned to him. He picked up a stout one with brown on the ends and held it under his arm like he was trying to show off. That wasn't necessary, Goose could already see his muscles bulging in that a-bit-too small shirt.

"Karl Marx?" He said. "Wrote the communist manifesto?"

Goose shook his head, "You've lost me."

"You uncultured fuck,"

He turned around and carried on putting fruit in the shopping trolley. They were having a barbecue as a baby shower, Mav and Ice had gotten the time off, Carole's mum and sister were coming around. Apparently Ron had asked his family but his mum, being the matriarch she was, had said she didn't like the idea of their relationship, said something about sin, so she wasn’t coming, and neither of his sisters were too. He'd tried to hide it but both he and Carole knew he was heartbroken about it.

"Okay, Thomas?" Goose suggested. "Tommy for short?"

"Too formal."

"Your best friend is called Tom!"

Ron turned and threw a sack of potatoes at him. Goose just about caught them.

"And have you seen Ice? He's the most formal guy I know,"

Goose shrugged, "Fair point."

"Pete?"

"No."

"Why not? He's my best friend and it's not too formal?"

Ron rolled his eyes and placed an armful of salad stuff into the trolley, "I'm not having our kid named after that little pipsqueak."

"Pipsqueak?"

"You can't deny he's short,"

Goose tried to argue but knew he couldn’t. Maverick was short for a pilot.

They carried on around the shop, deciding what snacks they needed and stuff for Bradley's lunches. Goose stopped next to the sweets and scanned for something specific. Carole was having a major craving for chewy, gummy fish lately and could go through multiple bags in a day if left unattended. 

"There they are!" He said, spotting them and grabbing a few bags.

"What are?"

"The fish, the ones Carole likes,"

Ron stared at him for a second then said, "We're going to need more than that," before throwing a few more in the trolley.

They carried on. Because she was pregnant, Carole was nesting and had cleaned the entire house multiple times. She’d almost vacuumed Bradley as he came into the house once. So they’d run out of most of their cleaning products.

As Nick reached for the bleach, "How about Daniel?"

No reply. Ron's shoulders began to tense. 

"Aaron?"

He wasn't even turning around now. No jokes or making fun of him. Something was up.

"Michael? Joseph? Joshua?"

"What's with all the biblical names?" Ron finally spat out. 

His tone was different. The way his hand clenched the box of washing powder told him something was wrong. He approached him like he was a tetchy animal, he didn't know if he was going to blow or burst into tears.

"Can't we just stop with the names for a second?" He said. 

"Sure, but we were only having fun-" Goose placed the bleach in the trolley. "-is it not fun anymore?"

"I already have a name picked out! Okay?"

Goose stepped back, shocked. He hadn't told him nor Carole about this. They'd been good with communication so far into their relationship, why the sudden change?

"What name?" He settled on.

"Wilhelm, Will for short," he spat out then added for context. "My Opa was called Wilhelm."

All the pieces fell into place. Ron was a private man when it came to his past, a trait he'd inherited from his grandmother, from what he'd learnt.

"He's the only guy I've ever had to look up to. I mean, getting killed by Nazis to save your family because you were hiding Jews, pretty much the most heroic thing a guy can do, right?"

Goose stroked his face as his strong mask faltered. Ron tried to resist but eventually lent into his touch. Slider tried to appear tough but in reality was just a big puppy.

"Why didn't you tell us? D'ya think we'd be mad?"

"I-I'm just not used to being vulnerable, you know that,"

"Hey, you're learning," Goose assured. "And I'm sure he'd be proud of everything you've done, I know we are."

He smiled, that golden sunshine smile that was one of the reasons he and Carole fell in love with him in the first place. Trying to find things out about Ron had been tricky at first, he was a safe inside another safe, but after a few years, and a pregnancy, they were getting somewhere.

"How about we get these back to Carole?" Goose gestured to the sweets.

Ron nodded. They were past the point of him falling into puddles of tears whenever he got vulnerable but it was still a big moment for him.

As they moved towards the tills he had an idea come into his head, "Hey, we can call him Willy!"

"No we will not!"

"We could, little Willy Bradshaw-Kerner? Sounds good to me."

"You are not desecrating my grandfather's name by calling our kid Willy,"

And that’s when things fell back into place, just as they continued to bicker, all the way to the car.

German Slider! German Slider! German Slider! If you can't guess I hc Slider's of german descent. His grandma (Oma in german) came to the US after fleeing the Nazis, her and her husband, Wilhelm (Ron's Opa or grandad) died. They were helping Jews hide but got found out so fled. Ron's family learnt not to talk about the pain because it was too much which led to some communication issues, and very conservative religious views on his mum's part.

Thanks for reading!

#slooserole #ron slider kerner #nick goose bradshaw #carole bradshaw #ron kerner #nick bradshaw #slider top gun #slider kerner #goose top gun #goose bradshaw #sloose #top gun #bear writes #german slider #german ron kerner #hurt/comfort #tom iceman kazansky #pete maverick mitchell #bradley rooster bradshaw #slice of life #food shopping #mention of nazis #grocery shopping #pregnancy #name suggestions

[reachingforthevoid]

Dr Who: the Evil of the Daleks 

I watched the black and white animated reconstruction with the original episode 2 on 8 January 2023. I’d not seen this reconstructed version before, but I think I may have seen the original serial.

When people ask me what Dr Who story I watched first, I can only answer, “I don’t know.” My parents were not fans of SFF and Dr Who would never have been a show they would watch if it was up to them. But, when I was an infant and toddler, we had the child of one of my great aunts stay with us for a while. She — the kid — was ten years older than me, and she loved SFF. Watching shows like Star Trek, My Favourite Martian, Lost in Space, and — inevitably — Dr Who became part of my family’s life during the late 1960s and early 1970s. When she left us, apparently I insisted we keep watching Dr Who… and we did.

I grew up in Australia where the TV schedules were very different. I have no memory of what I watched as a little kid, my only clues being the amusing anecdotes told by my parents over the years. One story that my mother loved to tell featured me as a toddler bursting into inconsolable tears when a Dalek was destroyed. I wasn’t talking then, but I was crawling and able to pull myself up to point at the TV screen so there was no mistaking about what had upset me so. 

The Evil of the Daleks was shown out of order in Australia, but at exactly the time when I was of the age described. It was also the only Dalek serial shown at the time. And, yes, my parents knew what a Dalek was.

Anyway, no childhood memories were unlocked while I watched this serial, which marked the end of Dr Who’s fourth season. It starts neatly by following on from the mysterious disappearance of the TARDIS from Gatwick airport — not vanishing, like the TARDIS is wont to do later on, but nicked on the back of a truck. The Doctor and Jamie give chase, and become involved in a 1960’s cold war spy thriller for a bit… and it’s such a shame that the original footage isn’t available to watch. The audience is aware of another mystery, an antique store selling brand new Victoriana and the man running it, Edward Waterfield, looks like he’s stepped out from a Victorian novel… but where are the promised Daleks? 

Audiences following on will recall that the Daleks can travel through time. The plot is their elaborate trap to snare the Doctor, which works. The remaining six episodes take us to the mansion of Theodore Maxtible (who looks rather like Karl Marx) in the year 1866, and to the planet Skaro. By my reckoning, that’s the first time we’ve returned to Skaro since 1964. It’s also the first time we see an amped up Dalek, this one called emperor. Dudley Simpson’s score works well to juxtapose the times and places.

By the end of the serial, Victoria Waterfield becomes one of two travelling companions. Two is a good number with this Doctor. Three is just too unwieldy. However, it’s curious to have both being young humans from Great Britain, one from 1746 and the other from 1866. 

#doctor who #the evil of the daleks #victoria waterfield #skaro #emperor dalek #1866 #1966

[project1939]

100+ Films of 1952

Film number 123: California Conquest 

Release date: July 4th, 1952 

Studio: Columbia 

Genre: western 

Director: Lew Landers 

Producer: Sam Katzman 

Actors: Cornel Wilde, Teresa Wright 

Plot Summary: In the 1840s several powers are fighting for control of California. Many of its inhabitants want the U.S. to annex it, including Spanish nobleman Don Arturo Bodega and tough American cowgirl Julia. They inadvertently find themselves joining forces to fight a group of Mexican bandits with ties to Russia. 

My Rating (out of five stars): **¾ 

Damn! This one started out so promising, but then it just fizzled out. It had a lot of good elements, including the ravishing Cornel Wilde, a strong female character played by Teresa Wright, and some beautiful location shooting... but ultimately it was hindered by a convoluted and lackluster plot.  (Some spoilers)

The Good: 

Cornel Wilde. I’ll admit I’m biased because he makes me weak in the knees, but his charm and charisma can carry pretty much any film. I don’t think any leading man could have made this one great, however. He was mostly just lovely to look at here. 

The character of Julia. Another strong woman in a western! She even got to shoot down one of the main bad guys! 

Teresa Wright. Sometimes her delivery got overly gruff, but most of the time she showed off the talents that made her such a respected actress. The scene where she breaks down after the death of a family member was haunting. 

There was some nice location footage. 

The Technicolor looked good- it especially showed off the colorful costumes.  

And speaking of costumes, whoever put Wilde in those clothes deserves a medal! 

Another poster with a shirtless Wilde! Every film from 1952 so far has him sans shirt on the poster: The Greatest Show on Earth, At Sword’s Point, and now this! Is this a good thing? I don’t know; it’s kind of objectifying to Wilde, who was a fairly intellectual guy in real life. Apparently the studios thought it sold tickets, though! 

The Bad: 

The plot felt somewhat labyrinthine at points, and I didn't always understand its trajectory.

Things just deflated about 2/3 of the way in. All the build up didn't go anywhere for me, and I found myself looking at the clock a lot, waiting for everything to wrap up.

There were some moments of noticeably bad rear projection. 

The bad guys were pretty unimpressive, because, aside from Martinez, we didn’t really get to know them. The tension was off-balance because of it. 

Alfonso Bedoya as Martinez chewed the scenery sometimes. 

Russia was the biggest bad guy in the film? In the 1840s? It was all a little bit too 1950s! I'm surprised Karl Marx didn't suddenly show up in California during the movie!

Accents! I love Cornel Wilde, but he was afflicted with the “now you hear it, now you don’t” kind of accent that was pervasive in the Classical Hollywood era.  

Do we actually have a queer coded character? It certainly seemed so. Both of the Brios brothers were slightly dandy-ish, but Ernesto in particular seemed to be a huge “wink wink nod nod." At one point, his bother even looked him up and down in an uncomfortable way, saying, “You’ll make a handsome governor, and I’ll have a brother in high office.” It was kinda gross. 

#1952 #1952 movies #100 films of 1952

[dykestache]

girl what

#photo diary #like i know shen yun is weird but what does china before communism even mean #edit nvm i get it now LOL it’s like a show abt china before it became communist. lame #apparently karl marx shows up at one point

[marisol993]

For some time now I've seen, over and over again, that the Qunari in the Dragon Age Universe are apparently some kind of racist caricature of black people, muslims and other types of poc's, bipoc's, minorities, ....

From a personal perspective I never saw them as such, but since a personal view of things isn't very objective and can be skewed by ones life-experiances I was completely willing to admit, that I might have been wrong about that and had an opportunity to learn something new here.

The more I thought about it and critically examined this statement though, the less I agreed with any of it. Especially since a lot of arguments in favor of this view seemed to boil down to "this person of [insert relevant minority here] said so". I.e. another "personal viewpoint".

So let's get into a critical analysis of the Qunari and why I think that they are so very far removed from any kind of "minorty" (from a western point of view) coding that you couldn't even see it with the power of the Hubble and James Webb space-telescopes combined:

First of all, who are the Qunari? The Qunari are tall, medium to heavily built, horned (or unhorned, if you only played Origins) humanoids, that come in varying shades of grey skin, with whiteish hair. They are more intensly sexually dimorphic than the Dwarves, Elves and Humans of Thedas, with the males being sometimes nearly twice as wide (especially in the shoulders) and much more muscled than the females. They call themselves the Qunari as they are followers of the Qun (their guide to life and society), though the word is more of an umbrella-term, since anybody of any race is called a Qunari if they "convert" to the teachings of the Qun.

Here's a picture:

At this point some people might already remark, that the Qunari are very obviously "black-coded" since apparently nowadays any deviation from natural, real-life human skintones automatically has to mean, that the fantasy-race in question is meant to reflect black or brown people (even if they are green or bright purple), unless you literally give them a complete and utterly snow-white skintone. If that is the argument you want to go with, I would like to redirect your eyes to the picture above, as it already disproves this. As it is shown there (and in the DA:I Character-Creator), the Qunari can come in a complete spectrum of skintones (from very light grey to nearly ebony), just like all the different races of Thedas (even the dwarves for some reason, which doesn't make much sense for a race that lived underground for most of their history, but what can you do..). This basically means, that yes there are dark-skinned (or "black") Qunari, but there are also those that could be better described as "light-skinned", so the coding-qualifier goes away.

Then there are the people, who might want to say, that because they are tall and "burly", together with the unnatural skintone makes them "black-coded" which is something I never really understood, since the tallest people in the world by ethnicity are the Dutch and if you look at heights in correlation with body-weight the Russians take first place. Both countries not really know for their large populations of darkskinned-humanoids. Another coding-qualifier that goes away.

And then there are the people (who I would seriously suggest should maybe review their own "racial" views, if "black and brown people" is the first thing they think about when it comes to this), who say, that they are a stereotype of the "savages and natives", which is something that is actively contradicted in canon. One of the most prominent traits of the Qunari is that they are efficiant to a T, use every resorce at the disposal to it's maximum (including their people) and that they are more technically and scientifically advanced than many other race in Thedas (except maybe the dwarves) . This is shown through their mastery of gunpowder (which they call gaatlok) and the fact that they can use chemicals and drugs to literally warp the mind of people without needing magic. They are in no way presented as "savage" and if they are named such, it's usually by people who they are actively at war with, who want to insult them. They are also not "natives" of Thedas. Even their so called "homeland" in Thedas, which is called Par Vollen, was colonised by them, when they landed at it's shores in 6:30 Steel-Age and started converting the original population of Tevinter humans and elves, with whom they have been at war with ever since. Let me say that again: The Qunari are active colonisers and at war with the Tevinter-Imperium, who's people are the original population of the land. Not exactly a typical "native or black" stereotype in western media.

So who do I think the Qunari are actually modeled after?

Well let's summarise:

The Qunari came from across the ocean in their ships filled with cannons and guns, to colonise the land and convert the native population towards their beliefs. They are currently fighting a war against the Tevinter-Imperium, an old and powerful empire, that engages in widespread slavery and practices blood-magic by sacrificing said slaves, sometimes also to one of their many gods.

(If you can't guess who I think they are supposed to be modeled after by now, I would recommend to maybe picking up a 7th-grade history textbook again)

Yes, you can make a very strong case for the Qunari actually being these guys:

The Conquistadors (heck, if you cross out a few letters you can even anagram the word "Qunari" out of the word Conquistador). Who also came from across the sea with ships, cannons and guns to colonise the land (south- and middle-america) and convert the native population (to christianity) and fought an ancient and powerful empire with slaves and blood-sacrifices (the Aztec-Kingdoms).

So after pissing of one half of tumblr with that, let's start with the other half by talking about the apparent "muslim-coding" and how I disagree with that too.

Let's start with a rough definition of what a muslim is and how I think that that alone shows how the Qunari are in no way coded to be them:

I would define a muslim as somebody who is an active member of the religion of Islam. Islam is defined by it's holybook (the Qur'An), which was revealed to the prophet Muhammad by an all-knowing and omnipresent abrahamic god.

This in and of itself basically already disqualifies the Qunari from being "muslim-coded" since first and foremost the Qunari are not a religion. They do not have a god and they don't pray to any, the Qun is not a "holy-book" and Ashkaari Koslun (the guy who wrote it) was not a prophet, who wrote down the word of god, but a philosopher who basically crafted a "guide to life and society" with his works.

If you really wanted to find something that is slightly "muslim-coded" in the world of Thedas, you might actually have more luck with the chantry-stuff, since they do have a prophet (Andraste) who could talk to god (the Maker), they have a holy book based of her teachings (the Chant of Light) and they believe that the whole world should follow those teachings, so god will return to them (singing the Chant from all four corners of the world). They even have their own flavour of jihadist religious warfare with the Exhalted Marches (though all in all I do think that the Chantry can be better viewed as a take on christian religions since the split between the Imperial Chantry and the original one is similar to the split of the (western) christian church into catholics and protestants).

So what do I think is a better representation for the Qun in the real world?

Well lets look at it in the simplest way possible that the canon gives us:

The Qun is a guide for the life of the Qunari (the people of the Qun) that ecompasses everything from laws, legislative guides, too how society should be struktured and how everyone has to fit into and function in that society, from the most mundane and simplest tasks and jobs to it's highest administrative bodies. Everyone in this society is evaluated, so that they can be put into a position that is best suited to them and their skill-sets. There they will then each work according to their abilities and each be provided for according to their needs (see what I did there). Yes, the Qun can in my opinion be best described as a take on an authoritarian-socialist guide to life, written by somebody with a similar philosophie as Karl Marx.

So all in all, I don't think that the Qunari are in any way black-, brown-, bipoc- or muslim-coded, but a fantasy take on the Conquistadors, if instead of a bible they had all carried around "A Guide to Life, Luck and Community, written by Karl Marx (during one of his more productive weekends)", visually represented by giant Minotaur-People of many colours.

Also I find this obsession with finding every and any kind of reflexion of our real world in some random fantasy setting, by people who are most of the time actively looking to get offended by at least something and mostly every- and anything, quite contrived most of the time and that the day people on tumblr learned the word "codeing" a significant part of the internets critical-thinking skills and will just shrivelled up and died.

Thank you for coming to my TED-talk.

#dragon age #dragon age origins #dragon age 2 #dragon age inquisition #qunari #the qun #thedas #tevinter imperium

[normal-thoughts-official]

Aftermath

The MC survives Richard Sutcliffe's attempted murder.

This is what happens after.

Fandom: It Lives (Visual Novels)

Relationships: Main Character & Tom Sato & Imogen Wescott & Danni Asturias, Elliot Vance & Main Character (It Lives Beneath), Danni Asturias/Imogen Wescott, Robbie Sutcliffe/Elliot Vance (mentioned), Richard Sutcliffe & Dying

Additional Tags: Crack, Humor, Canon Compliant, Mentions of Sex, that's basically it honestly this is just crack, also yes my character is named That Bitch that is his name, i do not have the maturity to pick my character's names and be normal about it, and since this is a crackfic i thought it was fitting to keep the name i had originally picked, anyway. enjoy, no beta we die like men, honestly the whole thing with robert trying to murder the MC was so crazy, im just like, theres no way to react to this that isnt crazy

Read it on Ao3

When Robbie and Elliot get back home from their date, the first thing they see is That Bitch making fishsticks, as expected. However, the kitchen is half-destroyed and That Bitch is drenched head to toe in lake water, which is considerably less expected. Richard Sutcliffe's corpse, which had apparently spawned into their kitchen for the purposes of quick visual storytelling, was also there.

"Uh… Watcha got there, That Bitch?" Elliot asks, frozen in place.

"Fishsticks," That Bitch replies, showing him the frying pan. "They'll be ready in a minute."

Robbie stares at the body, frozen in shock. "Is that my dad?" he asks.

"Hah, more like your dead," That Bitch replies, then does a double take. "No, wait, shit. I'm sorry, Robbie. I don't know why I brought his body here. Seemed like a good idea at the time. In my defense, I didn't know you'd be joining us."

"Robbie, uh, really likes fishsticks," Elliot says, face red.

"Yeah, no, I was stupid for thinking you'd spend time apart willingly, it's on me," That Bitch replies. "Anyway, Robbie, I'm, uh, sorry."

Robbie swallows. "Did you go looking for my dad's corpse in the lake, or…?"

"What? Oh, uh, no. No offense, but I kinda had other worries in my mind."

"Right, that's what I thought."

They stare at each other.

"Sooo… Fun conversation starters for the night... Why is my dad's corpse here?"

"Right. That's because I, uh, killed him. But in my defense, he started it."

"That sounds about right," Robbie nods. "What did he do?"

"Oh, you know. Showed up while I was cooking, struck me with tranquilizers, then shoved me into a coffin and threw me in the lake. The usual."

"I thought he was dead," Elliot says, dumbfounded.

"He is now! Better late than never. No, wait. Sorry, Robbie."

"It's okay," Robbie shrugs.

"Man, grandma kinda sucks at this whole murder thing. So many NPCs showed up in the story just to die, and she couldn't even take care of Robert? I thought her vendetta was specifically against the cultists anyway," Elliot says.

"Yeah, I remember I saw her running after Robert during the whole townpocalypse, she had a marlinspike and everything. I guess he just, like, survived being stabbed by a ghost."

"Wow, lame. No, wait. Sorry, Robbie."

Robbie shrugs. "It's okay. I mean, I already assumed he was dead, so it's not, like, news or anything. Also, yeah, your grandma kinda let you down on that one."

Elliot and That Bitch look at each other for a second. "Right. You kids should go into the living room do something appropriate for your age yet couple-y. I will get his body somewhere more hygienic, and then we can, like, properly talk about this."

"Sure, sounds like a plan," Elliot says, already grabbing Robbie's hand.

As if on cue, grandpa shows up. "Hey, kids. Sorry I'm late, I lost track of time. Hope you didn't do anything fishy. Heh. Oh my god, what is that?"

"Fishsticks," all three of them reply at once.

-----

The kids go into the living room, and That Bitch and Arthur debate what to do with the body.

"Maybe we should take it to the police?"

"Right, because cops are totally trustworthy to deal with something like this, particularly in this town," That Bitch replies.

"Touché. Why didn't you just dump him into the lake? People would just assume that he died during the flood like everybody else."

"His face is smashed in by what is clearly a hammer," That Bitch replies.

"And? Cops are stupid, they wouldn't question it."

"Holy fuck, you're so right. Damn."

----

They hand the body over to the body-fishing efforts, who predictably didn't ask anything about it. As a quick goodbye, Robbie said, "rest in piss, dad," before handing over the body. It was really emotional. Elliot put his hand over Robbie's shoulder solemnly and everything.

When they're leaving, they run into Tom, who was also volunteering to help with the efforts before he had to go back to college, because apparently at no point will he ever think he's done enough for strangers he's never met in his life. "Hey, guys, what's up?", he asks.

"Hey Tom. Richard tried to kill me."

"Oh my God, did you die? No, wait. I meant, are you okay?"

That Bitch shrugs. "You should see the other guy."

"Last time one of us said that, the other guy was completely unscathed."

"Last time one of us said that, it was you."

"Unprovoked???"

"Please stop referencing the Karl Marx K-pop Stan Fight every time we talk," That Bitch sighs.

"It fuels me."

"Right. Anyway, do you know where Imogen and Danni are? I kinda figured I should tell the details to you guys in person, and all. Feels weird to announce my almost-murder via text. WikiHow had no tips on how to do that."

"Oh, I know exactly where Danni and Imogen are," Tom says. "I've seen things, That Bitch."

"Good for them, good for them."

"Yeah. We should stop by Danni's place in like, three hours or something, and see if we can give them the details. Speaking of which, why is your grandma so bad at murdering the right people?"

"This is actually the one thing I don't have an answer to."

"Hey, cut Josie some slack," grandpa says.

"She tried to kill you," Tom points out.

"Yeah, but like, mood, you know?", he replies, shrugging.

"Solid point."

----

They get to Danni's house three hours later, as agreed, and knock on the door lightly to let them know they are there, and still See Things.

"Oh my god, Tom, again???," Danni screams, throwing an embarrassing capybara plushie at him.

"I should be the one saying that!! How are you back at it already??"

"'Back'?" Danni asks, frowning.

"He thinks we stopped at some point, babe," Imogen explains, with the patience of someone talking to a toddler.

"Oh, like, for snacks?"

"No, because we'd be tired or something. Like, for a few hours."

"Damn, lame. What do you think we are, 70?"

"I think you are very naked and making no move to fix that," That Bitch intervenes.

"Oh, right! Sorry, sorry," Imogen says, startling to hustle to find her clothes in the middle of the mess of the living room.

"You come into my house, you make Imogen put clothes on," Danni grumbles, pretending that she's looking for her bra, which is right in front of her and also bright yellow.

"Sorry, it's kind of an emergency. Richard, uh, tried to kill me."

"Yeah, but did you die?"

"Danni!," Imogen says, clearly going for a scolding tone, which is completely undermined by the way she's giggling at her antics.

"What? He looks fine to me. I'm sure Richard can wait a few more hours before we start looking for him again, or whatever."

"A few more hours?" Tom asks, shocked.

"Actually, I killed Richard already," That Bitch replies.

"Well, what the fuck are you doing here then? The case is closed. We'll see you tomorrow!" Danni says, shushing them out of the room.

"Tomorrow?" Tom squeaks.

----

Tom and That Bitch stare at each other as the door locks behind them. "I need more stamina," Tom says, pouting.

"Personally, I just broke a coffin while underwater, so I think I'm good."

"Damn bro, that's crazy."

"Well, you know how Fridays are."

"True. Did you guys have your fishsticks, at least?"

"Yeah."

"Cool. So, should we play videogames, or?"

"Sounds like a plan."

And that's that. Well, at least it was quick.

#it lives #it lives beneath #ilb #imogen wescott #danni asturias #tom sato #elliot vance #robbie sutcliffe #richard sutcliffe #dannimogen #it lives anthology #crack #im rlly on my bullshit huh

[randomnumbers751650]

Long, unedited text in which I rant about comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell and his monomyth,

Back in 2012 I wanted to improve my fiction writing (and writing in general, because in spite of nuances, themes and audience, writing a fiction and a nonfiction piece shouldn’t be that different) and thus I picked a few writing manuals. Many of them cited the Hero’s Journey, and how important it became for writers – after all Star Wars used and it worked. I believe most of the people reading this like Star Wars, or at least has neutral feelings about it, but one thing that cannot be denied is that became a juggernaut of popular culture.

So I bought a copy of the Portuguese translation of The Hero of a Thousand Faces and I fell in love with the style. Campbell had a great way with words and the translation was top notch. For those unaware, The Hero of a Thousand Faces proposes that there is a universal pattern in humanity’s mythologies that involves a person (usually a man) that went out into a journey far away from his home, faced many obstacles, both external and internal, and returned triumphant with a prize, the Grail or the Elixir of Life, back to his home. Campbell’s strength is that he managed to systematize so many different sources into a single cohesive narrative.

At the time I was impressed and decided to study more and write in an interdisciplinary research with economics – by writing an article on how the entrepreneur replaces the mythical hero in today’s capitalism. I had to stop the project in order to focus on more urgent matters (my thesis), but now that I finished I can finally return to this pet project of mine.

If you might have seen previous posts, I ended up having a dismal view of economics. It’s a morally and spiritually failed “science” (I have in my drafts a post on arts and I’m going to rant another day about it). Reading all these books on comparative mythology is so fun because it allows me for a moment to forget I have a degree in economics.

Until I started to realize there was something wrong.

My research had indicated that Campbell and others (such as Mircea Eliade and Carl Gust Jung, who had been on of Campbell’s main influences) weren’t very well respected in academia. At first I thought “fine”, because I’m used to interact with economists who can be considered “heterodox” and I have academic literature that I could use to make my point, besides the fact my colleagues were interested in what I was doing.

The problem is that this massive narrative of the Hero’s Journey/monomyth is an attempt to generalize pretty wide categories, like mythology, into one single model of explanation, it worked because it became a prescription, giving the writer a tool to create a story in a factory-like pace. It has checkboxes that can be filled, professional writers have made it widely available.

But I started to realize his entire understanding of mythology is problematic. First the basics: Campbell ignores when myths don’t fit his scheme. This is fruit of his Jungian influences, who claim that humanity has a collective unconsciousness, that manifest through masks and archetypes. This is the essence of the Persona games (and to a smaller extent of the Fate games) – “I am the Shadow the true self”. So any deviation from the monomyth can be justified by being a faulty translation of the collective unconsciousness.

This is the kind of thing that Karl Popper warned about, when he proposed the “falseability” hypothesis, to demarcate scientific knowledge. The collective unconsciousness isn’t a scientific proposition because it can be falsified. It cannot be observed and it cannot be refuted, because someone who subscribe to this doctrine will always have an explanation to explain why it wasn’t observed. In spite of falseability isn’t favored by philosophers of science anymore, it remains an important piece of the history of philosophy and he aimed his attack on psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung – and, while they helped psychology in the beginning, they’re like what Pythagoras is to math. They were both surpassed by modern science and they are studied more as pieces of history than serious theorists.

But this isn’t the worst. All the three main authors on myths were quite conservatives in the sense of almost being fascists – sometimes dropping the ‘almost’. Some members of the alt-right even look up to them as some sort of “academic’ justification. Not to mention anti-Semitic. Jung had disagreement with Freud and Freud noticed his anti-Semitism. Eliade was a proud supporter of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist organization that organized pogroms and wanted to topple the Romanian government. Later Eliade became an ambassador at Salazar’s Fascist Portugal, writing it was a government guided by the love of God. Campbell, with his hero worship, was dangerously close to the ur-fascism described by Umberto Eco (please read here, you won’t regret https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf).

“If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.”

Campbell did that a lot. He considered the Bible gospels and Gnostic gospels to be on the same level. Any serious student, that is not operating under New Age beliefs and other frivolous theories like the one that says Jesus went to India, will know there’s a difference between them (even Eliade was sure to stress the difference).

But Campbell cared nothing for it. He disliked the “semitic” religions for corrupting the mythic imagination (which is the source of his anti-Semitism), especially Judaism. When I showed him describing the Japanese tea ceremony to a friend who’s minoring in Japanese studies, she wrote “I’m impressed, he’s somehow managed to out-purple prose the original Japanese”. So, it’s also full of orientalism, treating the East as the mystical Other, something for “daring” Westerners to discover and distillate.

What disturbed…no, “disturbed” isn’t the word that I need in the moment, but what made me feel uncomfortable is that, in spite of all his talk of spirituality, the impression I had of Power of Myth is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more materialist than him. Not even Karl Marx, founder of the Historical Materialism, was as materialist as Campbell.

At one point in the book, he was asked if he believed in anything and he gave a dismissive reply and said “I want to get experiences.” A man who studied all the myths of the world available, apparently didn’t believe in anything. Is that what spiritual maturity is? A continuous flux of experiences? Being taken by some sort of shamanistic wind like a floating plastic bag?

In nowhere in the interview he talked about virtues. In rebellion with his Catholic childhood, he said that we should go to the confessionary and say “God, I’ve been such a good boy”. Any cursory reading of the Gospel would say otherwise. Wasn’t this exactly Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 18:9-14? While the wasn’t the publican, who went with humility and asked for forgiveness, the one who walked out with an experience? And not only in Christianity, since in Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is something you have to kill, not foster like an imaginary friend like in some internet circles, contamined with this obsession with experiences.

The way I came to see Joseph Campbell as a man who was so stuck in his own world that nothing could move him out of it. All he wanted to do was this big experience, but in the end it’s as wide as the ocean, but shallow as a puddle. Even when Campbell speaks about having a “cosmic consciousness”, all that New Age jargon, claiming it’s about people discovering they’re not the center of the universe, it’s still so…self-servicing. It addresses a crowd so obsessed with experiences, but wants nothing to do with anything that requires compromise. He quotes the Hindu concept of maya, that life is an illusion, but I wonder how right he is about it.

I want to share this critique, by a researcher in comic studies: “We do not remember The Night Gwen Stacy Died because Gwen’s death reminds us of our own mortality, ‘the destiny of Everyman’, but because the story exposes the fragility of Spider-Man reader’s fantasies. Even icons can die.”

The exposition of the fragility of myths, especially the Hero’s Journey, never happens in Campbell’s work. It never talks about the potential of myths hindering entire societies, causing strife and causing people who can’t fit to become outcasts. Not even the cruel ones, like the Aztec death cult is treated as sublime, ignoring the fact that the Aztec neighbors helped to Spanish because they had enough of the Aztec myth.

I have changed my article. While I will still write on the hero entrepreneur, I’ll take a more critical view. The focus of the entrepreneur as an individual has many issues, because it ignores the role of public investment (necessary for high risk enterprises, like going to the moon or creating touch screens) and it treats with contempt the worked wage. Cambpell also treated with contempt the “masses”, who cannot be “heroes”. The theory on the entrepreneur is the same, treating the entrepreneur as a hero and the waged workers as lowlifes who have nothing to do, but to work, obey and be paid – to the point it feels like some economists treat strikes as crimes worse than murder. Not only that, but they can exploit the worker (see a book named “Do what you love and other lies about success and happiness”, it could be replaced with “Follow your bliss…”).

Campbell wrote in a time that there was no Wikipedia. So his book was the introduction of myths to a lot of people. It helped it was well-written. He considering his approach apolitical, but it’s clear that’s it’s not exactly like that (though this is a reason why Jordan Peterson failed to become the next Campbell, since he’s also a Jungian scholar, but he tried to become a conservative guru and this was his downfall). And, nowadays, Campbell is still inevitable in the circles that his themes matter, unlike Freud and Jung. Read it, but be aware of its problems, because it has already influenced what you consume.

#my rants #this is just a rant #so don't take it as a final word #sources can be provided on request

[auroraluciferi]

a white supremacist apparently had an issue with this random post I made.

my post was about the shocked reactions people all over the world were apparently having to American ads for prescription drugs played on the break during the Meghan Markle interview.

the point I was trying to make is that the avalanche of consumer ads for prescription medicine is yet another insane hallmark of the profit-driven US healthcare system which most people fortunately do not experience and no one seems to fully understand.

I feel this one detail helps to breach the facade shielding the dystopian reality which divides us, and it helps to explain for many why the United States has been especially crippled by the effects of the global pandemic. the suffering, deprivation and cruelty of our health infrastructure is an essential feature of capitalism, not a glitch. For many people it has been a time of reckoning.

so this worthless asshole clearly decided now was the time to plant his racist flag - he messaged several times over two days, then I guess he got upset with what I was saying and blocked me.

what follows is unpleasant and contains racist and deeply offensive language, copied verbatim from my inbox and chat.

it has been formatted to fit your television screen.

dee6000 submitted:                                    

Can your socialist BS. The ads/big pharma are separate from or profit medicine. What harmed US medicine was result of democrat politicians copying Europe’s socialists that treated citizens rights with contempt. In the past US medicine was the envy of the world, British, Europeans, Canadians many others would travel here to receive care. Dems blocked enforcement of immigration laws hospitals went bankrupt and taxpayer funded medicaid was overburdened. Just as the influx of tens of millions of illegal aliens and migrants caused rents to skyrocket and wages to be dragged down. Hospital based infection skyrocketed as well hospitals started hiring illegal aliens who did not follow cleaning rules. These infections weren’t new, they are the norm in Latin America and other third world countries. Years later these hospital infections started showing up. Obamacare requires doctors under threat of fines to refuse to perform some diagnostic testing on some patients. Socialist and communist countries have even worse outcomes. And Britain and Europe are experiencing the results of 3rd world imported substandard doctors and nurses.

@auroraluciferi:

lmao. "ads/big pharma" are somehow "separate" from for profit medicine and everything else is the fault of these filthy immigrants from the third world

good luck with whatever ax you're trying to grind

dee6000:

Lmao, people controlling their own labor, by charging for their work, unlike in your communist, socialist sewers where the government elites enslaves people and profit off those slaves like parasites.Big pharma came about under globalism, globalism is Trotskyite international communism. Prior to Clinton’s pushing manufacturing out of the US, US pharmaceutical companies manufactured product here, under fda law, the drugs were tested. Now drugs made in communist China and socialist India are not manufactured safely, there is no oversight, illnesses have resulted as a result and while workers in those countries are abused hypocrite Chinese and Indian elites profit. You might resent truth but that is your problem. Superbugs took hold in western countries as they started allowing displacement of their citizens in health care jobs, from cleaning, nursing, etc with third world people, who yes do not respect hygiene and health and safety rules. That is a fact. When US citizens cleaned hospitals and nursing homes there were no superbug outbreaks, before illegal aliens were illegally working in US food manufacturing, children weren’t  being sickened and killed from eating ecoli, salmonella, and mold contaminated peanut butter and peanut products as dozens of children and adults were in 2008-2009 when Peanut Corporation of America machinery then operated and “maintained” by illegal alien Mexicans, had developed toxic black mold because the illegals didn’t bother cleaning the machinery despite knowing that was the jobs they were paid to do. Hearings in congress were held and parents spoke about it. I don’t care what you think, I know you are a fascist

@auroraluciferi​:

Okay then, I'll humor you - honestly I feel sorry because it clearly took a lot of effort and mental gymnastics to type up that word salad you sent me. Let's look at each of the "points" you just tried to make.

"People controlling their own labor by charging for their work" - that is a laugh. How exactly do you control your own labor if you are forced to sell it to the lowest bidder, competing against millions of others? If a business lays you off or goes bankrupt due to mismanagement, market fluctuations, accidents or a natural disaster, your labor then becomes worthless. The choice you are given as an employee or contractor unsupported by social welfare programs is "accept whatever pathetic wage we decide your labor and time is worth" or "lose your home and starve to death".

Your idea of "control" is an illusion in an economic system where human survival is based on abritrary market conditions and greed rather than the quality of life itself.

"Big pharma came about under globalism, globalism is Trotskyite international communism." - are you suggesting that some of the largest and most profitable companies on earth are the result of a global, communist conspiracy? Johnson & Johnson, Bayer AG, GSK and others follow the corporate conglomeration and consolidation model pioneered and perfected by 19th and 20th century capitalists and industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, William Hearst, and Cornelius Vanderbilts. Hardly a group of jaded communist revolutionaries.

The multinational companies they founded and combined have systematically destroyed competition within their respective industries, forced both their consumers and employees to accept substandard, dangerous products and poverty wages, then used their wealth to influence both conservative and liberal politicians to deregulate industries and labor laws for their own benefit. All done by willing and eager students of Adam Smith, not Karl Marx.

"Prior to Clinton’s pushing manufacturing out of the US, US pharmaceutical companies manufactured product here, under fda law, the drugs were tested." - I assume here you're talking about NAFTA and Clinton-era regulations, both of which were enormous gifts to those same companies I just described.

These manufacturers left America to gild their pockets by voluntarily exploiting the workers of countries that do not have labor laws, have substandard or nonexistent environmental protections, and would accept even lower wages than Americans. They could have easily remained in the US, paid higher wages to American workers, followed the most basic regulations, and still would have made obscene levels of profit - the demand of shareholders for more profit motivated the outsourcing of US jobs, not because a spineless corporate lackey like Bill Clinton forced them to.

At the same time, NAFTA enabled US agribusiness to flood the Mexican and Central American economy with cheap, government-subsidized corn - instantly destroying the ability of Mexican farms to collectively set fair prices, driving millions facing starvation and poverty into cities and ultimately North into the United States. It's pretty ironic that your illegal immigration crisis was created by massive corporations supported by the US government, but I guess that's inconvenient history for you.

Again, this is another pretty obvious feature of capitalism, not communism or socialism. Businesses have a natural tendency to cut expenses and maximize profit any way they can. In an actual socialist system, there would be no incentive to do that - healthcare and medicine would be provided as a right, rather than a paid-for privilege as exists in our current system. Workers would not have to compete with each other to survive if their basic needs were provided for.

Also just thought you should know, the FDA regulations apply both to drugs that are imported just as they are to drugs that are manufactured in the US. Furthermore, there would be no FDA at all without American socialists, reformers and consumer advocates pressuring Congress into creating it - not sure how you can pretend otherwise. It was made specifically to address how the 19th-20th century market failed to "self-regulate", resulting in toxic food and drugs manufactured here, in the US.

"Superbugs took hold in western countries as they started allowing displacement of their citizens in health care jobs, from cleaning, nursing, etc with third world people, who yes do not respect hygiene and health and safety rules." - This is pretty racist, and also the opposite of reality. "Superbugs" are the natural result of bacteria and viruses adapting and evolving to ever increasing levels of antibiotics, antivirals, and hyper sanitation in our food supply and cleaning products, as well as natural mutation. Diseases like the coronavirus are inevitable - the US has failed to respond effectively because our for-profit healthcare system does not have a market incentive to create stockpiles or public infrastructure to combat an outbreak, whether it's from China or Cleveland, Ohio.

People from other countries know how to wash their hands. They know how to clean. You have absolutely no evidence which would dispute that, just your own feelings and the idea that filthy brown people caused this totally avoidable disaster rather than a lack of basic planning.

Finally, when people are sickened by improperly cleaned equipment or tainted food and medicine, it is the result of a failure by the manufacturer or producer to properly train and supply their facilities out of negligence, to save on operating expenses, or because they ignore existing regulations and are not penalized for doing so - not because there is an army of dirty, ignorant Mexicans at the controls. Untrained, underpaid, and unsupervised workers will have a greater tendency to make mistakes regardless of if they are White Americans or immigrants.

"Facts" and "truth"? I don't see anything besides your own personal bias, poor logic and uncited bullshit that you have no proof of. The American healthcare system and things like advertising for drugs on TV are mocked and reviled across the rest of the world because people can clearly see how vulnerable it is to inevitable pandemics like this.

But I guess there will always be people like you who are happy to ignore reality and instead demonize normal working people for fleeing their capitalist-raped economies and come here in an attempt to provide for their families - exactly the same thing you would do in their situation.

dee6000:

Lmao! Then explain why for decades and they, the WHO, Doctors Without Borders and other wastes of resources still bemoan the fact that in Latin America, take Mexico for example the majority of the people not only don’t wash their hands before eating a meal, they don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom. They send nurses into schools to make a game of washing one’s hands but it doesn’t take. Next you’ll tell me that it isn’t true that child rape is part of Latin American culture. Mexico is so substandard health and hygiene wise that it’s water supply is contaminated with feces. Which is why foreigners are warned not to drink it or anything with ice in it. Because intestinal diseases, parasites are the norm. Go into any hospital in the US that employs illegals and they do not smell like antiseptic but dirty. I do not care what you think, the data shows superbugs started showing up in the US a decade after hospitals and nursing homes felt entitled to ignore employment laws and hire illegals. And yes, US corporations that off shores and were indulged by  communist China and the rest that have no environmental regulations, no labor laws (because under communism and socialism the people are slaves of the state) are only paid what the government thinks they deserve which is very little) they could profit more, or so they think. They became addicted to it and allowed their patents etc to be stolen. Under capitalism a worker has the right and power to reject a low wage. Under capitalism in the US a middle class grew and flourished, and poverty shrank. Under democrats and RINOs, who serve the same interests as democrats, the Clinton, Bush’s and Obozo the middle class was decimated, and poverty skyrocketed. Under Obozo more people became homeless, more so than during the Great Depression. You can spin and spin all you like. Your lies fall apart easily. Under illegal alien invaded democrat run California, the streets are tent cities, cholera, typhus and the plague have been found in Los Angeles, as well as other diseases.

At this point, he apparently blocked me. I didn’t realize this until after I was done writing my response, but here it is anyways

@auroraluciferi​:

It's pretty clear you feel all of your grievances can be blamed on those black and brown people and "Communist" China that you hate so much. I feel sorry for you, but I don't actually believe that anything I say is going to change that.

Your illusions are so wrapped up this weird ethnocentric pride and your comforting blanket of privilege that you're basically helpless against what's coming. You're burning all this energy being angry at people of color for "wasting" resources you apparently feel you are especially entitled to, when you can't even see that the scarcity of those resources is a dominant feature of capitalism.

The wealthy and powerful who benefit from that scarcity - both here in the US and in China - look down at sad little racists like you and they clink their champagne glasses together and smile. By blaming their crimes on Mexicans or whoever it is you clutch your pearls about, you're just making it easier for them to divide and conquer the working class globally.

So go ahead, do their work for them - whatever makes you happy.

Waste all your time and energy hating someone you do not know, whose experience and culture you do not know. Blame all the diseases and scarcity and crime on them, instead of on the cruelty and pointless waste of capitalism

Squabble over the pathetic little crumbs they kick down to you from above or whatever you can compete with against your neighbors for, then proudly claim your little dirt heap for an imaginary concept of white culture.

Like I said before, good luck with that.

#2021 #us #united states #healthcare #health #racism #meghan markle #oprah #interview #pharmaceutical industry #big pharma #ads #advertising #racist ask #@dee6000

[whiterosebrian]

Slow-Motion Crisis

If you’ve followed me for even a little while, you might recall what I’ve written about the seemingly failed pursuit of my creative dreams as a creative writer and artist. You definitely might recall what I’ve been writing about my search for a new path of mysticism. Even if you do recall, here I intend to put all that into a different context.

Ever since I was young I wanted to create things. That desire grew and grew more serious as I matured, regardless of whatever medium I considered. Those are the basics of that aspect of my person. Sadly, for multiple reasons, that dream was evidently indefinitely deferred. I thought that by the time I was pushing forty I would already be masterful, successful, well-known, and acclaimed. The sad fact is that my creative skills have matured so very slowly and I still get lost in the shuffle and I never had any contacts that would let me earn a living doing what I’ve liked most, much less have any big break.

There are moments when I have been tempted to give up these longtime dreams entirely just so I could survive as a decent member of society. There are moments whether I’ve wondered if I wasted so much time trying to develop my skills in vain hopes of growing to the heights of the popular artists and writers on the web. If I haven’t even been able to fully move out from under my parents’ roof and live on my own, what chance do I have of making it big and becoming a master?

Was I just chasing after personal glory? I don’t think that was the only reason why I hoped to rise as an artist and storyteller. Over time I really did want to leave behind a legacy that would deeply impact people’s lives and impact the world. I really did want to leave behind something truly great and beautiful, a deeply meaningful contribution to humanity. How many of you recall me saying that I am autistic? I have struggled with that disability for my entire life. Is that part of why I could never make any big entertainment or art connections? Indiana isn’t very suitable for making such connections anyway. Autism has imposed further challenges on my personal life.

I was a Catholic once. I was a Catholic convert for almost a quarter-century. More and more the difficult questions and harsh realities nagged at my deep inside. I sought truth, goodness, and beauty through the Catholic Church, but I saw less and less. What does Catholicism look like in the real world? What are its real fruits? Can it claim to be true? After nearly a quarter-century, those questions and realities in my heart all came to a head, and I made the difficult decision to step away from Catholicism. The pain of separation certainly remains. It is evident that I have been slowly worn down by so-called first world problems. Yes, I have privilege, but I also have vulnerability. I also have deep-seated pain. Is it clinical depression? That may not be the case, but I do increasingly feel worn.

Furthermore, this year has been rough for everyone. A pandemic has spread. Climate change has provoked terrifying destruction. I am living under a potential Neo-Confederate dictatorship (though apparently anyone who dissents is a totalitarian lawless Jacobin Bolshevik Nazi anti-white globalist Masonic jungle-savage narcissistic ultraviolent effeminate ultra-rich ultra-powerful demon-worshipping atheistic hedonist who slaughters unborn Black babies and white grandfathers with gusto and worships George Soros and Karl Marx and Robespierre and Beyonce). In the past, I thought that by this time I would be settling into a quiet life of simply crafting beautiful and substantial stories one after another. Now, though, I wonder if that is truly right. By that I mean I wonder if that is truly my calling or if that is what the forces of life and the spiritual entities who watch over me want for me.

I am now beginning to think that I have gone through a slow-motion crisis. I do feel worn down by a life that is privileged on the outside but stagnant on the inside. Perhaps that is why I now seek a new life, a new bond with earth and spirit, a new power to help those around me, and a new purpose. Perhaps that has influenced how I have been slowly been drawn into neo-paganism and esotericism.

A few days before writing this journal entry, I practiced seriously scrying with an obsidian mirror for the first time. Even if you don’t believe in magic power or spiritual entities speaking through a veil, you might still ponder scrying as involving the subconscious. That first session was surprisingly fruitful. I simply asked whichever entities would reach out to me to show me whatever I needed most to see or learn at that time. I caught glimpses of astral shapes that hinted at some way of dealing with my deeper needs. I have contemplated the possible total message since then. I might possibly set up some special personal rite for deep healing. I won’t say much for now, as I want to go back to the scrying mirror for another session or two for clarification and confirmation.

My life is truly undergoing a shift. I have said before that I wish to be a genuine healer, a genuine visionary, a genuine sage, and a genuine leader. I am also coming to believe that I should fill those roles as a magician and, perhaps, a pagan—but certainly connected to earth and spirit. I am serious. I still wish for a life where I can simply focus on creating beautiful things—but not just as an artist, but as someone who is in touch with earth and spirit, reaching to the powers of life and bringing them into my life and the lives of other people and the other denizens of the web of life. Exactly how I get to that life and what I will do from this point onward is still mostly unknown. I am not a sage yet. I am just a weak little man trying to find truth, goodness, beauty, and joy. Thank you for putting up with me yet again.

#crisis #life #dreams #spiritual path #magic

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

U Penn “Daily Pennsylvanian” caves to “Moonies”

▲ Sun Myung Moon’s robes are trimmed with real gold.

______________________________________

The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The university, established as the College of Philadelphia, claims a founding date of 1740 and is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered prior to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. More at Wikipedia

______________________________________

https://cultnews.com/2012/05/u-penn-daily-pennsylvanian-caves-to-moonies/

May 16, 2012 The Daily Pennsylvanian published an article titled “Some religious organizations on campus show ‘darker side'” (April 5, 2012). This report included information about Rev. Moon’s Unification Church (UC), commonly called the “Moonies”, which is now using a new name “Lovin’ Life Ministries”.

Leaders of the controversial church, which has often been called a “cult”, disliked the Daily Pennsylvanian article and ultimately demanded that it be retracted and removed from the newspaper’s Web site. The Ivy League publication established in 1885 caved in to the pressure and pulled the story. The student newspaper explained this was “due to a combination of factual and editing errors.”

Crescentia DeGoede, the local Philadelphia leader of a UC linked organization called the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), crowed about the results she achieved through her meeting with Daily Pennsylvanian staff. CARP is the UC organization commonly associated with proselytizing at college and university campuses.

DeGoede’s accomplishment was also reported by Dan Fefferman, the president of the so-called “International Coalition for Religious Freedom”, which has been characterized as a UC “front group”. (http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Feffermn/Fefferman-120427.pdf)

Rev. Sun Myung Moon  According to full page ads paid for by Moon, which were run in newspapers across the United States during 2002, religious leaders in “Spirit World” had a meeting to confer special heavenly status upon him. Those assembled included Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Confucius, Jesus and God in a meeting during Christmas the previous year. And they unanimously decided that Moon is the “Savior, Messiah and King of Kings of all humanity.”

Moon also can be quite outspoken about his distaste for certain minorities. In one speech he called for a global government with him in charge and said that once empowered, he’d cleanse the world of gays, who he referred to as “dung-eating dogs”, which should be eradicated through a “purge on God’s orders.” Does this seem somewhat similar to the rants and megalomania attributed to Charles Manson, Jim Jones or David Koresh?

Rev. Moon also was criminally convicted of tax fraud [including document forgery]. He served a sentence in federal prison. And despite numerous appeals that conviction was never overturned or pardoned.

Moon’s former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong says, “Father [Rev. Moon] demonstrated contempt for civil law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers”. She adds, “There was no question inside the church that the Reverend Moon used his religious tax exemption as a tool for financial gain in the business world.” And that “Personally, the Moons had an almost physical aversion to paying taxes. Lawyers for the church spent most of their time trying to figure out how to avoid them. That’s why the True Family Trust fund was based not in a U.S. bank but in an account in Liechtenstein.”

Imagine how hard it must have been for the editors at the Daily Pennsylvanian to sit down with and defer to the demands of Moon’s church.

The Daily Pennsylvanian deal Fefferman announced that the Daily Pennsylvanian had “promised” to do the following: 1. Publish in their next issue at least a few of ANY letters to the editor our members submit to the Daily Pennsylvanian before Wednesday, April 25th.
 2. Publish a revised version of the “Darker Side” article on the Internet, in which they will correct their use of the terms Moonie and deprogramming¦The original version of the article will cease to be available after this revision has been made.
 3. Publish a notification of the revision to the “Darker Side” article in print, directing readers to read the revised article online.
 4. Publish a follow-up article featuring our contemporary movement in Philadelphia.
 5. Communicate and consult with us each step of the way.
 6. Read any quotes they intend to use from interviews with our membership to us before they publish them, upon our request. 
7. Meet with Dr. Dunning [the professor who was misquoted by them in the original article] to understand his point of view and take corrective action for the misdeeds against him. They will also be encouraging him to write a letter to the editor, which they intend to publish.

The Daily Pennsylvanian has apparently complied with each and every UC demand. The subsequent article published by the Daily Pennsylvanian titled “Creating a new generation of the Unification Church” reads like a “puff piece” based upon a UC press release filled with propaganda, rather than a legitimate news story.

“High pressure tactics” and “brainwashing”  

In this revisionist version concerns about cults are spun by an apologist into when “families feel…robbed of their children”, but children feel that “their families” are “being irrational and not letting them choose their religion the way they want to.”

“Choosing their religion the way they want to”?

The original the Daily Pennsylvanian article squelched by UC leaders reported about the “high pressure tactics” used by campus religious groups to recruit Penn students.

The New Zealand Herald reported about a speech made by Moon and published in 2004 on the Unification Church website. Moon said his followers “must cast aside their friends and teachers, even their parents, and follow the True Parents” (meaning Moon and his wife).

“Humanity must mercilessly eradicate all bonds and relationships with the satanic world, not showing even the slightest attachment, and in this way return to the zero point and mark the dawning of a new creation,” Moon added.

Some might even observe that Moon’s goal of reaching “zero point” seems like a cryptic allusion to the net result of what has been called “brainwashing”.

In fact, the UC has been “convicted of brainwashing” in Japanese courts.

Of course according to Pastor Iwasaki Shota, supervisor of Lovin’ Life Ministries in Delaware and Pennsylvania, who is quoted in the newly revised article published by the Daily Pennsylvanian, this reflects a “situation in Japan”. He sees this as something like a conspiracy, which includes a “whole operation of media, government and police working on the side of the deprogrammers”. Shoto urges students “to work with Congress and ministers in the U.S. to help the situation in Japan.”

However, to better understand the background concerning UC problems in Japan read this “Joint Declaration Concerning the Moon Organization” (September 26, 1997).

A former member that grew up in the UC told NPR, “Everything was a system of control…That’s what it seemed to me like. They were kind of breeding us to be a certain way. And if you weren’t that way, there was something wrong with you.”

Moon’s own daughter doesn’t necessarily disagree. “Those of us – myself included – who were born into this movement or born into this family, we had no choice in the matter”, In Jin Moon told NPR.

Another former UC member told NPR, “If you left the church, you fell off the face of the earth…It’s the worst thing you could do. One person told us at Sunday school once, that blessed children who fall out of the church go to a box underneath of hell.”

For more details about what it’s like to grow up in the UC read “Growing up with the Moonies”.

Information control The Daily Pennsylvanian deal also included making sure that no copy of the offending article remained online.

DeGoede told the Unification Church Newsletter, “The executive editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian told me by phone that she has ordered former deprogrammer Rick Ross to remove the Daily Pennsylvanian article from his website, and he has said he will comply in a couple of days.”

The article as it was originally written had been archived at the Ross Institute Internet Archives (RI) within the Unification Church subsection.

After the Daily Pennsylvanian editor called the previously published article was converted to a news summary, which remains intact within the RI archives.

Apparently encouraged by their success with the Daily Pennsylvanian UC leaders thought they might try another news outlet in their ongoing effort at information control.

RI received an email and registered letter from National Public Radio (NPR) about another archived news report titled “Unification Church Woos a Second Generation” (February 17, 2010). NPR requested that this article be removed from the RI archives.

The article was then converted to a news summary, which remains intact within the RI archives.

Why did UC leaders take such an interest in the articles archived at RI? This probably occurred because both the NPR report and the Daily Pennsylvanian article prominently mention a new name now being used by the UC in North America — “Lovin’ Life Ministries”.

It is relatively easy to find out that “Lovin’ Life Ministries” was really just another name the UC is using to potentially recruit unwary college students.

Historically, deceptive recruitment tactics have been a frequent focus of complaints about Rev. Moon and his church.

Moon has used literally hundreds of names to promote himself, his agenda and/or pursuits over the years. This name game can be seen as an attempt to obscure the past and/or avoid all the bad press linked to Moon and his Unification Church.

The hateful “M word” Rev. Moon’s followers now revile as “pejorative” the label “Moonie”, which they once considered a “badge of honor” in the 1970s. Today the “M word” is categorized by the US as “hate language”

It also seems that any criticism of the Unification Church is likely to be labeled “hate language” by UC leaders.

But just last week a British newspaper the Daily Mail noted that “Moonie cult leader Sun Myung Moon” has the dubious distinction of being banned from entering Britain. He shares that honor with Louis Farrakhan and the American white supremacist Dennis Mahon.

Spin control? Fefferman, a devoted disciple of Moon for decades is looking forward to participating at the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) annual conference in Montreal. He will present a paper titled “Are ICSA, Info-Cult, and the Unification movement ready for mutual dialogue?”

There will also be a panel discussion at the ICSA conference in July titled “Ethics, activism against, and dialogue with cultic groups” moderated by longtime cult apologist Eileen Barker.

Ms. Barker once received $25,000 from Rev. Moon to help fund her book “The Making of a Moonie” (published 1984). In her book Barker generally minimized the damage done by the UC. Rev. Moon apparently got his money’s worth. Now it seems Barker may yet again yield further dividends. ICSA’s website confirmed the planned event.

Eileen Barker was also once named prominently by fellow cult apologist Jeffrey Hadden in a memo he prepared proposing a plan to counteract the American Family Foundation, which is now known as ICSA. Hadden queried “whether it might be possible for the UC in collaboration with several other NRMs [new religious movements sometimes called “cults”] to raise a significant amount of money that could go–no strings attached–to an independent group, which in turn, would entertain proposals and fund research on NRMs.”

Can cultic groups really change and become ethical new religious movements? Can Rev. Moon and the UC be trusted or is this all just contrived spin control?

Nansook Hong once remarked, “They [the Moons and UC] have orchestrated a remarkably successful campaign to win respectability and wield political influence. As usual, they have succeeded by deceitful means.”

Family business If and when groups called “cults” do genuinely change this is typically precipitated by a dramatic shift in leadership. And if such a group wants to implement real accountability this is most often demonstrated through democratic reforms and meaningful financial transparency.

However, the UC appears to be run more like a family business than a legitimate church organization. There appears to be no meaningful accountability for UC leaders, except to Rev. Moon.

But Moon is 92, so it won’t be long now until his children begin carving up his multi-billion dollar business and spiritual empire.

The church remains essentially a family business ruled over by a hereditary dynasty.

All that appears to be happening is an old Moon is being eclipsed by new Moons.

Address: https://cultnews.com/2012/05/u-penn-daily-pennsylvanian-caves-to-moonies/

____________________________________

‘Misunderstanding Cults’ book – Introduction and chapters by Benjamin Beit-Hallami and by Benjamin Zablocki

Preston Moon violence at the New Yorker Hotel

“WHY did you disobey my order?” … Mr. Yoshizumi hit me and pushed me twice … against a sharp, protruding corner…

Montreal girl dies fundraising for the Unification Church

A mother dropped her children off at Jacob House, N.Y., and went to fundraise – as directed by Moon. She was killed…

“They put a gun to my head and asked if I’d rather be shot or raped.”

Atsushi Funaki was murdered while selling roses for the UC in Philadelphia, PA

The Purity Knife – Jen Kiaba

Ken Sudo describes the rape of several sisters

Rape and trafficking in Bolivia. Eight church members involved.

All these UC members were killed while fundraising for Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han

True Mother showed no compassion or pity

Sun Myung Moon must have sex with 70 virgins, 70 widows and 70 men’s wives

Did Rev. Moon have a hotline to heaven? Understanding how he was using Korean shamanism is the key to the weirdness.

#Moonies #Cult News #Sun Myung Moon #Unification Church #Rape #Murder #MFT #Hak Ja Han

[academiawordsandconcepts]

Dialectics

Hegel:  Within Hegelianism, the word dialectic has the specialised meaning of a contradiction between ideas that serves as the determining factor in their relationship. Dialectic comprises three stages of development: first, a thesis or statement of an idea, which gives rise to a second step, a reaction or antithesis that contradicts or negates the thesis, and third, the synthesis, a statement through which the differences between the two points are resolved. Dialectical materialism, a theory or set of theories produced mainly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted the Hegelian dialectic into arguments regarding traditional materialism.

Evald Ilyenkov held that logic was not a formal science but a reflection of scientific praxis and that the rules of logic are not independent of the content. He followed Hegel in insisting that formal logic had been sublated, arguing that logic needed to be a unity of form and content and to state actual truths about the objective world. Ilyenkov used Das Kapital to illustrate the constant flux of A and B and the vanity of holding strictly to either A or -A, due to the inherent logical contradiction of self-development.[5]

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Hegel stated that the purpose of dialectics is "to study things in their own being and movement and thus to demonstrate the finitude of the partial categories of understanding."[34]

One important dialectical principal for Hegel is the transition from quantity to quality, which he terms the Measure. The measure is the qualitative quantum, the quantum is the existence of quantity.[35]

The identity between quantity and quality, which is found in Measure, is at first only implicit, and not yet explicitly realised. In other words, these two categories, which unite in Measure, each claim an independent authority. On the one hand, the quantitative features of existence may be altered, without affecting its quality. On the other hand, this increase and diminution, immaterial though it be, has its limit, by exceeding which the quality suffers change. [...] But if the quantity present in measure exceeds a certain limit, the quality corresponding to it is also put in abeyance. This however is not a negation of quality altogether, but only of this definite quality, the place of which is at once occupied by another. This process of measure, which appears alternately as a mere change in quantity, and then as a sudden revulsion of quantity into quality, may be envisaged under the figure of a nodal (knotted) line.[36]

As an example, Hegel mentions the states of aggregation of water: "Thus the temperature of water is, in the first place, a point of no consequence in respect of its liquidity: still with the increase or diminution of the temperature of the liquid water, there comes a point where this state of cohesion suffers a qualitative change, and the water is converted into steam or ice".[37] As other examples Hegel mentions the reaching of a point where a single additional grain makes a heap of wheat; or where the bald tail is produced, if we continue plucking out single hairs.

Another important principle for Hegel is the negation of the negation, which he also terms Aufhebung (sublation): Something is only what it is in its relation to another, but by the negation of the negation this something incorporates the other into itself. The dialectical movement involves two moments that negate each other, something and its other. As a result of the negation of the negation, "something becomes its other; this other is itself something; therefore it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum".[38] Something in its passage into other only joins with itself, it is self-related.[39] In becoming there are two moments:[40] coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be: by sublation, i.e., negation of the negation, being passes over into nothing, it ceases to be, but something new shows up, is coming to be. What is sublated (aufgehoben) on the one hand ceases to be and is put to an end, but on the other hand it is preserved and maintained.[41] In dialectics, a totality transforms itself; it is self-related, then self-forgetful, relieving the original tension.

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Marxist dialectic

Hence, philosophic contradiction is central to the development of dialectics – the progress from quantity to quality, the acceleration of gradual social change; the negation of the initial development of the status quo; the negation of that negation; and the high-level recurrence of features of the original status quo. In the USSR, Progress Publishers issued anthologies of dialectical materialism by Lenin, wherein he also quotes Marx and Engels:

As the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, and the richest in content, Hegelian dialectics was considered by Marx and Engels the greatest achievement of classical German philosophy.... "The great basic thought", Engels writes, "that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things, apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away... this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that, in its generality, it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But, to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words, and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation, are two different things.... For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it, except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy, itself, is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain." Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is "the science of the general laws of motion both of the external world and of human thought".[47]

Lenin describes his dialectical understanding of the concept of development:

A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis ("the negation of the negation"), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; "breaks in continuity"; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws – these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one.

[kvlt-ov-romance-blog]

Twin Peaks & Hauntology

A large deal of David Lynch’s content is surreal not just because of how odd it is, but also because of how familiar it is: For many entering the Twin Peaks universe in contemporary times, they have already been exposed to some imagery from the show or from David Lynch’s other work, which often makes many parallels to the show itself. For instance, prior to starting the original run of the series, I had indeed seen the classic portrait of Laura Palmer a myriad of times and knew the famous lines, “who killed Laura Palmer?” I had seen some of Lynch’s work too, and I also had in fact seen plenty of references to Twin Peaks in pop culture, but it was only when I began to immerse myself in Twin Peaks that I could say to myself, “this feels like deja vu.” The cinematography, the color palette, the dated film quality, the eerie music, everything about the show is setup so that it feels haunted, both from within its own universe and for those observing as though external spectators. Essentially, one of the main reasons why Twin Peaks is such a successful show in terms of endearment and also producing chilling reactions, is because it plays to humanity’s fragmented memories of time, rejecting a linear framework in favor of something that is more distinctly postmodern (i.e. time is not treated as a straight arrow as is the case for most shows). David Lynch innately flirts with these concepts throughout his career in philosophical and psychological manners that make many uneasy from various standpoints, including the metaphysical and ontological. One tiny yet distinctive and slowly emerging school of thought to grow out of the postmodern field of study is hauntology, coined by the French philosopher esteemed for his take on deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida, in his 1993 book, “Specters of Marx.” All things considered, Twin Peaks is an excellent example of hauntology expressed through an artistic medium, and here is some elaboration as to how and why.

So what is hauntology? Derrida originally developed the idea as a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, ontology being the study of life, hence “hauntology.” Specifically, his aforementioned book from 1993 extensively developed Karl Marx’s idea that “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism.” These were the opening lines to “The Communist Manifesto,” published in 1848 and yet managing to have widespread appeal on a major political levels, well over a hundred years after it had been written and even to this day, proving that Marx was right – Communism is haunting Europe and the rest of the world, chiefly due to the fact that it exists in opposition to the dominant mode of production around the globe, capitalism, but also because according to many scholars, we are perhaps living in a late stage of capitalism that is in fact quite similar to what Marx and his contemporaries envisioned, a stage of decay and corruption that gives way to a fork in the road of fascism, corporatism, and the like, but could also bring forth major developments in class consciousness with regards to revolution and unification. By treating Communism as a specter, it is essentially a faceless character, looming and lurking in the shadows, a ghostly apparition that either instills terror or hope into the hearts of those who find it depending on what side of the political spectrum they are on. Derrida also ties this idea into the Shakespearean play, “Hamlet,” which also began its first lines (“Who’s there?”) in a haunted sort of manner, involving an actual ghost. With regards to Hamlet, Derrida specifically makes note of how “the time is out of joint,” a similar occurrence to real world matters such as Communism and fictional matters such as Twin Peaks.

As Andrew Gallix of The Guardian describes hauntology, it is: The situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by an absent or deferred non-origin, represented by “the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive.” Peter Bruse and Andrew Scott further elaborate that: “Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. However, the ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past. Does then the ‘historical’ person who is identified with the ghost properly belong to the present? Surely not, as the idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality. The temporality to which the ghost is subject is therefore paradoxical, at once they ‘return’ and make their apparitional debut.” From here, we note how Derrida’s own writing focuses on the presumed “death” of Communism in the post-Soviet world, the question of “the end of history” and most significantly, “if Communism was always spectral, what does it mean to say it is now dead?” All of these concepts tie into the lost futures of modernity, and as Wikipedia writes in depth: “Hauntology has been described as a ‘pining for a future that never arrived;’ […] hauntological art and culture is typified by a critical foregrounding of the historical and metaphysical disjunctions of contemporary capitalist culture as well as a ‘refusal to give up on the desire for the future.’ [Mark] Fisher and others have drawn attention to the shift into post-Fordist economies in the late 1970s, which Fisher argues has ‘gradually and systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new.’ Hauntology has been used as a critical lens in various forms of media and theory, including music, political theory, architecture, Afrofuturism, and psychoanalysis.”

Now, regarding hauntology more as an artistic statement and genre than as something philosophical is the first way we can approach Twin Peaks. The style is unique yet also not: It is, as expressed by one of the most prominent artists of the style, Boards of Canada, “the past inside the present.” Most notably, hauntological art is expressed in music, paying homage to library music, vintage documentary-film scores, public information films, etc. This means a heavy dosage of old-school synthesizers, blips and bloops, samples of dialogue from long forgotten movies, and so forth. What we have on our hands here, is “21st-century musicians exploring similar ideas related to temporal disjunction, retrofuturism, memory, the malleability of recording media, and esoteric cultural sources from the past. Artists associated with hauntology include members of the UK label Ghost Box (such as Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, and the Advisory Circle), London dubstep producer Burial, electronic musicians such as the Caretaker, William Basinski, Philip Jeck, Aseptic Void, Moon Wiring Club, and Mordant Music, American lo-fi artist Ariel Pink, and the artists of the Italian Occult Psychedelia scene. Common reference points include library music, the soundtracks of old science-fiction and pulp horror films, found sounds, analog electronic music, musique concrète, dub, decaying cassette tapes, English psychedelia, and 1970s public television programs. A common element is the foregrounding of the recording surface noise, including the crackle and hiss of vinyl and tape, calling attention to the medium itself.”

Furthermore, “’hauntological music has been particularly tied to British culture, and has been described as an attempt to evoke ‘a nostalgia for a future that never came to pass, with a vision of a strange, alternate Britain, constituted from the reorder refuse of the postwar period.’ Reynolds described it as an attempt to construct a ‘lost utopianism’ rooted in visions of a benevolent post-welfare state. According to Fisher, 21st-century electronic music is the anachronistic product of an ‘after the future’ age in which ‘electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia and retrospection … What defined this 'hauntological' confluence more than anything else was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future….’ He explains that this is partly the result of stagnated technical advances since the 20th-century. The style has been described as the British cousin of America's hypnagogic pop music scene, which has also been discussed as engaging with notions of nostalgia and memory. The two styles have been likened to ‘sonic fictions or intentional forgeries, creating half-baked memories of things that never were—approximating the imprecise nature of memory itself.’ Early progenitors of the style include Boards of Canada and Position Normal.”

Lengthy quotes aside, the basic message is that hauntological art – particularly music – is dreamlike, vaguely nostalgic, and ghostly. Basically, musical deja vu. One could make a case that popular genres like chillwave and synthwave, which rely heavily on ‘80s aesthetics are also hauntological, but they lack the same sense of “dread” and “fragmentation” that established artists like Boards of Canada have (e.g. Boards of Canada’s last album, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” is directly linked to the themes of war, apocalypse, the end of history, civilization’s collapse, death and rebirth). The Caretaker, too, is another fantastic example of hauntology: Leyland Kirby publishes records dealing with themes of dementia (the absolution of memory loss) and much of his work is lo-fi, darkly reverberated jazz from no later than WWII; essentially, it is as though history did end with the second war, and when listening to The Caretaker, we are hearing ghostly apparitions committed to tape. “An Empty Bliss Beyond This World,” “Everywhere at the End of Time,” the titles of Kirby’s work alone is enough to suggest something hauntological is occurring. Kirby’s music becomes directly relevant to Twin Peaks: The Return when the viewer notes how similar the music and pre-1940s style are to The Caretaker in The Giant’s realm (some have even dubbed The Giant as a cosmic caretaker of sorts ironically enough). But in the meantime, it is important to discuss how this all relates to the original run of Twin Peaks. One may pose the question: “How is hauntology related to Twin Peaks?”

Remember when I said that we should regard hauntology as an artistic statement rather than a philosophical concept? This is the main and most easy way to comprehend the correlation of hauntology and Twin Peaks. In its original time period, airing in the early ‘90s, it appeared as an anomaly of sorts. The artistic style of the show was deeply rooted in something haunting, something to do with deja vu. Angelo Badalamenti, the composer of the show’s soundtrack, is known for his enigmatic and hypnagogic take on jazz and subtle ambient music, which connects quite well to the mysterious nature of everything going on throughout the show. What specifically helps mark a tonality of hauntology is the fact that the music constantly repeats itself, as if a record left on a repeat. And again, the music plays in direct relation to what is happening on the show: As soon as we hear the swelling, swirling synths or the melancholic piano of “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” we know something important is happening, often having to do with memories, or more menacingly, with doppelgangers and shadow realms. When we hear “Audrey’s Dance,” we know something surreal is going to happen, perhaps some backwards talking or a dancing dwarf. The music serves as a sort of specter, haunting the show and allowing us external observers to peer into the Twin Peaks universe and predict what may happen. However, because David Lynch and Mark Frost are masters of surrealist trickery, skepticism sets in: No matter how many times we hear the songs, few will ever know for certain what is going to happen, you just have to make educated guesses, which usually have the right framework (e.g. “something mysterious is about to happen”) but wind up lacking the correct response (e.g. “something mysterious did happen, but it was not at all what I had predicted”). We then become lost in a series of puzzles, clues, a labyrinthine of both artistry and metaphysics; we start to become haunted by our own theories and conjectures. Laura Palmer’s portrait, shots of diners and bars, foggy mountainous forests, elements from the show start to connect to each other but only in fragments, never in wholeness. In a sense, it may reflect upon the age old dilemma’s of duality versus totality, and even idealism versus materialism, but even theories pertaining to those ideas are never fully addressed and in fact there are arguments made that metaphysics and ontology are only meant to serve as emotional and aesthetic tools rather than as literal interpretations. This lack of knowing only deepens the mystery as well as the haunting effects of the show. It leads Twin Peaks to become a sort of solipsistic realm of sorts, and to the viewer, this is both utopian and dystopian; it leads us to become specters in its own twisted way.

There is also the cinematography as previously mentioned. For those watching the original series now, over 25 years after it originally aired, one thing you will notice is the dated quality of the visual imagery. Not in the sense that it has not aged well, but in the sense that everything is shrouded in ‘90s video-haze; subtle, muted colors, VHS-like quality. It adds to the mystique, and further expounds upon the notion of retro-futurism; now in 2017, there is a slew of television shows and movies that visually strive to recreate this retro feeling in the cinematography. Even musicians are becoming increasingly obsessed with this aesthetic, whether displayed in their music videos or in the music itself (beyond hauntology, as mentioned, there has been an increasing rebirth of ‘80s and ‘90s cultural obsession, for instance, vaporwave – which is especially visual and definitively postmodern – and even less abstractly, many major musicians are still drawing heavily from the ‘60s-’70s to the point where Boards of Canada’s unofficial mantra “the past inside the present” rings true). Watching the original series as well as Fire Walks With Me as they aired, untampered and unrestored, the surreal and dreamlike qualities of the show are enhanced, as is the hauntological pathos and logos: Time is thought to repeat itself, as one might say when they observe a new and younger generation of fans watching Twin Peaks. The older fans may note the quality and visual style of the series and feel haunted by it, but even for today’s modern fans, many of them grew up watching things out of the ‘80s and ‘90s and many have been exposed, even if unwittingly, to Lynch and Frost’s work, whether directly or through a more indirect means (e.g. modern shows which draw heavily upon their style, such as Mr. Robot). When the element of familiarity is added to the viewing experience of Twin Peaks, this is where the haunting effect of the show comes into place; viewers may go as far as the ontological route of questioning existential matters, as they find themselves placed in what seems to be a Lynchian role of their own – they are part of the puzzle and by extension, part of the same universe they are watching. While many would argue that time repeats itself, the other argument is more curious than that; time is an illusion, as are many things. The veil of Maya (the illusory nature of existence in Eastern philosophy which Lynch hints at throughout the series) runs deep, and on humanity’s quest to attain Moksha (enlightenment, freedom from the cycle of birth, death, rebirth) we become trapped in our own web of ego, self, identity, thought, emotion, and so forth. We are just as haunted as the characters in Twin Peaks, and when we watch the show, perhaps it is not meant to reflect separate human thoughts but to reflect upon the idea that we are one consciousness collectively and subjectively viewing itself; Twin Peaks is merely a mirror for our own enigma, and even Lynch himself is not free from this matrix as he plays the role of Gordon, because there are quite a few moments, most notably in Fire Walks With Me (e.g. the scene where David Bowie’s character Philip Jeffries vanishes) and in The Return, where even he is just as lost as other characters or viewers, even in spite of the fact that he most likely does possess some deeper knowledge of what is happening.

This brings us, logically, to the next interpretation of hauntology: The philosophical one, keeping in mind the fact that it is meant to represent an ontology, a means of understanding life and death. Twin Peaks does not shy away from the supernatural, and much of the time it would appear at first glance to be purely for showmanship. But the deeper you dive into the lore of the show, whether canonically or through your own interpretations, fandom, etc. the more these supernatural and science-fiction elements may relate to the history, the politics, the ontological, the metaphysical, and the spiritual. In the original show, plenty of nods were made towards Native American spiritualism, Eastern metaphysics, and even on historical levels, oddities like Project MK Ultra come to mind. Even on a sociological level, the show serves as commentary on the nature of small towns, federal versus local justice, human psychology, and so forth. What is problematic for viewers is that everything could be interpreted through very distinct lenses; perhaps the struggle between Leland and Bob represents the Kabbalah’s interpretation of the Sefirot and the Qliphoth (the tree of life and it’s shadowy counterpart respectively – which is especially possible when one watches The Return and notices the arm has now evolved into a tree of sorts). I have seen interpretations of the show that range from Buddhism to Rosicrucian to Masonic, some of which even go as far as casting doubt on the integrity of Lynch and portraying him as an occult figure with some sort of hidden agenda (conspiracy theorists fit right into the realm of Twin Peaks, though I believe most of their cause for panic is just misunderstanding Lynch’s eccentricity and morbid curiosity into hidden realms). The Return has featured the I Ching, Diane wearing colors that reflect upon alchemy, even a sort of genesis myth of Bob and Laura and perhaps everything else that occurs in this universe. The nuclear bomb dropping in the latest episode even brings forth to mind connotations of Shiva, of creation through destruction. Basically, since Lynch and Frost like to keep things secretive and keep us on our toes, we may never know for certain if there is a specific ideological current that fuels the show, if it is just a hodgepodge of different ideas, or if they are trying to say that all interpretations are egalitarian, that “your guess is as good as mine.” The last one would be quite an ontological statement to make, as it reflects upon the ideas of relativity, subjectivity, skepticism, perhaps even nihilism and absurdism; “can we ever find truth? Can we ever know it for certain?” That theme is addressed heavily on the show in various realms of existence, whether pertaining the surface level of reality (Laura’s death) or what may lie beyond (altered states, astral projection, time travel, you name it).

The Return is especially interesting in these regards. First time viewers of the original series were left haunted by their own theories and suspicions for 25 years before Twin Peaks would be visited again in a lengthy format beyond the movie; Twin Peaks faded into cult status, still familiar to many people but often looked upon with an air of uncertainty and wonder. When the show ended, numerous fanzines popped up trying to keep the legacy alive, delivering new theories with each new edition, but this was before the days of major Internet blogging and media distribution, so it was limited and obscure. But even when newer generations started to discuss Twin Peaks online, nothing was ever fully addressed; the haunting still lingered, both by the very facts of how the original show and movie concluded and by the nature of the series as being elusive, hard to pin down, and notorious for not lending viewers much explanation or help. Seeing the series return after being dormant for so long, it is akin to a spectral awakening of sorts. But that is not to say it is no longer haunted, in fact, far from it – Laura’s portrait, her diary entries, her soul, they still float about like ghosts, her theme song still occasionally popping up to haunt, and now the riddles are perhaps even more haunted because we are gaining more glimpses into the supernatural realms of the Lodges and even beyond, into what could be considered a sort of cosmic viewing lens of reincarnation or creationism and then-some. For much of the series so far, viewers have been particularly haunted by wondering when the “real” Cooper would come back, to the point this mystery seems to extend to ourselves: We identify with Cooper, we sympathize with him as being lost and we want him to find his way home because this is the happy ending we all wish for ourselves in life, we all wish to find ourselves and be whole. But as The Return progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge whether or not this is attainable and feasible, whether because we are looking at things from the wrong angle, because we do not yet have all the puzzle pieces, or perhaps most sinister of all, because of the possibility that we may in fact be a doomed species (something now hinted upon more than ever upon the contextual framework of the atomic bomb, the Dark Mother, the woodsmen, military secrets, etc.). In my opinion, The Return almost serves as a call to arms, that we should invest in more spiritual and metaphysical affairs because there may in fact be some validity to them. Whether or not that means deeply obscure occult references or just casually studying a philosophy is up to you, but I do believe that Lynch has always used his surrealist techniques to promote some form of critical thinking and higher consciousness, to the point where my own takeaway is that he is in fact going the egalitarian route, understanding that each ideology has its own merits and that instead of dogmatically following one, we should find balance. This is the foundation of perennial philosophy, and even in areas such as Thelema can one potentially reach this idea.

Twin Peaks in general reminds me a lot of the story of Lucifer; thought to once be God’s favorite angel, his rebellious nature meant that God cast him out of Heaven and he became a fallen angel. Lucifer’s name translates to “light bringer,” but from there, Lucifer is treated quite differently depending on who you are speaking to. There are many who believe he is Satan, that he is an evil figure commanding demons. There are those who believe him and Satan are one being, with Lucifer representing spiritual enlightenment and Satan representing earthly pleasure. There are those who believe Lucifer, the light bringer, represents our own internal means of achieving enlightenment (he is associated with phosphorus, the light energy essential to DNA) whether through ourselves our through Lucifer as an external deity. In Gematria, a method of interpreting Hebrew scriptures built on computing numerical values of words based on their constituent letters, Lucifer and Jesus both share the same value even. This is all to say: “How do we know the real Lucifer?” and from there, one may even ask the same of Christ, or of all religious figures. Religion is in and of itself a rather hauntological sort of philosophy, precisely because it requires faith in external narratives and storytelling, and much like with Twin Peaks, when the authors of such works are shrouded in enigma, it becomes hard to discern the facts from fiction and conjecture. Luckily, Lynch and Frost are alive for us right now, so their lore may one day be answered directly or we may one day have access to their private writings, but if nothing else, in the meantime, we are to be haunted by their mysteries. Ultimately, my personal belief is starting to become that the show is meant to function as a retelling of spiritual epics such as the creation myth, and their teachings such as Maya versus Moksha. In fact, this might be why some of us find ourselves experiencing such deja vu and familiarity, because in one way or another, we are familiar with what is happening, but the way Lynch and Frost portray the events is done in a new and innovative way that involves a sort of waiting game and a purgatory state of sorts: Twin Peaks was once the most bizarre and surreal show on television, and now from our vantage point in time – even among the postmodern background of a turbulent political, sociological, and metaphysical society – it once again is. Lynch and Frost serve as guiding figures, reminding us that even in the contexts of our most beloved displays of art and spirituality, we should not limit our understanding by just focusing on one source: In order to understand Twin Peaks, we have to look deeper and exercise critical thought, and utilizing a hauntological outlook will surely help viewers discern what is happening with regards to the woodsmen and fragemented, non-linear time narrative that is now occuring on the show.

#Twin Peaks #Twin Peaks: The Return #David Lynch #Mark Frost #Fire Walk With Me #Laura Palmer #Dale Cooper #Angelo Badalamenti #Hauntology #Metaphysics #Ontology #Existentialism #Absurdism #Nihilism #Occult #Surrealism #Time #History #Sociology #Anthropology #Philosophy #Political #Atomic Bomb #Nuclear #Religion #Spirituality #David Bowie #Kabbalah #Hinduism #Buddhism

[militant-holy-knight]

When Libtards Take the Terrorist Side

Leftists used to champion women and LGBT’s rights. How long until they are okay with wife-beating, hand-chopping, child marriage, FGM, slavery and polyandry?

I used to believe that those in the PC culture sphere that identify themselves as “democrats”, “Labour”, “liberals”, “leftists”, “communists” or whatever that have consistently rebuked anyone who dares to criticize Islam have done so out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness mixed with ignorance. But at this point, we can’t remain blind anymore that some self-described “liberals” are now malicious in their intent, and makes me wonder if the same Left who used to champion women’s and LGBT rights will soon say its fine for Muslims to throw gays off buildings, for women to cover themselves up or they will be splashed with acid, for Christians to pay protection money or be crucified.

I am not necessarily putting the “Left” or “Muslims” as a whole under the same blanket, I will get to this later on, but I refer to an specific alliance between far-left activists with a genocidal hatred for anything “conservative” (anything to their right-wing, including liberals who disagree with them) and those who genuinely believe ISIS was completely justified and they want to repeat the same process in the West. And worse, this rot is seeped deep into politics for anyone who sees it. The more recent examples I could think of are:

A Canadian resolution that would have recognized the persecution of Assyrians, Yazidis and Shias by ISIS as genocide was blocked by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. 

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has consistently called terrorist organizations like Hamas as “friends”. Hamas is an terrorist organization dedicated in turning Israel into a Islamic state and has systematically implemented Shariah law in the Gaza Strip.

Muslim Labour member Aysegul Gurbuz have been suspended praising Hitler on Twitter.

Linda Sarsour is an activist that has been embraced by American feminists for criticizing Donald Trump but has a history of promoting Sharia law and saying Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Her fellow Women’s March Tamika Malory got into hot water for praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and refusing to say Israel has a right to exist.

Iranian feminist Masih Alinejad condemned female SJWs for using the hijab in solidarity after campaigning so hard to be free in the Iranian regime.

Despite factual evidence to the contrary, ABC’s Matthew Douwd believes Muslims in America are far persecuted far more than Christians worldwide.

That last point is the key issue the Western left has when it comes to perspective. Recent statistics show that liberals seem to be completely divorced from reality when comparing the genocide of Christians in the Islamic world when compared to the “persecution” of Muslims in the West.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats, however, believe most Muslims in this country [America] are mistreated, a view shared by only 22% of Republicans and 39% of voters not affiliated with either major party. Fewer Democrats (47%) think most Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world, compared to 76% of GOP voters and 64% of unaffiliateds...Women are more likely than men to think most American Muslims are mistreated here but less likely to believe Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world. Nearly as many voters under 40 think most Muslims are mistreated in America (51%) as think most Christians are mistreated in the Muslim world (57%).

It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of Muslims persecuting Christians are not "terrorists" (at least not formally), but rather come from all rungs of Muslim society. Take Egypt, for example (the 17th worst nation according to Open Doors, an organization that tracks persecution of Christians world wide). According to the report, along with "violent religious groups," two other segments of society are "very strong[ly]" responsible for the persecution:  

"non-Christian religious leaders" — meaning Muslim clerics, sheikhs, imams, and the rest — "at any level from local to national" 

"normal citizens (people from the general public), including mobs."

Similarly, "officials at any level from local to national" are "strongly responsible" for the "oppression" of Egypt's Christians, particularly "through their failure to vindicate the rights of Christians and also through their discriminatory acts which violate the fundamental rights of Christians." Now, compare all this to the supposedly worse — in liberal minds — "mistreatment" Muslims suffer in America. According to a November 2017 Pew report: "In 2016, there were 127 reported [Muslim] victims of aggravated or simple assault." In the preceding decades, assaults on Muslims averaged around 50 a year.

Even if this number were accurate, it pales in comparison to what millions of Christians — not 127 — are experiencing under Islam. But the fact is many of these anti-Muslim hate crimes are later found to have been fabricated or grossly exaggerated. Note, for instance, how the Pew report conflates "assaults" with "simple assaults" — even though the latter "does not involve physical contact with the victim."

Moreover, Muslims in America do not experience institutionalized persecution — that is, persecution at the hands of governments, authorities, and police — as Christians under Islam do...Nonetheless... all these actual facts have little to do with what a significantly large segment of the American voting population — mostly liberals and Democrats... believe. Why they are so misinformed becomes apparent when one understands that the liberal media is dedicated to maintaining liberal narratives at all costs: in this case, that Christians are always the aggressors, while Muslims always the misunderstood victims.

Hamed Abdel Samad is an Egyptian political scientist and a former Muslim who made a scathing remark about the Western left when it came to cuddling up to Islam:

"The beginnings of the European left included principles like criticism of religion… Karl Marx was the first leftist, and he said that religion was the opium of the people. The left founded feminism and fought for women's liberation. Nobody fought for freedom of expression more than the left. The left said that nobody is above the law, and that nobody – not Moses, nor Jesus, the queen, the king, or any celebrity – is above criticism. They criticized, drew [cartoons], and made comedies about all of them. Nobody defended homosexuals more than the left, and the same is true of women's rights. But when it comes to Islam, the left morphs into the conservative right. You can draw [cartoons] of Jesus, of Moses, of anybody, but don’t draw Muhammad, because that's racism… Why is it racism? When you say that the immigrants have problems in their neighborhood, the [left] says: 'Don’t talk about the immigrants. They are victims of the West.' Man, the [immigrants] are killing one another. Their neighborhoods have become dreadful. No, you cannot criticize the immigrants, or else you are labeled racist and Islamophobic. They picked up the term 'Islamophobia' from the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, and they keep talking about Islamophobia all the time.”

"In Denmark, when a Muslim kid comes to school with bruises on his face or neck, nobody says anything. They leave him alone. But if they see bruises on a white Danish kid, they report it to the police and the social services, so that they will come and investigate his family. But when the Muslims beat their kids, it is viewed as part of their culture. This is a despicable leftist approach. I call it the racism of low expectations. They look at a Muslim and say: He will never be like us. He cannot be expected to uphold human rights, to accept criticism, or to accept dissenting views. They view Muslims as barbaric savages. I saw to my Muslim brothers: Don't be pleased that these people are defending you. They are looking down on you. It's true that I myself criticize you and your religion, but I respect you and your intellect. I want you to be better and to gain your rights. I don't want you to be satisfied by someone who pats you on the back.” (...)

"The [leftists] have a psychological complex towards their Western countries. They hate capitalism. They hate America. They hate the West. They see the West as the worst thing in the world, and they embrace and defend anything that is anti-West. They always wanted to defend the working class, but there are no working classes in the world anymore. (...)

With the working class gone, the leftists were looking for someone to defend, so they got us the 'Third World' – our beloved people of the 'Third World,' who are persecuted by colonialism, imperialism, and whatnot… Bring me a 'Third World' to defend… But the 'Third World' is no longer what it used to be, and nobody uses that phrase, so along came the immigrants, especially the Muslims ones. They come to the West... How nice! Come, I will defend you. Be quiet, and let me defend you. Don't say a word, and I will get you your rights. Some Syrian refugees who come here to Germany are young and eager to work and learn German. They want to make something of themselves before it's too late. They know that things in Germany might change, and they would be sent back, just like that. If economic or political conditions change, or if a right-wing party comes to power… So the young want to start… But you see that the leftists who help them say to them: 'You are still traumatized. You are still affected by the war.' Traumatized? They want to work. But they are told it’s not time yet. They want to keep them in the role of the victim. They want to keep them in a jar or in a zoo cage, like monkeys.

"This is the left that deals with the Muslims. These leftists defend the hijab and make a hijab-clad Barbie doll. The leftists are very happy, even though the company did it for gain: 'How wonderful. They made a Barbie doll!' I will dedicate an episode of my show to this subject. I will talk about how they are promoting the hijab in Europe these days. In the past, they would say that the hijab represents modesty. But the Muslim Brotherhood realized the West would not go for that modesty business, so they changed their rhetoric. They began to say that the hijab symbolizes freedom, self-determination, and emancipation. Now they are saying that the hijab means empowerment of women. Seriously?! The hijab means empowerment of women? To hell with this deception. And the leftists willingly buy anything the Muslim Brotherhood sells them. They are oppressed… They are all victims of the West… I should dedicate an entire episode to this psychological issue. The European left has created a hierarchy of victims. The best victims are the victims of the West, of Israel, of imperialism, and of capitalism. But a Muslim who kills his wife is a 'poor little thing'… The West drove him to this…

"When a terrorist says in his message that he is killing infidels because he was told to do so by the Prophet and the Quran, and that he must cleanse the land from abomination and corruption, and he even quotes Quranic verses in support of his point of view – the leftists say to him: 'No, you didn’t do it because of your religion. You are marginalized. You are a victim of the West. You are a victim of racism. You are a victim of colonialism. You probably applied for a job and was rejected by the West. You must have tried to become part of society, but was rejected.' [The terrorist himself] cites the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran as the reason, and in his last testimony, he writes that he did it because of his religion, because he wants to break bread with the Prophet Muhammad in Paradise… But it’s to no avail. The left has him pegged as a victim. For the leftists, any Muslim or African is a victim of the West. That's pure racism. It means that they do not see Muslims or Africans as people responsible for their own lives. No, the leftists want someone to defend. They like to play the role of the advocate. They have a sort of 'mother complex' and want to protect someone – even if it is from the leftists themselves."

It hasn’t been no surprise that our biggest academic institutions have been funded by Saudi petro-dollars, which gave an open space for Islamists to infiltrate it and disseminate their ideology. The most moderate liberals are usually indoctrinated into believing that past Islamic societies were more advanced and progressive than the European West, which is why they frame things that we would consider discriminatory like the jizya and dhimmitude as some kind of enviable status where religious minorities are protected and respected when it was factually untrue.

The most shrewd of these far-leftists see this as an game against their political opponents and Islamists like Muslim Brotherhood members make the more natural allies since they share one thing in common: being control freaks. They work side by side to ensure their power base, say liberal memes in public to rally the useful idiots and the public with their media as propaganda arm. This way they can hope to get people they disagree with de-platformed, silenced or maybe even killed.

Case in point, Islamist apologist (and possible terrorist sympathizer) Omar Aziz has recently penned an article in response to the Christchurch attack denouncing atheist author Sam Harris for having emboldened the NZ terrorist into carrying out his attack. Harris pointed out that Aziz’s article is dishonest because he is aware of Harris’ political positions as someone who opposes fascism and identity politics of any kind, yet writes such an article wasn’t tailored at refuting his points, but to discredit him in the eyes of the masses who don’t know anything about Harris. Aziz is even more dishonest by the fact the terrorist manifesto doesn’t mention Harris once the whole time, but since the public will be discouraged from reading it (and it constitutes as an crime in New Zealand), its very fortunate into misleading the audience.

The most frustrating thing about this is that Muslims and liberals themselves that disagree with the collective are rebuked and persecuted by their own rather than by “the other side”. I can’t keep keep track of the number of Muslim reformers (adherents or atheists) that are criticized by the left such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, Mohammed Tawhidi, Ed Hussein, Zineb El Rhazoui or Tarek Fatah, I don’t even dare Google them to see what is the latest hit piece written by some leftist retard. On a even more serious note, some of these might actually have their lives in danger.

Zineb El Rhazoui was a writer in the Charlie Hebdo magazine who survived the 2015 massacre due to receiving a Holiday extension and being at her home in Casablanca when the attack took place where twelve of her friends were killed including Charb. After the massacre, extensive security routines became a part of Rhazoui's life. She avoids eating at restaurants, taking the train and later moving from place to place because Islamists have issued fatwas calling for her death. 

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali used to be a Dutch politician before having to move out of the country after her close friend Theo van Gogh was assassinated by a Moroccan Islamist for making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies.  Considering that two years before van Gogh’s death, Dutch politician Pym Fortuin (a gay Catholic mind you) was also assassinated by an jihadist, Ali’s safety could not be ensured in the Netherlands and she had to flee. 

Tarek Fatah is a liberal Indian Muslim who advocates for secularism, gay rights, opposes shariah law and other things. He regularly clashes with Canada’s Muslim community and in 2017, has been nearly assassinated by a man hired by Muslim mafioso Dawood Ibrahim.

Rather than drawing condemnation for, the left has been at best silent or ignorant, or at worse unsympathetic if not downright cheerleading for their deaths to happen:

When van Gogh was killed, Rohan Jayasekera made light of his death for “overusing his freedom of speech” to criticize Muslims (yet, Jayasekera gave a platform for Holocaust denier David Irving).

Former Charlie Hebdo employee Oliver Cyran said his former employees brought their deaths on themselves and also accused Rhazoui of being anti-Muslim racist, without revealing her name or gender to give the impression everyone in Hebdo were all white bigots. She further goes to own him by saying that (from Wikipedia):   

if she were raped "the websites that posted your article will definitely say I was asking for it because I don’t respect Islam," she observed that Cyran himself had implicitly endorsed all of this by embracing the "whole moralizing discourse about how one must 'respect Islam,' as demanded by the Islamists, who do not ask whether Islam respects other religions, or other people.”

How are we supposed to expect the people to uphold liberalism that can’t even protect their own free-thinkers and politicians who dare to speak out against Islamic radicalism, are going to protect the average individual. I live in Brazil where no-go areas are a sad reality of our lives, but when I look at what happens in places like Europe (specifically Sweden), I get terrified. Our drug dealers are really crazy, but none are willing to go as far as carrying out bomb attacks or are that much in a rush to get into Heaven.

And if you think the creation of Islamic states backed by the Left is unlikely, you are sorely mistaken. Islam makes up only 3% of the population in the USA, mostly concentrated in Minnesotta, yet the local politicians want to enforce blasphemy laws in response to the Christchurch attack. Minnesotta, the same state where Ilhan Omar came from and is buddies with Linda Sarsour. The people reading this and believing it to be pure paranoia would have been shitting bricks if a evangelical Christian conservative was making similar prepositions. 

The first people hurt by this of course will be liberals themselves; surely they have already been. Maria Ladenburger for example was the daughter of an top European Union official who was raped and drowned by an Afghan asylum seeker who was already arrested before for trying to rape a Greek woman and admitted in prison to have raped a girl in Iran even before that. More recently, two Scandinavian girls Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland were beheaded while in a trip to Morocco by ISIS militants. Several people on the far-right were specially unsympathetic, specially in the latter case it surfaced  that the girls were pro-migrants themselves.

It’s easy for certain heartless individuals on the right-wing to say “they had it coming” or “burn the coal? Pay the toll” with glee, but this is an symptom of Western liberal pampering where women in particular are raised to believe everyone will be as open-minded as they were. Even though Morocco is sure a nice to place to visit, its far from an ideal place to live if you are a Christian, a woman or specially a Scandinavian liberal. I’ve seen Scandinavians saying that liberal virtue-signalling is just an natural and innocent thing to do in their countries in order to fit in better. 

I am sad to say that its not just exclusive to Scandinavia. Ever since 9/11, vast portions of the Western Left have disgraced themselves by their failure to acknowledge the threats posed to security and social cohesion by radical and fundamentalist Islam, and a craven willingness to align with Islamists in opposition to American foreign policy, entangled in an obscurantist web of moral relativity, postcolonial theory, identity politics, anti-Zionism, and general moral confusion. Even back then, many leftist ideologues argued that the World Trade Center attack was a “justified” action because of the USA for supporting Israel and their actions in the Gulf War, never mind those weren’t related - bin Laden repeatedly used the sactions against Iraq to rally Muslims against the West but never had any love for Saddam Hussein and Ba’athism. The most infamous incident was an essay made by Ward Churchill where he basically called the 9/11 victims “little Eichemanns” (in reference to Adolf Eichemann, one of the architects of the Holocaust) because they were bureaucrats working for the “genocide in the Middle-East”. Not a very wise move.

I am for one sick and tired of their collusion, but I am afraid this won’t be the last time I write about such topic. While the outrage against Brunei applying sharia law appears to show that liberals will draw a line at somewhere, I don’t think this will amount to anything and I personally find their outrage hypocritical. I close this off with something for you to ponder: if you think the Muslims you know personally are moderates just ask them if they would like Sharia law to be legally enforced, then you will discover the truth about how moderate they claim to be.

#terrorism #rants #politics #persecution

[kapmarvin]

Would Brexit Have Happened If We Had Listened to Nick Griffin?

With March looming, I find my thoughts being cast back a decade. A spectre was haunting Britain, as Karl Marx might have said. But this spectre was no form of socialism. It was a political party who struck fear and disgust into the hearts of many – The British National Party. They were especially odious to people like myself whose difference is all too conspicuous. My parents emigrated to the UK from a commonwealth nation. They were the children of British colonialism, as were their parents. I was born in the UK, of mixed ethnicity, a British citizen. I am one of those who stand on both sides of the fence. But on the subject of immigration, I was very much partisan then; intolerant to anything but blanket approval of it. I read straight off the liberal script. And I was never more liberal than with my accusations of racism. A lot of British people were angered by my belligerence. But I felt no doubt regarding my moral superiority. The matter was simple to me then: you are either racist, or you are not. There was nothing in between, I believed. I was then as many are now: absolutely self-assured.

That began to change the night Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time. Not because Griffin won me over with his arguments. There was no way he could have – he was never allowed to make any. That is the reason I began to change my mind. Griffin may have been a condemnable person. But take any condemned person; by what process do they become so? If they are guilty, and if there is justice, they are condemned by the due process of law. But first: are they not heard?

Nick Griffin was not heard that night. He was barely allowed to finish a sentence. And all in the name of a democracy he was constantly accused of undermining, by individuals who uncharacteristically banded together to make a scapegoat of him, but only when they were not individually posturing as the epitomes of liberal democracy itself. I was dismayed by the sanctimonious hypocrisy of these individuals, exploiting the public’s emotions to gain stray power, and the blindness with which they perpetuated with one hand what they proudly proclaimed to undo with the other. To that extent, they were no better than the man they attacked. But most unfortunately, this has become a defining characteristic of the politics of our time.

That night I had hoped to see an honest discourse carried out in good faith that would release the tiger in order to tame it, and potentially heal a nation. What I saw instead was an organised public punishment beating that achieved nothing but the deeper suppression of a grievance that would only fester like a plague bacillus until the opportune moment finally arrived to strike; perhaps a referendum on whether to remain in or leave the European Union.

The program ended with the question, “Has the BBC handed the BNP an early Christmas gift by allowing Nick Griffin onto Question Time?” My answer was yes, the BNP had been handed an early Christmas gift. But not by the BBC, but by the political establishment for being foolish enough to think that silencing Nick Griffin would be an adequate solution to the problem he represented. Nick Griffin was invited onto Question Time because his popularity had reached such a height that it would have been undemocratic to not do so. The reason for his popularity was that he addressed a grievance that is everywhere seen but nowhere else addressed. A grievance that has been raised before and since Nick Griffin. He was only one branch of a tree with many branches. Enoch Powell before him, Nigel Farage since. All dismissed, rightly or wrongly, as racists, without ever quite eradicating racism itself. Why not? Because cutting off the branch does not kill the tree. The root of this problem is the felt deracination of a demographic of people who identify themselves as British.

Whatever your views on this grievance, time has shown us beyond any doubt that it will no longer go unheard without incurring great damage as a consequence. Immigration changes nations and makes immigrants of all who live in them, for who is left living in the same country? For those who neither solicit nor consent to this dizzying change, the effects are devastating. We can only add insult to injury by not listening to their pain. I for one feel that multiculturalism is a beautiful thing that can only be improved by including the British, who for the most part welcome us.

And let us remember that a decade ago we were only a year into the financial crisis and the resulting austerity that devastated the poorest among us. We were told it was necessary, that there were no jobs, though this did not stop the poor being blamed and stigmatised for the position they were left in. Even reality TV producers capitalised on their misery. The country had a frenzy demonising them. If it is true that a society should be judged by how they treat their weakest and most vulnerable members, then it is we who stand condemned.

Imagine the rage of the poorest and weakest Britons when suddenly thousands of people began pouring into the country, apparently taking up the lives they must have felt ought to be their own. I say apparently because the fact is that a lot of the work immigrants do in this country borders on modern slavery. But to those who were not only disenfranchised by austerity, but also blamed for their plight, the increase in immigration must have been a form of hypocrisy that has only since been rivalled by the leader of the very government that preached the necessities of a decade, so far, of austerity then giving away billions of tax-payers pounds to a reactionary party purely to cling to power. What would you do? Nobody in the political establishment spoke for them. And that should be no surprise, as we all know that, in the world of economics, when the diners put the restaurant out of business it is the cooks and waiters who foot the bill, fighting it out amongst themselves. Neither Briton nor immigrant are to blame or triumph. Both are exploited ruthlessly by a political and economic class that thrives on conquering what it has first divided. But as far as the moral narrative is concerned, it is undoubtedly Britons who were painted as the villains. These people were left in a state of existential impotence. Where could they direct their outrage if not at the new faces available to them; not those of politicians who are never available, but of the workforce that was growing all around them and over them. Racism is not innate; it is grown - as a result, in this case, of being forsaken by your own country just when you need your country’s help the most. We failed these people and turned our backs on them. And only one man at that time, and only a few before and since, tried to speak for them. If you want people to make better choices, you have to give them better choices they can make.  

The democratic way to have handled this problem then would have been to make the program an opportunity to welcome those grievances out into the open where they could have been discussed safely and without shame. Perhaps then the concerns of the aggrieved could have been integrated into the nation’s consciousness, as well as assimilated by more acceptable parties. That way, an incipient rapprochement could have been achieved that would have steered the course of British history away from where it ended up a decade later, and instead towards union. But we cut our nose off to spite our face, and proudly celebrated our perceived fait accompli. In reality, Nick Griffin walked onto that program a perpetrator, but left it a victim. We condemned him for intolerance by showing him intolerance, condemned his party and supporters for a lack of inclusion by excluding them. History has shown us that this is a form of political engagement that simply does not work - yet it seems to have only increased to the point of being the only form of engagement that remains today; socially, as well as politically. If it is true that tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance, then it is we who have become the tyrants.

We had better recover the lost art of listening soon. We cannot rely on our “leaders” to be responsible for us. And soon we will be alone.

#Brexit #Nick Griffin #BNP #Racism #Fascism #Immigration #BBC #Question Time