Learning that John Gardner's GRENDEL is a vicious takedown of Sartre makes me understand why I loved it even as a young prog, and already makes even the second page of my reread an order of magnitude funnier than when I first took it in
That's the greatest part of it as art—it's written so that by the end, you *do* pity Grendel. But you also believe the world is made a better place when
~SPOILER ALERT~
Beowulf rips his limbs off and leaves him for dead
This is very similar, dramatically, to how Tolkien treats Gollum
But in Tolkien's realm, where Christianity is still in charge, Gollum is also *physically* weak—an object of pity, but overpowered by mere hobbits, once they understand what they're up against
Gardner writes from both a deeper history AND the understanding of what Sartre represents. He gets that this form of chaos is both very old, was once long-defeated, but is being resurrected as something MONSTROUSLY strong—and requires new Beowulfs to rip it limb-from-limb
To put it another way, Tolkien said: Here are our beliefs and our traditions, and if you hold to them, the King will return to restore peace
George RR Martin then said: lol no, all you say is lies, it was always about power, and this is its bloody and awful result
Yet 20 years before Game of Thrones, Gardner held up a black mirror in Grendel, and said No: this is you + your beliefs: you will rip the thin shreds of civilization apart in the name of your godless justice—and be baffled when something emerges that no longer cares to pity you
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The entire BLM movement is based on lies. But since it's backed by elite institutions who have no interest in actual truth—and who actively brainwash people to support their power in defiance of the truth—"voting" is exposed as a means of laundering power through "public opinion"
Good lord, he really is gonna get fired and have to start his own Joe Rogan thing, isn't he. What he's saying is indistinguishable from a dissident right groupchat whose opinions would get every single participant unpersoned.
Is there anything more revealing than the corpse of Jon Stewart getting trotted out every two years to push some ossified irrelevancy while Ol' Bowtie emerges as a political tour de force
"Clown nose on, clown nose off" was the most devastating own of the 21st century
Since the core tenet of the progressive faith is that all people are equal, resources like "education" are canonized as the only reason for inequality.
But if people privately spent the exact same quantity of resources on direct education, it would be recast as "privilege"
Belief in perfect equality means that creating it is a moral imperative. Infinite resources must be spent to achieve it
Since equality is curiously slow in arriving, more and more resources are spent creating the elitely educated administrative class capable of building utopia
Since this class is at the core of the progressive faith, it is intrinsically high-status. That means that huge numbers of people will fight to become part of it.
As it populates more and more of the elites and the bureaucratic middle class...
"Fear, finger-pointing, and militaristic action against the virus are unproductive. We may be better off adjusting to a new normal of periodic outbreaks."
The Cathedral appears to be mutating into something overtly hostile to continued human existence.
The Spanish flu killed 50-100 million people at a time when the global population was about 1.8 billion.
In today's terms, that would be 200-400 million deaths.
...why do outlets like Buzzfeed and Wired keep insisting there's nothing we can do about this?
It's strange that the possibility of the planet getting a couple of degrees warmer is justification for upending entire economies and societies, but the possibility of regular outbreaks of mega-death plagues is apparently "part and parcel of living in a global world"
The sustained act of delaying satisfaction to the reader is the core of drama, the hardest art of storytelling. It is especially true of horror, where the imagination is provoked to run wild and overwhelm all reason
The *entire point* of Lovecraft's mythology is these monsters are
a) beyond human comprehension
b) any enduring contact with them that might let you *start* to comprehend them will drive you insane, unable to describe them: that's how inhuman they are
The 2nd Amendment was designed to prevent need for a nat'l standing army which, in Europe, was a pretty new development—often used to conquer a nation's own people
To prevent this, 2A designated that power to militias formed by individual citizens. This is what it was made for
Attempting to strip the citizens of the ability to bear individual arms—rendering them incapable of assembling into a militia capable of defending the broader rights of the citizens against government conquest—is literally what the militia was empowered to stop
I'm not a big fan of democracy, but the historic, core roots of democracy have always relied on its individual citizens being
a) very well armed, and
b) capable of wielding those arms in defense of their nation when it came under threat