I owe @KaylinEvergreen and Dionysos, one of my absolute _favorite_ Hellenic deities, a bit of attention. so here it is!

Dionysos, or "Bacchus" as he's been called in Greece and Rome, is an unusual addition to the Hellenic pantheon—a late addition, thought to be imported.

(1/x) his own mythology seems to reflect the likelihood that the worship of Dionysos came in from the East: the general story is that he was born in Thrace, had a long period of wandering abroad, then returned to Greece—triumphantly drunk off his arse.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus

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there's a *lie* that #CSLewis told about himself in public, frequently. there were a lot of lies that he told about himself in public—not _malicious_ lies, but still lies.

this is something that Western society has trouble with: grasping that lies need not be malicious.

(1/x) if you say something factually incorrect, you're a *liar*, even if you believe the lies to be truths. @MattWalshBlog or @realchrisrufo BELIEVE their propaganda lies about trans people, and they double and treble and quadruple down on believing them, when challenged, but...

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the Pnictogen Wing has a hypothesis about @elonmusk's decision to ruin the public @Twitter API—it's not a hypothesis we've too much confidence in, but still we offer it: we think ONE of the purposes of doing this was to make Musk's own Twitter activities harder to analyze.

(1/x) yes, there's lots of other reasons that the @elonmusk / @mtaibbi / @GOP #Twitter fash gang would have for destroying the ability of outsiders to write Twitter applications. the fash crowd themselves make heavy use of bots, sock-puppet accounts, and other Twitter trickery.

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there's a very vague idea for a thread I've been chasing around my head all day. let me see if I can tease it out. I'll tell you the starting point: the writing of Mr. William Gibson (@GreatDismal) and his oft-quoted sentiment that the very rich aren't remotely human.

(1/x) that quote still *bothers* me. I've admitted this before (to Mr. @GreatDismal, even)—I have an immense inward aversion to thinking about anyone like that. even Elon Musk, grotesque as he is...I've tried over and over to find some trace of healthful human emotions in him.

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one thing that right-wing people (like @NateSilver538) don't quite get about being "right wing": whatever these people *call* themselves, however they choose to label themselves, in reality they're as *right wing* as their most extreme right-wing beliefs, firmly held.

(1/x) @NateSilver538 endorses the racist conspiracy approach to the #COVID19 crisis, i.e. "permit millions to die while blaming it all on China", and that's a *far right wing* belief. it doesn't matter what ELSE Nate Silver thinks he believes—it's not likely he even quite knows.

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#purity.

purity is the obsession of bigots, who define themselves as perfect and hence demand perfection in others.

one sees that arrogance constantly in the behavior of bigots like @NateSilver538 and @Cernovich. they act like nothing matters more than their approval.

(1/x) Christians habitually have been obsessed with purity and perfection, which they only ever find in things they can't really see. there's a kind of diffuse Gnostic fallacy that pervades Christianity—a belief that there's something intrinsically sinful about *matter itself*.

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I'd like to talk about one of the most reliable weapons of bigotry. it's especially a "toxic male" thing—you can view "toxic masculinity" as a form of bigotry, being bigoted about being male—but it's a general-purpose weapon for bigots. @bindelj and @Docstockk use it.

(1/x) it's *indignation*. point out something unpleasant to a bigot, and they take refuge in sputtering "how could you ever say such a thing??"

"me?! a BIGOT??? how dare you!!" @MattWalshBlog might say. or @mtracey or @mtaibbi or @NateSilver538 or @HJoyceGender or @elonmusk or—

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we feel like maybe we should finally read up on #CSLewis's correspondence; there's a volume, edited by Warnie Lewis and Walter Hooper (whom we do not trust) and who knows what might have been left out, but at least it's a start.

we have...well, inklings.

~Chara that's not an allusion to Prof. Williams (who has...been in correspondence with us) but rather our fears that Lewis might have catalyzed the growth of the American racist right-wing, the "evangelical" movement that formed as a reaction to Black civil rights struggles.

~Chara

my friend @ArmlessKittyfox gets straight to the point: all Christians, at some point, have to take a measure of responsibility in the general crimes and destruction wrought by Christianity. Christians have so far *fled* from their own extremists. they've shown no courage.

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https://twitter.com/ArmlessKittyfox/status/1633117945663483906

there used to be a hashtag, #NotAllChristians—it got ridiculed and abandoned, for "Not All Christians" is never a standard that's applied to Islam or other religions, nor to the "ideologies" that right-wing Christians like @MattWalshBlog and @DouthatNYT purport to oppose.

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ah, more topics of interest.

I'm sure folks have noticed the extreme tendency in the @elonmusk / @mtaibbi / @NateSilver538 fascıst circle to one-size-fits-all explanations for...well, everything! "tribalism" and "narrative" are like Elon Musk's infamous "X App" fixation.

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https://twitter.com/KrisAtLarge/status/1633234960063819778

they're like the dreary Campbell "monomyth" that dullards like @jordanbpeterson think is actually a valid intellectual concept, when really it's just the same Western daydream: the Theory of Everything. the single concept or doctrine that explains...everything there is.

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"it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game," that well-known bromide about #sports and sportsmanship (@mtaibbi and @NateSilver538 may or may not remember this clichéd phrase) is ultimately a statement about *ethics*. or morality, if you like.

(1/x) @elonmusk and @NateSilver538 and @mtaibbi, and their entire reactionary movement, have habituated themselves to rolling their eyes at talk of "morality", even though they do try to pretend to be moral. they always fail; Elon Musk defends "free speech" through censorship.

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oh, yes, let me cite some particular *spiritual* help I've gotten. you can believe that or not =p

being friends with Medusa of Sarpedon is very useful when you're always fighting like me. she can just sort of...stare at people. she's really good at staring people down.

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https://twitter.com/KrisAtLarge/status/1633220453589454849

I promise Medea of Colchis that Kris and the rest of us will be taking magical study more assiduously. she's had an uphill struggle with us, trying to get us to *think magically*, to think of magic as a routine tool, something that can be studied like I might study math.

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I feel like maybe the whole world is going to be getting some good news soon—I've wanted to believe in #hope, and I'm starting to feel it more often. soon, I hope, the Pnictogen Wing will have important things to do than kick @NateSilver538 or @elonmusk around in public.

(1/x) I feel moved to thank some particular people. probably a LOT of people. thousands, millions! I'm not sure where to start.

my family here in Seattle—Daria, Gravislizard, @KaylinEvergreen, and all the pretty cats and reptiles of the Bramble House—they've been so patient.

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let's talk about this some more—the fact that @elonmusk and @mtaibbi and other villains of the world truly do resemble *cartoon* villains, comic-book villains...partly because they all copy their styles from cartoons and comic-books. but then, so do people who aren't evil.

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https://twitter.com/KrisAtLarge/status/1632988967699353601

I've got nothing against people who copy their style from, I dunno, Sailor Pluto or Kamen Rider Ghost or whatever other really *heroic* people are to be found in popular entertainment. it's not copying comic books that's the @elonmusk problem; it's copying the Bad Guys™.

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it's possible for propaganda to be great art. it's not *unknown* even if most propaganda we're used to seeing in Western lands is like @DennisPrager or @mtaibbi propaganda, i.e. utter trash.

Eisenstein's "Potemkin" and Zhang Yimou's "Hero" come to mind as *good* examples.

(1/x) I *love* the movie "Hero" and yet I must remind myself, all the time, that it's propaganda—it's a supremely crafted and beautiful work of art that's designed to nudge you emotionally towards Chinese nationalism and the premise that Emperor Qin Shi Huang was a great leader.

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there's something I'd like to point out about @NateSilver538's recent behavior. it's important when trying to understand these awful people just how they *disguise* themselves. the excuses they utter, and in _what order_, matters a lot in understanding them.

(1/x) nothing @NateSilver538 *ever says* in public ought to be taken at face value. he's a bigot; he tells whatever lies are necessary to protect that. but there's a _pattern_ to the lies. there's a kind of boom-and-bust pattern to bigoted behavior. I'll try to explain.

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I think one of the most *astonishing* things that I've had to learn to accept about the modern Western political scene, at least as it exists on Twitter, is that our worst enemies really _are_ like something out of a comic or a bad 1980s cartoon show. they're *ridiculous*.

(1/x) remember *Gargamel*? I can't recall exactly how old I was when I knew about "The Smurfs", and watched it merely because it was fantasy-themed—even in childhood, I didn't think too much of the show. what the heck was going on with Smurfette? but Gargamel was something else.

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what's the line between *criticism* and *abuse*? I've skated it, I've blundered over that line many times—I know very well that I've said a lot of plain WRONG things. I've lit into people for bad reasons and I've gone too far. I've been trying to dial it back all my life.

(1/x) I'm still dialing. I'm like Jack Lemmon in the infamous story about Billy Wilder (who had no illusions about Lemmon's hamminess, i.e. his tendency to overact) in which Wilder asks Lemmon to give it "just a little less" for too many takes in a row, until Lemmon explodes.

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there's a curdled *spite* that's evident in people like @NateSilver538 and @mtaibbi and @bariweiss, not to mention the racist pseudoscientists and "dark intellectual" cranks they're inclined to heed—the @lesswrong / @slatestarcodex people. they stink of academic failure.

(1/x) @AEI propagandist @charlesmurray is another example. a genuine scientist humiliated him and Murray still grumbles—he's still festering with resentment that he's been kicked into the right-wing fringe. the "American Enterprise Institute" may sound impressive but it's not.

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there's a LOT of logical fallacies based on the same general principle: abuse of *probability*. peddlers of racist Wuhan Fu Manchu theories of #COVID19 like @NateSilver538 and @mtaibbi, and "scientific racists" like @EPoe187 and @charlesmurray, love probability fallacies.

(1/x) probability and statistics have given racists like @SwipeWright and @NateSilver538 more jargon to work with even than "biology". I'll illustrate the general method with a specific fallacy, the fallacy of equally balanced "sides" (there's always only two of them, too!)

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Western civilization has crystallized round a number of crude and even *absurd* secular myths. there's a Western "civic religion", with different flavors and denominations based on nation and region.

what do I mean by "civic religion"? let me start with a visible example.

(1/x) my example is the *American flag*, decorated with a typically inappropriate and insulting American symbol: the bald eagle, which hardly any American actually respects, because hardly any American respects the natural world.

there's a *civic religion* of "The Flag".

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