today is st.martin's day, also known as martinmas. the story of st. martin is that he had a coat, and cut part of it off to help another man keep warm

a lot of waldorf (anthroposophy) stuff is about catholic saints. on martinmas, they do a lantern walk. aesthetically, its cool:


the kids line up with lanterns they made and walk out into the darkness in a line. it has an obvious symbolic component: being the light in the darkness, going into the dark part of the year - st. martin's act, and others like it, that we can do, as illuminating a dark world:

after elections, much is made about how the educated vote vs the uneducated. ive benefited from education and am generally a book nerd, but there are dimensions to the educated vs uneducated dichotomy that dont fit into intelligent vs unintelligent. one is: cause and effect

… when you receive education, you are not “a cause”: you are “an effect”. you are receiving. you are there to be the effect of the educational institution. some people that are well educated have been in this state for years - this receptive state has been the focus of their life.

appalachia is a crazy place. “first and last frontier”. millions of people, but only one state is fully in it (west virginia) so it flys under the radar as a region - unlike the pacific northwest, the midwest, the south, which you can associate with many full states.

https://twitter.com/appyortho/status/1854559445314859436

appalachia took the brunt of having no environmental regulations at the time. they basically blew off the tops of mountains to strip them and things like that. in my opinion you can kind of code the increasing environmentalist vibe as you scan america east to west, starting here.

king of the hill, soon to be rebooted, has a voting episode. it ends with a voting PSA, taking the typical angle of: "what's important is that YOU vote" - implied: "that's more important than who you vote for".

its worth asking: did anyone ever actually feel this way?

... public voting PSAs take this angle for obvious reasons - entering the world of "popular civics" or "the civic religion" at this time had this notice on the door

but was it real? were there really a number of people so "lawfully neutral" that they actually thought this was real?

'the nightmare before christmas' was released 31 years ago today.

a strange film: after three decades, its still a feature of the cultural landscape (year round), you see its imagery often - it clearly has a special relationship to us.

this year, i tried to figure out why

... some people seem to instinctually take on this movie as part of their personality. i remember going to a girl's room once and she had a nightmare before christmas blanket. "yeah, that makes sense". people wear shirts of it, bumper stickers - all year, not just at either holiday.

one time i worked at a front desk in new york. we got what i call “jewish missionaries”: orthodox jews who want to get non-orthodox jews to be orthodox, or at least be more jewish.

so, they walk in the front door and ask, “is anyone that works here jewish?”.

“uh… probably“

… i mean, this is an arts building in new york.

so they (two guys) ask, “alright, can you check?”

…can i check… … uh… well surprisingly i do not have a list of jews here. you might imagine a variety of people would be kind of sensitive about that.

“uh… no. i cant check”

…

the problem with postmodernism and modernism isnt that its nonsensical or comically incorrect - its that it accurately describes the condition of this time. its annoying because its inescapable. essentially everyone and everything at this time is postmodern. thats why it sucks.

https://twitter.com/cernovich/status/1849157545518342494

the postmodernists are basically correct about what this time is and what its like living at this time. the mistake is to take this statement and infer that this means “…and thats a good thing”. in my opinion a lot of people cripple themselves by conflating these two things.

a big shift in my understanding of life has been an extreme distinction between intellectual and experiential knowledge. this seems obvious at first (reading about swimming vs. actual swimming), but the reality is unintuitive: you are often learning things you already know. this is often difficult to casually explain to people, and you sound like an idiot. real “i knew fire was hot, but then i touched it and was like ‘wow, it’s hot’” type situation. uh, you didn’t know that already? everyone knows that. well, i just re-filed that knowledge. sorry.

the relationship between mormonism and freemasonry is actual esoteric americana. unfortunately its too dynamic to fit into one point so you rarely get the whole picture. a crazy fact is that when the book of mormon was published it was (casually) called the “anti-masonick bible”:

https://twitter.com/nancy023922191/status/1847051985956360470

mormon scripture and cosmology (imo) essentially has the concept of conspiracy (as in conspiracy theories) woven directly into it. in the book of mormon they’re called “secret combinations”. in fact in some of joseph smith’s work cain is basically in one of these with satan.

when you have a kid, its hard not to realize that there are 10,000 ways that society checks you to make sure that you're "on script" - as opposed to being "off script". what you're legally allowed to do is perpendicular to "the script". its metalegal enforcement of social norms.

https://twitter.com/AdeleScalia/status/1844051006369489115

these are essentially (unironically) vibe checks that dovetail with the legal system via the subjective assessment of people with official credentials. so you might be allowed to do something - on paper, but if you trip the wrong wire, someone with credentials can be "concerned"

lately a topic around me has been "intentional communities". my questions about these projects always follow one path - one that is slightly annoying, but critical. it also applies to religion

sadly, it involves starting with some concepts from structuralism and post-modernism post-modern academic stuff, which you also get in online discourse, has an obsession with "the other". terms like "otherization", and questions about "who is excluded" - you can feel a fixation with who is put on the outside of any term or barrier or institution, all the time.

recently a big topic of conversation on here has been why taking ayahuasca seems to result in these large changes for people. the stereotype of someone taking one of these drugs and then radically shifting their life path is accurate. but why? heres an attempt to explain it

...

https://twitter.com/sporadicalia/status/1842240849721115087

i do obviously have religious views, believe in the spirit, spirit things, literal demons, and so on - but i think there is also a mental explanation that accounts for some percent of this. i see people grasping in this direction, and its difficult. heres the missing piece (imo)

tomorrow is michaelmas, the feast day for saint michael - an archangel most famous for slaying ‘the dragon’

one cool tradition i’ve seen in waldorf world is dragon bread: making a bread dragon, then using it to tell the saint michael story (and cutting its head off, if you want)





some people get a weird vibe from waldorf stuff because its related to anthroposophy, which we might say does not fit itself into standard christianity. i think regardless of that, there are some cool traditions that kids get a lot out of that fit with any spiritual pedagogy:

birth is one of the only constants that stretches back to the first people. of course, in modern times, all of these constants have an inverted element.

we can model most people's pregnancies and birth experiences as a process of gradually knowing: of gaining information.

... you learn that you or your wife are pregnant via a physical test - basically, a small "machine". then, you get to see the baby via an ultrasound. you see its feet, its face, they also let you hear its heartbeat. these are all sensory experiences, that impress firmly upon you.

[modernity, spirit, internet dating discourse]

you have attributes: your job, your hometown, your hobbies, your accomplishments, your past, and so on

i generally break up any view of "the self" along an axis. on one end, all that stuff: thats you - or, thats really part of you on the other end, it's the opposite. all that stuff is obscuring the real you

yeah, you have a job, stuff you did, stuff you like, where you're from, your family, but that's not really you, maan. your real self is underneath all that. you have go under that, to the real self

a brief recap of the entirety of human history through the lens of:

whats your vibe on being stuck in a jar?

1. post-modern: i would like to get out of the jar

our most recent cultural touchstone for being stuck in a jar is 'the matrix'. here, everyone is in a jar.

[...] neo gets out of the jar. the jar was a good time, if you're in it, but he was born into the jar. he didn't choose to be in a jar

you can see baudrillards book 'simulacra and simulation' in the film. likewise, for baudrillard, the jar was society's interlocking fake symbols, man

[postmodern themes and christian scenes]

jean lyotard, who presumably had an issue with modernity due to sharing his name with a piece of modern sportswear, gave a great and succinct definition for "postmodernism":

postmodernism is incredulity towards metanarratives.

[...]

https://twitter.com/owenbroadcast/status/1825885558641475694

thats it. i like this definition because its brief, and cuts right to the heart of one of the most broadly and confusingly used terms online these days. it really pins down the vibe of "postmodernism is just ... like... taking things apart, sort of, i guess", that you get online

this was one of “the” topics on here yesterday. i have no opinions or knowledge about this guy.

the function of propaganda isnt to convince people of something. thats what propaganda is like in movies.

in reality, one main function of propaganda is “perceptual narrowing”.

…

https://twitter.com/marlene4719/status/1824476348129185814

you watch a movie or read a comic book, and they show you “propaganda” in that universe. its usually something like “this war is good”, and narratively, that convinces people that the war is good.

real propaganda generally isnt like that. people are generally already convinced.

its a common trope that children are more in touch with something like "the spiritual realm". many marian apparitions are to children, you hear people say children can see things we cant

children can also be the subject of prophecy: the observed, rather than the observer

[...] in some tellings of 'sleeping beauty', the princess is given a curse by an evil witch: a prophecy, that on her sixteenth birthday she'll prick her finger and die. this can be altered, by another fairy, who makes it so she'll sleep instead of die, but it can't just be erased.

[george constanza and soviet mind control]

in the seinfeld episode 'the blood', george is surprised that his girlfriend lights a stick of vanilla incense before lovemaking. this sweet food scent has such a powerful effect on him that he leaves early, ravenously hungry.

[...] he assumes that she will light the incense again the next time he's at her apartment. he's correct - but this time he is prepared. he's brought food, so he doesn't have to leave early. in fact, they somewhat unexpectedly end up eating together during the lovemaking process.

a few months ago i found out that my great grandmother once got caught, by her husband, having sex at a factory she worked at with some guy, and she had a kid, who they gave away, so theres a secret lost line of my family out there somewhere

i thought that was interesting

... apparently when she started looking super pregnant, they sent her away somewhere. she had the kid, someone adopted him, and that was it.

decades later he found my grandmother, but she basically didn't want anything to do with him.

brutal. of course, i have no idea who he is.