a large component of new age is a kind of neo-shamanism. this centers around connection to ancestors, or the land your ancestors came from. it also centers around alternative forms of healing, often via plants. easy to run the numbers on how this is presently politically parsed.

https://twitter.com/superloafcat/status/1919156066304090134

average new age person (who wouldnt identify this way obviously) is skeptical of institutions (often specific things like banking, media), government, normal medicine, historical narratives - “new age” itself could easily, perhaps best, be modeled a type of meta-conspiracy theory

[slaughter in kid's books]

recently, i was discussing with a friend if children's general aversion to killing animals was innate, or a modern phenomenon. his response was that it's completely modern: in fact, it's intentionally implanted as a social control mechanism.

[...] if you distance people from the process of obtaining their food, which entails slaughter, it's easier to control them.

obviously, i have no way of knowing if this is true, but i find this interesting because: i have it. despite my ideology, i have the aversion and always have.

one noticeable aspect of older media is that to “be political” for normal people usually just meant adopting a particular niche cause, something like “save tigers”, and to be have the now common level of awareness about day to day politicians and events made you a politics junkie there was a time within recent memory where being the “political friend” just meant that you thought people shouldnt throw plastic into the ocean. that was it.

i was sitting in an office recently and looked down at a table of magazines. one had a decorated cake on the cover. i asked myself: is it real, or AI? all images will now be run through this hermeneutic. this is, literally, “dehumanizing”: to deprive of positive human qualities.

https://twitter.com/toys_retro/status/1910077872431403410

once again the AI image conversation should be steered away from “is it good or bad?”, “is it cool or lame?” (subjective, no way to prove these) towards: what does it mean? what does it do? but this angle is less explosively polarizing and more difficult to get attention with.

zygmunt bauman (modern social theorist) says that the constantly shifting and unclear nature of our time period also applies to interpersonal relationships: no one is quite sure what it means, specifically, to be a parent, a grandparent, a friend, a coworker, and so on.

[…] this sounds nonsensical at first - we can define all these terms easily: what a friend or grandparent is. but no one is clear on the obligations that these relationships entail, their day to day norms, what is expected, what assumptions are being made on either side: all unclear.

the white house actually used to look like this (this is not a joke)

https://twitter.com/michellelprice/status/1909334008640815289

photos instead of paintings (all this was later removed):

it looks like the AI conversation is going to cement around “are artists are coping or not” but id like to submit a second option: that its worthy of skepticism that my broke friends are beholden to copyright laws that apparently don’t apply to tech people making a lot of money the AI question really should be: are we doing wild west on copyright laws or not. if we are, okay - then that should apply to everyone. if we’re not - okay, then that should apply to everyone. everyone is basically arguing that now tech companies get to be the exception to them.

one key aspect of postmodernism is that art styles are self-consciously deployed as pastiche. this means theyre just used as surface, for what they represent: they become interchangeable. these almost meaningless academic concepts will increasingly characterize your everyday life

https://twitter.com/pjaccetturo/status/1904928890126053654

when an entire artistic milieu is used just for what it represents, not what it actually is (this already happened a long time ago), the blowback is that it becomes impossible to genuinely use and engage with those milieus. you can’t decide to not be self aware of this process.

https://twitter.com/lxrjl/status/1905002004797120845

the 'people not having kids' trend: fascinating. people can do whatever. but as a larger trend, clearly something is up. likewise, when i ask the older generation why they all had kids, they don't know. they "just did"

so i looked up why non-human animals might not breed

[...] one fascination i have with this topic is that it seems to be instinctual, thus the turn to animals. in my parents friend group, they all had kids around the same time. i (probably too much) grilled them about why they all did this and they all gave some version of "we just did"

‘what does the fox sign?’
(meta-animals in children’s literature)

animals seem to have an inherent symbolic content: winged birds have always been related to the spirit, we call someone “a rat” or “a pig”, or as in the intuitive relationship between lions and being a king.

[…] this is one level of symbolism: what does each animal mean? we can also climb up to a higher question: what do “animals” mean, as a class? how do we perceive and depict “animal”-ness? one case study of this is in an art and literature intersection often overlooked: kid’s books.

here's a book called richard scarry's busy busy world. i find this book extremely interesting from a pedagogical perspective.

our culture has taken the position of having an extreme aversion to stereotypes. well, that's all this book is: the stereotypes of each country.

[...] the story in france has people in fancy restaurants. the story in switzerland has goats climbing mountains. the story in mexico has a guy eating beans and buying clay pots. the story in india has a fortune teller. and so on. the entire content is just basic stereotypes.

what is the nature of the self in christian eschatology?

for those unfamiliar, eschatology is a branch of theology that just means, "how everything ends up". the final state of things. end of the story. how does this all play out? how the pieces land: that's eschatology.

[...] in the eastern system i'm the most familiar with, buddhism, there's a concept called shunyata. usually translated as emptiness - it means things are empty of inherent existence. like a sweater: you can see the sweater, but if you keep pulling threads off, you never get "it".

today i flew to nyc. a guy tells me they just implemented a program where, to drive into lower manhattan, you have to pay $9. its to ease traffic congestion.

why is this unethical? well, if youre familiar with the work of B.F. skinner, its very easy to explain.

here’s why: […] skinner himself wouldnt have seen this as unethical, but would have clearly recognized it as a form of operant conditioning (conditioning operants, changing people’s volitional actions) - as opposed to classical conditioning (pavlov’s dogs drooling)

can we find it on this chart?

it's fascinating how quickly a culture's conception of a topic can change. an entire civilization can basically forget or remember large pieces of its own history.

one of the first recent psychologists to treat the phenomenon of self-harm is a guy named steven levenkron.

[...] of course the phenomenon of self-harm had probably gotten people referred to psychologists for some time. however, when he told his colleagues he was opening a practice specifically focusing on people who engaged in self-mutilation, he got an interesting response from them.

i have a folder on my computer called:

“insane christmas vibes 1850-1950”

here are some things from it: the above image is louis rhead

this one is eugene grasset:

every aspect of having a pregnant wife is almost designed to be a thought experiment that illuminates 1000 aspects of our culture that are always there, but mostly invisible - and therefore difficult to grab until they’re impressing upon you - then suddenly, they’re right there.

https://twitter.com/borjomidrinker/status/1870277191562604922

consider: the due date. how do they know what day your baby is supposed to be born? well, they give you this date. they don’t tell you, generally (lets presume not out of malevolence) that something like 5% of babies are actually born on their due date. almost no one knows this.

one thing i've enjoy about the internet is getting a window into aspects of people's story that they would never share in normal everyday life. if you're interested here's one of mine.

my life changed forever here, off the main street in burlington vermont. it looks like this:

https://twitter.com/owenbroadcast/status/1868662807069397216

i was somewhere around my early teens, in a bookstore. i looked up on a bookshelf and saw a purple book spine. i just grabbed it. there was some feeling of providence about this book. i was called to take this book from the shelf.

this is the book. it's called stencil pirates.

if, at some point, you lived around a TV, you may be familiar with ‘festivus’: a holiday george costanza’s father created on seinfeld. as a resident atypical american religion enjoyer, let’s take a slightly academic religious ethnography pass over this (there will be magic).

… festivus is presented as a holiday created by george’s father as a reaction against commercialism. this holiday is then actually celebrated, and becomes a family tradition.

consciously crafting religion - live. a joke, but its real. is there an existing framework for this? yes.

johnny hart was an american cartoonist who started a comic called B.C. in 1958. he also created another popular strip called 'wizard of id'.

he was called "the most widely read christian of our time," by a former director of the office of public liaison at the white house.

... that designation may seem somewhat absurd, but he was still doing B.C. when he died in the 2000s. considering he made two of the most popular american newspaper comics, and ran them for about half a century - in light of how many people read books, it might actually be the case.

bizarre unnavigable part of being a parent is that there is no way to reveal the information that you dont give your kid any screens without making other parents upset. even if you intentionally set out to not tell them, if they dig enough, and find out, they then become upset. you can laugh about it, or blame it on any reason, or pad it infinitely with how much you love screens, or how youre just an idiot and dont know anything about parenting and are just winging it: doesnt matter. people just become upset at the information. its upsetting information

i have critical art history information. a guy named bob eckstein wrote a book called 'the history of the snowman' and this was the earliest image of a snowman he could find anywhere, from a dutch book of hours in the 1380s: he also claimed this was a snowman, from 1603 (yellow circle). real "that guy" research hours