[esoteric baby semiotics]

it is difficult to imagine something more wholesome than a baby. children are, in a way, the benchmark for what wholesome is. likewise, if you were asked to think of content that was unwholesome one subject that would immediately come to mind is sex

… it seems noteworthy then for those interested in symbolism, cosmology, religion, or sociology (life in general) to observe that these are only oppositional concepts when it comes to practical day to day terrestrial life. on deeper level, they are more than directly related.

one way to conceptualize mormonism historically is that it re-orients the christian system around the family unit, as we might say that at other times (possibly now, i cant say) it was organized around groups of monastics. this allows them to make statements like this one:

https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles/status/1778248518731198522

most american christians intuit that there is something essential about the family and marriage - but they lack the theological basis to say its essential. in my opinion they really feel that its “the whole point” and talk this way, but its hard to square in their big picture

one time, years ago, a guys dog brought fleas into my house.

the experience of having fleas goes like this: you see a tiny dot. you poke it, then its gone: the flea jumped when you touched it.

cycle: the visual stimuli, the suspicion, then the confirmation. over and over.

… this happens to you somewhere between one hundred to one thousand times, at random moments, all the time, until you get rid of them (which i did). then, you still think about it after. youre poking random black dots you never would have noticed before, just to check.

one evangelist wrote something like, "out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks".

this is a great principle for cultural analysis: whats really in a heart just comes out of the mouth.

one example: no one really thinks the point of public school is to make you smarter. im around a lot of parents, people with kids: that means people discuss homeschooling a lot. this discussion is also found online now, virtually everywhere

when the topic surfaces, if someone objects, sometimes people will show data about homeschooled kids generally doing well

lyotard characterized postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives”. modern man lives via provisional signifiers: aware of their arbitrariness as he freely chooses or creates them. this state and one potential exit from it is documented in 'harold and the purple crayon'. previous readings of the text have characterized harold in terms of eastern metaphysics, for example (most commonly) seeing harold's free construction of an empty yet tangible reality as an enacting of shunyata, the doctrine of emptiness of inherent existence found in nagarjuna.

any current mainstream conversation about our culture is dominated by a particular concept: the unconscious bias. said more philosophically: the unchecked presupposition

the idea that there are these hidden threads deep in the cultural mind, that affect how we see things

[...] it would be impossible to participate in any cultural discourse at this time without understanding this concept. its a kind of fascination for this time period. luckily, its also very intuitive, so everyone understands it.

everyone knows what this is, and they have examples.

many years ago as an exercise i got the largest notebook i could find and tried to record everything i remembered about my life until i left high school, all the way through, start to finish, in a few sittings

one huge issue i encountered here was impossible event sequences

.. i kept hitting these walls while trying to fit it all into a narrative. not misremembering - an inability to stack what i knew to be facts in a logical order.

i went to ohio with bryan. but then we stopped being friends after this other event. but then, we went to vermont.

i am obsessed with the concept of addiction.

i have a job where i can half watch things while im working, passively, in the background. there are documentaries about people throwing their life into something that ive watched hundreds of times. sometimes every day, for months. at a certain point i obviously began to wonder if this was unhealthy. thats a separate subjective question. the more interest question to me was: why?

at first, i thought it was autobiographical. i was raised by addicts, i had addictions, kind of just makes sense. at first.

intellectual western fine artists in the 20th century really adopted the attitude of “its your fault if you dont get it” and “you get what you bring to it”

if im bringing my own “art” to the art museum and its my job to understand it, we have to ask: uh whats the artist job then

https://twitter.com/giordkat/status/1769720798258843929

instead of just admitting that some art is mostly for other artists and intellectuals this type of painter puts themselves into the position of being somewhere below a build a bear workshop (do these still exist). the audience shows up to make it happen themselves, for themselves

of course this will be bad, but i feel the need to comment specifically on why, pre-emptively.

although it reads like the 'to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ' rick and morty post, its easy to misunderstand king of the hill.

its not a sitcom, or a comedy.

[...]

https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1766516978833907720

theres a joke online that "KOTH is a slice of life anime". this intuits something true about the show. the inspiration for king of the hill was 'do the right thing' by spike lee, specifically the way in which that film depicts daily life in a specific neighborhood and place:

many read about elaborate subtle social rules from the 1800s back to the dawn of civilization and think people were going along with all that because they were timid or dumb. in reality participating in a hyper complex set of social signaling rituals is just aesthetic and cool.

https://twitter.com/ChrisChipMonk/status/1768745561140912287

people understandably had a naive perception that doing away with all that would be an uncaging of the human spirit, that it would be liberating. turns out that with even a slight amount of historical hindsight this was backwards. you can only act smoothly within those confines.

just learned about phantom kangaroos

https://twitter.com/DisputedCDV/status/1767684499029078130

huge moment, im already in with the leading authority on north american kangaroo sightings

(unironically a great scholar whose work has benefited me in the past many times)

time to revisit the topic of ANGLISH.

anglish is an umbrella term for a style of english that tries to remove as much foreign influence as possible. prefixes, suffixes, nouns, all of it. it sounds unintuitive, but you pick it up very easily. here's some of my favorite examples:

https://twitter.com/echrell/status/1765834989017452624

here's a table i took from anglish dot org (yes, that many people have been invested in this - but the real payoff is reading passages in it. i'll post a few examples below.

it's very cool that once you start reading longer pieces of it, it becomes slightly intuitive.

it is almost spring, winter is ending

i would like to briefly provide a small field report. ive heard people discuss this online, but i would not have known how real it is unless i was "on the ground"

"snow days" are functionally over. i did not know. here is what i have seen: A) it's over

I have seen many posts online about people doing virtual learning with kids on snow days. like you, i would have assumed this is just isolated pockets, but it seems like its basically everyone.

this also goes down into extremely low ages, like first grade. npr:

in the video game that came closest to perfection, grand theft auto 2, one of the gangs are modern hindu ascetics: hare krishna

few remember how big an impact hare krishna had in the post 1960s west. there was even a subgenre of hardcore punk music based on it: krishnacore

...





hare krishna is basically a modern hindu (vedic?) movement led by the international society for krishna conciousness (ISKCON). if youve seen people like this at a subway station, thats the hare krishnas

people like this doing public sanskrit chants: dont see that much anymore.

imagine: a man. he is in a room somewhere. he has many items around him - normal objects. at this time, each item is tethered to a physical experience: how he obtained it, where he went, who he was with, and so on

his entire life is like this - a physical metal network, enmeshed

https://twitter.com/meghaverma_art/status/1758702149117116454

he has a stack of games and movies. when he looks at each one, he remembers buying it, or getting it from a friend. he remembers putting it in his car, losing it, finding it - all this colors his perception of it and his experience with it. how could it not?

he picks one up.

https://twitter.com/saycheesedgtl/status/1758539267058340114

i used to have a job working around comedians and comedy writers. it wasnt my job, but i was there.

ive done a lot of public speaking - some of it humorous. i dont talk about it, but many very large companies have technically paid me to do this.

heres something interesting: when you get good at "working" a crowd, its a skill in and of itself. an odd sociological data point is that once you cluster... over ten people together and you take on the role of "the speaker", they almost always react the exact same way

to everything. almost every time.

HP lovecraft and joseph smith:
thoughtforms in the american spirit

quasi-physical ancient native americans. lost civilizations. magical metal artifacts. piles of earth, dotting the horizon of the mind - and the actual horizon, in a place called: the northeastern united states. when we survey the spiritual landscape of a people, certain motifs make themselves known. in tibet, we find mountains infested with spirits, charnel grounds littered with burnt bodies, colorful flags that write prayers onto the wind. obviously, this "means something" about tibet

space in american scripture:
cosmic mormon moses

today, "pluralism" in religious thought means something like tolerance or acceptance. this was not the case in the 1800s, when it often referred to a different kind of plurality - cosmic pluralism: other worlds, and other planets this concept, which existed prior to modernity but seems to have really broken the surface (at least in the west) in the last few hundred years, was touched on by a variety of strange individuals, some of whom we have mentioned here before: ellen white, swedenborg, for example

a popular topic on the internet is cultural shifts that will result from generational changes - usually, in terms of politics

one area this is rarely discussed in is the arts, at a meta level. put simply, every museum survives because rich silent generation cuts them huge checks

in case youre unfamiliar, thats the generation before boomers

their wealthy urban members just give museums huge amounts of money - if they have it. usually this is totally thankless. maybe they get their name somewhere or a call. they just do it because they think they should.

modern man has a relationship to invisible forces he does not understand that is qualitatively similar to the type of relationship a “primitive” person had. you buy a house. theres this gas, called CO. you dont understand it, but it could kill you. its functionally magic, to you. you understand that it isnt magic, but you dont really know anything about it. its in these machines that surround you, i guess. it does something, but you cant see or hear or smell it, and if it gets out, you can die. only special men deal with and understand this thing. not you