Some of my readers may be surprised that with everything else happening in the world, I’m returning to the ongoing discussion of Situationism, that bizarre mixed breed that came about when European artists who hadn’t lost their creative gonads ended up digging their way into a pen full of Marxists in heat. Still, there’s a point to it all. I freely grant that there are plenty of things happening in the world, but Situationism has many more cogent things to say about those than the ideologies that pass for common sense these days.
Consider the outbreak of hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondia, which has the corporate media in a well-rehearsed swivet as I write this. Hantavirus infections in human beings are anything but new; they’ve been a problem across the Western United States for many years now, for example, as the virus is transmitted by the droppings of many common rodents. If you know anything about conditions belowdecks in cruise ships, you already know that the most likely vectors for the outbreak are rats, which are found aboard every ship on the seven seas, and whose droppings can all too easily get into kitchens, laundry, and ventilation systems on board. Given the impressively grubby conditions belowdecks in many cruise ships, the Hondia’s kitchen is certainly the first place I would look.
Of course this isn’t how the media’s spinning it. Those of my readers who remember the Covid-19 fiasco a few years back already know the story line being enacted around the hantavirus outbreak: the media’s spreading gruesome rumors of an imminent pandemic while public health officials insist there’s nothing to worry about—they’ll change their tune soon enough—while, wouldn’t you know it, the vaccine firm Moderna, which played so dubious a role in the Covid fandango, just happens to have a hantavirus vaccine ready for mass production, waiting for governments to start coughing up fantastically overpriced no-bid contracts for it. No doubt nurses are preparing their dance routines as I write this. All that remains to be seen is whether enough people will go along with the script this time to make it work.
I’ve suggested elsewhere that we need a new term for viruses that function as projection screens for spectral images of mass death in the collective imagination. The term I propose for these, in honor of the current candidate for that role, is hauntaviruses. Readers familiar with modern Continental philosophy will recognize that I’ve borrowed a typically mannered turn of phrase from Jacques Derrida, who coined the term “hauntology” as a portmanteau of “haunt” and “ontology” in the course of a famous discussion of Marxism. What he meant by it was that Marxism, like some other phenomena, doesn’t belong to the present, the past, or the future; the Marxist vision fixates on a spectral reality haunting the imagination, filling it with images of a time that never was and never will be, “the always-already absent present” in Derrida’s phrasing.
A hauntavirus is similar. What’s important about it isn’t the past, present, or future it actually has, but the ghosts of past pandemics such as the Black Death and the Spanish Flu, which are projected onto it, and the equally phantasmal forms of pandemics that have not yet happened, of the kind so greedily rehashed in books and movies, or in the strident warnings of experts trying to cadge more money for their pet institutes. The virus that serves as a basis for these gymnastics of the imagination may be highly dangerous, relatively benign, or anything between—it need not even exist as a biological reality—but the mere facts of epidemiology and disease biology have nothing to do with its status as a hauntavirus. All that matters is that the virus makes a suitable screen onto which fears and daydreams of mass death can be projected at will.
The distinction between virus and hauntavirus, between the facts of biology and the fantasies of the collective imagination, is crucial here. It echoes an equally important theme in the writings of the Situationists—the one that gave its name to the entire movement: the creation of situations as an artistic and political act.
Probably the best way to introduce this is to return to the most famous piece of plumbing in the history of modern art, the porcelain urinal submitted by Marcel Duchamp under a pseudonym to the first show of the Society of Independent Artists in New York City in 1917. (Those who’ve been following this series of posts will recall that I referenced that same urinal in our discussion of détournement.) The urinal came from a manufacturer in Philadelphia; it was signed “R. Mutt 1917” after the pseudonym Duchamp used, Richard Mutt, and titled “Fountain.” The art show, sensibly enough, refused to put it on display, and it got lost—I like to imagine that somebody took it and installed it in a bathroom somewhere, after scrubbing off the signature, and that it spent many years thereafter in some New York City building being used for its proper purpose.
Meanwhile Duchamp and his friends made the loudest possible fuss about it all, denouncing the Society of Independent Artists for cruelly suppressing so important and innovative a creative contribution to modern art. Later on, Duchamp “made” (that is to say, bought from a plumbing supply house and signed) numerous copies of the same work, which can be found in museums. Art critics these days claim that “Fountain” is one of the defining works of modern art; a good many people outside the modern art scene agree with this, pointing to “Fountain” as a good marker for the point at which modern “art” stopped being art in any real sense. It may not be inappropriate to mention that a whole series of performance artists have urinated in copies of “Fountain” in art museums; if a urinal counts as art, their logic goes, so does peeing in it.
It’s probably worth pointing out that Duchamp was not just pranking the art establishment of his time, though that was certainly one of the things he was doing. He was also an early adopter of the radical art movement Dada, which was founded in Switzerland by Hugo Ball and a circle of dissident artists the year before “Fountain” had its initial fifteen minutes of fame. Dada—the word means nothing at all, by the way, and that was quite deliberate—was one of the first cultural results of the First World War, in which the ideals of European civilization refuted themselves in a four-year spasm of mindless and pointless mass carnage.
All over Europe, artists, intellectuals, and ordinary people stared in horror at the spectacle of tens of thousands of men being slaughtered day after ghastly day in the attempt to seize and defend a few square miles of bloodsoaked mud, as politicians and pundits herded the next round of casualties toward the killing fields while babbling clichés about honor and virtue. In a very real sense, the beginning of the war in 1914 was when Western civilization died. Artists and writers, interestingly enough, had given advance warning of the death; the whole point of the Decadent movement of the late 19th and early 20th century was to announce that Europe was stumbling toward a shallow grave. Dada was simply the first cultural movement to press fingers to a pallid throat, find no pulse there, and proclaim the patient dead on the scene.
Responses to the announcement varied, but one of them—the one Duchamp expressed neatly with “Fountain”—was to challenge the ideals that drove Europe to self-immolation. The entire category of “fine art” was the product of those ideals. Really, Duchamp was asking, what’s the difference between the things that artists make and the things that plumbing factories make? Isn’t it simply a matter of cultural prejudices, most of them reeking of class privilege, that determines that some things get put in art shows and others get relegated to bathrooms?
It was a valid question, especially at a time when the products of quite a few avant-garde artists resembled nothing so much as the result you would get if a dog ate half a dozen tubes of paint and then happened to throw up on canvas. It became an even edgier question in later years, when artists across the Western world engaged in a no-holds-barred competition to see which of them could do the best job of producing works so ugly that the dog in question started to look like Rembrandt in comparison. Yet that question also has much broader applicability. In an era when all other standards have collapsed, what makes an artwork an artwork? Purely the fact that it gets exhibited at an art gallery or hung on the wall in an art museum.
That is to say, what makes an artwork an artwork is not the work itself but the situation in which it appears.
That was the original inspiration behind Situationism. Create the right situation, said the avant-garde artists who defined the Situationist movement in its early days, and anything can become a work of art. Nor were they entirely wrong. Look at anything with an eye to its artistic qualities, and you can experience it as an artwork. It may be a lousy artwork—that’s a detail that most avant-garde artists tended to avoid mentioning back in the day—but it can still be seen in artistic terms. The situation in which it is presented can make that easier or harder, depending on details. Thus, to return to Duchamp’s famous prank, it’s the situation in which a porcelain urinal appears to its viewers that determines whether it will get labeled a great work of art by swooning critics, or simply used as a convenience by men with full bladders.
The economic realities of the Situationists back in 1950s and 1960s Europe sharply limited just how much they could accomplish in terms of constructing situations. Lacking ample budgets, they had to make use of such objects and surroundings as they could find ready-made, or modify cheaply to fit their intentions. The tactics of détournement and dérive, which we discussed here in earlier posts, are the two core methods the Situationists devised to do this. Détournement is a way of taking existing imagery and redefining its situation in various ways, generally by changing the words that provide it with its conceptual frame. The dérive is a way of finding interesting situations that already exist, as well as developing the sense of psychogeography that the Situationists hoped they would get to use to design whole situations later on, if they somehow ended up with the funding.
The irony here, and it’s a rich one, is that the Situationists came breathtakingly close to making a discovery of considerable importance. It wasn’t a new discovery; it had been made not that long before their time by the Surrealists, about whom we’ll be talking in some upcoming posts; but the Situationists had a way of approaching the topic that could have given them a much more flexible and useful way of developing it. Unfortunately their intellectual background made it impossible for them to take that final step and grasp what would otherwise have been within their reach. The development of the dérive as a Situationist practice enabled them, if only they had realized it, to understand divination. In exactly the same way, had they been able to take that final step, the art of creating situations would have given them nothing less than the key to ceremonial magic.
Let’s take this a step at a time. A magical ceremony is a symbolic drama, a play in which every detail of the scenery and every prop on stage shares in a common meaning. Let’s say you decide, for some good reason, that you need to have more income than you currently do. We’ll assume for the sake of the example that you’re smart enough to realize that the most effective way to do this is to change your own state of consciousness, so that you pick up on the many opportunities for making money that surround all of us all the time, but that most of us never notice. How do you do this? By constructing a play of symbols that refocuses your attention on finding and enjoying wealth. There are various ways to do this, but the classic method is to use some set of symbolism that’s been proven by centuries of successful practice.
So you choose, let’s say, the symbolism of Jupiter, the planet of wealth. You provide yourself with an altar cloth and wall hangings of blue, and a blue tabard to wear over your white ritual robe. You get four blue candles for your candlesticks—four is the number of Jupiter—and some incense of a blend traditionally associated with Jupiter. You write out your intention in a single clear sentence that permits of no ambiguities. You go digging through your collection of books on magical ceremonies to find the relevant divine, archangelic, and angelic names to invoke, and to put together a proper incantation. You know, of course, that Thursday is the day assigned to Jupiter, and a little math or a few moments with the right app will give you the hours assigned to Jupiter on that day. (As they date from before mechanical clocks, the planetary hours vary in length depending on the season of the year.)
So when the hour of Jupiter on the day of Jupiter arrives, there you are, ready to begin. The altar and the room are draped in Jupiter’s blue, the four candles and the incense burner are ready, and you’ve donned your robe and tabard. You also know, having checked details online or in an ephemeris, which direction to turn to face Jupiter. You light the candles, sprinkle incense on the coals, and perform the opening ceremony, which you’ve practiced many times. The words of the incantation roll with practiced ease from your lips, and when it’s time to pronounce the mighty names, you know how to do it so that each name becomes a shape of sound that sets the air trembling and has similar effects on your body and mind. The whole time your imagination is just as busy, formulating a sequence of vivid images relevant to the working. As the working rises to a climax, you feel power building to an intensity almost physical in its solidity…and then you release the forces to do their task, proclaim the work accomplished, and close the ceremony in due form using the familiar ritual forms.
What happens then? No lightning bolts, no eerie special effects, nothing that violates the laws of nature in any way. It’s just that over the next week or so, you think of four potential side gigs that had never occurred to you before and probably wouldn’t have occurred to you any time soon, and convenient coincidences make it unexpectedly easy for you to pursue them. Since extravagance is one of Jupiter’s characteristics, you get to work on all four of them at once. It’s a whale of a lot of work to get them started, but each side gig turns out to net you a hefty profit, and after a while everything is running smoothly and your bank account blossoms like a meadow in May. You have accomplished your intention.
How have you done this? In psychological language, you’ve reoriented your attention so that, out of the vast range of things you could notice, some of the things that reach the surface of your consciousness are those that will point you to ways you can earn a bigger income. Phrase the same process in the language of occult philosophy and the framing is a little different; there the individual human being is seen as a microcosm, literally “little universe,” in relationship with the macrocosm, the “big universe.” A magical ceremony poises itself between these two, forming a mesocosm, a “middle universe” which is at once a model of the universe and a model of the self. The mesocosm mediates between microcosm and macrocosm, forming a template for desired changes in the relationship between them.
We can also talk about the process using the language of Situationism, however. From that perspective, the ceremony and all its trappings create a situation, in which everything is redefined in terms of a specific intention. Ordinary blue cotton broadcloth, brass candlesticks, wax candles, and the like, once put in that situation, are détourned from their usual status as cheap consumer products and become symbols of transformation, freighted with complex meanings and a potent emotional charge. The actions of the ritual become a dérive with a known endpoint, leading you through the psychogeography of your own consciousness toward a goal you have already envisioned and will soon reach in your everyday life.
That’s how the noted wizard Marcel Duchamp used magic to transform a urinal into a work of art, after all. It certainly looks as though the corrupt sorcerers of the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and other dubious actors are trying to use a closely related set of methods to transform an ordinary outbreak of a common rodent-borne virus into a global hauntavirus, complete with dancing nurses on cue, and then into a gargantuan cash cow. Magic is a constant reality in modern life, made even more common than it would otherwise be by the labors of well-funded and media-backed pseudoskeptics, who spend their time trying to convince the rest of us that magic can’t possibly work.
But it does work, of course. That’s the thing that makes all this fascinating: most of the time, if it’s done competently and aims for realistic goals, the process I’ve outlined works. Everyone who takes the time to learn and practice the traditional methods of magic knows this from personal experience. The Situationists came close to grasping that, though their Marxist presuppositions tripped them up; the Marxist embrace of strict materialism, and the corresponding belief that states of consciousness are determined by material details such as ownership of the means of production rather than by any subtler factor, made it impossible for them to realize the extent to which consciousness is primary and material conditions can be shaped by it.
Where the Situationists failed, however, an earlier avant-garde artistic movement partly succeeded. They were the Surrealists, heirs of the Dada movement, some of whose members plunged into occult studies as part of their creative work. The best of them built a bridge between art and magic that remains standing to this day. In later posts we’ll talk about them.
A bridge between art and magic? Color me intrigued 🙂
The Hantavirus spin has already dwindled to a whisper. So much so that the media frantically jumped to some more conspicupus to an outbreak that killed basically just three or four people. The new fad now is the classic Ebola virus in Congo, that virus has periodical outburst killing a few hundred of a few thousands people, bat usually it get contained fairly well.
The main problem facing these hauntvirus scaremongers is that we are mentally vaccinated by the covid megablunder. People are sick of beinf proclamed future victims of a new plague. The attempts are futile, and will be futile for a very long time
Have a nice day
Pierluigi
Great article!
Here is a meme based on the Situationist graffiti:
Triffid version
https://imgflip.com/i/asao7k
Little Shop version:
https://imgflip.com/i/asaogc
JMG,
The new Hauntavirus has a financial aspect to it as well. In hindsight, the American Version of the Covid Pandemic is looking to have been a giant financial bailout of the consumer economy and the banks and their political minions that are dependent on it. The amount of money dumped in to the consumer economy ( let along the largess available only to the rich) dragged the American economy in to a supercharged frenzy like sugar dumped in to a Petri dish.
The sugar rush is now over and the hangover is upon us. I know several people that are now buried in Covid Era loans that they thought they would never have to pay back. The resulting inflation is now wrecking the household finances of nearly everyone in the US.
The most recent scheme to prop things up again, The AI bubble, is starting to wobble and is having the unfortunate effect ( for the consumer economy) of acting as an excuse of mass white collar job loss.
With the sweet goodness of the Covid Bailout still fresh in the minds of the banks, big pharma, politics and retail, a new pandemic seems like just what the doctor ordered. I don’t think it will work this time.
One of the blogs I follow on Tumblr found an article describing someone’s deep dive into the background of Fountain. Specifically, the author went looking through plumbing supply catalogs from Duchamp’s time, trying to find the exact make and model of urinal that Duchamp used.
There was no such urinal for sale in the mass market at the time.
So the author came up with another hypothesis. Ceramics was one of Duchamp’s artistic media, in which he had considerable expertise. The hypothesis was that he made Fountain from raw clay, just like any other ceramic sculpture. If the Society of Independent Artists had refused Fountain after claiming they would accept all entries submitted, he could demonstrate that he had sculpted it, perhaps by producing another one while they watched, and then denounce them as a bunch of hypocrites. If they did accept it and display it, they would in turn be denounced by the respectable art world. Either way, he would be delighted. But they did a third thing: they accepted it and put it in the room with the other exhibits, but in a corner, then curtained off the corner so visitors didn’t actually see it. Deprived of the huge fuss he had hoped to incite, he had to make one himself, going to the press with his lie, inventing a plumbing supply house in a city widely despised within the New York City art world, minimizing the likelihood that anyone who cared would take the trouble to expose his lie before the public lost interest.
Same with all the “copies”. No two are exactly alike and not one is to be found among mass produced plumbing fixtures. So there’s a whole additional layer of pranking beneath the famous one, a layer that wasn’t exposed for a century and is hardly known even now.
This image, a poster for the band Crass, also comes to mind when speaking of Dada:
https://boo-hooray.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/7081.jpg?auto=webp&v=1710857871
Not only is it a clever détournement of war propaganda, but it shows that thru line from what Hugo Ball and Duchamp were doing to what Johnny Rotten would later do.
I think the economic aspect for Situationism and its later sideways mutation into punk, was a huge part of the whole thing. In the Sex Pistols song “No Future” Rotten sings:
“We’re the flowers in the dustbin / We’re the poison in your human machine / We’re the future, your future /
God save the queen, we mean it, man”
But this was at a time when jobs were scarce in England and more and more people were on the dole.
Squatting in abandoned buildings however, and living on the cheap, however, gave a number of artists in that and adjacent scenes the ability to live in their own situation.
I contend that as the suburbs empty and population contracts there will be a lot of buildings people could just move into here in the U.S… and from that, people who want to live an eccentric, artistic life on the cheap will have places to create situations. Magic might be involved. Well funded art institutions?
Probably not.
@JMG A bit off the topic of this post, but I thought you’d enjoy this. I am in the process of converting to Catholicism, so I spoke to the local priest the other day, looking for a little spiritual guidance. I mentioned that I read a blog by a druid and that he talked about the “disenchantment” of the world and how I felt that too while trying to open up to God and the experience of the supernatural. The priest snapped his fingers and said, “You need to read Rod Dreher! He writes about the disenchantment of the world.” I think you may be familiar with this author. I haven’t had the chance to read him, but thought you would find it interesting that even in the remotest corners of the world, people do sense disenchantment. I’ve noticed even mainstream Protestant churches trying to bring back enchantment. Like Baptist churches reviving Jewish rituals like Seder suppers, Methodists prostrating themselves in front of the cross or taking the Eucharist with a lot more reverence and thinking “Maybe the Lord is in here, and not just symbolically.”
In the meantime, I’ve been encouraged to take pilgrimages to little known Catholic shrines. And, I did make a pilgrimage to the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. That was truly an uplifting experience and a place that had the presence of God or as some may say, “enchanted.”
Relating to today’s post tangentially, my favorite composer is Erik Satie, an eccentric Frenchman from the late 19 to early 20th centuries. He wrote a lot of absurd and nonsense music and some of the most beautiful compositions I’ve ever heard. He was part of the early Dadaist movement. I’d even call him a “troll” in the sense of the above mentioned urial artist as you can never quite trust what his journals said.
“Dada—the word means nothing at all, by the way, and that was quite deliberate—was one of the first cultural results of the First World War, in which the ideals of European civilization refuted themselves in a four-year spasm of mindless and pointless mass carnage.”
“Dada” sounds like a baby’s first attempt to speak to his father. Perhaps unconsciously, the Dadaists chose that term to reflect a stammering appeal to the “fathers” (authority figures) who had sent so many young men to their deaths. As Kipling wrote after his only son died in WWI:
“If anyone asks why we died
Tell them: because our fathers lied.”
Interesting post, JMG. It’s certainly a different explanation from how I view the modern art world, but I follow the logic of Big Harma wanting to make a buck via creating a situation around a “hauntavirus”. The modern art scene has certainly done something similar, but has also restricted “artists” whom appear to have sold their souls to be allowed in the fold. Once in the fold, they’re taking part in what is some sort of money laundering/”asset creation” scheme. At least that’s how I see a guy like Jackson Pollock selling his wares for big bucks – when it appears to be something a no talent hack like myself could create in a few minutes. At least with a urinal you’re spinning something that was engineered.
At least modern art provides something tangible to hang on a wall or plop down in your garden. I’m still scratching my head over things like cryptocurrencies, NFTs or many of the promises around AI.
Maybe I’m just not artistic enough, but this went in an unexpected direction!
I sometimes get frustrated by how broad Dion Fortune’s definition of magic is, but then along comes something like this post that reminds me that just about everything about life is magical to some degree or another. And really, that’s not unlike science: it’s a method for studying nearly anything, not a fixed set of topics. Magic is in a sense engineering in the realms of experience and intention and since well near everything touches on those to some extent, magic covers well near everything.
—-
Also, I recently ran across a meme that seems somewhat relevant, if only in a silly way:
https://nitter.net/literallymecats/status/2048915638694167003
Untitled-1, art and magic have a vast amount in common. I’ll address that in detail in an upcoming post.
Pierluigi, I know. I wrote this post two weeks ago, because I was facing a very busy time this month. I’m very pleased to see that so many people recognized the hantavirus scare as the hokum it always was; with any luck you’re right about scaremongering.
Justin, ha! Thanks for these.
Clay, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. I can also think of a few political parties that would love to have another excuse to do mass vote-by-mail schemes, with all the opportunities for fraud those inevitably present. It’s all rather too reminiscent of a game of Clue: was it Doctor Plum in the library with a syringe, Senator Scarlet in the lounge with a ballot box, or Banker Brown in the study with a stock portfolio? Most likely it was all of them at once…
Joan, I remember you mentioned that in our previous discussion. Several sources online specified the Philadelphia plumbing supply as the source for the original; I’m not sure who’s right here.
Justin, I remember that poster. (One of my girlfriends in college, before Sara and I met, was a punk rocker and a major Crass fan.) Your speculation will almost certainly turn out to be correct, btw — reuse of abandoned buildings by survivors of a depopulation event is so common, and leaves such distinctive traces in the ruins, that archeologists watch for the signs as a way to figure out just when a civilization went under.
Watchflinger, yes, I know Dreher’s work tolerably well — the two of us sparred online now and then over differences of religious opinion, but I respect his work. Please tell your priest that he’s got good taste in bloggers. 😉 I”m delighted to hear that you’ve taken up pilgrimage — a worthwhile practice. As for Satie, no argument there! He spent a while as the house composer for Joséphin Péladan’s Catholic Rosicrucian order, and composed music for their meetings — have a listen to Satie’s “Sonneries de la Rose+Croix” some time.
Yavanna, that may be part of it; “dada” is also French children’s talk for a hobby-horse, of which the Dadaists had plenty!
Drhooves, that’s exactly correct. As background for my Ariel Moravec novels, I’ve done some reading into the criminal side of the art world, and the whole scene is astoundingly corrupt — theft, forgery, money laundering, tax evasion, and insurance fraud are among the games that the modern art scene plays. Wildly inflated fake valuations for worthless “art” are essential elements in many of those scams.
Slithy, ha! That’s a fine meme:
Fortune’s definition is as broad as it is on purpose, because yes, pretty much everything can be used for magic. It’s all a matter of intention.
“Hantavirus infections in human beings are anything but new; they’ve been a problem across the Western United States for many years now, for example, as the virus is transmitted by the droppings of many common rodents.”
Not germane to the main topic of this essay, but just a data point: the Hantavirus variant familiar to us in the American west is transmitted by rodent droppings, and can’t be caught from an infected person. The variant on the cruise ships (the Andean variant), is also from rodent droppings, but once caught, it can (though rarely) be caught from an infected person; that may explain why people are susceptible to panic about this particular variant. https://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/about/andesvirus.html.
But your essay is spot-on about “Hauntaviruses” as a “term for viruses that function as projection screens for spectral images of mass death in the collective imagination”! Hauntaviruses may do what horror movies do: reflect peoples’ unconscious traumas, complexes, and fears.
“As background for my Ariel Moravec novels, I’ve done some reading into the criminal side of the art world, and the whole scene is astoundingly corrupt — theft, forgery, money laundering, tax evasion, and insurance fraud are among the games that the modern art scene plays. Wildly inflated fake valuations for worthless “art” are essential elements in many of those scams.”
Sounds like a lot of companies on the stock market, which have wildly inflated fake valuations for producing worthless “products” and “services”. Especially the whole LLM business.
An American doctor with a confirmed ebola infection has been flown to Germany and is being treated in a fancy hospital in the centre of Berlin. The only way it makes any sense to bring such a pathogen from a remote outpost into densely populated western Europe is as an intro to an Outbreak movie.
I’m just down the road, relatively speaking, so if this kicks off I’ve got front row seats…
Mike from Berlin
I had just been meta thinking about money. (Thinking of about how people think about money). It’s fascinating that so much money and effort goes into marketing debt products. It’s an amazingly huge psi-op. The ads I’ve seen lately are quite divorced from reality. An example: Two guys get in a car and it does not start. One taps on his smart phone to borrow money for the repair and is transformed into a caped super hero. This is not a frame with your self interests in mind.
From your definition of magic, a change of consciousness through an act of the will, committing to give every dollar a job, then writing down every transaction would broadly be magic. (Yes, we did do a ceremony where we cut our credit cards in half) After doing the work for about 5 years, I see the world quite differently.
One of the most surprising things to me has been how hard it is to give money away. In particular there has been a lot of foot dragging by the would be recipients.
The second thing I’ve noticed is those in debt are subject to a lot of fear and willing to put up with a lot of grief.
I read somewhere that the hantavirus frenzy was a media distraction from this item in cruise ship news:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-cruise-ship-workers-disney-engaged-child-pornography-rcna344648
“Look at anything with an eye to its artistic qualities, and you can experience it as an artwork.”
In that sense, the entire discipline of photography is a sub-branch of Situationism. A leaf on the ground, a rusty old shack, me with braces holding my eighth-grade graduation diploma: with the right framing, lighting, and backdrop, each of these things can be a work of art.
And conversely, of course, staged photographs can be passed off as ‘true life’ or ‘the way things really are’. In a journalistic situation, we take our cues from the flat lighting or the scuffed-up appearance of the people in the photo rather than from the plausibility of the scene as a whole.
Fascinating as usual
1914 was certainly a pivotal year. Arnold Toynbee identified the 1914-18 conflict as Western Civilization’s breakdown, the point at which we ceased to make moral progress and the creative minority degenerated into a dominant minority.
An interesting piece of synchronicity is the prediction of the Watch Tower Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses) in the early 1900’s that the world would end in 1914. Maybe it was a broken clock phenomenon, they regularly predict Judgement Day, or maybe they were correct, just not in the way they expected.
Anyways, thanks JMG
The hantavirus scare has vanished from CBC. It was all the rage last week, but the big topic today is the US’ inditement of Raul Castro. And no hantavirus fuss yesterday either.
So I suspect this one has failed liftoff even faster than monkeypox.
I will point out that declining civilizations are prone to major disease outbreaks and epidemics, and these aren’t something to underestimate. I’m thinking of the Plague of Justinian here. So just because Covid wasn’t as bad as the media made it out to be, doesn’t mean that something else won’t come along to absolutely devastate us. Large numbers of poorly-nourished people packed into overcrowded and questionably sanitary conditions are ideal conditions for epidemics to be at their very worst. Frankly, I will be very surprised if covid is the worst we see on the way down.
“Isn’t it simply a matter of cultural prejudices, most of them reeking of class privilege, that determines that some things get put in art shows and others get relegated to bathrooms?”
This is what woke is trying to get across, that much of the modern world is cultural prejudices, reeking of class privilege, that hide the structure of power and blame the powerless for their lack of power. The classic woke line is “check your privilege” meaning both urging the speaker to examine their ideas and mentality for those prejudices, and to check them at the coat check because you don’t really need such corrupted mentality.
Would a decent working definition of a situation be “a context devoid of spectacle”?
I want to check if I am understanding you here by using different language.
The difference between a urinal in a bathroom and a urinal in an art gallery is the framing – in the art gallery it is framed as art. Along with the incongruity making a definite statement about modern art , the frame changes how you view the object, changes its meaning.
A magic ritual can be one way of changing framing – and I am not saying that is all that is happening in ritual – but it can have that effect. You described the effect of the ritual as changing the framing of how you view the world, what you notice and how you act.
Ritual is one way to change framing, but not the only by any means. It is one way of viewing the positive effect of using affirmations, as changing the perceptual frame you use to view a particular part of your life.
Am I understanding you correctly?
Yavanna #12:
Whether or not any strain of Hantavirus can actually spread between humans is still up for debate. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9574657/.
—David P.
For those who may want to play five-dimensional chess with Marcel Duchamp, here is an article I wrote on “The Artist as Something Else”:
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/the-artist-as-something-else
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-artist-as-something-else
“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” ― Marcel Duchamp
Famously Duchamp pretty much stopped making art to play chess all the time. But he gave us concept art. All those paintings are just mere retinal art after all!
Concept art led to land art. Land art led people back to, well, making structures on the land. Structures on the land may lead people back to making megaliths in their own backyards… or something like that.
–anyway, since I shared this before I was going to hold off, but then a coworker sent me a picture of Marcel Duchamp, during a discussion of the ethical use of metadada. I thought that was a nod and a wink from the arch trickster himself.
I got to see in person his Étant donnés once. It was really super striking and mysterious.
It probably won’t surprise anyone that I have a photocopy of a blueprint of the large glass near my desk at work, next to some more traditional pieces. To me it looks like a cross between a Rube Goldberg contraption and an alchemical engraving. Suitable for contemplation.
“That is to say, what makes an artwork an artwork is not the work itself but the situation in which it appears.”
I don’t buy this. The ability to distinguish an artist from a con-man seems to have disappeared from our decadent civilization. I’m a fan of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a writer who came out of this post WW-I millieu. I’m still trying to figure out if he was an artist or a con-man. But, because I’m a fan, I lean toward artist.
Hello JMG and commentariat:
First, thanks for your ironical and sharp short comment about the current MSM “hauntavirus” hysteria. Although I knew quite part of your information and I agree with your point of view, there’s some fact I didn’t know. For example, that a very “humanitarian” Big Pharma corporation was eager to give everybody its opportune vaccine against the (imaginarian) very lethal next pandemic. Do the math…”Avida dollars”.
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Yes, it can be said without any problem that Situationists were the cultural heirs of Dadaists and Surrealists, in the artistic aspect, so I’m not puzzled by your view. However, I think it’s amazing and very interesting how do you relate Situs “Détournement” to make up new alternative and contracultural situations, with the magic practice. You’re right Situs grasped the outer layers of magic (like pop psychology, advertisement and propaganda, to some extent), but their materialist compulsory indoctrination (evidently, being Marxists), prevented them to go further and deeper…
I find your reference to a near future post about Surrealism very exciting; I’ll waiting for it with tons of patience. Thank you on advance.
Yavanna, granted, but it’s still not a big deal. The Chilean Minstry of Health has an excellent website on the subject —
https://saludresponde.minsal.cl/hanta/
— which notes that that particular strain has been common in Chile since the 1990s. Here’s what it says about person-to-person transmission (translated into English):
“It is important to note that person-to-person transmission has been documented only in the Andes variety present in Argentina and Chile. In Argentina it has been documented in some family outbreaks and less frequently after close contact with infected patients, especially in the prodromal stage of the disease. In Chile, this transmission was documented in the Aysén outbreak in 1997. Subsequently, they have occurred in some small outbreaks due to close contact between people, where this type of transmission is hypothesized, being of very low frequency and occasional presentation (Parral in 2002, Corral in 2011, among the main ones).”
Anonymous, yep. I’m not sure how many people realize that the economy these days is mostly propped up by fraudulent valuations and other equally dubious scams.
Mike, it’s especially interesting in that the US, which doesn’t seem to be going along with the Hauntavirus business, has barred people from affected countries from coming here, while Germany is encouraging it. All I can say is make sure you’ve got plenty of stored food and toilet paper.
Bradley, glad to hear you’re wise to this! Marketing debt is essential, because most of what keeps the global economy afloat these days is packaging debt and pretending that the result is worth something.
AnnM, that may also be involved. It’s another move in a game of Clue: “Mr. Creep, on the cruise ship, with a nasty picture.”
Dylan, a valid point.
Raymond, the Watch Tower Society wasn’t the only group that predicted a 1914 end of the world, either. I think a lot of people sensed the shock before it arrived.
Pygmycory, granted. My guess, though, is that when it happens the media will be doing their level best to deny it!
Tom, and yet wokistas never check their own privilege. Theirs is primarily class privilege, as college-educated salaried employees with benefits, or aspirants to that status; they benefit hugely and personally from the structures of power, while shrieking insults at anyone who challenges their power and privilege, or points out that their beliefs are no more objectively correct than those they denounce.
Luke, nope. No context can ever be devoid of spectacle, because anything anyone perceives is a spectacle to one degree or another. A situation is the structure of expectations by which a spectacle is given its frame and meaning.
Charlie, yes, The one thing I’d add is that ritual is a very effective way of reframing, as it can affect framing processes below the threshold of consciousness.
Justin, thanks for this. I haven’t seen “Étant donnés” yet, though if I ever have the chance to visit Philadelphia again I’ll make a beeline for it.
Phutatorius, this is a good example of the importance of situations. The quote you gave was framed by this previous passage: “In an era when all other standards have collapsed, what makes an artwork an artwork? Purely the fact that it gets exhibited at an art gallery or hung on the wall in an art museum.” That first phrase is crucial, of course. If you don’t think all other standards have collapsed, then the rest doesn’t follow.
Watchflinger # 7:
Good luck with your own spiritual path! It’s interesting to see how it seems to be happening in different places the famous “Second Religiosity”, to some extent.
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Erik Satie:
I like some of his music, too. He was a minimalist musician “avant la lettre”. Do you know he was interested during part of his life in occultism/esoterism? (though a few years before his death, he cheered the Russian Revolution, ahem).
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Mike # 14:
Oh, the Ebola “friend”! How much time without having breaking news about this old bogey man…We should wait and see, but I can say a new pandemic European (and global) hysteria) would be a problem to the crazy and reckless plans the elites seem to have to “reboot” war in Ukraine and ME, methink. They must choose between wars or pandemic McGuffin as subterfuge to their business, not the two businesses alike.
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Phutatorius # 25:
I also tend to think Celine was a real and great writer, so a true artist; though a not very good as a person during his life historical context (to depict it in a short and soft way). I think he was Bukowsky favorite novelist, too.
The whole discussion of artist or con-man got put on steroids in the film F for Fake by Orson Welles. (Or was that H.G. Wells and Orson Scott Card? ) The museums fouldnt tell a real Modigliani from one painted by Elmer de Hory, and Clifford Irving faked his biopsy, er, biography of Howars Hughes. The writings of RAW turned me on to this topic. Still looms large in my mind…
& These topics hit one of my nerd-out buttons. Thanks for everyone forebearance as my mind spins in abstract splatter.
I am pretty sure I saw Étant donnés at an exhibition at Chicago or Cleveland art museums in 1998, while on a spring break road trip. I didnt know who Duchamp was back then, but it stuck with me. If it never left Philly, then I didnt actually see it, but somehow have a memory of looking through that keyhole.
So… the news and commentary deliberately aimed at the new populist demographic, especially working-age, underemployed men, is deliberately using Situationist methods despite claiming the whole thing flows from good business and marketing practices? I’d wondered why the lumbersexual look and general North Woodsy-ness are becoming well-established tropes and symbols of the people who hope to be the new populist elite or be their well-paid servitors… which means that we’re seeing a Situation being forged right out in the open while most people don’t bother to notice…???!!!???
And – hey, wait a minute… I’m participating without knowing it! I really AM a high-ranking member of an organization so secret that I never knew of it!
Okay – now what do I do with this cat I’ve let out of his bag?
I guess I never did see it, because it can’t travel… I dont know what that memory was of, then. Still, its intriguing as all get out, and I will make a beeline too. Sorry for the fake out.
JMG,
Oh that makes sense because I believe you were talking of the ego as a spectacle awhile ago and we can’t get rid of our egos. So that means we could make a situation of ourselves, our ego, by giving it a frame of expectations in order to give ourselves/ego a frame and meaning. This is obviously what magic is in a very real sense, as you said. I did a bit of this last night when I realized Aristotelian ethics has a teleology and we can give ourselves a personal teleology to use as a ground of reason for ethical decisions. The resulting ethos is a frame of expectations which gives the individual a frame and meaning – a situation.
I’m still very amused at imagining the Situationists’ response to where you took their thought process. The levels of aghastness the doctrinaire Marxist mind must experience at the thought of taking their derive and detournement straight into magic ritual …! “Those who know, do not speak.”
(I need all the amusement I can get, as after more than a month of free rein on Dreamwidth, I am once again getting the Mississippi page. It has given me another chance to read what they posted, and they do make it quite obvious that even if they wanted to comply, compliance costs would bankrupt them. And I was about to start posting again – it was Monday morning and I figured I’d type out a book review and share it for Magic Monday, which I still have not seen yet. One of the downsides to living at the dead end of a dirt road is that you only have satellite internet as a connection option.)
And a bit OT for this week’s topic, but yesterday I saw a headline about billboards appearing in NYC and SF saying, “Stop hiring humans!” I thought it might be an anti-AI campaign, but no. It’s an actual sales campaign, which the CEO called “intentionally provocative,” to sell the company’s AI “agents” as cheap alternatives to hiring people. My comment was: “I guess he never read Frank Herbert’s Dune and won’t understand when I say, “Let the Butlerian Jihad begin.”
Apparently, also yesterday, some other bigshot CEO was recorded saying he intends to eliminate “low value human capital” in favor of complicated computer programs. Said CEO is still trying to do damage control, starting with email memos to all employees claiming the quote is out of context, and workers shouldn’t feel threatened by “AI”.
And, just because “three is a magic number” according to the old Schoolhouse Rock cartoons of my youth, a third headline caught my attention yesterday: at recent college graduations, the graduates are erupting in boos at the mention of that particular technology. The short article listed three (again) different keynote speeches where the grads made their opinion of the “coming revolution” quite clear.
I suspect the tide has started to ebb, just as the cheerleaders are trying to work the crowd into a final frenzy. The articles all used the phrase “tone-deaf,” but it sounds like a LOT more is changing beneath the surface. I do not go out of my way to look for these kind of articles, yet spotted three in one day that demonstrated some breath-taking levels of cluelessness by our senile dominant minority.
In discussing how the situationists were hamstrung by their materialist dogma, I think you’re doing an excellent job showing how our metaphysics matter. Because metaphysics shapes what we think is possible and what we are willing to attempt, metaphysical views are not only theoretical, they are real. And as you imply in this post, metaphysics are deeply political.
Both the dogmatic religious metaphysics and the scientific materialist metaphysics have one thing in common: they convince human consciousness that it is ultimately powerless in this world. It is either subordinate to a sovereign God, or micromanaged by the inane movements of subatomic particles.
The metaphysics of western esotericism encourages us to explore the limits of human consciousness, to bend the rules, to play around with what is normally considered to be possible. And that is what can make it dangerous to those who need you to feel like you are nothing.
Justin, I’ve long admired Salvador Dali’s response to the immense role of forgery in the art world. In the town of Figueres, where he lived, there was a whole local industry of forgers turning out fakes of his work, primarily good copies of his lithographs. He became drinking buddies with the forgers, and used to sign blank sheets of lithograph paper for them, to make it easier for them to market their work as his!
Rhydlyd, marketing is all about creating and manipulating situations in cheap exploitive ways; that is to say, it’s a debased form of magic. That means the world is full of contending mages, striving to create the situations that advantage them and disadvantage their opponents. It also means that every single one of us is the head of our own secret society, and the world belongs to those who embrace this and start using their secret powers to create the situations they want. Get to work!
Luke, exactly. We can do it unconsciously, and therefore badly (in most cases), or we can do it consciously and get good at it.
KM, sorry to hear of your tribulations! Yes, I’ve been tracking the fantastically stupid and self-defeating utterances of our would-be cybernetic lords and masters as well. The problem they face is that none of them really understands that people who have less money than they do are, you know, people, and it never occurs to them that the crowds of people they’re trying to consign to poverty and misery might have their own opinions about that project of theirs. I don’t think we’re all that far from the moment when the blowback may turn kinetic.
Nephite, excellent! All ideologies of domination start by trying to convince people to accept a metaphysics in which they have no power over their circumstances. As you note, that’s why magic is always a threat to the little tin gods of social hierarchies.
Justin Patrick Moore 31
Hmm. Sounds similar to my mind’s switcheroo where I “recall” murdering my biological mother (full-on abuser) and buried her corpse under the kitchen overhang (in the backyard of the old house I grew up in); I know not by what method, maybe knife or brick-in-the-head. These “recollections” have happened for so many decades with such repetition, clarity, and consistency that sometimes I have to sit back, and say, “Nah, I could not have done that. Right? She sold the house in 1974. In the fifty years since, ”someone would have discovered the bones. Then they would’ve come after me. Then I’d be in prison. Therefore, since I am not in prison, I must not have murdered her and buried her bones in the backyard.” The recollections seem SO vivid.
Funny how ‘memory’ works.
Full disclosure. I really, really wanted to, but (I am guessing), didn’t. (Nah, in real life, she died in 2006. Do you think I was sad?👋🏼I simply left and never returned.)
💨🧑🏻🍼💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi John Michael,
Man, the same panic narrative was spun about avian flu (and that one, just like a stinky zombie of most advanced decomposition) which kept popping up. I’ve kept chickens for sixteen years now, and seems like every year, a flu will sweep through the flock. Takes out the weak reeds. So? There are no guarantees in life.
And hauntavirus, well, basic hygiene is probably a far cheaper response, although that may be too much to expect in some commercial circumstances. And there were allegedly some loose reports / rumours that folks working on those floating things, are possibly under paid. Hmm. Maritime safety regulator investigating Carnival cruise ship after whistleblower concerns. Beneath the pretty exterior may lurk a fuming mess.
It’s quite timely this post, for we’ve dealt with mice this year. Did you know that rats hunt and kill mice? All of the house defences were set up to deal with the much larger rats (and they’re big here), but I’d not fine tuned the arrangements well enough to cope with the smaller mice. A few weeks ago it was mayhem, but man, I beat the frack out of the last of the two mice. It’s been quiet since then, but I’m working on ensuring that this doesn’t happen again.
One of the interesting things about the Black Plague, is that not only did it occur during the hundred years of war, but the worst outbreak occurred after two failed harvests. People were in poor health prior to encountering the rodent / flea disease regardless. Nature did the rest. Commercial fertiliser shortages due to the dust up in the middle east, has been on my mind, which you may also have been aware of? Oh well, these things happen.
Ah, yes, all very true, but Jupiter would perhaps extract a cost? Those dark magicians behind the health scare which dare not be named, may likewise have incurred some serious debts. By the way, a large scale reaction to hauntavirus is probably not going to happen, maybe. The financial mojo is disappearing – don’t look at the rodents, check out the bond yields! 🙂 All strategies are subject to diminishing returns.
Cheers
Chris
@bradley: I haven’t seen quite such a brazen spell being cast by an ad for going into debt, but I have lately seen several that made me think.
One was of a girl around 18 going off in a car with her friends. The caption read something like “Better than in the chalet with your parents” and a bank logo. As far as I am able to interpret it, the bank suggests that students without a fixed income should take out a loan to go on a holiday.
The other one is recurring and says “You never knew how rich you were” with a bank logo. This is associated for example with a nice dinner for the extended family including grandma. Again, the only way I can parse it is that the bank incites you to take out a loan or increase the credit card limit to buy a family dinner.
They have in common a reframing of utter financial irresponsibility as being social and gregarious, while the bank is framed as pro-social.
So, Mr. Greer … what do you think would happen if some .. ahem, ‘art patron’ were to piss into one those ‘signed’ urinals .. IN PUBLIC!! … as some general publician, either because their bladder be full to bursting .. or due to the flippant ‘F#ck This!, ‘I’m gonna give it to the MAN!!’, just because.. My bet is that the modern PMC’S equivalent to the Salon of Yesterday would have said miscreant clapped in irons .. and thrown to the goal, for good measure, maybe even so far as hanging in an iron maiden .. just for good measure!
With regard to the Hauntviri .. Bola.. whatever .. ‘they’ will bring forth something .. SOMETHING, ANYTHING! .. to push forth their elite agenda to put the ‘useless eaters’ in their place .. come hell or high water. Have you noticed that Suddenly in the Knews, that the meme of ‘OMG!! moarrr gain-o-function’ hinkyness in UKRAINE!! has made a comeback in the western press??
JMG,
The Haunta virus was also a good candidate for a situationist moment because about a year and a half ago a particularly graphic example grabbed the attention of popular celebrity culture. The famous actor Gene Hackman died at his home in New Mexico because his much younger wife ,Betsy Arakawa caught the Hantavirus from a desert rodent and died before she could get medical help. Without her, gene who was suffering from dementia in his old age, died of neglect along with one of the family pets. This presents a scary example to the populous, that if someone as wealthy as the famous actor and his wife could be wiped out by the bug it must be scary.
Charlie Obert (#22) wrote: “The difference between a urinal in a bathroom and a urinal in an art gallery is the framing – in the art gallery it is framed as art. ”
True, but framing is only one difference between them, and not the most important one. Another difference, IMHO the most important one of them all, is that the urinal in the bathroom is connected to the building’s plumbing and the city’s sewers, while the urinal in the art gallery is not. (Of course, the art gallery’s building also may have plumbed urinals, but they are not on display in the art gallery itself.).
Academic or theoretical discussions so often overlook such basic, but unclassy, things as plumbing … There’s far more to objects than how they are framed.
Thinking about ritual as an act of reframing, I’m reminding of a passage from the Tao Te Ching: “The sage is without bias, and regards people as straw dogs.” (From Derek Lin’s 1994 translation.)
The “straw dogs” the passage refers to were ceremonial objects made of straw that were venerated during ceremonies, but after the ceremony was finished, they were stomped under foot to destroy them. The ceremony created a situation that framed them as sacred objects to be worshiped, but when that situation ended they became trash to be disposed of.
In the context of the passage, the meaning seems to be that the wise see no one as inherently above or beneath them, as inherently good or bad, etc. because it’s all a matter of context. Though note that context is an interplay of objective facts and subjective choices: you can’t just make anything mean what you want merely because you want it.
“The Fountain” is a term I use for Daath and I don’t know what the urinal having the same title says about me or the artists. I am amused.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 5/21). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May William B find wise guidance in his quest to establish a new life in a new land far away and free from certain toxic individuals in his former country.
May Matthew U. from Marion, Indiana’s dog of 14 years, Holly, who is dying of cancer, be blessed and comforted; may she pass on peacefully and without pain, ideally in her sleep, while knowing she is most loved. May the two of them reunite happily in the next life or incarnation.
May cabaiste22’s relative Megan, who had a sudden surgery due to a lump on her ovaries, heal quickly and without incident; may she be blessed and healed of any problems related to both the surgery and the lump.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Luke Dodson’s beloved uncle-in-law David C be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused; may mother be blessed and invigorated.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Open Space be filled with the strength he needs to heal quickly from his current bout of Chicken Pox; may his will remain strong, that he does not scratch; may he be healed completely, and suffer no scarring in its wake.
May Bob Ralston (aka Rasty Bob), who is in hospice care in Buckeye AZ, and who just lost his wife Leslie Fish, be blessed and find relief from his pain and discomfort; may Bob’s heart remain strong.
May Princess Cutekitten, who has made no comments on any of the Ecosophia blogs for a year now, and hasn’t responded to attempts at contact, be blessed wherever she is and in whatever form she may exist.
May Cathy N. of St. Marys, Ohio heal and recover from injuries caused by a fall.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, be healed of a recently discovered heart condition.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, whose cancer has returned, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment, and may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany, who is experiencing complications in her pregnancy due to an influenza infection, recover and have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Marko have the strength to seize the opportunities.
May Pierre’s young daughter, Athena, be healed from her fatigue and its root causes in ways that are easy, natural, and as holistic as possible.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
@ Pierluigi “The main problem facing these hauntvirus scaremongers is that we are mentally vaccinated by the covid megablunder. People are sick of beinf proclamed future victims of a new plague. The attempts are futile, and will be futile for a very long time”
I knew an environmentalist who was one of the first ones to chain themselves to trees to raise awareness and prevent them being chopped down. As he said, it worked fantastically the first few times but eventually society build antibodies to these things and it just stops working. Unless you can keep it novel, people just stop paying attention.
Regardless of where people stand, believing the narrative or not, pro or anti vaccine, pro or anti lock downs etc. I think everyone can agree that the handling of Covid was a total disaster in terms of the longer term damage it has done to peoples cohesion on potential dangers. We have build up antibodies against this stuff. This is both a good and bad thing.
With Hauntavirus, I think it is just the diminished-media (former mass media) trying to drum up something exciting to prevent their lights going out. If it bleeds it leads.
But I do wonder what will happen when a genuinely nasty pandemic comes long. The trust in media, health “providers”, government messaging has been completely trashed and it was those inside that smashed it up for their own gain. There is the risk this becomes ‘the boy who cried wolf’. Is it that one day in 40 years something comes a long that just wipes out a huge part of the population because we all said “We’ve heard this crap story before!”?
There is a good chance it will and it is because all the trust was eroded on endless short term corruption. And the worst part is that we probably won’t know until it is too late, but at the same time you cannot live in fear of every possible thing they thrust at us.
This graffiti near my work summarizes this well.
https://imgur.com/a/U7arPCH
JMG,
I am surprised this discussion of situationism has lasted a couple of posts now without a mention of an author who is either familiar with some of these ideas or perhaps has rediscovered a few of them himself.
I am speaking, of course (and in violation of the rules), of Chuck Palahniuk and Fight Club, the novel and the better known film adaptation.
Consider Project Mayhem’s mission to destroy “a piece of corporate art and a franchise coffee bar.” Or picking a fight just to lose it.
Situationism crossed with anarchy, perhaps?
Nephyte # 34 (And JMG):
“Both the dogmatic religious metaphysics and the scientific materialist metaphysics have one thing in common: they convince human consciousness that it is ultimately powerless in this world. It is either subordinate to a sovereign God”
Not every religious metaphysics points that human beings are powerless in this world. At least, there’s a religious philosopher who wrote humans have got freedom to choose and decide our path in our life; in a wide sense, this personal freedom comes from the own God freedom, in a lesser but real way. His name was Nikolay Berdyaev (a Russian Orthodox Christian). I’m not an Orthodox Christian, but I like his view. So please, don’t identify every religious (Christian) view in a mechanical way with determinism…
On the other hand, even some Marxists thought we’re conditioned, but not determined by economic situations: note there’s a subtile difference between condition and determination (conditioning lets some space to personal freedom, methink).
Unfortunately, I admit these non really deterministic Christian and Marxist views are a fringe minority within their usual mainstream determinist interpretations, but they’re worth to be remembered, too, and not to go into the garbage with their mainstream “comrades”.
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JMG # 35:
A good story about Dali, well, his famous motto was “Avida dollars”. He never hided his fondness to get rich, but I can say he thought he had all his right in the world to be rich, because it was evident he was a genius, so…he knew it and thought he deserved it.
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Polecat # 39:
“Have you noticed that Suddenly in the Knews, that the meme of ‘OMG!! moarrr gain-o-function’ hinkyness in UKRAINE!! has made a comeback in the western press??”
Yes, and like I’ve written in a previous comment, the current “business” of big conventional wars and the COVID 19 style viruses hysteria aren’t compatible to work together at the same time. Our puerile and reckless elites can promote an old/new wave of current wars again, or pretend there’s a scary and lethal pandemic, but not the two threats together: by evident reasons, war logistics are difficult when there’s a supposed deadly virus killing “millions” of people…
Ah, you’re really taking me back, JMG. For my sins, I have a degree in philosophy, gained many years ago. We wrote lots of essays about that urinal. You’re right, of course, about not making the final link.
JMG- Your reference to that horrifying specter of the 1918 influenza pandemic gives me a chance to share some recent scholarship. It seems that the over-use of aspirin to “treat” the flu may have been a major factor in its lethality. We know that aspirin was a relatively new medication (like RNA “vaccines”) and that its overdose can lead to stomach ulcers, bleeding, and coughing / vomiting blood, all recorded as symptoms of the 1918 flu.
Citation: Aspirin Misuse May Have Made 1918 Flu Pandemic Worse
Date: October 3, 2009
Source: Infectious Diseases Society of America
Summary:
The devastation of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic is well known, but a new article suggests a surprising factor in the high death toll: the misuse of aspirin. AThe article sounds a cautionary note as present day concerns about the novel H1N1 virus run high.
“You’re telling me that the treatment may have been worse than the disease, in the landmark worst-case scenario 20th century public health disaster?”
Yup.
JMG – Not only does a magical working for, say “wealth” focus the attention on ways to bring in money, but it should help you recognize what you MUST give up to achieve that wealth… such as artistic expression, rest, social relationships, etc. You have decided what will be your priority, and what will not. Be careful what you wish for.
Memory is a tricky thing. I was convinced of this “real” memory for quite awhile. I saw something on that trip that put me in mind of that artwork years later. It was a very special trip I took on spring break in my senior year with someone I was friends with from the monied classes. Someone different from the ex-girlfriend and birth mom I spoke of in the last post. She had a van and she was going to check out several colleges she was interested in attending. I was allowed to take the week off regular school to go with her on her spring break. An extra week off, but it was educational -so my parents let me! By that time I was already 18, and had joined the Holy Order of Ra-Hoor-Khuit. They had a lodge in Louisville, and a kind of sub-lodge in Northern KY suburb of Cincinnati.
So, I was traveling around Ohio, Indiana and Illinois with this girl I was friends with. Part of the trip was to see those campuses. In every place we either stayed with punk rockers she had networked with over the early DIY music message boards of the late 90s, people we had never met in real life. We also stayed with her grandparents for one night in one small Ohio town, and her aunt for a night or two outside Chi town. We went to several shows along the way too. I really do remember visiting the Fireside Bowl, a storied bowling alley in Chicago where they also have indie bands play on the floor. We saw a daytime hardcore show there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fireside_Bowl
In Cleveland I remember seeing the Rodin sculptures at their museum of art, which I still highly recommend. On another visit there much later, my wife and I happened to be going through one of the galleries when I heard familiar music. It was a quartet playing Oliver Messiaen. They were playing the “Quartet for the End of Time.”
In either the Cleveland museum on that trip, or the Chicago one… they had a modern art show going on, as they would of course. There was a fair amount of Andy Warhol and other stuff I remember. Or misremember. It was in that room where I later thought I saw the piece by Duchamp. …but perhaps it was something else viewed through a keyhole or the like. IDK, that was almost thirty years ago.
When we drove back to where we were staying after she visited the University of Chicago, we got lost in the southside and some one threw a brick at the van, but missed. That was kind of freaky.
There were a few other memorable local punk gigs we checked out. One place we stayed was quite skeezy. There was not even a sheet on the rusted out box spring. But it was punk AF. Another place we slept in this room at a hoarder house where all of this junk and old stuffed toys had been thrown. That was a weird one. Some other peoples places were nice. The apartment above a store in an art deco like building after this party we went to in the Parma neighborhood of Cleveland was also memorable, as was the party. Something about going to a basement party in that neighborhood, with a bunch of people I didn’t know stuck with me… none of the conversations. But drinking beer in a smoky basement. On the younger side there, with a bunch of slightly older twenty-somethings…
…and I’m not sure how much of any kind of that kind of experience happens now with youth. The freedom to not just wander the city, but to wander the state, the country…
…my dad drove to Maine to see his brother who had moved there when he was sixteen. I guess my grandma didn’t think it was a big deal because she had been sent to Cincinnati from the farm outside of Fort Laramie in Ohio to get a job when she was sixteen. They put her on a bus and sent her down to the city…
But now there are so many helicopter parents. I know that is reversing, but I still see a lot of it through the parents I sometimes talk to or hear about from the school where my wife works…
These are some kinds of stories from my life I’ve thought of sharing more… but I don’t know if they appeal to anyone else or not. I don’t read too many memoirs myself, but I do feel drawn to perhaps sharing some of these in some form or other. Perhaps in the Rudy Rucker sense of blending it with gnarl and adding SF and Fantasy elements to make it “transreal” like my short story “Knocking on the Door.”
What do people think? Does anybody like reading personal stories? I have one called “I Was A Teenage Thelemite” that is about finished, but I’ve been waffling on it.
In addition to my last comment about the supposed determinism in religious metaphysics, I’ve remembered my childhood Catholic education, to point a theological and historical fact. I’m thinking now about how Rome seems obsessed since a lot of centuries ago, with the term “free will”. This tendence grew even more after the Trento Counter-Reform, evidently against Protestantism. In the short form, the Vatican thought the best way to counter-attack Luther and his fellows was to go towards the opposite extrem to Protestant ideas (well, the opposite of a bad idea is another bad idea). I disagree. A mistake doesn’t fix another mistake…
So, if Protestants (especially Calvin) spoke and wrote about Predestination under God wisdom and power, Catholics learnt to believe human beings have a free will, which according some philosophers and theologians, is indeed a half hearted Pelagianism (an heresy which proposed humans could be saved by themselves, without need to be helped by God grace).
I personally think (I hope not to offend any Catholic who read this comment), there’s not a Predestination (full determinism) in our lives, but the another extreme (unlimited free will) isn’t realist neither. Indeed, although we’ve got a will, our mind lives within a brain which is in a material limited body, so yes, there’s a will thanks to our reason and inteligence, but it’s free…to some extent. We’re conditioned, but not to the extreme to be determined. Well, I mean, my view is a middle ground betweem those theological extremes, which by the way, have been secularized by modern philosophers and scientists (the determinism/freedom debate goes on today under different costumes, methink).
So I can say at least Catholicism in its current form, hasn’t a determinist metaphysics; which oesn’t mean it’s right in its optimist free will idea: its mistake is the opposite to the Calvinist mistake denying all human freedom.
Hi JMG, funny thing happened to me today. A couple of hours after reading this essay I picked up a $100 note blowing down the street. I kid you not.
Thanks to you I have learnt enough about synchronicity to know that I’d better refresh my acquaintance with Jupiter asap 🙏
Thank you for this, I never thought I would actually understand Situationism, but now I feel like I have a pretty good grasp. When I was a child in the 1980s, there was a Canadian workout show that somehow got syndicated on one of the main TV channels. The show was called 20 Minute Workout and it featured stick-thin women in skimpy leotards. It was straight up soft porn, and the “workouts” had women dancing with their butts nearly touching, women bending over so you could clearly view their emaciated thighs and between their legs, and porny close ups of their fully made-up faces and chests as they breathed heavily. I did not know it, but the show was my first initiation into anorexic culture as a girl. The fetishized body type was thin and adolescent. All of the women on the show could have passed for age 13 to 18. I did not know it at the time, but what was being sold to me as a child was dieting, and not just sensible dieting . . . extreme dieting. It also represented the cultural pressure of the time to grow up as fast as possible, a pressure that has not abated in any way since then. I was lucky that I never succumbed entirely to the black magic of shows like this one and I never became bulimic or anorexic, but almost every female friend I had growing up had an eating disorder. One thing I have learned since then is to always look past the It Girl or the It Boy to see what is actually being sold.
JMG – off topic, but this article by Craig Tindale traverses similar territory to your theory of catabolic collapse.
For your reference – https://x.com/ctindale/status/2056581456038969669
Robert Mathiesen #41
“Another difference, IMHO the most important one of them all, is that the urinal in the bathroom is connected to the building’s plumbing and the city’s sewers, while the urinal in the art gallery is not.”
Not necessarily so – there is a trend towards art exhibits which are set up in a way that encourages user participation in the artistic act – which in turn reframes the gentle art of emptying one’s bladder. (I recall that JMG commented on such user participation sometimes occurring.)
For most non-participatory, look-but-don’t-touch art exhibits, (better yet, See but don’t Pee) then the framing implies the appropriate behavior. In that case, Framing is everything.
Perhaps you could create a counter framing sort of situation by putting up a sign over a public urinal saying URINATION PROHIBITED HERE.
@Tom river: When anyone says to me “check your privilege,” my response is “Certainly, if you will hang your victimhood on the peg next to it.”
Chris, oh, there’s always blowback from evil magic. (There’s also always blowback from good magic, but it’s the kind you want: cast spells to bless and heal, and you’ll just have to put up with being blessed and healed.) It’s interesting to me how few members of our elite classes have founded dynasties, and how many of them get elbowed aside and fall from power in short order. As for the Black Death, yes, and those two failed harvests came as part of a long period of subsistence crisis: by 1300, populations across much of Eurasia had grown beyond what local agricultural resources could support. Nature dealt with that problem in her usual ruthless way.
Polecat, as I noted, performance artists have been doing it all along. It’d be interesting to see, if a member of the public did it, if he’d be thrown in irons or quietly redefined as a performance artist. As for hauntaviruses, yep — it’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, the current administration does about those gain-of-function labs.
Clay, a valid point. It might be interesting to watch for similar events — someone famous dying of a rare virus — as a way to predict the next hauntavirus scare.
Slithy, that’s certainly one way to read that passage. It also has a darker side, as the sage could take that as advice to use and discard people like straw dogs. Lao Tsu is not as gentle as he’s sometimes made out to be.
Luke, ha! Now you’ve got me seeing Daath as the place where the most prominent attribute of Chokmah releases the streams of energy that flow down onto the lower worlds… 😉
Ecoprayer, thank you for this as always.
Bfp, interesting. I haven’t seen the movie or read the book, for whatever that’s worth.
Chuaquin, that’s a fair point — it’s the majority of Christian and materialist ideologues, but not all of them.
Revert2Mean, it’s a good theme for philosophical reflection! It’s also lousy art, but that’s another matter. 😉
Lathechuck, thanks for this. I’d read a few references to that, but it makes perfect sense, especially in context. Ironically, aspirin has never done anything for me. My parents used to hand it out all the time for headaches and muscle aches, and it never offered any relief. Your grasp of magical theory is quite good, btw.
Justin, personal stories can be fascinating if the person has had an interesting life. You might consider getting some of yours in print and seeing how people react.
Darren, ha! Synchronicity strikes again.
Kimberly, that’s an excellent example of the malign construction of a situation, in order to détourn people’s desire to be healthy into a self-defeating quest to pursue a body type most of them can never hope to achieve. Thank you.
Darren, thanks for this. I was able to track down his Substack, which is a more accessible source for his ideas:
https://ctindale.substack.com/
I’ll be giving him a serious read as circumstances permit.
Charlie (if I may), that suggests a hilarious bit of détournement. Imagine that you hang up signs on a men’s restroom redefining it as an art exhibit, sign each of the urinals “R. Mutt 1918” or something similar, and put artist’s statements next to each of them — oh, and also the sink, which is credited to some famous artist or other. Then see how people react…
Anon, thank you! That’s a nice crisp response.
@Chuaquin (#52):
As for the paradox of free will vs. determinism, I find it most easily resolved in this way:
Yes, in principle we have free will, but most of us will go to almost any lengths to avoid using it in any way that makes a significant difference in our lives.
“But I do wonder what will happen when a genuinely nasty pandemic comes long. The trust in media, health “providers”, government messaging has been completely trashed and it was those inside that smashed it up for their own gain. There is the risk this becomes ‘the boy who cried wolf’. Is it that one day in 40 years something comes a long that just wipes out a huge part of the population because we all said “We’ve heard this crap story before!”?”
No kidding. We are seeing this with vaccines. There is a happy middle ground between polio and the 78 “recommended” shots. No one sane wants polio back even if most cases resolve with no permanent damage (I had an uncle who was in that category). One shot Mom did make sure I got was mumps as soon as puberty hit and I hadn’t had them yet. Another uncle got mumps at 17 and is immune to a successful paternity suit. He also got to keep his hair unlike the other males in the family. Then there is rubella and it’s infamous collateral damage.
There is some sort of objection to a vitamin K shot that is in the news which is why I was thinking about this. On the other hand why are we giving the barely born a hepatitis B shot when Mommy is not a druggie?
These Situationist articles are extremely well timed.
Last week we had Shani Puja in India, the Hindu ceremony for the worship of Saturn. I looked up the Shani Mantra to recite it, since I am in need of his influence right now, and I learnt that he is associated with the color Blue in Hindu tradition. I am a little surprised to learn that Jupiter (in some ways Saturn’s direct opposite) is associated with Blue in Western ceremonial tradition.
What are the colours associated with the other planets? Mars is Red, I suppose. Also, do you (or anyone else in this august commentariat) happen to know any quick ways to secure a strong saturnine influence in my life? I have been losing my way the last couple of weeks and having a hard time keeping to good habits for a while.
With respect (or something) to Duchamp, that feat continues to haunt cultural memory —
https://nojoenogo.com/2026/05/14/porta-john-recovered-from-iraq-now-on-permanent-display-at-the-louvre-interior-artwork-described-as-revolutionary/
There is no doubt room in genre studies for some sort of historical study of the genre of works following from the first exemplar.
Situationism is not dead yet… [last week]
A prominent MAGA-parody drag event—titled “Turning Point US Gay”—took place in Brooklyn, New York. The satirical fundraiser drew a crowd of over 1,000 people and featured performers mocking prominent conservative figures, successfully raising over $25,000 for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The night served as a direct pushback against anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-drag legislation pushed by conservative politicians. Held at the Bushwick venue $3 Bill, the event featured ten drag artists delivering spot-on impersonations of MAGA personalities and Turning Point USA figures, including: Melania Trump: Parodied by Kiki Ball-Change. Erika Kirk: Parodied by Lauren Banall. Other Figures included parodies of Rudy Giuliani and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.
Justin P. # 51:
“What do people think? Does anybody like reading personal stories?”
I’ve thought I’m part of the people too, so I’m going to answer your questions. I’ve read your story about that trip you did with that girl, when you were younger, and I’ve liked to read it. IMHO, I think it’s interesting, and you’ve made me to remember me how was my personal life when I was the same age than you were during your story in your comment (I won’t tell you what I’ve remembered because they’re personal memories I prefer not to share by now with you all). So you can guess I like to read personal stories, if/when they tell interesting things for me (it depends what do you tell us, but in general terms I tend to like others stories if I find analogies -even in a loose way- with my own life or friends/family known lives).
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Kimberly # 53:
Maybe it’s a casual coincidence, maybe it isn’t, but this evening (local time) I’ve just read a graphic novel, written and drawn by Victoria Ying, titled “Hungry Ghost” (translated to Spanish as “El fantasma que alimento”). In the short form, I can tell you it’s a partially self-biographic story about a teen girl (from an Asian origin family) who suffers bulimia, partly caused by her mother (who likes very much slim people). Ironically, her best friend is another teen girl who hasn’t any problem by a “big body”. I won’t tell you more to avoid a spoiler…
I’m a man, but I can understand to some extent the strong pressure on girls to match in the usual body canon. What you’ve written in your comment about that TV show seems a very bad example of spectcle (in the usual and the Debordian sense alike).
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JMG # 58:
Yes, there are many theologists and ideologists, that’s I wanted to point in my last comments. By the way, I don’t know wether N. Berdyaev religious philosophy is shared by most Eastern Europe Orthodox Churches, or it’s only a fringe idea (freedom asa basis for that Christianism). It’s interesting this thinker writes about “freedom”, but never about “free will” in a explicit way. I can guess that there wasn’t a Trento Counter-Reform within East Europe Orthodox Churches, so…Can I bet Orthodox Christians believe humans are free but to a lesser level than Catholic “free will” idea? (but equally far of Calvinist Predestination). If some Orthodox Christian reads me casually, he/she could explain me my doubt. Thanks on advance.
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A short thought about magic:
It’s a pity big churches heads, of different tendences, love to forbid magic as a whole, due to its supposed defy to the Almighty God, or directly identifying every magic practice with (cough) Satanism…I haven’t any problem with people who use magic to achieve responsible and positive goals in their lives, so I can say to this blog magicians (John included): No argument here.
Unluckily, my Christian view is a fringe opinion: Even some Conservative Christians, friends of mine, say I’m too “open-minded”, but I think they’ve got a too closed mind.
@Clay Dennis #40 – you said: “JMG, The Haunta virus was also a good candidate for a situationist moment because about a year and a half ago a particularly graphic example grabbed the attention of popular celebrity culture. The famous actor Gene Hackman died at his home in New Mexico because his much younger wife ,Betsy Arakawa caught the Hantavirus from a desert rodent and died before she could get medical help. Without her, gene who was suffering from dementia in his old age, died of neglect along with one of the family pets. This presents a scary example to the populous, that if someone as wealthy as the famous actor and his wife could be wiped out by the bug it must be scary.” I had this exact same thought. Remember the “sweating sickness” in England, that primarily hit the sons and daughters of the wealthy – they think that was a Hauntavirus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness It’s well primed to create a lot of hysteria, in that regard, because it’s sudden and stealthy.
JMG, do you think it will be harder to pull off, due to people’s memory of Crowvid?
Humm … ‘redefined performance artist’.. Mr.Greer, I’ll have to chew on that a bit. I just hope I don’t choke it though. As for any future zoonotic hink, I know .. as vials are to microbes .. that the CrayCrays that inhabit such locals as Olympia, Wa. will try to find some way to make us unruly purebloods pay for not abiding by their previous Convid stricktures. Fun times..
John & Chauquin: Thanks for your input. I may flesh a few out and put them into circulation and see how it goes. I kind of have a visceral reaction when I see autofiction (and not in a good way), but I’ve been reading some slice-of-life graphic novels (Love and Rockets mostly) and have enjoyed that quite a bit. Those somehow feel different than the literary end.
The hauntavirus and the news to death ratio. Right on topic,
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/news-death-ratio-strikes-again
One last point on the previous post, the Doctrine of the Means does not require that the point of maximum virtue be exactly at the center of the two extremes.
@JMG
“Lao Tsu is not as gentle as he’s sometimes made out to be.”
That’s a fair point. It occurs to me that Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu were responding to society tearing itself apart by promoting self-sufficiency and everyone keeping to themselves, while the hippies who latched onto them as role models were responding a society at war overseas by promoting interdependence and unity.
Ironically in both cases, arguably the opposite actually occurred: China eventually reunified, and America is now tearing itself apart.
“Dada” is argot (Parisian slang analogous to English cockney) for “job” or “professional endevour”, more recently (1950 onwards) it was more used as analogous to “my jam”, “my trick” in very much a détournement of its original working meaning. That meaning fits very well what Dadaism became, but it seems the meaning may have gone in the opposite direction. Dadaism appears first, the 2nd slang meaning appears later.
Hi JMG,
Thanks again for doing this. I knew a tiny bit about the Situationists, but it’s very useful to have this broken down in the way you are, into a series of tools that we can do things with. I’ve been exposed to these ideas a bit indirectly, but deeply enough that being presented with them in this way, I can see how they shape a lot of my thinking.
Something I think relevant: I told you one years ago (possibly you might remember) that I was in a band where the idea is to be the worst band in the world, and to make the most unlistenable nonsense. Part of the way we approached this, I can see in retrospect, was to create a kind of language of this band as a “thing”, we developed a kind of visual set of symbols that represent the band (costumes at first but then we abstracted them to be able to use them as objects without needing to wear all of them), basically there is a “thing” that is the band, and we are in the band and engage with that thing, but we need to reference it, so that it has a staying power that makes it all cohere in a way that is a sort of “show”. It’s maybe a little hard to explain, but I think without this stuff that makes it a show, the whole thing might not hold people’s attention.
Once we have that “show” established, it draws in all the concepts that we, and audiences, have about bands and shows in general, and then we can try to use those things, while also sabotaging them, and attempting to discover new ways to explode them. We actually played last night somewhere, and set up a karaoke station on stage, so people could play songs and sing them while we were just making awful improv music over top. It made it really fun, because then anybody could participate in the joke of it all, which made it a big stupid party – that is usually the mood at them, but this time I think it allowed the division between us and the crowd to be completely blurred. There is a kind of childish joy in just doing something terrible instead of something good, and seeing a lot of people entering into that state was a lot of fun.
Anyway, I could relate what you were describing to this. I appreciate this series!
Thanks,
Johnny
JMG,
Aha! Your comment ties a bow on a dream I had 8 or 9 years ago. TLDR is in the dream I was on a long journey and ended the journey walking into the hallway of a building outside some big cave./tunnel system. In the hallway, there were two doors. One had a sign that side “Lucid Dreaming” and the other side had a sign that said “Astral Projection”. I walked into the lucid dream door and there was a toilet. I proceeded to wizz in it. It was red (I would leave that out but I find it symbolically important). Dream ends and I proceed to have many, many lucid dreams over the following years (the first was shortly after the dream) and some out of body experiences. Dreams remain a key aspect of my spirituality to this day but I don’t try to get lucid anymore and mainly focus on interpreting. So your comment makes me think this was a flow of Divine WIll from Chokmah reflecting in my dream. I quite often wondered “why wizzing in a toilet?” of all things when entering the lucid dreaming door, now it makes sense! Thanks for participating in the revolving meditation of my life!
Oh, and to all … in my situationist book … swinging inside an iron maiden counts as ‘preformance art’, regardless as to whether the, um ‘recipient’ .. was forced, or not! Yes, yes I know this all sounds incredulous, being that we supposedly live in a civilized modern society, but .. considering the current geopolitical underpinnings presently churning, what’s not to think that we’re diving straight down into neo-feudalism .. abundant ‘free time’ aside (h.t. to our illustrious host ‘;] ). Perhaps, a new term needs to be put forth: hows-a-bout ‘Carno-Feudalism’, as our new hi-tech over-lairds feel no allegiance to the masses they proportedly ‘serve’ … all for the GOD of CONvenience, of course!! Apologies if this comment strays too far from the post’s vibe. Delete if you must, Mr. G.
Hi John Michael,
There’s something to be said about acting with good grace. Although, very occasionally I’ve flipped that on its head and let rip on a person who, for want of a better word, committed an evil act directed towards me. Not nice people, and sometimes it can be difficult to tell the colour of their soul in advance – although there are advance warnings, which I heed nowadays. Still it’s hard to know early though, and I’m sure you’ve met some folks like that over time?
Ecology has a lot to say about that other subject, and it’s not a pretty story – and is as applicable now, as it was back then. Thus why I mention the present fertiliser matter, which doesn’t seem to get much media attention either. I’ve often wondered if the pressure for the Vikings to set forth on their raids because it was either win big, get into farming, or starve. I believe they used to have slave run farms, which wouldn’t have been efficient. And history has something to say about the food production on that cod fishing island during WWII. I mean, man, the Spanish Flu came after WWI when how much agricultural production failed to be, due to loss of manpower? It’s an old story.
Cheers
Chris
You make a blanket statement that isn’t justified. The point of woke is to make people aware of their class privilege. Many people refuse to awaken, and ape the woke position while ignoring its critique. On this we agree.
The truly woke are sincere and are trying to make change. For example, my whole family is deeply involved with a niece’s NGO for finding scholarships for refugees in a Kenyan camp. We’re trying to use our (middle class) position to help, and trying to get anyone else we can to help too.
Your broad attacks don’t help, because they create cynicism and despair
The funny thing about derive as divination is that the person is actually identifying with the tool, the sign-gathering medium, as well as with the interpreter of the signs. Life as derive = being an instrument of a higher will in a way. Feels useful to consider. Thanks!
Rajarshi, western planetary colors vary, but here’s one standard set:
Sun: Yellow
Moon: Violet
Mercury: Orange
Venus: Green
Mars: Red
Jupiter: Blue
Saturn: Black
Some traditions assign Saturn indigo, which is a very dark blue, and give Jupiter sky blue. If you need Saturn energy in your life, in Western terms, burn a dark blue candle on Saturday, during the planetary hour of Saturn (that varies by place and season but there are plenty of online sources), and then recite a prayer to Shani — any traditional prayer will do, but the older it is, the better. You might also practice planetary charity by donating money three times, each time making the donation some multiple of 3, to a charity that benefits things ruled by Saturn — in the Western tradition, poor people and the elderly are proper recipients of Saturnine charity.
LeGrand, that’s seriously funny. Thank you.
Bruce, ordinary parody in defense of an established political agenda isn’t Situationism. It’s just one set of kleptocrats raging at another set of kleptocrats.
Chuaquin, established religions too often turn into lenocracy, that is to say, schemes in which the hierarchs insert themselves between the worshipper and the Divine and then demand payment for access. Magic is a threat to all such schemes because it teaches individuals how to make contact with the spiritual world directly. Thus it’s no wonder that the hierarchs get upset at us!
Polecat, I remember Olympia far too well. Having known my share of actual, clinical lunatics, I sincerely feel that calling the Washington state government cray-cray is an insult to honest psychotics. 😉
Justin, avoid any least hint of literary writing and you’ll do yourself a huge favor. Did you ever read Hunter S. Thompson? His hallucinatory memoirs are classics, but you won’t hear lit-crit types talk about them — they’re too lively and too well written, and put most literary fiction to shame.
Siliconguy, granted. Sometimes the mean is off in a wholly different direction.
Slithy, that makes quite a bit of sense.
Rashakor, fascinating.
Johnny, good gods. I can very easily imagine the entire Situationist International making a beeline for that concert and having enormous fun with it. There’s Guy Debord right now at the karaoke mike, drunk as a skunk, trying to recite chunks of Das Kapital from memory as rap lyrics over the top of your music, while Raoul Vaneigem laughs so hard he falls out of his chair onto the floor…
Luke, I think we’re getting into Surrealism a little sooner than I’d expected. I can all too easily imagine Max Ernst painting exactly that scene!
Polecat, nah, it’s already got a name, courtesy of Giambattista Vico: “the barbarism of reflection,” the point where the elite classes have gotten completely lost in a wilderness of abstractions and can no longer find enough of the real world to matter. Decline and fall follows promptly.
Chris, the Viking Age happened because the early medieval warm period caused the population of far northern Europe to expand, and then the weather started cooling again — so, yeah, it was go a-viking or starve. It’s an old, old story.
Tom, obviously I disagree. The point of woke is to defend the privilege of the bureaucratic-managerial class and provide it with weapons in its ongoing struggle against the working classes — you know, those people that wokesters love to denounce as racists, sexists, etc., while preening themselves for their own notional virtue. As for cynicism and despair, not at all. Only when the fake answers being offered by privileged wokesters are recognized for the instruments of class warfare that they are will it become possible to get a wider audience for responses to the crisis of our age that might actually do some good.
AliceEm, an excellent point, and one I hadn’t noticed. Thank you.
Well, JMG, it looks like we have “Return of the Situationists” this week – doesn’t have the same ring as “Return of the Jedi”; no light sabres either, I see. It is interesting to see how many gems you are finding from this bizarre little movement at the time when Faustian civilization was slouching into wretched decadence.
A note on the Hauntavirus scare and now the Ebola scare: these demented people in power really, really, really want another taste of (largely) unopposed tyranny, don’t they? Something about the timing has been bothering me lately, though: I have come across a large number of reports being made this spring in the USA and Canada of small aircraft (Cessna airplanes and smaller helicopters) dropping off boxes brimming full of ticks in rural areas – apparently the gig pays unethical pilots really well, too! I’m not sure if you’ve been hearing something similar south of the border… but I am wondering if the whole virus scare stuff would be a good distraction while gazillions of lab-grown Ticks from Hell are leashed upon us nearly unseen.
I burst out laughing at your statement, “theft, forgery, money laundering, tax evasion, and insurance fraud are among the games that the modern art scene plays,” because it just reminded me of the fact that there was a disreputable TV journalist by name of Evan Solomon who used to sell dodgy art to our current Prime Sinister, Marx Carnage. Solomon is now a Member of Parliament and Minister of Artificial Intelligence (a new ministry created by Carnage): once a crook, always a crook, I guess. On to bigger and better frauds!
https://no01.substack.com/p/the-wrong-virus
This dude argues that hantavirus lacks the biological properties necessary to function as a hauntavirus, and predicts that more suitable candidates will be found as quickly as possible. And he points to the important role the current energy crisis is playing in this new hauntaviral awakening: the coming need to ration energy without acknowledging doing so.
Speaking of dada, I just published a short primer on metadada ethics:
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/a-short-primer-on-metadada-ethics
“Metadada ethics, in the context of developing a sustainable approach to nonsensical eccentricity involves the moral principles and guidelines around the creation, proliferation, and end use of metadada associated with all the other dada that can easily be gleaned about a person through the dada trail they leave in the electronic simulacrum. It ensures that metadada accurately represents the underlying dada, respects the idea of privacy without actually respecting privacy, promotes transparency without actually being transparent, and supports equitable access to information crucial for environmental and social responsibility. Ethical metadada practices are vital for informed decision-making and accountability in the modern world, where the way we do things no longer makes sense, least of all in this short primer.”
Re the toilet in the Louvre:
> “These are not casual marks,” the [Louvre’s] statement reads. “These are declarations.”
That telltale goLLuM stench…
I cannot, within the rules of this forum, express the intensity with which I want the collapse to hurry up after reading this.
Tom River #75:
How is there NGO financed? Scholarships where—in Kenya or in the US or Europe? Genuine refugees or people who know that they can just claim they’re being persecuted and will be given things like scholarships? For that matter, wouldn’t they be better served learning a trade where they will be able to support themselves from day one?
My point is not so much to attack you personally, as I don’t know you and you might genuinely be doing good work, but that the cynicism is well deserved and created by the people being attacked, not the attackers.
—David P.
JMG, there’s something broken about your latest comment. I can see it in my RSS reader and in the “your comment is awaiting moderation” page but it’s not showing otherwise.
—David P.
Robert M. # 59:
Well, you’re right: That’s a real attitude within some people who prefer to avoid using their freedom, but indeed it’s an option too, because they’ve chosen with freedom, before losing their “free” will. You can see it in the evident case of addicts to alcohol or illegal drugs; they’ve chosen beginning their addiction, but now they lost their will…
I also think there are different will levels (so several freedom levels), according different personal situations. For example, a person with a healthy mind has more freedom to choose than an individual with mental problems, by evident reasons. However, within the mental disorders there are different levels on will limitation, so mild cases are more capable to choose, but worst cases can have a low will level (or directly they are unable to choose).
On the other hand, people can be compelled by outside influences to choose between more or less options. For example, people who lives in “democracies”(OK, more and more imperfect every day, ahem), can choose between more options than citizens-serfs in places like North Korea…
I think an agnostic philosopher (Hume) tried to find a middle ground between the too optimist statements about Free Will and pesimist Determinism. He wrote freedom and need cannot be separated in real world, and we decide this or that using our reason and passions alike; he accepted some freedom was possible, but taking in account our conditions, in a world where cause and effect work. Well, I won’t explain you Hume theories about will and freedom, but I think I’ve depicted his view in a short form.
Raharsi#61
We are Indoeuropeans.
And how about a jaunty tune of the week to share in relation to the post? This pop folk punk number from Chumbawamba (live version) is their song Ratatatay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTYXT2Hziz4&list=RDMTYXT2Hziz4&start_radio=1
It’s one to whistle and ursonate along with!
This song tells the true story of British surrealist critic and writer George Melly when he got mugged one night in Manchester. As the knife blade was pointed at him in the corner, he thought of the poem Ursonate by dada maverick Kurt Schwitters, and he recited it, no cast it as a banishing spell, against his attacker. It probably saved his life.
Dada may just save your life!
Hi JMG,
My ears perked up when I read, ‘In due form.’ That takes the Masonic ritual to a whole new level. We are changing the consciousness of the participants via a strict set of rules so that when they leave the Lodge, their minds have been detourned through ritual.
In Lodge, my question always goes back to: what did they know when they wrote the ritual?
Bruce T. # 63:
OK, people who made those parodies attacked the Trumpian Conservative spectacle, but of course (looking who promoted that “Situationist”-like show) they didn’t attack the woke-leftist-Democrat opposite political Spectacle…Congratulations for the wokesters, because they’ve shown they’ve got some sense of humor yet…against their enemies. I find they lack a bit of necessary self-criticism (with humor and/or seriously). They don’t dare to do it, so I think they’re in an ethical and intellectual poor situation, methink. And low class worker people is going to keep distrusting their fake friends, the woke-leftists-Democrats (and they’re in their right to go on doing it for a long time…).
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Justin P. # 67:
You’re welcome! I usually like well written and good stories from self-biographies, from famous people and average people alike.
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Tom # 75:
“The truly woke are sincere and are trying to make change. ”
Two personal ideas about your phrase:
First, the Truly People is an old story which has happened in every times when an ideology or religion shows it isn’t made of perfect people; so, soon or later, some individuals self-labelled as the True People begin their usual claims about their moral and ideological pure feelings, thoughts and actions…Looking at the many historical cases, I can say this reasoning is very weak in front of real world (oh, and there’s a real risk of sectarian partisanship, and worse things, ahem).
Second idea, I find your phrase contradicts the apparent motives for being a woke activist. I thought wokesters (and Leftists in general terms) want equality for everybody, without supremacism. However, when you write there are truly woke people, I see you mean, in an implicit way, the “good” wokesters are better than the “bad” ones, so…Are they in a superior level in the “woke pyramid”? I thought claims about this or that human group (usually white straight man, but there are another examples) being over another social groups (usually minorities) was the main sin to point according woke ideology. Oops!
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JMG # 77:
I think your explanation of usual hatred within Big Churches bosses against magic (even against “white magic” or magic used by Christian magicians-I guess they’ve existed and exist yet) is very possible. Unfortunately, lenocracy has been and is common when you pay attention to the higher levels of churches. I also find interesting how magic practice avoids pyramidal hierarchies, which differenciates it from usual religious structures. There are different levels of centralization and hierarchies within the Christianism, but I can see the worst of them, methink. I’m afraid to upset Catholics readers of you, John, but I’m evidently thinking about the near totalitarian power that the Popes have owned since a heck of centuries ago…ending in the Pope infallibility dogma (Oops!). On the other hand, not everything is IMHO negative in that branch of Christianism, to be fair with it.
JMG #58 – about the men’s restroom art exhibit – I am picturing plaques on the urinals that say:
Made possible by an endowment
by the John L Knight Foundation
@Tom R. #75 – “The truly woke are sincere and are trying to make change.”
Have you ever heard of The No True Scotsman Fallacy?
JMG, I would like to propose a radical theory. Given that, despite all the odds or even the impossibility, of The Babylon Bee keeping up with a Reality more satirical than fiction…is it maybe just possible, that they are reading your posts on Situationism???
Ron, I’m unsure as yet whether the parachuting ticks are a reality or a classic rumor panic; either way, it’s worth noticing. The thing that strikes me most forcefully about the parade of the hauntaviruses is that the people behind them have so obviously run out of ideas. It’s the same factor driving the equally dreary parade of woke remakes out of Hollywood — no matter how dismally each one fails, the next plops out behind it, because the people making them literally have no other ideas in their brains.
Omer, I freely grant that the hantavirus makes a poor hauntavirus, since it transmits very poorly from person to person. That doesn’t matter as much as you’d think, though, because the biological reality of any virus is irrelevant to its status as a social reality. You could take a completely harmless virus and turn it into a hauntavirus by lining up flacks in white lab coats to proclaim it as the worst threat humanity has ever seen, while media lackeys do their echo chamber thing and suppress competing views.
Justin, seriously funny. Thank you, and also the bright blue Rhamphoryncus you flew in on.
David, I’m not sure you’re aware that the site Clay linked to is a military humor site! I’ll check with my IT guy and see if he can figure out what the problem is.
Justin, “ursonate” is a new one for me. Does it mean “make noises like a bear”?
Jon, good. You’re paying attention. As for your question, the ritual didn’t get written at any one time — what we have in any given jurisdiction is a medieval ritual that’s been through many generations of revisions, some clueless, some rather less so. Go back before 1750 or so and a lot of the people involved knew stuff.
Charlie, good! Yes, that would work.
Celadon, I think it’s more likely that most of the staff members of the Babylon Bee are just pretending to be conservative Christians — they’re actually the members of the original Situationist International, who reincarnated as a group in Florida, met up covertly at the age of six, and have stealthily pursued a plan to prank the entire planet by generating absurdist fake news that’s more plausible than the real news. So far they seem to be succeeding. 😉
Tom River (#75) wrote: “The truly woke are sincere and are trying to make change. ”
Ah, yes indeed!
However, two hard questions immediately arise in my mind.
(1) The old maxim of all con-artists is, “Sincerity is the key skill in con-artistry. Once you have learned how to fake sincerity effectively, you can do almost anything with almost anyone.”
So how can the rest of us ever hope to tell the truly sincere from the skilled con-artists? They both present themselves in exactly the same ways to get you to do what they want.
That ends up as raw power-over, and — as Lord Acton once wrote — “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
(2) Is each and every proposed rational change for the better actually possible? As Immanuel Kant wrote, “No carpenter can ever make any straight thing from such crooked timber as mankind is.”
And when some change might be possible, how long can it last? Robert E. Howard ended one of his Conan stories (“Beyond the Black River”) by writing this: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind ….. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately always triumph.”
@Jon G (#86):
Kipling once wrote: “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” He was half-right: some forms of words (and accompanying actions) are more powerful than others. Of those various forms, probably the most powerful of them all is ritual.
In accord with our current materialistic philosophy, we have become a society almost without rituals. And it shows! It shows more and more with every passing decade!
Tom River @ 75 & David @ 81, here in the USA, we have already a vast oversupply of all sorts of “credentialed professionals”; we don’t need to import more. What we do need to do is enforce reasonable standards of ethics and competence on said soi-dissant professionals. The unethical and incompetent are found in every demographic and ethnicity, BTW.
While I hold no brief for anything remotely MAGA–which I do not see as a working class movement–I do have one question for the self described truly woke: we have an ever increasing homeless population in this country. When do they get to be important? The only organization I see doing anything for this group is Catholic Charities.
I read his Hell’s Angels book and some of his shorter pieces. The dude could write. I should read his longer works, for sure. The meme is hilarious. The gonzo approach… yeah, I like that when it comes to writing.
I think I held off on reading more of Hunter S. Thompson, because some of my friends who were junkies worshipped the dude. Thankfully I never tried heroin. I’m officiating my second wedding in two weeks. It’s for my friend I went to highschool and college with who started doing heroin when we were at Antioch, along with two of my cousins. He loved Thompson… when he and my cousin tried to rob a gas station, it was probably one of the best things that happened to him, as he got clean while in the clinker and ended up getting trained for a good trade and has done really well for himself in that respect. I was happy when he moved back from Seattle during the pandemic. And now I have this honor for him and his bride.
In that respect, my stories would probably be limited to some of those from that time period. Barry Gifford has a lot of stories from his childhood, and I really like his writing. At the same time, I also like his philosophy. He has been married a long time. Didn’t get whacked out on drugs or alcohol. Doesn’t have a lot of drama in his life. His stories are crazy though. He said an interview that he likes to keep the drama on the page in his writing, not have it in his life.
But I can still learn from Thompson. Emulate the prose, not the person!
Justin Patrick Moore 51
I can only speak for myself.
Little-ole me enjoys reading your stuff.
It is The Sun Magazine that has had a philosophy about publishing only (when non-fiction) “first-person” stories that (1) only the author knows about, and (2) that the story actually happened. (Names are changed to protect the innocent, and all that.) In other words, no-one else in the world can tell that story. The story is unique. The story rings true, and in this arti-jelly-fish-ial ill-telligent environment, “ringing-true” takes first place on what readers demand. Of course, good writing has a friendly tone to it.
I keep reading that folks these days, those born mostly around year 2000, seek writings (and other media) that feel truthful, where they get the feeling the author/photographer isn’t trying to pull a fast one. (That would include all advertising.)
It is the ringing-true that makes such stories so engaging, no matter what the topic.
Fiction, The Sun doesn’t hold to the first-person rule.
In digital world of zeros (0) and ones (1), your storytelling is a one‼️😉(yeah, that makes you feel REAL special. Pass-fail). No, really, your stories are at least four-and-a-half stars (I never give five stars; it’s against my religion). Keep on truckin’‼️
💨📓👩🏼🏫💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I was not, thank you. I feel very silly now.
Your comment now appears normally for me, so either your IT guy fixed the problem or it fixed itself.
Chuaquin #83:
I don’t want to put words into anybody’s mouth so I don’t know if that was the original point but you don’t need an addiction or outside coercion to not exercise your free will. A lot of people just follow whatever the default choice is for them, be it suggested by habits or by society. I’m not exempting myself from that, by the way, though I’m getting better at it.
—David P.
Another quirky French etymology point that dawned on me in meditation about one of the previous chapters on the Situationism.
The mathematical word for derivations in French is: (drumrolls…) dérivée. Both the French and English words for that concept are etymological dérives (which is actually a real concept in linguistics) of the word “dérive” (lol, stay with me here) and in modern algebra are tools to determine the general direction of a function, the same that the conscious unmooring of a barge determines the direction of the underlying current.
Etymological derivation is actually a drift in meaning of a concept reflecting the direction of the cultural zeitgeist at the time of the shift. I find it fascinating that the dérive of the word dérive happens circularly on different realms of understanding (consciousness).
You’re welcome, John. Thank you for taking the time to read the piece.
As for Ursonate, it probably is mystical bear sound utterance poetry from beyond the north gate.
It’s also a sound poem written by Kurt Schwitters, who was probably more famous for his visual art in the form of collage and his merzbau construction (Merzbow became the name for the long running noise music project of Japanese artist Masami Akita) . Here are some recordings of ursonate by various people:
https://ubu.com/sound/ursonate.html
UbuWeb is your friend if you need to track down some of this historical material re: Dada, Surrealism, and beyond… they have an amazing archive of material, not just sound, but PDFs of old art and poetry journals and the like.
His concept of Merz remains important to me!
https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/07/09/in-search-of-lost-art-kurt-schwitterss-merzbau/
https://timokorhonen.com/ursonate-2/
These are some of the words of power:
Fümms bö wö tee zee Uu
pögiff,
kwii Ee.
(Looking up George Melly again I see he was also a jazz musician. Going to have to track a recording down… )
@ Tom River – I have enormous sympathy for you. You have encountered a tough audience for the position you advance, which, I have no doubt, plays well in other places.
I really hope that you will not walk away from this conversation, because your heart is in the right place! But, sometimes it is truly hard (as Sinclair Lewis declared) to understand a thing (in this case why your points are getting the reaction that they are) if their salary depends on them not understanding it.
I truly hope you will hang around some, sit some with the reaction you’ve gotten, and put your dependence upon your salary to one side *enough* to begin to understand it.
As a help, because sometimes the writings of dead people are not as “charged” as current output, and can therefore throw light on the present from a perspective with no skin in the game, so to speak… I’d refer you to the scene that Harper Lee depicted so eloquently in Chapter 24 of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Meanwhile, please don’t lose (your very well placed) heart. There is a big BARK, coming at you just now, but I promise that it doesn’t BITE. 🙂
My blessings if you will have them! 🙂
JMG 77
> calling the Washington state government cray-cray
Consider me clueless.
This feels like an inside “Washington State” joke. I don’t understand. I experienced the State of Washington while hitchhiking (passing through) from New York State to Southern California at age 19 in the 1970s (via Canada). I have read about the State of Washington, much of it negative. It is BillSkates country. I saw the State of Washington merely by whizzing by. (Maybe I took a whizz there; others here have mentioned “pee.” See, I HAVE been paying attention.)
Is it a reference to Cray Research, in which case, I still don’t understand it. Someone, please spell out the logic and punchline…
💨🤓💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Justin Patrick Moore, I like personal narrative and find your comments interesting enough to it would be interesting to read yours. Also, I find Robert Anton Wilson the king of personal narrative.
Class, CLASS! a question: Does a Bear ursonate in the woods? .. anyone? .. anyone at all? You there – Mr. umm, uhh ….. Buellerenskyii?? Sorry Justin, I just couldn’t resist. I admit – I’m shameless.
Mr. Greer .. yeah, point taken. One is left to wonder if the entire Wa. .gov apparatus require amongst themselves a constant sheep-dipping of the Brown Acid .. before voting in Anything that’s supposedly deemed beneficiant ‘legislation’. The same sentiment applies to most municipalities, I would argue .. even across the Cascadian divide (a wave and a nod to Siliconguy nestled amongst the Coolies..)
[If there were a subject line, it would read “Metadada”.]
As an aside., one of the great forms of derive occurs — or used to occur — in open stacks research libraries, where pilgrims could wander for hours and days admiring the juxtapositions created by the cataloging system, and the carts filled with materials for reshelving.
One of the unfortunate qualities of the Situationists was their crushingly saturnine presence, probably connected not so much with materialism, or even dour self-importance, as with the European tendency to regard the serious as necessarily grim. One European psychiatrist remarked that the normative American personality struck Europeans as intrinsically hypomanic, as though levity and humor undermined claims to intellectual seriousness. On those terms, the normative European personality might strike Americans as depressive and catastrophizing.
At any rate, a very Americanized Situationist move might have been the creation of Halupedia (halupedia.com), which shines the light of LLM hallucinations back on itself, generating a vast encyclopedic database of LLM hallucinations, which can be meta-elaborated by appropriate, or inappropriate, prompts. (For example, https://halupedia.com/2026-halupedia-recursion-disaster.)
Back in the early days of OCR, it was hard to avoid generating a kind of found poetry based on scanning errors. Now, LLM hallucinations can be turned back on themselves., further spicing up the universe of LLM text generation.
0 the Great Wars of Halupedia Dot Com Slash Admin
The Great Wars refers to a protracted series of administrative disputes and subsequent archival purges that occurred within the nascent Halupedia Dot Com organization between 1898 and 1903. These conflicts, while lacking any physical combat, were characterized by intense bureaucratic maneuvering, the strategic deployment of obscure regulatory clauses, and a significant, though ultimately reversible, alteration of the project’s foundational lexicography. The designation ‘0’ in the title signifies the zero-sum nature of the outcomes, with no administrative faction achieving a definitive victory, and ‘Slash Admin’ denotes the specific administrative stratum involved.
In other news, Tucker Carlson had ex-Freemason and filmmaker Sean Stone on his podcast. Mr. Stone is convinced Angels and Demons were calling him on his cell phone during the time period of his Masonic initiations. Tucker did not challenge him. I think Occam’s Razer is appropriate in this situation, and we can chalk it up to prank or malice of humans. The callers were certainly creating situations, imo.
@Northwind Grandma: Thank you! You can’t go wrong with Ra, so I will think on this advice from The Sun.
@Luke Z: Thank you, I appreciate it…
@polecate: It’s not that a bear ursonate in the woods if no one is listening, it is what she is ursonating. Nurses and purses may also be involved. Dont’ resist, accept!
@ JMG # 77
Thank you so much for your guidance regarding Saturn.
Mary Bennet #94:
To be clear, when I asked “Kenya or in the US or Europe”, I didn’t mean that scholarships in the West would be preferable, quite the opposite. Though in my native Germany, a scholarship is hardly necessary as you barely pay anything to study at public universities anyways—students at my university currently pay 345€ and 7 cent the semester. None of that goes to the university, which is tax-funded.
This, importantly, also applies to foreigners. I don’t have the numbers right now but IIRC, only about a third of foreign students actually plan to stay in the country after graduating. In other words, my taxes are either used to just gift foreigners a degree or, if they stay here, teach my imported competitors. As you might imagine, I’m not a big fan of people coming here to study.
As for the unethical and incompetent being found in every demographic and ethnicity, this is obviously true. If you, however, teach certain ethnicities that they will be advantaged when applying for jobs and places at universities, their crimes won’t be punished (in 2021, about 45% of rapists receive suspended sentences in Germany), will get money just for existing, basically cannot be deported, can always come back if deported, and will just be let into the country, the corresponding demographic in your country will be disproportionally unethical and incompetent.
—David P.
Mary B. # 94:
” we have an ever increasing homeless population in this country. When do they get to be important? The only organization I see doing anything for this group is Catholic Charities.”
You nailed it: a good question to make wokesters think about their real priorities…I think you’ve opened a can of worms. It seems old school leftism motives for concern (like growing inequality between social classes, or even the social classes reality itself) have been under the radar by the usual leftists during last times, across the USA and to some extent, within another Western countries. It’s a wry irony when you’ve pointed that only Catholic Charities do something for homeless in your country (those patriarchal right wing Christians so “loved” by wokesters…).
It’s interesting to say situation here isn’t exactly the same as in the US; however, it rhymes to some extent with another local lyrics: Our current Madrid government is quite woke-ized (like usual leftists here in general terms), but I haven’t heard any serious and strong proposal by it to solve this endemic problem, named “food prices inflation”, which is slowly choking middle class and low class people in Spain. Well, it’s easier to choose easy targets like evily evil straight European men, avoiding hard targets like the real factic economic powers, methink. Acts have consequences, so (woke) left here is more and more detached every day from average people, and we’ll see what happens next general elections…
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David P. # 97:
You’re quite right, it’s evident the “herd instinct” exists within many people in different times and countries. There’s no shortage of historical examples, often sad and shameful examples. However, I can also tell you that ironically, people who think, say and do the same as others, imitating them, has chosen not to choose in an implicit way (indeed I think it’s an option between another ones, so it’s a will act). They’ve chosen to be conditioned by their society mainstream tendences, but of course conditions aren’t the same as determinism (there’s more room to decide, methink). I hope you understand better my view, according my not very excellent English level.
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A final comment about woke ideology:
It’s funny and sad alike to notice how people with apparent opposite world views and ideologies share uneasy biases and arrogant attitudes against the non believers in their favorite “echo chamber”. It’s easy to mock and denounce wokesters as a bunch of leftists zealots from a right wing politics view (ot’s true to some extent), but it’s also easy to remember the biblical famous phrase “to see the straw in your brother’s eye”. For example, I’ve met in my town and online too many Conservative and Traditionalist Catholics who see themselves as the True Catholics, despising another ways of being a Catholic from their moral supremacy (they’re better than center and “progressive” believers). Their opinions about (against) non Catholic Christians are even worse. Their favorite claim: They always speak in name of the Pope and the true religion, without asking another tendences Catholics if they want to be represented by them. By disgrace, they pretend they’re a majority shouting in the loudest way in internet, to hide theor real self-margination within our secularized society.
I haven’t any special hatred against Conservative/Trad. Catholics; it’s only an example of an interesting “evolutive” convergence” (or “involutive”) with their apparent enemies, the wokesters (true and real leftists, according themselves). Whatever else example of sectarian and partisan human group, it would be equally good to be depicted: indeed, there are too many echo chambers nowadays.
Justin, I also have a memory of seeing the artwork in question. In my case I would swear it was in the Fluxus exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1993 (that exhibit did travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, btw). I have a clear memory of looking through a peephole in a door and seeing that image of a female figure. However, it is very possible that what I saw was a short film; Duchamp apparently was a major influence on Fluxus, and I’m sure it would have suited them right down to the ground to borrow from his work.
About Tom River, wokeness, and his charities: I noticed the woke and the PMC make a point of giving to or buying (for charitable reasons) from the most remote, foreign, and exotic causes, the more so the better. A 21st century version of “The Starving Children in Africa,” and the purchases often are those you can wear – clothing, jewelry, etc. (This from leafing through the catalogs in my daughter’s mail pile.)
Myself, I made up my mind very early, that with limited resources, I’d do better to give locally, to those causes that address down-to-earth material needs. There is an excellent list of what those are, straight from the Middle Ages:
1. Feed the hungry
2. Give drink to the thirsty
3. Bury the dead
4. Clothe the naked
5. House the homeless
6. Comfort the sick.
7. Visit the prisoners.
Some comments: “#2: in dry country, hand out water bottles.
#3: “Bury the dead” has been taken over by the state, I think.
#7: The original reads “Free the prisoners.” In modern times, that requires an active legal mission such as the Innocence Project, or – before it went all wokey-pokey – the ACLU. But –
locally, here in Gainesville –
Family Promise of Gainesville offers temporary housing, food, clothing, etc.
The Food 4 Kids backpack program.
St. Francis House.
Helping Hands Clinic (medical)
Peaceful Paths Shelter (for those fleeing domestic abuse)
For the people who work for The Village: The Associate Assistance Fund, and The Associate Scholarship Fund.
For village residents who’ve outlived their money and need help with the rent (all 3 of them) The Helping Hands Fund.
There are others, but those have been taken over by statewide or nation-wide parent charities with out-of-state headquarters.
And St. Francis Vet Care – all-volunteer, since the homeless and poor have companion animals too.
Anyway, for what it’s worth., that’s the best I can do. And I don’t make a big point of doing so.
Justin, I certainly don’t encourage his lifestyle but he’s a great example of how the memoir can be a prose form that’s not only compulsively readable but very much worth reading. Delighted to hear about your friend — it’s good to know that sometimes, the justice system can actually do some good.
Rashakor, ha! Fascinating — thank you for this.
Justin, fascinating stuff. I could definitely imagine a bear doing that in the woods, so to speak — and as musical mystical bears go, it beats the bejesus out of Matthew Fox’s first theological book. (Admittedly a spare copy of Mad Magazine with half the pages ripped out could probably do that.)
Northwind, sorry. “Cray-cray” is slang for “crazy” in the sense of stark staring nuts.
Polecat, well, Northwind Grandma just discussed ursonating on Washington State, which is mostly forest, so I think your hypothesis will bear investigation. 😉
LeGrand, I recall — quite a few years ago now — the two of us putting a mimeographed Golden Dawn lecture from the 1920s on astrology through an OCR program, and having the result come out sounding rather like the passage of Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” that’s playing as I type this. I think I still have the postmodern poem I made out of it tucked away somewhere; I remember it talking about “its own astral unjbverse” and “torying offedto the day” (no idea what that latter was supposed to mean). Maybe that was an omen: the true purpose of computer technology is to automate the process of creating crazed surrealist nonsense. Thanks for the link to halupedia!
Luke, good gods. So Carlson’s guests are getting into blood libel territory now. (As Jasper Ridley’s history The Freemasons pointed out quite a few years ago, the rhetoric being directed at Masons these days is indistinguishable from the rhetoric directed at Jews that laid the foundations for Nazi mass murders. Ridley isn’t a Freemason, btw.) Why is it that as soon as a certain kind of Christian scents power, the first thing they do is try to drum up a pogrom?
Chuaquin, oh, trust me, I’m aware of the echo chambers on other ends of the political landscape as well — see my comment to Luke immediately above.
Patricia M, the wokester fixation on wading in as Great White Rescuers and fixing the problems of dark-skinned people in distant countries, while ignoring the problems their own policies are causing here at home, reminds me forcefully of Mrs. Jellaby from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, full of plans for the poor people of distant Boorioboola-gha, while her own children suffer from constant neglect.
I prefer to ask the question, “does a bear relieve themself in the woods”? Just because I think applying the singular plural form to bears is endlessly amusing. Who knows: it may even be a detournment.
Robert M. #93 Re ritual. I think one of the problems our culture has with ritual is our over emphasis on the virtues of originality. We see this in the larger culture with couples writing their own wedding vows rather than sticking with the traditional ceremony. Not that this is always inappropriate, but an automatic reaction against “the same old thing” makes tradition meaningless. In another June event, not content with pomp and circumstance and the graduation robes they share with past generations each graduate wants to add a personal touch. So instead of a uniform parade of young people celebrating their entry into the shared world of Western learning we have a motley crew of individuals celebrating their sexuality with a rainbow scarf or their ethnic heritage with Rasta colors added to their mortarboard or their politics with a keffifah. No one seems to understand that trying to stand out from the group you are joining implies a partial rejection of that group.
JMG,
That certain kind of Christian is what I call the “Paranoid Conspiratorial Christian”. Most of them are so obsessed with dark magic that they might as well practice it. They’ve been popping off as of late.. I think it’s a mind virus just as annoying and dangerous as wokeism.
I honestly like chill wokesters better than Paranoid Conspiratorial Christians
Chuaquin #110:
So what you’re saying is that following social conditioning is still a choice, though not a choice one has made consciously, yes?
I agree insofar that people choosing not to choose is different from true determinism. In my experience, true determinism is a position usually held as either a coping mechanism or to excuse harmful behaviour: “It’s not my fault I’m a loser, the universe forced me to” or “yes, my client did commit the murder but you see, he’s not in control of his actions, so you can’t possibly punish him.” (At least that’s what I think of insanity pleas). Another option is that the person claiming that just genuinely isn’t conscious and thus seems deterministic from their own perspective, even if that’s a misconception. We had a conversation on this week’s Magic Monday about how this might be the case for people with a poorly developed mental sheath, though I don’t know how you hold with such ideas, being a Christian.
But that is distinct from the claim that people following their conditioning is them not using their free will, which I still think is true. As you talk about social conditioning, it’s not like you choose to trust your parents. This seems to be the default state of humans. So, unless you’re given a reason to reevaluate that trust, you just don’t. There’s no choice involved. And this then also transitively applies to trust in whoever they tell you to believe, be it teachers, the government, the media, or any other authority figure imparting that conditioning. You could, at any moment, decide to reevaluate that trust and, if you still think you should trust them, actively choose to follow the conditioning, but until you do that, I think it’s fair to say that you’re not using your free will.
The same, I think, can be said for other forms of conditioning. It’s easy to fall into patterns of behaviour and until you recognise them and that you can break out of them, you’re not really choosing not to. Of course, once you do make that realisation and don’t do anything, then it becomes an active choice.
—David P.
Looks like Alberta is going to vote on whether it will remain in Canada or not:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgze8n5dxko
@Patricia Mathews #112:
“Myself, I made up my mind very early, that with limited resources, I’d do better to give locally, to those causes that address down-to-earth material needs.”
Me. too. I do not give to any “charitable organizations” (outside my church parish), because I want my money to go to those who actually need it, not to administrative bloat.
I have designated recipients of my charity, and I give every month. That is the best I can do.
Justin Patrick Moore # 107 .. I’m having trouble parsing your response.. could you please explain as you would a child.. I’m feeling the ‘Shroud of Density’ shrouding my grey matter. As Sarris (of Galaxy Quest film fame..) would *utter .. EXPLAIN!! … *sorry for the all caps. ‘;]
‘bear investigation’ .. Oh, Mr. Greer! I saw what you did there, tee hee!
Tom River will be best placed to explain what kind of scholarship he referred to. I will say that I thought he was speaking about small sums of money that allow children to attend primary school in the place in Kenya they live in. I find that a worthy cause, though it is open to debate if helping homeless people in one’s own country is even worthier.
Those who inferred that he was speaking of scholarships for Africans to study at European or North American universities (and then possibly take the natives’ jobs) are invited to think about where they got that framing from, since it was certainly not clearly indicated in his comment. In the terms introduced in this week’s post, it is a situation imposed on his comment.
“Woke” is rubbish.
Woke is a fad. It came,— it scorched,— it went. It is power-over (“if you don’t ‘think’ my way, it is thoughtcrime whereupon I shall judge and shame you, because I deem you flawed; defects are unacceptable.”)
It can’t be too soon that I never hear the word “woke” again.
💨🗑️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
And ….”not to administrative bloat….”
Peaceful Paths Shelter is run by members of the local Women’s Club
Family Promise is run by the local Unitarian church members here.
St. Francis House is Catholic, and in serious financial trouble due to rising costs.
Oh, yes, that’s one thing I look for.
Oh, and I also give to Operation Catnip – alley cats need friends, too, and I love cats. It’s a lesser amount, but there are those who would call it frivolous. (Phauz would disagree.)
@ Mrs. Jellaby….. bingo! I’d forgotten about her. Dickens called it on the nose. But then, Dickens was a pre4tty good observer of mess England was in at it lower income levels.
Thanks for the reminder.
Hi John Michael,
I see, there’s a bit of that reaction to population pressure building now, not that people view things that way. Hmm.
Dumb question time: Is the push to insert arty-fish-al programs into everyday life and business, a sort of ‘Creation of Situations’? In terms of costs versus utility, it’s got about as much going for it as that arty urinal. 🙂 Dunno.
I’m enjoying this strange journey you’ve taken us on. Is it my imagination, or you have some sort of project going on in the background, or hidden in plain sight up your sleeve?
Cheers
Chris
Aldarion #123:
Fair enough, that’s on me. In my defence, I’m not a native speaker and have just now learned that scholarships don’t just refer to university students.
Tom River, re my earlier comment:
My apologies. If you are indeed talking about sending children to school, most of what I said was uncalled for. I genuinely didn’t know that was also referred to as scholarships.
(The question about financing still stands.)
—David P.
Milton testing the robot check.
@Rita Rippetoe (#115):
I agree completely that “one of the problems our culture has with ritual is our over emphasis on the virtues of originality.”
Originality, by itself, strikes me as utterly worthless. Combined with knowledge and wisdom, it can be a good thing, rarely even a very good thing.
However, originality does have the ability to attract attention, which can be leveraged into fame and power, and those two things are destructive and addictive. Me, I prefer a Medieval piece of advice: “Love being unknown, and famed for nothing (Ama nesciri et de nihilo reputari).
Ritual comes as naturally to humans as does language. Just as children naturally want to talk, and sometimes even devise their own private and secret ways of talking out of sight and hearing of any adult, so do children naturally want to do rituals, and also sometimes devise their own private and secret rituals out of sight and hearing of any adult. No good can come from trying to repress or suppress so natural a human instinct: IMHO, a deritualized world is a dying world.
@ Patricia Mathews #112
Re your No. 3 “Bury the Dead”
I recently discovered an excellent and very local charity dedicated to a very simple concept. When people around here bury their dead, it is customary to host a meal at a local restaurant afterwards for some of the mourners. There is a group of women in my town who have been quietly making their catering services available to families who cannot afford to host such an after-funeral meal.
They cook, serve and clean, and allow the families to gather comfort from those who can share the meal with them.
Simple, and very very helpful at a time that is doubly stressful when people are both bereaved and financially stretched. And no overhead, no administration, all donations go directly into the meals.
About ritual, I agree with Robert Matthiesen that “ritual comes as naturally to humans as does language”. I also think people nowadays are groping for rituals which make sense in the context of their own lives, and which will also be acceptable to their peers, ritual being a group activity. I suspect that the rituals which folks eventually settle on won’t be wild and wacky, nor will they feature blood on the floor, heart pounding excitement. One example of an emerging ritual is the substitution of the gatherings being called celebrations of life replacing expensive funerals. These gatherings are generally an outdoor event, come as you are picnic and potluck, in which the friends and relatives of the beloved departed recall and pay tribute to the person’s life.
JMG, you may be delighted to hear (or at least vindicated) that the reactions to the hauntavirus (which has been alternatively bowdlerized using a certain Japanese loanword you may have picked up in your research on 2chan) from the wage-class and even some salary class members of the USA amount to “I wonder who is paying them to say this this time?”
@Robert Mathieson #129 – you wrote: “children naturally want to do rituals, and also sometimes devise their own private and secret rituals out of sight and hearing of any adult.” I can personally relate the first part, but not so much the second part (not as though you are wrong about it). When I was five years old and somebody told me something that I did not like, I would look straight at them, scrunch my mouth up and squint so as to raise my cheeks and then tilt my head up while still looking at the individual. The effect was to “disappear” the offender of my sensibilities under my cheeks while imagining that they are drowned in the sea. This silent ritual gave me great satisfaction, and nobody had a bloody clue what I was doing in public though observing adults would have undoubtedly noted that “Ronnie is an odd little boy.”
@Polecat: sorry, I can’t help you too much further with my noncentsical comments. It’s like David Lynch said, “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”
Maybe it was a chance meeting of a bear and a purse and mugger in the woods with a sewing machine and umbrella.
@JMG & Luke regarding some current “Christian” rhetoric on Freemasons as resembling such rhetoric on Jews. Funny that the topic has been raised. Just yesterday I clicked on a “random” Youtube link and ended up listening to a lengthy video (while making good use of my time weeding my garden beds) in which some self-proclaimed Christian authority on such things literally stated that the Jews (who are really Kabbalistic Devil-worshippers, according to him) have used Kabalistic terminology and symbols to infiltrate Christianity, primarily via Freemasonry, and get them to unknowingly commit themselves to El Diablo. He was most alarmed by the fact that a huge number of Southern Baptist ministers are also Freemasons. In effect, both Jews and Freemasons were being tarred with the same brush of being on the Antichrist camp. Yikes!
What I found interesting is that the presenter on YouTube was not a raving lunatic. Some of the things that he said about the Kabbala were accurate – though in some places he conflated Kabbalistic teachings with Hermitic teachings (same difference to him, I guess – none of it is Christian so it’s all gotta be bad!) and his dichotomy between raising oneself up to the Divine via certain occult practices versus making oneself worthy to be embraced by the Divine via faith in Christ is not totally off the mark.
Anyone who is interested in seeing how this Grand Conspiracy Against the Christians is laid out, the link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFoPR-IdCk
I suspect that it may be wise for Freemasons, Kabbalists and occultists in general, to be aware of what shite may be thrown their way as certain aspects of the Second Religiosity in this part of the world manifest. Not to scare anybody or anything; just a heads-up.
Justin Patrick Moore, thanks for the explanation .. At least you didn’t lead me into a bear trap, so there’s that. ‘:]
@Scotlyn – thanks for this! Serving meals to mourners is an excellent idea.
To everybody else: I haven’t been completely fair in my comments about my daughter; I’ve seen her doing actual work -labor – for the Food4Kids backpack program, and for making beds in the church hall for the Family Promise clients. This was before her work became so hectic and demanding, with everything in chaos at the University of Florida.
@JoeSchmo…. I’d be interested to know what Japanese loanword you mean, being unfamiliar with the 2-chan.
Ron M, oh trust me I know. I listen to some conspiracy podcasts for fun and most of them are Paranoid Conspiratorial Christians. It has me doubting myself in real life – “can I trust this person with tatoos who may be a Paranoid Conspiratorial Christian in disguise or not”. I still haven’t crossed this bridge of uncertainty and it’s kind of subtly torturing me. I have literally told no one “I am an occultist”. I have confessed to being a Druid which I intuited would go over better. This quagmire is so frustrating.
Justin Patrick Moore 134
> chance meeting of a bear and a purse and mugger in the woods with a sewing machine and umbrella.
Sounds like the basis of a children’s story. What happens next?
A sewing machine out for a walk in the woods mugs a bear over the head with an umbrella, grabbing the bear’s purse, then runs as fast as its sewing machine legs will allow it. (The sewing machine’s woods-mafia nickname is “Legs,” so all the animals for miles around know the reputation of the sewing machine for running fast, faster than bears.) The sewing machine reaches its cottage after having lost the bear. But the umbrella is damaged, so the sewing machine puts itself on its sewing table and mends the umbrella. …
Eliott Nesstal gets wind of the operation and tries to find the sewing machine’s illicit sewing & notions cottage. …
A sewing machine mystery for kids. Maybe we can get The Long Descent in there too.
💨🧵🪡💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
My mother wrote her PhD thesis on the Situationists so it’s cool to see them discussed here on Ecosophia. Her research brought her into contact with a number of weird British post-Situ types in the 1980s, including Tom Vague and Stewart Home, all of whom were enthusiastically getting into ‘feuds’ with each other in which they would self-publish DIY pamphlets accusing each other (and everyone else) of being crypto-fascists and whatnot.
Synchronistically enough, my friend Troy Southgate recently sent me an article about this scene (in which he makes a cameo appearance as one of those accused of crypto-fascism!): https://www.neroeditions.com/docs/communication-guerrillas/
It goes into a fair amount of detail about these Brits and their awkward, unsuccessful, but highly entertaining attempts to combine radical Marxism and occultism. Some hilarious moments include Home’s Neoist Alliance attempting to levitate the Pavilion Theatre during a Stockhausen performance, in protest against Stockhausen’s elitist artistic sensibility, which drew a counter-demonstration from the Temple Ov Psychick Youth, who objected on the grounds that such a working could “damage the ozone layer.” Also noteworthy are the Posadists, a group of Marxist UFOlogists who believed that a spacefaring civilization would surely be communist.
Siliconguy, I errored by in typing coolies instead of ‘coulees’. I blame the French..
Several years ago the Payless Shoes chain rented a space in an upscale mall, and invented a continental designer named Bruno Palessi, who got his own website and history for Google. They put the Payless shoes on display with markups of up to 1800 percent, and did a grand opening of PALESSI, inviting 60 “fashion influencers” to come, marvel, shop and buy – and they did. They filmed the “influencers” raving about the quality and design, and gladly paying the inflated prices.
Two days later they shut down, contacted everyone who had bought, and offered their money back and a chance to be in online videos of the stunt. There are still multiple videos and articles online about it, and the clips of the “influencers” are hilarious.
So that technique you describe is neither new nor uncommon – it is being used on us all the time. Part of the usefulness of the incongruity you describe is to make it visible. It can be used to help people wake up… or put them to sleep.
La Grand…# 105:
“On those terms, the normative European personality might strike Americans as depressive and catastrophizing.”
I’ve seen this tendence within main secular European philosophers and essayist, so I can agree, as an European myself. However, I think this tendence has been always stronger in Central end Eastern Europe than in Southern Europe. It seems the champions in seriousness and sadness when they write are (of course) German thinkers. Maybe Schopenhauer could be the champion within them, with his deep pessimism (though I like a part of his philosophy); then with a silver medal the very grim Existentialist Heidegger (I don’t like him very much).
Oh, the Danish Kierkegaard, a not very light thinker…
I can say the Romanian Cioran isn’t a happy thinker , neither. And Russian-Slavic attitude is often depicted as melancholic, maybe an stereotyope, or maybe not.
French Existentialism (with its Sartre and Camus polarity) seems to me under the thinkers I’ve remembered from the Central and East Europe in their “sadness level”, but they weren’t really optimist philosophers, neither.
Finally, it’s said about my own country “national attitude”, we the Spaniards usually hide a bitter view in front of life, under our Meditarrean mask of happiness. Well, you can read our most famous national novel (Don Quixote) in a grim mood, but indeed Cervantes wanted to write an humor novel, so…I think the European sad attitude shouldn’t be generalized in a 100% for every European country. I think our biggest philosopher of all the times (IMHO, Ortega y Gasset) was a serious man, but his view about life can’t be depicted exactly as pessimistic. Even there’s some photo of him smiling…I won’t explain you all his thoughts, only that he wrote human beings are rational and “vital”(non rational) alike. He also said “I am me and my circumstances”, which in the short form means we’re limited by outside situations, but to some extent we’ve got freedom enough to decide (if we are able to use our will), so I think Ortega was a mild and reasonable optimist, who thought we can decide our acts, taking into account our own responsability.
Maybe Americans who visit Spain can grasp this “slight” difference in attitude with the cloudy Europe beyond the Pyrinees…
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JMG # 113:
“So Carlson’s guests are getting into blood libel territory now.”
Oops! That’s not a joke. Here we know that thing, “libelo de sangre”. It’s a awful part of our History, so I know what you’re depicting, and it’s a very ugly and dirty thing. Antisemitic propaganda during last medieval times in Spain (more often in Castile), was made up of several fake stories about evil Jews who kidnapped a kid, tortured him (crucifixion) and killed him. Eventually they used his blood and flesh to drink and eat them (cough). Oh, Inquisition was very busy due to that “serious” Jewish crimes. It’s interesting in 1492 Jews were expelled from Spain…but Inquisition went on prosecuting and killing people from Jew origins who were baptized as Christians (between new enemies like Protestants and former Muslims).
So when you’ve written those two words, I can say you’re speaking in very serious way,and you’re right. I can tell you far right and neo Nazis here usually try to blame Jews in the classic Antisemitic way (indeed, far right loves to defend Israel and despise Palestinians); but it isn’t strange sometimes the old fake news against Freemasons come again in online and real world, within this groups. You can guess there’s a crime in our laws against people who denies the Holocaust and spread Antisemitic lies, so far right people isn’t stupid to be out of the Law. Nazis are Nazis,so they can’t avoid being Antisemitic. However, I doubt another groups are protected in such a hard way by Criminal Laws.
Of course, far right guys haven’t a great imagination, and they’ve got a lazy mind, so they repeat the rehashed and boring commonplaces against Freemasonry which were popular since the XIX Century until the last times of Franco dictatorship. A very nasty thing, one more within the many problems worsened by the usual and many echo chambers.
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David P. # 118:
Yes, I can say the “social default attitude” we can see in many people, following the “herd”, is an implicit choice. We shouldn’t generalize about every person, but I can point at least two situations to explain these “way of life”. First, maybe some of this people want to believe world in general and society in special are determinist, so they fool themselves to be happy (?) in this context. Second, another people seems to knnow there are another options to live, but they choose at will to ignore them. OK, I can add a third situation in which options 1 and 2 are mixed to more or less extend. And a conformist person eventually can change its mind, at least for a minute, and going out the “herd”. Human experience seems very rich in personal situations, more than we usually think…
Of course, there are minorities beyond social conformism, due to ethnics, beliefs, ideologies and personal choices. I’m thinking now in the counterculture. Its members despise mainstream culture and society, but I’m afraid they often have used their will to be conformists with their comrades within counterculture, imitating the alternative fashions “du jour” (ironically).
I understand your experience with real people. Well, I’ve met some determinist people, and my personal view about them, in the short term, is: I think they hide their responsability in front of their problems and acts sometimes under an ideology or belief, or more often, under the (fake) fig leaf of “scientific” determinism (though debate against freedom is a not closed unending topic nowadays).
Your idea about the act of trust as a non free choice deserves some attention. We should define the term “trust” before equating to trust in someone with being 100% conditioned by he/she/them. Of course, I can point a blind faith in a person or this or that people is a full conditioning, so it can be said that person or human group aren’t using their will to choose in a free way. You can find this human situations within hard cults, and “True Believers” in totalitarian ideologies, between more examples. However, most people, even under the hardest propaganda in totalitarian regimes, seems to live in an “elastic” conditioning, being relative conformist, not absolute brainwashed ones (more or less). In capitalist democracies, political propaganda is lighter, but advertisement is sometimes able to fool people to buy this or that thing (though its power has been idealized by the own advertising industry…). I think there are again many differnt levels in conditioning.
I think I can agree in your statement about conditioned people: they haven’t chosen yet, before realizing they’re conditioned. However, I also think this situation only works in a complete sense for the zealots and fanatics cases I’ve shortly depicted before. Average conditioned/conformist people would deserve a more serious analysis which unfortunately, I can’t do now.
My “theollogical” view about freedom and will is optimist…to some extent. I think human beings are able to use their will to decide to do good or bad things, choosing between more or less options, depending of different situations. It’s interesting to point that even the after Trento Counter-Reform (too optimist with the free will topic, methink), Catholic teachings remember believers only can be saved not by their only merit and power, but helped by God (Its Grace). So I think it’s implicitly admitted freedom isn’t absolute, because we aren’t perfect (sin) and some other realities like our material life in a material body. Berdyaev, an Orthodox Christian, wrote a book about freedom from a religious view, but he never wrote we’ve got a full freedom, though evidently he was a determinist, neither.
—————————————
(To be continued)
Charities for poor people topic:
Here there’s a common place, especially within the usual far right suspects, but very wide within average non woke people too, which in the short form is that most of spanish government, main trade unions and NGOs aid goes in favor of foreign migrants. It can be said it could be rough fake news, looking at who are its main supporters. However, I can’t deny in a first glance this nasty situation against spanish “native” poor people. Maybe real thing is in a 50%/50%? I haven’t enough hard data.
It’s interesting to point usual woke frantic denounciations against these stories as “racist-xenophobic-Fascists”, are usually as biased like their opposite ideological enemies. So I must be cautious and I’ll only tell you this story as a “sign of times” in nowadays Spain. I think even this commonplace is 100% a lie, it shows how heated are a heck of middle and low class people here with the declining woke fake consensus…
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Northwind G. # 124:
I wish to share your optimist prediction about woke totalitarian tendence final and full fall into oblivion soon, in a very next future; but it seems often people goes on redoubling in error, only for not accepting they were wrong. In addition to this, I think western “left” is very interested in keeping their usual business, fighting against easy targets (for example, straight Indoeuropean men) instead to disturb economic factic powers happy life, at least until globalization begins to fail…Please, don’t mistake wishes with real next future.
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Robert M.· 129:
I think originality is a good thing…when you mix it with beauty, useful purposes and another more virtues. I can say I also think civilizations always uses their “originality reserves” until they they spend/waste their last originality in the last artistics Vanguards; like the West during the first half of the XXth Century. then…real originality dies and we only see revivals and pastiches.
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Scotlyn # 130:
That charity idea seems to me very good, thank for your information about it.
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Ron M. # 135:
Oh, what an old story mixing together Jews and Freemasons in the same conspiracy theory… If you add to those nutty Christians the Commie bogey man, you’ll find again the boring and rehashed Fascist claims against a supposed Jewish-Freemasons-Communist conspiracy against the Good People. So I finally think there’s a shocking lack of imagination within the hard guys in the (far) right wing.
“I errored by in typing coolies instead of ‘coulees’. I blame the French.”
Coolies, cooties, coulees, with English you learn figure it out from context. As for the French, what can you say? Coeur d’Alene isn’t that far from me now, and Fond du Lac wasn’t that far from where I grew up. Sault Ste. Marie was a bit further away.
@JMG and @Omer
“I freely grant that the hantavirus makes a poor hauntavirus, since it transmits very poorly from person to person. That doesn’t matter as much as you’d think, though, because the biological reality of any virus is irrelevant to its status as a social reality. You could take a completely harmless virus and turn it into a hauntavirus by lining up flacks in white lab coats to proclaim it as the worst threat humanity has ever seen,…”
Hold my beer; Ahm.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bw9bVLDIAAAd9V6.jpg
This just in! We have just been made aware of a new viral infection! The HH-7 Herpes virus has been reported worldwide to be present in 90-98% of the population. WE ARE ALL INFECTED!
There is no telling where this virus originated (obligatory side glance at the FREEMASONS), or what long term exposure to this terrible pathogen will entail.
https://thepromotions.guru/cdn/shop/products/Walking-Dead-We_re-All-Infected_1200x1200.png?v=1571439666
The Centaur for disease control and the World health organist have already mandated strict oversight of all hospitals and coroners offices. But there is no telling how this scenario will play out in rural areas.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTgxnyjEntDif1f8AzOaAigSQR4ixttaigflg&s
Federal involvement might be needed.
May the gods help us all.
And please think of the children!
@ Luke Dodson et al: That is a hilarious story about all the infighting, re: British post Situationism. As a Stockhausen fan, and PTV fan, I stand with TOPY. Though I have read sone books by Stewart Home. Interesting dude… speaking of Home, cryptofascists and blood libel, the library got in his most recent work, which among other things is fierce in its anti occult rhetoric. Though also, not without uts points…
“Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness”
“The practice of yoga promises peace, self-realisation and release, thanks to the power of its ‘mystic’ Indian origins. But what if this is just hype? In Fascist Yoga, Stewart Home sweeps away the half-truths to tell a new origin story of the world’s first modern yogi – a Californian escapologist who added some Hindu fairy dust to gym and circus exercises.
Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise. From cult leaders to brainwashed followers, TV celebrities and fake gurus, the story of yoga has involved some of the strangest currents of humanity.
Today, the COVID pandemic has activated elements within the modern yoga movement to espouse far-right conspiracies, and QAnon’s fascist political programmes mirror some of yoga’s key early proponents.”
David P, #81
The charity is called Elimisha Kakuma and it was started five years ago by three refugees from the Kakuma camp in Kenya and my niece, who was their teacher. None of the founders are paid; the only paid employee is a teacher, my daughter, who’s paid a salary that would be tiny in the US but is enough in Kenya. All the students are refugees, from wars and family violence in East Africa. They have been given scholarships in many places: US, Canada, Britain, Germany even Costa Rica. They raise money in the US. At first, it was primarily my extended family, but now they are getting funds from Duolingo and a family foundation in Roanoke, as well as GoFundMe. All of them are brilliant, and will make a positive contribution to their new countries. One man we sponsor graduated summa cum laude from a small liberal arts college, but other go to top colleges like Harvard. Working in trades would be useless because no refugees are allowed to work in Kenya. I can talk a lot more about them, but I’ll stop now.
Alderion #123
Thank you for responding, and you are right. The students seek college scholarships, and are funded by the colleges themselves. I responded to David P with a long description of the charity.
@ Patricia Matthews #112
Yes, much charitable giving is virtue-signaling, as JMG rightly says. Deciding to help those near you is an admirable choice.
In the case of Elimisha Kakuma, the ideas have been well thought through, and help exceptional people trapped in a setting where they can’t even get enough food from the UN to survive.
@Mary Bennet #94
You bring up two valid points. The middle class is now being squeezed as the working class has been; it’s responded by getting more degrees, but when everyone does it, it doesn’t provide any advantage, and benefits the wealthier who can afford the education. AI threatens to wipe out big chunks of the middle class.
Homelessness is caused by high rents; states with higher rents have higher homelessness. The solution is to build more housing of all types. Current homeowners don’t like that, because their house value is based on scarcity of housing. One tiny fraction of liberal is aware of this — see Abundance by Ezra Kline and Derek Thompson — and is advocating for looser zoning laws.
@Celedon #89 and Chuaquin #87
You are both right that saying “some woke are sincere” isn’t a very strong argument, but it is true; no group is monolithic.
Let’s agree to talk about classes as a whole, ignoring the variation. JMG is right that the elite class as a whole use woke as virtue-signaling. They have become expert at taking more and more income, and any camouflage is useful to them. I’m really talking about the middle class, to which I belong. We’re also have income taken by the elite, but have found that acquiring knowledge has made our jobs safer, because the capitalists need knowledgeable people. That’s about to disappear with AI, and I expect a convergence between the middle and working class in the next ten years. In other words, a lot of middle class people are going to get a lot poorer.
My main argument with JMG is that he thinks the elites and the middle class act the same, while I strenuously disagree.
Phutatorius, I’ve got to admit that “themself” is one of the most cheerfully awkward bits of grammar I’ve encountered in a long time.
Luke, oh, no question — it’s as annoying as woke and far more prone to violence. As the game of musical chairs we’re in continues, and more and more people get shoved out of what used to be a normal lifestyle, I expect the paranoiac strain in Christianity to become unpleasantly widespread.
Chris, the insertion of LLMs into everyday life makes a great smokescreen behind which vast numbers of unproductive cubicle-class jobs can be eliminated. Blame it on progress! Ryan Breslow, founder and returning CEO of Bolt, just fired its entire HR department; “We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist” was his comment.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91545876/bolt-ceo-says-firing-his-hr-team-made-the-companys-problems-disappear
There are a lot of managerial-class jobs in modern industrial society that could be described in the same terms.
Joe, that’s really good to hear. Thank you for the cheering news!
Ron, yeah, I’ve been watching that very closely for a while now. Thanks for the additional sources.
Luke, oh my. That’s amazingly funny; thank you.
Charlie, and that’s even funnier. Thank you also.
Vitranc, no doubt!
Tom (if I may), listen to working class people in the US sometime about the convergence of behavior between the middle classes and the elites; you’ll get an earful. (I certainly did, which is why I say what I do.) That said, you’re correct that the collapse in cubicle-class employment taking place under the smokescreen of “AI” is going to upend that equation over the next decade or so. One very important question, to my mind, is how many people in the middle classes will respond to their abrupt experience of downward mobility by making common cause with the working classes, and how many will try to prop up their collapsing status by becoming even more hateful toward their supposed inferiors. Another is how many people in the working classes, after the way they’ve been treated over the last half century, will accept an extended hand from the former middle class people, and how many will spurn it. I don’t yet have answers to those questions; I’ll be discussing some of the issues in an upcoming post.
@Patricia #137
Starts with an h, ends with -ai.
@JMG thank you! I may as well note I’ve also been focusing on sources that have been strenuously shouted down by ppl in the “mainstream” communities of left and right– more often than not, it’s because they jabbed at the truth behind the current situation more than the corpocrats in charge felt tolerable.
Silicone # 145, I have to state that I do LOVE the FRENCH (situationists or otherwise) … not the EURO adjacent .. not the typical snot-nosed bureaucrat .. but the encountering ones of the third kind: namely the Galet Jaunes! Here’s hoping for an improved version .. now with high-impact eye protection! As for Wa. State topography, I own a detailed state atlas.. and have, as matter of course, COUNTED All of the coulees therein! So, I should’ve known better, before my hot little digits made keyboard contact. Silly me..
Hi John Michael,
🙂 Thanks for the article, and there is a guy I’d happily work for. Think of it as the difference between a business which is the equivalent of a large expensive standing army, and that of war band!
It’s so long ago now, but the very last time I went for an interview with a quasi-goobermint body, the nice folks were merrily talking about all the changes they wanted to make in relation to reporting. It was an error on my part to suggest that these were easily done, and in fact I had experience with such tasks, before then recounting relevant stories. Yeah, let’s do this mother! 🙂 At that moment, peering into their souls revealed frightened little rabbits being confronted by strong headlights bearing down on upon them. They were scared, and I was a bad cultural fit.
Only in small business have I encountered my people, and the work is rewarding because it is both hard and demanding. It’s fascinating to see larger businesses emulating some aspects. Look forward to reading your thoughts and I’ve no idea where you will take that discussion.
If I may add, you also rely upon your wits and work ethic. Respect.
Cheers
Chris
@ Tom River # 152
Thank you for putting your point into plain words. 🙂
“My main argument with JMG is that he thinks the elites and the middle class act the same, while I strenuously disagree.”
In relation to this straight assertion of yours, I happen to agree with you, 100%. Elites have one set of interests and middle class people have a completely different set. ( However, I also agree with JMG that vis-a-vis working class people, they might as well have. )
My most personal and immediate observations come from within my own family, since my parents represent what you might call a “mixed [class] marriage”. My mother’s family are working class, my father’s family middle class. While my own parents can be said to have effectively stepped sideways out of the interests of their different classes, by becoming Christian missionaries and becoming a very solid team that is still going strong 66 years and counting; their two families – my extended family – have always given me an example of how different American working class and middle class interests and values are – and how that shapes political positions, alliances, rivalries and etc.
Also, I have had a ringside seat at several of the “turning points” which spelled a downward lurch into even wider divergences, and even more difficulties speaking one another’s languages. The 1980’s and 90’s were extremely stressful for my maternal relatives, many of whom were laid of of good, unionised jobs, with all of the attendant downward mobility that implies. For my paternal relatives, most of whom had academic, academic administration or NGO type jobs, these were very good decades, many of them gained better salaries and conditions. If you recall a great deal of industrial outsourcing took place during those years, which set American blue collar workers into direct competition with their counterparts in other countries who they were not in a position to “collectively bargain” with in order to support their own interests. White collar workers were not (yet) in that situation, and the difference in impact was stark.
It was shortly after this that I began to hear my paternal relatives speak about my maternal relatives as if they were hicks, backward, racist, and etc, because they weren’t going to be pushed around into changing their words in order to be “respectable.” “Respectable” is a middle class value. (PS – my maternal relatives were under no illusions about how those middle-class, less employment-challenged, people were talking about them…. after all, they have perfectly good, working sets of ears).
Anyway, I think you are right about middle class people NOW being as dispensable to elites as working class people were THEN.
As JMG says it remains to be seen whether mutual solidarity might be found. On the evidence of my own, increasingly polarised sets of relatives… I’m not very optimistic.
According to Wikipedia, ‘Stewart Home’ is one Kevin Llewellyn Callan. OK, people can call themselves whatever they choose, granted. I do take exception to the reported comments about yoga, which, even in its denatured and attenuated Western form, has been of great use to many of us. If you are a non-competitive person who wants to maintain health outside of competitive sports, yoga is a good alternative. Howsomever, we who do like and choose to maintain our own health w/out having to pay out a small fortune to the medical world are used to being tagged with all sorts of uncomplimentary labels. Somone, I forget now which faction, tried out a be responsible for your own health meme, which didn’t last long. Don’t get me started on the front yard vegetable and herb garden wars.
‘
Terry Brennan @ 151 I believe that homelessness is caused by a number of factors, including sudden job loss, outsized medical and other kinds of debt, sudden illness rendering a person unable to work for an extended time and, under Reagan, AKA St. Ronnie, the policy of emptying what used to be called asylums into what were euphemistically called neighborhoods, i.e., the streets. I am convinced that was done because real estate investors wanted to build housing near the former facilities, which tended to be located just outside towns and cities. The fundamental cause, IMHO, is ever rising housing prices. Off the top of my head, I can think of three remedies, all politically unpalatable. One is to severely restrict immigration, another is RE price controls. I know, LW ideology says open immigration is a moral imperative, and RW ideology says price controls don’t work, and are a sin against the holy market. I obviously disagree with both. Yet a third, what I believe would be a good starting point, is the outlawing of foreign ownership of American real estate. I take leave to assert my belief that American farmland should be designated a critical natural security resource and not be allowed to be sold to foreign investors nor be taken out of farming at all. Yes, we do need some form of generous pension plan for farmers. Such a plan could, for one example, be funded by a small tax on farm products at every sale point, from the farm gate to the processing plant to the grocery distributor to the supermarket.
Building new housing is one thing to be done, but what about using and refurbishing the housing stock we already have? I would like to see cities adopt a use or lose it policy towards empty buildings, along with required transparency as to ownership and tax status.
R. Mutt
“Armut”, German: “poverty”
Duchamp was famously fond of puns of this thought.
Just thought I’d chip in with that
” The median master’s degree has a net ROI of $83,000. But some master’s degrees are worth over $1 million, while 40 percent have no net financial value at all.”
https://freopp.org/whitepapers/is-grad-school-worth-it-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis/
And AI is just starting to hit. It’s not going to get better not just from that but the market will from delegate people trying to qualify for the few jobs available.
@ Mary Bennet and Terry.
The 1000 lb Gorilla you are both leaving out of the housing price problem is the purposeful choice by the financial powers that be and the government to turn all of Real Estate in to the primary Asset Class in the USA. This started in full force just after the Dot Com Bust. As the USA deindustrialized it needed something else to collateralize its financial system than its network of factories. Housing prices were inflated, on purpose ,to reinforce the Ponzi style financial system we have and give home owners a savings substitute for the pensions of an earlier generation that were lost. Building more homes at this moment will not bring down prices as the system will just absorb them as more collateral at high prices. But as JMG as stated several times before. Values of Real Estate will begin to crash on its own as demographics and zero real economic growth wield their heavy hand.
Luke # 140:
“all of whom were enthusiastically getting into ‘feuds’ with each other in which they would self-publish DIY pamphlets accusing each other (and everyone else) of being crypto-fascists and whatnot.”
Oh oh, this phrase depicts IMHO a state of full paranoia, in its far left variety.
On the other hand, it’s true the (in)famous Stockhausen was a very elitist guy, indeed I can remember what Michael Nyman said during an interview, a heck of years ago, that Mr. Stockhausen music was according his opinion, “fascist”. Oops!, I can guess he despised in such blunt way this vangurdist musician, maybe by the same reason as British Post-Situs. I can say maybe I’m biased by my fondness to Nyman minimalism and contempt against Stockhausen “music”…though I think depicting him as a fascist is too radical for me.
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Justin P. # 147:
“Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness”
This title is explicit enough to “portrait” its author as a crazy conspiracy theorists, as crazy as the usual far roght white supremacists he wants to blame…I think he’s written an involuntary joke. He also shows me the far left can be paranoid too, in spite of its frantic claims about current leftism as the Ilustration philosphers heir, in the sense of being rational people (cough), against the right wing “irrationalism”.
I’ve guessed this author must be a (woke) far leftist. Am I wrong or right?
In addition to this nonsense accusations against Yoga as a whole, I can point it’s a boring and old commonplace within some Conservative and Traditionalists Catholics (yes, I remember them again) to blame Yoga practices for different motives. Instead to “discover” the Big Fascist Conspiracy like this probable woke zealot, some right wing Catholics like to blame Yoga to favor agnosticism (sic) and in the worst cases, leading some yoga nutties into satanic possession (ahem), due to meditation. It’s interesting to check their knowledge of Yoga theory and practice is an ugly and shameful mix of lies, ignorance and half truths. Why bothering in learn more about one of your “enemies” when you know all the Absolut Truths and you never are wrong? I find some deep irony in this shared hatred (though by different “non reasons”) against Yoga within two apparent opposite extremes in the political/cultural spectrum.
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Tom R. # 152:
I think you’re quite right when you defend yourself pointing groups aren’t monolithic. However, it’s also true different tendences within larger ideological groups avoid to show their inner differences to “non believers” in the outside of them, so they seem monolithic to outer witnesses. On the other hand, I know it’s possible the hypocrital and/or fake activists in this or that group don’t represent the whole group…thought unluckily, it’s usually common in every ideological group to mistake friendship to comrades with the need to hide their nasty sides.
A sad but real example: misantropist ecologists (in the short form, many animalists-vegans and “deep” ecologists) are a minority within another ecologist tendences. However, I never see the reasonable and humanitarian ecologists making a serious criticism against their travel fellows. And mankind haters usually are who shout online in the loudest way (OK, algoritms are culprists too) without limits…
I think I’ve understood well your comment about middle class, and I agree to some extent. However, I’m doubting which role is playing in western societies the middle class; wether is clearly separated from high class by its own interests (partially shared with low worker class due to growing inequality thanks to globalization, a.k.a. neoliberalism), or John is right when he points middle class is the high class “favorite pet”. I think it could depend on personal and families situation. I can also say situation can change depending of the countries, too. In the short form, maybe there are different definitions of middle class within this or that country, or in general terms, between America and Europe. we shoulf define what’s middle class nowadays here and there. I suggest John and you, if you don’t mind it, to define what is in your own opinion, the real middle class, giving reasons to think this or that idea.
Finally, I remember not too many years ago, everybody in Spain said they were middle class people. Of course, after 2008 crisis we never recovered our former economic wealth as citizens as before that year, so this ridiculous and arrogant claim has lived better times…
Mention of a sewing machine upthread reminds me of a very old joke, I don’t know if you guys know it.
Back in the days of the wild west this guy walks into a saloon and announces he’s a poet, and for a beer he will compose a poem featuring any name you care to mention.
So one guy pipes up and says, “Make a poem about my girlfriend, Annie Ransome.” The poet thinks a bit, and comes up with…
Down in the valley where the grass grows green,
There came a man with a sewing machine.
That machine it sewed so goddam fast
It sewed right up a wildcat’s ass,
Annie Ransome.
To bring things back on topic, note that the joke would not work in a different situation. For instance, you couldn’t set it in New York, or England. It has to be in a place where they talk in a certain way.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I got pretty far into the above essay, and was trying to figure out how to phrase a question about how magic relates to Situationism, but couldn’t quite identify the parallel features.
A couple of paragraphs later… “The irony here, and it’s a rich one, is that the Situationists came breathtakingly close to making a discovery of considerable importance. ” …and the question is answered.
I’m not willing to assign infectious diseases as “real” or “fake.” Some diseases fall into a situation that suits their nature, others don’t. A cruise ship has been proven to be an environment suitable for norovirus, maybe it works as well for hantavirus? Medical science can certainly make predictions about which environment permits the spread of which disease, but the ultimate deciding factor is the disease itself. (Not sure whether I can refer to the mass of viruses as a single entity, so please forgive the logical and grammatical confusion.)
Siliconguy # 161 .. “and AI is just starting to hit” .. I was reading Alex Krainer’s substack post re. A.I., whereby he had a video clip of Larry ‘the rat’ Fink stating to I don’t know who exactly: ‘investers’? .. ‘weffians’? .. the Globull FERENGI!? .. that he proposes feeding from the public at large, their pensions, retirements, well, any abscondable assets not nailed down, apparently, etc .. into the Ponzi of A.I. Data Center Narvana. What could Possibly go wrong? – HE/THEM aren’t even hiding their intentions anymore. These are people who, in an other age, would be found dragged from their vaunted estates .. tied up .. drawn & quartered, watching their own guts roasting on an open spit! They are disgusting in the extreme!
@ Terry
comment # 151
I disagree with both of your premises, from the Big Rock Candy Mountain ( California) anyways.
First off, we have alot of homeless for a few reasons, first traditionally In the USA people just keep going west looking for opportunities and the 3 west coast states are at the end of that, not to mention being an international destination legally and illegally. Then, we have a huge homeless industrial complex, which kicks back alot of jobs to PMC and grift to politicians, suppliers, etc… Solving the homeless issue would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Check the news to find out how much LA or SF has spent. This also means there are actually some freebies to incentivize the homeless, free medical no matter citizen status, lots of free food, free needles and drug kits, free tents and sleeping bags, etc…. Then, the weather is moderate compared to other parts of the USA, most of our high homeless areas are in the moderate weather parts of CA., dont need heat or AC to get by. We even build paved bike trails for them to use with the stolen bikes. We dont prosecute much compared to other states. Most of our homelessness is not fixed by housing. In my area we prove this by huge amounts of money for shelters and huge swarms of social workers reaching out and the homeless here are homeless because they like the lifestyle. The others we have housed in one place or another. Realy. Housing has rules like no drugs, no pets. ANd you cant trash the place. There is a community and culture of the unhoused here. Under CA law, we cannot break up illegal encampments unless and until an alternative has been offered. Even if just a group overnight shelter. And we have storage, locked, for their stuff overnight when they sleep there, handed back int eh morning. Of course, we also have people couch surfing, temporarily sleeping in their car and such due to housing prices, but that is not the bulk of it. Also, not everyone can possible all live in the same place and there are better location choices for someone on a low fixed income due to disability or low retirement.
Well, no, homeowners and other current residents are not against the new housing schemes in their areas because of fears for their housing valuations ! We are often against them because some developer who wants to make maximum money would love to put a 6 stopry apartment building in the middle of a large area of single family homes and people dont like the idea of the shading, the lack of privacy of the tall windows looking into their back yard and the taraffic. If you put that many “units” as they like to call them in a low density area, the roads and schools were not made with that in mind. all of a sudden there is traffic, no street parking, more speeding. SO, people dont like some of the proposed development because it actually would affect their quality of life. There is alot of this happening in areas surrounding me, cant happen in mine as I am out of town. SO, one of them, in an area of single family homes, there is a vacant lot of 1.8acres. That is now going to have 21 “units” of housing. 3 story duplexes. On what will be a little cul de sac off of existing neighborhood streets, their access street and cul de sac takes up alot of the developement, dont divide 1.8 by 21. That is at least 42 cars appearing there, in addition to the tall buildings were everything else is single story ranch homes.
In the larger town, which is still a small city of 50,000, it is all tall apartment buildings with less than one parking spot per “unit” being built in. what a night mare. Most are by commercial streets, so at least will not bother existing neighbors.
A huge amount of housing is coming online in this county, and it will not help the homeless, ot even the set aside “low income “units. because low income is considered to be about 90,000/year. And rents will be 3,000 maybe some 2,000something. A month. So some of us talk and wonder about who the audience is for all this new housing. We figure a vacation apartment for rich who like to vacation in that coastal town. Silicon valley workers who will do the commute to save rent money. International students who go the the University in town. But, it will do absolutey zip to address the housing shortage ( which we do have a housing shortfall) nor the local homeless issue
@ Marry Bennet
I actualy agree with you that we should disallow foreign ownership of property as one pillar of solving our housing crisis. In my area of California this would help ALOT. It would leave alot more housing on the table for locals.
And, yes, people with money, especially including foreigners with money, consider owning USA property as a good investment or at least a hedge.
Someone from SOuthern CA recently explained to me that you can get citizenship by “investing” in the USA which can also be real estate. So, Southern CA and the greater SF Bay area realy do have this as a contributing problem
Chuaquin (143)–
Yes, there’s a more granular way of describing the differences, and it’s not all one way, either: some European ideas end up being taken much mire seriously in the US (at least among academics) than in Europe. Nonetheless, compare and contrast Mark Twain, or Kurt Vonnegut, on one hand, and Schopenhauer and co. on the other. Or Euro-Situationists with someone like Robert Anton Wilson. Perhaps this has something to do with the extent to which Americans put on European culture as something external (whether they admit it or not) — and “dressing up” is not so far from clowning around?
Derrida’s comment on Marxism as a “hauntology– Not in the past, present or future, but always in the imagination” reminds me of the Sallustius comment, “Myths are things that never happened, but always are.” So, Marxism is a myth? I’ll have to think that one over. Maybe ‘Ideology’ is a more sophisticated way to say ‘myth.’
@ Chaquin, JPM:
That’s hilarious! Home was always a grifter, so I’m not surprised he’s jumped on that bandwagon (albeit about 3 years too late to be in time for the Current Thing he’s obviously still hooked on). I can already envision many “crying soyjack vs gigachad” memes coming out of that Stewart Home book.
“noooo!!! you can’t practise yoga it’s for far-right qanon anti-vaxxers!!!!”
“haha kundalini go brrrr”
@Chauquin: What the Stewart Home book reveals to me is the pervasive fear of the occult and practuces that expabd consciousness, awareness, and intuition. It seems to me these are prevalent on the left and right.
I am used to the feeling of being an outsider to both mainstream secular materialist and scientific worldview, as well as mainstream religious orthodoxy. Both deem the occultist as a threat.
I hope the paranoia, from wherever it comes from, can be staved.
P.S.: I like Nyman, but not as much as I like Stockhausen.
Cornelius Cardew was the most outspoken avantgardist against Stocki. I guess by his standard anyone who writes a score for other musicians to follow is a fascist. While I also am a fan of the freedom implied by free improvisation, I also think there is something to be said of following a written piece of music. Stockhausen’s scores are some of my favorite Glass Bead Games.
He was trained musically before his incarnation on Earth in the Sirius star system and his music is appropriately cosmic.
Robert Mathiesen & Rita Rippetoe: one of the most exhausting things about Wicca for me was the requirement that every ritual be “unique”. I totally understand reacting against the tedium of rote ritual in the churches/temples of one’s youth; I went through such a period myself. However, replacing that with the barest of frameworks and allowing everyone to improvise their little hearts out regardless of skill or ability was a pure example of our host’s dictum that “the opposite of a bad idea is usually another bad idea.”
Mike#14
Be prepared. In Spain , in 2014 we suffered a similar situation wich resulted in an outbreak caused by a nurse Who after atending to a patient of Ébola( imported from Congo in dying state) made a mistake in the operation of of undressing her protection gear, resulting in her contagion and the posibility of contagion for the people who were in her proximity the next days; hundreds of persons, because she were extraordinarily active althought she was suffering the initial symptoms of the Ébola.
Finally there was any contagion more , the nurse survived the Ébola, and the massive fear that we suffered passed. Resting the next anecdote for to be refered: The nurse was propietary of a dog , called Excalibur, wich the autorities ordered its sacrifice . This caused several protests against the ” murdering” of Excalibur.
https://youtu.be/DtB1EAPFlFg?si=D5hvF9E8G2VEPCxx
Joe, very true. When the mainstream has gone all in on defending absurd falsehoods, the truth will only be found on the fringes — though of course this doesn’t mean that everything on the fringes is true.
Chris, stay tuned. The US, and probably the other Western industrial nations in turn, is facing a wrenching transformation that next to nobody has recognized, much less thought through.
Gary, yeah, that sounds like Duchamp!
Siliconguy, “40 percent [of master’s degrees] have no net financial value at all.” That probably belongs on the tombstone of the American university system. Thanks for the link — I’ll be using that in an upcoming post.
Martin, funny.
Sylvia, that’s certainly part of the puzzle, but there’s also the way that viruses can become cultural phenomena in ways that may have nothing to do with their biological and medical qualities. That’s the thing I wanted to point out with the concept “hauntavirus” — the manufacture of pandemic terror is a distinct thing from the virus that may be being used to justify that.
Emmanuel, bingo. An ideology is a myth decked out in rationalist drag.
Thanks JMG!
Thinking about it a little more, something you might like about our performances is that possibly our main target is the academic seriousness of experimental music. Sometimes, admittedly, that is the closest analogy, sonically, to what we might be doing, but we never present/concieve what we are doing in that way. People will at times see us that way – there was a prety big, scary looking guy at the show last week (a regular I think at the dive bar we were playing at) who I think was taking in what we were doing as being like that – I asked him at some point what he thought, and he shared that he, ahem, “Fracking hated it!”, so we did our standard move with hecklers and opponents, and just give him a mic and let him join in and be part of it. When people realize that any insults they hurl at us are only going to make the whole thing that much funnier to us (and other people), and also add to the show being more chaotic and unpredictable (basically further in the direction we are trying to go) they usually loosen up and start laughing too, and by the end he was onboard.
Personally I enjoy the moments where things oscilate between this energetic childish comedy and these sections of uneasy “20th century” stuff, and then the times where both things are happening at once and you don’t really know how you are supposed to feel. Incongruent opposites piled on top of each other. The karaoke experiment is one we’ll likely use again, because then there were pop songs going at the same time, plus it allowed more people to participate, which is where I think the fun is – in that freedom from quality.
Ultimately it was yet another stupid waste of ours and everyone’s time in attendance, but people had fun, and bought alcohol (and we cleaned up quickly!), so hopefully the venue was OK with it all.
Thanks,
Johnny
Le Grand # 169:
Yes, when you compare the European Situs (from its French core to its “tentacles” in other countries), with a guy like R.A.W.,their heavy and serious approach contrast with his very ironic style, you see they had very different life attitudes.
In addition to my comment about the “Spanish exception” (maybe shared with Italy and Greece), I remember how Eugenio Trías pointed in one of his books, that grim German origin philosophy didn’t match well with our “national attitude”. For example, Center Europe main feeling in front of the world usually is anguish (especially within Existentialists like Heidegger). However, Trías thought Spanish typical attitude in front of life is surprise (which it hasn’t to be a negative feeling, it can be depicted even like admiration). Well, it also can be said our writer and philosopher Unamuno was very influenced by Northern sadness, even he wrote a book about “The Tragic Sense of Life”, but it seems the exception within the Spanish thinkers, methink.
By the way, the following link shows Ortega y Gasset laughing, and he seems sincere in this old photo…
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ortega_y_Gasset#/media/Archivo:JoseOrtegayGasset.jpg
(A philosopher can laugh, too…)
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Emmanuel # 170:
“So, Marxism is a myth? I’ll have to think that one over. Maybe ‘Ideology’ is a more sophisticated way to say ‘myth.’”
I think there isn’t a short nor easy answer for it. Some parts of Marx work are amazingt yet (I bet especially in Economy and criticism against capitalism), and they seem useful and reasonable even nowadays. Another ones are directly fake science (ideology: refined beliefs and opinions), for example the “proletariat dictatorship” or “primitive Communism”. Popper showed Marxist claims pointing there are supposed laws of History (similar to hard sciences laws) were non falsable, so they weren’t real science. Even I could say these claims are to some extent similar to the usually weak reasoning typical of conspiracy theories…Finally, the future Communist utopian society as End of History, hasn’t never happened: we can witness it with several counterfactical examples of countries ruled according the totalitarian Socialism (proletarian dictatorship). Both Popper and Berdyaev distrusted this final goal of Marxism, because it was too similar to the millenarist Christianism, but disguised in a scientificist costume. Of course, Berdyaev never saw confirmed his suspicions during his lives because he died before the USSR collapse, but Popper saw it…
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Luke # 171:
Yes, it’s a hilarious thing…I’m glad you enjoy it.
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Justin P. # 172:
Well, I don’t share your musical taste, but of course you’re in your right to admire Stockhausen…
“I am used to the feeling of being an outsider to both mainstream secular materialist and scientific worldview, as well as mainstream religious orthodoxy. Both deem the occultist as a threat.”
This phrase has made me to remember what the Swiss teacher and scientist Ernst Zürcher sometimes tells in some of his books. He’s been a serious researcher in plants and especially trees. He planned a complex experiment some decades ago, in which he showed little plants are born from seeds and begin to grow faster and stronger…two days before the full moon. He explains in his books this can be explained due to the young plants sensitivity to moonlight, whic indeed reflects sunlight. No magic nor spirits in this hard fact.
When he called for a scientists meeting in 1995 to show his discovery, and he began to explain it, near half of his public left the conferences room, laughing and mocking at him. They thought moon inlfuence was a silly superstition, before to be patient to understand Zürcher reasoning and hard facts. In addition to this ugly beginning of his greatest discovery, this guy thinks Rudolf Steiner as amateur scientist was cool and serious, and biodinamic agriculture really works. So often has been despised as a freak, because Steiner was an occultist too, a great sin for hardcore scientists.
It seems Zürcher theories have been better accepted during this last times since the ’90s, but he never has been seen without a bit of suspicion by official science, because he isn’t the typical materialist.
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Anselmo # 174:
“Finally there was any contagion more , the nurse survived the Ébola, and the massive fear that we suffered passed.”
Yes, I remember perfectly the Ebola mediatic hysteria in 2014 here. Beyond the MSM hype and the stupid theories I read online, I understood soon the direct contagion was too difficult to provoke a mass epidemic (it didn’t travel on the air), and in a grim and ironical way alike, the virus was too aggresive against its unfortunate victims that it usually killed them (in the worst cases) before spreading to much more victims…High number of casualties in Africa can be easily explained by the lack of enough hygienical measures there, unfortunately for that people.
One other thing, we’ve been doing a series of shows on these palindrom dates that are happening once a year. We had an idea for 520, which was our stupid answer to 420, and it’s stoner significance, and then when I noticed that last year the date fell on 5/20/2025 we started this project of celebrating the five 20s, each of which will fall on a similar date, 6/20/2026, 7/20/2027 (etc). Since we’d established 520 to some degree with last year’s show (and created imagery of a pot leaf with 520 above it – a visual that seemed both idotic and immediately accessible to anyone), we celebrated 520 this year again (that was last week’s show). If we keep this up (which is a big if), all the way through to 920, then we will take a break for a few years and start it back up with 430 in 2034.
Prior to this we’ve just been entirely passive, the group jsut activated when asked to play, which meant that we showed up at the requested time, became a “band”, played the show, then disolved again when it was over. Somehow it felt a bit like fate was stepping in with this 520 stuff, so it seemed worth being open to it as an experiment.
Thought it was worth passing this along as I doubted this would come up again, and could imagine this 520 project being of vague interest to you.
Thanks,
Johnny
@SisterCrow (#173):
The witches whom I know here in Rhode Island are not Wiccans, but Traditionalists from Lady Gwen/Gwynne Thompson (N.E.C.T.W.). They have told me that they stick strictly to the ritual forms in their rather thick handed-down Book. I applaud that!
@ScotLyn #157 and @JMG #153
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Scotlyn, you say it well: “Elites have one set of interests and middle class people have a completely different set. ( However, I also agree with JMG that vis-a-vis working class people, they might as well have. )”
I think that one of the governing tricks that elites have done extremely well in the last forty years is to set the working class and the middle class against each other, and the only way to get the elite to give decent wages is for the working class and middle class to unite against the elite. I’ve tried to preach this to my middle-class friends, and as you might expect, got nowhere at all. The middle and working classes are too deeply set in elite-created animosity for any useful conversation to occur. Two things might change it. One is downward mobility of the middle class. The other is thinkers of both classes realizing that they are wearing the same blindfolds. Perhaps both at once.
Speaking of self-published rants on intra-Leftist controversies, here’s a weird one between a post-Islamic Marxist and a pot magazine:
https://archive.org/details/against-the-modern-germ/mode/1up
Patricia Mathews (no. 112), those are the Works of Corporeal Mercy. Most of them come from straight the Sermon on the Mount.
Atmospheric River (no. 168), the USA does not offer a visa (let alone citizenship) on the basis of property ownership. The routes to permanent residency are mostly employment- or family-based. The EB-5 is for investors who create jobs, and requires a minimum of USD 800,000, although real estate might theoretically be the thing invested in. The cheapest Trump Gold Card costs USD one million for what is really just an expedited EB-1 or EB-2 (visas for immigrant professionals), and has few takers. Citizenship is a whole ‘nother thing.
#153 They replaced their HR with “People Ops” so it wasn’t exactly that they sacked them all but rebranded it, pushed for a culture change, and fire those who weren’t willing or able to get on board with it.
The problem that HR and similar mid-level corporate roles will find, is they are facing flack from both sides. The workers know that HR really work for management rather than themselves despite whatever progressive rhetoric they embrace, and the bosses see them as an impediment to moving fast as an organization.
Mary Bennet#159 Do you think that your country is ruled by the people ?
@ Tom River #180
“…one of the governing tricks that elites have done extremely well in the last forty years is to set the working class and the middle class against each other…”
While this is true, it is also worth noticing that working class people have one set of interests and middle class people have another, and this fact is what makes it trivially easy to insert that wedge.
Working class people’s interest are best served with less management/supervision, middle class people’s interests are best served with more management/supervision. Working class people’s interests are best served when wages are high and housing costs are low. The level of salaries is a matter of indifference to the interests of working class people, so long as wages are high. Middle class people’s interests are best served when salaries are high, but (also) when wages are low and housing costs are high. So long as salaries remain high, low wages makes everything else significantly cheaper, including the personal services which are patronised by middle class people, and middle class people tend to hold their biggest store of wealth in the form of real estate, including rental properties.
In fact whether one’s interest is best served by high wages/low rents vs low wages/high rents is a very reliable way to predict a person’s border policy preferences.
These diverging interests are actually rather difficult to reconcile. If you’ve done some work on ways to reconcile them, this would be significantly important work!
@ Scotlyn #180
The difference between working and middle classes aren’t as much as you think. For example, wages and salaries are just different names for how payment for labor is made. I agree that the middle class has taken advantage of the impoverishment of the working class as much as the elite have, which is the core of working class resentment. We’ve shown no class solidarity at all. At the same time, the working class has shown little solidarity to itself, and doesn’t see itself as an exploited class. How can the middle class show solidarity with a class that has no internal solidarity?
@ Tom River
Can you say a bit more by what it means to say someone “sees themselves as [belonging to] an exploited class”?
Can you say a bit more by what it means to say a class has, or does not have, “internal solidarity”?
These might be very useful starting points in reconciling these differing class interests.
@186 Scotlyn he’s trying to appeal to the chestnut that the “American working class sees itself as embarrassed millionaires, not an exploited proletariat” that liberals who have a slightly less shrill take on the wage class have (read: the ones who don’t simply generalize them all as evil fascist Trump-voters of evil). As a member of that class for much of my life, I can confidently say that really isn’t the issue. Again, you hit the nail on the head when you said that the goals are basically at odds at this point. The foundations were laid when Reagan destroyed blue collar lifestyles and the salary class did nothing, but when Dubya Jr. hit the country with 2 recessions and the GFR the white collars started whining.
Ofc, nowadays, the number of comfortably upper middle class netizens who claim to be with the proletariat but cross the street whenever they see a factory worker coming home or are literally sometimes “”too afraid”” to use a checkout with a cashier in it doesn’t help.