@shmibs@Moon Suppressing communication. I don't get it either, because IRC is considered a dinosaur, because it doesn't enable people to take their virtual frens with them, has no fun media embeds and is used by the most autistic people conceiveable.
@xj9@nik@Moon@r000t Its superstitious bullshit. There are simpler solutions than wasting protective gear: Don't be sodomite and isolate the vulnerable and ban all super spreaders. The rules we have now led to arbitrary creation of potential hot spots. Since my local government isn't run by lunatics, I can ignore the circus and wait for it to fizzle out. (probably by another cucking of the latest strain.)
@mystik@r000t@Moon@nik@xj9 These are only therapeutics. He wants 100% protection. There is Vitamin D and Tonic Water for that. I got through winter with Tonic water only btw.
@mystik@Moon@nik@r000t@xj9 On top of the fucking masks (hopefully handled appropriately) Of course. Also helpful is not going into certain hot spots. Like vaccination centers for example. One of the sure signs a vaccine works is you getting a weaker form of the disease you are getting vaccinated against. Since you need two swabs from that crap you its sure thing. On the risk I am doxing myself, I am blaming a recent outbreak on the effectively run vaccination center inside a fucking convention center that doesn't have 24/7 ventilation through carbon filters and UV lights.
@coolboymew Ah, here it is...
Every month or so since the 2016 presidential election campaign hit high tide, somebody has asked me to say something about the weirdest and most interesting aspect of that campaign: the role played in it by a diffuse constellation of right-wing occultists who united for a brief time under the banner of a cartoon frog. A fair number of my readers have probably encountered cryptic references to Pepe the Frog, the ancient Egyptian god Kek, a Euro-pop song from the 1980s titled “Shadilay,” and an assortment of online forums collectively known as “the chans”—4chan.org, 8ch.net, and the like—in connection with Donald Trump’s victory. Those of you who haven’t, well, you’re in for a wild ride.
When the first flurry of requests for a post about what I call the Kek Wars came my way, I decided to wait a while before responding. My thought was that after a year or so, the losing side would get around to dealing with the fact that it lost, the tantrums would subside, and it would then be possible to have a reasoned conversation about what happened and why. One of the more interesting features of the 2016 election and its aftermath is that the tantrums haven’t subsided. That’s not quite unprecedented—as we’ll see, it has some very specific and revealing precedents earlier in American history—but it’s a good indication that something out of the ordinary is in process.
Even though the leftward end of American politics is still busy melting down over Trump’s election twenty months afterward, I think it’s time to go ahead and try to have that conversation. In order to make sense of what happened, though, we’re going to have to cover quite a bit of ground that has no obvious relation to cartoon frogs and internet forums. We’re going to talk about magic, but magic always has a political context.
@coolboymew Here is the spicy part:
The cascade of synchronicities that surrounded Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign suggest to me that something not completely dissimilar is at work in today’s America. Wotan, though, is not an American archetype; while the Wild Hunt has its American equivalent—fans of old-fashioned country music will recall the classic piece “Ghost Riders in the Sky”—the Lord of the Slain on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir is absent in that song, and in American myth and folklore generally. We must look elsewhere for the archetype at work in today’s politics.
The brilliant Native American philosopher and activist Vine Deloria Jr. offered an important hint in his most influential work, God is Red. He pointed out that in the wake of the Reformation, Western spirituality lost track of a crucial variable—the spiritual importance of place. To most spiritual traditions, and to Native American traditions even more than most, specific places on the land have their own unique spiritual properties and powers, which are not dependent on the people who happen to live there. He went on to argue that much of the reason why modern American society stumbles so blindly from one preventable disaster to another is that we have not yet learned to relate in a sacred manner to the powers of place, the spirits of the land on which we live—and that those powers remain the ones that native peoples reverenced.
Thus it seems to me that there’s a specific mythic figure whose archetype is in play just now.
A great many native myths, from across the length and breadth of North America, tell of a being or a category of beings whose task it is to change the world so that the people can live there. Among the Salish-speaking tribes of southern Puget Sound, for example, the Changer is Moon; among the Takelma, who live in far southwestern Oregon, he’s Daldal the dragonfly; in some parts of the dryland West he’s Coyote, and so on. In some stories he’s a hero, in some he’s a buffoon, in some he’s an incomprehensible force of nature; the details vary, but the basic theme remains the same. The world was different once, say the tales, and then the Changer came and made it the way it is now.
The versions of the Changer story I know best have a distinctive shape. They’re episodic, and follow the Changer on his journey as he proceeds from the mouth of the local river to its source.
In the southern Puget Sound version, for example, after a long and intricate backstory, Moon leaves the land of the salmon people under the sea and starts walking up the river toward the mountains. All the beings who live there know that he’s coming, and they prepare various weapons and traps to stop him, because they don’t want him to change the world. So he meets a man who’s sitting at the water’s edge carving a big flat board out of wood. “What are you doing?” Moon asks him, and he says, “There’s someone coming who’s going to change things, and I’m going to hit him over the head with this board and kill him.” Moon takes the board, sticks it onto the man’s rump, and says, “From now on your name is Beaver. When the people come they’ll hunt you for your fur.”
Moon goes further up the valley, and he meets another man who’s looking anxiously around from the top of a hill. He has two weapons, one in each hand, and they have many sharp points. “What are you doing?” Moon asks him, and he says, “There’s someone coming who’s going to change things, and I’m going to stab him with all these points and kill him.” Moon takes the weapons, sticks them on the man’s head, and says, “From now on your name is Deer. When the people come they’ll hunt you for your meat and your hide.”
And so the story goes. In the hands of a skilled storyteller—and storytelling was one of the fine arts in Native American cultures—the story of the Changer would be spun out to whatever length circumstances permitted, with any number of lively incidents meant to point up morals or pass on nuggets of wisdom. There’s no rising spiral of action leading to a grand battle between the Changer and the beings whose world he has come to change; there’s just one incident after another, until the Changer finally reaches the source of the river and leaps into the sky to become the Moon, or turns into a mountain, or goes to whatever his destiny might be, leaving the world forever changed in his wake.
Trump is moon