New Years!

How To Be Safe In North America

death mention: at the very beginning of the episode (about 0:20), arin says, “YOU. DEAD. ON THE GROUND.” this may seem like a small thing, but it may trigger dpdr and make some people dissociate. i don’t experience this myself, so please let me know if i’m wrong! (i’m mod r)

implied pedophilia warning: at 1:25, danny talks about how a lot of old men keep stopping arin, who is playing as the 10 year old girl trainer.

death mention: another death mention at around 1:35, where arin says “what will the old man do?”, and he immediately follows it with “die”.

pedophilia warning: while still talking about what the old man will do (a few seconds after the previous warning), arin says “hit on young girls”.

suggestive warning: at about 2:03, danny begins his rendition of how a pokemon battle works, and says you “whip out your dicks and sword fight”. this ends at 2:18.

ableism warning: danny says the heat is making them st*pid at 2:38.

animal cruelty (beastiality) warning: at about 3:16, danny says (on the subject of beating/capturing a pokemon),”when it faints, you can just drag your sack on it’s face and do whatever you want? because we could’ve been sack-dragging a lot of roosters at this point.”, to which arin then says, “yes to that”.

animal death mention: at 4:10 when capturing a ratata, danny says, “it’s fucking dead now, it’s gonna run out of air in there.” he goes on to say, “what if pokemon don’t shrink when they go in there, they’re just crushed?”, along with arin making some pretty gross sound effects.

ableism warning: at 7:33, arin describes the strategizing the pokemon series as cr*zy.

sexual warning: at 8:04, danny and arin start talking about their friend Spazkidin3d’s very suggestive cartoon about nurse joy.

transphobia warning: as they’re talking about Spazkidin3d’s cartoon, they begin to talk about their other friend Stamper (who voices nurse joy in the cartoon) and how arin would “slam Stamper” is he were a girl.

misogyny warning: at about 9:27, arin starts calling the pokemon bitch. danny says it again at 9:49.

(source) (episode of Game Grumps referenced)

A Portrait of Normal Rural Life in Sweet Mother Russia

Risky Attacks Gone Wrong

Fabiola - Part Six

The beds were slabs of chiseled stone decorated and made comfortable with tasseled pillows. Fabiola could make that much out through the edges of the smoke-stained doorway curtains as she groped her way along the dark hallway of the brothel. She could hear the people in the rooms. Heavy breathing, tell-tale moans, and rhythmic slaps. Gallus, her prey, had disappeared somewhere in this maze.
  
It suddenly occurred to her to wonder if her father had ever taken a boy. Her brother hadn't. Gallus, the young man from dinner clearly hadn't. But she knew from overheard conversations that men often took boys. They spoke openly in front of the invisible Fabiola, joking about the softness of a boy's skin, boasting of having made one a woman.  The elders would change the subject when it came up or if one of the priests came into the room. Or the men would turn on their own to describing the women who earn and their encounters with servants. Fabiola knew what men thought of the women in this building. She felt it too, even if it made her uncomfortable. They couldn't control themselves, these women; they needed men and enjoyed their taste. Those who weren't ravenous for men were simply lazy. This is what Fabiola had been told a hundred times; it was the assumption behind everything that was said. It was the reason that Fabiola hated being called a whore for the way she dressed.
  
Very few of the women in the brothel seemed to be enjoying much of anything. Fabiola stopped to gaze through one of the curtains of an occupied room. There was a man with long hair and a scar across his back, a soldier, with a soldier's body. He was on his knees, entering a woman from behind. The woman wasn't lifting her leg for display as in the lamp, nor was she looking back with joy. Instead she rested the side of her head on a pillow, moaning and breathing absently while the man alternated between slow and fast movements, grunting to himself. Fabiola could see the drug at work in her eyes. And while part of Fabiola pitied the woman, whatever her reason for earning, there was a part of her who at this moment remembered the feeling of finger tips on stone and wondered what it felt like to be alone with a man in a room.
  
Continuing along the hallway, passing women waiting to ply their trade and rooms occupied with heat and sweat, Fabiola did her best to look through the crack of each curtain, trying to find Gallus. She didn't even know his name, and it bothered her to know that he was here, but she was determined. She was determined because he was here, and because she didn't know his name.
  
Eventually, having reached the end of the hallway, she again heard Gallus' voice. Forceful, yet assured, he was speaking--of all things--about the wanderers in the sky. As Fabiola slowly approached his curtain, she heard also the laughter and purring voices of the two women Gallus had taken with him into the brothel. She was afraid to look into the room. So Fabiola stood silently, as invisible to Gallus as she assumed she had been at dinner. There, in the shadows, she listened as closely as she could manage.

Sigourney Sundays

Source

Battle Scars

Place Holder Saturday! Today!

THIS IS A PLACE HOLDER FOR HOLDING PLACES. ALSO: WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE ANIMALS ALL LOOKING AT? WHAT DO A CHICKEN, A DOG, AND A CAT ALL HAVE IN COMMON?! 

Kendrick Lamar - Untitled (Live)

Broadcast - Come On Let's Go

Princess Aura

Psychos in Love

Low - Just Like Christmas

Eno/Hyde - The Satellites

To Sojourn

We know very little about Jesus. We know lots about what people said and wrote about him after his death. But the man himself is largely hidden from us. We know that his name was Yeshua, and that he was a Jew living in ancient Palestine. Historians suspect, for complex reasons that we need not get into, that Yeshua was taken in by an ascetic preacher named John.(1) This man initiated Yeshua into an apocalyptic strain of Judaism. This did not mean that Yeshua believed in our modern, cinematic version of the apocalypse—there was nothing of the End of the World in Yeshua’s words. He preached the arrival of a divine revelation, an unveiling of higher meaning and truth. God had touched down as a holy presence, ending the need for complex ritual and dogma. Yeshua took this message with him to Jerusalem during the busiest, most volatile day of the Jewish calendar. Local Roman authorities cruelly executed him shortly afterwards for nothing more than disturbing an already fragile civic peace. And that’s more-or-less what we know. Yeshua did not refer to himself as the son of God or as the anointed one, the Messiah or Christ. Those claims came later, as did stories of Yeshua's miracles and bodily resurrection.

Among the many things that we definitely do not know about Yeshua is the date of his birth. I am not surprising anyone when I report that the Christ Mass is celebrated on December 25 as part of a medieval Catholic attempt to convert non-Christians who celebrated the Winter Solstice. As such, Christmas is yet another thing obstructing our view of Yeshua, making us see what was not there. Which is unfortunate because the message of Yeshua is one worth preserving, whatever your beliefs. Yeshua’s God was an immediate presence, one beyond churches and superstitions. To quote Thomas Sheehan, “In Jesus’ preaching, the happening of forgiveness, the coming of the kingdom, was entirely the initiative of God. And yet at the same time it was not an objective event that dropped out of the sky. God became present when people allowed that presence by actualizing it in lives of justice and charity.”(2)

Behind all the dogma, myth, historical confusion, colonialism, and commercialism behind and surrounding December 25^th, there is a moment waiting for us—a parallel world of human simplicity, existing simultaneously with our own. One of the spiritual goals of the strands of Christian asceticism that provides the core to modern Systema, obfuscated by politics, consumerism, and a martial emphasis, is the actualization of this parallel world. Systema—at its core—seeks, after the words of one of the oldest letters of early Christianity, to transform its practitioners into foreigners and exiles with respect to the world, to inspire a transition from regular time to messianic time, “the time that remains between time and its end.”(3) As sojourners in this world, we place our faith in the sky and the heavens, the ever-present moment of opening that is human being, and the feeling of immenseness that accompanies that moment.(4)

The conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge, in Dicken’s Christmas Carol, is one from regular time to messianic time. Scrooge becomes a sojourner, faithful to the opening, enacting God’s presence in a life of justice and charity. He learns the true meaning of Christmas.

I saw a woman on the street today. She was speaking loudly into her phone, appearing agitated, but not speaking words of anger. She was stressed and frustrated. There was a doctor’s appointment to attend, family coming later that day, and some other difficulties. She looked hurt. Like life had taken something from her and she didn’t even realize it. Listening to her I thought of what Christmas had become. And then I remembered what it could be.

 (1)     Biblical scholars employ at least four criteria when determining whether elements of the gospel material are authentically historical: dissimilarity, coherence, multiple attestation, and language and environment. Whatever is reported of Yeshua that is dissimilar from the early Christian church or ancient Judaism, is coherent with other elements that are likewise dissimilar, written of in separate, unrelated sources, and typical of Aramaic speech and the cultural patterns of early Palestine, is probably authentically historical. See Sheehan, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (Random House, 1986): 25

 (2)     Ibid: 67

 (3)     Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom (Seagull, 2012): 1-8
 (4)     Nancy, God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues (Fordham, 2011): 15-16

The Twilight Sad - There's A Girl In The Corner

Lydia Ainsworth - PSI

Fabiola - Part Five

That night, along the road adjacent the Market Square, Fabiola found herself among the women who earn. Having slowly unfastened the lock to her wooden window shutters, she had slid carefully and silently out of her bedroom into the inner courtyard, making sure that the sentry did not see her. The babbling of the water fountain had concealed the ticking of pebbles under her sandaled feet, and a moments conversation between the sentry and one of his fellows had allowed her a chance to unlock and escape through the front gate. She closed it securely behind her, not knowing how she would find her way back into the villa come morning. Right now things like that did not matter. Not here among all these bodies; women, their breasts exposed to the cool night air or--in a few cases--draped in a transparent yellow silk; men, drunken and loud, pushing and roughhousing, fondling the women openly, negotiating their price. Fabiola had heard the warnings of her mother, and knew that these things existed, but those were only stories. This was real, in front of her.

  Suddenly a hand rested lightly on her shoulder. It was a woman's. Fabiola turned to look at her. The woman squinted lightly, inching her head forward drunkenly, as she examined Fabiola's masculine robe. Her other hand, the one not resting on Fabiola's shoulder, held a clay pipe. The woman's words were slow and halting. It was at this moment that Fabiola began to see how damaged and thin many of these women were, how vacantly they sold themselves. "You're new," the woman said.

  She presented Fabiola with the pipe, directing them both closer to one of the torches lighting the street. "It's good," she said, setting fire to a short wooden stick that she then used to ignite for herself the substance in the pipe. Fabiola took in the thick scent of the herbs as the woman dragged in the smoke. "Here," the woman said, exhaling. Fabiola took the pipe hesitantly, but then confidently. The woman held the fire to the pipe for her, and then Fabiola inhaled strongly. Too strongly. It left her bent over coughing for a few seconds.

  In that time some passing men had grabbed the arm of the unnamed woman, pulling her down the street with them, laughing, surrounding her, leaving Fabiola alone with the pipe. Having seen how it was done, Fabiola used a piece of straw on the ground to take another gentle toke. Nothing seemed to be happening, and she did not know any better. When the drug finally took effect, Fabiola was reaching the end of the earning district, among the brothels, where things were quieter. Standing dazed, she could feel the warmth of the torches through her clothing and the hardness of the ground beneath her feet. It seemed to her that the touch of the woman had remained on her shoulder, radiating into her skin. Fabiola ran her finger tips across the nearest wall. The edges of the stone read like letters of an alphabet, sharp and distinct and meaningful.

  She could make out the contours of people fucking in the alleyways. A woman pressed forward against the wall as a man thrust into her from behind, his left hand gripping her breast. Another taking a woman laying on her back, moaning and whispering to the woman what to say.

  Fabiola watched, her pupils dilated and mouth open, a slight wobble in her stance. But when one of the men seemed to look up at her, she startled, and shuffled away as quickly as she could. Realizing now how vulnerable she may have made herself, how far away from home she had wandered, Fabiola decided to try to make her way to safety. 

  However, it was in that very moment of rational clarity when Fabiola heard a voice that would eliminate all reason, all clarity. It was the young man from the dinner, Gallus. He was here on the street, talking loudly in the relative silence of the brothel district, oblivious of Fabiola's presence. Looking over, Fabiola could see that he had taken one of the women who earn under his arm, and was heading for the entrance to one of the buildings. An unexpected jealousy crept into her heart. It inspired her to follow Gallus into the building.

Let's Sauce In The Tub!

Sigourney Sundays

Mulholland Drive

"Now, you will see me one more time if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad. Good night."

Digital Underground - Return of the Crazy One

Find the Burning Bush

Who Did The Thing In The News?

"The hackers only latched onto The Interview after the media spent a week prognosticating over the possibility of it being the driving force behind the hack. It wasn’t until December 8, at least a week after the Sony Pictures hack went public, that the attackers started using The Interview as leverage. If you had just hacked Sony, and the world media just gave you the perfect opportunity to shift the blame onto North Korea, wouldn’t you do the same thing?
 
There’s also the overall timeline of the hack to take into consideration. The hackers managed to exfiltrate around 100 terabytes of data from Sony’s network — an arduous task that, to avoid detection, probably took months. Given how long it would’ve taken to gain access to Sony Pictures, plus the time to exfiltrate the data, I think the wheels started turning long before North Korea heard about The Interview.
 
Even if we take the movie out of the equation, the hack just doesn’t feel like something that would be perpetrated by a nation state. The original warnings and demands feel like the attacker has a much more personal axe to grind — a disenfranchized ex employee, perhaps, or some kind of hacktivist group makes more sense, in my eyes." (source)

Max Headroom Hacking

Groping in the Dark With....Burckhardt's Reflections

"The rivalry between history and poetry has been finally settled by Schopenhauer. Poetry achieves more for the knowledge of human nature; even Aristotle said 'poetry is more philosophical and profound than history,' and that is true, because the faculty which gives birth to poetry is intrinsically of a higher order than that of the greatest historians. Further, the end to which it is created is much sublimer than that of history."


                                                 Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History

Burckhardt gave us, whether we wanted it or not, our first lasting interpretation of the Italian Renaissance as a single historical epoch. Lots of kids have taken issue with that interpretation, especially with respect to the question of modernity and the equality of class and gender. Very little of what we would recognize as modernity is rooted in the Renaissance. The state was a medieval invention; anything resembling secularism would come later or would not come at all. Mathematico-empiricism is Baroque. In the realm of intellectual culture we generally agree that the Italian Renaissance gifted to the future knowledge of Greek classics, improved philological and historiographical methodologies, and a handful of witty political subversives. That's about all.

So, knowing this, I wondered why precisely current opinion differs so drastically from that of the nineteenth-century Swiss historian. The above passage, taken from a lecture on world history, offers part of an answer, a part I had not considered. We need to look to Schopenhauer's understanding of the relationship between history and poetry.* The German philosopher claimed that speech "represents a perfectly distinct class of ideas, whose subjective correlative is reason." There is no imagination in speech. Speech is reason speaking to reason. Poetry, as written speech, like philosophy, "reveals the events of our inner life, in so far as they concern the will," which "alone is the thing-in-itself." It accesses what is unchanging in mankind, revealing "the same, identical, unchangeable essence, acting in the same way today as it did yesterday and always."

History is merely the "mere coordination of what is known" with respect to particular facts, a category that is innumerable and infinite. From these facts one cannot access the universal. Against the Hegelians, Schopenhauer calls their "pseudo-philosophy" pernicious and--at root--a "crude and shallow realism," and "a shallow optimism." Hegelianism seeks a "comfortable, substantial, and fat State with a well-regulated constitution, good justice and police, useful arts and industries." But none of it reveals the inner life. Only poetry and philosophy and speech are capable of this revelation.

Burckhardt's approach to history was not as simplistic as Schopenhauer's (the Swiss historian trained at the University of Berlin under Ranke), but one does detect a similarity or influence between the two authors. Burckhardt often treated the writings of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and other Italian authors as the documents of important, uncomplicated witnesses to a profound change in the human spirit.

*Because I am lazy and ignorant, I simply followed the footnotes in the text. They led me to The World as Will and Representation Vol. 1, Section 51 and Vol. 2, Section 38. You can find these passages through Google if you're interested. 

Watching

Jenny Hval - I Called

Nightmares

John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1782)

Nicolai Abildgaard, The Nightmare (1800)

Marianne Faithfull - True Lies

Noah23 - Tearz in Heaven (ft. Swag Toof)

The Sting of a Flea or a Fly

"Detach yourself from concern for the body when you pray: do not let the sting of a flea or a fly, the bite of a louse or a mosquito, deprive you of the fruits of your prayer."

    Evagrius Ponticus

Sigourney Sundays

This Time, We Boogie!

Haunted Vagina?

Haunted Vagina!

MPAA vs. Pirates

"Leaked documents reveal in detail how Hollywood plans to take on piracy in the years to come. One of the top priorities for the MPAA are cyberlockers and illegal streaming sites, with lawsuits planned in the UK, Germany and Canada. Torrent sites are a medium priority, which the MPAA hopes to fight with criminal prosecutions, domain seizures and site blocking.

The Sony Pictures leak has caused major damage to the Hollywood movie studio, but the fallout doesn’t end there.

Contained in one of the leaked data batches is a complete overview of the MPAA’s global anti-piracy strategy for the years to come." (source)

Instructional Comics? - How To BDSM

This Stuff Looks Complex

Foxygen - San Francisco

Purity Ring - Saltkin

Instructional Comics - How to Strip Your Baby

Source: Will Eisner, M16A1 Rifle: Operation and Preventative Maintenance (1969)

Instructional Comics - Multiple Processes

Found this while investigating why Chrome runs so many chrome.exe files in Task Manager. Here was the answer, bright and clear, in a comic by none-other than Scott McCloud! Those Google kids know what they're doing.

A Woman's Army?!!

Trina Robbins, Fight Girl Comics #1 (Print Mint, 1972)

Philosophy and Life

Those familiar with ancient and late-antique Mediterranean philosophical schools will probably also be familiar with the work of Pierre Hadot, an historian of philosophy who ended his career at the College de France. Hadot is famous (as much as any academic is ever famous) for treating ancient philosophical schools as coherent ways of life. Platonism was a way of life. Aristotelianism was a way of life. Stoicism was a way of life. Back then a student of philosophy did not simply ask questions about the fields we delineate under the categories of physics, metaphysics, and ethics for the sake of asking questions. These investigations, and the answers characteristic to the various schools, were not only guides to correct living, but exercises in themselves; they molded the psyche of their practitioner so that it conceived of the world in a way distinct from other schools. The leaders of these schools were far more like priests of the Most High Good than they were like modern university professors. In some cases, especially in the Platonic tradition, they approached the status of holy men.

In a very short radio broadcast, transcribed in Philosophical Chronicles, Jean-Luc Nancy explores the act of philosophizing, contrasting it against the image of the philosopher presented above. Asking whether or not philosophy gives form to life, he determines that the question itself is about energy, about the difference between Descartes and Heidegger. “In one case, one supposes that the order of reasons generates energy, and in the other, one affirms that the effectivity of this energy is of an order different from the order of reasons. One thus poses the problem of the passage from one order to the other.”  Reasoning through concepts and ideas somehow mobilizes life into a particular configuration or it does not. In the latter case, we are speaking of two distinct forms of energy.

Nancy goes on to assert that this tension between ‘form’ and ‘life’ is necessarily internal to philosophy. Why? Because “a philosopher immediately disqualifies the notions of both ‘form’ and ‘life’ understood as frame and content or even as signification and experience…Neither form, nor life, nor concept, nor intuition, but from one to the other, or rather, from one within the other, through the other, but also one against the other, a tension without resolution.” Here Nancy efficiently twins a series of words which roughly sum up human being: frame-form, content-life, signification-concept, experience-intuition. Frame-form rests opposite content-life; signification-concept opposite experience-intuition. The philosopher, in thinking, thinks within and through and against and between the four polarized ends of this axis, mixing and matching, transposing and contrasting. According to Nancy, this tangle is the truth of life, which is “never simply available but is always caught up in its own practice.”

“Thus philosophy is less a ‘form of life’ than life forming itself, that is to say, thinking itself, in accordance with its excess over every given form or signification. Which also means, of course, this life thinking itself even in its death.”

We are reminded of Phaedo now. Philosophy is practicing to die. We are also reminded of the later Platonists who sought, through the practice of death, an ineffable and illuminating experience of Mind or the One. But those goals are not what Nancy is attempting to describe, are they? For Nancy, philosophy is a process that both produces itself and overcomes itself. It is a fundamental quality of life-as-thinking, which is the necessary life of humanity. Its purpose is to create and explore space in being. "Between religion and lived experience--in a space, let us note, where one also finds politics, science, and art--philosophy has the task, if I may say so, of spacing as such." According to Nancy, philosophy performs its work on the organization of society, on the investigation and cataloging of natural phenomena, and on the expression of lived experience. Like the ancients, Nancy's philosophy is an art of all arts.

  

Here we might infer Nancy’s evaluation of the philosophical schools described by Hadot and other historians of ancient and late-antique philosophy. They were bad at making space between religion and lived experience. Why? Perhaps because their philosophy, their life-thinking, was focused overly on the future of life-ending or life-over. The foundations and ends of their frame-form and signification-concept were gods or God. In which case, Nancy's philosopher would be a modern invention, or--if we are being charitable--a full flowering of philosophy's potential. I would say that Nancy's philosopher is one who faces death much less often than the ancients and early moderns would have faced it. It is the philosophy of a life possessing social services.

Whatever the case, it is interesting to note that much of Nancy's most recent thought has concerned religion. Having written this out, I now see that, through thinking, he is attempting to create space not only between religion and life, but within religion itself, transforming that age-old thought barrier into philosophy as such.

I wish him luck and success.

High Heeled Vampire Librarian

Summer of Haze - Twilight

Gotta get some shit done today.

Fabiola - Part Four

The young man, Gallus, watched the strange girl at a distance. The girl who insisted on wearing a soldier's robe over her white, wool-embroidered linen dress. Even from there, leaning against one of the arched columns of High Priest's Road, nestled among the fruit vendors, he could see the curls of Fabiola's hair peaking out from under her loose head scarf. Although she'd never looked at him, and perhaps did not even know he existed, Gallus could imagine returning to those intense brown eyes.
 
He took note of her leisurely walking pace as she moved closer and closer towards him, and examined her gestures for signs of who she was below those folds of cloth and beneath that soft, tan skin. Would her hand always feel so warm? Would she notice him? She seemed to notice everything else around her, as her eyes moved slowly and carefully from objects to persons to the open windows above the busy street. The modest, silent girl he coveted at dinner and fantasied about at night had opened herself now. In this moment of revelation, he could see that something about the old beggar woman had troubled her. Thoughtful yet alert, she strolled by him, oblivious.
 
Fabiola, meanwhile, flanked by her anxious servants, was thinking about property. She was thinking about money. It reminded her of stories that she'd heard at dinner regarding the man across the sea who had submit himself to fatal torture in order to erase all debts. What a strange thing to have done, she thought. This seemingly endless debt won't be paid until the wandering gods themselves collapse from exhaustion, destroying Fortune. Before that day, man will continue to prey upon man. And bodies will continue to disembark from ships docked along a river silted with the hopeless, penniless dead.
 
It was in thinking such thoughts that Fabiola decided that she was going to sneak out of her room that night and see how those bodies lived.

Purity Ring - Push Pull

Having A Thought

Tristen - Dark Matter

Angel Olsen - White Fire

Who Will Raid The Raiders?

Police in Sweden carried out a raid in Stockholm today, seizing servers, computers, and other equipment. At the same time The Pirate Bay and several other torrent-related sites disappeared offline. Although no official statement has been made, TF sources confirm action against TPB.

For many years The Pirate Bay has been sailing by the seat of its pants so any downtime is met with concern from its millions of users.

This morning, for the first time in months, The Pirate Bay disappeared offline. A number of concerned users emailed TF for information but at that point technical issues seemed the most likely culprit.

However, over in Sweden authorities have just confirmed that local police carried out a raid in Stockholm this morning as part of an operation to protect intellectual property.

“There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” read a statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement. (source)

Fabiola - Part Three

An old beggar woman caught Fabiola's eye. She had wrinkled brown skin, covered hair, and sang a soft song, bowing from her knees. It looked painful. One of the woman's hands had been broken before but never set. Bone jutted awkwardly around the capitate. Fabiola instructed her servants to fetch the woman. When the woman arrived, frightened by the attention of someone above her station, Fabiola attempted to calm her but they did not speak the same language. As Fabiola tried to purchase a new blanket for her, the woman shook her head and waved her hands, speaking as humbly as the language barrier allowed. "She says that robbers will take it from her," the cloth merchant interjected.

Fabiola paused and sighed, seeing now that she had drawn dangerous attention to this woman. Working with the merchant, they settled on a drab brown sack cloth. Fabiola then put some bronze coins in the woman's good hand, clasping it lovingly. "I'm sorry," she said. They looked into each other's eyes for a moment before parting.

Like rats trying to escape a sinking ship, she thought to herself, climbing over each other, leaving the weakest behind. 

Thoughts like this kept her from noticing that she herself had been noticed during this exchange with the beggar woman. He too had visited the market that day. And he too remembered warmly their brief encounter at dinner the night previous.

Decadence and Waste

Sigourney Sundays

La Sorciere

 

Jean-Luc Nancy - God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues

"Why have religions used this word god? Why even outside of religion is it not so easy to do without naming god in one way or another? Because it is not enough to use abstract names like Love, Joy, Mercy, or Justice in order to name this dimension of opening and going beyond. It is necessary to be able to address oneself to or to relate to this dimension. Why address oneself to this dimension or establish a connection with it? In order to be faithful to it.

What does it mean to be oneself as much as possible? It means nothing other than being faithful to this opening or to this infinite going beyond of the human by the human. It means being faithful to the sky or the heavens, in the sense I've spoken of."

Soft Moon - Black

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Jill Kraye and John Marenbon

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has reached its 200th episode. To celebrate this event, the host, Peter Adamson, a specialist in medieval Arabic philosophy, takes some time to discuss the category of 'medieval philosophy' with John Marenbon and Jill Kraye. The former is a specialist in early Latin medieval philosophy and the latter is a specialist in late medieval (or 'Renaissance') Latin philosophy. 

Marenbon advocates for a Long Middle Ages stretching from Plotinus to the mid-17C. He doesn't explain precisely why this would be, but we can assume that he's envisioning a period in which Platonic metaphysics makes up the core of elite intellectual culture. Beauty = Truth = Good = God as the centre of all thinking up until Leibniz.

Kraye is sympathetic to this notion but seems to want to claim that the Middle Ages represent a moment in which Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy came to surround and modify that core of Platonism. This would place the Middle Ages of intellectual culture between early-12C and mid-17C. The Renaissance would then name a phase in the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages in which the style and form of philosophical discussion mattered to intellectuals just as much as content did. Furthermore, the Renaissance would name a period in which philosophies other than Aristotelianism, such as Epicureanism or Pyrronic Skepticism, gained in popularity without replacing the Platonic core of most forms of thinking.

Jill is an historian interested in philosophy and John is a philosopher interested in history. They both want to contextualize the thought of their objects of study, but only John wants to think with those objects. Here in this podcast and also in a lecture given elsewhere, Marenbon suggests that we first isolate a philosophical problem that concerns us today, something that to us seems like philosophy. With that problem in hand we return to the past to see how it was dealt with then. But, in the process of doing so, we contextualize the old arguments and old solutions in order to provide contrast for the new, or to inspire new approaches to present problems.* Marenbon respects difference while prizing similarity. Jill, on the other hand, like most historians, wants to paint--to the best of her ability--a true and faithful portrait of her subject as it changes over time. Hers is the instinct of an antiquarian and a biographer and a pedant. Such an approach no doubt keeps us honest, and reveals to us the peculiarity of past minds, but it does little to sketch out how to make use of the past.

There is too much of Jill in me, and not enough of John.

*this strikes me as a benign version of Quentin Skinner's methodology. For more on him, check out this two part interview.

Slavoj Zizek - What Is Freedom Today?

War and Sci-Fi

"Clarke’s short story, Superiority, does not predict technologies that we recognize today, but elegantly describes a number of disturbingly familiar military technical failure modes. Such insights are especially helpful when thinking about new endeavors like the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Initiative, which will include both a new long-range research and development planning program and an offset strategy.

In a distant future, an unnamed dominant military power has been engaged in a lengthy space war with a technically inferior adversary. The dominant force appoints a new “Professor General.” This new leader changes the dominant power’s technology strategy from upgrading existing systems incrementally to developing and deploying new weapons, believing that “a revolution in warfare may soon be upon us.” This change in strategy sets off a series of disastrous events that ultimately leads to the dominant military power’s defeat.

Here’s how the decline unfolds. The superior force abandons the production of old weapons platforms to focus on the development of a new “irresistible weapon.” The weapon takes longer to develop than planned and can only be launched in limited quantities. During the development period, the adversary is able to build larger numbers of their inferior weapons so that even when the new weapon works as planned, it does not provide the anticipated advantage. The superior force then attempts a large-scale effort at battle management automation only to have the enemy rapidly adapt to their new concept of operations, targeting central nodes in their new order of battle to devastating effect. In response, the previously superior force develops a final new weapon only to have significant integration issues that throw their forces into disarray, precipitating their defeat within a month." (source)

Yoko Ono - Paper Shoes

Comics - Joe Kessler

Source

The Pull Out King

Rex Murphy and the Evangelization of Progress

This is amazing. I had no idea. Thank you Canadaland. As someone who has enjoyed Cross Country Checkup on numerous lazy Sunday afternoons and appreciated the few of Murphy's editorials that I'd seen on The National, I had always taken Murphy to be a neutral object in Canadian media. Admittedly, this was out of ignorance and selective listening. Shit like that happens when you ain't got cable and you tend not to regularly read Canadian newspapers. Often whole narratives and cycles pass me by without at all registering on my radar. But, man, I still wasn't prepared for this.

He's funny. I gotta give it to him. Murphy's oratorical skill is in full effect in the above video. I'm really impressed. And at the same time I'm very disturbed! He is preaching the virtues of energy production and consumption. He's preaching this with everything he can muster. Energy maintains civilization, he says.* Separating oil from sand and reaching the pinnacle of human intelligence are the same procedure, he says. It's a miracle, he says. Without energy there is no 'human dignity.' There is no social stability. Hell, there is no Newfoundland!

He's paid for these engagements, by the way. And then he goes on The National in favour of the oil sands. The CBC response reads like so. The National Post comments editor defends it thusly. And Rex himself writes this. 

Now I am ensnared in the fucking shit show that is media and gossip and low talk. Ugh. Welcome.

*It does maintain 21C carbon democracies, so maybe he ain't wrong in his wrongness.

Sigourney Sundays

Kaz - The Tragedy of Satan

I Didn't Think Erik Larson Could Do This

Click to Embiggen!

Jesus Christ!

Metal Gear Solid V - The Phantom Pain

Aw yesssss. The torture of scantily clad women, child soldiers, water boarding, cruel imprisonment, murder, unanaesthetized surgery, cowboys in Afghanistan, hiding behind horses, sneaking around, 'real-time weather', the simultaneous glamorization and criticism of violence and war, and a guy named Skull Face. What the fuck else do you want? Like, really? What? Nothing. There is nothing else.

David Luban - Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb

"But the pressure of liberalism will compel them to think about it in a highly stylized and artificial way, what I will call the 'liberal ideology of torture.' The liberal ideology insists that the sole purpose of torture must be intelligence gathering to prevent a catastrophe; that torture is necessary to prevent the catastrophe; that torturing is the exception, not the rule, so that it has nothing to do with state tyranny; that those who inflict the torture are motivated solely by looming catastrophe, with no tincture of cruelty; that torture in such circumstances is, in fact, little more than self-defense; and that, because of the associations of torture with the horrors of yesteryear, perhaps one should not even call harsh interrogation 'torture.'
 And the liberal ideology will crystalize all of these ideas in a single, mesmerizing example: the ticking time bomb."(source)

Fabiola - Part Two

That night she kept thinking about the lamp. Her mother would keep her from filling it with oil when it extinguished itself, but that had not stopped her from looking. She wondered what it meant, those naked bodies and her leg raised above his head. That luxurious couch. What connected them? Why was she looking back? She'd heard her brother with the slave girls. His quiet moans and their whimpers. Would that be her one day? Once she'd been married? Blood rushed to her cheeks against her will. Returned from dinner, she lay in bed remembering the furtive touch of the young man. Her racing heart and a feeling she did not understand prevented her from sleeping. She did not want to sleep. Not when she could let her mind drift with him. Sleeping would bring this dream world, this glow, to an end.

Awaking the next morning she chided herself for her immodesty. Her mother's words repeated themselves to her. She remembered the importance of her honour. And she remembered her duties as a daughter. Today she was to visit the market. So long as she was accompanied by two male servants she was permitted to go alone. This was yet another rare concession on the part of her parents. She did not really need to go. The servants were more than capable of selecting the fabrics they would use to assemble her brother's new clothing. But Fabiola wanted the market, just as she wanted the dinner. She wanted to walk along the waterfront, watching the ships as they unloaded foods, bodies, and materials into the city; she wanted to take in the scent of people cooking; judge the beggars on their appearance and skill; overhear commerce, gossip, and mundane talk. It excited her and made her feel that perhaps she could, walking behind her husband, one day belong on high priest's road, a citizen rather than a visitor.