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Reading an article on rationalism and metaphorically threw it across the room when "Negotiation Theory" came up

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Some of my fellow organizers are upset abut AOC voting to keep funding the Iron Dome. I am too. It's disappointing, but on-script for an elected. Take a look at any candidate for almost any position and they will list in the literature where they stand on "The Issues." What are the issues? They're the severed limbs of ideology, flailing independently of any coherence or principle. If "issues" can be broken off from ideology, then they can exist as thoughts in parallel with other contradictory ones, but never be synthesized, never reconciled in the crucible for ideological meaning. Electeds, even ones with pronounced partiality to ideology, survive by convincing us and the media apparatus that supports them, that this is what democracy looks like, clashing issues that cannot be reconciled, but can only win, lose, or compromise to something that dissatisfies everyone. Even worse, "issues" become entire groups of people and man-made disasters. A genocide in Gaza is an "Issue" distinct from the military funding of the very entity perpetuating it, and even from the "issue" of a Free Palestinian State. And these issues seem to barely overlap in the minds of our electeds when it comes to policy.

What could the alternative be? I'm not sure in this context. The Political Issue apparatus has become a component of our compartmentalized life, and informs those divisions within us between our political self, our livelihood self, our artistic self, our erotic self, etc. I'm sympathetic to these distinctions being actually useful, but there must be flow between them, to get a little Deleuzean about it. I would prefer a contest of ideologies, and a political apparatus within a democracy that presents ideological visions from which policy emerges, rather than working backwards from seemingly disjunct issues. It's not enough, as I think we've seen, for politicians to attempt that solo. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I can't imagine Mamdani won't run into similar problems playing the Democratic politics game in NYC, for example(Bernie's alleged warning to him on his support of a Free Palestine underlines this). A more parliamentary system of government may help, but it is still nothing without strong ideological presences(which we have, of course, but it's unitary - it's the Fascist ideology) and a media apparatus that does not make money on the industrialization of politics.

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There's a misdiagnosis of Trump and the behavior of the neoreactionary right, generally. I've seen him and MAGA called the Id of America, and it makes me grit my teeth. They're not the Id, they're America functioning as it was created to. There's nothing that is unpredictable about the neoreactionary playbook insofar as it's a new form of the same American imperial flows. Trump getting as much grift as he can from Middle-East and other states is precisely out of that playbook. If anything, Trump is the Ego of America, following his flitting, low-attention span desires to whatever will gratify him and grant him the greatest control in rational accordance with the channels for those desires American capitalism has provided. Anytime someone refers to him as the Id, they're trying to protect American Hegemony as they think it should exist, as some fictional source of benevolence. It never was!

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people are talking about brainrot like it's new but people have been bringing up bible passages in response to everything for millenia

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Meanwhile, my own occult work was taken to new places. In my 30th year, a friend of mine went clairvoyant in my temple as I was showing her one of the Enochian watchtower tablets (she was curious). She ran her fingers along one of the names on one of the tablets – one that wouldn’t be identifiable without some knowledge of how the system worked, which I don’t think she had – and claimed that that particular spirit wanted to talk to me. She agreed to take on the role of seer and a few days later I evoked the spirit while she sat before the tablet. This was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with countless entities (not just Enochian) that continues to this day. The particular spirit my friend alerted me to (from the elemental Water tablet, using the GD attributions) was tremendously helpful in helping me develop a visionary capacity that vastly exceeded anything I’d been capable of before. I regard this kind of thing as an essential component of the human experience that��s been culturally starved out of modern society.

-- Interview with Damian Murphy in The Aither

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stray thought about psychiatric medication vs other drugs

Today I took a low dose([redacted]mgs) of my prescribed antidepressant, and as is typical, for me, I felt effects immediately: heightened energy, slight tension and a fluttery feeling around my heart(anatomical, not metaphorical), certain digestive issues. My psychiatrists are uniformly surprised when I report back these immediate effects. This can be chalked up to placebo, perhaps, but regardless, the standard line I hear from psychiatrists, the line I've heard all my life since I've been on these things for almost all my life, is that you won't feel different for a week or so. This has never been the case for me. Contrast with *recreational* drugs where the whole point is to feel the effect immediately, and no one questions that. Same with prescribed amphetamines like JD Vyvanse and presumably other drugs, which you are also told you'll feel the effect of immediately.

Setting aside the actual neuroscience here, which I don't know technically but the outcomes of which is certainly a felt knowledge for me, I wonder if this is a kind of normalization of psych drugs to distinguish themselves from recreational drugs. Like these are drugs to integrate into your life in order to be a more functional worker, so it will take time to be productive. Trust the process and the doctors prescribing these. Don't use them to get a boost or rapid outcome, because that's what the bad drugs are for and these are the good drugs. Rely on these to become a kind of pharmacontology that cannot exist without these pills, rather than supplementing with them.

I'm not arguing against the efficacy and the usefulness/morality of psychiatrists at all, but wondering about how we classify and present certain drugs as opposed to others. Of course, this an also just be my body's response and is not indicative of all bodies, but I find it interesting I've never been told to expect an immediate effect, and certainly you're never told to use these intermittently. I don't buy that there's solely a pharmacological reason for this, but also a baked-in cultural one about how a christian capitalist culture expects you to use certain medicines and abstain from others.

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The original post is like 100% that dril tweet about the wise man bowing his head and saying there is no difference between good and bad things. It's also extremely weird to be on the left and not have an understanding of history and the many times authoritarians hollowed out the state and civil service to allow for a fascist takeover. It *is* bad right now, and while it's new in the United States, there's historical precursors that are pretty fucking instructive here.

Not gonna lie I think that some of you guys on the far left are catastrophically bad at threat assessment and completely unable to meet this moment where it is.

You can be as pissed as you want at the Democrats, but the Republicans trying to install a right-wing dictatorship is not business as usual. In fact one of the biggest reasons the Democrats suck so much is that they're still acting like it is!

What is happening is something both new and very bad, and you need to act like that, otherwise you're just sitting on your ass and wallowing in apathy that you're disguising as anger.

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I think often about this pasage from Erica Lagalisse's Occult Features of Anarchism - even some Zapatistas fell into conspiracy theories under the shadow of despair. This is where, perhaps, having a lifetime of self-doubt and loathing be the motivating factors in ones life is useful: it's easier to smell your own rotten ideas.

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Favorite lines, first and last fic

tagged by @sounisian-magus, thank you for the tag : D my first written thing ever was on sheets of paper when I was seven years old(it was about time travel. I was extremely sophisticated). My first fan fiction was on web 1.0 forums from way long ago and is now entirely obliterated. Here's something I wrote when I was like 20 as a joke: "See, I think you dick is a Platonist and is easily swayed by my purely deductive reasoning. It's stretching out towards God right now.”

And this isn't from my last story, but this post made me revisit old writing(like, way old stuff I have squirreled away on the internet) and found this from a short one I wrote in the early 2010s.  I hadn't posted much to my PEP because I hadn't felt very positive lately. Really, I've been feeling pretty negative, and PEP --it was called the Perpetual Encouragement Paradigm when the platform was being refined and streamlined in an office somewhere in the Bay Area-- isn't a place to share negativity. PEP distilled and purified the old social media networks. Your profile included the barest of personal details: real name, location(current), birthdate, profession, and a picture you are required to update weekly. You can do two things on the platform: post a personal accomplishment of some kind or give a PEP to the posts of others. A PEP showed you approved of the accomplishment, whether it was someone brushing their teeth or getting married. Posts that mentioned a product or brand would be automatically PEPped by bots, and high numbers of PEPs would be rewarded with discounts on products, the purchase of which would then be celebrated on PEP. The circle drew itself.

Spoiler warning, the story ended with the narrator masturbating in a public toilet!

As I pull up my pants, a curiosity catches me. I open the PEP app. I tap the search button and enter #public #masturbation. Over eighty thousand posts in the past day. PEP is used by six billion people. I read some of the posts: “Just masturbated in a public toilet!” Five thousand PEPs. “I really needed to jerk off in that stall. Feeling great now!” Nineteen thousand PEPs. I feel something inside of me become brittle.

I stay in my lane as a writer.

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analysis of fascism sometimes falls prey to the same presentist foundations of fascism itself. if it is this way now, it's always been this way, and if the people in power and making change are fascists now, well, they were always so. it's hard to expect anything more from someone like nate silver, and most of our commentariat really, but any remotely competent historian should be able to think maybe things were different once.

they're all obsessed with pet theories of the world shaped around the most stupid, racist, and crucially, simple—no reference to anything needed—frameworks imaginable. the nazi great man theory of history.

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I say "woke and gay" in an *exclusively* positive context and *exclusively* in the same cadence as the guy in the old doom comic says "rip and tear"

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trying to think of a good rebrand for DEI programs to make them more appealing

we should call them OPUS DEI programs

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From "Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos" published by Snuggly Books(https://asterismbooks.com/product/neo-decadence-12-manifestos).

The lack, the emptiness, the hunger. Now, under a consumer model of capitalism, right, we are shoved towards satisfaction. You have a problem, this thing will solve it. You have a need shrouded in your own fleshy mist of consciousness - the market will tell you what that need is and fulfill it, and you will be forever satiated. And your solution will be the same as Ana Ng's solution on the other side of the world. Your being becomes a bowl of rice, a million things blanched of taste, ready to be topped by the garnishes of capital so you can be sold to yourself in a more palatable form. In the process, our understanding of others is mediated only through what is sold to us. The action, the difference, is made into a pap we can digest, and the inventory of our selves shrinks to persist ever fewer sensations.

I don't know if the Neo-Decadents would trace themselves back to the Situations. Probably. There's links. Irruptions of mood and whim that can't stand still long enough to be sold. The anti-rationality that in retrospect is empirically necessary. The irony underlying both is their staunch rejection of old forms, dead hands weighing on aesthetics, as a rescue mission of what capital-spectacle-neoliberalism took from us. We can't name it, we can only temporarily paste words onto whatever it is until they're torn off by the wind. We forgot that's all we ever did. Similarly, we can't name what is is in people, but we can at least give them an outfit that's just for them. Fascism-revanchists-passeists cannot brook that difference, or the temporary naming of the thing, or the difference in people that is reflected by our unique understanding and affection of each. All labels must be violently preserved. For us, the indulgence of whims that melt into air today gives us something to look forward to tomorrow. In a season of decay, dissatisfaction is a moral imperative.

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mass-deprogramming of masculine amab culture (masc-deprogramming) by airing subliminal messages during football games that consists of quotes from Judith Butler, Monica Wittig, Paul Preciado etc

cis men are doing forcemasc self hypnosis every day

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images of foxes with things in their mouths...

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This is him. This is the awesome person from the depechemodelyric blog. but this is the blogger from depechemodelyric writing this actually. Because I just made Steven here his own tumblr dash. Therefore I get the inaugural post. And I don't think he knows how to log in yet SO HE CAN'T STOP ME MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

guys, the latest okc guy is pretty FUCKING awesome. Jesus fuck Christ. My dating track record is so horrible. This would be pretty rad if radical indeed he be. A for-real liberal? yesssssss! And even better—HE IDENTIFIES AS FEMINIST WOOOOOO-HOOOOOO!!!!! I had pretty much given in to thinking that I would just have to find a regular old guy and kinda turn him in to not-a-douche? I don’t even know, I was thinking lame things.

But. better than all of this.

HIS PROFILE DOESN’T TALK ABOUT ANY SUBJECT EXCEPT FOR AIR BUDDIES.

You have to read between the lines omg fuck yes.