#Dualistic

[whats-in-a-sentence]

An artificial distinction of women from men formed part of Pythagoras' dualistic view of the world. The ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher defined a set of ten opposites, which include 'male : female':

Limited : Unlimited

Odd : Even

Unity : Plurality

Right : Left

Male : Female

At Rest : In Motion

Straight : Curved

Light : Darkness

Good : Evil

Square : Oblong

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[allisongreenlee]

Ancient Babylonia: Exploring Literature, Law, and Justice

“The living need the truth, before rumor pollutes it.”― Mary Renault, Funeral Games The city of Babylon is one of the oldest and most important cities in Mesopotamia, which is now modern-day Iraq. It was founded over 4,000 years ago, and over the centuries, it became a cultural, economic and political center for the region. Babylon was the capital of the Babylonian Empire, which was ruled by…

[mysongdaily]

‘A light in the distance.

A secret of the night sky.’

[omanxl1]

Liquicity Drum & Bass Yearmix 2022 (Mixed by Andromedik)

Liquicity Drum & Bass Yearmix 2022 (Mixed by Andromedik)

Digital Crate Digging Continues as we proceed and continue with this HumpDay Extravaganza!!The saga / struggle continues as I continue to do what I do, I’ve got it on default settings as I drop this good word and let the music play, broadcasting live and direct from our remote outpost in Atlanta!!Check the menu, sonic assualts? O-Dizzle is begetting as history keeps repeating but some haven’t…

[zegalba]

Yoichi Nagasawa: Dualist Works (2002)

scans

[opens-up-4-nobody]

Based on yugioh, can you draw Joey Wheeler as a full grown man please? You can design how he looks and what job hed have

Not a dramatic change but I think he would be a good e-clown so he'd probably be a streamer

[highways-are-liminal-spaces]

Nature Ask Meme 🍄🦌🌳

Send me a number and I'll answer or post a photo!

Do you have a favorite place near you to "touch grass"?

What was your weirdest favorite animal as a kid?

If you could see any extinct species in the wild, what would it be?

If you could see any non-extinct species in the wild, what would it be?

What's the coolest wildlife behavior you've ever seen?

What's your favorite bird you've ever seen?

What's your favorite bird song or call?

Can you identify birds by song or call?

Do you have a favorite nature photo you've ever taken?

What's your favorite invertebrate?

Are you scared of any animals?

What stereotypical "icky" or "scary" animals would you defend to your last breath?

What is the ugliest mammal? What about the ugliest bird?

What animal has the cutest babies?

If you could domesticate any kind of animal as a pet, what would it be?

Would you rather see a volcano or a waterfall?

Would you be more scared caving or mountain climbing?

What's your favorite nonfiction book about nature?

What's your favorite fiction book about nature?

What's your favorite poem or song lyric about nature?

What's the most underrated mushroom?

Can you identify any mushrooms? How confidently?

Bioluminescence or mycelial networking?

What's your favorite freshwater fish?

What's your favorite plant to grow yourself?

Have you ever made a meal from food you've hunted/fished/foraged yourself?

What's your favorite outdoor activity?

What's your favorite local animal you see all the time but still love?

What's your favorite type of wetland?

What is your ideal weather?

Thunderstorms or fog?

If you had to give a presentation on any nature topic without any prep, what would you pick?

What is your favorite predator-prey relationship?

What is your favorite mutualism?

What is your favorite natural "cycle"?

What is your favorite adaptation?

Do you have a favorite piece of clothing with a nature pattern on it?

What is the most underrated ecosystem?

What ecosystem do you consider your "home" ecosystem?

What is your favorite kind of rock formation?

Igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic rock?

What is your favorite mountain range? Favorite individual peak?

Have you ever felt an earthquake?

Geysers or hot springs?

What is your favorite wildflower?

What is your favorite plant or flower smell?

What is your favorite species of tree?

Do you have a favorite individual tree?

What fictional species would you most like to observe in the wild, if it were real? Are there any ways to interact with fictional organisms you wish you had the opportunity to do?

What fictional environment would you most like to explore?

[hilsonapologist]

the books take great pains to frame farrier and torrinde as foils and irreconcilable opposites that represent the great nature vs nurture debate and only one can win or whatever and thats fine it makes sense within the context of the story but what the text oddly seems to not want to consider is that they might be one and the same. obviously their goal is the same but functionally there is almost no discernible difference between their methods either

tain shir and baru and all the other young girls farrier has tried to mould were just his version of the clarified. torrinde himself wasnt able to obtain his desired subjects thorough "breeding" alone, requiring such extensive conditioning to create the clarified that it was arguably more extreme than farrier's way of doing the same thing via the school system. and they both see this conditioning as static, unmoving once its taken root- unable to fathom that time and experience can change behaviour and cognition.

one major goal of the books in my opinion, and which it does achieve, is to show that neither torrinde or farrier are actually right. this is kinda obvious; they're both raging racists. they both believe in racial hierarchies based on "desirable" and "undesirable" racial traits- and they are indeed always considered racial traits, regardless of whether they attribute the source to the flesh or the mind. it is seen as a flaw of an entire race which can only be removed by removing the culture in which that race lives.

both of them see the family as a weapon of enforcement. like, both torrinde's eugenics and farrier's conditioning can only be successful if the people created by them then go on to partake in strictly dictated "hygienic" family structures and raise their children to emulate the same behaviours as them. even if torrinde is proven right, farrier's schools would still need to exist to begin inducing desirable characteristics that can then be bred down to future generations. even if farrier is right, his method would require a genetic family system to maintain the strength of his conditioning.

the fact that they're both expected to necessarily prove their ideology in a way that is executable on a large scale betrays the fact that this supposed race is just a ruse. maybe torrinde and farrier don't even realise that the real goal is in all likelihood to combine their methods to create a permanent underclass of people for the empire to generate profit from without being too expensive to keep in control- the entire thing is just a veneer for an underlying imperialist plot.

it wouldn't even prove whose hypothesis was correct- neither of them is following the experimental method after all, despite the concept of trial and control groups existing in the world of the story. it would prove simply who was able to enforce their oppressive ideology more successfully and efficiently while hiding or minimising the "failures".

[kirbyddd]

Despite its flaws, there has never been a more beautiful and faithful adaptation of Tolkien's work

[foe-paw]

bro i just got knocked clean off my socks by a podcaster's description of a Stephen King character made in such a way that i finally, finally, understood the reference behind Uncle Wiley's character.

first, the stephen king wiki description on randall flagg:

Flagg is described as "an accomplished sorcerer and a devoted servant of the Outer Dark" with general supernatural abilities involving necromancy, prophecy, and unnatural influence over predatory animals and human behavior. His goals typically center on bringing down civilizations, usually through spreading destruction and sowing conflict.

huh! that sounds kind of familiar! alright, on with the podcast excerpt-

Randall Flagg, he's the dude we're all here for, in one way or another, right. Because… Just to let you know, if you're a listener who has not read a lot of Stephen King, if you're here because you like hearing us talk about it rather than reading it yourself, Randall Flagg is in some ways the lynchpin around which all of Stephen King's later work is going to be built upon. He's going to leave this novel and he's going to show up in other novels. Randall Flagg is the Walkin' Dude, and he walks a lot. He is, uh- in- in the way that I think that if you're not a Stephen King reader, you probably associate Stephen King's ultimate embodiment of evil as Pennywise, because I think Pennywise has a much sharper popular culture profile. But Randall Flagg is really Stephen King's archvillain. And he is… He is the Heath Ledger Joker. He's also, kind of the Jared Leto Joker. He is also kind of the Jack Nicholson Joker! He is every Joker. Right? He's an Ur-Joker. — It's very funny that you just said he's not Pennywise. — Yeah. But he is the Joker! — Yeah, yeah. He is an agent of chaos who is calculating. — We get introduced to him - and I actually, I think the rest of the books kind of ruin Randall Flagg for me. Because Randall Flagg is really intriguing when we meet him here. He, uh, he's a drifter- so, again, we have these parallels. Nick Andrews, who is a drifter, but he's like, the good drifter… Randall Flagg is the bad drifter, who doesn't go from town to town to work, we get the sense that he just - he doesn't even remember his own past, right? There's something really weird about him right off the jump, he doesn't have a good sense of who he is and he does not care. He just has, like, weird memories of, like- impossible memories, right? Hhe remembers going to school with Charles Starkweather. He remembers riding with the KKK. He remembers, like, helping the weather underground build bombs. It's suggested that he's hanging out with Donald deFreeze and the SLA when they come up with the plan to kidnap Patty Hearst. And he's just a guy, he wears cowboy boots, he wears jeans, he wears a denim jacket, he's got pockets that are filled with all sorts of extremist literature? And, this is important- it's not just, like, extreme right-wing, right? It's extremism of any type. Right? Randall Flagg is the nightmare embodiment of horseshoe theory in a lot of ways. —Yeah. We talked a lot about liberal centrist Stephen King, and I think it should be instructive to everyone that his ultimate villain is just extremism of any kind. Like, any political statement that- or any political belief that is, like, outside the Overton Window, that's Randall Flagg. — He just, he has no ideology other than the sowing of chaos, right? Making everything worse is his goal and he doesn't have a very clear memory of his own life, the events are kind of strange, but also, and he has in his first chapter, right? He's walking down the highway and he always has- the phrase that is always used to describe him is that he "looks like a man with great good humor", right? He's always smiling, he's always laughing, but it's a mean and evil laugh.

from the Just King Things episode about The Stand.

i just feel so relieved because i've been kind of turning wiley's bizarre fucking sartorial choice of double denim in my head like a dog with a very confusing bone, but that decision is way less inscrutable if the source for the double denim turns out to be the bad-guy imaginary of Stephen King in the 70s sdkjskdjskdjskdj.

[legallypumpkinn]

Genuine question, wtf happened w Optimistic Duelist?? I’m not on Twitter, so all that I’ve seen is that they posted this, disappeared for a while, a bunch of people started shitting on them on both Reddit and Tumblr (Reddit nothing new obvs, but it left r/EnglishPumpkinParty and r/AltHomestuck and began happening on regular old r/Homestuck)??

I saw the Dirk sui comic and their reply, but liek… is that really it?? Did they just see a comic they didn’t like?? And weren’t they literally a part of developing HS2??? I am so disengaged in the Homestuck community lore but this has been plaguing my teeny little mind so I must ask >:?

[madmonksandmaenads]

I regret to inform you that I have become the kind of person who when someone says "Oh yeah [insert game/book/whatever] is kind of gnostic" must respond with "....in what way?"

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Art by Emma Whitehorse

* * * *

"No life is immune from suffering. When we’re in solidarity with people facing pain, injustice, war, oppression, colonization—the list goes on and on—we face immense pressure to despair, to become angry or dismissive. When reality is split dualistically between good and bad, right and wrong, we too are torn apart. Yet when we’re broken, we are most open to contemplation, or nondual thinking. We’re desperate to resolve our own terror, anger, and disillusionment, and so we allow ourselves to be led into the silence that holds everything together in wholeness.

"The contemplative, nondual mind is not saying, 'Everything is beautiful,' even when it’s not. However, we may come to 'Everything is still beautiful' by contemplatively facing the conflict between how reality is and how we wish it could be. We must face dualistic problems, name good and evil, and differentiate between right and wrong ... We can’t be naive ... , but if we stay focused on this duality, we’ll become unlovable, judgmental, dismissive people. I’ve witnessed this pattern in myself. We must eventually find a bigger field, a wider frame, which we call nondual thinking.

"Beginning with necessary, dualistic action and moving toward contemplation seems to be the ... path these days. We see this pattern in Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. Such people enter into the pain of society and have to go to God [the All, Source, Yahweh, Allah, use your wording] to find rest for their soul, because their souls are so torn by the broken, split nature of almost everything, including themselves.

"We need both action and contemplation to have a whole spiritual journey. It doesn’t matter which comes first; action may lead us to contemplation and contemplation may lead us to action. But finally, they need and feed each other."

~ Richard Rohr

(Natalie Sudman)

[officialpenisenvy]

but also it's very crazy to me that most people don't immediately clock the erlkonig as sexual or like. sexually predatory. if we can acknowledge a "death and the maiden" narrative as immediately sexual or at least a blatant allegory for sex why can we not do the same for the sick child and the evil luring him to death at all costs. especially when the text itself is so sexually charged. it genuinely reads like the 18th century equivalent of telling kids not to get into white vans with creepy strangers who offer them candy like??? i don't understand why there's so few critics who acknowledge that.

[bywandandsword]

Since Hazbin Hotel popped off, I've seen a few times people asserting that there is something racist about Alastor's backstory, given that he is canonically a Creole from New Orleans, but his demon form does not have any overt indicators of his being a person of color

So here's a gentle reminder and clarification, as a Louisiana Creole myself;

"Louisiana Creoles (French: Créoles de la Louisiane, Louisiana Creole: Moun Kréyòl la Lwizyàn, Spanish: Criollos de Luisiana) are a Louisiana French ethnic group descended from the inhabitants of colonial Louisiana before it became a part of the United States during the period of both French and Spanish rule. They share cultural ties such as the traditional use of the French, Spanish, and Creole languages and predominant practice of Catholicism. Some mistakenly think the term is a racial designation, while in fact people of European, of African, and of mixed ancestry have all been termed "Creole" since the 18th century." (x, emphasis mine)

Please pay special attention to the last sentence. While many, probably most, Louisiana Creoles are of mixed-race ancestry, not all are. I'm not saying there aren't valid critiques of Alastor as a character, this just isn't one of them

[puppetsoftomorrow]

how did the world react to the nyssara kiss?? to nyssa kneeling before her, knife in hand? surely this moment must have rang around the world. lives were surely changed because of this