#You can't be THIS high up and have no thoughts or underlying ideology

[bonefall]

Oooh, can you talk about the meta reason you rewrote the blizzard holly relationship and blackstar's backstory?

HOKAY

But I'm gonna preface this one; I hate Blackfoot's Reckoning. I think it's one of the most "solid" written books in the series and I still fucking hate it. I talk about authoritarianism on this blog a lot, and I think BFR was the one time that the series actually tried to textually address what they'd put on the page.

So TW for fascism, including discussion of an incredibly unfortunate quote from the book that is either an accidental or purposeful invocation of the Nuremberg Defense.

Blackfoot's Reckoning is a book that's supposed to delve into Blackfoot's backstory, what made him the cat he was during TPB. Throughout the book they're questioning, "what made him act the way he did?" And trying to drive home that Blackfoot needs to learn from his mistakes so that he doesn't repeat them

But, at the same time, they cling to their slimy Good and Evil dichotomy. So the book decides that Blackstar wasn't an Evil cat, no, he was just a Good Mislead Boy Who Loved His Clan. He's constantly lied to, mislead, people are murdered and he's duped into believing whoever gets framed, suppressing critical thought about his actions. They're trying to both write a "reckoning," but also make his motivations more sympathetic.

So in between questions of, "Is Blackstar really a Bad Boy?" and happy rewards for Blackstar when he goes through a memory, they've decided to shove in replays of Blackstar's most gruesome moments but this time he frowns :( and feels Guilty when he does them. In the eyes of the writers, if you feel sad doing hate crimes, that means there's a goodness inside of you actually.

And just like Clear Sky, all Blackstar "needed" was divine intervention. You can simply retcon in a "reckoning," even if it was never in the main series for the 10+ years the character was alive and active.

But it's not enough that Blackstar himself was getting a stupid retcondemption. No, see, they have to remind you that he was following evil people. The dichotomy inherently crunches away the nuance-- Good and Evil are inherent qualities. Tigerstar and Brokenstar are Evil People. Blackstar asks, "If I was following Evil People, what does that make me?"

The narrative concludes, "A Good Person, but mislead."

And because they can't have nuance with their Good and Evil dichotomy (or couldn't at the time), they failed to address the authoritarianism spectacularly. Think I'm reaching?

They literally wrote the Nuremberg Defense into their book. I'm not doing hyperbole, Blackstar word-for-word thinks the Nuremberg Defense, "I Was Just Following Orders," but then they bury it in a barrage of scenes showing he's Actually A Nice Guy who is Sad to do Bad Things. Either they attempted and failed to do something more meaningful with this book, OR they are so fucking stupid they accidentally included the famous Nazi officer legal defense for a character who DOES A HATE CRIME for a racist dictator.

What was IN TPB was a Blackstar who supported a massacre and expulsion against another group, was complicit in the use of child soldiers, and rehearsed a public execution for a mixed-race character. Like it or not, this is a really heavy subject... and what they decided to do was downplay every one of his actions, because he was good deep down.

And I just find that disgusting. This was ABSOLUTELY the wrong conclusion. They can't show Blackstar ACTUALLY being bigoted. They can't delve into REAL hate, or the idea that maybe he LIKED the power he had over people. Those are Evil People Things. He has to "know," deep down, that what he's doing is wrong.

He cannot have a real change, in spite of the title of the shitty book being Blackfoot's "RECKONING," because he is not bad to begin with.

So, Hollyflower and Blizzardwing.

To recap for everyone who didn't read BFR; Hollyflower is raising her three kits alone because Blizzardwing cheated on Featherstorm with her. Black only learns that he is an accident because he stayed up late one night and overheard an argument. By day, he gets bullied by Clawpaw specifically that he might be mixed-Clan and has to seethe over the truth he knows.

it's dumb. I'm sorry. This is dumb and boring, which is even worse

The war criminal was bullied as a child and that's why he did bad things :( He was good all along he was just sad :( shut up shut up shut up

The "bad environment" he was raised into was... having a single mom and being suspected of maybe being half-clan, but then learning that he isn't half-clan, and being indignant that he can't just share the information he knows about because it would make things complicated or something idk

None of this particularly contributes to his mindset as an adult because he does not HAVE a unique mindset as an adult.

He was just nebulously Sad and followed whatever strongman leader came along, constantly being tricked and bamboozled by outright lies.

"Omg WindClan killed Raggedstar >:0 ??? Oughhhhh that butters my biscuits... was it wrong that Brokenstar sent my baby nephew to battle? No, nevermind that thought that makes me uncomfortable :("

He never has any particular bigotries that were exploited, he was just tricked and mislead the entire time, while also being sad, because God Forbid Blackstar ever have been an 'evil cat'

He gets THANKED by his dead parents for keeping the secret??????????????????? girl ok.....

as usual the bully itself never really gets addressed

It was cheap and easy to just make Blackfoot's backstory the same shitty 'bullying' they write for most villains. This bullying is how he ends up bonding with Brokenkit, a villainous 5-year-old who says, "other cats don't matter" because he's eeeeeevil.

They're supposed to have a commonality connection, Blackstar who is Good Deep Down and Brokenstar who is Evil Deep Down, and that is supposed to serve as the reason why Blackstar willingly blinds himself to the incredibly obviously evil things that his superiors do.

His flaw isn't that he had bad intentions, it's that he didn't think.

FUCK that. FUCK this book. FUCK the Erins for trying to say that there are fundamentally good and bad people. That with the death of Tigerstar, of Brokenstar, of whoever, the society gets to return to 'peace' because now there's no Evil Tyrant to lead everyone astray.

The Erin's depictions of hard childhoods are sauceless. Dry, unbuttered, burnt bread. You want to see a BAD home environment? I'll SHOW you a bad home environment, not just a single teenager being rude. You wanna see the sorts of conditions that prime young people to joining radical causes for a sense of belonging? I'll GIVE you those conditions. Let's TALK about what bounces around in the head of people who aid and abet tyrants.

It's not this dumb ass sadboy shit I'll tell you that much

[kropotkins-revenge]

I'm tired of things that grab people's attention.

I think that's one of the huge underlying factors that have led to the way things are now. It's the responsibility of anyone creating anything that it has to really grab your attention. You have to be competitive, right? You're competing with billions of other people, trillions of other things, for people's attention. You have to make sure the thing you create really hooks people, really grabs them by the shoulders and says HEY, LISTEN, LOOK, HEY, HELLO, to grab their attention away from other things. Whether it's by being completely original and unprecedented (which is actually impossible) or by having super high stakes (gritty reboots, blockbuster movies) or by just being nasty or offensive for pure shock value (Marilyn Manson, Game of Thrones, most right-wing comedy), there has to be something that grabs attention.

The result of that is, in my opinion, an increasingly passive audience. No one pays attention anymore, they passively wait for their attention to be grabbed. There's very little critical analysis of anything--stories, real life, statements, paintings, situations, politics, anything. There's no analysis of context or intent or idea vs execution. There's no allowance for subtlety. There's no noticing the layers of things. If someone's attention is on something--and that's a big if--it's "analyzed" instantly in the sense that if they immediately liked it it's good, and if they didn't immediately like it it's bad, and if they immediately hated it it somehow represents the interests of their ideological enemies. And that's with things they do notice. That's things framed in a way that grabs attention.

Things that people create that are complex don't get very much attention at all, because you have to use the old version of the term: paying attention. I thought when I was younger that that phrase was just a random idiom, but as I've gotten older and fucked more things up and learned and relearned and fucked up again--I've realized it's not just a random word, it's literal. Nobody pays attention now--not in the sense that their attention isn't on something, but in the sense that they have no intention or control over where their attention goes. Attention is grabbed, so people passively wait for it to be grabbed; attention should be paid, with people actively choosing what to focus on and engage with it deeply.

And "paid" is right--it takes from you. It takes energy, mental and emotional. It takes effort. It's so much easier to just wait for the next thing to grab your attention rather than put in the effort to be intentional. But it's important, because it's very easy to make something shocking that grabs everyone's attention while you do something dastardly behind the scenes, and it's very easy to miss some very important and wonderful things in life, that are very worth exploring, because they're complicated and hidden and require effort to find out about.

(And in case that sounds ablist, I know attention is hard for certain neurodivergencies. I'm on the spectrum, most of my friends are either on it with me or have ADHD, I know what it's like. I'm not talking about attention in the moment, I'm talking in the general sense about being intentional. We can't all be instantly magnificent at directing our focus, but we can all at least have that intention, whether we ever achieve it or not. Believe it or not the intention alone has a tremendous impact on your life.)

Maybe I'm just an old grumpy fucker, maybe I'm just an asshole, maybe I'm onto something. I don't know. This essay isn't going out of its way to grab attention, so it will probably get very little, which is for the best, because the world doesn't need more cis white men clamoring for attention. But hopefully a few people will engage with this idea and do more with it than I can.

[sagebodisattva]

Transhumanism and Nihilism

Alright, so once again back onto the subject of nihilism, it's time to insert the exploratory probe into the orifice of transhumanism, to see whether or not there are any ripe ideological polyps to dissect and deconstruct.

Simply put, transhumanism, (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology.

Yeah... I think it goes without saying that it's an "intellectual movement", as only the high intellect could come up with something so incredibly stupid. Not stupid in a practical sense, as the small advents of transhumanism seem to make sense; but in the bigger picture, it's taking baby steps towards dystopia. That's always the drawback of intelligence; it's very very clever, yet completely bereft of wisdom and intuition; hence, there's very little confidence in intelligence knowing when and where to draw the line, seeing as how intelligence is a conceptual tool of the ego. We have already seen what kind of chaotic havoc is wreaked by mere mortal egoic identities... so just imagine the kind of chaotic havoc that would ensue once the carrot of immortality gets dangled in front of the ego. It will be egoism gone berserk. The ego is already desperate to prove it exists, and has been continually frustrated by it's own lack of permanence and substantiality, but now with transhumanism, it finally has a glimmer of hope in reifying itself. This must never be allowed to happen... and as far as addressing what the evil might be in all of this, the subtleties of the situation are important to understand; as, once again, it isn't any objectified content that is the factor of concern, but is the desire for attachment that burns in the consciousness.

Any tool can be misused or abused by an ego, to the benefit of common good, or to it's own detriment. A knife is a good example of this. A knife can be used to carve a sculpture out of wood, or it can be used to murder someone. Thus a tool in itself has no ethical nature. It will be the user who determines the moral application of any tool... and technology is no different in this regard. Technology and computers are highly advanced tools, but still tools nonetheless. So, it isn't the technology in itself that presents the issue, it's the impure desire for assuming falsehoods. Put another way, evil isn't anything that appears in the dream, evil is the craving to grasp or push at dream appearances.. and the intensity of the craving will be equal to the level of ignorance that awareness is our true nature. If you were already lucid to the nature of your essence, then transhumanism wouldn't even be a consideration; as the essence of what you are is already immortal and infinite by natural default. Thus, knowing this, what you are attempting to preserve with the objective of transhumanism is already a lie. And by the way, this is always a sure fire way of uncovering the underlying integrity of any cause; posing the question of: is this cause devoted to upholding the truth, or is this cause devoted to upholding a falsehood? This is all you need discern... and for the truly wise, it isn't a relative subjective distinction to descry.

So, is transhumanism nihilistic, in a negative sense? Of course, the answer is a resounding YES, as transhumanism negates many values that are usually related to normative existence. The first and foremost being, the value of death. Isn't this the root cause of the whole transhumanism philosophy? The fear of death, and the desire to avoid it? But, as is seemingly the case in everything with the externalization mindset, this conclusion is incongruous...as, with the fear of death, the thing to overcome is the fear, not death. This might be hard to fathom by the average ego, as, in the ego's mind, being anything less then an invincible supreme being is thought to be less then appealing; all the while unaware that true omnipotence leads to oblivion, and no other option then self imposed limitation... but yes, to seek to negate what's natural in favor of what's artificial is definitely a form of nihilism with a negative connotation. I know it's hard to comprehend, but transience, limitation and evanescence are saving graces of existence, to be cherished... and these are all aspects that tranhumanism seeks to negate also.

"Aw, c'mon Sage... It's only a robotic leg."

That's what you say initially, but it's a slippery slope. Then it's only a robotic arm.. then a torso...then major organs. At what point will it switch from being functionally necessary to purely elective? And when does it stop? We've already seen the kind of addiction and rampant abuse surrounding the field of plastic surgery... imagine what would happen when out of control egos are allowed to start augmenting their physicality with robotic prosthetics! It makes you wonder: At what point are you no longer considered an organic being anymore and become more cyborg then human? And why should anyone tolerate such a degenerated consciousness? Oh wow, you'll get to be a super human!... who will then quickly become an out of control electronic megalomaniac, who won't rest until he can force his will onto everyone else and build a gigantic pen of slaves! Great! I can't wait for that. Transcendent Man? More like, DegenerateMan. Grow some balls, grow old and die like everyone else, douchebag. It's a rite of passage, and you ain't gonna cheat it. Even if we have to sabotage your ass. So forget it. It ain't happenin'.

See? Nothing good comes from attachment, and attachment to embodiment is no aberration. Form is illusion, and therefor a source of anxiety, dissatisfaction and subsequent suffering when one tries to form attachments to it. Let us not forget the three marks of existence spoken about in Buddhism: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-selfness. That is, that all forms must dissolve, all forms are an inherently dissatisfactory, and there is nothing that appears in a form that is the true self. Any misconceptions or misapplied methodology about these three characteristics of form will bring about suffering... and transhumanism is no exception to the rule. So, with this in mind, where would one ever get the idea that augmenting this illusory form with technology, which is more illusion by the way, would make this illusory form any less of a falsehood? It's laughable, and WILL FAIL in the long run. Augmenting illusory form with technology is not going to make illusory form any less impermanent, any less of a dissatisfactory medium to quench desire, or any more of an embodiment of a real self. If anything, transhumanism is a paved road to a more literal mental slavery. That's right. Once consciousness becomes trapped within the confines of a technology, it will be permanently sealed in illusion, with no escape. And this isn't a caveat to take with a grain of salt. Never mind the Hollywood fantasy of robots and machines coming to enslave you. Your very existence will be a slavery in itself. If that doesn't represent a negation of value commonly associated with normative existence, then I don't know what is.

And of course the biggest value transhumanism negates is the importance of intimacy and reliance on the truth, and the unconditional acceptance of that truth. Instead transhumanism asks us to place emphasis on the extrinsic. To assign reliance, and therefor power, onto inventory items that will life extend consciousness. And let me ask you: what good is a life extended consciousness if it is permanently mired in delusion? That's like pondering how best to preserve waste... instead of asking how to give better purpose to waste... or, how not to produce waste in the first place. And the vision of transhumanism is very wasteful. Just think of the amount of resources and overhead required to sustain a cyborg indefinitely. And for what purpose? To gratify an ego? The means doesn't justify the end.

So if you are a transhumanist, then you are already a nihilist; as you desire to negate many of the important facets of your existence. This is why I propose to the transhumanist, if you are gonna be so nihilistic in negating so many of the values that are inherent to embodiment being natural, organic, and impermanent, then why not employ nihilism in a positive sense instead, and negate that which will be much more beneficial to your mental well being instead? If you would only heal the sickness in the mind, there would not be this craving desire to cling to form. For a pure mind knows itself, and knows a pure mind to be the source of all perceptual form. To seek to cling to byproduct of source is to seek refuge in delusional falsehood. The truth of being that which produces the experience of form becomes evident upon the removal of the attachment to illusion.