#the one thing we cannot tolerate is intolerance itself

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Hitchens: People want to pray, you can’t stop them. But we cannot have state subsidized prayer. We cannot have state subsidized preachers or chaplains.

Give it up, or give it to your deadliest enemy and pay for the rope that will choke you.

This is very urgent business, ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you: resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing.

You will be told, you can’t complain – because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it’s an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.

Watch out for these symptoms. They are not just symptoms of surrender, very often ecumenically offered to you by men of God in other robes, Christian and Jewish and smarmy ecumenical. These are the ones who hold open the gates for the barbarians. The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own preachers who will do it for you, and your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.

Resist it while you can. And if you wonder what will happen if you don't, look and see how a cricket team in Middlesex in England had to change its name by force last week because it was called, and had been for years, the Middlesex Crusaders. Look and how stories about little pigs can’t be taught to children in English schools anymore, lest offense be taken by the religions of peace.

Resist it while you can.

-

Starmer: One of the things that's coming up over and over again is Islamophobia and well, you can see by the stats, you can see the numbers rising, particularly since October the 7th, although we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that before October the 7th, this was all heading in the right direction. It's been far too high for far too long. Clearly, we need to just say over and over again, Islamophobia is intolerable. It can never, ever be justified and we have to continue with a zero-tolerance approach, and I think there's more we can do in government. There's certainly stuff online, which I think needs tackling much more robustly than it is at the moment.

Q: What I'm hoping, Keir, is your experience as a prosecutor means you'll be thinking about the strategy we can use to make sure we take action against those who break the law.

==

The UK is in very big trouble. There are weekly antisemitic parades through London calling for the eradication of Israel and the Jews, but Starmer's big concern is the imaginary dragon of "Islamophobia." That you are not allowed to oppose or even question Islam or its tenets or its unending and ever escalating demands. That disagreeing with and opposing Islam is itself - or should be - a criminal offence.

Reminder: opposing the imposition of Islamic demand and concessions to fragile Islamic sensibilities is not "bigotry." It's completely reasonable, sensible and necessary.

[yukichouji]

Some personal thoughts under the cut. It's fine to skip, I just wanted to put my thoughts somewhere. Always feels less dramatic when I write it down or say it out loud to someone and being stuck alone at home while sick for the second week in a row has to dem thoughts a circling.

Second week of sick leave and I am slowly driving myself insane. Take care of your mental health, kids, or it will take care of you (and not in the nice way)....

All joking aside, last year was just a *lot*, with little to no time/energy to properly digest. And of course, being home sick with not actually enough energy/brainpower to deal with all the feels in a good way but also not enough brain power/energy to keep the mind occupied and from wandering is a great time for things to catch up with you.

I'm making it sound more dramatic than it really is, again, but being an overly dramatic bitch is one of my few joys in life so here we are...

I guess it's just easy for the anxieties to build up when there is so much still hanging in the air that I can't really do anything practical about, yet. Plus the stress of missing work again combined with working in a field where getting a contract that covers a full year and not just chunks of it at a time is actually almost a luxury doesn't help either.

And this is, like, the forth or fith time this winter that I've been sick and off work for multiple weeks at a time. Gotta talk to my doctor about that, too, for sure. I guess I just need to live with the fact that health (in the physical sense) is an issue now, that trying to power through will make it worse, that my health is what dictates what I can and cannot do, not what I want, etc. etc.

I've had my mental health setting my cans and can'ts for me for the first health of my life and now it's the physical on top of that from here on out. I'm not a medical professional, but I've done a lot of reading to try to understand better what is happening to me and I think this may just be part of what living in a constant state of life or death stress response (what cPTSD does to you) catching up with the physical form of it all. You know?

Avoiding stress as best I can is now mandatory, not because it will actually make the stuff I'm dealing with better, but because that's the only option in not making it worse.

I don't have the energy to go over the whole story right now, but in an attempt to not sound so obtuse: I got diagnosed with three different food intolerances last year (dealt with EDs for over a decade, plus stress and the gut is a thing. I know some of that stuff is heredetary, but not always. Gotta have fucked something up there) which meant having to completely restructure my eating habits. Still trying to figure shit out honestly, it's *complicated*TM. And severe sleep apnea (apparently I just stop breathing over 50 times an hour at night for no good reason. My brain not giving the signal to breathe is the problem, not the usual, physical thing where your air way collapses and blocks itself) so now I sleep with a breathing machine (and will for the rest of my life, probably). And PLMDs, kind of like restless leg, where your brain keeps sending signals to your arms and legs to move and that keeps waking you up at night. Am trying to find the right meds for that but have not yet been successfull. Both are accasserbated by stress. I am constantly tired to the point of barely being able to function. Plus pretty intense Endomitriosis, which seems to also have affected my gut. Meds for that are mostly working, as of a couple of months ago, thank god. Still needs a bit of fine tuning, but I've finally found a pill that dials down most of the symptoms to way tolerable and doesn't make me feel so depressed I just want to die. So that's cool.

We have a system here in germany where you can get "disability percentages" based on how badly your quality of life is impaired by the illnesses your dealing with and it is getting harder and harder to get them, but I at least want to try. It would help with some stuff. But I gotta have the energy for the process and you can also only include things that you've had at least half a year of treatment for, so I still need to wait a little bit.

Trying to come to terms with all of this has been a bit, well, you know... Not easy. A lot of the time I'm still just kind of, too tired to feel much of anything, which helps. But is unpleasant when you've just got enough energy again to do feel things, but not enough to really do anything about it.

Gotta give yourself room to feel and breathe and just proccess, I guess.

With all of this doom an gloom, I kind of feel that it's important to state that I very much know that in the grand sceme of things my own suffering is miniscule compared to the suffering that others are going through right now. None of this will kill me outright. I still have much more quality of life than others with chronic illnesses (it gets so much worse than me here). And I'm still very glad to be here, alive, and all that. None of that sort of doom and gloom here. Just kinda wanted to get all that off my chest I guess. I write to get things out of my head and process them. Even though usually it's a little more refined than whatever this ended up being.

If you actually read to the end of this, I apologize. Here is some tea.

Go wrap yourself in a comfy blanket. Get yourself a treat, maybe. Do something nice for yourself.

[darkmaga-returns]

Pluralism, or moral relativism, is a rope tightly fastened around the neck of Western civilization. In biblical terms, pluralism is polytheism—the national sin of forgetting the Lord (Deut. 6:12-15). In practical terms, it is the denial of objective truth, the abandonment of morality, and the compromising of justice. Of course, it doesn’t present itself as such. Instead, it masquerades under the guise of false virtues like “universal tolerance,” which we’re told is a Christian virtue.

However, the inability to recognise that the value of “tolerance” is determined by the value of the thing tolerated has plunged the Western world into the spiritually dark and confused state it is now in. It mistook “universal tolerance” for a Christian virtue—not merely tolerance for a brother with a differing opinion, but the indulgence of objective evil, that which erodes a nation, undermines its moral foundations, and dilutes its Christian heritage.

Tolerance, when it involves accepting ideas and actions contrary to God’s Law of love, is not a Christian virtue. It is a sin. Christians are commanded to love sincerely, a love that hates evil, not tolerates it (Rom. 12:9). In fact, they are to have nothing to do with the works of evil, but to expose them for what they are, not to tolerate, but to actively avoid them (Eph. 5:11). “Intolerance” can be said to be just as much a Christian virtue as tolerance, because both are measured by the object tolerated or opposed.

As Christians, we are commanded to love our neighbour. This Christian love must involve actively opposing that which threatens the well-being of others. A parent who allows a small child to swim unsupervised, play on a dangerous road, or eat only sweets for every meal cannot be called a loving parent. There is obviously no regard for the child’s well-being. True love has an aversion to the things that harm its object, so there must always be an intolerance for that which threatens those we love.

Those who love God ought to love Him—and their neighbours—not by being indifferent to evil, but by hating it (Ps. 97:10). The fear of the Lord is not only the beginning of wisdom but also the hatred of evil (Pr. 8:13). Therefore, we are not to tolerate evil but to actively resist it (Jam. 4:7). In the Book of Revelation, the church that is intolerant of evil is the one Jesus praises (Rev. 2:2-3). Not only could they not bear those who were evil, but they also actively “hated” their works (v. 6). […]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Eric Levitz at Vox:

As of this writing, Israel’s war in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 34,000 Palestinians, including 14,680 women, children, and elderly people, according to the United Nations. But that is just the tally of the identifiable dead. It does not include those rendered invisible or unrecognizable by rubble and fire.  And that death toll could surge in the coming days and weeks. Roughly 80 percent of Gazans have been displaced from their homes, there are acute shortages of food and medical supplies, and thousands of small children are suffering from malnutrition.

Meanwhile, 121 Israeli hostages remain unaccounted for following their kidnapping by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups on October 7. We do not know how many are already dead or what cruelties beset those still alive. We do know that Hamas fighters have subjected some of their captives to rape, according to the United Nations.  On Friday, Joe Biden unveiled a plan to end these nightmares: The president has presented a roadmap to a permanent ceasefire. Broken down into three phases, the plan ostensibly aims to secure an immediate and durable end to hostilities, which would secure the release of all Israeli hostages; a surge of humanitarian relief into Gaza; the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from that territory; and international funding for Gaza’s reconstruction.  Plenty of ceasefire proposals have been floated before, but two things distinguished Friday’s: According to Biden, it was the Israeli government’s own plan, and it did not explicitly call for the total destruction of Hamas as a military and governing power.

Israel’s commitment to complete victory over Hamas has been one major obstacle to peace. To this point, Hamas has proven resilient enough to withstand Israel’s onslaught and tolerant enough of Gazans’ suffering to insist on retaining power, no matter the human cost. Hamas has evinced some interest in trading hostages for Palestinian prisoners, but it has shown none in total surrender. If Israel no longer demanded the latter, then peace might be at hand. In the days since Biden’s announcement, the Israeli government has distanced itself from the ceasefire proposal and reaffirmed its commitment to Hamas’s destruction. “Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Saturday. This response is unsurprising. Many Israeli voters find the idea of Hamas’s ongoing military presence in Gaza to be an intolerable security risk, and this is especially true on the nation’s right. Were Netanyahu to accept the agreement, his governing coalition would likely dissolve. 

Achieving peace in Gaza will therefore require a counterforce to Israel’s domestic political pressures. In recent weeks, the Biden administration threatened to freeze arms transfers to Israel if it conducted an assault on Rafah without a plan for protecting civilians in that city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had taken refuge. Israel proceeded to launch an airstrike that killed 45 Palestinian civilians in the city’s safe zone. If the White House wishes to turn its blueprint for peace into a reality, it may need to enforce its own red line. Such a measure would attract considerable opposition. Israel hawks in the United States insist that the Jewish state’s struggle against Hamas is existential and cannot end without that organization’s destruction. From this perspective, the death toll in Gaza is a tragic but unavoidable cost of a necessary war.  World War II analogies figure prominently in this line of argument. Last week, in a column titled, “Do we still understand how wars are won?” the New York Times’s Bret Stephens accused Israel’s critics of historical amnesia.

[...]

Today, Stephens writes, Israel finds itself waging such an existential war: Hamas has called for wiping the country off the map, and the Jewish state cannot know security until it destroys its enemy’s “capability and will to wage war,” a task that entails tragedies like the one that claimed 45 civilian lives in Rafah in late May. Rather than threatening to withhold arms transfers to force Israel into appeasing Hamas, Stephens argues, the United States must “understand that [Israel has] no choice to fight except in the way we once did — back when we knew what it takes to win.” But this line of reasoning is morally and intellectually bankrupt. That we are more horrified by the mass killing of civilians today than we were in 1945 is a mark of progress, not amnesia. And in any case, Israel’s war with Hamas is not remotely analogous to the Allied cause. 

By the time the United States and Great Britain began bombing Dresden and Tokyo, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were already in the process of mass murdering tens of millions of people. Hamas may have genocidal intentions, but it does not have genocidal capacities. Waging total war on Gaza is not necessary for averting the imminent slaughter of Israeli civilians; to the contrary, doing so risks the lives of the few Israelis whom Hamas is currently in a position to destroy.  Further, the Axis powers genuinely threatened the existence of neighboring states. Hamas is incapable of defending its airspace, let alone conquering Israel. The Israeli government is right to insist that Hamas must not be allowed to launch another October 7, but that attack was only possible due to easily avoidable failures of intelligence and border defense.  More fundamentally, Israel’s ends cannot justify its means in Gaza when those ends are themselves unjust. The Netanyahu government is not fighting to liberate Gazans from despotism and establish the foundations for a two-state solution. To the contrary, it is committed to Palestinian statelessness and dispossession.

The people of Gaza deserve better than Hamas, but the Israeli government has neither the capacity nor the will to give Gazans what they deserve. The best it can do for the moment is stop killing them. 

[...]

But this is not the question that Israel faces today. Hamas may have genocidal aspirations. But as of now, it has scant capacity to kill Israelis outside of Gaza. And bombarding that territory’s cities has made the safe return of Israeli hostages less likely, not more so, a point that has not been lost on many of the captives’ families. In reality, Israel does not need to level Gaza in order to ensure its own existence. To prevent October 7, all the Netanyahu government needed to do was take its intelligence seriously and fortify its borders. Israeli intelligence obtained Hamas’s battle plan for October 7 more than a year in advance. Last July, an Israeli intelligence analyst warned her supervisors that Hamas had conducted a training exercise that appeared to match the intercepted battle plan. But a colonel dismissed these concerns, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. As Israeli officials conceded to the Times,“Had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.”

Instead, Israel persisted in leaving the border fence with Gaza thinly defended, so as to devote more IDF troops to the protection of illegal settlements in the West Bank. The fact that Hamas’s rockets rarely succeed in killing Israelis tells us nothing about the organization’s moral character. But it does tell us something about the scale of the threat that it poses to Israel. Hamas is not a burgeoning imperial power. And it has no serious prospect of becoming one. Israel’s capacity to restrict the flow of arms and goods into Gaza places tight constraints on Hamas’s capacity to amass economic and military power. 

Israel’s obsession over wanting total destruction of Hamas is hindering efforts to end the carnage in Gaza.

[labitx]

Awareness and Deliberation

When two people walking on the road bumps into each other, one wasn't looking at not aware. The other saw and was well aware. Who's more at fault?

A very common situation indeed, but the outcome of the situation is quite nuanced. Really, who is at fault?

Argument #1: The person who is most dangerous, is the person who isn't aware of how dangerous it is.

This argument is probably the most common argument, and it makes sense. Even if we assume that all humans have good intent, you can only exercise that good intent if you are aware of the situation around you. Knowing is often step 1, and hence if you aren't even aware, you can't do much about it.

We see that in many situations in life: blind spots when driving along the road, distracted walking as evident in the above.

Argument #2: The person who is aware and still engage in the conflict, is deliberate in its intent.

Those who often argue with argument #1 often forget it predicates on a the basic assumption that all humans act with good intent. That is highly untrue of human nature, and is ever increasingly untrue in our society today.

The increase in road rage incidents is a clear indication that people are increasingly intolerant of others. People want to be right, people don't like to be inconvenienced. This is more true than ever in any point in time in history, for now attention spans are ever shorter thanks to short content formats, and things are so smooth and automatic that we cannot tolerate any hiccups and lack the skills for everyday human interaction in most situations.

Intent precedes action - that is whether someone is cognizant of the situation when causing harm of damage is often more important than the act itself.

This is also built upon legal concepts of the day, where whether you are in full control of your mental capacities when committing the crime, and whether the action was deliberate or unintentional. A person who knowingly hurts someone vs a pure accident despite taking all precautions, the first is often viewed as a more severe crime than the latter for the intent is more important. Thus, while it may seem very immediate that the person who didn't watch his way accidentally bumped into someone who watched his way and didn't care to step aside, is it really that clear who is at fault?

To generalise, the point is also to look beyond basic instinct when we evaluate any situation. It may be convenient to see something as simple and straightforward, but as critical thinkers, sometimes we should think deeper and that's where we improve our thinking skills and in turn, perhaps could change the world's mindset and elevate all our thinking.

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary218

4/20-21/2024

saturday - sunday

working on the notes i took last night.

going well i think. we'll see later but this stuff seems to be going over well with me atm.

was recently exposed to hito steyerl's bizarre words on palestine, which have less to do with the ongoing genocide and horror israel perpetuates than the art world being overtaken with, or i guess the outspoken-ness of what she calls "5%" of the art community in berlin being outspoken about hating what israel is doing, while the majority are also horrified by what hamas has done also. that classic of bourgeois liberal moralism appearing. it throws me off wanting to really read her work, although her work also, for the bits i got out of it, her essays an object like you and me and the wretched of the screen being rather good, imo, or at least having enough in them into spin into something else, information at least, there is a mechanism to her writing i don't entirely enjoy. it does not feel particularly, i don't know, it feels like political writing might want to connect quicker, not that it should be without abstraction, tiqqun certainly aren't afraid of this but they also couch critique in things that are all sort of apparent or ongoing or just parts of life. they also reckon with the thing i continually return to from that end of the ill-will essay, this:

But perhaps here it is now criticism itself that, by reintroducing a clumsy universal in spite of itself, struggles to enter the field of experience. It no longer allows itself to grasp things by the hand, but boasts of having understood them without bothering to penetrate them. The quest for meaning, the desire for liberation, and, in this way, the revolutionary aspect that the plurality of alternative ways of life currently proliferating give themselves — are these not the new lie that adopts the face of criticism today? This excessive politicization of existence, this unavowed desire to make oneself an example to follow — is this not the last myth to be destroyed?

i wonder if she is exemplary of this in some way, her tied so deeply in her practice as an artist and having her theory, she desires to instantiate something. it is perhaps not uncommon, to want to be example and authority. i also return to the very end of this:

To set out from this wound, as our concrete starting point: the point where denied being ceases to lie to itself, and grasps itself from within the gap between lived unreality and the derealization of its being.

hoping that i am at least somewhere in this region, the gap, i can only grope in the dark and in pain, but i feel in communion with corporeality and the suffering of not knowing, rich experiences they are i suppose, or hope. but i don't know.

i just want to understand, what i don't really know. possibility of new forms of life, or to grasp what i can't tolerate about this life, about these surroundings, the pain and so on, the pain of being disappointed and the intolerability of not being able to articulate something so i may be left to life, so everyone could be left to living. it feels so impossible.

perhaps i am too lazy and wrong in my readings, perhaps i have to become some sort of leftcom or something, hate all the french people i love, submit myself to some immortal material science. but the french feel right and coming across people who hate them deeply, haters of deleuze and bataille, you encounter such odd turns in their explications of their hate. i came across someone hating bataille earlier, they began being very queerphobic about geneis p orridge, it feels utterly pointless to go there, even as one is trying to make some point about how extreme art of that nature, in debt to bataille by some measure, is easily absorbed by the art world and easily sold. it is true, but we cannot blame bataille for this, i think. we can only attempt to take him where no one would like to buy, but they would like to see. an image you can see freely, without cost, not being given away but penetrating you as you penetrate it. somewhere beyond representation, merely, at least. i dunno. i wonder if i am just stupid and really can't read or something.

obviously, i will not become a leftcom, i don't even really know what that entails. i have taken up this position of being totally lost and caught in these throes of pain and intolerability. it is my lot in life.

anyway, i am gonna get thru six of the songs tonight, that's good, but it's 6 am i have spent too long in the sort of miserable nexus of thinking too much about things that get me nowhere and touch on passions and non-passions of mine, the pointless bickering among my kind, and the heat of trying to express a way out, trying to know who is saying anything, trusting/not trusting senses. it's odd. i am having a friend over tomorrow. i really should be getting to sleep now. ... ugh. and it's so fucking hot in here now.

i wonder now about reading steyer's essay about objects, i wonder if i try and think of ways out of what she says or ways to exceed it. she talks of turning to images, as becoming an object, i suppose though we might want to imagine an inversion, that at this stage, we are objects, we are categories and bases of knowledge, data is an object now, we are clusters of data, we are the database in some sense. what of internal relations within the object and its non-compliance, its being an image, myself the object, and imprinted on by images, and the failed relation back to then norm, noncommunicative moments, and so on? this is i guess what i want to get at in some ways and have theorized but perhaps i should take what she says as less something that affirms what i say, which is what i thought really, it felt like i could see someone agreeing, was she? i don't know. her desire to fall back on weird platitudes, to evoke fanon in an essay of hers and totally fail his project, it seems counter to the idea of her trying to know the objectified as perhaps capable, not just feeling but attempting something, ways out, to become. it is difficult.

everything is difficult.

but these songs sound good at least... so that's yay... also yay are these mag scans i found of kera magazine today:

love the pixel event hunting thing... gotta crib that maybe...

anyways. i am tired and it is freaking 6 am w t f !!

so

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[tanadrin]

one last thing about religion: i’m always especially skeptical when people argue that while Christianity may be narrow-minded and intolerant at times, Judaism is different and the criticisms of Christianity cannot apply to Judaism. There are enough people like Shalom Auslander who have talked about their experience with religious abuse and scrupulosity in Judaism that I think it’s fair to say that the experiences of certain people raised in Christianity and certain people raised in Judaism is at times eerily similar; like Christianity, Judaism is not a monolith, and while your experience of Judaism may be more open and tolerant, so are most people’s experience of Christianity. The existence of healthy Jewish spirituality does not invalidate the experiences of people raised with repressive and unhealthy Jewish spirituality, any more than the existence of mainline Protestantism negates the existence of those polygamist compounds in rural Utah.

Religion can be, among many things, an instrument for the exercise of power; and of course people with positive experiences of an institution or belief system are going to discount abusive instances of this as an aberration, just like people who are enthusiastic about the positives of democracy (or Marxism-Leninism, or psychiatry, or high school, or anything else) are going to discount its failures, or attribute them to aberrations of the system, or to misreporting, or to outright lies. That doesn’t mean those criticisms are actually wrong or in bad faith. And while you may be convinced that your version of the religion is the True and Unaltered Form that embodies its spirit, there are plenty of abusive assholes who will say the same about their version of religion, so it seems to me that it’s really beside the point.

And you can try to separate bad conduct from the institution itself, but I think then you will fail to understand the way that a particular institution can facilitate that bad conduct, like trying to understand why some cops are abusive while refusing to understand the problems with the institution of the police, or why doctors can be abusive without understanding the social role and attitude we have toward the medical establishment.

[hillbillyoracle]

Shadow Work and the Language of Trauma

***note: this is not a well thought-out essay, it's three ideas in a trench coat. please forgive the spelling mistakes and understand that this is a thought process not a thought finished ***

It is my great hope that the way we talk about trauma has a fundamental reckoning soon.

The toll moralistic language around trauma has taken on me personally has been staggering and I can't imagine I'm the only person. What I mean by that is how western psychology in particular responded to the research around trauma by spreading this message of "it's not your fault" and "you didn't deserve that" and "you're not a bad person".

"What? But it's true!" you might say. Well, it's true - in a specific context. But when it's generalized there are issues that come from using such heavy language like "deserve", "bad", and "fault". I've seen a progressive uptick in people using the language of trauma in contexts where it really does not apply as talking about trauma (in this loaded moral way) is normalized*.* I think I've seen it most often used to escape the discomfort of being held accountable but I've also been seeing it used to hide an intolerance for experiences someone merely does not enjoy by moralizing it through the language of trauma and integrating it through a traumatic narrative instead of actually attending to the tolerance issue.

Example: Person A is upset with Person B. Person A is speaking in a way Person B does not like but that they are not unhealthy or abusive for doing so (ie. being slightly louder than Person B would prefer, naming their experience of a situation in a different way than Person B would). Person B physically and emotionally cannot tolerate this exposure to something they don't like but rather than use a healthy coping mechanism like breathwork and then active listening, they connect the discomfort with a past largely dissimilar traumatic experience and begin to paint Person A as if they're being abusive for doing what they don't like - "Stop yelling at me!" or "You're gaslighting me!" For Person A, this send the message their neutral/healthy behavior is actually abusive and bad and healthy behavior is only what Person B has a tolerance for.

Here's the rub of it though. Person B's lack of physical and emotional tolerance is itself a symptom of past trauma. Connecting the experience to unrelated trauma and painting the other person as abusive as a way to deal with that intolerance is also a trauma response. But for Person A this is fresh trauma or possibly retraumatizing depending on their experiences.

Everyone involved is dealing with trauma, but since trauma carries this moral weight in our discussions, Person B is highly incentivized to focus the conversation on their trauma so they can escape being a "bad" person. Moral language tends to be totalizing meaning Person A might not feel like they can acknowledge Person B's past trauma for fear of their own being erased and not getting support. It's a bad fucking time.

This situation is not one of resilience, it makes communities weaker, and it's a conversation trauma professionals are only relatively recently having. But those of you who've been here a minute know I'm not really social theorist, I'm a shadow worker.

And my concern with is that this type of moralizing and the trauma-as-coping-mechanism in particular pose a real risk for shadow workers who don't confront and name it in themselves and others. For a few reasons.

For one, trauma is fundamentally disruptive to how we organize our personhood - an importance factor in doing magic - and if you are in a position where you're either using your trauma to moralize your way out of situations you can't tolerate or having to be around someone who is doing that frequently, there's a high incentive not to integrate fully, to give up your Power generally so you can exert what seems like more control in the micro of how those situations play out. By incentive I mean - who the fuck wants to be the "bad" person at the end of that and if "good" people are the one that's more traumatized than the other, well...you see where I'm going. If your immediate circumstances are so compelling that giving up your Power feels like a matter of life and death - it's going to be hard to do any integration work that doesn't immediately get undone.

Because of it's impact on Power, any spellwork done on the issue - without remediation for the issue itself - is likely to get weaker and be less helpful as time wears on. It's just kind of a black hole of a situation.

Two, it encourages black and white thinking which is at odds with Reality and you can't reshape reality skillfully if your view to begin with is prone to narrowing and narrowing. Not only are you less likely to assess and isolate an accurate root cause to perform work on, you're also less likely to select an effective spell given the situation in front of you. If you're continually using trauma-as-coping-mechanism and villainizing other people for what some part of you likely knows is totally neutral behavior, you're more likely to isolate them as the root cause and cast spell toward changing them. There are two outcomes from this - the spell work works on them but doesn't ultimately achieve what you want because what you really want is to be safe and they weren't being unsafe to begin with or, what more likely from what I've seen, the spellwork doesn't work because a faction of you knows that the root cause is inside you - which can even lead to curses or cutting ties to backfire on to you if you're not careful.

Okay so what do you do? To be honest, I've not seen a specific modality that works terribly effectively on this. I wish socially we'd have a reckoning and that would help a good many people. The best I have is something that I know will be incredibly unpopular but - stop moralizing trauma. Both people who've caused it and people who have it. I think the prospect of that is so scary because people think it's the only way to hold abusers accountable for their actions. But I promise you it's not. In actuality, labeling someone as "bad" is more harmful for us and holds less weight than talking about the material harms their abuse has had on us. I include emotional harm in material harms because I mean, it is. The body and the mind aren't separate so feelings are material.

From the prior example, maybe Person A makes the decision not to participate in the moralizing and instead stops to name the harms Person B's coping mechanism is having on them - confusing healthy behavior with preferred behavior, distress at being told a neutral/healthy behavior is abusive and by extension they're bad and deserving of being socially isolated or worse. Even Person B doesn't respond in a material perspective, Person A retains their Power by naming what's happening in reality as they see it and not fracturing to maintain the high ground.

Better yet, Person B, when they can't tolerate the actions Person A is doing that they don't like, could name that - "I'm having trouble tolerating what you're doing even though it's neutral/healthy. Parts of me want to say what you're doing is abusive even though in reality it is not." Then Person B would be able to rob the trauma-as-coping mechanism of it's appeal and retain their Power as well.

Clarity of language, free for the totalizing effects of morality, I think is the clearest path forward to putting down the trauma-as-coping mechanism. But it has to go both ways; stop using it for those who've harmed you and stop using it to describe yourself. I know that's the part I'm still struggling with a lot.

Anyways, I hope this is helpful to someone out there. You're not bad person for overgeneralizing your trauma to cope with things you merely dislike - but it does, in my experience, come at a cost to your ability to do effective spellwork. It's worth looking at the cost and seeing if it's worth continuing to use the coping mechanism to you.

[hyperpotamianarch]

Look, I'm going to illustrate my point by making an equivalent. Say I told you: "sure, I'm fine with you. But, you know, in my ideal world you'd have willingly committed suicide."

This is very personal, isn't it? Now, consider this: the religious practices of Judaism are an inherent part of its culture. You suggest we cut them. Maybe my equivalent, then, should be that in my ideal world you'd have willingly cut off your right arm? Is that any better in your eyes?

I thought the concept of variety and diversity of thought and opinion was largely acknowledged as something positive, since a variety of points of view can pour some light on things from various different angles. I thought that the beauty that exists in diversity was widely acknowledged, in the same way that a painting of many colours seems beautiful. It appears I was wrong. And to be honest, I'm not sure I have good arguments for it. However, to address something you said further, I think opposing variety is intolerant. I think hoping for the existence of a sole idea, in itself, is based on intolerance. It's good to hear you act tolerantly in your life, but your beliefs have a lack of tolerance to them.

You mentioned Christianity and Islam in relation to my point about convincing people to convert, and was partially right as to my intentions. My point was, specifically, about modern missionaries. Because Christianity of old certainly attempted to convince everyone to believe it through force, and that's not a good equivalent to your position. A good equivalent would be a person who wants, through word only, to convince other people to convert. They don't want the conversion to be forced; instead, they want the people to willingly change their beliefs, and I do not approve of that as well.

On another note, talking about Jewish trauma from Christian and Muslim attempts to force them to convert - the same happened with atheists, in Soviet Russia, for example. Or Revolutionary France and its idea of "to the Jews - as individuals, they shall get every right. As a nation they shall get none." Attempts at softer or harder assimilations have come to us from various directions.

I would like to point out another thing. Part of the reason that this point - of your ideal world essentially having no Jews in it - hit me so hard is because lately, someone I considered a friend made a comment in attempted solidarity regarding recent events about Israel. In their message, they have explicitly said they don't think the State of Israel deserves to be destroyed - but implied they think it shouldn't have existed in the first place. That in an ideal world, it would not exist. Your claim hits close to this, and similarly to the idea I presented at the beginning of this post, because all of those tell me one thing: for the people believing in them, the ideal world can't have me in it. I cannot exist in this ideal world, not as I am.

And that, I think, is the point: I see your end goal, the world you hope for, as intolerant because it cannot tolerate my existence. Or the existence of any religious Jew on this planet, because our faith is important to us, to who we are. And your means, thankfully, not being violent does not make the end any better.

Part of the reason for the huge backlash against you was that you said, on a post complaining about antisemitism, "wait. You don't think hating Judaism is antisemitic, right?" Something that feels roughly the equivalent of, "wait, you don't think hating homosexuality is homophobic, right?" Some people might consider your lack of discrimination between various faiths to be an indication you're not antisemitic, but are bigoted against religions. Yet others will claim that, since Judaism is among the things you hate, you are antisemitic - and islamophobic, and hinduphobic, and a variety of other types of bigotry directed against religion. This might be a question of semantics.

Regarding the false beliefs you claim we have, I would like to rephrase that. I believe that I'm descended from a nation that is thousands of years old, that has a covenant with G-d. I believe that I, as a descendant of this ancient culture, am responsible for keeping it alive, as my ancestors before me have. Because I was raised on this, and because it is a part of who I am. The only part of that I can understand why you'd consider false is the covenant with G-d, who you don't believe exists. I'm still a descendant of this ancient culture, and thus one of its preservers. And you want me to choose to drop it, because you believe it has no value.

I am not dismissing the possibility you were mistreated by some people in this discussion. Some assumptions about maliciousness were made, which I don't think are true, and have resulted in harsh words. What I find interesting is that you constructed your antitheism as an exact equivalent of what I'm portraying Judaism as - as inherent to who you are. Because, ideally, when a person is told a belief they hold is bigoted, the expected response is not "but please, let it not be bigoted!", it's that you will consider the bigotry in that belief and then abandon it. Instead, here, you beg me to consider your belief not bigoted because if it is - you are bigoted. Because you growing out of it isn't something you can see. A good equivalent here, then, would be to ask what if a person believed that all antitheists should willingly abandon this particular part of their belief, that all religions are bad. Would a person believing that seem threatening to you?

Question: what does being antitheist mean to you, as opposed to being merely an atheist?

I want the people of this world to make the choice and leave their religions. Every single one of them. I think religion, on its face, is bad. I think it necessarily brings superstition, even in the most secular religions. I believe superstition to be a threat to human progress. Superstition justifies racism and xenophobia. It justifies all fear of the unknown. It justifies intellectual laziness. It prevents people from facing the reality of death and this one life we're living.

I want all religion gone. But it has to be by choice. That's why I take serious issue with people calling me a bigot or saying I'm talking about genocide. Individuals choosing to change their mind isn't a genocide.

[arcticdementor]

When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

…

It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

…

That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

…

I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell. 

…

What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

…

The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks.

…

Remember, they wrote this in 2019, but think of this principle applied to now. If you are Viktor Orban, and you look to the West in 2021, you see a United States that is destroying itself with Critical Race Theory wokeness, which is starting to come to Western Europe. You see the Left here in Hungary starting to embrace it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter statue the liberal Budapest city government erected earlier this year), and you know that it will be bad for your country if this poisonous ideology takes root. So you encourage Hungary’s national soccer team not to take the knee before matches.

…

And so, the disintegrating West, headed towards shipwreck, is going to bring Hungary to its knees for trying to protect itself.

…

The authors go on to say that what it means to be a good Western liberal is changing so fast that people in the East never know for sure what vision of society they are supposed to imitate. Think about what it was like for us Americans. I was born in 1967, and educated by schools, by the media, and by every aspect of culture to believe in Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision. I took it seriously, and I believed in it, and do believe in it. But now the same liberals who argued for that are now arguing that this vision was wrong — that to truly be against racism, you must train yourself to think in exactly the same categories that white segregationists used prior to the Civil Rights revolution. It makes no sense. You come to understand that you have been conned. Never, ever believe liberals: they will change the rules on you, and blame you for your own confusion.

The authors go on to say that sex education in the schools has been a huge flashpoint of conflict within Central and Eastern European societies. It has to do with parents losing the ability to transmit their values to their children. In the flush of post-1989 enthusiasm, young people didn’t so much rebel against their parents as to feel pity for them, and to stop listening to them. The young took their catechism from the Western cathedral. Sex ed was a neuralgic point of the overall struggle between Central European populists, who believed that the traditions and the national heritage of these countries were in danger of being wiped out by the West. Imagine, then, what Hungarian voters must think when they hear the Dutch prime minister threaten to bring their country to its knees because he knows better what they should be teaching their children than they do.

The authors tell a story about how Viktor Orban, at the time an up-and-coming liberal from the countryside, was publicly humiliated by a well-known liberal MP from Budapest’s urban intelligentsia, who adjusted Orban’s tie at a reception, as if doing a favor for a hick cousin.

They go on to explain Orban’s illiberalism by quoting his criticism that liberalism is “basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.” Liberal universalism “destroys solidarity,” Orban believes. (“If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child.”) Orban believes that liberal policies will lead to the dissolution of the Hungarian nation because liberals by nature think of the nation as an impediment to the realization of their ideals.

The authors go on to say that Orban has long campaigned on the abuse of the public patrimony by the regime that governed Hungary after 1989, when Communist insiders used their connections to plunder what was left of the public purse, and left the weak to fend for themselves. This attitude explains Orban’s hostility to the banks after the 2008 crash. “[I]n Central and Eastern Europe, defending private property and capitalism came to mean defending the privileges illicitly acquired by the old communist elites,” they write.

(Readers, did you know any of this context about Orban and other critics of liberalism from Central Europe? Doesn’t it make you wonder what more you’re not being told?)

…

What’s preposterous about it? I know these guys are liberals, but what Duda identifies is the difference between soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism. In both cases, the Poles don’t get to decide for themselves.

There’s more to the book, but I’ll stop here for today. You don’t have to believe that Viktor Orban or any of these other politicians are saints in order to understand why they believe what they believe — and why people vote for them. The Cathedral did the same thing to Trump and to Trump’s supporters. Yes, there were some Trump voters with disreputable motives, and in any case Trump was by and large not an effective president. But the anti-Trump opposition’s passionate belief in its own righteousness rendered it helpless to understand why so many people hated it, and do hate it still. Trump’s own incompetence made it harder to take that critique seriously.

Trump lost, and most everything he did was wiped away by his successor. Viktor Orban wins — and that is the unforgiveable sin in the eyes of the Cathedral.

Here is the radicalizing thing, though. As you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, Viktor Orban appears to be building a conservative deep state in Hungary. His government has transferred a fortune in public funds and authority over some universities to privately controlled institutions. It is difficult to accept this, at least for me. At the same time, it is impossible for me to look at what has happened in my own country, with the Cathedral now extending its control over every aspect of American life, and to criticize Orban for this. The alternative seems to be surrendering your country and its traditions to the Cathedral, which pretends to be liberal, but which is in fact growing even more authoritarian and intolerant than anything Orban and his party stand for.

It is becoming harder to think of liberalism in the sense we have known it as viable anymore. Me, I would actually prefer to live in a more or less liberal, pluralistic society, where California was free to be California, and Louisiana free to be Louisiana, and so forth. This is not the world we live in.

…

The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

[evindimeta]

Are You Experiencing Some of the Common Symptoms of Ascension?

(Long Post)

Some of you may find this helpful, please only take what helps and do not worry or fret if something in this list does not resonate with you. You can take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. That is okay.

Those who need to hear this will be drawn to it, for that is the way of our great Universe.

~ Blessings to All ~

I was just looking at quite a few pages of COVID long haulers support groups...where a COVID-positive was indicated and they have not fully recovered their well being. 85% of the descriptions of their symptoms (which are found as negative health concerns) are labelled as COVID...some are being told it’s Lyme, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue among other unknown causes. As I reviewed the endless lists and common symptoms I found that they are very similar to ascension symptoms.

However most do not realize that they are going through a physical change in their DNA structure. Those who are aware and have gone through the many waves of change understand and roll with the fatigue and other symptoms in gratitude and not fear, trusting and seeing the positive change in who they are as this occurs. It is a leaving or shedding what has been known... to reveal the true self within.

I felt it would be supportive for you, and for your friends and loved ones to review to find a “positive outlook” on a changing body and world. May this fill you with hope, for all are emerging through this great transformation.

PLEASE NOTE: This article is based on work presented by Samuel Greenberg's original list and is not authored by Dr. Nickerson. Before you read this, realize that you are okay and that what you are experiencing is "The SHIFT". This is a normal process when the universal vibrational energy forces you to rise above your normal 3D level of existence here on Earth.  It’s all okay.  When in doubt, please see your doctor to confirm to alleviate fear.

Ascension Symptoms:

1. Feeling as though you are in a pressure cooker or in intense energy; feeling stress. Remember, you are adjusting to a higher vibration and you will eventually adjust. Old patterns, behaviors and beliefs are also being pushed to the surface. There is a lot going on inside of you.

2. A feeling of disorientation; not knowing where you are; a loss of a sense of place. You are not in 3D anymore, as you have moved or in the process of moving into the higher realms.

3. Unusual aches and pains throughout different parts of your body. You are purifying and releasing blocked energy vibrating at 3D, while you are vibrating in a higher dimension.

4. Waking at night between 2 and 4 a.m. Much is going on in your dream state. You can’t be there for long lengths of time and need a break. This is also the ‘cleansing and releasing’ hour.

5. Memory loss. A great abundance of short term memory loss and only vague remembrances of your past. You are in more than one dimension at a time, and going back and forth as part of the transition, you are experiencing a ‘disconnect’. Also, your past is part of the Old, and the Old is forever gone. Being in the Now is the way of the New World.

6. ‘Seeing’ and ‘hearing’ things. You are experiencing different dimensions as you transition, all according to how sensitive you are and how you are wired.

7. Loss of identity. You try to access the Old you, but it is no longer there. You may not know who you are looking at in the mirror. You have cleared much of your old patterns and are now embodying much more light and a simpler, more purified divine you. All is in order, You are okay.

8. Feeling ‘out of body’. You may feel as though someone is talking, but it is not you. This is our natural defense mechanism of survival when we are under acute stress or feeling traumatized or out of control. Your body is going through a lot and you may not want to be in it. My ascension guide told me that this was a way of easing the transition process, and that I did not need to experience what my body was going through. This only lasted a short time. It passes.

9. Periods of deep sleeping. You are resting from all the acclimating and are integrating, as well as building up for the next phase.

10. Heightened sensitivities to your surroundings. Crowds, noise, foods, TV, other human voices and various other stimulations are barely tolerable. You also overwhelm very easily and become easily overstimulated. You are tuning up. Know that this will eventually pass.

11. You don’t feel like doing anything. You are in a rest period, ‘rebooting’. Your body knows what it needs. In addition, when you begin reaching the higher realms, ‘doing’ and ‘making things happen’ becomes obsolete as the New energies support the feminine of basking, receiving, creating, self-care and nurturing. Ask the Universe to ‘bring’ you what you want while you are enjoying yourself and having fun.

12. An intolerance for lower vibrational things of the 3D, reflected in conversations, attitudes, societal structures, healing modalities, etc. They literally make you feel ‘sick’ inside. You are in a higher vibration and your energies are no longer in alignment. You are being ‘pushed, to move forward; to ‘be’ and create the New.

13. A loss of desire for food. Your body is adjusting to a new, higher state of being. Also, part of you does not want to be here anymore in the Old.

14. A sudden disappearance of friends, activities, habits, jobs and residences. You are evolving beyond what you used to be, and these people and surroundings no longer match your vibration. The New will soon arrive and feel so-o-o-o much better.

15. You absolutely cannot do certain things anymore. When you try to do your usual routine and activities, it feels downright awful. You are evolving beyond what you used to be, and these people and surroundings no longer match your vibration. The New will soon arrive and feel so-o-o-o much better.

16. Days of extreme fatigue. Your body is losing density and going through intense restructuring.

17. A need to eat often along with what feels like attacks of low blood sugar. Weight gain, especially in the abdominal area. A craving for protein. You are requiring an enormous amount of fuel for this ascension process. Weight gain with an inability to loose it no matter what you do is one of the most typical experiences. Trust that your body knows what it is doing.

18. Experiencing emotional ups and downs; weeping. Our emotions are our outlet for release, and we are releasing a lot.

19. A wanting to go Home, as if everything is over and you don’t belong here anymore. We are returning to Source. Everything is over, but many of us are staying to experience and create the New World. Also, our old plans for coming have been completed.

20. Feeling you are going insane, or must be developing a mental illness of some sort. You are rapidly experiencing several dimensions and greatly opening. Much is available to you now. You are just not used to it. Your awareness has been heightened and your barriers are gone. This will pass and you will eventually feel very at Home like you have never felt before, as Home is now here.

21. Anxiety and panic. Your ego is losing much of itself and is afraid. Your system is also on overload. Things are happening to you that you may not understand. You are also losing behavior patterns of a lower vibration that you developed for survival in 3D. This may make you feel vulnerable and powerless. These patterns and behaviors you are losing are not needed in the higher realms. This will pass and you will eventually feel so much love, safety and unity. Just wait.

22. Depression. The outer world may not be in alignment with the New, higher vibrational you. It doesn’t feel so good out there. You are also releasing lower, darker energies and you are ‘seeing’ through them. Hang in there.

23. Vivid, wild and sometimes violent dreams. You are releasing many, many lifetimes of lower vibrational energy. Many are now reporting that they are experiencing beautiful dreams. Your dream state will eventually improve and you will enjoy it again. Some experience this releasing while awake. My mother commented one day that she believed I was having nightmares in the daytime.

24. Night sweats and hot flashes. Your body is ‘heating’ up as it burns off residue.

25. Your plans suddenly change in mid-stream and go in a completely different direction. Your soul is balancing out your energy. It usually feels great in this new direction, as your soul knows more than you do. It is breaking your ‘rut’ choices and vibration.

26. You have created a situation that seems like your worst nightmare, with many ‘worst nightmare’ aspects to it. Your soul is guiding you into ‘stretching’ into aspects of yourself where you were lacking, or into ‘toning down’ aspects where you had an overabundance. Your energy is just balancing itself.

 Remember.....Finding your way to peace through this situation is the test you have set up for yourself. This is your journey, and your soul would not have set it up if you weren’t ready. You are the one who finds your way out and you will. 

Looking back, you will have gratitude for the experience and realize that you are a different person.

I hope this helps.

[thebibliosphere]

So, your post(s) about anaphylaxis is making my red flags wave. Would it be possible for anaphylaxis to start, instead of immediately after eating the food, after you've eaten so much your body can't tolerate it? I've had gastrointestinal symptoms for years, but all my specialists just sorta threw their hands up in the air since it doesn't match symptoms for anything else. Hope you're having a good day ^-^

Hey Dawnie <3

I’m going to put this under a cut cause it gets really long, but the tl;dr version of this reply is yes, yes it is.

So the way histamine intolerance works, is that sometimes the person can tolerate certain foods in small doses, but if their body gets overloaded, it builds up and up because people with HIT and damaged mast cells, can’t process it out their system the way healthy people do, (there’s some enzyme we’re lacking in) and it can trigger the mast cells into a degranulation, and then the person may experience anaphylaxis or milder symptoms like itching, or gastrointestinal symptoms. The analogy used is often a “histamine bucket”, in that if something is full, and you keep adding to it, it will eventually spillover. (Although more recently they’ve updated it to “histamine window” as in “your window of tolerance” for something.)

So for example, I eat spinach in moderation every day, which is an incredibly high histamine food, but also extremely high in nutritional value and I desperately need everything it can provide me to deal with my pernicious and regular anemia. The reason my body can tolerate it, however, in small regular doses, is because I emptied out my “histamine bucket” through avoiding all my triggers as best I can, which includes things like other high histamine foods that I do not need to survive (chocolate, tea, alcohol, etc), external triggers like dust, pollen, strong scents, strenuous exercise (due to the hormones released), exposure to certain chemicals, and yes also stress because stress causes your body to create excess cortisol which is a mast cell destabilizer, which is also why they think HIT/MCAS is more common in people with PTSD due to the damage untreated and prolonged stress can do to the endocrine system, but that’s a whole other post I could go into for hours. 

Unfortunately, you cannot completely eradicate histamines from your food, as all foods have histamine, just some more than others. But even then we need to eat some of those high histamine things, cause without them we become malnourished. Which is why you’ll find me, trying to put new foods back into my diet every now and then, with my epi-pens out on the table, my phone readily available, and always under the supervision of an adult who knows how to use my epi-pen and to call 911 if something goes wrong. Cause as scary as it is, I’m not about to nearly die from malnourishment again. (Putting foods back in, however, is a thing only to be attempted under medical guidance, and done incredibly slowly and one at a time so as not to flood your system.)

I’m also able to regulate symptoms with antiallergen meds like xyzal, although for some people with HIT (which some doctors now believe to be part of the lower end of the MCAS spectrum disorder, and not separate like previously thought) antihistamines can stop the body from processing histamine properly, which can also lead to further complications, so really it’s the luck of your genetics and the severity of symptoms. For me, I can’t stop it or my PoTS symptoms go off the charts, even though I’ve been taking it for so long it no longer helps with day to day symptoms like pollen or dust. Some people also become reactive to the fillers in the meds over time, which is why a lot of MCAS patients require their medications to be individually compounded to their needs.

There are some other supplements you can take which are mast cell regulators. Quercitin comes to mind as being extremely effective, and there’s some evidence to show that vitamin c can help the body process out excess histamine, but the dosage required can affect other meds so should always be consulted with over a doctor first. The supplements, however, do need to be as refined as possible, and avoiding triggers in the fillers and bindings of pills is probably the hardest part about using them to help your body deal with its shit.

Lack of sleep is also a huge factor because if you’re not sleeping, your body isn’t processing things out the way it should and that can also affect your mast cell stability.Also being low on Vitamin D, as Vitamin D is necessary for healthy mast cells, so if you’re deficient you may find yourself developing new or intensifying allergies as the mast cells start to break down.

I also saw your comment on my other post re: seizures, and while seizures are not a particularly common symptom of MCAS, due to the fact that there are mast cells in literally every part of your body, they can and do affect brain function (as well as the blood-brain-barrier) which can result in seizures for some people. For me, it used to be debilitating migraines that felt like I was going to go blind from the pain. I used to lie on the floor and writhe while clutching my head. Now when I get migraines, they’re still bad, and can really make me ill, but nothing as bad as they used to be in my teens, when, with hindsight, I was dealing with a lot of stress and unfolding trauma.

So, tl;dr reply to your question: Yes, sometimes you can eat certain things in small amounts and be just fine, but if something tips the scales of your balance, it can result in symptoms of MCAS flares and even anaphylaxis if severe enough.

For me, food, environment, and stress are my biggest triggers (so just y’know, life) and  I have to take steps to regulate those things as best I can to keep my body under control. If I recall, you already have an MCAS doctor, did they try you on a low histamine elimination diet? Did they talk to you about other external triggers and how to avoid them? Did they mention lifestyle changes and therapy for helping you to manage stress better? If not, they really need to because those all first-line responses to HIT/MCAS (along with appropriate medication) and I’m a little surprised they didn’t tell you about histamine build-up through certain foods!NB for anyone reading this: I’m more comfortable giving Dawnie in-depth info about certain meds and supplements because we are friends and I know something of their situation. If you’re reading any of this and it sounds familiar, please speak to a doctor first before attempting to self regulate or medicate. The treatment for MCAS is almost as dangerous (in terms of high risk for malnutrition) as the illness itself.

[rametarin]

Fiction. Is. Not. Reality.

Once upon a time, there were people that disapproved of sexual stuff in movies, comics and games, and those that were ambivilant to approving of it.

We defined them as ‘conservatives’, those that tended to defer to their organized religion or small community for those values, and ‘liberals.’ At least, here in the states. It was not accurate, but hey.

It was thought that getting your conscience from group think and religious nonsense was beneath a thinking, secular, self-actualized person that was on the side of reason, logic and facts. The path of sheep, idiots and those scared of their own reality, so they desperately clung to the abstractions presented in religious texts and the comforts of a support group that believe in it.

It was also thought that it was religion itself that made you a close minded moron that does whatever the group leader or the dogma of the text and its metaphysics says. That if religion just ceased to exist, then those close minded people would have nothing to cling to. That they’d be forced to consider the logic, facts and reason of their actions and be unable to continue down the path they were on without admitting they were wrong. That we just needed to abolish organized religion and disparage and embarrass the religious to make them see reason and abandon their faith, both personal and cultural.

That if we did that, all sexual stigmas and absurdities would give way to reasonable ones. Homophobia, intolerance of women doing stuff like wearing pants and driving. You know.

Well. Time went on, and some decidedly a-religious people started exhibiting behaviors in fandom and society while feigning being secular, empathetic, reason driven individuals. It turns out that religion doesn’t make you into a close minded psychopath, the sort that wishes those that support goofy ‘ships’ in cartoons and comic books would be raped or their children damaged/raped/murdered for the ‘ships of their parents. Those can come from decidedly agnostic/atheist people, themselves.

Turns out that petty sentiments like this don’t require organized religion, much less a specific one, for the worst sort of people to materialize from the rabble. You just need someone that feels very strongly about something and gets too invested in fiction to decide for other people that they shouldn’t like that anymore because imaginary things happening somehow is harmful to real life people somewhere at some time or another.

Yeah. So. Uh. We really need to reaffirm:

Fictional characters are not real

Fiction does not affect reality

Fiction in “society” does not make that society perform to the fiction.

Fiction has no effect on the sexuality, criminality or violence of a society.

Society is not a reality embodying all of us and defining us. It is a derivative. A shadow. You cannot control ‘society’ and thus control everybody’s thoughts and actions, nor make them think “right” thoughts, nor make them thing “wrong” thoughts by censoring materials from behind published or hiding them behind material you’d prefer they see.

And if you are one of those people that think censorship is alright if it’s to make sure the messages you approve of are read and experienced and the ones you don’t are unavailable, then you need to be oppressed. You’ve missed the meaning of liberalism. That which is not objectively harmful or doing harm actively, is fine. We do not need asterisks affirming that child marriage in the past was a bad thing for every history lesson, we do not need every comic or manga series to star objectively and inherently good people.

I’d hoped that ‘free thinking open minded liberal people’ would be more tolerant of content that they don’t personally approve of, but these toxic ideas about what is “good for the conscience of society” are creeping in thanks to a jealous, secular cult of people with very disgusting social science ideas of how being human and being groups of humans works. I’d hoped. But this venomous culture is threatening to usurp liberalism openly, now.

Even still, I welcome it. It’s a cancer that has subverted and subsumed liberalism for so long, manipulating it, co-opting it. It’s trying to take over the body or split it by mitosis; it’ll have a solid body to itself before long.

And I hope that when this divide happens, liberalism will be free of the disgusting culture platforming it. Because when the far-left sound like and have the social ambitions of the “far right” religious, that is terrifying beyond measure.

[felix-the-cat]

Wednesday, May 13, 2020 – 4:29 a.m.

The negative space is not a bad thing. It is a backdrop from which the message can be displayed; from which the Light can shine through brightest. This world is waking up to new possibilities and wonder. It is tapping into the infinite creative intelligence from within.

There are many things occurring here simultaneously. It is important that you understand that Spirit is here more than ever before. The vibrations of this planet have increased to the point where the ascended masters are now returning to you.

Soon you will see why you have had to go through such a time as this. Many of you are already realizing that these things that are occurring are for the highest good of all. No longer do you walk in darkness. You have been shown the True Path of Light and are following Spirit step-by-step along the path.

These are the days you have asked for and they are being formed within your framework of reality at this time. There is no going back to the old world. The New Reality is taking hold and has already formed in the Minds of The Awakened Ones.

What is it you envision for this world? You can make it into a reality for yourself and countless others. All you need do is to call it forth. These things we speak of are the True Death. They have brought you to a point of re-birth. You are being called into a new reality and with that comes the death of the old self.

You are now becoming a grander version of the Self that is a True Reality. It is the reality of the Spirit that has always been here. You are now being called to create from a new platform. You are being given a New set of tools with which to use.

Do not curse the darkness. It has always dwelt among you. Only now, you are beginning to see it for what it truly is. It is the backdrop of your existence and the Light is shining upon it. As more and more turn on their internal light the backdrop fades into a distant memory.

We are headed in a new direction here. We are ascending into the stars and are being rocketed forth into the 5th dimension together. Some are trying desperately to cling to the old way simply because it seems so familiar. Let loose your death grip on the old reality. Unclench your fists and rise into the heavens and join us.

We have created the Revolution of Consciousness that is a reality now. Open your eyes to the beauty and Love that is all around you. No longer are you fooled by the shadows. No longer are you afraid of the dark for you have become the Light. You walk along the path and simply stand in Light at long last.

You can no longer tolerate that which would cause you distress. It is being puled out of you as you look deep within yourselves and heal the shadows within. No longer is the backdrop of darkness necessary for your growth for you now know who you truly are.

You are a being of Light. You come from Source and indeed you are Source. You have asked for the experiences you have brought yourselves to. You are not a victim of circumstances any more than we are. We realize, as do you, that Spirit cannot be damaged.

You have simply wanted a place to let your Light shine so brightly. What better place to see your brilliant diamond light that shines forth so brightly than from a place of complete darkness. This is the backdrop you have chosen so that you may realize who and what you truly are at last.

The New Day is here. Once you realize that you are the Light and have experienced the darkness on a level so intolerant to your sense of Self, you will wake naturally; refreshed in the knowing that you can never be hurt, truly. You are an eternal being pretending to be weak.

Now, it is time for a New Game. A new dynamic playing field is being formed all around you and the rules are simple. Know thyself. Know thyself as Light. Love one another. Have compassion for those that you perceive to be less fortunate, for they too are playing their own game and are ready to call it quits.

You have all won at this game and now it is time for the Victory Celebration. As more and more of you wake each day, the vibration of the planet increases. We are close to critical mass upon this planet and, once activated, the world will truly change.

Look for it in the years ahead. More will be revealed as you walk daily with Spirit by your side. It matters not what the belief structure is. Love is love. There is no stopping it. With open arms it welcomes you back Home to a peace that is your birthright.

What a truly amazing time to be alive. You are on the cusp of the Grandest Awakening this world has ever seen. You have our attention and assistance. We are here to show you how you can walk as truly free beings do.

The way to achieve the peace and serenity you so desire is to go deep within and see the illusion for what it is. You have created all of this and you can create something entirely new and novel. Indeed, you already are.

There is nothing you need to do to make this happen. Your very existence upon this planet is all that needs to occur. You would not be here right now if it were not for your sincere desire to help. Your brilliant radiance upon your planet and upon your brothers and sisters is all that is required to bring this change about.

You are the chosen ones and are leading the cause for a New Day. You have been here before on other planets, so you know what to expect. In fact, you have been expecting this. You have been impatiently waiting for this to occur; for people to finally wake up to the truth.

Congratulations. You have made it. Now is the time to let your Unique Light shine. The world is ready; and, for the first time in your life you know what to do. Your intuition has been much amplified, and you are truly walking hand-in-hand with Spirit.

You will be amazed what is going to form all around you once people pull together and bring the beauty and majesty of this world into focus. You have the 2020 vision. It is here and you are learning how to use the New Energy Structure to bring about peace on earth at long last.

You have been warned of events that may occur but are shifting the timeline so that these things are minimalized, and the Awakening will be right on schedule. Thank you for being here to do this work that is so greatly needed at this time.

We are very grateful that you are growing up into fine men and women. You are no longer the children of the stars. You are now growing up as a species and making rational adult decisions. Already amongst you are the ones who are making it happen.

Have you noticed how clearly the lines have been drawn? No longer is there a grey area. Now it is becoming clear as you put on your new glasses and see the world through ‘New Eyes’. The world is showing itself to you. Revealing that it is not a muddled soup of grey but in fact quite black and white. The darkness has been revealed to you so that you may heal it within yourselves and the world as a whole.

Go throughout your day with the peace and knowledge that you know what to do. Create something new. Whatever your talent is, now is the time to put it to use. The world is ready to see what you have created with your Unique talents and abilities; and you are ready to show it to the world.

Stand up and be counted. Bring that book, painting, drawing, movie, song or whatever it may be to life. Get with the others and show us what you can do. Now is the time for show and tell as you bring forth the New Creations of Light that have laid dormant within you.

The darkness is showing itself to you and telling you what to do. Now is the time to step away from that and paint a different picture; one that the world truly wants to see. We look forward to meeting you very soon…

[tanadrin]

Legal Systems Very Different From Ours (Because They Do Not Exist)

(I forgot Scott had already done this, lol)

AZAREN

There is the land of Azaren, far to the north; a rugged, windswept country, it was settled by hardy explorers in an ancient age of migration, who have always been disdainful of central authority, and permit themselves to be governed only to the most minimal extent. As a consequence of this skepticism of government, there is also a general skepticism of public law. All law in Azaren--except the few scraps of administrative and procedural law necessary to operate the government--is private, and there is no criminal law. All disputes between parties are resolved by what we would consider in other countries civil suits, governed by strict rules involving standing. Theft, arson, even murder may all go unpunished, unless there is an interested party willing to file suit to obtain redress. The Azarenes by and large consider this system exemplary of freedom and justice, and we cannot help but admit an attraction to the cleanness of its philosophy.

A key component of Azaren justice is the principle that no entity is above the law; no entity, however powerful, is so majestic that it is immune from suit. This meant that gods, natural forces, even celestial bodies have been sued (though principally in more superstitious days long past), and where by the weight of evidence, or the simple failure to appear, have been duly issued fines, which remain on the public register of debts waiting to be paid. And naturally, Azaren countenances no doctrine of state or sovereign immunity. This principle, especially due to the absence of public law, extends also to relations between Azaren and other states. Naturally this principle extends to sublunary bodies like Azaren's own government: Azaren recognizes to doctrine of state or sovereign immunity, and not a few political revolutions have been wrought through cunning arguments in the courtroom. And note also that Azaren conducts no foreign policy as a unified whole--for that would require an intolerable tyranny imposed on her people, that is to say some form of tax to pay the salaries of a diplomatic corps--but what individuals and groups of individuals see fit to conduct. So from time to time, an individual or group of individuals together will decide some foreign state has wronged them, and, as is Azarene custom, will petition their courts for redress; and despite the diplomatic protestations of the representatives of that government, that any such proceeding is a clear violation of precedent in the community of nations, that by dint of its sovereignty no state may be sued in the courts of another, the Azarene court will hear the suit. And should the plaintiffs prevail, an order will be issued for the recovery of damages.

And it is for this reason and this reason alone that Azaren has any armed force: in case of a judgement entered against a foreign government, the militia of Azaren is authorized to confiscate property--in Azaren or abroad--belonging to that government (and if need be, its citizens) until enough has been seized to cover the amount owed. Whereupon, whatever the state of the field of battle, however close the foe is to total capitulation, they return to their ships instantly and retire to their home country.

GKNAI

The land of Gknai is ancient, possibly one of the longest-inhabited regions in the world; and as it is nestled deep in often-overlooked mountain valleys, it has enjoyed a history of uncommon peace and tranquility, well-fortified against the ambitions of neighboring princes; it has indeed earned its epithet of Many-Fortressed-Gknai; and in later millennia, this reputation for indomitability has served by itself to safeguard its borders.

As a consequence of its long, long history, it is said, Gknai is uncommonly bound by the pageantry of Tradition. Just as other countries have monarchies that have withered away into irrelevance, performing a few desultory functions of government under the strict control of their ministers, Gknai has its own titular kings and princes. Indeed, it has them by the wagonload. The difficulty of warfare in the region and the bombasticity of ancient aristocrats means that every valley is thick with Kings and Over-Kings, and Lords President, and Grand Dukes, and even Emperors. Most Sublime Hierophants tend their vegetable patches across the road from Thrice-Exalted Tyrants, and the multiplication of titles is not helped by the fact that under Gknaian traditions, every child inherits some share of the honors of their parents.

The Gknaians have never had a single political revolution to sweep the old order away, only centuries of incremential change. Therefore, each of these titles, in the abstract legal sense, still has some privilege attached to it, however slight it may be. Nor, if they wished to abolish their cumbersome system, is it clear how they might legally do so: there is no legislative authority in Gknai but custom, and for every amendment to the law some precedent, even if very weak, must be found that may be expanded and elaborated upon and carefully argued for until it is generally agreed upon in the whole land. Gnkaian legal codes incorporate much of this commentary, and a Gknaian law library is thus a fearsome thing indeed.

The most curious relic of Gknaian tradition is a form of trial, still in general use, called gopi-gai ogmo, or Trial By Endurance. It was argued by an ancient Gknaian scholar that wealth, strength, and even legal persuasiveness were poor proxies for the righteousness of a cause, and so poor criteria for deciding a lawsuit. For with wealth often comes prestige, and undue influence over the public; with strength, assured victory in the trials by combat; and a well-spoken orator might convince even the best of judges to decide a case in contravention of the law, if his eloquence and flattery are sufficient. Better, said this scholar, to align public interest with individual preference, and a hint of utilitarianism: clearly, the side that *wishes* to win more, should prevail. And how to decide that more efficiently, than with a test of endurance?

This is the form of the test: a hillside of a valley is chosen, one warm in the morning and cool in the evening, but not too hot or too cold; and the plaintiff and the defendant are seated upon it, gazing down at the valley below; and the judge and officers of the court withdraw to observe. That is all. Whomever remains seated and motionless the longest is judged to desire victory more. To stand, speak, cry out, laugh, smirk, or fall down is to forfeit the case. Neither of the parties may be spoken to; neither may be disturbed in any way. The only modification ever made is this: in matters deemed especially urgent, sometimes the parties are made to stand instead.

Judgement, naturally, usually takes days. One especially notable figure, Hrakal the Vexatious Litigant, widely feared for his tolerance of boredom and inclement weather, successfully lodged no less than three dozen lawsuits against his neighbors, until he met his match in Tatavru the Stubborn. That particular proceeding lasted more than two weeks, until an out-of-season snowfall gave Hrakal frostbite, and caused him to relent. I have also heard of a legendary conflict over a spite-fence in the valley of Upper Dabbar, where, it is said, the parties sat immobile for *three years*, sustained by surreptitious nighttime meals and the kind of intense mutual hatred known only by neighbors who share a property line. Another interlocutor I spoke with, an older woman, said that this was a corrupted version of an older tale, altered for believability's sake. In fact, she said, the dispute was *never* resolved. The parties sat immobile until the vegetation grew thick on their laps and shoulders; and if you visit a certain hilltop in Upper Dabbar, you can still see them, two seated figures covered in grass that have now become part of the hill.

BOSSUL

In the city of Bossul, all important questions must be settled by a consensus agreeable to all parties. Although apparently cumbersome, this system has many virtues. The government of Bossul enjoys approval ratings usually seen only in the most tyrannical of dictatorships, and though the city's martial fury has been inflamed many times, it has never actually gone to war, for there have always been one or two heads cool enough to refuse to support it. Alas, every occasion of government is nearly interminable as a result: even the most trivial meeting of the least prestigious committee can drag well into the night; and nothing about the culture or institutions of Bossul does anything to restrain the impulses of busybodies or know-it-alls who have, in every other culture on the planet, driven such consensus-driven systems into the dirt. Yet Bossul's persists, for uncertain reasons.

One, perhaps, might be the custom of Utabani-mo-Kalutabani, which might very roughly be translated into English as "Agreeing To Disagree." When a consensus *cannot* be reached--for instance, in an intractible legal case--a temporary truce may be enacted in the form of Utabani-mo-Kalutabani. In short, each side continues to live their life, pretending that they have won. Thus, from time to time, you may explore the city of Bossul and find such oddities as two different families, each on the opposite side of an inheritance dispute, living in the same apartment and pretending the other does not exist. You may find an employee, who has sued for wrongful termination, coming to work every day at a company that insists she does not work there. You may even, on occasion, find someone walking the street as a free man, whom the police insist that they currently have in their custody.

It is a strange custom, and one cannot help but wonder if it is of any practical use at all.

MOZICK

Mozick is a small island in the Hraspedain Sea, rainy in winter but temperate in summer, which like Gnkai has a deep respect for the usages of its past. In Mozick, this is something of a religious conviction, for their society is organized around the pronouncements of the Great Oracle of the Smoky Mirror, who lived and died more than a thousand years ago.

Such was the inerrancy of the Oracle's predictions (it was said), that the Oracle was trusted utterly in settling disputes and prosecuting criminals. Usually, the Oracle heard arguments before pronouncing judgements, but this was considered a formality; many times, a judgement could be given as soon as the parties entered the courtroom. And such was the faith the people had in their Oracle, that they feared what would become of their society when she died; so she set down in an enormous volume a list of judgements--thousands of them--in cases yet to come. They named no parties, nor any details of the case: only Guilty, Not Guilty, Liable for a sum of 400 Mozickian drachmas, etc.

The procedure in Mozick is thus: when cases are brought before the court, the time and order of each filing is carefully noted. Once a year, amid solemn ritual, the Book of Judgements is opened, and a judgement for each case is read off, in order. It is an article of faith in Mozickian law that the judgement is never wrong, though at times the wisdom of the Oracle has, the Mozickians admit, seemed... startling. There was, for instance, the legendary case of Uckmar the Arsonist, caught in the act of burning the Temple of Ytrabel-Sheh; the sentence read aloud before the prosecutors was "Defendant to go free, be compensated 10 drachmas." But, the legal scholars carefully explain, Ytrabel-Sheh was the god of rain, and an unusually wet summer that year had caused the slugs to flourish in Uckmar's garden, devouring his tomatoes. The arson was, perhaps, justified, or considered just compensation; the 10 drachmas were for emotional damages. So the careers of legal scholars in Mozick are made, harmonizing the decisions of the great Oracle with the principles of justice.

A careful accounting of judgements is important to the system--once it was discovered that one judgement had accidentally been used twice, necessitating a redistribution of three years' worth of punishments and fines; fortunately, no death penalties had been handed out. But the Book of Judgements is finite. And one day--a day that soon will be in the expected lifetime of Mozickian lawyers now practicing--those judgements will run out. What does this portend? Will Mozick be conquered? Sink beneath the sea? Will--as some quietly hope--the Oracle return? No one knows. But each year sees more of the judgements used up than the last, and soon the book will be empty.

[sorenthestoryteller]

February 8th, 2021 – In Which Soren Runs a Fever and Decides Now is a Great Time as Any to Start Kicking Over Money Changer Tables Being Operated by Arm Band Wearing Elephants

“what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

    human beings that you care for them?

You have made them

a little lower than the angels

    and crowned them

with glory and honor.”

-Psalm 8:4-5

                  In Milton’s “Paradise Lost” everything you need to know about the fall of Lucifer is summed up in the quote, “It is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”

              Over the years I have had many conversations about the Fall in general and in specific with Lucifer being the instigator of this whole mess. C.S. Lewis, Frank Peretti, and a few other names that slip my mind have helped to formulate some thoughts on the nature of darkness and evil, but the chief characteristic of Evil and Heresy is Pride.

              I truthfully cannot grasp the level on which angels operate. Beings of pure spirit and intellect that are not limited by having to use physical processing powers. My best guess is that their thoughts, recall, and experiences are all hyper-aware.

              What do you think the angels thought of God’s plan for creating something beyond them? Creatures that were weaker than angels yet somehow deemed worthy of love, honor, and glory?

              After Adam and Eve are created what do the angels see? Furless monkeys with no tails that make noises when you talk to them. Maybe in Lucifer’s mind, he thought Jesus just made a bunch of pets he could train to pick up tools and make things.

              I cannot imagine the response of these beings when the Trinity keeps going on with creation and take the time to create this bizarre mixture of spirit and animal. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters” has the title demon refer to us humans as being amphibians:

 “Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

               Those who have the misfortune to sit under my teaching for too long will recall that I often refer to the human experience as being a series of paradoxes. This quote from C.S. Lewis is the root of that claim. We exist in two realms at the same time, which is of course a paradox in and of itself. In a sense we are all Schrödinger’s Cat, waiting for the transition of the box being opened and our reality being redefined by what the Eternal is and is not.

              Bearing in mind how much nonsense and insanity is produced by even the most well-meaning humans among us, multiple that by a few billion, and that is a typical day for God.

              Infinite as the Trinity is, I cannot grasp the love it takes to take care of me, much less the capacity to feel an emotion and intimately know the name of billions of humans going through various stages of pain, elation, terror, love, and wonder.

              That experience, that Loving Madness of our Lord is what drove Lucifer to the point of rage and quitting. Was it first child syndrome, a group of angels being angry that God continued creating after making a series of intricate and beautiful beings so intense Scripture often calls them stars (you know those giant glowy things in the night sky we take for granted? That are an endless series of self-perpetuating nuclear explosions? Those are the angel metaphors.)?

              If humans were the ones creating, we never would have created ourselves, we would have been content with making beings of a spiritual nature and creatures to inhabit the earth.

              However, the Trinity rolled up their collective sleeves and said to the archangels, “Hey fellas, checks this out.”

              And what does that mean?

              What does it mean to be created to be just a little lower than the angels?

              What does it mean to be found worthy by God? To be chosen to be His sons and daughters? For God to decide each of us is worthy of love not because we could perform or do something, but because we simply are?

“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.”

― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

                 At this point I would like to bring this to the practical and meaningful point, there is much sickness in how we hate and isolate others by naming and grouping people as “sinners”. Fellow miracles of life, beings who are as equally of a mad paradox as us, and somehow we think we have the right to judge them.

              This is pride, this is the root sin of Lucifer, and it is the cause of most of our current misery and the threat of a revised version of Nazism becoming ever more popular here in America.

              For too long people in the Church have existed on this prideful notion that to be Christian means to live in judgment of those we deem our inferiors. Jesus does not care about our fake attempts at piety when it comes to extending love to those who are broken. Jesus is not concerned with how noble we think we are when we hold our nose and associate with those, we later judge and murder with our thoughts.

              Evangelicalism is on the verge of plunging to its death and we who chose to be judgmental in Jesus’ name due to politics are the ones who have done this. We brought the entirety of this church culture to the altar of conservative politicians and sacrificed it to receive Donald Trump.

              Evangelicals will never be able to remove the disgusting stain of the association of Trump and the horrific human rights abuses of the Republican party.

              Why is this such an important point?

              Because the people the Church is supposed to deliberately minister to are hated and despised by those who have conservative politics. It is a prideful human who decides those who are addicted to drugs, those who are disabled, and the poor are all worthless. It is their politics that dictate a person’s value is whatever they can contribute to further capitalism. Whatever is not explicitly stated in the Republican party is sure as Hellfire lived out in action.

              That action says those who look different, speak a different language, have a different culture, and have a different religion are subhuman.

              The only thing Christians should not tolerate is intolerance.

              If we are not willing to open our arms to all of those, we deem unworthy of Love, then we are not Christians. Instead, we merely belong to a social club that likes to get together to talk about how great we are while judging those we think lesser of.

              Like Lucifer did.