music by b r e t t v a n d o n s e l
Always Again Another Bloomsday: “To Blake, the evil acquired by man in the original sin is foundational for freedom and creative energy. Because it is so central to artists such as himself, he even retroactively attributes his view of Lucifer as hero to Milton, saying he wrote ‘at liberty when of Devils and Hell’ ‘because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ This is also seen through Percy Shelley revising Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, in light of reading Milton’s Satan as hero, as Prometheus Unbound. Prometheus, too, sacrificed himself to bring knowledge to mankind, and was in turn bound like Odysseus.” PreCursor Poets
Gathering Strength on the Horizon: “When threat modeling, one failure mode is to be blasé — embarking on a cruise in mid-March, say. On the other end of the spectrum is catastrophizing — using leaps of logic to reach the worst possible conclusion. Personally, I try to focus on concrete mechanisms and outcomes. In other words, what are you afraid of specifically, and what would it physically entail for that to come to pass? A tool like five whys can be useful for drilling down. Game it out, then brainstorm how to mitigate the risks that you actually face. For example: In what scenario is there a significant marginal benefit to being in rural Idaho versus simply holing up in your apartment for a few days? The answer depends on your exact situation, but that’s how you should think about this — in terms of practical pros and cons.” Sonya Mann
Humanism From the Right: “Right-wing humanism is a revolt against last-man harmlessness.” Nicolas Hausdorf
Notes on Animism and Accretive Theory: “Animism fits well with accretive theory. The concepts of being alive are accreted to the various things such that they do indeed respond in certain ways. We cannot say what ways such things would be. What we do hit upon here is the modality of attaching significance to plant, stone, river etc behaviour as if it has volition. Such a belief requires connecting phenomena together in certain ways e.g. considering the swaying of plants in the wind to be part of their movement and stronger still than that, that such movement might be discernible as communication or some other kind of action. The wind itself could be viewed in such a way, the wind as a being with a volition.” Centre for Experimental Ontology
The Leisure Class, Techno-Conspirators and the Leftovers: “The current crisis of Capitalism is both the manifestation of individualistic, internal competition within the leisure class, and the unavoidable result of its accelerationist, meat grinder-like nature. European Union mandarins, Blackrock finance druids, Silicon Valley technolords and Open Society spooks are all representative types of the contemporary leisure class; the same can be said of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Kanye West. Their common enemy has not changed either: it is the productive class, now incarnated in the Chinese industrial juggernaut, itself a body infested by voracious and parasytical financiers and CCP bureaucrats.” The Outpost
The Polymath Playbook: “The world seeks to label us, categorize us and pack us neatly into boxes. But we are humans, not objects. We are viscous. We dance around the lines between solid and liquid. We change and evolve. We ebb and flow. We shrink and grow. Fluidity is the essence of our humanity.” Salman Ansari
To the Creature Hiding Beneath My Stove: “Would I kill you if you crawled out and stayed put, sniffing around or wiggling your antennas or whatever sensory input system you’ve got? Let me put it this way: when I crushed you, my lizard brain would be completely in harmony with my executive functioning…I don’t even know if you’re a mammal or what. This I do know: You’d be a goner and you’d visit me in my nightmares, making that snap, crackle, pop of death night after night.” Jordana Jacobs
“Zones of Transition:” Micronationalism in the work of J.G. Ballard: “The urge to form micronations, whether as a joke, an experiment or a religious utopia, can in some ways be attributed to globalisation and the failure of political action to ignite the mass imagination. As Ballard once put it, the ‘overriding power of the global economy threatens the autonomy of the nation state, while the ability of politicians to intervene as an equalizing force has faded’. In this vacuum, micronational enclaves thrive.” Ballardianism
