2#: Notes on the Desertification of Signs and Men (Some Private Diagonal)
After America, Baudrillard often returns to this theme of banalisation. With his Stateside serenity having vanished, he frames the unstoppable advance of the desert of banality in increasingly bleak terms. He speaks often of loss – of the Westerner having ‘lost his alterity’, or sometimes ‘his shadow’ (a clear allusion to the Jungian concept of the Shadow). Without these spiritual aspects of his being, the Westerner falls into a state of being ‘identical to himself’. He becomes ‘the banalised individual’, or as we might dub him, the bugman.
Ghosts of the Pandemic (Covidian Aesthetics)
The non-place seeks to bypass the old places, creating instead a series of prescribed journeys and engineered trajectories that render the traveler fundamentally transparent to surveillance, market signals, and external direction. As we stand on the uncertain threshold of a radically reorganised post-COVID world (or simply one where COVID is perpetually present), the sense of the ghostly registers our sense of what Augé calls a “willed coexistence of two different worlds,” the old and the new, and our psychic unwillingness to sever ties entirely with what has gone before.
How the Lizard People Took Over America’s War (American Mind)
The Experts at places like the Center for a New American Security, who count as their largest donors Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, Exxon, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, inveighed to anyone who dare question our continued presence in Afghanistan that this was our duty, our responsibility as free people. If we didn’t support the women in Afghanistan who would? CNAS kept a revolving door with the State Department, hosting familiar faces like Michele Flournoy and Victoria Nuland and John Nagl—who, in 2012, wrote in the Washington Post that success in Afghanistan would require “armed U.S. assistance for decades to come” and only a nation of cowards would abandon the Afghans now.
The average soldier’s job had been shipped off to China anyway, so at least he could enlist and drone strike an 8-year-old Pashtun boy sent to plant IEDs on a dirt road, and when he got home to the sticks, his psyche fried, he could nod off on opioids until his heart stopped. Our Experts demanded he make that bargain, for his own sake, for the sake of justice in the world. And who was this soldier to object to the Experts?
Keep Thy Mind in Hell and Despair Not (Venture with Reality)
…if we are in hell, then why are there so many whose minds are clearly experiencing a different reality? Those who have acclimatized themselves to the fire. It is because we are conditioned to experience reality in a manner which is topsy-turvy, which is upside down. Wherein it is in fact hell which we attempt to ‘ascend’ to. Our reality is upside down, and thus, for those who adore the modern world more and more, they believe themselves to be getting closer to God. As one witnesses the scorn and distrust targeted towards simplicity, being-fruitful, asceticism, sincerity, meekness, politeness, generosity, charity and silence, one equally notices the reverence of hell.
Red Hand Files (Red Hand Files)
…prayer is primarily about listening. It allows the necessary space to experience the subtle intimations of the divine, and to acknowledge God’s divine need — what is required of us.
September 11 and the Humiliation of Empires (The Outpost)
It is crucial to know the price of one’s soul. Often, those who believe theirs has none end up forced to selling themselves for much less, even nothing, in return.
Smoke (Gray Mirror)
What God burns was meant
From the morning it was born to burn.
Vaccine Incentive Calculator (The Outpost)
Although individuals working for Power are human and prone to virtuous feelings themselves, Power itself is not. Public health is not compassion towards the population, but the managing of an asset, which happens to be Human in this case.
When your patient is the collective and not the individual, such measures are the obvious choice – public health professionals work for the public, not for you.
Is this perverse and Satanic? Probably. That’s why we should pray.
Vaccine Incentive Calculator (The Outpost)
Although individuals working for Power are human and prone to virtuous feelings themselves, Power itself is not. Public health is not compassion towards the population, but the managing of an asset, which happens to be Human in this case.
When your patient is the collective and not the individual, such measures are the obvious choice – public health professionals work for the public, not for you.
Is this perverse and Satanic? Probably. That’s why we should pray.
— Charles Curran (@charliebcurran) September 25, 2021