American Cultland — Greek Life Enculturating Debauched Robots: “…brutal lessons of totalitarianism and conformity. Indoctrination is responsibility. Abuse is friendship. Dissipation and lasciviousness is the height of living. And so, many hundreds of thousands automatons are born per year. ”
An Everyday Mercy: “‘A child doesnβt learn metaphysics by reading books. He learns it by looking into his fatherβs eyes during a thunderstorm.β HeΒ sees that the world is good. And he comes to know that everything is going to be alright.”
Don’t Return the Shopping Cart: “…almost every internet meme of note can be traced back to 4chan. Just as in the real world, the most shitty places are also the most fertile. Sterile environments donβt grow anything.”
Is Call of Duty a Government Psyop? “When Edward Snowden disclosed thousands of state documents a decade ago, itΒ quickly became clearΒ that agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Defense have for years used video games for counterterrorism operations, with spies conducting surveillance operations insideΒ World of Warcraft.”
Narrative Deserts: “As an interesting aside that breaks the pattern of narratives in Places vs Non-places, the Wim Wenders movie Paris Texas is set mainly in Non-places – from the desert of West Texas, motorways, sidewalks, hotel rooms, and motels. This works for the movie because Paris, Texas is about a man whose background and identity are unknown for most of the movie. The non-places lend their atmosphere perfectly to slowly unveiling who this man is and what his story is.”
Sacred Talk: “…treating an area X of life as sacred has an important tradeoff: we will put more energy into X, but will also think less clearly about X. ”
The Open Spiral: “…connection with ancestral spirits, and with the monsters that attend them, requires nautical and riparian journeys. Already in Book XI of the Odyssey, travel to the land of the dead involves an ambivalent crossing of sea and riverβOcean and the Styx are both mentioned. For the subsequent epic tradition, from Virgil, through Dante, passages into the lands of darkness, or the occult realmsβthe underworld, Hades, or hellβinvolve river-crossings by ferry. On a partially independent lineage, Beowulf passes down through the waters of a marsh to reach and slay Grendelβs Mother, the ‘accursed monster of the deep.’ These journeys have to be counted among our most profound structures of myth, trans-religious in scope. It is a measure, then, of Conradβs greatness that he radicallyβand compellinglyβreconceives them.”
Why We Need the Canon Wars: “Prophecy is rigorously inter-translatable with time-travel, which means it is essentially implausible. If prophecy ever occurs, at all, the way of things cannot be as it seems. What prophecy then says, primarily, is almost entirely independent of its message. Whether there is prophecy means more than anything it might say. So, is there prophecy? To settle this question, and any others of comparable gravity, falls not to us, but to Solemn Providence. It is here, exactly, that we are divided from our enemies. Sacred destiny stands upon one side, sovereign politics upon the other.”