Memories of the Hofstadters are pretty minimal: we used to walk down the stairs of the apartment building on Claremont Ave – we were on the 11th floor and they were on 9. I remember the hollow echo of the stairwell, and the dizzying height.
Warning: Rape, Anger, (Long)
This is not an attempt to equivocate. The victim of an assault is the victim and nothing anyone ever says can or should reduce in any way the victim’s subjective assessment of what they’ve experienced.
Warning: War, Death
Administrative note: I made an error attributing the movie and confused a different movie with a release of the same film under a different name. Explanation is [here] – in order to reduce confusion, I have done an edit-pass. If you see comments about how I am talking about the wrong movie, they are correct with respect to the initial version of this posting. Sorry about the confusion!
I don’t know if I have the necessary skill to convey how upsetting this topic is. I wish I could borrow the skills of Orpheus from somewhere, and get other people to watch it, get angry and scared, and – do something. I don’t even know what we can do, trapped as we are in the reality of nationalism and out-of-control militarism.
Threads is about the horrible deaths our political leaders have prepared for us.
If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read any further. But there’s really nothing to spoil. You already know roughly what happens.
They have fought, the bravest, for thousands of years; their record of defeat and victory is mixed but they’ve stood with the desperate, charged gloriously to victory, and – like all warriors – humped gear from one place to another.
You said I was unpatriotic, and that it was people that fought the cold war, who made the world safe for people like me, who sit comfortably and complain about their actions.
Content Warning: Torture
After this, I am going to stop posting about torture, and resume being my usual fake happy soap-making, nihilist, anarchist, technology strategy-loving self. I promise.
I was fortunate to grow up almost completely irreligious; I’ve never felt a need to replace some “lost” faith or to seek my meaning in the gift of the gods. Reading a lot of history as a kid teaches you that the gods elevate and destroy everyone more or less randomly. Epicurus was right – if they exist, their affairs are complex and elevated enough that they’re more or less irrelevant to us.
When someone says “Epicurean” what comes to mind? Usually, it’s hedonism – life spent in the pursuit of pleasure. If we were raised in a christian tradition, we might even hear “Epicurean” as slightly louche or sexually promiscuous. Epicureans, many of us think, are the sort who wear velvet smoking jackets and snort cocaine off the upturned buttocks of prostitutes.
A poster over at Charles Stross’ diary made a comment about nazis[1] that stuck in my mind for days, because he’s very right:
I started writing this as a sort of open snark-gram to Caitlyn Jenner, but I just couldn’t do it. As I started to think things through from different angles, I just got more and more depressed. So, I hit “Move to Trash” and tried again.
Root cause analysis, for me, always comes back to privilege, which is an instance of exceptionalism.