considering your heart is maybe the most throbbing part of your anatomy i find it remarkable how well the normal physiology of man is set up to allow you to forget it exists until something is wrong, such that if you do become aware of it, the untrained default is to assume something is terribly wrong.
it has something of the Fall about it. I think Adam was constantly aware of his circulatory system and as we acquired concupiscence we had to close off awareness because it became too much
it makes sense that people would look at the harry potter books, go “is this an artful selection of fantasies describing one increasingly deranged woman’s libido or is it a portal for true facts about house elves i can memorise” and decide for the latter
>Can you expand on “ is this an artful selection of fantasies describing one increasingly deranged woman’s libido” w.r.t Harry Potter? I read the books as a kid, but was never a big enough fan to have a feel for what you’re referencing
there are two ways to read novels generally: the french way and the english way. the english way is when you read them as instruction manuals for how to behave in society and treat the author as an instructor. the french way is when you read them as a collection of fantasies about dream characters doing things and treat the author as a pervert.
biologists have the worst attitude to acronyms
in this paper we describe a novel phenomena in primates wherein a male primate inserts his penis (P) into the mouth (O) of a willing conspecific (Wc) typically but not necessarily female. We characterise several observed instances of PO insertion (POI) and formulate hypotheses to elucidate the adaptive nature of WcPOI behaviour which we call “cocksucking” (CS)
when it comes to the halacha, if i wish to reduce the Law to a single purpose (silly idea to do, but i can have a little monocausophilia as a treat) i find the racism hypothesis more convincing than the hygiene hypothesis partly because even the highlights of the hygiene hypothesis: the cut your cock/don’t eat strange meats/menstruators reee require less rationalisation if you see them as components of “you have to do them to be Different and Better”
yeah you can come up with some things like pork being slightly more dangerous than other meats in antiquity but have u ever looked at the big 613 mitzvot list — there’s more to it than just how to wash your penis and be a farmer, like there are lots of ways to run a temple with sacrifices and these are some very specific ways being commanded where the rationale turns out to be “don’t do what the heathen (also running functional agrarian societies) do”
the whole passover suite of commandments is so super-rational that it is marked out especially as requiring a booster dose of Meaning every year to keep it going including a story about the most epic time some foreigners all got wiped out and your people survived.
also the big book of moses itself says the reason for these laws is because they are Israel’s side of the covenant, the other side of which being Tetragrammaton’s promise for Israelite supremacy. ritual cleanliness is a part of this but considering it’s part of a big list including a hundred ways to say “idolaters reeeee” it is strange to ascribe it as The Cause.
of course it is strange to ascribe any one thing as The Cause because the law expands beyond any attempt at rationalisation.
there is some complicated knot to be described about how, despite linguistic *science* being woefully unknown and unconscious, linguistic *engineering* albeit at a proto-scientific level, is something people are acutely aware of but which, lacking as they do a linguistic-scientific consciousness, is done with scientific terms recruited in a haphazard way.
you can only get yourself so worked up by reading posts. you need to take more drugs. you need to develop paranoid delusions about your friends. you need to egg your gang up to some punk war with another gang of junkies and share your theories about reptoid dinosaur folk from eden once you have the poseurs at your feet — they will listen. you need to make people believe you killed someone. you need to become a drug dealer. you need police involvement. you need to <sixth degree information redacted>. you need tertiary syphilis. you need to be a Western terminal for a people smuggling gang. you need to be Zomian.
>History WILL judge the school boards who are trying to ban Maus, though. Yes teens can get it outside of school but the decision that kids shouldn’t access Maus in school isn’t a neutral decision. The decision is motivated by reluctance to teach a historical genocide from the point of view of survivors and the children of survivors. That’s a stupid reason to ban a book. Maus is a comic book about Jewish mice. It’s not as graphic as the actual holocaust. It’s not an infohazard like idk, Isis Radicalization Weekly, or the Beginner’s Guide to Anthrax.
yes, certainly
on that day, the day of His great ire, after all mortal things have been calcined by the fire, then i, the YAMEN RUNNER, who served HIS HIGHNESS DAVID and HER HOLINESS SIBYL, shall stand up before all the sons and daughters of NABEE ADAM (on Him be the blessings and the peace of Allah) and bid in a loud, angel-trumpet-magnified voice
O! be upstanding my brethren for we are on holy ground! see, my lord HISTORY approacheth the bench to give arraignment of all our secret deeds! Quake! O quake! Oyez! Oyez! In the matter of HISTORY versus YOU, PERSONALLY. The JUDGE is coming!
HISTORY shall approach the bench, clearly a late model JEHOVAH resuscitated centuries ago to be the Judge of the Change at Potsdam where he was given a hasty shave, some dark brown Wohlstand-Brot-und-Schönheit dyestuff liberated from a nearby factory about the remaining visible hair and a tasteful turtleneck in matching brown to hide any Covenantal markings, but no less terrifying for all that
it shall be a long day, a long docket, Brother Listings Clerk dealing with many wretched sinners who wish to get their cases heard first before anyone else, mothers pleading for their wayward sons, cowards hiding in the archive rooms, risking premature annihilation by being pressed inside the mechanical shelving which wheels back and forth as the YAMEN RUNNER of HISTORY comes down to seek and bring out a tatty cabbagelike bundle for the attention of the court and, of my charity, bringing down cool water and words to apologise for the delay.
very often the faults of these timid souls are pathetically minor and it is such a case when finally after [INDETERMINATE ETERNITYLIKE INTERVAL] has passed, CYRUS SCHMUCKER, COMPTROLLER OF PECKER HOLLER COUNTY SCHOOLBOARD is brought before HISTORY
The hearing always begins, overseen as it is by a perfect Judge with such excellent administrative staff, by tracing the sin right back to its origin I REMEMBER ADAM WHO TASTED OF THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, WHO BEGOT SETH WHO STOOD IN PLACE OF HIS MURDERED BROTHER, WHO BEGOT… the genealogy goes on for some time since HISTORY, you may be sure, knew your father back in the day but eventually reaches… WHO BEGOT MARTIN WHO DRANK TOO MUCH AND COULD NOT KEEP HIS TEMPER, WHO BEGOT CYRUS…
and what did CYRUS do to make him quake so before my lord HISTORY?
CYRUS
CYRUS
CYRUS WHO VOTED IN A SCHOOL BOARD MEETING NOT TO AUTHORISE A PARTICULAR COMIC BOOK FOR USE IN SCHOOL LESSONS ON THE GROUNDS OF ALL THE CUSSING AND WHATNOT NOT BEING THE KIND OF EXAMPLE TO SET TO THESE KIDS I AM SURE WE CAN FIND SOMETHING BETTER
What shall my lord HISTORY do?
HISTORY shall judge CYRUS!
It is the sentence of HISTORY that CYRUS SCHMUCKER SON OF MARTIN, SON OF… (again, my lord HISTORY is mindful of antecedents when proclaiming sentence) along with all his ancestors hall suffer the SECOND AND FINAL DEATH.
YAMEN RUNNER, ERASE THEIR NAMES FROM THE BOOK OF LIFE AND CAST THEM INTO THE FIRE THAT CONSUMETH
this is HISTORY’S inevitable judgment.
the funny thing about the Masons is that they are not very Freemasonic. they aren’t organised into lodges — the word I think is only mentioned in a historical passage where the origin of the Masons is described. the concept of having a Head of All True Masons is not *unknown* irl but it is not the organising principle of Freemasonry which is, of course, a deeply republican institution. nobody is described as doing any funny handshakes, or wearing aprons, or anything really that makes them look like anything but Conservative Future golfers.
You could say that the Masons still do the funny handshakes and so on but then why is it not mentioned? Taboo? But most of the sexual tension in the books comes about from people pointedly breaking these, with the chief Masonic form of it being the Imperial Oath (also not very Freemasonic), and *everyone knows* that Freemasons are the funny handshake and aprons people, like they go on marches dressed like that.
What happened to Freemasonry?
the reason the saints were thrown out by the reformers is because both the gospel-as-written and north European political aspirations are about unmediated power relations, made fair by virtue of this unmediated quality — by the gospel everyone is to address God as Father equally and live together in that same collective unity, and similarly the ideal Northern society is composed of a coalition of free men uniting in moots, possibly under an elected King whom you have let into your heart.
Mediterranean society, on the other hand, in its ideal form is rich in patron-client relations but ones which, unlike real ones, are characterised by the patron being distant, infinitely wealthy, involved almost entirely in arcane politics which you are shielded from entirely and therefore reasonably and realistically beneficent within limited spheres, and therefore not also jealous of you seeking other patrons. is there a god-emperor at the top? maybe, yes, but that’s what your patron’s arcane politics is about. in the very worst cases you can just get your grandmother to speak to the mother of the god-emperor.
i think the part between Archimedes and Kepler is deleted, even today in a very multiracial and global because the myth of the history of science is really very shoddy and doesn’t withstand much investigation, like most kinds of scientific autonarration.
It’s not *entirely* due to racial chauvinism, because solidly european philosophers, mathematicians, alchemists and wizards from the period get missed out too.
you can make the standard history of science myth coherent by missing out the greek prologue entirely, and then it becomes a straightforward and recognisable tale about a group of occultists doing the classic occultist trick of “yes and…”ing each others stories except for once, and to everyone’s palpable astonishment, it works to convince people outside of the magic circle too.
the story begins in the 15th century when outsiders (read: nobles and capitalists interested, as they are now, in such things as navigation and complicated weapons systems) start to became convinceable that this philosophy adds value to their lives, and so when it became necessary to produce and accumulate the collection of elevator pitches, cryptographic proofs of work, marketing materials, crankish but attractive side projects, deceptively illuminating explanations, genuinely useful pedagogic aids and general techbro ego-inflation that comprises “The History of Science”
the justification for missing the greek prologue out is by observing that at the time this Great Philosophical Improv got started, basically every intellectual endeavour had to forge a similar fake patrimony: see in this period the great number of kings claiming to be Emperors, or poets not being able to write a simple bit of occasional poetry without having to put a Homeric epithet in every line, or how every new building had to adhere to Vitruvian norms, or the Protestants attempting to recover the spiritual clarity of antiquity. From this view, the ancient Greek stuff is marketing fluff akin to that of *another* group of “yes and” merchants who got going at that time — the Masons.
