Academia represents both the best and worst in our species. It is through academic institutions have helped humans share knowledge, helping us to build on our already massive body of giants. It's a cliche statement but Isaac Newton was correct when he wrote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I've personally experienced this phenomenon, and with great gratitude, I thank past writers for the concepts and ideas that now inform my own writing. I may not be a literary giant in any sense of the word, but the work I produce for my personal enjoyment is a culmination of all I have learned from my predecessors.

On the darker side of things, academia is a highly bureaucratic system often molded by politics over knowledge. This type of environment tends to attract some of the worst kinds of people in society - intelligent but malicious. They crave the prestige of being part of the intellectual club - perhaps even adding the coveted Dr. to their name - and climbing the power structures.

Academia is far from the only place that functions in this manner, and I'm sure you can think of other workplaces that inevitably end up what millennials would call “toxic”. Many factors lead to this situation, and today I'd like to discuss just one element - mean girls.

To be clear from the outset, this isn't a post that aims to attack women or criticize their existence in the workplace. I believe that any country that doesn't allow women in the workforce instantly halves their intellectual capacity. I am focusing on one kind of woman in the workplace and the effects they tend to have.

With that being said, I do apologize if I come across as misogynistic at any point. If you feel that I am being sexist, please comment.

What is meanness?

Anyone has the capacity to be mean. We've all been mean at some point, some of us have done it today.

At this point, I should make something clear. Meanness, as we use them, refers to intentionally enacted cruelty. It requires a malicious mind, which we all have. So here's an example to show what I am attempting to illustrate. A soldier kills their enemy with a headshot. That's violent, but it's not mean. The soldier then walks up to their victim and spits in their face. Now we're dealing with meanness. The intent is cruelty for cruelty's sake.

An important aspect of cruelty is that the one acting cruelly expects to receive nothing except the knowledge that their target is in pain or suffering, either physically or psychologically. Another example. A group of soldiers gain access to the dressing rooms of their opponents. They take all the clothing and equipment to gain an edge in the war. That's not mean, that's warfare. They also collectively poop in the middle of the room. Now that is mean. They gain nothing but the knowledge that their opponents will be humiliated when they find a steaming shit. Cruelty for its own sake.

Taking things a little further, when we talk about meanness in the modern day, we almost are never referring to heinous acts. A mother abusing their child is mean, but we'd seldom call it that. We'd use a “stronger” word like heinous. If the mother pranks the child by waking them up with ice water, that's what we'd call mean.

What do mean girls do?

First, we'd need to outline what a mean girl is. These are women who have advanced into adulthood and continued high school behavior but with the benefit of experience and finesse. They're not going to trip you on the corridor, call you a b-word, or tell you to your face that you're not invited to their party. No, it's a different monster altogether.

When the mean girl acts, it's often so well-crafted that you can never truly call it out. Genuine cases of “microaggressions”. They're lawful evil, never breaking the rules as they break your soul. Oftentimes, it'll be years later and you'll still be hurt by what a mean girl said

because the statement itself was innocuous but obviously deeply insulting

We need to talk about two species of mean girls - the equal and the senior.

The senior mean girl

When I mention the senior mean girl, I'm referring to a woman who is a higher rank than you in the institution. It doesn't have to be too much. She's just the project manager, for example. It gets worse, of course. The senior mean girl can be your boss, full-time supervisor, teacher, or department manager.

Carole Stephens states:

Mean girl behavior can be used to demonstrate the power a senior female attorney has over a novice female attorney. When treatment is flagrant, brazen, and unashamed, itcan be expressed in sexual harassment, physical abuse, biased hiring practices, or exposing women to a hostile, male-dominated workplace.

https://www.proquest.com/openview/f72a25218726baada8d740f118be4ff1/1

I've experienced such a mean girl. They weren't delusional about who they were and what they were doing. They explicitly told me “I like fighting”. I promise you they feel 0 guilt about what they do and in some cases they see themselves as morally justified. During my time in university, I got a glimpse of the environment. Holy shit, they literally make each other cry with their words, and scheme against each other for the same Chad. It's mind-blowing. My current workplace has like 2 women total and it's so based, none of this nonsense happens. Just goals to reach and shitposting on Slack. Women are incapable of constructing such a workplace. A majority female workplace will eventually involve someone making someone else cry.

Mean girls use the following strategies:

• Putting you in impossible situations

You are verbally given Section A of a task to complete. When you're done, you're scolded for not doing Section B as well. There are many other ways this can happen. The point is that you're made to seem completely incompetent for your inability to complete a task you were never fully instructed to do.

• Hanging their power over you

It's never explicitly stated of course. They'll never say “I'm the boss, you do what I say.” The threats are much more subtle. It'll be something like “if you keep doing that, we won't be colleagues anymore.” She is straight up telling you “do what I say or you're fired.” The consequence is that you know feel like you're walking on eggshells at work, terrified that you might piss her off. Of course, this behavior isn't exclusive to women, but it's definitely part of the mean girl arsenal.

• Displays of power

This can be as simple as standing over you as you work. You can't say anything about it because she's not doing anything wrong. But when you're sitting and someone is standing and looking down on you, it's obvious they want you to intimately know the power difference between the two of you.

Sometimes it's little verbal comments meant to make you feel small or stupid. For example, a meeting tomorrow begins at 8am. Mean girl: “And that means 8am, Sneedman. Alright?.” Nothing explicitly bad was said, but it was still an act of minimizing someone by suggesting they're so flawed they need special instructions to function.

• Public shaming and humiliation

This is perhaps the most powerful tool in their arsenal. A mean girl with power over you will never call you into their office for a private discussion if they have a problem. Instead, they'll wait for a meeting where all the staff is there, then you will be chastised.

They have to wait for a public crowd to start a full explanation of every frickup you've had at work. If they have enough power, it can be an astonishing thing to witness. When I was in university, I witnessed a woman with power completely eviscerate someone during a meeting, going full-on personal, to a room full of silence.

One of the biggest benefits of being the senior mean girl is that nobody can do anything about it. Nothing at all. If a senior mean girl snaps at you at work until you're trembling, then that's that. Nobody's going to help you nor will she face consequences.

There are so many ways to be absolutely vicious while still remaining perfectly within bureaucratic limits. They are the masters of putting up a finger to your face but never truly touching you. The senior mean girl can verbally attack you in a room full of people and nobody will help you for two important reasons:

1. They are afraid of becoming the next target

2. They don't want to lose their job or jeopardize their career

That's why co-workers will stay silent when they see bullying in the workplace. The bully controls their paychecks! You know what's going on is wrong but you also gotta eat.

The shaming game

Senior mean girls in power in academia will often play this game, and be sure that it is a game. It begins like this: You wait for a public event, somewhere liberals of your ilk will be convening. If it is a regular conference where academics give presentations followed by a crowd asking questions, you raise your hand, you point to your target, and you claim that they are a racist. Your reasoning doesn't have to be too strong. You can point to a single sentence taken out of context in a book they wrote a decade earlier. You can accuse them of saying something racist in the very presentation they were giving that day, whether or not the speaker intended to be racist.

The target is now caught in a Kafka trap. If they deny the claim, they seem more racist. If they admit it, they are now labeled a racist and may be shunned by the academic community. What happens next? Well, during my time in my department, some cried, some did actually fight back, sticking to their principles, but most were simply dejected, remained silent, and offered no rebuttal.

Mean girls are bullies in the truest sense. A bully isn't someone who attacks someone of the same power level. That's just a fight. A bully is someone who enacts cruelty on someone incapable of fighting back.

The consequence? You go to work walking on eggshells, afraid you might trigger the senior mean girl who genuinely has the ability to frick up your life on a whim. Never get yourself in this position. Always have an escape route, money saved, and don't tolerate mean girls in power for too long.

The equal mean girl

Most of the time, you'll be dealing with the equal mean girl. She works in the same office as you, maybe even the same job. On the surface, nothing is differentiating the two of you as professionals, but the mean girl will make sure you feel much smaller than them.

Her plan of attack is almost always shunning. The mean girl will never tell you to frick off. It's more subtle than that. You just don't get invited to events, then the mean girl makes it clear that you missed out by describing the event while you're in earshot. The pain of being shunned is the aim. She wants to upset you.

Shunning can also take the form of convincing you that nobody would want to work with you. It's not that you're arbitrarily being shunned - it's happened because you're deathly flawed in some way - you're too fat, not smart enough, you're a liar, and in some cases “you're a racist!”.

In addition to shunning, you also get gossip which is an insanely effective way to frick up someone's life whether you're male or female. I'm being serious, if you don't like someone and you can't fight them, spread rumors effectively instead.

The best rumors have an inkling of truth in them: “Sneedman visits the pig farm.” They then get twisted: “Sneedman fricks pigs, here is a picture of him going to the pig farm.” As many men wiser than myself have stated: when women want to hurt you, they go for reputational damage.

They may take a genuine flaw of yours - maybe you do lie sometimes. This flaw will then be magnified and spread to everyone to ensure that nobody even talks to you anymore. You're no longer a person who told a lie - you're a pathological liar, and nobody should speak to you ever because nothing you say is true. Viola! Now you have no reputation and you're shunned.

Lastly, mean girls are linguistic geniuses. They know how to say the perfect things with plausible deniability yet still clearly being harsh. I'll give you an example. Once a woman asked me why I'm vegetarian. I explained that I had read some books that changed my mind. Her response “Oh, so you just read those books.” There's nothing obviously objectional about that, but it's an obvious insult. Through this strategy, you are stuck with the pain of being insulted but with the inability to insult back without looking like the instigator.

Carole Stephens states it best:

Mean girl incivility encourages women to engage in unkind exchanges while remaining affable and approachable. The more socially adept a woman is, the better she is at engaging in mean girl incivility in a discrete way.

Conclusion

These tactics are psychologically damaging. Many don't recover from these experiences of being a target of mean girls at work. A lot of the research is geared toward mean girls doing it to each other, but rest assured mean girls can also frick up men.

With legs full of scars I have permanently darned myself to inceldom. Even if a woman did like my personality, she would still have to deal with the mess I've made of myself. The worst part is that I know it's not over. The darkness will return and I will crawl back to the razorblade as I always have.

I am forced to accept that I'll never experience intimacy and love with a woman despite craving it. In addition to being 5 foot 1, I am also covered in self-harm scars.

What does a hug feel like? I don't think I've experienced one this year. Also, have you ever dealt with a mean girl? I'd like to hear the stories.

I previously wrote about the history of psychedelic literature in Europe. I thought I'd round it out by briefly discussing American psychedelic literature. Hope you enjoy it.

In the Beginning....

According to Michael Boon, Silas Wier Mitchell is considered one of the earliest Western writers to describe mescaline. This claim is also made by McKenna, who argues that “in 1897 Philadelphia novelist and physician Silas Weir Mitchell became the first gringo to describe peyote intoxication”. As McKenna points out in more informal terms, Mitchell was an American writer and physician, and he is partially known for prescribing the rest treatment to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who would later write of it in The Yellow Wallpaper.

In 1896, Mitchell wrote an essay describing his experiences with peyote. In the essay, he describes hallucinations that gave him a sense of profundity and includes imagery of nature and the universe that evokes the transcendent. Colour is a recurring theme in his report. When he closed his eyes, he saw huge, fruit-like stones that were “green, purple, red, and orange; never clear yellow and never blue”. He acknowledges his inability to describe the intensity of these “gorgeous colour-fruits” and claims that all the colours he had seen before were “dull as compared to these”. Much of the imagery he sees is related to nature and is described in ways that are fantastical and imaginative. He mentions hallucinations of “soft golden clouds” and “things, like green birds”.

Not all the imagery described is natural. He also hallucinates manmade structures that evoke death and the divine. This appears in the form of an ancient Egyptian tomb that he sees. Themes of death introduced by the tomb are amplified by the “funerary orations” he hears, and the themes of the divine are further highlighted by the “priests in ornate headdress” that circumambulate the tomb. His senses and his perception of reality are also affected by his ingestion of peyote. He describes seeing a huge bird claw of stone from which hung a fragment of a substance that seemed to represent “Time as well as [the] immensity of Space”.

According to Boon, Mitchell's writing represents “one of the first explorations of visual abstraction in modern culture”. However, Mitchell's writing is not entirely novel and features literary elements that are common within European psychedelic literature. For example, he makes liberal use of colour in much the same way that Hoffmann and Benjamin do. Furthermore, Mitchell's writing also evokes the divine, a Romantic element, much like the European poet Gautier does. Lastly, Mitchell's psychedelic writing features death. As previously discussed, European writers such as Hoffman and Jünger also feature death in their psychedelic writing, using the concept to symbolise a “Great Transition” as Jünger describes it. Similarly, the death theme occurs to Mitchell as he transitions to a state of altered consciousness where contradictions and surrealism blend with familiar elements of his life. He is whisked away from his old life and sees himself reincarnated as a “fur-capped Mongol huntsman, cold-eyed and cruel, bow in hand, striking down a running rabbit from the back of a racing, gaunt half-wild stallion”.

From comparing Mitchell to the aforementioned European writers, recurring patterns regarding the use of the death and rebirth theme becomes apparent. For psychedelic writers, death is symbolic of a psychological transition that leads to rebirth. However, at the time in which Mitchell writes, this concept has yet to be fleshed out from a psychoanalytical perspective. As American psychedelic writers are further explored, the recurring theme of death and rebirth being used symbolically to represent psychological transition will become more ubiquitous and defined as psychedelics become an unignorable issue within politics, art, science, and other sectors of civil life.

Cannabis

Although mescaline is strongly associated with American psychedelic literature, several other psychedelics are also significant influences. Cannabis, for instance, makes multiple appearances in American psychedelic literature. While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how cannabis was introduced to North America, Suman Chandra et al argue that evidence points to the fact that “Louis Hébert (1575–1627), the apothecary (pharmacist) of Samuel de Champlain (1580–1635), a French navigator, cartographer, and explorer, introduced cannabis to American settlers in 1606”. Originally, the cannabis plant was used to produce hemp, which can be used to make a wide variety of resources including textiles, rope, and paper to name a few. However, between 1840 and 1900, cannabis was used for medicinal purposes in North America and was administered to cure ailments such as “tetanus, epilepsy, rheumatism, rabies, and as a muscle relaxant”. For some time, cannabis-infused medicine was freely sold in North American pharmacies, but this would not last for long.

Boon claims that the “first American writer to report on his own experiences with cannabis was the travel writer and diplomat Bayard Taylor” who writes about it in his text titled The Lands of Saracen (1855). Cannabis was not always tolerated in the USA and, as Boon notes, the end of the nineteenth century brought with it “a wave of paranoia about the drug”. Consequently, “a number of anti-cannabis laws were passed in at the state level in the early twentieth century”. Boon argues that these laws were motivated by fears of Mexican immigrants and blacks committing crimes under the influence of cannabis. A large influence in the criminalisation of cannabis was Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, who referenced the assumed link between the words ‘hashish' and ‘assassin' to argue for a link between cannabis and crime and largely ignored scientific work on the drug. As previously discussed, this etymological link is likely false. Nevertheless, he played a role in the “passing of the 1937 law against cannabis products”.

One of the ways that cannabis gained popularity in the USA was through its association with music, namely jazz. As Boon notes, “marijuana was used in black communities, especially in New Orleans, where it was associated with the jazz culture of the brothels”. Furthermore, by “the 1930s, there were a number of jazz songs about marijuana”. The love of cannabis did not stay in New Orleans, however. In Harlem, there emerged ‘tea-pads' where “people went to get high and listen to a record player, or jukebox”. Because of this association of jazz with cannabis, “one of the narcotics bureau's first targets was jazz musicians”.

LSD

LSD is another psychedelic drug that plays a prominent role in American psychedelic literature. It had as much, if not more, of a social impact in the USA as it had in Europe. In the 1950s and 1960s, LSD gained popularity among therapists and psychologists in the USA. Therapists claimed that when low doses of LSD were administered to their patients, “their patients' Ego defences relaxed, allowing them to bring up and discuss difficult or repressed material with relative ease”. By the end of the 1960s, “psychoanalytic LSD therapy was routine practice in the tonier precincts of Los Angeles, such as Beverly Hills”, and received plenty of positive attention.

With the increasing popularity of psychedelics in the USA came charismatic figures who associated themselves with these substances. Al Hubbard is one of those figures, and he occupies a prominent position in the history of psychedelics. Hubbard was born in Kansas and, although it is difficult to confirm many facts about his life, “his FBI file suggests he had links to the CIA during the 1950s”. In 1952, he “obtained some LSD, and had a literally life-changing experience”. Following this event, he developed a messianic complex, believing that “it was up to him to bring the new gospel of LSD, and the chemical itself, to as many people as he possibly could”. Using his government connections, he was able to acquire copious amounts of LSD from Sandoz and it is believed that he introduced an estimated “six thousand people to LSD between 1951 and 1966, in an avowed effort to shift the course of human history”.

He developed a form of psychedelic therapy that took patients out of the clinical settings of hospitals and instead put them in more comfortable locations with “pictures and music, flowers and diamonds”, to prime “patients for a mystical revelation”. Changing the setting has the potential to alter how an individual experiences a psychedelic session because, as Grof explains, “people in LSD psychotherapy often manifest seemingly inappropriate and highly exaggerated reactions to various environmental stimuli”. Hence, “it makes a great difference whether the session takes place in a busy laboratory milieu, in a comfortable homelike environment, in a sterile medical setting with white coats and syringes, or in a place of great natural beauty”.

Shamans

Pollan argues that Hubbard understood that the cognitive disruptions brought on by psychedelics could be effective for “breaking destructive patterns of thought and proposing new perspectives in their place”, hence his “greatest contribution to modern psychedelic therapy was to introduce the tried-and-true cowtools of shamanism, or at least a Westernized version of it”. Broadly defined, shamans are figures who “enter trance to provide services”, usually of a spiritual nature. Some definitions include restrictive criteria, such as requiring the practitioner to make use of “death-and-rebirth initiations, soul journey trances, and animal helper spirits”. The trance the shaman enters “represents a temporary state that appears psychologically”, and associated behaviours during trance include, but are not limited to, “trembling, shuddering, horripilation, swooning, falling to the ground, yawning, lethargy, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, protruding eyes, large extrusions of the tongue, paralysis of a limb, [etc.]”. The cultural narratives of the society of the shaman will determine how the trance is interpreted. For example, as Singh explains, some cultures might frame the trance state as spirit possession, soul journeying, or a combination of these and many other possibilities. Typically, an individual must undergo an initiation to become a shaman. Initiations usually involve rituals that feature “death and rebirth, ritual surgery, magical surgery of body parts”, or dramatic experiences.

Despite the scepticism the lens of Western rationality exercises over shamanism, the concept gained a foothold within America's psychedelic culture. This is partially due to the aforementioned North American tribes who had incorporated psychedelic plants into shamanic rituals for many years. However, figures such as Hubbard were also pivotal in expanding the school of thought which viewed psychedelics in a manner that shamans would – as cowtools to evoke emotional and psychological change for one's betterment.

Conclusion

America has a long history of psychedelic literature that continues with figures such as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Terrence McKenna. However, they deserve posts of their own. Tune in next time when I delve into the Beat Generation. Writing = no cutting.

porn starts after the * * *

We all hear the familiar security chime and the door swing open. I perk up, quickly set down the ladle and briskly walk—no, almost run—to the door. I throw my arms around William and bury my face in his chest.

“Hi, honey,” he says. I can feel and hear the vibrations of his voice in his chest.

“Hi baby,” I say. He brings his hand around my head and runs his fingers through a thin lock of my hair that managed to escape my bun. “I made chicken marsala, your favorite!” I tell him.

He lets out a soft chuckle, and we come to the table with the two kids.

“Mom, I'm hungry,” Johnny says.

“Now that Dad's home, we can eat. Boys, go serve yourselves. And Johnny, help your little brother out.”

“Okay,” Johnny says to me. He gets up out of his seat and walks over to Kelvin, who's reading a picture book about cars and trucks. “Kelvin, put that away now, we're going to eat dinner now.”

“Okay,” Kelvin says in his cute little voice. William and I have a beat of shared happiness watching our little Johnny helping out his brother.

Johnny goes to the stovetop and serves himself. Kelvin obediently stands behind his older brother, watching his every move. Johnny turns to him and serves him, though probably a little too much for his smaller stomach. My husband and I follow behind, serve ourselves food, and when we're all sitting down, we say grace and dig in.

I finish wiping down the countertop. The boys are in bed and William is showering after a long day's work. After putting away the leftovers and closing the fridge door, my eye is drawn to a family picture held under a magnet. I take the picture off of the fridge door and smile. It's a picture with me, my husband, and our two kids, taken a year or two ago by my sister while our family was playing at the local park. I love it so much because of the genuine joy on all of our faces, and because of my pride in the family that I have built. My hand feels the growing bump in my stomach, and I know that the picture will be outdated soon.

William steps out of the bathroom, hair dripping wet with steam billowing out of the open door. Almost instinctually, I perk up out of bed and bite my upper lip seeing his body like that, only obscured by a small towel. He smirks and starts running his hands through my hair, and I let out some kind of instinctual sound that I can't quite describe. William presses my face against his towel, his peepee throbbing underneath. I can smell his pheromones through it.

He lets go of the towel and it falls to the floor. His peepee flops onto my face, and I instinctually start sucking. He palms the top of my head with his hand, pushing my head towards and back, towards and back again. From so much experience, my gag reflex has been completely disintegrated. His peepee moves back and forth in my mouth, inching farther and farther back in my throat every time. It feel so good to feel and taste every square inch of his peepee filling my mouth and throat. His imposing figure—as seen from down where my eyes are—only makes me hornier.

Eventually I need to take a breath. I push back, and William's hand seems reluctant, but it lets go. I gasp. I grab his peepee, ready to keep sucking but William has other plans. He scoops me up and throws me on the bed, turns me around so that I'm laying on my back and my kitty is facing him. He grabs the waistband of my leggings and my panties and tries to take them off, but the leggings end up inside out, still snugly attached around my ankles.

“Stupid woman,” he says to me. “Why wouldn't you be ready for me?”

I giggle, say sorry, and kick my legs up to finish taking them off. As soon as they're off, he grabs me by my waist and brings me closer to them so my kitty is flush with the edge of the bed, and he goes inside. His hands on my waist, he pulls me into him and thrusts into me. My heart absolutely pounding, butterflies swarming about from pure love, I let out an involuntary moan, trying to keep quiet for the kids.

He thrusts into me more and more. He's so horny that I can feel his rapid heartrate beating through his peepee. Every bit of warmth he transfers to me, every inch he thrusts—it fuels my absolute desire for him, for him alone and no one else. I let out another sound, this one a deliberate release of my pent-up joy.

His right hand grows curious and moves its way up my chest under my shirt. He rolls my shirt up and grabs my breast as he fricks me. I make eye contact with him and smile, and then in pleasure I bite my upper lip. His breathing is heavy and labored.

He goes harder, his hip bones smashing harder and harder into mine. “Mmmmmmm~!” I say, my upper lip still bit. I wrap my legs around him, feeling what I can of his musculature with my thighs and the sides of my legs. He puts his hand on around my throat, and presses his thumb against my trachea. He lets out a soft grunt under his increasingly labored breaths.

I can feel in the rhythm of his thrusts and redness of his face that he's about to c*m. I wrap my legs around him and pull him close into me. As he exhales an exhilarated “Frick” under his breath, I feel the c*m squirt out of his peepee and into me. I moan now and c*m too.

He breathes heavily, exhausted. He kisses me and the baby in my stomach and then flops down to me. I lay my head on his chest, and he runs his fingers through my hair a few times. We fall asleep like this.

i wrote this myself. it is an extremely personal fantasy that feels almost strange to share online.

the most painful part about all of this is that this (or something close to it) is a reality for many women. it's just that God decided to curse me for some reason and now i am forced to be an onlooker to the life which i so desperately want to live. i believe that people are wired to want to live a certain way, so some women want to start families with their husbands in the suburbs, and others don't and would rather live in a lesbian relationship in the city. i dont have anything against the latter, its just that i have been cursed to be wired for the former. and it is thus that the life that i was made for only exists in my head.

i seriously think about killing myself everyday, maybe then i'll have a chance to be reborn as a woman, or at least be dead and not have to live through this.

I've been so depressed I've cried while masturbating, but I think I see the light once again. Everyone will reach turning points in their life. How you react in these moments determines who you are, what your resolve is, and how you will fare in the grueling game of life. Life isn't fair. Some people will find a relatively easy path, and will never have to encounter some of the harsher aspects of life such as poverty, loneliness, and social ostracization.

The person you are at birth will not be the person you are when you die (unless you die shortly after birth). Your personality will dissolve and rebuild several times, and you will become an entirely new person. For today's post, I'd like to describe the process of death and rebirth, and how drugs can help.

I really like the current font the site is using. They call it sewer side because the people who do it are shit. I wish my darn uber eats order would hurry up.

Carl Jung and Rebirth

I'll introduce Jung very briefly. He was a psychiatrist who was born in Switzerland in 1875. His father, Paul Jung, was a “Reformed Protestant vicar” (Wehr 1987; 9. while his mother, Emilie Preiswerk, suffered from mental illness. As a child, Jung had a deep interest in nature and, though he was surrounded by the church, he was unable to achieve any affinity for all the dogmatic side of religion. Paul was tolerant of his son's choices, hence when Carl decided that he would have to forego the feast of communion because nothing of religious importance happened for him there, Paul accepted.

This would not mark the end of Jung's relationship with religion, however, and his interest in the spiritual life of human beings would become a lifelong pursuit. In 1895, Jung began attending the University of Basel where he enrolled in the medical curriculum. There, Jung proved himself to be quite the polymath. In addition to being influenced by the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, he also familiarised himself with all the occult-spiritist literature. Jung's life took a turn when he picked up a copy of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's textbook on psychiatry, which motivated him to abandon his studies in medicine to pursue psychiatry. In this field, he would have a notable intellectual impact.

Although not completely paralleling Freud's theories, Jung's theories branch off from them. He, like Freud, believes in the unconscious. However, he does not conceptualize it as a psychic realm exclusively housing repressed or forgotten contents. This, according to Jung, only describes the personal unconscious. There is a deeper layer of the unconscious Jung terms the collective unconscious which has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.

Jung believes that the collective unconscious is populated by archetypes. In short, in much the same way that animals in the same species will inherit physical traits from their ancestors, so too are there psychic apparatus that are inherited in the form of archetypes. One of the archetypes Jung highlights is the rebirth archetypes which is ubiquitous in several religions and myths around the world. The most popular, of course, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ who defeats death. Though Jesus is divine, he takes the form of man, which in some ways suggests that we are all capable of overcoming death.

The death we overcome is not biological, it is psychic. You would be correct to also describe it as a transformation. A transformation can occur through an enlargement of personality whereby external contents are assimilated by the individual. Although the source of the personality enlargement is external, the individual must have within themselves the capacity to grow.

It's no coincidence that our heroes typically defy death. Allow me to explain. Jung lists identification with a cult hero as a means of bringing about the transformation of the personality. This occurs when one identifies with a god or hero who transforms in a sacred ritual. According to Jung, many religions and cult ceremonies are expressly intended to bring this identity about. In Christianity, he explains, the religion's theology came to include this form of the rebirth archetype over time as the outer God or Christ gradually became the inner Christ of the individual believer. WE ARE ALL CHILDREN OF GOD. WE ALL HAVE A CROSS TO BEAR, AND IF WE DON'T LOSE FAITH, WE WILL DEFY DEATH

Joseph Campbell and Rebirth

Born in 1904 in New York, Joseph Campbell's interest in mythology was sparked at a young age when his father took him and his younger brother to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Madison Square Garden, and to the National Museum of History, and he soon recognized similarities between the stories and symbols of Native Americans and those from his Roman Catholic upbringing. Later in life, he would study Hinduism and find the same symbols once again. He would also study Arthurian medieval material, and he would recognize the same symbols. Upon entering Dartmouth College in 1921, he studied biology and mathematics. However, he would eventually transition to the Humanities, earning his master's degree in medieval literature in 1926.

In 1928, he discovered the works of Freud and Jung which would influence him greatly. Comparing the two, Campbell argues that the Freudian unconscious is biographical, not biological, while the Jungian unconscious is based on a biological point of view. Unlike Freud, Campbell points out, Jung recognized the collective unconscious which is universally shared and from which mythic symbols emerge. During his lifetime, Campbell would expand on Jung's ideas of archetypes in the realm of mythology, theorizing how these images manifest in the myths, stories, and traditions of disparate cultures around the world.

Campbell notes the particular importance of metaphorical death and rebirth, stating that “all children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind”. He claims that this wisdom is captured in the Biblical verse 1 Corinthians 13: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”.

This death and rebirth, Campbell argues, is achieved through puberty rites. As Campbell explains: “in primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don't have your little baby body anymore, you're something else entirely”. Campbell even cites his own experiences of wearing short pants as a boy and wearing long trousers when he was older as a kind of puberty rite.

What must be noted is that rebirth is unattainable without the preceding death. The god of death is the lord of s*x. La petit morte. In this way, death and birth become intertwined concepts, and one cannot exist without the other.

In summary, the death and rebirth metaphorized in myth is not a clinical death that involves the cessation of all life processes. This is also the case with Freud's concept of Eros and Thanatos, and with Jung's death and rebirth archetypes. According to Campbell, within myths, death is a psychic process that we must all undergo if we are to achieve self-actualization.

Death and Rebirth via medicine

There is nothing wrong with looking for help. If you are sick, you see a doctor. It's that's simple. I had past experiences that made me deeply suicidal but I have gotten through them with some help from some pharmacological friends. Will I get everything I want? No, but that's okay. I shed my old self and a new one with different desires is born. I know you can do the same. To do so, you have to die first, and this is the scariest part. Just let the forces of life strike you with all their might. A little seedling of humanity will remain, and you will grow from it.

I don't advocate for drug use to solve all your problems. Everybody knows that's foolish. However, in times of crisis, it can be good to have something extremely powerful to basically destroy everything there and allow you to rebuild. Sometimes, drugs just help you by giving you false happiness. It's fake, but it gives you an opportunity to imagine an alternative reality to the depressing one you currently exist in. This is useful, as you know have something to have hope for.

Before I describe my drug experiences, I'd like to warn you that the substances I'm about to list are highly addictive and relatively easy to obtain. Do not go down this road unless sewer side is the only alternative. This is the chemo approach to mental health - drastic and deadly.

Admitting you need help

If you wind up in front of a doctor with significant self-harm, they'll almost certainly freak out. I've never met a doctor who took it even remotely well, and I don't blame them. When most people discuss self-harm, they're talking about cat scratches - you cut just enough to see blood. These cuts heal relatively quickly.

Then there's manic self-harm which you genuinely can't do without some manner of a mood disorder (or a disinhibited survival instinct). The accurate term for this is "self-mutilation", as you perform the type of injuries that will leave permanent scarring and sometimes nerve damage. These are burns or cuts that travel down to the dermis, and in extreme cases, the subcatenous layer. More often than not, stitches are required, though very few self-harmers will get them. To the average person, it's INSANE to deliberately mutilate yourself. A single razorblade cut will make most people wince, so to see a limb lacerated from top to bottom right down to the dermis is disturbing, to say the least. It looks like the acts of a disturbed and possibly dangerous person.

In this position, most doctors will refer you to a psychiatrist, but they'll also panic and prescribe you pretty much everything if they don't immediately institutionalize you. You will get very high doses of incredibly mind-altering substances, some of them highly addictive. This is a dangerous act, but it's also not a bad thing, as the doctor believes they are dealing with a life or death situation, and their primary aim is to sedate you at least to the point where you aren't a risk to yourself or others. It helps if you look relatively innocent (ie no tats or piercings, speaking clear English, and not acting like you know anything about pharmacological drugs).

The drugs I'm about to describe aren't SSRIs or Bupropion. Quite frankly, I have my doubts regarding SSRIs and their efficacy and I also believe they create chemical dependency which isn't always useful. Instead, I want to discuss the "destroy and rebuild" drugs that are highly psychoactive and will profoundly alter your state of consciousness.

Amitriptyline

This is the first line of defense against severe panic attacks, self-harm, and anxiety-induced insomnia. Doctors prefer it to benzos because it's not addictive. However, it does come with the downside of being quite easy to overdose with. According to research, it's one of the most common drugs used in successful sewer sides This is partially the reason why many doctors are moving away from it, and why my current doctor completely weaned me off it (I got much better shit though )

So what can you expect from Amitriptyline? Well, nothing and everything. Pop four or five and in about ten minutes, you'll be incapable of feeling any negative emotions. You won't feel any positive ones either. It's just a state of extreme numbness. Someone could get stabbed up in front of you and it wouldn't really click that you're witnessing a tragedy. You'd just accept it without much complaint. Wait a few more minutes, and your bed will become irresistible.

The benefit of Amitriptyline is that it gives you a break. If you're being assaulted by depression or anxiety, it'll disappear entirely for at least 12 hours. You won't be productive during this time, but your old negative mind will begin to die as you get the chance to think of anything but your misery. I highly recommend it.

It doesn't have much recreational value. If you're happy, there is not much joy to be had in switching off. Just go out and enjoy life instead of lying comatose for half the day. For anyone suicidal or in mental anguish, it feels like the hand of god rescuing you from heck.

Side story: I failed my driver's test 3 times before I took Amitriptyline for my test and passed. It calmed my nerves and sedated me enough to complete the test. You're not supposed to drive or operate heavy machinery on it but if it works it works.

Rebirth value: 6

Benzodiazepines

I'll call them benzos from now on. You've heard them rapped about, and they come under many different brand names - Urbanol, Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Jordan Peterson's breakfast. It's all the same shit (mostly) - just a matter of dosage. HGHLY addictive, HIGHLY dangerous. I warn you not to touch them unless you are genuinely a harm to yourself.

I can't begin to describe how much I love benzos. They are the evil-stopper. The pauser of pain. The muter of misery. Benzos don't make you happy. They make you not sad. I've read several posts on Reddit of people complaining that benzos don't do anything. That's because you're happy already! The drug is the true shit-tester. If you're playing at depression, they will do nothing for you. If you have a genuine serotonin deficit, it will feel like heaven come true. It's the only drug I've taken that genuinely feels like that Simpsons scene.

Pop 4 or 5, smoke some weed, and put on some music. The rest of your day is about to get perfect. It's really hard to explain what benzos do to your memory. I kind of have bullet-point facts in my head of how I feel on benzos but quite frankly I don't truly remember any of my benzo escapades. It's all a black hole. I just wake up in the morning knowing I had the best night ever.

Benzos have massive downsides. The chemical binds to your GABA receptors, which are the same receptors alcohol binds to. Consequently, you'll experience many of the effects of alcohol (stumbling, slurring, impulsiveness) without ever feeling shitfaced. You will feel 100% sober as you stumble around your house, get into your car, and speed to a drive-through at 2 AM with your headlights off. I've had experiences of tumbling down my stairs in my apartment with a tray full of food, and also trying to sort out my Pokemon cards, only to have them fly everywhere.

People do insane, life-ruining shit on benzos, and they remember none of it at all. Think about the last few years - if you recall a politician, celebrity, or public figure acting insane in public or you've seen someone being weird on an airplane, there's an 80% chance they were on benzos and maybe decided to drink as well. If you've done benzos, you'll recognize that "lucid insanity" very easily.

That lady there? OBVIOUSLY took benzos. No doubt in my mind. I've been lucky enough to not do anything crazy on benzos (that I remember lol).

Here's my theory: if you're suffering from heightened anxiety or depression, benzos will chill you out in a way that does not feel "wrong" or "drug abusey" at all. It feels like doctor-prescribed medicine and there is nothing sinister about it. If you decide to do them for fun, it will unearth all your repressed shit and after you mentally blackout, your body will continue to act out your repressed desires.

In my case, benzos make me read random articles online for hours before going to sleep and feeling happy that I went through a night without self-harming. I have no doubt that if I took them while not in a depressive episode, I would probably see manifestations of my sexual repression.

I would honestly would not recommend benzos except in a worst-case scenario. They're so good, they're bad. They will not fix your problems, just give you a brief break to remember that it's possible to not feel depressed all the time. For many, that's all they need. For most, they'll take this pill and ruin their lives with it. It also causes brain damage when used long-term.

If you're intent on using benzos recreationally, practice moderation. Additionally, make sure you tell yourself that it's an experiment you'll never repeat. There's no point in stating recommended dosage because it entirely depends on what kind of benzo you've been prescribed. I'd tell you not to do too much but if you get high and you have them at home, you're going to wake up with half of them gone even if you decided to take only one. Redosing is nigh impossible not to do once you're high.

Rebirth value: 6

Zolpidem

Well, well, well. What do we have here? The good stuff. The holy grail of pharma drugs, not counting opioids. It gets no better than this. From now on I'll be referring to Zoldipem as Ambien, but it's sold under a few other names including Nyxe for poorcels on generics.

Ambien is typically prescribed as a sleeping agent, though you'll also get prescribed it temporarily if you're at a point of crisis, especially if you're feeling self-deletey or are self-harming. It's better to be sedated for a while if the alternative is sewer side.

You need an incredibly small dose for the fun to start - about 5mg - and you'll have to decide to stay up after you're hit by incredible drowsiness about 15 minutes in. If you manage to stay up, you'll feel the greatest chill you've felt in your life. An armed robber could enter your house, and you'll help him load stuff into his truck with a smile on your face. You could sit down for dinner with Satan and feel sympathetic to his cause. However, unlike benzos, there are none of the shit-faced effects. You'll walk straight and look fine. Ambien is the best of benzos without the bad stuff.

You can take it at higher doses, but don't overdo it. Ambien makes you puke at high doses, and you run a risk of instant blackout. This is a deadly combination, as it leaves you liable to choking on your own puke. My advice is don't surpass 10mg. 15mg at most, unless you have a high tolerance (but seriously, don't abuse these drugs to the point of having a high tolerance). I've seen Reddit posts of people taking 100mg and that's insane and possibly deadly. I'd probably puke my bowels out. Nevertheless, I understand the pain, and for some, being knocked out for 24hrs+ is genuinely the best move they can make at that point in time.

Once you're in the Ambien zone, a warmness fills your body and your faculties of memory switch off entirely. No new memories will be formed for the next few hours. This is the "blackout" but don't be fooled into thinking you won't be 100% active during this time. The more you do Ambien, the more you're able to grip onto small glimpses of your time on the drug, but it's never the whole thing. Just still frames of a much longer video.

Unlike benzos, Ambien gets weird. Like, borderlines psychedelic weird. It makes the world wavy, you can hallucinate sounds and see colors bleeding out of objects. Much like psychedelics, it also gives you that "safe space" effect, allowing you to think about traumatic events directly without breaking down. This is INCREDIBLY useful for anyone seeking closure or to move past a painful experience.

I'm on ambien right now and it feels great. The fan's wind on my skin feels euphoric. I can think about anything and I'm not really disturbed or saddened by it. There's a strong desire to redose but I know better. Just ride the wave

Rebirth value: 8

Benzo and Ambien

I tried this combo last night. Don't mix them. 20mg ambien + 20mg benzos = instant blackout followed by puking all over my bed. It's not like coke or meth - there is no recreational value from going too far with it. There is a sweet spot for either drug and if you go past it, only bad things happen. You don't need to mix ambien with anything but weed. The same applies for benzos.

I don't think anything too bad happened last night except I sent the same work email to the same address three times in a row. I know it's weird, but I'm hoping it's a "whoops" weird and not "is this person on drugs?" kind of weird. I also had a bunch of messages from work, but it was nothing related to my actions. Folks at work are so nice to me, they're genuinely good people. If I told them I'm a degenerate depressive they'd probably help me without judging tbh but I'm smart enough to know they're not family lol never taking the mask off in front of them and neither should you

Drugs and inceldom

I was in a really dark hole, but I see the light again, and it's partially thanks to drugs. If I had a wife who loved me and had hope that I could start a nuclear heterosexual family, I would never touch a mind-altering substance ever again, but that's not the reality we're dealing with.

If you're an incel it's not the end of the world. Yes, it sucks, but you can still construct a livable life. Principally, you need four things:

• home

• vehicle

• money

• health insurance

I was going to add media, but I don't think it's vital. In fact, seeing relationships and hearing love music is probably going to deteriorate your mental health. Lock onto a singular goal and direct your fantasies toward it. Don't succumb to the temptations of imaginary friends, it keeps the social faculties of your brain active, preventing them from eventually rotting away and leaving you with no social drive. Don't think about people, don't imagine yourself in a relationships, and in public divert your gaze from women as they're only going to trigger fantasies.

It also helps if you present somehow androgynously. With long hair, a soft voice, no facial hair, and tons of pink/purple clothing, I often get misgendered. I've noticed that people give me that "frick, here's a loser" stare far less and instead I get more of a "oh, its an insecure girl" look which is a lot more sympathetic.

Don't look at doctors/psychiatrists as humans. They're robots and your last lifeline. If you need to speak to them, just switch your brain off and speak the truth, regardless of how cringe it is. They'll give you what you need to continue your incel life with some relative comfort. Another thing - most doctors aren't going to be mad at you. They just want to help! This is especially important if you're self-mutilating i.e. reaching dermal layer. You have a 100% chance of getting an infection, multiple infections in fact. Infections find their way into sterile hospitals, there is no way you're going to avoid them in your shitty home. A doctor will give you anti-infection medication to help when you do BTFO yourself.

As you incelmaxx, you're going to hit walls - if you live in an apartment, you'll probably hear your neighbors have s*x, you'll see couples in public, you'll realize 80%+ of music is about love/women which causes you to greatly narrow what you listen to. There are a million and one reminders that you fricked up severely and you'll never be a normie. Breathe through it. This too shall pass.

Also, bear in mind, nobody becomes an incel by mistake, especially as you get older. If you're being rejected, there's probably a very good reason why. It is moral to distance yourself from others, as you are doing them a favor.

Is inceldom inevitable? For some of us, yes. I do think we do things that push us in that direction. My biggest regrets:

• leaving groomercord dramasphere and losing my last social group

• not implementing the "just be first" strategy and finding a gf in grade school

• wasting years on asexuality

• indulging fantasies of escaping inceldom

Lastly, your imagination is your strongest tool. I truly believe that any incel should practice writing daily. You can create stories that perfectly suit your preferences and tastes, and they'll be void of any of those painful themes that upset you. The more you use your imagination, the greater the world worlds you can create, and the more you can escape from reality. It helps because mass-produced media is all about love and relationships.

There is life at the bottom. It's not a good life, but it's a life you can make worth living.

Thoughts on inceldom

Normies have break-ups and they recover by rebounding to the next partner. Incels get rejected and that's that. I find it difficult to accept that this is a matter of personality. The most vile humans to ever live, none of them are incels. Not one. Let's see:

• Gary Ridgway - killed over 60 women, got married twice

• Vlad the Impaler - over 40,000 deaths attributed to him, has 5 children

• Albert Einstein - openly hated women, still married and had children

• Arthur Schopenhauer - Literally the most prolific misogynist in Western philosophy and is considered the father of Western woman-hating. Had a wife and children, some of them as a result of adultery

• Jerry Givens - One of America's most prolific executioners who admits that he killed innocent people. He died married with two children

• Darrell Brooks - multiple felonies and no high school even prior to the Waukesha incident. Still has multiple children.

It sickens me to my stomach to know these folks are more attractive to women than I am. How do you not feel worthless when the bare facts are laid out like this? There's a simple explanation for this - height. Look at the percentage of evil people who get married, then look at the percentage of short people who get married. The pattern is 100% clear, being evil is less of a dating detriment than your height as a male. This article is the most depressing thing I've read in a while.

It has long been understood that tall people generally exhibit a variety of positive attributes: they are healthier, stronger, smarter, more educated, more sociable, more liked, and more confident than short people. Hence, it is not surprising that they are richer, more influential, more fertile, happier, and longer-lived than short people

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1570677X15000398

Studies that attempt to research correlations between height and number of sexual partners don't even include my height because folks my height are expected to be fricking incels.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230216073416/https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa16/2016/10/21/does-height-make-you-more-attractive

I challenge you right fricking now to find me a bigger predictor of male marriage. Nothing predicts your romantic fate more than height.

CONCLUSION

If you go around Reddit, you'll discover plenty of nurses and pharmacists sharing info on new drugs that are being abused and how to spot folks trying to acquire them. Such medical practitioners are violating their Hippocratic oath in addition to just being square pricks. "Oh noo boo hoo don't let them buy DXM noooooo you can't see demon spiders!" By turning people away from the relatively safe drugs, you're pushing them to street drugs which are more likely to frick them up.

On a side note, DXM is alright if you're used to self-experimentation. I tried it a couple of times. The first, I found myself in a spaceship, listening to A Tribe Called Quest as I enjoyed the groovy adventure. The second time I projectile vomited and experienced no pleasure or high.

If someone wants to do drugs, they're sick. Sober people typically receive their happiness from their relationships and achievements, and drugs are a distraction from that. I've never seen my mom take a drop of alcohol, because she has a husband and children to fill her life. For the rest of us, we'll take slivers of pleasure wherever we find them. Don't thwart us, or else you'll leave us with nothing but misery. Pharmacists be like "No, you can't have happy pills. Get back to your suffering." This is cruel and immoral.

Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England in 1894. According to Nicholas Murray, Huxley was “immensely tall – six feet four-and-a-half inches”, and he had a voice that was “beautifully modulated, silvery, precise”. His mother, Julia Huxley, died “of an inoperable cancer after a very short illness” in 1908. This greatly impacted Huxley, and Murray claims that the pain of the loss is apparent in Huxley's literature. As evidence, he argues that “in both Brave New World and its counterpart, the ‘good utopia' of Island, the nature of motherhood and the role of the family is an important theme, and one informed by Huxley's complicated feelings about the matter reaching back to his childhood experiences”.

Huxley would not avoid health problems of his own. His school attendance was not consistent because he “was ill as a child and missed some of his lessons”. When Huxley was sixteen and attending Eton College, he began experiencing pain in his eyes and he was taken to an eye specialist in London. It was determined that he had a condition known as keratitis punctata, and although doctors did their best, he was left blind from 1911 to 1912, and his sight was impaired from then onwards. His sight impairment was devastating because he was “a voracious reader, a painter, a delighted explorer of the natural world” and, according to Murray, “it was a catastrophe which he always believed was the most important single determining event in his early life”. Interestingly, George Woodcock notes that Huxley's seeing impairment was accompanied by aphantasia, and he “could remember scenes, but he could not create a scene by invention in his mind's eye”. Huxley writes about his experiences with near blindness in The Art of Seeing (1943).His sight problems may have been unexpectedly serendipitous because “realising that a medical or scientific career was now out of the question, Huxley turned to the idea of writing”. He read voraciously using braille and a magnifying glass, and he also learnt to play the piano by touch. His loss of sight may have also sparked his search for alternate ways to view the world, ultimately fuelling and shaping his views and interactions with psychedelics. When he was seventeen, he published his first text titled Crome Yellow in 1921. One of his most impactful texts is Brave New World (1932), a dystopian text that imagines a future where society is bioengineered and conditioned with the aim of crafting a perfect utopia.

In 1937, Huxley and his family moved to California, USA. During this time, there are “oriental elements that became increasingly preponderant in his religious attitudes”, and this is seen in writing. As Woodcock points out, in Island Huxley crafts a society with a “religio-philosophic basis combining Indian and European elements”. In the 1950s, Huxley began experimenting with psychedelic drugs. He “had heard, since coming to the United States, circumstantial reports of the use of the cactus known as peyote in the ceremonials of a semi-pagan Indian church in New Mexico”. While some view psychedelics as a psychosis simulator and others view them as recreational substances, Huxley instead saw them as spiritual helpers. As Woodcock explains, “he realised that the ways to enlightenment were many; that prayer and meditation in themselves were only techniques, and that there could be other techniques – mortification was one of them – which might effectively break down the resistance of the Ego”.

The doors of perception

The phrase “the doors of perception” is originally found in William Blake's text The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790). Within the text, it is written that “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite”. This carries a similar message to what The Doors of Perception argues with regards to psychedelics. Huxley's reference to Blake is no mistake, and he displays a constant fondness for the Romantic artist through his references to him, and titling an essay “Heaven and Hell”, making yet another allusion to Blake.

The Doors of Perception can be considered psychedelic due to the way Huxley handles the topic of drug use. The text is presented as an autobiographical account of the author's experiences, and he attempts to make himself appear as a man who is using psychedelics for the sake of science and knowledge rather than hedonism. Like psychedelic writers before him, he assumes the role of the psychonaut who aims to explore unvisited realms of human consciousness. Huxley, with his scientific tone and his philosophical musings regarding psychedelics and their social and spiritual potential, plays the role of the psychonaut quite convincingly, and his eloquence allows him to discuss even his most abstract thoughts.

Mescaline

Huxley's drug of choice is mescaline. As previously discussed, the use of mescaline is usually associated with Native Americans who have used it for generations for spiritual purposes. Huxley is aware of the relationship Native Americans have had with the drug, and he also discusses how Native Americans have appropriated customs and rituals of the past to still carry meaning in the modern world. As an example, he looks to the Native American Church which has been discussed in this thesis. Following the colonisation of the Americas, Native Americans had to deal with Christianity's encroachment on their culture. In many countries that have experienced European colonisation, Christianity often becomes the dominant religion that moulds many aspects of life including culture, morality, and law. In the process, the culture of the natives is erased. Rather than fight the overwhelming tide of Christianity, Huxley notes that some Native Americans instead did “something which is at once psychologically sound and historically respectable” and incorporated some of the fabric of Christianity into their cultural beliefs and customs. This can be seen in the way the use of peyote has been sacramentalised in a Christian fashion by the Native American Church. As Huxley explains, the church's “principal rite is a kind of Early Christian agape, or love feast, where slices of peyote take the place of bread and wine”. Hence, while Christians experience rebirth by taking part in the symbolic resurrection of Christ through communion, members of the Native American Church use mescaline instead for the same ends. The effects of mescaline are interpreted as religious and spiritual experiences and the Native Americans occasionally “see visions, which may be of Christ Himself”.

Huxley speaks positively of the Native American Church, and he lauds them for seeking “the best of both worlds, indeed of all the worlds – the best of Indianism, the best of Christianity”. However, Huxley does not spend much time using Native American worldviews to understand mescaline, nor does he use Native American myths and folktales to make sense of his psychedelic experiences. Instead, Christianity is the religion he mostly uses to frame his experiences. He makes use of Christian language and imagery, and he refers to Christian parables, including the story of Mary and Martha. This is not unexpected for Huxley, whose life in the United Kingdom and the USA would have chiefly exposed him to Christianity. His understanding of both Christian and Native American belief systems goes a long way to shedding light on the prevailing socio-religious climate in the USA during Huxley's time of writing. For instance, by highlighting the Native American Church, Huxley also brings to light the ways Native Indian belief systems in America were undermined by Christianity brought in by European settlers and how, while some Native Americans did try to form a new hybrid culture, others “reacted to white supremacy by becoming Americanised”.

Huxley treats his experiments with psychedelics as a scientific endeavour. This is seen, for example, when he introduces his experimentation with mescaline in quite a scientific manner. He uses precise language, including stating the date and exact dosage he took. In May 1953, Huxley is visited by a friend who is researching mescaline, and he allows Huxley to be his guinea pig. Huxley agrees and consumes four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water before patiently waiting for the effects. The objective, scientific tone of the text is further magnified by the fact that Huxley, after consuming mescaline, records his conversations on a “dictating machine”. Throughout the text, Huxley makes several scientific observations, and he posits theories on how mescaline might alter one's consciousness. He hypothesises that mescaline “interferes with the enzyme system that regulates cerebral functioning”. Consequently, it lowers the “biological efficiency of the brain” and permits the entry into consciousness “certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded”.

One of the ways he establishes a scientific tone is by inserting himself onto the end of a long chain of prior psychonauts and scholars. He begins his research by stating that “it was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systemic study of the cactus”, then continues by pointing out that “such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis, and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote”. Displaying his scientific knowledge of the drug, Huxley explains that “chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it”. He is also aware of how the drug garners interest from various fields of study including psychiatrists, philosophers, “neurologists, and physiologists”. By discussing his predecessors and outlining the body of scientific knowledge of peyote, he portrays himself as scientifically learned and positions himself as yet another psychonaut in a long line of experimenters.

Whether intentional or not, Huxley's scientific approach adds a subtle layer of humour to his text when it is applied to the most mundane of observations. A notable example of this occurs when Huxley stares at his trousers and notices “those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!”. He has a similar experience when staring at draperies, causing him to conclude that “for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphics that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being”. What might have been a forgotten observation suddenly becomes a scientific quandary, and in an attempt to solve it, he hypothesises that perhaps “the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows?”.

Despite his scientific approach, he also occasionally makes use of mysticism in his writing. This is seen through his several references to religion, especially Christianity. For example, when he attempts to explain negative experiences, he compares them to Dante's Inferno, an epic poem that imagines the Christian Hell as an abyss comprised of nine circles. Huxley also juxtaposes positive and negative psychedelic experiences by referring to them as Heaven and Hell, respectively. Thus, as has been the case with his predecessors, Huxley's psychedelic writing disrupts the usual boundaries between different modes of observation and blends the scientific with the poetic. Boon's research on Huxley suggests that the intermingling of the subjective and the objective in The Doors of Perception may be a product of Huxley's life and upbringing because he “came from a background in which literary and scientific pursuits had long coexisted”.

It should be noted that while Huxley does make use of mysticism, and though he does give into trailing thoughts and subjective language when describing psychedelic experiences, he does so to a lesser degree than his fellow psychedelic writers, including Ludlow. Comparatively, Huxley is far more lucid than his predecessors, and this is seen, for example, when, during a moment of navel-gazing, he states that “by its nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies, – all these are private and, except through symbols and a second hand, incommunicable”. He suggests that while humans may attempt to socialise, the human experience is ultimately a solitary one, as our experiences can only be shared through secondary means, and tools such as language can never fully communicate one's internal experiences. His remark echoes the kind of philosophizing emblematic of psychedelic writers who are tasked with describing the most exotic internal experiences, but Huxley can put forward a coherent thought without dipping into language that is too strange and imagery that obfuscates.

Huxley and Psychedelics

Like prior psychedelic writers, Huxley displays a positive attitude towards psychedelics, and this view does not change from the start to the end of The Doors of Perception. He does not see an issue with the regular use of mescaline, and he claims that reports by Dr Slotkin reveal that peyote users are “on the whole more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether from alcohol), more peaceable than non-peyotists”. He views the drug as superior to legal substances such as alcohol and tobacco which he believes are a detriment to society. However, he does not advocate for the banning of alcohol and cigarettes, and instead, he argues that by introducing the public to psychedelics, they could “exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones”. Mescaline may be the drug to do this because, as Huxley notes, “unlike alcohol, it does not drive the taker into the kind of uninhibited action which results in brawls, crimes of violence and traffic accidents”. He also stresses the harmlessness of psychedelics, and claims that “to most people, mescalin is almost completely innocuous”.

Although he sings the praises of mescaline, he is not entirely blind to its negative aspects. He notes that while mescaline is safer than most legal and illegal drugs, it is “not yet an ideal drug”. This is partially because, while many who consume mescaline will find sublime splendours and deep contemplation, there are a select few who find “in the drug only hell or purgatory". Although he presents mescaline as an alternative habit to alcohol and tobacco, he does not think that it is a perfect replacement because “for a drug that is to be used, like alcohol, for general consumption, its effects last for an inconveniently long time".

To Huxley, mescaline is a solution to a problem. He poses this problem to the reader by asking the following question: “short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home?”. To solve this problem, he hopes that mescaline will admit him “at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake”. Hence, in many ways, his motivations are that of the classic psychonaut, as he chiefly desires to explore anomalous states of consciousness.

To better understand Huxley's aims with mescaline, one would need to grapple with how he conceives of human consciousness. In Huxley's view, the human mind is capable of remembering everything that has ever happened to it and perceiving “everything that is happening everywhere in the universe”, a belief inspired by the Cambridge philosopher Dr C.D. Broad, who in turn is inspired by Bergson. However, much of the content consumed by the brain is “largely useless and irrelevant”. Hence, to assist humans, who are biological organisms geared towards survival, the brain, and the nervous system will shut out most of what is perceived, “leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful”. Hence, the brain and the nervous system can be thought of as a reducing valve that gives us “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive”. Some special individuals, however, can bypass this limiting valve to perceive more than the average person. These are the creatives and the spiritually enlightened through whose eyes Huxley aspires to see, though he plans to do it through mescaline. Huxley's ideas may have some psychoanalytical basis. The previously discussed Freudian concept of repression may be thought of as a form of reality narrowing in service of the Ego. However, this narrowing can be expanded through the use of psychedelics which, as C.J. Healy's research reveals, have been noted by clinicians to unearth repressed childhood memories.

Although The Doors of Perception is a popular text, there were several criticisms of it at the time of its release. As is to be expected, many critics chastised the text for its drug-centric nature. The ethnologist Weston La Barre claimed Huxley looked upon mescaline with the “Romanticism-ensorcelled eyes of Europeans” while the Oxford professor R. C. Zachner took umbrage at Huxley comparing his drug experiences to those of great mystical traditions. Huxley did have plenty of critics who praised him, however, and he has been celebrated by psychedelic writers who have come after him. In High Priest, Leary speaks of reading Huxley repeatedly before finally meeting him and describing him as a “wise and good man”.

The Doors of Perception is a highly influential text that has gone on to affect not just psychedelic literature, but also public perceptions of psychedelics. The text drew attention to itself due to the way it presents a psychoanalytic approach to psychedelic experiences and posits psychonautics as an intellectually valuable pursuit in the West as opposed to a merely esoteric cultural trait of primitive exotic cultures or a pastime of degenerates. Huxley was also influential in inspiring others to share their own psychedelic experiences. According to Boon, the late 1950s saw a large increase of “Huxley-inspired accounts of LSD and mescaline”.

Conclusion

Wewlad that was a long one. I hope you enjoyed it. Tune in next time when I discuss Hunter S. Thompson or circumcision or some shit.

As Hideo Kojima has taught us, humanity's first cowtools were sticks and rope. It's an easy idea to understand. Some cowtools are meant to keep people away from you, while others are to pull people in.

Some would argue that a mother's love is the strongest bond possible, and even when the umbilical cord is cut, an invisible strand remains. What happens when that strand is put to the test? Sprinkle trauma, pain, drugs, theft, and r*pe into the mix. How much can a strand handle?

More importantly, what happens when a mother kills their own child? All the mothers that I have featured in the past have been rightfully vilified. The woman I'm about to discuss never received hate. Instead, she received overwhelming love from women and men countrywide, and a movie was made about her, positioning her as a hero.

Today, we're going to South Africa to discuss Ellen Pakkies. The images are of Reeva Steenkamp who was killed by Oscar Pistorius. Just keeping things South African.

I tried to build up excitement and intrigue with this introduction but failed. The only saving grace is this meta-commentary that at least you know that I'm self-aware when my writing is shitty.

Buckle up, we're going for the detailed, researched story. You're welcome to point out any flaws.

Tik

When your body wants to release Dopamine, the following occurs. The neural impulse moves along the dopaminergic terminal and meets the dopamine receptor in the limbic system which has synapses (little spaces). A special protein is released by the synapse and it binds to the dopaminergic terminal of a dopamine transmitter.

Dopamine makes you feel good, but all good things must come to an end, so typically the dopamine is reabsorbed. But meth does not want the party to end, so it influences trace amine-associated receptor 1, convinces it to stop letting dopamine in.

=====

Notes from Reeva!

Synapses are related to sleep

• During sleep, synapses can be cleaned

• When we sleep, synapses decrease in size which allows for lymphatic system to clean the synapses

• During sleep the body prunes irrelevant synapses and neural networks, hence creating space

Once stimulated, a neuron will communicate information about the causative event. The neurons are called sensory neurons. Sensory neurons will send info to neurons in the brain and spinal cord.

====

But it doesn't stop there. Meth also encourages the production of more dopamine! Up to ten times more. It feels so good! It acts as an upper, giving you energy and acting as an aphrodisiac.

Of course, there are negative effects to this. Neural damage occurs, and this is irreversible. This can leave the user with memory loss, aggression, and paranoia.

Lavender Hill

Our story takes place in Lavender Hill. Despite the nice name, it is a place of horrors worse than Amityville, some would say.

It was created in the 1970s as a segregated area for Coloreds (mixed-race Malays, not Blacks). With poor access to the CBD and a lack of services, it dilapidated and this continued post-Apartheid.

A lack of policing resulted in the growth of gangs and the proliferation of crime which has come to characterize the township. The crime statistics are shocking, to say the least. Let's cover drugs, which is what this article is about:

>Although statistics for Lavender Hill specifically are difficult to ascertain, crime statistics from the South African Police Service (SAPS) illustrate the prevalence of drug-related crime in the area: between April 2011 and March 2012, Grassy Park (ward 68) recorded 1 810 cases of drug-related crime (SAPS 2012). Local gangs hold the bulk of economic power in the area and recruit many community members by offering financial support. For example, they offer to pay rent or electricity bills in exchange for hiding parcels.

https://ggln.org.za/media/k2/attachments/SoLG.2014-DDP.pdf

Part of the problem is that Lavender Hill is plagued with Tik, which in turn increases other crime rates.

Ellen Pakkies

There used to be far more information on her when the case occurred. However, most of it has been overshadowed by the movie they made about her.

According to her, she was sexually abused as a child. R*pe seems to be a constant theme in her life when she was 17, she was r*ped and had her first child, Abie Pakkies. Shortly after, she married at age 18. She had her second child, Colin. The marriage did not last, and she would go through one more marriage before meeting Ontil, her longstanding husband.

Like many others in Lavender Hill, Abie fell victim to drugs. He got hooked on Tik at age 13, and from then onwards his life became a tragedy. To get money to buy drugs, he would steal everything from Ellen, who owned very little to begin with. She tried to get him to stop, but he basically emptied the house to feed his habit.

This went on for years, with Abie stealing money from his mother and robbing her of her wages. She tried to get him to rehab but that did not work. He was kicked out of the house but he would return banging at the doors and windows begging for money the whole night. To put it mildly, he was a pest.

One day, Ellen had enough. Her son was living in the backroom of the house. She went to visit him, carrying a rope with her. She entered the backroom and found Abie sleeping. He was no threat. Ellen put the rope around his neck and started stranding him. The asphyxiation woke Abie up and he started struggling, likely in shock that his own mother was attempting to murder him. She tightened the rope, asking him why he never listens. He begged for his life, claiming he would listen from then onwards, but this was not enough to quell Ellen's rage. Let's cut to the chase - she killed her son.

Following the incident, she put on her clothes and went to work, much like Chris Watts. However, unlike the family annihilator, Ellen eventually confessed to her boss who then took her to the police station.

Her case was very famous in South Africa and I have vivid memories of reports always painting her in a sympathetic matter, as someone who was pushed to their limits. She eventually got a 3 year suspended sentence. I'm here today to say this is bullshit. This woman is a murderer just like all the others I've previously covered. I feel sympathy for her situation but not for strangling her own son. She did it in such a personal manner, to someone who was sleeping. Frick that.

What are your thoughts? Was Ellen justified? Or is she just a killer?

On today’s episode of Good Mythical Morning, Rhett & Link dig deep into their flavor memories and try to identify the name brand sodas from a line up of four unlabeled glasses, three of which contain grocery store knockoffs. As true, unbiased YouTube scientists — and using what they learned in a previous episode — they made sure that the sodas all came from the same size and type of container. Though this isn’t the first time they’ve tried to find the name brand drink, this is the first soda exclusive episode. So, are the name brand sodas really worth it? Here’s what they found out.

Diet Coke

Decoys: Big K, Signature Select, & Sam’s

Rhett is a Coke Zero man, so this round proved to be a bit difficult for him. He liked the Signature Select knockoff’s flavor, so he assumed that it was Diet Coke. Now, if you were hoping that Link might be a reliable taster today, I’m sorry to disappoint. After sipping all of the options, he said, “They are all so different and none of them are good, and I’ll drink Diet Coke as a treat but I don’t really like it.” I’m sorry, what?! Despite his self-proclaimed love-hate relationship with Diet Coke, he was confident with his guess. It was, of course, wrong. You’ll get ‘em next time, Link!

Rhett’s Guess: Signature Select

Link’s Guess: Sam’s

Sprite

Decoys: Great Value, Signature Select, & Big K

Great Value was definitely the prettiest of the four drink options. The guys admired the big, glassy bubbles. But…it was all a lie! They found it seriously lacking in fizz when they tried it. Next up was Signature Select’s knockoff. While Link liked it — and let the record show that he liked all of them — Rhett found it “too sweet.” The real contest was between the last two: Sprite and Big K. Big K’s lemon-lime had “less bite, but good flavor,” so Link gave it the “flavor award.” Sprite, on the other hand, got the “bite award.” The guys were surprised by the amount of bite it had and didn’t remember Sprite tasting that way, so they guessed Kroger. However, they both claimed that bite was more important than flavor, so they liked the Sprite more. They just didn’t quite believe that Sprite could be that good. If only they’d tried McDonald’s Sprite…

Rhett’s Guess: Kroger

Link’s Guess: Kroger

Dr. Pepper

Decoys: Big K, Signature Select, & Great Value

Link doesn’t like a whole lot of things. That includes Dr Pepper. Link, however, made it clear that he was confident in this round because his wife loves Dr Pepper. His proposed technique? “I’m gonna see if I can taste my wife’s breath.” “Can you hit the undo button?” Rhett asked (on behalf of literally everyone everywhere). While this round should’ve been easy for Rhett, he struggled a bit initially. “None of them taste like Dr Pepper. I think I’ve been drinking so much Diet Dr Pepper,” he admitted. But there were some hints that led the guys to guess correctly. Big K’s Dr K tasted “grapey.” Signature Select’s Dr Dynamite and Great Value’s Dr Thunder were too “candylike.” Dr Pepper, however, was the only one that didn’t taste “too fruity.” It’s safe to say that Dr K, Dr Dynamite, and Dr Thunder were trying way too hard. You just can’t beat the original.

Rhett’s Guess: Dr Pepper

Link’s Guess: Dr Pepper

Canada Dry Ginger Ale

Decoys: 365, Big K, & Great Value

Rhett & Link only drink ginger ale on airplanes. Relatable. So, for the sake of fairness, Rhett said, “I feel like we should get as high as we possibly can.” Of course, they’re talking about altitude here. That stuff can really dampen the taste buds. So, after climbing on top of a sofa — although I don’t think that’s necessary considering Rhett is 6’7” — they started drinking. And getting high was indeed the right move. They easily identified the Canada Dry Ginger Ale. Not only that, but it was their favorite by a long shot. “It’s the best one, it’s fizzier,” Link said. Though they were all pretty good, Rhett actively disliked Big K’s.

Rhett’s Guess: Canada Dry Ginger Ale

Link’s Guess: Canada Dry Ginger Ale

Barq's Root Beer

Decoys: Signature Select, 365, Great Value

In this round, the guys were yet again at a disadvantage. Rhett said, “I like root beer but I don’t think I’ve had enough of it.” Link, in very Linklike fashion, admitted he dislikes root beer because it tastes too much “like medicine.” He said that he drinks Topo Chico every night. “It has no flavor. And I look forward to it. Every time I pull one out of the fridge, I just get a little boost of happiness and I’m like, ‘Gather around family and smell my breath! Nothing to smell! Hello!?’ It’s great. It’s nothing but bite. It’s like drinking bite. None of this medicine. If I want medicine, I’ll go to the doctor, I won’t go to the grocery store.” Still, he seemed hooked on the creaminess of 365’s root beer. Does Link like root beer now? In my imaginary world, yes. Rhett dug deep into his childhood memories, “got inside that silver can,” and guessed Barq’s correctly.

Rhett’s Guess: Barq’s

Link’s Guess: 365

Final score:

Rhett: 3

Link: 2

Stephani, 35, Austin TX

Self-rated: 2/10

!straggots

Personal Life:

• "Been in debt since before she hit 18"

• "So I also have uhh CPTSD? So I also decided that I wasn't going to have emotions until this year too" timestamp !biofoids please translate this aside into scrotespeak

  • "Found out" February of last year? She doesn't say the word diagnosed

• "Somebody got me sent to the hospital for saying I was doing something I wasn't exactly doing" timestamp

  • "They said I was trying to commit suicide? Yeah, I kinda got like attacked, by the cops, and drugged by the EMS"

    • "Who said this?"

      • "This girl I've been trying to avoid for like a year or so...used to be a friend but you know sometimes people have to leave your life because they remind you of other people that make things wild"

Career:

• Nurse

  • "Lower paid nurse" - $32.54 hourly

    • Works a desk job now so averages 40 hours with a little overtime instead of the 60-80 she'd get otherwise

    • mostly remote

• Tries to do sidehustles

  • used to bartend for events

  • Writing jobs, currently freelancing writing curriculum for some company or school in Oregon?

Savings/Expenses:

• Checking $4'631 -> $5'639, currently $7400

• Savings $725?

• Retirement

  • Rollover IRA 2'189, currently just sitting not invested?

  • United Health Group 401k $9'515

  • Had thought she would get married and just have someone else deal with these issues for her

• A few $40 coffee trips?

• got scammed

• 55% of regular goes to rent (includes utilities), used to be on a COVID unit grift so her income was way higher when she got it

• Phone is $99 but she's supposed to get some credits for being a nurse from them?

Debt:

• I didn't catch the monthlies for a lot of these

• Lots in collections

• Mother had put some bills in her name before high school graduation

  • 

• A ton of stuff in collections

  • "I've restarted my life a few times and some of the stuff that's in collections I'm like writing letters to them because I've either never been to some of the places that are charging me or they were like my ex or other things"

  • Some of the companies are trying for debts that should have already expired or w/e

• "Portfolio recovery"

  • $100 a month, bought a laptop for a sales job?

  • "An Ashely's account" to buy furniture when she moved 5 years ago?

    • $645 left, was just a couch?

• IC Systems

  • Anesthesiology bill, currently owned by a debt buyer who's willing to give her at least half off

• Elevator Recovery $2039

  • broke her leg in 2020 and let the medical bills from that go to collections

• Credit Card:

  • Had to replace a battery around $160 but it's totally paid off now

• $30'556 in student loans

  • Around a $400 minimum payment, thinks she might be on an income based repayment? She's not certain

  • Some of these loans were for nursing school, some were from an abusive ex-boyfriend who used them to buy "race cars"

• Car debt: 9'000, 6 years and 25%?! not sure I heard that interest rate right

  • "So you what people do when girls go to car lot and try to get cars, they said like- they didn't even show me the original car that I went there for but they just told me the bank wouldn't loan me any money because the bank can recoup its losses easier on a new car than a used car if I were to not pay my car loans but I've never not paid my car loans so-"

  • $350 insurance payment

• Large number of hospital bills coming up

  • $4-5'000 "of the current ones"

    • Might get helped out by insurance but she's not counting on it

    • was thinking of payment planning it

This was an essay I wrote some years back, when I used to be a deeply devout communist and MLM-TW. This marked the beginning of my reading into Italian Left Communism, and straying into eclecticism before eventually abandoning communism outright. I had initially shared this essay internally with other LSC mods, who refused to acknowledge it. I then posted it publicly to multiple communist subreddits, even lefty pol. It was censored in all but one of them. In that last one, not a single person was able to provide a substantive reply, and all comments were variations of trite deflections.

I'm going to give the background that builds up to my question, and what I am contending is if Stalin was wrong in Economic Problems of the USSR. It's a bit lengthy, but please help me out here.

Background:

This all stems from a blog post I found that goes over Karl Marx's conceptualization of the DotP and lower-higher phase communism. It's a bit long but I recommend a read as it's more thorough than my following shorter (but still somewhat long) summary of it.

This blog concludes that DotP and socialism are not the same, and socialism itself is not a transition period between capitalism and communism. Rather, the DotP is the transition period between capitalism and socialism. Socialism wouldn’t have a DotP because it’s a lower phase of communism where classes would cease to exist, and the only remnant of the state that is left would be a “bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie” to protect what is called bourgeois right. Socialism, like communism, is classless and moneyless, and only differs on the fact that in full communism, there is a “communism” of distribution as well as production, i.e. all people work to their true ability and receive based on their need.

Marx backs up ALL of this in Gothakritik. Here is the textual evidence.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat is NOT the same as socialism – In Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx said:

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

It's common knowledge that Marx used socialism and communism interchangeably; that Lenin is the one who draws a clear distinction between socialism and communism, the former being the lower phase of the latter. But for argument’s sake, let's pretend that Marx was really referring to socialism as a transition between capitalism and communism. Why would this be untrue?

If political aspect of this transition is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, then what is the economic aspect?

First, understand that capitalism - as the blog succinctly puts - is:

…generalized commodity production where labor power itself has become a commodity. …those who operate the means of production…don’t own them. Instead, a separate class of people…own the means of production. The capitalists purchase labor power from…people who own neither land nor capital. The proletarians sell their ability to work, or labor power, to the capitalists and get in return a definite sum of money—called a wage. Wages are therefore nothing but the price of labor power.

(If anyone takes issue with this definition of capitalism from a Marxist POV, then please feel free to say why)

Second, understand that socialism would have no commodity production. Marx says in Gothakritik:

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

If private ownership of the Means of Production is wholly replaced by common ownership, then surely there can be no classes. In terms of ownership, all people are equal. Note that Marx essentially says commodity production is non-existent in socialism as well.

But how do we know Marx is referring to socialism (lower phase) and not communism (higher phase)?

Next paragraph:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society– after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

First sentence - Marx is referring to communist society that has immediately birthed from the fall of capitalism, which can only be socialism (lower phase). More important to note is that in this paragraph, Marx elucidates that money would not exist in socialism, carefully using the word “certificates” as opposed to “money”, and this is reinforced by the fact that Marx said commodity production wouldn’t exist. Money is a special commodity whose use value is what the value of all other commodities are measured by, according to the author. Token money represents a definite quantity of a money commodity.

Let’s get this straight so far

Socialism has: no money and no classes. No classes mean no class struggle either... ...and since the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is obviously predicated on a proletariat existing, it must precede a social stage in which that is not the case.

Therefor the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is its own stage. Or more specifically – the transition stage between capitalism and socialism.

Back to the original question: What is the economic side of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Clearly, it’s not socialism. So does that mean it’s capitalism?

Circle back to the first quote by Marx:

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Pay attention to the syntax first. The first sentence speaks of a transition between two ECONOMIC modes of production, THEN the second sentence speaks of a POLITICAL transition. We can infer then that the first sentence is speaking of an economic transition. This economic transition is a clash between capitalism and socialism, where both relations of production exist in contradiction to each other. There is no word for this economic transition stage that Marx uses, and interestingly I realized that the Maoists have this exact same conception of the modes of production and transition stages, they merely just moved the words socialism and communism back one place. To the Maoists: socialism refers to this nameless economic transition. Communism refers to both the lower and higher stages of communism.

A linguistic failure on both the part of Marx and Maoists, the former doesn’t have a word for the economic transition, and the latter doesn’t have a word to differentiate the lower and higher phases.

We have answered the original question and have successfully differentiated the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and socialism. Now let’s stick to this terminology that was presented in the first place for the sake of understanding: Nameless economic transition Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a political transition Socialism is lower phase of communism Communism is shorthand for the higher phase of communism.

The next question arises:

What is the difference between socialism (lower phase) and communism (higher phase)?

To reiterate, we already know that socialism features complete common ownership of the Means of Production, no class system, and no money. At first glance that’s pretty darn similar to full communism, and of course we have seen that Marx says wage labor and commodity production do not exist either. So what’s left to differentiate the two?

This is a long quotation by Marx but it answers it completely. Skip to the bottom for the English version:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form. Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.

In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal. But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

if you skipped, here is a simpler interpretation:

Marx says that socialist society is “stamped” by the capitalist past. He also says that under socialism workers earn according to their labor, not to their needs. A ‘ghost’ principle of capitalism remains. “a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.” This exchange is facilitated by what Marx calls certificates, not money.

This can be summed up very quickly – under socialism, there is a communism of the Means of Production, but not of the Means of Distribution.

A communism of the Means of Distribution would look like collective distribution of products/services based on need, not labor. Under socialism, this is not the case. Rather, something that Marx called “bourgeois right” – the same system that exist under wage labor. This is a “defect” in the lower phase of communism.

Moreover, Marx says that another defect in socialism is the “enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor.” From this flows the “antithesis between mental and physical labor.” As a result of the survival of the “enslaving division of labor,” labor is most certainly not “life’s prime want.” What prevents the abolition of the division of labor is insufficiently developed productive forces. Marx explained that right can never be higher than the level of economic development. Not all individuals under socialism will be able to work according to their true ability. Only the privileged will be able to, and this will be the case until the distinction between mental and physical labor dissipated, and the division of labor is abolished – the success of which marks the transition into full communism.

To further define socialism, if we have “bourgeois right” governing distribution, yet socialism is classless, what happens to the state? Marx was very hostile to any notion that the state could be a state of the “whole people” because if it does then it should dissipate – the state is an instrument of class domination and becomes useless without classes. Lenin provides an explanation, claiming the state during socialism is a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”. The state would exist minimally, likely insofar as a court system to settle disputes over the amount of work that one has contributed and their right to take goods from the “common stores.” There would also have to be an institution that enforces laws against shoplifting by people who want to get more goods than what they are entitled to based on the amount of labor performed. This implies that petty crime would still exist under socialism as well.

So what distinguishes socialism from communism is that socialism has bourgeois right over distribution, has a “state” of sorts or an analogue of it, has division of labor and a distinction between mental and physical labor, and will still contain a privilege where only some people can work according their true ability (though as socialism grows closer to communism, so will the amount of people with this ‘privilege’).

In communism, everyone gets be an intellectual. Agriculture will simply become another branch of industry (this is already slowly being the case as in the current time in the first world, agriculture involves more and more technology and first world farmers have little resemblance to farmers 100 years ago). Everyone can draw from “common stores” of goods according to their needs Everyone can contribute according to their true abilities and labor becomes life’s primary want.

The Question:

Lenin apparently reinforced everything Marx said in Gothakritik. Here is one important quote from Economics And Politics In The Era Of The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat:

Socialism means the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat has done all it could to abolish classes. But classes cannot be abolished at one stroke.

And classes still remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat they will not disappear.

Now here is when it gets dicey with Stalin and Economic Problems of the USSR. He claims that the Soviet Union has actually become socialist - by Lenin's own definition. That means Stalin is saying that the Soviet Union has surpassed the Dictatorship of the Proletariat into the lower phase of communism and become a classless society. Here are the relevant quotes.

It is sometimes asked whether the law of value exists and operates in our country, under the socialist system.

Yes, it does exist and does operate. Wherever commodities and commodity production exist, there the law of value must also exist.

How is this possible when Marx explains that commodity production does not exist under lower phase communism?

Undoubtedly, with the abolition of capitalism and the exploiting system in our country, and with the consolidation of the socialist system, the antagonism of interests between town and country, between industry and agriculture, was also bound to disappear.

All this means that the ground for the antithesis between town and country, between industry and agriculture, has already been eliminated by our present socialist system.

How is this possible when Marx explains the abolition of division of labor happens in higher phase communism?

We have a similar situation as regards the problem of the abolition of the antithesis between mental and physical labour.

...it really has disappeared in our present socialist system. Today, the physical workers and the managerial personnel are not enemies, but comrades and friends, members of a single collective body of producers who are vitally interested in the progress and improvement of production.

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

9 - Darklands LP IX: I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials

10 - Darklands LP X: We actually do some alchemy!

11 - Darklands LP XI: The Main Plot

The Witches' Sabbat

It's Halloween today, October 31, 1402, so it's time to take on the forces of darkness once again.

In our last episode, we finally made it to the witches' Sabbat, basically ComicCon for Satanists. Day one has a bit of an amusement park feel, but they seem to be building up to a big event tomorrow. We're going to do what we can to ruin their fun. But hopefully we won't have to slaughter everyone here. Even these people can still be saved if they repent.

Let's start out with the food. It's what Anthony Bourdain would do.

It's not ideal, but let's at least give these babies a quick baptism while we can.

We really do not want to attract too much attention, so we better be careful the next place we go.

Okay, let's see what's going on by the stream. Ugh. This is no good. But I'll try to give these people a chance. I'll boost Sasha's Speak Common and Charisma even higher and have her try to persuade them this is wrong. St. John Chrysostom is an obvious choice. One of the most important figures in the development of the early church, he was renowned for his oratory. Chrysostom literally is "Golden Mouth", exactly what we need now. Sasha now has 99 Speak Common but you can never be sure of success in dangerous situations like this.

As demonstrated here. Looks like these guys are gonna have to die.

They're very poorly equipped and no trouble to beat, but I expect we'll get in multiple combats before the Sabbat is over and we won't have a chance to heal between them, so any damage done here will add up. That cultist with his flail turns out to be more dangerous than I thought and Redactor gets hurt a bit.

We've drawn too much suspicion to ourselves. This busybody is going catch us eventually if we don't do better. I'll use the "yeah, I'm up to something" line, hoping to confuse him for now.

Let's check out the broom-riding and see if this really is as cute as they make it out to be in childrens' books. Oh no, it's actually awful.

Sasha still has her Speak Common boosted so maybe she can at least convince these people. She fails again and we have to kill these people too. I've consistently been getting really bad luck throughout this. Maybe Halloween isn't my lucky day.

Let's see what's going on at the altar. So that's what this is all about. They're summoning a demon. Satanists are so lame. It really is a ripoff of Burning Man.

We're under a lot of suspicion but there is absolutely no way I'd ever consider engaging in this kind of blasphemy.

My party has pretty terrible Stealth skill, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at failing this check.

Despite screwing up everything we tried to do, we managed to get by using brute force. Our party is hardly even injured. That chainmail really makes a huge difference when going up against a mob of poorly-armed enemies.

The fortress monastery? What's that? I guess we'll find out someday.

I have Sasha try to win over the baptism crowd and she fails yet again. Then it's summoning time. So that's where the Fortress Monastery is. I always knew that the Danes were Satanic.

We've got practically no injuries and most of our Divine Favor left. And for this special occasion I'm going to break out the alchemy. I'm passing out:

• Hardarmor - One for everyone. This will increase the quality and boost the effective thickness of the armor by +2, better than even plate without alchemical enhancement.

• Fleadust & Arabian Fire - Two for everyone. The offensive potions you want to spread around through your party. If one guy is carrying them all he might be engaged and unable to throw.

• Essence of Grace - The healing potion. There's no mechanic in the game to stop you from just chugging these constantly, which isn't really a fun way to play, so I'm going to arbitrarily limit us to three per person for now.

I won't bother invoking saintly aid to improve our weapon skills since they're already into the 80s. Okay, let's do this.

The demon turns out to be pretty weak. Am I over-prepared for this battle?

Now is the hard part. The high witch will be tossing potions and her minions have flails, which with 4 penetration would match our chainmail if it wasn't alchemically enhanced.

The fight is tougher than we've had in a long time, but not too challenging. The enemy can't penetrate our armor so they do very little damage to our Strength, but there's a lot of them and they land a lot of non-penetrating hits that do a few points of Endurance damage. Sasha takes an Essence of Grace to keep from getting knocked out.

The second wave is just like the first, but this time I'm a little smarter about defeating them in detail. Nathan manages to slip past the cultists to get to the high witch but she hits with him Fleadust or something, greatly reducing his skills, so he has trouble hitting her, but it's over soon enough.

We now have a clear mission ahead of us: Go to Denmark and assault the Fortress Monastery!

Sorry for this being so anti-climactic. I didn't realize how powerful my party had become and I wanted to make sure to explain all the main systems of the game before going forward with the main plot. Don't worry, it gets much more difficult.

Happy Halloween!

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

9 - Darklands LP IX: I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials

10 - Darklands LP X: We actually do some alchemy!

One of the few weaknesses our party has now is Sasha. She's not well armored enough and her longsword is pretty useless against most of the enemies we're starting to run into. I head back to our old home turf in Westphalia. I know Paderborn makes good weapons and Soest makes good armor. I buy her a poniard, basically a dagger. That might seem like a big step down as it has a base damage of 5 down from the longsword's 12 but it has 4 penetration (matching chainmail) and is much faster. With the poniard we should be able to get her into full chainmail eventually.

Level Scaling & The Main Plot

Darklands does have level scaling but don't jump to the conclusion that it's a bad thing. Some games like Oblivion are notorious for doing this the wrong way. All the enemies in the world are pegged to the same level as you, so theoretically if you could teleport to the end boss at the beginning of the game he would be at level 1 and the fight would be no more difficult than if you had played the whole game out to being level 20. In Darklands it calculates how strong it thinks your party is (I'm guessing based on skills) and as you get more powerful it upgrades the enemies, I believe twice. For example those street thugs who fought at the beginning of the game used to have just ordinary clothing on their limbs. Now it's padded armor. Presumably their attributes and skills are boosted too. But it still matters who they are. We're still going to slaughter those guys. But now a raubritter's henchmen will actually have some decent armor and are a challenge to us again. Since we're playing out the same quests over and over again, this is a way to make sure they don't get too stale.

Another thing that's triggered by your party growing stronger is an event calling you to stop just wandering around and take on mid game challenges. This definitely should have triggered by now. Either there's a bug or I got my saved games mixed up. So let's pretend it just happened now.

Well now we've got a real quest. Not from some banker or mayor but from God. Let's get on it.

I happen to be outside Magdeburg again. Let's check out this castle.

Oh it's not a castle. Yuna prays to St. Dorothea for guidance and we get this result.

Okay, let's go in.

(They act like I've already been here before. This must be a bug. She's an enigmatic astrologer who can see fleeting glimpses of your destiny. The first time you go here, she should either tell you that you're too weak and need get stronger or that you're ready to take on the Satanists at their Sabbat.)

Investigation

The Sabbat is where the pagans meet to celebrate their obscene rituals on one of their holidays. But when and where will it be this time? What would Crockett and Tubbs from Miami Vice do if they were hunting down a vast Satanic conspiracy in 1400s Germany? They'd start by picking up a low level Satanist and find out who his boss is.

We go to another Satanic village (there's quite a few) and slaughter everyone without even taking a single hit. Now what's this? Southeast of Goslar on June 21? It sounds like something important is going down. We should check it out. Today is June 5 but Goslar happens to be very close by so I should be able to get there in time. We'll want to avoid all combat if possible because we don't want to lose time healing wounds.

On the 15th we find this interesting Stonehengey type place southeast of Goslar. As we approach the music turns from adventurous to ominous.

I haven't been to a place this disturbing and depressing since I quit reddit.

A severed finger

I was thinking yakuza but actually Satanists would make more sense. So we've found the place we're looking for. There's not much to do but camp out here and wait a few days for them to show up. Maybe Redactor can stir up a few more potions. We're going to need them.

Nothing Happens

Somehow I missed them. Maybe I got the dates mixed up or something. Happens to me in real life all the time. Whatevs. We go to another Satanic village and get the next date: SE of Teschen on Halloween. Teschen is in Silesia near the border between Bohemia and Poland. It's pretty remote, but I think we've got plenty of time to get there.

Along the way we run into this place. It's a good reminder of just much history already existed back then. Germany had been Christian in Roman times but was then conquered by pagans who eventually were converted. This whole process took centuries, so there's ancient Christian ruins now that are long forgotten. In terms of the game, somebody probably sent us on a fetch quest here and I never bothered to go because I was far away at the time. But if we get his item maybe we'll run into him again someday.

See, I told you those Thunderbolt potions would be useful someday. I use one to blast open an entrance.

There's gotta be skeletons in every game.

This is the first time we've been in a long multi-part combat. There are groups of enemies around this dungeon and if I run into them I'll have to fight, but between fights we can walk around and go wherever we want. I'll have the party travel in single file so we don't get stuck every time we reach a doorway. But wait, Sasha, our weakest fighter, is pointman. I change the party's marching order so Nathan is in front. Now it's time to search for an exit.

Well that was easy. I find some stairs guarded by just one skeleton. He goes aggro on us when he sees us, kind of like a pod of enemies does in Nu X-Com. We make short work of him and walk off with the ancient crown.

I go after another one of these evil castle lords. For the first time we run into enemy archers. Everyone does fine except Sasha. Their armor blocks most of the damage, so it's only about 3 points for each arrow. A 3 point hit probably will only hurt endurance, not strength. Most of your lost endurance is regained after each fight so that's not huge problem. Restoring strength requires either rest, prayer, or alchemy so it's much more serious. Did I mention that when strength goes down to 0 your character is dead? Like completely permanently dead and you have to replace them with a new one.

I got plenty of time to kill before the Sabbat so I wander around the region, doing my usual thing, learning new saints and new formulas. In Pressburg the local alchemist trades to me the formula for Essence of Grace, the most important in the game as it's the healing potion that restores lost endurance and strength.

Teschen

Here we are. It's October 11, so that gives us plenty of time before Halloween to find the site and do some alchemy while we wait for the Satanic horde to show up. It's supposed to be SE of Teschen but Teschen is at the extreme eastern edge of the map. It must be this place. Yuna knows St. Raymond now, who can boost Redactor's Alchemy skill up to 99, so he can make huge batches of common potions. We'll settle down and let him do that for now.

Today's the day. Let's see what they're up to. WTF? This better not be Burning Man. I'll slaughter everyone if it is.

I'm going to chat up some of arriving weirdos and try to blend in with them.

Well obviously there's only one answer to this. They're a bunch of goths after all.

See, I still know my high school subcultures.

Uh oh. Instead of bomb-sniffing dogs for security they have Christian-sniffing dogs. Fortunately we don't have to try to bluff our way through. St. Aidan will help us. He was an Irish monk who converted the Anglo-Saxons of northern England and also really liked animals.

Good dog.

What in the heck have we gotten ourselves into? We'll find out in the next episode.

As many probably know by now the Voice is the biggest drama to happen in Australia in years, and it's pretty much taken over my posting. However, the campaign has gotten complicated and self-referential enough that I would 100% understand anyone jumping in for the first time or even after missing a week's worth of news would be incredibly confused about everything. This is why I present- the FULL guide to the Voice! Below is what will be covered, feel free to skip to 3-4 if you just want the drama without the context-

1. What is the Voice?

2. Who are the sides?

3. What is the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart?

4. What are the controversies?

If anything big comes up in the coming weeks/months I'll keep adding to this post, so save this if you want to stay up to date

1. What is the Voice?

The Indigenous Voice to Parliament is a proposed advisory body to Parliament. It would be elected by and presumably composed of Aboriginals, and it would give advice on Aboriginal issues to Parliament and to heads of departments or the PM personally. The election process is apparently going to be weighted, with elders (the oldest members/heads of a tribe) as well as those living in "remote communities" (this is essentially code for still living semi-tribally in bumfrick nowhere) given weighted voting over the mayofied urban Aboriginals.

It is important to note that the Government of the day both a) gets to frick with the Voice's composition, powers and process at will and b) can ignore any "advice" they get, HOWEVER they would not be able to get rid of it entirely. This is because the proposal is to put it in the constitution, which also means the Parliament can't actually just vote it in- the constitutional revision needs to be passed by referendum, and then the corresponding legislation setting it up gets legislated in afterwards. This does mean we have to talk about

1b. Referenda in Australia

Referendums in Australia do not pass by a simple majority vote. They pass by a) a majority vote and 2) a majority of Australia's 6 states (so 4/6). Territories count for the first count but not the second, so sucked in Canberra.

The proposed change is worded as follows-

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

To which when the referendum day comes you can answer Yes or No. So remember- YES means nonchuds , NO means chuds .

We still do not know when the referendum day will actually come, although there are some considerations. Albanese (the Prime Minister) has to call the referendum for early 2024 by the latest, and has committed to holding it in 2023. Voting in September/early November is presumed to be out because that's when Aussie sporting finals are, which means all the will be too busy watching footy and drinking beers to care about the Voice. By law elections and referenda have to be held on Saturdays so that also narrows it down. Pundits generally say October 14, but it could well be in November.

2. The Sides

2a. Yes

The Yes campaign is headed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Labor Party (the centre-left party). In Parliament he is also supported by the Greens (left), the "teal" independents (rainbow capitalists) and a few members of the Liberal party (centre right, also known as literally fascism). Albanese brought the Voice as a policy to the 2022 federal election and won, although he mostly won because the PM at the time (Scott Morrison) had become for good reason despised by most of the population as a corrupt smarmy happy-clappy r-slur.

Albanese however is pretty much a fairly inconsequential career politician who has only ever rocked the boat with the Voice, and that was because it wasn't all that controversial a year ago lol. His Indigenous Minister who is currently doing most of the work to push this is called Linda Burney, who apparently isn't drunk when she talks despite the fact that she really sounds like it. She has essentially for the past few months been brought out for damage control whenever something goes wrong for the Yes campaign.

There are also a series of activists who are working towards Yes under the banner of "Yes23", of which I'll highlight two. Noel Pearson is the activist who is meant to get rightoids on board with the Voice, because he says things like "look if you pass the voice and nothing changes you can blame us Aboriginals for it" and "just give us responsibility for our own problems". On the other side there's Thomas Mayo, who's a communist who hates Australia which is why rightoid have been focusing on him despite the fact he really isn't all that important, and I only mentioned him because he gets brought up a lot.

2b. No (chud)

The mainstream No campaign is headed by opposition leader Peter Dutton of the Liberal Party and his coalition partner the Nationals (rural rightoids), and supported in Parliament by fringe parties such as One Nation (gigarightoid lolcows). Peter Dutton is a former cop who became leader of the Liberals after they lost the election, and pretty much leads the rightoid wing of that party. Some state Liberal leaders are actually pro-Voice, so he hasn't gotten his party in line as much as Albanese has.

2c. No ()

A fringe No group is the "Blak Sovereignty" movement, with its parliamentary head being Lydia Thorpe (a lolcow who I made a post about months ago). Their deal is that the Voice would surrender Aboriginal sovereignty to the colonial Australian government so should be avoided. Lol.

3. What is the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart?

The Uluṟu Statement from the Heart is a document published by a bunch of Aboriginal elders and activists in 2017 under a bipartisan program, that called for the Voice, plus Treaty (we admit the authority of the Crown in exchange for gibs) and Truth (a commission that's meant to tell all the bad things that happened during colonisation). The controversy here is on whether or not to count the meetings and notes that went into the signed first page- the meetings and notes call for reparations and all forms of other gibs, which the first page omits. The characters involved in the Statement from the Heart have also been scrutinised (this is where Thomas Mayo comes from for example). Albanese has committed to implementing the Statement in full.

4. Controversies

Controversies so far include but are not limited to-

• the Voice becoming increasingly unpopular

• Yes campaigners being communists

• No campaigners being racists (some really were, some weren't really)

• No ads showing Thomas Mayo begging for gibs (this is racist obviously)

• National carrier Qantas putting vote yes on their aircraft

• Other big corps supporting Yes

• The mining industry supporting No (except it never did)

• Whether the chud No or the Blak Sovereignty No would make the No official argument in a state-funded information pamphlet- chuds won

• Whether the wording of the amendment would accidentally give the Voice power over the government of the day (it doesn't)

That's pretty much it, dramaussies tell me if I've missed anything big

Question: My father found one of my books. what do I do?

I have one work in progress book titled: Plans for world domination. I mainly write in it compiled notes and information that has been proven effective and that could be used in its respective field of: Politics, economics, warfare and social psychology. Alongside APA format and inner note citations (basically where other parts of the notes can be looked at for similar information) I’m 20 pages deep now.

The problem is that my father has seen this and he wants to talk about it. What do I do? Because I’m kinda relying on you to help me out of this jam.

Update: I tried one of the things you all had recommended, it had not went well. I told him I am writing a book and he said , ok, just dont let it become published, because I said so. I dont want to try and challange such a pig headed awnser, because the last time I tried to use my reason and logic, he got all pissed at me, like I just insulted the flag to his face.

At first this was just going to be a post making fun of a guy who's dad found his neurodivergent rambling, but then I went through his profile and realized how genuinely fricking crazy this guy is. Turns out he's a 17 year old who's writing a manifesto on his "simple use of using an autocracy model in the place of a democracy to pass bills quicker and faster solve the old problems before new ones pop up (he has "other plans to line up the ducks globally"). He also reckons he's being gangstalked by the desperado gang (he's "put precautions in place to stop them").

SHOW MORE

Russian is acquiring territory at a rate of 100 dead/km². Another 50 million dead, and they'll control all of Ukraine.

There are more than 50 million Russians, so it's doable.

So smart.

Yet he forgets that Ukraine is about to mobilise their 18 years old. And that Russian captured in 2024 more than in 2023 and all their big gains happened the last 3 months.

Why look at those facts if it will make things look bad for Ukraine ? I mean Ukraine is going to win any moment they get the game changer… wait he ain't talking about Ukrainian victory, what happened ?

Area taken really doesn't show the full picture. You could probably calculate that it would take something like 100 years for Russia to take the whole of Ukraine. However neither Russia or Ukraine can't keep this level of warfare up more than a few years at most. One of them will eventually collapse either from lack of manpower/equipment or due to economy.

Shut up stupid Redditor

This. One of them is going to give up because both are really, really struggling. Both are running out if people. Both are irritating their allies. Both are getting increasingly desperate.

Exactly

The difference is that Russia is running on volunteers while Ukraine is conscription. Most of those volunteers come from the most impoverished areas of Russia and even from foreign countries. Russia can keep the war going much longer than Ukraine

Shut up no truth Russian soldiers having low moral

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1fng9wy/russian_morale_is_collapsing_now_is_the_time_to/

Well, this ignores the fact that Russia is losing its position in the world (like in Syria) and that its economy is increasingly in trouble. It also misses the fact that the motivations are dramatically different. The Ukrainians are fighting for their very survival, they have very little incentive to surrender. The Russians are fighting for pride and money, which means they just want it all to wrap up quickly. The Ukrainians are far more committed to their fight than the Russians who are just there for a paycheck.

Exactly !

Ukrainian Journ*list Yuriy Butusov confirmed that 1,700 soldiers from 155th mechanized brigade "Anna Kyivska", which was trained in France and sent to Pokrovsk deserted before the first battle. He added that the brigade commander was dismissed immediately after the battle, and…

— AMK Mapping 🇺🇦🇳🇿 (@AMK_Mapping_) January 1, 2025

Ukrainian so motivated that after half year training in France they run away from their first battle. Not the second or third but first

Majority of Ukrainian dislike Zelenskyy, don't want 18 year old mobilised are ready to give up the territory

Burgers cuts the nafo budget and all the "combat Russian misinformation" budget. Media starts painting digits that tell majority of European now want it all just end

Ahmad Al Sharaa said in an interview with Saudi Arabian state-owned news outlet Al Arabiya this weekend. "We do not want Russia to leave Syria in the way that some wish."

Al Sharaa, still better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad Al Jolani (and other simply just as Jolani), is head of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the rebel coalition that deposed Assad.

"All of Syria's arms are of Russian origin, and many power plants are managed by Russian experts," Al Sharaa further told Al Arabiya, while also highlighting the "deep strategic interests" of what he described as the "second most powerful country in the world."

@DaddyReagan

Was insisting to me that Russian run away from that base like almost a month ago. Except Ukraine and EU (that ain't even part of that Syrian party) ain't interested in Russian leaving Syria. Redditors are too stupid to understand Israel, US, Turkey and the new Syrian gov won't benefit from Russian leaving.

"That isn't entirely true Russia forces are actually expanding And that has been noted on many occasions by NATO generals 1- https://www.businessinsider.com/top-us-general-russia-growing-back-pre-war-military-strength-2024-4

2- Atlantic council talking about how Russia military is expanding and it might reach peak military production in 2025 -2026 https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/nato-russia-dynamics-prospects-for-reconstitution-of-russian-military-power/

3- https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4589095-russian-army-grown-ukraine-war-us-general/

4- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-16/putin-says-russia-recruited-more-than-430-000-to-army-this-year

Since start of the war Russia conducted a semi mobilization for reserves

Meanwhile ukraine conducted six mobilization efforts in 2014 and 2015 Since the start of the war Ukraine have conducted countless mobilization and Ukraine has been snatching people from streets for year and half now

Antony blinken said in interview that Ukraine Basically has more equipment than troops at this point of time and they need to mobilize fast and also No increase in equipments will save them

Stupid Redditor making sense

With Trump as president, Ukraine will fall. It's a sad reality but we need to start admitting it.

This is smart Redditor, despite Ukraine last victory was on October 3rd 2022 so more than 50% of Biden presidency was without Ukrainian victories. So next years you will hear from them that Ukraine lost because of Trump

Because if Biden had won then Ukrainian demographics would been fixed. Can you argue with it ? You can't because you ain't multiverse creature that can test it

russia will collapse in 2025

— HotSotin 🇫🇮🇺🇦🇮🇱🇹🇼🇺🇸 NAFO (@HotSotin) December 31, 2024

That what I am talking about ! Oh wait it's not Ukraine going to win it's Russia going to collapse because subliminally they know Ukraine ain't going to win so they are coping with Russia will callabse

My fav prokhohol last year was this guy

Two things can be true at the same time.

Russia is advancing south of Pokrovsk, at huge sacrifice. Taking monstrous casualties and capturing a very small amount of land.

Ukrainian forces there are overwhelmingly outnumbered and feel hopeless as a result.

Both are true.

— Andrew Perpetua (@AndrewPerpetua) December 10, 2024

It actually isn’t a good result for Russia to shove a division into a fight with a few battalions and end up taking catastrophic casualties while capturing not much land. No matter how hopeless and overwhelmed the defenders feel.

— Andrew Perpetua (@AndrewPerpetua) December 10, 2024

I know a lot of people are currently obsessed with Russia’s advances in Ukraine, but I personally see these advances as largely a failure of the Russian military. They are dumping entire Divisions directly into combat and advancing a few km while sustaining absolutely…

— Andrew Perpetua (@AndrewPerpetua) December 7, 2024

Writes billions words in early December about Russian are now slowing down, Russian in December 2024 had best month since March 2022. Slowing down baby

Ukraine has two extremely toxic problems that should have been addressed a long time ago, but never were.

First, there is this pervasive idea that being mobilized into the military is basically a death sentence. Which is entirely untrue.

— Andrew Perpetua (@AndrewPerpetua) December 11, 2024

First, there is this pervasive idea that being mobilized into the military is basically a death sentence. Which is entirely untrue.

Ukraine literally didn't had any demobilisation the only way you get delisted from army in Ukraine is if you lose combat capability

Second, there is this idea that once mobilized, you can no longer contribute to the economy. This is asinine. Of course they can. There are many models of mobilization that allow people to keep their jobs and continue working while also being trained.

— Andrew Perpetua (@AndrewPerpetua) December 11, 2024

There are many models of mobilization that allow people to keep their jobs and continue working while also being trained

Ukraine has shortened the training requirements and so did eu for Ukrainian

So this homo suggest that Ukraine that is short on men power and has hard time replacing loses will just for lol train some guy to send him back to his regular job ?

This homo banned me but you can see he is genius. He believes that Ukraine has 6-12 months training and will do it 2 times Ukraine officially has 8 weeks training and in reality 2-3 and he talks about 100 weeks training

Then he finish of with this

Russian government: we have manpower problems
Russian military: we have manpower problems
Russian soldiers: we have manpower problems

People on twitter: RUSSIA HAS INFINITE MANPOWER AND WILL LAST FOREVER

— Andrew Perpetua (@AndrewPerpetua) December 14, 2024

And blocks comments because he wants to believe Russian having as much problems as Russian

I mean legendary frog brigade proved this point

Remember they haven't even really mobilized yet.

— Tom Neznamy (@Tom_Neznamy) December 14, 2024

So back to the front lines

Russian forces have completed the capture of Kurakhove. pic.twitter.com/tYSzMlLmzD

— KalibratedMaps (@Kalibrated_Maps) December 31, 2024

Kurakhove has fully been captured so now Ukraine will lose whole lower half of Donetsk and fight will start in Dniper region

As one Redditor wrote in og post

Once prokovsk is taken there is only fields till Dnipro, so loosing the Donbas would lose Ukraine the war. Taking the Donbas is by far the hardest part. Just look at WW 2 mr super military genius

Donbas is the most defensible part of that whole region of Ukraine / Russia, as you said first the Germans had trouble going through it and then Soviets too when they were retaking land. The guy calling this advancement against 2014 super entrenched defensive lines insignificant just outed himself as knowing nothing about the war

Ukrainian mappers of course don't report it

Since admitting Kurakhove has fully Ben lost is admitting that black line territory will be soon lost and chances are for truth Sirsky is going to mobilise then as he did with deepstatemap

Many people have high hopes with Trump that he will come and end it all.

And I have a good news, he won't

2025 will be year of legal battle. They talking about peace deal but what peace deal if nether Russia nor Ukraine are fighting each others ?

For a peace deal there must be a legal conflict and there just no conflict on paper. Russia wants that Ukraine side says that those 5 oblast are Russian territory. That something Ukraine side won't do since its defacto killing Ukraine, they of course don't have power to recapture it but they need cope that one day they will be able to do it. US offers no nato for Ukraine for 20 years. So every side wants to come out as victorious. But what West and Ukraine is offering Russia is just a draw and not fixing the reasons why Russia invaded. Why would Russia accept it after it survived all the giga western weapons. Aid for Ukraine is now around 500 billions that's inflation adjusted is 3 times more than lend lease to Soviet Union. And Biden created lend lease for Ukraine but never used it, you wonder why ? Because he was giving everything for free to Ukraine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_Democracy_Defense_Lend-Lease_Act_of_2022

Lend lease was such pathos moment

So after all the epic pathos moment how Russia will be defeated by united west

The scary tanks and long range missiles, Ukrainian are on their back foot without any ability to regain balance, west is offering Russian a draw

So you see it's ether Ukraine recognise that those 5 oblast are Russian or the grind will go on

As I mentioned before Zelenskyy is dead if he recognises those 5 oblast as Russian and he already against elections since now even republicans ask it and he still says no

So don't worry bros Slavshit won't end in 2025

Have a good year, see you again around February, need to study, will have exams about how bad and evil Trump is. Had to listen like 2 hours about how Trump is facist but you can't call him facist

Dramatards, today I'll tell you a bit about one of the most schizoid and polarizing figures in the recent history of Brazilian politics, Olavo de Carvalho (1947-2022)

Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho was born in Campinas, São Paulo in 1947. He was a "philosopher", writer, journ*list, professional politicuck, conspiracy theorist and astrologist and was considered as one of the "intellectual figures" of modern Brazilian conservatism.

In 1966, during the early stages of the Military Dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985) he joined the Brazilian Communist Party , he left in 1968 and became a rightoid. In 1976 he entered a psychiatric hospital after a meltdown and in the late 70s he studied astrology at PUC (Pontificial Catholic University) in São Paulo.

He became famous for publishing rightoid books in the 90s like "O Jardim das Aflições" and "O mínimo que você precisa saber para não ser um idiota". He became a Youtuber and gain followers, in 2005 he moved to the United States because he couldn't stand Lula and died in his ranch in Virginia after getting Covid in 2022 (he was antivaxx)

He was one Bolsonaro's most trusted advisors and I remember him getting an interview on Globo (mainstream news and literally globohomo) by Pedro Bial.

Now, there are many who said "he's the Brazilian Alex Jones", but that comparison is flawed. Alex Jones is an r-slur, Olavo wasn't, he was a very intelligent and articulated man and you could tell that in his interviews, the thing is the guy was insane, like clinically mentally ill and he believed every single schizoid conspiracy he came up with.

I'm gonna detail the schizoness now, if you want to learn his general ideology I'm linking his wikipedia page in English along the "Garden of Afflictions" his "magnus opus", I think it was translated to English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Jardim_das_Afli%C3%A7%C3%B5es

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olavo_de_Carvalho

So, beyond the standard "Global Warming is a hoax" and "vax causes autism", Olavo went farther and claimed dinosaurs are a hoax !dinochads. And he also believed in the Geocentric model and actually criticized Galileo.

Here's a video of him denying the existence of fossils and claiming "fossil fuels" are not of fossil origin !ifrickinglovescience

I'm gonna translate for you guys, he curses a lot and that's a bit difficult to translate so i'll do it word by word on that.

>on fossils, I even remember the book by Georffrey of (didn't understand last name) "Mutation Point" he spoke horrors of fossil fuels, and he claimed that by the end of the 1990s fossil fuels would be abandoned (phased out), that there would be other sources of energy, I'm still waiting for it, it's been 20 years and it hasn't happened yet. It just happens that scientists found hydrocarbons on a galaxy which is on the whore who birth it! Where there were never any fossils nor dinosaurs frick! So, "fossil fuels" are the whore which birth it you get it? Fossil fuels are you mom's butthole, there are no fricking fossil fuels or anything like that, this is a farce, a clownshow

On the blacks he wrote this

1. Blacks have no rights to reparations as it represents an incompatibility and bias as blacks used to enslave arabs and jews when they were Pharaohs

2. Slavery was the fault of blacks for falling because of their decadent, degenerate and unstructured societies pushed by their animistic religions

3. blacks had no cultural contributions to western civilization, only material contributions due to slave labor, having no rights to claim anything from the white Western world

4. Black culture is inferior to western culture and judeochristian traditions, the greco-latin onthology and the Renaissance, which shows blacks won more than what they lost with colonization

!macacos !nooticers thoughts on this fellow?

@Aevann, @MAGAshill can this get pinned please?

Frick all the Uvalde cops

They're all peepees

They don't peepee guns

They just run

When the shots rung

Chief Arredondo

The head honcho

Couldn't let the shots blow

For a whole classload

of kids

Talking about a barricaded subject

Nothing but a sick injustice

He's a man who can't be trusted

No disembowlment, but he's gutless

Sheeeit

The moral of the story be

No more weapons of war in the store

Because they used so morbidly.

Today we won't be discussing Uvalde, although that was my initial intention. Instead, I want to speak about Joseph Campbell and the world of archetypes and the hero's journey. Why? Because I don't always control what topic my mind wants to focus on. I took a singular xanax and I'm feeling mellow so let's begin so I get back to playing Alan Wake 2. I've been working on this one for a while so I hope you enjoy it!

The Early Days

Born in 1904 in New York, Joseph Campbell's interest in mythology was sparked at a young age when his father took him and his younger brother to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Madison Square Garden, and to the National Museum of History, and he soon recognised similarities between the stories and symbols of Native Americans and those from his Roman Catholic upbringing. Later in life, he would study Hinduism and find the same symbols once again. He would also study Arthurian medieval material, and he would recognise the same symbols. Upon entering Dartmouth College in 1921, he studied biology and mathematics. However, he would eventually transition to the Humanities, earning his master's degree in medieval literature in 1926.

In 1928, he discovered the works of Freud and Jung which would influence him greatly. Comparing the two, Campbell argues that the Freudian unconscious is “biographical, not biological”, while the Jungian unconscious is “based on a biological point of view”. Unlike Freud, Campbell points out, Jung recognised the collective unconscious which is universally shared and from which mythic symbols emerge. During his lifetime, Campbell would expand on Jung's ideas of archetypes in the realm of mythology, theorising how these images manifest in the myths, stories, and traditions of disparate cultures around the world.

Campbell on Myths

In The Power of Myth (1988), Campbell outlines much of his beliefs and theories regarding myths and their purpose. The text takes the form of an interview between him and Bill Moyers, an American journ*list and political commentator. The simplest definition Campbell gives for myths is that they are “stories about gods”. Of course, this causes one to question what gods are. Campbell argues that a god is a “personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe”. Furthermore, “the god idea is always culturally conditioned”. To illustrate how culture might affect a society's idea of God, Campbell compares societies that live in different geographies. According to Campbell, societies that live in the desert will lean towards monotheistic ideas of God because “when you're out in the desert with one sky and one world, then you might have one deity”. If a society dwells in a rainforest, however, they are more likely to practice polytheism because, as Campbell argues, the jungle is a place where “there's no horizon and you never see anything more than ten or twelve yards away from you”. Hence, we are more likely to speak of “the gods, plural, of the rainforest”.

In Campbell's view, myths are stories that are concerned with higher values and grand life aims relating to self-actualisation. This is clear when Campbell outlines what he believes are the four purposes of myths. Firstly, myths serve a mystical purpose. They assist to show humans “what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are”, as well as to evoke “awe before this mystery”. The second purpose of myths is to reveal a cosmological dimension. As Campbell explains, myths do this by showing “what the shape of the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through”. The third purpose of myths is a sociological one. Myths, according to Campbell, assist in “supporting and validating a certain social order”. Although “the main motifs of the myths are the same, and they have always been the same”, the sociological function of myths differs from society to society, and it can also change over time. The fourth purpose, the pedagogical function, is the one that pertains most to ‘gods'. Campbell elaborates by explaining that myths serve to teach us “how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances”. Important life lessons are transmitted from generation to generation through myths, and virtues are personified as gods that serve as guiding forces for the individuals and societies who follow the myths.

Campbell identifies a close relationship between myths and dreams and claims that “myths and dreams come from the same place”. Expanding further, he explains that they both “come from realisations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form”. The difference between myths and dreams is that a dream is a “personal experience” whereas a myth “is the society's dream”. The contents of dreams typically concern themselves with matters that are personal to our lives. Hence, drawing from Freud, Campbell argues that a dream “is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself”. Myths, however, are more universal and although their sociological functions may differ, the mythic images remain similar across time and cultures, such that it appears as though “the same play were taken from one place to another, and at each place the local players put on local costumes and enact the same old plays”. Summarising the differences, Campbell states that “the myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth”, and that one can tell that they are in accordance with the public when their dreams coincide with the myths of society.

Campbell offers two explanations for the similarities between myths around the world. The first theory involves archetypes. In the same way that human bodies are relatively similar the world over, so too are psyches similar. Hence, “out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes”. The second explanation Campbell gives is that myths spread through diffusion. To illustrate this explanation, Campbell gives an example of an agricultural society that develops myths around agriculture. As agriculture spreads, the accompanying myths will also spread. Consequently, aspects of agricultural myths such as the killing of “a deity, cutting it up, burying its members, and having the food plants grow” will “accompany an agricultural or planting tradition” but will not appear in a hunting culture. Rather than choose one explanation over another, Campbell states that “there are historical as well as psychological aspects of this problem of the similarity of myths”.

Death, Rebirth, and Myths

Campbell notes the particular importance of metaphorical death and rebirth, stating that “all children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind”. He claims that this wisdom is captured in the Biblical verse 1 Corinthians 13: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”. This death and rebirth, Campbell argues, is achieved through puberty rites. As Campbell explains, “in primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don't have your little baby body anymore, you're something else entirely”. Campbell even cites his own experiences of wearing short pants as a boy and wearing long trousers when he was older as a kind of puberty rite.

What must be noted is that rebirth is unattainable without the preceding death. In several religions, as Campbell points out, “the god of death is at the same time the lord of s*x”. In this way, death and birth become intertwined concepts, and one cannot exist without the other. Giving examples, Campbell lists the death god Ghede of the Haitian Voodoo tradition who is also a s*x god, as well as the Egyptian god Osiris who is “the judge and lord of the dead, and the lord of the regeneration of life”. From this, Campbell concludes that the central lesson to be drawn is that “you have to have death in order to have life”.

To be clear, the death and rebirth metaphorized in myth is not a clinical death that involves the cessation of all life processes. This is also the case with Freud's concept of Eros and Thanatos, and with Jung's death and rebirth archetypes. According to Campbell, within myths, death is a psychic process that we must all undergo if we are to achieve self-actualisation. He stresses this when he states that we are all born dependent on others and are required to be obedient to our caretakers. To “evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection”. Hence, the death and rebirth motif is a metaphor for “leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition”. The use of death and rebirth in this manner will be found in the selected psychedelic texts that will be analysed in the subsequent chapters.

According to Campbell, psychedelic experiences can be incorporated into a ritual that induces a rebirth experienced as self-transformation within the participant. Rituals are closely related to myths because rituals are, as Campbell defines them, “an enactment of a myth” (182), and “by participating in a ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life”. Giving an example of how psychedelics can be used in ritual, Campbell analyses the North American natives of north-western Mexico. This group associates the peyote cacti with deer and prepares very special missions to collect the peyote and return with it. According to Campbell, these “missions are mystical journeys with all of the details of the typical mystical journey”. The mission begins with disengagement from secular life. This requires the participant to confess all their faults before beginning their journey. As they approach the area that contains the natural growth of peyote, they pass special shrines that “represent stages of mental transformation”. Once they find the peyote, they approach the cacti as though they were deer. As Campbell explains, “they sneak up on it, shoot a little arrow at it, and then perform the ritual of collecting the peyote”. All these steps are not necessary from a practical perspective. However, they are necessary in a mythical context, as the ritual is a “complete duplication of the kind of experience that is associated with the inward journey”. Replying to Moyers who asks why the process must be so intricate, Campbell elaborates by saying that “if you undergo a spiritual transformation and have not had preparation for it, you do not know how to evaluate what has happened to you, and you get the terrible experience of a bad trip, as they used to call it with LSD”. What is suggested by Campbell is that the process of self-transformation – or the psychic/spiritual death and rebirth – is not arbitrary, and some guidelines must be adhered to, lest one suffer a bad trip. Campbell looks to religion and mythology to discover what these guidelines are.

Campbell argues that Christians also experience death and rebirth through the rituals and narratives of their religion. This is done by achieving a rebirth that represents a transcendence of one's current self. To do this, however, requires one to relinquish attachments to one's self and, in this way, experience a kind of metaphorical death. As Campbell explains, “you die to your flesh and are born into your spirit”. Campbell characterises this as a metaphorical return to the garden of Eden described in the Bible which is guarded by cherubim, and which humans have been banished from. He claims that to pass the cherubim and return to the garden requires an Ego death. Hence, “if you are no longer attached to your Ego existence, but see the Ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality, and you favour the larger against the smaller, then you won't be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through”. To find harmony, which is represented by the garden, therefore requires not a fear of death nor an unfettered attachment to life. This view of death is at odds with modern conceptions of death. From this perspective, death is not an end that is to be avoided, nor is it seen as the antithesis of life. Rather, it is conceived of as something that must be balanced with life to achieve harmony. Without death, there is no self-actualisation and only stagnancy is possible. As Campbell writes, “you have to balance between death and life – they are two aspects of the same thing, which is being, becoming”.

The motif of death and rebirth being a process of self-transformation is not limited to shamanic cultures and Abrahamic religions. It also makes an appearance in many Eastern religions and myths in the form of reincarnation. Campbell suggests reincarnation must be understood metaphorically because a literal interpretation fails to capture what is being conveyed by the myths. The idea of reincarnation, according to Campbell, suggests “that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realisation and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself”.

The Hero's Journey

The idea of death and rebirth as part of a psychological transformative process embedded in mythology is best expressed in Campbell's theory of the monomyth, which claims that in stories around the world, a recurring pattern of the Hero's Journey is present. In short, the Hero's Journey centres on an everyman who is thrust out of his ordinary world into an adventure that variously tests them, and ultimately has them facing death. By overcoming death, the hero is reborn, and they bring the treasures they gain back to their home. This story, although it may take a different archetypal form, retains the same structure, as it describes a universal psychological process. Hence, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell claims that:

whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story that we find.

In this work, Campbell explores his theory of the universal monomyth. The central figure, the hero, represents the idealised self as well as the highest ideals and values of a culture, and “is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms”. It is through the hero that myths illustrate that “there must be, if we are to experience long survival – a continuous ‘recurrence of birth' (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death”. There is a similarity between the Hero's Journey and psychedelics' effect on the psyche, as they both concern shifting one from familiar states of mind to unfamiliar, often novel mental states that can result in tumultuous experiences. As Campbell explains, “the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside”.

Conclusion

Nobody is going to read to this point so I can admit I'm going to try again with the girl who rejected me. I'm going to tell her I still have feelings for her and I can't get over them. Last time she rejected me, she also said she doesn't know how she feels so there's a chance if you ask me. I'm going to tell her I love her and I want to give a relationship a chance. If I fail, then it's truly over beyond belief.

Tune in next time when we discuss Richard Huckle, Peter Scully, and Daisy's Destruction.

I don't know, I feel like I might regret revealing the personal information I'm going to share in this post, but let's go.

There are so many ways to approach life, and two people dealing with the same situations can take wildly varying responses to it. Prison is a good example. Others break down and become hopeless. Some become mentally calloused and emerge stronger and more psychologically stronger.

Sometimes I wonder about events in my own life, and whether I'm viewing them from the correct perspective. Do you relate? Let's take inceldom for example. At times I'm doggedly determined to bring a new life for myself. Other times it feels like I'm just being stupid and that that everything I'm trying will lead to nothing.

But who knows what life will bring? Nobody can predict that kind of thing. Well, I can be certain that suffering is coming my way because that is the nature of life. However, love is not promised. I hope I become someone worthy of life, and find the strength to withstand suffering.

Today's post will cover a bit of psychiatry as well as a discussion on some of the difficulties of escaping inceldom. I always enjoy writing these. If you're the only person reading this, then that's more than enough. It's nice to write and remind myself that my life is real, and there are other people out there.

Bipolar & OCD

After jumping through multiple hoops, I was finally able to see a psychiatrist. My issues were explained, and we had a long conversation. He asked a lot about my sexual life which was uncomfortable because I basically had to explain my inceldom. It's weird how he almost instantly detected I was an incel. First, he asked me about my orientation, which I think he was doubtful about because I'm wearing pink nail polish. Then he asked me “have you ever had a girlfriend?” instead of “do you have a girlfriend?” or “when's the last time you had a girlfriend?”. He just knows.

I was asked to fill out a bunch of questionnaires that asked me a ton of questions about my life, past, and symptoms. After looking at the questionnaire and speaking to me, he concluded that I was bipolar and OCD.

The OCD diagnosis clicked immediately with me, and it explained the nature of my self-harming and its relationship with my endless stream of self-loathing thoughts. I had never considered it, but my self-harm is of an OCD nature, and I'm driven by obsessive thoughts of self-punishment and self-loathing, which leads to impulses I struggle with and fail to control. There is also a ritual to the self-harm event, a list of things I have to do before and after. Like holy frick can I get the hand-washing or “is the oven on” OCD and not the “you must rip yourself to shreds” one? This is the worst form of OCD.

Studies on the topic have been quite revelatory to me:

The second observation was based on our patients' description of their acts of self-harm as compulsive, ritualistic, meticulous, and painless. Lack of pain during self-harm has been associated to depersonalization, hysteria, or a transient analgesic state (Simpson, 1973; Takeuchi et al, 1986; Favazza & Conterio, 1989). Our patients seem to fall into the category of describing their act of self-harm as a transient analgesic state usually followed by pleasure, release of tension, or a feeling of well-being

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Fugen-Neziroglu/publication/15305679_Self-mutilation_anorexia_and_dysmenorrhea_in_obsessive_compulsive_disorder/links/5a020f560f7e9b6887472acc/Self-mutilation-anorexia-and-dysmenorrhea-in-obsessive-compulsive-disorder.pdf

I've stated this prior, but please don't self-harm. I know that I'm not the only one here who does this, and we all have our reasons. However, if you have some control over it, exercise it and don't do it. If you must, do it somewhere clothes can cover. You DO NOT want an arm full of cut marks. It will permanently stigmatize you. Regardless of where you self-harm, you're going to have to confront it if you ever get intimate with anyone, so it could easily extend your inceldom and leave you with lifelong body insecurities (and you have a genuine reason to be insecure because you mutilated your body you fricking crazy person).

A few cuts are one thing, especially if you're a girl. Your bf will kiss your scars. When it's clear you're in the triple digits with the cuts, it's a different matter. You look unstable (you are). It's clear it wasn't a “moment of weakness” but a lifelong mental illness that is violent in nature. Any streetsmart person is going to frick off because nothing good comes from folks like us. We sink to rock bottom and we drag you down with us - but of course, there will be folks (especially women) who are naive enough to think they can help or heal us with love.

==========

Quick notes from Holly!

So we all probably have habits and routines in our lives. That's normal. It's also normal to have intrusive thoughts at times, you know, things you think about that you probably don't want to or know are immoral. The common one people talk about is imagining just veering in front of oncoming traffic when driving. Furthermore, we all have things we do repetitively. As has often been said, humans are creatures of habit.

With OCD, all these normal traits are cranked to the max. It has to make you incapable of leading a normal life before it is considered a disorder. While I fortunately don't suffer from routine obsession (though the act of self-harming does follow a ritual), the obsessive thought of harming myself, and what I might do to myself is constant and unending. I know I am a danger to myself, that I am a bad person, and that a cutting is in order. The thought - the compulsion - is obsessive and all-consuming.

There is no escaping it. Submitting to the compulsion brings relief. But it does not end the compulsion. The thoughts will return and once again, I will be driven to the behavior which prevents me from living a normal life, one where I'm not constantly injuring myself.

==========

The bipolar diagnosis, I was not what I was expecting. However, there is a history of both diagnosed and undiagnosed psychosis in my family so I don't question it too much. I also considered my overall personality, and it may lead to atypical manifestations of bipolar that don't precisely match the stereotypes of the mental disorder.

It also shines a light that maybe I was the butthole in some situations. My PhD supervisor was mean to me, but he was also always pissed off at how I was constantly changing my thesis and throwing in a bunch of new ideas that didn't always make sense. I feel like I was kind of going hypomania on him, which makes me understand a little better why I might have pissed him off and made him not like me. It's not easy to work with someone who changes their strategic vision every week. To me, it felt like being creative. To him, it must have been impossible to work with me, especially when I refused to believe I was wrong about anything.

Some interesting research about BD and self-harm:

Previous research has found that individuals with mood disorders engage in self-harm at a higher rate than individuals with other DSM diagnoses (Selby et al., 2012). We found that individuals with bipolar disorder engage in self-harm at higher rates than individuals with a unipolar depressive disorder (52% versus 37%, respectively). This finding expands previous research showing that suicide and suicidal attempts (in addition to self-harm found in this study) are greater in individuals with bipolar disorder compared to unipolar depressive disorders (Rihmer and Kiss, 2002).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5679240

I feel like this highlights why I need a friend, not even a girlfriend, but just a friend. Someone who can tell me, “hey man, don't get piercings all over your face, you're going to regret it in a couple of months.” Imagine if I had been treated years earlier. I might have my PhD now.

So I got some antipsychotics and more yummy benzos. Feelig light is weight, it jut's sad I don't have anyone in real to talk about different benzos and the varied types of bliss they bring. The previous stuff mad me calm and function. This one feels far for "disinhibiting" and is already doing a number on my memoy and ability to focus. I brought an embien to my room but I lost it already. Oh well.

Honestly, they prescribe benzos like candy wtf just tell a doctor of any sort you're self-harming and if it's disturbing enough they'll fill your medicine cabinet with this shit. Indubitably, I've got enough to sell on the side at this point. I'm not complaining, the druggie life is based and I'm worthless, but holy shit I wonder how many normies they're turning into repeat customers forever while frying their memory. I wrote my life is worthless on something work-related, and it just got detered. It ws a surreptitious scry for help.

Why skydiving?

What does this have to do with finding a girlfriend?

Directly? Nothing at all. Both these tests of courage won't get me a gf. My hope is that they force me out of my comfort zone so that when I am in situations where I could acquire a gf, I know what to do to fight through the fear and act. I don't want another S.H. situation where I crush for ages and then get heartbroken after months of being in love. If I like a girl, I just want the yes or no immediately so I can move on. That only happens if I speak as soon as possible.

Secondly, these are opportunities to interact with human beings. Sure, these are humans more or less paid to be nice to me, but I think I still do learn some social skills by interacting with people, even if they're at work. Hopefully, these skills will help me speak to men and women (mostly women though).

There is also the matter of filling up my time and spending my money so I don't spend it on vices. This is pivotal to nofap, as having free time is one of the biggest things that can cause me to fail. I also have to deal with the craving to simply buy women's time. I have previously discussed my idea to buy a high-end escort for non-sexual purposes. The truth is that if I ever did something like that, it would inevitably end in s*x.

Maybe not the first time, maybe not the second time, but it would eventually happen. I would pay for s*x. The whole idea was just tiptoeing into prostitution as a solution to loneliness, fooling myself into thinking I tripped and fell into it accidentally. That was the only way it was going to end.

I'm a poorcel, so I can't afford both skydiving and escorting. So by skydiving, I've made escorting impossible. Basically forced myself to do the right thing by making the wrong thing impossible. Also, there's a non-zero chance I'll meet a skydiving cutie lol

This leads me to my next problem.

Where to find women?/

Online doesn't work (I've tried Tinder and other apps, never had a match ever). My only shot is a real-life situation where I can speak to someone and hopefully attract a nice woman with my personality because my looks and height kinda frick me over on first impressions. I have no hope online.

I've joined a hiking club and the first hike is on Saturday. I'm hoping I meet a girl there. I'm doing it for the cardio (I want to remain at the group) but also to

If you go online and look up “how to get a gf”, plenty of sites suggest you try volunteering. Let me explain why this is a meme.

You usually pay to volunteer

You thought that shit was free neighbor lol. You pay to be there most of the time, especially if it concerns animals.

2. It takes place during the day, sometimes for multiple days

Want to volunteer at the animal shelter? First you need to complete a course, which probably takes a whole week or two. You got the chance to take two weeks off work to learn how to clip dog toenails?

3. It's filled with minors and old people

I visited the volunteering websites around me. All the pictures feature either boomers or high school kids. These are the only people with time to do this shit. You're not meeting single 20-something year old women here. I don't know where they are, but they aren't out volunteering lol.

This is amazing. Literal hallucinations. It did leaked too muc drownziness and my inceldim feel amplified because I want to share this warm, loving world here lol. The drowziness is getting fierce fast, but normies get this emotional happiness when they gf I would, it's all's missing. Imagine walking through the mall, holding your girl's hand. I want to experience. Im also going to join Toastermasters - that's public speaking. I know I can write the best speeches and outcompete everyone. I don't if I'll be a good hiker.

My remaining ideas are hence the following:

work on nightclub club game

Mormon church

Attend as many events as possible around me

Hiking club

I'm hoping for the easy road. Just find a cutie at the hiking club on the first week, we get married the following week and this Incel nightmare is finally over. But I know at this point that life doesn't work this way.

Conclusion

In 2024, I will get a gf. Sorry, very confusing. I forget what I'm doing. I lost an ambin pill but that's okay i think just enjoying this is based. Weeed dabing while I listen to Midnight mauraudres by /A Tribe Called Quest RIP 5 foot freak very based benzo. Imagine if my dentist gives me more benzos loli lost my ambien pill but it doesn't matter. Versed did its job.

Greetings Dramatards,

about 2 weeks there was a lot of excitement during the Rugby World Cup, when RSA managed to squeeze out a win with exactly 1 point for 3 fricking consecutive times!

But that's irrelevant, what is relevant to us is the Dramarama which occurred in the meantime.

Today we will talk about some RACISM DRAMA when during the Semi-Finals (i think 22 October? ) when RSA faced off against Engerland in the 3rd Anglo-Boer war of 2023.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/22/tom-curry-accuses-south-africa-hooker-bongi-mbonambi-of-using-racial-slur

Basically a b-word mayo complained that the black giga-chad kang player Bongi Mbonambi, used a racial slur against him in the match during an altercation when the ball was being manhandled in the typical chaos when men beat each other up in the desperate hunt for the egg

Basically the pansy Tom "Turbo Cuck" Curry, moaned that Bongi had called him a "wit kant" or a "white c*nt" during the scuffle, and this made him very upset and hurt his feefees

Now unlike the plebe sport of soccer, where a lot of douchebags fake their injuries and racial slurs are a bit more common, the Rugby Union International organization very super serial seriously, so stuff like this can make news.

========(from article)

Curry can clearly be heard on a recording via O'Keeffe's microphone making the allegation of a racist slur to the official in the 28th minute of the match. He said: “Sir, sir , if their hooker calls me a white c*nt what do I do?” The New Zealander responded by saying: “Nothing please.” He goes on to add, after a short pause: “I'll be on it,” though it is unclear if he is referring to the specific incident. There is no audio available of the alleged comment by Mbonambi.

Curry was visibly shaken after the match.

When asked if something was said to him by Mbonambi, he said: “Yeah.” Pressed on what had been said, he declined to say but asked if the matter had been resolved at the end of the match – Curry appeared to go to shake hands with Mbonambi but the South African seemed to push his hand away – he added: “No. It doesn't need to be talked about. I'm not talking about it now.”

SA Rugby soon issued a statement, however. “We are aware of the allegation, which we take very seriously, and are reviewing the available evidence,” it read. “We will engage with Bongi if anything is found to substantiate the claim.”

The Springboks clinched victory with a 78th-minute penalty by Handré Pollard and at the full-time whistle one of a number of flare-ups between the two sides ensued. The England captain, Owen Farrell, clashed with South Africa's Willie le Roux but afterwards attempted to play down the incident, insisting it was just a “misunderstanding”.

If Mbonambi faces disciplinary action he could be handed a suspension in line with law 9.12 which states a player must not verbally abuse anyone. World Rugby regulations prohibit abuse based on, but not limited to “religion, colour, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation”. World Rugby could also intervene on the grounds of “bringing the game into disrepute”.

====(end article)

LOST IN TRANSLATION:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/24/was-an-afrikaans-rugby-term-used-by-bongi-mbonambi-lost-in-translation

So the moment this came out we aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll knew the Bongoloid was completely full of shit, and making mountains out of morehills.

You see black people in South Africa do not often use english slurs or curse words at alllllllllll. They much more often use Afrikaans slurs and curses, as the Afrikaners had had such a more profound effect on their lexicon. The very english word c*nt isn't used very much normally at all, especially by black peeps here. If someone here wants to call someone a c*nt - they'll use the afrikaans variant "Poes"

Additionally, all rugby players communicate in afrikaans during play and can speak it reasonably fluently , including all the black and coloured players whom all were usually influenced by afrikaans dominated rugby institutions and schools. This has had the added benefit that few people on earth can speak or understand afrikaans, meaning their have inbuilt secret code which the opposition can't understand, which can be very useful in certain plays if the opponents cannot understand you, like often throwing in the rugby ball from the side into liners.

Additionally, "kant" which is pronounced very much the same as "c*nt" means side, and as you can imagine is used very often in a sport where communicating direction between players is important. Bongi very likely said something along the lines "left side, right side, back side" to indicate to his fellow players where to receive a passing ball, and our r-slurred bongroid interpreted it in the noise as "%&*& C*NT"

Additionally there are white lines on the sides of a rugby field, which also likely could have been what Bongi had referred to.

https://apnews.com/article/south-africa-mbonambi-rugby-world-cup-1390e406c1ba87935342fc9f1f7c382a

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/article-12721675/South-Africa-star-Bongi-Mbonambi-denies-racial-slur-Tom-Curry-World-Cup-hooker-claims-speaking-Afrikaans-slams-England-unprofessional.html

Since summer is coming all too soon to !texas I got to work on a project I been needin to do recently: fixing my window unit

A little backstory. I live in a trailer. pulled this circa 2003 ish unit, from another trailer. it sat since the end of 2010

it was 2021 I pulled it out.

when you're a country boy, you make do. why go buy a new window unit when the old trailer's got some sitting around?

actually, I pulled 2 sister units of the same vintage and manufacture at the time. one had a bad refrigeration circuit, probably the compressor rotted out on the bottom and leaked the gas

a parts unit

it sat in its new home beside the driveway patiently until it would be needed

lo and behold, just 2 yeears later, its time came

the working unit had served me well for 21 and 22 but the bearings on the fan were shot from sitting 10 years without moving, partially exposed to the weather.

it was pretty loud.

and since you need AC at least 8 months out of the year in this glorious state , it was working pretty hard.

I had alreaty scrounged the capacitor from the parts unit bc it was going, and every six months or so I had to oil the bearings or they'd start to seize.

and it was getting worse. as 'winter' finally rolled around last year and I only needed the thing some days I could spare time to try and fix it. the seizing was terminal at this point and she would suffer no more

this wasn't my first time putting together a frankenstein unit. I had done basically the same thing before with 2 other sister units from another building. these were from 1998/1999, the good old days , older than me

they also sat since 2010

well one had no refrigeration and the other had a seized motor right from the get go. so I took the good from each and made one working unit

back to the newer unit... I pulled the fan assembly from the driveway machine and put it in. one uuge problem. It was so fricking loud

I couldn't even sleep with it on. these bearings were worse than the old ones, but at least they were still spinnign. there was still some heat to get through before november brought peace so I powered through

but it got worse. the plastic condenser fan, having sat outside, dissembled in the driveway, had been exposed to a bunch of UV I guess and had turned to more or less cardboard. (I could just peel pieces of it apart when I took it out)

the fan blades were breaking and making it go out of balance.

So by the end of the cooling season this thing was an ear bleeding and earthshaking monstrosity in my windowsill.

something had to be done... but its december now there's no need for AC I'll fix it later

that time was (is) now. ferbruary is coming to a close and with it will go the beutiful cold I've been enjoying. ( can't wait to find home)

I took the seized fan unit that was just waiting for some kind of final solution. I tore that motor open

there they were...

2 easy to replace 608s

got a 10 pack online for $7

pulled the mfs and pressed the new ones on

spin the thing

silence

so I threw her back together and into the window.

turned it on and there's only the sound of the air (and compressor) now

now you might have read this (probably not ) and wondered, what's that title about?

well its about what happened last night when I got the thing in the window and turned it on.

the satisfaction of a job well done washed over me as I sat down at the old puter to browse rdrams.

and then thought popped into my head. the pernicious idea. only for a moment, but made me stop right in my tracks: "why didn't I take pictures of everything to make an effortpost?"

and then I was sick

I realised this was the thought of a social media user. this is not me. no.

so no I DIDN'T take pictures. No you DON'T get to see

I'm going to enjoy my life with my own dmn eyes and I'm not going to become a 'gram zombie posting my every meal.

everytime I see a picture of a modern concert or venue where every. single. person. there is more concerned about filming the thing than actually being there, I want to vom.

it's disgusting and I feel ashamed for even the brief moment of remorse I felt about not filming this mundane task for the viewership of what, like 23 r-slurs online.

still felt the need to make the text post albiet

I should be making marseys like I came here to do but instead I've been gooning to stable diffusion building workflows and exploring advanced generative ai systems all weekend. at least I went outside and fixed a AC

Chuds and Kanye fans can leave now. You won't like this one. Today I want to briefly discuss Viktor Frankl and his ideas that have helped me redefine my life. I've turned to Freud, Jordan Peterson, Campbell, and Jung, and while they all have something to offer, none have gripped me quite like Frankl. I do warn that I am on benzos right now and it's making my screen vibrate so apologies for any typos and if I slip into nonsense. My eyes are half-closed and I forgot how much I took.

Viktor Frankl - Will you be a moslem or a kapo

As we all know, Frankl was a doctor who found himself thrown into concentration camps during Nazi rule. He lived day to day, not knowing whether he would be sent to the furances the next day, or whether his family was still alive. Throughout his time, he makes many interesting observations about human nature. Most notably, he describes the moslems and the kapos of the prisons. Some men, not due to starvation, but rather the loss of a will to live, would begin to waste away. When such men are noticed, it is obvious they can work no longer so they are sent to the showers.

If you wake up, shave, and look smart, you will be made to work, but you will not be killed. In fact, you may even become a kapo, where you will be in charge of other prisoners. From this position, you can help others escape or give better treatment to the prisoners (though Frankl notes that many of the Kapo were as mean as the Nazis themselves, it should be noted that jews in such positions were responsible for secretly freeing prisoners, and it is estimated that the descendants of these freed jews number in the hundreds of thousands today).

Regardless, the point is clear. Each day we wake up in heck. Will you be a moslem or a Kapo? Will you slump over, give up, and allow weakness to overcome you, or will you shave, and face each day as though you are the best worker possible? Either choice is suffering, but which do you think is better? For some, being a moslem is superior. At least you die soon. For a rare few of us, we are wiling to endure the suffering to one day become a kapo and relieve the suffering of the moslems.

Frankl BTFOs Freud

During Frankl's time, Freud was the definitive voice when it came to mental health and psychology. Frankl basically said - "yeah, all of that's bullshit, throw it away." Frankl has no respect for psychotherapy. His reasons are simple. His main concern with psychotherapy is that it fails to adequately address humankind's drive for meaning. Instead, such impulses are viewed as ‘defense mechanisms'. This tends to lead to cynical conclusions about human nature.

As Frankl argues: “I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my ‘defense mechanisms,' nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my ‘reaction formations.' Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!”. And that's what it ultimately comes to - what meaning have you inscribed in life to make the suffering worth it? Whatever you have dubbed "meaningful", this is what you will live and die for.

I'm sure so many of us reading this have been on the precipice of suicide. You're still here, your attempt failed, so you're clearly giving life a second/third/fourth chance. Why? Why not try to end yourself again? Clearly some sense of meaning has gripped you, at least temporarily. For now, that meaning surpasses the influence suffering has on you. I'd like you to think deeply about what that meaning is in your life. This could be the most important revelation you make to yourself.

Personally, my meaning comes from crafting my imaginary world. I know it has value, and that the people within it deserve a universe made of love. I love the inhabitants of Encante, and I will suffer through the agony of existence to ensure their world is treated with the respect it deserves. Where does your meaning come from?

As evidence for the importance of meaning in life, Frankl points to several studies, including one that surveyed students on what they found important, with results revealing that “16

percent of the students checked ‘making a lot of money'; 78 percent said their first goal was ‘finding a purpose and meaning to my life.'"

Another critique of psychotherapy put forward by Frankl concerns the fact that the theoretical framework is very much focused on the symbolic and theorized psychic processes. Though this may be effective in some cases, Frankl believes that it does have its limitations. Such limits become obvious when dealing with patients suffering from noögenic neuroses, which Frankl describes as neuroses arising from existential frustration.

Though it may cause suffering, Frankl argues that “existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic”. Isn't that liberating to know? There's nothing pathological about questioning your existence or even being frustrated by the very fact of your existence. These are all normal emotions!

Consequently, rather than attempt to cure the condition, it is the job of the therapist to pilot the patient through his existential crisis of growth and development. Frankl argues that noögenic neuroses do not emerge from conflicts between drives and instincts but rather from existential problems. Hence, he proposes that in such cases, “the appropriate and adequate therapy is not psychotherapy in general but rather logotherapy; a therapy, that is, which dares to enter the specifically human dimension”.

Logotherapy? What now? What the frick is that?

Logotherapy

Logotherapy, as defined by Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning, concerns itself with the search for the worthwhileness of life. I agree with Frankl here that this should be the primary mode of tackling mental health. Someone is sad and suicidal. Our first instinct is to say "noooo don't do it." What we should be asking first is "is your life worthwhile? Why or why not?" Oftentimes, people who are depressed will claim their lives are not worthwhile, as their emotional states aren't improving regardless of what they do. Such folks are moslems.

The kapos, they are able to stand up and shave daily because they have found a reason to consider life worthwhile.

logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego, and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment.

You're not here to soothe your id, fulfill base desires, or satisfy primitive instincts. Rather, if you're to not self-delete today, it will be because you've found meaning, not because you've escaped suffering (you can't). To understand what is being said, a radical change in your outlook on suffering is necessary.

You will suffer

Here's where most of us fail. We desire something and we believe it will bring us joy. We fail to acquire that thing, so we're plunged into depression and life feels meaningless. This is GOOD. The fact that you're suffering should be used as a rudder, directing you toward that which is truly meaningful. If that meaning does not exist, the suffering is not a rudder, it is a hole in your boat that will sink you to heck.

You're going to suffer, so here are your two options - suffer for meaning, or suffer for nothing. Unlike Freud, Frankl doesn't want to eliminate suffering. Instead, he wants to understand it as another important psychic process that is integral to our development and self-actualization.

the search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. Hence, what man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him

This is the heroic "call to adventure" Joseph Campbell speaks of. Will you stay and suffer in your shitty hometown (die a moslem), or will you seek out meaning, suffering all the way there (and maybe become a kapo/hero)?

The value of suffering

Forget about pleasure and pain. Why do you believe will give you meaning? Is it:

• family

• art

• knowledge

• love

Whatever it is, if it is meaningful, you will endure all manner of suffering to acquire it. As Frankl summarises, “man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life". Though suffering is something that is often instinctually avoided, he argues that “man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning”.

This is a radical view, as it is often the assumption that those things that seem to take meaning away from human life include not only suffering but dying as well. From Frankl's perspective, these could be the very things that imbue life with meaning. This perspective is not a masochistic one, as Frankl is not arguing that suffering is essential to finding meaning. As he summarises: “meaning is available in spite of - nay, even through - suffering”, though if suffering is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause.

Conclusion

It's okay for life to go sideways and for unimaginable suffering to strike. It is in these moments that we either become moslems whose lives were void of meaning to begin with, or we become greater than we ever were. Which direction will your suffering take you?

At least for now, I can hold onto the meaning of my parocosm, and it's enough. What is your justification for suffering? What makes it worth it? What would you endure Auschwitz for? Should be noted that when Frankl was freed his whole family was dead. All he had was his research. The same research that changed the world and helped millions, and I am attempting to relay it to you. Man's Search for Meaning is one of the bestselling books of all time, and I am glad he held steadfast to his meaning in the most dire circumstances.

Um dia atrasado pq eu tomei um ban de 1 dia por postar mulheres com pinto

/r/Brasil

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1hhapxv/d%C3%B3lar_dispara_e_fecha_a_r_626_maior_cota%C3%A7%C3%A3o_da/

Trancado pq estavam falando verdades inconvenientes demais, isso obviamente só pode ser obra de infiltrados fascistas de outros subs

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1hh3gqy/eu_j%C3%A1_entendi_a_quest%C3%A3o_do_d%C3%B3lar_alto_por_que_ele/

Um monte de bosta sem sentido, os caras tão dando nó na própria fimose pra defender o governo. Eu não li mas eu imagino que seja mais do mesmo: mercado fascista malvadão etcetc

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1hhc2o9/d%C3%B3lar_bateu_r_631/

O post não trancado mas altamente janniado

Olha só

antes

depois

KEK

Esquece, já trancaram

Vamos aos outros subs

/r/Brasilivre

Não li, mas imagino que seja tudo 'faz o L'

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/1hhb3y4/eita_poh/

Cagando na cabeça de um twitteiro r-slurado

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/1hh7z0l/a_seita_ataca_novamente/

Cagando na cabeça daquelas jornalistas nojentas

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/1hh2nmh/_/

Esse é pro @nuclearshill, tu que curte a argentina. viu que mataram um argentino no rio e o juiz não mandou prender?

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/1hgzlll/o_recado_no_finalzinho_%C3%A9_bem_importante/

Seria esse governo horroroso uma vingança do lula?

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/1hh2lm4/mude_minha_opini%C3%A3o_lula_est%C3%A1_se_vingando_por_ter/

Já aproveitando a deixa, isso aqui foi engraçado, mas não tem a ver

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/1hg8xw9/universidades_p%C3%BAblicas_brasileiras_beiram_o/

https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/1hh0jw5/discuss%C3%A3o_entre_jornalista_e_s%C3%A9rgio_sacani_sobre/

/r/Farialimabets -- era um sub de meme mas meio que virou um campo de batalha entre MAV do rBrasil e seres humanos

https://old.reddit.com/r/farialimabets/comments/1hh0y9h/compre_na_alta_e_venda_na_alta/

https://old.reddit.com/r/farialimabets/comments/1hh80x6/estupidez_level_1000/

https://old.reddit.com/r/farialimabets/comments/1hhcejq/o_mundo_n%C3%A3o_%C3%A9_mais_o_mesmo/

https://old.reddit.com/r/farialimabets/comments/1hhf274/a_um_m%C3%AAs_atr%C3%A1s_algu%C3%A9m_comentou_aqui_no_sub_que/

https://old.reddit.com/r/farialimabets/comments/1hh97a4/j%C3%A1_eras_sub_fomos_descobertos/

https://old.reddit.com/r/farialimabets/comments/1hhb8qe/partiu_aeroporto/

https://old.reddit.com/r/farialimabets/comments/1hh9vc5/achei_o_tal_ataque_especulativo_do_cambio/

https://old.reddit.com/r/farialimabets/comments/1hgmj5o/em_quem_eu_acredito/

/r/Flanelaa (reduto de gente que quer xingar o /r/Brasil)

https://old.reddit.com/r/Flanelaa/comments/1hh0qxz/o_governo_lula_%C3%A9_um_fracasso/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Flanelaa/comments/1hhcexl/update_senhores/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Flanelaa/comments/1hhbn4e/n%C3%A3o_sou_nenhum_economista_mas_acho_que_est%C3%A1_na/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Flanelaa/comments/1hgi10q/haddad_era_so_uma_ferramenta/

/r/investimentos -- Segura que agora vem pedrada

https://old.reddit.com/r/Flanelaa/comments/1hgi10q/haddad_era_so_uma_ferramenta/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hh41ul/acho_que_n%C3%A3o_tenho_emocional_pra_bater_cabe%C3%A7a_com/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hha874/selic_negociada_na_curva_de_juros_est%C3%A1_acima_de/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hhafgi/como_est%C3%A3o_protegendo_o_seu_patrim%C3%B4nio_desse/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hh16ru/vou_voltar_a_aportar_na_bolsa_brasileira/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hhdfqu/ueee_come%C3%A7ou_a_terceira_guerra_mundial/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hh5810/acredito_que_o_d%C3%B3lar_vai_se_acomodar_afirma_haddad/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hhcex4/s%C3%B3_pode_ser_piada_parte_2/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hhcv2l/saiu_agora_18hs38min_18dez24_bc_anuncia_leil%C3%A3o_de/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hhbd0h/onde_voc%C3%AAs_acham_que_vai_parar_essa_subida_do/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hhd39r/histeria/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hh5g9i/d%C3%B3lar_alto_no_fim_do_ano_%C3%A9_o_pior_cen%C3%A1rio_que/

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hgl87e/cansei_n%C3%A3o_vou_deixar_1_centavo_do_meu_dinheiro/

E pra finalizar, você sabe o que realmente é brigading?

Quando um MAV do /r/Brasil vai em outro sub pra fazer post desonesto defendendo o governo.

https://old.reddit.com/r/investimentos/comments/1hgg6a7/voc%C3%AAs_tem_no%C3%A7%C3%A3o_do_que_%C3%A9_um_ipca_7_at%C3%A9_2045_%C3%A9_uma/

Libertarians are a funny bunch. Half want to smoke weed and let corporations run everything and the other half secretly wants to roll back to 1946 America. How can person possibly tell which libertarian they are talking to? The age old litmus test of illegal immigration. It's always a hot topic among libertarians where half want to deport every illegal and the other half doesn't want the government to be strong enough to do that. It's their version of the omnipotence question.

Only instead of trying to give an honest and thoughtful answer, they just accuse each other of being sock puppets for (((sarc)))

The linked article is written by some foid that wants to have completely open borders. Typical libertarian talking point. Below is a summary of the comments

Chapter 1: 5.56 is a fed

Vernon Depner: Every time a criminal is punished, that tears apart a family.

5.56: I hope those ILLEGALS get theirs torn apart so good and hard. Time to watch some border footage, yum.

VULGAR MADMAN : Ok, Fed.

5.56: Ok, Fag

VULGAR MADMAN : Is 5.56 the length or the diameter of your penis?

5.56: A faggot would be interested in that kind of information.

VULGAR MADMAN: So you're tiny. I'm so sorry.

Don't look at me: .

A wild prfd1 appears!

prfd1 is angered by Don't look at me's comment consisting of a single, fucking, period.

prfd1: An international political (DEMOCRAT) organization issues arrest warrants for Jews……

	First nation saying – "WE WILL ARREST THOSE JEWS"

	.

	GERMANY – 2024.

	.

	WTF?

	DEAD SERIOUS.

	FUCKING LOOK IT UP.

	DON'T USE GOOGLE IF YOU ARE HONEST.

prfd1's version of gooning is injecting wild thoughts into unrelated conversations.

Chapter 2

Times's up on VULGAR MADMAN's and 5.56's refractory period. These lady boys are busting out the manly toys. First they swing at a woman. Her name is Fiona, she wrote the opinion piece on illegal immigration. Opinion pieces

are the only thing reason.com is has. They don't actually do investigative journalism. They constantly insult the main stream media's ability to do a job they aren't will to do themselves. Oh the illegal irony!

5.56: Fionas tears are almost as sweet as those of ILLEGALS. Im thinking about all the DOORS that are SHUT to the children of ILLEGAL LOSER parents. All those translator puppet children of ILLEGAL LOSER parents that speak no english and let their 10 year old ANCHOR BABY APPENDAGES do all the talking at walmart for them. How sad and hopeless they must feel. I really love it.

VULGAR MADMAN: You're really overdoing it sarc.

5.56: You are more retarded than you are old. Which is probably really hard.

VULGAR MADMAN: You only get hard when you go to links posted by palins buttplug.

5.56: Jesus Christ, this so has absolutely nothing to do with me. But you also failed to identify me correctly when I did my Fiona one trick pony parody account. You fucking idiot legit wouldnt stop accusing me of being OBL. Youre really not that bright, buddy.

Chapter 3: Drunken sockpuppets

GroundTruth has a solid question about how these policies will be enacted. He thinks racism is for practical matters though. He needs to be sent to the re-education camps first. FR FR.

GroundTruth pontificates with sweeping arms. "How does Trump propose to do this? Will we all be required to carry papers showing where we were born? As a practical matter, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?"

Sarcasmic turns his head to the side, his smugness already yanking back one side of his mouth.

	   "If you're unwilling to sacrifice liberty to round up 11,000,000 vermin, then you're not a libertarian. If you don't support expanded police powers and immunities to catch these vermin, then you're not a libertarian. 

	   If you oppose deploying the military to build concentration camps for these vermin, then you're not a libertarian.  No, if you oppose any of those things, you're a leftist. Duh."

5.56 looks in sarcasmic's direction and righteously yells "ICE ICE BABY".

"Getting your socks mixed up again?" says VULGAR MADMAN as he walks up the 5.56.

VULGAR lifts his pant legs to show both of his socks match.

5.56 rolls his eyes at VULGAR MADMAN while scratching his balls. He replies, "You are beyond retarded, bud. Hope you die soon,

telling from how inflexible your brain is it can't be much longer."

A bottle of scotch is crafted from artisanal air as its imagined contents glides into VULGAR's mouth.

"Your alcoholism will kill you first, sarcasmic." replies VULGAR

"You know that everybody here can see how much of a fucking dipshit you are when you call me sarc, right?" shouts 5.56.

"Keep coping drunky."

"I think youre coping with the fact that you are expired. Must hurt."

A commenter by the name 'Don't look at me!' clicks the littlest co-signing pen in the world.

"Poor sarc" he says while making a pouty face at 5.56.

5.56 didn't even turn his head while quipping,

"Another goddamn idiot, dont worry, won't look at you. Unless you really want me to lol".

The green ethereal form of Vernon Depner fills the room with a faded green smoke. Arising from the vapors is a skeletal hand draped in a tattered sleeve. A long yellowish boned finger points to 5.56. The spectre's drooping face wails "We can all see who the dipshit is."

DesigNate is not impressed by the Spirit halloween store theatrics and asks ,"Is that a 5.56 spoof or did him and Vulgar get some beef with each other?"

5.56 and MrMxyzptlk both have eager replies to DesigNate's query.

Disgust flinging from his mouth 5.56 lets us know what he really thinks aboug VULGAR.

"Vulgar is old and not very bright, so he is stuck on that sarc paranoia. He also seems to really like ILLEGALS for whatever reason. I mean, reason really doesn't have the brightest kind of commenters in general when you look at their little AI infatuations of late. But this here is as bad as it gets."

He continues.

"Its pretty obvious that Vulgar doesn't have the ability to process a whole lot of information, I mean I comment rarely, but not that rarely that the slow kid would have a reason to assume that I'm a sock."

MrMxyzptlk then offers his own theory to the query. "I think it's a reverse Spartacus gambit. Anyone they don't like they claim is 'Sarcasmic' a guy living rent free in their heads. They then dismiss this supposed sock of Sarcasmic as

being not worth discussing matters with. They're pussies."

From the top of the peanut gallery two new voices accuse MrMxyzptlk of being a sarc puppet

"Says the sarc puppet."

"Good one sarc!"

Chapter 4: AT is the worst AT-AT

A commenter by the name of AT thinks Fiona is cherry picking deflated numbers because she cited a report that came out in January of 2022. AT insists that Fiona could have used more relevant numbers and AT's barrage began with the glare of red rockets and bombs busting in air!

AT goes on a rant and I'm not copying all of it.

Sarcasmic from the top of the ropes invokes Godwin's law and lands with an elbow drop that causes his haters to spew cope.

"We're either a nation of laws, or we're not.

Germany in the late 1930s was a nation of laws. Everything that was done was done in accordance with laws and regulations from the government. Everything.

It doesn't matter if it would tear apart families, affect American workers, or require militaristic enforcement.

They said the same thing."

VULGAR scoffs "Sarc with his genius idea's again."

"He's now an ansarcist" says someone not worth remembering

"More like: analcyst." chortles VULGAR

AT replies with spit flying from his mouth.

"So what? You did the EXACT THING that I said punks like you do (and Godwin'd it while you did).

Look, this is simple:

If you DON'T want to be a nation of laws, THEN SAY THAT.

If you DON'T think the United States of America should be a thing, THEN SAY THAT.

Stop pussyfooting around where you really stand. The criminal illegal population in America is a SERIOUS problem.

If you want that problem to continue until the United States of America can no longer endure and then falls, THEN SAY THAT.

Or are you too much of a coward, and intellectual fraud, to do so – like Fiona clearly is."

Sarcasmic responds with vague talk about morals that vault him onto the high road.

"Authoritarians blindly follow laws because they blindly follow authority. People with a moral sense question unjust laws and see flouting them as a patriotic duty."

5.56 screeches

"Dude, the open borders camp is completely tonedeaf and out of touch with the reality of the kinds of individuals that illegal immigration brings into this country. Those upgraders are one of last groups that need sympathetic

political representation. Even the legal-ish ones know very well what theyre doing by instrumentalizing their children to become socioeconomic anchors. Making this shit legally easier isn't gonna help anyone."

AT is practically on his knees begging Sarcastic to declare that he hates America.

"You still can't even manage to say it out loud, can you. Can't sell it to anyone unless you obfuscate what you're peddling."

Chumby thinks making fun of Biden is going to make libertarians seethe

"Guess that makes Biden Hitler."

"Now THERE'S a winning ticket!" replies the ghostly form of Vernon Depner as he finally admits he's a nazi.

It's off to heaven now as his spirit finishes it's unsettled business.

Well that all the highlights everyone. I hope you guys enjoyed my first effort post. Jewish lives matter

Introduction

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky. It is not known whether he is cricimcised or not. According to biographer Peter Whitmer, there was “a sort of indescribable charisma that Hunter exuded from an early age”, and his peers recognised the “unique sense of humour” that would come to characterise his writing. As a youth, Thompson was very interested in sports, and he played baseball while he attended I.N. Bloom Elementary School. During 1948 and 1949, he wrote and distributed a sports journ*lism newspaper for his neighbourhood, and it served as an outlet for both his love of writing and his love of sports. At the time, Thompson was only eleven, and his writing was “linear and to the point, but that would change as he gained more experience. When he was fourteen, his father, Jack Thompson, died from a rare neurological disorder known as myasthenia gravis. Jack's death had a profound impact on Thompson, and some believe that it is the reason why he “left behind the dream of becoming an athlete”.

Thompson's foray into experimenting with intoxicating substances began in high school when he started drinking alcohol. During this time, he also turned into a delinquent, and his stunts initially involved setting fire “to a small eatery where students went for lunch”, but they soon grew more violent and came to include:

>pouring sulphur across the top lockers at the Collegiate Girls School, and lighting it;

>appearing at the Athenaeum Christmas dance with an entire department of stolen festive lighting; flooding the first floor of the high school with three inches of water during an assembly;

>dumping a truckload of pumpkins at the entrance to the Brown Hotel,

>or chasing the history teacher, Mr. Gearhart, around the classroom, threatening to hang him out the window by his ankles.

Thompson's alcohol-fuelled antics eventually caught up to him, however, and he frequently found himself in trouble with the law during his senior years of high school, culminating in him spending sixty days in jail after being charged as an accessory to robbery. After spending some time in the Air Force, he settled in New York where his passion for literature grew. As Whitmer notes, Thompson would spend hours “reading and outlining The Great Gatsby”, just so he could understand its inner workings. The text was highly influential on Thompson, who would go on to write his own drug-fuelled version of the pursuit of the American Dream.

Thompson the Writer

Thompson's professional writing career started in 1959 when he began working as a journ*list for Daily Record, a newspaper in Middletown, New York. His time there was brief, however, and he soon relocated to South America, where he failed to find a scoop and advance his journ*lism because, as he discovered, “in Brazil, it is more than who you know: it is who you are related to, and how much money you can give to the cause”. In typical Thompson fashion, he entangled himself in legal issues after he was found with a .357 Magnum, and “it then took real diplomatic intervention to extract him from jail”. He returned to the USA in 1963, where he settled in San Francisco.

His return to the USA coincided with the crescendo of the hippie movement, and Thompson had a first-row seat to see it all unfold. He shared some of the ideals of the hippies, as he was anti-establishment, and was a “gourmand of psychedelics”, but he did not always have a high opinion of hippies, especially those of Haight-Ashbury whom he accused of being “lazy, apolitical, unmotivated by money, and totally lacking aggressiveness”, descriptions which they would have likely not contested. He crossed paths with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters but “his rancid attitude towards the unmotivated hippies, didn't allow him to fit naturally with the peace-loving pranksters for more than a few long drug-sodden weekend blasts”. Thompson voices his criticisms of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in Fear and Loathing, casting derision on their carefree philosophy. After a bad experience, the protagonist thinks of the hippie mantra “tune in, freak out, get beaten. It's all in Kesey's Bible”, and concludes that it is all “bad gibberish; not even Kesey can help me now”.

Thompson began building his reputation as an eccentric journ*list, and he developed a unique method that involved him using an audio recorder as the basis of the writing and using drugs when witnessing the events that he was reporting. He grew comfortable with what Whitmer terms “confabulation”, meaning he would “glean a few facts from his friends, splice it with his inimitable style, and phone in an article, all the while recovering from a terminal hangover”.

Thompson the Character

To some degree, it could be argued that the public persona of Hunter S. Thompson is a fictitious creation. Even if one accepts this argument, it should not be forgotten that the same could be argued of any public figure who is conscious that they are being watched and judged. Merely knowing one is being observed adds a performative element to one's actions. Throughout Thompson's antics, there is a sense that he is keenly aware of his public persona, as seen in his 2003 interview with Conan O'Brien which he does while drinking liquor, smoking, and shooting with rifles at his own books.

Thompson's self-awareness should not fool one into thinking there are no genuine aspects to the writer's legend. Although his criminal history before Fear and Loathing has been discussed, it should be noted that even with his newfound fame, he continued to get into trouble with the law, including in 1987 when he fired a shotgun at a golf ball on the Aspen Municipal Golf Course. His disdain for those in power is also displayed through the scathing articles he continued to write about politicians, including Clarence Thomas. This lifelong record of criminality suggests that his oppositional stance toward authority and his devil-may-care attitude are integral parts of Thompson that would have existed regardless of whether he became a bestseller and public figure or not.

The one aspect of Thompson that is certainly not made up is his copious drug use which eventually caught up to him. In his later years, his health deteriorated so badly that his physician told him: “You are dead. And you have been for two years!”. He died in 2005, at age 67, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It has been speculated that his copious drug use likely contributed to the depression that led to his suicide. The paradoxical legacy he leaves behind, as Whitmer summarises, is that of a “hillbilly high-school dropout with a half-dozen bestselling books to his name”.

Conclusion

There is not much more to be said. The man is a legend. I'm not going to cut myself today because I distracted myself with writing, although I can't stop thinking about sliding that razor on my skin. Tune in next time when I discuss Sodom and Gomorrah.

Macro Conditions

Inflation is still sticky. This affects Mid cap Tech because of interest exposure. Also there is a slight mean reversion of the Magnificent 7 after their extremely bullish run from Q3 2023 to Q1 2024. As AI is looking it's glaze, investors are looking more and more towards the core businesses of this behemoths.

Labor market is also seemingly cooling which is a worry for the federal reserve. Since the Fed has assured investors of 3 cuts in 2024, this might be problematic since after a June cut, a November cut might be interpreted politically. Hence the Fed will be stuck with 2 cuts in 2024 thereby lessening the confidence of investors. The Fed had 4.5T of assets in 2020. Currently it has a cumulative asset of 7.5T. With the pace of rate cuts, it could take another 3 years to offload all these assets.

Mortgage rates are still high and out of line with Fed expectations which is another headache. FannieMae 30 year mortgage rates to end at 6.4% while the Fed expects them to go down to 5.7% at least.

Bank of England has held steady its rates at 5.25%. The highest in 16 years since the Great Recession while the Swiss Government is the first to decrease rates among western countries.

As long as S&P 500 is populated with companies with positive Cash Flows, Fed hikes weren't ever going to affect it as much as 2007.

As for evidence that June rates have a high probability of going down, the Fed would probably want to avoid November as well as boost the economy out of a possible recession.

Ripple Effects

Real Estate broker Compass has agreed to pay $57.5mil in fines to settle anti trust claims. M&A has also seen a slump due to anti trust claims.

Stock Picking is key in Regional and Smaller banks as these have large leverage and low liquidity. If Fed doesn't even make two rate cuts this year, consider these banks and financial institutions gone. Several Mid and Small cap stocks will also be filling Chapter 11 (high probability).

Demand for EV

With the exception of China and Korea, compared to 2022, there has been a contraction in EV sales. Many US car rentals have been selling off their EV fleets at a huge discount after seeing very low demand which have been a catalyst for Tesla's poor performance. GM and Ford have cut CapEX and Investment as well as R&D regarding EV. Companies like Tesla and Rivian which produce only EV are haemorrhaging money. While Tesla may be well diversified to withstand this shock, Rivian debts will soon be downgraded because its Cash Flow and Liquidity are not enough to grow/invest in new PP&E.

EU EV Situation.

With a stringent emission targets of 2025, the situation in EU might be a little different and the EU has set its penetration targets very high (some skeptical about whether it will be able to deliver). Also, on top of this, EU companies face tough competition from Chinese companies like BYS and MG which already have 2% of European EV share, offer 20-25% lower prices and like BYD have already planned to build plants inside the EU.

If this was not enough, Hyundai and Toyota are also bringing in their EV sectors over to Europe. As EU rejoices that the Russian gas cutoff hasn't affected the consumers in any devastating manner as Y-o-Y demand for gas has gone down 20%, it should be kept in mind that a commensurate amount of non essential manufacturing units have outsourced or moved away from Europe to China or the USA.

Two things are of note here:

The Euro Commission has launched an investigation into the export of Chinese EV due to it being the beneficiary of state subsidy, particularly the battery of the EVs.

BYD is gaining ground at a never before seen pace in LatAm which might very well soon become an all Chinese EV playground.

Utilities and Surging Power Demand

Power demand had remained flatlined in the US from 2006 to 2021. However there has been a big surge which has pushed the grid to an almost breaking point due to chip manufacturing being brought back, EV ramp up and Green Hydrogen Manufacturing. For now, the surge is met and managed via the surplus gas produced.

Just 2 days ago, the CEO of Duke Energy lined out three new gas power plants to be built soon, more investments in renewables and also hinted at the possibility of nuclear power plants to be ramped up at some point.

Due to the subsidies and zero tariff quota by the Biden Government, 54GW of solar power plants have been imported from South East Asia. Inside the US, Texas is providing subsidies for Gas Power Plants.

All this is coming to a head as there are no additional capacity for installations of transformers or other distribution and transmission infrastructure.

On top of this, there are the Data Centres(DC) which use as much energy as a small city. So not only do grids need to be developed, the entire infrastructure needs to be expanded by orders of magnitude too. These DC are moving towards hourly matching to keep renewables as an option. Hourly matching simply means investing in tech to required to realize Zero Carbon Electricity grid by getting Carbon free electricity procurement.

The DCs have also lobbied for building their own smaller nuclear power plants although nobody knows the state of that proposal now.

Meanwhile the SEC has made requirement of material disclosures of emissions data mandatory(till now it was voluntary).

Smaller newer tech firms like Fervo which seek to harness Geothermal Energy have come into play in recent times, although nobody can be sure about their tech in long term other than tech enthusiasts.

Biden's ALL of the ABOVE ENERGY STRATEGY (AAE) and why everyone hates it

AAE picked up steam with the 2008 election in tandem with Sarah Palin's Drill Baby Drill slogan. John McCain used the AAE as a rallying cry. Obama picked up on it too during his presidency as renewables boomed and O&G boomed after a long downward trend.

The idea was simple. The US needed all the sources it could find to protect its economy(from a recession) and its consumers(from inflation).

In 2012, Obama stuck with it and Romney used it too.

But in 2024, Biden is the closest to achieving it. (Although he never used it because he used the term “energy transition” too many times in his campaign to do a 180.

But due to advances in fracking and directional drilling, which opened up vast new O&G reserves, in 2023, US produced more oil than any other country in the history of the world.

Natural Gas saw an even bigger jump with the US becoming the biggest LNG exporter in the World. The geopolitical impact of this became clear after 2022 as Russia invaded Ukraine, the US shifted its exports from China, Japan and Korea to flood the European Market and nullify Putin's weaponization of Energy.

With Renewables, Wind and Solar got a 80Billion stimulus package under Obama in 2009 which became disproportionately successful, so much so that 15% of the entire US energy production comes from renewables today, just 15 years later.

The problem with AAE is twofold.

Republicans claim that the renewables part of AAE works only because of subsidies and that more O&G should be produced, while the Democrats complain that O&G should be reduced while Wind and Solar should be given more priority as production costs come down exponentially. Both the behemoth bills passed by Biden, the IRA and the Infrastructure Act contain provisions for Wind and Solar as well as Oil & Gas so neither camp is happy.

SEC Mandate, CSRD, EPA, CERAweek and Further discussions into the Macro of Fed decisions will be in tomorrow's post. Digest this first.