|||| Gunk (mereology) ...any whole whose parts all have further proper parts. That is, a gunky object is not made of indivisible atoms or simples. Because parthood is transitive, any part of gunk is itself gunk. 1 Nihilism is either necessarily true, or necessarily false. 2 Gunk is metaphysically possible. 3 If gunk is metaphysically possible, the nihilism is not necessarily true. 4 Therefore, nihilism is necessarily false. |||| | marchudson.net One of my go-to Nietzsche quotes is the one where he says “when you look long enough into the abyss, the abyss begins to look back into you”. And for years I had a get out from this – I could be climate activist/abyss-starer at night and weekends, and Sanctioned Good Person (I had a job that was indisputably socially useful and rewarding) by day. Now, well, now it’s just abyss staring all day long, and the morale-maintenance thing is even harder since we as a species are running every red light on survival lane. So, how do you keep hope alive? Simples. You don’t. Hope is a crock. Hope is a (self) – indulgence. What we need instead is courage. To keep “hoping” you have to be wilfully ignorant of physics, chemistry and political inertia. You have to be willing to suspend your critical faculties when some dreadful idiot, in legacy-mode, makes vague promises that she won’t have to fight for. You have to ignore that we have had 30 years of this crap, and it hasn’t worked. | marchudson.net | krisis.eu In truth, Acid Communism resists definition. The word ‘acid’ in particular, by invoking industrial chemicals, psychedelics and various sub-genres of dance music, is promiscuous. With so many uses and instantiations in various contexts, it is as difficult to cleanly define as ‘communism’ is in the 21st century. This textual promiscuity is no doubt what attracted Fisher to the phrase, but this has not stopped recent attempts to concretely define it in his absence. Acid Communism is a project beyond the pleasure principle. It is not only a project for the recuperation of the counterculture’s lost potentials but also the expression of a desire for an experimental (rather than prescriptively utopian) leftist politics. This is a maneuver present within so many expositions of communism. Marx and Engels themselves wrote how “communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” Acid Communism is, then, a project for seeking ‘the outside’ of sociopolitical hegemony. | krisis.eu | Wim Hof In the Bhagavad Gita they say, "The mind under control is your best friend, the mind wandering about is your worst enemy." Make it your best friend, to the point where you can rely on it. Your mind makes you strong from within. It is your wise companion. The sacrifices you make will be rewarded. Life doesn't change, but your perception does. It's all about what you focus on. Withdraw from the world's influence and no longer be controlled by your emotions. If you can grab the wheel of your mind, you can steer the direction of where your life will go. | Wim Hof | thewastedworld.wordpress.com Beneath the visage of the human, it is revealed, is but another type of slime, and something altogether alien to the human. It is this Gothic quality of matter that I wish to bring into confrontation with the reigning adherence to the “vibrancy” and “vitality” of matter within Posthuman scholarship. In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett discusses the vitalism of Thoreau, and highlights the role of metabolism in his theorisation of matter. In his diet, as in all else, “Thoreau strives to confederation with a set of bodies” which pass into his own body, and shape it by their particular natures (Bennett 2010, 46). In Bennett’s reading, the vitality of matter is affirmed by this process, because of the proof it gives to the commonality of all matter, and the easy assumption of the supposedly inert matter of food into the living matter of bodily tissue. In the metabolic process, one lump of matter is broken down into another, assumed into it, while transferring its vital force into a new body. Or, to quote Bennett at length: The activity of metabolization, whereby the outside and inside mingle and recombine, renders more plausible the idea of a vital materiality. It reveals the swarm of activity subsisting below and within formed bodies and recalcitrant things, a vitality obscured by our conceptual habits of dividing the world into inorganic matter and organic life (Bennett 2010, 50). The outside seeps into the inside, the organic becomes indistinguishable from the inorganic, and a vast swarm of processes are revealed beneath our supposedly stable forms. As in Braidotti’s Posthuman vision of death, the terms of discussion always return to a particularly “vital” materiality. Yet this element of the text grows more tendentious as it unfolds. Why should the process of metabolisation, this collapse of the organic and inorganic into a single matter, be read through the ideas of life and vitality at all? From a perspective of pure immanence, of base matter, why should the inorganic and the inert be collapsed into the organic and vital, and not the other way around? By focusing on the positive interactions of bodies, Bennett elides another reading of Thoreau’s text. After all, she notes, Thoreau ultimately concludes that “devouring” wild flesh does not in fact result in his own vitalization, but in the mortification—the rotting—of his imagination. (Bennett 2010, 47). If the eating of plant matter casts metabolism as the building of a confederacy of bodies, then the eating of flesh is here posited as something altogether destructive of those bonds. In contrast to the “New Materialism” of Bennett and others, with its central concept of vitality, we may posit a shadow cast in the form of a “Gothic Materialism” — a term which in typically Gothic fashion predates its sibling and has waited in the shadows. A full decade before Bennett’s work, Mark Fisher defined the Gothic intervention in materialism as such: Gothic Materialism as it is presented here [is] fundamentally concerned with a plane that cuts across the distinction between living and nonliving, animate and inanimate. It is this anorganic continuum, it will be maintained, that is the province of the Gothic (Fisher 2018, 2). As in Bennett’s theorisation of New Materialism, the core of Fisher’s Gothic Materialism is the breakdown of distinctions between different forms of matter. Both espouse a philosophy of radical immanence, working from the materialisms of Spinoza and Deleuze, yet it is from here than the two diverge. While in Bennett’s reading, the vibrancy and vitality of life are taken for granted, Fisher sees another question emerging. Taking the lessons of cybernetics to their conclusion, Fisher asks: What if we are as “dead” as the machines? To pose [this] question seems immediately inadequate: what sense would it be to say that “everything” – human beings and machines, organic and nonorganic matter – is “dead”? (Fisher 2018, 2). | thewastedworld.wordpress.com | PsyberMagick; Peter Carrol Extrapolate your cosmological observations with classical relativistic theory and you will end up with such absurdities as the big bang and singularities in real time (and space), which negate the theory you started with. Extrapolate with quantum chaotic theory and you will find that the 'big bang' occurred with equal probability in imaginary time at every point in the entirety of space that we now observe, to phenomenize the apparent mass and corresponding characteristic lightspeed of a universe finite but unbounded in both real time and space. It should come as no surprise that we can observe structures within the universe having a greater age than classical relativistic theory predicts for the universe. You can after all travel any distance you like in excess of 24,000 miles around the finite but unbounded surface of the earth without falling off. Similarly, you can travel for as long a time as you like around the four dimensional hyperspherical surface which constitutes this universe: although, as on earth, you cannot ever arrive at the same spacetime locus twice. The universe does not have any meaningful 'real' age, rather it has a temporal horizon of the order of 10 10 years at all points of spacetime. Future generatins will look upon the question of the 'real' age of the universe with the same amusement with which we regard the mediaeval concern about the distance to the edge of the world. | PsyberMagick; Peter Carrol | thelibertarianideal.com The speed now present in life, from logistics to technology bring forth whole new levels of optics that flatten and interface human lives. Perspectival lenses are shortened to recognise not a deep level of human-machine interconnectivity and addressability, but an interfacial regime of signs and screens that do the work of interpretation and narrativisation for you. Space and time have been warped by speed, delimiting the former as connectivity becomes instantaneous and distances between people and cultures are eliminated due to accessible knowledge and televisual/fibre optic linkages. Time has been limited, pushed away from the chronology of sequential events, as sequences translate into moments and singular anamnesis. Things blur and collide into moments of exposure, creating highlight reels and compilations. There is going authoritarian. “Authoritarianism controls the flow of information so that conspiracy theories never spread in the first place. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have tried to moderate content on their platforms, but this has proved to be an extremely thorny game of whack-a-mole and a textbook example of a wicked problem”[6]. There is going virtual, whereby moving one’s lifeworld from the organic to the computerised provides levels of control and certainty that are beyond the messiness of the real world. Of course with the increase in digital selves and botnets, the extent of this informational control may be limited as posthuman actors begin to inhabit and structure virtual worlds to their own ends. Finally there is the meta perspective, which attempts to analyse and map the various ideological and systemic lines that striate the modern world and its governance structures. There is also the issue of romanticism in this nomadic approach to identity construction. Metamodernism posits an understanding of subjectivity that attempts to combine modernist dreams of utopia with postmodernist cynicism and skepticism of overarching narratives. It oscillates “between hope and melancholy, between naivete and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity”, attempting to use pluralism and irony to produce desires rather than dystopic and melancholic visions[9]. However none of this removes the possibility for the brutality of the consequences that changes in systemic visions can bring about, and indeed is it a wise course of action to posit a naivety in relation posthuman subject-users who may well engage in a conflictual or violent manner. Further, is the concept of an atopic metaxis, a place that is no place, the appropriate framing device for a metamodern subject. Placelessness is one of the defining issues of confirming and finding identity in the institutional oceanography I mentioned. It produces forms of alienation and displacement that rock the foundations of one’s being, helping produce the postmodern mess of identitarianism we see today. “Not only is space conceived as fragmented, but space itself is also dynamic, mobile (imagine moving platforms). Patchwork doesn’t delineate a rigid set of neighbours for each patch, but allows local structures to change internally and with respect to its outside: some patch might want to cluster next to some set of microstates, another time escaping them, or drifting out into the open smooth cosmos, alone, but perhaps connecting via the immense cyberspace, or even stranger vistas, to the others. Just like the individual subject – strange, not-fixed, mobile, “garnering here, there, and everywhere” through connections, but not integrations. Travelling”[13]. Patchwork then is the development of institutional concatenations from dividual lines that are both combinatory and contrastable. War machines and nomadic configurations present possible methods for navigating the oceanography that is felt but not seen. | thelibertarianideal.com | vastabrupt.com Every morning in [location not found] is the same. Wracked coughing as the body realizes it has just spent another night intaking poisons. Sheets yellow with a thousand nights of accumulated sweat, but not worth wasting washing water on. The window is open to the heat of the veld and the gibbering xenocomm of population and city. Light filling the room like some horrible fluid, spilling over the windowsill and pooling onto the floor. Looking out over the buildings, so new and so harried they still bristle with rebar, seemingly leaning toward the Spine, thick with soft transit tubes hung from cables as it tumbles toward the coast. Sky to sea a sheet, nicotine colored, the true location of the horizon as good your guess as mine, a bleary latitudinal omphalos only discernible as a subtle desaturation. From the rim of the world civilian skimmers and Maersk behemoths alike issue in some secretive gnosis. These are bad thoughts to be having now. | vastabrupt.com | TOTAL MOBILIZATION, Ernst Jünger Today, through the cracks and seams of Babel's tower, we can already see a glacier-world; this sight makes the bravest spirits tremble. Before long, the age of progress will seem as puzzling as the mysteries of an Egyptian dynasty. In that era, however, the world celebrated one of those triumphs that endow victory, for a moment, with the aura of eternity. More menacing than Hannibal, with all too mighty fists, somber armies had knocked on the gates of its great cities and fortified channels. In the crater's depths, the last war possessed a meaning no arithmetic can master. The volunteer sensed it in his exultation, the German demon's voice bursting forth mightily, the exhaustion of the old values being united with an unconscious longing for a new life. Who would have imagined that these sons of a materialistic generation could have greeted death with such ardor? In this way a life rich in excess and ignorant of the beggar's thrift declares itself. | TOTAL MOBILIZATION, Ernst Jünger | runesoup.com History only seems to come into focus after about a hundred or more years, when the dirty laundry has been well and truly blown clean. By then, we’re already fucked. The ‘official’ narrative of what’s going on in the world is now so utterly preposterous, so top-heavy with barely concealed bullshit, that I find it truly, truly astounding that anyone can sit in front of a cable news programme with a straight face or a bullethole-free TV screen. Secret societies, for instance, emerged a few centuries ago in central Europe as a means of enabling the powerful to operate under the radar of the church and the crown. The mystical crap is largely a cover... Where else could the scions of the ruling families speak privately but behind oaths that, if broken, would lead either to the stake or the guillotine? As a social technology for communication and concealment, they remained highly useful right up to... and possibly beyond... the rise of Nazi Germany. You see, it’s the tech that continues, rather than the connections. There is no ancient order playing a centuries-spanning game with the ultimate goal of world domination. There is, however a persistent need for the great and the good to conceal their ever-shifting alliances. Just as the continued use of the horse as a system of transport for thousands of years is not a ‘conspiracy theory’, the accumulation of more wealth and power among fewer and fewer people is also not a ‘conspiracy theory’... it is an unfortunate result of the gravity inherent in western capitalism. The tech tumbles down, the adherence to a convenient worldview tumbles down, ‘the grand plan’ does not tumble down. This is a fundamental point and misunderstanding it can send you quite insane. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow-- priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web. (H. Bey) | runesoup.com | who.int 200 million women alive today have undergone female genital mutilation. There are an estimated 3 million girls at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation every year. [source: https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/fgm/prevalence/en/#targetText=Prevalence%20of%20FGM,female%20genital%20mutilation%20every%20year] Current estimates (from surveys of women older than 15 years old) indicate that around 90% of female genital mutilation cases include either Types I (mainly clitoridectomy), II (excision) or IV (“nicking” without flesh removed), and about 10% (over 8 million women) are Type III (infibulation). Infibulation, which is the most severe form of FGM, is mostly practiced in the north-eastern region of Africa: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan. In West-Africa (Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, etc.), the tendency is to remove flesh (clitoridectomy and/or excision) without sewing the labia minora and/or majora together. | who.int | Rise To Consciousness, DX888 A person cannot endow another with wisdom and understanding for it is not to give. It is a gift for each to experience, and the best we can hope to offer another is a "seed". If a seed is cast on fertile ground, it will blossom through active, natural processes. If overly fertilized or watered too much, it decays, but if left to its natural evolutionary process, it will normally let the good farmer know its needs through its very essence. The good farmer responds accordingly. Ministers, theologians, philosophers, politicians, and many other sorts all desire to be farmers, but many force the seed into ill nourished soil and many seek the harvest before the crop has been properly nurtured, often for self-profit or self-aggrandizing purpose. Instead of the natural farming methods, tainting pollutants (concepts) deter the growth process and try to make all the plants uniform with the farmer who places himself in charge of the evolution of the crop. Many heretical plants simply do not conform, so get weeded out and cast aside. Often they reroot themSELVES and grow better on the sidelines in among the weeds than they do in the neatly planted trows. Even the weeds cannot choke them out. Then, all too often some simply decay and are lost into the dust to further reduce to base atoms and eventually rejoin the flow of life in restructured form. On the other hand, consider the waysided plant that reaches fruition. It first renders forth a great outcoming and finding no further need for the stem, will quite normally decay and will also reduce itSELF to base atoms and eventually rejoin the life forces. Often, in the process, the healthy plant will reseed itSELF in order that it may propagate and further enhance the crop. Often also, this crop will take such firm rooting that all attempts to conform it are quite useless ("Old heretics never die, they are just reborn as heretics"). | Rise To Consciousness, DX888 |||| over thinking, over analysing separates the body from the mind ||||