Linnamuusikud

 

From Estonia.

Unnifished

 

Heights

“If you had a fear of heights, what would you do about it?”

“ I wouldn’t let it beat me! I’d overcome it.”

“And how would you do that?”

“I’d avoid heights.”

“You’d avoid heights?! That’s not overcoming it! That’s just avoiding what you’re scared of!”

“What else would you want me to do?!”

“I thought you’d confront it face to face, like spby going climbing up high things, scaffolding, mountains, chimneys . . . or say parachute jumping, hand gliding, bungee jumping or whatever . . .

“If I had a fear of heights,I’d go doing all that stuff?! Are you mad?! I’d just avoid heights!”

“Well I suppose yeah that could work too.”

“Of course it would work!”

in the desert

 

Unsure whether

 

I’m unsure whether to consider this finished or not. Maybe I could improve it, maybe I could wreck it.

Veneliti

 

Up the road a bit

Quick to Change

 The soul is quick to change company if we strive to show little diligence.

Isaac the Syrian.

January late afternoon

Almost Scared

 A conversation between two of the globe’s finest citizens:

“You know what I’ve been thinking?”

“What is it? Tell me. What have you been thinking?”

“I think mass immigration is perhaps even more beautiful than abortion.”

“Oh my goodness! You might be right!”

“I’m almost scared to say it, but I might, mightn’t I!?” 

“Be careful though. We must ponder this. It may be true, yes, but it may be a dangerous truth. Are the people ready for it?”

“Yes, there is that. But even worse, what if the central authority, so to speak, decides we are wrong, that is not more beautiful, and that the very idea is hate speech! Then never mind it being a dangerous truth, it would be a dangerous untruth! And what might befall us then?”

“We - and deservedly so - would be cancelled. Cast out.”

“Truth is a dangerous mistress.”

“And untruth is a bitch and a whore.”

“Yes. But to clarify, you are including men within those designations - the bitch and the whore stuff? You’re not implying truth untruth is feminine?”

“No, no, of course not.”

“Just as long as there’s no confusion.”

It Wasn’t Until

Computer whizz-kid Gill Bates is set to make an attempt on the musical entertainment business with the release of his new song: It Wasn’t Until You Rejected My Advances that I Realised How Much I Love You.  “Gill believes that if he can become an icon in the cutthroat world of philanthropic global healthcare, making it in the music business should be a piece of piss,” revealed a colleague of Bates.

Intriguingly, Irish musical and philanthropic icons Gob Blendorff and Bono (not his real name) are said to have assisted in the composition of the song through clever use of the Skype platform. “It’s amazing - you can be three different people in three different places, but through the use of Skype, if you’re the right people,  the barriers come right down, and you can be right there for each other spiritually, creatively and economically,” opined the aforementioned colleague of Bates from up above in the last paragraph. “These are very special people, but they’re also completely normal people,” he added.

docks, evening

The Great Thing, Osmosis

“You know what the great thing is about being a liberal progressive leftist?”

“What?”

“You don’t have to waste any time having to think for yourself. You just have to find out what you’re supposed to think about various zeitgeistian things, and then you just go along with these opinions, whatever they are, or however they may change overnight.”

“And this will all enhance your individuality?”

“Oh yeah. Big time. It’s all about individuality.”

“So that all means then that, rather than having to do something as tedious and time consuming ad thinking for yourself, that you've got loads of free time to do more enjoyable things like watching Netflix or whatever?”

“Exactly. It’s kind of like saving the planet at a mental level. You’re not having to pointlessly fire up all these neurons in your head.”

“But it can still take a bit of effort though, can’t it, finding out what you’re supposed to think so you can be an autonomous individual?”

“Not really, no. It kind of all happens somehow more by osmosis. You more or less just kind of absorb it all as a by-product of being tuned into the cultural noosphere.”

“That’s cool.”

Free Iran?

 

On the long way to the shop

 

Utilitarianism

I’ll try to make this quick. Regarding the doctrine of utilitarianism, people like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill tried to scrape some intellectual edifice together that, in the perceived absence of God, would include goodness in their sense of reality, rather than to simply end up with egotism and the satisfaction that of its desires as the highest virtue - which could of course become very unpleasant. The baby of goodness shouldn’t be thrown out along with the bathwater of God. So Bentham ended up trying to argue happiness was the highest good, and acts that promote happiness are good, acts that promote unhappiness are bad, and on the grander scale of things, the acts should aspire to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number. 

There was even devised something called a Hedonic Calculus, which would help calculate the overall pleasure and pain generated by an action, considering factors like intensity, duration, certainty, and extent. Where could one go wrong? Rationalism was pointing the way. 

So anyway, to take one look at what this greatest happiness of the greatest number can quickly justify:

 Gang rape. 

Yes, there is a victim, but there’s only one. Think of the weighing scales - it’s the happiness of the greatest number that we should be concerning ourselves with. Still, it makes one uneasy. Perhaps the Hedonic Calculus can come to our rescue.

So perhaps one tries to tweak the formula, but after a while of all this awkwardness, the rationalists start to realise they’re better off without this awkward goodness. Everything becomes so messy. Is it really even an element reason needs to concern itself with. Let the ego satisfy itself however it wants, and if that at times leads to the unhappiness of the greatest number, well, them’s the breaks.

duO

 

X22 Report, Maduro

 For what it’s worth, the X22 Report podcast - if that’s the correct term - after the Venezuela Maduro goings on. Click forward 2 minutes past the initial ads.

https://rumble.com/v73vgtm-ep-3810b-ds-criminal-syndicate-is-finishedarrest-of-maduro-will-lead-to-ele.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp_f

A couple of photographic titbits from the episode are pretty interesting: 

So the Biden Harris administration had a 25 million dollar reward on offer for the arrest of Maduro. How did they think this arrest might successfully incarnate itself, I wonder. And back in June 2020, Biden asserted that Trump admires dictatorial thugs like Maduro, while he by contrast would stand with the Venezuelan people for democracy, and by obvious implication against thugs like Maduro.

 Not that I remotely keep abreast of these things, from what I could see, this declared dictator and thug, towards whose arrest the Biden regime offered said reward of 25 million dollars, managed to keep going perfectly fine despite Biden’s standing actions - which I suppose isn’t all that surprising seeing as standing isn’t really the most active of verbs. 

One interesting point in the X22 show is that the “war against drugs” under the first George Bush wasn’t a CIA war against drug cartels, but a war against competing drugs cartels! The criminal syndicate wanted no opposition! If you were with them and their interests, fine, if against them or in conflict with said interests, not fine.

strUggle

 

This piece is a bit of a struggle to try to sort out.

Instrumentalist

 

Unfiltered Evening

,

 

There isn’t any filter applied here, just how things looked for a while, or at least how they were recorded by the phone camera, a few evenings ago

Chief Characteristics of Hollywood

 “What in you opinion are the chief characteristics embodied by Hollywood and its citizens?”

“Artistic integrity, political acumen and social conscience.”

“Yes! Hollywood is all that!”

“It is a world of virtue, which attracts the virtuous to the bosom of itself. And thus also it regenerates itself.”

“And you could even maybe say then that because of all the regenerating it possesses the quality of eternal youth.”

“Yes, you could perhaps say that also.”

Buxtehude

 Dietrich Buxtehude, 1637-1707

Forwards

“If you were going forwards, wherever you were going, or thought you were going, and the road, the pathway, whatever led straight into this big pit, what would you do?”

“And the pathway didn’t go round it?”

“No, no. Straight into it.”

“Well what kind of pit is it?”

“Impossible to know. It’s deep anyway, and it’s very dark. You can’t make it out.”

“I suppose I’d take my chances and have myself drop away into it. Progress is everything after all.”

“You wouldn’t turn back?”

“I couldn’t do that. That would be a refutation of everything I believe in.”

“Going forwards?”

“Exactly!”

Eternal Recurrence

“You know that idea of Eternal Recurrence? What do you think could be seen as a good example of it in history?”

“The Temptation in the Garden. It’s a phenomenon that endlessly recurs, though with a lot of fluidity to the form of the temptation!”

“And this happens to famous figures in history?”

“Well yeah, but to everyone all the time. But it’s a dynamic phenomenon or recurrence though rather than a static one.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because there’s freedom involved.”

swaNs, eVenIng

 

yesTerdaY

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Precursor

“The Revolution will not be televised” is a famous line from the song of the same name by Gill Scott-Heron from 1971. This line has a precursor though which many of us may be less aware of.

When the writer Maxim Gorky, a supporter of the Bolsheviks, went to plead with Lenin that, amidst the  mass executions of ‘class enemies’ being carried out by the regime, the life of a Romanov Grand Duke be spared since he was a fine historian, Lenin responded with the catchy line: “The Revolution needs no historian.” 

He was a very inclusive man. He would execute anyone.

Solzhenitsyn, Loving One’s Country, Lenin

                                        My people perish for lack of knowledge.

                                         Hosea 4:6

From D.M. Thomas’s biography on Alexander Solzhenitsyn where Solzhenitsyn, having survived life in the gulags and a recent failed assassination attempt on his life by the KGB and now expelled from the Soviet Union, in defending himself from various attacks, wrote to the New York Times explaining that:

. . . “what he opposes with every bone in his body is the belief that nationhood does not matter. Socialism’s aim, said Lenin, was to abolish the distinction between nations, to bring them into fusion. And Vadim Borisov observed in his essay ‘From Under the Rubble’, severe moral censure was addressed to Russian writers who could not overcome the ‘base instinct’ of loving their country.

Shortly before deciding on his expulsion, the Politburo (the highest centre of executive power in the Soviet Union) met specifically regarding how to deal with this impermissible intellectual dissident, and in the recorded minutes of the session “Brezhnev warns against nationalism as a breeding ground for anti-Communism. Victor Grisham, First Secretary in Moscow describes Solzhenitsyn as “a true degenerate”; this from a bureaucrat who liked to have a fully equipped brothel connecting with his office. Mikhail Solomentsev supported the call for more ideological warfare against nationalism, while long term Secretary of Ideology and Second Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Suslov added his warning against bourgeois nationalism.

Which all explains why a few decades on, good, obediently indoctrinated citizens of various western shores should be ashamed of their own nations and their nations’ flags as hateful far-right emblems! Down with nationalism! Onwards the ideology! I previously posted on this here: Bourgeois Missionary on a Bike. 

Another extract from the biography while we’re here, on Lenin from that book. Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918 into that communist era was himself, prior to ending up in the gulag, an ardent believer in both the ideology and in Lenin. He believed Stalin was polluting these pure waters, but he later came to completely revise that opinion of both, as he called it ‘the cult’ and of Lenin :

Against enormous odds, Lenin achieved his vision: Persuading a nation a seventh of the earth’s surface that any moral law could be broken in the interest of one class (back when the Left was seemingly all about the class struggle and the triumph/dictatorship of the proletariat and the defeat of bourgeoisie). Within a few years Lenin had prefigured all the evils that Stalinism would consolidate: unlimited power of the Party and the bureaucracy; total regimentation of public life and taught as a substitute for religion; the liquidation of alien elements; and all embracing organ of state terror with a vast system of slave labour camps throughout Siberia and the North.

If the people threatened this happiness he planned for them, they would have to be punished. Scores of peasant revolts were extinguished. The vast unpopularity of the Bolsheviks shook Lenin and forced him to reintroduce private enterprise on a small scale under the NEP (New Economic Plan). But he had no intention, had he lived, of letting this compromise continue indefinitely. As he wrote to Kamenev: “It is the biggest mistake to think that NEP will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror and economic terror.” 

This use of terror as a tactic of control was a staple of revolutionary ideology ever since the Reign of Terror  of the early 1790s in the aftermath of the French Revolution, seen as a shortcut to crushing all opposition - by definition evil - to the revolution and its leaders - by definition good. Responding to criticism from Boris Souverine, who had known Lenin, following Solzhenitsyn’s book Lenin in Zurich, he wrote:

How can anyone blacken Lenin’s name more than he himself did by ordering the execution of peasants for failing to clear away snow? . . . What can anyone say about Lenin and Trotsky . . . that would be worse than simply recalling how they created the first and greatest totalitarianism the world has seen, and how they devised the methods of mass terror, including the technique of drowning people imprisoned in barges (thus anticipating the gas chambers)?

Anyway, just to repeat the link to Bourgeois Missionary on a Bike

Return to Babylon - Transhumanism

 

A very interesting talk on the technological cult of transhumanism at Orthodoxy Ethos. The video in effect starts at about the 6 minute mark.

On its way

Whether this is on its way to a successful incarnation of itself or not I don’t know, but this is it as of now.

along the path

Outskirts

jackdaws, sky

 

Whether

 Whether it’s been worth trying to sort this out or not, I don’t really know.