RiotDoll [she/her, she/her] @ RiotDoll @hexbear.net

Woo Fool

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Joined

1 yr. ago

I already knew Israel lacked the mandate of heaven but if you needed further evidence

That's good! An open mind is fruitful, and anybody passing off certainty on these matters is selling you ideology or bullshit. I don't have good answers, I try to stay restrained compared to a lot of woo-ey folks, because I genuinely think going too far into uncritical belief is thought terminating brain poison the same way materialist reductionism is. It's a delicate balance, and a critical but open mind is key.

To keep it simple - lots of traditions have mysticism lurking somewhere near, but usually underneath the mainstream - in Islam, there are 'Sufi' traditions - in Judaism there is Merkavah/Hekhalot literature and Kabballah - Christianity is messy, and some 'mainstream' groups are openly mystical - my initial interest came from the fact I was deeply involved in charismatic/pentecostal christianity when i was in my late teens and early 20s - but there is also a (mostly medieval) mystical undercurrent to some movements aligned with catholicism. I think of the Beguines and other women who would end up burned as heretics, martyrs in my opinion, like Margueritte Porette. Within western esotericism, theosophy, hermeticism, etc. is a consistent mystical undercurrent of variable value - they're all fascinating in their own right and understanding even one of these academically can be an extremely deep rabbit hole. Often times the philosophy underwriting something like Theurgy has shockingly mainstream roots - often times you can trace those movements back to greek philosophers that are often taught in a context with their mysticism stripped out - Plato gets kind of held up as this pre-enlightenment rationalist, but that's pretty god damn far from the truth. The way he's taught more or less deliberately omits this material at the undergrad level and below, so it's not surprising most people aren't aware, but it is a real tragedy.

Descartes - one of the progenitors of the modern scientific method - developed it via dream visitations lol. The mystical is often imminent where humanity makes large leaps forward in thought; it would not shock me to some day find out Marxism is no different.

that's so epic, she is so badass.

I've been dipping my toes - I recently got a copy of the Tao Te Ching and, given that it's poetry, has been joyous to read. I've also been learning how to meditate and practice mindfulness via some Buddhist content creators, as well as some literature from the late Thich Nhat Hanh, whose books, "The Miracle of Mindfulness", and "No Mud, No Lotus" affected me deeply.

The thing about meditation for me has been that it lets me step outside the storm of my own mind - I begin to step out of my thoughts, they become vivid hallucinations - the things that I experience as thoughts when I'm not meditating take on visual and auditory form - even hearing a fractional moment of it used to jar me out of my meditative trance, but lately i've been able to stay detached, and it becomes a window into my own internal processes.

I've been slowly reading from an English translation of the Quran, and at first i had a difficult time dealing with its accusatory tone and rampant misogyny, but I began to kind of understand the deeper points of its parables and the purpose of its structure, and it has begun to affect me as well.

I am not overly familiar with Shinto outside of a few bullet points on its cosmology, and the broadest overview of the belief structure and metaphysics. I feel pretty ignorant of the religious landscape of Japan more generally, and my understanding of 'eastern' religion outside of a narrow buddhist and taoist context is nil

I've had religious experiences and I'm into the technical aspects of mystic traditions, things like divination - especially approaches that are complex and syatematic - looking for an understanding of these subjective experiences in my past and present, it has been humbling to let my guard down and approach these subjects without the biases and hostility most people approach them with, while also avoiding apologetics and polemics, and generally i am disinterested in material analysis - the confluence of religion and power is almost over explored and given far too much weight by most leftists for example, and i find those approaches boring at best and actively harmful at worst.

There is so much going on in esoteric philosophy that gets ignored because protestants and enlightenment philosophers hated mysticism so every philosophical tradition in their shadow inherits that hostility to its detriment - there are fascinating and brilliant things to be found and I really wish esotericism could have more mainstream penetration than it does

i would chat on discord, i'm a transfemme with some nerdy interests, but it's mostly fringe shit like esoteric religion, religious studies more broadly, language, and stuff most people, even weirdos, find uninteresting, but it's crack to my autism so vOv

the lathe of heaven turns as God cackles, a fate string spins off wildly towards the OP, striking him in his loins, he needs to suck cock now. What is this hunger? This isn't how it was supposed to go!!

when i was a kid i was traumatized by all the terrorism shit that was popping off- and setting aside the fact that I now believe saudi intelligence may have kicked it off on our behalf, i didn't understand why anybody would hate our nation - or israel, and other nations allied to us, back then - it just seemed like baseless hatred

but in 2023 it's very easy to acknowledge that the US is the great satan, and our puppets in the middle east - saudi arabia and israel - are equally demonic. Our worst, most brutal critics, when they weren't on our own payroll, ended up being right. the Empire is so god damned cruel and evil. I want this to end so badly.

being gay is pretty great, try being gay yourself. a bit of homosexuality enriches the soul, and it's the best all-round cover an agent ever had.

The entirety of our government that is elected, is a facade whose sole purpose is to absorb and justify its legitimacy. The actual power is nowhere near a ballot, and while a lot of people know this, there would probably be a critical mass of rebellious minds if those facades came down. The presidency and congress are essential in that sense - they create legitimacy for the unelected state. Without that legitimacy, their fight is suddenly domestic.

That element of the government is already preparing for real domestic rebellion - the militarization of police and the large swaths of the DoD's domestic army is entirely to answer that specific kind of unrest. It's also why the militarized right wing is almost entirely run by state assets.

So, yes america needs a president, just not the way normies think lol

i liked it, but i didn't even touch the previous games, so i lacked a lot of context. I wanted to like red dead online a lot better, being able to play as a lady was really cool - the character creator was robust enough that I made someone who looked like a genuine ancestor to me, and that was cool, if only because one side of my family genuinely went west in the 19th century but managed to be as unproblematic in deed as was possible for a white person, and it was cool to larp that experience.

but the main game is like.... "i'm an old man now" subgenre of Thing, like the God of War games - that shit sucks - and it's also like, broadly about the closing of the frontier, which could've been interesting, but because it's such a direct parallel of the "i'm an old man now" subgenre, just for worldbuilding, it's pretty much only cool if you have some kind of ability to relate to that, and are comfortable doing so.

personally i'm a really gay trans woman, so it's hard to wanna pick that shit up and finish it because aside from the janky and micro-transaction-expensive online portion of the game, there's nothing in this game for me.

i can't believe this ancient mummy is acting senile!!!! nobody, and i mean nobody, has been pointing this out for years now. how could we, collectively, liberal society, have seen this coming??????

bigotry and hate comes from weakness. As pointed out, American society atomizes to the deepest infinitesmal possible, therefore any fascism made in its image carries that along with it to its detriment (probably a good thing tbh). In a bourgeois context, it makes for an identity that can't coalesce materially outside of specific circumstances. For most, it is only emergent in an ephemeral, non physical sense. These 'highborn' individual sticks of the fasces are only bound in spirit and likeness, coming from a cohort that has been taught from birth that they are a main character.

The collective identity is one of atomized white men with specific class identities trying to singularly assert a one man will to power narrative, and it doesn't fucking work except that it cultivates a stock of loyal sychophantic influencers that the ruling class can select from to spread 'useful' lumpen messaging and to-fascism pipelines, as if they were speaking from their own mouth. That said, I think this the face of their influencers, and is not the entire picture. It would be a mistake to think this is the depth of that movement.

Another side of fash are the militias and gangs whose leaders are almost universally informants and state assets, and I think these really don't fit any kind of "soy" narrative, but are, in fact, fairly dangerous outfits that, if the domestic fascism has any kind of coherent organizational structure, will be the vanguard when that movement makes its move for overt power, which I do think is somewhat inevitable if the movement isn't properly crushed or if political circumstance doesn't take the wind from its sails.

These are a PMC type role for this new fascism, and yeah it's pathetic the same way a lanyard is.

To me it's a sign that there are parallel social structures and identities being built to serve the needs of the far right. It's long in the making - you can properly trace this stuff back to before most people alive right now were even born - we are witnessing a pretty mature movement midst a metamorphosis that seeks to use the united states and its failing institutions as a chrysalis.

Any kind of replacement of a state needs either access to extant civil/cultural structures, or to build paralllel ones - it's a step the left needs to take some day as well - but the far right has always been several steps ahead of the left in this regard, and I think these soy nazi dorks are just a sign that they're starting to populate non-essential roles of the society they want to build

i stopped listening around the time this happened. Matt pretty much was why i listened at all. I hope he gets better soon

I feel like our identity both enables us and obliges us to be more thoughtful than the average person, but I only agree with you to the extent that, there are plenty of "allies" who will revoke the identity of our siblings for wrongthink - this is flatly unacceptable. But trans folk aren't beyond reproach, and as a matter of internal policing, I'm pretty down with criticizing my brothers, sisters, siblings in gender-queerness for being overly self serving or disengaged politically.

with that said, this isn't anything i would trust or feel good empowering cis allies, politically aligned or not, to do. Not their business.

But the liberals and conservatives in our cohort need their Come To Ishtar moment, and facilitating that is good.

they do? good Lord lmfao.

so everyone needs to know there are entire classes of trans folk who:

-simp the military -are liberal or even conservative -very much just want to disappear into a passing gender role of choice and integrate into society completely so they can go back to being thoughtlessly bourgeoise.

it is, as always, a race and class thing. I'm a working class trans femme and i live and breathe communism, but the idea that we're any more politically reliable than any other group is surely shorn of ignorance. There are large contingents of middle class, middle aged, white transfemmes who look at you funny and disinvite you to their functions if you talk about redistributing wealth or abolishing the police

i bit the bullet and tried this, and the resultant discovery that BB is a badass and that hyper jumps are amazing has sold me completely. I also got the upgraded stabilizer, so grenade pockets are back on the menu

You've actually inspired me now i wanna write joe biden lovecraft fiction

i'm also an okay artist i bet i could whip up a plastique joe biden with like eyes bubbling out of waxy sheen funerary skin

hmm i might do both

hmm i wish there was a way to peacefuly deal with this, but since there isn't, well, alas...

I have to agree with some caveats. I wish screens pertaining to performance eval and stuff were a bit denser, and I feel like i really would've liked some interface options for manually managing cargo that wasn't just "drop and pick up in the order I want, auto-sort, or fuck myself"