Untitled By Irina Troitskaya On Flickr.

Take your clairvoyance and apply it to your life in the physical, Presumptuous half-hearted homunculus, Self-destruction is the power without knowing what the function is.

Felipe Andres Coronel

A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the sea, starlings, tortoises, Roman rooftops, a girl, giraffes and much else. He wants only to observe, to learn a modest lesson from creatures and things. But he can’t. There is too much to see in them, for a start. … And there is too much of himself and his culture in the world he watches anyway: the universe is littered with the signs of our needs, with mythologies.

Michael Wood

jensenacklesmishacollins:

Ei talupoegadele - No to peasants.

...

The majority speaks Sense.

http://jensenacklesmishacollins.tumblr.com/post/99414721364/as-i-said-there-was-a-protest-against-union

I've started noticing online how people from countries that don't need national defense really do not understand the nature of mandatory military service and wartime duty.

I had happened to scroll my way into a discussion on some american influencer family, who are all about being wealthy Conservative Christians who homeschool their kids so they won't get exposed to any other kind of values. Anyway one of the daughters married a man from Ukraine because there's no sufficiently white, conservative and christian men left in America I guess.

And originally this girl (who was sheltered, homeschooled, didn't speak any other language than english, and had zero experience of living independently) was supposed to move to Ukraine to live with her new husband, but then shit hit the fan. So they shipped their little family back to the US to live cozy on her parents' money.

So I happened to scroll into discussion about the Ukraine husband and the apparent vitrol happening online among the people who keep tabs on this family out of sheer curiosity. And there was someone, an american I guess from their writing style, who was baffled by the community's attitude towards him dodging the draft in his homeland. Like yeah the guy is a smug homophobic jackass, but isn't it fucked up to demand that he should volunteer to go fucking die??

And I kind of paused right there, having a kind of epiphany about how different worlds we come from, and how I really could not begin to explain this to someone who did not grow up this way. I'm not from Ukraine and I've never personally known war, but coming from Finland, I've got an understanding of how countries with a border and history with Russia are raised to think about war.

War isn't something you volunteer for. It's not something you can opt in or opt out of. It's something that comes to you, inevitably and eventually, and you're just lucky if it doesn't happen during your time. But if it does, that's just the cards that were dealt to you.

From the perspective of an invader, it's easy to equate "volunteering to fight" with "volunteering to die". It's easy to think that if you simply refuse to fight in war, there will be no war. That's not what it's like for those being invaded. When the war is brought to you, your choice is between "get shot in combat" and "get shot in your living room". Death is not voluntary, you only get to choose when and where.

Choosing to shake off that sense of duty doesn't make it disappear, it simply drops the weight on someone else's shoulders. Somone who may be more capable than you or less capable than you. If you were in a room with a button, knowing that there's a chance that you might die if you don't push it, but that there's a stranger in the next room, who has an equal chance of dying if you do push it. You don't know what those odds are, but if you decide to save yourself, you've chosen to rather risk the stranger.

Resenting someone from dodging military duty when their country is being invaded isn't a matter of hating someone for wanting to live. It's about knowing that this person decided: "Someone else's son deserves to die more than I do."

Kathleen Caddick（British, b.1937）

Snow in the Park  Acrylic on canvas   49.5 x 59.6cm    via

At times it seems we are living our lives as if we are going to write an autobiography after we're done.

- Experience

You coffee shop revolutionary son of a bitch.

Felipe Andres Coronel

life

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if Game of Life had been invented in antiquity. The concept is sufficiently simple for even a child to grasp and simplicity should have appealed to Pythagorean sensibilities…

Would they have developed standardized tokens for exploring the game, and would they have recognized it as a game?

Would there be biblical parables about the glider?

Would alternate rules have been considered heretical in the Middle Ages?

Would the R-pentomino have been thought an infinite growth pattern until some diligent mathematician, maybe an Arabic one in the 1000s, were to show the opposite by working out all 1103 generations?

Would the LWSS, the Gosper glider gun and related technology have been hailed as great inventions of the Renaissance?

Would the Gausses and the Eulers of this world have dedicated time to searching for new oscillator periods or spaceship velocities?

Would still lifes be tabulated by hand to stupendous numbers in the 1800s, and would these in modern days be memorized in a similar way digits of pi are now?

Would the entire concept have encouraged a considerably more rapid development of fields such as computability or signal processing?

Backwards/forwards time travel is overrated; I’d definitely rather explore alternate timelines…