None Of This Stuff Is Serious Or Complete And It All Comes With A Huge Helping Of "perhaps" And A Grain
None of this stuff is serious or complete and it all comes with a huge helping of "perhaps" and a grain of salt.
Nothing here should be taken as the final word on anything. No matter how sure of myself and arrogant I may sound. I know most of this stuff I write is silly or off-kilter or flawed in major ways.
So don't look for the flaws. You will no doubt find them. Look for what is new, different, insightful, creative, revolutionary, outrageous, or true. Try to understand the ideas and test those. Maybe each blog entry, as a whole, is a wreck for you. But there will parts that are treasures for you.
It ain't all that earth-shattering or revelatory to the world either, just to me at the time.
We are all becoming and we all figure things out or learn things at different times in our lives and often independently of others. Sometimes we really are the first person to think of an idea. Usually not. There are over 5000 years of recorded human thought and at this very moment there are around 8 billion other people. There is going to be a lot of convergent thinking going on. And a whole lot more of me hearing things sometime somewhere but forgetting where I heard it from (because I am a very curious and highly educated person who's been around and thinking for a longish time and it's hard to keep track of where all the shit in my head came from and which I created) from others or getting bits and pieces others worked on first and I had heard/read and then put a few things together in my head thinking it was all me.
So I don't promise they will all be new ideas. But they will all be new ways of looking at them. And I do think you'll find a few real originals in there as I transfer stuff from my gmail drafts over to this.
If I have a weird-ass idea or loving take on things that changes the world for the better, God bless it. But mostly I'm just here to share what my brain spit out for our mutual shits and giggles.
Even if I think there might be some really good stuff buried in there for anyone to find if they have the eyes to see and the ears to hear and the heart to understand.
More Posts from Drowningworms and Others
Recognizing propaganda and reminding yourself why it is BS does a huge amount to reduce the effectiveness of propaganda.
But, let the reader be aware, this does not make propaganda ineffective. It still works. It just takes longer. Some people fight it better than others. But for the average [White] American, the time we are 40 or so, we internalize too much of it find ourselves falling asleep into the American Dream and identifying with White upper middle class suburbia, status quo, the cops, American Empire, Capitalism, and billionaires.
this is the best tweet i've ever seen bar none
Every mosquito bite is an itchy way of joining yourself with nature.
A little bit of you becomes mosquito.
And then becomes a hundred mosquitoes.
A little bit of you then becomes fish and dragonfly, bluebird and bat.
A little bit of you will become grass and trees after that.
That itch is the itch of becoming one with Creation.
Sip by Jarod K Anderson
I was looking for the tropes, and that says something about me
Rewatched Madea Homecoming w my family last night. And the acting/directing is just so good. It's all relatively obvious when you are paying attention. But because we're all looking for the tropes, when you show us a little bit of what we're looking to expect we don't look for anything else and so we get hit by these big surprises. But if we were watching with an open mind, we'd have not been so surprised.
Just genius work by Tyler Perry.
What if we heard Noah's story differently? How would that change our understanding of scriptures and Christianity?
That is what is explored here. It's worth a listen.
Why the Northern Fremen don't believe in the Prophecy
The reason is just an incredibly simple, sociological reason. What do they keep pointing out about Arrakis? That the south is harsh and uninhabitable... to outworlders. We know this harsh environment increases religious fervour to bolster survival, but what does this mean for the north? Why did they lose their faith?
The settler's cities, Arrakeen and Carthag, are situated in the north. The Harkonnens don't believe the south is habitable so they only mine spice in the north. Their brutal suppression of the Fremen are only in the north.
So imagine you are one of the Northern Fremen. You know there's a prophecy about the Lisan al-Gaib, the Voice from the Outer World that would save your people. But here are these outworlders, who rampage your planet, who enslave and brutalize your people, who only see Arrakis as a resource, and its inhabitants as a means to an end, or "rats" that are in the way of their bottom line. Rats to be exterminated. Seeing all of this, of course you would start to doubt the prophecy. If this is how real outworlders are, why would the Lisan al-Gaib be any different from them?
And this is why Chani and the other Northern Fremen stop believing. They see through its manipulation of the Fremen. But they also understand that if the Fremen band together and fight back, they can win battles on their own. The Southern Fremen don't see any of this, because they're essentially protected from the violence of the colonizers by the dust storms near the equator. They might hear stories about the Harkonnens, but that wouldn't shake their faith in the Lisan al-Gaib. They are willing to simply wait for the "right" kind of outworlder, which does come along in the form of Paul and Jessica.
I think this is a really clever explanation of this divide in the thinking of the Northern and Southern Fremen, which is also related to the idea of how the environment that people grow up in shape their beliefs and their culture. Even though this is a departure from the first novel, this change is still true to the spirit of Frank Herbert's Dune.
"Look at this video of a child disappointed at their expensive gift! Children are so spoiled these days!"
That's cool. So, why did their parents upload their small child being upset online? In a public video, shared to the entire video? Why did they even save the recording?
Like. The kid in that scenario could be saying the most entitled nonsense in the world, and if their parents post it online to be publicly shamed, I'd still support the kid 100%. Thinking your child's life is a toy to exploit freely for #content is "spoiled"; when faced with mommy vlogers, kids should be demanding three PS5s and a new Bugatti, and we should be applauding them for it
