A small tool to view real-world ActivityPub objects as JSON! Enter a URL
or username from Mastodon or a similar service below, and we'll send a
request with
the right
Accept
header
to the server to view the underlying object.
{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"type": "OrderedCollectionPage",
"orderedItems": [
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1272904789734199309",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "(Originally posted to Facebook)<br /><br />So, having discovered recently that there is, in fact, NO isolated SARS-CoV-2 in the world, and the papers which claim to have found such a thing are referring to \"isolations\" of mixtures of human, animal, and microbial cells, toxic chemicals, and pharmaceutical drugs (\"there's a 'rona in there somewhere, gosh darn it\"), I'm going to have to backtrack on some of the things I've said over the past year.<br /><br />Mostly the idea that the \"Covid-19\" disease can be attributed to SARS-CoV-2 (it can't yet, not on the data we apparently have). There are no satisfactory data (\"satisfactory\" defined in terms of [molecular] Koch's postulates) to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is instrumental in the development of Covid-19 symptoms, nor are there necessarily sufficient data to claim that SARS-CoV-2 exists-as-such: that is to say - it may be something completely different that we're looking at, but the cognitive bias of virologists looking desperately for \"viruses\" to pin the blame on has led to random RNA noise being labeled as a \"virus\" because, hey ho, that's how we make money in science. I'm sure some of you on my friends list are becoming uncomfortably used to the degree to which finance impacts research in the modern world.<br /><br />If we applied the same criteria, and the same degree of scrutiny, to Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 as we did to ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin, nutrient therapy, sunlight therapy, etc. etc., we would quickly discover that there is no disease. Clearly there's no disease, because there are no data, there is no record of mechanisms at play; there is conjecture and theory, but no hard reality to pin them to. This is an even worse state of affairs than for ivermectin etc., which have data behind them, and hard realities to pin the theories to. More than 90% of studies show positive effect, both in terms of remedy and prevention. But ivermectin is not financially viable enough to market as a cure/preventative in this instance, so we'll \"fact check\" it.<br /><br />But of course, we can't place the Covid under the same weight of scrutiny as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin etc., because of all the money - there's so much money in Covid-19, we would annihilate entire industries if we just came out and said \"it's bollocks.\" So we have to keep it going somehow. We have to maintain this narrative that there's a pathogen out there, as yet unidentified, which is causing people to be seriously sick - I mean, no more sick than regular flu in most instances, much less sick in many, but still - the only way to save people is through shooting chemicals into them in a worldwide clinical trial that won't end until 2023.<br /><br />Sounds totally reasonably when you put it like that, right? I should mention, of course, that none of the vaccines on offer would survive the onslaught of premature doubt offered to aforementioned ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin, etc. etc. - since there is at least a percentage chance of death/disfigurement/debilitation, \"that's a clear no go.\" Wouldn't want anybody to be harmed by a medical procedure, would we?",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1272904789734199309",
"published": "2021-08-13T13:09:10+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "(Originally posted to Facebook)\n\nSo, having discovered recently that there is, in fact, NO isolated SARS-CoV-2 in the world, and the papers which claim to have found such a thing are referring to \"isolations\" of mixtures of human, animal, and microbial cells, toxic chemicals, and pharmaceutical drugs (\"there's a 'rona in there somewhere, gosh darn it\"), I'm going to have to backtrack on some of the things I've said over the past year.\n\nMostly the idea that the \"Covid-19\" disease can be attributed to SARS-CoV-2 (it can't yet, not on the data we apparently have). There are no satisfactory data (\"satisfactory\" defined in terms of [molecular] Koch's postulates) to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is instrumental in the development of Covid-19 symptoms, nor are there necessarily sufficient data to claim that SARS-CoV-2 exists-as-such: that is to say - it may be something completely different that we're looking at, but the cognitive bias of virologists looking desperately for \"viruses\" to pin the blame on has led to random RNA noise being labeled as a \"virus\" because, hey ho, that's how we make money in science. I'm sure some of you on my friends list are becoming uncomfortably used to the degree to which finance impacts research in the modern world.\n\nIf we applied the same criteria, and the same degree of scrutiny, to Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 as we did to ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin, nutrient therapy, sunlight therapy, etc. etc., we would quickly discover that there is no disease. Clearly there's no disease, because there are no data, there is no record of mechanisms at play; there is conjecture and theory, but no hard reality to pin them to. This is an even worse state of affairs than for ivermectin etc., which have data behind them, and hard realities to pin the theories to. More than 90% of studies show positive effect, both in terms of remedy and prevention. But ivermectin is not financially viable enough to market as a cure/preventative in this instance, so we'll \"fact check\" it.\n\nBut of course, we can't place the Covid under the same weight of scrutiny as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin etc., because of all the money - there's so much money in Covid-19, we would annihilate entire industries if we just came out and said \"it's bollocks.\" So we have to keep it going somehow. We have to maintain this narrative that there's a pathogen out there, as yet unidentified, which is causing people to be seriously sick - I mean, no more sick than regular flu in most instances, much less sick in many, but still - the only way to save people is through shooting chemicals into them in a worldwide clinical trial that won't end until 2023.\n\nSounds totally reasonably when you put it like that, right? I should mention, of course, that none of the vaccines on offer would survive the onslaught of premature doubt offered to aforementioned ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin, etc. etc. - since there is at least a percentage chance of death/disfigurement/debilitation, \"that's a clear no go.\" Wouldn't want anybody to be harmed by a medical procedure, would we?",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1272904789734199309/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1272571868460617739",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "(Originally written for Facebook)<br /><br />It boggles my mind that otherwise intelligent people buy the corona narratives. I do not know a single person that has personally looked at scientific papers, reviews, meta-analyses etc. that has not come away with the conclusion that things are not as they are reported in the media; not as reported by governments; not as reported by (historically morally bankrupt) pharmaceutical cartels &c. The media, government, and big pharma lines have changed during this whole affair - but the speed of information transmission is such that people seem to forget what has already been said, forget what bogus claims have already been overridden, forget that this entire charade was founded on principles which we now know not to be true (most notably, the proposed \"lethality\" of this disease, which has never manifested itself to the degree threatened).<br /><br />Most of the people who I'm connected to on Facebook - so most of you reading this - are aware, one way or another, that this is a very dodgy situation, with some very dodgy characters making very dodgy statements and demands. A few of you seem still to persist in the (to me fanciful) notion that if you absorb enough mainstream media, the mainstream narrative will become true, and you won't have to worry about the (former?) friends/family telling you that there's something wrong with all this. Never before have I seen so many people intentionally blinker themselves for literally no reward - you are being invited to hideously limit your lives, your capacity for enjoyment and sharing with fellow humans, and do so happily because, seemingly, it feels like getting a pat on the head from Daddy Government. \"Well done, little one. You avoided critical thinking! Have a cookie, there's a sport. Now close your eyes while we test drugs on you.\" I see the social medias have trained you for dopamine dependency.<br /><br />The me of twelve years ago would simply laugh and say \"you're cattle. You are bred for the slaughter. Since you don't bring about any kind of intelligence in this situation, you are clearly not fit for survival; one must chalk it up to God's sense of humour that you should have been born to resemble a human, without having any of the substance.\" The me of now hesitantly considers agreeing. Maybe we do need population control. Maybe we do need mass eugenics programs. Maybe the idea that life is worth it for its own sake is totally false, and really the intelligent people should just let the retards, the spineless, the inefficient/ineligible, kill themselves on the corporate machine. The only thing which stays my judgment is the fact that so many are perfectly innocent in their pipedream belief in the political-journalistic class: really, they are simply enacting these childish motifs in which Mum and Dad are infallible. It is a psychological safety blanket, to believe that \"the structure\" is in one's own interests, without any investigation.<br /><br />Everyone learns (eventually) that this is not true. If these individuals have yet to learn such a thing - I pray only that their inevitable disillusionment with their governments (and society at large) does not dismay them to the point of e.g. suicide, nor that they should blame themselves for their incomprehensible, unequalled gullibility in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary of mainstream narratives.<br /><br />If this (or posts like it) offends anyone - I would love to apologise, but I can't. The spirit of truth is not something one can apologise for. If you are offended, it is because you have believed things without due scrutiny. You are not offended by what I have said, but by the fact that you have been lied to by others, and have wantonly believed them without appropriate investigation into their claims if you have done this, the weight falls on you - not me - to rectify the situation.",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1272571868460617739",
"published": "2021-08-12T15:06:16+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "(Originally written for Facebook)\n\nIt boggles my mind that otherwise intelligent people buy the corona narratives. I do not know a single person that has personally looked at scientific papers, reviews, meta-analyses etc. that has not come away with the conclusion that things are not as they are reported in the media; not as reported by governments; not as reported by (historically morally bankrupt) pharmaceutical cartels &c. The media, government, and big pharma lines have changed during this whole affair - but the speed of information transmission is such that people seem to forget what has already been said, forget what bogus claims have already been overridden, forget that this entire charade was founded on principles which we now know not to be true (most notably, the proposed \"lethality\" of this disease, which has never manifested itself to the degree threatened).\n\nMost of the people who I'm connected to on Facebook - so most of you reading this - are aware, one way or another, that this is a very dodgy situation, with some very dodgy characters making very dodgy statements and demands. A few of you seem still to persist in the (to me fanciful) notion that if you absorb enough mainstream media, the mainstream narrative will become true, and you won't have to worry about the (former?) friends/family telling you that there's something wrong with all this. Never before have I seen so many people intentionally blinker themselves for literally no reward - you are being invited to hideously limit your lives, your capacity for enjoyment and sharing with fellow humans, and do so happily because, seemingly, it feels like getting a pat on the head from Daddy Government. \"Well done, little one. You avoided critical thinking! Have a cookie, there's a sport. Now close your eyes while we test drugs on you.\" I see the social medias have trained you for dopamine dependency.\n\nThe me of twelve years ago would simply laugh and say \"you're cattle. You are bred for the slaughter. Since you don't bring about any kind of intelligence in this situation, you are clearly not fit for survival; one must chalk it up to God's sense of humour that you should have been born to resemble a human, without having any of the substance.\" The me of now hesitantly considers agreeing. Maybe we do need population control. Maybe we do need mass eugenics programs. Maybe the idea that life is worth it for its own sake is totally false, and really the intelligent people should just let the retards, the spineless, the inefficient/ineligible, kill themselves on the corporate machine. The only thing which stays my judgment is the fact that so many are perfectly innocent in their pipedream belief in the political-journalistic class: really, they are simply enacting these childish motifs in which Mum and Dad are infallible. It is a psychological safety blanket, to believe that \"the structure\" is in one's own interests, without any investigation.\n\nEveryone learns (eventually) that this is not true. If these individuals have yet to learn such a thing - I pray only that their inevitable disillusionment with their governments (and society at large) does not dismay them to the point of e.g. suicide, nor that they should blame themselves for their incomprehensible, unequalled gullibility in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary of mainstream narratives.\n\nIf this (or posts like it) offends anyone - I would love to apologise, but I can't. The spirit of truth is not something one can apologise for. If you are offended, it is because you have believed things without due scrutiny. You are not offended by what I have said, but by the fact that you have been lied to by others, and have wantonly believed them without appropriate investigation into their claims if you have done this, the weight falls on you - not me - to rectify the situation.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1272571868460617739/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1271812781821136914",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "Race Realism: \"Really? Racism?\"<br /><br />Let's get at least one thing straight.<br /><br />All words are intended to communicate experiences.<br /><br />If I use a word, I am hoping that you will hear/read the word, and it will trigger some neuronal connections in your brain, bringing the sense/experience/memory of something to the fore, so that you can understand what I'm saying.<br /><br />Thus, if I say \"apple,\" I'm hoping you imagine an apple. If you've experienced one, that is.<br /><br />If I say \"race,\" what exactly am I asking you to imagine?<br /><br />I will gladly offer that \"race\" is terribly defined. It is in fact more poorly defined now, in its bio-social sense, than it ever has been. People do not seem to know what the word \"race\" is supposed to refer to - never mind what it does actually refer to.<br /><br />Let's clear the former out first. \"Race\" was originally (that is to say, in the 1800s or thereabouts) the distinguishing factor between \"different kinds of human(oid).\" Old timey people thought that human-like organisms may or may not be human (considering that they spoke very different languages, and some of them ate people). Eventually they found out that they were all human (more or less). In this time, the word \"race\" was brought into play as an easy way of distinguishing what general geo-ethnic background an individual had - based predominantly, but not exclusively, on outwardly obvious physiological characteristics, such as skin colour, hair type, facial structure, and so on.<br /><br />That was how the word was originally used. Races were \"Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid\" according to certain old definitions; others had more intricate (and arguably more interesting) ways of divvying humanity up into little sectors.<br /><br />I would not for one minute suggest that this notion of \"race\" is a viable biological determinant for anyone: that is to say, this stuff is kind of bogus. Yes, one can broadly distinguish between geographically/temporally-mandated phenotypes and group disparate peoples together into these conceptions called \"races,\" but this is not the biological reality the 19th century fusties thought (hoped) they were locking in on. This is, if there is such a thing at all, the \"social construct of race\" that so-called \"critical race theory\" seeks to undermine.<br /><br />Now let me provide you with an appropriate, biologically-founded definition of race - based on nothing less than the etymology (the root) of the word \"race.\"<br /><br />For the word \"race\" comes from a Latin root, which is \"radix\" - the word for \"root.\"<br /><br />Yes, the root of the word \"race\" is an old word for \"root,\" as in \"that which something stems from.\"<br /><br />A \"race,\" then, is hypothetically the collective body of organisms that have stemmed from a common root.<br /><br />Thus we can talk about \"the human race\" without rejoinder, because it is clear that all humans have come from some kind of common root - whether that be the Sapiens, or, as is increasingly likely, something far, far more ancient that is common across all hominid species (incl. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Dragon-man etc.).<br /><br />However, we might also talk about the \"European race\" in this instance, and there would be a biological basis for this type of talk - namely in that the bulk of Paleolithic and Mesolithic remains that have been tested to date (these being the apparent \"natives\" of the landmass) have carried particular genetic signatures, which can be traced back to specific individuals.<br /><br />Let me reiterate: in Paleo/Mesolithic Europe, by far the bulk of e.g. direct native maternal descent can be traced back to one female. The same is the case for the males: most are descended from the same man. Some few outliers are descended from different, more-or-less-related men, but they are in the minority.<br /><br />These people - the female on the one hand, and the male on the other - are the \"radices\" of their descendants. They are the \"roots\" whence those people(s) sprung. \"Native Europeans,\" as they are today, can trace their paternal lineage back over tens of thousands of years (or so the geologists say) to individuals that lived in/around the Fertile Crescent before moving north into frigid, inhospitable Europe (for some reason). Native European women are arguably even more ancient, and might find their radix in Asia. In fact, that \"race\" of women is found throughout Eurasia and the Near East, as well as in North Africa, as parts of the indigenous populations (though by no means the only part).<br /><br />\"Race\" is a biological reality if and only if it is tied to descent - that is to say, the genetic lineage of an individual, the route by which his/her genes ended up the way that they are. Thus, when faced with the issue of e.g. Irish-descended Afro-Caribbeans, one has to ask: are they Irish, or Afro-Caribbean? Well, in many instances: paternally Irish, maternally African. \"It gets complicated.\"<br /><br />This is the uncomfortable thing about the REALITY of race: it is extremely, extremely complicated, totally convoluted, clear only to those who have undertaken a significant amount of study of genetics, archaeogenetics, phenotypology, historical population migrations, and so on. Once you have all that under your belt, it becomes very clear: almost all of us are cross-breeds of various kinds. All of us have very, very clear \"races,\" genetically speaking, expressed through our direct Y-DNA/mtDNA inheritance. We are simultaneously \"people of specific races\" and \"people of mixed race.\" This is to do with how sex works, which I'm sure I don't have to explain to most (pro-tip: M + F = babby, you get half from each side).<br /><br />Now, what this means is that the \"popular race theory\" is totally bunk. Race is nothing to do with skin colour, hair type, facial features, bone structure etc. These things are all to do with race. A classic cart-before-horse scenario.<br /><br />You cannot necessarily tell someone's race from their phenotype. A black man might well be a ninth-generation direct descendant of a Chinese fellow. A Native American woman may be shocked to find that she is the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of a European woman. You would not be able to tell by looking at them: over time, taking more genetic influence from those around them, the demonstrably \"Asian\" or \"European\" facial features will be absorbed by local phenotypes. That's nature.<br /><br />These people will still carry markers showing their direct descent from these \"outlandish\" individuals, though. As far as biological reality is concerned: their root, radix, or \"race\" is encoded in that direct descent. So we have Black Irish, White Moors, Turkish Arabs, and American Asians. I will stress: only genetic testing, or some kind of extremely refined scrying, could work these things out about someone. Some people have memory of their ancestry - they will be able to say, \"oh yeah, my great-great-grandfather was Cherokee\" or something of the sort. Many have forgotten even that far back - never mind further back.<br /><br />The reality of race is evident in cultural modes, inherited response patterns expressed through so-called \"junk DNA,\" far more than it is evident in temporary/transitory things like hair and eye colour. Take an African man, marry him to a European woman, and marry their daughter to a European man, and the resultant grandson would be racially European - they may bear some sideways influence from their African grandfather, but it would not be direct, because of how genes work. They would presumably look, think, and act European - whatever the hell that means. And if you reverse the situation, have a European man marry an African lady, whose daughter marries an African man - the grandson again will be African through-and-through, because of how human procreation works.<br /><br />Never let babies be thrown out with bathwater. There is a biological reality to \"race\" - it is simply not the way people have tended to think about it for ~200 years. You have a race: your direct descent is your \"race,\" and you can take a DNA test and find out where your genetic material has come from. You will also find that individuals of all of the classic \"races\" (e.g. \"White,\" \"Black,\" \"Brown,\" \"Yellow\" etc.) will be related to you through your direct lineage, because individuals of most lineages have travelled far and wide through the world over tens of thousands of years, and brought forth successful progeny in far flung places.<br /><br />The bulk of my paternal relatives do not live in western Europe, even though my people have been here for well over a thousand years: the bulk of my paternal relatives are in Asia. I am more closely related, in terms of direct Y-DNA inheritance, to Bengali Brahmins and Gökturks than I am to native Europeans. In fact, only between 10-30% of the men in my part of the world are of this \"race,\" and yet we are often held to be characteristic of the region - tall, fair, etc. These are traits which we brought from Asia into Europe thousands of years ago (again, as the geologists say). We picked up the blue eyes here, but the other \"classic white traits\" (light skin/hair, tallness) are Asian - not European. I have explained this elsewhere on this page.<br /><br />Until people can get over the reality of people treating each other poorly - which involves making effort not to treat others poorly, no matter your reasoning (whether explicitly racially motivated [racism] or implicitly racially motivated [CRT], it doesn't matter) - we are going to use \"race\" to bash ourselves over the head with. And \"rootless\" individuals, psychopaths at the top of business and finance, will profit off of the mutual pounding, because they are not in that game; they are poised to take advantage of it. They will sell you European genocide, they will sell you slavery reparations, they will sell you colonialism and western monopoly, to make a buck off of you.<br /><br />They way you stop this from happening is by no longer treating race as definable by outward characteristics. THAT is how you stop judging people by their looks, and start anticipating that they are their own person, with their own history. They might be good or bad, as an individual. That has nothing to do with their \"race,\" nor does their \"race\" have anything to do with that - that's to do with their family, their background, their history, and their own personality. Some people are assholes, no matter the skin colour. We all have to be ready to deal with that, should it come about. At no point does it make sense to \"tar everyone with the same brush.\" If you've fallen into that line of thinking - whether you're a \"racist\" or an \"anti-racist\" - you've fallen into the hands of corporate mechanisms seeking to squeeze pennies out of you. Sorry, that's the biological reality of race.",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1271812781821136914",
"published": "2021-08-10T12:49:55+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Race Realism: \"Really? Racism?\"\n\nLet's get at least one thing straight.\n\nAll words are intended to communicate experiences.\n\nIf I use a word, I am hoping that you will hear/read the word, and it will trigger some neuronal connections in your brain, bringing the sense/experience/memory of something to the fore, so that you can understand what I'm saying.\n\nThus, if I say \"apple,\" I'm hoping you imagine an apple. If you've experienced one, that is.\n\nIf I say \"race,\" what exactly am I asking you to imagine?\n\nI will gladly offer that \"race\" is terribly defined. It is in fact more poorly defined now, in its bio-social sense, than it ever has been. People do not seem to know what the word \"race\" is supposed to refer to - never mind what it does actually refer to.\n\nLet's clear the former out first. \"Race\" was originally (that is to say, in the 1800s or thereabouts) the distinguishing factor between \"different kinds of human(oid).\" Old timey people thought that human-like organisms may or may not be human (considering that they spoke very different languages, and some of them ate people). Eventually they found out that they were all human (more or less). In this time, the word \"race\" was brought into play as an easy way of distinguishing what general geo-ethnic background an individual had - based predominantly, but not exclusively, on outwardly obvious physiological characteristics, such as skin colour, hair type, facial structure, and so on.\n\nThat was how the word was originally used. Races were \"Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid\" according to certain old definitions; others had more intricate (and arguably more interesting) ways of divvying humanity up into little sectors.\n\nI would not for one minute suggest that this notion of \"race\" is a viable biological determinant for anyone: that is to say, this stuff is kind of bogus. Yes, one can broadly distinguish between geographically/temporally-mandated phenotypes and group disparate peoples together into these conceptions called \"races,\" but this is not the biological reality the 19th century fusties thought (hoped) they were locking in on. This is, if there is such a thing at all, the \"social construct of race\" that so-called \"critical race theory\" seeks to undermine.\n\nNow let me provide you with an appropriate, biologically-founded definition of race - based on nothing less than the etymology (the root) of the word \"race.\"\n\nFor the word \"race\" comes from a Latin root, which is \"radix\" - the word for \"root.\"\n\nYes, the root of the word \"race\" is an old word for \"root,\" as in \"that which something stems from.\"\n\nA \"race,\" then, is hypothetically the collective body of organisms that have stemmed from a common root.\n\nThus we can talk about \"the human race\" without rejoinder, because it is clear that all humans have come from some kind of common root - whether that be the Sapiens, or, as is increasingly likely, something far, far more ancient that is common across all hominid species (incl. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Dragon-man etc.).\n\nHowever, we might also talk about the \"European race\" in this instance, and there would be a biological basis for this type of talk - namely in that the bulk of Paleolithic and Mesolithic remains that have been tested to date (these being the apparent \"natives\" of the landmass) have carried particular genetic signatures, which can be traced back to specific individuals.\n\nLet me reiterate: in Paleo/Mesolithic Europe, by far the bulk of e.g. direct native maternal descent can be traced back to one female. The same is the case for the males: most are descended from the same man. Some few outliers are descended from different, more-or-less-related men, but they are in the minority.\n\nThese people - the female on the one hand, and the male on the other - are the \"radices\" of their descendants. They are the \"roots\" whence those people(s) sprung. \"Native Europeans,\" as they are today, can trace their paternal lineage back over tens of thousands of years (or so the geologists say) to individuals that lived in/around the Fertile Crescent before moving north into frigid, inhospitable Europe (for some reason). Native European women are arguably even more ancient, and might find their radix in Asia. In fact, that \"race\" of women is found throughout Eurasia and the Near East, as well as in North Africa, as parts of the indigenous populations (though by no means the only part).\n\n\"Race\" is a biological reality if and only if it is tied to descent - that is to say, the genetic lineage of an individual, the route by which his/her genes ended up the way that they are. Thus, when faced with the issue of e.g. Irish-descended Afro-Caribbeans, one has to ask: are they Irish, or Afro-Caribbean? Well, in many instances: paternally Irish, maternally African. \"It gets complicated.\"\n\nThis is the uncomfortable thing about the REALITY of race: it is extremely, extremely complicated, totally convoluted, clear only to those who have undertaken a significant amount of study of genetics, archaeogenetics, phenotypology, historical population migrations, and so on. Once you have all that under your belt, it becomes very clear: almost all of us are cross-breeds of various kinds. All of us have very, very clear \"races,\" genetically speaking, expressed through our direct Y-DNA/mtDNA inheritance. We are simultaneously \"people of specific races\" and \"people of mixed race.\" This is to do with how sex works, which I'm sure I don't have to explain to most (pro-tip: M + F = babby, you get half from each side).\n\nNow, what this means is that the \"popular race theory\" is totally bunk. Race is nothing to do with skin colour, hair type, facial features, bone structure etc. These things are all to do with race. A classic cart-before-horse scenario.\n\nYou cannot necessarily tell someone's race from their phenotype. A black man might well be a ninth-generation direct descendant of a Chinese fellow. A Native American woman may be shocked to find that she is the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of a European woman. You would not be able to tell by looking at them: over time, taking more genetic influence from those around them, the demonstrably \"Asian\" or \"European\" facial features will be absorbed by local phenotypes. That's nature.\n\nThese people will still carry markers showing their direct descent from these \"outlandish\" individuals, though. As far as biological reality is concerned: their root, radix, or \"race\" is encoded in that direct descent. So we have Black Irish, White Moors, Turkish Arabs, and American Asians. I will stress: only genetic testing, or some kind of extremely refined scrying, could work these things out about someone. Some people have memory of their ancestry - they will be able to say, \"oh yeah, my great-great-grandfather was Cherokee\" or something of the sort. Many have forgotten even that far back - never mind further back.\n\nThe reality of race is evident in cultural modes, inherited response patterns expressed through so-called \"junk DNA,\" far more than it is evident in temporary/transitory things like hair and eye colour. Take an African man, marry him to a European woman, and marry their daughter to a European man, and the resultant grandson would be racially European - they may bear some sideways influence from their African grandfather, but it would not be direct, because of how genes work. They would presumably look, think, and act European - whatever the hell that means. And if you reverse the situation, have a European man marry an African lady, whose daughter marries an African man - the grandson again will be African through-and-through, because of how human procreation works.\n\nNever let babies be thrown out with bathwater. There is a biological reality to \"race\" - it is simply not the way people have tended to think about it for ~200 years. You have a race: your direct descent is your \"race,\" and you can take a DNA test and find out where your genetic material has come from. You will also find that individuals of all of the classic \"races\" (e.g. \"White,\" \"Black,\" \"Brown,\" \"Yellow\" etc.) will be related to you through your direct lineage, because individuals of most lineages have travelled far and wide through the world over tens of thousands of years, and brought forth successful progeny in far flung places.\n\nThe bulk of my paternal relatives do not live in western Europe, even though my people have been here for well over a thousand years: the bulk of my paternal relatives are in Asia. I am more closely related, in terms of direct Y-DNA inheritance, to Bengali Brahmins and Gökturks than I am to native Europeans. In fact, only between 10-30% of the men in my part of the world are of this \"race,\" and yet we are often held to be characteristic of the region - tall, fair, etc. These are traits which we brought from Asia into Europe thousands of years ago (again, as the geologists say). We picked up the blue eyes here, but the other \"classic white traits\" (light skin/hair, tallness) are Asian - not European. I have explained this elsewhere on this page.\n\nUntil people can get over the reality of people treating each other poorly - which involves making effort not to treat others poorly, no matter your reasoning (whether explicitly racially motivated [racism] or implicitly racially motivated [CRT], it doesn't matter) - we are going to use \"race\" to bash ourselves over the head with. And \"rootless\" individuals, psychopaths at the top of business and finance, will profit off of the mutual pounding, because they are not in that game; they are poised to take advantage of it. They will sell you European genocide, they will sell you slavery reparations, they will sell you colonialism and western monopoly, to make a buck off of you.\n\nThey way you stop this from happening is by no longer treating race as definable by outward characteristics. THAT is how you stop judging people by their looks, and start anticipating that they are their own person, with their own history. They might be good or bad, as an individual. That has nothing to do with their \"race,\" nor does their \"race\" have anything to do with that - that's to do with their family, their background, their history, and their own personality. Some people are assholes, no matter the skin colour. We all have to be ready to deal with that, should it come about. At no point does it make sense to \"tar everyone with the same brush.\" If you've fallen into that line of thinking - whether you're a \"racist\" or an \"anti-racist\" - you've fallen into the hands of corporate mechanisms seeking to squeeze pennies out of you. Sorry, that's the biological reality of race.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1271812781821136914/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1262874099342573568",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "That bit in Deicide's \"Dead By Dawn\" where he says<br /><br />\"Pieces of meat,<br />Just a kebab\"<br /><br />The lyrics are actually<br /><br />\"Demons appear,<br />Death they command\"<br /><br />Fuck me, I've been singing that wrong for ten years",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1262874099342573568",
"published": "2021-07-16T20:50:48+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "That bit in Deicide's \"Dead By Dawn\" where he says\n\n\"Pieces of meat,\nJust a kebab\"\n\nThe lyrics are actually\n\n\"Demons appear,\nDeath they command\"\n\nFuck me, I've been singing that wrong for ten years",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1262874099342573568/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1232815205600768000",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "Actuality, Factuality, vs. Reality<br /><br />What is actual is what is happening right now.<br /><br />The state that obtains now is the actual state of things.<br /><br />You will notice - what is happening right now is not the same as what was happening when you read the first sentence. It is now three sentences on. The actual has changed.<br /><br />What is factual is based on what was actual. Something having been noted as being actual is designated as a fact: thus, it is a fact that you started reading this. When you started reading this, it was actually the case that you were starting to read this. That isn't the case now. But back then, it was the case. So we call this a fact.<br /><br />Notice, that the fact has passed; it is a thing entirely of the past, with no necessary reference to the present, but that we habitually interpret the present as being the product of the past - for some reason.<br /><br />Acts and facts are constantly in flux. Perspective is integral to the formation of facts from acts. Thus, while to you it is a fact that you started reading this text at some point, to me this is not a fact until you tell me when you started reading it; and even then, what is factual to me, is only that you told me that you started reading it at some point - since the actual state I experienced relative to your beginning to read this was the state in which you were telling me about it. I didn't experience you beginning to read it - certainly not from my own human perspective, whatever we might say of transcendental non-localised consciousness or any such thing.<br /><br />Acts and facts are in flux. There is a changefulness not only to the actual state of the world, but also to our interpretation of this state, and of the states that preceded this one. The facts of the past are constantly re-interpreted in light of the actual present.<br /><br />There are those who would tell you that this is the sum of reality: that what is actually the case now, and what was actually the case then - the facts of the matter - together constitute all that can be considered real. The future is not real, for it has not been actualised yet. Imagination, conjecture, projection, fantasy - none of these are real, for they are only mental. All that is real is the experience of the mental impression; but the state suggested in that mental impression is not real, because it is not actual.<br /><br />Elsewhere I have tackled the subject of \"what is real,\" \"what is reality\" quite extensively - I will summarise the perspective here. Because it stands to reason, that what is real is somehow true; and that its reality, the cause of its being real in any way, is that truth factor. The essence of reality is thus truth.<br /><br />Now, what is true is true - that seems indubitable. Thus, it is true, let's say, that I exist. Because, if I did not exist, I would not be able to produce this text. And similarly, if you did not exist, you would not be able to read it. So it seems truthful to say that our existence, as we experience it, is a good measure for truth. Not anything particularly about our experience, which is always subject to perspective; but \"that we exist\" is indubitable, thus a good benchmark for truth in general - especially because our own existence is fundamental, primal, and intimate to all of us. I doubt any of us could characterise anything in particular that would constitute \"our existence\" at the expense of anything else, other than - perhaps - the mere and unlocatable knowledge of our existence.<br /><br />It would appear that for all the time that I am sentient, I am aware of the fact that I exist - not as fact, but as actuality. And indeed, beyond actuality; for it is actually the case, that my existence - my mere existence - such as it is now, is the same mere existence I enjoyed at the outset of writing this article. And it is the same mere existence that I enjoyed as a child, and presumably will enjoy as an old man - and so, it would seem, that this mere existence, is fundamentally true of all of the actualities that I experience; for in any actuality that is experienced by me, it is integral to the experience of that actuality that I exist. Without my existence, the experience could not happen; the actuality could not be noticed; could not be noted as fact; it would be as if it did not exist, and for all intents and purposes, all that exists is that which is experienced as actual - and there is absolutely no evidence as to the existence of anything else, other than the actual experience of those who are experiencing.<br /><br />This truth of my own existence is consistent throughout my changing states of experience. From birth till death, at the very least, it is conceivable that there is no gap, change, or alteration in my knowledge of my own existence. If there is any such gap, it could only be called sleep or unconsciousness - and even then, I am of the suspicion, that the knowledge of my existence remains itself and intact through that gap of non-experience, for it is not as if I have ceased to exist for a spell, so much as it is that time has ceased to exist for me. Space (as it is) has ceased to exist for me. Perhaps some dream has intruded - a new time, a new space, a new actuality has been instantiated within the experiential sphere. But it is not permanent; and it passes, and from deep sleep again I rise into waking, and this actuality presents itself to me in its present state at that point, and quickly subsides into factuality as I go about my day.<br /><br />What is unchanging and immutable is a good model for truth. For what is true, is, conceivably, always true. For example: it is always true that 1 + 1 = 2; this is because it is always true that 1 = 1, and it is always true that that which is signified by the figure 2 is the addition of one to another - a doubling of quantity, having started with a single item. Mathematics is a wonderful window into permanent and inalienable truths about our reality: for there is a fundamental pattern to number which is inescapable, whether one quests after nature, knowledge, death, or God. And we will recognise that even in those areas of mathematics which exhibit mutability, the principles of mutations are consistent and predicated upon the fundamental truths of the basic number series - e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.<br /><br />All actualities (that we experience) would appear to encode within them fundamental truths such as the identity of one, two, three, etc. All actualities (that we experience) would appear to encode within them the fundamental truth of our own existence.<br /><br />These true things - that we exist, that 1 + 1 = 2 - constitute far better what could be called \"reality\" than any of the things which are considered actual, or, thence, factual. In fact, the actual existence of any particular thing - even the actual existence of number as experienced - is predicated upon the self-existence of the thing that is actualised. This counts as much for the perceiver as for the perception: it is as much the case that you could not perceive if you did not exist, as it is that you could not perceive something non-existent. You could perceive, perforce, a non-actual state - in the form of memory, projection, imagination, etc. - but it would be the actual state of the present moment at that point, that you were mentally experiencing such a cogitation, such a formulation, such an imagery, and so on. And inasmuch as you could only experience such a thing based on the truth evident of your own existence, so too would it appear impossible for you to experience any thing without the truth evident of its own existence - evident to you in the form of its seemingness, the way in which it appears to you.<br /><br />The passing things of the world seem to come and go; but fundamental themes persist, such that we encounter several different kinds of \"plant pot\" in our lives, several different instances of \"banana,\" a variety of different \"cats,\" and so on. We are touching on Platonic Forms here. I would not like to enter into this discussion at this point - except insofar as to say, that there is a relativistic level, on which it appears as if the form/function of instantiated objects as conceivably collected into variably-defined groups constitute layers of essential motifs, these being imagined as \"real\" in ways above and beyond the mere instantiations of them - as ever, \"the Chair\" is more fundamental than any \"chair.\" And yet it could be conceived that in the absence of a conceptualising force such as a human perceiver, neither \"chair\" nor \"Chair\" could be said to exist. Thus I will leave such points aside for now - but I will hasten to urge you to reiterate to yourself that sense of fundament that accompanies the Forms as they appear to us, inasmuch as they are more reflective of the nature of reality than they are of the nature of actuality, even if still only actual in their way.<br /><br />If we are beginning to become clear on the matter, then - what is actual is passing. It becomes factual. What is factual is mutable. It can be perceived variously. What is real, then, is neither (necessarily) what is actual, nor what is factual - though it may include both of these things - but it is most certainly that which is.<br /><br />We have identified in this short piece that some of the \"things that are\" are, for example, ourselves, and oddly familiar but nevertheless obscure features like numerical identity (e.g. \"I am myself, you are yourself, he is hisself, etc.\"). These are persistent throughout actual states. What is real is not necessarily what is actual; but that any actuality can be actual, what is real is not far. In comparison, the factual is anything but real, being the impression of the impression of reality, edited by time and place.<br /><br />While we persist in living our lives on the level of facts, we live in delusion; we reiterate pasts imagined. While we persist in living our lives in the level of acts, we enjoy greater freedom: but are still somehow, it seems to me, limited to the transitory, and not yet fully capable or aware of our greater expanse. While we persist in living as the real, nothing is impossible; for all things are, simultaneously and instantly, at all times. That is the case of fundamental being. It is as impossible that all things could not simultaneously be the case as it would be that no things could be the case at any point; for the entirety of time, inasmuch as it is manifested as successions of actual moments, is itself constituted solely by the existence of that which is real, and is subsumed within that reality much as the film is subsumed within the reel (or the mp4, as the case may be nowadays). The literal film is an object; the movie it plays is an experience.<br /><br />Reality is like the canvas on which the figures dance. The beginning of the film and the end of the film appear upon the same backdrop. That backdrop never changes, throughout the entirety of the story. It is utterly unmoved by the events, Whether a film even plays or not, it is undisturbed. If a canvas could be its own film - its own library of films, infinite and unfurling - it might be like the reality that allows for all of these variegated, actual experiences.",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1232815205600768000",
"published": "2021-04-24T22:07:29+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Actuality, Factuality, vs. Reality\n\nWhat is actual is what is happening right now.\n\nThe state that obtains now is the actual state of things.\n\nYou will notice - what is happening right now is not the same as what was happening when you read the first sentence. It is now three sentences on. The actual has changed.\n\nWhat is factual is based on what was actual. Something having been noted as being actual is designated as a fact: thus, it is a fact that you started reading this. When you started reading this, it was actually the case that you were starting to read this. That isn't the case now. But back then, it was the case. So we call this a fact.\n\nNotice, that the fact has passed; it is a thing entirely of the past, with no necessary reference to the present, but that we habitually interpret the present as being the product of the past - for some reason.\n\nActs and facts are constantly in flux. Perspective is integral to the formation of facts from acts. Thus, while to you it is a fact that you started reading this text at some point, to me this is not a fact until you tell me when you started reading it; and even then, what is factual to me, is only that you told me that you started reading it at some point - since the actual state I experienced relative to your beginning to read this was the state in which you were telling me about it. I didn't experience you beginning to read it - certainly not from my own human perspective, whatever we might say of transcendental non-localised consciousness or any such thing.\n\nActs and facts are in flux. There is a changefulness not only to the actual state of the world, but also to our interpretation of this state, and of the states that preceded this one. The facts of the past are constantly re-interpreted in light of the actual present.\n\nThere are those who would tell you that this is the sum of reality: that what is actually the case now, and what was actually the case then - the facts of the matter - together constitute all that can be considered real. The future is not real, for it has not been actualised yet. Imagination, conjecture, projection, fantasy - none of these are real, for they are only mental. All that is real is the experience of the mental impression; but the state suggested in that mental impression is not real, because it is not actual.\n\nElsewhere I have tackled the subject of \"what is real,\" \"what is reality\" quite extensively - I will summarise the perspective here. Because it stands to reason, that what is real is somehow true; and that its reality, the cause of its being real in any way, is that truth factor. The essence of reality is thus truth.\n\nNow, what is true is true - that seems indubitable. Thus, it is true, let's say, that I exist. Because, if I did not exist, I would not be able to produce this text. And similarly, if you did not exist, you would not be able to read it. So it seems truthful to say that our existence, as we experience it, is a good measure for truth. Not anything particularly about our experience, which is always subject to perspective; but \"that we exist\" is indubitable, thus a good benchmark for truth in general - especially because our own existence is fundamental, primal, and intimate to all of us. I doubt any of us could characterise anything in particular that would constitute \"our existence\" at the expense of anything else, other than - perhaps - the mere and unlocatable knowledge of our existence.\n\nIt would appear that for all the time that I am sentient, I am aware of the fact that I exist - not as fact, but as actuality. And indeed, beyond actuality; for it is actually the case, that my existence - my mere existence - such as it is now, is the same mere existence I enjoyed at the outset of writing this article. And it is the same mere existence that I enjoyed as a child, and presumably will enjoy as an old man - and so, it would seem, that this mere existence, is fundamentally true of all of the actualities that I experience; for in any actuality that is experienced by me, it is integral to the experience of that actuality that I exist. Without my existence, the experience could not happen; the actuality could not be noticed; could not be noted as fact; it would be as if it did not exist, and for all intents and purposes, all that exists is that which is experienced as actual - and there is absolutely no evidence as to the existence of anything else, other than the actual experience of those who are experiencing.\n\nThis truth of my own existence is consistent throughout my changing states of experience. From birth till death, at the very least, it is conceivable that there is no gap, change, or alteration in my knowledge of my own existence. If there is any such gap, it could only be called sleep or unconsciousness - and even then, I am of the suspicion, that the knowledge of my existence remains itself and intact through that gap of non-experience, for it is not as if I have ceased to exist for a spell, so much as it is that time has ceased to exist for me. Space (as it is) has ceased to exist for me. Perhaps some dream has intruded - a new time, a new space, a new actuality has been instantiated within the experiential sphere. But it is not permanent; and it passes, and from deep sleep again I rise into waking, and this actuality presents itself to me in its present state at that point, and quickly subsides into factuality as I go about my day.\n\nWhat is unchanging and immutable is a good model for truth. For what is true, is, conceivably, always true. For example: it is always true that 1 + 1 = 2; this is because it is always true that 1 = 1, and it is always true that that which is signified by the figure 2 is the addition of one to another - a doubling of quantity, having started with a single item. Mathematics is a wonderful window into permanent and inalienable truths about our reality: for there is a fundamental pattern to number which is inescapable, whether one quests after nature, knowledge, death, or God. And we will recognise that even in those areas of mathematics which exhibit mutability, the principles of mutations are consistent and predicated upon the fundamental truths of the basic number series - e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.\n\nAll actualities (that we experience) would appear to encode within them fundamental truths such as the identity of one, two, three, etc. All actualities (that we experience) would appear to encode within them the fundamental truth of our own existence.\n\nThese true things - that we exist, that 1 + 1 = 2 - constitute far better what could be called \"reality\" than any of the things which are considered actual, or, thence, factual. In fact, the actual existence of any particular thing - even the actual existence of number as experienced - is predicated upon the self-existence of the thing that is actualised. This counts as much for the perceiver as for the perception: it is as much the case that you could not perceive if you did not exist, as it is that you could not perceive something non-existent. You could perceive, perforce, a non-actual state - in the form of memory, projection, imagination, etc. - but it would be the actual state of the present moment at that point, that you were mentally experiencing such a cogitation, such a formulation, such an imagery, and so on. And inasmuch as you could only experience such a thing based on the truth evident of your own existence, so too would it appear impossible for you to experience any thing without the truth evident of its own existence - evident to you in the form of its seemingness, the way in which it appears to you.\n\nThe passing things of the world seem to come and go; but fundamental themes persist, such that we encounter several different kinds of \"plant pot\" in our lives, several different instances of \"banana,\" a variety of different \"cats,\" and so on. We are touching on Platonic Forms here. I would not like to enter into this discussion at this point - except insofar as to say, that there is a relativistic level, on which it appears as if the form/function of instantiated objects as conceivably collected into variably-defined groups constitute layers of essential motifs, these being imagined as \"real\" in ways above and beyond the mere instantiations of them - as ever, \"the Chair\" is more fundamental than any \"chair.\" And yet it could be conceived that in the absence of a conceptualising force such as a human perceiver, neither \"chair\" nor \"Chair\" could be said to exist. Thus I will leave such points aside for now - but I will hasten to urge you to reiterate to yourself that sense of fundament that accompanies the Forms as they appear to us, inasmuch as they are more reflective of the nature of reality than they are of the nature of actuality, even if still only actual in their way.\n\nIf we are beginning to become clear on the matter, then - what is actual is passing. It becomes factual. What is factual is mutable. It can be perceived variously. What is real, then, is neither (necessarily) what is actual, nor what is factual - though it may include both of these things - but it is most certainly that which is.\n\nWe have identified in this short piece that some of the \"things that are\" are, for example, ourselves, and oddly familiar but nevertheless obscure features like numerical identity (e.g. \"I am myself, you are yourself, he is hisself, etc.\"). These are persistent throughout actual states. What is real is not necessarily what is actual; but that any actuality can be actual, what is real is not far. In comparison, the factual is anything but real, being the impression of the impression of reality, edited by time and place.\n\nWhile we persist in living our lives on the level of facts, we live in delusion; we reiterate pasts imagined. While we persist in living our lives in the level of acts, we enjoy greater freedom: but are still somehow, it seems to me, limited to the transitory, and not yet fully capable or aware of our greater expanse. While we persist in living as the real, nothing is impossible; for all things are, simultaneously and instantly, at all times. That is the case of fundamental being. It is as impossible that all things could not simultaneously be the case as it would be that no things could be the case at any point; for the entirety of time, inasmuch as it is manifested as successions of actual moments, is itself constituted solely by the existence of that which is real, and is subsumed within that reality much as the film is subsumed within the reel (or the mp4, as the case may be nowadays). The literal film is an object; the movie it plays is an experience.\n\nReality is like the canvas on which the figures dance. The beginning of the film and the end of the film appear upon the same backdrop. That backdrop never changes, throughout the entirety of the story. It is utterly unmoved by the events, Whether a film even plays or not, it is undisturbed. If a canvas could be its own film - its own library of films, infinite and unfurling - it might be like the reality that allows for all of these variegated, actual experiences.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1232815205600768000/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1230522708559396864",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "Basic Philosophy<br /><br />How would one even begin to start approaching the field of philosophy? Casually, it may seem that the majority do not even consider it; it is held by them to be more occult than science, less certain, thus more diffuse, ephemeral, perhaps even meaningless. And indeed, a bulk of philosophy is - as in the previous post - ultimately meaningless, referring to nothing but itself.<br /><br />And yet there is that simple fact, that all of the thinkers, actors, movers and shakers in this world have had their philosophies, whether conceived of as such or not; and all things that have unfolded in this world, certainly on the grander stages, have unfolded according to some philosophy, or some competition of philosophies, however the case may be.<br /><br />There is little in this human universe which is not touched by philosophy - science is rooted in philosophy, religion is rooted in philosophy, art and creative expression are rooted in philosophy (whether expressed in language or not). So, to say that one will tackle \"basic philosophy\" is a little bit like saying one will tackle \"fundamental breathing\" or \"simple thinking.\" We do not necessarily have (common) words for the things which are to be described. Nevertheless, I will do my best.<br /><br />This quotation from Wittgenstein sums up my stance quite succinctly: \"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of a language.\" The language in question is human language, as used every day; the intelligence in question is human intelligence, as used every day. The conflict between the two is this: the intelligence exists in a living, breathing, mobile world; the language is a collection of dead words referring to dead objects.<br /><br />Sounds are more typically nouns that can express adjectival or verb-like qualities: thus, the root of the verb \"to walk\" is the concept of the noun \"walking,\" as an action which can be undertaken. We render the fluid action unto a series of steps - quite literally in this instance. It is an objectification of a part of the world; an objectification of a part of our experience. Never mind that the experience is purely subjective; for the means of communication, it seems, we persist in objectifying, and, in the process, \"de-essencing,\" those parts of the world-as-experienced which we wish to communicate to one another.<br /><br />This is all well and good in itself, and perfectly practicable when it comes to everyday things; but becomes problematic the more complex our discussions become. The more nuanced our investigation, the more we enter into the realms of possibility, belief, imagination, creativity etc., the further we drift from the ideal of language-as-communication, the closer we drift to the idea of language-as-confusion. We are no longer using language to refer to seemingly fixed things, such as \"bucket,\" \"barrel,\" \"torch,\" \"person,\" but to increasingly fluid and (experientially) ill-defined things: \"thought,\" \"compassion,\" \"sublimation,\" \"quintessence.\"<br /><br />These, which are motive and passing references to internal states (depending on one's definition of the words - another perennial issue), are treated in discourse as if they are fixed and unyielding; and so we create for ourselves \"ghosts of language,\" things to which our words ought apply, which they ought seek to define, but which are either non-descript, non-existent, or are existent only as confusions - linguistic confusions - of realities which words, in proper usage, cannot really touch.<br /><br />If I were to say to you \"the car is red,\" and you were to agree, \"yes, the car is red,\" this does not mean that we are experiencing the same colour when we say \"red.\" All it means is that the car appears to us, as individuals, to be the same colour as all those other things which we both customarily call \"red.\" It doesn't follow from this that my red is your red; my red might be your yellow, as I experience it. And yet all of my reds would be yellow to you, and conceivably all of your yellows would be red to me - and so the communication would function, even as, realistically speaking, we refer to different subjective experiences by the same word.<br /><br />This is hardly a new thought experiment, but it's extremely useful in this instance. The fact that I might not experience this world in the same way as you stands regardless of how we talk about it - that we talk about it using similar language does not suggest that we are referring to the same (kinds of) sense impressions. It merely suggests that, if there is an objective world, and an objective difference between \"you\" and \"I\" within that world, the underlying structure of that world is such that, irrespective of the quality of the experiences it engenders in its perceiving entities, the means by which those experiences might be expressed/communicated is the same.<br /><br />But we begin to see that, while this is all well and good for things like \"red\" and \"tree,\" \"cold\" and \"water,\" it is not so good for things like \"love\" and \"conscience,\" nor is it very good for \"envy\" and \"melancholy.\" We do not have objective referents for these words: these are subjective experiences. There is no envy, out there in the world, such that I could pick it up and show it to you, for us to commonly agree to call envy; there is only that feeling, which is described in terms of other feelings, which is habitually understood as envy, but which may well be confused with other feelings - inasmuch as feelings seem always to exist upon a continuum, bleeding one into others, just as envy and jealousy are often mistaken for one another (and indeed, for myself - I could hardly know which of the two words to use in any case, considering just how frequently their uses are confused - whether they even refer to different states any more).<br /><br />This, you will find, is the fundamental issue of philosophy. It is not that there are real problems in the world which must be solved through thought and subjective investigation; it is that we would appear, as a species, to imagine problems into existence through the faulty use of language. Or, let us be blunt - it is not the use of the language that is necessarily faulty, but the understanding of the use that is lacking in some way. For while we know, subconsciously, that the utility of words is in their reference, and in the degree to which we refer to the same things by our words, we persist, in full consciousness, in the delusion that we must fundamentally define our words the same way - indeed that language must operate the same way for all humans across time, such that there would never be a different way of conceiving of language, communication, reference-referent relationship, etc.<br /><br />It would seem that we do not necessarily understand how it is that we use language; and, inasmuch as we use it without understanding it, we begin to fall under its spell. Language begins to take the place of the things it would refer to. The concept of \"redness\" overtakes the living experience of redness, to the degree that we can conceive of sentences like \"that's not red enough\" or \"that's too red.\" I have hilarious discussions with my other half over whether particular colours are blue or green - neither of us denies that they are the colour they are. But while we are aware of this discrepancy between our language as we use it and the real world to which it ought refer, the majority seem content to allow their language to use them, and to let it define the world in which they live.<br /><br />This is absurdity - this is insanity - it is quite ridiculous, from the outside, to see it manifested, day in, day out, in the form of economic idiocy, social instability, cultural inanity (and occasionally offence/imposition), miscarriage of justice, religious fanaticism, and so on. Countless psychological disorders are based more in mismatches between language and experience than they are in visceral trauma (though there is generally an experiential basis at the root, a severe blow, whether physical or emotional). Historians would have you believe that thousands of men left their homes to die in foreign lands over concepts surrounding \"God\" and \"right,\" \"holiness,\" \"evil\" and so on, these being the medieval Crusades.<br /><br />Even while we understand these words differently nowadays - is it not absurd, in retrospect, to think that one could kill in the name of God? And yet, apparently, it was done, in full consciousness (or so it would seem). There is nothing necessarily primitive about this - certainly not in comparison to us nowadays, who persist in the same absurd glorifications of words at the expense of realities, often at the expense of the living and the lives that could be lived - we, in fact, in the modern world are far more prone to misunderstanding our concepts and confusing our actions in the process.<br /><br />We claim on the one hand that we are invested in the long term health of the planet; on the other hand, we want to send spaceships to Mars, with all the emissions and other environmental issues associated. We send child slaves into mines in Africa to extract lithium to be shipped to China, at exorbitant expense, for the manufacture of batteries which are shipped to Australia, at exorbitant expense, for the manufacture of electric cars which are shipped to the Americas and Eurasia, marketed as \"ecologically friendly vehicles.\" The carbon footprint of a British-made motor, built, sold, and kept in Britain, is necessarily lower than any one of these electric vehicles. A standard petrol or diesel car is not capable of producing as much CO or CO2 in its lifetime as a transport ship does over one trans-pacific journey. Never mind three. Nor does one have to enslave children to collect the materials for it.<br /><br />We hear (or read) the words \"ecologically friendly\" and buy into it without research. We believe things verbatim, without investigation. We are so reliant on language, and on the appropriate/proper use of language - i.e. that people should not lie, that people should tell (only) the truth - that we do not even recognise the need to check these things. Thus, we consistently and persistently shoot ourselves in the foot in these and all sorts of issues - I chose electric vehicles and ecology, but I could have chosen farming practices, religious intercession, gender dysmorphia, news media, or the stock market as examples of just such absurdities going on every day, perfectly obvious to anyone who should choose to look, but generally uninvestigated because the language, as we use it, suggests that investigation is unnecessary.<br /><br />This is what it means, to be prisoners of our own language. Our actions in this world are very much shaped by philosophy - if not ours, someone else's. If we are unaware of this - if we are unaware of the bases of our considerations, of our dispositions, of our response patterns and so on - we are, effectively, putty in the hands of some kind of controller, whether human or, increasingly (as \"AIs\" dominate decision-making), machine. This is the dereliction of intelligence - often claimed in the name of intelligence! It behooves us as thinking humans to make use of the qualities we've got, and apply our intelligences in vibrant ways - through language, but also beyond and before language. Language should never be the limit of our abilities.<br /><br />Thus, should anyone ever say, \"do not do your own research; leave it to the specialists,\" you can produce for them two fingers in a v-shape, facing outwards. Such wordless speech is more than suitable in response.",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1230522708559396864",
"published": "2021-04-18T14:17:55+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Basic Philosophy\n\nHow would one even begin to start approaching the field of philosophy? Casually, it may seem that the majority do not even consider it; it is held by them to be more occult than science, less certain, thus more diffuse, ephemeral, perhaps even meaningless. And indeed, a bulk of philosophy is - as in the previous post - ultimately meaningless, referring to nothing but itself.\n\nAnd yet there is that simple fact, that all of the thinkers, actors, movers and shakers in this world have had their philosophies, whether conceived of as such or not; and all things that have unfolded in this world, certainly on the grander stages, have unfolded according to some philosophy, or some competition of philosophies, however the case may be.\n\nThere is little in this human universe which is not touched by philosophy - science is rooted in philosophy, religion is rooted in philosophy, art and creative expression are rooted in philosophy (whether expressed in language or not). So, to say that one will tackle \"basic philosophy\" is a little bit like saying one will tackle \"fundamental breathing\" or \"simple thinking.\" We do not necessarily have (common) words for the things which are to be described. Nevertheless, I will do my best.\n\nThis quotation from Wittgenstein sums up my stance quite succinctly: \"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of a language.\" The language in question is human language, as used every day; the intelligence in question is human intelligence, as used every day. The conflict between the two is this: the intelligence exists in a living, breathing, mobile world; the language is a collection of dead words referring to dead objects.\n\nSounds are more typically nouns that can express adjectival or verb-like qualities: thus, the root of the verb \"to walk\" is the concept of the noun \"walking,\" as an action which can be undertaken. We render the fluid action unto a series of steps - quite literally in this instance. It is an objectification of a part of the world; an objectification of a part of our experience. Never mind that the experience is purely subjective; for the means of communication, it seems, we persist in objectifying, and, in the process, \"de-essencing,\" those parts of the world-as-experienced which we wish to communicate to one another.\n\nThis is all well and good in itself, and perfectly practicable when it comes to everyday things; but becomes problematic the more complex our discussions become. The more nuanced our investigation, the more we enter into the realms of possibility, belief, imagination, creativity etc., the further we drift from the ideal of language-as-communication, the closer we drift to the idea of language-as-confusion. We are no longer using language to refer to seemingly fixed things, such as \"bucket,\" \"barrel,\" \"torch,\" \"person,\" but to increasingly fluid and (experientially) ill-defined things: \"thought,\" \"compassion,\" \"sublimation,\" \"quintessence.\"\n\nThese, which are motive and passing references to internal states (depending on one's definition of the words - another perennial issue), are treated in discourse as if they are fixed and unyielding; and so we create for ourselves \"ghosts of language,\" things to which our words ought apply, which they ought seek to define, but which are either non-descript, non-existent, or are existent only as confusions - linguistic confusions - of realities which words, in proper usage, cannot really touch.\n\nIf I were to say to you \"the car is red,\" and you were to agree, \"yes, the car is red,\" this does not mean that we are experiencing the same colour when we say \"red.\" All it means is that the car appears to us, as individuals, to be the same colour as all those other things which we both customarily call \"red.\" It doesn't follow from this that my red is your red; my red might be your yellow, as I experience it. And yet all of my reds would be yellow to you, and conceivably all of your yellows would be red to me - and so the communication would function, even as, realistically speaking, we refer to different subjective experiences by the same word.\n\nThis is hardly a new thought experiment, but it's extremely useful in this instance. The fact that I might not experience this world in the same way as you stands regardless of how we talk about it - that we talk about it using similar language does not suggest that we are referring to the same (kinds of) sense impressions. It merely suggests that, if there is an objective world, and an objective difference between \"you\" and \"I\" within that world, the underlying structure of that world is such that, irrespective of the quality of the experiences it engenders in its perceiving entities, the means by which those experiences might be expressed/communicated is the same.\n\nBut we begin to see that, while this is all well and good for things like \"red\" and \"tree,\" \"cold\" and \"water,\" it is not so good for things like \"love\" and \"conscience,\" nor is it very good for \"envy\" and \"melancholy.\" We do not have objective referents for these words: these are subjective experiences. There is no envy, out there in the world, such that I could pick it up and show it to you, for us to commonly agree to call envy; there is only that feeling, which is described in terms of other feelings, which is habitually understood as envy, but which may well be confused with other feelings - inasmuch as feelings seem always to exist upon a continuum, bleeding one into others, just as envy and jealousy are often mistaken for one another (and indeed, for myself - I could hardly know which of the two words to use in any case, considering just how frequently their uses are confused - whether they even refer to different states any more).\n\nThis, you will find, is the fundamental issue of philosophy. It is not that there are real problems in the world which must be solved through thought and subjective investigation; it is that we would appear, as a species, to imagine problems into existence through the faulty use of language. Or, let us be blunt - it is not the use of the language that is necessarily faulty, but the understanding of the use that is lacking in some way. For while we know, subconsciously, that the utility of words is in their reference, and in the degree to which we refer to the same things by our words, we persist, in full consciousness, in the delusion that we must fundamentally define our words the same way - indeed that language must operate the same way for all humans across time, such that there would never be a different way of conceiving of language, communication, reference-referent relationship, etc.\n\nIt would seem that we do not necessarily understand how it is that we use language; and, inasmuch as we use it without understanding it, we begin to fall under its spell. Language begins to take the place of the things it would refer to. The concept of \"redness\" overtakes the living experience of redness, to the degree that we can conceive of sentences like \"that's not red enough\" or \"that's too red.\" I have hilarious discussions with my other half over whether particular colours are blue or green - neither of us denies that they are the colour they are. But while we are aware of this discrepancy between our language as we use it and the real world to which it ought refer, the majority seem content to allow their language to use them, and to let it define the world in which they live.\n\nThis is absurdity - this is insanity - it is quite ridiculous, from the outside, to see it manifested, day in, day out, in the form of economic idiocy, social instability, cultural inanity (and occasionally offence/imposition), miscarriage of justice, religious fanaticism, and so on. Countless psychological disorders are based more in mismatches between language and experience than they are in visceral trauma (though there is generally an experiential basis at the root, a severe blow, whether physical or emotional). Historians would have you believe that thousands of men left their homes to die in foreign lands over concepts surrounding \"God\" and \"right,\" \"holiness,\" \"evil\" and so on, these being the medieval Crusades.\n\nEven while we understand these words differently nowadays - is it not absurd, in retrospect, to think that one could kill in the name of God? And yet, apparently, it was done, in full consciousness (or so it would seem). There is nothing necessarily primitive about this - certainly not in comparison to us nowadays, who persist in the same absurd glorifications of words at the expense of realities, often at the expense of the living and the lives that could be lived - we, in fact, in the modern world are far more prone to misunderstanding our concepts and confusing our actions in the process.\n\nWe claim on the one hand that we are invested in the long term health of the planet; on the other hand, we want to send spaceships to Mars, with all the emissions and other environmental issues associated. We send child slaves into mines in Africa to extract lithium to be shipped to China, at exorbitant expense, for the manufacture of batteries which are shipped to Australia, at exorbitant expense, for the manufacture of electric cars which are shipped to the Americas and Eurasia, marketed as \"ecologically friendly vehicles.\" The carbon footprint of a British-made motor, built, sold, and kept in Britain, is necessarily lower than any one of these electric vehicles. A standard petrol or diesel car is not capable of producing as much CO or CO2 in its lifetime as a transport ship does over one trans-pacific journey. Never mind three. Nor does one have to enslave children to collect the materials for it.\n\nWe hear (or read) the words \"ecologically friendly\" and buy into it without research. We believe things verbatim, without investigation. We are so reliant on language, and on the appropriate/proper use of language - i.e. that people should not lie, that people should tell (only) the truth - that we do not even recognise the need to check these things. Thus, we consistently and persistently shoot ourselves in the foot in these and all sorts of issues - I chose electric vehicles and ecology, but I could have chosen farming practices, religious intercession, gender dysmorphia, news media, or the stock market as examples of just such absurdities going on every day, perfectly obvious to anyone who should choose to look, but generally uninvestigated because the language, as we use it, suggests that investigation is unnecessary.\n\nThis is what it means, to be prisoners of our own language. Our actions in this world are very much shaped by philosophy - if not ours, someone else's. If we are unaware of this - if we are unaware of the bases of our considerations, of our dispositions, of our response patterns and so on - we are, effectively, putty in the hands of some kind of controller, whether human or, increasingly (as \"AIs\" dominate decision-making), machine. This is the dereliction of intelligence - often claimed in the name of intelligence! It behooves us as thinking humans to make use of the qualities we've got, and apply our intelligences in vibrant ways - through language, but also beyond and before language. Language should never be the limit of our abilities.\n\nThus, should anyone ever say, \"do not do your own research; leave it to the specialists,\" you can produce for them two fingers in a v-shape, facing outwards. Such wordless speech is more than suitable in response.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1230522708559396864/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1229931019629535232",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "When one delves deep enough into philosophy, one learns that the majority of our problems boil down to language.<br /><br />Or, let me be more accurate: there are two levels of \"problem,\" the one being \"practical,\" the other being \"existential.\"<br /><br />This is how bad language is for us - I am having to give these definitions, in language, to try to make sure that you understand the way(s) in which I am using words. I cannot necessarily be as specific as I might like to be in English (nor in any language, I could assume); nor can I anticipate that each and every reader will read each and every word the way I might intend it to be read<br /><br />That having been said: the difference between practical problems and existential problems is this. A practical problem you solve through practical action. \"The lamb has fallen into the brook.\" \"Go into the brook and fetch the lamb out.\" Problem solved. An existential problem has no solutions. \"Is the point of life only to die?\" \"Is there a way to bridge the subject-object gap?\" \"Can we know the nature of knowledge?\" \"Are we destined for something, or free, and if free, is that not a kind of restriction?\"<br /><br />You will understand immediately, I hope, that those latter example are all problems of language. They are problems with the way we define things, and, more specifically, with the things we seek to define - not as things in the real world, as real objects that we get our hands on, but as ephemeralities, poetic expressions which we use to characterise vague and uninvestigated impressions as to the patterns of life as experienced.<br /><br />All philosophy, so-called, thus falls into two camps: philosophy which inculcates and develops problems, and philosophy which collapses problems. The former is very good at making money. The latter is very good at giving it up.<br /><br />You will thus find the bulk of philosophers talking endlessly about words, and they will have a great many words to say about words - what words mean, what they can mean, how they mean certain things to some, and how they can (or could) mean other things to others, and how this all supposedly relates to ways in which we customarily define ourselves - all predicated on language. The Beast in this context is language, pure and simple. By attributing a name to an experience, isolating it to so many aspects and considering the rest \"not-that,\" we have separated out some part of the world, and in doing so, created an image of it, which we treat with our minds - with our words, now ever further removed from the realities they originally sought to express.<br /><br />Thus it is that the simple word \"apple,\" for a particular kind of fruit, can have \"symbolic meaning.\" The apple, of course, is synonymous for many with the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil - even though, there is no version of the bible in which that Fruit is referred to as an \"apple.\" It is once called a \"badness\" in some Latin versions, a word which is superficially similar to the Latin for \"apple.\" But even in this we see just how much room for confusion there is in language, with the possibility of disparate things being referred to by similar sounds. And in this, seemingly, is the root of most philosophical problem-making.<br /><br />I am I, we say. Everyone says I when they wish to refer to themselves - in any language, there is always that word which stands only for the speaker. What, then, have we done with ourselves, to give ourselves this name? Have we, as with the apple, isolated ourselves from the rest of the universe - considered ourselves separate, if not truly ever such - and then articulated the many, perhaps the infinite, ways in which we can talk about ourselves as distinct from all else around us, even in the absence of any real state in which we are necessarily separate from the universe in which we arise? And having done it once to I, human, it has thence been done for every I, and now every human is its own island, distinct in conception from all others, yet never apart in manifestation.<br /><br />The myriad problems of philosophy, which filter down into social issues, economic issues, issues of territory, warfare, love and loss, scientific non-starters, psychological incompatibility, the sheer abandonment of sense in favour of sentence - this is the malady of humanity as it experiences itself now. We are lost in the letter, the law goes unrecognised. What is really an emotional trauma is dressed up as a drug habit; what is really a physical impediment is lamented as a psychological hang-up. Animosity is called love, love is called abuse, religion is called delusion, delusion is called science. All this predicated not on any real problem - for there is no issue, I might easily get you food, water, housing, clothing, whatever you might need if you truly need it - there is no real problem in this world, but that thinking makes it so. For problems of the above sort are hellish, being unsolvable.<br /><br />I would be remiss to first entertain the possibility of the existence of something hinted at only in speech or writing; if I should not experience it directly in the absence of any such discussion, I should not consider it existent. Thus it is that I am comfortable with the Moon and the Sun, with the plants and the leaves, with the insects, mammals, fish and reptiles, with all the moving and unmoving things of earth, heaven, and wherever else my senses might penetrate - and notice how no philosophy touches these things, which are articles of sense, and thus subject to no real subjective scrutiny, unlike the notions of mind, spirit, soul, and their corollaries - God, community, \"world,\" \"race.\" There is no problem of economics or society that has not been conjured through poorly defined words - poor definitions believed in. Given belief without due scrutiny. It is an oversight on the part of Man that enables him to persist in the impossible at the expense of the practical. But, as with all things, it is through trial that lessons are learned. The best learning is learning through experience. Hearsay will only ever get you so far - especially if you believe things as you hear them.",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1229931019629535232",
"published": "2021-04-16T23:06:46+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "When one delves deep enough into philosophy, one learns that the majority of our problems boil down to language.\n\nOr, let me be more accurate: there are two levels of \"problem,\" the one being \"practical,\" the other being \"existential.\"\n\nThis is how bad language is for us - I am having to give these definitions, in language, to try to make sure that you understand the way(s) in which I am using words. I cannot necessarily be as specific as I might like to be in English (nor in any language, I could assume); nor can I anticipate that each and every reader will read each and every word the way I might intend it to be read\n\nThat having been said: the difference between practical problems and existential problems is this. A practical problem you solve through practical action. \"The lamb has fallen into the brook.\" \"Go into the brook and fetch the lamb out.\" Problem solved. An existential problem has no solutions. \"Is the point of life only to die?\" \"Is there a way to bridge the subject-object gap?\" \"Can we know the nature of knowledge?\" \"Are we destined for something, or free, and if free, is that not a kind of restriction?\"\n\nYou will understand immediately, I hope, that those latter example are all problems of language. They are problems with the way we define things, and, more specifically, with the things we seek to define - not as things in the real world, as real objects that we get our hands on, but as ephemeralities, poetic expressions which we use to characterise vague and uninvestigated impressions as to the patterns of life as experienced.\n\nAll philosophy, so-called, thus falls into two camps: philosophy which inculcates and develops problems, and philosophy which collapses problems. The former is very good at making money. The latter is very good at giving it up.\n\nYou will thus find the bulk of philosophers talking endlessly about words, and they will have a great many words to say about words - what words mean, what they can mean, how they mean certain things to some, and how they can (or could) mean other things to others, and how this all supposedly relates to ways in which we customarily define ourselves - all predicated on language. The Beast in this context is language, pure and simple. By attributing a name to an experience, isolating it to so many aspects and considering the rest \"not-that,\" we have separated out some part of the world, and in doing so, created an image of it, which we treat with our minds - with our words, now ever further removed from the realities they originally sought to express.\n\nThus it is that the simple word \"apple,\" for a particular kind of fruit, can have \"symbolic meaning.\" The apple, of course, is synonymous for many with the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil - even though, there is no version of the bible in which that Fruit is referred to as an \"apple.\" It is once called a \"badness\" in some Latin versions, a word which is superficially similar to the Latin for \"apple.\" But even in this we see just how much room for confusion there is in language, with the possibility of disparate things being referred to by similar sounds. And in this, seemingly, is the root of most philosophical problem-making.\n\nI am I, we say. Everyone says I when they wish to refer to themselves - in any language, there is always that word which stands only for the speaker. What, then, have we done with ourselves, to give ourselves this name? Have we, as with the apple, isolated ourselves from the rest of the universe - considered ourselves separate, if not truly ever such - and then articulated the many, perhaps the infinite, ways in which we can talk about ourselves as distinct from all else around us, even in the absence of any real state in which we are necessarily separate from the universe in which we arise? And having done it once to I, human, it has thence been done for every I, and now every human is its own island, distinct in conception from all others, yet never apart in manifestation.\n\nThe myriad problems of philosophy, which filter down into social issues, economic issues, issues of territory, warfare, love and loss, scientific non-starters, psychological incompatibility, the sheer abandonment of sense in favour of sentence - this is the malady of humanity as it experiences itself now. We are lost in the letter, the law goes unrecognised. What is really an emotional trauma is dressed up as a drug habit; what is really a physical impediment is lamented as a psychological hang-up. Animosity is called love, love is called abuse, religion is called delusion, delusion is called science. All this predicated not on any real problem - for there is no issue, I might easily get you food, water, housing, clothing, whatever you might need if you truly need it - there is no real problem in this world, but that thinking makes it so. For problems of the above sort are hellish, being unsolvable.\n\nI would be remiss to first entertain the possibility of the existence of something hinted at only in speech or writing; if I should not experience it directly in the absence of any such discussion, I should not consider it existent. Thus it is that I am comfortable with the Moon and the Sun, with the plants and the leaves, with the insects, mammals, fish and reptiles, with all the moving and unmoving things of earth, heaven, and wherever else my senses might penetrate - and notice how no philosophy touches these things, which are articles of sense, and thus subject to no real subjective scrutiny, unlike the notions of mind, spirit, soul, and their corollaries - God, community, \"world,\" \"race.\" There is no problem of economics or society that has not been conjured through poorly defined words - poor definitions believed in. Given belief without due scrutiny. It is an oversight on the part of Man that enables him to persist in the impossible at the expense of the practical. But, as with all things, it is through trial that lessons are learned. The best learning is learning through experience. Hearsay will only ever get you so far - especially if you believe things as you hear them.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1229931019629535232/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1195843241688281088",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "Garðaríki er andans ham<br />Níu inngangar níu útgangar<br />Margir veggir sveipan sannindi<br />Ljómandi inn leynda hjartat<br /><br />--------------------------------------------------<br /><br />The Kingdom of Enclosures is the Body of the Soul<br />Nine paths in and nine paths out<br />Many walls enclose the Truth<br />That gleams within the hidden heart",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1195843241688281088",
"published": "2021-01-12T21:34:06+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Garðaríki er andans ham\nNíu inngangar níu útgangar\nMargir veggir sveipan sannindi\nLjómandi inn leynda hjartat\n\n--------------------------------------------------\n\nThe Kingdom of Enclosures is the Body of the Soul\nNine paths in and nine paths out\nMany walls enclose the Truth\nThat gleams within the hidden heart",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1195843241688281088/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1187152372279951360",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "People seem to forget that the government can't wish things into existence. There are processes which have to be undertaken for things to be established as law in this country - processes which seem to have been overridden at various points this year.<br /><br />Might I suggest that this is illegal.<br /><br />Restrictions upon freedom of movement of lawful citizens in this country is a violation of fundamental rights - rights which our legal system is intended to uphold, not undermine.<br /><br />If a written law or statute goes against \"the spirit of the law,\" as defined through the \"practice of law as expression of the will of the people\" (i.e. Trial by Jury), it is considered unlawful, therefore, non-functioning as law.<br /><br />Police may attempt to uphold unlawful legislature, but they do this without the support of the law. All they have is a piece of paper which says \"if X, Y,\" irrespective of context - context which our legal system is required to take into account in the course of maintaining justice. This is why we e.g. define murder as first, second, or third degree and so on - context and intent are integral to the process of justice.<br /><br />If an individual is charged and arrested over some piece of legislation, and is subsequently cleared, through Trial by Jury, of any wrongdoing, that piece of legislation is immediately voided, having been overridden by the will of the people as expressed through the jury (randomly selected as they are - or ought be). That's how law works in this country. The real deciders of law are not the government, the courts, or the police; they are the people. You and I decide the law when we give a \"guilty\" or \"not guilty\" verdict as jurors in a case.<br /><br />The problem, of course, is that the people who are supposed to be overseeing this entire process are (invariably enmeshed with) the people who are looking to circumvent it. And there is clearly a substantial amount of money changing hands here.<br /><br />Considering the fact that \"Westminster\" and other governmental bodies have broken the law repeatedly this year, might I suggest that the people, as an executive branch of the justice system of the country (quite literally, the sole vehicle through which justice is conceived and executed), hold to account not only the players that are moving the pieces, but the entire system that is being rigged against the commons, for the sheer damage - demonstrable in suicide and other \"avoidable death\" statistics for this year - that has been perpetrated against the people at large?<br /><br />Of course, this is already happening, and numerous individuals and government bodies are being taken to court over malpractice already. Some of these people you see on T.V. frequently enough have been issued court summons related to their \"vested interests\" throughout the coronabunk - it would appear that the crisis, cooked up enough as it already is, has been used to siphon taxpayers' money into the pockets of various individuals and groups, who have not subsequently provided to the taxpayer the goods or services offered in return for the cash.<br /><br />People: this is illegal. These are criminals within our governmental system. They are by far not the only ones. Is it not about time that we held to account all such individuals, groups, and entities in general, whose sole directive in life, as evidenced through their actions, is to \"skim off the top,\" at yours and my expense?<br /><br />Whether you live in Britain, Germany, Sweden, France, Canada, the US, Australia, or Timbuktu, you have a vested interest in the long-term sustainability and practicability of your governmental and judicial systems. If you consider yourself to be a citizen of your nation, or even a citizen of the world, it behooves you - yes, you, you yourself, personally and individually - to monitor your governments, your judiciaries, your police forces, your militaries and navies, your intelligence services, your media outlets, your banks, your medical services, and so on. Not one of those institutions is free from corruption - not one will ever be free of the threat of corruption. The remedy to corruption is observance. \"Quis custodet custodes\" is the saying of the century. It is not impossible for a people to gain control over a corrupt government - or any other institution, for that matter. But it does require the instigation, and the knowledge that the mechanisms for the deliverance of the people's will are already in place.<br /><br />\"Useless eaters\" is a phrase that has been thrown about in reference to poorer citizens of the world - of course, the real \"useless eaters\" are these overblown boyscouts in government, in tech, in intelligence, in industry in general. Having never had to excel in any noticeable way (if your parents can pay for Eton, you are likely never to go hungry), they persist in the delusion that they are \"destined\" to thrive at our expense (edit: despite a lack of any noticeable merit). Oughtn't we disabuse them of this notion, and display to them the true meanings of the words \"law,\" \"government,\" and \"justice?\" If this is not in the best interest of nations in general, then the world is already communist, and I will resist as firmly as any White Russian.",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1187152372279951360",
"published": "2020-12-19T21:59:41+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "People seem to forget that the government can't wish things into existence. There are processes which have to be undertaken for things to be established as law in this country - processes which seem to have been overridden at various points this year.\n\nMight I suggest that this is illegal.\n\nRestrictions upon freedom of movement of lawful citizens in this country is a violation of fundamental rights - rights which our legal system is intended to uphold, not undermine.\n\nIf a written law or statute goes against \"the spirit of the law,\" as defined through the \"practice of law as expression of the will of the people\" (i.e. Trial by Jury), it is considered unlawful, therefore, non-functioning as law.\n\nPolice may attempt to uphold unlawful legislature, but they do this without the support of the law. All they have is a piece of paper which says \"if X, Y,\" irrespective of context - context which our legal system is required to take into account in the course of maintaining justice. This is why we e.g. define murder as first, second, or third degree and so on - context and intent are integral to the process of justice.\n\nIf an individual is charged and arrested over some piece of legislation, and is subsequently cleared, through Trial by Jury, of any wrongdoing, that piece of legislation is immediately voided, having been overridden by the will of the people as expressed through the jury (randomly selected as they are - or ought be). That's how law works in this country. The real deciders of law are not the government, the courts, or the police; they are the people. You and I decide the law when we give a \"guilty\" or \"not guilty\" verdict as jurors in a case.\n\nThe problem, of course, is that the people who are supposed to be overseeing this entire process are (invariably enmeshed with) the people who are looking to circumvent it. And there is clearly a substantial amount of money changing hands here.\n\nConsidering the fact that \"Westminster\" and other governmental bodies have broken the law repeatedly this year, might I suggest that the people, as an executive branch of the justice system of the country (quite literally, the sole vehicle through which justice is conceived and executed), hold to account not only the players that are moving the pieces, but the entire system that is being rigged against the commons, for the sheer damage - demonstrable in suicide and other \"avoidable death\" statistics for this year - that has been perpetrated against the people at large?\n\nOf course, this is already happening, and numerous individuals and government bodies are being taken to court over malpractice already. Some of these people you see on T.V. frequently enough have been issued court summons related to their \"vested interests\" throughout the coronabunk - it would appear that the crisis, cooked up enough as it already is, has been used to siphon taxpayers' money into the pockets of various individuals and groups, who have not subsequently provided to the taxpayer the goods or services offered in return for the cash.\n\nPeople: this is illegal. These are criminals within our governmental system. They are by far not the only ones. Is it not about time that we held to account all such individuals, groups, and entities in general, whose sole directive in life, as evidenced through their actions, is to \"skim off the top,\" at yours and my expense?\n\nWhether you live in Britain, Germany, Sweden, France, Canada, the US, Australia, or Timbuktu, you have a vested interest in the long-term sustainability and practicability of your governmental and judicial systems. If you consider yourself to be a citizen of your nation, or even a citizen of the world, it behooves you - yes, you, you yourself, personally and individually - to monitor your governments, your judiciaries, your police forces, your militaries and navies, your intelligence services, your media outlets, your banks, your medical services, and so on. Not one of those institutions is free from corruption - not one will ever be free of the threat of corruption. The remedy to corruption is observance. \"Quis custodet custodes\" is the saying of the century. It is not impossible for a people to gain control over a corrupt government - or any other institution, for that matter. But it does require the instigation, and the knowledge that the mechanisms for the deliverance of the people's will are already in place.\n\n\"Useless eaters\" is a phrase that has been thrown about in reference to poorer citizens of the world - of course, the real \"useless eaters\" are these overblown boyscouts in government, in tech, in intelligence, in industry in general. Having never had to excel in any noticeable way (if your parents can pay for Eton, you are likely never to go hungry), they persist in the delusion that they are \"destined\" to thrive at our expense (edit: despite a lack of any noticeable merit). Oughtn't we disabuse them of this notion, and display to them the true meanings of the words \"law,\" \"government,\" and \"justice?\" If this is not in the best interest of nations in general, then the world is already communist, and I will resist as firmly as any White Russian.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1187152372279951360/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1186714104728588288",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "The human race would appear to exhibit a rather advanced form of disease at the moment.<br /><br />This is not the disease you might immediately think of. It is not a physical disease, evident on the person, or on people at large, though there are clearly enough of those.<br /><br />This is a disease of the mind - or, more properly speaking, it is a disease of that magnetic aspect of the human being, that is to say, its electromagnetic resonance with the wider whole.<br /><br />There are those unaffected by this disease; those who are secondarily affected, through contact with the affected; and those who are personally affected. There are even those who personally affect - that is to say, put on - the disease, believing, for one reason or another, that it is the right mode of operation. These people are deluded.<br /><br />Let me characterise the circumstances and symptoms of this disease, so that you might know what I'm getting at.<br /><br />Every bird in the sky - more or less - has a little thing in its brain that lets it know where everything is. The sense is called magnetoperception; the organelle that provides this functionality I don't know the name of, but it's in the brain somewhere.<br /><br />This little bit of the brain allows these birds not only to fly in great flocks without knocking each other out of the sky; it not only allows them the deftness of flight, even in so large groups, that wows and occasionally worries onlookers who witness it, as if they were all controlled by a single puppeteer (so perfect is the flight); but it also provides them with an accurate means of navigation, worldwide, in the majority of weather and visibility conditions. Birds know where they are even over the ocean on a clouded night. Top that without a machine.<br /><br />These creatures can arguably fly with their eyes shut, if they want to: theirs and the earth's magnetic fields are more than sufficient for navigation. They will return to distant nests without fail, following their migratory paths, even if the sites have been changed irrevocably - dug up, built out, colonised by humans. But birds have built in GPS. They know where they are even if you disguise the area.<br /><br />There has long been a question in scientific research, as to whether humans exhibit any signs of magnetoperception; and if so, how? Where might the epicentre or organelle of human magnetoperception be? How might it function, and so on. Clearly we are unlike certain species of turtle, possessing quartzite crystals in their noses, by which they might \"smell\" the magnetosphere. Our brains are rather more complicated than those of birds. But in function, on this level, we are not so different from either species: studies show that we, much like our avian and chelonian friends, do indeed sense the earth's magnetic field, albeit more commonly on a 'subconscious' (that is to say - unrecognised, unwitnessed, unprocessed, i.e. \"stupid,\" \"dumb\") level.<br /><br />However, the effect arises, and the mechanism is still curious. To my knowledge, no single structure in the brain or elsewhere in the human body is solely responsible for the interactions exhibited between human tissues/brain states and magnetic fluctuations in the environment. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the human is a special creature precisely because the bulk of its physiology enters into, interacts with, and manipulates (!) the magnetosphere. Therefore, to seek for some isolated mechanism is foolhardy - it would be like trying to find which part of the knife's edge was the sharp bit.<br /><br />But this brief digression serves only to point out that we do, indeed, have magnetoperception hardwired into our experience - as, I would suggest, do all living creatures - whether we recognise it or not. And indeed, increasingly people do, and encounter conditions such as Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity - often, from my perspective, out of the sheer (and prolonged) shock of recognising that one does indeed experience such diverse phenomena as radio signals, microwaves, and wi-fi in a physical sense - much as one experiences the sensation of e.g. burning when faced with direct acute radiation, despite its invisibility to the eye.<br /><br />Such things are not so much miraculous as the ignorance of the possibility of them is miraculous: that a race should have arisen that, recognising on the one hand its biology to be managed by electrochemical signals, whose rhythms rotate in sequence with the earth and the Sun, in accordance with their electromagnetic fields, and on the other, that one might manipulate the earth's electromagnetic field in order to, say, transmit some information wirelessly over a long distance - that a race should have arisen having these two ideas, and not putting two and two together, and noticing that alterations to the electromagnetic field of the earth would necessarily alter the flow of life of the living creatures upon it - this is surely a race of dolts, or a race of the traumatised, the debilitated, the intellectually handicapped if in no other way undermined.<br /><br />So it is that I can imagine that I might shoot a gun to hit my target - a large turkey, perfect for dinner - and fail to recognise that shooting through my sister might kill her too. Well, at least we got the turkey. More food for us!<br /><br />There has been a sickening rush into the third and fourth industrial revolutions that seems, rather than to develop from the first and second, to rambunctiously ignore their missives; for the payoff for the first two has yet to go through fully - we are as yet unrecovered from the 19th century, never mind the 20th, and these fools would see the 22nd come in. The extraordinary deprivations of the past two centuries are accepted as a \"status quo\" from which we briefly extricated ourselves, into which many would see us hurl in the unveiling of \"smartglobe\" mentality amongst the financed proletariat.<br /><br />And yet this rush persists, and all the more doggedly the massed throng, increasingly represented in the world of wealth as doe-eyed CEO psychopaths bend over backwards to facilitate the self-butt-fucking of the mal-maligned middle classes, clamour for their \"devices.\" They persist in endlessly perusing barely cognisant content at the expense of the pain and sorrow of their lives, which are growing despite the chemical drip-feed, the persistent dopamine release. All in all they ignore themselves in favour of where they'd like to be; this endless pipe dream, \"if I can get enough tech, I won't have to engage with the real world anymore.\" And yet one knows, inherently, that it's a scam; one knows that the devices do not make life easier, nor do they make life more efficient, but they simply make it quicker, more hazardous, and less consistent in quality. All of this serves only to make it more stressful - which then, inevitably, requires the unleashing of yet further dopamine through the pursuit of social meddling and pornography.<br /><br />If the angle of my piece wasn't clear already, hopefully it is now - this cycle is itself indicative of a deep sickness on the level of the species. In that these behaviours are rife throughout the modernised world at this point, we can clearly show that there is something about modernisation, either the process itself, or the propaganda that accompanies it/has grown out of its development, that critically wounds the human-as-animal, the human-as-bios, humanity as an element of the wider world, rather than some separate entity. Indeed, it appears as if the effect of modernisation, or the tendency at least - even if the effect is never fully manifested, for the impossibility of it - the tendency of modernity is to sunder the human, individually and collectively, and the wider universe. This is evident not only in our treatment (misuse) of technology, daily, but in our bizarre delusions concerning space and space travel (physical impossibilities as far as any practical science is concerned). Perhaps it is the sheer totality of the propaganda - the degree to which it is wholesale, and leaves no stone unturned, touching all elements of life with its unholy mark - perhaps this wholescale assault is what has allowed the wool to fall so firmly over the eyes of so many in these regards, to accept education into idiocy, to accept payment for slavery, to accept taxation for slavery, and to expect technology to save us - all infantile conceptions. Biological maturity, in my view, behoves one to overcome these limitations. And yet the vehicles by which this might be done are few.<br /><br />I give no name to this disease. I give it no terminology whatsoever, because it is so endemic, and so characterises the past two hundred years of development, that it is hardly unfitting, in many cases, for so many Malthusians to say \"the disease is humanity itself.\" But it is not humanity itself that is at fault; nor is it the earth, nor is it the sky, nor is it the Sun, the Moon, the Stars and so on. I would not necessarily say there is a fault here. For while there are umpteen millions confounded by this delusion, there are yet at least two - a writer and a reader, here - who are wise to the arrangement, and recognise its weaknesses. So there is a function in this diseased state: it performs, to a point, and provides results. Scientifically speaking, we must learn: we must witness and examine the mismatch between humanity-as-it-would-like-itself-to-be and humanity-as-it-is in order to understand just how we come into such confusions in the first place.<br /><br />While we alter the earth's fields, whether magnetic or any other; while we alter our own fields, through the same and similar devices; while we absorb propaganda that informs us against our best interests, in issues of sex, nutrition, health, exercise, daily living, spirituality and so on, we are witnessing the suffering of Christ, as imagined on the cross, made manifest through the species as a whole - because I am holding my own hand, and slapping my own face, and saying: \"stop hitting myself.\" I understand that the anxious itch towards immediate self-gratification is wrong, in that it leaves me, in the aftermath, feeling empty and hollow; and yet there is a persistence in the gravitation towards that end, there is a doggedness with which the \"lesser man,\" self-dubbed, hoards his petty addictions, his panoply of information-based endocrine-editors. He will feel uncomfortable with himself for as long as he feels uncomfortable with the world; and he will feel uncomfortable with the world for as long as he feels uncomfortable with himself; and he will harm both, the world and his own being, in the pursuit of distance from either, and will be strung out and worn down by the end of it.<br /><br />But eventually we will tire of punishing ourselves for nothing at all; we will tire of punishing ourselves for racing to the finish, we will tire of punishing ourselves for wanting now what would have been better gotten later. We will tire of it, because time moves on. Time always moves on. These things which are problematic today will seem simplistic in the future; just as those things which were problematic in the past seem simplistic now. And in time, we will surely look back on this era as one of great discovery, even as it was one of great mistakes. For we have, at the very least, begun to re-uncover, by our own efforts, our innate and total compresence with the entire universe - the fact, simply put, that we are nothing other than that, and that there is no real gap or dividing line between any \"two\" things, so-called. This is our experienced reality. We hide from this reality, from the reality of self-knowledge, by claiming that we are only so much; and then punishing ouselves for our pettiness, with our proclivities and habits, the things we would rather not do but feel, from a place of confusion, compelled to undertake. This cycle of lies can only go on for so long before the weight of the truth allows it no more. And then - we will have the information. We will have the technology. We will have the experience of the pain, suffering, and loss. But we will also have the intelligence, the understanding, and, hopefully, the love to produce something worthwhile out of it - not for any other, but for ourselves. All diseases have a pathology and a remedy. Time is the greatest healer.",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1186714104728588288",
"published": "2020-12-18T16:58:10+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "The human race would appear to exhibit a rather advanced form of disease at the moment.\n\nThis is not the disease you might immediately think of. It is not a physical disease, evident on the person, or on people at large, though there are clearly enough of those.\n\nThis is a disease of the mind - or, more properly speaking, it is a disease of that magnetic aspect of the human being, that is to say, its electromagnetic resonance with the wider whole.\n\nThere are those unaffected by this disease; those who are secondarily affected, through contact with the affected; and those who are personally affected. There are even those who personally affect - that is to say, put on - the disease, believing, for one reason or another, that it is the right mode of operation. These people are deluded.\n\nLet me characterise the circumstances and symptoms of this disease, so that you might know what I'm getting at.\n\nEvery bird in the sky - more or less - has a little thing in its brain that lets it know where everything is. The sense is called magnetoperception; the organelle that provides this functionality I don't know the name of, but it's in the brain somewhere.\n\nThis little bit of the brain allows these birds not only to fly in great flocks without knocking each other out of the sky; it not only allows them the deftness of flight, even in so large groups, that wows and occasionally worries onlookers who witness it, as if they were all controlled by a single puppeteer (so perfect is the flight); but it also provides them with an accurate means of navigation, worldwide, in the majority of weather and visibility conditions. Birds know where they are even over the ocean on a clouded night. Top that without a machine.\n\nThese creatures can arguably fly with their eyes shut, if they want to: theirs and the earth's magnetic fields are more than sufficient for navigation. They will return to distant nests without fail, following their migratory paths, even if the sites have been changed irrevocably - dug up, built out, colonised by humans. But birds have built in GPS. They know where they are even if you disguise the area.\n\nThere has long been a question in scientific research, as to whether humans exhibit any signs of magnetoperception; and if so, how? Where might the epicentre or organelle of human magnetoperception be? How might it function, and so on. Clearly we are unlike certain species of turtle, possessing quartzite crystals in their noses, by which they might \"smell\" the magnetosphere. Our brains are rather more complicated than those of birds. But in function, on this level, we are not so different from either species: studies show that we, much like our avian and chelonian friends, do indeed sense the earth's magnetic field, albeit more commonly on a 'subconscious' (that is to say - unrecognised, unwitnessed, unprocessed, i.e. \"stupid,\" \"dumb\") level.\n\nHowever, the effect arises, and the mechanism is still curious. To my knowledge, no single structure in the brain or elsewhere in the human body is solely responsible for the interactions exhibited between human tissues/brain states and magnetic fluctuations in the environment. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the human is a special creature precisely because the bulk of its physiology enters into, interacts with, and manipulates (!) the magnetosphere. Therefore, to seek for some isolated mechanism is foolhardy - it would be like trying to find which part of the knife's edge was the sharp bit.\n\nBut this brief digression serves only to point out that we do, indeed, have magnetoperception hardwired into our experience - as, I would suggest, do all living creatures - whether we recognise it or not. And indeed, increasingly people do, and encounter conditions such as Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity - often, from my perspective, out of the sheer (and prolonged) shock of recognising that one does indeed experience such diverse phenomena as radio signals, microwaves, and wi-fi in a physical sense - much as one experiences the sensation of e.g. burning when faced with direct acute radiation, despite its invisibility to the eye.\n\nSuch things are not so much miraculous as the ignorance of the possibility of them is miraculous: that a race should have arisen that, recognising on the one hand its biology to be managed by electrochemical signals, whose rhythms rotate in sequence with the earth and the Sun, in accordance with their electromagnetic fields, and on the other, that one might manipulate the earth's electromagnetic field in order to, say, transmit some information wirelessly over a long distance - that a race should have arisen having these two ideas, and not putting two and two together, and noticing that alterations to the electromagnetic field of the earth would necessarily alter the flow of life of the living creatures upon it - this is surely a race of dolts, or a race of the traumatised, the debilitated, the intellectually handicapped if in no other way undermined.\n\nSo it is that I can imagine that I might shoot a gun to hit my target - a large turkey, perfect for dinner - and fail to recognise that shooting through my sister might kill her too. Well, at least we got the turkey. More food for us!\n\nThere has been a sickening rush into the third and fourth industrial revolutions that seems, rather than to develop from the first and second, to rambunctiously ignore their missives; for the payoff for the first two has yet to go through fully - we are as yet unrecovered from the 19th century, never mind the 20th, and these fools would see the 22nd come in. The extraordinary deprivations of the past two centuries are accepted as a \"status quo\" from which we briefly extricated ourselves, into which many would see us hurl in the unveiling of \"smartglobe\" mentality amongst the financed proletariat.\n\nAnd yet this rush persists, and all the more doggedly the massed throng, increasingly represented in the world of wealth as doe-eyed CEO psychopaths bend over backwards to facilitate the self-butt-fucking of the mal-maligned middle classes, clamour for their \"devices.\" They persist in endlessly perusing barely cognisant content at the expense of the pain and sorrow of their lives, which are growing despite the chemical drip-feed, the persistent dopamine release. All in all they ignore themselves in favour of where they'd like to be; this endless pipe dream, \"if I can get enough tech, I won't have to engage with the real world anymore.\" And yet one knows, inherently, that it's a scam; one knows that the devices do not make life easier, nor do they make life more efficient, but they simply make it quicker, more hazardous, and less consistent in quality. All of this serves only to make it more stressful - which then, inevitably, requires the unleashing of yet further dopamine through the pursuit of social meddling and pornography.\n\nIf the angle of my piece wasn't clear already, hopefully it is now - this cycle is itself indicative of a deep sickness on the level of the species. In that these behaviours are rife throughout the modernised world at this point, we can clearly show that there is something about modernisation, either the process itself, or the propaganda that accompanies it/has grown out of its development, that critically wounds the human-as-animal, the human-as-bios, humanity as an element of the wider world, rather than some separate entity. Indeed, it appears as if the effect of modernisation, or the tendency at least - even if the effect is never fully manifested, for the impossibility of it - the tendency of modernity is to sunder the human, individually and collectively, and the wider universe. This is evident not only in our treatment (misuse) of technology, daily, but in our bizarre delusions concerning space and space travel (physical impossibilities as far as any practical science is concerned). Perhaps it is the sheer totality of the propaganda - the degree to which it is wholesale, and leaves no stone unturned, touching all elements of life with its unholy mark - perhaps this wholescale assault is what has allowed the wool to fall so firmly over the eyes of so many in these regards, to accept education into idiocy, to accept payment for slavery, to accept taxation for slavery, and to expect technology to save us - all infantile conceptions. Biological maturity, in my view, behoves one to overcome these limitations. And yet the vehicles by which this might be done are few.\n\nI give no name to this disease. I give it no terminology whatsoever, because it is so endemic, and so characterises the past two hundred years of development, that it is hardly unfitting, in many cases, for so many Malthusians to say \"the disease is humanity itself.\" But it is not humanity itself that is at fault; nor is it the earth, nor is it the sky, nor is it the Sun, the Moon, the Stars and so on. I would not necessarily say there is a fault here. For while there are umpteen millions confounded by this delusion, there are yet at least two - a writer and a reader, here - who are wise to the arrangement, and recognise its weaknesses. So there is a function in this diseased state: it performs, to a point, and provides results. Scientifically speaking, we must learn: we must witness and examine the mismatch between humanity-as-it-would-like-itself-to-be and humanity-as-it-is in order to understand just how we come into such confusions in the first place.\n\nWhile we alter the earth's fields, whether magnetic or any other; while we alter our own fields, through the same and similar devices; while we absorb propaganda that informs us against our best interests, in issues of sex, nutrition, health, exercise, daily living, spirituality and so on, we are witnessing the suffering of Christ, as imagined on the cross, made manifest through the species as a whole - because I am holding my own hand, and slapping my own face, and saying: \"stop hitting myself.\" I understand that the anxious itch towards immediate self-gratification is wrong, in that it leaves me, in the aftermath, feeling empty and hollow; and yet there is a persistence in the gravitation towards that end, there is a doggedness with which the \"lesser man,\" self-dubbed, hoards his petty addictions, his panoply of information-based endocrine-editors. He will feel uncomfortable with himself for as long as he feels uncomfortable with the world; and he will feel uncomfortable with the world for as long as he feels uncomfortable with himself; and he will harm both, the world and his own being, in the pursuit of distance from either, and will be strung out and worn down by the end of it.\n\nBut eventually we will tire of punishing ourselves for nothing at all; we will tire of punishing ourselves for racing to the finish, we will tire of punishing ourselves for wanting now what would have been better gotten later. We will tire of it, because time moves on. Time always moves on. These things which are problematic today will seem simplistic in the future; just as those things which were problematic in the past seem simplistic now. And in time, we will surely look back on this era as one of great discovery, even as it was one of great mistakes. For we have, at the very least, begun to re-uncover, by our own efforts, our innate and total compresence with the entire universe - the fact, simply put, that we are nothing other than that, and that there is no real gap or dividing line between any \"two\" things, so-called. This is our experienced reality. We hide from this reality, from the reality of self-knowledge, by claiming that we are only so much; and then punishing ouselves for our pettiness, with our proclivities and habits, the things we would rather not do but feel, from a place of confusion, compelled to undertake. This cycle of lies can only go on for so long before the weight of the truth allows it no more. And then - we will have the information. We will have the technology. We will have the experience of the pain, suffering, and loss. But we will also have the intelligence, the understanding, and, hopefully, the love to produce something worthwhile out of it - not for any other, but for ourselves. All diseases have a pathology and a remedy. Time is the greatest healer.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1186714104728588288/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1156661418907783168",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "A little more about Odin<br /><br />So, it's been a while since I wrote anything about Odin. Maybe I should take another stab.<br /><br />I hope that anybody who's suitably/sufficiently interested in the figure is as perplexed and beguiled as I - I think that to consider that any of us has a \"hard handle\" on him in the slightest would be more than presumptuous - it would fly in the face of the spirit of the character entirely. Odin is not something that we are supposed to \"get\". That is part of the point.<br /><br />Take nature, for instance. Humans might anticipate - wrongly, in my view - that nature has some kind of inherent teleology, that it is \"here for us,\" that is to say, for our satiation/development, and that it thus \"serves a purpose\" - obviously omitting to mention the manifestation of natural disaster in any number of arenas of life, such that nature itself undermines whatever claim we might place upon it to possessing a utility definable by and in the context of humanity. Nature is clearly simultaneously \"pre-\" and \"post-human,\" if one considers things in that way: it transcends as much as it characterises that part of life which we call human.<br /><br />Odin is something like this, perhaps. There is something quintessentially human; and yet something, perhaps alien to many, of transcendental wilderness - the plane beyond manifestation, where psychic war is waged by monolithic Spirit. \"The gateway to madness,\" as many would have it - clearly wisdom, as some have shown.<br /><br />Odin does not admit of boundaries or limitations; they are fundamentally flung to the winds - in the mythology, no less than in that Odin purportedly existed before the \"mundane, natural world\" came into being (created out of the severed parts of Ymir, the primordial giant). Odin exists, in the myths, in a world in between carnality and psychic experience; his escapades take place in the world of men, as indeed in the worlds of Gods, Elves, Dwarves and so on - whether these are real places in time or not, the subtext of the myths suggests that they are psychological realms, more than that they are explicitly or exclusively physical locations.<br /><br />Odin, therefore, is a God \"beyond boundaries.\" Unlike Janus, who guards gateways with two-fold attention, Odin sneaks in through the back door and ushers his chosen in. Madness and confusion are his tools; diversion, subterfuge, and, if it is called for, even berserker rage, uncompromising expression of inner will as outer activity. All this, it seems - the total transcendence of the human condition, the reclamation of Godhood from within - predicated upon the simple, in my mind quintessentially human, drive to overcome; we have built within us, or at least, there are those of us who exhibit, an inherent drive towards transcendence - whether in worldly forms or in otherworldly forms.<br /><br />Odin is that God which represents this - he is \"the one who came before,\" so to speak, who \"showed the way.\" Inasmuch as Christians take Jesus as their guide in all things material and spiritual - Odinists take Odin in the same way, through different outward forms, to, in the ultimate sense, the same effect. The question is one of whether one's spirit is motivated towards the Odinic path, or the Christian; the Buddhist, or the Alexandrian. For some, Heracles was the figure to follow; for others, it was Thor. For those of us for whom it is Odin - as I have already said: how little can we truly say about this figure? To what degree will any of us know him as he knew himself?<br /><br />Suffice it to say - for those who have read the mythology - we should only come so far if, first, we should know ourselves as he knew himself. That is Odinism in totality: to follow the path that was set before us. No questions asked. We respect Odin because he achieved the things that he set out to do; and, bereft of all else, he achieved those things by his own will. That is the transcendent mode of excellent humanity: it is the essence of Arya as expressed in the northern form. It is a matter of spirit, whether we resonate more with the one form or the other - but the essence that is encoded therein, that was expressed through the figure in life, is all-consuming, and points to and consolidates the roots of all (spiritual) experience in common Being.<br /><br />Thus: a God of infinite forms, infinite names, infinite knowledge, infinite wisdom - and the power and prescience to make use of all accordingly, in keeping with the spirit and essence of nature. Perfection, in the mind of a northerner. There is none but that, and that is the way - whatever language it is said in, it refers to the same reality.",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1156661418907783168",
"published": "2020-09-26T18:39:31+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "A little more about Odin\n\nSo, it's been a while since I wrote anything about Odin. Maybe I should take another stab.\n\nI hope that anybody who's suitably/sufficiently interested in the figure is as perplexed and beguiled as I - I think that to consider that any of us has a \"hard handle\" on him in the slightest would be more than presumptuous - it would fly in the face of the spirit of the character entirely. Odin is not something that we are supposed to \"get\". That is part of the point.\n\nTake nature, for instance. Humans might anticipate - wrongly, in my view - that nature has some kind of inherent teleology, that it is \"here for us,\" that is to say, for our satiation/development, and that it thus \"serves a purpose\" - obviously omitting to mention the manifestation of natural disaster in any number of arenas of life, such that nature itself undermines whatever claim we might place upon it to possessing a utility definable by and in the context of humanity. Nature is clearly simultaneously \"pre-\" and \"post-human,\" if one considers things in that way: it transcends as much as it characterises that part of life which we call human.\n\nOdin is something like this, perhaps. There is something quintessentially human; and yet something, perhaps alien to many, of transcendental wilderness - the plane beyond manifestation, where psychic war is waged by monolithic Spirit. \"The gateway to madness,\" as many would have it - clearly wisdom, as some have shown.\n\nOdin does not admit of boundaries or limitations; they are fundamentally flung to the winds - in the mythology, no less than in that Odin purportedly existed before the \"mundane, natural world\" came into being (created out of the severed parts of Ymir, the primordial giant). Odin exists, in the myths, in a world in between carnality and psychic experience; his escapades take place in the world of men, as indeed in the worlds of Gods, Elves, Dwarves and so on - whether these are real places in time or not, the subtext of the myths suggests that they are psychological realms, more than that they are explicitly or exclusively physical locations.\n\nOdin, therefore, is a God \"beyond boundaries.\" Unlike Janus, who guards gateways with two-fold attention, Odin sneaks in through the back door and ushers his chosen in. Madness and confusion are his tools; diversion, subterfuge, and, if it is called for, even berserker rage, uncompromising expression of inner will as outer activity. All this, it seems - the total transcendence of the human condition, the reclamation of Godhood from within - predicated upon the simple, in my mind quintessentially human, drive to overcome; we have built within us, or at least, there are those of us who exhibit, an inherent drive towards transcendence - whether in worldly forms or in otherworldly forms.\n\nOdin is that God which represents this - he is \"the one who came before,\" so to speak, who \"showed the way.\" Inasmuch as Christians take Jesus as their guide in all things material and spiritual - Odinists take Odin in the same way, through different outward forms, to, in the ultimate sense, the same effect. The question is one of whether one's spirit is motivated towards the Odinic path, or the Christian; the Buddhist, or the Alexandrian. For some, Heracles was the figure to follow; for others, it was Thor. For those of us for whom it is Odin - as I have already said: how little can we truly say about this figure? To what degree will any of us know him as he knew himself?\n\nSuffice it to say - for those who have read the mythology - we should only come so far if, first, we should know ourselves as he knew himself. That is Odinism in totality: to follow the path that was set before us. No questions asked. We respect Odin because he achieved the things that he set out to do; and, bereft of all else, he achieved those things by his own will. That is the transcendent mode of excellent humanity: it is the essence of Arya as expressed in the northern form. It is a matter of spirit, whether we resonate more with the one form or the other - but the essence that is encoded therein, that was expressed through the figure in life, is all-consuming, and points to and consolidates the roots of all (spiritual) experience in common Being.\n\nThus: a God of infinite forms, infinite names, infinite knowledge, infinite wisdom - and the power and prescience to make use of all accordingly, in keeping with the spirit and essence of nature. Perfection, in the mind of a northerner. There is none but that, and that is the way - whatever language it is said in, it refers to the same reality.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1156661418907783168/activity"
},
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1148334275439112192",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497",
"content": "I really appreciate this, as a work towards furthering the understanding of the underlying order of steppe-based religions.<br /><br />This page is \"more or less accurate\", inasmuch as words can capture divine realities - there's room for quibbling on e.g. \"the nature of evil\" and \"the nature of matter\", but as a working cosmology/theology/system of ethics, this is pretty dope. Very close to the original form - in spirit, perhaps indistinguishable.<br /><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assianism\" target=\"_blank\">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assianism</a>",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1148334275439112192",
"published": "2020-09-03T19:10:26+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "I really appreciate this, as a work towards furthering the understanding of the underlying order of steppe-based religions.\n\nThis page is \"more or less accurate\", inasmuch as words can capture divine realities - there's room for quibbling on e.g. \"the nature of evil\" and \"the nature of matter\", but as a working cosmology/theology/system of ethics, this is pretty dope. Very close to the original form - in spirit, perhaps indistinguishable.\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assianism",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/entities/urn:activity:1148334275439112192/activity"
}
],
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/outbox",
"partOf": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/708812536908095497/outboxoutbox"
}