weev was always a nazi, again

90s & 2000s Internet culture was filled w/ ppl playing w/ the idea that 90% of reality is perception & that thus if you alter perception, you change the world. Lotta good people & interesting work came from those waters, but so did misanthrope edgelords like thiel, weev, andreessen, yarvin, land, &c

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— Dr. Damien P. Williams can't think of a fun display name right n (@wolvendamien.bsky.social) April 17, 2026 at 1:17 AM

Chaos Marxism was part of that tendency, and - as RU Sirius pointed out - perhaps destabilizing consensus reality altogether wasn't exactly a well-thought-out strategy.

Next time the sorcerer's apprentices will have to study more before we open the door to the Other Zone. You were so enthusiastic about the solve that you didn't even think about the coagula. And that's why we're in Issue 12 of Moore's Providence right now and goddamn Shub-Niggurath is coming right this way.

Well, I wouldn't put it in such ableist language, of course, but, YES.

Parasite goodness

 

The project is still on

 Read this (ThreadReader version). Even though the author is a hard materialist/individualist, I think it's vitally important for the work I've been trying to do here for almost *checks watch* HOLY CRAP ALMOST TWO DECADES. I hope to formulate a proper response soon. 

My mother's New Age perspective is more or less that whatever you believe is, by definition, true for you.

...So she will howl at me and my sisters when we bring up wildly abusive things she's done, "Why are you choosing to believe that?!! What does it benefit you!?"

— go to the elephant site @rechelon@mastodon.social (@rechelon) May 23, 2023

Happy New Year! (Or: Intentions Against Cynicism)

 

Actions are (judged) by motives (niyyah), so each man will have what he intended. Thus, he whose migration (hijrah) was to Allah and His Messenger, his migration is to Allah and His Messenger; but he whose migration was for some worldly thing he might gain, or for a wife he might marry, his migration is to that for which he migrated.

It may be the case that irony was once a powerful tool in the hands of the oppressed, exposing the hypocrisy of those in (political or religious) power. Sadly, this does not hold anymore - not in rich capitalist parliamentary democracies, in any case. Pop culture has internalized the 60s ethos of corrosive irony. It shows in second-tier comedians reproducing hierarchy - in the name of anarchy - by mocking progressive restrictions of discriminatory expression.

Of course, the left is not free of this type of irony, either. Much of what’s been written on this blog over the past few years has commented on this convergence of the worst parts of online culture and progressive social movements.

For the coming New Year, I wish every reader of this blog and of these words the clarity to see their motivations, the guilelessness to strive for pure intentions, and the grace to receive these.

P.S.

Here's another Hadith for you:

"God is beautiful and loves beauty"

I still remember the day, about three years ago, when I witnessed the beauty of souls trained in Sincerity and Love. I said to myself: "I don't know what it is these people have, but I want it, too." I cannot claim to have been more than moderately loyal to this commitment. But I do sincerely believe that it matters to have a commitment to strive after the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Humility is endless

The stuff I was writing here 15 years ago reads like a virgin writing about sex, and there's a damn good reason for that.

Not that it's worthless, but it's theoretical. 15 years of practice has taught me humility, and a struggle with shame and despair. Perhaps it can all be recycled to the good. We'll see.

Remain in Hell without despair

 

"Society is doomed for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of men working months with millions of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumb-ass with a bomb to bring it down." - Jason Pargin writing as David Wong, John Dies At The End

What the unreliable narrative voice of this excellent horror-comedy novel has discovered here and is presenting as a realisation of the awful truth is simply the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy. It is the nature of this universe that things are much easier to destroy than to build, that anything worthwhile decomposes into dust, atoms and kipple as soon as you stop paying attention to it. "Gresham's Law of Memes", as promulgated by this blog, recognises the same thing - "bad memes drive out good", destructive, nihilist appeals to the worst parts of our nature are much easier.

Somewhere in his 20+ years of blogging, Robert Fripp once quoted a Guitar Craft person who, while doing the huddle before a performance, felt the overwhelming urge to do something to spoil the mood/wreck the performance. In Fripp's parlance, that's the Great Deceiver talking (aka The Prince of This World, The Father of Lies and the Uncle of All Tricks). Eric Tamm's unauthorised Fripp biography quotes that Penfold-looking mofo as saying "Temptation is a reward... The Devil cannot make use of people who are drowsy... Until now, you were just a turkey." I think this is the same thing that Pargin is referring to, in the same book, by: 

when you read the Bible, the Devil looks back at you through the pages... even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows... you're somebody he may have to deal with.

"Performance is inherently unlikely," goes a Guitar Craft aphorism (which Fripp has said were written not by him, but by the "personal voice" which speaks through him on very good days. I have my own version of that voice which wrote everything good on this blog). Trying to do anything worthwhile and good in a universe based on entropy is unlikely. The very existence of life in such a universe is unlikely (which is why religious brain-death merchants love to use entropy to deny the science of evolution). And the existence of intelligent life, even more so. And the existence of intelligent life which has built a complex technological society about to make breakthroughs into space travel and artificial intelligence, even more so. 

The anthropic principle states that all this incredible unlikeliness must have happened for us to be here, able to grasp how unlikely it is, and make little-read blog posts about it. I wonder whether Gurdjieff talking about awakening to the true horror of the situation meant the same thing as St Silouan when he heard Jesus telling him personally to "keep thy mind in hell and despair not".

In strange and uncertain times, such as we are living through, on occasion a reasonable person might despair.
But Hope is unreasonable.
And Love is greater even than this.

Check out this smooth Prince of the Orient

Been reading a lot of Idries Shah lately. He was clearly a truly enlightened being and a con-man, and it's pretty clear from his works that he justifies the role of the Teacher as being to tell whatever lies are necessary to get the broad masses to accept the important stuff. You could call him the Lenin of Sufism, like Lacan is called the Lenin of Freudianism, with all the good and bad that entails. 

 Anyway, all his stuff is free to read online; I'd suggest you start with The Sufis, which is an interesting combination of "a good introduction to the literature" with "hilarious Robert Graves-style shaggy dog stories about how the entire Western Esoteric tradition is actually ripped off from Sufism, up to and including Gardnerian Wicca". (To someone who knows about this stuff, it comes off like that dude from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Or virtually any Iranian person you speak to.) And of course Robert Graves, alongside J. G. Bennett the teacher of Robert Fripp, were just two of the i-want-to-believe Westerners who paid Idries Shah to know what they really thought.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that Idries Shah seems to have had the same project with Western esotericists that Chaos Marxism has had with small Western communist groups. The purpose being to yell: wake up, bozos. You're not doing any good, you're just being a fanclub and jerking each other off, if not actively abusing each other. We've all got to learn how to learn.