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For the record, I have been the target of a "legitimate" magical attack before, and was able to feel it clearly. The person did not tell me they had done it, but it was obvious. I struck back and my perception is that I "won," which for me was reinforced by entries in their dream journal, which I had access to.
I am in no way saying curses do not exist.
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Perhaps even more disturbingly, these people are usually impossible to engage in spiritual conversation. Broaching spiritual topics will inevitably lead to them automatically and internally "translating" them into political ideas, which inevitably fail to grasp even the fundamentals of the spiritual idea in the same way that a silhouette of a complex object fails utterly to grasp its true form. They will then argue back against this silhouette with their own hylic political philosophy, and inevitably at the core of it are the same usual assumptions about the nature of truth and goodness that are inherent to the ideological school that they embody.
Even the ones who claim to be spiritual (such as Christian Fascists, or "witchy" Communists) expose themself through superficial conversation to have simply latched onto ideas that justify the underlying principles of their political philosophy. Christianity lends itself well to this because its theology demands unthinking acceptance and an absence of meaningful scrutiny. Occult tendencies are also employable in this regard in that they are (deliberately) mystically defined and thus, nebulously defined, which means that those who thoughtlessly parrot them can easily reduce them to a sense of meaningless aesthetics in which the primary value is their ability to visibly resist the social norms of their opponents.
An easy way to test this is to try to speak to any of them about magic. You will find that the Christian ones frequently deny that magic exists at all, even though many magicians (such as Abraham and Jesus) are present within their tradition, even though magicians who run contrary to their tradition (such as SImon Magus) are considered adversarial and worthy of meaningful confrontation, and even though the Bible explicitly prohibits sorcery. You will also find that the majority of "witchy queer" type people make hostile jokes when confronted with actual magical ideas, or even openly mock you for "believing in" the very thing they purport to be able to do. If they do not do this, they will nebulously imply that they can curse you, and of course, if you prompt them to actually do this, they will fail, because they have no idea how magic works and have never done any.
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If you point this out to them, the more erudite ones will vomit literature in their philosophical vein at you, saying that they prefer this or that philosopher's interpretation of their core ideology. They will drown you in a sea of rhetoric and demand that you engage with their deranged theories and appropriated vocabulary. They will not even entertain your arguments at all unless you are willing to argue with them in their own language, where the very meanings of common words (e.g. "critical") are rooted from the start in a way that supports their ideology. Because they will only accept arguments from their own school of literature, this not only means that you are starved of the argumentative tools that would allow you to meaningfully express ideas alternative to theirs, but it also means that you waste a lot of your own time filling your brain with crap that you couldn't be less interested in.
The less erudite ones will simply scream at you for not being like them, perhaps along the lines of your sexual orientation, gender identity, or racial and cultural background. They will shut their ears to anything you say, having an endless body of reinforcing literature with which to justify their ad hominem, but being often too lazy to even employ it beyond namedropping basic concepts ("degenerate", "privileged.")
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The most pervasive example is the supposed split between Communists and Fascists, who literally want the exact same thing. Their ideologies are almost indistinguishable from each other and are only differentiated by the values they purportedly enshrine. Each willingly ignores their ideologies' shared ancestry, instead choosing to bicker over which symbols are on their flags or which demographics they subject to oppression and/or genocide. When challenged on these elements of their ideologies they present excuses about their prior implementations, without realising that the "failings" they are identifying are inevitable products of human nature when their ridiculous and extreme ideas are actually implemented.
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These are the conditions that our ancestors struggled to be free of. These are the conditions of feudalism taken to an extreme, the conditions in which mankind has, at various times across various cultures, been forced to endure without change for hundreds or even thousands of years. Indoctrination so supreme that peasantry are complicit in their own oppression, shunning the quest for knowledge, being unbothered by their ignorance and restricted lifestyles, and thoughtlessly serving their masters.
And a lot of people want to go back to that, voluntarily. Then they form into factions and finger point at each other for wanting to do it the wrong way, orientated around the wrong social values, all the while heaping blame on the existing (extremely liberal and unrestrictive, if deeply and seriously flawed) system we inhabit for supposedly resembling feudalism more than their defective and absurd ideologies.
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Rows upon rows of head-bowed peasants content to live in concrete tenements and eat plain white rice, to have their access to culture and their formation of ideas neutered and warped by pervasive ideology, to be forbidden from even researching certain subjects or broaching certain topics. Legions of conformists who will happily stand behind any public hammering down of the nail that sticks up, and who are utterly blind to the ruling class that they are helping to enshrine in the name of the social body.
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It really feels like there are a lot of people online who see absolutely no problem with being made to live in the most conformist and restrictive way imaginable so long as "nobody gets hurt" and "everyone can eat"
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Honestly I find the idea that the health of the social body is more important than the freedom of the individual disturbing and even disgusting, it feels like a special kind of evil when I see people police the language others use and try to destroy them for even pointing out uncomfortable facts
Fediverse Contractor
Alex
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