A traffic light turns red, I brake, stop, think: The monsters are everywhere; that Polyphemus with his red eye, the giants of metal and frost shouldering the arcs of power lines against the dawn. You don't have to believe in, or even notice them. They move in the world with you. *Don't* believe in them; if you have to believe it, it isn't true. The light turns green. #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
Notices tagged with talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 17-Jan-2025 21:56:39 JST 
tinydoctor
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Jan-2025 01:55:54 JST
tinydoctor
Political dialects babelize. The confusion of tongues can conceal shared interests and objectives between leftwing and rightwing, and conflicting interests and objectives between right and right, left and left. Elites, left and right, exploit this confusion. Keep their constituencies captive with cant. Maybe we need the equivalent of #Polari for the internal proletariat, a right/left pidgin for the underclass, so the rest of us can talk under the elites. Hmm? #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 05:08:40 JST 
simsa03
Over on X I was trying out their #AI called Grok, and asked it a factual question. It returned a text it wrote while aggregating various sources, e.g., #Wikipedia. years ago I had conversations with people from #Wikimedia that due to machine learning, AI, and automated text-generation, Wikipedia's concept of articles consisting of lemma and corpus, is an outdated form of organizing "knowledge". In the future, I mused, people will ask a question and corresponding (!) to the level of differentiation, machines will provide a written text as answer, based on crawling the net for information. "Knowledge" will thus not be structured as lemma plus corpus but as transitory, individualized question plus answer. I suggested to those Wikimedians that they need to hurry to come up with a proper technical form for such "new" #lexicography, because right now -- that is: back then -- Wikipedia, by mimicking knowledge-presentation of material books and paper-based compendiums, is the last of its kind. As far as I know, Wikimedia never took up on this change, and now the Musks, Zuckerbergs, Gates, the surveillance capitalists have taken over not with a service but a new way of lexicography that Wikimedia and the various Wikipedia editons have missed out on. It will be interesting to see whether and how Wikimedia and Wikipedia can catch up.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 14:51:39 JST
simsa03
This world has an underworld (be it spread out in space or in soul). Which means that to this underworld our world is its heaven.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 14:30:24 JST
simsa03
Blinding oneself with any form of empiricism and materialism doesn't alter the fact that life and planet are spiritual affairs.
Exception: The form of empiricism and materialism chosen because one reveres the spiritual component of things being just that: material and empirical items.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 14:22:29 JST
simsa03
Relationships one has at young(er) age circle around one's hope for oneself, whereas relationships one enters at a latter age circle around one's hope for the other.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jan-2025 12:20:00 JST
tinydoctor
Patrianihilism. It’s a thing. #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Dec-2024 14:40:51 JST
tinydoctor
Is ideology a form of stupidity?
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 12:25:46 JST
tinydoctor
Sometimes I say, "I am a monk. I will not speak words. I will let silence master me. I will not consort with a lesser meaning than meaninglessness. But I always betray my vow.
I love the enemy.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 12:04:55 JST
tinydoctor
How did we die for love over and over and over and not die? How did we live on, with all the ones we loved who died written across our palms, fortunes we lived and never lived, how do we still live and love the dead. #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 07-Dec-2024 11:28:59 JST
simsa03
Robert Jungks "Der Atomstaat" von 1978 gehört zu den Gründungsschriften der deutschen Anti-Atombewegung. Alle später relevanten topoi:
• kein Unterschied zwischen militärischem und zivilenm Gebrauch der Kernkraft
• zehntausend Jahre strahlender Müll
• Produktionssicherheit verlangt massive Einschränkungen bürgerlicher Rechte
• Lobpreisung der Alternativbewegung,
• der lokalen erneuerbaren Kleinenergie
• des "sanften Wegs" im Umgang mit Natur und Mensch
werden hier zum ersten Mal zusammenhängend präsentiert.
Was im Buch nur an ein oder zwei Stellen durchschimmert und in seiner späteren Rezeptionsgeschichte gänzlich ausgeblendet wurde, ist, dass "Der Atomstaat" zwar über Kernenergie spricht, dies aber vor dem Hintergrund des "Deutschen Herbstes" (1977) und der Auseiandersetzung zwischen Staat und dem Terrorismus der RAF und der Bewegung 2. Juni vornimmt.
Dass Atomenergie in den 1970er Jahren als lebensbedrohlich empfunden wurde, hängt mit der Suggestion zusammen (Kap. 7, Abschnitt 5, S. 196), dass Atomenergie als Mittel des Staates gesehen wurde, Zwangsmaßnahmen und Einschränkungen bürgerlicher Freiheiten einzuführen und zu legitimieren, die man dann auch gegen den deutschen Terrorismus und seine Unterstützer einsetzen konnte.
Robert Jungk überträgt so das Bedrohungsgefühl einer Bevölkerung, entstanden aus der westdeutschen gewaltätigen Auseinandersetzung zwischen Staat und Terrorismus, auf das gänzlich andere Thema der Risiken der Kernenergie (die er m.W. technisch falsch darstellt) und schafft damit eine (west-)deutsche Abwehrhaltung gegenüber der Kernenergie, die später nicht mehr überwunden wurde (und nahtlos in die Protestbewegung gegen den NATO-Doppelbeschluss und die Stationierung von Pershing-2-Mittelstreckenraketen überging).
Man sollte diesen Aspekt in der heutigen Rezeption der Anti-Atombewegung der 1970er Jahre nicht übersehen. Ein erheblicher Teil des Widerstands gegen die Kernenergie war nicht technisch begründet, sondern aus der Angsterfahrung des "Deutschen Herbstes" und der Legitimationskrise der westdeutschen Bundespolitik.
Nicht nur wurde diese Angsterfahrung von Robert Jungk auf die Kernenergie übertragen, sie konnte danach auch nicht mehr aufglöst werden und lebt als spezifisch deutscher Angstreflex im Umgang mit der Kernergie bis heute fort.
#nuclear
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:11:42 JST
tinydoctor
Here's something I found on my drive. Not sure when I wrote it, or whether or not I've posted any of it. Thread: Many of the things we usually consider and treat reflexively as real and concrete, are, in fact, abstract fictions. Things like god, corporations, money, nations, human rights, and justice have no existence outside of human imagination.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Nov-2024 00:39:42 JST
simsa03
Soul is something you recognize in others, not yourself.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 14:24:39 JST
simsa03
I think that a lot of "mental" issues peole have are connected with a strange peculiarity: That the "size" of the soul not always (or rarely) fits the "size" of the personalities or personhood. That is: To me it often feels as if the oddities and struggles a person carries around with her has nothing to do with pychological problems – for which, then, therapists are called upon to step in – but that these people often have a larger soul than a personality to suit it. Or to put it differently: Their personality, their personality traits are smaller than their soul requires, like a glove too tight to fit the hand, thus constricting the hand, making it incapable to work properly.
Thus, there are people with too small personalities to fit their (comparatively) too large soul. As there are people with a too large personality for their soul given. Rarerly do both fit properly. (And I never came up with an example of a person with too small personhood and too small soul.)
The upshot for me is: There are psychological struggles in people that have notning to do with flaws or trauma or neuroses, to be dealt with by therapy and medical intervention. Sometimes things are a struggle because person and soul don't fit properly. Take for illustration someone with brown eyes. You wouldn't put him through therapy just because he has no blue eyes. There's nothing to be done about it. The same, I think, is with personhood and soul. Sometimes things are off that way, and it may take a lifetime for both to come together in a form of equilibrium. And there are, obviously, times or moments, when the soul just can crack through all personality, all personal limitations. In love, e.g., or when in an act of self-chosen "spiritural death" the ego is "sacrificed", set aside, for mery and compassion to have their way. Nothing to be "cured" but all to be waited for, and chosen to be enacted by the moral instance of that very person.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 03:18:29 JST
simsa03
"S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl" will be the second game, I guess, that I'll purchase at full-price and not at some discount. And it's not that I like these tedious tinker-and-resources-gathering/crafting/managing games. If I want chores, I'll clean my bathroom.
But like 20 years ago with "Half-Life 2", I'm a tourist who loves to wade through absurdly overdone landscapes, with weather effects and atmospheres so ridiculously overblown that you wouldn't even on drugs encounter them in real life. I just love strolling around looking, watching, gazing.. until I get shot by some AI generated villain.
("Half-Life Alyx" is another gorgeous visual experience with so many details and consistent "world building". It's just wonderful wandering around there and studying the debris, the fauna, the extraterrestrial impacts on the Odesa-styled City 17...)
Sadly, today's progress in computing powers (both for the CPU as the graphics cards) invites the industry to either remake old titels (to "freshen" them up visually) or publish new titles primarily with the emphasis on graphics and visual effects. Otherwise these titles have become pretty boring (with regard to story telling, game mechanics, loot system and such).
Not to mention the absurd length of such games. Remember when games like "Half Life, "Half Life 2" and others took about four hours for a decent playthrough? Now you can waste up to 60 hours to get only through tzhe main story line and various side quests. Ridiculous. Who has that kind of free time any more?
Anyway. I'm looking forward to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl". Although to be released today, I'll give it two more months until the main bugs are fixed. And spend my time until then with "Tomb Raider" (the first game of the relaunch trilogy) which is still an amazingly consistent self-contained game; with "Half-Life: Alyx" (the PC mod version); and some others like "Far Cry 5" (very nice landscape), "Callisto Protocol" or "Dead Space", or the original "F.E.A.R." series
As an afterthought: I tried "Black Mesa" and "Black Mesa Blue Shift". Awful games. Look like Playmobil in overdrive. Shiny plastic surfaces, and the XEN world is such a terrible visualisation of somebody's bad mushroom trip... They overblew it on all accounts. Both games show in their "extraterrestrial" environment the deep influence "Dear Esther" seems to have had on game developing. But while the latter Indie game is a gem that too my knowledge first successfully used a "walking simulator" to engange the player in a trance like state (stunning graphics), the kids of the "Black Mesa" Remake teams took the visual ideas of "Dear Esther" and streched them all for the sake of mere bombast. Shock and Awe. (Never thought that Donald Rumsfeld would win even one battle.)
As a second afterthought and thereby returning to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl": There is a whole genre of games built around the concept of a "zone" of some unknown influence through which "stalkers" move carefully in order to garner riches and avoid "anomalies". These idea rest on two templates.
One is the 1971 sci fi novel "Roadside Picnic" by the Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 based his movie "Stalker" losely on that novel). Here the the topoi of the "zone" and the lone scout (called "stalker" after the Tarkovsky movie, I guess) were first introduced.
The other template has been the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 with its subsequent evacuation of the entire population due to radiation, the abandonment of the aerea, and the rewilding henceforth, with radiation givin the the rewilding its specific drift into the unexpected.
Both templates are ruminated again and again. And in their combination, the specifically otherworldly character of "Roadside Picnic", the strangeness of the aliens' visit and what it might mean what they left behind, is substituded with the survivalist theme of the nuclear power plant catastrophe of 1986. I'd love to see games in which the more miraculous aspect of "Roadside Picnic" plays a decisive role. Wonderment and fascination not because of sneaking skills and visual traumatisation of the player but because of the bafflement and wonder created by the story. A shock and awe not of Rumsfeldian liking.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 08:10:21 JST
simsa03
Always remember: The majority of US-ians wanted this. They wanted the Gaetz, Gabbaed, Rubio, Hegseth, Musk, Ramaswamy to be in charge. They wanted this fascism and they wanted this weird, old and dark America¹, this Kick-your-ass-America. They wanted minorities to suffer, migrants to bleed, thealth care to be abolished and abortion done again sophistically in the back alleys with cloathes hangers. They wanted tax cuts for the rich at the expense of infrasturcture investement for the lesser well-offs. So stop complaining. Stop raging. The US wanted this. And we'll be lucky if we can avert the nuclear bombs and their fall-out. Climate crisis? Fuck off! In the end, in four years time, when people turn up again from the dungeons to the daylight, they'll be happy they survived. "Look, it wasn't all that awful. Didn't he built great autobahns?" All who rage now will fall in line sooner or later. Because, why do you expect any different when Russia of today shows you clearly that you cannot stay apart, that you will be amalgamated with the regime? Until you agree, first hesitatingly, later strongly, and then beating up all others who still resist. You will become this regime because you will have forgotten how it is to be a human being. So you'll start roughing up the migrants, the refugees, the poor, or your students, in what some smartie-ass calls "lateral violence". It surely doesn't feel that way. When you become the regime, exerting pain onto other will show you how little you knew yourself, how little there was a chance that things might turn out differently, and how happy you are to act out your inner murderer. You will happily fall in line. Exactly because you think you are a "victim". Everyone is a victim, that's how tyrannies work. And the leader, he's not the butcher but the one who by acknowledging his own pain identifies it with that of the nation. So that the nation's healing and his very own become one and the same, his pain his looking glas by which he detects what it is that hurts the nation. And you want to stay apart? You wouldn't even recognize whether there was a place left to stay apart on. You will become the regime. And succumb with a sigh, of relief, of joy, of unity, of "family", of acknowledged pain. You will rejoice in your hate. And get out the vote for another term for this regime. Don't kid yourself. You who are the most opposed now will fall in line first. Because there is no difference between populace and regime. Nowhere.
¹ Alluding to Greil Marcus.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 08:39:02 JST
simsa03
This thread https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1854030304677073233.html made its way around and everybody freaked out. Calm done, it's pretty much nonsense, born out of the author projecting his fears rather than displaying his understanding.
True, my belief in #peakfascism, utterly justified in early summer, has been smashed by the state elections in Germany and the various elections now in the U.S. I had hoped otherwise and it didn't turn out. Yet.
But that doesn't mean that the nonsense displayed in this thread (esp. posts # 11-17, 20-25) should be taken as reliable prediction or even profound insights instead. It's not based on an informed understanding of facts, but based on fear. Which is, as one doesn't need to learn anything for that, easier to act out and act upon.
Calling T and Musk "the worst men in the United States" [#11] and conveniently ignoring Peter Thiel, Miriam Adelson, Mitch McConnell, some of the Supreme Court justices, etc., is just silly.
Anyway, NATO will not cease to exist [#12] (although perhaps shrink); most of Gazans will not be killed [as claimed in #13] (although Israel will, in my opinion, annex the West Bank and leave Gaza to international administration); the EU will not shrink in size [#14] (no arguments given for the preposterous claim it would); a "new axis of evil" [#15] (rather: its enlargement) especially with the "new members" mentioned is so utter and uninformed nonsense that I don't even know where to start debunking that claim. Suffice perhaps that most of these new members are too poor and weak to pose as a threat.
With regard to the horror porn the author sketches of the U.S. turned end-Weimar Republic [# 20-25] with all the screeching of martial law and police murder rates sykrocketting due to police activities, stock market crashes, and all, seriously, man, on what does the author base such fever dreams? Esp. when most of the stuff he is in the prerogatives of the individual states and not the federal government.
Where I think the author is partly right is that nuclear weapons will get proliferated to more states. The author mentions Saudi Arabia, the Emirate of Dubai, and Egypt [#16] but ignores, e.g., the aspirations of Turkey. He also ignores that the UK and France think about sharing their nuclear weaponry with the European countries and even Germany thinking about acquiring nuclear deterrence, and all not for the authors beloved reason, i.e., T playing with witholding the U.S. nuclear shield, but for the other main reason, i.e., the imperialism of Russia and Putin. Which, of course, the author fails to mention; as he fails to mentio the other imperialism in China and Xi. (With that the author lands in the lala-land of conspiracy theories which all fail because they neglect or ignore the complexities they are supposed to explain.)
The author is likewise partly right, in my opinion, that there will be a "new axis of evil". [#15] But definitely not the one he thinks of. (Venezuela, El Salvador, and Israel are in this new axis, but Iran is not? Seriously?)
What emerges with T's second term of office, in my opinion, is an emerging and balancing alliance of oligarchic families, crime networks, states turned to mafia organisations,¹ greedy autocrats, influential billionairs, surveillance capitalists, etc., trying to run states like corporations, transgressing state boundaries and replacing international treaties with oligarchic accords and influence spheres. Their main goal is wealth, sweetened with power. In order for them to get rich and their activities unrestricted, they will use the means and institutions of national states to advance their aspirations. If Ukraine stands in their way, they will obliterate it. If not, they will find a more cost-efficient way around. One that is better for "business". (Imagine a Russian movie gangster's heavy English.)
Financial greed does not need to be the sole motivation; finding meaning and purpose beyond, esp. when combined with a reason to fight and exert power, is a second one. Putin is a good example. Greedy like hell he still invests heaviliy in historical romaticism. Money doesn't provide meaning and purpose. Neither power. Meaning comes from somewhere else. Virility too.
But all that does not mean that "fascism" (in lack of a better word) is now on the loose. It means that many oligarchic endeavours will turn out not to work or to work better when not combined with violence, when climate crisis is taken seriously, etc. That is: The rising and increasing worldwide oligarchic interconnectedness that results in reshaping whole national states into mafia organistation (with the president or leader as the Capo dei capi of such a mafia organisation) is far more likely than "the end of the world" as the author of the thread knows it.
And if that outcome or development is the more likely scenario, than the instabilities that we will confront is less so in the civic spheres of societies than it is in the hierarchies of such crime syndicates posing as states themselves.
What most people ignore when looking at such mafia systems is that they are intrinsically volatile and insecure to all of their members. Violence, paranoia, alliances, mistrust, and constant power struggles make not for the stability of such entities but for the violent character of these. And as one can see in the history of Russia of the past 30 years: Leave the mafia organsation and the Capo unchallenged, and life can be pretty normal for the burgeois peasant.
That does not mean that I prefer such a life. But it means that I think the author of thread misplaces the area where violence will occur. The end is still far away. From that arises hope and obligation.
¹ This is not about a state being infiltrated by some mafia activities – and thus in part being harmed and in another capable to fight back – but a state that is turned completely into a mafia organisation: a criminal enterprise that uses the resources and legal perogatives of a national state in the service of the criminal entity. Or put differently: a mafia organisation that poses as a national state.
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 00:28:38 JST
tinydoctor
@f4grx @molly0xfff Another thing my mother used to say: Shoulda woulda coulda never did nothin’. I wish her ghost spoke that in my ear more much more often. I know, that’s a should woulda coulda. Thanks Mom. My fierce mom. My ferocious mom.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 03-Nov-2024 03:59:24 JST
simsa03
One of things I find baffling about the various conflicts that collectively make up what is called the Middle East conflicti is the Palestinians' insistence on the "right of return" of all "refugees". From the fact that several hundred thousand Arabs were displaced in the wars of 1948 and 1967, they not only claim a status of refugee for the displaced and their descendants but a "right to return" of both to "their ancestral homeland".
But if, somehow, being displaced creates a status of refugee, and if, somehow, this title is automatically handed down to the descendants of those originally displaced, and if the status of refugee, somehow, creates a "right to return", if all these premisses hold true, then why cannot Jews claim exactly the same for themselves? Many Jews were expelled after 70 CE and continuously later on from what since the 1920s has been called Palestine; their descendants are in that very sense "refugees", and so they likewise have a "right to return" to their "ancestral homeland". That is: If Palestinians can claim indigeneity and from that a right to the land, then so can the Jews.
So if Palestinians want a "right to return", they'll have to accept the presence of all Jews in the *same* land for the same very reasons.
And contrary, if Palestinians hdo not have a "right to return", if one's ancestors' indigeneity does not create a legitimate title over the land, then the Jews don't need to bother whether they have such a title legitimately or not. It suffices that in 1947 the U.N. General Assembly accepted the partition plan of the land for both people (Res. 181 (II)) which the Jews accepted and the Palestinians of their own choice rejected.
To say the Jews are "colonizers" is thus utter nonsense – unless one can give convincing criteria for how many generations must have passed until one's ancestors' indigeneity does not (or: no longer) establish a valid claim to the land by the descendants.
Good luck with that.
Ironically, it is the very Palestinian claims of indigeneity, displacement, and inherited refugee status that all the more confer validity to the Jewish claims on the Judea and Samaria Area.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 26-Oct-2024 13:44:00 JST
simsa03
Culture seems to be Man's attempt to prevent his imagery to populate and overtake his world. It is suppression, indeed, but not in the Freudian sense of Eros (neither Eros nor Thanatos that is) but of imagery.
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