luka

Well-known member
If you look in the comments under his new one someone is calling him a cucked heeb faggit or something
 

luka

Well-known member
Quite a lot of the new posts are political, trying to understNd and come to terms with that shift and defend like, you know, all the imagination magic intuition stuff from the charge that it always leans Nazi in the end
 

luka

Well-known member
It can make people very angry. Ben Watson went pyrple in the face cos he's a member of the Marx cult and committed to historical materialism. It gets under a lot of people's skin which I find interesting in itself
 

craner

Beast of Burden
It can make people very angry. Ben Watson went pyrple in the face cos he's a member of the Marx cult and committed to historical materialism. It gets under a lot of people's skin which I find interesting in itself

It gets under my skin to an extent, but not on this blog which is at a much higher level.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I definitely lean towards the conviction that conspiracy theories lead or reduce to antisemitism, so I find his perspective fascinating and refreshing and it makes me think twice or more, which is good.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Some of this is a distant echo of the split between the country and the city, between rural and urban forms of life. I've lived in both, and my propensity towards spontaneous mysticism was far greater when I lived in the countryside - you go for lonely walks in unpeopled places, and a sense of the cosmos as possessing a heterogenous order of its own, quite separate from the patterning of human civilisation, leaps out at you and bedazzles you. Hello birds hello flowers hello trees hello piper at the gates of dawn.

The right-wing thing to do, I think, is to see the complexity and turmoil of urban life as a corruption of the relative homeostasis and implicate order of rural life, and seek to re-impose rural anarchy/spontaneous order upon mass society. Make everything fit back into the village-sized view of how a social system should work, with a place for everyone and everyone in their place.
 
It's a big secret world where you get information outside of time

Ha! I also like this blog. It's possible I first discovered it from a link on here years back but don't remember. It gives me the feeling I'd get from late 90s internet browsing. Strange and ambitious writing that feels like it's trying to spin itself outside of everything to be about everything at once. Makes me think a lot about the materiality of language, the media as reality producer. In some ways the whirling energy in the writing style strikes me as someone who’s had a religious experience, the writer might have alluded to that too, can't remember.

Great pictures too

Especially like this series
http://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-ship-of-sun-is-drawn-1.html
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I've just read the first part of the most recent essay. It's very insightful and makes a great deal of sense, although I think he overreaches with his thesis that it's the Right that's now fun, sexy and spiritual while the Left is characterized by dreary, desiccated materialism:

The bulk of the “Left,” though, refuses to engage with these figures and their concepts altogether because it concludes, and understandably so, that their metaphysical philosophies are inseparably coupled with their tainted politics. So in rejection of all spiritual and metaphysical speculation and sentiment, leftists generally favour a fairly reductive scientific materialism.

As I see it, a huge chunk of the Left, maybe most of it, is radically opposed to rationalism, atheism and science. Even people who don't follow any particular religion themselves will pigeonhole you as a Sam Harris/Richard Dawkins clone if you describe yourself as a rationalist or atheist (a classic droidism, that one).

Of course, what you might call the social left, concerned mainly with identity politics and social justice, has an uneasy relation with orthodox Marxism - Marx is after all just another dead white guy - but how many people are really an orthodox Marxist these days?

Gonna read part 2 now.
 

version

Well-known member
As I see it, a huge chunk of the Left, maybe most of it, is radically opposed to rationalism, atheism and science. Even people who don't follow any particular religion themselves will pigeonhole you as a Sam Harris/Richard Dawkins clone if you describe yourself as a rationalist or atheist (a classic droidism, that one).

What happens if you don't describe yourself as anything? Do they just assign you a descriptor anyway?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
What happens if you don't describe yourself as anything? Do they just assign you a descriptor anyway?

I'm not sure I get you - what sort of interaction are you imagining?

I just meant that the word has connotations that a lot of left-wing people don't like and has become to an extent taboo in progressive circles. And not for no reason, because there is undeniably a tendency for some people with a large public profile to make a big deal of being a capital-A Atheist who opposes all religion, when it practice it's used as an opportunity to bash Islam in particular.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
I think there is warrant for such generalizations, if you just remember that that is what they are. As he makes a case for in the essay as well, it is not a bad thing for political movements to be bound in some type of tradition of spirituality and philosophy.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I think there is warrant for such generalizations, if you just remember that that is what they are.

Sure, and I accept that. But just as I think it would be very sad if someone felt inhibited from calling themselves a Christian just because there are some cunty Christians, I'm not going to avoid using the word to describe myself just because Sam Harris thinks Islam is an existential threat to Western civilization or because Richard Dawkins thinks Harry Potter is harmful to children.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I thought we started saying agnostics instead to distance ourselves from that bunch

Well that's exactly the sort of thing I mean.

There was some writing a few years ago about "New New Atheism", referencing the likes of Jim al-Khalili, which can summed up more or less as "You can be an atheist without being a dick about it", or that being non-religious doesn't have to imply a blanket anti-religionism.

http://www.onreligion.co.uk/new-new-atheism/
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Has anyone else read Alan Garner's more recent novels (Strandloper, Thursbitch, Boneland)?

Strandloper suggests a fundamental continuity between Cheshire folk mysticism and Australian Aboriginal spiritual practices. Thursbitch is in large part about a bull-worship cult in the Pennines. Boneland is fairly indescribable, being both a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen / The Moon of Gomrath, and an extremely elliptical story about humanity on a geological timescale.

They're not about hermetic knowledge exactly, but they are about the timeless breaking into time, mostly via cyclic temporality, mythic patterns repeating.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Never read em, but heard of thursbitch I think. They sound pretty good. What's the best one to start with?
 
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