Female Worker Ban Totally Unofficial

Molyneux and UFOs

The body of humanity.

The Gentle Tyranny of Nathan Rambukkana

~~~

 Wilfrid Laurier University is the latest scandalous instance of the political weaponisation of academia.  A year after Jordan Peterson warned that changes to Canada's Human Rights Act and Criminal Code amounted to legally-compelled speech, a teaching assistant has in fact been censured by an ad hoc tribunal for presenting Prof. Peterson's argument without reflexively condemning it.  The old characterization of university as a neutral space for higher learning is now passé.  Social justice as an ideology has been fully institutionalised.

Clearly Lindsay Shepherd, the offending TA, is the hero of the day.  She had the foresight to secretly record her superiors, the presence of mind to cogently convey her position, and the courage to face down a hostile panel accusing her of gendered violence and the passive endorsement of evil.

Wilfrid Laurier will undoubtedly suffer for this episode, but it's her supervising prof Dr. Rambukkana who comes off the worst in Shepherd's recording.  He accuses her of creating a toxic teaching climate with her problematic opinions.  Nonetheless, perhaps partly because he hasn't yet given any interviews, Rambukkana does not present as a real person.  He is a caricature, an absurdly convenient condensation of trends that have worried people like Peterson.  He steps forth and offers himself as a stock character in the dramatic enactment of our collective troubles.

If it wasn't him, it would be someone else.  If it wasn't Wilfrid Laurier, it would be another university.  However outrageous this occasion may be, despite or even because of the concreteness of the evidence, the scandal functions chiefly as a target for the projections of people who have already made up their mind on these matters.  The whole thing is so unsurprising that it's tempting to damn, denounce and decry and be done with it.

I wish it were that easy for me.  You see, fifteen years ago, Nathan Rambukkana was my TA.  I remember a sweet, gentle soul, who you can almost hear behind the tremulous and uncertain tones of his inquisition.  The question that presents itself is how did a well-meaning academic end up an Orwellian villain?  This is perhaps a question for us all to ask ourselves.

Nathan, what happened?  When did justice become about revenge for hurt feelings?  How did the infinite multiplicity of possible perspectives reduce to mandatory Marxism?  Who made that argument for you, and why did you never share it with us?  It confused me then and it confuses me now.

You know, the problematising of my positionality left me a broken wreck, so I've had fifteen years of sorrow in which to try to reconcile your seeming friendliness with the antisocial angst of my later professors.  There is no rational argument to be found, as far as I can tell.

For what it's worth, I think the most helpful thing you taught us was that reading cultural studies sometimes requires letting it wash over you without trying to understand it.  In hindsight, that sounds a bit like brainwashing.

All of this hoopla is over a short clip attesting to the existence of a debate, a piece of critical thinking in a communication class that you deemed to be inappropriate for school.

Do you remember, Nathan, the time you made us watch an entire episode of The Young Ones in lieu of conducting a tutorial?  I don't know if you thought you were giving us a treat, or if you were just hungover that day, but the case you made for its relevance to our studies was extremely weak, everyone hated it, and I was offended.  But I didn't take it to your bosses, because I was under the misapprehension that you're a nice person.

Evola

UFO

When Jared Taylor Came To Town

Your Favourite Viola Player is an Evil Wizard

Big Buts: My Intellectual Journey

~~~

When I was six years old, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  I thought it over, and decided this was not the sort of thing I should talk about to anyone ever.  Because I couldn't talk about it, I gradually forgot about it.  This is the story of my intellectual journey.

When I was thirteen I bought Fingerprints of the Gods.  I discovered in that book that humanity's past might not be a single simple linear ascent to greater sophistication.  So I took Ancient History in high school, where I was told that humans began as apes, and civilisation began with pyramids.  There was no acknowledgment of any uncertainty in this story, so I kept my mouth shut.

I tried LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and synthetic phenethylamines, dextromethorphan, salvia divinorum, and a weak preparation of dimethyltryptamine.  These helped me to apprehend that every person has a spark of divinity within, an eternal consciousness watched over by an absolute awareness that precedes the universe.  It's not the sort of thing you talk about, so I didn't.

I went to university for three things: film, theatre, and the critical examination of culture to determine what the hell is wrong with the world.  I learned how to use a primitive camera for greater authenticity, how to pretend that a wooden box is really a chair, and how to place the blame for all the ills of the world on straight white men like myself.  Marx and Freud got together with Adorno and Marcuse to say that I was a born oppressor whose guilt was proven by my denials, a pathological sort of person who must be repressed to encourage tolerance.  I saw the mental dressing down that occurred when you didn't agree this was all brilliant stuff, so I gave up on participating in seminars.

Disillusioned with academic cultural studies, I applied my philosophy education to the perils and opportunities of the internet.  What could be gleaned from those who spoke only to niche audiences, or took advantage of anonymity?  I found that most every time there was a subject considered too crazy to countenance by polite society, there was at least a kernel of truth to it. Every time, too, there was someone who took that truth too far.  I didn't want to be a fool or to be thought one, so I didn't even begin to engage with any of these interesting topics, except to study them.

The Earth is almost certainly round, but I haven't been to space or studied the physics of planetary formation, so I have to take someone's word for it.  The return of flat earth theory is likely being helped along by intelligence interests for the study and manipulation of the population, but as a thought experiment it's a peerless gauge of a person's capacity for challenging their assumptions.  No, the Earth isn't flat, but all it would take is a vast intergenerational conspiracy to deceive you on the matter.  It's a valuable exercise to consider the inconceivable for a moment or two.

Vaccines are described as safe and effective, but their inserts list serious conditions as side effects.  The unconscionable opinion of the science-denying anti-vaccine Dr. Andrew Wakefield is that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should be issued separately at different times as three generic vaccines instead of one patented product at once with a greater potential for adverse effects.  This is why people have tried to silence and destroy him.  Vaccines may claim credit for the benefits of nutrition and sanitation, but the basic theory is still sound.

The elite meet in secret to party away their cares and perform ritual magic to absolve their consciences, but they always have, and the world hasn't ended yet.

There is strong laboratory evidence for mostly weak but almost universal powers of precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, but the people claiming strong powers have more reason than most to fake them.

JFK wanted to limit the power of the central bank, tell the people about UFOs, and cooperate with the Russkies to go to the Moon, so everyone got together to kill him, but he was probably Abraham Lincoln in a past life, so he may already be back.

Crop circles are mostly faked, but the people who regularly make them feel compelled to do so by an unknown force.

Stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering seems like it might be a real thing, but if we're all being contaminated by metals falling from the sky and seeping into our brains, then the people saying that necessarily have addled brains, and shouldn't be trusted.

Bread and milk are very bad for you.  You shouldn't eat them.  But they're delicious.

9/11 was executed by Saudi terrorists with help from Mossad, the CIA, and members of the Bush administration, but everyone fucking knows that.

Some people are absolute jerks, and when the delicate equilibrium of your brain is tipped so that you stop breaking down endogenous DMT at the normal rate, you spontaneously trip out on your own brain juices and your asshole boss turns into a lizard.  But that still doesn't prove there aren't reptile people.

Unidentified Flying Objects are a mixture of psychological, social, optical, and piezoelectric phenomena coupled with the observer effect operating on chimeric projections of consciousness grounded in other layers of reality, distorted by terrestrial psy-ops instigated by boys with toys they want to keep secret.

But before I had found all of these qualified positions, I was willing to throw myself into one.  Dr. Steven Greer said that he could use a combination of remote viewing protocols with Vipassana meditation to call down these UFOs.  I had just read some relevant books, and I dimly recalled seeing something in my youth, so I decided to reverse engineer Greer's methods and see me some UFOs.  With a vague sense of addressing myself to interdimensional star people, I continually asked in my head for a period of several months if I could please see some saucers. It worked, but what do you say about that?

After years of coping with the psychological fallout of seeing a fuckton of flying saucers on request, I came to terms with the mystery of our perennial interaction with others from a distant land, whatever the truth of it is.  I made my peace with the unspeakable at last.  I had weathered the gauntlet of conspiracies and the occult, of all the impossibly crazy ideas a person can consider, and I had emerged half-sane and not completely unreasonable.

It was around this time that it was pointed out to me that the critical theory I had read at university as an apparent critique of "our" own culture was actually disproportionately written by members of an ethnocentric tribe that considers itself as distinct from, and superior to, our deplorable culture.  It wasn't sober self-criticism at all.

It was then that I realised that actually paranormal phenomena are relatively easy to discuss.  You may accept or deny them.  Jews can only be praised or ignored.  To do otherwise is to invite accusations of stupidity and evil, for having the misfortune of asking a question that has been rendered curiously cartoonish.

This has been my intellectual journey thus far.

Tribalism and Phish

~~~

In the summer of '97, when I was thirteen, I somehow convinced my father to take me to see the band Phish for a whole weekend.  We drove to a decommissioned air force base in Maine, where tens of thousands of smelly travelers had convened to hear jams and hang out in the lot that was here a whole airstrip.  My mother didn't have any idea of the scene we'd find, else she wouldn't have allowed it.  My father rightly saw that it would be an interesting novelty for us both, and bless him for the effort.

The first sign on approach was one selling water pipes by the side of the road.  I didn't know what water pipes were, but I sensed I was entering another world.  Shortly that telltale stoner gave way to thousands of cars, and thousands more people setting up tents and meeting friends. 

There was a pervasive funk in the air that could not be avoided.  I learned years later that it was not the pot smoke I was smelling everywhere; it was the pot everyone was carrying in their pockets.  The word was "nuggs."

It wasn't just the drugs, though.  I can't remember ever seeing so many happy people in one place, and I know at least two of them weren't on drugs.  There was something more going on.  I was glimpsing not just a subculture, but an actual community, with its own economy, etiquette, and attitude.  It was a group of people cultivating a particular consciousness, and doing it not just with hallucinogens but with a shared sensibility.  I think the rot was just beginning to set in as it always does, but by and large these were peaceful, loving, unified and respectful individuals.

At one point Dad related to me a conversation he had with a woman with plates from some distant state.  She had seen her first show, and decided to hop into her car and start following the band for the rest of the tour.  Many people did that, suddenly leaving their square lives to relax on the road.  I sensed they were the ones who could afford to do so.  People sold food and jewelry and drugs out of their vans, but to even be in the position to drop out of society in that manner, one must have a certain standing in it to begin with.

There were surely a goodly number of trustafarians, but a lot of otherwise ordinary people too.  Young and old, hippie and normie, from every corner of America and beyond.  I saw a sea of people washing away from the stage after every set.  There were no fights, no bad vibes that I picked up.  Everyone was cooperating to create a spontaneous city of people with a taste for fun, surprising, eclectic music.  Phish as a band is musically omnivorous, contagiously sharing their love for different forms.  That kind of idiom can only welcome all kinds.  They studiously avoided politics or serious worldly concerns.  Phish was a safe space without judgment.

So what a twinge I felt when I got home and read an article out of Boston reporting on The Great Went.  One line stood out, a needle seeking to puncture that pleasant bubble.  The author observed, and then pointedly said nothing further on the matter, that there were almost no black faces in the crowd.  It just hung there, in the middle of the article, awkwardly interjecting itself as a non-sequitur.  What was the reader supposed to make of it?

Some people got together, and had a good time, and no one got hurt, and great memories were made, and happy songs were sung, and it felt like a rite of passage for me, but there weren't any black people there.  I should probably feel bad about that.  Why don't black people like Phish?  They play blues and jazz and funk music all the time.  Is that cultural appropriation?  Is Phish racist?  Is that why blacks don't like them?  Am I racist because I like Phish?  I wish more black people were there, so I wouldn't have to worry about this.

I had never seen a more cohesive and cheerful community, but the implication was that it must be doing something wrong.  I couldn't figure out what that was.

It should be said that Phish followed a cultural template from the Grateful Dead, who apparently trafficked LSD for the CIA.  Every rebellion of the last while has had an element of social engineering somewhere within.  I really don't think that Mike Gordon, the Jewish bass player, is actually the handler for three programmed stooges, deliberately removing good-hearted people from regular society where they might do some real damage, but it would be naive to pretend the mass movement of lots of people on lots of drugs listening to nonsense songs to escape from their privileged lives instead of improving their world is an unmitigated good. 

Nevertheless, however embarrassing, there is a fundamental sweetness to an unpolitised hippie.  Those who fall into the lifestyle of following a jam band, or who manage it on their vacations, find a fandom that could be called a family without too much hyperbole.  Certainly, they are a particular tribe, with symbols and chants that may move them more than those of their nation or town.  Phish doesn't have a constitution.  They don't have a foreign policy or a seat at the UN.  They do have singing, and dancing, and drums, and drugs, and lots of friendly, welcoming people, but apparently no black people, and that's a problem.

How To Build A Synchronicity Machine

 ~~~

Imagine that meaning is a real thing, a stuff, not an airy nothing that you make up.  Imagine that ideas and feelings are a river flowing beside you, and you can dip your toe in or dive in completely.  Imagine that everything you think goes into that river.

The notion of signs and portents, synchronicities and other suggestive coincidences is out of fashion with most in the Western world, but very much alive with a few.  Occultists and New Agers, drug takers and UFO abductees are often forced to get used to the notion, that they can sometimes engage in conversation with their surrounding environment and the events that occur within it.

There are at least a couple of ways to do this.  One is to simply go through your day with an anticipation of magic.  Treat every encounter and unexpected deviation from your plan as a potential message just for you.  Look for the meaning, learn the lesson, hear the message. 

Understand that this is clinically a sign of madness, so don't advertise it too broadly.  You may even find that sharing your synchronicities with a sympathetic party will be less than you hoped for.  The significance was specially made for your consciousness, and on some level your consciousness may have participated in its creation.  In any case, only you know the weights and measures of your own mind, so no one else can validate your synchronicity for you.  Simply give yourself permission to perceive as significant that which feels significant.

Look for meaning and you will find it.  Follow it and you'll find more.  There is no precise content here that needs to believed.  Maybe you're getting in touch with your Higher Self, or guardian angel, or the spirits, or God, but the channel can be hijacked by devious demons leading you astray just as readily as any other information source you might use.  That goes doubly if the whole affair is just a projection of your mind. 

Synchronicities are cues to remind you to be conscious.  Even if it's only a mis-fire of the meaning-making part of your brain, that should alert you that your brain is bored and wants something meaningful to do.

So much for the worldly path.  Go outside right now and you may well run into an old friend, or see an amusingly relevant advertisement on the side of a bus, or find something you've always wanted in a shop window.  What qualifies as a synchronicity is mostly subjective, but you must meet the process halfway, with intentions and reactions.  Probabilities are constantly aligning themselves into improbabilities, if you can only notice it.

But is there any more that can be done to harness this peculiar mystery, and make it more useful?  For instance, are we forced to tailor our meaning from whole cloth every time something surprising happens?  I don't think so.

It's my understanding that many Native American tribes could use the aforementioned method along with a codified understanding of the significance of different animals.  Go for a stroll through the woods with a problem on your mind, and the first beast you see may deliver an insight or a hint for a course of action.  But the natives generally didn't have a system of writing, and we certainly don't have ready access to a tradition of totemic symbolism.  Historically speaking, we found other ways to acknowledge this phenomenon.

In the European north, it was runes.  In the south, the Tarot.  Far to the East, the I-Ching.

Each of these was a language.  They were developed and interpreted in an attempt to establish a system that could represent all the stations of life,  all the configurations and permutations of consciousness that a person might experience, based on the philosophies and belief systems from which they emerged. 

Undoubtedly there are elements of the human psyche that are so firmly instantiated as to be effectively eternal, but the colour and flavour of consciousness is continually evolving, particular to a certain time and place and culture.  Anyone born today in the West to normal parents can't help but be playing at something outside of their immediate reality when they employ these methods.  The Tarot deck on which most are based was itself a modern construction, an erudite and reverent attempt at authenticity.  That's laudable, but even Traditionalists today have grown up in a world in which you must make your own authenticity.

This is primarily a proposal for the obsessive systematisers among you.  Not everyone is able or inclined to produce a comprehensive conceptual system.  I did it accidentally.

The first step is to legally assemble a large music collection on an electronic device.  There should be several thousand songs at least.  The words, tones, timbres and genres should all speak to you personally on some level, to your own typical range of thoughts, moods, and feelings.  It helps if you have a modicum of variegation in your soul.  If you only have one mood and only ever listen to one kind of music, we may be wasting our time here.

If, on the other hand, you know yourself a little bit, and know what you like, and know what you care about, and you have questions, and goals, and intentions, you are prepared for step two.  Simply randomize that collection, as you may have already been doing, but do so without the assumption that a random order can't convey anything.  Turn on "shuffle" and press "play," unfocus your mind a little, and imagine there's an ethereal DJ, intermittently spinning deep cuts to get your attention. 

Consider that if you were sitting outside of materiality with certain cosmic standards discouraging direct intervention, a random system might represent a permissible loophole.  The interpretation of the message is on the embodied human.  Maybe that song title or lyric is a direct response to what's on your mind, or maybe you're reading too much into things and going a little crazy.  Maybe there wouldn't necessarily be anything wrong with that.

This doesn't discount logic or reason.  You can still check one idea against another to see if it holds up.  You need not be bound to otherworldly intuition or divinatory crapshoots.  Merely understand that we habitually seek patterns and meaning, and even if that's only a vestigial impulse it can still help us.  Ultimate truth is great, but the subjective apprehension of truth may be more valuable for personal psychological health or life success.

The message here is that there are messages everywhere.  We live inside a synchronicity machine, so it can sometimes be hard to see its activity.  That's why it's useful to try to represent the world in miniature in a book or deck of cards.  But maybe ancient esoteric symbolism from a foreign culture doesn't speak to you.  That's okay.  Make your own Tarot. 

Load up a digital jukebox with songs that make your soul sing.  Play the music and think about what matters.  Make connections and associations.  Is there a perspective from which that verse may be relevant to my situation?  You will learn something, even if you absurdly overreach in the interpretation.

It won't always work.  You can't make demands of it.  But take this with you: when your heart lights up because the radio seems to be playing a song just for you, just don't be a heartless coincidence-monger.  Revel in that moment of being connected with yourself and the wider universe, and it will happen more often.

Intermediate Ideologies

Three conclusions on mysticism

A characteristic story about Nietzsche

"In the case of Canada..."

Propaganda in a Democratic Society

Ideologies

Spellbinders

The intellectual conscience.

Cult of the genius out of vanity.

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.