Notes, QLT History, Questions for J.S.
chaos magic
theological realism
or maybe, an applied anthropology of religion
Gods as desiring machines, as technologies, as perhaps even a coping or way of being schizophrenic
lately I've struggled to eat. i buy nice ingredients at the store i know are healthy and then i don't eat for 3 days. had a lot of dietary trauma i guess. a lot of the really beautiful stuff spoils fast, heirloom tomatoes rarely last more than a couple nights by the time they get to me. had one stay good for like two weeks and counting. haven't checked today. what do you think Hanaka was like the first time? i don't think many people talk about it but i feel like a lot of people have seen something weird that they can't quite shake. a flying saucer or a ghost or have like a high batting average on their dreams predicting the future, nothing to write in to a national psychology lab about but still, one wonders
surrealist qlt history. the cold war turns into an arms race to master the human psyche. national surveys of people's dreams plus statistics plus ideologically driven desperation for a magical edge against the ussr
the world war runs longer, with American forces tied up with internal contradictions and misadventures. the British suffer bleeding ulcers in India which leave the French undersupplied and undersupported, prompting the third Third Paris Commune during which the single largest civilian death day of the war was carried out by the French King's (why not, the former count of Paris and heir of the bourbons is back on the throne) army. the king dies childless in exile and the ball bounces back to the orleanist cousin he agreed to make his heir. unfortunately for him the mass murder of the martyrs of 30 Thermidor CXXX leads to a massive drop in moral. across the line, Rosa Luxemburg avoids bring assasinated by the SPD because the kaiser has the leaders of the SPD shot for conspiring against him. when this fails to achieve an improvement in the war effort representatives of the military have the kaiser forcibly abdicated and, childless, a new house is elected Head of the Empire just in time to before being sidelined by the generals it is Britain which goes fascist under Churchill after the British royal family meets with an old friend from sinn fein.
America has had a rough go of it, with the civil war resulting in a black liberal capitalist revolution followed by white counter revolution followed by communist revolution followed by federal reoccupation in support now of the black liberal federal overseas and suppliers, now the white klan aligned planters, now the rural and urban working classes, now the occupying soldiers and officers. during this period spiritualism continues it's war fueled expansion, along with the ghost dance movement (the extended wars of reconstruction, of which Abe's War was only the second, following Bleeding Kansas in the alternate chronology), which came along with a few decades extra time on the part of the western Indian tribes before the Indian wars could be concluded: indeed, by playing the eastern factions against each other, and even split off. certainly Hawaii might escape and Alaska would probably be sold to someone else, maybe the Japanese. the interior West and deep south become gurrilla zones, with cowboys exchanging pistols for machine guns. i think a communist revolution has happened in Brazil but they let the emperor, who survives a Republican Fascist coup attempt to stop emancipation from going further. the emperor becomes a hostage in Rio and control of him becomes a matter of too much ceremonial import to just kill him, so the radicals give him a bunch of propaganda jobs aimed at decentering but not outright abolishing the Catholic Church in Brazil, and idk the make the aristocracy a lottery based system and the emperor becomes a monk and his title is passed around among children. not that he's happy about all this, but they don't exactly give him a choice.