🌅🐢Feast of the Risen God 🌖🐍Snake Moon🌹⚒️ 31 Marx 2024 ♈🐏Aries 🌱🪻192 Germinal CCXXXII🍁🐉🏮🐇🍁🐎Wood Dragon Year - Fire Rabbit Month - Wood Horse Day 🌁 Day 10,151 ⛩️

A friend asked to see some of my marginalia so i’m uploading some pictures of my copy of The Strange Death of Liberal England, by George Dangerfield, which I’m currently re-reading.

Dangerfield’s prose gorgeous, a pleasure to read.

Unfortunately my edition is missing a couple pages from the chapter “The Women’s Rebelion,” though I was able to find the missing pages in a PDF of the complete text pretty easily.

My marginalia tends to cover minor reactions (“?” or “"!” as well as a host of symbols specific to my own shorthand), definitions/etymologies, artistic depictions of something in the text, and the date and daycharm of a given reading session.

• Responding to R

  what you said to me previously really hurt and I'm still processing it and what it means for our friendship.

  I was really hurt by some of the things you said. I've been thinking about them for months and months. and I've been thinking about whether I know how to call you friend afterwards.

• Sans Grades

  I would encourage you to research how education has been structured without grade, because this isn't some thought experiment of mine; grades are by no means a universal in education.

  to answer your questions though, you could make calc and pre calc open to students who could then choose which classes to attend based on their understanding of the content. a test could be used as one source of data to indicate readiness to advance, but any given test only measures how good you are at taking that given test. readiness to apply a skill in practice or to advance in training are not necessarily signified by testing well.

  likewise, don't pass on people who don't feel ready to move on just because they got a C average on their tests. often students cram the days before the test and get a decent grade but retain little or nothing by the time the next class begins. or they cheat on the test, which the test rewards by passing them because, again, tests don't measure actual proficiency with the material. they just test how good you are at taking that given test. the two skill sets may or may not overlap.

  instead leave entry level courses open to all, so that there is no shame in taking a remedial English class to brush up on your grammar, or a 100 level seminar in a field you know well but in a subfield you don't know anything about.

  tl;dr you can allow students to match themselves to the classes that will most benefit, challenge, and engage them without being bound by the rule of grades.

• Electoral Politics

  I find the complicity argument very underwhelming. if you vote for Biden, you're complicit in his crimes. if you don't vote for Biden, you're complicit in Trump's crimes. idk it's very idealistic, very Day of Judgement Answering for Your Crimes.

  .

  from a more consequentialist perspective, you have the choice between aiding the Democrats as they move further to the right each election in a bid to head off the Republicans, who also keep moving further to the right, or you can vote third party to try to build an electotal alternative, or you can do what a lot of people do and not vote, which signals general dissatisfaction without building up any particular party.

  .

  I live in a non swing state so I generally vote third party if there's an option and spoil my ballot if not.

  realistically, the Democrats are not going to win every election--since WW2 the Republicans tend to win more often, so having a theory of change based on voting as hard as possible so that Republicans never get in power to make things worse really just ignores the situation--they're going to win more often then not, and the Democrats will pick up the scraps and block any leftward change. if your goal is to improve society and not just to put off fascist escalation for another four years, electoral politics offers little.

  .

  I will vote for Biden when he has Trump taken out by drone strike

  .

  shoplifting does more good than voting

• Terra Ignota Notes

  what is the general interpretation of Mycroft's History and Chronicle if we assume an atheistic perspective, with as little appeal to the supernatural as necessary.

  .

  what, if anything, accounts for Bridger, Achilles, the resurrections, the relics, JEDD's time-defying brain scans when doing math, Cato's alleged abilities, etc?

  .

  my own critical interpretation is that the Muhave 'bash was working on some extremely cutting edge craft, possibly involving contacting an alien presence across a universe, or exposing reality as a simulation and editing it through Apollo's son Bridger, or appearing to do so.

  .

  Bridger was placed near OS's security umbrella and Mycroft (who is heir to Apollo in genius and love for Utopia's dream) is exposed to Bridger, who is something like Rosthvether, able to extend part of their biomass by touch onto other objects and beings and thereby change them, like Haley did with Mycroft.

  .

  the transporter, crystal ball, magic wand, etc might be stand ins for other tech of equal of less power, prototypes derived from Apollo's insights but not fully understood by his hive.

  .

  as for the resurrections, Bridger/Rosthvether (sorry I have no idea of the spelling) may have the capacity to resurrect people but faking an assassination of JEDD Mason could also be plausible. in that case, the intended audience might be JEDD themselves, since they were not able to pursue the bloody arts of politics until being assured that Gods don't die when their ships of flesh expire.

  .

  this might mean Mycroft was selected to write the gospel of JEDD and Bridger to lay the groundwork of an imperial cult.

  .

  however personally given the text I do think it makes the most sense to assume many of the key actors do presume supernatural qualities regarding Bridger's relics and interventions, or at least science sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic to the rest of 2454 society. this would make the trunk war over the relics make sense.

  .

  general question: in your own words, how would you describe the final events of PtS (beginning at, say, Mycroft at the Temple of Janus)

  my own impression is that Mycroft is either about to fall and die or be assassinated by Tully or on JEDD's orders (foreshadowed by him reconciling himself to Cornell's and Ando's deaths and choosing to let them rest) and in his final moments he is being contacted by the Future to let him know that the Reader who summoned Mycroft to him by cunning arts/resurection tech is downloading Mycroft's mind into their own, along with Hobbes and possibly 9A so as to lean on/be used as their laborers as colonists for new worlds, and these are Mycroft's last words typed out on his tracker.

  or it's propaganda? fabricated by partisans of the Prince or Mycroft seeking to add to Mycroft's sainted and magical status

  .

  [was the appearance of the alexander a response to The Prince?]

  but I tend to think that the Alexander was less of a parting gift to Jedd then to 1. Cato, Bridger's third parental figure who helped Bridger build ALEX the robot and who loves Utopia's dream and is kind of a counter-Apollo figure since Cato didn't want to assassinate people but did so while Apollo was willing to wage war for the stars but is killed in it's second battle and also to 2. Achilles, parent number 4, who doesn't want to fight a war but has been called back because he's The Soldier and in Alexander is one of the Harbingers and who also loves the stars.

  .

  and if there also happens to be a being for whom the trolly problem is debilitating who is in position to inherit/conquer the world, that seems pretty relevant to the miraculous.

  .

  I think this is a big part of Mycroft's guilt. if they hadn't killed Apollo and the others Bridger might have grown up in a 'bash like the Mardi's, a prince-god of Obalonga (sp?) to eclipse JEDD Mason the way Jedd eclipsed the earlier Mardi children and Mycroft. he would have grown up in a 'bash that was dedicated to destroying this world to make a better one.

  in contrast, he grew up under/kind of as a member of the house of the bash dedicated to the opposite principle: to remove individuals and their worlds to save this world from war.

  the one common 'bash member between the two is Mycroft. before he met Bridger, Mycroft was Sniper's dog as well as Jedd's.

  .

  the fact that Mycroft destroys Bridger's destined home (if they are Seine's child) and then Bridger shows up at the SW's bash around when he starts working there, plus the opposition between the principles of the Mardi's and OS, and the alternate parallel timelines and childhoods of Bridger's, these suggest that the timing of Bridger's childhood is tied to Mycroft, to his two weeks (when Bridger would have been about to be born), or to the three way philosophical battle between the Mardis, OS, and Mycroft, or both which attracted the interest of the miraculous.

  .

  currently re-reading PtS and I'm confused about || MASON's oath as released before the black out resumed--it already specified "while I am human" in the original, but I thought that's what gets changed in Cornel' ||

• Theory

  regulation implies a monadism, mechanical, punishment a duality, cultivating and loping

  ..

  I've read Madness and Civilization a couple times and I'm discussing Foucault in my thesis.

  ..

  In a recent Acid Horizon podcast interview (will update when I determine which) they discuss a critical issue with Madness and & Civilization being Foucault's relative silence on demonic possession, demonology, and exorcism.

  ..

  (I encountered a parallel claim in Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici, concerning the which trials.)

  ..

  I'm not sure how accurate this is and wanted to get the opinion of others. I recall Foucault discussing artistic portrayal of mythical or dreamlike creatures as a touchstone for madness and unreason

  ..

  It strikes me that the distinction (of which seems to be put simplistically that unreason is outside reason while madness is a very broadly a perversion or alternatively appropriation of reason into acting like unreason and simultaneously a radicalization of reason against itself) between reason and unreason mirrors to some degree certain Christian cosmographic motifes (such as the working by Providence of evil acts into good ends, the fall of Lucifer allowing for Divine forces to triumph over him, the transubstantiation of the death of a God into victory over death). There's this intent angst of dualism trying to be monism between Providence on the one have, Good/Evil on the other, and on the gripping hand a desire or expectation for triumph by reversals, inversions, transcendence common both to the discourse of reason, unreason, and madness and Christian accounts of wars in heaven, Divine economy, temptation or corporation personified as a demonic campaign

  ..

  demons though don't always behave like you expect an enemy would. in the case of the Galiean Possession, we see the demons operating at one level as a stand in for the Roman occupation (name of Legion,

  ..

  there is a demon in my head who tells me I have free will.

  ..

  for my part addiction makes a lot of sense given my need for repetition and ritual, so the consistent habitation of any given coping mechanism often resembles and is something that I rely on doing consistently. the goal and design is to not stop, to not quit, even though everything about depression entails needing to quit at so many things to manage very scarce spoons.

  .

• Nightmares

  Invoking against Nightmares:

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutu_(Egyptian_god)

  I suffer nightmares most nights, It would be nice to have an invocation to use before or during my nightmares.

  for about 6 months I've been reading tarot daily and have used that to reflect on nightmares and that's given me some insight. my nightmares usually involve being trapped at my abusers' house, driving off cliffs, memories of being homeless, losing my job, failing a class and losing my scholarship, being on runaway trains, and trying and falling to hold a door shut on an attacker.

• Worldbuilding

  ..

  Union Democrats

  ..

  Liberal Republicans

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  Radical Republicans

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  Democrats

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  Socialist Party (Marxist, Confessional, and National)

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  Populist Party

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  Conservatives, Bourbon Republicans

  ..

  The Union under the Radicals expanded into the Caribbean, as conquest abroad under the banner of abolition. the forces of Haiti

  ..

  the Emperor in Brazil narrowly recovered from a coup of republican generals by appealing to popular forces and in a decisive case working with a battalion of armed ex slaves who personally retook the imperial Palace. this was a turning point and the emperor would promulgate a commitment to abolition as part of his campaign to return to power.

  ..

  Communism of India took power through people's chakras, people's councils, and overtook the Soviet Union (led by Trotsky's in a coalition with the SRs of which Stalin's departure from left Trotsky the junior partner to the agrarian faction, which favored the separate network of Peasant's Soviets, less spending on industrialization, more southward orientated.

  ..

  the Emperors of China, having taken power back to the ethnically Chin, struck a different policy towards the merchant class and pursued alternative economic and industrial policy.

  ..

  instead of executing the family, the SRs end up installing the Czaravitch and ultimately he ends up indicating and retiring to a Buddhist Monastery, Greek Buddhism being one of the court recognized religions in the Russian empire. the anti religious sect of the Bolsheviks found themselves with less influence with the SRs in the coalition, while Lunacharsky, as Commissar for the Enlightenment, Culture, Education, Propaganda, found himself tasked with fostering an intersectarian socialist identity across workers and Peasants.

  ..

  a conference of saints, a Congress of Prophets, gods and angels and demons and spectres all incarnate together, Jesus and Mahayana Buddhists who would found the Greek, Egyptian, and Spanish schools, The Circle Maker and Immanuel the Messiah inspiring coalitions and rebellions and pressure point warfare among the Semitic faiths and their neighbors against the Romans

  ..

  Holy Assembly of Isis

  Cult of Mary

  the Order of the Sphinx

  Spanish Buddhism is more Celtic, while Greek and Egyptian were both initially Hellenic.

• Random

  so the church is separate from the state but the state is not separate from the church?