sanity_is_maddening

Thank you for this. This is a phenomenal framing of the death of meaning.

This also has scratched an itch that has been bothering me…

Because I would say my biggest frustration with what you specifically described is how it bled through the common landscape of ideas. Through the whole social fabric.

It’s almost an infection in all forms of communication now.

It’s not just in ads, but journalism and even fiction or how art only seems to be presented as only viable as submissive to commerce and act merely as entertaiment or be condemned to oblivion where close to none can find it.

I’ll add a more precise example to what I’m trying to communicate…

There has been a strangely growing number of “eating the rich” pieces in all forms of media and art this decade.

Fiction especially seems to have escalated the rate in both literary and cinematic explorations. But it is clear that the current cultural landscape wants mere faint acknowledgement to act as consequence. Awareness is the only permitted punishment. Because then it has to forcefully act as the only form of absolution available.

So the invitation to mockery and the cartoonish portrails of the wealthy triggering the intended and controlled schadenfreude response is what is “sanctioned” for publishment or distribution. Because it addresses the existence of a problem but with enough distance from reality that it remains divorced of real world consequences. So bring on projects where the elite are just clowns or murdered in silly ways in silly thrillers and horror flicks but leave out of focus or frame, the consequences of their actions, or at least the more concrete and real forms of how real lives are affected by them. But especially and essentially leave out the possible and tangible ways in which the problems of the system that benefit them and negatively impact others can be spotted or dealt with.

There are projects who do not fit this description, but they don’t get much publicity, wide promotions or wide distributions in the end. Even when they get acclaimed runs in festivals or good critical reception. The “Machine” doesn’t get behind them.

Which is obvious in the end, after all, the publishers and heads of studios do belong much more to that faction in the class war. But if they play it well, they make it seem brave to finance these carefully selected projects to “the other side”, but just as long as these act as “casual roasts” of their peers, and not indictments that call for actual consequences. As it would be a call on themselves to actually change, or for them to also face consequences. In reality. And not just in just a performative plane.

So… “We may acknowledge the problem, just as long adressing that said problem is not permitted or at least inaccessible to most” becomes the approved and sanctioned approach.

Also to add another tangent to the death of meaning in the post-truth world… it is not a coincidence that in the current social paradigm of alternative facts and the subsequent alternative realities that people inhabit, the only form of universal concensus seems to be that the world as we know it is coming to an end.

And the death of meaning is an inevitable contributor to that conclusion, regardless of whom or from where one observes the world now. As it is an unsustainable reality from all angles.

The great tragedy is that onto itself the end of the world as we know it is not necessarily a terrible ordeal if people were allowed to perceive other ways of existing.

But as it stands, bleakness seems the only outcome as the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy running on a feedback loop of self-preservation.

Anyway… I hope I made enough sense in my rant in comparison to your sharply written and succinct comment. Again, I thank you for your words, even in your other comments in this thread.

I’m going to try and follow up on your writing.

We all need more people with your level of insight. And not in just “times like these”. But always.

So I wish you the best and hope to find more of your writing shared around along the way.

Cheers.

Yeah, Bazzite has the best word in town for a gaming distro.

Rendered speechless I am, as I weep at the sight of such sublime prose.

A delight worthy of a true bard!

Bravo!

Did ye mention the cursed option?? It is wretched and thou shalt not name it to others here!

“Amazon”! “Google”! “Apple”! “Microsoft”! These art with the devil and shalt be pledged to be forsaken! Forbidden words here, ye see? And thou shalt forsaketh these!

Linux, by the one Torvald is the bid! We shalt fork it or foster thine many bastard children to a better morrow.

And all sources shalt be seen!

And all protocols shalt be open!

To all who shalt join the bid of a morrow of freedom!

deleted by creator

Oh, absolutely. Biomagnification is inherent to the logic of raising through the trophic levels. So even if we forego the zoo experiment as a setting, in theory any time there’s a toxin or a man-made hazardous chemical due to pollution in the wild, we are bound to find higher levels of either due to the concentration effect alone.

We can even point that back to the study, as the zoo animals were eating domestic raised animals by humans and the inherent hazards of that practice surely increase the risk of cancer, not lower it. Maybe they can even start a lab grown meat trial with carnivorous zoo animals and see if the cancer rate actually lowers from that alone. In theory, it should.

Thank you!

If anyone here can find it, a few years ago there was also a meta study that evaluated the aggregate information provided by zoos and found that carnivore animals are a lot more likely to develop cancer than omnivore animals and herbivores. Herbivores, the least likely. Which from a trophic balance makes absolute sense. Given that a large predator without self regulation would require other population control occurrences to be in place from a meta-space perspective. And amino acid density doesn’t really discriminate what is growing, anyway. So, it all makes sense. As it’s supposed to.

And speaking of this, us Humans have to develop our own self-regulation at an individual level and species level combined or we’ll continue to predate on the environment and each other as a result of our own devised resource scarcity. The fact we fight viruses and cancer better and better only makes it more necessarily so. Lack of self regulation always leads to scarcity. It is how the initial predation systems were formed to begin with. Ambulant organisms reproduced and consumed without any inhibitors or restrictions, leading them to prey on each other when the lower trophic levels were no longer available to sustain their numbers and consumption. Again, it all makes sense. As it’s supposed to.

Yeah, RFK does sound like he believes the craziness he’s spewing. He’s gonna get a lot of people killed, that’s for sure. He already has. But the people who believe that he’s only gonna get the dumb side of Americans who believe him killed are so wrong. That’s not how this works. I get a lot of Americans on vacation where I live in Portugal. And it’s also true all over Europe and the rest of the world. And it is terrifying to think of the very probable outbreaks and who knows what else to come.

And thanks, I’ll use Wikipedia to read more about Lysenkoism over the weekend.

Thank you for the reply.

Thank you for clarifying. I’m sorry if I jumped in with my interpretation. I know who Lysenko was. But not much more than that he was a biologist who kept denying science in behalf of the state. So I didn’t know if that was what you meant and that is why I apologised in the advance if I was misinterpreting it.

But yeah, state dictating science. And the U.S. really seems to be headed to that level of catastrophes you described. I need to read more about Lysenkoism. Like I said, I didn’t know much about Lysenko other than he was a scientist betraying science for the state propaganda. I don’t even know if he believed the nonsense he was spreading. But then again, I don’t even know if the ones doing the same now do either. And I have a hard time reading up on people like that. Makes my stomach turn in revolt.

But as a permaculture enthusiastic and someone who has a project with his girlfriend that uses syntropic theory, I’m very curious to read about what kind of nonsense were they applying to farming back then. Do you have any suggestions to read? Like a book or an article? Or should I just put Lysenkoism in a search engine and eventually find the farming part? Would love to know more about this, so if you have some pointers, I would much appreciate to learn more about this.

I think it is comparing the Soviet’s movement spearheaded by a biologist named Trofim Lysenko to the the current lobbying to destroy science’s credibility. It was akin to the current lobbying against scientific integrity that started in the U.S. and bled everywhere else. People will immediately think of the hacks that move through the podcasts these days, I’m sure you can think of a few too. It’s using a veil of pseudoscience to confuse the layman and advance the purpose of a few under another veil, one of an ideology. Lysenko was very much like the figures of today like that kermit the frog imitation that passes for scientific expert on the “dumbtube”. I don’t want to name these horrific hacks. They’re already taking too much of the bandwidth as it is and for far too long. And I hate that most people that think they’re too smart to fall for their crap, fall right into the next trap, which is to go argue and generate more visibility for them. These people never learned the old online code “Do Not Feed The Troll”. We spotted them and let them starve. But I compared them more to Gremlins, because they multiply. The grifers spot the grift and chime in for the take.

I hope I didn’t misinterpreted the comment you asked about. But Lysenkoism is a great shorthand to describe it all indeed.