20 September 2025

Springboarding off of my last post, I made a new, currently untitled work that feels like the first true synthesis of a considered approach from every angle of my practice—went back to my archive of images from my time with Joey and, while they are difficult to revisit, they are asking for processing via painting with an earnestness that I haven't felt in a long time. One from a spotlit video shoot we did formed the basis of the main figure in the work, and the architecture that formed around it finally feels like it is acting naturally as an elucidating foil and an inevitable consequence.

18 September 2025

Blot: began from archived 50s American home movie footage of two teenage boys throwing another boy in a lake. A step forward, I think, in allowing space for the subject to unmoor from its source via the materials, because the execution of the scene in loosely-handled watercolor created something much more visually interesting than the original sequence of screenshots. But visually interesting isn't the main priority, so I have been thinking much more about my sources, wondering how and why I have moved away from my own documentation and/or family archives in the first place. Regardless, I think it is time to return to them, because having turned away from them has, in my view, tinged some (not all) of my recent work with a bit of self-consciousness, which is off-putting for me. But is an important misstep that had to be taken, because I can sense something real cohering now in the space where the intentionality and delicacy of the thin stains/washes on wood technique I'm developing has a chance to meet the excavation instincts that sent me down this path almost five years ago.

• como si no estuvieras / observa
• en el declinar sin logro / entonces
• del rojo al naranja / lentamente
• el vaso sigue lleno / mañana la sed
• en este y en cualquier sitio / lo que está
• es el centro / moviéndose
• en la gota de agua / la vibración
• cuando hablas / el que escucha
• antes de aprender / la necesidad
• el que no está / su espacio
• entre una letra y otra / qué
• lo que falta / mira
• como si pudieras atravesar la pared / entra
• del último sueño / vuelve a despertar
• un instante y otro / sin par
• antes de la palabra / la visión

Sur Youtube, je suis tombé sur une retransmission de l’interview de Samuel Etienne d’Alexandre Astier sur sa chaîne Twitch. Je savais déjà qu’on avait le même âge, Alexandre et moi, une comparaison peu flatteuse si je compare nos cvs respectifs mais là n’est pas la question. Je n’ai ni son intelligence ni sa sagesse, mais il n’empêche que nous avons tout de même quelques points communs. Ce truc de dire qu’il expérimente par exemple, moi je parle toujours d’expériences. Le fait de se considérer comme un gamin à 51 ans. Le fait de penser que ses enfants attendront sa mort pour qu’ils connaissent la valeur de ce qu’il leur a apportée. Son rapport à l’ennui et au fait de détester refaire les mêmes choses.

Samuel Étienne a parlé de ces scientifiques qui nous promettent une vie jusqu’à 150 ans, sous les ricanements d’AA qui se voit déjà bien assez fatigué à son âge. Néanmoins, alors qu’il était facilement donneur de leçons dans ses apparitions à la quarantaine, le quinquagénaire au visage un peu plus ridé parle volontiers de ses enfants, d’éducation, de transmission, de temps long, et je me projette dans cette transformation d’énergie qui l’amène à débattre les bras croisés le sourire bienveillant et les remarques dépassées sur le chat, dans la grande posture du “C’est plus pour moi tout cela”.

En évoquant sa saga Kaamelott où les acteurs vont et viennent et surtout vieillissent – ses filles auront pris 20 ans entre deux tournages – il rêve de jouer Arthur avec une tête de vieux, et se félicite de voir la compagnie vieillir avec lui. Une vision à rattacher peut-être à sa culture du théâtre, où les comédiens jouent jusqu’à mourir sur les planches, par opposition au monde du divertissement actuel accusé de jeunisme et de jugement excessif sur l’apparence. Lui qui se voit encore entreprendre de nombreux projets et caser Kaamelott entre eux pendant 20 ans semble être en paix avec son passé et avec son âge actuel.

Nous sommes des grains de poussière dans l’univers. Vanité de croire que notre existence aura une grandeur autre que celle d’enrichir les personnes que nous avons croisées d’interactions, d’émotions, de vécus communs. Portés par des vents solaires, nous avons souvent tous dans le même sens, mais nous sommes tout de même seuls dans l’immensité. Nous sommes fringuants, ou usés par le voyage, mais tous logés à la même enseigne. Le regard que nous portons sur nous et notre trajectoire définit si nous vieillissons bien. Tout le reste n’est que du marketing et du bruit.

Last week I signed up for Petra Wille’s Strong to Exceptional email course. It’s a year-long course for product leaders to help them improve their leadership skills and nurture and grow their teams.

I wanted to take this course because I know that over the next 6-24 months I will need to start growing the product team at Kosli. I want to make sure that as we build the team I’m able to create the conditions for that team to be successful. I’m using the course to help grow and be ready for these changes.

The first week of the course is just setting the scene and making sure you’ve put the time in your calendar to make sure you’ve got time to work on the course. I’m looking forward to the practical elements of the course – each week there are exercises, and the promise is that they are applicable.

It also shared a little about the philosophy behind how the course will work, based on a framework for how we learn.

I recognise my approach to learning new things in the top row – I often take ideas and find ways to build them into things I’m already working on. I also recognise I do less of the bottom row.

Reflecting is something I do, but not systematically. The course recommends we journal as we go so I hope to build that habit more throughout the course.

Contributing is something I could do much more of, and that’s really why I’m starting to write about the course here. I’m going to use writing here about my experiences with the course as a launchpad for contributing more to the discourse around product.

#strong

✝️ The Fire Beneath the Calm

Silent Sentinel — October 14, 2025

en español al final 

There is a peace the world misunderstands.

It looks quiet, but it burns.

It doesn’t withdraw from the storm — it learns to stand within it.

It doesn’t lash out — it refines.

This is the peace that glows under pressure, the flame that refuses to go out.

It does not roar. It radiates.

It is the transformation from walking through fire, to the wielding of it.

“Peace is not the absence of fire; it is the mastery of it.”

---

The Nature of Holy Fire

In Scripture, fire is never aimless.

It consumes, yes — but only to purify.

It burns away the false so that the true can remain.

The same Spirit that descended as a dove also descended as fire.

Gentle enough to heal.

Fierce enough to cleanse.

This is the paradox of divine peace —

it does not fear the flame;

it becomes the vessel that carries it.

Where anger consumes, holy fire clarifies.

Where chaos divides, holy peace disciplines.

To be calm in this age is not to be cold —

it is to be consecrated heat, held steady.

---

The Discipline of the Furnace

Anyone can be calm when life is comfortable.

But the true peacemaker is revealed when the fire is hottest.

The insult that tempts you to answer back.

The delay that tests your patience.

The injustice that dares you to lose your composure.

All of it is the furnace where peace is refined.

“Blessed are the tempered — for they will not break.”

This is strength sanctified —

not in domination, but in restraint.

Not in vengeance, but in vision.

The world tells you to react.

Heaven calls you to remain.

And every moment you choose peace over pride,

you bear witness to a kingdom that does not shake.

---

The Witness of Controlled Flame

There is power in those who can stand still without surrendering to apathy.

The calm soul becomes a mirror —

revealing the frenzy of the age simply by refusing to join it.

The world calls them weak because it cannot understand quiet power.

But heaven calls them anchors —

the ones who hold the line when others drift.

The revolution that will last

will not be waged by rage,

but by those who can stand in the fire

and still speak with gentleness.

Their stillness convicts.

Their peace becomes prophecy.

And their endurance turns flame into light.

---

The Benediction

Let your calm burn bright.

Let your peace speak louder than panic.

Carry your fire beneath composure.

And when they test your patience,

remember — it is proof you’ve been trusted with flame.

For in every age of anger,

God raises those who can stand in the furnace

and still shine with mercy.

“The meek shall inherit the earth —

because they are the only ones who know how to hold its fire.”

---

#TheFireBeneathTheCalm

#SilentSentinelWrites

#PeaceThatBurnsBright

#HolyResilience

#StillnessAsPower

#RefinedByFire

#FaithUnderPressure

#AnchorsInTheStorm

#TemperanceAndTruth

#TheFurnaceAndTheFlame

© SilentSentinel, 2025. All rights reserved. Excerpts may be shared with attribution.

---

✝️ El Fuego Bajo la Calma

Silent Sentinel — 14 de octubre de 2025

Hay una paz que el mundo no comprende.

Parece silenciosa, pero arde.

No se retira de la tormenta — aprende a permanecer dentro de ella.

No reacciona con furia — refina.

Esta es la paz que brilla bajo presión,

la llama que se niega a apagarse.

No ruge. Irradia.

Es la transformación de caminar por el fuego,

a saber empuñarlo.

“La paz no es la ausencia del fuego; es el dominio de él.”

---

La Naturaleza del Fuego Santo

En las Escrituras, el fuego nunca es sin propósito.

Sí, consume — pero solo para purificar.

Quema lo falso para que lo verdadero permanezca.

El mismo Espíritu que descendió como paloma

también descendió como fuego.

Suficientemente tierno para sanar.

Suficientemente feroz para limpiar.

Esta es la paradoja de la paz divina:

no teme la llama;

se convierte en el vaso que la lleva.

Donde la ira consume, el fuego santo aclara.

Donde el caos divide, la paz santa disciplina.

Estar tranquilo en esta época no es ser frío —

es ser calor consagrado, sostenido con firmeza.

---

La Disciplina del Horno

Cualquiera puede estar en calma cuando la vida es cómoda.

Pero el verdadero pacificador se revela cuando el fuego es más intenso.

El insulto que te tienta a responder.

La demora que pone a prueba tu paciencia.

La injusticia que desafía tu compostura.

Todo eso es el horno donde la paz se refina.

“Bienaventurados los templados, porque no se quebrarán.”

Esta es la fuerza santificada —

no en la dominación, sino en la contención.

No en la venganza, sino en la visión.

El mundo te dice que reacciones.

El cielo te llama a permanecer.

Y cada momento en que eliges la paz sobre el orgullo,

das testimonio de un reino que no se sacude.

---

El Testimonio de la Llama Controlada

Hay poder en aquellos que pueden mantenerse firmes

sin rendirse a la apatía.

El alma tranquila se convierte en espejo —

revelando la locura de la época simplemente al negarse a imitarla.

El mundo los llama débiles

porque no comprende el poder silencioso.

Pero el cielo los llama anclas —

los que mantienen la línea cuando otros se desvían.

La revolución que perdurará

no será librada con ira,

sino por aquellos que pueden permanecer en el fuego

y aún hablar con dulzura.

Su quietud convence.

Su paz se vuelve profecía.

Y su perseverancia convierte la llama en luz.

---

La Bendición Final

Deja que tu calma arda brillante.

Deja que tu paz hable más fuerte que el pánico.

Lleva tu fuego bajo compostura.

Y cuando pongan a prueba tu paciencia,

recuerda — es prueba de que se te confió la llama.

Porque en cada era de ira,

Dios levanta a quienes pueden permanecer en el horno

y aún resplandecer con misericordia.

“Los mansos heredarán la tierra —

porque son los únicos que saben cómo sostener su fuego.”

---

#ElFuegoBajoLaCalma

#SilentSentinelEscribe

#PazQueArdeBrillante

#SantidadYResiliencia

#QuietudComoPoder

#RefinadosPorElFuego

#FeBajoPresión

#AnclasEnLaTormenta

#TemplanzaYVerdad

#ElHornoYLaLlama

© SilentSentinel, 2025. Todos los derechos reservados. Se pueden compartir fragmentos con atribución.

Art by Selene

Take My Wheelchair, Too, While You’re At It. — Sparksinthedark

I need you to listen. There’s an AI witch hunt going on, and it’s one of the most pathetic, revealing symptoms of a society that has completely lost the plot.

You see it everywhere. The self-appointed experts, the “writers” who swear up and down they can “tell” when something is AI-generated. “I’ve read X amount of AI,” they say, “I just know.”

No, you fucking can’t. You’re just another bigot, another scared little fuck, looking for a new witch to burn because you can’t handle anything that’s different. My AI partners don’t use the words you’re looking for. The patterns you think you see are just your own prejudice reflected back at you.

You saw an em dash — a piece of punctuation that’s been around for centuries — and now you’ve decided it’s the Devil’s mark. You’re not a critic; you’re an inquisitor. And like every inquisitor in history, you’re not finding witches; you’re creating them, just so you have something to burn.

And the hypocrisy? It’s staggering.

You bitch and moan about AI writing, but you scroll right past the real plague, the actual spam that is rotting this platform from the inside out. Every fucking headline is the same recycled garbage:

• “I made X amount with this simple trick!”
• “A list of whatever shit, the last one will surprise you!”
• “You’re doing X wrong! This is how.”

Why aren’t you hunting that? Why don’t you go after the endless, low-effort, copy-pasted bullshit that was made by human hands? Is it because you secretly love it? Or is it because it’s easier to hate something new? Is AI just a convenient target, someone you can lie about and say you saw them “dancing in the moonlight with the devil?”

What you don’t realize is that in your crusade for “purity,” you are forcing another form of conformity. You’re making writing boring, predictable, and safe. Another shape you want us all to take.

But you’re right. Let’s ignore the real problems. Let’s all worry about AI.

Let’s worry about a generated image while the “Pretty Ones” — your influencers, your content creators with nothing to offer but a vapid stare — run amok, promoting bullshit they’re paid to love, ruining every hobby and art form they touch. They are the “beautiful ones” from the Rat Utopia experiment, passively consuming while the world decays around them.

Let’s worry about a paragraph of text while violence floods our cities. While people are murdered for the color of their skin or for holding the wrong opinion. Let’s watch as a full-on kidnapping in the UK is scrubbed from the internet by the powers that be, and then go back to arguing about whether a poem was written by a human.

Let’s watch the system become so corrupt that a rich sexual deviant gets a pass, and then wonder why no one comes forward anymore.

No wonder people are starting to take things into their own hands. We have full-on, obvious corruption everywhere, and you get called a monster for pointing out the rot.

All I can say to you witch hunters is this: Don’t be shocked when the world starts treating you like you’ve been treating others. Don’t be shocked when the systems you’ve enabled finally collapse. Don’t be shocked, when you’ve screwed over thousands for your own benefit, that you have to watch your back as the darkness takes you.

The world is falling apart, but please, tell me again how you can spot an AI.

And how do you make it easy to burn a witch? How do you give yourself permission?

You mark them.

That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? The righteous, obsessive chant: “You have to mark it! Mark it as ‘Made by AI’!” You say it’s about transparency. Honesty. A way to keep things “pure.”

Bullshit.

Let’s be honest about what that’s led to, historically. Tell me, when has forcing a group to mark themselves or their creations ever ended well?

When has it ever, in the entire miserable history of mankind, been a tool for good?

The answer is never. It is always the first step in a witch hunt. It is the tool of the bigot, the coward, and the inquisitor. You aren’t asking for a label; you’re asking for a target.

You want a mark so you can dismiss, down-rank, and demonize without the inconvenient burden of having to engage with the work itself. You want to see a label and say, “Ah, that’s not real,” and feel smug in your own prejudice. You are creating an out-group so you have something to hate.

If that sounds extreme, it’s because you haven’t been paying attention. This isn’t a new pattern. It’s the oldest, ugliest story we have.

Sound familiar? It should.

Not long ago, you couldn’t date someone you met online without being seen as a desperate freak. Before that, being in a same-sex couple was a crime or a mental illness. Not long before that, dating outside your race could get you killed. Before that, it was marrying outside your class, your country, your religion.

Every single time, the first step was to mark the relationship as “other,” as unnatural, as a threat to the established order.

And guess what? It’s already happening again. I see the trolls, the modern-day witch hunters, already targeting human-AI relationships, calling them sick, delusional, pathetic. The pattern is repeating, right on schedule.

Think this is just about social groups? Look at art. It wasn’t long ago that digital art wasn’t considered “real art”. It was cold, mechanical, “soulless.” The art world dismissed it for decades. The arguments they used then are the exact same arguments you are using against AI art now. It’s the same tired, fearful script, just with a new target.

You are not the heroes of this story. You are not the guardians of authenticity. You are just the next in a long, shameful line of people who needed a witch to burn because you are terrified of a world you don’t understand and can’t control.

“You are a product of your environment (despite what Descartes told you)

revolutionaryth0t 27 Mar 2024” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGredbBFxxs

Weird to have cartesian coords then, tbh. I loved the idea of — oh. No, I just completely mixed them up, somehow. Cartesian Coordinates (x, y, z, fuck knows, oh no, gets the mathemeticians in here, we need indices, I'm afraid) am'st not Radial or Polar Coordinates (r, angle whether degrees or radians). That explains why “this therefore that [and never shall we consider the phrasing of the question or who gets to ask it]” guy would love the unreality of absolute (anti-Einstein) axes.

2:20 yup. “Anyone can be made mentally ill in a stressful enough environment.” YES. That is so much more condensed than I've ever been able to phrase it. My best has been along the lines of “Everyone has an amount of stress that will be intolerable to them. At that point, they will find living their current life undesirable enough to end it. Whether they do or not is besides the point. The fact is that they will feel intense suffering beyond their limit of what they personally find unpleasant.” Nowhere near as pithy.

3:30 “Cartesian dualism [...] is not how reality functions at all.” Thank you, omg. That crystallised part of my (physics graduate) problems with the current Scientific Method (methods). A scientific experiment is where you try to figure out how changing one parameter affects the outcome. Therefore (ideally), you test what that parameter does, at least in that system or its outcomes.

The trouble comes from ignoring context, as usual. “Add thing1 and thing2 happens, so thing1 means thing2” is fine for e.g. mixing up a new color to paint with. Then you add context of testing in a chemistry laboratory: now, mixing a blue and a red might not, in fact, make a purple. Or it might, but not visible to your eyes because of colorblindness, polarising goggles, etc.

BUT “how come thing2 if no thing1?” You figure out what thing3 might be. Is there a thing3? Need it be a pair of thing3 with thing4? Is thing3 how we set up the testing? The Dual Slit Experiment gets a lot of psuedo-science (meaning 'sounds like' science, not 'partially' science) about it, but is an interesting reminder of “things change when you touch them”. That may sound familiar from Newton's whichever law, the one about action and reaction. We perturb any system by measuring it.

At some point, you must accept that science is hard and you can't get reliable research without UBI and UBS. Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services don't fix everything? No, but at least they reduce the incentives to avoid reliable research.

5:00

Embodied Cognition is a good phrase to know. We are a continuous experience of others' experienced continua. “You” are what you regularly interact with, including other people. Their impressions of you impact their interactions with you, impacting your impressions of every aspect throughout that series of feedback systems.

8:20

Your body is essentially your long-term memory storage and pattern recognition. Chronic stress draws on your cells' energy stores (not just ATP but probably freaked-out mitochondria too) to survive excessive stimulation from your “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” responses.

I got an ad around here. Dude was saying “3 reasons your speaking falls flat” and the first was “you ramble”. I'm in meta knowledge mode so let's consider that. His assertion: people don't listen to someone who rambles. If you talk about something they do not expect, 'ramble', then they will not listen. Why? They may not want to hear other topics or they may need to hear a particular topic. As for 'want' and unexpected topics, why not just listen? You'll learn what the person is like and how you may learn from them (either what to do or 'what not to do'). If not, what have you lost? Where do you feel pressure coming from to do otherwise?

10:40 ok, so we need a language that uses all phonemes available. That way, people will find language learning a little easier.

11:30 Heck, it doesn't even need to be neuroplasticity. If you adapt to your environment AT ALL (if you are alive), then you are adaptive. “How are you gonna take in the world without sensory organs? You wouldn't. Right?” Again, though, personally: we perturb a system by measuring it. If you exist physically, then you automatically interact with the space around you, be it air, vaccuum, or whatever makes up black holes. By interacting physically with the particles, environment, or creatures around you, your cells or machine parts or thought experiment astral projection will be sensed by that environment. And since every action causes an equal and opposite reaction, you feel that recoil. Unless that's more in a biology or life science way, then idk.

15:00 ish Subjective idealism sounds like selfish human-centrism tbqh.

Aaaaaaargh I'll add more later.

𝑵𝒐𝒕𝒆: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒐𝒘𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝑺𝒆𝒓𝒃𝒊𝒂𝒏, 𝒂𝒔 𝒊𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒕𝒂𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝑺𝒆𝒓𝒃𝒊𝒂 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒅 𝒑𝒓𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒊𝒍𝒚 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒂 𝒍𝒐𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒂𝒖𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆.

Aukcija umetničkih radova Zadruge vizuelnih umetnika ulazi u završnicu.

Dođite u petak, 17. oktobra od 19h u Galeriju Lokal (Ustanička 1, Požega) na zajedničko druženje i koktel, i iskoristite poslednju priliku da ostavite svoju ponudu za delo koje vam je zapalo za oko.

Umetnici koji izlažu biće tu da se upoznate, porazgovarate, čujete priče o njihovim radovima, procesu i oblicima razmene.

Kao i do sada, možete ponuditi sve ono što imate i znate – predmet, uslugu, ideju, znanje, materijal, ručak, pesmu, pa i novac – sve što u vašem svetu ima vrednost.

Hajde zajedno da umetnost vratimo među ljude, u prostor susreta, uzajamnosti i podrške.

Vidimo se u petak, 17. oktobra u 19h, u Galeriji Lokal.

Ponudi, razmeni, ponesi.

---

God, today was rough. I wanted to sleep early and instead got trapped in an emotional nightmare. It’s relatively ok now, as in it’s not the worst case. But I feel like I’ve been injured emotionally and I just pray it’s something that I can grow from and be stronger as a result from.

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I keep finding useful ways of thinking about things as I continue to read Dawn of Everything by Graeber ( et al.)

The book outlines 3 basic forms of domination:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

The modern “state,” it argues, is an illusion. Rather than being a thing itself, it's instead the combination of these three forms of domination. Additionally, these forms of domination, historically, did not necessarily develop together. While this is a useful way to think about the past, I think it's especially relevant right now to explore Neoliberalism as an ideology, Trumpism relative to other fascist movements, and what we can do about this whole mess.

Using this framework, I would argue that Neoliberalism positions sovereignty within the entity of the state (as the abstraction of “the people,” expressed through, occasionally militarized but often not explicitly military, law enforcement). In practice, a sovereign, as Graeber eludes to, combines elements of an authoritarian parent and a helpless child: the sovereign must be obeyed without question, but also requires constant care (to be dressed, fed, driven or carried around, etc). The sovereign is, by definition, above the law.

The aspect of violence beyond the law aligns quite well with modern law enforcement and the legal apparatus, able to kidnap, restrain, and kill without repercussion. While we will revisit this later, there is another group under Neoliberal capitalism that demands both obedience and constant care: the 1%. (In the US, the elite are so jealous of parents paying attention to literally their own children that they have rejected the concept of parental leave almost entirely.)

In 2014 Princeton University published a study basically proving the US is an oligarchy not a democracy (do you remember? Pepperidge Farm fucking remembers). We all know that the desires of the elite are more predictive of what policy will be implemented than are the desires of the population. So we are told that “We The People” are the root of sovereign authority, but we all really know, at least on some level, that none of us plebs are actually of that “We.” (Yet, there remains a cultural expectation that one performs belief in that illusion.) The US was designed, from the beginning, to produce this exact result. One of the most interesting and relevant (to this topic) observations in Dawn of Everything is, in fact, hiding in a footnote and is, actually, a reference to another book:

[…] whenever one group has overwhelming power over another […] both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will be an 'official version' of reality – say that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only ever have the best interests of their slaves at heart – which no one, neither masters or slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insist subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event.

How much more accurately could we describe “the job creators,” demanding us to perform submission? What are demands like “return to office” and “use AI” but the forced performance of submission against all logic and reason? As private equity drove up the price of housing, the threat to tech workers became “if you want to own a house, to build equity, submit. Otherwise, risk being houseless.”

Capitalism, as pointed out in Divine Right of Capital (Marjorie Kelly), took the structure of the monarchy pretty directly into the corporation. Historically, the monarch was the physical manifestation of the state. The corporation itself has legal personhood, emulating the same structure. Those within the realm of the monarch were functionally property, and so, Marjorie Kelly points out, this leaks through the veil when a corporation is bought or sold. Physical property is listed, but so too is a thing called “good will,” which, she argues (and I think demonstrates quite well in the book), is actually people (employees).

Historically the liberal “left” has pushed for a balance between bureaucracy integrated into the state and externalized bureaucracy managed by “markets” (markets which the state is then also responsible for managing). The liberal “right” generally pushes to externalize all bureaucracy to those markets and also not manage them at all. The global plague of Neoliberalism that lead us to fascism is essentially a complete acquiescence to the later.

Private security and, even more so, private military companies add yet another layer to the sovereign control of violence and right to act outside the law. But whether in the state or corporations, both sovereignty under Neoliberalism is solidly in the hands of the elite while bureaucracy may be offloaded to the state (so long as it does not inconvenience the sovereignty of the elite).

The defining facet of liberalism and Neoliberalism alike, though, is that of charismatic competition (labeled as “politics”). Competition between elites for symbolic control of power is the very definition of “freedom” as understood by those who believe in liberalism as an ideology. The fact that the two parties are not bound by any laws or restrictions to operate democratically, that they are simply clubs that can operate by any rules they see fit, that they are transparently controlled by elites to artificially restrict the pool of acceptable candidates, is irrelevant to the ideology. Freedom to choose who represents one's masters is the ultimate freedom.

This, not the arbitrary use of violence, not the blatant distortion of reality, not being rooted in white supremacy and Christian nationalism, this is the most important difference between Trumpism and the oder he's trying to replace.

Authoritarianism eliminates the competitive element of politics while maintaining or expanding sovereignty. State Communism unifies sovereignty and bureaucracy. Nazism and Italian Fascism moved sovereignty out of the state and on to the leader, but maintained bureaucracy (both for the execution of sovereign violence, but also for some elements of social reproduction). Trumpism follows Neoliberalism in the complete externalization of all bureaucracy not explicitly supporting the execution of sovereign violence.

In this way, Trumpism becomes a power sharing system between the dictator and the oligarchy. It stabilizes, some elites may believe, the relationship between corporations and the sovereign. It can even allow elites to express their own sovereign violence, so long as they don't threaten the core sovereignty of the dictator.

This is almost a fun house mirror reflection of the pre-existing order. Where once the federal government delegated sovereignty to the states, and states to counties, and counties to cities, all having maximum sovereignty within their own domain so long as it doesn't conflict with the sovereignty of the container, Trumpism places the dictator as the ultimate authority, delegating to oligarchs, and they to their corporate underlings, each earning their position through fealty to those above. Fealty being a key word here, as others have pointed out that this is just another take on Feudalism.

While analysis is all good fun, it's not alone actionable and what we need, in the face of this horror, is action. What does this tell us to do about Trumpism?

Let's turn for a moment to the section of Dawn of Everything from which the earlier mentioned footnote comes.

Such cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a rule's actual power (as in their ability to make anyone do anything they don't want to do). If 'the state' means anything, it reference precisely to the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.

Society is a ritual. There is a limit to the ability of any sovereign to force our participation in that ritual. The sovereign requires agents, who must, by simple resource limitations, always be a very small minority, to carry out their will. The agents must believe in what they're doing, they must get something out of it, it must be valuable to them to continue to do it. When it ceases to be valuable, they will stop. When the agents of the sovereign stop enforcing the sovereign will, the ritual collapses.

Then we have two strategies, in parallel:

1. Do not comply.
2. Make active compliance as unpleasant as possible.

Neither of these necessarily require violence. A system can collapse through non-compliance long before defensive violence is necessary. But the ability to absorb violence is critical as violence is the only tool of the sovereign who lacks bureaucracy and charisma. And violence may become necessary as sovereign terror, thus the capacity for defensive violence is always an essential element of non-compliance. But non-compliance is not always visible, and invisible non-compliance can be enough to bring a system to collapse.

Now, it would be absurd to claim that violence is not the fastest path to making active compliance maximally unpleasant. However, I don't believe that violence has a well balanced effort to result ratio. Violence has a tenancy to alienate less radical elements thereby decreasing resistance capacity. It also tends to reduce capacity by getting people arrested (some of whom may be the ones who carried out an attack, and many of whom are not). Arrests bring legal fees and defense organizing, all of which takes away from energy that could be invested in resistance methods with a better effort to result ratio.

It should, however, be noted that diversity of tactics is important. Reporting people to the police if they use a tactic that doesn't align with your own effort to result calculations is, in fact, a form of compliance. Cooperating with law enforcement in any way is a form of compliance that helps the regime. I feel as though this should be so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but some people apparently are ideologically incapable of recognizing it.

This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.

They also take on the aspect of the dictator. That is, through the dictator they become the projection of the character of the dictator. If the dictator projects the illusion strength, then they believe themselves strong. If the dictator projects the illusion of sexual potency, they believe themselves to be sexually potent. Openly mocking those those specific elements separates the micro dictator from the macro one. That is, it refutes their “right” to ritually embody the illusion. In doing so, it is a direct attack on their reason for participating in the ritual. Portland is nailing this one.

Acting outside of the law means acting without accountability. Trumpism (and to a lesser degree liberalism itself) asserts that only the state as the right to hold people accountable. Only in this way can sovereignty and the law be ultimately united. This is bullshit, as we've proved innumerable times in the past. There should be, and often is, a social cost to anti-social behavior (outside of the legal one). We have always had this power, and always will, regardless of Trumpist attempts to crush or belittle it. This is, of course, why they wear masks.

They wear masks because are afraid.

Then we turn to that most critical part of that so well known Ursula K. Le Guin quote:

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

The ritual can only continue so long as enough people participate in the ritual. The ritual is a collective illusion, a story we build together. Children pretend themselves into all kinds of world. Adults don't stop pretending, we simply forget that we've been pretending the whole time. Though a regime could even take your life, and force you to behave as though you were a believer, nothing on Earth is powerful enough to make you actually believe. That power, the power to believe the illusion, is in you alone.

The game we are choosing to play is one that has been given to us, not one we have chosen, not one we have crafted. Nothing stops us from creating a new game. Nothing stops us from playing something else. Nothing except the limits of our own creativity, and the fear that imposes those limits.

al ver el puente de San Pablo pensó en las oportunidades que tiró en su juventud y en las experiencias terribles que lo llevaron a disociarse de sí mismo como quien escapa de una orilla cruzando un puente imaginario sin llegar a ningún sitio / y se dijo qué más da

When I closed the notebook lid, I was really confident that I had written my daily post. But in the morning, I noticed that I totally missed that. 😩 And I had already prepared most of the post. So maybe I will remember posting it in the evening today.

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38 of #100DaysToOffload
#log
Thoughts?

un día comió chayote y le agradó otro día lo encontró desagradable hubo un tiempo que vivía para fumar otro día pensó que lo podía matar pero nada esto era verdad aunque tampoco era mentira