Day: January 7, 2021

The arc of autonomy

You start helpless. You may end helpless. It is one of the arcs of a human life.

The arc is about autonomy.

I think.

If story is the underpinning, then you are a story and there is an arc. You may define your autonomy in terms of ‘what I can meaningfully achieve for myself as framed by the customs and traditions I was raised on’ or you may define it as self-will, which (candidly) never seems to play out quite as well as including others in your self-definition.

Part of the arc is your contribution to the lifestream – whether you have children, and your children have children. But it’s not the most important part. Everyone can make a contribution to the human family, it doesn’t have to be genetic.

 

 

The Persistence of Saints

The persistence of saints that I speak of today is not the virtue of persistence, or steadfastness to duty which is customarily among the reasons they are saints at all. Nope, it’s the fact that those suckers stick around.

The persistence of saints has to do with their value to people after they are dead, for gain and the glory of a deity (or deep conception, or, since my religious and ideological tent is quite immense, even mere curiosity).

Where people are squeamish of god, they are rarely squeamish of saints, a fact I attribute to how you can meet a person any day of the week, but gods are so scarce that it’s easy to believe they’re not taking appointments this year, or any other. Even very secular people, folks with no religious affiliation, will follow cultural folkways about where to put pictures of important people in their moral formation; existential authors, rappers, midwives, farmers or dive instructors.

If I were to put a pin through any picture of an existentialist to suspend it in a saintly niche I suppose it would be de Beauvoir. She really cuts the crap on things especially on this whole evil thing.  -“Insisting that the future is undecided and that its form will be shaped by our present decisions Beauvoir argues that it is only by insisting on the dignity of today’s human beings that the dignity of those to come can be secured.” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I would put it over my desk. Or at the end of my bed, where I’m more likely to actually look at it.

 

 

a through line from the Brother’s War

Image

[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property–justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people–was not exacted from them.

screenshot of parlor post made by Proud Boys USA lamenting themselves proving to be much weaker than soy beta cuck communists who for months on end "managed to take on and beat whole armies of cops (and proud boys)".

Proud Boys on Parler (above typed out)

Extremely embarrassing to spend months mocking antifa and licking cop boot only to go out there and get absolutely rinsed by cops who were barely even trying. Weak stuff. Those teenage commies managed to take on and beat whole armies of cops (and proud boys) and they’re all skinny wimp soyboy betas, but we got scrubbed like it was nothing. And all for the sake of some rich oranage pedophile who doesn’t give a shit about any of us? Sad.

democracy at the Capitol

So despite preparing for the mob, the mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, and the Chief of Police, had a victory over the mob taken away because the Capital Police let the mob into the White House, and then the federal prosecutor refused to prosecute anyone, on 45’s orders. (This according to Racine, whom I heard interviewed.)

I’m going to keep the news turned off, this is some bullshit.