In 1741, Ludvig Holberg wrote a novel about an extraordinary subterranean journey undertaken by a student named Niels Klim. While exploring a cave in Bergen, Norway, Klim unexpectedly falls deep through the Earth's crust and emerges into a hollow underworld. He discovers Planet Nazar, an inner world illuminated by its own miniature central sun. Klim initially lands in Potu, a highly sophisticated, egalitarian utopian kingdom inhabited entirely by intelligent, mobile tree-people. In this unique society, positions of authority are strictly merit-based. Because Klim can run exceptionally fast but makes rash decisions, the deliberate tree-people find him ill-suited for governing and employ him as a country courier. Through his courier travels, Klim observes various underground cultures and introduces European technologies to Nazar. Gaining influence, he turns power-hungry and initiates a tyrannical military revolutionagainst the native trees. The tree-people ultimately overthrow his regime, forcing Klim into exile. He escapes through a narrow fissure, tumbling back to the surface of the Earth to live out a quiet life as a humble town clerk in Bergen. You can read the full story here: gutenberg.org/files/27884/27…

One time, in my youth, I ate some mushrooms with dubious psychoactive properties. I have to admit that not even then would I've been able to come up with that story.

Consent is the sexual language of prostitution.

I’m genuinely shocked when I see girls tweet stuff like, “maybe teach your sons not to stare at my huge perky tits and nipples when I’m wearing a tight semi-transparent top with no bra instead of telling me how to dress???”

I'm glad to see you survived the birthday celebrations.

Anyway, it's a sort of consolation that one of the most useless professions of the modern world, being a poet, is actually one that can not, as of yet, be replaced by AI. 4/4

Indeed. There's a reason the best soldiers have always been farms boys. And it's not primarily because they are physically superior, but simply because they are accustomed to things being killed.

Be that as it may, my point in the original post rests more on these riots increasingly being driven by non-French populations.

Doesn't your first post contradict the second?

And then, some times, it's 1789.

The West is bankrupt, but not in any sense our leaders would recognise. We're not on the brink for lack of cuts to social security or healthcare. We allowed ourselves the luxury of lies. We thought ourselves so rich and powerful reality was optional. The debt has now come due.

I'll go out on a limb, in full knowledge this might make me look like a jackass later on, and state that what they are describing, a useful battlefield robot, performing tasks that now take human hands, on any relevant timescale, at $10,000, is as likely as my Olympic sprint gold

Young women have a hard time figuring out how men can have sex without wanting to immediately claim them. She thinks “but I’m special, how can they not see this?” And yes, she is special, but so is everyone else. Everyone has their unique personality, story and body. In the sense everyone’s special, no one is. Sexual diversity becomes the thrill. Once every woman is having sex in hopes of a relationship, we’ve created a culture of free sexual diversity for men (which to many becomes their kryptonite). Women try to secure a relationship through sex and hormonal connection yet cannot fathom how men can’t be persuaded by something literally everyone can give and call it evil, failing to see their own feminine manipulation tactic. They’ll say men are so bad and ignore what women are doing as a whole which is making men less likely to want to commit to anyone. I’ve battled with the “do women have agency” question. It seems that we do, but the second something doesn’t go the way we intended to, we pretend we don’t. And that is exactly where the new definition for the word rape comes from.

Legend has it, in the winter of 928, King Henry I (the Fowler) of East Francia was marching beyond the Elbe River against the West Slavic pagan tribe of the Hevelli, and ordered a lowland fortress to be built here in today’s Ziesar, Brandenburg 🇩🇪 According to local tradition, the fortress was heavily fortified with seven towers, seven bridges, seven walls, and seven moats, to better protect the place, and to frighten the Hevelli, because seven was an unlucky — devil’s number for them. 
Today the castle museum tells the story of this place, and of Christianization by Frankish kings, Charlemagne and others. In my picture is a 13th-century miniature of the baptism of Clovis, the warrior king of the Franks, which took place in Reims by the hand of Saint Remi, around 498. 
And then there is the beautiful plain late Gothic brick chapel, in these wonderful red tones, like so many buildings in this area.

In Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982) we find two households set in stark contrast to each other. The first is that of the Ekdahls, a theatrical family. The lengthy depiction of their Yuletide celebrations in the first hour of the film is thoroughly pagan in spirit—though it concludes with a perfunctory reading of the story of the birth of Jesus, during which everyone observes a stiff and obligatory solemnity. The other household is that of the rigid Bishop Vergérus, which is utterly devoid of joy, and even of color. There are two tendencies in Bergman—the optimistic/life-affirming (Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries) and the gloomy (Seventh Seal, Winter Light). In Fanny and Alexander, these tendencies confront each other. And this film helps us make explicit what the “gloom” consists in: it is fundamentally Christian. Almost all the gloominess to be found elsewhere in Bergman stems, in one way or another, from his struggle to deal with his loss of Christian faith, and search for meaning in a Godless universe. It is not hard to see where this element in Bergman’s character comes from: his father was a prominent Lutheran minister, later chaplain to the King of Sweden. And it was upon his father that Bergman based the character of the sadistic Bishop Vergérus. As to the “pagan,” life-affirming element . . . well, that apparently emerges quite unconsciously, from deep within Bergman’s Nordic soul. Ultimately, the pagan is victorious over the Christian in both Fanny and Alexander, and, it seems, in Bergman himself.

Is it incredibly silly? Yes. But it's also sort of a good thing. It's a symptom of WWII becoming just history, along with Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. It was weaponised to justify a lot of shit in the post war era. Better it's ridiculed and dismissed.

But if you didn't engage in "Wrong think" you wouldn't be liable for punishment. So, you see, it's all on you. That's the conservative perspective, when you define conservatism as reflexively defending the status quo, even though that status quo is red in tooth and claw leftism.

Kvinner vant alle rettigheter, menn beholdt alt ansvar.

Rumours are that Saudi-Arabia is mustering a coalition of the purchased to try to push back the Ansar Allah forces. But odds are it'll be far too late. Just looking at the map is deceiving, as the "Houthis" already hold the major population centres. It'd take a major invasion.

Politicians have been accused of living in a bubble for ages. But it's more true than ever. The nature of the career ladder weeds out anyone with any real expertise or truly intelligent. There's no one in the room, even from the civil service, to tell them the facts. 1/2