Ran Prieur

August 9.

2024-08-09T21:10:28Z

August 9. Continuing from the last post, if there is a world beyond this world, the closest I come to it is listening to music. The mystery is how something so profound can be so subjective, with completely different songs giving different people the feeling of connection to something greater. My favorite playlists are the ones constrained by obscurity, and this week I revised my ultimate obscurities playlist, songs that are Not On Spotify, and posted it to YouTube. It's just over an hour long, and the song I'm in love with right now is a dreamy 2009 ballad by the Australian band The Kill Devil Hills, Lucy-On-All-Fours. At first I thought it was about drugs. Now I think it's the same kind of song as Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna.

August 7.

2024-08-07T19:50:02Z

August 7. Five Reddit links, starting with the silliest. From a thread about things that only Americans do, I was surprised to learn that it's an American thing to lean on stuff.

A large and fascinating thread, What's the worst drug ever? It's between fentanyl and deliriants.

From Ask Old People, why there are no useless degrees. The entire comment:

Because in our day, education simply for the sake of education was a good and desirable thing. Colleges used to have the goal of turning out well-rounded citizens and no education was ever "wasted" because being educated - no matter the degree - was considered an objectively good thing. There were a lot of ways to contribute to society no matter what your degree was.

Now colleges are nothing more than job training programs churning out cogs for the machine, and have no interest in education for its own sake. Society no longer values an intelligent and well-rounded citizenry, either. In a culture where everything is monetized, most degrees will be "useless" if they're not strictly utilitarian.

Related, from two years ago, a very well written comment about the causes of the political troubles in America. The comment below it is less correct but more interesting: "The factories moving to low-cost countries has resulted in poverty for people who cannot wrap their heads around poverty not being caused by a moral failing, and it's driving them crazy."

Finally, from the Spirituality subreddit, a cool thread about kids saying things that suggest awareness of a reality beyond this world. I wonder how far we could go with this, if it was encouraged in normal families.

August 5.

2024-08-05T17:30:58Z

August 5. Posted nine days ago to the subreddit, The Failed Assassin, The Dictator, and The Magus. That link goes to the subreddit post, which contains the link to the article. What I find most interesting is that Mussolini survived an assassination attempt, just like Trump did, by making a sudden head motion which happened to dodge a bullet, and getting barely clipped, in Mussolini's case on the tip of his nose. This is a perfect example of the saying that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes.

The rest of the article is about occult mind control, and while I accept the occult, I don't think there's any magical shortcut for control. There are two ways to get someone else to do your will: find someone who already wants to do that thing and organize them, or apply overt social force and overcome stubborn resistance. It's possible that occult rituals could help, or synchronistically line up, with the first of those methods, to give motivation and luck to someone who already wants to do an assassination.

The comment in the post goes deeper into the esoteric beliefs of the American right. What I find most strange is that J.D. Vance and Opus Dei both believe in spiritual evil, and see themselves as fighting against it -- while I believe in spiritual evil and see them both completely serving it. It's almost like serving evil, and fighting evil, are not opposites, but two views of the same thing. Quoting Thaddeus Golas: "The seduction of evil is precisely in that it involves us in trying to eliminate it."

The common thread is compulsive fixation: a narrowing of focus that is self-reinforcing and hard to pull out of. Compulsive fixation looks like evil to everyone whose interests are excluded by that fixation. And if you're prone to fixation, an easy thing to fixate on is something you're against.