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.
August 7. 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.
August 16. What Is a Twin Flame? Lately it's a trendy word for a soulmate, but this 2022 article explains how it started out as something more specific and interesting:
Unlike life partners -- what we consider to be soul-mate relationships or "the one" -- twin flame relationships are intense and challenging relationships that force us to deal with our unresolved issues and, through trials, tribulations, and breakthroughs, become a bigger person. Because of this intensity, it's uncommon for twin flames to be a lifelong partnership. Rather, they are people who enter your life for a period of time to help you grow and steer you on course. "It is common for those relationships to separate because they are very difficult to maintain."
August 22. Scientists reveal a fascinating neurocognitive trait linked to heightened creativity: "Our study found that creative individuals do not perceive unusual information as odd; they process it similarly to typical information." My guess is that creative people perceive all information as odd. More precisely, neurotypicals have an information autopilot mode, which is confused by unusual information. Creative people do not have that mode, and must engage all information with their full conscious attention.
September 5. I'm taking another crack at one of my favorite subjects, motivation. I've said before that motivation is only a problem for humans, but now I'm thinking it's a problem for any organism that doesn't fit its environment. No squirrel ever said, "Oh no, not more nuts to gather." But in captive animals you get a mismatch between what they're made to do, and what they're permitted to do.
With a perfect fit between organism and environment, what you feel like doing and what's good for you to do are one and the same. I have some political ideas on how to get closer to that, to build society bottom-up from intrinsic motivation, instead of top down from money sucking up more money. But realistically, humans are so good at constructing novel environments, that we're always going to be somewhat in a limbo of unfit.
Some people say, instead of motivation, all you need is discipline. Either they're bullshitting, or they're playing on some kind of easy mode. I seem to have good discipline, enough to push myself through the school system with good grades, and do a few jobs where I came home with just enough energy to do basic tasks and sleep. At one point in my 20s, I pushed myself so hard that I started to have nightmares about being dragged to death. Another time, between jobs, I had such fatigue that I could barely walk to the store. Modern medicine drew a blank, and I was advised to have more fun.
Since then I've spent decades trying to tease out a compromise, practicing the subtle art of riding little stretches of feel-like-doing, to get some rest from driving myself. I've found that a good thing to do, when I'm unmotivated, is to play video games -- not all day, just for an hour or two. A good game reminds me what it's like to be in a zone of energizing activity, and that mental state often carries over into the outside world.
Lately I've found another trick. I'm working on being fully present, trying to balance my attention on the smallest bits of what I'm doing, in the smallest bits of time. I've reclaimed a habit from my teenage years, of gently touching objects that I pass, to remind myself of where my body is in space. When I do something clumsily, I slow down and do it again with full focus. Coinciding with these practices, I've noticed that chores are no longer painful. It's not like I enjoy washing dishes, but now the task feels barely harder than sitting on the couch. Also, I seem to have more free time.
I suspect that this is the secret talent of elite doers: they are naturally highly present. They have an intutitive knowledge of when to push through and when to ease off, and they work with such micro-scale efficiency that they tend not to burn out, but to slide into some kind of flow state.
September 16. D&D is anti-Medieval. "Gygax wrote D&D in a country where, 100 years before, frontier land was considered free for the taking. (19th century propaganda depicted the land's original Native American inhabitants as inimical savages, like orcs.) At the same period, the success of America's industrialist "robber barons" taught the country that birth and family weren't the keys to American power; the American keys were self-reliance, ability, and the ruthless accumulation of money."
September 20. Donald Hoffman has done a bunch of YouTube interviews, and this is one of the best, Proof That Reality Is An Illusion. I especially like the part from 17-29 minutes, about the consciousness of inanimate objects. I always say, it's not that rocks have consciousness, but that consciousness has rocks. Paraphrasing Hoffman, everything we experience is an expression of the universal mind, but our metaphorical VR headset is more tuned into the consciousness behind other humans, and less tuned into the consciousness behind rocks, which is why we see them as mere rocks.
Less coherent but more poetic, a comment from the Psychonaut subreddit on Can the cosmic joke be terrifying and not funny? Edited:
In this zero dimensional non-space I realized that nothing existed outside, there was in fact no outside. The earth, life, time, movement, existence all was made up. I had never moved, never passed a single moment from that zero point. You see the world through the lens of yourself. That means you don't talk to people, you talk to yourself through people. The ego is a narcissistic child. It is also a survival mechanism, but it is not the truth of what any human being actually is. It's just a thought pattern and reaction pattern. Being a subjective center of the universe is a thought pattern, objects existing outside is a thought pattern. When they collapse it can be clearly seen that you never left home. This state is not verbally describable, literally not speakable. You do exist but not in the way that you think because thinking is in the way.