The Spartan Utopia and the Death of the Buddha (Mahāparinibbāna Sutta)

A sort of footnote on the historical reality (or unreality) of Lycurgus of Sparta, less than three minutes long:

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/mZw9_Tm0obs

And, now, a sort of footnote to a footnote: The Historical Buddha: Did He Really Exist?

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/vE9DYWfthSo

The illusory purity of inaction and ignorance: the real impurity of action and wisdom.

This is an extreme example of the excuses being harder to quit than the thing itself: Irish neutrality has ended, but the excuses made for it still haunt this earth. Here's the brief article I'd like to draw your attention to:

LINK: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-1.409461

In the midst of that article you'll find the remarkable phrase "One side was as bad as the other" —a uniquely Irish attitude toward World War Two that I still encounter in Newfoundland today. This dismissive attitude is not the same as outright Neo-Nazi-ism, but it has created the basis for the peculiar kind of antisemitism now prevalent in Ireland (and amongst those who think of themselves as Irish in Canada, to some extent).

During WW2, the Irish government did not allow the public to have any knowledge of the then-ongoing holocaust, as part of a policy of "neutrality" that can indeed be glossed as passive support for the Nazis. It also established the pretense that (i) the Irish, in their victimhood, are morally superior to the British Empire, but also (ii) the whole world outside of Ireland cannot possibly be worse than the British Empire. As the linked-to article shows, this "logic" was extended to both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

The Irish Press told its readers in April 1943, "There is no kind of oppression visited on any minority in Europe which the Six-County nationalists [of Ireland] have not also endured."

Moral superiority, alas, does not result from the things we do not do, and wisdom does not result from the things we do not know: the Irish have confused moral ignorance with morality, thinking action inferior to the purity of inaction. Neutrality justified by ignorance of evil soon starts to justify both ignorance and evil for the sake of that neutrality.

Plutarch 03: Primitive Communism, Decadent Aristocracy. Lycurgus of Sparta.

LINK: https://youtu.be/FBCSRMTAZJw

Share the link with a friend, share the link with your worst enemy. ;-)

We're dealing with the intersection of mythology and political philosophy once again with the third chapter of Plutarch's Lives: the "biography" of an entirely fictional character, Lycurgus of Sparta —presented both as "real history" and as the model for a better, future society that many have emulated.

Thrasymachus: Nihilism Against Idealism, Plato's Republic and the Socratic Method.

A few of you have heard this before, when it was a podcast and not yet a youtube video.

If so, I would challenge you to leave an intelligent comment on the video this time: you have "a head start", relative to other members of the audience who are only now hearing it for the first time, and there are very few intelligent comments (publicly) on these videos (although I do hear back, privately, from many members of the audience).

LINK: https://youtu.be/YRKmDw4aov8

Race is not a social construct: an anti-racist perspective.

[A member of the audience writes in reply to my short video titled, Anti-Racism: Perception and Action:]

I think the real issue is that skin color doesn't tell you anything meaningful about a person's character, which is the only thing that matters. The degree to which anyone else believes your skin color defines you of course changes the way they treat you, but this is a false belief, since race is a social construct rather than a biological reality. Realizing this is as close as we can get to being colorblind, but since there are still people who believe the mirage, we are stuck navigating that regardless.

[And I reply:]

No, you're making two incompatible points: (1) "I think the real issue is that skin color doesn't tell you anything meaningful about a person's character, which is the only thing that matters." (2) "…race is a social construct rather than a biological reality."

Point two is nonsensical if you profoundly understand point one: skin color is a biological reality but is not salient to judgements made about a person's character —it is "real but irrelevant". It would be deeply incoherent to then try to argue that it is unreal and a social construct: in parallel, it wouldn't liberate anyone to argue that homosexuality is unreal and a social construct.

As a further —even more absurd— parallel: it doesn't liberate anyone to argue that veganism is biologically unreal and merely "a social construct". The cultural concept of veganism is different in China, America and Israel today, and a human being could reasonably say that these cultural assumptions are "socially constructed" in some sense, but it is utterly absurd to claim that veganism as such, sensu stricto, is a biologically unreal social construct. Likewise, cultural assumptions surrounding homosexuality are different from place to place, etc.

There is a biological difference between beef and tofu; there is a scientifically, objectively real difference between a vegan and a non-vegan —and, likewise, there is a scientifically, objectively real difference between someone who never drinks alcohol and someone who regularly does —and this difference is ultimately rooted in the biological difference between alcohol and orange juice. If there were no chemically real difference between alcohol and water, and if there were no biologically real difference between the effect of alcohol and the effect of water on your brain and body, this whole line of reasoning would be ridiculous.

Is there some great step taken forward for human equality if we say that the effects of alcohol are "biologically unreal" and that alcoholism is merely "a social construct"? Perhaps the relationship between cholesterol and heart attacks is similarly relativistic?

My video (Anti-Racism: Perception and Action) already made this point: disregarding differences does not overcome them, but deepens them. We do not make progress —and we do not liberate anyone— by pretending that these differences do not exist. What is shallow let us regard as shallow and what is profound let us regard as profound.

This is the London Review of Books… which has become a youtube channel… with all the inevitability of a can of tomato soup rolling down a staircase.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG1RRmjv760

Their struggle to avoid sounding self-congratulatory exacerbates their idiocy: it would have been better if they could have spoken self-confidently in the first person, "This is how and why I became an intellectual, and this is what it means to me, etc."

The Unbelievable Ignorance of the CIA: Somalia in 1968.

Quote, "Politically, Somalia is remarkably cohesive. There are almost none of the ethnic, cultural, or religious divisions which plague much of the rest of Eastern Africa." [Page 3, bullet point 2]

This was not a propaganda statement: this is quoted from a "proper" intelligence report, for the government's internal (and "secret") use only.

LINK: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000231744.pdf

This report certainly failed to foresee a world in which people of Somali ancestry would be a larger percentage of the population of Finland than Italy. And, of course, Somalis are an even larger percentage of population of the state of Minnesota.

It is peculiar to imagine how many of the specialists involved in these projects might still be alive (in Italy, in Russia, etc.) to be interviewed, retrospectively, about their experience in the making and unmaking of modern Somalia, today.

Back in bed with a spinal injury: misc. life update.

Can you believe someone stole my book at the gym? My copy of Plutarch's Lives, volume 1, Loeb edition... stolen right off the stationary bicycle when I left the cycling room for 30 seconds.

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/Sg-dExkTq5U

Festina lente, indeed.

 [J. Falcon, a member of the audience, writes in:]

Eisel -- your rapping has been improving, man! Great stuff. What's your current recording process? Flow is tight and compelling overall, but I think you're rushing in a few places (either when you fell behind or starting the next line too soon when a minuscule gap might suit your rhythm better.) If you're not already, recording to a metronome might help you get an even stronger flow (and then removing it from the final version of the recording). If you don't know the exact BPM of a track you're rapping over, you can try getting a free metronome app and tapping the rhythm, which can often detect the tempo pretty accurately. Hopefully I'm not telling you stuff you are already implementing! Great work in any event -- love how much passion and energy comes through in the delivery. You rap like you love life.

Festina lente.

Re: "…but I think you're rushing in a few places…" —this was recorded mere minutes after the lyrics were written, with zero rehearsal or preparation. If you watch the motion of my eyes, you can see that I'm still reading the lyrics off screen as I go and, of course, I'm interrupting myself by breaking out laughing.

I was also recording in natural sunlight, and arbitrarily challenging myself to finish the whole thing before the sun became too dim (on both days). You can see this in the second half: the color tint hasn't been artificially adjusted, it is naturally shifting from yellow to faint blue.

Re: "If you don't know the exact BPM of a track you're rapping over, you can try getting a free metronome app… Hopefully I'm not telling you stuff you are already implementing…" —nope. I never have and I never will. This is "outsider art" in every sense of the term, i.e., the good and the bad of it. I am an outsider to hip hop culture, and an outsider I will remain.

———

[HistoryReset, a member of the audience, writes in:]

This is the tightest rhyme you have dropped since bomb cyclone or [that song about Kanye West].

Yep. The whole creative process took place within two days —and I didn't even work on it "all day" for either one of those days. This was my first time rapping on camera (as opposed to "on the microphone" with the camera turned off) and I think this is now necessary to overturn the assumption that whatever you're doing is A.I. —in other words, I don't have the luxury of being a disembodied voice anymore. ;-)

[Meanwhile:] Cocaine has corrupted the Canadian police. And quite possibly every other police service on earth, at this point.

A few of you will remember (long, long ago) when I challenged the youtuber known as ModVegan on her excuses for the decriminalization of drugs: she believed (e.g.) that everyone should be allowed to use cocaine without fear of legal repercussions, but she then seemed to be unable to deal with the implications when asked how this would apply to police officers, medical doctors —anyone with any real responsibility. This is made more obvious when we are talking about positions of authority that involve life-or-death decisions (like police officers and medical doctors) but the point is the same for even the most modest of minimum wage jobs: neither a construction worker nor a babysitter can be trusted if they're using cocaine —and, on the contrary, both examples may endanger the lives of others.

This is a short news item but some of the details are telling: one police officer asks another if he looks okay —while high on cocaine— as he is about "to go to daycare", presumably to pick up (or drop off) his own child. The other police officer tells him, in reply, to keep his sunglasses on, to conceal his "cocaine eyes".

The problem is more profound than anyone wants to admit to themselves: people leading meaningless lives will risk them for practically nothing at all —for the mere semblance of purpose and meaning brought about by the pursuit of a chemically-induced high.

This is short term gratification that comes at the cost of a real commitment: anyone playing with cocaine (let alone meth, fentanyl, etc.) is aware that they will not grow old. One way or another, they will not experience old age before death.

What happens when workplace cocaine use isn't just a problem in the construction industry, but in the law enforcement industry… quite possibly in each and every industry? Everyone already knows, unless we choose not to know.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn-4epTZEDA

Fear of Failure: the life of the body, the life of the mind.

I do not want to pester my patreon supporters with a notification for each and every "short" uploaded… HOWEVER…

It's not your fault, but it is your problem. #nepal

 

An especially poignant "short" covering the full gamut, from global warming to the breakup with Melissa.

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/CniEpHzKtNk

Cocaine Iceberg: Newfoundland.

 

Okay, just this once, I'm gonna say it:

SHARE THE LINK WITH ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

LINK: https://youtu.be/wi-UD3Cr8Fk

Plutarch 02: Romulus and the Rape Culture of Rome.

If the title is too shocking for you, keep in mind: they don't exactly call it "the arranged marriage of the Sabine women."

LINK: https://youtu.be/rDGURRn5kV0

Lindsay Clancy: Antidepressants Don't Work.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7pEjjuYKBY

What Melissa had to say FIVE YEARS AGO today.

Really bizarre listening to this again today.

(It's a monologue from Melissa: aside from one sentence in the intro, I'm not a part of the video.)

LINK: https://youtu.be/hXZk6MAGy9A

Uploaded September 4th, 2021 —and today is September 5th, 2026.

Micro-Fame: all of the disadvantages of fame, none of the advantages.

Leave it to the U.S. Department of Justice to bury the lead in reporting a story like this: Farhan Jami will spend 46 months in prison after setting fire to a car… https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/new-york-man-sentenced-prison-possessing-incendiary-device-he-ignited-near-victims

…the car in question having been parked in the front driveway of a "Twitch Streamer", i.e., a woman who records and uploads herself while playing video games in revealing attire.

I am sure it stretches the limits of credulity for you to imagine, dear reader, that this woman chooses to live under the name JustFoxii.

There are some women who are so beautiful that they effortlessly receive more male attention than they can manage their whole lives long: it is significant to observe that JustFoxii here is not one of them. She is a woman who is, instead, putting in a huge amount of effort to create a barely-convincing illusion of natural beauty. If I met her at the gym, I would honestly consider her to be Hoyle's Rules ugly, with or without that makeup on.

Alas, ugliness is no defense against the savage instincts of intellectually unsophisticated men: Farhan Jami drove 700 miles, lit this fire, and then --exhausted-- fell asleep in his own car immediately afterward, just to express his jealousy after discovering that this woman had a boyfriend. His defense lawyer attempted to make this seem reasonable by claiming that Farhan had sent her a significant amount of money and then, in retrospect, after the existence of the boyfriend was revealed, regarded this transaction as a scam. https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/butler-county/monroe/man-who-tried-to-bomb-car-in-monroe-was-jilted-by-woman-he-met-on-internet-attorney-says

Gone are the days when such a man might be expected to write a poem, I suppose.

I would remind you: unbeknownst to me, Melissa gave Abhishek our home address so that he could send gifts to her. Melissa was hoping to receive lavish gifts from him, although not strictly speaking (quid pro quo) in exchange for the nude photographs and videos she'd been sending to him. She got a Kindle Paperwhite out of it. And, yes, at various times, she had the paranoid fear that Abhishek would somehow use his knowledge of her address to harm her. Of course, he could have used his knowledge of the address to harm me. He didn't.

Nobody with a brain wants fame: whatever it is you want to accomplish, fame is either an obstacle separating you from it or an unintentional consequence along the way. Fame does not enable the accomplishment of anything —not even the playing of video games.

I have talked about this with some of the local comedians: if what they want to do is write comedy, etc., this whole business of becoming famous (on the internet or in real life) is a massively counterproductive digression from the task at hand. It may really prevent you from doing the very thing you'd imagined you'd become famous for.

However, what the internet offers most people is not fame, but micro-fame: a situation in which they suffer all the disadvantages of fame with none of the advantages. That was my situation before I'd met Melissa, and now, again, after we have parted company.

The world begins with you and ends with you as well: instinct, evolution, nihilism.

[A reply to a message sent in from a member of the audience.]

Well, I've got bad news for you: (1) you're insane and (2) you're probably always going to be insane.

There's absolutely no advice I can offer that would help you.

Human beings are "the creation of" evolution: you need to deal with the implications of evolution as a biological process over millions of years.

And you have to see the uncomfortable reality of human beings living in apartments and animals living in zoos within that million-year-spanning context.

Whatever you imagine ancient philosophers would say on the subject doesn't matter much at all, does it?  That's just something you've made up in your own mind to suit your own interests --even if (paradoxically) it is merely in your interest to make yourself feel guilty about aspects of your own instincts that you cannot control.

The world's history begins again with you: every man's birth is the year zero --and there is nothing Anaximander or Aristotle could say that would help you with your struggles against human nature in any way whatsoever --not even if an archaeologist could now dig up a (heretofore unknown) text that answered precisely the question you've been asking me.

You can hate yourself for being an animal (for being a product of millions of years of evolution) or you can learn to make the most of it: you're an animal, but this doesn't mean you're limited to being an animal only.  You can be far more than a mere animal, but the "more" that you accomplish (through self-discipline and the creative use of your imagination) doesn't make you any less of an animal than a marmoset or a mandrill.

You are not a fictional angel: you are not a fictional character from an ancient (and idiotic) text.  You are not a soul trapped in a body made of flesh, nor are you a good person trapped inside a bad one.  There is no rational core surrounded by irrational impulses: everything you despise as an instinct is who and what you really are.

You cannot become some philosopher's ideal of what human nature could be or should be: you will never be half-man and half-hallowed-abstraction --you will always be entirely a man and entirely an animal.  Entirely: not half of one and half of the other.  In your own experience, in one lifetime, you will exhaust the remit of human nature and exhaust the remit of animal nature as well, leaving nothing undone or unknown in the remainder.

In this sense, the world begins with you and ends with you as well.

The divine mystery is human laziness: where people stop thinking, stop living, stop learning --beyond that unmarked barrier is god --and his power consists entirely of your ignorance, your lack of curiosity.  The more diffident you are the more sacred this world seems: your unthinking conformity to the accumulated idiocy of past generations is the consecration of that darkness --and my nihilism deconsecrates the world with an unwelcome dawn --a dazzling and discomforting light.

Plutarch 01: Virtue is Not Virtue, Therefore it is Called Virtue.

THESEUS. Episode 01 of a series on Plutarch's Lives, reading the whole thing, from start to finish. And quite possibly by the end I'll be fluent in Finnish. (For totally unrelated reasons, I AM CURRENTLY LEARNING FINNISH.) #ancientgreece #ancientrome #ancientgreek #ancientlatin #classics #booktube #bookreview

Social Media Addiction Doesn't Exist, You Do.

No intro, no outro, just real talk. ;-)

LINK: https://youtu.be/yL0ru5KQbCY

Drama arises from possibilities, stated openly, tragedy from the lack thereof.

This was also uploaded to my "bad writing" channel, From Ink to Inc., under the slightly more provocative title, House of the Dragon (Season 3) WAS TRASH: How Not Why.

LINK: https://youtu.be/aDpKStRyMIo

LINK: https://youtu.be/Em94yEZjk-Q 

House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 8 (S03E08). #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

Diet, exercise, sex and language education: learning by instinct, calling it science.

This was uploaded to my other channel ("The Monolingual Polyglot") under the slightly more provocative title, The Polyglot Scam: "Days and Words." ‪@daysandwords‬

LINK: https://youtu.be/rZvC6SoC3Ys (à-bas-le-ciel)

LINK: https://youtu.be/KpcBUSWs9fo (Eisel Mazard: Monolingual Polyglot)

The Recently Rewritten History of Meir Kahane.

Most of you will have never heard the name before, so… to leap right into a quotation from Colin Shindler from 1991:

During the week, he exuded a sexual charisma and chased “shiksas” in singles bars whilst establishing a series of right-wing front organizations to report on liberals and leftists often for the FBI. As Michael King, he co-authored a book entitled The Jewish Stake in Vietnam and was vociferous in attacking Jewish liberals for their opposition to the war. As Meir Kahane, he defined the war as a milchemet mitzva—an obligatory war and even lobbied his cheder students to enlist to fight in Vietnam.

In 1966, Kahane’s philandering lead him to proposing marriage to Estelle Donna Evans with whom he was conducting an affair. Two days before the marriage, Kahane wrote to Evans and told her that he was already married.

He still did not reveal his true identity to her. A few hours afterwards, the distraught woman threw herself off the Queensboro Bridge and died later on the operating table. She was also found to be pregnant. Kahane later told close friends that Evans had killed herself because she had terminal, cancer. In the 1980s, Kahane publicly denied that he had even had an affair with Evans.

[Source:] https://colinshindler.co.uk/on-the-death-of-meir-kahane/

He had a newborn child that same year, 1966, with the same wife who would raise four children with him in total; those four would produce 30 grandchildren by 2008.* She had married him when she was only 18 years old and would proceed to write her own biased version of his biography after his death. Tragically, or perhaps tragi-comically, the book is biased in his favor.

In the same year that he was assassinated, 1990, a book was published under the promising title, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane —From FBI Informant to Knesset Member. In this review, again, the long shadow cast by Estelle Donna Evans looms large, although the reviewer seems to be uncomfortable with judging the man's philosophy by the life he lived and the women he loved:

Friedman openly blames Kahane for the 1985 bombing in Santa Ana that killed Alex Odeh, an Arab-American community activist. “The rabbi was laying the groundwork for a terrorist underground in the United States that the FBI says carried out a string of bombings in 1985 that killed two persons, including Alex Odeh,” Friedman writes. “Kahane had long dreamed of forging a Jewish underground that would spread fear and shatter the souls of his enemies. Now just a year after his Knesset victory, he had professional assassins roaming America.”

“The False Prophet” struck me as a hit piece because Friedman appears to be driven by a visceral hatred of Kahane. The author does not try to discredit Kahane’s racist and anti-democratic ideas by showing why they are morally wrong or politically unworkable. Rather, he tries to convince us that Kahane’s ideas are bad because he is so bad--according to Friedman, he’s a loser, a nut and a very nasty fellow.

Thus, Friedman dwells on the sordid details of Kahane’s adolescent sexual experiences, his “ungracious” demeanor as a poker player, even the fact that Kahane is a stutterer. We are given a leering account of a particularly ugly incident in which Kahane apparently jilted a woman whom he picked up in a bar during one of his self-appointed undercover operations; the woman, who may have been pregnant with Kahane’s child, threw herself into the East River.

Significantly, Friedman scolds the New York Times for failing to print the story of Kahane’s dead lover back in 1971: “If the paper of record had published all it knew about Kahane, a self-righteous, Orthodox rabbi who constantly moralized about personal relationships, then perhaps both he and the JDL would have been destroyed.”

[Source:] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-08-29-vw-38-story.html

Ah, yes, well… I certainly have a conflict of interest here… perish the thought that anyone would ever judge my philosophy by the life I've lived and the women I've loved… my terrible habit of forcing everyone in a relationship with me to read Aristotle, etc.

Hot off the press in 2021, a new perspective is brought to this history by Shaul Magid, with a title promising some kind of detached neutrality: Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. I do not own this book and I have not read it: I'm unwilling to pay $37 (Canadian) for it and will wait for some opportunity when the price… recedes. Kahane's own books are still remarkably cheap, in paperback form, with titles that state their theses so clearly as to make the rest of the text seem redundant: Time to Go Home, 1972, and They Must Go, 1981.

Rightly or wrongly, the man's name is now attached to the (largely leaderless) Hilltop Youth phenomenon in Israel. I do not recommend reading this article from The Guardian on the subject, but… the headline alone establishes how seemingly self-evident the connection between the two has become: "Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics."

[Source:] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/mar/20/meir-kahane-israel-kach-ben-gvir-long-dead-extremist

A turn of phrase that became famous within the vegan demimonde a decade ago —which is to say that it was well-known to a few dozen people who cared about the future of the movement— was, "Who has suffered less?"

The memory of the video in which I said this has grown distant, but I know that I said it several times, comparing the complaints about the supposed suffering vegans undergo in organizing a picnic to the Communists who had lived in caves in Laos where they had to pump in air with a hand-crank while bombs fell around them —it's possible I mentioned examples from the French Revolution, from the struggle against slavery in Haiti, or even anti-Communist rebellions.

Veganism remains a praxis in search of a principle: it has a political program, but no philosophy behind it (i.e., aside from my own philosophy, ignored by 99% of my fellow vegans, hated by 0.9% and appreciated warmly by the remainder). By contrast, in looking at Meir Kahane as a case study, we can see the enduring success of an outrageously stupid philosophy combined with an obviously immoral praxis —and yet the two legs of that political program work together, and have walked far.

Israel's Hilltop Youth do literally build houses: they do "create communities" in a palpable sense that the vast majority of vegans I've known fantasize about (and, again, this was addressed in numerous videos, including my "manifesto", On Community, now outmoded by No More Manifestos and Future of an Illusion). They build houses —and they carry guns and occasionally kill people while they're doing it.

There is not now and never has been a vegan movement as successful as the Hilltop Youth. There is not now and never has been a vegan philosophy as successful as Kahanism. Now you may tell me if vegans have lost the struggle for the future of stupidity because they weren't intelligent enough, weren't stupid enough, or both.

Primordial Ignorance, Instinctual Laziness, and Innate Stupidity: a Short Sequel on Beauty and Ugliness.

[I received a positive reply from "Eyedontexist", following up on our conversation already posted here. I'm using italics just to differentiate the two voices in the dialogue this time.]

—————

@a-bas-le-ciel I hear you, and I don’t disagree that physical inequality exists and that some people are more physically desirable than others. I don’t disagree that a person can be physically beautiful while being a cruel or evil person - nor am I saying the cruelty would negate the physical reality.

I guess I’m speaking to a notion of “inner beauty” not of physical or sexual desirability. I don’t use the terms “beautiful” and “desirable” synonymously and I guess I was making more of a semantic argument in that respect because the former feels more subjective to me than the latter. I’m not meaning to be dishonest or paint myself as virtuous for this, I’m speaking to the experience of “beauty” as an internal experience what happens within myself when interacting with people who possess beautiful qualities.

And maybe I am a bit delusional, I’m not negating that lol. It would be perhaps comparable to the delusion of a person in love who genuinely perceives their partner as the most beautiful person, even when that perception would be shared by no one else and would be objectively false. Maybe I’m focused too much on the internal experience of beauty generated by interactions filtered through a lens of love and while you’re making a point about something else entirely. I can see how I might’ve derailed the point of the conversation onto something not quite attuned to the point you were making but I just feel deeply about the notion of “beauty” itself because it’s meaningful to me in more ways than just the shallow ones and I wanted to express that.

I’m not anything special physically, will certainly not draw attention through appearance alone but am experienced by others as attractive when they get to know me because of the inner qualities I’ve cultivated. The social leverage is real but not entirely contingent upon my physicality.

I think you make a fair point in saying that we need to have clear language to delineate what is meant in these conversations, in any case. I don’t mean to assert a false notion that we can all be equally on the same level of physical desirability nor am I saying that physical appearance is irrelevant/grants a person no social leverage. Especially for sociological conversations it makes sense to disregard the subjective and focus on the level most of the world is operating within.

I don’t think you’re wrong, especially since your aim is to ultimately draw people to more meaningful pursuits (which is something I agree with). I’m just recognizing a spot where our views diverge and am curious to see what kind of thoughts proceed open communication.

Idk, I’m open to the possibility that I might be full of shit and missing the point but I’m trying to come about this conversation earnestly and I’m open to amending my mental frameworks around it - just speaking from where I currently stand and how I currently conceptualize things.

I appreciate your thoughtful response and willingness to engage. Sorry if my response is all over the place, I’m sort of just speaking stream of consciousness - not my most organized line of reasoning.

—————

Thanks for taking the time to write in: both in this video and in my replies here (that will appear below it) all I can really do is disambiguate the nature of the problem.  Millions of people live for many years with this kind of ambiguity you're playing with ("inner beauty", "mind over matter", etc.) and don't take seriously the damage done by the cycle of deception and self-deception that ensues. The difference between ugliness and beauty may be a tragedy that few people can cope with, preferring to escape into delusions rather than really accepting responsibility for it or accepting their own powerless over it, and this is why it is such an important contrast to the life of the mind and the development of the intellect —again entailing dangers of deception and self-deception —again entailing "truths too terrible to tell" both about personal responsibility and personal powerlessness (in dealing with our own primordial ignorance, instinctual laziness, and innate stupidity).

—————

@a-bas-le-ciel That’s very powerfully and beautifully stated, thank you. You may be highlighting a significant blind spot for me and I want to take that seriously and consider the possibility of unintended consequences my perspective may be unknowingly perpetuating. I’m generally pretty stubborn and must come to conclusions through my own process of internal reasoning before I can fully integrate change but I respect you highly and if this means that much to you, that’s an indicator to me that it’s something worthwhile to contemplate upon more deeply. Thanks again, I will think on these things.

Dealing with Physical Inequality to Understand Intellectual Inequality: A Dialogue on Beauty and Ugliness.

[A well-intentioned comment from the audience: he or she is using the name "Eyedontexist".]

[…]

In my perspective, even if a person genuinely believed they needed to reincorporate animal products into their diet to be healthy (accurately or inaccurately), it should be regarded as a tragedy and done to the most modest degree possible, always aiming to do as little harm as one can - not treated as a spectacle or celebrated as ‘I’m finally free from oppressive veganism’ and treated as a free pass to be indulgent without limitation.

I think society hammers in the idea that physical desirability is a metric of a persons value or worthiness of being loved (especially to women) and it’s always sad for me to see somebody internalize that notion and struggle with self-worth but it’s not an excuse that makes harming animals acceptable and the suffering is minuscule in comparison to the reality those animals go through.

Some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met are old, “fat”, and do not approximate conventional beauty standards in the slightest. Beauty to me is the kindness of a persons heart, how they care for others, the depth and intensity of their mind. All things within our power to cultivate through our choices.

Being honest and real is important to me but being kind and gentle is important to me too (for the type of person I would like to be and not everyone has to want to be that way). I would have approached this topic differently than you did but I think the bottom line of the points you make are essentially right.

The questions I often grapple with are, how do we reconcile with humanity’s inhumanity and stay loving towards our fellow humans? Not because they deserve it but because we cannot sustainably change each other through shame.

I sympathize with your anger and recognize it as a manifestation of profound and reasonable despair. I appreciate you continuing to fight the good fight in the face of it all.

I don’t expect that you’ll agree with all the sentiments I’ve shared in this comment but I just wanted to share them anyway.

—————

You don't believe any of these three statements, that I will here quote back to you in reverse order:

3. "All things within our power to cultivate through our choices."

2. "Beauty to me is the kindness of a persons heart, how they care for others, the depth and intensity of their mind."

1. "Some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met are old, 'fat', and do not approximate conventional beauty standards in the slightest."

No: the difference between being beautiful and being ugly is not within our power to cultivate through our choices.  You need to recognize that the majority of people are powerless to change their own ugliness: it wasn't their choice, and it is beyond their power to command.

No: beauty and kindness are two totally different things —and "therefore" beautiful people are quite capable of being cruel —and cruel people are quite capable of being beautiful.

Pretending that you don't know what beauty means is the lowest order of deception.  Pretending that beauty is a consequence of kindness or wisdom, as you do, would be truly evil and immoral: whereas I am encouraging people who are ugly to cultivate these other (intellectual) virtues, you are instead saying that ugly people are incapable of them —only the beautiful are intelligent and wise.  And, in this pretense, you think yourself virtuous, and that is the most sickening delusion of all.

There are some remarkably ugly comedians here who hate me: they have seen beautiful women showing interest in me at the comedy club —and neither beautiful women nor handsome men ever showed interest in them.  A few of the comedians have openly talked about this with me: they've seen that I have some kind of charisma that they don't have.  They should have other, better reasons to hate me, but they're not even capable of being envious of my writing or things I've accomplished or experienced under the heading of "the life of the mind".  One comedian here said to me, directly, that he has never once had a beautiful woman come up to speak to him after a show, whereas I've had this experience innumerable times when I wasn't even performing on stage.

Equality is not equality, therefore it is called equality.  The shallow end of the pool helps people to reach the deep: dealing with physical inequality —honestly— is necessary because it prepares you to deal with intellectual inequality [at the deep end of the same pool].

Mainstream, moderate religion IS ALSO a dangerous, delusional freak show.

This video at first seems to propose a contrast between "ultra-orthodox" and the reasonably moderate, mainstream members of the same religion, who are willing to be open for business on the sabbath day… but, in fact, if you give this video six minutes of your time, you'll find that both sides being contrasted are utterly insane (neither side can be sincerely described as "secular").

LINK: https://youtu.be/zuvfciN8lrY

Mommy Tang is still fat and ugly. STILL.

The youtuber now known at "LOVE SOO" is now ex-vegan… but let's deal with the really profound, underlying issues here, my people… THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ARE UGLY AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

Conservatism: the instinctual insistence that everything was better in the past.

Among the more pathetic features of conservatism is the instinctual (but inconsistent and intermittent) insistence that everything was better in the past: no, universities in the 1940s were not better than they are today —and university-educated people were not more enlightened in the 1960s than they are today —and the intellectual and moral caliber of the professors was not better in those decades than today.  In related news: the moral character of organized crime has not much changed.

The context for this conversation is not really necessary to know, but I made two very short videos about "the Jason Arday scandal",

(1) Jason Arday did nothing wrong. https://youtube.com/shorts/7auNd9ftVyM

(2) Jason Arday: Steroids for the Soul. https://youtube.com/shorts/lDmnpFgEi2g

I would remind you: historical nihilism has a great deal to do with the examination of history, with the hypothesis and conclusion that there is nothing to be believed in.  The things conservatives believe in are utterly laughable to me —both presently and historically.

Don't Stop Reading: from a "gym bro" who spends all his time chasing women half his age.

LINK: https://youtu.be/-galtD4Qabg

Quitting Video Games to Read Plutarch's Lives. Again. ;-)

LINK: https://youtu.be/XVbp5u4iD_U

Erotica and Heroica: How to Write Tragedy. (HOTD & ASOIAF)

Or, perhaps, "Writing Tragedy… HOW NOT WHY." ;-)

On à-bas-le-ciel: https://youtu.be/iXcWfR6jbdY

On From Ink to Inc.: https://youtu.be/H9D7TvK2xY4

House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 7 (S03E07). #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

And they are corrupted by the very act of questioning itself…

…both the questioner and the person being questioned.  You understand.

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/5Hm2VWBuRyo

Am I vegan for the animals? Are you?

A "QNA" responding to just a single question: all new, all different, in 2026.

LINK: https://youtu.be/tHho1fKl-KI

What Would Shakespeare Do? House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 6.

Guest-starring Benjamin Netanyahu.

LINK: https://youtu.be/__EWBnpOZqI (à-bas-le-ciel)

LINK: https://youtu.be/C5cfb1jKIL0 (From Ink to Inc.)

House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 6 (S03E06). #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

Alicent vs Rhaenyra vs Cole: Loss of Virginity, Religion & Revenge.

This can be found both on à-bas-le-ciel and also on From Ink to Inc.

LINK: https://youtu.be/Ki1uYiQ5yec

House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 5 (S03E05). #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

[Brand New Ancient:] The Myth of the Left Wing Odyssey.

Original title: "Did Emily Wilson Rewrite The Odyssey?"

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e665ldFOOBU

The question being asked here is not whether or not it would even be hypothetically possible to make Homer "left wing" through a mere act of translation… the question is, instead, whether or not Emily Wilson has already done it.

And, yes, if I get married to Emily Wilson, I will be bound (as a matter of duty and honor) to get all of those same tattoos inscribed upon myself (for reasons I have recently explained in an entirely earnest comedy video). Inevitably, of course, her marriage to Marco Roth ended in divorce, precisely because they didnt' share the same tattoos.

And yes, BTW, I am indeed insinuating that the perception of her translation as "left wing" is entirely a shadow cast by the prejudice against her appearance —most certainly including her tattoos. Not that I can see anything left wing about her particular taste in tattoos: we are living on a planet on which Mike Tyson has portraits of both Mao Zedong and Che Guevara permanently etched upon his body. Frankly, he would have been better off getting married to Emily Wilson.

The philosophy of the plastic bucket.

Having a philosophy is an admission of your own subjectivity, etc.

Literature without philosophy, philosophy without literature, etc.

Link to the video on à-bas-le-ciel: https://youtu.be/sYeMFCyXedU

Link to the video on From Ink to Inc.: https://youtu.be/8mMDwxseWEE

House of the Dragon Season 3. #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

Sex is Not Shallow, the Study of Languages is Not Profound.

Here's the link to the video on the language channel, Monolingual Polyglot: https://youtu.be/HAobfK9-SnI

And here's the link to the video on a-bas-le-ciel: https://youtu.be/CaOMhkdfCuI

Immigration & Evolution: Alternatives to Racism.

This is a modest proposal for the total reform of systems of immigration in the Decadent West, with an unhealthy emphasis on the examples of Finland and Canada. The theory of evolution is not racist: immigration policy is racist and always has been.

LINK: https://youtu.be/cublT9MAVeo

[Other voices:] The Terrorists of Khalistan: Canadian Politicians Are Still Dancing with the Ghosts of this Independence Movement.

The first few minutes of this video are, admittedly, rather boring, however, if you either fast forward or endure, the ensuing anecdotes about daily life during the period of the insurgency (circa 1988 to 1993) are extremely important and interesting.

He explicitly compares the effects of the social control exerted by "the men with AK-47s" to the Taliban, e.g., threatening (and later shooting) a school teacher to try to compel the female students to wear more conservative uniforms (although the style of dress reflects a Sikh tradition, in this case, rather than an Islamic one).

The extent of the ignorance of Canadian politicians in getting entangled with the Khalistan independence movement is unproven and unknown —and I do not here mean the politicians of any one party only, but all Canadian politicians in general since 1984. The attitudes of those who were not ignorant may be more difficult to understand than those who were.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6mm-woNAy8

I note for the record that the original title of the video I'm linking to was, Row over Diljit Dosanjh’s Satluj, Khalra, and the bloodied years that took Punjab there[.] This is an unbelievably boring title that likely would have led to the video being ignored.  

[Other voices:] The Demographics of the Deficit: America's Aging Population and Impending (Public Sector) Bankruptcy.

IMO, you can start playing the tape right around the ten minute mark: the preamble about America's "remarkable experiment" bringing "freedom to the world" for "a quarter millennium" is difficult to endure, not to mention the anecdote about his adopted son, but he proceeds to make some important points about "basic math" (in his own idiom) soon thereafter.

This is David Schweikert of Arizona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Schweikert

Despite claims about tax cuts, he argues, the percentage of the economy harnessed by taxation has not declined: the debt crisis is caused, on the one hand, by excess spending but, on the other, by excessive numbers of the elderly and the declining numbers of the young —his emphasis on this latter point is rare.

[11:10] Next year, we're going to have fewer under 18 than we had 20 years ago, and double the number [of people] 65 and up, but are we allowed to actually say that?  It's not personal!  It's not actually [a matter of] Democrat [vs] Republican, it's just math!

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMzESl-J6Mc 

MKULTRA: the Tyranny of Scientific Certainty.

LINK: https://youtu.be/szOiGOziFRA

Aaaaaaaand here's the link to MKULTRA hearing from a few days ago in the American House of Congress, i.e., the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, specifically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQulJS-R50

Writing comedy is for intellectuals pretending to be idiots: stupid people shouldn't even try.

I will make an effort to avoid posting each and every "short" as a Patreon update…

…this one is only two minutes long…

however, in this case, I'm aware that most people will see the video without seeing the title (if they see it at all) on youtube.

The title, alas, is an important part of the package here.

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/PEIeAqu-a4Y

Vegans: We Lost the War.

I'm not anti-immigration: I'm anti-religion. #nihilism

This video is under three minutes long (and is therefore "a short", in Youtube's hierarchy of categories) but it occurs to me that I should post is here, separately, in part because it directly pertains to the informal article I wrote a few days ago, And, in politics, when men become tired of talking they become dangerous.

LINK: https://youtube.com/shorts/28xHVEoUoc4

The same video was posted to my Monolingual Polyglot channel under a significantly different title: there are over 100,000 muslims living in the city of Helsinki alone, perhaps 140,000 in Finland as a whole. There are certainly more than 15,000 speakers of Somali languages in Finland now; I cannot find a source for the claim that this number exceeds 23,000 or 28,000 —but these claims are bandied about the internet. The future of Islam in Finland is now an extremely contentious question but —of course— I am not willing to counterpose Christianity to Islam, I am instead trying to clearly counterpose atheism to all religions.

And this was discussed at greater length in my video Islamophobia is Doomed: the Critique of Mass Deportation as a Moral Cause.

Talking to Josh Menchions: a productive area of negotiations.

This linked-to article, here, will give you some sense of why nobody wants "to stand up to" this guy, no matter how despicable he may be, no matter how many enemies his defamation campaigns (and his "career" of petty conniving against comedians) may earn him: although his comedy constantly addresses the fact that he's an object of pity, he doesn't realize that this same pity conceals the extent to which he's despised. Or, at least, it allows him to deceive himself: he is, in fact, a rare example of someone far more hated than I. And for worse reasons, of course.

I was not exaggerating when I said that people warned me about him on the very first day that I arrived in this city, and I am not exaggerating when I say that other comedians told me that Josh had made their lives miserable, however, they are all willing to suffer in silence while this guy plays his self-appointed role as the king of comedy. And, again, we all know why: pity, a slow poison endured by both the poisoner and the poisoned.

—————

Dude, you should hear Melissa's side of the story.

Chris gets on stage and says terrible things about his ex-wife.

You never hear his ex-wife's perspective.

Chris isn't banned from the club.

Luke makes jokes about his ex-girlfriend.

You never hear his ex-girlfriend's perspective.

Luke isn't banned from the club.

You've banned me from these two clubs because of a story you made up in your own head, and it just isn't true.

Melissa doesn't blame me: Melissa doesn't think I did anything wrong.  And she uploaded both YouTube videos in which she's speaking alone,

and also YouTube videos in which she's talking to me, AFTER the breakup.

I don't think Chris or Luke (or Mav) are gonna do a podcast with their ex-girlfriends the way I did, bro.

E.M.

—————

[I am omitting his reply, out of some strange sense of chivalry.]

—————

Okay, cool:

problem solved.

If that's your story, there's clearly no reason for any hostility or conflict between us.

See you tonight at the club.

E.M.

—————

[Again, I am omitting his replies here. It should be intuitively obvious that they contributed very little to the conversation.]

—————

So what do you wanna do tonight?

You want to drink a cup of coffee sitting at the same table and actually get to know me?

Or do you wanna act like we're enemies for no reason at all?

Yeah, dude, I've had positive feedback from many comedians who appreciated my filming short clips of them: they say things like, "Oh, great, can you send that to me, I'm gonna post it on my Instagram?"

Some asked me if I'd captured a good moment of them after a set.

Many comedians here actually do regard filming from the audience positively, and they've told me this: they like the fact that they'll get free promotion and reach a few more viewers.

If you have a house policy that nobody should be filming, fine: I'll put the camera away, and it's done.  No reason for any conflict.

Nobody has ever said that to me before, but I can totally understand the policy: if you don't want people to have their phones out, let them know, or let me know, and I'll follow the rules.

You've never said that to me before, but now, all of a sudden, it's an excuse to ban me.

You and I have no reason to be enemies: I don't think you're stupid enough to believe stories made up about me and my ex-girlfriend, Melissa...

when (1) you've met Melissa, and (2) you can hear her attitude in any podcast or video, any time (unlike Chris's ex-wife, unlike Luke's ex-girlfriend).

You're creating a conflict out of nothing.

E.M.

Esoteric. Occult. Even spiritual. Nihilism.

This was stated in response to my newly minted maxim, "But there are no lessons of history. There is only history."

Cf. "What I do is esoteric: I don't explain anything to anyone." https://a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.com/2026/06/what-i-do-is-esoteric-i-dont-explain.html

And, in politics, when men become tired of talking they become dangerous.

Many years ago I observed that Joe Biden's policies, once elected, could be described as "Hyper-Trumpian" (or, perhaps, as "Hyper-Trumpism") —and we now see a similar pattern amongst the opponents of Donald Trump in Canada. Under several different headings, Canadians are implementing policies that are more Trumpian than Trump himself.

You may well say, "Canada has not yet had dead bodies in the street as a result of immigration raids, as the Americans had in Minneapolis." Indeed, not yet. The removal of "more than one million Indians" from a country the size of Canada could entail many brutal episodes of the Minneapolis sort. Or, instead, there may be no expulsions at all, entailing a different kind of scandal.

How we ended up with the headline number being one million rather than two million, I cannot say: "According to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada or IRCC approximately 1,053,000 work permits expired by the end of 2025 and another 927,000 will do so in 2026." [I am quoting Anirudh Bhattacharyya, as published in the Hindustan Times, Dec 31, 2025.] Perhaps the reasoning behind using one million as a round number is that roughly half of these two million immigrants are migrants from India, specifically?

The actual numbers of people being expelled are rather smaller: 1,712 Indian citizens were deported from Canada in the first three months of 2026, reportedly. This is in the context of an overall decline in the country's population of 55,000 during the same three months, reportedly attributable to both these declining numbers of immigrants and also the inclement contrast between the number of births and the number of deaths this year.

If we set aside distinctions of mere rhetoric and rationalization, what is the difference between current Canadian and American policies on ecology and the environment? On the gas and oil industry? And, finally, on the topic of immigration?

The consequences of what Canada is now doing under these (Trumpian) headings are immediately palpable.  Many, many other promises will remain as abstractions on a chalkboard for decades —perhaps forever.  Immigration may not seem like an important policy in principle, but its importance is exaggerated in practice because so many other political principles have no practice at all.

Here is the National Post presenting you with a series of salient graphs and statistics: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-data

I am not the sort of imbecile to say, "This is the meaning of the word Liberal, therefore, if your party is called the Liberal Party, this is what your political promises and policies must be." I am a nihilist who sees in words something less than an imperfect tool made to imprecisely express culturally conditioned meanings —less, not more. And, unlike Plato, I cannot imagine anything profound in the gap between the imperfect use of words and our supposedly perfect intended meanings: I find nothing there to be believed in. However, the meaning of the word Liberal has now changed —suddenly— for reasons that nobody is willing to talk about. And, in politics, when men become tired of talking they become dangerous.

Is Bad Writing Better than No Writing at All?

Link to the video on my (still obscure!) creative writing channel, From Ink to Inc. = https://youtu.be/9hBxBy1nnQs

Link to the video on my (still obscure!) autobiographical channel, à-bas-le-ciel = https://youtu.be/aVUpaEKRwsw

House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 2. Yes, that's William Shakespeare in the thumbnail. You're lucky I didn't include Seneca. #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

1971: Richard Nixon's Other Genocide.

Today we have a seemingly bland headline in The Daily Star,¹ Bangladesh-China ties enter a ‘new era’. This is actually quite dramatic news, if you're aware of trail of dominoes tracing back to 1971. Dead bodies and dominoes, I suppose.

The salient Wikipedia article is simply titled, Bangladesh Genocide.² And that title is itself a sort of political declaration. Some people say that 3,000,000 died. Some say 300,000. Some say 30,000. But we all say genocide. And we all blame Nixon and Mao —who were engaged in negotiations, at the time, and who both felt they needed Pakistan (or, rather, "West Pakistan") to continue to be their ally —partly but not entirely because of those negotiations.

This article reflects "the state of the art" in anonymous authors counterposing contradictory sources —and it is a dying art form. In 2026, this tapestry of many patches (and many tailors) is now being replaced by the A.I. synopsis of unseen sources. Here's a telling excerpt:

Australian Doctor Geoffrey Davis was brought to Bangladesh by the United Nations and International Planned Parenthood Federation to carry out late term abortions on rape victims. He was of the opinion that the 200,000 to 400,000 rape victims were an underestimation. On the actions of [the] Pakistan army he said "They'd keep the infantry back and put artillery ahead and they would shell the hospitals and schools. And that caused absolute chaos in the town. And then the infantry would go in and begin to segregate the women. Apart from little children, all those were (sic) sexually matured would be segregated. And then the women would be put in the compound under guard and made available to the troops ... Some of the stories they told were appalling. Being raped again and again and again. A lot of them died in those [rape] camps. There was an air of disbelief about the whole thing. Nobody could credit that it really happened! But the evidence clearly showed that it did happen." [better source needed]

In October 2005, Sarmila Bose published a paper suggesting that the casualties and rape allegations in the war have been greatly exaggerated for political purposes. Whilst she received praise from many quarters, a number of researchers have shown inaccuracies in Bose's work, including flawed methodology of statistical analysis, misrepresentation of referenced sources, and disproportionate weight to Pakistani Army testimonies.

Historian Christian Gerlach states that "a systematic collection of statistical data was aborted, possibly because the tentative data did not substantiate the claim that three million had died and at least 200,000 women had been raped."

Is it possible, now, for Bangladesh and China to become allies instead of enemies? The political elite in India still bitterly resents the decisions Americans made circa 1971 —although, of course, there would be more utterly immoral decisions to come. It is difficult to imagine that the political elite in Bangladesh would blame the Chinese less.

All of this, of course, is connected to Cambodia. I cannot say the two are parallel, nor that they are intersecting: they are two points on one and the same straight line.

Justin Trudeau and the Khalistani phenomenon are linked to a relatively minuscule massacre from 1984 with a Wikipedia article merely titled Operation Blue Star to describe it, utterly lacking the word genocide, you will observe, although there's a similarly bizarre range of estimates as to how many died (from a few dozen to a few hundred to more than five thousand, etc.) with a similar struggle on the part of the anonymous authors contrasting ostensibly respectable sources raising their eyebrows at one another. My point here is merely that this "minor massacre" is enough to put Canada in a position of permanent and perpetual hatred, although Justin Trudeau's connection to it is far more tangential than the connection between Nixon (and Mao) and East Pakistan in 1971.

I have purchased a copy of Joe Sacco's (relatively recent) book, the Once and Future Riot. Whether or not it was the intention of the author, this book will doubtless make an important political myth out of an even smaller massacre, the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. Although this is certainly a massacre important enough to be remembered within India, it was never remembered outside of India for long enough to be forgotten before Joe Sacco's book made this myth out of it.

I have always heard socialists say that we must learn the lessons of history. But there are no lessons of history. There is only history.

—————

Footnote 1: https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/diplomacy/news/bangladesh-china-ties-enter-new-era-4209866

Footnote 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide

Finnish history in the Soviet period… from a uniquely Canadian perspective.

This documentary film (made by and for the National Film Board of Canada) is now impossible to find a copy of, impossible to pay to see via streaming services, etc.

https://www.nfb.ca/film/letters_from_karelia/

The topic here is taboo in the extreme, whereas "the opposite" story is commonly told: ethnic Finns and Karelians escaping from Communism in the Soviet Union / Russia (to live in Finland itself, or sometimes in the United States and Canada).

The reality is that people moved in both directions: there were Finnish and Karelian people voluntarily signing up to become a part of the utopian experiment.  To what extent those people were honest with their children and grandchildren thereafter is an open question.

Keep in mind that even in Japan there were always a few Japanese and Ainu (in each generation) who would flee north over the Sakhalin Island border to sign up for Soviet citizenship, voluntarily.

My impression is that Finns still exoticize Karelians, regarding them as significantly different from the Finns of the west coast —not merely in their accent and religion but even in their physical appearance.  

—————

The 2005 documentary Letters from Karelia (directed by Kelly Saxberg) chronicles the tragic "Karelia Fever" of the 1930s, when hundreds of idealistic Finnish Canadians emigrated to the Soviet Union seeking a socialist utopia. It centers on the personal story of Aate Pitkänen, an electrician who left Thunder Bay, Ontario, for Karelia in 1931.

While many migrants faced crushing hardships, typhoid outbreaks, and Stalin's Great Purge, Aate's ultimate fate remained a mystery after he was separated from his family and disappeared in 1941. Over sixty years later, his unmailed letters from a Finnish prisoner-of-war camp were discovered. These letters reveal his dramatic journey from a communist pioneer and USSR ski champion to a Soviet spy, ultimately uniting his sister, Taimi, with the son he never met.

—————

[UPDATE:] https://vimeopro.com/shebafilms/shebafilms/video/20276087

^ One of my viewers, Evan, sent in a working link.  It is evidently being distributed, for free, on the creator's Vimeo.

In Defense of Bad Writing: ASOIAF & HOTD

LINK: https://youtu.be/1yuYGg5zZsA

House of the Dragon Season 3. #hotd #asoiaf #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

[Other voices:] Maailman onnellisin maa

The last time I really listened to music "in my target language" was back when I was studying Cambodian. Kommando Tehtävä are probably too left wing for me… but they're certainly of more interest than the average Beijing punk band.

Joku taas rappukäytävään oksentaa
Viikonloppuisin baarissa turpaan saa
Viinanhuuruista melankoliaa
Joka neljäs meistä lottoaa

Someone is throwing up in the stairwell again
You get a mouthful at the bar on weekends
Melancholy from alcohol fumes
One in four of us plays the lottery

Kyllä Suomi on maailman paras maa
Täällä Karpollakin riittää asiaa
Hengitysilmastakin veroa kai maksaa saa
Korkeakulttuuria Salkkarit toimittaa

Yes, Finland is the best country in the world
There is enough to do here in Karpo
I guess you have to pay a tax on the air you breathe
High culture delivered by Salkkarit*

[A Finnish TV "soap opera" that has been broadcasting continuously since 1999: like my own life, it's just one sex scandal after another, apparently.] 🦓

Ei täällä töissäkäynti kannata
Suomessa ei saa rikastua
Köyhiltä tuet pois leikataan
Ne säästötoimiksi meikataan
Kyllä Suomi on maailman paras maa
Täällä Karpollakin riittää asiaa
Hengitysilmastakin veroa kai maksaa saa…

It's not worth working here
You can't get rich in Finland
They're cutting subsidies for the poor
They're pretending to be austerity measures
Yes, Finland is the best country in the world
There's plenty to do here in Karpo too
I guess you have to pay tax even on the air you breathe…

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9uXpWOodss 

Book vs. Show: "Family Honor" in ASOIAF and HOTD.

Link to the video on "From Ink to Inc.", a relatively unknown channel: https://youtu.be/gMfIwIWJ6vo

I will, eventually, also upload this to à-bas-le-ciel —my well-established channel that nevertheless remains utterly unknown. ;-) 

Josh Menchions: the King of Comedy. In Newfoundland.

 
LINK: https://youtu.be/Nh9PzrLARcQ

Daemon Must Die, Daenerys Must Die, Jon Snow Must Die: the Real Villains of ASOIAF & HOTD.

LINK: https://youtu.be/2fEIeJEZAMM

I said "Daemon Blackfyre" when I meant "Daemon Targaryen" AGAIN.  Throughout THE WHOLE VIDEO.  You'll figure it out.  House of the Dragon Season 3. #hotd #asoiaf  #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

The dotted line between poetry and reality: the dotted line between Catullus and Cicero.

The source being quoted (and promoted) here was written in a less barbaric and brutal era of internet communications, 2014, when humanity was not exclusively devoted to wearing a mask, wielding a knife, and stabbing itself in the back:

‘Adulter, impudicus, sequester‘ convicium est, non accusatio.

(‘Adulterer, pervert, dealer in bribes’, this is the language of slander, not of prosecution.)

The strange tale told (and in large part concealed) in Cicero's strange Pro Caelio is the only evidence we have that what Catullus had to say about his own sex life was not fictional —and was not intended to be seen as fictional by his contemporaries.

Our Pro Caelio purports to be the speech delivered by Cicero to conclude the defence; a speech which is famous among classicists for its over-the-top denunciation of the sexual mores of the prosecution’s star witness, Clodia (a woman alleged to have been the inspiration for Catullus’ lover, [referred to in his poems by the pseudonym] Lesbia).

Here is the short article I am drawing your attention to:

https://whatwouldcicerodo.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/power-corruption-and-lies-in-defence-of-caelius/

The author is still alive and (as is typical of this era of the internet) continues posting to Instagram, but no longer to his (long abandoned) blog, linked to above.

https://www.instagram.com/sillettandrew/

York University —quite possibly the most miserable place on this earth that I have ever set foot— somehow ended up making a translation of the Pro Caelio available to the public without crediting the translator.

[Cicero:] But now I will handle her [Clodia, a.k.a. Catullus's Lesbia] with moderation, and proceed no further than my honor and the case itself demand. I have never thought it right to take up arms against a lady, especially against one whose arms are so open to all.

The denunciation that ensues, delayed by many digressions to contrast the morals of "the fallen age" we are (now) living in to the glorious past of a still-more-ancient Greece and Rome, tells us more about Cicero's character than it does about Clodia or Caelio or Catullus.

https://www.yorku.ca/pswarney/Texts/pro-caelio-trans.htm

What I do is esoteric: I don't explain anything to anyone.

What if this is going nowhere? #HOTD #ASOIAF

 

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUptMmb9IKs

House of the Dragon Season 3. #hotdseason3 #season3 #s3 #grrm #gameofthrones For those who don't know, "ASOIAF" = A Song of Ice and Fire, a broader category (of books) that includes both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.

Emily Ratajkowski, you're wrong for this one.

I think this one is not appropriate for any of my podcasts… so it will remain a youtube exclusive.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7hkc-nlxVU

Here's the link to the article… although it is an article about an article, I note. https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/emily-ratajkowski-used-sex-to-become-new-woman-after-divorce/ She has said of herself that she stopped having sex with her husband around precisely this time when he'd cheated on her ("[they] stopped being intimate six months after she gave birth") although I would not assume a six month timeline, nor would I assume they had a wonderful sex life immediately before those six months —I would just assume that the decline of their sex lives, as a couple, was somehow related to his infidelity (perhaps his infidelity was the cause of the decline, rather than merely being an effect of the decline, we don't know).

Like Pythons Pretending to Be Ants.

Is anyone else here old enough to remember Couchsurfing?

Supernatural aspects of daily life: esoteric aspects of nihilism.

Happiness: a mask without a face.

The longest three minutes of your whole entire life. ;-)

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qYW-yrsTAK0