Sunday, March 7, 2021

The Postmodern King of the World


By now, I'm sure many of you have heard about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)'s rune. For those unaware: This annual event, a rallying point for the Republican party, unfolded between February 25 and 28th in 2021. CPAC normalyl finds a way to generate some minor controversey, but this year was special. This particular conference will be remembered for the stage, which appeared to be in the shape of an odal rune

The meaning of this rune is a matter of some dispute, but it's generally associated with nobility, lineage, and inheritance. As such, it has been used in a rather predictable fashion in modern times. The odal rune was appropriated by Nazi Germany, specifically the SS, as an emblem. More recent fascist and Nazi groups, such as South Africa's White Liberation Movement and Italy's National Vanguard, have also employed this particular rune. 

Some have described the odal rune at CPAC as inverted. This is a fair enough assessment. Typically, the "wings" or "feet" of the rune are placed at the bottom. In the case of the CPAC stage, they're at the top. So, if this rune is typically associated with nobility (including noble bloodlines), are these Republican kingmakers signaling that they're not up to the task? 

Maybe, but I suspect that the symbol on the stage has more the one meaning. In some circles, it's in odal rune. But to me, in the inverted form, it looks suspiciously like the Owl Cave symbol from Twin Peaks. Of course, the Owl Cave symbol appears in a variety of guises in Peaks, occasionally with wings downward like a conventional odal rune. But as Owl Cave symbol is also closely associated with owls, the wings are more often than not upward. Just like the one at CPAC. 

The first time the Owl Cave symbols appears is towards the end of the second season. Within Owl Cave, it appears on a devise that reveals a map to the Black Lodge. It's later revealed that the Black Lodge can only be entered during a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, i.e. a Great Conjunction

the symbol as it appears in Owl Cave

All of this is interesting in light of developments with in the QAnon ARG that I recently addressed here. To recap: There seems to be a full blown effort afoot to take QAnon deep into Theosophical waters with the recent Shawunawaz and Sabmyk LARP. 

Shawunawaz is a mythological sword originally crafted by the Orion Kings of Atlantis. Over the years, the sword was wielded by an hero worth his or her salt --GilgameshAchillesAlexanderSpartacus, and even Napoleon. In more recent years, the sword was returned to it's rightful owner, the Persian Princess Ameli Achaemenes, by none other than George Soros. Princess Ameli destroyed the sword so that it's power could no longer be abused, but it appears to have returned to us in these trying times. Or possibly Princess Ameli can transform herself into the sword of Shawunawaz. I'm not entirely clear on that point dear reader. 

2 to 1 Princess Ameli is a man....

Anyway, the sword has returned, in some form or other, so that it can be wielded by an entity known as "Sabmyk," the "preordained ruler of the world." This being came into existence on December 21, 2020 --which just happened to be a Great Conjunction --or began the process of assuming his kingship. Again, it's not entirely clear (like much of this mythos). 

Sabmyk also has a symbol with shades of the Owl Creek thing, and is closely associated with 12, the number of trees in the Glastonbury Grove, where the Owl Cave symbol leads too, and where the Black Lodge can be accessed during the conjunction. 

Sabmyk is also said to have 12 generals under his command

There are some other interesting numbers connected to Sabmyk as well:

Long time readers of this blog are aware of the significance of 17

This Sabmyk character is a little more than a thinly-veiled variation on Theosophy's old Maitreya trope: the Ascended Master of Ascended Masters, sent to guide humanity's spiritual development during troubled times. Or some such shit. It's gone through quite a few variations over the years, touching everything from the I AM movement and the Church Universal and Triumphant


"Then it started to get weird...."

In many ways, it was inevitable that QAnon would end up with their own version of the Maitreya. People connected to it like Thomas Schoenberger and JZ Knight have been pimping the Ascended Masters claptrap for years now. Sooner or later, they would need their World King, right? 

Really, this is par the course for Theosophy and it's derivatives. We touched on this a bit in a Farm episode this past summer, but it bears repeating here: One of the defining legacies of Theosophy in the twentieth century was the "inspiration" it provided to authoritarian political movements of various stripes --BolshevismNazismsynarchy, and even the Moral Re-Armament movement (which helped mold so much of today's Christian right) were all touched by it, especially the Ascended Masters teachings. 

This is not entirely surprising, given that Theosophy worshipped hierarchy every bit as much as the Traditionalists (who were themselves heavily indebted to it).  Of course, Theosophists and their ilk hide behind phrases like "spiritual hierarchy," and insist that anyone can pass through the grades with the proper spiritual development. And naturally, this spiritual development is generally only available through expensive courses that only affluent white people can afford. 

And that brings us to another of Theosophy's offspring: the New Age movement. Surely the New Age movement, with it's crystals, veganism, and Space Brothers (more on in a moment) has transcended this authoritarian impulse, right? 

But what about the gurus?

New Age sects have a disturbing tendency to deteriorate into cults of personality around a charismatic "teacher." NXIVM (which grew out of the closely related "Human Potential movement") is an industrial strength example, but a host of New Age figures from Werner Erhard to Carlos Castaneda have engaged in some very dubious behavior in regards to their followers. 


Erhard (top) and Castaneda (bottom)

With Theosophy's DNA spread so widely now throughout a host of fringe right and left wing groups, it should come as little surprise that authoritarian movements, be they QAnon or "Cancel Culture," are so pervasive. The timing is especially noteworthy: Bolshevism and Fascism both had their coming out parties around the 1919/1920 timeframe. This paved the way for two decade dominated by dictatorships. A hundred years later, and it looks like the stage is set once again. 

The earlier project came to a crashing halt in 1945. But if Christopher Knowles is correct (as he normally is), the project got jumpstarted again in 1947 via a novel means: technology, or maybe more accurately, "Lucifer's Technologies." A major outgrowth of the postwar technological boom was the PC and the Internet. And neither QAnon nor Cancel Culture would be possible without either of those things. Indeed, the authoritarianism of the twenty-first century is wholly derived from Lucifer's Technologies. 


There's another component, however, that is not often talked about: postmodernism. Postmodernism first began to gain traction in academia during the 1980s. By 2004, it arguably became the dominate paradigm in the West, not just within academia, but also among the managerial class groomed by academia. For more on this transformation, see Bradley Bowden's Work, Wealth, and Postmodernism. And as I recently discussed with the great Edmund Berger, postmodernism has an authoritarian bent as well, and schizophrenic one to boot.

The end result of this is a ruling elite who, on the one hand, believes godhood via their technologies is imminent, and, on the other, believes that there is no longer any objective truth or meaning. Hence the reverence for science, which can no longer even adhere to the scientific method. To say that this will not end well is an understatement. 

But as Knowles suggests, that's probably the point. Another thing about the rise of postmodernism is that it's the perfect paradigm for high strangeness. In modernism, a UFO is either a nuts-and-bolts spacecraft from Zeta Reticula, swamp gas, or a delusion. In postmodernism, it can be all of these things, as well as an inter-dimensional AI, a demon/angel, a time travelers, and a host of other possibilities, all simultaneously. The same is true of the supernatural, esp, and anything else that falls under high strangeness. Postmodernism is at least capable of providing a more satisfactory explanation for these things than it's predecessor ever could. And it seems at least as adapt at generating authoritarian political currents. 

Nick Land is very much a product of postmodernism

Fittingly,. Twin Peaks is perhaps the one fictional work they really got high strangeness right. It captured the nonsensical aspect of it like no other. And make no mistake about it: Nonsense is a crucial aspect of all of this. Both postmodernism and high strangeness thrive off of it.


 To return to Knowles, who has been hitting it out of the park lately: In another recent post, he suggests that the bizarre behavior often demonstrated by events of high strangeness maybe a form of "depatterning." Effectively, its a means of reorienting human perception, by assaulting our drive to find meaning and structure in things. 

"Incidentally," this is also a major preoccupation of postmodernism as well. Indeed, one of it's most celebrated offshoots is known as "Post-structuralism," which is basically an attempt to reject all forms of structure. With this paradigm now dominating intellectual currents throughout the West, the absurdity and surrealism of demonstrations in the twenty-first century makes a lot more sense. But is there something even more nefarious at play? 

This embrace of postmodernism on a societal wide level is doing far more to reorient human perception than random encounters with high strangeness by lone individuals or small groups ever could. To this researcher, it comes off as a form of societal wide conditioning. The public is being primed for a whole new way of thinking. 



31 comments:

  1. For me the films "Rollerball" and "Fight Club" perfectly captured the dystopian nature of a postmodern society: a world where heroism is illegal, masculinity is deprecated, aggression is channeled into meaningless distractions, spirituality is de-fanged, the masses are demoralized and all power is concentrated in a tiny technocratic elite. Postmodernism works well to create this new dystopian order; it takes a wrecking ball to all our traditional virtues and clears the way for a new kind of slave society. Of course it will ultimately fail, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a horrible thing to live through.

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    1. Very good mate. The question is, who or what is doing the post-modern conditioning. One might say it is a powerful elite of the political right, but I suspect something other. CG

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  2. Recluse,

    "The end result of this is a ruling elite who, on the one hand, believes godhood via their technologies is imminent, and, on the other, believes that there is no longer any objective truth or meaning."

    Shades of V For Vendetta, both in the Voice of Fate, and in V stating, "This is not Do What Thou Wilt, this is do-as-you-please."

    And as all too often happens, I see shades of Lovecraft looming over our future. As old Castro told us, "the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

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  3. What I have to say about this subject would not be welcomed by persons on the Far Right, or the Woke crowd. Largely because if it's true, it would force them both to have reevaluate their loyalties. As well as what they think they know about history...
    Whenever I take a look at some of the lunacies that issue forth from the Woke crowd (telling everyone that heterosexuality is intrinsically wrong, asserting that white males are born evil), I have to wonder how much of this might be engineered.
    As I have observed before, contrary to what many people think, the Nazis were acutely aware that without the desperation of the post WWI Weimar era, their reign would never have been possible. Even after they took power, they continued to study the ways in which societal crisis, as well as personal trauma, empowers movements such as theirs.
    Most people, when they look seriously at the Nazi influence on programs such as MK-Ultra, OFTEN, etc., don't really seem to grasp one crucial point.
    They focus on things like the creation of assassins, and other uses. But, they overlook the following.
    If there was a genuine hope to revive and empower a Nazi/Fascist type model of rule, then a large portion of the programming they would have done would have been designed to recreate the instability of the Weimar period. Including creating an aggressive pseudo-opposition to their agenda.
    And, to do that, they would need to have an unhinged and vociferous array of opponents. Persons and programs so extreme, that people would feel the need for a "cultural rebirth" of the kind that brought Hitler to power.
    I have to wonder how many of the more extreme voices out there (like the Woke people), are a a product of this initiative?
    This does not mean that the persons in question would know that. It's far more likely that they have no knowledge of it at all. But, if we accept that memes, as well as mental imbalances, can have a viral effect, then much of what we see with Woke style intolerance could be something that was deliberately seeded in the American mind decades ago.

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    1. Agree, however, a meme is a kind of virus that infects many, but not all minds ... Jo

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    2. Agree, however, a meme is a kind of virus that infects many, but not all minds ... Jo

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    3. It's a trope that drug fuelled and trauma based mind control was a Nazi invention. I've yet to see any textual evidence for it. Similarly, the US claimed that MK Ultra/MONARCH style programmes were necessary because the USSR was doing it. But I've never seen any evidence for this either. Just an assumption based on these two entities being all purpose villains. The British pioneered these techniques and there's evidence of Ewan Cameron's activities.

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    4. "British" = ensconced descendents of invaders such as "The Normans" & "The Romans", the bureacratic civil servant caste of the ages - the rank & file of the "empire" that "never ended".

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    5. The Secret Sun Never Sets on the Roman Empire.

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  4. To be clear, I am focusing on the Woke paradigm because of two reasons. First, because intolerance in any form disturbs me. But, also because it's a form of extremism that still has a veil of propriety covering it.
    The Far/Alt Right crowd, the Trump supporters... their danger is obvious. You can, as the saying goes, see them coming a mile away. I mean, when a posturing, narcissistic buffoon like Trump stands up and talks about how the nation's problems can be fixed by building a Great Wall to keep out those "evil foreigners", it's obvious that a totalitarian agenda is at work.
    But, because the Woke extremists claim to be representing repressed/marginalized peoples, it's harder for peoples to see the danger they represent.

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    1. Italy had her "years of lead;" the 21st century Empire has its "years of memes." But its strategy of tension either way. This article from last year's huffpo was a gift to B*n Sh*piro, for whom it was tailor-made; he tweeted it out with a simple caption: "Welp..."
      https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rbg-mom-joins-satanic-temple_n_5f6b3565c5b629afbe990c15

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  5. Regarding your very cogent observations about post-modernism, here's an interesting fact.
    The Temple of Set, which as most of you know is the brainchild of Nazi Black Adept Michael Aquino, is a thorough proponent of post-modernist thought. Pick up any book published by Aquino or the T.O.S.
    It's a point I have tried to make many times. The Nazis were post-modernists, before the term existed. They also believed there was no objective truth, and that reality is only what we force it to be. This is why they were able to commit the kinds of atrocities they did.

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  6. For anyone interested in pursuing the links between post-modernist thought, occult doctrines, and authoritarian government, I recommend a book entitled "The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology"
    This is a compilation of various lectures and meeting notes of Georges Bataille's Acephale Group. Reviewing these materials, it becomes evident that only the thinnest of veils divided their ideas from the Volkisch occultists of Germany. In fact there is even mention, in the notes on one of their meetings, that one of Acephale's members had visited Germany when the Nazis were in power, but before the war started. He detailed visiting one of their Ordensburg castles, and witnessed one of their night-time rituals. The group discussion of Acephale goes through what might be adopted from the Volkisch views.

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  7. Was waiting for "out of the park" Knowles to address the right-wing rune/occult stagecraft, its really smack-dab in his stagecraft wheelhouse, isn't it? Too bad Cardi B or a Trans entertainer wasn't briefly on stage, he could've created a three-part series about the deadly occult ramifications of the rune technology on display.

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    1. This made me snort with laughter - spot on.

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  8. Fascinating that the CPAC display happened at the same time the average (apolitical?) entertainment consumer was probably introduced to the concept of "runes" via Wandavision. Also as the "Scarlett Witch" name was uttered in the MCU for the first time. And of course, the show is literally about "creating your own reality" ... there are many slipstreams available via Lucifer's technologies, but I suspect they are all flowing to the same place.

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    1. Runes are really in their origin sigils anyway. So it's sigil magic by a different name.

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  9. The scholarly rigor of this blog has kept me a faithful reader so I feel obligated to correct the blatant errors made in this post in its discussion of post modernism and post structuralism. Regardless of how these analytic approaches are misconstrued by conservatives fighting their Kulture Kampf, neither post modernism nor post structuralism are moral philosophies. Rather they offer researchers techniques to analyze existing power systems and critique them against their privileged claims. They are descriptive not prescriptive in nature. Perhaps, the confusion comes from people conflating these schools of thought with the particular conditions from which they arose. Post modernism initially was an attempt to reveal the hidden hegemonic prejudices and assumptions of modernism, namely, the claim that analysis of society by the powerful institutions was free from cultural biases. This came about as the Eurocentric model of the world began to compete with other entrenched cultural traditions. Post structuralism was a response to the disintegration of the industrial working class and it sought new models to replace the rigid Marxist framework of proles versus capitalists. Both of these approaches were a response to the rapidly changing world of the 20th century. Corporations may indeed utilize insights provided by these approaches; for example, it is no longer acceptable to insist the boss is right because he is an older, white man seeped in the norms of a wiser age. As well, governments can no longer claim they are civilized so they have right of rule over savage peoples. These are the fruits of this "post-whatever" approach to the study of power and culture. This is not to claim they offer solutions to the myriad problems of our disjointed world but at the same time they are not some diabolic mind virus responsible for whatever conservatives are having a moral panic over on a given day. They are merely prisms through which we can examine how power hides and reveals itself in the ever changing arena of the world.

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    1. Just a quick note here to say: thank you. Thank you for this. No expert but I've always understood that "marxist" criticism is the useful bit leftover from "marxism" as an ideology. That is, as a method of critiquing power relations/dynamics rather than a positive ideology. I have always understood "post-modernism" in a similar way, that is, as a term of description rather than prescription.

      Agree also that the deployment of these (now) loaded terms like "cultural marxism" and "postmodernism" are much better understood as empty buzzwords wielded in "conservative" kulturkampf agitation, rather than what such terms might actually mean.

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    2. Cheers- correcting misconceptions online is a particularly thankless job. "Cultural marxism" is also a bugbear of mine as the term makes absolutely no sense. Marxism is grounded in materialist study of power and explicitly considers culture as epiphenomenal to economic/political relations. Cultural Marxism is a flag that the person using it has no idea what they are talking about and consumes too much conservative media.

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    3. Recently on The Farm, Recluse interviewed a guest who is very familiar with how "cultural marxism" made it into mainstream discourse over time. It is really just another term for what was once called "political correctness," or "multiculturalism," and is certainly of a piece with what is now called "woke." Here's a link and a long quote:

      https://www.academia.edu/38560843/PART_2_CHAPTER_13_FCF_4GW_AND_MULTICULTURALISM_BRIDGE_81_PAGES
      The Free Congress Foundation’s Bridge to the Hard Right: Traditional Values
      Part of this creation of ideological affinities to enable various segments of the broad right-wing to collaborate and share a common perspective on the mortal enemy, even if they used different language, was the Free Congress Foundation’s efforts to spread their ideas related to “cultural Marxism,” “political correctness,” and “multiculturalism” to audiences as varied as the Department of Defense, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, the Holocaust-denying crowd of Willis Carto, and the white nationalist audience of The Political Cesspool.
      All of this has been consistent with the Boydian notion that an organization that is not open and innovative is closed and decaying. This theory of “cultural Marxism” is now so commonplace, that when Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, asked anti-communist and anti-civil rights leader Phyllis Schlafly for a Daily Caller website interview, if “‘cultural Marxists have already won in the country,’” Schlafly simply agreed.
      The Free Congress Foundation and William S. Lind have used a variety of methods to disseminate their theory of “multiculturalism” or “political correctness” beyond the confines of the Christian Right. Weyrich’s rather pessimistic 1999 assessment of the conservative movement suggested that the Free Congress Foundation’s concepts of “Cultural Marxism” and “political correctness” were so widely understood in the movement that the terms did not require explanation. According to Weyrich, “I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics…. The ideology of Political Correctness [“which we more accurately call ‘Cultural Marxism,’”], which openly calls for the destruction of our traditional culture has so gripped the body politic, has so gripped our institutions, that it is even affecting the Church…. Suffice it to say that the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.”
      Lind’s 4GW articles in the U.S. Marine Corps Gazette, especially the 1994 article that introduced to a Defense Department audience the idea that “multiculturalism,” an alien philosophy advocated by “cultural radicals,” the internal domestic enemy, would plunge America into a racial, religious, regional, and sexual-orientation Hobbesian war of all-against-all, was preceded by like-minded efforts aimed at the Christian Right and the white nationalist right via the book Cultural Conservatism published in 1987.
      The Free Congress Foundation was instrumental in diffusing its theory of cultural Marxism or opposition to multiculturalism into the fringes of the right-wing. Bill Berkowitz reported that Lind was the “key popularizer of the idea of cultural Marxism.” The idea spread and subtly mutated from the Free Congress Foundation to Patrick Buchanan’s 2000 presidential campaign, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, the League of the South, the American Free Press, and the Americans for Immigration Control, Paul Craig Roberts, and David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

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    4. Very interesting! I find it curious that the term cultural Marxism itself is incoherent and nonsensical while being portrayed as the Big Bad to American thinking by conservatives. I guess what they fear is an open multicultural cosmopolitan world. They are trying to sell their particular fairytale and require an enemy. It seems those that decry post modernism the most are those who insist on the exclusive validity of their own brand of truth. What they fear is people calling them out on their bs and post modernism provides a vocabulary and critical conceptual framework to do just that.

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    5. I started seeing constant allusion to 'Cultural Marxism". What is usually referred to is the thought of Frankfurt School cranks and Gramsci. Oddly- and this is worth a deep dive, Gramsci's 'prison writings' (So Mussolini's prisons allowed hard core communist thinkers to compose 'theory'? I'm skeptical) were edited and translated by Pete Buttegieg's father. I'm wondering if they were entirely fabricated. Were I Miles Mathis, I'd say they pretty obivously were.

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  10. "Conservatives" who are frequently called out for not conserving anything, but rather attempting to impose a variety of forms of order. Such a bewhildering array of form of order, in fact that they prove your thesis. The Trickster no longer needs to disrupt our science with bright lights in the sky and shadowy figures claiming to be from Venus. We've invented algos to do it to ourselves. The "left" has their own version of the same thing with Green New Deals promising a return to the neolithic.

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  11. The Arts, & Its "derangement of the senses", are the realm in which po-mo took leech-like hold, "The Arts" derided as not "real work" like say a career in business/engineering/mathematics etc, but all these non-artistic fields are as full of this po-mo nonsense as the sneered at "Arts" (bitcoin, borne of hard worked STEM fields, being some kind of O.G. non-fungible token). It's all "dark arts" at the end of the day working upon us if we acquiesce, like the pussy/maga hat pepsi/coke battle etc It just facilitates means to dissociate, alienate, divide, channel & rule.

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    1. The old divide and conquer stratagem continually upgrades it's public image.

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  12. With the disintegration of a master narrative power is stripped of its virtue - everything becomes competing fairytales and there is no appeal to a higher truth to arbitrate between their mutually exclusive claims. Power resides behind the spectacle and its the ability to stage manage the increasingly cataclysmic events engulfing the world. The spectacle of politics and finance have become advanced mind control techniques. The masters of this realm can generate consensus reality, generally in the form of wealth but powered by the magic of fame and celebrity. This is the real trick of our apocalypse - keeping 7 billion human beings distracted while the world burns. I only hope individuals are able to sort this out and so we can reclaim our sovereign birthright over our habitat and lives. Post-modern analysis can be used to see through the manipulation, exposing the methods by which the powerful use art, culture and entertainment to keep us under their terrible thrall.

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  13. https://youtu.be/zmYegIGhwtc
    -There is also a few more very informative videos but as another commenter said, the misrepresentation and reductionist interpretation on postmodern philosophy (which is already a reductionist labeling on many very diverse and distinct thinkers) shows very little familiarity with said philosophies and a conflagration with the postmodern condition which mean very different things depending on the topic. Like the take on post-structuralism is almost laughably just plain wrong. Go to the sources not the hearsay.

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    1. See comment above directed to Gravinci; look ye upon the crumbling edifice of 2015-16 Quilette thinkpieces, and weep.

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  14. Okay to clarify my point lets look at politics that refute post -modern thinking - Iran, North Korea, PRC, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Murdoch conservative media

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  15. So, I read this article about a week ago. Very interesting. I lived in Sweden for about 8 years and had the opportunity to see many rune inscriptions but other than a historical curiosity I didn't really pay more attention than that. So, I didn't actually know anything about the Odal rune before reading your article. Imagine my surprise tonight when I'm watching season 1 episode 2 of Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch when about 30 min. in I see a variant of the Odal rune stuck to a corkboard. Random interesting coincidence.

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