sharknado slashfic posted:

Hell yeah the orb center owns

Squizzle posted:

it should only accept the space person coins from yesterday-ish

Orbs posted:

Thank you!! I've been working hard on it when I have moments to spare.

Also, uh... has the dot ever been purple before...? I am trying so hard not to strongly interpret, but

Bilirubin posted:

only accepts coins from Ghana

sharknado slashfic posted:

loving all the people Charles Berlitz ripped off were right

helta posted:

https://twitter.com/rosscoulthart/status/1765196411203891371?t=dEN7EIwtcwf05Bv3N3Hk8g&s=19

helta posted:

https://twitter.com/rosscoulthart/status/1765196411203891371?t=dEN7EIwtcwf05Bv3N3Hk8g&s=19

mediaphage posted:

not one of his better videos imo, especially the part about “oh we can’t get off the planet so we’ll just never care about anything we see up there” seemed a little silly

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

deleted
anybody have a screenshot saved?

Squizzle posted:

i woke up at 2:30am because my knee feels like a knife has been slipped under the patella from one side, and yet there is no knife visible

is this aliens or a govt psychic attack

Squizzle posted:

i woke up at 2:30am because my knee feels like a knife has been slipped under the patella from one side, and yet there is no knife visible

is this aliens or a govt psychic attack

SniperWoreConverse posted:

Bob fish was on secret missions to monitor the Bermuda triangle tftd base and all his undeniable & clear footage of uap emerging was confiscated and delivered to write Paterson in the 70s because blue book never ended, just the public part.

helta posted:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-to-investigate-ufos-but-without-the-distraction-of-conspiracy/

more poo poo from sean k!

quote:

Unfortunately, some who have been peripherally involved in these programs are taking advantage of the lack of understanding of security compartmentalization among the public—and some members of Congress—and feel that exposure of national security activities is a public right.

quote:

The harm of such exposure would be incalculable: billions of dollars and decades invested in military capabilities exposed to our potential adversaries to satisfy ill-informed curiosity.

quote:

harm

quote:

billions of dollars and decades invested in military capabilities

SKULL.GIF posted:

There is also apparently a secret underwater military base east of Miami.

helta posted:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-to-investigate-ufos-but-without-the-distraction-of-conspiracy/

more poo poo from sean k!

Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

The Superhumanities posted:

Ontological Polytheism and Moral Pluralism

The cultural psychologist and anthropologist Richard Shweder, with whom I opened my reality experiments, has laid out as clearly as anyone our three options for resolving the glaring problem of religious and cultural diversity—the problem of why there are so many different symbolic forms in the cultures and religions of the world. Enter Shweder’s essay “Post-Nietzschean Anthropology: The Idea of Multiple Objective Worlds.”

Shweder begins the essay by pointing out that such symbolic forms, “all those things that people around the world say and do about witches, ghosts, and spirit possession,” are believed to “refer or point beyond themselves to another realm.”96 But how exactly are we supposed to understand such claims, particularly when there are so many of them, and they are all so different? Take again the seemingly simple question, “Why do we see people claiming to be witches in almost every culture, and in contexts involving no coercion or threat?”

Shweder sees three basic options.

The first option is what he calls ontological atheism. This is the null hypothesis, which, for Shweder, was first clearly articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche and was most famously and smartly announced in the potent phrase, “God is dead.” This declaration, which is announced by Zarathustra in the opening parable of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, happens to correspond with what I have called the seer’s mystical realization in August 1881. “Around 1882 Nietzsche thought he had the answer to the witch question. Many contemporary cultural anthropologists think he was right.”97

This particular answer solves the problem of the plurality of the symbolic forms of the history of religions—all that magic, Mesmerism, and magnetism—by simply arguing that they refer to nothing at all. Their differences need not be our concern because of the same null reference. They are so much fancy or illusion in the head. The answer to the witch question can be paraphrased in this way, then: “There are no witches. We can ask what functions these beliefs serve, but it simply makes no sense to ask to what realities such symbols might point, since there are no such other realms. There are only social functions here, in this world.”

The second option is what Shweder calls ontological polytheism. This option reads the endless symbolic forms of the history of religions as evidence for an endless series of actual reality-posits—that is, of different realities: “According to the ontological polytheists the framework of reality is multiplex in disjoint planes, and it makes sense to interpret diversity as though there is more than one objective world.”98 The answer to the witch question would go like this, then: “People claim to be witches in so many cultures because there are witches. Magic really works in some reality-posits, and so people experience themselves as witches. They are correct to do so.”

As I understand it, this is the option that Shweder adopts in the essay, the idea of multiple objective worlds of his subtitle. Or, in Shweder’s post-Nietzscheanism, “monotheism is dead,” but polytheism is quite alive and well. In this polytheistic reality, plurality is not a problem but a gift, since “cultural variety illuminates the multiplicity of objective worlds.”99

But Shweder also recognizes a third option. This is a kind of mediation between the first and second options. It does not deny the different symbolic forms of human cultures as referring to nothing, as the first option does, but neither does it accept them on their own terms, as the second seems to do. In effect, this third option lines them up in a developmental or normative progression or hierarchy. In effect, this third option argues “that reality is uniform or homogenous, and that symbolic forms and reality-posits are not uniform and homogenous around the world because not everyone is equally in touch with reality.”100

Shweder is fully aware of how destabilizing his own position—ontological polytheism—can be. He summarizes what he does not hesitate to call a “universal truth” this way: “the knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.”101 Comparison, real unflinching comparison, is mind-bending.

As we move into our next chapter, it is very important to recognize that Shweder’s ontological polytheism also implies a moral pluralism, which is not at all the same thing as moral relativism, conventionalism, or subjectivism. It is simply not the case for Shweder that “anything goes.” His is a strong middle position between moral relativism (the ethical is simply a matter of local convention or personal opinion) and moral universalism (there is an objective and absolute moral law that different cultures approximate to different degrees)—a “universalism without uniformity,” as he puts it. What this means is that “there is no single and complete rational ordering of morally relevant goods.” What this entails is the capaciousness to not assume or suggest that “objective reality is devoid of moral truths,” that “those who disagree with our judgments of right and wrong are either moral cretins or barbarians,” or that “one’s own way of life is the only possible flowering of the ideals of an objective moral character.”102

In this admittedly rare humility, it can be said that every society works from a particular moral logic, often of a passionate and normative nature (and so is moral in its own terms), but these moral logics are in ethnographic fact different, sometimes very different. To put some detail on these philosophical abstractions, there are multiple ethical worlds around what Shweder and his colleagues have identified as the three moral clusters of autonomy, community, and divinity. In the summaries of the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt (who studied with Shweder), these are, in order: “the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences”; “the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations”; and “the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.”103

Such a global framing is actually quite helpful in our present context, as we can easily see through such a comparative construct that the modern academy generally only values the legitimacy or existence of the first and second moral clusters (autonomy and, to a lesser extent, community), whereas what I am calling the superhumanities tries to integrate or negotiate a relationship between the first (autonomy) and the second (community) and third (divinity), with a strong accent on the third. The contemporary humanities, in other words, “solve” the comparative challenge by essentially deleting or erasing any serious cross-cultural ontological discussion (the “divinity” of the third cluster) and asserting, or just assuming, its own clearly Western and obviously modern individualism and sociology, with the human being now nothing but a historically conditioned and fully material social organism who should be entirely autonomous (but never is).

Many, of course, who do not fall clearly into Shweder’s first answer to human diversity (ontological atheism or the null hypothesis) are not so certain. I know that I bounce somewhere between the second and third options (ontological polytheism and a normative spiritual cross-cultural development). I should add, though, that my working hypothesis of a dual-aspect monism, which I am about to introduce under the poetic banner of the Human as Two, aligns quite well with the nondualisms of Hindu and Buddhist Asia, not with my own birth culture and its Christian theisms, unless someone like the papally censored Meister Eckhart and his astonishing German sermons are held to represent these same Christian traditions—a real stretch, I assure you. I ultimately think that the radical Hindus and esoteric Buddhists are simply more correct about the nature of reality than the believing theists.104 So perhaps I adopt option three.

Or maybe the theists are correct, too, or correct enough, living in their own reality-posits, which they themselves cocreate everyday through ritual, belief, custom, and institution. The real can certainly become “God,” if that is what you want and work hard enough to cocreate through ritual, will, and prayer.105 Certainly, Meister Eckhart said as much: God emerges from worship and belief, somewhere between the abysmal Ground and human belief.

Chas McGill posted:

I want to know more about the 'silurian hypothesis' cos the concept is fun. Can anyone recommend a book/podcast episode/video about it? Sceptical stuff also welcome. I just love the idea of extremely ancient things.

Chas McGill posted:

I want to know more about the 'silurian hypothesis' cos the concept is fun. Can anyone recommend a book/podcast episode/video about it? Sceptical stuff also welcome. I just love the idea of extremely ancient things.

Orbs posted:

Yes. It is in fact a fundamental right for the people to know what the gently caress their government is doing, supposedly in their name.

History will not forgive or forget what you chose over the truth, Sean.

030524_3 posted: