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Posts Tagged ‘Thanatopsis’

Chicken Soup with Tweets

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2025| Leave a Comment »

They want to restore the "integrity" of an agency built by J. Edgar Hoover.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-14T18:58:24.002Z

Brussels sprouts are disgusting; they even SMELL disgusting. As do all their siblings.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-15T18:18:53.218Z

Not to mention that being restricted to idiotic, simplistic 18th-century notions of "right" and "left" reduces all political thought and commentary to a second-grade level.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-17T16:31:24.699Z

He also seems ignorant of the fact that Canada is geographically larger than the United States.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-18T18:22:25.152Z

A truly Ozymandian monument to futility and the hubris of politicians.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-19T17:00:46.680Z

And yet some think I'm a weirdo for refusing to eat uncooked or undercooked food.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-21T03:41:07.764Z

We *really* need mandatory retirement ages for politicians.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-22T04:53:57.294Z

Another timeline cleanse.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-22T18:34:52.255Z

206-year-old Christmas carol annoys rando, and the Atlantic is ON IT

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-25T18:08:12.311Z

Finding "trending topics" in my margin this morning was like finding a big cat turd on the kitchen floor. Luckily, a "sweep this shit away" button was included.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-26T18:07:13.546Z

Because a healthy brain can't help learning?

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-27T18:59:40.901Z

Why don't techies who name their software after mythical people, places, and things bother to think about the implications of the name they choose?

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-30T22:33:12.105Z

"As Attorney General, I will not permit steroidal Oklahoma thugs to face criminal prosecution for conduct adhering the state principle of violence toward all minorities who fail to abase themselves and unquestioningly obey state actors."

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2024-12-31T16:34:59.336Z

When a headline asks a question, the answer is nearly always “no”.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-03T04:05:11.236Z

THIS RIGHT HERE.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-03T18:22:20.545Z

I sometimes wonder what kind of abuse it takes to reduce a human mind to a collectivist one. In darker moods, I assume it's a disease of the soul itself.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-04T18:02:54.971Z

In real life, I was 25 from the time I was about 15 until the time I was about 35. Professionally, I was 28 from 33 to 40, then aged about 1 year for every 2 until 2015, when I turned 49.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-06T05:30:30.070Z

The real reason for this is not "AI", but that most teachers are lazy thinkers who predictably reward certain statements and conclusions which can be tracked and tabulated by machine learning algorithms, rather than rewarding actual thinking ML systems cannot parrot.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-06T18:51:13.912Z

Very close: the full picture is that a democracy in which there are functionally only two parties is not sustainable.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-07T05:45:48.471Z

Some of us warned y'all about allowing chief executives to govern by monarchical diktat by declaring "emergencies".Y'all were all for it when the executives were on "your" schoolyard team.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-08T18:24:52.542Z

"No civilization—no matter how resilient—is actually permanent."

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-09T18:12:38.106Z

Reporters: please stop saying a law is "meant to" do such-and-such when it's obvious it was never ACTUALLY intended to do any such thing, but rather to convince the gullible that it was.The phrase you're looking for is, "the law was PRETENDED to do such-and-such".

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-10T18:09:50.321Z

"Looks like your adblocker's on!"Yes, I turned it on a decade ago and left it that way. What next, Captain Obvious? "You're breathing"?

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-14T16:41:16.344Z

He "looked like" a hypocrite for the simple reason that he *is* a hypocrite; it kinda goes with the territory. Republics are like cesspools: the biggest chunks float to the top.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-01-15T18:44:02.688Z

 

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Throwback Created Thursday

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on November 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The dictatorship of the majority is…the most oppressive tyranny of all because it has a huge army of sympathizers and informants with which to enforce its demands.
–  “Guy Fawkes Night”

People love to say, “if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,” but this is completely backwards:  it is the voters who have no right to complain, because by signing on to this devil’s bargain they agree to be bound by it.
“Honored in the Breach”

The rulers [of modern republics]…treat government as a colossal game of hot potato, eternally passing the ball forward in the hopes that it will be in someone else’s hands when the music at last stops as it inevitably must.  –  “Cleansing Fire”

The continuance of life for any given creature requires the regular deaths of countless others.  –  “The Mysteries“

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Day of the Dead 2024

Posted in Holidays, Philosophy, tagged , , on November 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Though worlds and suns are considerably longer-lived than we, they too must eventually perish in the fullness of time.  –  “Let There Be Dark”

“Every single thing in the Cosmos is mortal, and will pass away in its time.  [Organisms and empires alike] rise, thrive, decline, and fall, to be replaced by younger ones which then decline and fall in their time…crumbling into dust and passing first into memory, then legend, and eventually beyond the horizon of sentient knowledge.”

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Tweets Aplenty

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Links #721

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 28, 2024| Leave a Comment »

An unintentional body movement can lead to death.  –  Scott Harlan

Since I often share my earworms with you, I’m unsure how this one – presenting a view of death not at all unlike mine  –  has managed to avoid being featured before.  The links above the video were provided by Jesse Walker, Winnie Pond, The Onion, Mike Siegel, C.J. Ciaramella, Popehat, and Marc Randazza, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Tweetenstein

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2024| 1 Comment »

 

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Teenage Throwback Thursday

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The lurid, sensationalized tragedy porn narratives that make up the body of “sex trafficking” mythology are nothing more than Gothic horror tales that opportunists pretend are real.  –  “Unreal Horrors”

Every…sex-work[er]…has had clients fall for her; it’s a natural outgrowth of a situation in which a lonely man spends a lot of time in the company of a beautiful, alluring woman who only shows him her best side.  –  “Out of Bounds”

You are going to die.  Soon.  And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.  –  “Thanatopsis”

Sex and death are but two sides of the same coin:  the former is the door through which we enter the world, and the latter the door through which we leave it.  –  “Eros and Thanatos”

That experience of being a stranger in one’s own community, of being treated like a living oracle, like a weird visitor back from the underworld with divine wisdom to share…that, I think, is the experience which defines the old.
–  “Let There Be Dark”

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The Mysteries

Posted in History, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on November 1, 2020| 3 Comments »

Death is what gives life meaning, and fighting excessively against it is as childish and futile as the behavior of a toddler who refuses to let another child take his place on the carousel once his ride is done.  –  “Thanatopsis”

Every year on the Day of the Dead I write about the inevitability and goodness of Death.  Yes, I said “goodness”; as I wrote in “Eternity“, “Eternal life wouldn’t be a gift; it would be a horror literally beyond imagining.”  I’ve never been especially afraid of death; part of that is due to the fact that “I was a strange, wild, moody Wednesday Addams of a child, born on Halloween night and fascinated with horror lore and imagery.  Autumn was both my native season and the one in which I felt most comfortable…” The rest, of course, was a combination of chronic depression and ruthless pragmatism; for much of my life I endured long periods in which I would have viewed death as a welcome release, and even when I was in a cheerier frame of mind I was still rational enough to recognize that the continuance of life for any given creature requires the regular deaths of countless others.  But it wasn’t until my forties that I started become really philosophical about mortality, and only five years ago did I really start to deeply ponder its spiritual dimension.  The latter development was not merely due to age, though that undoubtedly helped put me in the right headspace; a catalyst was required, and that catalyst was edible cannabis.  I started experimenting with what are typically and not-entirely-correctly called “recreational drugs” near the end of 2014, and though several of them gave me very rewarding experiences with others, it was the psychedelic experiences I had from using largish doses of edible cannabis alone (or more accurately, without human company) that opened the doors to the Infinite and gave me a perspective on death, the soul and my place in Everything which eventually led to a spiritual peace unlike any I had ever known.  I was far from alone; those who refuse to be bound by the Puritanism which has trapped modern humanity in a death-grip have for decades tried to tell everyone else about the healing and mind-expanding power of psychedelic drugs, and since the 1990s studies have increasingly demonstrated the power of such substancies to alleviate depression, PTSD and other mental health issues.  But this is not a new discovery, it is, rather, a rediscovery of truths known to our ancestors millenia ago:

…sacred tripping was not simply a function of prehistoric religious rituals and shamanism, but an integral, even central part, of the world of the ancient Greeks….The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name, by Brian Muraresku…shows…the centrality of psychedelic use…in an elaborate and mysterious once-in-a-lifetime ceremony at the Temple of Eleusis, a short distance from Athens.  We’ve long known about…the Mysteries…and the rite of passage they offered — because it’s everywhere in the record.  Many leading Greeks and Romans went there, including Plato and Marcus Aurelius…The Greeks and Romans went to Eleusis only once in their lives, like the Muslim hajj, to participate in a nocturnal rite, and were sworn to secrecy as to what went on.  But the constant theme in the ancient literature around this ritual is that it somehow took the sting of death away.  “Death is for mortals no longer an evil, but a blessing” was the phrase attached to it…Historians and classicists have long pondered what this meant and what exactly happened, but all agree that it required drinking a special brew.  And new discoveries of ancient chalices and cups — and new techniques of testing ancient residue — have begun to suggest what made these archaic potions so special…they contained countless herbs and spices and ingredients, among them, critically, elements of ergot, a fungus that infected barley and rye and had potent hallucinogenic effects…Another re-examined excavation in Pompeii found the preserved remains at the bottom of large barrels jars dated to 79 CE:  chemical analysis found it included seeds of cannabis, opium, and hallucinogenic nightshades.  The recipe for the psychedelic brew and the preparation of it was restricted to women, who passed on the secret recipes from mother to daughter, and was the particular preserve of older women.  The effect, we’re told in the sources, was transformative: you saw past life and death, you became unafraid of your own mortality, you gained perspective and inner peace…
When I read this article a few days ago, I wasn’t really surprised; I have long understood that knowledge is cyclic, and many truths are gained, lost, and gained again, not merely on a societal level but in the lives of individuals treading paths new to us, but well-worn by countless others.  And my own life is replete with “coincidences” and “happenstances” which are in actuality nothing but; I see them as the Hand of the Divine, though you of course are free to draw your own conclusions.  I do not have access to the sacred recipe for the transformative cocktail at the center of The Mysteries, and yet I nonetheless have followed in the footsteps of my many-times-great-grandmeres by offering to others the wisdom that mortality is not a thing to fear, but rather a blessing to accept when it comes to us in the fullness of time.

 

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Eros and Thanatos

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on November 1, 2018| 2 Comments »

When [the universe is] over it will fade away, leaving nothing behind except the fact that it existed, and that it was savagely beautiful.  –  “Whistling Past the Graveyard”

Every year on this day, the Day of the Dead, I publish a thanatopsis, a meditation on death.  This is not to say that I myself only think about it at this time of year; as regular readers already know, Death and I are old friends, and “when he at last come to collect me it will be a rendezvous rather than a capture.”  Accordingly, he’s never very far from my thoughts, and I generally think and speak about him with the nonchalance most people think and speak about minor medical problems; at a recent checkup, my doctor questioned my disinterest in undergoing an expensive and extremely unpleasant cancer-screening test which is apparently considered routine for people above 50, to which my response was a shrug and “I’ve got to die of something.”  Some people think this odd, but I remind them that I am a courtesan, and sex and death are but two sides of the same coin:  the former is the door through which we enter the world, and the latter the door through which we leave it.  For the first few millennia of human civilization, sex-goddesses were usually also associated with war and death; the Sumerian Inanna was the twin sister of Ereshkigal, ruler of the dead, and once tried to usurp her sister’s throne (a misadventure which resulted in the death of Inanna’s husband, the vegetation-god Damuzi, and therefore the origin of the seasons).  And Mexican sex workers are among the most devoted worshipers of Santa Muerte, the personification of death.  My belief in the goodness of death is not merely a result of my pagan philosophy, though; it is also based in the practical understanding of the inevitability of death and its role as the redistributor of resources from the moribund to the young, and also in an unsentimental recognition that gerontocracy is the enemy of human progress:

…if you like working your arse off to support the decades-long retirements of a bunch of old dinosaurs whose cognitive norms formed a generation before you were born, just imagine how much you’d love it right now if 90% of the population were born before the Second World War, and a sizeable fraction of the people voting on stuff like sexual rights came of age in an era when it was still considered OK for humans to actually, legally own other humans.  The current rulers of our world were mostly born in the 40s-60s, and their ideas provide ample proof of that; imagine how it would be if most of them had been born in the 19th century…

Humans may be the smartest monkeys, but we’re still monkeys, fragile creatures controlled by poorly-developed minds dominated by primitive fears and foolish ideas.  So perhaps it’s fitting that Western culture’s impending demise is being driven by tyrants whose destruction of freedom and justice is enabled by the masses willing to give them any power in exchange for their impossible promises to delay death, both personal and cultural, just a little longer.

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Eternity

Posted in History, Philosophy, tagged , , , on May 7, 2018| 8 Comments »

Regular readers know that I am not afraid of death, and in fact consider it a positive good.  And so, though I understand why people might want to have a little extra time on this plane, I can’t understand ruining the quality of the whole merely to drag the end out for a few extra years.  Nor do I understand the obsession with or demonization of a natural process; all things die, including nations, species, worlds, suns and even the observable universe itself.  Furthermore, the idea that extending human life would also extend productive life is science fiction; even now people tend to “run out of steam” over time, and even though people in developed countries live longer on average than they once did, there’s no evidence that canalization of the brain takes place any later than it did in ancient times.  What that means is, if you like working your arse off to support the decades-long retirements of a bunch of old dinosaurs whose cognitive norms formed a generation before you were born, just imagine how much you’d love it right now if 90% of the population were born before the Second World War, and a sizeable fraction of the people voting on stuff like sexual rights came of age in an era when it was still considered OK for humans to actually, legally own other humans.  The current rulers of our world were mostly born in the 40s-60s, and their ideas provide ample proof of that; imagine how it would be if most of them had been born in the 19th century.

Even if you believe in souls (as I do), you have to recognize that most of the popular ideas about such life-forces (such as the belief that they are somehow connected to rotting corpses after death) are absurd, childish and impossible.  There is no such thing as changelessness; there are only differing rates of change.  The idea of a changeless entity existing literally forever is utterly ridiculous, and frankly, I think people who imagine they want to live forever – even as a disembodied soul – have not done much thinking about what eternity actually looks like.  Compared to Eternity, the 15-billion year life of the current observable universe is exactly the same as Planck time.  I don’t mean similar; I mean exactly the same.  Indistinguishable.  15 billion years, or 15 trillion, or 15 googols of years (that’s 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000), or 15 googolplexes of years, are all exactly the same compared to Eternity.  Eternity is an infinite amount of time, which means any finite number, no matter how incomprehensibly large, is exactly as insignificant in comparison to that as the tiniest number one can define.  Eternal life wouldn’t be a gift; it would be a horror literally beyond imagining.

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