/lit/ - Literature

>>13063834
yeah, that's why mass shitposting on /lit/ is important. prevents you from getting carried away, which is a good look

also tfw no prana-bindu qt gf

>>12441781
one of the things i have come to appreciate about Frank Herbert is the Bene Gesserit. i feel as though what he was anticipating was a world in which, in a sense, both God and Man were dead. atheism was one thing, but mass movements were another. and he didn't have to read a metric shit-ton of Freud or French theory to recognize the decentered subject.

into that world, i think, he injected his own workaround: the breeding of men, but not via the Ubermensch - were it so, Paul Atreides would have been a lot more excited for the jihad than he was (and note Herbert's own sense that it was much more the Middle East you wanted on your side, rather than a bunch of doomed and brooding Teutons quoting Spengler). that *men would need guidance* as they in turn directed other men towards the Golden Path does not strike me as being all that crazy. the task would fall to women to groom the future, and he settles on the Bene Gesserit as being feminist-Nietzschean-Jesuit-witches as power brokers. and ones who also warn about *the dangers of excess emotionalism in politics.*

that's not a crazy thesis. the Bene Gesserit aren't merrily overthrowing the Cartesian system for the umpteenth time, but they also aren't shouting Cry Havoc. Paul is a *disaster* when he appears - unlike, say, Neo, who is the Chosen One who will lead Zion - and only to the rebooting of the Matrix, and a failure to partner with Smith against the machines, and much else, much of which has been said before.

i like that idea, quite a lot. Herbert had a very keen sense about the inherent corruptibility of political actors, who were in the end always hubristically doomed by their own grand designs (even Leto II cannot escape from boredom, or loneliness).

the Bene Gesserit are one of the more underrated factions in spec-fiction, imho. they had, undoubtedly, a kind of brutal realpolitik in mind, but this was mainly because - i think, anyways - Herbert sensed that we were approaching an age when men really would need women to take the reins for a while. it's just that how they did that had nothing to do with wearing fucking pink hats or shouting It's Bene Gesseritphobia!!1! because that would have been fucking *bullshit.*

>>12364884
>>12364875
Space Taoism is basically deconstruction for schizos. it argues for radical sincerity and fidelity to things rather than deconstructive critique, because in the end we all only see what we want to see. there is no Outside perspective, really. Land is cool and /acc is cool because it crumbles the inherent sanity-stabilizers that come with critiquing capitalism (which nobody really does anymore) or critiquing other social woes that follow from (which are endemic, and are ultimately only strains of socialist protestantism). philosophy does not work once it becomes activism. what you want is to be able to think about the deep meaning of computers and what an AGI would look like, and - although this is optional - without becoming an absolutely cold-hearted shitlord who feasts on stem cells and so on.

to be balanced; to be able to live amidst the Flowing of the Spice; to know that the Kwisatz Haderach is a bad scene; all this stuff. Space Taoism has much love for Dune for this very reason. plus, you know, prana-bindu QTs.

i've had like five cups of coffee today and i haven't posted here in a while, so i realize i am probably sounding even more unhinged than usual. but really not all that much has changed since the Mighty Cruffitan. only daily re-confirmations that mass politics is gahbage and that Uncle Nick is setting a very fine bar which we all must jump over in our various ways. u/acc is silly; r/acc is probably going to be like the Real Communism that many are waiting for, and which will not happen. also, Christianity is unironically based as well, but this is a more recent discovery for me.

sorry, i'm kind of all over the place today. but basically same old shitposting mutant. basically it will take a while before i return to form