June 29, 2023

Ancient aliens: America's divine intervention genesis myth about civilization and life itself

Having looked at the distinctly American genesis myth of our prehistory -- inhabiting the same land as dinosaurs and missing links, threatened by a volcanic rather than a diluvian apocalypse -- let's look at the other distinctly American genesis myth about our even deeper history. How did life itself ever come to be on Earth? It's actually the same myth regarding the birth of terrestrial civilizations, at a far later stage of our species' history -- being seeded by aliens!

In contrast to the creation myths of most cultures throughout the world and over time, ours does not dwell on the creation of the Earth itself, the stars, sky, oceans, and so on and so forth. You can believe in the Abrahamic universe-creation myth of the Old World, the Big Bang, or whatever else. Those inanimate things are taken for granted. What we really want to know is, how did life begin and get to where we human beings are today? And for us compared to other animals, how did civilized societies begin and get to where they are today?

The myth is not interested in evolution as much as the initial birth from apparent nothingness. Notice that the "cavemen and dinosaurs" myth doesn't say where primates came from -- they're just there, in media res of their drama. And the myth about the origins of life itself doesn't concern itself with any particular species that is present far later on, human or otherwise. Evolution is boring, while creation from nothing is interesting.

This is another stark contrast with the Old World creation myths, where human beings are created in their more-or-less current form (e.g., Adam and Eve). Sometime in the distant past, a creation of some kind occurred -- whether it was creating life where there was none before, or primates where there were only non-primate animals before, or hominids where there were only apes before, or human-like cavemen where there were only missing links before.

Somehow -- it doesn't matter how -- that initial creation led to us here today. We did evolve from earlier forms, but how that happened is irrelevant. How far back does the creation process go? And who if anyone was in charge of the initial creation?

Notice that this creation myth accommodates the 19th-century debates on the evolution of human beings. Not being an Old World culture, we never felt very threatened by the idea that homo sapiens evolved from earlier primate forms, rather than being created as we are now, back in the Garden of Eden, according to Abrahamic myth which took root in Europe during the Middle Ages via Christianization.

We have never had a national church, de jure or de facto (although during the mid-20th C., the United Methodist Church came the closest). Nor, therefore, any hierarchy of national church officials who could enculturate Americans in the Genesis creation myth. And no, contrary to clever-sillies, nothing is a "church" outside of Christianity. Academia is not a church, and the two most popular creation myths held by the general public -- Genesis for Christians, ancient aliens for non-Christians -- have taken deep root *in spite of* constant pressure by the hierarchical officials in the schooling sector to kill them off.

Nor is civic philosophy and dogma a "religion", let alone a "church". Church refers to a Christian institution, in contrast to mosques for Muslims, temples for Buddhists, etc. And all stripes of American civic philosophy and dogma are entirely silent about creation -- of the Earth, of life, of homo sapiens, etc. There's no primeval narrative of how things began, let alone one bringing supernatural or at least more-than-human actors and supervisors into the cast of characters.

And so, because we're not committed to where contemporary human beings came from, we can avoid the whole controversy arising from Darwin, who only says how things evolve once life-forms have existed, not whether or not there is a first created form of life and how that came into being. That controversy vexed all Old World religions, but not ours -- we're so new, we could just build in an agnostic stance regarding evolution at the beginning!

The Mormons -- America's global religion -- are also famously equivocating on evolution, with high officials officially saying don't ask, don't tell, it doesn't matter. What matters is the creation of life, the creation of god-like beings, the creation of civilizations in the New World, the appearance of Jesus in the New World, and so on and so forth. Don't worry about whether or how today's human beings descended from earlier primates.

Our creation myth also avoided the controversy about the Big Bang vs. static universe from the early 20th C., right as our myth was starting to take shape. Ours is not about cosmogenesis, unlike many other major religions and folk cultures, including Christianity. We could already sense that controversy as it was developing, so we built in an agnosticism about it from the outset. Only focus on the creation of life, humans, civilizations -- not the universe itself, stars, planets, and all that other inanimate and non-societal stuff.

* * *


The ancient aliens myth only began -- when else? -- during the 1890s, after our integrative civil war was wrapped up, and our ethnogenesis could get going for real, as in the lifespan of every empire. And where else could it have been born but out West? -- Flagstaff, Arizona, to be exact. Although hailing from a Boston Brahmin family, Percival Lowell used his wealth to build a world-class observatory in Arizona, where viewing conditions would be superior than back East -- but also because it would be more Romantically American to explore the next frontier of outer space, from our defining meta-ethnic frontier out West (against the Indians and later Mexicans).

Although later famous as the site that discovered the ninth planet Pluto, whose existence was predicted by Lowell, it was initially dedicated to the study of Mars -- specifically, what Lowell thought to be its canals. The overview of his vision of Mars can be skimmed in the Conclusion section of his book Mars (1895).

The canal structures suggested that not only was there water on Mars, there was life, it was intelligent, and it was advanced enough technologically, and organized in a socially complex way, as to complete irrigation projects.

If anything, he thought they were more advanced than anything on Earth -- inventing and using technology far beyond our own, and rising above petty partisan politics, to undertake such a planetwide project. He says that human beings are not even the highest of the mammals, putting us in our lower place relative to Martians. And he says Martians and their civilizations are far older than ours, Mars being an older and dying planet. These elements of the narrative are all necessary for the next step, where they intervene in Earthly matters.

He does explicitly state that life on Mars will likely have evolved into different forms from life on Earth, owing to the different environments they're adapting to. But that doesn't contradict a belief that they could have visited us in the past, seeded our civilizations, or even seeded life itself on Earth. It only requires them to have a somewhat different superficial form, and that we were not made entirely in their own image -- rather, at the abstract level of "life-form" or "intelligent life-form" or "civilizational being".

Although Lowell didn't go that far in his non-fiction work, a contemporary of his -- also a popularizing astronomer -- did in an early work of science-fiction, Garrett Serviss' novel Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898). Here, Martians are hostile to Earth, engaged in a War of the Worlds kind of battle with it. During one of their missions to capture slaves from Earth, 9000 years ago, they built the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Egypt (the Sphinx being made in the image of their leader).

While the Earth-battling Martians hardly resemble the benevolent steward / supervisor gods of later versions of the myth, this is still the beginning of the myth of ancient aliens directly intervening in the course of events on Earth, seeding a major civilization.

And true to our Europe-obscuring identity, Serviss located the ancient alien intervention in Egypt, not even an Indo-European culture like the Greeks, Romans, Celts, etc. That would have been too much of a Euro-LARP, so if it has to be set in the Old World, it must be within the Saharo-Arabian sphere (Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, etc.). This was decades before the Egyptian craze of the 1920s -- it's simply the most obvious solution to "Old World civilizational ancestor of America that is not related to Europe". The only others would be from the Far East, and that's too much of a stretch of the imagination, compared to the Fertile Crescent.

If you're an American, and want to learn a dead language to study our civilizational ancestors in the Old World, you want to learn hieroglyphics, cuneiform, or maybe Biblical Hebrew / Aramaic -- not Greek and Latin (back-East Euro-LARP). I'm sure the Saharo-Arabians find this imagined heritage of ours comical -- "you Faranji people come from Europe!" But we are American, and Americans are fundamentally not European, so no, we do not come from Europe. Where else could we have derived from in the civilized Old World? -- China? C'mon, the Fertile Crescent is far more believable than China...

* * *


After the European empires, aside from Russia, bit the dust after WWI, and became occupied by America after WWII, the American myth of ancient aliens began to take root in Europe as well. This process reached maturity by the late '60s, when Erich von Daeniken wrote Chariots of the Gods? It was soon made into a feature-length documentary movie, whose English dub you can watch on YouTube here.

This is far and away the best audio-visual telling of the narrative, with amazing photography, ethnographic portraits, voiceover, and conveying the sublime nature of the archaeological record. It's superior to the more plodding, meandering, and less artistic renditions associated with Rod Serling from the same time period (In Search of Ancient Astronauts, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, and The Outer Space Connection, all available on YouTube as well, but you can stick to the last one, which incorporates the first two).

I think von Daeniken being Swiss was important, since he was not part of a collapsed empire, and was not subject to the hangover effect that had wiped out native cultural innovation in the collapsed Euro empires. Similar to Le Corbusier in architecture, who was a footnote to the American pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright of many decades earlier, yet still more original and influential than the Bauhaus people from Germany and Austria (like Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer).

You can tell how well the Europeans had incorporated the American framework by their avoidance of their own European ancestors. The focus is on ancient Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, and New World cultures like the Maya, Tiwanaku, Easter Islanders, and so on. Nothing about China, nothing about Greece or Rome. The book, but not the movie, does include Stonehenge among its examples. Indeed, in the movie there's only a single passing mention of any Indo-European culture -- purported descriptions of ancient astronauts in the Ramayana of the Indo-Aryans.

From the ancient aliens narrative, you'd hardly know that there were people and civilizations in Europe during ancient and Medieval times! But that's unsurprising given its American origin.

Some local adaptations did work in their own history, such as the British movie Quatermass and the Pit (1967), in which contemporary people discover a Martian spaceship in the London Underground from millions of years ago, along with skeletons of primate ancestors just as old, the preserved remains of the insectoid Martians, and the revelation of Martian intervention in the evolution of the hominid lineage on Earth. That could be totally American, but the story also uses this Martian spaceship's effects to explain historical accounts of the devil, spectral phenomena, and other witchy goings-on -- within England, during the Medieval and Early Modern periods.

* * *


How about further back, to the creation of life itself on Earth? This view, strangely titled "directed panspermia", goes back to an American and Soviet collaboration (as in many other areas of 20th-C. culture, the only two empires left standing coincided, both sharing outsider status vis-a-vis the Early Modern Euro empires that defined high culture up until then). Namely, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovsky, whose 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe raised the possibility that extraterrestrial life-forms could have purposefully delivered life to Earth.

Where *those* life-forms are supposed to come from, who knows? And who cares? The genesis myth is only meant to account for the ancestry of us, the story-tellers, and perhaps our fellow animals. Just as we are not interested in cosmogenesis, we aren't interested in whether the alien race that seeded life on Earth was itself seeded by a third alien race, and if there was a prime mover alien race, and so on and so forth.

Likewise, American culture is not really concerned with the other direction of panspermia, whereby we would seed life on other planets. That is about our future, whereas this concept is really to account for our distant past.

For my money, the best telling of this myth is the 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Chase" (from the amazing season 6). It's not just a high-concept "what if?" story, but brings to life the excitement of high-stakes archaeological fieldwork, collecting clues, solving puzzles, and trying to stay one step ahead of your competitors in the race to the finish. This version is about the spread of humanoid life, not life in general, but that is to keep the focus on the ultimate subject of narrative interest -- us, not plants or viruses or whatever. If aliens could seed humanoid life, certainly they could send mold spores to other planets as well.

* * *


Redditards, Wiki-brains, and other midwits love to deride the ancient aliens creation myth -- creation of life itself, of humanoids, or of civilization -- as a "pseudoscientific hypothesis" or "conspiracy theory," terms that they never use for Adam & Eve, Noah / the Flood, the World Tree, Persephone and the harvesting cycle, and so on. By now, so many Americans believe, or are at least open to the possibility, of the ancient aliens story, that it cannot be a hypothesis -- common people don't know what a hypothesis is, how to test it, how to analyze results, weigh in on counter-arguments, etc. It's a story that you believe or don't, and science has nothing to do with it.

None of the most popular entries in the genre present the concepts in the manner of a scientific method, experiment, etc. On the surface level, they're trying to make sense of seemingly unbelievable phenomena, while on a deeper level they're trying to connect us with our distant ancestors through narrative, myth, and storytelling. And as such, there's little that "science" can do to push or pull anyone.

Very few people have "beliefs," let alone a system of beliefs. It's not about belief, in the sense of a theory. It's about whether the story gives meaning to that person, not individually, but as part of something larger than themselves -- to their distant ancestors, the chain of transmission up to the present, and the universe beyond our own world. It's more about emotional and social and cultural satisfaction, which nerdy arguments, "data", etc. cannot move one way or the other.

Exactly like Adam & Eve, Noah and the Flood, and other such myths from the Old World. It's just that, as with most clueless back-East academics and media-ites, they deny that America is a different culture from anything in the Old World. But just cuz we're a young civilization, doesn't mean we aren't distinctive, and these various origin myths -- Cavemen and Dinosaurs and Volcanos, Ancient Aliens, and the Book of Mormon -- are all a testament to that. They're as American as burgers and blocky buildings.

The rAtiOnAL SkEPtiCs who think they're smart or insightful for trying to deboonk origin stories involving aliens, are the same who labor fruitlessly to convince Americans that cavemen and dinosaurs never lived at the same time (somebody's never watched the Flintstones), that there was not a worldwide flood that destroyed all life except for Noah's Ark, etc.

The haters' arguments require no math, problem-solving, pattern recognition, specialized knowledge, breadth of knowledge, or anything like that. Any idiot can make them -- and plenty of total numbskulls and ignoramuses do.

What they are is autistic, not able to empathize with normal human beings, who have a deep need for the social / cultural / emotional satisfaction of belonging to something beyond their individual personal private self, across both time and space. Autists have a broken social lobe in their brain, and being incapable of empathy, they project their broken social lobe onto everyone else as well.

"Why would anyone want to feel connected to others across space and time? Nah, they must be making scientific-method claims subject to experimental testing..."

There's a heavy overlap between know-nothing rational skeptics and libertarians, both highly autistic and clueless. Libertarian morality is only about "avoiding harm and fraud", excluding matters of purity, sanctity, and taboo (Jonathan Haidt, The Moral Mind). So when they see a sacred narrative, they don't mind pissing all over it -- not as a vindication for their side of a debate, since there is no debate. They're cluelessly assuming the other side is involved in scientific claim-making, rather than cultural bonding through narrative and myth.

This is why no one regards them as smartypants or intellectuals, who happen to use their big brains for sacrilegious purposes -- they're just clueless midwits or dum-dums. It takes no IQ to piss on something sacred, it's entirely a matter of attitude.

And like typical self-centered semi-children, they pat themselves on the back for how clever they are, when it's only a matter of their attitude, not brainpower or knowledge, which are middling and spoonfed from some online midwit clearinghouse / group chat like Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.

Normal-brained Americans will keep alive the stories of "When dinosaurs towered over cavemen," "When Martians visited ancient Egypt," and the like.

49 comments:

  1. Do you believe in a potential for Oswald Spengler's "Second Religiousness"?:

    https://www.benespen.com/2017-7-13-the-second-religiousness/

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  2. "This is why no one regards them as smartypants or intellectuals, who happen to use their big brains for sacrilegious purposes -- they're just clueless midwits or dum-dums. It takes no IQ to piss on something sacred, it's entirely a matter of attitude...

    Normal-brained Americans will keep alive the stories of "When dinosaurs towered over cavemen," "When Martians visited ancient Egypt," and the like."

    Do you regard those who piss on Star Wars the same way like this hipster historian?:

    https://washingtonspectator.org/juvenilia-strikes-back/

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  3. Regarding nerdy science and "data", they only make people more entrenched in their existing beliefs:

    https://qz.com/869587/using-science-in-an-argument-just-makes-people-more-partisan

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  4. If you counter-signal the original Star Wars trilogy, you're anti-American, since it is our national epic -- hitting on the primitive + futurist themes (and even ancient astronauts who bring new life and tech to untouched planets).

    Even our normie high school English teachers back in the '90s straight-up told us it was an epic the likes of which had not been created in centuries -- true. Our ethnogenesis only took off for real in the late 1800s, whereas the Early Modern Euro empires got started many centuries earlier. They already had their Shakespeare and Milton.

    Now it's our turn -- only it's a movie, the medium that we pioneered and perfected. And it's in the naturalistic dramatic style that America, Russia, and Scandinavia pioneered in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Ibsen, Chekhov, and Stanislavski). So, not so dazzling on the verbal dimension, as with Shakespeare or Milton. But the dramatic structure, themes, character arcs, etc., are all perfect. And it's one of the greatest works of visual culture ever created, not to mention the musical score.

    Only insecure back-East Euro-LARP-ers would react to Star Wars (the original, true trilogy) as though it were kids' stuff, as opposed to some tedious Victorian novel about status-strivers whining about their frustrated status contest efforts. Fuck that. Only Elizabethan and Jacobean plays rival the peak of American movie-making, in the Anglophone world.

    I'm not reading through that article -- got as far as it being about the '60s counter-culture and libtard activism making us mature and shedding our arrogance as Americans (*huge snore*), and then the Reagan reversal of that zeitgeist making us immature. Too many things wrong with that to read further.

    First, the civil breakdown peaked circa 1970, and was already out of gas by the mid-'70s. If you're a libtard whining about the end of the hippies and anti-war protesters, you're supposed to pin the blame on disco and 1976 -- not synth-wave and Reagan in the '80s. Disco was all about moving on from all that partisan bullshit and activist whining.

    THESE - ARE - THE - GOOD - TIMES
    LEAVE - YOUR - CARES - BE - HIND

    Without reading further, probably some tired crap about how escapist Star Wars is, and that fantasy or sci-fi = flight from the gritty realism of '70s cinema. What's grittier than the Mos Eisely cantina, or the trash compactor room in the bowels of a ship, or the dust bowl homestead of Luke's family?

    Just cuz it's set in another time and place, libtards think that means it's escaping and avoiding the tough hard-hitting questions of the here and now -- so fucking stupid. Yes, Shakespeare setting the action in Venice, Verona, or Denmark meant that no one would interpret it as being about domestic politics! Of course Star Wars is about America.

    But, it's not urban, and if anything it's anti-urban, with the Empire having cities-inside-ships, compared to the nomadic rebels, hardscrabble farmers like Luke, and the primitive Ewoks. Libtards can't stand anyone taking a swipe at urbanites, high-density living, and praising nomads and sparsely populated farms.

    In the libtard mind, unless the movie conveys through the screen the smell of piss and cum encrusting every surface of downtown Manhattan, it's just not reeeaaaallll. Shut the fuck up.

    You can counter-signal the abominations of the second trilogy in Star Wars, and especially the woketard Millennial-pandering ones from the 2010s. But the original Star Wars trilogy is all-American aesthetic excellence, with nothing to apologize for.

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    1. Perlstein even complains about the music score as being "Old Hollywood" compared to the "violins" of proto-Woke New Hollywood:

      https://www.salon.com/2015/12/21/star_wars_got_us_ready_for_reagan_you_suddenly_have_permission_to_think_in_very_juvenile_terms_about_how_history_works/

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  5. Americans hating on the original Star Wars trilogy is like Romans hating on the Aeneid.

    As sacrilegious as publicity-stunt art is that targets Christianity (like Piss Christ), we've never been a Christian nation, in the way that France was, or Spain, or Britain, or even the Protestant German statelets in the Holy Roman Empire.

    So, first, it's not very daring to begin with. No trangressive edgy points for sacrileging against Christianity in the late 20th-C. America.

    But when someone does take part in a high-profile, deliberately disseminated attack on American icons like the original Star Wars, it's a million times worse than Piss Christ. If we had a strong central state, you should be called before an inquisition and burned at the stake for trying to de-sanctify the original Star Wars trilogy.

    You don't have to sing its praises, don't have to watch it at all if you don't want to. But going out of your way to piss all over it, cut it down, smear it, etc., using your media megaphone or school curriculum authority -- death penalty!

    Which is why most libtards have opted to co-opt Star Wars for their own partisan shilling (e.g., the Republicans are the Empire, and the Democrats are the Rebels). They know they can't shit on Star Wars without committing cultural treason -- and I don't think it's just a cynical move on their part, to avoid raising the ire of the mob. Libtards are American, too, however embarrassed they are about it. Defiling Star Wars is not something that would occur to most of them in the first place, as Americans.

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    1. Dr. Stephen J. Krune III8/27/23, 11:24 PM

      This is completely crazy. But never mind the weirdness of putting Star Wars on the level of Jesus Christ, what do you make of the fact that George Lucas himself has repeatedly pissed on the movie, commenting about how it was never the way he liked it until he ran five or six (who's counting?) editing passes that added 90s CGI, pace-destroying extra scenes, and that retarded logo?

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  6. Speaking of sacrilege and Pluto, Americans have to hold the line about calling it a "planet" with no qualifiers like "dwarf", and if anything to add in "ninth planet" or "furthest planet in our solar system", etc. And to keep transmitting the mneumonics that have a P at the end, like "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas / Pizza-pies".

    The international body that decides how to label reality is just jealous that Europe's heyday as a scientific powerhouse has been over for more than a century, and that the center of gravity shifted to America -- and the USSR.

    European empires were too mired in post-collapse hangover, to discover Pluto in the early 1900s like Americans did. They didn't build the best observatory of the time, in order to carry out such projects. And to reiterate, Lowell funded that observatory out of his own Boston Brahmin pocket! We had a cohesive expanding empire, where the elites are good and do beneficial things for the public, not like today as we begin our collapse and contraction, and elites won't do anything like that ever again. Let alone European elites -- way too decadent and navel-gazing, as well as skinflints.

    Was that decision of the 2000s a reaction to our "Freedom Fries" bullshit? You don't have to take it out on an innocent planet like Pluto -- imagine being that much of a spiteful libtard.

    Pretty soon the international astronomical body will try to re-label the "moon" as something de-sanctified like "terran satellite 1" or something. That way, they try to drain some of the wonder and awe and sense of accomplishment out of America landing on the moon and exploring the moon.

    "The moon" -- you mean, like, *the* moon? The one up in the night sky? Yes, that moon! Wow! Putting a man on the moon, holy shit!

    Landing on terran satellite 1 -- not as awing.

    And not long after that, as we descend into another Dark Age, the Euro-tards will claim that the moon landings (plural) were faked. Yes, I know there's already conspiratorial types in America who've already said that for decades, but it has never been mainstream or even a plausible maybe / maybe-not scenario for Americans. Total blasphemy, unthinkable.

    We predicted and discovered the ninth planet in the solar system, and we put a man on the moon -- first!

    Hat-tip to the Russians for the first artificial satellite around Earth, and the first man in space. But as the Euro-tards descend even deeper into anti-Russian hysteria, the international astronomical body will soon claim that Sputnik was faked, and that Yuri Gugarin was really on a film stage in Moscow.

    Hold the line!

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    1. Dr. Stephen J. Krune III8/27/23, 11:25 PM

      Literally no one cares, Wally World. Come back to MPC to debate this, I'm not interested in posting more comments here.

      Delete
  7. Final brief remark: Europeans moving here to do research does not count as "Europe contributing to science". Science, art, culture, etc., are all produced by large-scale, socially complex collectives / institutions / etc.

    They are NOT produced by individuals. Individual traits make minimal difference -- intelligence, personality, genetic lineage, make no difference if you're not plugged into the complex institutions of a rising empire. If you're in a collapsing empire, or a primitive tribe, all the IQ and inquisitiveness in the world won't result in jackshit regarding the arts and sciences.

    Einstein working in America gets filed under American accomplishments. Ethnic Persians working at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad gets filed under Abbasid accomplishments, not Iranian accomplishments (only if they were working in and patronized by Isfahan rather than Baghdad).

    But, as our collapsing empire focuses on individual traits, social Darwinism, genetic determinism, etc., nobody will reflect on that reality either -- but it's still true.

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  8. It is indeed hard to believe that there are folks out there who think "New Hollywood" was authentic and the "Blockbuster Era" is garbage.

    https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/NewHollywood

    https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheBlockbusterAgeOfHollywood

    IMO, if "New Hollywood" continued and the Blockbuster Era never happened (say if George Lucas died on a motorcycle in 1973 and Spielberg was killed by a shark), American films (and certainly cartoons) would have had a Video Game Crash of 1983 style collapse and takeover by Japanese media!

    https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983#:~:text=The%20Crash%20killed%20the%20American,(%24250M%20in%202021).

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  9. Oh, and another great thing about the late 1970s to early 1990s compared to the zeitgeist of the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s...

    Females had big puffy hair again!

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  10. Did you know the two movies expected to be hits in 1977, Martin Scorsese's "New York, New York" and William Friedkin's "Sorcerer", were dreary, depressing dramas that crashed, burned, and did abysmally?

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  11. A lot of Star Trek and certainly Star Trek: TNG is "smart", "serious", "mature", and so on. For a series to be the above adjectives, it doesn't have to be a dreary, depressing drama with no beauty or likeable characters (like what Perlstein seems to think is "good" about "New Hollywood").

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  12. RIP the arts and the sciences then, because there are no successor rising empire to the United States.

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  13. Recent comments sidebar is back! I junked the old provider altogether and went with this one instead, which worked right away, when you include the extra code about "if the comments are still not loading".

    https://newbloggerthemes.com/blog/add-recent-comments-widget-to-blogger/

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  14. Silly owl, you're pronouncing "ability" correctly! You're North American, and most of your ESL audience probably knows a North American dialect, where pronouncing the "t" (or a "d") with a flapping sound between vowels is the standard:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapping

    It's only pronounced with an aspirated "t" in London (in the posh register). You're not English, so it sounds strange when you try to imitate them in this one way, while otherwise speaking in the standard North American dialect.

    Stop worrying about how you pronounce things, you're totally standard! ^_^

    Aside from a few specific words you already know about, and we can kid around about ("layg" etc.), you speak the standard dialect.

    I don't know where this particular insecurity suddenly sprang from, but for the love of God, do not try to sound European! We're not European, and it's fine -- it's great, even!

    We've already constructed our own standard dialect, so that differences with British standard English is not a deviation from the ideal. We've created a whole new separate ideal, after founding a new empire and a new culture to go along with it. (Well, plus the Canadians who copy their American superiors, hehe.)

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  15. Hey Moooom, you can probably stream Chariots of the Gods live and archive it, like Gura did with Night of the Living Dead, since that one was public domain.

    According to this upload to Internet Archive, CotG is now public domain as well -- it hasn't been taken down after nearly 5 years.

    https://archive.org/details/ChariotsOfTheGods_201808

    Maybe because it's from Germany (just with an English voiceover for English-speaking audiences), and their copyright laws only last 40 or 50 years? It came out in 1970, so it's over 50 years old by now. Or they forgot to renew the copyright along the way?

    You may have to have a Cover intern, or knowledgeable superfan, look into it. But it certainly appears that way. Plus there's the full upload on YouTube that's been up for nearly a year, suggesting that it's fair game:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guPG2DlhBdI

    Worst case scenario, you could do another watchalong (without streaming the movie itself), and have a convenient free link to give the audience. But this time make it public, for your audience who is not membered. And to experience the awesome way that movies used to be made -- like you said tonight! Terse, no BS, no hysteria or hype, even when presenting some pretty out-there ideas...

    I'll bet a lot of your audience has never seen old-school National Geographic type portraits of everyday life in foreign countries, especially primitive ones like those who carried out the Cargo Cult. So much cool stuff that movie-makers won't show anymore!

    Just the color palette alone is worth it, you don't see rich blue skies, verdant grass, and dark intimate lighting like that anymore. And actual moving camera-work, not just still images like it's a slide show + lecture!

    Easy way to kill a couple hours of streaming, for when you can't think of something else. And it's not playing a video game. :)

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  16. ALERT: Twitter finally closes itself to the public audience. You can only see someone's feed / tweets / etc. if you create an account and log in to it. Earlier, anyone could browse your feed, whether they had an account or not, whether they were logged into it or not.

    As of this morning, lurking has been banned, which rules out the vast majority of people who looked at Twitter content. Twitter has a very small number of accounts, compared to other platforms like YouTube, TikTok, etc.

    Most of Twitter's audience are passive lurkers, who will never tweet anything of their own, never retweet anyone else's content, never like a tweet, never comment on a tweet, and never quote-tweet something. They simply read it like an audience member, not a participant -- it's the media, after all, not a forum.

    If they wanted to take part in media creation on the platform -- to add another voice to the toxic talk-radio panopticon that the site has devolved into -- they have already signed up, signed in, and begun tweeting, liking, commenting, DM-ing, etc.

    All this does is eliminate the silent majority of the audience who treat it like a news aggregator, a text-based talk-radio channel, and so on, to be consumed but not interacted with.

    So, if you're a content creator who posts notifications of what's going on with your content, via your Twitter feed, they will no longer be received by most of your audience.

    For the time being, try posting news to your main platform, like a post on your YouTube channel, Substack page, Patreon page, etc. And try to get the word out about this additional source of news, via platforms that are still open to the public -- Reddit, 4chan, and tumblr.

    ReplyDelete
  17. This closing-off of Twitter has been in the works for the past few years, I think since 2020. At first, they copied Instagram -- the first major platform to deliberately kill off its audience, by only allowing lurkers (the silent majority of the audience) to view 20 or so posts from an account, before locking the screen and prompting you to create an account and log into it, in order to view more.

    With Twitter, it was only like 5 tweets on someone's feed, before the screen locked.

    But you could still use the search function to retrieve all of that account's tweets -- not their retweets, however, but if you just wanted to see what X was up to, you just searched "from:X" and sorted by recent.

    A few months ago, Twitter killed the search function entirely for lurkers -- not just those using it as a workaround for their suicidal screen-locking bullshit. You couldn't search at all.

    But at that time, they undid the ban on lurking the main account. So it was back to scrolling through someone's main feed.

    This morning, they have killed that off as well, so that only a tiny minority of insane diehard media junkie voices -- not ears -- will remain. You're only going to be talking to each other from now on, not also to a broader "just reading" audience.

    ReplyDelete
  18. The failed elite strivers who implement these audience-killing policies on a media platform, have been insulated by 10+ years of free money flooding in from the central bank (QE), and 0% interest rates, so that nothing they did wrong could ever backfire on them. Their big stock line would only ever go up.

    The only reason they implement them is to game the system of metrics, to lie with statistics, which is what the end-result of the BIG DAYTA craze of the 2010s has been.

    The audience size of Twitter will not increase above its trendline due to this new obstacle. If someone wanted to be an active participant in the media circus that is Twitter, they have created their account, stayed logged in, and begun their tweeting, liking, DM-ing, etc., long ago. Everyone knows what Twitter is, so there are no naive people out there to make aware of the option to become a media voice on the platform. There is no more blood left to squeeze from that stone.

    So instead of dealing with the saturation of their niche, they try to forcibly convert lurkers into actively logged-in accounts. Again, this does not increase the audience size, and it will not increase the engagement metrics either, since even if someone does convert from lurker to account-haver, they are never going to tweet, like, comment, DM, etc. -- just passively lurk, as always before, after jumping through an annoying hoop.

    But since most lurkers don't value the platform like insane participants do, this hoop will simply drive them away altogether. You can't force people to become diehard obsessives, who will humiliate themselves with an ever-escalating series of hoops to jump through.

    That's right -- today it's just creating an account and staying logged in. Next month, it's being required to meet quotas for creating your own tweets, retweets, likes of other content, comments, and DMs, otherwise your account will be categorized as inactive and you will revert to being locked out of the audience all over again.

    Next month after that, it's having to pay a recurring subscription fee just to passively read others' tweets. The next month after that, the fee will double, and your quotas will double too! The next month after that, you will have to create multiple accounts for your single self, in order to make the big line of "monthly user growth" go up.

    ReplyDelete
  19. These policies only exist to justify the phony status and ill-gotten wealth of the failed elite strivers who are desperately hanging on in the tech sector.

    "I-I-I'm useful to the corporate family -- I made the big line of monthly user growth go up! Don't cut me off! I can't refinance a mortgage at 10%, I bought my condo when mortgages were 1%! Please!"

    That they do not change the reality of the situation -- how many people read Twitter -- does not matter. The point has become the metrics themselves, not the underlying reality that they were purported to convey through numbers. It's just a great big system-gaming parasitic corrosion fest by this point.

    Elon Musk's tenure has seen the situation rapidly deteriorate. At least under the old guard, you could search for an account's tweets and see not only their main activity, but their replies on others' tweets as well, sorted by recent like a timeline.

    And you could search in general, like for a news topic that you've heard about. Nobody on Twitter will link to the original story anymore -- because they're all just diehard media junkies, they assume everyone else is, too, and are already in the loop on the basic facts. The only thing they're interested in is takes, reactions, etc.

    At least you could've searched Twitter in the pre-Musk days and found the basic facts from someone. Now, that's impossible.

    And as bad as it was to only be able to read 5 tweets before screenlock, now it is less than 0 -- you can't even see the person's header, username, etc. in an opaque background, a la Instagram's lockout screen. It's totally blank, with just the prompt to create an account. Never, bitch.

    I don't know whether Musk himself is responsible for killing off the audience in the QE-brainrotted delusion that lurkers will convert to active media voices, since that was already under way for several years. He could have accelerated it, since he began charging for the blue checkmarks, as though that is even a drop in the bucket of the revenue they receive directly from the central bank's printing presses.

    Maybe he tried to right the ship, return it to being a public forum, but got out-maneuvered by the entrenched tech bureaucracy of the platform he bought in a hostile takeover. Much like Trump trying to decrease immigration, while sending the rates off the chart (minus the non-partisan, and worldwide lockdowns due to COVID in 2020), widening the trade deficit rather than narrow it, send more troops back into Afghanistan and send American boots on the ground in Syria and bomb Syria, and add a member to NATO, against his 2016 campaign themes.

    I can't figure it out or care to. All I know is Twitter is dead, and will only decompose further going forward. The silent majority will never create accounts, stay logged in, juggle a zillion passwords across ever more platforms that implement these requirements, and so on -- just for some occasional mindless infotainment. Get fucking real!

    ReplyDelete
  20. I was already down to reading the Hololive girls' feed for updates on their main content creation (streams on YouTube, not tweets on Twitter), and a tiny handful of infotainment accounts.

    So losing Twitter will be NBD for me, it'll just make for an annoying and unnecessary transition for streamers to post updates on open instead of closed-off platforms.

    Twitter discourse has always been incredibly fake & gay, I got almost no inspiration or the beginning of a rabbit-hole journey from it. Just mindless infotainment.

    I never have been a news-cycle junkie, but if it's remotely interesting, the Red Scare ladies will probably touch on it in their podcast.

    I've never written for a Twitter audience either -- as proven by how decoupled my themes and interests have been from the takes du jour on Twitter. It's just so boring and tedious and timelooping over there.

    I'll continue to pursue my own interests, visions, etc., here in the ruins of the blogosphere -- and I won't try to forcibly convert lurkers into account-havers just to read the comment feed that I use as a quasi-social-media timeline in the sidebar!

    What gets me down about the suicide of Twitter is what it reveals about where the whole cursed society is heading -- toward a new Dark Age. Not like it was the Library of Alexandria or anything like that, but it shows the same symptoms of imperial collapse, abandonment of stewardship, privitization of former public goods (at the same time as they become worthless, however, through institutional decay), and just the general swallowing up of the whole world by The Nothing.

    The Great 404-ing of the online universe. I'll always be here, though...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The yeeting of kiwifarms from the internet, even including archives of the site and forum on other platforms really feels like a dead canary in the mine to me too. The fact that a few powerful well connected elites can erase a legal site from being hosted or viewed anywhere on the normal web with basically no legal or social consequences is scary. “The internet is forever” is truly dead.

      Delete
  21. I told you so! "Bro, just create an account." And now, new accounts only get a quick peek at the timeline, old unverified accounts only get a minute or so to browse, and even the monthly paying bluechecks get locked out of the site on a daily basis!

    Never give these scumsuckers an inch -- they'll take a mile! Once you prove that you'll humiliate yourself, it's over, it only keeps escalating.

    When do my other predictions come true, about having quotas on the production side, in addition to rationing on the consumption side?

    Haha, imagine submitting your pathetic self to this degradation, for some of the worst content on the entire internet!

    At this point, I'm just going to browse an open site that screenshots Hololive girls' tweets, or conveys the gist of what was said at any rate.

    The YouTube algo already handles upcoming streams, since they know I watch their channels. But for a notice about an upcoming stream that is not yet in a YT frame, or maybe a last-minute cancellation / re-schedule, I'll need a post of some kind. Whether on the streamer's channel community tab, or screenshot of a tweet on 4chan or Reddit or something.

    I've seen this shit coming for a LONG time, I just didn't say anything in 2020 because I didn't want the failed elite strivers at Twitter to get wise to my workarounds. But now that those are gone, there's no point in discussing them, and how long this closing-off of a major platform has been in the works.

    It has zero to do with Musk specifically, or bots, or data scraping, or whatever other BS rationalization. This goes back to 2020.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Reminder to the techno-Panglossians: there are no laws of conservation in social systems, unlike closed / inanimate / physical systems (like matter + energy, momentum, etc.).

    "B-but, what alternative do people have to Twitter? Nobody will leave until there's a superior alternative, r-r-right?"

    WRONG!

    The US dollar is losing its status as a reserve currency, despite there being no alternatives to replace it in that status. That simply means the currency ecology is becoming multipolar, rather than having a single currency to rule them all.

    The next 10 currencies below the USD could be malaria-infested mudcakes, and they would still become adopted as regional currencies, as the dollar leaves a void at the global level. That is because there is no rising / expanding empire to take the place of the American Empire, and enjoy the associated benefits, like minting a large-scale reserve currency.

    That's right -- no new empires to fill America's shoes. This means the geopolitical world is becoming multipolar. A power vacuum does NOT get filled -- only in the inanimate physical domain. A power vacuum in geopolitics only gets filled if there's a worthy competitor. Similar to the Byzantine Empire arising on the border of the older Roman Empire, eventually taking its place as the sole empire of the Mediterranean (including occupying Rome / Papal States itself!).

    But there are no empires rising now, so there will simply be a vacuum at the global or hemispheric level.

    Just the same with an online platform -- MySpace's vacuum was filled by Facebook, a worthy competitor.

    It's possible that some other platform will be created in the future that will fill the niche left empty by Twitter's suicide. But that platform does not exist right now -- Mastodon? Gab? Truth Social? LOL.

    Maybe a Russian-based platform like Telegram? I dunno, that's more likely than the tiny platforms from the West, and more likely than a whole new platform coming into being and becoming dominant on top of their debut.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Probably, we will just see another disintegration of social complexity, a multipolar online ecosystem, rather than one forum to rule them all (Reddit), one microblog to rule them all (Twitter), and so on.

    We lived through that world in the 2000s, and it was fine -- better, in fact. It won't hurt at all.

    Still, that does mean that the sub-networks within the overall Twitter network will have to break out and make a space of their own somewhere. Hololive already has their own website -- they could have a section of their website dedicated to the girls' feeds.

    For the time being, it would not have to replicate the like / share / comment functions of Twitter. We're passive browsers -- we just want to see when they're going to stream, what the topic of the stream will be, do they have to postpone something due to getting sick, brief remarks or jokes, etc.

    The silent majority is not going to submit to escalating humiliations just to use Twitter as TV Guide for streamers.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Always amusing to see slaves rationalize their humiliations as "based, actually".

    If Musk returns Twitter to a totally open site like it was around 2010, he's a hero for welcoming so many people into the site instead of being an elitist censor!

    If Musk shuts Twitter down, he's a hero for forcing us off of the hellsite so we can touch grass again!

    In reality, nobody replaces Twitter with touching grass, the biggest cope of them all. They just find some other online platform instead. Or maybe they make more time for watching streams, playing video games, Netflix, or whatever else. Not going outside, let alone socializing IRL.

    We saw the same thing with Trump -- whatever he did, was "based, actually". He removed some troops from abroad? Based, no more fuel for our bloated empire! He sends boots on the ground in Syria for the 1st time, bombs it for the 1st time, sends 10s of thousands back into Afghanistan? Based, fuck those anti-war whiners!

    People are so mind-broken that they just latch onto these figures as a crutch to keep from ending it all. Therefore, whatever happens -- X, or the polar opposite of X, or anything in between -- is proof that we live in the best of all possible worlds. If bad outcomes could potentially happen, then it's not a very reliable crutch, is it?

    I will never beg for tweet-crumbs, I will never fill an engagement quota, and I will never create an account!

    ReplyDelete
  25. Do these slaves create accounts for all the other bullshit functions that have been colonized by failed elite strivers in the collapsing tech sector?

    You want to order a pizza for delivery? Create an account with Pizza Hut and sign in to place your order!

    You want to know our store hours for today? Create an account with TJ Maxx and sign in to stay up to date with our schedule!

    You want to ask me out on a date? Create an account with Tinder and sign in to get the convo started!

    More accounts under management! Monthly user growth lines going up! See, I'm helping, I'm worthy, I deserve my six-figure annual handout from the central bank!

    NOTHING HAS CHANGED, let alone been improved!!! The same number of people are ordering pizzas, the same amount of foot traffic goes on in the stores, the same number of people are hooking up or sexting! They've only been forced to jump through these pointless digital hoops beforehand!

    Imagine being so mind-broken that you think you can't actually perform these functions without submitting to the humiliation of failed elite strivers in the IT sector?

    Once you create an account, you submit to their ever-shifting and humiliating Terms of Service, like a common slave. They can lock your account, suspend it, limit its functions, impose requirements on logging in / engaging, ration your activity, whatever the fuck they feel like, in order to justify their worthless value-subtracting job.

    Never!

    ReplyDelete
  26. Creating an account? Female trait.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Back when book covers used to be to-the-point, yet packed a stylistic punch:

    https://bc-img.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/images/cover/bc/9781310398695_16667585570.jpg

    From the Corgi edition (1971), in the UK.

    If you've never seen an example from the heyday of book cover design, notice the major difference with today's approach -- really, since the '90s or 2000s or so. This is far from the coolest example, but a notable one nonetheless.

    Back then, the cover was visually translating, conveying, or impressionistically evoking, the textual contents inside. It was a creative work in itself, accompanying the main creative work of the text.

    Now, the cover is just a visual checklist of marketing buzzwords, or rather buzz-icons, buzz-designs. The visual counterpart of a category tag. They don't form a creative work unto itself. They're just there to clue people into the content, or signal what target audience it's aimed at / is it right for you?, or otherwise serve as mere marketing and advertising.

    This change has happened through the graphic design world. Album covers, movie posters, video game box art, DVD / Blu-ray covers, you name it. They're no longer creative works unto themselves, that accompany and convey the main content inside.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Now the dumbass thinks everyone's a bot! And cutting off your ability to do anything, even bookmark, which a bot would never do anyway!

    What a wonderful online nation to apply for digital citizenship to!

    "Join our family, and you too can be treated as a traitor immediately upon receiving citizenship! Why, we're only doing this to protect our citizens from harmful traitors and their treasonous activities! We here at the Ruling Council of Twitterland believe in nuking our own country to protect it from outside subversives!"

    Talk about an auto-immune disease -- Elon Musk personally infected Twitter with AIDS!

    ReplyDelete
  29. You can't make this shit up, and I have been literally laughing out loud all day over these dispatches from Reddit, letting the real world and silent majority know of the complete annihilation and chaotic confusion unfolding within the wall-locked city of Twitter.

    From my unclouded view here in the ruins of the blogosphere, I can only LOL as I see the flames raging and plumes of smoke fogging over that hellsite.

    And the damnedest thing is, the slaves will choose to be burned alive rather than flee for refuge. They all have alternative sites to communicate from -- but none of those have the prestige, status, and clout that come from the Twitter branding! They really feel that way.

    Imagine thinking that anyone takes you seriously just cuz you're on the bird app! Just another midwit clearinghouse like Reddit or Wikipedia or whatever. Mindless infotainment, not conversations that shape history, lol.

    "B-b-but, it's where the ideas people gather! It's an online salon! A digital -- " No it's not, calm the hell down, are you kidding us? It's just a toxic talk-radio show with a zillion voices cacaphonously baiting each other as part of opaque clique turf wars that no one with half a brain gives a shit about!

    If you're not creating content outside of Twitter, you were always a boring shitposter to begin with, could not have hacked it in the blogosphere (YouTubesphere, whatever else), and just rely on Twitter's branding rather than substance. Like moving to Brooklyn and thinking it makes you cool...

    ReplyDelete
  30. The genius plan to eliminate bots ensures that only bots will remain among the accounts in the aftermath. Classic case of QE-insulated dum-dums not thinking through the 2nd-order effects of their massive disruption.

    Passive browsers will no longer be in or around the platform.

    Former browsers who might sign up, will not do so, upon learning that their browsing is severely limited, and even if they pay monthly, there are few benefits.

    Existing users are treated as bots, rendered inactive, with no reason to stay on the platform, from both directions -- they can't tweet out things themselves, and they can't read anyone else's things since they are being treated as bots as well!

    And the larger signal it sends, that the Ruling Council of Numbskulls can and will implement these site-destroying plans whenever they want, with no warning, no appeal, no recourse.

    Wow, way to coax wary browsers into joining! Way to retain existing citizens!

    So ridiculous, and again despite all the literal LOLs I've been enjoying all day long because of this outbreak of cyber-AIDS on a hellsite, I know it's not long before cyber-AIDS starts claiming more and more of the online universe, not to mention the IRL counterpart, where nothing is open, nothing has a fixed / predictable schedule, etc.

    If people can't wake up to our having already plunged into a new Dark Age, you are seriously ngmi.

    ReplyDelete
  31. This blog is still open, though. I will never abandon my post. I will never renounce my calling.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Final Indiana Jones movie drops the ball storywise by making it about Ancient Greece and Rome -- back-East Euro-LARP, not American like the rest of the series. It's supposed to follow the American focus on the New World and the Saharo-Arabian sphere within the Old World.

    Temple of Doom set it in India, among Indo-Aryans, so also not quite what's needed -- but still hitting on the exotic / primitive / ancient theme, and far enough from Europe that it doesn't feel too LARP-y. In the American imagination, India is kind of the furthest reach of the Middle East.

    Even the 2008 one was set in Peru!

    But the new one is Greece and Rome, during the expansion of the Roman Empire -- even more LARP-y. To really make it avoid the Euro-LARP, there can't be any connection to European empires, and the Roman Empire went across half of Europe. Ancient Greek Golden Age philosophers are in the "Western" canon as well.

    So it would have to be set in the Minoan civilization or something like that. Possibly not even Indo-European, weird script, earlier hieroglyphics, island rather than mainland Europe, no heritage or lineage that we derive from them -- pretty alien and exotic and primitive, as civilizations go. But with one familiar myth to us, so it isn't totally bewildering -- the Minotaur and the labyrinth.

    Part of the new movie is set in Tangier, Morocco -- but it's just a modern city, not hitting on the primitive, exotic, sublime, dangerous wild nature aspect of venturing abroad. Part of Raiders of the Lost Ark takes place in Cairo, but most of the Egypt scenes are near the pyramids themselves, remote from the comfort and security of present-day civilization.

    Also, the Cairo scene has a Medieval feel to it, without tons of industrial-age artifacts, compared to the Tangier scene in the new one involving a car chase, instead of a guy wielding two swords, as though gunpowder had not yet been invented.

    Whoever wrote / directed the new one has no clue what Indiana Jones is about, naturally as our empire and culture enter full-on collapse.

    I see the director is from New York, whereas Spielberg's formative years were out West, in Arizona and California, and George Lucas is from California. But I doubt it's all due to the director -- just broader disintegration of American culture and mythology, where the culture-makers don't even know how the story is supposed to be told in rough outline.

    Keep the Roman Empire LARP back in New York City where it belongs, not in Hollywood. Musical plays about Rome, perhaps, but not movies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ancient Rome has gotten somewhat of a resurgence in the last couple decades in the cultural sphere. First came being the Christian and slave hating “baddies” capable of epic degeneracy of the classic Hollywood movies, or in the case of euro media, comic doofuses. Later on you start to get reappraisals like I Claudius, Gladiator and later Rome, etc full of gritty honorable soldiers and political power plays. The empire was still dysfunctional and unfair but in that general “life is unfair” way of other gritty modern movies. There now also even an academic push towards showing how ethnically diverse Ancient Rome was, how Black TM it was, etc, with butt-kicking women. It’s as if I’m the twilight of the American empire we are looking back at the Roman’s fall and having to cope about it being not that bad.

      Delete
  33. The biggest copers about the fall of Rome are the Roman fanboys, though, not the culture-makers.

    In all the LARP-ing about the Roman Empire, none of them ever get past 30 BC. It's as though the Year of the Five Emperors, and then the full-on collapse of the Crisis of the Third Century never happened. Suddenly some barbarians overrun the peninsula in the 5th C., and that's when It's Over (TM).

    Also they never address the subjugation of other Italic peoples by the Romans during the early stages of their expansion in the peninsula. No focus on the very early days of who spurred them into uniting in the first place -- the expansion of the Celts.

    It's always the integrative civil war period for them, the only debate they have is "Is some contempo figure more like the Gracchus Brothers or Julius Caesar?" Anytime someone mentions Caesar, you know it's just midwit obsession with a personality cult leader.

    In the American context, we already had our Caesar -- Abraham Lincoln, who won and was martyred during our integrative civil war. If you want the military campaigner role as well, add him with Ulysses S. Grant. Midwestern excellence!

    Of course the LARP-ers are all back-East, particularly bad among Southerners, who were the losers of the civil war -- the ultimate cuckery, pining for a figure to crush them and forcibly integrate them into a central state that they have little influence over.

    That's what the real Caesar did, and that was the role he was carrying out -- continuing the forcible integration of non-Roman Italic peoples that had been under way for a long time by then. Ditto for the Midwest / Old Northwest forcibly integrating the South. Out West has been in control for a long time, and Southerners are the least empowered or influential at the national level. They are America's Sabines, Samnites, Sicilians, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  34. Why do they refuse to see beyond 30 BC, as their cope? Because the disintegration never happens, and there are never any dark days ahead -- just continued expansion and at most saturation / stagnation during the 2nd C.

    And it heightens the drama for the parapolitical LARP-ers in the audience -- there are two starkly different paths ahead, which will we choose? That only holds when the empire is still cohesive enough to integrate after a civil war -- when the civil war hits in the disintegrative stage of empire, there is no shared path forward, everything just fragments and splinters into chaos.

    That is clearly what is happening now in America, but in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance from living under chaos for the next many generations and centuries, they have to double down on how powerfully whole the empire is. So they can't look to the 3rd century AD, ever. They have to go back to a civil war amidst a background of imperial integration and cohesion -- the 1st century BC -- and psychologically and discursively quarantine themselves there forever. Sadge.

    What's most pathetic about this LARP-ing is that these are the people we're supposed to view as the thought leaders, political influencers, brain trust, finger on the pulse havers, etc. They're the most clueless -- if they can't tell you we're in the analog of the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, and insist we're in the growing-stronger and ever-expanding stage of that empire, they are not only morons, but politically harmful.

    "When will America's Caesar deliver us from civil war?" -- sorry bud, Lincoln and Grant already showed up to play that role, over 150 years ago.

    ReplyDelete
  35. It's the same with the fear-mongers about Caesar, though. They're just as clueless and LARP-y -- they just take the opposite emotional tone from the fanboy LARP-ers.

    "Heavens to Betsy! If America stays on the current course for much longer, we very well might become plagued by American Caesarism!"

    It's taking the same psychological cope about avoiding the disintegration of empire, but marketing it to a different target demographic -- people who emotionally seethe over, rather than cheer for, populism.

    We already had American Caesarism, from McKinley or Teddy Roosevelt up through FDR at least, maybe the rest of the New Deal if you want to talk about the strong central state as a whole rather than just one leader. Then the central state became weakened / dismantled / deregulated during the neoliberal / Reagan era, leading to the outright disintegration of the 2020-and-after era.

    ReplyDelete
  36. Linear A is not Semitic, to bring it back to the Minoans for a moment. I never looked into solving this particular open puzzle before, but talking about the probably non-Indo-European nature of the Minoans got me thinking -- who *were* they, then?

    I don't have a solution, but I can definitively rule out Semitic, and probably Saharo-Arabian as a whole.

    Here's a lexicon of Linear A, by one of its main researchers, John Younger:

    http://people.ku.edu/~jyounger/LinearA/lexicon.html

    Notice that quite a few words, whether base words, names, places, have the same consonant in the first and second "position", assuming these reflected Semitic triliteral roots.

    For example: D-D-M-T and D-D-M-N, K-K-N-T and K-K-P, no examples for P however, Q-Q-D and Q-Q-R, R-R-D and R-R-M, S-S-P and S-S-T, no examples for Z however. I leave out examples with M and T since those could be putative prefixes in Semitic, not part of the root.

    These examples violate a very strong and pervasive phontactic constraint in Semitic languages against having the 1st and 2nd consonant be the same, while perfectly allowing for the 2nd and 3rd to be the same (or the 1st and 3rd, for that matter).

    I discussed this contraint in the post below, which concluded that Akkadians referred to the head as the "yak-yak" part of the body, figuratively using onomatopoeia for speech sounds ("qad-qad") coming out of the head to refer to the head itself. Unlike other, later Semitic words for "head" that are not figuratively derived (like "ra's" in Arabic, "rosh" in Hebrew, etc.).

    https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2020/03/did-ancient-akkadians-refer-to-head-as.html

    Also, Linear A doesn't look like it distinguishes a set of emphatic consonants (although there is a K vs. Q distinction), nor pharyngeals. Not very Semitic!

    If it's not Indo-European, then the best guess is that it's related to Etruscan or other such pre-IE and non-Saharo-Arabian family, as many scholars have already claimed.

    The evidence above is only to rule out Semitic.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Star Wars is America's national / imperial epic -- nobody said that made the movie equal to Jesus Christ. Blaspheming the movie is like being anti-Aeneid in the Roman Empire.

    That is the context -- a libtard critic hating on Star Wars, for the predictable reasons, but being anti-American on top of it all.

    And pointing out that most libtards have not taken this route, but have tried to co-opt it for their woketard agenda as of the 2010s -- because blaspheming Star Wars is a cultural bridge too far for even them, if they're American and writing for an American audience.

    You can't express your anti-Americanism by being anti-Star Wars -- you have to say "Umm, ACKSHUALLY, Hillary Clinton is leading the Rebel Alliance against the MAGA stormtroopers commanded by Trump Vadar, and the 2016 election is like the Empire Strikes Back after the uplifting Obama years".

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  38. Nobody cares about George Lucas either -- he's certainly not sacred, the movie Star Wars is. That's why he has always created such a backlash among the American audience for adulterating the original movies.

    So there's no angle of "Even George Lucas himself..." -- don't care, Lucas could be retarded for all we care, and the movie was saved in editing, by the composer, by the cinematographer, the actors, or whatever else. The movie itself is what's sacred, not the director.

    If Virgil began adulterating the Aeneid several decades after its original publishing, no Roman would've held the revisions to be sacred, just cuz "Virgil himself" made them. The work, not the author, is sacred.

    The author is just a vessel for inspiration and creation, an imperfect human being. If good luck / the gods / etc. favor that person, a great work may result from their efforts. But several decades later, maybe they get it in their head that they know better than their initial inspiration, and make revisions.

    But no one in the audience is going to take those as equally divinely inspired -- they're going to LOL at the author for thinking they know better than whatever forces inspired the original.

    We've all seen the behind-the-scenes documentaries about the production of the second trilogy, and how void of inspiration that was. That's why no one holds them to be sacred -- even if they were also created by "George Lucas himself".

    He's not a god or a saint, and we only put the original trilogy in sacrosanct status because it is compelling art, as well as our national epic. The later movies are not, so we have never afforded them that special status -- if anything, we've always been vocal about how much they suck, and how awful "George Lucas himself" has been in the years after the original trilogy's creation.

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  39. You're getting the argument twisted because you want to evaluate Star Wars on purely aesthetic terms, which is not the context of the discussion here. It is the place of that work in our nation's culture, as a symbol of our national identity, as part of the glue that bonds Americans together socially and culturally. We are the culture that created and bonds over Star Wars -- like it or not on purely aesthetic term.

    And even on purely aesthetic grounds, the original trilogy is great. You can't compare it on purely aesthetic grounds to any other nation's epics because it's in an entirely new and different medium -- audio-visual movies, not oral or written poems, stage plays, sculptures, paintings, etc.

    You can't criticize the dialog for not being as poetic as Virgil or Shakespeare, because movies are characterized by naturalistic dialog, not poetic of full of figures of speech. The narrative structure, character development, etc., is also only a piece of the whole for a movie -- so much is based on the visual and musical aspects of the work, and the Aeneid has nothing like that to compare against.

    What the Romans and British Empires did create visually, in narrative / dramatic genres, pales in comparison to Star Wars! I think even the non-dramatic visual art looks better in Star Wars -- its architecture vs. Roman architecture. That's fine, they had no way technologically to create the visual art that movie-makers can create.

    All the Early Modern Euro empires had bitten the dust by the time the movie medium matured, so none of their national epics are in that medium, for us to compare against.

    But all of these works *can* be compared regarding their importance in their nation's culture, as a symbol of collective identity, as objects that are sacrosanct to that group of people.

    And therefore, what happens when you attack the original Star Wars trilogy -- it's sacrilegious, not merely hating on a movie you didn't like.

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  40. That's also why you're confusing an objective assessment of its role in the collective culture, with a personal subjective judgement of its aesthetic merits.

    I do happen to think it's great on purely aesthetic grounds, and that as a national epic it holds its own against other national epics.

    But even if I thought the original trilogy was pure mediocre crap, I would still make the same assessment of its role in American collective identity, and that its sacrosanct status placed it in the same category as the Aeneid within the Roman Empire -- on collective identity grounds, whether or not on purely aesthetic grounds.

    You're not going to honestly argue against the main points about Star Wars' role in American collective identity and culture, so there's nothing to debate.

    There are no controversial hot takes being made in this post / comments about Star Wars, just a pretty obvious statement about how special it is, and what happens when you try to attack something that special, and why you would try to co-opt rather than desecrate it for your agenda.

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  41. What's the Russian equivalent of Star Wars? Their empire didn't implode until well into the 20th century, long after film was developed.

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  42. Good Lord man. Star Wars is shit and in a century people will care about it about as much as some Zoomer today cares about a silent film from the 1920s.

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  43. Cope harder. Ethnogenesis is not a series of "one damn cultural innovation after another", as though after a certain length of time, people get tired of something and dump it forever. It depends on when in the imperial / ethnogenetic lifespan it was made. Shakespeare has never gone out of fashion in British culture, and never will. Nor has Don Quixote in Spanish culture. Or ukiyo-e prints in Japanese culture.

    More than that, those works have not disappeared from *other* country's awareness of those nation's culture. What does Germany, Lebanon, and China know about British culture? "Uh... Shakespeare!" Whatever else they may say, Shakespeare is in that list.

    Star Wars was made by the mature phase of our empire and its culture, so it's been sacrosanct since it was released, and has never gone out of style. Only the crappy prequels and sequels / spin-offs will go through these fashion cycles, perhaps some dropping out of awareness entirely.

    Again, don't care if you personally aesthetically dislike one of the high points of Seventies Hollywood for the masses, just cuz it's popular or cuz woketards tried to co-opt its brand in the 2010s. Like it or hate it, it's sacrosanct and isn't going anywhere, for the rest of American history -- or in any other country's awareness of American culture.

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  44. When I say "Arthurian aliens" and "cosmic Camelot," I mean Star Wars. It's clearly not like a Western movie in being largely historical -- it's more like Arthurian legends in British culture, something from the mists of the deep semi-legendary, mythological past. But, still leading up to the culture of the intended audience -- British for Arthur, Americans for Star Wars.

    That's how the whole thing begins: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" -- where English is a widely spoken language, where there are geological, social, economic, and cultural markers of the American West (especially in its Wild West days). Where there's an occasional African-American character, but not other recognizable racial or ethnic groups from contempo Earth.

    They do live far from Earth, just as Aeneas lived far from Rome, or Theseus was not from Athens, or Cadmus was not from Thebes, or Rurik was not from Moscow. But the characters of Star Wars are a kind of proto-American society, just in some primeval form -- before we landed in America, were at war with the Indians and Mexicans, etc.

    We could have, and often do, use Medieval Europe for that purpose -- to contrast against who we became after ethnogenesis in the New World. But Star Wars takes those Medieval European tropes about knights, magic, religion, etc., and bypasses the factual / materialistic connection to Europe, placing it in someplace far away and even further back in time. So that our pre-American state was still not too European -- we want to avoid identifying as European no matter what, even Medieval Europeans or Ancient Europeans.

    Ancient Egyptians or Israelites, sure. Arthurian legendary figures from deep outer space a million years ago? Even better!

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