Fraternal organizations. The Elks, the Moose, the Oddfellows, all that. Considered kind of obsolete in modern life, right?
Used to have an economic “function” - sufficiently large risk pools for the procurement of life, health, unemployment, and disability insurance, but were later displaced in that role by governments, employers, and unions.
You don’t see much of them anymore. There’s still the American Legion and VFW, but they draft off the military services’ collective identity formation (initiation rituals, shared experiences, collectively sung songs) rather than doing their own in-house.
But, you know, there’s potential there. Fraternal organizations can pull off some serious shit. You get a bunch of guys drinking and singing songs together, throw in some woo-woo mystic aesthetics, add a hierarchy with absurdly pompous titles and you get… the Nazi Party. (Beer Hall Putsch, and all that.)
Or the Freemasons. (Who no, don’t rule the world, but have been pretty important to several national revolutions.)
Or the Ku Klux Klan.
It’s interesting to see particularly where each particular one lifts their goofy aesthetic from. College fraternities invoke Greece, or at least the platonic Greece of Platonic Greece. I guess that makes sense for the intersection of academics, drunkenness, and homoeroticism, but other than the three letters and the occasional toga party they don’t push that too hard and their everyday mytho-aesthetic is pretty much civic Americanism - leaders are called “president”, “secretary”, “treasurer”, etc.
The Nazis were all into German palingenesis so obviously they went heavy on the historic Germanicness as a theme, something I didn’t pick up on until it was explained to me was that a lot of their everyday terms - gau, gefolgschaft, etc. - would have come across as archaic and medieval even by the standards of a culture that had been a feudal monarchy in living memory. The American equivalent would be like if the government was conquered by renn faire types who started giving things goofy-ass D&D names.
EXCEPT OH FUCKING WAIT, THAT’S THE KU KLUX KLAN. Wizards and Dragons and Realms and Provinces and Giants and Cyclopses and Goblins. The Klan was also really into being 2spooky4u. Like, as I write this, it is Frightful PM on the Wailing Deadly day of the Sorrowful month, as the Kalendar reckons it. But then that was always the schtick: “We’re knights! Or are we… ghosts?! ~oooOoOoOOOOoOoOooo~”
And I mean “really, who could take this seriously?” Well, tumblr, who could take your whole Halloween spoopy Skeleton War shit seriously? The answer is no one, so you don’t, but you keep doing it anyway, and so did they.
The Freemasons were weeaboos! I mean not as we know it now, Masonry predates the opening of Japan and subsequent Japonisme, but it’s the same thing, a goofy appropriation of an idealized version of the exotic Orient, using the then furthest-east culture they were in contact with, the Ottoman empire. There was some Moorish stuff too, so maybe the theme should be “Mediterranean Islam”. Temples and fez-wearing Shriners (ahem, “the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine”) and the Moorish Rite. THE FREEMASONS WERE ISLAMABOOS.
(Actually, you know what more recent organization has combined fraternal socialization, revolutionary potential, and a cod-Islamic theme? The Nation of Islam.)
On the one hand, fraternal organizations have been able to wage campaigns of violent subversion capable of overthrowing or supplanting governments; on the other they have always been total fucking nerds getting drunk and geeking out, the two are in no way exclusive.
The tragic urge to self-overcoming has been identified as the only way man and his presence in the world may be ennobled, and this has become the primary element of our suprahumanist ethic. It is what the ancient Greeks called areté, the quest for excellence: the act of living up to one’s full potential.
Since suprahumanism recovers and transfigures the founding myths of Indo-European culture, when it comes to specifying its particular tenets such features as the following might be listed: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; the importance of honour (‘shame’ rather than ‘sin’); a heroic attitude towards life’s challenges; the exaltation and sacralisation of the world, beauty, the body, strength, and health; the rejection of any ‘worlds beyond’; and the inseparability of morality and aesthetics.
Modern materialistic society is based on two principles: that nothing is worse than death, and nothing is better than wealth. In contrast, aristocratic society is based on the principles that there are things worse than death and better than wealth. Dishonour and slavery are worse than death. Honour and freedom are better than wealth. Trading wealth for spiritual goods demonstrates one’s freedom from material necessity. Hence, transforming wealth into the spiritual — into honour, prestige, or beautiful and ‘useless’ things — is an aristocratic virtue.
The term ‘aristocracy’ (areté) is used, throughout this book, in its etymological sense, and should not be confused either with ‘nobility’ — as a social class — or with ‘elite’. An elite is merely a minority holding power within a certain society; an aristocracy distinguishes itself by ability to interpret and express a certain collective will, identity — or sovereignty. An aristocracy incarnates the spirit of an entire community, not particular class interest. Georges Sorel, without lapsing into paradox or oxymoron, speaks of ‘proletarian aristocracy.’
The highest value for a suprahumanist ethics undoubtedly lies not in a form of ‘justice’ whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but in all that may allow man to surpass himself. Since to consider the implications of life’s basic framework as unjust would be palpably absurd, such classic antitheses as noble vs. base, courageous vs. cowardly, honourable vs. dishonourable, beautiful vs. deformed, sick vs. healthy … come to replace the antitheses operative in a morality based on the concept of sin: good vs. evil, humble vs. vainglorious, submissive vs. proud, weak vs. arrogant, modest vs. boastful…
Daniel S. Forrest, Suprahumanism: European Man and the Regeneration of History (via hierarchical-aestheticism)
The one thing I have to say about #GamerGate, it’s that for the biggest and most successful pushback against online social justice culture to date to consist of a twitter hashtag campaign encouraging people to pressure spineless corporate suits into cutting off the income of people expressing unpopular positions for fear of alienating their consumer base…
…well, you know what they say. Live by the sword, choke on your own medicine.
For that matter, contemporary sexual assault/harassment panic and counterpanic is a damn near perfect rhyme with the early ‘90s. You young’uns might want to consider Michael Crichton’s 1994 novel (and near-immediate movie adaptation) Disclosure, or Antioch College’s attempt to impose an affirmative consent policy on students. But ultimately that all fell off the radar.
And I can’t help but wonder how much of that had to do with the Clinton impeachment and the kind of left-leaning people whose support of that stuff was in part about its potential for attacking conservative male power with things like the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings discovering, to their horror, that it could be weaponized against them too.
Actually though, it was a clerical error. It turns out the Trooper had notified the wrong Justin Priest’s family—the Justin Priest who actually died was a 33-year-old.
Alaska police claim they requested the Trooper go to the Priests’ home to find out if the crash victim was their son, NOT to tell them he had died. However, Alaska State Troopers spokeswoman, Megan Peters, insists they were asked to make a death notification.
Whatever the true scenario, Alaska police head-honcho, Chief Bryce Johnson, said, “I’m almost speechless for words. This shouldn’t happen.”
montana ‘american redoubt’ types band together to carve and re-grade 3 entire counties into a portrait of ronald reagan, staring up into the sky, staring out of the earth forever, from the human point of view it’s huge but from space it just looks like the earth is a big head with a comically small face
Around 400 AD, an Indian medical book recorded a disease marked by pustules and boils, saying “the pustules are red, yellow, and white and they are accompanied by burning pain … the skin seems studded with grains of rice.” The Indian epidemic was thought to be punishment from a god, and the survivors created a goddess, Sitala, as the anthropomorphic personification of the disease.[15][16][17] Smallpox was thus regarded as possession by Sitala.
i think “agency” is mostly shorthand. any fictional characters we create, by rule of the fact that they are characters we create and control in the first place, do not actually have agency. they do what we write them to do. agency in fictional characters does not exist, really.
agency, then, becomes shorthand for a larger discussion and analysis and just a general feel of “is what the character doing work for the character, or is this done for the thrill of the audience”.
i’ll give an example from comics. rogue is a pretty well liked member from the x-men, right? and black widow has her own pretty good share of fans, both from the movies and the comics.
in A+X #2, an avengers and x-men teamup book, chris bachalo writes a story where rogue and black widow have to team up and fight a sentinel. but, he writes a scene which feels pretty clearly not for the characters, but for the audience.
of all the ways for rogue to get natasha’s knowledge, there’s tons - nose to nose contact would have done it, and rogue herself knows her powers well enough that she doesn’t need to be told that she can just absorb the knowledge from natasha on how to fire a sniper rifle. what’s more, the info she absorbs/remarks almost immediately turns to natasha’s private romantic/sexual life, and rogue remarks on what a good kisser she is. the scene, the plot, was put together to get them to kiss, everything else be damned.
it’s a scene that breaks any illusion of agency, because it comes off pretty clearly “i wrote a scenario to get the two hot girls to make out”, and like, exists solely for that. it’s not for the characters, it’s for the audience and it feels like, to some degree, the author themselves.
this isn’t even going into the horrible Emma Frost/Black Widow team up, which is a million times worse.
natasha and rogue do not have agency, flat out. they’re fictional characters, and they do what they are written and drawn to do. however, a writer and artist can construct a story, a narrative, where what the characters do feel like they are doing for the characters, and not for the author, and much more pertinently, the audience. discussion of camera angles and focus in any medium would be useful here, not just story choices - what the camera focuses on and how it frames characters very much changes internal feelings and ideas about a character’s “agency”.
agency doesn’t exist in fictional works, but how media frames characters, how they setup their stories, actions, and reactions, determines whether we feel like the character is being themselves, or if the character is doing something that raps on the glass of the TV screen or the glossy pages of the comic book and makes it clear that they have no agency.
Thing is it’s not even hard, I got two off the top of my head;
First is okay, girl can’t kiss anyone without powersucking them, that was the whole tension of the R/G thing. Which means her only opportunity to consensually kiss someone is if they volunteer for a powersuck, which means every time someone volunteers for a powersuck she’s going to want, and press for, intimate contact, a kiss at least, out of skinship hunger. Her sexual desperation expresses both as lonely vulnerability and ruthless predation at the same time, so match her up with any given character and she can bottom from the top while perfectly expressing the X-titles “mutant=puberty” theme. (Plus between all the personas she’s internalized she’s the pannest pansexual there is.)
That’d take some setup outside of any given scene, though. For a one-off the correct answer is she absorbs demurely through gloveless fingertips, then once she has a taste goes in for the kiss. They look shocked and she says “come on, you always wondered what that would be like”, they go “what, making out with you?”, she smirks and says “no, sugar, making out with yourself” and flies off to kick ass.
Unlike spacetwinks I’ve never written erotica for the public, but I did grow up with a.s.s.t.r (and a.s.s.t.r.m), and my standard way to break writers’ block is to daydream up sexual fantasies and then write them down.
Only ever shown them to (and crafted them for) girls I was involved with, but the feedback’s been positive.
taylorswift I HAVE A FIRST DATE TOMORROW WITH A BOY IVE BEEN BEST FRIENDS WITH FOR TWO YEARS? WHAT DO I WEAR? HOW DO I DO THIS I DONT HAVE AN OLDEE SISTER AND I NEED ADVICE CAUSE WHAT IF IM NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I’m gonna have a breakdown about this tomorrow I’m not ready
don’t leave me hanging ://
If he’s your best friend and asked you out on a date, he’s probably seen you at your best and your worst, hair up or down, make up or natural… He likes you for you, so don’t act like someone else or stress out to the point of acting different than you usually act. You got this.
I told you Taylor Swift is going to be Queen of America.
