I just spent this last weekend in a beautiful part of the New Mexico high-desert-forest, at the 9th Tribal Vision Festival. If you set aside the wind, cold, and dry-ness (I'm a low-elevation rainforest creature) - this was an absolutely perfect event! A great balance
So, I got back up to Denver yesterday morning, where I'm staying with a left-anarchist friend. Unfortunately, this friend tends to associate with and think very much like the Left end of things, moreso than the anarchist end of things. I do actually feel that we've made great progress on that recently.
So... yesterday was some kind of American Cult Holy-day apparently. Not one I've ever been cognizant of, and certainly haven't observed.
My buddy had some friends over to observe the ritual... twice. In a row.
By far the best part of that was before the ritual started, while a few of us were outside by the BBQ, and their neighbor gave an EPIC rant about personal sovereignty & personal responsibility.
But they were drinking, and mocking it... so that's better?
Oh, and they were watching the debate, as watched and commented on by a live-streamer named Vaush. Vaush's twitter simply describes him as "antifascist" while his YT about reads:
Hey, comrades! This channel exists so I can channel my creative energy, artistic talent, and rhetorical skill into something productive and useful to others. For now, that seems to be yelling at reactionaries and fascists. Who knows what the future might hold?
RationalWiki describes him as:
a socialist YouTuber and occasional troll who advocates for "pro-markets" libertarian socialism to replace capitalism as an economic system in the near future
From the little glimpse of what I saw, he seemed quite emotionally invested in the statist paradigm, wildly democrat-supporting, violence-supporting, state-supporting, and clearly a member of the Church of Scientistism.
The "debate" itself was almost exclusively ramblings and circular paragraphs that say nothing. "kids fighting on the playground" as my friend put it when the rest of us came back inside a few minutes after it started.
I sat through about 10 minutes of it before I had to leave the room. I'm not sure what parts of the experience were really screwing with me, but it definitely felt bad to be in that room. Was it the ridiculous premise of the whole thing? Was it the room full of people emotionally invested in it? Was it a frequency put out through the feed itself, in order to affect human brains?
The only thing that I heard that was telling in any way was when Trump, referring to the COVID-19 vaccine, said:
"We have our military that delivers soldiers and they can do 200,000 a day. They’re going to be delivering ... it’s all set up."
I even asked my buddy to rewind it, because all of them had missed it. They listened, sort of went "yeah?" and just continued watching... None of them were even phased by it.
Meanwhile, there were multiple moments of group-think, where someone would literally repeat what the live-streamer had just said, framed with "Ya..." and "...right?"
Luckily, the house has a basement, so I went downstairs, put on my noise-canceling headphones, and listened to The Goat Rodeo Session for a while, then wandered through a bunch of interesting videos :-)
HIVE.D!