Late November

It's a quiet gray at the hut. Light snowfall. Reading 'Liberalism - A Counter-History' about the "unique twin birth" of slavery and liberalism.

The white men who most wanted to escape the 'absolute power' of kings and popes over them were also those who most insisted on their 'absolute power' over their property which included other humans. The three major 'liberal' revolutions - in Holland (v. Spain), England (1688) and America (1776) - were all financed by the wealth and labour of chattel slave-economies. Liberal's beloved 'free-trade' was often about avoiding government restriction on massacring Aboriginals and trading Africans as commodities. The "neo-liberals" of today seem similar, both are very concerned with 'morality' as long as it does not harm their profits.

It is fun reading about the founding 'liberals' as they fight over the issue of slavery-----


British: You American rebels are a joke, you cry out for 'Freedom' but champion slavery.

Northern USA: Hold on! The British Empire runs on slavery - your English court ruling just moved the obvious slavery to the periphery. Yet you still have your colonial 'coolies', indentured servants, despised naval pressgangs, your brutal workhouses, the coal-miners in Scotland wear collars with their owner's tags! And don't forget the Northern US is as free of the taint of 'slaves' as England itself.

Southern USA: You are both full of it. Slavery is the foundation of any liberal civilization since Greece and Rome. Free white men should never be degraded by menial servitude.  Our slavers are treated better than your 'white working poor'. And both of you still profiting from the products and transportation of slaves!

Northern USA: Be quiet, Southern hicks! You've spent so long with Africans that you are contaminated by them, that's why you love slavery not liberty.

British: The whole continent is polluted with illiberal and deviltry. Without a firm rule by the Crown you guys would just keep importing Africans slaves to replaced all the Indians you keep killing off. So no more of this 'liberty' talk until you've earned it.

Northern USA: You don't get to talk to us like we were your "slaves", you effete English snobs!

Southern USA: And you don't get to talk to us like we were your "slaves", hypocritical Yankee!

ect, ect..... This is Liberalism 200 years ago.

I also found Locke's argument's that judges can hang you and captains can shoot you but they can't touch a farthing of your money insightful. 'My ill-gotten gains are more sacrosanct than your life' seems to be the driving philosophical doctrine.

More glorious grayness. Springtails (snow fleas) on the decaying snow. Weird, they normally appear in early spring.

I must confess I'm not "working at home", what I'm doing is not on an economic scale. Perhaps that's obvious. No one asks. Reading the darkness of history, treading unnatural snow, still a Romantic. Writing as balm.

I'll reformat R2N this forum over the winter break. I like having it abandoned, teetering over the ocean. It has that feel of a university after the semester is over, empty but still humming with echoes of heavy thinking. There is still a hut with smoking trickling out of it, congeries of books block much of its light but provide insulation from the wintry ocean gales.

My old 'media ethics' cortex still wiggles. I felt a tremor reading wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_controversies. It confirms something I heard on Dr. Who interviews, that MI5 (British internal security agency) vetted everyone who every appeared (or worked?) for the BBC. There is a very hard limit to what political views can be broadcast. Dr Who can indulged in any fantasy, unlimited by time and space - except leftist politics! This is why you have to work if you want to see outside the Anglo-American empire. They specialize in myths and fantasy.

Reading the chronology of BBC controversies is a great reminder of how tricky journalism can be. Watching the government attacking the BBC over being 'too balanced' on the Falklands war (1982) and the Rape of Iraq (2003) reminds just how independent so-called 'state media' can be, unlike the US 'corporate media' that was so supine in the Rape of Iraq (2003) that they functioned as state-propaganda outlets. As Viacom CEO, Sumner Redstone explained, his politics were Democratic but Viacom's interest were best served by the Republicans. And so the USA traveled further into outer darkness....

The last 'controversy' of the list revealed a BBC so placating to the endless whining alt-right that it is hard to understand. In 2019, a BBC host was punished for being too anti-Trump. Her comment?

Naga Munchetty wrote: "Every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, "to go back to where I came from", that was embedded in racism. Now I'm not accusing anyone of anything here, but you know what certain phrases mean."

This was in reference to Don Trump's racist tweets that "'progressive' Democrat congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world [should] go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came."  

Munchetty's comments were very, very mild. In simply tracking down Trump's actually quote, every headline I scrolled discussed the tweet's racism. Even Trump's British political allies were shocked by Trump's blunt racism.

guardian wrote:The leader of Britain’s Brexit party praised Trump’s words despite saying they made him feel uncomfortable.

Farage, who has close links with the Trump administration, added: “You realise, 48 hours on, it was genius because what’s happened is the Democrats gather round the Squad, which allows him to say, ‘Oh look, the Squad are the centre of the Democratic party."  

Trump was targeting four non-white congresswomen with his remarks, only one of who was born outside the Homeland. Farage has commented that his two youngest children are white, have German passports and speak "perfect German".

"He is a remarkably effective operator," said Farage but compared watching his ally’s “brisk style” to being a child watching Daleks on Doctor Who.”

Ahhhh, the Daleks. Every British sprog's favorite fascists with their cries of 'Exterminate' and zapper raised in an permanent 'seig heil'.



And so this aimless ramble wraps itself quite nicely... Cue the Orchestra!

As always

The time 9:19 am and the lighting is sunset. The sun's rising is so low and creeping westward, that it feels like western sunset light. I should go north for a winter to see the sun just skimming the horizon because there is magic in just the lower latitude version.

I feel like I've gotten away with something. In a world that threats of continued capture and enslavement, I have managed partial escape. The world is still fascinatingly mysterious, full of bubbling yeast, bird tribes and planetary mechanics. Rural living means I pursue knowledge at 2006-era internet pace because of an onerous satellite monopoly, but this is still ample. Order books on-line was a revelation, I enjoy inter-library-loans, but I have always dreamt of having a library room. Me and Borges smelling old books.

The D&D project is actually nearing the end of research. The deepest veins are coming into resolution, like the 'The Magazine of SF and Fantasy'. It's is Appendix N ground-zero, has Grahan Wilson's sketches, the genre of "slick fantasy", the readership in Saigon. D&D is a story of Chicago, it's museums and publishing houses and environs, it's Insurance firms, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lake Geneva cottage country and cobblers, Diplozines, the cold war, nam draft, long-haired wargamers, anti-war JW clerics for Nixon, the first season of SNL, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Night Gallery and Let's Make A Deal, the Marvel comics explosion of the mid-60s, the occult explosion that fueled and fed on the Exorcist, the MiddleEarthquake and it's profiteers, cowboys, male-bonding, nerds performing as RANDian toughguys to protect themselves and their fellow nerds, boredom with history-based war-gaming, post-apocaylspe landscapes, elder gods and mutants, Shaver's dero, St. Clair's shadow people, and all those Northern sagas! Still lured by Woden's manly howls despite the bloody Nazi tarnish.

Yeah.....


Just frame it with concepts like Frontier, Boy Adventure fiction, coloniziation, imperialism, gothic, Barbarism, cultural degeneration, masculinity, post-wII consumerism, 1950-60s modernism, the 70s gonzo culture as Star Wars looms ahead. It gets really tricky, core elements like Liberalism, abject violence and newage pseudo-rational mysticism, cloud the mind and hurt the soul. The sheer violence of history revealed by this lens is daunting. The simultaneous dis-enchanting by modernity and re-enchanting by the genies and wizards of capitalism is still a crude but hard-won understanding.

If a return to the starting concept of the bestiary, it brings its own lens: encyclopedias, real animals, the biology of monsters, the interesting tradationals uses of bestiarys to generate sermons, the cool histories of those monsters that make the medevial-Borges-Gygax transisiton.

Yeah....

The squirrel outside is so fluffed-out that it is rounded. The temperature has dropped 10 degrees, the pressure risen 17, we were woken this morning by strong winds, but the rains and warmness have shrunken the snows.

So...

I have to draw the event-horizon of the project at about 1980, with the publication of the MM in 1978 being the basic ending. The scintillating techno-dragon of post-80s fantasy is has its roots deep in the 1970s, DND and computers are bound by ancient pacts, the running of dungeouns has been a major use on processing power. I have scoured old VAX 'flash-copies' for 'code archeology' clues.

Like an adventure, thieving, plundering and exploring. And that's where it all flips back on me.
I have seen myself in many of the fantasy writers and it has not been easy. Psychologically and politically, I'm often saddened by many writers lives, but I have to adapt to that. This is a game about 'America's first way of war' and 'primitive accumulation' so I cannot claim innocence, I came suspicious with my bag of lens to detect any blood stains.

And honestly I got seduced again and again. The Pulp Poets (CAS, HPL, REH) got me. Anderson's Broken Sword, Fafhrd and Mouser, The Hobbit, Dunsany's Pengena, the Gothic Imperials (HRH, Kipling, Stoker, RLS). Burrough's Tarzan was a wild ride of racism even as he turns up in a tuxedo to damn civilization's inhibitions once more.

Phew...

The cerebral fluid is in flux. Cortexs wiggle. The wintry sunlight oozes. I leave the Web.



When 'Appendix N' votes on Vietnam it is split