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#Iran conditions for ending the #USRAEL invasion and restoring flow of oil.
👉 #USRAEL has to stop their #nuclear weapons programs and disarm
👉 Regime change in Washington and Telaviv
👉 The #warcriminal leaders to be sent to #thehague for trial on #warcrime charges
👉 The religious fanatic in charge of the US military, responsible for murder of #venezuela fishermen and 160 schoolgirls to be likewise sent to face warcrime charges
👉 USRAEL Nuclear power stations and peaceful programs to be supervised by #IAEA and the #UN
👉 Demilitarization of the rogue states of US and Israel military, keeping only enough military for border defence
👉 Reparations to the state of Iran for the destruction of civilian and dual purpose assets from seized USRAEL assets
👉 UN supervised program to dismantle the state controlled media and restore independent voices
👉 All American and Israeli citizens abroad to be clearly designated as hazardous and toxic by wearing Red jumpsuit with "KICK ME" stencilled on the back and a red dunce hat
👉 McDonald to serve exclusively halal meals
👉 American and Israeli harlots to cover their lewd hair tempting men with appropriate headwear (Red dunce hat abroad)
Those terms are non negotiable.
🤡 -
Finding Easter
As as Astronomist I am often asked “How do they calculate the date of Easter?”, so here goes.
The simple answer is that Easter Sunday is on the first Sunday after the first full Moon on or after the Vernal equinox. The Vernal Equinox took place this year on March 20th and the first full moon after that was on April 2nd.
I say “simple” answer above because it isn’t quite how the date of Easter is reckoned for purposes of the liturgical calendar.
For a start, the ecclesiastical calculation of the date for Easter – the computus – assumes that the Vernal Equinox is always on March 21st, while in reality these days it is more frequently 20th March, like this year.
On top of that there’s the issue of what reference time and date to use. The equinox is a precisely timed astronomical event but it occurs at different times and possibly on different days in different time zones. Likewise the full Moon. In the ecclesiastical calculation the “full moon” does not currently correspond directly to any astronomical event, but is instead the 14th day of a lunar month, as determined from tables (see below). It may differ from the date of the actual full moon by up to two days.
There have been years (1974, for example) where the official date of Easter does not coincide with the date determined by the simple rule given above. The actual rule is a complicated business involving Golden Numbers and Metonic cycles and whatnot.
Here is excerpt from the Book of Common Prayer that shows Anglicans how to determine the date of Easter for any year up to 2199:
The calculations are based on the approximately 19-year metonic cycle., which is why the above table will not work indefinitely
For this year we find that (2026+1) ÷19=106 with a remainder of 13 (106 × 19 being 2014). The Golder Number for this year is therefore 13, or XIII in the Table. This gives the date of the Paschal Full Moon, which occured this year on 2nd April, which is indeed the day in the centre column next to XIII in the left-hand column in the table. The Sunday Letter is determined by the remainder of (2026+506+6)÷7, which is 4, so this year’s Sunday Letter is D. The date of Easter Sunday is given by the entry in the centre column next to the first occurrence of D in the right-hand column after the Golden Number XIII appears in the left-hand column, i.e. April 5th. I hope this clarifies the situation.
#astronomy #BookOfCommonPrayer #computus #Easter #Equinox #GoldenNumbers #SundayLetters -
Finding Easter
As an Astronomist I am often asked “How do they calculate the date of Easter?”, so here goes.
The simple answer is that Easter Sunday is on the first Sunday after the first full Moon on or after the Vernal equinox. The Vernal Equinox took place this year on March 20th and the first full moon after that was on April 2nd.
I say “simple” answer above because it isn’t quite how the date of Easter is reckoned for purposes of the liturgical calendar.
For a start, the ecclesiastical calculation of the date for Easter – the computus – assumes that the Vernal Equinox is always on March 21st, while in reality these days it is more frequently 20th March, like this year.
On top of that there’s the issue of what reference time and date to use. The equinox is a precisely timed astronomical event but it occurs at different times and possibly on different days in different time zones. Likewise the full Moon. In the ecclesiastical calculation the “full moon” does not currently correspond directly to any astronomical event, but is instead the 14th day of a lunar month, as determined from tables (see below). It may differ from the date of the actual full moon by up to two days.
There have been years (1974, for example) where the official date of Easter does not coincide with the date determined by the simple rule given above. The actual rule is a complicated business involving Golden Numbers and Metonic cycles and whatnot.
Here is an excerpt from the Book of Common Prayer that shows Anglicans how to determine the date of Easter for any year up to 2199:
The calculations are based on the approximately 19-year metonic cycle, which is why the above table will not work indefinitely
For this year we find that (2026+1=2027) ÷19=106 with a remainder of 13 (106 × 19 being 2014). The Golden Number for this year is therefore 13, or XIII in the Table. This gives the date of the Paschal Full Moon, which occured this year on 2nd April, which is indeed the day in the centre column next to XIII in the left-hand column in the table. The Sunday Letter is determined by the remainder of (2026+506+6)÷7, which is 4, so this year’s Sunday Letter is D. The date of Easter Sunday is given by the entry in the centre column next to the first occurrence of D in the right-hand column after the Golden Number XIII appears in the left-hand column, i.e. April 5th. I hope this clarifies the situation.
#astronomy #BookOfCommonPrayer #computus #Easter #Equinox #GoldenNumbers #SundayLetters -
Finding Easter
As an Astronomist I am often asked “How do they calculate the date of Easter?”, so here goes.
The simple answer is that Easter Sunday is on the first Sunday after the first full Moon on or after the Vernal equinox. The Vernal Equinox took place this year on March 20th and the first full moon after that was on April 2nd.
I say “simple” answer above because it isn’t quite how the date of Easter is reckoned for purposes of the liturgical calendar.
For a start, the ecclesiastical calculation of the date for Easter – the computus – assumes that the Vernal Equinox is always on March 21st, while in reality these days it is more frequently 20th March, like this year.
On top of that there’s the issue of what reference time and date to use. The equinox is a precisely timed astronomical event but it occurs at different times and possibly on different days in different time zones. Likewise the full Moon. In the ecclesiastical calculation the “full moon” does not currently correspond directly to any astronomical event, but is instead the 14th day of a lunar month, as determined from tables (see below). It may differ from the date of the actual full moon by up to two days.
There have been years (1974, for example) where the official date of Easter does not coincide with the date determined by the simple rule given above. The actual rule is a complicated business involving Golden Numbers and Metonic cycles and whatnot.
Here is an excerpt from the Book of Common Prayer that shows Anglicans how to determine the date of Easter for any year up to 2199:
The calculations are based on the approximately 19-year metonic cycle, which is why the above table will not work indefinitely
For this year we find that (2026+1=2027) ÷19=106 with a remainder of 13 (106 × 19 being 2014). The Golden Number for this year is therefore 13, or XIII in the Table. This gives the date of the Paschal Full Moon, which occured this year on 2nd April, which is indeed the day in the centre column next to XIII in the left-hand column in the table. The Sunday Letter is determined by the remainder of (2026+506+6)÷7, which is 4, so this year’s Sunday Letter is D. The date of Easter Sunday is given by the entry in the centre column next to the first occurrence of D in the right-hand column after the Golden Number XIII appears in the left-hand column, i.e. April 5th. I hope this clarifies the situation.
#astronomy #BookOfCommonPrayer #computus #Easter #Equinox #GoldenNumbers #SundayLetters -
Finding Easter
As as Astronomist I am often asked “How do they calculate the date of Easter?”, so here goes.
The simple answer is that Easter Sunday is on the first Sunday after the first full Moon on or after the Vernal equinox. The Vernal Equinox took place this year on March 20th and the first full moon after that was on April 2nd.
I say “simple” answer above because it isn’t quite how the date of Easter is reckoned for purposes of the liturgical calendar.
For a start, the ecclesiastical calculation of the date for Easter – the computus – assumes that the Vernal Equinox is always on March 21st, while in reality these days it is more frequently 20th March, like this year.
On top of that there’s the issue of what reference time and date to use. The equinox is a precisely timed astronomical event but it occurs at different times and possibly on different days in different time zones. Likewise the full Moon. In the ecclesiastical calculation the “full moon” does not currently correspond directly to any astronomical event, but is instead the 14th day of a lunar month, as determined from tables (see below). It may differ from the date of the actual full moon by up to two days.
There have been years (1974, for example) where the official date of Easter does not coincide with the date determined by the simple rule given above. The actual rule is a complicated business involving Golden Numbers and Metonic cycles and whatnot.
Here is excerpt from the Book of Common Prayer that shows Anglicans how to determine the date of Easter for any year up to 2199:
The calculations are based on the approximately 19-year metonic cycle., which is why the above table will not work indefinitely
For this year we find that (2026+1) ÷19=106 with a remainder of 13 (106 × 19 being 2014). The Golder Number for this year is therefore 13, or XIII in the Table. This gives the date of the Paschal Full Moon, which occured this year on 2nd April, which is indeed the day in the centre column next to XIII in the left-hand column in the table. The Sunday Letter is determined by the remainder of (2026+506+6)÷7, which is 4, so this year’s Sunday Letter is D. The date of Easter Sunday is given by the entry in the centre column next to the first occurrence of D in the right-hand column after the Golden Number XIII appears in the left-hand column, i.e. April 5th. I hope this clarifies the situation.
#astronomy #BookOfCommonPrayer #computus #Easter #Equinox #GoldenNumbers #SundayLetters -
Finding Easter
As an Astronomist I am often asked “How do they calculate the date of Easter?”, so here goes.
The simple answer is that Easter Sunday is on the first Sunday after the first full Moon on or after the Vernal equinox. The Vernal Equinox took place this year on March 20th and the first full moon after that was on April 2nd.
I say “simple” answer above because it isn’t quite how the date of Easter is reckoned for purposes of the liturgical calendar.
For a start, the ecclesiastical calculation of the date for Easter – the computus – assumes that the Vernal Equinox is always on March 21st, while in reality these days it is more frequently 20th March, like this year.
On top of that there’s the issue of what reference time and date to use. The equinox is a precisely timed astronomical event but it occurs at different times and possibly on different days in different time zones. Likewise the full Moon. In the ecclesiastical calculation the “full moon” does not currently correspond directly to any astronomical event, but is instead the 14th day of a lunar month, as determined from tables (see below). It may differ from the date of the actual full moon by up to two days.
There have been years (1974, for example) where the official date of Easter does not coincide with the date determined by the simple rule given above. The actual rule is a complicated business involving Golden Numbers and Metonic cycles and whatnot.
Here is an excerpt from the Book of Common Prayer that shows Anglicans how to determine the date of Easter for any year up to 2199:
The calculations are based on the approximately 19-year metonic cycle, which is why the above table will not work indefinitely
For this year we find that (2026+1=2027) ÷19=106 with a remainder of 13 (106 × 19 being 2014). The Golden Number for this year is therefore 13, or XIII in the Table. This gives the date of the Paschal Full Moon, which occured this year on 2nd April, which is indeed the day in the centre column next to XIII in the left-hand column in the table. The Sunday Letter is determined by the remainder of (2026+506+6)÷7, which is 4, so this year’s Sunday Letter is D. The date of Easter Sunday is given by the entry in the centre column next to the first occurrence of D in the right-hand column after the Golden Number XIII appears in the left-hand column, i.e. April 5th. I hope this clarifies the situation.
#astronomy #BookOfCommonPrayer #computus #Easter #Equinox #GoldenNumbers #SundayLetters -
History's lesson
Prussia, the largest German-speaking kingdom, does no longer exist because of wars.
https://historyguy.com/wars_of_prussia.htm
Alexander von #Humboldt traveled to #Paris and thanks to Aimé #Bonpland he published books that inspired Charles #Darwin.
https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/humboldt/online/alexander-von-humboldt-bonpland
Likewise, Wernher von Braun traveled to the enemy country and helped establish NASA.
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[Edit: Solved!] I [had] a bizarre-ass #Bash #scripting problem. I'm at my wits' end.
I have a script that scans a directory and picks a random file from it. This script works just fine if I invoke it manually, from the command line in a terminal window.
But if I run it from the Linux Mint/Cinnamon menu (start menu, whatever), it hangs when it tries to list the files in the dir. Likewise when run from crontab (which is how I really want to run it most of the time). 🧵 1/4
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RE: https://mas.to/@tezoatlipoca/116263075699722140
Well, I had to give up on the #rsync approach - rsync over #MTP seemed to have issues with copying some file metadata that rsync would need to handle incremental updates. Subsequent rsyncs would re-copy _everything_. Boo.
Likewise using #android usb-debug mode and `adb push` (android debug tool on linux) also only re-copies everyting.
I could use #termux on the phone to provide an actual rsync or ssh host on the phone (which would also let me use wifi). Or..1/
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RE: https://mas.to/@tezoatlipoca/116263075699722140
Well, I had to give up on the #rsync approach - rsync over #MTP seemed to have issues with copying some file metadata that rsync would need to handle incremental updates. Subsequent rsyncs would re-copy _everything_. Boo.
Likewise using #android usb-debug mode and `adb push` (android debug tool on linux) also only re-copies everyting.
I could use #termux on the phone to provide an actual rsync or ssh host on the phone (which would also let me use wifi). Or..1/
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RE: https://mas.to/@tezoatlipoca/116263075699722140
Well, I had to give up on the #rsync approach - rsync over #MTP seemed to have issues with copying some file metadata that rsync would need to handle incremental updates. Subsequent rsyncs would re-copy _everything_. Boo.
Likewise using #android usb-debug mode and `adb push` (android debug tool on linux) also only re-copies everyting.
I could use #termux on the phone to provide an actual rsync or ssh host on the phone (which would also let me use wifi). Or..1/
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RE: https://mas.to/@tezoatlipoca/116263075699722140
Well, I had to give up on the #rsync approach - rsync over #MTP seemed to have issues with copying some file metadata that rsync would need to handle incremental updates. Subsequent rsyncs would re-copy _everything_. Boo.
Likewise using #android usb-debug mode and `adb push` (android debug tool on linux) also only re-copies everyting.
I could use #termux on the phone to provide an actual rsync or ssh host on the phone (which would also let me use wifi). Or..1/
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RE: https://mas.to/@tezoatlipoca/116263075699722140
Well, I had to give up on the #rsync approach - rsync over #MTP seemed to have issues with copying some file metadata that rsync would need to handle incremental updates. Subsequent rsyncs would re-copy _everything_. Boo.
Likewise using #android usb-debug mode and `adb push` (android debug tool on linux) also only re-copies everyting.
I could use #termux on the phone to provide an actual rsync or ssh host on the phone (which would also let me use wifi). Or..1/
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Please copy and paste into the form on the website of your Senators and Representative and share with friends. https://www.congress.gov/contact-us
Dear Sen / Rep
I oppose any suspension of the federal gas tax, including legislation such as the Gas Prices Relief Act, as a means of offsetting the economic burden of this Republican Administration's war in Iran. I likewise oppose lifting any sanctions on Russian oil.
If Congress believes (as I do) that this war imposes an excessive burden on Americans, Congress should end the war. Only Congress may declare war, and only Congress may fund it. Neither a formal declaration nor a proper authorization has occurred. Suspending the gasoline tax does not address that constitutional failure; it subsidizes indecision.
Focusing on gas prices minimizes the stakes. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz affects the entire global supply chain of critical materials including industrial sulfur as well as, copper, and cobalt, two materials essential to electric vehicle batteries and semiconductors. One-third of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer passes through the Strait.
Suspending the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gasoline tax is theater. It does not address the scale of disruption and papers over Congress’s responsibility to make a clear decision about the war itself.
Do not sign or vote for a suspension of the federal gasoline tax. Do not lift sanctions on Russia. Address the war directly. Your constituents are watching.
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I saw Chess on Broadway today. Let's start with the good stuff.
The score remains among my favorite of any musical. Every song is excellent, from the Overture all the way to "You and I." The only downside is there isn't time to include every great song from every past version of Chess, with perhaps the most notable exclusion being "The Russian and Molokov." I was surprised by the placement of several songs, notably placing "Someone Else's Story" anfter "Endgame," but they all worked.
The orchestra and cast were all spectacular, with the lead trio Aaron Tveit, Leah Michele, and Nicholas Christopher pulling me into a trance each time they sang. The picture of Lea Michele I had in my head before today was the girl on Glee, but she embodied Florence in a way that rivaled past stars Elaine Paige, Judy Kuhn, and Cassidy Janson. I'd likewise place Christopher in my top three Anatolys, along with Michael Ball and Tommy Körberg. I was a bit skeptical of him in the opening, but as he gets closer to Florence he opens up his emotions more, and he completely brought down the house during "Anthem" and "Endgame" Tveit, meanwhile, is far and away the best Freddie I have ever seen.
Danny Strong's new book gives Freddie bipolar disorder, showing him with manic episodes at the beginning of the story, and show a positive side to his relationship with Florence. We also see Freddie resent the pressure that comes from being a national champion since age 11. The changes give Freddie depth I have never seen in previous productions, and Tveit brings him to life with a physicality, voice, and movement that pulls me in. During a couple of songs, Tveit swung on bars in a manner reminiscent of what he did in Next to Normal while still singing. I wonder if Tveit talked with Alice Ripely about portraying someone dealing with bipolar disorder. When Florence and Freddie break up, it hits much harder than in any previous production I've seen, due to Freddie having more depth and excellent performances by Michele and Tveit. During "Endgame," Freddie sings some parts of the song that have traditionally been sung by the ensemble, and the difference in his portrayal from earlier productions brings a new energy to a song I've heard hundreds of times.
Strong also establishes that Florence and Anatoly already knew each other and expressed mutual attraction prior to the start of the show. Moreover, we are told four years pass betweet acts, giving much more time for Florence and Anatoly's relationship to develop, further increasing the tension when their relationship is threatened.
Hannah Cruz brings a jaded, cynical attitude to Svetlana that pleasantly surprised me. Also carrying over from the original Broadway cast is the reprise of "Where I Want to Be," sung by Svetlana and Anatoly. New to this production, Strong has Svetlana find Florence's weakness. Florence ultimately tells Anatoly he should go back to the USSR: Not because of her father, but so that his kids can have their father.
Now, let's move on to the stuff that is not as good. Bryce Pinkham's Arbiter is the narrator for the show, and he frequently speaks in a tongue-in-cheek humorous tone, with jokes that are at odds with the solemn authority The Arbiter projects during his epynomous song, as well as "Quartet" and "The Deal." The subject matter of the show is serious, and the main trio all deal with serious issues in a serious tone singing serious songs, only for the narrator to interrupt with jokes. Walter and Molokov also joke with each other, but this feels much more in keeping with their characters.
The creative team made efforts to keep the story relevant to audiences born long after the cold war ended, with mixed effects. One part I really liked was when Walter threatened Florence with deportation to Hungry. Less effective was when The Arbiter sarcastically mentioned politicians from the 2020s by name, which pulled me out of the story and into the present. I believe the story is sufficiently relevant to critique modern politics without needing to explicitly name any real contemperary politicians, and audiences are already going to think about one partuclar person due to Freddie's last name.
There were more scenes than usual of Molokov and Walter negotiating, and so I was surprised we didn't hear them perform "Let's Work Together" from the original Broadway production.
The song that gave me the most mixed feelings was "The Interview." The stronger relationships between the lead trio give a stronger payoff when they reunite on TV. But, as with the original West End production, Freddie only has a pre-recorded video of Svetlana. I believe this is a step down from the 2018 West End production, when Freddie surprises Anatoly by revealing Svetlana and her son are actually in the station in person. We ultimately don't see Anatoly's kids at all during the show, which weakens the ending in which his kids are the reason he returns to Russia.
But all my criticisms vanished from my mind as Florence and Anatoly embraced for the final time during "You and I." The score, cast, and orchestra make up for any faults I may find with the book for one of the most enjoyable Broadway experiences of my adult life.
#Chess #MusicalTheater -
The links between Russian officials and the American Religious Right,
like those between Kremlin-linked actors and American white nationalists,
are easy to trace.According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Duma member #Yelena #Mizulina,
who helped spearhead Russia’s anti-gay “propaganda” law,
has been “heavily involved” with the WCF.#Vladimir #Yakunin, former head of Russian Railways
—and a Kremlin insider who has cultivated additional links with the American theocratic “#dominionist” movement
—has also served as a WCF committee member.Likewise, Russia’s 2011 package of anti-abortion legislation saw conspicuous links with the WCF’s efforts.
To wit, the package of abortion restrictions, speared by Mizulina, was launched a day after a series of WCF higher-ups,
including Carlson and Managing Director Larry Jacobs,
settled into Moscow for a
“Demographic Summit,”
the WCF’s most substantial assembly in Russia to date.As the head of a Russian women’s advocacy group later said,
“It was 100 percent clear that everything [in the anti-abortion legislation] was copied from the experience of American fundamentalists
and conservative circles of several European countries
where abortion is forbidden or restricted severely.”Or as the WCF would later claim in its promotional material:
The WCF “helped pass the first Russian laws restricting abortion in modern history.”
Still, the WCF is by no means the lone U.S. Religious Right organization outspoken in its praise of Moscow,
or supporting Kremlin policy.Over the past few years, arch-conservatives in the U.S. have begun espousing something approaching infatuation with Putin,
especially for Moscow’s leading role in both passing and encouraging anti-LGBT legislation.For instance, #Bryan #Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the "American Family Association"
and who still hosts a show broadcast over its radio network,
has called Putin the
“lion of Christianity.”Evangelist #Franklin #Graham
—who visited Russia in 2015 to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill
—has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity.”(8/N)
#WCF #Allan #Carlson #Anatoly #Antonov #Viktor #Medkov #antiLGBT #Alexey #Komov #Brian #Brown #IOF #Religious #Right #American #missionaries #David #Duke #Preston #Wiginton #Harold #Covington #Mike #Cernovich #Matthew #Heimbach #HailPutin #PutinForTsar #Novorossiya #Konstantin #Malofeev #TraditionalistWorkerParty #Richard #Spencer #NPI #antiSemitism #monoracial #statehood #Lügenpresse #Jobbik #Nina #Kouprianova #Byzantina #Richard #Spencer #Matthew #Heimbach #Alexander #Dugin #Eurasianism #Eternal #Rome #Alex #Jones #InfoWars
-
The links between Russian officials and the American Religious Right,
like those between Kremlin-linked actors and American white nationalists,
are easy to trace.According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Duma member #Yelena #Mizulina,
who helped spearhead Russia’s anti-gay “propaganda” law,
has been “heavily involved” with the WCF.#Vladimir #Yakunin, former head of Russian Railways
—and a Kremlin insider who has cultivated additional links with the American theocratic “#dominionist” movement
—has also served as a WCF committee member.Likewise, Russia’s 2011 package of anti-abortion legislation saw conspicuous links with the WCF’s efforts.
To wit, the package of abortion restrictions, speared by Mizulina, was launched a day after a series of WCF higher-ups,
including Carlson and Managing Director Larry Jacobs,
settled into Moscow for a
“Demographic Summit,”
the WCF’s most substantial assembly in Russia to date.As the head of a Russian women’s advocacy group later said,
“It was 100 percent clear that everything [in the anti-abortion legislation] was copied from the experience of American fundamentalists
and conservative circles of several European countries
where abortion is forbidden or restricted severely.”Or as the WCF would later claim in its promotional material:
The WCF “helped pass the first Russian laws restricting abortion in modern history.”
Still, the WCF is by no means the lone U.S. Religious Right organization outspoken in its praise of Moscow,
or supporting Kremlin policy.Over the past few years, arch-conservatives in the U.S. have begun espousing something approaching infatuation with Putin,
especially for Moscow’s leading role in both passing and encouraging anti-LGBT legislation.For instance, #Bryan #Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the "American Family Association"
and who still hosts a show broadcast over its radio network,
has called Putin the
“lion of Christianity.”Evangelist #Franklin #Graham
—who visited Russia in 2015 to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill
—has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity.”(8/N)
#WCF #Allan #Carlson #Anatoly #Antonov #Viktor #Medkov #antiLGBT #Alexey #Komov #Brian #Brown #IOF #Religious #Right #American #missionaries #David #Duke #Preston #Wiginton #Harold #Covington #Mike #Cernovich #Matthew #Heimbach #HailPutin #PutinForTsar #Novorossiya #Konstantin #Malofeev #TraditionalistWorkerParty #Richard #Spencer #NPI #antiSemitism #monoracial #statehood #Lügenpresse #Jobbik #Nina #Kouprianova #Byzantina #Richard #Spencer #Matthew #Heimbach #Alexander #Dugin #Eurasianism #Eternal #Rome #Alex #Jones #InfoWars
-
The links between Russian officials and the American Religious Right,
like those between Kremlin-linked actors and American white nationalists,
are easy to trace.According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Duma member #Yelena #Mizulina,
who helped spearhead Russia’s anti-gay “propaganda” law,
has been “heavily involved” with the WCF.#Vladimir #Yakunin, former head of Russian Railways
—and a Kremlin insider who has cultivated additional links with the American theocratic “#dominionist” movement
—has also served as a WCF committee member.Likewise, Russia’s 2011 package of anti-abortion legislation saw conspicuous links with the WCF’s efforts.
To wit, the package of abortion restrictions, speared by Mizulina, was launched a day after a series of WCF higher-ups,
including Carlson and Managing Director Larry Jacobs,
settled into Moscow for a
“Demographic Summit,”
the WCF’s most substantial assembly in Russia to date.As the head of a Russian women’s advocacy group later said,
“It was 100 percent clear that everything [in the anti-abortion legislation] was copied from the experience of American fundamentalists
and conservative circles of several European countries
where abortion is forbidden or restricted severely.”Or as the WCF would later claim in its promotional material:
The WCF “helped pass the first Russian laws restricting abortion in modern history.”
Still, the WCF is by no means the lone U.S. Religious Right organization outspoken in its praise of Moscow,
or supporting Kremlin policy.Over the past few years, arch-conservatives in the U.S. have begun espousing something approaching infatuation with Putin,
especially for Moscow’s leading role in both passing and encouraging anti-LGBT legislation.For instance, #Bryan #Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the "American Family Association"
and who still hosts a show broadcast over its radio network,
has called Putin the
“lion of Christianity.”Evangelist #Franklin #Graham
—who visited Russia in 2015 to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill
—has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity.”(8/N)
#WCF #Allan #Carlson #Anatoly #Antonov #Viktor #Medkov #antiLGBT #Alexey #Komov #Brian #Brown #IOF #Religious #Right #American #missionaries #David #Duke #Preston #Wiginton #Harold #Covington #Mike #Cernovich #Matthew #Heimbach #HailPutin #PutinForTsar #Novorossiya #Konstantin #Malofeev #TraditionalistWorkerParty #Richard #Spencer #NPI #antiSemitism #monoracial #statehood #Lügenpresse #Jobbik #Nina #Kouprianova #Byzantina #Richard #Spencer #Matthew #Heimbach #Alexander #Dugin #Eurasianism #Eternal #Rome #Alex #Jones #InfoWars
-
The links between Russian officials and the American Religious Right,
like those between Kremlin-linked actors and American white nationalists,
are easy to trace.According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Duma member #Yelena #Mizulina,
who helped spearhead Russia’s anti-gay “propaganda” law,
has been “heavily involved” with the WCF.#Vladimir #Yakunin, former head of Russian Railways
—and a Kremlin insider who has cultivated additional links with the American theocratic “#dominionist” movement
—has also served as a WCF committee member.Likewise, Russia’s 2011 package of anti-abortion legislation saw conspicuous links with the WCF’s efforts.
To wit, the package of abortion restrictions, speared by Mizulina, was launched a day after a series of WCF higher-ups,
including Carlson and Managing Director Larry Jacobs,
settled into Moscow for a
“Demographic Summit,”
the WCF’s most substantial assembly in Russia to date.As the head of a Russian women’s advocacy group later said,
“It was 100 percent clear that everything [in the anti-abortion legislation] was copied from the experience of American fundamentalists
and conservative circles of several European countries
where abortion is forbidden or restricted severely.”Or as the WCF would later claim in its promotional material:
The WCF “helped pass the first Russian laws restricting abortion in modern history.”
Still, the WCF is by no means the lone U.S. Religious Right organization outspoken in its praise of Moscow,
or supporting Kremlin policy.Over the past few years, arch-conservatives in the U.S. have begun espousing something approaching infatuation with Putin,
especially for Moscow’s leading role in both passing and encouraging anti-LGBT legislation.For instance, #Bryan #Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the "American Family Association"
and who still hosts a show broadcast over its radio network,
has called Putin the
“lion of Christianity.”Evangelist #Franklin #Graham
—who visited Russia in 2015 to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill
—has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity.”(8/N)
#WCF #Allan #Carlson #Anatoly #Antonov #Viktor #Medkov #antiLGBT #Alexey #Komov #Brian #Brown #IOF #Religious #Right #American #missionaries #David #Duke #Preston #Wiginton #Harold #Covington #Mike #Cernovich #Matthew #Heimbach #HailPutin #PutinForTsar #Novorossiya #Konstantin #Malofeev #TraditionalistWorkerParty #Richard #Spencer #NPI #antiSemitism #monoracial #statehood #Lügenpresse #Jobbik #Nina #Kouprianova #Byzantina #Richard #Spencer #Matthew #Heimbach #Alexander #Dugin #Eurasianism #Eternal #Rome #Alex #Jones #InfoWars
-
The links between Russian officials and the American Religious Right,
like those between Kremlin-linked actors and American white nationalists,
are easy to trace.According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Duma member #Yelena #Mizulina,
who helped spearhead Russia’s anti-gay “propaganda” law,
has been “heavily involved” with the WCF.#Vladimir #Yakunin, former head of Russian Railways
—and a Kremlin insider who has cultivated additional links with the American theocratic “#dominionist” movement
—has also served as a WCF committee member.Likewise, Russia’s 2011 package of anti-abortion legislation saw conspicuous links with the WCF’s efforts.
To wit, the package of abortion restrictions, speared by Mizulina, was launched a day after a series of WCF higher-ups,
including Carlson and Managing Director Larry Jacobs,
settled into Moscow for a
“Demographic Summit,”
the WCF’s most substantial assembly in Russia to date.As the head of a Russian women’s advocacy group later said,
“It was 100 percent clear that everything [in the anti-abortion legislation] was copied from the experience of American fundamentalists
and conservative circles of several European countries
where abortion is forbidden or restricted severely.”Or as the WCF would later claim in its promotional material:
The WCF “helped pass the first Russian laws restricting abortion in modern history.”
Still, the WCF is by no means the lone U.S. Religious Right organization outspoken in its praise of Moscow,
or supporting Kremlin policy.Over the past few years, arch-conservatives in the U.S. have begun espousing something approaching infatuation with Putin,
especially for Moscow’s leading role in both passing and encouraging anti-LGBT legislation.For instance, #Bryan #Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the "American Family Association"
and who still hosts a show broadcast over its radio network,
has called Putin the
“lion of Christianity.”Evangelist #Franklin #Graham
—who visited Russia in 2015 to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill
—has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity.”(8/N)
#WCF #Allan #Carlson #Anatoly #Antonov #Viktor #Medkov #antiLGBT #Alexey #Komov #Brian #Brown #IOF #Religious #Right #American #missionaries #David #Duke #Preston #Wiginton #Harold #Covington #Mike #Cernovich #Matthew #Heimbach #HailPutin #PutinForTsar #Novorossiya #Konstantin #Malofeev #TraditionalistWorkerParty #Richard #Spencer #NPI #antiSemitism #monoracial #statehood #Lügenpresse #Jobbik #Nina #Kouprianova #Byzantina #Richard #Spencer #Matthew #Heimbach #Alexander #Dugin #Eurasianism #Eternal #Rome #Alex #Jones #InfoWars
-
"I used to think the backbone of America ran right down the middle -- from the Dakotas to Texas. Sadly, if recent events have taught me anything, it’s that red states are spineless. The obsequious manner in which conservative voters capitulate to an untelegenic mountebank is either cultism, cowardice, or a combination of the two. It’s certainly not the backbone that built our great nation.
It's important to bear in mind these are the same gullible saps who thought the arrival of a Dollar General in their communities would save Main Street rather than eviscerate the local economy entirely. They're notorious for supporting flimflammers who delight in hoodwinking them.
These are likewise the same degenerates who think the prospect of a cage fight on the White House lawn is a fitting means by which to commemorate the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The irony doesn't escape the intellectual mind. Juvenal’s 'bread and circuses' idiom is obscenely fitting.
I recently happened upon a comment written by a Gravy Seal residing in a Kansas town made famous by right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh. The self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist applauded Trump’s “crackdown,” saying 'if Martial law is what it takes, so be it.'
'The communist demotards are lying,' he wrote. 'I’m glad Trump is gettin rid of the homeless. I’m tired of seein all these stolen Walmart carts all over town.'
For a Christian, the gentleman evidently suffers a lack of altruism.
Of course, when it comes to the question of where exactly transients are being relocated, nobody seems to know, and few 'Christians' appear to care."
http://web.archive.org/web/20250903020440/https://www.alternet.org/trump-loves-the-poorly-educated/
-
"I used to think the backbone of America ran right down the middle -- from the Dakotas to Texas. Sadly, if recent events have taught me anything, it’s that red states are spineless. The obsequious manner in which conservative voters capitulate to an untelegenic mountebank is either cultism, cowardice, or a combination of the two. It’s certainly not the backbone that built our great nation.
It's important to bear in mind these are the same gullible saps who thought the arrival of a Dollar General in their communities would save Main Street rather than eviscerate the local economy entirely. They're notorious for supporting flimflammers who delight in hoodwinking them.
These are likewise the same degenerates who think the prospect of a cage fight on the White House lawn is a fitting means by which to commemorate the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The irony doesn't escape the intellectual mind. Juvenal’s 'bread and circuses' idiom is obscenely fitting.
I recently happened upon a comment written by a Gravy Seal residing in a Kansas town made famous by right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh. The self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist applauded Trump’s “crackdown,” saying 'if Martial law is what it takes, so be it.'
'The communist demotards are lying,' he wrote. 'I’m glad Trump is gettin rid of the homeless. I’m tired of seein all these stolen Walmart carts all over town.'
For a Christian, the gentleman evidently suffers a lack of altruism.
Of course, when it comes to the question of where exactly transients are being relocated, nobody seems to know, and few 'Christians' appear to care."
http://web.archive.org/web/20250903020440/https://www.alternet.org/trump-loves-the-poorly-educated/
-
"I used to think the backbone of America ran right down the middle -- from the Dakotas to Texas. Sadly, if recent events have taught me anything, it’s that red states are spineless. The obsequious manner in which conservative voters capitulate to an untelegenic mountebank is either cultism, cowardice, or a combination of the two. It’s certainly not the backbone that built our great nation.
It's important to bear in mind these are the same gullible saps who thought the arrival of a Dollar General in their communities would save Main Street rather than eviscerate the local economy entirely. They're notorious for supporting flimflammers who delight in hoodwinking them.
These are likewise the same degenerates who think the prospect of a cage fight on the White House lawn is a fitting means by which to commemorate the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The irony doesn't escape the intellectual mind. Juvenal’s 'bread and circuses' idiom is obscenely fitting.
I recently happened upon a comment written by a Gravy Seal residing in a Kansas town made famous by right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh. The self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist applauded Trump’s “crackdown,” saying 'if Martial law is what it takes, so be it.'
'The communist demotards are lying,' he wrote. 'I’m glad Trump is gettin rid of the homeless. I’m tired of seein all these stolen Walmart carts all over town.'
For a Christian, the gentleman evidently suffers a lack of altruism.
Of course, when it comes to the question of where exactly transients are being relocated, nobody seems to know, and few 'Christians' appear to care."
http://web.archive.org/web/20250903020440/https://www.alternet.org/trump-loves-the-poorly-educated/
-
"I used to think the backbone of America ran right down the middle -- from the Dakotas to Texas. Sadly, if recent events have taught me anything, it’s that red states are spineless. The obsequious manner in which conservative voters capitulate to an untelegenic mountebank is either cultism, cowardice, or a combination of the two. It’s certainly not the backbone that built our great nation.
It's important to bear in mind these are the same gullible saps who thought the arrival of a Dollar General in their communities would save Main Street rather than eviscerate the local economy entirely. They're notorious for supporting flimflammers who delight in hoodwinking them.
These are likewise the same degenerates who think the prospect of a cage fight on the White House lawn is a fitting means by which to commemorate the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The irony doesn't escape the intellectual mind. Juvenal’s 'bread and circuses' idiom is obscenely fitting.
I recently happened upon a comment written by a Gravy Seal residing in a Kansas town made famous by right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh. The self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist applauded Trump’s “crackdown,” saying 'if Martial law is what it takes, so be it.'
'The communist demotards are lying,' he wrote. 'I’m glad Trump is gettin rid of the homeless. I’m tired of seein all these stolen Walmart carts all over town.'
For a Christian, the gentleman evidently suffers a lack of altruism.
Of course, when it comes to the question of where exactly transients are being relocated, nobody seems to know, and few 'Christians' appear to care."
http://web.archive.org/web/20250903020440/https://www.alternet.org/trump-loves-the-poorly-educated/
-
What is a ‘true self’ and what is a ‘false self’?
I’ve always been instinctively suspicious of Winnicott’s notion of the ‘true self‘. Not because I doubt that it’s a frequent experience to find oneself relating in a manner which is in some fundamental way fake, somehow untrue to who we are. To the extent this is a routine feature of human experience it implies as a corollary forms of relating which are in some fundamental sense true to who we are. Likewise it is a common experience that these forms of relating feel good in some diffuse yet profound way. In essence I understand Winnicott to have been saying that relating from the true self keeps us in touch with our fundamental creativity, enabling us to act spontaneously in terms of who we are rather than acting defensively in order to comply with the (imagined) expectations of those around us. In essence the false self acts as a defensive carapace which forms to protect ourselves developmentally when we encounter situations in which we cannot be ourselves in this more spontaneous way. It’s what Gabor Mate describes with admirable clarity as the tension between attachment and authenticity:
The seed of woe does not lie in our having these two needs, but in the fact that life too often orchestrates a face-off between them. The dilemma is this: What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel? What happens, in other words, when one nonnegotiable need is pitted by circumstance against the other? These circumstances might include parental addiction, mental illness, family violence and poverty, overt conflict, or profound unhappiness—the stresses imposed by society, on children as well as adults. Even without these, the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity can arise. Not being seen and accepted for who we are is sufficient.
Myth of Normal, pg 147
As Mate later observes, “That some attachments may not survive the choice for authenticity is one of the most agonizing realizations one can come to” (pg 476). In this sense we could think of Winnicott’s concept as a way of describing how this tension plays itself out (or fails to) i.e. the manner in which we learn to pretend to be something other than what we are in pursuit of a sense of safety in our relations with others. In its more extreme forms this issues in a complete compliance with our environment and the demands we encounter within it, even preemptively so such that we are contorting ourselves to demands which no one is actually making of us. This is part of all childhood experience, as I understand Winnicott, with the difference being the degree to which the false self crowds out the true self and how deeply embedded the legacy of this becomes in adult life and with what consequences.
The problem I see is the tacitly essentialist register of ‘true self’ and ‘false self’. Not only does it lend itself so readily to simplification, such that we might simply seek to replace the (bad) ‘false self’ with the (good) ‘true self’, it fails to register the dynamic character of the process which is being captured. As I understand it these are more like psychic sources which become more or less integrated into the structure of our quotidian engagement with the world around us: the source of spontaneous and creative action which keeps us rooted in the present and the anticipatory and fearful action which is orientated to the future. It’s untenable to live entirely in the first mode as an adult so it’s more a question of how readily accessible that source is and how much it infuses our interaction with others and the world around us. Likewise the second mode provides a necessary feature for survival in an unpredictable world but it can squeeze out the possibility for authentic relating such that it makes any relating in the first mode untenable. Everything becomes about projection, performance and preparation rather than simply being and doing. The tension isn’t a one-time trade off, particularly outside of clinical settings, but rather a life long struggle between two modes that are essential to being human and thriving in a complex and open world. This is why I like so much Christopher Bollas who talks about this as an idiom:
Winnicott’s important statement that the true self is the inherited ‘personality potential’. From my point of view, this is exactly what it is: a complex inherited core of personality present at birth, an idiom of being and relating that will evolve and become activated according to the infant’s experience of the mother.
Essential Aloneness, loc 395
The other main quality of the true self is ‘spontaneity’: the gesture made real. We see somebody we would like to talk to, and we approach them and introduce ourselves. This is the gesture made real. If we merely think about doing this but we don’t actually move towards the person, the gesture is accomplished only as an inner mental representation. So one of the ways to evaluate the evolution of an individual’s true self is to note the extent to which their gestures have been made real.
Essential Aloneness, loc 407
It’s this movement from internal towards external gesture which is mediated by caregivers who meet the infant’s developing idiom and support its elaboration. For Bollas our personal idiom is defined through such elaboration as we relate to objects, including crucially cultural objects, in a manner which unfolds a particular sense in which I’m this person relating to these objects in this specific way. I develop my own specific idiom through the objects I select, how I engage with them and the way I’m changed in the process. There are objects which, as he puts it in Being a Character, act as ‘keys’ which unlock elements of our idiom:
Certain objects, like psychic “keys,” open doors to unconsciously intense—and rich—experience in which we articulate the self that we are through the elaborating character of our response. This selection constitutes the jouissance of the true self, a bliss released through the finding of specific objects that free idiom to its articulation.
Loc 208
The people we feel an affinity with. The places we find we belong. The music which moves us. The books which leave us changed after reading. As he puts it in Hysteria loc 100:
So each self will find particular individuals more attractive than others, will find certain actual objects — works of fiction, pieces of music, hobbies, recreational interests — of more interest than others, and in the course of living a life will have constructed a world which, although holding objects in common with other selves, will have shaped them into a form as unique as their fingerprint.
To be a ‘true self’ involves living in a way that is consistent with our idiom. This also means living in a way that calls for the continual elaboration of our idiom because to live with it consistently involves a continual encounter with objects that provoke this potential through their relations. The objects call forth experiences in us, activate potential that were previously latent, leaving us changed in all manner of ways. This I think is what is at work when cultural bingeing is edifying rather than deadening, a sense of being immersed in something that moves you rather than being caught in the circuits of drive to avoid something else. Indeed I’m currently bingeing on Bollas because I’m finding things here which express my idiom, particularly in the intellectual register of the sociological account of psychodynamics I’ve inarticulately groped towards over a long period of time. There is something about how I see the world, as well as how I want to account for what I see, which is being elaborated through reading his work. In doing so I’m changed in a manner which is deeply satisfying.
It suggests to me that cultural engagement can be a crucial source of connection to spontaneity. To write because you have the ‘feel of an idea’ (in my favourite phrase of C Wright Mills) rather than because you want to elicit a response in your readers. To read something because it’s gripping you rather than because you want to be someone seen to read things like that or to be someone who has read it. To listen to what moves you and leaves you feeling alive in the immersion. In the jouissance associated with these experiences we connect to something fundamental in ourselves: our personal idiom or ‘true self’. That enjoyment can be rich and generative because it touches something fundamental about who we are. Why am I the person so moved by this music? Why am I the person so fascinated by this author? It follows from Bollas that I think we ought to sit with these experiences, to linger in them so that we can sensitise ourselves to what is at work in them without allowing analysis to substitute for immersion. It’s how to really enjoy cultural engagement but it also has a broader psychic significance as a manner in which we connect with ourselves and what matters to us.
It’s less clear to me though what this means interpersonally. There’s a greater complexity to our object relating with people because they are, well… people. They too have their own idiom. The ruthlessness in object relating which Winnicott argued was essential to our psychic development becomes potential sources of harm in our relating with others. But conversely the fear of hurting others can be a stifling constraint on the possibility of authentic relating. The term which comes to mind here is atmosphere: the space that exists interpersonally and what it means for the possible expressions of idiom in the reciprocal relating that takes place. It’s also the question of what’s energising and what isn’t. How does it feel to be-with a particular person? Do you come across feeling energised or depleted? Do you feel elaborated or diminished? Do you feel sharper edged or somehow blurry? The complexity arises because relating in terms of our personal idiom can be genuinely harmful for the other. Indeed as Mate observes attachment and authenticity often cannot be reconciled. But there’s something here I think about finding who your people are as a matter of converging idioms and the atmosphere which prevails as a consequence of this convergence.
#christopherBollas #falseSelf #gaborMate #objectRelations #relating #trueSelf #Winnicott
-
What is a ‘true self’ and what is a ‘false self’?
I’ve always been instinctively suspicious of Winnicott’s notion of the ‘true self‘. Not because I doubt that it’s a frequent experience to find oneself relating in a manner which is in some fundamental way fake, somehow untrue to who we are. To the extent this is a routine feature of human experience it implies as a corollary forms of relating which are in some fundamental sense true to who we are. Likewise it is a common experience that these forms of relating feel good in some diffuse yet profound way. In essence I understand Winnicott to have been saying that relating from the true self keeps us in touch with our fundamental creativity, enabling us to act spontaneously in terms of who we are rather than acting defensively in order to comply with the (imagined) expectations of those around us. In essence the false self acts as a defensive carapace which forms to protect ourselves developmentally when we encounter situations in which we cannot be ourselves in this more spontaneous way. It’s what Gabor Mate describes with admirable clarity as the tension between attachment and authenticity:
The seed of woe does not lie in our having these two needs, but in the fact that life too often orchestrates a face-off between them. The dilemma is this: What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel? What happens, in other words, when one nonnegotiable need is pitted by circumstance against the other? These circumstances might include parental addiction, mental illness, family violence and poverty, overt conflict, or profound unhappiness—the stresses imposed by society, on children as well as adults. Even without these, the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity can arise. Not being seen and accepted for who we are is sufficient.
Myth of Normal, pg 147
As Mate later observes, “That some attachments may not survive the choice for authenticity is one of the most agonizing realizations one can come to” (pg 476). In this sense we could think of Winnicott’s concept as a way of describing how this tension plays itself out (or fails to) i.e. the manner in which we learn to pretend to be something other than what we are in pursuit of a sense of safety in our relations with others. In its more extreme forms this issues in a complete compliance with our environment and the demands we encounter within it, even preemptively so such that we are contorting ourselves to demands which no one is actually making of us. This is part of all childhood experience, as I understand Winnicott, with the difference being the degree to which the false self crowds out the true self and how deeply embedded the legacy of this becomes in adult life and with what consequences.
The problem I see is the tacitly essentialist register of ‘true self’ and ‘false self’. Not only does it lend itself so readily to simplification, such that we might simply seek to replace the (bad) ‘false self’ with the (good) ‘true self’, it fails to register the dynamic character of the process which is being captured. As I understand it these are more like psychic sources which become more or less integrated into the structure of our quotidian engagement with the world around us: the source of spontaneous and creative action which keeps us rooted in the present and the anticipatory and fearful action which is orientated to the future. It’s untenable to live entirely in the first mode as an adult so it’s more a question of how readily accessible that source is and how much it infuses our interaction with others and the world around us. Likewise the second mode provides a necessary feature for survival in an unpredictable world but it can squeeze out the possibility for authentic relating such that it makes any relating in the first mode untenable. Everything becomes about projection, performance and preparation rather than simply being and doing. The tension isn’t a one-time trade off, particularly outside of clinical settings, but rather a life long struggle between two modes that are essential to being human and thriving in a complex and open world. This is why I like so much Christopher Bollas who talks about this as an idiom:
Winnicott’s important statement that the true self is the inherited ‘personality potential’. From my point of view, this is exactly what it is: a complex inherited core of personality present at birth, an idiom of being and relating that will evolve and become activated according to the infant’s experience of the mother.
Essential Aloneness, loc 395
The other main quality of the true self is ‘spontaneity’: the gesture made real. We see somebody we would like to talk to, and we approach them and introduce ourselves. This is the gesture made real. If we merely think about doing this but we don’t actually move towards the person, the gesture is accomplished only as an inner mental representation. So one of the ways to evaluate the evolution of an individual’s true self is to note the extent to which their gestures have been made real.
Essential Aloneness, loc 407
It’s this movement from internal towards external gesture which is mediated by caregivers who meet the infant’s developing idiom and support its elaboration. For Bollas our personal idiom is defined through such elaboration as we relate to objects, including crucially cultural objects, in a manner which unfolds a particular sense in which I’m this person relating to these objects in this specific way. I develop my own specific idiom through the objects I select, how I engage with them and the way I’m changed in the process. There are objects which, as he puts it in Being a Character, act as ‘keys’ which unlock elements of our idiom:
Certain objects, like psychic “keys,” open doors to unconsciously intense—and rich—experience in which we articulate the self that we are through the elaborating character of our response. This selection constitutes the jouissance of the true self, a bliss released through the finding of specific objects that free idiom to its articulation.
Loc 208
The people we feel an affinity with. The places we find we belong. The music which moves us. The books which leave us changed after reading. As he puts it in Hysteria loc 100:
So each self will find particular individuals more attractive than others, will find certain actual objects — works of fiction, pieces of music, hobbies, recreational interests — of more interest than others, and in the course of living a life will have constructed a world which, although holding objects in common with other selves, will have shaped them into a form as unique as their fingerprint.
To be a ‘true self’ involves living in a way that is consistent with our idiom. This also means living in a way that calls for the continual elaboration of our idiom because to live with it consistently involves a continual encounter with objects that provoke this potential through their relations. The objects call forth experiences in us, activate potential that were previously latent, leaving us changed in all manner of ways. This I think is what is at work when cultural bingeing is edifying rather than deadening, a sense of being immersed in something that moves you rather than being caught in the circuits of drive to avoid something else. Indeed I’m currently bingeing on Bollas because I’m finding things here which express my idiom, particularly in the intellectual register of the sociological account of psychodynamics I’ve inarticulately groped towards over a long period of time. There is something about how I see the world, as well as how I want to account for what I see, which is being elaborated through reading his work. In doing so I’m changed in a manner which is deeply satisfying.
It suggests to me that cultural engagement can be a crucial source of connection to spontaneity. To write because you have the ‘feel of an idea’ (in my favourite phrase of C Wright Mills) rather than because you want to elicit a response in your readers. To read something because it’s gripping you rather than because you want to be someone seen to read things like that or to be someone who has read it. To listen to what moves you and leaves you feeling alive in the immersion. In the jouissance associated with these experiences we connect to something fundamental in ourselves: our personal idiom or ‘true self’. That enjoyment can be rich and generative because it touches something fundamental about who we are. Why am I the person so moved by this music? Why am I the person so fascinated by this author? It follows from Bollas that I think we ought to sit with these experiences, to linger in them so that we can sensitise ourselves to what is at work in them without allowing analysis to substitute for immersion. It’s how to really enjoy cultural engagement but it also has a broader psychic significance as a manner in which we connect with ourselves and what matters to us.
It’s less clear to me though what this means interpersonally. There’s a greater complexity to our object relating with people because they are, well… people. They too have their own idiom. The ruthlessness in object relating which Winnicott argued was essential to our psychic development becomes potential sources of harm in our relating with others. But conversely the fear of hurting others can be a stifling constraint on the possibility of authentic relating. The term which comes to mind here is atmosphere: the space that exists interpersonally and what it means for the possible expressions of idiom in the reciprocal relating that takes place. It’s also the question of what’s energising and what isn’t. How does it feel to be-with a particular person? Do you come across feeling energised or depleted? Do you feel elaborated or diminished? Do you feel sharper edged or somehow blurry? The complexity arises because relating in terms of our personal idiom can be genuinely harmful for the other. Indeed as Mate observes attachment and authenticity often cannot be reconciled. But there’s something here I think about finding who your people are as a matter of converging idioms and the atmosphere which prevails as a consequence of this convergence.
#christopherBollas #falseSelf #gaborMate #objectRelations #relating #trueSelf #Winnicott
-
What is a ‘true self’ and what is a ‘false self’?
I’ve always been instinctively suspicious of Winnicott’s notion of the ‘true self‘. Not because I doubt that it’s a frequent experience to find oneself relating in a manner which is in some fundamental way fake, somehow untrue to who we are. To the extent this is a routine feature of human experience it implies as a corollary forms of relating which are in some fundamental sense true to who we are. Likewise it is a common experience that these forms of relating feel good in some diffuse yet profound way. In essence I understand Winnicott to have been saying that relating from the true self keeps us in touch with our fundamental creativity, enabling us to act spontaneously in terms of who we are rather than acting defensively in order to comply with the (imagined) expectations of those around us. In essence the false self acts as a defensive carapace which forms to protect ourselves developmentally when we encounter situations in which we cannot be ourselves in this more spontaneous way. It’s what Gabor Mate describes with admirable clarity as the tension between attachment and authenticity:
The seed of woe does not lie in our having these two needs, but in the fact that life too often orchestrates a face-off between them. The dilemma is this: What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel? What happens, in other words, when one nonnegotiable need is pitted by circumstance against the other? These circumstances might include parental addiction, mental illness, family violence and poverty, overt conflict, or profound unhappiness—the stresses imposed by society, on children as well as adults. Even without these, the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity can arise. Not being seen and accepted for who we are is sufficient.
Myth of Normal, pg 147
As Mate later observes, “That some attachments may not survive the choice for authenticity is one of the most agonizing realizations one can come to” (pg 476). In this sense we could think of Winnicott’s concept as a way of describing how this tension plays itself out (or fails to) i.e. the manner in which we learn to pretend to be something other than what we are in pursuit of a sense of safety in our relations with others. In its more extreme forms this issues in a complete compliance with our environment and the demands we encounter within it, even preemptively so such that we are contorting ourselves to demands which no one is actually making of us. This is part of all childhood experience, as I understand Winnicott, with the difference being the degree to which the false self crowds out the true self and how deeply embedded the legacy of this becomes in adult life and with what consequences.
The problem I see is the tacitly essentialist register of ‘true self’ and ‘false self’. Not only does it lend itself so readily to simplification, such that we might simply seek to replace the (bad) ‘false self’ with the (good) ‘true self’, it fails to register the dynamic character of the process which is being captured. As I understand it these are more like psychic sources which become more or less integrated into the structure of our quotidian engagement with the world around us: the source of spontaneous and creative action which keeps us rooted in the present and the anticipatory and fearful action which is orientated to the future. It’s untenable to live entirely in the first mode as an adult so it’s more a question of how readily accessible that source is and how much it infuses our interaction with others and the world around us. Likewise the second mode provides a necessary feature for survival in an unpredictable world but it can squeeze out the possibility for authentic relating such that it makes any relating in the first mode untenable. Everything becomes about projection, performance and preparation rather than simply being and doing. The tension isn’t a one-time trade off, particularly outside of clinical settings, but rather a life long struggle between two modes that are essential to being human and thriving in a complex and open world. This is why I like so much Christopher Bollas who talks about this as an idiom:
Winnicott’s important statement that the true self is the inherited ‘personality potential’. From my point of view, this is exactly what it is: a complex inherited core of personality present at birth, an idiom of being and relating that will evolve and become activated according to the infant’s experience of the mother.
Essential Aloneness, loc 395
The other main quality of the true self is ‘spontaneity’: the gesture made real. We see somebody we would like to talk to, and we approach them and introduce ourselves. This is the gesture made real. If we merely think about doing this but we don’t actually move towards the person, the gesture is accomplished only as an inner mental representation. So one of the ways to evaluate the evolution of an individual’s true self is to note the extent to which their gestures have been made real.
Essential Aloneness, loc 407
It’s this movement from internal towards external gesture which is mediated by caregivers who meet the infant’s developing idiom and support its elaboration. For Bollas our personal idiom is defined through such elaboration as we relate to objects, including crucially cultural objects, in a manner which unfolds a particular sense in which I’m this person relating to these objects in this specific way. I develop my own specific idiom through the objects I select, how I engage with them and the way I’m changed in the process. There are objects which, as he puts it in Being a Character, act as ‘keys’ which unlock elements of our idiom:
Certain objects, like psychic “keys,” open doors to unconsciously intense—and rich—experience in which we articulate the self that we are through the elaborating character of our response. This selection constitutes the jouissance of the true self, a bliss released through the finding of specific objects that free idiom to its articulation.
Loc 208
The people we feel an affinity with. The places we find we belong. The music which moves us. The books which leave us changed after reading. As he puts it in Hysteria loc 100:
So each self will find particular individuals more attractive than others, will find certain actual objects — works of fiction, pieces of music, hobbies, recreational interests — of more interest than others, and in the course of living a life will have constructed a world which, although holding objects in common with other selves, will have shaped them into a form as unique as their fingerprint.
To be a ‘true self’ involves living in a way that is consistent with our idiom. This also means living in a way that calls for the continual elaboration of our idiom because to live with it consistently involves a continual encounter with objects that provoke this potential through their relations. The objects call forth experiences in us, activate potential that were previously latent, leaving us changed in all manner of ways. This I think is what is at work when cultural bingeing is edifying rather than deadening, a sense of being immersed in something that moves you rather than being caught in the circuits of drive to avoid something else. Indeed I’m currently bingeing on Bollas because I’m finding things here which express my idiom, particularly in the intellectual register of the sociological account of psychodynamics I’ve inarticulately groped towards over a long period of time. There is something about how I see the world, as well as how I want to account for what I see, which is being elaborated through reading his work. In doing so I’m changed in a manner which is deeply satisfying.
It suggests to me that cultural engagement can be a crucial source of connection to spontaneity. To write because you have the ‘feel of an idea’ (in my favourite phrase of C Wright Mills) rather than because you want to elicit a response in your readers. To read something because it’s gripping you rather than because you want to be someone seen to read things like that or to be someone who has read it. To listen to what moves you and leaves you feeling alive in the immersion. In the jouissance associated with these experiences we connect to something fundamental in ourselves: our personal idiom or ‘true self’. That enjoyment can be rich and generative because it touches something fundamental about who we are. Why am I the person so moved by this music? Why am I the person so fascinated by this author? It follows from Bollas that I think we ought to sit with these experiences, to linger in them so that we can sensitise ourselves to what is at work in them without allowing analysis to substitute for immersion. It’s how to really enjoy cultural engagement but it also has a broader psychic significance as a manner in which we connect with ourselves and what matters to us.
It’s less clear to me though what this means interpersonally. There’s a greater complexity to our object relating with people because they are, well… people. They too have their own idiom. The ruthlessness in object relating which Winnicott argued was essential to our psychic development becomes potential sources of harm in our relating with others. But conversely the fear of hurting others can be a stifling constraint on the possibility of authentic relating. The term which comes to mind here is atmosphere: the space that exists interpersonally and what it means for the possible expressions of idiom in the reciprocal relating that takes place. It’s also the question of what’s energising and what isn’t. How does it feel to be-with a particular person? Do you come across feeling energised or depleted? Do you feel elaborated or diminished? Do you feel sharper edged or somehow blurry? The complexity arises because relating in terms of our personal idiom can be genuinely harmful for the other. Indeed as Mate observes attachment and authenticity often cannot be reconciled. But there’s something here I think about finding who your people are as a matter of converging idioms and the atmosphere which prevails as a consequence of this convergence.
#christopherBollas #falseSelf #gaborMate #objectRelations #relating #trueSelf #Winnicott
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What is a ‘true self’ and what is a ‘false self’?
I’ve always been instinctively suspicious of Winnicott’s notion of the ‘true self‘. Not because I doubt that it’s a frequent experience to find oneself relating in a manner which is in some fundamental way fake, somehow untrue to who we are. To the extent this is a routine feature of human experience it implies as a corollary forms of relating which are in some fundamental sense true to who we are. Likewise it is a common experience that these forms of relating feel good in some diffuse yet profound way. In essence I understand Winnicott to have been saying that relating from the true self keeps us in touch with our fundamental creativity, enabling us to act spontaneously in terms of who we are rather than acting defensively in order to comply with the (imagined) expectations of those around us. In essence the false self acts as a defensive carapace which forms to protect ourselves developmentally when we encounter situations in which we cannot be ourselves in this more spontaneous way. It’s what Gabor Mate describes with admirable clarity as the tension between attachment and authenticity:
The seed of woe does not lie in our having these two needs, but in the fact that life too often orchestrates a face-off between them. The dilemma is this: What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel? What happens, in other words, when one nonnegotiable need is pitted by circumstance against the other? These circumstances might include parental addiction, mental illness, family violence and poverty, overt conflict, or profound unhappiness—the stresses imposed by society, on children as well as adults. Even without these, the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity can arise. Not being seen and accepted for who we are is sufficient.
Myth of Normal, pg 147
As Mate later observes, “That some attachments may not survive the choice for authenticity is one of the most agonizing realizations one can come to” (pg 476). In this sense we could think of Winnicott’s concept as a way of describing how this tension plays itself out (or fails to) i.e. the manner in which we learn to pretend to be something other than what we are in pursuit of a sense of safety in our relations with others. In its more extreme forms this issues in a complete compliance with our environment and the demands we encounter within it, even preemptively so such that we are contorting ourselves to demands which no one is actually making of us. This is part of all childhood experience, as I understand Winnicott, with the difference being the degree to which the false self crowds out the true self and how deeply embedded the legacy of this becomes in adult life and with what consequences.
The problem I see is the tacitly essentialist register of ‘true self’ and ‘false self’. Not only does it lend itself so readily to simplification, such that we might simply seek to replace the (bad) ‘false self’ with the (good) ‘true self’, it fails to register the dynamic character of the process which is being captured. As I understand it these are more like psychic sources which become more or less integrated into the structure of our quotidian engagement with the world around us: the source of spontaneous and creative action which keeps us rooted in the present and the anticipatory and fearful action which is orientated to the future. It’s untenable to live entirely in the first mode as an adult so it’s more a question of how readily accessible that source is and how much it infuses our interaction with others and the world around us. Likewise the second mode provides a necessary feature for survival in an unpredictable world but it can squeeze out the possibility for authentic relating such that it makes any relating in the first mode untenable. Everything becomes about projection, performance and preparation rather than simply being and doing. The tension isn’t a one-time trade off, particularly outside of clinical settings, but rather a life long struggle between two modes that are essential to being human and thriving in a complex and open world. This is why I like so much Christopher Bollas who talks about this as an idiom:
Winnicott’s important statement that the true self is the inherited ‘personality potential’. From my point of view, this is exactly what it is: a complex inherited core of personality present at birth, an idiom of being and relating that will evolve and become activated according to the infant’s experience of the mother.
Essential Aloneness, loc 395
The other main quality of the true self is ‘spontaneity’: the gesture made real. We see somebody we would like to talk to, and we approach them and introduce ourselves. This is the gesture made real. If we merely think about doing this but we don’t actually move towards the person, the gesture is accomplished only as an inner mental representation. So one of the ways to evaluate the evolution of an individual’s true self is to note the extent to which their gestures have been made real.
Essential Aloneness, loc 407
It’s this movement from internal towards external gesture which is mediated by caregivers who meet the infant’s developing idiom and support its elaboration. For Bollas our personal idiom is defined through such elaboration as we relate to objects, including crucially cultural objects, in a manner which unfolds a particular sense in which I’m this person relating to these objects in this specific way. I develop my own specific idiom through the objects I select, how I engage with them and the way I’m changed in the process. There are objects which, as he puts it in Being a Character, act as ‘keys’ which unlock elements of our idiom:
Certain objects, like psychic “keys,” open doors to unconsciously intense—and rich—experience in which we articulate the self that we are through the elaborating character of our response. This selection constitutes the jouissance of the true self, a bliss released through the finding of specific objects that free idiom to its articulation.
Loc 208
The people we feel an affinity with. The places we find we belong. The music which moves us. The books which leave us changed after reading. As he puts it in Hysteria loc 100:
So each self will find particular individuals more attractive than others, will find certain actual objects — works of fiction, pieces of music, hobbies, recreational interests — of more interest than others, and in the course of living a life will have constructed a world which, although holding objects in common with other selves, will have shaped them into a form as unique as their fingerprint.
To be a ‘true self’ involves living in a way that is consistent with our idiom. This also means living in a way that calls for the continual elaboration of our idiom because to live with it consistently involves a continual encounter with objects that provoke this potential through their relations. The objects call forth experiences in us, activate potential that were previously latent, leaving us changed in all manner of ways. This I think is what is at work when cultural bingeing is edifying rather than deadening, a sense of being immersed in something that moves you rather than being caught in the circuits of drive to avoid something else. Indeed I’m currently bingeing on Bollas because I’m finding things here which express my idiom, particularly in the intellectual register of the sociological account of psychodynamics I’ve inarticulately groped towards over a long period of time. There is something about how I see the world, as well as how I want to account for what I see, which is being elaborated through reading his work. In doing so I’m changed in a manner which is deeply satisfying.
It suggests to me that cultural engagement can be a crucial source of connection to spontaneity. To write because you have the ‘feel of an idea’ (in my favourite phrase of C Wright Mills) rather than because you want to elicit a response in your readers. To read something because it’s gripping you rather than because you want to be someone seen to read things like that or to be someone who has read it. To listen to what moves you and leaves you feeling alive in the immersion. In the jouissance associated with these experiences we connect to something fundamental in ourselves: our personal idiom or ‘true self’. That enjoyment can be rich and generative because it touches something fundamental about who we are. Why am I the person so moved by this music? Why am I the person so fascinated by this author? It follows from Bollas that I think we ought to sit with these experiences, to linger in them so that we can sensitise ourselves to what is at work in them without allowing analysis to substitute for immersion. It’s how to really enjoy cultural engagement but it also has a broader psychic significance as a manner in which we connect with ourselves and what matters to us.
It’s less clear to me though what this means interpersonally. There’s a greater complexity to our object relating with people because they are, well… people. They too have their own idiom. The ruthlessness in object relating which Winnicott argued was essential to our psychic development becomes potential sources of harm in our relating with others. But conversely the fear of hurting others can be a stifling constraint on the possibility of authentic relating. The term which comes to mind here is atmosphere: the space that exists interpersonally and what it means for the possible expressions of idiom in the reciprocal relating that takes place. It’s also the question of what’s energising and what isn’t. How does it feel to be-with a particular person? Do you come across feeling energised or depleted? Do you feel elaborated or diminished? Do you feel sharper edged or somehow blurry? The complexity arises because relating in terms of our personal idiom can be genuinely harmful for the other. Indeed as Mate observes attachment and authenticity often cannot be reconciled. But there’s something here I think about finding who your people are as a matter of converging idioms and the atmosphere which prevails as a consequence of this convergence.
#christopherBollas #falseSelf #gaborMate #objectRelations #relating #trueSelf #Winnicott
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Florence Nightingale in Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts:
.> The more one hears about this famine, the more one feels that such a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before.
.> — Florence Nightingale (1877).> The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends.
.> Dissident journalists like William Digby in Madras... and the Bombay Statesman’s representative in the Deccan stirred troubling memories of the Irish famine as well as the #SepoyMutiny. In England, moreover, a group of old Indian hands and Radical reformers, including William Wedderburn, Sir Arthur Cotton, John Bright, Henry Hyndman and Florence Nightingale, kept The Times’s letters column full of complaints about #Calcutta’s callous policies.
.> Obdurate Bombay officials meanwhile continued to outrage Indians and incite charges of a cover-up in the press by refusing to publish any estimate of rural mortality. (Even Florence Nightingale was snubbed when she requested figures in early 1878.)
.> The bubonic plague came to Bombay in summer 1896 probably as a stowaway on a ship from Hong Kong. At the time, some scientists theorized that drought, as previously in southern China, was a critical factor in driving plague-carrying rats into more intimate commensality with human victims.36 Bombay, in any event, offered an ideal ecology for a pandemic: fetid, overcrowded slums (perhaps the densest in Asia) infested with a huge population of black rats. For years health officers had warned #British administrators that their refusal to expend anything on slum sanitation was preparing the way for an “epidemic apocalypse.” Florence Nightingale, in addition, had repeatedly crusaded against the city’s “phantasmagoria” of disease conditions, but the “European townspeople were united in blocking increased taxation to pay for new water and drainage schemes.”
.> The railroad system, meanwhile, consumed (to 1880) thirteen times as much investment as all hydraulic works. As the pro-irrigation lobby led by Sir Arthur Cotton and Florence Nightingale protested during the 1876–77 famine: “Now we have before our eyes the sad and humiliating scene of magnificent Works... that have cost poor India 160 millions, which are so utterly worthless in the respect of the first want of India, that millions are dying by the side of them.” ( #Gandhi, echoing this critique, would later denounce the railroads that “depleted the countryside of its [food] stocks and killed the handicrafts” as an underlying cause of #famine.)
#India #Madras #FlorenceNightingale #Bombay #BubonicPlague #IrishFamine #Railroads #Telegraph #TechWillSaveUs? -
ZU – Ferrum Sidereum Review By Andy-War-HallLiteral metals are always cooler when they come from space. A blade forged from meteoric iron is effectively the same as one made from iron you can find on Earth, but don’t tell me you wouldn’t want the space knife way more. Likewise, metal music always sounds cooler when it feels like it’s from another world. Enter ZU, the Italian jazz metal trio comprised of guitarist/bassist Massimo Pupillo, saxophonist/keyboardist Luca Mai, and drummer Paolo Mangardi. ZU forged their latest record, Ferrum Sidereum, Latin for “iron of (or from) the stars,” to sonically approach something otherworldly, drawing from the historical spiritual significance of meteoric iron as inspiration for their music. And forge ZU did, because Ferrum Sidereum is an 80-minute double album of progressive, industrial, punk-infused, and fully instrumental jazz metal. But is Ferrum Sidereum a gift from the stars, or should you look for your metal closer to home?
Ferrum Sidereum is a record that revels in texture and rhythm more so than melody. Like ObZen-era Meshuggah, ZU play melodically bare but rhythmically exquisite riffs, with their prog and metal elements manifesting into bouncy, syncopated djent jabs prominent on tracks like “Golgotha” and “Kether.” Guitars are low (“Ferrum Sidereum”), bass is plucked with abandon (“Charagma”), and drums roll with jazz-practiced precision and metal aggression (“La Donna Vestita Di Sole”). Industrial elements and saxophone conspire to either inject a sense of progression to simple riffs (“Hymn of the Pearl”) or, more often than not, tear your ears a new one with punkish, dissonant whines and whistles (“Fuoco Saturnio”). ZU bounce between these loud, crunched moments with Tool-like passages of meditative, methodical calm and repetition with a hodgepodge of percussive additions to fill out space (“Pleroma”). You likely won’t be able to hum anything off Ferrum Sidereum by the end, but it’s undeniable that ZU are very particular about sounding a very particular way.
ZU have the chops to carry the load of a double album, but Ferrum Sidereum unfortunately doesn’t have the substance to fill one. To achieve a sense of spiritual ritualism, ZU obviously had to rely on repetition within songs, but it quickly just gets excessive and bland. Differences between songs—like “AI Hive Mind” and its distinct, mathcore level of scronk in its guitar tone and saxophone or “Golgotha” and its use of ghostly choir to build unnerving atmospheres—get lost in the flood of crushed djenting that better defines Ferrum Sidereum. ZU stick to such a strict palette that following along to the album as a whole becomes tedious, and the lack of melodic leads or even just a singer make Ferrum Sidereum easy to drift away from mentally. Eighty minutes and no hook is a big ask for any listener. Ferrum Sidereum’s uniform construction does lend it a sense of unity, and ZU’s expert musicianship and occasional atmospheres do make the record a good background listen, but for the purpose of intentional, critical listening, it leaves much to be desired.
This is deeply disappointing to me, because Ferrum Sidereum can at times be simply transcendent. When it comes to shaping otherworldly and religious atmospheres, when ZU get it right, they get it right. “La Donna Vestita Di Sole” feels like a festival from another planet with its twisty sax riff, while the conclusion to the closing title track uses the dichotomy of furious palm-muted riffing and complete silence to make an ending both meditative and succinct. The one-two punch of “The Celestial Bull and the White Lady” and “Hymn of the Pearl” sees ZU at their most sublime, awash with delayed clean guitars and tribal drumming derived from the same sacred geometry as Lateralus, both stirring and refreshing to the mind and soul. There’s great material on Ferrum Sidereum, songs so good I can see clearly the greatness that ZU see in it, but material buried under about as much runtime of bloat as well.
I know there’s a world where Ferrum Sidereum clicks with me, but here and now it doesn’t. ZU are wildly talented musicians, and I know there are fans of instrumental metal who will gobble this up, but for me too much of what makes Ferrum Sidereum enthralling (its rich atmosphere and contemplative nature) is sidelined by what makes it boring (djent). “Hymn of the Pearl” may make a reappearance in December for SotY contention, but I think I’ve gotten enough of ZU’s latest as a whole. But I’ll keep an eye out for falling rocks, regardless.
Rating: Disappointing
#20 #2026 #Djent #FerrumSidereum #HouseOfMythology #IndustrialMetal #InstrumentalMetal #ItalianMetal #Jan26 #Meshuggah #ProgressiveMetal #Review #Reviews #Tool #Zu
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps MP3
Label: House of Mythology
Websites: zuhom.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/vajrazu | zuism.net
Releases Worldwide: January 9th, 2026