How To Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life
“If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning eighty, “if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.” Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) considered the same abiding question at the same […]#social-critique — Public Fediverse posts
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The Loveliest
The woman
with a
double chin
and fat fingers
around plastic bags
plops down
in the seat
across the aisle
and blocks
my view of the
goddess
whose magazine
is filled with
clothes
she'd fill out
quite nicely.
The pretty
and the ugly
sit side by side
and I wonder
who is
the loveliest
in God's eyes.February 22, 2002
#2002 #Beauty #bodyImage #ChristianReflection #compassion #consumerCulture #ContemplativePoetry #divineBeauty #empathy #everydayHoliness #faithAndBeauty #fashionMagazine #God #GodSEyes #Grace #humanDignity #imageOfGod #Incarnation #innerBeauty #judgment #Love #outerBeauty #People #publicTransit #sacredWorth #seeingOthers #socialCritique #SpiritualPoetry #theLoveliest #Theology #Women #WordPressTagsPoetry #Writing -
The NEW Soylent Green
A Moses-like figure stands before the mic at an NRA convention and thunders, “I will give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”
At the end of the sci-fi film Soylent Green, that same actor implores his detective boss to spread the news, “Soylent Green is people!”
In the movie, as the corpses pile up from an overcrowded, miserable earth, they are carted away in garbage trucks, secretly converted to Soylent Green, and fed back to the living. Soylent Green is better than the old Red and Yellow varieties, but it is scarce, so there are riots. A detective played by Charlton Heston discovers the deception. In a word, humanity has become cannibals, feeding upon itself, in a state-sanctioned system of cyclical violence.
Such is the world created by the NRA. It plays upon the irrational fears of a few to continue to thwart common sense gun legislation. Its largely successful lobbying over the years has distorted the original intention of the Second Amendment so much so that it has become almost impossible to pass laws more in keeping with the Founders’ intent.
When the bodies continue to pile up as a result of gun violence, and there is no legislative change primarily due to the lobbying of the NRA and the like, we are in every sense of the word disrespecting the dead and feeding upon ourselves.
In a state-sanctioned system of cyclical violence.
Like in Soylent Green.
And like the movie, the end result is not very pretty.
But go ahead. Watch the news.
Take another bite.
June 23, 2014
#2ndAmmendment #AmericanGunCulture #cannibalisticSociety #CharltonHeston #commonSenseGunLaws #cultureOfFear #cyclicalViolence #deathAndPolitics #Dystopia #Film #gunControl #GunViolence #legislativeParalysis #massShootings #moralOutrage #newsCommentary #NRA #politicalLobbying #propheticWriting #publicPolicy #Satire #SecondAmendment #socialCritique #socialDecay #SoylentGreen #stateSanctionedViolence #Violence #violenceInAmerica -
✮ Color of the Bone ✮
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Subscribe #AllegoricalPoetry #AuthenticSelf #books #CharacterAndIntegrity #ContemplativeWriting #CourageAndConviction #CourageToBeDifferent #DignityAndGrace #EmotionalResilience #EmpathyAndUnderstanding #EnduranceAndHope #Erwinism #ErwinismWritingStyle #ExistentialLiterature #FYP #HumanCondition #HumanConnection #HumanDiversity #HumanNatureReflection #HumanWorth #IdentityAndAcceptance #IdentityAndBelonging #IndividualFreedom #IndividualityAndConformity #InnerPeace #InnerStrength #Inspiration #InspirationalPoetry #Learning #Life #LiteraryAllegory #LiteraryArt #LiteraryExploration #LiterarySymbolism #Love #MeaningAndPurpose #MetaphoricalProse #MetaphysicalReflection #MoralReflection #Motivation #NatureAndHumanity #NatureAsMetaphor #OvercomingPrejudice #PerseveranceAndHope #PersonalGrowth #PhilosophicalAllegory #PhilosophicalPoetry #PhilosophicalWriting #Poem #PoemAboutIdentity #Poems #PoeticMeditation #PoeticPhilosophy #PoeticReflection #Poetry #Progress #ReflectiveLiterature #ReflectivePoetry #ResilienceAndStrength #SelfAcceptance #SocialCommentary #SocialCritique #SocialExpectations #SoulfulPoetry #SpiritualAllegory #SpiritualReflection #StrengthThroughAdversity #SymbolicImagery #SymbolicStorytelling #SymbolicWriting #ThoughtProvokingPoetry #TimelessWisdom #TransformativeJourney #UniversalHumanExperience #WisdomAndCompassion #Writing -
Riley Critiques Capitalism's Foundation in Theft, Explores Themes in New Film
Filmmaker Boots Riley says capitalism is built on theft of land, labor, and resources. His new film "I Love Boosters" explores this.
#BootsRiley, #Capitalism, #Iloveboosters, #FilmMaking, #SocialCritique
https://newsletter.tf/boots-riley-capitalism-theft-film-i-love-boosters/
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Boots Riley's new film "I Love Boosters" uses surrealism to show how capitalism steals land, labor, and resources.
#BootsRiley, #Capitalism, #Iloveboosters, #FilmMaking, #SocialCritique
https://newsletter.tf/boots-riley-capitalism-theft-film-i-love-boosters/ -
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https://youtube.com/shorts/vKqk2nIpYvk
Oh Argentina, you say?#PeterThiel #Palantir #SurveillanceState #USPolitics #Accountability #TechBillionaires #PoliticalMeme #CurrentEvents #SocialCritique #Hypocrisy #GenerativeAI #Privacy #NoBillionaires #TaxTheRich #EatTheRich #MAGA #FuckICE #Project2025 #TrumpEpsteinCoverup #NoKings #AI #FuckAI #AIisTheft #Oligarchy
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#PeterThiel #Palantir #SurveillanceState #USPolitics #Accountability #TechBillionaires #PoliticalMeme #CurrentEvents #SocialCritique #Hypocrisy #GenerativeAI #Privacy #NoBillionaires #TaxTheRich #EatTheRich #MAGA #FBI #CIA #FuckICE #Project2025 #TrumpEpsteinCoverup #NoKings #AI #FuckAI #AIisTheft #Oligarchy
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The crowd erupts. But who are they really clapping for?
Applause is currency and most people spend it on those who deserve it least, while the real builders work in silence.
New essay on manufactured consent, false heroes, and the revolutionary power of keeping your hands still.
🔗 https://kairos-prometheon.com/en/blog/2026-04-11-the-applause/
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The US flag has become wallpaper and marketing. Displaying it on everything from flip-flops to trash masks deep divisions and profound insecurity. It is the ultimate hypocrisy: using the symbol to justify wars and invasions, selling a hollow moral superiority while the true value of freedom is lost in the noise.
#USA #BlindPatriotism #Hypocrisy #Imperialism #AmericanCulture #PoliticalMarketing #SocialCritique #Geopolitics #Nationalism #HardPower
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51RA
They stamped his body in sections beneath white factory lamps.
The men on the line did not know his name, though some of them felt it move in the machines before ever they heard it. They knew only that the air in Bay 4 had changed over the past few months. It had become charged in some way difficult to explain without sounding foolish. Small things accumulated. The press would shudder once before starting, as if waking from unpleasant dreams. Finished receivers, lined in neat rows, sometimes gave off a smell like struck flint though no spark had touched them. More than one worker complained of hearing what sounded like breathing through ear protection, a slow, deliberate inhalation and release beneath the pounding of stampers and the whine of torque drivers. Most laughed it off. Factories had their noises, their quirks, their little ghost stories. Men who spent ten hours a day amidst repetitive thunder began to hear all sorts of things.
But Owen Kreel had worked the line for seventeen years, and he knew the difference between a bad bearing, a loose panel, and something for which there was no mechanical name.
The first time he truly noticed it, a lower receiver had come down the conveyor and stopped directly before him, though the belt was still moving and the others behind it continued their slow approach. That should not have been possible. Nothing stopped without jamming the line. Yet there it sat, black and unfinished, rocking ever so slightly as though it had arrived under its own intention. Owen stared at the serial engraving panel, waiting for the code to blink into the screen above his station.
Instead, for the briefest instant, he thought he saw letters already there.
S I R A
Then the belt jerked. The receiver slid on. The monitor filled with ordinary production data. Owen said nothing.
That night, he dreamed of a great hall filled with rifles standing upright like candles. Not piled, not racked, but planted muzzle-up in a black floor that shone like church stone after rain. Between them walked a tall figure in a long coat, his hands clasped behind his back, moving with the calm assurance of a bishop inspecting graves. Owen never saw his face clearly. Only the cheekbones, the severe brow, the mouth that seemed always on the edge of pronouncing sentence. The figure paused before one rifle and laid two fingers against the barrel almost lovingly. At once, all the others turned—not physically, for they had no heads to turn, but inwardly, spiritually—toward that touch, as brambles turn to light. Owen woke with his heart hammering so violently he thought for a moment that someone had been pounding on his chest from the inside.
By dawn, he had persuaded himself it was nothing.
That was before the first shooting of autumn.
The television over the breakroom refrigerator showed the same images all afternoon: parking lot tape fluttering in a cold wind, ambulances, a woman collapsed against the hood of a cruiser, children being led in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders. The model name of the rifle was spoken and respoken by anchors with grave expressions and professionally moderated sorrow. Owen stood among the others holding a paper cup of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand. Nobody said much. A few cursed the killer. A few muttered about mental illness. One man began, reflexively, to complain about how the media would twist it, but even he could not summon conviction. On the screen the camera cut to a close-up of investigators carrying evidence bags. One bag contained part of a shattered black receiver.
Owen spilled his coffee.
There, just for a second, under the harsh bloom of the news camera, visible through blood smears and fingerprint powder, was a marking like a scratch or flaw in the metal. A tiny hooked incision near the serial block. Owen had seen it before. Three days earlier, at his own station, on a piece he had assumed defective and sent back down the line.
He told himself it could not be the same one.
But after that he began to see the mark everywhere.
Not on every unit. That would have been simple. This was worse. It appeared only on certain pieces, and never exactly the same way twice, yet always with the unmistakable coherence of a signature. Sometimes it looked like a hooked thorn. Sometimes like a stylized numeral. Sometimes like the vertical of an I crossed by accident. Once, after a twelve-hour shift, he found himself tracing it on a fogged bathroom mirror before realizing his finger had moved without instruction from his mind.
His wife, Mara, asked him twice that week if something was wrong. Owen told her he was tired. It was the season, he said. Mandatory overtime. Election noise. The world being what it was. He did not tell her about the dreams, nor that he had begun waking with words in his mouth that felt old and metallic, as though he had been sleeping with bullets under his tongue. He did not tell her that at work, when the riveters screamed and the line thundered and all the men bent in rhythm to the making, there were moments he felt less like a laborer than a priest attending some dreadful liturgy.
Soon he could no longer ignore the sense that the rifles were not being manufactured.
They were being prepared.
It was around this time that the old man came into the gun shop.
The shop stood forty miles from the plant, out past a line of cornfields already gone brown and a stand of bare trees black against the lowering sky. Owen had gone there before, though never with any real pleasure. He told Mara he was looking for parts for a deer rifle inherited from his father, which was not entirely false. In truth he had gone because he had started to feel that if there was an answer anywhere, it might lie not in the factory but in the places where the finished bodies came to rest before entering the hands of their owners. If there was a haunting, perhaps it deepened at the point of choosing.
The bell over the door gave a dull, funereal clatter as he entered. The shop smelled of old wood, solvent, rubber mats, and a faint undernote of mildew. Rifles lined the walls in patient ranks. Glass cases held pistols like relics. A television in the corner played a hunting show with the sound turned off. Behind the counter stood a young clerk with a trimmed beard and an eagerness in his face that made him look almost childlike. Near the back, seated beside a rack of black semi-automatics, was an old man in a dark coat with a cane laid across his knees.
Owen noticed him at once not because he moved, but because he did not.
He sat absolutely still, as if he had been there for years. His face was narrow and bloodless, his hair a thin silver swept behind the ears, his eyes hooded but very bright. There was something ecclesiastical about him, though not in any comforting sense. He looked like a minister defrocked for cruelty, or a judge who had confused punishment with righteousness so long ago he no longer remembered the distinction.
The clerk asked if Owen needed help.
“Just looking,” Owen said.
The old man smiled without showing teeth.
“That is how it begins,” he murmured.
Owen turned. “Excuse me?”
The clerk either had not heard him or pretended not to. He busied himself with a receipt printer that had suddenly begun to chatter.
The old man lifted one hand from the cane and gestured toward the rifles behind him.
“Most people believe they choose these,” he said. His voice was soft but had an odd carrying power, each word landing with careful weight. “But objects have their devotions too. They wait for the hand fitted to them. They have a patience greater than ours.”
Owen should have left then. Instead he found himself stepping closer.
“I know you,” the old man said.
“No,” Owen replied, though the denial came weakly.
“Not by name. By trade.”
A pulse began to throb in Owen’s neck.
The old man’s gaze shifted to the nearest rifle on the rack, a black carbine with a rail system like exposed vertebrae. “There are houses in the world,” he said, “and there are lineages. Men think they invent lineages because they stamp their trademarks into steel. It is the other way round. The lineage chooses its workshops. It passes from forge to forge, flag to flag, century to century. Sword, musket, repeater, carbine. Each age gives it the body it deserves.”
Owen swallowed. “What are you talking about?”
At that the old man looked at him fully, and the eyes were so pale they seemed almost colorless.
“I am speaking,” he said, “of Sira.”
The name entered Owen like cold water poured down the spine.
He took a step backward. “Who told you that?”
The old man’s smile broadened very slightly. “He did.”
From the wall behind him came a soft metallic tick, as though one of the rifles had shifted on its peg.
The clerk looked up at last. “You okay, sir?”
Owen glanced toward him, grateful for the interruption, but when he looked back the old man had not moved by so much as a breath.
“What is Sira?” Owen asked, before he could stop himself.
The old man considered him. “A principality,” he said at last. “A hunger. A masculinity severed from mercy. The ecstasy of force. He has worn many names. Mars in polished marble. Tyr in frost. empire, nation, defense, honor, destiny. He likes whatever title men use when they want to kill without having to call it killing.”
Outside, a gust of wind struck the building and made the front glass shiver in its frame.
“He is not the gun,” the old man continued. “Do not make that mistake. The gun is only his favored mask in your age. He resides wherever metal extends grievance faster than conscience. But certain forms suit him especially well. Repetition suits him. Modularity suits him. Civilian devotion suits him. A thing built not only to fire, but to signify. To reassure. To threaten. To complete a certain kind of broken man by giving his fear a skeleton.”
Owen wanted to laugh, or curse, or walk out, but all three impulses failed in him. “Who are you?”
“A witness,” said the old man. “Too late, as witnesses usually are.”
Then, leaning forward slightly:
“And perhaps a coward. I have seen him before.”
The shop lights flickered. For one impossible instant every rifle in the place seemed to deepen in color, black turning to a kind of abyssal sheen that swallowed reflection. Owen smelled hot oil and something else beneath it—something like a battlefield after rain.
“When?” he asked.
The old man tapped the cane once on the floorboards.
“Whenever men discover that industry can manufacture destiny.”
The clerk finally intervened, smiling uneasily. “Sir, are you shopping for anything in particular?”
Owen blinked. The old man was simply an old man again, thin hands folded over his cane, expression faintly amused.
“No,” Owen said hoarsely. “No, I think I’m done here.”
He left without remembering the walk to his truck.
That night the dream returned, but now the hall of rifles was a cathedral. The black floor stretched farther than sight, and the planted weapons rose in long aisles beneath an unseen vault. At the far end stood Sira.
He was not monstrous in shape. That was the most dreadful thing. He possessed the severe beauty of authority, tall and lean, clad in something like a military coat cut with liturgical elegance. His face was gaunt, his mouth composed, his eyes dark hollows lit by a disciplined fire. He looked neither young nor old. He looked inevitable. Around him there clung no chaos, no slobbering demonic frenzy, but order—perfect, ceremonial, merciless order.
When he spoke, his voice was the sound of boots in a corridor, of bolts sliding home, of a crowd falling silent before a podium.
You have helped build my chapels, he said.
Owen tried to run, but in dreams one rarely runs well.
The rifles all around him began to whisper.
Not loudly. Not with words at first. Only a susurrus like men reciting vows under their breath.
Then one voice separated itself from the rest, and Owen realized with horror that it was his own.
He woke with his throat raw and his hands clasped together as though in prayer.
His wife was already up.
He could hear the TV in the kitchen serving up the news.
There had been another shooting.
#AmericanViolence #AR15 #cursedObject #darkFiction #darkSymbolism #demonicPossession #GothicHorror #GunViolence #hauntedWeapon #horrorWriting #industrialEvil #literaryHorror #MassShooting #modernGothic #politicalHorror #principalityAndPower #propheticFiction #psychologicalDread #shadowFigure #Sira #socialCritique #supernaturalHorror -
#America, F*** Yeah - Team America OST
#Iran#nemoradio not funny
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372588/
BTW this is not a love song! 💡 ✅ #Socialcritique paired with #Satire
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Techno‑Feudal Elite Are Attempting to Build a Twenty‑First‑Century Fascist State
#HackerNews #TechnoFeudalism #Fascism #Oligarchy #TechnologyPolitics #SocialCritique
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The Sane Society "A society can be sick — a pathology of normalcy that affects the mental health of individuals." Sale: $25.00 to $1.99 by Erich Fromm Rating: 4.6/5 (219 Reviews) #psychology #society #politics #philosophy #socialcritique #BookSky #Books
The Sane Society -
To the travel cat who sees a Dutchman and assumes a cloud of smoke; to the stranger who sees a Muslim and assumes a closed door; and to the Board members who see a policy and assume a moral high ground: Context matters.
I am often greeted with the noise of "incidental" outrage: "F@ you, zealous bigot." My answer remains the same: "My dear, context please. Your words are just noise." Read on: https://library.profpeter.my/paper-trails/mastodon-short/no-context-no-talk
#ContextMatters #CriticalThinking #LiquidModernity #SocialCritique #Philosophy
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"In the Netherlands, we have two sayings: 'To float a balloon' (to test or try something out) and 'That kite won’t fly' (something won’t happen or isn't applicable).
How do these relate to the woman choosing breast augmentation? By already ,,,..Read on: https://library.profpeter.my/paper-trails/mastodon-short/some-kites-are-hard-to-steer#BodyImage #SocietalPressure #MentalHealth #SelfWorth #DutchIdioms #VisualMetaphor #AutumnMood #Photography #SocialCritique #Authenticity
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As René Magritte once proved, a drawing or CGI animation of a pipe is not a pipe. So if there's a comics, a cartoon or video-game involving a pipe being lit, it DOESN'T imply a real pipe being lit.
- Hur, but the drawing of a pipe was based upon a real pipe, DUR!
While some physical pipe was indeed a likely source of inspiration for a hand-drawn/CGI pipe, it doesn't imply that that real pipe was lit: one doesn't need to see a pipe being lit in order to draw a pipe being lit. It's trivial physics to be imagined, not something that needs to be previously observed.
So, again, no pipe needs to be lit in order to draw a lit pipe. I guess it should be a common knowledge among humans, but it seems like it isn't... People let their senses deceive them, then everything remotely alluding to a lit pipe feels like it's a real lit pipe (the thing in itself, Ding-an-sich), and, no, it isn't, wake up, Neo!
(This may or may not be about pipes: ceci n'est pas une pipe)
#thoughts #socialcritique #philosophy -
Barbarism is played out.
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." - Oscar Wilde
#OscarWilde #LiteraryQuotes #AmericanHistory #SocialCritique #WildeanWisdom #Decadence #ThoughtProvoking #QuotesThatMakeYouThink
