anthony galluzzo

What makes the Covidian lesbian bar story so appealing is its quintessentially American and specifically New England character: a remote sect of true believers trying to preserve the old faith, but consumed by vicious factional conflicts over how to live up to its strictures…

You sometimes get the sense that some leftists think essentially all categories of suffering are illusions, constructed by societies that tell people how to experience life. Sickness and disability, for example, are merely constructed as states of suffering, containing no intrinsic character of experience in themselves. It’s reminiscent of Gnosticism: there is a demiurge deluding you by constructing a false, flawed world of suffering, but if only the demiurge’s trickery could be removed, we would see that above/beyond it is the true reality of Heaven. We must liberate the aspect of the divine world—the soul—from the illusory prison of suffering (the physical world). In socialist Gnosticism, the demiurge is capital, fascism, etc. None of our suffering is necessary; it is all entirely imposed by the malevolent or incompetent demiurge(s) which construct the illusion of suffering. I don’t think this is actually true. I think part of the material base of society is human cognition, human experience, human neurobiology, and it is quite malleable but not infinitely so. The natural world is part of the material base of society, and the natural world includes us. It includes our brains, with their biases and limitations. I do not think any society can be successful in constructing illness and disability as per se virtuous or positive states of experience. For better or worse, we are built to find these experiences unpleasant, and while capitalism and fascism may turn these experiences towards moral projects that *actively harm and devalue* the sick and disabled—which is wrong—they did not invent this substrate of experience. Instead, capitalism and fascism are *also* responding to the material base of human perception and cognition; it feels bad to be sick or disabled, and we use these things as moral metaphors, so capitalism and fascism respond to this and incorporate that into their own projects, towards their own ends. But removing capitalism or fascism does not in fact remove illness or suffering or disability, and socialist states have generally pursued efforts to make their citizens healthier—often with great success. Healthcare is something many socialist societies have done disproportionately well! So, yes, while we should reject MAHA-style health fascism, which frames the sick and disabled as justly suffering/dying as punishment for their moral weakness or moral contamination, it goes too far (and misidentifies the problem) to suggest that fitness *itself* or even the individual desire to be fit, is fascist or capitalist. Capitalism and fascism do not *create* that desire, or the positive experience of fitness, but they turn it to bad ends. We can turn it to good ends, but we cannot invert or deny the reality of it.

It's wild how many credentialed dipshits and interiority-free philistines have big opinions on how literature should be taught and written about.

"The academy is increasingly populated by yellow-highlighter kids chasing gold stars. They want to be told they’re right. They want to be told they’re good people. The academy has chased out most of the cranks and weirdos who have unorthodox ideas." chronicle.com/article/the-co…

Justin Patrick Moore for Romanticon today! “in Druidry, Bards are highly respected for their immense ‘oak knowledge’ of poetry, history, songs, stories, traditions. In ancient times Bards were the ones responsible for keeping the store of knowledge in memory”