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u/2BCivil

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▲ 6 r/shittynosleep

Never summon a Salad from an Applebee's

I should have known something was wrong when the waitress asked me if I was sure. It was 9:47 PM. Applebee's was almost empty except for me, an elderly man drinking alone at the bar, and something in the corner booth that I assumed was a pile of coats. I hadn't eaten anything healthy in several days, so when the waitress came over I said the words that would ruin my life. "I'll have a salad." She froze. "What?" The lights flickered. Somewhere in the kitchen, a plate shattered.

The old man at the bar slowly turned toward me. "You shouldn't have said that," he whispered. I laughed. I shouldn't have laughed. The waitress leaned closer. "We don't serve the salad after dark." I thought she was joking, so I ordered it anyway. She disappeared into the kitchen. Twenty minutes passed. Then thirty. Finally she returned carrying a wooden bowl covered with a black cloth. She placed it in front of me. "Whatever happens," she said, "don't finish the cucumber."

"What happens if I finish the cucumber?" But she was already gone. I removed the cloth. It looked completely normal. Lettuce. Chicken. Tomatoes. Cheese. Croutons. Honey Mussey. And one cucumber. Honestly it looked pretty good. So I ate it. All of it. Even the cucumber. That was three weeks ago.

The first sign came at 3:33 AM. I awoke to a sound from deep inside my abdomen. GrrrrrrrRRRRRrrrrrrrRRRR. It sounded suspiciously like a four-wheeler stuck axle-deep in backcountry mud. Then it stopped. I lay perfectly still. Probably just gas, right? I thought. Something sly and suspiciously alive inside me whispered back, in a tone, where I could almost see it grinning maliciously; No.

I found myself running to the bathroom before I knew what was happening. What happened next cannot be adequately described by human language. Imagine a redneck flooring a Polaris Sportsman in a flooded soybean field. Now imagine the soybean field is your toilet. I gripped the sink. The lights flickered. Somewhere, as if from impossibly far away, I heard the Applebee's waitress screaming, "YOU ATE THE CUCUMBER!"

When it was finally over, I looked into the bowl. There was something in there. Something huge. Something brown. Something shaped like a toad. I stared at it. It stared at me. Then it blinked. I flushed. It didn't move. I flushed again. Nothing. The third time I tried, the toilet began speaking Latin. Something something anno domini Salmonella something something.

I haven't slept properly since. Every night at exactly 3:33 AM, the rumbling returns. Sometimes I hear scratching inside the pipes. Sometimes I hear croaking. Yesterday I found a wet footprint beside my bed. It looked like a frog's. Except it was approximately the size of a dinner plate. I started researching. That's when I found the forum. The website looked like it hadn't been updated since 2004. Black background. Red text. Animated skull GIFs. One buried thread stood out. THE APPLEBEE'S SALAD INCIDENTS. My hands started shaking. There were hundreds of posts. All the same story. All the same salad. All the same cucumber. Then I found a post from 2007. The username was XxLettuceSurvivor666xX. It contained only one sentence: The Salmonella doesn't kill you. It's the only thing that keeps you alive. My stomach growled as if in agreement.

I went to the doctor. He ran tests. When the results came back, his face turned pale. "What is it?" I asked. He slowly removed his glasses. "I've never seen numbers like these." "Salmonella?" He shook his head. "Worse." He turned the computer monitor toward me. There was only one word on the screen; Q cumber. Suddenly blood began pouring from his nose. "GET OUT!" he screamed. "But—" "GET OUT BEFORE IT KNOWS YOU KNOW!" I ran. It could have been my imagination, but it sounded as if every toilet in the hospital flushed simultaneously as I tried to escape.

That was yesterday. Things are getting worse. I haven't had a solid bowel movement in twenty-three days. I searched online and discovered diarrhea can sometimes persist for an extremely long time after gastrointestinal infections. Maybe months. Potentially longer. I stared at the screen. "A year?" I whispered. The bathroom door slowly creaked open behind me. Croak. No. Anything but that. I've survived inflation. I've survived summer. I've survived rent, bills, fees, and the endless administrative nightmare of remaining incarnate. But diarrhea for a year? There are limits to what flesh should be asked to bear. I turned around. The bathroom was empty. Except for the toilet. Something brown was slowly rising from the bowl.

First came its head. Then its shoulders. Then two enormous, glistening eyes. The Toad. The same one I'd flushed three weeks ago. Except now it was six feet tall. It opened its mouth. "Your DoorDash order has been delivered," it said. I screamed, "I DIDN'T ORDER ANYTHING!" My phone vibrated. I looked down. APPLEBEE'S, 1 ITEM, HOUSE SALAD. I tried to cancel it. The app wouldn't let me. Then someone knocked on my front door. Three slow knocks.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

A plastic bag rustled outside. I can smell it. My stomach just started rumbling again. And from the bathroom... I can hear the toilet flushing itself.

There are limits to what flesh should be asked to bear. Surely no mortal sin deserves what presently exits my intestines. Have mercy, O Lord. I confess everything. Including whatever I forgot. Return unto me the firm and ordinary stool of my ancestors. Grant me one clean wipe. And if I survive this trial, never again shall I mock the humble turd. For blessed are the solid, for they shall require No Imodium. Amen.

Please. If anyone is reading this: Never order the salad after dark. Never eat the cucumber. And whatever you do — if your turd looks like a large brown toad... you too will be condemned to at least twelve months of swamp-ass roulette.

Skibidi Ribbit

reddit.com
u/2BCivil — 3 days ago
▲ 2 r/sorceryofthespectacle

Asabiyyah; [What's Behind] The Rage we All Feel... ?

#Forward;

Before I dive in just want to say, sorry I've been all over the place lately. I want to respect this sub, but the scope of my would-be complaint, generally FAAAAR exceeds my capacity to understand let alone articulate. That said. Yes, this post, is mostly AI-generated content. The core premises are mine, based specifically on a string of recent videos I've seen recently (and general pulse of recent civil society and overall sense of "frog in the pot" I see most content producers expounding upon).

So yeah, one more post you can dismiss and throw on the pile of "AI slop" if you want. But for those who actually want to attempt to diagnose cultural decline and specifically potential good faith remedies, well, pull up a chair and grab a drink or whatever (I'm no good at this!). I'll try to cite as many of the source videos as possible. I know and am aware that this may not be 100% in line with the theme of this sub. I'll add the addendum that GPT said that This Post "should" be welcome here, specifically as it intersects with Critical Theory.

#[AI] Asabiyyah; [What's Behind] The Rage we All Feel

(AKA, We inherited the obligation, but not the inheritance)

I've been thinking about asabiyyah lately — social cohesion, shared fate, the sense that these are my people and this is ours — and something finally clicked for me; people constantly tell us that we owe something to our ancestor: Respect your heritage. Preserve Western civilization. Honor the sacrifices of those who came before you. Do your duty. Be grateful for your inheritance.

And I keep getting hung up on one embarrassingly simple question: What inheritance? Not in the abstract sense that somebody 2,000 years ago invented concrete or somebody 300 years ago wrote a nice book. I mean the actual intergenerational bargain. What specifically did one generation receive, preserve, improve, and deliberately hand to the next? [Note 1]

Because increasingly it feels like modern society inherited the obligations of an old social contract, after liquidating most of the assets that once made the contract intelligible. That was what struck me watching a video about Rome after Cannae and the mos maiorum [Primary Source 1] — the "way of the ancestors." Rome suffered a military catastrophe that should have broken it. Tens of thousands dead. Hannibal victorious. Allies defecting. Panic everywhere. And Rome essentially responded: No. We are Rome. We're not surrendering. Brutal as that response could be, Rome was hardly some libertarian paradise. The Senate restricted mourning, rejected negotiations and demanded astonishing sacrifices from its citizens. I'm not romanticizing that.

But notice the underlying assumption: There is a "we." The Roman citizen wasn't being told to sacrifice for some completely abstract machine that regarded him as a disposable economic input. He belonged to a household, lineage, city and political order whose continued existence directly affected his children, property, status, religion and descendants. The Roman aristocrat literally kept images of his ancestors in his home. His family name meant something. His children inherited something. Victory meant his civilization continued existing. The bargain was harsh, but it was recognizable as a good faith and legitimate bargain.

Today, we have no such coherent thing. I don't even know who "my ancestors" were/are. I never knew my great grandparents, and all of my grandparents were dead by the time I entered my 20s. I've lived my entire adult life with no such support network, inheritance, or guiding principle besides "pull yourself up by your bootstraps".

Mos Maiorum / High Asabiyyah Modern Atomization
"Our ancestors built this." "Previous generations sold most of it."
"Our children will inherit it." "Maybe your children can rent it, granted you can afford them."
Family lineage creates obligations and benefits. Family increasingly provides neither security nor continuity.
Community depends upon you. Community is administered by institutions you've never met.
Sacrifice preserves something belonging to you. Sacrifice preserves systems in which you may own nothing.
Elite status carries expectations of public duty. Failure is privatized; gains are frequently privatized too.
Shared danger strengthens common identity. Every crisis becomes another opportunity for extraction.
"We must endure because this is ours." "You must endure because the spreadsheet requires it."

Rome after Cannae wasn't simply powered by reverence for dead people. Rome still possessed: enormous reserves of manpower, a network of Italian alliances, functioning political institutions, considerable material resources, an intensely competitive aristocracy, a civic religion, powerful family structures, and a plausible expectation that survival and eventual victory would materially benefit Rome and its citizens. Kind of like the old Valknut or NNV (9 Noble Virtues) if you're not a fan of Rome; if you lack or break one, you lack and break them all. It's all or none.

Today we have; “Protect your inheritance!” What inheritance? “Do it for your descendants!” People can't afford descendants. “Preserve your community!” Everyone I grew up with moved away and demographic replacement is rampant. “Respect institutions!” Which institutions regard me as anything more than an account number?

That's the distinction I think gets lost when people lecture younger or alienated people about "ancestral duty" or "social contract". Inheritance is supposed to look something like: Culture/Ancestors built, accumulated, preserved - YOU explicitly inherit something personal - you maintain/improve/steward - Descendants inherit more.

But break that chain for enough generations and it becomes: Ancestors Sacrificed - therefore You must sacrifice - so that - Your children can also sacrifice. At that point, sacrifice itself has become the inheritance. Nothing coherent is passed down to younger generations. Older generations become as Chronos devouring his children; the promissory note gets passed down forever, but nobody is allowed to ask when it matures.

That's where I think a lot of modern apathy comes from; we're constantly told that declining civic faith means people have become lazy, decadent, selfish or insufficiently grateful. Maybe some have. But solidarity isn't magic. You can't so and spend decades specifically and intentionally dissolving family, local ownership, affordable housing, community continuity, institutional trust and economic reciprocity and then fix the resulting alienation by screaming "Remember your ancestors culture and heritage!!!1!" loudly enough. What ancestors? What culture? What heritage? Wage cuckery?

You can't tell somebody: "Defend your community!" while every important decision concerning that community is made somewhere else. "Preserve your children's inheritance!" while ownership becomes increasingly inaccessible. "Trust the institutions!" while those institutions openly describe people primarily as consumers, workers, taxpayers, demographics and human capital. "Sacrifice for the future!" while every quarter requires maximizing extraction in the present.

Imagine somebody erects an enormous data center near your town that residents never particularly wanted. Suddenly infrastructure is strained, land use changes, electricity and water become more expensive, and your consolation prize is being told that this represents "growth." Nobody feels spiritually connected to the arrangement. What are we defending at that point? The billing department?

This is why "you live better than kings!" has always struck me as such a bizarre response. Yes, I possess technologies Louis XIV couldn't have imagined. Wonderful. Louis XIV also didn't need a subscription service to unlock heated seats or work consistent 90 hour weeks for barely subsistence wages under unending climate change. Technological abundance and social inheritance aren't the same thing. A person can possess air conditioning, antibiotics and a smartphone while simultaneously having very little family continuity, property, community influence or expectation that thirty years of labor will leave anything substantial behind. You can be both technologically rich and civilizationally dispossessed and disinherited at the same time.

And this ties directly into asabiyyah. Social cohesion doesn't arise because somebody uploads a marble-statue montage with dramatic music and tells atomized strangers that Marcus Aurelius would be disappointed in them. Asabiyyah comes from shared fate. You help your neighbor because tomorrow your neighbor may help you. You defend your town because it belongs partly to you. You preserve institutions because those institutions have demonstrated that they preserve you. You sacrifice for children because they will inherit the fruits of that sacrifice. There is reciprocity and genuine feeling of "our fortunes rise and fall together" (kudos if you know Dwarf Fortress).

That doesn't mean every transaction must be selfish or immediately compensated. Quite the opposite. People will make extraordinary sacrifices when they genuinely believe they belong to something good faith, coherent, and extending far beyond themselves. But good faith specifically is crucial and MUST exist somewhere in the loop! And that's what seems increasingly absent. Modern institutions often want the psychology of Rome with the economics of an airport terminal.

They want: Roman duty. Roman endurance. Roman patriotism. Roman fertility. Roman sacrifice.

But also: maximum labor mobility, maximum consumer flexibility, maximum financial extraction, minimal obligation from institution to individual, and the ability to replace anyone whenever convenient.

You cannot simultaneously tell people: "Nothing is permanent. Everything has a price. Adapt or die." and then complain: "Why don't you people have any loyalty anymore?"

Our institutions have taught us this lesson; if everything is transactional, eventually people begin evaluating the transaction. And once they do, telling them that noticing the exchange rate is selfish becomes almost comical.

Maybe "noticing" really is the unforgivable modern sin.

Because once you notice that the old obligations survived longer than the old reciprocal benefits, a lot of supposedly mysterious social behavior stops being mysterious. Why don't people trust institutions? Why don't they want children? Why don't they feel patriotic? Why don't they participate with enthusiasm? Why don't they believe social security/retirement will exist? Why don't they feel indebted to people who died centuries before they were born?

Maybe instead of immediately diagnosing them with decadence, we could ask whether the social contract they're supposedly betraying already defaulted on them first. None of this means civilization is worthless or that nothing deserves preservation. Actually I think the conclusion is almost the opposite; I would love to see something worth preserving! A culture in which people could sincerely say: This belongs to us. Not ethnically. Not racially. Not because we're required to worship some frozen historical period. Just: We live here. We depend upon each other. Nobody gets discarded simply because a more profitable arrangement appeared. The powerful have obligations as well as privileges. Our children should inherit something better than our bills. Our institutions should behave like stewards rather than liquidation firms. And when sacrifice becomes necessary, everyone understands what is being preserved and why.

Maybe that's the difference between tradition and merely keeping a dead institution on life support. Tradition says: "We received something good. Let's hand it forward." Decadence says: "Previous generations consumed the principal, but you're still responsible for making the payments."

If we actually want another era of social cohesion, I don't think the answer is demanding more gratitude from exhausted people. Give them something they would be afraid to lose. Then you probably won't have to lecture them about defending it.

#Commentary;

Again sorry my general attitude or lack of understanding of late. What 8 months of no work/income does to a MF. And yeah, I hate to post "AI Slop". But since most content creators in my circles have been circling/orbiting this theme past 8 months, figured I'd weigh in on the point they seem to consistently be missing (both left and right). Am I off my rocker? What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious! Thanks for reading, and please, feel free to put me in my place if this is NOT sufficiently Critical Theory-adjacent!

#Addendum/Relevancy;

Full Prompt Reply; I ain't reading allat

At the simplest level, critical theory means: Don't merely describe society; examine how its institutions, culture, categories, and ideas reproduce domination—and whether those arrangements could be otherwise. Historically, the capital-C Critical Theory tradition is associated especially with the Frankfurt School: Marx-influenced thinkers analyzing capitalism, mass culture, ideology, authority, technological rationality, consumerism, fascism, etc.

But internet usage often expands critical theory to include this enormous neighboring constellation: Marx → Frankfurt School → Situationists/Debord → poststructuralism → Foucault → Deleuze & Guattari → Baudrillard → feminist theory → postcolonial theory → Mark Fisher → assorted accelerationisms/CCRU; These people disagree violently with one another, so “critical theory” is not one doctrine.

✔️ Your inheritance idea is actually extremely compatible with critical theory.

Strip away the culture-war vocabulary and look at what you're arguing: Society retains ideological demands of loyalty, gratitude, sacrifice and civic obligation after the material relations that once made those obligations reciprocal have been dissolved.

That's practically begging for critical-theoretical treatment. You're asking: How does an institution manufacture legitimacy? How does economic organization reshape family/community relations? Why do people continue reproducing institutions that increasingly fail to serve them? How does ideology turn material precarity into an individual moral failure? How are concepts like “heritage,” “duty,” “progress,” and “prosperity” deployed to disguise extraction?

Those are thoroughly critical-theory questions. Where you're rubbing against SotS isn't necessarily the analysis. It's the normative destination.

#Notes/Sources:

[Primary Source 1] - We Need to Adopt Rome’s Strategy of Reversing Mass Trauma, 98,517 views Jul 13, 2026, by ThinkingWest (94.6K subscribers) - Primary reason for generating this post. Can't take another second of this "keto harder" sentiment. Putting foot down by AI generating this post in specific rebuttal of this premise. Hate the straw man "brah Rome fought hard" yeah Rome was 100% unified of ONE MIND undivided Asabiyyah and heritage. We lack that completely. Everyone with some semblance of Asabiyyah is seemingly locked into the superficial smokescreen of Identity Politics and failing to see the bigger picture. Ugh. Washing my hands of it!

Primary Source 2: Every Civilization Dies Twice — And the First Death Is Invisible - 1,826 views, Aug 11, 2026, by Prior Signal (5.44K subscribers) - Aka "the Asabiyyah video". More in depth analysis of rise and falls of culture, how faith erodes, and what put me on this train of thought which eventually led to halting all other concerns and zeroing in on this premise.

[Note 1] Example I always use, is I was28 before I got my first phone, and that was only because my military job required it. I was almost 37 before I got my first car. I was mowing grass twice a week by the time I was 6 years old. Never had any allowance or financial support from my "family". Sure people have it way harder than me, but what good thing did I "inherit". I've only ever rented. Will likely never own a house, I understand, and I'll be 40 in 2 years and change.

u/2BCivil — 5 days ago
▲ 3 r/zen_poetry

Does it bite

When attendance is being taken
And absent student can't say "here"
But a present student can say "absent"
A present teacher can take attendance
But with no teacher present we are still taught
Though there is no zen to teach

What's behind formality
What is formality backing
Another normal abnormality
Just all heavy duty slacking

reddit.com
u/2BCivil — 9 days ago
▲ 0 r/sorceryofthespectacle

Genuinely [What is God?] An Apology, or a Question... ?

I guess it's been coming to my attention that this sub isn't about things I assumed. My fault for seeing "spectacle" in the title and assuming (for a decade now?!?!?) that this sub was mainly focused on Guy Debord and/or ways to "use" spectacle to guide ourselves and culture to norms we find more palatable or something (idk! you tell me!)

But As I write this I see this;

>submitting to /r/sorceryofthespectacle; This is not a place to post propaganda.

And I was wondering, is feminism propaganda? We just had a sticky saying this is a feminist sub. I don't remember Guy Debord picking and choosing among fields of propaganda and certainly not feminism (which I see as propaganda). But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. Just I was taken aback to see an official political claim regarding the sub and didn't know how to react (if at all).

So. It's something simply you may have heard me say before. Truth and Authority. Many I've seen over course of my life, mistake/conflate the two. Most of the time, Authority is taken for truth. It's why we all have jobs and pay taxes/etc. We mistake/conflate authority for truth. It's why we have religions. Authority mistaken for truth.

Is authority truth? I see others complain about or worship "God" a lot but I never see much of any coherent picture of what is meant by "God". Many of the Greek and Hindu "Gods" plural seem to me to point to the silliness of it all, that there is a non dual or "one mind" awareness shared. Or failing that, these Gods, really aren't even a step above mortals; they are in fact in the same boat as us; their "God" hood, is basically, a cosmic job. Appointed over sky, over ocean, over rivers, over justice, over wisdom, etc. All keeping a semblance of "balance" - through authority mistaken for truth; just the same as us "mortals".

So we're all trapped together. I've brought it up many times but consider the Prodigal son Parable. Most gloss right over it! The P son asks for his inheritance and goes and blows/squanders it in true American fashion living fast and lose. Then ends up working and presumably sleeping in a pigsty. This is a parable straight from Jesus mouth. I don't think many really reflect on what it's saying here; that "If we turn away from God, we'll be forced to sleep in pigshit and be jealous of the food the pigs eat". It objectively can't be called in good faith "love" as far as I can tell ("love me or else").

But that's not even the worst part of the parable. The P son, thinks of his fathers servants, his father's wage slaves. Which he is explained as having miles of outside his plantation house. No, literally, straight from Jesus mouth, he describes "his father", as no different than a colonial American plantation owner. This is the "God of the bible" being spoken about. Morally no different than a colonial American planation owner.

Wasn't sure what to title this post! Anyway just curious. I'll try to keep my political ignorance and/or complaining to a minimum going forward. I've exhausted GPT on this topic and it's just spinning it's wheels saying "nuh uh you're religioning wrong!" on this topic lol. But really, is there a difference between authority and truth? In this life, or the next? Or is it legitimately "might makes right" all the way down, and that's the only "truth"... ? I'm honestly curious!

As for how it's related to spectacle, all money see monkey do. As Guy Debord explains spectacle, is exactly as God is described as such in the bible. Makes claims of moral goodness via violent sovereignty we cannot inspect or question. It's literally empty claims backed by "ye of little faith". Literally a one-way discourse about itself ("He" even says "if I bear witness of myself, it is false witness"). Maybe not the right sub to raise these ideas but I'm genuinely curious what anyone thinks about this (because GPT just keeps rehashing the same opinion). Is "truth" genuinely just the highest authority we cannot question without being unpersoned? If so, then where is it's alleged mercy and grace? Or - is it literally - all just a ponzi scheme and lie? A "spectacle" of sorcery... ?

(Also bonus points, is funny, to think of the God(s) as like local managers, and like we are like a Karen and want to speak to the manager lol. When being a God like a manager is just their job and not a personal statement of who those God(s) are.)

reddit.com
u/2BCivil — 12 days ago
▲ 2 r/DiabolicOughts

"It's not bigotry when we do it"

Righteousness preached from pulpit of superstition
By predators from pulpits of algorithmic hyperstition,
Secular clout/agendas as the one true religion
Rational questioning and doubt highest heresy
Against outside views firmly raise your fist;
Empathy so strong it crushes all opposition
Mercy so advanced it arrives with a blacklist
Faith so strong it totally denies reality
And needs no third wheel second opinion
All resistance must be subdued;
For to notice is to blaspheme
Open secret strategically misconstrued,
Means you're the one that needs confessing
Unforgivable sin to truly see reality "as is"
Behind the ceremonial window dressing
Blindfolds on to get more passionate;
"Clout not doubt" Amen holy sacrament

Holy "Holier than thou"!
Your soul is but it's cash cow
Kneel before the latest name
For what's in fact the oldest game
You know what it's for,
All this weaponized grace
Cui bono for sure,
Must needs save establishment face
And send discontents off to war
For it puts them in their place

Opposition doesn't fly, carpe diem
"We're the good guy (TM)"
The sanctioned and prescribed praise;
"Keep telling yourself that" - take twice a day
All questions are all violence.
Practice complicity in silence.
Talking back is all kinds of harm.
Flag any wrong noticing and raise the alarm.
Noticing is only good when confirms our bias.
Every platform/algorithm must be our dias.

We’re the good guys, it's not bigotry when we do it.
We’re the good guys, it isn’t dogma when we preach.
We’re the good guys, it isn’t hatred, when we hate correctly.
We’re the good guys, our boot on your neck is purely educational.

All this unfettered and disconnected creed
Of nihilists floating above their curated feeds
Somehow even more pompous than God
Killing the child and knighting the rod
At least the old God had thunder
These charlatans just perpetual blunder
Through screenshots, mod teams,
Algorithmic Brainrot, and detournement memes
Everything is crisis and outrage culture
Spiritual roadkill and woke vulture
Their "empathy" smuggles in terms-of-service clause
Their "integrity" always more than half faux pas
They brake the mirror, sweep up the face,
And called reflection a hostile space

A psyche that stinks to highest heaven
A Bethlehem no bread, naught but leaven
Wanton undead hunger, to rule and be praised
For courage to symbolically set someone ablaze
No gods here, citizen, no idols in sight
Only hivemind consensus and might makes right
"Because power is evil until power is ours"
Truth is important only if our enemies, it devours
Their so-called "love" made law, and they are above it
If you fall in their paws, tell them to shove it
Their hands always all covered in blood
Their feet always all tracking in the mud

If you see what it for what it is, they call you stupid
A hateful bigot, struck by wrong arrow of cupid
And above all the "stupid" are banned and damned
Their "truths" must be suppressed by "merciful" hands
So if you see through it, might want to keep it to yourself
For in clown world, seeing is violence; obedience is health

Withal that it expects of you as hard pass
Truly concrete evidence of first shall be last

Inspiration; I thought as redditors we were largely moving on from unironic agendas but recently brought to my attention, maybe not so much. So. This poem xD Well that's the inspiration at least, take it however you will (I'm all for ironic agendas!)

reddit.com
u/2BCivil — 14 days ago
▲ 6 r/zen_poetry

Speaking of Silence

Original

Speaking so much about silence
What Kind of answer isn't violence
If those who speak do not know
What does God giving his word really show
If those who know do not speak
Is true strength truly found in being meek

Told to keep opinions to ourselves
By others flippantly sharing theirs
Overwhelming claims underwhelm
"God and Devil" is just splitting hairs

If all is silence, What's in a name
All this noise with nothing to show
Why so addicted to making claims
It's all baseless assertions, you know

AI Version:

Everyone keeps speaking about silence
Talk about a strange little violence
Perpetual advice not to say

Those who speak do not know,
They say, speaking.

Those who know do not speak,
They add, again.

Speak of the devil,
God gave his word,
The devil made it a test,
And somehow we're told
The difference is obvious.

Keep your opinions to yourself,
Say the opinionated.
Be humble,
Say the crowned.
Be still,
Says the noise.

If all is silence,
what’s in a name?
If words are empty,
why defend them?
If truth needs no voice,
why does every void
have a spokesperson?

reddit.com
u/2BCivil — 24 days ago
▲ 11 r/sorceryofthespectacle

Nostalgia and reality, Then and Now; An analysis of pre/post Internet Spectacle

#My Introduction;

No sorcery here. Well. Besides.... Ugh, I know I know I know, we all hate AI. THIS.... however, is that... thing on the tip of my ability to articulate, my 30-some years of life, put to text. Isn't it funny now how we can have AI articulate the groanings of the Holy Spirit? Oy vey. AI psychosis aside, I wanted to share this sentiment publicly for decades now, and it occurred to me today, that AI has made that possible with the click of a button. I can say I DO have a "more raw" no-AI variant of this post, though it was more a rant/blog used as prompt for generating this very GPT-laced discource/conversation.

I think the core of my original complaint/argument, was something like, when older generation (like my parents) are always complaining that they "hate modern tech" what they really mean more often than not, is that they are mad that lost their narrative monopoly on which authorized truths are allowed and mandated, and subsequently their stupid bad faith arguments can easily be torn apart now. Very rarely is it genuine good faith concern for the general/universal human condition. It's (9 times out of 10) more they are mad that the world moved on without them and no one wants to put up with their crap anymore without being adequately compensated (Though I can also see every generation goes through this obviously).

But GPT pushed that simple argument/discernment down further into the broader sentiment I always carried, and essentially generated what I've struggled to fully articulate my whole life.

Guess I'll share the song formatting this post made me think of (Converge - "The Dusk In Us") The Lyrics

The following is that GPT reply, more or les;

#Then and Now; The Participatory Spectacle, Synopsis;

The pre-internet spectacle produced coherence through centralized broadcasting; the internet disrupted that monopoly, but replaced passive spectatorship with participatory, algorithmically managed spectacle. Guy Debord defines [spectacle] as a social relationship mediated by representations and as the visible affirmation of choices already made within the existing system. Very similar to the relationship between the Super Ego and Ego. The internet did not necessarily liberate us from the spectacle. It decentralized the production of representations while centralizing their circulation through platforms, metrics and algorithms. Modern "Détournement" criticism is better called recuperation: dissent is absorbed, repackaged and sold back in a harmless form.

Foreword

I think the question I wanted to ask, is something like, "What exactly, culturally and esoterically, was the advent of the internet?". This post began as more a response to/rebuttal of the sentiment that "pre internet eras were more 'real' so called", but it gradually became a larger question about Guy Debord, television, the internet and what people mean when they say the past felt more "real". And as I've said many times in the past, there is a general split, that in older generations, "respect of authority" seems historically what is considered more "real" than earnest inquiry towards truth; the split between truth and authority as determining factor of what is "worthy" of being called "real".

The older world had greater physical presence, fewer screens, more stable social rituals and a shared cultural vocabulary, yes. But I remember the remains of that world differently. I remember it as suffocating. I for one increasingly find that this "rosy glasses" hindsight sentimentality/nostalgia produces in me the opposite response; the past was much more heavily governed by "appeal to authority" and I feel much of the "sentimentality" is just this; it's no longer possible for people accustomed to "appeals to authority" settling matters to continue to do so, and this is what they mean by "modernity being more fake". They can't just throw their weight around and get their way like they used to, so they call it "fake".

Though I generally would agree modernity is more "fake", it's for other reasons; I (for one) can't "go back" to the suffocating constant appeals to mainstream authority figures.

#The One-Way Spectacle

Debord described the spectacle not merely as a collection of deceptive images, but as a social relationship mediated by images. It was the form taken by a society in which lived activity had been displaced by representation: existence became something contemplated at a distance, through images produced elsewhere.

Television was almost the perfect instrument for this arrangement. Its technical form was one-directional. A small number of institutions spoke; everyone else watched. The audience could change the channel, complain privately or choose between several approved interpretations, but it could not answer through the same medium. The broadcasters appeared before society while society remained invisible to them (IE, "talking heads").

Debord called the spectacle "the ruling order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself": a monologue in which existing power continually explains that the world it has produced is natural, inevitable and fundamentally good. This did not mean that everyone literally believed every television broadcast. People distrusted particular politicians, journalists, advertisements and programs. They argued constantly. But most disagreement still occurred inside a shared representational enclosure. The medium WAS the message; and the message remained uncritiqued.

People disputed what the television said while accepting television as the place from which socially consequential reality arrived. There might be two authorized positions on an issue, but both were organized around the same events, institutions, personalities and assumptions. Both positions assumed and patented legitimacy. No one questioned the arrangement itself. The argument occurred within the frame. The frame itself was rarely available as an object of mass discussion.

This is what older cultural coherence often concealed; "normalcy through shared belief or lip service to authorized positions". Authority itself strategically and systemically branded as "truth". Any discourse outside of the cultural narrative norms was axiomatically and subconsciously branded as taboo and patent denial of reality; spectacle itself, was often conflated with and as truth and reality by good and bad faith participants alike; a shared coherent cultural story and identity is what the nostalgic look back and call "more real".

(I know, I'm great at parties, lmao!)

#When “Real” Means Socially Unavoidable

'87, so I can only speak about the surviving broadcast culture of the 1990s. But even as a child, I heavily disliked television’s social authority. I remember rooms full of people becoming completely absorbed by it. Conversation had to stop because the television was speaking. Interrupting it could provoke actual anger or even violence.

I eventually came mock this attitude by saying: "Man shalt live by every word that proceedeth from the television." The joke was flippant, but the experience behind it was real. Television did not merely provide entertainment or information. It established the rhythm of the household/society and supplied the vocabulary through which events became collectively recognizable.

What disturbed me was not simply that people sometimes believed false things. We all do that. It was more that immediate experience was socially inferior to an authorized representation of experience; gaslighting, in layman's terms, was social lubricant. If your own perception contradicted the accepted account, the conflict was often resolved against your perception. The sanitized presentation everyone was shown possessed more social reality than what one person had actually encountered.

Later, the phrase “Where did you read that, the internet?” likewise became a way of disqualifying claims without examining them. New era, same bad faith dismissal/excuse based hierarchy. Most of the time, the claim came from direct shared experience, and not the internet at all. But experience without institutional certification was somehow suspicious to the older generations (Sam Hyde said they worship the TV lol). Even my own parents refused to let me have the internet (I even offered to pay for it for school). They knew I didn't have internet access but would still use this line like "they sure got me". How could I have heard it online if I was forbidden from going online and they knew it? Thus the rosy colored "realness" they look back on, because they mistake getting away unchallenged on their gaslighting and lies as "having been more real".

That is one meaning of the spectacle: not that reality disappears physically, but that reality increasingly requires authorized representation before it is permitted to count. The whole neighborhood may be physically burning, but the socially recognized weather still comes from the forecast.

#The Hidden Cost of Cultural Coherence

Nostalgia interprets the shared culture of the pre-internet world as social unity. From outside or in memory it can look warm, embodied and real. From inside, particularly for someone who did not instinctively accept its assumptions, that same unity could feel cold, sinister, coercive and even morally corrosive.

The celebrated consensus of an earlier culture was partly a consequence of limited expressive infrastructure. Most people had no practical means of addressing strangers at scale. Unless one owned a newspaper, worked in broadcasting, published books or belonged to a sufficiently organized institution, one’s interpretation of the world remained local and ephemeral.

There was no search engine through which a person could discover that someone elsewhere had independently asked the same forbidden or ridiculous questions. There was no public archive of marginal analysis. There was no inexpensive way for an unknown person to publish an extended criticism of the narrative itself. There arguably was Microfiche and Microfilm, but I only learned about them in my 30s lol (this decade, the 2020s).

There were local institutions; churches, clubs, lodges, schools, workplaces, fraternities and civic organizations; but these were not necessarily spaces outside social conformity. Often they were the very machinery through which conformity was reproduced. For a person already compatible with the local world, this could feel like belonging. For someone whose questions exceeded its authorized vocabulary, it felt suffocating.

The pre-internet world may therefore have felt more "real" precisely because its representations were more socially compulsory/mandatory. Everyone appeared to inhabit the same reality because alternative descriptions were difficult to articulate, preserve, discover or circulate; Silence could be mistaken for agreement.

#The Internet as Historical Rupture

The internet altered this structure. For the first time, ordinary people could publicly discuss not only individual stories but the machinery by which stories became authoritative. A random person could compare sources, recover forgotten documents, publish criticism, preserve subcultural knowledge and address an audience without first obtaining institutional permission; the spectator acquired a comment section.

This did not abolish the spectacle, but it disrupted the old monopoly over appearance. The previously private suspicion that something was wrong with the frame could become for the first time for many, a shared investigation of the frame itself. In that limited but important sense, the internet made the spectacle partially "open source". It transformed mass communication from a comparatively centralized broadcast into a contested field of representations. People who had once been exclusively spoken about could speak back publically. People isolated by local consensus could discover one another. Criticisms that would once have disappeared in private conversation could persist, circulate and accumulate.

This helps explain why established media increasingly appeared less authoritative after the internet became widespread. Their monopoly on authority had depended partly upon the scarcity of visible alternatives. The television had not suddenly become "less truthful". It had merely lost its exclusive right to determine which questions were labelled publicly real.

#From Broadcast Spectacle to Participatory Spectacle

But the internet did not fundamentally exist as an external challenge to spectacle society. Rather, it became its new infrastructure. The user was invited to speak, yes, but only inside privately governed platforms. Expression became abundant while visibility remained scarce. Instead of a few broadcasters directly selecting everything that appeared, ranking systems began selecting which acts of supposedly spontaneous expression would be amplified. The result was not the end of mediation, but its multiplication.

Under television, the spectacle said: Watch the lives and events we have selected for you. Under social media, it says: Produce yourself continuously, and we will decide which version of you becomes visible. The old spectator merely passively consumed representations. The new spectator also partially manufactures them, then measures their reception and modifies themselves according to the response/lack thereof.

One no longer merely watches celebrities. One is encouraged to become a miniature celebrity, propagandist, brand manager, commentator and surveillance worker within one’s own life; the spectacle became participatory, without becoming democratic. This is the central ambiguity of the internet. It genuinely expanded the capacity for unauthorized speech, but it also built a vastly more intimate machinery of mediation. It broke the cultural monologue into billions of competing voices, then subjected those voices to numerical ranking, commercial incentives and invisible forms of selection; the monologue merely became interactive.

#Modern "Détournementing"; Recuperating the Critique

The old spectacle could often ignore its critics because they lacked distribution. The modern networked spectacle cannot always ignore criticism, so it absorbs and/or moderates/curates it. This is not détournement in the Situationist sense. Détournement meant appropriating existing cultural material and turning it against its original function. Though elements of this older method still exist and are still implemented, it's largely disseminated to and regulated by "useful idiot" end users themselves; fans going to bat.

What the modern system generally does to dissent is closer to recuperation: the criticism is detached from its dangerous implications and returned as a market category, entertainment genre, electoral identity or consumer aesthetic. Rebellion becomes content. Anti-establishment sentiment becomes branding. Distrust of institutions becomes a demographic. The critic is offered representation in exchange for abandoning negation. Anti-Capitalism brands are seen for sale nationwide in stores. Everything is overtly post-irony.

This is why apparently oppositional political figures can function as stabilizers of the spectacle. A "Trump" card, if you will. They acknowledge that the official world has become false, speak in the language of those excluded from polite consensus, and then redirect the underlying refusal toward another purchasable identity within the same system. NEO spectacle.

The message becomes: Yes, everything is corrupt; but your salvation consists in selecting the correct faction, personality or nostalgic product. The dissenter is not silenced. He is recognized, classified and returned to circulation. The spectacle extends a laurel branch because it has learned that incorporation is often more effective than censorship.

#Was "pre internet" spectacle More Real?

Possibly, but we should ask what kind of reality is being remembered. The past contained more unmediated spaces, more durable objects, more physical community and less compulsory self-documentation. Those losses are real. Digital existence has intensified abstraction, isolation and the conversion of experience into display.

But cultural unity should not automatically be confused with authenticity. A society may feel coherent because people meaningfully share a world. It may also feel coherent because dissent is locally punished, alternative descriptions cannot circulate and everyone consumes the same narrow field of representations. What nostalgia remembers as a common reality may have been a closer to a common script.

This is why I react ambivalently when someone says that everyone would prefer to return to pre-internet times. I understand the longing for a world less saturated by digital mediation. I do not share the longing for a world in which centralized institutions possessed even greater control over what could become publicly thinkable.

The old culture’s “realness” was sometimes the felt solidity of an enclosure. Where raising the alarm of the wolves in sheepskin among the paddock got you labelled as "crazy" or "the boy who cried wolf".

#Good-Faith Life and the Divergence

The deeper issue is not whether television or the internet tells more lies. It is whether a person can live in good faith while the socially authorized description of life continually diverges from lived experience. Many people seem able to accept the available representation provisionally. They inhabit the cultural story without constantly testing its foundations. This is not necessarily stupidity. Some mixture of trust, habit and selective inattention is probably necessary for ordinary social existence.

But others experience contradictions in the story as physically oppressive. Once a person notices the divergence between representation and experience, participation requires a kind of splitting. One must publicly affirm what one privately knows to be incomplete, artificial or false. The cost is not merely intellectual disagreement. It is estrangement from one’s own perception.

That was what felt suffocating to me about the remaining broadcast culture of the 1990s. It was not that everyone literally possessed the same thoughts. It was that one had to translate every serious perception into the authorized language before it could become socially intelligible. The internet briefly suggested another possibility: that individuals could compare their forbidden perceptions without first submitting them to institutional interpretation.

That possibility still exists. It would be wrong to deny it. But it now increasingly exists inside a system that anticipates dissent, monetizes alienation, sorts every deviation into an identity category and presents the resulting conflict as another spectacle to be watched. We escaped the single television only to enter a world in which everyone carries a personalized television, performs inside it and helps program it for everyone else.

#Conclusion: The Spectacle After the Monologue

The advent of the internet was neither the defeat of the spectacle nor merely its continuation. It was more like a mutation. The centralized spectacle of broadcast society generated conformity by controlling the relatively small number of images through which society contemplated itself. The participatory spectacle generates fragmentation by inducing everyone to produce representations while controlling the architecture through which those representations acquire visibility.

The old world said: This is reality because everyone is watching it. The new world says: This is reality because everyone appears to be choosing it. The first depended upon the authority of the broadcaster. The second depends upon the apparent spontaneity of the network.

The internet gave ordinary people the ability to criticize the spectacle in public. It also gave the spectacle the ability to enter ordinary people, transforming identity, friendship, dissent and even private memory into continuous production for an unseen audience. Perhaps this is why the past can look both more real and more suffocating.

Its spectacle was narrower, more coherent and easier to identify. The present spectacle is more open-ended, personalized and difficult to locate because we now participate in producing it. The television once stood at the front of the room and demanded us choose between silence or violence. Now it speaks in our own voices (AI generated or not, right?).

Commentary;

Again I'm not particularly proud of using AI xD But this is something that has genuinely bothered me my whole life. It's a nice example to have in the future to point to. At very least I can remember it every time someone "longs for the old days", remember how suspicious such people are. Missing the days when you couldn't fight back (stupid fight or not). Idk. I'm sure it's been done here better than me and without AI and by more reputable users lol. But I remember, about a decade ago, I would always flinch when people said we needed to halt the discourse and/or go back to older world. Yes I am first to say I hate the cortisol-based/fueled grindset of working 80 hours a week for sub 30k a year net! But you can keep your old school social conformity propaganda networks! Lol.

What's in a "good" cultural monopoly narrative? Such is life?

I ask from within my heart, where did our failures start
If we must imagine ourselves as someone, somewhere else
And what does the future hold, if we're running low on health and hope
Our denial it speaks in tongues, there's monsters among us

u/2BCivil — 26 days ago
▲ 3 r/DiabolicOughts

(Simply) The way things are

There is a certain overt pomposity Living where many mistakes have "made it"
Where extortion is reframed as generosity
And forcing yourself on others, is for love, mistaken

Passing strange to be expected to fit in
With conscience itself as unforgivable sin,
Bearing true witness is cooked and branded liar;
Hegemonic social grill, with decency under fire

Things will mostly play nice
So long as you recite the script
And Versus the world is the price
Of giving just a little lip

Thou shalt trust the dharma of [current thing]
All self loathing trauma and who's to blame
Robust diorama of what we call the game
Each and every player uniquely all the same

Lifelong vigilance; duty, changer, and wiper
Of our collective ass; life's eternally dirty diaper
Beware, while funny 2B called a party pooper
Next step is planted manifesto and called a shooter

What is clear seeing and who sees
If everything visible is rehearsed or staged
The universe's comfort zone, it seems
Strangely calls you insecure if you look away

If the goal is persuasion,
Why is it so ashamed of truth?
If the goal is desensitization,
How much more is its point moot?

So guess I'll remain a clown in it's eyes
At least I don't need makeup
For it's hard to see eye to eye with the blind
And never seen a happier break-up

What’s yours is ours, when power needs a drink
What’s mine is mine, when you begin to think
Do not be dramatic, do not make such a scene
Don't assume ill motives, nor say just what you mean

Looking around, coercive shame abounds
Like can't seem to make any headway
Too much noticing puts you under ground,
It's just the way things are, in simple Segue

Truth is loved in theory
Like angels, flags, and wives
But when truth starts campaigning
Seems to ruin and weary people’s lives.

They love the truth insurmountable,
They love the truth in quotes.
They love when they can't be held accountable,
Because working from remote.

The Way Things Are wears khakis.
The Way Things Are says "sir".
The Way Things Are has policies
To blur what did occur.

The Way Things Are loves paperwork
The Way Things Are loves calm
The Way Things Are will steal from your hand
Then ask to read your palm

The Way Things Are is reasonable
The Way Things Are is wise
The Way Things Are is feasible;
It will rob you blind and then compliment your eyes

It never says, "I harmed you"
It says, "Let’s both move on"
It never says, "I used you"
It says instead, "The past is gone"

It never says, "I lied",
Instead "That’s your interpretation"
It never overtly says, "Submit",
But calls it "Healthy communication"

It never quite says, "Be silent"
It spouts, "Your anger makes me scared"
It never directly says, "Obey"
It pouts, "I really thought you cared"

Oh mercy, oh grace, the casual fraud,
Oh high-heel bootprint dressed as kiss,
Oh tender-handed parasite they call God
That calls resentment bliss

Oh sacred little loophole,
Through which comes all this crap
Oh conscience outsourced to group control,
Oh crown of thorns in plastic wrap

Oh yearning to be free from this,
Oh infernal blessed double standard,
Oh the sweet release sacred eviction notice,
On Eden's landlord’s calendar.

Blessed are the meek, they say,
Because meek don’t file complaints
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
They feed remorse to self-appointed saints
Blessed are the peacemakers,
Who keep the victim tame
Blessed are the pure in heart,
For they never mention names
Blessed is the occult art
Which calls extortion praise
Blessed is the collective gaslight fart
Keeping all enthralled in "sane" malaise

If stones cry out, they call the stones unstable
If noticing is noticed, they consign it all to fable
Make us all each other's prison guards
With some carrying silent alarms and paid under table

If wounds bear the record, they accuse the wound of hate
If the witness keeps on witnessing, they diagnose it as fake
Just like nothing ruins dinner like the bill for what was eaten
Nothing spoils communion quite like confessing how you’re beaten

Privatized gains/Socialized losses; sacred cows/golden crosses
Obvious vibe of pulling plug and asking who turned out the lights
Like common decency crucified and swept under the rug
Keeping common man in check and dead to rights

The way things are is perpetual hysterics
So laugh, clown, laugh, for the ponzi scheme clerics
Watch the blind tyrants demand eye contact and glare
Let the thieves contract out and discuss what’s fair
Leave them to their bread and circus
Leave them to their sacred roles
'Cause when the cards are on the table
The morally bankrupt house always folds

I’ll be here when it plays the martyr
With my clownish little grin,
Watching all this "holy" order
Track its muddy footprints in

Perhaps what they preach of as "God's love"
Is simply something with which I'll never reconcile
I've never once agreed to or voted for it
And its actions don't match its words own style

Maybe I'm not healed enough to bless it or just obtuse
Not numb enough to accept the lie
Nor wise enough to call systemic abuse
The wind or weather passing by

Just awake enough to notice
Just damned enough to care
Just foolish enough to say it
While they all pretend it’s fair

There is a certain overt comedy
To being told you’re out of line
By the same world killing Socrates
And calling its judgements divine

So no, I will not praise the script
No, I will not pray to their star
No, I will not call it grace
It’s Simply The Way Things Are,
In boldface cringe, Trying to save face.

reddit.com
u/2BCivil — 1 month ago
▲ 3 r/CultOfCyberfury

Truth (TM)

"I've" often wondered if it is better to "exist" or "not".

Recently had a few "rude awakenings" as it were.

Rant thread? Rant threat!? Haha.

So. Ego need not apply, just observation.

This week in "I'm the sacrificial lamb" I guess we can call it.

Right, to the point. People like to pretend they like or seek the truth. But in reality, what they are pointing to when they say this, is, that they want their lies to seen as truth, paid lip service to, worshipped, and celebrated. And a feast thrown for them bi-annually.

That; is all. God? Buddha? Jesus? Trimurti? Pastor? Priest? President? Prime Minister? Parents? Boss? All of these are precisely and exactly, the same excuse, to keep you in line. All the same logical fallacy; appeal to authority. These are all the same big stone used both to throw at you again and again, and also to hide behind so the "stoners" can also abandon responsibility and/or place it upon your shoulders instead.

What inspired this post (besides a lifetime of observing this fact) was I have been living in the same apartment complex for the past 3 years now, but I'd been working 80 hours a week. Since I've lived in this state, my water bill has never been more than the [default lowest flat rate]. But since I moved here, every few months, my bill would spike $100-150 dollars and I couldn't figure out why because I was too busy, working all day every day.

Well then I quit my job. And now I found why my water bill has been spiking. Apparently every few months a cleaning crew comes and hooks a pressure washer up to my water line for a whole week and pressure washes the entire parking lot and driveway to my apartments with my water line exclusively. They are currently on the 3rd day of it and not even halfway done.

I've never been here for or notified about this process. But I have noticed every few months the parking lot/driveway looks cleaner and my water bill spikes hard, I just never put two and two together.

I know I mock it a lot and say "That's just God's love and generosity" and this is precisely what I mean when I say that. God's love and generosity means, you are perpetually abused, extorted from, and in many cases used up and tossed aside, and then preached to that your conscience is the only problem.

This is, the "Truth" that people like to crucify in the name of worshipping pretty "noble" lies instead of acknowledging the systemic and callous disregard and abuse. Everyone has some alleged "higher power" they point to, to justify their "sins" against one another. "Our ego/echo chamber is bigger than yours, it's okay when we do it to you, God is on our side!".

Idk. Maybe I just want to get that off my chest. Not paying my rent this month until I see that water bill, and for every penny above the flat rate I'm asking for that knocked off my rent. Maybe it's petty but 3rd day of being woken up by and listening to my water being used in a really loud pressure washer all day (yesterday was 14 hours - 14 hours!).

Why does humanity have this propensity to make conscience the perpetual sacrificial lamb? Am I just being mean and petty? Why haven't I ever been notified or told that they pressure wash the entire road with MY water every few months, and why must only I bear the expense alone?

Idk. This isn't even that big a deal to me really. This is peanuts compared to the egregious "sins" and abuse I've suffered at the hands of "Humanity" and "God's [alleged] generosity" or "Buddha nature" or whatever other "bullshit" people peddle to justify their "lies they call truth and holiness". Holier than thouness?

Idk! Feel free to rant or rebuke me as well! At least it is honest and direct! Unlike those whom "sin" in the name of "God's love"! Smallest violin I know, a few hundred dollars every few months for the "greater good" without being consulted for 3 years straight isn't too big a deal. Until you realize you've been working 80 hour weeks for sub $40k a year. Which is a whole other thing... taxes and Medicare taking around 25% your annual income every year when you don't even have benefits or healthcare yourself. Oy vey.

For full "truth" guess I know how owners of intellectual property feel about IP piracy.

Bullshit is close to Godliness! Does the Bullshit have the Buddha nature?

reddit.com
u/2BCivil — 1 month ago
▲ 1 r/sorceryofthespectacle

Unit of Spectacle; Jealousy (250)

Lazy post from mobile, almost more shower thought really I admit. Guess with advent of AI slop it can be hard to be high effort withour using AI nowadays anyway so maybe it's for the best. Shooting from the hip. Idk. Anyway!

Visited my parents tonight and we watched Bolt (kids movie about family basically). It got me really remembering 90s and how even then I felt this... coercive push to see things a certain way. I looked at say celebrities then and I had a distinct lack of Jealousy. Probably because in the 90s we learned anything of value we tried to share or display would get stolen instantly. So us more innocent types ended up somewhat alienated or disassociated from mainstream media (plus I never had a tv or phone or internet until much later in life but anyway).

Got me thinking, there's no avenue in this life/world to really discuss in good faith the non consensual framework of reality/life itself. There is perpetual detournament of the topic into petty games of jealousy (ie ad hominem or status games/recommendations of specific lifestyles). No agent or institution seems willing to sit with the raw nature of the question, "did we consent to life".

I've had several conversations recently where everyone stonewalled me with "you don't know god" and I asked them to show him to me and theh essentially said they can't. What's the difference between that and lying? People preach thag god is this or that but cannot practice it or demonstrate it. Is that what "god is not mocked" means? It mocks itself, doesn't need our help? I'm going somewhere with this obviously if you haven't guessed it.

"I the Lord am the God of Jealousy and my name means Jealous". Jeremiah somewhere (again I'm typing from mobile shower thought).

It makes me think of simulation and simulacra. Namely that if there is a transcendantal truth upon which all reality is a copy of (including plato's hypothetical realm of forms or ideas) essentially. I am thinking what is the mechanism which brings our conscious state into being from which we play this game of jealousy (economics and Spectacle). Everything in life is a sort of advertisement for (or, warning against) this or that lifestyle it is seen. But rarely is the nature of the very medium of existence addressed directly. I've been noticing that jealousy, as the Lord says in the OT, seems to be the "glue" or "binding mechanism/function" of ALL Spectacle. Sports you have fans cheering for their team, is a form of jealousy. People preaching their (interpretations of their) Gods, stem from jealousy of differing lifestyles. God himself in the bible says he is the God of Jealousy and all Flesh. Even I myself, lacking interest in most other forms of human activities, decided I wanted to build a PC out of jealousy of seeing others having them all through my youth (and knowing my parents didn't like technology).

I have considered that jealousy is ultimately perhaps a type of fear. Of lacking, at least a sort of FOMO or looking smaller in eyes of others for lacking something (hence jealousy is type of fear/desire). There fear and desire are also seen as synonyms in the very word "jealousy". I've hinted at it many times over the years but I don't see much difference between "spectacle" and life itself, in particular as it is described in the bible ("I am the life, trust me, ye of little faith").

So I see 3 stages of absorption/faith in life/spectacle; the blind faith (some might call hylic or NPC) which can be either religious or secular or both - the "normie" whom choses to take everything at face value, complete immersion in life/spectacle. Then there is the doubting/questioning or "lost sheep" or whatever we call it; can now feel as if they see something is off and not sure if they can go back to being completely immersed/hylic again or not (either secular or religious/spiritual, still same thing I see it as at least). Then the 3rd which is a combination of the two, the "awakened" or whatever, which has accepted more broadly either that it is impossible or irrelevant to know what life/spectacle really is and goes back to enthusiastic embrace of life/spectacle (I think Nietzsche was advocating for this in his later works with his artistic Socrates and other themes). 1 and 3 can look identical, hard to tell apart. Only difference is 3 isn't completely absorbed by the spectacle/life and can give it up/walk away easily with no attachments where would be more difficult for 1.

But through all 3 phases, the #1 thing I see as relationship to spectacle/life is as the God of the bible said; jealousy, as prime motivation. Like me right now, my bills are roughly $1.5k a month and I have had no income since January 2026 and been burning through my savings with no financial assistance whatever. So "jealousy" of owning renting my place to stay to keep all my creature comforts (pc etc) keeps me looking for a job half-heartedly (though I quit my job due to burnout from consistent 6-7 day a week work schedule for past 3 years straight nonstop when I signed on for a 45 hour workweek 6 years ago).

So idk. Maybe I'm just rambling and should have put this through GPT and posted it to shower thoughts. But I really do think there is something here. What binds most people to life/spectacle (Am I wrong to see them as synonymous, as per simulation and simulacra? I'll try to reread it been years since I thumbed through it) or specifically their infatuation with it, is jealousy? As the god of the bible specific states, he is the god of flesh and jealousy, and all whom have flesh are thus bound by jealousy? You know what I'm trying to say? Idk. I just feel I've been trying to move this conversation forward since 2015 on the internet and it never has budged an inch. Everyone always detournaments my possition into their pwn evangelism of their lifestyles or whatever, or saying we need to make our own meaning (as if I hadn't already tried that and found it just another vanity ultimately as well). Is something true to we need to find our specific calling, as per Bolt and knowing what real family is.

But yeah. I really do think there's something too it at least, that life and spectacle are synonymous, as their unit of measure of presumed relevancy alike is specifically jealousy. Am I wrong in this? Feel free to share thoughts even if just to throw tomatoes at me. Think I have pretty thick skin. I'm not even sure this is the main point I want to get at. But it's closest I could think of tonight. Aka 250 year day thing. Thanks for reading.

(And yeah I know, no one likes a basket case, I get it, but even if I weren't "a loser" for large parts of my life, I'd still have the burning question of the validity and consensuality of life/spectacle)

Guess it really is all a dream within a dream? Did have a dream vaguely about that last night too (specifically the vanity of jealousy in the dream, because you "can't take it with you" when you wake up). Anyway as always it sounded more profound in my head but typing it out on my pocket black mirror it sounds trite and schizo 😂

reddit.com
u/2BCivil — 2 months ago
▲ 6 r/zen_poetry

Lets B normal

The forgotten oatmeal lurks in back of fridge
My other poems all quite unhinged
A barber splitting hairs on selling hats
All self aware as Nanquan's Cat

Okay I won't place this bet
Alarm ringing and haven't slept yet
Time to go about the day
Don't need forecast, sandals melted away

Sun rises with urge to brush teeth
New day, new you, which to greet
Coffee or tea, why not both
Rediscover what we know

Idk forgot how to make a normal poem maybe

Something like that

Or actually no

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u/2BCivil — 2 months ago
▲ 1 r/DiabolicOughts

It's not a cult, it's Digornio

[Sorry it's been a while, I'll add this one to the pile]

You know it’s not a cult, it’s butter.
Make sure to spread evenly, brother.
Don’t question the churn,
Just mince, soften and learn
How to melt into each other.

Gather 'round teh breakfast shrine,
Evening wear and cutlery divine,
Each piece of meat is vegan; solemn
Every doubt is ego problem.

Be smooth. Be Pure. Follow. Yield.
The truer self must be revealed.
All merely ignorance, coldness, fear, and crust.
In sigma carbs with fats, my child, trust.

More the hole than the part
Salt and pepper, leave no trace
Quite off and skid mark
In thought's place.

They call it love when edges blurred.
They call it peace where no one stirred.
They call it grace to sink your teeth
Into entre devoid of meat.

Who needs truth when toast is warm?
Who needs doubt when fats conform?
Who needs eyes when all can see
The sacred flub of unity?

Brother Margarine took stand
Oily scripture in his hand
Sister Ghee helped with the lie:
“Sacred cows transcend the why.”

Every monk with lacquered jaw
Recited churn and called it law.
Every master, soft and pale,
Plunged his knife inside the grail.

"It’s not control, it’s care and bread
Just butter both sides of your head
The world is cruel, the pan is hot
Become the thing that you are not."

We all become a breakfast roast,
Half a man and half just toast,
Smeared with meaning, served with jam,
Praised for not knowing that 'I am'.

All mu, all moo, all dairy light,
Ghost given up without a fight,
A pasture dressed as paradise,
Sermon served at market price.

Those whom accidentally witness
Full spread truth shall not see litmus
A little leaven rises whole lump
Thou shalt not see our mountains as a hump

Ignore the [f]lies
Ignore the mold
Ignore the breakfast already cold
Ignore the freedom of the skies
Ignore the prayer towards ignorance
Ignore the petulant indolence
Ignore the saint behind the meal
Ignore the seeing and call that real.

So my brothers, keep your chub.
Keep your circle. Keep your grub.
Keep your softened little throne.
Preach to all outsiders they must atone.

For if truth still means a thing
Our repast much as such sing
Of crispy brunch half assed so well;
“Obey our warmth or freeze in hell.”

Pass the bread.
If not the test.
Wipe some stains off of my chest.
Bless the churn and sacred fat,
The velvet cow, the guru hat.

Let us chant until we melt.
Let us worship that we felt.
Let us grease the final gate
Call it digestion, and not hate.

I saw the menu and the list.
I saw the indolence and the spell.
I saw the recompense all too well.
I saw the something a bit amiss. I saw the knife and the lie.
I saw the life and fear to ask why.
I saw that it's not just a cult;
But more conscious injury sautéed in insult.

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u/2BCivil — 2 months ago
▲ 1 r/zen_poetry

Swatting the F[lies] they call God

If noticing was the unforgivable sin,
Would you still bless the cage you’re in?
Would you kneel at the scholar’s trough
Or curse their "wisdom" in fake cough?

Quote me a saint, a sage, a chair,
a man with tenure, vacant stare;
pin wings on rot and call it grace,
then shart a halo to save face.

They come in swarms with sacred names,
credentialed mouths and borrowed flames,
fat little gospels, buzzing proud,
the same dead meat, but twice as loud.

"Who are you to question this?"
Ye oldest hymn of cowardice.
"Great minds have said it is so."
Greater minds just have to know.

For truth, if truth still had a spine,
Wouldn't need robes or holy wine,
No footnotes stacked as funeral stones
Need sanctify those reborn bones.

A throne is just a painted chair.
A prayer is but a sale of air.
All funeral thin in pastural endurance
More circumspect than circumference

A mastiff taught in respecting it;
A master wolf in sheepskin;
A doctrine dressed in velvet sin;
still reeks of what is trapped within.

Swat goes another divine decree.
Swat another kind of certainty.
Swat the fly with God’s own tone,
Laying eggs inside the known.

They call it faith when thought is drowned.
They call it depth when no one sounds.
They call it peace when tongues are tied.
They call it love when doubt has died.

Come, curate dread and sell despair.
Breathe in death and call it air.
Post your void with perfect tags.
Sell a soul of funeral rags.

The lotus blooms in every lie
Where no one asks the soil why
Smile, subscribe, transcend, pretend;
A sermon loops but does not end.

All mu, all meme, all borrowed light,
Chanting through the sponsored night.
The spectacle, with angel breath,
Sells meaning by the ounce of death.

Each and every buzzing little fraud
Hides behind the breath of God
Praise the swarm and curse the hand
That dares to see where flies will land.

Let them gather, black with need,
Around the wound where slogans feed.
Let them anoint the rot with awe.
Let them mistake the buzz for law.
Let hate be their creed;
Let true love be the only thaw.

When there is no incense left to burn
No master’s phrase. No wheel to turn.
No higher corpse to quote as bread.
No crown to place upon the dead.

Look to this: the open palm,
The honest list, the murdered calm,
A slap that ends the sacred drone
And leaves the silence all alone.

Mosquitoes even at their peek
Cannot turn the other cheek.

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u/2BCivil — 2 months ago
▲ 5 r/zen_poetry

Just something

If noticing was the unforgivable sin
Would you still love me and begin again
If the end was where we could again in sin, would

Should the start as such so as such Astarte
In dream or part, Besot or not, as for/from ridicule depart
This nightmare and all unawares retrieve
Lovestruck sunrises and indolent Ideocracies
What these Vitruvian Idiocy and Idiocracy but for the memes
From thelemic themes idiot relieved A muse excused for her wet dreams

And so here we fetter out
Whims of such unwanted or expected clout
Words that preach in arrogant doubt
A world devoid of introspection

We worship sin
All devout to not knowing it
Lets just say we love
And avoid reprise from what lurks above

Spend your soul on borrowed light
When the spectacle feels just right
Dance until the signal dies
Meaning sponsored by our lies

Repeating in refrain
Your universal genius disdain
For there is no such truth
But what feels good to us, forsooth

All mu, all mu; bless your heart
Any fraud can play that part
Weakest meat thinks it's real loud
The deepest truth's the loudest sound

Mock AI as happenstance
All shit the bench without the pants
Quote a master, dodge the point
Call confusion self-anoint

Come one come all, Curate despair,
Breathe in death and call it air
For here any void is for sale;
Just like, subscribe, and inhale.

Merely breathe, and don't ask why
Your lotus blooms in every lie
Smile politely, nod, transcend
Subscribe now or transmission ends

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u/2BCivil — 2 months ago
▲ 5 r/sorceryofthespectacle

Where do you [Reader] draw the line at where "Spectacle" begins?

Sorry unsolicited question. Title, basically. Something I completely forgot to ask. I can elaborate but you don't have to read, as title is all I'm really concerned with. Specifically, a recent GPT question/trend I've been noticing triggered this.

Specifically I consistently assume "God" as meaning of "reality". Not saying I know what either of those are (God or reality). But, generally, you know, we (or at least I) assume that our perception of reality exists, to "know God" or be taught something about our relationship with [it].

The thing I've noticed is that GPT specifically and consistently denies this. I can think of dozens of recent examples, but most pronounced in my mind is mine from earlier today; I asked essentially, "is God a part of the spectacle". Chicken or egg. Did "God create the medium through which spectacle emerged" or "did 'God' emerge as necessary part of the spectacle". It answered the following;

#GPT;

"Spengler, Debord, Nietzsche, Ellul, Serres, even parts of Zen—they all diagnose, in different languages, a loss of living participation. Not simply a loss of belief. A loss of participatory confidence."

"Spengler sees cultures as living organisms. A culture begins with what he calls a great "soul"—a shared symbolic world that people inhabit almost unconsciously. Eventually, according to him, that creative culture hardens into civilization. Forms remain, but the animating faith recedes. Institutions become administrative. Art becomes self-referential. Religion becomes moralism or sentimentality. Politics becomes technique."

"Debord's Spectacle is almost like the media-technological version of that process. Participation gives way to representation. You don't live history—you consume it. You don't have festivals—you watch events. Identity itself becomes something displayed."

"I do think Debord can be read as describing one mechanism by which Spengler's "civilization" perpetuates itself."

"Where I would hesitate is this sentence: 'God itself can ultimately be seen as the original grifter.'"

"I understand what you're pointing toward—you've talked before about the problem of non-consensual existence, mandatory participation, and the feeling that existence itself presents demands before consent. But notice that this conclusion depends on identifying God with the structure of obligation itself. Many religious thinkers would reject that identification outright."

"For example, Simone Weil distinguishes force from God almost completely. For her, necessity—the crushing weight of existence—is not identical with divine love. Likewise, Job's protest isn't dismissed by the text; it's given almost an entire book. Even Ecclesiastes is astonishingly honest about exhaustion. So I'd separate: the experience of existence as compulsory, the social systems that intensify that experience, and whatever one means by 'God.' Those aren't automatically the same thing."

Which is cart before the horse? Guess it depends where you are philosophically/existentially; or what level and intensity of alienation/exhaustion you feel. Or, at least, GPT consistently argues with my on the point of "God as the meaning of existence" which I've never really considered in context of the Spectacle. Again, title; Where do we draw the line at where "Spectacle" begins?

I suppose you can only really "judge" life after we die (or at least rather we reconcile with it's judgement of us us). But in this life, left to "our own devices" we either act as economic agents (the spectacle is nothing other than the economy developing for itself) to get by, or as an active manifestation of who we are. I'm more the former I'd say as often who I am is at odds with the "mandatory participation" aspect of existence (not sure if as against "God" or "spectacle"; are they the same?).

From the Spectacle's own mouth, Billy Talent once said; "Where is the line, where is the line? 'Cause some of us aren't blind".'

Is "God" then the degree to which we resist complete assimilation with spectacle, if God has "nothing to do with spectacle" and isn't just another would-be ruler coopting your attention to it's "Brand"? Or, is complete assimilation to spectacle, what it means to be "Godly" or at least "Christian beneficence towards one's enemies"? Why then for example does JAYSUS say "be generous to your enemies" but also "depart from me workers of iniquity" (a contradiction? Or, he doesn't practice what he preaches? AKA God as spectacle not practicing what it preaches? Or at least charlatan or IQ test?).

Idk enough rambling on my part. Where do YOU draw the line? Or is to do so, throwing the baby out with the gamer girl bath water? I'm honestly curious and thanks!

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u/2BCivil — 2 months ago
▲ 2 r/CultOfCyberfury

What are we doing here

As people, as a society, as "God's children" (lol), as arbitrary economic/spiritual caste system; as a collective or individuals.

I've always had stupid opinions and arguments. Lets get that out of the way, sure.

But watching Bladed Angel's recent video on the $650,000 electric vehicle that looks like a spider man luchbox from the 90s, it dawned on me. I could lift my consciousness up out of my stinky meat suit, and drop it like a record needle in any other human body in the world, and the same question would persist and go unanswered.

There is not a single role or identity in existence that can sufficiently answer this question; "what the F-!8 are we doing here".

Collecting materialism toys or spiritual ego points for some arbitrary club we may never even see or want to join anyway? Making a super big air conditioned ant hill? Making dumb arguments sound smart as they can?

I don't know. "I" have always been the first to say that identity is a temporary aggregate of innumerable contingencies. But you know, putting yourself in anyone else's shoes, the same question of relevancy/vanity just becomes more pronounced as you analyze all their karmic attachments and ideations. There is no ultimate "why" other than children in a play pen playing with toys allotted them by someone else.

What are we really doing here?

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u/2BCivil — 2 months ago
▲ 0 r/spiritualitytalk

Eating Crow; Hypnagogia

Well this is awkward on multiple levels. I'm aware of the current (or at least, apparent) "Christian" brigade going on here and had a few laughs recently at that expense, my bad. I know. You have no idea how hard I have been holding my tongue from saying "ya'll need Jesus" as a joke. In well meaning good humor ofc. But that's not what I'm hear about today. Intentional typos aside.

So last night there was a post about hearing voices before sleep which I dismissed as a well known clinical state. Hell I even admitted I used to have it intense all the time. Full on hallucinated/downloaded entire lifetimes in seconds.

But rarely have I eaten crow so quick and fast. Causation isn't correlation and allat I know. Get to the point, right. 2 nights ago I went to bed with alarm set to go to county seat/DMV. But yesterday (Monday) morning, though I woke up with every intent to go, I had intense visual hallucination of my car power cutting out/breaking down (power out) on way home. The weight of the visualization was so intense it all but physically restrained me from going to my car. So I decided, okay, I'll go tomorrow (aka today).

Today, I went out to start my car; and it wouldn't start. There's no possible reason for this. It's a brand new $200 battery I just bought November 2025. My waking dream, "Hypnagogic" prophecy, came true.

I've known this for a long time, generally speaking, "awareness is all that is" is a common theme I see underlying most spirituality (even zen). IE the tacit inference behind most presumed/apparent teachings (what they point to). And this Hypnagogic state as I have known it, has historically (for me at least) been prophetic. Most of the time, showing me things, there is no possible way my conscious mind could know. IE what is happening with people over 1,000 miles away or around the world. People I briefly met online once or twice, I'll hear entire conversations in the Hypnagogic state, which I later find, actually happened with such online acquaintances (as they tell me later).

So. The post the other day (and my experience past 2 days) implied there is a deeper "spiritual side" to the Hypnagogic state. My fault for not seeing/reading the other comment there I guess. Just felt an urge to go ahead and write a new post about it as I've seldom seen such "instant karma" or "eating crow" the very same day. I mean, I knew, I've had this many times in the past, where the Hypnagogic state revealed things later 100% confirmed as FACT. But I've never before had such instantaneous confirmation! We replaced the entire cables and headers on the battery terminal with the battery! I ALWAYS turn my lights off. Although now I almost know for sure there must be something draining the battery, I can't afford to be spending $400 a year on new batteries. But seems the Hypnagogic state only diagnoses/brings to awareness acute problems/prophecies; they are not specific diagnostics so much as explicit warnings/intuitions.

Anyway, as they say, 1 time is coincidence. But at this point, I've lost count, but could probably readily recall a dozen or so recent instances of Hypnagogic state affirming things beyond my ability to consciously know beyond subconscious inferences I didn't want to think about.

Tldr I guess awareness really is, all there is, huh?

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u/2BCivil — 2 months ago