Same · as · a · Wildcat

I'm looking at you, wcg...

I saw the stills of aurorae on Saturn from the Cassini probe. The question is, would you be able to see them from Titan? How could I find out?

My characters in my SF novel are currently on Titan, and/or a space station orbiting Titan. I'm trying to work in some local color, as it were...

Another question: I know Titan is pretty much methane and other hydrocarbons. What, therefore, would it be really easy to make there?

Once upon a time, I was told by a certain Reclaiming person that I was conceited and expected people to treat me like a "big witch," or something to that effect. That was, no coincidence, shortly before I left Reclaiming. From time to time over the years I have sensed a "who the hell does that bitch think she is?" vibe wafting in my general direction.

Look...I self-initiated at 20. Later I was told by a Alex-offshoot priestess that the rite I'd come up with by myself was very similar to the one she used for her 2nd degree initiations.

I helped run a group that met every week for two years and did not implode. In the process I helped introduce several people to witchcraft who either went on to become leaders in the community or came back to me later and told me I'd changed their life. That was when I was 25.

I built connections between the Pagan communities in Chattanooga and Atlanta with local African Traditional Religions and Native Americans, enlisting said Pagans in activism directed by the latter and thus putting our money where our mouths were in a way that counts.

I was in a Pagan band. I wrote music for the Goddess 2000 Project in Atlanta. I gave a public prayer representing the Pagan Cluster at a SOAW protest in front of 10,000 people. I've been involved in more projects and public rituals and outreach and general Pagan shenanigans than I can list here.

I started a Reclaiming group in Atlanta. (That one did implode, but I brought teachers down and sponsored and taught classes and generally got that ball rolling.)

I worked as a professional psychic off and on for ten years, and taught classes on Tarot and psychic development all over the Southeast, in venues large and small.

My Feri teacher has been practicing for thirty years. He wrote a lot of liturgy and exercises the rest of the trad uses, wrote an essay which Margot Adler quoted extensively in the updated edition of Drawing Down the Moon, and is one of the most intelligent people I know. (I know a lot of bright people). He is extremely selective about who he teaches. To my knowledge, he has only initiated one person in the last ten years. That's me.

So yeah, I do think I'm the shit. Nor do I think that devalues the contributions of other people, or other approaches. Rather the opposite. Just because you haven't heard of someone already, or don't know everything they've been up to, doesn't mean they don't know what they are talking about. They may have trod paths you are unaware of. I know what I know, and I do what I do. I'm proud of that.

I already knew most of the stuff in How to Explain Things to Libertarians because I am clever like that.

But what do you do when you tell someone that we HAD untrammeled capitalism in the late 19th century, and it sucked for anyone who was not a robber baron...and their response is to claim all of those problems were REALLY caused by government interference, so you've PROVED THEIR POINT?

You conclude that you are talking to a crazy person who will lie baldfaced and make shit up in order to keep their ideology intact, is what. And disengage. Which is what I did.

I don't know whether to congratulate myself for being willing to question my previous experiences that Rand fan = Fundamentalist and give someone a chance to prove otherwise, or berate myself for attempting to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear while teaching it to sing. I just don't know.

I went to see it last night with thinkmonkey. I found it freaky and hilarious.

It also made me strangely nostalgic for the good old days when I was learning to be a psychonaut cyberpunk kung-fu witch and conducting psychic experiments with all my friends. We may not have gotten better results than the Army, but at least we didn't waste any taxpayer money to do it. We also managed to have a quasi-Pagan/occulty/psychic development group that met every week for two years and did not implode. We had a bit of drama here and there, but hell...most of the group was under 25, and all of us were under 30. It comes with the territory, and the hormones. Later experience revealed to me that we actually had very little drama, and more importantly we didn't have the gut-wrenching, soul-destroying trainwrecky kind. The group broke apart slowly because people moved away or got interested in other things. No splosions.

We also didn't kill any goats. We freaked out a few people though. I consider both of those to be pluses.

He has grown three inches since July. He is growing out of pants and his shirts all suddenly ride up. He has topped five feet. 5'1" to be exact.

He is gaining on me.

In addition, he is bulking up a bit. His shoulders are noticeably broader, and he has gained a bit of weight. He hasn't reached the beanpole stage; he's gearing up for it. This is only the beginning.

Well, I guess I better save my pennies to spend them on clothes...

One of the folks on my friends list (hi capi!) has a post about how it takes a lot of character and self-respect to carry on a monogamous relationship. Poly people on the other hand like to talk about how it takes a lot of self-awareness and honesty to carry on a polyamorous relationship. Relationships, everyone seems to agree, are a lot of work and require maturity.

Well, damn. What are all of us flawed, temperamental, self-doubting, indifferently truthful, lazy people to do?

I had a boyfriend in college who asked me to marry him after we'd been dating for two or three months.

I said "No. Ask me again in a year." As it turns out, he didn't. He was too busy sleeping with someone else behind my back. So, um, yay for my instincts.

I've also experienced creepy stalker behavior, complete with death threats. They never start out that way; initially that person was intensely attentive. So I don't find it cute or "romantic" when someone is all over me. It's true that some people are just like that; love makes you crazy. Also it's flattering to think I have that effect on someone. It's also true that manipulative people try to get in under your radar and get you to form an attachment to them as quickly as possible, so you won't notice their other shenanigans through the haze of beta endorphins.

I don't think it requires discussion, though. I would just take the time I require to feel like I have enough space...a day or so. If the person's response to that is to get angry that I'm not responding fast enough...that is a huge red flag. If they are Very Hurt, that's a different one. Gently concerned that they offended me is fine, and I'll just let them know that they didn't, though really...this is what dating etiquette is for, people. As silly as some of those rules are, they have their uses. One of which is to allow a romantic relationship in the early stages to proceed (or not) with a minimum of calamity.

Though, as a witch, I've visited the Isle of Apples and returned. I don't believe in Hell.

I don't believe in the idea that you are punished in your next life for actions you take in this one. I think it's far too easy to take that idea and extend it to something very destructive, the notion that if someone has misfortune they must have earned it. I repudiate that.

I personally believe in reincarnation because of specific experiences I have had. I'm not absolutely attached to the idea, however. I think it's enough to live the life you have, be the best human being you can be, and the rest will look after itself.

I do think there's one thing that's irrefutable. If you believe or hope or suspect that you might return to the world, consider: You will come back to the world that you helped make.

From textsfromlastnight.com:

(631): hooked up with a girl who spoke elfish last night..what up 8th grade lord of the rings fantasies

So...What do y'all think? Is the ability to speak Sindarin or Quenya sexy? (Which one is hotter?)

Ban? No. However, I would question the judgment of a librarian who bought "120 Days of Sodom" for a high school library.

In an ideal world, libraries would be lovely alternate worlds with infinite resources where one could find any book ever written. They aren't. They have budgets, and the school has an educational purpose. Asking questions about what that purpose is, and how it is being served with the resources available, is a legitimate, realistic, and important question, without getting into issues of censorship. Spending those resources on Upton Sinclair rather than the Marquis de Sade isn't censorship, it's common sense. On the other hand, if you think you can make a case for the Marquis de Sade, go for it.

How to Explain Things to Libertarians

Quoth the author: "Libertarians’ historically illiterate insistence that socialism is synonymous with totalitarianism..."

I swoon.

"Isn't that book the Bible of right-wing losers?" - Lisa Simpson

I shall expand upon my criticisms of Rand. I'm in that kind of mood.

I do grant, as someone on Goodreads said, that the books are useful. Anyone who is a fan of Ayn Rand is someone to avoid. It's good to know that before you get too involved. And unlike more personal questions, it's easy to work into casual party conversation: "Hey, what do you think of Ayn Rand's books?" If the person's eyes light up and they declaim upon their admiration of Howard Roark or John Galt, you have the opposite of a keeper. You know to throw that one back.

I mentioned in comments that I read The Fountainhead as a teenager. I was going to enter the essay contest the Ayn Rand Institute runs every year. They offered a lot of money, and I'd already won a couple of state-level writing competitions.

I couldn't bring myself to write anything that wasn't scathing.

The books are terrible in all respects. They are bad art, bad writing, foully mis-representative of human behavior, laughably improbable, bone-headedly self-contradictory, morally putrid, and pragmatically incoherent. Even the supposed free-market ideals which Rand espouses with such Darwinian cheer don't actually appear in her books. There is something the characters call that, but even they don't actually believe that it should apply to them. For example, Roark's clients don't like his work and he can't make money as an architect. This is seen, incomprehensibly, as evidence that they are stupid and he is a genius, instead of being the only real example of the free market winnowing someone out that actually happens. When he blows up his own building this is proof of his ideals instead of an appalling waste of resources; instead of being rightfully excoriated as a trifler and an inefficient wastrel he's a hero. Why? We don't know. There is no sensible reason given. Nothing any of her characters do in The Fountainhead makes any sense, or bears any resemblance to how actual persons behave. If you dare ask why of a Randroid, you will be told that you just don't understand.

They are all like that, her books. They are appalling wastes of paper product and binding glue. They are wastes of ink, and of the effort required to lift them from the shelf and turn the page. You could spend those calories and that time watching Wife Swap re-runs.

If it were only that. If only...a waste of time is perhaps not a good thing, but it's your own business. You might read Ayn Rand, or watch Fox News, in perfect peace for all of me if you would just exhibit a moderate degree of decency and decorum and keep it to yourself. I myself like to read textsfromlastnight.com and chuckle with schadenfreude. It is a perfect waste of time, and not nice of me, but essentially harmless.

Alas, no. Rand devotees are right, they know they are right, and they have to share, with, as noted in the GQ article, a grim impervious defiance of logic rivaled only by Fundamentalists.

And that points to the real, true and basic contradiction of the Randroids. They declare, with that special dollop of Nietzschean contempt, that they are free and the rest of us (of course) are sheep. But if you cannot ever reflect upon an ideology, if you can't evaluate its limits or especially admit when it fails (and the Randian philosophy has spectacularly failed on all levels and by all measures), if you not only can't admit that it might be wrong but believe anyone who dares to disagree is actually evil, then you aren't free at all. You are ideology's slave.

The Bitch is Back

Goddamn, the experience of being 19 years old and reading Ayn Rand! The crystal-shivering-at-the-breaking-pitch intensity of it! Not just for that 19-year-old, but for everybody unfortunate enough to be caught in his psychic blast radius. Is "experience" even the right word for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged? Ayn Rand's idolization of Mickey Spillane and cigarettes and capitalism—an experience? Her tentacular contempt for Shakespeare and Beethoven and Karl Marx and facial hair and government and "subnormal" children and the poor and the Baby Jesus and the U.N. and homosexuals and "simpering" social workers and French Impressionism and a thousand other things the flesh is heir to: experience?


As I said elsewhere: Human beings don't work the way she says they do. Societies don't work the way she says they do. Economies don't work the way she says they do. Her books are painfully awful and warp the term "literary art" even as one hesitates to apply it. Yet her ideas and novels persist because they feed the most indestructible and gullibility-producing force in the universe, human egotism.

From virginia_fell, because I think it's hilarious and so will thinkmonkey