If You're Actively Advocating For Genocide, No Matter How Pure Your Political Theory, You Are A Shitheel

I had a sad today. Realized that with fall coming on strong, all the butterflies are going away. I haven't seen a colorful flitter bug flying around in days. Oh well.

Thinking back, I guess one of the more surreal episodes of my life is when I would serve Mass as an altar boy and I was wearing my Slayer Reign in Blood t-shirt under my cassock. Then biked home listening to Morbid Angel on my Walkman. Just doing my part for minor blasphemy.

Watterson pulled no punches

Right now, in the West Philippine Sea and South China Sea, there's an unofficial naval conflict going on between the Chinese Coast Guard, "Chinese fishing boats", and various SE Asian nations. Basically, the CCP has decided to basically seize fishing grounds, lay claim to various islands and shoals and try to gain control of the sea lanes. They've been intruding into EEZ areas of smaller nations chasing fish, and are eyeballing the enormous amounts of trade that pass through the area. There's also huge oil fields and natural gas reserves under water that China is eager to control.

"Volunteer fisherman" in special fishing boats that have been reengineered for ramming have been pushing other nations out of their fishing grounds. Much like the little green men of the Crimean invasion, these little blue men (from their blue outfits) are deniable assets used to enforce Chinese will. They basically suck as fishing boats now, but boy howdy can they damage other fishing boats.

Along with this, the Chinese have been building land onto reefs by dredging to create instant sovereignty land which they then claim. Other nations have responded with derelict ships being anchored across reefs that act as permanent bases.

Recently, during a supply run to a Philippine base ship, the Chinese Coast Guard decided to intervene and called the whole thing an intrusion into Chinese waters. They rammed the supply ship and made a hostile boarding brandishing swords, knives and axes, the Philippino sailors fought back with bare hands and whatever weapon like object they could lay hands on. A Philippino sailor reportedly lost his thumb in the fracas along with other injuries.

So, uh, HOLY CRAP. Pirates, cutlasses, boarding actions, water cannons... everything old is new again.

The Evil Little Hairy Cave People of Europe in Pulp Fiction

From the 1900s to the 1940s, there was a trendy theme in occult and horror stories that the explanation for widespread European legends of fairies, brownies, pixies, leprechauns and other malicious little people, was that they were a hereditary racial memory of the extremely small non-human, hairy stone age original inhabitants of Europe, who still survive well into modern times in caves and barrows below the earth. Envious of being displaced on the surface, these weird creatures, adapted to the darkness of living underground and unable to withstand the sun, still mean mischief and occasionally go out at night to capture someone.... usually an attractive woman....to take to their dark caves for human sacrifice.

Displaced by the arrival of Indo-European language speakers at the dawn of the Bronze Age, these original, not quite human stone age people of Europe were driven deep underground into caves and barrows below the earth, where they went mad, adapted to the darkness and acquired a fear of daylight, became extremely inbred, in some cases acquired widespread albinism. It is these strange little people who gave the descendants of Europeans a haunting racial dread of places below the earth like mines and caves, and it also is these strange, hairy troglodytes who originally built the uncanny and mysterious menhir, fairy rings, and stone age structures of England, Scotland, and Ireland that predate the coming of the Celts and Romans.

In some cases, these evil troglodytes are usually identified with the mysterious Picts, the pre-Celtic stone age inhabitants of the British Isles. In some cases, they are identified with the Basque people of Spain, best known as the inventors of Jai Alai, and the oldest people in Europe who speak a unique language unrelated to any in the world.

The original codifier of this trend was Arthur Machen, a horror writer who is less remembered than his contemporary, Henry James, but who may be the best horror writer in the generations between Poe on the one end and Lovecraft/CL Moore/Clark Ashton Smith on the other. His story, "the White People" from 1904 (a reference to their strange cave albinism) was a twisted Alice in Wonderland with a girl who is irresistibly attracted to dark pre-Roman stone age ruins and who is eventually pulled underground.

In addition to being a great horror writer, Arthur Machen was a member of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization, and was often seen at the Isis-Urania Temple in London. Many of his works have secretive occult knowledge.

H.P. Lovecraft in particular always pointed out Arthur Machen as his single biggest inspiration, though he combined Machen's dread and occultism with Abraham Merritt's sense of fear of the cosmic unknown, seen in "Dwellers in the Mirage" and "People of the Pit."

Another and scarier example of this trend would be "No Man's Land," a story by John Buchan, a Scotsman fascinated by paganism and horror, who often wrote stories of horrific discoveries and evil rites on the Scottish moors. He is often reduced to being described as a "Scottish Ghost Story" writer, a painfully reductivist description as in his career, Buchan wrote a lot of thrillers, detective, and adventure stories as well. In later life, he was appointed Governor General of Canada, meaning he may be the first head of state to be a horror writer.

It was Buchan who first identified the cave creatures with the Picts, something that another Weird Tales writer decades later, Robert E. Howard, would roll with in the 1920s.

Howard is a very identifiable kind of modern person you often see on the internet: a guy who talks tough, but who was terrified to leave his small town. He created manly man, tough guy heroes like Conan the Barbarian, Kull, and El Borak, but he himself never left his mother's house. It's no wonder he got along well with his fellow Weird Tales writer and weird shut in, HP Lovecraft. With 1920s Weird Tales writers, despite your admiration for their incredible talent, you also can't help but laugh at them a little, a feeling you also apply to a lot of Victorians, who achieved incredible things, but who are often closet cases and cranks who died virgins ("Chinese" Gordon comes to mind, as does Immelmann).

With Howard, his obsession with the Picts and the stone age cave dwelling people of Europe started with an unpublished manuscript where at a dinner party, a man gets knocked out and regresses to his past life in the Bronze Age, where he remembers the earliest contact between modern humans and the original inhabitants of the British Isles, the evil darkskinned Picts. This is a mix of both the "little cave people" story and another cliche at the time, "the stone age past life regression novel," another turn of the century cliche.

Still with the Picts on his mind, Howard would later create Bran Mak Morn, a Pict chieftain, who predated Kull and Conan as his Celtic caveman muscle hero. Howard was of Irish descent and proudly anti-Colonial and anti-British, with his Roman Empire and Civilized Kingdoms as a stand in for the British and other Empires, which he viewed as rapacious and humbug, a view shared by his greatest inspiration, Talbot Mundy. His "Worms of the Earth" gets to the heart of why these little cave people scare us so much: they remind us that we live on land that is impossibly ancient and we don't fully understand at all.

It was another Weird Tales Writer a decade later who wrote one of the last stories about the little hairy cave people of Europe, though, Manly Wade Wellman in 1942. Wellman was mainly known for creating the blond beefcake caveman hero Hok the Mighty set in stone age times, and for his supernatural ghost stories of Silver John the Balladeer set in modern, ghostly Appalachia (like many ex-Weird Tales writers, he made a turn to being a regional author in his later career, in the same way Hugh B. Cave became a Caribbean writer), but Wellman also had a regular character known as John Thunstone, a muscular and wealthy playboy known for his moustache who used his great wealth to investigate the supernatural and the occult. Thunstone had a silver sword made by St. Dunstan, patron of Silversmiths, well known for his confrontations with the Devil.

Most John Thunstone stories featured familiar stories, like a demon possessed seance and so on, but one in particular featured a unique enemy, the Shonokins.

The Shonokins were the original rulers of North America, descendants of Neanderthal man displaced by American Indians. This fear that the land we live is ancient and unknowable and we just arrived on it and don't know any of its secrets is common to settler societies, who often hold the landscape with dread, as in Patricia Wrightson's fantasies of the Australian Outback. It was easy enough to transport the hairy cave people from the Scottish Moors to North America. I suspect that's what they are, a personification of a fear shared in the middle class, that in the back of their minds, that everything they have supposedly earned is merely an accident of history, built by rapacity and the crimes of history, and that someday a bill will come due.

A text page in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales gives strange additional information on the Shonokins not found elsewhere:

Since then, there have been too many examples of evil cave people who predate Europeans. Philip Jose Farmer's "The All White Elf" features the last survivor of a pre-European people who live in caves. A lot of other fiction of course has featured the Picts, but according to our modern scientific understanding, which describes them as much, much less exotically, as a blue tattooed people not too different and practically indistinguishable from the Celtic tribes that surrounded them, and which they eventually blended into.

On top of all these other shenanigans, Ol' Pooty Pants has poured enormous amounts of money into the monastic community at Mount Athos, specifically for the Russian monastery and sketes. And subsequent to that, there's been an opening of an investigation into how the monks (who are allowed bank accounts) have been laundering funds for Putin and his cronies. Also, since the opening of hostilities in Ukraine, security services believe Russia is running a spy ring out of Mount Athos through Kirill's cooperation.

The Moscow Fiasco

At the prodding of @quonunc, here is a quick overview of the incident I fondly referred to as "the Moscow fiasco" in a previous ask about the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. It's a subject dear and horrifying to my heart after I wrote my undergrad dissertation on it.

In short: this is to do with how the Moscow Patriarchate (Russian Orthodox Church, hereafter ROC) is entirely in bed with the Russian government, and how Patriarch Kirill (of Moscow and All Russia) has been responding to the ongoing situation in Ukraine (and former Soviet lands more generally). Picture will make sense lower down the post.

The slightly longer short answer is that Patriarch Kirill is entirely in favour of the Ukraine war, and the ROC clergy are under significant pressure to support that as an official church stance-- my dissertation topic started to germinate when, completely by accident, I came across a 10-minute video of a ROC priest explaining very slowly and carefully that when he met the Pope, he did not talk about Ukraine. Will link this video if I can find it again, but at present it's proving elusive. (EDIT: found it!!! It was the Metropolitan Hilarion of Budapest and Hungary. This video looks like a hostage video honestly £10 says there's someone behind the camera holding a gun to this man's head for legal reasons this is a joke).

The foundation for this belief is obviously completely political (and the history of how the ROC and Russian state are completely entwined is long and complicated to say the least!), but officially the ROC stance is that it's about reclaiming the historic Slavic spiritual unity founded on the Baptism of Rus' in the year 988 by Vladimir the Grand Prince of Kievan Rus' when Slavdom become Orthodox. Proponents of this "Russian World" theory (Russkiy Mir') basically argue that it's the influence of the West that has fractured the unified Slavic people into different, opposing nations, and that by "liberating" Ukraine of this alien ideology of nationhood, the Slavic Orthodox world will regain its historic unity under the common banner of Orthodoxy. All I will say on this is that these people have a very rosy view of Kievan Rus', but that's a post for another day.

This has obviously caused friction within the Orthodox world. Ukraine now has two Orthodox churches-- the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which is in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is in communion with the Russian Patriarchate. They are not in communion with each other, and Constantinople's decision to grant autocephalous status to the OCoU caused Moscow to schism with Constantinople. Constantinople is also accusing Moscow of heresy (specifically, ethno-phyletism). Moscow obviously denies this. Obvious question for the Catholics among us-- does this mean Russian Orthodox christians are no longer Orthodox? No, because schisms between Orthodox churches are not particularly unusual, and they remain within the general cloud of Orthodox communion links.

The whole mess is then immortalised in the absolute monstrosity that is the Main Cathedral to the Russian Armed Forces, which is what I wrote my diss on. The YouTube video linked there is promotional material from Russian military-themed TV channel Звезда, and is one of the better sources of info on it-- a lot of English-language sources contain a lot of incorrect information on it-- either because they don't understand the cultural background, or just straight up lies from the Russian govt propaganda arm--, so take anything they say with a grain of salt. Kirill then gives televised sermons from this cathedral in which he talks about the glorious Russian martyrs of the Ukraine invasion, does his best to harmonise Stalinism and Orthodoxy, and oversees military parades for national holidays. This cathedral has a huge amount of weird symbolism and imagery, and I am super happy to talk more about the mosaics and propaganda going on there, because it's a lot (to say the quiet part out loud: pLEASE ask me more about this cathedral because the more I think about it the more scream-worthy facts about it I remember).

You may have seen memes with this picture of the Virgin Mary (below). Yeah that's from this cathedral. And it's a really really fucked up image. Like, more fucked up than you may think. Could have written my entire diss on this image alone and how shockingly awful it is. western orthobro converts who keep reblogging it as if it's somehow cool and macho are just showing how little they know and it's embarrassing.

The militarism of the ROC since this whole thing has also gone bonkers and there's a huuuuuge amount of corruption and weird stuff going on. The tension between the clergy and the laity has been extremely high for decades, and has spilled over most notably in Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer stunt, an exhibition called Осторожно, религия! (beware, religion!), and some shenanigans in church-building more generally. On this particular incident I would point to the blessing of nuclear weapons and the canonisation of a patron saint of long-range nuclear missiles as key moments. The cathedral also has matching mosaics of Putin and Stalin, a fact that the Russian government very much wants you to think never happened (officially the mosaics were removed, but they absolutely were not-- muggins here found them and has the pictures to prove it).

The main takeaway from this topic is that situation is obviously complicated and the repercussions for everyone involved-- particularly Russian and Ukrainian laypeople-- are unpleasant to say the least. It gives something of a window into the Putin regime and its propaganda arm (Epiphany swim, topless horseriding pictures, Soviet-style policies, I could go on) more than anything else, because the situation inside the ROC is still quite obscure. From talking to people who know Kirill personally, it's not clear quite what he thinks is going on or why he's involved the way he is. Either way. Fiasco.

Watching the Last of Us, and so far meh. The third episode was masterful, had both of us crying, great story telling at its finest. The rest, basically generic tv action with farcical drama generated by asinine main characters. There's potential, they need to step things up.

All's groovy when the weather is nice and the cabin is comfy. Rainstorms and tea, sunny days in the hammock, idyll and pleasantry. There are a few things that you need to know, though, in order to get by:

You will need a knife. All of the time, especially when you don't have one on you. It needs to be sharp, and sturdy, and you need to be willing to use it. Tactical knives are poo for this, as are expensive ones. Find one for your pocket or belt, one you can pull a thorn with or cut an errant root.

Firewood comes by the rick or cord. Ricks can also be called face cords. A full cord or bush cord is a volume of well stacked firewood, four foot high and across, and eight feet deep. A rick is a single row four foot high and eight feet deep. Split firewood is 12-16 inches long, no bigger than three-five inches in diameter. If you can find someone who delivers, great. If you can find someone that stacks the delivery, latch on quickly and get some wood. You're going to need at least a cord for the winter, probably two, maybe more if it's really cold.

Invest in good slippers. When you wake up in the morning, or get up in the middle of the night, and the fire is down, your feet will thank you.

Have a pantry with preserved food, at least enough for everyone in the house for a week. It can be canned or jarred or dry, monotonous or varied, but if you get snowed in and can't get to the market, you can at least eat something.

The forest is going to actively take the land back. You're now locked in eternal battle with Queen Anne's Lace and blackberry canes.