#381

Factually Masculine 2024 continues to be some phallic shit, my brother. 

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Another way to define a man is to say that there is woman, and man is that human thing which is not woman. As I have stated, this is imprecise and it is more precise to say that man and woman are expressions of that thing which is human, that woman is the original template, that man is an accessory to woman, an appendage shaped by natural selection to increase genetic variation and improve survival rates for women and infants--not for themselves.

Perhaps it is a sense of injustice at the particulars of this arrangement, an unwillingness to be sacrificial of the self for the sake of the other, that drove the memetic ape's males to assert that man is the template and the progenitor, that woman exists to produce ever more masculine men and ever more pliable women. Too many men lived too long, it seems to me. This is the kind of logical lattice I notice older men are wont to suspend before the truth of the universe, because they are idle and childish and chatter like castanets about the unfairness of life. These are withered, puckered assholes who hate to work but love to eat and drink, who do not love but are profoundly interested in fucking and indeed, who shrink from no violence or base trick in their pursuit of these satisfactions. These are the men who spurn the Dao, laugh at Buddha, and crucify Christ, and having crucified him, twist his corpse to their purposes, standing it upside down and winding it in chains. These men are manipulators. Dark wizards. Men of shadows and secrets. Men who suck blood and sleep on glittering golden hoards. The mouthpieces and lickspittles of demons.

Some have wielded these powers and told these lies from father to son for so long the names don't matter. Some rise and fall. Some are new on this earth and merely aspire to snatch for themselves as much of these ill-gotten gains as they can, to drink the black waters of their own diseased fiefdom, to serve as a prop for these grotesque architectures and shore up their foundations.

Cowards and liars. Landlords and masters. A blight and a parasitic infestation striking at the roots and poisoning the fruit of the tree of masculinity. Imagine going to a tree for shelter from the rain, to find shade from the burning sun, and finding yourself swarmed with stinging insects, blinding you and paralyzing your limbs. Imagine going to take a bite of fruit, and as the flesh gives way to your fingertips and approaches your mouth, it seems to boil over with a wriggling freshet of maggots.

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Not just them, either. How many men who want to believe themselves good have labored their lives long deluded and ensared by wicked enchantments, inextricably invested in a petty slavish mediocrity designed never to enrich or ennoble them, traveling only down paths laid out for them by men not worthy of the name, who whisper in his ear of heavens, of nations, of natural law, of the rights and duties proper to a station and the rightness and duty of station, of master races and glorious destinies, of sacred purpose and eternal glory?

Really, it breaks the heart. And still so many motherfuckers out here marching to that bleary-eyed tune, swinging their arms and walking lockstep behind anyone who promises them that they're better than a faggot, that mommy was a stupid bitch and I'm your fuckin daddy. 

--JL

#380

Been wearing the same shirt for three days, and it reeks to high heaven like a monkey in its prime because I am MAN. Hup hup! Say whatever you want, but you'll know how bad you wanna fuck me/shame me or how bad I'll kick your ass/you need to kick my ass the second you get a whiff. Information is important, and really, I feel we've been robbed of an essential dimension of our social interrelations with this mania for pretending we smell like chemical cocktails that have nothing to do with anything. It's all part of taming and manipulating the human herd animal: neutralizing odors enforces the idea that the natural state of a person is abominable and unclean; odor control and odor value can then be established along artificial lines in order to enforce class and control behavior. Think of what a woman won't do, in terror of creating her own natural odor in a perceptible way, this manifestation just one link in the criminal and intolerable chains of psychic oppression that bind her. Think of how little money a man can ultimately make, if he is unable to smell sufficiently ostentatious in the halls of power; god forbid the scent of motor oil or cow manure hang about his clothing; god forbid a dude sweats more than a little on the upper lip and that only under intolerable conditions, like fucking his wife.

Factually Masculine 2024 arrives, in-and-out-single-paragraph-palate-cleanser-tiger-phoenix style. How's that for ideas about smells? Give smells a thought. Do you even know what you really, truly smell like? You might not.  

--JL

#378

Proof, you say of my credentials to speak so confidently of what authentic masculinity looks like?

Oh, strap in motherfuckers

it's about to be 

FACTUALLY MASCULINE 2024

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First thing to maybe keep in mind is that the body as the fulcrum of the progenital act is objectively a detached and clinical thing. Procreation as something which is involved with gender is memetic, not biological. The body that is able to impregnate happens to be vested with that equipment, and the body with the capacity for impregnation happens to be vested with equipment which interacts with the preceding. Maleness and femaleness are not significant here except as enhancers to this basic drive which we have in common with so much that is alive.

Behavior is rigid when it is encoded in instinct. Significantly, behaviors which we show to be instinctual, or are anecdotally preconscious, are reliably similar in all human beings, regardless of gender. Degrees of difference related to biological sex can be measured, but broadly, humans react instinctively to stimuli as humans, not as men and women. It is in the social sphere, in the more malleable learned behaviors, that one sees gender come into play. And the forces that work to shape our learned behaviors train us in the performance of roles that are suited to the gender not by what is set in stone but by what they dictate in the name of organizing societies, which is the layering of our instinctive group behaviors and the parallel evolution of culture.

What a man is, what we think of as a man, is something created. Something invented. Maybe it makes sense, maybe it doesn't.

Fact is, the definition changes all the time, and means different things at different times the world over.

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Well, let's say it's not just that you don't even believe any of that, it's that you don't even believe the world is more than four thousand years old. You may think it is reasonable that said world is flat and domed and placed at the exact center of a spherical, limited universe, with the light of God coming in through holes in the dome. Let us crawl backwards diagonally into the worldview which has us as created by conscious entities operating on a different level of metaphysical reality. What I mean is let's say you think God raised Adam from the clay and breathed life into his body, and made woman as a corollary to his creation, a way by which the multiplication of Adam might be achieved. Or that we are all made from the materials of a giant, and what we are in this life depends on whether the universe fashioned us from the head, the arms, the legs, or the feet, that by our thought and deed we may, however, climb our way up through those materials and escape their affect to join the perfect eternity of the universe. There are many more just such ideas. Very likely you believe that the history of the world resembles something written down in a religious text far more than it does an objective historiography against the backdrop of geologic time. 

There are many other ways I could say it, but the crux of it is, you believe that what a man is is a thing fundamentally sacred, ordained by the divine, defined as such, and that no mistakes can be made when it comes to what a man is--evidence to the contrary is sacrilege, is defilement. 

Just gonna come out bald with it: priests lie. It's fundamental. Until you basically wake up to that, you're not gonna get any farther.

A breakdown: 

• That there is a transcencdent nature to existence, that something impalpable has a presence in the life of the world and the life of human beings, is something that has been appreciated by human beings as long as we have existed in this world.
• It cannot be true at the same time that this transcendent nature applies more concretely to your own culture, your own people, and that a human being from a different culture can correctly believe the same. Yet we all have an explanation for why we are exceptional in the eyes of the beyond. 
• This is because that is the kind of motivation that energizes and unites a tribe into becoming a culture, into organizing itself a into a society, and a society into a civilization.
• Civilizations are built on inequality. An important early distinction in human group existence was that of the shaman and the rest of the tribe, and while matriarchal and tribal norms dictated the terms of existence and the performance of gender, this was a stable and equitable arrangement; the shaman was a conduit to the beyond, a nature in which human beings were a tiny part of a vast whole. Decisions were made in this spirit that led to the spread of the human animal and others like it through vast areas in sophisticated and durable units. This would eventually lead to geographical hotspots that gave rise to populations which were able to rely on what became agriculture, bringing with it a revolution in human behavior. 
• The revolution disrupted this arrangement, and the moment was primed for new stories, stories that would serve as points of concrescence around which society could be designed and stratified by storytellers and seekers of power. Power, for the first time, could be wielded economically, through proxies, through new taboos, through further, stratifications of class driven by the rise in population and proximity, through innovations that exalted the strength of the arm and the need to pay homage to that strength, which was an extension of the strength of the beyond, the strength of universe, the strength of gods, who shaped the world--not a pack of frauds who didn't want to do any work.
• The shenanigans would only get worse and more widespread with time. Call me a liar.

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We gotta come back to that shamanic energy. We gotta forget the dams and come back to the river, and we gotta let that river flow where it'll flow. We gotta understand that the universe is infinite, and accept no intermediaries between ourselves and the radiant light of the beyond. That we are a near-insignificant point in point in a vastness that can only be imagined and an essential and irreplacable part of that vastness. 

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Happy Sunday motherfuckers! The sun is out where I am and the sky is an unbelievably electric shade of blue. EDIT: Factually Masculine 2024 runs seven posts, however long? Is that how I decided? I dunno. We're doing it like this now. I don't care.

--JL

#373

Fucking losing my mind over here. But what else is new? This is Factually Pointless, the free and easy ravings of a madman undergoing existential mastication. Rejoice, brethren! We are the eternally digested, breaking down together in the great roiling stomach of this universe. 

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You see a lot more fake bullshit these days, but that's a) kinda relative and b) if you are of any kind of advanced age, say, older than fourteen, and have ever so much as looked at internet, you should have prepared yourself well for this level of saturation. I get that this is not a very reasonable outlook. We are all built to pay attention to very different things in very different ways, from the obscurely particular to the embodied universals.

My policy is to assume that if an institution--let's say, a governmental organization or representative or representative body, or if you prefer, a media outlet--is putting out deepfaked shit or is addressing the social issue of fabricated content less than adroitly and intelligently, then they know goddamn well what they're doing and projected ignorance must be construed as feigned. I don't accept the kind of fucking incompetence I see out there as legitimate. Safer in the long run to consider it a manipulative stratagem.

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I may be a no-name idiot with no standing at all in this world, but I don't have to be a fucking sucker into the bargain. If I am tricked, let the trick be justifiably sophisticated. If I am subject to powers I cannot resist, let them at least have to exert their irresistibility. I'm not here to make things easy for anybody that wants to fuck me up or own me. 

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Feels good to write that, but what hope do any of us have? 

Only hope itself, I guess, and whatever paths our particular hopes can illuminate. Only what keeps us going.

Whatever we do, we are not lost if we hope. In hope, nothing is in vain, and no defeat is total.

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We cannot know the mind of God, so I would say that my actual leap of faith as Kierkegaard would have it is throwing myself as completely as I can, all my life, into the truth of the prior two sentences. It is easy for me to believe the inscrutable universe has no regard for us whatsoever. I can accept that and understand life, having lived, as an even trade. In context, however, in the human particulars of what it is to have lived as part of a narrative--a narrative, that is what is crucial here--I cannot and will not accept the narrative as shitty. I say it's a good story. I say it was worth telling no matter how it ends, how many fucked up evil details make it hard to stomach. That's my leap of faith. That is what I am a knight for, again, in Kierkegaardian terms.

--JL

#248

I think one of the funniest things about television is how if they interrupt the broadcast for something, they tell you directly and in no uncertain terms that they are returning you to a state of regularly scheduled programming. Who says the media lies to you?

--JL

#103

Fine. I'll bite. You want some fucking opinions about Venezuela? You want someone to tell you what to think and feel about it even though there is but the slimmest chance that it is any of your motherfucking business or anything you could fucking hope to remotely comprehend or materially influence?

Look no god damn further.

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It's like I just said. You don't fucking know. You don't understand Venezuelan history--did you look any up? Any at all? Did you even read the Wikipedia article? Was that utile, if you bothered?

There are no useful links. I'm not going to send you to a twenty-minute video that will succinctly and accurately sum up the situation because any such video is hollow propaganda.

Stuff like that is everywhere, the internet sits chin-deep in hideously gross oversimplifications and anti-history. I cannot comprehend why in the living devil motherfuckers consider themselves educated on a subject, matter, event, concept, text, or issue after ten minutes of reading, a conversation or two, and a half-hour of what passes for thought in such skulls.

No, I am not being an asshole! That was me being generous. Said motherfuckers usually just watch a single video, made by someone in the CIA, a troll, a communist, or a complex admixture of any of the aforementioned.

What do you truly know about past and U.S. activity in Venezuela specifically? What do you truly know about the people who live there? If it's direct witness or direct word of mouth, how big is your sample? What were their sources? How does their credibility rank, at a guess? Do you know for sure they were really there, or understand things competently themselves? If you're relying secondhand, on reporting or writing or hearsay, what were sources of the reporting, how biased their publication, who paid them, who funds the publication? Did you bother to check? Do you really know what it means to be "on the left" in that country? In that sphere of influence? What do you know about each dictator specifically? Do you know the actual, full, complete story of La Revolución Bolivariana? How about the big one, Bolívar's actual revolution, and what it accomplished, and how? You know who Andrés Bello is? You know if that's a relevant question? How about economics? How much oil, when did it become an issue, what lake does it come from, what are the problems with that? What's the other main export? The staple crop? The GDP before Chavez and what happened after? How about the GDP before Caldera? You know who Rafael Caldera was, what his policies were like? What do you know about the post-Chavez strikes? About the news on the ground day after day, month after month? You follow that news pretty carefully as it happened for the last nineteen years? You know the current "government" is the Fifth Republic, right? What can you tell me about the other four? Were there really four? Who is Aquiles Nazoa? How about Antonio Arraiz?  How many native Venezuelan tribes can you name? What year was the country founded? What was Nicolás Maduro's job before he became president? What is the name of the mountain north of the capital? What is the name of the tallest waterfall in the world, and where is it? Here's a clue: it's not in fucking Cuba. If you think you know the answer--do you know its real name? What do you know about the Venezuelan prison system? The school system? About Venezuelan public transportation, Venezuelan bureaucracy, its culture, its demographics? You know there's a German mining company at the source of the largest river in the country (know its name?) fucking it up mining some gold? What company? Why German? What is the history of German naturalists exploring Venezuela and its ramifications? What year was Venezuela "discovered" and by whom? What country has supplied Venezuela with the jets for its air force? Why do Venezuelans eat so much pasta--when they can get it? Is there still racism in Venezuela? How is it different and similar to racism where you live? 

Don't know where to stop, but I could go on. I could ask you questions until my fingers bleed. How many answers do you really, truly believe you possess, and if it's actually a lot, so what? That makes you right? And if you're right--fucking somehow--so what?

Hopefully you're starting to come around to my point. You don't know shit. You're not fucking qualified. And if you are, you're probably not on Twitter talking about it, you're doing a real fucking job that takes up too much time and effort for you to participate in the masturbatory punishment chatter war that is ripping apart the collective psyche. Soon we will be no more than particularly violent gibbons, screaming particularly ugly sounds.  

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Okay. Okay. Now. Please listen carefully. This part is what I really want to say.

Nothing is ever as simple as the corporate headline, the great leader, or the social alphas in your politically-charged echo chamber make it out to be. They make that shit seem simple in order to control you, which is to say, in order to use you, which is to say, to dehumanize and abuse you in order to profit off your ignorance and gain power from your manipulated acquiescence.

Whatever they are talking about, whatever they are saying, that is the game, and you are the piece.

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Well! I don't think I actually need to write anything else except

SHUT
YOUR
TRASH
FUCKING
HOLES
ABOUT 
VENEZUELA

AND 

GIVE THIS A THOUGHT, NOW 

EVERYWHERE YOU WEREN'T BORN, DON'T LIVE, AND DIDN'T SPILL BLOOD


I'm talking to other Venezuelan immigrants! I'm talking to immigrants at large! I'm talking to U.S. citizens! I'm talking to ALL OF YOU, EVERY LAST ONE

SHUT
UP

SHUT 
UP

YOUR "DIALOGUE" IS FUCKING NOTHING


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by all that is holy, don't you have your own problems?


--JL