People are annoyed with all my posts about Trump, I understand it. So today we’ll talk about something different and unrelated.
Before the birth of the United States, there was a city on Jamaica, named Port Royal. It was known at the time as the most sinful place on Earth, a place where pirates and prostitutes congregated. Port Royal was the auction center for the Caribbean slave trade. It was also the richest English city in the New World.
The people living in Port Royal were very wealthy. They had everything a man’s heart could desire, there was fine wine, beer, cacao, plenty of meat, there were numerous prostitutes and there was a tavern for every ten men. All of this was paid for, through piracy and the slave trade. They traded in black people from Africa, as well as in white indentured servants.
That is, until one day, on June 7th 1692, a massive earthquake struck Port Royal. Two third of the city immediately fell into the ocean. The remainder, was struck by a massive tsunami. About 2,000 people died immediately as a result. But in the days that followed, thousands more died slow painful deaths from their injuries and of disease spread by the rotting corpses. There were very few survivors.
The city never recovered from any of this. They tried rebuilding the city, but then in 1703, a fire began in a warehouse, gunpowder deposits exploded all around the city and the whole place was once again reduced to ashes. They tried rebuilding the city after this fire too, but then a series of hurricanes struck the city, in 1712, 1722, 1726 and 1744. The city never recovered after that.
The people in the English speaking world at the time, believed that God had punished them for their sins. Members of the Jamaica Council declared: “We are become by this an instance of God Almighty’s severe judgement.” The Reverend Cotton Mather, who we all know from the Salem Witch Trials, had this to say on it: ‘There never happens an earthquake, but God speaks to men on Earth.’
Today of course we understand that earthquakes happen because of tectonic forces beneath the Earth’s surface, rather than God punishing people for being selfish and materialistic. We also understand what causes hurricanes to form and we’re pretty good at predicting the path they’ll take. But at the time, people could only explain such things as the will of God.
In unrelated news overshadowed by the presidential election, Los Angeles has just had its fourth consecutive detection of bird flu in its wastewater, at a new record level of 87.62. This does not seem to fit the dumping of waste milk or an origin from wild animals and instead suggests local infections.
Many of these Caribbean island nation states have among the lowest suicide rates in the entire world, so they must be doing some things right.
Tropical beaches, tanned skin, tax havens and tourism.
Great find!
Were I a fiction writer, I’d be looking for a way to incorporate this into my next story.
>That moment when you realize God is just a consciousness that is really good at manipulating atoms and space so hurricanes might actually still be caused by God.
I’d consider this God to just be Nature however, she drowns slavers and profligates, very based!
Far out, just imagine what would’ve happened if they’d voted for Demoncrats!
I’m going to start a new political party called the ‘Irony Party’, and run for president on the platform that we will round up and shoot all of the people who talk about nothing but politics all of the time. Then after we win the election and have killed all of the people involved with politics including the members of the political party we just formed, the world will ironically turn into a utopia because all of the worst people will no longer be around.
Very good.
I thought my comment was appropriate here though, given this latest piece from Rintrah is obviously a political comment about God blasting everyone with his wrath for voting Trump.
Our man Rintrah seems to have framed Trump in his mind as Satan, and Kamala as Jesus. I don’t think Trump is a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but this seems misplaced to me.
If I had to guess (and not being God that’s all I can do), I would say God is not on either of their sides.
But then, the God I read about is not sympathetic to overwhelmingly profit motivated cunts: something about his Son flipping over the tables of the money changers and then getting executed in the most horrid way possible (although Gaddafi might debate that) comes to mind.
That said, I would agree that the world is deserving of the wrath of God. I do not presume to know God’s mind (Thy will be done God – whatever that may be), but I doubt very much that if God does decide that a purge is necessary that it will play out quite how Rintrah appears to expect.
Time for a track by Zakk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5fdX94ollw
Anytime you please God.
I am ready.
And another by Lemmy for the atheists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1hSSuc42P8
I might not agree with him, but he was always dignified, and a man of conviction and integrity deserving of respect. Sad to be an atheist, but Lemmy, an atheist himself, sums up their best arguments nicely.
Why is he silent?
Is he blind?
And more importantly, from my point of view, where is the fucking apocalypse!
Let’s get this shit over with.
Burn Babylon, you fucking whore!
For the earful listener, Lemmy answers his own questions:
“let right or wrong alone decide”
What is ‘right’? What is ‘wrong’? Where does knowledge of these things come from?
Somehow, we all know what these things are, we just know it, we just feel it.
This is not a rational thing: something that can be broken down into a list.
And it’s tired, but there are no atheists in the trenches. It’s just a truism I’m afraid.
You all know what the right thing to do is, because we all just feel it.
Time to do something. Maybe even something, ‘just because’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb3FJdRk-tI
And yeah, you really should have known
Just because.
That’s all the instructions we get.
I failed your victims, and so did you.
I saw the photos of their torture wounds, the pictures of their families, the footage of the squads going door to door looking for them, the pictures of their dead, read their pleas for help. . .
And if you don’t know who I’m talking about, well that’s on you.
Just because.
Fuck you all!
And fuck me too.
There was no arguing with ‘the machine’.
You want some irony Tryptie?
I’m a tough mutherfucker, I used to swing an axe or hammer all day – my crew used to call me ‘the machine’, but I tell you, I broke down at my desk and cried like a baby when I saw the photos of one of our allies who had been tortured that we abandoned.
Many have seen and done far worse.
Of course.
But where is your limit?
When does your conscience kick in?
I probably have a relatively low tolerance, yours may be higher, but you will feel it.
And when you do. . .
LISTEN TO IT!!!
And as much fun as this has been, I think that’s about it for me.
Tyyptie all you do is talk about politics. You’re basically a low status white male constantly complaining about how much you hate the president and how there are too many brown people in your country.
“The Demiurge is a RAPIST and these FUCKING HYLICS and their foreign and false MATERIALIST RELIGION are ruining this Realm!”
– Tryptie the low status enlightened entity (or whatever).
Yes we get it, you don’t like the guy running things and people who are alien to yourself, me too.
Politics is simply what happens when power relations between individuals, the same story of individuals and their relationships only scales up and up the chain. It can’t be otherwise until there is no such thing as individuality.
This is why war is a beautiful thing, it allows us to solve our differences in virtue constructively instead of yelling at each-other.
“We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.”
– Carl von Clausewitz
>Politics is simply what happens when THERE ARE power relations between individuals
Yeah thats the ironic part. I will never see my utopian vision come to fruition, because I will have to be killed too as part of the Irony Party political platform.
That being said if you’re talking about the spiritual side of things, this goes much deeper than ‘I don’t like the guy running things’. This is moreso personal than political, in a way that it’s probably difficult to understand without having experienced what I have. It’s the way you would feel about somebody who had killed someone you love, moreso than how you’d feel about a politician whose policies you hated. The reason I overuse the word ontology, besides having just having taken a random liking to the word, is that I’m always trying to convey that in order to understand what I’m even talking about requires a radical shift away from the common understanding of what reality actually is, and the basic assumptions most people in this world make about how things actually work.
I think all politics is personal deep down.
I see your point yeah. I guess where I would draw the distinction is that most cases of what people refer to as ‘politics’ involves interacting at least in part with some form of impersonal system, such as a government, a corporation or another form of bureaucracy. It’s not quite the same thing as like, how someone gets along with their parents or something you know?
Not sure if coincidence or not but currently in Australia and there were a fair few dead birds on the beach the last few days. Don’t remember seeing hardly any ever in my early life living here.
“disease spread by the rotting corpses”
Of course there is no such thing. While it was then thought that decaying bodies spread “disease” via the miasma they emit, this is now understood not to be the case. It’s a little ironic to read such obsolete claptrap in a piece where the payoff is the claimed rise of a new virus.
how about flies, flees and rats?
what about groundwater contamination, on a tiny island with probably limited modes of access to fresh water?
Fleas can’t survive and reproduce on corpses.
I suppose if one wanted to have a picnic amid a pile of rotting bodies, and some of the flies that had previously visited or fed (perhaps as larvae) on the corpses then defecated on the potato salad, and you ate it, there might be microbes that started on a dead body that ended up inside you and made you sick. I’m a little dubious about how that would actually work (what sort of virus or bacteria or flatworm or whatever would be spread that way?), but in any case, that’s not an epidemic.
If large numbers of bodies after an earthquake cause a spike in the rat population, then that could negatively affect public health. But that’s because there are more rats, not because dead bodies “spread disease.”
And certainly if somebody with a fecal-oral disease like cholera dies near water that feeds into the water supply, and the body is not collected, then the bacteria might be transmitted that way for a period of time, especially since people often evacuate their bowels at the time of death. But that’s essentially the same as if the person were still living.
Look, there are a lot of good reasons to bury or otherwise properly dispose of human remains, but the “spread disease” thing is a holdover from pre-modern medical ideas such as miasma.
This lingering misconception can have serious consequences: I have seen reports from large, mass-casualty earthquakes in places like Turkey where after a week or so they start talking about bulldozing collapsed buildings they were still searching for survivors because of the fear of “disease.” To facilitate this, it is declared that no one who had been trapped in the rubble could possibly still be alive, even though that is clearly false.
Alright so, all other things being equal, dumping corpses in the water supply is no hygienically worse than swimming in water that you later drink. Thanks for the clarification!
By the way do you really believe this?
There was a paper just recently published about an incident from a Norse saga of a well being deliberately fouled by dumping a dead body into it which has apparently been archaeologically verified through searching the bottom of the very same well from the story. https://www.sciencealert.com/this-skeleton-is-the-first-person-ever-found-from-a-norse-saga
I mention this interesting discovery because while the usual advice is to simply not feed trolls such as yourself, I think it is more compassionate to give you carefully selected morsels of information to nourish whatever small bit of humanity could still be alive in there.
That is a very interesting article!!!!!
So it was an attack by Roman Catholics. For some reason I never thought of Roman Catholics as making it into Norse sagas, but there they are. And according to the saga, they left the people in the castle alive, but did take their possessions (other than their clothing).
From the article:
“The event was a stealth attack carried out by the Roman Catholic enemies of King Sverre (known as Baglers, or Bagal, for the crosiers carried by bishops). While he wintered elsewhere, the Baglers invaded his castle in his absence.
“Thorstein Kugad accepted service with the Bagals, and went with them,” the saga reads. “The Bagals seized all the property in the castle, and then they burnt every building of it. They took a dead man and cast him into the well, and then filled it up with stones. Before they left the castle they called upon the townsmen to break down all the stone walls; and before they marched from the town they burnt all the King’s long-ships. After this they returned to the Uplands, well pleased with the booty they had gained in their journey.”
According to the saga, the Baglers spared the people within, leaving them nothing but their clothes – but fresh corpses don’t fall from the sky, and it’s plausible that the event wasn’t completely bloodless. The Well Man may even have been a Bagler himself, slain by the castle’s defenders.”
It does look like the body dump was a way to make the well unusable.
BREAKING: New LSWM conspiracy theory just dropped (which I tentatively endorse):
https://twitter.com/red_pill_us/status/1855151375136833838?s=46
On an entirely unrelated note, discuss:
https://twitter.com/becomingcritter/status/1854724163551776889?s=46
OT: here is a collection of Thomas Ligotti quotes.
The blackest of the blackest nihilistic and pessimistic observations about the human condition
I want all to read, but I think of both SYM and Karen as I look over it (opposing forces?)
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/128466.Thomas_Ligotti
Forgive me for laying it on thick, Karen
“ For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better. For pessimists, there is no amount of happiness—should such a thing as happiness even obtain for human beings except as a misconception—that can compensate us for life’s hurt. As a worst-case example, a pessimist might refer to the hurt caused by some natural or human-made cataclysm. To adduce a hedonic counterpart to the horrors that attach to such cataclysms would require a degree of ingenuity from an optimist, but it could be done. And the reason it could be done, the reason for the eternal stalemate between optimists and pessimists, is that no possible formula can be established to measure proportions and types of hurt and happiness in the world. If such a formula could be established, then either pessimists or optimists would have to give in to their adversaries.”
SYM:
> It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.