...but that's not really true, is it? I mean, I consider myself a radical polytheist (i.e. I believe that ALL gods exist and try to honor as many as practical) so I believe in the Moirai and the Norns, for example. Also I guess I can say that I believe in Fate/ because of all the Heroic Spirits running around the Pnictogen Wing.

Mostly I wish to resist the trap of thinking that every little thing that's ever happened in our life was purposeful. It can easily seem so, but then I remind myself that I'm assigning a sense of purpose after the fact: event A happened, then event B, so A can be construed as a setup for B. But time and causality are tricky things (as special relativity implies) so, you know, maybe A was the consequence of B, only it happened out of order. I prefer to think of my life as having a permanent sense of mystery woven through it; that way I retain a sense of free will. =p

A particularly noteworthy coincidence is on my mind right now, though: the fact that I somehow pushed through my extreme shyness and fear of crowds to start attending Christian churches and even undergo adult Catholic initiation. My friend Kaylin has many times expressed her astonishment that I made myself undergo a public baptism. She knows me well and knows how timid I am around masses of strangers, so she's still amazed that I did a full immersion baptism in a packed parish church. I'm amazed myself, in retrospect. What on Earth possessed me?

And yet now it seems weirdly apt to the circumstances, because U.S. politics has become strangely dominated by adult Catholic converts. Having undergone the experience myself, albeit in an earlier decade and among liberal Catholics, I'm appalled and frankly disgusted at how adult Catholic conversion now seems modish, like a good political and social move. I've got an article on my phone from a Catholic writer, talking about how it's like rebellion for fuck's sake. I can laugh, but the laugh is hollow: I myself felt rebellious at the time. I was seeking to separate myself from my "biological" family, from whom I felt thoroughly estranged, and join myself to a different family. And I'd soaked up a lot of G. K. Chesterton, the famous Catholic reactionary writer who attempted to assert that his embrace of Catholic orthodoxy was the true rebellion, a rebellion back towards sanity as he put it. So... 😬 ...I know what it's like, even though I repented of my error. But it seems like there's a heap of American right-wing extremists who still believe Chesterton's lie (a lie breathed through silver, if I may say) and have made themselves feel like revolutionaries, merely by embracing an offensively shallow and aesthetic Catholicism devoid of moral substance.

So, uh...where do my duties lie in this strange situation?

~Chara of Pnictogen

That's a huge topic to bring up in the morning and I only want to talk about it briefly. I think this is a massive problem, and the Elon Musk phenomenon must surely be only the largest and most public example of it: contemporary Internet culture and the computerization of everything has produced a situation where having a cult-like faction of Internet fanatics on your side permits organizations and leaders to do crimes, basically, but in a way that allows for plausible deniability. How on Earth can this problem be tackled?

Stochastic terrorism is dangerous because of just this phenomenon. Someone like Matt Walsh can incite mass harassment and violence simply by issuing a particularly vicious harangue, dropping names and hinting at terrifying crimes, counting upon a chaotic and perpetually angry Internet mob to pick up the hint. Plainly this is a problem that antedates the Internet, but the Internet and social media have made it particularly easy. Twitter and other websites can function as informal clubhouses for violently minded groups who can nevertheless claim that there's no organization at all, just Internet randos. (In a similar spirit do the GOP propagandists assert now that 6 January was merely a happenstance band of holiday excursionists who wanted to see the Capitol.)

Stock manipulation of "meme stocks", like $GME, rely upon the cultish powers of a fanatical sect of monomaniacal investors who "just like the stock" (again they're careful to pretend that they're not TOO into it, to avoid any suggestion of collusion or conspiracy) who tend to act in concert, following orders that aren't issued by any one person. The plans of the $GME investors or other investment cults are "emergent" in a sense, arising from an evolutionary process at work in the $GME faction, but mostly controlled by the declarations and decisions of a relatively few people regarded as authoritative by the rest of the mob.

The situation with Elon Musk and Twitter, or Xitter rather, seems to be especially dire, however. In essence, the Musk cult has become an unofficially employed (through "X payments") branch office of the Musk business empire, doing specific jobs on behalf of their supergenius leader. Effectively they're like the Tesla and SpaceX marketing department. They attempt to manipulate the value of $TSLA, as with $GME and other meme stocks. They do stochastic harassment and terrorism, as with Matt Walsh and "Libs of Tik Tok" and others. And because of Twitter's opaque and broken methods of community moderation, which are largely controlled by automated reporting mechanisms that have been seized and abused by Musk's fanatics, the entire social medium is effectively controlled and censored on behalf of Musk and yet Elon Musk and the X executives can probably claim that they're not doing anything themselves. (To be fair, I'm sure they're secretly intervening themselves on behalf of special friends.) The censorship has been largely delegated to the Musk cult and their methods of mass-reporting Musk's political enemies. We have largely escaped such censorship because of our PvP Twitter methods: we're not trying to play to a mass audience and therefore we have none, and the Musk fans regard us as unimportant because of our microscopic following. Thus we've been able to keep hammering away at a small number of Twitter targets. All the same we've had accounts caught up in Musk's "bot purges".

It's a wretched situation and worse, it seems like the sort of thing that can't really be pinned down with laws that make sense. These cult-like factions aren't really cults—there's no formal organization, often no formal leadership, no specific doctrines even if it's clear that everyone involved believes in, and carries out, much the same things. I can't think of any way you could possibly legislate against such a phenomenon without being oppressive. The people involved can mostly claim that they're not doing anything malicious and they're not following orders; they're just really enthusiastic. Even when it's clear they're lying, it's hard to say that they know they're lying, because of the irrational nature of these quasi-religious groups. The fanatics don't seem entirely aware of what they're doing.

What is to be done? I mean, aside from reading more Lenin.

~Chara of Pnictogen

...you know, the Butlerian Jihad people never said anything about building a likeness of a cat's mind.

~Chara

I agree, Medusa of Sarpedon. We're all pretty fond of Matou Sakura around the Pnictogen Wing. 👍

There are thoughts in my head about how Matou Sakura has functioned as an emotional anchor for an entire franchise but they're too complicated to express right now.

~Chara