Driver, Where You Taking Us?
This is the end. Not of anything, just The Doors. If the world ever seems to have lost its collective mind and you just can't make sense of it, just drop some acid and pop Apocalypse Now in the VCR and in just a few short hours it will all make sense again. For those who are in a hurry or short on psychedelics, you can just listen to 'The End' on repeat while reading Conrad's Hear of Darkness for similar effect.
Not worried about all that this evening, just indulging in a little Jim Morrison. Wonder if it'd work for grokking abstract art too? Will have to test it out on our next speed run.
Speaking of the Speed, we finally made it back there last week. Had a bit of company after the ball dropped, so we spent the afternoon getting arted. They had an exhibit on Otherworldly Journeys, featuring the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, which seemed a good place to start a new year.
For our otherworldly journey, they gave us these little plastic magnifying glasses, so we could read the fine print see the fine details in the prints. Quickly decided that that piece of plastic was my new favorite photographic toy. Need to do some portraits with it.
All good things come to The End, but there were some lightboxes and transparencies to make our own journeys into the bizarre before it got to that.
Congratulations, your post has been added to Pinmapple! 🎉🥳🍍
Did you know you have your own profile map?
And every post has their own map too!
Want to have your post on the map too?
This got me laughing hard.
You really had A great adventure. I just love the quality of your pictures.
Then there was the CCP stuff😅
For a much data as it consumes you'd think it'd be able to figure out how to budget the extra time that comes with travel. Guess they haven't figured out how to monetize piss breaks yet...
Thanks! We had a blast, enjoyed every minute of it. Lol, that CCP thing had me rolling once I got through doing a double take.
Thanks for dropping by!
You are welcome.
Be sure to drop your next adventure here. I loved every bit of your adventure.
Will do!
Jethro, dude... Congratulations on all the attention you're about to receive.
It's just a name, he don't own that building.
Thanks, but I will believe it when I see it. Counting chickens and all that.
Oh I know, just has a 60 year lease that nobody is very keen on buying right now. It was the first time I'd gotten to flip off that name on a building.
Let me know when you see it.
I shared the middle finger experience and it was delightful.
Will do!
Tag, you're it!
Dammit, forgot to duck!
Congratulations.
I don't think you could pay me enough to visit Mordor on the Potomac. I wouldn't mind some of the museums, but between my disgust at the pervasive nationalist propaganda exuding from the very architecture and the servile begging from the crowds for government do do their bidding, I think I'd puke myself to death.
I'm no fan of democracy as a system. We've had time to test it. It has failed us. The Lysander Spooner essay I have been serializing covers the subject better than I possibly could here. It's time to stop pretending the political manifestations of bandwagon fallacy, false choices, and collective ignorance can grant authority. The delusion that we do have a voice and we are somehow represented allow systemic corruption and abuse to continue because people believe there is some foundation of legitimacy behind it. Strike the root instead of trying to reform it, I say.
I know a lot of people disagree with me here. Maybe it can be redeemed somehow, but not by allowing more centralized power over our lives.
Mordor on the Potomac, that has a certain ring to it, I'm going to have to remember that one. Still, I think you're doing yourself and the city a disservice. Once the bureaucrats and functionaries go home to Maryland or northern Virginia it's just another decent sized city, albeit with a fetish for white marble and stunted buildings. Besides, it's quite a bit of fun to eat a bunch of edibles and go wandering in the belly of the beast taking photos of the insanity and absurdity.
As for your critique of democracy, you're preaching to the choir. For all the noise about democracy, this country is technically a republic, in no small part because the founders were far more interested in protecting property rights vs human rights.
That's great, as far as rhetoric goes, but unless and until it's followed with concrete actions to back it up it's still just more empty rhetoric. What's you got? You can't get people to go along with abandoning the old way of doing things without showing them a better way first. Nonviolent propaganda of the deed so to speak. The organizing of mutual aid and mutual support networks last year as part of the BLM protests is the best example of what I'm talking about that I can point to.
Market anarchist, is that another way of saying ancap? Or is there a distinction between the two? I'm going to have to refresh myself on Spooner but I'm curious, are you familiar with Max Stirner?
(If this comes across as harsh/hostile, please pay it no mind. I blame the internets and lack of coffee)
It's not my original name. Use it to your heart's content.
I can't tell you everything I do to be subversive, because a lot of it is "illegal." However, as a librarian, I do promote a lot of independence. Homeschooling, homesteading, and individual intellectual development are already encouraged locally. I just wish we weren't funded by extortion.
I have read little Stirner. His adherents tend to be off-putting, but that's not necessarily his fault. I would like to call myself an anarchist without adjectives, but the concept of the agora is, Ibthink, one of the keys to a stateless society filling the needs ofnthe community. Mutual aid is not an enemy of the market, after all. But too many lazy thinkers use "capitalism" as shorthand for "things I don't like in modern socoety." Same for "socialism," although it appears to me the critics of socialism can sometimes be more coherent.
No sweat, if you had I'd probably have been more concerned. I was poorly caffeinated and cranky and trying to skip the exchanges of rhetoric.
Dogma is the bane of humankind, so I'm not too keen on the adjectives myself. Stirner makes a lot of sense if you've been on a steady diet of nihilism, I suspect many of his adherents are using him as rationale rather than reason. In my darker moods I can appreciate him, most of the time Bakunin is more to my taste.
I still remember the Great Recession, I suspect our notions of the market are rather divergent 😎 Still, I'd rather figure out where we can cooperate rather than wasting our time not changing each others minds 🙂
Have you seen Michael Malice's The Anarchist Handbook collecting assorted essays from various schools of anarchism? It's a pretty diverse collection. On a broader view, I do see merit in Bakunin, Proudhon, De Cleyre, Goldman, etc. but I recoil instinctively from anyone who claims to be an anarchist today but wants to impose their political and economic preferences.
Using statist means cannot achieve anarchist ends as far as I can tell, and no community built on a foundation other than voluntary consent can stand. The market of voluntary exchanges and interactions does not preclude voluntary communes, syndicalist co-ops, mutual aid societies, and other systems of interaction.
The typical left anarchist I encounter online has a strawman idea of markets as a corporate hellhole while turning a blind eye to all arguments pointing out the corruption political power injects even as they claim Stalinism or Maoism can't be used to discredit communism because it was a political hierarchy.
Such a long journey. Because of lockdown, it've been a long time I have not gone somewhere. I miss Google:)
A wonderful eye-traveling through your post!
Our lockdowns are a thing of the past, covid not so much. Hopefully you can go somewhere soon!
Thank you! :)
Hiya, @lizanomadsoul here, just swinging by to let you know that this post made it into our Honorable Mentions in Daily Travel Digest #1314.
Your post has been manually curated by the @pinmapple team. If you like what we're doing, please drop by to check out all the rest of today's great posts and consider supporting other authors like yourself and us so we can keep the project going!
Become part of our travel community: