George is addressed with a consideration of acting-into an altercast position in conflict with his less than socially ideal plans.



As opposed to a libertarian, prioratizing dreams of individual adventure and world travel, George contemplates acting-into, shaping and crafting the specificatory structure altercast by Mary, who addresses him as a man of ideals, which of necessity compel adjustment of those priorities to practical duty: to a position rather as husband and community builder, upheld against capitalist destruction thereof.

..........

Analysis: John Shotter’s Social Accountability and the Social Construction of “You” Part 2

In pursuit of this analysis, we may usefully trace background to Shotter and Harre’s negotiated concerns here:  “The Verum Factum Principle”

From Wikipedia:

“Giambattista Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) (“On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language”).[7] The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation: “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.” This criterion for truth would later shape the history of civilization in Vico’s opus, the Scienza Nuova (The New Science, 1725), because he would argue that civil life – like mathematics – is wholly constructed.”

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The most fundamental questions of who we are and how we might organize in our defense has a cogent, preliminary answer outlined by the Euro-DNA Nation 

We organize our identity as advocates of our people, who are of indigenous European descent, for the maintenance of our distinct genus on the whole and in the maintenance of our distinct species as well.

The very act of participating in the Euro-DNA Nation establishes a degree of merit to individuals as worthy members from the onset: This person is willing to undertake a minimal act in essential distinction of themselves and their group in flight or fight for the defense of European types.

There are additional qualities that need to be drawn-out by means of criteria other than genetics, of course. For example, Bowery might seek demonstrations of particular skills to confirm the type that he is looking for in his particular community. Lister would be correct to look for additional criteria beyond genetics and so on. These particular qualitative concerns are provided for in the Euro-DNA Nation as well.

We may hypothesize and verify that we do have a definition of White/European Nationalisms which can move easily in consensus, neither yielding to slobs or snobs.

Although there is some confusion over what constitutes White/European Nationalism by way of slobs and snobs, there is a de facto consensus that all people of indigenous European parentage, including Russians, are valid members. With that, there is a normal provision that the various kinds of Europeans ought to be able to maintain their distinct demographics and not have them blended away, not even with other European types. This normal provision protects against the slobs, those who cannot see the depth and importance of European differences from one another and in some of their slovenly cases, not even seeing difference from non-Europeans. It also protects against snobbish definitions of White, which would deny the overwhelming Europeanness or the value of some European kinds; in this case again, they are not seeing or acknowledging a difference that makes a difference from non-Europeans. Their concerns that some patterns among those others which are unlike theirs and not distinctly European might damage their kind if integrated, are alleviated by the human ecological accountability of the particular national and subnational bounds.

Thus, by maintaining national, regional and communal differences and values we may handle concerns of the snobs and the slobs. The snobs, those who do not really care for certain native Europeans, not recognizing them as a part of “us”, may be placated by the fact that borders with these groups that they do not particularly care for are maintained. They have the means to stem limitless blending away. Therefore, they do not need to throw these people overboard along with the non-Europeans. On the other hand, the slobs, people who have a tendency to be lax in recognizing the differences between Europeans or even worse, from non-Europeans, are, by the means of these national, regional and communal accountabilities, also prevented from going too far.

This framework allows for more and less pure alike, it maintains both genus and species of Europeans and thus provides a crucial basis that in theory might serve organizational grounds for our identity, its defense and expanse, even, into new territories.

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by Neil Vodavzny

Structural linguistics & semiotics are typically technical topics with an innate tendency to get complexified. The origins, from Greek drama and its Hegelian dialectic of ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’ are easier to comprehend.

While it’s easy enough to follow that people think in terms of binary opposites (human and animal, male and female etc), and that those structures permeate language, it’s subsequent extension in terms of semiotics or study of signs (notably by Umberto Eco) is another matter. The essential theory (Saussure) is that signs in language are arbitrary, and that they refer to external objects which give them meaning - language has a completely relative or arbitrary meaning in itself. Eco qualified this to the extent that, in his scheme, cultural convention denotes some signs as significant in themselves, ie, their content has cultural significance unrelated to the external world. He calls this iconic.

This is obviously useful enough for writing best-sellers (Name of the Rose), but there is also a sense in which iconic words are related to ‘non-culture’ - I’m taking a cue from developments in structural anthropology by Levi-Strauss. These words are again opposites, and they are words frequently associated with myth - sun and moon, life and death, male and female, predator and prey, marriage and solitude. These words are iconic in nature (there is the myth that swans will pair for life or ‘marry’) and cross-cultural. But, since they apply to nature as a whole, you can also say they are non-cultural. So, there are non-cultural signs (and portents) that occur in myth.

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Continuing my ramblings about motoring...

If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

I do not know the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche well, and have not read a single one of his published works from cover to cover for the best part of forty years.  I do know there is a grand vision of human meaning and a narrow one of human freedom, and there is rampant purposivity as well as progressivism, and naturalism but also anti-Darwinism.  There is anti-socialism, anti-militarism, anti-democratism, anti-statism in parts.  There is much more than the vulgar moral framework of “god-killing” and “aristocratic radicalism”.  For example, there is life affirmation.  If someone asked me for an interpretation of the above quote, without telling me that it is from The Will to Power, I would say that it is about emotion in human presence and its positive perspective on the lost life that went before.  Read in that way, the first and last thoughts, especially, are possessed of the same sublimity and make the same tangential approach to Truth as any metaphysical fragment in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.  It is hard to believe that someone could write in that way without knowing everything.  And yet, for most thinking nationalists he might as well have never conceived of more than the “higher man” and the teleology of greatness, the life lived for glory, the life of Homo heroicas.

Here, for example, is Jonathan Bowden enunciating what amounts to the default or, a least, dominant nationalist credo:

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by Neil Vodavzny

Myths are stories and, therefore, difficult to disentangle from the impetus to story-telling. To that extent, they are products of Man’s subconscious which itself is a more primordial product of nature. The question is what do myths mean, and second, how detached is material Man from his subconscious reality?

I don’t subscribe to the view advanced by Michael O’Meara (referenced here) that myths are there purely to advance some cause. That more or less is the wrong way round. Myths have a basis in action, whether it’s hunting, gathering or war, love and death. They comprise a variety of tropes, such as the ‘trickster’ - in tribal lore the scavenger or intermediary between predator and prey. The trickster figure is found far and wide, regardless of origin. Prometheus stole fire by trickery from the gods, for which he was bound to stone. The Norse god Loki as seen in recent film adaptations of Marvel, is a pretty complicated character forever oscillating between damnation and redemption.

The second question (how detached is modern Man) segues into pop-culture! The Beatles, being so iconic, might have taken on that mantle. Lennon maybe could be likened to a carefree trickster with shades of angst, while Ringo resembles more a buffoonish entertainer? In any case, the meaning is clear enough, so, to answer the second question, it depends if you believe in myths!

One of the problems is material Man is divorced from his subconscious because he doesn’t believe. If you accept that myths contain a truth that isn’t accessible to the ‘questioning’ mind, that is itself a critique of modernity. To quote the aforementioned John Clifton (The Comics Journal #90):

“The function of art isn’t to question our knowledge, that meagre corpus of answers we’ve managed to intuit.. rather the aim of art is to challenge the questions, to quell the analytical function from swallowing everything up in indecision and rationalising..”

Clifton’s point is that a comic-book fan or artist aims to produce the definitive version of Batman or Loki. The reason is that they’re archetypal figures; Superman the sungod to the dark dionysic Batman. Marvel’s schtick is for characters to represent forces of Nature, such as the Norse thunder god.

Now, you could take that a lot further. Nature, in King Lear, acts as a metaphor for his state of mind. In Japanese film-maker extraordinaire Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), a bolt of lightning illuminates the archaic gate through pouring rain, stage for the epic re-telling of the forester’s story by, among others, a ghoulish medium (Kurosawa adapted the plot of King Lear in epic Ran). In The Seven Samurai, Toshiro Mifune’s hectic performance of the reluctant samurai, born of peasant farmer stock, could be said to represent the trickster. In one scene he gives an impassioned speech railing against both camps from his rough and tumble vantage point (see article here).

Do dreams and myths have a reality which is lost to modernity, and is this visible mainly in folkloric films and the superhero mythos? If so, it’s the reality of iconic forces and their corresponding folklore. We know that these forces exist, and that the storms are rising, and we choose to believe in our increasingly fake world of information-flows, genes, cyber-systems, money-markets, latter-day materialism. There seems to be two separate things going on. One is that we are accepting of ‘advances’. The other is that they are less relevant to the iconic forces we see around us, ie, we are detached from reality.

The problem (see previous article) is our creative, temporal world of artists with talent (pop-culture) is superimposed on a fake world of gadgets! ‘Temporal’ in this context means anything with a story, a rhythm, a meaning, a presence (I mean like a lot of classic comic art has presence), some creative impulse. The modern world is more and more of the present (not ‘presence’), probably for the reason there’s too much questioning and not enough simple action.

A peasant-culture is easy to identify in terms of very straightforward actions; threshing, herding, singing, dancing. These actions, as I suppose, have a certain mythic context. In a similar way, the American West with its cowboys, rustlers, lawmen and outlaws with conflicting values had a certain mythic context. That’s why what I see in folkloric fantasy has more realism than the fakery to which we are increasingly subject.

by Neil Vodavzny

Just a bit of background - perhaps as a result of experience as a comicbook fantasy writer, I’ve become convinced that mythical action is needed for reality to be ‘felt’ or meaningful. I’m actually quite serious about this. The world of action is the world of ethics. It’s the idea acting makes things more real, through cadence & song, ritual.

Action and myth
Myths provide a basis for reality because they contain action as ethical constructs. Pictorially, this could be Disney’s fairy-tale world - you have cuteness & at the same time hints of goth wickedness. It’s quite easy to extend this concept into Levi-Strauss’s structural ideas - Man the hunter, gatherer, harvester - but even without going into tribal lore, it’s apparent that a world without action is amoral.

I myself am a believer in structuralism, and it’s worth noting Levi-Strauss is dealing with myth in terms of action – predatory raptors, crows that scavenge, the prey, the harvest. You believe in myths because they seem sensible, not because of any formal proof. That’s the point - if the universe is an ethical construct predicated on action, this is why we have myths. Myths have reality because of their meaning; contrast latter-day existentialism – we live in a world which believes in ‘realism’, not sense & feeling, archetypes of heaven and earth.

This is a circular argument. Myth & action belong together because neither are capable of formal circular proof - instead they are ethical constructs. Basically, you have to believe in the presence of a moral grounding to reality, and myths are accessories to that belief.

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This little video shows Italian police removing their helmets in solidarity with what appears to be an Anonymous protest, but is wider than that.  One of the posters on the YouTube page explains:

The demonstrators are an eclectic amalgamation of Italians, from truckers to students. The origin of the protests stems from the Pitchfork Movement, which began as a group of Sicilian farmers pushing for government reforms but grew into a nationwide revolt against banks, the Italian tax collection agency Equitalia, the European Union, and the Socialist-backed minority government, which is moving to privatize higher education.

People are stirring everywhere.

True Belarusian nationalism and its history have been opaque to westerners. The process of its true nationalism becoming opaque along with its struggle for revival may be instructive - and particularly if successful, useful for purposes of WN cooperation.

Still, “Western values” may creep-in through lack of bounds South and East as well..

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