Spring Equinox

 

The picture above is AI-generated, but the sky from my location does look more or less like this right now, with a sunset, a crescent and the Evening Star "below" and "to the left" of the Moon. And it´s the Spring Equinox, too!

Fantastic.  

The holy war has begun

 

Credit: JJ Harrison 

So I just watched "Dune: Part Two" from 2024. The film is well-made and interesting after a fashion, but it moved me much less than I had expected. Certain aspects flet dragging. Such as...Chani, Chani and Chani. Did I mention Chani? 

This female Fremen warrior constantly tries to sway the main protagonist, Paul Atreides, from fulfilling his dark destiny. And of course fails. The whole thing isn´t just boring. It´s also similar to the Padme-Anakin drama from "Star Wars". Maybe George Lucas got the idea from the "Dune" novels, who knows, but in Hollywood terms, Lucas has the primogeniture. Oh, and Atreides accepts his fate without too much questioning. The choice is grey-grey rather than black-or-white. Again, like Anakin´s choice in "Star Wars".

I never read Herbert´s novels, and probably never will, but I did notice that all other film or TV adaptations of this space opera are extremely colorful and flamboyant, to the point of cringe. Or is it camp? Denis Villeneuve´s style is markedly different. We´re obviously on a desert planet, and part of the film is actually in black-and-white (the gladiator fight). Not even the pseudo-Russian aristocrats look too fancy.

The reactions to "Dune: Part Two" from "Alt Right" trolls on-line were...interesting. Sure, they complained about Chani, but nobody seemed to notice that "Muad´Dib" (i.e. Paul Atreides) is really *the bad guy*. But perhaps the Alt Right really likes the idea of a Muslim jihad destroying the based Space Empire? As long as a *man* is in charge who refuses to listen to His Annoying Girlfriend. LOL. Besides, isn´t Paul (who looks rather whimpish for a Muslim Mahdi) really manipulated backstage by a cultish matriarchal sisterhood?

Funny have people can miss even the most obvious things. 

With that, I close this little review.   

 

 

Lekstuga

 

AB:s chefspolitruck tycker att Mohamsson förvandlar riksdagen till en lekstuga. Hans alternativ? Sossarna borde förvandla den till *sin* lekstuga istället. LOL. "Detta är ren populism". I själva verket kan utrikespolitiken skötas väldigt enkelt...av Utrikesnämnden. Där alla partier (även de något lekfulla) är representerade. 

Jag har talat.  

"Väck misstroende mot Simona Mohamsson"

Main character energy?

 

Friday again. 

Arktisk uthållighet

 

Credit: FunkMonk 

Helt vansinnigt om det nu är sant. Vilket det mycket väl skulle kunna vara...

Danmark förberedde sig på ett anfall från USA

Current mood

 

Somewhere outside Stockholm just now...

Dark moon

 

Och vad är problemet?

 

Credit: SarahYantra(?)

Och vad är problemet? Det är väl bra att ungdomar äter hälsosamt. Och hur korkat är det inte att göra köttätande till en höger-vänster-fråga?  

Köttätandet ökar bland barn och unga

Orkanen

 

Två korta kommentarer. Ett: Detta verkar motbevisa den västerländska framstegstanken, "historiens slut" och liknande dumheter. Istället har vi en oscillerande rörelse. Två: Tänk om auktoritära populister kommer till makten *eftersom demokratin inte klarar av att lösa samhällsproblemen*? Det betyder inte att auktoritär populism nödvändigtvis är positiv. Men det väcker ju *vissa* obekväma frågor, eller hur? 

Den tredje autokratiseringsvågen

Mr Breakfast

 

Here is our man Formscapes again. I commented on "Mr Breakfast" and one of his videos about the GenZ revival before.

>>>Recently (ish) the channel "religion for breakfast" released a video which addressed the "zoomer religious revival" phenomenon. In the video, Mr Breakfast argues that this phenomenon isn't actually occurring, and that the headlines claiming otherwise are all misleading, and presents a decent pile of survey/statistical data which seems to suggest that no such revival is happening.

>>>This, my friends, is a great example of why quantifiable data should never be trusted more than your own eyeballs. Source; my eyeballs. What the statistical data does show is that there had been a very pronounced downward trend in religiosity over the past few decades, and that this downward trend seems to be coming to a halt. But, argues Mr Breakfast, this halt of a downward trend is not a "revival" because there has not been an uptick in church attendance, professed religiosity, conversions, etc... >>>Statistical data is, I ven under the best of circumstances, a sawed-off shotgun among epistemological tools, due to the fact that it is extremely reductive and abstract, and - significantly - because the extent of this glossing is usually not fully clear to people. >>>In this case, what those numbers aren't accounting for is the fact that not all human beings are equal in terms of cultural influence. Among any generation of people, you are going to have a very large majority of people who are just kind of "going with the vibe", and a very small minority of people who are standing on the razor's edge between present and future. The latter are what the kids these days refer to as "main character energy", so I'm told. >>>So if you want to understand the direction a given zeitgeist is headed in, you shouldn't be taking of surveys of everyone as though everyone were equal. You need to look to the "main character energy" people and see what they are doing, bc in very short order, the "just going with the vibe" people will be following along with the trail being cleared by the former. >>>When I - a millennial - was in my late teens and early twenties, all of us "main character" kids were into things like Marxism, new atheism and postmodernism. No statistical study performed in 2008 would have predicted that in 15 years, those ideas would have leaked into every aspect of pop culture. But anyone paying attention could have told you that, bc they could see with their own eyeballs that those were the topics of interest to all of the people of that generation who were undoubtedly going to become novelists, opinion piece writers, screenplay writers and academics in the coming decades. >>>The current religious revival is like that. Look at the people who are suddenly converting to Orthodoxy and Catholicism. They aren't the "go with the vibes" kids. They are the cerebral, autistic nerds who will be novelists, opinion havers, screenplay writers, etc in the next decade or two. >>>Now to be clear, I don't think that this is a good thing - for reasons I'll be getting into in my next unscripted rant video, so stay tuned for that - but it is definitely happening, and that is in fact what the statistical data shows if you have eyeballs with which to see what the statistical data is actually about. >>>Nothing is Hidden™️

Original text here:

Formscapes comments Mr Breakfast