Mine Brine
Pickle the canary so he doesn't smell like coal
‘cause this is Thriller, thriller duckstack
Here we are, just park your duckstack right over here. The valet will take it. Yes, we’re going to park it right in this gentleman’s email. You’ll be free to come pick it back up again anytime.
Just kidding, we lost the keys, its stuck in their email forever, they’ll probably have to call a towing deletion service just to keep it from junking up the space. Sorry about that. Enjoy your night though!
Public Service Announcement: New Tree
Please don’t cut it down like the last one
If you’ve heard the wailing cries of the damned when you go outside in your yard recently, do not be alarmed. Our Duckstack environmentalists have simply determined that your yard could use some more greenery, and have installed a new willow tree. A weeping willow, to be precise. With the salty sap that drips from its pores constantly, and its elegant, sprawling branches drooping low to the ground in despair, this tree should provide a unique combination of hydration and shade to your yard’s ecosystem. Don’t worry, this service is provided free of charge. Just part of our commitment to the environment!
Meme religion
If its a viral media personality, its probably a virus.
This week, a meme convert to Catholicism and a meme convert to orthodoxy were exposed as insane alcoholic drug addicts who were cheating on their spouses with each other and of course they were big time NeverTrump republican pundits with a lot of high profile contracts with various media agencies who rose to prominence lecturing people about chastity and how to make a good marriage and in general being vocal commentary givers like most of us online, with the small detail of not believing any of it.
Sounds like a lot of trouble, right? One rose to prominence in under a year, and the other has a long history with Ben Shapiro’s Blaze TV, among other things. These people each had over 100,000 followers. That’s a lot of people who apparently were unable to register their sliminess, even though it was obvious to me from pretty much the moment I heard about them. Not that they were cheating with each other just that they were hacks, I mean.
In my right wing extremist circles, we have the term “low IQ racism”, to describe the failure mode which is becoming ever more popular, where stereotyping goes beyond just acknowledgement of cultures and averages and motivations, and into conspiratorial type thinking, where the described group is seen as basically an evil djinn manipulating the fate of society and which conventional methods like logic, empiricism, and argument are seen as too tangible to even interact with. Haunts and specters require ghosthunter Ways Of Knowing12 and ghosthunter Solutions. Just like in marriage, negotiation is harder (and requires a lot more humility) than just going to war.
Discernment is not really something that can be taught, since most of it comes down to practice with people, having “seen the type” before. This is difficult, nuanced, takes effort, and nobody has any appetite for learning the little heuristics like “If someone is doing a big public conversion they’re probably in it for the spectacle” or “prostitutes who claim to be penitent but are still setting themselves up for attention and to be fawned over are probably not” or “highly worldly women are probably vulnerable to worldly peer pressure towards dissolving their marriage” and so on. In fact, most people are not even inclined to verbalizing their intuitions about these things. So when their discernment blatantly fails them, people will get mind broken by it and invent a heuristic so wide its supposed to be a catch-all so that they never get burned again.
Coincidentally, this is often exactly what the meme converts are doing as well. I would estimate we are at most about halfway through “woke”. In hindsight, nearly all of it will have been essentially fads- But there’s still a lot more to come, and there’s going to be a ton of religions that are going to misread the winds and bend the knee. Most churches and especially most pastors rely on voluntary tithing to make money- meaning if their messages aren’t popular, they actively start dying. As society continues to deteriorate, people are going to flee anywhere they can that promises any sort of principled, institutional refuge, which is what we’ve already been seeing in the mass wave of young converts to Eastern Orthodoxy- a church that was hitherto nearly entirely racial and entirely unheard of in the United States. It isn’t really about the religion’s truth claims, and the difference between “in it for the prestige” and “in it for the alignment” can be razor thin.
Thanks to a preposterously large investment portfolio, The Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints finds itself in the somewhat unique situation of being able to say “no” to converts, and thanks to being the least fashionable religion on the planet, basically every prospective convert needs to swallow their pride in the first place, meaning basically nobody is converting for clout reasons. I’ve seen it happen but then they realize they actually did just sign up to stay off of coffee and booze and they immediately self-weed, which is an incredibly handy doctrinal immune system, when you think about it. Not that we want people out, of course, but the church can actually stake sincerity above other factors, and it doesn’t even need to be that rigorous about it. Unfortunately, similar standards were not implemented in church owned auxiliary organizations such as BYU and Deseret book, and the church now finds itself playing catchup, but the apostles have been taking measures to gradually bring these institutions back into alignment.
A lot of religions don’t have this, and a lot of organizations don’t have this. If the federal government had this it would probably go a long ways towards lowering racial tensions in America- Most neocon pundits aspirationally claim America is a “nation of ideas”, that anyone who believes in American values can be an American. And the problem with this isn’t that such a nation couldn’t work, its that as it stands such a thing is unenforceable. We all know leftists don’t really believe in freedom of speech, religion, guns, capitalism, and so on, but are they no longer Americans? What would America have to look like, to be able to revoke citizenship on this basis? A lot would have to change to build such a nation. So this rhetoric is mostly self-serving, to go the normal idealist route of espousing an ideal to avoid having to get your hands dirty with subpar solutions and actions.
I’m not going to say hypocrisy is bad. Everyone is hypocrites, espousing standards they fail to meet, and its not wrong to do so. But when there’s a path of least resistance, the people traveling that path are likely to have a lot of different reasons for doing so, so its going to be a lot harder to judge that path on its merits. Standards can go too far, expecting the superhuman is a recipe for disaster, so this is something where a person really does need to walk in the middle and mind both sides of the road, forgiveness in one hand and prudence in the other. The name of this virtue is: Temperance.
A Game of Telephone
Please welcome this exciting new regular duckstack feature
I think its high time we started seeing if I can retype the same thing verbatim every week. The people have been waiting for too long.
History
A series of Spooky Sentences hits the bobdaduck household…
“mom did I fall out of love… or murder?” Could go either way I guess
“caterpillars go into cocoons and then murder turns them into butterflies.” Kids got some strange ideas about death.
Our son, in tears: “I don't love holes more than dinosaurs…” Turns out he was upset that his sister had stolen his crocheted blanket and given him her dinosaur blanket.
Our son, staring at himself intensely in the mirror: “I can't move my eyes around” Not without looking away from the mirror
I asked my son: “why were my shoes outside?” and he told me “I put them in the greenhouse so they could be warm.”
Loreoscopes
what’s your story?
Fable: The stars in the sky are speaking to you, the constellations are animate. They are going to teach you a moral lesson, but its going to take like 8 billion light years for it to get here.
Parable: The stars are your metaphor. A metaphor for nuclear fusion.
Novel: There are a lot of stars in the sky, and a lot of different things happening. Most of them aren’t necessary, but it makes a pretty whole. Just like you.
Epic: The number of stars is staggering, and our sun has to kill all of them.
Short Story: Your star sign is the falling stars, which burn brightly before disappearing, unless they annihilate all life on earth. You are a dinosaur.
Poem: Some of the star names rhyme, and you should only draw constellations made out of those ones. Just call it an animal or something, its not like anyone really checks these things anyway.
Ducksnax
lol
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Centering-Black-women%E2%80%99s-ways-of-knowing:-A-review-Starks/b328c79800360d2608b89cb1603dc7bf95118b9c
https://www.academia.edu/123756151/Black_Ways_of_Knowing_House_Home_and_Hope
https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?courseid=017862&term=1262
https://aggiesblogaboutblackwomenwriters.blogspot.com/p/black-womens-ways-of-knowing.html
https://www.academia.edu/43580957/African_Ways_of_Knowing
https://www.jstor.org/stable/48563014?seq=2
highly recommended reading but the uptake is that when you’re at war with reality and empiricism then gossip networks are literally the holy grail
I wasted far too much time trying to figure out which two pundits you were talking about. I even resorted to asking a Fake Intelligence, which of course promptly and confidently fabricated something out of whole cloth and when pressed admitted it had done so.
Most of my constellation started its lesson about 7.9999 billion years ago, so it should arrive any day now. But as the student, i'm a lot less patient than they are, so the anticipation of waiting 8 billion more years for him to judge my answer is going to kill me.