Moonshot Polyglot
I'm the solar flare soldier, I'm shooting for the moon
this duckstack isn’t big enough for the both of us
You stand on the shoulders of giants. Giant ducks, to be exact. If you didn’t know this, it means you need to pay more attention. I know what you’re thinking: “I’m paying as much attention as I can, but I don’t see any giant ducks.” This is the problem with faithlessness. You need to perceive the ducks with your spiritual eyes. The carpet beneath your feet is symbolic of duck feathers. The pavement outside is solid like flippers. The giant duck you are standing on itself stands upon giant ducks of its own. That’s why we called our newsletter The Duckstack- its to draw attention to this eternal truth.
Environmental Advisory: Moonshine
This isn’t your grandmother’s soda pop
There exists an illegal beverage called moonshine, created in secret by barbarians and savages. Its effects are eldritch, and its taste is violent and strange. Forbidden in all cultures and by all peoples, it is spoken of in hushed tones. We urge you to write your congressman and request he take stronger action against this harmful substance.
Its carbonated milk
Realpolitik
The average, modal leftist, thinks the assassination of Charlie Kirk was a good thing. That’s kind of the table stakes we’re dealing with. Curtis Yarvin once pointed out that if witches were actually real, witch hunting would not be nearly so popular due to the grisly magical demise most would almost certainly be fated to reach, and the same goes for “Nazis” and “Fascism”. If the political Right was half the fascists the left wanted them to be, insurrectionist judges would have been locked away and the country fixed long ago. The immensely politically popular DOGE effort to reduce waste and fraud in the government was sued, overturned, and as far as I know all of those kids are now on trial to go to prison because there is no legal solution to insane leftist judges. The videos of them being deposed are heartbreaking. A government funded antifa contingent personally sought out and doxxed and fired multiple of my friends in Utah and elsewhere over their support of the family proclamation just a few years ago. And now leftists are just openly shooting at RW public figures with unsurprising regularity. So it can be understandable that tempers are running “a little hot” so to speak. There is no appetite for peacemaking.
And people are becoming more and more aware of the phenomenon of “Suicidal Empathy”, in other words willful blindness to the consequences of mercy. Increasingly, the heuristic all operate under is “Nothing bad can happen when you are being kind.” Societal social rules have gained the bent nearly exclusively of the moral framework needed to govern kindergarteners; when you’re teaching a bunch of kids, none of the conflicts matter, and so avoiding conflict overrides basically everything as the highest priority. The slogans plastered about a schoolroom are taken unironically as apex morality- “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” “don’t judge.” “bullying is wrong” “keep your hands to yourself.” “Always share.” These morals are very easy to conflate with Christianity, because they use a lot of the same words, but the words mean different things.
The rules that govern a kindergarten are great for harmony, but terrible for building things. Harmony has an important place, but as our church’s prophet recently taught, “The covenants we have made inevitably position us as devoted participants in the eternal contest between truth and error.” His examples of being a “peacemaker” demanded actively inserting oneself in other’s troubles- whether those troubles were their sins, or their marriages, or more benign matters. The logistical issue is that peacemaking relies on someone else coming to the table, something that happens in maybe 1% of cases. If someone doesn’t want to repent, or civilize, there’s not a lot you can do to force them. Enemies are real. Or as a different prophet of our church put it, if you don’t have enemies, you aren’t living the gospel right.
But is everyone an enemy who is not a friend? What we see among the right wing is undoubtably a self-defense reaction to progressivism. There’s no appetite for hearing it but that pendulum can swing too far. And its understandable- you’re under attack, you can’t afford to set the table for your enemies. The Book of Mormon talks about this. But the fact is that even within countries undoubtably at war, most of the actual citizenry doesn’t even care. The way a group behaves is not necessarily how the individual behaves. Setting the plate for your enemies to stab you with is suicidal empathy. But if you set the table for no-one, you’ll never make friends, or do any good in the world. Though it has a different consequence set, suicidal antipathy comes with plenty of drawbacks of its own. I can’t speak for other churches, but in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints our goal is something higher, between the two.
1The Book of Mormon spends about 250 pages talking about war and war tactics, the movement of armies, numbers slaughtered, and military fortifications. Most people who haven’t read the book do not know this, and you would certainly never know it from looking at our religion from the outside. However, what you find in the written history the book contains is that over and over again the righteous combatants try to come to an accord with their enemies before they (or God) brutally slaughter them. It goes quite out of its way to mention this. If you don’t at least extend an offer of peace, God won’t hold you guiltless. The Book of Mormon talks about this tons.
If you will permit me a moment of racism, I think I can illustrate why this would be the case. Why mercy towards even enemies would sometimes be a good idea, even though it sounds insane on its face and we can observe cities literally burning around us upon the same principle.
At least in fairly recent history, most of the first world civilizations in the world were created by white conquerors who also happened to be extremely xenophilic. Third world countries are not exclusively but are usually dominated by excessive, retarded tribalism. Picture Native Americans sending their braves out to rape a rival tribeswoman as a mandatory coming-of-age ritual. Which is a fairly tame example of what Native Americans generally were like.
Remember this guy in the Pocahontas movie? The real story behind this life was that people were starving and he caught a couple Indians making trouble in their settlement. He released them back to their tribe as a gesture of goodwill, with a message asking if they could trade for food. The Indians said “sure” and when he showed up to trade they ambushed him, stole all the stuff, killed all of his men, then they tied him to a post and their women peeled all of his skin off with mollusk shells while slow roasting him alive2. Then all the historians mocked him for being naive and too generous and he was remembered as a total idiot until Disney rehabilitated his image.
So “empathy” can easily go catastrophically wrong. But what happens when you are a generous idiot is that people are able to be less guarded around you, and therefore they are able to be (selectively) generous idiots themselves. This does not mandate, but does create the necessary conditions for, a social phenomenon called “cooperation.”
No one person can do everything. To put a rocket on the moon you need engineers, welders, programmers, physicians, coordinators, bookkeepers, and dozens of other niche skillsets none of which are possible when you have to selfishly hoard every resource you come across. If you only have engineers and your rivals only have programmers, sharing without guarantees just makes you weaker. You can do a contract, a businesslike trade, to get around this, but the absolute ideal scenario is that cooperation is baked into the fundamental fabric of both of your cultures. “Of course I will share my engineer, if I need a programmer of course they’d send me one.” Marriage works this way too. Happy marriages are naturally selfless towards each other. Call it a United Order.
People try to artificially recreate this environment with kindergarten morals, usually by coercion. Wishing is important to set goals, but not on behalf of other people! “You need to give me your programmers. Then I’ll know its safe to send you an engineer” Rather than sending over an engineer for free, with no expectations, to set reciprocity as a culture. This almost always happens because not doing so exposes you to the risk of getting stabbed in the back but it also allows actual thieves to hijack your ideology to try to coerce handouts from the gullible with no intention of reciprocating. I heard once that a big reason the handshake was developed was to demonstrate to someone that you were not holding a weapon. Someone has to take the buck first.
This is basically the only way to build up a commons. We all like commons because we all benefit from it. But we don’t like paying taxes. However, Americans know that getting taxed is a lot easier when you have representation. Meaning you know the commons exists for you. These principles are unraveling because modern people, especially right wing modern people, no longer have such guarantees, and have been laboring for years in hopes of a theoretical commons which never came.
Take the immigration issue for example. We can think of hundreds of examples of Americans getting along excellently with specific people of all races and nations, and yet a campaign of explicit mass deportations won Trump the first Republican popular vote in 20 years. What’s going on? America has absurdly high immigration, but absolutely no assimilation. The foreigners bring their cultures, their ethnic feuds, their social norms, and then publicly spit on their hosts as inferior. America is treated as a global economic zone rather than a country- its inhabitants in a fiscal sense treated as existing entirely to provide resources for the third world. Immigrants send their paychecks home, with some economies of countries such as Mexico and India being propped up almost entirely by remittance money. Civil rights law is used exclusively to prevent white males from getting lucrative jobs. Ethnic conclaves of explicitly racial activists constantly lobby government officers for explicitly racial concessions, whilst suing into oblivion any white person who tries to do something similar. In short, dispossession. People are right to be angry. Christ warned about this scenario multiple times in multiple places, stating that such dispossession invites violent backlash.
The liberal sin is to act as though none of this is the case. You can theoretically have something in common with someone who chants death to your country. “A violent, mentally ill felon is a nuclear physicist just waiting for his chance.” Some degree of LARPing is necessary to achieve miracles, but acting as though cooperation has already happened, as though mutual understanding has already been achieved, this sets us up for trouble. It is demanded that we treat all groups as equals when we are not, rather than as potential equals whom we hope will rise to join us as brothers. For all the leftist talk about racism and other isms, it has always felt to me like this is the only grounds on which true charity can be extended. The love of a parent for their children does not exclude treating the children as individuals, nor demand ignoring their vices.
I don’t think being a peacemaker requires pretending you aren’t at war. But being at war doesn’t mean you’re constantly fighting either. Not if you’re smart. You’re mistaking war for genocidally, which is against the gospel generally speaking. During wartime you make attacks on specific objectives, and you try your best to avoid hitting civilians and noncombatants because you aren’t a savage. You even mid-war negotiate prisoner exchanges and all sorts of mini-treaties. In most cases being simple trading partners is better than war, because collateral damage is a fact of violence, both to infrastructure, in spending your own resources, and in the accidents inherent to using force. Suicidal antipathy says “always fight, everywhere”. All this does is mark you as a feral beast that’s a possible danger even to sympathetic onlookers and allies no matter how just your grievances. It is entirely possible to negotiate someone’s removal from your property whilst being cordial, or even sending them away with gifts. Its normal hospitality when someone comes into your home even. The savior doesn’t want us to die or live in untruth, but neither does he want us genocidal or frenzied. His goal is the salvation of all mankind, and if you’re going to be on his errand, something I have covenanted to do, its on us to do his work, where we can.
Good fences make good neighbors. Being wise as serpents means hide your teeth.
HOW GRASS WORKS
It doesn’t have the protestant work ethic, I’ll tell you that much
Grass is probably the most famous mushroom in the world. Like the quaking aspen3, grass develops a shared root system underneath your lawn, wherein it communicates with each other things like “I am being stepped on” and “the bugs are beautiful today”. Healthy grass has a beautiful green coloration, to ward off predators. It does the opposite of this. When grass dies it returns to its natural tan, symbolic of the barren desert and the scorching sun whose coloration it had been storing up all its life, to be released in that moment. Grass, like people, grows upwards, and like people, it is normal to cut it shorter with industrial sawblades. Grass are, evolutionarily speaking, our closest mushroom cousins.
Grass is highly empathetic. If someone gets hurt next to it it says “oh no” to its neighbors, but does nothing due to its inability to move. This leads to an existence full of helpless horror, but grass is an optimist. Grass and houses have a symbiotic relationship. When the grass breathes, it cools the house down, and when the house breathes, the grass gains insight into human nature. Grass’s natural enemy is the sky.
History - New Duckling
fresh from IFA or wherever
The bobdaduck family is pleased to welcome an addition in our newest daughter. She is human and makes noises like “eh” and “rrrrr”. But more like, guttural. She will have a lot to contribute to The Duckstack in the coming months, and I’ve assigned her to the typewriter mines.
We had the opportunity to go to a child’s birthday party where there were horses, and our kids got to ride them. Our toddler enjoyed it in quiet contemplation, a soft pleased look on her face. Our son stuck his arms out airplane mode the moment we stuck him in the saddle.
Before the baby was born, our son asked who was going to be the dad. We told him “No, papas gonna be the dad.” And he looked at us like we were stupid. “Papas already a dad.”
He asked us today “is <baby’s name> a children?”
I was giving the toddler kisses and she rolled over and said “owie”
The toddler is becoming more aggressive towards her brother, and while he is playful too rough sometimes, he doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. So when she comes up to him and hits him he just sadly takes it. To our horror, she has taken up biting, and I walked in the other day to discover her gnawing on his head like some kind of zombie
And Now A Word From Our Sponsor
I don’t know who this guy is. He just walked into the studio4
word
Ducksnax
Accelleration
Don’t even get me started on the relationship formalities expected between cousins
Maybe they were having a bad day IDK
another famous mushroom
I’m calling the couch my “studio” now, update your style guides accordingly