raven

Geotrickster’s 10 Year Anniversary

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Raven Steals the Sun by Preston Singletary

On the fourth of April it will officially be the 10 year anniversary of this blog. If it was another 10 years older backdated in time it would have been called part of the ‘Blogosphere’. Thankfully, that did not happen. I will be traveling on the fourth of this month, however. So instead I am going to upload this at a time when much of the world is in April Fool’s Day. It seems fitting. In that 10 years there have been 223 posts, well, now 224 I suppose. Not a bad clip.

My original purpose with this site was to serve the following purposes:

  1. Practice for policy idea writing.
  2. Working through issues I wasn’t sure about yet. A first testing ground so to speak.
  3. An online resume of sorts (see publications tag).
  4. To provide a repository for all the articles I either did not want to publish through someone else due to needing a custom tone or could not get published elsewhere (a formerly much more common arrangement).
  5. To be funny and casual about stuff treated with way too much seriousness elsewhere.

Once I began publishing externally much more frequently, the amount of analysis on foreign policy decreased massively, with domestic and philosophical posts growing, and even a few fiction pieces too. Aside from this though, the original 5 points seem to have largely stayed intact.

A lot has changed since Spring of 2015. Otherkin no longer rule the internet, replaced by a medley of domestic terror-coded ideological otherkin. A global pandemic ran rampant and unleashed the contradictions of late neoliberal breakdown. A carnival barker became President twice in a nonconsecutive manner, the first since Grover Cleveland to do so. In the interregnum between these terms a vegetative fossil held the presidency, but since much of the media liked him there was a coordinated conspiracy to pretend that this was not so. Greater multipolarity in world affairs, something that was basically inevitable from the Great Recession onwards, went from the primary world issue in the background to very much the forefront. The failure to establish a left populism, undone by postmodern moralism and puritanism and tied to the rotting corpse of a liberal establishment, led to the rise of a right populism which is far dumber than the left that should have been born from Occupy but wasn’t.

And then came signalgate to really ram home one consistent theme I have always hammered on this site: it is not primarily malicious competence that is responsible for so much of what you see, but a kind of autopilot incompetence. Notice too how a scandal that should be overwhelmingly directed against Mike Waltz in particular seems to be intentionally obscured by the very media that broke the story, likely because they find his uber-hawk establishment positioning the most palatable of anyone in the government and fear his replacement. Freedom of will? Human consciousness directing the species through rationality? These are the most overrated concepts in all of the humanities. We do not assign this special status to other species, and it makes our observations of their behavior far more objective.

So on the surface everything changed. But if you were paying attention nothing really unexpected happened at the macro scale. The empire was in decline when I started, it still is now. The planet is suffering under incredible loss of biodiversity and conditions of accelerating climate destabilization, same as it was then. Neoliberalism was a discredited force everywhere but finance and the media 10 years ago, and now its often even discredited there too. These things were always going to happen no matter what individuals or even specific countries were wielding the most power, though the rate of the change might differ between variables. Trump is an accelerant.

But just because real life is fatalistic doesn’t mean its predictable! Far from it. This site has the name it has because of my fascination with trickster figures in mythology. They remind us that the murky reality of moral ambiguity that we live in is random and fun in at least equal proportions to its more dire and tragic elements. To quote Dasha Nekrasova from before her podcast went fully unbearable: “Stay alive- something retarded might happen.” These are words to live by.

I would like to think that in these 10 years I have been consistent. Always willing to admit when I make a bad call (Russia won’t invade Ukraine outside of the Donbass/Crimea areas, Hillary will pull out a squeaker in 2016, Syria won’t fall to foreign states-*though in my defense I always carved out a Turkish exception to that one as a hedge, which sadly turned out to be correct). Want to dunk on me, those predictions are all still here. You can search for them. But I have had a greater number of correct calls too in the same time frame (A second Karabakh War with advantage this time for Azerbaijan, the always lingering dangers of the Israel Lobby on crafting viable foreign policy, US recognizing Moroccan rule over Western Sahara, the increased importance of Panama and the Arctic for geostrategy, other countries invoking their own form of R2P to justify war-no longer leaving this as an Atlantic only causus belli, and the missionary/military uses of social progressivism, to name just a few).

If there is one criticism anyone can rightly lob at me which I will proudly accept as true it is that I am a geographic determinist. I am. And if I am doing my job, other people will see why this apparently reductionist position is the pinnacle of material philosophical rigor and policy planning priorities. When accepting geographic determinism, people can virulently disagree on policy but still do so rationally and respectfully, knowing at least that all sides share a common physical reality. The animal is made by ecology.

So with a decade on here passed what are my favorite entries and which were the most popular?

Most popular is easy to prove as I have access to the data:

Oversocialization: An Alternative Social Media Theory, Geotrickster’s Official Rankings of DnD Editions, For Every Cheney Gained, a Million Voters Lost, seem to be the most consistent view getters, in some cases years later. I have even seen one of my lines from the most recent of these appear at random throughout the internet (the one about the party of FDR being replaced by a bunch of Patrick Batemans and the cast of The View).

Considering that there are hundreds I can choose from for my personal favorite I am just going to go with what hits the memory banks first as entries I am personally most proud of. These would be:

How to Write a Generic International Relations Article (from the first month no less and which apparently made my former doctoral advisor break out into laughter when he saw it during a meeting), Speculative Realism’s Mongolian Debut, Going Along With the Coyote Conquest, 17th Century Survival Tips for a Hysterical Age, Designing the Ideal International Relations Education, and Delving Down to Prospect (fiction!)

As for the future? I publish more often off this site than on it these days, but there will always be things that need a personal touch or that cannot be fiddled with by editors, things that fill the liminal spaces between clear cut genres and acceptable discourse, and books no one else wants to review. So long as that is the case, I will be here.

North American Shinto Shrines

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I recently got back from a trip to Japan. Though the purpose of this trip was primarily familial, I was able to go to Kanazawa (new location for me) and Kyoto (an overdue return trip) for historical reasons.

I made sure to go to as many shrines as possible, as I love Shinto Shrine culture. A non-unversalist and localized way of integrating people’s need of the spiritual and public ceremony with everyday life focused around local legends, lore, and topography.

What follows is an attempt to lazily (i.e. with AI) render Shinto shrines dedicated to North American folk heroes and cryptids, from the Raven of indigenous Pacific Northwest folklore to more modern fare like cryptids. Sadly, I was not able to give the shrines themselves an Americanized look and retain the overall theme. Normally, this is the kind of thing I would draw myself, but its focus on buildings (a weakness of mine) means this is the more efficient method.

Jersey Devil
Mothman
Raven
Coyote

Now for Halloween I just have to figure out what the North American equivalent of the Nuribotoke is.

Santos Steals the Sun

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Raven/Santos transformation mask, Southeast Alaska, early 21rst Century.

The Old Man at the Head of the Nass River hoarded the sun, moon, and stars in boxes within his home. Raven, living in a dark and primordial world, was curious as to what such things looked like. He slipped into the Old Man’s daughter as a seed, and then was born to her as a child. He would then cry in the presence of his new ‘family’ to see what was in the boxes. Being shown by his exasperated grandfather, he would then ‘accidentally’ spill their contents. This gave us the first the night and then the daytime sky. Finally caught, he transformed back into his raven-form and escaped up the Old Man’s chimney, being stained black in the process of egress by either the burning of the sun in his beak or the ashes of the firepit (depending on which version is told).

George Santos is no Raven, of course. But while he lacks the true long term cleverness of a proper trickster figure (an archetype I often enjoy covering here for obvious thematic reasons) he is currently playing a very similar role.

The litany of lies this man-now hilariously serving as a Congressman from New York- has told is too lengthy to even bother listing out here. Some are still ambiguous as to what extent the claim is false, though all are at least partly lies. The way this is presented by actors in Congress and the media, however, is as a scandal of a pathological liar that looks bad on Santos himself. But the problem with this narrative is that Santos’ lies are precisely why this desperate Howdy-Doody-looking nobody got a seat in the most powerful legislature in the world. The lies, at least temporarily, worked. It was republican party candidate vetting, democratic party opposition research, and national level media that failed. Santos is a fool, yes, but a fool who exposes the foolishness of those who pretend they are not also fools. The fact that Kevin McCarthy had to entertain this man for weeks just to get his vote to be confirmed speaker, is the pinnacle of farce. Forget your airport bookstore political thrillers, this is real life written by Jack Vance.

In this way, George Santos has (unintentionally) rendered a civic service to the country, even if not his particular congressional district. He has proven that local media is the front line of vetting, and how an over-nationalized and corporatized news industry has undercut and sidelined this vital role. He has shown how many people, especially political elites, rely on this hollowed out media apparatus for their own world view, failing even the most basic of operations in an electorally competitive district. Santos has even shown the folly of choosing candidates based around identity politics style checklists when the lines between Jewish and ‘Jew-ish’, gay and married to a woman, waging GOP culture war on drag queens while being a drag queen, and having ones family die in every tragic event of the last 80 years multiple times over effectively mean nothing. In a world were presentation is all that matters it becomes an inevitability that public personas will arise that only tell others what they want to hear.

But Santos, being so over the top, so positively clownpilled, makes a mockery of this unstated process. It is now so obvious that it cannot be denied or ignored any longer. The house of lies creates its own parodies. The execrable late night news-comedy shows, whose last gasp of relevancy was ten years ago, never could have made a politician parody so on point as this even at their former heights. When our comedians drop the ball on parodic delivery, the people who they are supposed to be observing must stand up to the task.

You could make the case that right now, at this exact moment, George Santos is the single most illuminating figure in Congress. Much like how Raven, breaking out from the Old Man’s house with the sun in his beak, once lit up the sky of the Pacific Northwest. From that point onwards there was no going back to the willful ignorance of the murky world.