Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just past midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me and the teachers who influenced them in turn. I'm currently tracing my Martinist lineage.  That's rendered complex by the Martinist tradition that one does not name one's initiator, so we'll have to go back via slightly less evasive routes. Last week's honoree, Dr. Gérard Encausse, who wrote about magic under the pen name Papus, didn't act alone in reviving the Martinist tradition and founding the Martinist Order; he had the capable assistance of this man, Augustin Chaboseau. Papus and Chaboseau were medical students together, and were startled to discover that each of them had received the Martinist initiation by way of two different lineages. They each initiated the other, and thereafter worked together to preserve and transmit the Martinist tradition. Chaboseau's wife Louise was famous in her own right as a leading French feminist, and one of the first female pharmacists in France.

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't even know any such bills were up, so I haven't seen any of this, but what I assume to be the basic argument is not that strange. Given what I can see about the potential reasonableness of the motives and beliefs of the people involved, I'm not sure there'd be any reason to see anything going on as "very, very weird", such as to be in need of any unusual supernatural explanation.

When a government is given powers to cross an otherwise-plausibly-sacralizable boundary for one purpose, even an otherwise individually justified and sufficient purpose, it becomes a lot harder to coordinate anything like at-all-politically-relevant outrage against that same government crossing that same boundary for some other purpose, even an otherwise clearly insufficient purpose. It's called a "thin end of the wedge" political situation. Other terms people use in connection with this kind of situation are "frog-boiling", "encroachment", and "ratchet effect".

For example, I don't know the details, but I've heard that there were surveillance powers American politicians took for the government claiming that they were needed to fight terrorism, and promised would only be used to fight terrorism. Within a decade (?) they were being used as part of the war on drugs. The way these things usually go, anyone who tries to call this out as unacceptable is treated as politically non-credible, because of the emergent aggregate effect of an intuitive mass political calculation combining four important factors:

- a "yeah, well, whaddaya gonna do" intuition that there's nothing that can be done,

- an absence of an idea that there's a bright line that can be drawn so as to be able to threaten any sort of actually-politically-effective outrage at its being crossed, enough to actually sufficiently deter politicians from the specific moves that would cross that line,

- a sort of background instinctive tendency of "well, yeah, they have all the power, you can't go up against that you'll just lose",

- the fact that the further scenario steps where people in the government leverage this loss of privacy to inflict harm on people in exchange for political power are sort of obscure and diffuse and systemic and variable, and generally cannot be compellingly concretely imagined in prospect nearly as well as in retrospect, so everyone just thinks the people who do feel compelled by imagining those scenarios in prospect are freaks and losers who aren't with it enough to understand how unfashionably discreditable it is to obsess about such things.

You may be more familiar with this sort of calculation in connection with encroaching aggregation of power by media, social media, and Internet technology corporations, rather than by governments. The corporation-audience covenant terms that corporations originally adopted in response to social pressures not to support things like advocacy of racial violence, after a decade or two mutated to accommodate social pressures not to support conservative beliefs about where morality came from (literally the motive Brendan Eich was ousted for acting on) or who was licensed to express which kinds of beliefs about which people were of which sexes, and then that led into the whole public-discourse disaster with the cutting people off from their friends and family and job opportunities for arguing for what the the official line about vaccine safety and efficacy was to become a few months later. Thin-end-of-the-wedge encroachment phenomena are real.

So, for people who have experience of this sort of thing, it's entirely reasonable to flip completely the frack out. The ask is not "accept more pervasive and structural government intervention to control pornography on the internet". The ask is, "accept more pervasive and structural government intervention to control pornography on the internet, and also become politically utterly helpless against all thirty other things the next few parties in power are going to want to do to pervasively and structurally control whatever it plays well to their donors and power bases to control on the internet, as if you were a conquered populace who no longer had a representative government".

In particular, I mean I don't know what is *currently* being proposed, but it doesn't seem possible to control pornography on the internet without having some kind of effective mechanism to track everyone who says anything, and gradually coerce every form of centrally managed social media into fencing out all forms of untraceable anonymous posting. And then gradually coercing every form of centrally managed connectivity provider into fencing out all forms of anonymous protocol, like what Cloudflare did to 8chan, but instead of just being at the level of hosting providers to individual web sites, it would be at the level of network providers to entire protocols like Mastodon or Jitsi. Like if every connection on the internet was as locked-down as if it was an app from the Apple app store (no offense to Apple, they stood up for the most important kind of freedom as long as they could). This would be plausibly an existential threat to human freedom as such, given that the forces of unfreedom in any given country would still be entirely able to coordinate using a global internet, and the control technology would be contagious between national governments.

(It's not even like I think there aren't possible infohazards that might prove to warrant this "existential danger for humanity's future" level of extremity, but pornography -- at least, the pornography we have today at any rate -- is not one of them.)

I guess maybe if you wanted to do work to make some other sacred bright line viable than "pervasive intrusion of the internet" versus "sacralization of privacy on the internet", a bright line that was better-placed in your eyes and protected all forms of privacy *but* pornography, magic would be one way of going about doing that? Like what Dion Fortune and her circle did for Britain during WWII. In Vernor Vinge's near-future SF setting, there's supposed to be a bright line between the all-pervading surveillance powers the government has for preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction (after a metropolis, I forget if it was Chicago or Denver, was destroyed by unspecified means in the backstory), and all the rest of the government. Maybe something like that.

(We might, after all, end up needing something like that soon anyway. The angle on the problem that I find compelling is that the voting public needs to know more and believe more-truthful things about how political institutions and political incentives and collective action work, in order to actually adequately support the legislation and executive and judicial self-restraint that would be needed to safely stabilize such a bright line.)