Joost Vervoort (portal goblin)

This is a great writeup. Thanks a lot @666brian666.bsky.social! 'Terzij de Horde have an uncanny ability to get your blood flowing and fists raised in defiance like they do on “Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone,” a record that answers the times as leadership globally doesn’t seem to care to do so.'

Love it. Hilversum vibes

YouTube video by Zes Losse Tanden Met Terzij de Horde! | Zes Losse Tanden Aflevering 9.02

@johanvanhattum.bsky.social and @joostvervoort.bsky.social guested at the 6 Losse Tanden podcast! Fun times with @pvdp.bsky.social and the crew: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVdW...

Top is an empty rectangle with a jagged line in the middle. The left side is labeled "Frame" "F is happening!" The right side is labeled "Negation" "F is not true!" Below is a large image of Kirby, a round pink blob with eyes with a small version of the Frame F shape flying into his mouth. To the right is a large pink rectangle labeled "Kirby" "K is happening, that's why they're saying F"

i made a template you can use to think about what "frame/negation/kirby" looks like for other issues.
For example:

Frame: DOGE is a govt efficiency project to save $

Negation: Actually it made things less efficient and cost $

Kirby: DOGE was a project to break and privatize federal bureaucracy

i made a helpful reference

Rode Lijn demonstratie op 5 oktober in Amsterdam Het overgrote deel van Nederland wil dat onze regering concrete sancties neemt tegen Israël. Massaal trekken we op 5 oktober opnieuw de rode lijn.

Things are shifting around the response to the genocide in Gaza. Join your protests, union strikes and other actions. If you're in the Netherlands, there is another hopefully massive protest happening next week: www.amnesty.nl/actueel/zond...

Come to the Amsterdam Red Line protest agains the genocide in Gaza. Find connection in collective anger, grief and care. www.amnesty.nl/actueel/zond...

Spiritual disease as a bio-weapon Why it’s useful to understand the rise of fascism as political-spiritual warfare

Spiritual disease as a bio-weapon: why it’s useful to understand the rise of fascism as political-spiritual warfare. anticiplay.medium.com/spiritual-di...

Thanks @liandak.bsky.social!

Spiritual disease as a bio-weapon Why it’s useful to understand the rise of fascism as political-spiritual warfare

Interesting post on how we are messed with on a deeper level and where to find hope. Thank you @joostvervoort.bsky.social anticiplay.medium.com/spiritual-di...

And then feeling, or listening, to something in you that responds to that corruption and degradation. What does it say?

And maybe this fire is already lit in you. But if you feel half asleep to what I’m talking about, but curious about being more activated, it can be worth taking a moment to really feel how the reality of fascism is creeping into your soul, your energy and your being.

Or maybe it’s just a wordless fire.

Perhaps it lights the flame of truly wanting a better future. Maybe it’s humor at the profound smallness of fascism. Maybe it’s all of this.

Or the response can be a flood of love and deep care for everything and everything that is so deeply, deeply beautiful and vulnerable in this world.

Where I feel hope is that being aware of how deeply we are being messed with can create a response in our individual and collective systems. It can light a fire in us that says ENOUGH or FUCK NO.

So far, so very fucking depressing. But what I’m hoping to point out is that you are being fucked with in a very deep way as part of a spiritual-political war, and the metaphor of spiritual disease is the best fit for this.

The opponents of fascism have to be made spiritually weak. If these opponents are not aware that their spiritual power is essentially being sapped, degraded and ruined, because they hold more cognitivist ideas about experience and reality, all the better.

If fascism wages a spiritual war, its approach to ‘flood the zone’ with idiocy, unreality and endless cruelty is like unleashing spiritual disease as a bio-weapon.

People have been describing the current wave of fascism as a ‘hedonistic fascism’ that feels like it is entitled to everything and that takes great sadistic pleasure in humiliating its perceived enemies.

Fascism is an alluring spirituality of closed-hearted domination and death struggle, and it is able to attract people with that closed-hearted, sharp, powerful type of energy.

Hardcore fascist ideologues certainly see themselves explicitly in spiritual terms, even if you don’t. That is why right wing religion and fascism fit together so well.

And this is a victory for fascism, which I believe can be usefully understood as a spiritual force waging spiritual warfare.

The people who care grow exhausted at a deep spiritual level, and those who don’t care become more spiritually deadened.

People who feel active pain about what is happening to the world feel their very sense of humanity being choked. But those who turn away from the suffering or enable the destruction of societal structures for their own perceived short term benefits are also undergoing spiritual degradation.

There is a way in which the incessant stupid cruelty of fascism wants to eat away at our very souls and at the feeling of that connection.

Bear with me for a moment and let’s imagine for the sake of this metaphorical usefulness that we have souls in some way, and maybe a connection to the sacredness of life.

I feel like it is useful to talk about this moral wounding in spiritual terms, no matter how religious or non-religious you are. The language of spirituality can still have metaphorical power to help describe how fundamental this wounding is.

There is the notion of ‘moral injury’. When people are faced with crimes and cruelty that they cannot accept morally, but that they cannot do anything about, this wounds them.

I’ve been struggling to articulate something about this that I feel might somehow be of value or helpful. Many people I’m sure already feel this very consciously.