Doomscroller #2: - this week — Saruman trashes Elrond and Isildur at White Council Meeting. Ma'at. If leftists had a Superman. Concentration Camp Resistance.

My opinions on shit I found online. This week: Saruman is a Sauron puppet, throws Elrond and Isildur under the bus. Ancient Egyptian Religion. Socialist Superman. Holocaust and Resistance.

Saruman trashes Elrond and Isildur at the White Council meeting. He said they were disrespectful because they wore their armour to the meeting, and that Elrond accused the Nazgûl in attendance of being mind-controlled puppets, and cited historic precedent of Annatar the Gift Giver being deceptive and dishonest about his intentions. Which is outrageous, because Annatar (Sauron) has been a very good friend to Isengard. You know, for all the complaints about Saruman killing trees and blowing up Ents, he brought jobs, he was making industry happen. And he can Make the Shire Great Again…with help from Sauron (the first neoliberal billionaire industrialist!)

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Ma'at is the Egyptian Goddess of Truth, Justice, and Cosmic order. She embodied a concept for the Egyptians similar to what other civilizations might call "Dao" or "Dharma".

From Middle Egyptian; An Introduction To The Language And Culture Of Hieroglyphs by James P. Allen :

“I made every man like his fellow, I did not command that they do jzft/isfet (wrong), it is their hearts that destroy what I have said."

— Amun expounding Ma'at in a Middle Kingdom Text

“I have given bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked.”

“I was a husband to the widow and a father to the orphan.”

— Tomb inscriptions listing the Ma'at that the deceased has done

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You don't need to use Superman's powers overtly as a leftist. It is sufficient to PROTECT revolutionary movements as they experiment with creating a stateless, classless, moneyless society. The biggest problem has always been the siege socialist conditions forcing these experiments into an increasingly authoritarian direction out of desperation to survive. With a Superman that give security guarantees, there is no longer a need to rush through capitalist industrialization (the usual cause of suffering under "communist" regime) or compromise with authoritarian measures (emergency measures that are hard to remove once put in place).

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Blessed is the Flame: An introduction to concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism by Serafinski

Excerpt #1:

A different approach: We have already been led to our slaughter — it is all around us. The world in which we exist is a protracted death, a sort of economically-sustained limbo in which hearts are permitted to beat only to the extent that they can facilitate the upward stream of capital. The plague of domestication has reached into every wild space, and the lines of colonization have crossed us more times than we can count. Every unproductive aspect of the biosphere has been flagged for eradication, from the “beam-trawled ocean floors” to the “dynamited reefs” to the “hollowed-out mountains,”’ the highest calibers of technology are locked into a perpetual killing spree chugging along in a “monotonous rhythm of death.” We who still have air in our lungs are the living dead, and struggle daily to remember what it feels like to be alive, holding tightly to the “desire for wildness that the misery of a paycheck cannot allay.” We roam the desolate architecture of our slaughter houses (“the prison of civilization we live in”) like ghosts who feel but cannot quite understand the vapidity of our existence.

To borrow some apt phrases from the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF): we have become thoroughly integrated into “a system that crushes us on a daily basis”, that “controls our thoughts and our desires through screens” and “teaches us how to be happy slaves” while letting us “consider ourselves free because we can vote and consume”, and all the while, “we, like cheerful Sisyphus, are still carrying our slavery stone and think this is life.” As an American Iraq war veteran-turned-strategy consultant wrote in the New York Times in 2013: “The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.” The extent to which we have internalized the rhythms, values, and stories of this civilization “ties our future to [this] undead and all-devouring system.”

Excerpt #2:

“The Holocaust experience is a very condensed version of most of what life is all about.”
—Dori Laub

"For a variety of reasons history has exceptionalized this particular genocide, but I’ve come to understand it as part of an unbroken continuum of domination that neither began nor ended with Hitler. It’s important to remember that the Nazis didn’t have to build all of their own camps (some of that work was done by the Social Democratic governments prior), nor did they have to decommission all of them after the war (the Soviets put a couple of them to good use). Let’s also remember that the post-war trials of Nazi doctors were conducted under the explicit understanding that most governments of the world are guilty of perverse, unconsensual human experimentation. Most notably, the United States, from where many of the Nuremberg judges came, had been involved in this kind of brutal scientific experimentation throughout much of the 20th century, infecting prisoners with malaria plasmodia, infecting death row prisoners with pellagra, or testing the effects of nuclear radiation on general populations. The Nazis were only found (or remembered as) guilty because they lost the war. Their camps were not fundamentally unique, though they certainly brought a devastating industrial flair to the whole concept. Giorgio Agamben has aptly argued that the concentration camp is the defining feature of modern politics, as it represents a “site of exception” from the enlightened facade of civilized society. Indeed, everywhere we look today we see Nazi machinations at work, though these parallels are often too controversial to utter. And yet for those willing to see it, from the Gaza strip to the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre, from the factory farms to the Alberta Tar Sands, the logic of this civilization continues to show its true colors. In order for some to live safely, others must be declared Ballastexistenzen and be shackled, violated, and killed. In order for humans to thrive, the earth and all of its other inhabitants must be subjugated and ravaged. Although the uniforms have changed and the tactics have evolved, the same basic struggle against domination continues. The phrase “never again”, repeated often by victims and descendants of the Nazi holocaust, rings more and more hollow with every passing moment."