your car has just burned down… the sun is bright...

fired. fired.

incidentalism is the philosophy that will be used to write the epitaph on Gus Leonisky’s urn.

“Gus died from eating too much of his favourite food: chocolate, bread and butter.”…

Nothing like “Here are the honourable ashes of Gus Leonisky (1932- ) who died doing one too many cartoons to expose the morons, the psychopaths and the idiotpaths that rule the world by lies, deceit and force.” This would not make any sense, would it?

Incidentalism is the philosophy of every day’s irrelevant stuff. 99.9 per cent of what we do is swimming in incidentals. Even our vote on election day is but an inflated incidental grain of sand in the well-oiled wheels of political hubris which can only be defeated by greater numbers of incidentals that always come back to bite us on the butt.

I love incidentalism. It’s like background musak in a lift. It rates below “entertainment” because entertainment is designed to distract us from the rubbish of “eventful” news. Incidentalism is accidental without the pain of the crash. Musak is designed to make our brain go poop. Most news delivery is now designed like stand-up comedy — as serious presenters stand up and deliver the lines befitting a Dick Emery routine with the gravitas of undertakers, or amusing like the floppy checkered trousers of a sad circus clown whose dog has just died, in centre-ring.

There has been this comedic news-show created for millennials on Channel Ten called The Project… It’s distilled magic-dust where the news is mostly that of the official media/government Newspeak with some rolling-in-the-aisles comments, even if someone has spewed, plus some incidental wisecracks about nothing and everything…

Incidentalism is what we do, like preparing breakfast on automatic, watching grass grow and squashing a cockroach on the kitchen floor. No second thoughts. All good. We clean up. We go to the supermarket and buy stuff on impulse, on pricing — or by subconsciously getting something we don’t need, recalling an advert seen during our entertaining mode, when we had nothing else to do.

But apart from loading the coffers of some multinational, this incidentalism has zero impact on the workings of this planet, apart from a small footprint in our carbon equation which will be soon deaded by the time we reach our last CO2 expiration date. Incidentalism has zeropointfive intellectualism at its core.

Being polite to our neighbours won’t change the fact that "The Donald" and the former pretender Madame Hillary are/were deviously lying dudes who make bad decision on our collective behalf. And don’t blame me. I had nothing with them-two idiots becoming the last choice of a country mudwrestling in the rancid aggressive sauce. We’re taught “morality” as essential to our sanity and wellbeing — and yet there is not an ounce of morality in 99.999 per cent of our leaders, even the Christian ones, like Scummo. They change their misappropriated moral compasses, like the wind twirls in Melbourne during a one 24-hour period. There’s more determination in a fluttering Pieris rapae’s brain, in search of which garden plant to muck up next — your spinach-lot sounds good…

Here comes a currawong. Lovely bird, smart bird, intelligent. The currawong is black with a white streak on the tail — big, a bit like a streamlined crow, with the refined flight of a magpie. His (or her) yellow eye with a black pupil knows you’re here, incidentally. The currawong is chased by the smaller birds that know “he” (could be a “she”) is the enemy, possibly incidentally thinking of raiding their nests for food.

Feeding ourselves has a lot of incidentalism in it. “Cuisine” is used to brighten this aspect of life with a bit of entertainment. Nowadays, cooking shows have become the prime time (un)reality on TeeVee. Food fights are popular. Food competition were becoming stale… There are many TV channels dedicated to cooking exclusively. A new one is about to crop up, and there you will be able to watch all the recycled (encored) recipes for offal and pigs’ arse with a zest of flair. You thought you would skip them the first time around. Nupe. They are encored. Lucky you.

Off course, like supermarket bumfight for shelf space by product makers, the more choice on freetoair, the less you need to switch to cable, which is about the same quality, except it’s not freetoair (ah... the “green” button…). You pay big bucks for your incidentalistic entertainment, whether you are freetoaired or cabled. On neither will you learn that your government is helping another one, to drop bombs on some poor people whose incidentalism was different from yours. They just wanted to live… Especially the kids... That will teach them, but you don’t know or you’re so incidental in your views that you don’t even blink. You should be outraged! Incidentalism could be the comfort of ignoring what is uncomfortable. Bad news? All news are bad by definition, but the news are only an incidental sidekick to advertisers.

They know you habits. They know your incidental dedication to incidentalism and to buying stuff. And incidentally, you seem unable to stop doing something — anything. Even nothing… or complaining about the news. We need to be busy. Thinking about how Trump and his moronic troops are mucking up the world is too depressing. Incidentalism is bland but not depressing. Bland is better. Another beautiful day… could not be better.

And then there is a better news service that your government is trying to destroy, because "better" means the Scummos of this country have to perform “better” which is an impossibility when their best interest engine is broken, one-sided or twisted in knots…

Without the central and collected news service of the ABC, the theme of community breaks down into special interests and religious crumbdom.

Media is varied, sure, but disjointed. Fox news becomes an easy listening because you need your dose of racist anti-feminist incidentalism to confirm you are not alone with neo-Nazi views. In New Zealand at least, apparently (I have been told) the media is totally pathetic. Our better Aussie media is constantly under attack from the Murdoch press often siding with the government of the day to destroy the ABC and SBS. If you want better news, you need to go to community radio like Skid-row, where for one hour a day you can listen to DemocracyNow!…

But amongst all the variety of media outlets, the incidental young people are left behind in droves. They only get their infonoos from iPhoneys and Androids inAppt. Google and Facebook have become the incidentalised NewsSpeak of 1984, in 2018.

Meanwhile, the Greek and Spanish oldies who once worked hard to make this country great — though I knew a few of them who exploited the bad-back-scams of the 1980s from staged car crash or workplace accidents, to get a life pension and an insurance payout — have garnered enough dosh to buy a satellite dish and get their entertaining amusements/news items direct from their own countries on the other side of the world.

At least they can enjoy incidentalism in their own language, but more often than not, the news they get has a different twist to those of our primal national broadcaster — News Limited. These Greek and Spanish oldies get better informed! And the music is not that lovely Rap music that pollutes most of the airwaves in Aussieland. Their music is still modeled on harmonies from the “revolutionary" Julio Inglesias and Nana Mouskouri.

This is a tragedy.

In the best incidental land of incidentalism, this music could pass as musak! Anyway, having news that are closer to the truth of what’s happening in the world is infuriating — but these wogged oldies know how to interpret the better understood news that do not suit their neo-Con views. Yep. This does not change their opportunistic incidental belief. Some of them thought that opportunity meant various tax evasion schemes, that Trump is god reincarnated and that neo-fascism is a stroll amongst the petunias, while the left wing socialists are to be sent to gulags. And they cannot see “global warming”. No one can. Except experts which cannot explain why we're not cooked yet… In their days (the wogged oldies like Gus) anyway, the weather was what it was. Still is…

Pass the philosophical mustard, please, incidentally… I just spilled some red wine… and by the way, your German car is on fire... Lucky the fire brigade has just arrived...

Gus Leonisky

Your incidental incidentalist... (picture at top: Gus Leonisky)

By Gus Leonisky at 24 Nov 2018 - 4:28pm
Gus Leonisky's blog
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whatever in history...

whatever

Meanwhile:

Scientists have come up with a new and ingenious way of fighting global warming: use chemicals to blot out the sun. Whether we’ll then have to fight (and do everything else) in the shade, the research doesn’t quite spell out.

Since the world can’t seen to agree on reducing CO2 emissions, why not tackle the problem from the other end, scientists from Harvard and Yale have surmised. The researchers recently published a study which suggests that spraying large amounts of sulfate particles into the Earth's lower stratosphere in order to literally dim out the sun could cut the effects of global climate change in half, and it might even be cheap!

https://www.rt.com/news/444762-global-warming-dim-sun/

May as well die first... or read:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/27224

By Gus Leonisky at 25 Nov 2018 - 7:35am
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then came the post-modernist incidentalists...

Since French post-modernist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva have corrupted the social sciences, Russia has been recast as an enemy again, targeted by a new type of intellectual McCarthyism - one conjuring up and vilifying the so-called white, male, Christian patriarchy.

The bastardization of late-20th century Western social sciences (for the sake of convenience here, "West"/"Western" meaning "a free society, not under totalitarian or theocratic rule") can be largely accredited to the rise of one French philosopher, Monsieur Michel Foucault (d. 1984), equally known for his supremely eclectic intelligence as he was for his sado-masochistic bent, rapacious sexual appetite, and borderline death worship (Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, 1991[1989], pp. 65-68). More on this decidedly non-academic stuff shortly.

Despite enduring heavy criticism for selectively choosing data that fit his arguments (James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, 1993, pp. 104-105), he enjoyed several stints at European universities, before landing a visiting professorship position at the University of California, Berkeley in 1980.

There he introduced his brand of French post-modernism to the already rebellious-minded, anti-establishmentarian student body. He drew large crowds to his Howison Lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity", eventually developing a massive following in the social sciences, which was already becoming increasingly entangled in human rights movements and politics, following the social upheaval of the 1960s and the malaise of purposelessness often attributed to the end of the Vietnam War and the 1970s.

Michel arrived in the US just in time to feed the intellectually hungry masses — and San Francisco was there to feed his voracious sexual appetite and obsession with pain and death. In interviews with the gay press, he praised sado-masochistic activity, describing it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously (Eribon, 314-316).

He frequented the San Francisco homosexual bathhouses, engaged in unprotected sex, eventually contracting and succumbing to the AIDS virus. On death, Michel wrote the following (Miller, 20):

"It is in death… that the individual becomes at one with himself, escaping from the monotonous lives and their leveling effect; in the slow, half-subterranean, but already visible approach of death, the dull, common life, at last becomes an individuality…and gives it the style of its truth."

"What man encounters in his death… [is the] fulfillment of existence."

Let me get this straight: we are OK with men obsessed with death educating our impressionable, vital youth? Can a biologist or geologist get away with such perverted drivel?

His impact in the academic sphere was immense, paving the way for the French post-structuralist school's takeover of the humanities, notably by ideological figureheads such as Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler: Kristeva was a fervent Maoist and has been recently outed as a spy for Communist Bulgaria (which she denies, of course), was heavily criticized for her ethnocentric approach in her own work (e.g. Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, 2007, p. 132), and was embarrassingly exposed for her absolutely appalling attempt at pedantry with her misuse of mathematics (Sokal & Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures,1997); Butler is a leading feminist who is perhaps best known outside her very narrow, altogether unscientific field, for winning the Philosophy and Literature ‘Bad Writing' Prize in 1999. Their students almost invariably label themselves as feminists (correctly), Marxists (incorrectly), post-modernists (correctly) … pick a card, any card.

For people so consumed with identity issues, they really do love their labels.

See the recent shining example of Masha Gessen, who has been recorded saying "it's a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should even exist… fighting for gay marriage involves lying about what we are going to do to marriage when we get there."

This is just the tip of the iceberg with this Gessen character. Her pal, Timothy Snyder, Yale historian, has recently been criticized by The Nation for his woeful application of post-modern tropes to global politics resulting in the demonization of nations with traditional Christian values, in this instance, Russia:

"[Snyder] is the apotheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trump's wake… [His book] Russia > Europe > America"-the road to unfreedom is a one-way street… What happens when conspiracy theorists insist that activists are Russian dupes?"

No wonder the left hates Russia so much — they've been indoctrinated to do so by their ideologically compromised sensei.

The main tenants of the post-modernist, post-structuralist school of thought (none of the proponents like to admit they belong to this school, oddly) is to uphold an intrinsic distrust of institutions of power (headed by white, straight men), their versions of history (written by white, straight men), and to deconstruct binary sociological (and even biological) categories (pitting white, straight men vs. everyone else). All modern systems of virtue and morality (championed by white, straight men) are inherently corrupt and tainted by the stamp of the patriarchy (ruled over by white, straight men).

Wait… what was that last part again? I'm a bit snowblind, all of the sudden. What's sex got to do with anything? Just imagine a neo-feminist repeating "white, straight male" like a mantra in a crescendo, with bloodshot eyes and saliva flying from "their" mouth (Is that the proper pronoun? Or should I use Zie or Xe?).

Now I feel better.

On a more serious note, however: how many different ways can one actually not say that "white, straight men are the problem" but continually imply it? Should we tack on "Christian" as well?

Edward Said, the famed cultural critic and father of post-colonial theory (which bleeds in to post-modern thought a great deal), had this very worry, as he warned how traditional sciences like geology, biology, etc., were growing to the detriment of the humanities, accusing literature departments of instilling incomprehensible writing styles and factionalist sentiments in their students, resulting even more in the diminishment of intellectual quality.

A harmless fringe theory at best initially, rooted in Freudian and Nietzschean rhetoric, post-modernism has morphed into a nihilistic, spiteful philosophy that has now given birth to violent movements, including Antifa (seemingly based at Berkeley), which routinely promotes and uses violence at its rallies (whose presence in the Charlottesville clash contributed to the tragic death of Heather Hyer, who was of course appropriately posthumously by Antifa as a rallying martyr).

Those who hold traditional values or who at least reject the social justice warrior war cries as victimhood and scapegoating propaganda are now in danger of being physically assaulted if they defend their beliefs. We can easily place the blame at the feet of university deans and department chairs for allowing the social sciences, once lauded as a place of debate and intellectual freedom, to go to hell, frankly.

In 1980, Berkeley allowed a sick, sadistic French man who felt at odds with the world and had an axe to grind access to our youth (I recall a young German artist in the 1920s whose used his charm and way with words to harness a people's sense of purposelessness and pride to carry out a vicious plot of hatred and revenge).

Previously confined to academia, the post-modern toxic sludge has spread to the media and politics, giving birth to (yet another) new McCarthyism. It is one not attached to Cold War sentiments involving a totalitarian regime and its free, democratic enemy. This demon looks very much like a "pre-Foucaultian" US, with a culture dominated by traditional, modern values, and traditional institutions, such as heterosexual marriage, (Judeo-)Christian ethics, and a unified (generally speaking) cultural mindset. The hammer and sickle have been replaced by crosses and capitalism — yet no matter what Russia does it will continually be recast as an enemy by popular Western intellectuals, sadly. It always seems one step behind the US — let's just hope it will be spared from this period of utterly empty-headed post-modern claptrap where the Newspeak is non-binary and gender-bending is the new virtue.

James Joshua Pennington, PhD

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201811251070113860-foucalt-patriarchy-d...

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