from the early days of the internet, we might remember "netiquette" -- in general, when, in posting to a listserv, one is so vehement that one finds oneself using all caps, i.e., "shouting," and sloppily accusing other list members who have a longstanding engagement with culture, religion, mysticism, and politics in his or her poetry -- well, this is a sign that one has crossed either into discourse that best takes place in private, say around someone's kitchen table, where there are fairly equitable ad hoc rules for debate, or one has ceased to care about debate altogether

while the message from LA did raise up a number of canards like Buddhists instead of Buddhism being nonviolent, and the medieval versus the modern

but there are some divisions here between secular government and sectarian government, that are easy for westerners, perhaps more familiar with western history, to understand as medieval-to-pre-early-modern, since this happened part of the way in Europe then (tho monarchy was still using religion to justify authority) and then more in the 1700s in the Americas (the long 17th century)

there are other divisions between modernism / those after modernism and those who are unaware of modernism, and that is different than being affected by modernity or contemporary society

[watched Dave Chappelle's block party last night -- he is a Muslim, a convert, he invited the matching band of Central State U, which is connected to Wilberforce / the AME church to play, admittedly before a lot of message hh and then a fugees reunion concert, in front of the "broken angel" house in bed-stuy, which was built by the daughter of an h'wood director who seems to have had a brief career before the production code institution, and all shot by the eternal sunshine director -- a situation so sublime that of course Chappelle, its creator, was said to be crazy, driven by his insanity first to Africa and then back to yellow springs]

but rationality and having a rationale are two different things, and I hope there is at least room on this list for those like myself who think Weil was mostly an anorexic who failed to break through to meta-systematic thinking, and don't really appreciate her glorification of agricultural workers being subsumed by the agricultural machine just prior to the effective exploitation of the (Christian) Vichy regime of just this sort of imagery

now, her critique of progress, like many other such,

I also want to mention that Dr. Sultan was pretty vehement in refusing the "heretic" label, which seems appropriate, since if one is not a believer, one can't be a heretic; you can be apostate if you're not a believer; in Islam, you can be taken to court, in a theocracy, for being anti-Islamic if you're non-Muslim, but you can't really be "excommunicated" since there's no one official community.


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I had no problem following the full link; given that she's in LA, I would think she should hang around for quite some time if she doesn't get a job at Disney.

She was quite forceful in rejecting the heretic label; if you're not a communicant, you can't be excommunicated; if you are not a believer, you can't be a heretic. People on list in addition to myself have commented, of course, that the "no Buddhist sectarian violence" argument's a canard.

However, modernism and the rise of 20th century secularism, perhaps mostly under the influence of westernization of popular culture, does seem an increasingly bitterly marked division between increasingly popular and powerful and fundamentalist religions and increasingly less secular states, even here in LA. Could I say "increasingly" in that more? I think we can see that on list with the religious posts (Weil's enthusiasm for man turned into cog in an agricultural machine?, the logic problem which also didn't seem to recognize (like Weil's thought) that logic is a human system among many such) of the past few days.

Politics, religion, belief -- it is all directly related to poetry, even if you don't write overtly political statements like the all caps posters the past few days --

NY is, ironically, apparently the super satan because it is so secular -- you wanna take out Christians? Bomb Oklahoma City with fertilizer originally made from leftover WWII armaments. Wanna bomb LA? Ooh, and like, who cares? We do most of our filming in Vancouver.

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