Waiting for, supporting and relying on heroes is fundamentally passive and disempowering.

Becoming heroic, by contrast, is TOO empowering and is a way of activating unearned power in the quest to force others into one's will.

All heroes and heroics must be banished.

And in other news, the US centre-left has had, for much of my life, a certain waiting-for-a-hero quality that was most strongly in evidence in the groundswell of support for Obama (and a lesser extend with Sanders). Once the hero arrives, everything is taken care of, so no need to, say, vote in further elections, or continue to protest the war. Everyone can take an 8 year holiday on pacifism (and wake up in 2016 wondering what happened).

But also, the original idea behind 'No gods, no masters' was anti clerical power. And the problem of the clergy was that they wielded an enormous amount of political and economic power based partly on their connection to god. This knowing-god's-mind and carrying-out-god's-will is strongly akin to notions of heroism. Of course, the other source of their power is tradition, but that also figures into the heroic ideal.

tl;dr: the slogan was really against heroism the whole time.

No, but really, I want to talk about this:

'No gods' is often a cover for anti-Semitism and islamaphobia (see: Charlie Hebdo)

And the notion of 'heroes' is not only a core idea in ur-fascism (see: Umberto Eco's essay), but I'd guess that a lot of asshole behaviour by manarchists comes from their conception of self as heroic.

If we see ourselves in solidarity rather than as liberators, we'll get a lot father and be less terrible.

No heroes, no masters.

(Everyone can keep their gods because religious freedom is a cornerstone of liberty)

In reality, since England pioneered the Industrial Revolution Tolkien so despised, *Sauron was a hobbit*.

Which might make rather a more interesting story.

It takes a remarkable intensity of ignorance of thematic, linguistic, geographic, cultural and historical clues to be able to read Lord of the Rings and not realise that Orcs are Turks and the whole thing is about a mythical heroic England preserving a sanitized Roman past against an inherently evil/weak/powermad Continent.

But English speaking fantasy readers have been well trained from birth to ignore structural features in our literature, so we generally do manage to pull this trick off.

.. so Saruman would be Germany, England's staunch ally through the Victorian age and fellow leader of 'civilisation', who suddenly and shockingly (to English minds) switched to rival in the years before WWI. The Brandywine is the English Channel, Bree is France.

There is no Pacific Ocean or Indian Empire or Americas or colonialism, despite these being the source of Actual England 1914's banking wealth, because LotR is Fantasy Conservative England's fantasy world and money just.. grows, I guess.

But good lord this is what you have to do just to disable backslashes.

It's heroic and glorious but...

https://github.com/AlexKnauth/no-vert-bar-lang/blob/master/no-backslash/lang/reader.rkt

Well, this might be a clue.

See, someone ELSE has already been mightily pissed off by that weird vertical bar thing!

http://docs.racket-lang.org/no-vert-bar-lang/index.html

The only actual thing to do I guess is to try to read through all the Racket packages at https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/ and see if someone has already done what I need.

(I have been through this loop many, many times.)

I know I'm asking for a lot:

* a Schemelike environment that runs *natively* on Windows and on Linux
* that's currently maintained
* with full native desktop GUI bindings
* and a system-native GUI editor/IDE that speaks the same keyboard/mouse shortcut dialect the host OS does
* with a syntax that doesn't reserve special characters because I want to try to write a DSL in it for authoring text adventures

I guess I'm never going to get that last

Sigh. It really is just Racket, I think, for any Schemelike language with prebuilt executables on Windows without a Posix emulation environment.

So I have to figure out how to cripple its reader before I can begin.

Ok so I tried to download MIT GNU Scheme because it runs on Windows and the installer ran fine and then I clicked the Start Menu icon and literally got this

https://mastodon.social/media/AMHiypWWO4R2ZVyggvs

"Marking a day no one—with the possible exception of Terry Gilliam—was sure would ever come, Terry Gilliam announced yesterday that he had completed principal photography on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a mere 17 years after he began shooting."

❗❗❗

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/06/05/terry_gilliam_has_finally_finished_shooting_his_don_quixote_movie_and_it.html

i have strong feelings about epistemology

how did i get to be this way

Doesn't mean we should try to be compatible with each other.

And what do you mean "nobody is interested"?

You're just bashing it

the privacy envelope I get, assuming you mean private payloads are not encrypted

suppose Hubzilla supported sending and receiving stuff using ActivityPub, and we started to send our assets to other parties, e.g. a Zot app or webpage or a wiki - what are they to do with them? Is there a way to tell what to accept and what to do?