Dissident Memes #12 🌅 Resurrection Edition
Censored speech isn’t free speech. Only free speech is free speech, and they HATE free speech.
It’s been a while since I put together the last edition of ‘Dissident Memes’—almost exactly 7 months. So I think it’s time to let my subscribers and other readers know with this new issue that I’m sorry it’s taken so long and why.
I could now awkwardly try to blame it on personal hardship or something similar, but that would sound almost ridiculous in view of the people who are much worse off at the moment. The most accurate and honest reason I can come up with after a lot of thought is that I just didn’t have it in me.
I just didn’t have it in me to sort things out, think about them in depth, let alone write, translate or even create memes, in addition to all the everyday stuff and tons of information that flood my inbox every day. So it’s all been pretty much on the back burner for the last six months—much to my annoyance…
There was certainly no shortage of topics I wanted to write about or inspiration for new memes. However, I could no longer find the right balance between input (huuuge) and output (marginal). It felt like I was being buried under an avalanche of information from which there was no escape.
Thoughts were brewing into a storm in my head, making it increasingly difficult for me to sort them out, link them together and get them out of my head as something meaningful.
This was also reflected in the ratio of texts in progress, half-finished translations and unfinished memes (again: huuuge) to the works actually completed and published (again: marginal). I also became increasingly dissatisfied, you could even say grumpy—a trait that was completely alien to me until then.
I urgently needed to do something to break out of this energy-sapping spiral. And then, by chance, I came across this excellent piece by
on fractals and holons …“It’s easy to overlook the underlying order and patterns that persist in a world in chaos. What’s holding it all together.”
I realized in an almost magical way that it was not the sheer amount of information or the chaos it caused in my head that almost drove me to despair, but rather the creeping oblivion of my realization – which had always guided me well until then – that everything that happens is repeated and reflected in recurring patterns, and that everything is connected.
The following paragraph in Kathleen’s piece, in particular, ultimately made me resolve my input/output imbalance. Even though she refers to authors there – “reading one, passing the other” – the kaleidoscope metaphor she uses also works if you replace “authors” with “information”:
Opting to read this author, and pass on that one is a little like turning a built-in perception-kaleidoscope. One’s view will shift and alter creating a new impression, a new internal image of the world. On and one.
Using this “built-in perception-kaleidoscope” as a kind of “sorting lens” that shows you that a lot of information has a similar – if not the same – information content makes it much easier for me to deal with the fact that I only need a fraction of the flood of information that comes at me every day to produce a meaningful output. For me, it was like a relief from the constant feeling of missing out on something that might be important for my work.
This even prompted me to change my profile description. From “musician putting together the pieces of a dystopian puzzle” – which in retrospect sounds rather gloomy and exhausting – to “musician on a fractal journey”. A much more uplifting description, I think, and also one that might invite some people to accompany me part of the way on my quest for … whatever.
Anyway, I’m on the road again—and as promised, here are a few memes that I managed to finish in the past few weeks. Share them or download them and print them out, make paper planes out of them and throw them at protesting climate hysterics, antifa idiots or local politicians. Or decide for yourself what the hell you want to do with them—after all, you’re grown up enough to have read this far. And above all, don’t let THEM take away your sense of humor —you’ll certainly need it!
*Heckler: “Shut up! Come out with the memes!”
Ok, here we go…
Meanwhile in Germany..
Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if there ever was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space. ~Jonah Goldberg
Great collection, re-stacked on Notes! xx