Blogging Beyond Theocracy: Technical addendum

 Last paragraphs revised 20 April (around 4:00 AM)

Birth of Dionysos (at center, getting pulled out of Zeus's thigh, with his crown already on). Apulian red figure kraton, late fifth or early fourth century B.C.E., via theoi.com.

The following statements are all probably untrue:

(1) When Zeus's pregnant girlfriend Semele saw him in his full divine splendor, the sight literally burned her to death, so he snatched the fetus and sewed it up inside his thigh in order to bring it to term.

(2) When Mrs. Bennett heard that somebody was moving into the big house at Netherfield she immediately decided the new guy ought to marry one of her five daughters. 

(3) When the Moskva blew up and sank in the Black Sea, nobody knew what caused it to happen.

But they are untrue in obviously different ways, with obviously different functions, even if it may be difficult to say what the functions are. 

The last, the lie, is the easiest: it's meant to deny the truth, which is that we know very well what caused the ship to sink, two Neptune missiles fired by Ukrainian forces. 

Nothing to Get Hanged About

No, Elise, I don't have any expectation that you will ever experience shame. I'm not concerned with your feelings at all.

I want you out of government. The first and most vital step in protecting our Capitol is keeping people like you and Jordan and Mo Brooks away from it.

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 28, 2021

Then again, she also seems to think something bad happened—a "tragedy"—because she's blaming it on Speaker Pelosi, as Alexandra Petri notes at the Washington Post:

What did you do in the war against reality, Daddy?

George W. Bush in Texas with chainsaw. From Erynn's Pinterest.

I've been reading and digesting and rereading this essay, "Normalnost", in the current LA Review of Books, by Peter Pomerantsev and in conjunction with the marketing of his new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which brings together the Russia theme and the Trump and Brexit themes across some unexpected parameters: not that Pomerantsev discounts the thing we've come to expect about "them" doing something horrible to "us", but that he sees the horrible thing that's happened to us as something that also happened to them, first, and something you could notice at first in the world of the arts, at the time of the breakup of the USSR, in the collapse of "a system of making sense of the world":

In History Becomes Form, the Russian art historian Boris Groys describes this process as the “Big Tsimtsum,” a term he borrows from the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, an alternative version of creation where God first brings the word into being and then retreats from it. “[T]he withdrawal of Soviet power, or the Tsimtsum of Communism, created the infinite space of signs emptied of sense,” writes Groys. “Soviet ideology knew nothing of chance. […] It saw itself as the necessary product of historical development as understood by dialectical materialism. […] In the early 1990s this ideology was suddenly gone — and the world became devoid of meaning[, leaving Soviets] in a sea of empty signifiers.”

Which led to the Russian avant-garde of conceptualists and performance artists becoming increasingly fixated on the panic of meaninglessness, depicting meaning as disposable or abandoning language altogether or contrariwise trying to rebuild meaning as a kind of group-therapy activity, when