3:52 am
January 5, 2015
One of my favorite novels is Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, and it’s sequel Parable of the Talents is amazing too. I also love a lot of her short stories, and her novel Kindred is a remarkable examination of gender roles, race, and systemic oppression that completely leaves me hollowed out (in a good way).
“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles,and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.”
― Octavia E. Butler
She was a prophetic genius, the first sci fi writer to ever win the MacArthur Genius Grant, she focused her attention on social hierarchies and power structures and uncovered, IMO, deep human truths. Like the above, for instance. It speaks to me so much in regards to the recent political climate. And as I think about my own art, and its purpose. It’s a trapping we can’t escape from. Everything is a fight for control.
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
And then this one. Political biases aside, I wish so many people would think about who they are supporting politically in these terms. I was talking with @violentdope about the political atmosphere in our country and the Parable books really break down what I expect to be the ultimate failures of electing the wrong people. They’re a post apocalyptic and dark as fuck, but theres wide spread economic and environmental disasters and a ton about social class.
The Parable books are liberal propaganda, mind you. And many fans of her work are shaking with fear as they hear a presidential candidate who sounds a lot like the villain in the books quoting the presidential villain in the books. These were written long ago. The coincidence is mostly uncanny.
“Help us to make America great again.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
The one that fucks me up the most though is this:
To shape God, with wisdom and forethought, to benefit your world, your people, your life, consider consequences. Minimize harm. Ask questions. Seek answers. Learn, teach.
God being sort of Impermanence; change in the micro and macro. It fucks me up because it’s so easy to be reactionary and not even realize it. To trust the information given to us by authority figures. It’s a guiding religious principle for me that I struggle with daily in some aspect or another.
I remember sitting in my Earth Science class and someone who denied climate change was telling the professor that they didn’t believe in it and that “even if it was true, theres nothing we could do about it.” and the professor was like “actually there’s a lot we can do about it. we adapt. we change. it doesn’t have to be apocalyptic.” and I think that’s the crux of where I am spiritually and artistically these days. we can adapt. we can change and learn and grow but only if we insist on it. To use an inaccurate figure of speech, our choices don’t have to be the ostrich sticking it’s head in the sand or running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off.
Sorry. I’m rambling.
Anybody else read her? I think juggalos of all political stripes could benefit from the way she wrote about activism and organizing.
Whoop Whoop Mr. Tidwell :
Violentdope
9:42 am
May 4, 2014
And whatever u do, try not to have nightmares about the impending ice age or the clown-shaped glacier hiding under your bed. BOO! Here’s a science guy who studies and describes climate change not as a political agenda, but as a natural cycle:
YouTube Video Climate Change: The REAL Inconvenient Truth!! – (NOT man-made) – PART 1/2
And fuck trigger warnings. Fuck them right in the ear.
Whoop Whoop krunk :
OCJ_Brendan![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
5:30 pm
March 20, 2013
Mr. Tidwell said
One of my favorite novels is Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, and it’s sequel Parable of the Talents is amazing too. I also love a lot of her short stories, and her novel Kindred is a remarkable examination of gender roles
this is as far as i got before saying to myself ‘rob is trying to censor me again’ and went to bed.
sorry and shit man, i cant stand for the most part your ranting about why im a racist/bigot/etc, im not going to read someone else opinion on the matter. you barely get a pass because i like you. some random woman who write in riddles is just going to piss me off…..
You should read inter brandon sanderson, the guy is ahnds down one of the greatest writers of all time….. yeah i went there.
5:50 pm
January 5, 2015
Krunk, what do you suppose the purpose of some politically motivated climate change conspiracy is?
Also, the book isn’t so much about what causes climate change but rather what can we do about it. Even if it wasn’t man made (and it most certainly was), limiting the carbon we put in the atmosphere would allow us more time to prepare ourselves for shifting temperatures and produce a more balanced system of production which is desperately needed as fossil feuls are a dwindling resource. Moving forward technologically would create jobs and a new economic boom for our nation. I don’t see a downside.

7:07 pm
May 4, 2014
Mr. Tidwell said
Krunk, what do you suppose the purpose of some politically motivated climate change conspiracy is?..
My best guess it that it’s a way to control market economy (commercial competition.) I’m not a conspiracy theorist, just someone with hundreds of college science credits who can spot a rigged experiment when I see one. The pseudoscience that the United Nations stands behind seems based on an agenda (“how are humans causing climate change”) rather than scientific inquiry (“what factors contribute to climate change?”) From what I’ve seen, humans and carbon emissions are only part of a much larger cycle of climate change. A historical example of this type of bottom line v. science clash is the War of Currents between Edison and Tesla. According to
http://energy.gov/articles/war…..s-dc-power
“Edison, not wanting to lose the royalties he was earning from his direct current patents, began a campaign to discredit alternating current. He spread misinformation…”
Humans might lie; science doesn’t.
Here’s a beautiful song that sums up the poetry of corruption:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg
YouTube Video Everybody knows – Leonard Cohen
Whoop Whoop krunk :
OCJ_Brendan![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
7:42 pm
January 5, 2015
But can’t you see that the oil industry has a history of promoting biased information, like when they repeatedly denied lead poisoning had anything to do with leaded fuel? They fought for years before Clair Patterson was able to get regulations in place that helped clean our air considerably. They hired scientist after scientist to disprove his research and offered him billions to research other fields.
I think the wording of the research is deliberate not to manipulate the market ( to what end? Why?) but to be specific in what we want to learn. We know what causes climate change, carbon in the air. What we need to figure out are ways we contribute to the naturally produced carbon. We know volcanoes and fires etc contribute to the amount of carbon in our air, what we need to focus on is what behaviors of ours do we need to change. We are remarkably adaptable but one of our best adaptations is forethought and observational thinking. It gets us out of having to adapt to the environment. We know that were put a lot of carbon in the air and that carbon in the air warns the temperature of the planet, so what do we do about it? Give oil companies tax breaks if they invest in alternative energy. Promote alternative fuel sources. Developing solar, wind, and hydro sources for power creates diversity in the market place rather than continuing to support a singular industry like oil.
Our neighboring planet of Venus has entirely too much carbon in the air and it is inhospitable to any earth based lifeforms. Our goal must be to prevent that from happening here as best we can and that means changing our behaviors. If the oil industry leaders decided to shift their economic weight behind an alternative fuel source, we’d be great. The problem there is the best options are renewable and that means hard to capitalize on. Capitalistic greed fails us if we’re only interested in what exploitable systems are the most valuable by the sheer fact that value is derived from scarcity.

8:02 pm
May 4, 2014
Are u from Venus, Mr. Tidwell? Beyond emotion and spoon-fed media pseudofacts, we don’t know that carbon is the only contributing factor to climate change. Hardcore scientists don’t think the climate change debate is over, but has just begun. We are nearing the end of an interglacial time, and most of this planet is scheduled to freeze. Again. That’s the inconvenient truth; George Carlin made a great point about the arrogance of humankind that may apply here:
YouTube Video George Carlin remix – Save the Trees
P.S. I’m sensing u watch the Cosmos reboot. Beware of celebrities posing as teachers.
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10:43 am
May 4, 2014
Mr. Tidwell said
Krunk, what do you suppose the purpose of some politically motivated climate change conspiracy is?..
Perhaps Obama’s crater of a legacy can shed light on that question. A new congressional investigation on Climate Change
“…discovered efforts by the Obama administration to censor the information given to Congress, interfering with the body’s ability to perform critical oversight work.Instead of providing the type of scientific information needed by Congress to legislate effectively, senior departmental officials sought to hide information, lobbied against legislation, and retaliated against a scientist for being forthcoming,” Smith said in a statement. “In this staff report based on lengthy record before the committee, much has been revealed about how senior level agency officials under the Obama administration retaliated against a scientist who did not follow the party line.”
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11:18 am
September 18, 2012
Oh what a shock, you believe the conservative website when it slanders the other side. My Kanye, you’re fucking stupid.
Facts are, global warming is real. It is proven to be directly caused by carbon emissions because historically our planet gets warmer with more carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon emissions are also proven to be rising at an unnatural rate since the industrial revolution. Where shit is wrong is the idea that the threat is imminent and that we need to act now. We don’t, but it’s good to find an economically salubrious solution while we can.
Fucked up thing is you are trying to make all these people look like crooked folk with an alternative agenda yet you fail to realize that the oil industries, the ones that basically own the political party that denies climate change, the people that historically will pay off scientists to lie to us, are the ones that are pushing these stupid ideas. Of course you bite because “woooo my side has to win wooo go republican/libertarians and fuck democrats/neoliberals!” Maybe you should step down from this discussions until you are willing to become more of a critically thinking adult about them.
2:59 pm
Members
August 6, 2013
Exxon has known about human contributions to Climate change since they had an internal investigation about it in 1977. The lead scientist told Exxon management “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” He then said, “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”
That was Exxon’s lead scientist. Paid by Exxon for this investigation. In 1977. And Exxon did what the NFL and Big Tobacco did when science threatened their profits: they lied. The formed coalitions to claim the science was controversial, they lobbied against bills that tried to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Don’t take my word for it, though: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
3:44 pm
Moderators
February 15, 2014
King Lucem Ferre said
Oh what a shock, you believe the conservative website when it slanders the other side. My Kanye, you’re fucking stupid.
Hey, she quoted one of my retweets!
I see it as information. I didn’t blindly believe it when I retweeted it. I retweeted it for the purpose of info. It is still a far shot to be believable, especially considering the source. The discussion that the tweet engendered was not about the source that published it, but the information contained within. It lead to both “sides” stating information about it. For that I thought it was a good article for the discussion it created on twitter.
I have am not climate change denier, but I did throw that article out there on twitter, as I have thrown some info on here that has been attributed to climate deniers. It wasn’t because I thought “woooo my side has to win wooo go republican/libertarians and fuck democrats/neoliberals!”, it was purely for the info and discussion.
I am really not trying to attack anyone. Honestly.
3:51 pm
Moderators
May 22, 2012
Psyral Infection said
… It wasn’t because I thought “woooo my side has to win wooo go republican/libertarians and fuck democrats/neoliberals!”, it was purely for the info and discussion.
think about that for a while. even better, take time to reread the whole series of left/right arguments, then think on it.
I am really not trying to attack anyone. Honestly.
far as the wannabe politicos in the forum are concerned, that puts you deeply in the minority. im talkin benthic deep.
not that i had to point that out to you.
awfully paranoid, arent you?
4:44 pm
May 4, 2014
I suspect congressional investigations might be correct if they agree with ice-core data from the Joe Rogan video above. And I don’t care where climate change information comes from, as long as science backs it up. Time to feed the vegan SJWs I’ve got chained in the basement. I’m thinking veal paste.
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6:32 pm
July 28, 2016
I think the really alarming thing about the rights argument is that you have to completely ignore a lot of information for the information you accept to work.
Like, yes, absolutely we all agree that other things can lead to climate change and that the climate has changed in the past. This is not in dispute anywhere. A large enough meteor hits earth and our climate will change drastically. We know what carbon does to our atmosphere and we know that it is a natural process of heating and cooling based on the chemical make up of our air, and that if we had more volcanoes of significantly larger sizes we would be a lot more like venus, which is scarily a predictor of what we have to look forward to.
We took shit out of the ground and burned it, changed the chemical make up of our sky and we are smart enough to see that in the distant future there are going to be problems.
This is not in question. Right? These are all things that we can agree on. These are things that the evidence shows.
The industrial age brought forth a new problem, we significantly increased our carbon emissions. Right? no one denies that this is a thing.
The problem is, the right wants people to believe that the oil industry isn’t at fault and shouldn’t be expected to change. Why? Because change costs money. Our nation was built to promote the idea of driving. Our freeways were created so that people would buy cars, and then buy oil. We invested in our infrastructure because we saw automobiles as being a solution to an old problem and now we’re stuck with consequences we hadn’t anticipated.
Because our actions have consequences.
And I disagree that we do not need to act now. The sooner we act, the less harsh the change will be. Eventually, and I’m talking hundreds, if not thousands of years, we will be at a point where the problem begins to escalate beyond our means of correction and we have to give up the fight and find a different kind of solution.
But in the mean time the arguments are: hey we should start looking at ways to fix this problem we accidentally created v the left wants to make money off your habits and so do I and I’m already making a lot so you know you can’t trust them.
If the problem is really who stands to profit off the global climate change problem, then find better solutions rather than pretending that we aren’t putting a shit ton of carbon in the air, or that chemical changes in our air don’t matter, or that this could have happened in a different time from different sources. None of that negates the truth of the matter which is that we’re in desperate need of solutions, if we want to continue having people live on this planet.
Which, if you don’t, then fine say that. If you simply don’t care about the quality of life after your impending death, fine. That’s on you, but don’t pretend like it’s some altruistic motive of trying to uncover some secret plot to make the global sun market rich.
Interesting, some solutions have been found that don’t rely on everybody switching to solar power: if we paint our roofs white it reflects more sun than it absorbs and we can cool the planet a bit. Also, using power more ethically and thoughtfully. Doing things that strengthen our local economy by purchasing food and other items that are locally farmed or manufactured. These are things that don’t require much investment, government intervention, or reduce our individual use for gas. What a joke.
Can we get back to talking about Octavia E. Butler though? Everybody should read her.
I know change is hard and scary for some of you, but try thinking about the quotes from hers and thinking about change as potential for growth and not potential for more consequences.
If you really believed that all lives matter we wouldn't need to say black lives matter
9:31 pm
March 30, 2013
krunkazphuk said
Mr. Tidwell said
Krunk, what do you suppose the purpose of some politically motivated climate change conspiracy is?..
Perhaps Obama’s crater of a legacy can shed light on that question. A new congressional investigation on Climate Change
“…discovered efforts by the Obama administration to censor the information given to Congress, interfering with the body’s ability to perform critical oversight work.Instead of providing the type of scientific information needed by Congress to legislate effectively, senior departmental officials sought to hide information, lobbied against legislation, and retaliated against a scientist for being forthcoming,” Smith said in a statement. “In this staff report based on lengthy record before the committee, much has been revealed about how senior level agency officials under the Obama administration retaliated against a scientist who did not follow the party line.”
lol crater of a legacy?
As the kids say….
DID YOU DIE, THOUGH?
Obama did nothing to fuck my shit up. Neither did George Bush Jr., Bill Clinton, or anyone else in congress. I don’t blame my problems on those people. They never met me, and I’ll never meet them.
Be self-sufficient, don’t over-dabble in politics. That’s my advice. It’s not real, anyway.
Whoop Whoop Old Mr Dangerous :
Carnivalkilla4411:31 pm
September 18, 2012
Actually, George Bush caused the economic stumble of 2008 which sure as hell did effect a lot of people. Don’t forget the unnecessary war that killed thousands and sunk us into debt. He’s the worst president in recent history. Also, Obamacare took healthcare out of the hands of older people. There are tons of things that have drastic effects on people.
Whoop Whoop King Lucem Ferre :
Old Mr Dangerous7:26 am
Moderators
February 15, 2014
Old Mr Dangerous said
… Obama did nothing to fuck my shit up. Neither did George Bush Jr., Bill Clinton, or anyone else in congress. I don’t blame my problems on those people. They never met me, and I’ll never meet them.Be self-sufficient, don’t over-dabble in politics. That’s my advice. It’s not real, anyway.
I am mostly with you. I had never had an issue with politicians actually changing anything in my life till Obama’s second term. That’s when my income tax bracket got hit. I pay almost $1000 more in taxes now. Actually, I get almost $1000 less back than I did before.
Ok. to get back on topic… Octavia Butler. Not a fan, of course. A lot of her work seems to point towards socialism. I am also not a fan of works that point out race and gender so prominently. That has to do with my methods of looking at those issues. I feel that the use of that tends to be more divisive. I do understand that at the time of her writings it may have been necessary to open peoples eyes to such things but I feel we are now entering a stage where pointing out those issues tends embolden those that would fight against it. I wish to promote racial and gender inclusiveness by living my life without racial or gender specifications as much as I am able and attempt to lessen any lingering racial/gender specifications in my mind by making those issues completely non-issues to me within my perception.
As a “sci-fi” writer (a term she never fully agreed with) she was exceptional. She broke the rigidness of the genre at the time by exploring themes that had not been really explored. I am not referring to the intertwined race and gender themes, but the general direction her books went. They were “Phillip K. Dick” kind of groundbreaking.
Conclusion: I recommend her works for those who aren’t as close minded as I am to socialist undertones. And again, I understand her stance on race and gender, but feel that the direction today should take a different approach to create a more inclusive society.
Whoop Whoop Psyral :
Old Mr Dangerous11:00 pm
March 30, 2013
King Lucem Ferre said
Actually, George Bush caused the economic stumble of 2008 which sure as hell did effect a lot of people. Don’t forget the unnecessary war that killed thousands and sunk us into debt. He’s the worst president in recent history. Also, Obamacare took healthcare out of the hands of older people. There are tons of things that have drastic effects on people.
If you’re from where I’m from, there never was a chance to succeed. Unless you hit the lottery or had a connection to the glass company a town over. There’s no way to tell if it would’ve turned out better with a different president, unless we can view other multiverses soon, but it was my fault for trying to make it there. I should have had the foresight to understand that no matter how hard I worked and how much I saved, that it was and is outrageously improbable to survive in that part of the country without being on welfare or knowing someone.
I don’t disagree at all that George Bush Jr. was a disaster on an unspeakable level. He and his cabinet were disastrous on a level that was staggering. Basically what I’m saying from my rant is that I try not to blame anyone but myself for wherever I am in life.
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