"Power Without Knowledge...": President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings

Just for fun: What's a better name for the Gestaltgeist iteration of the Cosmintern?

  • Cosmicist Interstellar (Cosminstel)

  • Cosmicist Intersidereal (Cosminside)

  • Keep it the same! They're still nations even if they're on another planet!


Results are only viewable after voting.
Media Matters: The Last of Us
Released in September of 2016, The Last of Us was an epic post-apocalypse film directed by Sam Raimi. Based on the Atari-exclusive game of the same name, TLoU likewise centered on a tale on a survivalist road story set twenty years after an extremely virulent strain of cordyceps fungus became capable of infecting humans and caused the almost spontaneous collapse of human society under the weight of the zombie-like "Infected". Following a harrowing prologue set on "Outbreak Day" where his daughter is killed, Joel (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is tasked with escorting Ellie (Bella Ramsey) from Boston to northern Colorado in the hope that her immunity to the cordyceps infection can be used to synthesize a vaccine, dealing with Infected, raiders and the fascist remnants of the American government along the way.

An immediate hit with Atari fans and newcomers alike, The Last of Us garnered praise for its pragmatic but still faithful adaptation of the game, as well as for its masterful use of practical effects, best seen during the film's (comparatively) rarer but more impactful encounters with the Infected. While Morgan was incredibly effective in his role as Joel, the breakout casting of the film would be Ramsey, with critics gushing about her emotionally-moving and action-packed performance, all the more remarkable for being an essential unknown among American audiences. At its core a story about surviving and living on in the face of loss and trauma, the arc of Joel and Ellie gradually connecting, letting down their guard and coming to develop a genuine father-daughter bond was a prominent feature of many glowing reviews, netting Ramsey herself an Oscar that year.

Originally "merely" a critically and popularly acclaimed story of zombies and the families we choose, several aspects of the film have gained new attention in the wake of the election of Buchanan. The fascist American remnant "FEDRA" became a repeated point of comparison with the Department of Heartland Security and the rest of the domestic security apparatus under the new administration, while the revolutionary "Fireflies" drew parallels with groups as diverse as the Weather Underground, Extinction Rebellion, and the Double-V movement, with differing degrees of sincerity depending on who was making the remark. While much of this early analysis would focus on the various factions present in the film's world, perhaps the most shockingly prescient was the nature of the Infected.

With the outbreak of the Gray Lung pandemic, Candida auris, new attention was paid to the nature of the film's apocalypse. Beyond the simple commonality of a global fungal pandemic, and one where one of the earliest signs of infection is wheezing, no less, the complete collapse of an effective government response over the course of weeks went from being a fanciful invention to a scathing bit of foreshadowing to the seeming inability of the Buchanan administration to staunch the tide of new C.a-19 infections. Another uncomfortable parallel was Raimi's choice to adjust the timeline of the game for his adaptation, shifting Outbreak Day from 2013 to 2000. While he has said he intended it as a critique of the inherently reactionary nature of the DHS during the Powell years, this had the unfortunate effect of shifting the narrative present of the film to 2020, further intensifying its preexisting culture war cachet and ironically turning it into a must-watch for many on all sides of the fractured political landscape.
 
Sorry, got distracted with life stuff, I'll try to post some more actual updates later in the week. Also:
If I can think of an angle I like @Laserfish might get their wish for a vignette 😂 Per the rules something a bit more grounded, likely set during the "transportation" years before the ice goes into a freefall cascading collapse 🤔
 
Oh wicked fate! Why have you bestowed upon me this terrible foresight 😭 All jokes aside there's now an escalating spread of Candida auris outbreaks in US hospitals. Clearly I can't be stopped.
 
If I can think of an angle I like @Laserfish might get their wish for a vignette 😂 Per the rules something a bit more grounded, likely set during the "transportation" years before the ice goes into a freefall cascading collapse 🤔
I think I've settled on an idea that could work, the trick was finding a vignette concept where A.) I could resist my natural urge to structure it in some weird way or tie in a bunch of interesting but still tangential ideas and B.) I could stage a scene set in Antarctica that didn't rely on an insurmountable amount of lore or didn't end up too ASB for the collection's focus.
 
I think I've settled on an idea that could work, the trick was finding a vignette concept where A.) I could resist my natural urge to structure it in some weird way or tie in a bunch of interesting but still tangential ideas and B.) I could stage a scene set in Antarctica that didn't rely on an insurmountable amount of lore or didn't end up too ASB for the collection's focus.
Spent some time writing out notes for it today, the best part is it would allow me to reference a historical episode I'm actually surprised I completely forgot about in the TL proper!
 
re-read the TL lately
honestly it's a bit hard, ideas fuses here and there, but it has a certain appeal, the intricated ideas, the multiple references to niches culturals or politicals items, the symbolism, the slighty hermetic feeling of the whole...
your works are a rare sample of what I can only call weird alternate history, it's really cool
I was gonna say it also somewhat remind me of Neal stephenson but I remember you already cite his works and now I can see the influence it has on you
The recent post about the esoteric cosmicism leave me with images of codex of mixed aztec codex-illuminated manuscript of future scientists trying to implement some new alchemy through nanotechs ;)
since the zoranists seems to take a good place in the latest developments, i'm a little amused they choose this peculiar symbol ; in the book, the zoran equation is kind of a pipe dream, an arcane knowledge which is ultimately lost to the times as revealed in the last twist... on the subject the novel also features a lot of the habitual goofyness of the author's works : black people are revealed to come from Mars, and the war that ended the old advanced world was between post scarcity white civ in antarctica and if I remind well mesoamericans assholes who appears to have variable lenght of pregnancy (from five to eight months or something). So I suppose it can be borrowed for a lot of weird race related beliefs
(anyway sorry for the lenght of the comment, I'll stop here)
 
re-read the TL lately
honestly it's a bit hard, ideas fuses here and there, but it has a certain appeal, the intricated ideas, the multiple references to niches culturals or politicals items, the symbolism, the slighty hermetic feeling of the whole...
your works are a rare sample of what I can only call weird alternate history, it's really cool
I'm glad you think so! Aside from being the way my brain naturally free-associates information, I figure life OTL is plenty strange, we're just desensitized from living in it, so I wanted to create something slightly disorienting.
I was gonna say it also somewhat remind me of Neal stephenson but I remember you already cite his works and now I can see the influence it has on you
Hopefully I avoid his penchant for weak endings but the man can take his often wildly disparate interests of the moment and knit them together into a story that's compelling and coherent for all but the last 10-20 pages or so, which given the elevator pitch for some of his novels is nothing short of inspirational to me 😂
The recent post about the esoteric cosmicism leave me with images of codex of mixed aztec codex-illuminated manuscript of future scientists trying to implement some new alchemy through nanotechs ;)
At the highest degree of enthusiasm, there's very little difference between the Maximalists and the Sutterites, since both operate on a shared belief that their preferred arenas (politics and the occult, respectively) are exercises in altering lived conditions through ritual, collective will and social psychology. It helps that a certain theatricality is common at the higher levels of Cosmicism more generally, since the Cosmintern is basically constantly running an elaborate psyop on its enemies.
since the zoranists seems to take a good place in the latest developments, i'm a little amused they choose this peculiar symbol ; in the book, the zoran equation is kind of a pipe dream, an arcane knowledge which is ultimately lost to the times as revealed in the last twist... on the subject the novel also features a lot of the habitual goofyness of the author's works : black people are revealed to come from Mars, and the war that ended the old advanced world was between post scarcity white civ in antarctica and if I remind well mesoamericans assholes who appears to have variable lenght of pregnancy (from five to eight months or something). So I suppose it can be borrowed for a lot of weird race related beliefs
(anyway sorry for the lenght of the comment, I'll stop here)
The Zoranists are actually significantly less weird than either Theosophy or The Ice People when it comes to race theory, since the founder of the movement was essentially just conflating elements from both in an exposure-induced hallucination. For their part, Zoranists regard all humans as "Aryan", with most considering the other root races either metaphorical or interdimensional depending on where they come down on the spectrum between "it's a philosophical movement" and "it's a religion".
 
LOOK UPON OUR WORKS
To add a bit of color I've decided to come up with monuments for each of the Regional Commonwealths! Aside from showing the ambition and material security of the post-Macondo generations they'll also allow we a nifty conversation piece for my characters to explore aspects of their society. Unless otherwise noted, all are in the stripped Szulalskian style popular on the continent.
  1. Ultima Unbound, representation of the Antarctic peoples and entry point for all new immigrants, found on the rasping Tongue of New Nantucket.
  2. The Modern Tauroctony, Mithras slaying the Bull of Wall Street, the triumph of will over wealth, found in the suppurating Legation Quarter of Caprona.
  3. The Star Chamber, home to the most advanced terrestrial telescopes of the Corps of Discovery, nestled in the heights of the Starkweather Mountains of Dakkar.
  4. The Crucible, pride of Cosmicist environmental control, fully enclosed, fully mutable*, ten square miles perfectly tailored for the Flower War in the wilds of Inner Xanadu.
  5. The National Preserve, the greatest experiment in constructed ecology in human history, dominates the Pale of Symzonia.
  6. The Nameless Temple, heart of Zoranism, seat of the Nameless Priests and the High Priest Not To Be Described, found atop the Plateau of Leng.
  7. The Struggle, the Kanaloa raised from the depths, restored and suspended over a faceless statue of Sutter, found on the Midnight Coast of New Swabia.
  8. The Moloch Machine, former heart of Company operations in Antarctica, maintains its disgusting Silicon Valley minimalism even after becoming a museum in the Riallero Historic District.
  9. The Palace of the Precariat, seat of power in the ARC, straddles the South Pole and the Straits of Karnak.
  10. Star City, crown jewel of the Corps of Discovery, gateway to the stars, found on the island of Protonga**.

*A testbed for colonization domes, the Crucible has a malleable climate to provide diverse training for the Antarctic Armed Forces. In Festival years hosted in Antarcica the extremity of the environment is ratcheted up for more entertaining gladiatorial combat.

**Formerly Easter Island, and not to be confused with the much broader Protonga RC.
 
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At the highest degree of enthusiasm, there's very little difference between the Maximalists and the Sutterites, since both operate on a shared belief that their preferred arenas (politics and the occult, respectively) are exercises in altering lived conditions through ritual, collective will and social psychology. It helps that a certain theatricality is common at the higher levels of Cosmicism more generally, since the Cosmintern is basically constantly running an elaborate psyop on its enemies.
This and the whole occult zoranist thing remains me of some politicals fields I explore lately, the decoloniality thought among them, which postulate knowledge as a political force of domination, especially the western imposition of their particular brand of scientific rationaly. I suppose cosmicism take account of that and try to use this force as a liberating one.
The Zoranists are actually significantly less weird than either Theosophy or The Ice People when it comes to race theory, since the founder of the movement was essentially just conflating elements from both in an exposure-induced hallucination. For their part, Zoranists regard all humans as "Aryan", with most considering the other root races either metaphorical or interdimensional depending on where they come down on the spectrum between "it's a philosophical movement" and "it's a religion".
so it's kinda like the five ages of humanity in greco roman myths or the equivalent in maya myths, these races are just symbols of spiritual progression or regression more than racialist thought ?
 
This and the whole occult zoranist thing remains me of some politicals fields I explore lately, the decoloniality thought among them, which postulate knowledge as a political force of domination, especially the western imposition of their particular brand of scientific rationaly. I suppose cosmicism take account of that and try to use this force as a liberating one.
It's part of their general redemption of transmuted forms of accelerationism and hauntology, the line gets very blurry between theory-fiction and occultism, it's basically the quantum physics of political science.
so it's kinda like the five ages of humanity in greco roman myths or the equivalent in maya myths, these races are just symbols of spiritual progression or regression more than racialist thought ?
Pretty much, yes. It's all either allegory or machine elves, depending on who you talk to. The only Cosmicist race theory is the belief in the Coming Race, though whether this is figurative (a humanity free from exploitation and precarity and expanding like mad beyond the Earth) or literal (all of the figurative stuff, accomplished by an amalgamated future race) is an open question.
 
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Cosmintern Aesthetics III
Here are some examples of the Szukalskian style embraced by the ARC! Their architectural style isn't quite this ornate, being essentially a Greco Deco slightly stripped form, but that doesn't stop the Arctic Council nations from basically treating Antarctica like it has the architectural sensibility of the Necromongers 😂

425d8bb1325528f47b3b7da4c232ee0c.jpg


scuplture-front.jpg


Syrenka-DP.png
 
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Went through and updated the monumental architecture post! Also just read through the entirety of 2020: Shots Fired and And Our Flag Was Not There: A History of the Second American Civil War for the first time. Pretty entertaining, and though the Antarctic Revolution* would be occuring under completely different conditions and would be nowhere near the level of clusterfuck it does give me some interesting ideas about horizontal military organization 🤔


*Even the theoretical American Cosmicist Revolution from any description of City on a Hill would be FAR cleaner cut and much less depressing.
 
So, if I remember correctly, drones are used more often in both combat and entertainment. How are they used in society now, and how advanced are they? What do they look like as well? Also, horizontal military organization? Now that's going to be interesting...
 
So, if I remember correctly, drones are used more often in both combat and entertainment. How are they used in society now,
Aside from a substantial presence in the military and security apparatus they're also omnipresent in everyday life, for example:
  • Personal drones are fairly common, either as a bit of fun to fly around or used for things like recording original content. The latter are similar to ones used by the professional film collectives.
  • Flying drones are also used to deliver most mail and small packages.
  • Drones with some combination of legs snd wheels come in a variety of models aimed at things like search and rescue, assisting paramedics, and transporting cargo.
  • Since the ARC is almost entirely arcologies there are robust fleets of drones flying or crawling around cleaning or doing standard maintenance* basically everywhere. They're also very common in heavy manufacturing*, and since heavy industry is state-owned the models used are virtually identical.
and how advanced are they?
Personal drones are basically the only ones that are directly controlled by a human, with most of the rest using savant AIs about as intelligent as an a particularly clever and well-trained animal aside from incredibly granular knowledge and skills specialized to their roles. Advances in materials science have made them both light and strong for their size and their movements are smooth enough that an Antarctic commercial drone walking around wouldn't even spook a dog, something helped by the incorporation of biomimicry through things like soft robotics. They're also relatively easy to repair and display the Antarctic tendency for industry-wide interchangeable parts. In the event of invasion they'd make fantastic technicals 🤔
What do they look like as well?
Smaller flying drones use a quadrotor design, though larger ones only use those when hovering/gliding, mainly relying on heavily articulated wings as high speed ornithopters. Terrestrial models usually have both wheels and legs, switching between them based on terrain. Most drones divide their cameras and sensors between stationary ones dispersed over the body and fully-mobile "heads", unless their function is best served by a steadycam. They're typically sleek, though there's a wide range of colors and patterns fully adjustable by users and in cases where aerodynamics are less of a factor there's more room for ornamentation and textured "skin" based on personal preference.
Also, horizontal military organization? Now that's going to be interesting...
The post on decentralized military organization in that timeline was very interesting to be sure! I haven't settled on how far I want to go with it 🤔


*Think the sort in Avatar: The Way of Water.
 
I've decided I'm going to retcon Extinction Rebellion out. Aside from the fact that they're an actual group and I've enjoyed coming up with analogues, the environmental protest movement will be far more radical anyway from the Regressive influence (even if in-universe they argue that Regression is inherently reactionary). Their new analogue will be a group called the Green Knights, expect axe motifs and exploding pipelines, among other things...
 
The Great Divide: The Murder Ballads
*Trigger warning gang, this one's gonna get rough*

Modern American mythology has always had a disturbing connection to its media. After First Blood people believed that Vietnam veterans were spit on when they rotated home. The cowboy hat was a creation of Westerns and cigarette ads. The Klan and all its horrors sprung fully-formed from screens playing Birth of a Nation. Through this lens the acceleration of violence and protest that set the stage for the 2016 election can trace its contours to The Murder Ballads. Ballads did not create what it would unleash, but it is abundantly clear that the energies released in the latter years of the Mosely-Braun presidency drew the series fully into the vast lunatic fringe of American conspiracism.

A dark and ambiguously supernatural detective anthology series, The Murder Ballads began to critical acclaim in 2014 with the release of the first season, subtitled The Western Book of the Dead. Starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, playing against type as brooding detectives wading through the morass of American depravity, the season was set in Arizona and revolved around sexual violence, human trafficking, murder, and sinister cults, spanning the 1990s to the 2010s and given a disturbing supernatural air through the deft sprinkling of references to The Three Imposters, a previously obscure horror novel by Arthur Machen. Although there was some pushback from the Hispanic community for the season's approach toward Santa Muerte, reaction was broadly positive, with critics praising the emotional performances, constant air of tension, and humanizing portrayal of the victims of coyotes on the border.

The second season, starring Christian Bale and Jessica Chastain and set in Washington, D.C., would be released in 2015 and subtitled The Blood-Dimmed Tide. Tied directly to the prior season, Blood-Dimmed Tide revolved around occult architecture, political conspiracies, secret societies and perverse rituals, with the Machen references replaced with intimations drawn from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Similarly beloved by fans and critics alike, a third season was ordered almost immediately. And that's where it would have rested, season after season of horrifying glimpses of the suppurating rot under the skin of the American dream, if it hadn't been for Darren Ratch and Victoria Vasquez.

Though Mosely-Braun was not the first Black president, her election and the progressive hope that she had embodied had led to a sort of cultural schizophrenia on both left and right. The former grew increasingly disillusioned in the face of police violence and economic exploitation even as the latter sunk into the wilds of baroque and wild-eyed conspiracies born out of the confluence of the remnants of the Satanic Panic, the Sovereign Citizen movement, and the perennially-popular New World Order conspiracies, all seemingly ignored by the bloated security state. In the long hot summer of 2016 the Zodiac videos began appearing on the Libertalia forum and the country exploded.

Since the latter months of 2015 San Diego had been plagued by a string of unsolved murders, almost all targeting undocumented immigrants and local labor leaders and environmentalists. The posts would begin the following year, a series of videos and long cryptic screeds from a masked man (?) making a series of extraordinary claims:
  1. The poster claimed credit for the murders gripping the city and further claimed that they were the Zodiac killer, though explicitly not the original one.
  2. Zodiac was not a person or a group, but rather a title claimed by "freedom fighters" using information from the future to prevent the rise of a New World Order.
  3. Agents of the NWO operated at the heights of power, doing unspeakable blood rituals to a dark star called Nibiru to ensure their eternal rule.
  4. The killings would not stop until the nation had been purged and the mantle would be taken up if they were caught or killed.
Panic gripped the city as the killings continued and Zodiac began cultivating an online following, either fellow travelers enthralled with the killer's bizarre blend of conspiracies or murder tourists intrigued by the theatricality of the Zodiac's encoded messages. Victoria Vasquez, mayor of San Diego, second generation immigrant and proud progressive, had made a vow that the killer would be caught and brought to trial. She had only succeeded in putting even more of a target on her back, and on July 4th, 2016, the Zodiac would strike, assaulting a city council meeting with a veritable arsenal. What followed was a horrifying scene of wanton violence as the killer streamed the "trial" and execution of the mayor and several city employees and members of the city council before being overwhelmed and gunned down by police. He had finally been unmasked, but at what cost?

Darren Ratch was a Border Patrol agent with over a dozen allegations of brutality to his name in a little over a year on the job. In his home police found the apparent backdrop used for the Zodiac videos, as well as a manifesto and rooms packed to the rafters with journals, photos of local citizens, community leaders and officials, conspiracy lore, and souvenirs taken from his victims. According to his tightly-written manifesto Ratch had become convinced that the federal government was an illegitimate military-industrial dictatorship, drowning the country in a flood of illegal immigration in a bid to destroy its culture and any possible resistance at the behest of a people-smuggling predatory elite, and he was certain that The Murder Ballads and other pieces of media were an attempt to launder an expose on the entire corrupt system. According to the best reconstructions of the timeline it was at this point he began to "receive" his instructions and list of targets, though it has since been determined that he had come across most of them through his work. Though no one could prove who leaked his manifesto and the wealth of crime scene photos online within hours of his death the deed was done and time would show that Zodiac would live on.

For the left Vasquez put a face to the scourge of state violence that had been increasingly in the news with the seemingly continual eyewitness recordings of the police engaging in disproportionate violence that looked suspiciously like executions and of the Department of Heartland Security denying things like due process and basic humanity to those caught up in the dragnet of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. What was quickly being called the Zodiac Massacre was a direct catalyst for the Double-V Movement, named in honor of Vasquez and hearkening back to the original fight against fascism abroad and racism at home during World War II. Calling for an end to the forever wars, massive demilitarization of police, and the complete dismantling of the DHS, the Double-V Movement brought together Americans of all races and creeds loudly agitating for radical steps to crush what many saw as a resurgence of white supremacy.

To the most toxic elements of the right it was another story. Speculation ran rampant that the Zodiac was on to something. The fight against the New World Order had a new face for a new century. As the social justice protests turned to riots in the face of police repression those already partial to the allure of the fever swamps would only grow more radical as they saw what was, to them, incontrovertible evidence of traitors and fifth columnists tearing down the country at the behest of their monstrous elite. The Zodiac manifesto would find a wider audience than any sane society could tolerate as violent clashes between the rapidly crystallizing lunatic fringe came into bloody conflict with the supposed catspaws of the cabal, from the Double-V movement to the Green Knights as they accused their opponents of being cultists, demons, and voracious abusers. Though filming had finished, the third season of The Murder Ballads was quietly shelved in the face of the national mood, as the Era of Bad Feelings lurched sickeningly closer to an American Years of Lead.
 
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Couple minor notes:
  1. As you can likely infer, in this TL True Detective stuck with its original working title.
  2. The season descriptions are obviously made up, but the idea of season 2 revolving around occult architecture and sex cults in DC was inspired by a joke the creators made when people bugged them about what season 2 would be about OTL.
  3. I'm sure you can imagine what Zodiac supporters are meant to be a stand-in for. Truth really is stranger than fiction.
  4. Unrelated to the above, but the Green Knights still keep the XR hourglass (it looks nice and is fairly intuitive), it's just that one of the arms of the central X is extended into a tomahawk. Might do a flag for it 🤔
 
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In fact if I go ahead and make the Green Knights flag I'll likely go ahead and make ones for the Double-V movement, Weathermen and Myrmidons/Zodiac* as well. Here we see the seeds being sown for what will eventually become functionally the paramilitary arms of the major parties in the wake of the Shatter after a nicely divisive administration to simmer through— naturally the Myrmidons will be all in for cracking skulls on behalf of America First, Double-V will be more associated with the identitarianism of the Equal Rights Party and the Green Knights will be almost completely siloed in among the Citizens. As for the rest the Weathermen will have a presence in the left parties, Freedom tends to rely on private security and the Neofeds are too alarmed by the whole thing and naturally passive to admit the need for a proper paramilitary. The Subversives mainly focus on digital warfare and memes over physical fighting and Manifest Destiny! is far too fractured for a united front, running the gamut from secessionist militias and ethnocacerists to a Double-V/Green Knight united front. Naturally DHS will have agents practically glowing in the dark trying to infiltrate all of them.


*Since these two will cross-pollinate almost immediately they'll have one shared symbol.
 
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Unlike most of my lathe-of-heaven-esque predictions the new Zodiac and his lunacy is a new development in my evolving map of the TL, though the fact that Nic Pizzolatto was talking even in jest in 2015 about a True Detective season revolving around a satanic sex cult operating in DC shows that plenty of things seem to just have been waiting in the ether to rear their ugly heads.
 
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