Found via Srsly Wrong. Click the photo to see the source.
Encountering the words “Florida” and “political candidate” in the same sentence usually means “prepare for hilarity”, and this is no exception — especially because the phrase “goat sacrifice” is also involved in this particular case.
Pictured above is Adrian Wyllie, who until recently was the chair of Florida’s Libertarian Party. He recently resigned in protest over refusal to reject their sole candidate for U.S. senate in their bid to fill the small shoes of outgoing senator Marco Rubio.
That sole candidate is a man who goes by the name Augustus Sol Invictus:
As anyone who’s played Fallout: New Vegas knows, any dude with more than a modicum of charisma who’s adopted a buzz-cut and a self-aggrandizing old Roman name and is aiming for a leadership position is bad news:
Like the Caesar of Fallout: New Vegas, Invictus wandered about the desert, and did some weird, blood-spattered things. In Invictus’ case, he sacrificed a goat as part of a Hindu-inspired “renounce the world” self-purification ritual. “I did sacrifice a goat,” he said according to one report, “I know that’s probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans. I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness… Yes, I drank the goat’s blood.”
He does say that the way in which Wyllie says he killed the goat is a lie: “I have never dismembered a goat in my life. I have performed animal sacrifices as part of my religion.”
Yes, kids, this is sexy sex magician Aleister Crowley, who taught us the great rule:
The people you see at an orgy are never the people you want to see at an orgy.
Invictus practices Thelema, the religion/philosophy established in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley, sex-magic occultist and fun guy to quote when you’re at the goth club. He does it independently, as he’s been kicked out of the religion’s fraternal organization, Ordo Templi Orientis, for what he says are “political reasons”. What does it take to get kicked out of a group whose central tenet is “Do what thou wilt”?
On the whole, becoming a pagan, taking on a vainglorious name and sacrificing goats are probably among his less wacky ideas. The stuff he posts online is a far richer vein to mine. It starts off like a lot of libertarian writing: it starts off with some pretty reasonable stuff, but soon careens all higgledy-piggledy into Batshit Insane Land soon after…
Consider this posting on the Invictus for Senate site, A Declaration of the Failings of the Federal Government. It starts off sensibly…
1. The Federal Government has abdicated its power over the creation & implementation of legislation, having handed it to special interest groups.
2. It has allowed Money to usurp the role of Law.
3. It has waged wars on foreign lands to the great detriment of the American people and to the people of the World. What is distant to the American public was not so distant to Serbia, to Iraq, or to Pakistan.
But go ahead, keep reading:
19. It has allowed the degradation of our ancestral Holy Days in the name of Tolerance, demeaning Christian Rites for fear of the Jews. Where Nativity scenes are allowed, there must stand a menorah of equal visibility.
24. It has promoted with great vehemence the doctrines of mass democracy, blind tolerance, and mandatory guilt for decades upon decades, such that the individual Citizen is expected to worship the lowest of humanity and abandon any inclinations he may have toward elitism.
25. It has abandoned its eugenics programs & elitist mindset in favor of a decadent ideology that rejects the beauty of strength and demands the exponential growth of the weakest, the least intelligent, and the most diseased.
If you believe what he says in his interview on the Comcastro “geek culture podcast”, he’s no longer into eugenics (start at the 22:33 mark).
It’s a sad tendency for geeks to idolize cruelty and brutality, and confuse them for strength, cold rationality, free thought, and non-conformity. Unfortunately, the podcast hosts did just this. They seemed to be bigger fans of eugenics than Invictus, even in its watered-down social Darwinist form of cutting social programs to weed out the weak. They sounded almost disappointed when Invictus said he doesn’t support “positive eugenics” anymore.
One of Wyllie’s issues with Invictus is that he’s calling for a second civil war. Wyllie says Invictus means violent uprising, Invictus claims that it’s more of a war for the mind. Here’s an excerpt from one of his articles posted on LinkedIn, titled A Call for Total Insurrection:
So this is what I propose: Disown your leaders who have advised you to sell out. Stop trying to sneak into the two-party system, and abandon your faith in it entirely. Stop playing their game and create your own. Stop trying to earn a comfortable spot in the System, and infiltrate it to turn it against itself. Because otherwise, you are fighting a war you cannot win. Without first engaging in social and cultural insurrection, there can be no true political change. If you think you are going to save the world by voting a Libertarian into the Senate, you are dreaming. And if that is your mindset when you go out posting my flyers and wearing my t-shirts, you might as well be polishing the brass on the Titanic.
I do not want you to vote, so much as I want you to wake up. I want you to drop out and tune in. I want you to take LSD and practice sorcery. I want you to listen to trap music and black metal, to learn the law and to break it deliberately, to find your own religion. I want you to learn the use of firearms and subject yourselves to rigorous physical training. I want you to treat your bodies as Holy Temples and to take your girlfriend to a strip club so you can seduce a dancer in the back room. I want you to worship Nature and dance naked in the moonlight ‘round the fire, screaming in ecstatic joy. I want you to revolt. Raise Hell. Break your limitations. Renounce your life and go into the Wilderness, that God may speak to you of things to come.
If you’re like me, the question you’re probably asking is: “Hang on a moment — does it have to be trap and black metal?“
On his Facebook page, Wyllie explains why he resigned his position in the Libertarian Party:
By now, some of you have probably heard that I have resigned as Chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida. I feel I owe many of you the courtesy of an explanation for my decision.
I have been extremely outspoken against Augustus Sol Invictus, who is currently the only candidate for the Libertarian U.S. Senate nomination. My strong opposition to him has put me in conflict with the LPF Executive Committee.
Mr. Invictus has repeatedly vowed that it is his destiny to start a second civil war in America. In a 2013 memo to his colleagues, he wrote, “I have prophesied for years that I was born for a Great War; that if I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War, I would begin it myself.”
He has described himself as an American Fascist, and even his campaign logo is nearly identical to that of Benito Mussolini. He has displayed swastikas in his published campaign materials.
He has expressed support for a eugenics program, which would sterilize, euthanize or forcibly abort “the weakest, the least intelligent, and the most diseased.”
Many of his supporters are known members of Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, such as American Front, Vinelanders, and Stormfront, and he has been recruiting them into the Libertarian Party.
In a private, face-to-face meeting with Mr. Invictus, I asked him directly, “Do you actually intend to kill millions of people and start a civil war?” His answer to me was, “It’s my religion.”
In response, Invictus says that both he and Mussolini took the logo from ancient Rome, and that while he has represented some hate groups as their lawyer, he’s no racist. “My four children [from a prior marriage] are Hispanic,” he says.
If you didn’t click on the Comcastro podcast link above, do it to hear the accent he uses in casual conversation. Then listen to the recording immediately above (another “Hey, man, I’m not a eugenics fan anymore!”), and the videos below and make a note of the decidedly different accent he uses when engaged in oratory:
Invictus says that nerves and the adrenaline rush of public speaking causes him to switch to the Dixiecrat accent. Here’s my guess for the accent he adopts when sacrificing goats:
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Sign of the day
Photo by Yours Truly.
It’s the season formerly known as “Fall” or “Autumn”, but it’s now called “Pumpkin Spice Season”, when everything gets blasted with pumpkin spice (or pumpkin pie spice), a vague designation that usually means some combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, and sugar, with the less basic-bro/bitchy types throwing in a little ginger to give it some zing.
Photo by Yours Truly.
With the release of the Pumpkin Spiced Pumpkin Seeds pictured at the top of this article, we’re getting pretty close to the event horizon. We’ll truly hit it only when someone finally comes up with pumpkin-spiced pumpkin spice. As for the seeds pictured above, I hate to admit it, but they’re so very dangerously addictively delicious.
Found via @ MargaretNrthwd. Click to see the source.
As much as I love to mock, I’m not ready to go as far as the Washington Post does in their recent article, titled Enough with the Pumpkin Spice, America. It’s Getting Embarrassing. It’s America’s very own thing, it’s still the early days in the culture, and hey — you don’t see anyone in India going “Cool it with the curry, guys, we’re turning into a stereotype”, or in my own native neck of the woods saying “Cut it out with the rice already!”
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Friday fashion advice
A fedora, while jaunty when worn right, comes with so much negative cultural baggage at this point in time that you’re best off leaving it alone, along with flare pants and wide lapels.
If you need a little more background on what happened to this poor hat, Vice’s History of the Fedora should help you get up to speed. An excerpt:
While the fedora was enjoying its brief re-entry into the realm of the fashionable, a writer named Neil Strauss was hard at work on what would become the foundational text for the fedora’s terminal phase. In his book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, Strauss described the “seduction community,” a loose group formed online and IRL by nerdy, socially awkward–and often white, middle class, and entitled–heterosexual men who gave money to self-styled “pickup artists,” or “PUAs,” in hopes of learning how to manipulate women into sleeping with them. Among more nefarious tactics like “negging” and “cat-string theory” was “peacocking“: “a technique developed to get attention in busy, distraction-filled environments such as night clubs…by wearing something showy like a cowboy hat or a glowing necklace.” Many men took this as a cue to wear a hat. Many of these hats were fedoras. In a paper titled “Fedora Shaming as Discursive Activism,” Ben Abraham pinpoints a widely reblogged tip from a popular PUA forum:
“If you wear a hat, make it memorable, easy to spot, and something to work with your style. This is usually easier than it sounds. Try the fedora…it portrays you’re a stylish man that knows what he’s doing, and it’s a great lock-in prop.”
This was both a reflection of pre-existing fedoras and a catalyst for fedoras to come. An infinite feedback loop; a douchebag ouroboros.
Click the graph to see the source of this misleading graph, the Fraser Institute report Ontario: No Longer a Place to Prosper.
In their latest white paper, the conservative/libertarian/pro-Voldemort think tank known as the Fraser Institute is playing dirty statistics pool. Take a look at the graph above (taken from page 15 of the report), which at a casual, innumerate glance, paints a picture of Ontario as a Soviet-style bureaucracy where there are more public sector jobs than private sector ones.
Then take a closer look at the Y-axes for each of the job categories:
Each line has its own y-axis, with the private sector axis starting at a higher number and on a much larger scale than the private sector axis. This trick allows them to make it appear as if public sector jobs are taking over, a bit of graphing jiggery-pokery that’s about as intellectually honest as the canoe vs. battleship comparison shown below:
The one bit of honesty in the Fraser Institute’s graph is that they provided a citation showing where they got the data from: Statistics Canada’s CANSIM table 282-0089, the Labour Force Survey estimates. I went there, used the “add/remove data” feature to narrow the report down to Ontario for the years 1993 through 2015, plugged the January numbers for each of those years into Excel and generated this graph:
Click the graph to see it at full size.
The funny number games don’t appear to end there, however:
Again, if you want to look at the numbers, go to Statistics Canada’s CANSIM table 282-0089, the Labour Force Survey estimates, use the “Add/remove data” feature to limit the numbers to Ontario, and set the span of time to January 1993 – January 2015. I took those numbers and plugged them into this spreadsheet.
When someone presents you with a graph like the Fraser Institute’s, they’re counting on you to be lazy and ignorant. Don’t let them be right.
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