Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul. [Lunatic emphasis in the original]

Outsideness Strategy bitchez.

This was my gateway into the horror-tracts of Ebola-Chan. It was immediately obvious that something of great significance was happening.
Upsetting (for those still nursing shreds of humane moral intuition): certainly, and deliberately.
Meaningful: beyond question, and massively.

The ebola trendline is currently exponential. Richard Fernandez places the phenomenon in its proper intellectual context. Whatever else the outbreak may be — a human (and economic) catastrophe for West Africa, a threat to the West — it is also a revelation (or ‘apocalypse’ in the strict sense). It’s a Khan Academy demonstration for slow and reluctant learners. Such things lend themselves to spontaneous religious interpretation.

It wasn’t supposed to look like this:

The (rough) coincidence with the death of 4chan is — in itself — a topic of abysmal fascination. I’m kicking that can for the moment. There’s much on this precursor discussion thread of relevance.

For now, some preliminary indications as to why this might be thought to matter (immensely), in revisable order of gravity:

(1) Readers of John Michael Greer are prepared for socio-economic decline to be accompanied by an eruption of religious abnormality. For anybody with a taste for irony (a crucial epistemological disposition, in the opinion of this blog), there is much nourishment to be found in the Ebola-Chan phenomenon. Most prominently, despite — and more probably because of — the shocking racism propelling it, Ebola-Chan opens a cross-cultural plane of communication completely absent from the ‘responsible’ Western responses to the plague. It makes sense of ebola in a way that is far closer to the sensibility of its target populations than the lofty medico-globalist pronouncements of legitimated authorities. Ebola-Chan packages the outbreak for a folk-religious response — of exactly the kind it is being met with in the villages it (or ‘she’?) ravages.

(2) Ebola-Chan is a demoness of communication, not only across cultures (West Africa, America, Japan …) but also between cultural and biological patterns of virulence. The ‘meme’ — as a more-or-less exact analog of the gene — is unleashed on 4chan in sympathy with the virus. It connects with the biological contagion, in various ways, through relations of copying (transcription), prolongation, and promotion. Ebola-Chan is a crossing.

(3) As memotechnics, Ebola-Chan condenses an accumulated stock of practical heuristics. Its genre is, most immediately, that of the chain-letter — conveying a message pre-adapted to spreading. Copy me, or be punished (stricken). It’s darkly humorous, cruel, ironical, and self-reflective, but at the level of memotechnics none of this undermines anything. If “I love you Ebola-Chan” spreads as a joke — it still spreads. The Nigerian email scam industry attests to the inter-cultural consistency of this memotechnic plane.

(4) Ebola-Chan is already operating as a factor in Fourth-Generation Warfare. It complicates the pacification efforts of the ‘international community’ in unpredictable ways. Once again, certain peculiar cultural formations are waiting to connect with it. At this stage it is difficult to reach even the preliminary stage of a lucid analysis, but clearly the memotechnic militarization of a medical emergency is an obstacle to the smooth evolution of established management procedures. The WHO is not ideologically equipped to publicize its intervention within the context of an occult religious race war.

(5) To what extent is Ebola-Chan an avatar of globalized Helter Skelter? Surely not to no extent at all?

(6) As 4chan is pushed ever deeper into the shadows, it seems reasonable to assume that its practical alliance with memotechnic chaos will also deepen. In this respect, Ebola-Chan is the Yin to the Cathedral’s Yang — a complement, fed by subterranean conservation laws. Much prophetic density accompanies such an analysis. If it is an end, it is no less the beginning of an end.

Badly cropped but horribly beautiful.

ADDED: Ebola-chan, ebola-chan, Ebola-Chan, ebola-chan, Ebola-Chan is Love~ …

ADDED: Ebola-Chan on Facebook.

ADDED: WaPo takes a look. “But even if the mods do remove [Ebola-chan threads], Ebola-Chan may have done her damage. Much like the disease itself, now that she’s out there, there’s no controlling her.”

ADDED: Rituals to Nurgle: Ebola Is Coming (Styxhexenhammer666).

There’s apparently been a brouhaha of some kind. Jim comments on the episode here (his post comes up first on a “4chan purge” Google search). I couldn’t find anything else that was helpful quickly.

This strikes me as far more also fascinating. It’s actual 4GW in the guise of a media prank.

Anyway, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law (with the understanding that sovereign Admin spanking rights are always conserved).

The great 4chan exodus. #GamerGate pic.twitter.com/IFC5USdfxG

— The Bechtloff (@thebechtloff) September 18, 2014

ADDED: Down the rabbit hole …

Our Chavez, who art in heaven, the Earth, the sea,
And we, delegates, hallowed be thy name.
Thy legacy come, so we can spread it to people here and elsewhere.
Give us this day light to guide us.
Lead us not into the temptation of capitalism;
Deliver us from the evil of oligarchy,
Like the crime of contraband,
Because ours is the homeland, peace, and life.
Forever and ever. Amen.
Viva Chavez!

We owe this contribution to the world’s storehouse of religious ecstasy to María Uribe, representative of Venezuela’s Socialist Party.

For the record, all the “villains” on Thomas and Friends are the dirty diesel engines. I’d like to think there was a good environmental message in there, but when the good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke – and they are all pumping out smoke – it’s not hard to make the leap into the race territory.

Pluto-capitalist, white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal — the horrors of this children’s TV show run deep.

Well guess what? It’s not OK.

Progress.

ADDED: SoBL on the case.

ADDED: Synchronicity watch —

Is anything other than nuclear annihilation too good for the UK? http://t.co/f9ZfdvXGwW

— Henry Dampier (@henrydampier) June 25, 2014

It's pitiful that many embrace HBD because they think it validates their political interests (I.e. right wing BS), and for no other reason.

— misdreavus (@SuperMisdreavus) June 10, 2014

Just *who* do you think proved for you "neo-reactionaries" that heredity explains most adult var. in IQ within developed countries?

— misdreavus (@SuperMisdreavus) June 10, 2014

[*sigh*]

(I think I saw a tweet by Jayman that also came out swinging, but I’ve failed to hunt it down.)

ADDED: The Jayman commentary (excavated by Mr. Archenemy).

ADDED: Some relevant comments in this thread.

Read Mencius Moldbug.

— Justine Tunney (@JustineTunney) April 28, 2014

This strikes me as a poly-dimensional crisis moment — or at least cultural storm signal — (for NRx, for Google, and for the USA), so I’m obviously on tenterhooks to hear what people think.

ADDED: The anti-Tunney (or one of them).

Anson Chan …  rose through the prestigious Hong Kong civil service to the top appointed position of chief secretary, resigning in 2001 when she felt the chief executive was allowing Beijing to chip away at Hong Kong’s core values: rule of law, a level playing field and freedom of press, speech and association. Since then, she said, democracy’s hold has grown more precarious … 

Did you spot the subtle non sequitur? (To resolve it requires some understanding of the fact that the precise, technical meaning of ‘democracy’ to experts like Hiatt is ‘nice Westernish stuff we like’.)

I’ll just let that simmer for a while …

ADDED: There have been some strange goings on at The Guardian recently, for instance, this article on seasteading — because climate change.

ADDED: Now in The Telegraph: “The self-described ‘champagne tranarchist’, who launched Occupy Wall Street in 2011, said that if the technology industry was to take over the US government she would be ‘prancing around skipping for joy’, but accepted that it was unlikely.”

ADDED: Contemplationist (@i_contemplate_) catches this:

@ramdac @abbynormative Our government is already a corporation. All we're doing here is finding a better corporation to run our government.

— Justine Ní Thonnaigh (@JustineTunney) March 21, 2014

“If [this] is not neocameralism, I don’t know what is.” Quite.

ADDED: Justine Tunney interviewed by Christopher Mims (definitely not to be missed by anyone interested in this peculiar episode).