Xen – The Zen of the Other the Audio Drama

Xen - The Zen of the Other

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC, and more.

This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
Buy Digital Album $6.66 USD or more

Xen: The Zen of the Other is a work that follows one man as he attempts to find his way through the jumble of modernity that envelopes us all and threatens to strangle us in its “Tentacles Longer Than Night.”

Cast into a world where the liminal overlaps with the world of paranormal /philosophical speculations, Ezra Buckley struggles to keep his head above water long enough to pluck a jewel of wisdom from the crown of a forest spirit.

In a world devoid of rites of passage, Ezra finds himself on his own as he is confronted with the very real prospect of having a life-changing, Liminal experience in the woods of Big Sur, if he can survive it.

Is it even real?

Is it the legendary Watchers of Big Sur phenomena or something else?

Xen is a work that confronts the questions of identity, modernity, life, the other, and the place for rites of passage in the modern world.
This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
credits
released October 29, 2021

Xen: The Zen of the Other

Written by Ezra Buckley. You’ll have to decide for yourself if that’s a real name or not.- thepsychopath.org
Background information by Cameron Whiteside, if that indeed is his real name.- whereiscameron.wtf
Produced by P. Emerson Williams- pemersonwilliams.wordpress.com
The voice of Joseph Matheny performed by himself- josephmatheny.com
The voice of Ezra Buckley performed by Chris Gabriel aka memeanalysis- memeanalysis.com
The voice of Ralph performed by P. Emerson Williams
The voice of Tiamat performed by Anna “Maiya” Young- www.godmonsters.com
The voice of Racoon 1 performed by Iskandar Sakut abn Mayu (aka Eian Orange of Z(enseider)Z)- eianorange.zenseiderz.org
The voice of Racoon 2 by performed Deb Petrochko – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(mythology)
The voice of the waitperson performed Missy G – afieldofred.wordpress.com
The poems of Ezra Buckley read by Joseph Matheny

Xen: The Zen of the Other- Copyright 2021 Joseph Matheny
All Rights Reserved

Against longtermismIt started as a fringe philosophical theory about humanity’s future. It’s now richly funded and increasingly dangerous

[While I find this article interesting, it is, in the end, a lot of “angels dancing on the head of a pin” speculating because of the basic supposition that the longtermist are making that humanity should be saved. If you’ve been reading his site very long, you know that I do not think that is the case. However, it is an interesting read. Humanity’s ability and even desire to delude themselves into thinking we have a chance of survival or even that we should try is always amusing. Wouldn’t it be deliciously funny if adherence to this doctrine leads to the total annihilation of humanity? ]

It started as a fringe philosophical theory about humanity’s future. It’s now richly funded and increasingly dangerous

Against longtermism

Full article here: https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo?utm_source=rss-feed&fbclid=IwAR3eI9WVko6HKXCKPDbo8DSMgvSc6qZPUdNwymTvH_DO3kw3DneS2m3EQJ4

But reflect for a moment on how humanity got itself into the current climatic and ecological crisis. Behind the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, decimation of ecosystems and extermination of species has been the notion that nature is something to be controlled, subjugated, exploited, vanquished, plundered, transformed, reconfigured and manipulated. As the technology theorist Langdon Winner writes in Autonomous Technology (1977), since the time of Francis Bacon our view of technology has been ‘inextricably bound to a single conception of the manner in which power is used – the style of absolute mastery, the despotic, one-way control of the master over the slave.’ He adds:

There are seldom any reservations about man’s rightful role in conquering, vanquishing, and subjugating everything natural. This is his power and his glory. What would in other situations seem [to be] rather tawdry and despicable intentions are here the most honourable of virtues. Nature is the universal prey, to manipulate as humans see fit.
This is precisely what we find in Bostrom’s account of existential risks and its associated normative futurology: nature, the entire Universe, our ‘cosmic endowment’ is there for the plundering, to be manipulated, transformed and converted into ‘value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives’ in vast computer simulations, quoting Bostrom’s essay ‘Astronomical Waste’ (2003). Yet this Baconian, capitalist view is one of the most fundamental root causes of the unprecedented environmental crisis that now threatens to destroy large regions of the biosphere, Indigenous communities around the world, and perhaps even Western technological civilisation itself. While other longtermists have not been as explicit as Bostrom, there is a clear tendency to see the natural world the way utilitarianism sees people: as means to some abstract, impersonal end, and nothing more. MacAskill and a colleague, for example, write that the EA movement, and by implication longtermism, is ‘tentatively welfarist in that its tentative aim in doing good concerns promoting wellbeing only and not, say, protecting biodiversity or conserving natural beauty for their own sakes.’

Christianity and Cultural Collapse with Paul Kingsnorth

Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. In this episode we discuss his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Western cultural collapse, modernity, hell and spiritual belief in contemporary society. Kingsnorth’s blog can be found here: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ — Become part of the Hermitix community: Hermitix Twitter – https://twitter.com/Hermitixpodcast

Support Hermitix: Hermitix Subscription – https://hermitix.net/subscribe/

Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/hermitix

Donations: – https://www.paypal.me/hermitixpod

Hermitix Merchandise – http://teespring.com/stores/hermitix-2

Bitcoin Donation Address: 3LAGEKBXEuE2pgc4oubExGTWtrKPuXDDLK Ethereum Donation Address: 0xfd2bbe86d6070004b9Cbf682aB2F25170046A

 

Climate change set to worsen resource degradation, conflict, report says

Climate change set to worsen resource degradation, conflict, report says
Clouds gather but produce no rain as cracks are seen in the dried up municipal dam in drought-stricken Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, November 14, 2019. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings

LINK TO ARTICLE: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/embargo-climate-change-set-worsen-resource-degradation-conflict-report-says-2021-10-07/

A vicious cycle linking the depletion of natural resources with violent conflict may have gone past the point of no return in parts of the world and is likely to be exacerbated by climate change, a report said on Thursday.

Food insecurity, lack of water and the impact of natural disasters, combined with high population growth, are stoking conflict and displacing people in vulnerable areas, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) think-tank said.

IEP uses data from the United Nations and other sources to predict the countries and regions most at risk in its “Ecological Threat Register”.

Serge Stroobants, IEP director for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa said the report identified 30 “hotspot” countries – home to 1.26 billion people – as facing most risks.

This is based on three criteria relating to scarcity of resources, and five focusing on disasters including floods, droughts and rising temperatures.

“We don’t even need climate change to see potential system collapse, just the impact of those eight ecological threats can lead to this – of course climate change is reinforcing it,” Stroobants said.

Afghanistan gets the worst score on the report, which says its ongoing conflict has damaged its ability to cope with risks to water and food supplies, climate change, and alternating floods and droughts.

Conflict in turn leads to further resource degradation, according to the findings.

Six seminars including governments, military institutions and development groups last year returned the message that “it is unlikely that the international community will reverse the vicious cycles in some parts of the world”, IEP said.

This is particularly the case in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, which has seen more and worsening conflicts over the last decade, it said.

“With tensions already escalating, it can only be expected that climate change will have an amplifying effect on many of these issues,” the report said.

(This story corrects to remove extraneous word from headline, no change to text.)

Reporting by Isla Binnie; editing by Barbara Lewis