So, the crazies, I mean the very nice people who follow Q and Proud and whatever, have they:

a) always been here, just variations of the same throughout human history
b) what R's been talking about for years now, chaos resulting from Crash Space
c) something new, growing chaos from something ( rapid technological advances leaving people behind, killer robots, AI, etc )

I concede I'm not an expert on R's non-fiction reads, so I may be misinterpreting it ( my previous queries into this field, notwithstanding - I forget, get confused ). Crash Space, from how I (mis)understand it is the psychological blow back of scientific discovery stressing religion. As more lose faith, it can lead to a trauma and to nihilism. The possibility of life having no meaning will trip us up and many may go crazy, doubling down on religious identity to the point of violent absurdity, failures of institutions and the like.

If I got this Crash Space stuff right, I think there's something to it and what we've been seeing could well be the effects of this phenomena. We've "known" politicians can be goofy, but it was always kinda on the sly and though there was corruption, society seemed to move along - now we're seeing unashamed jelly-fish people lead us, just a naked self expression for power absent any concern for the consequences in broad daylight. Not sure which is worse, the cynicism of taking advantage of the mad herd or those who actually believe and fight for it. It's really something.

At risk of ruining our run of uninterrupted civil discourse of all things mind, I'm becoming a bit of a stoic in my age toward politics, more interested now in how people are political than being political, myself: the effectiveness of propaganda, the source/cause of cosmology, the parallel of increased political participation with partisanship.

This is pretty cool, you're political identity from the date you were born. If you were born 1950 - 1954, you're likely Democrat now, but before and after you're likely Republican up until 1980. The coming of age for those born in early 50's was the late 60's.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/08/upshot/how-the-year-you-were-born-influences-your-politics.html

So we don't know where thoughts come from. What is your best guess? Select "You" if you think you ever, even just once in your lifetime, create your own thought(s).

If you like, comment how you think the conversation would go, kind of food you would order, etc. I picked Inrilatas as I felt he was one of the more under-utilized characters in the story. I was surprised by his limited role and felt he had so much more to say/contribute.

Has anyone ever mentioned anything about Leweth's dialogue with Kellhus where he mentions "The forest seemed to... beckon to me..." or something like that?

It sparked some thoughts about whether or not it could be reference to Moenghus preparing the way.

... Moe Sr will still save us all

Somehow moenghus engineered the death of leweths wife knowing he would move to the remote country side and eventually encounter his son whom he would need 30 years later

We could well be on Moe Sr's TTT. A few things may have tripped him up ( going blind for the wrong reasons - but this may be part of the path, I found it curious he would make that error, to not understand the Psuke and himself to know it would be folly - so could be part of the "plan". Kellhus's madness threw him and he had to recalculate on the fly - maybe he figured out his son was possessed and recalculated he had to have his son kill him to reorient the TTT to continue? Or appear to kill him? The Chisarum were very good at cloak and dagger, people hiding in other people, etc.

I love quotes. Love the quotes before each chapter in PON and Dune. Love them from all walks and times. So I'm starting a thread to collect cool quotes.

This post is a “guess” … which is to say I don’t know Bakker, nor can I read the man’s mind. Over the past few months I’ve seen some criticism of the work on plot and clarity and hope to rope some of you back into enjoying these books and look forward to more, as I do.

Bakker has been presenting the coming/happening of what he calls The Semantic Apocalypse on 3 Pound Brain. He’s leveraging a “Bulls-eye” approach in that medium; he’s telling you exactly what it is, that it’s happening, why and how it’s happening and his concerns about it. I think he knows he’s losing a lot of people with that discussion and he’s not surprised by it. He’s simply showing us something most ( if not all ) of the rest of us cannot see because we’ve never looked at something like this before ( or more accurately, we’ve not used our “eyes” in a way beyond what evolution has yielded us ). He’s pointing right at it, but we’re looking up, down, behind us, eyes closed, right at it but not understanding it – his “pointing”, precision, is not good enough to get us to see it.

The books are an alternative approach to showing us this Semantic Apocalypse. By using tools such as obfuscation, misdirection, inconsistency, deception and lies, he’s having us follow him through the forest to get to “it”; since the bull’s eye approach is failing him, he’s trying to jar us into understanding using a medium so many enjoy. This is why he says those who are most put off by the books are actually “getting” the story better than those of us who don’t. Which is to say, those who are pissed off with the ending of TUC, et al are actually following him to see what he sees. The rest of us not so disappointed are risking not ever getting “there” … by trusting him too much we could be cheapening the experience taking a shortcut to the destination, missing the richness of the journey ( which is designed to enhance our “sight” ) and may still not get it once we arrive. Those of us ( like myself ) who enjoy the details so much, we risk never even arriving ( wandering around the forest, following our own path, too easily amused  ). He’s not a sadist, he’s getting no pleasure from this. He’s alarmed and doing his best avoiding the Casandra trap ( clairvoyance without believability ), he genuinely needs more brains on this to vet this out so we/humanity have a chance to adapt and survive it.

If you’ve read this far ( i.e. 7 books ), considering not giving up and continuing. Yes, our beloved hero is salt. Yes, there’s a lot of crazy shit that doesn’t make sense. Keep going and bring your anger/disappointment with you – we may find something of what he’s going on about together. Some of the richest insights into the work have come from the harshest critics.