Ethically modified schematic reconstruction of a meme

Who says the Left can't meme? This is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. It's been making the rounds on 4chan, but it would be a shame if those of my readers who don't frequent that wretched hive of scum and villainy missed out on it. It's from a paper by Sarah Rodriguez-Louette, "Memeing Scientific Racism: The Digital Reframing of Racialist Ideologies," in which she wants to write about racist memes but can't actually include them in her paper because that would be, like, racist, so she resorts to these hilarious "ethically modified schematic reconstructions."

Here's the funniest one:

The text that's been removed from the original meme -- which is not actually a soyjak but a caricature of British activist Richard Murphy -- is "your daughter was raped by a retarded cannibal." Good thing it was ethically modified so the reader wouldn't be exposed to such shocking language!

Here's a Baudrillardian analysis of this particular meme, from /pol/:

This next one is even more puzzling, as no offensive text has been removed. Rather, completely unnecessary (but admittedly funny) captions have been added. I guess just the fact that the pictures are "schematic" rather than being photos makes it all less offensive? Or maybe it's that the nature of the 2020s "social unrest" is no longer explicit? Anyway, the deliberate awkwardness of it all does make it considerably funnier than the original.

Needless to say, /pol/ is having a lot of fun with this new "ethically modified" format. I think it's going to be the next big thing in memetics.

The question is how people like Sarah Rodriguez-Louette will report on this next generation of memes. How do they ethically modify what's already been ethically modified? I'm sure they'll find a way.

Red crows, white feathers, Whitley and owls, a man falling from the sky, and water as blood

Other errands having taken me to that part of Taichung, I stopped by a used bookstore. I didn't buy anything, but three books caught my synchromystic eye. First, this edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius:

This book actually came up back in September 2022, in "I'm being shadowed by a red turtle dove," when I searched my Kindle library for Tomberg's Meditations on the Tarot and got this:

That's the same edition of Marcus. At the time, I was just interested in the fact that there was a red bird on the cover -- synching with the red turtle dove of my post title -- though I noted, "Not a dove (it looks more like a red crow), but still!" and linked back to my December 2020 post "Red crows of the Sun." That symbolism has come back up recently; I mention the Red Crow of the Sun in both "I will follow you into the dark" (June 19) and "October 3 and 4, and white crows" (June 20). In both cases, the red crow was mentioned in conjunction with white birds (a white owl and a white crow, respectively), and the Marcus book shows a red crow and a white semiplume feather -- that is, a small fluffy feather rather than a long flight feather. Stories from the Messengers includes a story about such a feather:

Audrey leaned over the edge of the deck holding a small fluffy feather. She looked down at me and said, "An owl feather just floated down and landed right between all of us!"

This occurred in full daylight, an odd time for an owl to be in flight, and no one saw any bird above them. They described watching the little feather drifting down from high above, floating in from the direction of the lake. . . .

I got a few close up pictures of the little feather. It was white fluffy down and about two inches long. I showed these photos to a few bird experts while researching this essay. They all said the same thing -- they couldn't be sure, but they thought it was from a turkey.

Two inches is awfully long for down, even from a large bird like an owl or a turkey, so I think it must actually have been a white semiplume, as seen on the cover of the Marcus book.

Back in January 2024, I posted "White feathers, strange sights," the post taking its name from a song on Australian singer Whitley's 2007 debut album The Submarine. The last line in the song is "A white feather fell." The album cover features a picture of an owl and the name Whitley. Ditto for the cover of Stories from the Messengers.

Apparently (according to German Wikipedia) the singer chose his stage name as an homage to American blues singer Chris Whitley, with no reference to Whitley Strieber.

Coming back to today's bookstore visit, the second book to catch my eye was this one:

It's a Nigerian short story collection titled What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. Just yesterday I posted "The Tree of Life and the flesh and blood of Jesus" on my Book of Mormon blog, a more Book-centered discussion of ideas first broached here in "The white blood of Jesus" (June 18). In yesterday's post, I discuss Nephi's High Mountain Vision, in which the Spirit says to him:

thou shalt also behold a man descending out of heaven, and him shall ye witness; and after ye have witnessed him ye shall bear record that it is the Son of God (1 Ne. 11:7)

In other words, the Spirit tells him that he will see a man descend ("fall") from the sky and then tells him what it means. In the post, I note that, despite what the Spirit says, Nephi doesn't actually report seeing a man descending out of heaven and discuss a possible way of reconciling the discrepancy.

Both that post and its June 18 predecessor discuss the idea that the "water" that flowed from the wounded Christ's side, and the "living waters" he talks about, represent a second sort of "blood" that flowed in Jesus' veins. In yesterday's post, I connect this to the strange modern Mormon practice of drinking not wine, nor even grape juice, but water in remembrance of the blood of Jesus. All of which brings us to the third book that caught my eye today:

It's a novel titled Water from My Heart -- in other words, water as a type of, or substitute for, blood.

The Stone Woman Mystery

One June 16, my exploration of the zanier corners of Mormon YouTube led me to an obscure channel with the strange name We Zombi Rod of Iron, which looked pretty out there. The homepage highlights a 12-video series called "The Stone Woman," so I figured that was the most logical place to start.

The first video in the series says "Stome Woman Mystery?" in the thumbnail.

The supposed "mystery" (the question mark is amply justified!) turns out to be kind of dumb, and I gave up on the video, and the channel, about halfway through. Basically, the guy drives around the United States photographing stone carvings on buildings, and a lot of the carvings are of women. He lumps all of these together -- just being a carving of a woman on a building is enough (even the "stone" part isn't rigorously enforced) -- and takes each as another instance of "the" Stone Woman and as further evidence that "she," mysteriously, is everywhere.

He also repeatedly asserts that we have no idea what "she" means, that this is lost symbolism from a bygone era and is to us moderns a sealed book. Despite this, many of his examples of the Stone Woman are immediately recognizable and understandable. The reader will probably already have noticed that both the channel icon and the thumbnail show standard allegorical depictions of Justice, with her sword and scales. Several others were clearly depictions of the Greco-Roman goddess known variously as Athena, Minerva, or Pallas. I'm no expert on art history or iconography, and not every Stone Woman was recognizable to me, but those that were mostly fell into these two categories: Justice, and Pallas Athena.

⁂

Speaking of art history, around the same time Frank Berger had been posting about the 19th-century German artist Franz von Stuck, publishing "That'll Turn You to Stone, For Sure" on June 12 and "The Vision of St. Hubert" on June 14. This was apparently occasioned by my own June 10 post "Quotable quotes from my commenters," which linked back to an older post of mine on which Frank had left a comment about the symbolism of the vision of St. Hubert (a stag with a cross or crucifix between its antlers). Nevertheless, the first Franz von Stuck painting he posted after that was not The Vision of St. Hubert but rather Head of Medusa, the woman whose face will turn you to stone. In the post he describes the Gorgon as if she herself were made of stone, with "a smooth, unblemished alabaster face."

The St. Hubert painting is also somewhat relevant. The scene is dark, and Frank writes that it expresses the notion of "following something to where you need to go."

⁂

On June 19, I posted "I will follow you into the dark." The title is a reference to a Death Cab for Cutie song, and to a story in Mike Clelland's book about following an owl through the night, but the link to The Vision of St. Hubert is obvious. In that post, sculptural depictions of Pallas Athena come up again:

I thought the black crow made a nice complement to the white owl. I remembered that Edgar Allan Poe's famous Raven had originally been an owl, and that the bust of Pallas in the published poem is a holdover from that earlier imagery.

Then, looking up an old post of mine, I found two comments -- one mentioning the Death Cab for Cutie song that would become the title of my post, and the other quoting from "The Raven" and drawing particular attention to the bust of Pallas.

What had originally made me think of the bust of Pallas was the complementary pair of a black crow and a white owl. The next day, I posted "October 3 and 4, and white crows." Following the footnotes in Clelland's book, with a black owl on the cover, had led me to a book with a white crow on the cover: White Crows by Trish MacGregor. I downloaded it and found in the author bio on the first page a reference to the author's winning an Edgar Allan Poe award, reinforcing the bust of Pallas connection. The bio also repeatedly referred to the author's novels as "mysteries."

Not until this morning did I read beyond the author bio and the opening epigraph (from my namesake, William James). The first chapter of this novel -- classified as a "mystery" -- is titled "The Stone Woman." This is an obvious link to the We Zombi Rod of Iron video. While We Zombi's "stone woman mystery" is a nothingburger, the one in White Crows is about as mysterious as it gets: A woman in the Florida Keys literally turns to stone. As the cops examine the petrified body, they find on her shoulder an also-petrified sliver with a tiny inscription etched into it: "White Crow 1440 June '44." One of the cops says:

"It sounds like it could be a reference to William James's famous line: 'If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.' Turning to stone when you die is certainly unique."

(Sorry, no matter how famous William James's line may be, it's just not plausible that a cop could quote it verbatim off the top of his head.)

The cops then turn their attention to "June '44" and wonder what century it refers to, the idea being that perhaps the technology to turn someone to stone will exist in the future, and that the incident may involve a time traveler from 2044 or 2144 or 2244.

My own thoughts turned instead to the past: June 1844 is when Joseph Smith was assassinated. I knew that Joseph Smith and Edgar Allan Poe were near-exact contemporaries, being born within a few years of each other and then both dying young. Is it possible that Poe wrote "The Raven" -- from which comes the bust of Pallas -- in June 1844? I looked it up. The poem was published in January 1845, but the Wikipedia article mentions "the summer of 1844, when the poem was likely written." I couldn't find anything more specific than that, but it would appear that June 1844 is a definite possibility.

I word-searched White Crows for any reference to Poe, ravens, Pallas, etc., but found nothing, so any connection is coincidental.

Humanoid deer creatures

I took this photo on June 15, seeing it as a continuation of the Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring theme. See "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos" (May 18) and "Vermeer and meerkats" (May 19).

Today I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2020:

Update: Immediately after publishing this, I checked Arts & Letters Daily. The first link on the page was to a review of a biography of Vermeer.

Comically inadequate ASCII art

Today's post "October 3 and 4, and white crows" led me back to "Finding Boster the Nose" (May 2025) because one of the Boster characters has a white crow as a pet. That post includes this map:

Johnny Apple Changer, the character who finds this map, laments the fact that it is made with ASCII characters (asterisks and underscores):

Johnny rejoiced. He felt a little sad that Boster the Basket had made the map with ASCII as that made it a little hard to understand, but he felt very happy about it all.

The asterisk is ASCII character number 42. In "October 3 and 4, and white crows" I quoted part of the author bio in the novel White Crows, my interest being the fact that the author had won an Edgar Allan Poe award. I didn't quote the full sentence -- the first sentence in the book -- but it also includes the number 42:

T. J. MacGregor is the author of 42 novels and in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight.

Maolsheachlann's latest post, "That's How the Digestive Disintegrates" (June 19), mentions his coining the title phrase as "a humorous substitute for 'that's how the cookie crumbles'." This of course prompted me to try to come up with my own humorous substitute, but I failed. The best I could come up with was "That's how the Mandelbrot fractures" -- Mandelbrot being both a kind of cookie and the name of the most famous fractal ("the fat man in the complex plane") -- but I decided the pun was too roundabout to really land. Anyway, the thought led me to the Wikipedia article on the Mandelbrot set, where I discovered that the first published picture of the set was a piece of ASCII art composed of asterisks:

Since the whole point of the Mandelbrot set is its infinite complexity, this ASCII rendition is just as comically inadequate as the map to Boster the Nose.

Say it loud -- I'm [inaudible] and I'm proud!

I find it highly entertaining that a certain advocacy movement currently brands itself as Pride, with no modifier. They're so proud they don't want to say what it is they're proud of. The pride that dare not speak its name. Quite the paradox.

October 3 and 4, and white crows

It is well known that reading about synchronicities induces them. It is also well known that I already experience more than my share of them. Nevertheless, here I am reading Stories from the Messengers, Mike Clelland's second book about owls, UFOs, and sync.

Some of the stories Clelland relates come from an elderly lady (b. 1943) who was at the time blogging under the pseudonym Gypsy Woman. He includes several long quotes from her, and her writing style reminded me of our own paranormal-experiencing Boomer lady, Debbie. One of her stories is of a near-death experience involving levitation: "I began to rise out of my body . . . I continued to move upward toward the ceiling."

Then I read this:

It was because of her essay about seeing that white owl out her bedroom window that I [Clelland] was introduced to Gypsy Woman. This was a sighting that foreshadowed the death of a close relative. This owl story takes place over two consecutive days, October 3 and 4 of 2013.

I have my own owl story which takes place over the very same consecutive days, October 3 and 4, but of 2009.

On May 30, I posted "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion." (Communion here refers to the film adaptation of the book by Whitley Strieber, who wrote the foreword for Clelland's book.) In that post, I write about finding a (fake) photo of a levitating woman that had been posted to /x/ on October 3, 2013 -- the same date as Gypsy Woman's experience. Here is Gypsy Woman, as quoted by Clelland (brackets and ellipsis in Clelland):

Yesterday morning [Oct. 3], I woke with a start -- didn't know why -- just woke as if someone had shaken my shoulder or something. I sat up in bed and looked around trying to figure out what was going on... I was sitting on the edge of the bed and something out the window of my sun room door caught my eye.

The property is covered in trees, but there's one tree at the end of the driveway that is, for all intents and purposes, dead. The limbs are always bare. I saw something in this tree, and whatever it was seemed really large. At first, I thought it was a helium balloon stuck on a limb, but it was probably as large as two or three of those balloons.

I walked over to the window and saw that it was an owl, a very large white owl.

In a comment posted earlier this morning, on "The red waistcoat again," Debbie reminds us that her "property is almost completely wooded." Helium balloon imagery obviously ties in with levitation.

In my May 30 post, I noted that Debbie's first email to me was dated October 3, 2021, in her time zone, but October 4 in mine. It was the next day (October 4 for her) that she first mentioned levitation.

These syncs made me curious about this Gypsy Woman, so I checked Clelland's footnotes and found her blog, which was clearly designed by someone who grew up before the rule of tincture was invented, and which hasn't been updated since 2013. Scrolling down, I found a post titled "ufo's in the desert and guns at area 51...my childhood travels," which I clicked since Area 51 has been in the sync stream.

The first comment there was by someone called Trish, who turned out to be Trish MacGregor, with a link to http://qqq.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets. Clelland had mentioned a website called Synchro-Secrets a couple of times, but I hadn't been able to find it. Correcting Trish's typo, I found that www.synchrosecrets.com redirects to a website that is now called The Mystical Underground. In the sidebar there, I found a link to this book:

In "I will follow you into the dark" (June 19), I had posted about white owls and black crows. Clelland's book has a black owl on the cover, so now we have the reverse: a black owl and a white crow.

My post also mentioned non-black crows (the Red Crow of the Sun in Chinese tradition), as well as Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven," noting that the titular bird had originally been an owl. All this was enough for me to acquire a digital copy of White Crows. I don't intend to read it just yet, but I looked at the first few pages.

The first sentence of the first page -- a "Meet the Author" bio -- mentions that Trish MacGregor "in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight." The first page of the novel proper is an epigraph showing that the book's title comes from my philosophical namesake:

"If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white."

- William James

It's also perhaps revelant that in Boster vs. Boster the Pig (see "Finding Boster the Nose"), the former Boster keeps an albino crow as a pet.