We are not the same

Accompanied by a white hart

On June 10, I posted "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which included this image of a modern variant on the Hermit card of the Tarot:

A hermit is a solitary, and so most decks show the hermit walking alone, the main "canonical" exception being Oswald Wirth's design, in which the hermit is being led by a red serpent. In the above version, he is accompanied by a large white hart.

In the comments on that post, Wade reported that he had asked the Fake Intelligence he refers to euphemistically as the Dioscuri how to say "the white hart" and "the red deer" in Adûnaic. Tolkien provided no such vocabulary, but of course that didn't stop Castor and Bollocks from hallucinating something. In this modern-day Black Speech, apparently, the word for "hart" or "deer" is razâ. I obviously disapprove of Wade's "AI-dunaic" rannygazoo, but as we shall see below, the sync fairies seem to have liked this one enough to use it. So, viva la razâ, I guess.

On the Hermit card, instead of the usual imagery of a hunter following the white hart, we have the hermit and the hart traveling side by side. And it's night. Yesterday afternoon, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

[W]hile driving home at night from her second shift job on a rural road on the outskirts of High Point . . . she noticed a deer running alongside her car; it was a big buck with huge antlers, staring straight at her while galloping on the shoulder of the road, side-by-side with the driver's window.

When Alan asked her how fast she was going, she replied about 45 to 55 miles per hour, which was the posted speed limit for that stretch of road. The deer remained right beside her car for about a mile. She wasn't scared, just stunned because the deer was staring at her, their eyes locked the entire time she drove.

She slowed down and sped up to see what the deer would do, and it slowed down and sped up, accordingly. Finally, about a mile from her home, she came to a complete stop. The deer stopped too, and continued to stare at her for what seemed like a half-minute more. Then it turned suddenly, jumped a ditch, and ran into the woods. It was obvious to Alan and Carson that something wasn't right about her account.

This evening, I did some work at an auto parts company, and it was dark when I finished. On the road, I noticed that the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a black backpack with this logo on it:

The logo is a stylized white hart's head. The brand name is PRAZA, which includes RAZA, the Fake Adunaic word Wade got by asking specifically how to say "the white hart." Under that is the slogan "You Never Walk Alone." Not even if you're a hermit, apparently.

This one's for Bill and Leo

Memes that will make you say "[text removed]"

Plus ça change éthiquement, plus c'est la même chose

For Bruce: That's a common French expression. It means, "The more it's ethically modified, the more of a meme it is."

More ethically modified fun

See my last post for context.

And this one, from /pol/, takes "schematic reconstruction" to limit but somehow still works:

Update: I've decided I like this version better than the one in my last post:

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.