As I mentioned last month, I’ll be doing a monthly discussion post here on From The Forests of Arduinna. Here is July’s.

First as an update, as many of you know there has been really intense flooding in the Ardennes and also along the Rhine. We escaped this ourselves—we live in a high valley where a watershed starts, so there isn’t as much of a chance for intense rain to flood us (though last year this did happen). The friend I mentioned in The Secret of Crossings did get flooded signficantly; however, she was able to clean up the damage really quickly because we had gotten so much up to higher ground before hand.

It’s finally sunny here. In fact, we’ve had very little of a “summer” to speak of. While some of my plants have enjoyed the intense rain, others in my garden have given up (for instance, tomatoes). But today I went to a social event that required me to dress up, and I took this photo in the sun this morning before putting the tie on:

The event was a rather high class (in the European sense of the word) event. I won’t say much more except that it took place somewhere the Rothschilds are known to frequent, and royalty, and other people of wealth I don’t normally meet very often. And at some point I was in a conversation about Marx that was maybe one of the most pleasant and intelligent conversations I’ve ever had on the subject, much more so than any American “social justice” internet interaction.

And speaking of the internet, I’ll be officially no longer using Facebook or Twitter starting on Lughnasadh. There will be some automated postings from here and other places I write onto those platforms, but I will no longer have any direct interaction with social media.

The reason I’m leaving is because I’ve realised it deeply alters the way you think about the world. At some point I’ll write more on this, once I’ve had enough distance, but I’ll add another interesting point here: those people I mentioned above? They don’t use it either.

Anyway, for this month, I’d love to discuss social media. What have you noticed about the way the interactions there are different from your real-life interactions? Have you noticed a shift in the way you think after using it?

Also, I’ve noticed a lot of the “woke” extremism stuff tends to be more severe online than it ever is in in-person interactions. For instance, some woke person just called me a “fascist” on social media because of that photo above, because I quoted Nietzsche under it (“Become who you are”). I can think of no in-person interaction where anyone would ever think to say such a thing.

It’s easier to speak without consequence from behind a screen.

That sort of distancing seems to only increase the extremism of this stuff. What kinds of things have you noticed? Feel free to vent if you need.

Much love, and thanks for all the support!

—Rhyd