#noema

A noema (pronounced noh-EE-mə or noh-AY-mə, plural noemata) is intrinsic knowledge about one's kintype, hearttype, or other alterhuman identity. Noemata may include memories, things one experiences as memories but which are not believed to be real memories, gut feelings, and general knowledge about the looks, life, or habits of one's alterhuman identity. Noemata may have a psychological or spiritual basis, may be a mix of the two, or may have unknown origins. As noemata are intrinsic knowledge, knowledge from external sources such as books, films, and games are not noemata.

You might hear some people ask, “How could we have known what was going to happen to American politics 5 years ago?” And you can answer them by pointing them to this article / paper, published in 2020 by NOEMA. The article elaborates on research performed in the 1990s that identified social and political trends pointing to serious upheaval due to political populism and the historical tendency for the wealthiest members of a society to turn away from a society that is as good as it can be for most or all people and to, instead, move toward an oligarchy that favors themselves and their children at the expense of everyone else. It’s a really good read.

An excerpt:

Almost three decades ago, one of us, Jack Goldstone, published a simple model to determine a country’s vulnerability to political crisis. The model was based on how population changes shifted state, elite and popular behavior. Goldstone argued that, according to this Demographic-Structural Theory, in the 21st century, America was likely to get a populist, America-first leader who would sow a whirlwind of conflict.

Then ten years ago, the other of us, Peter Turchin, applied Goldstone’s model to U.S. history, using current data. What emerged was alarming: The U.S. was heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years. Even before Trump was elected, Turchin published his prediction that the U.S. was headed for the “Turbulent Twenties,” forecasting a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.

Given the Black Lives Matter protests and cascading clashes between competing armed factions in cities across the United States, from Portland, Oregon to Kenosha, Wisconsin, we are already well on our way there. But worse likely lies ahead.

Our model is based on the fact that across history, what creates the risk of political instability is the behavior of elites, who all too often react to long-term increases in population by committing three cardinal sins. First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. For example, in an increasingly meritocratic society, elites could keep places at top universities limited and raise the entry requirements and costs in ways that favor the children of those who had already succeeded.

Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts.

Such selfish elites lead the way to revolutions. They create simmering conditions of greater inequality and declining effectiveness of, and respect for, government. But their actions alone are not sufficient. Urbanization and greater education are needed to create concentrations of aware and organized groups in the populace who can mobilize and act for change.

Top leadership matters. Leaders who aim to be inclusive and solve national problems can manage conflicts and defer a crisis. However, leaders who seek to benefit from and fan political divisions bring the final crisis closer. Typically, tensions build between elites who back a leader seeking to preserve their privileges and reforming elites who seek to rally popular support for major changes to bring a more open and inclusive social order. Each side works to paint the other as a fatal threat to society, creating such deep polarization that little of value can be accomplished, and problems grow worse until a crisis comes along that explodes the fragile social order.

I don’t really get much exomemories. Not from other lives at least. Depends on when and how you or I count lucid dream world, it’d be a toss up for me to call all of them exomemories, but I also wouldn’t say some of them aren’t. It gets fuzzy at time whether it truly is just made up chaos from mind, or if it has been a view into a different world. Sometimes they felt like that.

Until it finally clicked a couple days ago, when discussing with a friend the physics of attacking someone from above in the air (for. reasons), and it occurred to me that they are for combat, defensive combat, against a very specific threat that of course is a threat for flighted creatures - being attacked from above. See, when you attack someone from above, you flare your wings to hit feet-first, because shock absorption has to be a thing - but almost immediately your head comes down to bite at the back of their neck, because that’s the most vulnerable spot probably on the entire body of a dragon. If you can grab high up on the back of the neck between your jaws, it’s going to be all over for your opponent pretty quickly.

Unless, say, your opponent has backwards-facing horns with which to gore you in the eyes, mouth, or general face area (maybe even the throat, if you’re really incautious with it) if you’re too far up their neck.

last night i hadn’t done any research about maned wolves yet. i had been too busy hyperfixating on other alterhuman things during the day to start looking stuff up, and too tired to think about it as i was getting ready for bed.

as i was absentmindedly watching youtube videos, taking a break from alterhuman stuff, i got the urge to do a deep throaty sound. not really like a howl, but sorta? my head would be in a howl-ish pose, but the sound would be shorter and different. random creature instincts aren’t too out of the ordinary for me, and i don’t know if i’ve had this one before; if so, it would’ve been a while ago.

it occurred to me that this might be a sound maned wolves make, so after my video was finished i looked up some others about maned wolf sounds. and! the first one was of a maned wolf roar-barking! which was very euphoric. i watched a few more videos, which mostly showed them squealing/squeaking. i already do that all the time, stemming from my fox kintypes + autism.

i’m pretty sure i haven’t heard any maned wolf sounds before then. i’ve only seen them in pictures and a 2-second silent video as far as i remember. so my explanations for this roar-bark noema is: 1) i have heard the sound and just don’t remember, 2) simple but enjoyable coincidence, or 3) i subconsciously got the impression that they’d make a sound like that just from looking at them, which my brain then randomly threw at me.

unfortunately this hasn’t helped me much with the actual questioning. i don’t think it’s a kintype tho, if it’s anything at all. the muzzle stands out most — it doesn’t quite fit me. i think it’s too long, or the wrong shape in another way. it feels dysphoric to imagine on myself. however i have seen many red foxes whose muzzles are longer/different than my red fox muzzle, too. maybe the maned wolves in the closer-range videos just happened to have different muzzles than me and i’m applying a face shape to myself that i don’t even need to have.

again, sounds and appearance alone aren’t very helpful, especially this early on.