Santa Muerte: The Enigmatic Allure of the Beautiful Girl

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A really interesting article on the memetic behavior and unfolding of Santa Muerte in northern Mexico and the southern US:

https://wp.nyu.edu/therevealer/2016/10/ ... Xy1n-RpY90

Another subtitle I might give it 'It's all good until you declare a war on drugs and recklessly turn the country south of your border into a war-torn narcostate'.

As enough people know I'm also not a reductive materialist and I think there's a lot in this article that's quite demonstrative about how this sort of thing works - ie. nature abhors vacuum or disequilibrium, and where you create either condition you'll get these kinds of results.

I'm a reductive materialist - nature abhors a vacuum? why did she make almost everything in space out of it? disbalance? if there was balance between me and not-me, it would mean I'm dead and my atoms are spreading, rather than temporarily staying somewhat in place - I'm all disbalance!

sorry for going off topic so quickly.

Speaking in terms of ecosystems - both in 'nature' as we think of it as well as political (really the same thing but I'm probably saying that for other people's benefit since I believe you're already of that mindset as well).

I do, also that it's a metaphor. It was meant to as a tongue-in-cheek comment.

Human politics being part of nature or nature being built on stabilized imbalance?

Maybe she's "Lilith".

There's definitely a lot of overlap between the two, similar things can be said of Kali as well (Lilith seems to be a western motif of her in a lot of ways).

I think Hecate before Lilith because I haven't heard Santa Muerte brought up in sexual contexts yet - and who doesn't have a fetish for for a good face of 'day of the dead' makeup!

Politics as extended phenotype - insofar, yes, a part of nature. But it doesn't have many things in common with nature - in politics, stories and beliefs are important. - In nature, it's all atoms.

And stabilized imbalance - well, I prefer the expression punctuated equilibrium. Things are stable for a while, then there's periods of rapid change, then there's stability again, for a while.
But the idea of ecisystems and stability does not really have a factual basis, in nature, everything's constantly in flux, and not every change produces a stabilizing counter force. Sometimes things just get totally out of whack. -

We as humans are clearly giving rise to a complexity that we don't observe often outside of our own observed behavior, that much is true.


Gaps in the food chain have a way of filling themselves in, it might take thousands of years or more but that tends to be the result. Obviously that structure can get significant rifts, like a comet or asteroid overthrowing an ecosystem and then you just end up with a new one growing into the territory of the former.