Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

There's an old Burkean critique that revolutionary ideologies are utopian. And then there's Vogelin's critique of revolutionary utopianism that says that the problem begins whenever you try to turn the tools of capital-T Theory on the dull stuff of material history.

I prefer the Deweyite critique that says that if you think you know what your revolution is going to bring, then your revolution is less complicated than a trip to the beach, and your Theory is little more than an etiquette book.

Test Ice-9 on Subglacial Lake Vostok.

Dear Mastodon peepz,
It costs you zero dollars to be kind. But on the other hand, it also costs you zero dollars to manifest greatness in your every moment, to look upon everything in existence and to comment, "I willed it to be such." JUST A FRIENDLY REMINDER :) You are free to choose or free to choose not to choose, but you can never be authentically unfree.
THANKS 🙏

Aristotle bad.

I will keep saying this until people get it. Aristotle bad. Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent, commentitia esse.

I like being a liminal agent.

All the TRUE Scotsmen agree with me.

Just yield one more thing to the grave, bro, I swear just one more little bit of the living vitality of the cosmos needs to be traded away for power and control. Once you submit to death just a little bit more, you'll be like God. I promise, bro. It's just death. It happens all the time. You don't have to make a big deal about it. Just embrace death a little, please.

It's really fucked up how the merchants of death infiltrate everything.

Listening to my boomer music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5NfF02H-HA&ab_channel=SubtextRecordings

There is something really amazing here about the anti-title theatricality that happen in social media these days. I have to speak gnomically because a lot of these performances are wedged really expertly between cherished social practices. But it is fascinating if you know what to watch.

The strongest knock you can make against this stuff is that it's unoriginal. SO FUCKING WHAT. Nobody cares that all of the synthpop of the 80s was downstream from Kraftwerk. A sound is not a patentable invention. This isn't science, it's a scene.

The second-strongest knock you can make against this is that it's all bro-y, the kind of stuff you'd hear blasting out of a frat house while guys named Trevor smoke salvia inside. Again, SO FUCKING WHAT. That's not considered a knock against other art

We went through a genuine indie sonic aesthetic in the 2010s (a bunch of Vampire Weekend / MGMT soundalikes) and nobody wants to honor it at the level of, like, 80s synthpop or 90s grunge.

I would call this genre something like "hipster runoff," inspired by the eponymous publication and by this line in a review of Reptar's Body Faucet:
>an acoustic reggae cover in a crack den. … Afrobeat-tinged equivalent of landfill indie
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jun/28/reptar-body-faucet-review

It is impossible to overstate how much humans have benefited from having other animal societies to observe: ants, bees, dogs, dolphins, whales, apes, etc.

Can you imagine what a mindfuck it would be to be the only social species on the planet asking, "Maaaybe this is why our society is the way it is, but we have no way to get out of it so idk."

That Tao Lin essay on autism is one of the most thought-provoking thing I've read in years. I can't really get it off my mind, and I read it when it first came out.

Look upon your polis and fall in love with her.

@niplav I would simply analyze the object into its constituent parts, evaluate them each independently, and then calculate the aggregate evaluation based on the weighted average of the parts.

Gorgias: problematic fav

I just realized the protagonist in "Mean Girls" has a name that's pronounced like "Katie" but it's commonly mispronounced as if she were named "Catty," as in cruel, vindictive, etc.

The alternative is the mindset that you follow polite protocol to the letter in order to have the standing to lecture everyone.

The contrast between the moralism and the smugness, somehow, is actually the worst part of it. The moralism says "I am scrupulous in my treatment of others" but the smugness says "I am waiting for the opportunity to be cruel to someone for the sake of a distant and inhuman principle."

What is this pattern of reaction-formation? How does a person end up like this?

Contrary to the Nietzscheans, I think I really really really do depend on the kindness and generosity of others, but I am also vertiginously close to acknowledging that those people don't owe me shit.
You know what all those polite terms are there for? "Dear X," "Please," "Thank you." They reflect the reality that I have no control over you, that I NEED you to uphold some basic human dignities, and I am frankly reduced to pleading with you to alter your self-conduct in many cases.