Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

In old Hollywood, when a character "preferred the company of strangers," it indicated that they were haunted by the patterns of traumatic response that they reproduced in their intimate relationships.
Today, boomers who prefer the company of strangers are that way because their family keeps begging them to be less shitty and the boomers refuse to listen. Instead they go find minimum wage workers in the service industries and tell them a highly edited version of their lives.

A cold wind blows and it's getting dark. Even the voices from inside the forest seem lost now. You can barely remember what you once dreamed about. What was LK-99? What was an LLM? Was there ever a future, or was there always just this -- the smooth flat river, the smooth flat grass, the endless grass.

Wrap everything in more disclaimers. Disclaim your disclaimers. Surely at some level of HR-speak we can access the clean and pure use of language, one that cannot be compromised by rival ethical commitments, obtuse wording, or bad-faith.

You wake. It's 1582. You are a French trapper in New France. You are alone, except for the voices you hear in the wilderness beyond the rivers' edge. You have been told that they are savages. Your small rivercraft has finally broken down past the point of any repair. Rats are chewing your boots at night. You had hoped that the trees would come back to the river as you traveled further north but instead you find yourself in an endless sea of grass. The birds show you that winter is coming.

@niplav lolwut

The stoic practice of oikeiosis formalizes the moral schema of "near" and "far" ethical obligations. In modern practice, the inclusion of the "far" margins of ethical life have been recognized in 2 ways:
1. The most popular practice is to find the most ethically "far" constituency and to use this constituency as the cause that you champion as demonstration of your ethical commitment.
2. The less common approach is to identify the seams, the frontiers of discontinuity for ethical practice.

The Talmud teaches that the most cringe and unimpressive moron from the most boring part of the world has more value than the most majestic mountains or the mightiest rivers.

It's always "empathize with vegetables and icebergs" and it's never "empathize with people in a non-hip part of the third world with mixed moral status."

There was one concept of the "self" that people arrived at as a consequence of a post-Romantic Classical education in rhetoric. This is the concept of the self that was celebrated by, say, the Abolitionist movement and the first Utilitarians.

The concept of "self" held by contemporary students in higher ed has much more to do with algorithms, surveillance capitalism, a crushing retaliatory state, and economic atomization.

Every education reformer has a passage in their biography that's like, "That September, the mill burned down and I was transferred to the Edutorium for Waifs and Insane Horses. My pedagogue was Mister Percival, who assigned for me to write a journal. For the first time, I was allowed to write in the FIRST-PERSON about MY OWN IDEAS! and I WAS FREE!"
And then education reformers in 2023 try to apply this stuff to zoomer students who are addicted to the most extreme memetic infoweapons imaginable.

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