Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Seems fair to infer that there were multiple moments when Roman elites could signal their social virtue by conspicuously sympathizing with the barbarians with trendy a neoplatonist-ish religion (Christianity).

Why can't I talk to my inbox?

It's astonishing to me that none of the AIs are integrated with email inboxes. I'm imagining a killer app that can transform your inbox into a voice-interactive service you can talk to on your phone. Think of the way that an administrative assistant in 1960 would be able to give her executive the skinny on all the inter-office memos, even if he just called in on the phone: that's what I want.

Or maybe I need to be negative about being negative about being negative. What's the fucking point? There's no coming back from being negative about being negative. It's never been more over than when being over is over.

I'm considering becoming intensely negative about negativity itself. Just an absolute freak. A drama-llama who goes into hysterics against negative thinking. Catastrophizing every case of catastrophizing. We're never getting over this.

a podcast,, where the host's talk about subjects we're ALL familiar with but their really raunchy and ruude about it !
COULD BE A BIG IDEA

It's absolutely incredible how much you can eat if you just stick to protein, veggies, fruit, AND POTATOES.

So anyway I'm proposing that in a profoundly enmeshed community, a "quantitative" individuation (I, me, and mine) might not be possible. Instead identity might be borrowed from a "quantitative" totality (us, we, and ours). And what is borrowed from the totality is a "relational" individuation (filial piety, role, and rite).

Mimetic rivalry in a differentiated kin group: "Mom always liked you best."

Mimetic rivalry in an enmeshed kin group: "Let's all scapegoat the Smith family."

Let's say that you're imagining a really enmeshed kin-group that has to rely on each other for everything, down to the basics of survival. It basically enmeshes everyone emotionally and any particular person only gets to *borrow* identity or role from this family-system, which basically has narcissism at the group level.

It seems obvious to me that the whole thing must push mimetic rivalry to the kin-group level. Only the most subtle kinds of mimetic rivalry are safe inside such a system.

But the Confucian system doesn't seem to take place in a much more enmeshed social reality -- one in which an assertion of independence would bring overpowering social sanction, &therefore the individual achieves identity through ritual and deference. Seems like a totally different polarity.

Maybe Fukuyama's *Identity* book covers this? His "political order" project took China as the normative case, so maybe he loosens up on his neoplatonic shtick. IDK let me know if you have recommendations.

Having trouble finding something that critiques Girard from a (neo)Confucian perspective. It feels pretty basic to point out that the basic constitution of individuality in the Girardian system occurs through control of an external referent and defended against mimetic rivalry.

My boomer WWC neighbor is bumping Eminem

"Excitotoxicity" seems pretty darn close to what the kids these days call "fried."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_hypothesis_of_schizophrenia

@feistel yep
Barnum-esque discipline

Anybody else hate having to maintain focused attention on a long-term complex symbolic task for hours at a time?

Behold, the modern successor to the Mysteries of Eleusis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfA3ivLK_tE

No paper in psychology will ever be cited as much as that goddamn gorilla in the basketball video. When this civilization is a distant memory there will be reports of that video circulating, attesting incredible epiphanic power to it like it was the Oracle at fucking Delphi.