Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

A Potempkin village relies on forced perspective. Wherever there is a widespread social conceit being entertained, there is also a balance of incentives and disincentives holding the audience in their positions.

Anyone can lie, but when you lie in such a way that other people are incentivized to share the lie, it's public relations.

Hey remember how all of those people made those social media posts encouraging their friends to take "camping" trips with them in the summer of 2022?

Trying to think of memes from the 20th century that have achieved mythic / paradigmatic status:
- Spaceship Earth (technically before the 20th century, but it didn't really break out before Fuller)
- Prisoner's Dilemma
- Survivorship Bias
- Infinite Monkey Theorem
- Doomsday Clock
- Library of Babel

Hell is leaving a sentence incomplete in a draft and later having no clue how to end it.

I hate that thing where it makes more sense to read an essay from the inside out. Luhman's book on self-reference is like this: if you start at the beginning you're fucked, but if you start at the middle and leak outward then you have a chance.

Taxis is a canon of rhetoric! Get it right, people! I want Narratio, Partitio, Refutatio, Confirmatio, Peroratio!

The most frustrating ideological position is to be 98th percentile something. You can't get yr kicks by being a centrist contrarian, but you don't get the flaming purity of a True Believer either. You have to defend both ideological radicalism AND a few carve-outs on their merits. It fucking sucks.

It's ya boi Yung Sensorium Engaging in Transvaluative Sign-Processes

I would say that the main difference in my personality since becoming a legal adult has been acquiring a deep and bitter sense of guardedness. I used to YOLO way more shit, and chiefly social stunts.

NPR Boomers like it when you talk about old Randy Newman albums with them. It's a form of discourse that's recognizable and safe, unlike *gestures broadly*.

One of the richest ironies is that the academic humanities are disparaged as an idle hobby at the same time that the Elon demographic is certain that these academics have somehow unleashed a set of cheat codes that threaten to override everything else in industry and technology.

Given the tendency of academic reviewers to become less reliable with more leniency (as during lockdown), and the tendency of academic presses to make cooler book designs with more time, and given the delays involved in academic publishing...
We are probably near or in the historical nadir for unhinged books that look really cool.

Maritimism vs Continentalism

The emergence of a German nation-state is just output from Frederick the Great, who's basically following the response of Frederick the Soldier King after the Peace of Westphalia.

After the collapse of "universal monarchies," both France and Spain are out of the "continental superpower" business.

Between the Anglos' victory lap and the German consolidation, you basically have the table set for WWI. And so on and so on.

Most of history after 1700 just seems like follow-through to me. Like the American revolution, the Spirit of '48, and the march of liberalism just seems like a victory la(r)p for the Protestant Republics after the Glorious Revolution.

If you were the Onion writer who coined one of the classics, would it be more psychologically healthy to think that Apollo had cursed you with prophecy, or that your darkest moments of cynicism had actually ripped off the superfices of reality and exposed the cyclical and patterned qualities of human depravity?

@enkiv2 There's ultimate causes and then there's proximate causes, you know? Leave the ultimate and satisfy yourself with the proximate -- that's my advice.

@enkiv2 Like, my best friend went from being someone who was outrageous, adventurous, and curious into a shell of his old self -- alcoholic, self-harming, and suicidal. It's that fucking bad. And if you want to talk about it as a social issue, you're on a fast track to get lumped in with some of the worst people on the internet.

@enkiv2 It's a black hole out there. I'm not in this market so I feel that I can objectively say that I've never seen a social process grind up so many people and leave them feeling so worthless. I know a guy who's a handsome 6'4" doctor with ethics and money and lots of chill, and he endured 2 years of touch-starvation.

It honestly reminds me of the Great Recession, when I saw a lot of really smart, capable people denied the earliest opportunities to develop due to trivialities.

There is wonder-working power in the precious blood of the lamb.