Show newer

The medicine man will fix it. The medicine man will make it all better. The medicine man can see who you really are inside. The medicine man can judge what true fairness is. The medicine man can arrive at complete conclusions from incomplete information. The medicine man can utter the holy words that turn calves into cows and grey into silver.

Everyone should listen to the medicine man. Listening to the medicine man makes you a good person, and not listening makes you a bad person.

Bro she hit it with the Infinite Player cause he's goofy.

Praise unstable marginal equilibria! Praise musement! Praise freedom! Praise the gradient Form of the Good!

hmmm maybe if I score some debate club points while 20 responses into a highly abstract debate, it will prove that I'm right in any way that matters

Persistently haunted by the feeling that some of the great and noble things of the world were wasted for petty and venal reasons before I ever got the chance to do anything about it.

The absolute, very best kind of "UPDATE" to read at the bottom of a blog or thread is the one where the poster announces much later, "It turns out I wrote this while beyond the parameters of sanity and I have recently been diagnosed with X." Just an absolutely explosive auto-interpretive gesture.

What I'm saying is that continental political philosophers are the try-hard salutatorians and American liberals are the drunk jocks who have capriciously torn global history from millennia of imperialist philosophy.

Show thread

The American liberal, who has recently come back from a brutal campaign destroying the government that had been understood as the most powerful in the world, wrote a new definition of universal human rights on the back of a cocktail napkin and in the same evening proceeded to hire a prostitute in a racist manner (???) and passed out from a bunch of old-timey drugs.

Show thread

Continental liberalism: [visibly sweating] We have to very precisely preclude every possible consequence of popular liberty of while constraining the revolutionary potential of liberalism, but if we don't accommodate the popular appeal, we'll be inviting a new Napoleon.

American liberalism: YOLO

In Avatar, James Cameron uses his aesthetic imagination to reconcile his drive for oceanic ecotourism and his rich techie drive for techno-competence pr0n.

On this note, I was looking up the news from July 13, 1946. I found this really touching remembrance that WEB Du Bois wrote for a friend of his. It's a pretty amazing little wormhole. You'll be glad you read it.
credo.library.umass.edu/view/p

Show thread

I have this urge sometimes to make a hobby out of re-listening to archival postwar media in chronological order, like listening week-by-week to all those "Bell Telephone Radio Hour" things. It seems like the key to recovering whatever culture was before the Boomers.

I have no use for Roman theory. I have no use for Aristotle, either. I root for the Platonic or the non-Socratic Greeks.

My shibboleth is the password for everything true, moral, and beautiful. Your shibboleth is meaningless sounds that conceal your ignorance behind obfuscation.

The highest form of friendship can communicate exclusively in memes.
What the Greeks called "philia" refers to that affectionate recognition of the self in others, and much of meme culture is organized around the recognition of the self through moral friction. By presenting memes to others we are able to confess our troubles, our self-concepts, and refer these to trusted others for aesthetic evaluation. The totality expresses that play drive building through moral striving.

Remember when that Dean did that interpretive dance to R.E.M. to inform a bunch of MFA students that their COVID-era tuition wouldn't be refunded? What a display of dominance.

Show older
Mastodon

a Schelling point for those who seek one