Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

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

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.