Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.
Joined Dec 2022
The single greatest thing about social media is the you get to see/hear what rationalizations sound like outside of your head.
Every time a gimmick account breaks character, posts rule34 Donkey Kong content, and then writes a 10,000-word essay about how important this was for The Revolution... Remember that's what you sound like in your own head.
Gutenberg's invention was not a press (medieval germans had lots of presses), it was not printed books (medieval germans printed books from blocks), it was movable type.
The importance of movable type is that it allowed the machine to become propagated with the innate human capacity for compositionality.
The subsequent scientific revolution is an extension of this simple characteristic.
Part of the reason why the pro-gun-types have stuck so strongly to the highest law (as opposed to making other pro-gun arguments based on, say, pleasure) is because they know that the whole contest is over as soon as anti-gun-types seize the highest law. Once empowered by law, morality culture can't countenance things like stochastic gun violence and in those cases, morality culture uses state capacity to crush it into the dust. This is precisely what the pro-gun-types are prepared for.
Gun politics are impossible in the USA because they do not fall cleanly along these lines.
Pro-gun-types have recourse to the highest law, but they appreciate guns as part of the good life and not as a means to fulfill an abstract principle of morality. Thus they are largely on the side of ethos culture, using the resource of morality culture against it.
Anti-gun-types have recourse to lived experience--such as the terror of being in a world of stochastic shootings--but they want the high law.
should read:
>break the law in *service to their personal lifestyle
Ethos culture exclusively lays claim to "honor," and is more or less the only shop in town for related concepts like virtue or character.
Morality culture exclusively lays claim to "fairness," and is more or less the only shop in town for related concepts like social fabric or right.
Evangelicals bring a stiff spine of morality culture to the largely ethos-based Red Team coalition that is largely willing to sacrifice the law, state capacity, for the sake of the comfort of a lucky few.
Emancipatory interests bring a caution and circumspection about law and state capacity to the largely morality-based Blue Team coalition that is largely willing to sacrifice comfort and enjoyment for the sake of fulfilling universal laws of fairness.
In the face of this, ethos culture resorts to irrationalism and morality culture resorts to hyperbole.
The current political coalitions in the US don't line up with these anymore. In the Red Team coalition, evangelicals represent morality culture. And in the Blue Team coalition, emancipatory interests represent ethos culture.
The long struggle for racial equality basically broke the two coalitions.
Ethos culture can rationalize enslavement as a means to the good life for elites, but it has no internal rationale to justify making life vaguely shittier for a minority.
The forces of morality culture struggled to organize around more subtle, _embodied_ sense of racism as experienced by African Americans. Morality culture is always ready for a death-struggle over a principle, but not over patterns of medium unfairness.
Prohibition was the last political drama in which these two cultures were intact.
Ethos culture was "wet," and Morality culture was "dry." Ethos culture was content to break the law in spite of their personal lifestyle, and morality culture was content to use state power to enforce prohibition with machine guns.
The two cultures in US America are "ethos culture" and "morality culture." Ethos culture is organized around the pursuit of the good life in the body. Morality culture is organized around the fulfillment of abstracted imperatives.
Thomas Jefferson is the exemplar of ethos culture. John Brown is the exemplar of morality culture.
The US Civil War was brought about by northern grey-wool-wearing morality culture's fulfillment of the abstract imperative for universal political emancipation.
Girardian mimetic historical dialectic, coming in piping hot.
In ancient cultures, the one scribal class that would set the conditions under which men could be allowed to do harm to men were priests.
In classical-medieval cultures, the scribal classes included priests, counsellors, and doctors.
In modern cultures, the scribal classes have added psychologists.
I think that the key to this might be to recognize that YOUR MAGNUM OPUS ALREADY EXISTS, word-for-word, but it's buried very obscurely inside the Library of Babel and/or down a very distant path through lexical vector-space.
Maybe people need to realize that if they produce a bunch of halfass notes, it can AT LEAST be used to burrow through the LLM to a point where the machine can be used to create non-trivial extensions of the human output.
There's something to be done with Romantic irony & fragmentary philosophy VS the tendency of many people to have an unwritten magnum opus in their imaginations.
Like... NaNoWriMo is some overachiever shit. I want to see a 12 hour period where people just drink a whole pot of coffee and write their halfass version of "Speculative notes toward X." The world would be much richer for it.
Look, I get it: you're edgy.
What is the practical upshot of saying all this edgy shit?
It seems like there's an under-exploited attractor in polemic-space that's in favor of 100% human-permeable borders but which also punishes capital flight with righteous fury. Basically adopt "move to where the jobs are" as a policy goal.
sha ka chaa
There's value to having respect on a hard binary.
You assume I am a decent person but I wrongthink all the time just for the speculative activity.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.
Joined Dec 2022
