Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

I just realized the protagonist in "Mean Girls" has a name that's pronounced like "Katie" but it's commonly mispronounced as if she were named "Catty," as in cruel, vindictive, etc.

The alternative is the mindset that you follow polite protocol to the letter in order to have the standing to lecture everyone.

The contrast between the moralism and the smugness, somehow, is actually the worst part of it. The moralism says "I am scrupulous in my treatment of others" but the smugness says "I am waiting for the opportunity to be cruel to someone for the sake of a distant and inhuman principle."

What is this pattern of reaction-formation? How does a person end up like this?

Contrary to the Nietzscheans, I think I really really really do depend on the kindness and generosity of others, but I am also vertiginously close to acknowledging that those people don't owe me shit.
You know what all those polite terms are there for? "Dear X," "Please," "Thank you." They reflect the reality that I have no control over you, that I NEED you to uphold some basic human dignities, and I am frankly reduced to pleading with you to alter your self-conduct in many cases.

I have immediate disgust for people who think that they have the right to speak new orders to strangers, first and before anything else, in the patter of a kindergarten teacher.

I'd rather throw in my lot with the Nietzscheans than with people who are think they get to lecture anyone and everyone about their peccadilloes with a "Dear people," "It only takes a few seconds," and a "Thanks!" because at least the Nietzscheans realize I am not a masterless puppet but rather that I am self-mastering

"It is a law of nature for the greater to dominate over the lesser"
THEN DO IT
BECOME GREATER, NOBLER, FREER THAN YOUR RIVALS

Athens lost the Civil War the instant that it ceded its moral superiority over the slavers. This is how you produce Thucydides in a culture that was worthy of Pericles. This is how you become dominated by Philip II when your culture was worthy of being liberated by Socrates.

I'm writing a bunch of examples of counter-arguments that can be provided from different perspectives, and while I think that an assholish personality is required for each of these perspectives, they each have an admirable degree of internal logic.

If Athens had supported the helot rebellion like the Spartans feared, they would have suffered no additional negative consequences (the Spartans reacted as if the Athenians were intent to support the helots), Athens would have won the Peloponnesian War in advance by ethical means, and the unrivaled democratic empire would have been an uncompromised example to history.

wake up babe we're doing German Romanticism again

Thesis: culture with dull/unenlightened/normie politics
Antithesis: smart/enlightened/edgy political commentary on culture
Synthesis: obscurantist/playful/schizo cultural commentary on politics

In the 2020s, the real cutting edge in culture is treating politics as a space for culture. There are teens who obsess over political compass memes, or over creating webcomics depicting the interactions of polities, or over niche meme political ideologies. There's a strong parallel to rare Pepes.

This is the space of the contrarian arthoe podcasters. They're transitioning their tastes for cultural criticism to ideology itself.

It's the natural evolution of all that goddamn Tumblr commentary.

There's a certain podcast-that-shall-remain-unnamed that's got one host who's a NYC-area art burnout who has now transitioned to unhinged political commentary. Approve or disapprove of the commentary -- what this fundamentally indicates is that all of the new direction in the culture-politics crossover.

In the Obama era, every Grinnell English major had a Tumblr critiquing culture from a political perspective. The current culture-sludge of the 2020s is downstream from this. This is not my point

"Babylon 5 has many of the same storytelling vices as The New Pope."
>refuses to elaborate
>leaves

Tired normative stance: I must pursue [inhuman moral X]. The fact that I do anything else is an accident of my biology and a better person would expunge it for me.

Wired normative stance: My ethos is rooted in the bios of the human, semiosis is the sensorium, and screwing around with culture is an imaginative and possibility-building act for myself and the cosmos.