The frozen ground of the Altai Mountains preserved this beautifully detailed Scythian woman's boot for over 2,300 years.
The leather boot was decorated with a red woollen braid, with leather figurines and gold-leaf, possibly depicting ducklings.
Photo credit Sergei I. Rudenko/ Washington University. https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/museums/shm/shmpazyryk.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0ruczzG1TpZNqVjz9f4QTey_xlsE6VBN4lG5Ksn2yIsiJLTskn3YmqLj8_aem_AUMB1uCQewdUjL6CCmCwVIVAZrmdIQWfkLHBl3kxfHKhgRX32RKoM_r-74pNj9e98a2JsxuHlI5ga2jS98bsidwh
"This compulsion strikes him at a certain instant; and he remains
under it forever after"
"To assert a proposition is to make oneself responsible for it, without any definite forfeit, it is true, but with a forfeit no smaller for
being unnamed"
Maybe this is where the Arendtian analysis comes in handy? Most people experience life most of the time as animal laborans, who is immersed in the cycles of nature. Even homo faber has to gradually and incrementally strive out of a naturally-informed disposition.
As *ahem* a true elite, I am one of the zoon politikon who strikes forth into the risk and self-definition of human affairs unconditioned by nature.
It's really fucking weird talking to eco people for me. Like... Do you not realize that your subjectivity is coming from inside you? There's this special constellation of nerves and anatomy that make it possible for you to use signs and that's why we're talking. There's really nothing of truth, beauty, or justice in nature per se. It merely informs human responses that expose the freedom that they bring from within.
I just took a nature-relatedness inventory and I think that this is probably my most uncommon character trait. I have demonstrated a very very low sense of relatedness to nature. I don't have anything against it but it seems like a category error to think of nature in most of the declarations supplied on the inventory. It seems like getting weepy over neon triangles or something. Nature's over there and I'm over here. I feel like I'm the only one who has his head in straight in this issue.
My effective altruism project is getting people to
1. HOLD ONTO THE RAILS ON THE STAIRS
2. HOLD ON TO THE RAIL WHEN YOU GET OUT OF THE BATH
3. NEVER GET ONTO THE ROAD WHILE DRUNK OR IMPAIRED, INCLUDING ON A BICYCLE
My job has made me into a TBI truther. Brain injuries are devastating to cognition, self-regulation, and a bevy of other health outcomes. It's linked to a zillion bad social outcomes.
Forget about every other factor that determines human development outcomes: forget about genes, IQ, pollution, whatever. All of that shit is easily washed out by one good fall off of a bike. But unlike genes, we can actually do something about protecting brains.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.