Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

"The leading statesmen
of both parties, including Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, James Wilson, Albert Gallatin, James Bayard, Rufus King, Na-
thaniel Macon, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren,
Robert Hayne, Daniel Webster, and many others, supported a version of
the district plan. "

Madison wanted to pass "district plan" amendments, and a version of the plan passed each house in his time, but no one passed both together.

And the fuckiest part of all of is that the particular shape of that the US prioritized expanding the franchise due to the particular pressures of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian coalition. If that coalition had confronted different institutional frustrations, or John Quincy Adams hadn't gotten distracted with anti-masonism, maybe the Electoral College would have gotten the push instead.

If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to defend one of these it would be the property requirement.

IMHO the Electoral College has less intellectual merit than the demand that all voters must own property.

"I'm not saying I'm a Gracchist. I'm just saying that if the logos structures the entirety of the Empire, it has to be entirely pervasive, and that means that the servile classes also have the potential to be internally governed by logos. So when I see these silly little barbarians trying to talk about the logos, an inner spirit that surpasses their bizarre ritual laws, I think 'Good for them! More power to you!'"

Zeno of Citium: da man of da millennium

It's funny to imagine how virtue signalling would work in a political order that Nietzsche would tell us was unaffected by Christian slave morality.

The sincere answer is that stoicism introduced a slave morality in Roman society that was highly regarded among elites, but which sat VERY uncomfortably with the tendency of Roman elites to violently suppress slave revolts and populist movements.

Sympathizing w/ Christians probably let Roman elites signal slave morality in spite of this tension.

Seems fair to infer that there were multiple moments when Roman elites could signal their social virtue by conspicuously sympathizing with the barbarians with trendy a neoplatonist-ish religion (Christianity).

Why can't I talk to my inbox?

It's astonishing to me that none of the AIs are integrated with email inboxes. I'm imagining a killer app that can transform your inbox into a voice-interactive service you can talk to on your phone. Think of the way that an administrative assistant in 1960 would be able to give her executive the skinny on all the inter-office memos, even if he just called in on the phone: that's what I want.

Or maybe I need to be negative about being negative about being negative. What's the fucking point? There's no coming back from being negative about being negative. It's never been more over than when being over is over.

I'm considering becoming intensely negative about negativity itself. Just an absolute freak. A drama-llama who goes into hysterics against negative thinking. Catastrophizing every case of catastrophizing. We're never getting over this.

a podcast,, where the host's talk about subjects we're ALL familiar with but their really raunchy and ruude about it !
COULD BE A BIG IDEA

It's absolutely incredible how much you can eat if you just stick to protein, veggies, fruit, AND POTATOES.

So anyway I'm proposing that in a profoundly enmeshed community, a "quantitative" individuation (I, me, and mine) might not be possible. Instead identity might be borrowed from a "quantitative" totality (us, we, and ours). And what is borrowed from the totality is a "relational" individuation (filial piety, role, and rite).

Mimetic rivalry in a differentiated kin group: "Mom always liked you best."

Mimetic rivalry in an enmeshed kin group: "Let's all scapegoat the Smith family."

Let's say that you're imagining a really enmeshed kin-group that has to rely on each other for everything, down to the basics of survival. It basically enmeshes everyone emotionally and any particular person only gets to *borrow* identity or role from this family-system, which basically has narcissism at the group level.

It seems obvious to me that the whole thing must push mimetic rivalry to the kin-group level. Only the most subtle kinds of mimetic rivalry are safe inside such a system.

But the Confucian system doesn't seem to take place in a much more enmeshed social reality -- one in which an assertion of independence would bring overpowering social sanction, &therefore the individual achieves identity through ritual and deference. Seems like a totally different polarity.

Maybe Fukuyama's *Identity* book covers this? His "political order" project took China as the normative case, so maybe he loosens up on his neoplatonic shtick. IDK let me know if you have recommendations.