Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

The anarchists discipline their ranks by exposing their backsliders to elections, and thereby subjecting them to the agonizing and paradoxical combination energies that politicians provide: nerd and theater kid energy.

Democracy is a system by which the anarchists punish us statists by sending their most marginally pro-social representative to be a representative of chaotic neutral in order to generate the surprise needed to steer the ship of self-organization. We democrats think that we are settling issues by a comparing crowd sizes, but the truth of it is that all of this happens in a clearing created by the silent anarchist majority.

The liberal subject -- autonomous, empirical, rational -- was the culmination of an Enlightenment project of public *paideia,* or *bildung*.

We're in a moment of crisis due to the revolution in media technologies that are used in the formation of liberal subjectivities.

Exciting stuff is going on in material-adjacent fields all the time: really cool friction welding techniques achieve great results with totally plain-jane aluminum, anisotropic carbon fiber composites create really cool performance traits, etc.

"Walking on eggshells" is basically the phenomenology of internalizing a norm or standard. A person who feels like walking on eggshells is not experiencing something contrary to tyranny, but is participating in it. Tyrants and tyrannizing personalities want you to feel like you're walking on eggshells. They want you to be painfully self-aware. They want you, you, YOU to feel the blame.

At the end of the day, this is what it all comes down to, right? There's just an internal switch that gets thrown and you direct your energy to B instead of A. As much as people try to rationalize the process, almost all of that stuff is window dressing around a big gaping aporia beyond any faculty of reason. People make original choices when they're re-awaken to freedom -- typically by being in the presence of someone else acting truly free, novel, and original-- and the rest is just commentary

An unrivaled force in behavior change is "I realized that was stupid and stopped doing it one day." Follow me if you want more useful tips.

For me, the mark of a superior philosopher is one's ability to make lifelong friendships with excellent people:
Nicholas of Cusa had Toscanelli and Cesarini;
Hamann had Kant, Berens, Herder and many others;
Peirce had James (although not many others);
Henry George had many, including Tom L. Johnson.

I'm suggesting that "ESP" corresponds with the Cusan vision of "intellectus," or direct access from the immediate source of experience. "Ratio," which can be duplicated in machines, involves the discursive operation of the objects within mental experience.

A funny thing about Turing's *Computing Machinery and Intelligence* is the discussion of ESP.
ESP seems like a pseudo-science now, but thinking machines were unthinkable in 1950. And the nice thing about this comparison is that they resemble Nicholas of Cusa's distinction of "ratio" and "intellectus."

"Ratio" is discursive comparison, judgment, choice, etc. The kind of thing that no one would argue computers are incapable of doing. "Intellectus" is direct apprehension, like the angels.

This is honestly one of the scenarios that scares the shit out of me. For all of the problems we see coming down the pike w.r.t. climate change, a major volcano would yield a lot of ecosystem collapse in novel/unexpected ways. All of this would force the existing political system to actively make choices about geoengineering that are very likely to be badly informed, poorly executed, and insufficiently tracked. Once we're geoengineering on the fly I suspect we'll lose the whole planet.

There's no reason to assume a supervolcano won't erupt today.

If there is one vice in Greek thought it is this: because they had the misfortune of being *first* in the culture of inquiry, they misinterpreted the silences in their own dialogues as a kind of resting point, akin to the rest of an Olympian athlete after the games. But in the history of thought, the scale of those silences have shrunk into caesurae or less. And now it becomes apparent that there is no resting point within the world of ideas, and that inquiry does not pierce-through to the end.