C. Rawes

New #HoPWaG for you today: The Zhuangzi's critique of dogmatism in argument and politics, which it calls "shi-fei" thinking.

www.historyofphilosophy.net/zhuangzi-shi...

#philsky #philosophy #podcast #daoism #zhuangzi

All I can say is you are very Brave.

20 years in also a long time. For many people, it won't be again. It'll be the first time in a theater or at all.

The two things that'll make our worst fears much more likely to come to pass are that we continue to treat ecological breakdown as a side-issue and that we fail to mount an assertive defense of liberalism

The thing that worries me most is that I was very plugged into narratives about civilizational collapse and exterminism. I still think this is a possibility, but I've spent a while trying to convince myself it's not very likely.

Another big one was telling people in the 2010s that NRx should be read not as political theory but futurism.

I remember when it first came out telling people Children of Men would be the future. I remember being told I was wrong. It is a sad, horrible truth that all the most doomer political views I held in my depressive youth are coming to pass.

this is really grim

If you you can't pay us or be put to work by us then you're not human

This is simply turning the machinery of state into an engine of cruelty, pure and simple

I'd love Quakerism, if it weren't for the pacifist absolutism and monotheism.

I'm against the death penalty but not for fascists. If you're a fascist you have absented yourself from the norms of civilized life.

A lot of the fashionable ideas of Western academia now strike me as coming from a place where the stability and legitimacy of society was never really in doubt; you could play all kinds of subversive games and sound as radical as you like knowing things would go on much the same as yesterday

In the Current Six Thresholds

In the Current Six Thresholds https://www.wikiart.org/en/paul-klee/in-the-current-six-thresholds-1929

At a party earlier, conversation turned to politics, and friend started a sentence with "you see, Charlemagne" and everyone pivoted dramatically

Bluesky unwrapped: You cried 15 times and screaming uncontrollably twice

I will keep saying it: we live in Ballard World

They want to feel Significant, in Control and to eliminate every perceived threat to their Status—psychological desires that are insatiable

I love when people say "joined (date)". Friend, this is not my first or only account

I have the boring opinion that COVID was a massive cultural trauma that shattered—or at least fractured—the foundational assumptions people had about themselves & the world. That involved temporarily adopting beliefs or behaviours that at least some now find disturbing. These are disorienting times

Exactly. The new U.S. National Security Strategy is much worse for Europe than most people had imagined. Europe is described as a bigger threat than both China and Russia, and they outline the need for regime change in Western European countries as part of a civilizational struggle.

The New Cold War is against nationalist authoritarianism, and the US is on their side.

Going to double check just in case

By God, he's right!

Do you know what else JG Ballard warned us about? How an increasingly censorious or puritanical culture would remove any imaginal expression of our darker impulses and thereby increase the likelihood of genuine expressions of them irl.

I think existing terminology is a good standard. People deserve reasonable accommodations. It's just that a lot of people are unreasonable.

Yes, I suspect there's a motte and bailey going on. Make a radical claim, then defend a less radical one. Either way, his antagonism isn't called for.

For example, while heritability rates go between 70-90%, we also have reason to think environmental factors, like uterine and birth conditions, play a role. But he's using an unnecessarily agro tone and being kinda dismissive about it.

I think his point is that we don't know that autism and ADHD are caused by these things, only that neurological and genetic differences are strongly correlated to them. I suspect he's trying to draw attention to the fact we don't have a monocausal account of either of these conditions.

"They knew they were being lied to, but if lies were consistent enough they defined themselves as credible alternatives to the truth. Emotion rules almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised."