smoke-in-the-wind

[smoke-in-the-wind]

becoming a reverse-gnostic where i believe in a transcendant world of muck and protons and shit. but we are fallen creatures trapped by the demiurge in the flawed world of ideas and concepts, cursed to only touch falsehoods like "sphere" or "apple" instead of the divine truth "a bunch of stuff in a big lump"

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in a speech in December of 2003 Bush asked Libya to “fully engage in the war against terror.” Times were wild for the international order

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early 2000s was a really weird time

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i’m proud of the ten people in vermont who recognized what was at stake, recognized that great is the enemy of good, held their nose, and voted for joe biden

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book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

I was so excited to see a copy of this in real life bc it's something I studied in art history. this is a book that was typeset and printed by hand using wooden blocks but every one of the characters was invented for the sake of the piece and does not correspond to any word in the Chinese language

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i do think it is your duty understand your fellow members of humanity. becoming a secluded pariah is a temptation to be resisted

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Let’s be real Balkanizing really was the funniest thing that could have happened to ZA/UM

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“but tell me senator, how will congress counteract the deflationary effects of your Mandatory Mass Ritual Sacrifice Act?”

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most "motivational" grifts seem to be targeted towards convincing people they have some rare and hidden potential, but I think you could make a case that the baseline, median amount of potential that any human has is, in fact, enormous and the main problem is that most people don't do anything with it?

like. it doesn't really matter if IQ is actually measuring anything useful or not if someone with a median IQ can already do most if not all knowledge work with the same competency as someone with 130 IQ. and I'd be highly skeptical that any correlation with competency bares out much farther than that in any way that's measurable.

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The relationship between corporatist and fascist states is infamously tricky to unravel since they each heavily borrowed ideas from the other while attempting to monopolize the same ideological niches through propaganda and political violence.

In particular, I’m currently thinking about the scenario in the years prior to Anschluss where the Austrian Fatherland Front represented a Roman Catholic semi-theocratic system while Nazi German countered with its ultra nationalist principles, and how this can be used as a microcosm of much of the current political issues plaguing the MENA region.

Most of the non-monarchist states in the Arab world and its neighbouring areas (and several monarchist ones too) have been dominated for much of their post colonial histories by rival camps consisting of nationalists and religious fundamentalists. This has resulted (with the support of foreign actors as well) in a system where much of the anti-theocrat actors are ultra nationalists and much of the anti-nationalist actors are religious fundamentalists. This vicious cycle has stabilized wherein one group replaces the other, only to be overthrown years later themselves by the prior group. And recent history has shown it’s quite tricky to escape this!

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the infrastructure that goes into just an average city is insane to think about. power grids, sewage systems, water distribution, garbage collection. Like. It takes a lot of organizing to make it all work!

[smoke-in-the-wind]

i am of the opinion however that mathematics and its many satrapies are derived from empirical observation. It’s just hard to envision the mind removed from all sensory stimuli, one way or another. Can the mind know it exists independent from any external interactions? I mean, ibn sina says yes, but his justification for that seems to be mostly just “trust me bro” so I dunno.

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I’m an agnostic but for a priori knowledge

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the Achaemenids are to Jewish history what Rome is to Greek history, and Rome is to Jewish history what the Achaemenids are to Greek history

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the line from most real to least real:

-subjects

-mental states

-numbers and shit

....

-physical stuff