#is that ethical and possible?

[trans-phone-eater]

Hey so like if you just didn't care about ethics or fear of bio engineering then could you create a lifeform that's basically just a continuously growing lump of flesh and could you just keep harvesting flesh off of Gregory the flesh monstrosity

[longelk]

kc true fursona

[hashileio]

you join the cafe & meet the crew (minus one)

[philosophybits]

The cause of freedom is not that of others more than it is mine: it is universally human. If I want the slave to become conscious of his servitude, it is both in order not to be a tyrant myself — for any abstention is complicity, and complicity in this case is tyranny — and in order that new possibilities might be opened to the liberated slave and through him to all men. To want existence, to want to disclose the world, and to want men to be free are one and the same will.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

[hussyknee]

I'm really not a villain enjoyer. I love anti-heroes and anti-villains. But I can't see fictional evil separate from real evil. As in not that enjoying dark fiction means you condone it, but that all fiction holds up some kind of mirror to the world as it is. Killing innocent people doesn't make you an iconic lesbian girlboss it just makes you part of the mundane and stultifying black rot of the universe.

"But characters struggling with honour and goodness and the egoism of being good are so boring." Cool well some of us actually struggle with that stuff on the daily because being a good person is complicated and harder than being an edgelord.

Sure you can use fiction to explore the darkness of human nature and learn empathy, but the world doesn't actually suffer from a deficit of empathy for powerful and privileged people who do heinous stuff. You could literally kill a thousand babies in broad daylight and they'll find a way to blame your childhood trauma for it as long as you're white, cisgender, abled and attractive, and you'll be their poor little meow meow by the end of the week. Don't act like you're advocating for Quasimodo when you're just making Elon Musk hot, smart and gay.

[archive-z]

rambling abt my notetaking methods as someone with memory problems for @divorceblogger

i am not an organised person by nature, but in my apartment Everything Must Have Its Designated Place, and that place must be the most intuitive place i will look for something — keys Must be hanging by door, bc if i leave my keys literally anywhere else (coat pocket, bag) i will NOT remember and then i will not be able to lock my door & leave for the day. the goal is work with my brain, not against it. things should be in the most intuitive place possible, and if they can’t be, i should “leave a trail of breadcrumbs” in order to help myself find what i KNOW i will forget. this is also a strategy i apply to my world of Concepts and IdeasTM.

previously, i was organising my notes into a google doc where each entry was dedicated to a single book/chapter/essay, with (1) a summary of the text, (2) relevant quotations transcribed & cited, (3) my own thoughts responding to the material, and (4) other works in the bibliography that i should check out.

This presented several problems: google doc quickly became massive an unwieldy for a 2-year research project & v laggy

lots of closely related ideas existed in isolation bc it was organised by-book instead of concept-first

couldn’t remember where to find shite bc i would have to recall the exact book the idea was from to find it (BAD for the “trail of breadcrumbs” approach)

very linear process — read & summarised one text, moved on to the next. not letting ideas “accumulate“ (build upon each other) bc it was difficult to search/constantly have to refresh myself on notes i’d made six months to a year ago

~late 2021 or early 2022, this talk is what rly sold me on adopting obsidian. i started using obsidian as my primary notetaking tool, specifically for its ability to hyperlink between concepts & display those connections in graph view (picture above). it solved the problems above with the added benefits of being Not Google & being able to sync to my phone/ipad/laptop (via icloud).

now my process looks like:

Step One: Read the material in its entirety while highlighting and making notes in the margins

by entirety I mean like full article, full chapter. if it is a full book, this is going to take multiple sittings bc i only have the cognitive stamina to absorb one chapter at a time. trying to push thru mental fatigue will exacerbate memory problems into a self-fulfilling spiral. the highlighting & annotating is absolutely essential bc it lets me talk back to the book while reading, without the cognitive fatigue/loss of momentum of stopping read to type up notes, etc.

Step Two: Go thru the material again from the beginning, this time transcribing important quotations into a note

somehow people have gotten zotero to talk to their obsidian by tbqh i haven’t bothered bc i’m fairly fast at writing my citations, and the plugins rabbit hole seems like a massive upfront time investment to me.

Step Three: talk back to the material, write my own thoughts & summaries, make connections with other works/ideas

having obsidian as this big repository of my thoughts on previous books i’ve read, previous movies I’ve seen, concepts and defintions from essays, etc makes really easy for me to start writing a new note with my thoughts about something and just go “okay, I’ll put this concept in [[ square brackets ]] so it can link to my note with all my info on that subject rather than rooting thru one million notebooks or folders of misc notes and projects to find what I’d already written abt that subject”

Step Four: Break the material into smaller units of information

i breakdown/separate out my note on a single book/essay into several smaller interlinked notes abt the concepts covered. that way the information lives (with correct bibliographical citation) in a note titled with the concept, and then that note can get added to incrementally with each new book read. this allows my notes to be organised concept-first rather than book-first.

this — ESPECIALLY the part where i connect the notes to other notes — is a rly important part of the process bc it is the “leaving myself a trail of breadcrumbs” to be able to remind myself of concepts/ideas/texts i may have already encountered that feature similar ideas. if i am wondering if i’ve previously written anything on “regicide” i can click on the note called “regicide” and discover i’d written abt macbeth AND hamlet but not agamemnon and leave a note saying “come back to this and connect it to yr other ideas abt regicide as a form of [[patricide]] in [[agamemnon]]”.

Step Five: leave yrself “on ramps” to revisit notes as new concepts are added and connected

i can’t remember where i got this advice, but it was when you are writing more than can be achieved in a single sitting, leave yourself an “on ramp” before you finish for the day. like if i am coming back to something, maybe it’s not the next day but a whole week later. it is a lot more helpful if i open up a note i was working on and see “REMEMBER: YOU WANTED TO LOOK UP THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORDS FOR THREAD AND FATE TO SEE IF THERE IS A CONNECTION”

do not get caught up in “finishing” a note bc notes will be every-accumulating. work on something for as long as it serves you. if the amount of information is overwhelming, it probably needs to be broken down again into smaller concepts that can be hyperlinked together.

i think that covers most of it but i might come back to this later if there’s anything important i’ve forgotten. oh, yeah, also i love Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, but that’s less important if yr note writing a thesis, just trying to track info across many different texts for yr own purposes.

[francesderwent]

it’s interesting to me how close songs like “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” or “The Manuscript” get to a robust ethics of love versus use. beyond simply the assertion that leaving is a betrayal of love which ought to be forever, these songs contain a pretty strong rejection, specifically of sex where it did not belong and had no business appearing. she can say, not just you leaving was cowardly, you ruined something real, but I regret you all the time—I wouldn’t do it all over again, any of it. not just you hurt me within the bounds of our love story, but this wasn’t above board at all. it wasn’t love. you took advantage. another way to say this: “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” and “The Manuscript” recognize that sometimes sex is a sin. not leaving afterwards, but sex itself. for the first time, we’re presented with a love story that couldn’t have been saved by an eleventh hour confession of love, by “don’t go” or “I want you for worse or for better” or “the worst thing that I ever did was what I did to you”. the whole thing is rejected as poisoned.

but these songs can only make such a strong statement because there’s the age gap to point to. to the modern mind, it’s easier to recognize use when there’s a clear power imbalance, but I think we’re getting the causation wrong, or at least oversimplifying it. the reason there shouldn’t be sexual relationships between people of drastically different ages isn’t that older people and younger people exist as such in relationships of imbalanced power. a healthy relationship between a mentor and a mentee or a teacher and a student is about guidance and education and protection and respect. these things aren’t “good” exercises of power or restrained power, they are not exercises of power at all.

power enters into the equation when one party decides to use the other. this choice transforms every difference in the relationship into an inequality, every imbalance into a threat. this wasn’t always secretly there under the relationship, it’s a totally transformed new kind of relationship now that use has entered into it. the more differences and asymmetries there are to start with, the more dramatically unequal the new relationship is—not because the relationship was bad inevitably and to begin with! but because these relationships are more vulnerable and so bringing use into them is a greater corruption, which magnifies the damage that is always there. even a perfectly “equal” relationship becomes a power struggle when use enters into it.

but the further step which is invisible to modern eyes is that sex, outside of marriage, does this all on its own. somebody who sleeps with you without marrying you is using you, full stop. and as much as I think this revelation is between the lines of Tortured Poets (and I do think that, it’s in the parallels between the two men!), she can’t face it head-on. there is no she thought about how he said since they loved each other, everything had been above board…she wasn’t sure. because modernity is so convinced that that has to be above board. so the closest thing we get to a song that speaks to that creeping feeling that she was used again is the mashup of Sweet Nothing and Hoax, and her derisive conclusion: all that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing.

[flying-cat]

The richest man on Earth is, presumably, from what we have seen thus far, going to be an active part of our government or influential to important decisions and discussions at least. I think this is definitely where we start worrying guys!

[chicago-geniza]

Oh I bet Bridgerton is one of those shows where the source material is so thin that people write crazy good, sophisticated fanfiction, making a yellow brick road out of a breadcrumb trail

[huldrabitch]

Everytime I see anything about ozempics I think about the superior iron man comic where evil capitalist Tony releases extremis disguised as an app to make people healthy/beautiful, only to add a 100 dollars subscription fee per day making him even richer and also turning millions of people addicts desperate for money to keep the app.

[thankstothe]

[gyrovagi]

i miss my wife the architect come back to me 😭😭😭😭😭

[philosophybits]

Socrates did not believe in gods, so he wanted to justify virtue by reason. Kant also did not believe in God, and therefore he derived his morals from "Law." But if there is God, and all men are the children of God, then we should be afraid of nothing and spare nothing. And then the man who madly dissipates his own life and fortunes, and the lives and fortunes of others, is more right than the calculating philosophers who vainly seek to regulate mankind on earth.

Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

[skin-slave]

He had everything they needed to incriminate him planted on him. I mean, planted on him. Sorry. Planted on him. Sorry.

[spurgie-cousin]

the fundie mormon patriarchal logic is so incredibly nonsensical, and like don't get me wrong all misogyny is nonsensical. But for Kody "back to patriarchy" Brown to admit that each of his wives (minus Robyn although he doesn't say that) were not only the primary caretakers for their kids but also the primary bread winners of their homes, while he still expects to be the considered the head of his family is INSANE. like what do you even do????

and I know we've known that information for a long time but I just need to know the rationality he uses to still act like these women aren't the actual back bone of "his" family and therfore deserve more respect as leaders. Kody especially has never really had a consistent job, and he certainly has never provided care for the kids while the wives are working, so I'm just dying to know what he thinks he brought to the daily family dynamic besides just being the only adult man around.

and Kody is not even unique in that regard, it's just crazy how blantaly mormon polygamy was built for the veneration of a man who does not much more than exist tbh.

[tubbytarchia]

I've been suffering from a clogged nose/throat and shortness of breath for many years and only today managed to get recommended and sold medicine that helps (unlike everything else I've tried) and I cannot express to you guys how absolutely amazing it feels to be able to breathe again