#univocally

[barcoland]

The chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible. (Henri Matisse)

[orfeolookback]

not to mention bisexuals are still fucking loathed by the rest of the community. bi ace solidarity

[geopolicraticus]

Friday 07 March 2025

Grand Strategy Newsletter

The View from Oregon – 331

The Boundless Ocean of Unlimited Possibilities

…in which I discuss interdisciplinarity, univocal sciences, appearance and reality of subdisciplines, starting over from scratch, de-centering, Copernican re-foundings, Einstein on the limiting case principle, weak and strong formulations, axioms and postulates, and the science of science…

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/the-boundless-ocean-of-unlimited

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/the-boundless-ocean-of-unlimited-possibilities-2b14c10ed0e3

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1jcyei1/the_boundless_ocean_of_unlimited_possibilities/

[mybuddyjimmy]

Univocal

Univocal [yoo-nə-VOH-kəl] Part of speech: adjective Origin: Latin, mid-16th century 1. (Of a word or term) Having only one possible meaning; unambiguous. Examples of univocal in a sentence “The scientific term I learned today has a univocal definition. ” “Aaron tried to use univocal words so he could be understood clearly.” #wordoftheday

[kelimeoyunu]

Ünivokalizm: Alfabede tek ünlü olsaydı?

Lipogram, belirli bir harf ya da harf grubunu hiç kullanmadan yazılan metin. Georges Perec'in e harfini kullanmadan yazdığı La Disparition ("Kayboluş", 1969), lipogramın tanınmış örneklerinden. Yayımlandığı tarihten bu yana, dünyanın dört bir yanında, üç yüz sayfalık bu romanı, lipogram kısıtına sadık kalarak, yani e harfini kullanmadan ana diline çeviren birçok çevirmen çıktı. Bizde, üstelik romanın her biri alfabenin bir harfine karşılık gelen yirmi altı bölümüne Türkçe alfabeye uysun diye üç yeni bölüm daha ekleyerek, Cemal Yardımcı başardı bu işi. Yardımcı'ya başarısından ötürü herhangi bir ödül verildi mi bilmiyorum, fakat bu tür başarılar dünyada hep ödüllendirilmiştir. Pek çok okurun, kitabı, e harfinin hiç kullanılmadığını fark etmeden bitirdiği bilindiğinde Perec'in romanının niteliği daha iyi anlaşılır. Lipogram demişken Ersin Tezcan'ın E'siz Potkal (1997) adlı, altmış iki sayfalık eserini anmayı da es geçmemek gerekir.

Ünivokalizm ise, metnin, sesli harflerden yalnızca birinin kullanılarak yazılması. İlk bakışta, bu tanımla, ünivokalizm lipogramın tersi gibi görünebilir. Birinde bir harfi (genellikle sesli bir harfi) atıyorsun, diğerinde ise tersine, sadece o harfi kullanıyorsun. Oysa ünivokal (tek sesli harfli) bir metin ya da şiir, lipogramın kısıt kümesi genişletilmiş, ekstrem bir türünden başkaca bir şey değil. Roman uzunluğunda lipogramatik metinlerin yazılması mümkün; öte yandan, aynısını ünivokal metinler için söyleyebilmek güç. Neden? Çünkü, örneğin Türkçe için düşünürsek, tek sesli harf yerine yedi adet sesli harfi dışarıda bırakmamız gerekiyor. Roman değil de şiir yazsak? Türkçede bilinçli olarak ünivokalik yazılmış şiir örnekleri var mı bilmiyorum; ama çevrimiçi kaynaklarda şöyle bir aratınca o tür bir örnek pat diye önüme çıkmadı. Çıkmayınca bu işi bir deneyeyim, dedim. Acaba hangi sesli harfi seçseydim? Kendime tek deneme hakkı tanıyacaksam, bari en zor olanıyla uğraşayım, diye düşündüm. A, e, i, ı - Pek çok kaynakta bu dördü, verdiğim sırada, en sık kullanılan ilk on harf arasında geçiyor. O ve u, sıralamada az farkla, ı harfini takip ediyor. Geriye ü ve ö harfleri kalıyor ki en az kullanılanın ö olduğunu kestirmek her halde zor değil. Hem ö, Özcan'ın ö'sü değil mi? Körün istediği bir göz...

Ortaya çıkan metin, şiir mi, değil mi, giderek anlamlı mı değil mi, "bacağı kırık çekirge bir adım dahi atabilse zıplamış sayılır" diyerek değerlendirmeyi okura bırakıyorum. Metin, istenirse bir bütün olarak, istenirse bizzat aşağıda yaptığım gibi, üç bölüm halinde düşünülebilir. Türkçe söz varlığında yalnızca ö sesli harfini içeren sözcüklerin hemen hepsi, mümkün mertebe tekrara düşmeden ancak iyi kötü şiirsel bir atmosferin yaratılması sorunu da gözetilerek, metin içersinde kullanılmıştır.

(I) bön mösyö köy örf, döl döş örk, börk örs, lös, gön köy köy böğ, cönk gönç sör köşk sörf, blöf tör, görk föy, fötr, fön köşk köşk köz, flört kör jön çöl göç, gök öç, öd öz, töz, ön söz çöl çöl pöç, lök kök çöl, göl köşk, çöp köy... yön? (II) öf dört göz! kös kös kös döv! öf pöf ! höst nötr (!)  tröst! ört, gömgök göt! öhö! höt! (III) ör, ör, sök sök, sök, çöz çöz, çöz, böl böl, böl, dök dök, dök, sön sön, sön, çöğ çöğ, çöğ, öt öt, öt, çök çök, çök, çöm çöm, çöm, öp öp, öp, öv öv, öv, dön dön, dön, gör gör, gör, söv söv, söv, göm löp löp göm göm, göm, öl!

[brigidfaye]

E Poem

The sea, her envy. Every eve he sees eyes, deeply.

[opencommunion]

"This new mode of sex intelligibility necessitated the eradication of the ‘true hermaphrodite’—that is, a conception of the hermaphrodite as possessing ‘both’ sexes, in a manner of corporeal simultaneity. This conception of hermaphroditism is reliant on what Anne Fausto-Sterling terms, citing early modern English jurist Sir Edward Coke, the doctrine of the ‘sex which prevaileth,’ a notion which, while testifying to the legal and juridical fixity of a two-gender system, nevertheless acknowledged a certain sexed co-presence in cases concerning hermaphrodites.

It is precisely this conception of sexed co-presence which is erased with the rise of the ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’, which relegated hermaphroditic hybridity to the realm of the chimerical, claiming that behind the apparently mixed sexual attributes of hermaphrodites lay a ‘true’ sex, rather than a ‘prevailing’ or dominant one.

What ensued was the development of a variety of methodologies and experiments which aimed to find one absolute material determinant of sex and, thus, to discredit ‘true hermaphroditism’ (that is, an absolute, irreducible entwinement of ‘male’ and ‘female’ attributes in a subject) in order to reify and further congeal dominant cultural conceptions regarding the ‘truth’ of univocal sex."

Hil Malatino, "Situating Bio-Logic, Refiguring Sex: Intersexuality and Coloniality," in Critical Intersex ed. Morgan Holmes, 2009

[straynoahide]

queer humanity

just a reminder to LGBTIQ/queer, progressive christians:

queer erasure discourses from "ex-gays"/ex-lgbtiq, pseudo-compassionate discourses, etc, are not christlike

human beings have psychosexual diversity but are of one humanity. every human being is called to a free and fulfilled life in which your love and erotism are not reduced by the constraints of others' shortcomings, much less projective issues - religious or not.

traditional mores, gender roles, social expectations, etc, are not His word. His word is never hateful; and if it is- it is not the last word. your Conscience matters. your love matters. your passion matters.

queer erasure is always a previous stage of queer lynchings, although then won't call people queer when doing that. the people who are the most vehemently anti-gay always do so from a place of personal queerphobia; all personal bigotry, as opposed to political bigotry, is projective.

so just to be perfectly clear: conversion therapy is a crime against humanity, and one of the most grievous sins that can even be conceived of: pseudo-scientific, politically motivated torturing children, teenagers and at-risk youth to change who they are and result in measurable clinical illness from psychological and sexual repression. there is nothing remotely compassionate, kind or godly in it. abuse is not love.

it has to be condemned always, in every community, univocally and in no ambiguous terms by all authorities, religious and secular.

if you are Catholic, know that it is also against our doctrines. the queer spirit will never be daunted again after Stonewall. we are not 'urges', 'clothes', 'behaviors', 'ideas', 'ideologies', 'mannerisms', 'same-sex attractions', etc... we are full human beings, period.

please, stay away from those people until you are far enough in your own healing as a queer religious person - and pray for them to heal from those who have led them to that low point.

[onetwofeb]

'

“And surely it is psychoanalysis that leads us to say that the subject is not univocal.

There where I am thinking I do not recognise myself, I am not. This is the unconscious.

There where I am, it is all too clear that I am lost.”

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, page 103

'

[barcoland]

The one who falls and gets up is so much stronger than the one who never fell. (Anonymous)

[vyvilha]

making malanka costumes with friends and when i asked who should i be they univocally replied Old Man

[createdbyprayers]

Brothers and sisters in Fide.

"I bow my head to a great mind, I bow my knees to a great heart.", Victor Hugo.

I used to think that only before Christ can we kneel when we enter a church, or when we pass by the altar we also kneel.

You can't compare Christ and a loved one who died, but you can suddenly realize that the person was gifted not just with high intelligence, but also with willpower and true love. And you understand that your loved one, now gone to the House of the Heavenly Father, is worthy of you kneeling before him, because you have learned how much he kept silent about his suffering only so that you would not know about his pain.

A few years ago I had to go to the funeral of a childhood friend, and during the prayers before the burial, his mother knelt down.

That day she was the only one standing at her son's coffin in the snow, since it was winter, she looked at him in a way she had never looked at him before.

Please pay attention to loved ones who exhibit strange behavior. Even some demonstrative behavior can be a cry from the heart.

There is a dialogue like this:

-Why don't you shout?

-I scream, but you don't hear...

And if a person doesn't ask for help, it doesn't mean that he doesn't need it.

We can buy a place in the cemetery, but not in heaven.

But they may also not remember us after the funeral, but the Lord will never leave this person and the one who loved him.

"And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, to be with you forever." John, 14:16.

Here it speaks about the holy spirit, but this does not mean at all that the holy spirit cannot help but send us a person who will comfort us and be our friend.

Yes? Univocal.

[pharmaciacatholica]

In this way, he dissents from his contemporaries who "divide fundamental theology (or apologetics) into two parts": (1) the defense of Christian revelation itself (against the rationalists), and (2) the defense of the infallibility of the Catholic Church (against the Protestants and schismatics). By rejecting this artificial bifurcation of the apologetical discipline, Garrigou maintains the univocity of Christianity and Catholicism. The defense of divine revelation's existence ultimately and necessarily terminates in Christ's Catholic Church. The "apologete" cannot separate the fact of divine revelation from the Church to whom Christ has entrusted his divine revelation. "True Christianity is nothing other than Catholicism; hence, true and complete demonstration of Christianity already contains the demonstration of Catholicism.”

Fr. Cajetan Cuddy O.P.

[tanadrin]

Wait, I don't quite understand the bit about everybody having a separate particular judgment and then getting judged again at the Final Judgment in Catholicism. Can you fail the first one and pass the second? For that matter can you do it the other way round? Or is it a thing where actually nobody should end up failing the Final Judgment since you'd have already repented in purgatory by then and ought to be good?

I mean looking for a logical justification for it is sort of beside the point. This is the sort of thing, like the Trinity, that you come up with when you need to reconcile competing contradictory sources while presupposing the univocality of sources, which in the Catholic case also includes “sacred tradition,” i.e., shit somebody made up that we are emotionally attached to.

But purgatory only works for lesser sins. If you die with an unconfessed mortal sin on your soul, you don’t go to purgatory, you go straight to Hell.

[talenlee]

Game Pile: The Arilou

New Post has been published on https://press.invincible.ink/game-pile-the-arilou/

Game Pile: The Arilou

In consideration of science fiction storytelling there are some problems that kind of have to be tangled with between the realism of here and now and the fantastic of the story can intersect. It’s because there’s a hypothetical attenuation between the scientific of the genre, the way that things need to be built out of conventions and frameworks we’re already familiar with. Sometimes this can be done with single, deeply, and fundamentally important boundaries on reality, like how in Mass Effect there’s the introduction of a new, single element one level higher than Hydrogen, and its presence allows for all the stuff in that universe that we conventionally consider to have broken the rules of our reality.

One of those challenges is the Fermi Paradox, which is – simplified – ‘hey, where are all the aliens, bro?’ If there are a lot of aliens and we’ve had a lot of time, surely we’d see some sign of them, and we haven’t. This puzzle is at the heart of a lot of different science fiction stories. Sometimes it’s addressed, sometimes it’s central to the whole narrative (spoilers for The Three Body Problem I suppose), and sometimes, in a story big enough, it just gets to be a detail in amongst many.

In Star Control 2, there is a species of little green humanoids that fly around in strange saucers that don’t behave according to the laws of physics the way that other species’ space ships do. They’re called the Arilou, or more formally the Arilou Lalee’lay, and they speak to humans as delightful tricksters who are here to help us and guide us through the stars.

They like to use the term ‘enigmatic,’ which is a good term for it. They do things that don’t seem to make much sense. Now, part of the challenge with all of this is that when you’re dealing with alien civilisations, hypothetically they should have some sense of individuality and cultural variety just by dint of having such large numbers, and yet, the genre that Star Control lives in is that there are [The culture] and then occasionally, like Admiral Vux or Fwiffo, you get individuals from that culture. Complicating this further are some cultures that aren’t cultures – the Mycosynth and Orz in particular.

Spoilers for the Orz I guess.

Anyway, the Arilou project a uniformity of purpose, a univocality of culture, and that means that their reasons are inscrutable. They appeared out of nowhere to join an alliance, but only once humans did. Then when humans were enslaved by the Ur-Quan (we’ve talked about them before), the Arilou also disappeared. They then rejoined the normal world when the humans sought them out, all because of their special, mysterious connection with humans.

Anyway, the Arilou are kinda dicks?

See, if you asked the rest of our galaxy about them, they had no idea they existed, which is pretty odd. After all, they’re very technologically advanced and somehow did everything without trading with other people. They know a lot about everything in the whole of the sector and they interact freely with them as soon as Humans are involved. And bear in mind, that’s Humans Humans. There are two cultures in the Star Control Universe that provide a wrinkle to what it means to be humans.

Most obviously, there are the Androsynth. They are uh, they’re humans? They are definitively and actually humans. They’re cloned humans who have left the Earth and undergone whatever modest genetic translation you can do across a few generations, which is nothing fit enough to guide towards speciation. Androsynth and humans could absolutely interbreed, if not for the fact the Androsynth regard humans as being a bunch of slave-keeping assholes.

Which they are.

But that’s not all, because there’s also the Syreen. Syreen were originally conceived as a kind of Sexy Space Succubus, but in Star Control 2 they were fleshed out into a fully realised culture of their own. They’re a culture of predominantly women who are completely genetically compatible with humans, which, if you’re curious about such things, means they’re basically humans. Of course the question about why the Syreen are like that is a huge puzzle for the universe to answer, and the weird thing is there’s actually a pretty obvious answer as to why there’s a culture of nonhuman humans parked a few hundred light years away.

That answer is ‘probably something the Arilou did.’

But the Arilou don’t care about the Syreen. We know this because the Syreen were the people who witnessed the way that the Arilou abandoned the universe the second humans were slave-shielded. In fact, this led to the Syreen being defeated by the Ur-Quan and that’s why the Syreen call the Arilou a bunch of weasels.

Here’s the thing: The Arilou have fucked with humanity. The nature of Star Control 2 is that it is a world whose narratives leave a lot of questions because the why of how things ended up the way they are isn’t as important as the what the player gets to do in the discovering of it. To that end, what I can tell you about the Arilou is something with no greater answer, complicated further by the fact that the source for it is largely diegetic information from the Arilou themselves.

The Arilou assert that they want to preserve humanity from interactions with entities that exist. These entities, they claim, are fundamentally dangerous to humans, and therefore, the Arilou have changed humanity, like all of humanity so as to not be noticeable to them. They do this, and then also hide their own influence on humans, their presence in our history, their homeworld and a bunch of other stuff because they believe that ignorance is the humans’ best protection.

This belief is such that when they discover Humans know things, they bemoan them because the knowledge of things like the presence of the Orz or the way that Arilou travel through space is something that’s going to create problems for them later down the line. This ignorance and this enshrinement of it, complete with their discussion of keeping secrets from humans seems to indicate that they were doing things to keep us from finding out about other alien cultures.

When I talk about the science fiction speculation of Star Control, it’s not like I’m talking about it as a fundamentally predictive kind of text. It’s a science fiction story built out of the ideas of science fiction of its time, and there’s no reason any of this stuff needs to be built out of any kind of reasonable science. It’s wild to me that when Star Control 2 released, exoplanets were a theory (a pretty well justified theory). Now they’re confirmed facts. It isn’t even that remarkable a thing, when you think about it — the idea other stars wouldn’t have planets would be such a weird idea as to be impossible.

Every time we learn a bit more about the universe, in so doing, we discover the parameters that play with the edges of these big questions. Why aren’t there, why are there, how common is this, and the beautiful thing about it is that knowing these things are deducing actual answers to actual questions and we may know those questions better — and their potential answers — comes from being able to play with them, to see these ideas used in the media around us.

And in Star Control 2, this question of why are we alone has an answer that introduces you to the question.

The Arilou are why we are alone.

Because they were looking for things to make that way.

[nicklloydnow]

Derek Mears as Judge Holden

“Judge Holden's Weltanschauung-

His Theoretical Teaching

Since the hopes of a harmony and a Kantian "perpetual peace" prove to be untenable, all that remains is war, the "ultimate practitioner," who destroys by pushing things into their eternal existence. Like Heraclitus, the judge gives war its supremacy because war shows how things really are. It contains the principle of reality and points to the fact that existence, not the mind, has to come first. In a duel, it is only the outcome that counts. It does not matter which of the participants is right or wrong. War supersedes and overwrites such distinctions. Any other preconceived framework formed by the mind will fail the test of reality. In a Nietzschean manner, the judge gives the example of the moral law as an invention for the "weak." For Nietzsche, the weak are those who cannot come to a clear-cut decision and thus establish an end. McCarthy's nihilism is so systematic that the outcome is not moralizable post factum. One cannot even suggest that "might can be right" because power is absolute and cannot be represented in terms of right and wrong; it just is. The only possible law is the "historical law" or the law of necessity that is an immediate, immanent manifestation of what is.

The judge does not reject the mind, though; he is everything but a mindless killing machine. He just gives priority to the order of existence, the all-inclusive order that contains the mind itself. A thing will still exist whether one thinks of it or not. The mind cannot create existence; only existence can by being its own cause. And because the mind cannot will anything into existence, it has to be put in its right place and recognized for what it is: a mere mode of existence, like the body, among others. This means that it cannot impose the way it thinks, its own laws, its own mode of functioning, which is merely its own mode of existence, onto what exists. This happens only when the mind starts looking at itself and, like a sorcerer's apprentice, it opens a reflection that implies consciousness and that stretches into the infinite without being able to close it. The mind has to just become an instrument through which things that exist get their voice. This univocal perspectives is the substantial link between Spinoza and Nietzsche but will connect the judge and Chigurh as well.

The fact that the mind cannot rule over things doesn't impede it from knowing them though. In his reading of Blood Meridian, Steven Shaviro calls it a "radical epistemology" that "subverts all dualisms, of subject and object, inside and outside, will and representation or being and interpretation." Things are useful "breadcrumbs" for the dedicated archivist Judge Holden while Anton Chigurh calls them "instruments.” The principle of reality is thus discerned starting from bare facts. The judge is an avid collector in his notebook because they are God's "words": "He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. He archives material yet truthful artifacts as if to discover a road map that would help him find his way through the "maze" of existence. He is the one who singles out the "thread of order in the tapestry," thus knowing the (one) way of existence, the way things are (or become). It is in this sense only that he will be able to "dictate the terms of his own fate." This mastery is neither a creation/imposition of a new order nor an altering of an already given one. It neither shapes one's fate nor gets rid of it altogether; one is not beyond fate. Freedom emerges from finding this one path "and not some other way," this "thread of order" in the labyrinth that conquers a mystery, a darkness that generates fear so that one's decisions are taken from an active position rather than a passive one.

Like a memento mori, these facts will keep one grounded in the necessity of the "historical law," in the very "heart of darkness" that reminds one that "death and dying are the very life of darkness". In turn, they will keep the judge away from imaginative projections of the mind that generate superstition, mystery and fear. He records them like in a citation "a l'ordre du jour” in order to maintain the state of war and thus be closer to its eternity. "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way" (BM 259).

Judge Holden loves war because it brings about "a new and broader view" (BM 261). War is the supreme game of life that teaches the unity of existence. "War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god" (BM 261). Playing games is "nobler" than any other action, and war is the supreme game because the wager is one's most precious possession: one's life. When one wages one's life, one wages oneself, one's identity that resides in the subject, the game will "swallow" both the player and the game itself, merging both subject and object in its unity. From the perspective of this unity of existence, one can access something more than one's life. It allows one to partake in a realm of eternity that goes beyond duration, beyond beginning and ceasing to be. At this point, even "notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings" (BM 159). The unity of existence is an all-inclusive whole that cannot be broken into contradictory parts. Its parts will be distinguished merely as forms that are still embedded in the whole. In this game of war, one cannot clearly distinguish and oppose necessity and randomness anymore. Better said, loving one's fate will affirm necessity and freedom at the same time. Further, life and death are not mutually exclusive anymore but rather inextricably connected as two halves of the same coin. Embracing one will by default affirm the other.”

- Adrian Mioc, ‘Holden and Chigurh, Cormac McCarthy and the Ethics of Power’