October 2011
37 posts
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Ivan's Rebellion and the Social Contract
[from the old blog again…]
I have long had a problem with book 1, chapter 9, of Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’, the chapter titled ‘Real Property’. To me the failure of this treatise has always been the scantiness of available land outside the monopoly of the Sovereign (something perhaps Rousseau did not adequately anticipate in his time) which brings into doubt the genuineness of the...
thelittlephilosopher asked: A light bearer you say? And what is this light you bear with you?
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Exponentially Yours
How did I forget this feeling? How did I forget to eat poetry & bum a ride on the Kerouac express? How did I forget what Dylan sounded like when he was toked and looming above us? How did I forget the singularity of philosophy and being, the absurd as revelation? Once in it becomes exponential. Once in it is as if I had never left.
As the world braces for impact, the barricades and...
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electriclady-:
Bob Dylan/ Sad Eyed Lady of the...
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“The monotonous canon runs thus: the young man must begin with a knowledge of...”
– from Nietzsche’s ‘On the Use and Abuse of History’
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Song plays prominently in Tyrannosaur, adore it.
...
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The Embodied in DONT LOOK BACK
Albert Hall slips out of view through a grainy sixties windshield as Bob Dylan, caught unguarded by Pennebaker’s camera, reminisces about the performance he had just rushed from moments ago.
Dylan: God, I feel like I’ve been through some kind of… thing, man.
Pennebaker (laughs): You have.
Dylan: No but I mean there was, something was, something was special about it, that’s all.
Shortly after...
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“And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste....”
– The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
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The Russian Novel
Eighty pages from the end of The Idiot, and I need to say something about the Russian novel, or rather, the Russian novel as idea, for what can I honestly say about the Russian novel - I am not Russian, know not a word of the language, and have only questionable translations of Dostoevsky to rely on. Still with something akin to childish naivety I wish to tell you about this idea. The Russian...
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Pang
[From the old blog, 4/13/2005]
I felt a pang. That much I know, it was definitely pang-y, I may even go so far as to describe it as a ‘pang of anxiety’. But how quickly in the reflex of conversation this ‘pang’ elevates to ‘despair’, not because it deserves to be but rather because ‘despair’ has greater currency in conversation, it serves a more...
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“Is it possible to avoid pain? Yes, but you’ll never learn anything. Is it...”
– Paulo Coelho (via thelittlephilosopher)
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Shit List
“Social networks present information about what people like; more informative if, instead, they described what the don’t like” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Bed of Procrustes
So for some Taleb-inspired counter-programming, here is the shit I hate (not aiming for complete list, trying to avoid the more obvious ones like cancer):
Electronica
Concept art
Divine Reason
Groups larger...
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Tweets on the occupy movement and those who...
Status-quo lays claim to the structure of your life & of yr loved ones including anything of real human value -this is the con of settling
Any moment I lived and was happy was not granted by the status-quo anymore than I can say the roof over my head made me fall in love
My happiness is not yet copyrighted
the real value is distinct from any status-quo, the structure changes and the human...
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“Only what we dream is what we truly are, because all the rest, having been...”
– Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet (via gwyon)
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“What precisely is my object in writing? If it is not for the public, then after...”
– Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky.
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Enjoy it while it lasts...
Whenever I see my child respond to a favorite toy differently, a once beloved stuffed companion for the latest gizmo, something in me stirs. I am not the Peter Pan type, I don’t have a closet full of old toys. Rather, I see in that cruel design the possibility that I too will lose my luster in his eyes. The tight embraces with head resting on my shoulder, the emphatic Dadd-E! It goes....
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Pandora's Box
How does the positivist spirit live on? So many defeats intellectually, so much development of thought & still clinging to 19th cen. ideal
There’s no greater fascism than the brute force of presumptive science. The reduction of life to information that one believes to control
Further maddening is the implication that to think of the body as anything other than said information is to be...
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Nursing a Feeling
Today I boasted about how happy I am to be out of school and it really truly does feel incredible to not be a part of that life sentence anymore, but the boast was ultimately more then about school, it was about a feeling of joy that encompassed me in all facets. It was an exaggeration. Today, not twenty minutes after said boast I was knee deep in some yawn-inducing innanity, dull dull dull...
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