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This is for long, empericaly-light diatribes about psudo-random topics. Unrefined mental detritus that might make its way into a more polished and real thing later, but also a lot of talking out my ass.
There might be some insight, but its a needle-in-a-haystack type situation. procced at your own risk.
If you have anything to say, email them to me and ill stick them on this page, aswell as with maybe a response.

Hot Topic Hell(s), Aboslute Hierarchy and Unbreakable Contracts

I recently read up to date (6/18/24) on Whore of Blood Which is like Helluva Boss but SCP and better, which itself is Habin Hotell but better. Having engaged in no discourse sorrounding any of the properties, I assume there are many thoughtfull takes about queerness, domestic abuse, the meaning of family, and genitalia dimentions. However, my brain being as it is, I would like to focus on the economic implications of ontological facts that objectively have no bearing on our world!

Briefly, pataidiologically, these worlds (WoB's is obviously more elaborated and a bit different, but the comonalities between the 3 are enough that I will treat them as one) is the modern, secular conceptualization of actual organized christianity applied to occolt symbols thereof. What happens when you die is a good illustration of this; Christian doctrine states that you either go to Heaven or Hell when you die (not really but pretty much), and it would only occor to a modern mostly secular person that there needed to be a large DMV-style beurocracy to sort out who goes where, to any old christian it would have just happened. Then, the authors fill this beurocracy with occolt symbols like supernatural beuracrats, ominous old-timey departmental logos and an explicit insane-asylum vibe. I would like to point out the fact that Roman legal doctrine had a significant incluence on these christian occolt symbols and ideas, but a modern person has a much more accute (if subconcious) understanding of it then the symbolic cannon.

Inside the boundry of the story, there are two major ontological differences that affect interpersonal relationships meaningfully: The ability to make genuinely unbreakable contracts, and the existence of absolute hirearchy.

A key feature of any contract is the risk that it is not upheld, and without this risk everything would get real fucked up real quick. The relationship between Angel Dust and that other guy is the most obvious case, where a non-repudiateable contract traps one party in a majorly disfavorable buisness position for an indefinite ammount of time (Read: Raped for Eternity). In one of the WoB stories, there is the implication that a court of some sort exists to litigate these contracts in, but there is no indication that the total legal subbordiantion of oneself is not uncommon. This is eveident in one of the few legal documets we actually see: high-powered demonic lawer Primrose's employment contract wisely contains a provision demanding compliance with the "Universial Decleration of Human Rights" (presumably the UN one, because if universal is taken to mean binding to relevent afterlives there clearly is not one) for her and her family, important not only because her employer is well known for human rights violations but that some basic level of worker protection needs to be in any contract that canot be unilatterally vacated by either member.

This brings us naturally to the next aspect of the world: its governance. Hell is run by a gang of petty nobles and feudalists in buisness suits, who differ from their human counterparts only in that thier claims to absolute supiriority seem true. This doesn't seem to be just because they sit atop a pyrimid of contractually-bound peons, but there is inherent biological (spiritualogical?) differences bewteen roalty and commoners, apparent in the halo mechanics and the taxonomy of devil types. This creates obvious tention in a story with what feels like more trans charecters then cis, and indeed most of the romantic plotlines are about class miscegenation of some sort. Fuckhead in WoB explores this, the sweet relationship between Fruitbowl (implied lowclass) and Daisy (higherclass) is overriden by Daisy's subordinate relationship with her mother (real bigwig), making things pretty shit for the both of them

Earlier, I claimed that these conditions don't exist in our universe, and that was partially true. Obviously there are no metaphysically binding contracts and in the age of Smith&Wesson anyone with some real determiniation can waste prety much any aspirent feudal overlord. However, the expectation that similar rules hold strong remains, and the punishment for violating the absolute superiority of your boss or breaking a contract can be harsh. As such, much of the usual nonsense people get up to here is probably common there, but is there any buisness strategies that could be different there then here? And can we fix any of this using these tools? And what about Heaven?

I ofcourse have thoughts about all of those, but I aslso have a job that I need to do to pay rent analyzing mortal law, so I will leave its potentiality for a later date.

Update 6/18: spinning off into won file for potential eventual refinement

Paris is Burning would be good to play with the ideas of the similarity in social constructeness between money and gender becuz the ppl are notonly genderqueer but also explicitly wealthqueer (?)

Thoughts on hedgehogs and foxes

There is a tale as old as anyone can know about a hedgehog and a fox. This is another tale that misses the important aspect of scale-- is it not a million tiny spines, each hardened and intricately designed and uniquely placed tha tmake up the hedgehog's defenses, and isn't it the tight unity of body and mind that allows a fox to dodge so?>/p>

Straining the metaphor? obbiously. True? I think so. We are all hedgehogs in God+'s plan, and all foxes to the plants we eat for dinner.

There are two Important similar videos that I watched Recently and I want to share:

If you are anything like me, you are in no way prepared for these videos. Both almost killed me in thier way, and they certainly elecited a new feeling. I have much to say about the content of both, but it would be disorganized and unconnected and so forth, so in the spiret of Silejoism (see immediately previously article) I will focus on the feeling.

Both videos feature someone doing something I care about at a level I can never hope to attain while simultaneoulsy doing or focusing on something absolutely ridiculous. Both videos are presented very academically, with only the occasional reminder of the absurdidty of the premise. I am suspicious of the underlying point made by the creator, but can't help but love these videos because they both very obviously "have the sauce".

They make me feel hopefull about what preforming at a high level really means. If these dipshits can do it in their fields, surely I can. It also makes me wonder how much weird shit high-preformers git up to and just don't tell us about. There is also an aspect of the grotesque; both people are doing something at a certain nexus of depraved pysicality and intellectual comment that is simultaneously repellant and deeply appealing. Complex.

Not just Irony, but the very practice of media analysys is DEAD

The video essay has democratized critical media analysys to the point where anyone can do learn it with ease, and the massive availability of accessible metanarratives online means that it can be applied to any political point of view.

This means that the project of thinking about what we watch to learn more about ourselves is over, because we can now define ourselves totally in relation to media analysys. I am defined to a large extent by my ability to tear any entertainment product a new asshole in a matter of seconds, but since I can totally represent myself in this act means I don't learn about myself in the process.

The only (non-recursive) option here is to engage with all media at an entirely surface level. What bodily feelings does it give me, what viceral emotions, what does it motivate me to do immediately after? Search for positive vibes and ride them, avoiding the impulse to analyze the content of the media, only looking at the content of the pysical reaction.

Good enough to be an art movement! (an ironic statementabout the content, I have already violated my own rules. I guess this sort of thing takes practice.) Call it Sijeloism, after the Toki Pona word for a body or substantive existance.

Technofeudalist Realism and Switching Costs: two Thoughts about Technofeudalism

Just got my copy of Yanis Veroufakis' Technofeudalism (off amazon, ofcourse, Big reccomend), and I have what are right now two seeds of thought about it that might grow into somehting larger. The first is a broader look on the lack of catasrophic revolution through an analysys of the precice economic motions of technofeudalism. The second is accepting as true the basic premisis of techofeudalism, what are the myths and media in which it represents itself? a difficult question because as with classical feudalism, the king only needs to justify himself and mythologize to non-serfs, who are in limited supply under technofeudalism.

The basic premise of the first question came when trying to economically think about how cloud rents are set. By definition, cloud capital is a very diverse and frankly annoyingly vauge entity that extracts rent from all aspects of society, but it seems to exist both culturally through the technostructure's affects on our desires when interacting with the economic sphere (and potentially social sphere, but I feel thinking about that is a bit beyond me) and as a multi-sided platform in controll of our markets. Traditionally, two-sided platforms were argued as nessacarily providing some service otherwise they would be outcompeted by direct contact between parties. What prevents a not-amazon from entry and disruption online (where there is little of the pysical concerns(ie startup cost and dificulty of obtaining loans for by definition sub-profitable ventures) is their unique access to both buyers and sellers, each forching the other onto Amazon to access more of the other, giving Amazon Nigh-unprecedented monopoly power.

Update c. a couple days later: realized all this is bullshit after the Amex thing. My apologies.

Furries as metaphor: cross-frame application to further understanding of (empathy with) homophobes

Been reading Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler, and she proposes that the main way that homophobes remain genderphobic by constantly refusing to understand "gender". Since it is not particularly dificult to understand and the repeated invocation of it in their rhetoric brings them into contact with it, they must constantly work to affirm how little they could possibly relate to it, and therefore prevent contamination with the idea.

If this sounds like gibberish, yeah. Butler is a total nerd, and constantly speaks philosopher jargon, which valid, but also not great for most. Something that helped me and might help some yall is connecting it to how I felt about furries; I believe the psychological dynamics are pretty much the same. For a while I hovered at a vauge distaste intellectually and overt disgust emotionally, feeling and somewhat thinking that there was some sort of deep mystery to the whole thing but refusing to do any investigation or talking with a real furry, out of fear of being found out with any sort of intrest in the subject beyond denial, and I think Butler thinks that similar dynamics charecterize homophobes, and if true, feeling out these feelings might be a way for me and some yall to empathise with them in a know thy enemy sort of way.

Was just at the library and some kid started talking to me trying to get me to buy him a laptop. Asked him what his favorite part of school was and he said "videogames". Was going to say something about how if we made roblox woke we would have anarchy in the century, but it occors to me that roblox might already be pretty not horrible maybe. A lot is said about like 4chan and the toxicity of the early internet, but those of us who spent our formative years on it are a proper gaggle of fags. Is this sampling bias on my part, selection bias on who decides to get off the internet when, or evidence of a genuinely positive force in society?
Doubless a question already asked a million ways a million times before.

Representative democracy trains us to think of politics as a weak link problem

Thoughts on the events of 4/29 in president's circle SLC

student protesters and riot cops at night

This account is solely my subjective oppinion a day after the events, and I have not had time to compost this into an adaquetly appealing, or even coherent, narative. This text is not to be taken as a factual re-telling of the events, or my own final oppinions about them. Proceed with caution.

I was initially not planning on going to the protest, but a brief convorsation with a classmate convinced me that I wohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEou104m_P0uld sufficently regret not going, so after a change of footwear I was ready. I went directly there after my exam, and arrived before the speaches started. Mecha have gotten good at talking less, although it is somewhat telling that the best speech by far was Julio's reading of something a former Black Panther had written. The establishment of the encampment was a suprise to me, but between my love of camping and the overall energy I was begining to get into the mood, and decided to join the campers. At this point I thought the police would be largely unwilling to clear the encampment, so I brought a whole bunch of shit including my Blahaj.

After a brief intercession where I had a nice chat with some people, I was directed to sit in the middle with the other campers, and told that we were likely to get arrested in defence of the camp. After some consideration I decided that I was willing to go through with that, because I didn't have any exams untill 3:00 the next day. We remained seated in the circle for some time, waiting for news from the negotiators. a couple of experienced organizers more or less filled the air with encouragement for those of us less sure, genuinely impressed with the psychological power of the collective demonstrations.

At approx. 9:15, when negotiation with the university had fallen apart, the police began to announce that they were going to clear the area, and I began to seriously elive that I was going to spend the night in jail. At this point I wrote a close friend's phone # on my arm.

The cops understood they needed to keep us active so when the clas came we were more tired then them, so they sent out one joker with a megaphone every 20 minutes to rile us up. This kept us standing and chanting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEou104m_P0for 2 hours. 1.5 hours in, I took a catnap-- sometimes the whole cant-really-feel-strong-emotion thing works well. Mildly nervous, sentiment shared by everyone. I decided to treat this whole thing academically, as more of an observer then a participant to generally get in as little trouble as possible, while still sticking it out.

Eventualy, SLCPD showed up, and (it appears) distributed riot gear between themselves and the UPD. People with locked arms began rapidly circling the camp, but there were not enough, so the perimiter was broken and the police wited for people to get tired and for the thing to fall apart. Then, they started to hit in waves, pulling down tents and grabbing 2-3 people per hit. They could have picked us off like that, but the rear appears to have fallen apart at this point and we fell deeper into the camp. The perimieter falling at this point seems to have been a largely good thing, because it allowed the hardcore mfs who knew how to handle themselves to form an effective front infront of us campers, and I elected to hang back and essentially keep my hands visible. I am not afraid to say that at this point I was noticably nervous and feeling less and less like getting arrested.

At this point, the presumably soon-to-be-infamous hatchet was confiscated. It was a foot long at most, wilded by a no more then 5'5" individual who did not appear particularly pysically powerfull. They were a bit high-strung through the prior protest, bringing their own megaphone and generally being a bit more wild then the rest, but in a much less organized way then the real ones who were organizing. They sat down in the encampment behind the main body of campers, and as the police pushed into the encampment we were herded away from them by an organizer. seperated, an officer went around behind them and simply picked them up, causing them to drop the hatchet without swinging it (or assuming a position where they could swing it with any efficacy). Certainly not the brightest bulb in the box, a silid condmnation of individual action, and (based on the SLCPD officer walking around holding it like a foul daiper afterword) an example of cops blowing things out of proportion. A news article reported the hatchet confiscation and "injuries" from thrown bits of cardboard and disposable plastic water bottles (at the pigs), implying a connection.

At this point, I think that MECHA people began to liquidate the camp on the opposite side of us. I assumed that the pigs had fully encircled us and were the ones pulling down the tents. The line of real ones held 2 charges, in a roughly triangle shape with us campers in the middle, preventing a total rout. Hands on shilds with hands on backs, 2-3 layers. Wooden planks and a stool interceeding.

Eventually, once approx 2/3 of the tents had been pulled to the far end of the field, the organizers called for a "tactical dispersion". Obviously sortof a chickenshit thing to do, but I will admit to being glad for an excuse and not hesitating to take my leave of the scene, obviously sortof a chickenshit thing to do. I was initially suspicious of the person who made the argument, but with the breakup of the crowd I was more then happy to take the conformation of some rando as confirming the truth. It appears I should not have been so doubtfull. Tactically, it makes sense: sufficent matierel had been recovered to keep the thing going, and they needed to keep bail money and non-arrested personel supplies up to keep things moving into the future. After I left, I assume some people tried to stick it out or the cops charged the stragglers, to make up to the reported 17 arrests.

I procedded to take a long route to my dorm, and on the way I was briefly accosted by a truck full of homophobes who appeared unable to pronounce "faggot". I offered a hand gesture without comment and kept walking.

What did we learn?

3:13 pm 4/30: follow-up rally announced for 6:00. Not going to attend due to major negative vibes (read: because I am a total poser), specifically with the timing and rumors I feel like this is more just an excuse to fight the cops then really spread the word. Noble, but not what I feel like doing. Not publishing notes till tomorrow morning for obvious infosec reasons.

8:09 pm 4/30: Protest moved to metro jail, good call. Also good call to not attend, the vibes are definately negative. A possible interpritation for all this is that the internet has created a uniquly radical and small bubble in the SLC leftist community (myself included, insofar as I am really a leftist and/or part of a community)-- the classic we go hard bc we need to combined with the social media bubble thing.

8:55 pm 4/30: After further reflection, bhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEou104m_P0ad call. most attendees at protest were college students w nothing better to do like myself. Off campus, main source of warm bodies (me) is absent. Also, I think (based on vauge phrasology, potentially incorrect) that they are protesting for the release of hachet person. An impressive show of solidarity, but taking their eyes off the ball a bit in my oppinion: bad optics, small potatoes goal, high risk for little reward. Not my play. On a personal note, I dissapoint myself with my brain's attempts to assume hachet person's gender in the feminine. Even if their dumb af, they have a right to pronounce.

5:19 am 5/1: I was wrong about last night's rally. I suppose they grabbed Julio (black panther speech guy) Monday morning, and he was infact totally innocent and I 100% should have been at the protest. Lesson: trust the people, they know whats up. Publishing blog.

It is best to think of degrowth not in terms of the litteral reduction of GDP per capita, while that is necacary it is also anciliary. It is more the premise that it is easier to decouple GDP growth from human happieness then it is to decouple it from polluting.

Since capitalisim tries to convert all transactions to money, it is easy to trace all phenomena through money, but a "materialism" that stops whenever it hits money will inevitably miss whatever remains after capitalism's failed comoditization

Academia and Feudalism

CONTEXT

I have recently been thinking about this sort of thing, and I think it makes more sense if you see academia as trying to graft an essentially mideaval mode of production and life history onto our modern capitalist world.

The career path for an academic shares many similarities with ye olde craftsman's- work on the family farm untill young adulthood, building basic skills, then go apprintace under some master craftsman who will provide a sort of mean standard of living, then work your way up eventually completing a masterwork (PHD thesis) and being accepted as a master, where the guild cooperation keeps you in buisness and you can eventually start training apprintaces of your own.

Academia worked like this for a while, by simultaneously convincing aristocrats to give them money and also acting as a two-sided platform to give legitimacy to wealthy children while subsidizing research to build that legitimacy. Most scientific progress was done either as a side-hustle of the otherwise provisioned or as part of this mideaval institution.

Then, the industrial revolution at about 1750 began ravaging the original trade guilds by comodifying and mass-producing their goods. Academia doged this bullet (kindof) because research by definition cannot be commodified-- good research is on some level fundamentally different from all other research, so the mideavil trade guild structure needed to be maintained.

I am not advocating for this mideavil system in terms of fairness or goodness for reaserchers, it was full of rent extraction (think of having the students author sections of his textbook that he still makes money off of) and the construction of fiefdoms of hangers-on even when it isn't healthy (having Sabine get this independant funding but still expecting her to be "loyal" to him), just pointing out that it has a major part of the goods and bads.

Anyway, as our society has become totally capitalist and donors/governments stopped recognizing the feudal character, they started desperately trying to comodify research to fit it into the capitalist framework (just the right amount of edgy) and create the samey degree mills that we know & love by inventing macines (string theory's framework) that can produce new papers that hit a basic standard of "new" to seem like real reserch but not too new to escape the comodity definition (a new partical is new enough, but doesn't smash the framework)

So academia is really just a confused jumble of some of the worst parts of mideaval craftsmanship and comodity production, full of some of the most earnest and intellegent people out there and also just a whole bunch of assholes.

As far as solutions go, Sabine's jump to youtube is interesting, but I don't know if it is sustainable (because of how much revenue per view she gets, there needs to be like a fuckload of casual pysics fans for every researcher supported, and IDK if there are enough of those to sustain a productive field's worth of researchers. And also, the attention economy has it's own set of yikes things that we have just begun to see the edge of.

A silly and radical suggestion: Grant by lottery. Standardized testing for proficiency in basic skills (mathematical and statistical competence, maybe writing ability), and then randomly assign 5 year grants to anyone who scores above a certain amount. Maybe we can even keep the masterwork structure, but that would be a big compromise. Teaching positions w cross-subsidization when not haves a grant (they can teach math and writing, they just passed a big ol test in it!)