Friday, December 16, 2022

Pest


“Order is not a pressure imposed upon society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.”--Ortega y Gasset

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Charade. Mendacity. Posturing. What would be good training for a politician?
Trump was inducted into the celebrity wing of the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013. Jesse Ventura was the Governor of Minnesota.

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There are stories about 'long Covid,' persisting symptoms of fatigue, headache, and the like, subjective and vague. An ongoing study compares long-term exams and, so far, there are no diagnostic findings that would allow you to even say for sure that post-Covid even exists, biochemically.

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Taking religion's place as a source of meaning, purpose, community, and ritual are various ideologies: Mindfulness/yoga, tarot/astrology, social progressivism, LGBTQ+, wellness/self-care, online communities like Reddit & the Rationalist community, new age spirituality

All of these originated in California.

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Pest

"Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”

With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences. Foucault’s central idea was that the ways we understand ourselves as human beings aren’t timeless or natural, no matter how much we take them for granted. Rather, the modern concept of “man” was invented in the 18th century, with the emergence of new modes of thinking about biology, society, and language, and eventually it will be replaced in turn.

As Foucault writes in the book’s famous last sentence, one day “man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” The image is eerie, but he claimed to find it “a source of profound relief,” because it implies that human ideas and institutions aren’t fixed. They can be endlessly reconfigured, maybe even for the better. This was the liberating promise of postmodernism: The face in the sand is swept away, but someone will always come along to draw a new picture in a different style.

So, apparently, Foucault thinks the condition of man is not a condition at all, it is a collection of circumstances engendering new, shallow responses by an old, but shallow homo sapien. This notion has led to a lot of modern confusion about humanity as insubstantial, unstable, and arbitrary.

And, of course, dangerous. Man is more than erratic, he is a threat to himself and his environment. This view has great appeal among the Guardians of the Earth who stand like St. Michael with a flaming sword protecting the Garden. Two groups have emerged that agree mankind should go, but in very different ways.

The first is Anthropocene anti-humanism, inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment. This view would sacrifice human existence for the greater good of safeguarding the world.

Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that anti-humanism decries—scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. So humans would develop their successors. Those successors would presumably be designed in a way superior to their creators with better motives for protecting the earth.

So much of the thinking of the future is led by people who hate the very nature of mankind, believe he is a disease contracted by an innocent Earth, and are eager to destroy or replace him.
(Adapted from an article in The Atlantic)


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