Nature is “the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve — and nothing else.”

Although Derrida, in a 2004 lecture, suggests that “Deleuze laughs at psychoanalysis, to me, sometimes, a little too quickly,” and he jokes that part of Deleuze’s “absolute originality in French” is “admiring Jung more than Freud,”[vii] it is Derrida himself who perhaps laughs too quickly in this case given the admiration for Jung expressed by Bergson, Bachelard, and Simondon

Peterson claimed that being trans is a “sociological contagion” comparable to “satanic ritual abuse" During the podcast, Rogan and Peterson speculated on what causes a person to be trans. Peterson asserted that the answer is a “sociological contagion” comparable to “the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s,” referring to the “rash of false allegations” about supposed occult child abuse that fueled the “satanic panic” during the 1980s and early 1990s. 

Martin Heidegger regards Western metaphysics as ontotheology, which has taken various forms throughout history but essentially retained its fundamental characteristic: it has come to forget Being and turned to various forms and concepts of beings, mistaking them for Being.

general theory of the creative imagination

Greece, a topic that increasingly drew his attention, not as a blueprint to be copied but an experiment that could inspire a truly autonomous community

ne of Castoriadis' many important contributions to social theory was the idea that social change involves radical discontinuities that cannot be understood in terms of any determinate causes or presented as a sequence of events. Change emerges through the social imaginary without strict determinations,[21] but in order to be socially recognized it must be instituted as revolution.

... psychoanalysis can and should make a basic contribution to a politics of autonomy. For, each person's self-understanding is a necessary condition for autonomy. One cannot have an autonomous society that would fail to turn back upon itself, that would not interrogate itself about its motives, its reasons for acting, its deep-seated [profondes] tendencies. Considered in concrete terms, however, society doesn't exist outside the individuals making it up. The self-reflective activity of an autonomous society depends essentially upon the self-reflective activity of the humans who form that society.[140]

For Castoriadis, self-examination, as in the ancient Greek tradition, could draw upon the resources of modern psychoanalysis. Autonomous individuals—the essence of an autonomous society—must continuously examine themselves and engage in critical reflection. He writes:

Castoriadis began to develop his distinctive understanding of historical change as the emergence of irrecoverable otherness that must always be socially instituted and named in order to be recognized

1/10 What World is this? Oh yeah the CW. terrylarosa12 January 2022 Within 10 minutes some potential lesbianism, encouraging, interracial adopted parents, small town with black and white people living together, awful disgusting rap music. Check check check. Thankfully Superman and Lois mostly stays away from this nonsense. Another alien show. Avoid.

The way Anthony Fauci talked to the Republicans is how everyone should talk to rightwing extremists. Am I on to something? Absolutely. For a lot of people on the left, Fauci’s pushback was refreshing. People are tired of the pandering, and of watching misinformation be lumped into the category of “free speech.”  While Fauci’s “moron” comment was indeed a great moment of transparency, we should also consider his ability to humanize the situation with the anecdote about his own harassment.

“Once Trump normalized discourse that was hateful, xenophobic, conspiratorial and sexist, he made it more mainstream. People who previously self-censored those thoughts felt free to not only think them, but say them – particularly on social media, where anonymity removes accountability. That hasn’t really changed.”

Living in spheres means creating the dimension in which humans can be contained. Spheres are immune-systematically effective space creations for ecstatic beings that are operated upon by the outside” (I, 28). Spheres then are shelters from formless, chaotic, and inhuman forces. They can be found wherever humans are found – in the womb, in the family, among friends, in church, in nations and empires, and on maps of our world and the cosmos. One might see each social or ideological sphere as the phenotypic expression of the human need for community.

No one really has the language yet to describe the fragmentation of perspective that is beginning to unfold. Liberal democracy is designed to accommodate multiple "opinions" or even "points of view", but it's clear that what's happening now is beyond this.

Deleuze draws a different conclusion: judging images according to the degree to which they conform to the idea, imposes the constraints of Platonic representation on the simulacrum; ordering it according to the requirements of similarity and imitation, and thus obstructing its demonic “power of the false.” This is why Plato splits the domain of images in two, making that part which conforms to the original, the copy, placid in its conformity, while locking up that part which remains rebellious, the simulacrum, “in a cavern at the bottom of the Ocean.” This, Deleuze claims, is Plato’s motivation in setting up the domain of representation, overseen by the theory of ideas, which “philosophy will later recognise as its own” and which Nietzsche calls on those in the future to overthrow; by allowing the simulacrum to rise to the surface, in order to affirm its “phantasmatic power,” its power to deceive.

At this conjuncture, taking to Twitter to assert one’s antifascist bona-fides is just as futile as studying Sanskrit in resistance to authoritarian communism. Just as futile, and a lot less interesting.

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …– From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt

Before the internet, escaping to the wilderness was touted for its health benefits. Now, it is a remedy to the abstract category of technology — screen light and digital noise

In 1995, environmental historian William Cronon published “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In it, he critiques the Western concept of “wilderness” as nothing but a fantasy that prevents us from meaningfully engaging with ecological systems. He argues that the idea of wilderness is beset by a central paradox: It supplies the “ultimate landscape of authenticity,” allowing for the purest expression of a human self, and yet it excludes human presence by definition (wilderness is wherever other humans are not). Wilderness thus remains a “profoundly human creation” — charged with individualism — in which we perceive not “nature,” but “the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.”

The irony in all this is that these “protectors of enlightenment” are guilty of the very behavior this phrase derides. Though often dismissed as just a fringe internet movement, they espouse unscientific claims that have infected our politics and culture. Especially alarming is that these “intellectual” assertions are used by nonscientists to claim a scientific basis for the dehumanization of trans people. The real world consequences are stacking up: the trans military ban, bathroom bills, and removal of workplace and medical discrimination protections, a 41-51 percent suicide attempt rate and targeted fatal violence . It’s not just internet trolling anymore.

Focus 2022 Borders, Migration and KnowledgeThe migration of people is intimately connected to the migration of knowledge and culture. However, strong international borders still define what is considered national literature, art, or history and which artists, writers, and thinkers from which parts of the world gain global recognition. We invite project applications that explore how national and international canons are produced and changed. Under what conditions do knowledge and culture circulate easily, and when are they blocked? What powers and interests are served when canons are defined? How do museums, universities, archives, and libraries change when traditional intellectual and cultural power centers are displaced or decentered? Questions concerning borders, migration, knowledge production and circulation as well as social and cultural transfers across nations are the focus of the current call for applications for Ph.D. scholarships. We encourage applications for projects concentrating on following aspects, although other topics will also be considered: - trajectories of migration and mobility of cultural and intellectual production, - social and cultural dimensions of borders, - cultural borders and their manifestation in arts and cultural production, - circulation of ideas and knowledge, - the changing understanding of the “national”, - transnational and global cultural institutions and canons, - decolonizing decoloniality – what is a decentered approach to producing, disseminating, teaching about and acting upon knowledge in more equitable ways. We invite applications from Ph.D. students worldwide studying borders and bordering phenomena in different regions of the world. Both empirical research based on extensive fieldwork and projects centered on theoretical reflection are eligible for support. Innovative and challenging research questions as well as comparative approaches are highly welcome.

MacDonald's outstanding work complements Ricardo Duchesne's "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization" and Arthur Kemp's "March of the Titans." Read more

Schneider has continued to break records on Jeopardy! and has extended her record for longest winning streak by a woman with her 24th victory. She has become the highest-earning woman in the show’s history and fourth highest-earning regardless of gender, with a total of $897,600 (just over £660,000).

“I’d like to thank all the people who have taken the time, during this busy holiday season, to reach out and explain to me that, actually, I’m a man,” she wrote. Schneider continued: “Every single one of you is the first person ever to make that very clever point, which had never once before crossed my mind.”

Then she will make her way to the grief sub I help mod and will start posting that Doctors and Nurses killed him and screaming at other people grieving Covid deaths that they are sheep who are going to die of a fake disease.

In the face of these deaths, their surviving friends and supporters have started to allege that the dead QAnon figures are being murdered, either because they were refused internet folk remedies like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, or because they were killed by the deep-state to cover up their conspiracy theories. In December, Kuzma and a number of other conspiracy theorists were sickened with COVID-like symptoms after appearing together at a conference. Rather than acknowledge that they had COVID, the far-right influencers suggested they had been targeted by an anthrax attack.

Milan Kundera tells us that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The Secret Life of “Political Correctness” In his campaign speeches, including Trump’s New Hampshire speech following the June 2016 massacre of 49 people at an Orlando, Florida nightclub, Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked “political correctness”. “I refuse to be politically correct”, Trump told his New Hampshire audience. “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap,” he complained to South Carolina business leaders back in September 2015. “This country, political correctness is killing us,” Trump charged in a February 2016 interview on NBC’s Today show. Throughout the primary season Donald Trump has attacked “political correctness” so much, it might have raised the question – was he aware of the dark new conspiracy theory association that the term “political correctness” has taken on, over the past decade and a half, for many on the American right ? If he wasn’t, he probably is now.

In his new book, Lazzarato deals, among other things, with the differences of the old and the new fascism. Adorno already suggested that the new fascism does not have to come with uniforms, boots and Nazi symbols. For Lazzarato, too, it is clear that after 40 years of neoliberal politics, what announces itself as a new fascism will not be a simple repetition of the interwar experience. For him, neo-fascism results from a twofold mutation, namely, on the one hand, from historical fascism and, on the other, from the organization of counter-revolutionary political violence. The historical fascism, after the revolutionary forces were destroyed, was quite an agent of the process of „modernization“, which, „integrated“ socialism and eliminated by force any manifestation of the conflict. In Italy, he restructured traditional industry and created the film industry, reformed the school system and the civil code, and, like the Nazis, established a kind of welfare state. Adam Tooze points out that the history of the intimate relationship between capital and fascism was rewritten and distorted during the Cold War, omitting, for example, the fact that as early as 1935 important banks such as JP Morgan collaborated closely with people who were later treated as fascist criminals.

Information exceeds communication. Deleuze: “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” Information is at once this resistance, and what it resists — its own dead form, communication.McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto

One of Deleuze’s goals was to “deterritorialize” the West (which is equivalent to making it alien to natives) and to give advantages to “minorities.” Foucault wanted to transform history (in which the living are heirs of the dead), into a heap of chance events, cut off from each other, serving only to show the cruel domination of Westerners over others. For Bourdieu, inequalities were caused by perverse actions of the system on individuals who are equal, not only in rights, but in capacities.

Universities Since the 1970s, French university leftists (Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu), have elaborated systems of deconstruction and delegitimization of the West, which have even reached the United States. This approach makes the white man a sedentary, anecdotal minority. This seems to have been a conscious ambition: to bring about an intellectual and philosophical revolution like those that had taken place in science and industry.

“LOOKS LIKE CIVIL WAR is BECOMING INEVITABLE !!!” read a post a month before the Capitol assault. “WE CANNOT ALLOW FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS TO STAND ! SILENT NO MORE MAJORITY MUST RISE UP NOW AND DEMAND BATTLEGROUND STATES NOT TO CERTIFY FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS NOW !”

Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.