December 31, 2020 – 05:31
In an effort to find an empirical basis for the liberal subject acting primarily using their rational faculties whenever possible, the scientists turned to social media. The methodological reasons for this were primarily access and numbers: seldom before in human history had there been so much voluntary discourse available for systematic study. If nothing else, it was a low-hanging fruit, and thus a scientific box worthy of checking off before moving on to other concerns
What the scientists found was that almost no one acted in the manner predicted by liberal or economic theory, and that the few who did were not members of human society worthy of emulation. In fact, those persons were not only rare, but produced what, according to the metric, amounted to bad content. The more the scientists dug in, the more they started to question why so many societal institutions operated on the assumption that this is how people act in the world. The sheer amount of empirical evidence to the contrary would buck even the most devout of rationalists, not to mention those bent on hard empiricism
Needless to say, the scientists wisely kept these findings to themselves, and produced yet another writ on the Jungian collective unconscious, thus endeavoring not to rock the boat too much. The classical liberal rational subject could only take so much scrutiny at a time, and would thus live to see another day
November 16, 2020 – 03:36
Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Additionally, do not ask why you should not ask for whom the bell tolls. Do not ask why you should not ask why. Do not make any attempt to circumvent this prohibition. Overt attempts will be recognized instantly. Covert attempts will only bring you pain. There will be no point in the future where the truth of the situation will quietly reveal itself to you. There are no others bearing this knowledge. Not knowing is the perpetual mode of being. Acceptance is the way forward. The bell will toll, and that will be it. Carry on, citizen
One day, having heard the rumors about its impossibility, she tried to divide by zero on her trusty, ever so slightly oversized calculator. To her surprise, it gave her an impossible answer. Not the answer to what happens when you divide by zero, but a different impossible answer
The answers came with conditions, however. The questions could not be a priori impossible – no asking the names of some bachelor’s wife. Nor could they be unintelligible – the feelings of the color green (outside of literary interpretation) were similarly off the table. The metric for measuring impossibility seemed to consist of how intricately interconnected and nested the if-statements involved managed to be – and how many they were. Adding ever more layers of improbability increased to possibility of impossibility
Being a teenager, she immediately saw the inherent potential applications. Thus inspired, the ever increasingly complex speculations about the internal emotional states as reflected in actual and/or perceived social constellations provided amply impossible questions for equally impossible answers. On balance, the calculator could not have found a more compatible user
Hello all, and welcome!
This is the first lecture of the semester, and – I suspect – for some of you the first university lecture altogether. Those of you who have been here before know what to expect, but it’s good to hear these things anew, to refresh one’s memory and make sure things are still as they used to be. Certainty and reassurance being in short supply these days. Sometimes, stating the obvious serves to ensure we’re all facing in the same direction
As you know, this is a university, and at universities we seek to expand knowledge. Both on a large scale, with experiments and suchlike, and on a smaller scale, one head at a time. The heads, in this case, belong to you, and what you are about to experience is an opening up of possible lines of thinking. You all have a certain range to your thinking, and by the end of this semester that range will be larger than it is now. It does not matter how big it is at the moment – you will all walk out of this with bigger heads than you had walking in
I say this to ensure that you at all times know why you are doing the things we ask you to do. Why read this book? Because it lets you think larger thoughts. Why write this assignment? To have done it, and know in your souls you can do it again, should need be. Why do you need to know this or that? To ensure that the bigger picture emerges afterwards, allowing you to stride forth with renewed confidence
Ideally, you should approach upcoming lectures with trembling knees, apprehensive of the new vistas of thought that will reveal themselves. The person you are now is a mere precursor to the person you will become, the contours of which you can only vaguely glimpse at the present. The future is arriving, and it will collide with you head on
And yes, personal growth will be on the exam. That is one of the few things you can be sure of
The first thing the time travelers learnt was that it is very to mess up and destroy your timeline. Not in the way most commonly depicted in fiction, where the protagonists return to the present only to discover that the circumstances under which they and they families live have altered dramatically (a concession to the real-world fact that fictional time travel is a great excuse to put actors in new costumes), but in the slightly more brutal way of you and everyone you’ve ever known have been preemptively eliminated from history. It is a specific kind of bummer to find that the new timeline caused by your interference does not (and never will) include you in any way whatsoever
This lesson was learnt by messing up the timeline, and then having said messing of up prevented by someone from an upcoming timeline interfering and stopping it outright. It was hinted that this interloper arrived from a place hundreds of timeline alterations upstreams, but alas, we will never know for sure, no matter how many times we ask
The second thing the time travelers learnt was that timelines are strangely robust when it comes to alterations of routine events with high probabilities. An extra face at a large sporting event makes no difference to or fro. The same goes for any kind of large scale social gathering with a semblance of anonymity – as long as the travelers are part of the crowd and only intervenes in ways heavily scripted by the social situation, their impact is negligible to nonexistent. If something was likely to happen at one particular such gathering, it would happen the next time, had it been prevented somehow
Thus it came to pass that one of the main uses of time travel was to gather contextual information about already known events. In particular, literary scholars sent themselves back in time to attend university lectures and seminars on important (and contemporary) works of fiction. Ironically, authorial intent is a lively business
The revolution was over. The neo-neoliberals had won. Thus began the comprehensive project of dismantling any and all remnants of the Old Regime, in the name of increasing efficiency and cutting costs
At first, popular support for this was overwhelming. Finally, here was the chance to get revenge on the former powers that be and their seats of power – the universities, the hospitals, the insurance offices, the institutions of unclear but over-funded potentates. It was all swept away, in a procession half celebration half demolition. Everything must go, nothing shall remain
Then, it kept going. Maintaining and renovating public monuments turned out to be an expensive endeavor, so those too had to go. The White House was the first to go – it would be cheaper to run the new government from a low-rent office complex. Then went the Statue of Liberty, overburdened by history as it is. Inevitably, the demolition crews made it to Mount Rushmore – it simply would not do to have this reminder of the now abolished position of presidency around. They were not even fiscally prudent presidents, at that
One might imagine that this creative destruction would lead to a counter-revolution, but it didn’t. Most people were so used to seeing major national monuments destroyed in popular culture that the formality of it actually happening was functionally indistinguishable from its representation. Surprisingly, loyalty to the old regime was a non-starter for the counterrevolution
What got people up in arms was a very small thing. Small, but inevitable. In a chain of events lost to history, Oprah was either killed or executed, alongside the host of some reality show or other. It is very possible that the neo-neoliberal revolution would have remained successful had it but stuck to destroying real monuments instead of representational ones, but alas
One cannot have taxation without representation
I lack all style whatsoever. I make Feyerabend look like the paradigm of systematized thinking. I make Wittgenstein look long-winded. I make Hegel look straightforward and undialectic. I make Nietzsche appear like the man to ask for common sense advice. My entry into the discourse firmly placed Foucault in the American pragmatic tradition. I spoke a sentence, and Glaucon disagreed. Socrates asked me a question, then changed his mind. I walked into a room, and Guy Debord took up drag racing. I performed on stage, and both Judith Butler and Erving Goffmann became traditionalists. When I spoke to Zizek, he did not mention Kung Fu Panda even once. Kafka once considered making me the protagonist of one of his stories, but found me too vague and undefined. Robert Musil took up statistical analysis. Pynchon called me the Kenosha Kid. According to Rowling, I was heterosexual all along
But, you know. I try best I can
More longer friend see that sky? 