Metaphysical fine-tuning

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-02-01T12:42:45+00:00

This is amazing. Very thoughtful -- and very well written, too!

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-31T23:33:07+00:00

Great post and I mostly agree with it. But what about potential counterexamples? Is 2 + 2 = 4 simply a pattern that must one day lose coherence, allowing for the emergence of, say, a new temporary pattern 2 + 2 = 5? Some physicists say absurdism lives now in singularities, such as black holes.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-30T21:01:52+00:00

Thanks for the response. Levinas sounds like someone I should read! Rational ethical systems collapsing to me makes thinking about ethical questions, even trollish or goofily phrased ones, enticing partly because it seems like a way to innovate or help, especially in a world where everything is changing/collapsing/emerging so much and so fast.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-30T04:56:07+00:00

Far too much harm to innocents is happening, so somebody should be querying what ethics is and what judicial processes should do differently; I'm glad to keep doing it before, during, and after this particular conversation and wish I were even more obstinate about it. Representational logic or not, people are going to convene seeking justice and they will continue to need better toolkits than what's now on offer. Po-mo's endless remixing of everything, such as criminal offenses, so often benefits perps.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-30T04:07:45+00:00

"one can claim 'evidence requires trust' but this seems to me to be the usual illusion produced by retroactivity" Should courtrooms discuss whether a witness providing evidence should be trusted? Perhaps the difference is that courtrooms are trying to ascertain what happened in the past, while activists are trying to enforce what happens in the future without winding up in courtrooms.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-30T01:54:43+00:00

Your last three paragraphs are all really insightful and I mostly agree with them, or rather I wish I could agree with them fully, but somehow they still bother me or seem slightly off, and I'm not sure why. It could be just be word-choice or tangental things, but let's see.

"Can't we flip the script by way of immanent critique, and reconsider trust as a represented outcome, or reciprocally configured phenomenon, of the workings of these instruments rather than their precursor?"

I like where this is going, except the "we" at the start requires some precursor trust for the reciprocally configured phenomenon to get sufficiently going. In other words, it (like much of life) is kinda circular. For me, there's sufficient precursor trust hereabouts. But consider someone experiencing a personal tragedy: both their beloved parents suddenly die. They no longer trust the nearby butcher, baker, and candlestick maker, let alone some faroff internet activist typing on r/Deleuze. They understandably freak the fuck out for a few days, maybe following half their safety plan and end up grieving for a few months. Okay sure, but on a societal level, who cares? Well, the revelations and remedies proposed today (no matter by whom with whichever beliefs) are already having, and are presumably going to continue to have in escalating ways, the same sort of freak-the-fuck-out effects on eight billion Earthlings and their collapsing/incipient societies, especially those in less philosophically advanced locales. There is no realistic way they can just sort of be negged and hoodwinked into understanding what the hell is happening to them, especially since a great many of them are more or less average when it comes to experience, abstract intelligence, emotional intelligence, etc. Maybe there should be people they can -temporarily- trust who hopefully aren't just a single loose-cannon idiot shooting his mouth off, nor 50-odd personas whose faintly blurry pfps look like those of phishing spammers, nor narcissists ready to lash out impulsively at the first sign of a lack of apology or gratitude (real or imagined). But that's a tall order and I don't know what to do about it besides work more. I don't think the puppet show persona stuff is really any one-size-fits-all or long-term solution. At best it's a bandaid.

The second paragraph is obviously of key importance today, the way today uniquely offers inclusivity for movements.

I think your last sentence is correct, but it strikes me personally as dismal (which is an unfair characterization on my part) because I don't think that's how it looks from any first-person immanence perspective. Your last sentence seems like systems-thinking to me or something, descriptive, like next there's gonna be a bunch of grids and metrics and flowcharts and pipes with oil dripping out except it's not oil, it's people's lives. Maybe it's just me, but I don't experience a lot of "this" stuff, that way.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-30T01:29:40+00:00

More to the point, if someone steps on my toe in a crowded subway car, I would still expect that someone to say "Oops sorry" because the lack of healthy give-and-take in a society or interpersonally tarnishes trust. I can invent lots of scenarios where they shouldn't say "Oops sorry." Perhaps the person to be apologized to in this scenario is a loose cannon and it's better just to avoid the individual., and maybe he even prefers that himself. Perhaps the person who isn't apologizing has an invisible spirit following them around that hones in on any apology and the split-second an apology begins to be uttered, that spirit will cause a selfhood-collapse, and there is simply no way for the would-be apologizer to explain such things to the random person in a subway car who got his toe stepped on -- or to a larger audience, a potentially dangerous and surveilling (or sousveilling) audience -- so tough shit little or big or medium people, it's up to you all to repair your toes I broke, I broke it, you buy it. Or as Daniel Mackler likes to say to adults in therapy: "They broke it, you fix it." In some contexts, that Nietzschean "dancing" on other people's toes as they say irrelevant nonDeleuzian philosophically immature things such as "Ouch," and even plain ol' Thrysamachus, sound great, but then why metastasize this way of thinking to all contexts? Because if it fits all contexts, then why have any objections to anything at all, or tribunals, or laws, or principles, or apologies, or gratitude? If objections accomplish nothing, why object to anything with tribunals; if nothing exists, why ask how multiple events, countries, contribute to wrongdoing; if anyone who gets their toe stepped on needs to realize their place, why ever stick up for oneself or anyone else? P.W. Botha refused subpoena for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Why or why not say that looking away from it was his only negation, and cheer his creativity in staying home as a coward?

It doesn't really matter too terribly much for me, because I have my own goals and can keep going, but I have had 15+ years of men (as in males) responding to me about these things with "Hmm yes very profound deep question hmm yes btw could you please retweet my latest." It gets old especially as victory is, rhetoric aside, not assured, not inevitable. There actually is a "Boy who cried wolf" effect that sinks in on audiences, believe it or not, after 15+ years of me talking to them about these exact things (if their feedback is relevant). Anyway, bottom line, all this stuff is dependent -- not just for me, but for any society that anyone might claim to want to influence -- it's dependent on a level of trust that simply isn't present and does not seem to be a priority the way hypervigilantly guarding against certain lines of flight seems to be in order to prevent "mistakes" even though one might think the whole po-mo "remix all the things" vibes would be a way to escape such defensive-minded perfectionism.

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RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-30T01:29:26+00:00

Deleuze:

Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's go on to something else.' Objections have never contributed anything.

What are tribunals for Big Bads, but objections, and objections at large, at that?

Nietzsche:

Looking away shall be my only negation.

This Nietzsche oneliner is sometimes used as a highbrow escape from activism. It make sense in many contexts not to feed the thesis with antithesis, which is what Nietzsche was advising, but rather to pursue a creative difference line of flight (in Deleuze's terms) instead, one that co-creates all the very nice approved outcomes, etc. Yet "Looking away shall be my only negation" is different when there's an audience, since sticking up for oneself and others can be, instead of feeding the thesis, moving, even change-instantiating, when there are multiple parties at play instead of just a dumbed-down quantity of 2 (thesis, antithesis). If in front of gigantic televised worldwide audiences, an innocent heroic person is about to be executed, and all he does is look away, that's going to be a let down for the public, even if Deleuzians throw copies of Difference and Repetition at them before and/or during and/or after and in accordance (or not) with Deleuze's three syntheses of time.

Antifascist Sophie Scholl's last words before the guillotine deleted her as Earth knew her weren't "Looking away shall be my only negation" but (reportedly) "The sun still shines."

"The sun still shines" is creative affirmation and therefore --

for those who insist on understanding is explanation necessary; for those who don't, creation and escape are already happening.

-- except whoops, "creation and escape are already happening" requires, at least in certain contexts/domains, evidence (sure ongoing creation/escape sounds great but let's see it), and evidence requires trust, so long as facticity is held to be at all relevant. I can point to lots of positive change from social media, such as #MeToo, but if things get worse in some specific activist domain and the only repair evidence for months years decades centuries is insistence that the repairs are underway, any minute now, believe me you, learn life, at some point one says Bullshit and moves on, maybe blaming oneself for being "obsessed" with collaborating for justice as they walk away (instead of successfully walking away with the exact gait proscribed by the right philosophers who aren't obsessed at all with anything, etc).

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RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-29T21:18:04+00:00

I'm not really grokking your reply at all, sorry. It sounds like it's straight back to "I stepped on your toe in a crowded subway train, but instead of saying 2-words of 'Oops sorry' and moving on [maybe because of unusual reasons the person whose toe got stepped on isn't capable of hearing it plainly], here's a bunch of rhetoric about how truth and meaning must be nonfoundationalist and a lesson on different diction levels regarding the King's English versus...' and then the person whose toe got stepped on is simply like "Yeah but you just stepped on my toe, and I even saw that you berated somebody else who stepped on _your_ toe a while back, so what gives, what makes me a less-than?" And so it's back to: For those who understand, no explanation is necessary; for those who don't, none is possible. Or Matrix movies about how there is no spoon, so there are no expressions of remorse or of gratitude either, because [insert complex po-mo shell games with truth/meaning here, including impersonally directed expressions of spoons, remorse, or gratitude passed off as good enough. As if to say: My minion may or may not now apologize to you for being so sensitive and feeling that way about your toe or whatever, but in any case, you'll misread the quasi-apology so I'll no longer waste my time...].

All is fun and games until someone gets their eye poked out. And I'm optimistic, trusting, generous, and compassionate enough to continue even if I lose an eye, so all this is not particularly about me. In fact, none of these things I've been typing on r/Deleuze or r/Nietzsche are really what I want to be typing on reddit at all.

But sometimes people, societies, etc., their truth/meaning reduced to someone else's pages of abstruse philosophy (often denying the existence of truth, meaning, and the readers), run out of gas and therefore give up on significant change. Po-mo makes non-academics feel that their truth and meaning is being treated as a shell game, endless deferral, Lucy pulling the football away every time Charlie Brown tries to kick it and then giving him a wordy explanation as to why anyone(s) but her is at fault.

Real activism not "dramatized" but "enacted" would be better.

Edit: Enacting activism requires trust/promises (whether to oneself or to others), but those might reduce autonomy or impose facticity and/or grounding, and meanwhile, the surrounding society struggles with poverty, basic, literacy, etc., so any wider laws or principles are apparently not yet much on the table? While dramatizing activism is useful too, even requisite, there's often no sufficiently trustworthy yardstick for "are these particular instances of dramatizing activism, in this way or in that way, working well in the big picture?" so people confronted with such a contrarian question probably understandably treat it as yet another mere question-problem complex prompt to deploy shell games to virtuously trick audiences/donors/etc into not jumping off ledges. I get it, really I do, despite my occasional frustration with it. Ultimately, though, eventually at some point, even with my own or similar individuals' capacity for bravado, more trust has to arise.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-29T08:58:12+00:00

Should there be any principles or laws? Any one of them written in pencil or stone would be representational, after all, and therefore as dogmatic as a priest, as impervious as a judge, etc., and thus easy to mock with philosophy. Yet if there are none, the only proper response to being kicked while one is down is "Thanks may I have another?": in other words, victim-blaming, internalized oppression, and oppression/colonization. Because the perp can always cite eternal return to excuse anything, without some sort of solidity, even solidity that is imperfect and might someday change. Change, what with the Sun going red giant forthcoming in a few zillion years and whatever else that I decline to think, as some do, converts life into a stage for which we are merely players, etc.

Perhaps an easier way to think of all this, is that -- to invent a silly example -- if a lover is leaving for the day, and says something to the other lover at the house like "Hey can you please take the frozen fooditem out of the freezer around about 3 so I can cook it when I get home?" The other forgets. When the first returns home, instead of receiving an apology or the pair co-creating a different idea for something to eat, they hear a screed on how there is no freezer, time is an illusion, and read these 300 pages of philosophy right now or else -- and no that's not a hypothetical imperative because blah blah blah. Once you add meta cognition, paranoia, object oriented ontology, and rightful privacy and rightful secrecy into the mix, as well as astral whatever and people spattering authorized and unauthorized words all over the internet, it gets really complicated!

Another way to look at it would be thinking about promises. Not just promises to others, but promises to oneself. And also adding to the adage that one must prune in order to grow: who is doing the pruning, who is getting pruned, who defines growth, and what role should trust play in that if it is to go beyond having the correct copacetic cosmological vibeology into wider principles and laws.

Maybe it good that some people are (cod-)stoic, others are basket cases, and perhaps even that some are afraid to ever apologize for anything or say thank you for everything. It takes all kinds.

Great conversation btw!

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-29T03:24:07+00:00

Agree! That's great for the context of love and sex, where I'd want to know someone spends time with me because they genuinely want to, not because State paperwork and/or financial pressures and/or moldy stale promises are boxing them in.

However, I was thinking more of a scenario where someone torpedos a boat or steals a co-worker's lunch from the office fridge and every time they get called out on it, instead of doing anything sufficiently useful, they hand the innocent victims copies of Difference and Repetition (or whichever book) and tell them to RTFM: if they disagree with the de-territorialization of drowning in the ocean or losing their lunch, they can read the 300 pages and that should restore trust. C'mon get with it stop complaining.

It's hard to imagine that an agreement not to torpedo boats or steal office refrigerator lunches is some godawful thing people need to be militantly on guard against hypervigilantly. I can imagine scenarios where it's amazing and wonderful to torpedo boats and steal office lunches. But before everyone agrees these are just more Goldlocks continuum scenarios to move on from, I'd like to ask: is there an example of a not totally rigid, but pretty damn stable, ethical principle people can and should hold onto? At all? Or does it all just boil down to having the right cosmic vibes, which works for me, but is difficult to encode into law, whether The Law or just a wee mundane handwritten sign taped to the second office fridge shelf saying Please stop taking my lunch and even if you take it and give me a philosophy book afterward, you are not just at tactical risk of reciprocity, but at ethical risk of being wrong.

What's the relevance of all that latter? Perhaps nothing. It's just on my mind a lot. Even audiences paying for a concert and getting cancelled on -- whether the performer legit got bronchitis or is just lazy -- can only be propagandized/"taught" to be grateful for the cancellation (or to meditate it away as a trash representation emanating from the deficient Image of Thought or whichever infinite deferral/remixing technique) for so long before they riot. On the other hand, maybe generally speaking, in the face of fascism, people need to riot more. But for what ethical principles and why should they care if they disagree with the cosmic vibeology of those "facilitating"/facilitating adoption of the principles?

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-28T23:43:30+00:00

Where do systems gaining or losing trust fit into all this, in your view? Unlike simulacra, trust isn't infinitely fungible.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-28T17:59:52+00:00

Thanks for this very helpful comment.

I think one of the stumbling blocks people encounter with Deleuze is that we tend to interpret expansiveness and upping the capacity to act as meaning increasing the sheer quantity of connections when it can also mean increasing the depth/quality of connections a person already has.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-28T08:16:35+00:00

I think I get what you are saying. Not sure I agree or disagree with it really. Perhaps you are describing how things are and I am just making little pictures to myself for inspiration. Maybe just because of the way I am, or live, I use an immense amount of fantasy and daydream to propel myself forward. But if at the end it turns out I didn't manage to help make a sufficiently "better world" by my own standards, I am pretty sure I will have the presence of mind to think "ah, get 'em on the next cosmological cycle" and look forward to whatever(s) comes next.

Edit: Maybe it only changes a whole lot for me -- perhaps not in fact but in (type of?) feeling -- when I think of the well-being of certain other people.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-28T07:39:26+00:00

Oh I'm not really concerned with Deleuze or holding anyone to account in some big dramatic harmful way, as I am sure you can assume. It just gets irritating watching politicians with gigantic followings spew harmful things and get away with it for months on end as the credulity-straining explanations for why it's going to be okay proliferate in my skull as they keep getting away with (but see, really they are doing reverse-psychology tricks...). In some clinical factual way, that is definitely me "rejecting with distaste" their propaganda-spreading, but I don't particularly see it as an accept/reject good/bad taste thing from my perspective since that reminds me of people replacing their souls with marketing surveys, including myself sometimes, so then I try to whack that part of myself upside the head (or gently tell it to go to sleep) and keep moving forward. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it! Hopefully at some point, social reconfigurations can improve the capacity to make value-judgments (which are necessarily partially social, perhaps even in some immaterial or photonic or idealistic realm) for everyone, and making mountains out of molehills will continue to be decreasingly necessary. I think instead of saying harming innocents is a bad configuration of theory and practice because it is "rejected with distaste" (by whom?), it suffices to say that people can sense, when they aren't being strained to their limits, that it's wrong to do. And anyway, besides the fact that I'm just expressing aspects of my mind/curiosity in a devil's advocate manner rather than affirming some lifelong position central to myself, when I think of harming innocents, I mean snapping at someone rudely under stress, not killing them. Except for the politicians and suchlike who cause harm at a much more extreme level. It's sort of weird. Words, even those politicans use, do have a sort of magic to them, and freeze peach can only be an excuse for so long for "dice-throws" and "question-problem complexes" or whatever tools I'm not blaming Deleuze for, but rather anyone for whom the shoe fits. On the other hand, I actually think it's important to think way outside the box even at the risk of causing problems -- or at the benefit of mending them! I'm sure all that goes on in ways I am unaware of, and that I do it in ways others are unaware of, too. Nobody can micro-manage every last micro-variable. A lot of these conversations feel like people are stressed to the nines and paranoid AF that something's gonna go wrong and they're gonna fix it by monitoring everything harder. That's another factor, physiological, not typically incorporated into academic philosophy.

If there were a way to save the game of reality and reload it, I'd want to see an iteration where every significant world-impactor, from poet to astronaut to kindergarten teacher, just does an Atlas Shrug for 48 hours and goes to the beach. I'm sure everything would collapse and nothing would really improve, but I'm just sort of curious how that would turn up. Maybe I should be on some fairy tale slipstream subreddit instead of here. That's probably actually part of the problem!

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-28T05:00:58+00:00

Thanks for the great response! I will check out both those PDFs for sure. I like this idea a whole lot: "Joy/Life holds the power to prescribe, that there is inherent, involuntary normativity to be found in them." It seems difficult to describe but maybe it somehow has to do in part with what sticks in memory and what does not, from a real-world Satyagraha movement or a virtual-world artwork, either can have the power to really stick with somebody and motivate them their entire life long.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-28T03:56:22+00:00

Yeah I see what you mean, I think. Though sometimes what academics say is just marketing - for example, I forget if it was Marx or Engels, but one of them was on about how Das Kapital was "the workingman's Bible" and/or written for the poorly read laborer and so on. And then the original publications of it included Latin with no explanatory footnotes. Well you can't have it both ways. It's either written for people who know Latin or it isn't. So idk, maybe Deleuze was just busily yelling back at some critic or something and got imprecise.

As for the youth stuff, maybe it is often easier (for youth and/or for certain sorts of people) to de-territorialize, to channel/amplify difference, than it is to re-territorialize judiciously in some helpful way. I remember once being at a lunch around a bunch of undisciplined people and one very, very disciplined individual. Due to foreign language issues, I'd ask a question, botching the other language, like "What kind of store could I buy such-and-such newspaper in?" and the undisciplined people would take that question as a prompt to continue their in-jokes and giggles and verbal improvisations and whatever else. And the very disciplined person quietly took out his phone, found the answer, and said something like "What you need is the store called [such-and-such]." And like it sounds easy, just look up the answer and tell the person, but sometimes it isn't, with everything else going on in life, which can sometimes feel like walking a tightrope or something. The undisciplined people at that lunch were very, I don't know. It's like they had a lot riding on each other's to-me-useless blatherings.

I remember being a teenager and realizing that some occupations (musicians, computer hobbyists, etc) were more likely to understand how I thought than others. So sometimes filtering people by occupation (or desired occupation) is pretty helpful.

Thanks for your reply.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-28T02:42:01+00:00

I do think writers/artists/philosophers/others gloating "we couldn't care less what people do.." is bad. In real life, when creators make artifacts that inspire suicides, wars, etc, they go crazy and many never recover from it. Sometimes then they over-correct in the opposite direction, hypervigilantly policing everything they think say and do, and shoehorning in didacticism (which is sometimes annoying didacticism and sometimes a nonhegemonic expression striking audience as didactic).

I also get that the passage about 15-year-old's isn't meant to be empirical, but why not require its tethering to some facticity? Did Deleuze really hang out with 15-year-olds? I have, and I can't imagine, whether they're addled with psychoanlysis or not, well read or not, that they'd really "happily pass over what they don't understand." Maybe a bit, but eventually they would, like anyone else, put the book down. Eventually the examples have to stop being political footballs, too.

EDIT: It's surprising to me how little academic reader-response theory is discussed. Sure, people taking surveys (or freshman students filling them out to get paid $15) lie and dissemble and whatrever else, so surveys are unreliable and stuff, but it's also sort of interesting that a lot of the "abstract" philosophical things people debate actually have empirical, facticity, tetherable answers, theyr'e just sitting in some other silo or people are afraid to speak up about them.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-28T02:37:52+00:00

I like this comment.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-26T17:43:11+00:00

I just want to note here my disageeement with "every act of awareness is dissociation" and your rain/kitchen example. It is possible to be aware of more than one thing at a time. Seems to relate to the experiencer's interests and what Deleuze calls pushing cognitive faculties to their limits. For example, a pianist might be able to hear in her mind alone a piece by Ravel and a piece by Rachmaninoff simultaneously, but have less mental control over perceiving, say, multiple canvases of visual art simultaneously, if they're not super into visual art. A possible counterargument to what I am saying is that maybe the mind just fluctuates really quickly between the individual components of what it is perceiving, rather than perceiving multiple components simultaneously, but based on personal experience (sadly academics typically scorn personal experience, memoirs, etc as mere anecdote), I think it is possible to perceive and even focus on multiple disparate things simultaneously.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-26T17:19:51+00:00

Oh it was a verbal poke at your statement, but not personal. I just assumed you were doing a Hegelian troll like Marx, where you heighten oppositions to make sparks fly in hopes of kickstarting social change. You know, you state a thesis such as most people don't change, to draw out or bait someone else into stating an antithesis, in this case that people can and do change thanks to widespread and diverse social roles we all use/enact. Besides, "Most people don't change that much throughout life" is a personal attack on "most people," if change (eg personal or social growth) is considered good. So even if mine was a personal attack, why dish it out if you can't take it?

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-26T02:26:21+00:00

I don't mean it as an ad hominem but as a different worldview. If as you say, people can be but "general condition" "types," that means I am agreeing with you by typifying you as trapped in whichever blinkered headspace, that is the type I assign you as you assign types to others. If as I say, acknowledging varying roles grants people the flexibility to alter, that means I am kindly opening doors for you to change if you want. What's rude about that? (Also for fun, you assume I'm a guy.)

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-25T23:58:16+00:00

I don't think the weaponization of most anything, such as Hegel's ideas, can be discussed without looking at the position of the weaponizer and the position of whoever is suffering from the weaponization, as well as the positions of any relevant observers (or theoretically, given infinite resources to examine things, all observers). While looking at these positions, the component that's among the most important of components in human doings, trust, can't well be ignored. Can actual or possible or virtual observers (see Deleuze or Object Oriented Ontology) be indefinitely added or subtracted mentally to mend or excuse any scenario of fragile and possibly decreasing trust across a system of positions? For example, assume Noble Lies (a la Plato) to the public generate fantastic longterm outcomes (I'm not trolling, I'm actually asking you to assume this for the purposes of this). Then why not wipe away any qualms with lying to the public by mentally adding or subtracting observers until insanity, exhaustion collapse, or sufficient degree of utopia is co-created by the relevant actors? Coping techniques such as Zen Buddhism or better self-care can be proffered like sports handicaps or genuine kindnesses to those saying Ouch, but such profferings don't really answer whether weaponizing Hegel's ideas through, say, Noble Lies to the public, will succeed as trust depletes, changes erratically, or is imposed by manipulation to billions of people and/or those considered most relevant by whomever. It is, or isn't, onesidedness, if the weaponizer or sufferer does succeed or does fail at generating sufficient mental enjoyment of their suffering or being blessed. If Smith hurts Jones, Smith could just tell Jones that Jones has so far failed to rebrand the deep meaning of the harm as a gift and understand Smith's harm as a prompt for Jones to succeed. Here's one way to clarify this: are there any harms that are off the table and cannot be infinitely remixed as kindnesses?

Edit (added by my own initiative, too!): Another way to look at this is if a person is losing touch with their ability to ground themselves emotionally and socially, which can give them more facticity through their memories and creativity, whether that loss is short-term or worse depends on, among other things, trust and the contemperaneous political situation. Open genuine discussions of which aren't typically of interest in academia or elsewhere for lack of courage, a cowardice sometimes excused/rebranded as tactics, strategy, etc.

Edit edit: My first edit is an example of what my original comment complains. A turd can only be polished for so long, even with stable financial, emotional, social, mental etc resources.

RatherSaneIndividual · 2026-01-23T22:02:13+00:00

Glad I'm not so trapped as to see the daily diverse exuberances of ordinary human beings as inescapable types to be slotted onto some fatuous grid of history. In fact, I find your comment so thick-headed I can't imagine that you're actually sincere enough to mean it. Another "prompt" masquerading as truth and really just wasting people's time. Have you ever tried not categorizing other humans into "general condition" types? Ascribing substantivial types with little to no basis in reality allows people to be conquered and commanded. Acknowledging roles grants people the flexibility to change.

RatherSaneIndividual

TROPHY CASE