the fencing response is the result of brain stem trauma, not pain.

the problem is that he was wrong; Empathy is a good thing. You are embodying his shitty ideology by not having empathy. That doesn’t mean you gotta suddenly like the guy or not call out his shitty ideology, but don’t let yourself get dragged down into the septic tank and get covered in the shit.

I’ll gladly die on this hill, get at me nerds

his book on propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, is also well worth a read.

I think his ideas on concentration camps/prison camps slot in nicely with Deleuze’s ideas about Control Societies and the ways that technology is being used to extend the Foucaultian ideas of discrete enclosures to never-ending enclosures in all aspects of life.

And, if you like Ellul, you should definitely check out Ivan Illich’s work. He’s another social critic coming from a heterodox Christian perspective (Catholic in this case). His ideas can seem a bit unintuitive at and even off-putting to modern sensibilities at times (especially his idea of Life as Idol and his critique of modern medicine in general) but he’s another guy with a lot going on that has been pretty accurate in his prognosticating of contemporary society.

many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)

A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control”, which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs.

The real king here is Baudrillard but his writing isn’t always the most accessible

there’s a lot of mid-century French theorists spinning in their graves right now

IRC continues to demonstrate the superiority of protocols over platforms. Unfortunately, the modern internet is entirely dominated by centralized platforms and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

is there currently any work being done to do that though? It’s great that that is possible but if nobody is doing it, it’s only a cute hypothetical.

liberals gonna lib but what does the acceptance, or rejection, of science have anything to do with it? Plenty of fascists have had no problem embracing science as a method of political expediency and plenty of leftists have rejected scientific advance as a measure of political progress.

that’s some delicious red herring you’ve got there

the only thing more aggravating than using imperial is having to listen to all the complaining about how metric is better. We get it, bro; it’s out of our control at this point

but now you can use the magic words that get the morons in the executive suites all hot and bothered

the thing to do here is to continue referring to it as the DoD. I know that nobody of any consequence will do anything that could be construed as interesting but a person can dream

voting only works if you also put in the work after the fact. When biden got elected, suddenly all the political fervor of the previous ~4 years vanished. And, assuming we get out of the current morass in one piece, it’s likely that all the uproar going on now will similarly disappear once “our guy” is in the oval office again.

Voting is the least any person can do, but without pounding the pavement and going out and doing the legwork, it’s just a bone they throw to us so we shut up. It happens every time, in every presidential election I can remember, and yet there are still people out here saying “but dae vote or dont complain!!:!:!:!:!”!“!”!?!!:!L!". It’s insulting.

There are few, if any, actually effective political movements that relied solely on officially approved political avenues to achieve anything. The Civil Rights movement in the US didn’t merely vote until the federal government deigned them worthy of being treated like human beings; they got out in the streets and demanded equality. The Indian Independence movement didn’t succeed by only appealing to the official colonial political apparatus using whatever methods were allowed them. They went and earned it.

So, whenever the liberal voting bloc is ready to stop letting themselves be politically infantilized by the electoral process, get at me.

the next big industry in software is fixing shitty AI code, screen this