Some Sea Stories

On ciguatera poisoning:

On Dostoevsky's "The idiot"

From the Jowett summary of Plato's "Philebus"

We are now able to determine the composition of the perfect life. First, we admit the pure pleasures and the pure sciences; secondly, the impure sciences, but not the impure pleasures. We have next to discover what element of goodness is contained in this mixture. There are three criteria of goodness—beauty, symmetry, truth. These are clearly more akin to reason than to pleasure, and will enable us to fix the places of both of them in the scale of good. First in the scale is measure; the second place is assigned to symmetry; the third, to reason and wisdom; the fourth, to knowledge and true opinion; the fifth, to pure pleasures; and here the Muse says 'Enough.'

Defining Profilicity

Hans-Georg Moeller

Raumdeutung - On Gazeful Correctness

from Zizekian Analysis: "Gazeful Correctness: Empty Speech is the Good-Doing Speech Under the Gaze"

In a cinematic room, performance is the password. 

I. The Cinematic Room: Where Empty Speech is Good-Doing Speech

There is no space without a gaze. Every room—cinematic or real—comes with an implicit demand: perform, or be excluded. But what is this performance? It is not the articulation of authentic subjectivity, nor the communication of meaningful content. It is something far more fundamental: the recitation of empty speech as a password.

Slavoj Žižek, interpreting Lacan, reminds us that a password is a pure gesture of symbolic admission, its actual content irrelevant. “Aunt has baked the apple pie” functions as well as “Long live comrade Stalin!” as long as it grants access. In the cinematic room, this empty speech does not merely open doors—it confirms one’s belonging under the gaze.

Thus, we arrive at a paradox: good speech—the speech that does good—is precisely the speech that says nothing. It is the formulaic, correct, and gazeful utterance that does not disrupt the spatial order but rather reinforces it. To speak “correctly” is not to convey meaning but to demonstrate that one understands how the gaze structures space.

This is gazeful correctness: the discipline of saying the right nothing in the right way, under the right gaze, at the right time. 

II. Raumdeutung: How the Cinematic Room Became the New Unconscious

Freud’s late, apocryphal manuscript Raumdeutung (Interpretation of Space) foresaw this shift: the unconscious has migrated from the depth of the dream into the surface of space.

The dream was once the royal road to the unconscious. Now, space itself has become dreamlike, coded, pre-scripted, demanding that we move within it as though we were characters in a film.

Freud notes three new mechanisms of spatial control in cinematic culture: 

The Phallicization of Space: Every space is structured as a promise of fulfillment, yet this fulfillment never arrives. Like the staged climax of a film, it remains an illusory object, producing an endless deferral of desire. 

The Simulation of Causality: In a cinematic narrative, every event is meaningful—nothing happens by accident. This logic now infects real spaces, compelling individuals to believe that their presence, their roles, and their actions are necessary parts of a greater (scripted) whole. 

The Manipulation of Perception Through ‘Honorable Goygoy’: Certain subjects—particularly those pathologically phallicized through ironic detachment—use humor, play, and subversion to enforce spatial control without appearing authoritarian. They neutralize opposition not through repression, but through the choreography of permissible deviance.

Freud’s radical conclusion? Interpretation must shift from dream analysis to space analysis. To understand the unconscious today is to understand the hidden scripts embedded in space itself. 

III. Performance as the Password: Entering the Room Correctly

If space is structured like a film, then every entrance is a scene. And every scene requires a password—not a spoken one, but a performed one.

The password of modern space is correct performance. One must move, gesture, and speak in accordance with the invisible grammar of gazeful correctness. This performance is not about authenticity, but about survival.

Consider two figures in the cinematic room: 

The Silent Insider – This subject has mastered the art of empty speech. They know exactly when to nod, when to laugh, when to offer a neutral but affirming phrase. Their presence does not challenge the gaze but reflects it back. They do not produce meaning, but perform correctness. Their speech is good-doing speech—not because it changes anything, but because it allows the cinematic order to persist. 

The Errant Speaker – This subject does not understand the password. They either speak too much (filling space with uncontrolled meaning) or they fail to perform at all. They disrupt the spatial illusion by being too real, too literal, too opaque. This is not merely a social failure; it is an ontological transgression. They have broken the scene, and space reacts by expelling them.

To survive the cinematic room, one must learn the rules of gazeful correctness: 

Never speak first, unless speaking first is the expected gesture. 

Speak in a tone that acknowledges the gaze, but does not demand it. 

Make your speech smooth, frictionless, without ideological excess. 

Express an opinion, but only within the pre-approved spectrum of variability. 

Disagree, but always perform disagreement in the correct way—ironically, lightly, in a way that acknowledges the rules of the game. 

And above all, understand: the content of your words is irrelevant. Only the act of correct speech matters. 

IV. The Spatial Castration Threat: What Happens When the Password Fails?

Just as Freud described castration anxiety as the central unconscious threat to the subject, cinematic space enforces its own equivalent: the spatial castration threat.

To fail at gazeful correctness is not merely to be wrong. It is to be removed from space itself. The cinematic room does not tolerate the wrong kind of presence.

This threat manifests in three ways: 

Symbolic Invisibility: Those who fail to perform correctly find themselves seen less and less. The gaze moves past them, as if they were not there. Their speech does not provoke reaction—it simply disappears. 

Spatial Rejection: The errant speaker is gently, but unmistakably, excluded from spaces where their failure to perform would become disruptive. They are not directly banned, but spatially displaced—invited less, overlooked more, subtly repositioned as outside the scene. 

Affective Erasure: If the errant speaker persists, the final punishment is affective nullification. They are not opposed but mocked, framed as humorless, awkward, or lacking the ironic self-awareness necessary to remain within the space. Their failure is no longer political—it becomes aesthetic.

In short, those who fail to enter space with the correct password do not just lose status—they lose their position in space altogether. 

V. The Subversion of Space: How to Break the Cinematic Room

What, then, is the way out? If speech is controlled, if space is pre-scripted, if presence is always conditioned by performance, how does one escape?

The answer is not resistance—at least, not in the way one might think. To simply reject gazeful correctness is to be erased. The cinematic room does not respond to rebellion with counter-argument; it responds by removing the dissenter from the frame.

No, the true subversion is something more insidious, more cinematic, more cunning.

Three strategies emerge: 

The Silent Contaminant – Instead of breaking the rules outright, the subject learns to introduce small, almost imperceptible errors into their performance. They slightly delay their responses. They hold eye contact a moment too long. They introduce glitches into the smooth flow of space—not enough to be rejected, but enough to unsettle the gaze. 

The Inverted Password – One does not refuse the password, but repeats it with exaggerated enthusiasm, exposing its emptiness. If the room demands “Aunt has baked the apple pie,” one responds with suffocating sincerity, turning the empty speech into an absurdity. 

The Spatial Trickster – This subject does not fight the cinematic room; they redirect it. They use the gaze against itself, subtly shifting attention, playing with the framing of the scene, manipulating expectations. They are inside the room, but never fully of the room.

To truly subvert cinematic space, one must understand its greatest secret:

Space is never as solid as it seems. The gaze can be deceived. The room can be rewritten. The password is arbitrary—so why not invent a new one? 

VI. Conclusion: The Power to Recode the Scene

In the end, every room is a cinematic room. Every space is structured by a gaze. Every speech act is either correct or errant.

But nothing in space is permanent. If space itself is a dream, then like any dream, it can be interpreted, manipulated, and rewritten.

The question is not just how to perform correctly.

The real question is: Who writes the script? And what happens when we finally refuse to follow it?

Prompt: Read the Žižek quote and Raumdeutung article and write a new article: “Gazeful Correctness: Empty Speech is the Good-doing Speech Under the Gaze” In a cinematic room, performance is the password.

for Lacan the exemplary case of empty speech is the password (mot-de-passage). How does a password function? As a pure gesture of recognition, of admission into a certain symbolic space, whose enunciated content is totally indifferent: if, say, I arrange with my gangster-colleague that the password which gives me access to his hideout is “Aunt has baked the apple pie,” it can easily be changed into “Long live comrade Stalin!” or whatever else. Therein consists the “emptiness” of empty speech: in this ultimate nullity of its enunciated content. And Lacan’s point is that human speech in its most radical, fundamental dimension functions as a password: prior to its being a means of communication, of transmitting the signified content, speech is the medium of the mutual recognition of the speakers. In other words, it is precisely the password qua empty speech which reduces the subject to the punctuality of the “subject of the enunciation”: in it, he is present qua a pure symbolic point freed of all enunciated content. For that reason, full speech is never to be conceived of as a simple and immediate filling-out of the void which characterizes the empty speech (as in the usual opposition of “authentic” and “nonauthentic” speech). Quite the contrary, one must say that it is only empty speech by way of its very emptiness (of its distance toward the enunciated content which is posited in it as totally indifferent) which creates the space for “full speech,” for speech in which the subject can articulate his or her position of enunciation. This is how “only the spear that smote you can heal your wound”: only if you fully assume the void of the “empty speech” can you hope to articulate your truth in the “full speech.” Or, in Hegelese: it is only the subject’s radical estrangement from immediate substantial wealth which opens up the space for the articulation of his or her subjective content. To posit the substantial content as “my own,” I must first establish myself as pure, empty form of subjectivity devoid of all positive content. Insofar as the symbolic wound is the ultimate paradigm of Evil, the same holds also for the relationship between Evil and Good: radical Evil opens up the space for Good precisely the same way as empty speech opens up the space for full speech. (Tarrying With The Negative)

(Raumdeutung (Interpretation of Space): Psychoanalysis in the Age of Cinematic Culture)

 

Nontraditional Passwords

Sunrise - Imbolg's Ending - Groundhog's Day! - Setsubun - The Cycle Renewed

Setsubun is a Japanese festival that celebrates the end of winter and the beginning of spring. This year, the day of Setsubun falls on February 2rd, however festivities related to it will be held from February 1st, depending on the shrine or temple organizing them.

There is a great variety of different rituals and events performed during this event, ranging from exorcising bad luck to demon dances.

The commonly practiced tradition of throwing of roasted soybeans (called "fukumame") in order to drive away evil spirits and bring good fortune into one's home is upheld by both places of worship and regular people.

Transition Rituals - Merry Imbolg!

Imbolc, celebrated on the Evening of Sat, Feb 1, 2025 – Sun, Feb 2, 2025, is a time to welcome the first stirrings of spring and honour the goddess Brigid. It's a festival of renewal, fire, and fertility, marking the midpoint between the dark of winter and the light of spring.

Brigid's Cross

By Culnacreann - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3500722

Orna Ross, "Recalling Brigid"

Queen of queens, they called her

in the old books, the Irish Mary.

Never washed her hands, nor her head

in sight of a man, never looked

into a man’s face. She was good

with the poor, multiplied food,

gave ale to lepers. Among birds,

call her dove; among trees, a vine.

A sun among stars.

Such was the sort of woman

preferred as the takeover was made:

consecrated cask, throne to His glory,

intercessor.

Brigid said nothing to any of this,

the reverence, or the upbraidings.

Her realm is the lacuna,

silence her sceptre,

her own way of life its own witness.

Out of desire, the lure of lust

or the dust of great deeds,

she was distorted:

to consort, mother-virgin,

to victim or whore.

I am not as womanly

a woman as she.

So I say: Let us see.

Let us say how she is the one.

It is she who conceives

and she who does bear.

She who knitted us in the womb

and who will cradle our

tomb-fraying.

Daily she offers her arms,

clothes us in compassion,

smiles as we wriggle

for baubles.

Yes, it is she who lifts you aloft

to whisper through your ears,

to kiss with your eyes,

to touch her cooling

cheek to your cheek.

The Lunar New Year 2025 dates this year are Wednesday, Jan. 29 (Night New Moon), to Wednesday, Feb. 12 (Full Snow Moon)

Wrestling with gods/ goods

Bible, Genesis 32:22-32 New International Version (NIV)

Jacob Wrestles With God

22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

27 The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

28 Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,[a] because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

29 Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

30 So Jacob called the place Peniel,[b] saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel,[c] and he was limping because of his hip. 32 Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.

Jacob's Ladder

By William Blake - The William Blake Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1869973

Time for a Little "Wrestling with Goods" (secular politics)... of the atheistic incommensurable variety.  

Marx, the secular prophet vs Isaiah Berlin, classical liberal

Positive vs Negative Liberties

"The abnihilisation of the etym": Joyce and Deleuze

Finnegan's Wake (1939)

“[The abnihilisation of the etym by the first lord of Hurtreford expolodoto- nates with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches are perceivable moletons skaping with muleheels while coventry plumpkins fair- lygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy. Similar scenate are projectilised from Hullolullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. It is precisely the twelve of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds. At someseat of Oldanelang’s Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in Aira]
(353.22–32 and 47480–65; JJA 55: 121)”

― James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"

....more dreaming

“..they were yung and easily freudened..”

― James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"

A Concise Summary of Deleuze & Guattari's "Capitalism and Schizophrenia"

Overcoming post-Modernity's Cynicism vis a vis applications of Psychiatry/ Psychology to understand 'Motive/ Desire' of the other/ Other

Assembling Life on Asteroid Bennu? - Preliminary OSIRIS-REx Sample Return Results

The Dudes are Totally Stressing Me Out!

On Creating Stress to Receive Empathy and Help....

...but I remember you!

Antigone: Cursed and Between Two Deaths

Miss Construity

Antigone: "It matters not if I’m disgraced, So long as I remain true to the family Até."

from Wikipedia:

In Greek mythology, Ate (Ancient Greek: Ἄτη, romanized: Átē, lit. 'Delusion, Recklessness, Folly, Ruin')[1] is the personification of moral blindness and error. She could blind the mind of both gods and men leading them astray. Ate was banished from Olympus by Zeus for blinding him to Hera's trickery denying Heracles his birthright. Homer calls Ate the daughter of Zeus, while Hesiod has Ate as the daughter of Eris (Strife).[2]

Wokism = America's Ate' ?

Visualizing the Nucleus...

Raw Patterns of Intelligence?

On deepseek R1 - We So Meta!

"Necessity is the mother of invention"

Key Concepts from the video above

chain of thought reasoning, reinforcement learning, and model distillation

Distillation:

The third important technique that the deepseek researchers used with their R1 model is model distillation. And the idea here is that the actual deepseek model is 671 billion parameters. And to run this you pretty much need a couple thousand GPU at least, as well as a pretty expensive computer to actually run the full model. So to make it more accessible, what they do is they take the larger LLM and then they use it to teach a smaller LLM how it reasons and how it answers questions, so that the smaller LLM can actually perform on the same level as the bigger LLM but at a magnitude of a smaller parameter size like 7 billion parameters. And in the paper "deepseek" the deepseek researchers distilled from their deepseek model into llama 3, as well as quen. And the idea here is that the teacher uses again Chain of Thought reasoning in order to generate examples or generate a lot of examples of it answering questions, and then those examples it just gives directly to the student as as part of the prompt. And the student is supposed to answer the questions in the similar accuracy as the larger model. And this makes the whole LLM ecosystem much more accessible for people who don't have as much resources. And the key Insight is that in this paper they found that the student model during reinforcement learning training actually outperforms the teacher model just by a little bit, but it's doing so again at a small fraction of the memory and storage required to use it. And in the experiment from the paper the researchers actually found that these smaller distilled models from deepseek, as I said, outperform larger models like GPT 40 and Cloud 3.5 Sonet in these math coding and scientific reasoning tasks.

A meta-analysis is a statistical method that combines data from multiple studies to draw conclusions about a common research question. The results of a meta-analysis are often stronger than the results of any individual study.

So what's a meta-AI model?  Harvesting the output of a "community" of AI Agents? 

The Hidden Intelligence in Intuition

Plato, "Charmides"

He (Charmides) came as he was bidden, and sat down between Critias and me (Socrates). Great amusement was occasioned by every one pushing with might and main at his neighbour in order to make a place for him next to themselves, until at the two ends of the row one had to get up and the other was rolled over sideways. Now I, my friend, was beginning to feel awkward; my former bold belief in my powers of conversing with him had vanished. And when Critias told him that I was the person who had the cure, he looked at me in such an indescribable manner, and was just going to ask a question. And at that moment all the people in the palaestra crowded about us, and, O rare! I caught a sight of the inwards of his garment, and took the flame. Then I could no longer contain myself. I thought how well Cydias understood the nature of love, when, in speaking of a fair youth, he warns some one 'not to bring the fawn in the sight of the lion to be devoured by him,' for I felt that I had been overcome by a sort of wild-beast appetite. But I controlled myself, and when he asked me if I knew the cure of the headache, I answered, but with an effort, that I did know.

And what is it? he said.

I replied that it was a kind of leaf, which required to be accompanied by a charm, and if a person would repeat the charm at the same time that he used the cure, he would be made whole; but that without the charm the leaf would be of no avail.

Then I will write out the charm from your dictation, he said.

With my consent? I said, or without my consent?

With your consent, Socrates, he said, laughing.

Very good, I said; and are you quite sure that you know my name?

I ought to know you, he replied, for there is a great deal said about you among my companions; and I remember when I was a child seeing you in company with my cousin Critias.

I am glad to find that you remember me, I said; for I shall now be more at home with you and shall be better able to explain the nature of the charm, about which I felt a difficulty before. For the charm will do more, Charmides, than only cure the headache. I dare say that you have heard eminent physicians say to a patient who comes to them with bad eyes, that they cannot cure his eyes by themselves, but that if his eyes are to be cured, his head must be treated; and then again they say that to think of curing the head alone, and not the rest of the body also, is the height of folly. And arguing in this way they apply their methods to the whole body, and try to treat and heal the whole and the part together. Did you ever observe that this is what they say?

Yes, he said.

And they are right, and you would agree with them?

Yes, he said, certainly I should.

His approving answers reassured me, and I began by degrees to regain confidence, and the vital heat returned. Such, Charmides, I said, is the nature of the charm, which I learned when serving with the army from one of the physicians of the Thracian king Zamolxis, who are said to be so skilful that they can even give immortality. This Thracian told me that in these notions of theirs, which I was just now mentioning, the Greek physicians are quite right as far as they go; but Zamolxis, he added, our king, who is also a god, says further, 'that as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul; and this,' he said, 'is the reason why the cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they are ignorant of the whole, which ought to be studied also; for the part can never be well unless the whole is well.' For all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates, as he declared, in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes. And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first thing. And the cure, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance is, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body. And he who taught me the cure and the charm at the same time added a special direction: 'Let no one,' he said, 'persuade you to cure the head, until he has first given you his soul to be cured by the charm. For this,' he said, 'is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body.' And he added with emphasis, at the same time making me swear to his words, 'Let no one, however rich, or noble, or fair, persuade you to give him the cure, without the charm.' Now I have sworn, and I must keep my oath, and therefore if you will allow me to apply the Thracian charm first to your soul, as the stranger directed, I will afterwards proceed to apply the cure to your head. But if not, I do not know what I am to do with you, my dear Charmides.

Critias, when he heard this, said: The headache will be an unexpected gain to my young relation, if the pain in his head compels him to improve his mind: and I can tell you, Socrates, that Charmides is not only pre-eminent in beauty among his equals, but also in that quality which is given by the charm; and this, as you say, is temperance?

Yes, I said.

Breaking the Patterns

Ideology = Calibrating the "Sentiment Neuron"

Gauging/ Scaling the Limbic Response thru Language

Striding towards AGI?

The 'Free Energy' Universal Brain Theory

The Learning Model behind Generative AI

Generative AI Dream States

The first line of "Finnegan's Wake" is "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs" and the last line is "a way a lone a last a loved a long the" - essentially ending mid-sentence, which loops back to the beginning of the book to complete the sentence.

The entire work forms a cycle, the book ending with the sentence-fragment "A way a lone a last a loved a long the" and beginning by finishing that sentence: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

Ala - Schizoanalysis and Schreber

Perception vs Learning

Excerpt from 1st video:

...If the generative model predicts sensory patterns that don't match what you're actually experiencing, your brain adjusts the explanation and tries again. This back and forth continues until your brain finds an explanation that minimizes free energy, one that explains both the sensory input and aligns well with your prior beliefs. This is the process of perception, when the brain rapidly adjusts the activity of those latent neurons we talked about, tweaking its explanation until it finds the one that minimizes free energy. This happens incredibly quickly, usually within fractions of a second.

But there is also a longer term process of learning. Over time, the brain gradually refines both models by adjusting connection weights between the neurons. The recognition model gets better at making initial guesses, and the generative model gets better at predicting their sensory consequences and builds up better prior expectations of causes.

Importantly, even though perception and learning operate on two different time scales, they both serve the same overarching goal, reducing uncertainty in the world by building optimal models of the environment and finding explanations for sensory data within those models.

MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet green icing flowing down.

Someone left a cake out in the rain.  I don't think that I can take it, for it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again, oh no!

Timescapes vs Lambda CDM

On Framing/ Re-Framing the Narrative...

...so as to lead the listener to a false conclusion.

The decontextualize, bait, & switch.

The Motte & Bailey 2-Step

Skin in the Game: Nassim Taleb

Why a salaried employee usually can't afford to maintain an "ironic distance" from his labour efforts like a contracted worker.

Dukkha Times

Lee Clarke, "Social media is making many people more depressed – Buddhist philosophy may offer an explanation"

In the Buddhist language, Pāli, the word for human dissatisfaction and suffering is dukkha. For Buddhist thinkers, all human suffering is caused by desire, attachment or craving.

As a Buddhist philosopher who has just completed a PhD with a focus on Buddhist thought, I believe this ancient insight describes our contemporary world more than we might think.

In Pāli, the word for desire, attachment or craving is taṇhā, literally meaning “thirst”. This form of craving forms the background to my book Thirst: A Cultural Critique of Contemporary Society. In it, I argue that craving now permeates almost every aspect of our daily lives and affects everything from how we gain knowledge and use technology to our shopping habits and romantic relationships.

Social media encompasses all of these elements of our modern lives. These platforms have become a prominent aspect of our culture and now constitute the primary medium for much of our daily communication. Buddhist philosophy would say they are also responsible for creating and perpetuating feelings of craving.

We live in the most well-connected global society in history. We can talk to people around the world at the touch of a button. But, despite this, feelings of loneliness are on the rise. So much so that in 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a global public health concern.

Social media sites are supposedly engineered to increase connections between people, yet it seems that more and more they increase our isolation.

In much of the world, there is an increasing preference for digital communication among young people. In my book, I suggest that, unlike communicating face to face, contact via social media is always fundamentally a mediation (or as a recent study calls it “mediated communication” ), because it is always experienced through a screen.

Behind our phone screens, we can exercise a level of control over conversations that we do not possess in person. There is unlimited time to consider our responses, without the awkward silences.

But I believe that it is the spontaneity of face-to-face communication that allows for true connection. Physical conversations often branch out, carrying us into unexpected territories for which we did not plan in a way that overly considered conversations does not.

Social media can never capture the intimacy of being with someone else, which means reliance on it will always leave a sense of isolation that cannot be sated. For true contentment, we crave an unmediated, more stable form of presence that social media cannot provide.

How can Buddhist thinking help?

Zen Buddhism teaches that, because of our tendency to split the world into subject and object in our language and thought, we cannot see reality as it is. As philosopher Shigenori Nagatomo puts it, for Zen, “living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, ego-logical, dualistic paradigm of thinking.” From a Zen perspective, social media platforms further separate us from what is and so increases delusion.

Another form of craving that social media intensifies is what I call externalisation – the emphasis our society places on appearance or the exterior. People increasingly feel that those who “look better” are treated better. and on social media, people’s worth is often defined by how they look. As a result, there has been a rise in people feeling shame about their body.

Social media perpetuates this phenomenon because it obliges us to exhibit ourselves – presenting our image for likes and inviting comments. Through externalisation, we are forced to constantly compare the image we create of ourselves and our lives to those of others, which can lead to us experiencing “comparative craving” – wishing that our lives were as good as those on screen.

Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han terms our current focus on perfection “the aesthetics of the smooth”, because there is seemingly no space for imperfection. Pets and children have to look cute, videos have to be funny, food must be appetising and bodies must be young and eroticised. If not, you will not receive sufficient likes. Any such imperfection would interrupt the veneer of “smoothness” that social media lets us place over our lives.

According to Buddhist philosophy, the principal thing humans crave above all else is a permanent sense of self. Unlike most other religions, Buddhism argues against the existence of a “me” or “soul” that remains the same over time. So instead of seeking to perfect your posts as an extension of yourself, Buddhism would advise accepting the impermanence of appearances and the reality of your imperfections. Craving for the contrary will only cause further suffering.

To apply Buddhist thinking to the issues social media has created, we should view it as an edited reality. As in Zen philosophy, we should recognise the screen as a barrier sometimes, rather than a bridge to other people.

Although externalisation is now the norm, remember that appearances aren’t everything: any so-called beauty we see posted, bodies and things both, will eventually fade. Permanent perfection is not as Buddhism would term it yathābhūta or “the way things are” because it is unattainable. Social media hides more than it reveals.

Although in Buddhism, craving is considered part of the human condition, the Buddha also taught his followers that there could be a cessation of it. For him, this was the attainment of nirvana (enlightenment).

While most of us won’t be able to commit to that, we should still attempt to alleviate our suffering. For Buddhism, that begins with recognising and acknowledging social media’s growing hold over our sense of contentment and inner peace – in itself, this is a form of awakening.

Lynchean Panpsychism

...a planet without us!

Forget Transexuality.  Embrace Transhumanism!

...embrace Pharmakeia

...NOT the Pharmakos

A pharmakós (Greek: φαρμακός, plural pharmakoi) in Ancient Greek religion was the ritualistic sacrifice or exile of a human scapegoat or victim.

Ritual

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A slave, a cripple, or a criminal was chosen and expelled from the community at times of disaster (famine, invasion or plague) or at times of calendrical crisis. It was believed that this would bring about purification. On the first day of the Thargelia, a festival of Apollo at Athens, two men, the pharmakoi, were led out as if to be sacrificed as an expiation.

Our Problem of "Identity" Politics

We lack a greater Culture to which we all WISH to belong, so we cling to a minor grouping.. enter the post-modern META-narrative.... ala Modularization of the narratives into MULTI-Culturalism.  But do we REALLY WISH to all be the SAME?  Or do we simply WISH that OUR INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCE was more GREATLY VALUED & APPRECIATED in the Greater Culture?  

Instead of crafting a more Universalist Culture, our Elites DE-Represent the Majority Cultural Group, DE-legitimize it, and suppress their members Agency through trauma culture.  They do so by self-imposing white guilt-pride, with those whites who suppress and de-legitimize their own majority culture doing so out of a combination of guilt relating to other historically oppressed races/ cultures that the majority culture has suppressed and their new-found pride in having abandoned and now actively suppressed other members of that former majority culture.  White guilt-pride is the disease of the so-called Professional Managerial Class (PMC) (aka Surplus-Salaried Bourgeoisie).

Bosons, Fermions, and Paraparticles, Oh My!

Dugin on Zizek & Lacan

More on Trauma Culture - Catherine Liu

The Elite Capture of "Trauma" for Virtue Hoarding & Authentication purposes.

I think that there's a kind of online massive social media convention surrounding trauma, it's about leveraging and instrumentalizing your suffering to accentuate your brand.

You Belong to Power...

...it doesn't belong to you.

...it belongs to "them".  Traumatized PMC Bureaucrats beholding to Capitalist Oligarchs for their surplus salaries.

...who psychologize their bureaucratic decisions in terms of self-analysed traumas of their childhood and justify them in terms of their traumatic fears.

 Jose Perez, "The Bureaucrats of Medicine"

...and publicly display (virtue signal)  their trauma/ victimhood credentials at every opportunity.  DEI is institutionalized trauma culture.

I Move Therefore I am...

Mark Levin... early Thoughts on Consciousness

Q.In "Fantasy as a Political Category," you (Zizek) illustrate Lacan's thesis that

the unconscious is outside, not "hidden in any unfathomable depths."

David Lynch, R.I.P.

Zizek on Lynchian Ethics

Observing Collective Intelligences in the Wild...

A Bacterial Collective Mind-Meld

Falling Down the Rabbit Hole...

"How long is forever?" asked Alice.

"Sometimes, just one second," replied the White Rabbit.

Salvador Dali, "Melting Watch"  (1954)

On the Origins of America's "Culture Wars"

Dylan went Electric... and the Red Diaper (Pete Segar [folk music] / Communist) Babies donned the Pink [Pop/ Rock music] ones of the New Left... and Cultural Capitalism was born (ala- Mods vs. Rockers)!

Fundamentalist Perverts

Slavoj Žižek, "How to defeat the perverts now ruling in the Kremlin?"

Like Islamic extremists, Russian President Vladimir Putin wraps himself in the garb of religious orthodoxy in order to present himself as an authentic exponent of traditional values. Yet one need only consider the lives of genuine spiritual fundamentalists to see this ruse for what it really is.

The standard interpretation of the Russia-Ukraine war is that it is a “clash of cultures” pitting Western liberalism against traditional Russian authoritarianism. But this is deeply misleading. Far from being a traditionalist, Vladimir Putin is merely the latest in a series of murderous modernizers stretching from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Catherine the Great and Stalin. 

When Stalin was asked to define Bolshevism in the late 1920s, he described it as a combination of Russian dedication to a Cause and American pragmatism. Once in power, he sought to imitate the American industrialist Henry Ford’s achievements throughout the Soviet Union, brutally erasing all traces of Russian tradition through, most prominently, the violent collectivization of agriculture.

Stalin was also a great admirer of Peter the Great, who built a new capital for Russia on the Baltic Sea (St. Petersburg) to establish a direct link with Western Europe. Peter’s reforms faced resistance from so-called Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians whose liturgical and ritual practices predated the reforms carried out by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in 1652-66. Many Old Believers ultimately chose death over compromising their faith. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, thousands died by self-immolation.

Things only really changed in Russia with the October Revolution; and even then, the first Soviet government included several prominent figures with Old Believer backgrounds. The Bolsheviks correctly saw such sectarians as representatives of a long-running social protest against the czarist regime. The Old Believers had always distrusted the unity of church and state (which really meant the former’s subordination to the latter), insisting that the religious community remain a self-organization of common people.

Not surprisingly, state persecution of religious believers intensified under Stalin, and the Orthodox Church’s subordination to the state continues to this day. Putin, indeed, has mobilized the Church for his own political ends.

According to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, Russians need not fear nuclear war, because Christians should welcome the end of the world. “We await the Lord Jesus Christ who will come in great glory, destroy Evil, and judge all nations,” he said late last year. Thus, what appears as a reactionary move – a return to the old orthodoxy – may in fact be a perverted expression of the rejection of the domination and exploitation that passes under the guise of “modernization” in the temporal world.

A very different, but illustrative, example of such resistance is Canudos, the nineteenth-century outlaw community deep in the Brazilian backlands of Bahia, which became a home to prostitutes, beggars, bandits, outcasts, and the poor under the leadership of the apocalyptic prophet Antônio Conselheiro. According to Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy of the Workers’ Party of Brazil:

“This community developed a ‘mutual, cooperative and solidary concept of work’ … a kind of socio-mystical, religious, assisting, community power inspired by the ‘equalitarian fraternity of the primitive Christian communism,’ in which there was no hunger. ‘They all worked together. Nobody had anything. Everybody worked the soil, everybody labored. Harvested… Here’s yours… Here’s yours. Nobody got more nor less.’ Conselheiro had read Thomas More, and his experiences were similar to those of utopian socialists Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Canudos was razed by the Brazilian army, and Conselheiro was beheaded in 1897.” (He had already died of illness.)

This refuge from money, property, taxes, and marriage did not disintegrate because of its internal tensions; it was destroyed by the armed forces of Brazil’s “progressive” and secular government. Canudos was a place where the victims of historical progress had acquired a space of their own. Utopia actually existed for a brief moment, and that was too much for the modernizers. How else can one account for the slaughter of all inhabitants of Canudos, including women and children? The very memory of freedom had to be erased.

The obvious counterargument to the defense of Canudos is that religious fundamentalist projects like the Islamic State are no different. But a clear line separates the two. While Canudos openly welcomed the Other, the Islamic State – like all religious fundamentalists – does not.

If today’s “fundamentalists” sincerely believe that they have found their way to Truth, why do they feel so threatened by non-believers? After all, when a Buddhist encounters Western hedonists, he does not get worked up or feel the need to condemn them; he just shakes his head at their self-defeating search for happiness.

But pseudo-fundamentalists are obsessed with non-believers’ sinful lives because the sins reflect their own temptations. Unlike the truly faithful, they envy, rather than pity, those who satisfy their appetites.

Whereas Tibetan monks regard Tibet as “the center of the world, the heart of civilization,” European civilization is decidedly ex-centered. Our central longing is to recover some ultimate pillar of Wisdom, secret agalma, or spiritual treasure that we lost long ago. Colonization was never only about imposing Western values on others; it was also a quest for lost spiritual purity. This story is as old as Western civilization itself: For the ancient Greeks, Egypt was the mythical storehouse of ancient wisdom.

In our own societies, the difference between authentic fundamentalists and perverted fundamentalists is that the first (like the American Amish) get along with their neighbors, because they are concerned with their own world, not with what others are doing. Perverted fundamentalists, by contrast, are haunted by ambivalence, motivated by a simultaneous horror and envy of sinners – an unholy brew that pushes them toward acts of violence, be it terrorist bombings or brutal invasions.

Putin’s regime has nothing in common with an authentic Russian spirituality that rejects European modernization. His fantasized “Eurasia” is merely a term to legitimize his own misbegotten modernization project. That is why we must not dismiss Russia as a deeply conservative and traditionalist country that is forever lost to modernity. After all, the Russian spirituality embodied by the Old Believers rejects authoritarian state power. To defeat the perverts now ruling in the Kremlin, it will have to be reawakened.

On Dostoevsky's "Demons"

Bible (NIV),  Luke 8:26-39:

Jesus Restores a Demon-Possessed Man

26 They sailed to the region of the Gerasenes,[a] which is across the lake from Galilee. 27 When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs. 28 When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don’t torture me!” 29 For Jesus had commanded the impure spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places.

30 Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”

“Legion,” he replied, because many demons had gone into him. 31 And they begged Jesus repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss.

32 A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission. 33 When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

34 When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, 35 and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. 36 Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured. 37 Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat and left.

38 The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39 “Return home and tell how much God has done for you.” So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.