I saw a post go by about how rules carry an implicit threat of violence. I think my thoughts on the matter are a tangent that would constitute a derail of the point of that post, so I'm starting a new one instead.

I believe "rules" work better as parameters for our own decision making, rather than walls designed for other people to slam into.

I was raised by computer engineers, so I tend to think about decision making in terms of pseudocode:

IF [situation I find myself in] THEN [known options for dealing with this situation] ELSE [best guess according to general default understanding]

as opposed to just signs everywhere that say

NO

Okay, yeah, sometimes we do actually need those boundary signs.

"No, really, it's not okay for you to hurt me."

Mostly, though, what we're really looking for when we make up all these rules-that-are-walls is a map for navigating the overwhelming territory of reality.

The thing is, people get confused and frustrated and scared and angry when they realize the map they have doesn't match the territory they find themselves in and now they don't know how they're supposed to navigate it. The knee-jerk impulse is "This situation wasn't accounted for in my options, therefore this situation is not allowed to exist".

But deciding there shouldn't be something in the territory because it's not on the map is a fundamental error in map use.

By definition, if the map and territory differ, it is always the map that needs to change.*

* If it's the territory that needs to change, that's not a map, it's a blueprint!

To Be Kind

Or the characteristics of confidence:

Stoic, Talkative, Authoritative.

"You're so wise"

"You're so cool"

"You're so sweet"

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What I really appreciate about The Talos Principle 2 is that big chunks of its writing genuinely read like they were written by someone who's personally had to justify the discipline of philosophy to a STEM major. "There exists an implicit moral algorithm in the structure of the cosmos, but actually solving that algorithm to determine the correct course of action in any given circumstance a priori would require more computational power than exists in the universe. Thus, as we must when faced with any computationally intractable problem, we fall back on heuristic approaches; these heuristics are called 'ethics'." is a fascinating way of framing it, but then I ask why would you explain it like that, and every possible answer is hilarious.

My husband and I are watching the TFS Dragonball Z Abridged commentary, and it struck me how often discussions of morality are tied up in rhetorical questions. Goke's "and I gave you a rhetorical answer!" kinda *IS* the right response to many pop-mprality questions. The classic example, which eventually I'll post about in a lot more detail, is the trolly problem: the only correct answer to which is killing the person who keeps tying people to train tracks.

That's a totally sincere answer, by the way. The whole point of the trolley problem is there is no right moral answer - except, that scenario is a constructed one! Attacking the construct is where moral action can be taken. But that's very much the TFS Goku style rhetorical answer.

I know they meant it as a joke, but it's honestly a pretty decent conceptual model for looking at bad questions of morality

Wherever there are politics or economics no morality exists.

Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas

why is it that we only have like two licenses from any mech producer that’s a good guy? For a game where like there are clear good and bad guys (even if who you play isn’t necessarily linked to that) it seems strange to me that the only loot and XP you get is… more benefits from the bad guys

I can tell you the answer, but to do so, we're gonna have to talk about a completely different TTRPG.

If you've read @makapatag's truly excellent Filipino martial arts TTRPG Gubat Banwa (and if you haven't, here it is), you may notice that every single character class description (with one notable exception) ends with one of these babies:

I am not Makapatag, and I cannot write with quite as much grace and eloquence as he can, but I will try:

If you choose to become a Lancer, ask yourself why you mock the name of peace with these weapons of war. You call yourself a saviour, but your steed was forged from the murder of a world. You stride across the sky in a colossus built in your own image, so why are you too cowardly to give it your face? Why do you believe these machines of death can preserve life?

It is important to note that the admonitions in Gubat Banwa are not just there to make you feel bad; they are there as legitimate questions. The Sword Isles have seen so much blood, death and tragedy. Wars are not glorious and killing is not a game. So, knowing all of that, why have you taken up this discipline - no matter how noble and virtuous it might claim to be - to shed more blood, to bring more death, to write more tragedy? What could possibly drive you to this? What need is so great that you must kill?

The thing with Gubat Banwa is that there are legitimate answers to these questions! There are bad people doing bad things, and some of them will not be stopped with words or kindness. Sometimes, as sorrowful as it is, killing is the correct choice to prevent greater suffering and deeper tragedy - but adding less misery and death to the world is still adding some amount of it. Even the most necessary wars will drench the ground in the blood of the innocent.

A sword is a tool meant to kill humans; while it can be used for other things, it is not well-suited to anything other than this. A mech is, in its most basic essence, just a very complicated sword: it's usually used on things larger than a person, but it's still a tool built to kill.

So why have you taken up this path? Humanity was saved from the brink of extinction and has created wondrous technologies like printers, cold fusion and mind-machine interface, and yet you use them to play soldier in a giant metal man. Why do you choose to take up this machine of death, built by the greedy and pitiless? Why do you think these machines can ever make things right?

Because sometimes, despite everything, they can.

Warhammer 40K shows an awful world full of monsters and monstrosity, and in the darkest moments of its history, Lancer's world looked just as bleak, but Lancer's world differs in one crucial way. Warhammer's world has long given up trying to be better, but Lancer's world never did. Lancer's world kept insisting a better world is possible, and it used what tools it had to make it so.

Sometimes the correct choice, no matter how bitter it may seem, is to kill someone. When you need to do this, a sword is a perfectly good choice for the job.

If you find yourself discomforted by the fact that all the people you can buy mechs from are corrupt and immoral - good! You have correctly engaged with the text. You have understood that the sort of people who would make giant walking death machines and sell them for profit are not good people. But you still have a job to do, and you need the correct tools, and those people have them.

Lancer is not a game about a perfect world - it is a game about a deeply flawed and imperfect one that does not let its imperfection stop it from trying. You have to try to make a better world, even with imperfect tools made by unpleasant people.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

Holiday Theme: Happy Hogswatch

IT IS HOGSWATCH, said Death, AND PEOPLE DIE ON THE STREETS. PEOPLE FEAST BEHIND LIGHTED WINDOWS AND OTHER PEOPLE HAVE NO HOMES. IS THIS FAIR?

"Well, of course, that's the big issue--" Albert began.

THE PEASANT HAD A HANDFUL OF BEANS AND THE KING HAD SO MUCH HE WOULD NOT EVEN NOTICE THAT WHICH HE GAVE AWAY. IS THIS FAIR?

"Yeah, but if you gave it all to the peasant then in a year or two he'd be just as snooty as the king--" began Albert, jaundiced observer of human nature.

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

It's funny, I feel like I spent a lot of time pointing out that there's almost always a third path of some kind of balance between two things being treated as a false dichotomy, and I'm just waiting for someone to tell me I'm politically a moderate or centrist.

But I'm not.

Because, at least in the US, "Moderate" and "Centrist" haven't actually described finding the necessary balances on various axes of ethical philosophy in general in a very long time - if they ever did. They're people trying to hold some kind of middle ground between what I find fairly reasonable and compassionate in ideal, if a bit lacking in practice, and what I find downright abhorrent in ideal and cruel in practice.

It's not ethically centered or moderate to try to hold a line between "Everyone is allowed to exist" and "Except those people, who we've decided aren't people". "Everyone is allowed to exist" is already a centered place. Pulling it off center, drawing a line at one ridiculous extreme, and then drawing a line halfway between the two and saying "This is the middle now" isn't ethics. It's barely geometry.

But we don't really get anywhere coherent by turning everything into a false dilemma just so we can demand everyone be "with us or against us" even when that doesn't actually make sense.

Yes, there's no middle ground between "Live or Die" but few things are actually that clear-cut, and it's not actually valid reasoning to try to reduce everything to that for the sake of feeling like we have the moral high ground. We're not solving any practical problems with that shit. We are, at most, soothing our feeling of overwhelm from seeing how big the problems really are.

And they ARE big. Far too big for any one person to solve. Any one person has got to pick their battles, narrow their focus, to be effective. That doesn't mean we as a society have to pick our battles - that's another false dilemma. Nothing gets solved by only one person, so the limits of a single person to solve things are only relevant to that single person. All solutions to big problems are, by definition, group efforts.

So... yeah, being centered is important to me. Being centered in the things that actually fucking matter.

The axes I care about being centered on are things like:

Compassion and Wisdom

Freedom and Equality

Individual and Community

Functional and Ideal

Accommodations and Boundaries

And the distribution of resources and responsibilities.

In all things, moderation - even moderation.

On Confidence, Pt. 1

Deny an opposing opinion;

Why let another perspective reign supreme?Postmodernity is dumb;

My thoughts are correct and I willNever conform to uncertainty.

Everything is either good or bad,

How else will I convince others of my political strength?

I’m always in the moral right so what’s the point

Of understanding the pain I’ve inflicted?

I do what I want and I fuck who I want;

There will never be…

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Poor Things (2023) by Yorgos Lanthimos

Book title: Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata in Latin; 1677) by Baruch Spinoza

One of the most common failure modes of deontological systems of ethics is the valorisation of bad outcomes. When actions are held to be inherently good or bad regardless of their outcomes, the willingness to accept demonstrably horrible outcomes in order to behave virtuously can itself come to be seen as virtuous; and, moreover, the worse the outcome, the greater the virtue demonstrated thereby. Left unchecked, this way of thinking can, and often does, lead to the perverse conclusion that those whose actions yield the worst outcomes are the most virtuous.

This, ultimately, is why media like Breaking Bad will inevitably be received as celebrations of the very ethoi they purport to critique by their adherents. When Walter White’s cracked funhouse mirror version of traditional masculinity repeatedly leads him and everyone around him – including those he claims to be protecting – to bad ends, his persistent refusal to reevaluate his behaviour is seen not as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of Walter’s ethos, but as evidence of Walter’s own moral courage. In this essay

The Oedipal Prism: Circumspection of the World and Entities Within-the-world, cont. (Part 3)

References: Signs and Sinthome

What distinguishes the multiplicity of signs which fall under the remit of the square of sinthome from signs that originate by way of the prismal interiority of the “castrational” symbolizations (castration–frustration and castration–privation)? The answer is that signs which pertain to the square of sinthome (by falling into relation with it from the outside, and becoming seen from within) issue forth from the fact of reference. 

“We shall again take as our point of departure the Being of the ready-to-hand, but this time with the purpose of grasping the phenomenon of reference or assignment itself more precisely. We shall accordingly attempt an ontological analysis of a kind of equipment in which one may come across such ‘references’ in more senses than one. We come across ‘equipment’ in signs. The word “sign” designates many kinds of things: not only may it stand for different kinds of signs, but Being-a-sign-for can itself be formalized as a universal kind of relation, so that the sign-structure itself provides an ontological clue for ‘characterizing’ any entity whatsoever.” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time pp. 107-108).

This kind of relation is what I decided to call a “semiotic relation” on my drawing of the square of sinthome. A relationship to utility, which emerges from signifiers, and is borne along by the configurations of the phallus within the respective dialectics of both frustration and privation, is established between two terms from inside the prism. This occurs also by means of an inversion into an opposite.

Thus the source of a top-inverted symbolization is discovered: sinthome itself, the symbolization which is founded on elision. The source of this elision is in the primacy of the ethical real: what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called face-to-face.

What this source of elision primordially inspires, as far as Heidegger’s ontology is concerned, is the placement of references onto the semiosic square. I see such a placement occurring on the diagonal lines which denote that the relationship between two terms on the square is “contradictory”. There are two of these: one between ~S2 and S2, and one between ~S1 and S1.

Once more, the two signs on the square are denoted S and ~S. Therefore, the two distinctive references which occur on the semiosic square are between S and ~S1, and between ~S and S2.

Heidegger adds, however:

“If the present analysis is to be confined to the Interpretation of the sign as distinct from the phenomenon of reference, then even within this limitation we cannot properly investigate the full multiplicity of possible signs. Among signs there are symptoms [Anzeichen], warning signals, signs of things that have happened already [Rückzeichen], signs to mark something, signs by which things are recognized; these have different ways of indicating regardless of what may be serving as such a sign. From such ‘signs’ we must distinguish traces, residues, commemorative monuments, documents, testimony, symbols, expressions, appearances, significations. These phenomena can easily be formalized because of their formal relational character; we find it especially tempting nowadays to take such a ‘relation’ as a clue for subjecting every entity to a kind of ‘Interpretation’ which always ‘fits’ because at bottom it says nothing, no more than a facile schema of content and form.” (Being and Time, pg. 108).

This implies that not all signs, which ought to be denotable as S or ~S, conform to this relation of reference which is found occurring within a semiosic quadrangle. And Heidegger also crucially informs us: “Every reference is a relation, but not every relation is a reference.” (pg. 108). Hence, how we may also find contrary relations, as well as relations of implication, along the the semiosic square. But there is something else in the above passage which functions as a warning about the “Interpretation” of what Heidegger refers to as “primitive Dasein”. What he might really mean to criticize are psychoanalytic interpretations of world mythologies, perhaps, or overly-symbolistic interpretations of cultural literature. Yet, Heidegger is not at all denying that literature and mythology have their symbols, nonetheless.

At this junction, and in my estimation, Heidegger truly makes nothing but the highest demands of a potential psychoanalyst. One begins to see from all this, within the contemporary cultural logic of narrative interpretations, a compounding of imaginary dimensions that are parsed out into a completion of analytic understanding by way of “the difference between the reference of serviceability and the reference of indicating” (pg. 109). This is because we are also informed that “for primitive man, the sign coincides with that which is indicated” (pg. 113), and because it has been left undecided for users of the semiosic square which reference is the one of indicating: is it the reference from S to ~S1, or the one from ~S to S2?

On the coincidence of a sign with what it indicates, we are also told: “Not only can the sign represent this in the sense of serving as a substitute for what it indicates, but it can do so in such a way that the sign itself always is what it indicates.” (pg. 113). Therefore, the utility of a sign for “the kind of ‘Being-ready-to-hand’ which belongs to entities encountered in the primitive world” is reduced to being either an other signifier (~S1) or a signified (S2).

But what of contemporary human civilization, and our relationship to signs? Is all that is missing from “primitive man” the reference of serviceability (rather than indicating) for signs? And what of the conversion of semiosic squares into symbolizations? How does all this bear upon the ethics of Lévinas and any resemblance found to the semiotic relation posited in the square of sinthome?

Firstly, what Heidegger seems to mean by “primitive Dasein” and its relationship to signs doesn’t seem tenable from a typical anthropological viewpoint, although he basically says as much, and clarifies that he is rather laying a groundwork for aiming towards a completed philosophical understanding of worldhood: “In what sense, then, is reference ‘presupposed’ ontologically in the ready-to-hand, and to what extent is it, as such an ontological foundation, at the same time constitutive for worldhood in general?” (pg. 114).

But prior to the posing of this question, proof of the presence of Lévinas’ ethical philosophy of the face-to-face emerges in what Heidegger enumerates as the three relations which may occur between sign and reference:

“The relation between sign and reference is threefold. 1. Indicating, as a way whereby the “towards-which” of a serviceability can become concrete, is founded upon the equipment-structure as such, upon the “in-order-to” (assignment). 2. The indicating which the sign does is an equipmental character of something ready-to-hand, and as such it belongs to a totality of equipment, to a context of assignments or references. 3. The sign is not only ready-to-hand with other equipment, but in its readiness-to-hand the environment becomes in each case explicitly accessible for circumspection. A sign is something ontically ready-to-hand, which functions both as this definite equipment and as something indicative of the ontological structure of readiness-to-hand, of referential totalities, and of worldhood. Here is rooted the special status of the sign as something ready-to-hand in that environment with which we concern ourselves circumspectively. Thus the reference or the assignment itself cannot be conceived as a sign if it is to serve ontologically as the foundation upon which signs are based. Reference is not an ontical characteristic of something ready-to-hand, when it is rather that by which readiness-to-hand itself is constituted.” (pp. 113-114).

What this amounts to, as far as a semiotic relation is concerned, is the positioning of a worldly chirality from the perspective of the orientation between interiority and exteriority. Thus, just as much as Dasein as Being-in-the-world is (an apparently flawed) point of departure for phenomenological investigation, so does the Levinasian face of the Other peer into the window of sinthome nonetheless at whatever makes its home within the prism of poiesis-genesis-sinthome.

I honestly think that Joanne had it the worst (psychologically) during the midnight tea party.

Imagine being bullied and isolated for a year, because someone fabricated an entire web of lies about you due to you getting a tiny bit of positive attention. The truth about the situation finally comes to light, you get your (very demanding) dream job, are well liked among your peers and are finally included within the schools society.

And then within one night you:

-discover your comfort teacher and your first friend are not real and are actually private investigators

-find out your boss who is supposed to be your role model and protector is a murderer

-realize that the principal has been on vacation for a year and was replaced by THE FUCKING GRIM REAPER

-learn that the vice principal is DEAD (and was subjected to human experimentation)

-learn that you're the second replacement for a guy who got brutally murdered and ALSO subjected to human experimentation (which you are witnessing right Infront of your eyes in real time)

-literally hear why and how these humans have been experimented on

-see how someone gets turned into dinner

-almost get turned into dinner yourself and can't escape on time because your body shut down out of shock.

-see how your "friend" is hunted for sport by the grim reaper.

-also see your "comfort teacher" crush someone's head right Infront of you.

-become unconscious out of shock.

-loose not only your boss, two friends (Soma and Ciel )and comfort teacher after this whole fiasco, but also your entire network of coworkers because they got a promotion you're too young to have.

-on top of that YOU CANNOT talk about what happened to you to anyone because you were sworn to secrecy and you can't really talk about it privately to your former colleagues either, since they're now a completely different rank than you.

Like- the guy didn't get physically injured, but he was the only real student to witness the entire Midnight tea party, because he couldn't escape on time. (And let's also not forget that he's the youngest of the real students present at the party and definitely the most sensitive one).

Since the Midnight tea party will happen again, Joanne and his former coworkers are probably forced to attend again since they can't really publicly share the reason as to why they don't want to go.

A noble soul is not that which is capable of the highest flights but that which rises little and falls little but dwells permanently in a free, translucent atmosphere and elevation.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, 397