#good philosophy

[geezerwench]

This is utterly profound.

The Keanu Reeves Three-fold Path.

[jaynovz]

if yall ever want like serious advice from me about how to solve burnout as a creative it's like...

literally ignore it. stop pushing. go do something else, enjoy your life, fill it with other things, do what brings you joy in the moment if you can.

go to the gym, take a walk to touch grass and look at dogs and smell flowers, cook dinner, watch tv with your friends, talk about your feelings as needed with ppl you trust, take a drive and blast your music, do the chores you need to do, the job hunting slog you need to do, read books that aren't for research, stop cordoning off your brain for The Craft or The Draft or whatever the fuck

forget about the project, stop thinking about it for as long as it takes to be excited again.

fuckin rest, basically

[theabigailthorn]

New episode of Philosophy Tube will be on Nebula this week - I just need to render and do the subtitles and metadata!

The YouTube cut will be out on December 8th!

I'm excited for this one, I reckon it's some of my best work - especially on the editing

[philosophybits]

Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root remains weak and is easy to pull out.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[spotsupstuff]

day 6

all love to Martini and Procyon (the blue)

[ghelgheli]

one of the fundamental mistakes serano and a lot of others make involves the following line of reasoning:

1. some people have dysphoric other-gender embodiment-desires (e.g. for different genitals) before they acquire an understanding of gender-sex associations or even that there are genitals other than their own

2. if gender is totally socially constructed, as the social constructionists say, then these embodiment-desires would not be possible in such a state of ignorance

3. modus tollens the social constructionists are wrong and there must be some innate gender-desire

this is often accompanied by the following:

1. if social constructionism is right, then the abolition of gender would mean the elimination of dysphoric embodiment-desires

2. the state of knowledge prior to acquiring gender-sex knowledge is analogous to the state of affairs under gender abolition

3. in that state some people still have dysphoric embodiment-desires

4. modus tollens the social constructionists are wrong

these arguments are often defensive, to be fair—the first premise of the latter argument is unfortunately made by certain social constructionists too, steamrolling those early childhood experiences. but in both cases there is a circular mistake happening. the dysphoric embodiment-desires can precede gender-sex knowledge specifically because they are separable from it. penis-dysphoria in young childhood can only be called gender dysphoria if we assume the very gender-sex epistemic constructions we have agreed not to take for granted! and the former dysphoria may well persist in the absence of the latter constructions. this is what people say when they talk about a (utopian, perhaps, but nonetheless coherent and logically possible) gender abolitionist future where people can have whatever procedures they desire done. the embodiment-desires are still there! they are just freed from gender-sex associations.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Welcome to the Dungeons of Fear and Hunger.

[veryintricaterituals]

Something about Good Omens from a Jewish perspective, something about Crowley, about questions, something about how we are not in heaven, about how we get to decide the rules here on Earth, something about discussion, about wrestling with G-d, and something about how G-d is outnumbered and doesn't get a say, something about how "heaven" and "hell" don't really matter, about trying to make things better from the context of our lives, something about leaving the world a better place than you found it, something about drinking and enjoying life right here and now, something about "they tried to kill us and failed, let's eat".

[thebearme]

what can I say, Pico is my favorite

[variousqueerthings]

asexual in a bisexual way

bisexual in an asexual way

[tygerbug]

"Okay, but, when did Star Wars get all 'woke' and anti-fascist and political?" "1977."

[franeridart]

The Housecat Philosophy - Ep 52

Ep 00 || < Prev || Next >

Read ahead on Patreon || Catch up on Webtoon || support me on ko-fi~✨

[theabigailthorn]

Vulnerable Moment

I loathe doing the Patreon shout outs every month because it makes me so anxious, and because those posts always get super-low engagement. People enjoy watching my content but they super don't enjoy the idea that it costs money to make.

But this month the Philosophy Tube Patreon took a bit of a dip because a lot of patrons suddenly had to restart student loan repayments (and fair enough! That's a more important expense!) Philosophy Tube takes time and money - it has to be done through crowdfunding because that's the only way it stays free, accessible, and properly researched. So if you can afford a couple of dollars a month, NOW WOULD BE A GREAT TIME TO SIGN UP!

[philosophybits]

He that does good to another does also good to himself; not only in the consequence, but in the very act of doing it; for the conscience of well-doing is an ample reward.

Seneca, On Benefits

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)