#reflexivity

[pratchettquotes]

Granny Weatherwax didn't hold with looking at the future, but now she could feel the future looking at her. She didn't like its expression at all.

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

[philosophybits]

Man is Nature creatively looking back at itself.

Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas

[wordswithloveee]

If you want to be happy, do not dwell in the past, do not worry about the future, focus on living fully in the present...

[espartanoyu]

Dawn of the Soldier

What is a soldier without his sword? That he is a poet without his sheet and paper or his tongue, that he is a king without his kingdom. My mother always told me fantastic stories about these lands as if they were worlds of Fantasies, while I tried hard I would fulfill all my dreams, and so it was, when I came of age I moved away from that hut that my parents had, leaving only with a dirty sword and a rusty armor Ready to live those adventures that my mother used to say, that my mother recounted with her sweet voice, storms, suns, droughts, all of that I had to live day after day that passed around this beautiful kingdom One day I just woke up at the dawn of a new day realizing that that fantasy was not treasures or riches, but the experiences one got, one got, the people I met.

That is why the best adventure one can have is not with treasures, but with friends.

(no art used belongs to my property, credit to their respective authors)

[lavideenrose]

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Thomas Hardy

[girlstressed]

can’t stop smiling in inappropriate situations

[bodhi-ryuchai]

OPEN MIC NIGHT ......beaucoup de conneries a Paris Nuit!

Man, it started out to be a beautiful day. The sun has been shining with a nice cool breeze simmer all thoughout air on this early spring season Friday. Right now, it’s evening time as I sit at the bench by the Pantheon. I’m just around the corner from a place called “The Pomme” in the Latin Quartier where I may perform at an OPEN MIC. It’s nestled around the University area in this quartier full…

[emmashiel]

The Diabetes Self-Management Alliance 2024

[impriindia]

Feminist Immersion: Reflexivity, Decoloniality, And Global Impact

Event ReportTrisha Shivdasan The Gender Impact Studies Center (GISC) at IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi conducted a Three-Day Immersive Online Certificate Training Course on ‘Feminism: Fundamentals, Facets and Future’ from February 23rd to 25th, 2023.  The course, spread over three-consecutive days, introduced the participants to the origins and trajectory of feminism, its…

[figuringoutstill]

"If classic ethnography's vice was the slippage from the ideal of detachment to actual indifference, that of present-day reflexivity is the tendency for the self-absorbed Self to lose sight altogether of the culturally different Other." (Rosaldo in Culture and Truth)

A challenge not just of ethnography but the entire pursuit of knowing and advancing 'knowledge'!!

[aestheticofaccumulation]

24 hours in the life and a year in the making: accumulation as belated social media trending. (Hello, world.)

[iwanttobethevoid]

In philosophy there are certain base assumptions that create starting points (usually value oriented assumptions)...and then they create form, usually forms that map onto reality in some conceptual way. But those formal structures are different iterations of the same type of patterns that then overlap with other patterns in other philosophy...and it all turns into conceptual repetition. People seem similar. As though through life you see how base conditions and starting assumptions create patterns that have slight variations, and it is only a matter of time before new information becomes old information and is added to the rest. Though this should not matter because content is what matters...but content insofar as it becomes explicable seems to die a bit, as though a boundary while making something navigable also can kill what makes something a living thing (what even makes a thing a living thing to begin with though? A certain type of reflexivity in which a thing is self-reflective/replicating?). And the starting point is, of course, human contact with things to begin with. That world is already limited by what our minds are able to paint, and those same minds react to the situation, reflect it, live out our history and our old ways of thinking. How we feel cycles through, becomes a bit more bearable or sometimes worse, maybe a moment of joy. But all of that shuffles around and shifts and reacts to the environment, especially as we close ourselves off (when you hear nothing for days and then hear a sound, it assaults you. You touch nothing for days and textures become violent). We are so malleable, it confuses me where any kind of actual being rests in that mess of reaction (though of course, being is probably just exactly that anyway, in the reaction). How can it be proven that any one of us is alive, or what is being alive to begin with? Why would it even need to be proven?

Do you ever feel as though it is impossible to communicate anything actually? As though there is no one who is able to reach through the veil that separates you from things and actually show themselves as another creature who has experiences at all, much less experiences similar enough to your own that they could actually speak with you. With that you who sits further back than the other iterations of you, if that is even something aside from a kind of base feeling (most of the time I think that 'seat' is empty entirely, there is only this illusion that we really exist and behind it nothing, fragments or collections that some sense of existence emerges from and that our feelings grab onto as we interpret reality in a narrative). My key question here is if there is anything at all that might separate a reaction from an action, or if they are ultimately the same thing. And why would it matter? Action cannot be disconnected from reaction in the same way humans are not separable from other animals but by hazy definition...is the only difference where the reaction comes from? Can a reaction come from a 'someone', from a 'reason'? Is the only difference what we, as biased creatures, deem worthy of being called 'human' or 'agential'? I think that there is some mistake in my thinking that there must be some kind of dynamic and unpredictable movement to life. That there must be something other than the basic sum of our experiences played out on the canvas of cells with which we were born. These are all baseless expectations, probably ones formed before I even knew they were being formed. So there is nothing to be confused by or disappointed about.

But now I find it difficult to see things as living at all, they appear dead already in a sense. And I recognize that our malleability also means a kind of strength...for arbitrary decisions to feed ourselves some goal plucked from nowhere and give ourselves conditions that more benefit our state of being and guide us in some sort of singular direction. We can train ourselves like dogs and this works insofar as our conditions allow particular methods to take root. Living probably happens somewhere in there, where you just take things in, focus on them and don't really think much about the why behind it because a true draw, a true life probably looks to the things themselves. That seems to be living 'inside' somehow, getting involved. In terms of 'options' it seems to me that there is some kind of hope... So long as that singular direction is supported enough by conditions to not dissipate into air. So long as you are able to take hold of your body and rewire emotions to feed themselves off of your goals. Maybe you have the right history to give your direction some kind of weight (losing one's family in a fire, deciding to fight fires). Maybe you never thought about questioning a dream that you had and held for most of your life (momentum build up). Maybe you have such intense willpower that nothing particularly matters about why you make a choice, rather you just make them and then events occur and you continue doing whatever because it happens to be along the way (apathetic momentum/going with the flow). So long as that can occur, perhaps that is a choice, or I don't know, something. It can happen I suppose is the point.

Have you ever gotten the hint of the idea that there is something alive out there, or something beyond the boundary of this mess that is humanity? I suppose that sounds idealistic and idiotic. Part of me thinks this idea merely comes from lack of information at a young age and the inability to fit the information I had into an appropriate context. But really it can go both ways and you could say that as one learns more, expectations generated by past experience prime assumptions to fit with what one knows whereas possibility denies that things must be the case in the way one assumes, even when your sample size of patterns and content grows. But then when you do get more information...it appears everything fits. Which is probably a good thing I suppose...it all fits together in some wonderful cosmic dance or whatever. Even the truly absurd things, the 'unreasonable' ones, appear to reflect only that what is rational and what cannot be rationalized fit into the same pattern of existing things. That they boast the same formal nature, only differing in content (Things that appear to contradict usually do only because of a lack of information or because they are dependent upon one another. In the same way that life is recognized in the context of its end as a boundary and in the same way that absolute existence must include negation or else there is nothing by which it can be defined). But that whole seems dead somehow...I am unsure why. Perhaps too much similarity, or perhaps not enough in the right ways. Most likely though, my vision is coming at things from an angle that is incomplete.

I get the sense in mass movements of history, there is something like human life that expresses itself, where people have been curious about the world around them and learned about how the world moved. Learned about the inner workings of plants and rivers and the structures of nature that they moved inside of and depended on and were simply aware of the existence in it. And then that information was passed along to other people, in small acts, ways that people didn't particularly pay attention to. Human life was woven into reality in that way; what it meant to be the kind of thing we are was the things we did, and it still is insofar as we live it and most of all it seems when we do not notice, but simply persist with all that that involves. And perhaps those small acts of humanity have been gathered up by people who have seen them, and then those people have made things that reveal entire worlds built of them by way of artistic means...or philosophy, or simply in their life itself. Then, of course, those people who do that in the right conditions for attention are lauded as geniuses, but maybe all they did was focus in the right way on something that could have been anything, and arranged it into the actual underlying thread that seems largely ignored in living consciousness (But then isn't that more of that 'narrative', but on a mass level, the narrative individuals make that creates an identity where there is only a sleeping kind of reactivity that does not realize itself at all?).

You see, I think I assumed that conversations could happen after an established deep rooted understanding when one grows up to be an adult. That all the things so obviously clear and fascinating were a given, and that there was an entire world of things to talk about after that fascination had been affirmed. That as an adult you are given more tools by which to communicate and share those mysterious bits of knowledge about the depths of the human tradition and the world in which creatures like us live in and have made. A world in which humans as creatures simply understood something very fundamental about our own existences that bound us together as similar enough not to trip over ourselves and create our own problems through misunderstandings and holding to concepts that survive simply because they are old. But it seems instead as though there are multitudinous versions of death. Little deaths, of dreams or of pictures of a reality that is good enough not to fuck up someone's mind later on. Deaths of possible ways a person could live, or deaths of a reality one could have had if they had been afforded the opportunity...to act yeah, but sometimes to even understand what might have been possible. And then bodily death, or death of possibilities afforded by body parts functioning, or by owning particular things. Even minuscule deaths, where a word or idea could have grown but it was killed instead by a conceptual environment. It seems like we are excellent at creating places for things to die, because we are all bad at listening. And I think I am as well. Bad at doing anything but reacting to things, even when making those arbitrary decisions to act, it seems to go nowhere. Even turning off the mind, it remains difficult to stay open to experiences, and truly experience them. They all appear distant because they remain untouched by most it seems, except in those isolated pockets into which people have retreated...probably to protect themselves, or to choke out the twisted understandings in which we all react based off of our pain. I don't really know.

One guess I have is that human contact in similar experience, rooted ones, those create worlds in which the entire concept of a world can be repainted. If little deaths are multitudinous, it seems little lives would be as well, in that life and death, if they are changes in form, cannot be unbound from one another. So then maybe to 'wake up' to prove that something else is real is a way of proving that oneself is real by finding a mirror somewhere in reality and seeing that one can be a mirror for someone else and see a mirror in someone else. Thus why I see this entire thought process as being the result of hollow interactions...I think that all it takes to flip it is talking to the right people, and for some reason it seems that people who seem to understand one another hardly cross paths. There is a great risk in others as well...because we are mirrors I suppose. Of being killed, probably by accident or misunderstanding, or of dying more. We live in a thick sludge of human minds though, even when speaking with no one. It seems finding a pocket of 'freedom' somewhere is one of our only hopes for survival.

[wilbursoot-updates]

Wilbur is implying he was involved in the death of an elderly war criminal!

[peeco]

[shatouto]

i've seen a poll about gale and anders but i feel like this one is a more difficult one to answer

[vaguely-concerned]

one of my favorite garak mannerisms is whenever someone says something to him he clearly finds completely wild and his eyes briefly widen like

before he reacts properly. when someone tells you something SO fucking stupid that you momentarily turn into a muppet