this is petty but i just am extremely unimpressed by gillis' writing style

there's already plenty of substance i disagree on but that alone makes this unappealing to slog through

honestly also the stakes and terms of concern feel like gossip and chatter that we're trying to elevate to significance. maybe its just me being biased against contemporary events as potentially significant in the same way, but i can't help but feel that none of this will matter in a few years

just another one of those works that feels like it arrived stillborn from the press

"as an anarchist who came up in the radical left in the '90s and '00s" is like half of gilly's shtick lol

we haven't begun yet but one think i want to note at the outset is that he keeps attributing "liberation" as a common goal and is speaking about how he's going to demonstrate that the true hearty socialists and anarchists realize it better than postmodernists but like

the critique of holism is good and fair

i think the fact that the question of scientific realism vs antirealism not being a conscious or central issue should tip you off to something, and you'll need a great deal of caution attributing and constructing that position to knock down

i imagine it'll be treated as lack of rigor or as cowardice or some other similar deficient trait but i think theres benefit to ignoring something and seeing what comes of it

"anarchists with the stench of humanism" damn straight

ugh lmao i know this is like one of the main points of the book but "the hard sciences are radicalism and the humanities are reactionary" is so weak man

like im being reductionist in that attribution, certainly at this early stage, but you can see the seeds being planted for it

:sob: even like the characterization of the opposition's position can't avoid your humanism

yes please keep repeating that science is radical because it seeks the root of all things thats so insightful and brave and has so much carry-over to the political context youre so right

lol. the poor analytic philosophy "that was out of step with the popular narratives of the humanities which greedily followed adorno and horkheimer in wildly misrepresenting the logical positivists." lol.

lmao bro this is so embarrassing. look like i'm not a staunch defender of everything adorno ever did and certainly im not like hard-line supporter of all these specific guys and movements, but like.. really?

"aronowitz correctly perceived that the inclinations of the frankfurt school (and marxism more generally) towards "holism" and "dialectics" were existentially challenged by physics' radical focus on underlying root dynamics".

if you repeat it enough its true, surely. but also it just completely misunderstands the err of this era. the focus on "instrumental reason" was not dialectical enough, that was the good part you got right with your critique of holism. i guess i have to take that back now

also like, to be clear, i have no dog in the race of defending pomo as a movement, i really couldn't care less. there were undoubtedly a lot of quacks and maybe they had outsize influence. tbh im not deeply informed on the history of may 68 and all its subcurrents, so i dont care the litigate that.

i'm also sympathetic to the argument that the way a philosophy is used matters a lot and reflects upon the thought itself, and of course there's a reciprocal influence there. that isn't being spelled out but i just want to make it clear that i'm chill with that if used carefully.

at the same time though, and for that very reason, some distortions of thinkers and what your broad gloss of them are do matter, especially because you're building to a throughline and generating a historical account leading up to the present

i just really dislike this habit of "our history, wow look our great history as anarchists" and then pointing out the awkward missteps or tendencies in alternative movements. no matter the anarchist current we're able to wipe the error away and essentially ascribe virtue to the rank and file

"a german term like 'wissenschaft' that means something looser than a body of knowledge and may connote something closer to theology and art in a context can become translated as 'science' in english and then greedily directed in critique towards the STEM barbarians" 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

yay i love the devtools debugger pause

when i first heard the news on patreon, i was rather disquieted. but after the last couple months of my own development, i really get it

if nothing else, i can only appreciate the cautiousness and consideration of display, in contrast to my brash and haphazard experience

i sat my white ass down and listened

wes cecil is really an odd figure, i don’t think he ever really has very profound insights lol. observational comedy as philosophy/sociology

i like basically every post yasa makes, no one is doing it like them

the choice of chop suey was intentional because i had this segment in mind, i was being a little hyperbolic below

i was too lazy to find a segment that didn’t have a repeat sign that undercut my point like op lol but shhh nobody noticed

the flow of my speech is so uneven lol

it’s as if i have to strenuously extract the thoughts from my brain, then in a separate step i rush to spit them out all at once, in this staggered repetition

oh shit and lenin too

okay look i’ve done a fair amount of charitable reading but still, i feel like there’s some difference between a self-acknowledged attempt at charitable reading and just reading to see where it takes you, and daring to be inspired without hesitancy

i find the obsession with epistemology in certain circles to be fascinating

philosophical traditionalists at heart, you have to respect the hustle

i’m pretty tired

i just want a reason to talk to you

still great btw

hm i wanna go up but i dont wanna be covered in cat hair

guess i’ll change

that oughta do it

okay i only made it through book 1 tonight but thats alright, it was just enough

more later :)

i prefer "you're stabbing me while i sing this" over "i'm stabbing you while i sing this"

if nietzsche accuses me of decadence, so be it