Comrade Chicklet @ComradeChicklet@radical.town

According to Hegel, if you present someone else's opinion on some issue as the most favorable, but you do not present it as your own opinion, then we are nonetheless justified to treat it as if it is your opinion, since you openly declare that it is the best way that you can think of the issue at hand.

Thus, Hegel claims of Cicero that he must be read as agreeing with the Epicureans on the futility of philosophical efforts, not because Cicero openly subscribes to the Epicurean position, but because he presents it as the most defensible contender in the debate concerning the value of philosophy.

This is a very interesting interpretative principle, and I am quite partial to it. For, if we say that some way of thinking is evidently preferable over all other ways of thinking but at the same time refuse to adopt it, we are in fact refusing to think along with our own insights, and this is just an instance of willful stupidity and aimless self-disavowal.

Personal responsibility is suspect whenever it is advanced as a general social principle, or given a universally applicable form.

It is almost certainly going to be used as a means of repression, after all, since it tends to promote individual obligations to meet pre-given societal norms and standards.

And not even the Kantian solution, which is to make everyone individually responsible for formulating their own obligations, is tenable. Since it assumes (wrongly) that everyone is in fact capable of formulating their own obligations, and that those who are capable of it are not, in the very process of formulating their obligations, compromised by society already.

This leads me to believe that 'personal responsibility,' as a concept, cannot be used in social contexts at all. It is a fine thing to hold yourself accountable, and even to remind others of their commitments, but any substantive notion of personal responsibility has to be kept out of the discourse.

The political discourse about terror is very misleading, because it represents terror as an exception. But it is in fact the ruling principle of bourgeois society.

At every turn, people's sense of independence is undermined, and they are made to feel little by the rulers of this world. 'Freedom' is just the mistaken sense of independence of those who are not inflicted in this situation.

Class warfare, legal sanctions, and police terror are the order of the day as an always present threat, if not a lived reality. At the same time, a generalized fear-mongering is perpetrated by the institutions of the state, capital, and governmentality.

This is not a peaceful tranquility to which terror is an exception. This is a well-regimented social world, underpinned by a pervasive, civilized, and 'reasonable' terror.

Those schooled in the art of politics understand terror in this sense, not in the sense of a wild and incidental attack or lashing out, which is child's play by comparison.

In this time of Nazi invasion in the Fediverse, let's remind ourselves of the old saying of the Jacobins:

No freedom for the enemies of freedom.

Accepting the limitations of what you can accomplish is often, paradoxically, a precondition for accomplishing something. Far from being demotivating, it gives you a sense of proportion and priority. And it also helps you to not be so hard on yourself if you don't accomplish that which was impossible to accomplish to begin with.

I am out of beer.

This Pearl Jam cover of Neil Young's 'Keep on Rockin' in the Free World' is so real. It is, like, the realest thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qkg56kYv6I

No matter how misunderstood and lonely you feel, there are others like you out there. Maybe you just have not found your crowd yet, but there probably is a crowd for you.

Do not give up expressing yourself, and do not trade in your unicity for conformity just to be accepted. It is not worth it.

You will be happier making authentic connections in the end, even if it seems as though you cannot make those connections at the moment.

Keep on rocking, people.

Networking is a social pathology, and 'accumulating social capital' is the battle cry of the petty functionaries of a sick world.