My morning thought. I think what's most incompatible about the way I think and the journal article format as a means of capturing and validating thought is that I have a completely different sense of the relation between tentativeness, rigor, and informatic compression.

I think one way of looking at the economic pathologies of our society, without using words like 'capitalism' and 'rentiership', is to talk about inequities in the distribution of risk. Some have more taste for risk than others, sure, but risk is not distributed on this basis.

In the UK, so much of our political troubles come from the growth in the landlord class, who if nothing else, wield disproportionate power relative to their social worth: at one and the same time claim to be martyrs to the risk of investment, and demand these risks be minimised.

Of course, it's possible to make claims like this: e.g., nurses have every right to claim that they shoulder not merely more risk than most, but far more risk than is strictly necessary. The pandemic has made this brutally obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

However one chooses to tally up compensation for this social role, be it financial, social, or some other privilege, it's pretty obvious that every last 'essential worker' is shouldering more societal risk than most non-essential workers compensated far better than they.

The way this trade off gets (implicitly) articulated as 'pay vs. purpose' is one of the enduring insights of @davidgraeber's Bullshit Jobs. Yet there are many essential workers who don't even get the illusion of purpose in compensation for personal risk (e.g., warehouse staff).

@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 I accept that I haven't given a proof of this impossibility, but I believe the concerns I've laid out could probably be formalised in a way that would lead to one, though it'd involve something like a combinatoric diagonalisation similar to Russell's paradox.

@schulzb589 To state my issue in a more philosophical way, I think the desire to combinatorially totalise mathematical syntax is an effect of something like a transcendental illusion, what I sometimes call the Mythos of Logos.

@schulzb589 It's the Leibnizian desire to obviate creative dialogical interaction (dialectical reason) by providing a deductive system (monological reason) that would allow us to simply 'shut up and calculate'; the desire to obviate the pragmatic autonomy of discovery by automating it.

@schulzb589 It doesn't matter how many times this desire is betrayed by its own formal tools: Russell, Godel, Turing, Chaitin, etc.; it doesn't matter that these betrayals are what drive the externalisation of thought by producing new tools to automate computation. It always comes back.

@schulzb589 The desire to brute force reality, be it mathematical or empirical, is always lying in wait, whispering seemingly 'reasonable' lies about what is and isn't rationally possible. This is as close as I come to endorsing Heidegger and Adorno's worries about technoscience.

I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.

A statement about Stephanie Hayden.

In January I became aware that Ms Hayden (who monitors this account despite being blocked) had made a series of defamatory allegations about myself and my wife.

The allegations were made on Twitter, via Hayden’s account, and were widely retweeted.

The allegations were that as a result of her making a police complaint, (1) the police were seeking to urgently speak to me.

Furthermore (2) that police has spoken to me on 26/12/20 and offered some kind of “robust” advice about my conduct on and off line.

Finally (3) that police attended my home address in November, where my wife mislead them as to my whereabouts.

Hayden commented about this at length on Twitter, said that both and I am my wife had lied, and that I had even given a false address in Hampshire.

I said at the time all the allegations were false.

The police “complaint” was nothing more than Hayden making yet another vexatious complaint to the police, as Hayden routinely does.

The police did not speak to me on 26/12/20, as alleged, or at all.

There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.

Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.

In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.

I sometimes contemplate aiming for some other kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship instead. In part because I might be more effective if I...I don't know, got laid more? But that's not really the thing. More like, if I had someone around whom I could regularly relax.

But mostly, I don't pursue those alternative relationship-setups out of a sense of something like loyalty to myself + a vague sense of wrongness and/or sadness about it. It often feels like giving up or giving in.

[I might elaborate on the wrongness sometime.]

@ImPranav_M @GunduHuDuGa That's a good qsn, if not a bit nuanced. Avataras are of many varieties and frankly, most of the classification is only for our understanding and not really binding on Paramatma Himself. We can take several approaches to understanding this. If you go by a Vedantic approach,+

@GunduHuDuGa Avatara means that which descends from an exalted state (Taara). Going by Upanishadic observaton of Purnam adham purnam idham, every manifestation of Bhagavan is indeed wholesome. In fact, Avataras usually happen when Iswara is propitiated with certain qualities already+

@GunduHuDuGa described in the Vedas by other Devatas. So, in order to please them, He assumes the form that best envisages the said Vaidika tatvam. For example, Varaha and Nrusimha avatars, though they have sthoola prayojanas, also exemplify the Tejovanna tatvam propounded by Upanishads.+

@GunduHuDuGa All these tatvams ultimately emanate from Him so whatever form He takes is indeed Purna. Now, one may ask then if that's the case, why such a distinction had to be made in the first place. That is because of upasana vidhis and understanding of how Bhagavad tatvam shines+

@GunduHuDuGa with each Leela being performed. Let's take Nrusimha avatar. The purpose of the avatar is neither to save Hiranyakasipu nor rescue Prahlada. For that He need not descend down as H's boons are applicable only for Brahman's creation and not Paramatma Himself.+

Back when I went to Bishop’s University, I managed the student radio station, CJMQ. When I started, it was kind of a pirate station. We had an illegal antenna on a roof, and a couple of residences could get us through the radiators somehow. Nowhere to go but up.

Happily, it was 1993. Pump Up the Volume made it cool to be a DJ. Grunge and indie were huge. We went from, like, 12 DJs to 100 and started acting like a real radio station. God, it was awesome. It was like we were on a quest. It felt like a real crusade.

Eventually we decided to try to get an FM licence. This was no easy feat. The bureaucracy was maddening. It cost a lot. We needed to find a proper tower. Long story short, after two years of solid effort, everything came together: CJMQ was awarded 88.9 on your FM dial.

We were going to launch one blissful night in 1995. I planned a massive party and woke up the morning of, not quite believing we’d finally made it. I went to say good morning to my roommate, David, and… Not a single sound came out of my mouth. Not even a whisper.

I had completely and utterly lost my voice. OH GOD NO. I raced to the pharmacy and scribbled a note to the pharmacist: “I’ve lost my voice, and I really need my voice.” She nodded and retrieved two suppositories. They were each the size of large-caliber artillery shells.