Vatican II - not even once.

Losurdo also covers the “classical liberal” origin of the notion that “The basic idea is that if you don't come from a cultural background that comes from a traditional Western perspective-ideally Anglo-Saxon— then you aren't equipped for and properly formed for freedom” in depth.👇

Bluesky feels like a space station, low on everything, orbiting a dead planet.

Are sure Carmen Sandiego was a criminal and not on the run from her 5 singing psycho exes?

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing an inconsequential number of academics that Rorty’s left and right Sellarsian binary exists

There is no philosopher who I love more in concept and hate more in prose than Feuerbach.

For anyone curious about what's been going on in my course on The Revenge of Reason for The New Centre, here are some of the diagrams from the last session, suitably cleaned up, pointing in the more systematic direction my work is developing in. Aa sketch of my reworking of Platonism.

Working link: deontologistics.co/wp-content/u...

This morning’s insufficiently-caffeinated opinion is that fiction writers should go back to making shit up

The speed at which life is outpacing The Onion is wild.

To put some Naomi Klein on it: a failure of the left, particularly men on the left, is ceding masculinity to the right (Pipik-ing). It’s easier to perform a sort of disavowed masculinity that create a positive masculine figure that is consistent w/ feminism but doesn’t feel like living an apology.

So if there’s the technological ability for private firms to actualize personal pricing at point of sale, we’re totally beyond the “administrative complexity” argument against implementing a progressive sales tax, right?

Revisiting this old interview on the concept of concept, which summarises the consequences of my earlier work on the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics quite nicely I think: www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/the-con...

I want to buy a house inside the last 6 minutes of this song. Defacement - Duality #metalsky #metal #dissodeath #doom

312 Mogwai, But Wet Pans-tara

well we did lose to legal Calvinball and we aren’t going to fight back. but at least we spent a hundred million dollars losing

Full short form interview with me about The Revenge of Reason courtesy of Rorotoko: www.rorotoko.com/micro-interv...

Happy Mother’s Day to all my Danzig lifers out there!

Related/isomorphic: Sohn-Rethels-stans indexing abstraction to commodity exchange. Brother, you’re working from a creationist-level timeline of human history.

“I wanna be on a first name basis with your mortician” and 999 more pick up lines available now on my Substack.

However you get there I guess…but probably shouldn’t have taken Bezos for people to turn on the Met Gala. It’s a gross successor of aristocratic preening not the affirmation of Paris Is Burning.

I have finally managed to sit down and read the ‘Abstraction Fallacy’ paper, and it is extremely disappointing. This is Searle on syntax/semantics except primitive intentionality gets hand waved by tying qualia to autopoiesis (metabolic vulnerability/thermodynamics/etc.): philarchive.org/rec/LERTAF

Amen.

I stay upbeat, never let negativity win. Like an apophatic, I smuggle positivity in.

With the renewed Analytic/Continental divide talk hereabouts I thought I might dredge up a blog post on the topic from over a decade ago. It mostly holds up, though I may be a little more vicious in describing the vices of either side these days: deontologistics.co/2013/06/16/b...

1000% agree that much of continental Phil doesn’t beat the platitudinous word salad charges, but saying something uncomplicated in a complicated way isn’t useless if the uncomplicated insight has legs (e.g., deterritorialization).

If this is a joke or a misunderstanding, what would him being serious about war crimes/genocide even look like?

The Technocrat’s Lament. . .

That deconstructing the carceral state must include clemency for the Hamburglar

I’m really glad to see Senators Warren and Shaheen sent this letter to Sec. Hegseth about the WEXMAC TITUS program which is helping fast-track the construction of immigrant concentration camps (and also floored and humbled that they link to my story about the program in the first sentence)

The NYT says today’s #NoKings protests had “no shortage of skeptics,” and then quoted exactly one of those skeptics: The chairman of the Ole Miss College Republicans (as of 2025.) But of course, the Times doesn’t ID him as such. He’s just a Concerned Youth.

I have a crazy way of reporting on 'No Kings' that's different from the NYT...I go out and talk to protesters about what they think Sure, size matters, but so does the passion of a movement offering the 4-letter word that beats back dictators Hope My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/trum...

When no one else wants to party in the space of giving and asking for reasons.

As the 18th-century war between mechanism and romanticism returns, we face a new question: can we build artificial souls? An Essay by @deontologistics.bsky.social

Luke warm “elevated” #horror takes - 1. Sad is easier to pull off than scary. 2. Horror can be a great vehicle for commentary, but it’s not horror if the audience doesn’t care if your characters die.

I have an anxiety joke, but what if it isn’t funny tho?

“I have zero introspection…400 years ago it would never have occurred to anyone to be introspective”. Andreessen’s combo of neurodivergence, vast wealth, airport book executive summary knowledge and intense white guy sense of personal centrality should be studied by future historians

Two stages of the AI/jobs narrative are: 1. AI is going to revolutionize productivity, which means it’s likely coming for your job. Good luck with that 2. We should still do capitalism tho, because AI will create jobs we haven’t thought of…probably

If you think the “post-“ crowd’s use of the Courtier’s reply is bad, go argue w/ a Catholic institutionalist re: apostolic succession.

On shame discourse again: shame didn’t go anywhere. The balkanization attendant to more powerful self-sorting mechanisms made shame hyper local, which, in turn, expanded the horizon of shamelessness outside those environs. So before we “bring back shame” those mechanisms must be thwarted/diminished

What a win for Markwayne’s everywhere.

I get the instinct behind “bring back shame,” but it strikes me as similar to saying “bring back penicillin” after an antibiotic resistant bacteria has ravaged the population. I don’t think “shaming” went anywhere, I think there’s been a socio-cognitive adaptation.

One of the amazing things about conservatives and reactionaries is the ability for them to un ironically appreciate art that absolutely hates them.

“My mother’s love for me had been so strong, so consuming, she killed each and every living person in the village…as I turned to her corpse I kissed her sweet smelling hair and said ‘thank you’” Rorcal whips. #metal #metalsky #doommetal #blackmetal

The anti-Bluesky discourse seems really overheated and dumb. It's a website, FFS. There's plenty of interesting discussion on it and a lot of smart people on it as well. It hasn't supplanted Twitter, true, but the idea that this represents some sort of major disqualifying failure is farcical.

No cheating, your last saved pic of a celebrity is your therapist.

“The second Trump administration launched the most vicious attack on public sector union workers since the Reagan era…” And watched US union membership soar to a 16-year high

2026 basically

I’ve never read Infinite Jest & have no idea what’s it’s about other than “Tennis…” But w/ God as my witness, I’d spend a day w/ someone who has it in their bookshelf before I spend a minute with someone still performing “I Hate David Foster Wallace More than You Do” in the year of our lord 2026.

The new piece by Anil Seth in Noema (www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...) is like a bingo card of currently popular anti-computationalist tropes, but above all it exemplifies the conflation of consciousness and personhood in debates about AI and potential human-likeness.