muck
@muck.bsky.social
one who floats. analytical engine enjoyer.
Pinned
muck
@muck.bsky.social
· Sep 4
The world wheel spins. Aimless, careless wandering. Chasing shadows; projections of psychophysical attractors. The trickster invites you, "Here! Here!" You will follow.
Abandoning if not religion then the religious worldview was clearly a misstep of modernity. People just sublimate the impulse into politics in ways that are at best delusional and at worst apocalyptically destructive, because they want apocalypse on Earth and in their lifetime.
November 8, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Abandoning if not religion then the religious worldview was clearly a misstep of modernity. People just sublimate the impulse into politics in ways that are at best delusional and at worst apocalyptically destructive, because they want apocalypse on Earth and in their lifetime.
Reposted by muck
Trump defeated the establishments of both parties to become president twice, break most civic and legal norms of import, end-run the Constitution's safeguards against Trump-like figures, survive numerous career-ending scandals, and now single-handedly holds a party together that would have spent
Trump has gotten huge numbers of infrequent voters to the polls, twice. He's deeply unpopular but has mobilized a large, unprecedented coalition of Americans motivated by some combination of ignorance, avarice, and cruelty. It is hard to describe what he has as something other than charisma
His charisma is fundamentally incompatible with me (and likely many of the people on Bluesky) but it’s kind of insane to say it doesn’t exist
November 7, 2025 at 12:13 PM
Trump defeated the establishments of both parties to become president twice, break most civic and legal norms of import, end-run the Constitution's safeguards against Trump-like figures, survive numerous career-ending scandals, and now single-handedly holds a party together that would have spent
Spiritual fulfillment should come from post-9 pm rumination, reading books, and altered states of consciousness (including dreams)
November 5, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Spiritual fulfillment should come from post-9 pm rumination, reading books, and altered states of consciousness (including dreams)
Reposted by muck
Blocking hatemongers is one thing but this trend of using mass block lists to avoid hearing from people who might or might not hold points of view you expect to disagree with is unhealthy imo and hurts the platform.
Bluesky was better off with folks like Margaret Mitchell and Giada Pistilli on it.
Bluesky was better off with folks like Margaret Mitchell and Giada Pistilli on it.
November 3, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Blocking hatemongers is one thing but this trend of using mass block lists to avoid hearing from people who might or might not hold points of view you expect to disagree with is unhealthy imo and hurts the platform.
Bluesky was better off with folks like Margaret Mitchell and Giada Pistilli on it.
Bluesky was better off with folks like Margaret Mitchell and Giada Pistilli on it.
Technocracy - which most people on this site support to some non-trivial degree - is incompatible with democracy and liberalism on both a philosophical and practical level, and global fascism's negative reaction to it is like the one sympathetic thing about it. I do not desire a globe-spanning DMV.
November 3, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Technocracy - which most people on this site support to some non-trivial degree - is incompatible with democracy and liberalism on both a philosophical and practical level, and global fascism's negative reaction to it is like the one sympathetic thing about it. I do not desire a globe-spanning DMV.
This is a real phenomenon and has little directly to do with the internet and everything to do with an education and parenting industrial complex that practically does everything in its power to instill learned helplessness. 1001 moral panics over who will think of the children have caught up.
something weird I've noticed over the past couple of years: college students used to be adults, but are now children. it's strange. I'm even seeing grad students, who used to be adults, now be children. whereas people who used to be old, like postdocs, are now normal? maybe TikTok is to blame.
October 30, 2025 at 4:01 PM
This is a real phenomenon and has little directly to do with the internet and everything to do with an education and parenting industrial complex that practically does everything in its power to instill learned helplessness. 1001 moral panics over who will think of the children have caught up.
I disagree with the politics of megastructures.
October 30, 2025 at 3:59 PM
I disagree with the politics of megastructures.
The reason why technology may or already has first automated away a lot of intellectual labor instead of drudgery is less because of technical limitations and more because there's no incentive to, even if it would be more efficient. It would mean an end to factories as we know them.
October 29, 2025 at 11:10 PM
The reason why technology may or already has first automated away a lot of intellectual labor instead of drudgery is less because of technical limitations and more because there's no incentive to, even if it would be more efficient. It would mean an end to factories as we know them.
We live in a supply-driven economy full of high-pressure advertising, planned obsolescence, inefficiency and waste, IP rents, etc. It is acceptable to hate producers sometimes, since they do, in fact, exploit their "treatlerite" consumers. Anything else is workerist Marxism.
October 28, 2025 at 3:04 PM
We live in a supply-driven economy full of high-pressure advertising, planned obsolescence, inefficiency and waste, IP rents, etc. It is acceptable to hate producers sometimes, since they do, in fact, exploit their "treatlerite" consumers. Anything else is workerist Marxism.
I'm not a Marxist. I'm a Mumfordian.
October 27, 2025 at 5:36 PM
I'm not a Marxist. I'm a Mumfordian.
I think this anti-tech hysteria might be getting out of hand. Dangerous, even.
October 26, 2025 at 12:35 AM
I think this anti-tech hysteria might be getting out of hand. Dangerous, even.
There is something deeply ironic about the popularity of video essays and people being exhausted by them. Like someone wished for YouTube to be more cultured and the monkey's paw curled.
October 25, 2025 at 4:49 PM
There is something deeply ironic about the popularity of video essays and people being exhausted by them. Like someone wished for YouTube to be more cultured and the monkey's paw curled.
Stancil reply guys (i.e., serial harassers) are insane. Just witnessed both a nazi and a commie respond nigh-instantly to a fresh stancil post with less than 10 likes.
October 23, 2025 at 2:17 AM
Stancil reply guys (i.e., serial harassers) are insane. Just witnessed both a nazi and a commie respond nigh-instantly to a fresh stancil post with less than 10 likes.
Microdosing X, the Everything App to remind myself just how loathsome fascists are.
October 22, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Microdosing X, the Everything App to remind myself just how loathsome fascists are.
There is a style of political ideation that is just reproducing various bourgeois middle class norms with increasingly elaborate justifications and rationalizations. It is at its core conservative but only sometimes presents as such. It's only marginally less noxious than fascism.
October 22, 2025 at 7:41 PM
There is a style of political ideation that is just reproducing various bourgeois middle class norms with increasingly elaborate justifications and rationalizations. It is at its core conservative but only sometimes presents as such. It's only marginally less noxious than fascism.
People have diachronic personality traits that are largely independent of their environment (regardless of whether or not they're biologically determined). This includes various authoritarian personality traits, which are at best potentiated by propaganda.
October 21, 2025 at 5:09 AM
People have diachronic personality traits that are largely independent of their environment (regardless of whether or not they're biologically determined). This includes various authoritarian personality traits, which are at best potentiated by propaganda.
Reposted by muck
anybody else feel like the systems of control that dominate their entire life only ratchet tighter and tighter as time goes on. Laws upon laws until everything is illegal once someone is mad at you
October 17, 2025 at 6:21 PM
anybody else feel like the systems of control that dominate their entire life only ratchet tighter and tighter as time goes on. Laws upon laws until everything is illegal once someone is mad at you
i'm sorry I can't take fearmongering over "disinformation" very seriously. it's not new or especially bad in the 21st century - a mildly reality-agnostic engagement with reality is the perennial state of mankind -
October 20, 2025 at 1:54 AM
i'm sorry I can't take fearmongering over "disinformation" very seriously. it's not new or especially bad in the 21st century - a mildly reality-agnostic engagement with reality is the perennial state of mankind -
Law and order democrat (wants Trump executed)
October 13, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Law and order democrat (wants Trump executed)
Digital media theorists as late as 1997, perhaps later, believed something now as banal as hypertext would lead to the creation of a literary Aleph; a practically infinite book, senantically inexhaustible. And this was seen as exciting if not good.
October 9, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Digital media theorists as late as 1997, perhaps later, believed something now as banal as hypertext would lead to the creation of a literary Aleph; a practically infinite book, senantically inexhaustible. And this was seen as exciting if not good.
Gentoo can not be that bad... Firefox and LibreOffice have binary packages... my CPU is fast...
October 8, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Gentoo can not be that bad... Firefox and LibreOffice have binary packages... my CPU is fast...
The history of civilization is the history of the development of both rational-legal laws and informal norms that limit the ability for one person or group to arbitrarily and unilaterally harm another person or group. Authoritarians despise this since they imagine themselves as infallibly good.
October 6, 2025 at 6:48 PM
The history of civilization is the history of the development of both rational-legal laws and informal norms that limit the ability for one person or group to arbitrarily and unilaterally harm another person or group. Authoritarians despise this since they imagine themselves as infallibly good.
Blocks and especially blocklists can be toxic in their own right. They aren't merely purely good tools to ease one's experience or frustrate serial harassers. If you're going to be social at all, yes, there is a degree to which you should be forced to interact with a diverse set of people.
October 6, 2025 at 6:25 AM
Blocks and especially blocklists can be toxic in their own right. They aren't merely purely good tools to ease one's experience or frustrate serial harassers. If you're going to be social at all, yes, there is a degree to which you should be forced to interact with a diverse set of people.
Hatred for your fellow man
October 6, 2025 at 5:30 AM
Hatred for your fellow man