23 Comments

Tonic intersectionality. Christians, following the late, great Donald Keefe, SJ, might use the phrase: free unity.

Not to mention the Commandment: Thou shalt not covet.

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Hadn't heard free unity. Good one. I personally like multiplex unity.

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"All the best words get stolen from us."... I believe it's because words contain the magic of creation... that's why it's called "spelling".

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"The best and brightest are denied what should be their natural positions in society, which are instead occupied by the absolute worst." That pretty well describes gov/bank/corp at this point.

Diversity might be the fundamental law of ecology, nature always strives toward ever greater diversity. The homogeneity of modern consumerism and it's blase' attitude toward species extermination is pathological, but not surprising. The Marxcissists demanding we all accept oppressor or victim status is just more of the same madness, and doomed. The trans thing is like the hatred of nature gone to it's most extreme. The entire woke/globalist/trans/covid phenomenon is like a death cult, insofar as it all seems to be in denial of declining fertility and excess mortality, as if depopulation is fundamental to the ideology.

Be tonic. Celebrate diversity in all things. Thanks for helping to show the way.

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"All the best words get stolen from us."

Truer words were never spoken. "Liberal" used to refer to the political right (in both senses of the word "right"). I'm in the process of writing a long article about this chronic leftist "word-flipping".

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1987)

"Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words..."

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)

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Great quotes. There are some bits in Ponerology (the book) like this, too, including about the strange ability of pathocrats for creating endless numbers of new non-words. That's why there was an acronym for everything in the USSR. And worse, the words were boring, and made even more boring by being turned into acronyms.

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I'm so honored I don't quite know what to say. You make the parallels between beautiful music and social harmony so obvious it feels like something everyone must already understand. I also love the introduction of negative convergence and positive divergence. I don't see you say it explicitly, but I think this is a great way of conceiving of the difference between a toxic and tonic diversity.

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"but I think this is a great way of conceiving of the difference between a toxic and tonic diversity."

Seems like something I should've said explicitly... LOL. Thank you, Grant!

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Each variable trait, each individual intersection of traits (i.e. each person), has a telos, a purpose to fill in the mosaic of social relationships we call society.

Shades of Hopkins and Duns Scotius here —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inscape_and_instress

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Hadn't heard of this. Thanks!

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This is a really thoughtful piece - and excellent use of a foundational value in Roman law (also thanks for sending a bunch of new subscribers my way).

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Thanks, Helen, and you're welcome, too!

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So well said, thanks Harrison.

What would the world be without true diversity, inequality, and the freedom to discriminate? I guess we are finding out!

Understanding the stolen language is so important, as Orwell was so prophetically wrote.

I have an older Oxford Dictionary of English (a rather large single volume) in which I have good intentions of using rather than online references that so easily morph in the cultural mêlée of ideological idiocy we seem to be in.

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Back when I was a teenager, my Dad got me a massive two-volume Oxford as a present - though not as massive as the multivolume set, if I remember correctly. And yeah, it was on my list - I'm a nerd. Really gotta use it more often...

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When I was in Oxford as a young 20 something I saw the full multi-volume set of the Oxford dictionary and thought how wonderful to have that in my oak-walled library!

Well I never got the set and don't have the oak-walled library, but my single volume is good enough.

I too have to use it more often!

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Yeah, an oak-walled library would be nice... Visited the Biltmore Estate in NC recently and, man, that library is a dream. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Library,_Biltmore_House,_Biltmore_Estate,_Asheville,_NC_%2846675472672%29.jpg

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This seems to relate to self-organization, allowing each to find his place in society according to his talents and abilities, with the idea that the resulting social order will tend to be the best one possible. Of course, that doesn't seem great if you're destined on this basis to be lower in the hierarchy than you'd prefer - hence the necessity (for them) of affirmative action, nepotism, etc.

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The possibility L raises is that if you're destined to be on a lower rung - but you make enough money to be relatively comfortable - you won't mind. I think that's generally true, in my limited experience. If you don't earn what you're worth, or your boss is an upjumped moron, you get resentful. But that only applies to normies. It's the aspiring pathocrats that want to be above their station in life, hence the necessity (for society) of ponerology to combat the pathological AA, nepotism, etc.

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It was really more the characteropaths I had in mind, who in a healthy society are kept very far from power (and resent this). Most people aren't all that ambitious - they just wanna grill, and have a pretty reasonable idea of what constitutes fair dealing.

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Yep, well put.

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Feb 3, 2023
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That's why so many people don't know the Universal Truths: they're in the footnotes.

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It's profound, but is it universal, in the literal sense?

"At any given instant, it is never meaningful to ascribe a size to the universe, in saying what it ‘looks like’ at the Janus point we should consider only its shape there."

Julian Barber, “Chapter 12, The Most Beautiful System” The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time (2020) p166

The Janus point is Barber's theory about the beginning and end of the universe. Is physical space a shape (which can be scaled to any size) or a space? It's the difference between a vector image and a raster image. A triangle that is a shape, or a bunch of pixels that form a triangle.

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I think the sense in which it's universal is less geometrical and more syntactic--on the level of nonphysical, ultimately "linguistic" structure. It's the basic dynamics and operations that scale. Whitehead and Langan, and the mystics, are my go-to guys here. So fractality is more of a symbol for a nested and distributed cognitive template, not necessarily to be taken literally in terms of spatial relations.

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