A colleague and I chatted about a recent publication; he graciously noted he didn't agree with me. I realise that my example was strictly US. In this post, I don't lose the US frame; I added more background and brought in some name support. Feedback and counterpoints welcome.
👉 https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/12/the-architecture-of-cognitive-compromise/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
#philosophy #morals #ethics #thickness #legibility #ontology #biopower #habitus #paradox #tolerance #epistemology #abortion #rights #culture #frameworks #society #blog #podcast #communication
#morals
The first sign of corrupt morals is the banishing of truth.
[Le premier traict de la corruption des mœurs, c’est le bannissement de la verité]
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) French essayist
Essays, Book 2, ch. 18 (2.18), “Of Giving the Lie [Du Démentir]” (1578–79) [tr. Screech (1987)]
More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montaigne-michel-de/…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #montaigne #micheldemontaigne #corruption #culture #custom #debasing #dishonesty #lies #lying #manners #mendacity #morals #mores #society #truth #untruth
So, I am a Computational Biologist. Keep that in mind. I’m an actual scientist who works with ecological concepts, specifically the microbiome. One of the most insufferable reactions to the cyberpunk era we inhabit is the emergence of anti-science ideas from the left in response to techno-fascism. The strange part is that many people on the left do not even recognize them as anti-science, because they assume the left is aligned with science and the right opposed to it; ergo, if the left says it, it must be scientific. It is insane: washing your hands is technology. Medicine is technology.
I think, because the Internet has hijacked people’s brains, many conflate technology with electronics or machines. Anthropologically, technology consists of material objects, techniques, and organized practices through which humans intentionally intervene in their environments. Technology is culture, and human culture is technology. When someone learns a skill or a discipline from someone else, that is an extension of technology.
Technology encompasses craft traditions (blacksmithing), agriculture, and institutionalized processes of teaching and learning. Agriculture is one of the oldest forms of technology. Yes, farmers are tech workers. I write code, but I also spent a large amount of time on a farm, and I can tell you that many tech workers who pride themselves on writing code would not know what to do with farm equipment.
So, from that broad perspective, we can sum technology up in one word: education. A basic heuristic for determining if something is cultural or not is: can it be taught and learned? These words? I was taught English, and I am using an invented language to transmit knowledge to you; ergo, I am using technology to transmit cultural knowledge to you. Reading a book is thus using a piece of human technology. So, being anti-tech connotes being anti-education.
What got me thinking about this is a toot I read on Mastodon:
The truth is that society needs to develop ethically and ecologically more than it does technologically. That’s not to say that we should shun technology, but our development along other lines lags far behind our technological capacity.
Sounds valid, right? That is the distinct smell of bull shit.This is a clear example of what is called a platitude. Platitudes are memetically hijacking people’s brains. Memetics actually hijack your brain—they change it. It’s similar to how a retrovirus can alter the genome of its host. So, trying to have conversations with these people is pointless, which is why I avoid the chronically online Internet scene and arguing with them.
It made me want to scream. As I mentioned earlier, technology is basically a set of things you learn from other humans—typically within a culture—that helps you do or make something. You know what else is learned within human society? A normative set of cultural values about how we ought to behave. So, both technology and culture emerge from the same thing simultaneously and mutually. You cannot have humans intervening in things to achieve ecological development, because that is technology, and you cannot educate humans on ethics without an invented language. It is literally an anti-education argument.
Ethics and technology arise together from the same human conditions and social processes. It makes little sense to claim that technology is “outpacing” ethics. The two do not develop independently. We form ethical norms in response to new capacities and circumstances. There would be no cultural norms about how to use the Internet if the Internet did not exist. And, there would be no ethical debates about AI if AI did not exist. Ethical reflection emerges alongside technological change because both are products of human culture.
As new problems create new technologies that create new problems, societies respond by negotiating norms, rules, and expectations appropriate to those contexts. The same pattern appears in politics. Politics concerns who gets what, when, and how—it is the negotiation of power, rights, and resources. Without resources or competing claims, there would be nothing to negotiate. Ethics and politics are not trailing behind technology because they are co-emergent responses to the same underlying realities.
New York Times: Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Mingled With Silicon Valley Start-Ups. This link goes to a gift article. “The documents illustrate not only Mr. Epstein’s deep relationships in Silicon Valley but also his ability to gain access to hot deals and buzzy start-ups, some of which would become pillars of today’s tech industry. Along the way, Mr. Epstein was aided by venture capitalists, […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/02/08/new-york-times-jeffrey-epsteins-money-mingled-with-silicon-valley-start-ups-gift-article/
@log @ambiguous_yelp this is a reductio ad absurdum of your position. You literally just admitted that you believe toddlers have no inherent moral value. What if the moral agents whose guardianship they’re under are abusive? How does your faux-morality handle that?
Those inversions can be demonstrated to be incoherent. If good and evil are immature, that implies that there is no reason to act one way over another. If that is true and someone really believes, the question is why aren’t they behaving randomly.
Believing incoherent notions of good and evil is bad as is the case with evangelicals.
#philosophy #moral #morals #ethics #MoralRealism #metaethics
"Most vegans engage with food far more consciously than the average consumer. They’re more aware of where their food comes from and what’s in it. They’ve set clear criteria for what they will and won’t eat. They seem far less susceptible to advertising. Rather than simply repeating what their parents and grandparents ate, they’ve actively thought about their diet."
#tobiasleenaert #substack #food #choices #morals #meat #vegan #veganism #carnism
Proudhon said property is theft, but Claude tells me that property is violence.
Which one is correct? Why not both?
#philosophy #property #locke #rousseau #proudhon #fairness #morals #ethics #parable #islands #humancondition #fences #luck #metaphor #psychology #blog #podcast #claudeai #ai #writing #thinking
Tuesday, February 3, 2026
Russians chose a freezing February night: Damaged buildings, casualties reported as Russia resumes strikes on Kyiv amid large-scale attack -- Instead of 6 missiles, there are only 2; Ukraine's Air Force reveals dire air defense shortage --Russian forces trying to bypass and infiltrate Vovchansk in Kharkiv Oblast -- How Kyiv Zoo is protecting life through the coldest and darkest winter of the full-scale war ... and morehttps://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/02/tuesday-february-3-2026/
prioritize your thoughts, simplify your life…
You've followed the influencers on simplifying your life. You've adopted a minimalist lifestyle, but all of it falls flat. Have you been looking at it the wrong way?https://thedignityofman.net/2025/10/06/priotize-your-thoughts-simplify-your-life/
Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules
So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate
A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:
“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”
— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)
I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.
ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.
Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.
Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.
What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.
Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!
On to the convo:
A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.
By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.
This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.
Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?
The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.
The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.
It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.
I've long considered the connexion of Law and Morality to be weak and tenuous.
https://philosophics.blog/2026/01/31/why-so-serious/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
After listening to this survival-cannibalism-on-the-high-seas story by Judge Coleridge in 1870 and the attendant murder convictions, my opinion gets categorically worse. Pictures at 11.
#philosophy #psychology #law #morality #morals #jurisprudence #consistancy #trials #blog #hiatus #video #society #justice #humancondition #AskMeWhy #politics #girard #serious #history
BlueSky Is A Platform For Attention Whores With No Standards
I’m convinced that Bluesky is the platform for attention-whores who perform and humiliate themselves for validation and affirmation. It’s really sad. I don’t feel bad when bad things happen to them as a consequence because they were already warned, yet they prioritize fitting into a culture and refuse to deal with their feelings of inadequacy. The reason they stay is that the bar is low for meaningful engagement, allowing them to indulge in their obsessions and compulsions while being rewarded for self-destructive behavior. It truly is quite pathetic.
I initially joined Bluesky for the sexual content because people on Mastodon have little interest in sex and much more elaborate norms around sexuality. Contrary to what people think of me, I don’t actually use social media in the conventional way most people do. I view it on an abstract, non-algorithmically served layer via my network analysis tools, and I interact with YouTube in a very constrained way. So, I wasn’t aware of how bad things were until I started using Bluesky conventionally. The men on Bluesky are just plain repulsive to me. Desperation, neediness, lack of independence, and obsessively posting about a single topic (like sex, religion, or politics), instead of developing a genuine hobby that demonstrates skill, progress, and mastery, are major turn-offs. I find a lack of standards absolutely disgusting.
For example, if someone abhorrent gives you a compliment, you don’t accept it. If an abhorrent person follows you, you block them. Yet what I see are men posting sexual content and seeking attention and validation from anyone, regardless of who it’s coming from. If I look through someone’s activity and see nothing but low-effort posts interacting with nothing but sexual content or obsessive engagement with that type of content, I lose interest immediately.
A reason why my husband has held my attention for over a decade is that there is always something new with him. He is always randomly looking into developing a new skill. One day, he started randomly speaking Mandarin to me, which I did not know he knew how to speak. He had told me he had been learning Mandarin. Yes, my husband is neurodivergent and his interests are cars, but that doesn’t displace all other things. Another reason why my husband holds my attention is that he can keep a conversation going and match anyone’s changes. It’s not one ritualistic or compulsive thing every single fucking day.
A very real consequence of the lack of standards in gay sexual spaces, especially given that many misogynistic, homophobic far-right men suppress their homosexual attractions, is that many of the fetishes in gay sexual spaces are reminiscent of manosphere content. Because of what I do for a living, I have access to audience segmentation metrics and social embeddings of how content is served. Manosphere content clusters with homoerotic content that men consume. At some point, obsession became so normalized that people stopped realizing it was problematic.
Unless gay men set boundaries and tell manosphere bros, “we’re not having that,” you’ll see what I see on Bluesky. I’m actually very sexual myself, and I frequently go to bathhouses—those that have very explicit rules—sex parties, and orgies.
The funny thing is that I have had plenty of really deep philosophical conversations sitting in the hot tub of a bathhouse with naked gay men. Because of health codes and all that, you can’t do sexual things in the pool or the hot tub, so those areas were places for genuine play and conversation, while spots like the saunas were the fuck spots. I recall a particularly interesting conversation I had with an older gay man who had been going to that bathhouse since the ’80s. He explained to me the social context of the HIV epidemic and how, basically, no one knew it was sexually transmitted, so everyone was still barebacking at that exact same bathhouse we were in.
The issue here is people who fuck and sexually perform for awful people who want to murder them because they have absolutely no fucking standards and are so emotionally needy that they forgo all forms of self-preservation. I’m a computer scientist, so I have access to a lot of data tools. I can tell you for a fact that there is a strong correlation between men who want to murder gay men and trans people and the ones liking, engaging in parasocial dynamics with, and commenting in their replies. You’re willing to take sexual attention from people who want to kill you, and that blows my mind.
In their minds, Bluesky is better if it is not a Nazi strip bar but a Nazi BDSM-furry-kink club? What the ever-loving fuck?! Honestly, I watch a lot of feminist content that rips manosphere content apart, so much so that I can instantly recognize coded things. The “fuck no!” moment for me is when I saw manosphere-coded things being fetishized in the ego networks of large gay adult content creators and OnlyFans creators in social network embeddings. It’s not like it is insidious. If I see it, everyone else sees it; they are just ignoring it because they are prioritizing sexual validation and their obsessions.
🤬 National poll: Less than half of parents say swearing is never OK for kids
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-national-poll-parents-kids.html
#swearing #polls #children #parents #parenting #morals #culture #survey #research
Laurens Perseus Hickok, a Presbyterian grandee, notes that God hands out goodness even to the ungrateful, and calls that godlike. Which is awkward, because we prefer a deity who audits recipients. If charity waits on thank-you notes (ex: USAID, Ukraine), Hickok suggests we’ve misunderstood God—and made stinginess sound theological.
From my latest post on the class basis of morality
https://proletarianperspective.substack.com/p/their-morals-and-ours-the-class-basis
The infamous JoJo thought experiment - Michael Vazquez and Sarah Stroud
Friday, January 16, 2026
Russian drone strikes Lviv playground -- 70 Russian soldiers destroyed during assault near Kharkiv -- "Disgraceful statement": Ukraine condemns International Committee of the Red Cross over moral equivalence on energy strikes -- The Ukrainian war cemetery that can't stop growing ... and morehttps://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/01/friday-january-16-2026/
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