labs that are also churches. to me
(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)
took around 500 pics driving around the olympic peninsula over the weekend! here are a few favorites :)
Mihawk has bi vibes and Shanks has pan vibes.
From now on this is how I will be explaining the difference between bi and pan to people. Bi? Is whatever Mihawk is. Pan? That’s Shanks.
Mihawk has bi vibes and Shanks has pan vibes.
this book website gives you the first page of a random book without the title or author so that you can read it with no preconceptions!!! great for discovering new recs
[“Levinas turned away from the fog of Being, and went the other way - towards individual, living, human entities. In his best-known work, Totality and Infinity, published in 1961, he made the relationship of Self with Other the foundation of his entire philosophy - as central a concept for him as Being was for Heidegger.
He once said that this shift in thinking had its origin in an experience he had in the camp. Like the other prisoners, he had got used to the guards treating them without respect as they worked, as if they were inhuman objects unworthy of fellow feeling. But each evening, as they were marched back behind the barbed-wire fence again, his work group would be greeted by a stray dog who had somehow found its way inside the camp. The dog would bark and fling itself around with delight at seeing them, as dogs do. Through the dog’s adoring eyes, the men were reminded each day of what it meant to be acknowledged by another being - to receive the basic recognition that one living creature grants to another.
As Levinas reflected on this experience, it helped to lead him to a philosophy that was essentially ethical, rather than ontological like Heidegger’s. He developed his ideas from the work of Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whose I and Thou in 1923 had distinguished between my relationship with an impersonal ‘it’ or 'them,’ and the direct personal encounter I have with a 'you.’ Levinas took it further: when I encounter you, we normally meet face-to-face, and it is through your face that you, another person, can make ethical demands on me. This is very different from Heidegger’s Mitsein or Being-with, which suggests a group of people standing alongside one another, shoulder to shoulder as if in solidarity - perhaps as a unified nation or Volk. For Levinas, we literally face each other, one individual at a time, and that relationship becomes one of communication and moral expectation. We do not merge; we respond to one another. Instead of being co-opted into playing some role in my personal drama of authenticity, you look me in the eyes - and you remain Other. You remain you.
This relationship is more foundational than the self, more fundamental that consciousness, more fundamental even than Being - and it brings an unavoidable ethical obligation. Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists have been trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. Levinas did more: he turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of it…
Meanwhile, the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel was also still arguing, as he had since the 1930s, that ethics trumps everything else in philosophy and that our duty to each other is so great as to play the role of a transcendent 'mystery.’ He too had been led to this position partly by wartime experience: during the First World War he had worked for the Red Cross’ Information Service, with the unenviable job of answering relatives’ inquiries about missing soldiers. Whenever news came, he passed it on, and usually it was not good. As Marcel later said, this task permanently inoculated him against warmongering rhetoric of any kind, and it made him aware of the power of what is not known in our lives.
One striking link between these radical ethical thinkers, all on the fringes of our main story, is that they had religious faith. They also granted a special role to the notion of 'mystery’ - that which cannot be known, calculated or understood, especially when it concerns our relationships with each other…
The mystery tradition had roots in Kierkegaard’s 'leap of faith.’ It owed much to the other great nineteenth-century mystic of the impossible, Dostoevsky, and to older theological notions. But it also grew from the protracted trauma that was the first half of the twentieth century. Since 1914, and especially since 1939, people in Europe and elsewhere had come to the realisation that we cannot fully know or trust ourselves; that we have no excuses or explanations for what we do - and yet that we must ground our existence and relationships on something firm, because otherwise we cannot survive.
Even the atheistic Sartre showed a desire for a new way of thinking about values. He had been scathing about traditional ethics in Nausea, writing in Levinasian terms of how bourgeois types, professing to be well-meaning humanists, had 'never allowed themselves to be affected by the meaning of a face.’ In Being and Nothingness, he went on to say that the placid old ethical principles based on mere tolerance did not go far enough any more. 'Tolerance’ failed to engage with the full extent of the demands others make on us. It is not enough to back off and simply put up with each other, he felt. We must learn to give each other more than that. Now he went even further: we must all become deeply 'engaged’ in our shared world.”]
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
All this talk where people conflate “wholesome” with “sexless.” Oh yeah? Well I think it’s wholesome when girls cum inside their friends.
I have to level with all of you. While I do write smut from time to time, mine is rarely wholesome. I just think it’s important to acknowledge that sex can be wholesome.
Because if you categorize it all as filthy, that takes some of the satisfaction out of doing particularly deranged, filthy, evil sex.
