upright & seeking nutrition

The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.                                                                 ― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception How bad was it really though? The critics are right that the pandemic comparatively hasn’t killed as many people as other causes. But the real point should be that we don’t take other causes like degenerative diseases or accidents or substance abuse deaths as serious social problems. They’ve been normalized as matters of personal frailty & moral dissipation, not as having any social cause at all. Politically, society hasn't even existed since the 1980s when Reagan busted the unions & Thatcher ju...

Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.                                                                                        --Michael Oakeshott Authoritarians talk about protocols, but the only valid ‘protocol’ would be something like ‘perceive, think, act.’                                                                                                    --Ray Peat...