situatedness
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where eternity’s shadow slinks
walking about myneighborhood listeningas Debussy fillsthe day with nocturnes scurrying squirrelsleap toward safetyfrom the old thinkerplodding on along is there more bird song?do feathered cousinswhistling and chirpingapprove these preludes? a bee knocks my handon way to freshlyplanted flowerbedgathering pollenalong the… Continue reading
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Haibun 06Jul25: Reading, Authority, and Reason
When I was young, I thought books were keys to the vault of answers. If I read enough, deeply enough, I’d know what to think. I mistook tradition for commandment. Decades later, I sit among these same volumes—dog-eared, underlined, marked… Continue reading
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Philosophical Faith in the World: Neither Sinner nor Consumer
Karl Jaspers small text provides us in 2025 with a manual of quiet defiance. For queer and other marginalized thinkers, educators, counselors, and all who remain exposed in the neoliberal storm winds, Jaspers offers us Way to reassert the soft power… Continue reading
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Neoliberalism: The Operating System of the Society of Control
Neoliberalism, emerging as a reaction against Keynesian policies, transforms social life through market logic, individual responsibility, and state facilitation of capital. It prioritizes deregulation, privatization, and austerity, reframing citizens as entrepreneurial actors. In Texas, neoliberal policies since the 1990s have… Continue reading
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Reversion, Reconciliation, and Restoration: Toward Tranquility in the Current Empire
Looking Back Almost twenty years ago, I began troubling the word peace. Like many of us, I had long imagined peace as the cessation of violence, the arrival of stillness, the mutual exhale after the fire. But something in the… Continue reading
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From Republic to Serfdom: Misreading Rome in America’s Rural Imagination
Introduction The recent interview with Ammon Bundy in The Salt Lake Tribune highlights a recurring theme among certain rural conservatives: the belief that the expansion of government welfare signals the decline of a once-great republic. Bundy’s assertion that the U.S.… Continue reading
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For Tihleigh, 21 Oct 2023
If you do not bring your friends up with you, who will? If you do not let your friends bring you up, who really can? There is nothing else to lifting each other up than beholding that the greatest truth—freedom—obtains… Continue reading
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Finding unexpected meanings
Take care with how you read but do not be afraid to find new interpretations. Continue reading
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Ready… set… leap!
Obviously, folks make leaps all the time: they leap for real joy, they leap to invalid conclusions, they leap into bad deals, etc. So a distinction must be drawn between springing-forth from the solid ground of critical experience (the dance… Continue reading
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Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider | Books | The Guardian
Identity politics finds critics everywhere. Throw a rock at a rack of newspapers and you’ll probably hit an editorial condemning it. Conservatives such as Republican House speaker Paul Ryan blame it for polarisation, while liberals like the Columbia University historian… Continue reading
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Encountering the Encompassing
PHIL 1050, MWF @ 1:00pm, Monday 19 Sep 2016 My young friends were asked to read Jaspers chapter on das Umgreifende, the Encompassing or as Ralph Mannheim translates the term in Way to Wisdom, the Comprehensive. Not an easy thing to… Continue reading
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General Kafka
“The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial something happened we cannot know details rest assured… it happened not a good thing a hushed thing sitting… Continue reading
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Loving Struggle, Possible Existenz
Philosophizing must be a work of art that is always on the brink of failure; a befriending of the power of imaginative vision that already stretches too far until it reaches contradiction and breaks down. Only in this reaching beyond… Continue reading
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Irrationality: Factual Fictions
irrational (adj.) late 15c., “not endowed with reason” (of beats, etc.); earlier (of quantities) “inexpressible in ordinary numbers” (late 14c.); from Latin irrationalis “without reason,” from assimilated form of in- “not, opposite of” (see in- (1)) + rationalis “reason” (see rational). Meaning “illogical, absurd” is attested from 1640s. via etymonline.com… Continue reading
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TONGUE SANDWICH, Plagiarist
NOTE: This piece was originally a reblog. It can no longer be found at TONGUE SANDWICH. Turns out, TS is a horrible little plagiarist. You can see an interchange between that vile man and myself below. And what an ironic… Continue reading
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Daodejing 27
#27* The one who masters walking leaves no footprints. The one who masters speaking makes no slips of the tongue. The one who masters counting needs no tally tools to count. The one who masters shutting the door needs no… Continue reading
CALL ME MAGGIE 