Diakena
@diakena.bsky.social
Podcaster, writer, nurse (in training). Kierkegaardian-Trotskyist. MNUFC loon, Madison mingo, Bundesliga casual.
https://diakena.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
https://diakena.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
Reposted by Diakena
(living in a country where the most successful people are obscenely rich and shameless perverts and psychopaths) Time to teach my children to be honest and study hard in school
December 26, 2024 at 8:45 PM
(living in a country where the most successful people are obscenely rich and shameless perverts and psychopaths) Time to teach my children to be honest and study hard in school
Reposted by Diakena
if you’re an isolated, angsty, strange young man, please know that you can become a Kierkegaard scholar instead of joining fringe online communities
September 12, 2025 at 11:30 PM
if you’re an isolated, angsty, strange young man, please know that you can become a Kierkegaard scholar instead of joining fringe online communities
Reposted by Diakena
the "tax the billionaires" political refrain is Good Actually in part because it is a call for the people at the top to actually be constrained by rules informed by the public interest, a virtue that fingerwagging correctives about how much revenue such taxes would *really* generate doesn't address
September 9, 2025 at 10:59 AM
the "tax the billionaires" political refrain is Good Actually in part because it is a call for the people at the top to actually be constrained by rules informed by the public interest, a virtue that fingerwagging correctives about how much revenue such taxes would *really* generate doesn't address
Common tactic of the chronically unreflective and insecure.
"Self-important condescension is like peeing on oneself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings." -Alan Wald
"Self-important condescension is like peeing on oneself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings." -Alan Wald
People still writing books about how lefty college kids are wrong feels like fighting what was yesterday's war yesterday.
www.politico.com/news/magazin...
www.politico.com/news/magazin...
Cass Sunstein on What Lefty College Kids Get Wrong, the Dangers of Trump and His Own Regrets
In a new book, the longtime legal scholar offers a defense of liberalism from its critics on both the right and the left.
www.politico.com
August 31, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Common tactic of the chronically unreflective and insecure.
"Self-important condescension is like peeing on oneself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings." -Alan Wald
"Self-important condescension is like peeing on oneself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings." -Alan Wald
Fully armed and supplied police forces spent summer 2020 beating protestors while nurses worked through a pandemic wearing garbage bags because they ran out of proper medical gowns
It is insane to me that the government can find money to pay ICE agents increasingly larger sums of money, yet teachers have to buy their own pencils.
August 19, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Fully armed and supplied police forces spent summer 2020 beating protestors while nurses worked through a pandemic wearing garbage bags because they ran out of proper medical gowns
Reposted by Diakena
It has often been said that fascism is when colonialism comes home, but now we can also say that it is when the organized abandonment that defines racism overspills its boundaries (the irony of course is that it does so in the name of preserving the wages of whiteness).
August 19, 2025 at 1:40 PM
It has often been said that fascism is when colonialism comes home, but now we can also say that it is when the organized abandonment that defines racism overspills its boundaries (the irony of course is that it does so in the name of preserving the wages of whiteness).
August 15, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Reposted by Diakena
Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.
I think we’re on the cusp of mass attempts to automate teaching, and I also think it is going to be a massive wasteful failure in ways that will make the “learning loss” of the pandemic look like a speed bump next to a mountain.
August 5, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.
Was literally writing about this exact phenomenon when this happened. Ty Donald Trump for making this essay easier to write
diakena.substack.com/p/enemy-hall...
diakena.substack.com/p/enemy-hall...
August 2, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Was literally writing about this exact phenomenon when this happened. Ty Donald Trump for making this essay easier to write
diakena.substack.com/p/enemy-hall...
diakena.substack.com/p/enemy-hall...
Yeah, Descartes' Meditations with the Objections and Replies
Remember when that guy published a mid article, people told him it was bad online, then he collected the replies and published them as a second article (also attributed to him)? We might not have liked it, but that was what peak analytic philosophy performance looked like
July 28, 2025 at 10:58 PM
Yeah, Descartes' Meditations with the Objections and Replies
Reposted by Diakena
Reposted by Diakena
dude this party is such an echo chamber. it's just friends hanging out and chilling and having a good time. you need to invite some people over who want to kill you with hammers
June 11, 2025 at 12:53 PM
dude this party is such an echo chamber. it's just friends hanging out and chilling and having a good time. you need to invite some people over who want to kill you with hammers
For anyone interested, I turned the last couple chapters of my book into a Substack post. Admittedly the Zizek/Peterson debate feels like old news, but I still see interest in critically responding to Petersons ideas. Here's one attempt that may prove helpful.
diakena.substack.com/p/critiquing...
diakena.substack.com/p/critiquing...
Critiquing the Lobster
On Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek, and everything discussing these two naturally entails...
diakena.substack.com
July 24, 2025 at 1:03 AM
For anyone interested, I turned the last couple chapters of my book into a Substack post. Admittedly the Zizek/Peterson debate feels like old news, but I still see interest in critically responding to Petersons ideas. Here's one attempt that may prove helpful.
diakena.substack.com/p/critiquing...
diakena.substack.com/p/critiquing...
Reposted by Diakena
In 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote a gorgeous, prescient essay called “The Pandemic is a Portal”. In this piece, I discuss who actually walked through it: the COVID conscious community, and why I’m proud to be a part of it.
www.thegauntlet.news/p/the-pandem...
www.thegauntlet.news/p/the-pandem...
The Pandemic Has Been a Portal (for a few of us)
It's true that most people keep choosing "normalcy". But the COVID conscious community is showing us a radical new way forward, that centers care
www.thegauntlet.news
July 22, 2025 at 2:45 AM
In 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote a gorgeous, prescient essay called “The Pandemic is a Portal”. In this piece, I discuss who actually walked through it: the COVID conscious community, and why I’m proud to be a part of it.
www.thegauntlet.news/p/the-pandem...
www.thegauntlet.news/p/the-pandem...
Reposted by Diakena
Marching was great, winning was great, but the best part of last night was reminding y’all that your mental health is important, you are valued, and that our community is here for you.
May 18, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Marching was great, winning was great, but the best part of last night was reminding y’all that your mental health is important, you are valued, and that our community is here for you.
Reposted by Diakena
Impossible to communicate to people that once you decide that a group more vulnerable than you can be sacrificed in the name of your own safety or interests that you have already entered into an tacit agreement that you can also be sacrificed in the interests of a group less vulnerable than you.
May 8, 2025 at 12:35 AM
Impossible to communicate to people that once you decide that a group more vulnerable than you can be sacrificed in the name of your own safety or interests that you have already entered into an tacit agreement that you can also be sacrificed in the interests of a group less vulnerable than you.
Reposted by Diakena
"Do your own research," "Grow your own food," "Get a gun to defend yourself" Okay, but I would like to like in a society, something where we work together to improve life for each other and not in some weird amalgamation of little robinsonades where everyone is looking out for themselves.
April 30, 2025 at 1:57 PM
"Do your own research," "Grow your own food," "Get a gun to defend yourself" Okay, but I would like to like in a society, something where we work together to improve life for each other and not in some weird amalgamation of little robinsonades where everyone is looking out for themselves.
Reposted by Diakena
The stupidity is the point. All of these cuts to research, to education, to libraries, are not cost saving measures that have collateral damage to knowledge, they are attempts to eviscerate collective intelligence.
Apply this to literally everything we do, unfortunately - and especially higher education (with relative research infrastructure too):
"Even if this gets reversed in four years, we will *never* recover the missions, partners, people who will be gone."
"Even if this gets reversed in four years, we will *never* recover the missions, partners, people who will be gone."
First the rumour was a 20% budget cut. Then, 50%. Now the president's NASA budget is out and it's a 68% cut to astrophysics ($1.5B to $487M).
Even if this gets reversed in four years, we will *never* recover the missions, partners, people who will be gone.
www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...
Even if this gets reversed in four years, we will *never* recover the missions, partners, people who will be gone.
www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...
April 12, 2025 at 12:04 PM
The stupidity is the point. All of these cuts to research, to education, to libraries, are not cost saving measures that have collateral damage to knowledge, they are attempts to eviscerate collective intelligence.
Reposted by Diakena
Thanks to @diakena.bsky.social and @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social for having this conversation with August and I about our book comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in real-time!
newbooksnetwork.com/the-communis...
newbooksnetwork.com/the-communis...
January 17, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Thanks to @diakena.bsky.social and @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social for having this conversation with August and I about our book comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in real-time!
newbooksnetwork.com/the-communis...
newbooksnetwork.com/the-communis...
2024 reading in review
open.substack.com/pub/diakena/...
open.substack.com/pub/diakena/...
2024 Reading in Review
Another year, another pile...
open.substack.com
January 1, 2025 at 9:00 PM
2024 reading in review
open.substack.com/pub/diakena/...
open.substack.com/pub/diakena/...
