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duellona.bsky.social
@duellona.bsky.social
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duellona.bsky.social
A book on cybernetics and complexity by William Poundstone titled The Recursive Universe
August 11, 2025 at 8:55 PM
duellona.bsky.social
No cheating. Post your lock screen.
July 26, 2025 at 3:08 PM
duellona.bsky.social
David Graeber’s ‘The Bully’s Pulpit’ on the elementary structure of domination
February 21, 2025 at 3:28 PM
duellona.bsky.social
And what is true of social class is also true of any other form of structural inequality: hence epithets such as “shrill women,” “angry black men,” and an endless variety of similar terms of dismissive contempt. But the essential logic of bullying is prior to such inequalities. It is the ur-stuff of which they are made.
February 16, 2025 at 8:18 PM
duellona.bsky.social
This is precisely like Graeber’s analysis of elemental human domination in The Bully’s Pulpit. A sickeningly familiar and widely distributed pattern. thebaffler.com/salvos/bully...
This triangular dynamic among bully, victim, and audience is what I mean by the deep structure of bullying. It deserves to be analyzed in the textbooks. Actually, it deserves to be set in giant neon letters everywhere: Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself. Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call it the “you two cut it out” fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor further ramps up attack. This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying “Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!” or “Can’t you two just calm down and learn to see the other’s point of view?” The clever bully knows that this will happen—and that he will forfeit no points for being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to just the right pitch, the victim’s response can itself be represented as the problem.
February 16, 2025 at 4:57 PM
duellona.bsky.social
That explains where this chip in my arm came from
February 14, 2025 at 2:24 PM
duellona.bsky.social
Cassandra The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers Hooked on the stones of the wall The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth; does it matter Cassandra, Whether the people believe Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they’d liefer Meet a tiger on the road. Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion - Vendors and political men Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised in kind Wisdom. Poor bitch be wise. No; you’ll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men and Gods disgusting — you and I, Cassandra -Robinson Jeffers, 1944
February 5, 2025 at 5:58 PM
duellona.bsky.social
January 17, 2025 at 4:06 AM