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Marat's avatar

Chiming in to say, first of all, that I've love this blog. Reading these articles with my morning coffee has been a refreshing morning ritual. It's witty and incisive and so on.

Decided to chime in on this article in particular as it's far more on the practical end as opposed to the far-sighted political engineering side of things- This problem of speech is one I run into daily.

I'm a millennial, grown up during the old, wild days of the internet, and with artistic pretensions.

I've always had to engage in this sort of balancing act, between my desire for free and transgressive expression, with the growing practical necessity of staying out of the regime's crosshairs as society becomes more authoritarian.

It's clear, that on some level, the 'gauche' character of shitposting is something that can easily help reinforce power, and that serious, informative 'urbane' discussion is being choked out by the weeds of all these aforementioned '-speaks'. But at the same time, there's that Nietzsche quote about having chaos within you and dancing stars - What I loved about the olden days, was the ability to pivot between urbane discussion and irreverence, the high-brow and the-low brow, as different modes. In my private chats with close friends, we strike a comfortable balance between the two, but in public (we live in a society!), things tend either towards brainless limbic system reactionary chatter, or towards the regime's definition of 'polite intellectual discussion' -i.e. having a stick up your ass.

I'm typing this out quickly because I have other things to attend to today, so maybe I'm not thinking things all the way through, but basically, I want the order and stability that makes sane discussion possible, but I also don't want to have a stick up my ass forever.

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Zathras's avatar

If anyone is interested in being friends let me know. Good friends make life easier.

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