jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Can’t be bothered to count but it must at least be close bsky.app/profile/essj... 020
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 30/09/2026—I think it’s good too. But Kant modifies what I expect from it 000
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 30/09/2026I’m sure I’m botching Kant a bit and that he must be botching the ancient schools. But I find myself often thinking versions of this argument in explaining the endless revivals of stoicism and perhaps some therapeutic or new age thinking (I won’t blame it on Epicurus) 111
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 30/09/2026What do you make of Kant’s objection to it in the second critique? I mean his suggestion in the second part that Stoicism and Epicureanism are the great failed attempts to “analytically” reduce happiness to virtue and vice versa, however that we cannot retreat from the task of synthesizing them? 110
Reposted by jackie essjackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 10/02/2026I see. www.youtube.com/watch?v=E361...youtube.comWhy consciousness is software, and software is spirit | Joscha Bach | FULL INTERVIEWYouTube video by The Institute of Art and Ideas 171
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 20/09/2026strange that these elite fora which combine pseudoscientific and pundit-style sophistry, from iai to ted to jeffrey epstein's edge-org, seem to keep reinventing themselves. why is the form so persistent? critique never sticks. social epistemology specialists and philosophers of science, we need you! 011
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 20/09/2026my actual criticism of this stuff is in this thread. this is NOT primarily propaganda that manipulates your sense of the facts, but your sense of the possible, of what is alive in the conversation, of the social nexus of serious thinkers and public voices, of the Overton window, etc 110
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 20/09/2026apparently it's that time of year again bsky.app/profile/nate... 110
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 19/09/2026I seem to speak up more on the bad days, and against that tendency let me just say that this is one of the good ones. The last month was one of the lowest and most difficult I’ve had in a long time but it has actually let up. You truly never know when mercy will arrive or where from 0250
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 19/09/2026in a way the text was a machine which accelerated the development of fruiting bodies (the adult reflective stance) from the immanent mycelial smooth consciousness which under a certain reading they seem to praise. fair play to the boys I think this may be what they were going for after all 020
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 19/09/2026I think the grammatical simplifications relative to German make it a better language, even if German may be a bit more logical with modalverben. it doesn't make sense in my life but I would so much rather be learning Dutch than German right now 010
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 18/09/2026honestly as many as it takes. but they should stop checking tickets on sundays 010
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I wouldn't call it a unified theory, but seems related to the politics of embattled, locked-out resentment which is practiced and performed now from above. it seems very different than old-school aristocratic entitlement, and different than the sense of earned victory of the old bourgeois captains 130
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I think they're sometimes related by an sense of cultural victory in which grievance and resentment remain fully intact. for example people will try to prove that comic book movies are *real art,* when there is no other kind of movie that receives comparable investment, audience size, or marketing 162
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 16/09/2026is this ai proof of the Komlós conjecture solid, do we think? fair play to the clanker if so arxiv.org/abs/2609.11189arxiv.orgVector Balancing via Directional Total VariationOur main result is a $3\sqrt{2π}$ bound for the Komlós signing problem: every finite family of real vectors of Euclidean norm at most one admits a signed sum of $\ell_\infty$-norm less than this const... 020
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 14/09/2026have you found his substack? or the infinitely long pablo held interviews? 110
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 14/09/2026this very day I texted a crazy number of chris songs to a friend — when you and me got arrested, elephant in the room, thorn, fingers of mars, hand sign, full professor, I hear harp, a little bit of floor 110
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 14/09/2026you're sweet to say so. just loved return to forever since I was a kid, and got a bit more curious in the last few years—a friend began to remind me of flora. was also thinking of her life as an interesting navigation of the long brazilian dictatorship, from exile to exile 000
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 13/09/2026absolutely incredible that this exists. I love Flora Purim, had no idea there was anything recorded in this period 192
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 13/09/2026well, I think it could have gone otherwise in that the missed chance was sometimes just the chance to say something true, not necessarily a pivotal intervention in politics or group dignity, but a bit of signal in the noise, a rally, a refuge, a reminder that we have something to say 020
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 13/09/2026I found it very sad at the time and still do now. a missed chance, not necessarily to reach better outcomes by sheer argument, but at least to produce better answers to "who are we?" or "what do we by our very presence negotiate?" all diminished by over-reliance on quick-staling academic trends 130
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 13/09/2026if you have extreme or isolating opinions, a few of those opinions may be correct, but it's extremely unlikely that all of them are. so I think one check would be to attempt to be as deliberately commonsensical as possible and willing to learn from others in other areas of thought 1150
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 13/09/2026antisemitic and transphobic brainworms seem to be synergistic, can think of many other examples of this, with different initial political trajectories, through marxism, green politics, anarchism, free software ideology, esotericism. I think the common mechanism is a breakdown of epistemic trust 1240
Reposted by jackie ess🐺Cold🪦Sam @pdfmerchant.bsky.social · 13/09/2026in 1627 someone published a text called 'Woe to Drunkards' with an honest to goodness Chad knight vs. Virgin fop meme 1813228
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 11/09/2026hit a frightening PR in the bulgarian split squat yesterday 45kg for a set of 4, then a set of 5, then a set of 3. previous PR was 30kg for ten. and you know what? it helped. the sun is out and life is turning a corner 2120
Reposted by jackie esssteph @fkareynolds.bsky.social · 10/09/2026a year ago today: I performed an hour of music — some traditional, some original — on philly's WKDU youtu.be/WD7N0Y68qsc?...youtu.beSteph Jacqlin on WKDU — Sept 10 2025YouTube video by Steph Jacqlin 0143
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 09/09/2026do you see this language as very different than Karl Popper's "three worlds" ? Frege was certainly a nasty and Popper's not my cup of tea, but he's not a fascist. It doesn't look to me like this kind of idealism (expressed with ordinary German words) explains very much about political differences 000
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 08/09/2026thank you, brad www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4Rv...youtube.comBrad Mehldau - Fourteen Reveries: 1 (Scrolling Score)YouTube video by Brad Mehldau 031
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 08/09/2026what the fuck chrisweisman.bandcamp.com/track/when-y...chrisweisman.bandcamp.comwhen you and me got arrested, by Chris Weismanfrom the album Maya Properties 040
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 07/09/2026I’m sorry that while you lived I was afraid of you and afraid of hurting you and afraid of the ways we were after all alike. You saw that clearly, if nothing else. Now this final act of violence. Goodnight. Peace to the living. 070
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Home, the hospital, ambition, a town over. I wish you’d tried everything twice, and me a third and a fourth time. You were trying. 1110
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 07/09/2026I find it rather interesting that memory of the DDR or of the immediate period of unification doesn't seem to be reflected in voting preferences. when the wall came down, the current 45-59 group were kids or young adults, and the 60-69 group were in their late twenties or early thirties. 161
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 04/09/2026have you ever been listening to music with someone and they pause the song to go back over a certain moment, "no but do you *hear* it?" and of course totally ruin it. They can't accept the opacity of your listening. That's what Gérard does in this film, with his four-year-old, he stops the song 070
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 04/09/2026reminded of a bit from Adam Phillips, which is more to do with enduring conflicts, but just the line. Pialat seems to say that the problem is not only the endurance of hate and conflict, but of indifference, distraction, the lack of mirroring www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3... 250
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 02/09/2026signed, a rainbow person who finds all of the rainbow things not for me and a little bit silly 010
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 02/09/2026what I mean by non-position is that it's good to signal sometimes that we can maintain a supportive but uninvolved stance to disputes which may indeed be circular or pointless or in the wrong direction, but which we trust to form part of a community's internal deliberation and growth 110
jackie ess @essj.bsky.social · 02/09/2026I don't think one has to think about this for very long to see that the balance might be in favour of using the progress flag, even as it doesn't necessarily mean what you think or what I think. But might signal safety, contemporaneity, progressive resolution of intra-lgbt debates, and non-position 110
![you know how people sometimes say "no pain no gain"
?
I have a small modification
fuck gain
no pain no pain
[link to bulgarian choir]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:flo3aqd3kv33hgqc2kiwj362/bafkreigpfaeauztoxgj2o6dx75ts4pv2ucdnpr4gnpk3j7ei4vpfor4j3u)
