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Krapp’s Last Vape

@krappslastvape.bsky.social
208 followers 83 following 334 posts

Bibliophile, Ailurophile, Recovering Puritan, Marxist, Co-Host of Moral Minority www.patreon.com/c/MoralMinority

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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
Balancing the estrangement of technology and the undeniable hold these devices have over our mediated access to narrative meaning is the problematic of contemporary art. So far, the two films that most interestingly capture this problematic are Eddington and The Shrouds.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 23/08/2025
The trouble with pairing a criteria of impartiality with optimizing the good is that everyday ethical actions get minimized. Local goods, like being part of a network of care or helping a friend, encircle our lives and make up the majority of our difference-making activity.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Wokeness was a liberal pressure campaign whose gentle mechanism of consciousness-raising was social ostracism with a call to historical knowledge. It remains incomplete because what was needed (and this has been the case since 1864) is a total reconstruction of American society.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
A curious pattern emerges from those who take issue with the political character of the novel. It is not that they think a novel shouldn’t evince any politics whatsoever, rather they desire a novel that doesn’t challenge their prejudices or make them uncomfortable—non-woke.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 09/08/2025
I was never fit for the socialite networking life. To start with I am repulsed by alcohol and sloshed behavior will instantly send me reeling towards the door. Growing up, I always imagined small gatherings at friends’ homes; good food and vigorous conversation.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Someone recently pointed out that Michael Schur owns the film rights to Infinite Jest and many of its dystopian conceits seem eerily prescient, but surely Schur knows that an adaptation would be anathemic to the ambitions of making an addictive book for readers mesmerized by visual media.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
I do think people reading less contributes to recurrent anxiety and depression. If you want a prolonged, enriched dopamine bath as opposed to stocking a bottomless hunger with a pittance of flickering images and repetitive motions, hide your phone and read for an hour.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Sartre indicates an ethics on the grounds of his ontology. The possibility of human action requires the apprehension of what the present situation fails to bring about and what ought to be realized as our end. On this basis only can a transformative political project begin.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
“Uncool, earnest, and serious” encapsulates the kinds of critics and scholars I admire, those whose fidelity to stating what they believe to be true and worthy of care is a matter of not only aesthetic integrity but moral conviction and praxis.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
Rereading Jane Eyre for the umpteenth time in PDF on my phone, squinting through my keratoconus at the bluish backlit text; bridging the chasm between the reading life of 19th-century candlelit gothic bibliomania and the schizoid dispersal of texts of the 21st.
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Reposted by Krapp’s Last Vape
Left Nietzschean @devingoure.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
I had a great time discussing the Schreber Case and sharing some of my personal experiences with psychosis with Lepht Hand! You can also find the my first entry in a series on Schreber, psychosis, and the mass psychology of fascism here: open.substack.com/pub/devingou...
open.substack.com
The Schizoanalysis Project, Part 3
The Curious Case of Daniel Paul Schreber
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Liberal democracy was pretty good for a lot of people, flaws and all. It’s current competitors (U.S. neomonarchical protectionism and ethnonationalism for example )are uniformly awful and represent a new dark age of ignorance, mass suffering, and enslavement.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
“Ideology” in critical theory describes the complex of beliefs that constitute a group’s existential orientation towards their social role. Ideology is mystifying or “false” to the degree to which its conceals the normative content or ethical consequences of this complex.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
The American Ideology, which includes intertwined beliefs about the unguided benevolent effects of laissez-faire, individualism, the inherent stability of the American constitution, and the unlimited prospect of prosperity, is the most ethically clouding drug ever concocted:
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
The first novel that enchanted me and made me believe that being a writer is a very good thing indeed was Jane Eyre. I read it as a 13-year old, artistic Virginian boy with the good fortune of having excellent English teachers who I wanted to impress above all.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
The natural act of reading in public or any equivalent act of concentrated absorption might appear to a screen-addled generation as performative. If you’re not a reader, you might very well interpret it as a goofy an
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
Gavin Newsom is the first openly Vichy Democrat. Here is a politician without principles; a slimy nihilist in moral parity with J.D. Vance who adopted progressive rhetoric for the sake of advancing his own personal power and abandoned it the moment the political winds shifted.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
Using the threat and imposition of tariffs as a cudgel of faux-dominance and isolationist chauvinism is the most profoundly stupid, irrational, and destructive policy that any global power has ever attempted. The only possible result is devaluation and the erosion of trust.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
My mood is sinking; capsizing. Despair interpenetrates my being, rendering my extremities stiff and aching and aswirl with modal possibilities. If only I could get up for a walk and keep walking without thought, or lasso a thought into restorative action.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
With Newsom’s heel turn on trans rights the Democratic Party is immediately signaling that they believe opposition is impossible and would rather turn collaborationist to make sure they get a slice of the spoils. Moral cowardice doesn’t begin to encapsulate the disgrace.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
It’s not surprising that AI endorses solipsism. The ostensible nihilism of the techno-utopian drive to the fantastical singularity when stripped of its grandiose pretensions is simply the dream of splendid isolation from all humanity; the snuffing out of any demands and desires.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
The hardest part about working in the restaurant industry is keeping up the facade that serving people food and drink or providing excellent service matters at all and that we all wouldn’t be better off spending our days in the streets preparing for civil war.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
It’s not impossible to avoid talking about politics and focus instead on personal fixations. I’m still reading, thinking, and hopefully writing more, but I cannot pretend that the political isn’t colliding with the everyday and the possibility of any future whatsoever.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Beginning to think that the options for salvaging American democracy and avoiding a geopolitical ticking time bomb are narrowing to a military coup or act of God.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
If you think that the Democrats have an authoritarian red line rather than continued shrugging impotency, then you’re a credulous anachronism. Our nonplussed politicians are cozying up to fascists, tracking the new flows of capital in order to enrich themselves.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Political conservatism has undergone a transformation within my lifetime from a suspect, but at least ostensibly rational common sense morality of fidelity to principle and trust in traditional ways to an irrationalist, freewheeling ressentiment for all social change.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
If you work in the service industry, spending 8+hours a day on your feet running to and fro in absurd circuits punctuated by demoralizing interactions with the entitled and oblivious, I strongly recommend you discipline yourself to read and write in your spare moments.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
Polarization is when it no longer makes sense to distinguish between proximity to an ideal political center and qualifiers like “far”/“fringe” no longer exempt fellow travelers from responsibility. An ascendant far right movement is coterminous with old-fashioned conservativism.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
Here’s the insane argument for the unitary executive power currently being made: 1. The Constitution enumerates broad executive power. 2. The people elect the chief executive. 3. Since the people elect the executive, interfering with this prerogative of power is antidemocratic.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
Obliquely telecasting with sullen eyes and furtive glances to everyone around me that the only way out of this authoritarian crisis is completing the unfinished work of reconstruction.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
The American people aren’t idiots (although we aren’t beating the illiteracy allegations). Mostly we are weak-willed, passive, risk-averse, complacent, and accustomed to believing that the material impact of politics is far removed from our everyday functioning.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
In these times of politically-motivated military purges, I wonder how much honor and sense of a higher duty actually exists in those entrusted with immense destructive power or whether it’s the moral cowardice of ‘just following orders’ all the way down.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
From the bottom of my heart I am sincere in saying that if you cannot wrap your head around the value of non-representational art, the pretentious, the difficult, nonlinear, atonal, dissonant, and uncomfortable, then you’re more than halfway to fascist barbarism.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
We are living in a time of accelerating events of such norm-exploding, world-historical nihilism that it’s hard to catch one’s breathe; dumbfounded helplessness, bloodcurdling anger at absurd injustice; despairing like a petrified spectator before the halo of catastrophe.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
When you’re on the left, there are several roles available to you of varying suitability. You might become an activist who patiently chips away at the status quo. In bellicose times, you turn militant and risk your life. Or, through no fault of your own, you become a writer.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
If you want to get an autistic, train-obsessive kid to appreciate silent era films, I know of no better prescription than Buster Keaton’s The General(1926).
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
I’m sympathetic to psychoanalytic readings of authoritarianism, but it’s hard to believe that there’s so much angst over fluctuating gender expression. Masculinity, its presentation and maintenance, is the furthest thing from an existential concern. Then again—I’m not a fascist.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
DBH’s new “confessional” essay boils down to the claim that, like many us. we who both sense and contemplate the inadequacies of reductive physicalism and secular disenchantment, are basically at home in modernity, while still accepting consciousness as spirit.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
Every evening, call it ritualistic masochism, I peruse the headlines from major American and European news outlets convinced with growing consternation that it may be the last headline I or anyone will ever read.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
Healthiness is a predicate with many permutations (as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard knew) and not easily instantiated by hyperfocusing on physical exercise (weightlifting, long, contemplative hikes). 1/2
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
Transgenderism even more than the nativist threat of immigrant hordes is at the nexus of right-wing scapegoating in our fascist moment. The existence of transgender people casts an ontological pall on the false utopias of gender binarism, the family, and the nation.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
There’s a phenomenon closely allied with anti-intellectualism but localized to social media wherein you can convince the dumb and gullible (easily awed by free-floating citations) of your ‘rigorous’ and ‘complex’ thought by piling on references and jargon w/o logical connection.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
In the early 2000s, coming of age as a ostracized, cyclothymic girl inclined towards goth aesthetics and skepticism meant getting into astrology and becomingWiccan. Currently, it equates to body fascism and mean girl revanchism. Read Adorno to learn more about this trajectory.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
The “loneliness epidemic” wouldn’t feel so lonely if our society recalibrated how it valorizes fulfillment and meaningfulness. I’m afraid we’ve devalued nonromantic human relations that don’t pivot around the search for a perfect complement to self-sufficient individuality.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Maybe it’s just me, but any political or social analysis that defines modernity and its disenchantments as “Satanic” is not offering a serious way forward for the religious or secular.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show was a well-directed medley of bangers, but its subversive gestures were blunted. I appreciated the double entendre of Uncle Sam Jackson playing the cautious voice of (white) American sensibility, but it could’ve gone harder.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Instead of watching the Big American Cultural Event, I watched Elia Kazan’s critique of populist demagouery, “A “Face in the Crow”(1957). In the film, Andy Griffith, playing devilishly against type, is a narcissistic drifter and remade into a folksy con man.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
The wholesome elder couple that sees Naomi Watts’s character off as she arrives in the LA in Mulholland Drive(1999) is seen next in a limo with rigor mortis smiles, underscoring Lynch’s core thesis on fantasy images: the imperceptible slippage between dreams and horror.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
Accelerationism is the eschatological view that it would be a blast to hasten the end of the world and is formally indistinct, despite its neorationalisfic associations, with Christian doomsday cults. It is both a facile nihilism and a willful evil.
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Krapp’s Last Vape @krappslastvape.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
My stepson is autistic with a hyperfixation on commercial airliners with a speciality in tracking historic plane crashes. As you may have guessed, he is now a radicalized anti-fascist and announced so by storming into my room in an apoplectic rage.
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