iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 4h

"The system no longer supports the lifeworld; it has metastasized into an uncontrollable force with its own imperatives. [...] The result is a pathological condition—a modern society unresponsive to human purposes[.]" via @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social

nybooks.com

Message in a Bottle | Peter E. Gordon

Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 18h

The Sopranos: Season 5 Episode 1 - Counter-transference

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Manuscript of Qanun fil-Tibb (Canon of Medicine), Volume 4, by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) Iran or Iraq, dated 1074 CE at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This morning I'm thinking about the question: how have conflicts between modernism, anti-modernism, and post-modernism manifested with respect to thinking about mental illness?

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Big Expenditures • “In the 1950s and the 1960s, the cult of the Orgasm succeeded the cult of Mammon as the basic passion of American life.” - Daniel Bell, The Contradictions of Capitalism

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

‘The Secrets of Autism - The number of children with autism and Asperger’s in the US is exploding. Why?’ Time Magazine, July, 2002.

S
CIENCE
THE SECRETS OF AUTISM
THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN DIAGNOSED WITH AUTISM AND ASPERGER'S IN THE U.S. IS EXPLODING. WHY?
By J. MADELEINE NASH
T
OMMY BARRETT IS A DREAMY-EYED FIFTH-GRADER WHO LIVES WITH his parents, twin brothers, two cats and a turtle in San Jose, Cali-fornia, the heart of Silicon Valley. He's an honor-roll student who likes math and science and video games. He's also a world-class expert on Animorph and Transformer toys. "They're like cars and trains and animals that transform into robots or humans-I love
them!" he shouts exuberantly.
And that is sometimes a problem. For a time, in fact, Tommy's fascination with his toys was so strong that when they weren't around he would pretend to be the toys, transtorming from a truck into a robot or morphing into a kitten. He would do this in the mall, in the school playground and even in the classroom. His teachers found this repetitive pantomime delightful but disturbing, as did his mother Pam.
By that point, there were other worrisome signs. Pam Barrett recalls that

SCIENCE
Paradoxically, the very thing that is o terrible about autistic disorders-that hey affect the very young-also suggests eason for hope. Since the neural connec ions of a child's brain are established through experience, well-targeted mental exercises have the potential to make a dif-ference. One of the big unanswered ques-tions, in fact, is why 25% of children with seemingly full-blown autism benefit enormously from intensive speech- and social-skills therapy-and why the other 75% do not. Is it because the brains of the latter are irreversibly damaged, wonders Geraldine Dawson, director of the University of Washington's autism center, or is it because the fundamental problem is not being adequately addressed?
The more scientists ponder such ques tions, the more it seems they are holding pieces of a puzzle that resemble the interlocking segments of Tommy Barrett's Transformer toys. Put the pieces together one way, and you end up with a normal
FIRST PERSON • TEMPLE GRANDIN
Myself
was 2%years old when 1 began to show symptoms of autism: not talking.
I repetitious behavior and tantrums. Not being able to communicate in words was a great frustration, sol
screamed. Loud, high-pitched noises hurt my ears like a dentist's drill hitting a nerve.
I would shut out the hurtful stimuli by rocking or staring at sand dribbling through my
always revolved around what I did rather than who I was.
Even today personal relationships are something! don't really understand. I still consider sex to be the biggest, most important "sin of the system," to use my old high school term. From reading books and talking to people at conventions, I have learned that autistic people who adapt most successfully in personal relationships either choose celibacy or marry someone with
COWGIRL: She found fame and success designing feed pens
As a child, I was like an
animal with no instincts to guide me. I was always observing. trying to work out the best ways to behave, yet I never fit in.
When othe…

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Daniel Bell, The Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

What happened in the United States was that traditional morality was replaced by psychology, guilt by anxiety. A hedonistic age has its appropriate psychotherapies as well. If psychoanalysis emerged just before World War I to deal with the repressions of Puritanism, the hedonistic age has its counterpart in sensitivity training, encounter groups, "joy therapy," and similar techniques that have two characteristics essentially derived from a hedonistic mood: they are conducted almost exclusively in groups; and they try to "unblock" the individual by physical contact, by groping, touch-ing, fondling, manipulating. Where the earlier intention of psychoanalysis was to enable the patient to achieve self-insight and thereby redirect his life-an aim inseparable from a moral context—the newer therapies are entirely instrumental and psychologistic; their aim is to "free" the person from inhibitions and restraints so that he or she can more easily express his impulses and feelings.

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Joe @josephfgough.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Hopefully it should be published before too long! (Full title is 'After Mind: Myths of Mind and Mechanism in Philosophy, Science, Medicine, and Law, hopefully out by the end of the year with OUP)

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Reposted by Joshua Richardson

Joe @josephfgough.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This is my best stab at it! From my soon-to-be-published 'After Mind'... 👀

There are political reasons for the uptake of Moncrieff ’s overdiagnosis
view. The view has been directly used to support cuts to psychiatric services—
Wes Streeting, currently Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, used
the overdiagnosis argument to justify taking a machete to social and medical
support (Devlin, 2025). Politically, it is an incredibly convenient solution.
Disability support claims have been rising, especially since COVID-19; 55%
of these are accounted for by claims due to psychiatric illness (Devlin, 2025).
I have spoken to people on the frontline in medicine and working in schools
who are acutely aware of how overstretched the available resources are—
there are far fewer support resources than are needed. Children are dying
on long waiting lists for psychiatric care (Wollaston, 2025), with waiting lists
of as long as five years (Jayanetti, 2022), and suicidal children being refused
places on overwhelmed waiting lists entirely (Fazackerley, 2024). This has
knock-on effects: more and more referrals are ‘urgent’ emergencies be-
cause help was not provided sooner (Gregory, 2025b). It is much easier for
politicians, and front-line practitioners, to believe that those who are not
getting help are not really ill in the first place. The alternative, facing up to reality, requires acknowledging that there is
a big, expensive youth mental health crisis that requires radically more re-
sources (Bawden, 2025; Davey, 2024; Gregory, 2024, 2025a; Partington,
2025). Despite psychiatric illness accounting for 45% of all illness in people
aged 10–24, it accounts for 2% of global health budgets (Davey, 2024).
From the perspective of practitioners, this is unlikely to happen—waiting
for money that will never come is too grim to bear. From the perspective
of politicians, this is inconvenient. It is worth noting that this is economi-
cally illiterate—down the road, it is expected to cost the UK £1.1 trillion...

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

This morning I'm thinking about the question: what are the strongest arguments for psy-abolition and anti-psychiatry being expressions of neo-conservatism?

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Intellectuals discussing intellectuals for intellectuals. • What happened to the intellectual? youtu.be/fG1RRmjv760?... via @lrb.co.uk

youtu.be

What happened to the intellectual?

YouTube video by London Review of Books (LRB)

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This morning I'm thinking about the question: what is the role of John Coltrane's music in the history and evolution of modern music?

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Reposted by Joshua Richardson

Ann-Sophie Barwich @smellosopher.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Paul Watzlawick's work, research in addition to his popular writing, is highly recommended.

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The final paragraph of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) is eerily prescient.

THE POSTMODERN CONDITION • 67
We are finally in a position to understand how the computerization of society affects this problematic. It could become the "dream" instrument for controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle. In that case, it would inevitably involve the use of terror. But it could also aid groups discussing metapre-scriptives by supplying them with the information they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions. The line to follow for computerization to take the second of these two paths is, in prin-ciple, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and data banks.231 Language games would then be games of perfect information at any given moment. But they would also be non-zero-sum games, and by virtue of that fact discussion would never risk fixating in a position of minimax equilibrium because it had exhausted its stakes. For the stakes would be knowledge (or infor-mation, if you will), and the reserve of knowledge-language's reserve of possible utterances-is inexhaustible. This sketches the outline of a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown.

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Reposted by Joshua Richardson

Jason Bailey @jasondashbailey.com · 23/09/2026

THE DEVILS (1971), RT if you agree

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This morning I'm thinking about the question: how prescient was schizoanalysis, given current psychotherapeutic culture?

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Posting to say thanks to @smellosopher.bsky.social for introducing me to this book. Was frustated and delighted to find it referenced in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition.

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

“I feel like the psychiatric profession messed up big in the tone it took when it came to public outreach and mental health awareness efforts. We communicated to people that we have stuff figured out, that we know what to do.”

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

“Don’t be afraid of your unconscious mind! It’s not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity.” • The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin . . . #latheofheaven #sciencefiction #ursulakleguin #scifi #books

AVON/A3547/$195
WINNER OF THE HUGO AND NEBULA AWARDS
URSULA K TECUN
HER HIGHLY ACCLAIMED NOVEL
OF A BRILLIANT VISION OF OUR POSSIBLE FUTURES
THE IATE
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HAE
NOW A PBS DRAMA SPECIAL

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

“It is very possible to lead a fulfilling life when there is a partnership and intentional relationship between the child and the support team.” A child-parent interview on living with an adult child with schizophrenia, by Sarah An Myers. • www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/livi...

psychologytoday.com

How to Parent an Adult Child With Schizophrenia

A daughter shares her father's strategies for parenting an adult child living with a psychotic disorder.

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Reposted by Joshua Richardson

Casmilus @casmilus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Some Eng.Lit. grads describe "postmodernism" in a way that invites the question "so was Kant a postmodernist, then?" If you're sufficiently blurry on what modern philosophy actually was, I suppose "the postmodern" tends to engulf it.

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This morning I'm thinking about the question: how might Immanuel Kant be responsible for postmodern thought?

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Excellent book for anyone interested in comedy, the Culture Wars, and the history of cancellation.

A
HISTORY of showBiz
AND THE culTurE
WARS
OUTRAGIOUS
KLIPH NESTEROFF
Author of The Comedians and We Had a Little Real Estate Problem

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

“The great merit of this scientific biography is that it sets the reading in geology & biology that upended Tennyson's picture of the world within the homelessness of his own situation. He had been uprooted, emotionally & physically, and felt helpless.” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Peter Howarth · Types and Typology: Tennyson’s Scientific Imagination

In February 1840, Alfred Tennyson was in a bad way, argumentative and restless. Thomas Carlyle, whose own public...

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Reposted by Joshua Richardson

Read: Full Spectrum Resistance 🏴🍉🌹 @phil-kapitan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Holy shit, @elephantgraveyard.bsky.social's new video is already over 2 million views in 2 days 😳 Watching now 🧐 youtu.be/wn9pQb4ukBo?...

youtu.be

How Comedy Drowned in a Radioactive Cesspool of Corruption and Depravity

YouTube video by The Elephant Graveyard

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Copy of the Globe and Mail from September 12th, 2001 that I kept.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL
CANADA'S NATIONAL NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED 18:4
• GLOBEANDMAIL.COM • WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2001
Bush promises swift revenge as hijackers strike the world's financial heart, killing thousands and ushering in a chilling new age of terror
A day of infamy
INSIDE
45 PACES OF COVERAGE
кріля со мо а
THIS SECTION
and their President Ms
• Bomb Tel Avie jubilant
• Badisorial: Let loose the war
acked

THE GLOBE AND MAIL
CANADA'S NATIONAL NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED
SEPTEMBER 12. 20
Bush promises swift revenge as hijackers strike the world's financial heart, killing thousands and ushering in a chilling new age of terror
A day of infamy
INSIDE
45 PACES OF COVERAGE
THIS SECTION
R.0.8.
U.S. will never be the same
Markets are paralyzed, banks try to ease jitters
MARCARET WENTE
Know how to be early?

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

This morning I'm thinking about the question: do you even read science, bro?

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

25 years ago today I was in my first class on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It soon became clear that something of considerable enormity had just taken place. . . . #immanuelkant #wtc

Philosophy 451H: 2001-2002
Kant
Instructor:
Bernard Hodgson
EC S115
748-1011, ext. 1517
E-mail: bjhodgson@trentu.ca
745-9742 (home)
Secretary: Kathy Axcell
EC S118.3
748-1011, ext. 1814
E-mail: kaxcell@trentu.ca
The course will consist in a close critical reading of the major work of
Immanuel Kant-the Critique of Pure Reason. If there is a book that is indispensable to an understanding of the foremost problems of contemporary philosophy, Kant's
"first critique" is surely the prime candidate. Put bluntly, one can now undertake philosophical inquiry in sympathy with the basic views of Kant's first critique or in resistance to them, but certainly not in ignorance of them. However, our engagement with Kant's epistemology is deeply problematic. For instance, in explaining the "activation" of the mind through the imposition of its categories of the understanding on our sensory impressions, Kant's principles are father to recent
"constructivist" accounts of the "making of worlds". But Kant would vehemently oppose present tendencies to endorse a "theoretical pluralism" capable of underwriting alternative worlds. There is one necessary structure to the human mind for Kant: one fixed set of categories for all times and places. Similarly, prevalent "positivist" or "naturalist" orientations in our scientific culture find encouragement in Kant's insistence that since our cherished "spiritual" beliefs in God and moral freedom seek to apply the mind's conceptual structure beyond the limits of sensory experience, the characteristic pretensions of such beliefs to legitimate knowledge are entirely groundless. On the other hand, Kant parts company with naturalistic attitudes in emphasizing that scientific inquiry cannot discredit our belief in either a perfect God or a free will outside the natural causal order-indeed the fundamental objective of Kant's general perspective of
"transcendental idealism" is, as he puts it, "to limit reason in order to make room for faith". In short, a ca…

Schedule:
September 11
Administrative Meeting
September 18
The Possibility of Synthetic a priori knowledge; The Distinction between Analytic and Synthetic Judgements;
Prefaces to First and Second Editions and Introduction, Critique, pp. 7-62
September 25
Transcendental Aesthetic: Space and Time as a priori intuitions; the nature of mathematical knowledge,
Critique, pp. 65-91
October 2
Transcendental Logic; Transcendental Analytic: The Categories and their Deduction, Critique, pp. 92-175
October 9
The Schematism of the Categories; Synthetic a priori Principles, Critique, pp. 176-239
October 16
The Refutation of Idealism, Critique, pp. 239-256
October 22-26
Reading Break: No Classes
October 30
The Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena, Critique, pp. 257-296
November 6
Transcendental Dialectic: The Transcendental Ideas;
The Parallogisms of Pure Reason, Critique, pp. 297-383
November 13
The Antinomies and the Cosmological Ideas: The World, its Origin, Structure, and Infinity, Critique:, Pp. 384-464
November 20
The Cosmological Ideas II: Natural Causality, Human Freedom, and God, Critique, pp. 464-484
November 27
The Transcendental Ideal and Proving the Existence of God, Critique pp. 485-531
December 4
The Regulative Use of Ideas and Beyond, Critique, pp.532-
570
PartI
Prolegonena
Plagiarism:
Plagiarism is an extremely serious academic offence and carries penalties varying from failure in an assignment to debarment from the University. Definitions, procedures, and penalties for dealing with plagiarism are set out in Trent University's Policy on Plagiarism which is available on request from every department or college office or from the Registrar's Office.

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This morning I'm thinking about the question: How can religious experience be rationally understood to provide learning about human cognition, psychological and emotional healing, creativity, and love?

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

“The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions … I set about obeying the orders of the voice … [it] told me exactly how to go about it, and I obeyed [.]” - From Touching The Void by Joe Simpson

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Madness and mystical experience talk re: Simone Weil.

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

24,000 feet high descending from the peak of Baintha Brakk (aka the Ogre) in Pakistan: Then came a shout: “I’ve broken my legs.” gripped.com/profiles/the...

gripped.com

The Climber Who Broke Both Legs and Crawled off a Himalayan Mountain - Gripped Magazine

The epic story of a first ascent and how Doug Scott survived the Ogre with two broken legs

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Introduce yourself with 10 acts you've seen live: Leonard Cohen Laurie Anderson Nirvana My Bloody Valentine Terry Riley Tony Conrad Boban Markovic Tanya Tagaq Public Enemy Brìghde Chaimbeul

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Joshua Richardson @schizosemia.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

This morning I'm thinking about the question: what is it I want to say?

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Reposted by Joshua Richardson

Bryan W. Van Norden @bryanvannorden.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Just a reminder that the documentary I hosted, "Wisdom of China: Laozi," is available for free on YouTube, in case you want to assign or recommend it in your classes this upcoming semester! youtu.be/lvglQJDrgJI?...

youtu.be

Wisdom of China: Laozi

YouTube video by Bryan Van Norden

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Demiurge of Doom @euthyphro.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Je pratique mon français par solidarité avec le Canada

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