Drawing with the 4yo. There are animals on both sides of the page. Suddenly there is a dragon, who eats all the animals on the page. But only the ones on the front of the page, cause dragons cannot move from the front to the back of the page.

#postmodernism

"Baudrillard is not the clownish postmodernist his detractors caricatured, nor the whimsical nihilist students quoted for shock. He is the autopsy surgeon of the technocratic age. Each book is a scalpel cut across the body of modernity, slicing through the organs of politics, media, sexuality, and war, exposing how they metastasized into simulation. The result is not diagnosis in the medical sense but necropsy. His writings insist that the body under examination is already dead, that modernity’s structures are cadavers animated only by circuits of signs. To read him seriously is to accept that he is not describing decline but staging the posthumous report of a reality that has already disappeared.

What he saw long before the present algorithmic empire was that technology would not merely augment reality but replace it with its own operational fiction. The screen, the code, and the network do not represent the world; they enact it. A war fought on television becomes indistinguishable from its spectacle. A political order administered through polls and simulations ceases to be representative and becomes purely operational. A financial system governed by derivatives no longer reflects value but generates it out of recursive circulation. In this regime, signs no longer represent but execute. To watch television, to scan an image feed, to scroll an algorithmic timeline is not to witness the real but to inhabit a program that produces its own reality."

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/10/02/the-technocratic-abyss-baudrillard-and-the-execution-of-reality/

#Baudrillard #Technocracy #Algorithms #Modernity #Postmodernism

Pretty floored by this building in #Budapest: Lehel Vásárcsarnok by László Rajk Jr.
Do we have something like a #PostmodernismAppreciationSociety here?

#postaesthetics #00s #architecture #postmodernism

"One of the most concerning developments in recent years has been the mainstreaming of certain fascist ideas previously thought to be extinct, or at least deeply fringe. This includes the AfD’s obsession with “remigration,” a fancy word for the mass deportation of migrants and asylum-seekers from Germany. As Herzog tells us: “a main effect of introducing the concept is that other German political parties are now debating which migrants are dutifully hardworking and sufficiently culturally integrated to be allowed to stay.”

Increasingly, far-right parties set the terms of the debate, making it so that moderate politicians cave to fascist framings while still believing they are offering a rebuke. Productivity as a measure of citizenship is one of those framings that we see play out in many different contexts around the world.

Historically speaking, this harkens back to the increasing anti-disability animus that took over Germany in the decades leading up to the Third Reich, when calls for “euthanasia” of disabled Germans led even supposed moderates to cave on the question of sterilization. The extremity of these proposals for euthanasia killings led moderate commentators to seem even-keeled when they proposed sterilization as a solution to the allegedly hereditary problem of disability. In the process, “it became socially acceptable (and felt, to many, simply intuitive and even morally right) already prior to 1933 to express contempt for or to wish to invisibilize people with intellectual impairments or psychiatric illnesses.”"

https://jacobin.com/2025/09/herzog-postmodern-fascism-afd-maga/

#Postmodernism #Fascism #USA #MAGA #Germany #AfD #Racism #PostmodernFascism

Science doesn't march steadily toward Truth—it lurches, resets, and rebrands. 'Correspondence' is a comforting myth, rhetoric the real arbiter. My new essay argues for truth as archetypal: communal, rhetorical, linguistically insufficient.

https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/20/the-truth-about-truth-revisited/

#Philosophy #CriticalThinking #Postmodernism #Epistemology #Rhetoric #Foucault #Truth #Language #Nietzsche #Rhetoric

We can’t stop wanting morality. Primates grumble about fairness, humans build systems of virtue. Alasdair MacIntyre calls for Aristotle’s oak tree. Nietzsche admits the floor is gone. Deleuze points at the rhizomes spreading sideways.

The need is real. The telos is not.
https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/19/the-morality-we-cant-stop-wanting/

#Philosophy #Nietzsche #history #books #Deleuze #Ethics #Postmodernism #morality #moral #virtue #Thinking #Reason #Rationality #critique #Review #bookReview