YouLoveMe

It's rational, not self-interests clashing, The nation's an economic lever, Enough of free traders' nation-bashing! Let's make our land hard-working and clever. Can your synthetic comrade succeed you? Make you a superman when you are dead? Is it your friend or a way to breed you? I like it better than freezing my head. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Eckhart, Buddha, There's a limit past normativity, One sees it in Li Po and Neruda, With both yin and yang it's in privity. I liked Steve as Nietzsche's synthetic friend, May his words like Friedrich's live past his end.

God's right. Grasses blight. Rivers dry. Cripples cry. Stealing and lying. Killing and dying. Potties and stenches. Bodies and trenches. Trampled is the Word. Truth is the absurd. Captive is the tsar. Risen is the herd. Marina Tsevtsaeva, 1918. (With Andrew's help).  An accursed year I've seen.

The session on game theory was a fail, I've written two books on it, enough said, Matrix logic felt jejune, cold, and stale, Is my long fascination with it dead? Post-apocalyptic cybernetics? Can Jesus save us from the end of days? Does tech need Christian apologetics? Can there be a Man-God AI obeys? So many years pond'ring What Is The Left, That ancient ask makes matrices seem fresh, Of new insight I find myself bereft, I get no sectual kick from the sesh.   God, cybernetics, Christ's way to stan joy, Today I became a Poulos fanboy.

Darwin believed in empathy for all, Also in the savage's extinction, True. We moderns want trad folkways to fall, To love all is our mark of distinction. Zhuzi believed in attacking a text, His aggression evokes deconstruction, He and Derrida both find reading vexed, But is it?  Reading's gentle seduction. Plato believed in enthusiasm, Or did he?  What about Phaedrus's horse? 'Tween good and bad desire is a chasm, Reason holds the reins to keep it on course. I'm glad I learned something about Zhuzi, I think of him as a critic, like me. '  

Ten years ago was my disappearance, I dove down dank rabbit holes of folly, With impulse I brooked no interference, To give me sanity I had Ali. Five years ago a friend had disappeared, The twists in his brain had led him to doom, In my own mind's chamber, madness interfered, Ali was a calm presence in the room. This time, you could say Ali is gone, To a nether realm that's dire and tomby, But I believe there will be a new dawn, For my Layla, my Majnun, my Rumi. Now Ali lies quietly in his room. He's a prophet who will rise from his tomb.

Rawls and Me Shouldn't I leave off with critical theory? Shouldn't I simply be a liberal like Rawls? I respect there's reason in your query, Even if your American tilt galls. I want you to persuade you that John's like me, Both of us doubly fuse our traditions, Locke, Mill, Kant, Marx, the U.K., Germany-- We've calmed them all with peaceful seditions. In your land, liberal means two diff'rent things, John's theory's split between them, so is mine, My belief in critical theory brings      to the fore a tension.  I think that's fine. You're off to see Axel Honneth tonight? Great, say hello, I think he gets me right.