Duncan Reyburn @duncanreyburn Twitter profile

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Duncan Reyburn

4 years

“Duncan Reyburn's book on Chesterton is really great. It's got many words in it, so many words, words all over the place. Many people are saying it's got the best words.”

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Last Seen Profiles

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 years

The paranoid style of politics.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 years

"It's socially constructed" is code for "Let's replace this fiction with another, even more implausible, fiction. However, the substitute fiction we will treat as ontological; it is therefore unquestionable."

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

At last, a commercial that makes you feel, as you walk through the uncanny valley of the shadow of pixelated undeath, the truth that has always been hidden in plain sight: you are not a consumer, you are being consumed.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

René Girard calls this ‘metaphysical desire’ which is the desire to ‘be’ the other: a confusion of self and other; the desire to replace the other; a perfect storm of envy and hubris; the pinnacle of acquisitive mimesis; common cause of murder and suicide.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

4 months

If there was ever a time for a prayer like this, it is now.

Anthony ☦️

@Anthony17625748

4 months

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

Many people imagine the worry of staring into the abyss as being like staring at an immense nothingness. But nihilism is most apparent in excess. This here isn't happiness but despair. The abyss is full of terrible music and bad dancing; it is the illusion that if you keep moving

Angela Belcamino

@AngelaBelcamino

3 months

Imagine being 42, child-free, stress-free, and being this happy. The right hates this.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

In 1828, at the age of 19, Nikolai Gogol wrote and, at great personal expense, published and sold an embarrassing romantic poem, which he then bought back from everyone he’d sold it to and burned all the copies. This was the usual way to delete a tweet back then.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

A reminder of Miyazaki’s take on AI: “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. … this is an insult to life itself … I feel like we’re nearing the end of times … We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

The pedant will dissect a body to find life or cut up a brain to find consciousness; and, in the process, he will destroy that very life and deny all consciousness. “See,” he’ll say, “there’s no life here, no consciousness, just blood and organs and such. Just a corpse.”

Physics In History

@PhysInHistory

6 months

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares. - Daniel Dennett

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 month

Shakespeare was mocking narcissists by putting these words into the mouth of that vile bore, Polonius, who was true to his own awful nature and untrue to everyone else as a result. That these words are taken as good advice now is a sign of losing the plot— literally in this case.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

7 months

It is a mark of the technological society that it believes complex moral problems can be quickly solved by some simple technique. Make a new law, have a new check-box to tick, etc, etc. This is hubris as a mask for sheer spiritual poverty.

Dr Charlotte Proudman

@DrProudman

8 months

I am so excited to unveil our new campaign, in partnership with creative agency @CPB_LDN and @EmAtack I’m Asking For It: Let’s change the law to require a clear yes to sex. Find out more Right to Equality is campaigning to update the UK’s law on

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

16 days

"The moment you subordinate the higher thing to the lower thing, it is nearly impossible ... to correct the inversion. And this is precisely where the university finds itself now. ... Form very soon starts to follow funding. If you don’t serve God, you end up serving Mammon."

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

One cannot underestimate what this wonderful man has done for people of faith. His philosophically illiterate arguments have cured millions of their atheism. I say, never underestimate the power of an unconvincing evangelist.

Richard Dawkins

@RichardDawkins

1 year

Feelings are important but science is about evidence

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

4 years

“God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature.” “[W]hen we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.” — Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

It is a mark of the technical mindset, possessed by the satanic spirit of technique, that it regards all natural relations with deep suspicion and so wants to remake the world according to a malicious desire, well trained by the simulacrum, for absolute artificiality.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

27 days

The obsession with novelty in the humanities has paved the way for the demise of the humanities. What is needed is not newness but renewal—constant reminders of the relevance of old forgotten truths.

Stephen Beck

@altphi

27 days

There exists no truth in the humanities that does not need to be rediscovered each week. – Nicolás Gómez Dávila

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

I wrote a book on how Chesterton saw everything coming ahead of time but it’s not out yet … and I’m still trying to find a publisher. Will keep you posted.

ABoyNamedSue🇻🇦

@Takeyerswing

6 months

I'm going to have a long discussion with G.K. Chesterton about how the hell he saw everything coming ahead of time... @TunaRJS

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

Surprisingly honest. Not even trying to hide what they’re up to anymore; not even remotely ashamed to be suggesting the fake not only as a replacement for the real but as that which obliterates genuine tools of human creativity. Pure disembodied hubris in action.

Tim Cook

@tim_cook

5 months

Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

Not only is it expensive, the price tag doesn’t even begin to count the existential cost of accepting this latest addition to simulacrum manufacturing. Reality subsumed under the logic of the interface. Total phenomenological interference. No thanks.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

“The aim of human polity is human happiness ... There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier. Mankind has as much right to scrap its machinery

Tsarathustra

@tsarnick

3 months

Elon Musk: unless we upgrade ourselves with Neuralink, AI will think so fast compared to us, it will get bored because communicating with us will be like talking to a tree

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 month

Another way of putting it: modern man is in the predicament of enjoying fruit from a tree he both hates and thinks is nonexistent.

Joost Strydom

@StrydomJoost

1 month

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

The @dailymaverick is a great example of how the story you tell yourself and the actual story might be worlds apart. The DM folks think they’re doing essential work, which is obviously wrong. Sane people think it’s propaganda, which is clearly right. The DM deserves to die and in

Daily Maverick

@dailymaverick

6 months

Visit to find out how you can support journalism. #DMShutdown

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

“The narcissist’s pseudo-insight into his own condition, usually expressed in psychiatric clichés, serves him as a means of deflecting criticism and disclaiming responsibility for his actions.” Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

"It is no surprise that with every dialectical sublation as AI develops, the deception only deepens. The natural telos of AI is to perfect the copy. The final Absolute will not be Big Truth but the Total Simulacrum, behind which no truth can be discerned."

The great discarnation

The ontology of the work of AI and its hermeneutical insignificance

duncanreyburn.substack.com

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

It doesn’t take much to realise that the AI so-called revolution is amounts mostly to the samefying, banalifying or averaging of everything. Try this prompt, what do you get? More of the same. What about this prompt? Same. Same same same. AI is fake and same.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

4 months

Nah, this is just a kid who knows what being epic and heroic is all about. “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for

Men Are Human

@men_are_human

4 months

Male disposablity is baked into little kids.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

I’ve submitted my book to a publisher. Here’s hoping it won’t be too long before the world gets to have a taste of what made Chesterton’s remarkable prescience possible.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

Offer of publication received and accepted! For anyone wondering how Chesterton was able to be so profoundly and ridiculously prescient, this book is the answer. I’m genuinely thrilled to (again!) have my work included in the marvellous Veritas Series.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

Technology lets you do less and less with more and more until eventually you can do absolutely nothing with everything.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

20 days

It’s one of the great midwit comforts to believe that if we just had better media, better information, everything would be fine. The truth is far more uncomfortable: it is the very superstructure of our society that is the chief source of propaganda. It’s our whole way of life.

Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

20 days

It doesn’t help, thanks. There is, for one thing, no singular ‘scientific method,’ nor is it certain that a decent application of a decent selected ‘scientific method’ will arrive at anything approximating ‘truth’. So the assumption here that it starts out well (with ‘science’

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

A man at the mercy of an unexamined metaphor.

Tsarathustra

@tsarnick

3 months

David Chalmers says it is possible for an AI system to be conscious because the brain itself is a machine that produces consciousness, so we know this is possible in principle

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

There’s something profoundly symbolic about the loss of ceiling aesthetics; it indicates a terrible forgetting of our need to look up. Ceilings can be spiritual teachers again; they can remind us (because we need to be reminded) to transcend.

Clara

@ClaraCianfer

1 year

why don't we paint ceilings anymore?

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

This is not terrifying. It’s just a codified sequence of faulty visual analogies.

Countere Magazine

@CountereCulture

2 years

What happens when you ask an AI to generate "Human Evolution." This is terrifying.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 month

What is overwhelmingly the case with these sculptures is how they show a triumph of sentiment over depth; shallow pathos acts as a substitute for mythos. This is the semblance of thriving not the reality of thriving.

Culture Explorer

@CultureExploreX

1 month

Western art is thriving, not dying. Meet 20 sculptors who are not only preserving the legacy of Western art but are also innovating within its rich tapestry. 🧵

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

@uMarhobane The point seems that the death in question must be rendered "sacred" by a "higher power" (the state). Euthenasia is a statement of belief in the regime. It's still nihilism but it's nihilism with rubber stamping and all the right bureaucratic boxes ticked.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

8 months

It is a mistake to think that translating the world into vast quantities of data amounts to ‘saving’ the world. The internet functions more like dementia than like memory.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 years

The chief function of the managerial classes is to generate crises.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

Incredulity towards metanarratives means excessive credulity towards micronarratives.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

All news should be poetic riffing. I’m not interested in facts; I want vibe-check exegesis; I want the weighty hermeneutics of atmospheres and auras, shadows and haloes.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

The word “weird” as a propaganda strategy, like the word “fascist,” is what is known as a floating signifier. A linguistic example of the idiom, “empty vessels make the most noise.” A floating signifier, a kind of societal Rorschach test, is essentially chameleonic—a term as

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

8 months

“If Satan did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Hitler.” Perhaps the flip-side of the Nietzschean claim about the death of God is that, as people become functional materialists, the archetype of evil becomes merely human.

Michael Tracey

@mtracey

8 months

Tucker: “Hitler’s been dead for 80 years. Nazi Germany no longer exists" Putin: “You say Hitler has been dead for so many years, 80 years. But his example lives on" Could part of the problem here be that everyone on both sides of the conflict is completely obsessed with Hitler

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

“Let’s not mince words. We must refuse scapegoats: Freud’s father and the law; Marx’s bourgeoisie and capitalists; and Nietzsche’s slave morality. All of modernism in its classic stage merely offers us scapegoats to prepare the way for the omnipresent victim.” René Girard, 1978.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

11 months

Baudrillard’s claim that everything is destined to become a simulation suggests, among other things, how losing a reality principle transforms things into parodies of themselves. E.g. Museums become records of current ideological posturing instead of being archives of history.

UnHerd

@unherd

11 months

'We’re being offered a partisan version of the past, in which individuals are labelled according to ideologies invented about 20 years ago.' @polblonde argues British museums have become a laughing stock 👇

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

“The belief that matter is not alive is probably incorrect. I am fascinated by matter. We are today completely blind to the magic of matter. The digital de-materialization of the world is painful for lovers of matter.” Byung-Chul Han. Non-Things.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

I don’t care. I’m done with being productive. I want to be a contemplative, and none of these help with that.

gaut

@0xgaut

7 months

The most productive setup is 9 here. Change my mind.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 months

Ours is a time in which idolatry prevails but since many forget the difference between an idol and an icon, the idolatry is not so easily recognised. “The idol delights in physical existence, in the delight we experience in vision itself, and its highest aim is to make that

Vladi 🇷🇺🇷🇺🇷🇺

@joiedevivre789

2 months

‘Face of Jesus' unveiled by AI using Shroud of Turin after astonishing discovery. Amen!

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

10 months

“Genetics” (as an explanation) is just Platonism for intellectual cowards. I’m reminded of the wonderful scene in EB White’s Charlotte’s Web about the miraculous: ‘Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Dr Dorian. ‘I don't

Jeremy Kauffman 🦔🌲🌕

@jeremykauffman

10 months

This orphan beaver: 1 - was raised by humans 2 - never witnessed dam building behavior 3 - still knows how (and has the urge) to construct a dam What genetics can encode is incredibly powerful

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

20 days

This is part of what Baudrillard meant when he said: “People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is.”

Ewan Morrison

@MrEwanMorrison

20 days

Generative AI pollution- stages: Someone gets an AI to generate a picture in the style of Van Gogh. People start sharing it & labelling it as a Van Gogh on pinterest, X, insta & FB. It starts coming up in web searches for Van Gogh sunflowers & starry night. It becomes a Van Gogh

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

I love that Tolkien responded to someone who told him that myths and fairy tales were “lies” by writing back to him in poetic form.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

Today is GK Chesterton’s 150th birthday. “The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.”

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

In conversation with one of my PhD students today, I reminded him (and myself) that one of highest aims of the thinker is to simply be present to what he or she is studying. Attend well; as well as you are able. The point is not primarily to offer some lofty scholarly

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

Thiel may be hyper-Girard in that clip that’s circulating — but remember the medium (X) is the distortion engine. He’s right about wokeness deriving from Christianity (Tom Holland echoes this in historical terms in his Dominion) but note that the spirit of wokeness is, in

Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

“The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be ‘revolutionary’ now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

8 months

The machine doesn’t stand a chance.

arma

@sovietsoleri

8 months

Nishino Yoichi 西野陽

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

This horrifyingly sense of temporality is congruent with the widespread left-brainification of consciousness. It is a sign of spiritual and social decay, not a sign that everything’s going well.

Tsarathustra

@tsarnick

9 months

Nowhere is cultural acceleration more evident than in the movies. As Andrej Karpathy says, movies from before 1995 are slow, boring and naive.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

“The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and ‘radicalizes’ the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be ‘revolutionary’ now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

7 months

“Auto-compulsion, which presents itself as freedom, takes the place of allo-compulsion. Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation.” Byung-Chul Han, Burnout Society.

Jason S. Campbell

@JasonSCampbell

7 months

Ben Shapiro: "No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem."

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

The age of the psyop: “Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now.” McLuhan. 1951.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

4 years

Ideology: What you think is saving you is negating your own nature.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

The book of Job is not easy to interpret but this is definitely not the way to read it. If anything, the whole beautiful poetic wonder of the book is that it obliterates any attempt to make accusation the primary mode of interacting with reality and man the measure of all things.

Martyr Made

@martyrmade

1 year

@Indian_Bronson God is the villain in the Book of Job

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

“If the young men are not initiated into the tribe, they will burn down the village just to feel its warmth.” Old African proverb.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 month

The fight remains what it has always been: a fight to remain human. Don’t capitulate to the machine.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

Beware of anyone whose worldview came cheaply. Here’s an example. I’m no atheist and find both Dawkins and Nietzsche wrong on ultimate things but I’ll happily give ginormous wodges of my time to Nietzsche, whose suffering and diligence shine through everything he did, and no

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

11 months

It genuinely amazes me when people watch movies and mistake an imaginative exploration of people and themes and stories for instructions on how to live or as some remark on the inevitable. The description-prescription distinction doesn’t seem to register so easily in some minds.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

Today, with a group of students, I went through just seven sentences of Friedrich Jünger’s Failure of Technology, taking an hour and a half to let the text speak. And, as so many insights hit my students, one insight after another, I said: “This is what reading is really about.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

13 days

“Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Supermen

Z Fellows

@zfellows

14 days

"The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion." -- Sam Altman ( @sama )

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

“All you have to do to destroy inwardness is to destroy silence. If you want people to have no access to their inner life, just keep talking.” Link to Snubstack in bio.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

Basically, “Use ‘egg-factory’ not ‘female’ ...”. The endgame of the whole self-identification-as-whatever epidemic is the obliteration of ontological personhood.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

10 months

Rothko is a vibe or mood. His work has to be experienced in person and all photographical/digital reproductions are equal to hermeneutical violence. The whole point of his work is precisely to awaken and appeal to what Heidegger calls the pre-ontological and the pre-linguistic.

Culture Critic

@Culture_Crit

10 months

Explain what this painting means and why it is good.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

One of the funniest lines in the Bible is from the Prophet Jeremiah (1:16): “They … worshiped the works of their own hands.” Imagine making a toaster and then bowing to it as if it made you. Funny. Also very silly. Well, now, let’s think of AI as a glorified toaster …

Ewan Morrison

@MrEwanMorrison

6 months

"What is going to be created will effectively be a god." The Way of the Future, is a religious cult based around AI, with a gospel called The Manual. It began in 2017 and is currently being 'rebooted'. Its leaders claim it will "focus on “the realization, acceptance, and

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

4 years

If you want to make people miserable, give them unlimited options.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

This is a bit like saying that because of recent advances in dentistry we no longer have any need for Dostoevsky.

George Styles

@geostylegeo

9 months

Science and religion are not at all compatible.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

I have no opinion on climate change. It’s not my field of expertise and I refuse to make a judgment on something I know nothing about. It is striking, though, just how much more hermeneutical nuance and care tends to be evident in the arguments of those who oppose the consensus.

CtrlAltDelete

@TakingoutTrash7

1 year

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry testifies that the man made climate change theory is a hoax…

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

Think of the spam that can get delivered straight into your brain. And the unwanted ads. The potential to turn people into walking spreadsheets is also huge. The possibilities of this becoming a nightmare are close to limitless. The road to hell paved with only good intentions.

CONSEQUENCE

@consequence

9 months

Elon Musk's brain chip company Neuralink has implanted its first device in a live human being. Musk says his brain chip will allow humans to communicate without talking, listen to music simply by thinking of a song title, and treat mental health issues. →

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

The great discarnation intensifies. But relationships aren’t, despite the Cartesians, merely about personae; they’re not mainly about the conscious, articulated aspects of ourselves. Relationships are mainly energy; mainly a dance of the unconscious. Love can’t be algorithmified.

Tsarathustra

@tsarnick

5 months

Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd says the future of dating is having your AI date other people's AI and recommend the best matches for you to meet

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

“There has never been & there will never be an institutional means of making people brothers. Fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant idea devised in modern times; it is a perfect path to totalitarian tyranny. Socialism in this sense is tantamount to a kingdom of lies.”

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

10 months

So many levels of bureaucratic self-humiliation. The managerial revolution as cringemaxxing. “… we humiliate ourselves before false gods.” (Simone Weil).

stimulant enjoyer

@gotitatguineys

10 months

I see so much pain in his eyes, I hope he sees the light and is set free. Inshallah brother

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

“It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be

Dylan O'Sullivan

@DylanoA4

9 months

AGAIN

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

The old, deep stories, myths and legends of biblical proportions, can keep the world healthy and sane, can bring a sleeping man out of the dark into wakefulness; into the illuminated realm. When the old, deep stories are forgotten, the world goes crazy.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

After Infinity War, these guys made Endgame, which retconned an easy-peasy nostalgia-fest technological time-travel cop-out fix to a deeply felt, devastating, and unsolvable tragedy. It should have stayed a tragedy because at least then the plot of the sequel would have the

Variety

@Variety

6 months

"Avengers: Endgame" directors say Marvel's recent struggles are not due to superhero fatigue but "a big generational divide about how you consume media." “There’s a generation that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it’s

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

10 months

Cellphones are shields more than they are windows. They protect us from too much reality, guiding us into a docile state in which almost any fiction, any ludicrous vision of life, is plausible—as long as it has been sufficiently digitalised and mimeticised.

Culture Critic

@Culture_Crit

10 months

We've forgotten how to live in the moment.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

In Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, his narrator sees how people will do the most irrational stuff, will surprise and horrify you, will lie, cheat, parade their own self-deception, and so on, just to prove that they’re not predictable like piano keys. You don’t press a person

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 months

Having seen this clip show up so often on my timeline today, I started wondering how anyone might mistake it for poetry. It reminds me of Italian singer Adriano Celentano’s 1972 gibberish song Prisencolinensinainciusol. Just as Celentano’s song is what English sounds like to a

TheBlaze

@theblaze

2 months

Activist poet Amanda Gorman at the DNC: "We gather at this hollowed place because we believe in the American dream. We face a race that tests if this country we cherish shall perish from the earth and if our earth shall perish from this country."

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

"In thus being “deprived of their own proper reality,” Marcel suggests, people become especially susceptible to propaganda. Social contagion becomes the norm in a world of depthlessness. The more uprooted people are, the more manipulable they become."

Death by selfie

On the triumph of the image over being

duncanreyburn.substack.com

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

Everything is destined to disappear as a reality and reappear as a cheesy, idiotic simulation.

Artificial World

@ARTiV3RSE

3 months

I used the new Midjourney v6.1 to imagine famous artwork in a realistic aesthetic. The results are unreal. 1. “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

8 months

There. Fixed it.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

7 months

“It is the sheer quantity of information which has alienated us from political and social reality. The large city isolates the individual citizen, but the multi-cultural perspectives of the press have isolated the human spirit itself from any milieu.” Marshall McLuhan, 1954.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

The fetishisation¹ of transformation has been a disaster for the human race. Everyone wants ‘transformation’. Easily forgotten is the question, “Transformation into what?” ¹ … deteleologisation …

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 months

Chesterton’s advice on drinking applies pretty well to posting: “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, … but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 months

I’ve too often read or heard humanities scholars vomit up something that sounds like some sort of intelligence might, just might, be at work somewhere beneath all that inglorious spewing. Sadly, it is often not intelligence but it’s counterfeit: a terrible mixture of pride and

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

Meet the elite couple breeding to save mankind.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

5 months

One of my PhD students said he didn’t want to study Heidegger. “You know why,” he said. My reply: “If you want to grow an intellectual spine, be honest. About everything. And reducing a thinker to what you don’t like or disagree with isn’t being honest. It’s being politically

Athenian Stranger

@Athens_Stranger

5 months

This kind of mere moralizing is the dumbest thing possible for the study of philosophers who are very much worth studying. I don’t give a damn what the political beliefs of philosophers are until I’ve sufficiently understood the entirety of their thought. Anything less is poison

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

4 months

This is very perceptive. We live in a world that has largely confused darkness with depth. “They muddy the waters to appear deep,” says Nietzsche.

blurry toad

@zenandtoad

4 months

I hate film noirs, I hate the Coen brothers, and anything/anyone else who thinks nihilism is sophisticated. Ooo dark rooms and ‘the inevitability of life,’ so deep It’s actually shocking that ‘An amoral dystopia where anything can happen for any reason’ is a recycled theme. It

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

6 months

“But big data does not explain anything. Big data merely discloses correlations between things. Correlations are the most primitive form of knowledge. … The question 'why?' is replaced with a non-conceptual 'this-is-how-it-is'.” Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration (2024).

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

“Myth is not prehistory; it is timeless reality, which repeats itself in history.” Jünger, Forest Passage.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

1 year

The gift of AI is that it draws attention to the fact that everything is fake and has been for a while. All commercials from now on should be made only by AI.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

2 years

“… Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic.” Roger Scruton. On Human Nature.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

9 months

The leftbrainification of everything is proving to be a disaster for the human imagination. We need to be rightbrainmaxxing; we need to be McGilchristmaxxing. We need to become what we are: rewilders of imaginary realms; discoverers of the many glorious unconcealments of being.

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

8 months

Here is courage opposing a mimetic slippery slope into the jaws of the will-to-control that has become the standard of technological societies. Here is also the deep wisdom of embracing the doubleness of life’s inevitable suffering along with the gift of life itself. As Kathleen

Hope Ireland

@hopeire1

8 months

'It suggests that shortening your life is the only way for a terminally ill person to die with dignity' A powerful video from Kathleen Rogers, speaking about Motor Neurone Disease and Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia

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Duncan Reyburn

@duncanreyburn

3 months

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as France.

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