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OOONT

                                             November 29, 2018

The other day, a friend of mine asked me what my
opinion was of object-oriented ontology -- yes,
I have some weird friends -- so I went off and
started skimming around through some writings on
the subject, and I am here to report that the
outer envelope of this gaseous entity smells bad.
                                                               DEEP_ECOLOGY
You see, it's a very bad thing that human beings
go around privileging themselves over those other
objects, and really we should realize that we're      An early criticism of
just one kind of thing in the thingoverse: we need    this stuff is that it
to adopt a flatter hierarchy, a "democracy of         appears to be anti-
objects".                                             humanist.  That brave
                                                      little toaster deserves
You might think that this is some sorta               just as much consideration
exaggerated parody of some post-pomo idiocy,          as your grandmother.
and we can but hope that my intentionally
sloppy reading is wrong, that there is                I gather that the
something solid inside this cloud of objects,         OoOntocracy responded
an objective to this line of, uh, thinking            to that one with a
beyond impressing the rubes in the fuzzy              "nuh-uh no fair
studies departments.                                  never said it (not
                                                      really)" prompting
  There's something familar about                     some arch remarks
  all this, there's a tendency for                    about how all objects
  intellectualoids to go after a                      are equal, but some
  deflation of human pretension--                     are more equal than
  what makes us think we're so                        others.
  great after all?  All is vanity.
                                                      And I think they made
  They can end up seeming like some                   the "we're engaging in
  sort of uncaring monsters, traitors                 dialog" maneuver,
  to the human race...                                meaning they're not
                                                      playing by touch
  There were some issues back in the 60s              moves, and you can't
  where some people who'd just discovered             expect them to stick
  Buddhism would talk about how suffering             to anything.
  was inevitable and necessary and feel
  surprised that people opposed to the
  Vietnam war found that offensive.

  Then there's the tendency of some
  environmentalists to slide into the
  idea that "saving the earth" is a          EMPIRICAL_MORALITY
  two-sided conflict that means
  they need to be at war with humanity.

  And some vegetarians go for a line
  of thought something like "once we
  regarded other races and nations as
  sub-human, and that was bad,              VEGE
  therefore nothing should be
  regarded as sub-human".  How dare
  you regard human beings as special?


          But you know, human beings really do
          matter to human beings.

          (Bunch of damn chauvinists.
          Some day the toasters will rebel.)


But there are evidently some thinking
feller artistic types out there who find
OoOnt very useful in their work...

  For them I gather it's another
  route to animism, though I don't     While the idea that every object
  know why you wouldn't just go        has a spirit of its own would
  there directly.                      seem to be a fiction, it's a
                                       fiction that seems well suited
                                       to assist human beings in
                                       dealing with objects.


                                                OBJECTS_THROUGH_THE_ANIMIST

                                                        ANIMISTS



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