I’m many things. Here’s perhaps a few worth knowing.

I’m:

  • an M.A. in #Philosophy
  • a teacher, mostly #teaching #academic #writing
  • a committed #FOSS user
  • a #Fediverse enthusiast

If you’re into Mastodon, you can also find me @UdeRecife@firefish.social.

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  • 120 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Thank you for your comment and for bringing in some sanity.

    I’m a former cellist, who has been trained in the western cannon, and you’re absolutely right.

    Music is music. The so-called classical tradition is just hyped up musical culture from the rich and powerful European elite of those days.

    There’s nothing in it more special or high minded except for the fact that it was a learned tradition. It was especially cultivated to cater to those who were wealthy enough to actually pay for the privilege of having music played to them whenever they feel like listening to it.

    I’m over-simplifying, but that’s pretty much the gist of it. In the 19th century, and with industrialization, more and more people came to have their own pianos at home, so they too could have music at home whenever they felt like listening. Guys like Brahms made a huge buck back in the day catering to this new public.

    The point being that classical music is just a fancy name for that music tradition which, as you correctly pointed out, is a white European thing used to assert a supposed intellectual dominance over other peoples and their own cultures.

    Remember, music is music. There’s nothing inherently good about classical European music. Actually, if you hear that tradition thoroughly enough (I did), you’ll quickly find out that some of it is actually really badly written, even by the so-called great (I’m looking at you, Beethoven, and your Op. 91, Wellington’s Victory “Battle Symphony” – what a piece of crap!).

    tl;dr Classical music is indeed a politically charged term with nasty political implications. As a musical tradition, it is indeed over-hyped and made up to be something bigger than it actually is.









  • Don’t get me started. The thesis, antithesis, synthesis is Hegelian only in the sense that Marx was a leftist Hegelian. For that historical dialectical movement is actually a Marxists’ material reinterpretation of Hegel’s teleology of the Absolute.

    Yes, you could argue that Marx is simply Hegel under a different guise, and that thesis, antithesis, synthesis is just an explicit reformulation of Hegel’s ontological dialectics. But then you might as well say that the whole western contemporary philosophical tradition is in some sense Hegelian as every known philosopher since has been trying to overcome Hegel. Which, in some sense, is true.

    In any case, this will only prove the Hegelian fanboy point: aufhebung, bitches!


  • For life. That is. If you’re non-Hegelian.

    Otherwise you become a kind of know-it-all as anything and everything that is raised for or against your Hegelian Weltanschauung is necessarily ontologically subsumed into the historically inherently determined dialectical self-manifesting and self-fulfilling recognition of one’s own liberty which is nothing other than the unavoidable individual instantiation of the greater collective coming to terms conscience of the Absolute. Aufhebung, bitches!








  • Guy Debord captures the problem best in his The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

    In theory, you could probably go against it. Problem is that the Spectacle (capitalist ideology visually manifested) is tautological and self-reinforcing. Even to critique it you have to make the critique a spectacle, which immediately undermines that very same critique (think of any YouTube video critiquing YouTube).

    So no, it’s no the same. The odds are insanely stacked up in favor of keeping the structure in place—unlike breaking away from said belief in the divinity of kings.



  • Sorry if I mistake your intention. If that’s the case, it’s just me making a wrong guess.

    You’re probably misreading this.

    I authored THE NAME. If you prefer, I’m the name-giver, the author in this sense.

    Linus is the namer and the creator of that kernel.

    As creator he is by right allowed to name his creation whatever he likes. Just like me, as the cat ‘entity creator as a pet’ am allowed to name it whatever I like.

    No outsiders input required. You get now what I mean by author?

    Whatever your reply may be, let me thank you already for engaging. It’s nice to be pressured to explain something in simpler, more accessible terms.