This is stupid. I'm stupid. 🤣

I haven't been reading all this Camus just to take this insidious technofascist overreach without a fight. ⚔️

Prank calling my neighbors with a solar death ray at 3 am

Because I haven't been stopped yet, I just requested a meeting with my NC state senator and NC state representative about the data center rezoning issue and SB 382. I'll let you know if I get one.

I had duck confit tonight and my soul left my body.

North Carolina, if we want to be able to block data centers from close proximity to residential areas, we HAVE to get the state legislators to repeal or amend SB 382. The cities have no power to update our ordinances until we get rid of the restrictions against downzoning. Call your state reps.

Do you ever wish you could meet up for coffee with whoever owned and annotated your book before you bought it at the used bookstore? Whoever had my ethics anthology was smart and funny.

You don't need to debate with anyone who thinks burning down people's homes will "solve" whatever "problem" they claim immigration has caused. They're literally just fascists. They don't deserve the air in their lungs, much less yours.

I'm having to learn zoning to try and fight a data center being built a stone's throw away from a neighborhood in Charlotte, NC. I wish I could count on city council to do their jobs and protect their people, but too many of them are in corporations' pockets.So we have to organize and raise hell.

I'm trying to figure out why Bluesky feels like a ghost town for me. I'd like to leave Threads but I have not found my people here.

Bari Weis is girl Joe Rogan... she just kinda saunters around sprinkling disinformation on things

CHARLOTTE: The next step, now that we have a data center moratorium, is to communicate effectively with the city planners. Ask them: what are you using this moratorium to do? Urge them to do impact studies on noise and light pollution, and to reclassify data centers as INDUSTRIAL, not COMMERCIAL.

Veteran teachers, how much of your successful classroom management is attributable to the sheer force of your personality? I truly believe my theatre degree helped me with managing behavior far more than my teaching courses ever did.

In Franz Kafka's The Castle, the longer K. spends in the neurotic bureaucratic nightmare of the village, the more conditioned he becomes to it and more willing to tolerate absolute nonsense.

That's not a [straw man noun]. That's a [overblown transcendent concept].

Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones Eye Roll

Alt: Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones Eye Roll

static.klipy.com

I've done a comparative philosophical analysis of Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, as these two works have so much overlap in both voice and ethos. Please enjoy this monster of a paper I've been writing since February. open.substack.com/pub/amycheek...

Fate “Unknowable but Certain”: Beowulf as the Absurd Man

Albert Camus and the Anglo-Saxon glorification of the losing battle

open.substack.com

My remarks from Tuesday night's public hearing on a 150-day data center moratorium at Charlotte City Council. We all must do what we can against the AI incursion. youtu.be/TSBggzGO5bE?...

CLT DATA CENTER MORATORIUM: My remarks to City Council

YouTube video by Amy Cheek

youtu.be

My goal as a high school teacher next year is to do as much paper/pencil and discussion seminars as I can make happen. The only screen during class most days will be mine. Also going to a pomodoro timer for a daily class brain break. I need to be a good steward of their young minds.

Is anyone in a city that has successfully BANNED the construction of new data centers? I have an opportunity to directly pitch a proposal to one of my city council members next Tuesday, and I need as many effective ideas as possible.

People want to use genAI to pretend to be writers and artists, but they don't want to actually listen to or protect the writers and the artists.

Am I taking my philosophical studies very seriously? Yes. Am I reading Nietzsche and absolutely fixating on the most inconsequential takes for my own entertainment? Also yes.

Simone Weil already defeated Citizens United in her essay "The Needs of the Soul." What is taking us so long? "Intelligence resides only in the human being, individually considered. There is no such thing as a collective exercise of the intelligence..." 1/2

Simone Weil's definition of social order is the best one I've read so far: "A texture of social relationships such that no one is compelled to violate imperative obligations in order to carry out other ones." It really lands how disordered the United States currently is.

Head over to my Substack to see yet another of my critiques (as I did with Kant) questioning a philosophical theory that bases human value or fulfillment on our ability to reason. It's a short read that grew out of some coursework I wrote earlier this year. open.substack.com/pub/amycheek...

Initial Critique of Aristotle's Function Argument

A modest counterexample to the "human function" in The Nicomachean Ethics

open.substack.com

We are being run by bad-faith actors harnessing mass religious psychosis so that rotted oligarchs with wealth-addled brains can balkanize existing nations into technostates. If we don't grind the labor systems to a halt soon, it will be too late to meaningfully resist.

As a more or less recovered thespian, I really like Camus' connection to the stage and how it permeates his writing. His description of the Absurd as the feeling of an actor being divorced from his set contains everything it needs to.

I was today years old when I learned that in Magic: the Gathering, the Avatar creature type (the Ur-Dragon, Arahbo, etc), the purest version of the creature's essence that exists in the Blind Eternities and from which all other material summons of that creature emanate... is just Plato's Forms.

This past week I kept wanting to text my MAGA parents after almost a year of no contact to see where they are on some of these current events, but then I remembered I don't like punching myself in the face.

So I did finally finish Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and I'm elated about it. Putting together my five most impactful takeaways to publish on the Substack by the end of the month. #philosophy