NEW: ICE tackled + arrested Juanita Avila, an Oregon shop owner who is a legal permanent resident and had her green card in her pocket.
When she asked through sobs why they didn't believe her, one masked agent replied: “Because they lie all the time.”
Video + interview with her and her daughter:
Wowwww they lost Fox News?!
OK that concludes today’s quodlibetal session! That was fun. Thank you to Karen from Finance for the central question
I think this newfound human capacity to bend material reality to the extremely specific fantasies and desires of the individual is indeed a new horizon in the history of pleasure.
In short, my tentative answer is that on this question specifically I might disagree with Foucault (hypothetically).
To put it more bluntly, until quite recently in human history, if you had sexual fantasies about dragons or werewolves or octopus tentacles or any of the other creature shit people are into now, you had to put a regular dildo inside you, close your eyes, and pretend really hard.
Now, not so much!
I don’t think Foucault could possibly have imagined the possibilities that 3D printing would bring to sex, both in terms of privately making sex toys and in terms of customizing them to very precise and abstruse specifications, in a way that transforms the boundary between fantasy and reality.
Once we define things this way I think it’s pretty clear that pleasure has new “affordances” for its expression, to use the rancid language of economics and tech.
I’ll give just one example: 3D printing.
I would approach Foucault’s (hypothetical) assertion from a Spinozan-Deleuzian perspective (of course). My version of the question is: whatever the component pieces, does the pleasure in question, as a whole, affect us in new ways or allow us to be affected in new ways?
But you can keep playing this game forever: “all pleasures are just neurons firing”; “all pleasures are just atoms moving around.”
So again, you have to figure out your frame of reference before this question really means anything.
For example, you can look at a phenomenon like the cam girls of the 1990s and say “Oh this boils down to voyeurism, voyeurism is nothing new.” Or we could look at OnlyFans and say “Oh this is just prostitution, prostitution is nothing new.” “Fisting is just anal sex,” etc etc.-.
We can say *in general* that pleasures break down to component drives just as images break down into pixels and words into phonemes.
So the first question is one of resolution: what level are we looking at? Use? Conception? Realization? Conscious enjoyment? Micro? Macro?
A lot depends here on what we mean by “new pleasures,” which is hard to pinpoint without having a passage of Foucault to look at. New in the sense of “undreamed of”? New in the sense of “previously unrealistic”?
Alas for us, perhaps fortunately for him, Foucault died before the invention of the Internet which in my opinion has indeed transformed desire and taught us new pleasures, some of them quite wretched and cheap.
For philosophy? Anything published by @hackettpub.bsky.social then as many Penguins and Loebs are you can afford.
Hackett and Penguin offer the best ratio of price to quality on the market. Loeb is not so cheap but for many texts still the best option. Remember to include non-Western philosophy!
I feel like explaining something who had a philosophy question
Scoop 🚨
The NYPD has continued issuing criminal summonses to street vendors despite @mayor.nyc.gov @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social pledge to remove them from vendor enforcement
“We still have hope,” one vendor said about the mayor
New for @documentedny.bsky.social
documentedny.com/2026/03/06/s...
This thread about Platner is damning. Wow! Of course it won’t make a bit of difference, just quoting it so that I can come back to it later.
Is it fun selling work for $2 that a few decades ago would have brought in three months’ rent? No.
Do I like having a loyal audience of self-selecting readers who give me absolute intellectual freedom? Hell yes.
Anyway check out my patreon we have fun over there.
www.patreon.com/fucktheory
The second of my 4 lectures on Melville’s Pierre is now live! This one is about madness, family, and the psychological novel.
text $2
audio $5
www.patreon.com/posts/150680...
I phrased this wrong bc what’s happening in Iran is just as serious. But both things are happening.
Israel is doing vile things in Lebanon while everyone is looking at Iran. There’s an actual distraction, for the distraction crew.
The second of my 4 lectures on Melville’s Pierre is now live! This one is about madness, family, and the psychological novel.
text $2
audio $5
www.patreon.com/posts/150680...
For over a year now I’ve worked so hard and tried everything I could to avoid this. But I couldn’t save enough, so here we are.
I made a Gofundme. Depending on the outcome I will either hire an expensive immigration lawyer and give it one more try, or pack up and use the money to start over.
Omg Morgan 💀
Here’s what happened to the Roman Emperor Valerian after he became obsessed with invading Iran.
Remember a couple of months ago when I told that academic to quit her job and her deranged ugly husband spent four hours shrieking at me and then she spent the weekend DMing my mutuals flat-out lying about me “harassing” her?
Nice, normal, ethical people!
Europeans have had a genuinely unhealthy fixation on Iran since the ancient Greeks.
Academics love to do fuck all about things when there’s a chance to intervene and then lean back and smugly sneer 6 months later about how we’re all just looking for the guy who did this.
Many are asking, I guess
