An anti-historicist sense of history is knowing when to make exceptions for principles and taking on burden of eternal storytelling after...
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...When you make an exception, you create unsettled meaning. You have to contextualize it indefinitely until greater truth/principle emerges
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...an exception/special case becomes fuel for dangerous historicism when it becomes possible to use it as a precedent in uncritical ways...
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... the only thing that can prevent that is *living* memory...a constant reinterpretation of the story in new contexts to restrict its power
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...digression. Cloudflare memo is kinda like an event from Mahabharata, which is full of stuff like this, and a great example to learn from
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...The Mahabharata contains a theory of consequentialist ethics (the Gita), but the actual story is a bunch of exceptions/violations of...
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...If you read the Mahabharata as a book you don't get this, but as a living tradition it's a set of ethics conversations around exceptions
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...You never quite settle these questions, but you simultaneously sharpen your ethical imagination and sense of history through working them
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...the Cloudflare memo will go down in history as a Mahabharata-like morality tales that can and should be endlessly discussed because...
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...it's how you'll learn to actually process the idea of free speech as a living philosophical problem rather than a dead-and-settled thing
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