3/ The life force and hours wasted trying to tinker with DALL-E to mitigate text errors 😫 In the end I just had to admit defeat with some images and others in which faces are mangled etc. Oh to have a budget for working with real illustrators. Must be nice to have that luxury.

Read 20 tweets

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Apr 10

🧵The Court Without Nature (©️CJ)
A forensic fable on the erasure of justice and the construction of procedural law without truth:

‘The Disbanding of the Bench’

Once, there were judges who did not make law but saw it. They looked into the nature of things and ruled according to what was. But then a man arrived who said,

“You are no longer interpreters of being ;you are managers of peace.”

He dismantled their bench, took away their books, and gave them ledgers.

“You shall still wear robes,” he said, “but you will no longer speak of justice. You will speak of duty.”

2/ The New Oath

A new generation was sworn in. They no longer studied the nature of man. They learned codes, tables, classifications. They were told:

“Law is what is commanded. Morality is what is enforced. Right is what prevents conflict.”

They memorized procedures. They practiced neutrality. They were told this was freedom and that freedom meant never judging what is good, only what is permitted.

3/ The Mask of Continuity

Outside the court, the people still heard the words:

“Natural Law,” “virtue,” “peace.” But the meanings had shifted. Natural Law no longer referred to nature, only to regulations that claimed its name. The citizens obeyed, thinking they were governed by the old principles. But the law no longer reflected the real. It reflected the permissible. The mask stayed on; but what it covered was gone.

Read 20 tweets

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Mar 30

🧵Why Classical Education Is Not Enough:
Jefferson’s Vision, Containment & the
Forgotten Foundation of Constitutional Liberty ©️

The American Founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, understood that public education was not a luxury, nor a neutral civic service. It was the metaphysical infrastructure of a free Republic. It was designed to form the kind of person capable of self-government: morally anchored, intellectually disciplined, and able to perceive truth as something real, knowable, and binding. Jefferson called for the cultivation of “enlightened citizens” not to celebrate vague liberty or license, but to prepare individuals to discern, uphold and defend the moral and constitutional order of a principled, self-governing society.

Liberty was not a feeling. It was a responsibility and education was the instrument of forming the soul capable of carrying that responsibility.

2/
The American Founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, understood that public education was not a luxury, nor a neutral civic service. It was the metaphysical infrastructure of a free Republic. It was designed to form the kind of person capable of self-government: morally anchored, intellectually disciplined, and able to perceive truth as something real, knowable, and binding. Jefferson called for the cultivation of “enlightened citizens” not to celebrate vague liberty or license, but to prepare individuals to discern, uphold and defend the moral and constitutional order of a principled, self-governing society.

Liberty was not a feeling. It was a responsibility and education was the instrument of forming the soul capable of carrying that responsibility.

3/ State Education Was Designed to Dismantle This Vision

The rise of State-controlled education; beginning in the mid-19th century, was not a corruption of a neutral system, but a deliberate inversion of the Founders’ metaphysical intent. Civic formation was replaced with bureaucratic socialization. Moral realism was replaced with behavioral conditioning. Self-governance was replaced with managed compliance. State education took the external form of civic schooling but reoriented its telos; from forming conscience to engineering obedience. It functioned not to secure liberty, but to neutralize its preconditions.

Read 10 tweets

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Mar 30

🧵What Academia Refused to Teach:
A Confession and a Call (text & image©️)

To our professors of law, civics, history and political philosophy:

You have taught many things. You have lectured on Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Rawls. You have assigned The Federalist Papers, taught Aristotle, debated Kant. You have published, peer-reviewed and promoted “civic literacy.”

And yet you have never taught the People this:

That there are two entirely incompatible foundations of law;
one grounded in obligation enforced by sovereign will,
the other grounded in being discerned by sovereign reason.

2/
That Pufendorf and Blackstone gave us law as a structure of control, while Reid and Wilson gave us law as participation in truth.

You did not teach the people that these foundations are not merely theoretical but operational. That one leads to administrative simulation; the other to popular sovereignty grounded in Natural Law. That one creates compliant subjects; the other forms self-governing citizens.

3/ A Generational Failure

You failed to teach this distinction to the generations who came after. And so they entered civic life; good, willing, intelligent, but utterly unequipped to discern the foundation of the Republic they were told to preserve. You gave them theories, but not judgment. You gave them history, but not truth. You gave them language, but not participation.
You gave them the Constitution, but not the soul it depends on. Those generations are owed an apology for what was withheld from them.

Read 12 tweets

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

@thepalmerworm

Mar 21

🧵The Sound of Logos:
Musical Counterpoint as Metaphysical Contemplation

Well this evening’s research had me dipping back into ‘The Vipers Of Venice’ (Farrell) regarding Descartes & Leibniz. While there I spent far longer in the sections on musical counterpoint than I really had time for and it reminded me just how much I miss conducting and directing ensembles and also how the practise of music as anything other than self expression is anathema to most - even (and this was alien to my experience) in Church music. I grew up singing liturgical settings of Renaissance & Baroque composers; Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, Bach etc. As a music student I learned to write in their style, according to the laws of counterpoint. The music teachers/lecturers would occasionally reference vague notions of ‘Harmony Of The Spheres’ or music composed ‘To The Glory Of God’, but not one single teacher ever taught the precise correspondence between the formal musical structure; its laws of motion and the metaphysics being mapped in sound. We were taught the compositional laws as ‘just historical rules’ with no reference at all to their profound meaning. This was the entire telos of that music disregarded! So here’s a brief outline of why that lost understanding is so important:

2/
In the modern mind, music is nearly always equated with expression; a personal, emotional outpouring, a form of self-communication. This assumption is so deeply ingrained that few pause to ask whether music might once have served a radically different purpose. And yet, in the world of sacred polyphony and early counterpoint, music was not about the self at all. It was not self-referential, not emotive in the modern sense and not a vehicle for personality. Instead, it was a structured, formalized, deeply reverent act; a sonic reflection of the created order.

3/
Musical counterpoint, especially as it developed in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, was not merely a compositional technique. It was metaphysics in sound. The composers who mastered it; figures like Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, were not crafting emotional performances; they were engaging in theological architecture. They built sonic cathedrals out of tone, time and harmony. And those cathedrals were designed not for entertainment, but for contemplation, submission to God’s created order and contemplative reflection on the Biblical text being set.

Read 8 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @thepalmerworm

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

the palmer worm 🌲mother, wife,choral conductor.

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!