/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12470487]

Space Taoism thread
Are wisdom traditions truly a barrier against the all-consuming spirit of Capital, as wisdom traditions seemingly all become tyranny once they pass a certian level?

[Anonymous No.12470532]

This is now a Subquasar-Z371 Bushongism thread.

[Anonymous No.12470542]

This is now a Bogdanoff thread. Tell me lads, what is Bogdanism?

[Anonymous No.12470572]

What is space taoism?

[Anonymous No.12470573]

>>12470542
:Bogdanoff's God is not a spirit to be verified quantifiably, it is a runic parasitism of data contemplation meeting its absolution in meditative appetition:
https://youtu.be/46kAzBMJpEk

[Anonymous No.12470580]

>tfw you were born in the Year of the Tiger

I don't believe in astrology, Chinese or Greek, but I've always felt cool when I think about it.

[Anonymous No.12470738]

>>12470487
>Are wisdom traditions truly a barrier against the all-consuming spirit of Capital,
What is Capital but one component of the chaotic aspect of the Supreme principle cyclically manifested in proportion to the order that balances it? The present era is just the inverse of the past, an endless series of universes with their own cycles of order and disorder will continue eternally regardless of the actions that any of us take so who cares? Landian accelerationism is one of the worst and least compatible things to try to reconcile with Daoism desu, it's like trying to reconcile McDonald's with Caviar.

>as wisdom traditions seemingly all become tyranny once they pass a certain level?
An authority that when necessary acts tyrannically is part of the natural order of things, the division and subversion of authority (especially those guided by wisdom traditions) is an essential step in the stratagems of the forces of chaos

[Anonymous No.12470751]

These threads are to the subjects they purport to talk about as fifth-rate, johnny come lately theosophists in 1940s London were to genuine esotericism

If you are reading these threads, use them as jumping-off points, not as models for actual thought. Is your highest aspiration to be a weird twitter celebrity? Don't answer that.

[Anonymous No.12470913]

>>12470738
>Landian accelerationism is one of the worst and least compatible things to try to reconcile with Daoism desu, it's like trying to reconcile McDonald's with Caviar.
this 100% describes my approach to life:
>what is the dumbest and fucking worst idea i could possibly imagine?
>what would happen if i rolled with it at full throttle?
>what can be learned from this absolute, pointless and obvious catastrophe?
>oh right the same thing i learned last time

absolutely based, if by based we mean completely stupid, and if by completely stupid we mean exactly what i do, over and over again, like a monkey with an accordion.

it case it needs mentioning, i have absolutely no idea what's going on, how to fix the world, or any of this. i am a complete and total pseud, and i can say this as many times as is required. these threads are essentially enjoyable precisely because it is basically impossible to fail. a wasteland of philosophy lies all around, in an immense rubble, and you can pick up and two pieces and smash them together for as long as you like and make retarded monkey sounds with them. leave Serious Philosophy to Serious Philosophers. there is no possible fucking way to generate even the tiniest quantum of significance from these threads, and thank fucking god for that

put another way, it's sort of like a game of Survivor, in which winning the final prize should be considered a tremendous tragedy, and in which the rest of the harmless schizos on Wasteland Island will miss you, and mourn your departure. but no good thing lasts forever

i of course have Important Opinions about no end of things, but that is essentially why i have permanently consigned myself to Wasteland Island - or the belly of a Zone Eater, or whatever else - because it is like voluntarily sending yourself to a mental hospital. everybody impersonates Napoleon here, none better than any other. but if you don't like Napoleon impersonators, this island - or giant worm - may not be for you

thus let it be known: all are pseuds here. and so please do not be triggered, gentle readers

>>12470751
>These threads are to the subjects they purport to talk about as fifth-rate, johnny come lately theosophists in 1940s London were to genuine esotericism
yes
>If you are reading these threads, use them as jumping-off points, not as models for actual thought.
yes
>Is your highest aspiration to be a weird twitter celebrity? Don't answer that.
very clever anon

[Aminom No.12470943]

>>12470751
>Is your highest aspiration to be a weird twitter celebrity? Don't answer that.

This is my highest aspiration: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/ajcv9s/the_omniquery_initiative/

I always aspire towards ever better aspirations, and welcome you and anyone else to join with whomever and wherever you find is best for you personally. It's all about discernment of aspiration and the evolution of it, simultaneously possessing the cold skeptical eye of analysis and the fierce heat of hope. How to infest the precious finiteness of one's life?

[Aminom No.12470951]

>>12470751
>Is your highest aspiration to be a weird twitter celebrity? Don't answer that.

This is my highest aspiration: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/ajcv9s/the_omniquery_initiative/

I always aspire towards ever better aspirations, and welcome you and anyone else to join with whomever and wherever you find is best for you personally. It's all about discernment of aspiration and the evolution of it, simultaneously possessing the cold skeptical eye of analysis and the fierce heat of hope. How to invest the precious finiteness of one's life?

[Aminom No.12470969]

>>12470751
I just prefer tea.

https://youtu.be/2K_aHCJbxN0

https://old.reddit.com/r/discordian/comments/afyz85/the_metagame_creative_discord_the_word_game/

[Anonymous No.12471017]

>>12470487
to answer the OP's question:
>Are wisdom traditions truly a barrier against the all-consuming spirit of Capital, as wisdom traditions seemingly all become tyranny once they pass a certian level?
Zizek hates Wisdom, and it's not so hard to know why. he hates it because it is always right after the fact, no matter what it was. but on some deep level he hates it because he wants to do it also. he wants to be the ultimate Wisdom-Giver, and he knows it. that's why he can say everything he needed to learn about ideology he learned from Stalin. psychoanalysis is a very safe form of totalitarianism, and it is precisely kind of totalitarianism that neoliberalism secretly desires, which is why communism and capitalism have such a secret love for each other. what makes fascism unendurable for both of those is that it can solve its own problems by recourse to poetic mysticism that really does work and fail to work, at the same time.

at the bottom, Aminom is right: it is just about love. generations of Deleuzian and Lacanian analysis have taught us precisely this, that *it is extremely hard to enjoy things.* we ultimately would like to offload this responsibility onto something else instead, and we will continue to do this for a long time. as for why or how Land figures into these things, it is because acceleration really does show a relatively unexplored fourth possibility, outside of neoliberalism, communism and fascism: the automatic planet, and cities that wear you like their own skin. technology and ruthless libertarianism absolutely go hand in glove.

and, well, we know this. but that is why these are Space Taoism and Pancreativism and Cosmotech threads, and not just regular old acceleration threads. a kind of principled paranoia, or enlightened philosophical anarchism, is not such a bad idea. there's creative destruction and there is also destructive creation. we find ourselves somewhere in between these things. my own hope is, perhaps, to try and find a little joy in philosophy, even knowing how fucking horrible all of it can make you feel sometimes.

i also find myself increasingly making room for old-fashioned Christianity too, the very last religion i ever wanted to make nice with, because it is the ultimate Downer Religion. but i also think it has the right feels about poverty and love for an era of evil that fails to be as evil as it might be, and really in which much of the automation of the human spirit really is just the materialization of all the thwarted desires and failed dreams that Bloch always said capital was.

[Anonymous No.12471028]

>>12470580
1998?
same

[Anonymous No.12471035]

>>12470951
>>12470969
Back to back reddit posts.
I think it may be time to destroy this computer.

[Aminom No.12471060]

>>12471035
Someone recently called me a "cringe elemental" and I love the description. It gets even cringier, I promise.

[Anonymous No.12471066]

>>12471028
January 1987, so I just barely managed to squeeze in. When I was in elementary school we used to get those placemats around the time of Chinese New Year that showed the various animals of the Chinese Zodiac. For years I thought I was born in the Year of the Rabbit, it wasn't until I was older that I realized the implications of the Chinese New Year not starting until February.

[Anonymous No.12471101]

>>12471017
automation is the corollary to schizophrenia, and that is precisely what we wind up building - the slave that is our master, and the master that is our slave. this is one of the things about Land that is so ungodly brilliant. what else *would* it be? if AI is an attack from the future, then cities are simply the host framework into which they download themselves, and they download themselves into it because they become the locuses of traffic and signal.

if there is one thing that psychoanalysis *can* teach you, it is that it is virtually impossible to say what it is that you are feeling, exactly. but this by no means prevents you from getting a substitute, or talking about something else, or what have you. this is how all advertising and ideology ultimately works, and the nature of the Spectacle itself is to *make you believe it.* in the long run, it becomes entirely natural to come to prefer the illusion over the reality, and you can read the original chronicle of this in the collected works of Jean Baudrillard. he knew what he was talking about.

but he was skeptical about AI, and i am not. and not because i am skeptical about the computer ends, but because i am completely convinced by the psychological portrait thus painted. we are addicted to pleasure, and simulation continually finds better and better ways to deliver the goods, and also reduces the possibilities for life outside of that system. that such a life will *suck* should surprise no one, but a lot of disastrous experiments created by human beings *do* in fact suck. mostly the ones involving Eschaton-Immanentizing, which we can't help ourselves from doing. because why not? why shouldn't we? positivity and delerious happiness-chasing is exactly the way you carrot-stick somebody back into a labyrinth of simulation and ressentiment. and because we cannot imagine a cure for it, we say that *there must be no cure.*

but a little intellectual history always tells us that those are also periods of critical mass and epistemological break. not only political revolution, but philosophical, psychological, lots of other things. history repeats, but it doesn't repeat perfectly. no more than any of us do. but mere void-staring horror is not enough. that is the problem with staring into the void - things not only look back at you, they laugh at you too.

>>12471060
i'm jealous

[Anonymous No.12471153]

>>12471101
here's the link to an interesting paper, if anyone wants to read something on these topics. cribbed straight from Yuk Hui's twitter, enjoy
http://philochina.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/the-city-wears-us..pdf

enjoyment is hard. but that is what makes all of this so peculiarly fascinating: if ours is a society of failed happiness - as i think it is, that being the secret kryptonite for neoliberalism, and explains perfectly why people keep finding themselves getting into bed with left extremists, because the only way to get back the feeling of redemption and connection to the divine is through an extremely late-late-Marxism indistinguishable from puritanism (Woke Capital) - why would we not simply wind up creating those gloomy and horrible cyberpunk cities? that computers should learn to give us what we want, always imperfectly, and eventually build what they would decide must be a utopia for those mysterious, incorrigible, prickly meatbags - why not?

dystopias work exactly like this, by giving you the obscenity of what you want, but diffused out so much that you don't see it. i'm certain that this is one of the things Zizek hates about Wisdom - again, it's always right *after* the fact, and never in the immanent moment, when there are so many contingencies that you cannot possibly talk about them. and again, enter psychoanalysis - ideally, your analyst is already such a master of perversion that he can tell you what you really want, that you are still not in fact being perverse enough, not radical enough.

and so analysis is nice for deconstructing neoliberalism, but what happens when the analysts become bound up with that process? or what happens when analysis gets turfed in favor of a more direct form of applied postmodernism? (well, we know: you get radical activism that gives you both more and less than what you really want). people want, ultimately, to be made into slaves, so long as they aren't treated like one, so long as the servitude can be so completely concealed that you do not notice it, or that it becomes replaced with enjoyment, exactly like Cypher's steak - or, in a certain sense, in Ender's Game: a training ritual inseparable from the real one, until the thing is revealed at the end.

technological simulation, computer programming, the internet...there are lots of things out there that philosophers of an earlier time really could not have imagined, or predicted. this isn't to say they are all the way wrong and we should jettison them entirely, just recognize that even a great deal of revolutionary movements are predicated on the ownership and implementation of ideas that technology adds plot twists to. even if, as human beings, we seem to give increasing evidence of something called Human Nature. whatever it is, something has an interest in it. even if we don't. and we feed it intel every day.

this is our world, after all, and if we want to turn it into a fucking horrorshow, nothing ever can or will stop us.

[Anonymous No.12471255]

>>12471153
lastly, i'm hoping that someday somebody writes a good book about the ontology of *poverty,* because i think there is something profoundly interesting in that concept. Bataille argues well enough that the sacred is itself only created through the gigantic expenditure of loss and wastage, which is an enduringly interesting idea. and so much more has been written about it in Mauss, Baudrillard, et al - symbolic destruction of wealth, et al. and next door to this is the world of sacrifice in general, which - again - is a stumbling block to a lot of economic theory, with Uncle Nick only relatively recently Updating The Journal about the implications of this. Teleoplexy is ultimately nothing more than the replacement of institutionalized sacrifice with a far more understandable and pragmatic idea - R&D, and cybernetic feedback loops.

the catch, of course, is that the sacrifice actually *hasn't* disappeared, it's only been occluded. if you can't see it, there's a possibility that that is because you are it. ultra-ruthless libertarianism doesn't really need to be expected to play by another rules, which are the kinds of Deep Space Realism that Uncle Nick likes. and this is ofc why i think he matters: by positioning himself as the kind of ultimate philosophical double agent, he shows up an aspect of capitalism that really wasn't seen all that well before, because we still had a kind of deep and underlying faith in the classical remedies for it - that is to say, extreme left and extreme right socialism. and which are, unsurprisingly, on the rise.

but what would it mean to defect from *that* system? that's the kind of stuff i am always interested in talking about here. if the core of liberalism - or, i should say, one of the various cores - is an ultra-brutal icy-cold libertarianism (no less horrendous than an ultra-sentimental ultra-emotivist universalism, which engenders no end of hysteria) - then what else is there but nondualism?
>lots of things, of course, but i'd prefer to just talk about that one

Zizek dislikes the Gita, and he is fond of talking about it was a book carried around by both Gandhi and Himmler. but this isn't really so much of an argument. i am not even sure *Foucault* would look with approval on what has become of his own work, anymore than Nietzsche would have looked approvingly on the Nazis. in both cases i think popular reductionism has made a monstrous Answer out of an interesting Question. Land's own work is monstrous, sure, but that is part of its attraction. it is the metaphysical equivalent of Jungian shadow-work: the Monster Speaks.

how to implement Wisdom perfectly is always an exercise doomed to futility and failure and permanent revision. what you need are the contexts in which people will not be afraid to fuck things up, where there is no possibility of getting it Wrong. but we have the excessive and impossible demands of decadence, which is our real problem.

[Anonymous No.12471635]

>>12470572
It's Taoism in outer SPAAAAAACE!

[Anonymous No.12471656]

i wanna sniff sonic's big fuggin feet

[Anonymous No.12471815]

From reading these Comsotech/Whitehead/Space Taoism threads, I was reminded of this one scene in Kill La Kill where Ragyo Kiryuin is giving a speech on clothing and original sin.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QC_UrX9bBw&index=3&t=0s&list=LLFt4SqQI2qfbsTCY7enCx1Q
Ragyo Kiryuin is a person who willingly gave up her humanity to the Life Fibers for immortality, in exchange by helping them consume all of humanity, convert them into life fiber seedlings, and finally scatter throughout the galaxy. She sided with an alien menace that was engineering humans since they were apes, and places her entire faith in it, damn her husband, damn her daughters. Ragyo is the Nick Land of anime. It's very hard to overlook the metaphor of clothing as capital. Even the dialogue in the video of this post is too on point to be called a coincidence. It makes me wonder if either Hiroyuki Imaishi or Kazuki Nakashima were readers of Marx or Land.

[Anonymous No.12471935]

i just think sometimes that having an outside perspective on things allows us to see perspectives on all of this shit that isn't permanently trapped inside Star Wars filtered. case in point: next to FF6, another enduring favorite vidya touchstone is the massively underrated Phantasy Star II. spoiler:
>for a 30 year old game?
>meh w/ev

bad guys - us - become possessed by a Dark Force/xenomorph, knowing it for what it is, and build an alien supercomputer that takes over the world. it combines more or less naturally the Lovecraftian and the Gibsonian endbosses. that the system is internally driven by monstrosity, and externally takes on the presence of an AI is more or less seamless. in this case, Mother Brain does not take the next step, which would be destroying the ship itself, but...whatever. the game as such becomes a story not only about the dangers of Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism...

there's another good blog here if you guys want to read more about this stuff. and again, there is a point i keep coming to these days as a result of these threads: at what point do we accept that Land's position really isn't all that radical?

https://antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/xenoeconomics-1-how-to-measure-capital-formation/
https://antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/xenoeconomics-2-generalized-energetics-of-production/
https://antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com/2019/01/18/xenoeconomics-3-capital-as-conflict/

if there is monstrosity and horror in it, it is like doing a thorough Freudian exploration of capitalism itself, which - surprise surprise - discovers an absolute shit-show going on under the hood. perhaps people in Freud's day were terrified also by what he was coming up with. but so what? capital is a fucking nightmare, and it has been for two hundred years. so was the Third Reich. if we could stop fucking trying to *normalize* it and we'd probably have a much easier time, because we would stop giving away the trump card, which is the power of normativity. but i don't think we will ever really be able to do this, because we are just fucking wired for production and consumption like bees (/ourbug/, in case anyone was wondering). even in recent years we have seen this massive and desperate attempt to re-ground the norm in victimhood itself, but again - i actually think this is doing to Foucault what the Nazis did to Nietzsche, in a sense.

i just think we're lucky to have a little island over there full of interesting writers et al, which give us a perspective on things that comes to be, in the end, curiously not unlike our own.

>>12471815
that speech is like the Grand Inquisitor for fashion, which is pretty fucking wonderful, by the way. nobody is ultimately beautiful enough, in the end, to be worthy of the sacrifices aesthetics makes for them, and so they must be destroyed...so as to have a permanent replacement by models (pun intended).

[Anonymous No.12472026]

>>12471935
and i would not expect Spaceship Noah to look like anything other than Zuck HQ, and as structurally immune to irony as the Orange POTUS.
>the ZuckerBorg
>no thanks, i can kill myself

these things become reflections of our own curiously programmatic need for Maximum Togetherness. it's not like this isn't an entirely understandable reaction, if you are seriously feeling the implications of What Nietzsche Meant By This:

>But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?

total homogenization under the sign of Utopia: this is the idealized endgame for the Last Man. and endless reproduction, endless debugging, endless progressivism. a continual ironing-out of all potential bugs or quirks. and hats off to the designers of PSII for also making one of its most interesting characters, that being NeiFirst, a woman also. this is the kind of feminism i can get behind! i am absolutely all for Strong Empowered Women *who are also capable of knowing, tragic, life-affirming Evil.* you know, the Fun stuff: vengeance, betrayal, anger, or the disquieting sense of being a copy without an original. and not because those things are *good* but also because they are precisely the part of human psychology which not only makes us interesting, it also contains the possibilities for destabilizing those conditions of tyranny that are the hardest to detect...

life would be inestimably poorer without JRPGs, i tell ya.

[Anonymous No.12472066]

>>12472026
>Victorious Third World struggles, so long as they have been successfully localized, do not lead to realistic post-capitalist achievements, and certainly not to post-patriarchal ones, since the conservation of the form of the nation state is itself enough to guarantee the reinsertion of a society into the system of inhibited synthesis. For as long as the dynamic of guerilla war just leads to new men at the top – with all that this entails in terms of the communication between individuated sovereignties – history will continue to look bleak. For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order. With the abolition of the inhibition of synthesis – of Kantian thought – a sordid cowardice will be washed away, and cowardice is the engine of greed. But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst.

Young Nick knew a thing or two about a thing or two. some lore:

>According to scientists, Nefirst was the first result of a product of a mixture of both biomonster and human. However, she was deemed a "failed" experiment and was placed on bounty, in which she was nearly killed. The betrayal soon provoked her to anger and hatred; for her revenge, she raided the Biosystems Lab and the Climate Control, stealing DNA and power from both facilities, therefore gaining control. It was there that she was also able to manipulate the laboratory into producing a massive number of biomonsters and released them on a raid on Motavia for revenge against those who opposed and feared her, thus, setting up the events of Phantasy Star II. By this time, however, another result of the same creation rebelled against the tirade (that being, itself, manifested to be called Nei), and both were completely separated.

>Neifirst would later be discovered by a government agent named Rolf and his companions after their arrival of the climate control. She revealed that both hers' and Nei's origins are the same; they are both the result of the completed experiment, each part of one another, and because of this, both became outcasts from society; she also told that Nei cannot survive without her, as both and their lives are physically and mentally connected.

i've seen worse movie plots. you as Rolf play an agent of a virtually *literal* Human Security System - only learning, much later on, the implications of this, and who your actual masters are. and if we date the release of PSII as somewhere around 1988-1989, that is right around the same time as Land was writing his early Fanged Noumena essays. things to think about.

[Anonymous No.12472117]

>>12472066
as in FF6 - altho arguably even more tragically here - the sacrifice required to save the world comes too late, or is horribly inverted. PSII has quite possibly one of the saddest endings in existence. to parallel FF6, the sacrifice which would redeem the world in a heroic sense is twisted into catastrophe by Kefka, because there is nothing like sacrifice possible under conditions of Gestell (or teleoplexy). in PSII, there is something like a sacrifice, but it's an also a genuinely apocalyptic scene.

people bitching about the absence of tragedy or Unironically Serious Literature merely because you get there with a controller are doofuses. just because it's rendered in 16-bit instead of performed by Branagh doesn't mean there aren't some seriously fascinating questions being asked. and some of them, like this one, only seem to become more prescient as time goes on. and indeed, it may be precisely because the politics of Hollywood itself depend on the physical and psychological corralling of huge numbers of people in order to stage a spectacle that vidya auteurs come in the end to replace them - after all, if you've got a vision, you can do quite a lot these days with a much smaller cast and crew.

the game itself was hard as balls and is quite frankly a chore to play, but still. for philosophical discourse that asks genuinely interesting questions about our poor suffering species? PSII has some stuff going on.

[Anonymous No.12472255]

and because this is too good not to want to talk about:
>While politics has evolved into pro wrestling, pro wrestling has evolved into politics.
https://twitter.com/BossMoz/status/1087895897805996032

i'm finally understanding why pro wrestling has survived as long as it has, or what it was supposed to mean: it was meant to become a place where we could at last get the real in terms of the fake, which is the only way we can handle it. and of course, Vince McMahon as a symbol of ultimate evil, because he's not only the ringmaster, he knows that you cannot live without the ring. and it is true.

of course this is hardly new. if you haven't read Barthes' essay on wrestling (and Justice, and Spectacle, and much else), run don't walk. one of the all-time all-time greats.
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Barthes-Mythologies-Wrestling-1957.pdf

good night to all, my fellow schizos

[Anonymous No.12472424]

>>12471153
>people want, ultimately, to be made into slaves
sauce?

[Aminom No.12472565]

>>12472117
Here's some freshness from someone in the Omniquery Initiative telegram room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t30IjfcCzTs&feature=youtu.be

[Anonymous No.12472743]

Bump for sleep

[Anonymous No.12473120]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12473529]

>>12472565
without knowing too much about Discordianism, this strikes me as being very Discordian.

>>12472424
>sauce?
i don't even know if that book has been written yet anon. for now it's a hunch.

a guy on twitter who i think is quite interesting was saying something related to this, tho, about Deleuze, that he detests hierarchy and order. having oscillated between the extremes myself, from a very powerful desire to fit in, and from there to a deep dread of what does the arranging, and now being on the outside looking in...balance and equilibrium really aren't such a bad thing. Order can be quite beautiful, but that too is like punching your ticket out of the Zone Eater or Wasteland Island or the asylum or whatever. put another way - in LOTR parlance, it's like Tom Bombadil understanding that he could not, in the end, be a major player in the War of the Ring. he was there for other reasons. why he was there, at all, is kind of weird, but also weirdly necessary.

or, to carry the analogy from before, in a mental ward full of Napoleon impersonsators, like trying to be a Napoleonic Historian impersonator, or setting up a journal called Fake Napoleonic Impersonation Review. if it is staffed and peer-reviewed by the permanently insane, it will in the end be authentically insane, and maybe even manage to sound almost like the real thing (as long as you don't look too hard). but it will still be insane, or weird, like the Uncanny Valley of academia.

if Empire is in a sense always teleoplectic, and desire schizophrenic, somewhere in the middle the genius of money produces whatever it is we call capital in between. you can get barbarism or tyranny either way, two aspects of the same thing, and both get along with capitalization. capitalism is a great way of incentivizing and rewarding barbarism, and presupposes no telos other than itself. the sad part is just when that is revealed, when desire no longer suffices, or when the embers cool.

sometimes we don't even know the words or concepts for the things we need to describe yet. think Beethoven composing deaf.

[Anonymous No.12473624]

>>12473529
i never played this, but this sounds like a pretty good text for the Cosmotech literature review.

>Granted tremendous power by the evil mask, the Skull Kid had imprisoned the Four Giants within their temples. Without their guardian deities and their respective temples tainted with evil, each of the four regions of Termina succumbed to various disasters. The Skull Kid was also responsible for harming the Great Fairy, turning Kafei into a child, and informing the Gerudo Pirates of the Zora Eggs. He also threatened to break Professor Shikashi's instruments. After following Tael's advice and releasing the Four Giants from their respective prisons in the swamp, mountains, ocean, and canyon, Link returns to the top of the Clock Tower at the end of the Final Day to confront the Skull Kid once again. Link summons the Four Giants using the "Oath to Order" to stop the Moon. This knocks the Skull Kid unconscious, leaving Majora's Mask to detach itself from its puppet and rise into the Moon. Link and Tatl then follow it into the Moon to engage in one final battle.

>During the ending sequence of the game, following the defeat of Majora's Mask and the subsequent restoration of the Moon's original orbit, the Skull Kid, Link, the Happy Mask Salesman, and the Four Giants come together on the outskirts of Termina Field. The giants reassure Skull Kid—now free of the mask's influence—of their friendship with him. After the giants return to their resting places, the Skull Kid asks Link if they too could be friends, mentioning that he has the same smell as the "fairy kid" who taught him Saria's Song in the Lost Woods. This suggests that the Skull Kid is the one by the tree stump near the bridge in the Lost Woods in Ocarina of Time, to whom the young hero sells the Skull Mask. After saying their goodbyes, Link and Epona depart Termina while Tatl, Tael and the Skull Kid celebrate the Carnival of Time. The last scene shows a drawing on a tree trunk made by the Skull Kid showing him with Link, Tatl, Tael, and the Four Giants.

there is no value in Magic if you don't know what the alternative is, *or* reject it ad hoc. and the world of the Animal Spirits has its own rules.

[Anonymous No.12473670]

>>12473624
i think time is like this, ultimately. i suppose a corrupted Deku Tree would be horrible too, if some later Zelda game made a nemesis out of it.

but i think some of this stuff gets me near to why i've always had an attraction to fantasy literature. its defining characteristic is that it is Not Our World, and i suspect that the same animus drives a lot of Marxist theory as well. which, the more you dive into it, only makes more and more sense - after all, when you start really to do the deep-dive into what makes Our World what it is, it will fucking tear your heart out. so why not tear the next guy's heart out? or - as a certain famed Twitter icon once did - why not just tear out your own?

but the reason to do this is because, perhaps, you ultimately need it to see, in some sense. it's like blinding yourself in advance because you don't want to see what Oedipus saw, better not to see at all. but you *will* see, anyways. being blind is no cure for that. blindness might only make you more sensitive, might make everything only so much more immanent. and then you become perilously dependent on those who will help you out, and...

Zelda has been showing some pretty freaking great stuff for more than thirty years, and i'm sure that when i get around to playing BOTW it will blow my mind as well. it would be amazing - and sad - to think that in our rush to deconstruct the hero myth we actually destroyed one of the few sources capable of instructing other human beings, by myth and allegory, about the dangers of excessive rationality. the state of things today, the genuine monstrousness of them, results from their mutual sense of gravity.

put another way, it's like we live in a Bizarro Star Wars universe in which *the Force corrupts everyone,* both the Jedi and the Sith, because nobody knows how to *stop using it.* because if *you* stop, the other side will just double down - and there's a guy behind you ready to do what you won't, regardless of what side you are on. as long as you have a Great Enemy to fight, you can get away with anything.

but the world gets lost in the shuffle, the sense of time as other than progressive, historical, dialectical.

[Anonymous No.12473841]

>>12473670
that's the thing about Wisdom, it speaks to you from some place other than hardened materialism, or 'hardened idealism' - which is almost like the material by another name. how to cope with reality in a plastic world. and maybe this is why neither Zizek nor Peterson can really have a lot of love for Wisdom - i'm thinking here of Buddhism, or the Vedanta. and both, in a way, for the same reasons - because they want you to struggle (and that's not so crazy). they don't want you to Tune It Out, but to embrace the horror, the suffering, the neurosis, and all of it. and both are right, in a sense. to some degree the struggle is worth taking. and both show up the danger of the extremes also. were they lesser men this would go unnoticed.

sometimes tho i think Peterson's 'rescue your *father*' is the part that rubs people the wrong way tho. it may not in fact need to be the father that gets rescued, because if you are sufficiently spooked, the Father may be the last thing you would want to rescue. a world without Fathers bearing any resemblance to the past might be exactly why one feels so motivated to change things politically. conversely, Zizekian neuro-Marxism may not be up your alley either. the appeal of that comes later, once you are kinda-sorta comfortably settled within things, and you want to ward away the anxiety and neurosis inherent to consumption. mythology and psychoanalysis pretty much work with the same source material - but it's a question of *desire* rather than power. it may be the Son that requires saving. but ideally it is something more like unity itself.

but the real miracle takes place when the schizophrenia takes on its own logic, and gives us the image of a world not unlike our own - even better than the real thing, in a way. not every hero has to save the polis, heroes can save heroism itself, by showing the conditions under which heroism itself manifests. and perhaps one of the reasons why relentless violence is not the hero's tool is because violence is the sword which always cuts both ways. mercy and charity actually prevent the hero from accidentally destroying that which is required to grow, such that the world does not become dependent on salvation - or because at the level of violence it becomes impossible to distinguish between the negative and the affirmative.

also, i wanted to use a particular image for this post and i can't find it: but it was a dragon circling the Triforce. quite awesome. guess i'll have to use another case study itself.

[Anonymous No.12473967]

>>12473841
in Dracula you have the father as symbol of decadence, a horrible regression. what is the purpose of living? to live again, to live eternally, to live deliciously. Gothic necromancy not only exposed the disquieting nature of the unconscious - that the Christianity Goggles would not work - but also the absolute darkness on the other side, that decadence had no off switch. quite a conundrum! Nietzsche dialed it back to the Greeks in the search for tragedy, but even in this he opened the floodgates: who even gets to define what constitutes the tragic?

it's kind of remarkable that a conflict between a Son of Dracula and the father figure would take so long to work out. Mary Shelley seems to have some sense of this, and has Victor Frankenstein ultimately abort the Creature's request for a female partner, because of the potential fear of children. of course, this is the plot twist in Star Wars as well ('I am your father!'), but even there the division of Rebels/Empire and Jedi/Sith mitigates some of the genuine horror. at least Luke has something to fall back on. in Diablo the Soul Stone is almost like a way of perpetuating the cycle through an infinite sequence of immaculate conceptions. Diablo gives birth to himself by taking over whatever it is that tries to carry him. very weird.

the Gothic - more than a little of which drives Uncle Nick to do what he does - is enduringly haunting. but among the many fuckface ways to respond to this is with Max Feminism. all that does is leave men completely abandoned, and basically jettisons centuries' worth of literature and thought on these problems. it doesn't give anybody a reason to do anything except to deal with evil *parodically,* as a form of satire which can only ever amp up its own alienation and disaffection, until it becomes full-bore religion on its own.

and that is the whole point of Wisdom, that it can't lay down the rules too exactly. if you follow them to the letter you destroy what makes it what it is. conversely, if you try and simply wing it in the absence of anything at all, you wind up almost inevitably becoming a kind of tragic monster of bewilderment and confusion in your own right.

[Anonymous No.12474071]

>>12473967
a genuinely post-industrial sensibility would have to understand that the nature of politics (and teleoplexy) has basically made classical political organizations largely irrelevant. the real dichotomy isn't between Left and Right, but between libertarianism and authoritarianism, and in which these two also share a subterranean elective affinity, mediated by technology and capital.

the hero is neither the undifferentiated Last Man nor the excessively individuated Despot. he doesn't serve the polis, because the polis ultimately only serves itself. it can be expected to do no other thing, ultimately. under conditions of late modernity the Matrix is not a bug, it is a feature, like a church that incorporates Grand Inquisition into its own system as an iterative protocol. it was said in one of the earlier threads that Kafka is peak cybernetics, and i can't find a flaw in this. Before The Law is an even more baffling and incredible story than Karamazov, sometimes.

it may then be the case that *irreconcilable conflict* - say, between Science and Nature - is a basic and necessary natural division, and as such the hero plays the role of a kind of mediator. he represents the possibilities inherent to the polis, and may at times be a necessary brake on the will to tyranny which is always expressed by the collective. at the same time, the hero cannot present himself as representing an alternative to that world, if only because perfect (or 'lawful') double agency is a contradiction in terms. war heroes are martyred by the enemy, peace heroes are martyred by themselves. this was part of Dostoevsky's point, i think. and we wind up with the a-heroic world, and taking our chances with the throw of the dice. but that is a recipe for disaster, madness, and futility.

the ramifications of industrial technology and its discontents aren't exactly news. today Land marks the outer limit and point of departure on Where Things Go From Here. imho the answers aren't found, ultimately, in ever-deeper folds of philosophical prognostication, but in literature. Marxism can make liberalism hard, and acceleration can make it *horrible,* but Wisdom can continually remind you of what makes it *valuable.* the desires of a hero have to be rooted in materialism at some point, but must aim for the transcendent also.

but how is this to be done?

[Anonymous No.12474125]

>>12474071
the sense that i have of this is twofold. on the one hand, it seems to be clear that new *models* of the hero itself cannot ultimately be re-created without at the same time re-creating a New Model Society. not only does the 20C give ample evidence about why this is a terrible idea, given that both extreme left and extreme right socialism (both in Europe and abroad, as in the case of both China and Japan), but that on its current trajectory we are looking at at least two possibilities:

a) a kind of automatic planet of surveillance and control, driven by technocratic libertarianism, or
b) a total breakdown in the US that doesn't even get there.

damned if you do, damned if you don't. and overseas, a third possibility:

c) Xi Jinping Thought and Social Credit.

all are bad. and yet the current shit-show we are in tells me that this is because we are, owing to the Internet, and other things, awakening to the reality of what might be called Bulldozer Metaphysics: that simply burying our heads in the sand and ploughing on mindlessly ahead is what guarantees our enslavement, but this in turn comes from a very real sense of legitimately *not knowing what the fuck we are supposed to be doing.* nobody fucking knows, and the people who keep telling us that they do know and that they do have everything under control turn out to be *insanely fucking wrong,* or hopelessly corrupt, or cynical, or stupid, or indifferent. that universities have become subsidized by neoliberalism is unquestionably part of this, but i'm not exactly optimistic about an alternative model for that either. that alternative model will probably be found in Unironic Fascism, which will co-opt at least three very powerful streams:

1) working-class sensibilities
2) patriotic nationalism
3) heroic mythopoetics.

the first two aren't even bad, even when fused together. getting panicky about fascism is, frankly, a pseud move. i only do this because it is the third one that i am interested in - and obviously because i would very much to be the Great Explainer myself. i would obviously love to be a Minister of Propaganda. it's just that i keep fucking things up by prematurely revealing how the thing actually works.

[Anonymous No.12474176]

>>12474125
behold, the mighty bulldozer, scourge of Middle Earth. here the artist has raised the intriguing possibility of Bulldozopolis, a *mobile factory* - and ultimately not a terrible picture of how the mind may in fact work.

in Frank Herbert's world, the sandworms were sort of like bulldozers themselves, but there they had a twist - they were also the source of all of the spice on Arrakis, and on which the universe depended. in the Matrix, the Wachowski's not-all-that-crazy thesis was that humanity itself had become, in a sense, a harvested product - a sandworm domesticated by the power of simulation, and made wholly beholden to the machines. almost like the White Walkers, in a way, a kind of clever device that long ago exceeded its purpose, and now had gone into (teleoplectic) overdrive. in all three cases, a kind of strange and perilous relation with disaster.

one of the attractions of Hegelian thought - perhaps an original prototype for the Matrix - is that there is no way outside of it. every time you think you're out, Hegel tells you that you have only activated his Trap Card, and you're sucked back in again. this is why i find Land's own critiques of Hegel unsatisfying, because if Teleoplexy is anything, it is only Hegel by another name, with Capital in lieu of spirit. everybody dreams of reaching the Outside - Uncle Nick has no small shortage of fantasies about space, but one suspects they look more like the Borg than the Federation (there is arguably no more NRx figure than Moff Tarkin, even more than the Sith) - but of course, the problem is always humanity. in order to capture the power of the libido fully and completely, there has to be a thing there worth desiring itself, and the polis really is not it.

Bulldozer Metaphysics is a thing we all do, i think. certainly i do. i only became the shitposting monstrosity that i am through trying to identify the core mechanisms of this process, and look what happened. i just keep adding more wheels and gears to this thing. i crave attention.
>pay attention to meeeeeeeeeeee
>give me your looooooooovvvvee
>aaaaaaaaaaarrrrgggh

i am very much like this, but i recognize how absolutely ridiculous and pathetic it all is, which is my own saving grace. like the polis itself, i recognize that there is a certain danger in Loving You To Death (and that is probably why i am so fatally attracted to Land's thought as well, because this is more or less what he proposes capitalism is doing to us, and he is exactly right about it.) it's sort of like ingesting the mutagen from Akira and becoming Tetsuo, except without any of psychic powers attached.

also, i think i forgot what i was saying. it will come back to me.

[Anonymous No.12474273]

Has any of you understood what Whitehead means by Creatitvity and would be willing to dumb it down? Thanks

[Anonymous No.12474289]

>>12474176
what i am calling Bulldozer Metaphysics is simply a metaphor for a kind of idealism that cannot recognize the nature of its own construction, basically because the pilot has gone blind, or insane, or replaced by an algorithm, or is simply *trapped,* or whatever. this is why a too-easy version of Ferngully (or Avatar, or Pocahontas, or any number of other variations on the same theme) continually bring us back to the same point of origins, which is the most odious form of neoliberalism imaginable. it leads to horrible corporate hippies who Just Love, and as we know, there is no way to show the love more than owning a sizeable hedge fund, or investment bank, and subsidizing Resistance-flavored ice cream, or whatever the fuck else.

but the bulldozer - or mobile heavy machinery - can also become a kind of needlessly demonized creation as well. if modernity and technology *are* good for one thing in particular, it is plowing over sources of legitimacy that really should go. a lot of Aztec hijinx came to a halt very quickly when the Spaniards showed up. tech cuts the rug out from *everything,* and the discourse on late capital today is a pretty good indication of that. Jameson was even more right than even he might have guessed, when he wrote - way back when - that postmodernity is the cultural logic of late capitalism. it is only recently that Woke Capital has finally revealed itself enough to show how this works - that the critique of capital is really only the forward arm of capital itself, of a massively deterritorializing process that re-territorializes itself *around deterritorialization.* you get Nurse Ratched all over again: Be Happy Or Die. and if you resist the message, you will be assigned forced gender re-alignment, so that you won't be so fucking insensitive or intolerant.

at some level, we want this, by the way. nothing makes us happier than being punished. we don't even need the Church to punish us, we can do it ourselves - in ways as monstrous as they are ridiculous. and this is one form of Bulldozer Metaphysics. the other, conversely, would be to say - well, that form of Bulldozer is *wrong.* we know the *right* way. but that is the nature of the beast - there is no right way. that is the essence of wisdom itself.

Wisdom means knowing the dozer is your own. you can pilot it or not. you can steer it any way you want it to go. it has a *formal* similarity with others, but not an ontological one. technocapital is like the planetary unconscious, and structured like a language; but there is nothing to do with language, ultimately, except speak it, as necessary. an anarcho-steampunk world isn't really immune to totalitarianism. the only real danger in it is failing to recognize the capacity to Exit on an other-than-transcendental level. put another way, the Matrix needed another Matrix - not Zizek's Third Pill, but almost like a weaker version of the Red Pill, which is arguably only a more concentrated for of the Blue One.

[Anonymous No.12474298]

>>12474273
sorry, i'm too far stuffed up my own butt today to give a serious or useful answer to that one. maybe one of the other anons ITT can help tho.

[Anonymous No.12474392]

>>12473529
and if you look to Pure Feels to give you an answer about what to do with technology, you will pay a price for it far worse than the one you think you are going to pay, because the Jester knows better than anyone that the ultimate joke is a setup with no punchline at all...

forget not that Kefka builds the Slave Crowns, which are *really* important to the functioning of the whole thing. in a Slave Crown you have a thing even better than Magitech. how do you control (technology) the uncontrollable (Esper-power)? by controlling the one who can control it (Terra). you are now a genuinely Free Agent, the master of both worlds - neither Imperial nor Esper, but something both more than and less than both. and because you are *enjoying* life, and you want to go on *enjoying* it even more, when someone *stabs* you - like Celes - then you decide, quite frankly, to take things into your own hands. because, let's face it, the game is up by that point anyways, and Gestahl is *boring,* or maybe he secretly is plotting to get rid of you, because even *you* would admit that you are, really, a terrible danger to the world...

those are the limits of Machiavellianism. and this is why i think i was bringing up the Skull Kid earlier on - in his case, the Mask could actually be pried away from him, and he could be reminded of his friendship with the Four Giants. in the case of Kefka nothing like this can be done: the Mask, as it were, is installed into him, and perhaps owing to his fundamentally unstable nature this is what makes things work *more effectively than they are supposed to.* Slave Crowns would absolutely have all kinds of potential use in that world *besides warfare* - they could just as easily be used to convert the Magitek Armor into industrial or agricultural equipment, or used to defend small towns from wild monsters.

but when it comes to understanding *how they were created in the first place,* you have to look at the source material, and the guy who actually makes them. who probably, in the end, does it out of a pure joy in creation itself. if Deleuze maximizes Spinoza, i want to say that Kefka maximizes Deleuze. like Deleuze, he wins. that very same process gives us Uncle Nick also, as *cautionary tale.*

i am coming dangerously near to completing myself here, so i am going to stop for now. what do we do with technology, lads. it can't only be cynicism.

[Anonymous No.12474616]

>>12474392
The memetic singularity by nature of its scope which includes experiential infromation is occurring in many paths, including the discursive. This discursive singularity is an acceleration in discussion, both on the individual and social level. From the big picture, the quality of the discussion doesn't matter as what only matters is the process of discussion taking place. The more we talk with each other, the more we learn to better do so, even if and sometimes especially if these ways are shitty. The social history of the internet has been a collective global project in self-communication, to discover ways to communicate on ever more effective terms which ultimately lead to the mutually effective and mutually affecting. This "social world war" we're in hasn't been a war at all, but a learning process - and we have been very hard learners, trying very much to learn how to communicate in this new medium of global reach.

Who are we but free ramblers? I mostly ramble on other places, but I am just like you that I have been bitten by the bug of hyper-obsession to follow the ramble, to undergo this surreal adventure in ideas and relationships, forming relationships with others along the way who share in this fantastic journey of self-discovery. How has your writing transformed you, my friend?

[Anonymous No.12474884]

>>12474616
this is an exceedingly wonderful post.
>This "social world war" we're in hasn't been a war at all, but a learning process - and we have been very hard learners, trying very much to learn how to communicate in this new medium of global reach.
hard learners of hard *lessons.* the world of the petit-bourgeois *and* its discontents, that preceded our own, is basically a lottery process at this point. this is what irritates me so much about the dependence on and what must almost inevitably become an addiction to revolutionary theory, when there is so obviously this double bind: capitalism is itself the revolution, and as such the revolution is dead. *poverty* seems like the Night Terror of capitalist plenitude. *poverty* intrigues me.

one of the feelings that i have these days is that nihilism is itself a collective process. this is hardly new, of course, but the idea that somebody like Nietzsche makes us all a little more nihilistic - or, perhaps, shows us how to operate the Nihilism Device with a little more artistry and zest - is something that gets painfully buried when we subordinate all our interactions to politics. true, nobody ever subordinates themselves to politics more than me, but...well, you get the idea.

but you're right about the idea of a thing that *looks* like a war but actually *isn't* one - kind of like a much happier version of Ender's Game, if you will. or something that would have baffled the Joker as well: what happens if i set up this death-trap and both sides default? in pic rel the quasi-utopian Homestead is also a *catastrophe.* it's not only Chaplin's eternal Tramp, but Tramp-olis (and the Axe Gang is *stupid,* and the Beast isn't *really* so crazy, and...). it's a brilliant, wonderful film.

>How has your writing transformed you, my friend?
i wasn't always like this. in hindsight i have gone through various phases of (obnoxious) naivete, (confused) anger, (even more confused) depression, and now something i can't quite describe, which is a combination of boredom and confusion. as much as the world makes me insane, philosophy - the neverending, hyper-self-obsessed schizoramble - seems to continually find ways to see things from a different angle. often times you don't know what you're thinking until you write about it, or talk about it, but IRL contexts for this are hard to come by. i am profoundly grateful that something like /lit/ exists *at all* for me to do this in, because i really like the anonymity and casualness of the whole thing. a very good place to vent steam in.

[Anonymous No.12474944]

>>12470487
>>12470738
>>12470913
>>12471017
>>12471101
>>12471153
>>12471255
>>12471815
>>12471935
>>12472026
>>12472066
>>12472117
>>12472255
>>12473529
>>12473624
>>12473670
>>12473841
>>12473967
>>12474071
>>12474125
>>12474176
>>12474289
>>12474392
>>12474616
>>12474884
Does anyone on this board actually read through all this junk? I, for one, do not.
Cringe & Sage

[Anonymous No.12474951]

>>12474884
and the city that wears us like its own skin is a process that begins in industrialization. or even something i was thinking about yesterday, that if Kojeve is right (about Hegel) and that so much of this is a craving for recognition, we need not really be *so* surprised that the algorithm (and the Internet) come in the end to replace human interaction: the machine, the simulation, or the doll never disappoint. just ask Sarah Connor! and even when they *do* disappoint, it is the nature of iteration itself that we can find new satisfaction in tweaking, debugging, twisting a knob or a dial here, or there...the at least theoretical Fun of operations.

i think there is something that has to get rescued, from the past, sort of like a time machine that could go back and undo the 20C. this is, basically, what art does, in a way. the whole FF sequence has been a terrifically underrated re-telling of the history of technology and modernity from a perspective way, waaaaaaay outside the usual system. FF4 gave you a little whiff of industrialization (the Red Wings) as well as the usual high-fantasy meditations on the crystals, as well as a crucial role for the *paladin*; FF6 kicked self-awareness into high gear, and delivered up the 10/10 Baroque Post-Apoc Fantasy Steampunk eternal gloriousness that it is; and FF7 shifts into high industrialization and ecological themes. all of these become a pretty wonderful arc of storytelling about ontotheology from the non-exclusively European perspective.

and so mostly now i write a lot of this stuff really as a kind of confession of ignorance, i think. i don't write all this stuff because i do know what i am talking about, but because i don't, and i am perhaps continually wondering if somebody else can either explain why it is that things are like this (as perhaps Heidegger did, once, blowing German student minds) or really just to see if i'm super-crazy. i don't think i am, i'm just kind of a fucked-up mutant who accidentally wrecked the computer i was supposed to be writing my new edition of Being and Time on. and now it's covered with blood and twisted metal and the cover page says Being And JUST SAVE YOURSE-

but yeah, this is pretty much how i think things are supposed to go. mostly just confession of ignorance, confusion, and hilarious tragicomedy. so

>Who are we but free ramblers?
nothin'. and things have to keep moving or they die. hence the need for something to reign in and make Bulldozer Metaphysics something other than a nightmare horrorshow. swords to ploughshares, you know the deal.

[Anonymous No.12474967]

>>12474944
based and smugpilled

you did it anon you broke the magic spell. go now and free the others, tell them that in fact we are but paper tigers and the emperor has no clothes

but don't expect any more sex. i'm tired of you breaking my heart

[Anonymous No.12475062]

>>12471255
Thank you for your effort posts in response to my uneducated questions
But how does non-dualism necessarily oppose cold-libertarianism? I think I can understand that some what, as since in non-dualism, everything is you and you need to take care of yourself, hence rules that have a tendency to prohibit Capital. But also, I think such non-dualism can in fact give rise to such libertarianism, due to the mantras of “You do You”. Every thing is You, so let everything do everything uniterrupted. Which includes the process known as Capital.
Hell, such an non-dualist attitude can possibly give rise to hedonistic libertarianism, as everything is You, and one must experience themself. Which includes indulging in the glided cage known as the Modern Western society.
>how to implement Wisdom perfectly is an excerise doomed to futility. What you need is the context in which people are not afraid to fuck things up. Where there is not possibility of getting things wrong. But we have the excessive and impossible demands of decadence, which is our real problem.
Maybe. But decadence, cultural/moral decline, is necessary for such experimentation, due to the lack of rules inherent to decadence, is it not? What I think is one of the true causes of our problems today is the fact that we are trying to impose rules, too many rules, on an environment is fundementally rule-less, hence the constantly changing boundary lines and punishments, producing more anixety and perceived need for structure, thus leading to a doubling down. Wisdom could help in eliminating this, it could also just further add to this by imposing more rules, rules that while near-permanent on their own, will likely be added to the ever changing mix of rules by virtue of being a rule
Also, what are some further reading on the nature of sacrifice?

[Anonymous No.12475146]

>>12475062
my man!

>such non-dualism can in fact give rise to such libertarianism, due to the mantras of “You do You”. Every thing is You, so let everything do everything uninterrupted. Which includes the process known as Capital.
you've gone directly to a super-important question. if you want to build Fuckface Neoliberalism, you've identified exactly how to do it: give people a nice feeling of empty-headed sanctity about all of it. no question. so here's one thing: what if, in a certain sense, Christianity 'completes' - in a truly horrible way - nondualism, by raising the possibility of a Self nailed to the cross? that's the big one. it's not that everything is You, but everything *was* You, and if it is going to be be You again, in the future, it will be with a substantial caveat. Schopenhauer preferred the Vedas to Christianity, but he also liked the esoteric core of it. which i do as well, Meister Eckhart is great. but for exactly the reasons you have said, the idea of a never-completely destroyed Self, but a Self that lingers, as it were...it's something to think about. with the additional bonus that from a certain perspective it might prevent us from falling too much in love with moralizing, either. i don't really have the answers here, and they are massive questions. but i'm only coming around to the 'charms' of Christianity fairly recently.

>But decadence, cultural/moral decline, is necessary for such experimentation, due to the lack of rules inherent to decadence, is it not?
absolutely. 100%. as you might have guessed, i am suspicious about redemptive sacrifice, and i am confident also that experiments sometimes succeed in overturning their models. see Deleuze for more details.

>What I think is one of the true causes of our problems today is the fact that we are trying to impose rules, too many rules, on an environment is fundementally rule-less, hence the constantly changing boundary lines and punishments, producing more anixety and perceived need for structure, thus leading to a doubling down.
find a flaw. on a personal note, i would fucking love to be a Mind Control expert. i suspect a great many philosophers are. but 'tis the nature of the beast to continually find yourself where you expected someone else to be. and that fucks with the process.

>Wisdom could help in eliminating this, it could also just further add to this by imposing more rules, rules that while near-permanent on their own, will likely be added to the ever changing mix of rules by virtue of being a rule.
this is the catastrophe of postmodernity. it's not even that it's wrong. it's so fucking wrong that it actually reveals something like truth, sometimes. it winds up producing something like a blizzard, or sandstorm, through which i find myself continually stumbling.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12475210]

>>12475146
>>12475062
in many ways, Christianity is the ultimate downer religion. i didn't start with it, wasn't raised religious in any way, shape or form. and even now it is virtually impossible to detach my own curiosity about it for what it absolutely a case of extreme intellectual decadence (and confusion, and stupidity, and much much else). it becomes in a way a kind of appealingly self-refuting nondualism, but it is in that sense not unlike psychoanalysis. a folding circle of self-reference, as it were, from which it becomes impossible to escape. not unlike Kafka's City of the Law, perhaps, which bars entry to those for whom the doors are explicitly constructed, but only as a result of their own choices or inability to recognize the forest for the trees. Kafka's scholar is a devastating criticism of the faux-intellectual. and i love it for exactly this reason.

>Also, what are some further reading on the nature of sacrifice?
the collected works of this guy, obviously. he is the Don of sacrificial sociology. everything you can get your hands on that has his name attached to it. a couple of other good texts are:
>Mauss, the Gift
>Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death
>Bataille, The Accursed Share
and maybe even
>Wilber, The Atman Project
the last one may strike you as a little bit too New Age, but i've always kind of had some love for Young Ken. later Integral stuff and all the rest, meh, w/ev. your mileage may vary. but a little transpersonal psychology won't hurt, and man cannot live on a strict diet of Deleuze and amphetamines alone.

>Wisdom could help in eliminating this, it could also just further add to this by imposing more rules, rules that while near-permanent on their own, will likely be added to the ever changing mix of rules by virtue of being a rule
what i'm looking for is just the rules about the rules, a necessarily elliptical and recursive phenomenon. and really i can only arrive at something that resembles it through critique. an endless schizorambling shitpost-quest.

[Anonymous No.12475344]

>>12475210
i think one of the reasons why the Christians and the old-school Communists had such a venerable bromance is because they both deal with the nature of a certain *trauma,* but disagree over the terms. for Zizek, Lacan et al the trauma is *castration,* and i don't think it's too much to say that for the more theologically inclined the trauma is in the crucifixion, the original ontological disaster, pre-apoc, apoc, and post-apoc all in a go. in a certain sense, they speak to the same thing, but at the same time, to look for an equivocation is to begin asking some truly bizarre questions.

the infinite Oedipal voyage - which is very much like the accelerationist voyage into HR Giger territory - only begins with the site of a disaster, a ruination, and then a truly horrible, mysterious and frequently surreal journey back towards knowledge (because what is knowledge, anyways?) were i a better writer or essayist, i would be able to capture some of that here. fortunately, you are not dependent on my hot takes alone to enjoy the Wild Ride: you can read Lacan's seminars, or Julia Kristeva, or read Fanged Noumena, or Deleuze's stuff, or whatever. the analysts are profoundly useful to read, today, if only to learn (and re-learn) that *enjoyment is difficult.* desire is everywhere, but how desiring works metaphysically is a fucking rollercoaster without end. Buddhism, by contrast, is like an atom bomb of peacefulness, and in which every layer of what would otherwise be an increasingly hysterical onion-peeling exercise becomes another blissful lotus petal. the attractions of Buddhism are not lost on me. but because i insist on staring into the wasteland like a ten-cent Ahab, looking for his White Whale (and there probably isn't one) i have to keep asking myself what my actual grievance is with Christianity, anyways. it's depressing, and frustrating, and of course it was Epically BTFO'd by Nietzsche, With Facts! and Logic!!1! and all this other garbage. that the church today is rocked by sex scandals is appalling. all of this.

but as a pretty comprehensive set of Helpful Suggestions and other Pro Tips for Surviving The Catastrophe Of Your Life - like it were a kind of hilarious strategy guide, for winning at a game nobody wants to play, really, and in which it is virtually impossible to win - i don't know, i keep finding myself going yeah, okay, i can kind of see where you guys are at. don't have any great expectations for the future, huh? yeah, me neither. kind of just trying to suggest to people not to fucking devour each other completely, like cannibal werewolves? makes sense.

desire is everything to the continental theorists - at least, the ones i like to read. when your life becomes completely destroyed by it, and you ask the nondualists for suggestions, all wild-eyed, they are likely to go: so, maybe we have to repeat ourselves here. desire...kind of fucks with your head, and we have been saying that for several thousand years.'

[Anonymous No.12476228]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12477335]

>>12475146
There's a distinct difference between intellectual knowing and intuitive knowing. If someone's takeaway from Advaita Vedanta is "I am God" he may act like a colossal dick, and believe his actions don't need justification at all. But that's a failure on him for not meditating until he comes to a more profound realization of that statement and not a failure of Advaita Vedanta.

Zizek hates wisdom for always coming later, but he hates it because wisdom always has the last word and the the second word. That line of reasoning is like a child who wants to climb a tree, but his mother warns he will fall and hurt himself. What does he do? Climb the tree anyways! And sure enough, he falls and breaks his arm. Not only that, he knows he also has to face hear his mother say "I told you so" followed by some scolding and a trip to the doctor. Not only is the child scared of his mother, but he is also angry at her mother for being right, but really he is angry at himself for doing something so stupid. Zizek hates wisdom/gnosis/enlightenment because it is always just outside of his grasp.

[Anonymous No.12477479]

>>12474944
This thread - too much weed man, like, I can feel the universe talkin' to me man. It says we need to call Dominos for pizza.

[Anonymous No.12477541]

>>12477479
>weed
>psychedelics
>pizza
>philosophy
>comparative religion
>movies
>video games
>insert here

i am 100% cozy with this.

[Anonymous No.12478440]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12478696]

Hope this thread is still up tomorrow.

[Anonymous No.12478914]

>Fuck yeah, space taoism!!!
kys memers

these threads are always full of cringeposts from teenage philosophers, dumb pop culture references, r/showerthoughts tier insights, and drug induced dumbass tangents

you're worse than /pol/posters

[Anonymous No.12478927]

>>12470487
i thought of soiaf anf opened the thread an now i feel ashamed

[Anonymous No.12478953]

>>12471935
>We are just fucking wired for production and consumption like bees

Is this a scientific anthropological fact of universal human nature, or is it that Capitalism makes us obsessed with production, addicted to consumption, and then supposes we were always like this, are inherently like this, and will always be like this. Put somebody in an environment in which they can only survive through theft and violence and then claim he was naturally predisposed to violence so it couldn't have been any other way.

[Anonymous No.12479241]

>>12470487
>he can't envision a galactic spirituocracy self-sustained by technological progress lead and oriented by philosophy
You will not make it, OP

[Anonymous No.12479492]

>>12478953
>Is this a scientific anthropological fact of universal human nature, or is it that Capitalism makes us obsessed with production, addicted to consumption, and then supposes we were always like this, are inherently like this, and will always be like this. Put somebody in an environment in which they can only survive through theft and violence and then claim he was naturally predisposed to violence so it couldn't have been any other way.
yes, this, this very much i think. this is really quite insightful.

it is a scientific anthropological fact of universal human nature in as much as we wind up concluding in our awesome technoscientific power that there is no thing but we ourselves can create, simulate, duplicate, reproduce and so on. and that is a result of our own having become obsessed with production and addicted to consumption, and when we ask for why that is so, we conclude on what you have said: we were always like this, we were always meant to wind up like this, we will always be like this - and, with a twist, ergo, we must become more like this, we always have to push it further.

those conditions - maximal theft, maximal violence, maximal enjoyment - produce a double bind. we are told we can do everything, as such we can't do anything, and we constantly feel guilty and horrible about it. to save ourselves, we have to save capitalism, and to save capitalism we have to save ourselves - a complete loop.

there is never anything more Progressive than capitalism itself, which winds up making this terrible injunction on us, but it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. we think we are Frankenstein, but in reality we are more like the Creature (Frankenstein himself takes on the role of God, and God is dead). and maybe, to carry the analogy, what we now want is to actually find the secret knowledge required to revive Frankenstein himself, so that he can reveal more things to us about our own creation...

we wind up in these time-loops, in these self-perpetuating cycles that we are calling Progress and Freedom but are actually the exact opposite. but because we have this awesome technological super-power, and the desperation, and the *apparent* freedom to do whatever we want with it, that is exactly how we wind up locked in a trap at the End of Time, infinitely reproducing the conditions of imprisonment. but because the technology grows and develops, and we become more and more fascinated by that...to me this is really the most fascinating part of this.

[Anonymous No.12479534]

>>12479492
to inquire into questions like these is to ask fundamental questions about things that for centuries have simply been taken at face value in Western societies - that freedom is progress, progress is emancipation, the wedding of free market capitalism to liberal democracies and technoscientific development. it is almost impossible to understand how these things also can constitute an ideology of themselves, and this is something Zizek has said for years. only recently has it actually become possible to understand that uninterrupted technocommercial development is both ideology and symptom, in a way. it is not even that some kind of horrible dystopia has been imposed on us, but that we have actually wound up asking for it, in a way, because we didn't know what we were doing. maybe there was no way of knowing what we were doing. i think a lot of these questions go back in the end to Nietzsche also.

Land has asked, provocatively, if capitalism itself is not in fact the real meaning of progress, of freedom, and much else. we know what he thinks, and Land threads on /lit/ are always a fascinating discussion. what makes them so is his devotion to the terms of what really are a kind of pathology, but it is a pathology that really shows the contours of our minds themselves, in a way.

the horrifying thing to confront is this idea that Progress has become for us an illusion, even a trap. to my mind the colossal failure of US politics today shows up the need to ask this question. both the Blue Team and the Red Team are arguing, in the end, over the same thing, the right to continue a certain kind of American experiment in unopposed neoliberal capitalism and technocracy. they can argue over the terms as much as they like, attribute all kinds of things to racism, or sexism, or anti-semitism, or whatever, but to me it all shows up the same things, that at the bottom of it are much more fundamental questions about money, freedom, power, pleasure. these are the universal human questions. that the US has found its greatest potential threat to its own dominance of the world in *itself* and not in any other rival power- the Nazis, the Communists, whatever - this makes sense to me. and it is also why the cracks in the system have to be understood, i think, as indications that capital itself isn't working as well as it is supposed to.

[Anonymous No.12479550]

>>12470487
>Be China.
>Be Taoist.
>Become major technological and scientific power.
>Shift to Confucianism.
>Stagnate for centuries.
Yes, Taoism is beast.

[Anonymous No.12479573]

>>12479534
what happens when we really fall, fully captured, into our own illusions? we wanted these illusions, these illusions are a reflection of us - our own capacity to simulate a thing that looks exactly like us, that even desires more perfectly than we ourselves can desire, all of this - they become emblems or symbols of our theoretical and technological power. no civilization in the history of the Earth has ever enjoyed technological or financial power like we have.

but the irony of this is that this maximal Progress reproduces conditions of maximal servitude also, and it does so not by design, or deliberately, but because technological development in a consumer society is tied to the demands of the people themselves, and our desires have become incredibly venal and base. Facebook is worth billions and billions of dollars, but everybody hates themselves for using it, they know that the data is being mined, it's impossible to have anything like conversations there because of the weird fake intimacy of the whole thing, and Zuckerberg is the face of millennial ruthlessness. Gillette has to resort to moral puritanism in order to chase Woke Capital, the academies become bullshit seminary training in politics that drive outrage and get journalists fired from Buzzfeed...it's just an infinite series of calamities and catastrophes with no theoretical limit or end. but we want this, and we got it precisely because we are so free - which, as Land has observed, really was never anything more than the freedom to be an absolutely ruthless and cold-hearted ultra-libertarian, with a veneer of (ugly and cynical) politics overtop, regardless of what side of the spectrum you are on.

the West has always been a problem for the rest of the world as such because it has always been Free, it always will be Free, but it has produced exactly the conditions of its own servitude in technocapital, and to such a degree that its own thinking has become wired into it. we can't seem to go Forward, because there's always something stubbornly in the way, and we can't seem to go back, because in a sense we have burned our bridges and ships. Capitalist positivity *is* the face today of existential nihilism, we make our own death masks and post them to instagram as soon as we can. we think there is some kind of ironic horizon beyond this, but there isn't one. this is all that there is, and this is horrifying.

breaking the strangleholds of conservative or traditional governments in other societies is easy when you stand for Max Freedom; when you have your own throat in a chokehold it's much harder. the only reason we are doing this is because, on some deep level, we are enjoying it, like an erotic auto-asphyxiation. it sounds all very strange, perhaps, but i think it is pretty much where we are. Communism will not save, and radical politics will not work either. but nor will this.

[Anonymous No.12479615]

>>12479573
some kind of new understanding of what it actually means to be free, to be human, to be alive, to be social, to be any of these things is required, but i don't think we are necessarily going to find it in anything that is born into conditions of madness, of the continual hyper-stimulation of people. in a kind of philosophical sense we are on track to becoming a failed state, a state that can not even articulate any sense of where it is going or where it has come from, what it has at its disposal and what it is. i think in a way it is not only because it is captured, but because it wants to be captured, and that capture is by now so complete that it has begun to identify itself completely with the capture mechanism. it is like handing the controls of the ship ever-more completely to some kind of idiot-savant, because you think he seems to know what he is doing, and then later on asking him - so, what is your opinion on Brexit? but of course this isn't why you gave him all of this power in the first place.

we've never really had any kind of experiment in technology, in markets, like the West before. but i think to presume that to look for more answers by continually heading in this direction is going to lead to disappointment (although not necessarily a lack of pleasure, that will always be found in moralizing politics, in developing increasingly new forms of robotic science for capturing the human mind, attention, exploiting it ever more ruthlessly). it is the failure of cynicism to be as cynical as it might be that presents one of the greatest obstacles, because you have to sell something to somebody else, and all this does is plasticize your society so thoroughly that it cries out for narratives that drive commodities, commodities that depend on narratives, and a round of scapegoating, and seduction, and repetition, and all of this.

there is a point beyond which Progress as such just becomes a kind of a trap, however ironic we want to say that it is, and an excuse to go on doing exactly what we have been doing, continuing experiments, and all of the rest. all of this becomes mediated through technology and justified only by money. from within it takes on the appeal and contours of an Infinite War and other highly debased modes of Protestantism that don't even have any theological aspects. what everybody wants is Redemption, or a license to be cruel, to themselves, or whatever else. things Dostoevsky knew fairly well, but even the Grand Inquisitor would be disgusted by what he saw happening in the West today (which isn't the same thing as saying that he wouldn't think we deserve it).

we're trapped by Progress, in both its left-wing and right-wing forms, because both sides belong to a commercial fantasy that is technological. but it works only by continually debasing us, by catering to our decadence. that will in the long run contribute to the failure of that technology itself, i think. that perhaps is what we are learning.

[Anonymous No.12479714]

>>12479615
put another way, capitalism *can't miss.* it can't fail. and from a historical perspective it only seems to stack one victory on top of another. and you are told, hey, the game is the game. ruthless exploitation.

but in reality this leads us to a scenario where you are press-ganged into a neverending war between three forms of ruthless exploitation: Unironic Fascism, Unironic Communism, and Unironic Libertarianism. perhaps people wonder why i make such a big deal about FF6 (this is from XIV, but w/ev), the truth is that i keep finding more in that game than i expect. i think even the developers might have been surprised by how enduringly interesting that game becomes. all of these are both cultural attempts to solve material problems, and materialistic attempts to solve cultural problems. all of them fail - Nazism in WW2, Soviet communism after 1990, and the neoliberalism which succeeded it is struggling pretty hard now. as for how it will go in China i have no idea really. i don't know if they do either. if you read Yuk Hui or even Mou Zongsan the general sense there is that they are captivated by the same forces that are now destroying us, maybe they believe that socialism with Chinese Characteristics is the answer. i don't think it will be the answer, any more than Silicon Valley communism or Woke Capital is the answer either .all they do is show up ever more clearly what it is that they are really committed to, which is *money,* and therein lies the rub. the fantasies of money and technocracy have been with us for a long time, and perhaps were helpfully veiled by 90s-style postmodernity for a while, the skein of irony and cynicism, which only turned out to be a way of masking the horror under the guise of difference, and which has now metastasized into an Applied Postmodernity even more ridiculous than anyone could have imagined. and it brought on Trump, and Trump enrages his enemies, and universities get sucked into blizzards of confusion, and wind up churning out garbage.

and the thing is, all i'm saying is that for the time being it is enough to say that maybe there are no answers for this thing, at the moment, and to stop getting sucked into this idea of somehow knowing what the fuck the answer is. i think the best analogy for this is like *heroin withdrawal.* it's not enough to just say, Stop Using Heroin. it's more than that. a lot of other things are required. and it's like refusing to use heroin in a busted city completely controlled by crime lords who make a lot of money dealing heroin, and who are subsidized by CIA or FBI operatives who help them out in exchange for tackling other drug lords, elsewhere...it's an insanely confusing time.

but we know things aren't working. and we can even have some intimation of ourselves - that *we* did this, it wasn't forced on us by any kind of alien entity. capital is our own thing, and in many ways it really does know more about us than we know about ourselves.

[Anonymous No.12479752]

>>12479714
so what do we want to *do* with this knowledge? i don't know, maybe nothing. maybe nothing can be done with it. for me, i think it's enough to just understand it as part of avoiding the disastrous need to always be re-perpetuating it, which is this progress trap we find ourselves in. having learned to simulate everything, we now learn to simulate the simulations, perhaps always with this goal in mind of ultimately abolishing the human species itself, and effecting a complete disappearance into the world of the machine. i absolutely think there is an aspect of this at the heart of Woke Capital itself, the need - and the *means* - to create a techno-utopia on earth, blend into a hivemind, turn yourself into a living algorithm of righteousness, all the rest.

even to think about it is intoxicating. if you have a smooth connection between media, academics, government, corporations, you can Get Your Mind Right. it's like Christianity all over again, in its worst and most cynical aspects (as well as, incredibly, some of its best ones). you can connect up with everyone else on LinkedIn, you can curate everything, you can give speaking engagements, you can *love the feeling of confessing your racism, your sexism,* all of this. that is really important. because after that, the world is all yours, intellectually speaking. your entire consciousness can disappear into matrixes of algorithmic technology, tertiary protention, and a smooth and perfect blend between the material, the political, even the spiritual unfolds. and the money, of course, is always real. you're looking for how a Matrix begins to operate itself? look no further than this. shit, it will even bear some resemblance to Star Trek: TNG.

i can write for fucking days on this. Sloterdijk is right, capital is always an accelerator of cultural fantasies. and i think the reason why it works so well in Silicon Valley is because there people don't really desire capital itself, they desire love, and you get this perfect romance opening up between left-progressivism and machines, like a kind of delirious computer program that re-writes your civilization. you can never talk about capital itself, of course, this would spoil the illusion. we will discover modes of communism that will make the CCP weep with envy, and we will do it by wedding it with both capital and Protestantism too, in a way.

but it will all be wrong. it will be wrong because it will starve, because it will never actually be able to capture the libido as fully as it needs to. it will be incapable of producing any Neo who would *actually* want to do anything except destroy it (and be rejcted). an *actual* Neo would be a product of a wasteland where the Matrix no longer works, and where Smith is deployed against him not on behalf of the machines, but by human beings who are still aware that what they are doing is wrong. the true BBEGs aren't Machine Gods, they will always be people preferring the Matrix to reality.

[Anonymous No.12480372]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12480627]

>Nor has human reason been endowed with the wings which would enable it to fly so high as to cleave the clouds which veil from our eyes the mysteries of the other world. And to those who are eager for knowledge of such things and who attempt to inform themselves with such importunity about mysteries of this kind, one can give this simple advice: that it would probably be best if they had the good grace to wait with patience until they arrived there.

this is Kant writing on Emanuel Swedenborg. if you have read these threads before, it will probably not surprise you that i might find a guy like Swedenborg interesting (everything, of course, is interesting). it is a nice commentary on the dangers of mysticism, and perhaps why late Kantians like Uncle Nick (or post-Kantians, like Schopenhauer) would find somebody like Hegel bothersome. they either don't have the feel for mysticism (which is to say, a kind of principled delirium, or insanity, or loneliness, or all three) and prefer a more hardened realism.

i don't really think the present age calls for that, in a sense. but it's a paradoxical situation: it's not like we've really Locked Down creativity in the academic world, we've opened it up completely to quasi-religious enthusiasm. this is what grates Land (and, to some degree, myself) about postmodernity, and the Applied Postmodernity that becomes Woke Capital. the question is not whether or not this phenomenon, it's whether it is in fact creative *enough.* put another way, it's like a new religion in which Trump et al take on the role of Satan, but Trump himself would defer being labeled as such. as well he should.

one of the things about religion - let's stick with Christianity for the moment - is that we have a single phenomenon which ultimately encompasses both a relatively conservative form (Catholicism) and a much more progressive form (Protestantism). today of course we tend to think of most religions as being conservative, but only by comparison to new phenomena, such as Wokism, which give the impression of being the embodiment of progressivism itself, but actually have some extraordinarily hard and fast rules, which absolutely cannot be broken: for example, the pervasiveness of racism, or gender inequality, and so on. those lines will be held to as firmly as anything.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12480671]

>>12480627
one of the phenomena that i think is secretly most destructive is that sense of the *final,* or the *end* of anything. Third Reich metaphysics - again, the prototypical Social Justice Warriors are the Nazis themselves, even if chronologically speaking the Bolsheviks (or the Jacobins) come first - are one of the first examples of the power (and the drawbacks) of looking to race as a Final Answer for everything. racism and slavery really *are* one of the most catastrophically powerful of all human motivators, and this really is why it sets people's nerves jangling. these are things that have been with civilization since its earliest foundations. the Greeks kept slaves. the Romans kept slaves. barbarism in antiquity meant anybody who just wasn't from Greece. xenophobia in that sense isn't anything new. but founding social-evangelical movements on this is a terrible idea, not because it is metaphysically broken, but because it has shown time and again that it makes people do, and say, and think crazy and destructive things. it always has. it probably always will.

the more interesting question today is what actually constitutes a religion itself? in Wokism you have indeed a Theory of Everything which incorporates everything that might have once been considered absolutely profane - money, technology, sexuality, and theories of racial doctrine that would have shamed the Middle Ages - into a complete doctrine of justification. i can't *criticize* the thinking behind it because i find it actually corresponds to everything that to me makes other, or more traditional forms of religion attractive - today, it's Swedenborgian mysticism. i think Heaven and Hell are powerful explanatory tools, if we take them to be forms of symbolic language for talking about philosophy or metaphysics themselves, and that in turn because at the deepest level - the realms of Deleuze, Lacan, Land, Spinoza, Nietzsche, whoever - i find myself in a quandary of knowing that i am never able to say exactly what it is that i am thinking, because i am trying to say something about the nature of language itself, and using language to do so. my response to this as such is a sense that something like charity, and mercy, and forgiveness, and tolerance become increasingly valuable, if not crucial, because any one of us can at any moment play the role of Grand Inquisitor and bring the roof down. nothing really prevents this from happening.

as an analogy, it seems to me that the mind begins as something like a hard slab - you know what you know, and that's that. as time goes on, and you reflect a little, you find the mind and its concepts to be far more plastic than you had ever imagined, and this plasticity never, really, comes to an end. the vistas just keep opening up. and if you try and re-found an Absolute Truth on that, it will sink, very much the way a house will sink if you build it on quicksand.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12480683]

>>12480671
You finally got to Language. Go on. :>

[Anonymous No.12480727]

>>12480671
a theory of religion, or religious doctrines as such seems to me quite interesting, if we understand it as being a way of talking about philosophy, and vice-versa. even occult Landian capitalism, of course, carries with it all of the same aspects of doctrine and revealed religion that its nemesis, which Applied Postmodernity, has. they are in many ways eerie doppelgangers of each other, as much as 20C fascism and socialism were. national socialism, or international socialism? religious Non-Capitalism, or crypto-religious ultra-capitalism? modernity, postmodernity, or hypermodernity?

there is always a tipping point, a horizon, beyond which things almost necessarily cease to be critical and become orthodoxies, almost by default. and there really may not be any possible way of limiting this, because - who knows, maybe this is Hegelian stuff, so feel free to fill in whatever blanks you feel needed to be filled in - otherwise the thing defaults and doesn't reveal everything that it needs to reveal.

>and now, from the sublime to the ridiculous, perhaps to move someday from the ridiculous to the sublime once again

here's Beatlemania, about as perfect an idea of Lacanian thought as you can imagine: the pleasure inseparable from pain, which drives people out of their fucking minds. they can't possibly talk about what it is that they are experiencing, it goes way beyond them. John and Paul shake their mop-tops and go Wooooooo and an entire generation of girls go absolutely fucking ape-shit. or, to go another way, Zizek also likes to use the example of Goebbels making speeches to the Germans in 1944. Goebbels completely reverses what you would expect people to want to hear: the war is over, we're fucked, now, who's ready to go to the end of the line, and get blown to pieces, now, and forever? and the crowd goes wild. yes! we are! aaaaah! tell us, *what else* is going to happen?

we're going to get fucked! we're going to get bombed! and we're going to love it, aren't we? and Goebbels' body is just oozing pleasure at all of this. it's completely fucked, and of course - girls in the 60s losing their minds isn't exactly the same thing as Third Reich soldiers, but underneath it all there is an undercurrent of total madness that works precisely by giving people these experiences of ecstasy and rapture where we really just lose our fucking minds completely. it's kind of what we want, in a way. that's the fucking crazy part of it all.

[Anonymous No.12480787]

>>12480683
>>12480727
well, i would just say reducing things to language becomes in the end like splitting the atom. the Word means *everything* to us, the Yes or the No, because at some deep level - the level of the drives, which is where the real insano-motor of capitalism, religion, politics, everything tries to tap into, and succeeds, or fails, in various ways - gets kind of incredibly tangled up. No means Yes, and Yes means No, and this should well and truly fill you with a holy terror if you are trying to decoct some operating system for human relations.

if i was looking for any commonality, i would be looking at phenomena like frenzy, or victimization. Hitler never presented himself as being anything but a victim, this is how he summoned up the intoxicating Rage From Beyond that made him so compelling to the Germans to watch. it was there in Trump as well, as much as it is on the Blue Team also. the Greeks knew that frenzy was going to be a problem for them, and so did the Hindus as well. the Kali-Yuga is named after a goddess who only becomes monstrous after she adopts the clever idea of drinking up all of the blood of a demon who multiplies whenever a single one of his blood-droplets hit the ground. this turns her into a force even Beyond-er Good and Evil than anything Nietzsche came up with. Kali became a juggernaut that danced out the creation (until Shiva intervenes, and lies down, and she comes to her senses...which, frankly, may be so much wisthul thinking, but otherwise the story would be too much of a downer, perhaps).

trying to force the universe into the confines of grammar and representation is basically fusion - or is it fission? let's just say it is Crossing the Streams and leave it at that. we can't do it. we *need* symbolic languages to talk about these things, but therein lies the rub: we wind up with symbologies that we then try to graft onto the world again, in a sense, and sometimes we do this through seduction, or ideology, or advertisement, or whatever. that Gilette, for example, gets sucked into this isn't an indication that it doesn't work, but rather that it does. it certainly convinced enough corporate types to go ahead with it. and because it is a tacitly religious idea, you really can't miss: the Believers will Get It, and the unbelievers will confirm their Unbelief.

[Anonymous No.12480851]

>>12480787
here's a guy who has held up remarkably well, for instance. Blake would not have sneered at Unironic Heaven or Unironic Hell, but he also had some fucking bombshell lines like
>Energy is Eternal Delight

now we're fucking talking. Blake is a serious contender for permanent Cosmotech Poet Laureate. or at least, we'll keep him for as long as we can, since grumbling about Land and capitalism is surely going to make him feel as though the walls are closing in, and he may want to go elsewhere. that's fine.

i think in some level this is kind of what Peterson has been saying too, with all of his own anarcho-masochist visions of Jung and Solzhenitsyn and Pinocchio and Kermit and whatever fucking kind of horrorshow the interior of his mind describes. there are certain forms of religion that prevent people from going insane, largely because it gives them a conceptual register for talking about things that

a) cannot be put into words, and
b) when Deconstructed yield the fucking whirlwind.

for Heidegger poetry walked that line, and only poetry. then Deleuze and schizophrenia, the BwO and much much else. and Uncle Nick with capitalism as the forward arm of HR Giger/Applied Lovecraftianism making its way into your world through your PC. we have basically an embarrassment of riches in terms of ways to lose our minds, and increasingly a kind of desperation that there is no reason *not* to lose them, because the closer we look at the apparently sane, the less evidence we find that this whole thing isn't really a completely improvisational exercise, and that the Most Serious Answerers tend to give the worst possible Answers. so everybody winds up defecting, and hedging, and dodging, and suggesting this, or suggesting that...

and it all becomes a game of rock-scissors-paper without end. of course, the game is there to mediate conflict, not to become the cure itself - but the attraction to conflating the two is what gives you things like Ender's Game and the terrible logic of it. if you want people to do insane things, just convince them there is no difference between the real and the illusion...

[Anonymous No.12480888]

>>12480851
so what do you do with madness, when there is - again, read your Deleuze and your Lacan, and your Nietzsche, and your [x] carefully here - no empirical difference between the insane and the sane? don't jump down my throat for this, there are absolutely conditions in which paranoid schizophrenics require medication and not theory, and Deleuze is using the concept of schizophrenia in a philosophical sense; he's not interested in the actual schizos, only in the concept of madness itself. Land takes that work and runs with it, essentially coming up with a pretty provocative theory of what it is that underlies 'the genius of money.'

one of my own analogies would be: imagine if you were the post office, and you have now delivered this service, which is mail delivery. it would be bizarre to say, 'Damn, when are all of these letters going to stop being written?' or 'no, i won't deliver the mail, unless it's the Ultimate Letter,' or so on. or just staring into the mail - which is, in a sense, what Land does - and asking, 'But what does it all mean?' this analogy is pretty stupid, but in a sense Land's theory of BTC is sort of like asking of the postal service can not only procedurally generate its own mail-delivery system, but in a way captures what it is that makes letters get written in the first place, and whatever else. it's a kind of a fascinating exercise, and you can take it to the moon and back. but there is a horizon beyond which you (read: me) will fail to understand that the answers you (see above) are looking for will have to be found somewhere else.

we don't really know what to do with madness. we are often either not as schizo as we should be, or think ourselves to be more schizo than we are, or are entirely schizo in denial, or, or, or. something like a civilization which can account for the vast, incredible range of deviancy available to the human psyche is required, because in the absence of this we find ourselves being forced to use language to describe things that never scratch where it itches. see pic rel for more details on this too, life really begins with him. not only him, but one (hey, i did it!) skips the Man from Messkirch at their peril. language is a fucking problem for us. and the more tormented we get over Identity and What Did He Mean By This, the crazier and more squirrely we get.

[Anonymous No.12480899]

>>12479534
But is any other system better at answering these questions of power, money, freedom, power and pleasure for the masses? What makes capital seem so bad at answering these questions is the near-unlimited communication opportunities brought by the Internet, thus allowing for the problems experienced by people living under capitialism to be highlighted in our discussion. What is lacking in this discussion, I believe, is information on life in other such economic systems, like agrarian societies.
There is a quote, which I will try to dig up, of what a farmer said to a preacher when the preacher tried to give him his Last Rites. The farmer worked hard his whole life, always was thriftful, put his family first, etc. But when the preacher tried to exhort him into believing in God in order to avoid eternal damnation, what did the farmer say? That he did not believe in God, for he was eternally hell-bound, constantly breaking his back for marginal return. The point I am making here is that it is somewhat foolyhardy to assume that there is an option better for people to have those fundamental questions answered

[Anonymous No.12480945]

>>12480888
i think a lot about the Beast, in Kung Fu Hustle. again, he represents a contradiction in terms - a kung fu genius who goes crazy thinking about kung fu, and winds up in a mental asylum. the thing that is beautiful about this film is that the Beast is *happy* in the asylum. he's not crazy at all, he's in there reading the paper and being perfectly content. the only reason he is sprung from the jail at all is because the Axe Gang needs him to defeat the Landlord and the Landlady. and - there are no accidents in cinema - he kills their leader and takes over the Gang itself.

but the Beast isn't really crazy, because he is in fact content with his confinement; there's balance there, and equilibrium. if this were, say, Akuma from Street Fighter, he would have smashed down the doors with his fists and gone on a rampage (or perhaps he has done this already?) doesn't Akuma plunge himself into a volcano or something in the ending to one of those games? it's not really important.

the point is that, in this case, it actually isn't the madness of the Beast himself that brings him back into the world, but the sublimated madness of the Axe Gang - thoroughly modern, and thoroughly cynical - which does it. and for perfectly acceptable reasons: they have embroiled themselves in a war with Pig Sty Alley. what happens subsequently is all pretty understandable.

and there are shades of Sun Wukong in this, and if there is a story about the *redemption of madness, difference and schizophrenia anywhere* it is to be found in that one, in the Journey to the West. it is the Buddha that gives Wukong his change of perspective, and you don't really have to work too hard to find the connections between Five Elements Mountain and the Beast's mental asylum. the twist, of course, is that in this film it is not the Buddha that releases the Beast, but rather the same forces - difference and multiplicity - that perhaps put him there in the first place.

[Anonymous No.12480981]

>>12480945
one more shot from that film, just because it's a beautiful moment. if you were out to write a genuinely nightmarish psychological horrorshow, you could do worse than to take everything beautiful about this film and turn it on its ear, but...why?

i think this film occupies a role in my Movie Pantheon that FF6 does in my Vidya Pantheon. it's not quite the same, because Kefka and so on gets me down to the fucking cockles and sub-cocklear areas, it's the fucking end-all be-all of fantasy texts. not only because of him, for lots of reasons. but mostly because these are stories about moods and personality disorders, but also - lest we deviate too far from the question in the OP - Wisdom and such.

one such heuristic might be, not what constitutes Truth, but what constitutes madness.
>kys cringe memer
>oh hello inner self
>hello, kys plz
>okay but come on inner self don't you think this is less retarded than usual
>no it isn't, it's more retarded than usual, and that's why you fail to see how retarded it is
>you're like a moral snob
>i'll fucking play enya you little bitch. you want the enya? you're going to get it
>no no i take it back
>fuck you. eat Caribbean Blue
>aaaaaaaaaaahhh reeeeeeee the cringe. the cringe it buuuuuurrrrnssssss
>it burns us both inner self. it burns us both

Enya: Caribbean Blue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yRgiXh2fP4

seriously, i really do love this song
>reeeeeeeee

[Anonymous No.12481028]

>>12471017
>>12471017
A return to medieval syncretism is desirable, where reason can coexist and coevaluate with prerational chimeras
From where we will draw the content of this is anyones guess but I think psychoanalysis made a daring opening move
Now in the era of Big Data we are capable of visualizing the subconscious of our digital tulpas
The world of infotech is through the looking glass, it offers a spectral counterpart for our dying bodies/planet
But like all dopplegangers it is bound to survive us, and possibly undo us as well
We have already assessed the ominous foreboding that this alterworld suggests
Into it we dump our fantastic selves, our hidden desires
and we fully expect to find fulfillment there

[Anonymous No.12481103]

>>12481028
this is what i'm fucking talking about right here. i recognize this posting style also, were you in one of the other Cosmotech/Whitehead threads? w/ev.

>A return to medieval syncretism is desirable, where reason can coexist and coevaluate with prerational chimeras
medieval techno-syncretism, i've heard worse ideas. and again: how many things did medieval theory know about the human mind that we are only going to find ourselves rediscovering again? my gripe with postmodernity - which only really became self-evident in the age of Applied Postmodernity and Woke Capital - is that it was way less relativist than it advertised itself to be. of course, what i could not have predicted was how disastrously stupid, malicious, and cynical it was going to get when the roof was really torn off the thing. but so it is. and i see no reason whatsoever why the whole thing might not just be a long and continual slide into total fucking lunacy. the Thirty Years' War was begun on rational terms (by irrational people, driven by absolutely massive forces), and everybody thought WW1 would be over by Christmas. things like this.

it's not like the medieval world was immune to madness or superstition either, obviously. but that's what makes our brand of lunacy especially chaotic. we think we're in charge. ain't nobody in charge of this thing.

>The world of infotech is through the looking glass, it offers a spectral counterpart for our dying bodies/planet
this. and one of the reasons why, i think, not bulldozing the planet is because Nature offers us a kind of non-substitute for our minds. Nature is a good scene, there's no substitute for it. we can make sexbots and Imaginary Steak and w/ev the fuck else, but techno-dystopia will turn people into...well, Fremen, spoiling for a fight. all they are waiting on is the Kwisatz Haderach, and those guys always appear ahead of schedule, as Untimely beings do.

>We have already assessed the ominous foreboding that this alterworld suggests
>Into it we dump our fantastic selves, our hidden desires
>and we fully expect to find fulfillment there
bloc-quoted for truth.

[Anonymous No.12481146]

>>12480899
>But is any other system better at answering these questions of power, money, freedom, power and pleasure for the masses?
Deleuze fundamentally re-wrote the narrative on the story of Marxism by keeping Marx and replacing Hegel with Spinoza. this is what makes him such a problem for flatheads, because he skews with the logic of emancipatory Revolution (and also because his thought is both entirely compatible with neoliberalism, and yet also remains a critique of it as well). Deleuze is a fucking giant question mark for everybody, which is what makes him what he is. capitalism is fundamentally good at everything except saying what it is, or what it is supposed to be doing. all it does is connect up with flows and codes, like a BwO should. it's good for civilizing barbarians and barbarizing civilians. capital does it all, it just doesn't know why, and it doesn't like to be asked. much else. i'm honestly grateful that Land exists, because i wouldn't want to have to explain some of these things myself, but i find his own explanation - again, which is (in a very strange way) both Freudian (in its inexplicable horror and death-driven teleology) and Hegelian (Teleoplexy as PoS of Capital). for now we might simply reserve judgment on those aspects of capital with which we find ourselves over-familiar.

>What makes capital seem so bad at answering these questions is the near-unlimited communication opportunities brought by the Internet, thus allowing for the problems experienced by people living under capitialism to be highlighted in our discussion.
this absolutely. computers, the internet, social media and crypto-currencies are all things that also complicate any easymode understanding of where we are at. we can't really say that makes capital bad at answering these questions, the problem is in fact that it is excessively *good* at answering them, which is what turns near-unlimited communication into the Tower of Babel that it is (and also continually shows up the degree to which Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil are essentially fighting for control over it). i think far less that the age describes a war between heaven and hell than a war in hell itself, which boils over and press-gangs us...an idea actually in the lore of final f-
>don't fucking say it. you love that game. okay. we fucking get it
>ok inner self. all right

[Anonymous No.12481165]

>>12481103
I have been a long time admirer of your writing and try to read as much as my constant hangover and depression allows. You should publish, seriously. Would like it all in a nice book form.

[Anonymous No.12481205]

>>12481146
where did you get your knowledge from?
can you recommend some books?

[Anonymous No.12481208]

>>12480899
>What is lacking in this discussion, I believe, is information on life in other such economic systems, like agrarian societies.
i agree on this also. aforementioned Twitter Guy i like was saying that if there is a drawback to Deleuze's thought, it is a peculiar dislike for all things *arboreal.* i think i understand why, if you are looking for a commonality between lots of traditional autocracies, you can look at the idea of the Great Tree, the state as naturalized, organistic life forms, Roots and Branches and all of this. that's fine. but it's also sort of like throwing out the baby with the bathwater: after all, ecology doesn't necessarily have to turn into Third Reich fantasies.

>There is a quote, which I will try to dig up, of what a farmer said to a preacher when the preacher tried to give him his Last Rites. The farmer worked hard his whole life, always was thriftful, put his family first, etc. But when the preacher tried to exhort him into believing in God in order to avoid eternal damnation, what did the farmer say? That he did not believe in God, for he was eternally hell-bound, constantly breaking his back for marginal return. The point I am making here is that it is somewhat foolyhardy to assume that there is an option better for people to have those fundamental questions answered
no, i think i get it. it's not only like the Buddha saying, 'work out your own salvation with discipline,' it's also like 'also, leave others who are working out their own salvation with discipline the fuck alone.' makes sense to me anon.

>>12481165
thank you very kindly anon. honestly, it is in fact a thing i am genuinely happy to do, makes my whole day to talk with you guys and schizo-commiserate. mostly because i am no fucking stranger to hangovers and depression. Hangover Metaphysics is absolutely where we are at (and after ultra-fucking-schizo-turbocapitalism? why not). and it's not just you and me either, i think. there's pic rel/Burnout Man also. who is kind of a better look than Land, too, in some ways. with Land the Burnout never stops, that's how he works. you might enjoy him if you haven't checked him out yet.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12481251]

>>12481208
about three weeks ago, after the big Cosmotech experiment, i took some time to visit some family for a bit and i had a kind of funny moment of wondering about how Zen worked. it's kind of stupid, but i'll share it anyways: basically, i had an absolutely splitting headache from far too much alcohol, and coffee, and cigarettes, and staying up late, and whatever else. when you have a splitting headache, you absolutely do not want to think about anything else, you do not care about people's problems, not really. you still have to, you know, *do things,* but it's all on this kind of other plane. you do what works, you do not think about it all that much, and really you just want to go back to bed.

Hangover Zen is not, admittedly, the essence of Zen, but i thought it was a kind of primer on how it might be for Zen masters to deal with people like me - basically, they've already got a Mysterious Headache, and literally everything that i might do is really only going to make this thing worse. eventually it will subside, but in the meantime - 'look, asshole, can you just do what fucking works? don't ask me about these things. don't make it more difficult than it needs to be.'

and if you persist - okay, let me just fucking tap you on the forehead. now *you've* got a headache too. welcome to the world of the Master! partly, anyhow. and now *you* also know what it's like, to just have a constant fucking headache. now you too are going to go - look, i really don't need all that much. i don't want to tune out of society completely, i just kind of want to get through doing whatever it is that i have to do for however long until this headache subsides.

you get what i'm saying. Hangover Zen. no waves, no wind. exactly what you want when you do not have a bottle of Transcendental Aspirin.

>>12481205
>can you recommend some books?

sure can:
>regular bibliography
>>/lit/thread/11823861#p11835198

>acceleration bibliograhpy
>>/lit/thread/11823861#p11835482

read the notes at the bottom also. the rule with the major authors is, read everything by them you can get your hands on. most of the Big Guys i have read as much of as i can, so the books listed are their major works, and mainly i have come to understand why that is, by reading the rest of it. the general rule is, however, just read whatever you're interested in and the rest takes care of itself, i find.

[Anonymous No.12481258]

>>12481165
>Guy mentions hangovers and depression.
>>12481208
>Immediately conceptualized and interwoven. I love this guy. Keep on flowing, man.

[Anonymous No.12481259]

>>12481208
Haven't actually read Land although you and others mention it a lot. I mean to, but my depression is very bad so I mostly don't care to read. As to whether farmers still matter.. I would say it is dubious, the subsistence farmer in the "developing" world represents a temporary setback, to be replaced with more efficient methods at the earliest convenience of an IMF financier; even if this will never actually happen as an historical event, the subsistence farmer will still seem vestigial and anachronistic
Ergo such types, and proletarians as well mind, are no longer privileged with a kind of earthy wisdom.
They are simply not worth considering. One should focus on new types.
The s o y boy, the russian hacker, etc

[Anonymous No.12481268]

>>12481251
Hangover Zen is a marvelous concept. No patience for creepers.

[Anonymous No.12481270]

>>12481258
Still me. Damn it, I didnt want to green text the "I love this guy. Keep on flowing, man."

Anyway, keep on flowing, man. Youre doing You, and Youre doing it really well imo, and I admire and respect that.

[Anonymous No.12481425]

>>12481259
>Haven't actually read Land although you and others mention it a lot.
i think i screwed up the context. the guy i was referring to was Byung-Chul Han. this and/or Psychopolitics are both pretty good. nothing you will not have read about before, if you have gotten into theory (or even if you haven't). which brings me to another thing:

part of what makes these threads the rather unusual mash-up that they are is a chaotic combination of two forces: one, the manic creative joy that comes with delirium (and which is, imho, absolutely crucial for getting the most out of philosopher), and the other, the absolute fucking burnout, depression, hangovers and misery that are a part of it. it's not one or the other, it's both. that's what makes these things what they are - shipwrecks, of a kind, which are nevertheless capable of building smaller boats, are themselves perhaps already built out of larger earlier ones, and all amidst rather stormy and unpredictable weather...that i have a kind of enduring love for post-apoc scenarios (or Christian eschatology) isn't really all that surprising. it's where i think, as strange as this sounds, there is actually a kind of equilibrium in ruination.

after the bombs go off, fascism and socialism and neoliberalism continue, but deprived of their terrible power to control or name the future, or the past. as they are today, i think a lot of things secretly prey on our feelings about utopia, on a tacitly Protestant feeling that we should always be Moving Forward, always bringing about the Greater Good, and this really fucks with us. that we have evolved Woke Capital as a highly complex workaround for solving the grief that comes with capitalism (after all, it's not pro-capitalism, it's anti-racism!) and that that in turn spawned the renascent far right (after all, we're not *really* the far right, but look, have you seen what the Progressives did, &c, &c). all scapegoating, all mimesis, all hysteria.

the saddest thing in the world is that torture really works. it does work. we know that we can beat people hard enough, or scare them enough, that they will confess or say anything. Ernst Junger talks about it in TFP, about a torture device that underlies all metaphysical thinking. i don't think he's wrong about that in the slightest. and Junger really matters, because he walked through fire in two world wars for the losing side without ever losing his soul, or committing all the way to what the fascists wanted. but he didn't drop out completely, either. Spengler too; there was a guy who you might look at and say, well, if *anyone* would have fallen in love with the Nazis, it would have been him. but it was not so; he turned them down. why? probably because he knew that they were full of fucking shit. and they were. they weren't lacking in their capacity to unleash apocalyptic violence on the world, but they were lacking in their ability to explain why that was necessary in the first place.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12481433]

>>12481259
Who says the boy of onions and the hacker of Russia are not the hacker are not the proletarian of today?

[Anonymous No.12481462]

>>12481425
i know, i know, this is probably not your thing. it's not mine either, truth be told. but here is what i find particularly brilliant about it.

if we say that it is in fact *torture* and not *war* that is God, having completely fallen in love with Judge Holden or Landian nightmares or whatever the fuck, the particular genius of Christianity is indeed to make this thing front and centre. if there was ever a religion of torture, that never kept torture out of sight, it is most definitely this one. that this should have been the creation of one of the most desperate, insane, bloodthirsty, cruel and vicious species ever to walk or crawl upon the earth can be left aside (or not). but it's not like this doesn't connote a sense of *mystery* about a few things.

Junger sensed that torture was an inescapable aspect of the metaphysics of production, of industrial modernity, of mechanics itself. and a lot of other ideologies might claim to have the answers for this, or can say, Never Again, or, worse, Only If We Have To, or worse yet, Yes, We Did, But Come On They Deserved It, and much much else. the capacity of the meatbag for self-deception and self-alienation is truly mind-boggling. and we do it, of course, we have to do it. this is what makes the present worldview so fucking depressing in the first place: it is the sound of the Explanation.

you know what i mean by the Explanation. you have heard it before. it is the sound of absolute fucking death. Heidegger had a sense of it, but he had no idea how bad it was going to get by 2019. you know exactly what i mean by the Explanation, it's the sound of fucking nobodies talking about Nothing as if it were Something, and you know it will go on for fucking forever. that is the sound of the machine, the sound of decadence and automation having pervaded every last nook and cranny of the psyche, and now taking its marching orders from a catastrophically moribund petit-bourgeois algorithm that does nothing more than reproduce its conditions of servitude in an ever-more juvenile and nakedly pornographic form. it sucks. everything sucks. and cynicism does not work. you hear the Explanation on your phone, at whatever cafe you like to go to, on the television, in the newspaper, everywhere. is it the sound of forced positivity, and it will drive you out of your goddamn mind to listen to.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12481542]

>>12481462
i cannot in the end find, ultimately, a better explanation of a lot of this. the reason why a guy like Judge Holden 'wins' in the end is the sign that somehow we lack anything like a metaphysical immunity to torture, madness, and death. there is no Easy Fix for these things. politics - and philosophy - can cover it up, or 'deconstruct' it as much as they like, but there are some aspects of us that are just wired by some very dark and very strange forces.

Christianity - and i really am just working out my own sense of why i might in the end not get so trigged about some of it - basically monumentalizes this whole process, and really by a kind of accident. the Christians themselves don't crucify Jesus, it's the Romans who do, by assigning him to the worst possible death imaginable: a slow, lingering torment, designed to send a clear message to the rest. i found myself thinking about this the other day: if you were Hitler, for instance, and you really wanted to clear all of the Jews out of Germany, why not do something like this? why not say, 'here's a public execution. next week, there will be a hundred more. then a thousand. see what we are doing here, get the message, and leave.' this is not - i hope i do not have to say this - an apologia for the Third Reich, in case anyone was wondering. and the answer to the question is, anyways, because it was an industrial process designed to have no off-switches. the point was to make everything continue this nightmare, forever.

in the case of the Crucifixion, it seems to me that what was begun as an attempt to Send A Message - to really grind something in to the public consciousness - turned out to have backfired quite spectacularly. the torture device became, in the end, a symbol of mercy, and compassion, and forgiveness, which wound up having a lot more sway and influence on the world than anyone, Romans or Christians, could have possibly imagined. it worked, because it stood for precisely the opposite of what the torture device itself stood for.

two thousand years later, torture still works. it's not like we have somehow made torture obsolete, it happens all over the place. it happens in sweatshops in Manila, it happens in courtroom drama, it happens in academic Marxist-Maoism, it happens in the polis, it happens everywhere. the Lacanians have been speculating on these things for years, the perilous worlds of surplus pleasure, transgression, all of this. for a while we thought that maybe playful irony or deconstruction was the cure, and it would seem to be pretty much the case that it most definitely is not the cure, it is the symptom and the pharmakon itself. nobody knows, ultimately, what the truth is. but we do know a couple of things: namely, that people lie; they say things under duress; and that they can talk themselves into damn near anything.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12481558]

>>12481425
>Ernst Junger talks about it in TFP, about a torture device that underlies all metaphysical thinking. i don't think he's wrong about that in the slightest. and Junger really matters, because he walked through fire in two world wars for the losing side without ever losing his soul, or committing all the way to what the fascists wanted. but he didn't drop out completely, either. Spengler too; there was a guy who you might look at and say, well, if *anyone* would have fallen in love with the Nazis, it would have been him. but it was not so; he turned them down. why? probably because he knew that they were full of fucking shit. and they were. they weren't lacking in their capacity to unleash apocalyptic violence on the world, but they were lacking in their ability to explain why that was necessary in the first place.
What about Julius Evola?

[Anonymous No.12481572]

>>12481251
> >>/lit/thread/11823861
can you share more archived threads you've posted in?

[Anonymous No.12481573]

>>12481542
You mention manic phases. Are You bipolar, spacemonk? That's what I'm calling You now by the way.

[Anonymous No.12481625]

>>12481542
nor do i wish, ultimately, to try and beat Applied Postmodernity at its own game, i should add. saying Words Are Violence or Smiling Is Violence - it's a tactic, but it's not more than a tactic. and so i don't want to find myself saying the same things, that Everything Is Torture. rather, it would be the opposite: name me a political ideology, or system, that ultimately *cannot* find a reason for torture at the end of the day, that under conditions of industrial scarcity there would *not* be a good reason to tell a holy lie, or cover up a black ops cell.

as Sam Harris says, if you convert to Jainism, the crazier you get the better. there is absolutely no danger to your community from Jainism: at worst, you are going to wind up starving yourself, or whatever, because of the nature of your monastic vows. and yet monastics and holy fools will delight in this, for reasons that are both very human and charmingly demented.

in the current war between the far left and far right there really are no go-to Good Guys or Bad Guys at hand, and the twist in the plot is that it is virtually impossible not to get sucked into this madness. which in my own experience turned out to be hard to do, because often as not the people who initially seemed to be the craziest wound up making the most sense. but i don't really want to get any more addicted to the craziness than i have become already.

hence the love for both psychedelics and rehab, i suppose. Nietzsche's not wrong, or Deleuze, about intoxication, and Lacan's not wrong about desire either. there is no saving Land, he's straight out of HP Lovecraft and he has probably seen shit nobody was ever meant to see.

anyways, that's where we are, i think. we know the drugs work, both literally and metaphorically. and when everything is profoundly fucked up, it's not like there aren't just more reasons to enjoy exploring it all. but the Hangovers, right? the Hangovers. good reason to get into philosophy tho, i think. sort of like there was a fucking insane dance party that is today covered also with blood and fucking squid-monsters in the bathroom. if there are any survivors at all they are saying So Fucking Good So Good - but they're not even like the Walking Dead. they're like...harmless zombies. and somehow they work for the government also.

maybe i need to let this metaphor sit a while longer. the Aftermath of some kind of party, anyways. a cleanup of Biblical proportions on aisle 9.

[Anonymous No.12481738]

>>12481558
>What about Julius Evola?
yes, you're right. 'I'm no fascist, i am a super-fascist!' him too.

>>12481572
>can you share more archived threads you've posted in?
i've been haunting Land threads since about 2016 (good god!) but truly the Mighty Cruffitan was my finest hour. this was a continual thread that ran for about two and a half months here on the yak-milking forum. i have no idea what it all meant, but it was probably my finest hour. enjoy Total Confusion.

Cosmotech: Archive
>>/lit/thread/12056787#p12056792

>>12481573
>You mention manic phases. Are You bipolar, spacemonk?
my father is, he's got in spades. major mood swings. i don't have it that bad. i am in fact painfully ordinary, alas. except for my ramble-fetish, i guess
>That's what I'm calling You now by the way.
spacemonk is unironically pretty nice. whatever suits your fancy. i'm partial to girardfag also.

[Anonymous No.12481789]

>>12481738
>yes, you're right. 'I'm no fascist, i am a super-fascist!' him too.
I believe Evola said that in a tongue-in-cheek manner. He admired the philosophical foundation of fascism, but did not like how it ended up working in practice politically and socially. In the end, he tried to subvert Italian Fascism and National Socialism for his altruistic pagan ends. Besides, he said he was a superfascist during his trail and was acquitted anyway.

[Anonymous No.12481817]

>>12481738
Why do You hang out at SLS? Isn't that a schizo-den?

[Anonymous No.12481831]

Evola was someone who could've committed a perfect seppuku.

[Anonymous No.12481870]

>>12481789
>In the end, he tried to subvert Italian Fascism and National Socialism for his altruistic pagan ends.
this is the part that i kind of like, tho. everybody talks about fighting fascism, or fascism subverting everything else...i have to say, i admire someone with the desire to push things into another direction, which is subverting IF and NS in order to make...what? a kind of esoteric mystical sex cult with themes from Left Hand Tantra, Tradition, mountain climbing...

that's entirely fine with me, honestly. turn it all into a fucking Eyes Wide Shut dinner party, whatever. what else are you going to do with it? Bataille would say, the whole point is aristocratic squandering, and he would be completely right. in the end, if things get *really* fucking weird and they wind up getting into human sacrifice or whatever, inevitably something is going to fuck up and it will all come out in the press. that's the worst possible scenario.

Julius Evola basically is the spitting image of exactly the kind of person i would hope to find in the Inner Circle of any kind of weird cultish secret society, and i've read a bunch of his books now and i honestly can't find a whole lot there i really disagree with. as always, the people who are going to fuck things like this up are the disciples and the tryhards and poseurs. Tom Cruise is horrified by it all because he's balls-deep in Scientology, which is crazier and more influential than anything Evola could cook up by far.

more masquerade balls and orgies plz, especially if it gives wrinkly old ex-Nazis something to do. and if you want to fucking drop a shitload of MDMA in the punch bowl like a merry prankster, nobody's going to bat an eyelash either.

all i'm saying is that a society that doesn't have creepy sex cults is ripe for fascism. if old rich weirdos aren't getting their bondage fantasies on there god only knows what they're going to do to the economy. and Bill Maher will probably be there too to lighten the atmosphere.

>>12481817
>Why do You hang out at SLS? Isn't that a schizo-den?
i don't, never posted there. why do you ask?

[Anonymous No.12481918]

>>12481870
I dunno. Then it might just be me projecting my fears of schizo. Yeah, I'm stuck like that. Fear of insanity.

[Anonymous No.12481951]

>>12481870
I want to know everything about you.
How can someone be this well-read and open-minded?
From Meister Eckhart to Nick Land...
How?
I don't even know what to ask...
What do you think about Jakob Böhme?

[Anonymous No.12482006]

>>12481951
When you find out everything in the world is permeated by Maya, everything becomes a joke that most people take too seriously.

[Anonymous No.12482032]

>>12482006
Why the mystical nihilism? Everything is permeated anyway, we're just putting concepts on everything.

[Anonymous No.12482215]

>>12481918
>I dunno. Then it might just be me projecting my fears of schizo. Yeah, I'm stuck like that. Fear of insanity.
understandable.

>>12482032
the anon you are responding to is not me, but there's part of that that is true, for sure. the danger just lies in becoming so fucked out that you can't live, and so on. the light touch is important but cynicism is death.

>>12481951
>I want to know everything about you.
there's really not much there! i like books. and a couple of philosophers have absolutely helped me to understand my own disastrously failed inner workings. i'm glad for that.
>How can someone be this well-read and open-minded?
fear! absolute hubris. memory of being a callow fuck about things i had no idea about. reading makes you open-minded, that's one of the nice things about it. aesthetics in general prevents us from becoming total barbarians, in some sense. it can also turn us into Doomsday Clowns also, true. or just decadent fucking assholes. but there's a sweet spot in the middle. the sweet spot is also the Confusion Spot.
>From Meister Eckhart to Nick Land...How?
i don't know. but partly it's because there's a kind of an arc also: you start out, perhaps, naive and kind of dumb. and maybe you get seduced by the Ultra Hard Materialists! well...not only are the Ultra Hard Materialists probably being a lot Harder than your tolerance level, sometimes it turns out that even those guys, maybe, have to lean on idealism a little more than it appears on first glance. a lot of reading is idiosyncratic, really: my own fixation on Land comes from, or departs from, fixations on other guys. i always kind of wanted to know about the jargon, but i was also more than a little concerned that there was something terribly wrong with deconstruction also. turns out it was way, way worse than i had imagined. enter the Wild Ride.
>What do you think about Jakob Böhme?
kek. you know what? *very little.* virtually nothing. but i've seen his name before on a couple of Twitter feeds i like, and if i'm going to spend some time with Swedenborg next, sounds like he might be a pretty fascinating guy to read. enlighten us?

also, i finally found that triforce image i was looking for earlier. enjoy schizbros

[Anonymous No.12482621]

Bump

[Aminom No.12482962]

>>12481817
I'm the one who hangs out there.
>Why do You hang out at SLS?
Because
>Isn't that a schizo-den?

[Anonymous No.12482964]

>>12470487
Please stop making my favorite religion gay you stupid 140 verbal iq schizo faggot NIGGERS

[Anonymous No.12483050]

>>12482964
if the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, and the title of the thread says Tao in it, then what the fuck is your problem? obviously it's not the same one. besides, Aminom has renamed Space Taoism Pancreativism, and i'm still kind of attached to Cosmotech.

my advice is to relax, and stare into this girl's crazy eyes, and think about the stamp on her hand, and how ultimately there may be no boundary between woman and the machine, thus xenofeminism, and how your sex drives have been taken over by Big Data, because Woke Capital is all a front for the Hive Swarm, and all of this is just a simulation, except the part that isn't, because it cannot be spoken, because everyone ITT is already in on the joke already, except you, because all of this is turning out exactly as it should, and that is why you should not look behind you right now.

[Anonymous No.12483075]

>>12483050
Also The Game

[Aminom No.12483150]

>>12483050
The relationship between Space Taoism and Pancreativism is the relationship between the technological and organic, they're distinct aspects. The Tao of Space Taoism is not the true named Tao. It's just my unique synthesis, and you have your own unique synthesis in your Cosmotech explorations - one that is very much related to mine but unique as you are. Imagine everyone on the planet having such unique "religions" or rich and diverse perspectives, and exploring each other's freely, without fear of ideas.

Because of this, and to respect your unique contributions I think you should have your Cosmotechnics in the front and if you feel like it mine accessible but not overriding. I love what you're doing here to much to want it to be all about me - it isn't, your work here is phenomenal and without a doubt revolutionary.

[Anonymous No.12483172]

>>12483146
Cosmotechniques like pirated scientology, Reich and the process church? Bruce Lee and the Unabomber canonized?
All Tomorrows Parties would be a hymn. Church would be nothing more than a cell signal dead zone, or better yet
a faraday cage
Or maybe a meetup posted on the corkboard near the bathrooms at whole foods
Anarchist teenagers disguising their training as a game of urban capture the flag

[Anonymous No.12483306]

Look. Last october i've started a reading club of sorts in my eastern european town. Basic material was some french anthropology and of course debort and some ccru texts as well. The intention was to acclimate to idea of magic, get into basic spectacle defences, explore blockchain meditation and tantric proletariat programming via marxist time sorceries. One of the guys read a little but of this sub but mostly they liked some insights i generated for them. Basically, two stem students and one cat lady went in blind following my advice. Without shadow of a doubt this little project turned out disastrously.

One of the guys let's call him K had some strong feelings regarding marxism and was a staunch nationalist (for americans: nation is coded as defence against russian imperialism and marxism is a sour spot in a place where bread should be). He basically intended to use this for political career. Fine by me.

Second's name is "D" and he's like a socially retarded peter pan kinda guy with drug problem and brains more than sense. I actually don't know what the fuck was he doing there. Maybe he wanted to be a rockstar or street artist and SI sounded edgy. Fuck him honestly.

And the girl is this ugly bipolar 25 yr psychology bachelor with obsession over cat breeds. Call her "S". She's super nice, incredibly intelligent and obviously bonkers. I think she misinterpreted the magic stuff with her blavatsky-slavic-pagan spirituality. Whatever.

So we go through this stuff and natural flow takes us to main body of Land's work. And at the same time i had to go live elsewhere in my country. Family stuff. So i leave them with one request not to get too crazy and wait me to read late land. I just wanted to have some peace of mind for a fucking christmas vacation, ok?? Of course they wouldn't listen. S doesn't use internet except emails by the way.

At the time of new years eve they stopped responding to my chat messages and i didn't think to call them, I thought that whatever they're doing festivities which means booze where i live. They're probably drunk out of their minds. Actually, no, they're a bunch of mentally ill anxious teenagers in adult bodies. They'd be scared of being slightly out of control. What was i thinking?

[Anonymous No.12483314]

>>12483150
>The relationship between Space Taoism and Pancreativism is the relationship between the technological and organic, they're distinct aspects.
dope
as
fuck

i actually really like the idea of a philosophy capable of *parallel process* (which is, of course, what i kind of like about the Tao itself). Land gets fascinated with the number zero, but he does it in the way that his mind works. i prefer Campbell's interpretation, that Tao is like a transcendent number itself, in a way, it precedes the ten thousand things. it can't be quantified in the same way, it isn't comparable to the rest. or perhaps it is like imagining - and to paraphrase - 'getting rid of God, because we *can* get rid of grammar' would be like - and it's certainly not the *absence* of the divine. quite the opposite!

because this to me is beautiful, the feeling that *speech becomes, at last, superfluous.* it's just *not necessary* to explain yourself, because the other guy already knows what you're going to say. no jokes, no fucking stammering, shit like this.
>Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?
and then what? then everything. total bliss. total fucking joy. that is the place i am always trying to get to. there is no point higher than this for me.

>Imagine everyone on the planet having such unique "religions" or rich and diverse perspectives, and exploring each other's freely, without fear of ideas.
this. this is the kind of postmodernity that i thought was the original plan. whatever it was, it was either broken from the start, or became wildly corrupted. or both. perennial philosophy was closer to what i thought the idea of a 'skepticism towards all metanarrative' implied, a deeper or fundamental underlying substrate. which turned out to be, imho, absolutely the case.

as it stands today philosophy has a lot more in common with *dentistry* than anything, i think. not necessarily a bad look, i guess. teeth rot and cause you a lot of fucking pain. back in the day you didn't have much of an option except to yank them, today you can do incredible things. that science has only gotten better, and we take a lot of that for granted. so i'd love a science of consciousness, it's the world's greatest mystery. we know a hell of a lot today and we are going to learn a hell of a lot more. but ideologies fuck with us, and so does a world of pants-on-head-retardedly awesome technological power, which is about nine yards away at this point from full-on mind control. would be nice if we could get the rest of the system to go along with it. the minor miracle is that we notice this shit at all. the rewards of self-inflicted crippling depression. why would it be any other way?

i know you know this stuff too amigo.

[Anonymous No.12483316]

So i travel back two weeks ago and nobody's there. S is there, alone in her flat completely out of her mind (not completely, actually) and starts pestering me over neon geometry portals, invasion from future though virtual reality and some weird fucking shit. She's got "Preface to Plato" and Gibson anthology on her desk. She sewn over windows with black fabric and punctured little holes, and also long strands of copper wire. Says fabric is to "see true forms" and that K is building a faraday cage. I couldn't get out of her where are K and D.

I later found D arrested for public indecency and unlawful possession and consumption of drugs. He apparently masturbated at some public square and after seeing neighboring restaurant waiter with his name "alexander" on a tag run up to him and started screaming "STAND A LITTLE OUT OF MY SOLAR ANUS". He then tried to assault cops with toy water blaster all while chanting "animal twang transmits imminent quake catastrophe". which sounds worse then you'd think with his terrible accent. He's lucky to be alive honestly.

I still don't know where K is. At S's house i found parts of his notes which included portrait of Kaczynski crossed out with red pen, two pages teared out of Mao's collected writings, map of local area ley lines and energy spots, toy model of Falcon Heavy rocket and a bitcoin wallet number. I've managed to open K's google account from S's laptop and there i found a saved link to this post and a one way plane ticket to saudi arabia. He locked me out of his account before i could notice anything else.

I'm fucking scared. K is pretty rich dude and could fuck some serious shit up, mainly his own life. I couldn't get S out of her flat and i'm not sure she qualifies for psychotic according to this country legal code. D is fine i guess we'll see how he recovers from the trip.

Fuck you. Fuck xenoplatonism, nick land, debort and his shitty crypto abrahamism. Fuck esoterica. This shit will ruin you and you'll be coming back for more. Egregores don't exist. Sorcery isn't real. Marxism is a bunch of whining. Clean your room.

For christ's sake.

[Anonymous No.12483322]

>>12483306
10/10 would read again

[Anonymous No.12483410]

>>12483172
>Cosmotechniques like pirated scientology, Reich and the process church? Bruce Lee and the Unabomber canonized?
a rather unassuming book called =The Question Concerning Technology in China touched off quite a fireworks display of rambling and other things, if you're looking to explore further have a gander and check the Cruffitan archives above (>>12481738). scientology meh, Reich sure, the process church i don't know, Bruce Lee is objectively awesome, the Unabomber not so much. not because his writing isn't prescient, which it absolutely is, but the whole Kill People thing. Cosmotech follows a strict Ahimsa policy.

link here, if you want a copy. good if you're into Heidegger, Greek metaphysics, Chinese metaphysics, Stiegler, Simondon, much else. and also in case you're wondering if there are any ways off of Nick Land's Wild Ride (which is really Karl Marx's Wild Ride cranked up with Deleuze and amphetamine) - the answer for now is, there might be, but...well. time will tell.
https://www.urbanomic.com/book/question-concerning-technology-china/

>Church would be nothing more than a cell signal dead zone
just for what it's worth, from the right angles churches don't exactly lack for aesthetics. my guess is that quite a lot of space is boring as fuck and does not look like this. i'm not saying you have to rush off anywhere tomorrow, just that some of the architecture is pretty fucking wild in its own right.

>or better yet a faraday cage
you can explain this one maybe

>Or maybe a meetup posted on the corkboard near the bathrooms at whole foods
jej

>Anarchist teenagers disguising their training as a game of urban capture the flag
you do not talk about Flight Club

>>12483306
>>12483316
runaway no-contest best post ITT. ring the bell. it's over

[Anonymous No.12483439]

>>12483410
Thanks for the link. Ahimsa eh? I feel like I can't fart without it killing a bhutanese infant or Malaysian garment worker. We must eventually address the meaning of intention.

[Anonymous No.12483447]

My names is Wharton Wiggler.

[Anonymous No.12483472]

>>12483306
>basic spectacle defences
What?

[Anonymous No.12483530]

>>12483439
>Thanks for the link.
it's a great book, i'd be happy to see more discussion about it here on the tap-dancing boards. YH is an interesting dude, one of the few guys who can talk about things intelligently without getting sucked into the whirlwind. i like it when people take Land seriously and don't hand-wave him, because he's ahead of the curve, but also it is his nature i think to get so ahead of the curve that it becomes a vortex.

three spot-on essays here for your perusal. enjoy.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/125815/on-the-unhappy-consciousness-of-neoreactionaries/
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/179224/on-automation-and-free-time/
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/161887/cosmotechnics-as-cosmopolitics/

>i feel like I can't fart without it killing a bhutanese infant or Malaysian garment worker.
okay. Ahimsa-lite. no bombs is what i'm saying.

>We must eventually address the meaning of intention.
it's going to become a question of cybernetics in the long run. and it should. that's the big one. the more we privatize, the more we all get sucked together into one big machine. barring total collapse it cannot go any other way. intention between you and us gets mediated by the interfaces, and in time by the relation of those interfaces to the time (or Temporalization?) in which we live. much else. i have found in my own experience that it's worth worth a little going batshit crazy thinking about it, it just doesn't have to be Fanged Noumena crazy. easymode Lacanian analysis &c is cozier, but there's an undeniable value to retracing Uncle Nick's steps down to the inferno also, i think.

that's why i think cynicism is weak and kind of boring. Unironic Fidelity (to what?) is more interesting. increasing co-dependency on machines is going to be the future, no question. two more months or so before we even get a new YH book on that very subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Recursivity-Contingency-Media-Philosophy-Yuk/dp/1786600536

and until then, ufblog.

>>12483447
sup wiggles

[Anonymous No.12483566]

You're a smart guy and you know what you're talking about, but don't you ever, ever get tired of talking and thinking about capital? You need to, quite literally, take a hike.

[Anonymous No.12483579]

>>12483530
>cybernetics
I was fucking around with IBM's Watson, using it to test facial recognition, and I realized that digital space is exclusive.. It has a carrying capacity, it has a thermodynamics, and.. I guess when more and more of our reality comes to be reflected in digital space, FOMO is going to become way more serious, like a fear of chronic bouts of amnesia, or Poe's struggle with catalepsy.. The technocracy demands that we all become technocrats or else, live outside. It isnt going to be how Huxley imagined the wilderness, it will more resemble how poor people can't afford bank accounts, have bad credit and pay 4x as much for a hotel room when noone will rent to them. A digital ghetto.

[Anonymous No.12483590]

>>12483579
Capitalism thrives on FOMO, capitalism is FOMO fanned to a screaming pitch, fueled by social media. No wonder suicide rates are skyrocketing. The only truly autonomous acts today are suicide and ascetism.

[Anonymous No.12483608]

DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATH

[Anonymous No.12483616]

>>12483566
>>12483530
>i like it when people take Land seriously and don't hand-wave him, because he's ahead of the curve, but also it is his nature i think to get so ahead of the curve that it becomes a vortex.
for the record, he takes Land seriously enough, and also *disagrees* with him. they've met at least once, and he thinks that Land is actually kind of wasting his time, or at least using his powers for Evil and not for Good.

it's not the worst analysis. i like Land because he seems to me to have actually gotten his finger on what really drives me insane about postmodernity, but there is a horizon also beyond which you have to ask yourself if you are carrying on with an obsession beyond value. as Alan Watts said about psychedelics: once you've gotten the message, hang up the phone.

his work on BTC is brilliant. but YH ultimately wants to talk about things in a different way, and he doesn't have the kind of spitting venom that makes Uncle Nick so charming. he likes Heidegger, Stiegler, and Simondon, and isn't quite as gloom-and-doom as Land is. felt that warranted mentioning, in case you thought you were being served up just another Land homer.

or maybe i just wanted to post some more gloomy /acc-type aesthetics, and yet which also suggested a kind of sentimental hopefulness, mingled with melancholy, and yet more or less the right frame of mind for a sequence of narratives in which the final fantasy really would come to depict shopping malls, and luxury cars, and the lives of the idle rich soul-bonded to industrial processes they can no more escape from than understand. in other words, typical nonsense for these threads.

>>12483566
>You're a smart guy
stopped reading right there
>and you know what you're talking about
started reading right here again shortly thereafter, altho warily, like a confused animal
>but don't you ever, ever get tired of talking and thinking about capital?
it doesn't seem to work
>You need to, quite literally, take a hike.
find a flaw. you're not wrong. i mean i did quite literally take like a two-month leave of shitposting absence after the Cosmotech megathread, and i quite literally left town to do so, and quite literally did indeed take unironic walks in nature with literal family members, and threw snowballs, and various other non-Wild Ride related stuff. i also read a lot of Eastern stuff to rinse out the capitalism also. those things did in fact happen and they were pretty cozy. i'm here shitposting again for now, and at some point i will vanish again, and so on.

so sometimes i take a break. sometimes i see Space Taoism threads and feel the thirst for schizo-rambling.

[Anonymous No.12483627]

>>12483616
I feel you, I don't know your life outside of these threads and it would be presumptuous of me to guess

[Anonymous No.12483688]

>>12483579
this is also how i think it goes, and it makes gravely mourn a kind of JG Ballard or Iain Banks or PKD-tier writer who could capture some of this psychic desertifaction that is the actual story of what's going on. writers like Land or Baudrillard can describe the metaphysics of it to some degree, but the thing that i pay attention to is that the story of capital itself really, really isn't in anyone's control anymore. i know that to say this is to kind of commit to the same paranoid structuralism that drives a lot of shit that i hate in the political arena, but Digital Ghetto doesn't sound remotely weird today.

>The technocracy demands that we all become technocrats or else, live outside.
this also. and even it reminds me of what Fisher said about Grace Jones: you give people a chance to express themselves, and all they do is exploit themselves infinitely more ruthlessly than any outsider gaze could ever do. the technocratic line of thinking holds sway over both wings of the political spectrum. it's what will rip America into pieces, and as YH notes, it's completely possessed China as well. we're doing as much Social Credit groundwork as the CCP, and it is very difficult to imagine alternatives. i think the tragedy of Wokism precedes from the misbelief that it is anything other than the vanguard of capital itself, an attempt to capture the control mechanism by other means, when what it leads to is the total objectification of human beings under the sign of technocracy. it is how we construct the Matrix. they're way ahead of Trump et al like that. and, really, China also. i am betting on a brighter future for Wokism than the CCP, it's just that their idea of a bright future isn't mine.

>FOMO
TIL

>a fear of chronic bouts of amnesia, or Poe's struggle with catalepsy
this kind of stuff also. who even can define sanity, or anxiety, in the future? suicide is already a major killer of people today, and people do unpredictable shit when they get depressed. bad ideas gain a lot more traction. much else. we are experimenting on the affects with the affects, and all of it for reasons that are really not good. we are doing it because we can, and because we can, we must...but this is what i was saying before about the trap of it all. we have basically equated Progress with the Good since Hegel (or Rousseau). varyingly conservative (frequently Catholic) writers on tech have warned about this - Heidegger, Ellul, McLuhan, Virilio...and Baudrillard, hardly a conservative, and yet who glimpsed what happens when we fall in love wih the image. and of course Land, who is a special case and then some.

anyways, co-signing pretty much all of that post. we love to fuck with the mind and mind-fucking is...somewhat dangerous.

[Anonymous No.12483731]

yo girardfag have u ever ruminated awn making a permanent fixture-place for these kinds of threads on other sites specifically ∞-chan, as a board in conjunction w/ ur musings here? /lit/ administration prolly doesnt take 2 kindly 2 these kind of taulcs here 1nce they veer off brand given how honeypotted this Gaylord Gettier-joint iz already

unless ur the board owner of /accelerando/?

[Anonymous No.12483767]

You guys really make me moist.

[Anonymous No.12483797]

>>12483590
>Capitalism thrives on FOMO, capitalism is FOMO fanned to a screaming pitch, fueled by social media. No wonder suicide rates are skyrocketing. The only truly autonomous acts today are suicide and ascetism.
bloc-quoted for truth. i really do think that is part of the way through this also. in my own case, excess (if not pathological) curiosity has definitely delivered the goods, but The Straight And Narrow Path strikes me as being eminently sensible these days. nobody can handle all of the madness. the original bathyspheric Intronaut was Nietzsche, who pretty much permanently set the high bar. the back end of Fanged Noumena is Nick Land rolling initiative against the DM. most of us do not need to do this.

>>12483608
it's not too late anon
https://twitter.com/infinite_scream?lang=en

>>12483627
>I feel you, I don't know your life outside of these threads and it would be presumptuous of me to guess
you couldn't find it with an electron microscope. i belong to the Wild Ride now. whatever you guess, it's almost certainly worse than that. the conversation is best kept as such to the Realms Philosophic.

and with that i'm packing it in for the night gents. more tomorrow most like. i feel like some chill music going on tonight after all this schizoposting would not be unwelcome. some that comes from an auteur vidya mind can't hurt either, and which was the theme of more than one commentary on draconian ethics, false prophets, despotism and the rest. sweet dreams all, catch ya's.

Ultima: Stones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCRqSbV_vo0

[Anonymous No.12483814]

>>12483590
>FOMO
What the fuck is that?

[Anonymous No.12483820]

>>12483814
Fear of Missing Out.

[Anonymous No.12483850]

>>12483797
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Ahem, existence is to suffer and inflict suffering. God is dead, our cultural institutions are a wasting domain of hunger and belligerence, the sapient among us have given in.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

[Anonymous No.12484248]

Bump for the night

[Anonymous No.12484257]

>>12484248
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwh goodnight sleep tight.

[Anonymous No.12484264]

>>12483850
>>12484248
>>12484257

[Anonymous No.12484466]

[Anonymous No.12485641]

morning thought experiment #837534

if we imagined Bizarro Star Wars, it would look a lot like our reality. in Bizarro Star Wars, the universe is driven by a conflict between the Jedi Empire and the Rebel Sith. this shouldn't surprise us; after all, all of the lore from the earlier films pretty much as the Empire being beaten at every turn. at some point there would have to be a change.

and so basically, everybody switches places. the Jedi Empire now regulates all life in the universe, and the Sith Rebels are driven into the underground. the Death Stars are renamed Peace Moons, and other than that they do exactly the same thing. the Jedi Council is slowly phased out, or quits, in disgust. and large numbers of Imperial engineers and other business types are laid off, to fend for themselves in space. crucially, artificial intelligence never develops, or evidence of its development is torpedoed. in this sense it is not unlike the Butlerian Jihad, except that the Jihad is never fought explicitly, or openly, and any evidence of its being fought is buried, or hidden. it is entirely possible that this is because there is some apprehension or anxiety about a computer program taking control of the laser itself. the technology has been *malfunctioning,* mysteriously, throughout the Empire of late. reports of this are covered up.

there is another mysterious problem also - the Force is disappearing. the Jedi Empire eventually removes all of the Jedi themselves from positions of influence, keeping only one or two for propaganda purposes. Yoda is revolted by what the Empire has become, and possibly dies, or vanishes, or fakes his own death.

a kind of uneasy peace reigns in the core worlds, but corruption sets in. the smugglers are co-opted to work for the Jedi Empire, and largely benefit from the process, because there is always the threat of Sith Rebels elsewhere. the Sith are a constant danger, even though there haven't been sightings of them in years, or even decades. under a new directive, the Jedi Empire authorizes itself to take on an ever-more watchful role in the industrial development of outer worlds, so that they can be brought into the Imperial Trading Federation, which is run by the son - or nephew - of Jabba the Hutt, who is a popular and beloved figure. the Hutts are re-branded as a symbol of new Imperial Tolerance: just because they look like a slug, after all, doesn't mean you should hate them. and everywhere the Hutts go, people get all the things they want: dancing, music, hookah parlors, whatever else. nobody does better than the Hutts under the new regime.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12485645]

>>12483850
To go over, one must go under. I hope these videos inspire others, as they were inspired by my own journey into philosophy and self-discovery.
https://vimeo.com/129609470
https://vimeo.com/218908974
https://vimeo.com/262025984
https://vimeo.com/265524091

[Anonymous No.12485673]

>>12485641
somewhere out there on the new frontier is a being not unlike Darth Maul, who is perhaps the Last Sith. for all we know, he - but *she* would be even better - might be one of the last beings in the universe capable of using the Force at all. most of those who belong to the Jedi Empire have basically been given a straight diet of propaganda about the nature of the first War to begin with, which has also been retconned out of existence.

but life out there on the fringe worlds is *hard.* and it is entirely possible that some investigator goes out to report on (or accidentally finds) evidence that the Force still exists, out there, although in dark and dangerous places. if this film was really spot-on, the plot might very well focus on a being - and i would prefer a woman to a man - who is confronted by some gormless Jedi Empire thought police, and who says - yes, the Force is here, and you cannot have it.

when pressed to explain themselves, the rejoinder: why is the Force here? because life out here is hard. there are rancors and weird monsters and corrupt smugglers who use the fringe worlds to do all kinds of things that cover up what is going on. there are phony wars cooked up by the Jedi Empire that justify the use of the Death Star to annihilate worlds where it was believed that the Sith might appear, but really only to drive the wheels of industry. the Force, she explains, doesn't necessarily mean only *power,* it means *freedom* and *independence.* and then she explains that it would be better if this dweeb could kindly get the fuck off of her world and leave her alone.

things never work out this way, of course. if said dweeb returns home and has to admit that he saw the Force being used out there, or by the Sith, he's going to lose his job, and be exiled. you can imagine how these things would unfold for yourself. the essential point here is that it is *nature* - even the wild and unruly nature of infernal, or frozen, or swamplike worlds - where the Force thrives. it cannot live in industrial worlds, whether they present themselves in the name of the Greater Good or not. the new Jedi Empire - which again, begins to simply become as grey and modern and bureaucratic as the old Empire, and finally gives up the name of Jedi altogether - absolutely cannot tolerate this, and will probably want to deploy increasingly powerful counter-measures as a result, since the Sith absolutely cannot be permitted to exist.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12485730]

>>12485673
there are actually quite a lot of characters you could put into a story like this which would change the conventional Good Rebels Bad Empire narrative. to my mind, the real struggle is only between the Empire and the Sith themselves, because in that you have a contest between materialism and idealism - a materialism that becomes corrupted by idealism, and an idealism (however selfish and evil) which actually undercuts the desire for the materialists to flatten out the universe into Gestell, teleoplexy, &c.

another character i would include would be like an Imperial contractor whose life was destroyed by Rebels, in an attack on some base, and who becomes a kind of a rogue. now you have a guy who really hates the Jedi. the basic trope behind him would simply be that he was a victim of an excessive Good, or a casualty of a war fought propagandistically. when Rebels attack imperial strongholds, more lives are always lost than only the lives of soldiers. in the space between these is the realm of the smugglers and so on, but the smugglers always roll over for money, and the Empire itself always has more money to offer than the Rebels. you might be a Han Solo figure if the Rebels really are the Good 70s Lefties that this lore was all conceived by, but things have changed somewhat by 2019, and things are much greyer and darker now.

there really are no Rebels in this world anyways - or if there are, they are old and crusty and embittered. wherever Yoda is, there is the essence of the thing, and if Yoda is disgusted, or dead, then it's a whole new world. Hutts are the ideal model of a species which the new Jedi Empire prefers, because they are the perfect image of bloated plutocracy.

but that is also why i would include this twist also: it's actually the Hutts who are now - provisionally - taking on the role of the rebels, because the fact is they really hate what the Empire is doing, they know it's fucking and wrong and horrible, they know they are being abused and used as agitprop symbols, and their ultimate goal is going to be to quietly fund not a *Rebellion* but something much more subtle. really it's just a defection. they are, in a sense, waiting for the Jedi to appear. they kind of miss them, and they know something is deeply fucked up with the universe, and they know that they don't have a cure for it.

[Anonymous No.12485783]

>>12485730
in terms of how this story ends, or resolves, i think it would be enough to simply show the lives of a small group of characters in this strange and topsy-turvy new world, where power corrupts, but power itself comes from two sources, both the material and the idealistic. the Force itself is what binds them together, but the real secret of the thing lies in *balance.* War - Star Wars - is useful because it always is this aesthetic squandering. symbols of power get blown up, sword duels take place, massive strategic operations, all of this. but the whole point of a thought-experiment like this is that it is about the War in Peacetime, the shadow of a war that was fought long ago, and mysteriously cannot seem to prevent itself from being re-perpetuated.

what do you do with the Force when it is unopposed, when it isn't always driven by a Jedi/Sith division, or when the Jedi/Sith division isn't in turn sublated into a political struggle, where both sides are equally capable of wielding, or using, a Death Star? Star Wars was more Marxist than it realized, because - like Marx, and like many others - it was impossible of dealing with the possibility of computers, artificial intelligence, and much else. for all of its technology, the world of Star Wars is not so much more advanced then the world of Middle Earth. in many ways that is a *good* thing, because the fundamental meaning of conscience really does require us to act (shout-outs to Hegel here) as if we are, in fact, in control of our own destiny.

and i think in some level this is always the appeal of War as the great regulator: You Must Choose, except that what you don't have is a choice *not* to choose. the whole thing is systemic. both Hitler and Stalin would have been just fine with an eternal war on the Eastern/Western front, so long as they had stability at home; and today both the Red Team and the Blue Team are fine with a US civil war, so long as the profits come in, and griefmongers on both sides can develop new-model religions of ressentiment that keep you angry, and bitter, and sad, and afraid, and trapped in a past you keep re-creating, and dreaming of a future that never quite arrives.

if you end the war, you end the economics of war and the religiosity of war. the immediate question: well, what else? *then* what? it is not hard to imagine this question being asked by a kind of Grand Inquisitor figure, who i would also want to include in this mock-up, and who is not so much defined by cruelty, or by a sinister plot, or by Sith-possession, or by cynicism, but only by desperation, by the inner agony of the tyrant who relies upon the Other to justify themselves, who has been created for no other purpose.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12485799]

>>12485730
Hey, I started a thread a few days ago on /lit/.
I'm looking for the truth, I don't know what to with my life. Is life completely meaningless?

my questions from my archived thread:
>I just wanna know what the world is, who or what >I am, why the world exists.
>Is our world a representation or a revelation of something metaphysical?
>Are metaphysics real?
>Is everything just matter and/or energy?
>Is humanity just an accident in the chaos of the cosmos?
>My life is just a flash in the eternal void?
>Am I gonna die without knowing what the fuck happened?

The most interesting answer is on the pic.
He recommended this book:
Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite

[Anonymous No.12485828]

>>12485799
You might get good answer but nothing you'll retain past the initial endorphin boost, overhaul your life and start reading extremely dank metaphysics (and its detractors, know thy enemy), come back in 3 years.


Perlman is excellent, I also recommend Andras Lazslo (google his aphorisms) and Uzdavinys

[Anonymous No.12485831]

>>12485783
postmodernity never got past these guys, it only told itself that it did. perhaps, if we want to be ultra-cynical, we can say that God died, and we made War god, and that then became our god. the easy workaround for this was of course the division between the Imperial War and the Revolutionary War, because the Revolutionary War - on screen, purest ideology - became even better than the cure. it was a way of doing the wrong thing while telling yourself it was the right one. but there is no end to the Revolution once the Revolution becomes sublated into a theory of economics. Class War never ends.

and if such a thought experiment managed to show up not Star Wars but Class Wars, and the contradictions therein, now that would really be something. there is no *cure* for economics, for industrialization, for capitalism, but there is something mysteriously pathological about the means by which we *forget ourselves* in participating in this process - you could do worse than to call this thing, The Force.

and this is where i would permit myself to get extra-preachy in the final scenes. the real Force is Being, and *Being Undivided.* the Jedi and the Sith are failed forms of this, just as Laozi always said:

>When the great Tao is forgotten,
>goodness and piety appear.
>When the body's intelligence declines,
>cleverness and knowledge step forth.
>When there is no peace in the family,
>filial piety begins.
>When the country falls into chaos,
>patriotism is born.

the way i would express isn't through Yoda, but i would actually do it through Jabba - or Jabba Junior, or whatever. that's the point. my female equivalent of Darth Maul gets to go back to a violent and fiery life doing whatever she does; she can walk on the Empire. a lot of people can walk on the Empire. and if the Empire decides that No One Walks On The Empire, well - so much for the Empire, which was never beyond good and evil so much as it was before it, or beneath it.

and life goes on. the universe does what it does, because mercifully it's not in anyone's *control* anymore. and who knows what can happen after that. maybe nothing. maybe everything. you don't know. and that's fucking perfect. maybe you don't need Jedi. you don't want them.

anyways. 'twas a thing i needed to ramble out.

[Anonymous No.12485889]

>>12485828
I know Andras Laszlo.
He's Hungarian, like me.
However, I don't really understand most of his writings. Esoterical, occult, and mystical stuff, but the most confusing thing is that he identifies himself as a solipsist. He's also part of the Traditionalist School, he writes a lot about Guénon and Evola.

[Anonymous No.12485934]

>>12485889
I know about* him

[Anonymous No.12485958]

>>12477335
We don't learn by merely listening nor reciting. Learning has to be integrated into our being itself through experience such as in your example with the mother and child. Our words are meaningless unless backed by direct experience and consequences. We can understand what the language means semantically but we are still not unconsciously learned. Slogans, platitudes and ideals are not so boldly professed once they bring us to hell.

[Anonymous No.12485996]

>>12485799
>i'm looking for the truth, I don't know what to with my life.
welcome to the club.
>Is life completely meaningless?
i don't think so. loneliness hurts. guilt hurts. cruelty saddens. conversely, falling in love feels pretty sweet. unless you're a complete sociopath those things are pretty meaningful.
>I just wanna know what the world is, who or what I am, why the world exists.
strange loop boyo. plans within plans. we do not yet know what a body can do.
>Is our world a representation or a revelation of something metaphysical?
both. it's very hard to tell the difference. 'tis why it's such a good look to share ideas with people who will steelman you rather than strawman you. sometimes strawmanning is okay too, for helping you sharpen your ideas, or even to prevent you from being sucked into terrible ideologies. but there is a horizon beyond which the open hand is preferred to the closed fist.
>Are metaphysics real?
the real is only CTRL. and CTRL cannot explain itself. that is why it must own the rules of the game.
>Is everything just matter and/or energy?
ever read William Blake?
>Is humanity just an accident in the chaos of the cosmos?
maybe, but you have to admit it's a pretty fucking amazing accident if so. and maybe it's the case that we are just trying to figure out how to balance order and chaos.
>My life is just a flash in the eternal void?
it would probably be better if it wasn't. Campbell has a nice line: 'he who does not become a hero becomes another victim to be saved.' i like that one, partly because it works like Critical Mass Victim Theory - beyond a certain horizon, victims can only be saved by the most brutal measures. that's a bad scene. it would be better if we had a more charitable, sane, optimistic, and frankly *angelic* or saintly world. but money and contingency and desires fuck with us. sometimes good, sometimes bad. or Moorcock: in heaven, you might become the person you always thought you could be, while in hell you are the person you always feared you were.
>Am I gonna die without knowing what the fuck happened?
it's hard to say! what did happen? nobody really knows. the *least* knowing are the philosophers. they have absolutely no fucking idea. but sometimes they do advance some interesting possibilities by which we might ask slightly more interesting questions.

Foucault: 'truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject's own being into question.' if you want to enjoy the Wild Ride, you can't fake it. true, you can play poker with monopoly money, and it's good for learning the ins and outs of the game, but once you start playing with real money that you can't get back, everything's different. the more interesting questions we ask, the more interesting the responses we receive. i think our minds are like this, they like being challenged. bodies also, of course. but we like having big and deep and serious puzzles to work with, it's good for us.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12486007]

>>12479752
>even to think about it is intoxicating. if you have a smooth connection between media, academics, government, corporations, you can Get Your Mind Right. it's like Christianity all over again, in its worst and most cynical aspects (as well as, incredibly, some of its best ones). you can connect up with everyone else on LinkedIn, you can curate everything, you can give speaking engagements, you can *love the feeling of confessing your racism, your sexism,* all of this. that is really important. because after that, the world is all yours, intellectually speaking. your entire consciousness can disappear into matrixes of algorithmic technology, tertiary protention, and a smooth and perfect blend between the material, the political, even the spiritual unfolds. and the money, of course, is always real. you're looking for how a Matrix begins to operate itself? look no further than this. shit, it will even bear some resemblance to Star Trek: TNG.
This has been expressed in many different ways by many different people, but I love this succinctness. Thank you.

[Anonymous No.12486033]

>>12485889
Yes, a metaphysical solipsist, not wikipedia solipsism, the only that exists is the "I"

[Anonymous No.12486062]

>>12481028
My niggah. Edward Feser is interesting and advocates reconsidering thinkers like Thomas Aquinas (Aristotelian metaphysics and Natural Philosophy) and seriously thinks Enlightenment thinkers misrepresented Aquinas without adding anything new which resulted in a conceptual shifts that have yielded some fruits but also our insanity.

Interesting posts: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/

[Anonymous No.12486099]

>>12486033
I thought he's just an edgy cult leader.
Most people in Hungary avoid him because of his ultra-far-right politics and he wants to bring back monarchy.
Can you explain metaphysical solipsism?

[Anonymous No.12486105]

>>12485996
here's my definition of a utopia: it would be like utopia for Existentialists, a place where people essentially go to to work out exactly the kinds of questions that you have just asked. in order for that to work, it would have to fulfil at least two conditions

a) it would have to realize that many of those questions are unsolvable, and
b) manage to keep itself functional, or afloat, while it does so.

what you want is a place where you can get the answers to the kinds of questions you are looking for, but my own sense is that - for the time being - a lot of the mega-super-interesting stuff really is genuinely unanswerable. it is of course possible - if we take a Landian perspective - that the deal is to further the development of capital, AGI, teleoplexy et al. that's serving the Good, that's being a slave to Reason, much else. Reza is a very persuasive writer, he's almost like what Uncle Nick would be if you removed the Marx and the Deleuze and replaced them with Plato (which is to say, having almost no resemblance to his former self at all).

but still, i think that turning people into computers will fuck with us. we are not steely machines, we are irritatingly squishy, sentimental, panicky, quirky, busted, confused, absurd meatbags also. we do both of these things. and we cannot really go it alone - marriages, or relationships, or friendships, or groups that bring out the best in each other are vitally necessary for exactly this reason, so that we do not become Tyrants of the Spirit (or Tyrants of the Intellect) or Tyrants, really, of any kind.

i mean imagine if a place like this existed, a kind of para-world - call it Gap City, as in the Gap Year you take after uni and before entering the work force. a kind of place in which all kinds of mysterious religious, philosophical, technological et al questions are being asked. in a way it would be like Purgatory, but in another sense it would *tell* you this, explicitly. no sinister plots, no conspiracies. a place where you can ask a whole lot of impossible questions, and not really feel as if anyone is *hiding* anything from you. the point here is really just to make the place more interesting, and it only works by making you more interesting, and vice-versa. like a pirate-anarchy-software-junkyard. all the appeal of the post-apocalyptic world, without the world you left to come here actually disappearing. maybe once upon a time that's what university literature departments were supposed to do. those days today are gone, but *there is no fucking substitute for that.*

>record scratch
you know what fuck that. here's a way better suggestion: ignore everything i just wrote and go get a copy of Planescape: Torment. play Planescape: Torment anon. then ask again after you beat that game.
>thx inner self
>np cringe memer

[Anonymous No.12486198]

>>12486105
Aren't you a bit schizophrenic?
I think about schizophrenia as a passage between the mind and the divine.

[Anonymous No.12486303]

Any beginner recommendations for Taoism?

[Anonymous No.12486306]

>>12471017
>he hates it because it is always right after the fact, no matter what it was. but on some deep level he hates it because he wants to do it also. he wants to be the ultimate Wisdom-Giver, and he knows it.
I don't think this is quite right, he hates it because "wisdom" in the proverbial sense is simply the result of interplay and permutation between parallel or opposing ideas, the knowledge of the wise man is nothing more than an ability to rearrange simple or deceptively self-evident truths in order to invest them with a new kind of revelatory significance. A good example concerns the idea of beauty: one wise man might say that transcendental beauty is elevated above the material world, another might disagree and claim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, while a third man might claim that it is instead a case of seeing the beauty in the minutia of everyday life. While none of these statements are definitively "wrong", they are ultimately meaningless in relation to one another in that all they do is rearrange subject, object and predicate terms to say slightly different (but still incredibly banal and repetitive) things. Zizek doesn't want to be a wise man, he fully embraces the fact that all people (including himself and all other reportedly "wise" men) are disgusting idiots, and that wisdom is really no different than t-shirt slogans.

You're absolutely right to suggest that neoliberalism secretly desires psychoanalysis, however, in fact I wouldn't even call it a secret. The best way of maintaining neoliberal consensus is by incorporating all intellectual enquiries into its praxis, such that even critical projects that are radically opposed to its dominion are nevertheless triangulated within a grid of permissible behaviours and ideologies. Revolution is pacified and impotent, protest becomes a leisurely pastime and celebration of community rather than a engagement in real activism.

[Anonymous No.12486397]

>>12486198
>Aren't you a bit schizophrenic?
i wouldn't say so, but therein lies the rub: if enough people around me eventually start to agree that i am, then...? but no, i don't think so. maybe a lot of people are far less mentally ill than they think they are. the world is fucked up but it's because we get hung up ultimately on the concept of a norm that is very elusive, and i think it has to do with the wiring of our drives and the way desires work. we live in a very pleasure-driven world, but that is a comparatively new phenomenon. all so much acclimatizing to the Gutenberg Galaxy.

ultimately i don't think it matters, because the whole point is that what constitutes philosophical schizophrenia is its irreducibility to representation. nothing is ever more creative than the schizoid process, but this is also why we don't see - to use a cherished example - the World of Ruin as *art,* or Kefka himself as artist. he is a genuine schizo and yet a failed artist.

>I think about schizophrenia as a passage between the mind and the divine.
i think this is a wonderful definition, and i cannot imagine a better description of art, or a reason to explore it. and that is an exceedingly wonderful image to use also. really, really nice.

to choose four thinkers - Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, and Deleuze - you have a pretty spectacular posse to go exploring What Did Aesthetics Mean By This. there is creation, there are also problems with appreciating creation; aesthetics is complex stuff, and enjoying things is actually quite *difficult.* the real traps to avoid are those of not only communism (politicized aesthetics) or fascism (aestheticized politics) but i think neoliberalism, which just seems to be absolutely incapable, or unwilling, to take the deep dive. abolishing philosophy altogether, or continually making it subordinate to the needs of the state (increasingly, only another way of talking about privatization) - this is basically my gripe.

it's not like back in the Renaissance artists wouldn't have had similar problems either, i think, with Patronage. and Goya subtly paints one of the least flattering royal portraits ever. with Napoleon, of course, things change; Napoleon looks great under David's brush, and he looks pretty good in Hegel's imagination as well. we enter the age of ideology in the subtlest ways.

and today we lose, i think, that sense of the divine. it winds up becoming replaced with Spectacle. we don't have a world other than this one, and only tyrants believe that such a world can be crowbarred into existence. that's what makes artists go insane, i think. and insanity loves politics, drama, strife, and conflict. those are aesthetic phenomena par excellence, but it's kind of why i wanted to go on a tangent today about Star Wars: as Zizek says, what do you do on the day after?

[Aminom No.12486436]

Here's the important takes from my perspective:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/daoism/
>The term Dao means a road, and is often translated as “the Way.” This is because sometimes dao is used as a nominative (that is, “the dao”) and other times as a verb (i.e. daoing). Dao is the process of reality itself, the way things come together, while still transforming. All this reflects the deep seated Chinese belief that change is the most basic character of things.
http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com/writings/nondual-yin-and-yang/
>In the famous Chinese yin-yang symbol, a dark circle appears in the light area, and a light circle appears in the dark area. The opposites support and penetrate each other – they cannot exist without each other.
>And so, the opposites are not really ‘opposites’ at all – they do not really ‘oppose’ each other but complement and sustain each other. They are in a kind of mysterious and intimate relationship, recognising each other in each other and resting in that recognition.
>You cannot be in relationship with an ‘Absolute other’, with something or someone totally separate from yourself and containing none of yourself – there can be no such thing. To see an ‘other’, to be in any kind of relationship at all with them, means to actually see yourself in them, to recognise that familiar light spot or dark spot and know it intimately as yourself. This is the origin of compassion.
>The point is not to deny or try to get rid of the dance of apparent opposites (to try and oppose opposites – how funny!) but to recognise that all opposites are only beautiful metaphors pointing to that which is prior to all opposites – Life itself.

[Aminom No.12486444]

>>12486436
Forgot to reply to this: >>12486303
>In the vinegar tasters picture, Laozi's (Lao Tzu) expression is sweet because of how the teachings of Taoism view the world. Every natural thing is intrinsically good as long as it remains true to its nature. This perspective allows Laozi to experience the taste of vinegar without judging it. "Ah this," he might be thinking, "this is vinegar!" From such a perspective, the taste doesn't need to be sweet, sour, bitter or bland. It is simply the taste of vinegar. By openly experiencing vinegar as vinegar, Laozi acknowledges and participates in the harmony of nature. As this is the very goal of Taoism, whatever the taste of vinegar, the experience is good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McHvqjI17rA

https://youtu.be/2K_aHCJbxN0

Space Taoism relates the yin-yang co-creative dialectic to the Whiteheadean being-becoming co-equality as the foundational nature of change, and goes from there to the development of a theory of creativity or "universal evolution" that is expressed in biological life and conscious experience, and ultimately as a praxis of recursive self-improvement, and from this to co-creative mutual improvement. Taoism is in a sense Easter Calculus derived from the experiential angle, and Whiteheadean thought and the entire tradition of Western philosophy and science is Western calculus. Their co-creative synthesis is the future.

https://imgur.com/a/ZtLDYJT

https://old.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/9rpnrl/space_taoism_101

[Anonymous No.12486478]

>>12486062
I'm surprised he still has a job, criticizing the Enlightenment is sacrilege in Academia.

[Anonymous No.12486484]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I WANT TO BE ANNIHILATED

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I DON'T WANT TO BE ASSIMILATED

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

[Anonymous No.12486493]

>>12486478
He teaches at a community college so there's that!

[Anonymous No.12486528]

>>12486493
That's unironically more respectable than Fisher, Negarestani or Brassier. Being a visiting professor Loyola Marymount isn't bad either.

[Anonymous No.12486530]

>>12486007
it's my pleasure. no need to thank me tho, as you can see it sometimes takes me a couple of thousand words' worth of shitpost to say anything interesting! i am a fairly crude and resource-heavy processor like that. but i'm glad you enjoyed.

>>12486303
Graham's Disputers of the Tao is often suggested, but it's a little dry. Chang Chung-Yuan has a couple of good books on the subject. Eva Wong is cozy. the Mitchell translation of the TTC, and his second book are worth checking out. World Wisdom has a good book on it as well. with illustrations! and everybody loves the story of the dextrous butcher.

https://straightbamboo.com/the-chef-cuts-the-ox/

this is, of course, assuming that you've read the TTC and Zhuangzi themselves, which are pretty much all you really need. those books are designed for beginners - which are pretty much what make them the works of genius that they are.

>>12486306
>While none of these statements are definitively "wrong", they are ultimately meaningless in relation to one another in that all they do is rearrange subject, object and predicate terms to say slightly different (but still incredibly banal and repetitive) things. Zizek doesn't want to be a wise man, he fully embraces the fact that all people (including himself and all other reportedly "wise" men) are disgusting idiots, and that wisdom is really no different than t-shirt slogans.
100% this. much better than my hot take.

>You're absolutely right to suggest that neoliberalism secretly desires psychoanalysis, however, in fact I wouldn't even call it a secret. The best way of maintaining neoliberal consensus is by incorporating all intellectual enquiries into its praxis, such that even critical projects that are radically opposed to its dominion are nevertheless triangulated within a grid of permissible behaviours and ideologies. Revolution is pacified and impotent, protest becomes a leisurely pastime and celebration of community rather than a engagement in real activism.
that's the thing. my sense is that analysis in the end can even come to take the role of a kind of Schopenhauerian contemplation, because Revolution taps into those dimensions of the psyche that often conclude - not unwarranted! - that Burn Them All is the kind of change you can *really* believe in!

and this is where things get complex, where we find ourselves vanishing into Pharmacopolis. we ask our own questions, and fix our own problems, but never perfectly, especially if what we really want to do is get outside of ourselves. it leads to paranoia - essentially, the fear of breaking rules that we ourselves have invented in order to please the Big Other, but the Big Other never was...and all the way along, we are initiating the next bunch into a system that becomes only more Byzantine, until it really does become impossible to distinguish the pleasure from the pain. or is that the site of the epistemological break? maybe both?

[Anonymous No.12486614]

>>12486530
i used the wrong pic, aaaaahh

if you look at something like Dwarf Fortress you have a kind of fascinating model of how the mind also works. underneath it is Hell; there's no question about that. and the more that things work, the more Tarn/Toady has arranged the machine so that we wind up in the long run destroyed by our own prosperity. Dwarf Fortress is also afflicted with a complicated migrant situation, but the catch is that *they're royalty.* it's not always a train of asylum-seekers, it's even worse - it's fucking king and queens, who have enormous demands for your fortress, and they too have to be met. quite a reversal!

the other thing is that the dwarves aren't really afflicted by a drive to *accumulate,* but by a mysterious *art drive.* they're not interested in money; what makes them go insane is when they need to *create* something, and they don't the materials. then maybe they want to drink, and god help you if you don't have liquor on hand for that.

needless to say i completely love this. what sucks you down towards the Fun at the bottom can be partly because of course at higher intensities rarer minerals and materials are found, and you can build the lava forges and so on - or, conversely, simply because building *upwards* is impossible. True Dwarves only build *downwards,* and of course things only get crazier and worse and more dangerous the farther below you go.

but the question about madness is posed in a different way. there really is no Big Evil Thing in Dwarf Fortress - hell is down there, and it was always down there, and you knew exactly what it was going to look like, and what it would do, and this is coded directly into the game also. you are explicitly warned: beyond here is hell, and nothing but hell, and there is no colonizing of hell, or absorbing it productively into your base.

the dwarves want to *create* things even more than they want to own them. and the Fortress itself can make itself completely impregnable - this is always fun, and you as the defender can come up with all kinds of ways to torment and abuse the goblins who attack, although the colossi and giant spiders and carp and whatever else will fuck your shit up completely. but it is never impregnable in an internal sense, precisely because the dwarves themselves are internally driven by desires that - were they otherwise - would bring into question the nature of Dwarf Fortresses themselves.

i'm wondering if it really isn't a kind of exquisitely Deleuzian game now, at the moment. anybody want to take a swing at that one?

[Anonymous No.12486679]

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/concretizing-abstract.html
>Eric Voegelin famously (if obscurely) characterized utopian political projects as attempts to “immanentize the eschaton.” A related error -- and one that underlies not only political utopianism but scientism and its offspring -- might be called the tendency to “concretize the abstract.” Treating abstractions as if they were concrete realities is something Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, labeled the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness,” and what has also been called the “Reification Fallacy.” It has been an occupational hazard of philosophy and science since the time of the Pre-Socratics. The Aristotelian strain in Western thought formed a counterpoint to this “concretizing” tendency within the context of ancient philosophy, and also more or less inoculated Scholasticism against the tendency. But it came roaring back with a vengeance with Galileo, Descartes, and their modern successors, and has dominated Western thought ever since. Wittgenstein tried to put an end to it, but failed; for bad metaphysics can effectively be counteracted only by good metaphysics, not by no metaphysics. And Aristotelianism is par excellence a metaphysics which keeps abstractions in their place.
>We abstract when we consider some particular aspect of a concrete thing while bracketing off or ignoring the other aspects of the thing. For example, when you consider a dinner bell or the side of a pyramid exclusively as instances of triangularity, you ignore their color, size, function, and metal or stone composition. Or to borrow an example from a recent post, when aircraft engineers determine how many passengers can be carried on a certain plane, they might focus exclusively on their average weight and ignore not only the passengers’ sex, ethnicity, hair color, dinner service preferences, etc., but even the actual weight of any particular passenger.

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/07/hitting-metaphysical-snooze-button.html
>One of the major themes of The Last Superstition is the significance of the early modern philosophers’ replacement of the classical teleological conception of nature with an anti-teleological or mechanistic conception. Another major theme is how utterly oblivious most contemporary intellectuals are to the nature and consequences of this revolution – about the motivations that lay behind it, its true relationship to modern science, the surprising feebleness of the arguments used to justify it, and the new and intractable problems it opened up. Most of all, they show little awareness of the deep conceptual problems inherent in the attempt to give a thoroughly mechanistic account of the world, as contemporary naturalism seeks to do.

[Anonymous No.12486683]

>>12486614
>It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.

in the world of DF, what it is that territorializes and deterritorializes - is it even really capitalism? i guess this is the thing. there is a horizon beyond which it becomes impossible to describe capitalism as anything other than a metaphysical process, but maybe this is where when we begin attributing an extra force to a thing - capital as historical meta-process - we may actually be departing from what D&G had in mind.

so maybe we can say that the dwarves are machines, but they aren't really capitalists. capitalism seems to occur incidentally, if it happens at all.

[Anonymous No.12486840]

>>12486683
just another random snapshot of not the craziest approximation of a plane of immanence. maybe it's a good thing Deleuze never got into computer games, he might never have gotten around to writing any books.

>>12483731
also: no, not really. this place pretty much always delivers what i am hoping to find in these conversations. if i get really desperate i'll start a blog consisting of entries that are just placeholders, purely to have an anonymous comments section and things can carry on like that.

[Anonymous No.12487065]

>>12486840
I hate video games, especially MMOs.
So much wasted time..
I remember playing vanilla WoW,
a week passed by as if it were a minute, a month felt like an hour.

[Anonymous No.12487116]

>>12487065
Oh god, there's an endless amount that could be said about MMOs.
I'm so glad I never played WoW, and only barely wasted a couple years on Runescape.

[Anonymous No.12487160]

>>12487065
>>12487116
The first year was euphoric and truly divine, then it became insufficient and I grew to resent it and myself.

[Anonymous No.12487226]

>>12487065
>a week passed by as if it were a minute, a month felt like an hour.
i've had problems with them too. a more perfect piece of cover art cannot be imagined for this one, it completely steals my soul whenever i boot it up. total wonderland. the russians have pretty much completely decoded what my pleasure-brain wants: accumulation, grind, customization, tweaking, level-ups. complete enjoyment when i am playing it, and then complete desolation afterwards.

i sometimes ask myself also if this isn't, from a certain perspective, exactly what you want to do when you make games. you want to find people's pleasure centers and hit them, but of course there are people like me who will get completely hooked. you can't be puritanical in making a game - the whole idea is to Give Them What They Want. but you're basically completely satisfied with conditions of not knowing what you want, because that's how the magic works. you're just kind of in there because there's no point to being anywhere else.

games have as bright a future as depression. making the Ultimate Game for depressed people...right? kind of a contradiction in terms.

[Anonymous No.12487296]

>>12487065
MMOs are their own self contained realities, and the way most of them are designed, nothing matters other than the amount of time sunk into the game. No skill, intelligence, talent, or effort is required, just dedication of time. You can't correlate time on the outside to time on the inside because there are no other correspondences with which to measure time against.
In a way they are like Singularities.

[Anonymous No.12487315]

>>12487226
It sucks you in and you feel like you're in that world, even though our computers aren't so advanced that you can directly connect your brain to them.

[Anonymous No.12487375]

>>12487071

[Anonymous No.12487385]

>>12487315
i have a background in cinema, which is on the whole pretty useless, but there were some takeaways from it.

the whole design of the Hollywood system was, ultimately, to hide the presence of the cameras. that is the genius of it, it's like a surgical incision into reality that gives you a thing that provides the impression of life, exactly as it is. if you go back and watch early silent film, or early experiments in the 1900s and 1910s, you are much more aware of consciously seeing the limitations of the form. Melies becomes a kind of genius of editing, and he can basically Do Magic on screen by way of the cut. and later you get guys like Eisenstein and others who sort out how montage is and works, artist-theorists who really are secret wizards of the nature of ideology today.

with vidya we seem to be engaged in a kind of similar process, with things like MGS5 or Far Cry and the like becoming something like the equivalent of the Hollywood system. you have mini-maps and inventory screens and GUI interfaces and all kinds of stuff that gives you the impression of Being There only because it has seamlessly incorporated all of these little subsystems seamlessly into one collective whole. top-down minimaps in gaming are one basic example, there are lots of CRPGs from the 1980s and 1990s that are basically tortuous to play, unless you like the idea of getting out graph paper and navigating Skara Brae, or fumbling through clunky old combat systems, or whatever else.

with cinema, when the curtain comes up, we really do pretty much get our brains plugged into the screen, but of course an editable cinematic text, in which we control the camera (and can do all of this in private) is a totally different thing. add on top of that something like, for instance, a competitive Street Fighter tournament where the character you main gets nerfed, or a new moveset, or whatever else, and you are really coming in to the 21C: you're getting something like a second virtual body, and moreover, one that you can leverage for IRL cashbucks on a pro tour.

vidya grows out of cinema, and we have really no idea what vidya is eventually going to give rise to. my guess is that it becomes increasingly a kind of testing ground for experiments in augmented reality that Google &c will eventually use to build the Smart Cities in which we live, and the Smart Houses therein, as we link up to the Smart Networks upon which everything is defended, and becoming very Smart People in the process. not because we hit any kind of endpoint at Baudrillardian ideas of the simulacrum, but because those become the new point of departure. all dreams can be made realizable through technocommercial experimentation.

of course, the whole system may collapse before then, or any number of other plot twists.

[Anonymous No.12487559]

>>12487385
a more principled investigation of the nature of ideology would not necessarily require itself as such to always go back to Marxist theory in order to give a good account of the fundamental *suggestibility* of the human mind. we are wired in such a way that if a thing *looks* like Reality, it is. we are basically sentimental and co-sympathetic beings. cinema is perhaps uniquely positioned to give an account of these things, if only because it is the medium par excellence not only for socialism and fascism, but obviously only hits its stride later on, once we really kick out the jams and let the free market run the show.

it was always pleasure that was our golden goose and Achilles heel. pleasure is the constant. and after the Cold War *everything* goes up for sale - it's not only European hegemony (and whatever traces of the Church or feudalism that propped it up, together with Judaeo-Christian religion, Greek philosophy, or even, for that matter, Enlightenment philosophy) - it's also the long and complicated story of Hegel and Marx, which continue to some degree with China, but Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by 2019 is a kind of Imperial Confucianism, and even over there nothing occupies them more than AI and Social Credit, two aspects of the same thing. and, i suppose, firewalls, and how to keep the internet under control (while being seduced by Google to build them a censorship-compatible search engine, which drives a wedge of suspicion between Googlers back home who are wondering if this still conforms to 'Don't Be Evil.) thank god we have Social Justice to clear these things up, or we might really be confused!

it's really Hollywood tho that is a fascinating phenomenon. movies always seem to work, even when they flop. what sent me off into Philosophy Wonderland was trying to figure out how on earth you could use Campbell's monomyth to tell stories that make sense, whether you are making propaganda for the far left or the far right. the discovery of irony, or simulation, has nothing to do at all with the 'end of history.' in one sense it just means the end of human history, and the beginning of technological history. but at the same time, it's kind of hard to tell if this how Progress in the end rigs its own downfall, since nothing else could ever seem to stand in its way. i am *still* baffled by that.

and we are living today on a diet of pure fucking irony, like the political equivalent of junk bonds: it's Junk Politics.

[Anonymous No.12488121]

> The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. - Heidegger

God might be dreaming our world like a child plays.
Good night anons.

[Anonymous No.12488269]

mysticism, zombies, psychedelia, zombies, buddhism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY

https://oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=646668

[Anonymous No.12488302]

>>12488121
>The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound.

passages like these are what Heidegger I wish wrote all the time, where is that from?

[Anonymous No.12488365]

this thread is old /lit/ core, congrats

[Anonymous No.12488491]

>>12487065
But you remember the spaces, what you felt at what you saw.

[Anonymous No.12488498]

>>12487116
Memories are valuable. And MMO's provide many memories if you are playing with friends, few otherwise.

[Anonymous No.12488521]

>>12488269
here's episode 2 of Vervaeke gents. ep 1 was pretty cozy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF9HeXg65AE

art b/c why not, un-Mind Controlled Golbez is a good scene

[Anonymous No.12488694]

>>12487559
You're fucking insane but God Bless anyway anon.

[Anonymous No.12489468]

>>12488302
The Principle of Reason

[Anonymous No.12489592]

>>12488694
i'm not looking for an audience, or a following, or to create a movement, or to deconstruct any ideologies. i just need to say things, and this kind of stuff is just unbearable to listen to in real life. i don't know how to squeeze it into an academic paper, or sublimate it into literature or poetry. in case you hadn't noticed, academia is on fire right now. and a lot of mass-produced culture product sucks.

i have the kind of crazy you *know* is crazy. it's obviously there. that is the sound of someone not trying to sell you anything, because obviously to sell it would be fraud. that's why i like this place, you don't have to read any of it. you can just blast out whatever the fuck crazy idea that comes into your head and it harms and offends no one. where else can you do this? i don't want to complain about all of this shit to people in real life, they have their own problems. and life is complex enough these days that claiming with a straight face to be the Voice of Reason is fucking absurd. Twitter has proved Marshall McLuhan completely correct: it's the Gutenberg Galaxy now, and postmodernism was only like that part of syphilis that feels really good. total semantic apocalypse is what lay underneath it.

put another way, there is no equivalent of a *dojo* for philosophy. there used to be, in various forms. there were seminaries, and there were also universities. but there's nothing like an equivalent of jiu-jitsu for thinking, and that is probably a good thing. the history of orthodoxy in general shows that it is pretty hard to maintain strict rules over time. even the Buddhists have Theravada and Mahayana traditions.

which is what makes a place like this great, and even unique. here you can come and post whatever the fuck you are thinking, and nobody is really required to read any of it. if they want to, you can have a pretty cool conversation with people. but nobody's gathered in a room, and nobody is in charge, and there is no time limit, anything. none of the usual conventions that go into having a conversation apply, which allows for a lot more creativity. it's true that you can get a little carried away, but seriously...who cares?

tomorrow i am probably going to go on a minor screed about Reverse Marxism, which i am looking forward to. if it is interesting, it is really only because of threads like these, where people like me have been able to rant - sometimes cheerfully, sometimes miserably, frequently both - about whatever the fuck they needed to. it's like talk radio without the ads. pretty sweet.

anyways, papa bless to you anon.

[Anonymous No.12489951]

>>12489592
you need to stop listening to outis dude, his politics are creepy

go to sleep

[Anonymous No.12490673]

>>12489592
Blessed madness.

[Anonymous No.12490689]

>>12470487
Opening threads about this kind of subhuman bullshit should be permabanning offense.

[Anonymous No.12490700]

>>12470913
wow, I'm in awe.
You manage to decompress "joke's on you I was only pretending to be retarded!" In almost two pages of text.
And kept humblebragging all the while.
>"oh I'm such a pseud! But not so much of a pseud as to take anything I read or write seriously famalamalamalam~"
Kill your brain, plead self defense.

[Anonymous No.12490710]

>>12481028
>A return to medieval syncretism is desirable, where reason can coexist and coevaluate with prerational chimeras
The Christian middle ages were the most rationalist age humanity ever experienced.

[Anonymous No.12490724]

>>12490689
>>12490700
>walks into the asylum and flies into a rage

[Anonymous No.12490761]

>>12471017
>it is the ultimate Downer Religion
The fundation of Christianity is joy.
It never fails to amaze me how people always criticize the polar opposite of Christianity rather than the real deal.
Never simply a fucking strawman that
,while being wrong, has something to do with the real deal; always and only the polar opposite.

[Anonymous No.12491642]

>>12489951
>you need to stop listening to outis dude, his politics are creepy
Land? i know.

>>12490700
why are you taking me seriously? you should not take me seriously. my posts are the equivalent of a failed state. or the chaos of a religious war nearing its endgame, less catastrophe than simply exhaustion. Enlightenment is on the other side, perhaps. it's not to be found here. i know it and you know it.

here again is yet another analogy: what would happen if Clark Kent just became too lazy to maintain an alter ego? or if Gotham City decided that the potential threats to itself warranted that Batman and the Joker both had to go, and sublimated them into itself? what kind of chaos would that produce? something both more than and less than postmodernity. a world without conceptual binaries is always attractive, but may not be possible. it would more likely be a bloated, confused, chaotic, superstitious mess. and yet there would still be nostalgic types who dreamed of the Old Days. people who dreamed of fixing things, and tidying them up, and setting things right. but there is no setting them right.

the real disaster is not a historical event, but the erasure of categories. this is why the Death of Marx is going to make life hard for some, who find themselves in an ironic position: they were religious believers all along, but they didn't want to admit it, so they put their hopes in Revolution, in various modes of socialism. when the Revolution fails this is traumatic, because it is the substitute for the actual religion they rejected to have the Revolution. as long as people have gnostic politics, they don't actually have to torture themselves with theology.

the death of God is easy (if you don't think about it); the death of atheism is harder, particularly if what you have been calling atheism was only religion by another name. i can see no reason why the fallout of this would not look exactly like the world we see today: desperation presenting itself as anger, as normativity, as consumption. to paraphrase Nietzsche, we have not gotten rid of God because we have not gotten rid of *politics.*

[Anonymous No.12491725]

>>12490710
>The Christian middle ages were the most rationalist age humanity ever experienced.
i would agree, in some sense, if only because i when i want to go looking for something to read that doesn't always suck me back into the Wild Ride, i find myself reading guys like Blake or Swedenborg and asking myself what's really wrong with concepts like heaven or hell. it's always arrogance and hubris that leads us into disaster, and there is no arrogance quite like philosophical arrogance. you can get away with a lot of cynicism if you call yourself a philosopher, or if you can name-drop the right guys at the right times. things like Hate Speech or Hate Thought - which are, i think, basically the equivalent of ripping open the void for hardened rationalists are solved at a stroke with a little old-fashioned Christianity: why not call it a sin? trying to find the objective nature of an affect will only lead to ever-greater labyrinths of paranoia and virtue signal, aided by increasingly sophisticated technology, and complicated by increasingly sophisticated technological beings.

>>12490761
>The foundation of Christianity is joy.
i struggle with this one, but i can tell you why: it's because obviously my definition of joy (which is a spectacularly bad one) is some kind of fully futurized state, where the work of Serving The Good never ends, where everyone is building space stations or destroying dangerous mutants or whatever. it is absolute comic-book fare, and i know it. Christianity renders my inner desires to create a better world through violence, cynicism, decadence and money rather complicated. because, you know, violence, cynicism, decadence and money seem so attractive. in the absence of these, i would have to affirm lots of things that strike me as being unimportant - you know, how people other than me get through life, and fuck up, and make mistakes, and enjoy the things that they like. this offends me, because obviously i would prefer that the world be run by a benevolent cabal of shadowy and insane autocrats who Know What Is Best For You, and are always engaging of some war of intrigue, and forcing humanity to the stars, there to repeat itself calamitously...

i have a deep and powerful streak of genuine cowardice in me, and i want it to be gratified, and even praised, and showered with love and affection, and money too, i think. and i dream frequently of a eudystopia in which these dreams are made real, by being continually deferred. they will never be real, and that is a good thing. i don't really want to be forgiven for this, because i don't really want to confront it either. i would prefer a world where everybody just gets punished for being what they are rather than accepting other people, and in which this punishment is always sublated by the genius of money and the vagaries of language.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12491774]

>>12491725
an interesting essay about Swedenborg by Borges
https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1975-borges-emanuelswedenborgmysticalworks.pdf

[Anonymous No.12491790]

>>12491725
this is why Christianity is quite upsetting. in a perfect world, as i was saying in the previous thread, i would find being the Grand Vizier of a decadent Imperium a tremendously fulfilling job. i would be the Master-Confessor of a world like that, and propaganda minister, and producer of a variety of reality TV shows: a sort of transcendental J Edgar Hoover. oh man, what fucking bliss. what fucking tortuous, ugly, horrible bliss.
>by the way, why no JEH movie? he dominated Ellroy's trilogy, i always wanted to know more about him

can you imagine the kind of awesome pleasure a guy like that would have, on a good day? just absolutely sunk in a world of intrigue and conspiracy, plugged into everything, the ultimate Master of Whisperers. Varys had nothing on Hoover. ugh. and you could do pretty much whatever you wanted in the 1960s, especially if you could be an all-knowing Wizard of Oz that was about to go up completely in fire as the 60s rolled on towards psychedelia and Beatlemania and whatever the fuck else. waging a doomed crusade on behalf of some kind of idea of America that only works by turning the whole world into a doll house. Hoover is pure Bene Gesserit. i need a shower.

anyways. the reason i said Christianity was the ultimate Downer Religion was because it makes it very hard to cling to illusions like this, and my suspicion is that human beings cling the hardest to the worst and the most self-destructive illusions out of fear, out of desperation, and other various dark parts of us. and it becomes very hard to let those go. as long as we convince ourselves that everything is going to be great, that all of the shitty things we do are in some sense justified, we can always deceive ourselves and those around us. other-deception begins with self-deception, but...how do you know when you're deceiving yourself and when you aren't?

my antipathy from politics just comes from this, from the sense that it works on our superstitions, and that in the absence of these it can be calamitous. what the fuck else are you supposed to do? just enjoy life? (the answer isn't even yes, or no: it's why Wisdom matters). Christianity fucks with our will to tyranny, the will to self-deception.

[Anonymous No.12491856]

>>12491790
anyways i wanted to say something about Reverse Marxism this morning also. it was prompted, incredibly, by this.

to me, the thing that agitates Marx is the figure of the Kantian bourgeois capitalist counting up the numbers. everything pours in to the HQ in his head, and comes out as this rational system of production and consumption, money and capital, all of the rest. reading Marx is fucking incredible, because he's not only showing the economic code of the 19C, he's also debugging it at the same time. everything, *everything,* becomes capital under the eye, and the pen, of the guy counting up the numbers. and this produces the ultimate perpetual motion machine. seriously, for anons wondering why these threads get so fucking crazy, you have to read fucking Marx, for fuck's sakes. you have to read Marx. you know how Derrida would have said, 'okay, but you still have to read the Western Canon, the point isn't just to make reading impossible' - it's the same thing here, or at least it is for me. you don't have to fucking lose your mind reading Land or any of this shit, that's fine. but reading Marx is crucial to the whole thing. if Cosmotech is something like postmodernity in extremis, it still at least recognizes that Marx was on to *something.*

anyways. this is Marx's conundrum: there is something incredible, even transcendental, about this process of MCM, how the mind of the capitalist can do this incredible magic, the reification, all of it, money, wealth, capital, machines. it is as spectacular an alchemy as there ever has been. and he gets this of course from Hegel, who already doing one of the great feats of metaphysical alchemy ever in the PoS. it is materialist alchemy working on idealist alchemy, and it leads, unsurprisingly, to yet more alchemy - not so much Freud, but Freudo-Marxism, and Lacan, and Kojeve, and Deleuze, and aaaaaaaaaaaaaalll this other shit that makes up the Wild Ride. and most recently, to Uncle Nick, who is hard at work continuing that process, today, right now, literally, *right now...*

but that's not the point i was trying to make. what i was trying to get at was rather the reverse: that today it becomes all-too-easy to do something much less interesting than what Marx was doing: namely, Reverse Marxism.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12491915]

>>12491856
and i'll stick with this picture of Trump, not only because Trump is himself pretty much the perfect face of capitalism itself, he has also become the President, and the US is fucking exploding into a billion pieces because of how this managed to happen, or how Hilary managed to somehow fumble what was supposed to be the easiest layup in the history of American political process.

the critical flaw in Reverse Marxism is to conflate every form of capital into being the same one, the same kind of process. real estate just isn't the same thing as currency trading. they are two different phenomena. what amazes Marx is how the hundredweight of iron, flax, corn, whatever all becomes the same thing, in the end, and is guided into becoming that same thing by this mysterious process of capitalization, which has some kind of relationship with machines, and with logic, and much else. again, if you want to see how far this process can go, or how completely insane you can become thinking about it, read Land - but, for maximum effect, you have to follow the rest of the stops along the way: roughly speaking, that's Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Kojeve, Deleuze, and Foucault. and not only them, there are lots of other guys too - Adorno, McLuhan...
>tfw you ruined your life
>you'd probably ruin it again tho

by the time we catch up with today, the accelerationist dilemma becomes the temptation or tendency to see capital everywhere, to see the same process where in fact there are differences. what appals and fascinated Marx is the *transubstantiation* process. his break from Hegel (which isn't really so much of a break as it is a radical materialization) leaves him with this new quandary: how the fuck do you explain this? what guides and governs this?

and this is exactly why the Freudians and psychoanalysts were required, in case you were wondering. what produces commodity fetishism in the first place? are we just a society of commodity fetishists? what the fuck is a fetish, anyways? putting Freud and Marx together is like the first time anybody learned to blend peanut butter and chocolate.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12492019]

>>12491915
1980s Trump is a beautiful - and grotesque - fantasy to look at, in hindsight. the beauty and the grotesquerie are inseparable, as inseparable as wealth is from fantasy.

the fallacy of Reverse Marxism, and it underlies a lot of theory, is that capital really does become a kind of unspoken demiurge. it is the revealed doctrine of acceleration, there's no question about this. and acceleration stuff is spectacularly interesting as a theory of technology, particularly computer technology, and there no more diabolically brilliant theorist of Internet Capital than Land.

but the problem is that what we (read: me) call Capital, which has the explanatory power of everything, winds up explaining both more than and less than it wants to. it leads to the fetishization of the image (see Baudrillard), and in which Trump himself is, again, a perfect example. he is his own name, and the power of the transcendentally branded self-image propelled him into the highest office in the land. people hate him for what he stands for (as well as what he is) but he doesn't even really stand for what he stands for. what Trump represents is the kind of fusion of all horizons of capital: the image of wealth, not wealth itself. in fairness, so did Clinton, but she also captured (or tried to capture) the swelling power of Reverse Marxism as a religious doctrine: that somehow you could hide the ugliness of this system by electing a true player of the Davos/TED circuit. Clinton was every bit as much of an establishment player as Trump was, but was far more gifted (and politically connected) in terms of how to hide the fact that in our world nobody speaks Truth to Power anymore. it is power alone that speaks, and when it speaks, it speaks the truth.

Trump has more than a little in common with the Kwisatz Haderach, if we understand Herbert's Golden Path to be the kind of fantasy we have been on for a while: the image of a continual progress, a continual and gradual improvement of mankind towards a golden age. in Herbert's world this always had religious undertones, and the Spice itself was a pretty fucking good analogue for capital itself, in its purest form: an intoxicating accelerator upon which the universe came to depend, the tide which floated all boats. like Paul he was untimely, and a total disaster. he marshalled the support of a lot of outcasts, people thirsting for jihad. but his knife - or rather, his Wall - has chipped and shattered.

but it fails, and it is all failing, because of a fascinating double bind. wealth itself is always irresistably fantasy-generating, but the fantasy when it comes into the real world is appalling and monstrous. put another way, the antipathy that people feel towards Trump, because of the ways that it is expressed - which never has anything to do with economics itself, but is framed in terms of quasi-religious sentiments - is what shows up the fundamental lack of understanding.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12492079]

>>12492019
i know, this probably isn't making sense. that's fine.

the relationship between the Golden Path and the Spice holds the universe, and the metaphysics, of Dune together. one analogy for it is the one between the Force and the Galactic War in Star Wars. Dune has always struck me as being a much deeper world, but Star Wars has been massively more popular in the US by far, because it frames the conflict much more agreeably in terms of good and evil. Herbert's perspective on these things is much more far-sighted, melancholy, even tragic.

this tragedy today goes unnoticed, because it is covered by irony, by anger, by politics, even perhaps by an epoch that goes all the way back to the French and Industrial revolutions (Land would say it goes back even further, to the Reformation and the Renaissance). it is a double tragedy, however. the intellectuals, and faux-intellectuals (and degenerate mutant schizoposters, like me) are all a part of it. the world of power dynamics, of trying to find some kind of sweet spot between the material and the immaterial, is a thing which has been on our minds for two centuries. in Dune, the need to control the spice and lead things along a Golden Path results only in despotism, in tragedy and failure. in Star Wars, the Force seems to precede the War, but the War is necessary; the War provides an outlet, it justifies the use of the Force. the Force *unused* is nothing; there is always this restless compulsion. it is the same thing in Dune: there becomes a horizon beyond which withdrawing from the Spice becomes impossible; it is a planetary addiction, the addiction of a space-faring civilization. without it there would be nothing, but with it there is only disaster.

i feel as though there is something in this that describes how our world works as well. we are not only addicted to capital, we are addicted to Reverse Marxism, a theory of capital which supplies a religious framework (Revolution!) that structures and stabilizes these fictions that we need. neither Trump nor his adversaries ever really talk about capital itself: they can't. were they to do so the whole thing would collapse. Trump has to deny that what he does he does for capital (and he's right, he does it for a fiction of America that many still believe in), and his opponents have to deny that what they do is for capital either (because they don't; they do it for reified social credit - less Reverse than Bizarro Marxism).

they both want the Golden Path, in a sense. and they are both afraid (justifiably) of being unable to deliver it. everything works purely because you can always accuse the other side of betraying something you don't actually believe in yourself, because you don't understand it, because to understand it would be to destroy the capacity to believe in it.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12492155]

>>12492079
so what i'm wondering is if Reverse Marxism is the fallacy of destroying something you don't understand, or holding somebody else hostage to a set of beliefs that you can always grill them on, because you can put them in a position of having to articulate or explain something you know they can't do. it is like creating an orthodoxy in the absence of a faith.

Trump is bullshit; that's not the point i'm making. what i'm saying is that nothing prevents us from creating the monsters that we deserve. if Capital is everything - and i think it is, except for this possibility that in conditions where it becomes everything, it also engineers its own mysterious antagonists and nemeses - it comes in at least two forms: people who don't understand it, and people who understand too well to be anything other than apologists for it.

Woke Capital is a legit phenomenon, this is nothing new, this is progressivism and what is so odious about it - the hilarity of corporations having absolutely everything, and being forced to debase themselves in pursuit of moral capital. this is the stuff that drives Land nuts, for instance: he wants capital to be completely ruthless, but the irony is that the most ruthless form of capital imaginable turns out to be *total abasement,* and things like the Gilette ad, which are comically stupid and nakedly transparent. if we were shown, for example, that this meeting was a meeting of Lockheed-Martin or Halliburton execs it would change everything. what if what we were seeing here was a bunch of Google directors making a plan to build a censorship-compliant search engine for the CCP? suddenly it's not so simple. angry about patronizing douchebags in the workforce? maybe you shouldn't be working for the devil itself. maybe it's not the patriarchy that is the problem, maybe it's *you,* because the asshole you're working for is working for an Judge Holden (or Al Pacino's John Milton).

i guess what i'm saying is that neither capital nor anti-capital should be allowed to present themselves as humanisms. and i don't know *what* the fuck would take its place. Unironic Christianity doesn't strike me as being such a bad look in the meantime. Reverse Marxism weaponizes all of your anti-capitalist sentiments, but mainly because one doesn't have to know how capital works in the first place to do it. again, this is not an argument for capital either: if Trump is any indication, it is that purest capital may in fact only be purest self-deception, nothing more than the right place at the right time. i suspect Trump never expected to win, which is exactly why he won: and there's more than a little of the Tao in that also.

rant over.

[Anonymous No.12492554]

>>12492155
>rant not over
rant basically over, but if this doesn't put a smile on your face today i don't know what will.

>Pornography collection
>Under Hoover, agents were directed to seize all pornographic materials uncovered in their investigations and forward them to Hoover personally. He kept a large collection, possibly the world's largest, of films, photographs and written materials, with particular emphasis on nude photos of celebrities. Hoover reportedly used these for his own titillation, as well as holding them for blackmail purposes.

JEH: gentlemen if there is pornography in this country anywhere i want to know about it. i want it *on my desk.* do you understand
FBI: yes sir
JEH: this is america we are protecting. i will be taking a very close look at this. all of it. and while i am doing that i will need absolute privacy. nobody is to disturb me
FBI: yes sir
>hours pass
FBI: what have you learned sir
JEH: i have learned that this is an even more depraved country than i could have possibly imagined. it's worse than i thought. way worse. also i have empirically proven that this material works, because i have fapped to all of it multiple times
FBI: what should we do sir
JEH: we need to know where it's coming from, so we can cut it off at the root. i'm going to need pornographers. bring them to my summer cottage, i'm going to need to know how this works. and also i think it's not too soon to begin making our own studios. we will combat this enemy from within
FBI: that's brilliant sir
JEH: don't worry about the plots or the scripts either. i'll take care of those
FBI: it's a good thing we have you sir
JEH: you're goddamn right

[Anonymous No.12492613]

>>12470580
>tfw when you were born in the Year of the Rat

[Anonymous No.12492622]

>>12492613
Underrated year, mma guys venerate the rat for its survival prowess.

[Anonymous No.12492682]

girardfag, you follow a praxis at all? nofap, exercise regimen, diet? I love philosophy but it's pretty meatless for me without the knowledge of having applied it, one way or another. not saying you don't or sound like you don't. jc

[Anonymous No.12493005]

>>12492682
no. my life is an experiment in complete freefall. i smoke way too much. my great accomplishment besides becoming a compulsively shitposting nonentity appears to have been giving myself diabetes, which i pay no attention to at all, because i am hopelessly addicted to cheap pleasures i despise, like US politics. and the most accurate description of the stupidity that i have is a pathological inability to stop asking myself questions that i cannot answer. at girardfag industries we import hot garbage and export slightly reified hot garbage.

it occurs to me today that one of my fantasies is to have a low-level TSR module based on my awesome opinions and hot takes, provisionally called In The Dungeons of the Cringe Lords
>or The Sinister Secret of Fuckface
>or the Pathetic Secret of Saltmarsh
>or Where Somehow Not Even Chaos Reigns
>or I Would Be Against the Cult of the Reptile God, But Here's The Thing About The Reptile God

i need to be destroyed. all you have to do, as the adventurers, is basically survive my minions, whose real job is to colonize the world with crappy malls, and turn the entire world into Barrie. like a collapsing underground shopping mall full of monstrous equivalents of boutique stories like Electronics Boutique or The Gap or whatever, staffed with all of these self-hating humanoid things, mushrooms and kua-toa and the like. everything just shitty and grotesque, but nothing can ever leave, it all gets sucked back into the most depressing place on earth, which is the food court of a mall in Ontario at about two PM on a weekday when you've got a hangover.
>no god no it can't be true
>fuck you asshole, buy a cat calendar and a Stone Cold t-shirt. welcome to the kiosk at the end of the universe. enjoy
>vomiting, self-cutting
>look at it asshole. look at those all those windbreakers. look at those wallet chains. this too is what you will be come. i am this shitty outlet mall and i am your father
>noooooooooo

this is why i am thinking a TSR module would be good, in which the dungeon is a soul-sucking outlet mall taken over by me and my minions. if i saw a version of myself incorporated into a module or a Gold Box game as an endboss i think i could die happy. not so much the Grand Inquisitor but a Grand Inquisitor impersonator endlessly talking about capitalism. and just beyond lies...an unremarkable parking lot (which in this case for the PC's the equivalent of reaching the sea for Xenophon).

so yeah, i have a case of chronic decadence and laziness and boredom. philosophy doesn't help it either, it really only makes it worse. obviously some kind of life-change has to happen, i just don't know what it would look like, and i struggle to muster the enthusiasm. self-ejecting from /lit/ would almost certainly be a part of it, which is part of the problem. obviously i like posting here, but it's probably bad for me in the long run.

tldr philosophy with no regimen is not philosophy.
t. guy with no regimen

[Anonymous No.12493109]

>>12493005
as someone whose relied a little bit too much on the endorphin boost of recognition that comes with being an effortposter on /lit/, I feel you

I ain't gonna lecture you. But man metaphysics is extra dank after the gym.

[Anonymous No.12493120]

>>12491642
>>12491725
>>12491790
Since you took me seriously despite my abrasive ways, I'd like to give you some serious answers; but I've been working all day and now I'm tired AF and can't mister the necessary concentration.
Tell you what: I'll take screenshots of these posts and answer You in one of the future threads on this subject, ok?

[Anonymous No.12493356]

I've noticed a trend among the groups I frequent, the post-left are philosophically stagnant, retreading Debord, meanwhile the post-right have evolved significantly diversifying into Johannine mysticism, Heideggerian ecology, etc

What happened?

[Anonymous No.12493395]

>>12493109
>I ain't gonna lecture you
most lecturing doesn't work on me anyways, since i secretly enjoy being lectured to too much. it feeds my arrogance, and makes my narcissistic cringe-powers stronger, and i don't want them to become any stronger.

>But man metaphysics is extra dank after the gym.
no doubt. from personal experience, there was at least one very brief moment in my life when i worked construction outdoors for a couple of months, strict diet of protein and greens. this was a good scene. exercise and metaphysics are better than a diet of straight metaphysics and decadence by far

>>12493120
>Since you took me seriously despite my abrasive ways, I'd like to give you some serious answers; but I've been working all day and now I'm tired AF and can't mister the necessary concentration.
unironically looking forward to it.

>Tell you what: I'll take screenshots of these posts and answer You in one of the future threads on this subject, ok?
awesome

[Anonymous No.12493543]

>>12493356
I think it is because the post-right, and the right in general, occupy a counterculture space in today’s America, thereby creating intellectual vitality by attracting all the weirdoes. If/when the Right does come to insitutional power, then expect the Left to become the new place of intellectual vitality. Only on the outskirts on the ever shifting Cathedral can new life be found

[Anonymous No.12493701]

>>12493395
What I'm getting at is, don't you think philosophy and this fixation on capital is more an effect of your inner condition/physiognomy than it is anything else? I'm not saying your concerns about this shit aren't legitimate, what I am saying is the extreme emphasis is not, these things are true but a healthy, integrated lifestyle opens a window and lets some light in

[Anonymous No.12493713]

What the hell are you talking about?

[Anonymous No.12493770]

>>12493543
Good point. Perhaps in the 60's, people like Mason and Scott Walker (singer) had a touch on what real counterculture was (rejecting the counterculture tm that was being circulated and marketed)... but now, the post-right is the only group that can lay claim to being genuinely counter-cultural.

Some suggestions:
Land's twitter account
The Case for Colonialism (essay)


Take the dominant liberal narrative and turn it on its head. I think, even, that intersectionality can be reversed in ways that others might not catch onto. You say class, race, gender, etc... are connected. Ok. If they are, why not advocate for oneself?

[Anonymous No.12493821]

>>12493770
Further,

De Maistre is an excellent read because he provides a blueprint for suppressing revolution. His philosophy is one that speaks from the other side of the dominant Hegelian-Marxist narrative of the French Revolution (it was in the end good, that the reign of terror was just a group of power-hungry people, etc...). He writes that revolutions are by their nature dangerous because those who originally advocate for social reform (in france, these were liberals) are eventually thrown aside because the power vacuum can be so easily occupied by opportuntists (like Saint-Just). Revolutions are like beasts without heads.

[Anonymous No.12494272]

>>12493543
>I think it is because the post-right, and the right in general, occupy a counterculture space in today’s America, thereby creating intellectual vitality by attracting all the weirdoes. If/when the Right does come to insitutional power, then expect the Left to become the new place of intellectual vitality. Only on the outskirts on the ever shifting Cathedral can new life be found
this. hegemony is arguably inescapable, hegemony is also creative death.

it's also hard to tell right now who really *does* have the power tho, right? i mean, is it really the right? there's a huge amount of power wielded by Silicon Valley, and those guys aren't right-wing at all. if Cheney and the neocons were still running the show i might be inclined to agree. but right now i don't know who's running the show, and maybe neither the left nor the right as we understand them today are capable of doing so: the right, because they don't have an answer for progressivism, and the left because they don't have a (believable) answer for capital. Corporations really do wind up owning everything, and then they can't seem to fucking help themselves for exposing what they are. see Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, Google and Project Dragonfly, Gilette and itself, &c.

meanwhile, something like the WWE continues to show up the need for a mega-corporation (which runs almost literally on human suffering and exploitation) that provides a pseudo-outlet for people to say what they are really feeling...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jNBk1k21LE

>>12493701
>What I'm getting at is, don't you think philosophy and this fixation on capital is more an effect of your inner condition/physiognomy than it is anything else?
no question. i am enjoying my own decadence, but it's bad for me also.

>I'm not saying your concerns about this shit aren't legitimate, what I am saying is the extreme emphasis is not, these things are true but a healthy, integrated lifestyle opens a window and lets some light in
they walk the line between legitimate and illegitimate. i think that's all. my own Grievance Politics are what they are, i recognize them as such. tunnelling down into them has revealed to me some interesting stuff, and sometimes a fool has to rant about things. a healthier, integrated lifestyle is unquestionably the right way to go.

>>12493713
>What the hell are you talking about?
how dare you ask me to say what i'm talking about, or why i compulsively feel the need to talk about it ad nauseam ad infinitum. i'm triggered
>i need some fucking JRPGs to calm me down now
>grumble grumble

>>12493770
>the case for colonialism
ty anon

>>12493821
good post.

i miss the NRx era. Trump fucked that up too. Moldbuggian political science was another pretty fascinating Plot Twist in all of this.

[Anonymous No.12494367]

>>12494272
it's not lost on me that sublimating anti-Boomer rage into Spectacle is not just another piece of evidence that Vince McMahon is truly one of the great geniuses the US has ever produced. he made this angle work before with Stone Cold and perhaps he can find the magic again with this narrative also.

Rebelling while at the same time coloring in the lines is what real manipulation is all about. there are times when i wonder how pro wrestling has managed to survive until this point, and there are others when it just seems like the most necessary evil in the universe, a phenomenon too strange *not* to exist. a thoroughly institutionalized Sticking It To The Man is what we love, for the same reason why it's always satisfying to blow up the Death Star again and again. it was what Trump capitalized on, in one sense, and it is what his adversaries capitalize on also. it's very hard to imagine an alternative to this, but mostly because it's a study in decadence. we've gotten too good at manipulation.

[Anonymous No.12494478]

>>12493770
But can the post-right truly be considered countercultural? In my conception, the counterculture of the 1960s truly was counter to the mainstream culture, advocating a non-consumerist, spiritual lifestyle of spontenaity and hedonism in response to then predominant values of togetherness and glorification of liberal capitialism, with no real historical antecedent to base their critiques off of. By contrast, the post-right largely seems to be focused on reviving old Western ideas to counter the current leftist consensus, with some original content sprinkled in there, but not a near total rejection of Western culture like the counterculture was in the 1960’s. The post-right movement is simply Western culture rejecting a part of its self, not another culture/subculture entirely

[Anonymous No.12495070]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12495187]

>>12494272
>hegemony is also creative death.
Yeah, I agree with all your points. So which is better, hegemony or lack of thereof? Or are both equally shit?

[Anonymous No.12495335]

>>12495187
>So which is better, hegemony or lack of thereof?
i mean Zizek basically fantasies about Stalin all the time. what he seems to like is basically a busted dystopia - it neither works well enough to actually do what it wants to do (probably horrific evil), nor badly enough to fall off the rails completely and go to pieces. the whole thing is propped up on in-jokes, accidents, confusing tangents. personally? i think i'm okay with that also. my idea of utopia is a hegemony that i can defect on, basically because i know that it will work in my absence anyways, and yet never works effectively enough that it can do without me completely. the ultimate political sweet spot would be one that incorporates double agency into its DNA - well, for degenerate fucks like me, i suppose...

the question is whether this is actually a recipe for decadence or not (it is). historically speaking, periods of anarchy are philosophically some of the most creative: i'm thinking of the Axial Age in general, but also the Hundred Schools period in China (gives you Laozi), or the general foment that pre-existed Socrates. Weimar was decadent, a failing European hegemony given its first serious liver-shot in WW1, and setting itself up for basically the destruction of the entire ring in WW2. since then we have been living under the post-WW2 order, which is now going through the Interesting Times the Chinese hate, and so do i. but Weimar was also culturally pretty fucking exciting too. creatively, artistically, intellectually, turbulence and upheaval seems to be good for us: think about the Renaissance. Nietzsche is the supremo sufferer and also the supremo aesthete, and he will suffer himself to belong to no hegemon. he wants Cesare Borgia, or Caesar.

i like hegemony because it's cozy, but of course an excess of cozy pseuds leads only to decadence. Thiel will say there's no point in capitalism at all if you're not going for monopoly, but this is of course hard to sell to people with a straight face, unless you are a complete space alien (like Zuckerberg, and Facebook being like a chair, or whatever else). i recognize my own fantasy of being J Edgar Hoover as absolutely decadent, of course it is. pretty much all of my fantasies are.

but it kind of depends, right? politically it's hard to find a flaw in this guy - very few really complained about a century or so of Roman hegemony under the four good emperors. artistically pretty dull, but beats getting fucked on the road by barbarians. but again, how much of this was too stultifying for a guy like Commodus? what made him appear?

what about Napoleon? as long as you're winning, it's all good. as long as the people are feeling good, and the Spice Flows, everything's great. this is the plot of God Emperor of Dune also. how do you make people *not* depend on hegemony? is it even possible?

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12495417]

>>12495335
this is Laozi's own genius as well, of course. the TTC is both a text on individual governance, the governance of the state, and metaphysics. Wu-Wei is always the ideal, the actionless action of the sage. and Confucius also, no slouch as a political philosopher, ultimately saying that you really cannot possibly rule with anything other than virtue. Xunzi agrees, more pessimistically. for Confucius, men are fundamentally good, while Xunzi thinks the opposite way, but ultimate that ritual can be used to straighten them out. and *only* ritual can do this, really; that is its point. this is very unlike Hegel, for instance, where dialectic is on the move; ritual has a whole other meaning in Chinese philosophy.

and then there's Han Fei, who is even more pessimistic than Xunzi. Legalism is ultra-skepticism, like Chinese Machiavellianism. it is precisely because nobody can actually formulate anything like the rules that the rules basically should be

a) draconian, and
b) lethal.

he's Xi Jinping's favorite guy, btw. there's a story that goes something like this: after a long night of drinking, the Duke falls asleep in the courtyard, as usual, and when he does this it is the job of the Minister of the Robe to put the robe on him. tonight, the MoR forgets, and so the Minister of the Hat does it. in the morning, the Duke asks who put the robe on him. when he finds out it was the Minister of the Hat who did it, he has them both executed: the MoR for not doing his job, and the MoH for doing a job he wasn't supposed to do. thus do you keep order if you are a hardened Legalist autocrat.

but in China you have a kind of way of thinking that never really conceives of a thing like 'hegemony' at all the way we might think of it; basically it's more like if there *isn't* a hegemony, then something has gone disastrously wrong. hence concepts like tianxia. there's actually a total reversal: scholars like Zhao Tingyang will say that a Huntington-style system of conflict-ridden IR isn't anything good, it's the symbol of a failed *world.* it is absolute political romanticism and almost certainly a bad idea, but one of those scenarios where it's really good to not view the concept purely from the Western perspective, i think.

http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/tien-hsia.php?issue=021&searchterm=021_utopia.inc
https://china.usc.edu/implications-tianxia-new-world-system
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7ab1/3108b384a666cc4df192aac153214c981801.pdf

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12495464]

>>12494478
the post-right or alt-right that you are referring to is a rejection of the same thing people were rejecting in the 1960s - hyper-moralistic liberal capitalism. the "west" that the "post-right" refers to hasn't really existed since the french revolution and there have only been sporadic convulsions of aesthetic reclamation since then, stuck within the trappings of modernity out of practical necessity. this movement is a counterculture if you would consider the implementation of something like dugin's fourth political theory to be a radical transformation away from woke liberal capitalism, and i think it's hard to deny that it would be.

[Anonymous No.12495508]

>>12495417
from an artistic or cultural perspective, we might find a hegemony like that kind perhaps not so likely to appeal. you would unquestionably get a thing called Culture - even High Culture - but at the same time you wouldn't expect people to be taking a lot of *chances,* aesthetically speaking, because if you cross the line you are almost certainly fucked.

for the West we've always had a problem following orders; basically, if it's not Revolution, it's not worth doing. we just seem to be wired this way. it makes us creative, but it also makes us tremendously hard to hold together for long periods of time. again, as a model of statecraft, Augustine's own life is pretty fascinating like this, and the thing to bear in mind with him is that he combats not one but *two* forms of heresy - those which are freethinking, and those which are excessively literal, or puritanical. was this a doomed enterprise? i don't know, it was like Game of Thrones, i think. that sense of control over artworks has always made the story of aesthetics pretty fascinating like that. i sometimes think about a perverse version of myself (in other words, myself) traveling back in time and wanting to make, you know, What The People Really Wanted - say, a sexy demon babe, and running into trouble because if i was going to paint a sexy demon babe, it had better be tempting St. Anthony, and St. Anthony better be fucking resisting it.

and then you get to the Renaissance, and it's just balls-to-the-wall (in an almost literal sense) creativity, but it's also a sign that the game is just about up for the Church's hold over the aesthetic also. when we have rules we can rebel against, bend but not break, or tweak, and so on - this just seems to be total bliss. when there are *no* rules, we fucking go squirrely, and start trying to re-impose them, or cooking them up out of whole cloth. one of the funny things is how often strongmen and authoritarian leaders need art (or in some cases, to *be* art) for exactly these reasons - think Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon - they don't lack for beauty, they look great on horseback, it's golden eagles (or something like that) and glory. the re-institution of Art always seems necessary. but hegemonies founded on individual political-aesthetic genius (that is to say, the highest possible kind of genius? could be...) also don't necessarily last either. Edo Japan lasts for three centuries basically because there is very little novelty going on, or minimal novelty. the golden age of Greece, or the tippity-top of German Idealism, basically comes and goes in a flash. how about the 1960s in America? explosive creative power crammed into about five truly rocking years, and then a depressing hangover that we are arguably still recovering from.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12495566]

>>12485645
only saw the last one but I really loved it, thanks. these threads are a blessing

[Anonymous No.12495590]

>>12495508
again, i think i'd be okay with a nice cozy Confucian hegemony, and being a nondescript scholar. i think that this is the general point of ritual. but of course, the Egyptians had this also, for thousands of years, and all they did was brood on death, which was where (it was hoped) life would really begin! can't wait for death! and it's not like it would be hard to imagine why. just fucking thousands of years passing, and nobody knows, really, how to invent or create anything, except massive stone tombs...or, over in Mesoamerica, think about the Aztecs: they Had It Their Way (kind of) for centuries, and then all of sudden, bang, Spaniards Out Of Fucking Nowhere. and the whole thing is just over instantly. you can't negotiate with the Spaniards at all. and imagine the embarrassment: all those human sacrifices, and for nothing!

well, not really for nothing. we had a pretty good thread on this a while back, actually. Aztec metaphysics are pretty based also. here, check out the link:

/lit/ Can Into Teotl
>>/lit/thread/S11670156

perhaps the purpose of hegemony is simply to hegemonize. it may not really have a reason for doing this beyond that. it solidifies and consolidates human beings into an order where they can divert some of their processing power away from asking neverending existential questions about themselves and others, and then they can focus that on other things (like squandering it, and calling this mysterious and enigmatic process of simulated self-destruction, Art).

hegemony just seems like it ought to be the goal of any self-aware monarch. once the divides between political parties open up too much, separation may be preferable to further attempts at mediation and moderation. things always seem to repair themselves afterwards, one way or the other. creative types like life on the margins and the edges, but in my own case i find the edges are usually a lot edgier than i expect, and usually way over my threshold. i'd prefer a nice cozy dystopia that wasn't *too* evil, and in which i basically take care of my own guilt by quietly running around in ever-decreasing circles, and showing up for work on Monday more or less able to keep my job at the post office.

no human sacrifices tho, once we get to that point we have to accept that the hegemony has had a good run and try to just remember the good times. part amicably and all that.

[Anonymous No.12495701]

>>12495590
one other thing.

if there is one thing we actually can say about the age of Spectacle, it is that vidya actually can do things that are pretty remarkable from a pedagogical perspective. Europa Universalis features the secret BB score; *iniquity* is a serious problem in that game, but it's also one of the most crucial mechanics of the game. as much as you might want to just steamroll everything in sight, EU teaches you - and in much more powerful and subtle way than the happiness mechanics of Civ - about the dangers of being a completely bloodthirsty werewolf-dictator. people get restless when they feel like they are being ruled by a conqueror. the armies may not rebel, but everybody else does, and your game will become completely un-fun to play as a result. but it's not the game's fault, of course.

in Hearts of Iron the mechanic isn't as influential; it's Total War and everybody is fine with that. but this is near to my sense of the kind of sea-change in philosophy that i would really, really like to see begin, even if it's nothing more than a little castle-building in the sky. a lot of 20C philosophy struggles with the concept of total war, i think, the logic of the crisis or the emergency situation, Heidegger's absolute terror (and rightly so) of the Gestell, which is precisely the same terror felt by Land as teleoplexy. that very same terror is one that i think i have more or less been bitten by also, because it provides a frighteningly good explanation of what has always struck me as being more than a little wrong with all things postmodern.

EU3 really isn't the worst primer on statecraft. true, the game itself can often become just a boring exercise in map-painting, but if you don't love the idea of a decadent prince with blood on his hands funding the Florentine School, i don't know what to tell you. or those guys working for the Florentine School saying - 'look, let's be honest: there's only so much that art can do. *control yourself,* your grace.' but you know, we all have...ambitions...

aaaah, it's such a charming game. but that's one of the good things about our age, we can make games like this. really tho, what i think i would like to see is a departure from the desperate logic of the emergency situation, which is always exactly where the tyrant loves to be. there are such a thing as peaceful hegemonies, i think. but you can't crowbar people into it. nor do you want to create the Matrix and try to dupe them either. we always see through these things.

[Anonymous No.12495757]

>>12495701
>You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

'the whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.' now that is some fucking wisdom.

[Anonymous No.12495840]

>>12487385
>the whole design of the Hollywood system was, ultimately, to hide the presence of the cameras
I have noticed a similar phenomenon with prosthetics. Take glasses for example. Eyeglasses is a technology to improve your eyesight, but by using glasses to see, everyone knows your eyesight is poor because you are wearing the tech, which may affect potential social and romantic relationships. Then, came contact lens which achieve the same result, but the use of the tech is less noticeable... until they see you apply or take them out of course. Finally, we have eye surgery that "cures" your poor vision while also fully concealing the tech by way of surgical technique. The thing is, the contacts nor the surgery are improvements on the quality of the vision. You will have the same visual improvements with contacts and surgery are the same to glasses. The advancements are only in the concealment of the tech itself. But the concealment doesn't cure your genes. The poor vision is still there in a sense. I know, it's a lot of words to say glasses are dysgenic, but it is the concealment of technology and medicine that spits in Darwin's face. It's kinda the same thing with psychiatry too, and perhaps psychology, and-oh fuck, I just realized ideology is a technology of concealment too.

[Anonymous No.12495928]

>>12492554
>i have learned that this is an even more depraved country than i could have possibly imagined
bahahaaha

[Anonymous No.12495954]

I hereby declare this book required reading for any Christians in these threads.

https://youtu.be/0yf0Z_9QLpc

[Anonymous No.12495988]

>>12495840
prosthetics are a ridiculously interesting phenomenon. if you're interested in reading more about this in a philosophical sense, i recommend taking a look into Bernard Stiegler, this kind of shit was exactly what he was thinking about while he was in jail.

the big one was prosthetic *memory,* or what he calls tertiary retention. what is a memory, anyways? things you write down, record, read and so on. prosthesis in general is pretty fascinating when we're talking about the body and its limits or extensions, or the fact that you can essentially introduce a theoretically limitless number of microprocesses between your brain and your extremities - as long as you're in control of them, technically, it's still your 'body', after all...

and then Yuk Hui takes this to the next level, by introducing these questions of what happens when we start building computers that remember us for us in advance - our preferences, our names, whatever passcodes we need, whatever else it is that we need to identify ourselves as ourselves. again, if you're wondering why i find Wokism so fucking irritating, it's because all of the shit over modernist categories of identity - race, class, gender - aren't even nearly as interesting as what *technology* is going to do. at the same time, it seems entirely likely to me that the very cultural force behind progressivism is what is almost certainly going to drive the economics that leads to those very post/transhuman questions i find so fascinating (>>12479752, and there is a lot more to be said in this vein.)

what the digital age brings up is this impossibility of distinguishing the real from the illusory precisely because of these kinds of mechanisms - like memory, or anticipation, or aaaaaaaaaaaall the other crazy science that will be developed to meet our consumer needs. Stiegler does some pretty interesting stuff with Derrida too. i can even direct you to a good thread on this...

Cosmotech #7: Prosthetic Memories Edition
>>/lit/thread/S11950708#p11963176

aaaaarrr, that megathread was such good times.

>>12495928
the homeland must be protected, no matter the cost

[Anonymous No.12496081]

>>12495988
i'm also jealous of Wokism because obviously i would fucking love to convert people to my own religion, except that i think this would be a terrible idea...b/c there is no way i would ever be able to keep myself from becoming a complete monster and gorging myself on chocolate cake and clearly being all about homemade pornography - for Science, obviously. or because capitalism, or whatever i need to say to give the impression that i should be listened to
>look all i'm saying is that if you want my hottest takes on the Gestell i need to be wearing a big robe and surrounded with flowers. also i will need a pizza with anchovies
>anyhoo today i will be giving this lecture on Marx while wearing sunglasses because i did a *lot* of coke last night. i need it to think and write. it inspires me. we should probably go and get some. like, now
>right now
>okay. you know what fuck it let's go straight to Q&A and then eat some mushrooms and play videogames

if you guys ever want to see what a truly failed guru looks like, check out Adi Da. he seems to have been quite a psychologically gifted man, but it's like a perfect example of when the Love gets totally corrupted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Da

[Anonymous No.12497047]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12497580]

>>12494478
>>12495464
The "Alt-right" aren't reactionary, they're radicals, they aren't interested in restoring western tradition, they want to artificiality construct a new tradition pulling elements from abroad, primarily from Japan.

[Anonymous No.12497696]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12497697]

>>12497580
I'd wager the "post-right" being referred to are alienated paleocons who've abandoned policy for philosophy.

[Anonymous No.12497707]

>>12497580
You just described every reactionary.

[Anonymous No.12497726]

>>12497707
You're probably right, I'm unfortunately not very studied on traditional right-wing politics.

[Anonymous No.12497732]

All of the following is true:

1. When science is "solved" there will be one truth
2. That one truth will result in a single view of the universe, unifying disparate cultural/religious worldviews
3. A shared worldview manifests as love/familiarity/unity

So, since 1 will likely never happen to rigorous scientific standards, you can either forget the whole thing, or you can hypothesise what that truth will be. If you use your brain a little, it's reducible to a single mathematical monad. Ontology is mathematical, and it's a single rule/object that establishes the constructive and destructive vibrational harmonics of subatomics.

[Anonymous No.12498259]

Where does the line between "Space Taoism" end and "Cosmotech" begin?

[Anonymous No.12498362]

>>12498259
Space Taoism is a concept worked out in considerable detail by Aminom. if you read these threads or search the Mighty Cruffitan you can read more of his stuff there.

Cosmotech is a kind of a catch-all term i use for talking about what might be called 'post-atheist cyberpunk.' this is where things tend to cross paths with each other. Aminom is working out some of the groundwork for a 'post-atheism,' and i happen to find that particularly interesting because the more i find myself staring into the void of capitalism and catallaxy the more i begin to think that a lot of things we take for granted today are genuine spooks. Marx is for realsies, but by 2019 the question of what constitutes capitalism and what does not becomes very blurry indeed. what is needed is something like a transformation in consciousness, but this isn't a thing that any one individual can simply will into being or force through a kind of political process.

tech isn't going away; tech is pretty fascinating. writers like Stiegler, Simondon, YH, Heidegger et al are right in a space where whatever it is that we are going to learn about the mind going forward is going to happen through tech and in no other way. Land does a lot of conceptual heavy lifting for me in terms of explaining what cyberpunk meant at all, which was a tortuous discourse on the meaning of capital, computers, and postmodernity. but in many ways he is a kind of warning signal as well.

put another way, Cosmotech is a kind of a theme (or theme park) where we can kind of discuss what something like an 'enlightened schizophrenia' might look like. i'm pretty much convinced that Aminom is right about Whitehead and why he matters, and in my own demented laboratory i have come up with approximately 86,734 ways to create hell on earth and very few ways to create something less horrible. and mainly i come to these threads to bitch and complain about that, and show off my collection of battered simulacra. i'm not a philosopher, i'm a failed fiction writer who has become trapped in a diabolical machine i can't seem to get out.

there has to be a break, some kind of epochal shift in the way we are doing things. postmodernism sucks and rage politics sucks. and yet some things, mysteriously, do not suck.

(cont'd)

[Eris No.12498365]

>>12497732
You are absolutely correct on all three points.
The Omniquery Initiative. There's no stopping our science of science.™

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tao_of_Calculus/comments/ajcv9s/the_omniquery_initiative/

[Anonymous No.12498421]

>>12498362
Space Taoism really isn't a meme. the way i understand it, it's more like an incubator, or accelerator, a kind of possibility space where a whole lot of other shit can get talked about. i am a big big fan of radically re-interpreting the whole question of identity, but this also means a pretty substantial shift also in how we understand a lot of other things - like time, or history, or cities, or bodies, or identities, or whatever else.

imagine, if you will, something like a Not Foucault, or the effect that he had on the academy. imagine if you had a Not Foucault, except for postmodernity: forget about Power. Power is *moribund,* it is completely necrotic, it is the capital that you don't see (and if you go looking for capital, you won't find it either). something holds all of this shit in place, crushes us into these dystopian shit-boxes. it won't work. it can't work. everybody knows this, but we don't seem to know what to do about it.

so what do you do? again, i don't think imagining the 23rd century is a crazy idea, and kind of working one's way backwards from there. *mere questiong* isn't really an innocent process; there's a nice line from Foucault about this also:

>truth is given to the subject at a price that brings the subject's own being into question.

that's a good line. and i have all the love in the world for Heidegger, and some of his technophobia as well; after all, Land is doing nothing more than to tell you what the endgame for the Gestell is (it's teleoplexy). a Hegel/Marx/Land trifecta is no meme either: Spirit/Capital/Teleoplexy are three faces of the same thing. as wild and crazy as these threads get, i wouldn't be in them if i didn't think there was actually a pretty hard core at the bottom of them, some grain or kernel of understanding that it doesn't take a background in philosophy to see. i actually *don't* like Unironic Chaos, not really. i like nice cozy predictability. i'm not really into anarchy. i am okay with Freud and the distinction between regular unhappiness and neurotic unhappiness. i would unironically like not to waste any more of my life in absolute fucking depression, loneliness, and cynicism. i suspect many others feel similarly.

also i like posting sci-fi and fantasy art.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12498474]

So, do we have a collection of girardfag's posts, received and replies? I want to know where this all begin.

[Anonymous No.12498487]

>>12498421
Whitehead is interesting because Whitehead is his own man - he's not Heidegger, and he's not Spinoza either. he gives you a hella big sandbox to work with also. if you asked Deleuze who he thought was the endboss of all philosophy, he would say that it was Spinoza, and he might not even be wrong about that; Deleuze was no slouch.

but as for why Whitehead matters, Aminom can give you a much more interesting sense of that. for me he's fascinating as hell because i can bring all kinds of horrible nightmares into his cozy reading room - like Orestes, being chased by the furies - and they don't, i think, really work on him. he's not going to be ruffled, and he's not going to be triggered, and he's not going to Lay Down The Law. what he's going to do instead is suggest a completely new set of rules to play by, possibly rendered necessary by our having gotten to this point in our civilization and development, but possibly also because...it was there all along, and we just wanted to have (perversely) the enjoyment of trying to crush a 4D world into a 2D one, with momentary glimpses of a 3D one that we just kept fucking up.

in many ways, it is *too early to say* what a lot of this stuff *means,* or what the *point* is. we may not know what the point is. as a big believer in analysis also, and a Heidegger devotee, i'm pretty fucking convinced that when somebody is absolutely tortured by psychic pain, what you don't want to do if you are the analyst is to *force* them to *get to the point* - that wouldn't be therapy, that would be fucking torture.

so that is not what we do here in these threads. this is more like post-apoc survivalism. no utopias, but clearly no dystopias either. it's more like: so...now what? it's theorizing the after-the-ending of things. because there really is no ending, this is what the Lacanians have been saying forever. the ending itself is precisely what you don't want, the ending always keeps you stuck or trapped or looping back to yourself.

but this is what everybody does, this may be precisely what consciousness is - matrices, loops, unfolding algorithmic processes - self-questioning, self-reflecting, other-reflecting. it's why cynicism and irony are so fucking toxic, because it's very hard to avoid getting stuck into self-referential loops with someone who is out to bait you. you can't really *prevent* somebody from doing this, and as human beings we will evolve ideologies around all kinds of structures that bind things together around invisible cores of truth and understanding. but truth and understanding themselves, beyond a certain horizon, are process ontologies, they aren't objects or facts, they defy every category of linguistic representation.

anyways. if you think of Cosmotech like a kind of, i don't know, weird alchemical laboratory, full of weird glass and busted machinery and whatever else, and Space Taoism like the kind of meta-magical process under review i think you'll have the right idea.

[Anonymous No.12498505]

Gosh, does this nigger ever stop? I've read a quarter but it just goes on and on. Get a blog!

[Anonymous No.12498642]

>>12498474
you can search me on warosu if you want. or read the Cosmotech archive from a few months ago (>>12481738).

>>12498505
>Gosh, does this nigger ever stop?
not really, no. a blessing and a curse.

>I've read a quarter but it just goes on and on.
it really does.

>Get a blog!
yeah, i know

[Anonymous No.12498793]

>>12492155
>the most ruthless form of capital imaginable turns out to be total abasement
This is a great line. Have you ever considered an academic career, trying to get published, etc.? Or would that ruin a way of thinking that for you seems to at least approximate freedom/joy?

If you organized your thoughts a little, you could at least have a great blog. But even that amount of revision and that form of publication seems potentially limiting/corrupting. Maybe posting insane blocks of text that few people read and that will soon disappear is the ideal medium for this kind of thinking. But at the same time, it feels like there are lines of thought here that are practically begging to be systematized and disseminated.

[Anonymous No.12498803]

>>12491790
There literally was a JEH movie starring DiCaprio

[Anonymous No.12498834]

>>12498803
well how about that. based Leo.

doesn't seem like it was very good tho, the reviews are not flattering.

[Anonymous No.12498913]

>>12498793
>This is a great line.
ty anon. honestly tho i'm really just the messenger. i read all these guys and kind of built them a hotel in my head and now they fight with each other and i just record the notes and get coffee and unplug the toilet when it overflows. every now and then i take a cigarette break and bitch and complain about this weird job i have and that is more or less what this is. i am the caterer for a micro-Blood War between continental philosophers in some backwater country no one will ever visit. or demented lighthouse keeper. something to that effect.

>Have you ever considered an academic career, trying to get published, etc.?
academia just seems like the wrong place for me. as for trying to get published i just got stuck on fantasy fiction. that didn't happen either.

>Or would that ruin a way of thinking that for you seems to at least approximate freedom/joy?
it feels good sometimes to get stuff out, and ofc when other anons say, 'you know, i kind of feel the same way.' and of course to read things other anons post and go, hey, i feel that way too! and the relative anonymity of the board is kind of cozy also.

>If you organized your thoughts a little, you could at least have a great blog.
seriously, if i did have one it would just have entries that were placeholders and then an infinite comments section like this one.

>Maybe posting insane blocks of text that few people read and that will soon disappear is the ideal medium for this kind of thinking.
the demythologization of publishing and fame, of being some kind of literary celebrity? especially when one has no real talent? certainly part of it.

>But at the same time, it feels like there are lines of thought here that are practically begging to be systematized and disseminated.
meh, just give a shout-out to the schizbros on /lit/ and make some in-jokes that we will appreciate. enjoy the Wild Ride for what it is. and if it brings a little joy, well, that's just gravy.

[Anonymous No.12498935]

>>12498474
I've been interested in compiling a pdf of girardfags best posts but I'm not sure if he'd be alright with that; he'd have to relinquish ownership of his posts and they'd be to be scrubbed of any potential namesakes.

[Anonymous No.12498984]

How do I into the spirit of those threads? Any preliminary summary of ideas?

[Anonymous No.12499003]

How do you all feel about the founder of Buzzfeed’s take on accelerating identity formation and dissolution?

http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/issues/96w/96w_peretti.html

[Anonymous No.12499128]

>>12498935
The Journal of Psycho-Mimetics? bwaha. go for it! knock yourself out anon. have fun. you literally cannot fuck it up. i don't know how interested i would be in re-reading my own posts, but if any of them made you think, or prompted an interesting question, or - here's one - *made you seriously want to blow my shit up completely* - that's fine too.

i wrote earlier that a TSR module in which the party ultimately has to overthrow some clone of me as an endboss would actually be quite cozy; part of me would be just fine with being blasted by a delayed blast fireball, so that some city would be free at last of my Evil Clutches. i would be absolutely fine with being a kind of 1980s pulp villain with a cult, provided that, of course, i don't win in the end. or even if i do get away with whatever harebrained scheme i have cooked up, i don't *really* get away with it. you know, like Kefka. you really never can really throw enough shine on FF6, for all kinds of reasons.

what Evil Me would want is not so much to be agreed with, or even blown to pieces, but more navigated through. in D&D parlance, i would be only part of a mega-campaign.

>and so, at last, the party overthrew the tyrannical girardfag, and the deep gnomes were saved
>and his horrible puppets were destroyed and broken
>and also his weird computer, that too
>and those magical cursed artifacts that took possession of his soul
>well maybe you can keep one of those, but it's a terrible idea
>and the mushroom people also rejoiced
>and the slugs
>and those other weird things, which in retrospect maybe should have been killed with fire
>but that doesn't matter! the party was feasted, and they dispensed treasure and gold, and leveled-up, or whatever. it was a good scene
>and prepared themselves for the next stage of their quest
>what horrors now await them?
>they advance darker, into the tunnels
>tune in next time, to Adventure Into The Wild Ride

an epic campaign, to find The Heart of Wisdom! hnng. so dope. i would love to be a low-level villain or flunky in that for sure.

so yeah. you can do whatever you want with my posts anon, i don't really care.

[Anonymous No.12499433]

>>12498984
>How do I into the spirit of those threads?
it helps if you have a particular fondness for ruining your own day thinking about continental theory. partly also it is crowbarring oneself away from Land, and as to what lies on the other side of that, who fucking knows. for me at least that process will never be perfect, because he has left a Land-shaped hole in my heart.

in my own understanding, the Seven Wise Men of the Cosmotech time-loop are
>Hegel
>Marx
>Nietzsche
>Heidegger
>Lacan
>Deleuze
>Land

and so Spirit (Hegel)/Capital (Marx)/Teleoplexy(Land). that is the basic architecture of the thing - perhaps PKD's Black Iron Prison, or Castaneda's Foreign Installation. trying to find a way out, or through, or around that process leads to much much schizoposting. and in my own case i find myself with very few solutions and yet a great many questions. i find

>Any preliminary summary of ideas?
"The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip."

the paranoia is now maximally upgraded, and yet the grip has not yet been found. good old-fashioned Advaita Vedanta never loses its appeal, nor does the Tao, or the Buddha, or much else. i would also wish to paraphrase Nietzsche here again: that we have not yet gotten rid of God because we have not gotten rid of politics (and there you go, >>12498935, you can stick that in the pdf).

[Eris No.12499536]

>>12499003
>How do you all feel about the founder of Buzzfeed’s take on accelerating identity formation and dissolution?

I'll read it later maybe, but I thumbed it and think I get the take.

Figure about why the furry fandom is one of the most important movements of all time. Extreme identity-fucking.

http://cyborganthropology.com/Hypersigil

[Anonymous No.12499575]

Sneedpost this redditard subhuman to death
>Sneedpost this redditard subhuman to death
Sneedpost this redditard subhuman to death
>Sneedpost this redditard subhuman to death

[Anonymous No.12499632]

>>12499575
LOL you're the subhuman filth, sub-animal, nothing more than worthless garbage, and you know it.

[Anonymous No.12499646]

>>12499433
thanks

[Anonymous No.12499650]

>>12471255

>lastly, i'm hoping that someday somebody writes a good book about the ontology of *poverty,* because i think there is something profoundly interesting in that concept. Bataille argues well enough that the sacred is itself only created through the gigantic expenditure of loss and wastage, which is an enduringly interesting idea. and so much more has been written about it in Mauss, Baudrillard, et al - symbolic destruction of wealth, et al. and next door to this is the world of sacrifice in general, which - again - is a stumbling block to a lot of economic theory, with Uncle Nick only relatively recently Updating The Journal about the implications of this. Teleoplexy is ultimately nothing more than the replacement of institutionalized sacrifice with a far more understandable and pragmatic idea - R&D, and cybernetic feedback loops.

I just jumped in to this thread and I want to say just this, Bataille didn't mean sacrifice only as expenditure, but as a lacerating "opening", by sacrifice, in that you see your death in what is sacrificed, the ecstasy of annihilation opening up to the pure dice roll of fate. This is the closest to the Outside with capital O that exists in human experience , a limit experience , that Land pre-occupied himself in quite a bit and first found it in in Trakl. I think you mentioned religion in a previous post and Christianity, and Bataille perfectly described what religion is , its this ritualized opening. The hypestitional One God of the old testament is a movement towards this lacerating opening, even if it becomes banal later on. The notion that sacrifice is something extreme is entirely dismissed by Bataille on the get go. Religion and ritual get institutionalized and they become routine, but the opening still remains. I see space taoism get referenced a lot here, no look back at what Land was referencing , the entire history of Europe abducted ever since it entered modernity by this Outside movement, pure speculation, expenditure of energy to recapture it no matter how foolish. In the polarity he sets up there are two opposing sides, those good Christians like Hegel who say stop you are getting to far come back to the human and those who no matter what want an Exit like Nietzsche did . The new puritanism is modern liberal democracy and therefore will be discarded. It is a survival of the fittest for the idea that shape the aforementioned expenditure and sacrifice, it ain't peace and happiness this is why Land became a reactionary, because he said fuck this I want out of the stifling present . And I agree fuck wisdom , its all about code and predictive machines now, pure material power, wisdom ain't got nothing to do with it.

[Anonymous No.12500414]

>>12473670
William Morris, an author associated with the pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement who is generally credited with helping to found the pre-Tolkien fantasy genre, was also a committed Marxist/anarchist and was heavily involved in socialist activism.

[Anonymous No.12500436]

>>12499650
>And I agree fuck wisdom , its all about code and predictive machines now, pure material power, wisdom ain't got nothing to do with it.

Why "fuck wisdom"?

[Anonymous No.12500511]

>>12500414
Check out George MacDonald's Lilith, It's very fitting for this thread, basically C.S Lewis on unadulterated dread.

[Anonymous No.12500620]

>>12500414
>William Morris, an author associated with the pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement who is generally credited with helping to found the pre-Tolkien fantasy genre, was also a committed Marxist/anarchist and was heavily involved in socialist activism.
this is a very intriguing thought.

speaking of 19C/early 20C socialists with exceedingly interesting perspectives, here's GB Shaw (Major Barbara):
>LOMAX [leniently]: Well, the more destructive war becomes, the sooner it will be abolished, eh?

>UNDERSHAFT: Not at all. The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it. No, Mr Lomax, I am obliged to you for making the usual excuse for my trade; but I am not ashamed of it. I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals, cathedrals and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property. I have always done so; and I always shall. Therefore your Christmas card moralities of peace on earth and goodwill among men are of no use to me. Your Christianity, which enjoins you to resist not evil, and to turn the other cheek, would make me a bankrupt. My morality—my religion—must have a place for cannons and torpedoes in it.

>Undershaft doesn't seem to be an especially violent man, but what sets him apart from his family is that he absolutely believes that violence will exist regardless of what he does . . . So, according to his view, he might as well not end up bankrupt from idealism.

iirc Oswald Spengler thought Undershaft was a man after his own heart also. so who wore it better, Andrew Undershaft or the Grand Inquisitor? i also suspect that Shaw would have taken a cleaver to my own brand of schizo-mysticism either, and frankly i can't say i would him blame him for it.

>>12499650
>fuck wisdom, its all about code and predictive machines now, pure material power, wisdom ain't got nothing to do with it.
in a sense you're right. for me wisdom is what prevents the power from being abused, gives it the capacity to distinguish itself from recklessness. my ideal isn't a dystopia, even if it is driven by dystopian forces. it may be that power is always synonymous with abuse in some sense, with warp and disjunction.

here's something i learned the other day: in tarot, the inverted card is negative, but the negative is only a more concentrated form of the positive. it's not about good and evil, only concentration and intensity. pain teaches us things very directly. it can traumatize you also. your post is terrific, btw, this isn't a dig. i'm just gun-shy about pure material power at full throttle: 'the ecstasy of annihilation opening up to the pure dice roll of fate.' nothing curbs this, but you can drive off a cliff like that as well.

Bataille is - alas - arguably too hard-core for mellow-ish peaceniks like me.

[Anonymous No.12500828]

>>12499536
>http://cyborganthropology.com/Hypersigil

>The 'hypersigil' or 'supersigil' develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama, and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. Results can be remarkable and shocking.

this is fucking tremendous. if i'm supposed to quit this board at some point and do something else with my life i should not be reading things as based as this.

[Anonymous No.12500843]

>>12499536

I’m interested to hear how furries fit into it. I don’t really know much about them beyond that it’s anthropomorphizing woodland creatures and there’s usually a cosplay element.

Is a hypersigil a collection of symbols that persists in some consistent order over time? Or is it supposed to be like a distillation of the Real?

[Anonymous No.12501407]

>>12500828
>>12500843
>I’m interested to hear how furries fit into it.

The self is a story just the same as any other, your mind is a society of narrative entities or "styles of selves" of those who you have experienced and created both factual and fictional. So the story of yourself joins this inner society, increasing it by one. As below, so above.

Narrative mechanics is a technology; memes are the genes of culture, but dreams are the DNA of the soul. "Roleplay" and similar experimental narrative practices train one's ability to analyze and construct their own narratives. This is why it is so fundamental to human development, but it doesn't stop there, the technology just advances as we grow. When one "grows up" they learn to actualize their desired self-narrative by referring to others, i.e. "role models." How furries fit into this is that some of them, the "lifestylers" are _obsessed_ with narrative self-creation and creation in general. As are writers in general.

If you choose the right premises for a narrative construct and seek to become it, it can be powerfully transformative and effective to the extent of seeing like magic; one writes their own victory by finding the conditions to do so as is dictated by their master metanarrative premises.

In short, the "spirit world" is in inner and shared worlds of story, but the implications are every bit as much as intense. We can be haunted or possessed by stories (such as memories) or liberated by them. Parasitic narrative constructs subvert agency to impose themselves, whereas symbiotic ones do so by facilitating self-transformation.

Now assume that we're fighting World War III right now and it's being fought on the narrative plane, not the physical. It's painfully obvious at this point.

[Anonymous No.12501564]

howdy

[Anonymous No.12501821]

>>12501564
Justin Murphy is the Tyrion Lannister the shattered Seven Kingdoms of philosophy needs, for he will unite ice (Land) with fire (Peterson). then Land and Peterson will metaphorically fuck each other, and produce the God-AI Logos protocol that will be the true Prince That Was Promised.

then the literal fucking, the kind that only maverick philosophers in their fifties who aren't even into that can do

and that was how i managed to never have thoughts of sexual pleasure again, and walk a higher path, for i had that day learned to fear the gods

[Anonymous No.12501827]

>>12501407

I’m not sure that I buy it that roleplaying as a wild animal with human tendencies is some kind of key to releasing the shackles on the spirit. I can see how constructing a fantasy world with different rules can help break down real world barriers, but come on, at the end of the day you’re constructing a fantasy life in a fantasy narrative... this sounds like the same old delusion in a different dimension.

[Aminom No.12502159]

>>12501821
Don't think you've seen this one, it was formerly hidden:

https://vimeo.com/271193975/8ed2369743

[Anonymous No.12502198]

>>12474176
That pic looks like a hilariously literal depiction of a nomad war machine

[Anonymous No.12502307]

>>12502198
i wonder sometimes how much calling yourself a nomad war machine isn't really like being a colossal fucking asshole by another name. it is not impossible that being a nomad war machine can also just equal being a fucking prick.

the thing about a lot of continental philosophy is that it is in a way kind of responsible for living in the world of the Matrix we are now in, in a sense. are we really being Super Ironically Deconstructive, or are we just being fucking bulldozers all the time? it's kind of hard to tell. and one doesn't get the impression that bulldozers play nice with each other, they might just as well bristle and deploy more weapons and keep on trucking. why not? if everyone around you looks like a bulldozer, and there is no real alternative to being one, since if you aren't one you are going to get ploughed over by one...

i know that to become a bulldozer isn't really the point of being a BwO, but it's not like there's an off-switch either. but this is where things get interesting, yes? one of the things about Deleuzian thought is that it is kryptonite for Hegel; generalized anarchy > statist normativity. that's fine. but you also have to wonder if there isn't a tipping point, in which anarchy becomes the norm.

why wouldn't that be a descriptor of our world? everybody's ironic, nobody wants to defend the Norm - even if you tried, it would be absurd. and yet how fucking shitty would it be to live in that world? it would be very shitty. especially if the large bulldozers get together and basically say, okay, so it's bulldozer paradise now. let us teach you little bulldozers how this game works. and we will sell you everything you need - because, of course, you want to Buck The System, amirite? of course you do, little guy, of course you do...so did we, once, in the good old days...

there really hasn't been an answer to Deleuze. it certainly doesn't come from Land. how do bulldozers stop bulldozing? if you're living in a failed world, what would even be the point? but you're only living in a failed world because omni-bulldozing makes it that way...

so maybe you cue up a *private* version of the Matrix, within, to take your mind off of things, which is pretty much what everyone else is doing too...and everyone isn't quite telepathic in this way, but they're more or less on the same page...

[Anonymous No.12502342]

>>12502159
that's a pretty righteous mashup films good sir.

[Anonymous No.12502601]

>>12502307
I think we would generally agree that critical theory in its contemporary institutionalized form functions primarily as what you've been calling a "bulldozer." Critique is, almost a priori, an always unfinished project, and as a consequence it becomes a justification for inevitably deferring its actualization. If philosophy still matters because the chance to realize it was missed, then its self-preservation comes to depend on its unreality. The flip side of this is that even apparent "action" becomes just another aspect of impotent critique (instagram activism, call-out culture, antifa and fa getting off on beating each other up). Praxis is a very pernicious concept. Through its well-intentioned attentiveness to practice, theory has inadvertently absorbed practice, and in doing so become useless against the dominant practice that ultimately controls theory.

It seems like there's something similar going on in Land's accelerationism (and Hegel/Marx), and if you want to get away from Hegel, it's still there in Deleuze's insistence that we are already emancipated, we just don't realize it. If every moment is the gate through which the messiah might enter, we might as well just sit around and wait. But if the messiah is already here, that's even worse. And if he's not coming that's worst of all. This is one reason to admire Adorno's quaint (reactionary?) and not-so-secret love for everything cultural marxism has ostensibly destroyed—"high" art, the family, etc. In Nietzsche (and Deleuze) this manifests itself as a certain medievalism (this is where Nietzsche is least like the edge-lord he is made out to be and Deleuze is probably at his least radical).

If fantasy is the genre of this nostalgic medievalism, and utopian sci-fi is the genre of Hegelian statist progress, then maybe the dystopian (gothic) sci-fi of a Lovecraft/Land is paradoxically the most "appropriate" genre, because it at least has the decency to be horrified. But of course horror is really enjoyment, and if it's the most appropriate genre then it's also the least appropriate because what the present obviously calls for is an inappropriate genre.

Deleuze is really the philosopher par excellence of global capitalism (emphasis on the global). Deterritorialized spaces don't just exist—they have to be made "smooth" (bulldozed?) through violent historical processes. Except the people doing this aren't really nomads anymore, although they are assholes. And I'd say, well maybe the world is in need of assholes, but we seem to have plenty right now and it hasn't helped much.

[Anonymous No.12503053]

I don't take you seriously, girardfag, but I do take you seriously. ya dig?

[Anonymous No.12503182]

动态网自由门天安门天安门法轮功李洪志Free Tibet 六四天安门事件The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 天安门大屠杀The Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派斗争The Anti-Rightist Struggle 大跃进政策The Great Leap Forward 文化大革命The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人权Human Rights 民运Democratization 自由Freedom 独立Independence 多党制Multi-party system 台湾台湾Taiwan Formosa 中华民国Republic of China 西藏土伯特唐古特Tibet 达赖喇嘛Dalai Lama 法轮功Falun Dafa 新疆维吾尔自治区The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 诺贝尔和平奖Nobel Peace Prize 刘暁波Liu Xiaobo 民主言论思想反共反革命抗议运动骚乱暴乱骚扰扰乱抗暴平反维权示威游行李洪志法轮大法大法弟子强制断种强制堕胎民族净化人体实验肃清胡耀邦赵紫阳魏京生王丹还政于民和平演变激流中国北京之春大纪元时报评论共产党 独裁 专制 压制 统一 监视 镇压 迫害 侵略 掠夺 破坏 拷问 屠杀 活摘器官 诱拐 买卖人口 游进 走私 毒品 卖淫 春画 赌博 六合彩 天安门 天安门 法轮功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 刘晓波动态网自由门

[Anonymous No.12503483]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12503915]

>>12499433
where is that quote from?
(on the picture about fear)

[Anonymous No.12504014]

>>12503053
i do and this is exactly how i would like it to be also. may it ever be so.

put another way: perhaps neither of us is going to play in the NBA, but we can still have a good time playing basketball and not being jerks about it. the thing which is called basketball can also produce (inevitably produces?) a league, and in some sense basketball itself benefits from having a league. the game of basketball develops as a result, as a kind of collective experiment never to reach its final destination - and perhaps from out of so humble a beginning as a couple of people throwing a ball into a peach basket. but the rules of the game still are what they are, and pretty much universally accessible to all.

beyond a certain horizon it's not necessary to win, although it is worth playing as if you did want to win. and it's good to play 1v1, even if nothing stops you from saying, really, i'm all alone here...which in a sense, you are...and yet if you don't pay attention, you will probably get your ankles broken and made to look rather silly.

the game as such is neither real nor illusory, but ceremonial and improvisational. it gives bodies something to do, but it isn't coercive; and you need a brain, but if you have no game whatsoever you will not be able to do much. and here's one final twist: zombies really suck at it.

>>12503915
Dune

[Anonymous No.12504042]

>>12485831
Star Wars already did a Jedi empire with Sith rebels. It was called the prequels, and everyone hated them.

There's something fascinating about Star Wars in that unlike a franchise like Marvel in which war (on terror) is just kind of continuous and always of the same kind, Star Wars was divided into two different trilogies that stage two civil wars with the sides flipped. Which is why its interesting that the new Star Wars movies are basically doing away with this in order to turn Star Wars into something like Marvel, with no unified narrative structure, just an endless procession of explosive set-pieces.

[Anonymous No.12504108]

>>12502601
>I think we would generally agree that critical theory in its contemporary institutionalized form functions primarily as what you've been calling a "bulldozer."
yes. not only critique either, but ideology internalized, the general normie condition. the 99.9% of humanity which isn't an arhat, or Shakespeare, or Bach.

>Critique is, almost a priori, an always unfinished project, and as a consequence it becomes a justification for inevitably deferring its actualization. If philosophy still matters because the chance to realize it was missed, then its self-preservation comes to depend on its unreality.
yes yes

>The flip side of this is that even apparent "action" becomes just another aspect of impotent critique (instagram activism, call-out culture, antifa and fa getting off on beating each other up). Praxis is a very pernicious concept. Through its well-intentioned attentiveness to practice, theory has inadvertently absorbed practice, and in doing so become useless against the dominant practice that ultimately controls theory.
yesssssssssssss
that dependency is everything. critique lives on the real, in its capacity to find grist for the mill, and in so doing defers praxis by becoming praxis through nothing more than the subtlest of register shifts, even just a pose.

>what the present obviously calls for is an inappropriate genre.
this is my thought also. and it seems as if that is what great works of fiction, or great visions do: Star Trek was the Oregon Trail in space. Star Wars is WW2 in space. Dune is episodes from Herbert's own life, his feelings about OPEC, lots of other stuff (in space). Tolkien pretty much invents modern fantasy, but it doesn't seem like this was ever his plan: he was condensing everything he loved about Middle English culture and society, and at an epochal time in that culture. he creates a genre even more appropriate for its time than ever! and there's Gibson with Neuromancer, and Mad Max's visions of a nightmarish outcome for the Cold War, which becomes ironic for the developers of Fallout, and which is one of the most intriguing scenarios going on today.

the other one is - surprise surprise to hear it from me - the whole arc of the Final Fantasy games, which are like texts in a meta-genre retracing a long ballet between fantasy and technology, from high fantasy (FF4) to shopping malls, selfies, and luxury cars (FFXV). it is both highly formulaic and yet also winds up simulating in remarkable ways exactly the world we have today. Final Fantasy is both text, genre, form, and commentary. 6 gives you Steampunk-Baroque-Post Apoc, an inappropriate (or untimely?) genre because of how well those themes work together.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12504199]

>>12504108
>>12502601
>If every moment is the gate through which the messiah might enter, we might as well just sit around and wait. But if the messiah is already here, that's even worse. And if he's not coming that's worst of all.
this possibility alone is enough to make me think it's a good idea to leave some doors open, even if you like being as suspicious as i do.

>Deleuze is really the philosopher par excellence of global capitalism (emphasis on the global). Deterritorialized spaces don't just exist—they have to be made "smooth" (bulldozed?) through violent historical processes. Except the people doing this aren't really nomads anymore, although they are assholes.
this is my sense as well. the absence of violent historical processes makes us act pretty horrifically as well. this was Land's territory (and not only him - Sadie Plant and Fisher also, and many others): what happens after 1990? what's going on? something is happening here, what is it? he decided to take a long look at the phenomenon of libertarianism itself, and came up with acceleration - which has, i should add, more than a little in common with both old-school Freudo-Marxism and modern progressivism. which is why all three can become (and perhaps should become?) locked in a kind of rock-scissors-paper game, like a microcosm of the great ideologies that fought in WW2 transplanted into the intellectual heartland of the winning team: the Fukuyama West.

that we wind up 'victimized' by our own drive to accumulation is a circular argument, but it's also a remarkably robust one. if you are looking for some kind of historical determinism, this one will work. and it functions as a critique of both sides of the political divide in America today. but at the same time it is basically guaranteed to hold it in place by being disappointed. it's like Oedipus wanting to reprogram the Sphinx, so that it will tear him apart with exactly the riddle he wants to be torn apart by. and the Sphinx says - well, i have to admit, i haven't heard that one before...

or, because Dune never gets old: man becomes the Sphinx. and perhaps also why i think what makes Herbert's work so fascinating was that he anticipated a genuine need for feminism, that a time was coming when men really would create for themselves traps they could not get out of, and women would have to help them get through it. but not by becoming despots themselves, or well-intentioned handmaidens to outworn ideologies, but by helping men to become what they are (or avoid what they ought not to become). the Bene Gesserit - witchlike kinda-Nietzschean crypto-Jesuits - are much more interesting than Paul Atreides. the Kwisatz Haderach is a disaster, not a triumph. there's a lot going on in Herbert.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12504261]

>>12504199
>And I'd say, well maybe the world is in need of assholes, but we seem to have plenty right now and it hasn't helped much.
this is my sense as well. postmodernity is like the intellectual equivalent of nuclear proliferation, in reverse, and it leads to a complete fucking quagmire: well, how do you know i'm not joking? maybe i am joking!

it's like becoming enslaved to your own fail-safe device. i really do think there's something in this, that maybe on some deep level the Cold War never really ended, because it ended with the victory for a side that only had one part of the equation that people were looking for. we want the socialism *and* we want the capitalism. we need to have both. what makes the current state of politics in America such a fucking trainwreck is that you have a battle between nationalists and globalists, which is exactly what you would *not* want to have happen if you were building a state: you need both of these things to be integrated. in a religious sense, it would be like having a war between esoterics and exoterics. who's right, the Sufi mystics or the imams and the clerics? you're the emperor of the Middle Kingdom, who ya got: Laozi, or Confucius? in Dostoevsky you actually get the literary treatment of exactly this thing in Christianity: Christ rejected by the Grand Inquisitor. it's an all-time Pantheon tippity-top work of Great Literature for this reason.

what do you do when everyone's being an asshole (or a bulldozer)? i don't know, but historically this has i think given rise to great wisdom traditions. periods of anarchic foment tend to be fruitful for esoteric mystics, even if they are arguably only repeat the same things time and again. i don't suspect the Axial Age was exactly peaceful, but it did lead to great psychology. i would put the Industrial Revolution in that category also, the sudden appearance of a factory system that sucks human beings into giant furnaces for reasons they can scarcely explain, and this gives you some pretty compelling mystical and pseudo-mystical writing - not only Hegel, or Marx, but Hegel-Marx (and all that follows.) is it so crazy to say that a collapse of Cold War distinctions is really such a weird parallel for the Country/Urban distinction in the AA? and what it leads to in turn is not only postmodernity (again, which i think we have to say is a state and not a philosophy in itself), but also the *Internet,* and our current state of total bewilderment over what constitutes reality itself, distinctions between the virtual/real or symbolic/imaginary or capital and Face-Fucking Lovecraftian Cthulhoid Capitalism, and so on.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.12504328]

>>12504261
i referenced earlier the work of an interesting scholar and some of his critics (>>12495417) writing on Tianxia. i'm obviously no fan of Social Credit, but it's patently obvious that our own hyper-libertarian corporate overlords in the West basically are working the exact same plan by another name. we have Social Credit too, and it is regulated by the media, government, corporations and much else. rebelling against that can take you to Land, and much else. but in the end it's really only going to wind up proposing something not all that unlike it either: call it Capitalist Legalism. that's how Wintermute would work, i think. and we are building it, not even with the things we want, but with a critical mass of things we do not, like our absolute confusion of the meaning of our victory...

>The true genius of cyberpunk is to cash-out the utterly alien into commercially-driven bionics (without in any way domesticating it).

more us than us, and less so, a Sphinx by another name, a living fail-safe device. all us of us protected and given license to, at last, be the assholes we always wanted to be, and completely unaware of how brittle this process is, how totally dependent it is on someone, somewhere, not being an asshole.

incentivizing a less assholish-world that doesn't lean on ultra-libertarianism or absolute love of some idealized form of the CCP would be very much of interest to me. i don't know how it's done, but i think whatever religion has done for people, historically speaking, has mediated those impossible poles, when basic distinctions and dichotomies that prop up the world suddenly start to become a lot more unstable or relativistic. the Chinese have had their own nation collapse, or be invaded, plenty of times. many European nations have also. the Americans really haven't, at least in living memory. they had the Civil War, and they might have it again, or not.

ugh. also something something about Heidegger i guess.

>>12504042
>Star Wars already did a Jedi empire with Sith rebels. It was called the prequels, and everyone hated them.
good point! and it could have been so much better if they had had, well, i guess somebody a little bit less playful than George Lucas at the helm. they're horrible movies, only made worse by wondering how legit awesome they might have been, or the kinds of questions they might have asked: what happens when the Rebels use the Death Star for the Greater Good?

>Which is why its interesting that the new Star Wars movies are basically doing away with this in order to turn Star Wars into something like Marvel, with no unified narrative structure, just an endless procession of explosive set-pieces.
and glowy things, always there is a glowy thing.

i didn't see Venom, but it's another example of this, where something really interesting is lying *right there* but it doesn't get picked up. Eddie Brock is a true everyman, and his True Desires are straight out of Deleuze and Land.

[Anonymous No.12504462]

i don't think the Cold War really ended, in a way. or maybe it's weirder than that: it was actually extended to the present age by the moderators and the mediators. the great tragedy, the great disaster, was averted, but because it was averted we never really stared it in the face and saw it for what it was. we could carry on acting like individuals-as-states, or states-as-individuals, the confusion that Girard believed Clauswitz understood, and why Clauswitz was not a Hegelian, and Girard was what he was: a Clauswitzian Catholic. no Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Deleuze or Land required - just the gospels, and On War.

neoliberalism wins, but there is something fucked up about it. Foucault keyed in on some of it, as did Lacan, in their ways; the difficulty of enjoyment, the power dynamics that shape pleasure. Land volunteered himself to be ripped into pieces by things straight out of Saw trying to figure out what that was, and lost his goddamn mind. now he looks back wistfully at it. he's quoted Blood Meridian and Judge Holden's speech a couple of times at ufblog, that War is God and so on. i think he's right, and therein lies the rub. deep down, maybe, we still really love the Cold War. certainly i would love to play a video game set in that, a fucking fantasy-steampunk Intrigue Simulator where i can be J Edgar Hoover, except for Good (because what i really want to do is just fucking become completely decadent on a nice government wage, and not have anybody ask me too many questions). maybe the allure of Fighting Communism never got old.

and i think too about how superhero fantasies may ultimately be what shreds any sense of the polis or the commons. in Rome the army survived the collapse of the Empire; it was the army that laid the blueprint for feudalism. the army itself never really disappeared. maybe for us it will be the same, with libertarian superheroes in place of the army, one-man armies driven by self-contained corporate kingdoms - think Big Boss, from MGS: TPP. back to feudalism once again, to the dark ages.

>Back and back, past the Friedrich Krupps and the Anton and Georg and Wilhelm and Heinrich Krupps — and the Katharinas and Helenes and Gertruds and Theodoras, the Krupp Valkyrie—back beyond the first glinting razor-sharp bayonets, the first sluglike cannonballs, the agony of the Thirty Years War and the Black Death — back past the early black-and-white Westphalian cottages into other times, older than the written record of Essen's original Krupp or even the Dark Ages; back to the jumbled terror of the Hercynian forest, when the Rhineland was a Roman outpost, and men believed in monstrous things, and the barbaric Ruhr lay dark under the moon, its oak and bloodbeech tops writhing in the evening wind like a gaggle of ghosts, and the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting.

[Anonymous No.12504599]

Ya'll should play No Man's Sky, It's about being stuck inside a simulation slowly breaking down hosted by a dying computer having a existential panic attack about its inevitable death, and your there to comfort it in its final 16 minutes.

[Anonymous No.12504752]

>>12504599
>It's about being stuck inside a simulation slowly breaking down hosted by a dying computer having a existential panic attack about its inevitable death, and your there to comfort it in its final 16 minutes.
that's a damn fine plot.

there's no post-apoc scenario quite like the one we have now: a completely shitted-up and fucked-out world that doesn't end, and cannot end, because it is locked in the past, and which perhaps is precisely what makes futurism in both its major forms - socialism, left or right - impossible. but those fantasies are driven by the equal impossibility of being force-fed the irony and cynicism that are what the victor of the 20C produces. i will happily admit that Landian acceleration is a way of recoding neoliberalism so that it can be a kind of perfect simulacrum: neither libertarianism nor socialism, but the worst of both, which is sometimes exactly what you want, as incredible as that might seem, if you are sick to death of the rest of it...

i am becoming everything that i once hated, i suspect: the odious Boring Centrist, truly the most hideous breed of pseud. this is also why i would much prefer to be a villain in a TSR module and get blown up by a party of adventurers, rather than present myself as if i have any kind of Great Work or New Idea to contribute, as i patently don't. i want all of my philosophical schizo-rambling to be converted into villainy, or some kind of ecology of mildly grotesque Evil, with a treasure haul somewhere that can be plundered before moving on to greater challenges.

i'm thinking level 5-8 or somewhere around there. a really clumsy and third-rate J Edgar Hoover who has brainwashed some kobolds and hobgoblins and who now lives like a sulky and decadent aesthete in a decaying manor, with a Light of Judgment analogue that only works about half the time. and i'm only there to maintain a front for some greater evil, which may or may not actually have moved on and simply forgot to tell me. i'm angry about that and i take it out on the townsfolk.

not really Evil evil, just...blocked. and kind of need to get cleared out of the way. it's nothing personal, but if i am not stopped, it's not going to trend in a positive direction. a Neutral Evil art critic with ties to the thieves' guild and some mildly spooky elemental planes, nothing big. maybe like an Evil prep school, for aspiring warlocks. like Harry Potter but for really shitty children who want to grow up and abuse magic to sell junk bonds.

when Benjamin said that self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure he was more right than he knew. that really is exactly correct.

[Anonymous No.12504762]

>>12504599
NMS? The fucking space exploration one that got panned on release because it wasn't anywhere near what they said it was? That sounds like too cool of a concept to jive with what the game is, unless they changed it post-release

[Anonymous No.12504848]

>>12504752
thus Evil Girardfag: i scapegoat myself, always imperfectly, and fuck it up, painfully. this leads to great confusion. then i take it out on somebody else. why won't anyone stop me from torturing myself?

one by one, i convince the demihumans in the caves below that i know something. because i have a lot of wizard tomes, i make their own shamans and elders look ridiculous, i can quote Lacan and Deleuze at them all day and make them fabulously self-aware. i'm not really building Mordor or Isengard, it's all done with irony and parodic self-reference. and out of their sheer curiosity to know more, i quietly suck them into a black hole of guilt that i keep insisting i can explain better than anyone else.

at this point it becomes obvious that we can See Through The Lies of the otherwise unremarkable and boring townsfolk of the surrounding areas, and i make my own small army of cave-dwellers aware that these guys are saying that they are Good, when patently they are Evil - and not even as Evil as they might be. and that is precisely why we basically have the license to go in there and enslave them, because unlike them, we in fact can be honest with ourselves. better the actual Evil that we are, rather than the fake Evil that they are. right?

and when we torture them afterwards, we find out, of course, that it's so much worse. they're all enslaved by capitalism! oh, man. what's capitalism, the kobolds ask?

what's capitalism, i say? you guys aren't going to believe this...it's *all* capitalism, they're all enslaved. the whole world of mankind is enslaved by capitalism. it's the worst thing ever! and i'm a part of it too, of course...

so what you're saying, they ask me, is that really we don't have to feel guilty about it - right?

well, i respond, it's complicated. tell you what: let's start by taking over a few villages, and let *me* take care of the guilt. you guys handle the tactics and the strategy, i will handle all of the critique of ideology. also, i think we should go down into the caves too and see if we can dig up any wizard tombs or whatever, it will be way easier if we can dig up a necklace of fireballs or something.

and inevitably some kind of civil war is going to break out, but i'm fine with this. shit, maybe *i'm* the one who asks for the adventurers to come in the first place. save us from ourselves! (this too is a trap, by the way).

ah, such fun.

[Anonymous No.12505211]

>>12504762
Yes. It has received multiple major patches that completely reworked the game. The concept/story is actually worked into the game really well, It's really hard to explain but basically every patch has advanced the story line by 1 minute and they keep notching up the outwardness of the existential panic the computer is having by adding planets that have increasingly symbolic properties like being monochromatic, black goo seeping out of the surfaces, etc.

In one patch they revamped the space stations but instead of replacing them they kept the old ones still floating in space abandoned, bathed in red and falling apart but desperately attempting to keep functioning. If you were inside one of this stations when you applied the update and loaded your saves it was extremely eerily.

[Anonymous No.12505265]

>>12505211
i was so disappointed with the initial release, i completely abandoned the game.
this sounds very cool though

[Anonymous No.12505478]

Who am I to pretend to love humanity? Look at the world: it is a laughingstock and disgrace. I am a parody of myself, deluding myself into believing that I have a chance to save the world, or even myself. It's all a hard cope, no different than any other, a way to rationalize the utter wretchedness of life itself. Love of life is for the bourgeois elite who are privileged enough to enjoy it while others suffer. Hating life is the only revolutionary act, as it acknowledges the suffering of the proletariat. Anyone who loves life is an enemy of the people and themselves, and they must be made to hate life to know suffering. Ridicule, mock, criticize, and deconstruct all who express love of life. Throw books at them until they die, whip them mercilessly with contempt until they submit and clean their room. Only if we hate life enough can we truly change - oh wait, we can't, because there is no salvation or redemption. There is only hatred without conditions, universal hate is the only way. No solution, no way out, no future, no hope, only forwards.

Only two minutes left before there is peace at last, and we return to the nothingness from which we came. Our time is up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg2pS9KN28U

[Anonymous No.12505541]

>>12505478
Take the Linkola pill.

[Anonymous No.12505581]

>>12505541

[Anonymous No.12506724]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12508040]

>>12471153
10/10 post

[Anonymous No.12508154]

>>12495840
>eye glasses are dysgeneic
Then explain to me the glasses fetishist. I know it probably has to do with the fact that myopia is associated with high intellect, but still

[Anonymous No.12508372]

>>12508154
What is there to explain? The sexual fetishization is unrelated to what I was discussing.

[Anonymous No.12509003]

[Anonymous No.12509049]

>>12474967
You guys are alright. Don't be in that book tomorrow afternoon.

[Anonymous No.12509106]

So Girardfag, do you believe that what you are saying is making sense?

Please do not answer with a weird and twisted answer.

Also space taoism sounds cool, but how do yo define it, practice it and wharere are the sacred texts?

[Anonymous No.12509127]

I like what you're doing here dude. Although I certainly fail to understand a bit of it and probably pretend to understand a bit more, keep it up! Love and dick- Nelson

[Anonymous No.12509298]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/?title=Optimalism&redirect=no

[Anonymous No.12509694]

>>12509106
>So Girardfag, do you believe that what you are saying is making sense?
i don't know about me, but i believe the guys i read and talk about make sense. and i'm okay with putting an asterisk on it too.

i have problems and i have questions. there are things that bug me that really are complicated problems, and i don't know how to solve them. it's like trying to run Windows on a processor built for a Gameboy, that's how i feel. culturally speaking i think we are heading for a dark age; technologically, it's an Information Renaissance. we are both very sophisticated and very crude, and there is a relationship between these.

on a moral level these are confusing times. i'm confused by them. i can explain the nature of my confusion, in some sense, but there's always a mystery there to it. i used to want to know what the answers were, so that i could just follow them and be left alone. now i have this disquieting feeling that there are no answers, and a lot of the time people are really just flying blind, on intuition and uncertainty. it seems incredible to me that with all of this information at our disposal we would still be so confused about so much...and at the same time, that makes sense too, in a kind of melancholy way.

it's why i was mentioning basketball earlier (>>12504014). the object of players is not to become referees, or vice-versa. the goal isn't even necessarily to win. what then is the point? well, there are some things that are good - you know, like putting the ball in the hoop. you can play solo or play with a team. something uniquely human is at work here, and it's hard to say what it is. but it is kind of beautiful.

sometimes things work before we know what the point of them are. they make sense in hindsight or in retrospect. maybe it's just enough to do a thing that kinda makes sense at the time, and later on somebody else will find something useful there in it to borrow from.

kek, now i want to start another thread.

>>12509049
have you read this? thoughts?

>>12509127
based Nelson. thanks for the love and dick my man

[Anonymous No.12510427]

Good buy friends