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Farted by Losperman, November 01, 2005, 01:26:35 AM

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VCRClock

hey, confession: my mental image of jack white is jack black
<Marlin Clock> This thread seems proof positive that divisiveness at any level is usually bad for the Clock Crew.
<PhantomCatClock> are we talking about the same clock crew

PhantomCatClock

slurpee you described cookie clicker and then you made a punchline that was also cookie clickster

Slurpee

jack white looks like a drowning victim
he looks like a grown-up child star
he looks like an fmv intro for a ps2 survival horror game
he looks like johnny depp playing michael jackson circa 2009
he looks like robert smith's fat son

Slurpee

Quote from: PhantomCatClock on March 31, 2020, 12:28:58 AM
slurpee you described cookie clicker and then you made a punchline that was also cookie clickster
I wish I read more zizek so I could say something insanely pretentious to this

VCRClock

Quote from: Slurpee on March 31, 2020, 12:31:38 AM
jack white looks like a drowning victim
he looks like a grown-up child star
he looks like an fmv intro for a ps2 survival horror game
he looks like johnny depp playing michael jackson circa 2009
he looks like robert smith's fat son

[u2]H9CkFHy--8w[/u2]
<Marlin Clock> This thread seems proof positive that divisiveness at any level is usually bad for the Clock Crew.
<PhantomCatClock> are we talking about the same clock crew

Slurpee

I read that paperclip maximizer (which is a real thought experiment) joke, or somebody told it to me, ages ago, and honestly once you start recognizing "make the number go up" as a distinct motivation in human beings, you start seeing it everywhere
the dopamine hit of simulated progress is a supernormal stimulus, and you could go on about the problems it creates for days, but in reality the problem is even more deeply rooted in our society
the scientific revolution brought renewed emphasis on empiricism as the route to real knowledge, but with that came renewed emphasis on quantifiability; success is only recognized as success if it can be measured in numbers. quantifiability isn't inherently good or bad, but it is inherently an abstraction and with the efficiency of abstraction always comes neglect of exceptions and of outliers. that "making the number go up" gives us a dopamine hit just means those who accumulate a very very large number tend to be hopeless addicts of the illusion, be they celebrities, billionaires, or cult leaders
cookie clicker recognizes the absurdity of abstracted achievement with its mechanics, while also mocking the alienation it brings to what the abstractions are meant to represent


there I did it, fuck you zizek

Slurpee

Quote from: VCRClock on March 31, 2020, 12:44:06 AM
Quote from: Slurpee on March 31, 2020, 12:31:38 AM
jack white looks like a drowning victim
he looks like a grown-up child star
he looks like an fmv intro for a ps2 survival horror game
he looks like johnny depp playing michael jackson circa 2009
he looks like robert smith's fat son

[u2]H9CkFHy--8w[/u2]
I am honored, flattered and humbled

Slurpee

trying to read my own post in zizek's weird slobbery voice and it doesn't really work, for some reason I keep defaulting into werner herzog

GreyClock


FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK

does zizek do cocaine? cause the main thing I take away from zizek is that his writing style is really similar to the essay-length internet forum posts cokeheads somehow write up in minutes.

Slurpee

Quote from: FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK on March 31, 2020, 07:30:43 AM
does zizek do cocaine? cause the main thing I take away from zizek is that his writing style is really similar to the essay-length internet forum posts cokeheads somehow write up in minutes.
he's a lacanian
all of the post-structuralist thinkers read like thought soup

Slurpee

not that...
like, not because they don't make sense, they just require such a degree of assumed knowledge to understand that it's incomprehensible to a layperson

like, when the matrix was big, did you ever actually try to read Simulacra and Simulation? jesus christ.
with the map the size of the land it's mapping and the map replaces the land? like what the fuck
but that book does make sense if you know how to read it

FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK

the only stuff in the "inspired the matrix" genre I've read are various William Gibson things and BLAME.  but that reminds me of when I tried to read The Myth of Sisyphus. I read a summary of it and figured "I really like the cut of this camus dude's jib lets give it a shot". went out and picked up a copy. it was over a decade ago so maybe I'm hazy on it, but it was constantly referencing works by other writers and expects you to have fully read all of said works. every single sentence cover to cover is like that so the whole thing was completely incomprehensible. I can handle googling stuff sometimes, but that was too much. I actually gave up. I bet it would be amazing if I had the prerequisite knowledge to actually enjoy the damn thing. I'm not sure if Simulacra and Simulation is as hard to follow as Sisyphus. but I can say the few fragments and essays I've read of Zizek were comprehensible at least. I have experience reading cocaine. it's a beautiful language in it's own right.

VCRClock

someone once recommended i read "society of the spectacle," and once when I was reading it waiting for a [smart] friend to show up at a coffee shop, he showed up and was like "you're reading that shit?"

I don't think it assumes you know anything, but it's so dense (is it just a bad translation?) that you have to reread every section you read and ask yourself "did I understand anything about the idea he just tried to communicate, or did I just know how to read all those words"

one and a half years later, I'm still nowhere close to finishing that shit

it's just there because I think I should read it for some reason even though I'm not being entertained or feeling enriched
<Marlin Clock> This thread seems proof positive that divisiveness at any level is usually bad for the Clock Crew.
<PhantomCatClock> are we talking about the same clock crew

Slurpee

#113374
Quote from: FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK on March 31, 2020, 08:16:30 PM
the only stuff in the "inspired the matrix" genre I've read are various William Gibson things and BLAME.  but that reminds me of when I tried to read The Myth of Sisyphus. I read a summary of it and figured "I really like the cut of this camus dude's jib lets give it a shot". went out and picked up a copy. it was over a decade ago so maybe I'm hazy on it, but it was constantly referencing works by other writers and expects you to have fully read all of said works. every single sentence cover to cover is like that so the whole thing was completely incomprehensible. I can handle googling stuff sometimes, but that was too much. I actually gave up. I bet it would be amazing if I had the prerequisite knowledge to actually enjoy the damn thing. I'm not sure if Simulacra and Simulation is as hard to follow as Sisyphus. but I can say the few fragments and essays I've read of Zizek were comprehensible at least. I have experience reading cocaine. it's a beautiful language in it's own right.
right yeah exactly

I think, some ideas are just new, and we don't really have the language to talk about them
so philosophers have to invent ways to talk about them, and the way they do that largely stems, as most language does, from metaphor
and then those metaphors become the foundation for other ideas that build upon or reject them, and that's where that density comes from

sometimes these ideas eventually work their way down to the mainstream ("late-stage capitalism", "meme") sometimes they don't ("interpassivity")
you know what interpassivity is?
it's that thing you do where you buy a bunch of steam games and don't get around to playing any of them. that's it. the act of collecting replaces the purpose that collecting was meant to serve. it's not inter-active, it's inter-passive. interpassivity.
tidy, right?
but you can't use it yet or everybody will think you're an asshole. we have to wait for a webcomic that explains it to go viral or something

but zizek also does dip into the dense philosophical jargon sometimes (bolded the interesting parts):
QuoteAs Badiou demonstrated apropos of the Stalinist show trials, this violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite, in the obsession with pure appearance: in the Stalinist universe, the passion of the Real (ruthless enforcement of the Socialist development) thus culminates in ritualistic stagings of a theatrical spectacle in the truth of which no one believes. The key to this reversal resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious, since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle. The fundamental illusion is here that, once the violent work of purification is done, the New Man will emerge ex nihilo, freed from the filth of the past corruption. Within this horizon, "really-existing men" are reduced to the stock of raw material which can be ruthlessly exploited for the construction of the new - the Stalinist revolutionary definition of man is a circular one: "man is what is to be crushed, stamped on, mercilessly worked over, in order to produce a new man." We have here the tension between the series of "ordinary" elements ("ordinary" men as the "material" of history) and the exceptional "empty" element (the socialist "New Man," which is at first nothing but an empty place to be filled up with positive content through the revolutionary turmoil). In a revolution, there is no a priori positive determination of this New Man: a revolution is not legitimized by the positive notion of what Man's essence, "alienated" in present conditions and to be realized through the revolutionary process, is - the only legitimization of a revolution is negative, a will to break with the Past
zzzzzzzzzzzz

but then later in the same essay he says, like, the most amazing shit about 9/11 I've ever read:
QuoteThe WTC bombings again confront us with the necessity to resist the temptation of a double blackmail. If one simply, only and unconditionally condemns it, one cannot but appear to endorse the blatantly ideological position of the American innocence under attack by the Third World Evil; if one draws attention to the deeper socio-political causes of the Arab extremism, one cannot but appear to blame the victim which ultimately got what it deserved ... The only consequent solution is here to reject this very opposition and to adopt both positions simultaneously, which can only be done if one resorts to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions, each one is one-sided and false. Far from offering a case apropos of which one can adopt a clear ethical stance, we encounter here the limit of moral reasoning: from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is not innocent - to adopt such an "innocent" position in today's global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction. The same goes for the more ideological clash of interpretations: one can claim that the attack on the WTC was an attack on what is worth fighting for in democratic freedoms - the decadent Western way of life condemned by Muslim and other fundamentalists is the universe of women's rights and multiculturalist tolerance; however, one can also claim that it was an attack on the very center and symbol of global financial capitalism. This, of course, in no way entails the compromise notion of shared guilt (terrorists are to blame, but, partially, also Americans are also to blame...) - the point is, rather, that the two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. The fact that global capitalism is a totality means that it is the dialectical unity of itself and of its other, of the forces which resist it on "fundamentalist" ideological grounds.

            Consequently, of the two main stories which emerged after September 11, both are worse, as Stalin would have put it. The American patriotic narrative - the innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride - is, of course, vain; however, is the Leftist narrative (with its Schadenfreude: the US got what they deserved, what they were for decades doing to others) really any better? The predominant reaction of European, but also American, Leftists was nothing less than scandalous: all imaginable stupidities were said and written, up to the "feminist" point that the WTC towers were two phallic symbols, waiting to be destroyed ("castrated"). Was there not something petty and miserable in the mathematics reminding one of the holocaust revisionism (what are the 6000 dead against millions in Ruanda, Kongo, etc.)? And what about the fact that CIA (co)created Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument AGAINST attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely their duty to get us rid of the monster they created? The moment one thinks in the terms of "yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but one should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism," the ethical catastrophy is already here: the only appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity with ALL victims. The ethical stance proper is here replaced with the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable. In short, let us make a simple mental experiment: if you detect in yourself any restraint to fully empathize with the victims of the WTC collapse, if you feel the urge to qualify your empathy with "yes, but what about the millions who suffer in Africa...", you are not demonstrating your Third World sympathize, but merely the mauvaise foi which bears witness to your implicit patronizing racist attitude towards the Third World victims. (More precisely, the problem with such comparative statements is that they are necessary and inadmissible: one HAS to make them, one HAS to make the point that much worse horrors are taken place around the world on a daily basis - but one has to do it without getting involved in the obscene mathematics of guilt.)
it seems like such a simple, beautiful, self-evident truth: the comparison of human suffering is vain and obscene

if you actually care about human beings hurting, it makes no sense to use one person or group's pain as a bludgeon to rationalize away another person or group's pain
as AJJ put it, "you're an irreplaceable human soul with your own understanding of what it means to suffer / and that's a huge bummer"

wish I could bottle that concept and spray it on people

Slurpee

Quote from: Slurpee on March 31, 2020, 09:46:28 PM
wish I could bottle that concept and spray it on people
maybe that's why zizek slobbers so much :duelin:

Slurpee

Quote from: VCRClock on March 31, 2020, 08:45:36 PM
someone once recommended i read "society of the spectacle," and once when I was reading it waiting for a [smart] friend to show up at a coffee shop, he showed up and was like "you're reading that shit?"

I don't think it assumes you know anything, but it's so dense (is it just a bad translation?) that you have to reread every section you read and ask yourself "did I understand anything about the idea he just tried to communicate, or did I just know how to read all those words"

one and a half years later, I'm still nowhere close to finishing that shit

it's just there because I think I should read it for some reason even though I'm not being entertained or feeling enriched
I want to know more about your friend's reaction

does he also think it's badly communicated, or does he have a good grip on it but just thinks it's stupid?

Slurpee

oh
the other thing I was going to say is

w/r/t sisyphus,
because these new ideas trickle down into the zeitgeist, sometimes going back to when they were first introduced can be confusing just because you're watching somebody draw and explain the blueprints to a neural path that you already have

I haven't read sisyphus but it might be like that
OR
it could be that other thing where you think you know the basics of something but it turns out to have SO MUCH MORE GOING ON, like uh shroedinger's cat. haha it's like a cat in a box or something right? and like is it alive or dead? who knows!

Slurpee

if you read the origin of species, darwin wasn't in any way inaccessible, but he was so utterly, unbelievably thorough that it almost reads redundant

like, okay, dude, some traits are better than others at helping those that carry them propagate within their environment, so they tend to get passed along and over time the accumulation of small changes in trait composition become larger differences. GOT IT
it almost seems self-evident

but at the time it was an idea nobody had ever had before so he had to do his due diligence, and boy did he

also it's almost a shape of thought that can be applied to different contexts. this concept that an environment passively influences what prospers within it and the results are natural and not intentional or predictable, it's a very powerful idea that expanded our understanding in pretty much every field of knowledge in a way that I don't think most people fully appreciate, so, y'know, good on him

FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK

Quote from: VCRClock on March 31, 2020, 08:45:36 PM
someone once recommended i read "society of the spectacle," and once when I was reading it waiting for a [smart] friend to show up at a coffee shop, he showed up and was like "you're reading that shit?"

I don't think it assumes you know anything, but it's so dense (is it just a bad translation?) that you have to reread every section you read and ask yourself "did I understand anything about the idea he just tried to communicate, or did I just know how to read all those words"

one and a half years later, I'm still nowhere close to finishing that shit

it's just there because I think I should read it for some reason even though I'm not being entertained or feeling enriched
oh man I feel that. sometimes you just want to finish a book like this out of spite. or it turns out to be worth the time. either way it's getting fucking read.

Quote from: Slurpee on March 31, 2020, 09:46:28 PM
you know what interpassivity is?
it's that thing you do where you buy a bunch of steam games and don't get around to playing any of them. that's it. the act of collecting replaces the purpose that collecting was meant to serve. it's not inter-active, it's inter-passive. interpassivity.
tidy, right?
but you can't use it yet or everybody will think you're an asshole. we have to wait for a webcomic that explains it to go viral or something

I like having a word for that. I think I've fallen victim to that a bit lately. my rom collection so god damn massive and I haven't played a new game since I beat drakengard. but when I force myself to actually play some obscure thing I downloaded forever ago it does end up still being fun. gotta have personal responsibility alongside massive game collections. I know I could get around that a bit by downloading full rom/iso sets but I want my shit catered specifically to me damn it.

Quote from: Slurpee on March 31, 2020, 09:46:28 PM
zzzzzzzzzzzz

but then later in the same essay he says, like, the most amazing shit about 9/11 I've ever read
that sums up everything he's ever written. just replace 9/11 with whatever.

nothing nothing nothing nothing "oh hey that's genuinely neat" nothing nothing

Quote from: Slurpee on March 31, 2020, 10:18:29 PM
oh
the other thing I was going to say is

w/r/t sisyphus,
because these new ideas trickle down into the zeitgeist, sometimes going back to when they were first introduced can be confusing just because you're watching somebody draw and explain the blueprints to a neural path that you already have

I haven't read sisyphus but it might be like that
OR
it could be that other thing where you think you know the basics of something but it turns out to have SO MUCH MORE GOING ON, like uh shroedinger's cat. haha it's like a cat in a box or something right? and like is it alive or dead? who knows!
I remember thinking it all made sense when summarized, but the main problem in actually reading it was that in order to even just know what he's talking about you have to go research something he's using as a reference point. he namedrops the book, and assumes you know what concepts from the book he's talking about and a full understanding of the book in general. doesn't even specify or summarize. I actually got sick of reading Kim and Dune for a somewhat similar reason. those are good books too I could tell, I liked em,  and that wasn't every sentence either, just every page. and you could just read a few lines or a few paragraphs at the back of the book that's all it was. not so here, gotta go hunt down a separate book. camus is asking me to have already read a different book or essay every sentence. it's like how math textbooks are written assuming you know the previous concepts these ones are built on. he's writing for people who had comprehensive knowledge of all major philosophical works and all then-current works. "okay so this is where we're at with philosophy as a whole, and taking ALL of that into account here's what I have to say:". except I didn't even get that far. honestly there's nothing wrong with that, he probably couldn't get his ideas out as comprehensively as he wanted at the time any other way, like you said about not having the right language yet. even now there probably isn't the right language for some of it. which means it's a gigantic hassle for me and I'm gonna go read something else no matter how good camus is and that's what I did. my memory might just be exaggerating this though it's been a while.