Chinese protectionism/censorship (they only allow 34 Hollywood movies a year) has helped incubate a domestic film industry. As Richard Hanania points out, citing a study by James McMahon, that as of now, 9 out of 10 of the highest grossing films in Chinese history are domestic, all released in the last few years.
State censors require that all films in China, both of domestic and foreign origin, adhere to “the principles of the Chinese Constitution and maintain social morality” (O’Connor & Armstrong, 2015, p. 9). These standards are maintained through the prohibition of certain images and scenes that depict “demons or supernaturalism, crime or any other illicit or illegal actions within China’s borders, disparagement of the People’s Liberation Army and police, and anything that could be perceived as anti-China–including merely damaging Chinese sites or monuments.
Something like Leviathan (2014), a depressive/cynical-for-the-sake-of-it movie with Russophobic undertones, wouldn’t have been made (or at least screened) in China and that’s probably a good thing for the Chinese.
That said, another curious finding from the author James McMahon, although it is not in the paper, is that Russia – along with India and China – has the least intersection with American cultural consumption. That is, they have the lowest correlations between films that do well in the US box office and in their own.
This seems to largely be a map of cultural closeness to the US. Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa are all in the top 5 closest countries to the US.
I suspect that the distance between the US and Russia might even start to further increase with the increasingly heavy-handed promotion of “Woke” themes in American cinema.
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There is (or used to be) a loophole where 3D films were counted as different from regular films, and so could get a spot in Chinese cinemas, which is why there was an avalanche of 3D gimmicks a few years ago
Chinese censors (and to a lesser extent the Russian gay propaganda law) are also the only reason American blockbusters don’t have more overt woke shit in them, instead it’s mostly throwaway scenes that could be edited out/dubbed over for the international versions
With such a robust Chinese film culture, I wonder why more of their films don’t make it to Western movie houses? At least to the art house circuit?
Great films made in the West including Chinese themes”
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e5/The_Last_Emperor_filmposter.jpg/220px-The_Last_Emperor_filmposter.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/97/Seven_Years_in_Tibet_cover.jpeg/220px-Seven_Years_in_Tibet_cover.jpeg
Were they shown in China?
Obligatory comparison of film posters:
Western vs Chinese Star Wars
https://imgpile.com/images/NlxrEb.jpg
Chinese vs Western Black Panther
https://imgpile.com/images/NlxkX4.jpg
Don’t know about The Last Emperor but it may be too US-centric and come across as ridiculous.
IIRC seven years in Tibet wasn’t nice about China’s Tibetan landgrab so you would have to remove a few scenes.
“The Last Emperor” too “US-centric” coming “across as ridiculous” ?? LOL!
I can see, however, how “Seven Years in Tibet” would have a difficult time making it past the censor’s cutting board.
The only Chinese movies I care about are martial arts spectacle:
Enter the Dragon.
This is pretty decent girl on girl action:
The US is the hub of world culture and information. China is a spoke. Notice how Chinese propaganda calls the US “racist”, “gun-addicted” and “not inclusive enough.” It can only use US self-criticism to engage. All spokes must travel by the hub, but the US does not need to phrase its propaganda in Chinese terms. The US is the hub.
Being the bicycle might not be good for Americans, I am unsure on this, but it is excellent for “America” and those who gain power from it.
The dissident right mostly wants to be a spoke, with their own distinct selves, but cut off. I don’t think the mainstream right agrees. I think they prefer to bask in the glory of “America.” In this context, dissident right doom prophesying is both an attempt to persuade the mainstream right and a cope.
It isn’t that the mainstream right don’t understand dissident right facts and arguments, it is that they have a different priority. They want to grill and have glory, as does the mainstream left in their own way. This is why they move together, having little spats on what will accrue the most glory, but always working it out. Much to the seethe of dissidents on both sides.
So how does your worldview, vis-à-vis “America” filter down and reflect on the two US made films that I bring up above? Do you also find them to be “US-centric” and “ridiculous” as commenter El Dato seems to do? Do you know whether either of these films were ever shown in China, even in altered forms?
There are plenty of crime dramas and other films that depict the criminal underworld in Chinese cinema. So I imagine there are some more specific or subjective criteria for what constitutes the “certain images and scenes” depicting crime or illicit or illegal activity.
They’re hub films. I’ve only seen the Brad Pitt one and it was thoroughly enjoyable. The Chinese government won’t like it, because they are presented badly, but anyone else can enjoy it. Both have probably been watched outside of China more than any Chinese film, despite not really being popular blockbuster type films. They aren’t “US-centric”, they are just “centric”
Extremely rigorous laws, only selectively applied, is the global standard for corruption done subtly.
The Dutch are culturally close to the US. People sometimes ask why the Dutch speak English with an American accent. They don’t.
I have recently been on a binge of watching modern Russian movies, and I would say they would do fairly well at the US box office if they were allowed to be properly distributed.
I got on this kick after being impressed by the Metro games that were made in the Ukraine and are based on a series of Russian science fiction novels. First rate graphics, compelling story line, and going by the credits, somehow made with a fraction of the staff of a Western video game.
Through streaming services like IMDB, Tubi, Pluto etc., I am finding Russian movies, mostly science fiction, that have English overdubs or captions. Like the video games; first class CGI, a good story line that seems to assume an audience with a higher average IQ than that for Hollywood productions, attractive performers, excellent cinematography. The only thing that could be a drawback is that the dialogue can seem stilted and hokey to audiences raised on cynicism and nihilism. As a side benefit it is intriguing getting even a cinematically filtered view of Russian life since we get so little exposure to what life is really like in Russia.
I think that if widely distributed these film could do reasonably well in fly-over Red country. The problem is that as pointed out by other commenters, these movies are fatally un-woke for the (((film distribution system))). As expected, almost every actor is white with maybe some Tartar or Siberian heritage, there are no visible gays or trannies. The female characters are often brave, resourceful and plucky, but they aren’t 110 pound Mary Sues who can punch out multiple 200 pound Commandos. The characters look like Midwestern Americans and the plots look like 1950’s movies enhanced by state of the art CGI. The American entertainment industry will burn down their companies and commit mass suicide before they would let movies like this get broad distribution and marketing in cinemas or high viewership cable channels.
(BTW, one question I have is why do so many of these movies star Rinal Mukhametov, is he the Tom Hanks of Russian cinema or something?)
Interesting to see how Hong Kong is much more similar to the west in tastes compared to mainland China.
I don’t think the movies I linked to and similar ones in China are movies that were supposed to be prohibited but managed to slip through because of corruption.
The current Chinese standard for film censorship does seem to allow for the domestic production and screening of depressive/cynical, neo-noir type films like the Russian film Leviathan that Karlin mentioned. The 2 films I linked to would be examples. Although I haven’t seen Leviathan so perhaps it is Russophobic to a degree that Chinese censors wouldn’t approve with respect to Sinophobia.
Why were Bollywood films popular in Soviet times? Was it some kind of political fix? Or do Russians really like Indian films? And why?
I watched “Stalker” a while back. From my perspective, it felt like a very alien film. I was completely fascinated by its strangeness – its long takes – even though I don’t like that kind of film – what I would consider arthouse. It felt like I was really watching something foreign. But I have not seen very many Soviet films, with which to compare it.
I’ve heard someone say that communist films are often like plays. I’ve wondered whether any Soviet films are remembered fondly today as crowd pleasers.
I have Stalker and some other Tarkovsky movies in Criterion Blu-Rays. My take is that his work. reflects Tarkovsky himself as much as is it does Russian culture. You could plausibly see similar styles and tone in the work of other avant-garde auteurs like Goddard, Bergman, Jodorowsky, Herzog etc.
Are you kidding? Soviet comedy was epic.
“Ivan Vasilievich changing profession”, ” Irony of Fate”, “Brilliant Hand” – just off the top of my head. They will easily beat any modern Hollywood comedy, and hold the ground against all time best in the West.
Real crowd pleasers.
With this, however, I believe, and sincerely hope, this overlap reaches zero (and am deeply unhappy it can’t go in the negative infinity)
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/intersectional-imperialism-and-the
Yes, Wokeism is now officially the most ultra-holy ideology of the Global Cuckistan, to be enforced by utterly annihilating and outright genociding all dissenting populations. Basically, the most insane idea you think they will do, and then make it even worse.
Western cinema depicts even ordinary Soviet or Russians as cold and machine like in their actions.
This can be seen in the recent Chernobyl series compared to the Russian although not so interesting Chernobyl 1986 that resembles more of a human story.
Is it just me, but i have noticed that in a lot of American shows the “good guys” speak with British accent? Especially if they are white and male.
If so, i think US is purposefully diminishing its role as a global culture hub.
Personally, i think peak American culture was Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’. Bubble gum, jeans, sexy blonde, and a Cadillac in the driveway – everybody wanted this, from Russian warehouse worker to Bangladeshi peasant. It was aspirational. Eighties and nineties were the peak of American cultural dominance.
In the modern culture, the essence of America – individualism and consumerism, are washed out in favor of British accent guys and weird tribals. Even though the label still says ‘made in America’. But is sushi an American culture just because there’s a Japanese restaurant on every corner in US? I think it would be stretching it. I would argue sushi is still Japanese culture, even if made in America.
Will this cosmopolitan mix sell well globally? Not sure about that, at least not as well as consumerism and individualism that preceded it. I mean, do Bangladeshi peasants really care about race relations in the US? I don’t think so, they still want that Cadillac in the driveway. Cadillac is aspirational, racial preaching isn’t.
So i guess i would argue US as a country isn’t really a hub anymore. It has been replaced by a more global vision, and for how long this global vision remains attractive to the unwashed masses, we will see.
These sound a lot like traditional Maoist arguments against the US, the Soviets had some similar ones. (That famous meme of the Statue of Liberty with a lynched black guy hanging from it comes to mind.) Here the situation could be that the US has been behind the curve on a lot of this stuff and is only following the path that countries like Russia and China already took some decades ago.
The substack article in the link given by Svevlad in message 20 seems to have some nice examples of where the current US line is close to a retread of Communist positions from 50-60 years ago.
Also I think each country tailors its propaganda to its target audience, China probably uses different messaging to other countries where concepts of this kind don’t resonate as much.
This is true, up to the early 2000s the US seemed like the top place to live. I still like to see a Cadillac, Lincoln, Corvette or Ram truck driving along our country roads, and when you see old US cars, and compare Chevrolet Impala or Pontiac Bonneville with Vauxhall Viva or Morris Marina.
Can´t speak for the “Tibet” one (although the poster certainly gives a poor impression), but the last Emperor was quite mediocre, although it did have very nice cinematography and sets.
The best Chinese film I´ve seen to date (not many) is still “Hardboiled” (SAVE THE BABIES!). The “Infernal Affairs” trilogy was good, although I actually found that for once, the Shart remake, “The Departed”, was better, probably because it was Scorsese.
In general though, I´ve found Chinese cinema very unimpressive compared to that of Korea or Japan, but then again, that´s probably more due to my own swipple taste than anything, China has the demographics for churning out endless dumb and expensive blockbusters, Japan and Korea not so much.
Speaking of that Korean “Parasite” film a while back, it was entertaining but nothing special, not to mention many, many things about the script did not make any sense at all, not in an absurdist manner either, more a case big holes in it´s story logic. “Burning” from Korea in the same year was far, far better, although admittedly it doesn´t have as wide of an appeal.
But I´m the sort of person who enjoys Bela Tarr´s excruciating movies, I guess reiner tor is familiar enough with him, if no one else.
In Spartakus good guys which were the slaves spoke with American accent and the bad guys which were slave owners in British accent. And good guys were played by Jewish American actors: Kirk Douglas and Toni Curtis.
Local American culture ‘peaked’ around the early 20th Century, 1910-40 or so (classic Hollywood, literary activity, authentic and diverse musical traditions etc.), and even then H.L. Mencken accurately diagnosed the key, perhaps only, endearing quality and competitive point of American cultural life worldwide was that of the world´s biggest freakshow circus.
Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ was a conscious homage to that real peak of American pop culture: the Age of Marylin Monroe. But yes, the 80s were another, smaller peak.
Yeah, that’s a very good film, and one that has almost nothing what-so-ever to do with the USA, lol.
The subliminal message in US movies of the last 30 years is that 99.9% of people are sheep who will run around panicking until a hero or natural leader comes to rescue them. In contrast, the message in Chinese and Russian films seems to be that by working together everyone can contribute to solving problems. The western vs asian societal response to Covid seems to offer proof of a kind.
I recently read a series of Chinese sci-fi novels (The Three Body Problem series), and I was surprised by the author’s basic assumption about how society would function in a crisis. He assumed that society as a whole will make sacrifices and rally around to solve the problem. If it had been written by a modern western author, the story would have riots in the streets, gun toting lunatics and a flawed person (inevitably a retired and resentful special forces vet) who becomes a singular hero and rescues everyone.
They’re not trying to export at all, so that’s not surprising.
Japan has an extremely active and actually population animation movie industry right now, but you don’t really hear about it much either, even with a significant American fanbase. It even has “woke”-ish themes that some in the West would like.
https://www.avclub.com/mobile-suit-gundam-hathaway-reckons-with-the-privilege-1847228242
But if there’s no effort to localize or export, its not surprising that you won’t hear it. Chinese media being exported right now are all video games, which I think is probably the right way about it, being that it hits a younger audience and generally just seems to work better(Poland’s recent soft power comes from The Witcher, which was originally anchored by the game as well).
Yes, the basic notion in a lot of Chinese stories is that while there is often a single hero or heroine, ultimately it is the entire “society” that he or she lived in that helped make it possible. There’s a pretty strong “no man is an island” vibe. You often do get a single character who saves the world or the like, but there’s a strong thought for parents, teachers, friends, etc who made it possible for this moment to happen, for him to be able to be as strong as he is, and for him to grateful for all that, etc.
I did an analysis of one game’s story not too long ago, in my comments. I can link it if you’re interested(or might redo it with updates).
A cousin recently talked up that series very highly, although I still wasn’t sure whether it was worth checking out, as he’s a physicist and (understandably) has scant interest in any event or topic outside of his field. Although he’s probably smarter than I am, his total lack of curiosity about world events was pretty stunning. He didn’t even know that our estranged country (several times removed), was nearly exterminated last year, sad!
Time is only a theoretical concept to a physicist, we haven’t yet proved that it exists.
“This seems to largely be a map of cultural closeness to the US.”
could be a language gap map. and there are english speakers in India from the British occupation, but that’s only like 10% of the population.
listening to 3 minute american pop songs is one thing, slogging thru 2 hour movies in a foreign language is another – most people won’t do that, even if the movies are relatively good. they’d rather watch crap that they can at least understand. hence bollywood.
a lot of the dialog in movies doesn’t translate well, even when it’s translated well. that’s why hollywood was mainly sending action movies and sci fi blockbusters abroad.
For centuries Europeans couldn’t believe that China doesn’t give a crap about them, nor the external world in general. Same for cultural offshoots like Japan and Korea. The West first had to have the industrial revolution, and then literally come to Japan and China in steampunk battle ships, press a futuristic pistol into their heads and say ”Now I’ll make you notice me. Who’s the barbarian now?”
The moment external pressure abates, these Asian societies snap back to the original self-absorbed condition. Especially China, with it’s separate Internet ecosphere only helping. Sure they love selling their products to the external world, and go visit it as tourists to take some prestige selfies in front of some crumbling amphitheater or castle, but otherwise not so much.
Contemporary Russian quasi-Hollywood flicks for a good time with a brewski:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0011699060/ (Inception-type adventure)
https://imgpile.com/images/NmCvHN.jpg
https://imgpile.com/images/NmDzv1.png
https://imgpile.com/images/NmCxJo.jpg
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5629524/ (second Inception-type adventure. Tony Banderas!!111!)
https://imgpile.com/images/Nmxcok.jpg
https://imgpile.com/images/Nmxrr2.jpg
https://imgpile.com/images/NmxXiX.jpg
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8664988/ (Alien-invasion/apocalypse adventure)
https://imgpile.com/images/NmT9Hl.jpg
https://imgpile.com/images/NmbJ3x.png
https://imgpile.com/images/NmdOFj.jpg
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8060328/ (Alien contact/disaster adventure)
https://imgpile.com/images/NmKb5G.jpg
https://imgpile.com/images/NmKjDR.png
https://imgpile.com/images/NmMzPX.jpg
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt06054874/ (Pseudo-historical barbarian sword adventure)
https://imgpile.com/images/NmdEbw.jpg
https://imgpile.com/images/Nmhd4c.jpg
https://imgpile.com/images/NmhLZG.jpg
Modern Russian adventure sci-fi flicks and epic adventure flicks cost on average around $4 million to make. Make of that what you will.
I realize how much fun and exhilarating playing videogames can be, but yet I feel that producing great films is somehow on a higher cultural plane. Creating great films is much more of a way to demonstrate to the world the high cultural level of the civilization being filmed, certainly more than video games can demonstrate. I say this as somebody who in edition to appreciating video games also enjoys pop music, come books and graphic novels. Of course crappy films abound and are just as junky as the lowest denominator pop art.
Why do you think that the Chinese afford so little importance at self promotion (softpower) by not trying to export their films to the outside world?
I found the first book’s opening chapters a bit hard going because I was taken out of the unfolding story by my preconditioned western expectations – especially as the tale starts in revolutionary China and naturally there are casual ‘everyone knows’-style historical references about that era. However, I really enjoyed it once I got in to the rhythm of the writing and the foreign (to me) perspectives.
Once I’d finished the first book I dived straight in to the subsequent books in the series, however by the end of the series I think the author was running out of steam.
Recommended.
As Rahan already said, same reason why the Japanese don’t. It’s not that they don’t care about the Western world, it’s just of very tertiary importance to the domestic market. They’d be far more interested in selling to the Asian market first.
I don’t know about “high cultural plane”, the video game difference is that it has higher fan engagement so it forms a community distinct from nationality. You’re making it into a national thing but it’s really more about a company and its own fanbase community; you can’t do that with movies, there’s not that tight communication between director and viewers.
You are not of the age, I think, I appreciate what I mean but it’s really more about the engagement and community than anything.
Arguably we may indeed be moving into an age of the reduced prominence of mass media, and more into smaller groups with shared niche interests. I might have to think about it.
Martin Scorses heavily promoted the film “The Grandmaster” back in 2013. It was actually directed by Wong Kar-Wai and was nominated at the Academy awards in several categories. You might find it to be an enjoyble film, as I did:
https://youtu.be/uC5amKLgnFU
You might be onto something. Even the way television channels are presented today, they’re already broken down into many different categories, presented for a specific niche audience (sports, cooking, gaming, cars, science fiction, noir and old films, news, travel etc.).
Classical Western lit, including adventure lit (Ivanhoe, 3 Musketeers, Jack London etc) frequently addresses the reader, and the act of storytelling is like an interaction between equals — the writer and the reader.
Today there is the notion that the reader must be constantly submerged in a hypnotic state and if he ever resurfaces then “the writer is doing it wrong”. Same for music appreciation and film appreciation. This is an important symptom of the overall drift of the status of the westerner from “autonomous citizen” to “semi-conscious consumer bio-unit”.
I find the notion of “high cultural plane” to be cringey as heck, I have to admit. I’m a writer and I spent an inordinate amount of time engaged with art in detail(in fact, I probably should start a blog, given that I actually make notes on everything), but I don’t have any precise idea what “culture” should mean beyond a set of mores and expectations for solving problems in a community. Whenever art tries too hard to be “cultured,” in my opinion, its pretentious and frankly, stupid.
One of my favorite movies is probably the Outlaw Josey Wales. Its a great movie, well acted with what is basically a simple revenge story but given great significance given the Civil War context – proper appreciation of the movie ultimately requires that the viewer have some awareness of Civil War. A lot of the spaghetti Westerns were great – they had excellent key visuals: a Fistful of Dollars used facial closeups, almost like still images, which created an excellent mood. Is that “culture?”
Is Lord of the Rings “culture” because Tolkien is an astoundingly meticulous craftmans who wrote and rewrote an universe for twenty or more years of his life? I like Robert Howard’s incredibly poetic writing much more so, does that mean that Conan with its big chad muscleman and virgin sorcerers is more cultured than Lovecraft’s intricate worlds?
TV series are able to develop characters much better over a period of time than movies, which are quite time bound, but movies are able to place more effort and money in a compressed spectacle. Is the improved opportunities for character development in a series an evidence of its increased culture? Is the precision of direction and the ability to splurge a vast spectacle evidence of culture?
I think it is ultimately a meaningless term, when used in that context.
Ultimately, I just recognize mediums. Each medium has its strength and weaknesses. Just tell a good story and let the audience judge. If I was going to be arbitrary and difficult, then the greatest “culture plane” has to be the Greek play(Oedipus Rex is a beautiful example of a trilogy) and it is tragically playwatching seems not a very popular form of entertainment at all, despite the perishability of the performance, the interaction between audience and actors, and the depth of expression needed to convey without the advantage of pounding music or camera tricks to tell the audience what to feel.
But yeah, just tell a story. Leave “culture” for history to judge.
I actively make notes and comment on novels and books when I read it to this day(often I address the writer, as if talking to him, in my notes), and I still think that’s the way that a good book should be read; at least, that’s what I think Seneca would have opined so. It should be an act of co-creation between author and reader, and in that depth of engagement, a kind of beauty.
The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company. Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner. Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction. – Seneca
I really like this idea, and wish I’d have done it as a teenager onward.
Here is a decent Russian comic film (for two weeks it was the world leader at Netflix)
https://www.netflix.com/ru-en/title/81438809
https://kg-portal.ru/img/98387/main_2x.jpg
Here is the trailer in English, I have an inverted one on my computer for unknown reasons
https://youtu.be/cuSluHJGs9k
The unversed version can be viewed at the link to Netflix
Another reason perhaps for some people to sit down and learn Russian: to access the additional 150+ adventures of Conan, Kull, and Red Sonja which Russian writers have produced for their home market. Mostly by respected local masters of fantasy and sci-fi.
https://imgpile.com/images/NrIUEC.jpg
https://imgpile.com/images/NrI7Cj.jpg
Sonja
https://imgpile.com/images/NruIN2.jpg
Kull
https://imgpile.com/images/Nru4mM.jpg
EDIT: This was supposed to be an answer to post 43
Wrote an answer, somehow posted it as an answer to another post.
Please check out comment 47, cough.
Furious name in Russian is Legenda o Kolovrate, or Legend of the Swastika. 🙂
You can see it on his shield, yup.
Delightful summary, thanks!
It really depends on sensibilities, I guess.
We’re infamous for subbing everything but stuff meant for kids, for example. Dubbing just makes everything sound dissonant and weird.
On the other hand, the average westerner is way too busy, or has a way too short attention span/patience for that I guess.
Many games are surprisingly artistic. Certainly not hyper-popular like crappy yearly shooters, but still pretty good.
For example – American McGee’s Alice franchise. The games look amazing, have intriguing plots, and are just very… unique in general. On the other hand, their unpopularity can be blamed squarely on EA trying to stuff what’s probably, ironically, the only “artsy” game published by them, under the rug.
It’s a pretty young medium still, though. It will develop further, especially when the current bubble of cash-grab garbage pops.
Being in the Anglosphere (and having much laxer censorship laws) “helps”.
Some of the distinctness in cinema is about inheriting the fruits of Hong Kong’s Cantonese film industry which stayed relevant until the mid-2000s when much of the actors, directors and writers started to approach the mainland Chinese market and ended up converging with their norms, while adding a distinct outlook that is way less influenced by American cultural trends of the last 10-15 years. The way the film industry is “earning their RMB” eventually alienated much of the younger generation who elevates identity signalling above much else, disowning anything that is suspected of “licking the Commies”. They mostly turn to Japanese/Korean pop culture (I am more of an anime-ish guy)
I’m not much of a movie-watcher myself except for some weekend flicks shown on TV, when I was younger. Thoroly enjoyed Stephen Chow’s comedies, particularly Hail the Judge, maybe because of its social awareness. A personal observation: TVB no longer shows From Beijing with Love for obvious reasons.
Hate to be pedantic in response to an otherwise good post, the only surviving trilogy of a Greek tragedy is the Oresteia by Aeschylus performed in 458 BC where he also won the first prize. Unfortunately, we only have a few lines of the accompanying satyr play, Proteus. Sophocles’s three Theban plays are often categorised as a trilogy but they were performed at different times and do not form a continuous narrative.
Yeah, “shared universe” is probably more precise. I actually read Antigone first, with no idea that it was related to Oepedius Rex and it existed perfectly fine as an independent work.
I think they marketed “Operation Red Sea” and “Red Cliff”, both of them very good war movies, with excellent box-office results worldwide. The pace in “Operation Red Sea” is amazing.
Antigone is a great introduction – one of the most well known and one of the best. The famous Ode to Man sung by the Chorus is fantastic warning to Man.
Here is a spoken translation by Paul Woodruff. It begins at 16.17 and goes to about 20.11.
I’d be curious to see how he is portrayed there. There’s always been something very charming about him and the way that Howard writes his universe in general.
Then the court waxed wroth, and the judge talked a great deal about my duty to the state, and society, and other things I did not understand, and bade me tell where my friend had flown. By this time I was becoming wrathful myself, for I had explained my position… the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge’s skull; then I cut my way out of the court…
Just overall, he was outstanding, especially for a writer of his time(and I read quite a bit of pulp from his era).
A good tell for me has been to read it aloud – there’s surprisingly a lot of fiction, even good fiction, that doesn’t handle it well(like Zelasky’s Nine Princes in Amber), but the mark of outstanding prose is that it can convert to an oral form with not only function, but beauty. Another thing, too, is the aspect of age – he’s avoided almost every idiom that we usually use(who would say “reared a broken dome-like structure” and “overthrown” in the form of “destroy” is not typically used for material circumstance), so it has this freshness, as if seeing the same language with new eyes.
I’d love it if the Russian authors have the same degree of wordsmithing placed into their Conans. Vladimir Nabokov, of Lolita fame, is said to have loved Fitzgerald’s style so much that he typed The Great Gatsby verbatim, letter by letter, key by key on a typewriter until the notion of the spirit and flow of Fitzgerald would somehow find itself into his soul by feel of his fingers. I do love that notion: a ritual dedication of love to a style and the sense of channeling; I like to think he was more than slightly successful in his effort.
Though, I remember in an interview, he said that he believes that his life’s greatest legacy has be the abrupt cessation of parents, worldwide, from naming their girls Lolita.
The best “Chinese” films of recent memory were the King Fu Panda franchise 🙂
Unfortunately they were made in America (although there was a lot of input from Chinese people). It was hugely popular in China, and many Chinese lamented that a film that “got” Chinese culture so well was not made in China.
In America they’re seen as just cartoons, but in Asia animation is taken far more seriously and considered adult fare as well. The recent Demon Slayer animated film in Japan was one of the highest grossing films in Japan among adults.
Personally, I think children’s literature and films can be extremely high quality and very worthy of adult attention – C.S Lewis said that he never felt the rueful nostalgia many feel for their lost childhood because he enjoyed fantasy and fairy tales into old age. The modern conception of “growing up” and putting “nonsense” behind one and becoming “practical” leaves many people emotionally stunted – thankfully, this attitude is less prevalent in Asia!
The King Fu Panda films were really very moving depictions of Chinese cultural themes, not just in context but most crucially – in tone and mood.
There was a beautiful reference to the classical Chinese novel Monkey, or Journey to The West – the monk makes an arduous journey through the Western wilderness to retrieve a precious Buddhist manuscript. After successfully retrieving it, he travels halfway back to China only to discover that the paper is blank! He returns to get the “true” manuscript, and is told that the blank page is the true wisdom, but is anyways given a different manuscript with “conventional” wisdom on it to take back. Panda references this nicely.
I referenced this once to AltanBakshi, but he was completely ignorant of this famous scene from Monkey so did not understand – much like the monk in the story! 🙂
Nezha is an amusing and good Chinese animated film available on Netflix also.
If you want more “serious” Chinese films, you will likely have to turn to Hong Kong and Taiwan, to directors like Wong Kar Wai, etc. Although there are some good films produced in mainland China as well.
Ultimately, you simply cannot produce compelling and high quality art in a society heavy on censorship and intent on controlling and suppressing artistic freedom. A certain level of anarchy and chaos – freedom – is absolutely essential to creativity and art.
Sparta did not produce art, Athens produced mountains of it. Rome is also not known for producing high art – and China models itself on Rome. A culture devoted to the “practical” will produce great works of engineering but not great works of imagination or intellect.
But China is a culture going through a “practical” phase of “control”. Eventually it will get past this and began producing great again.
In the meantime for Asian art you have Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan (Singapore is sterile for the same reason as mainland China), India, and even Thailand has some moving and interesting films.
Planescape: Torment is a work of literary art, but something like Detroit: Become Human also shows what the media can be in terms of cinematic storytelling.
The chorus is excellent. The exploration of Law in Antigone – the notion of the conflict between the Law of Man and the Law of Gods was probably the first introduction to the concept(I was very young, maybe 12 or 13), and its been one that has considerably influenced my thinking. It probably led me down my entire interest in storytelling, and while I promptly read the great English plays, and appreciated them, I’ve never found that they had quite the same sense of depth.
Ultimately, I appreciated it enough that I went to Greece, I think in 2006 or so, I left roses at the Hill of the Muses near the Acropolis. No idea if that was the right thing to do, but it felt right.
Yeah, Disney’s Anastasia is an excellent presentation of Russian themes and values and the fact that Russia doesn’t have an equivalent export to the US yet is evidence of their heavy-handed censorship and spiritual repression that keeps them from producing great art. Such impeccable logic.
Or perhaps, Americans know how to make a product for Americans. Knowing your audience, having the same cultural milestones, context and understanding as they do, allows you to present information and ideas to them in an appealing fashion, even if they were inspired from a foreign source. Thanks to the export of American values internationally, this also allows them to produce products for audiences internationally that have internalized these values, well, at least until now since wokist values aren’t quite getting as exported quite as swimmingly.
Well, this is shocking, I say! Who knew that knowing your audience was important when selling to them?
Certainly not the person who believes he’s immune from naive realism and idles himself into making grandiose statements while being constantly wrong.
Know your audience, and you can sell to them. News at 11.
Well, the premise of Anatoly’s post that we are all discussing, is that Chinese audiences have not seriously internalized American values. The highest grossing films in China, Anatoly shows, are not those that are highest grossing in America. Clearly, then, the two audiences have different tastes, and Hollywood has not exported it’s values to China and then sold it movies. That is the whole point of this post.
And Chinese audiences specifically praised the Panda films for depicting traditional Chinese values, and were upset they could not produce them themselves.
Finally, the scene in the Panda film that I mentioned, that the scroll containing the highest wisdom is blank (emptiness), alluding to the same scene in the classic Monkey novel, is supremely un-American, but deeply rooted in classical Chinese culture and Buddhism.
While Panda himself may seem very “American” in his goofy, rambunctious energy, he is actually very similar to Monkey in the novel, who is depicted as a goofy, eneretic, superficial, and vain rascal who hides unsuspected depths and is the main hero, to the astonishment of everyone.
This too is a main theme of classical Chinese culture – the fool or beggar dresses in rags is actually the sage, to the astonishment of conventional people who expect a figure of mainstream accomplishment.
But I am quite sure you never read Monkey, and in general are unacquainted with these “reversal of conventional perspective” aspects of classical Chinese culture (or esoteric Western culture). You seem sadly to have adopted the most superficial aspects of conventional Western culture (or Chinese culture), with it’s obvious, on the surface banalities that any good burgher might believe in.
But still, the fact that you are displaying an interest in culture and works of the imagination at all, and seem to have for the time being at least abandoned you mechanistic conception of the universe, is a very promising sign, and I applaud you and watch your progress with optimism.
The Attraction movie had a budget of 300 million rubles, or 4 million dollars. So the weakness of the ruble is one factor; everyone involved basically gets paid a lot less. Similarly, the Russian defense budget in dollars is a measly 46 billion.
People who don’t have it as cushy as we do will work smarter, more efficiently and harder. When the 4A gaming studio was making the first of the superb Metro 2033 games, they had just 40 employees in a shabby office in Kiev, crowded around card tables and sitting on folding metal chairs. The employee parking lot had only four cars because almost none of the designers could afford one.
The whole “small town dark genius trio” — Robert E Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith — started out as poets. And that’s very very important. They–unlike some modern poet–sweated over every single word, and also how it works inside a line, and inside the larger whole.
This was carried over later into the prose of all three.
I am now reminded of how a character of the great and very un-PC Kingsley Amis (vastly better in an English understated way, IMO, than Tom Wolfe; not to be confused with his postmodernist son Martin Amis) describes a modern poet in the brilliant “Difficulties With Girls”, set in the 1960s:
Other books by Amis the elder I’d recommend in a flash are “Stanley and the Women”, and “Girl, 20”.
So no, the Russian Conan writers aren’t real poets from a hundred years ago, although with so many of them, some do get quite poetic, especially some of the female writers (damn good stuff by some of them). Mostly generic Slavic “Witcher”-tier stuff.
Perumov has one book out in English (epic fantasy, mix of Howard, Tolkien, and Jordan as atmosphere, got voted best fantasy in Europe for the year by the Scandinavians, made a splash across the continent, totally ignored by the Anglosphere), and you can check out how his style translates, if legal in your location.
In English it’s way more clunky and dense, but still works.
https://anonfiles.com/Z8B7I415u1/Godsdoom_-_Nick_Perumov_-_Copy_epub
https://www.risingshadow.net/libdb_images/books/35870-godsdoom.jpg
Interesting that the Chinese state, officially founded on the scientific materialism of Marx, is so worried about demons and supernaturalism that those are the first things it bans on the big screen. Apparently the “scientific materialist” state doesn’t believe in its own ideology but has the exact same metaphysical concerns as explicitly religious states, such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. Lol.
From the McMahon chart:
It’s surprising that ethnically Chinese-dominated Singapore is so congruent with American film culture, while mainland China is not. And it’s not the Malays or Subcons in Singapore causing the difference, because Malaysia and India about as divergent as China.
Singaporeans really are a different breed? Even the other Chinese exclave, Hong Kong, is only about halfway up the chart, next to the notoriously culturally chauvinist French.
I’m sure that you’re currently much more immersed into video gaming than I am (I’m actually not currently involved at all), but there was a time where I really “got into it” and played quite a bit. Our “go to games” were mostly from the very exciting “Need for Speed” franchise, Golf games and an occasional romp with Lara of the popular “Tomb Raider” franchise. Before this period, I had the opportunity to play some” Madden NFL Football” and the strange but addicting “Final Fantasy”.
To me, quite frankly, video games are and will probably remain in the final analysis “games”, somewhere between chess and a trip to your local amusement park (very wide parameters, I’ll agree!). Sure, the games have evolved into almost real visual time machines, where much attention is given to historical accuracy of period dress, furniture, clothing, buildings, weaponry etc. etc…but in the end these are all props to make the games more interesting and alluring. Game storylines are preconceived and can only allow for a certain set of formulaic endings (?)
In contrast, for me, great films that add cultural historical value are to be located somewhere between great painting and great novels. Some of the greatest films are of the vast historical/story genre, like “War and Peace”, “Cleopatra”, “Ben Hur”, “Qui Vadis”…even films where the plot is related to less lofty historical themes can be great, for they open up a world that explores the day to day lives of ordinary people. Many, many great novels have been adapted for screen purposes.
Please don’t feel insulted by anything that I’ve written here, for like you, “I still need to think about it” ” I think that we’re having a very interesting conversation here, and hopefully we’ll continue “thinking about it”. How to look at video gaming as true and great art?…
OT as i believe it is important:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext
https://ria.ru/20210725/koronavirus-1742802818.html
I’ve heard of several musical composers that also sort of “channel” another composer’s writing spirit when writing music. It’s probably done more than we know. 🙂
Great insight!
Those are your words, not theirs. They were annoyed because they felt that it was a form of “cultural appropriation”, which is basically a stupid notion, but one that plays well with people.
Your presumed skill at perception fails you once again. The fundamental Americanness of it was less the goofiness than the central premise of the story: to become “who you want to be, you can do it.”
I’m pretty certain that you don’t even know any traditional Chinese tales, since you’ve been too busy listening to yourself. You wouldn’t know that Su Wukong, the Monkey King tried to challenge Buddha and failed, thus producing a hierarchy. You wouldn’t understand the main point of the story of the Foolish Old Man removes the Mountain. You probably have never even heard of the Legend of the White Snake.
Like utu said, blabbity neophyte. Try and accept your ignorance, like the Zen masters you claim you respect, it might help you learn something. Listen more, and write less.
I provided a video above which can help.
But basically the fundamental aspect to this is the interaction element as I mentioned, in the media itself, but also in the community aspect of it, where fans discuss elements and essentially co-create something(like our discussions, in a way), but if there’s also developer involvement, it means that the entire thing takes on a highly engaged and evolving role.
That’s also how a lot of “customers” get converted into “salespeople.”
It creates a common background, a common language, and a common sense of feel(plus it age-filters, I suppose). Note the regular references by AK to Deus Ex, for example.
That’s not always the case, but also I think missing the point. So do novels, obviously.
Its the themes discussed and what you take away from it. What are the themes discussed in Lord of the Rings, for example? An adventure happened, but all of the themes of God’s power, the nature of good and evil, the value of hope, surprises of joy and horror, and ultimately, novels are trance-states like hypnosis(in fact, this is actual science) to transfer you into another world, a make-believe that’s real for you, and in being real for you, allows you to deeply emotionally engage with events that never happened. Movies do this too, with images of people and music and whatnot. Heck, porn attempts to do too, not that it has a lot to say, but the central principle applies.
And thus, so can games, and this is especially so because it is interactive. Even if it takes to a fixed point, its the journey there that matters, and in games, the journey can be particularly unique per playthrough, e.g. roguelikes do this in particular, where the world is randomized, and each time you play it, people mentally produce an entire story to sensemake it.
Some games(my favorite, actually) basically are dedicated to telling a story like that:
https://dfstories.com/the-hamlet-of-tyranny/
Not that anyone’s planning to see this, but red china made the new Flop Gun film change patches on ” Maverick’s” flight jacket.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/top-guns-maverick-appears-changed-to-please-chinas-communist-party-2019-7%3famp
Do a Google search on Chinese reception Kung Fu Panda –
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSPEK34047220080705
Far from being annoyed at cultural appropriation (an absurd Western notion), they admired and enjoyed the films – they only rued that China could not have made them. The films were some of the most highly grossing in Chinese history.
As for Monkey, he attains to Buddhahood by the end of the novel. He is cunning, wayward, irreverent, and a thorough scamp; the opposite of a solemn monk. According to Arthur Waley, he represents “genius” (I am not convinced of this).
He is also vain and constantly hankering after “greatness”, which gets him into endless trouble and finally imprisoned by the Buddha.
His elevation to Buddhahood occurs after his desire for foolish greatness is chastened after many misadventures.
The beggar dressed in rags who is really a sage, or the utterly commonplace person with no obvious distinction who is really a sage, are regular tropes in Chinese culture (and are a commonplace in martial arts movies – by contrast, Western superheros are either billionaires like Bruce Wayne or powerful aliens like Superman, or regular boys who acquire superior powers like Spiderman ) and this theme is illustrated by the climax of Monkey – after fighting off so many monsters, and braving so many dangers, the sacred scroll they sought is “empty” – only, they could not understand the profound messages. Ruefully, Buddha gives them a more conventional teaching.
The idea that greatness does not show itself off, and is not to be found along men of conventional distinction and achievement, is also a theme of Christianity and Jesus’ teaching.
It is a key theme of genuine spirituality, you vain peacock 🙂
The idea that the central theme of Monkey is something so tedious and conventional as “hierarchy” – well, only you could come up with something like that 🙂
You’ve provided me with a lot of great information here to think about, helping to explain your views about video games as artwork. I need some time to mull this all over and watch the video too.
Thanks very much!
I’ve never been more glad that I tried to learn to write from Howard, then. Thank you for letting me know, I’ll have to look up Clark Ashton Smith more.
I have not seen the Grandmaster, but am a fan of Wong Kar Wai (who isn’t?) so must watch it! Thanks, I remember when it came out but for some reason never got around to it.
One of Wong’s most underrated films is 2046, a strange and haunting sci-fi film that I found deeply moving – for reasons I don’t fully understand (and those are the best kind :))
I am sure I can “conjure” the good spirit AltanBakshi by saying some utterly scandalous and utterly preposterous and outrageous things about Buddhist teachings 🙂 That’s the magic spell that will do it – I am a greater magician than Daniel Chieh and can command greater spirits! 🙂
As for fairly tales and fantasies, parables and myths, they are so essential to our spiritual education and such good nourishment in our parched desert of a mechanistic culture – we all hunger for them, but our culture has shamed adults into thinking they are “childish”. A mature adult must attend only to the grim business of survival!
Cleopatra and Quo Vadis are supposed to be rubbish films aren’t they? Not seen them but know their reputation.
Anyway no surprise that Dr Zhivago is the 6th highest earning film of all time – people throughout the west LOVE the idealism of October revolution and the beauty, imagery and style of both Tsarist and revolutionary Russia and the Russian world in general.
For all the fake tough talk from NATO lackeys – nobody gives a f**k about idiot States like Poland, the Baltics and any other loser and liar faking moaning about Communist “repression” – that’s why any films about it would earn about 3 dollars and why no Hollywood producer is bored enough to want to make these stupid types of films – but Dr Zhivago has everybody in west desperate to see it, with all the best actors and directors desperate to make it
Russian cinema, TV and pop music are still very popular in the ex USSR states, irrelevant if they do disgusting anti-russian policies. That is a good achievement considering the influx and enthusiasm for American and British cinema and music after 1991 in Russia and all the rest of USSR.
On the issue of conquering western markets, I think the modern Russian films are too well produced, which gives an empty or artificial impression when russians do it, in a way that it isn’t when Americans do these films.
Although I agree with your assessment of the film “Dr. Zhivago” I have no idea why you’re trying to denigrate great films like “Cleopatra” and “Qui Vadis”?
Yeah, if I wanted to find a Sixth Tone piece about why Chinese censorship is bad, I’d be able to find it too. Denied.
Yeah, its called character development. He gains humility and is elevated for service. You could learn from his example.
It is indeed a regular trope, but I do not think that you know what it means, much like you have failed to understand the meaning of a “foolish old man” in the story of the mountains.
Spend more time being a quiet. It’ll help. And a beggar, perhaps, after you send your material wealth to Karlin.
Congratulations on being wrong about me not having read Chinese tales to add to your many other things on being wrong on. Now, consider these other Chinese virtues: 孝/忠, 理, 仁 & 义 and do more thinking about you ramble again.
I suspect that Singapore suffers culturally because it has a smaller pop than HK.
It is a pity that it does not have a Chinese population that is the same size as HK, so we could do a like comparison, but from looking at the West, I believe that diversity would also hurt it culturally. That is, it is probably ideologically incapable of making a Chinese film, though it might be technically possible.
Though no doubt cost would be another important factor, with HK being cheaper, and the mainland being cheaper still.
Taken at their word, Wokist values are an attempt to be as inclusive as possible; to be the lowest common denominator. The attempt is not to convert the world to US values, but to permanently place the US on the ever-shifting centre ground.
Taken by their word, wolves just want you to be part of them.
But more seriously, wokist values rely on certain nonsensical assumptions about reality, so eventually it’ll have to break. Right now, its only working because it basically has a lot of coercion, but it is also spiraling to become more extreme to justify its own structural weaknesses.
I suspect it won’t pan out well. I guess we’ll find out.
It certainly won’t help exports; I work with South Korea, for example, and if the West finds Asia alien, trust me, Asia basically finds the West just as confusingly weird to put it lightly. The “meeting of minds” gap is increasing, not decreasing.
An interesting question is whether those types of people are more interested in their values or more interested in their individual pride?
In which direction does most of their motivation flow?
This is complicated by the fact that their values are also mediated by their pride, and may even be mistaken by them, as a surrogate for it, but their extreme success also suggests that their success, not the success of their values, is paramount to them.
Sadly “going woke” does not seem to have resulting in “getting broke” at all. The exceptions are stupid and derivative products which may have done even worse without the Wokism.
If creative talent is limited, then drearily formulaic woke dross seems to be the next best thing.
I appreciate that the “if” is a big factor.
IMO, it is hard to see a film without humans as “Chinese.”
Perhaps, there are reasonable commercial justifications for using cartoon animals as characters. Likely, they are easier to trademark and merchandise and appeal to very young children (an audience you can build off of). But I cannot help but feel that the movie was partly an attempt to deracinate the Chinese.
You find that “hard?”
How would the conversation, where they decided to use cute animals in “an attempt to deracinate the Chinese”, have proceeded among the film producers?
Must have been very difficult ideologically for the Soviet Union to compete with Hollywood blockbusters, like Star Wars or Terminator or Aliens. Of course, now the films have gotten dumber and more pozzed, so it is probably less of a problem.
Have not yet watched a Soviet comedy, but I am very interested in it. I have heard that communist humor has certain characteristics, and I want to see how Soviet humor compares with modern Chinese humor. Rumor is that there are a few NK comedies on Youtube, but I haven’t watched one yet.
Not seen those films, but have heard they were reviewed badly and box office failures.
I suppose they could still be great films – Mutiny on the Bounty starring Marlon Brando is supposed to have failed financially and critically……… but I thought that the first half of the film was very good, although the second half was a joke.
On an entirely tangential note – the Hitchcock film Frenzy, which is completely unknown, is easily super ior to Psycho. Vertigo is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. Shadow of a Doubt is an excellent film but Rear Window is total trash.
Wouldn’t that be evidence for the opposite?
While you’re agonising over what fits your label of “Japanese” or “American”, someone else is selling a lot of sushi.
US cultural products only seem to fail this way by being too early. Some people take this as evidence that the US is forcing everyone down the same cultural agenda, but I’d say they’re just good at getting ahead of the flow.
Bangladeshi peasants don’t want “prestige” US films, but I bet they like Fast & Furious.
It remains a hub because it is a global vision. Or perhaps, because the people making stuff have global vision and see what is coming next.
Rear Window is a delightful chamber composition from the first seconds onward.
In a more lighthearted way–the Seven Year Itch (1955) with Monroe, the first half is terrific, until Monroe’s presence becomes too prominent.
Okay, I’ll bite: how is a film made outside of China, the home of the Chinese people, without any real Chinese characters “Chinese?” Is it because Jackie Chan voiced one of the characters? Because it has a panda? Or because the producers were inspired by greed to go after the Chinese market?
Your second implies that you think Hollywood has no political orientation. Has never taken a European cultural product, with a European historical setting, and filled it non-Europeans. And that nobody has tried to subvert identity by using nonhumans.
Who knows what the case is in this instance? But Hollywood de facto tailors for a multiracial audience. Perhaps, the motivation is mercenary, in this instance, but it carries a strong political message about race, nevertheless. And Hollywood isn’t concerned with perpetuating the Chinese people, which is a moral concern all Chinese people should have.
I was specific in my question. You have run off on a tangent. Why?
Another confused tangent. It seems that’s just the way your mind feels it needs to run. What is it running from?
Hollywood’s “political message” has been remarkably on trend, decade after decade. You think they’re brainwashing everyone. I think they’re excellent at understanding and sincerely believing in trends. These are two theories which explain the same phenomena, but mine doesn’t require any of the absurdities that yours does.
“Should” is a strong word.
Well, if it’s any consolation to you, the animals are typically Chinese – a panda, a monkey, a tiger, a red panda (called Shifu, the Chinese word for red panda), a goose (I don’t know why I think of goose as Chinese, but somehow I do), a praying mantis…well, the snake isn’t particularly Chinese. The villains are wild boars, water buffalos, (demons in Eastern mythology frequently have boar or horned buffalo heads), cougars, etc. One of the villains is a peacock. One of the sages is a turtle.
The architecture and natural setting are classical China, very evocatively rendered, as well as the costumes.
Lest you see this as an attempt at multiculturalism, folk tales involving a cast of various animals have deep roots in traditional Indian and Chinese culture.
The classic Chinese novel Monkey has a main cast of a monkey, a pig, and a monk, and features a huge variety of talking animals.
But most importantly, the values illustrated are deeply Chinese and the atmosphere and culture are straight out of China, distinctively and overwhelmingly Chinese.
The entire atmosphere is entirely Chinese culture, through and through and in so many ways.
Now, if you still want to see this as propoganda for ethnic variety rather than the traditional practice of using animals to illustrate human themes that we find in all cultures, but particularly Eastern, I suppose I can’t stop you – although I think you are being just a tad obsessive and humorless here 🙂
But what this emphatically is not is promotion of multiculturalism – it is promotion through and through of Chinese culture.
American films are dubbed. In Italy, for example, every major Hollwood actor is always dubbed by the same voice actor. So Italians think John Wayne was a basso profundo.
Oh goody, you’ve begun to notice that letting go of your ego might be a good thing. Truly, the beginnings of wisdom.
Try practicing it by admitting that you’re wrong and don’t know all things.
Why don’t you try using your brain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foolish_Old_Man_Removes_the_Mountains
http://www.fao.org/uploads/pics/Rice-terraces-china-banner.jpg
Meditate on that. What could it possibly mean?
You can talk to this chimerical version of me of your own mind with or without me.
Since it doesn’t seem that your worthier cause is life extension, you are clearly wrong.
You heard wrong:
Both excerpted from Wikipedia entries relating to these films
Of course both films had their detractors too. I’ve seen both films and tend to agree with these positive reviews. You claim that both films were “box office failures” which factually, by examining ticket receipts, they were not, but in fact great successes.
Well, I guess one could argue that animals have a certain cachet in China due to the zodiac. (Even if not all animals belong on it) and due to recent industrialization. It may also be that Christianity has in part discouraged animal fables.
But it is also true that the Chinese have made a lot of adaptations of Journey to the West, and that they have always (as far as I know) had lots of Chinese in them, in addition to the animal characters.
Life extension is cool, but people don’t actually die. Space travel is the most worthy cause.
Have you seen the TV series Mythic Quest? I really enjoyed it. There is a sub-storyline in season two which I found particularly beautiful.
Very surprised – I have constantly read that Cleopatra nearly bankrupted MGM (if that was the studio) and brought an end to that type of historical epic film which until then, was a regular production in Hollywood.
Again with Quo Vadis, I’ve never heard or read anything suggesting it was regarded as one of the top biblical “epic” films.
Looking at what you have posted, I think I am majority correct about Cleopatra, but not so much with Quo Vadis
I just like Sunny Deol films.
Border, Ma Tujhe Salaam, Gadar, Ziddi, Hero.
Etc.
😀
Best of 90s Bollywood, fk the rest. Otherwise, occasional Sikh or Punjabi violent film.
Why don’t you try watching these films for yourself and make up your own mind? They’re out there to watch for free…..
As far as boxhouse failures/success, that’s not debatable as the verifiable information clearly indicates that both films were huge moneymakers.
I sometimes feel that death may be the true revelation, the beginning of an adventure and a mystery I cannot now understand.
I wouldn’t miss it for the world 🙂
I will enjoy my life heartily, and when my time comes, soon or late, in a year or 40, I will embrace it.
You don’t know what you may be denying yourself – survival, in the end, is a petty ambition, based on fear of the unknown.
You have cut yourself from similar intimations by your cultivation of a mechanistic mindset, so it is understandable you fear the unknown.
I wish you well.
True – but this is a purely animal fable, a specific and traditional genre, so there are no place for actual humans.
Yes, Christianity may have discouraged animal fables, which is unfortunate, but I do not believe true to the spirit of Christianity. St Francis after all was a great lover and charger of animals.
This is incredibly encouraging, the correlation is lower than I’d have guessed. Would assume Russia would be similar to Italy, and higher than India.
I think the “GAE” made a big mistake being so overt and reactive with their post 2014 Russophobia campaign. Could have gone easy on Russia at the superficial level, while continuing to rot out Russia’s youth with toxic memes. Instead, Russians are a little bit hostile, or weary to anything associated with America these days. The Cunning of Reason!
Russia is in a great position. Every-stronger domestic internet, massive food exporter, now value-added specialty foods included. Super weapons. Strong, lean, army that can take casualties.
I would like to see stronger moral messages and less sex in Russian TV shows however. Russian entertainment should be trying to make a domestic “Sopranos” or “Game of Thrones” must-watch series, but one that subtly conveys strong moral lessons, such as the Brat films.
Still working on that ego, I see. Good luck with that.
Oh, its called Journey to the West, btw. Next time before you claim to be all knowing of “Chinese culture,” it might behoove you to be able to read Chinese.
Its two separate things.
Those promoting “wokeness” either directly benefit from it – the Bioleninism manifesto, or are not harmed by it. They may additionally fear that reversals harm them; thus the often strong argument that pro-transexual laws are a matter of “life and death.” They are strongly invested in their personal causes: this only tangentially related with being “inclusive to all,” which is in fact impossible, as it is a well known paradox of tolerance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Going woke probably won’t ever result in going broke; I had some time to think about it while dealing with chaos(walked a dog in 100 F for like an hour, found another lost dog, had to run around for another hour more plus to find the owner, etc); wokism is basically a religion, I mentioned before, so it isn’t possible to “go woke go broke” any more than it is to “go Christian and go broke” in a very religious Christian nation. Its probably going to be established in the West for some time yet, overcoming its contradictions with typical hypocrisy needed for many religions.
Being essentially religious, however, it will not jive well with other cultures unless they adopt the same religion, and to some extent, that’s why NGOs serve as missionaries. I don’t think its ultimately working – along with the Great Firewall and most likely increasing Russian blocking, we’re most likely going to see increasingly segmented ideological sections of the world.
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-disconnected-itself-rest-internet-125922022.html
So much as the native Canadians, for example, weren’t able to understand Christianity at all besides, “The water sorcery that protects us from evil spirit of disease” since the entire logic of “man coming back from death means everyone now has eternal life if they pledge in his name” was lost to them, I think non-woke nations are probably just not even going to have the cognitive toolkit to even comprehend wokism. I felt that with the Japanese, when they responded to complaints about Nier having a scantily clad protagonist with, “I like girls” and other such total nonsequitor answers; I’m feeling that with South Korea right now where the creative work I’m has the government involvement prohibits any mention of drugs while drug legalization to increasingly hard drugs is the norm in the West:
https://mobile.twitter.com/JeanSwanson_/status/1415426476124491776
Its weird, but widespread communication may have actually made the world a lot more ideologically segmented and polarized(this has been argued, I remember, as having been seen in Facebook where increasingly people segment themselves into hidden communities), and perhaps eventually we’ll see cultures in the world without the basic cognitive toolkit to even comprehend what others consider as typical norms. And they’ll just be isolated from each other until a struggle for resources happen, and then that’ll be negotiated with the universe’s oldest language of directed physics, applied strategically to vital spots.
Since AStra took my Russian tv channels away, the only Russian films I see are courtesy of Amazon. They are all, with an exception, historical costume dramas telling the story of key events in the modern Putin approved context. One about Sophia, the last Byzantine princess is the only to really stick in memory. While they focus on aristocratic heros, their ichly clad women and their priests, there is always some inclusion of the common man playing a key role. The films are watchable but neither masterpieces of acting (more or less the same ensemble each time) nor historically accurate, in that historical attirudes were not modern ones but who ever gets that right?
Then there is the Sci Film about a rebellious teenage girl making friends with an alien who crash lands in Moscow. Much too American. I looked for Major Grom on Amazon without success.
When I had Russian tv channels, I used to follow a series set in a modern village about witches. It seemed a good review of modern Russian concerns.
I’m glad to hear that you’re able to conjure up spirits better than anybody around. How about getting Bashibusuk back to reappear here? (no offense AltanBakshi). 🙂
I think that even Karlin misses the guy.
Imagine living a country full of Pakis, and not knowing this costs 2 quid a month.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/640459736919048202/869019315159048232/unknown.png
Full 4K reels before they hit theaters too,
https://iptvexpress.net/iptv-channels/
Fuckboi,
Puyi’s been the subject of rehabilitation here, so you can watch the Last Emperor on domestic streaming services. The last time I saw the film in the West was in university, but I don’t remember anything really cut.
Did Yoshiko Kawashima feature particularly prominently in the director’s cut? That’s about the only part of my recollection that was fuzzy.
Unfortunately Bashi is beyond even my power 🙂
I have a feeling he’ll be back sooner or later on his own, though.
Destruction comes from the bottom that is on top. Cheap seats at Karlin-Stolin ceremony collapse first.
Karlin Stolin Givat Zehev Kviat Mezuza
Sorry, I can’t answer that one. It’s actually been quite few years since I viewed this film. I’ll never forget the grandeur of the buildings within the Forbidden City……
Similarly, the scenes within the monastery at Lhasa in “7 years in Tibet” were splendid too….
It recently dawned upon me, but you appear to be the living embodiment of Larry Darrel, a young American who exchanges the security of a promising career in the big city, marriage to a good looking socialite from a wealthy family, and instead goes off to the confines of a mountaintop monastery to find some meaning to his life: “The Razor’s Edge”.
At the very least, I think that you’d really enjoy this film if you haven’t already viewed it. It’s free on YouTube, give it a spin!
Are there any good Chinese films? There is the obligatory Ash is Purest White and An Elephant Sitting Still, but the other main ‘Chinese’ films of good repute are not from the mainland: Chungking Express, Yi Yi, In the Mood for Love. PRC seems to have killed off the genuine artistic talent. When I think of Chinese films I think of abhorrent CGI and terrible writing e.g. The Great Wall, Viy 2: Journey to China, and the Wandering Earth. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is also overrated.
This reply isn’t cultural at all but just to give you some hard data.
Singapore no longer has a Chinese majority (2.7M Chinese out of a total of 5.7M). These are Straits Chinese who can go from total Americophile to Sinophile, but not having recent blood ties to China. There are already 2.2M migrants and the rest being Malays and Indians.
Hong Kong is solidly Chinese (6.9M out of 7.5M) and more than 1M are recent immigrants from China since the 90s, with varying degrees of assimilation to the Cantonese majority culture.
Tho I guess Singapore is on the demographic trajectory of Persian Gulf Oil States and HK is on that of the Baltics, so the sheer numbers might converge for a bit.
HK isn’t that cheap because of the housing bubble, tho a bit cheaper than Singapore. But production costs was one of the main factors HK’s film industry merged with the mainland’s.
This is one thing, and semi-agrarian communes that work out a prospective alternative to industrialism another. One provides personal relief while the other opens up possibilities of civilizational transformation.
There are people more dedicated than me, who are either disillusioned with industrial consumerism, tradcons, Deep Ecology types, Kunstler-pilled, localists, agorists, and even those who are trying to avoid vaccination-based segregation or centralized control of production or finance.
FB and Twitter, MeWe and Gab, will collapse sooner or later. These social media used to be built on “friendship” circles and later leveling cultural influences, which becomes ideological curation (either centrally or by ghetto self-policing) after serious political polarization. We should go back to the time of 4chan and specialized forums, or move on to Discord-like chat groups with none of the centralizing authority Discord has.
Culture inevitably moves from one form to another. There was a peak period for novels, theatre, movies, TV sitcoms, etc…all are now in the past. Before that there was a peak period for radio, miniatures, sculptures, opera, lives of saints, passion plays. Even Olympics today seems a thing of the past.
US had a sweet spot in he last cultural era with Hollywood, music and TV. It is still well represented in today’s culture, but no sane person would claim that it has the same level of dominance. The new genres are unformed and often not even named consistently, so there is an obvious opening for the rest of the world.
If you look at patterns of cultural diffusion, at the beginning there is always an attempt by all players (countries big and small) to have a part in it. It only consolidates later. We are in early stages. That means that US cultural dominance is vulnerable – US will have to do better than they have so far and the silly homo-gender-racial obsessions are not helping – no matter what the ever conformist and loyal Laxa claims. It is a mud-fight and that’s kind of a fun thing. The obvious fact that US seems to want to stop the rest of the world is discouraging – it suggests fear and doubt, cultures like that don’t prevail.
Chinese and Korean historical TV soap operas are pretty entertaining. I liked these four, which are available in the U.S. on Amazon Prime:
Ruyi’s Royal Love in The Palace (Chinese; 87 episodes)
Ming Dynasty (Chinese; 62 episodes)
Empress Ki (Korean; 51 episodes)
The Slave Hunters (Korean; 24 episodes)
I’d say South Korea ranks first place in terms of the quantity and quality of film and TV production output relative to population. I think that there are a lot more outstanding Korean movie and TV titles that I could mention, but I’m too cheap to pay extra to watch them.
Really all this speculation of increasingly “religious” wokeism makes me want to write a satirical yet overly serious and graphic novel about increasingly absurd “ideological bantustans” the world will be divided into
Think 1984 meets Alice in Wonderland. The hyperwoke white liberal North American zone, which practices literal human sacrifice in the form of suicide quotas to reduce racism, and raids surrounding “badwhite” statelets, an afto-islamic neo-roman hyper-we-wuzzist Europe led by autistic rightoid butthurtbelters, weird christian-pagan-muslim hybrid Africa led by a blasian Hong Xiuquan-esque figure and so on and so forth
It honestly sounds like a great seed. Go for it!
I’ll be on the lookout for a copy of it at my local comic book shop. All masked up, of course. 🙂
According to the 2020 census, Singapore is 75.9% Chinese. Do you think they are fudging the numbers? Wouldn’t that be hard to hide? Though I understand PAP is falling.
I am saying that they are clumsily moving towards more tolerance. In reply, your argument implies the impossibility of gradation. I strongly disagree.
You applied the label “religion” because Wokism roughly fits the description. You then used that label as the next stage of your argument. This appears to me as a logical sleight of hand. “It is a religion because it looks like one, it therefore acts like this specific behaviour because that is what religions do.”
I see the globe as much less ideologically segmented and polarised, even while specific locales have been able to become more so.
You can dispute this observation, but, if we accept it, it aligns perfectly with my thesis. This is exactly what you would expect from a less than fully aware impulse towards greater tolerance. Locales would be more diverse even as the globe would look more similar.
Didn’t notice too much US-centricisn in The Last Emperor but I did notice some anti-Japanese sentiment, which seems to be a running theme in many Chinese-made films. See “Lust Caution” and “Ip Man” for example.
Could you provide a source for that information? It is at odds with the following passage from Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, p.204:
We will have to agree to disagree. I believe that it is ultimately a material concern: animals form social groups(and cells organize, for that matter) because it is competitively advantageous to do so. Such social organization utilizes hierarchy and control, etc, in order to operate: cooperation requires protocol.
Greater individualization has been the result of the enlargement of the pie due to increased energy availability, but ultimately there’s only so much “status” or “power” to go around and unlimited wants, so its no different from any other economic consideration. Wokism isn’t going to fundamentally change this nature of scarcity and infinite wants; it just is going to move around the social consensus of who’s more valuable and who’s less so.
I understand your perceptive. I believe that’s a version of subscribing to this essentially religious perspective, and I don’t actually have anything against it: many religions ultimately provide a positive vision which indicates their purpose.
As above. I think similarity is an useful method of logical processing. This is also part of the notion of radical conservatism, as describedin the podcast I linked you to previously.
It would seem self-evident if that if I accept your postulate, then your thesis is supported.
I do not accept your postulate.
I believe that certain artifacts of commonality have spread, such as the usage of English, however, this has not actually in the end promoted a common understanding – which to me, is a surprisingly pleasant thing.
This is in thanks, partly to Wokism: take, for example, the meaning of the word “woman.” Each word is a word, a descriptor, but it also holds chthonic and chthonic meanings, expectations and so on. What “woman” means to me, is different from what “woman” means to you, which is different from what “woman” means to a transexual flag-waver of Wokism. And as the urge to redefine terms keeps increasing, coupled with the ease of access for individuals to choose groups that reinforce their specific form of understanding of the words will lead to increasing ideological isolation despite appearances to the contrary.
Take you and me, for example. If we were forced to work together, we’d have to compromise our perspectives somehow, and along that way, forced to reconcile and synchronize the actual meaning of our words in order to communicate effectively. But we’re not. Instead its easy enough thanks to technology to just find others who echo our worldview, and mostly isolate ourselves with them, and then just conflict in what occasion we do happen to encounter each other in digital space. So over time, our words ought to just keep desynchronizing further and further away; what’s true on a personal level, can thus magnify on a global level.
My apologies, I confused him with Hunter S. Thompson.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/109apf/til_hunter_s_thompson_used_a_typewriter_to_copy_f/
Vaccinating children with MRNA is an early form of human sacrifice, so you are not far from reality.
The badwhite-badmen wokism is a natural outgrowth of liberalism, it is fully dominant in the West and here to stay. As WWI changed everything hundred years ago, the Corona fever is changing everything now. When people look back in the future they will marvel at the sudden collapse of rationality – just like in 1914. The same mentality that thought it was great to machine-gun millions in muddy trenches is with us again.
Incidentally, one of the great bridgers in spite of this is images and cinema, which I believe that our commentator utu has written about is a powerful method of spreading its values(and to our concern, wokist values):
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-witcher-goes-into-multicultural-mode/#comment-3658587
In fact, movies and other deeply immersive media very much create a kind of trance mode, similar to hypnosis and the use of images, etc help broadcast a reality to the viewer, which is the reality of the creators(or the one they wish to present).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis#Music
This is why cultural isolation and increased wokist mangling of their cultural exports is a very positive thing.
Ha! Thanks, I appreciate the comparison 🙂 I didn’t see the movie but I did read the Maugham novel. Maugham is a fantastic writer, I think I’ve read nearly everything he’s written.
But I think I’m much less “lofty” and serious than Larry Darrel – I just want out of the dreariness of Industrial Civilization that produces so many broken people and stunted lives. We don’t need to be living this way – it’s only our fear that makes us trade our birthright – the glory of the world – for a mess of security and safety.
I’m not even against technology, just the mechanistic mindset – the doltish-mechanistic mindset as Nietzsche called it – and the insane quest to dominate and control nature, based on an unnecessary fear.
But I think the world is changing. A century again, a “primitivist” like me was looked at with pity – the dominance of science seemed so assured.
Today, the sheer fury and alarm of people like Daniel Chieh at my ideas suggests that they are terrified and on the run.
The world is changing 🙂
Like most everything progressivism has attached itself to the olympics just haven’t got any blood left in them, completely drained of any animating spirit. I used to find it interesting to see the opening ceremonies and how the host nations would present their nation and culture to the world (the Beijing Olympics in particular I recall being an incredible spectacle). This week I was barely aware they were starting, and on happening to flip to them, the first thing I saw was a negress (who apparently doesn’t speak japanese?) lighting the Olympic flame (jeez, I wonder which global hegemon put them up to giving her the most prestigious role possible).
Whether the Olympics were in Australia, America, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, or any other of the US’ imperial holdings there was no way a surly negress wasn’t lighting that torch, so as somebody who is interested in seeing displays of the host nation’s culture, why should I care anymore? I can see american astroturf on tv any time I like, it’s nothing special.
There are many alternative ways of life to the current normal, which is unsustainable and based on false metaphysical premises anyways.
As the current paradigm collapses under it’s contradictions, unsustainability – and crucially, joylessness and boredom – all sorts of interesting and beautiful experiments will be tried.
Ultimately people want joy, creativity, life, and systems that fail to deliver this eventually collapse. Ultimately control is no fun – people want spontaneous life, risk, adventure.
Ultimately fear is no fun, and control and hierarchy to stave off fear can only be tolerated for so long. The human in us will rebel against it.
On another thread, in discussing two communities, one of transhumanists and one of ordinary humans with low technology, Karlin suggested that many ordinary humans would want to defect to the safety, convenience, and immortality of the transhumanists.
In my view, it would be the opposite 🙂 Many transhumanists would find this life of safety, convenience, and immortality unbearable, and would yearn for a life of joyous dirt, risk, adventure, and humanity – even death. Perhaps death would be a special reward for transhumanists, that they had to pay large sums of money for 🙂
Res Warner wrote a beautiful book on exactly this theme called the Aerodrome, where the officer from the strict, clean, efficient, orderly, Aerodrome eventually defects to the joy, chaos, disorder, and love of the community below it.
E.M Forster wrote a beautiful story on this theme too, the end result of the safety and convenience of technology – The Machine, I think it was actually called?
In the early stages of technology, brilliant thinkers could see the dreary end result of the quest for safety and convenience, and wrote about it extensively.
In the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans had reached an apogee of sterile order, safety, and convenience – and found life dull (read the Stoics and Epicureans – resigned people who have given up on life). It took something radical like Christianity to break through the gloom.
So this happens periodically. But it never lasts.
Humans want “status” and “power” for two things. One, as instruments to get them more of what they actually want, like healthcare, nice food and other pleasing experiences. Two, just for “power” and “status” themselves. The latter, to be enjoyed, necessitate that someone else suffers in turn.
This distinction is crucial for my argument. I find that reifying the “instrument” over the “pleasing experience” leads to most people’s problems. It is also the justification which you give for rejecting gradation.
Status for its own sake doesn’t feel good to me. I do like to recognise reality, otherwise, I feel out of tune, but feeling superior carries the extremely painful sting of loneliness, which may hurt more even than the sting of feeling inferior does. I, therefore, see competing over “status” for its own sake as essentially a stupid programme of self-harm.
People, to me, seem to be working this out over time. They need only understand themselves better, in order to see it.
I also see “power” in the same way. It can certainly be useful, but making people do that which they otherwise wouldn’t, against their own deepest direction, makes me feel sick, literally. I can ignore this malaise by distancing myself from it through constructing abstract arguments to justify my behaviour, but the malaise remains, whether ignored or tended to.
I hope you can see that the above is not religious.
You might say that my observation that “people seem to be working out” that “power” and “status” are not gratifying in and of themselves, is a religious viewpoint, but I think that the world really has changed like that. You explain this as possible due to there being “greater energy”. I think that is one very reasonable explanation for a phenomenon that is easy to recognise, but I also think that explanations for such a big thing will necessarily be vague, like that, and multi-factorial, and beyond me.
It can be a useful shortcut, but it also inevitably introduces error. Perhaps the shortcut allows the thinker to hold more truth in their head than they otherwise would be able to, so the introduction of error is worth it, but I don’t think this is true in this case, for the reasons which I have outlined above.
I disagree, but this is a matter of factual observation, which, given the scale of what we are observing, cannot easily be measured in an appropriately objective way. We’ll just be waiting and seeing on this one, I suppose. I do notice that conflict is down, though, and that young people across countries have much more in common than old people across countries, even if I find some of the ways in which they have things in common to be obnoxious misunderstandings of themselves.
It can, but it requires that the force of being afraid of what they don’t understand overwhelms people’ curiosity and desire to understand themselves. Technology enables both of these inclinations to an ever greater degree. Humans will therefore be tested on which one really impels them. We will see!
My “religion” comes entirely from inside. I think I see the same thing in others, but buried under a lot of darkness and fear. I could be wrong about them, and I could be deluded about myself, but I have my reasons and my experiences, and from these, come my still fragile optimism.
People, as they are, are not the same, but there is a commonality, and a desire to tolerate others and allow them freedom and security. At the same time, it is true that “social organization utilizes hierarchy and control, etc, in order to operate: cooperation requires protocol.”
Technologies, physical and social, make these two facts more complimentary. It, therefore, reduces the human desire to put others down in order to feel big.
It is a sort of hypnosis, but I see it as peeling layers off people, even if the ones that get revealed can be scary and confusing. In fact, they are likely to be scary and confusing, otherwise, that person would not have needed to pile on more layers in the first place.
I also concede that people can have layers peeled off which they are not ready for. This can be very damaging. It can stimulate trauma, awful behaviour and a fight or flight response. Fear is there for a good reason, even if it is ultimately unnecessary.
Recognising that humans exist in the darkness which they need right now does not preclude recognising that they ultimately don’t need that darkness at all.
I believe that you seeking “status”(validation, rights, autonomy, etc) right at this moment, even if you don’t realize it, and insofar as you seek to remove the desire to express it over others, it is most likely because you fear being controlled – which is a rational fear.
I believe this competition is a fundamental – and useful – aspect of existence. I also believe that self-delusion away from it is useful, though.
So we can have no agreement on this, indeed, I find the notion that it being “stupid” to be silly, since if it was so “stupid”, how did it come to existence? It at least served a purpose to evolve and is strongly adaptive. If you are to believe that it some form of “darkness”, then I respect it but only as a religious perspective.
It is better to begin to understand something, than not to at all. In this case, I do not believe that it has introduced error.
This entire thing is essentially religious: “rise from the darkness.”
Even the idea of “peeling off layers” is essentially a religious notion that there is authenticity. There isn’t. Hypnosis can create all sorts of authenticity for you, it doesn’t mean that it is true in any factual way and this in fact, caused a huge amount of damage at one point, triggering the entire Satanic panic era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome
You can plant ideas in people with hypnosis. People can believe the ideas are true. It doesn’t mean nothing in terms of spiritual wellness or anything.
I find this notion, as well as most notions of authenticity almost completely nonsensical. It comes from “inside.” Inside what? Your body? Your soul? Your thoughts and feelings?
Are you the same person if drunk? If I wired you up with an amphetamines drop, would you be the same person? What if it was with psychedelics, instead? I can answer that with probable effect: the first will lower inhibitions, the second will increase aggression, reaction time and decrease openness, and the third will decrease aggression, lower reaction time and increase openness. “You” are the cocktail of chemicals that can be externally altered.
Also, then: Robert Galbraith Heath ran an excellent experiment with deep brain stimulation which created all sorts of interesting ideas, urges and feelings in the participants; some deep seated. There’s also Delgrado’s experiments.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-man-who-fought-a-bull-with-mind-control
So that’s the big, brusque stuff: putting chips in brains, and major psychoactive influx to modify your neurotransmitters. Oh yeah, small things like hormones too. Things that cause major changes in the body, you know, also change the brain.
So then, if you can accept that, then you can notice that smaller, more subtle effects are possible too: gut microbiota that creates or modifies hormones, altering neurotransmitters balance, the effects of hypnotic influence from consumed media, and so on and so on.
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-020-00884-z
I spent much of my life studying this.
So yes, I do think that you have an essentially religious perspective, however you may feel that you are grasping a Truth. It certainly may feel so to you. I certainly feel things that are Truth too. But that’s my religion, as well.
You have confused “contempt at your ongoing stupidity” with a stronger emotion, but I do understand your deep desire for continual self-ego boosting to make up for your failures, so do continue.
I should clarify, this is less exactly “status maximizing” but “status loss aversion”, which is of course maximizing in its own way. Loss aversion is an extremely strong motive for behavior and I believe, is a strong reason why “rights creep” has happened and why it cannot be reversed even if demonstrates overall harm.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/
In summation, loss aversion is most likely going to be the cause of collapse of wokism if anything, much as cancer cells eventually kill their hosts. There’s no “scaling back,” there’s only death, although its also possible that a relatively stable version of it can manifest, akin to AK’s “critical race theory as white supremacy.”
“American films are dubbed.”
indeed. and like i said, most people aren’t interested in that. they would rather watch crap movies in their own language than watch great foreign movies that are translated.
this is really well studied, since the hollywood people have billions of dollars on the line. as soon as the local movie industry is able to make halfway decent movies by the local standards, movies that would still be crap by US standards, the local population switches over to watch those since they can understand them in the native language in real time.
IMBD now has a filter for that, so when you try to look up the best movies in some year, you don’t get a list that’s 50% total crap foreign movies from India and China. the Chinese action and sci fi movies HAVE gotten a lot better, and are better than the Russian movies, but none of them are really all that good. at least they have 0% woke content. the Korean movies are the best, but they’re still not all that good on average by US standards.
US streaming services are flooded with these movies, so any American can easily watch most of the stuff coming out of China, India, Russia, and Korea, and observe that it’s largely crap. compared to US blockbusters, it’s all second rate stuff at best, third rate in general, and that’s their best efforts, big budget productions.
Is “soft power” just a phrase invented by the CIA to deter nuclear proliferation and militarization?
My experience of winning at that game is even more unpleasant than my experience of losing at it.
Being excellent at this lose/lose game is a tragic talent of mine.
Just for clarification: do you consider it a “rational” fear beyond that which brings “authentic” benefit?
“Authentic” is defined here as that which does not exist solely as a relation to others. It can include material goods, services, freedoms, opportunities etc, but only that which does not intrinsically do another person down.
A leper might repeatedly put their hand in the fire and not be “stupid”, as you say. They lack the sense required to know that they are getting burned. “Darkness,” in my parlance, is when a sense is switched off, as in there is some area or phenomenon which that person’s consciousness cannot sense.
Leprosy may be “strongly adaptive” if you need to pick something out of a fire and you only have your hand, but, if you’re just doing it to show off, with no “authentic reward”, it is kind of stupid.
Winning at status games hurts as much as losing. Most people seem to have some form of emotional leprosy which precludes them from being aware of that.
As a defence for your consciousness from your own sense, this “leprosy”, may be necessary, for various reasons, for various people, at various times, but hopefully not forever. It is a diminishment and its comorbidities are manifold. You can see it in people’s unhappiness and otherwise inexplicably bizarre behaviour.
They had a layer pulled off which they didn’t yet have the courage to face. The only way they could cope was by projecting it out. This is common.
Have you noticed that underlying it all, both you and Aaron are cynical nihilists? I do appreciate that your ways of coping with that lack are different, but I think you both recognise it.
Roughly, for me:
Fears < Feelings < Intuition < Visions < Truth
I appreciate that you probably don’t believe in that last step.
Drugs can switch off, or muddy “senses,” or turn some on. This changes our picture of ourselves and the world. Leading to us seeming like different people. The same can be said of brain experiments.
I recently smoked a high dose of a hallucinogen from the frog “Bufo Alvarius.” I have not done any drugs for years and have little experience with hallucinogens, of which this is supposedly “by far” the strongest and most intense. It did very little to me and I was perfectly able to think and communicate lucidly. The people administering the dosage were completely confused by it, up to the point of thinking that I was somehow lying. In their status game, I had won, but, of course, their sadness at losing is extremely painful to see. They felt much less of themselves.
I was also very anxious before trying it, but would consider doing more akin to having a cup of coffee, because I was extremely familiar with the sensory experiences which it switched on. I had an idea that this might be the case, but I am still surprised by how right that idea was. I am also trying to look for all manner of explanations alternative to the one I hold, as my own makes me feel sad.
You see everyone existing in “lack”, because there is no “truth.”
I see truth, but that people can only get there after a long journey through their “lack”.
I’d say “religion” is where charlatans try to impart their lack onto others.
Other than putting my own experiences across, which are only valid to me, because I experienced them, and therefore not valid to others, I will mostly only suggest that people should not fall into a religion or ideology which causes them to ignore their own senses, which will see them stuck somewhere along their lack.
This is why I object to the word “religion”, though I understand that you think that it is fitting because my experiences are not “truth,” but essentially hypnotised into me.
I was talking with my friend yesterday. She believes that people should be protected from hearing things that they find grievous and that this limitation on experience should take priority over people’s ability to express themselves. I understand why this is important for many people, at many stages of their life, as hearing something grievous can cause trauma and deep craziness, but ultimately reality is better, all experiences are better and all senses being open is better, if/when you can appreciate them. You might say that “better” is subjective, but they are better because that makes that subject more complete.
Most people who peel a layer off, or switch a sense on, by smoking the extract from “Bufo Alvarius,” find the experience very extreme and need a lot of help and support to integrate it without falling into trauma. “Better” is a matter of timing.
You are also absolutely right when you say that we cannot agree. I would not be having this conversation with you if you were the type to take my word for what I say of “truth”. It would be an unpleasant experience for me to override your needs/timing in this way.
I can only explain my “truth” as it appears to me, while hopefully coming across as credible and even-minded, which you do, and express my clear perception that people run from things which they know and things which they sense, even to the point of turning those senses off, or removing knowledge from their awareness, and they construct grandiose excuses, which they repeat to themselves, to justify doing so.
It is possible that you are doing that with your arguments, it is also possible that I have self-hypnotised into a “truth” because I got bored of “lack.” I am not completely convinced of either, but the evidence from my experience is extraordinary.
Just curious – how would you characterize my cynical nihilism?
If you don’t mind my asking. Thanks!
Not much to add, since I disagree with your basic priors.
There’s also rational fear of loss, of course. It doesn’t have to be an assured harm: it is rational to fear an incoming tsunami. Nothing might happen to you, but the percentage of likelihood of harm x impact is a pretty normal Bayesian inference that our brains automatically run.
I do not see such a concept as that meaningful. We are not islands and we have finite resources. Your exercise of a service, such as being able to get inexpensive and high quality food, requires the effort and harm of others:
I do not even believe we fully exist not in relation to others.
https://scitechdaily.com/is-reality-a-game-of-quantum-mirrors-a-new-theory-helps-explain-schrodingers-cat/
This is not an appropriate comparison. Lepers are not selected for; the conditions where their lack of nervous response is optimal are too rare for it to be generally useful.
This does, however, allow me to mention that there are places where lack of sensation is indeed optimal and has been selected for. From the excellent Other Minds:
And of course, we do not have deep perception of the exact internal motions of our kidneys, or the like; likewise, our body works to remove pointless sensory information from us. So yes, where it is adaptive, we’ve evolved against behavior as well.
Status-gaining is not one of those.
And if maintained, will lead us to be “different people.” That’s basically the point; ultimately we are an ecosystem in ourselves and our brains utilize neurochemicals to build our personality profile. To eliminate that notion ultimately takes us to the idea that Aaron had of people not needing brains, and then ignoring the existence of the brainstem for basic breathing.
The rest is all a lot of your personal feelings about things, which discount along with the basic notion of authenticity. I appreciate that you believe in yourself.
I employ certain tactics, but I appreciate my own Truth which is quite distinct from it. I do recognize it as a form of religion, however.
In this, though, Aaron and I might actually agree: I think the notion of relying on the senses of the self as truth is a really basic and silly idea of naïve realism. He handles the same idea very differently from me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology)
I mean, it is a real thing. But the first purpose at some point had to be that it helped reinforce the job viability of some CIA analyst who formualized the concept.
There’s a lot of things like that: OODA loop, killology, etc. Pentagon people have a talent for making new discoveries that make their own jobs more invaluable.
Out of curiousity, is your personal pronoun for yourself “they” since you are open, inclusive and welcoming?
I’m amused by the thought if my schema for theory of mind is functional to that extent.
That’s only distinct by degree, as nothing which exists now is selected for by the current set of conditions. Everything is selected for, vaguely, only by past conditions.
Makes sense.
We are different people from moment to moment, if you explain people solely by their physicality, yet that does not accord with the balance of anyone’s experience.
You seem to be prioritising the limited experience of the brain stem examiners when doing brain stem examining, with their full life experience and conception of themselves.
I do not doubt that if you removed my brain stem, I would stop breathing, but I also do not think that would blot out my existence. Our experience says that we remain as a thing even though our physical form changes constantly.
An abrupt and big change in physical form may cause a tremendous disruption, but it seems reasonable to extrapolate that what is “us” will eventually recoalesce in some form. A small shock takes such a small time to coalesce from, that we don’t even notice it.
A huge shock may take rather more. Many first-timers who take this hallucinogen will dissociate. Needing a lot of time to coalesce after the shock. This is the same for all trauma. Perhaps it is also the same for trauma which is seemingly life ending? The shock being to your self-conception and the limited way in which you see yourself, in particular, with your attachment to your body.
Yes, what people are conscious of, and what people sense on some other level, do not match up.
Some of this is because that extra information is pointless, some because it is painful, some because it is scary, but there’s a lot of fulfilling and useful stuff in the painful and scary things.
It is for some people, just as the pain of hurting people is subdued for others. You have balance when you experience both, at the same time. That is having your senses open.
They are meaningful in that there are huge differences in how different things measure up according to those two scales. They are very far from a 1:1 correlation.
Yes.
We usefully use sex to describe our bodies and genetics. “She” and “he” are best used to denote sex, or else they denote very little; hence the Mobius Strip madness of the trillion different pronouns, which represent the temporary triumph of labels over deeper descriptions.
Optimistically, what we’re seeing is such a proliferation of labels that it eventually returns to the beginning, but with more self-awareness. People were “men” and “women”, and men had to like trucks and women had to like dolls.
Now, if a woman likes trucks we are meant to tell her that she is a “man” or “genderfluid”. Eventually, we may get to a point where we realise that the appropriate label is “woman who likes trucks.” This would be an improvement over the beginning of the journey, even if the journey itself has some harrowing moments.
As far as I know within Wokeness Inclusivity is a key value but it has a particular meaning; when a member of a minoritised or marginalised identity grouping has their identity validated and accepted by an oppressor group who first recognise, confess and then take steps to dismantle their systemic power and privilege.
Woke cultural production seems to revolve around this theme to the point that it is always the main plot, but can come in certain different flavours; the exposure of white supremacy, heteronormativity, cis-normativity, patriarchy, ableism, thin-normativity or healthism and so on.
I’m not sure it truly appeals to the lowest common denominator in the same way as the US ideal of the 1990s used to (the Cadillac in the driveway, nice house with a fence, well paid job etc.), also whether the meaning of this type of content will be fully understood by a lot of audiences outside of the West (even outside of Anglo countries).
This type of thing will explain why there are so many seemingly pointless remakes though, big films have to be remade in such a way that the problematic content of the original is exposed and deconstructed and undergoes correction.
To summarise what I perceive is at the end of what you are saying: “the truth is that there is no truth and you can take comfort by telling yourself that nothing really matters.”
Is that a yes to you being an “they?”
If so, I am a genius.
Anyway…
I had an entire set post about how it was excellent that you believe that brainstems are not important, but unfortunately the post was lost. Well, rest assured, I am happy that you think so and hope that this becomes a widespread and integral part of the wokist religion, as I think this will be helpful for future conflict resolution once applied physics is needed.
Incidentally, and I hope it isn’t offensive, but I did a copy paste of “layers” with “body thetans” and found that it worked, possibly worked even better as the Xenu idea provides a reasonably excellent means of distribution of negative external agents in the population. I found this greatly amusing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_thetan
The only appreciable difference that I can discern between you and Larry Darrel, is that you seem to be more tilted towards hedonism, with all of your emphasis on having fun. But the both of you display a yearning for the metaphysical, religious and contemplative side of life, so there are definitely some similarities too.
Maugham wrote so many novels and other types of literature, where does one start? Additionally, so many of his novels have been used as the basis of so many films too…Alas, the only book of his that I own that adorns my bookshelves is his romp into espionage literature, “Ashenden: Or The Secret Agent”, a thoroughly enjoyable read. Did you know that he was a real life spy for British Intelligence, and even was sent on a high level mission to Russia during the revolutionary war period (Provisional government time)?
Since you’re the only individual that I know of who even knows about Somerset Maugham and has read some of his works, could you please recommend a few of his works that you’ve found to be enjoyable to read?
And by all means, do see the film “The Razor’s Edge”, I’m sure that you’ll thoroughly enjoy it.
Olympics has been politicised, and so has culture, academia and religion. The politicisation repulses most people, it is a kiss of death. Wokeness is a form of aggressive propaganda and black women are the ultimate symbol, so Ms. Tokyo had to be black. People will pay for a lot of things, but they won’t pay for propaganda.
Ms.Osaka gained some points at US Tennis Open when she left in a huff due to “referee racism” (or something like that). This is quite entertaining, a Wakanda world of anger and dreams.
I thought that was a clear “no”. On the other hand, I’m not offended by it, if that means something to you.
I am also interested in you elaborating on your theory of the mind, even if my perception, from when you have made assumptions, is that you’re only half of the way there. This is partly because I’ll consider any theory which explains why I feel like I come at life from the opposite direction. My own is so unreal as to be a bad idea to share.
This makes me sad to inform you that I am easily the least “Woke” person I know offline.
No, it is flattering. Ideas promulgate because they contain kernels of truth. I am sure you could do the same “find & replace” with many sets of beliefs, across cultures and history.
I note though, that the “Xenu idea” sounds like a whole heap of projection. They could be replaced with “white supremacy/the Jews/GloboHomo/Reptillians/Communists/Capitalism” as anyone wishes.
The Sopranos was full of moral examples (it certainly never glamourised criminality) and serious themes, it just never hit you its audience over the head with it and never got preachy. I think the closest it ever got to explicitly expounding any moral message was this scene, very coldly expressed, and the more powerful for it.
And please to do not compare David Chase’s masterwork with trash like GoT.
That was beautiful.
That the world as we ordinarily perceive it – composed of seperate objects – is not the truth. The characteristic function of the human mind is to analyze the world into discrete objects – if it can be shown that we cannot rely on our minds to reveal truth, then the characteristic picture of the world our mind shows us – a world of discrete, seperate objects – is not correct.
Therefore, these seperate objects – not being truly seperate – are not as important as we think.
In this view, competition, strife, selfishness, war, is replaced by love and cooperation, and anxiety vanishes. A world of interrelation replaces a world of seperation.
If we are seperate objects, it makes sense to maximize self interest at the expense of others, and it makes sense to be anxious about our death.
If we “don’t matter” – sounds so cynical and nihilistic doesn’t it? – then we are not likely to be selfish, or anxious about our death.
If “we” are parts of a larger whole, and the world of seperate objects revealed by our senses and minds is an illusion, then we stop fearing for ourselves and stop maximizing our self interest.
Life for most of humanity is the anxious quest for survival – witness Daniel Chieh with his desire to maximize order, safety, control, and “adaptiveness”. These are his supreme goals – not joy. He scorns “feelings”.
We do not take mere comfort that no “thing” (individual, discrete object) truly matters. We find ecstasy and joy in being released from the anxious quest for survival that poisons the life of most humans and from the acts of selfishness, competition, aggression, and violence we commit to safeguard our discrete, seperate selves.
If the discrete object does not matter on its own, but only in it’s relationship to the whole, then it’s imperfections – cause of so much sorrow and anxiety to be “superior” and acquire status and prestige – are redeemed. The desire to be “somebody” comes from the feeling we are “nobody”. But what if being “nobody” releases us into being – “everything”?
Instead, we take our place within a larger whole, which is beautiful. Our harmony with the larger is reflected in our attitude to ourselves, where just as we no longer make war on others, we no longer war on our own nature.
I am honestly surprised that you do not see the beauty of this vision.
But even though I published that rather long screed, I do not think you will understand. It just restating what I have said up till now.
If you haven’t seen it up till now, it merely means we do not share the same metaphysical intuitions. Our minds are structured differently.
And that is no big deal!
We do not have to agree. I agree with many of your comments and your comments are worthwhile – do keep posting!
Most people in today’s age seem unable to understand this vision, though it is the mainstay of basically every spiritual vision.
I am considering no longer writing about it, but just living it with like minded people – and thereby sending ripples through the Sheldrakian field 🙂
Perhaps that is best how I can have an influence – simply living beautifully, joyfully, and well. I don’t even mean that this will be an example to others, to contrast against the anxious survival-quest most people are engaged in, and the resulting cramped and depressed lifestyle.
I mean something more mystical than that 🙂
Be well. Continue the good fight.
Well, I’m just trying to look at it from the perspective of a nationalist and through the lens of risk management, taking the unidimension of entertainment.
With the US and the UK, there is a staggeringly common experience: going to a third world country, being in some nowhere town, and being told by young people that they want to move to your country. No doubt, it is partly a function of open borders, but I think it is also partly a function of soft power.
Turkey produces a lot of soaps, and I get the sense that it is also true of Muslims in perceiving Turkey as a place to which they wish to migrate. From my perspective, it is bad place to live, but not to them, especially when it is romanticized.
I’m not sure that there is a developed country with substantial soft power that hasn’t at least started to dip its toe in globohomo.
SK is at a small scale, where in order to have a domestic culture industry, it may need to export. The same probably is not true of Japan, and it is certainly not true with China.
But as a thought experiment I wonder about this: Suppose SK could launder the “made in SK” label. Use Deepfake to automatically mask the origin of its cultural product. Replace the Koreans with Nigerians or Indonesians, as the each case might require. But still make the same amount of money. Would they really be worse off? With nobody understanding that it came from SK?
We classify the world with schema. Your schema implied a “they.” The vagueness of answer, which is usually a “yes” or “no”, implies a “yes.”
Its a popular religion, widespread religion in the West. Little wonder “woke” does not go “broke”(though the gradual decline of living standard will be amusing to watch, but that rarely discourages religion). Its where it exits its immediate regions where it runs into some problems.
Yes, the principle of similarity. As such, you can see how wokism is a religion with its own set of moral principles, language, and vision of utopia(the last which you share). And missionaries!
You would not be immune from this, even if you think you are special. I think Sylvia Plath had a beautiful quote about that.
Ideally not, and less is better.
I know a lot of people in and from a lot of countries.
No, but I did it in the opposite way.
White people, including white conservatives, are, globally, far more aligned with the values which inform Wokist creations than are other peoples. It is therefore not surprising that Wokists make strenuous, if often clumsy and mistaken efforts, to try to adapt to other groups.
You can see this in the Islamo-Woke alliance in Europe. It is, madly, a real thing. The Wokists are trying to transform themselves into something which hits all of the key needs of the Islamists, without sacrificing what allows them to be so dominant among white people.
I think this type of box ticking is a diversion from the creative process, but they think they’re trying to even out an imbalance which they perceive is there. It is the same old uninspired formulaic approach, but for a global audience.
They haven’t fully jettisoned that. This content has also spread far beyond the West. It seems to sell extremely easily.
Yes, also, what come first – the ideological imperative or the lack of creativity?
I think that you’re conflating a bunch of different things which produce soft power.
1) Part of soft power is just artistry and the entire “entertainment complex.”. The overall trance state created by good media is often just a function of skill, talent and capital investment. This is why in the US, even if wokism gets extremely annoying and turns off people, its unlikely that media can become “not woke,” since the central repositories of talent have been fully converged. The barriers to entry for competitive entry within the US are just too large now. Literally, conservatives have no access to capital.
Like pop songstresses, this has become a winner-take-all category – people, even worldwide, have only limited money and time for entertainment; the Schelling Point up to this point of, “what’s high quality produced entertainment” has been American.
2) Some degree of globohomo has been the norm in the entertainment industry since time immemorial; actresses are expected to be whores, for starters. They do not typically get to market their values to the entire society, though. This might be part of some ongoing issue in the US were celebrities have acquired a certain degree of status and real power, and so their values(and various virtue signaling measures), so they get to increasingly eat out the brains of the entertainment industry. Disney, etc, getting their brains eaten out is a sign of young society as a whole getting their brains eaten out, and then the young artists transferring over their values.
You seem about my age. Do you remember all of the otherkin people and so on? Yeah. They grew up and now are othergendered, etc.
3) Using animal characters, etc, to de-ethnicize individuals. Well, yeah, I think that’s probably true and self-evident, but that’s also not that weird as a whole. Part of fiction is that you want your audience to identify and if you use ethnic individuals, you may lose part of your audience. So its been common increasingly to animal or other nonethnic substitutes. I don’t think its a conspiracy, its just a good artistic strategy:
SK will be fine, ultimately.
https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/why-did-young-south-koreans-ditch-the-democratic-party-and-president-moon/
Once wokism weakens its host countries enough that they cease to be the “strong horse,” they will also lose a huge catchet of soft power. Hard to be “the place that everyone wants to be” when you get bullied by hard power.
You feel like you’re “nobody”. You might have experienced a release when you came to this realisation, but where does your conception of “you” go from there?
This is why I used the term “cynical nihilism”.
Daniel’s answer to the same problem is no less valid than yours. It may even be more practical, though I suppose, if it were that way for you, you would have adopted it, and vice versa.
What’s next? Ever get odd signs of things? Strange patterns you ignore because otherwise you’d be crazy?
Are you sure your viewpoint hasn’t solidified into an ideology and become a layer separating you from truth?
Why this need to “go somewhere”, and why this need for what’s “next”? Why so restless and dissatisfied?
Once you can honestly answer this question – and not for me, but for yourself – you will understand my position.
Until then, I fear there is “nowhere” for us to go, as it were 🙂
I would suggest that you are much closer to Daniels metaphysics than you are to mine, and like him, need to “get” somewhere. Only, you two disagree on where exactly.
I am outside this circle, and cannot participate.
Good luck, and keep on posting.
The expectation was Finn, the black guy in Force Awakens would be another scene-chewing buffoon like Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element, instead he was one of the few realistic characters, albeit with nothing to do.
You’ve chosen the path of “ego negation” for this stage of your life. I admire your resilience in attempting to stick to it, but your occasional lapses into boasting demonstrate to me that you need something more.
Daniel Chieh seems to have chosen a path of “ego inflation.” He sees your unwillingness to play his game as not only weakness, but a weak lie.
In return, you see his position, as if it comes from a desperate inferiority, even as you self-conceptionalise as “nothing.”
Daniel copes by trying to balance his inflated ego by immersing himself in the epic wonders of the universe. It reduces that inflated state by relation. His self-conception therefore also doesn’t fulfill what he needs.
In these two ways, you can see the ingenuity with which the human psyche will jerry-rig whatever is available to make up for the gaping hole where “truth” is supposed to be.
They both work, and suit your purposes, for now.
Ok, I will give you a fuller answer, because, who knows?
Being nobody is the same as being everybody and everything – where is there left for “me” to go then? I have arrived. I am where I need to be 🙂
Or rather, I haven’t arrived. I have always been here, I just didn’t know it.
The idea that if there is nowhere to “go”, life has no value (nihilism), presupposes that life – now, just as it is – is insufficient.
Is it? What is wrong with how you are – how life is – right now? What are you lacking?
I agree. There are no “wrong” answers. Each answer is appropriate to people on different levels of insight.
Daniels answer is just as right for him as mine is for me. I only oppose him when he tries to monopolize the answer, and claim his is right for everyone – and mine must be suppressed because it’s dangerous!
Otherwise, let a thousand flowers bloom!
Finding my rightful place in the Whole, “next” loses all urgency. Where is there to go? Can it be that everything is perfect as it is – or do we lack the courage for this insight?
Odd signs of things and strange patterns that may drive me crazy? Once one approaches the universe with an attitude of acceptance, patterns appear beautiful and benign – they no longer appear strange, disturbing, and mad.
Do I have a viewpoint? Or have I been released from all “specific” vantage points (that is what a viewpoint is)?
Once you no longer see yourself as a seperate objects, cut off from everything else, you no longer occupy any “specific” place from to have a viewpoint 🙂 You are like empty space – what is the viewpoint of empty space?
And what is truth – can we know it?
🙂
Yes, certainly I agree. I should have made my comment clearer. I mean merely that Russia should make must-watch TV shows, and use that as a vehicle to model proper behavior, promote virtue. I would consider Breaking Bad also a semi-model here. Something people can’t help but watch.
This is exactly how you come across as soon as the tremendous effort you have to make to remain “nobody” gets too much.
Can you see this pattern in your own behaviour? If not, know yourself.
“But I am nobody!”
No, not in your actions, you’re not. There’s a distinct pattern of somebody within them and you just haven’t worked it out yet.
One question you need to answer is “why, me being me, would I have chosen everything that I have done and has happened to me in my life?”
That realisation will lead to a nice feeling.
Then, with that deep level of self-knowledge, you can move onto answering that same question for others in your life, though I don’t think it is possible to get all the way there on their behalf, or desirable.
This is helping people. Not to be “nobody”, or to be just “somebody”, but to be them.
“But I am one with everything!” Not while you have a body, you’re not.
Of course – I am nobody, but also somebody 🙂
I am human, and each human occupies particular space – therefore he has a “viewpoint”. As you say, as long as I have a body, I am “somebody” (do I have a body though – a discrete, seperate body?)
But it might be possible to also realize one is nobody? Can one be somebody and nobody at the same time?
It would mean occupying a sort of “dual viewpoint”.
Immersed in being somebody, I inevitably and naturally feel anxiety, selfishness, aggression. One cannot escape this while in a human body. But does it increase our suffering – and the suffering we inflict on others – to be totally and absolutely immersed in this viewpoint?
Is it possible to at the same time to “realize”, or “wake up” to, the perspective that I am also nobody – and therefore, everybody?
One remains oneself, but one develops a sense of humor 🙂 And a beautiful sense of lightness. A sense of humor is perhaps the most profound thing.
As a great man once said, being “enlightened” (I hate that pompous word, so misleading!) – is exactly like ordinary life, just two feet off the ground.
You say helping people is to be them – I agree! But to be no “one”, is to be everyone – is that not clear?
The Buddhist Diamond Sutra says you should adopt the perspective of “nowhere”, think a thought that has no supports.
When you are every “where”, you are nowhere. When you are no “one”, you are everyone.
But to be everyone, is also to be yourself! Just differently, lightly, with a sense of humor 🙂
And people with a sense of humor don’t go to wars, or rape the planet, or amass riches while others starve – much less people who are everyone.
I liked the move and I also read the book but now I do not remember differences too much. I also remember reading Of Human Bondage from which I remember two themes. One it was the character of physician as a throorughhy educated man that is not uncommon in late 19th and early 20th century literature when quite a few physicians were indeed educated and could be good conversationalists. The second is his pivot or pitch for Spain as apposed to Italy. Spain is great, go there and appreciate its greatness which was a hard sell because since Spanish Armada Brits when thinking of Spain felt contempt and fear. They still do – mostly contempt.
I have read somewhere that Maugham is appreciated more by foreigners in translation than by native English speakers because his style – and I forgot exactly why – was somehow not pleasant to English ear. I read him in English as a foreigners and I was not able to discern such a nuance.
I don’t believe you.
Why, you being you, would you have chosen everything that you have done and has happened to you in your life?
I didn’t think you would believe me 🙂
If you were to believe me, you would have done so already. Are my ideas really so wild as all that 🙂
Well, since I think the discrete “me” is an illusion, the question is really – why has everything chosen to be what it is? Which is the same as to ask – why is the world as it is? The question, why have I chosen, cannot be disentangled from the question of why the world is as it is.
The question of me – or you – is not seperate from the question of All.
On another thread, you mentioned the idea God is experiencing what it is like to be a human being.
You may or may not know, but this is the basis of Hindu theology. The Atman, split himself into countless shards, in order to experience the adventure of being human (and a rock, a tree, etc).
The Nataraj statue, the statue of dancing Shiva, wreathed in a circle of flame, representing Shiva dancing the destruction of the world, holds her hand up in the classic gesture of “do not be afraid”.
Why should one not fear, at the end of the world? Because in the end we are all God playing at being human, and at the close of the last age, the Kali Yuga, the age of darkness and decline, the circle of experience is finally complete. It has all been done, the good, and the bad.
The Atman then gathers up the splintered shards into himself again, and eons pass. But just as we wake from sleep, the world is reborn again in all it’s fresh splendor. The Golden Age starts again, and the eternal cycle continues.
Therefore there is no cause for fear – both because we are not discrete objects, and because non-existence cannot be final, as existence and non-existence imply each other – are in fact two terms of one thing.
It is all a brilliant and intensely absorbing play – lilla – where we think the stakes are so high, but in the end as every mystic says – Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian – all is well. Do not fear.
It is a myth – a beautiful one, and all myth express truth in some form even if they are not quite literal.
Might I have chosen to be me, and do what I do, and have happen to me what has happened, because we are all splinters of God, experiencing what it is to be human?
The Kabbalah, too, says that God needs humans to experience what it is like through us.
I oppose hedonism to what I regard as the anti-spiritual “gravity” of taking this earthly realm too seriously 🙂 In other contexts I support a simple life with few comforts, like when I go camping!
G.K Chesterton the great Catholic writer – no stranger to the pleasures of food – also mightily opposed the spirit of gravity as anti-Christian and anti-spiritual, and wrote very beautifully on the spirit of lightness to be found in Christianity and spiritually in general.
But I hear what you are saying.
As for Maugham, I particularly enjoyed his collection of short stories. I believe Penguin released them in four volumes – they are superb! The Ashenden stories are I believe volume three, they are quite amusing yes 🙂
Beyond that his intellectual autobiography A Writers Notebook is very good, and his travelogue through Southeast Asia, A Gentleman In the Parlour, is excellent. Pico Iyer – a superb travel essayist worth reading in his own right – loved this.
Of his novels, I read them all and enjoyed them all, but none stand out in my memory. The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, and Liza of Lambeth, perhaps (in addition to the Razors Edge) Of Human Bondage is of course his magnum opus – it’s good. The title comes from a line from Spinoza, who was referring to the bondage of the emotions – and the way out 🙂
The Magician is an atmospheric and enjoyable tale, but suggests more than it achieves. You keep on expecting more, but it never comes. Still enjoyable.
I did know he was a real life spy! In that era one could be a suave British gentleman and a spy! Perhaps partly responsible for the James Bond archetype?
I will watch the movie thanks!
You unfortunately lost me at soap opera.
I hope that you weren’t offended by my suggesting that you might have some hedonistic proclivities. I know that I sometimes am when my 89 year old roommate calls me a hedonist, as I like to cook with a bit of flair and zesty spices, and like Chesterton, enjoy a good after dinner smoke and a glass of sherry. He has his own “vices” too – but we’re all prone to see these “vices” in others and not in ourselves.
Thanks for sharing your reading experiences of Maugham’s work. I’ve also seen two other films based on his short stories, “Trio” and “Quartet” both quite delightful entertainment. I counted up 46 films based on his literary output, mostly produced in the late 1920’s – early 1940’s, that is a testament as to how popular he was during the first half of the 20th century. I’m itching to get my hands on his travelogues about his trips to the Far East.
You need not be concerned with my metaphysics at all. Everything is exactly as it should be.
Aggression is part of existence, after all, and this is why you deserve to experience pain.
All is as it should be, and I’m glad to be part of it 🙂
Exactly.
Albeit, it might take time.
It will appear as if I’m saying one thing in different ways over and over on this site, but I am convinced that global insanity and neuroticism will only increase before the “bubble” pops, with catastrophic effects.
On the other hand, I am also a fervent believer that in the end, everything has a place, and will be set in it, at some point. Massive tragedies are unnecessary, but I don’t care about them, because in the long run, they don’t matter.
I watched Star Wars simply because a girl I like liked it. Always thought it was somehow a “childish” franchise, and after watching all of it, I haven’t changed my mind. It’s not bad, sans the sequel trilogy which feels soulless like a lot of things today, but I like my media to have a little more… edge. Which to people here probably won’t be a surprise hehe.
Anyways, I digress. Finn, indeed, caused quite a controversy – remember, this was the absolute peak of mutual leftoid-rightoid butthurt, when blackwashing and shoehorning coloreds into everything for no particular reasons was at it’s peak, or at least, people weren’t used to it like now. So I didn’t expect much from him.
Cue, he is one of the most realistic characters in the whole movie, yet despite being supposed to be a secondary protagonist of sorts, he is sidelined and barely used. That annoying fighter pilot buddy of his gets all the spotlight, and suffers from the ancient American Mandatory Hero Complex, making him incredibly bone-headed and insufferable (though I must admit, the subversion of this for the sake of strategy is quite nice). What a shame.
Here’s a definition of the American term “soap opera”:
“a serial drama performed originally on a daytime radio or television program and chiefly characterized by tangled interpersonal situations and melodramatic or sentimental treatment”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/soap%20opera
The etymology (origin) of the term “soap opera” (sometimes simply called “soaps”) is due to the type of commercials (advertisements) that were shown during daytime TV “soap operas” during the 1950s when many American housewives stayed at home raising their children. These TV advertisements were often for laundry detergent (i.e., laundry soap), because product marketers knew their target audience would likely find “soap opera” content appealing. The term “soap opera” is also somewhat derogatory; regular opera is considered high-class, but “soap operas” are considered middle-to-lower-class.
“Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace” is based on a historical figure: it chronicles the marriage of the Qianlong Emperor and Ula-Nara, the eventual Step-Empress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruyi%27s_Royal_Love_in_the_Palace
It’s mainly about intrigue of the most intricate and malevolent sort among members of the imperial harem. That’s why I used the term “soap opera”.
“Empress Ki” is also based on a historical figure: it chronicles Gi Seungnyang, a Korean woman who eventually marries Toghon Temür to become a Grand Empress of the Yuan dynasty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Ki_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Gi
The “Empress Ki” and the “Ming Dynasty” series have more interesting and dramatic plot development, but there’s still quite a bit of interpersonal melodrama. The “Slave Hunters” series is interesting as a dramatization about slavery in Korean history, with an interesting plot line as well. These last three series also have more “action” scenes (fighting, battles, etc.).
Modern psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists are thoroughly fascinated by the “out of body” experiences of those who experience near death, which seems to strongly suggest that there is indeed a body/spirit separation. So many thousands of these sorts of experiences have been recorded, and they all seem to point to certain trends and consistencies.
As a Christian, I am daily reminded that I was made in God’s image, therefore a very important “somebody”. That Christ laid down his life for the multitudes in order that all have the opportunity to experience Theosis, also reminds me of everybody’s possible immortality and metamorphosis into becoming a god.
What’s your experience?
If it is good enough for God then it must be good enough for you.
Perhaps start by identifying your fears, if only to yourself.
Please, no references to long-dead sages when you are speaking about yourself to yourself. They might stimulate your thought, but you seem to have used your interpretation of them as a proxy for your thought. It is strange, when you think about it.
More directness would be more conducive to more clarity.
Yes, I do believe there is enough evidence, physical as well as philosophical, to say we are not merely our physical, discrete bodies.
Personally, I wouldn’t put it that soul and body are two seperate things, but two aspects of an underlying energy. But perhaps that’s just difference in expression, and I respect your way of putting it.
One thing I have learned in reading about religion and spiritually is that seemingly opposite words are often different ways of saying the same thing.
So, to be “everything and everyone” is to be a very important”somebody” indeed – no less than God! But it is the same as being “nobody”, no “one” (as discrete, individual object).
That is how I understand to be made in God’s image. At the same time, Orthodoxy speaks of Kenosis – emptying ourselves out, as God did. Becoming “nobody”.
So there is this dual message in Christianity – on the one hand, you are of supreme importance! On the other, you must become “nobody”, empty yourself out.
To me, the two things are really saying the same thing but from different perspectives 🙂
The problem with humans is that we become too immersed in being “somebody” (a rather frail, finite, small somebody), and forget our connection to everything else and everyone else, that we are much larger. This creates alienation, modern anomie, anxiety, meaninglessness, aggression, selfishness, etc.
Best, is to hold both perspectives in our minds. But religion only emphasizes the seemingly “negative” to counteract our innate tendency to emphasize our being exclusively somebody.
As for Theosis – I always understood this to mean that we become connected to God (to Gods uncreated energies), as a branch to a tree, and not as becoming seperate Gods?
Do you feel it means we become seperate Gods in our own right? If yes, this is quite similar to Mormonism – and there is nothing wrong with that. Bruce Charlton has also crafted a version of Christianity that believes this.
I was not at all offended by you describing me as a hedonist – on a certain level, I am! And unashamedly 🙂 Only, I feel there is a neglected spiritual dimension to hedonism – God made the world and saw it was good – in certain contexts, that could be rehabilitated, and usefully opposed to the grim “work” culture.
That’s an incredible number of films – I will try and watch some for sure.
You might find this interesting in terms of synch, and I do think this echoes what I mentioned about synchronization(though it suggests a much deeper level, at consciousness itself). I don’t know about the dramatic proclamations, but I do like and agree with the suggested notion that cooperation leads to almost a blending effect.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/brains-might-sync-as-people-interact-and-that-could-upend-consciousness
I don’t think it’s possible to make an absolute distinction between my thought and the thought of thinkers I’ve been inspired by.
I believe that books do not give us any new thoughts – they merely articulate what we have always thought but could not quite say.
That is why when you read a thinker you like, you have a shock of familiarity and recognition – and not novelty. It’s always, Yes! That’s what I always thought!
My fears are like those of everyone; suffering, death, lovelessness, meaninglessness, insignificance.
What do we all fear?
It is our fears that launch us on the quest for religion, philosophy, science.
That is why I don’t believe anyone is “bad” – the seemingly worst person is merely trying to avoid suffering and find meaning.
Yes. And is this not the basis for my philosophy of acceptance?
I think what you are saying here, is than why even search for a philosophy that transcends the perspective of a discrete self if that is how God wants to experience himself?
That is an absolutely valid and intelligent point. Thanks for making it.
Ultimately, all I can answer is – because God also wants to transcend that perspective, in me 🙂
Utimately, it isn’t essential that people “wake up”. If it is your time, you will.
I awake to find myself troubled by suffering and meaninglessness. Motivated by inner promptings, I search for a solution. It is God in me impelling me.
I then try and ease the path of those who are similarly troubled by sharing the fruits of my experience and search, as others have eased my path by sharing with me.
But as for those not yet ready to “wake up”, like Daniel Chieh – I recognize God is still having his – mine! – adventure of Seperation through him.
Please understand – I am not trying to persuade Chieh, or those like him. It is impossible, it is not their time yet to wake up.
Moreover, it would be wrong to prematurely wake someone up when they are not yet ready. Thankfully it is also impossible.
Chieh is a foil to show the path only to those who are ready.
Sorry for once again quoting ancient philosophies, but there is another Hindu idea that seems to have drawn forth from within me the shock of recognition and familiarity.
In this idea, humans society is divided into castes, the priest, the warrior, the merchant, the craftsman, etc. A single way of life is not appropriate for everyone. Some must first taste the extremes of aggression and wealth, before seeing their futility. Souls are born to the position that is best for their education.
Eventually, though, everyone wakes up – but not till they have had their fill of Separation.
Again, a myth – a myth may not be literal, but it is more than just a myth.
I have no choice but to endure the tongue lashings of formidable fellow like yourself, Daniel, o Defender of the Conventional View 🙂
I, too, am glad to be the occasion for you to taste aggression to the full – it is good to be an instrument of education to a fellow soul.
Yes, all is well 🙂
I think that your first quotation is closer to Orthodox teaching than your second one. We’ll never become “separate Gods” unconnected to God. God will finally fill our beings totally with his spirit, and our godlike natures will insure our immortality. The gospels are clear that we will become as gods, written with a small “g” and not with a capitol “G”. We can never totally unite with God in some sort of pantheistic process, but only with his uncreated energies that you’ve already mentioned. Only Christ himself was ever able to totally unite with his Father (see the Gospel of John for a clearer definition of this relationship). In my own human and childlike manner, sometimes I use the relationships of the minor gods on Mt, Olympus or Asgard with Zeus or Odin as an analogy. Of course this viewpoint isn’t biblical, but it serves its purpose for me. 🙂
Laxa, you’re a woman stfu. Men build harems with status, women use it to shrink them.
Chieh, the bifurcation or splitting you’re positing ignores use of immigration to drive centralization.
Immigrants shore up the capital against the provinces, similar work would be at play in Woke Empire.
Demographics. Svevlad, the tragedies themselves are part of the path to the outcome. Hukam,
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I believe that immigrants form into ghettos that have separate ideas, thus the strangeness of Wokeness is Islam at times, but on top of that, even fully absorbed entrants into the Wokism religion proceed to seek for gibs for themselves – and since Wokism is essentially a pro-individualist, “authenticity” philosophy that disregards the notion of common sacrifice and valorizes the idea of victimization as virtue, such individuals are essentially in complete congruence with its principles and so you just get increasingly little turf battles of “who really deserves sympathy” like TERF vs transexuals or the ever spiraling weirdness of Brazil:
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race
As one could imagine, their advanced degree of wokism does not produce a highly effective nation, indeed, not one that even had a lot of control of its own territory.
Once again, you are wrong, though I’m glad that your stupidity is painful, like it should be.
That’s a very nice vision, thank you!
It’s funny, because to the modern mind taking our “rightful place” within a larger Whole seems rather weak and pathetic compared to the prospect of dominating and mastering the Whole.
It seems like a counsel of servitude, rather than being the Master! And who doesn’t want to be the Master?
However, connecting to the All is quite literally – by definition – to be as “big” and as powerful as it is possible to be.
When you establish a relationship of domination, you are still only a “part”, a “fragment”, however grandiose a fragment – there is still room to get “bigger” – that is why even total domination of nature would not satisfy the modern mind. It would still need “more”.
As long as we see ourselves as seperate “fragments”, we cannot dispense with the philosophy of “endless growth” so characteristic of the modern mind.
Because humans can be satisfied with nothing less than the All 🙂 Only that is our true home.
So dominating nature is actually a much less “glorious” position to be in that to take our rightful part within it – which connects us to the All.
But modern metaphysics rests on the notion of Seperation, so the highest level of glory it can conceive is merely to establish a relationship of domination.
This is a really fun link for me to read, thank you! I have tremendously different internal experiences when I choose to engage in a process like that described, either with people or other phenomena. It also pays measurable dividends, that others quickly remark upon.
Since my conceptual framework for this is almost entirely built on me trying to put into words what I see, I fear it does not communicate easily, so I really appreciate other terminologies which cover the same ground.
One visual which I just saw when trying to reflect on this: imagine a lighthouse out on a rock at night, surrounded by a stormy dark ocean. It emits two beams horizontally, out of its top, in opposite directions, as it spins.
The faster it spins, due to lower internal friction, the more of the dark it will illuminate, and the more ships it will help bring safely to shore.
But the faster it spins, the more motion sick will get the lighthouse keeper, until perhaps he passes out, or needs to turn the whole thing off.
A lighthouse’s success will be determined by the courage and resilience of the lighthouse keeper, his humility in recognising his limits, and the lack of internal friction in the lighthouse. Whether the lighthouse keeper will direct the ships to where they need to go, where they want to go or where he wants to get them to go, is a complicating factor.
In the conventional view you represent, as a finite, frail being, being wrong is the worst thing one can be.
But in my view, a God would be rich enough to revel in being wrong 🙂
Yours is the mindset of inadequacy, mine the mindset of plenitude.
I’m more thinking of the dominant minority type, and ghettos aren’t as unfamiliar as you describe.
You basically get the woke types paving the way for more normal or trad Muslims or w/e later on.
An internal virtue spiral where authenticity to the roots instead of wokeness becomes the status signal.
Terf v Trans or Brazil skin tone are all Western, I mean foreign culture using Woke state to entrench.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
You would be wrong about this too.
But your ego wouldn’t let you admit it, of course.
Well, it’s all about jockeying for status and resources, so it’s the oldest human game in the universe, just with different rules for this game.
So the way I see it, either you get alien ghettos that don’t synch well or you get integrated immigrants who now participate in the spoils-seeking.
Neither of the above improves the coordination of the system. There’s some capability in it but I think it’s ultimately a train heading off the rails. The question is if it has self correction mechanisms.
Odds are yes, unfortunately. But less dominance of the narrative is good.
Good, then have the courage to say your own thoughts in your own voice, rather than ventriloquising others.
You’re generalising your fears into nothing, rather than addressing them specifically. This is a common coping mechanism.
It is also usually the result of someone hiding from their fears, rather than having faced them.
No, I am saying “make your bed, before you go gallivanting around town, pretending to have transcended your own experience and fixed your own mess*, which you are merely hiding from.”
*Know yourself.
I too can quote famous people and wise stories!!!
Have you seen “40 Year Old Virgin” with Steve Carrell?
You can catch it on Netflix.
In it, he plays the eponymous 40 year old virgin, who works at an electronics store.
One day he is playing cards after work with Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, some really funny old Indian guy and maybe another. They are sharing stories of what they did that weekend, each one gets more and more extreme.
Eventually the attention moves to Steve Carrell and he talks about his experience with a woman at the weekend. He makes references to other people’s opinion on women and hides in generalisations, but, when pushed, he describes touching a breast as just so good, “it is like touching a beanbag full of sand.”
Everyone bursts out laughing and he is outed as the film title declares him.
Don’t be the 40 Year Old Virgin, up to that point in his life. Be him after that experience, he is living so much more.
I don’t disagree with a lot of the philosophy you advance, I just feel that too much of it is a cover for learned helplessness and that you really need to get back on that platform.
The same beliefs can be held by different people for radically different reasons. I don’t know much about the Buddha, but I believe he could dissolve himself in the light of the universe at will, while remaining fully aware. Can you?
Intelligent, perpispacious people need to be careful of cargo culting that which they can’t yet fully understand, because they haven’t experienced it. Theorising is usually a way of hiding from a person’s reality.
It is certainly a form of hiding if that theory isn’t actually built on their own visceral experience.
This wouldn’t make what you’ve done a loss. It was an experience in itself, but don’t get stuck in it. Just because it has no particular colour, it doesn’t mean that you’re in the light, it probably means that you’ve retreated into the dark. Cynical nihilism all too easily turns into an excuse for “ignorance is bliss.” It is impressive that you have survived in this way for so long, merely looking at the colours in you, and the world, and going “wow, they sure are bright.” But it is cold in the dark, and draining. Step back into life, and see how the full spectrum feels on your skin.
Don’t be. Another one of his avowed beliefs is that hypocrisy is a good thing.
The entire thing is just a ramble for his license to do whatever he wants. The only way to get through it is via the most universal language of the universe of all: pain.
He doesn’t think it’ll work, of course. But he knows very little, having no imagination.
You seem to want to establish the existence of a discrete, seperate self, that can have thoughts completely separate from those of others.
I think this is an illusion, and I prefer the metaphysics of relationship.
Moreover, it is important to show that my thinking does not exist in isolation, but is related to the thinking of others.
The context of my thoughts, the relationships and connections they exist within, are part of them.
So I apologize, but I reject your notion of the importance of – even the existence of – “ones own thoughts” 🙂 Since we are not isolated islands, to understand ourselves, we must understand others, up to, the whole.
You seek to “personalize” everything – but the personal cannot be understood apart of the universal. To take large issues of universal import, and reduce them entirely to petty, transient issues of personal life, is to misunderstand them. Not that our trivial personal issues are unimportant – but one must “zoom out” and see them in their universal context, to understand them.
I think this comes from the metaphysics of radical Separation, which I have rejected.
In the same vein, I do not think our fears are unique, and I believe they can only be understood in relation to the collective fears of humanity.
Once again, you seem to want establish unique, discrete self that exists suspended in a “void”. I think one cannot understand oneself outside of ones relationship to the Whole.
You say “know thyself” – seeming to think ones “self” is a discrete entity suspended in a “void”, unrelated to anything else.
I believe “know thyself” means knowing our place and relationship within the whole, in the context of others, what they feel, suffered, and thought.
I cannot know myself without knowing the whole. I am not seperate.
Again, a fundamental metaphysical difference between us. I have already explained this, but you have not, it seems, understood.
You have not understood me. I do not believe we can be “fixed” – that is the metaphysics of Seperation, where our flaws are seperate from the larger whole.
In my view, our perfection lies in the fact that we are a total mess 🙂
There is no “making ones ned” – this ideal of “self-perfection” is the metaphysics of Separation, of inadequacy.
We remain total messes – and have a sense of humor about it 🙂
I am happy to hear it!
But your tone of hostility and defensiveness suggests something in me threatens you as well, on a very, very deep level, the level of baseline assumptions 🙂
This notion of learned helplessness, means your implicit assumption is that something must be done, must be “fixed” – and that I am inventing “excuses” to not do this urgent, important something.
You are certainly entitled to your view – but you have merely restated your metaphysics here. You have simply assumed what we set out to discuss and ascertain the truth of. In the form of a conclusion, you have smuggled in the assumption.
If at this point in our discussion, you can simply assume the very bone of contention in this fashion, means you cannot understand my metaphysics.
“Learned helplessness” (not in personal life, but in metaphysics) has a rich religious pedigree, and “passivity” or “quietism” is a frequent religious injunction.
Yes, I know you want me to see my issues as entirely personal and not examine them in relation to universal themes, but this kind of “contraction” of consciousness promotes misunderstanding. One must “expand” ones consciousness.
It would be wonderful if you could expand your consciousness and examine your personal issues in the context of universal human themes!
I would heartily recommend this. Break out of the narrow circle of the merely personal and see what is truly at stake!
It will shed immense light on yourself and your personal problems.
I don’t accept this radical bifurcation between theory and experience.
They are intimately related. Theories are but epiphenomenon of our emotions. And one cannot hold a theory without experiencing it’s emotional and physical implications in our deepest selves!
One may well prefer theory to life – like when one buries oneself in chemistry or math to not deal with emotional issues.
But theories about life are intertwined with life.
And if we ignore theory, we become slaves to unconscious metaphysics that may be doing us harm.
This is “folk Buddhism” – magical tales like this have their place, and they “symbolize” the profound philosophy and metaphysics.
The philosophy and metaphysics of Buddhism are simple and clear, and do not involve dissolving into anything.
I have tried above to explain what it might mean to “dissolve” oneself while remaining oneself – and it is nothing magical or mysterious, just a radical shift in perspective.
If you have understood from my philosophy that I retreat from life, then I don’t know what to say.
In fact, my philosophy releases me to live life to it’s intense fullness, creatively and joyously, rather than live it as an anxious quest for survival or “self-improvement” (anxious desire to be superior) 🙂
But Alas! Laxa, I do not think our minds are enough in sympathy to really understand each other. The gap is too wide!
I think your comments with their talk of wholeness, integration, and acceptance have misled me. It is not uncommon for what one really cares about to not be what one says.
However, you are entitled to your positions and to your metaphysics and values, and I respect them.
Good luck – and keep on posting!
Cheers.
Pain has already liberated me, my friend 🙂 It is the great educator. I think you have only waded in the shallows of pain, so you still think superficial treatments like “control” can solve the problem of pain. You merely try and deal with the symptoms of pain – I try and deal with their causes.
And the world would be a better place, and humanity happier, if we were taught to do “what we want”. Why distrust your nature so? Is this war against yourself and the world really necessary?
Don’t worry, let me affirm your persona for you:
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/arni-italian-figurine-goofy-hobo-tall-1792280023
Are you truly satisfied with this self-conception? The trillion words you hide behind says not.
Lol, I’m going to buy that, and put it on my desk 🙂
I disagree. A surplus of pain is what pushed him to hide in this box, or, hopefully cocoon.
He needs a hug, understanding, some cheering on and a reminder that the platform does actually exist for him to swim to.
Pulsing electric shocks through the water, in which someone is drowning, might help them to swim to safety by providing extra motivation, but it would be my last resort.
Perhaps electric shocks and coaxing will prove the most successful.
I disagree with this also. The entire thing is just an excuse for him to hide from his wants.
Your imagination is yet remains limited. I look forward to furthering your education, just as you have learned that I was right that your masochistic little heart couldn’t tear yourself away.
As for the rest of your rambles, you don’t even have any idea what I want or do, so you’re talking only to yourself and you have wasted enough of my time.
I have indeed learned much from you, Daniel, and look forward to learning more. Thank you.
Not sure if there is a real national strategic value to cultivating status in the Global South. SK for instance entered markets where Hollywood had no serious presence. It is not unreasonable to suppose that in some of them, it makes SK a more appealing destination than America – I think it could win on aesthetics alone. But perhaps, I’m overestimating the dangers, when film and TV is the last thing migration stems from.
As to politics, I’m pessimistic when it comes to parliamentary democracy being able to address the challenges of modern invasion. SK and Japan, while being nowhere near as in trouble as the West, are both much further along, than the West was in the early stages of border erosion, when the English were complaining about the French coming over to use their health service. First black olympian in UK was 1968. I’m not sure politics has an easy solution to address the problem of foreign brides in SK, which seems likely to erode national identity.
Never knew any “otherkind”, but theater kids can be pretty weird. In some sense Hollywood is theater kids writ large, but with a lot of money and sex. I.e., some of cultural poz is self-organizing, directly from psychological profiles of actors and writers, without any need for powerful figures to lead the subversion. That is why I am a big believer in censorship. I think creative types often suffer from a lack of inhibitions, and some external inhibitory mechanism needs to be added to balance things out.
I expect that the US will continue to lose status. But I’m not sure I see Hollywood being displaced for the most part, without some competitor state to the US having a strategic vision to damage it.
If I had to pick a prison for myself, that’s not the one I would pick.
Why not? Goofy hobo seems rather carefree and happy to me 🙂
Perhaps, you are afraid of freedom and happiness. It sounds strange, but many people are afraid of happiness. And fear of freedom is classic.
Yes, Goofy Hobo is my emblem. I love it. Thank you!
I don’t know enough people in the Global South to answer your question, though I can give you a very mundane reason why they cultivate “status” anywhere they can: money. The entertainment industry is an industry at the end of the day, and BTS was almost 2% of South Korean GDP.
https://shadow-twts.medium.com/the-bts-effect-on-south-koreas-economy-industry-and-culture-975e8933da56
Money is pretty motivating for them to continue to want to be of status.
I generally agree with this. I don’t even think that censorship has a significant influence on art, so as long as it is evenly applied and the rules are clear. That’s the tricky part to be consistent about. If you want to discourage artists from certain themes, make it obvious what it is. Certain creative types will probably try to evade around the words, but that’s still okay. Just work with it.
If you let artists create work – putting in months of their life – and then rugpull them, people will soon stop producing art. That’s probably not what you want.
That latter part is what China has had issues with, and needs to be careful about.
I don’t know about the Global South, but I did know at least two girls who surprisingly became extremely drawn toward Asian culture basically because of the pop culture. The first one was Finnish, who based on Korean pop music, went down a rabbit hole via Korean drama, games, and eventually sought to learn the language, to emigrate from Finland which she found boring. As extensive as that is, I found that more “normal” as it is the typical form of ever-increasing engagement and admiration of a place broadcast via soft power.
Another Canadian girl(also white, if that matters) I know just now has a much more interesting version of this: I’ve known her for a long time, back when she was a teenager, and she was always a bit more girly than the Western norm expects, though back then she was more “excitable and bubbly.” I recently began to talk to her again to find that she has really rather extensively bought into Chinese soft power such as mihiyo games and religiously watches a couple of Asian idol and variety shows.
Unlike the first girl, she doesn’t rabbit hole the same way: she doesn’t want to move from Canada yet, and she has only tried to learn Japanese. However, she has extensively shifted her personality from the “excitable and bubbly” to the “cute, cheerful and innocently docile” ideal she sees, and very much internalized it, along with a steadfast refusal to talk about politics, replacing most such talk with supportive giggling instead of voiced opinions. Its so very Chinese in some ways.
I find it fond, but I also find it interesting in a sense of “water finding its level.” Of course she is influenced by the media she’s viewing, but its also media she is seeking, because the West’s portrayal of women are not something that she feels for(conservatives basically bash women, even ones seeking to be feminine as she is; liberals basically tell her that she’s not right). So she found the media that fits better, and then, allows herself to synchronize with it.
So yes, I think that there’s defections already. Maybe not at the level of big budget movies, etc yet, which take a lot of capital expenditure and so on, but wokism is allowing holes to happen.
Raise the Red Lantern has a following.
I feel sorry for this:
https://images.app.goo.gl/ziT8Aa1rsBhm5mNM6
Don’t feel sorry! You’re doing very well on this forum.
The gap between me and the rightoids here is too great for me to have any impact. But someone like you, who is intermediate between me and them, might actually reach them. Your attacks on me increase your credibility.
Rightoids are also deeply in thrall to women (despite all the macho bravado, and perhaps because they suppress the feminine within them), and your gentle, soothing, motherly ways are perfectly adapted to this audience. It is very healing to them.
Please continue.
Incidentally, I suppose the second type may very well be what one considers a “5th columnist” since she has internalized foreign values, but doesn’t want to move.
The values she’s internalizing: “endurance/silence is a woman’s strength”, “men should and are expected to be relied upon for material worries”, “women are expected to provide validation and emotional support for men”, “the art of cuteness is important”, “talking about politics is for cringe unhappy people and certainly not for women” are almost directly opposed to the Canadian values of “speaking out is important,” “people are responsible for their own emotional state,” “no one has obligations, especially not because of sex”, “be yourself, don’t act cute if you don’t feel it”, “strength is beauty”, “politics is personal, especially for women”, etc.
Her best option for self-preservation the further her values move away from local ones is to promote foreign values as local. Amusingly, in her own way, she’s not conservative at all: she’s very much a radical in her society.
What is your understanding of my previous comment?
Or she is just being who she feels she needs to be?
Does the concept of a non-political 5th columnist make any sense at all?
Now that I clicked on your link, I don’t think I understood it at all. I skimmed too quickly.
What is the meaning of your comment? I don’t understand it.
Yes, I think it can.
First, there’s the refusal to oppose what appears to be foreign influence – negligence is an action as well. But even nonpolitical people can serve as forces for political change, such as via supporting people who are political or by promoting what appears to them as nonpolitical art – which she certainly does, heavily and overtly. Its particularly meaningful since she in Vancouever, a place with heavy Chinese influence, and theoretically she’d be someone who’d not be bothered by further increase in Chinese power and population and indeed, cheerlead for it, however quietly she does so.
It allows her to build a new mental schema around dislike of Americans, which a lot of Canadians have. For many, the dislike of Americans is to be actualized by trying to be more woke than Americans. She has another strategy, and introduce this idea to others, even if its subtle.
I do think that everything has influence, in a way. It doesn’t have to be dramatic or shocking, but everything has influence.
I’d bet that she’d pick the rough attempt at tolerance that she lives in, over forcing her own particular rhythm over those around her.
Taking the Woke at their word again, they are attempting to examine and deconstruct the underlying assumptions of whiteness, heteronormativity and so on. The underlying motivation, shorn of all the shadow-born intolerance* and hatreds, is to make the culture as easy for her as possible, while making it as easy as possible for her friends and family, who no doubt differ from her.
There are also two types of Chinese in Vancouver. Those who arrive to spend their parent’s/boyfriend’s credit cards in Nordstrom, while they live in their parents’ safety deposit boxes in the sky, should China go weird again, before returning home, and those who despise all of that, preferring to deeply engage with the locale.
Commenter Xi-Jinping, who sees this, in the worst possible way for himself, as the other way around, should balance off with your advice.
*When people are constantly talking like they need serious therapeutic intervention. It is probably because they do. Crazier people have always seemed more sensitive to trends.
I generally agree that she(and most people) just want to live their own lives, but I don’t think that its as all passive you think. At the end of the day, the more that she lives by these internalized morals(those are now her Truth), the more she can feel that others who imply that she’s “wrong” for living with her parents and only trying to work part-time jobs on occasion or that she has a “fake personality” will also find her lashing out in her own quiet way, mostly by implying that other women are deeply unhappy.
I’ve seen both with her.
People live in a society like fish live in water: they interact with each other. Conflict is inevitable with such trends. Adhering to an idea that people have obligations(especially “unchosen obligations”) inevitably is in conflict with an idea that people shouldn’t have obligations: its a direct conflict of moral beliefs.
5th column, I think, doesn’t mean “active political force”; as suggested by its title, it means someone who “supports” the foreign values, and thus can act in ways seen as caustic to the local culture, even if it is in an extremely passive way(such as promoting pacifism if the nation is under attack).
By their own values, the Woke claim that they are all inclusive. But as I’ve established several times, its pretty much impossible. Indeed, in her case, she’s not even able to find native media that promoted her original sense of being, and that’s probably because rival Woke values basically eat up all of the oxygen in media creation. A good possibility anyway. Material concerns do matter at the end of the day: only so much money and time for media creation, etc and there has to be enough for an audience for them.
I like conflict. Ultimately, it makes life pretty interesting. Its what is essential to storytelling and all that.
Defence mechanisms you use include clogging your ears with theory, blindfolding yourself with faux self-deprecation and wrapping yourself in a black shroud which you pretend is “nothingness”, so you can’t pay attention.
You are defending yourself against discovery, from both others, but, most importantly, from your own awareness.
I’d go back and read my comments to you in this thread.
Go through one paragraph, put your phone down, sit and reflect on what it brings up, how it makes you feel and what notions come to your mind. Then sit longer and continue to reflect.
We can get to my last comment after that.
If you’re only using the very surface of you to engage, the “Hobo Goofy”, then you will only understand yourself at the surface and your understanding of what others say will remain superficial.
I am being invasive, in a way, but I am not “attacking” you. I am showing you more care, in my attempt to notice you and understand, than you show yourself. This is not of great credit to me as I am taking my own value, but it is an indictment of how “Hobo Goofy” treats the rest of you.
I see conflict as fine.
Every protracted example, which I have looked at, consists of each side trying to teach the other, usually unknowingly, something about themselves, usually the thing they need most to learn right now.
This makes “conflict” just less self-aware “cooperation” and not categorically different, which also makes it crucial for storylines because this lack of awareness allows the characters to develop.
I’m sure the Dodo bird learned a great deal from its human hunters, as did the victims of cyanobacteria that nuked the entire planet so that the oceans ran red with rust. I wonder what the lesson was. “Die because we like oxygen as a byproduct?”
At any rate, I enjoy this form of “teaching” with great aplomb.
Conflict, as hidden cooperation, often goes very wrong, at least from within common understandings of “wrong”.
I imagine that this was made much more likely by the Dodo Bird – Human gap in understanding being far too large for the two sides to be able to work things out!
I’d also argue that a conflict is between two or more sides. The Dodo bird wasn’t actually a party in that conflict, but merely collateral damage to whatever conflicts were going on among the hunters, probably something to do with time preferences.
I appreciate that I’ve advanced 3 distinct arguments above, that may be seen as obviating each other. The paragraphs descend from “above to below” in language and I don’t think they contradict, but this may be overambitious.
Yes, as alleged “masochist” AaronB has found out.
I think we just disagree. It’s not a big deal.
Believe it or not, it’s even possible to respect those you disagree with 🙂
I respect and accept your philosophy, but I disagree with you.
One day, I shall meet someone on Unz who disagrees with me, but is secure enough in themselves to respect my position and not seek to delegitimise it or pathologize it.
It will happen! 🙂 (Actually, I think Mikel and Mr Hack are like this. Class acts both)
Thanks for the conversation and your thoughts, and good luck on further commenting on this blog. Your comments are interesting and add value.
Cheers.
You can run from her, but not from yourself.
You can’t reasonably disagree with comments that you didn’t even read. I left a comment consisting of a few words and a picture. You replied to it with a long and irrelevant bluster, before admitting, upon request, that you never even tried to understand it. If that is what attention you accord to a few words (zero), then I cannot imagine you accord much attention to the rest.
If I saw myself as playing a game with you, this comment of mine would be checkmate, but I don’t, which leaves me disappointed that you could never share in the experience, even if I did get to learn a lot about you.
For Daniel Chieh, yes, writing “checkmate” does make me smile, but it also makes me sad.
Madame, I hereby concede defeat, and accept the checkmate 🙂
Like Daniel Chieh, you have proved yourself superior to me.
I have not, in the end, proved a match for your superior wit. I have no answer to your charges against me.
I, however, shall continue to appreciate both yours, and Daniel Chieh’s excellent comments, though I cannot promise to agree with you two excellent people.
Good day to you both.
You should serve slowly to ensure your first serve gets in, so that you’ll win, a lot.
What is wrong with this?
Kenosis is only a stage of Theosis that presupposes that one seeks union with God, not an end in itself. It’s good to sometimes empty oneself of all of our turbulence, fears and anxiety that we often feel deep down, before meditating on Holy things and the Trinity. One does not make the “emptying out” phase the sole purpose of ones existence, as it might be in some forms of Buddhism, but only a temporary starting point. If one is empty in his spirit for too long, one risks the chance of becoming lonely. As one whose thinking process is much further evolved than mine as regards to Theosis* puts it:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/theosis-english.pdf
*However, Theosis should never be looked upon as some kind of a race where certain individuals may excel in conquering some of the passions that lead away from Theosis, and therefore be considered as “more advanced” and closer to union or of a higher status. The most important thing is to be involved with the process itself, somewhere on the pathway.
Thanks, despite the language, which is alien to me, I really like your comment. Can you share how you came across this stuff and an intellectual biography of it?
Thanks, Mr Hack.
I thought that Kenosis meant that if one empties oneself, one thereby makes room for God to fill you with his spirit?
In other words, one cannot achieve Theosis entirely by ones own efforts. You do your part – and then God steps in and takes over the rest.
So yes, the “emptiness” is not the goal – the resulting “fullness” is the goal. But if one is emptied of “self”, one makes room for God.
Is this understanding incorrect?
This is similar to the “negative theology” of Catholic mystics. The “unknowing” involved is merely to clear away concepts and ideas – a concept by definition “delimits” an area of meaning. If something is red, it is “limited” – cannot also be yellow – and make away for a fullness without limits.
So the “negativity” of Kenosis and negative theology is only apparent – by eliminating a limiting factor, it paves the way for a fullness and richness that is limitless – God, the All.
Is this understanding incorrect, Me Hack?
In Buddhism, “emptiness” is similarly only in terms of familiar concepts and ideas. This emptiness is actually the richest fullness possible – beyond all limiting concepts.
The older versions of Buddhism, the Theravada, has a more purely negative stance – but even here, Nirvana is described as a state that transcends our concepts, and not as conventional emptiness.
As regards Kenosis, I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong. It has been a long time since I read in Orthodox theology, and I may well have misunderstood.
There is nothing wrong with this – if winning is your goal.
But winning isn’t always ones goal. Or better put, one sometimes wins by losing 🙂
But that kind of winning, is the kind where there is no loser. And that is the best kind.
I don’t need a definition. I abhor all soap operas, in fact the corrupting touch of soap operas is what made shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones boring.
I don’t mean to say losing is winning (it is not a secret “reverse” strategy to maintain superiority) – one no more wins by losing than wins by winning 🙂
Sometimes, winning simply isn’t the point.
You think you will win a tennis match by serving extra slowly to ensure your first serve gets in?
I have no clue, I don’t follow tennis – you’re way too cryptic for me 🙂
I have a hard time deciphering many of your shorter comments. Go easy on me, none of this elliptical stuff – at least in your shorter comments. Your longer ones I can understand.
I think you’re overestimating my intelligence 🙂
Or, to quote Nietzsche –
Your understanding of Kenosis is similar to my own. I don’t think that I contradicted your understanding of it anywhere in my comments above?
I’m really glad that I peeked your curiosity about Theosis. I can point you towards a booklet written by Archimadrite George entitled “Theosis The True Purpose of Human Life”. Within its 76 pages you’ll find more than enough information to get you started. I use it along with the gospels as a study guide. You can access it in 10 different languages. It has literally turned my life around:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/theosis.aspx
#244 addressed to AaronB’s comment #239.
You have a treat in store for you. Lovecraft and Howard were great writers and I admire them unreservedly but Clark Ashton Smith was the greatest of the trio.
He was also one of the great American Decadents.
Cleopatra lost money because 20th Century-Fox spent an insane amount of money on it. The budget was unbelievable, partly due to Mankiewicz’s incompetence as a director. It cost so much to make that no matter how well it did at the box office it was simply not possible to recoup the costs. But it was a massive massive hit.
If you want to see a truly excellent Hollywood epic from that era watch El Cid instead. An infinitely better film.
They think that they are clumsily moving towards more tolerance. Up until the 90s they really were clumsily moving towards more tolerance.
The problem is that they decided that the only way to have complete tolerance was to enforce tolerance. That’s like guaranteeing a man’s freedom by locking him up.
Partly the change occurred because all the battles had already been won. By the 1990s tolerance had already been achieved. What do you do if you’re a political activist and there are no more battles left to fight? The answer is that you invent imaginary enemies who must be defeated.
You’re in the same situation as the US military which has had no viable enemies for nearly thirty years. So they keep trying to manufacture new enemies (even if they’re imaginary), otherwise the gravy train stops.
And the political activism gravy train must never be allowed to stop.
There’s also the problem that in looking for new battles to fight they’ve been forced into fighting over issues that are clearly nonsensical and absurd (such as pretending that a bearded man in a frock is actually totally a woman). The only way to defend such absurdities is by adopting an ultra-aggressive approach. You can’t persuade people that bearded men in frocks are women by means of rational argument. You have to threaten people to make them believe such things. There’s the added problem that the trans issue is being pushed by people who are seriously mentally disturbed.
As far as Chinese films, I’ve been enjoying the modern stuff coming out, but still love the old Cultural Revolution-era martial arts films the most (being raised on them.) The Chinese really do love unhappy endings.
As for Russian cinema, I’ve been really getting into it using https://sovietmoviesonline.com. Though I liked seeing them at the small cinemas that aired Gogol classics.
The further these cultures are from modern American media and interests, the better. Noospheric diversity is fun and protective.
Yes, it does, thanks to the indistinguishable-in-effect nature of malice and incompetence. Sabotage and accidentally breaking something have the same effect, but their natures differ.
She might not be politically active as a person, voluntarily, but she certainly has become a political object, more than the usual person in a democracy.
You know that, “deal with politics, otherwise, politics will deal with you?” Well, that sort of thing.
But, it will be a good test to see how deracinated Canada is. If they start hounding on her out for blood, then maybe Canada isn’t lost and merely needs a cultural change to survive. On the other hand, if they allow her to indirectly espouse foreign values, especially since a lot of them are also espoused by an “enemy country,” maybe the Canadians really stooped down to retardation and can’t even defend their own self-destructive values.
I think this is true up to a point but from what I can tell the Woke only make efforts to adapt to certain identities that they themselves have defined, and in particular ways they have determined to be appropriate, beyond this it is the job of the world to conform itself (or be conformed) to the Woke definitions and worldview. In Woke terms this will be understood as liberating the world and its peoples from ignorance and false consciousness and allowing them to enjoy an authentic state of existence.
Perhaps another way of seeing this is as something akin to the 1939-41 Nazi-Soviet pact, both the Woke and the Islamists in Western countries have something to gain from an alliance at the moment and, while attacking a common enemy they can also try to build up their strength for a predictable future conflict with each other.
But while maintaining the pact, it is still the case that Wokism has to redefine Islam and Muslims into its own categories and particular vision, which has little to nothing to do with the content of Islam (much of their worldview will probably qualify as Satanic from an Islamic point of view) and Islamists have to do the same in reverse with the Woke.
There are these ideas of ‘repressive tolerance’ and ‘liberating tolerance’, based on the idea that oppressed people cannot really enjoy the fruits of tolerance so only the destruction of whatever causes oppression can create the conditions for authentic tolerance. Though there is some tension between the idea of liberation and tolerance, because achievement of liberation will mean there is no longer anything to disagree about and so no need for tolerance anymore.
Liberating tolerance might involve burning down the premises of right wing newspapers, silencing and intimidating the supporters of oppression, forced re-education of those who are in a state of false consciousness and who don’t understand what they are doing, things like this.
Within Critical Theory I believe there is also the idea that no one is free until perfect freedom or liberation for all is attained, so theorists are driven to constantly seek out hidden contradictions or problematics within society in order to confront and resolve them, to reach full social liberation.
Are Sikh kids able to carry sabres and machine guns to the classroom?
No, Then your society is intolerant||
Doubly so if you find any of this objectionable.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/640459736919048202/869898427029422141/unknown.png
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
There’s nothing elliptical or cryptic in my comment. It is a grounded example of flawed thinking that you were supposed to be able to answer literally. I will explain the importance later, but first you need to be able to understand why these examples are flawed.
A football manager notices that winning teams tend to celebrate after their matches. He therefore schedules celebrations after all of his future matches. Will this help him to win?
A a poor man notices that rich people go on expensive holidays. He therefore goes on a bunch of expensive holidays. Will he get rich?
A fat man notices that people who lose weight get congratulated a lot. He therefore forces all of his friends to congratulate him. Will he get thin?
A hurt man notices that healed people tend to make fewer emotional demands of other people, he therefore makes no emotional demands of other people, will he heal?
A troubled man notices that serene men tens to have fewer conflicts, therefore he avoids all conflicts, will he become serene?
“Finn hate” was a Shlomo-manufactured, anti-White nontroversy to get free advertising, while ignoring red chinkos who are actively hostile against blacks in their movies.
We’re nowhere near Peak Orc.
Ever since common thug Saint Meganose of Fentanyl overdosed, it’s non-stop negroids on screens, with no signs of slowing.
Whether anyone White is “used to” the (((planned assault))) of these noxious negroes remains to be seen. Whitecotts are needed.
All religions and ideologies thrive when they serve some of the underlying needs of their adherents.
Wokism and Islam are in a conversation, this allows them both the possibility of gaining an intuitive understanding of the other adherents’ deeper needs.
Wokism, with its extreme flexibility and constant innovation, isn’t so much an ideology as a confused impulse towards inclusion, which is to include and validate the deeper needs of as many people as possible within a certain space. It also means that it isn’t static enough to be an ideology or religion.
This is why Wokism will add new channels, from that conversation, and will flow part of itself into a shape with which Muslims will want to swim in.
Wokists are constantly creating new labels, with new meanings. They even seem quite manic in trying to “discover” new identity labels which could work for those who are left out.
Resisters, who are attached to older labels from more rigid worldviews, religions and other ideologies, don’t like it, and won’t like it, until Wokism adapts well enough to include them too.
At the moment, Wokism has created more aspects in itself, which fit the type of people who were less attached to the structures that existed in society; which makes sense as they were the softest ground and the easiest to detach.
This is why its proliferation of identities mostly fits those who would have been attracted to “Bioleninism” or who are a bit crazy or alienated etc. But an impulse to include that has the fluidity of changing its full shape, sometimes in just a week, on a global scale, will erode off more and more people from their previous rigid identities, because it will end up better serving their needs.
Those who oppose it, because they are firmly attached to their previous identities, are left with the only hope that it will flow in so many directions that it will exhaust itself or become totally contradictory – that it will collapse in a circular firing squad.
This may end up being true of Wokism, with that label, but then it will drop the label “Woke” too, because the impulse to include and be included will remain, and will continue to gain in strength as long as people have their fears reduced by greater economic and physical security, and to have their positive freedoms increased, with greater economic growth and technology.
The internet greatly increased our positive freedoms. I now have the freedom to converse like this with you, a total stranger, for example. It also supercharged the impulse to inclusion which, in part, has come to be known as Wokism.
The label may change, the shape will differ, but water doesn’t snap under the weight of contradictions, it just flows over more and more ground, the more water that is added, and, in this case, technology creates the positive freedoms and sense of security that is like a continual tropical downpour.
I can see why. Weird question, but did it affect, or roughly coincide with, a change in your romantic life?
Deciding that “good” intent doesn’t matter is a form of self-harm. It means that you have paused in your attempts to understand and therefore shut yourself off from reality. Sometimes people need this space, but there’s a pain in it.
I understand.
You do not think philosophy can have an impact on ones emotional state. It’s a cargo cult.
Our problems are purely personal and do not relate to the great universal themes that have troubled mankind since the dawn of history, and no light is shed on them by seeing them in a larger context. The great sages and religions and philosophers, novelists and artists, do not illuminate our personal problems.
Therefore, I should just stop espousing my disturbing philosophy and just agree with you and Daniel Chieh that the purpose of life is progress and to become superior 🙂 Will I not shut up already with my “theories” !
Moreover, yours and Chieh’s approach to life does not rest on any implicit metaphysics that needs to be fleshed out and brought into the light of day and examined. The competitive view of life does rest on an implicit philosophy. It is just is, and cannot be questioned.
I do understand, Laxa 🙂
I am probably crazy, but I think I just might have to disagree with you here, while completely sympathizing with your desire to think this way and respecting your right to do so.
If you do respond to me, I would only ask you the courtesy of explaining clearly what you mean, while avoiding crypsis as much as you think you can.
I think your cryptic and elliptical writing style may be a result of your reluctance to examine your own implicit metaphysics, and writing in a straightforward manner may help in this.
And btw, while both you and Chieh are in fact unknowingly espousing a very developed and complex philosophy of life, which I hope you one day have the courage to examine in the light of day, it cannot be suspected to rise to the level even of a cargo cult.
People who see the purpose of life as progress, competition, and to become superior, do not exhibit happiness and serenity – no one would be tempted to cargo cult these attitudes.
In this attitude, the promised payoff is always in some distant future. It attracts desperate gamblers, who have given up hope on the present,, and not potential cargo culters.
Cancer doesn’t have immoral qualities. Cancer only wants to live. Your death is only coincidental to its desire to exist.
I do think that women tend not to see the innate violence of existence.
I watched someone die of Cancer, who arrived there with a consciousness that was completely unable to accommodate itself to “his” fate.
His particular Cancer was a rebellious part of his own body, that was invading and destroying his immune system.
This made a tragic sense, as he was an extreme individual, in that he had kept the world at an extreme distance from himself, and now part of him was in conflict with the rest, trying to disable even the most basic of his defences.
His consciousness knew that it had missed out on so many fundamental things, but could get no inkling of what they were. He therefore died in a completely confused regret, even the rebellious Cancer could not get him to open up in this lifetime.
What can a doctor hope to do, when a person is so completely stuck as that? He’ll be fine, but it was heartbreaking to see even that much pain be unable to teach what needed to be taught.
I am not saying here the right philosophy is sufficient on its own.
Experience is crucial. Often, a shattering experience in our lives is necessary to precipitate the search for a new paradigm, as the old one has proved inadequate.
William James writes about such events in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Some shattering experience causes a complete collapse in our habitual mental defenses, the paradigm we have been using to control and explain the world, leaving ruin in it’s wake. Curiously, with the loss of control comes great serenity, peace, and even ecstasy – the religious experience.
When I say implicit metaphysics, I also do not mean we must have positive intellectual content in our view of the world. In Zen, we are advised to sweep our minds clear of specific vantage points (or not take them as ultimate and true). But that too is a metaphysics of sorts!
We are all operating from a paradigm, generally unknowingly. Our culture implants in us an implicit “software” – that is often unconscious because so familiar – and that is often deleterious to our mental health and potential to thrive.
That is why Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living – he saw that the implicit assumptions of Greek culture, implanted in childhood and thus unconscious, were leading people to live far below their potential for thriving and happiness.
While the Zen injunction to have no assumptions at all – “no-mind” – may seem the exact opposite of the examined life, it has the same purpose and effect – to sweep away old stale mental paradigms that are clouding our life.
You are in your own cargo cult.
I am not describing “philosophy”. I am describing your situation. I am describing you.
You hide behind “philosophy”, not because it must always be a disguise, but because you don’t want to be seen clearly, by others or, especially, by yourself.
You are pretending to be “nobody”, not because you have shorn yourself of your vanity, striving and pride, through spiritual development, but because you are hurt and use that pretense as a coping mechanism. It was necessary, but now it is not.
“Nobody” is your current prison of delusion. There’s so much more to you and it uncosnciously bursts out whenever challenged. That pressure will only get worse.
Perhaps “nobody” as a “self” isn’t always a fraud, but it is when coming from you, right now.
I was extremely reluctant to be this direct, but sometimes the bandaid just needs to be ripped right off. Your wound is healed, but the bandaid itself is rotting. Move on.
No real changes in my romantic life since when I first got interested in Theosis, about 10 years ago.
It looks like you’ve already read the booklet, what are your first impressions?
You’re right, it was a slightly “wierd question” which is okay. Why did you ask this question, anyway?
Please, always be direct. One hides behind confusion to avoid examining what one truly thinks.
Because you are too afraid to examine your implicit metaphysics, you cannot understand what I mean when I say I am both somebody and nobody.
Your implicit metaphysics – too familiar to be conscious – is logic, dualism, seperation. So you cannot understand how two seemingly opposite things can be reconciled in a higher synthesis.
This is a block you will not overcome until you are prepared to seriously look at the assumptions underlying your world view – and cease denying you have implicit assumptions.
If looking at yourself is too painful and unbearable, look at Daniel Chieh and the general run of Unz commenters – they are you, you are them.
Your talk of love, wholeness, integration is not you – it’s a persona you hide behind so you don’t have to examine your true metaphysics, which are those of the mainstream.
While I had high hopes for you at first, I more and more feel I am merely talking to another regular Unz commenter at this point.
This is not your fault, and I still respect your right to your positions. Although I want you still feel free to respond to any comment I make, I don’t think it is likely anything fruitful will come of our discussions.
As for myself, I will continue offering my perspective here for whoever may desire an alternative to mainstream metaphysics.
Cheers, and thanks for the convo and your thoughts. I wish you well.
The great Zen sage you are, indeed.
I’d call you a hypocrite, but you know what you are. I wish you instead many learning experiences.
On a basic level, you must have grown a lot. I wonder how a romantic other could have kept up, or if it would have brought a new relstionship into your life. Big change can be very challenging for those around us.
Killing the cancer works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
GoT had its issues, but it had an attractive scenery and ambiance. Sopranos had the unfixable problem of taking place in a very ugly New Jersey-like environment. With all the wakandization that D. Chase tried, there was no way to escape the ugly people in an ugly environment dealing with ugly issues.
This whole milieu is of limited interest to outsiders – Americans don’t understand that their thugs, whether Sicilian, Irish or black are of little interest to others. Their lives are boring and they are in real life very stupid, so any story about them will reflect that stupidity. Plus the fat, houses made out of cardboard, endless driving…give me GoT any day, at least the scenery was good.
I was being gentle with you.
I know exactly what that feels like. I also know you have no idea.
You think “yourself” is your metaphysical theorising, and this is why you think this thing of me.
Try to understand.
Of course my “talk” is not me, just as your “talk” or “metaphysics” is not you, but I see myself very intensely, which allows my “talk” and “metaphysics” to closely align with me.
Do you even begin to understand how perverse it is that you identify as your “metaphysics”?
You have built a scarecrow, haphazardly patched together from other people’s discarded ideas, and which you call “nobody”, while also literally idolising it as yourself.
The thing for you to do, when you have the courage, will be to smash that “Hobo Goofy,” so that you can turn back in and see yourself. It will be fine. There actually is something there and you might find some appreciation for it.
It can, but it didn’t in this case, and not because of a lack of medical expertise or effort.
So much effort was made that the attempt at a “cure” became terrible in its effects, even as the chance of success approached zero.
Sometimes cutting through the Gordian Knot is excising the cancer, sometimes it is moving on from this life. Nothing stays tangled forever.
Hijabs are literally banned from most jobs/places in Europe, let alone long beard + salwar.
So, this idea that a Woke Muslim alliance is poised to take over is asinine.
Europe still hasn’t adopted most aspects of basic multiculturalism and is whiter than 1950s America.
The Right just has paranoid delusions about Islam even though it does mostly what they want religion to।।
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Laxa, I am interested in discussing what attitudes, life outlooks, and metaphysics best lead to mental health and flourishing, happiness and serenity.
This more and more seems for you to be about my personal deficiencies and inadequacies. I will grant you that everything you say about my personal deficiencies are correct.
Do you have anything to say about my philosophy? Can you “raise” your gaze above petty considerations of whether I’m “inferior” and look at what attitude in life best leads to flourishing? I will fully grant you that all you say about my inadequacies is completely true.
I apologize, but at a certain point, conversations about who is superior – perhaps the most popular topic on Unz – are less interesting than the larger questions of life. If you can join me in looking at the larger questions of life, then I welcome you.
But if you mainly just want to talk about questions of personal inferiority and superiority, I am sorry, but I’m afraid I can no longer join you there.
You will have many, many takers for that kind of conversation on Unz.
The ideas which align best with how that particular person is, at the moment, will least block them from flourishing, and will most allow them to feel the safety required to take risks.
This is why “you” are a crucial point in discussing the appropriateness of your metaphysics. The current mismatch between the two is leading to incoherence and defensiveness on your behalf, plus an astonishing lack of insight.
The conversation has not been about me. I have only dropped a few personal experiences in, as a forlorn attempt to try to get you to connect back. The conversation has always been about you, which is that which lies beneath these metaphysical rags, which you want to convince everyone is your skin.
I appreciate that this might seem merciless, but they’re just words on a page with no real power over the circumstances of your life. They don’t represent anything outside of yourself that threatens you. It is, therefore, time to show courage.
So I guess the answer to my question of whether you can discuss the ideas themselves and not my personal inadequacy is a resounding “non” 🙂
Take care, Laxa.
Don’t give me that nonsense. You’ve been telling people how they should live, and how you should live, not discussing the technicalities of stamp collecting, or some other subject where “you” don’t really come into it.
Rolling on your back and showing your belly is not an appropriate response. You should get up, stand straight and go look in the mirror, say “who am I”, and then answer that in your life.
Why do I feel this was said in a suddenly growling, bestial voice?
Careful, Demon, your mask is slipping…
Did you raise her with your Dark Arts, Daniel Chieh?
But what kind of demon are you? I know. A Succubus – honeyed, flowing, feminine tones to seduce, concealing anger, and a hatred of joy and freedom.
Well, Succubus, you will be right at home here on Unz 🙂
I will not be playing your game of “superior/inferior”, with all the negative energy you like to feed on – but you will find fat hunting grounds here, have no fear.
This all has gone off the rails too much.
Just a few thoughts re. the topic.
I’m only partially qualified because, with very few exceptions, I don’t watch movies anymore. But, until 35 or so, I’ve been sort of a cinephile, so I know what ‘m talking about.
one should clearly differentiate between popular & art films. For Westerners, Asian & Soviet/Russian films were/are interesting when they’re “art”. Most “popular” films- not so. I’ve only skimmed through tons of Russian patriotic, WW2 films on YouTube. They are well made, acting is good etc.- but this is not interesting anymore. WW2, with very few exceptions, is an exhausted topic.
Chinese movies are, if we are to trust esteemed American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, very good in the past two decades: https://www.alsolikelife.com/2000s-jonathan-rosenbaums-essential-cinema & after. But, Western audiences don’t, except aficionados, watch these films because their cultural codes are frequently too different & hard to decipher. I guess something similar would be the case with the Chinese & most very good European or American films – the audience would not understand moral, cultural, psychological dilemmas of movies’ protagonists.
So it goes beyond current Woke propaganda & basically dull, boring Hollywood films of today. Only rather shallow, but dynamic films from other cultures can be watchable & understandable. For instance, the much acclaimed Tarantino’s Once upon a Time in Hollywood (I haven’t seen it, just slices) is virtually incomprehensible outside of American popular culture.
If Europe wishes to survive it better become even Whiter.
Ditto Amerikwa.
To the more humorlessly literal minded among you, I’m not saying demons exist.
They may exist – I’m not saying they don’t. But they may also just represent perennial human archetypes, psychic tendencies or forces – in a totally non supernatural sense.
Or they may actually exist 🙂
Good intent may be a plea for mitigation in a court of law. In personal relations it means nothing other than ignoring feedback.
Now that you can hear that voice, do you have the courage to try to understand it? To let it into the light?
Yes.
Like a hypnotic cobra, which might stop swaying, to suddenly dart and bite and poison you at any moment?
Please trust me when I tell you that such a beautiful part of creation would only be so angry because it was kept in a dark box for so long.
Do you talk to mom like that, too?
There’s a trap there. You may refuse to understand someone’s good intent because they have hurt you via misunderstanding, which you have decided is ignoring, and vice versa.
Obviously if you feel awful in a relationship, you should change its terms, or leave, but I’d be cautious of throwing stones.
It works differently if you don’t know the real story of the Manson Gang etc, but I have met plenty of non-Americans young enough to not have a clue who they were, yet really enjoyed it.
One can enjoy some moving pictures without understanding a thing.
It seems to me that Wokeism is more about exclusion than inclusion. It’s about defining who is acceptable and who isn’t.
For example if you belong to one of the 117 different approved genders you’re acceptable, but if you’re “cishet” you’re not acceptable. And “cishet” embraces at least 95% of the population. So Wokeism excludes most people.
AaronB, do not fear Triteleia Laxa, she is just as phony as you.
None of those genders describes you?
I doubt it. They are exhaustive.
“one should clearly differentiate between popular & art films” . – Good art films are made in many places. And possibly popular as well. But only American popular films are universal.
And you are correct about Leviathan. Good film. That it depicts dark sides that exist everywhere does not mean it is anti Russian or whatever. In beleaguered and insecure places doing laundry in public is often perceived as anti which only leads them to be more insecure and more beleaguered.
Not in the business of debating wignats, sorry.
Hope your son(s) have their foreskins.
If being white or becoming whiter = negrolatry
Then sorry, white genocide worldwide।।
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Sorry, sweetie, it’s the end of the line for us. We had a good run.
But there’s little point in me engaging just another negative person on Unz.
Know though that I do have sympathy and pity for demons and Succubuses – they are, after all, just broken and corrupted humans.
I shall, alas, have to return to my regular programming of combatting the Saruman-like “lawful evil” that is Daniel Chieh 🙂
Gandalf had to die and be reborn to successfully defeat Saruman. One day you’ll have a clue what that means, hopefully.
There was a man, reclining under the shade of a palm tree, occasionally disturbed by falling coconuts, looking out at the seemingly placid, sun-dappled, blue sea, and he was bored.
Root cause analysis: you have mother issues. You have my limited sympathy.
Utu may know more about this area than I do.
I’ve never felt the need or the desire to be pigeon-holed into some rigid closely defined category invented by somebody else. That seems rather oppressive to me. There are two sexes, male and female. I belong to the male sex. I’m not aware of having any gender.
Until a few years ago I had never met anyone who required a gender to which to be assigned.
‘…But what kind of demon are you? I know. A Succubus – honeyed, flowing, feminine tones to seduce, concealing anger, and a hatred of joy and freedom…’
I fear I’m going to have to abandon my hypothesis that Triteleia Laxa and AaronB are the same person.
Still possible, of course, but…
‘They may exist – I’m not saying they don’t. But they may also just represent perennial human archetypes, psychic tendencies or forces – in a totally non supernatural sense.
‘Or they may actually exist’
You exist. We can be reasonably sure of that.
I agree absolutely, but you get my point.
The worst thing about the gender identity stuff is that it’s so incredibly misogynistic. It trivialises women. It tells a woman that the fact that she is a woman is irrelevant and unimportant and meaningless. It started by telling women that anyone can be a woman. All a man needs to do is put on a dress. And it has gone beyond that and is now erasing women altogether.
It turns being a woman into a joke. And it’s a deliberate and conscious misogynistic attempt to turn women into a joke. “Hey, I have a beard and a penis but I’m a woman because I’m wearing a frock.” It turns being a woman into meaningless play-acting.
The gender identity stuff has only been able to gain a hold because feminism has now been colonised by men in frocks. And those men in frocks have a burning hatred of women.
It’s not about being inclusive. It’s about mocking women.
It’s also an inevitable consequence of the fact that feminism no longer has any independent existence. Feminism is just one small part of a larger coalition and it’s the most powerless part of that coalition. That coalition includes much more powerful groups that are actively hostile to women. The most powerful group is the LGBT lobby and the LGBT lobby is now effectively the trans lobby. They dominate it completely. And what unites the trans crowd is their contempt for women.
Feminists would have been better off keeping their distance from the LGBT lobby. They have zero interests in common.
Lesbians would also have been much better off keeping their distance from the male homosexuals, with whom they have zero interests in common. And they should never have remained in a coalition with the woman-hating trans crowd.
When a man with a penis and a beard puts on a frock he thinks he now has the right to have sex with lesbians, and if lesbians turn then down the lesbians get labelled as Nazis.
I don’t see much inclusiveness here. What I see are vicious power games, with women as the victims.
If the Lesbians turn them down quietly then nothing, if they make a scene then Nazis.
The funny thing about power games is that subtlety & tact are rewarded while brashness is not.
While it may sound funny to pontificate on how white women have lost all power, online,
IRL this is far from the case||
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
For a commie fag and lesbian sympathizer you made couple good points about the crazy woman fraction. But I would not be too concerned about the crazy fraction too much. The whole phenomenon is a part of the entertainment industry in the form of the performance art where some actors immersed themselves too deep into the method acting schtick. Just enjoy watching the Theatre of the Absurd.
The overwhelming majority of women are unadulterated women. There are 30 millions child bearing age (20-34) women in the US. They produced 3.6 million babies last year and they will produce another 3. 6 million next year… When they reach 40 only 15%-20% of them will remain childless. So we can count on 80% of women to remain unadulterated even if some of them in later age decide to join the troupe of performance artists.
Lesbians’ odds of becoming pregnant is nine fold lower than that of unadulterated women and obviously the transes will never be able to be pregnant. Thus lesbians to maintain their level must recruit circa 90% of new members from among the children of non-lesbians. And I suspect that the defection rate from the troupe among lesbians who gave birth is high.
They have plenty of interests in common; both of them wish to see men with less power over them. And since men actually did have power to some extent, it forms a concrete Schelling point to organize against, while the ascendency of lesbians/trans was still nascent and theoretical. LGBT is quite functional when all of them are considered as essentially freaks; splitting the coalition would weaken them.
Its just that water found its own level. Its possible, even that women are worse off than before. But the course of action was understandable: neutralize a real threat to status advancement. And “going back” is going to be difficult anyway, thanks to the how that confirmation bias works.
You can sort of see this in the literal way that anti-feminist women are treated: “Are you stupid? Do you want to be a slave again? Just read something already!”
Life is all about vicious power games. Women are aggressors as much as victims. And they might have, after all, increased their relative status from before with more financial resources. If they clash with trans, etc, its just because ultimately they need to further increase their relative status(or security in present status).
I want to be important. By being different. And all these other girls say the same thing. – Sylvia Plath
This comment has a “Dems R the Real Racists” feel.
It is likely that this gender stuff has overflowed its banks, given that the torrent is being determined by the flapping of people who believe that their personal happiness depends on self-castration, but I bet it continues to flow downhill and settles into a channel which the vast majority of young women support. Those young women will then become old, and the holdouts in the generations above, who long for the days of lesbianity, will fade from memory. We’ve seen this pattern repeated many times.
I remember, in the mists of time, like 5 years ago, having some earnest acolyte explain to me how “sex” and “gender” are different. That “sex is just your biology” while “gender is your expression of masculinity and femininity.” Gender is now so valued over sex that these same people sometimes pretend that sex doesn’t exist, but going back to formally recognising that sex does in fact exist, is only a minor clarification. It does not obviate the whole gender ideology.
My internal reaction at the time to the anxious explainer was “you’re stupid, I don’t need your awkward labels to justify acting as I want,” even as I listened quietly.
I was confused why this intelligent girl was so serious about such nonsense. The thing is that she needed these labels to allow herself the sense of internal security to step outside of the type of even more stupid “men must do this, women must do this” mantra that you often see here.
You may not so easily fall into that trap, but she does, because she needs a trap to feel safe, so her, and others like her, developed a roomier trap, so they both feel safe and have a little more internal freedom. To you, it looks like regression, to her, it is an increase in the nuance and sophistication of the system with which she sees herself and the world.
Think of it as how people discuss horoscopes. To some, a person identifying as their monthly horoscope is bizarrely deciding to identify as the month they are born in. This seems like a big downgrade on knowing yourself, but, to the many people doing so, it is a huge improvement on their sense of internal panic at having no idea where to start.
Sadly, the biggest characteristic of “inclusion” is that it dumbs things down. This is because the biggest differences between the “privileged” people and the rest, were never sex, race or other identity groups, but psychological maturity and intelligence. It also pays to remember not to assume psychological maturity of someone, just because they’re intelligent. The New York Times Oped page isn’t worse because it has more black writers, it is worse because so many of those black writers, and the white writers too, are inane midwits whose psychological depth extends to fuzzily understanding their monthly horoscope.
The horror of it all is when you realise that for so many people who are engaged, this actually represents an increased sophistication on what they would have achieved had the culture not dumbed down so much to include them, but this is also the reason to be optimistic.
Could the culture have really increased inclusion of stupid, superficial people by openly stating that’s what it was doing? I think not, instead we get a bunch of transparent euphemisms that only can’t be seen through because the absurdity of the spectacle distracts us.
Random question, but do you have any good fiction books to recommend? I don’t mind the genre, just something well-written and imaginative, and also written recently.
Once you see propaganda films made during WW2, it is hard not to see most later films made about it as state-legitimizing propaganda. Doubly true, if you are aware of the CCP’s monomania for the topic.
I enjoy Asian culture. I think lack of diversity just makes everything more enjoyable, but I must admit that for whatever reason – whether it is the influence of Buddhism or just HBD differences, some of the themes strike me as very alien and basically incomprehensible. For example, I think I’m genetically incapable of liking the ending to “Crouching Tiger…”
Though, I can appreciate it on an abstract level, as something Eastern and alien. And part of the gain from that is realizing how deracinated what passes for Western culture these days is, because it does not contain any themes that are archetypical of Europeans, throughout history. For instance, nothing that could be mistaken as being Christian, whether it is really due to HBD or not.
I poop in a toilet. I win.
Lol, I found the ending to Crouching deeply moving and mystical, but my Anglo-Saxon brother in law who works in IT found it utterly incomprehensible and even repellent 🙂
I don’t think it’s a racial thing, though, but a culture and personality thing.
It depends on many issues.
For instance, I don’t think that many Asians (or Joe Sixpack) would “get” a brilliant adaptation of a Conrad novella in French, “Gabrielle”:
Om the other hand, I doubt most Europeans/Americans would like to watch these on a regular basis:
Would non-Christians or those not acquainted with Christianity “get” this?
Of course, anyone can enjoy this:
It depends on many issues.
For instance, I don’t think that many Asians (or Joe Sixpack) would “get” a brilliant adaptation of a Conrad novella in French, “Gabrielle”:
Om the other hand, I doubt most Europeans/Americans would like to watch these on a regular basis:
Would non-Christians or those not acquainted with Christianity “get” this?
Of course, anyone can enjoy this:
” propaganda films made during WW2,” – Many “documentaries” and newsreel with footage of combat made during WWII were completely staged with troops running around snd shooting blanks. All sides were guilty of doing it.
You will notice that Red Army almost always is charging from right to left which implies that they always positioned cameras like that or film was left-right flipped to get the effect or what they filmed was staged. I wonder if Germans did similar thing: left-to-right on Eastern front and right-to-left on Western front. And in countries where people got used to “South up” maps all footage would have to be reversed to preserve the propaganda intent of armies charging in the politically correct direction.
The real footage from WWII which may amount to thousands (or millions?) of miles of film is kept somewhere in storage. I find it very disappointing and annoying that new documentaries about WWII contain the same ‘real’ footage I have seen in documentaries that were made 50 or more years ago. It seems that nothing new is brought from the storage. Then even more annoying is the use of a wrong footage as an illustration of unrelated events which happens in almost all documentaries as what is available or permitted is very limited and because editors are lazy and ignorant.
The question is are there the archive cleansing brigades combing through the archives for inadvertently captured ‘incorrect’ events, embarrassing and criminal events and whether they just bury the footage deeper and remove from catalog or slate it for destruction?
While in more recent years one can find more footage from within Germany and occupied Europe on YT still it seems that showing a relative normalcy of life is treated like a taboo. Just keep showing more horrors caused by Germans and more dead bodies of Jews.
I like Dark Eden by Chris Beckett. I also have an unusual recommendation: Fire & Dust.
https://planewalker.com/wings/archive/firedust.html
I also write.
30 Obscure Anime Adaptations of Western Literature
https://myanimelist.net/featured/2259/30_Obscure_Anime_Adaptations_of_Western_Literature
Western Literature in Japanese Film (1910-1938)
https://www.tesisenred.net/bitstream/handle/10803/667250/alpi1de1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Adapting Western Classics for the Chinese Stage
https://www.routledge.com/Adapting-Western-Classics-for-the-Chinese-Stage/Qi/p/book/9780367733827
The Idiot, Akira Kurosawa
BURNING (2018). Murakami – Faulkner
Secret Sharer (2014) Jospeh Conrad (mostly asian cast)
I know, but these are adaptations switching cultural codes & setting universal stories in a different socio-cultural-imagological context.
Asians, east & south, would soon tire of all these palefaces who look the same and have dilemmas they don’t understand. The same goes for Bollywood caste soaps & similar stuff for Europeans.
Even within more or less the same cultural zone, most US sports films about baseball, golf & American Football are completely alien to virtually all Europeans-
A bit OT, but related to how this thread developed.
Laxa, a Left Wing Woke Totalitarian, came into this forum and immediately formed an alliance with Chieh, a Right Wing Legalist-Transhumanist Totalitarian.
The emerging alliance between left wing and right wing totalitarianism is something I will expand upon on Karlin’s next Open Thread.
People, take note of this. The right and left divide is not the great issue of our time – it is a distraction. Similar to the supposed conflict between the US and China – both are emerging totalitarian states. They may quibble among themselves about the exact nature of the totalitarian society they wish to create, but they will ally against freedom, spontaneity, and joy.
Laxa, also, is not White and not native to the UK.
Well, children, the great issues of our time are shaping up to be more interesting than we thought!
Like Orwell, I would have been happy being a country Vicar – or the modern equivalent – but we live in politicized times, and the issues of the 20s and 30s of the last century have only went to sleep for a while.
The swirling, turbulent energies which have been released, will settle. Breathe and enjoy. It is all you and will all work out for the better.
What you wrote earlier in the thread:
My addiction to posting on UNZ is a serious compulsion that I pray every day I will be released from.
Now is the time.
Does your mom know of how much time you spend posting on racist online sites? Would she approve?
TBH, I found Jackson’s King Kong self-indulgent and overlong. But I am a big fan of the original. I have wondered whether it might be an accidental allegory of America’s experience with blacks.
PBS once aired this documentary filled with footage of blacks and gays in WW2. I just saw it promoted like 20 years ago, did not watch it. But I found it really bizarre. Must have had to comb through a lot of stuff just to find them boarding ships.
Anyway, I mainly meant feature films made as propaganda during WW2. I find them very grating, the way they are filled with condescension and contempt for the audience. Often seems like they are meant to appeal to the mindset of a 10 year old. The worst one I can remember, which is somewhat sophisticated, is Hitchcock’s “Sabateur”, 1942.
Of course, it denounces the enemy’s bombing of cities, when the protagonist works in an aircraft plant. It features the Statue of Liberty quite prominently, and shamelessly tries to pass the Lazarus poem off as French. But what I find most disturbing is one scene where a bearded lady is sympathetically elevated – seems to presage the current tranny insanity.
A while back, I watched a 1971 adaptation of Kidnapped, costarring Michael Caine.
The ending deviates significantly from the RLS book. I won’t try to recount it, as it would lose something in the telling. But the final shot, bereft of any people, seemed to have a metaphysical meaning that I felt would almost uniquely appeal to both Westerners and Easterners, even though I felt the film was purely European in character. (Which makes it distinct from most movies made in the West, then or today)
Interesting!
You make me want to watch the movie, thanks.
Women breed & raise kids.
Men fight & die.
Anything else is irrelevant
and a distraction||
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
No, you are the toilet.
https://www.unz.com/estriker/new-fbi-initiative-will-put-hate-crime-quotas-on-local-law-enforcement/
Pleased to be enrichment.
How many people do you know who have fought and died?
0?
I guess you know no men.
96 crore.
But trannies are the real misogynists. Anyone who hasn’t noticed that has only failed to do so because they’re trying desperately hard not to notice it.
But the “men must do this, women must do this” mantra had already ceased to be a threat by the 1980s. The idea that that mantra is a problem is a classic case of creating an imaginary threat that must be combated. The only people who still take that mantra seriously are a tiny minority of bitter loser men, who are unfortunately over-represented here at Unz Review. Spending too much time on Unz Review can give one the impression that there are lots of knuckle-dragging male misogynists out there. There aren’t. It’s just that if a man is a bitter loser male misogynist chances are he’ll end up commenting at Unz Review.
Up to a point. It’s certainly true that the biggest differences between the “privileged” people and the rest, were never sex, race or other identity groups. The biggest differences were power and money. Identity politics is useful to those who have power and money because it distracts people from thinking about power and money.
In fact lesbians are now in the position where men have more power over them. The only difference is that the power is being wielded by men in frocks. And whereas ordinary men generally like women, the men in frocks don’t like them one little bit. It’s giving the lesbians the chance to discover what it’s really like to be oppressed. They’re now encountering the testosterone-fuelled rage of men who would like to be women but can’t be, and those men are driven by a seething hatred of real women who have no difficulty in being women.
It’s a good example of a political alliance that seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out to be a colossal self-destructive mistake.
Mostly I don’t disagree with you but I think you’re a tad over-optimistic that things will sort themselves out. The problem is that there are people with a strong vested interest in ensuring that social conflict continues indefinitely.
In fact things already had sorted themselves out by the 1980s. Women could do pretty much what they wanted to do. Homosexuals and lesbians could do pretty much what they wanted to do. Women (and men) were free to express their sexualities more or less as they saw fit.
But that meant that feminist and LGBT political activists no longer had any justification for their own existence. So imaginary grievances had to be created, and in order to ensure that those political activists continue to be comfortable and prosperous and have unlimited opportunities for virtue-signalling new imaginary grievances will continue to be created.
World War T is not a war fought to achieve certain objectives. The war is an end in itself. It must go on forever.
((( federal buttheaded idiots )))
((( Department of Just Us )))
((( Dept of Homoland Absurdity )))
((( anti-defecation league )))
((( stupid posturing lawyer center )))
((( Amerikwa )))
It’s okay to be White.
It’s not okay to kill Christ.
Everything must go.
A small proportion of the combatants are so at war with themselves that they need to constantly be at war with something externally to distract themselves. I don’t imagine that it is psychologically easy to believe that extreme self-mutilation is the only way in which you will achieve peace. Nevermind actually doing it and finding out that you still feel at war.
But those individuals are not nearly enough to maintain a political movement.
They could legally, but their problem isn’t so much the law, or even other people, as it is themselves. “Inclusion” is giving them a socially approved language, no matter how facile and dumbed down, that they can use to navigate their own issues. This is why it is so deeply appealing to them. Weak-minded people need the collective voice to affirm a framework that they can understand and integrate.
Sometimes shocks from politicised transformation to a society really are so big that the society goes way off kilter. I don’t think this is that, but it is possible.
I am, therefore, not just saying that everything will be fine, even in the medium term. I am instead trying to pull out what really give Wokism its success, so that other better and more consciously designed systems can outcompete it. Wokism serves the real needs, not just of the minority of its antisocial adherents, but of many others too. It is those needs which competitors need to meet, rather than just dismissing them.
You mean the ones who are so misogynistic that they will self-mutilate in an attempt to become women? That is a hard sell.
It is like posting out that black CRT practitioners propose an ideology which sees black people as impossibly stupid and passive. This is true, but it doesn’t make them the real racists, no matter how much extreme abuse they hurl at black people who disagree with them.
It isn’t the external threat. It is the internal threat, as articulated in my other reply. This language and ideology means so much to them because it helps them internally. A lot of people just aren’t that bright and a lot of people need frameworks only slightly less facile than “men must do this, women must do that” to escape that framework.
Since you’re on Unz, I imagine that you have realised that not everyone is very intelligent, but it is another level of realisation that, even among the very intelligent people, many are barely self-aware. They use the language of self-knowledge, because it is everywhere, because people need it, but they don’t have a clue. Wokism may be like training wheels for this stuff, but training wheels are better than riding a bike and constantly falling off in a panic.
960 million Sikh men? Basing this entirely off the one individual I know, which is totally unfair, I know, but can the world really sustain 960 million doughy, mother’s boys with hair so greasy it almost drips?
Not when you give it some thought. You’re a man who wants to be a woman. You pump yourself full of female hormones. You get yourself surgically mutilated. You buy pretty frocks. You wear makeup. Then you look in the mirror and what you see is a bloke in a dress. You see a sad caricature of a woman. You realise that nobody who is attracted to women is going to want to date you or sleep with you. They want to date or sleep with real women.
You think you’re not going to develop a seething hatred of real women? You think you’re not going to hate real women because they do have people wanting to date tham and sleep with them?
I am sure that will be a common deep issue of many transgendered individuals, but for culturally discussed “misogyny”, which most people will therefore have to see as it is, you’re going to need something more surface level.
Now that I agree with.
To some extent Wokeism is successful, not just because it serves real emotional needs, but because there are no viable competing ideologies. The Economic Left is dead. All the mainstream Right has to offer is Greed Is Good. The various non-mainstream rightist movements such as the dissident right offer little but crazy conspiracy theories and bitter hate. The Religious Right is crazy and (mercifully) has declined into political irrelevance. Moderate liberals are keeping their heads down for fear of being cancelled and they don’t offer the same opportunities for virtue-signalling.
I think it an excellent thing that various groups of mutilated men and women who want to sleep with women and women who want to have more nice things all can’t get along well, because it provides a lack of cooperation that exposes them to more permanent solutions.
It does mean that there are potential cracks in the Coalition of the Fringes. Cracks which could be exploited.
Of course one thing we can be certain of is that the Right (both the mainstream Right and various dissident rightist groups) will fail abysmally to do anything to take advantages of such opportunities.
I still have vivid memories of a thread at Unz Review on the subject of the trans madness threatening to destroy women’s professional sports. When a couple of commenters were rash enough to suggest that maybe this issue was an opportunity for the dissident right to actually gain some support among women they were howled down by the geniuses of the dissident right whose attitude was, “Hey, why would we want to win support among women? We should celebrate anything that hurts women.”
Raise better then woman, ੫+. Sikh =/ Khalsa
ਸੋਫੀ ਸ਼ੂੰਮ ਪੰਥ ਨਹਿ ਰਾਖਨ । ਕਿਯ ਕਿਸ ਦਾਰੁਨ ਕੇ ਅਭਿਲਾਖਨ । [The Guru commanded] “I will not keep misers and teetotalers in my Panth, [my Singhs] will have the desire for vicious warfare.”
੯੬ crore is the # of Shaheed Singh in the Panth.
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ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I was thinking of applying a dialectical approach to this. The first point would be that Wokeism looks like the consequence of the spiritual and cultural victory of the middle class New Left combined with the economic victory of neo-liberalism.
But, this combination constitutes a big contradiction at the foundation of the political order, so over time it should be threatened by the old Economic Left (maybe, but not necessarily an actual political movement, could just be some of the social and economic forces Marxists were describing) plus the re-emergence of the old paleo-conservatives, Fascists and the religious right wing of various kinds, but in updated forms. They will feed off the existence of the foundational contradiction.
To protect themselves against this the Woke establishment will double down and try to make their system more authoritarian. Despite this over time it should either evolve into or be seriously challenged by the other things.
On the topic of the dissident right, I don’t think things have reached the point at which the right wing is motivated enough to really start to work on creating an updated form of neo-Fascism. The countries where understanding of what Fascism was as a political ideology (rather than a term of abuse or scare word from the Left) are also the places where the governments try to make politics of this kind illegal because of its potential to undermine democratic norms. It does have this potential, but the Woke will also trash democratic norms and bring them into disrepute, opening up ground for the radical right.
In normal circumstances Anglos probably don’t need or like Fascism, but as Anglo nations become less and less Anglo, it becomes a possible option.
Not really. Those laws are nuanced and mainly meant to act as protectionist measures and to not have any directly seditious materials produced (like Leviathan).
I’ve watched many similiar movies and they have even had excellent critical acclaim within China as well.
China is using its national champions like Tencent to set it up for future cultural dominance. Rather than buying up newspapers and TV stations (that would have met opposition in other countries), Tencent is buying up video game companies the world over and nobody is the wiser. This is a clever play to control the mass medium of the future – mainly video games. Tencent is making a bet that video games are the future. We will see if they made a good bet.
Global vision? US doesn’t have a global vision. It has momentum. Due to being the dominant cultural force for the better part of 50 years, people are accustomed to US media and it continues to use this to spread its ideas. However, at this point I think that US culture is beginning to lose appeal and is slowing down – especially with the rise of Asia and asian powers beginning to replace it (look at how Saudi Arabia allowed BTS concerts, whereas it would not allow US bands to perform. Moroever, look at how North Korea allowed a South Korean band to perform but not a US band)