Early in The Matrix, Neo used a hollowed-out book with the title Simulacra and Simulation to hide an illegal data disc which appeared in an early scene of the film.[3] Later in the film, Morpheus utters these words after the main character Neo wakes up from his computer-generated virtual reality, experiencing the Real as a desolate, war-torn, yet spectacular geography. For Žižek, this represents a prime example of the 20th-century's "passion for the Real," for which the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the ultimate artistic expression. His argument is that because this passion was sublimated into the postmodern "passion for the semblance," Americans experienced the "return of the Real" in exactly the same way as Neo did in the film, i.e., as a nightmarish virtual landscape or "reality as the ultimate 'effect.'"- Wikipedia entry for Slavoj Zizek's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real"
Sunday, September 11, 2016
9/11/01 - The Return of the Real - 9/11/16
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22 comments:
Les Deplorables: I like it!
The influence of the emerging alt-right on Trumpism should not be underestimated.
Andrew Anglin, head degenerate ate The Daily Stormer (who calls Trump the GOD EMPEROR [his emph.]), is launching a new campaign:
An enterprising Stormer has been handing out fliers at Pokémon GO gyms for the purpose of converting children and teens to HARDCORE NEO-NAZISM!
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Re. Obama v.ISIS, what do you really expect from a POTUS with regards to ISIS?
from Obama? nothing. From a POTUS? Something less than nation building... like Blitzkrieg.
btw - ru woke yet? ;)
cuz it looks kinda Klannish.
Embrace your inner wokeness!
What looks Klannish?
Wokeness?
Ultra PC? Count me out.
Got called an 'ableist' recently for using the word 'nutter'.
Humans drive anything to its illogical, absurd heights.
What looks "klannish"? Blackface, obsessing with your racial past and 1:16 on the video, dreaming of your race "taking over America".
1:16
I think you might be projecting your own fears there: talk of a "race war" (with the 'dindus' genociding poor, defenceless 'whitey', what else?) runs through rightwing US subculture like an irrepressible meme. Now more than ever. Do read some Breitfart comment threads, FJ.
Obsessing? Really? G-ddamn pesky coloreds should really shut up and accept their lot, shouldn't they? Ain't gonna happen though.
So, if the alt-right does it, it's legit, right Gert? I'll remember that when I schedule my next minstrel show performance.
Meditation on a Tragic Anniversary
A radiant cloudless morning
_____ air fresh and clear
__________ sky the brightest blue
_______________ mood mellow
A lovely young day bright with promise ––
And then a gleaming silver shell appeared
_____ mirroring beautifully the morning sunshine
__________ A Thing of Beauty –– but horribly out of place
_______________ like a spacecraft from an alien planet
Dipping crazily far too low upon the skyline
_____ before anyone could feel the menace ––
_________ it smashed directly into a gigantic upright construct ––
_______________ one of a pair ––
Twin monuments to Greed and Vain Ambition some were quick to say
But sudden violent death eradicated an entire investment firm
_____ in one horrific instant ––
__________ dozens of bright young lives incinerated –– gone!
Before dazed onlookers could begin to understand what was happening
_____ another silver shell acting as a missile
__________ crashed into the second of the giant pair.
Ugly buildings! A hideous blot
_____ on the once-graceful Manhattan skyline!
“Ada Louise Huxtable might secretly rejoice at this,”
_____ part of me though wickedly, for I had always resented
__________ the overbearing, outsized twins ––
_______________ bounders, interlopers, invaders!
But before that ruined day was halfway through
_____ three-thousand innocents had been
__________ burned alive, brains and eyeballs boiled
__________ skulls pulverized, skeletons crushed
_______________ between twisting, white hot girders
_______________ pelted with falling rubble midst the flames
_______________ caught, crippled, crumpled, smashed to bits ––
__________ Smothered in collapsing stairwells and buried alive
_______________ in a torrent of red hot cinders and debris
In so many ways the scene must have mimicked the final hours
_____ of the residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum
And then there were those hideous echoes
––––– of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire ––
Where so many jumped to their deaths
_____ to escape being burned alive ––
In an instant smashed skulls, broken bones and bloody pulp
_____ were all that remained of their vibrant young lives ––
__________ and locked inside the ruined sweatshop ––
_______________ cinders –– ashes and soot.
And just a year ago in Benghazi –– to mark the anniversary
__________ of this Great Triumph of Barbarity over Civilization
_______________ our young, handsome, well-meaning,
_______________ hopelessly naive, ambassador to Libya
_______________ was surrounded in his quarters,
_______________ dragged out into the streets
_______________ beaten, sodomized and brutally murdered.
But what does any of this matter? What difference does it make?
_____ Let’s just forget about it, and MOVE ON.
__________ Might as well.
We are privileged to live in interesting times.
Kyrie eleison!
Kyrie eleison!
Christe eleison!
~ FreeThinke
I do so wish you guys would communicate your sentiments in ENGLISH instead of Modspeak, Politispeak, or Postmodernese –– or whatever the hell you call your garbled, cryptic, abortive method of non-communication.
I've also come reluctantly to the opinion that far from being the brilliant philosopher he seems to want us to believe he is, Zizek, –– whom I initially found attractive, because he has an appealing countenance and seems sincere instead of duplicitous ––, is guilty of repeatedly getting tripped up in his underwear with far-fetched attempts to explain and redefine fairly obvious phenomena.
I do not doubt Zizek's sanity so much as I do his ability to "interpret" reality with any degree of accuracy and authenticity.
His is the "Analysts" perspective... meant to interpret the powerless "Hysteric" position (as opposed to the "University" interpreting the "Masters"). It is his responsibility to point out to the hysteric that part of the interpretation that he "lacks".
Unfortunately, to do what Zizek does requires words not put together by the masses... a form of "postmodernese" so that others, such as myself, might observe and understand his "methods". As one of a slightly different ideological perspective (right v. left), I hope to perhaps identify what is missing in his own analysis of the Last (most recent) Man.
From what you've said, Thersites, it appears you've accepted a whole set of fabricated hypotheses and the terminology that goes with them as "Gospel Truth" in much the same way Fundamentalist Christians and other religious bigots "accept" the Bible as "LITERAL" truth.
In the Final Analysis, "labels" mean nothing, and fantastic circumlocutory attempts to "analyze" what may or may not be the "true motives" behind human (mis)behavior wind up being more obfuscatory than revelatory.
The ONE and ONLY Conflict worth our time and attention is the primal confrontation between Good and Evil.
Unfortunately for our perennially-adolescent species, too many have a penchant for continually "tempting the Lord our God" by trying to see how far we might go in getting away with denying and defying His Holy Word.
Naturally, that leads only to one disaster after another.
Simplistic?
I can understand why many might want to think so, but after seventy-ficew years of "kicking against the pricks," myself, I can honestly say I no longer believe in questioning Divine Precepts. All that "questioning," and ovet-analyzing produces little but Doubt, Confusion, and ever-greater does of Perplexity, Consternation, and Hostility.
Well, I'm glad you've found your "answers".
...and in the final analysis, "The Word" consists entirely of "labels".
And as far as I'm concerned, Nietzsche was right about the difference between "Bad" and "Evil". And Lacan has captured this difference (putting the 'D' in evil) quite well.
Nietzsche, "Beyond Good & Evil" (260) Slave-morality is essentially the morality of utility. Here is the seat of the origin of the famous antithesis "good" and "evil":—power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of being despised. According to slave-morality, therefore, the "evil" man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the "good" man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being. The contrast attains its maximum when, in accordance with the logical consequences of slave-morality, a shade of depreciation—it may be slight and well-intentioned—at last attaches itself to the "good" man of this morality; because, according to the servile mode of thought, the good man must in any case be the SAFE man: he is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, un bonhomme. Everywhere that slave-morality gains the ascendancy, language shows a tendency to approximate the significations of the words "good" and "stupid."—A last fundamental difference: the desire for FREEDOM, the instinct for happiness and the refinements of the feeling of liberty belong as necessarily to slave-morals and morality, as artifice and enthusiasm in reverence and devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic mode of thinking and estimating.—Hence we can understand without further detail why love AS A PASSION—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.
Post-modernism represents the "triumph" of slave morality, a world in which "evil" no longer exists in "form", yet is everywhere prevalent.
...as for my disdain for "certain" truths, there is still one to which I still cling:
“The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power”
"The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached -- and against which he taught his disciples to fight." - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, unpublished fragment, Nov. 1887
Note the "irony" in the new post-modern language of "woke-ness"
"Beauty's voice speaks gently: it creeps only into the most awakened souls."
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"
...must be a typo... "it creeps only into the most AWOKENED souls..." ;)
We, the 'evil', the 'deplorable' are all that remain of the old 'aristocratic' "Enlightenment" Orders.
The ONE and ONLY Conflict worth our time and attention is the primal confrontation between Good and Evil.
...unfortunately "evil" has little to do with it. It's the primal confrontation between Good and Bad that we should concern ourselves with. The painting "within" the limits of the frame. Let Caesar (and Analysts/ Philosophers) concern HIMSELF with all things "evil" (and outside the frame).
Don't misunderstand me, FT. I value your virtues of Faith, but not above ALL else.
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