With you there. Hearing this shit from liberal friends has been melting my brain and i think the time has finally come to organize, or at the very least commiserate with comrades irl.

“No she’s not great on the Palestine thing but…”

> I take a road trip
> trump assassination attempt
> I take another road trip
> trump assassination attempt

I must take more road trips

He’s gone dry

I know I gotta meet people where they’re at but damn it still stings when you’re introduced as “very liberal.”

I’m not a liberal. :juche-tears:

Somebody posted this article here a couple years ago with the thesis that the internet will not survive, and that was before LM saturation.

Okay I have some thoughts. I’m going to be taking a more computational approach.

So we have no free will. Everything we do is determined, i.e. given the current state of your brain, as well as extraordinary advanced technology, you can “calculate” what your next behavior will be. An issue arises: you are not a brain, but a brain in a body. We are not goop floating in a void, but a sensing and acting entity.

I’m not much of a Cognitive Psychology kind of guy, but one of the more interesting theories that has emerged in recent years is embodied cognition. This theory is a reaction against the traditional “brain in a jar” approach where cognition occurs only in the brain, and instead posits that cognition is a process of the brain and the body. The body’s sensors structure incoming information before it sends it to the brain. This “re-structuring” of information is so complex that these sensors, as argued by proponents of embodied cognition, perform a computation on information before it reaches the brain.

Okay, so we can’t just take our brain’s state in order to calculate our next behavior, we need our body’s state as well. We put that into our Human Predictor 9000.

But another problem arises: we are not just a brain in a body, but a brain in a body in an environment. That is to say, we are not just a body floating in space but are a body forever grounded in an environment. This environment acts on us in so many ways. We’re talking background radiation, oxygen levels, amount of green things we can see in an immediate moment, how much stuff is touching our skin, voices and other sounds of events happening in our environment. We’ve established that our body is just as integral to cognition as our brain, but our body, like our brain, is exposed to all these happenings in our environment. You know what that means.

Time to simulate the universe.

Maybe it’s a big step to go from our local environment to the entire universe, but if we don’t then we will have to draw a line somewhere. Drawing a line, however, is going to create a computational model which, at some point, deviates from the modeled reality. At this point I’m reminded of the beginning of the Baudrillard book where a map that accurately depicts the territory would have to completely cover it. In this case we need to simulate an entire universe so as to understand our own. But don’t we already have access to a simulation of our Universe? Isn’t our own Universe the calculation of itself? Why bother creating a simulation? I suppose you could argue that a simulation would allow you to calculate the Universe at a rate faster than it actually proceeds, though I’ll let other nerds think about that possibility.

If we take our Universe to be the calculation of itself, then we can extrapolate that to ourselves. What will I be doing in 60 seconds? We can calculate that, but it’s going to take 60 seconds to run. If you want a better calculation than that then I’m afraid you’re going to have to go and muck about in the nonsense world of thought and will.

Also this is how he introduces the movie:

Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation’. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixar’s Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We’re left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations – or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large – is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

“They’ll take your anti-capitalism and sell it back to you” is voiced in my head often.

Mark Fisher used Wall-E a couple times in Capitalist Realism (pasting more for context):

For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.

Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being ‘unrepresentable voids’ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market (In the end, Wall-E presents a version of this fantasy – the idea that the infinite expansion of capital is possible, that capital can proliferate without labor – on the off world ship, Axiom, all labor is performed by robots; that the burning up of Earth’s resources is only a temporary glitch, and that, after a suitable period of recovery, capital can terraform the planet and recolonize it). Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market’, its ‘growth fetish’, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.

By this analysis Wall-E is reaching levels of Dystopia not previously thought possible.

I like this interpretation. When I’ve played in the past I assumed that it was libshit, mostly for the lack of any socialist presence. But it doesn’t paint a great picture for the liberals.