Breathing true absurdity... But I guess this means that I can 𝔅𝔢 A part of the ever-unfolding daydream...
Lake Norman/Hillsborough, NC
Joined May 2009
- Tweets27K
- Following913
- Followers1.6K
- Likes8.6K
VinnyDog retweeted
Venture Bros probably is my favorite show of all time but it’s so hard to recommend to people, like it’s kind of a dated Johnny Quest parody for a season or two and the best character gets replaced for awhile by a sympathetic pedophile lol but it’s fucking amazing
VinnyDog retweeted
I'm not sure if llms count as a new mcluhanian medium, because as I see it media are all defined by human communication. Say whatever you want about authors being narcissists or whatever, but every previous technology is, at a mechanical level, humans communicating information to other humans. Llms are humans talking to themselves. Then reverting to the old medium, Internet, to communicate to each other "look what I talked to myself about". It's more like an anti-medium than a new one. It breaks the rule that old medium becomes the content of the new medium, and it reverses it, people post screenshots of their llm masturbation/talking to themselves, the new antimedium becomes the content of the OLD medium. Perverse!
VinnyDog retweeted
they HALO jump john fetterman into the dead center of tehran, buttass and fucked up on crystal. the ultimate weapon. but he gets porno mad and starts flinging around IDF guys so they have to flamethrower him and he’s just yelling
VinnyDog retweeted
The answer is not that complicated: Iranians are highly educated. And I’m not just talking about formal education (which many Westerners have), I mean on an everyday societal level. Iranian TV and radio are full of intellectual religious/philosophical debates and discussions, history, classical music, poetry readings, and so on. Iranians value literature and the arts, and they inherit thousands of years of civilisation, not just found in beautiful historic palaces and mosques, but also in their own homes, from hand-knotted rugs to intricate marquetry and ceramics.
Of course, not everything in Iran is so highbrow, but contrast that with the constant slop and brain-rot that Westerners consume daily, from late night talk shows to other types of filler programming, and the revulsion that Westerners display towards anything that isn’t mass-produced, monotonous capitalist junk. No doubt, there is cultural programming in the West, too, and – especially in Europe rather than the US – there are traditional crafts that are valued, but these no longer percolate widely on a cultural level. They are mostly dead and the reserve of older generations and the ‘eccentric’ (as they are viewed).
Ultimately, these societies and cultures are not the same.
Many of today’s Iranian politicians are also veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, and they have lived through severe difficulties in their lives. They are not like the pampered career politicians you find in the West.
VinnyDog retweeted
The post-war "open society" explicitly took the social question (how society ought to be organized) off the table of public discourse. The result is that all social engineering is furtive, secret, and therefore done in the name of incoherent unjustifiable goals.
I would find the left's position on borders and immigration so much more interesting if they just said out loud that yes they're trying to bring about the final World Hegelian State. I wish they had interesting new books and intellectual panels on youtube talking about this.
Too much secrecy and silence and avoidance of intellectual articulation, and no you don't get "credit" anymore for being affiliated with an actually interesting philosophical idea. Instead what you wind up with is a "zombified" political form where everybody is going through the ritual motions (protest borders, say nation-states are bad, etc) but nobody can remember why.
VinnyDog retweeted
Yeah, history actually happens over centuries and millennia. America’s position as global hegemon becomes more desperate requiring more desperate measures to uphold itself— this feedback loop is a death spiral. That’s what a later empire is like.
You’re unable to view this Post because this account owner limits who can view their Posts. Learn more
VinnyDog retweeted
as time goes on everything is going to feel more and more "off", all polite society, normie stuff, because its already a strained game of pretending we havent all seen the things we have, and its only going to be more strained and get worse going forward, for the people who cant face that, which is the majority
VinnyDog retweeted
I’ve been trying to think of the best way to describe this because it’s grown increasingly relevant the last 2-3 years with the Tate bros/Fuentes/Clavicular/whatever but it really is true astounding how minstrel-esque short form video content has become as a cultural construct. An ever more obtuse and more bizarre cast of characters whose monkey dance just becomes this kind of orgiastic… thing.
I’m really not sure the right way to describe it. Part of me wants to say irrelevant - but it *is* relevant, at least in the realm of ideas. Vapid gets a little closer. Basically just this endless dog-and-pony show of schizophrenic clowns bouncing off each other constantly with no end result or graduation ‘upwards’ in anything. No further sophistication.
Ultimately, I think the real critique of short-form video is that it’s actually deeply *destructive* to those who engage in it as critical actors. One can disseminate ideas, but they can’t ‘rally’ people around those ideas, graduate them into anything more, etc. The content platform itself is totally nonconducive to evolution.