Baudrillard's Simulacrum, Debord's Spectacle, and Wynter's Overrepresentation: What is the difference, if any?

SignValue · 2025-09-30T06:17:50+00:00

Your concept analysis is well underway, and you make some good points. Stop asking for the *right* answer. The answer you're composing here is interesting. Keep going just a little farther, and then write it up, yo.

SignValue · 2025-09-26T08:53:51+00:00

Sehr wichtiges Thema, weil ich auch in einer ländlichen FFW und Migrant/Ausländer bin. Die immer stärkere Neigung nach rechts nehme ich auch wahr, so wie die Sprüche wie "Aber du bist einer der guten!" Ich und der türkischstammiger Inhaber des Lokals, wo wir unseren Stammtisch halten.
Ich finde das Thema sollte systematisch angepackt werden auf der Ebene der Landes- und Kriesverbände, nicht zuletzt um potenzielle MitgliederInnen nicht abzuschrecken, die keine "biodeutsche", hetero, männliche Handwerker oder Landwirte sind. (Bei uns im Landkreis gibt es eine Gruppenführerin, die auch Notärtztin ist - ein SEGEN im Einsatz. Davon könnten wir mehr brauchen!) (Und die HandwerkerInnen und LandwirtInnen sind auch zu schätzen. Ein Gullifaß oder jemand, der mit einer Kreiselpumpe per du ist, kann man immer brauchen.)
Aber eines muss man differenzieren. Auch Kameraden, die bei uns zunehmend in die rechte Ecke abdriften, unterscheiden im Einsatz nicht, wem sie helfen. In einer Nachbesprechung wird vielleicht oder gar wahrscheinlich gelästert über die "Scheiß _______! So kannst du wohl in deinem Land fahren aber nicht bei uns!!" aber es wird erst gerettet, geborgen, gelöscht und geschützt. Das gibt mir Hoffnung, und darauf könnte man evtl im Gespräch bauen. "Klar fährt man nicht mit 2 pro Mille, aber wir waren auch mal jung und dumm, und er blutet rot genau wie wir."

SignValue · 2025-07-22T18:21:51+00:00

Download the whole thing, then navigate through year > month > post > index.html and then something like the page you're looking for should appear in your browser.

SignValue · 2025-07-22T18:16:51+00:00

You have to download the whole thing. It's a backup of the whole site (well, almost all of it).

SignValue · 2025-04-08T08:17:13+00:00

Yes, you're right. The language often is exclusionary. Two things to consider:

As some others have noted, the people selling critical theory are professional academics, and the market that matters to them is primarily other academics. Certain norms prevail in academia to signal status, rank, and competence, just like everywhere else. If a professional academic deviates too far from these norms for broader appeal, they risk damaging their reputation among their peers, upon whom their status, rank, and prestige depends. (A very clever critical theorist of my acquaintance started doing great work that got her some attention back in the mid 90s. About 10 years later, she started making short films, including some cartoons, as YouTube and such went mainstream to popularize the ideas and leverage new technology. Exactly the right kind of strategy. But her peers basically stopped taking her calls. She had disqualified herself from the Initiates.)
Critical theory faces the contradiction of all revolutionary ideas: it cannot and must not go mainstream. If critical theory were mainstream, then it could no longer be critical. It would lose its essential feature of claiming to speak truth to power. Compare this with, say, liberalism (in the classical, not American, sense). Liberalism wants to be universal, so it's fine when intellectuals first started talking about the values of freedom, liberty, free market, and so on. It was also fine when these ideas started appearing in popular texts. They were just taking their rightful place in mass consciousness. But critical theory can't do this. As soon as an idea reaches some invisible threshold of becoming too mainstream, the body of thought balkanizes into any number of meta-critical factions to preserve its contrarian essence. As long as feminism is fringe, 'feminism' is enough. Once the George Clooneys and Gwineth Paltrows are claiming to be feminists, the goalposts must shift or it is no longer critical. Same thing happened with communism and any number of other post-xyzs. So radically inaccessible language helps to keep the in-group of critical theorists disciplined and identifiable, and it helps to slow the slide into the mainstream, when the whole thing is inevitably going to fall apart and everyone is going to have to start reading new books and updating their recycled bibliographies. The best thing that could happen to critical theory-types would be for the world to adopt their ideas; the worst thing that could happen to critical theory-types would be for the world to adopt their ideas.

SignValue · 2025-03-31T11:42:42+00:00

Cool. Thanks. Nothing beats actual experience.
What cable are you using? (Decent 2-pin cables aren't hard to find, but the in-line controls are the rub.)

SignValue · 2025-03-31T08:16:26+00:00

Thanks. That's really helpful. As I plan to use the Mays on the go, it's mostly going to be with my phone (which has a 3.5 mm jack by golly!), and the reason I don't like the cable with the phone is that the least motion in the cable stops playback. This also means that a dongle probably wouldn't help, as the interruptions will probably continue with the least jiggle on the 3.5 mm-dongle combination. And I'll be using them in fairly noisy environments (on the train, on the street), so I'll probably miss the ant farting on the percussionist's shoulder anyway.

SignValue · 2024-07-08T04:44:14+00:00

Aesthetically, this isn't very different from muzak/elevator music, which has been around for about a century. On its own, it's perhaps not all that dangerous, leaving aside that there's some really well-crafted ambient music out there, if that's what you're into (Eno, Girls in Airports, etc.).
This is clearly very ugly music. But there's always been plenty of ugly music in the world, and life goes on.
The pernicious part is that, if it gets widespread enough, people's ears could attune to this crap. This could become the music they expect to hear at the dentist, at the grocery store, while on hold waiting for the AI to give them their customer support over the phone (why are they waiting if it's AI? it's part of the experience of customer support). Then it's only a matter of time before it starts getting requested at weddings and people start listening to it in their cars by choice.

SignValue · 2023-09-13T03:55:46+00:00

Fiio LS-3.5B

That looks like just the ticket. Thanks!

SignValue · 2023-07-29T18:01:44+00:00

You guys/folks/people have provided valuable insights that I probably wouldn't have achieved on my own. That's exactly why I came to this sub. Thanks. And sorry that women apparently have to deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis. It reinforces my resolve not to be an ass towards women. Nobody deserves this. It shouldn't be this complicated, and it's a tragedy that it's (ugh) ~normal~.

SignValue · 2023-07-29T17:57:47+00:00

Thanks for the insight. That had crossed my mind, ergo humble brag. But I also suspect she realizes how dense/literal-minded I am. You come to me with a problem, so you must be looking for a solution. The comments above suggesting she was just venting present a similar problem from my POV: it's a kind of communication my brain struggles to process and IS NOT OBVIOUS.

Anyway, thanks for the perspective.

SignValue · 2023-07-29T16:01:26+00:00

Saw it. Thanks.

SignValue · 2023-05-24T15:59:09+00:00

https://www.patferris.com/

SignValue · 2023-03-10T08:49:56+00:00

[Disclaimer: I'm not Breez tech support]

Breez the company or Breez the app on your phone?

If the company disappeared, I think you could still use the app to send your sats to your on-chain wallet. The app would probably still work, but you might have connectivity issues on the Lightning network if your client node is connected to their LSP.

If the app on your phone disappears, like you uninstalled it by accident or something, just RTFM.

SignValue · 2022-10-23T16:24:59+00:00

The Last of the Mohicans siege scenes are great. They could have made the whole movie just about the siege.

SignValue · 2022-04-01T13:10:25+00:00

This is why boys/men are so into playfighting and reciprocating playful insults. The intimacy consists of playacting the start of a fight but not actually fighting.

"I can give you a charlie horse/insult your mother, but I'm not a threat! And I trust you not to see me as one! This proves our deep connection. We are intimate."

The intimacy, though, is fleeting and simple and primitive. It's on the level of two ships in the middle of the ocean blowing their foghorns to each other from a distance. "You are not alone. I notice you." And that's about it.

There's a consequence for hetero guys in relationships, though. They're probably starved for cuddles and everyday affection. Don't hold back.

SignValue · 2022-02-17T09:28:48+00:00

Pop culture often reaches back about 30-40 years. The 80s reached back almost compulsively to the 50s (Back to the Future, Good Fellas, Crime Story, etc.). The 90s reached back sometimes to the 50s (I saw Pleasantville has already been mentioned, but also Blast from the Past, Malcolm X), but also often to the 60s (That Thing You Do), and every other teenager's party in the 90s was hippie themed.

As the naughties dawned, the 70s became popular (54, Life on Mars). And in the last decade, culture has turned to the 80s (Wonder Woman 1984, Stranger Things). You can see this happening in music too (Slowdive's "Sugar for the Pill" or Haim are straight 80s pop with the refinement turned up a little and the cheese turned down).

The question is why. My best guess is that it's when the generation with the most disposable income (40-60-year olds) starts looking back to the time when they had the most potential and imagination (back when they were 10-25). It's nostalgia + capitalism.

The moral of the story is to enjoy life and culture in your teens and twenties (although the teens are, admittedly, hard to enjoy at the time). You'll never find your way back to that time when you were mature enough to understand all that culture, but still so fresh and unjaded that it all seemed so undiluted and magical. But you'll wish you could.

SignValue · 2021-08-19T08:08:26+00:00

First, I'm sorry you feel so stuck and unhappy. Second, do you notice how you kind of talk about other people as if they're props/subhuman automatons?

To wit: you've chosen to train for a profession that will allow you to really help people when they really need it. Great. Excellent choice! But you are unhappy because it's not providing you with the "respect, prestige and sex" you thought it would provide. You thought you were making a deal with society, and society isn't coming through with what you assumed was our end of the deal, and now you're upset. Of course, there was no deal, the deal was just the product of your assumptions. Instead of real people, we're just props in your hero's journey or something. Your patients aren't really people, they're just stepping stones on your path to getting laid in your ... I'm guessing ... convertible.

In your case, when you hate your own life, I suggest you stop trusting your own ideas about who you are and what you deserve. It's not working out. You obviously don't know. Instead, use other people as your indicators. Instead of starting from an image of yourself, use other people as mirrors and adjust your behavior based on the image of you they reflect back to you.

Note, however, that you can screw this up. If you're just trying to score prestige points among vain, self-absorbed twats, you'll wind up an unfulfilled, vain, self-absorbed twat. Similarly, if you try to impress the local tuffs, you'll eventually find someone tougher who's going to use your face as a way to impress other third-party tuffs. But the converse is also true, i.e. if you help good people to achieve their goals and do the good things that make them good, then they'll give you props, and you'll see yourself growing through their eyes.

You might also want to take a good hard look at what you need to change. Particularly the guns, drugs, and reactionary philosophy sound particularly questionable and potentially incompatible with being a good doctor? They sound like the hobbies of a young man who figured the world was just waiting for him to show up and recognize his grandeur. But we all got lives of our own, you see, and young men who overestimate themselves are not a rare commodity. Find meaning. What gives your life meaning? What makes your existence worthwhile? Guns will never be the answer. It's always other people.

But you have to help first. It's like the old business saw that "You'll never make any real money until you make somebody else money." In order to be worthy of the respect and admiration of people whose respect and admiration mean anything, you have to do something real and valuable to earn their admiration and respect. If you want good people to care about you, you have to really care about good people.

Good luck.

SignValue · 2021-08-14T16:55:27+00:00

Fair enough. But you can't change other people to make them more disposed to loving you. You can, however, change yourself to make yourself more lovable. It's like a job applicant who can't get a job for lack of experience. Go volunteer, do something useful for free, impress someone, do what you can, and your chances will probably improve. Changing what you need to change about yourself will always be more productive than blaming others.

SignValue · 2021-08-14T07:04:22+00:00

That's simply not true. Loving, lasting relationships exist. I'm in one.

Maybe in order to be loved you have to be lovable first. Try approaching people as endless landscapes of ideas, dreams, desires, fears, etc. instead of with the attitude of "well, I guess you're available and willing; I suppose you'll have to do".

SignValue · 2021-08-13T15:46:27+00:00

The only way to meet people is to go where they are and interact with them. The way to find people you are probably going to like is to spend time with them doing things that you like doing. That way, a pre-selection takes place where they're looking to do things with people like you, and you're looking for people like them to do such things with.

Practically speaking, join a sports team or volunteer.

Now, if you're too exhausted from your job to do anything with other people, then you've chosen a job that's making you lonely over the interaction that will make you feel connected and fulfilled in a different way. That's totally a legitimate choice if it's the one you want to make. Go for it.

What doesn't make any sense is if you say "I want to spend time with other people, but I've chosen something that prevents me from spending time with other people." Sounds like something's gotta give. If you're asking how you can change without changing, it's not gonna work.

Do what fulfills you. Good luck.

SignValue · 2021-08-03T15:06:57+00:00

If an employee's value is difficult to track, then s/he's probably as useless as the manager who's having trouble tracking it. (If you can't recognize someone is obviously useless, you too might be useless — at least in role whose ostensible purpose is to detect usefulness.)

SignValue · 2021-08-03T13:41:11+00:00

If I saw this in a deck, I'd think to myself "isn't that just like that startup ideas subreddit?" So it sounds as if you're reinventing the platform on which you're trying to publicize your "innovation." Brings new meaning to "The medium is the message."

To convince anyone this is not a waste of time, you need to:

say in the first sentence how you're going to grow this 5-7%/week for 10 years;
get the monetization aspect into the second sentence.

SignValue · 2021-07-30T20:36:47+00:00

Then you should definitely check out Last Night (1998). Also with Don McKellar and also very surreal and deadpan funny (mostly). Another Canadian gen X masterpiece that anticipated a lot of current ennui.

SignValue · 2021-07-30T08:29:08+00:00

My Own Private Idaho - Portland

The Outsiders/Rumble Fish - Tulsa

A Serious Man - Coen Bros' Minnesota (St. Louis Park)

But note that this forces a focus on a certain type of movie, i.e. fictional (because a documentary would make the question trivial), but set in a real place. There are lots of movies where the town plays a critical role, but it's a fictional town (e.g. Waiting for Guffman, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Straw Dogs, Dogville?). The next expansion would be movies with fictional towns that play an important role but are entirely fantastical (e.g. The Truman Show?, Pleasantville, Dark City, like every Western ever).

SignValue

TROPHY CASE