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Favourite Smoking Venue

  • Clubs and Concerts

    Votes: 2 25.0%
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    Votes: 4 50.0%
  • Restaurants

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Workplace/Classroom

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  • In Secret - Hard Drugs More 'Sociable'

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    8

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
The actual solution is to find some way out of the whole perverted binary system, which you have pinpointed correctly as being essentially about creating solipsistic addiction/depression states.
How about actually getting health because it feels good?

Sorry - you just edited. Yes, the pre-requisite is not to care about the mixed messages. Being physically healthy can help with that in itself.
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
how do you disentangle "health" the image of it as purchase-able via addiction-weakness-marketing and some unmediated actuality of organic "real" well-being?
The actual solution is to find some way out of the whole perverted binary system.

discipline and cleaning house. hard work: step by step get rid of addiction (of all forms).

empty the mind, above all else of interiorized control mechanisms. re-learn to be self reliant and resilient of temptation.

meditation - if capitalism wants us cut-off from ourselves and alienated from each other, we should get back in touch with ourselves and re-establish unbreakable bonds with others.

I gotta get in shape now. Too much sitting is ruining my body. Too much abuse is going on for too long. From now on there will be 50 pushups each morning, 50 pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.

it is no accident that the "awakening" of travis bickle coincides with a completely new attitude towards the body.
 
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gek-opel

entered apprentice
How about actually getting health because it feels good?

Sorry - you just edited. Yes, pre-requisite is not to core about the mixed messages. Being physically healthy can help with that in itself.

I would also add that I personally see no reason to desire to live a massively extended life. (although that does not mean I'm valorising destructive-hedonism). That seems to be a vital part in deconstructing the Capitalist system as is: many of its negative aspects stem from the desire to over-extend the human term without obvious benefit, which to my mind creates personal misery, excessive wage slavery (obv along with consumerism), excessive pressure on stock markets etc...
 

zhao

there are no accidents
and all of this non-sense man... all of this romanticizing addiction... these silly notions that "sophistication" is somehow related to sickness? what a bunch of bull-shit. just playing right into their hands.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
I would also add that I personally see no reason to desire to live a massively extended life. (although that does not mean I'm valorising destructive-hedonism). That seems to be a vital part in deconstructing the Capitalist system as is: many of its negative aspects stem from the desire to over-extend the human term without obvious benefit, which to my mind creates personal misery, excessive wage slavery (obv along with consumerism), excessive pressure on stock markets etc...
Being 'healthy' (that word is starting to annoy me tho) is not directly about extending life, it's much more about improving your immediate experience and ability to function correctly. And that doesn't mean to function on capitalism's terms. If you feel good in yourself you have less need to self medicate with food, drugs and things.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Fear of death is a driving force of consumerism (see Delillo's White Noise)

Precisely! Its ultimately what is played upon above all else! Identity and fear of death, constructing an identity to deny death (whilst filling the world with dead fetish objects, filled up with voodoo powers, literally death-over-life over death, well sort of...)

@zhao: I totally understand the desire for fascistic (self-)discipline in terms of an oppositional strategy, (cf fight club and 300 also) but that is merely positing an image of rebellion in a sense, (the masculine-homo-fascist "real") which ends up becoming its own fetishistic end point... and is not to be trusted...
 
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gek-opel

entered apprentice
Being 'healthy' (that word is starting to annoy me tho) is not directly about extending life, it's much more about improving your immediate experience and ability to function correctly. And that doesn't mean to function on capitalism's terms. If you feel good in yourself you have less need to self medicate with food, drugs and things.

Ultimately we must renounce "health" to become truly healthy. In a sense our non-mediated identities are precisely our inimitable symptoms (mental and physical).
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Ultimately we must renounce "health" to become truly healthy.
Do you mean health in the sense of being some imagined ideal?
In a sense our non-mediated identities are precisely our inimicable symptoms (mental and physical).
I don't think so. And much of what has be gotten through really is from outside. General bullshit and 'interiorised control mechanisms'.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Do you mean health in the sense of being some imagined ideal?

I don't think so. And much of what has be gotten through really is from outside. General bullshit and 'interiorised control mechanisms'.

Perhaps you are correct... maybe I was too extreme there... but certainly breaking out of the binary is the way through (maybe Zhao- in terms of a true-Zen renunciation of desire?)
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Perhaps you are correct... maybe I was too extreme there... but certainly breaking out of the binary is the way through (maybe Zhao- in terms of a true-Zen renunciation of desire?)
Yeah, i wouldn't say all desire, just 'false' desire that results from a false 'lack'.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
All that is wrong in you is not you. You need to dis-identify with. Reject it. Expunge it.

It's not really a case of imposing some state on yourself - it's discarding the useless garbage.
Or simply understand "you" is a necessary illusion, "you" = a mere nodal point set in a vast (multi-registered) sea of flowing, seething, violently teeming self-maximising viral information.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Or simply understand "you" is a necessary illusion, "you" = a mere nodal point set in a vast (multi-registered) sea of flowing, seething, violently teeming viral information.
The problem is that if what's doing the 'understanding' is part of the system then it's not going to have a very clear idea of itself. You have to do the work, there's no other way - it can't be effective through simply grasping conceptually.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Not fascism. Exorcism.

im not sure why a disciplined resistance to capitalism is so quickly labeled "fascist". not very useful.

to reiterate and summarize what i said earlier -- discipline has 2 functions:

1. to exorcise the demons of capitalist mind (and desire) control

and

2. to re-establish connection both with ourselves (as well as with others).
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Gek

I don't think there's anything wrong with desire - I believe we have natural desires that become perverted. We have a sense of lack because we are out of touch with ourselves. I think smoking often results from this by the way, as do a lot of things.

I also don't think that everything is contingent - that's part of the capitalist/democratic fundamentalist belief that there is no other way.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
im not sure why discipline and resistance to capitalist control is so quickly labeled "fascist". not very useful.

to reiterate and summarize what i said earlier -- discipline has 2 functions:

1. to exorcise the demons of capitalist mind (and desire) control

and

2. to re-establish connection both with ourselves (as well as with others).

Because the system you are espousing (complete with filmic references) is explicity within the homo-fascist aesthetic. It rests upon a (deceptively seductive) naive assumption that we can return to some pre-lapsarian natural state of bodily/mental purity.

About four years ago Zhao I was absolutely "down" with this line of thinking but it simply doesn't add up.
 
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