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Science and the status of science strike me as more the purview of Lyotard than of Baudrillard. To get back on-topic, it was asked - so long ago I forget by whom - why Baudrillard said that the Gulf War did not happen? I think there were two philosophical questions Baudrillard wanted us to...

Naturally, I echo everything that Nomadologist says... I just don't see any sense in which Derrida, for example, is postmodernist. Neither do I understand how anyone could read Baudrillard's writings on something like Las Vegas and read them as 'celebrations'; they are masterpieces of cool...

Ah, turning to the media for the truth of something, then disclaiming responsibility when it turns out not to be true... there's a Baudrillardian irony there... Evidently, it doesn't mean all things. It is cultural analysis, not a scientific theory. It's somewhat new; like since there were...

And calling Baudrillard a 'postmodernist' is like calling Marx a 'capitalist'. Just because he analysed what others called the 'postmodern condition' - he rarely used the term 'postmodern' himself - does not imply that he approved of that condition.

No? What about Symbolic Exchange and Death, then, which is in part about the denigration - or ghettoization - of the dead in Western culture?

Your disdain for solipsism is creditable; it's a pity that the caricature above bears no relationship to anything Baudrillard wrote; more alarmingly, I can't see how you've derived it from the Wikipedia entry, either. Baudrillard famously wrote against the subject, for one thing. The 'if...

LOL Tate, yes, I do 'agree' with the rest of Carl's post, but then I'm not literal-minded and humourless. What is sexist about an attack on two specific women btw? Surely 'punchable winsomeness and self-satisfied artsy-slapability' aren't gender-specific insults? I'm sure we could think of...

Tell that to Ministry.... Plus, Pop Group/ Stewart were always bigger in Europe and Japan than they ever were in the UK.

It's all about the punctuation - the remarks about the Wire in general* and about Current 93 were contained within parentheses, clearly indicating that 'smugness personified' referred to what Carl Impostume called the 'punchable' Newsom. I don't see what the problem is in being put off by...

Naturally, I like gloss, extravagance and glamour - but Prince always struck me as showbizzy and rawky rather than glamorous. I file 'Purple Rain' with Van Halen and Bon Jovi. mms - it's not that I don't like Astral Weeks, it's that I do like it, but that's it ---- I'm not awestruck or...

... in the voice of Lisa Simpson... Any lingering interest I had was terminated with extreme prejudice by the photographs accompanying the Wire feature (this happens a lot with The Wire, which seems to go out of its way to use delibidinizing face shots - Current 93 rendered completely...

Speaking of which... I've never really understood the appeal of Astral Weeks either! This is a classic case, actually, in that it's not that that I don't like it, I do --- I'm just not even close to grasping what is exceptional, outstanding, life-changing about it ...

Everything purple is bad. Yay, for all the Prince loathing: I never liked the black D H Lawrence at the time, but that garish eighteez production certainly sounds even more dreadful now. But don't we have to distinguish between not getting something and disliking it: I GET Prince, I just don't...

But aren't we already in a situation that's much worse than that? i.e. imagine someone time traveling from 82 and it's hard to believe that they wouldn't be shocked by how old-fashioned so much of what is played on the radio sounds. Sure there was REO Speedwagon etc back then, but they didn't...

OK, well I certainly didn't intentionally misrepresent you. Let's try again... I said: But Borat (unlike Ali G) has no relation to any social reality whatsoever. You said: That this is so blindingly obvious is exactly the reason it's not racist. At all. I inferred from this that you meant...

OK. The argument, evidently, is not that Borat is the same as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is that to excuse something of racism if it has no basis in social reality is absurd, since it would excuse more or less any example of racism one could think of, especially the most noxious...

Yes, that's right. And The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not racist because there's no Jewish conspiracy to control the world. Poignant? Jocks and rednecks racist shock... Given that nothing is being 'exposed' here, it's pretty clear that such 'exposure' is the flimsiest of pretexts to...

Yeah, Gervais isn't Oxbridge; it's the meta-pretexts and the being unfunny he shares with Baron Cohen. Thing is, with Borat, it's not like I sit there laughing, but thinking 'I really oughtn't to find this funny...' At least that would produce an interesting tension. I sit there stony faced...

Quite.... Cohen is one of the most ugly and repellent aspects of the current full spectrum dominance of British culture by public school twits...

I think it's much less complex than what went on in the 70s... The 'complexity' just amounts to hypocritical disavowal...i.e. it isn't US who are trading in idiotic stereotypes for laughs; what's funny is that OTHER people (more stupid than us) can take such stereotypes seriously. Of course that...