sus

Moderator
I like everything about the Grapejuice quote except the silly bit where he suggests anagrams are how we rebuild
 

sus

Moderator
I just don't think that kind of cryptographic gameplaying will ever be seriously loadbearing. There are far higher bandwidth ways of encoding hidden meanings or layers in texts.
 

sus

Moderator
But the pleasure in Trump is surely that the political-economic system, which we have been made to understand as this dark, transcendent, impenetrable intelligence, is being sidelined by the very mundane, primitively human impulses of one man.

In some ways he and Elon are the ultimate tests of "deep state," meant loosely to include markets and all these sprawling systems of decentralized power that can stigmergically coordinate to enforce their interests.

Can you in fact "just do things"? Or will "the system" keep you in line?
 

sus

Moderator
the day to day stuff i am not sure about whether it helps or not. if you are reading the news every day there is a comfort in having someone you trust interpreting it for you. helen thompson did that for me for a while.

I think it's really unhealthy

To me, the response to global postmodernism (ie a crisis of meanings) is a new localism

Because when you get concrete and local, words and systems DO mean things, they ground out in real and consequential ways for the organisms that inhabit them

Broke: Getting your day ruined over events you can't control, thousands of miles away

Woke(2): Seeing potential improvements in your town square and pouring your effort into making them happen
 

sus

Moderator
Horrific things have always been happening, somewhere in the world, and the only thing that changed in the 20th C is global news networks, which do not have their viewers or readers interests at heart, but instead serve up a complex neurochemical cocktail, moreish as a proper drug

Paying attention to shit that doesn't affect you and that you can't affect is the definition of insanity
 

sus

Moderator
Everywhere I go on the Continent. Young people are defacing beautiful marble with the words Free Palestine. Now I think what is happening in Palestine is horrific as does anyone with a heart but to make your own local space uglier cruder and more profane in an impotent screech against injustice a thousand miles away is to me metonymic for a widespread dysfunction. It is like family members burning bridges over Thanksgiving quarrels. The local order breaks down into dysfunction and there is no appreciable effect on the distant issue.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'm frustrated because we, collectively, don't even seem capable of agreeing on what the equation is in the first place. It's the ongoing nature of it. The constant mapping and remapping of the territory. There's always another development or criticism which needs to be brought in, another book about how we're actually in some new form of capitalism the author's just invented or how some thinker who's been forgotten was actually correct and just needs tweaking.

so, the swill vomited up by the bourgeois academy as a replacement for rigor?
 

sus

Moderator
Are the anagramic meanings just one example of the "exuberant excess" that all texts contain? Or
 

sus

Moderator
I am only trying to say that I think "Above my paygrade" is a good stance for an employee of the world, and that we can't all be upper managers who steer the great global ship.

That democracy works better at the municipal scale than the international scale.

In Brazil often I felt that people had a different attitude they took a tremendous amount of pride in their work, in their modest corner of the world.

In America everyone thinks they're destined for greatness they're God's answer to the world's problems.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Neither is wrong. It's just the chances of making it as the latter are slim and the amount of work required is more than most can handle. Not to mention you also want to be fit for public consumption at the same time because talent and product are only part of the equation. You'll probably have a better life as the former. Burning bright is expensive.
 
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