/lit/ - Literature

>>11999798
i've said before that i am actually an icycalm fan. obviously there is stuff we would disagree on, and any presumptive debate between us would no doubt be a fracas. it's why i'm not interested in that. my thing with philosophers is not that they be paragons of virtue, *only that they be consistent.* and he is that, at least.

so i'm fine with contrarians. as i've said before, i'm a huge fan of the Arcade Culture essay and also his essays page. he likes Baudrillard and so do I. he seems to have a special bond with Nietzsche that - alas - i do not share. icycalm has found his own way through the vortex of postmodernity, and it's by becoming a reactionary vidya game critic, which gets the added bonus of being unbelievably fucking interesting also.

personally, my sense is this: rooting for the Schmitt friend/enemy distinction is like rooting for the house in blackjack. it's probably going to win out, most of the time. violence - in particular *aesthetic violence* - is intoxicating. but in that sense the 20C got wickedly high on its own supply. in the 21C the bloom has come off that rose for me. not because it doesn't work, it's because it *always* works, and in the end it leads to SoC's, terrorism, the infinite semantic bludgeoning over marginalization and victimhood, Social Credit, and everything else that makes me want to fucking neck myself.

but ofc, none of this is to detract from icycalm's shine. he's an utterly fascinating guy. i prefer his vidya writing to his OOTW aphorisms, and i wish he did more of it. but what he did lay out in terms of Make Vidya Great Again is fine by me. and bullet hell *is* the vidya genre of choice for Cosmotech, i think. fwiw. i guess all i want to say is that i ultimately have Confucius higher on my own power rankings than Nietzsche, but in my meme 3x3 list both Nietzsche and Baudrillard are in there along with, so.

made this one a while ago, it hasn't changed too much.

>top: laozi, confucius, heidegger
was really into chinese stuff for a while. heidegger's just god-tier.

>middle: deleuze, girard, buddha
i realize this is a completely insane combination.

>bottom: lacan, nietzsche, baudrillard
usual continental guys.

>>9818975
>Middle- Rene Girard (I think?)

nope. like i said, that was the b-team. RG is the captain of the a-team.

>>9783838
here's my cornball 3x3 list. given how little i have been meditating of late the buddha would probably move himself off this list and mcluhan would take his spot. outside there's a waiting room where de maistre, junger, some stoics and a bunch of other guys are hanging out.

my whole thing is, i think, how to live. just that, how to live. it's why i'm keen on the idea of writing a kind of phenomenology of spirit that takes this stuff and turns it into a fable-ontology so that i can move on from being a girardfag and just be an anonymous dude out there in the world again.

but heidegger tho. it's just about being an individual. caring about the world is part of individuating, and too much care can prevent you from fulfilling *that* even more necessary obligation. there's no need to be a martyr. girard argues very persuasively that we already *have* one of those and that one is plenty.

i'd love *not* to care. i sincerely would. i would love not to give a shit about politics - even metaphysics. i'd love to be able to just let all of it go. unfortunately, i can't. i'm still stuck in the world and surrounded by other people who, in spite of my alienation, look and sound much like me. i am sometimes bothered by this. but i have reason to believe that people are much the same everywhere. this bothers me sometimes, b/c o the fun things humans do to each other in the name of the good, the beautiful, and the true.

but there's no other way to go about thinking but with the continentals. the analytics are good for sharpening your tools, but for Being and the big questions, it's the continentals all day.
>and the clusterfucks they get themselves into

so it's good to care, but it's even better if you can care in the right way, care effectively, care in a way that is mutually beneficial to all involved.

>>9783953
>freedom merely implies one is free to have drives and attempt to freely deal with them.
nothing mere about that my man. the sky's the limit

>better question; what current freedoms would you want to restrict?
restricting campaign finance spending in US presidential campaigns would be good. maybe inheritance taxes for the 0.000001%. the kyoto protocols. i thought JBP was correct about bill C-16. there are others. the girardfag Hey Don't Be a Fuckface Decrees For A Better, Happier, Sexier Meme World, Today
>forthcoming

>sweatshop labor?
not a crazy example

>and
and? sweatshop industry labor sucks. sadly, it's an inevitable suck
>muh capitalism
>yes. i know. but it sucks tho. and the solutions are not simple

>solutions?
wear a condom, study hard in school, call your mother & go to church. if you are a small pacific micro-state just Do What Singapore Did
>if you can

>playing video games 12 hours a day is not good
probably true

>or youth raves
hey i liked raves

>or gender study degrees is helping ruin the nation
big questions indeed. gotta be cool & articulate. can't get trigged. that's job #1.

>>9655699
>putting chinese philosophy in quotation marks
I'm a big fan of the Chinese. The more I dive into acceleration the more I start to realize why.

>Maybe the "ideal" contest and proxy in place of violence for me is something like the Aztec Flower Wars. Highly ritualized small scale "battles" where prestige was at stake.
Possible. But I think it's the nature of these things to get out of hand.

>I'm sure we can find a way around human sacrifice.
The boy at centre thought so.

>f I had to pin down a central assumption it's that the Middle Kingdom was ontologically prior to philosophy
*Super* interesting and I agree. Mega-interesting. The Tao precedes thought and creation. Massively interesting stuff there.

>rying to base philosophy on pure argument (manifested in Kant) strikes me as an error. Maybe i'm a pleb and overly Orientalizing but all this talk about "Asian Philosophy" strikes me as a poor attempt to legitimize their philosophy which isn't quite up to the same intellectual rigor as in the Occident.
In a sense yes, but the Occident is now reaping the whirlwind of capitalism and automation. That's why acceleration is required reading. Nothing ever outsmarted Western metaphysics except its own time-bending progeny: technology and finance.

>Even Taoism became ritualized, and Zhuangzi didn't cause societal instability. So even spontaneity has order. They figure out ways to make things work. It's a hopeful thought.
Spontaneous order. Hopefulness. I am right there with you on that.

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