I'm up for demeaning those trust fund crusties.

What are there 5 of them in the whole country? Resentful pauper much?


Anyway, the social context that creates trust fund crusties is somewhat interesting.  Seems related to the Russian literary concept of the Superfluous Man:

The Russian critics such as Vissarion Belinsky viewed the superfluous man as a by-product of Nicholas I's reactionary reign when the best educated men would not enter the discredited government service and, lacking other options for self-realization, doomed themselves to live out their life in passivity. Scholar David Patterson describes the superfluous man as "not just...another literary type but...a paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, a presence in life" before concluding that "the superfluous man is a homeless man".

What goals does America popularize besides "make money"? The utility of money has diminishing returns (below a certain threshold that can be reached by private individuals). What happens when you've effectively reached the limit of whats worth earning?

The concept of a rich man going incognito and interacting with the lowest tiers of society is a very common literary trope.

I like hyper-competitive team based multi-player games. The type where if you make one bad play, you get people flaming you for 30min and telling you to uninstall and go kill yourself.

From the front page:

Did you know that...

…words like Nazi, anti-semite and conspiracy theory were all created by Jews as a means of thought control?
…National Socialist Germany conducted the first successful nuclear weapons test?
…Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom wrote an exposé on Jewish human organ harvesting?

Mind control and organ thievery! Sound about right for a political wiki.

Adobe's flash plugin for Linux was always hilariously bad.


By the way, to view youtube in HTML5:

http://www.youtube.com/html5



Adobe Reader X is something else.

And as The Book Of Revelations predicted.
Babel. Nobody able to communicate with anybody else.
'no wot I mean?'

A lot of people seem to have problems communicating with conservatives, who tend to make excessive use of metaphor.

Liberals tend not to understand the logic of conservatism; they don't understand what form of morality makes conservative positions moral or what conservative family values have to do with the rest of conservative politics. The reason at bottom is that liberals do not understand the form of metaphorical thought that unifies and makes sense of the full range of conservative values.

http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html


In the case of this wendigo discussion: It's just layer upon layer of metaphor built up. The original wendigo legend itself can be viewed as a metaphor, and then someone lifted it into a spiritual/psychic context, and then again into a political/philosophical one. None of these domain shifts are structure preserving, so it's not hard to imagine people drawing very open ended, confused or wrong conclusions. 

For example in geometry: Projective space is a more general/abstract space than Euclidean space (euclidean space is a subset of it) but things like angles have no meaning in Projective space because of its structure/context. If it were a political metaphor/abstraction/generalization/whatever there would be nothing stopping someone from talking about angles in projective space to prove whatever they fancy.

Math is confusing enough even with its very precise terminology and strictly imposed structure. It's really no wonder, people have no clue what the fuck the other person is talking about, when using natural language, and improvising chains of abstractions with no obligation, or even chance, to verify their consistency.

It’s irrelevant in the sense that it's a minor event with little to no impact.

At any rate, the point of such a 'class' isn’t really to teach anything but to further push the boundaries of accepted social norms

It's both. Are we surprised that schools indoctrinate? The proles need to be told what to think, what to listen to, and how to dress.

as though any form of change amounts to ‘progress’.

Right, but cheap sentimentality for the past is pretty much the conservative's analogue to this.

In a casual discussion someone calls modernity dysfunctional. You step in to defend it with some kind of “get with the program” type statement while at the same time appearing unconcerned.
...
I just can’t understand this viewpoint as it seem to recognise the modern world as a shithole but then resorts to accepting it as the only solution.

I'm defending nothing. Your assumption makes no sense, yet you refuse to question its reasoning. That's really one of the underlying points.

Is it not possible that a totally functional person might find fault in the world?

Society is flawed, people are flawed and the world is flawed. A healthy person acknowledges this and doesn't constantly dwell on it. Most activists (feminists in particular) tend to just be butthurt about one thing or another and use their cause to inflate themselves or transfer blame for their own shortcomings. Their thinking is pretty much dominated by confirmation bias and thus they see symptoms of their cause in everything around them.

Here we have a series of disciplines which were developed as a meditative means of bringing mind and body together

Yea that's a much more interesting approach to it.

I think in some cases though (shaolin?) it was originally just a means for monks to get some exercise.

HA HA HA OPINIONS

Doesn't seem contradictory to me based on the finer context.

Metal is like a mythology, and so it doesn't require a literal interpretation as the process is largely subconscious. Taken for what it is, you don't even consider whether it's serious or not because the music speaks for itself.

It speaks directly to the savage ape man lurking within. Metal's primitiveness becomes its defining virtue because the ape can't be escaped no matter how hard one tries and acknowledging this puts you one step closer to self-actualization.

Anyway back to the main topic:

The primate has no real need for poetic lyrics. Has anyone here really disqualified a metal album based on its lyrics? Just fucking growl, moan, scream and throw feces at the crowd.

I think with metal the vocals, production and lyrics act only as amplifiers and are not core components. Compare Mayhem's "Live in Leipzig" vs the studio album: its the same despite any aesthetic differences.

Although i guess one could counter argue that those Burzum re-released tracks are fucking terrible.

So in this way perhaps even an obvious joke like Impaled Nazarene can hit on something 'serious'. The dream can influence reality without directly translating into existence.

Probably this one of the major reasons why most bands create only a handful of vital albums and then go on to produce garbage for the rest of their career.