I can't get over how fucking good that show is. Perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes - for every single episode in the season. I think I've watched every episode at least 3 times now and I pick up on new things with each rewatch. Technically accurate hacking plots, a style/art direction I would describe as Fight Club meets Stanley Kubrick, a basket case of a main character committed to radical anti-capitalist ideology... It's like this show was written for me. And it's the latest addition to a growing list of excellent TV shows with recovering opiate addict protagonists. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention to this detail before, but between this, Elementary, Fear the Walking Dead and You're The Worst, there seem to be quite a few recovered/recovering junkies on TV these days.
I appreciated the detail in the computer stuff, but they could've done as much research into the drug stuff (pharmacologically/chemically and a culturally/economically) for some verisimilitude, no? I rather liked most of the show, but found some of it needlessly melodramatic and edgy, and the characters-that-are-a-product-of-the-protagonist's-head will always feel derivative of
Fight Club in these days for better or for worse. I haven't watched the finale because of that ridiculous self-censorship in case, God forbid, they should
trigger someone, but you remind me that I'll have to hit that up on Popcorn Time ... so yeah, I'm watching it. I wonder about the politics, though, since like all mass media it's emanating from the very dark heart of the Establishment, but it's on at least the surface you just as say radically anti-capitalist, like a few other things, Rage Against the Machine being on a big contract with Epic Records a division of oh so corporate Sony,comes to mind, and so on, and so on ...
Depends on your definition of 'readable' I suppose, heh. Zizek's writing style is a very love-it-or-hate-it kind of thing. He rambles a lot, he goes on insane tangents, he forgets his previous point to wax poetic about some historical anecdote or old Yugoslavian dirty joke, and he mixes a very pop philosophy approach (the aforementioned tangents and random dirty jokes, frequent analogies to bad movies, analysis of seemingly trivial pop culture phenomena) with some very dense and often counter-intuitive philosophy (his main influences are Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Lacan - an eclectic group to say the least). I find him insightful and entertaining to read, but many people very reasonably find him insufferable. I don't know if I would have appreciated him nearly as much if I hadn't learned him in the context of college policy debate, being coached by a Ph.D. student in Lacanian psychoanalysis... But my first full Zizek books were The Sublime Object of Ideology (his first full length book in English, a good intro to his reading of Lacan with a healthy splash of Hegel and Kant) and Revolution at the Gates (a short book, largely consisting of Lenin excerpts, but the Zizek-written chunks in between are probably the clearest explanation of how his Lacanian psychobabble relates to his Marxist-Leninist politics), decent starting places if you wanna give him a shot.
I've read my Žižek and appreciated him, I always appreciated reading some stuff that diverges from my own perspective ... but yet it doesn't always diverge as much as I might assume. I gather that you and I have rather diametrically opposed political views, but I think the horseshoe-theory has some application here. I'm what would be best described as a genuine reactionary, on the somewhat radical anti-liberal(*in the classical sense), anti-bourgeois Right, with an emphasis on traditional social and ethnic values, c.f. Chesterton, distributism, but as the man himself said:
GKC said:
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
... but also Dávila, Leo XIII PP, and even to an extent Evola, and yes, I am drawn to more than a few elements from the newly emerging esoteric Internet fascist types, though I recognize their utter naïveté and impracticability, and for all that yet I can find a great deal to agree with in the leftist critique of bourgeois societal structures, and being that psychiatry is my day job, find the Lacanian (and to a lesser extent, Deluzian) critique of our deeply fucked up modern world as it manifests itself in our individual psyches at least minimally compelling, although I rather inherently disagree with their ultimate goals or conclusion. I suspect you and I would have a rather interesting and spirited political discussion should we ever have the chance.
Self-deprecating jokes aside, I actually love Facebook. I'm absolutely terrible at keeping in touch w/ friends and family, and FB allows me to feel at least a little bit connected with people I haven't actually seen or spoken to in years. Plus, being the socially anxious ball of neuroses that I am, it's easier to maintain social appearances and project a sanitized version of my day-to-day life in digital form. All things considered, graduating from a good law school at 30 is a better outcome than I would have predicted for myself a decade ago. The whole 'a growing majority of my close long term friends are married or engaged and I haven't been in a serious relationship for years' thing is still a bit unsettling, though.
I was on facebook during my early college years, when you needed a dot-edu address to join and be a part of an approved educational institution and all that, but left it soon thereafter for operation security reasons, since then it has I guess evolved into something totally different, worldwide, and yeah, fuck that. Up with Google in the candidates to be the aforementioned Robot's "E-corp," despite the felicities of connecting with old friends and all that. I'm shit at that too, reconnecting with friends, even family, but again, half of that is OPSEC, ingrained habits from years in the game, even though I've been years out of the game, even statute of limitations type years, which is why I'm telling a lot more amusing stories on this forum lately, and yet it seems like there's an enormous psychological barrier to reach out to anyone, given how isolated I was in the name of my own safety back when things were what they were, so part of me is also like, I was so isolated from all these people over so many years, so who should give a fuck about me now, even family. So in my present life it's probably clinically paranoid, given that I'm no longer involved with any of that stuff, each node in the social network seems to provide additional information to the Man, and thus additional threat, if you dig. Even though I'm thoroughly retired and for some years from anything which should
per se require such, I find it difficult to deviate from the precepts which I taught myself so many years ago. I still rock the prepaid phone, etc. It's fully ingrained in me. Anything on the Internet that requires me to dox myself just troubles me to my soul. I don't even like signing up for those supermarket discount cards, because, you know, why should I tell those bastards and probably the NSA what I'm buying every week? But maybe that's just my PI. What can you do?
Anyway, yeah, God bless. Hope you and I get to have the opportunity to have some pleasant, mutually enriching political discussions sometime in the future.
Hope everyone else is well. I'm busy with work and when off, drinking myself into a stupor. As I said in my introductory post, corpulent, alcoholic, menlacholic, medicated. But honestly, the psych meds are working. Starting to be less melancholic and able to leave the house without panic attacks. If anyone cares I'll be happy to list 'em and give advice seeing as I'm not only a recipient but an active participant in this model of care towards others. I'd encourage anybody in need not to be ashamed and to step up and seek out some psychiatric care. And see, this point took me years to accept, but our whole scene is about better living through chemistry, right? We'll seek after the latest analogue and comment endlessly about it's virtues and unique characteristics, but some of us will spurn what we can have at the doctor's office. I think that's a fallacy. The modern world is so deeply fucked up that we need to seek solace in psychopharmacology and we ought to seek it out wherever we can have it, probably with a preference to the legal and the less dangerous and physically and psychologically impairing, so yeah. All of us, I think, in this community share a certain disaffection with the psychological and sociopolitical
status quo, it's what drives us to alter our consciousness, but we ought to embrace all the options, yeah? I myself know that psychologically I am far from ready for a psychedelic experience in my current state, so instead it's about 6 prescriptions and a lot of hard liquor, but whatever it takes to wake up and face this fucked up world that we live in, right?
God bless you all and I hope this finds you well. I can't even express how much this community has meant to me over the years, and now it's quite a different community, but I feel blessed to reconnect with it and with all of you.
With warm regards,
SKL