devingoure.bsky.social
PhD in political theory, posts on philosophy, Nietzsche, mental health, politics, and games of all sorts. “The stillest words are those that bring the storm.”
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Yeah I can see some of that so far. I’m only 5 episodes into SNW and loved the last two, but it was definitely them paying homage to more familiar Trek territory.
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I think classic Trek is at its best when the stakes are less existential and more philosophical/emotional. It was very clear that Discovery didn’t want to attempt anything like “The Inner Light” or “Visitor” or “Living Witness” (just a few obvious faves for me)
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Yeah I think that’s a fair point about the stakes. That’s always something the one-off format of older Trek struggles with. But the flipside for me was that I got sick of jumping from one universe-threatening event to another.
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I mean you can come up with anything you want for 1000 years of Star Fleet history and the best you can do is “uhh all the warp drives everywhere blew up simultaneously and no one knows why”?
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I felt the exact opposite tbh (just recently finished the series). Season 1 was actually my favorite. I really did not like the plots of seasons 3 or 4.
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Right the point isn’t that in the past conservatives were actually committed to these ideals and now are not. What’s interesting to me is how certain ideological narratives continue to live on in a kind of undeath where no one can believe them anymore, but no real alternatives are on offer.
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Many of them still can’t bring themselves to face up to the fact that Trump’s movement is antithetical to freedom and based on the worship of power, violence, and cruelty. It’s not the fact that Bezos is appeasing the dictator but the language he chooses to do so that’s interesting to me here.
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Ah ok I misunderstood, my apologies.
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What was once seen as *the* moral absolute, the “never again” imperative that was to anchor the post-war international order that emerged in Europe, has once again passed into the historical amnesia of “why not?” 4/4
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That today anyone can even gesture towards a “moral case for mass relocation” is disturbing evidence that my grandfather’s friend was right to worry about that loss of collective memory. 3/4
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What the far right today dismisses as “human rights ideology” was in fact born out of the power of collective memory and the need to remember world-shattering experiences that could never be repeated, even though preserving their memory meant reliving trauma. 2/4
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DK becomes heavily about the moral drama and handles it effectively, obviously with an unbelievable performance from Ledger, but it doesn’t have the same aesthetic, stylistic coherence of BB.
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My serious reason for preferring BB to DK: in BB Nolan created a much darker, more aesthetically interesting version of Gotham that feels like a careful and authentic movie realization of the comics. In DK we leave the more intriguing setting of creepy Gotham for a replica of NYC.
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Shots FIRED lol
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Also I do really like The Dark Knight but surely “best comic book movie ever” isn’t a super high bar?
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Haven’t seen Oppenheimer, Interstellar fell flat for me.
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The Dark Knight is a good movie, The Dark Knight Rises not so much imo
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Also Batman Begins is the best of the 3, fight me lol
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I have to confess that I tried to get through Tenet twice and found it to be unwatchable.
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Admittedly I’m mostly not a Nolan fan (I like Memento and The Prestige though), but “bad” is probably too uncharitable. Maybe just mediocre? It’s clearly the worst of the three Batman movies imo.
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Oh definitely, I agree. There’s also the hard MAGA core that’s exulting in the destruction right now. It’s just that they’d never have been enough to re-elect him without the other group of amnesiacs lol
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Collective memory is dead.
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“All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation.”
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From “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, p. 242
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“Our society is too soft on criminals” says the world’s biggest criminal while working for a 34-time convicted felon
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Just emailed you the zoom and Discord links!
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The optimist in me hopes that they’re overplaying their hand. They’ve mistaken a narrow victory in the election for a total victory in the culture war.
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*on here
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Ah OK sorry, lol, I think I’m just being sensitive since I’m not used to posting in here yet
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Also I guess I don’t understand the etiquette here? Am I not supposed to post something on this site unless I’ve confirmed that it’s novel?
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Yeah I don’t think it’s new, pretty much standard fare under Elon, but they seem to be more emboldened and rabid now that Trump is in office again
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But I’ll try to refresh my memory on some of his comments on Stoicism and give you a more developed answer.
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Yeah, here I think Nietzsche more or less shares Gibbon’s assessment that Christianity weakened the Roman Empire and precipitates its fall. I think his view would be that Stoicism doesn’t quite produce the pervasive nihilism that enervates culture in the way he thinks Christianity does.
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Nietzsche wants to affirm that enduring suffering is important for then transfiguring it into joy and affirmation. So a big part of critique of Stoicism is that it aims to anesthetize pain rather than to convert it into creative energies. This goes for his broader view of asceticism as well.