SriK covered it, though some of the others got close here or there:
http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 0#msg24700What that retard weaselboy is doing (looking for tiny inconsistencies between articles that were written months or years apart, and then screaming EUREKA! once in a blue moon when he finds one), is a deeply reactive process. It doesn't lead anywhere except to waste your time and make you appear even more stupid than you are -- it even
makes you stupid. If I, for example, were working in that way I would be screaming Eureka in every other one of Baudrillard's pages (and in every other of
Nietzsche's chapters), and getting nowhere. The point is TO UNDERSTAND the author, not to "prove" him wrong. And the main thing that that weaselboy moron has failed to understand is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to describe a real process in its entirety without contradicting yourself at some point, because real processes (i.e. ALL processes, because all processes are real), are circular -- they "turn in" on themselves (because the universe is finite, and they cannot expand forever), creating "apparent paradoxes" in the process, which are impossible TO DOCUMENT WITH WORDS without contradicting yourself. But you are only contradicting yourself IN THE WORDS, not in your brain, hence why the reader's task is to try to RECONSTRUCT the (non-contradictory) process IN HIS BRAIN WITH THE HELP OF THE WORDS. In the debacle above, to get back to the point, SriK has done it better than everyone else, with the help of the explanation that I gave him the other day about a piece of shit ultimately being art, and possessing artistic value, even by
my definition of art -- though only a negligibly small amount of value, therefore "being art" only in an extremely limited, ultimately
pedantic sense, i.e. NOT being art. Because when I say "art is the craft of illusion", this ultimately renders
every object in a existence an artwork -- even ones NOT created by "man" (an objection, by the way, which SriK failed to make). Because, after all, what is "man"? (A miserable pile of piles, etc.) If it is impossible to pin down the definition of man to a specific group of creatures (and trust me, go to any decent biology professor and they'll tell you it's impossible), the term "man" can therefore be applied to everything -- even to rocks! And if it can be applied even to rocks, then it can also be applied, for example, to the seeds from which trees grow, therefore making trees man-made, therefore making trees art!
But again, this is to be autistically stupid in the weaselboy sense. This is to misunderstand the author
on purpose, because you have some autistic grudge against him and would rather "prove" him wrong than fucking understand anything. As I explained to SriK in the other thread, if you go about it this way you can ultimately take every word in the dictionary and show how it can be used to stand in for every other word, thus rendering communication impossible, and any piece of text nonsensical (or, alternatively, make any substitutions you want and make any text say whatever you want it to say, even the opposite of what the author TELLS you that he meant to say). But this is, to say it once more, the REACTIVE way of reading, of "deconstructing" -- the ACTIVE way is to try to FUCKING UNDERSTAND WHAT THE AUTHOR IS TRYING TO TELL YOU, and if you are a noble man and a genius like me, EVEN EXPLAIN TO THE AUTHOR WHAT HE WANTED TO SAY BUT DIDN'T MANAGE TO QUITE GET ACROSS AS CLEARLY AS HE WOULD HAVE LIKED TO, in the manner described by Nietzsche here:
Nietzsche wrote:The opinions of one's opponents. -- To assess the natural quality of even the cleverest heads -- to see whether they are naturally subtle or feeble -- one should take note of how they interpret and reproduce the opinions of their opponents: for how it does this betrays the natural measure of every intellect. -- The perfect sage without knowing it elevates his opponent into the ideal and purifies his contradictory opinion of every blemish and adventitiousness: only when his opponent has by this means become a god with shining weapons does the sage fight against him.
icycalm wrote:That's what the perfect sage does. The perfect idiot, on the other hand, not only fails to understand what his opponent is saying, but twists and obfuscates and falsifies THE FUCK out of it -- and "only when his opponent has by this means become a pathetic worm with no weapons whatever does the idiot fight against him".
http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=13204#p13204Which is where weaselboy and his ilk come in. (Weaselboy, by the way, who a few pages back was trying to impress everyone with his knowledge of philosophy by calling Jean-Jacques Rousseau JOHN-JACQUES, lol. That'd be like me calling Baudrillard John Baudrillard lol -- proof that I hadn't read a word of him lol. Not that having read the moron Rousseau, "the moral tarantula" as Nietzsche called him, would have helped him, or Mill or whatever other retarded pseudo-philosopher that kid is pretending to have read. Still, it helps to see what kind of people you are dealing with when they fail to even get the goddamn names of their authorities right.)
Of course at this point someone could come and reproach me with the accusation that, in my Simulacrum essay, for example, I am doing the same thing to Juul as I am reproaching weaselboy here with. But that is, once more, to have failed to read the essay closely enough and to have misunderstood me. For every time I criticized Juul for some idiocy, I explored ALL POSSIBLE INTERPRETATIONS of his claims -- I took that little passage of his apart and put it back together again in every possible way -- I explored even avenues which
the author himself did not explore in an effort to get something intelligible out of it -- I gave him every possible avenue of escape. The fact that I got nowhere in all these efforts is simply due to the passage being A MENTAL ABORTION, which the author vomitted with not the slighetst concern of explaining anything, but simply in order to get a book published and establish his reputation. For THIS is the real meaning of Half-Real; the book has absolutely nothing to do with videogames, and the words in it were thrown in the most random and haphazard way simply to get the pages filled. At the end of
every attempt at critique of that book, THIS is the fact one will always come back with, the TRUE interpretation (which is to say the most insightful, the most powerful one) of what that book is trying to say: "PLEASE CONSIDER ME AN AUTHORITY ON VIDEOGAME THEORY" -- just like every one of weaselboy's posts in that retarded thread are crying out to heaven "PLEASE CONSIDER ICYCALM'S THEORIZING WORTHLESS".
And that, dear readers, is how a genius gets to the bottom of things. None of those people, neither Juul, nor anyone posting in the Ghetto thread (bar the Insomnia readers), actually have THE SLIGHTEST desire to understand how videogames work -- otherwise they would be discussing my theories for 30 pages, not random shit that has absolutely nothing to do with them (and the same goes for the rest of that worthless forum). Of what use is it if the subhumans say "WE ARE INTERESTED IN THEORY", "WE ARE INTERESTED IN PHILOSOPHY" -- their actions speak A HUNDRED TIMES louder than their words, and betray them to anyone with the eyes to see them.
