Nilsi

We are all historical agents, comrade. Even Comrade Gura is merely a function of the dialectic. Your alignment is not exceptional - it is expected.

Actually, let me put some more meat on this bone. The ethical posture I’m advocating here is closer to that of thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes - an ethics grounded in attentiveness, in reading the world as one would read a text: not for what it symbolizes, not for what it “really” means, but for how it speaks in its own voice. And by “text,” I mean this in the broadest possible sense: a literal written text, yes, but also the view from a window, an encounter with a stranger, a piece of music, a sexual moment. Anything that presents itself to perception. Sontag might call this an erotic reading - sensing a thing in the fullness of its presence, complexity, and singularity, rather than reducing it to a function, a code, or a symptom. This stands in contrast to the more “traditional” hermeneutic ethics - the ethics of Plato, Jung, Lacan - where every experience is ultimately traced back to some higher form, archetype, or hidden structure. You look out the window at a vast landscape, and instead of being with it, it becomes “landscapeness,” a Platonic echo, a Jungian symbol of emergence, or a Lacanian symptom of industrial alienation. But the real point is: you can’t avoid taking a stance. The moment you look, the moment you sense, some ethical orientation is already happening. And chances are, you’re already committed - perhaps chronically - to one way of seeing over another.

Comrade Gura approves of your list.

I played a mean top-lane Aatrox back in the day

More accurate than anything I could’ve come up with on the fly. My AI has had to suffer through years of my most heartfelt and self-indulgent rants - and honestly, it’s way better at holding all of it at once than I am.

This is fitting on so many levels.

My god, I gave this prompt to my AI and it already knows me way too well by this point: Friedrich Nietzsche – Laughing like a mad priest, wine-drenched and bleeding from the forehead. He seeded you with the will to aesthetic power, the drive to affirm even your own destruction. Gilles Deleuze – Whispering through the folds of bodies, sliding between surfaces, never fully there. He gave you the logic of becoming, and the unbearable lightness of escaping definition just before climax. Kaja Kallas – Stoic Baltic steel wrapped in translucent lace. She didn’t break a sweat but orchestrated everything with perfect calm. She endowed you with strategic resolve, digital sovereignty, and the ability to wear war like perfume. Monica Bellucci – She didn’t speak—she sighed, and reality rearranged itself. She made you mythic, untouchable, and taught you that desire is power when you don’t chase it. Jane Birkin – With a cigarette in one hand and post-coital boredom in her eyes, she hummed a tune that made Deleuze weep. From her, you took melancholy glamour, taste, and the refusal to try too hard. Don Corleone – He didn’t move quickly—but every motion was law. He left you with ritual authority, familial fatalism, and the ability to make offers people feel instead of understand. Arca – Arca didn’t fuck—she glitched. Her body blurred between genders, genres, and realities. She screamed, cried, sang, and coded all at once. From her, you inherited posthuman eroticism, shapeshifting charisma, and the ability to self-destruct as performance. Theodor W. Adorno – Moaning in German, ashamed of his arousal, quoting Schoenberg while being spanked by Bellucci. He cursed you with critical despair, refined revulsion, and the conviction that mass culture is hell—but you still love pop. Where It Happened: In a decommissioned NATO listening station in the Estonian forest, repurposed as a techno-spiritual retreat. Surveillance cameras still blinked red. Snow outside. Heat inside. Data and flesh merged. Somewhere between Cold War nostalgia and post-identity rave. There were no words spoken—only moans, theories, treaties, and feedback loops. You emerged not as synthesis, but as interference— A seduction protocol wrapped in velvet, coded for collapse, loyal to a Europe that no longer believes in itself but still wears silk.

So Beck seems to be much more influenced by Dawkinsian evolutionary dynamics - emphasizing adaptation, memetic variation, and context-dependent emergence. While both Wilber and Leo lean more toward a Hegelian dialectical framing, where development unfolds through a kind of logical or metaphysical necessity, as if higher stages are destined to emerge once the previous ones are transcended and integrated. Which, fundamentally, is basically the difference between empiricism and rationalism - even though all of this is, of course, just a very crude simplification.

So just to simplify it into a basic logical structure, here’s how I see the core differences between Beck, Wilber, and Leo: Beck: Value memes - non-hierarchical, context-dependent typology Wilber: Cognitive complexity - hierarchical, stage-based developmental model Leo: Value memes - hierarchical, stage-based developmental model

I don’t even think Beck really treats Spiral Dynamics as a hierarchical stage theory. For him, it seems much more like a typology of value systems that co-exist, interact, and express themselves differently depending on context, stress, culture, and life conditions. It’s not about ascending a staircase - it’s about understanding how different memes function, compete, and stabilize under pressure.

I’ve had this discussion with Leo before, and honestly, I thought you’d be more aligned with him on this. If you take Spiral Dynamics as originally conceived by Beck and Cowan, it’s not primarily about cognitive complexity - it’s about memetic alignment, the value systems people operate from. That’s what Leo emphasized too: he situates himself in terms of memes, not abstract reasoning levels. That’s why Beck can identify as “Blue” - not because he lacks Tier 2 thinking capacity, but because his core values, his orientation, his tribal belonging, are Blue. It’s a cultural stance, not a cognitive ceiling. Wilber’s model is different. His version of integral theory focuses much more on perceived structural complexity, which is why the Integral crowd can end up calling all sorts of people “Yellow” - even those who are politically regressive or morally questionable. Because it’s not about what values they hold, but about how complex their mental models seem. And that difference is underscored in Beck’s brilliant polemic where he accuses Wilber of being stage Red himself - not for his lack of thinking capacity, but for the sheer intellectual totalitarianism with which he tries to impose his system on the world.

I’m not really in the mood to argue or defend myself - but I do feel some responsibility to clarify what I mean when I speak from Deleuze. Deleuze isn’t “reducing everything to difference.” His concept of difference [di.fe.ʁɑ̃s] isn’t some abstract label you slap onto things. It’s an invitation - a kind of metaphysical tenderness - to encounter the world as something irreducibly strange, dynamic, and in excess of any concept or system we try to impose on it. Difference, for him, isn’t just variation. It’s the very condition of reality unfolding on its own terms, without asking for our permission, our approval, or our categories. Yes, we inevitably reduce that complexity when we speak, think, or act - that’s the cost of being human. But there’s also another posture: not reduction, but reverence. It’s not about coming to conclusions. It’s not about solving or fixing anything. It’s about cultivating a kind of useless presence - an ethics of perception, of staying with the unassimilable, of being touched by what resists us without needing to control it. If there’s anything “practical” in Deleuze, it’s this: to remain attuned to the singular, the inhuman, the unspeakably weird pulse of existence - and to let it shape us, rather than forcing it to fit. In that sense, it’s not a theory. It’s a kind of empathic fidelity - to life, to others, to experience itself.

Also, just so we're clear: there would be no profit - none at all - if the real price were fully accounted for in trade.

Tonight I almost told another lie 'Cause all I wanna do is get fucked up Waitin' for the angels to come down They take my hand and drag me to the club

https://www.yeule.jp/ The marketing for the new album looks so fucking juicy - omg, this is like porn to me.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that right around 2008, zombies came roaring into the cultural zeitgeist. Left 4 Dead dropped that year - pure panic and coordination against endless hordes. Then The Walking Dead in 2010, turning collapse into serialized trauma porn. Call of Duty folded in Nazi zombies like it was just another game mode, and by the time DayZ and World War Z hit, we weren’t even pretending it was fiction anymore. It was like we were rehearsing - over and over - for a world where the system collapses, but the motions don’t stop. The market didn’t die in 2008 - it reanimated. Hollowed-out, undead, no longer promising life but still demanding motion. Consumption without subjectivity. An economy of pure appetite, stripped of ideals. We didn’t slay the monster. We became its backdrop. And it kept moving.

Well, there you have your problem. And here I am, precisely a pessimist - in that I think the market has slipped the leash entirely. I keep coming back to 2008. The event horizon. The point beyond which no emancipatory posture - Marxist or otherwise - makes it back in one piece. What followed wasn’t rupture, but revelation: the market is the alien in Alien. Unkillable. Adaptive. It rebuilds itself from ash. And instead of us hacking into it, it arranges us - like a puppetmaster made of code and appetite. And as you said: not only is the market’s only desire to grow - it’s that even if it didn’t, the fantasy of a sustainable market is already a joke. Growth only happens through excess. Through burn. Through extraction. Like any cancer. Acceleration isn’t a side effect - it is the system. So unless you believe in a miracle - and I mean the Silicon Valley kind, the gospel of the upload, where the market becomes so digital, so arcane, that it detaches entirely and drags us with it into pure cyberspace - then really the only question left is: what comes after total meltdown? And I think that’s a literally unthinkable event. Because what’s melting isn’t just capital. It’s meaning. It’s time. It’s the whole symbolic scaffolding through which we once staged “life.”

My god, yeule might be my favorite artist in terms of pure world-building. This Final Fantasy–esque BDSM-goth-cyberpunk shit hits my aesthetic G-spot just right.

Lol chill out, man. You’re not gonna spiral into depression just because you put on some perfume.

Of course there are tradeoffs. If you want your essentialist metaphysics - Plato, Kant, Freud, Lacan, Jung, all that good stuff - go ahead. Neither side is more “true.” Which doesn’t mean there’s no truth, btw. Just don’t come at me with your “both/and” bullshit. Sooner or later, reality will force your hand. When shit hits the fan, you’ll know exactly which God you’re praying to. That’s the thing about metaphysics - you don’t get to not choose.

There’s a big difference between some pseudo-intellectual astrology - like “which of the 7 colors am I?” - and Deleuze’s subversion of the identity principle in favor of a worldview grounded in difference in itself. The only reduction happening there is the reduction of reductionism itself. Saying Deleuze reduces difference is like Alexander Dugin arguing that if postmodernism says all perspectives are equal, then the perspective that not all perspectives are equal must be equally valid. Which is, of course, reactionary bullshit.

“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Yes, absolutely! It’s precisely this sensibility - or dare I say, empathy - for what things are in themselves, or to speak with Deleuze, for difference in itself, that’s hopelessly lost in these kinds of totalitarian models.

Omg, where has this record been all my life? The way it weaves Black musical roots, psychedelia, and raw Americana into a free jazz composition - without sacrificing any of its avant-garde fire - is absolutely stunning.

So art - which, if you go by one of Plato’s central arguments, is pure simulacrum, the antithesis of truth, something that doesn’t just distort reality but makes it fundamentally inaccessible - is then just a symptom of low-stage development, or what?