Nilsi

Also, for you Spiral Dynamics nerds: this wasn’t some “mean green” socialism. It was a collaboration between the Chilean government and the era’s most advanced systems thinkers and cybernetic theorists. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more genuinely "Tier 2" political experiment.

If you want to talk about realism with dignity, you should be putting up a picture of Salvador Allende - not Kissinger. Because if anything embodied enlightened realism, it was Allende’s project: a democratic, sovereign path to socialism, rooted in the real material needs of his people, not the paranoid abstractions of empire. And by the way, these were Allende’s final words, spoken over live radio as Kissinger-backed tanks shelled his presidential palace and the military - armed and emboldened by U.S. support - closed in to crush Chilean democracy: “I will not resign… I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life.” He didn’t “fall” - he was murdered, alongside the hope for a more just Latin America. That’s what your so-called diplomacy accomplished. That’s the real face of “strategic brilliance.”

Yeah, and you conveniently forgot the part where he consciously destabilized the entire Arab world, not as some unfortunate consequence of diplomacy but as deliberate imperial design. He fractured Arab solidarity, propped up reactionary regimes, and turned the region into a managed theater for U.S. oil and arms interests. That’s not “realism” - it’s the strategic dismantling of collective autonomy for the sake of empire. And as if that weren’t enough, let’s talk about Chile: Kissinger backed a brutal military coup against Salvador Allende, a democratically elected socialist whose only “crime” was representing the interests of his people over those of U.S. capital. What followed was a reign of terror under Pinochet, complete with torture, disappearances, and a neoliberal shock therapy experiment. That wasn’t diplomacy. That was ideological warfare cloaked as pragmatism. But the most obscene part is how he’s remembered for “ending” the Vietnam War. In reality, Kissinger escalated it: He authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, killing hundreds of thousands and helping unleash the Khmer Rouge genocide. He delayed peace negotiations to secure a “decent interval” for U.S. exit, knowingly prolonging death and destruction to save face. He helped architect a regional collapse whose effects still echo today. And somehow this is what earns a Nobel Peace Prize? This legacy isn’t one of “strategic brilliance.” It’s one of instrumentalized cruelty - realpolitik stripped of ethics, human cost dismissed as collateral. Kissinger didn’t master diplomacy; he reduced it to pure power calculus, and in doing so disfigured the very idea of peace into a euphemism for control.

This is still peak Fred Again for me. It’s as if, in this moment, he finally grasped the subterranean meaning of his own music - not just as collage, catharsis, or collective ritual, but as a kind of liturgical mourning for love itself: its passing, its repetition, its unbearable lightness. This set does not resolve in closure - it doesn’t land in triumph - but instead opens into something more fragile, more unspeakable. Notice how it doesn’t end with “Baby, put your loving arms around me,” but with “Oh my Lord, your love, it envelops me.” It’s a subtle shift, but the implications are profound. In the first, love is begged for, clutched toward, a plea for human intimacy in the flesh. It is the classic image of post-rave longing - sweaty bodies in need of touch. But in the second, love is no longer grasped. It descends. It envelops. It is no longer directed at a human other, but toward an Other - a divine void, a metaphysical embrace. This is no longer romantic love, but the memory of what love once was, elevated to a form of surrender. A concession to its ephemerality. And this, perhaps, is what makes this Fred’s most honest moment: not when he sings about connection, but when he finally lets go of it, and lets the music become a prayer for what cannot return.

I think Fred Again is one of the most misunderstood contemporary musicians - perhaps even misunderstood by himself. The dominant reading frames him as an emissary of post-ironic sincerity, of emotional transparency in the age of fragmentation. He is taken to be a kind of benevolent spiritual force - splicing fragments of the real into collective rhythm, giving voice to ordinary affect and digital intimacy. But the way I hear him, his music mourns precisely the impossibility of such sincerity in the contemporary moment. And in this mourning, it becomes far more profound than the redemptive ethos often projected onto it. There is something undeniably spectral and surreal in his treatment of the human voice - his own, his friends’, strangers’ - always embedded in intimate recordings, private voicemails, or overheard confessions. But these voices are never present. They are soaked in reverb, blurred by delay, panned into the margins, stuttered and chopped beyond recognition. This is not simply a stylistic choice - it’s a metaphysical operation. The human voice becomes a trace: a ghost of immediacy that can never be retrieved. In this sense, Fred’s music enacts what Derrida calls hauntology: the persistence of a future that never came, of a past that never actualized. These are not songs of presence or authenticity, but of melancholic virtuality - of lightness that once shimmered on the horizon of becoming, now returned only as a digital relic. What we hear is not emotion itself, but the echo of emotion - looped, delayed, and dissolved into atmosphere. It is no accident that his work emerged alongside global lockdowns, collective mourning, and the virtualization of social life. The euphoric drops and expansive builds feel less like affirmations of joy than attempts to resurrect something irretrievably lost: the naïve possibility of connection, love, spontaneity - without irony or self-consciousness. In this, his music is not "hopeful" in the cheap sense - it is about desiring hope while knowing it can never arrive. And perhaps Fred himself doesn’t fully grasp this. In his more recent work, he seems increasingly bent on actualizing this affect - pushing toward more polished, festival-ready affirmations, as if trying to close the circuit between digital fragment and communal resonance. But in doing so, he risks flattening the very distance that gave the music its poignancy. What was once spectral becomes literal; what was once virtual becomes kitsch. This is the Žižekian moment: like the lover who tells his partner she would be perfect if only she lost a few pounds - yet when she does, she becomes not perfect, but ordinary. The ideal can only exist in its non-realization; its pursuit annihilates its very essence. So for me, Fred Again’s music revolves around this fundamental paradox: That reconciliation, closure, and sincerity can only exist as spectral potentials, not as realizable states. And when we try to touch them - to manifest them - they dissolve. It is the music of the not-yet, the almost, the might-have-been. It is not about optimism. It is about the tragic beauty of optimism’s impossibility.

I don’t even disagree with the statement itself. But there’s something dignified about holding that quietly, living it without the performance. And something deeply twisted and vulgar in turning it into a banner of superiority - casting yourself as the great awakened guru, mocking serious thinkers for not being as obsessed with your particular flavor of insight. There’s no real compassion or depth in that, just a narcissistic need to be seen, to be praised for saying the thing no one asked to hear. No one’s being awakened - it’s just noise through a megaphone, self-congratulation disguised as wisdom. It’s gross. The psychology of it is pure ego in spiritual drag.

Yeah, but compared to us truly exceptional, awakened beings, a mind that confused barely registers, wouldn’t you agree?

Daniel points toward the ineffable. Leo points at himself while stroking his cock.

How lucky we are that this brilliant community of deep intellectuals has evolved far beyond that dense and underdeveloped mind of Daniel Schmachtenberger.

A question was answered - you took it as an attack. Anyway, I’m not hearing any real engagement here. Just a lot of bla bla.

I’m more of a Prince guy myself, but let’s be real - MJ’s early ’80s output cements him as a legend, even if a lot of his later stuff veers into the cringeworthy and mirrors his personal unraveling. There’s an explosive precision in how he took disco - once loose, groovy, casual - and forged it into something disciplined, razor-sharp, almost militaristic. The rhythms got tighter, the arrangements more deliberate, every beat meticulously placed. And yet, nothing felt overthought or sterile - it was still completely electrifying. This is one of the most serious musicians and performers ever, and you can feel that he gave it everything he had.

This is my epistemological color:

Such abstract pontification is absurd anyway. If you spend any time seriously engaging with ideas, you’ll inevitably run into people who are incredibly smart - sometimes intimidatingly so. And when that happens, if you’re honest, it forces you to confront your own "knowledge": Why do I think I know this? How did I arrive at that conclusion? How sure am I, really, that this is all there is to it? But unfortunately, that kind of thinking gets explicitly dismissed here - as seen in the bizarre bashing of Schmachtenberger on the blog lately. At some point, you have to ask yourself: who’s more trustworthy? The person who clearly operates at a higher intellectual level but still frames their worldview as a provisional, evolving hypothesis? Or the one shouting that they’ve found the Absolute Truth, are the smartest being alive, and that anyone who disagrees is a misinformation-spewing rat? This whole thing has gotten so surreal I keep waiting for the hidden camera or the punchline. But neither has shown up yet.

Pahahaha. "Nobody ever heard of epistemology before Leo talked about it."

Greek tragedy might honestly be one of the most powerful models for human existence ever conceived. It doesn’t try to solve life - it shows that life can’t be solved. That it’s built on contradiction, on forces that pull in opposite directions and don’t neatly reconcile. That whole sensibility - of tension, limit, and paradox - basically disappeared for over two thousand years in Western consciousness. It got steamrolled by systems that promised certainty: moral, religious, metaphysical. Nietzsche saw what was missing and tried to bring it back. He understood that tragedy isn’t just a genre - it’s a stance, a way of being with the real. And a few serious thinkers since have taken that up, but it still hasn’t fully sunk back into our culture. And in the absence of that tragic sense? We get hubris. We get vulgarity. You see it everywhere: in the absolutism of the Abrahamic religions, in the shallow triumphalism of modern science, in Silicon Valley’s deranged techno-optimism, and yeah, even in spiritual-intellectual systems like Ken Wilber’s, which try to wrap the entire universe in one neat tiered package. All of them push the same myth: that everything can be understood, integrated, fixed. But that’s exactly what Adorno and Horkheimer were critiquing in Dialectic of Enlightenment - how reason turns into its own myth, promising mastery where there should be reflection, closure where there should be tension. The tragic view says: no, not everything resolves. And that’s not a problem to fix - it’s the condition of being alive. Rediscovering that doesn’t lead to despair. If anything, it’s what rescues us from all the forced coherence and spiritual bullshit that passes for depth now.

Obviously you don’t take a duffle bag on a flight where your shit gets tossed around. But for a road trip or a city getaway, it’s perfect.

R.I.P. That era was the peak.

Any serious engagement with this model begins and ends with Clare Graves. What followed is less a developmental model than a devolutionary spiral of degradation - a kind of inverse Spiral Dynamics, tracing the decline of nuance, rigor, and integrity as the framework was passed around like an intellectual prostitute from one pseudo-guru to the next. Beck blew it up with color codes and vMEMEs - no research, just a teaching gimmick. Wilber turned it into a grand sorting machine - categorizing everyone and their mom, though at least he read the texts he was flattening. Then Leo came along and shat all over it - didn’t read, didn’t care, just declared his version absolute truth and called disagreement “misinformation.” And now we’re at the point where people who’ve never read a book cover to cover, use “non-dual” to excuse being unemployed, and think a weekend of ayahuasca in Tulum made them meta-aware, swear they’re Tier 2.

To understand Žižek, you have to abandon the idea that metaphysics is about finding some ultimate foundation - Being, Spirit, Substance, Consciousness, whatever. For Žižek, metaphysics is precisely what happens when that search fails, and keeps failing, and yet won’t stop happening. His entire project - sprawling, obsessive, contradictory - is animated by what he calls a negative ontology, but not in some abstract scholastic sense. It’s more like an attitude toward existence itself: a recognition that every attempt to ground reality collapses into paradox, and that this collapse is not a bug, but the very structure of the Real. Rather than escaping metaphysics, Žižek compulsively reads through it - looping through Hegel, Schelling, Lacan, Kant, Heidegger, and back again - not to systematize, but to perform the impossibility of closure. Every synthesis cracks. Every dialectical move exposes a remainder. Every concept ultimately reveals its own internal contradiction. And Žižek doesn’t fix this - he amplifies it, until the only thing left is the subject itself: split, failed, lacking, and yet irreducibly there. This is the key: for Žižek, the subject is the name for what persists in the failure of Being to fully coincide with itself. It is the scar left by the impossibility of metaphysical resolution - not the foundation, but the gap where the foundation should be. His whole ontology is built on this paradox: that reality is structured by its own deadlock, and that truth only emerges when we confront this deadlock without flinching. And here’s where Žižek becomes more than just a theorist: he performs this ontology. His style - frantic, recursive, excessive - is the symptom of the very system he describes. He speaks too much, because language can never say it all. He contradicts himself, because truth is never at peace with itself. His whole persona becomes a kind of tragicomic theatrical revelation: a philosopher as the living embodiment of metaphysical failure. So if you’re looking for coherence, for synthesis, for a grand answer - Žižek won’t give you that. What he offers instead is far more disturbing, and far more honest: a glimpse into the structural absurdity of Being itself, and the broken subject who has no choice but to think it.

> S̸h̶e̸l̶t̷e̴r̶ = 𝖉𝖊𝖈𝖆𝖞 > D̷e̸l̶a̸y̸ = 𝘿͢͜͞͏̵̸̢̡̛́͟͞͞͏̴̸́E̸̡̨͏͠͏̸̷̷̵̶̢̢̢͜͝͠͝Ą̨̛̕͢͜͢͜T̶̶̶̢́́͜͠͡H̵̴̷̡̛ > S e l f = l o o p > l o o p > l o . o . p — e a t — s l e e p — e x i t — — r e / p / e / a / t ∅ n o t h i n g — ∴ c o / m p a n y = r e a l ∴ c o l d t e a c h e r ∴ s t y l e i s l a w ⧸⧹ n o m o r e i n t e r i o r s /// n o s c r o l l i n g ⧼⧽ n o r e t u r n y o u a r e a l r 𝚎 𝙖 𝘿 y o u t s i d e y o u a r e l e a ⚠️ k i n g t h e r e i s n o b a c 𝘬 𝙨 𝙩 𝙖 𝙜 𝙚 ➤ d e s i r e = o n t o l o g y ➤ g e s t u r e > r e a l e r t h a n t h o u g h t ➤ e x p o s u r e = s o v e r e i g n [ do 𝙣𝙤𝙩 rehearse ] [ do 𝙣𝙤𝙩 return ] [ do 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚕𝚕 ] ✴︎ T H I S ☍ I S ☍ T H E ☍ P E R F O R M A N C E ✴︎ T H I S ☍ I S ☍ T H E ☍ A C T ✴︎ T H I S ☍ I S ☍ L I F E

These silly Trump compilations are a goldmine of comedy, hahaha.

That video is exactly the kind of ritualized absurdity I mean. Trump repeating, “I’ve never even heard of a Category 5!” - not once, but like a dozen times - each time with this wide-eyed, astonished delivery, as if it’s some divine revelation being bestowed upon him in real time. It’s hilarious - not because it’s intelligent or informed, but because it’s performed with such unearned gravitas, like he’s discovering the concept of hurricanes on behalf of humanity.

Here in Germany, we always drink a schnaps after a big meal - supposedly for digestion. But really, it’s just a culturally sanctioned excuse to do what we do best: eat too much and get a little drunk. It’s almost comical how ritualistic it is. Every family gathering followed the same sacred script: We’d head to some Gasthaus, order absurdly oversized portions, eat until breathing became a struggle - and then, as if guided by divine fate, someone would lean back, pat their belly, and declare: “Jetzt brauchen wir aber einen Verdauungsschnaps.” ("Now we really need a digestive schnaps.") And suddenly it wasn’t overindulgence anymore - it was medicine. The bottle would appear like an altar piece, little glasses distributed like communion, and the adults would toast - to health, to family, to digestion - and then proceed to get charmingly, ceremonially tipsy. It’s absurd. And yet, there’s something quietly beautiful and sacred about it. Like all the best rituals, it’s ridiculous, totally unnecessary - and somehow absolutely essential.