Juice
@Juice@midwest.social
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 4 days ago:
I have around 1700 hs in Destiny 2, and close to the same in Bloodborne. Over 1000 hours in the last 2 monster hunter titles. I’ve replayed resident evil 4 and castlevania sotn dozens of times.
So those are my most played games
- Comment on Love her or hate her, she’s spitting facts 1 week ago:
Put a ring on it immediately.
- Comment on Enshittification only hurts product itself, not users. 1 week ago:
Oh enshittification is coming for Windows. In the future. Like it hasn’t happened yet or wasn’t the first and worst of these companies for it to come for. But something that hasn’t happened yet, not in the past. Interesting.
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t played them since they first came out, practically a lifetime ago. Actually now that I think about it my friend is really into halo lore I wonder if they saw the show.
It was hokey but I liked it. And yeah I thought it ended really strongly but there’s no plan for a 3rd season
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 2 weeks ago:
I played the first two
- Comment on [Même] Which movie was this for you? 2 weeks ago:
I just watched the Halo series, thought it was corny but kinda awesome, and then discovered noone else thought it was awesome. Def had some problems, tried to shoehorn in a lot of stuff but by the finale I was super hooked
- Comment on Feral Science 2 weeks ago:
Crucial supporting NPCs in Monster Hunter
- Comment on pump up the jamz 2 weeks ago:
That would sound amazing
- Comment on pump up the jamz 2 weeks ago:
So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys
- Comment on She-Ra Lives! 2 weeks ago:
*more than
- Comment on Nostalgia and remake culture 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on ... 4 weeks ago:
This is garbage why the fuck should I care about what some nerd with a sub stack thinks about other academics? Intellectuals suck, Marxist intellectuals are no exception. So in the wake of MacCarthyism, at the dawn of Neoliberalism, intellectuals in universities were being pressured to gravitate away from Marx. No shit. Does this mean they were correct to do so? Well the death of the militant labor movement around the same time would give us some indication.
Why would you care so much to try and ensure that people don’t read very good books that you likely havent read? Seems like someone with an axe to grind. But let me assure anyone who is reading this, Marxist Intellectuals are as big a pain I’m the ass, and kind of necessary, as they are in any other org. The problem isn’t with the intellectuals though, it’s that there’s not enough regular working people who read and understand revolutionary theory to push back against them and their tendencies toward splits and polemics and laziness.
This is the problem with not reading Marxism though, the basis of the argument is “all these smart people stopped studying Marx” and takes it for granted that it is because the source material was somehow incorrect. And maybe some of it was, there’s no shortage of that. But that explanation completely ignores structural and social pressures that would have been a clearer and more direct explanation than, “all at once all these smart nerds left Marxism, so they must have been right to do so.” This is not what causes a mass exodus. What causes someone to leave a field of study for another one is the threat that their livelihood will be taken away.
Its so funny I wonder if this would have worked on someone who was new to Marxism. Homie I’m so far gone, if you think this post might be the reason someone would give up on reading Marx that person would have to be already unfamiliar. Actually engaging with other Marxists will do more to run you out of Marxism than this goofy ass nerd ass substack
- Comment on ... 4 weeks ago:
I did neither of those things, literally
- Comment on ... 4 weeks ago:
Wow 70 years of history is so flat, it just folds right up in your pocket like that, stunning. Its possible you’ve left a few details out
- Comment on ... 4 weeks ago:
So no, no one understands it.
What was the last nail, exactly? I don’t see how swapping out neo-liberal drivel with “scientific Marxist drivel” would be any improvement
- Comment on ... 4 weeks ago:
Does anybody understand what this meme is trying to say? I feel like its pretty obvious
- Comment on ... 4 weeks ago:
Cuz that’s what this meme is trying to abandon - science
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
well im not a philosophy professor, and ive done my level best to explain basic humanities concepts to you. its funny because i used to make these exact same arguments that you are, and my understanding was incomplete, as it still is. i hope you dont have it figured out as much as you think you do, because then you’ll likely not grow as a person. In any case I’ve made long arguments as well as I can make them. Thanks for the discussion
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
But your problems with my explanation depend on a view of reality that is completely divorced from time. Your conditions for realness depend on the existence of a real physical object and reject socially contingent objects, which is your right, but this is an example of an epistemological crisis: I insist that things that are socially real are real; you deny their existence, also denying the existence of law, value, many things that our society depends on. If you pick out parts of my argument that you don’t like and act like the points that I did make just don’t exist, then you are making your argument based on willful ignorance. But besides that, if your standard for what is real differs from mine we cant even have a debate, we just talk past each other smugly assuring ourselves that we are correct because our opponent is just like stupid or something. Maybe you think I’m stupid, I don’t think you’re stupid. My point is you can’t just deny the existence of things that are real in every way but physically. If a huge proportion of people in a society believe that something is real it is the same as that thing being empirically real. You can’t just throw away thousands of years of history because it disagrees with your narrow definition of objectivity. Or I guess you can, none is stopping you, but don’t pretend its consistent with reality.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
I’ll try to be a little less obtuse. I thought better about getting into this in the shitpost comm, and since I’m getting massacred my first impulse was probably correct. But I’m a huge nerd, cant help it.
So I guess I don’t know what you mean by epistemologically consistent. As a general rule of epistemology, people can have different, incompatible epistemologies, which basically renders communication impossible, since the participants use different models to determine what is true. This uh happens a lot since people think the way that they determine truth is the “right” one. Even my attempt to adapt different ways of thinking to different situations has limits, since I’m never going to subscribe to like flat earth theory. Not all epistemologies are equally valid or rigorous. Arithmetic is highly rigorous, whereas flat earth has a low bar for proof. Also I’ll argue that the validity of various theories of knowledge are historically contingent. Empiricism isn’t just “more true” than religion because it is more rigorous; in fact the hermetic tradition was extremely rigorous and scientific, but because they viewed “god” as indistinguishable from nature, they could synthesize religion and empirical science without contradiction. Their scientific inquiry was a sacred religious ritual where god learned about its own physical body (nature) through the consciousness of the scientist which was a part of the consciousness of god. This kind of monism is completely foreign to us, yet Isaac Newton was a Hermetic whose theories are still highly relevant and rigorous. But if a scientist publicly expressed these views to the academy they’d be deemed an eccentric, if not a crank of the highest order.
The second part of your question is more straightforward. How would the world change if god didn’t exist the way I described, as being socially real? There’d be no churches, no religious art, no pilgrimages that attract tens of millions each year. There’d be no recognizable European medieval period. Tens or hundreds of millions of people wouldn’t donate their time or money to the church. Which like, wouldn’t that be fucking awesome? no indigenous “schools” no religious colonialism/imperialism.
But all these followers aren’t lying in order to trick you into thinking god exists. They feel god, they experience god through their institutions, rituals, art, monuments, and yes, crimes. This exactly is the limit of pure Empiricism, it forces you to completely disregard subjectivity, or relegate it to a lower order of “realness” than a physical object. A stone in the middle of a lake will have little effect on the outside world outside of its extremely local circumstances; but a religious belief can have deadly implications for millions if it becomes the policy of a government. Laws, money are socially real, determined by their existence on paper, are upheld by sophisticated social constructs that reach into our minds and our behavior. But again, is a law not “real”? Of course it is. Try to break one in front of a cop and find out how real it is.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Well I was specific to say that you have to look at things dialectically in order to see the connection. When you describe other people’s beliefs, you say they believe in something that doesn’t exist. So in order for something to exist, it has to be a “thing” or an object. This is its own type of logic called “Empiricism” or more radically, “Positivism”. Empiricism is a really good basis for reasoning, especially scientific reasoning. The creation of Empiricist reasoning is the intellectual basis for the (notably Atheistic) Enlightenment, which is the ideological superstructure for our current Modernist milieu.
But empiricism is actually bad at other kinds of epistemology (theory of knowledge.) For example, it necessarily divides the objective and the subjective into two separate “things”, as well as the mind and body. This leads to some wonky conclusions about metaphysics and the self, particularly where human experience meets nature. Empiricism is great at categorizing, but often fails to reassemble the collection of objects back into a monistic whole. As such Empiricism’s theory of social is extremely atomized and individualistic.
Like the way you describe religion, as " trust me bro this thing exists," is a perfect example. There is that part to it, the belief in a god, but there is also creation and appreciation of monuments and temples, ritual, community, social events, group study, all of these human experiences that collectively make up the very real and undeniable power of religion. But my understanding of your explanation just has a bunch of alienated individuals with the same wrong ideas, with no explanation or historical context as to how things became this way. This is also how people come to the very wrong assumption that the value of money doesn’t exist. Because it doesn’t have an objective form, it doesn’t exist. This is just completely untrue. It is socially real, which is as real as any object. In fact religious belief and power is just another form of social currency.
Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm and countless other philosopher theologians imbued Christianity with a consistent, self supporting logic. That was their job, and they have been extremely successful. We can discuss the limitations and shortcomings of that logic, but denying that it is logical is just willful ignorance.
Dialectics has its own shortcomings, so I’m not arguing that one is better than the other. But each form of epistemic reasoning, of which religious belief undeniably contains a vast epistemology, has certain advantages and shortcomings. In my opinion our task isn’t to find one way of reasoning and then brow beat others into accepting that reasoning, this is a form of fundamentalism – a way of determining knowledge, meaning and truth that supercedes all others in every way; which is exactly what religious fundamentalists want people to believe (so those people can be exploited, as fundamentalism always serves some higher power whether it be religious or economic.) Instead I think we should learn as much as we can, acknowledge the strengths and shortcomings of each way of conducting analysis, as well as our own strengths and weaknesses in doing so, and use them as tools to help us understand the world that exists. Leave nothing out, embrace contradiction, and learn how to become the most fulfilled, practical and honest selves.
But then again, everyone is on a different path ;)
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
There’s a philosophy called dialectics where opposites actually define one another. Atheism is a really good example of this IMO. Atheists usually define their beliefs as “no religion” but in practice they are anti-god, anti-religion. This means that even though religion has its own internal logic, being anti-religion has an opposite logic: what is good over here is bad over there. So it really ends up being that theism and atheism, through their contradictory traits, embody a single rational system.
But as many people have learned, through wrestling with these contradictions, we eventually reach a third stage where we just don’t give a shit anymore, or maybe we develop some ways of grappling with metaphysical questions which religion is really good at but atheism basically just deny these problems even exist. I think that’s why we often relate atheism as being childish, because a lot of people who are self aware and introspective will start out with a religious phase, then go through an atheist phase, and finally land in that secret third thing that is unique to the individual and their community.
I was recently reading a book about Hegel and early Marx, and the author Cyril Smith quoted one of Marx’s letters saying something like, “atheists are like children trying to reassure a grownup that they don’t believe in the bogeyman” do it seems like these “reddit atheists” have been on this same bullshit for at least the last 150 years
- Comment on Please stop 1 month ago:
Reddit is Bloodborne
Okay this might be the comment that makes Ted Kaczinsky’s manifesto take on new meaning and inspiration for me - Comment on When somebody backs up their argument with a 90-minute video 1 month ago:
As someone who has read those 5 books, and the next 5, and the next 5 and so on, those people never go away. I still recommend those books but in my experience they’re almost always in-group signalling and not coming up with a new synthesis of the material as understood through their own unique experiences as a worker. Actually those people will be the first to tell you that experience doesn’t matter its actually their experience reading books that matters.
“The traditions of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.” is as true for the left as it is any other tradition.
- Comment on Anxiety 1 month ago:
I have no self control with weed, I was literally high for about 3 years straight. Was high functioning, and it helped me through some very difficult times. But I had a severe psychotic break last November that took about 6 months to fully recover from. Tried going back but my tolerance isn’t at a place where I can function on it anymore, and if I have it in the house I’m high from when I wake up to when I go to bed. Idk why I have no self control, blame it on the ADD baby. Wish I could smoke a few times per week like my friends but I can’t so, I’m on that sober shit.
Its not too bad, I read a bit more and play less video games
- Comment on How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality. 1 month ago:
Scientific research indicates we see colors pretty damn similarly, with edge cases for colorblindness and also people who are more color sensitive.
One way this can be studied is by studying the metamerism of different colors by different observers. Metamerism is the study of how colors change given different light sources.
There are other objective qualities that give hints that we have similar ways of experiencing colors. You mention that colors are nothing more than our brain assigning “color” to frequency of light – but light is itself just a frequency of electromagnetic radiation, namely the frequencies that make up the bulk of the radiation emitted by the sun.
So to a normal observer without colorblindness, there are more variants of colors of green than any other color. Green is of course situated in the very center of the roygbiv spectrum, it is the “most visible” color. The colors with the least amount of variations are red and violet, which are situated at the edges. Frequencies above violet or below red become invisible making up infrared and ultraviolet radiation.
Where we get tricked up, and I used to have identical suspicions as you did, is that we consider color to be purely subjective, because we aren’t taught to unify subjectivity and objectivity into a united whole. Color isn’t completely imagined, there are certain surfaces that absorb and reflect certain frequencies of EM radiation just as the structures in our brain that process this ocular input are more or less similar. Things that are subjective aren’t usually associated with being “real” the same way that objectively “real” things that exist out in the phenomenal world are. However, color is socially real, we can almost all identify colors that are the same and colors which are different. Since the set of colors which are “red” are fewer than the set of colors which are “green” then there is no way that what I experience as red is the same as what you experience as green. Artists use colors to convey emotion and are able to achieve this with many many different observers. Warm colors are warm, and cool colors are cool. There may be different levels of sensitivity but in my experience this can be somewhat trained into an observer though no doubt there are outliers who have a unique sensitivity to color differences.
So there are objective factors which align with subjective factors let’s say 90% of the time, which strongly supports the idea that we experience color more or less the same way. The trouble is not that subjectivity and objectivity are irreconcilable, in fact it is when we fail to reconcile them that our troubles begin. In my opinion, this is a huge problem that creates all kinds of issues when we try to relate to each other; it may be the most prominent philosophical problem of our age. Luckily it is fairly easily remedied with a slight change in the way we think about subject and object. Its useful to separate them sometimes but we need to be able to reunify them, which just takes practice in my experience.
- Comment on How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality. 1 month ago:
There’s a rare disease that turns peoples faces into demon faces called prosopometamorphopsia that can be partially relieved by observing things under different colored light.
- Comment on I hate how anything without "world" in its name is just about the US 1 month ago:
Jimmy Eat USA
- Comment on PS5 Homescreen Now Replaces Unique Video Game Art With Annoying Ads You Can’t Turn Off 1 month ago:
Whelp looks like the ps4 will be my last Sony console, too bad
- Comment on Sorry to be a bother... 1 month ago:
I’m a big proponent of fork theory.
Basically, fork this shit we are all forking forked.
