Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him.
He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs, you know the type. And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face. On the follow-through of the last swing, though, the handle of the ax snaps in a spray of splinters. You now have a broken ax. So, after a long night of looking for a place to dump the man and his head, you take a trip into town with your ax. You go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the broken handle as barbecue sauce.
You walk out with a brand new handle for your axe. The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your garage until the next spring when, on one rainy morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the blade.
Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store. They sell you a brand new head for your ax. As soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.
You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same ax that slayed me!”
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
A variation of the Ship of Theseus problem - like all the classic philosophical problems, you can argue this for a thousand pages and you wouldn't come any closer to "solving" it.
Technically speaking, if he is still living, then he wasn't slayed in the first place. Your question is illogical and, thusly, invalid.
Also, since he's a Nazi, we are all fucking then.
And, before anyone says, "Well, he is the undead now and to be undead, you must have been killed first," I posit this:
If you are undead, doesn't that, by necessity/logic, make you, "living?" If not, then what would you call it? And I'm not speaking in the literary/fictional/metaphysical sense, I'm speaking in the literal/logical sense. And if you wouldn't call something that wasn't dead living, what would you call yourself? Also, calling something, "undead," does not qualify as a label. That would be like calling the color white/black (depending on whether you use the art definition or the lighting definition) uncolor. Or calling a man unboy. It just doesn't make sense.
And, on the not-too-entirely-different hand, if he is a zombie, why does he seem scared? Typically, in a literary/fictional sense, if you chop off a zombie's head, it severs the brain stem and renders the zombie impotent/dead/whatever. If that is true, how did he come back to life? And since removing his head did not, "kill," him the first time, why would he think that it would do the job the second time? Of course, I'm making the assumption that he is frightened based on his exclamation about the axe and cannot be entirely certain that I haven't just wasted more of your time.
Spoiler:
Hobo Zombie: TRAAAAAAAIIIINNNNNNSSSSSS
Woman Zombie: COMPLAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNSSSSS
Englishmen Zombie: REFRAAAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNNSSSSS
Thanks for the idea Lutz!
Last edited by doobzilla on Wed, 4th Jan 2012 16:06; edited 1 time in total
Hmm, but what if this "thing" isn't really alive, "reanimated" can mean it's being controlled by something else.
Then again, it speaks, so who the fuck knows..
@doobzilla - Well, if you could determine that it was indeed clinically considered dead the first time, why wouldn't be able to be slain twice? I wouldn't call it illogical.. Unrealistic & silly is more like it.
Edit: Oh, you posted your edit after I posted this. Excellent, I love it when thoughts come out of unthinkable things such as this..
Hmm, but what if this "thing" isn't really alive, "reanimated" can mean it's being controlled by something else.
Then again, it speaks, so who the fuck knows..
@doobzilla - Well, if you could determine that it was indeed clinically considered dead the first time, why wouldn't be able to be slain twice? I wouldn't call it illogical.. Unrealistic & silly is more like it.
Edit: Oh, you posted your edit after I posted this. Excellent, I love it when thoughts come out of unthinkable things such as this..
So.. is a zombie dead or alive? If it's undead it's alive. If it's dead, then wtf is it doing running around eating flesh and brains?
In the kind virus-zombie that we see in for example Resident Evil, you could argue that they are never really dead, atleast not on a cellular level - and on the other side, we have Haitian zombies, which are if IIRC, reanimated by voodoo magic, thus not really "alive", just.. animated by an outside force..
@doobzilla - Well, if you could determine that it was indeed clinically considered dead the first time, why wouldn't be able to be slain twice? I wouldn't call it illogical.. Unrealistic & silly is more like it.
Yes, but, "clinical life," is, at best, a meager interpretation of what it is to be alive and/or dead. By that definition, all heart-transplant and heart-bypass patients should be considered to be reanimated/undead/zombies/whatever...fuck you
And, I completely agree that, if what you say was true, that it wouldn't be illogical. But if you get to go around decapitating Nazi's, I get to say what I want.
Of course, the zombie argument always brings back my fond memories of Zombie-Jesus days gone by... Of course, growing up in the Bible-Belt of the U.S. of A., I've had to contend with all sorts of Zombie-believers that dislike anyone calling their savior Jesus Christ a zombie.
And, on another entirely different note. Why isn't, "zombie," spelled z-o-m-b-y when in singular form? For some reason, it makes more sense to me that way. Goddamn, I'm weird sometimes... And for that matter, where in the holy fuck did that slug come from? And why didn't you just use a bunch of salt on it? For God's-Zombie-Son's-sake, you were in a kitchen, man! And why in the hell would you be carrying your axe around in the kitchen? And if you weren't, why didn't you just run the fuck away and not look back?
Perhaps we are all looking at this the wrong way. Maybe the Nazi is representative of Sin's failed relationships (mostly emotional, the sex stuff comes later, no pun intended). And by shooting him first, then attempting to chop up the body, he is saying that he is through with playing emotional games and is ready for a change (I also believe that since this story takes place from Winter to Spring, it is an allegory for change). Then, as he finally accepts the change in his life (the new axe handle, as it were), his erectile dysfunction rears its ugly head and must be eradicated with his newly-changed emotional outlook. Then, he chips the, "head," of the axe (obviously alluding to his penis), and must have it replaced. Then his, "Nazi," (obviously his ex-lover) comes back into his life and he has to qualify his feelings of fear and disdain in this story.
Of course, I've just wasted even more of your time than the original story, but this is the internet, if you don't want to be wasting time, go outside and play fetch with your dog/wife/kids/whatever...fuck you
Hobo Zombie: TRAAAAAAAIIIINNNNNNSSSSSS
Woman Zombie: COMPLAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNSSSSS
Englishmen Zombie: REFRAAAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNNSSSSS
Thanks for the idea Lutz!
Hobo Zombie: TRAAAAAAAIIIINNNNNNSSSSSS
Woman Zombie: COMPLAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNSSSSS
Englishmen Zombie: REFRAAAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNNSSSSS
Thanks for the idea Lutz!
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