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 Posted: Sun, 7th Apr 2013 03:10 Post subject: Our current society |
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So as most can see, I started getting into graphic novels, which can be seen in the other thread. Irrelevant mostly but anywho, it's what's starting this thread. I didn't know there was a world of actual NOVELS hundreds of pages thick. I always knew graphic novels by the 10 page comic books I used to buy as a kid in the 90's.
Muti has been awesome with recomending me stuff but while I was at the book store I found one that caught my eye called Channel Zero.
What caught my eye is it's done in the same idea as 1984 and V for Vendetta, I love stuff like this because our world, mostly the country I live in, is quickly turning to it.
The point of this thread however, relates to all countries where technology is present, your phones, computers, 50 inch tv's. There's an introduction page Warren Ellis wrote as a blog, and decided to put it into the first page of the complete edition of the book, and wanted to share it here.
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Pop culture rolled over and died some time ago. Some people actually think Marilyn Manson is scary, that Kurt Cobain had something to do with rebellion, that Bret Easton Ellis is a dangerous writer, that it’s a good thing that you can buy McDonald’s in Prague, that movies are somehow relevant to our lives.
Television is our stage and our anaesthetic. Real life happens on television in preference to our homes and streets. People resolve their relationships on freakshow chatshows instead of in living rooms or beds or even goddamn bars.
And it spreads. Rupert Murdoch beams his shit into Asia, English children are taught that Z is pronounced Zee by goddamn Barney, and all of a sudden, world cultures become the Monoculture, the same conversation, the same clothes, the same show. All tuned to Channel Zero.
And, all over the world, one by one, we quit fighting it. We sit and we put the book we’re reading down and laugh at the arseholes on Jerry Springer, snigger at Matthew Perry, get our news managed for us by CNN, and suddenly we’re like all the rest. We’re in cultural lockstep, taking holidays in other people’s misery, asking for our stinking badges, dead heads nodding over phosphordot fixes.
Someone’s remembered what comics are for.
In goddamn America, of all places.
Meet Brian Wood.
Over here in comics, things are different, you see. Sometimes we’re an outlaw medium. Sometimes we’re just the preferred tiny place for neurotics and losers to gibber in. Either way, we’re an outside art, a fringe medium watched by no-one but the more voracious cultural commentators and the aficionados. We don’t have huge corporations trembling at our every movement, because we make no money compared to the other visual narrative media. That vast commercial pressure isn’t brought to bear on comics. Which means, often, that we can say what we want without rich men’s scissors attacking our work until it’s safe for little Tommy in Dogshit, Nebraska. I hate little Tommy in Dogshit, Nebraska. I want to kill little Tommy in Dogshit, Nebraska. And so does Brian Wood.
Brian Wood remembers how to be angry. He remembers how to wake up in the morning and look out at this plastic MTV-soundtracked world we’ve agreed to exist in and get pissed off with it. And he goes to his desk and makes buzzing, scratchy, shuddering people, the innards of the people-shaped things he sees lockstepping down the street outside, and he puts them in a crazed, broken America that really is just the America we know seen through a cleaner window, and he makes those people move the way they should. He makes them talk about revolution. He makes them spark and snarl and scheme and scream the way pop culture icons are supposed to. They rant and rail against the dying of the light the way people should.
The longer CHANNEL ZERO runs, the purer it becomes. It grows dominated by symbols, huge dark images of a beaten world filled with a beaten generation, the place that, like Ginsberg howled, saw its best minds destroyed. Black things grow out of the pages, looming over and burying Jennie 2.5 and Channel Zero’s other hopeful monsters. The semiotics of a heartdead world hit like gunfire -- but, in the interstices, you begin to hear music. Anger and passion rise up again.
For all its black and white somber mien, CHANNEL ZERO is, to me, one of the most uplifting comics of the Nineties. CHANNEL ZERO is about winning. It’s about learning how to give a shit again, about finding ways to make things better. It’s about anger as a positive force of creation. It’s about your right to not have to live in the world they’ve built for you.
It’s about turning off the television.
-Warren Ellis
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| Posted: Sun, 7th Apr 2013 11:10 Post subject: |
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Current society thrives on idolizing Stupid. Because Stupid generates a lot of money.
Just look everywhere with a con man's eyes. There's so many idiot in this world it's hard NOT to get rich if you're a con artist/politician/religious user.
As far as I'm concerned I judge a society by watching the wealth distribution, basically ask yourself a question, who's rich in a certain society?
Infrastructure and essential service businesses aside. Justin bieber has enough money to kickstart the economy of a small country. Politicians whose sole job is to bullshit and hide money offshore.
Entertainment industry that's barely worth anything when it comes to creativity. And then we got the religion club, a club funded on indoctrunation and bullshit, not only does it rip people off of their money but of their brains and lives.
How did these people get so much money? Because of stupid people. And if stupid people generate a lot of cash you're damn right they're gonna breed a shitload of them like cattle.
And let's not even go check out the third world... That's a whole other level.
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DXWarlock
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| Posted: Sun, 7th Apr 2013 12:39 Post subject: |
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Its not that we are "turning into this" its that people realize its going on, and think the more they notice it, the more common its occurance is in relation.
the television has no more bearing on this perpetual state of man than anything else. Just because people now and again notice its the focus point now used for it, doesn't mean its a new trend.
Greece had its Colosseum for its version of jerry springer for the masses to watch others less fortunate and enjoy the show, and plaza's of Speeches to push the masses the way they wanted to the trends and fashions. Kingdom has a lot of excess indigo cloth? The ruler had his members dress in that cloth and wander the bazaar to make it fashionable to buy.
Rome had similar tools to use to do such things.
Egyptians had sages and high priest that spoke on pure authority of the 'gods' on what the masses should do and like.
All the way up to the middle ages of the church and state telling people what to think, believe and follow.
The popes been around centuries, and has been around for this very reason. hes been the "TV" of the catholic religion. To pass on the mundane and everyday rhetoric that people blindly absorb and follow like zombies.
The queens of the centuries was always the 'MTV" of fashion, people went as far as to remove or blackout teeth to look like the queen in the middle ages because she lost hers.
So just because we now have a light box to replace these things, doesn't mean its 'society going downhill'.
Its been at the bottom of the hill since we form groups of us. Just because you looked up and noticed the mountains in the background, doesn't mean we just rolled down them in the last 50 years.
I mean if you can point out something society does now, falls for now, or is a new trend that hasn't been happening to the masses since recorded history, then its 'new and worth looking into' otherwise its humans being humans, while other humans have a revelation that we are doing it (again and again).
This is not someone "waking up and realizing what we are becoming" its someone waking up and realizing what we are. Centuries upon centuries of the majority of the people being mindless followers of whoever gives them comfort and security.
Turning off the TV wont fix it, its not the TV's fault, its just showing 24-7 what mankind is.Change mankind, not blame the box we use to tevo our existence on and play it back to ourselves.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
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| Posted: Sun, 7th Apr 2013 13:46 Post subject: |
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It can change if enough generations go through a solid education. As long as religious schools exist in the world the amount of retards on this planet will only grow not to mention the "God will sort'em out" mentality is the cause for many issues overpopulation is one of them. The most vital thing to teach kids is how to detect bullshit and protect and be masters of their own minds.
It all backtracks to the human mind because it's what's in it that controls what we perceive.
Why is religious institution never taxed around globe? Because they provide dumb idiot blind voters and that puts the religious leaders in the same league as the government so they treat each other nicely for mutual profit.
You're right, Humanity has always been this way but today it's on a massive scale with power that can change the planet itself and the way it's going. Hopefully as any failed experiment it'll end up destroying itself and whoever's left would learn their lesson and put the pursuit of knowledge and truth above all.
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| Posted: Sun, 7th Apr 2013 15:04 Post subject: |
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| FireMaster wrote: | It can change if enough generations go through a solid education. As long as religious schools exist in the world the amount of retards on this planet will only grow not to mention the "God will sort'em out" mentality is the cause for many issues overpopulation is one of them. The most vital thing to teach kids is how to detect bullshit and protect and be masters of their own minds.
It all backtracks to the human mind because it's what's in it that controls what we perceive.
Why is religious institution never taxed around globe? Because they provide dumb idiot blind voters and that puts the religious leaders in the same league as the government so they treat each other nicely for mutual profit.
You're right, Humanity has always been this way but today it's on a massive scale with power that can change the planet itself and the way it's going. Hopefully as any failed experiment it'll end up destroying itself and whoever's left would learn their lesson and put the pursuit of knowledge and truth above all. |
Ah well as long as we are unable to escape this gravity well the universe should be okay. Sometimes I think humanity is some kind of world cleanser mechanism destined to nuke itself out of existence leaving a clean and slate for new life forms to be created.
Per Ardua Ad Astra
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 21:02 Post subject: |
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what a load of meh, so long as you've got food in your belly and a dry roof you can be as pretentious and condescending of the world around you as you like.
The simple fact is globalization is sanitizing everything for the vested interest of a tiny fiscal minority. These few dosen people mostly in the Conservative Right and their families control the media, the shows you watch the technology you watch it on, the advertising propaganda telling you what to watch and what to buy, comics are a part of this especially the mainstream.
It's a simple cycle of the herd consuming who are themselves generally outside of the means of production and an industrializing monopoly that control the means of consuming. The more we consume the more complicit we are.
In Britain I have the Republican Right to thank for all this. Thatcher, Whitelaw and Howe destroyed British society and substituted the unions and British industry with Republican 'Grand Old Party' economics. Thanks guys.
I hate the modern consumer wheel, we consume for want rather than need, it erodes democracy and has turned youngsters into by the minute consumer monsters. They have no idea how to be original or create anything since their to busy twitching on their iPhones and gawping at whatever other bottom of the cultural pyramid shit their into.
Last edited by fishslice on Tue, 7th May 2013 21:26; edited 1 time in total
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DXWarlock
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Location: Florida, USA
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 21:26 Post subject: |
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| fishslice wrote: | what a load of meh, so long as you've got food in your belly and a dry roof you can be as pretentious and condescending of the world around you as you like.
The simple fact is globalization is sanitizing everything for the vested interest of a tiny fiscal minority. These few dosen people mostly in the Conservative Right and their families control the media, the shows you watch the technology you watch it on, the advertising propaganda telling you what to watch and what to buy, comics are a part of this especially the mainstream.
It's a simple cycle of the herd consuming who are themselves generally outside of the means of production and an industrializing monopoly that control the means of consuming. The more we consume the more complicit we are.
In Britain I have the Republican Right to thank for all this. Thatcher, Whitelaw and Howe destroyed British society and substituted the unions and British industry with Republican 'Grand Old Party' economics. Thanks guys.
I hate the modern consumer wheel, we consume for want rather than need, it erodes democracy and has turned youngsters into by the minute consumer monsters. They have no idea how to be original or create anything since their to busy twitching on their iPhones and whatever other mindless shit their into probably watching some gay lord like Pewdiepie be irrelevant and amusing. |
Again you are confusing "what I am noticing of my generation as getting worse" with "what has been since ancient times".
Only difference is you are more personally vested in, and experiencing this one first hand so it seems more serious and emerging.
Replace anything you said with rome, greece, egypt, inca, or any other historical large civilization..and there in no difference.
For the "turned youngsters into minute consuming monsters"...this is Socrates over 2000 years ago(well attributed to Socrates by Plato):
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
So really its nothing new, kids are the same now as they was 2000+ years ago...or in other words, humans are being humans. Just now and then someone realizes it and acts like "Since I just slowly realized this, it must have just recently started slowly happening".
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 21:39 Post subject: |
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| DXWarlock wrote: | | fishslice wrote: | what a load of meh, so long as you've got food in your belly and a dry roof you can be as pretentious and condescending of the world around you as you like.
The simple fact is globalization is sanitizing everything for the vested interest of a tiny fiscal minority. These few dosen people mostly in the Conservative Right and their families control the media, the shows you watch the technology you watch it on, the advertising propaganda telling you what to watch and what to buy, comics are a part of this especially the mainstream.
It's a simple cycle of the herd consuming who are themselves generally outside of the means of production and an industrializing monopoly that control the means of consuming. The more we consume the more complicit we are.
In Britain I have the Republican Right to thank for all this. Thatcher, Whitelaw and Howe destroyed British society and substituted the unions and British industry with Republican 'Grand Old Party' economics. Thanks guys.
I hate the modern consumer wheel, we consume for want rather than need, it erodes democracy and has turned youngsters into by the minute consumer monsters. They have no idea how to be original or create anything since their to busy twitching on their iPhones and whatever other mindless shit their into probably watching some gay lord like Pewdiepie be irrelevant and amusing. |
Again you are confusing "what I am noticing of my generation as getting worse" with "what has been since ancient times".
Only difference is you are more personally vested in, and experiencing this one first hand so it seems more serious and emerging.
Replace anything you said with rome, greece, egypt, inca, or any other historical large civilization..and there in no difference.
For the "turned youngsters into minute consuming monsters"...this is Socrates over 2000 years ago:
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
So really its nothing new, kids are the same now as they was 2000+ years ago...or in other words, humans are being humans. Just now and then someone realizes it and acts like "Since I just slowly realized this, it must have just recently started slowly happening". |
The emergence of Right Wing selfish individualism is a new phenomenon I feel. Western post war culture and society has changed radically from a collective view of the World to being individualistic. This erodes good manners and is the root problem you describe above. Two thousand years ago you were either tribal and lived a very conservative life of the land relying on the goodness of the community or lived in very authoritarian conditions, military discipline and hard work being the order of the day.
In the West today we tend to live parallel lives divorced from each other, our humanity is being eroded by the consumer wheel, consumerism and the interests of a tiny fiscal elite. This impacts democracy, fair distribution of wealth, political and cultural literacy. We are compliant to a 21st century narrative maintained by 21st century technology and political ideas born from commercial globalization.
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DXWarlock
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 21:47 Post subject: |
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It's no different back then.
Day to day life was just as self absorbed, egocentric, and such then.
The romanticized perception of the meek and kind of the times, is no where near the reality of what it was like.
There was just as many arguments, fights, wars, and disputes within and with other 'tribal' lifestyles as there was the mass civilizations. Ancient Indians for 1000's of years had just as much self absorbed egotism as we do now. Tribal lifestyles exiled to die a lonely death the troublemakers and nonworking lazy ones..how is that 'goodness of the community'?
The Romans lived lavish lifestyles of greed, self enjoyment, and ignorance of the masses just as today, while spending that time talking about they needed more, and worked too hard and deserved larger bathhouses from the government. The Colosseum was nothing but a 'you tube or american idol' of its time. built SOLELY for the purpose of appeasing the masses by distracting them, by their own request of wanting to watch useless but entertaining things. If wanting to watch people die in extreme ways to entertain your own boredom isnt 'selfish and self absorbed' example in the extreme...then I dont know what is 
Both roman AND greek women in some cases to feed their children..was hired by better off people, to be raped by animals for their entertainment, often 'raped to death' by animals..Tribal nations often forced slaves or captured enemies to 'keep them amused' in various ways..just to kill them later. It was totally a "all about me" outlook that caused these things.
There was homeless beggars ignored and shunned in the marketplace by people shopping, just as ow with homeless asking for change and being ignored.
The roman era fell mostly because of the idea of 'eroded by the consumer wheel, consumerism and the interests of a tiny fiscal elite.'... Its really no different.
People havn't changed..just people, of every generation, since that time, all want to say "no no ours is by FAR the worst example of it". they want to demonize current times, as being far worse, so they can justify the idea that they can have more hatred toward the concept of it, because its now 'worse' in their time.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
Last edited by DXWarlock on Tue, 7th May 2013 22:04; edited 3 times in total
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DXWarlock
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 21:56 Post subject: |
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| fishslice wrote: |
The emergence of Right Wing selfish individualism is a new phenomenon I feel. |
Studying history of any large civilization. it was rampant in any stage of its existence. Cultural divides of difference in social opinion of who or what was most important. the good of the person vs the good of the civilization.
Human ego of the "Looking out for #1" didn't start since TV was invented.
Its been around since mankind first saw other men in caves and went "fuck them we got to get by first, throw rocks in their cave to let them know we are better than them"
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 22:04 Post subject: |
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I get the fact that human beings are largely the same, the ego and Id remain constant, it's the perceptible change over the last 100 years I'm referring too. The fact that within the ever present constant of human behavior the 21st century has seen an acceleration of a sort of grand material nepotism that should be a concern or wake up call for us all. This is a problem that instead of being localized from one community to the other by varying degree is rapidly effecting the whole of humanity due to corporate globalization.
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DXWarlock
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 22:09 Post subject: |
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So in other words "Down with the man, they are taking over the world?"
that's an age old ideal too
How is corporate globalization of the world now, any different than the fiscal elite of Greek or Rome controlling everything in (the known) world of that time? To any average roman citizen. The powers that be, and the merchants at hand ran/sold/controlled/owned everything they knew existed. and pushed the idea that people needed what they offered, and should consume as much as possible of it.
Again, as long as man has had land to claim, someone has always had more than their share of controlling of it.
I do agree humans need to wake up to this fact, but I'm saying its that we've oversleep not 100 years, but 1000's while its been happening just we now have 24/7 media and news at our fingertips that points this out non stop.
The only thing I see different is the speed of which the news of these happenings can travel..and the ease of knowing about it. Not the frequency or scale of the attempts to do them.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
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couleur
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 22:16 Post subject: |
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The difference is that now we really are at the point of making a huge garbage ball out of our planet. Something no civ has ever achieved! Congrats!
"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."
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DXWarlock
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| Posted: Tue, 7th May 2013 22:26 Post subject: |
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Indeed it's the acceleration of this corrosive thinking.
My problem is that the ancient human tendency towards self interest and individualism has in the West been enshrined into the political law of the Right. It is being adopted wholesale by super communities resulting in the many problems we see today.
We need to use what intellect we have to be alert to this rather than accepting there is little we can do. I just don't accept the doctrine that this is all that humans are capable of. Indeed human history is littered with instances were influence is brought to bare to improve balance and social justice in human civilization. Christianity, the unions, NHS and free medical care, the welfare state, environmental organisations and protection of wild and rare species, philanthropists such as Buffet, Kaiser, Rowntree and Wilberforce hell even the Gates foundation.
Better to die trying than not try at all.
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