It isn’t cheap keeping billions of dollars of state of the art weapons systems operational.

On earth

“I make my own cheese. With muh dick.”

All the doctored numbers are saying the economy is great, inflation is great, employment is great.

It’s not true, and anyone who actually lives on planet earth and doesn’t have their butler doing the shopping knows it.

I expect that the moment a party the bureaucrats don’t want to prop up is fully in power the numbers will reflect reality and magically suddenly everything will be horrible oh my god the numbers are saying the world is ending and it’s all Trump’s fault!

I might sound conspiratorial, but if you have a situation where in 11 of 12 months there are downward revisions on data that the government and central banks really need to be better to justify what they want to do, I think that is inherently suspicious. Given that something absurd like 80% of political donations go to the presently outgoing party, I feel there’s a reasonable expectation of where the bias is coming from.

I’ll say I could be wrong, maybe everything really is fine and all the numbers will continue to be great in February, but every signal that doesn’t have duct tape over it is screaming massive recession and yet the numbers keep showing everything is awesome. It’s like if you tape your speedometer at 55, it doesn’t mean you’re not doing 90, and you can hear the motor revving, you can see everything moving faster, you can hear the wind rushing up against the windows, but the gauge says 55 so you must be going 55!

Consumer debt levels are going crazy, the yield curve has been inverted for a while now, house sales are crashing in some key markets, auto sales are way down, there are mass layoffs at many companies, but according to the number line goes up.

It took me way longer than I’d like to admit to get that one.

You have cited Wikipedia, which is citing the southern poverty law center.

In other words, you’re a hypocrite.

I have warned about this with respect to these numbers before, and I’m going to warn about them again: you really can’t trust the employment numbers right now. The amount of downward revisions in the past 2 years is absurd, including one 800,000 job downward revision prior to the election. It’s entirely possible and even probable that these numbers will be revised further downwards.

What I actually expect is for a lot of numbers to keep looking better than they really are until about January 20th. And then suddenly a whole bunch of stuff is going to end up looking the way it really is…

In my previous essay, I made the point that the first Matrix movie was the only one that was competently executed, and that is because the first movie is an anthem to postmodernism and that was the water in which the Wachowski fish swim, and they are made up of the same matter as the river thereby. The hero’s journey is to understand that the world in front of him is a lie and it’s only by rejecting the narrative his senses give him and embracing a literal deconstruction of reality in terms of the symbols of the matrix he sees near the end of the movie does he find the power to tear down the systems, and the final monologue is a proud statement that Neo will tear down the existing systems and reveal the falseness of the narratives.

The second and third movies were a mess in part because while they engage with philosophies, the movies don’t really integrate those ideas in the same way the first movie integrated postmodernism. In my essay I proposed a second and third movies that would focus on Neo utilizing his inherent virtues as a hero to overcoming the challenges ahead of him. This would be what sequels rejecting postmodernism would look like in my view.

The second movie introduced a new power – Neo’s ability to interact with machines outside of the Matrix. This new power is a synecdoche, where a part represents the whole, of the problems with the movies. why does Neo have this power? Because the movie wanted him to have the power. Practically, there is no explanation for this power given the logistical hurdles of wirelessly manipulating machines. Philosophically, there is no connection between this power and the themes presented of the Matrix being the false simulacrum of the peak of human civilization and Zion being the Desert of the Real. Morally, there was no reason the he deserved this new power, he didn’t engage in virtuous conduct to achieve it. It was a deliberate decision which was made ostensibly for the spectacle of it. The story and the narrative find themselves at a crossroads because the actions within the story and the narrative within the story are at odds, and that is a theme throughout the second and third movies, a disconnect between the themes and the events of the movies.

Instead, we got obtuse philosophical dissertations and action scenes that lacked any meaning. After the Architect scene, Neo “chooses love over logic” which has emotional weight, but lacks philosophical grounding and doesn’t actually have any moral weight because it isn’t clear that choosing to save his lover is the right thing to do, and his passivity limits the moral conviction he shows.

The sequels pivot from postmodernism to systems theory, free will versus determinism, and the cyclical nature of oppression and rebellion, but ultimately there is a difference between narrative and story, and I think that’s best illustrated by the difference between the high-minded philosophical concepts spoken of in for example the Architects dissertation, and the actual themes the actions within the movie demonstrate. The themes are discussed but never actually integrated into the plot.

Another theme they somewhat ham-handedly tried to include was the idea of Neo as a messianic figure. They used the imagery at the end of the movie to imply that Neo was an embodiment of Justice and Christ-like, but the narrative is not the story and the trilogy doesn’t really support this viewing.

The disconnect between narrative, the story, and the actions of the story makes the addition of philosophical ideas weak, and arguably serves to distract from the core themes of the story as such. If the addition of philosophical ideas was firmly rooted in the core construction of the trilogy then it could have been one of the smartest and best trilogies of all time, but most people found the sequels pretentious, bombastic, and boring because it’s ultimately just a bunch of things that happen with little holding the events together once you start ignoring the dissertations on philosophy peppered throughout.

Contrast with the first movie which is explictly about postmodernism, and has a “real world” that’s gritty and ugly and boring and a “Matrix” which is sexy, stylized, and exciting, and the core journey for the hero was to learn to deconstruct the world around him and to reject the narrative of the machines, with one of the main enemies in the story being someone who has been released from Platos cave but wants to return and never know the sun.

To your point about Debord’s works criticizing spectacle, the Wachowskis neglected to give Neo an integrated arc by exploring the boundaries of his powers in ways that reflect his virtues or philosophical growth. We have many great examples of this in media, where the hero’s journey is quiet and reflective instead of loud and reactive. Instead, they leaned on spectacle, which felt like a regression rather than an evolution.

The original Matrix movie is so powerful that today its imagery is used as shorthand for major political movements (The Red Pill). The second and third movies by contrast were ephemeral, and nobody talks about them much today except to mention that they weren’t very good. Nobody uses Colonel Sanders, extended rave sequences, stopping robots with your mind or Neo-Jesus as metaphors for anything. that’s in spite of the fact that we’re in a world that wants meaning and is seeking it desperately. This helps illustrate the difference between them.

One argument could be made that the disjointedness of the sequels was intentional or that the big dumb action scenes were intended to be hollow and meaningless as an intentional philosophical statement. I tend to think neither of these are true based on how self-satisfied the writing seems to be, and how the cinematography really seems to want to convince you that the big dumb action scenes are actually interesting and cool (for example, the slow motion focus on a cool flip from Trinity in Matrix Reloaded). It would suggest that there’s further disconnects within the movie where the visual language it’s using aren’t consistent with the message allegedly being portrayed. Contrast with a highly philosophical piece such as Spec Ops: The Line, which starts off playing things straight but slowly changes the character of how it is portrayed to enhance the discomfort the player would be feeling from the actions the player character has taken in the player’s name.

As Morpheus said in the first movie, “Quit trying to hit me and hit me!” – If the movies were doing their job as implementations of a compelling philosophical framework, they would be engaging through the embodiment of those values. Instead, the movies are boring to watch even during the most incredibly choreographed fight scenes (and one could argue that it was intentional, but I’d counter that the cinematography didn’t imply it was intentional, it seemed to imply “you should think this is really cool and epic”). This likely wasn’t what they were aiming for, but instead was a symptom of a Hollywood that by this time was starting to be disconnected from the material world and like a car stuck in the snow continued to push the gas harder hoping to move forward but instead just digging a deeper rut in the ice.

So given this perspective, what do you think makes the sequels a cohesive and integrated whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? How does one great movie and two poor movies equal three great movies as a whole? How do you counter the criticism that instead of leaning back from spectacle they instead leaned into it with action sequences that were ultimately boring and hollow in ways that harm the piece instead of helping them?

In my previous essay, I made the point that the first Matrix movie was the only one that was competently executed, and that is because the first movie is an anthem to postmodernism and that was the water in which the Wachowski fish swim, and they are made up of the same matter as the river thereby. The hero’s journey is to understand that the world in front of him is a lie and it’s only by rejecting the narrative his senses give him and embracing a literal deconstruction of reality in terms of the symbols of the matrix he sees near the end of the movie does he find the power to tear down the systems, and the final monologue is a proud statement that Neo will tear down the existing systems and reveal the falseness of the narratives.

The second and third movies were a mess in part because while they engage with philosophies, the movies don’t really integrate those ideas in the same way the first movie integrated postmodernism. In my essay I proposed a second and third movies that would focus on Neo utilizing his inherent virtues as a hero to overcoming the challenges ahead of him. This would be what sequels rejecting postmodernism would look like in my view.

The second movie introduced a new power – Neo’s ability to interact with machines outside of the Matrix. This new power is a synecdoche, where a part represents the whole, of the problems with the movies. why does Neo have this power? Because the movie wanted him to have the power. Practically, there is no explanation for this power given the logistical hurdles of wirelessly manipulating machines. Philosophically, there is no connection between this power and the themes presented of the Matrix being the false simulacrum of the peak of human civilization and Zion being the Desert of the Real. Morally, there was no reason the he deserved this new power, he didn’t engage in virtuous conduct to achieve it. It was a deliberate decision which was made ostensibly for the spectacle of it. The story and the narrative find themselves at a crossroads because the actions within the story and the narrative within the story are at odds, and that is a theme throughout the second and third movies, a disconnect between the themes and the events of the movies.

Instead, we got obtuse philosophical dissertations and action scenes that lacked any meaning. After the Architect scene, Neo “chooses love over logic” which has emotional weight, but lacks philosophical grounding and doesn’t actually have any moral weight because it isn’t clear that choosing to save his lover is the right thing to do, and his passivity limits the moral conviction he shows.

The sequels pivot from postmodernism to systems theory, free will versus determinism, and the cyclical nature of oppression and rebellion, but ultimately there is a difference between narrative and story, and I think that’s best illustrated by the difference between the high-minded philosophical concepts spoken of in for example the Architects dissertation, and the actual themes the actions within the movie demonstrate. The themes are discussed but never actually integrated into the plot.

Another theme they somewhat ham-handedly tried to include was the idea of Neo as a messianic figure. They used the imagery at the end of the movie to imply that Neo was an embodiment of Justice and Christ-like, but the narrative is not the story and the trilogy doesn’t really support this viewing.

The disconnect between narrative, the story, and the actions of the story makes the addition of philosophical ideas weak, and arguably serves to distract from the core themes of the story as such. If the addition of philosophical ideas was firmly rooted in the core construction of the trilogy then it could have been one of the smartest and best trilogies of all time, but most people found the sequels pretentious, bombastic, and boring because it’s ultimately just a bunch of things that happen with little holding the events together once you start ignoring the dissertations on philosophy peppered throughout.

Contrast with the first movie which is explictly about postmodernism, and has a “real world” that’s gritty and ugly and boring and a “Matrix” which is sexy, stylized, and exciting, and the core journey for the hero was to learn to deconstruct the world around him and to reject the narrative of the machines, with one of the main enemies in the story being someone who has been released from Platos cave but wants to return and never know the sun.

To your point about Debord’s works criticizing spectacle, the Wachowskis neglected to give Neo an integrated arc by exploring the boundaries of his powers in ways that reflect his virtues or philosophical growth. We have many great examples of this in media, where the hero’s journey is quiet and reflective instead of loud and reactive. Instead, they leaned on spectacle, which felt like a regression rather than an evolution.

The original Matrix movie is so powerful that today its imagery is used as shorthand for major political movements (The Red Pill). The second and third movies by contrast were ephemeral, and nobody talks about them much today except to mention that they weren’t very good. Nobody uses Colonel Sanders, extended rave sequences, stopping robots with your mind or Neo-Jesus as metaphors for anything. that’s in spite of the fact that we’re in a world that wants meaning and is seeking it desperately. This helps illustrate the difference between them.

One argument could be made that the disjointedness of the sequels was intentional or that the big dumb action scenes were intended to be hollow and meaningless as an intentional philosophical statement. I tend to think neither of these are true based on how self-satisfied the writing seems to be, and how the cinematography really seems to want to convince you that the big dumb action scenes are actually interesting and cool (for example, the slow motion focus on a cool flip from Trinity in Matrix Reloaded). It would suggest that there’s further disconnects within the movie where the visual language it’s using aren’t consistent with the message allegedly being portrayed. Contrast with a highly philosophical piece such as Spec Ops: The Line, which starts off playing things straight but slowly changes the character of how it is portrayed to enhance the discomfort the player would be feeling from the actions the player character has taken in the player’s name.

As Morpheus said in the first movie, “Quit trying to hit me and hit me!” – If the movies were doing their job as implementations of a compelling philosophical framework, they would be engaging through the embodiment of those values. Instead, the movies are boring to watch even during the most incredibly choreographed fight scenes (and one could argue that it was intentional, but I’d counter that the cinematography didn’t imply it was intentional, it seemed to imply “you should think this is really cool and epic”). This likely wasn’t what they were aiming for, but instead was a symptom of a Hollywood that by this time was starting to be disconnected from the material world and like a car stuck in the snow continued to push the gas harder hoping to move forward but instead just digging a deeper rut in the ice.

So given this perspective, what do you think makes the sequels a cohesive and integrated whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? How does one great movie and two poor movies equal three great movies as a whole? How do you counter the criticism that instead of leaning back from spectacle they instead leaned into it with action sequences that were ultimately boring and hollow in ways that harm the piece instead of helping them?

No, you may not. Next question.

I feel like 12 hours is well past “Several hours” and enough that you just say “12 hours”.

That’s pretty much an entire day, and that’s messed up.

If you’re worried that you’re too square, the only way to change things with pretentious art is to tape a banana to your chest.

The count is already nobility, and he’s good with numbers.

Gotta be masterofballs.

There’s still people who defederated wolf balls today, years after it closed, out of fear he might one day return.

Someone might point out Japan’s flaws.

Well I think that there’s two points to be made here.

The first is that a lot of the issues in Japan today are a direct effect of modernist ideology. The fact that you can use modern ideology to get everyone together to push for a certain goal is one of the reasons for the acceptance of an extremely poor work-life balance, everyone ends up focusing on ganbatte as a cultural touchstone, and the reality is that modernisms focus on productivity and a shared cultural goal and certain elements of Life has those same negative connotations. The fact that kids work so hard in school and then leave school and go to work so hard at work is exactly because modernism tends to drive everything towards the one goal of modernism.

Japanese democracy and rule of law are arguably just as corrupted as for example Victorian England’s corruption of democracy and rule of law. Both are parliamentary democracies with a relatively weak emperor or King at the top of the hierarchy. Modern society during the Western modern age was also dramatically imperfect, which is one of the reasons that the World wars ended up happening.

The other point I think is that it doesn’t really matter whether Japan is truly successful or is just maintaining face, in terms of acting as a repository of modernist ideology for a fallen postmodern West. We can see absolutely the problems with postmodernism in the west, whereas Japan is a very orderly society perhaps too much so, the West is accepting of a lot of horrific crimes without really judging those crimes to the extent that they should because postmodernism rejects Grand narratives and most values. If you’d rather walk outside at night in a postmodern society or a modern society the question is absolutely indisputable.

But a return to mere modernism definitely isn’t going to save the West. We can see from both modern and postmodern societies that both ideologies have massive blind spots that end up with the extinction of its people. However, what is undoubtedly necessary in the west is for a return to an ideology that at least recognizes that virtue exists and is something worth striving towards and that some ideas are good and some are bad and goodness and badness of ideas does exist.

A lot of your criticisms could be levied against the Arab world, they are absolutely tribal, in a lot of ways they are backwards, they ended up facing a period of massive humiliation because in spite of a fairly warlike ethos they we’re just rolled over by the West in the world wars, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve returned to the highly conservative religious doctrines that they’re in right now. None of the criticisms of the Arabs change the fact that their work ended up helping to fuel the Western Renaissance.

Also note that the advancements of the Renaissance were not towards a return to classical culture. What resulted was a synthesis of Christian culture and classical culture which actually ultimately resulted in modernism. This suggests that the west, even if strongly affected by Japanese modernism, isn’t going to just move into that but into something different based on the cultural zeitgeist at the time, for better or for worse.

Mob is the goat even now.

Historically, it makes sense to consider Japan as a contemporary modern state, and the west’s nations as contemporary postmodern states. The people who rebuilt Japan after World War 2 were somewhat conservative – businessmen and military men – and so rebuilt the world to the ethos they understood, which was modernism. You can see this in their media which may question narratives but does not wholesale reject them. Japan is a fundamentally conservative country who modernized because they realized if they did not the colonial powers would eat them whole just as they did to much of the modern world in the era before World War 1.

Both the west and Japan use the trope of the bad guy who turns out not to have been a bad guy after all. There’s a big difference in how the two accomplish this trope, however. The west believes in destroying existing standards and narratives, so it asks the question “Maybe what Dr. Evil is trying to do isn’t so bad after all? From another perspective maybe trying to stop him from using his moon laser to blow up the earth is wrong?”. Japan derives this trope from the Chinese stories “Journey to the west” in which the evil can be chastened to understand they have been wrong and convinced (through either force or reason) to change their evil ways and become good, suggesting that there is a good and that people ought to strive towards that good.

I was reading “Enough with this slow life! I was reincarnated as a High elf and now I’m bored volume 7” the same day I wrote the article about the Matrix, and it had a great scene in the first third of the book that proves my point. Spoilers, I guess.

In the story, we’ve seen the main character spend decades learning to fight with a sword to honor his teacher. We’ve seen him master magic with a great mage. We’ve seen him make friends with many different people, and become a world-class blacksmith and later learn to make magical weapons. We’ve seen him help build a nation, and we’ve seen him help to win a war.

He is approached by one of four true dragons in this world asking “Do you want me to destroy this world?”, and he had previously made friends with that dragon but he said “No, and if you try I’ll fight you”. The dragon was his friend and took that as proof that the world was still worth saving so they go off to fight another high elf who wanted to destroy the planet to kill all the humans.

The two of them in their capacity as high elves are roughly equal, but he’s slightly stronger with a bow. His opponent is surrounded by the spirits of dead high elves from the war that broke her heart and made her want to destroy the world. With his century of mastery of the sword he learned from the humans, coupled with the sword he crafted with lessons he learned from the dwarves teaching him blacksmithing imbued with magic the mages taught him, he was stronger than the other high elf and would be capable of beating her, except with the spirits of the dead high elves around her he’d have to kill her, and he despaired because he didn’t want to kill her. As he prepared to do what was required, the spirits from his village alongside all the spirits he’d met in the blacksmithing forges, and in the waters he sailed, and in the wind against his back as he walked, and in the statues he created from stone came to back him up. It never said it out loud, but it was obvious that this battle was actually about the connections each fighter had gained, and it wasn’t even close. With all the connections he’d formed with all kinds of people through his travels he was able to stop the other high elf without killing her, and that thread of the story ended (One of the story’s core themes is that there’s a lot going on because the high elf lives for 1000 years, 300 years longer than even the elves, so we revisit people and places and their descendants, so there’s another book and a half)

I was having a conversation with a “Virtual Acquinas” last night, which led me to the following thought:

“Doctor Angelicus, it seems to me that because God is good, his commandments to help us achieve the kingdom of heaven are not things that ultimately hurt us in this material world, but help us. I believe this is in accordance with what you call natural law, that God’s law is not in disharmony with nature. We follow His commandments, and not only are we saved spiritually by the grace of God, but the material world we live in gets better for it. Of course, we live in a world after the fall, so in this imperfect world good things will still happen to bad people and bad things will happen to good people and it may not immediately be apparent that the commandments will help us, but that’s what patience and humility are for. Because the material world becomes so much better, we become arrogant, thinking we achieved all this on our own without God, and so cast aside His commandments. Like Adam, we leave the garden of Eden as we are doomed to do whenever we choose to allow our Hubris to grow too strong. This would be a tragedy like Sisyphus but for two things: First, God’s grace to give us entry to the kingdom of heaven. Second, we do fall, but because we have been saved through Christ, we are not like Adam – we grow and are a little stronger, so when we once again find His commandments and follow them again, we aren’t starting just outside Adam’s Eden, but near the gates of our own metaphorical Eden, a new high point for humanity on Earth. To be clear, we need not fall to grow, and we do not need to choose pride and can instead choose humility so we do not fall. However, when we do fall, when we do allow ourselves to be taken over by pride we do not fall all the way, reflecting God’s grace reflected in our natural state.”

I mean… you know who they are.