I am really hungry

So I reserve the right to cut this short at any moment I feel like and rush off to my home where I will eat a to-go box full of chicken, pasta, and love. I did that last night. Then I tried to type up a blog entry at home. For some reason I typed it up in note pad and the whole thing god lost because I am a moron. So first order of business? Reconstruction!

It is prolly for the best though, last night, for whatever reason I was fucking exhausted so my though process just sort of collapsed in on itself and refused to go fowards. As it turns out I have underestimated the metaphysical complextities that pornography has to offer. Yeah who would of thunk? See on a superficial level it is easy to work with. However, as soon as you start getting more in depth with it all superficiality falls apart into a pile of dust and ashes. Or like a lead rake, as has become one of my new favorite phrases.

So tearing it down and working my way back up again. I want, for the first essay, to look at how pornography and reality jive within the metaphysical constraints of Baudrillard. The short answer is that it isn't very nicely. The thing is though that the long answer is long, not just long but it is this cascading fail spiral that shoots outwards into the sky like some glorious fail beacon. I think I got it though so lets see if I can get it done this time without melting down.

Generic Hardcore straight porn is a spectacular example of the real's ability to slip into the hyperreal. See in ordinary media there is a barrier between the real and the hyperreal. Yes there is. I am putting it there deal with it. Okay I guess it isn't much of a barrier but something is there. When a media crosses from they hyper real to the real it is the viewer that acts as a conduit. A piece of media isn't inherently hyperreal. Nor is viewing the media an inherently hyperreal act. However, viewing the media, taking away inpressions and then forcefully imposing those impressions over the real regardless of what the real is? Now that is how we get people living in a hyper real state. See everything that happens on TV is staged, especially most reality tv shows. So looking to a sitcom for advice as to how to ask a girl out is a bad idea. Better yet go read Being There. It sums up this point with righteous perfection.

Soft core porn also falls into the above example because the elements within softcore porn nessistate that the actual sex act is faked. The thing about hard core porn is that the actual sex act is real. You know that shot. THe extreme closeup shot of the penis going into the vagina over and over again, relentlessly until you are so bored and turned off that you idlely wonder if star trek is on? Yeah that shot doesn't really excist for any direct erotic value. They do excist however to show you the viewer that the sex you are seeing is real. This is actual sex. The image on the screen isn't what is important. Its actually kinda gross. No what is important is the real sex that is happening. Along similar lines, the money shot excists to demonstrate to people that here is a man! And his orgasam happened. Ironically, with the exception of female ejaculation, the precariouse reality of the female orgasam is ignored. Sometimes they are visable, most times they simply pass by without any real concern. Since there is no visible way to prove she had an orgasam or is faking it we just let her make those awful moaning sounds and go with it. The money shot though? You see that, it happens. It is actually called the money shot because that is what people are paying to see. It is the irrefutable proof that what was just seen was sex, the man has just recieved maximal pleasure, and now some jizz covered girl would like a towel and that camera out of her face.

The thing is that while the sex is real, the actual portrayal of the sex act is so wildly staged that there is no way to call it anything other than hyperreality. More so than reality television which shares more aspects of sitcoms and game shows than anything actually real. Pornography takes a real act and turns it into this bizzarely staged hyperreal construct. When porn tries to shakily add a story, it gets even worse. Worse to the point where you are left wondering what the hell did they even bother for.

Oh then there is the "sex video" porn where couples send in thier sex videos to this site and this helps supposedly to short circuit the sterilized hyperreal approche that mainstream porn takes. Because, the people involved in the movie are actually undergoing the physilocial effects of sexual intercourse, and the point of the hardcore porn is to demonstrate this as much as possible it removes the barrier that most media has between the viewer and the real. Everything that happens in porn is possible. Why? Cause it just happened.

Now the results of that? I dunno. That is where I am stuck. HUNGRY. Okay so I am going to lay out some things and then I am going to fucking eat because I really really want to. Well lets start with something easy and go south. I don't beleive that pornography is the cause of rape, rape culture, sexual repression, deviance, or anything like that. Hell I don't even believe in deviance. Wow I just realized that. I make up deviant... later. Okay so lets move onto pornography addiction, unhealthy sex as a result of porn, and hilarious emergency room stories. Now that is a grayer area which I think gets at the heart of the situation a little bit better. I can fame pornographic addiction within the terms of hyperreality in a couple of diffrent ways depending on the severity and type of addiction. This is good. The only way to be unaffected by pornography though is to either be specificly examining it on a metaphysical level and that' iffy. Or to understand the entirerty of what I am saying and to know that while everything depiced in the porn is possible, pulling my dick out of her mouth mid blowjob and jizzing in her face is more likely to get me punched rather than to just have her sit there smiling like she is a series of wet holes that excists for my pleasure.

Ugh this is just the start, The series of wet holes thing is something I am adressing in another essay and it will compare and contrast the way fetish porn and normal porn approch their subject. Essentially they approch their subject in exactly the same way, however the resluts are diffrent due to the fact that fetish porn is just plain diffrent.

Woop.

Okay the hunger pains are subsiding so lets do a little thing with the actual essay proper. I want to finnish reading Simulacra and Simulation. Or at least I want the things I think are going to be relevent read. Then I think we are going to be talking about non fetish hard core porn. I want to focus on two Jenna Jameson videos. One lesbian, one generic porn. I want to focus not on the actual sex act itself, but all the random, bizzare leadup to the actual sex act. So what the hell was all the above about? Yeah that will be in there too, however, the lead up makes the actual sex act seem less real when it is infact anything but. People will end up in these exceedingly bizzare situations which end in sex understanding what is actually going on with the sex in reffrence to hyperreality is nessisary when trying to figgure out what the hell is going on with all that crap that is happening before the actual sex. Cause that whole leadup stuff? Veeeeeerrrrry interesting.

The New Post

...go read the post before this one. Then read this one. Why? Because I am WAY to lazy to go use bloggers publishing options.

Okay you done? Actually I don't care.

So Language games! First some preliminary reading.

"2....Let us imagine a language ...The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words 'block', 'pillar', 'slab', 'beam'. A calls them out; --B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. -- Conceive of this as a complete primitive language. "

"6. We could imagine that the language of (2) was the whole language of A and B; even the whole language of a tribe. The children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others."

"7. In the practice of the use of language (2) one party calls out the words, the other acts on them. In instruction in the language the following process will occur: the learner names the objects; that is, he utters the word when the teacher points to the stone.--And there will be this still simpler exercise: the pupil repeats the words after the teacher--both of these being processes resembling language. We can also think of the whole process of using words in (2) as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language. I will call these games 'language-games' and will sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game.

And the processes of naming the stones and of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games. Think of much of the use of words in games like ring-a-ring-a-roses. "

Wittgenstein is neat. It also gets much much more complicated later on. Right now though we can all be good with that. Yeah? Well to bad that is all I could find off the interwebs at the moment. Those numbers at the start of each quote are actually in the text. He did that to make the whole thing easily cross reffrencable. You can see it happen in both 6&7 where he reffrences 2. It's neat he was dyslexic so he broke up his text like that to avoid tripping over himself like I am wont to do. He als does it because he is weird.

Language games is one of the foundational building blocks which I used to construct my ideas of both politics and the outer church. It is also the way I use to justify a lot of my ideas regarding the way we construct our value systems and moral beliefs. Language is how we communicate after all, not just with each other but also inside our own heads as well. When we think to ourselves we don't revert to some basic proto language that only works for ourselves, this is unfortunate and I think I might get started building one. No our own introspection is affected by language as well.

Alright all ready off to the point. If you aren't on board by now I'll catch you later. Lets start big and work our way down. At this historical moment the biggest, shineyest, example of one word meaning all sorts of diffrent things is nigger. Oh yeah. I don't really throw that word around to be big scary or shocking, but lets face it. This is the clearest example of what I am talking about ever.

Quick run down

Black on Black- Some of them disaproove of it, some of them don't care, but the offense is mild to moderate at worst.

White on White- Well if I walk past you and hear I will think you are stupid. It is generally used ironically...or as a synonym for dude.

Black on White- Not a good idea.

That's how language games work. Honestly, I would be better off with another Wittgenstein quote but it will do. Go back up to two. Stone has a diffrent meaning between builder assistent than it would between two people hanging out looking at pretty rocks. I illustrated this with nigger. I also chose nigger, because the word itself has a set of ideological values behind it. Black on black it is a source of something, speaking for black culture will just make me look like an idiot but if I had to hazard a guiss I would say that it is a source of identity for them.
When we go white on black it takes that source of identity and preverts it, it turns it ugly in the most profound way possible and makes that identity into a shameful thing. THats so strange too, that identity could be shameful.

Thing is that it connects together for much bigger ideas as well. Groups of people gather together based son something...lets say gaming. Within this gaming group words will take on certain meanings that they don't really have in out side world. Nuts I can't think of one at the moment but they do. So when one member of the gaming group mixes with another group and starts to throw the terms around to people who aren't familiar with it there will be confusion. The closter the word sounds like it actually means something the worst this disconnect will get.

Hyperreality is an excelent example. It sounds like it means something, realtiy that is so real that it becomes unreal. Or whatever you think it means in your head. Its cool. It is actually a theoretical term coined by Bauldillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation. It means something specific. When we take it, and run with it based on what we think it means we are creating a language game around it. When we take it to our friends we induct them into the language game, and this conitnues onwards. The original deinition isn't lost, it is just changed to a limited group of people.

We do this on a much larger scale with ideas.n Lets take... hmm... abortion. No I just erased a paragraph proving that abortion is a terible example. The rules to D20. Actually I just repeat myself by saying the same thing in the nigger section.

The problem here is that this is fundamental. It is also unique not only with every individual person, but also with every group of people that person interacts with. I think I am going to come back to this topic in a little bit.

What I am running into is the problem that people act diffrently in a group of people than alone. There is a certain vidication in knowing that next to you there are people who hold the same beliefs and that you two are playing the same language game when you speak to each other. Those who we choose to surround ourselves with have a much bigger impact on our actions than say a talking head in a box. We will take that talking head's words and we will convert it to our own. Or we will take our own rules and convert them to the talking heads. Either way. Okay yeah I need to come back to this one after some reading. There is more here I just need to get at it. I also want a pretzle.

Keeping my Promises

Media Dogmaists and you

Or perhaps you are one of them. It is hard to say. See there is this piece of convetional wisdom that "the media" is this all encompassing urentity which controls "the masses". This is an argument that for a long time I agreed with and even advanced every so often. Then... I started to make arguments that advanced things like personal responcibility, and I started to break away from the idea of reffering to people as empty souless masses and I started to recognize them more as people. More and more the arguments for media dogmaism began to fall by the wayside further and further until now I am on the other side of the argument. The problem is that I didn't take the rest of the world with me and I can't do my outer church politics love fest when I have people still believing that we are a homogenious mass of that all think/believe the same thing and that it is the media that makes us this way. I realize now that I can describe the media's eddects in terms of my own theory, and I might either do that later as part of a larger post where I talk aobut the catholic church along with it. Still we need to do some generalized practical work, and flying off on my own little thing is appealing but I'll wait a little bit before doing so.

I need to repaint my nails. TThere are three of us again which means no more pots and pans. Don't worry that's code for something, if you were menat to know you'll know.

First a linguistic approch. THe phrase "Media control". Meida control it is one of those things oh man for now on I am spelling media as Medea because that is really cool. Medea control, is one of those concepts that we don't even question anymore. The medea gives out information, people absorb this infomation as fact and they don't form their own opinions, instead their opinions comes from the "dark part" of the medea. Reductive? No not really that is how these people believe the world works. There is this fundamental belief that other people all think diffrently and by diffrently not at all. However, in terms of people and their responces, the media controls NOTHING. Nothing at all. They do not have mind control lasers, they do not beam information directly into people's heads, they don't even force us to watch. No. What the media does is influence people's views.

Yeah that may not seem like such a big deal. However it is. I don't think there is a big fancy latin term for it. BUT it is a logical fallicy. Or I suppose more accuratly it is a rhetorical trick. Eiher way it is one of the lower of the blows. See by using the word control it adds an extra sense of urgency to the arguement that simply isn't present when we use a term like influence even though influence is the more accurate term. Control is one person asserting their will over another suplanting desires and free will. That is what control is. Control isn't a narrowing of options it is me telling you what it is you will do. Control is hot. The media no more controls what people think and believe any more than video games lead to violent behavior. You can tell you can watch yourself a little Glenn Beck Marathon and not think he is right once.

If you hadn't guessed it the video game thing is part of my next point. See this is another fallicy which does have a fancy name but I can't remember what it is. I also don't feel like looking it up. See this presupposes that you believe that the media isn't a major influence in violent behavior. If you think violent media CAUSES violent behavior see the above section. Enough on that topic. Behavior, and beliefs are two different things but they are indeed closely linked. Lots of people behave based on their beliefs, you know how that goes.

Now I'd use these two arguments to form an ideological wedge which I can then use to pry their argument open and I can begin pulling out all the garbage that they have had rammed into their heads from... you know I have no idea where it comes from.

As a brief aside the idea of media control is actually really simplistic. This is because it is so rarely challanged. I mean the only people who would stick up for the media are people in the media or drones. Drones are awesome but should generally be written up as either special cases or lost causes. You essentially have to deprogram these people which is a fascinating process, but it is also something I've never managed to successfully do. I've come close, but man it is rough going. Anyway, no forget the anyway I just sort of airdropped drones in without explaining what is going on lets get to that.

Back when nintendo was a real company we called them Nintendbots. They are the people who get violent during the coke vs. Pepsi debat, and heaven forbid you run into one of them while you are trying to talk about something real. These are the drones. People who have entirely surrendered themselves to whatever dogma happens to catch their atension. They are big, loud, kind of scary, and they will whole hearted believe just about anything no matter how utterly insane it is. These are the people that media dogmaists end up pointing at the most. They do present a tricky thing to work around. One thing that is important to do is to remeber that these people have always excisted. THere has pretty much always been an entity out there telling people what to think. The easiest and most famous example of this starts with a C and ends in atholic church. Sure sure religion blah blah blah. I am willing to say that the catholic church used religion as a convient vehicle to get its message acrost without being argued with. The media just had to develope some really interesting tools.

I think I got mos of this down and taken care of. One of the things I need to address, is something that actually came out of left field for me, and that is the unifying effect of the internet. The funny thing about this argument is that it, it, god I actually don't know where to begin because it is so perfect. So utterly perfect that you can't even begin to imagine it. The argument as presented is that the internet acts as a unifying force which allows fringe groups to gather together under one banner. I'm not sure where it came from or how but it caught me off gaurd with how utterly wrong that statement is and how utterly perfect it is for my point.

The internet here died and I forgot how much I love notpad. Then I just fixed it! Still love note pad. Anyway...

The internet as a unfying force? Are you seriouse? That is about as far away from the truth as you can possibly get in terms of what the internet does. As a communication platform, it generally is a spectacular failure on a grand scale. Take look at the evolution of blogger, which came from livejornal, and before that the personal webpage. Lets face it right now I am just a little bit better than a talking head. See you can leave a comment or something, but there is no gaurntee I'll read it. Actually FYI I get no notiication what so ever when people leave a comment so sometimes months will go by before I will see it. The communication here is nearly entirely one way. There are forums, but lets face it forums are more people shouting their opionons next to each other rather than to each other. There isn't enough of a dialouge, and even when there is, the conversation is rife with things like misinterpretation, people reading to fast, or even people no teading the entire post without thinking. Aim and other chat programs don't really do much better in this regard. Esentially communication over the internet is just like comunication in real life, it is flawed, people don't listen,there is an over excitment to express one's own views rather than to deal with the ones at hand, and actual conncetion is exceedingly rare. The internet is not a solution. It is a tool, just like the rest of "the media".

With the expetion of the drones, people cherry pick what they believe and what they don't. They form their opinions because they agree with what they hear or they see no reason to disagree with it.

This blog became ramble tastic but I enjoyed writting it, I got a better handle on what I want to say for a later date. I need to dig out my copy of philosphical investigations and really put some weight behind this.

Here's how just from memory. See there are the language games... hrm I'm gonna break this off into a new post though.