Blessed are the Poll-Makers

"hey man, let's all lose out bearings!"

let's find them

infinite feedback loop regression; I fought the board and the board won

unless I withhold my vote, but then I have already posted, see

each of these options could be easily given a contemporary substitute.

i feel like this sums up the spirit of a swathe of ILX, many of my own contributions included.

Torn between nationalisation, spaghetti, and thermonuclear war. I'd only truly desire the latter if nationalisation and spaghetti became permanently unobtainable.

opinion justified through boredom, obv. but what a feeble use of boredom.

voted brigitte bardo pond, the old nazi

and this is also how The News works. this week, you're invited to play fantasy Pope manager.

i keep falling asleep at my desk no matter how early i go to bed. what's up with that?

vague otm

this represents a paradoxical moment of choice between choice and pure aesthetic receptivity

7.Haven't you ever felt like giving up reading the newspapers and putting your foot through the television? In that case, you have come to appreciate that:

a.The press, radio and television are the crassest vehicles for the lie. Not only do they push real problems (such as "How can we live better?", a question asked in concrete terms every single day) further into the background, but they also induce each private individual to identify with ready made images and to put himself, abstractly, in the shoes of a head of State or a filmstar, or a murderer or a victim... in short, they induce him to react to life as if he were someone whom he is not. The images which rule us mark the success of that which is not ourselves, which haunts us out of ourselves; of that which transforms us into objects to be categorised, labelled and hierarchised in keeping with the usages of the general commodity system.
b.There is a vocabulary at the disposal of hierarchical power. It is to be found not only in the information services and in advertising, in ready-made ideas and habits and conditioned behaviour, but also in any expression which does not pave the way for the revolution of everyday life, every expression which fails to serve our pleasures.
c.Every moment one works for the commodity system (i.e. most of one's time), imposes on us its representatives and images, it's meanings and vocabulary. This battery of ideas, identifications and modes of behaviour dictated by the need to accumulate and to replace the commodity over and over again, makes the SPECTACLE in which everyone plays a part he really fails to live and lives falsely that which he is not. That is why role-playing is living the lie, and mere existence a sickness without end.
d.The spectacle (ideologies, culture, art, roles, images, representations, commodity-words) embraces all those aspects of social behaviour by means of which men enter the commodity system and, by becoming subsistence objects, (commodities) conspire against themselves, renouncing the pleasure of really living for themselves and freely constructing their everyday lives for themselves.
e.We subsist amid a forest of images with which we are driven to identify. We act less and less for ourselves and more and more as puppets of abstractions that direct us according to the laws of the commodity system (i.e. profit and power).
f.Roles and ideologies may be favourable to, or hostile towards the ruling system... it makes no difference since they are part of the spectacle, part of the ruling system in either case. Only that which destroys commodity and its spectacle is revolutionary.

why did it fail? I believe this is why:

"hey, you're reading Debord, he's cool"

"yeah he's great, I find his ideas very influential on my own"

"ah so you're a Debordian"

"yes, I suppose I am"

i repurpose this from the grip of a relationship with alcohol which i imagine as liberating but is actually a reification of submission to commodity capital, what i imagined in booze as subversive of commodity - it's impermanence, it's destruction thru use - actually being the quintessence of commodity.

still i'd rather, on the whole, be drunk.

xp

tools don't fail, they just get left behind by people who fail whilst using them

the only way to win, as ever, is not to play. but to receive, with equanimity. trouble with damascene anticommodification railing is that it just ain't zen

drunkenness is a sublime iteration of commodity, as it is so unconscious to its own highly controlled circumstances

the trick is to adopt these tools subtly, not by force but by the immeasurable weight of passive ingrowth. which is why deleuze hit me harder, just seemed much more chill, war machine and all

not that debord isn't otm, because he is, tragically and horribly so

this is also why sports journalism and reportage is an infinitely nobler craft than its current affairs cousin - sports may be the spectacle but they are tangible and permit participation; their agenda is not opaque and they are to some extent aesthetic

yeah, and criticism that participates with its objects is a valid discourse. only score-keeping and the claims of objectivity are repressive mechanisms in and of themselves.

Is this the Spam Poetry thread?

no this is the glib celebration of the status quo thread

perhaps this season, I shall play cricket without caring of my personal score, just the aesthetic manner in which to address the ball and interact with the vast expanse available for penetration, my antagonist's cunning in preventing the bowler's best efforts breaching my defence

mark g, keeping us honest as ever

who can deny that a tendency toward the asymptote of pure aestheticism is a similarly asymptotic escape-route worthy of consideration?

Without scores it's even closer to masturbation than currently is the case

you say it, padre, like masturbation is a bad thing

sport as occasionally mutual masturbation is possibly its highest imaginable ideal

Mutual masturbation as sport several cuts above it tbh

there's an open goal in there somewhere. the taking of an open goal can be a pure aesthetic act, maybe the purest

nah scores in sports is fine, it was the scoring of the non-sporting that repelled me

but for the individual participating to play without a care for the score, that sounds like a fine thing

a chap could lose his bearings in weather like this

Scoring in football is vital as it tethers the formless-or-form-compromised expression of physical endeavour to a narrative of localised achievement and pride, a narrative which is largely organic, self-governing and difficult for the fingers of commerce to entirely corrupt, try as they might

mini-skirts!!!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

*bites nails*

I pressed the button for thermonuclear war

picked old people. considered spaghetti, tho.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Up with mini-skirts!

sex is the biggest sell, followed by apocalypse