I have a notion that both the ancient West and East experienced a chance to align with systems of thought that reject desire, either in part or whole. In the East, that was more successful and stuck around longer. Unfortunately for us, it remained a fringe notion (think how we would react to a modern Diogenes). However, we never completely forgot, flirting with similar ideas from the direction of Christian piety, the synthesis of Eastern thought that occurred in the counter-culture era, and the psychoanalytic frameworks of Lacan, Deleuze+Guattari, and others. Now that our desires are being exploited against us by the tech that mediates our very existence, it makes sense we would seek defense mechanisms. There's trillions of dollars of economic force out there creating, curating, and capturing desire. It's probably worth stepping back and asking how being embedded in that structure is actually affecting us and the degree it's aligned with our innate interests.

As a result, they mostly respond to efforts to reach a lay audience by distancing and criticizing. They are really harsh on the compromises inherent in meeting lay audiences where they are.

Consider the difference between. "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultry" and "you shouldn't kill or sleep with your neighbor's wife because both actions cause more harm than they provide benefit, which ought be our goal because the conclusions of such a cost/benefit analysis closely align to most people's natural sense of right and wrong". The former is a statement of morals. If you include the "...because God said so, and God is always right", then it becomes an ethical argument, like the second. The key is arguing the why down to axioms, and defending those axioms as superior to other axioms.

A self-help book like "How to win friends and influence people" provides rules to follow, to achieve a desired outcome, and attempts to explain why the rules work. It doesn't spend much, if any (it's been a while) energy arguing why you should want the desired outcome, or if the desired outcome is actually a good thing.

Narrative warfare is real. Be especially careful when it's something that conforms to your priors. The cost for agitprop is now effectively zero.

I think the more important question isn’t whether the prose sounds polished, but whether the situation described is plausible and whether the discussion that follows is useful. People are free to be skeptical; I’m mainly here to hear from those with relevant experience or practical advice.

Being careful about narratives cuts both ways, including being careful not to dismiss difficult stories solely because they’re uncomfortable or well-articulated.

You win, MS. I thought I could keep a Windows box around for the occasional game and as an emergency backup for when I need random peripherals to "just work". I give up. The current Windows box (which I barely use anyway) is my last one.

I put Arch on it last week and couldn't be happier. My 3080 is working just fine. Rocket League is even better on Proton than native Windows; turns out Java MC is a nice switch from bedrock, and my kid that I play with agrees, so we'll play that version together instead.

I have a tiny partition with unregistered Win 11 just for Roblox now. I tired to put MC on there, in case we wanted to do bedrock once in a while, but now the MC launcher is, for some reason, tightly coupled to the Microsoft Store, and if you're not logged into that, you can't play MC, not even the Java Edition, so that's the end of Windows MC for me.

Microsoft is user hostile and all but there is a good product in there somewhere

It is like the old “Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing”.

Windows only costs what-ever-portion-of-you-new-machine's-price-it-is⁰, if your time, privacy¹, attention², and just your general desire to be given some respect³, are all worth nothing.

I kept Windows on my main home PC when 10 tuned up (I very nearly switched then) because of games & DayJob compatibility, and a side-order of laziness. These days I game very little⁴, DayJob stuff never touches my personal equipment, and panel-beating Windows into being less annoying is much more effort than Linux on the desktop⁵, so that is the way I've gone.

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[0] Very few people buy Windows directly. Standard UK pricing for Win11 Home is £119, but I doubt more than a few people pay close to that much.

[1] Even if you pay for Enterprise licensing, I'd easily believe that without jumping a few hoops there are still potential issues here for the truly concerned.

[2] Adverts on the 'king start menu and elsewhere? Get stuffed. No, I didn't want to consider installing “Keeper of the Golden Bollock”, or whatever that game was that popped up as an option when I was starting keepass on the [day job] laptop the other day…

[3] I consider the pop-ups and other nagging inserts, for adverts and extolling the virtues of CoPilot & other things, that only have “yes” and “maybe later” buttons with no “leave me alone, I know it exists, when/if I want to look at it I'll let you know” option, as signs of disrespect.

[4] That industry has pushed me away with irritations too, and I have significant other hobbies now.

[5] Linux has been my core OS server-side for decades, but aside from my University years and the netbook era that MS killed, I've not used it significantly elsewhere⁶ for long periods.

[6] caveat: I'm counting Android as different enough to be considered something else, more so as the walls around that garden are slowly inching up.

I have two perspectives on this, as a user and as a Windows admin. And I apologize in advance that this turned into a bit of a rant.

As a user all these things are at best annoyances to work around and at worst borderline malicious. You can easily remove the ads in the Start menu, uninstall the built-in apps you don't need and turn off the things you don't want. Sure upgrading to Pro offers more options to turn off some (but not all) of the bloat in Windows. However a significant portion of the tweaks needed to turn things off either needs Pro to get access to local group policy or diving into the registry to adjust dozens of values, and this is not something I consider accessible by average users. And there are some things like the constant reminders to sign-in with a Microsoft account that cannot be disabled in any way. I am aware that there are de-bloat scripts which preform these actions automatically for the less technical users, but asking users to run random scripts as the first thing to do on a new system to fix issues sets a bad precedent and is not something that I think should be widely encouraged since that behavior can be easily exploited since the users that need those kinds of tools may not fully appreciate the consequences of their actions.

With regards to malicious behavior take OneDrive. By default OneDrive will start on login then prompt the user with a system notification to sign-in to OneDrive to backup their files and the only options it gives the user is to either say "Yes" or "Remind me later". The only options to stop this are either to uninstall OneDrive or apply a setting via GPO to stop OneDrive from generating network traffic until a user signs-in. And in the security center if you don't sign-in to OneDrive it will always display a warning that your files are not protected because you are not using OneDrive, and as far as I know there is no way to disable that on editions other than Enterprise even if you uninstall OneDrive. For the average user the easiest way to make these annoyances go away is to sign-in to OneDrive. I cannot tell you how many people have come to me complaining that they signed in to OneDrive and now all their files have disappeared because OneDrive moved everything to a different folder then removed all the local copies of files that had been synced to the cloud and because their computer was not connected to the Internet they could not access the files that now lived only in the cloud.

I think OneDrive is a prime example of the issues I have overall with Windows these days, it effectively gives the user as little agency as possible in using their system by constantly nagging them to enable things they may not want or even understand with the only options presented being to just do what it tells you.

As an admin I have a much poorer opinion of the work required to completely de-bloat a "clean" Windows install. In addition to all of the above let's consider the Start menu. In a Windows environment it is not practical to manually remove the offending shortcuts in the Start menu since those are set in each user profile and I am not going to follow every user around to manually clean up their Start menus every time they login to a new computer. Pro editions of Windows 11 actually do have the ability to customize what shortcuts appear in the Start menu by default for new user accounts and this does allow for removing the ads. However that particular Start menu layout policy can only be set by an MDM, it seems Microsoft has made the decision to not provide a group policy option for applying a Start menu layout in Windows 11 like they did with Windows 10. This means if you are exclusively managing Windows with an on-prem Active Directory you can't remove the ads from the Start menu using a managed policy.

You can upgrade to Enterprise which does have a simple option to turn off all the consumer features, however I know of exactly zero businesses that will pay the significant extra for Enterprise just to disable these annoyances that everyone is already used to.

Microsoft has turned Windows into a tool that does everything in its power funnel users to Microsoft cloud services. The user experience is being actively degraded with all the nagging and forced usage of their services such that the path of least resistance to get rid of all that is to give up and just sign-in with a cloud account. Now to be clear, I don't have a problem with Microsoft offering these services and I can see how they can be useful things for some people, the problem I have is the way they are going about it.

It is great that we have so many people working to make sure we can de-bloat Windows and turn it back into a usable platform for those of us who don't want any of these forced features. But at the end of the day this is software that we are paying for that does not respect its users.

Hegel declared the Cartesian cognito can't exist in the singular. Lacan, Deleuze, Husserl, and many others said the same, that the subject is a function of its dialectic with the other. Dasein is Mitsein. There is no complete subject, floating in space by himself. Without an other, the subject cannot exist, at best becoming an object, at worst psychotic. Either way, isolation is a process towards annihilation.

If you're smart, find other smart people for authentic interaction. Likewise if you're not smart, though the problem there is easier for statistical reasons. Find them, turn off your parasocial pacifiers, and talk. You'll know it when you've found someone compatible, because you'll be able to emulate their mind, and they yours. It's not just a nice to have, but a need, a necessary component for survival. Without it, the sane you will cease to be, replaced by a zombie or a madman.

For example, Lacan is given a good spanking by Sokal both in his paper Transgressing the Boundaries and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in Intellectual Impostures. Lacan looks like a complete fool if this is your only exposure to his thought. Again, Sokal is not wrong on his criticisms in these excerpts. Lacan definitely uses mathematical terms incorrectly. He was making an attempt to formalize his field (psychoanalysis) by skimming textbooks/papers on topology, knot theory, and other mathematical subfields and, from the perspective of someone who uses those terms for precise things, rather haphazardly putting them together. His "mathemes" go through many updates throughout his career, getting ever more complex. Later, Lacan almost certainly was suffering from senility (as most of us will by age 80), and got rather obsessed with the fake math side of his own work.

However, if you actually read Lacan, this is a miniscule and often completely ignored side of his work. No Lacanian psychoanalyst is filling their notebooks with fake math formulas and computing what's wrong with your relationship with the objet petit a. They're metaphors, shorthand, or diagrammatic expressions of what he's really saying in the ~10k pages of his massive corpus. Many of us use compsci terms all the time to express things metaphorically (e.g., being out of bandwidth or disk space when we really mean real world time and mental memory). Think about it this way, and Lacan becomes a source of manifest brilliance, as I discovered only way later in life.

All that said, the critical theory and cultural studies space of the 90s was indeed a cesspool, living in the shadow of former intellectual greats. The great flood of mediocre intellects was starting to bear its rotten fruit, but the truly fatal problem was the politicization. Sokal only addressed this some, making surface-level wrongness his focus in some kind of defense of his own field's purity. Politics poisoned critical theory just like it did wherever else a field became subservient to the street-level goals of a political monoculture. Mindless foot soldiers, bleating about race and gender, capable of only bumper-sticker-length thoughts, make poor philosophers, it turns out. That should've been the core of his point, and could've been helpful framing for a countercurrent against it. Leftist intellectuals, or what was left of them, could've cleaned up their own space, and put the people like this article's author in a quiet corner where they belong. (Note how even here, he can't help but get sucked into the immediacy of the left-reactionary political zeitgeist; the spittle being anything but subtextual.) Instead it came to its inevitable, expensive conclusion of having the decolonization of the university from political imperialists done for them by their equally unthinking opponents.

1. He claims to not to want to be understood too quickly. If you believe that, you might say he's forcing the reader (or emerging psychoanalyst) to not just take his ideas as a simple list of facts to be memorized. He often rants about other fields being reductive in the face of necessary nuance. You might also justify this by saying precisely that perspective is necessary in psychoanalysis, with the human mind (particularly the suffering one) in all its unexplored complexity being its target. I'm of two minds on this: I see his point, but there are certainly times when such is an obstacle. Of course, that's if you believe him in the first place. He also said he was something of the master, and his audience the acolytes. He was trying to build a new school under his system, after all.

2. Lacan's ideas are indeed complex and extremely tightly interconnected (or polyvalent, as he likes to say). The graph of Lacanian thought has a lot of nodes (ideas), and an extremely high number of edges (relationships between ideas) per node, and thus very high graph density. If you think about it from that perspective, how does one present such a oeuvre in the linear form like essays or speeches? Further complexifying things is that he was building this in situ, his Seminars being akin to live-blogging that development. He often asks his audience if there's an expert on a particular topic and if so, to let him know about some detail. He never wrote a comprehensive final form of Lacanian thought, so any secondary texts you read will be that author's interpretation. All this creates quite the conundrum for anyone getting started.

If you want condensed info and clarity, go for a secondary source (Bruce Fink being my favorite), while noting the above. I'd also say that, like Hegel, Lacan has something of a language of his own, one you can learn. If you find his ideas compelling (I do, and have benefited from them in my personal life greatly) you should still read him as a primary source. Even if you do the actual learning via other sources, I'd assert that Lacan is one of the last of the true Renaissance men, pulling in ideas from everywhere and everywhen, and I also find reading him an expanding experience just from that perspective.

I appreciate the mention of Bruce Fink, as his name is new to me. Any works of his or others you might recommend to me would be duly noted.

Here was my early Lacan workflow: Lots of Freud essays (you need to know Freud's major ideas cold), The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan by McGowan, The Lacanian Subject by Fink, Seminar VII, Seminar XI.

I've read a lot of other stuff since then, but this path into Lacan worked for me. By the time you've read these, you'll know where to go next on your own. You'll also know pretty early in it whether Lacan is for you. Also, if you don't like Freud (and I don't mean disagree with him, but dislike the overall approach), you can safely stop there.

I've tried to listen to ŽIžek, but he sounds like nonsense to me. Like exactly what Sokal was taking the Mick out of.

Note how the author can't help but take sides on every political signifier he references. He supposedly wanted to write about the Sokal affair from his side, but the essay ends up being a polemic deeply in the now, to the degree that the documentary effort is substantively diminished. That's what papers in his field read like in the 1990s, and still do to this day.

yes, to me this is not about the Sokal affair, it's absolutely only about Gaza/Palestine, and how even Sokal itself is a hero of the cause, and how he used a way to advocate for higher standards in social science even if some thinks of this way as not ethically spotless, but everything is all right after all because they were doing politics back then (and the whole construct conundrum was already put to rest by Professor Fuss decades ago, basically right after the affair, he-he), and so on and so on, politics on the occasion of the anniversary of the affair.

that said now I'm trying to get a copy (or at least some response to) Fuss' 19 page book (!) about essentialism/anti-essentialism. sounds interesting. (really shows how academia needs to shut up when they cannot even their their own theory promulgated in their own circles, and come to some working conclusion, instead of just playing the forever armchair quarterback and vanguard at the same time.)

He was basically a cult leader. There seemed to be something going on where people are infinitely forgiving of French intellectuals (and other continental philosophers) because they are the most skilled people in the world at having infinitely complicated writing styles.

Other episodes in this series include "Althusser kills his wife and communists keep admiringly quoting him", "every 70s French intellectual signs an open letter endorsing pedophilia", and "every department at Cambridge endorses giving Derrida an honorary philosophy degree /except/ the philosophers".

I still read him because his ideas are brilliant and helped me in innumerable ways. He's dead now and his books can't hurt me. They're not even ideological, so you can't make the same case as you could for avoiding, say, a certain Austrian political theorist. However, if we somehow resurrect Lacan, I won't be lending him any first editions from my collection.

If only you hadn't put "political" there I was going to think of a joke about Wittgenstein. Who was possibly the grumpiest Austrian in the world at the time, even considering the other one.

We had a system of overproduction of sentient office equipment, who waste their time on pointless Zoom calls and sending emails that no one reads. That had to end sooner or later, and was already about to collapse on its own. BS job holders are miserable anyway. Let's give these people purpose (closing the gap between activity and tangible output), free them from debt-slavery, and fix all the broken infrastructure around us.

I know it’s taboo to claim anything positive about any Musk company.

But Optimus is coming. To fold my laundry and do my dishes. And maybe one day strip some wires.

They'll win in the short term, due to the tyranny of convenience. Then, when all economic value has been extracted from them and the possibility of future value made nil, they'll lose. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll win though.

The death drive is Freudian, not Jungian. However, it might be very relevant here. Freud's conception of it would include passively accepting death. As you say, by the time the prisoner is about to be executed, they're often resigned to their fate, the death drive having overcome the id long ago. Contrast with massacres where the victims weren't expecting it (the Malmedy massacre of freshly captured troops comes to mind from the same era) and you see people trying to run away once it starts.

Lacan called himself Freudian, but I think his conception links the death drive with active desire, seeking a form of self-destructive pleasure by action. I recall from Écrits that he links it to masochism, for example, calling it an expression of transgressive jouissance.

> In “Colonialism from a European Perspective,” Kojève argued that the industrial nations of Europe should give financial aid to the “underdeveloped countries” that were their current or former colonies. Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and Bataille’s theory of expenditure, Kojève called this “giving colonialism.”

Bataille did suggest this in his book The Accursed Share, specifically that the US should give all its excess wealth to India "without reciprocation". He posits that energy (wealth) that isn't used for maintenance or growth can only be wasted on war or luxuries like monuments, calling that wealth the book's namesake.

What he misses is that there are other options, like investing in research which can open up new avenues for growth, or hoarding commodities (thereby storing the wealth) like China is doing with rare earths. Whether either of those (or other options) is a good idea is a separate question, of course.

This is just a personal take, but I consider this in conflict with (my interpretation of) Bataille's famous essay, The Solar Anus. Perhaps if he was able to conceive of the above, that wouldn't be the case.

rough night? He's talking about what we would call "soft power" today. But yeah, we can also do research and hoard commodities, they probably aren't mutually exclusive.

In short, by defining the other, one demarcates the boundary of the self and defines ones identity. Self-identity necessitates the other, in its self-conception and interdependence of the latter's existence. To be reductionist, what does it even mean to be oneself if there is no other?