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u/HermesOTT

r/DarkPsychology101 r/Gnostic r/Pessimism r/TwoandaHalfMen r/Jung r/Anarcho_Capitalism r/Existentialism r/conspiracy_commons r/Phenomenology
There is no Hormuz crisis
▲ 10 r/conspiracy_commons

There is no Hormuz crisis

A crisis implies lack of control, but there is total control here.Israel, and its puppet Trump, want to keep Hormuz closed in order to increase momentum for the IMEC corridor, in which Israel will directly control the flow of Middle Eastern oil to Europe via pipeline flow through Haifa.

Everything else is noise to distract the masses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Middle_East%E2%80%93Europe_Economic_Corridor

https://preview.redd.it/uqlb12qqg0jh1.png?width=1265&format=png&auto=webp&s=991b5a2416a86675bb7e03519d1352802215b87f

reddit.com
u/HermesOTT — 7 days ago
▲ 21 r/Phenomenology+5 crossposts

Ecclesiastes as the First Phenomenological Record of Life Under a God of Totality

This essay argues that the oscillation running through Ecclesiastes - praised by some as literary paradox, dismissed by others as unresolved pessimism - is the existential, phenomenological record of someone performing the crucifixion of opposites under a god-image that contains evil without the vocabulary to name what it contains. Qohelet is stranded between a polytheistic solution no longer available within the monotheistic tradition he was writing inside, and an individuation vocabulary not yet invented, which is why the text can only oscillate rather than resolve.

https://livingopposites.substack.com/p/the-earliest-crucifixion

u/HermesOTT — 13 days ago
▲ 5 r/Existentialism

The Observable Structure of Reality

“War is the father and king of all.” - Heraclitus

The testis produces hundreds of millions of spermatozoa in a single ejaculation, of which, if expelled during coitus, the overwhelming majority die within the vaginal and cervical environment within hours, destroyed by acidity, by the immune response of the female body treating them as foreign matter, by simple failure of motility, before a single one reaches the fallopian tube. Of those that reach the tube, most swim in the wrong direction or arrive too late or too early relative to ovulation. Of the few that reach the egg, only one (if that) fuses with it, and the moment it does, the egg's membrane changes chemically to block every other cell from entering, sealing the fate of the rest, which disperse and dissolve.

The fertilized cell divides. As it divides it begins to differentiate, and differentiation proceeds by selective destruction: cells that are overproduced in the forming neural tube are kiIled by programmed internal collapse so that the tube closes correctly; the webbing between what will become fingers is present in early development and is then eliminated, cell by cell, so that the fingers separate; the tail structure present in the early human embryo regresses and its cells die and are reabsorbed; roughly half of the neurons generated in the developing brain are eliminated before birth, pruned because the connections they might have made are not the connections the organism will use. None of this is malfunction, this is what forming a body consists of.

A large fraction of these fertilized eggs never progress to term. Many fail to implant at all and are shed, unnoticed, with the next menstrual cycle. Others implant and are lost weeks later, chromosomally incompatible with continued division, expelled by the same body that received them. Others survive to a birth that endangers the child, the mother, or both, through processes - hemorrhage, cord compression, prolonged obstruction - that predate any medical intervention capable of addressing them and that kiIled mothers and infants in large numbers for the entire span of human existence prior to the last century.

The infant that survives birth is sustained by the transfer of nutrients extracted by the mother's body from other organisms: plants uprooted from soil, mid-cycle in their own growth, or animals slaughtered by exsanguination, a process which in an animal with an intact nervous system produces a measurable and audible response to pain for some duration before death. The child, as it grows, will itself consume other organisms directly - plants harvested before they complete their own reproductive cycle, animals bred, confined, and kilIed at a schedule set by the consuming species rather than by the natural lifespan of the consumed one - at a volume that, aggregated across a population of billions, reduces the number of wild species and the total population of individual organisms within those species that the earth is able to sustain.

Every cell in the child's body will die and be replaced on its own schedule throughout the child's life: skin cells within weeks, the lining of the gut within days, red blood cells within months, until by most estimates the great majority of the cells composing the body have been replaced multiple times over a normal lifespan, none of it experienced, none of it consented to, all of it required for continued function. Every day, the immune system identifies and destroys cells within the body itself: cells infected by viruses, cells that have accumulated mutations, and cells judged incompatible with continued function. The continued existence of the organism therefore depends not merely upon preservation, but upon continual internal elimination. A cell that refuses the programmed death required of the organism ceases to participate in differentiation and instead becomes malignant. Continued life of the organism therefore depends not upon the universal preservation of every cell, but upon the correct death of particular cells. Across generations, every lineage continues only because some organisms reproduce while countless others do not. Whatever account one gives of the mechanisms involved, no lineage persists through the preservation of every individual. Continuity itself is inseparable from selection.

The child's body is not solely its own. Bacterial and viral cells inhabiting its gut, skin, and other surfaces outnumber the child's own cells, and these populations are born, compete, starve, and are kiIled by the immune system continuously, at a rate exceeding anything occurring among the child's own cells - yet the child cannot digest food, synthesize certain vitamins, or develop a properly functioning immune system without them. The boundary between self and other, at this scale, does not hold. What persists as 'the child' is itself a sustained population-level die-off occurring across species lines within a single body.

The child, in turn, differentiates by choice as well as by biology: this friend and not that one, this belief and not that one, this trade and not that one, this mate and not another, each choice foreclosing the branch not taken, and forecloses further by aging into a body whose own cells begin to fail at differentiation correctly, accumulating errors that either kiIl the organism through malfunction or are caught and kiIled by the immune system before they can, a process that itself eventually slows and permits what it once prevented.

At a scale larger than any individual life, the fossil record documents multiple prior extinctions in which the large majority of species then living, predator and prey and neither, were eliminated - not by any moral failure of any organism involved, not by war or sin or the misuse of will, but by asteroid impact, atmospheric change, and the ordinary turnover of geological time, indifferent to whatever consciousness, however limited, any of the eliminated organisms possessed.

At every scale examined - the cell, the organism, the species, the ecosystem, the planet across geological time - the process observed is the same process: differentiation proceeding by selection, selection proceeding by the death or foreclosure of what is not selected, and continuation of any given form purchased at the direct expense of some other form that does not continue.

Beyond any single planet's history, every star eventually exhausts the hydrogen that sustains its fusion. Depending on its mass, it swells, collapses, or detonates, and in doing so it sterilizes or destroys whatever orbited it - any planet, and anything living on that planet, regardless of what had developed there, however far, in whatever direction, or for however long. This is not a rare catastrophe befalling one unlucky system, it is the ordinary, universal endpoint awaiting every star, including the one this planet orbits, which will in time expand and end whatever remains here, having done so to uncounted other systems already, unwitnessed, before this one existed at all.

At the furthest scale physics currently describes, the universe itself is expanding at a rate that carries galaxies apart faster than light can cross the growing distance between them, a process that ends, by current models, in a state in which no further energy differential exists anywhere to sustain motion, structure, or change of any kind - a uniform, cooling stillness in which nothing further happens, ever again, to anyone or anything.

The question, therefore, is not whether destruction exists. That is empirically obvious. The question is whether destruction is accidental to reality or constitutive of it. Given this as the actual, observable operation of the world at every scale, from the sperm cell to the extinction event to the death of stars to the eventual stillness awaiting the universe itself - the ancient image of the Ouroboros rendered in biology, ecology, and cosmology alike - how does one account for it under the image of a single, all-good God, who is said to have made it, to preside over it, and to love equally everything within it? One must either conclude that the world was not created by an omnipotent God, that such a God lacks complete power over creation, that creation itself genuinely includes destruction within the divine act, or that the observable structure of reality is radically misleading about its own nature. These possibilities are not equally compatible with every God-image.

If love is a property of the divine, it must be a love that includes the death of sperm cells and embryos as part of the mechanism, the predation of organisms as part of the process, and the eventual heat death of the universe as the endpoint. This is not a love that the human tradition has ever described as 'love' in any recognizable sense - it is the love of a process that consumes its own creations, at every scale, without exception. This is not a new observation. The Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Greek tragedians all wrestled with the same problem: the world is not organized around justice or love. The Christian privatio boni was a late, forced solution to a problem that the tradition itself had already articulated. A defender of the privatio boni may reply that these processes belong not to creation itself but to the Fall, yet this merely relocates the question. If creation was capable of becoming a reality whose observable structure operates through continual selection and foreclosure, then that possibility already belonged to the created order itself.

Under this description, 'good' cannot mean 'that which is preserved' and 'evil' cannot mean 'that which is destroyed' because preservation and destruction are the same process, differentiated only by scale and perspective. The sperm cell that dies is not evil; the egg that selects one is not good. The embryo that fails is not punished; the one that survives is not rewarded. The star that explodes is not destroyed; its elements are dispersed to form new systems. The process itself distinguishes only between persistence and non-persistence, it does not distinguish justice from injustice, innocence from guilt, virtue from vice. Those distinctions arise only when conscious beings evaluate what has occurred. Value is not written into the process itself; it is a judgment made by consciousness within the process - which may be the only thing the process could not generate on its own, and the only reason any of this was ever witnessed rather than merely occurring. This is what the God-image of totality actually looks like: a process that produces and destroys without preference, that selects and forecloses without judgment, that creates through destruction and destroys through creation. The privatio boni is a refusal to look at this directly. The Abraxian position is the choice to look at it without flinching, and to bear the weight of what is seen. This is not an argument for despair, it is an argument against false consolation. The universe is not organized to provide comfort, and the attempt to force it into a redemptive framework is an act of psychic narrowing against the overwhelming weight of evidence.

At every scale examined - the cell, the organism, the species, the ecosystem, the planet, the star, the universe - the process observed is the same process: differentiation proceeding by selection, selection proceeding by the death or foreclosure of what is not selected, and continuation of any given form purchased at the direct expense of some other form that does not continue. This is what existence consists of. The God-image that can accommodate this reality is not the all-good Father who loves everything equally and will someday redeem it all, it is the God of totality, who contains both creation and destruction, selection and foreclosure, life and death, as the same process, without preference, without judgment, without redemption, and without end.

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u/HermesOTT — 1 month ago
▲ 1 r/Pessimism

The Observable Structure of Reality

“War is the father and king of all.” - Heraclitus

The testis produces hundreds of millions of spermatozoa in a single ejaculation, of which, if expelled during coitus, the overwhelming majority die within the vaginal and cervical environment within hours, destroyed by acidity, by the immune response of the female body treating them as foreign matter, by simple failure of motility, before a single one reaches the fallopian tube. Of those that reach the tube, most swim in the wrong direction or arrive too late or too early relative to ovulation. Of the few that reach the egg, only one (if that) fuses with it, and the moment it does, the egg's membrane changes chemically to block every other cell from entering, sealing the fate of the rest, which disperse and dissolve.

The fertilized cell divides. As it divides it begins to differentiate, and differentiation proceeds by selective destruction: cells that are overproduced in the forming neural tube are killed by programmed internal collapse so that the tube closes correctly; the webbing between what will become fingers is present in early development and is then eliminated, cell by cell, so that the fingers separate; the tail structure present in the early human embryo regresses and its cells die and are reabsorbed; roughly half of the neurons generated in the developing brain are eliminated before birth, pruned because the connections they might have made are not the connections the organism will use. None of this is malfunction, this is what forming a body consists of.

A large fraction of these fertilized eggs never progress to term. Many fail to implant at all and are shed, unnoticed, with the next menstrual cycle. Others implant and are lost weeks later, chromosomally incompatible with continued division, expelled by the same body that received them. Others survive to a birth that endangers the child, the mother, or both, through processes - hemorrhage, cord compression, prolonged obstruction - that predate any medical intervention capable of addressing them and that killed mothers and infants in large numbers for the entire span of human existence prior to the last century.

The infant that survives birth is sustained by the transfer of nutrients extracted by the mother's body from other organisms: plants uprooted from soil, mid-cycle in their own growth, or animals slaughtered by exsanguination, a process which in an animal with an intact nervous system produces a measurable and audible response to pain for some duration before death. The child, as it grows, will itself consume other organisms directly - plants harvested before they complete their own reproductive cycle, animals bred, confined, and killed at a schedule set by the consuming species rather than by the natural lifespan of the consumed one - at a volume that, aggregated across a population of billions, reduces the number of wild species and the total population of individual organisms within those species that the earth is able to sustain.

Every cell in the child's body will die and be replaced on its own schedule throughout the child's life: skin cells within weeks, the lining of the gut within days, red blood cells within months, until by most estimates the great majority of the cells composing the body have been replaced multiple times over a normal lifespan, none of it experienced, none of it consented to, all of it required for continued function. Every day, the immune system identifies and destroys cells within the body itself: cells infected by viruses, cells that have accumulated mutations, and cells judged incompatible with continued function. The continued existence of the organism therefore depends not merely upon preservation, but upon continual internal elimination. A cell that refuses the programmed death required of the organism ceases to participate in differentiation and instead becomes malignant. Continued life of the organism therefore depends not upon the universal preservation of every cell, but upon the correct death of particular cells. Across generations, every lineage continues only because some organisms reproduce while countless others do not. Whatever account one gives of the mechanisms involved, no lineage persists through the preservation of every individual. Continuity itself is inseparable from selection.

The child's body is not solely its own. Bacterial and viral cells inhabiting its gut, skin, and other surfaces outnumber the child's own cells, and these populations are born, compete, starve, and are killed by the immune system continuously, at a rate exceeding anything occurring among the child's own cells - yet the child cannot digest food, synthesize certain vitamins, or develop a properly functioning immune system without them. The boundary between self and other, at this scale, does not hold. What persists as 'the child' is itself a sustained population-level die-off occurring across species lines within a single body.

The child, in turn, differentiates by choice as well as by biology: this friend and not that one, this belief and not that one, this trade and not that one, this mate and not another, each choice foreclosing the branch not taken, and forecloses further by aging into a body whose own cells begin to fail at differentiation correctly, accumulating errors that either kill the organism through malfunction or are caught and killed by the immune system before they can, a process that itself eventually slows and permits what it once prevented.

At a scale larger than any individual life, the fossil record documents multiple prior extinctions in which the large majority of species then living, predator and prey and neither, were eliminated - not by any moral failure of any organism involved, not by war or sin or the misuse of will, but by asteroid impact, atmospheric change, and the ordinary turnover of geological time, indifferent to whatever consciousness, however limited, any of the eliminated organisms possessed.

At every scale examined - the cell, the organism, the species, the ecosystem, the planet across geological time - the process observed is the same process: differentiation proceeding by selection, selection proceeding by the death or foreclosure of what is not selected, and continuation of any given form purchased at the direct expense of some other form that does not continue.

Beyond any single planet's history, every star eventually exhausts the hydrogen that sustains its fusion. Depending on its mass, it swells, collapses, or detonates, and in doing so it sterilizes or destroys whatever orbited it - any planet, and anything living on that planet, regardless of what had developed there, however far, in whatever direction, or for however long. This is not a rare catastrophe befalling one unlucky system, it is the ordinary, universal endpoint awaiting every star, including the one this planet orbits, which will in time expand and end whatever remains here, having done so to uncounted other systems already, unwitnessed, before this one existed at all.

At the furthest scale physics currently describes, the universe itself is expanding at a rate that carries galaxies apart faster than light can cross the growing distance between them, a process that ends, by current models, in a state in which no further energy differential exists anywhere to sustain motion, structure, or change of any kind - a uniform, cooling stillness in which nothing further happens, ever again, to anyone or anything.

The question, therefore, is not whether destruction exists. That is empirically obvious. The question is whether destruction is accidental to reality or constitutive of it. Given this as the actual, observable operation of the world at every scale, from the sperm cell to the extinction event to the death of stars to the eventual stillness awaiting the universe itself - the ancient image of the Ouroboros rendered in biology, ecology, and cosmology alike - how does one account for it under the image of a single, all-good God, who is said to have made it, to preside over it, and to love equally everything within it? One must either conclude that the world was not created by an omnipotent God, that such a God lacks complete power over creation, that creation itself genuinely includes destruction within the divine act, or that the observable structure of reality is radically misleading about its own nature. These possibilities are not equally compatible with every God-image.

If love is a property of the divine, it must be a love that includes the death of sperm cells and embryos as part of the mechanism, the predation of organisms as part of the process, and the eventual heat death of the universe as the endpoint. This is not a love that the human tradition has ever described as 'love' in any recognizable sense - it is the love of a process that consumes its own creations, at every scale, without exception. This is not a new observation. The Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Greek tragedians all wrestled with the same problem: the world is not organized around justice or love. The Christian privatio boni was a late, forced solution to a problem that the tradition itself had already articulated. A defender of the privatio boni may reply that these processes belong not to creation itself but to the Fall, yet this merely relocates the question. If creation was capable of becoming a reality whose observable structure operates through continual selection and foreclosure, then that possibility already belonged to the created order itself.

Under this description, 'good' cannot mean 'that which is preserved' and 'evil' cannot mean 'that which is destroyed' because preservation and destruction are the same process, differentiated only by scale and perspective. The sperm cell that dies is not evil; the egg that selects one is not good. The embryo that fails is not punished; the one that survives is not rewarded. The star that explodes is not destroyed; its elements are dispersed to form new systems. The process itself distinguishes only between persistence and non-persistence, it does not distinguish justice from injustice, innocence from guilt, virtue from vice. Those distinctions arise only when conscious beings evaluate what has occurred. Value is not written into the process itself; it is a judgment made by consciousness within the process - which may be the only thing the process could not generate on its own, and the only reason any of this was ever witnessed rather than merely occurring. This is what the God-image of totality actually looks like: a process that produces and destroys without preference, that selects and forecloses without judgment, that creates through destruction and destroys through creation. The privatio boni is a refusal to look at this directly. The Abraxian position is the choice to look at it without flinching, and to bear the weight of what is seen. This is not an argument for despair, it is an argument against false consolation. The universe is not organized to provide comfort, and the attempt to force it into a redemptive framework is an act of psychic narrowing against the overwhelming weight of evidence.

At every scale examined - the cell, the organism, the species, the ecosystem, the planet, the star, the universe - the process observed is the same process: differentiation proceeding by selection, selection proceeding by the death or foreclosure of what is not selected, and continuation of any given form purchased at the direct expense of some other form that does not continue. This is what existence consists of. The God-image that can accommodate this reality is not the all-good Father who loves everything equally and will someday redeem it all, it is the God of totality, who contains both creation and destruction, selection and foreclosure, life and death, as the same process, without preference, without judgment, without redemption, and without end.

From: https://livingopposites.substack.com/p/the-observable-structure-of-reality

u/HermesOTT — 1 month ago
▲ 17 r/Anarcho_Capitalism+1 crossposts

The Rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

This analysis argues that the DSA’s rise - driven by demographic shifts, economic concentration, and the failure of the Western redemptive egregore - is not an organic grassroots movement but the next iteration of controlled opposition. The DSA is permitted and amplified by the apex because it offers a redemptive container for popular resentment while remaining structurally incapable of threatening the apex itself. Its policies will follow the COVID template: concentrating wealth at the top, distributing a fraction to the lower classes, and eviscerating the upper-middle class.

https://livingopposites.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-democrat-socialists

u/HermesOTT — 13 days ago
▲ 3 r/Jung

Does Jung not discuss Ecclesiastes? Why not?

I know how much Jung focuses on the book of Job, using it as a way to promote the idea of an unconscious God who mankind brings consciousness to over time, yet I do not see much if anything about Jung's ideas around Ecclesiastes, which to me seem just as relevant. Qohelet seems to experience the crucifixion of opposites under a God image containing both all good and all evil, similar to Abraxas in many ways (and one may note that Qohelet uses only the neutral "Elohim" instead of the Jewish covenental "Yahweh") - the whole experience, other than the tacked-on ending, bounce one pair of opposites off of another over and over again without apparent resolution. I would think this would have been quite relevant for Jung's attack on the privatio boni. It doesn't appear like Jungian experts like Edinger, Murray Stein, Hillman focus on Ecclesiastes either. Why do you think this is?

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u/HermesOTT — 2 months ago
▲ 9 r/TwoandaHalfMen

Watched all 262 episodes, a season by season review

Season 1 was released in 2003, Sheen and Cryer were both born in 1965 so they’re 38 here - young! They had previously acted in Hot Shots together. Angus T. Jones who played the “half man” is 10. Cryer still has his hair, in later seasons it starts to go and they spraypaint it back on (and make fun of that in an episode). This is the introduction season - Alan and Jake move in, the mother Evelyn is introduced (who I was surprised to find out is gay in real life), Sheen is roguish but loveable as a wealthy Malibu playboy with new love interests every episode - and the show is finding it’s feet which is okay, but the first season in syndicated shows is rarely very strong. Highest rated episode: Episode 5, 8-8.5/10. Lowest rated episode: E22, 3/10. Season average: 5.18.

Season 2 (2004). This sophomore season is finding its footing, and the season average improves a bit. There are a couple of standout episodes, and a bunch of mediocre ones. The show has yet to fully find its groove. The best episodes typically involve Alan and Charlie without the supporting cast - Berta, Evelyn, Judith, and especially Rose are generally inferior and for different reasons, although not always. The show works when it stays inside its own realism (male fantasy, fraternal dynamic, consequence-light hookups) and weakens whenever it imports elements from outside that realism (Rose's stalker logic, the shrew dynamic's unresolvable power asymmetry, the two-dimensional female authority figures). Highest rated episode: Episode 12 and 23 both with 9/10. Lowest rated episode: episode 9 and 13 both with 3/10. Season average: 5.395.

Season 3 (2005). This season features both Charlie and Alan engaging in multi-episode relationships, Charlie with Mia and Alan with Kandi (after Kandi sleeps with Charlie first). The episodes remain highly erratic in their ratings, with the highest rated episode being Episode 9 with an 8/10 and the lowest being Episode 12 with a 2.5/10 because it was too forced and Cryer overacted. The highest rated episode was lower than the highest ones in prior seasons and the lowest was lower, but the season average still increased. Season average: 5.416. I’m a little surprised and was expecting a steady increase by season 3.

Season 4 (2006). Somewhere in Season 3, definitely by the start of Season 4, watching began to feel like a chore and not so much fun. I attribute this to the basic idea of the show being fleshed out and explored, so the ratcheting of outlandish behavior has started (see Kandi) to try to keep the show “fresh”. Yet I will keep grinding out the episodes, at least for now, out of lack of a better thing to do, and I still want to find the episode that made me laugh so hard. Highest rated episodes were Episodes 6, 9, and 14 at 8/10, and the lowest was Episode 2 with a 3.5/10. Season average: 5.354, so slightly decreased from Season 3.

Season 5 (2007). This was a truncated season with only 19 episodes as opposed to 24 in a standard season due to the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. Highest rated was E13 with 8/10 and the lowest was E12 with a 2, maybe less - the worst episode of the show so far which was modeled on Misery and featured Rose. Season average: 5.157, which continues to decrease from Season 4 and 3. On the bright side, Alan has started slightly displaying some kooky characteristics, which Cryer pulls off very well, which will be accentuated in future seasons to keep the show from becoming too stale.

Season 6 (2008). This was the worst season so far, both because the show is treading its wheels and because Charlie’s extended relationship arc with Chelsea is a downer. The actress who plays her is fine and doesn’t bother me, but she is written intrinsically as a nag - not due to a personality quirk, but simply due to male/female dynamics. This season had the lowest episode of the entire series with a 0, Episode 21, which featured a wildly unrealistic scenario with Rose, a character I don’t like. The highest rated episode was Episode 4 when Charlie hits on Alan’s receptionist, while Alan is very unhappy about it. Jake has much less screen time this season, as does Evelyn, and Rose is almost featured not at all (thankfully). Season average: 4.479, which surprisingly continues its decline from Season 5. I hope it pulls out of this rut next season.

Season 7 (2009). The show rebounds from the prior season but is still treading water; Sheen’s acting is increasingly becoming frazzled due to off-screen drug use. The highest rated episodes of the season were episode 1 and 12 tied at only 7.5/10, and the worst was episode 10 which was a 0 where the writers infantilized Charlie’s character in a clumsy and dumb manner. Season average: 5.045, so better than Season 6, but still worse than other seasons.

Season 8 (2010). Cryer noted in his autobiography how bad Sheen looked this season to the point he couldn’t remember his lines. The season was poor, and I hated the Rose-focused episodes. The highest rated episode was E13 with a 7.5 or 8/10 because of Alan’s funny jealousy, the worst was E14 due to it being a ridiculous Rose-centric episode. The Season average was 4.1875, the worst of every season, and there were only 16 episodes when a normal season has 24 - a truncated season. I could see the deterioration of Sheen in real time almost, which began in the middle of Season 7 and never recovered, and they increasingly focused on Cryer’s character to try to make up for it. I will note, looking back, that watching this show has likely encouraged me to drink more alcohol (nothing too crazy).

Season 9 (2011). Fuck it, I’ll keep watching the goofy Kutcher seasons and see how long I can stomach them - no guarantees. I hadn’t found the hilarious laugh-out-loud episode I’ve been looking for, which I guess must be in the Kutcher batch. It wasn’t clear if the show would continue after Sheen’s departure, but the network had pre-sold a couple more seasons and the money was too good to resist, I guess. Hugh Grant was supposed to be Sheen’s replacement but he backed out at the last second, uncomfortable with the lack of script to review. The biggest problem is that the hedonism fantasy is dead under Kutcher, that only worked under a rogueish but loveable Sheen (maybe it would’ve worked under Grant? not sure) - and Kutcher sucks, dopey voice, desperately wants to be likable and be seen as “smart” - so the continuation of watching this must be different. We will see if Cryer can carry the show on his own with the rest of the original cast, or if he can’t - I don’t know. The flimsiness of the Alan/Walden connection is readily apparent and the bones aren’t strong enough to hold up the story regardless of the acting; most of the rest of the cast has been downgraded into occasional appearances to make room for new characters like Kutcher’s ex-wife, girlfriend, business partner, etc - I wish they had kept Herb around more, his character is excellent. I know that Cryer and Kutcher got along well, although their onscreen chemistry is mediocre, and Cryer attended Kutcher’s wedding (unlike Cryer and Sheen at the end - Cryer hasn’t spoken to Sheen since the latter’s meltdown). The highest rating episodes of the season were E9 and E22, both excellent episodes (E22 was the one I was looking for), and I gave them 9’s, but they both could have been higher. The worst episode was E12 which gave Kutcher a gorilla for a brother, 0/10. The season average was slightly better than Season 8 at 4.5/10, good enough to keep watching. Cryer is fully carrying the show by escalating into ever-increasing absurdist situations where he is the butt of the joke; Kutcher isn’t funny at all. Also, the house itself is and has always been its own character and part of the show, and see below how they massacred my boy. This has implications extending to the core differences between the two eras; light hedonism vs. bland technocracy, a small part of a much bigger trend draining the world of color.

Season 10 (2012). The Kutcher-era show premise really wobbles - it’s wildly unrealistic that Walden would keep Alan living there - and there are far too many Walden-focused episodes. The highest rated episode was an Alan-focused episode at only 7/10, episode 22, and the lowest was a Rose-focused episode at 0/10, episode 6. The season average was yet another near low, at 4.217/10. Jake’s character was written out of the show after Jones publicly calling it “filth” due to his Christian beliefs, but he later apologized and will be back for the series finale. I’m still thankful the show continued - it’s worth watching still for Cryer’s performance - although Kutcher still deeply sucks. Berta is featured in a bunch of episodes sporadically, while Judith and Rose have mostly been written out of the show.

Season 11 (2013). This is was a strange season; the first half was really terrible, political and unfunny, but the second half surprisingly got better and better. The show initially pushes lesbianism, homosexuality, and transsexuality in a very crass and crude way, but then it pivots to a plot involving Alan having an affair with his ex girlfriend while becoming friends with her boyfriend under an assumed name, and this grew on me over time. The second half focuses more on Alan instead of Walden which is a plus. Lowest episodes: E9 and E10 which push transsexualism with 0’s, highest was E17 with Alan dating his ex girlfriend’s boyfriend’s sister with a 9, but the finale was also solid with an 8. Season average: 4.09/10, the lowest season yet, but the first half was a 3.18 average and the second half was a 5, so it picks up substantially.

Season 12 (2014). The show ends just a couple years before Me Too starts (2017), when humor more or less officially died. This is a short season with 16 episodes, when most seasons had 22-24. It’s not a surprise that this was the last season as ratings declined starting in Season 11 because of the policitized stuff (lesbianism, transsexualism, homosexuality, gay adoption).

This season was really terrible, and there was a long stretch of 0 ratings, which picked up toward the end when they end the gay marriage/adoption plotline and pivoted back to adult relationships. The season average was a horrific 2.28/10, by far the worst of the series, and the highest rated episode was an 8 in the series finale, which was well plotted with a lot of jokes. The show was founded as a guy’s fantasy - Charlie Sheen with his beach house and women, displaying magnanimity to his loser brother - and ended with a gay marriage and mixed race child adoption, with a lesbian niece. I guess that reflects the cultural transformation of America too. Season 12 was hard to sit through despite being a short 16 episodes and I must say I’m glad it’s over. Then again, it’s pretty amazing how they stretched this concept about - with an ultimate focus on Alan’s Job role and the house itself - for twelve seasons.

S1–S4: stable plateau (~5.2–5.4), S5–S8: Sheen-era decline with one rebound in S7, S9–S11: Kutcher era stabilizes at a mediocre ~4.1–4.5 rather than completely collapsing, S12: genuine collapse (2.28). Episodes rated above 9 were S2 E12, E23, S9 E9, E22, S11 E17.

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u/HermesOTT — 2 months ago
▲ 19 r/Anarcho_Capitalism

The "left" vs. the "right" terms are messy, unclear, contradictory

I understand that people gravitate toward the “left” vs. the “right” as shorthand terminology, which is why so-called “democracies” (i.e. oligarchies controlled by the owners of the media) feature them so heavily, but what these terms mean is a curious and nebulous thing. Is it based on race? Class? Economics? Collectivism vs. individualism?

National Socialists and communists had substantial overlap in the psychologies of its members. Hence Robert Conquest in Reflections of a Ravaged Century, p. 64:

>"Hitler himself said that Communists far more easily became Nazis than Social Democrats did.  On another occasion he remarked, "the Reds we had beaten up became our best supporters," a point also noted by others.  A remarkable firsthand example is given by Patrick Leigh Fermor in A Time of Gifts...In a German workmen's bar late one night he made friends with a group of young factory hands just off a late shift.  One of them offered to put him up in a family attic.  There he found what seemed to be a "a shrine of Hitlerism" - flags, photographs, posters, slogans, emblems.  His new friend laughingly said he should have seen it last year - all "Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World Unite."  He and his friends were Communists and used to beat up Nazis in street fights.  Then, "suddenly," he had realized that Hitler was right, and he and his friends were now SA men.  "I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides," he said."

Both movements appealed primarily to attachment-regulated and meaning-regulated constitutions in crisis, offering a redemptive collective identity (the volk, the proletariat) that metabolized individual suffering by relocating it into a heroic collective narrative with designated enemies. The ease of switching from one to the other was that the underlying regulatory demand (give me a collective identity, a meaningful enemy, and a redemptive future) was identical, and both movements were offering psychologically analogous products under radically different symbolic vocabularies. Social Democrats didn't convert as easily because they were offering a more procedural, institutional, less numinous product - parliamentary reform rather than redemptive revolution - which serves a different psychological need and doesn't generate the same switching behavior.

This analysis extends into the present. 2026 Trump supporters - I think of Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse as one - are part of the so-called “right”, yet Trump is basically supporting extreme financial predation, few if any deportations, total Zionist domination, and endless tens of billions of dollars of theft for himself and his allies. These blind hero-worshippers have, psychologically, much in common with 2009 Obama supporters, I think.

The messiness around these labels is why I have mostly dropped them. To me what fundamentally matters is understanding the nature of the crucifixion of opposites and where people hold it, because the crucifixion must be held somewhere: offloaded into a political movement, a charismatic leader, a religious framework, economics, or the "scientific consensus"; denied through antinomian predation; or borne internally as part of the crucifixion of opposites itself.

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u/HermesOTT — 2 months ago