>>45158
Well which one? Or I have a better question namely why in the fuck would I ever put it on there to begin with? Why the fuck should I pay out the ass for a massive piece of spyware at the OS level which I hate? I mean maybe you don't give a shit because you're a Swede for the same reason I'm more ambivalent about Chinese spyware but I actually have to keep living here for now.

So that's one thing and the fact in case you can't tell that I've fuckint hated every iteration of Windows since XP in fact if I could get away with it with modern gaming I'd just install a cracked version of XP instead. It had its things but I quickly grew accustomed in spite of liking certain things more about Windows 95. Then the dark days arrived with win7, which I tolerated like mold on an otherwise perfectly good sandwich. Then 8 was foisted upon me and I couldn't stand it any longer or its absolutely BULLSHIT tablet design calling every executable an "app" and the least user friendly piece of a hog's shit I've ever seen but at least I am and have been use to it for ages and more importantly it's the closest I have to backwards and forwards compatibility right now, which is the entire point of the design of my new rig.

A hell of a lot of games have trouble running in win10, an OS I've heard not one single good thing about ever to begin with. Which means my new gaming rig would all of a sudden have problems some of which I'd never even be able to fix and leave them DOA like Deadlock is for even my current system. So I'll be paying a lot of money for an NSA bot baked right into the system while preventing me from playing my games and pissing me off and making me angry every single time I turn it on, as opposed to 8.1 which by the way I never even upgraded to until 2019.

Yeah you heard me. I used win8 straight through most of 2019 until I was forced to update because it was literally the only way I could get my new GPU to be recognized and get the already obsolete drivers for it at the end of last summer. Were it not for that I wouldn't of even bothered upgrading to win8.1 which had seemingly no effect on my system and which itself I am still mildly suspicious of what kind of NSA tier garbage got put on my system.

I will continue to use Windows 8.1 or win8 unless my hundreds of dollars worth of hardware literally is incapable of running that system and I will not pay Bill Gates for it either. I don't even care if I have to do some retarded as shit workarounds at this point. I have zero good reason to use that OS and every single reason to keep using 8.1 and by God if I could get VTMB2 to run in a Windows XP environment I would just be using that.

>>44777
It's really not and it isn't just because of the controls. Like I get that this was probably the first time lots of people were exposed to these ideas but it still felt like a kids game in certain weird ways while approaching very mature ideas, all of which I think helped it fill this niche at the turn of the century to where most people view it with a kind of nostalgia goggles. The overwhelming impression that I get is people specifically enjoyed it because they were under 20 when they first tried it. Like, probably 15 year olds.

I've already written at length here about than once about why I think Deus Ex sucks I think? but suffice it to say that the real problem hobbling it to me is the fact it's not that original and is basically just a 90s kitchen sink that came years too late and arrived just in time to seize on very obviously dated elements like The Matrix and The X Files and goth fashion just enough that probably it still gives people nostalgia, but that it was not remotely groundbreaking either for narrative outside the vidya medium at least nor especially for the mechanics.

Frankly the thing that I found most telling about everybody who raves how good it is is the fact that they try to say it was innovative but they never ever seem to bring up System Shock. Why? Because they were probably too young to have played it.

This has all made me realize that Eidos is basically a bunch of hacks who quite frankly just got really lucky and somehow popularized their game whereas the makers of things like Marathon and System Shock did not, most probably due in part to the fact that only a select small number of us even had access to gaming in the early to mid 90s and that by 2000 vidya while still being considered a "nerd" thing was already mainstreamed and popularized. But when you look at a game like System Shock and SS2 the whole argument that it was "innovative" completely falls apart. Having damaged limbs is in fact the sole defining thing I can even think of and many of the augmentations are not useful in fact I'm pretty sure I finished it with mostly just using heal. Almost all the other elements were pioneered instead by the System Shock games.

Having only beaten it in like 2017 or 18 or whenever it was I can say that I'm not impressed from a more objective standpoint. Bear it in mind that this is a year 2000 game. Most of the things one might be misled into believing are notable about it were already tried and common stock back then, for years in some instances including non-linear levels or puzzle solutions. I do not know why games often had a level with 3 stages though. VTMR's level structure was exactly the same in that regard.

I lastly think that the real reason people remember it aside from the more mature concepts (which is probably what people mean by innovative because back then with a few very notable exceptions like Starcraft, Fallout, Planescape etc most games were incredibly banal and childish in their stories if stories even existed at all, with Jedi Academy and VTMR being two good examples) is the fact that JC Denton's voice acting was so poor that it crossed over to the other side of memorably comical. I'm pretty sure what they were going for is him being an unfeeling robot much like the cyborg lady whose name I forget atm but given his dialogue it became probably unintentionally hilarious. Like I'm pretty sure that for example when you fry that girl's father or you outright kill him yourself and the line goes

>that's a shame

that it was at least originally meant to convey his loss of humanity to cybernetics. I personally think that they bungled it and ended up trying to play it all for laughs, which is the main thing people end up remembering it for I have no idea why so many games insist on giving NPCs good voice actors but making the PC flat, dry, and sometimes just bad it's like a half measure between fully voiced player and silent player character.

I think that part of the reason I am especially so harsh on the game is not just because I genuinely didn't enjoy any of it nor was I impressed by the sporadic namedropping like a college freshman of a couple book titles etc. but because I can also take it in the context of Deus Ex HR, which unlike the first wasn't a bad game but which really exemplifies the ham fisted to downright idiotic handling of ideas from Eidos. What it helped emphasize to me was how thoroughly derivative and contrived a lot of things are and how much they really didn't have a lot of fresh ideas themselves. It made me feel like their studio was run by pretentious guys wearing OBEY caps when in HR I could see dozens of places where they really couldve dealt with things like identity, class, moral relativism, the mind, state power, the list goes on and on except at least HR was fun to play.

Started translating Pelevin's Crystal World into German. It's pretty hard, luckily though I researched a bit and found a Russian paper about "The Role of Pretranslational Analysis" that uses it as an example and explains most of the references :D
& I already have a copy of a published English translation to compare with.

>>44724

>What does he say about it, really only a metaphysical incident? Why is the spirit ahistoric?
>That would be a difference to Foucault e.g. where history is a condition of culture and not culture a condition for history.

He describes it esoterically with the "Ursymbol" etc., but you can easily "turn him on his head" and say that a culture arises from some unified literary, architectural traditions etc. I think it's just an instance of his "mysticism", as he also tends to criticize the overuse of cause-and-effect thinking, it doesn't really change much.
The crucial point for Spengler is maybe that once a culture with its forms and symbols is established, it is bound to go through its life cycle in a more or less pre-determined way, unless something like the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs happens, where a culture was completely destroyed from outside.

>It's all a big vague regarding Spengler foreseeing. I would stick with extraolation of modernity.

I mean, obviously he didn't foresee the future in some supernatural sense, what else do you want him to do other than to extrapolate from modernity while keeping the parallels to what we know from previous cultures in mind?
I read this quote by Adorno which is maybe quite accurate: „Der vergessene Spengler rächt sich, indem er droht, recht zu behalten“
I haven't read his essays on Spengler yet, but they're discussed a bit here: http://somedirtylaundry.blogspot.com/2020/06/adorno-kulturkritik-der-gesellschaft-s.html

>Which would mean that history only occurs with civilizational empires or cultures?

Yes, he separates the epoch of human pre-history with mostly tribes (when there were no high cultures yet), and then the epoch of high cultures, starting roughly with the Babylonian (or rather Mesopotamian) culture.

>Reading Dugin there is the fantasy of a Russian Empire

More like Eurasian iiirc, but yeah, the fact that he's able to even think all this stuff may also be evidence that Russia's culture is still relatively young. Now that I think about it, there is also this motif in Russian literature of Russia as a carriage (in Gogol), or a train (in Gumilyov) that is going somewhere unknown...

>Russia being a superpower like it has been.

I don't think Russia's ever been a superpower tbh, maybe it was imagined as such at the height of the Soviet regime during Cold War. But I doubt that's what Dugin has in mind.

>The question that would be if tsarism is due to russian soul or because power play including power over narration e.g. interact with each other in order to create a culture that values leadership and obedience.

I suppose one doesn't necessarily exclude the other, but just to clarify, Spengler sees the "Ursymbol" of the Russians as the "infinite plain", i.e. the focus is more on the "Brüderlichkeit", as it also is in the Sorokin book I mentioned (though driven ad absurdum)

>Perhaps that is when his theory might "fail" alltogether

Sure, he basically admits this

>But what about his rise and decline? This pretty much ontological for me.

I was being a bit facetious, but if we are at the late stage of civilization (i.e. End of (Western) History), people don't really need an ontology of history.
Though now we actually have quite popular authors like Yuval Noah Harari or Steven Pinker e.g. who write about history as a story of progress.

>>44725

>"Anti-Spengler" by Otto Neurath

I read through an excerpt, only thing I found in German, kinda interesting to see what a contemporary of Spengler wrote, but it's rather silly. Neurath seems to be a rationalist/empiricist who's in a moral panic because Spengler doesn't provide proper proofs etc.
Btw I read some other secondary text and had a good laugh at this sentence:
Für Georg Simmel war Oswald Spenglers Hauptwerk “die wichtigste Geschichtsphilosophie seit Hegel” (ap. Felken 1988, S. 114), für Walter Benjamin war ihr Verfasser “ein trivialer Sauhund” (ap. Felken 1998, S. 114).

>Might listen to the Spengler lecture you mentioned, it's about an hour long, right?

That one's good, but it's quite superficial, he just goes over the different cultures and the life cycle of the West mostly iirc.
He has another series where he goes over the chapters in detail, I can recommend e.g. this vid, touches on a couple of stuff we talked about, "End of History", power politics, mentions Foucault & Agamben briefly etc. (funnily enough also gated communities):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3E4SN9KiUc

Btw I also stumbled upon this quote regarding cultural exchange:
"alle Kulturen mit Ausnahme der ägyptischen, mexikanischen udn chinesischen haben unter der Vormundschaft älterer Kultureindrücke gestanden; fremde Züge erscheinen in jeder dieser Formenwelten."

>>44889

>But I doubt that's what Dugin has in mind.

A multipolar world at least. Not ruling it all, like American world police.

>I mean, obviously he didn't foresee the future in some supernatural sense, what else do you want him to do other than to extrapolate from modernity while keeping the parallels to what we know from previous cultures in mind?

The problem that I see is that Spengler extrapolates Adorno and his verwaltete Welt will sound very familiar today as well, because we are still living in modern times in a way, not in industrial modernity, though in third world countries it is more, but postindustrial or whatever you wanna call the age we are currently living in, still modernity is widely acknowledged, especially in the sciences, systematicity is a key feature of modernity for me what we have not left yet and people think that is why his theory is valid, these to things seem to rather just correlate though.

>He describes it esoterically with the "Ursymbol" etc

And that is where I'm out, it's poetry and mysticism and should be taken as such. Grounding is necessary, I haven't found a way around it yet. I don't know how he makes it plausible but I stick to abstract things that do not construct an ontologic veil.

I'm reading about Lorenz Puntel atm, he wants to reactiveate the universal, the absolute. Studying Hegel for 16 years he came to the conclusion that Hegels system is not a system Since I haven't read Hegel I can't say much, but he says that Hegel did not adress language, only a few times and now he tries to make the best systemic philosophy we can have. He also pointed out what repells me from Heidegger (besides his romantic molasse), ontology becomes a shadowy and mystic thing, the idea of going to the core or ground is basically good but the answer is not philosophy anymore. Now myths are nothing that left us in modernity, but one has to be aware of these things. That is why asking if Spengler is right does not take you very far. The analytical depth can be made much deeper.
Anyway, I'm eager to see what Puntel will put forward, as I think a certain unversalism is not wrong, but is has to answer the question of the particular in a satisfying manner.

The cover is cringe, otherwise for German readers this can be an interesting book, I enjoyed it as a good overview.

The book starts with some words regarding the concept of revolution (as modern phenomenon as following will show), and then proceeds to go along the US and French Revolutions, sheds light on what Kant and Hegel said about these revolutions bonus: you get a brief idea of Hegels understanding of history and its evolving to then ofc deal with Marx and Engels as turning Hegel upside down not Weltgeist is driving history but material conditions of the people, followed by anarchist conceptions of revolution (Bakunin & Kropotkin) and then the opposition between Lenin (avantgarde led revolution/state party) and Rosa Luxemburg (revolution from above or by elite/avantagde is to be denied, must come from the base).
A short excursion to the conservative revolution (capturing the term revolution to frame a disruption as regression into some authentic ("") past).
We then get to know Walte Benjamins and Herbert Marcuses concept of revolution, the later under the impression of WW2, Stalinism and Ausschwitz. For Marcuse the revolutionary subject(s) are the marginalized and also important is an imperative to reject the perfect(ed) consumer governance, or state machine This is btw. where lefties and more radical liberals met since the 1960s.
Another subchapter is given to Frantz Fanon and Focault, Fanon is interesting here because the revolutionary subject(s) are now the "Damned of the earth" (3rd world, (de)colonized states) which was also well recieved in western circles, anti imperialism etc. The Red Army Fraction understanding was, I think, along the lines of fighting in the center, while the damned were fighting on the periphery. At least that is what I read in an interview with Gabriele Rollnicke, member of Movement of 2nd June.
The last chapter was on Balibar, Zizek and Graeber, wasn't really caring so much about this. Balibar is for democracy as radical inclusion one might say, Zizek says (liberal) democracy becomes ideology and has to be questioned or else makes politically impotent, and Graeber is some anarchist who has been aligned with Occupy movement (mind it was published in 2013)

All chapters are basically trying to answer the following properties that come with the question of revolution in all theories:

1) The relationship between and new and old / disruption and continuity
2) negative Freedom: freedom from / positive freedom: freedom to
3) use of violence (from necessity to exclusion)
4) subject of revolution (history itself, people (classes, leaders, avantgardes, "bandits" (anarchists) etc)
5) temporal dimension (when and how long, a moment (event) or an ongoing process)
6) spatial dimension (local/ global ect)
7) scope of impact (politcal - change of political institutions/ social - change of social relations

The question of modernity and history simmer in the background all the time.