Started reading the first pages of The most radical gesture by Sadie Plant, former member of the CCRU. It's her dissertation from 1992 and written before she even went to Warwick. Yet I expect it to reveal connections between situationist thinking/practice and that of the CCRU.

A good subsumption of postmodernism is given in there right at the start:

Of course, the situationists’ attempt to transform everyday life has been defeated, although their involvement with the upheavals of 1968 made them believe they had succeeded in helping it on its way. Neither have there been any further projects of the scale of that perpetrated by the SI and, in the present fin de millénium atmosphere of postmodernity, such all-encompassing revolutionary theories are said to be no longer possible. They bear the illegitimate arrogance of political totalitarianism, depending on unsupportable beliefs and assuming the possibility of ascertaining the way the world really is, regardless of the vicissitudes of appearance or the ambiguities of meaning. On this reading, the situationists’ attempt to construct a unified theory of capitalism merely brought them within the totality they thought they were opposing. But in spite of the radical opposition of situationist and postmodern thought, all theoretisations of postmodernity are underwritten by situationist theory and the social and cultural agitations in which it is placed. The situationist spectacle prefigures contemporary notions of hyperreality, and the world of uncertainty and superficiality described and celebrated by the postmodernists is precisely that which the situationists first subjected to passionate criticism.

This continuity is not coincidental. The philosophers most closely associated with postmodern thought, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, both emerged from the same political milieu as the situationists. Baudrillard’s work is informed by his contacts with the situationist Guy Debord, and Lyotard was involved with Socialisme ou Barbarie and the mouvement du 22 mars, probably the groups whose political ideas and activities were closest to those of the SI. Allusions to the situationists are to be found in the work of both authors, and although postmodernism turns situationist theory against itself, the traces, even the tyre-tracks of the style, vocabulary, and scope of the situationist project run across postmodernism. Poetry, pleasures, cities, and subversions are themes common to both frameworks, and in their hostility to the Left, their attacks on the complacency and complicity of established forms of radicalism, their desire to collapse distinctions between the aesthetic and the everyday, and their search for the loci of social power in relations of language, knowledge, and everyday experience, the situationists provided postmodernism with much of the ammunition for its attacks on established genres of thought and s o c i a l o rganisation. Moreover, the tactics with which postmodernism makes these attacks were already present in the situationist armoury: pastiche and deconstruction, subversive violence from within systems of social organisation or thought, playful irreverence towards respected theories, and the exposure of every hidden allusion and resonance.
Postmodernism uses all this to convey our departure from the modern period in which we experienced ourselves as autonomous subjects capable of making judgements, expressing desires, and acting upon the world. In Jean Baudrillard’s work, it suggests that modern society has become hyperreal, a world in which the spectacle defines, circumscribes, and becomes more real than reality itself. Baudrillard describes the seductive power of images which fool us into believing a reality persists beyond this hyperreality, and suggests that subjectivity is produced by a host of networks of social relations and discursive constructions so complex that it cannot be unravelled to reveal causes, directions, or meanings. There is no such thing as a social whole or a theoretical unity: the notion of society is a myth belying the essential discontinuity of social relations, and the development of theory is the totalitarian exercise of power on the world’s dynamic fragments. The individual and the world are decentred: there is no core, no soul, no God, and no economic imperative. Alienation is not a problem peculiar to capitalism, but an inevitable feature of life to which we might as well develop a positive attitude, and the search for authenticity betrays a hopeless nostalgia for a unity which never existed in the first place. We live in the midst of codes, messages, and images which produce and reproduce our lives. These may have had their origins in commodity production, but have since won their independence and usurped its role in the maintenance of social relations. All that remains is the pleasure of playing in the fragments, the disruption and resistance of the codes in which we live, the jouissance of realising that the search for meaning is endlessly deferred and has no point of arrival and, in the absence of new movements, styles, or genres, the continual reiteration of those of the past In the postmodern imagination, alienation is everywhere and is therefore nowhere; power is dispersed and so impossible to seize. We will only ever feel at home, liberated, and content if we give up looking for a world more real, a social organisation more free, and a happiness more profound than those provided for us. There is no subject of history digging capitalism’s grave, and no Elysian field on the other side of the barricade.

Considered in these terms, postmodernism is a manual for survival, and a very good one, in a capitalist world which seems immune to transformation. Building on the failure of the social revolution which has been just around every twentieth-century corner, it cultivates an attitude which enables one to cope with the continual refurbishment of buildings, opinions, cities, and fashions, and its reassurance that it is quite natural to feel lost, confused, and uncertain of the solidity of the ground beneath one’s feet is welcome news to the shaky survivor of the late twentieth century. But, full of advice about surviving in the here and now, it tells us little about the possibilities of transforming it: of metaphorically and literally leaving the twentieth century behind. And this was the intention of the situationist analysis, which was not a treatise on survival, but an indication of the possibilities of living in a world for which the imperatives of survival have long since disappeared. It was not an account of how to have as much fun as possible in this social environment— although in this respect it rivals postmodernism—but the theoretical transcription of attempts to have as much fun as possible changing it.

The Aneristic Principle is that of apparent order; the Eristic Principle is that of apparent disorder. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of pure chaos, which is a level deeper than is the level of distinction making.
With our concept-making apparatus called "the brain" we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about-reality are mistakenly labeled "reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality" differently.
It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T) True reality is a level deeper than is the level of concept. We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The order is in the grid. That is the Aneristic Principle.
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be true. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the Aneristic Illusion. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.
Disorder is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the Eristic Principle.
The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the Eristic Illusion. The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.
Reality is the original Rorschach. Verily! So much for all that.

William James, A Pluralistic Universe

Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested originally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.
Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions that originally interfered.
Another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance, and the universe will be for him like a vast grab-bag with black and white balls in it, of which we guess the quantities only probably, by the frequency with which we experience their egress.
For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is we who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.
Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them, brute necessities express its character better.
All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with some one or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is nevertheless prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, that they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, at bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better be avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable than another's, and our visions are usually not only our most interesting but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they want to think and do?—and I think the history of philosophy largely bears him out, "The aim of knowledge," says Hegel, "is to divest the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home in it." Different men find their minds more at home in very different fragments of the world.

>>23649
If you mean in the privacy of RAC Bernd's own home, then yes, he is free to post and discuss such music. He's also free to buy such music without anyone giving him grief. That wasn't the point.

You obviously don't care about extreme music (after all, you are a Christian, I wouldn't expect anything less from you), but to bring you up to speed, Antifa have been a menace in getting Black Metal shows canceled. Just look at the wave of Black Metal shows that got cancelled between 2016 to today as well as the rampant deplatforming they've spearheaded:
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/antifa-attack-police-and-shutdown-messe-des-morts/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/montreal-police-condone-antifa-attack/
http://www.deathmetal.org/article/antifa-chases-nsbm-tinged-band-horna-across-the-united-states/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/antifa-shuts-down-taake-the-human-troll-band/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/metalsucks-whines-about-hells-headbangers/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/iron-bonehead-triggers-witchhunt-by-portland-maoists/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/usbm-cornerstone-elegy-records-closes-its-doors/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/paypal-no-platforms-moribund-records-for-satanic-beliefs/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/metalgate-nyogthaeblisz-excluded-from-maryland-show-for-racism/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/metalgate-spotify-proscribes-politically-incorrect-metal-bands/
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/singapore-gets-in-on-the-hate-crime-crusade-against-heavy-metal/

From all the posts I've seen between you and him, I get the feeling you are still firmly committed to radical leftist causes which explains why your anti-right-wing partisanship has clouded your judgement. You seem disappointed that most western left-wing movements have been coopted by woke capital which frustrates you because they'll no longer be revolutionary. As much as I don't expect sympathy from you, stop acting like Antifa aren't a huge pain in the ass.

>>23652

>Said Montreal police constable Benoît Boisselle about the Communist antifascist terrorists who attacked the the police protecting the Messe des Morts festival where Graveland was scheduled to play. The Antifa thugs were clearly supported not only by the communist Industrial Workers of the World union but by the local Montreal city government too. Three of the perpetrators identities are known: recidivist junkie and anti-Semite Katie Nelson, Éric Sédition (a card-carrying member of the IWW), and Alexandre Bouleric (member of the Canadian federal parliament from a district in Montreal). All walk free to terrorize again.

>The Canadian government of social justice warrior Justin Trudeau and the German government of General Secretary Merkel clandestinely supports the leftist attempts

Yeah I'm done I'm not reading any more of this bullshit. How about actually giving us some unbiased sources on this? The idea that antifa are both a "real menace" and not just an imaginary one, and that the cops of all people are on their side, is exactly the kind of crazy bullshit I meant. It's even harder for me to take a bunch of middle class white kids crying like pussies about their victim complex because theres allegedly a few hooligans. Know what we used to call that? A fucking mosh pit.

>you're a Christian
>you dont listen to extreme music

And whatever this other garbage is supposed to mean although I'm unsure what you even mean by "extreme" music. You mean like metal extreme? Or do you mean as in extremists, like Prussian Blue? In which case you're right idgaf if they get the shit beat out of them. Talk shit, get hit. If you mean extremists crying like bitches yeah it makes me respect them so much less because again, metal concerts at least back in the day had mosh pits. People actually getting injured moshing was a thing. The way you are complaining reminds me of these $200 pre torn jeans faggots I absolutely can't stand. Obviously a lot of this is from being a lower class white guy so I have little patience for this type of crap.

As for "extreme" if you meant like, shock rock, I listened to Marilyn Manson while he was still being protested dude. Part of why I also respect Brian Warner so much to begin with is his ability to be very eloquent and generally well spoken about his views. I also really doubt antifa which isnt even a real big thing to begin with has any kind of institutional backing Manson's opponents had although to be fair that's probably the sort of thing that gave him such an edgy appeal to begin with.

>>23654
It's actually not. If you listen to a bunch of hysterics and lies from poltards they will tell you Soros is singlehandedly destroying white people and antifa is some big monolithic organization and anyone who thought Trump was a Zionist neocon moron must be paid by CTR and on and on. This is because they are mentally incapable of organizing themselves by providing anything like a coherent argument as opposed to shitposting meaningless buzzwords at you and accusing anyone who disagrees of being part of one monolithic conspiracy or another. Antifa merely fulfils that same functional role to them. The bigger irony is these guys swallow this bs despite having no experience of anything and just taking roleplaying shitposts online at face value yet somehow seeming to believe all these are real things. It's the same mentality as this guy who brought his AR to Comet's Pizza. What was perhaps the funniest thing about all that is most of their "clues" were literally just things they themselves were guilty of by being part of vierkanal, like the focus on "cheese pizza" to begin with. Somehow this irony was lost on them. Meanwhile the guy was surprised to find no children locked in cages in a basement that didn't exist and the moment he said how retarded it was they immediately started accusing him of being a crisis actor with equally flimsy evidence as every other retarded bullshit they swindle teenage boys with.

That is the same case with antifa. I have literally never seen or met any "antifa" people. I have met a few who'd sympathize with such a thing because they're part of the broader "sjw" idpol bullshit, and they're neither common nor remotely organized. There is no such thing as any central committee of antifa, they have no funding, and they largely have no support, not even among that many leftists, being more like a bunch of punk rock kids and hooligans flipping over trash cans. We have a bigger problem with sports fans rioting after their team wins or loses than antifa I shit you not.

>>22913

> there are two main parties

Incorrect. You're too into this Seppo idea. Australian government has always had several parties in the parliament. In fact our current government is a coalition, primarily made up of the Liberals and the Nationals (former Country party), the very notion that you completely forget about our third major party just goes to show that you're a completely ignorant city-dweller or a Queenslander (where the Liberals have been completely subsumed by the Nationals since they don't have any support.)

The Nationals have 10 seats in parliament, the Liberal National Party (Which is just the Queensland branch of the National party) has 23 seats, while the Liberal party only has 44. 33 vs 44 to make up the very slim majority government of 77 seats? Its a very clear coalition government, its not some either-or situation.

> so nobody can have an actual agenda because otherwise they'd implode

In what world do parties not have different factions? You make out that these factions are somehow worthy of being a separate party? Yeah, there are a few people vying for leadership positions, but that doesn't really even divide them too much. The PM isn't even in the constitution, the party that forms government can choose whoever to be the public face of it, they don't even need to have a PM. It happens in minor parties all the time, its just completely out of the public eye because they've only got a single seat and we vote for people, not parties, so it is pretty much irrelevant.

Theoretically Australia doesn't even need to have political parties, it didn't for a while (the titles were just nominal), there is no reason why it couldn't go back to a partyless government apart from the culture which has developed. Its barely even enshrined into our constitution and wouldn't even be there at all if it weren't for some casual vacancy issues (parties sort any succession crisis naturally.)

> a lack of secondary industry

This isn't because of major parties anyway, its because the Greens (originally formed by anti-nuclear activists) prevent us from generating all sorts of electricity, not just coal and nuclear but others as well. The deadlock between the Coalition and Labor means that these minor parties are extremely influential and are overrepresented in the senate.

>>23223
Characteristics ascribed to God aren't about the nature of God, but about we perceive It. This is called negative theology, and it's the most basic kind of theology. God is indeed far too big and complex for our heads to grasp and our languages to speak of, but we can grasp and speak of his doings in this world, and this is the whole point of Revelation. Lets put it this way, we cannot grasp the godhead, but we can see the consequences of his hands acting in this world. When Jews call God "Father" or "Lord", they aren't saying that he has testicles or is a landed nobleman, they are giving him the highest human authority that our minds and languages can ascribe. Again this is just basic theology, they are very well aware that our minds and languages can't describe such a supreme being, but our minds and languages are all that we have, so we do it anyway, which goes to remember also that we are mere creatures with very limited powers. This way, the problem of ineligibility of God and God's powers lies in our own limitations, not in his.

And you're wrong in many ways saying that this is a problem of Abrahamic religions only. It is a problem of any metaphysical kind of religion (Hinduism has similar problems) as well as natural theology and even rationalistic philosophy. The whole debate between Idealism and Realism lies on this, it's very typical of idealists such as Kant, for example, to deny that we can have real access to the Reality out of our minds, but that we should try anyway, and that our job is to try to build idealistic models of reality that work well enough through science, but that we should always be aware that they are just scientific attempts, and not actually a description of reality.

I don't know norse mythos well, but your idea that abrahamic religions are somehow wholly different from pagan mythos is a typical protestant belief and I find it unsurprising that you're a swedeball (notice how neopaganism is typical only of protestant countries). Take the epic of Gilgamesh for example, it is a pagan text but also something that influenced the bible, the epic is about the greatest of all kings who's basically a super human, but still mortal in the end, and he wants that last upgrade in power, he wants that which belongs to gods only: immortality. These kinds of tales, of humans having to deal with their mortality no matter how powerful they are, are the basis of many religions. Existence of beauty implies existence of ugliness somewhere, existence of mortality implies immortality somewhere. The things that cause us to die were given the names of spirits, and then of gods, and then of God. Religions are about dealing with the awareness that we are very limited beings susceptible to much greater natural powers, this is why strongly atheistic modes of being, such as Marxism, recognizes that an entirely humanistic atheism must do away with any perceptions of limitations of human powers, which they try to do by preaching technological progress.

>>23263

> this is a problem of Abrahamic religions only

Never said that. Most holier then though types on the internet comes from this strain of believers though. So it is easier to argue with.

> swedeball

What does that have to do with anything? Also desert religion isn't anything different then norse mythos. The Abrahamic god is just a god who's inventors won a war, real or cultural. There were a lot of gods running around in the desert, most of them are evil spirits or something nowadays. I was refraining from saying that but there you have it. Your whole life perception is based on some dudes in the desert killing some other dudes and raping their women.

Also

> pagan

Who is the pagan? People who string up horses and slaves in trees or people who believes they drink the blood of their god?

>>23406

>There were a lot of gods running around in the desert, most of them are evil spirits or something nowadays.

That's the point and you still missed it. What I'm saying is that monotheism is just a natural upgrade to polytheism, which is an upgrade to shamanism and animism (and then there are people claiming that rationalistic atheism is an upgrade to monotheism). There's clearly progress in religious belief. Religions are about explaining things that are out of our control but greatly affects us (death being the main thing), advanced forms of polytheism typically have an hierarchy among gods, the higher god typically accumulates a lot of power, specially when it comes to being the creator of things, until other gods lose godhood and become angels, demons, etc. Hierarchy among gods is bound to happen when those believers begin to question what are the relationships among the many gods, because if gods have some kind of absolute authority among humans that we just have to accept (again, death), then it is natural to question which one of them has more authority over the other. Now what some people such as Habermas claim is that enlightened atheism came from christianity/judaism, because worshiping one god only ends up making it so that a lot of earthly things no longer can be explained by the action of gods, spirits, demons and so on; these things are now free to be explained by human reason. During the middle ages catholicism reintroduced ways of attributing earthly things to transcendental powers (Saints, dead people, etc), but protestantism banished all of that. I read this theory through Habermas, but I have an impression that it's Weberian in origin (never bothered to look for it).

You're complaining that an all-powerful God wouldn't bother about us (and if you read the Book of Job, this is basically what God says to Job in the end), and what I remarked is that we indeed have no direct access to God (except through revelation in judaism and christianity), but that we can see the effects of his hands acting on creation. But then came protestantism and its sola-fide sola-scripture theology and changed that: miracles no longer existed, our dead ancestors no longer were a link between us and the transcendental, god no longer could also be found outside the bible (through natural theology) but instead only through Revelation as it was registered in the bible. So we get to this god that looks more like an imposition, a god who revealed himself once and then vanished forever, instead of a god which is still necessary to explain phenomena in the world around us. Religion in this case becomes something completely other from the natural world around us.

Your objections are objections about how we think of god, and what I'm saying is that traditionally we didn't think of god directly, but rather we tried to think of him through things in this world that we thought needed god to be explained, god was an a posteriori thought. You're basically claiming that because time paradoxes can't be solved, then time has got to be an illusion, and Einstein's answer to that was that we shouldn't think of time as something apart from the rest, and this keeps the time paradox problems from arising, and the theist answer to your objections are of the same kind.