>No one should just go sit with zero context and no support.
C'mon now. It's not hang-gliding or dropping acid, it's sitting quietly in a room. Not everything in life should be treated as if it's horrendously risky or can't possibly be understood by people exercising common sense.
Nor, in my opinion, do the agglomeration of various meditative practices and teachings, no matter how old and "sacred" they may theoretically be, necessarily have anything all that critical to add to the subjective experience of simply sitting quietly. Just like the practices and teachings that accompany many organized religions, a lot of meditative lingo and theories about meditative "progress" is, IMHO, horseshit peddled by people who have decided to make a living selling said horseshit or have defined themselves by their unquestioning acceptance of said horseshit.
edit: I should add that I can recognize that, as others discuss in this thread, deep meditation over long periods may trigger various psychological issues for some people. However, it's also true that, for example, eating food can be extremely problematic for some people who have serious eating disorders. That doesn't mean that the mere act of eating, which most people manage to do just fine, somehow needs to be guided by some deep tradition, and I don't believe that sitting in meditation needs such guidance in general either. For most people, meditation is a very gentle, mildly restorative practice that aids mood and focus, not some metaphysically shattering cataclysm.
Strongly disagree. There's more to meditation than just sitting quietly. I'd say it's more analogous to breaking out of a sandboxed VM and gaining read/write access to the underlying OS and kernel.
My personal anecdote - I developed a difficult-to-control, anxiety-inducing thought* while dabbling in meditation a couple of years ago. I experienced a week or two worth of extreme anxiety, and had a panic attack. To this day, the obsessive thought is still with me and causes occasional distress. I can't say with certainty that the meditation practice was the cause, but the timing coincides, and I've never experienced anything like this prior to the meditation practice.
* not exactly a thought, but I'm not quite sure what to call it. It's more of an involuntary, difficult-to-control channeling of my focus/perception toward sensations which I perceive as uncomfortable and disturbing.
It sounds like intrusive thoughts. Some (a lot of?) people have thoughts that pop up in certain contexts where they are incredibly unwanted and they can be disturbing to experience.
This is a difficult topic for me to articulate, so the below explanation is merely my best effort to express the experience in words.
The perception of my own heartbeat is something that I've always been squeamish about, but for most of my life it was never a problem. It made me a bit uncomfortable during high intensity exercise, but it was easy enough to just ignore.
During meditation, I began to perceive my heartbeat more intensely than ever before, and it became a "center of gravity" that my attention would often "fall into". My attention would gravitate toward intense perception of my heartbeat not only while meditating, but also at other times (while trying to fall asleep, while trying to focus on work, while driving), and paired with my pre-existing squeamishness, this became very uncomfortable. I might go through most of my day normally, but as soon as my mind becomes idle for a bit, or if something triggers me to start thinking about my heart, my mind will uncontrollably gravitate toward perceiving my heartbeat, and I'll struggle to ignore my heartbeat and to focus on other things.
My strategy at the time was to attempt to become more comfortable with my heartbeat through continued meditation. I thought that by deliberately focusing on my heart during meditation rather than trying to ignore it, I could "fight the monster face-to-face", kill off the squeamish feeling, and learn to perceive my heartbeat as a benign sensation.
Unfortunately, I developed a delusion that I might gain the ability to consciously control my heartbeat (analogously to how we can consciously control our breathing when we think about it), and that I'd injure or kill myself because I'm not at all qualified to exercise that kind of control. I convinced myself that this is impossible because the heart uses its own pacemaker, unlike the lungs which are controlled by the nervous system. But this didn't kill the delusion - it just transformed it into a more vague anxiety, centered around the notion that I might be inadvertently abusing whatever regulatory connections exist between my heart and my brain. I think this delusion is really just a transformation of the visceral squeamishness that I originally felt when I began perceiving my heartbeat, into a more cerebral form of "squeamishness". I made the decision to stop meditating a couple years ago, but the delusion still lurks in my subconscious and comes back from time to time.
So to summarize, when it first began, the uncontrollable heartbeat perception paired with the squeamishness/delusion caused a lot of agony for about two weeks. I've gotten significantly better at ignoring my heartbeat and not being so troubled by it, but it's a problem that I haven't been able to completely get over.
I've heard about a similar thing happening to someone on a Goenka Vipassana retreat. The sound from their heartbeat became too overwhelming for them and they had to stop.
Maybe taking refuge in the impermanence of that feeling could help? That the squeamishness is just a state of mind and like all things arises from emptiness (sunyata) and returns to it? But yeah, putting away the practice sounds completely reasonable in this case.
In a Thai tradition I practiced a bit from they'd tell you to not focus your attention and awareness on anything above the heart center at the beginning, to really just keep it at the naval, as these sorts of difficulties with the body aren't uncommon.
I think maybe we're talking about different things, and it certainly doesn't help that we're trying to translate concepts from sanskrit, pali, apabhraṃśa, abahatta, etc. that don't necessarily have great translations into an English speaking society without much of a tradition in these things.
I absolutely agree that anyone can (and should!) sit quietly in a room and breath. That could probably fall under a category of beginner pranayama or pratyahara. Physical yoga or qi gong practice is also a great thing to undertake as it begins to develop awareness of breath and sensation at this stage.
But I think what a lot of others here are discussing is a meditation practice that has a goal of uncovering deeper layers of consciousness and realizing the nature of mind. Without support that can be quite overwhelming. If it isn't for you, that's wonderful! It definitely was for me.
It's like programming. You don't need anyone's support or help to pick it up and start building things. If you don't seek out resources, though, you are liable to fall into bad habits and constantly reinventing the wheel.
Meditation sometimes leads to weird or difficult experiences. That's just like any other effortful activity we engage in. There's many who have encountered similar problems before us and their guidance could mean the difference between astagnant practice and reaching what one aspires to.
Even just 20 minutes a day sustained over a long time (e.g. 5 years) is enough to bring life-changing effects. It isn't as benign as it sounds on paper
There's nowhere left near me at all that sells the New York Times, which was the paper I liked to read in physical form. Used to be a fun weekend ritual to pick up the Sunday edition from the coffee shop down the street and sit around reading things and doing the crossword, but I can't find it anymore. I'm not sure if it was covid that killed off the distribution or just the economics of print.
Almost certainly the latter. The economics of distribution are extremely harsh. Fixed cost per site per day has to be covered by all parties and a profit. Say it costs USD$30 for a van stop at a place, idle the vehicle, unload the goods, and pay the driver then you need to sell a whole lotta newspapers to break even. The solution, if you enjoy print as I do, is to purchase longer term periodicals. Weekly news magazines are good. The New Yorker, Economist, etc. Smiles from China where we have no such options.
Making those assumptions about IndrekR isn’t very fair. Like him/her, I brew my own coffee (using locally purchased beans) but I go out of my way to support local businesses. I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since 2010 and the only online purchases I’ve made in the last three years were FFP masks (I couldn’t find a local chemists who stocked them for some strange reason), RAM chips and an SSD drive (the local PC shops are gone). Having said that, I regretted paying €20 for a bicycle chain from a local bike shop (who weren’t particularly pleasant to deal with) when I could have purchased the same chain from an online retailer for €5.
Apparently a lot of people around here like Bill Hicks, and why not? He was a brilliant comedian, and maybe the most viciously accurate (and just vicious!) satirist there ever was of the grossly self-satisfied smugness that typified post-1989 American culture. He was easily worthy of being remembered alongside Carlin and Williams, and I think would've been had he not died of cancer just as his career was starting to really take off.
You can find a lot of his stuff, full shows as well as excerpts, on YouTube, and I'd recommend doing so. You'll find your question better answered there than here.
After the Berlin Wall fell. That was one of Lenin's "weeks where decades happen", and the decade that happened in that week was the 90s, when the United States believed it had won the world forever and behaved accordingly.
A post is just a suggestion, a proposition. If there was no place for it, or interest, then it would die in oblivion. But apparently people like bill hicks here!
Historical material is always welcome here, and the only criterion for a good HN post is gratifying intellectual curiosity. I had no idea that the New Yorker had profiled Bill Hicks while he was still alive. That's already interesting!
Bill Hicks saw what most 30 years ago wouldn't and that has become painfully obvious today.
- The war on drugs
- Imperial hubris
- Safetism
The foresight of Hicks is evident by the fact that most Republican voters agree with Hicks on these issues; the last two maybe more than Democrat voters - at least the ones who havent been purged by the neoliberals (Tulsi, we love you!).
Nothing that Christopher Hitchens ever said struck me as remotely insightful. Characterizing one of his reductive proclamations as a "razor" does not make it more useful or accurate.
Well, it kinda did though, didn't it? Being charitable for a second, I suspect it's more that history is "on pause" than ended, but I do get a feeling of almost timeless stasis.
In comparison to the scale of ideological, political, economic, and social changes for the 19th and 20th centuries, essentially nothing has happened since 1992. No major nation has had a revolution. There have been no major wars between nation-states. No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down. Nothing historical has happened -- so the end of history.
From what I've read, a lot of people felt similarly in the late era of the Pax Britannia. (Which is a big part of why I think it's just "on pause".)
> In comparison to the scale of ideological, political, economic, and social changes for the 19th and 20th centuries, essentially nothing has happened since 1992. No major nation has had a revolution. There have been no major wars between nation-states. No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down. Nothing historical has happened -- so the end of history.
The period since 1992 was relatively peaceful, that's right. But that's not what Fukuyama's thesis was about, especially since he couldn't know in 1992 what would happen in the next 30 years.
Fukuyama's theory was that mankind has reached its optimal, stable state and that that the further historical changes are very unlikely, because why would people want to mess with perfection :) It was basically very naive optimism, I guess he was still in euphoria after Soviet Union collapse...
Since then we had "war on terrorism" and PATRIOT act, big financial crisis of 2008, rise of social media and surveillance state, and now COVID pandemic. Plenty of historical changes, most of them for worse.
> Since then we had "war on terrorism" and PATRIOT act, big financial crisis of 2008, rise of social media and surveillance state, and now COVID pandemic.
Don't forget rising authoritarianism again, which was one of the characteristics of Fukuyama's notion of the end of history, the fall of totalitarianism with the USSR.
Eric Li, from China has a big take on that: the West thinkers, including Fukuyama, stopped thinking since they assumed history was written. No more authoritarian state would outperform a liberal one.
Apparently history is still being written.
You are disrespecting Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, Turkey... and of course Yugoslavia, which started breaking up in 1991 (Fukuyama started his ramblings in 1989) and didn't end until 2001 - if you can consider the current fragile peace an end, which it really isn't. Plus, most South American countries continue to "tweak" their constitutions every few years, one way or the other. And if you go to Africa, well, have I got news for you...
> There have been no major wars between nation-states.
The US literally invaded and occupied two sovereign countries since then, in both cases continuing major operations for more than a decade. But if we consider "nation-states" only Western states or superpowers, there has been no such war in the 30 years before 1992 either. That's because conventional "top-quality" nation-state conflicts have been made impractical by nuclear weapons and MAD, well before 1992. What we have now is asymmetrical warfare (superpower vs minnow) or proxy warfare. That doesn't mean these conflicts don't make history or don't change things significantly - they very much do.
> No ideologies of note have arisen or been cast down.
The techno-utopianism that the internet generated is an ideology in itself, and the backlash has only just started. Same for conspiracy-theorism as a way of life, climate change, identity politics... just because they don't make people wear the same shirt and march in the streets, it doesn't mean they are not deeply-ideological movements. You can argue that they were "invented" before 1992, but 1) inevitably these things take time, 2) they didn't really have that much traction until the '00s.
> Nothing historical has happened
That's such a sheltered viewpoint. I'm sure quite a few people in Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, Brazil, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Ukraine, Tunisia, Lybia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Rwanda, Sudan, Chad, Congo, Somalia, Algeria, Liberia, Mali, etc etc, would have something to say.
History is very much grinding all around us, it's just a question of whether we actually want to look at it or we'd rather pretend it didn't exist.
all of those sound quite mildly incremental though. Note how many of these wars achieved nothing and basically circled back to where they began, the same old conflicts returned ... with the addition of china
Yes, it's pretty clear he was falsified. (China didn't go liberal! Shocker.) Doesn't mean his ideas weren't thought-provoking. But it's probably best to think of such political science as political philosophy.
I think there is just not a shared definition for "history" among people who here that line in a vacuum, vs more Marxisty type people. "history" is a very particular thing for Marxists. even in his book you are talking about, it is talked about on those lines, not in an everyday concept of history.
I don't understand why this comment is here. It's a good thing to point out to people that don't know what he meant, but within his own framework he was incorrect, which he admitted. The social relations we see today are not the ones he originally predicted and there's absolutely no guarantee that it won't get "worse" or go in a completely different direction.
To be fair, by “end” he meant “telos,” or “ideal,” following Hegel. He did not mean that there would be no more history. Of course, his thesis is still wrong.
EDIT: the original essay also had a question mark at the end of the title.
Yeah, not sure I'm going to give much serious eartime to an academic who is most famous for predicting democratic neoliberalism was going to sweep the globe, pre-9/11 and the ascendancy of China.
Well his history ended in 1992. The guy spent a life becoming an expert on Soviet imperialism and in a few days most of his knowledge became obsolete. I could see how he could say something like that.
As opposed to CEOs and upper management, who are all lovely people and want nothing but the best for their employees, and are definitely not motivated by short-term gains.
Depends on whether you get a good union structure or not. As an observer, it doesn't seem like employees get a choice besides when voting whether or not to instate a union at all.
Don't Look Up, currently out on Netflix, seems to owe a fair amount to Idiocracy. And/or to the ways in which American culture morphed into Idiocracy over the last several years.
The thing that bothers me about most contemporary praise for Idiocracy is the failure to view it through the appropriate historical lens, and so most of the praise ends up being shallow in the retconned context. Idiocracy was created in a specific time period—the same one that American Dad! was born in. (NB: "born" being the crucial word in the previous sentence.) It's possible in 2021—or 2011, even—to have watched and enjoyed both for the first time and still not understand why either were created.
I'm seeing more references to Idiocracy now on social media because of Don't Look Up's recent release (compared to, say, how frequently Idiocracy was mentioned last month). There's a lot of problems with Don't Look Up that make for it not being an example of greatness or even very-goodness, but one thing in particular in comparison to Idiocracy are the movies' protagonists. In Idiocracy, Not Sure is a pretty average guy—maybe even a little dumb. This is what the writers of Don't Look Up missed out on. Idiocracy is smart people writing about about a dumb-to-average "hero" because the egos of those involved (the creators and their audience) don't require him to be bigger than they are. In contrast, Don't Look Up is a movie written by people who are as smart as Not Sure is dumb, trying to write for characters who are supposed to be smarter than the writers themselves and the people who are supposed to enjoy the movie the most.
Some reviews called Don't Look Up smug and sanctimonious—and they're right. With Idiocracy and Don't Look Up, the humility and lack thereof, respectively, when comparing the two accounts for a lot of why Don't Look Up is worse than it should be. (Given what Don't Look Up tries to do, it should do it better than Talladega Nights does, for example, but it doesn't.) Also accounting for a lot of what made Don't Look Up a not so great way of cribbing from Idiocracy is that Idiocracy was taking aim at the zeitgeist, whereas Don't Look Up is a very safe movie to make.
I mean...I can see why it'd be called smug...but to be honest, I don't think it was targeted to people that would be bothered by the smugness.
That is, it seemed like it was genuinely an expression of frustration/dismay/astonishment by it's creators to give it's audience a bit of...not quite catharsis...solidarity perhaps?
Well, yeah. And that's exactly what's wrong with it. That's _all_ it is. As a result, the sense of smugness is undeserved. It's a way for everyone who sits in the second panel of the glowing brain meme to shit on people in the first panel and feel good about it, instead of focusing on the fact they're still in #2. It's an out-and-out display of the word "sophomoric".
Considering that film is an art form, it "only" being an expression to it's intended audience is just fine. There's no obligation or advertisement to be anything more than that.
The target audience is fucking exhausted with the never ending deluge of bullshit we're being faced with.
No one's walking away from watching it feeling superior. That's the thing, it's describing a situation that we all lose, but only some even acknowledge is even happening.
> The target audience is fucking exhausted with the never ending deluge of bullshit we're being faced with.
You're not reading me. That sense of exhaustion is as appropriate as the smugness that it's being used to justify.
> Considering that film is an art form, it "only" being an expression to it's intended audience is just fine. There's no obligation or advertisement to be anything more than that.
This only makes sense as a defense if we can say that it tries to do something, does it, and doesn't do anything else. The problem is that the movie and those reacting most positively to it in public certainly pretend that it's more than it is.
So it's wrong in the measure of a thing that it does what it tries to do at minimum, but it's also wrong in that it doesn't do anything else (what it tries to and nothing more).
What it does do, unintentionally, is showcase (to exhibit without examining—again, unintentionally) what's wrong with the people who are supposed to be on the right side—a lack of self-awareness and sense of culpability while standing opposite the people on the wrong side stupidly chanting, "don't look up". Each group has enough in their reserves to provide enough stupid juice to take down everyone when pooled together.
> No one's walking away from watching it feeling superior.
> You're not reading me. That sense of exhaustion is as appropriate as the smugness that it's being used to justify.
Asking genuinely inquisitively: Why do you think the sense of exhaustion is inappropriate?
> This only makes sense as a defense if we can say that it tries to do something, does it, and doesn't do anything else. The problem is that the movie and those reacting most positively to it in public certainly pretend that it's more than it is.
What do you think the public is pretending it is? (Or re-articulating it, if you feel I'm not understanding you?)
The level of discomfort it engendered was off the scale. The depiction of the political and media is so close to reality that I ended up fast forwarding through it and at this point have paused watching as continuing is just too uncomfortable.
So from that point of view, and at least for me I would say that the movie is a success, job done. Unfortunately I don't think I'm the person who needs to receive this message. I don't need to be told that the world is going to shit at a faster rate than ever. I don't need to be told that most (all?) media, main stream or otherwise only succeed in rating somewhere between barely acceptable and blatantly corrupt on an ethical/truthfulness scale. The only way I can continue to exist with some degree of happiness is to simply try to ignore the majority of what is going on outside my bubble. I don't think I'm alone.
That said, I'm really interested how this movie has been perceived by those who think everything is wonderful. Are their world views so different that they have any ability to understand that this is not a comedy set in a different world, where politicians and media are clueless to their own ignorance and stupidity? Do they understand that this movie is holding a big bloody mirror up to the Western world and giving a giant wake up call. Unfortunately given how a lot of people seem to have reacted to the last couple of years, I have to think that they would just look at themselves in the mirror, adjust the makeup and wonder how those stupid scientists can not understand that they are messing with the latest media fed delusion.
Now I'm going to close my door again and pretend that the world really is wonderful. Have a nice day.
I do not think the point of this thread is to discuss our personal liking of these movies but just to add another data point to yours, as much as I agree with the message of Idiocracy and found it merely funny, Don't Look Up was a really good movie for me.
It felt so grounded in reality that it took very little creativity to write or think about. Making 1-to-1 comparisons of things and people isn't very interesting. Such thin layers of abstraction don't add much value in media just as they don't in software development. It's basically just cut-and-paste.
It’s interesting that you call the characters cartoonishly stupid, but another poster in this thread characterized the film as “so grounded in reality that it took very little creativity to write or think about. Making 1-to-1 comparisons of things and people”. I have not seen the film yet, so I’m a little curious how opinions could differ so widely.
Can you give an example of something from the film you thought was so cartoonishly stupid?
I would argue that our reality today is even dumber and more hostile in some ways, so I suppose this is a matter of outlook. I was surprised that they didn't have a literal war break out, for example.
Sure, I guess I was expecting satirical comedy and it was just satire. It wasn’t funny to me and it wasn’t particularly entertaining.
I wasn’t engaged or entertained so I thought it was terrible.
I think Idiocracy was great because it was funny and used the future to allow you to see and imagine how it came to be that way. Don’t Look Up exaggerates the present in a way that feels familiar but misses the mark somehow.
I’m likely the target audience for the movie based on my left of center politics, but I suspect some will say it’s a great movie because of political tribalism and never watch it again because they know it’s actually not very good.
Right but the ostensible hook for the reader's interest is the moderately banal design of the corkscrew. Which, to anyone with any sense of perspective, is not a particularly compelling problem.
Indeed, I would rather have a banal corkscrew than have to read a totally banal essay. At least the corkscrew does not falsely purport to impart wisdom to me.
I can understand how what I personally find engaging can be banal and unnecessary to others, but with this case I can't think of anything that would serve as a more fitting opening metaphor for the entire essay. The chunky wine opener that serves its intended purpose and was a gift, but lays taking up an incongruent amount of space for its intended use invites some observation on all the other unused-but-still-owned stuff that we're forced to either continue possessing or send along to the trash.
I guess some (not implying you) might consider the observations somewhat shallow, and maybe they would find the solution to be "simple". Just throw more stuff out.
VCV Rack has been featured a lot of times on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?q=vcv+rack), and judging by the "2" in the submission title, I think OP wanted to highlight the new version that was just released, hence appropriate to link to the release logs instead.
> I don't understand the impulse on HN to make everything as technical as possible.
Well, it is called "Hacker News" and hackers tend to be technical, kind of makes sense.
C'mon now. It's not hang-gliding or dropping acid, it's sitting quietly in a room. Not everything in life should be treated as if it's horrendously risky or can't possibly be understood by people exercising common sense.
Nor, in my opinion, do the agglomeration of various meditative practices and teachings, no matter how old and "sacred" they may theoretically be, necessarily have anything all that critical to add to the subjective experience of simply sitting quietly. Just like the practices and teachings that accompany many organized religions, a lot of meditative lingo and theories about meditative "progress" is, IMHO, horseshit peddled by people who have decided to make a living selling said horseshit or have defined themselves by their unquestioning acceptance of said horseshit.
edit: I should add that I can recognize that, as others discuss in this thread, deep meditation over long periods may trigger various psychological issues for some people. However, it's also true that, for example, eating food can be extremely problematic for some people who have serious eating disorders. That doesn't mean that the mere act of eating, which most people manage to do just fine, somehow needs to be guided by some deep tradition, and I don't believe that sitting in meditation needs such guidance in general either. For most people, meditation is a very gentle, mildly restorative practice that aids mood and focus, not some metaphysically shattering cataclysm.