Friend sent me this one from his family's Christmas party
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
Or maybe this is a third order.
The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
USA > US Flag > Police state > Rugged Individualism as a vibe presented through arbitrary nonsense. That seems more like hyperreality than semantic algebra to me since everything through police state reflects the same idea of centralised state authority worship.
0/10 No bald eagles
but
10/10 If bald eagles are on the back
Undyne would wear thin blue line boots. Sorry, that's canon.
Not because she supports the US police, because she doesn't know what an "Usa?" is, but because she genuinely believes she's the thin and literal blue line.
"These boots were made for lickin', and thats just what they'll do..."
