I get how someone who doesn't really think much about the media they consume could watch Breaking Bad and think Walter White is doing what he does for moral reasons. If someone who just watched the show casually while relaxing after work doesn't get it, there's no reason to be snobbish about it. It's easy to get caught up in the male power fantasy if you're an alienated Western male.
But the fact that this clown calls this "analysis" is making me yell at my screen. Letting Jane die was "morally justifiable" because she was a "bad influence on Jesse"? He "overcame his fears" by killing Tuco and Gus? Rejecting the money from Gretchen was good because he's "nobody's charity case"? Holy fucking shit imagine missing the point this badly.
And then this nonsense about "humans follow incentives that provide positive rewards in the brain" as if it was profound psychology and not just a comically verbose way to say "humans do what they like & want". It's a completely meaningless sentence, the point is to analyze what Walter values most at different points throughout the show, and if you look at that you'll find that he values his ego over money & his family's safety from episode 1, when he rejects even asking Gretchen for money and chooses to cook meth instead, greatly putting himself and his family at risk right from the start because his ego doesn't allow him to ask others for help. He becomes more ruthless and more megalomaniacal as the show progresses, sure, but this clown thinks he was still perfectly justified in everything he did up until the point he poisoned the kid.
If I ever put out media analysis like that, I want you all to put me out of my misery because clearly I must have been lobotomized.
I mean, it's not even subtle though
Killing people is generally bad, it's...pretty easy to go 'holy hell, they're becoming terrible people' based on just that alone
Because coming to the conclusion that a poorly paid teacher who wanted to keep some dignity after being diagnosed with terminal cancer is a victim and then a monstrous product of all the modern systemic ills of this life in America would put you at odds with everything you've been taught. So it's dog eat dog for Mr. White :dean-frown:
nothing sexier than a disembodied brain in a box that is also a utility monster
dae le meat computers
I mean; yeah kinda.
I don't really believe in "the soul" or meaningful human agency a lot of the time. :shrug-outta-hecks:
why feeemales won’t date logical sirs of reason
Uhh... Because they are featherless bipeds.
Ones with brains big enough to comprehend the horror, fragility, and fundamentally inexorable futility of biological life; and understandably they're gonna chase after whatever allows them to not think about that.
Reductionism may seem “honest” to you but it has to ignore the larger comprehensive intersectional picture.
I mean, I'm just gonna be direct with you, I just think materialist determinism is just correct.
Like, I need you to understand here that I am not whatever weird office-guys you know & talk to. I grew up in a trailer, I went to special classes as a kid, and I make car parts for a living. I do not believe what I do because I'm trying to be "more clever" than others, I know I'm not that smart.
I just think it's what's capital-T "True".
I haven’t yet seen a proposal to reform society with hard determinism in mind that wasn’t some panopticon surveillance state worse than the one we currently have or otherwise a techbro nightmare world, so even the illusion of human agency doesn’t seem that bad compared to the many bad alternatives I’ve had to hear so far.
Uhh, IDK. I am admittedly the kind of person who sorta took & ran with right-wing propaganda about "awful Soviet authoritarianism" & was like "Yeah, cool that's great. I hope you get fuckn' domed & that I get what's good for me." like 5-or-so years ago.
I suppose I have developed marginally in that time, in that I no longer believe that that's actually what living in AES states is like, nor do I think it's precisely necessary but I also still kinda wouldn't care if it was.
Deriving a sense of superiority over other people by excessively dwelling on that (and presuming it as absolute truth) is its own high, its own vice, and ultimately I don’t see the point of that outside of the sense of superiority. And I’ve seen how far that sense of superiority can go, especially among college students I knew.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/125
I think both the person depicted in that comic & the person writing it are (respectively speaking) not very well aware of, & not really interested in engaging with what Nietzsche was actually kind of writing about. I prefer Jonas Ceika's takes on the matter. Although to be fair, I myself am by no means a strict adherent to, or particularly good practitioner of anything like Neitzchian moral philosophy.
As to the points about "superiority"; I have to reiterate here, I am a wretch & I know it. And my statement was a very weak criticism, if one at all really; there was a reason why I had prefaced what I said with the featherless bipeds bit.
I’d rather, “illusion” or not, “meat computers” or not, that people flourish and experience what joy they can in their lives, as if their decisions and aspirations matter and are validated.
That is fair, and tbh, "Meat Computers" is admittedly not really a very good analogy one way, or the other. Meat does not exactly work like a silicon computer chip even under the best of circumstances; & the brain is a highly sophisticated (and analogue) electro-chemical organ. My main point is really to just question how much of what people do is actually intentional & consciously directed action, and what substance does the idea of consciously directed action even hold if we do take material causes (and also the chain of causal necessity) to be paramount in the development of any, or all phenomena?
I personally think that we hold on doggedly to the idea of a personally real & extant idea of free will, because we are (for one reason or another) loathe to rid ourselves of those most old & morally forceful ideas of Western Christian Tradition; the ideas of Personal Sin & Eternal Damnation. But this is a complex topic & I'm starting to drift off to sleep.
Hmm... That said I'm a big fan of Adam Curtis as a documentarian; while he has I think somewhat unfortunate takes on the nature of Socialist States in the previous century, I think he has an excellent accounting of the cultural & social degradation of Anglophone society from the Cold-War era onward.
I bring this up because one of his works; All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace deals, I think not necessarily in my own beliefs, but in those which you are more familiar with. And I would hope to think that I am not entirely unfamiliar with the ways in which those views run up against both serious moral & also factual problems.
But these are things to discuss later if you would wish.
But then we wouldn't have Dan Olson's penultimate takedown of that particular review
There's no subtlety by the last episode. He basically tells the reader he's a monster and why he did the things he did. He says 'I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it and I was alive.'
That's literally one of the last things he said. This isn't even 'the curtains are blue' it's refusing to admit the curtains are even there in the first place.
‘I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it and I was alive.’
The guy acknowledges this but basically says it's a good thing because he's "realizing his potential" or something
If you read any self-help or 'entrepernurial' mindset books, this line of thinking is pervasive. It is difficult to say where the epistemology of the ideology comes from, some combination of Protestant Christian ethics, settler-colonial rationalizations, and American revivalist mystic traditions. Most of which culminates into Objectivist style morality drivel.
There is never a thought that 'Maybe what I like isn't really the potential I should realize.', 'Existence is likely too absurd to have a meaningful measure of what potential is.' or 'How is this practice replicable and sustainable past myself and my own experiences? (Is this developing a culture or just neuroticism)', it is simply 'What makes me feel good is right because it makes me feel good.'
I think this is closely related to the recent trend of nurses and to some extent doctors calling patients "clients" and airlines calling passengers "customers". UlyssesT, you're good at finding words/phrases to describe things, name this specific type of alienation for me :>
YouTube essays used to be mostly done by people who were inspired, but now there's lots of shit that feels like it was written as a school assignment, which is probably because these creators just want adsense money. for whatever reason, breaking bad and better call saul analysis tends to be a magnet for this type of thing.
Like the Joker is a guy who finds crime funny. Saul is a character who destroys himself by his greed. he's not Tim Finnegan
Another funny complex is how analyzing-fans refer to James, Jimmy, Saul, and Gene as separate characters, even though it's never a helpful or insightful distinction, and the different personas aren't even separate from one another. they took the "Walter white becomes Heisenberg" shitpost and doubled down on it.
tony soprano was the good guy cuz he liked a horse energy
Haven't watched (I guess I don't hate myself THAT much, huh..) but If you watch the scene where he makes his son drink more than he wants to just so he can feel more powerful than Hank, and you come away from that thinking, hell yeah.. IDK and that's pretty early on in the series if I remember correctly
Truuu, gotta get on that grindset 8) This Post sponsored by booze corp no. 7
i think the thing that makes people fail to get these early moments is that we still feel bad for him, like we don't know who he is, and he seems flawed but earnest, which is why we don't think too hard on the fact that he killed 2 people on season one like walter is the only person in season one that we see killing and the show makes us think like walter does IF ONLY JESSE DID NOT TELL HIS NAME, as if walt is not the reason all of this happened
That is part of it for sure, but I think it's also a lot of "this or that guy deserves bad stuff happening to them, beacuse they're criminals". What I think makes that scene with the drinking so special is that no matter what the politics of the viewer are, almost noone would empathize with Walter in that moment. Giving one shot to a youth is probably OK with most (even with Hank), but 2nd.. 3rd.. The show goes out of it's way to make it clear that Walter does not give a shit, even when he's not dealing with other criminals. There might be other scenes like that, but that just stuck with me most I guess.
Letting Jane die was “morally justifiable” because she was a “bad influence on Jesse”?
unlike walter, whose whole reckless abandonment towards jesse leds him to the situation where he is pretty much enslaved by some dudes so he make drugs for them to sell, also isn't the whole reason why he does that whole stunt in the end is to kill jesse because he thinks he was doing the meth willingly and that only changes because he notices OH NO I FUCKED HIS LIFE TOO LIKE EVERY SINGLE OTHER ONE I TOUCHED BECAUSE I AM A PSYCHO like i don't think even walt would think he was cool or epic by the end
it is really wild that both of them have such different takes on motivation here because both bryan and gillian would understand the character pretty well at that point
i think both of these are true but i always thought he knew or suspected jesse was making it because he is the proudest, how could a nobody who did not learn from him do such a good job, to the point that people thought it was the real deal, like even with the recipe the only other person who got close to doing it was the guy in gus' lab, who pretty much learnt it from him too.
