I was offlije for 12 hours and apparently every single American has lost their minds over garbage bags and squirrels. What in the actual fuck is happening
my phone broke because i'm a drunk so i've been offlineish for about two weeks. no idea whats going on anymore
genuine question
what the fuck is this squirrel and why are we even talking about squirrels I’m so confused
Apparently was a squirrel that became prominent on social media (which someone was keeping as a pet). Squirrel was seized by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and euthanized, presumably because it was a squirrel that was being unlawfully owned in New York state?
presumably because it was a squirrel that was being unlawfully owned in New York state?
The response to a pet being 'unlawfully owned' (accepting the absurd premise that you need someone's permission to befriend a squirrel) is to kill it?
it's the New York answer to every question, baybee, ayyy ooooh!
Yeah, I don't get it either
Seems it would've been easier and more humane for that department to just hand it over to a wildlife rehab facility, all other things the same?
They took it from a wildlife rehab facility, he wasn’t just some dude with a squirrel, he was opening a wildlife rehab center
Apparently they euthanised both the squirrel and a raccoon that the guy also owned because the squirrel bit one of the cops and they wanted to test the animals for rabies (which I guess can only be done posthumously?)
Murderpig lying about something so they have the chance to kill? Say it ain't so
Half of all Americans won't acknowledge police brutality and authoritarian overstep when it happens to poc, but will for a squirrel.
This whole thing is stupid
The simulacra reaches the end of its cycle, ceasing its relationship to anything that came before, becoming an entirely new image, both, at the same time, devoid of meaning and full of it, like some binary unit.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Show
We ain't reached stage 4 yet. This is just stage 3 or maybe even 2. Stage 4 is when alt righters will adopt squirrels as their symbol and some years down the line no one will even remember why. You will have memes using squirrels and grifters selling merch because that's just a thing now. It will be like pepe the frog.
Watch as they try to appropriate Sandy Cheeks for this purpose. That's the stage when they transfigure everything into incel culture.
It's going to have something to do with her last name being Cheeks which is also something one claps
Isn't pepe at stage 3? Frog -> Comic with frog -> Comic frog recontextualized
I guess you could say it's gone Frog -> Comic frog -> 4chan comic frog -> Alt-right symbol?
But I feel like it's too close to step 3 then. Wouldn't step 4 be when pepe stops being a comic frog and enters a different shape or medium? Like they now adopt frogs as pets or it's no longer pepeAs far as I can understand, the stages are
- The sign is considered to bear a close resemblance to its refferant
- The sign is considered to be a distorted image of the thing being referred to
- There is an absence of the referred to object. Sometimes we might question whether or not it even existed, but we know what is being refered to, even if we know nothing about the referred to object.
- The sign has no relation to the original referred to object. It just is, and few/no one knows or bothers to find out the original context.
An example that I found online:
Stage 1: You have a word processor that saves the paper you wrote to a floppy disk with a button. The button has an icon that looks like a floppy disk.
The sign (floppy disk button) directly refers to the action of saving on an actual floppy disk.
Stage 2: Your word processor saves the paper you wrote to somewhere on your computer. You can choose to save to a floppy disk with it, or to your hard drive, or perhaps some other location. The button has an icon of a floppy disk, as that is what save buttons do.
The floppy disk icon is misleading, as you don't have to save on a floppy disk. But you can still save on a floppy disk if you want.
Stage 3: You have a word processor that saves your paper to someplace, perhaps your hard drive, perhaps one of these newfangled CDs. The save icon retains the image of a floppy disk.
*The floppy disk is gone, but you still remember it. *
Stage 4: You write your paper in google docs, you click the save icon and it is saved to the cloud. You know it's the save icon because it's the save icon everywhere. You don't know what it depicts; you were born in 2005 and have never heard of a "floppy disk"
In the case of pepe the frog, it is an alt right symbol. Why? I don't know and most people don't know. It just is. For the squirrel/garbage image, we know what is being referred to since it happened very recently, so at most it is stage 3. The symbol is also still referring to the original stories of PNUT and Biden's "garbage" comment. So it is actually stage 2. I wouldn't call it stage 1 because the symbol is combining 2 stories that had no original relation and creating new meaning out of it. There is a distortion of the original.
Yeah I follow what you mean, I guess I'm just arguing that we're still at step 3, because it's still "Pepe the frog" and not just frogs as a general concept or a wide variety of frogs or just "the frog" or whatever. The sign itself hasn't changed since leaving the webcomic, only the context in which it exists. The sign itself also undergoes a transformation, as far as I understand it. Pepe is as much at stage 3 as the squirrel thing is, is what I'm saying.
If you wanna be real pedantic/nitpicky/"having an interesting convo" (the latter is how this interaction feels for me, hopefully it does for you too <3) you could also argue wether the comic is step 1 or 2.
Well, as far as I am aware, the distinction between stage 3 and 4 is not a hard line and kind of blurry.
the latter is how this interaction feels for me, hopefully it does for you too <3)
I feel that way too
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It is a coworker story because I've heard this exact same story from the chuds I work with, except it was about an alligator. It would be the only thing that punctuates his thoughts before he goes back to talking about crimes.
where is this quote from?
ive read it before, on a book about symbols and language i think?
Google with double quotes is your friend - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22fourth+stage+is+pure+simulacrum%22
Simulacra and Simulation (French: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard...
Stages
Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages:
-
The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where people believe, and may even be correct to believe, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
-
The second stage is perversion of reality, where people come to believe that the sign is an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
-
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.
-
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.
-
THAS WHAT I'M FUCKIN TALKIN ABOUT BABY 
