Aesthetic Materialism

I subscribe to the American Ontology, which can be stated as follows: An entity can be said to exist, if and only if, and to the extent that, it is, or pertains to, a celebrity. Places, material objects, and animals exist to the extent that they are the places, material objects, and animals of celebrities.  Events don’t happen unless they happen to celebrities.  Entire regions of the world don’t exist, because they don’t contain celebrities.  The American Ontology can be seen as a logical consequence of Berkeley’s famous esse est percipi : to be is to be seen.  And therefore, the more seen something is, the more it is .  Everyone else can be dismantled, and used for spare parts. In turn, the American Ontology has its own logical consequences: celebrities only exist because of their relation to other celebrities.  For instance: Jordyn Woods is famous (i.e. existent) because she was living with Kylie Jenner.  Kylie Jenner is famous because she...

The conclusion I come to, if it can be called a conclusion, is that the concepts of "ethics" and "morality" are far profounder and more mysterious than either religious people or people like Nietzsche - or for that matter pipsqueaks like utilitarians or Kantians, etc., etc. - are willing to face.  Perhaps the term "concept" should not be used at all.  Marx was right to leave these matters virtually untouched in his writings. These are things we know - but we don't know how we know them, and to put a finer point on it, we don't know what we know.  They are there before us, but when we reach out to grasp them, our hands move right through them.  The philosopher who comes closest to expressing this situation is Wittgenstein.... ...When Alain Badiou speaks of "philosophy," what he means by this word seems to be something like the work of Hegel.  But it's significant that Hegel tended not to use the term "philosophy" - he pref...

Who is Game of Thrones for ?   We hear it is about dragons and wizards and giants and dwarves, and we say - okay, it is a children's story.  But then we hear it is a story filled with sex and prostitution and violence and murder and rape and incest (lots of incest) and mutilation and torture and castration (lots of castration) and geopolitics and economics and heads getting chopped off (a lot) and people being burned alive (so many) and other things which seem inappropriate for children. And then we find out more: George R. R. Martin (did he change his middle names so that he would be more like J. R. R. Tolkien?) started writing "A Game of Thrones" in 1991, and it's very much a 90s phenomenon.  A young man, brooding grimly, dressed all in black, with a sword, in a cold realm completely covered in snow, surrounded by black trees, standing next to a white wolf: aesthetically, this is totally Black Metal.  Perhaps the most famous Black Metal musician (unfortunate...