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Brilliant!
I had to look up kayfabe, as I’m not familiar with professional wrestling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe
However, philosophers are used to leaning into absurdity and exploring thought experiments no matter how outlandish, so I would commonly accept the premise and drive the joke to extreme in the same spirit to make it rebound on the joker (who if miffed, then typically says something to the effect of “You’ve taken it too far!”, when all you’ve done is take the premises to their logical conclusions). Remember that integration (of ideas, facts and models into a coherent worldview) is the real problem (and civic and planetary duty), while antisocial, delusional and antiplanet interests attempt to sow disintegration in the same sense, often by cacophony, avoidance of reasoned argument and employment of fallacies.
Incidentally the Star Trek: Next Generation episode referenced, Darmok, might show an unconvincing language model, but its worth is as a thought experiment (maybe Picard as newbie or youngling with learning difficulties faced with people unwilling to explain or accommodate). That the alien society appeared locked in to poisonous ancestor worship seems to go unexamined in its Wikipedia page; it would have no language to overthrow the patriarchy.
Blindboy could have used the example of Westminster-style parliaments where opponents stage elaborate fights in the main arena yet are boozing bosom buddies off-stage. Alice Roberts recently made the point about theatre and what we call Western democracy having the same identifiable origin point in Athens. Our political parties descended from court factions. Hypocrisy and cant are core British values.
NPC is non-playable character, and the discussion is about a form of political solipsism. Anyway, I’ll have to come back later to finish it.
It’s anachronistic to say billionaires developed social media. Owners of social media platforms like Facebook might have become billionaires, billionaires might have bought social media platforms like Twitter, but generally the billions came after, AFAIK.
Aside from that, this conversation suggests how useful science fiction and games can be for political discourse. I don’t know much about the music, though. Nor wrestling.
The problem with Blindboy’s positive characterisation of self-esteem is that it ignores the dimension of accurate self-scrutiny (or self-respect, or self-regard). If you fail to examine your own life honestly and accurately, build up a realistic model of yourself, your actions and traits, then high self-esteem is unhealthy, even toxic to others. So self-esteem and self-respect are two quite different things, though commonly confused. To be fair, he returns to the topic with more nuance later.
Aside: I watched a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing which self-summarised the play as a paean to romantic love. I disagree, the play is much more about self-love. And where does racism take root?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-esteem#As_narcissism
Blindboy talks sense about artistic personas, protest, crackdowns, Irish anti-colonialism, neoliberalism, the manosfear and other things. Interesting to hear Ash Sarkar talking about the limits and ‘obsequiousness’ of British counter-culture (Punk luvvies, I guess).
Great stuff. Heard BB mention the conversation with AS weeks ago but forgot all about it until Bella circulated it.
Taing!