Nilsi

Neither of them would care about the other's project on its own merits - so no, this wouldn’t be fruitful at all.

Animals don’t do art. So yeahhh… I hate your argument.

OMG, this blink record was one of the first CDs I ever owned - also one of those eternal earworms.

I don't know if I actually like this, but this motherfucker has been stuck in my head for days. I wanna be your John Wayne I wanna be your religion But I need a change and I guess I'm just existing ahhhh, please make it stop, lol.

There are even clearer blunders in Leo's worldview, yet most people here follow him blindly. So if Leo feels entitled to point out flaws in Jordan Hall's worldview, I should equally be entitled to highlight flaws in Leo's. Also, I'm sure Jordan Hall would agree that it's the individual's responsibility to critically investigate his worldview rather than blindly adopt it as gospel - so I'd say we're even overall.

You people do realize there’s more to life than “God-Realization,” right? Jordan Hall has never once claimed he's chasing some profound mystical union with God - his aim is explicitly about crafting a practical model for living as a human being. That's the central issue with Leo's position. He fails to clearly emphasize - especially to those less discerning - that his entire philosophy explicitly hinges on the single-minded pursuit of "God-Realization." While that focus is fine and powerful, he complicates things by casually mixing in other topics like politics and ethics without clearly marking them as tangential. This leads people to conflate ideas and assume everything Leo says can be taken as gospel, applicable to every domain of reality. Clearly, most people here do not share his obsession with "God-Realization," yet they remain fascinated by Leo (who himself is often ambivalent about the scope of his work) and adopt philosophical points as if these ideas inherently lead to prosperity and fulfillment across all aspects of life - when they clearly don't, due to profound trade-offs involved. No amount of Neo-Platonism will ever provide practical guidance or even any clear inclination on how to live your life and its possibilities beyond "contemplating the One" - an approach that is clearly impractical, or even undesirable, for most people. I would welcome it if the rhetoric around this topic were toned down a bit, and other viewpoints were allowed to be taken serious and evaluated on their own merits, rather than against some external standard like "does it lead to God-Realization or not?" or even worse, "does this align with what Leo said in a particular blog post or not?" Politics doesn't face this restriction, despite having no connection to "God-Realization," so I'm wondering why philosophy can't be afforded the same standard.

It’s crazy to think that this song existed for over fifteen years merely as a demo before its final, carefully sculpted form emerged on A Moon Shaped Pool. Yet, even in that raw, stripped-down state - Thom Yorke’s voice accompanied only by the sparse resonance of acoustic guitar - the song possesses a timeless immediacy, arguably resonating even more profoundly in its bare essence. If this isn’t the artistic spirit in its most profound form - patiently nurturing an idea over decades until it is finally ready to be released - I don’t know what is. And for this composition to emerge as the closing track on Radiohead’s latest studio album underscores just how deeply significant this song was to Yorke. He withheld it until the last possible moment, carefully guarding it before surrendering it completely - and how fitting the title he chose for this final act of creative letting go.

I've always found myself at a curious distance from Radiohead, which feels strange given how closely their sonic palette aligns with my tastes. While I've always acknowledged Thom Yorke's prowess as a songwriter, their music, for reasons I can't entirely articulate, has never fully resonated. Yet True Love Waits stands out as one of the most hauntingly beautiful meditations on love ever composed. Its inclusion under the Radiohead moniker is itself somewhat paradoxical, as the piece essentially presents Thom Yorke in an unguarded moment, voice laid bare, weaving emotional intimacy into a chamber-pop arrangement evocative of Philip Glass’s post-minimalist repetitions. And despite addressing the painfully familiar motif of fragile love and the anguish of clinging desperately to something inexorably slipping away - a motif repeatedly trivialized in countless pop ballads - Yorke's interpretation remains sonically original and affectively sincere, skillfully avoiding any descent into sentimental kitsch. In this sense, Thom Yorke is undeniably one of contemporary music’s most significant figures, and True Love Waits might well be his most transcendent artistic achievement.

Louis XIV in a vape, you hit it twice (The Finest) I hope it's nothing but love in paradise

Emotional. Original. Powerful. I want more of that Avant-Garde Leo energy.

Yeah. For me, it’s a rollercoaster - one moment I’m giga horny, having rough, animalistic sex; the next, my mind drifts somewhere far off and I just want to throw a blanket over myself, light some ciggies on the balcony, and lose myself in William Basinski tape loops. So yeah… mixed bag, lol.

I want to live in a world where you can go to your standard psychologist and say "I'm so successful and accomplished in life, but yet I feel so empty inside and I'm longing for something more but I don't know what it is, and I'm an open person who takes in new ideas and sensitive to subtler aspects of life", and the psychologist answers "have you tried art?"

But that seems pretty mild from what I can tell. His writings strike me as well-considered and even tempered, so I doubt he was having wild, coked-out sex with his patients while grinding his teeth like a rabid animal. More likely, it was just a little pick-me-up - probably more of a microdose situation.

I don't even know - read Nick Land or do cocaine, how do I even explain it? Your thoughts start racing at hyperspeed, chasing their most excessive logical conclusions, which are inherently antihuman and antihomeostatic. Philosophically, it's fascinating - at times even sublime - but, of course, your heart might also just explode. So, you know, not saying you should try it.

Oh yes, absolutely - it pushes you into pure post-human meltdown if you do enough of it. You know, Nick Land wrote most of his accelerationist philosophy during a multi-year amphetamine binge, right?

You know the old joke about being a VIP in the Gulag, right? A prisoner in a Soviet labor camp is called over by the commander, who says: "Comrade, because of your dedication and loyalty to the Party, you’ll get a special treat every Sunday!" Excited, the prisoner asks: "Oh? What is it?" The commander grins: "Instead of just one rotten fish head in your soup - you’ll get two!"

You're going on the gulag list too.

It’s ironic how this concecpt of the "Great Awakening" has done a full 180. As far as I’m aware, it was originally coined by Alexander Dugin in the context of his arcane philosophical project as a reaction against object-oriented ontology (OOO) - an obscure Western academic trend obsessed with post-humanism and the primacy of the object (mostly AI, synthetic biology, and other radical non-human actants, as Bruno Latour calls them). For Dugin, this technological accelerationism was an imminent civilzational thread to Russia and had to be countered by a return to tradition, which, in his view, was the only way the subject could survive the future rather than be dissolved into a flat, object-oriented world. And yet, through some strange alchemy of Silicon Valley, QAnon and MAGA, the term has now been co-opted to mean precisely the opposite - often invoked in service of hyper-acceleration, techno-capitalist inevitability, or reactionary digital politics. So much for American and Russian agendas aligning, by the way.

Good one! If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of early electronic music, you should check out Stockhausen. I won’t pretend this is a staple in my rotation, but I find it philosophically fascinating - how the emergence of electronic music sounds almost like a primordial soup of sound trying to bootstrap itself into existence. Ironically, this is also exactly the kind of music that gets overlaid onto visualizations of prehistoric life in documentaries and sci-fi movies.

Ehhh, I don’t know. I’ve had beautiful afterglows from some gnarly cocaine binges or excessive rolling - just from contemplating the slow, spotty recollection of the sublime post-human ecstasy I’ve experienced. Beauty transcends such vulgar neurological mechanisms. Sorry if that was a bit of a tangent. But also, not sorry - because it’s true.

Maybe just drop the whole misunderstood genius shtick and have a normal conversation - one where you can, of course, make whatever philosophical point you want. Or just fuck off. That’s also an option.

Hmm, I’ve always gotten a very nice afterglow from microdosing LSD. Maybe that’s your clue that your life sucks? Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, but that’s just my take - as someone almost a decade into exploring mind-altering substances. Whenever a high doesn’t justify itself as a singular aesthetic experience and I find myself chasing more, or - as Carl points out well - when I start comparing my ordinary experience to the high, it usually means there’s something fundamentally off in my current situation. Probably something worth sitting with and contemplating.