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Revision as of 06:12, 7 June 2026 by Reversedragon (talk | contribs) (If humor is a form of government, then it can outlaw protests / Trump is Žižek)

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  1. Edgeworth's dialectic

    (Ace Attorney) -> motif examined in Ace Attorney 2. [1] [2] Edgeworth collides with Wright. he has a particular way of thinking which is 'a problem' to Phoenix Wright. Wright continues to push on 'in authenticity'. after the incident where somebody tried to frame Edgeworth (following inside the recurring theme of behind-the-scenes fights between the criminals and the lawyers or detectives) and the Judge(?) reminded people of his actual violations of procedure, Edgeworth leaves. when he comes back, he gives Wright some very cryptic advice about 'knowing what it means to be the defense' after he 'discovered what it means to be the prosecution'. at the end it becomes clear Edgeworth did change. as much as he still seems reluctant to say it out loud he seems to have been jarred by his encounters with Phoenix and realized there was a need to to also collide the two of them together mentally and transform himself into something else.

    this motif is... a mixed bag. in some ways it's a good thing — it's always great to see a character re-evaluate themself. in some ways it's a little yucky because it reminds me of Fukuyama's dialectic but somehow applied to people. in Fukuyama's dialectic it's asserted that improvement and moderation are inherently tied together such that there's not really any such thing as change, only restoring the perfect. and here, you can almost see a nasty undertone that Edgeworth had to rethink himself because his personality was "not moderate" and "had to be moderated" while Phoenix, in being defined by authenticity and a kind of purity of character, is characterized not by actual striving for self-improvement but by inherent perfection. Franziska von Karma is obnoxious but like, as much as this isn't my favorite kind of 'character development', at the very least she did work hard to get where she is. meanwhile the game ultimately seems to knock that concept of improving through effort, and after thinking about it a while that's a little unsettling honestly. it's like Edgeworth didn't improve morally because he tried to do that — the form of effort that is relevant here and possibly more important — but because he regressed to the mean, he fell back to the Ideal. that concept is the thing that bothers me.
    Socratic dialectic + ?? = Edgeworth's dialectic. Fukuyama's dialectic + character development (fiction) = Edgeworth's dialectic. Miles Edgeworth + authenticity (Lacanianism) = Edgeworth's dialectic. Miles Edgeworth + The unpredictability of Subjects will save the world = Edgeworth's dialectic.

  2. Edgeworth's dialectic (Ace Attorney) -> added previous propositions. some of these may need to be merged together? I think Q64,43 is its own motif because it can be considered the Ace Attorney version, or the "fictional works" version of the motif, while at least Q51,01 would be separate from it.
    [edit:] yeah, no, I think all of these items can reasonably be separate, but Q51,01 is the main one, and Q64,43 and Q51,03 are specific senses of it expressed as Items rather than sense labels (which is okay, or perhaps better).
  3. Subjectivity makes people listen / When The Subject simply is, it compels people to listen / Edgeworth's dialectic (Ace Attorney; generic) / Susie's dialectic (Deltarune) / Bartleby's dialectic (Lacanianism)
  4. watch my taffy dance ("Come along with me")
  5. The unpredictability of Subjects will save the world / Bartleby the unlikeable guy will stop the problem by stoking empathy (The Excessive Subject, Žižek) / whatsisname the unlikeable guy will stop the problem by stoking empathy (misquote) -> I only caught this one after three or more times of listening to a Deltarune analysis. on Noelle's blog there is an incident where Susie is about to bite Kris, but then she stops because Kris said something unexpected. the blog post does not even explain what Kris said, underscoring the motif that Kris is an "excessive Subject" even to The Player. outside Deltarune, this same concept is portrayed much worse in The Excessive Subject. Rothenberg and Žižek clumsily try to explain that basically if a person is just really unpredictable people would eventually be forced to have intersubjectivity and learn empathy. honestly? I really do not think so. the problem isn't that reactionaries don't understand things. the problem is that the processes of society are much more physical and "inanimate" than people want to believe, reactionaries understand those processes all too well, and they choose to perpetuate cruel patterns because it's genuinely materially easier than doing otherwise. like, to get them to change you'd have to force them to expend energy and create things when they don't want to. doing nothing is much easier than doing something. people being unpredictable doesn't make Actually Getting Off Your Butt And Doing Things become easy.
  6. technetium rule / Be authentic unto others so that others will be authentic unto you / (9k)

Humor

  1. Nothing is more democratic than to have the high and mighty lampooned and spoofed (Hustler v. Falwell) ; Hustler Magazine and Larry C. Flynt, Petitioners v. Jerry Falwell [3] [4] -> it feels strange there is so much talk about the role of humor recently. I feel like it's one of many faces of Edgeworth's dialectic.
  2. Humor is a form of government -> I hate this proposition because I know it's not true but I have a very hard time disproving it because I don't even know what's the best concrete place to start.
  3. The point of protests is to increase social costs [5] -> this is one of the most Lacanian political theories I have ever seen, and I feel secondhand embarrassment that anyone calling themselves "communist" would advance it. this is just a version of Edgeworth's dialectic. it's one of the least bad ones, granted, but it's still not very good.
  4. Humor is a form of government -> my first thoughts here... humor can be used by literally anyone with any point of view, and it can be used to discourage things that are normal or harmless if enough people subjectively decide they're awkward. trans women have been the subject of terrible jokes for decades and decades, all intended to make them go away. "global warming" has also been a very frequent subject of jokes. and people who are told that hateful jokes aren't funny generally don't change their minds, they just keep repeating them to people quietly anyway and complaining that culture has become 'authoritarian'. as much as it may be tempting to say that that in itself is funny (decades ago the complaint was Stalin's government killing 100,000 Trotskyites and now you get upset about this?), it's really not, because it shows that the statement that humor can govern people including everyday bullies and political figures isn't true.
    if you have a definition of "democratic" that includes people actually facing consequences when they're governed that wouldn't allow them to infinitely continue the same behavior, then no, humor is not democratic. humor is about as democratic as impeaching Donald Trump, because it has done about as much to get him out of office.
  5. If humor is a form of government, then it can outlaw protests / If humor is a form of government, then protesting can be outlawed and suppressed simply by calling frivolous protests "actually stupid" -> I am really surprised I haven't already seen this happening. because it's exactly the way actual nazis think.
  6. Humor is a form of government -> to claim that humor is "democratic" seems to be using a definition where "democracy" has nothing to do with giving the people any power to govern each other (so, democracy is not government of the people by the people and for the people), and in fact is almost synonymous with freedom; as people have more and more freedom there is democracy, but when people are actually given the power to govern the people that has nothing to do with democracy.
  7. Trump is Žižek / Trump making crude jokes does not prove Slavoj Žižek is Donald Trump, but arguably does prove that Trump is Žižek, or, to put it more literally, that the Republican party is a countable instance of blue or brown anarchism whether charcoal anarchists want to believe that is actually considered anarchism or not / Trump making crude jokes does not prove Žižek is a Tory, but does imply that Žižek's premises are incorrect and he is not modeling what he thinks he is; Žižek claimed he was a "Communist" but if Trump does what Žižek says and is against Communism it means that what Žižek believes is not Marxism or Leninism; this is to imply that what Žižek believes is blue anarchism
    Humor is a form of government + Donald Trump and crude jokes = Trump is Žižek.
  8. The point of protests is to increase social costs -> Can "social costs" meaningfully exist if people can at any point pivot and claim they aren't part of the countable society that attempts to impose costs? They have every incentive to claim that they aren't part of that society and also that the "other" society is part of theirs or subject to theirs. This theory of society actively breeds imperialism.
    god, the use of the US Civil War as somehow proving the point that upholding slavery created a social cost..... is 'we can secede, gain sovereignty, and shoot whoever we want' a social consequence or is that a position of power? I think it's hard to defend that it isn't the latter, especially after Reconstruction only led to a more even balance of power between bigotry and not-bigotry. not a good thing! you don't want not-bigotry and bigotry to be equally valid.
    Confederates weren't trying to conquer the North, but Tories now are, as if adding them into society and calling them 'Americans too' in fact created a trend toward more social consequences for progress and fewer social consequences for bigotry.
    neodymium rule: social costs flip over; impose cultural standards onto others only when you are willing to endure completely different and objectionable standards actually being imposed onto you.

Technology

  1. Can we really trust companies with technology?! / Can we really trust companies to use their technology for good?! -> this is one of the biggest glaring contradictions in the whole of blue anarchism. that government must be used to contain """technology""", the place power supposedly comes from, but that we're really not supposed to think about government and nearly supposed to forget it exists after an election, and that society must be developed through people spontaneously creating technology with no guidance from anyone else. that feels like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
    "power comes from technology" "we only have society when we regulate technology" "well you have to have businesses" "businesses don't have anything to do with anything" "they're a business, they have to make a profit" "why are you criticizing businesses, what popular commercial product have you created" "businesses are greedy, homicidal, and out of control" "we have to regulate businesses" "we swear we aren't Bolsheviks and we won't beat up businesses like Trotsky's army at Kronstadt" "no, businesses aren't more important than a pandemic response" "we know that you think having a pandemic response is literally Bolshevism but uh.... we can cause you to consent to vaccines by employers paying people to get them, which is not coercion despite our attempt to program people with different desires to get what we want" "so there's nothing left to profit off by growing businesses except building data centers over Black neighborhoods? um..." "capitalism isn't dead, uh, go promote growth in Israel and Ukraine so we'll have someone to sell to. maybe we can bulldoze Iran and somehow turn all the growth in Iran into growth for us"
    honestly, like... anticommunism is one of the most dangerous technologies ever invented, because it makes your government secretly build atom bombs whether you want them. can we ban anticommunism just because it's dangerous and acts as a material process that causes the creation of corporations and institutions thus making it a technology?
  2. Power comes from technology / Political power comes from material inventions and philosophical technologies, including corporate structures, government institutions, and ideological conditioning [6] [7] -> no. now, I like the definition of technology here. that part is not really the bad part — honestly, it's pretty cool and fitting to be able to call something like Marxist historical materialism a technology. that said, this is an Idealist model of where power comes from. it doesn't look like it at first, when it appeals to material objects like spears, bomber planes, and datacenters full of LLMs, but the telling part is when it considers policies to be technologies on the same level as physical inventions. while that shouldn't be a bad thing it's definitely being done for the wrong reasons. what's being implied is that technologies are something that are deliberately created as social constructs by individuals based on what they personally want — based on individual knowledge, individual ideology, and individual will. the article says that individual actions and decisions can never fully be prevented, which is correct, but then it claims that they can be contained anyway, based on some oddly specific between-the-lines reasoning that if people decide to do something it must then be possible to tell them not to decide to do it. this is not correct. people are countably separate material objects capable of multiplying their capital and capacity for destruction before they are rational agents, so if you try to believe that Ideas and Free Will are the basis for government then you'll end up at the conclusion that government is almost impossible. all you can really claw back from the harsh facts of reality is the concept that because people have the capacity for destruction that in itself means that there's the right for a nation-state to assert government over them. but nation-states are countable, so you have to decide which nation-state has the inherent right to capture which people. and if you decide it wrong, the United States will forcibly assimilate a bunch of individual Native Americans into the United States identity and culture just so they are incapable of waging a war against it. or, for a more fun example, if you decide wrong the Communist Party of the Soviet Union will forcibly assimilate a bunch of Trotskyists that would rather create their own countably separate Marxist party, and make them operate within and construct the Soviet Union even as they don't really want to. this really is not how government works or where it comes from. you see this in the contradiction between Bolshevism attempting to take possession of Careerists and take away their right to appropriate capital or towns so the petty bourgeoisie don't exist any more but the whole sea of "petty classes" and people who don't understand Marxism that exist all pushing back at once and adding up to significant portions of a population as well as what may be majorities within First World populations. if it were true that Communism can't contain these classes for the greater good, then they would also be too powerful for Liberal-republicanism to contain.
  3. Power comes from technology -> look very closely here, and you'll catch it: the implication that political power is inherently bad, and while it's something society is allowed to have 'as a treat' the reason it has to be regulated is that power, democratic or un-democratic, is inherently destructive.
  4. Anticommunism is a technology
  5. Anticommunism is a dangerous technology / Anticommunism is a dangerous technology that must be banned or regulated -> this is so stupid it's hilarious and yet it's one of those moments where I'm like, did I have a moment of dark genius...? would this actually work?
    I know this would be a fun B-side chapter though. Hello, U.S. Congress. This is the Emancipation Party for statist anarchy. I may be an anarchist, but I don't believe in letting dangerous technologies run around freely. This is why you have to regulate anticommunism as a dangerous technology...
    Anticommunism is a technology + ?? = Anticommunism is a dangerous technology
  6. The regulation of technology is an instance of Edgeworth's dialectic; technology is regulated when individual behavior becomes Extreme relative to other individuals and Filaments of individuals press individuals to change

Markets

  1. Markets are an anarchism because they involve Edgeworth's dialectic

International war and bigotry

  1. Moderation is a form of extremism / Because individuals vary greatly, their normal healthy states of being are in effect naturally "extreme" relative to each other, and thus any attempt to regulate an overall population's "extreme" behavior by bringing down "moderation" on every single individual one-by-one is in effect an attempt to intolerantly force a specific way of being on large numbers of people, and through the sheer quantity of that action it becomes extreme -> this sounds like something a schizoanalyst would say but at the very least it's more correct than what Mr. Jiang says.
  2. If the United States dropping an atomic bomb on Japan was an acceptable way to change the Japanese population's behavior, then why wasn't ramming a plane into a single United States building okay? -> when you think about it — well, at least if I remember right — there was less death and damage.
    so like, when Lacanians go around spewing this idea that Edgeworth's dialectic can fix anything with no historical materialism or Marxism required, this really tests that claim. dropping an atomic bomb on Japan is basically just a very large-scale version of Edgeworth's dialectic — it attempts to bring a change in Japan's consciousness by the United States being exactly as it is but fighting back against Japan. at small scales it may not be harmful but at large scales it can become horrifically violent. and for what, to preserve the arbitrary idea that people change their behavior or artificially design their national culture starting at Free Will?? I genuinely don't see how a country spontaneously attacking the United States with a plane isn't the same thing. the other country sees the United States being aggressive, it asks for a change in behavior, it deals a warning blow if there is not a change in behavior to signify that the other country wants the United States to go away and isn't giving in to the bullies. we've already established that Edgeworth's dialectic is a potentially toxic process that allows reactionary groups of people to pressure anybody they like to behave the way they behave. so we know it's not actually a matter of Good and Evil. but I think this demonstrates that it inherently favors and privileges war. if two populations each get convinced that 'fighting back against each other and setting boundaries' is the way to end each other's aggression, they can end up going to war basically indefinitely.
    gosh imagine a category-of-things Item which is 'book that effectively recommends dropping an atomic bomb on Japan'.
  3. Sanctions can be anarchic / (9k)
  4. Anarchy can be anhierarchy / (9k) -> Cuba is one of the best examples. anarchists go around trying to say that the negative effects that occur during Government or a locus of conjoined patriots happen because of Government, but what they don't realize is that there can be any number of cases where similar negative effects occur from decentralized processes in which people come together as equals and nobody rules anybody else, all the un-governed equals in the process who fairly agreed with each other to enter the process as a matter of peace and friendship just spontaneously all collect onto a decision that's really terrible, and somewhat literally a bunch of equal people simply decide to be more equal than other groups of equals.
    something can totally, almost indisputably be an anarchy and yet do horrible things to other groups of people on the level of Bellegarrigue's concept of "civil war" (warring states periods, violent global empire).
  5. Trotsky showed that Stalin was wrong by being authentic
  6. A world that tries to fix prejudice and hatred through "moderation" ("normalcy"; "basic human decency"; "socialization"; "symbolic castration" or "discipline"; etc) will see moderate lukewarm forms of fascism pop up and persist for decades, not the elimination of fascism

Objections

  1. Edgeworth's dialectic -> I recognize how funny having a section called "objections" on this page is, but. pun not intended.
  2. A human being does not actually have free will without an objective view (materially accurate model) of surrounding reality, because an inaccurate model of reality does not allow intelligently picking between what consequences will be produced as opposed to unpredictably producing whatever consequences result from a person's arbitrarily chosen actions -> really important distinction to make between Edgeworth's dialectic and like, the way the world really works.
    Edgeworth's dialectic is surrounded by this claim that being 'authentic' and disrupting bullies "gives them freedom", but usually also with this implied assumption that 'the bullies' gain freedom because they always had Free Will and decided to reach for Freedom. both things cannot be true. if "Wright" and "Edgeworth" had to collide with each other in an unconscious process for Edgeworth to change, then Edgeworth didn't choose to change, he just did. that change was brought on him without really emerging from his own will or consent. now, to be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself; it's bad by Existentialist standards, but I'm a Communist, I think you know all the stereotypes about how I love to force people to change. (I don't, actually. I find it existentially terrifying to even have to fight a Trotskyist let alone an anarchist. a Tory I wouldn't really care about the central government having to 'catch'. but anarchists can be severely emotionally manipulative to the point they honestly scare me and I think if I'd lived in the USSR I would have tried to get the anarchists relocated to another country or region because as far as I can tell "anarchists" and "resolving antagonisms" really do not mix.) if Edgeworth decided to change because he was already free to choose, then the step of Wright bumping into him to cause that while having the most authentic and "free" character he can wouldn't be necessary.
    sidenote: it is really weird how 'authenticity' here is distinctly an abstract Ideal, and it acts as a form of 'character' (essence) in a specifically Idealist way. there is an almost 'pataphysical interaction here between the Ideal of Authenticity and the Ideal of stubbornness, violence, or confrontation.
  3. Edgeworth's dialectic is inappropriate for use at large scales; the Idealist model of "moderation" and "extremes" cannot be expected to operate reliably or at all in large societies as opposed to very small clusters of people -> I love calling this Edgeworth's dialectic over 'Susie's dialectic' because just knowing this name comes from a series about court cases it makes it sound weirdly 'official', not least because it's a relatively fancy name, and the character canonically has a surname.
    sneaking in anime characters into a discussion that's basically about laws becomes funnier the closer it gets to being impossible for someone who didn't about know the series to identify what's going on. trying to sneak in a Pokémon when people don't know what Pokémon is: basic. talking about ace attorney like it was a real court case: advanced.

Ideologies or fields

  • Aa / psychoanalysis
  • MX / existential materialism
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