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So the "broadcast yourself" thing is an excellent development, if it can change attitudes toward the realization that the life of an ordinary person is worth living;

But then again it's not innocent. Some people manipulate this desire of people to 'broadcast themselves' and make money and shape culture with that desire.

What you're saying about the everyman becoming more of a rolemodel is correct, and it's been happening for a while. It's the 'loser revenge', the knee-jerk from the high expectations we've been forced to deal with for lots of decades. Get in a great school, get a great job, get a great wife, make great kids, have a great house and all that.

So now the couch potato is fighting back for his right to be unsuccessful, and that's a healthy reaction. But.

The people that benefit from selling things to humans, will just find a different way to sell their things using the shifted paradigm. They will make a coorporation out of human expression, and they'll steer it subtly, perhaps not-so-subtly in the direction they want it to go. The 'nobody revolution' is a sham, because it's politically correct. You can do nothing and be nothing and share that with people in Big Brother, a videoblog, wherever just as long as you don't overstep any bounds. As long as you don't question authority, you don't have any radical views, you don't say anything you shouldn't say. If you do anything you shouldn't do, this process spits you out like the nothing you are. This revolution is televised, and it is controlled.

The great secret here is that they've let the dumb nothings make idols out of each other. Just as long as they remain oblivious to why they're nothings and how they could change that. It's like a little slave-colony where one of the slaves every week gets featured in the media of the colony, and all the other slaves look up to him or what to be him. It increases productivity and keeps everybody occupied. It's a difusion tactic while a few people who are not nothings are persuing their power plan.

I'm glad this argument is over, then.

I'm certain it does it for you on some levels you describe for you to keep doing it. I just wouldn't feel well doing it personally because my set of ethics (which I didn't choose but rather adopt and mutate over time naturally) would make me feel bad if I 'broadcasted myself'. So it isn't so much a judgement over what you're doing being bad according to your standards, but just according to mine.

Where did I say steroid use disqualified him? I'm saying he's not a bodybuilder, not just because he doesn't compete,  but he couldn't EVEN IF HE WANTED TO. This is the main difference between your soccer analogy. With his synthol augmentation, he literally cannot enter recognized IFBB (like FIFA is to soccer) competition.

For the purposes of this argument, a person that doesn't fulfull the criteria for entering a FIFA-sanctioned match but once did (like Valentino in bodybuilding) might not be an active professional football player, but is a retired football player. That was my argument, and it remains. I don't care if Valentino is practicing since it is irrelevant to the case I'm making. Which was from the begining that people from the bodybuilding scene can grow extremely odd-looking without being photoshop jobs. I could post people who are IFBB ready and are still making me puke, will that cap off this side of this strange argument I find myself into?

When did I say he was disqualified due to steroid use??? House rules? I was talking about regulations from the sport's governing body. I'm using that as the absolute definition, because otherwise it'd be pointless arguing, since every definition would be subjective and it would boil down to a difference of opinion, "agree to disagree" and rainbows and kittens.

Fair enough, but as I said, show me a 'proper' bodybuilder and let's discuss pukage over that, Valentino's not really that useful to my argument, which is based on a pretty natural destaste for this type of body-warping.

A majority of NFL, MLB, cycling, and Olympic athletes use anabolic steroids. It's difficult to test for, especially when minimal cycles are needed for results. Not really sure how this is relevant.

The documentaries I saw made a direct connection between such abnormal physiques as Valentino's and steroid use. While even the documentaries concerned said that the link isn't exactly medically proven and that Valentino was injecting a lot of things besides steroids, it's not really the level of detail that interests me. What interests me is this: the human body becomes like that of the bodybuilder through not only training and dieting, but injecting stuff into you. That's pretty gross for me.

Even if you take the injecting out of the equation though, and we can all pretend body builders get like that through just training, just one look at the models (I can't pretend they're athletes, as for all their rigorious excercise and dieting in the end what they do is stand, flex and smile) walking the distance to the stage, duck-footed, their own bodies hindering their basic function of WALKING or CROSSING THEIR ARMS I find that pretty gross and depressing as well.

It's his name. The one his parents gave him in the real off-line world. If I called him "buddy" or "pal" then I could see how that's snide. "Chief" has a nice ring to it also.

But you're not my parent. And this is the internet, it's considered proper decorum to adress someone as he chose to be adressed online, unless specifically stated otherwise. I go by 'Helm' in this forum, not Telemachus. What you did then, implies some sort of familiarity there between the two of us that calls for the omission of this decorum, where there is none. We are neither friends nor have we ever extensively talked, even. Can you see how that could be considered snide? I didn't take insult to that though, but the reasoning you provided for it seems dodgy.

Continuing the metal analogy, say I assert that The Doobie Brothers

As I said, go ahead and post bodybuilders who are bodybuilders, and probably I'll feel grossed out too. If Valentino is the 'Linkin Park' equivallent to my metal, then show me the 'Iron Maiden' equivallent to my metal and let's discuss this perfect-looking man.

Which isn't to say I would ever put videos of myself talking about whatever online. I think you'd get the effect bio is talking about just by watching them back yourself after, perhaps a few select people too. I too find the 'broadcast yourself' mentality of the recent internet age to be a bit of a turn-off.

biothlebop, great post. I hadn't considered that angle of the matter.

I think bodybuilding in moderation has definite benefits. As with most things, moderation is the key word.

From my point of view body-building is grotesque even as a premise. It's one thing to have an atheltic body from training or whatnot, and another to go for maximum muscle. I don't really care, nor did expect I'd have to debate this particular opinion with Big Brother or anyone around here but hey, go ahead and tell me my opinion is wrong again if you want to.

About asking whether Valentino was/is a bodybuilder, yes it wasn't I RUB MY QUESTION IN YOUR FACE but more 'huh? what? this guy isn't a bodybuilder? Since when?'. You chose to not include certain people into the bodybuilding club, those that use steroids I guess, and how where I to know that were the 'house rules' about bodybuilding for you? Two different documentaries I've seen about this grotesque, mainly american passtime said that a majority of professional bodybuilders use steroids.

He might be a shitty bodybuilder, but he's a bodybuilder from my point of view.

But seriously, post almost any picture of a beefy bodybuilder and I'd think he looks almost as bad. In my mind that's just not how human bodies should get.

About metal being music for cavemen, sure, I won't explode in your face if you call it that, I'd just tell you it's a statement I -partly- disagree with.

let's see. image posted was fake, someone says 'that's fake' and I remember I had seem some sorry bodybuilder person who through substance abuse of the worst way got into a similar state. So I post the picture as a reply to the 'that's fake' thing. I was meaning, crazy shit like this happens.

Now, whether sorry person is indeed a practicing, participating bodybuilder, I really really don't care. As far as I know, he was the product of the bodybuilding environ, a very grave reminder of what can happen with steroids. A lot of bodybuilders use steroids. Though Valentino is a cartoon case, I find for example this person equally nausiating, and he seems like a bodybuilder to me.

Bodybuilding for me is an expression of pathological narcissism (LET'S GET BIG! LET'S PUMP IRON WOO!) and has no redeeming factors. That's just an opinion though, you might find it annoying, you know?

I see. I see him as the product of that environment, though he may no longer participate. I couldn't care less who is actually a 'professional' bodybuilder and who's not.

Gregg Valentino isn't a bodybuilder, Big Brother?

Go go cold hard grim reality.

But hey Ildu. You can do a retarded stupid standing-on-the-spot dance.

Also you can wear designer clothing.

And you can't be fat.

There's been an ongoing effort to educate pixel artists in the benefits of more proper pixelling programs over at pixelation, and to ween them off the piece of shit microsoft has by default on its oses, that's why you see me being ticked off.

Go find some of Helm's work and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Why do you assume that since I make pixel art, I make it in MSpaint? That program is awful for someone who wants to make art fast and efficiently. As a pixel artist, I urge anyone with an interest in the form to instead use graphics gale, pro motion, d paint, p paint, brilliance, gfx 2, ANY other program than mspaint which is shit.

Korn need to tune up.

Limpingfish. I am torn between Piece of Mind and Seventh Son for the record I'd listen to if I listened to Iron Maiden a lot. It's amazing how there's *no bad songs* in either record. There ain't a lot of Heavy Metal bands that manage that. Sadly latter maiden are copying maiden.

Iron Maiden are a very iconic heavy metal band, with a lot of amazing albums under their belt I sheldomly listen to, but know by heart nonetheless. One could do worse than listen to such music, filled with passion, conviction and occasionally interesting lyrical themes.

If you can't run .exes and unzip stuff you either have a severily corrupted due to viruses computer, or you have a motherboard fault or something of the kind.

I guess this should probably be a PM instead, but since you asked.

Well when I first experienced that the very foundation of human action in many ways, which we have so easily presupposed to be willpower, is meaningless... it sort of shortcircuited me (especially since at the time I was on a very willpower-aescetic path), but now I'm fine, a reasonably happy guy, going about doing things that please me.  Given to an expected amount of ups and downs, I feel.

As with every philosophical baggage we carry that cannot be proven (not that anything can be reliably proven as with the problems with epistemology, but not even depended on in this case), I am for coming to terms with this realization: there are many, many other reasons we use free will other than it being a true supposition. As you say, if it's useful to you, go for it. Can you be happy without it? I think so. How do you abandon it? it's not just coming to terms with the words of it, it's experiencing it. I've been around free-will discussions for as long as I've been on the internet, and my position was always that it exists. No amount of talk, even reasonable talk, about determinism could shake that 'feeling in my gut'. It was only when certain experiences occured that this belief was shattered inside me, gone like it never was there. There was a period of readjustment, a lot of philosophical shedding of skin, and then here I was. On the outside not much has changed (beside my return to a lot of things I had cut off).

Most of the things we say every day to each other are unfounded lies that serve many many different things than the persuit for truth. They're about feeling better, extinguishing social anxiety, about coming out on top or playing an angle, all about personal survival, that occur deep within your mechanism, uninfluenced by 'you'. We are automations that use words as the debugger of our internal machine code. Machine code which will make as much sense to us if we could look at it directly as it makes sense to you when you read

01011001011011110111010100100000011001000110111101101110
00100111011101000010000001110010011001010110000101101100
0110110001111001001000000110010101111000011010010111001101110100

The debugger loops back data and realization and it self-influences, upgrades, evolves, but it's all internal code that the small pathetic part of it which we call 'self-awareness' is both oblivious to and better off being. Words aren't meaningless. They're meaninful inside in a place where we can't look with our microscopic eye, and even if we could all we would see would be unfathomable oceans of data where every part influences every other part in such complex interfacing structure.

The belief of oneself existence is similar to the belief in free will, in that it really means nothing concrete and can be similarly removed, and would also have very little to no effect in every-day life just as long as you kept communicating for all these other reasons besides 'truth'. True solipsism is just going about saying things, but not believing anything. More people are solipsists than those that know what the word means. Philosophy is useless as persuit of truth.


I don't think putting pressure on sick people using a lie such as free will helps them at all though. It's no longer fun and games. When you are late for a date and your date tells you "please don't do that again", and you say 'I will do my best', though you know you're not in such fine control of your intention, that's fun and games. When one is constently feeling awful about themselves and can't stop crying and all that, and you tell them 'try to be more happy!' then you're a jackass.

People who go through psychotherapy are often put through analysis by doctors. This  analysis gives them the space to communicate with themselves (not with their analyst) and arrive in certain personal reflections that help them be happy. The analyst tries to cut from these reflections, away those that could be feeding neuroses. Like, a depressed person would temporarily arrive to feeling better by self-reflecting "If I just can control EVERY ASPECT OF MY LIFE, I will be happy again!" This could lead to a period of happiness as the lie works and the person survives. However it can lead to control neuroses and such, and the work of the doctor is to hear what you say and steer you towards a comfortable lie which will work for you. This is not bad. I don't believe in anything that is true either. I am happy. I hope other people can be happy too, if it takes lies, so be it. The deal is trying to achieve an amount of lie-baggage that is not overbearing, and that which helps you socialize and carry on the stuff that will keep you reasonably happy.

Sometimes analysis is not enough - because it deals with a very non-scientific (analysts are not scientists) process: it messes with the debugger. It's trying to influence what the debugger sends back into the program for alteration. This is a very personal procedure that will never be totally codified. Then people try medication. Medication does a few things to your body that we know, and a lot that we do not. In comparison to analysis, it's a brute-force approach. Instead of fixing you from the bebugger, slowly ever so slowly making you feed back the data to your system so now you're over the problem, the drugs just alter your biochemistry themselves, sending 'I feel happy' dopamine, endorphine, whatever else you need. These may not fix the psychological fixation issue, but may provide a good groundwork for the debugger to start considering the options that will lead to long-term recovery. In any case, there is no medication without combined analysis, but there is analysis without medication. It's all up to what the severity of the symptoms are.

Most people on depression meds will continue to take depression meds for the rest of their lives. But that's not so bad either, if the only sideeffect is that constant need of them.

I am sorry, I don't believe in/understand free will. Whatever you do is all you could have done, I don't see the point in telling someone 'try harder to be happy'.