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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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While I cannot know for certain, I think @HalloweenSnarry references the classical Prison Riddle, i.e. a shit test used as part of a «registration» rite for a new cell mate, popularized on Russian imageboards (this stuff was recently brought to the attention of Westerners by Galeev).

The riddle in question is a near-perfectly polished psychological attack against a relatively powerless newcomer in a honor culture setting; it's really pretty crude, but lazily googled translations are lacking, so here goes. «There are two chairs. On one, sharpened pikes. On the other, jerked [erect] cocks. On which one do you sit, on which do you put your mother?» As is common with riddles, it rhymes.

Supposedly, default passwords are:

  1. «I'll take the sharpened pikes, cut down the jerked cocks, will sit myself and sit my mother».

  2. «I'll sit on the pikes and sit my mother on my knees».

In principle, the universal counter «For what reason do you inquire?» (literally), or some blah like «We're fine with standing, thank you very much» are also valid, though I haven't had the opportunity to try it out.

There is a whole family of those riddles, sadly their charm is untranslatable. The most reductionist one is «Offer your ass vs. sell your mom?»

I like the trolley problem one:

You're on a train, chained to levers that can turn either left or right. There's a fork in the road ahead - your mother is tied to a pole on the right and your buds, ten of them, are on the left. Which way do you turn, who do you hit?

Answer: today's buds [could be] tomorrow's cops.

Russian (and broader Russophone) culture pays a lot of attention to the problem of choosing between terrible options and false dichotomies, captured in the saying «horse-radish ain't sweeter than radish». E.g. the Escobar Axiom of Choice (Escobar is a Ukrainian black metal character):

In any choice between only two mutually exclusive and opposite entities, both alternatives will be exceptional fucking shit.

Or in the original form:

«this [one] is fucking shit, and that one is fucking shit. Both fucking shits are such that I just fuck her mom's mouth».

Pelevin has developed this idea into a faux-dialectical method, e.g. in «Batman Apollo»:

– The Chinese Taoists, – he said, – had a similar notion, I will retell it in my own words. Struggling for hearts and minds, discourse workers constantly demand that people answer 'yes' or 'no'. All human thinking must flow, like an electric current, between these two poles. But in reality there are always three possible answers: "yes", "no" and "fuck you". When too many people begin to understand this, it means there is some wiggle in the skulls. In our culture, it has reached a critical point. It needs to be reduced drastically.

And earlier, in «P5: farewell songs of the political pygmies of pindostan»:

Ludwig Wittgenstein had claimed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that he had discovered a general form for describing the sentences of any language. In his view, this universal formula accommodates all possible signifier constructions – just as the infinite space of the universe accommodates all possible cosmic objects.

"That there is a general form of sentence," writes Wittgenstein, "is proven by the fact that there can be no sentence whose form cannot be foreseen (i.e., constructed). The general form of the sentence is: "The issue is so und so" ("Es verhält sich so und so").

However, philologist Alexander Sirind, an associate professor at the Irkutsk Pedagogical Institute, recently managed to disprove the famous formula, by giving an example of a sentence that goes beyond the all-encompassing paradigm outlined by the Austrian philosopher. It goes like this: "Fuck you, Wittgenstein".

But as for the CCP vs the Globohomo, I think another piece of imageboard fancy is more relevant – the 4chan «freedom is best, and hard choices» or maybe the Ben Garrison remake «the march of tyranny». If you don't have negotiating power except in the form of defecting in protest, and your defection threshold is only reached after both tyrants have curtailed freedoms of their subjects, just to a different extent (and that's still a better case than what we have here) – eventually both tyrants converge to absolute dominance and all subjects are maximally debased.

The Chinese Taoists, – he said, – had a similar notion, I will retell it in my own words. Struggling for hearts and minds, discourse workers constantly demand that people answer 'yes' or 'no'. All human thinking must flow, like an electric current, between these two poles. But in reality there are always three possible answers: "yes", "no" and "fuck you". When too many people begin to understand this, it means there is some wiggle in the skulls. In our culture, it has reached a critical point. It needs to be reduced drastically.

This reminds me of older discourse around powertalk(?), wherein enough people "leave" the game of producing to extort producers, that society begins to collapse. (I only briefly leafed through a decade ago and current perusal leaves me uncertain whether that was the source.)

I know that this is the premise of Atlas Shrugged, and Zvi's Maze Sequence goes there as well.

Yeah, that first one was what I was thinking of.

Your ending paragraph puts things a lot better, though.

There are two chairs. On one, sharpened pikes. On the other, jerked [erect] cocks. On which one do you sit, on which do you put your mother?» As is common with riddles, it rhymes.

Password template seems to be any solution where you don't sit on the cocks and your mother is absolutely unharmed/uncocked. I did figure that out as much, but thought of retarded shit like placing the chairs sideways and both of us sitting on the side edge or something. I might just be too "neurodivergent" for Russian prison. That fails the "fuck you" criterion though.

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