Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

[Click here to read the reddit post to whom I am replying.] None of this was hard for me to understand. Spike's dream was that he could escape the consequences of his actions, and he tried to do this through a thoroughly absurd, amoral lifestyle, drifting aimlessly through space and barely scraping by on bounty hunter gigs without concern for any of the broader moral implications. Julia was someone whom he kept within his memory as though she might be safe there as a mental image; so, he had a "dream" of her which he could wander back to as a vestige of some love or meaning in his otherwise amoral, apathetic life. So, when she died, he woke up from the dream she represented. He beheld that he could not escape his past by looking to the future. So, he sought revenge on Julia's behalf and died a martyr, ridding the entire universe of Vicious and thus finding his redemption, represented by his star up in the skies. The Beatles quote about "the weight" one has

"I'm glad you made this retrospective. Here are all my criticisms of it:   1. I knew you'd reference the work of B-Mask by the end of it. I did appreciate the Bentley voice; you had me fooled, but only for about three seconds. Yet the hours I had wasted watching Will's analysis might have been better spent had he not burdened his interpretation with his own pretensions, some of which I'm glad that you at least depart from, even if it's to the opposite extreme. (At least the Taurus/Capricorn dynamic proves to be a thing in fact.) 2. The part you both agree on, both between yourselves and with the likes of Zeke from Powercell , is that the central theme of the third game is "letting go" and disidentifying with one's past, both personal and cultural. I cannot overstress the fallacy in such a line of thinking, though I can't deny this theme was probably intended by the writers (which accounts for why the ending disappointed me, as well a

**[10:40-11:22:]** "*But I've said in my reviews that so many of the supposed 'heroes' in* Rings of Power *are evil, and the show doesn't seem to realize it, and it seems like the showrunners genuinely don't understand what Evil is, themselves. Tolkien's world was black-and-white; there was Good and Evil, and they were battling. But not this one. Not in *Rings of Power*.  [...]  Sauron was evil. And yes: you can have good people who fall to Evil, but **they are good or evil;** there is no 'anti-heroes'*." ** Disparu.  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHQ0pLK1SBg]** That sums it up, and it resolves a problem plaguing modern writers that I've tackled with great force and perseverance: moral ambiguity in place of genuine discernment and complexity. If there is an objective moral truth, then one can't say that "we are all the devil, deep within even the purest Soul," since it is in one's choices and one's actions that one

“I am not the only one responsible for my well-being here. I trusted you, and you accepted the responsibility. If you had not accepted, then you wouldn’t have been capable of taking opportunities away from me. It was not my fault that I trusted you, since trust is not an evil thing, but rather yours that you betrayed that trust, since treachery is evil. So: don’t try to preach responsibility to me because I suffer. You’ve confessed that, had you acted otherwise, I would have benefited, and you can’t deny that, had I never trusted you, you never could have acted as you did. I suffered through the combination of my own goodwill and your betrayal of it. YOU are to atone, not I. You cannot separate responsibility from Justice.” [My own writing. Image unrelated.] Sadly, this is lost on narcissists who claim that we are not responsible for how we have affected Others. Yet the Truth is this: that all of us depend on Others for our own well-being, and responsibility requires the admission of t

Tolkien was not a Fascist, but his anti-Fascist politics were nonetheless as playful and escapist as his stories, and I can’t imagine that the irony of his own contradictions had been lost on him. There cannot be an abolition of control, since abolition is control. One cannot be arrested for professing what is in the interest of State, since only States can make arrests. (A “citizen’s arrest” is nonetheless a *legal* possibility.) There is no friendship without loyalty to common goods and expectations; there can be no noble aspirations without class distinctions, and a monarchy without a constitution is a tyranny. If all are born with evil in their Souls, then any has the obligation to control it, both in Self and Others; this especially is true if only some are evil and the others good, for any innocence must be protected. Men cannot defend those worthy of protection if there is no rational consensus in between them about who is worthy. All of our moral aspirations strive to the fulfi

There is no shortage of contemporary dialogue about the villainy of narcissism, yet this only proves to be the case when the tradition of objective moral criticism has run dry and when psychology has filled the void. What there has not yet been sufficient conversation in addressing is that narcissism rarely is exclusively a personal phenomenon, since there are social forces which produce it, and psychology is one such force. Certainly NOT another narcissistic self-insertion for Ms. Gao . Egalitarian psychology, conspiring with politics, commits the most atrocities in this regard, since it is emblematic of the “leveling” that Kierkegaard described nearly two hundred years ago. What is a more barbaric rule than “treat all others with respect, though they’ve not earned it?” What is more repulsive as a style of parenting than to deny that one’s own child is special? Love must always manifest in love for the distinctions; it is hatred which aspires to subvert all difference and unify all th

Thomas Sowell’s proposition, as I have been led to understand it , is that there are only two predominant positions in the realm of politics, the one assuming that we’re tragic beings who are predisposed to failure by our flaws, the other that we’re good at heart and that we have the opportunity to build a better World. Yet classical morality, in all its forms, cannot be classed as one and not the other of these viewpoints, since it’s founded on the understanding that we’re beings who are neither perfect nor entirely corrupt, and that is why we *must* be better, that the World is fallen, and that in itself implies the *obligation to improve* it. Any moralizing rhetoric that seeks to undermine this fact — that our flaws are just what makes perfection necessary as a goal — is evil. Cynicism and Utopian ideals are both authoritarian and arbitrary. Moral progress always moves from lead to gold, so there’s no point in trying to define the essence of all men as being either gold or lead. **[

"* Life is fragile, men are vulnerable and it is of the essence of the human situation that they are such. For in heroic societies life is the standard of value. If someone kills you, my friend or brother, I owe you their death and when I have paid my debt to you their friend or brother owes them my death. The more extended my system of kinsmen and friends, the more liabilities I shall incur of a kind that may end in my death*." Alasdair MacIntyre, *After Virtue*. I ask anyone who ever tries to humanize the Titans: watch the final scene of that first episode, over and over, watch that tearful boy as he is carried off, torn from his mother by a coward strong enough to separate them but not save them, crying with those big, green eyes, as opalescent as Spring dew on blades of grass, as she, his loving *kaasan*, right before those boyish eyes, is cut in twain betwixt the teeth of a monstrosity, a grinning menace, smiling as no man could smile in witnessing such cruelty, and tel

There will be those who would accuse me of becoming that which I've opposed, perhaps of having been that very monster from the outset of the lurid drama that's my life. They'll point to actions I have taken by comparison to those committed by these villains I have referenced as such. Yet why would I have called them "villains" if I could relate with them, when those I did relate with, even those reviled by the masses, I have listed as among my Heroes? Such a shallow point of view examines my behaviour with no context for its motives, so it must remain a point of view and nothing more, for *motive* and *intent* define the action of a character, for they define the character of any action.   They don't know my motives, not far lack of honesty upon my part, but rather lack of interest in human motivation. Yet the motives of these heroes and these villains in the realm of fiction are far less opaque, as fiction is designed to act as revelation for such motives. My

In the realm of Anime, I'm still a novice, though I *have* watched *Evangelion* a total seven times. The perfect balance seems to have been struck, in that example, between elements. Yet if its imitator *Gurren Lagann* represents extremes in terms of tact, restraint, and pacing, rushing through a goofy, optimistic narrative that's lavished with frivolity, *Attack on Titan* represents the opposite extreme: a largely humourless and horrifying Gothic nightmare that, I am informed, drags on for 86 progressively depraving episodes, a number that would make me want to 86 *myself*, since I could barely touch it after the premiere's conclusion. I can say, with confidence, that what I witnessed in that scene disturbed me more than any other work of media, and, to this day, I think upon it as the principal example of *inhuman evil*: the existence of a plane of horror that transcends mere human comprehension, though it's not beyond imagination. Here were monsters that had clearly

The fact remains that, if an action is *intrinsically* contemptible or vile, then it will be recognized as such by anyone with clear discernment. Those who will be most disgusted are not those most guilty but the ones most innocent. The Jungians suggested that this was because the innocent suppress their own repugnant tendencies. Yet even those who have become aware of such repugnant tendencies will feel disgust in seeing them incarnate in the flesh, for those will be the ones best armed not only to perceive them but to fight them. No: the Villain isn't always you. It is not you as individual. It is not even you as member of society. It is not your society itself. Not everything revolves around you. Neither is the Hero always you; that's just a goal to strive for. Why? It is because, while your mythology may be what Jung calls a "projection" of collective psychic forces, it remains a symbol with a meaning in **the World.** All peoples have mythologies they turn to in