
The Paris attacks did not take place - MrJagil
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/11/paris-attack-place-151122121442263.html
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scrumper
This is a bad article really. After reading it I'm none the wiser as to what
'hyperreality' and 'simulacra' actually mean in this context. I can make
guesses, but the author doesn't explain his central concepts and fails to
build a case around them. Am I wrong to expect much clear writing and a
developed argument from a university professor? Or is the price of admission
to this article a familiarity with Baudrillard's work?

~~~
1812Overture
It's post-modernism. The author doesn't know what it means, and if he's a fan
of Wittgenstein he'd probably argue that there's no point in even looking for
meaning in it.

~~~
hightechlowlife
"To challenge and to cope with this paradoxical state of things, we need a
paradoxical way of thinking; since the world drifts into delirium, we must
adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of
truth, of causality, or any discursive norm."

Great idea, Baudrillard. Reality has become confusing, therefore, let's act
like retards.

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krapp
Media necessarily presents an abstraction of reality to the viewer. However,
the pervasive and distributed nature of information gathering and
dissemination in the Internet age opens that abstraction up to people in a way
that simply wasn't possible when all media was "black boxes" (television,
radio, newspaper, etc.) Media now encompasses people uploading footage to
Youtube from their phones in the middle of a war zone.

The premise of Baudrillard's argument as I understand it - that the model of
reality created by media is useless fiction and propaganda, which must, one
assumes, be rejected out of hand as postmodernists seem to want to do - has
possibly become more tenuous over time. Although some would (and do) assert
that the fabrication of reality by corporate and government interests has only
exploded exponentially and become even more pervasive, and that the appearance
of fine-grained truth presented by social media is, itself, only a more
elaborate set of lies.

This phenomenon, by which reality is described through abstractions and
attempts at narrative, is everywhere - and it's arguably unavoidable, given
that the very nature of human consciousness is a post-hoc hallucination
generated by the unreliable narrator that is the brain. Should science dismiss
all of its theories as incredulous nonsense because its models are
falsifiable? Of course not, because even imperfect models can be useful. What
exactly are we to be left with, if we must reject abstraction? We cannot
reject it, we are it.

It is likely true, however, that for many people the rest of the world exists
primarily in the form of a set of packaged narratives or curated experiences
presented on an electronic screen or a device. There is also possibly a
discussion worth having on the ever-shifting definitions of "war" and
"terrorism" and just and unjust conflict in the modern age, because to an
extent, the arbiters of these definitions exist as ghosts in the machine.

Unfortunately, I had to wade through the cesspool of comments in the linked
article and the Wikipedia page on Jean Beaudrillard to even get a superficial
idea of what it was even talking about. The degree of contempt this article
appears to have for the lay reader only makes it likely most of the discussion
around it is going to be complaints about how difficult it is to understand.

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goldenkey
I believe there is a difference between hyperbole and outright falsities. No
excellence of academia redeems a statement like "The Paris attacks did not
take place." I'd argue that any kind of academic appreciation of these false
statements, in postmodern reflections on hyper-reality, say more about the
hyper-reality that academia seems to dwell in, particularly in the non-
technical sciences like sociology and philosophy. For reasons of lack of
rigor, it's easier for these specious "worldly" reflections to dwell in the
non-technical sciences, than lets say Chemistry, Biology, Math or Physics.
Need I say more about how I feel on the (dis)merits of this article...

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HelloNurse
A dumb but legitimate philosophical reflection. The only interesting and
surprising thing about this article is Al Jazeera choosing an exceptionally
disingenuous title.

