I get how someone who doesn't really think much about the media they consume could watch Breaking Bad and think Walter White is doing what he does for moral reasons. If someone who just watched the show casually while relaxing after work doesn't get it, there's no reason to be snobbish about it. It's easy to get caught up in the male power fantasy if you're an alienated Western male.
But the fact that this clown calls this "analysis" is making me yell at my screen. Letting Jane die was "morally justifiable" because she was a "bad influence on Jesse"? He "overcame his fears" by killing Tuco and Gus? Rejecting the money from Gretchen was good because he's "nobody's charity case"? Holy fucking shit imagine missing the point this badly.
And then this nonsense about "humans follow incentives that provide positive rewards in the brain" as if it was profound psychology and not just a comically verbose way to say "humans do what they like & want". It's a completely meaningless sentence, the point is to analyze what Walter values most at different points throughout the show, and if you look at that you'll find that he values his ego over money & his family's safety from episode 1, when he rejects even asking Gretchen for money and chooses to cook meth instead, greatly putting himself and his family at risk right from the start because his ego doesn't allow him to ask others for help. He becomes more ruthless and more megalomaniacal as the show progresses, sure, but this clown thinks he was still perfectly justified in everything he did up until the point he poisoned the kid.
If I ever put out media analysis like that, I want you all to put me out of my misery because clearly I must have been lobotomized.
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That is fair, and tbh, "Meat Computers" is admittedly not really a very good analogy one way, or the other. Meat does not exactly work like a silicon computer chip even under the best of circumstances; & the brain is a highly sophisticated (and analogue) electro-chemical organ. My main point is really to just question how much of what people do is actually intentional & consciously directed action, and what substance does the idea of consciously directed action even hold if we do take material causes (and also the chain of causal necessity) to be paramount in the development of any, or all phenomena?
I personally think that we hold on doggedly to the idea of a personally real & extant idea of free will, because we are (for one reason or another) loathe to rid ourselves of those most old & morally forceful ideas of Western Christian Tradition; the ideas of Personal Sin & Eternal Damnation. But this is a complex topic & I'm starting to drift off to sleep.
Hmm... That said I'm a big fan of Adam Curtis as a documentarian; while he has I think somewhat unfortunate takes on the nature of Socialist States in the previous century, I think he has an excellent accounting of the cultural & social degradation of Anglophone society from the Cold-War era onward.
I bring this up because one of his works; All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace deals, I think not necessarily in my own beliefs, but in those which you are more familiar with. And I would hope to think that I am not entirely unfamiliar with the ways in which those views run up against both serious moral & also factual problems.
But these are things to discuss later if you would wish.
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