[social studies] The Zombie fascination in century 20.1

[Harvey]

If you sort of know that you're dead, then I guess you're perfectly adapted to the (mis)information age, which in a way, is how it always was. We're afraid that the zombie is a perfect adaptation to modern life, they don't kill or eat each other, they only eat the others, the 'survivors,' the heroes of their own story, typically maladjusted, dissatisfied, losers, loners, outsiders. No points for wondering why these are the types authors of the zombie mythos always sympathise with and represent as the hero. Perhaps the zombie mythos is the apotheosis of the 'author as parasite' theme in horror fiction. His fear is their hunger, their return, to take back what is missing. Shooting them in the head is the ultimate rejection of discourse, a prime reason 'in my humble,' for the 'cold dead hands' reasoning of the NRA. Guns exists for two reasons, 1) to kill, and 2) to get the other guy to accede to your demands. Self preservation isn't a good argument, after all, post apocalypse survival is a contradiction, except for the solipsist. And pretty soon he will come to shift his own lonely paradigm.

[elfismiles]

TV station hacker warns of zombies in Montana

GREAT FALLS, Mont. (AP) -- A Montana television station's regular programming was interrupted by news of a zombie apocalypse.

The Montana Television Network says hackers broke into the Emergency Alert System of Great Falls affiliate KRTV and its CW station Monday.

KRTV says on its website the hackers broadcast that "dead bodies are rising from their graves" in several Montana counties.

The alert claimed the bodies were "attacking the living" and warned people not to "approach or apprehend these bodies as they are extremely dangerous."

The network says there is no emergency and its engineers are investigating.

A call to KRTV was referred to a Montana Television Network executive in Bozeman. Jon Saunders didn't immediately return a call for comment.

The Great Falls Tribune reports the hoax alert generated at least four calls to police to see if it was true.


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/ ... 1-19-46-16

[justdrew]

ya know, it could be zombie's were upregulated to distract from a more realistic threat, vampires.

btw - Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, is a fairly good movie for an action based movie of it's type.

[elfismiles]

Got back yesterday from our friend's annual Zombiethon.

Zombiethon 2013 Friday night:
• Hammer Films' The Plague of the Zombies
• Shock Waves
• White Zombie w/Bela Lugosi

Zombiethon 2013 - Saturday:
• Dawn of the Mummy
• Pontypool
• Return of the Living Dead part 2
• Rifftrax – Mutant
• Hell of the Living Dead
• Lucio Fulci's The Beyond

Zombiethon 2013 - Sunday:
• Messiah of Evil
• The Video Dead
• Zombie
• Demons
• City of the Living Dead
• Dead and Buried
• Day of the Dead

Zombiethon 2013 - Monday morning wrap-up before checkout:
• Rifftrax – Night of the Living Dead



... meanwhile ... P-Zombie!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

Philosophical zombie

A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.[1] When a zombie is poked with a sharp object, for example, it does not feel any pain though it behaves exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil from the stimulus, or tell us that it is in intense pain).

The notion of a philosophical zombie is used mainly in thought experiments intended to support arguments (often called "zombie arguments") against forms of physicalism such as materialism, behaviorism and functionalism. Physicalism is the idea that all aspects of human nature can be explained by physical means: specifically, all aspects of human nature and perception can be explained from a neurobiological standpoint. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, argue that since a zombie is defined as physiologically indistinguishable from human beings, even its logical possibility would be a sound refutation of physicalism.[2]

Contents [hide]
1 Types of zombie
2 Zombie arguments
3 Responses
4 Related thought-experiments
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References and further reading
8 External links


[edit] Types of zombieThough philosophical zombies are widely used in thought experiments, the detailed articulation of the concept is not always the same. P-zombies were introduced primarily to argue against specific types of physicalism such as behaviorism, according to which mental states exist solely as behavior: belief, desire, thought, consciousness, and so on, are simply certain kinds of behavior or tendencies towards behaviors. A p-zombie that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a normal human being but lacks conscious experiences is therefore not logically possible according to the behaviorist, so an appeal to the logical possibility of a p-zombie furnishes an argument that behaviorism is false. Proponents of zombie arguments generally accept that p-zombies are not physically possible, while opponents necessarily deny that they are even logically possible.

The unifying idea of the zombie is of a human that has no conscious experience, but one might distinguish various types of zombie used in different thought experiments as follows:

A behavioral zombie that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human.
A neurological zombie that has a human brain and is generally physiologically indistinguishable from a human.[3]
A soulless zombie that lacks a "soul."
[edit] Zombie argumentsZombie arguments often support lines of reasoning that aim to show that zombies are logically possible in order to support some form of dualism - in this case the view that the world includes two kinds of substance (or perhaps two kinds of property); the mental and the physical.[4] According to physicalism, physical facts determine all other facts. Since any fact other than that of consciousness may be held to be the same for a p-zombie and a normal conscious human, it follows that physicalism must hold that p-zombies are either not possible or are the same as normal humans.

The zombie argument is a version of general modal arguments against physicalism such as that of Saul Kripke[5] against that kind of physicalism known as type-identity theory. Further such arguments were notably advanced in the 1970s by Thomas Nagel (1970; 1974) and Robert Kirk (1974) but the general argument was most famously developed in detail by David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind (1996). According to Chalmers one can coherently conceive of an entire zombie world, a world physically indistinguishable from this world but entirely lacking conscious experience. The counterpart of every conscious being in our world would be a p-zombie. Since such a world is conceivable, Chalmers claims, it is logically possible, which is all the argument requires. Chalmers states: "Zombies are probably not naturally possible: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its laws of nature."[6] The outline structure of Chalmers' version of the zombie argument is as follows;

1.According to physicalism, all that exists in our world (including consciousness) is physical.
2.Thus, if physicalism is true, a logically-possible world in which all physical facts are the same as those of the actual world must contain everything that exists in our actual world. In particular, conscious experience must exist in such a possible world.
3.In fact we can conceive of a world physically indistinguishable from our world but in which there is no consciousness (a zombie world). From this (so Chalmers argues) it follows that such a world is logically possible.
4.Therefore, physicalism is false. (The conclusion follows from 2. and 3. by modus tollens.)
[edit] ResponsesChalmers' argument is logically valid: if its premises are true then the conclusion must be true. However, other philosophers dispute that its premises are true. For example, is such a world really possible? Chalmers states that "it certainly seems that a coherent situation is described; I can discern no contradiction in the description."[7] This leads to the questions of the relevant notion of "possibility": is the scenario described in premise 3 possible in the sense that is suggested in premise 2? Most physicalist responses deny that the premise of a zombie scenario is possible.

Many physicalist philosophers argued that this scenario eliminates itself by its description; the basis of physicalist argument is that the world is defined entirely by physicality, thus a world that was physically identical would necessarily contain consciousness, as consciousness would necessarily be generated from any set of physical circumstances identical to our own.

Some philosophers[who?] maintain that a possibility stronger than logical possibility is required and that, while a zombie world is logically possible, such a weak notion is not relevant in the analysis of a metaphysical thesis such as physicalism. Most agree that the relevant notion of possibility is some sort of metaphysical possibility. The zombie argument claims that one can tell by the power of reason that such a "zombie scenario" is metaphysically possible. Chalmers states; "From the conceivability of zombies, proponents of the argument infer their metaphysical possibility"[6] and argues that this inference, while not generally legitimate, is legitimate for phenomenal concepts such as consciousness since we must adhere to "Kripke's insight that for phenomenal concepts, there is no gap between reference-fixers and reference (or between primary and secondary intentions)." That is, for phenomenal concepts, conceivability implies possibility. According to Chalmers, whatever is logically possible is also, in the sense relevant here, metaphysically possible.[8]

Another response is denial of the idea that qualia and related phenomenal notions of the mind are in the first place coherent concepts. Daniel Dennett and others argue that while consciousness and subjective experience exist in some sense, they are not as the zombie argument proponent claims. The experience of pain, for example, is not something that can be stripped off a person's mental life without bringing about any behavioral or physiological differences. Dennett believes that consciousness is a complex series of functions and ideas. If we all can have these experiences the idea of the p-zombie is meaningless.

Dennett argues that "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".[9][10] He coined the term zimboes (p-zombies that have second-order beliefs) to argue that the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent;[11] "Zimboes thinkZ they are conscious, thinkZ they have qualia, thinkZ they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!".[10] Under (reductive) physicalism, one is inclined to believe either that anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombie – following from the assertion that one's own conviction about being, or not being a zombie is (just) a product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's. P-zombies in an observed world would be indistinguishable from the observer, even hypothetically (when the observer makes no assumptions regarding the validity of their convictions). Furthermore, when concept of self is deemed to correspond to physical reality alone (reductive physicalism), philosophical zombies are denied by definition. When a distinction is made in one's mind between a hypothetical zombie and oneself (assumed not to be a zombie), the hypothetical zombie, being a subset of the concept of oneself, must entail a deficit in observables (cognitive systems), a "seductive error"[10] contradicting the original definition of a zombie.

Verificationism[1] states that, for words to have meaning, their use must be open to public verification. Since it is assumed that we can talk about our qualia, the existence of zombies is impossible. A related argument is that of "zombie-utterance". If someone were to say they love the smell of some food, a zombie producing the same reaction would be perceived as a person having complex thoughts and ideas in their head indicated by the ability to vocalize it. If zombies were without awareness of their perceptions the idea of uttering words could not occur to them. Therefore, if a zombie has the ability to speak, it is not a zombie. Nigel Thomas argues that the zombie concept is self-contradictory in that, since zombies ex hypothesi behave just like regular humans, they will claim to be conscious, which, whether this claim is taken to be true, false, or neither true nor false, inevitably entails either a contradiction or a manifest absurdity.[12]

Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky sees the argument as circular. The proposition of the possibility of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences, which is exactly what the argument was claiming to prove.[13] Stephen Yablo's (1998) response is to provide an error theory to account for the intuition that zombies are possible. Notions of what counts as physical and as physically possible change over time so conceptual analysis is not reliable here. Yablo says he is "braced for the information that is going to make zombies inconceivable, even though I have no real idea what form the information is going to take."[14]

The zombie argument is difficult to assess because it brings to light fundamental disagreements about the method and scope of philosophy itself and the nature and abilities of conceptual analysis. Proponents of the zombie argument may think that conceptual analysis is a central part of (if not the only part of) philosophy and that it certainly can do a great deal of philosophical work. However others, such as Dennett, Paul Churchland and W.V.O. Quine, have fundamentally different views. For this reason, discussion of the zombie argument remains vigorous in philosophy.

Another way to construe the zombie hypothesis, however, is epistemically -- as a problem of causal explanation, rather than as a problem of logical or metaphysical possibility. The "Explanatory gap" -- also called the "Hard problem of consciousness" -- is the claim that (to date) no one has provided a convincing causal explanation of how and why we are conscious. It is a manifestation of the very same gap that (to date) no one has provided a convincing causal explanation of how and why we are not zombies.[15]

[edit] Related thought-experimentsFrank Jackson's Mary's room argument is based around a hypothetical scientist, Mary, who is forced to view the world through a black-and-white television screen in a black and white room. Mary is a brilliant scientist who knows everything about the neurobiology of vision. Even though Mary knows everything about color and its perception (e.g. what combination of wavelengths makes the sky seem blue) she has never seen color. If Mary is released from this room and experiences color for the first time, will she learn anything new?

Swampman is an imaginary character introduced by Donald Davidson. If Davidson goes hiking in a swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt while nearby another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules so that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death then this being, 'Swampman', has a brain structurally identical to that which Davidson had and will thus presumably behave exactly like Davidson. He will return to Davidson's office and write the same essays he would have written, recognize all of his friends and family and so forth.

John Searle's Chinese room argument deals with the nature of artificial intelligence: it imagines a room in which a conversation is held by means of written Chinese characters that the subject cannot actually read, but is able to manipulate meaningfully using a set of algorithms. Searle holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave.

[edit] See also Philosophy portal
Blindsight
Causality
Consciousness
Explanatory gap
Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Hard problem of consciousness
Inverted spectrum
Map–territory relation
Mind
Mind-body problem
Philosophy of mind
Problem of other minds
Reverse engineering
Sentience
Solipsism
Turing test
[edit] Notes1.^ a b Kirk, Robert. "Zombies". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2 ... s/zombies/.
2.^ Chalmers, D. (1996): The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, New York.
3.^ Harnad, Stevan (2000). Minds, Machines, and Turing: The Indistinguishability of Indistinguishables. 9(4): 425-445. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information. http://cogprints.org/2615/.
4.^ Robinson, Howard. "Dualism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall ... s/dualism/.
5.^ S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (1972)
6.^ a b Chalmers, 2003, p. 5.
7.^ Chalmers, 1996, p. 96.
8.^ Chalmers, 1996, pp. 67-68.
9.^ Dennett, D. C., 1991, Consciousness Explained, Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown
10.^ a b c Dennett, 1995, p. 322.
11.^ Dennett 1995; 1999
12.^ Thomas, 1998, see imagery-imagination.com
13.^ edge.org
14.^ Yablo, 2000, §XV.
15.^ Harnad, Stevan (1995) "Why and How We Are Not Zombies. Journal of Consciousness Studies 1:164-167
[edit] References and further readingChalmers, David. 1995. "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness", Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 200–219. Online PDF
Chalmers, David. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardcover: ISBN 0-19-511789-1, paperback: ISBN 0-19-510553-2
Chalmers, David. 2003. "Consciousness and its Place in Nature", in the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, S. Stich and F. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell. Also in Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, D. Chalmers (ed.), Oxford, 2002. ISBN 0-19-514581-X, Online PDF
Chalmers, David. 2004. "Imagination, Indexicality, and Intensions", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 68, no. 1. Online text
Dennett, Daniel. 1995. "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies", Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 322–326. Online abstract
Dennett, Daniel. 1999. "The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?", Royal Institute of Philosophy Millennial Lecture. Online text
Kirk, Robert. 1974. "Sentience and Behaviour", Mind, vol. 83, pp. 43–60.
Kripke, Saul. 1972. "Naming and Necessity", in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. by D. Davidson and G. Harman, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, pp. 253–355. (Published as a book in 1980, Harvard University Press.)
Nagel, Thomas. 1970. "Armstrong on the Mind", Philosophical Review, vol. 79, pp. 394–403.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" Philosophical Review, vol. 83, pp. 435–450.
Thomas, N.J.T. 1998. "Zombie Killer", in S.R. Hameroff, A.W. Kaszniak, & A.C. Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates (pp. 171–177), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Online
Yablo, Stephen. 2000. "Textbook Kripkeanism and the Open Texture of Concepts", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 81, pp. 98–122. Online text
[edit] External linksOnline papers on philosophical zombies, by various authors, compiled by David Chalmers.
Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind
Philosophical zombie entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Skepdic entry on p-zombies
A Qwantz comic on the subject of philosophical zombies
On The Conceivability of Zombies Paper argues that Philosophical Zombies are not conceivable


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

[82_28]

Respectively 20 and 30 years ago today:

First attack on WTC

Thriller was released

[justdrew]

[elfismiles]

^^^ Aaaah, FIDO. Fun zombie movie!

FEMA Censors Information About Bizarre ‘Zombie UFO Crash’ Exercise
Details of drill pulled from FEMA website
http://www.infowars.com/fema-censors-in ... -exercise/


EDIT: See also...

'Valley firefighters trained for UFO contact'
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16292

[Laodicean]

At AMC, Zombies Topple Network TV

By DAVID CARR

When a show about the walking dead on basic cable beats every network show in the ratings demographic that advertisers care most about, you have to wonder who the real zombies are.

A zombie, after all, is something that continues to roam, and tries to devour all in its path even though its natural life is over — a description that does not sound that far-fetched when it comes to broadcast networks.

During its run last fall, “The Walking Dead” was the highest-rated show among viewers 18 to 49, the most-sought age group, with a bigger audience than network winners like “The Big Bang Theory,” “American Idol,” “The Voice” and “Modern Family.”

Now the zombies are back for the second half of the show’s third season, and they continue to gnaw on everything in their path, including the broadcast networks’ historical claim to being the only place to find a mass audience. Three weeks ago, the zombies owned Sunday night, attracting 7.7 million viewers in the 18 to 49 range, more than any broadcast show in the land.

It gets better (or worse, if you are a network). AMC has a spinoff chat show about zombies called “The Talking Dead,” and even that is making waves. That same Sunday three weeks ago, “The Talking Dead” drew almost 2.8 million viewers ages 18 to 49, trumping NBC not just for the night, but for all of February.

Being a cable network, it’s clear, is less of a disadvantage than it used to be, as broadcast networks become just one more click on a seemingly infinite dial.

A couple of things are at work here. For years, inertia kept viewers locked on the big broadcast channels, but these days, consumers are roaming omnivores, hunting down whatever has heat and water-cooler value. And network appointment viewing has given way to foraging and bingeing.

AMC, along with its studio partners, has always made sure that if someone wants to catch up with America’s favorite zombies, or “Breaking Bad” or “Mad Men,” two of its other hits, then past seasons are readily available — on demand, on Netflix or on iTunes. As a result, the audience for “The Walking Dead” is up 51 percent overall last year, and it is one of the most consistently talked about shows on social media.

It’s worth noting that the gap between basic cable and broadcast television has gradually shrunk as satellite and telecommunications companies have joined the fray. There are about 115 million television households in America, and some 99 million of them have access to AMC. On the networks, old franchises are tiring, new efforts are flopping in record time and a show like “The Walking Dead,” whose audience grew slowly and steadily over three seasons, is just not in the playbook.

“AMC sold the show to Netflix early, so when people started talking about it, it was there for the watching,” said Alexia Quadrani, a media analyst at JPMorgan.

Last Thursday, I visited Josh Sapan, the chief executive of AMC Networks, at his office across the street from Madison Square Garden. You might expect him to be celebrating his zombies’ success, but you’d be wrong. Mr. Sapan has been at AMC for 25 years and he is too superstitious to tempt the gods like that. As a collector of lightning rods — he has acquired more than a hundred, two of them on display in his office — he knows that sticking out has a cost.

“I would have put big odds against a cable show winning over network five years ago,” he said. Still, he warns, “People’s taste in what is popular can be very fleeting and short-lived. There is some alchemy at work here that is hard to diagnose and replicate.”

“It’s a big moment to those of us who are in the business,” he added, “but I don’t think the general public, especially young people, even think about where programming comes from.”

The zombies have not devoured all Mr. Sapan’s challenges. Even though advertising in the fourth quarter is up 16 percent over the previous year, earnings at AMC fell short of Wall Street estimates because of a costly fight with Dish Network and expensive outlays to service debt.

And he’s right to give the American audience, a notoriously fickle bunch, a wide berth. Ask NBC, which went from first to worst this season in nothing flat. As my colleague Bill Carter pointed out, the peacock was on top of the pile in 13 of 15 weeks from September to December, according to Nielsen. Since then, it has dropped below not only its broadcast brethren but also Univision, the Spanish-language network.

“The Walking Dead” was actually NBC’s for the asking in 2011. At a news tour for television reporters in January, Kevin Reilly, who is now at Fox but was a top programmer at NBC when the show was still up for grabs, talked about the one that got away.

“ ‘The Walking Dead’ is an extraordinary thing,” Mr. Reilly told reporters. “I bought the script at NBC from Frank Darabont. I developed it. I loved it.”

But NBC was back on its heels at the time, and Mr. Reilly ended up letting it go. “I thought it was good, but it was an early draft,” he said. “And then, when I left and I heard it went over to AMC, there was just a lot of serendipity involved.”

In fairness, “The Walking Dead” would have never made it to network prime time in all of its gory glory because of broadcast standards. Not long ago, I was wedged in the back of an airplane and took solace by catching up on Season 3 on my iPad. The guy next to me was sawing into some meat of unknown agency and looked over at my screen, where a pack of zombies were lustily feasting on human innards. “Really, dude?” he asked. “Zombies?”

AMC is also home to “Breaking Bad,” where a former science teacher turned meth chef has been known to use chemistry to dissolve the bodies of people who got in his way. Think about the box that the broadcast networks are in. Audiences expect spicy and sometimes dark narratives, but because the networks are still in the business of not offending mass audiences, they cannot even grab a hit when it comes lurching through the door. And A-list actors who used to demand that their work show up on the big networks are now after their agents to get them onto a prestige cable show.

“The talent which used to complain about being on something like AMC now want to be where good stories are being told,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research. “All around, it’s a very seismic change in the television industry.”

It’s programming that rules now, not platform or position on the dial. I watch all kinds of AMC shows and I couldn’t tell you what channel on the cable box they live on — even if a zombie were after me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/busin ... nted=print

[justdrew]

In The Flesh, Upcoming BBC Drama Series About Reformed Zombies Brought Back Into Society

it just don't stop

[brainpanhandler]

[JackRiddler]

Bumping because I bumped the sister thread (the one with the poll).

Fuck! How did I miss the most obvious answer of all?

It's about the tendency in capitalism to render an increasing majority of the population superfluous.

Well, anyway, it's represented in some of the other options.

Here's a post where I'm having fun on FB:

https://www.facebook.com/stephen.brooks ... ment_reply

Stephen Brooks
41 minutes ago ·

STOP ALL THE WALKING DEAD SPOILERS, this isn't twitter... give me at least 24 hours, damn...
Like · · Share · Unfollow Post
3 people like this.

Joel Biske There are zombies in it.
40 minutes ago · Edited · Like · 1

Nikos Evangelos It's about the tendency in capitalism to render an increasing majority of the population superfluous.
17 minutes ago · Like

Stephen Brooks that was the theme of dawn of the dead and land of the dead... but not every zombie property is about capitalism
11 minutes ago · Like

Nikos Evangelos It's about the anxiety of the white-identifying bourgeois a la Americain that they are being overwhelmed numerically by every form of feverishly imagined Other.
8 minutes ago · Like

Stephen Brooks and that would be day of the dead
6 minutes ago · Like

Nikos Evangelos It's about the desire of the alienated atomized post-modern individual to freely kill - kill as a moral imperative, even - all these crowds with whom he (she, but mostly he) cannot connect, and who burden him with their meddling and smells and incessant minor demands and just by being in the way all the time.

[mulebone]

George A. Romero gave birth to the modern zombie with 1968′s Night of the Living Dead, and at present the most popular example of that horror subgenre is The Walking Dead. A Romero-directed episode of the AMC series, then, seems like a natural fit. But sorry, gore junkies, Romero just isn’t interested.

In a recent interview, Romero revealed that he’d actually been approached to work on the horror show, but declined because he didn’t think The Walking Dead focused enough on the zombies.

Romero offered his thoughts on the current zombie craze in a conversation with Big Issue via Geeks of Doom. As Romero’s idea of the zombie is still going strong nearly 50 years after Night of the Living Dead, the magazine asked whether the appeal of these monsters would ever die. “Not in my book!” Romero responded.

However, the current craze has Romero reluctant to get too heavily involved.

Once they bleed out of pop culture I’ll be able to go back and do them again. I don’t want to touch them now. Gosh, they are all over the place. The Walking Dead is the number one television series in the States, World War Z, games, commercials… Ugh! It’s too much!

The filmmaker continued:

It feels like I don’t have a horse in the race. They asked me to do a couple of episodes of The Walking Dead but I didn’t want to be a part of it. Basically it’s just a soap opera with a zombie occasionally. I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism and I find that missing in what’s happening now.

Romero stated the obvious. The Walking Dead is a fucking soap opera with the occasional zombie tossed in. At the very least they should pay George a nice fat royalty check for taking his ideas, adding nothing, and then making big fat wheel barrows full of money with them. Another "dark & edgy" pop culture pimple that offers a line of action figures for the armies of "dark & edgy" over sized adolescents who are such total dipshits they don't realize they're just over-sized adolescents staring at a TV screen.

My son & I used to tune in & rip it to shreds. It was great fun. We'd cheer every time one of the whiny cast members became a Zombie McNugget. Then he told me that he'd overhear kids in his school talking about the show like it was Holy Writ. That, of course,made it all the funnier.

We still sporadically tune for the odd giggle. I do enjoy how all the cast members have spent months crawling through zombie hell yet still manage to keep the same hair styles they had at the beginning of the show. Sheriff AnnoyinglyMoral's beard magically stays the same fashionable length. I picture him slogging through a post apocalyptic world, pistol in one hand, a shiny Norelco beard trimmer in the other. It's all a hoot.

To Romero's credit, he was smart enough to avoid explaining how the zombies had reanimated. The Walking Dead people weren't. Their reanimated reptile brain contrivance only makes me wonder why the zombies aren't walking around trying to fuck their human steaks. Although, I'm thinking that armies of rotting cannibalistic zombie rapists sporting big suppurating erections just might be a little too "dark & edgy" for the kind of people who think that there's anything remotely "dark & edgy" about sitting in their Lazy Boys staring at a TV set.

A little over a year ago there was a discussion at The Atlantic where The Walking Dead became a metaphor for just about everything. From terrorism to eco-meltdown to underwear that bunches up around a sweaty ball sack.

As those astute culture critics frolicked in their inner geekdom, they liked to repeatedly mention that The Walking Dead wasn't so much about zombies as it was about the protagonist's valiant efforts to maintain their humanity in the face of implacable odds.

They championed this "humanity" from a website whose header ad was from EXXON.

Jesus, talk about dissociative behavior.

Jesus, talk about bullshit.

But, that's what the Interweasel was given us: a great big repository for our babbling bullshit.

Just like this post.

Babble babble babble.

Here, I'll even add my own, entirely meaningless & pointless interpretation of a TV show I occasionally watch when I'm bored:

The Walking Dead is the death fantasy of a culture overladen with self obsessed narcissists. In these fantasies our deaths are blood filled epics overladen with meaning & metaphor, gunfire & explosions. In reality, we'll most likely spit out our last breath as we lie in a puddle of our own pee while the world barely notices or care that we're gone. If you doubt that please, without looking, name 5 people from your local obituary column for today.

Come to think of it, it isn't much different than Russell Brand's narcissistic pampered Westerner's vision of revolution:

At this point I’d attended a few protests and I loved them. At a Liverpool dockers march, the chanting, the bristling, the rippedup paving stones and galloping police horses in Bono glasses flipped a switch in me. I felt connected, on a personal level I was excited by the chaos, a necessary component of transition, I like a bit of chaos however it’s delivered. The disruption of normalcy a vital step in any revolution. Even aesthetically, aside from the ideology, I beam at the spectacle of disruption, even when quite trivial.

Oh the joy of chaos amongst the overfed. I imagine that chaos is quite wonderful. Right up until the point the grocery store shelves empty & we begin to understand what the word "hunger" really means. I'd bet that that would be about the point when Russell "I'm a hero for spouting Socialist rhetoric on a TV show" Brand would sell his trendy socialist soul for a nice hunk of corporate cheeseburger.

[Ben D]

Fwiw, wasn't Jesus the first to point out the zombie like nature of pc conditioned humanity of his day with this quip..."Come with me. Let those who are dead bury their own dead people."

Some context...Matthew 8

21 Another man who was a follower of Jesus, said to Jesus, `Lord, let me go first and bury my father.'

22 But Jesus said to him, 'Come with me. Let those who are dead bury their own dead people.'

[tazmic]

http://kotaku.com/the-inevitable-black-friday-supercut-is-nutso-1473132587

[tazmic]

It's about the tendency in capitalism to render an increasing majority of the population superfluous.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/us/backlash-by-the-bay-tech-riches-alter-a-city.html