The Council of Elrond

Moorcock already did the joke about lotr being a propaganda rendition of the war written specifically to support the claims of Aragorn's descendents to the throne of Gondor before you were born.

Also I long for the day where they just show the orcs as the undead elves they should ideally be.

There are also raving bands of humans that attack people, including orcs. I'll admit im being hyperbolic and Sauron is a bit of a cunt but playing devil's advocate is fun and its not unreasonable to suggest there could be orcs that aren't at war with elves and men, simply because most of the time they aren't at war with them.
Whether or not the two groups could coexist in the same lands is a different question entirely.
I only read them when i was about 12, so its been a while I'll admit. But that was my point, he sits around kinda chillin' until somebody starts a (not very covert) conspiracy to murder him.

Technically there's no reason an Orc or Ur-Kai can't be a good person, they just never get a chance to. Everything from the moment of their creation puts tremendous pressure on them to conform to the mold of a solider for evil. Failing to fit in results in death at the hands of their own kind.

The fact that they are victims of the lord of the ring too doesn't change what needs to be done.

>There are also raving bands of humans that attack people, including orcs. I'll admit im being hyperbolic and Sauron is a bit of a cunt but playing devil's advocate is fun and its not unreasonable to suggest there could be orcs that aren't at war with elves and men, simply because most of the time they aren't at war with them.
It's also something that sat better with Tolkien as a catholic when people bothered to ask him.

The attempts to find and destroy the One Ring started in the second age when he almost killed everyone. The last alliance only barely survived and without a blind luck crit by Isildor everyone would be dead or the Lord of the Ring's slaves.

The only reason he stopped trying to kill or enslave everyone was his body was destroyed and his power scattered to the winds. The moment he was strong enough and had a lead on where the One Ring had ended up he went right back to his plan.

He wasn't hunting the Fellowship because they were trying to kill him, he was hunting them to try and seize the ring back from them.

Partly because he never, until the very end, understood they wanted to destroy it.

Aragorn's distraction at the black gate is so successful because Saron was absoloutly sure the most powerful of Men would have seized the ring and kept it for himself. The idea that the most powerful artifact Middle Earth had ever known would be willingly put into the hands of a hobbit was inconceivable to him. He always expected Gandalf, Galadriel, Eldron or Aragorn, or someone like them, to seize the ring for themselves.

My understanding was that in at least one interpretation, an Orc is merely an "evil" elf. If an Orc stops being horrible all the time, it stops being an Orc.
Which, honestly, makes a lot of sense. That's why the Dwarves hate and fear the Elves: because there are shit tons of evil Elves (Orcs) and only a relatively small number of "Good" ones who mostly fuck off and hang out in their tree houses, being rude and superior all the time. Elves who choose evil become weak, twisted, horrible things... and there are still tons of them.
It also makes Uruk Hai make sense as a faction: they're "Half Orcs" (iirc) who are no longer limited by their Elvish ancestry. They have the human capacity to remain strong while choosing either good or evil, and the Orc/Elf tendency to physically change and stay with whatever alignment they choose. Assuming they're all getting torture and trained by Saruman and his lackeys, it makes sense that they're a pretty formidable force int he world.

No elf ever became an orc because he decided to do evil things. Doing entirely evil things goes against their fate and nature.

>he sits around kinda chillin' until somebody starts a (not very covert) conspiracy to murder him.

So you don't remember anything about the books at all, then. That's fine, just don't try to argue as though you do. Your representation of events is factually wildly inaccurate.

I'm sorry but a thousand years of relative other can not be put down to "he was totally plotting their downfall the whole time!" or "he just needed to regain his strength!" if he had been so weak then why would any orcs follow him? If they weren't following him until he regained power why were the skirmishes between them and the other races so relatively rare and isolated compared to what happened later?

I don't argue from the point of view of expert, you keep trying to pin that on me. I am the devil's advocate, i already said that.

>relative
Meant relative peace, whoops.

>If he was weak why would the Orcs follow him?

He wasn't weak. He was still, even disembodied, one of the most powerful creatures on Middle Earth.

>Why follow him?

He didn't really demand much of them, putting them to the task of holding a scrap of Mordor and maintaining his tower.

>Why weren't they fighting much?

Because Men drove them back into Mordor, held the Black Gate and killed any that tried to leave. Gondor's forces sat there like a cork in a bottle, keeping the rest of Middle Earth mostly Orc free.

>Regained his strength

He did that relatively quickly. After the early third age he was plenty powerful again, he simply was waiting for the Ring to surface. He was immortal, and the Ring was vital to his plans, so he had no reason not to wait as long as it took.

A few decades ago, a great leader rose up and blitzkrieged the surrounding nations. They executed many who they got their hands on and oppressed those they thought of lesser races.

The free nations of the world, and some not so free nations, struck back in a costly conflict and defeated him soundly.

Sometimes philosophers are full of shit, especially when not shoved to the front lines of a battle or oppression.

He built up alliances with the men of the East and South, rebuilt his power in Mordor, and, oh yeah, sent the Witch King up north to organize the systemic extermination and genocide of Arnor.

Didnt Sauron also have magic power and could do things like heal grievous wounds?

Yeah but that guy was from a nation that had barely existed for a hundred years and started wars literally every 10 years for all of its existence.

Lets not forget that Sauron is doing great humanitarien work. His actions saved thousands upon thousands of humans, labeled as "eastlings" from thirst and starvation.

Philosophers are great at asking the right questions, but shit at giving the right answers.
What else is new under this sun?

What's your point? If someone amasses armies and starts invading nearby lands they are starting shit and probably should get a good talking to.

Like America invading Iraq.

>My understanding was that in at least one interpretation, an Orc is merely an "evil" elf. If an Orc stops being horrible all the time, it stops being an Orc.
Counterpoint: Fëanor is somehow not an orc.

besides the fact that this kind of post-modern criticism has difficultly being applied to early and pre-modern kingdoms which populate middle earth-- it should be noted that Elves do not colonize or interfere with the other races. In fact, while the elves do have immanent power, they're reign is decayed and they are but faction in middle earth. It is Sauron and Saruman who destroy the good and peaceful realm through (without any kind of special reading into the text, btw) industrialization and enslavement. Sort of overlooked here. When you see the enslavement of men, hobbits and all other creatures of middle earth under the oppressive, yet distant and obscure reign of Sauron, I can't imagine Chomsky, and Fanon saying these things about the elves and not Mordor.

>Guys, consider this, orcs dindu nuffin!

"Hilarious" as that is the practical outcome would be Sauron curbstomping the entirety of Middle-Earth because he does not give a shit about such questions of philosophy or politics and the neighbour states are now in social unrest and therefore all the easier to subjugate.

Bravo. No all the places that were no so shit to live are under the domination of Sauron and the orcs are killing everyone who won't be enslaved under cruel conditions.

And that's without touching on the dindu nuffin.

FEANOR DID NOTHING WRONG

couldn't handle being rejected by galadriel because he wanted to sniff her hair, made some shiny rocks and fell so in love with them I'm surprised he didn't just make a crystal fleshlight instead, and things only got worse from there.

fucking Fëanor.

>crystal fleshlights
WHAT FEANOR DID WITH THE SILMARILS IS NONE OF YOUR ERU-DAMNED BUSINESS

There is nothing wrong with any of these things.

What I like about this comic is that people on either extreme of the political spectrum think it conveys an important truth.

...

Existential Comics already did the same joke before, with Foucault criticizing Kant's Paladin for killing orcs.

There's mcsweeneys.net/articles/unused-audio-commentary-by-howard-zinn-and-noam-chomsky-recorded-summer-2002-for-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-platinum-series-extended-edition-dvd-part-one

And in a more self-important and less jokey style, you have Moorcock's Epic Pooh and The Last Ringbearer.

So yeah, it's a joke/criticism that has been done before, though OP's comic is still pretty good. Chomsky is spot on.

Epic Pooh has been torn to pieces by anyone with a vague capability at criticism. It's honestly just one long autistic shriek of jealousy from Moorcock.

Then maybe he should've learned to build a fucking boat himself.

Oh yeah? That sounds interesting to read. Do you have any links?

I'm on my phone, so having difficulty finding the right one.

>I'm on my phone
Ew.

It is funny, because, well, of course in LoTR that kind of thinking has no relevance, but it's quite relevant in our world where there is no ultimate evil descended from demons.

This is actually quite well thought arguments, and I can definitely see that they are right, if not for the ultimate evil of evilness that is Sauron. Applicable to the real world certainly.

I don't think they're good at anything at all. Philosophy needed to stop being a thing when it gave rise to real science.

>Moorcock criticises a group of celebrated writers of epic fantasy for children, including Tolkien, C. S. Lewis
>Moorcock accuses these authors of espousing a form of "corrupted Romance", which he identifies with Anglican Toryism
I laughed my guts out.

>real science
This is the part where I tip my fedora to you, good sir.

"Real science" as you call it is nothing more than a methodology and model construction. It doesn't replace philosophy at all.

t. engineer

One produces results. The other produces philosophers.

Why are there black people in Middle Earth

Holy shit, I have never wanted to kill someone more

>This is actually quite well thought arguments

They are arguments built around polls that ignore just how few in number everyone is compared to orcs. It's nothing but tyranny of the majority while ignoring all other evidence.

Calling those arguments well-thought out is missing most of the absurdity, even if you recognized this world has no Sauron.

When that Chomsky says that nations create their own external enemy to ensure that the people don't look at their own domestic problems, he's right.

When he says that the external threats are often not that much of threat and are very frequently overblown, he's right.

When he's calling propaganda, he's right.

When he wonders who is really the aggressor, and look at history to prove that sometimes it is the 'good guys' who were the unrepentant aggressors, he's right.

When he's calling the shot on invading a peaceful sovereign nation and destroying it, he's right.

Sauron and the good vs evil of LoTR makes all those points entirely moot, but Chomsky arguments here are very valid in a real world.

You're looking st the arguments wrong. It's not that they're right, but that they could be right. And in this particular case, they are dead wrong.

To argue that something that can be right is always right is a very naive fallacy.

Fine, I'll bite.

You are looking at the problem from the industrial viewpoint. Just because someone gets a degree in Philosophy doesn't mean they actually deserve it.
That doesn't mean that philosophy as a whole is useless.

Let's take, for example, theoretical physicists that investigate, I dunno, the components and their ratios of the star matter, registering it via spectrum analysis.
Is it widely used in the modern culture from the viewpoint of bystander? No. Does that mean their work is useless? No.

Ethics is widely used when considering the application of the law. Logic is pretty much the basis of the entirety of math as we know it. Epistemology is what the entirety of scientific method is built upon.

What you broadly call "science" is just a method. A theory and an experiment. Conduct an experiment, observe the results, build a model that describes the result of the experiment AND of all the previously conducted experiments, call it a "theory", build an experiment to try and disprove the theory.
Rinse, repeat.

Completely disregarding the entire branch of philosophy simply because you can't see any tangible results from it isn't right. It influences minds, first and foremost. A tool without a conscience to wield it is nothing more than junk.

And yeah, before you ask, I majored in Electrical Engineering and minored in Biotech. Go and bug someone else.

>and probably should get a good talking to.
>Like America invading Iraq.

Try it faggot.

No they're not.

Despite what Chomsky thinks, not every nation on the world is post 1950ies America.

This took a minute to find again: curtisweyant.com/blog/epic-pooh-pooh/

It's fairly even handed and avoids the histrionics of a lot of responses.

Indeed systematic education doesn't guarantee good scientists/philosophers/politicians, only a steady stream of people that pass the minimum requirements and have memorised enough keywords.

>systematic education doesn't guarantee good scientists/philosophers/politicians, only a steady stream of people that pass the minimum requirements and have memorised enough keywords.
>memorised enough keywords.

It's funny because rote memorization was considered the defintion of wisdom and intelligence in the classical era. Aristotle hated the idea of the written word because it made people lazy, no more would they memorize their histories, their treatise - reading instead would enable any idiot to learn and espouse poorly thought and incorrect interpretations of any given thing because they just got it right off of a page (or slate) like a lazy shit instead of spending days, weeks, memorizing and debating it.

Martin Luther echoed a similar lament after he realized spreading the gospel to the masses via printing caused massive fictionalization within Christianity. He regretted the protestant reformation later in life because it took spirituality and god out of the hands of philosophers and holy men and put it in the hands of every rich shithead who could afford a book

The common version is that orcs were made by Morgoth from elves via torture and debasement - and no doubt something we would consider magic.

It's worth noting that Tolkien recanted this idea however, and the published silmarillion features this idea only because the editor ignored Tolkien's handwritten note 'change this, orcs are NOT elves' - which is apparently underlined.

Tolkien produced an essay on the origins of orcs and their nature, and capacity for goodness, or not, and dithered back and forth a few times on whether or not orcs had souls, whether they were corrupted elves, or indeed, humans, interbred with beasts, or even simply repeating lines mechanically imbued into them by Morgoth and not sapient at all.

He never reached a final answer though.

Elves are indeed capable of malice and evil, without becoming orcs.

Pictured is the elven King of Gondolin executing Eöl, the Dark Elf - not a racial title this, but his own sobriquet - for murder. He was also a rapist.

The writer of that comic is a Commie fuck who hates libertarians and anti-feminists.

Orcs = Bad Tortured Elves always presented a number of problems, not least of which the fact that elves were never that numerous and even the lowest elves, the Sindarin, were superhuman. Orcs however are frequently referred to as weaker and meeker than a man, with the exception of the so called 'high orcs', or Sarumons Uruk Hai who were specially bred and created.

The issue is that Morgoth, being the Satan figure, CANNOT create. That power is denied him. So Orcs had to come from somewhere - but where would they come from, in a perfect world with no evil? Morgoth had to corrupt *something* to create them.

In my opinion the answer lays with things like Old Shelob and Tom Bombadill, both beings who are not a part of Eru's creation, yet somehow exist inside of it. Shelob's mother Ungoliant is said to come from the creeping darkness outside of creation, a sort of primordial chaos figure.

In my opinion Orcs are the descendants of smaller, more wretched spirits that crept into the world at it's birth, furtive pygmies clinging to the worlds underbelly.

Memorisation, discussion and understanding, that was the flaw of the written word, a word book does not understand, nor does it explain or use locally relevant analogied, it just repeads word for word what was written a day, a year, a century, a revolution ago.

It's well enough for maths and physics but using "hard" memory for a "soft" field is silly.

Hell just nailing down language with words is a mess, poor old Shakespeare had his relevant puns, rhymes and dirty jokes murdered by fixing them as immutable words in a mutable language.

Or maybe i'm just rambling.

Scholars will always try to pretend language is fixed and immutable

People who use it will always point, laugh, and continue to make shit up.

Protip: don't point this out to your English prof, reminding them the entire academic basis of their field is subject completely to the whimsy of the individual does not endear them.

He posts regularly in Anarchist and Communist subreddits and he called Anthony Memetano a "reactionary" because he supported Capitalism in a video. His comics are shit.

Sound hypothesis.

I believe that lesser Maiar as leading orcs is mentioned in History of Middle Earth - I think Tolkien specifically points out 'Boldog' - whose name is after all very similar to Balrog - the orc-captain from the Lay of Liethan - and hopefully the upcoming edition of Beren and Luthien! - might well be an Orc-formed Maiar.

There's a quote in the footnote here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boldog

Tangible results are the only measurable ones, dude. The nebulous contribution of philosophy to human comfort has been superceded by methods which produce verifiable, tangible results.

I'm glad i never spent time learning it in a class, lets me just enjoy it as a happy amateur instead.

>don't point this out to your English prof
He's got tenure so he laughs with us about it.

TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY..

Tolkien, being a Catholic, believed that goodness and mercy were inherent in the nature of the universe, because it was the creation of a just and merciful god.

Alternatively, this. Git fukt Death.

I don't need a philosopher to teach me mercy or justice, or science to dissect it for me. Some part of it is instinctively human, we get no credit for discovering it.

Then what is merciful?
To let a sick child linger or grant it relief?
To let it give hope to it's parents in life or to make them move on?

Doesn't that sort of logic extend to any particularly complex idea?
I mean, it's not like there are cheeseburger molecules. Some things literally require context to function.

The difference is you can construct a cheeseburger out of things.

Justice and Mercy are concepts.

>Moorcock's Epic Pooh
Literally "I don't like it so it's bad/reactionary."

...But a cheeseburger is a concept by which we arrange things. Like, a cheeseburger can have lettuce and tomatoes, but it has to have a patty of some kind and cheese of some kind.
Justice and Mercy are 'recipes' for behaviors. Obviously, not all substitutions work, but just like cheeseburgers, there's a wide variety of interpretations and implementations, some of which are successful and some of which aren't.
>food metaphors

See the critical response above. It's not just spiteful, but intellectually dishonest.

>The last alliance only barely survived and without a blind luck crit by Isildor everyone would be dead
fuck yourself movie fag

But they're not, if you're going to argue this, do a little more deeper thinking into what Justice and Mercy are.

Some people see killing a wounded animal as Mercy, others do not.

No matter how you try and cut it, a Cheeseburger is still made up of those composites to make a cheeseburger.

Mercy and Justice are concepts unique every time they are observed.

I really need to write a "Philosophy for STEMfags" course someday.

There are multiple things that STEMfags use on a daily basis in math/programming/physics that descend directly from philosophy.

Pic very related, exactly why I said that philosophers ask questions, whereas science gives answers.

He's right about CS Lewis though.

Yes yes, and the automobile owes it's existence to the horse carriage. That doesn't make it relevant today, nor philosophy a useful field of study. Better things have replaced it.

>No matter how you try and cut it, a Cheeseburger is still made up of those composites to make a cheeseburger.
Vegan, gluten-free non-dairy cheeseburger.

Based Billy Boy Based

Still made up of objective components.

>So Orcs had to come from somewhere - but where would they come from, in a perfect world with no evil? Morgoth had to corrupt *something* to create them.

Have you heard the hypothesis first postulated in Morgoth's Ring, that the Orcs are not in fact sapient beings at all? The theory goes that Morgoth, being incapable of creation, had sculpted beasts into crude mockeries of the living and given them properties that for all intents and purposes appear intelligent - a sort of philosophical zombie built in rebellion against creation.

This is why Orcs have minds most similar to their master, and in fact hardly have minds beyond their master at all - for example, Black Speech is the language of Orcs, and it is an explicitly artificial language constructed by Sauron much like Doublethink is in 1984. In fact, this is why Orcs bred with men to produce Uruk-Hai are so efficient - Saruman and Sauron have finally been able to combine the bestial, unthinking Orc with man, and thereby increase their power by orders of magnitude (the lowly beast can never compare to a human, after all.)

what's the point of doing this whole anarchism thing at tolkien who thought anarchism was pretty cool

i'm pretty sure it just doesn't apply

Okay, so is as tofuburger with cheese a cheeseburger or not? Some people would say yes, and some people would threaten to shoot you for suggesting it.
The entire point of a concept is that it's a shared or at least approximately shared understanding of a situation. Dissonance occurs when one person's understanding of 'cheeseburger' or 'justice' differs from another. Attempting to resolve it by saying that there's no such thing just because not everyone can agree on what exactly makes it up doesn't seem like a correct solution. It's more like a general understanding than an absolute checklist.
But those 'objective components' violate the definition of cheeseburger for some people as much as the objective component of taking someone off life support violates the definition of Mercy to some people.

So what you suggest is that Orcs are (at least not originally) sapient beings at all, but rather crude MACHINES which over time developed sentience on their own?

Are they the component that make up a cheeseburger?

The dietary ship of theseus.

If they aren't the competent that make up a cheeseburger is it a cheeseburger?

What if the components are rearranges, or prepared differently?

is ti the preparation, arrangement, the name?

Of is a cheeseburger more than the
components?

Is the a universal inherent "cheeseburgerness"?

You're confusing the names of things with the interpretation of things.

At the end of the day a Vegan, Gluten-Free Non-dairy Cheesegurger is still what it is.

Mercy and Justice have no objective meaning.

Anarchists are butthurt that they're the villains of history, and thus like any ass-ravaged monster they try to tear down anything and everything they can get their hands on.

I don't trust movements that began the modern conception of terrorism.

Leo Tolstoy was a Christian Anarchist as well iirc

>Anarchists are butthurt that they're the villains of history
Gosh, I wonder why they'd be upset with being misrepresented like that

Gosh, I really do wonder

>That doesn't make it relevant today,
Funny guy.

Literally right now I am working on the project that concerns the technology embryos' genetic modification. My personal project concerns using the existing gene-mod techonology to enhance the cloning techniques.
Unless you define the ethics that concern clones, and what essential rights they have, and whether they should be treated as an object or a subject, you don't even know what to do next with it after you obtain the technology.
And don't even start me on AI.
>b-but it's the subject of law!
Yes, and law is created on the basis of ethics.

The society is formed by the philosophy that is available to it. If you live in the society, it's literally impossible to avoid being influenced with different kinds of philosophy.

That is exactly what I'm suggesting, that Orcs are beasts driven by instinct and programmed by Melkor and Sauron to appear humanoid, perhaps out of some intense longing and envy towards the other races of the world.

Tolkien wasn't pro-Anarchist, he was just against Large structures of Government and prefered the Older Anglo-Saxon methods of governance of a Community Within a Community.