Patriotic Dissent
Progressive Rule
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Who's Whom
The callous indifference shown by German Chancellor Angela Merkel (indeed, of the entire German elite, which moves in lock-step) for average Germans in visiting upon them hordes of young Muslim men so she can stake her claim to secular sainthood defies understanding. Does the West, and Germany, now have a new kind of elite, or is what we see merely the same old elite, adapted to the present?
For a long time after World War II we were told how the Nazi terror and the Holocaust were the result of a fatal flaw in the German character, a devotion to order and weakness for authority. A cliche this shop-worn has to be false in large part if not in whole--nothing so complex can have such a pat explanation, and this one in particular seems too ideally suited to the vanity of the victors and too useful for post-WWII cultural Marxism (and just plain Marxism). It reeks of the "authoritarian personality" myth.
Besides, our experience here in America tells us there's a big difference between the behaviors and motivations of the elite and those of the common man. We're told, for instance, that we must take in the refugees of Middle Eastern wars because they're "our" fault. But none of our military meddling in the region has anything like a popular origin; even the Second Gulf War (which the neocons had been long planning before 9/11 and the false specter of "WMD") was only effected by a massive misinformation project launched in the trauma following 9/11, and the people, weary of war, voted Barack Obama in largely to correct that mistake. The people spoke--and were betrayed. The wars continue under the rudderless foreign policy of the Obama Administration. Of course, the great migratory invasion of 2015 looks less and less like the mass outpouring of war refugees than it is one of opportunists, responding to cliear signalling by European elites that the gates are open and they are welcome. In the same breath, the elite lies to the people, and winks suggestively at the invaders.
Yet the people are still guilt-tripped by that same elite to acquiesce to this latest project--taking in a massive influx of "refugees"--as atonement for our acquiescing to their previous, and ongoing, wars and foreign interventions. Do they ever get together, say at Bilderberger, and have a good laugh at the shit they get away with? No wonder they disdain us.
If you should ever have the good fortune to be within arm's reach of a verified member of the political elite and he tells you "we" must take in the refuse of the neocons' wars, I urge you to avail yourself of the unprecedented opportunity to slap him and demand "what do you mean 'we', asshole?"
So the common man can be excused if much of the behavior of the elite seems to him to be motivated at times by indifference, at others disdain, for his concerns. But mostly the common man, still, shows a remarkable passivity in the face of elite mismanagement and bigotry. We keep letting it happen, and their attitude keeps getting more disdainful, more dismissive.
But what of the German elite, which seems farther gone than any in its determined delusion? Is it that the German people are so different or flawed, or is it that the German elite is different, flawed? Germany was after all not fifty years into unification under Bismarck when the First World War broke out, having so recent a history of having been divided into countless principalities, and arguably hasn't returned to anything like a normal development process since.
Now we see an elite there that appears nothing so much as to lack maturity. Look at its confused, irresponsible romanticism, as some openly suggest absorbing the refugee invasion is the means of absolving the nation (not finally, be sure) of the sins of the Holocaust. If Germany's unique history makes its elite even more contemptuous of its people than other Western elites, one shudders to think just how far they might take this madness. But no one seems to be asking.
Goethe famously said of the Germans that they were "so estimable in the individual, so wretched in the generality." (I could say the same for our current American elites, who are no doubt fine and decent people when taken singly.)
From Gordon Craig's (so-so) history of Germany, The Germans:
"In looking at the careers of these three industrial giants, one is hard put to discover any trace of nobility or generosityof spirit. It has been said of [Alfred] Krupp that he never spent a penny on the arts or the sciences or the poor or the community, and this was no less true of [Hugo] Stinnes and [Friederich] Flick. Krupp gave Prussia no prior claim on his weapons and cheerfully sold his most dangerously efficient ones to powers that might use them against his fellow Germans. Stinnes made a reputation as a patriot by this defiant speeches at Spa about what would happen to the French if they tried to exact reparations by force; but, when the French did precisely that, three years later, by marching into the Ruhr, he not only profited from the ensuing inflation, which he sought to prolong by refusing financial assistance to his hard-pressed government, but also did his best to to conclude mutually profitable deals with French concerns. As for Flick, there is no evidence of national concern in any of his undertakings."
Is the "fatal flaw" in German character less the peoples' willingness to follow its leaders than its leaders' indifference and disdain for the people? The flip-side of a romantic, sentimental view of a people, such as that Hitler at least pretended to have for Germans, is a pitiless contempt, particularly if one sees that people as weak or inadequate. I recently provided a quote attributed to Hitler near the end of WWII:
"If the war is lost the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elementary survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy those things. For the people has proven itself to be the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the East. Those who will survive this struggle will in any case be inferiors, for the good are already dead."
Sounds familiar to any American used to the experience of an elite that has gone from speaking in fawning, dishonest platitudes while acting in preening self-interest (how many times have we been told something the elite wants--like open borders--is what "makes America great"?) to occasionally breaking out in ranting contempt when stymied at all by popular will (what makes America great has nothing to do with Americans, it seems now, who only stand in the way of her realizing that greatness through immigrants).
And if Germans are more disposed toward acquiescing to authority, isn't the real tragedy incumbent upon that only realized when authority misleads, betrays or otherwise fails them? If a people are as thrifty, industrious and law-abiding as the Germans are said to be, it follows that all they need to thrive is responsible and capable leadership. It strikes me that the myth of Germans fatally disposed to following elite authority serves, ironically, no one so much as the elite group in authority.
For a long time after World War II we were told how the Nazi terror and the Holocaust were the result of a fatal flaw in the German character, a devotion to order and weakness for authority. A cliche this shop-worn has to be false in large part if not in whole--nothing so complex can have such a pat explanation, and this one in particular seems too ideally suited to the vanity of the victors and too useful for post-WWII cultural Marxism (and just plain Marxism). It reeks of the "authoritarian personality" myth.
Besides, our experience here in America tells us there's a big difference between the behaviors and motivations of the elite and those of the common man. We're told, for instance, that we must take in the refugees of Middle Eastern wars because they're "our" fault. But none of our military meddling in the region has anything like a popular origin; even the Second Gulf War (which the neocons had been long planning before 9/11 and the false specter of "WMD") was only effected by a massive misinformation project launched in the trauma following 9/11, and the people, weary of war, voted Barack Obama in largely to correct that mistake. The people spoke--and were betrayed. The wars continue under the rudderless foreign policy of the Obama Administration. Of course, the great migratory invasion of 2015 looks less and less like the mass outpouring of war refugees than it is one of opportunists, responding to cliear signalling by European elites that the gates are open and they are welcome. In the same breath, the elite lies to the people, and winks suggestively at the invaders.
Yet the people are still guilt-tripped by that same elite to acquiesce to this latest project--taking in a massive influx of "refugees"--as atonement for our acquiescing to their previous, and ongoing, wars and foreign interventions. Do they ever get together, say at Bilderberger, and have a good laugh at the shit they get away with? No wonder they disdain us.
If you should ever have the good fortune to be within arm's reach of a verified member of the political elite and he tells you "we" must take in the refuse of the neocons' wars, I urge you to avail yourself of the unprecedented opportunity to slap him and demand "what do you mean 'we', asshole?"
So the common man can be excused if much of the behavior of the elite seems to him to be motivated at times by indifference, at others disdain, for his concerns. But mostly the common man, still, shows a remarkable passivity in the face of elite mismanagement and bigotry. We keep letting it happen, and their attitude keeps getting more disdainful, more dismissive.
But what of the German elite, which seems farther gone than any in its determined delusion? Is it that the German people are so different or flawed, or is it that the German elite is different, flawed? Germany was after all not fifty years into unification under Bismarck when the First World War broke out, having so recent a history of having been divided into countless principalities, and arguably hasn't returned to anything like a normal development process since.
Now we see an elite there that appears nothing so much as to lack maturity. Look at its confused, irresponsible romanticism, as some openly suggest absorbing the refugee invasion is the means of absolving the nation (not finally, be sure) of the sins of the Holocaust. If Germany's unique history makes its elite even more contemptuous of its people than other Western elites, one shudders to think just how far they might take this madness. But no one seems to be asking.
Goethe famously said of the Germans that they were "so estimable in the individual, so wretched in the generality." (I could say the same for our current American elites, who are no doubt fine and decent people when taken singly.)
From Gordon Craig's (so-so) history of Germany, The Germans:
"In looking at the careers of these three industrial giants, one is hard put to discover any trace of nobility or generosityof spirit. It has been said of [Alfred] Krupp that he never spent a penny on the arts or the sciences or the poor or the community, and this was no less true of [Hugo] Stinnes and [Friederich] Flick. Krupp gave Prussia no prior claim on his weapons and cheerfully sold his most dangerously efficient ones to powers that might use them against his fellow Germans. Stinnes made a reputation as a patriot by this defiant speeches at Spa about what would happen to the French if they tried to exact reparations by force; but, when the French did precisely that, three years later, by marching into the Ruhr, he not only profited from the ensuing inflation, which he sought to prolong by refusing financial assistance to his hard-pressed government, but also did his best to to conclude mutually profitable deals with French concerns. As for Flick, there is no evidence of national concern in any of his undertakings."
Is the "fatal flaw" in German character less the peoples' willingness to follow its leaders than its leaders' indifference and disdain for the people? The flip-side of a romantic, sentimental view of a people, such as that Hitler at least pretended to have for Germans, is a pitiless contempt, particularly if one sees that people as weak or inadequate. I recently provided a quote attributed to Hitler near the end of WWII:
"If the war is lost the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elementary survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy those things. For the people has proven itself to be the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the East. Those who will survive this struggle will in any case be inferiors, for the good are already dead."
Sounds familiar to any American used to the experience of an elite that has gone from speaking in fawning, dishonest platitudes while acting in preening self-interest (how many times have we been told something the elite wants--like open borders--is what "makes America great"?) to occasionally breaking out in ranting contempt when stymied at all by popular will (what makes America great has nothing to do with Americans, it seems now, who only stand in the way of her realizing that greatness through immigrants).
And if Germans are more disposed toward acquiescing to authority, isn't the real tragedy incumbent upon that only realized when authority misleads, betrays or otherwise fails them? If a people are as thrifty, industrious and law-abiding as the Germans are said to be, it follows that all they need to thrive is responsible and capable leadership. It strikes me that the myth of Germans fatally disposed to following elite authority serves, ironically, no one so much as the elite group in authority.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Social Justice Isn't Funny
Forgive me for presuming to know something about humor, despite being neither a professional humorist nor a critic. But I'm going to join the growing ranks of rank amateurs who think they understand comedy, for the purpose of denouncing them. Irony!
Humor's base material is irony and absurdity. It depends on the recognition of these things--sometimes psychologically repressed, sometimes socially and politically suppressed--that is our shared experience. It isn't enough for a gag simply to be ironic or absurd; it has to reveal these things in its subject, whether that subject is conventional wisdom, a common human foible or a specific event of notoriety.
It does that by confounding our habituated expectations. It's in the way a joke leads you along a narrative path to an unexpected but still logical--and above all true--conclusion, similar to the way jazz confounds the resolution of melody in novel, complex ways to the delight of the listener. The resolution--in humor, the punch line or central idea behind a gag--must be unconventional but not discordant. It has to ring true. The greater the gap between the expectation of the set-up and the resolution that is the punch line, the greater the satisfaction. Ideally it's the surprise revelation of an inherent truth. At its very best, it exposes a lie we're all forced to endure.
The more that narrative set-up is cliched, kitsch, or best of all the more false it is, the better raw material it makes for satire or parody. If that narrative is an outright lie, skewering it on the lance of humor transcends comedy and becomes something like enlightenment. If that lie is perpetuated by the powerful for purposes of control, humor becomes something like political dissent.
Humor succeeds when it mockingly reveals dishonesty and fails, as it so often does in our politically correct times, when it obliviously advances dishonesty.
Humor transgresses. A comedy club is akin to a safe place for a religious ritual allowing the temporary indulgence of transgression. Comedy provides catharsis for the emotional tension built up by the commonplace. Conventional wisdom and social mores necessitate a certain amount of hypocrisy (some more than others). Baggage. Baggage we need to relieve ourselves of, if only for a moment. They don't call it comic relief for nothing. Of course now we have an elite and entertainment class that is hostile to the mass, and this beneficial process has been co-opted for the deliberate destruction of the old social mores, of the idea of common mores itself. The process of leveraging comedy to destroy culture is wearing comedy itself down. We laugh a lot now, but our laughter is more shrill, more cynical, more desperate. The joy is slowly being wrung out of it.
This all occurs to me when considering the rash of ill-conceived but well-received attempts at humor inspired--in a same-day flash that was hasty even by Internet standards--by Ahmed's notorious clock. By now any thinking person can see Ahmed wasn't the passive victim of prejudice but the active proponent of a gag. A humorless gag--Ahmed did not deny his suckers the expected resolution; he gave it to them in heavy-handed earnest. The result was not to expose commonplace dishonesty, but to reinforce it. It's the antithesis of the comedic gag that confounds our expectation and reveals the truth; it gives us precisely what we expected, with the purpose of creating a fiction. It's a first-rate con job (I haven't the heart to acknowledge we've been taken in by a second-rate con).
Ahmed provided the morally insecure with something they crave, moral outrage. He played to their vanity--something I'm sure a professional con-man would say is essential. And being the product primarily of vanity this moral outrage is as false as the hoax that prompted it. The very premise supporting Ahmed's con--of a pernicious "Islamophobia" that threatens to consume us--is false. Ahmed bamboozled an entire nation, with its willing, gleeful participation, and that willing participation is the real crime.
The greater guilt lies with these willing marks, who are legion and include the most influential among us. If sanity were to somehow magically reappear, and the nation as a whole was suddenly able not only to see clearly the fraud but to soberly reflect on its effects, we would have to conclude that our president and the titans of industry who opportunistically submitted to the hoax for their own personal and political ends are not just wrong, they're reprehensible.
What they would have you believe obscure authorities did to a fifteen year-old boy--that is falsely accuse and traumatize him out of hasty prejudice--they do to the nation as a whole. A nation that already reels from the unrelenting project to slander its history and dismantle its core, of which Ahmed's hoax is a sort of synecdoche, the part representing the whole. In their enthusiastic participation in Ahmed's hoax, they reveal their determined participation in that broader project.
But the extent of the hysteria, its reach into the upper echelons of culture, media and politics, acts as an oppressive fog. The severest criticism of this high crime seeks only to correct the record, allows itself to be distracted by the "overreaction" of the Texas authorities, when those who use their influence to assist in the hoax should be subjected to censure, ridicule and moral condemnation. Because of that fog, that overwhelming din of a million shrill voices advancing the lie, I think even those elites engaged in the fraud don't understand the extent of evil in their actions. Our elites are moral zombies who unfortunately retain their effectiveness in everything but their ability to recognize moral consequence and evil.
But to return to humor. Most of the reaction was painfully unfunny--Ahmed's most earnest suckers are decidedly not amused; even as their condemnations resembled something like revelry. He who holds the social justice high ground always doth protest too much, and in this case the protestations continue like a week-long, drug-fueled rave.
But a great many took it as an occasion to demonstrate their comedic chops. Twitter (in the word of one true-believer oblivious to the irony) "exploded" with amateur comedians inadvertently demonstrating that pc not only, as Steve Sailer likes to say, makes you stupid, it makes you unfunny. Everywhere they were posing with clocks, as if to demonstrate the stupidity and (more irony) too-quick presumption of Those Awful Texas Rednecks. But the joke's actually on them:
Of course the joke doesn't work because Ahmed's clock looked nothing like a clock. Everywhere people were missing the joke, posting photos of digital alarm clocks--just like the one Ahmed dismantled and put in a suitcase to resemble a bomb--and even traditional wall clocks, cracking themselves up at how anyone could be so blinded by paranoid bigotry as to mistake...well, there the joke fails, of course, but no one seems to notice. Context is obliterated in the desperate rush to signal virtue. So on it goes, despite the increasingly obvious nature of Ahmed's con. Humor, like logic and empiricism, like decency, will just have to give way to Diversity and Progress.
Humor's base material is irony and absurdity. It depends on the recognition of these things--sometimes psychologically repressed, sometimes socially and politically suppressed--that is our shared experience. It isn't enough for a gag simply to be ironic or absurd; it has to reveal these things in its subject, whether that subject is conventional wisdom, a common human foible or a specific event of notoriety.
It does that by confounding our habituated expectations. It's in the way a joke leads you along a narrative path to an unexpected but still logical--and above all true--conclusion, similar to the way jazz confounds the resolution of melody in novel, complex ways to the delight of the listener. The resolution--in humor, the punch line or central idea behind a gag--must be unconventional but not discordant. It has to ring true. The greater the gap between the expectation of the set-up and the resolution that is the punch line, the greater the satisfaction. Ideally it's the surprise revelation of an inherent truth. At its very best, it exposes a lie we're all forced to endure.
The more that narrative set-up is cliched, kitsch, or best of all the more false it is, the better raw material it makes for satire or parody. If that narrative is an outright lie, skewering it on the lance of humor transcends comedy and becomes something like enlightenment. If that lie is perpetuated by the powerful for purposes of control, humor becomes something like political dissent.
Humor succeeds when it mockingly reveals dishonesty and fails, as it so often does in our politically correct times, when it obliviously advances dishonesty.
Humor transgresses. A comedy club is akin to a safe place for a religious ritual allowing the temporary indulgence of transgression. Comedy provides catharsis for the emotional tension built up by the commonplace. Conventional wisdom and social mores necessitate a certain amount of hypocrisy (some more than others). Baggage. Baggage we need to relieve ourselves of, if only for a moment. They don't call it comic relief for nothing. Of course now we have an elite and entertainment class that is hostile to the mass, and this beneficial process has been co-opted for the deliberate destruction of the old social mores, of the idea of common mores itself. The process of leveraging comedy to destroy culture is wearing comedy itself down. We laugh a lot now, but our laughter is more shrill, more cynical, more desperate. The joy is slowly being wrung out of it.
This all occurs to me when considering the rash of ill-conceived but well-received attempts at humor inspired--in a same-day flash that was hasty even by Internet standards--by Ahmed's notorious clock. By now any thinking person can see Ahmed wasn't the passive victim of prejudice but the active proponent of a gag. A humorless gag--Ahmed did not deny his suckers the expected resolution; he gave it to them in heavy-handed earnest. The result was not to expose commonplace dishonesty, but to reinforce it. It's the antithesis of the comedic gag that confounds our expectation and reveals the truth; it gives us precisely what we expected, with the purpose of creating a fiction. It's a first-rate con job (I haven't the heart to acknowledge we've been taken in by a second-rate con).
Ahmed provided the morally insecure with something they crave, moral outrage. He played to their vanity--something I'm sure a professional con-man would say is essential. And being the product primarily of vanity this moral outrage is as false as the hoax that prompted it. The very premise supporting Ahmed's con--of a pernicious "Islamophobia" that threatens to consume us--is false. Ahmed bamboozled an entire nation, with its willing, gleeful participation, and that willing participation is the real crime.
The greater guilt lies with these willing marks, who are legion and include the most influential among us. If sanity were to somehow magically reappear, and the nation as a whole was suddenly able not only to see clearly the fraud but to soberly reflect on its effects, we would have to conclude that our president and the titans of industry who opportunistically submitted to the hoax for their own personal and political ends are not just wrong, they're reprehensible.
What they would have you believe obscure authorities did to a fifteen year-old boy--that is falsely accuse and traumatize him out of hasty prejudice--they do to the nation as a whole. A nation that already reels from the unrelenting project to slander its history and dismantle its core, of which Ahmed's hoax is a sort of synecdoche, the part representing the whole. In their enthusiastic participation in Ahmed's hoax, they reveal their determined participation in that broader project.
But the extent of the hysteria, its reach into the upper echelons of culture, media and politics, acts as an oppressive fog. The severest criticism of this high crime seeks only to correct the record, allows itself to be distracted by the "overreaction" of the Texas authorities, when those who use their influence to assist in the hoax should be subjected to censure, ridicule and moral condemnation. Because of that fog, that overwhelming din of a million shrill voices advancing the lie, I think even those elites engaged in the fraud don't understand the extent of evil in their actions. Our elites are moral zombies who unfortunately retain their effectiveness in everything but their ability to recognize moral consequence and evil.
But to return to humor. Most of the reaction was painfully unfunny--Ahmed's most earnest suckers are decidedly not amused; even as their condemnations resembled something like revelry. He who holds the social justice high ground always doth protest too much, and in this case the protestations continue like a week-long, drug-fueled rave.
But a great many took it as an occasion to demonstrate their comedic chops. Twitter (in the word of one true-believer oblivious to the irony) "exploded" with amateur comedians inadvertently demonstrating that pc not only, as Steve Sailer likes to say, makes you stupid, it makes you unfunny. Everywhere they were posing with clocks, as if to demonstrate the stupidity and (more irony) too-quick presumption of Those Awful Texas Rednecks. But the joke's actually on them:
"It's funny because it's so true, you see!"
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Hitler's Neverending Revenge, 2015
"If the war is lost the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elementary survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy those things. For the people has proven itself to be the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the East. Those who will survive this struggle will in any case be inferiors, for the good are already dead."
--Adolf Hitler
That "people from the East" is especially resonant at the moment. From somewhere below, a bitter cackle is heard...
--Adolf Hitler
That "people from the East" is especially resonant at the moment. From somewhere below, a bitter cackle is heard...
Diary: Leering Arabs
At the University downtown school is back in. Groups of young people are everywhere on the street, moving furniture, some carrying bedding, as they move into the apartments near the school. As I cross the street I'm cut off by a distracted driver in an SUV pulling up to the far curb in front of one of the student apartment buildings. I go around behind him and pass him on the sidewalk to his left, before changing my mind and turning around to go the other way. As I pass the car I hear the driver from inside calling, with a Middle Eastern accent:
"Hey. Hey you!"
Great, I think; this asshole is starting trouble, after I was so gracious in not so much as giving him a second glance after he cut me off. I stop and approach the lowered passenger side window, ready for whatever--there's only one of him, at least. I lean toward the car and he says:
"No. Not you."
I look the other way and see two young girls, attractive, lively, utterly oblivious to me and the skeevy looking Arab in the car's shadowy interior.
"You. Hey you. You want a ride?" He calls out. They don't even seem to see him, as they move off in the other direction. I move along myself, thinking, would it really be such a bad thing if I was to drag him from the car and give him a lashing (assuming I could pull it off )? Is "stay away from our women" really such a bad sentiment? Is it really bad for women?
When I lived in California I used to joke that I wanted to start a band called Leering Mexicans. People, even Mexicans, got the joke. The leering Hispanic would-be street-suitor is a commonplace in Southern California; it's a commonplace here in the Northwest now--I recall once experiencing revulsion at the sight of a Hispanic man in a car who appeared to be in his thirties making a gesture with his mouth--that I can only compare to what Hannibal Lecter does after that ridiculous "...fava beans and a nice Chianti" line--in the direction of two girls on the street who looked to be barely out of middle school. He did it in the same instinctive way I've noticed cats call out to birds (and the expression was very similar):
But this is Portland now. Young vulgarian Muslims and others (make that Others, capital O) mingle with tattooed, decadent American youths.
"Hey. Hey you!"
Great, I think; this asshole is starting trouble, after I was so gracious in not so much as giving him a second glance after he cut me off. I stop and approach the lowered passenger side window, ready for whatever--there's only one of him, at least. I lean toward the car and he says:
"No. Not you."
I look the other way and see two young girls, attractive, lively, utterly oblivious to me and the skeevy looking Arab in the car's shadowy interior.
"You. Hey you. You want a ride?" He calls out. They don't even seem to see him, as they move off in the other direction. I move along myself, thinking, would it really be such a bad thing if I was to drag him from the car and give him a lashing (assuming I could pull it off )? Is "stay away from our women" really such a bad sentiment? Is it really bad for women?
When I lived in California I used to joke that I wanted to start a band called Leering Mexicans. People, even Mexicans, got the joke. The leering Hispanic would-be street-suitor is a commonplace in Southern California; it's a commonplace here in the Northwest now--I recall once experiencing revulsion at the sight of a Hispanic man in a car who appeared to be in his thirties making a gesture with his mouth--that I can only compare to what Hannibal Lecter does after that ridiculous "...fava beans and a nice Chianti" line--in the direction of two girls on the street who looked to be barely out of middle school. He did it in the same instinctive way I've noticed cats call out to birds (and the expression was very similar):
But this is Portland now. Young vulgarian Muslims and others (make that Others, capital O) mingle with tattooed, decadent American youths.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Friday, September 18, 2015
Clock-Blocking America
All the best people, all the way up to our Poser-in-Chief, are very impressed with young Ahmed's homemade alarm clock. The White House, Google and Twitter headed the roll of the trolled, inviting him to visit. MIT called (well, tweeted). But, despite the president asking for him to "bring his clock" to the White House, no one seems much interested in this evidence of the young man's genius, which must be rescued from the inherent bigotry of Texas school-teachers.
Well, here an electronics hobbyist has analyzed the clock that stopped time and, quelle surprise, it's less an impressive piece of work than it is, yes, a suspicious device:
I found the highest resolution photograph of the clock I could. Instantly, I was disappointed. Somewhere in all of this – there has indeed been a hoax. Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. He didn’t even build a clock. Now, before I go on and get accused of attacking a 14 year old kid who’s already been through enough, let me explain my purpose. I don’t want to just dissect the clock. I want to dissect our reaction as a society to the situation. Part of that is the knee-jerk responses we’re all so quick to make without facts. So, before you scroll down and leave me angry comments, please continue to the end (or not – prove my point, and miss the point, entirely!)
For starters, one glance at the printed circuit board in the photo, and I knew we were looking at mid-to-late 1970s vintage electronics. Surely you’ve seen a modern circuit board, with metallic traces leading all over to the various components like an electronic spider’s web. You’ll notice right away the highly accurate spacing, straightness of the lines, consistency of the patterns. That’s because we design things on computers nowadays, and computers assist in routing these lines. Take a look at the board in Ahmed’s clock. It almost looks hand-drawn, right? That’s because it probably was.
Computer aided design was in its infancy in the 70s. This is how simple, low cost items (like an alarm clock) were designed. Today, even a budding beginner is going to get some computer aided assistance – in fact they’ll probably start there, learning by simulating designs before building them. You can even simulate or lay out a board with free apps on your phone or tablet. A modern hobbyist usually wouldn’t be bothered with the outdated design techniques. There’s also silk screening on the board. An “M” logo, “C-94” (probably, a part number – C might even stand for “clock”), and what looks like an American flag. More about that in a minute. Point for now being, a hobbyist wouldn’t silk screen logos and part numbers on their home made creation. It’s pretty safe to say already we’re looking at ’70s tech, mass produced in a factory.
So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 756.Ahmed's clock may be junk, but the Narrate-o-Matic is working fine; bullshit goes in, narrative honey comes out. So yes Ahmed, do bring your clock when you report to the White House; it doesn't matter if it's any good, it needn't actually tell time even (the President knows what time it is, I assure you). But after you, it's the second most important prop for this presidential photo-op.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Trolling America
Call me a conspiracy-theorist, but if I wanted to provoke a 24-hour outrage like today's #IStandwithAhmed global orgy of virtue-signalling I could do no better than this:
His father, Mohamed ElHassan Mohamed, is a fascinating figure in his own right. He's a Sudanese immigrant who has twice declared himself a presidential candidate in Sudan. When Florida pastor Terry Jones put the Quran on trial and later burned it in 2012, Mohamed was the Muslim holy book's defense attorney...
Curiouser and curiouser. Or, rather, less and less curious.
Ahmed's clock
Suitcase bomb
This has several elements of media manipulation. The innocent child, the "racist" authorities overreacting out of irrational "phobia" in, of all places, Texas (!), the immigrant angle, the police involvement. What you wouldn't know if you were just following this thing on Twitter or blogs (as so many do) is that the kid wasn't accused of carrying a bomb to school, but of playing a hoax, by carrying the understandably suspicious looking contraption above to school. Call me a jerk, but I want to know if this kid's parents are involved with CAIR.
Update: I posted this before I saw
this:
Curiouser and curiouser. Or, rather, less and less curious.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
The Shame of the Tame
I've been meaning to post here once per day at least, but with the time I had today I found myself meandering the web, posting to Twitter and other meaningless diversions with which I seem to be so smitten; so I'm getting cheesy and expanding on a comment I left at Sailer's here. (The internal struggle against my inborn laziness--the Dale curse--is eternal. Oh what I could have done with my life if I was only more energetic, ambitious, intelligent, good-looking, brave, tough, strong, personable and a few other small things. This close, man!)
Anyway. Sailer:
Me:
I’ve seen this juxtaposing of white and black flash mobs on YouTube before. The “white v black flash mobs” video below I find downright heartbreaking: a remarkable and beautiful performance of the “Ode to Joy” played on the street in a Spanish city, following a montage of the usual black mayhem over a fitting hip hop track of a gangsta un-apologetically and savagely proclaiming himself a "nigger", proud of the worst stereotypes that is said to entail. That decent blacks cannot, will not, at least any longer, denounce much less do anything about gangsta culture, I find almost as outrageous as the behavior itself. It's as if it's all they have, in the end, and they know it; it's commodified in music and culture, and converted to power in politics through the demagogy of "white privilege". Why would they, after all, want to go back to the Bad Old Days where black inferiority was assumed? Because of the bloodshed on the streets? Because of the degradation of their women, and ours? Because black dysfunction threatens to consume us? Because of the decadence infecting us all? Ha! Small price, apparently, to pay for the status quo they, and their white enablers, so jealously protect. Arguing for a white version of order and society is now a sucker's game.
Black culture is winning, hands down. It's only if and when the protective embrace of a still, somehow, functioning Western system finally gives way that the whole game is up. Witness the behavior of Europeans in the face of the "refugee crisis" to see that there is an assumption that it will never give way, no matter how much strain we put on it. They're probably right: it isn't that something has to give, necessarily; maybe it's just degradation and adaptation until we no longer recognize what we had, and no one will miss it.
Honesty is not possible--no people will accept they're "inferior"--so reconciliation is not possible. But then, "superior" and "inferior" are social constructs--if you don't care for enlightenment, "progress", Western notions of order. Indeed; the whole idea that blacks are shortchanged by living in the West is utterly dependent on discounting the value of these things. What we're really experiencing is the competition between competing models of society, one black, one white.
I don’t expect people to hate blacks because of this behavior–myself I’ve gone beyond fear and loathing to a blank, dumbfounded state; it simply Does Not Compute–but why, how, can we still hate ourselves, after such knowledge? How is it so many whites can be exposed to this disparity yet still profess things to be their opposite? The only verdict I can arrive at is more shameful than the convention that says white racism holds back black achievement: we are a weak people, over-awed and surrendering to the superiority--yes, that word!--of a stronger, more vigorous folk. We only try to copy, or appease. But then I'm wrong; there are people that willingly accept their "inferiority": white people. Individual whites demonstrate their personal moral superiority by proclaiming their group moral inferiority. Whites are the best of people; whites are the worst of people. Whites are a fucked up people.
Having seen this flash mob comparison (or a similar) video before I found myself fantasizing grimly about one of these white flash mobs getting crashed by one of the black versions. Say, one of these food-court choirs proceeding along and all of a sudden here comes stomping through the middle one of those gleefully violent wilding packs. A less gruesome Cleon Peterson work come to life. This came to mind when I saw a European crowd serenading a group of “refugees”, some of whom appeared dumbfounded (what must they think?). It makes you want to cry. Shame on us.
Here's the video I mentioned above:
Just let me die on the streets fighting this thing, whatever it is; let me reconcile and redeem this squandered life in an honorable death. Alas, even that much, too little, too late, I will not manage, I know. Cheerio!
Anyway. Sailer:
What’s going on in Europe is a Flash Mob. In the Age of the Smartphone, a huge crowd can be assembled at much lower information transmission cost than just a decade ago. Chancellor Merkel assumed she could still break the EU rules to make a modest humanitarian gesture and get lots of thumbs up from the global media without setting off The Camp of Saints.
But that’s not how things work these days.
Here’s poor Ms. Merkel’s vision of a Flash Mob:
But here’s a different, more relevant kind of Flash Mob:
Me:
I’ve seen this juxtaposing of white and black flash mobs on YouTube before. The “white v black flash mobs” video below I find downright heartbreaking: a remarkable and beautiful performance of the “Ode to Joy” played on the street in a Spanish city, following a montage of the usual black mayhem over a fitting hip hop track of a gangsta un-apologetically and savagely proclaiming himself a "nigger", proud of the worst stereotypes that is said to entail. That decent blacks cannot, will not, at least any longer, denounce much less do anything about gangsta culture, I find almost as outrageous as the behavior itself. It's as if it's all they have, in the end, and they know it; it's commodified in music and culture, and converted to power in politics through the demagogy of "white privilege". Why would they, after all, want to go back to the Bad Old Days where black inferiority was assumed? Because of the bloodshed on the streets? Because of the degradation of their women, and ours? Because black dysfunction threatens to consume us? Because of the decadence infecting us all? Ha! Small price, apparently, to pay for the status quo they, and their white enablers, so jealously protect. Arguing for a white version of order and society is now a sucker's game.
Black culture is winning, hands down. It's only if and when the protective embrace of a still, somehow, functioning Western system finally gives way that the whole game is up. Witness the behavior of Europeans in the face of the "refugee crisis" to see that there is an assumption that it will never give way, no matter how much strain we put on it. They're probably right: it isn't that something has to give, necessarily; maybe it's just degradation and adaptation until we no longer recognize what we had, and no one will miss it.
Honesty is not possible--no people will accept they're "inferior"--so reconciliation is not possible. But then, "superior" and "inferior" are social constructs--if you don't care for enlightenment, "progress", Western notions of order. Indeed; the whole idea that blacks are shortchanged by living in the West is utterly dependent on discounting the value of these things. What we're really experiencing is the competition between competing models of society, one black, one white.
I don’t expect people to hate blacks because of this behavior–myself I’ve gone beyond fear and loathing to a blank, dumbfounded state; it simply Does Not Compute–but why, how, can we still hate ourselves, after such knowledge? How is it so many whites can be exposed to this disparity yet still profess things to be their opposite? The only verdict I can arrive at is more shameful than the convention that says white racism holds back black achievement: we are a weak people, over-awed and surrendering to the superiority--yes, that word!--of a stronger, more vigorous folk. We only try to copy, or appease. But then I'm wrong; there are people that willingly accept their "inferiority": white people. Individual whites demonstrate their personal moral superiority by proclaiming their group moral inferiority. Whites are the best of people; whites are the worst of people. Whites are a fucked up people.
Having seen this flash mob comparison (or a similar) video before I found myself fantasizing grimly about one of these white flash mobs getting crashed by one of the black versions. Say, one of these food-court choirs proceeding along and all of a sudden here comes stomping through the middle one of those gleefully violent wilding packs. A less gruesome Cleon Peterson work come to life. This came to mind when I saw a European crowd serenading a group of “refugees”, some of whom appeared dumbfounded (what must they think?). It makes you want to cry. Shame on us.
Here's the video I mentioned above:
And Cleon Peterson's grim satirical vision of "oppressed",
Orc-like humanoids taking their revenge on decadent whites:
Orc-like humanoids taking their revenge on decadent whites:
The Struggle
There is a War
Just let me die on the streets fighting this thing, whatever it is; let me reconcile and redeem this squandered life in an honorable death. Alas, even that much, too little, too late, I will not manage, I know. Cheerio!
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Justice isn't Funny and Funny isn't Just
Steven Colbert's Late Show is only two shaky episodes old, but the
Social Justice™ scribes are, unwisely, not waiting for it to take off before trying to clip its wings. After regurgitating an old complaint about him employing an "all white" writing staff of seventeen men and two women (actually up from one, which is of course a hundred-percent increase! someone alert Nate Silver!), this Atlantic writer is already worried for the condition of the program's soul:
This is leaving aside the ethical and artistic sin for which Colbert is so often praised: using art and entertainment (inexplicably placed in quotes above--what is she saying with that?) as a means of promoting political and social goals, rather than as a means of understanding politics and society. Art as factional propaganda rather than critical revelation. If Colbert is guilty of anything, it is this.
But being a successful promoter of the Narrative, fittingly enough, comes with the privilege of pointing out the silliness of the Narrative, as Colbert demonstrated when accepting an Emmy for his Comedy Central show (with, I imagine, mostly the same staff he's taken to late night), by thanking a writing staff composed of "those guys, and one woman" and saying "I'm sorry for that, for some reason."
Still, when these favored few show rare glimpses of awareness, it never seems to make it into their work in any meaningful way. A comedy show is too valuable for the symbolic gesture of token-hiring, but it's also, in this case, too valuable to point out the absurdity of token hiring.
But what strikes me about this latest teapot tempest is its premature nature. The SJW modus operandi (whether Justice's zealous auxiliaries recognize it or not) is to wait until a thing succeeds, then to sweep in and demand it be more "representative" (and to make the absurd argument that it needs to do this to succeed). This holds true across the professional and cultural spectrum, for various manufactured crises, from success in STEM fields to the military to comedy. The less representative a field is, the more potential it holds for plunder by diversity. These are tremendous growth opportunities, vast, untilled fields, for a political movement that has become a parasitic industry.
Perhaps they see the same pattern the rest of us are seeing, the other side of the counterfeit "inclusion" coin: it's not that white guys are hogging up all the jobs and influence, it's that non-whites and women are not contributing their fair share--and the white guys are either too busy doing to notice or too polite to mention it.
But then. A writing staff is, in many ways, the soul of a show. The 19 people Colbert selected for The Late Show will decide much about how his influential platform will do its influencing. And Colbert himself, furthermore, is someone who—based on interviews he’s given as himself rather than the characters he has played on The Colbert Report and, now, The Late Show—seems to think deeply about the structures and systems that make the world what it is. He seems to understand, in a way many comedians don’t, that even the most innocuous kinds of “entertainment” play a role in defining culture.What progressives don't seem to understand is that these white, overwhelmingly male (and Jewish, but who's counting?) writers are doing advocacy on behalf of "women and minorities" that they, and their humorless advocates in "serious" journalism are incapable of doing for themselves. If these shows were to yield completely, and make their comedy staffs resemble Bennetton ads, they wouldn't survive to then to take their (dubious) role "defining culture" for the rest of us rubes. Unless of course they adopt the corporate model many of us who work for a living know: have the white guys do the heavy lifting and place the diversity hires in harmless, window-dressing positions. This is hard to do when your job is to sit in a room and compete to see who has the best ideas. Indeed, putting a token-hire discrimination-lawsuit-in-waiting in that humbling environment has the potential to be much more than the standard cost of doing business it is for corporate America. Colbert knows, even if he won't allow himself to learn from it, that his writing staff, like Tom Wolfe's protagonist in Bonfire of the Vanities says of the similarly non-diverse bond room at the fictional Pierce & Pierce, is "no place for empty gestures."
And Colbert himself, furthermore, is someone who—based on interviews he’s given as himself rather than the characters he has played seems to think deeply [read: correctly] about the structures and systems that make the world what it is. He seems to understand, in a way many comedians don’t, that even the most innocuous kinds of “entertainment” play a role in defining culture.
This is leaving aside the ethical and artistic sin for which Colbert is so often praised: using art and entertainment (inexplicably placed in quotes above--what is she saying with that?) as a means of promoting political and social goals, rather than as a means of understanding politics and society. Art as factional propaganda rather than critical revelation. If Colbert is guilty of anything, it is this.
But being a successful promoter of the Narrative, fittingly enough, comes with the privilege of pointing out the silliness of the Narrative, as Colbert demonstrated when accepting an Emmy for his Comedy Central show (with, I imagine, mostly the same staff he's taken to late night), by thanking a writing staff composed of "those guys, and one woman" and saying "I'm sorry for that, for some reason."
Still, when these favored few show rare glimpses of awareness, it never seems to make it into their work in any meaningful way. A comedy show is too valuable for the symbolic gesture of token-hiring, but it's also, in this case, too valuable to point out the absurdity of token hiring.
But what strikes me about this latest teapot tempest is its premature nature. The SJW modus operandi (whether Justice's zealous auxiliaries recognize it or not) is to wait until a thing succeeds, then to sweep in and demand it be more "representative" (and to make the absurd argument that it needs to do this to succeed). This holds true across the professional and cultural spectrum, for various manufactured crises, from success in STEM fields to the military to comedy. The less representative a field is, the more potential it holds for plunder by diversity. These are tremendous growth opportunities, vast, untilled fields, for a political movement that has become a parasitic industry.
Perhaps they see the same pattern the rest of us are seeing, the other side of the counterfeit "inclusion" coin: it's not that white guys are hogging up all the jobs and influence, it's that non-whites and women are not contributing their fair share--and the white guys are either too busy doing to notice or too polite to mention it.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Tuesday, September 08, 2015
Western Values are Production Values
Steve Sailer has pointed out this same young
(or "military age") fellow toting about a picture of Angela Merkel like some sort of Byzantine icon of Jesus (Ms Merkel achieves secular sainthood) has now managed to appear not once, not twice, but three times in news reports about the ongoing refugee invasion of Europe:
"Okay, okay, but the light is all wrong..."
"Yes! The gesture is genius! That's why you're a star! Wrap and set up the next shot."
We've seen this sort of thing before, in another case of the political and media elites coming together to sell the public on a desired policy, as commenter JohnnyWalker123 points out in the Sailer comment thread:
I remember back when the Serbians were supposedly ethnically cleansing the Kosovars in 1999, the television channels and papers kept showing up the same image of a refugee woman over and over again. It was bizarre how often she kept appearing. So much so that someone mentioned it on one of the major cable networks.
The eliciting of emotion to manufacture consent in this way was parodied brilliantly back in 1997 in Barry Levinson's film about a political operative teaming with a Hollywood producer to create a fake war with Albania to distract from a scandal involving the president and an underage girl, Wag the Dog:
In the film Woody Harrelson's Private Schumann is actually a dangerous convict from a military prison:
Likewise, any misfits who get through will be fine as long as we keep them on their meds (weed, alcohol and pussy, if my observation of Portland's own military age Muslims is any good) and don't provoke them.
All this production is missing now are the product placements.
"That's good, Dahood, but less the cheerful shopper, more the grateful pilgrim, like we discussed..."
"Yes! The gesture is genius! That's why you're a star! Wrap and set up the next shot."
I remember back when the Serbians were supposedly ethnically cleansing the Kosovars in 1999, the television channels and papers kept showing up the same image of a refugee woman over and over again. It was bizarre how often she kept appearing. So much so that someone mentioned it on one of the major cable networks.
The eliciting of emotion to manufacture consent in this way was parodied brilliantly back in 1997 in Barry Levinson's film about a political operative teaming with a Hollywood producer to create a fake war with Albania to distract from a scandal involving the president and an underage girl, Wag the Dog:
In the film Woody Harrelson's Private Schumann is actually a dangerous convict from a military prison:
Likewise, any misfits who get through will be fine as long as we keep them on their meds (weed, alcohol and pussy, if my observation of Portland's own military age Muslims is any good) and don't provoke them.
All this production is missing now are the product placements.
"Kirsten, we'll add the racist mob later of course, just give us some sort of reaction to that and hold the chips a little higher..."
Monday, September 07, 2015
...imagine a Chu stamping on a human face, forever...
"The enemy at last in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off..."
It's forbidden to speak of it in such terms, but the (hopefully) premature triumphalism of non-whites regarding the (hopefully not) inevitable demographic damnation of white America bears all the marks of betrayal.
Not even the most fervently liberal white (excluding the Alinsky-ite radicals, who really gave us fair warning) of fifty years ago would have thought, much less said, that the success of the unprecedented opening up of American society and politics to minority groups did not entail--indeed, depend on--a concomitant effort on the part of those groups to live up to their end of the bargain--to not destroy this wonderful system we had built. We've let them into our house and now they're setting it on fire.
Not even the most fervently liberal white (excluding the Alinsky-ite radicals, who really gave us fair warning) of fifty years ago would have thought, much less said, that the success of the unprecedented opening up of American society and politics to minority groups did not entail--indeed, depend on--a concomitant effort on the part of those groups to live up to their end of the bargain--to not destroy this wonderful system we had built. We've let them into our house and now they're setting it on fire.
Saturday, September 05, 2015
Desperate Measures
To explain the odd, old posts below, I'm editing and republishing old stuff in a desperate attempt to unblock myself. I've been trying to get back in the groove for months, only able to occasionally blurt out something, writhing inwardly as the world churns on in fascinating horror. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed. It's probably that I don't really have that much to say, and I don't like repeating myself. Anyway, there's the explanation that wasn't requested by a reader who isn't there.
Flashback in the Pan
Dec. 27, 2006
The ferment forms eyes, which turn upon the ferment, in wonder.
I am rising into the atmosphere, looking down upon the earth. Time is accelerating, the earth spinning so fast I can no longer make out its surface. Higher and higher I go into outer space. Momentary flashing irregular pauses reveal successive cycles of decline and rebirth below: ice ages, droughts, floods.
Civilizations are rising and falling, overtaking one another, each building out toward the heavens before falling back to earth to be reclaimed by the soil and buried beneath the crude beginnings of its successor. These strobe-beats are coming so fast now that they resemble an old film. I try to reach back toward the earth, as if to capture it in my grasp; it is only then I realize I have no body.
The sun is dimming, turning red; the earth is cold, inert. All is a flash of blinding, platinum light, searing the eyes, as the dying sun explodes. The light recedes, leaving behind the earth, now a ball of flame trailing the phantom current of the blast. The rate of time's increase becomes unbearable; I feel it taking me apart, cell by cell, atom by atom. The earth is now a brilliant, orange-red ember glowing in an onyx sea dappled with pin-pricks of starlight. Already it is dimming, fading in concert with my own dissipation: body, sentience, memory, identity, all now indistinguishable as they pass into dust.
The ferment becomes aware, becomes self-aware, seeks to save itself through flight, succumbs and is submerged again in dissolution.
Our lives are futile escape attempts.
The ferment forms eyes, which turn upon the ferment, in wonder.
I am rising into the atmosphere, looking down upon the earth. Time is accelerating, the earth spinning so fast I can no longer make out its surface. Higher and higher I go into outer space. Momentary flashing irregular pauses reveal successive cycles of decline and rebirth below: ice ages, droughts, floods.
Civilizations are rising and falling, overtaking one another, each building out toward the heavens before falling back to earth to be reclaimed by the soil and buried beneath the crude beginnings of its successor. These strobe-beats are coming so fast now that they resemble an old film. I try to reach back toward the earth, as if to capture it in my grasp; it is only then I realize I have no body.
The sun is dimming, turning red; the earth is cold, inert. All is a flash of blinding, platinum light, searing the eyes, as the dying sun explodes. The light recedes, leaving behind the earth, now a ball of flame trailing the phantom current of the blast. The rate of time's increase becomes unbearable; I feel it taking me apart, cell by cell, atom by atom. The earth is now a brilliant, orange-red ember glowing in an onyx sea dappled with pin-pricks of starlight. Already it is dimming, fading in concert with my own dissipation: body, sentience, memory, identity, all now indistinguishable as they pass into dust.
The ferment becomes aware, becomes self-aware, seeks to save itself through flight, succumbs and is submerged again in dissolution.
Our lives are futile escape attempts.
Saturday Sermon
No Exit
(originally published on Dec 11, 2007)
Now that all the groups have disappeared, and every tribe has dispersed, we know ourselves as isolated but similar to each other, and we have lost the desire to unite.
—The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq
Reality is the only word in the English language that should always come in quotes.
—anonymous
Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?
—“Cowboy,” The Short Timers, Gustav Hasford
Oh the things you’ll see! Oh the Places You'll Go!
—Dr. Seuss
We arrived at that place, finally. That imagined place where dreams were made real. Dreams of incomprehensible wonder revealing new, miraculous dimensions of imagination. The dreams held us in perpetual, childlike awe. But there we also found nightmares, nightmares we ourselves had released with the dreams. Nightmares at once unimaginable and familiar.
Once released the dreams and nightmares grew beyond our control. They merged and blended, endlessly recombining to create grotesque hybrids, spawning deformed children; all the while growing in number and mass. The sacred and the profane bled into one another until they became one. The sum of every dream became a communal dreamworld, the product of every mind and the product of no single mind.
Art was separated from artist. Meaning was being made meaningless. The people no longer controlled their imagination; it controlled them. The collective consciousness eroded and crowded out the individual. Privacy and solitude were becoming relics of the past. The people were becoming one unindividuated mass, like the inescapable dreamworld they beheld. Yet they were isolated from one another and alienated from the whole.
Every desire, every impulse, every fear and conceit, all vanity, was released to collect in an unintelligible mass overhead, lowering down upon them as it grew. All eyes turned upward, first in wonder and then in despair. Some warned that the dreamworld was displacing the real. But it was no use; there was no returning, and the authorless dreams and nightmares grew and combined as one, crowding out the sky, like a great, gathering storm.
Reality has competition. The virtual and the representational are gaining prominence in the individual and collective psyche, cutting into reality's market share. "Virtual" reality has even gained practical value. Everything that doesn't require direct human contact is gradually, inevitably, migrating away from it; economic utility alone ensures this. Engagement with one's fellows is increasingly unnecessary, and increasingly superfluous. It is now possible for one to survive within and even contribute to society without physically engaging it. For each one of us the necessity of human contact is diminishing. Human interaction is being rendered unnecessary
This fundamental shift is transpiring in a historical blink of the eye--within the span of a single lifetime. The experience of our youth is already antiquated; the world our children will pass on, unimaginable. We are on a path that seems predetermined to end with—or merely pass through—the manipulation of perception at the synaptic level, where experience lives. It is all but certain that we will eventually master the interface between perception and reality. We are not cutting out reality but cutting it off, stranding it. We are not "playing God", but displacing him. Reality is being made malleable, becoming a mere "social construct." But "reality" and "nature" are not the same thing. This we forget. Even as reality is coming apart at the seams, nature remains, utterly unchanged and unfazed, as indifferent as ever.
In the future it may come to pass that the individual will have less need for sociality. Evolutionary pressures for it may already be easing. Technology and human vanity combine to ensure that procreation itself will inevitably become a commercialized, streamlined, efficient process, with conception and gestation taking place in vitro and managed by professionals customizing their product for a clientele ordered by wealth; a hierarchy of reproduction intensifying human inequality and its attendant social stratification. Today's already disingenuous prohibition against eugenics doesn't stand a chance; it will eventually become a curiosity, if it is to be remembered at all. As for sex, romance and love; their connection to procreation is all but severed; they are now primarily recreational. Family as we know it will pass into history, but the struggle for genetic predominance will continue. It may become a rout as some enjoy unlimited access, and others are shut out entirely.
There is no guarantee that in the future the individual will not select, and be selected for, solitariness. As it is, a growing percentage of the populace is disengaged from and irrelevant to the politics and governance of society. As the average person's personal liberty grows in the absence of any authority over it, such as by church or community, indeed, as personal liberty becomes the highest virtue, his political autonomy and influence lessens, and he is increasingly irrelevant to a polity he finds confusing, opaque, and unresponsive.
The common man concedes influence in exchange for being left alone; he can count not being pressed into the service of defending the nation or contributing to its welfare or governance beyond paying taxes. He enjoys unprecedented personal liberty and unprecedented social irrelevance. He is left to his amusements; lurid, hyper-lucid and hyper-stimulating ("more real than real")—sensually and morally deadening. Over the horizon somewhere another class, increasingly alien, works the levers of society and gathers privilege unto itself.
Culture today still retains its partly shamanistic roots—imposing the necessary illusion of order on a natural world fundamentally incomprehensible due to its sheer size and totality; that the human heart can be cordoned off from nature is an ancient dream we still pursue. This fundamental religious belief is what made civilization possible. Absolute truth had to be declared and established before it could be determined (and before we could set out on the path to where we now enjoy the conceit of declaring it nonexisent). Society had to drop anchor somewhere, anywhere, to establish an immutable reference point, to free itself from its primordial drift. But still it is an illusion, and as such it could not last. The illusion has been exposed; we are cut adrift once more.
For the ancients it was the indecipherable chaos of the capricious elements upon which a semblance of order had to be overlaid; a mythology of cause and effect had to be created, and eventually the gods were born. Scientific revelation, in laying bare the patterns underlying the confusion and demystifying the sacred mysteries of sky and stars, incidentally exposed and killed the gods. But nature's indifference and caprice still haunt us. New mythologies are hastily erected in the form of sociological conceits: ideology, philosophy, social theory and criticism. But they are ad hoc, cobbled together; they fall as rapidly as we put them up. Mystery is no longer the overriding feature of the physical world. Now it is the confusion of a species whose awareness has outstripped its evolutionary pace—that has outrun nature but cannot overcome it. We are still uncovering patterns, still killing gods.
Nature means, literally, everything. Out of necessity we create false layers of remove between ourselves and nature; arbitrary, imaginary divides. But, as with all human artifice, their erosion begins before they are even finished, before they come into being. Nature works upon us even through the very barriers we erect. The clock is always ticking. Human convention is no less a product of nature than anything else, and in nature there is no such thing as permanence. Nature has time we don't. Literally, all the time in the world. Nature is time. Flux is its only permanent feature.
Meanwhile, we have grown bored with merely manipulating our physical environment. The pace of change has made a mockery of permanence, so we mock and deride the social conventions attempting to preserve a semblance of it, otherwise known as community, habitually. This exposes a lack of confidence. Of faith. Paranoia is imprinted in our genetic code; we sense there's something else out there. We attempt to give shape and form to this vague fear.
What should be the ultimate practical concern, the physical environment, takes on a religious, millenarian air; mainstream environmentalism prophesies catastrophic wrath to be visited upon us for our sins if we do not admonish ourselves and atone. Alarmed at our very real and apparently boundless hubris, we fashion myths of a vengeful nature wreaking havoc on us and reclaiming the land.
Global warming and AIDS have both become political and social movements predicated on a mythology of hubris and social injustice bringing about catastrophe. But beneath this lurks nothing so much as a profound lack of confidence, not entirely misplaced perhaps, in the ultimate wisdom of human society. Beyond hardcore political activism, the unacknowledged subtext of AIDS as a social phenomenon is the hope, now revealed as hopeless, that the disease would, finally, chasten humanity to temper its headlong descent into sexual immorality and chaos. Remember when "AIDS changed everything"?
Likewise global warming is being invested with the hope that it will spur a revolution in the production of energy, just in time to head off the next global conflict and make a Third World as rich in resources as it is in hostility irrelevant.
In the end, catastrophe mythology is not, as it appears at first glance, misanthropic conceit, but collective vainglory. We give ourselves too much credit. Nature will indeed reclaim the dominion it never really relinquished, but it will have nothing to do with us. We are not even bit players in nature's tragicomedy, but mere scenery. It is we that we need to keep our eyes on.
Violence permeates the culture, but the reality of daily life for the vast majority is excruciatingly dull in comparison to the alternate reality of cinema and video games. For sensational appeal, it simply cannot compete. The innate aggression and paranoia of the average man is increasingly aroused in inverse proportion to its decreasing necessity.
We have not conquered but insulated ourselves from the physical world, and have begun the logical next step, crafting an alternate reality—a reality manipulable at the individual level. Meanwhile nature still inhabits this false idyll, untold patterns unfolding still. We delude ourselves that nature has been marginalized, finally made small and comprehensible, but we can no more escape her than we can escape ourselves.
In a culture with no center, taken over entirely by commerce, prominence of place is awarded entirely by mass appeal. The vulgar shares space with the formerly sacrosanct. The common cannot be ennobled by its elevation, but its opposite cannot avoid being trivialized by being made common.
Decency cannot survive an order determined by sensationalism. Real life horrors compete for attention with their fictional counterparts. The collective imagination conflates and confuses them. In the end, it all must combine; beauty and ugliness, truth and fiction. In the historical memory they will be indistinguishable. In our minds they nearly are already.
So, what then? I propose no action, no change of course, no return, because these are impossible. There is no going back. It is only for us to gaze in wonder and hold on tight.
(originally published on Dec 11, 2007)
Now that all the groups have disappeared, and every tribe has dispersed, we know ourselves as isolated but similar to each other, and we have lost the desire to unite.
—The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq
Reality is the only word in the English language that should always come in quotes.
—anonymous
Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?
—“Cowboy,” The Short Timers, Gustav Hasford
Oh the things you’ll see! Oh the Places You'll Go!
—Dr. Seuss
We arrived at that place, finally. That imagined place where dreams were made real. Dreams of incomprehensible wonder revealing new, miraculous dimensions of imagination. The dreams held us in perpetual, childlike awe. But there we also found nightmares, nightmares we ourselves had released with the dreams. Nightmares at once unimaginable and familiar.
Once released the dreams and nightmares grew beyond our control. They merged and blended, endlessly recombining to create grotesque hybrids, spawning deformed children; all the while growing in number and mass. The sacred and the profane bled into one another until they became one. The sum of every dream became a communal dreamworld, the product of every mind and the product of no single mind.
Art was separated from artist. Meaning was being made meaningless. The people no longer controlled their imagination; it controlled them. The collective consciousness eroded and crowded out the individual. Privacy and solitude were becoming relics of the past. The people were becoming one unindividuated mass, like the inescapable dreamworld they beheld. Yet they were isolated from one another and alienated from the whole.
Every desire, every impulse, every fear and conceit, all vanity, was released to collect in an unintelligible mass overhead, lowering down upon them as it grew. All eyes turned upward, first in wonder and then in despair. Some warned that the dreamworld was displacing the real. But it was no use; there was no returning, and the authorless dreams and nightmares grew and combined as one, crowding out the sky, like a great, gathering storm.
Reality has competition. The virtual and the representational are gaining prominence in the individual and collective psyche, cutting into reality's market share. "Virtual" reality has even gained practical value. Everything that doesn't require direct human contact is gradually, inevitably, migrating away from it; economic utility alone ensures this. Engagement with one's fellows is increasingly unnecessary, and increasingly superfluous. It is now possible for one to survive within and even contribute to society without physically engaging it. For each one of us the necessity of human contact is diminishing. Human interaction is being rendered unnecessary
This fundamental shift is transpiring in a historical blink of the eye--within the span of a single lifetime. The experience of our youth is already antiquated; the world our children will pass on, unimaginable. We are on a path that seems predetermined to end with—or merely pass through—the manipulation of perception at the synaptic level, where experience lives. It is all but certain that we will eventually master the interface between perception and reality. We are not cutting out reality but cutting it off, stranding it. We are not "playing God", but displacing him. Reality is being made malleable, becoming a mere "social construct." But "reality" and "nature" are not the same thing. This we forget. Even as reality is coming apart at the seams, nature remains, utterly unchanged and unfazed, as indifferent as ever.
In the future it may come to pass that the individual will have less need for sociality. Evolutionary pressures for it may already be easing. Technology and human vanity combine to ensure that procreation itself will inevitably become a commercialized, streamlined, efficient process, with conception and gestation taking place in vitro and managed by professionals customizing their product for a clientele ordered by wealth; a hierarchy of reproduction intensifying human inequality and its attendant social stratification. Today's already disingenuous prohibition against eugenics doesn't stand a chance; it will eventually become a curiosity, if it is to be remembered at all. As for sex, romance and love; their connection to procreation is all but severed; they are now primarily recreational. Family as we know it will pass into history, but the struggle for genetic predominance will continue. It may become a rout as some enjoy unlimited access, and others are shut out entirely.
There is no guarantee that in the future the individual will not select, and be selected for, solitariness. As it is, a growing percentage of the populace is disengaged from and irrelevant to the politics and governance of society. As the average person's personal liberty grows in the absence of any authority over it, such as by church or community, indeed, as personal liberty becomes the highest virtue, his political autonomy and influence lessens, and he is increasingly irrelevant to a polity he finds confusing, opaque, and unresponsive.
The common man concedes influence in exchange for being left alone; he can count not being pressed into the service of defending the nation or contributing to its welfare or governance beyond paying taxes. He enjoys unprecedented personal liberty and unprecedented social irrelevance. He is left to his amusements; lurid, hyper-lucid and hyper-stimulating ("more real than real")—sensually and morally deadening. Over the horizon somewhere another class, increasingly alien, works the levers of society and gathers privilege unto itself.
Culture today still retains its partly shamanistic roots—imposing the necessary illusion of order on a natural world fundamentally incomprehensible due to its sheer size and totality; that the human heart can be cordoned off from nature is an ancient dream we still pursue. This fundamental religious belief is what made civilization possible. Absolute truth had to be declared and established before it could be determined (and before we could set out on the path to where we now enjoy the conceit of declaring it nonexisent). Society had to drop anchor somewhere, anywhere, to establish an immutable reference point, to free itself from its primordial drift. But still it is an illusion, and as such it could not last. The illusion has been exposed; we are cut adrift once more.
For the ancients it was the indecipherable chaos of the capricious elements upon which a semblance of order had to be overlaid; a mythology of cause and effect had to be created, and eventually the gods were born. Scientific revelation, in laying bare the patterns underlying the confusion and demystifying the sacred mysteries of sky and stars, incidentally exposed and killed the gods. But nature's indifference and caprice still haunt us. New mythologies are hastily erected in the form of sociological conceits: ideology, philosophy, social theory and criticism. But they are ad hoc, cobbled together; they fall as rapidly as we put them up. Mystery is no longer the overriding feature of the physical world. Now it is the confusion of a species whose awareness has outstripped its evolutionary pace—that has outrun nature but cannot overcome it. We are still uncovering patterns, still killing gods.
Nature means, literally, everything. Out of necessity we create false layers of remove between ourselves and nature; arbitrary, imaginary divides. But, as with all human artifice, their erosion begins before they are even finished, before they come into being. Nature works upon us even through the very barriers we erect. The clock is always ticking. Human convention is no less a product of nature than anything else, and in nature there is no such thing as permanence. Nature has time we don't. Literally, all the time in the world. Nature is time. Flux is its only permanent feature.
Meanwhile, we have grown bored with merely manipulating our physical environment. The pace of change has made a mockery of permanence, so we mock and deride the social conventions attempting to preserve a semblance of it, otherwise known as community, habitually. This exposes a lack of confidence. Of faith. Paranoia is imprinted in our genetic code; we sense there's something else out there. We attempt to give shape and form to this vague fear.
What should be the ultimate practical concern, the physical environment, takes on a religious, millenarian air; mainstream environmentalism prophesies catastrophic wrath to be visited upon us for our sins if we do not admonish ourselves and atone. Alarmed at our very real and apparently boundless hubris, we fashion myths of a vengeful nature wreaking havoc on us and reclaiming the land.
Global warming and AIDS have both become political and social movements predicated on a mythology of hubris and social injustice bringing about catastrophe. But beneath this lurks nothing so much as a profound lack of confidence, not entirely misplaced perhaps, in the ultimate wisdom of human society. Beyond hardcore political activism, the unacknowledged subtext of AIDS as a social phenomenon is the hope, now revealed as hopeless, that the disease would, finally, chasten humanity to temper its headlong descent into sexual immorality and chaos. Remember when "AIDS changed everything"?
Likewise global warming is being invested with the hope that it will spur a revolution in the production of energy, just in time to head off the next global conflict and make a Third World as rich in resources as it is in hostility irrelevant.
In the end, catastrophe mythology is not, as it appears at first glance, misanthropic conceit, but collective vainglory. We give ourselves too much credit. Nature will indeed reclaim the dominion it never really relinquished, but it will have nothing to do with us. We are not even bit players in nature's tragicomedy, but mere scenery. It is we that we need to keep our eyes on.
Violence permeates the culture, but the reality of daily life for the vast majority is excruciatingly dull in comparison to the alternate reality of cinema and video games. For sensational appeal, it simply cannot compete. The innate aggression and paranoia of the average man is increasingly aroused in inverse proportion to its decreasing necessity.
We have not conquered but insulated ourselves from the physical world, and have begun the logical next step, crafting an alternate reality—a reality manipulable at the individual level. Meanwhile nature still inhabits this false idyll, untold patterns unfolding still. We delude ourselves that nature has been marginalized, finally made small and comprehensible, but we can no more escape her than we can escape ourselves.
In a culture with no center, taken over entirely by commerce, prominence of place is awarded entirely by mass appeal. The vulgar shares space with the formerly sacrosanct. The common cannot be ennobled by its elevation, but its opposite cannot avoid being trivialized by being made common.
Decency cannot survive an order determined by sensationalism. Real life horrors compete for attention with their fictional counterparts. The collective imagination conflates and confuses them. In the end, it all must combine; beauty and ugliness, truth and fiction. In the historical memory they will be indistinguishable. In our minds they nearly are already.
So, what then? I propose no action, no change of course, no return, because these are impossible. There is no going back. It is only for us to gaze in wonder and hold on tight.
Alternative America Phrasebook
"Your guide to the idiom of mass delusion."
Civility, n., hackspeak, The silence or acquiescence of one's political enemies.
Civility, n., hackspeak, The silence or acquiescence of one's political enemies.
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