Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

But why should anyone be indignant or potentially even surprised about such a simple and necessary matter of fact?

 

[CiG]

Today we're inundated with stories, entertainment and other distractions due to advancement in media tech (which leads to the 'make a comment online and move on' phenomenon that HP alludes to), in the past warfare news was the talk of the town and because we had less media distractions it really was quite central to the common interest and conversation, go even further back and the draft deepens people's observation of warfare because it meant people had family likely serving.

Simply put, we're closer today to warfare in terms of ability to observe, but we're more distant due to scattered interests, exemption of mandatory military service and general media distraction.

 

[Einherjar86]

I find most of this agreeable, especially CIG's comments on the modern media.

A lot of this has been previously illuminated by leftist critics such as Baudrillard (many of whom probably wouldn't describe themselves as democrats). In a chapter on Apocalypse Now from his book Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard writes that "it is necessary for us to believe in this:

the war in Vietnam "in itself" perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a victory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a superfilm, which completes the mass spectacle of this war.

No real distance, no critical sense, no desire for "raising consciousness" in relation to the war: and in a sense this is the brutal quality of this film - not being rotten with the moral psychology of war.

Baudrillard gets at the central premise back in 1981, at least from the perspective that CIG helpfully highlights. But he isn't suggesting that the Vietnam War (or the Gulf War, as he will write a little more than a decade later) actually didn't happen - he's suggesting that in the era of late modernity, late-20thc techno-globalism (i.e. democratic neoliberalism), mass media and the spectacle of film permit its audiences the fantasy of believing that it somehow never happened, that they can view the film, or observe it, and yet somehow isolate themselves from its visceral occurrence.

This is also a version of what Žižek gets at when he writes that the 9/11 attacks were available to most people - to a "popular audience," so to speak - as a film spectacle. We watched the towers fall down and thought: "This is like something out of a movie."

Thomas Pynchon also toys with a similar notion in Gravity's Rainbow when he imagines the entirety of World War Two as a film at the end of the novel - readers discover that they have in fact been sitting in the theater watching a movie unfold.

So, tl;dr, I agree with CIG that modern media and film play a big role in the distance we (or many of us) experience from war.

 

[Dak]

Excellent points, and I think supportive of the PJMedia piece, even if "Democracy qua Democracy" is a singular culprit.

 

[Einherjar86]

Bakker is a systems theorist, even if he doesn't want to admit it...

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/myth-as-meth/

A post-intentional theory of meaning focuses on the continuity of semantic practices and nature, and views any theoretical perspective entailing the discontinuity of those practices and nature as spurious artifacts of the application of heuristic modes of cognition to theoretical issues. A post-intentional theory of meaning, in other worlds,views culture as a natural phenomenon, and not some arcane artifact of something empirically inexplicable. Signification is wholly material on this account, with all the messiness that comes with it.

Cognitive systems optimize effectiveness by reaching out only as far into nature as they need to. If they can solve distal systems via proximal signals possessing reliable systematic relationships to those systems, they will do so. Humans, like all other species possessing nervous systems, are shallow information consumers in what might be calleddeep information environments.

 

[Dak]

I think when it comes to intersectionality between our respective interests, this might hit right in the center:

https://aeon.co/essays/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-brains-together

Watts via Land.

 

[Einherjar86]

Yeah, I read this back when Aeon originally published it. Really good piece. I feel like Watts possesses an admirable mixture of scientific practicality and respect for the experience of subjectivity.

 

[Dak]

Here we go:

http://www.macroresilience.com/2013...iting-the-radical-left-and-the-radical-right/

Most critics of neoliberalism on the left point to the dramatic reduction in the scale of government activities since the 80s – the privatisation of state-run enterprises, the increased dependence upon private contractors for delivering public services etc. Most right-wing critics lament the increasing regulatory burden faced by businesses and individuals and the preferential treatment and bailouts doled out to the politically well-connected. Neither the left nor the right is wrong. But both of them only see one side of what is the core strategy of neoliberal crony capitalism – increase the scope and reduce the scale of government intervention.

 

[Einherjar86]

That is wonderful. It makes a lot of sense and would explain a great deal about the persistence of complaints from the left and right - that liberals can complain that government doesn't do enough, while conservatives complain it does too much.

 

[Dak]

It really makes a lot of sense. Of course, what I will call the "Misesian" critique about the scope of government is exactly this. That by increasing the scope the scale must necessarily decline. How this appears functionally is that the connected can avoid the narrowingly capable focus of an increasingly stretched bureaucracy (although direct/indirect costs and taxes still increase). Some random person loses everything because of some obscure law but MegaCorp gets away with proverbial and/or literal murder. Of course, the anarchist solution is zero government and I've backed off of this if for no other reason the majority of people will never go for this. It's the utopia of the high-IQ aspergerish few. I think that article may offer a nice middleground.

Edit: Austrian Econs' and others have called neoliberals/(neocons) Trotskyites for a while. I don't think the replication of the Soviet system is "unwitting".

 

[rms]

Not news, not mort, not philosophical but I think this is a really solid article on B Clinton & "Tough on Crime" (shit title though imo)

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/stone-mountain-kkk-white-supremacy-simmons/

 

[Einherjar86]

Seems interesting, wasn't able to cover all of it. Long read... Enlightening though, if not entirely surprising. Clinton was a neoliberal president to an intense degree, the president of the "happy nineties." It makes sense that most of his policy concerns would avoid issues that trouble that whole narrative.

 

[Dak]

Although Bush scummery is multigenerational and therefore maybe worse on the whole as a family, I don't know that any two people occupying public office over the last x number of decades deserve more villification for a variety of reasons, both concrete and conspiratorial, than the Clintons.

 

[rms]

I just feel so ignorant on the southern US political realm, seeing that use of location + speed is just a damning argument against that policy

 

[Dak]

I just feel so ignorant on the southern US political realm, seeing that use of location + speed is just a damning argument against that policy

I have no idea what you are referring to here.

 

[rms]

Clinton using his tough on crime speech utop that Georgia monument. In combination with the glorification of the Confederacy in symbols and leadership during the time period.

Sure there's more, just ignorant on it

 

[Dak]

Clinton using his tough on crime speech utop that Georgia monument. In combination with the glorification of the Confederacy in symbols and leadership during the time period.

Sure there's more, just ignorant on it

The Clintons are pure opportunists. They do or say whatever they need to.

 

[CiG]

One of his best moments was his Sister Souljah moment, he's obviously a much better political personality than Hillary.

 

[rms]

I have no doubt that is true for most politicians, but the South seems to have that hypocrisy more in the open and not really confronted until relatively recently.

Trying to figure out what it is in the north, segregation I guess?

 

[Dak]

Possibly partially because of a more limited number of tribal affiliations?

On a different topic: I've argued before about the completely ludicrous (although explainable) left- intellectual ignoring or whitewashing of communism, while Fascism is the Supreme Evil.

It is completely uncritical to be "anti-oppression" or start talking about how lives matter, or whatever else in that vein, and to be a communist apologist.

This came up recently due to my expressing some disdain about some prominent "social activist" speakers with ties to the US Communist party. Then this article came across my feed.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-house-is-on-fire--8466

The pure numbers are bad enough, and unless one were a Jew, the culture of fear and oppression isn't close either.