Our Betters Make Plans
Attention, comrades. My fellow heroes, titans, thinkers of deep thoughts. It is time to map out the world of tomorrow:
There are no post revolution theatre troops, only post revolution mine troops, comrade. pic.twitter.com/ACIref7r9r
— Hegel Borg™️ (@xxclusionary) June 10, 2024
Because after the revolution, we will need accessible theatre.
Presumably, to take our minds off all the riots and ruin and burning cars. Earlier revolutionary rumblings can be found here and here. Topics covered include the pivotal importance of “artists and visionaries,” and the righteous washing of other people’s bin contents. Thereby enabling us to “eat from a revolutionary and resistance standpoint.”
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
You would, I think, be scandalised, or possibly amused, by the salty language that often accompanies my Thursday evening ritual of checking Ephemera links prior to their materialising on this blog.
David, as a (retired) technologist, I would empathize. (And I’m one who thinks empathy is often a symptom of mental disorder (unlike sympathy)).
(Do I owe extra for overuse of parentheses?)
Can’t help thinking it would be easier to just, you know, turn up on time.
Can’t help thinking it would be easier to just, you know, turn up on time.
I’m told they experience time differently. I believe you’ve posted about it before.
Where’s the opportunity for performative indignation in that?
That vibrantly enriching combination of subnormal intelligence and pathological narcissism.
These people who claim to “experience time differently” are never early to work or for an appointment. Curiously and inexplicably. 🙄
“I just wanna say aaaaaaahhh!“
This is bog standard riot control. Hold the line, identify the people in the mob that are the inciters, the ones driving the riot, then send a small strike team of heavily armored cops into the mob to grab that person and extricate them swiftly. Robs the riot of the fuel it needs to burn and scares the hell out of the rest of the rioters.
The police know how to defuse riots. They’re trained for it. When they don’t it’s because they’ve been ordered not to.
In the Leftist utopia, nothing shall be allowed to interrupt their self-regard.
Not earning a living.
Not negative feedback (in the form of loss of business or customers) for creating a terrible product or service.
Not criminal consequences for antisocial behavior.
Not voices raised in concern or disagreement.
And certainly not the inconvenience of others.
This. And it does far more damage than most people understand. Ah, but thapth conthpiwathy theewy.
If you scroll down, you’ll discover, much to your surprise, that Mr Wise is a bit of a racist.
Question asked.
Because the constabulary is more likely to arrest anyone trying to stop her than they are to take notice of her vandalism.
No refunds; credit note only.
So you’re a cunning linkist.
I fear that someone will take that as a challenge. Comic sans, perhaps.
[ Checks inside coat. Verifies presence of truncheon of repentance. ]
So you’re a cunning linkist.
Well played sir!
[ golf clap ]
“One small dive for a man, one giant bellyflop for transkind…“
One of our betters: “Straight black men are the white people of black people”.
If only. The moral dimensions of most fictions and fantasies are orthogonal to what they’re about. They fail to grasp the true moral core and end up with the wrong lesson entirely.
I mean, let’s look at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. That scene where Dolores Umbridge forces Harry to write “I must not tell lies” in his own blood while fluffy kittens gambol across her decorative plate set. She revels in Harry’s pain because she’s a stone-cold sadist, and yet she cloaks herself in cuteness and simpering smiles and frilly pink robes.
So the lesson from Rowling is that evil people sometimes attempt to conceal their cruelty by decorating themselves with harmless-looking trappings.
Is it any wonder, then, that Rowling is not fooled by rainbows and glitter and can identify the monsters hiding behind them? Does the left twig to this?
No, the parallel evades them entirely. They attack Rowling instead — the one who, like Harry, refuses to recant the truth despite immense pressure even from governmental forces.
I’ve heard them attempt to draw other lessons from Harry Potter, and every single time they miss the point by a mile. “But Harry Potter is about marginalized people!” they mewl, not realizing that they read HP as a kid and so they only have a kid’s understanding of the series. The deeper themes evade them entirely.
“Read another book!” the right taunts.
When actually they didn’t read HP the first time.
It’s not just stupidity. It’s that people are attached to their worldviews for reasons other than… well… reason.
Case in point, Colin Wright, evolutionary biologist, makes a plea: how do you get through to someone like this?
I responded that “You’re not just asking him to change his opinion on a discrete issue — you’re asking him to cut ties with his tribe, to renounce his friendships and alliances, to change his core identity and reframe how he sees himself in the world.”
And more at the link.
That, as the kids say.
Mr Send Dopamine is, it seems, a bit far gone.
He pretends that he wouldn’t want to be rescued from Muhammadan kidnappers if the people holding him hostage were likely to get hurt. He insists that “white supremacy” is a thing and is lurking, invisibly, everywhere. He doesn’t think lesbians should prefer lovers without penises. He likes The Acolyte.
And anyone who disagrees with him is a “racist,” a “fascist,” a “white supremacist.”
It seems he bought his worldview wholesale. And he clings to his collection of badges very tightly.
As I said upthread,
Again, it’s an entirely different, and incompatible, decision-making process.
If pretty much any interaction has to be tested for in-group seemliness – Is This An Opinion That A Person Like Me Is Supposed To Be Seen Having? – then thinking must become quite fraught, quite weird.
It all seems terribly stressful. And not an obvious recipe for mental health.
On the contrary, you’ve offloaded the task of thinking to the crowd. You’re the kind of person who goes along with whatever’s in style, flying like a starling in a murmuration — you just need to stay in sync with the next six birds around you, so you manage the quick turns and velocity changes with ease.
Memorize the incantations and recite them frequently. Say what you hear said and do what you see doing. No need to evaluate the thoughts in your head for seemliness because that’s not where your ideas originate. It’s all derived by mimesis.
Oh, I dunno. I mean, yes, I suppose it can save a lot of time, a lot of sifting through boring stats and such, and all that disagreeable testing of one’s own assumptions. Instead, the answers are just there, on the shelf. But the fashions of What To Mouth In Order To Belong tend not to be internally consistent – it’s more of a dissonant patchwork of gestures and slogans. Contradictory imperatives. Or pretend-imperatives.
And fashions can change quite quickly. The ground on which one stands doesn’t seem terribly stable. Doesn’t seem very load-bearing.
And then there’s the issue of encountering sustained testing of those currently-fashionable claims. If there’s not much behind them, bits may break off. And people may see. Again, stressful. Though I suppose that’s when one has to start calling people names. Like emitting squid ink.
I was once told, grudgingly, something to the effect that “At least you back up your opinions with examples and explanations.” As if this were an odd thing. By someone who was vaguely scandalised by something I’d said, but who couldn’t explain why it was wrong.
Actually pretty good for a dad joke.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that being concerned that one’s opinions are logically consistent and correspond with observable reality isn’t the same thing as being anxious that one’s opinions conform to peer-group expectation. The emotional loading seems quite different.
I mean, being annoyed with yourself that you got a fact wrong, or overlooked some detail, or misquoted a statistic, doesn’t feel the same way as realising you’ve transgressed this week’s ideological fashion and may therefore be cast into the outer darkness.
Oh, I see what you mean. Where the penalty is social death — at the hands of your peers — you’re going to experience quite a bit of anxiety. Maybe that explains some of the disparity in emotional wellness between left and right.
Yes. If I overlook some detail or screw up some argument, I don’t experience the kind of neurotic drama seen, for instance, here.
My opinions, including the ones I screw up, are not about belonging to The Fashionable Tribe.
Poor Sue.
I quite liked her on GBBO, and I saw her take a trip up the Mekong. Maybe she’s actually insufferable, but the groveling is hard to watch from anyone.
zolpidem kicks in
I can’t say I feel overly sympathetic. Best not to play those kinds of games.
But you see what I mean? The emotional loading is quite different. Pretence and error ain’t the same thing.
In other news, having strangers, people you don’t know, taking your car, randomly, would not be inconvenient or annoying, apparently.
I think we’ll give that one a post of its own.
Comments that-a-way.
Agreed. Keeping up with political fashions must be somewhat stressful for all but those with very low intelligence or very pathological personalities.
Is This An Opinion That A Person Like Me Is Supposed To Be Seen Having
VS
Is This An Opinion That A Person Like Me Is Supposed to Have
Both these are examples of people who haven’t reasoned their way to an opinion.
It’s only stressful, or only seems stressful, to people who remember what it was they believed with such passion yesterday. These people don’t think like that. They are entirely “in the moment”. This “in the moment” thing is considered to be psychologically healthy. If the group signals that we are thinking differently today, you just change your mind immediately and promise to sin no more. It’s really quite easy and less stressful once you get your mind right.
Hungry rabbits
In college I was a hippie sort of, and followed my small in-crowd (took yoga, was a vegetarian , clothing styles) for a while BUT there wasn’t any performative virtue back then, nor any banning people for wrongthought. I read lots including actual philosophy and thought lots and came to conclusions mostly bounded by reality, and no one hassled me for it at the time. And I just lived my life in that context. I assumed that an examined life was worth living, to paraphrase a greek philosopher. Apparently, this is not how it is done anymore.
Wait . .. I’m supposed to be concerned about that?
[ Clattering, shouting. ]
I mean, let’s look at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Must we?
“Read another book!” the right taunts
Yes. Please do.
Rowling is of a piece with Pratchett and Star Trek: TOS – adult ideas, dumbed down and simplified for children, and presented in the way the author wants you to think. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that; Starship Troopers does the same thing. The difference is that Heinlein and his fans have always been upfront about the fact that it’s a book for children, not adults, and that you should graduate to more sophisticated literature once you’re out of your teens and think for yourself rather than regurgitating what a celebrity thinks.
So the lesson from Rowling is that evil people sometimes attempt to conceal their cruelty by decorating themselves with harmless-looking trappings
That could never happen here. Well, maybe it could.
OK…maybe this is where I’ve been wrong about Heinlein. Does this apply to all his writings? They’re all meant for teenagers? Because that I would understand. I’ve never discussed much SF literature with friends. I kinda liked it but I was more of a spy novels guy. But judging from virtually every post on Insty about the mooooon and going back to the moooon people seem to have vewy, vewy concerns about needing military bases there because high ground and throwing rocks which I’m pretty sure all comes from Heinlein. But again, I’m the ignorant one here.
My take on Starship Troopers was that Heinlein had been fascinated by the phenomenon of fascism and wanted to understand it. He came up with a world in which a society which is effectively Nazi, and organized around ongoing genocidal war, is the only society with a chance of surviving and indeed, the only sane form of society. Now, that world is conspicuously different from the one we live in. He understood the Nazis not as deliberately evil, or even ill-intentioned, but as deranged, living in a bizarre fantasy ungrounded in reality but in which their conduct made sense. And made the point by presenting a world in which the fantasy was actual, and the conduct therefore sensible.
Such is my theory. I expect it’s full of unseen holes, so point ’em out.
You’ve only seen the movie, I take it, which is a dishonest satire of the novel.
And have not read any of Heinlein’s stories and nonfiction.
Heinlein was a libertarian, and often wrote anti-racist messages and themes into his stories. Leftists, however, liked to smear him as a fascist because:
1. All soldiers are fascist oppressors (unless they are communists or islamo-fascists)
2. Anyone who depicts military service as honorable is a fascist. See #1.
3. Anyone who criticizes communism is a fascist.
4. Leftists always lie in this way about those they disagree with.
3a. Anyone who is insufficiently left-wing is a fascist.
This is a very old lie. But still popular.
Me: “Sam, it doesn’t bother me that you like to suck cocks. But Stalin’s?”
Actually I grew up on Heinlein, read most of his fiction. And I loved the movie, but it’s not a film of the novel, it’s a film of a Mad magazine parody of the novel. The fascist element is basically missing from the movie. In the novel, the system is a conscious system with a purpose. In the movie it’s a bunch of clowns with no idea what they’re doing, but who like fancy uniforms.
[ Looks askance. ]
Fascist elements?
Please enumerate the fascist elements. And while you’re at it, the non-fascist ones.
How about the fascist imagery? The senseless brutality? The pervasive government propaganda? All quite different from the novel.
A lot of sf fans do display a very childish worship of Heinlein Case in point talking about how SpaceX boosters land on their tails “like God and Heinlein intended” which is not meant ironically if you listen to them in person. Sure, it’s impressive technology but please.
“Throwing rocks” is a recurrent reference to Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in which the Luna rebels win independence by bombarding the Earth with catapult-launched rocks.
A military presence in space seems a reasonable concern, given the sad reality of global politics and the idea that having all one’s military assets at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well makes them less useful in space.
Heinlein gets some well deserved credit for playing a major role in bring sf out of the pulp era with far more sophisticated writing. His predecessors were not good enough to appear in mainstream fiction-publishing magazines but he achieved that a few times.
A military presence in space seems a reasonable concern, in the context of LEO out to geosynch or maybe a tad beyond. A military presence on the mooooon is silly and/or absurd. Except possibly in the way, way as yet unproven viability of extracting wealth from the moon itself. Which itself is unproven as to what specific geographical location one would need to be in to extract the as yet unproven wealth. We went there 50 years ago and planted a flag. No one cares. No one looking to make a buck anyway. That so many “conservatives” swoon like schoolgirls at the thought of flying to the moon on the taxpayer’s dime is itself absurd. It’s as if reasonably well educated people have no bloody idea how far away the moon is. Hint: it’s mighty damn far. And then there’s Mars…
Well that’s the thing: The economic value of the Moon is as yet unknown. And if it may have economic value then military considerations should be studied. I don’t pay much attention to what NASA wants to do, figuring that private ventures are more likely to reflect real world possibilities. We’ll see….
I guess we aren’t getting a reply backing up those assertions.
Yes, I was off on a bender for some days. The movie is very much about American militarism and crony capitalism. The people you see are all playing the same old game and it takes til the end of the movie before we see any sign that they even appreciate the circumstances that they’re in. The novel depicts a genuinely different society with a point of view that has been beaten into shape by the circumstances.
Militarism and propaganda do not define or constitute fascism. I’d go so far as to say that the kind of society at risk of fascism is one that has a capacity for militarism and propaganda; but it needs to go further. The sense of collective identity and existential adversity is essential, and the bugs provide it in Starship Troopers where the Nazis basically had to hallucinate it. If we are indeed seeing Nazism in the Ukraine (not something I would concede lightly), then Putin is giving them all grounds they need.
Verhoeven relied on imagery to convey clues that this was a fascist society. The omnipresent war eagle symbol, the long black Gestapo coats, and the heavy handed and omnipresent propaganda were crafted to remind us of 20th century fascism.
So any society (fictional or historical) which faced up to an existential threat was fascistic? No.*
No. The bugs are merely a convenient plot device to provide a reason for the war and a contrast between the bugs’ efficient perfect communism and Earth’s very libertarian society.
You cannot use the mere presence of a existential enemy to “prove” that the society fighting that enemy is fascistic; you need to demonstrate that the society’s culture and institutions are indeed fascistic, something that is rather hard to do given that Heinlein portrays it as being very high in individual freedom.
It would be better to instead look at the theory of fascism, as expounded by various fascist thinkers going back to Mussolini et al. At the very brief, soundbite level, fascism involves a top-down organization of society. (See the concept of corporatism, advanced by Mussolini and others, and revealingly endorsed–implicitly and explicitly–by contemporary progressives.): Government formulates policy and issues instructions to corporations. (Corporations in fascist/corporatist political theory are business cartels, individual companies, labor unions, professional organizations, social service organizations, recreation clubs, social clubs, interest groups, etc. All of society must be organized in “corporations” which coordinate the totalitarian control.) Those corporations then pass the governments decrees down the hierarchy ultimately to the individual. And those corporations facilitate totalitarian government by taking on much of the local responsibility for enforcement. (This is one reason why fascists like big organizations as opposed to huge numbers of tiny companies and independent local organizations.) This is different from old style socialism in that ownership of those organizations remains nominally in private hands, but government maintains total control.
Remember the fascist slogan, “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
And then there is the ultra-nationalistic aspect of fascism. (This fanaticism can be national, or ethnic, or racial, or religious.) This contrasts with international socialism, which is class-based but just as murderously fanatical. In fact, the early fascists were inspired to switch from internationalism to nationalism precisely because their internationalist ideology was rejected by the working classes of the nations of Europe.
Addendum: Given that Heinlein portrayed his future Earth society in a highly sympathetic light, it is absurd to speculate that he was exploring the nature of fascism: In every book and story he wrote, he made it quite clear if a society deserved condemnation or even serious criticism.
“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
–George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune (24 March 1944)
“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’ “.
–George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)