Platonic Inversion

My husband and I were discussing some issue he has relating to other people intellectually and he arrived at an idea that is not necessarily original, but was new(ish?) to us at the moment.  Hence this is something of a “brainjackin’” post, but I’m mainly using some of my go-to Philo 81 vocabulary to explain it.  My dude had initially spoken of it in terms of semiotics, which is a field I’ve been petulant about learning, because I have the same prejudices as the bitch that “citation need”ed the shit out of the semiotics wikipedia page.

My man said that it seems the most foolish people are often thinking in the most abstract ways, which is an inversion of what you’d imagine foolishness to be.  You would think foolery derived from simplicity in thought, but that it often comes from an advanced human ability to categorize.  For example, how would a deer feel about a bear?  It would recognize that as a dangerous animal and run away.  How does a human feel about a bear?  We immediately think of cultural images, which could well supercede our animal sense, and endanger our lives.  A bear will eat you regardless of how you perceive it, and I’m not saying every person eaten by a bear thought they were pallin’ around with Yogi or Gentle Ben, but some certainly have.  Even those who didn’t see the bear as friendly were still seeing it as a symbol rather than as a flesh and blood creature that will kill you on a lark.

When tapped for jury duty recently I had to watch a video giving a cursory review of unconscious bias, so I was in mind of it.  Unconscious bias is how we categorize people and other things we experience as a shorthand for judging everything and everyone we encounter on an individual basis – an ability that is literally prejudice but does have some practical utility in preventing us from feeling overwhelmed by the world.  Cultural icons and received wisdom can be direct sources of our biases.

What those videos don’t get into, because it’s unnecessary for their purpose, is that we can have biases about almost everything we do or experience.  Routines that save us the effort of thinking can get to the point where they replace practical thought completely.  If you know exactly what to say or do with every experience you encounter, sunrise to sunset, how prepared are you going to be for something outside your experience and understanding?

You meet somebody at a party that can easily talk with anybody about babies and relationships and work, but whose eyes glaze over when you mention music or art or filing for unemployment or how gender is a thing they are currently experiencing, or that you could go look in the corner of your bathroom right now and see a spider if you were so inclined, I dunno.  If you’re even slightly unconventional in any way, and you go among the banal, you will find out the limits of their ability to think real fast.

My dude tried to run a book club once, and all anyone had to say about any given story put in front of them was the same shit.  They sought the parts of the stories that matched certain expectations and hammered that button.  One person, after reading Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? said “It’s a modern retelling of the Persephone myth” like prose is all about simple answers, and didn’t bother contributing much after that.  The less people attended, the more pointless the book club felt, but the more people attended, the more superficial the treatment of the reading.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave proposed that what we observe directly before us was less than real, that it was all debased shadows of the perfect concepts of what is and what can be.  That bear is a shadow of the ur-bear, the ideal bear who embodies bearness most perfectly.  One could take that as an early striving toward scientific understanding, that he was really saying we experience only a fraction of bearness and that one could understand much more deeply by using science not yet available to him – dissect the bear, measure its bones, compare them to the bones of relatives living and extinct, overlay the results from osteology with a tree derived from genetic characters, place that bear in its evolutionary context, run cognitive tests on it, compare its gut flora to those of coyotes and deer, etc etc.

I think it would be more accurate to say he was getting at a mystic view of the world, where abstract concepts were more significant and important than the reality that is in front of you – reasoning more important than empiricism.  But humans have a remarkable ability to devise cognitive shorthands that give us license to walk through life in zombie mode.  Those cognitive shorthands are abstractions of observed or communicated reality, ignorant of the specifics of what is actually there and even superficially apparent.

It might be that Plato was, in a thinky way, reaching for the simplicity of walking through life freed from thought.  If you have determined the ideals of how things are and should be, shadows can be dismissed as unimportant.  Now, thousands of years later, we’ve perfected that art of abstraction.  It turns out there is no truth to be found in ideals.  The realities that abstraction helps people ignore are the exact places where the world is burning; the abstractions are where the memedog sits saying “This is fine.”

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Brainjackin: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Good

Hey remember J-horror?  Japanese horror movies?  Who cares at this point, right?  There was a long-haired lady ghost, maybe a well, a video tape, a tiny boy in his tighty whities?  I dunno.  On the back of viral success of a few imported movies, Hollywood decided to milk the genre for a few bucks.  Attempt one was pretty successful, followed by nothing but suck.  Probably the coffin nail was the last iteration of hollywood’s the grudge.  Ill.

When this was going on, I became aware of the genre, but knew about the same as anyone in amurrica.  However, very early in my relationship with my husband, we shared our favorite movies with each other, and I discovered more.  There was a standout among Japanese horror directors that does not get much love in the USA, save from the extremely hip.  That’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Did I say Akira Kurosawa?  Is that what you read?  Go back and reread that name.  It’s worth remembering.  Kurosawa means something like Blackmarsh, and is a fairly common name.  It ain’t like the highlander; there can be more than one.  Kiyoshi thinks of himself primarily as a horror genre director, but his work has so much virtue that he keeps getting tapped to direct arthouse movies, like Bright Future.  That film is fine, but lets allow the boy to do what he wants.

My husband’s favorite film by him is Cure, but a few others hold special places in his esteem as well.  Retribution is the first and unfortunately only one we saw in the theater.  Pulse is excellent and had a shit hollywood adaptation filmed in like, a community college in sarajevo after it closed for the night.

The guy is a feminist.  I don’t know how common that is in Japan, but the themes of certain other famous j-horrors are sometimes low key misogynist, so it stands out.  He doesn’t use the word, but in movies that are otherwise full of subtlety, he will sometimes stop the proceedings to underscore that women are full-on human beings whose lives do not depend on men, and whose lives matter.  Retribution features a scene of dark humor at the expense of a traditional-minded male character, Guard From Hell ends with the male and female leads shaking hands and parting ways.  He drives away in his car, she walks to the bus.  He was once tasked with making a titty film called The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girls and made it without titties, getting into trouble with the studio, blacklisted for years.

That’s just one example of the ways he stands out from the crowd.  How do I describe what the movies are actually like?  He’s just one of the best movie directors in the world.  Sometimes his subject matter will keep you away.  Sometimes budget or other constraints have caused weakness in a project, like on Charisma, so I can’t say he’s perfect.  But when it’s all working right?  Easily as excellent a director as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Danny Boyle, John Carpenter on his best days.

His movies don’t invade your space, hammer you with what they’re about.  They are quiet and reward paying full attention to the screen.  They make it hard to look away from the screen, drawing you in with something more than just suspense or drama.  It’s hard to characterize the art of making film out of sight and sound, out of medium and edit, of coordinating the work of others to create a single coherent story that transcends its subject matter to get right into your head.

My personal favorite was Retribution.  I hope someday a lot more of his older stuff becomes available in the west.  It’s hard enough to make the time to give a two minute song your full attention these days, and I’m asking you to watch two hour movies, so…  Make of this all what you will.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa good.

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How Fringe Figures Wield Outsized Influence

Had some people doubting my assertion that the gnu atheists significantly contributed to the rise of fascism.  My life is fucking microwaving my brain right now.  I’m having a bad time in part because people around me are having even worse times.  I shouldn’t be writing this right now.  I should be helping people I care about get thru their shit.  But I’m running out of queued posts and this is something I can generate a few words about.  So here I am, really profoundly not fucking feeling it, but committed to the bit of daily posting.

Celebrities advertise the positions they endorse.  Advertisement wins new converts, but importantly, it can reach the people who matter the most to global power – moneyed fuckoes who want to hear their power justified, who want a religion or belief system that exonerates them from the egregious injustice their privilege itself represents.

Remember the NYT puffing up the Intralectural Dork Web?  The Yooniversity of the Intellectional Durk Werb at Austin dot org?  Whatever that shit was called?  If you’re a big enough asswipe, you can make a bank fulla money just saying the fuckshit you believe, because the kochs or millers or rockefellas can give u a shower of gold.  A golden shower, if you will.

One thing feeds the other feeds the other feeds the other.  The game goes like this: get famous, say evil things, watch evil men line up to pay you for promoting evil that benefits them.  Via hyper-incestuous thinktanks and lobbies and yacht parties and media juntas, the thousand-headed hydra of conservative bobbleheads normalizes fascism and emboldens politicians to put that ideal into practice.

Dawkins et al were definitely part of that, and still are.  They spend more time promoting fascism now than fighting against oppressive religion.  He has become an absolute second stringer.  Fuckin’ Candace Owens and any number of rappers and standup comedians have bigger seats at the table than Dawkins now.  But I watched this happen.  We all did.

I’m just gonna assert again what I did the first time around.  Elevatorgate was one of a rapid-fire series of reactionary movements that helped convert misogyny into a broad tent fascist movement.  Misogyny was the starting point, but it eventually incorporated conspiratorial thinking and fringe beliefs, racism and xenophobia.  Amusing to think about old dicky wondering why o why his side includes the flat earthers.  Keep thinking about it.  Maybe you’ll figure it out before you die.

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Brainjackin: Kafka Good

There are things I wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for my husband.  I was broadly aware of Franz Kafka and his works, aware of what people meant by “kafkaesque,” but that awareness meant I wasn’t actually reading it.  I’m just sunshine and lollipops over here.  Unfortunately I am also horney on goffs, so I ended up married to one, and ended up reading some Kafka for myself.  Now I know – Kafka deserved the fame.  It’s absurd to say he’s really good actually, but he’s really fucking good, actually.

On my husband’s thirtieth birthday, he got the dying words of Franz Kafka character Josef K tattooed on his arm – “Wie ein Hund,” in the handwriting of Kafka himself.  My dude must be more goth than anybody in alles die deutschsprachige welt, because google image search for that quote comes back with nothing but cutesy inspirational dog pictures.  Yes, we know that means “like a dog,” but c’mon.  Sort yourself out, Deutschland.

One time I mentioned Kafka to a German lady and she had no idea who I was talking about.  Yeah, he was Jewish and lived in Prague, but he’s the most famous writer of the German language in much of the world for a reason.  Sorry, Goethe is cheesy.  Mann is lovely but I never heard of him until I was cohabiting with a goth.  The disregard for our boy feels antisemitic.  Do you like your own language or not?

So.  What’s good about Franz Kafka?  He owns your ass.  As an author, you want to communicate a feeling to somebody, make them experience it, and if it’s a feeling that cannot easily be expressed in words?  All the more impressive.  People will talk about the absurdity and futility in his stories, but they don’t mention the humor and the pathos.  It’s dark humor, the emotions are sad as hell, and when you’re experiencing both of these things and more, all at the same time, you are spellbound.

Unless you’re immune to art, which is a trait we can add to DickDawk‘s laundry list of character defects.  At least he has the courage to never delete his history of incredibly embarrassing tweets.

So far I’ve read The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Hunger Artist.  I know, I haven’t even read The Trial.  Fake Kafka fan.  Despite my high praise for him, I would not call myself a fan.  What he did as an artist was basically perfect.  Sometimes I can think of a quibble with even some of the greatest literature of all time, and I have no such criticism for Kafka.  However, did I mention my sunshine and lollipops?  When it comes to dark art, I am a tourist.  It isn’t for me, for who I am.  But it’s absolutely worth reading, regardless of who you are.  Just once.  Check him out.

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Lemme At Im

I wanna kill Jesus.

You know, I’d love to be a nicer person to all the good people of the world who happen to also be christian, but it’s mighty hard.  Mighty hard.  Shitbird preachers like to unfairly characterize atheists as all hating god &/or jesus, but I’m sure it isn’t true for most of you.  It is true of me.  Very true.

There is, on balance, more justification in the words of jesus for progressive ideas than for conservative ones.  Twisting that shit into prosperity gospel and gaybashing is twisting.  But I don’t care about the feelings of some ancient dead guy.  I care about the monster he created, and if I am to take his continued supernatural existence as true – as christians want me to do – then if I were to meet this superghost?

Fuck that motherfucker.  It’s on.

I’m that Dexter-flavored hypocrite who wants to kill the killers.  Atrocities make me mad, make me feel like doing something atrocious, and there are now millennia of horrors that happened on resurrected jeezy’s watch.  Culturally christian people who wanted to believe they could point to something older and better within their ancestors invented wicca, which – in culturally christian fashion – positions one’s people as the real victims in all of this.

Well, your people are the real victims in all of this, wiccans, but witches aren’t your people any more than they are mine.  Your people have been christian for a very long time, like their oppressors.  Christians oppress christians more than the Romans ever had a chance to.  These are the atrocities of which I spoke.  Of those that were tortured and killed for witchcraft, how many had any cultural context for being anything other than christian (or atheist, which can come into existence without being taught)?  Europe was utterly dominated by christianity during all of the witch hunting times.  Their victims were christian.  (oh yeah just remembered the muslims and jewish people, lol.  anyway…)

That’s not mentioning the much more frequent form of historical oppression they engaged in – sectarian warfare.  Genocidal violence, mass slaughter, women and children hung from the walls, cities burned – all for believing in jesus wrong.  I look at that shit and cannot feel schadenfreude about jerks I disagree with killing each other.  I see the torture and murder, and it infuriates me.

Somebody’s gotta pay, and if I try to pin down which sect shot first, that’s playing their game.  No.  I can do them one better.  These sects wouldn’t exist if jesus wasn’t a real supernatural guy that rose on the third day yadda yadda, right, Kenneth?  Only the magic version of jesus could have inspired these millennia of obscene cruelty.  And therefore, magic jesus must die by my hands.

Gimme the spear, centurion.  It’s time to stick this pig again.  For old time’s sake.  Just a jesus murdering party, me and my besties.  Who’s in?

Guys?  C’mon, it’ll be fun.  Guys?

 

 

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Brainjackin: Renaissance Cuties

We’ve all heard the names of various renaissance artists before, right?  Not being Italian, it’s easy to miss that some of those guys are known by nicknames.  Davinci, Caravaggio, Raphael, Tintoretto, Botticelli, and Bronzino sound similar enough to anglophones, but that list is the equivalent of Anglos being named Stratford, Carmichael, James, Spunky, Reginald, and Prettyboy.

In particular, Tintoretto’s nickname meant something like “little painter boy” and Bronzino’s “tan boy.”  There was a military dude from back then, who is best known now from being the subject of art – a sculpture bearing his nickname, the Gattamelata.  That shit means “honey cat.”

I suppose history will remember Cherilyn Sarkisian as Cher and Louise Ciccone as Madonna, so maybe we’re still at it.  But regarding those renaissance cuties, I didn’t know about it until my husband told me this information he had picked up in Art History.  Thanks, man.  I’m turning this tidbit into blog content.  The essence of brainjackin’.

What other historical figures are known by a nickname?

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Throwing the Game

A thought follows from my recent bothsiderism post.  There have been a lot of situations like this in recent years, haven’t there?  A group or individual devoted to a cause decides they hate some oppressed people so powerfully that they ally with opponents, and set their own cause back by decades.  The obvious example is terfs aiding fundies to absolutely devastate women’s rights, all because trans women are yucky.

The slvmepit queen’s contribution to fascism set vaccine acceptance, research, and availability back decades, when that was originally her cause.  If memory serves.  Maybe she was more of a nü atheist, whose raison d’être was pwning christians, and didn’t spend much digital ink on pro-vaxxing.  It’s been a long time.

Dawkins, Harris, etc set atheism back a lot.  One of the sorest groups of burned atheists has to be the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who recently had to watch christian bigots gloating as they excluded women from military careers, had to watch the executive branch that controls the military go from being the most inclusive it had ever been in history to literally labeling DEI as a hate movement.  But, y’know, having to respect people on their own terms is a tall ask.  Better to hand the world over to theo-fascism, right?

Man that last group really hacks me off.  Terfs are just comparable to nazis to me.  They’re gloating, gleefully evil moustache-twirling freaks, living their best lives at the expense of the human species.  Consistent in their evil, right?  Anti-woke atheists are such mealy-mouthed little creeps, weaselly motherfuckers acting like there’s a centrist or even liberal way to oppose social justice, man, I wanna slap the shit out of them.  Don’t ever let me meet that little old man.  I don’t know how well I could restrain myself.

I wonder if there are any environmentalists out there who got environmental protections overturned because somebody asked them to be nice to black people.  I wonder if there are any black power activists who got racist politicians elected because the alternative was a woman.  I wonder if there are any women who … eh, we all know that story now.

All I’d like to say in conclusion is this:  If your support for a cause is so weak that you’ll throw the game that hard, maybe don’t get involved in the first place?  Nobody needs friends like you.  Fuck’s sake, atheism is probably worse off now than if Dawkins had never picked up a microphone.

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Gangbusters

In real life, it seems like organized crime and the FBI were nearly as bad as each other, by turns.  If you want to point to feds fighting the Klan, you have to remember that one of their informants killed children in an act of race terrorism.  To what extent did taxpayers foot the bill for that atrocity?  Or suicide-baiting MLK, blackmailing gay people, etc.  We can also point to mobsters who did a few good things, like fighting against domestic nazism before the US got involved in WWII, giving some charity back to their communities, etc.

Probably on balance the mobsters were worse.  Those guys are fucked-up monsters.  The feds have “protect people from criminals” in their job description and surely lived up to that ideal in at least a half-assed way once in a while.  The job description for mobster is “do nasty shit that is illegal for a good reason.”  Any good they achieved was optional and incidental.

This is a dreampost tho.  Why get into all that?  I believe these opinions influenced a dream I had recently.  It took place in a Prohibition era setting, with cops and robbers treated as a source of humor.  It was all in good fun there.  Zany hijinks, Keystone Cops shit.  But near the end of the dream, there was a chase scene that took a dark turn.

Cops were pursuing crooks when a car full of civilians got in the way.  There were a lot of people, like it was an open-topped bus.  The cops didn’t stop blasting at all, firing tommy guns through the crowd to hit the mobsters.  The first wound was a guy getting a fingertip blown off, followed by a lady getting shot in the back of the head, with the exit wound in her eye socket.  Not as big as it would have been in real life, tho it was disgusting.

This is normal enough for my dreams.  Gotta bring on the gore the closer I get to the alarm clock going off.  Wake up time.

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A Moment of Bothsiderism

The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens.  That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I.  That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.

Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign.  Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA.  If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.

If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy?  Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people.  When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard.  I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them.  Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well.  Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.

So here’s my moment of bothsiderism.  Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers?  Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy?  Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question.  Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.

In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA.  That broad tent is wild as hell.  It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better.  The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.

I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances.  We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.

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Princesa de la Nuca

Had a dream that nuclear czar was a job title that existed for each nuclear weapon, of which there were only a few dozen in existence.  It was a hereditary title that had been passed down from Europe before taking its modern form in the USA.  The dream took place in the late medieval period, following a widowed nuclear czarina in a Penelope situation.  A crappy noble guy that had squandered his fortune came seeking hers, as she was not wed, but high castle walls and loyal servants ran interference.

First, it was a group of young ladies that blocked the suitor in his efforts; later it was me, in the mode of an ambiguously employed jester-thief-vizier.  I either low-key betrayed her or just failed in my duty, resulting in the suitor gaining access.  She was obliged to marry him, to spend years watching him squander her fortune.

The sheisty czar was talking about how it was perfectly natural that he had lost most of her money on a timeshare, when she snapped and asked me what the hell she was supposed to do about all of this.  I replied, “I’m really surprised this guy isn’t in chunks by now, spread from here to the Danube.”  We started killing him and I woke up shortly after that.

I never did find out how she was in charge of nukes several hundred years before they were invented.

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