I have also wondered if the occasional revelations of Israeli mutilations are a deliberate partial lifting of the mask to deliver a surreptitious threat to the Western populations as if to say, “Look at what we can do! So don’t get any ideas or you will be next!”
That female IDF soldiers are involved here compliments some of the more bizarre X tweets featuring what look like soft porn models dressed – partially i.e. semi-nude – in military gear accompanying juvenile bragging about the “Power of Israel”.
Re: Sheanah’s comment about media presentation of psychopaths, I would have said that the idolisation of psychopathy has been a recent thing but, considering the lineage of gangster movies, this worship of thugs goes back a long way. What might be significant is the new “normalisation” of psychopathy via e.g. the Dexter series. Back in the Cagney days the psycho was the rare exception but Dexter has the psycho as secret killer/“boy next door”. (Even an obvious predecessor like the Bloch/Hitchcock “Psycho” has a killer “boy next door” in an odd backwater location – and of course the blatant admission of psychopathy in the very title.) With Dexter the killer has truly moved next door. Even more to the point, the script and the direction are clearly aiming at causing the audience to sympathise with the central character. This is one of those cases where a common social awkwardness that everyone feels is easily aligned with murderous actions.
Re: the “communist” label being applied to the covid “response”, this was marketed as a selling point in the UK where there was a big implication that some kind of revolution had taken place and we were all now “Left”. I realise that this wouldn’t happen in the US – or at least not to the same degree. But it was precisely that “Leftist” spin on this “fight against covid” that seduced so many on the Left. Which is why those who opposed the covid narrative were branded “Rightists”, this being emphasised by the fact that the media cunningly allowed a certain (limited) amount of covid scepticism to be expressed openly on Right Wing channels. This shrewd manoeuvre was predictably seized on with glee by the new “Covid Left” who happily trumpeted the meme of “strange bedfellows” when anyone on the Left allied themselves with the aforementioned Right Wing channels. This led to a few sad naïve cases of a dissident happily “converting to the Right” by embracing some of the Rightist rhetoric e.g. Naomi Wolf.
The anti-communism rhetoric becomes so dispiriting that it’s easy to feel demoralised with the “anti-Covid” dissident sites. And this is where I noticed an odd phenomenon: every so often I would encounter a commenter who really did seem knowledgeable and perceptive and often very articulate and eloquent. But these commenters never lasted long. And I reckon they were intelligent enough to realise that there was no point in continuing their discourse amongst channels that were so inadequate in their perception.
And “inadequacy” is an inadequate word. I recently had an encounter on an Off-Guardian comment thread that was utterly appalling in the callous flippant sadism shown towards the Palestinians. After which I myself felt like adopting the withdrawal method. But this is what happens when you are having an exchange, which process shows that you implicitly show empathy for your interlocutor ... and then he says something so vile that you realise further debate would not be worthwhile. This fits in with John’s point about the appalling sadistic gloating over personal tragedies (cf. Dugin’s daughter) and the utter spiritual vacuum this illustrates.
One curious development is that the Right Wing view of the “demonization” of the world has a lot of resonance now considering the list of unbelievable psychotic sentiments now being uttered openly (cf. “It’s OK to rape children”). More and more I’m coming to realise the relevance of that Adorno quote (he was actually talking about psychoanalysis but it seems to be spilling over into external reality): “Only the exaggerations are true”.
great observations. First, working backward...the sadism now on display is soul wracking. I saw an IDF soldier holding a child's trophy, amid the rubble of what was that now dead childs house, and mocking it. I mean who does that? That is a sign of psychopathy. That person should immediately get a psych hold… But no...its not done privately, they make a fucking tik tok video of it. So it is possible that this is in part a warning. I remember when the current genocide began that has been actor michal rapaport was threatening people 'the jews' will come to get you. I think one thing that has happened is that the deep core supremacism of, actually, a lot of jews, besides zionists, is being exposed. I think for the genuine marxist and leftist jews this must be a trying time. I still know a lot of jewish intellectuals and thinkers who I feel have retreated from view because they simply dont quite know what to do. Second *off-guardian* is now a cess pit of racism and crazy tin foil hat junk. Sadly. I wrote a couple pieces for them back when covid first hit. The strange bedfellows meme is something that i think is just unavoidable. I mean even since Covid (the ultimate strange bedfellows phenomenon) with Ukraine/NATO and trump/harris one gets into arguments with people who are surprisingly perceptive about aspects of the Great Reset or Overpopulation but then will say...,.Kamala is a communist !!!! Or the WEF is a giant global communist conspiracy. So on the one hand you have white liberals applauding Kamala and wringing their hands about trump, and you have right wing Paleo conservatives (with american flag avatars) calling for an end to digital ID and surveillance and 15 minute cities. Its a strange time. Finally, the normalizing of psychopathy and Dexter is a big discussion, actually. I both agree, sort of , and disagree. Because its more than just the depiction of homicidal maniacs being normalized, its also that Hollywood manufactures such bad films and TV shows today (see The Union with marky mark and halle berry, or any dwayne johnson vehicle) that its hard to even analyse. Watch Red Notice....this is a film, an expensive film, that literally makes no sense. NONE. Its almost amusing to watch because its like....wait....why are they in a russian prison? No wait, its not a russian prison exactly....because zionist actress gal gadot is in an office there and she is a jewel thief.....no wait.....and on and on and on. IF you go back to Arnolds early action films like Raw Deal (1986 directed by john irvin) which was the first crossover film for arnold, it now seems like a masterpiece, like Kurosawa had made it, but no it was just that guys like Irvin were skilled journeymen hacks, but compared to this stuff today, it feels like Antonioni or something. So these sociopathic characters are not just being normalized, but they are appearing in sub literate fragments of a narrative. The entire presentation of reality is destablized and incoherent . The normalizing has come to include an autistic and derealizied vision of the world.
I recall the Rapaport rants on twitter. It’s predictable that when you have a celeb shovelling out this stuff, it’s never a major star but these “15 minute” stooges like Rapaport and Mayim Bialik.
The diminishing sense of the latest media productions is everywhere on display on Netflix. Admittedly my wife and I only watch these programmes as a filler-in whilst having our tea. But even considered as a momentary diversion, the quality is often sub-zero. We were recently suffering something called “Snow piercer” which was some kind of wacky post-apocalyptic thing with an endlessly circulating train housing the remaining human survivors in an icy waste – which I suppose isn’t a bad metaphor for capitalism. But at one point there’s this character in a bar who whips out a guitar and starts singing some kinda soulful self-pitying ballad whilst everyone watched in an apparent state of awe and I thought, “What the fuck is happening?” And this is a feeling that is becoming increasingly common now: I have no sense of connection with what I’m seeing.
One aspect of it is the obvious total detachment between concept and execution e.g. the endless zombie plague movies that feature survivors that behave in ways that have no credibility whatsoever e.g. the stripped down community battling against the flesh eating undead and psychopathic still living enemy groups ... and the teenage daughter decides to leave the compound because she has to “find herself”! (“Fear The Walking Dead”) Or the two gay lovers in “The Last of Us” who build their own gated community – which involves only the two of them as they ruthlessly annihilate all incomers! This no doubt reflects the bourgeois obsessions of the affluent Western producers – and obviously of the audience too.
“Dexter” was founded on a reverse morality where rather than having the punishment fit the crime, the crime must fit the punishment i.e. Dexter is going to kill anyway. But even that sliver of “logic” is soon abandoned. “Breaking Bad” circumvents these issues by dredging up the most unsympathetic characters imaginable.
And then there’s the superhero genre which is inherently juvenile – and yet even there you find regression in that the early 80s Superman movies now seem almost dignified. By the time we get to “Venom”, there is a relapse into tacky adolescent thuggish stunts that might have worked in a comic but look embarrassingly infantile transferred to live action.
All of which is cheapened further by CGI effects that are glib and forgettable – indeed you think you’ve already forgotten them even as you’re watching them!
The evisceration of any sense of intellectual discipline on Off-Guardian has left me with a decreasing interest and goes a long way to explain the disappearance of the few commenters worth reading. I recall one such from decades ago who went by the name of “Warszawa” (presumably lifted from a David Bowie track) but who vanished. And then a later commenter called “Patrick L” turned up on Off-G. During an exchange with me, he revealed that he WAS “Warszawa”! And then his reincarnation also disappeared. I reckon that these commenters are intelligent enough to realise the futility of further posting.
(From the non-Marxist side, G G Preparata has pretty much vanished, having produced nothing on covid, though his previous writings are now being re-published under his own label.)
I remember patrick L. He commented on my blog posts about ten years ago. He was very sharp. I think he took offence at my tone in one of our exchanges and just disappeared. (i think i was wrong, too, but this lack of argument is another symptom of something). That section of the gay couple in The Last of Us was very curious. It was rather well done but I don't think the creators of that show at all understood the nihilism of this mind set. The combination of Covid and the vaccine debates, coupled to Trump, and then all set against US foreign policy in general really made for some strange analysis. It was as if people in general were overwhelmed. The result was mass short circuiting , cognitively .
I have also wondered if the occasional revelations of Israeli mutilations are a deliberate partial lifting of the mask to deliver a surreptitious threat to the Western populations as if to say, “Look at what we can do! So don’t get any ideas or you will be next!”
That female IDF soldiers are involved here compliments some of the more bizarre X tweets featuring what look like soft porn models dressed – partially i.e. semi-nude – in military gear accompanying juvenile bragging about the “Power of Israel”.
Re: Sheanah’s comment about media presentation of psychopaths, I would have said that the idolisation of psychopathy has been a recent thing but, considering the lineage of gangster movies, this worship of thugs goes back a long way. What might be significant is the new “normalisation” of psychopathy via e.g. the Dexter series. Back in the Cagney days the psycho was the rare exception but Dexter has the psycho as secret killer/“boy next door”. (Even an obvious predecessor like the Bloch/Hitchcock “Psycho” has a killer “boy next door” in an odd backwater location – and of course the blatant admission of psychopathy in the very title.) With Dexter the killer has truly moved next door. Even more to the point, the script and the direction are clearly aiming at causing the audience to sympathise with the central character. This is one of those cases where a common social awkwardness that everyone feels is easily aligned with murderous actions.
Re: the “communist” label being applied to the covid “response”, this was marketed as a selling point in the UK where there was a big implication that some kind of revolution had taken place and we were all now “Left”. I realise that this wouldn’t happen in the US – or at least not to the same degree. But it was precisely that “Leftist” spin on this “fight against covid” that seduced so many on the Left. Which is why those who opposed the covid narrative were branded “Rightists”, this being emphasised by the fact that the media cunningly allowed a certain (limited) amount of covid scepticism to be expressed openly on Right Wing channels. This shrewd manoeuvre was predictably seized on with glee by the new “Covid Left” who happily trumpeted the meme of “strange bedfellows” when anyone on the Left allied themselves with the aforementioned Right Wing channels. This led to a few sad naïve cases of a dissident happily “converting to the Right” by embracing some of the Rightist rhetoric e.g. Naomi Wolf.
The anti-communism rhetoric becomes so dispiriting that it’s easy to feel demoralised with the “anti-Covid” dissident sites. And this is where I noticed an odd phenomenon: every so often I would encounter a commenter who really did seem knowledgeable and perceptive and often very articulate and eloquent. But these commenters never lasted long. And I reckon they were intelligent enough to realise that there was no point in continuing their discourse amongst channels that were so inadequate in their perception.
And “inadequacy” is an inadequate word. I recently had an encounter on an Off-Guardian comment thread that was utterly appalling in the callous flippant sadism shown towards the Palestinians. After which I myself felt like adopting the withdrawal method. But this is what happens when you are having an exchange, which process shows that you implicitly show empathy for your interlocutor ... and then he says something so vile that you realise further debate would not be worthwhile. This fits in with John’s point about the appalling sadistic gloating over personal tragedies (cf. Dugin’s daughter) and the utter spiritual vacuum this illustrates.
One curious development is that the Right Wing view of the “demonization” of the world has a lot of resonance now considering the list of unbelievable psychotic sentiments now being uttered openly (cf. “It’s OK to rape children”). More and more I’m coming to realise the relevance of that Adorno quote (he was actually talking about psychoanalysis but it seems to be spilling over into external reality): “Only the exaggerations are true”.
great observations. First, working backward...the sadism now on display is soul wracking. I saw an IDF soldier holding a child's trophy, amid the rubble of what was that now dead childs house, and mocking it. I mean who does that? That is a sign of psychopathy. That person should immediately get a psych hold… But no...its not done privately, they make a fucking tik tok video of it. So it is possible that this is in part a warning. I remember when the current genocide began that has been actor michal rapaport was threatening people 'the jews' will come to get you. I think one thing that has happened is that the deep core supremacism of, actually, a lot of jews, besides zionists, is being exposed. I think for the genuine marxist and leftist jews this must be a trying time. I still know a lot of jewish intellectuals and thinkers who I feel have retreated from view because they simply dont quite know what to do. Second *off-guardian* is now a cess pit of racism and crazy tin foil hat junk. Sadly. I wrote a couple pieces for them back when covid first hit. The strange bedfellows meme is something that i think is just unavoidable. I mean even since Covid (the ultimate strange bedfellows phenomenon) with Ukraine/NATO and trump/harris one gets into arguments with people who are surprisingly perceptive about aspects of the Great Reset or Overpopulation but then will say...,.Kamala is a communist !!!! Or the WEF is a giant global communist conspiracy. So on the one hand you have white liberals applauding Kamala and wringing their hands about trump, and you have right wing Paleo conservatives (with american flag avatars) calling for an end to digital ID and surveillance and 15 minute cities. Its a strange time. Finally, the normalizing of psychopathy and Dexter is a big discussion, actually. I both agree, sort of , and disagree. Because its more than just the depiction of homicidal maniacs being normalized, its also that Hollywood manufactures such bad films and TV shows today (see The Union with marky mark and halle berry, or any dwayne johnson vehicle) that its hard to even analyse. Watch Red Notice....this is a film, an expensive film, that literally makes no sense. NONE. Its almost amusing to watch because its like....wait....why are they in a russian prison? No wait, its not a russian prison exactly....because zionist actress gal gadot is in an office there and she is a jewel thief.....no wait.....and on and on and on. IF you go back to Arnolds early action films like Raw Deal (1986 directed by john irvin) which was the first crossover film for arnold, it now seems like a masterpiece, like Kurosawa had made it, but no it was just that guys like Irvin were skilled journeymen hacks, but compared to this stuff today, it feels like Antonioni or something. So these sociopathic characters are not just being normalized, but they are appearing in sub literate fragments of a narrative. The entire presentation of reality is destablized and incoherent . The normalizing has come to include an autistic and derealizied vision of the world.
I recall the Rapaport rants on twitter. It’s predictable that when you have a celeb shovelling out this stuff, it’s never a major star but these “15 minute” stooges like Rapaport and Mayim Bialik.
The diminishing sense of the latest media productions is everywhere on display on Netflix. Admittedly my wife and I only watch these programmes as a filler-in whilst having our tea. But even considered as a momentary diversion, the quality is often sub-zero. We were recently suffering something called “Snow piercer” which was some kind of wacky post-apocalyptic thing with an endlessly circulating train housing the remaining human survivors in an icy waste – which I suppose isn’t a bad metaphor for capitalism. But at one point there’s this character in a bar who whips out a guitar and starts singing some kinda soulful self-pitying ballad whilst everyone watched in an apparent state of awe and I thought, “What the fuck is happening?” And this is a feeling that is becoming increasingly common now: I have no sense of connection with what I’m seeing.
One aspect of it is the obvious total detachment between concept and execution e.g. the endless zombie plague movies that feature survivors that behave in ways that have no credibility whatsoever e.g. the stripped down community battling against the flesh eating undead and psychopathic still living enemy groups ... and the teenage daughter decides to leave the compound because she has to “find herself”! (“Fear The Walking Dead”) Or the two gay lovers in “The Last of Us” who build their own gated community – which involves only the two of them as they ruthlessly annihilate all incomers! This no doubt reflects the bourgeois obsessions of the affluent Western producers – and obviously of the audience too.
“Dexter” was founded on a reverse morality where rather than having the punishment fit the crime, the crime must fit the punishment i.e. Dexter is going to kill anyway. But even that sliver of “logic” is soon abandoned. “Breaking Bad” circumvents these issues by dredging up the most unsympathetic characters imaginable.
And then there’s the superhero genre which is inherently juvenile – and yet even there you find regression in that the early 80s Superman movies now seem almost dignified. By the time we get to “Venom”, there is a relapse into tacky adolescent thuggish stunts that might have worked in a comic but look embarrassingly infantile transferred to live action.
All of which is cheapened further by CGI effects that are glib and forgettable – indeed you think you’ve already forgotten them even as you’re watching them!
The evisceration of any sense of intellectual discipline on Off-Guardian has left me with a decreasing interest and goes a long way to explain the disappearance of the few commenters worth reading. I recall one such from decades ago who went by the name of “Warszawa” (presumably lifted from a David Bowie track) but who vanished. And then a later commenter called “Patrick L” turned up on Off-G. During an exchange with me, he revealed that he WAS “Warszawa”! And then his reincarnation also disappeared. I reckon that these commenters are intelligent enough to realise the futility of further posting.
(From the non-Marxist side, G G Preparata has pretty much vanished, having produced nothing on covid, though his previous writings are now being re-published under his own label.)
I remember patrick L. He commented on my blog posts about ten years ago. He was very sharp. I think he took offence at my tone in one of our exchanges and just disappeared. (i think i was wrong, too, but this lack of argument is another symptom of something). That section of the gay couple in The Last of Us was very curious. It was rather well done but I don't think the creators of that show at all understood the nihilism of this mind set. The combination of Covid and the vaccine debates, coupled to Trump, and then all set against US foreign policy in general really made for some strange analysis. It was as if people in general were overwhelmed. The result was mass short circuiting , cognitively .