I haven’t viewed all of the initial part yet but mention of the covid story on Don Johnson’s cruise flick prompted the following ruminations:
I have often wondered what exactly the routine is when these obsessive memes keep being regurgitated. Of course it’s not just covid. There was a time when you couldn’t tune into a TV programme without some transgender subplot. This went through soap operas, kids’ shows, detective shows etc. From “Doctor Who” to “Baby Reindeer” to “Baptiste”, there seemed to be trans characters everywhere and usually played by those who identified as trans in “real life”. Now how did that happen? I will always maintain that the whole trans issue is the most fantastical meme ever to hit the news. As with covid, if no-one in the media had mentioned it, it would never have happened. So how to explain all those shows suddenly awash in the topic?
Without wishing to delve into Ickean speculation on conspiratorial networks, it nevertheless seems inevitable to posit some kind of co-ordinated effort involving nodal points of influence. Of course it helps if there are various supremely rich individuals who would appear to be genuinely steeped in the trans ideology – “Martine” Rothblatt for example.
Such speculation dovetails with the curious monolithic front presented by “Leftist” groups re: covid – the way they all unhesitatingly jumped on the covid meme train and never let up.
And this matter leads into the odd current quiescence of the pandemic narrative – the silence here being particularly notable with reference to those little sites who I’d say were definitely NOT part of some nefarious network. Those sites who were taken in – but who seem to have just carried on without any detailed backward glance at the matter. I’d guess there is a deep seated unease and embarrassment festering there.
All of which leads me to note that since 2020 there has been a speeding up of media nonsense in which there are surges of “shock and awe” followed by sudden cessations where it all just vanishes.
there is always a question of exactly how these mechanisms work vis a vis propaganda. Often , clearly, the writers sense without much difficulty the prevailing tropes to follow. But sometimes its also clearly a memo was handed down. And in much of the trans stuff im sure thats the case. Other *woke* values are just part of Hollywood culture, and you will notice there is ALWAYS one happily domestic gay marriage in every show. EVERY SHOW. On one level this isnt really a problem but at a certain point it begins to impinge on the integrity of the narrative. (im guessing there are not many same sex marriages among detroit homicide cops for example).
Sorry – I should have responded to your comment earlier but I have found that Gmail doesn’t always notify me – another odd case of technological communication “failure” (shades of X shadow banning or am I getting paranoid?).
Yes I note the “woke” specification requirements of every show. It doesn’t bother me mostly and I reckon you have to be judicious in these matters of critique since divide-and-rule is always the most potent method of maintaining domination. But it’s easy to feel irritation at a certain manipulative device and then allow that irritation to spill over into outright prejudice at a certain sector e.g. the politicised use of the term “anti-Semitism” has led to some commentators venting their wrath at “the Jews” which is of course the very effect that the propagandists wish to provoke.
Simon Elmer seems to have gone off the deep end in this respect. He now complains about teams of Islamic fundamentalists being used by the UK state – which may be indeed credible but this leads him to make the neoconservative noise about how Islam is “incompatible” with those much touted “Western values” – a crass statement that essentializes a religion.
I make an exception for the ceaselessly propagandised “trans” issue since this “demographic” seems to me to be totally fictitious and indeed fantastical and which increasingly impresses through its utter vacuity. It consists of the civil rights rhetoric being drained of all content. A recent example of the interminable series of pride posters tells us:
“Celebrating the beauty and fluidity of gender identity during Genderfluid Visibility Week! Gender is not a fixed point—it’s a journey, unique to each individual. Visibility matters, and your identity is valid every day.”
So what exactly is this “fluid” concept “unique to each individual”? Can you imagine any of the previous champions of civil rights giving us “I have a dream” speeches about such nullity?
Indeed it becomes increasingly obvious that trans is the ultimate logical conclusion of that diversionary tactic highlighted in Schlain and Lee’s “Acid Dreams” in which the 60s protest movements were derailed through deviations towards sex and drugs.
Jeffrey Sachs is a propaganda guy. How is it that he, an economist, was on the COVID commission?
How is it that later, he was able to call out the west causing nord stream to be destroyed? And oddly enough even though one pipe didn't get damaged, they shut it all down and said it'll take months to repair. IT'S STILL NOT REPAIRED???
Same with the false dichotomy of covid: lab leak vs zoonotic. Neither. It was normal death counts manipulated and some hospital and nursing home procedures that caused death before the jabs. Either lab leak or zoonotic stories are a distraction.
Also, they said it would take a few months to repair the others. It's been years and it's still not repaired.
So, you can respond that they didn't do it cause of the sanctions against Russia.
Fine, but then why is Russia still allowed to pay Ukraine to transit gas through Ukraine?
I'll repeat... Why does it matter if they're russophobic or not? Perhaps you're exposing your bias to think Russia is really fighting the West.
I see it as the same globalists dividing us into Oceania, Eurasia, and EastAsia. The pipeline story makes Eurasia serve Oceania. European citizens lose because like I said, they still pump gas through Ukraine and the Nord Stream is a bullshit excuse to stop gas to Germany. Russia is complicit because they never lost 1 pipe and could still be sending gas to Germany, like they do through Ukraine which is even more insidious and contradictory to the story that it's Russia vs the West.
Re: zombies. If 90% of the population became zombies, and 10% are survivors, how many zombies do the survivors have to kill per month in order to not go extinct? The zombies occasionally infect a survivor, so each battle with zombies involves some diminishment of the group of survivors. Then what birthrate will they need to maintain their numbers into the future so that they don’t go extinct during the endless battles with zombies? Can they even take time to make babies and raise children during this war? Has the science figured out the answers to these questions? People need to know. Anyway, the best zombie movie was Sean of the Dead because it was a comedy and it was humane. In the end, the protagonist takes care of his zombified best friend, who is now cured and non-contagious but permanently brain damaged.
Another great apocalyptic TV series was LOST. The writers put in lots of influences from philosophy and literature, and they were proud that they got a lot of fan mail from people who read the books that appeared in characters hands or that were influences on the story. One obvious influence, conscious or not, was Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. It’s not quite an apocalyptic story, but like that genre, it involves characters who get to experience the struggle to survive outside of their domesticated boring life back home. The irony is that even though they are a bunch of fuckups and fugitives, they all want to get off the island and get back to the hell they were living in.
About Dr. House, I recall that in one episode, he mocked a mother who didn’t want her baby vaccinated. If the show had still been on during the pandemic, what would the writers have put into his dialogue? Would they have turned that wit, cynicism and pessimism toward the pharmaceutical industry and hospital bureaucracies, as they often did on other matters? Would he have used repurposed ivermectin? He often used repurposed drugs, daring maverick that he was. I suspect they would have gone along with the prevailing doctrine, and they would have used the virus as a way to kill off one of the main characters when an actor wanted out of his or her contract.
"Lost" started in 2004 and just so happened to have a character called Sayid who was from Iraq. And he turns out to have an unspeakable past as a torturer for which he must atone.
Oh nothing about the zombie movies – and “Walking Dead” in particular – makes sense. Indeed, I once read a fascinating interview with the maker of WD who noted that, at the end of series 1, the survivors were holed up in an underground laboratory where there was a scientist investigating the zombie plague but the interviewee said he was uninterested in this development which took the series into more of a science fictional terrain. So this meme gets ditched – a move which pretty much abolishes all possibility of conceptual development and leaves us with the central fixation of WD – which is frankly a kind of return to the Wild West but with a Malthusian outlook.
And indeed the zombies are pure Malthusian dread. They are ferociously unproductive and just eat everything – or rather, and very significantly – they need a specific type of nourishment: live flesh. They are the ultimate bourgeois bugaboo: the lower orders who have come to drag the middle class down to their wretched level. They can never die and somehow there always seems to be more of them arriving every day.
Furthermore, there is nothing attractive about them. Vampires can be sexy, werewolves can be powerful, Frankensteinian monsters can be pathetic. Despite odd attempts here and there, the zombie resists “humanisation”.
The case of “Lost” is interesting. It seems to have initiated that peculiar craze for “mystery” programmes i.e. the show with a startling premise which demands an explanatory resolution. The original example was, I think, the 60s series “The Prisoner” about the British agent who gets kidnapped and ends up in a strange village where names have been replaced by numbers. But perhaps the time wasn’t right then for the genre. “Lost” really started the whole thing off. After that, we had things like “Life on Mars” (a cop from 2006 goes into a coma and seems to wake up in 1973), “Manifest” (A plane seems to go through some kind of time loop), “Glitch” and “The Returned” (dead people come back to life) etc.
What seems intriguing to me is that the last ever episode of “Lost” aired at around the same time as the last episode of “Ashes to Ashes” (a “Life on Mars” spin-off). But “Ashes” had an ending that was far more satisfactory in that it just went for a straightforward “heaven and hell” scenario whereas “Lost” seemed to wander into some vague posthumous chamber in which the souls are waiting for the next stage in their spiritual journey – or something. And I couldn’t help but notice that there were allusions to Christianity and there was a little Buddha statue too and I reckon there were similar nods to other religions. I think the reason for the difference is that, in America, there is this “culture war” in which, had “Lost” delivered the kind of decisive “Ashes” resolution, there would have been an uproar in which a large portion of the viewers would complain about “being duped” by Christian propaganda. Whereas in the UK, folk are less partisan about it and are more prepared to enter into the spirit of the piece.
Yes I recall that House sneer at “anti-vax” episode. Here is the relevant bit:
“They think that you'll spend whatever they ask to keep your kid alive. Want to change things? Prove 'em wrong. A few hundred parents like you decide they'd rather let their kid die then cough up forty bucks for a vaccination, believe me, prices will drop REALLY fast.”
If some parents refuse the vax and their kids die then that would prove the vaxxes work and the price would be more likely to rise surely?
(122 comments! I’m guessing we won’t see those figures again!)
And I noticed the reference to Roger Scruton and realised that he is a figure who ironically seems relevant to discussion of the zombie genre. I say “ironically” since I’m sure a fellow as self-consciously cultured as he wouldn’t dream of tainting himself with such “proletarian” trash. Which adds to the irony since, as I hinted below, I think the real appeal of the zombie genre is less suited to any proletarian outlook as it is to a middle class position i.e. precisely the position adopted by Scruton. And in this, he has provided explicit evidence himself. Bear with me:
I have always found it difficult to read Scruton as almost everything he writes embodies an excruciatingly servile eagerness to legitimise himself to some idealised upper strata of “gentlefolk”. Terry Eagleton has humorously commented on this aspect of Scruton – an aspect intensified by what seemed a deep shame at his own inadequately aristocratic origins. This nauseating sensibility was best summed up in his novel “Francesca” in which the central character, Colin, is a thinly disguised stand-in for Scruton himself. Colin has a fight in his work which is described thus:
“One day a gang of morons waited for him in the vat house, anxious to readjust his social standing to their requirements. They leapt out, fists flailing, boots chopping the air. As luck would have it, Colin was carrying the ruler with which he had checked the levels in the valves. It had a sharp edge of alloy, and by wielding it above his head, he was able to gash two cheeks, half sever an ear, and poke out a glutinous eye before running for the gate and safety.”
Note the grisly violence which puts us well on the way to Walking Dead territory. Note also that hugely revealing detail – that this “gang of morons” were “anxious to readjust his social standing to their requirements”. THIS is the entire crux of the bourgeois mentality: The wretched lower orders – who are seen as being barely human at all – are consumed with only one drive i.e. to bring the “worthy” middle class down to the slime.
It is obvious that we are in the same psychological arena as that fixation on “the haters” who “hate the good for being good”. One theory of fascism is that it erupts precisely from the middle class when they find themselves in a position of tension and anxious uncertainty. (A position which seems endemic to their very being.)
These are the ones obsessed with hierarchy and their perceived position therein. Their cringing deference to those “Golden Ones” above is naturally entwined with their bottomless loathing for the “verminous masses” below who are always grasping upwards to pull everything down. It is this intense psychopathy that lies at the root of the appeal of the zombie genre.
I haven’t viewed all of the initial part yet but mention of the covid story on Don Johnson’s cruise flick prompted the following ruminations:
I have often wondered what exactly the routine is when these obsessive memes keep being regurgitated. Of course it’s not just covid. There was a time when you couldn’t tune into a TV programme without some transgender subplot. This went through soap operas, kids’ shows, detective shows etc. From “Doctor Who” to “Baby Reindeer” to “Baptiste”, there seemed to be trans characters everywhere and usually played by those who identified as trans in “real life”. Now how did that happen? I will always maintain that the whole trans issue is the most fantastical meme ever to hit the news. As with covid, if no-one in the media had mentioned it, it would never have happened. So how to explain all those shows suddenly awash in the topic?
Without wishing to delve into Ickean speculation on conspiratorial networks, it nevertheless seems inevitable to posit some kind of co-ordinated effort involving nodal points of influence. Of course it helps if there are various supremely rich individuals who would appear to be genuinely steeped in the trans ideology – “Martine” Rothblatt for example.
Such speculation dovetails with the curious monolithic front presented by “Leftist” groups re: covid – the way they all unhesitatingly jumped on the covid meme train and never let up.
And this matter leads into the odd current quiescence of the pandemic narrative – the silence here being particularly notable with reference to those little sites who I’d say were definitely NOT part of some nefarious network. Those sites who were taken in – but who seem to have just carried on without any detailed backward glance at the matter. I’d guess there is a deep seated unease and embarrassment festering there.
All of which leads me to note that since 2020 there has been a speeding up of media nonsense in which there are surges of “shock and awe” followed by sudden cessations where it all just vanishes.
there is always a question of exactly how these mechanisms work vis a vis propaganda. Often , clearly, the writers sense without much difficulty the prevailing tropes to follow. But sometimes its also clearly a memo was handed down. And in much of the trans stuff im sure thats the case. Other *woke* values are just part of Hollywood culture, and you will notice there is ALWAYS one happily domestic gay marriage in every show. EVERY SHOW. On one level this isnt really a problem but at a certain point it begins to impinge on the integrity of the narrative. (im guessing there are not many same sex marriages among detroit homicide cops for example).
Sorry – I should have responded to your comment earlier but I have found that Gmail doesn’t always notify me – another odd case of technological communication “failure” (shades of X shadow banning or am I getting paranoid?).
Yes I note the “woke” specification requirements of every show. It doesn’t bother me mostly and I reckon you have to be judicious in these matters of critique since divide-and-rule is always the most potent method of maintaining domination. But it’s easy to feel irritation at a certain manipulative device and then allow that irritation to spill over into outright prejudice at a certain sector e.g. the politicised use of the term “anti-Semitism” has led to some commentators venting their wrath at “the Jews” which is of course the very effect that the propagandists wish to provoke.
Simon Elmer seems to have gone off the deep end in this respect. He now complains about teams of Islamic fundamentalists being used by the UK state – which may be indeed credible but this leads him to make the neoconservative noise about how Islam is “incompatible” with those much touted “Western values” – a crass statement that essentializes a religion.
I make an exception for the ceaselessly propagandised “trans” issue since this “demographic” seems to me to be totally fictitious and indeed fantastical and which increasingly impresses through its utter vacuity. It consists of the civil rights rhetoric being drained of all content. A recent example of the interminable series of pride posters tells us:
“Celebrating the beauty and fluidity of gender identity during Genderfluid Visibility Week! Gender is not a fixed point—it’s a journey, unique to each individual. Visibility matters, and your identity is valid every day.”
So what exactly is this “fluid” concept “unique to each individual”? Can you imagine any of the previous champions of civil rights giving us “I have a dream” speeches about such nullity?
Indeed it becomes increasingly obvious that trans is the ultimate logical conclusion of that diversionary tactic highlighted in Schlain and Lee’s “Acid Dreams” in which the 60s protest movements were derailed through deviations towards sex and drugs.
Jeffrey Sachs is a propaganda guy. How is it that he, an economist, was on the COVID commission?
How is it that later, he was able to call out the west causing nord stream to be destroyed? And oddly enough even though one pipe didn't get damaged, they shut it all down and said it'll take months to repair. IT'S STILL NOT REPAIRED???
https://off-guardian.org/2023/02/21/nordstream-2-seymour-hersh-feeds-the-fake-binary/
Same with the false dichotomy of covid: lab leak vs zoonotic. Neither. It was normal death counts manipulated and some hospital and nursing home procedures that caused death before the jabs. Either lab leak or zoonotic stories are a distraction.
https://denisrancourt.substack.com/p/there-was-no-pandemic
Off guardian , though , is absurdly russohobic. True about Hersh, but the rest is the typical fro them .
What does it matter if the story itself is odd.
They supposedly took out 3 of the 4 pipes.
Why couldn't they use the 1 good one?
Also, they said it would take a few months to repair the others. It's been years and it's still not repaired.
So, you can respond that they didn't do it cause of the sanctions against Russia.
Fine, but then why is Russia still allowed to pay Ukraine to transit gas through Ukraine?
I'll repeat... Why does it matter if they're russophobic or not? Perhaps you're exposing your bias to think Russia is really fighting the West.
I see it as the same globalists dividing us into Oceania, Eurasia, and EastAsia. The pipeline story makes Eurasia serve Oceania. European citizens lose because like I said, they still pump gas through Ukraine and the Nord Stream is a bullshit excuse to stop gas to Germany. Russia is complicit because they never lost 1 pipe and could still be sending gas to Germany, like they do through Ukraine which is even more insidious and contradictory to the story that it's Russia vs the West.
Don't worry, Russia is a leader in CBDCs.
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/globalists-flee-in-terror-as-russia
Another good blog that might cure you from your Russiaphilism...
Re: zombies. If 90% of the population became zombies, and 10% are survivors, how many zombies do the survivors have to kill per month in order to not go extinct? The zombies occasionally infect a survivor, so each battle with zombies involves some diminishment of the group of survivors. Then what birthrate will they need to maintain their numbers into the future so that they don’t go extinct during the endless battles with zombies? Can they even take time to make babies and raise children during this war? Has the science figured out the answers to these questions? People need to know. Anyway, the best zombie movie was Sean of the Dead because it was a comedy and it was humane. In the end, the protagonist takes care of his zombified best friend, who is now cured and non-contagious but permanently brain damaged.
Another great apocalyptic TV series was LOST. The writers put in lots of influences from philosophy and literature, and they were proud that they got a lot of fan mail from people who read the books that appeared in characters hands or that were influences on the story. One obvious influence, conscious or not, was Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. It’s not quite an apocalyptic story, but like that genre, it involves characters who get to experience the struggle to survive outside of their domesticated boring life back home. The irony is that even though they are a bunch of fuckups and fugitives, they all want to get off the island and get back to the hell they were living in.
About Dr. House, I recall that in one episode, he mocked a mother who didn’t want her baby vaccinated. If the show had still been on during the pandemic, what would the writers have put into his dialogue? Would they have turned that wit, cynicism and pessimism toward the pharmaceutical industry and hospital bureaucracies, as they often did on other matters? Would he have used repurposed ivermectin? He often used repurposed drugs, daring maverick that he was. I suspect they would have gone along with the prevailing doctrine, and they would have used the virus as a way to kill off one of the main characters when an actor wanted out of his or her contract.
footnote. The new season of FBI begins with an anti Iran narrative. Its so blatant now.
"Lost" started in 2004 and just so happened to have a character called Sayid who was from Iraq. And he turns out to have an unspeakable past as a torturer for which he must atone.
Oh nothing about the zombie movies – and “Walking Dead” in particular – makes sense. Indeed, I once read a fascinating interview with the maker of WD who noted that, at the end of series 1, the survivors were holed up in an underground laboratory where there was a scientist investigating the zombie plague but the interviewee said he was uninterested in this development which took the series into more of a science fictional terrain. So this meme gets ditched – a move which pretty much abolishes all possibility of conceptual development and leaves us with the central fixation of WD – which is frankly a kind of return to the Wild West but with a Malthusian outlook.
And indeed the zombies are pure Malthusian dread. They are ferociously unproductive and just eat everything – or rather, and very significantly – they need a specific type of nourishment: live flesh. They are the ultimate bourgeois bugaboo: the lower orders who have come to drag the middle class down to their wretched level. They can never die and somehow there always seems to be more of them arriving every day.
Furthermore, there is nothing attractive about them. Vampires can be sexy, werewolves can be powerful, Frankensteinian monsters can be pathetic. Despite odd attempts here and there, the zombie resists “humanisation”.
The case of “Lost” is interesting. It seems to have initiated that peculiar craze for “mystery” programmes i.e. the show with a startling premise which demands an explanatory resolution. The original example was, I think, the 60s series “The Prisoner” about the British agent who gets kidnapped and ends up in a strange village where names have been replaced by numbers. But perhaps the time wasn’t right then for the genre. “Lost” really started the whole thing off. After that, we had things like “Life on Mars” (a cop from 2006 goes into a coma and seems to wake up in 1973), “Manifest” (A plane seems to go through some kind of time loop), “Glitch” and “The Returned” (dead people come back to life) etc.
What seems intriguing to me is that the last ever episode of “Lost” aired at around the same time as the last episode of “Ashes to Ashes” (a “Life on Mars” spin-off). But “Ashes” had an ending that was far more satisfactory in that it just went for a straightforward “heaven and hell” scenario whereas “Lost” seemed to wander into some vague posthumous chamber in which the souls are waiting for the next stage in their spiritual journey – or something. And I couldn’t help but notice that there were allusions to Christianity and there was a little Buddha statue too and I reckon there were similar nods to other religions. I think the reason for the difference is that, in America, there is this “culture war” in which, had “Lost” delivered the kind of decisive “Ashes” resolution, there would have been an uproar in which a large portion of the viewers would complain about “being duped” by Christian propaganda. Whereas in the UK, folk are less partisan about it and are more prepared to enter into the spirit of the piece.
Yes I recall that House sneer at “anti-vax” episode. Here is the relevant bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urZLTobAfJc
The logic is dodgy. Consider what house says:
“They think that you'll spend whatever they ask to keep your kid alive. Want to change things? Prove 'em wrong. A few hundred parents like you decide they'd rather let their kid die then cough up forty bucks for a vaccination, believe me, prices will drop REALLY fast.”
If some parents refuse the vax and their kids die then that would prove the vaxxes work and the price would be more likely to rise surely?
Hi John. I was perusing this old article from your site:
https://john-steppling.com/2013/05/the-night-sky/
(122 comments! I’m guessing we won’t see those figures again!)
And I noticed the reference to Roger Scruton and realised that he is a figure who ironically seems relevant to discussion of the zombie genre. I say “ironically” since I’m sure a fellow as self-consciously cultured as he wouldn’t dream of tainting himself with such “proletarian” trash. Which adds to the irony since, as I hinted below, I think the real appeal of the zombie genre is less suited to any proletarian outlook as it is to a middle class position i.e. precisely the position adopted by Scruton. And in this, he has provided explicit evidence himself. Bear with me:
I have always found it difficult to read Scruton as almost everything he writes embodies an excruciatingly servile eagerness to legitimise himself to some idealised upper strata of “gentlefolk”. Terry Eagleton has humorously commented on this aspect of Scruton – an aspect intensified by what seemed a deep shame at his own inadequately aristocratic origins. This nauseating sensibility was best summed up in his novel “Francesca” in which the central character, Colin, is a thinly disguised stand-in for Scruton himself. Colin has a fight in his work which is described thus:
“One day a gang of morons waited for him in the vat house, anxious to readjust his social standing to their requirements. They leapt out, fists flailing, boots chopping the air. As luck would have it, Colin was carrying the ruler with which he had checked the levels in the valves. It had a sharp edge of alloy, and by wielding it above his head, he was able to gash two cheeks, half sever an ear, and poke out a glutinous eye before running for the gate and safety.”
Note the grisly violence which puts us well on the way to Walking Dead territory. Note also that hugely revealing detail – that this “gang of morons” were “anxious to readjust his social standing to their requirements”. THIS is the entire crux of the bourgeois mentality: The wretched lower orders – who are seen as being barely human at all – are consumed with only one drive i.e. to bring the “worthy” middle class down to the slime.
It is obvious that we are in the same psychological arena as that fixation on “the haters” who “hate the good for being good”. One theory of fascism is that it erupts precisely from the middle class when they find themselves in a position of tension and anxious uncertainty. (A position which seems endemic to their very being.)
These are the ones obsessed with hierarchy and their perceived position therein. Their cringing deference to those “Golden Ones” above is naturally entwined with their bottomless loathing for the “verminous masses” below who are always grasping upwards to pull everything down. It is this intense psychopathy that lies at the root of the appeal of the zombie genre.
Michael Moore did not, and would never, endorse Trump. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/michael-moore-endorsed-donald-trump/
yes we did discover that, but clips of this, earlier, suggested he was https://globalnews.ca/video/3026587/michael-moore-calls-potential-trump-presidency-the-biggest-f-you-in-history Post script.... why would he never?