vimingok posted:

disperse the Amerikkkans throughout the Third World

Wtf NO.

saying no to free fertilizer smh

Acdtrux posted:

I've been watching a bunch of slow movies like tarkovsky & tarr bela and I no longer have the patience for this what are some action movies

LEGEND OF THE DRUNKEN MASTER the english dub is excellent. also hard boiled, looper, shaolin, journey to the west, ronin, the italian job, the mountain between us, heat, vampire hunter d bloodlust, the shallows, man of tai chi, the nice guys, the guest, ninja scroll, pusher 2, shin godzilla, the cabin in the woods, les miserables (2019), edge of tomorrow, pretty much any steven soderbergh movie, and the tv show Police Squad! which aired in 1982 which is here on youtube in a playlist

lo posted:

Acdtrux posted:

I've been watching a bunch of slow movies like tarkovsky & tarr bela and I no longer have the patience for this what are some action movies

you should watch hard boiled by john woo

Many people are saying this!

filler posted:

never heard of it, this is a new idea I came up with. JDPON © filler

88888 posted:

been watching a lot of x-files, which is nonsensical and often not very good. only mentioning this because I just found out that david duchovny is from NY and is not, in fact, french canadian, which is something I believed for some reason

you wanted to believe

Populares posted:

Mormons did Buenos Aires.

Acdtrux posted:

video essay which is better than usual left tube but maybe not, I am too teetoataled to tell.

I’ve been thinking about this video lately because it’s time of plague, I have some days off & I like Dan Olson for what he is most of the time, one of the few knowledgeable people on YouTube trying to lead people out of what “film theory” has come to mean in most online conversations, to get them to think about elements of moviemaking and storytelling. He’s also close to the only person who can make a YouTube video about a video game that anyone will watch that says anything at all that’s interesting about the game or the industry. Like his video on Fortnite is maybe the only thing anyone needs to watch if they care at all about this thing that makes a LOT of money through a model everyone else has rushed to imitate.

Olson’s not a Marxist, continually erases etc., but this video is mostly about connecting trends at the level of ideology and the social structures intermediate between material foundations and ideology on its face, and I think that’s useful in similar ways to how Sy Hersh on U.S. black ops is useful, it can inform further materialist analysis. The first half of the video is about how it feels good for Democrat/Labour brains to explain why e.g. the earth isn’t flat when the empirical basis for Flat Earth is treated by its cult as an adversary to be conquered instead of a reason to accept it. Olson has a couple of dimmer, dweebier friends on YouTube with slightly bigger audiences, and a good chunk of the video is Olson explaining very politely why their multi-million-view videos on Flat Earth are just sublimated jack-off material that eagerly, almost desperately, misses the point.

It’s good stuff, that first half and its use as a framing device as he begins to cut back and forth in the lead-up to the last shot of the video. Olson does more than any of his friends, or other fatuous “flat earth debunkers” using little animated graphics to wow Mythbusters addicts, to provide a video that would absolutely convince anyone who really believed what flat earthers advance uniformly in their 10- or 20- or 30-odd list of complaints: that people should trust their eyes. He can do that better than his friends because he knows more about how to shoot video. When Olson thinks his first-run results will need too much explaining, he doesn’t do that, but lays bare how he went all the way back to that same spot on the lake and controlled for that stuff in response to his self-critiques, all to make an ironclad case that you can believe what you see, and what you see is the curvature of the Earth captured from a camera at ground level, and here’s how he did it, you can do it too.

Olson looks at the case he’s made, which is probably the best job anyone’s ever done at making it on YouTube where there’s a miniature monetized industry for doing it, and says, It feels profound to see the curve of the Earth in front of you since you don’t tend to think about it... but I had to show you this because you almost certainly have no need of it, you don’t believe in Flat Earth, so to make my real case, I had to show you why this part makes you, the likely viewer of my channel, feel good and like it’s a victory for you and me, because it’s the only real way to prove to you that it’s not one, that it’s entirely beside the point of how Flat Earth ideology works, which you, the viewer, claimed to care about by bothering to watch this video.

Then he uses his own knowledge of his platform to make his case that followers of Flat Earth and QAnon/QAnon-adjacent media are mostly, if not all, the same people, and that what really grips them about those two systems of belief are common and recognizable functions they serve, and they’re not the ones that seem “obvious”. It’s again very polite, but he’s doing something gutsy here. He’s calling out his own left-liberal, petit-bourgeois audience & his most popular cross-channel traffic booster pals, telling them they’re mired in self-satisfied denial and haven’t bothered to do the hard thinking they consider part of their identities, telling them they’re addicted to Flat Earth debunking videos and to the whole Neil deGrasse Tyson/Mythbusters amalgamation for suspect reasons, and probably calling out his past self as well to some degree.

Where I think Olson stumbles is that he shares with his friends the common left-liberal desire (need?) to see QAnon as a looming and novel threat instead of a current trend in a continuum of far-right conspiracy theory. He bases that mostly on a couple “lone wolf” shooters who happened to dwell in the QAnon morass in some recent moment, because those common ideological elements means it’s just where people like them end up right now, then starts to imply that the logic of the ideology leads to a special and spontaneous outbreak of QAnon-propelled mass violence on a national scale, something he presents as scary and novel. That puts his line of argument at odds with its own original thesis, so it’s immediately less than convincing. It seems like he’s trying to tell a story that he feels needs a dramatic, spooky ending.

Olson also doesn’t do a great job of backing the alarmist stuff up when he presents more examples. He plays the video of the wall-eyed deadbeat dad who kidnapped his kids in a high-speed chase, the living stereotype of the “movement” who posted videos to social media where he begged “kyu-ANNE-in” to save him. He runs clips of the cracked egotist yuppie QAnon lady-oracles from the U.S. and UK as they recite their do-nothing mess of beliefs in language that’s a cross between 10-year-old indigo-child YouTube and 20-year-old cable TV comedy-news. He plays a bit of the high-production-value, talk-radio-style grifters who barely pretend to believe what they’re saying. It’s all funny in a Comedy Central sort of way, meaning none of it seems like anything new, but rather what he started out arguing it was, the current bucket into which these people have sloshed, one that’s the same general shape as the previous one.

The issue with trying to present QAnon as a stark and looming threat is that it’s a philosophy that appeals for those reasons Olson lists, and also one that he doesn’t dwell on, but that follows from the others: QAnon is a militia movement theme-park ride that chucks both militia and movement. Its demand is for you to do nothing but sit on your fat ass and read posts that flatter the reader by suggesting they do nothing but sit on their fat ass and puzzle out those posts, which are nowadays mostly tired catchphrases from older, well-known conspiracy theories. It’s complemented by a succession of crowd-sourced fad side-conspiracies that are stunning for how well they argue against doing anything at all. (How do you save JFK, Jr.?) The conspiracy is “do nothing and you’ll be rewarded”. It literally tells you that it’ll all work out better if you just sit and watch.

Does that mean there’s zero chance of mass far-right violence today? Of course not, and if it breaks out, some part of it will necessarily tie itself to one or more leading right-wing conspiracy theories or paranoid trends, whatever those are at the moment, QAnon or otherwise. Angry lone Nazi shooters will do the same right now, because what else are they going to do? They can only fill so much space in the text field with complaints about the ex before they remember they’re typing a suicide post because they’re part of a movement, or something...

QAnon is remarkable because it doesn’t offer even a video-game or Western-movie fantasy of street action against mongrel hordes as a white American soldier, but a fantasy where you turn on the TV one day, the one you as a QAnon type have with a Charter coax running out the back instead of an Ethernet or video cable, and say, Wow... it’s like I read & typed on the Internet, those other people did it, the people already in charge are now double in charge. Then I guess rock candy shoots out of the screen into your mouth, no one really knows what QAnon heaven is supposed to be like, except that it’s like things used to be and a dusty list of long-retired Democrats go to jail, and you don’t have to do anything by yourself or with others to get there—fascism without fasces.

It’s about as close as anyone’s ever gotten to pacifascism. “Pacifier”, maybe, not “pacifist”. QAnon won’t in any way prevent far-right violence, but it hardly pushes it through its own lazily adversarial form of reasoning, because it can postpone its victory indefinitely by consensus. Its leading slogan is pure quietism, and the one after that suggests you’re automatically a hero as long as you tune in. If roving armed yuppie gangs ever form under QAnon banners, it won’t be because QAnon got them out into the streets, it’ll be out of sheer lack of ideas about what else to put on them.

marknat posted:

cars posted:

Its leading slogan is pure quietism, and the one after that suggests you’re automatically a hero as long as you tune in.

Aren't there some interesting parallels here in petty-bourgeois socialism? That all that's required is your education and you can absolve some of your moral complicity in the matter? I'm not sure QAnon goes to that depth, but you know what I mean.

Maybe... I think nowadays the idea in the U.S./UK is that you can actualize that through a blinkered 2x-speed repeat of the European social democratic collapse: vote for Sanders, or Corbyn or a future equivalent, and go out and canvass for them and their m8s and turn everyone on to that idea, and the “good” bourgeois-party politicians will turn off the “bombs” spigot and turn on the rusty, mid-20th-century “fuck you we got ours” benefits spigot, and everything that comes out, comes from nowhere, never runs out and certainly has nothing to do with why the bourgeoisie paid for all those bombs... and that’s “socialism”, no worrying over the means of production necessary.

We had a joke on here a little while back about how some U.S. online news source tried to explain “socialism” to readers as when the state provided goods & services to people at “significant discounts”.

In any case, petty-booj socialism in the same areas today seems to promote a lot more activity than QAnon, even if it’s recuperation, and even if that’s not saying much considering QAnon itself.

cars posted:

The issue with trying to present QAnon as a stark and looming threat is that it’s a philosophy that appeals for those reasons Olson lists, and also one that he doesn’t dwell on, but that follows from the others: QAnon is a militia movement theme-park ride that chucks both militia and movement. Its demand is for you to do nothing but sit on your fat ass and read posts that flatter the reader by suggesting they do nothing but sit on their fat ass and puzzle out those posts, which are nowadays mostly tired catchphrases from older, well-known conspiracy theories. It’s complemented by a succession of crowd-sourced fad side-conspiracies that are stunning for how well they argue against doing anything at all. (How do you save JFK, Jr.?) The conspiracy is “do nothing and you’ll be rewarded”. It literally tells you that it’ll all work out better if you just sit and watch.

Does that mean there’s zero chance of mass far-right violence today? Of course not, and if it breaks out, some part of it will necessarily tie itself to one or more leading right-wing conspiracy theories or paranoid trends, whatever those are at the moment, QAnon or otherwise. Angry lone Nazi shooters will do the same right now, because what else are they going to do? They can only fill so much space in the text field with complaints about the ex before they remember they’re typing a suicide post because they’re part of a movement, or something...

QAnon is remarkable because it doesn’t offer even a video-game or Western-movie fantasy of street action against mongrel hordes as a white American soldier, but a fantasy where you turn on the TV one day, the one you as a QAnon type have with a Charter coax running out the back instead of an Ethernet or video cable, and say, Wow... it’s like I read & typed on the Internet, those other people did it, the people already in charge are now double in charge. Then I guess rock candy shoots out of the screen into your mouth, no one really knows what QAnon heaven is supposed to be like, except that it’s like things used to be and a dusty list of long-retired Democrats go to jail, and you don’t have to do anything by yourself or with others to get there—fascism without fasces.

It’s about as close as anyone’s ever gotten to pacifascism. “Pacifier”, maybe, not “pacifist”. QAnon won’t in any way prevent far-right violence, but it hardly pushes it through its own lazily adversarial form of reasoning, because it can postpone its victory indefinitely by consensus. Its leading slogan is pure quietism, and the one after that suggests you’re automatically a hero as long as you tune in. If roving armed yuppie gangs ever form under QAnon banners, it won’t be because QAnon got them out into the streets, it’ll be out of sheer lack of ideas about what else to put on them.

“I didn’t really care for any of this, my brothers. ‘And what will you do,’ I said, ‘with the big big big deng or money as you so highfaluting call it?”

-- Excerpt From: Anthony Burgess. “A Clockwork Orange”

A very predictable plot twist to the arrest of the Boogaloo boys in MI who supposedly tried to kidnap the health insurance CEO daughter-governor, presuming for the sake of argument that they actually did such a thing and it wasn't just Facebook posts assembled by FBI stooges who also only wanted to be on TV, was the fact that the supposed ring leader came into enough of an inheritance to pay cash for a rural home in MI, but all that got him was more time to get deeper into more Facebook bullshit.

Because, as the man said, they didn't know the answer to the question of what to do with the "big big money."

One of the neo-Nazis who was doxxed very early on around the time of Charlottesville lives near me in a neighborhood that starts on the low end around $750k to $900k in home value, and property taxes are high so you're not gonna live there without making $150k to $200k a year. Last time he popped up he was still humping those neo-Nazi discord chats, organizing a "movement" of 30 dipshits in a city of 7 million who were only capable of taking a video of themselves standing in front of closed office buildings, because they were scared to go anywhere they might find a confrontation.

The neo-Nazi scumbag also didn't know the answer to the question of what to do with the "big big money."

The genius of the Qanon grifters is that they identified what their boomer audience (and its aspiring wanna-be boomer children) wanted: to be able to go back to the time of doing nothing. Their target demographic is the junior vice president of office supplies at the transmission parts distributor in Fucknuts, WV who has his assistant print his emails for him. Their entire existence is a dying amalgamation of cliches. They "support the cops" (nothing) and "support the troops" (nothing) and a multitude of other platitudes, just as the centrist libs "center voices" (nothing) and "raise awareness" (nothing).

The only thing they ever wanted to do was nothing... but still amass or maintain enough equity to comfortably watch TV until they fall over and die, of course.

Acdtrux posted:

My second critique is that the Olson's analysis of the psychology could have been presented better. The ideas relating to purity, authoritarianism, and harmony with nature are the theories of the construction of race. It seems to me that the "harvesting adrenochrome" aspect of the conspiracy theory is also related to race since the imagined violation of autonomy involved in the conspiracy exists to also construct an imagined "would-be purity." This theory retroactively constructs the possibility of aryan purity by believing that it is under threat, and the threat in this case is a infinitesimally small signifier (adrenochrome) being removed from the racially pure subject. (adrenochrome is lacan's objet petit a). Olson basically understands these ideas, but I think the analysis could be advanced a bit. In the video, it seemed to me that he spent a lot of time rehashing the idea that these conspiracy theories have the collective desire to create a pure world but I would have liked to see how these beliefs are related to existing oppressive structures like race and the nuclear family.

If I were to spend more time with a video like this, or if I were writing the script, I would emphasize more how some of the manifest content of the beliefs are related to the nuclear family. A central aspect that was presented in the video is the delusional belief that there is a child sex trafficking ring, engaging in the violation of children's sexual autonomy, and that the authoritarian aspects are justified by reference to this delusion. The video presents this as seemingly an authoritarian pro-Trump ideology, although I would emphasize the fact that the violation of sexual dynamics, like the ideas associated with adrenochrome, exist to construct an imaginary but oppressive "pure" structure. Here, the delusions about pedophilia reinforce the dynamics of the nuclear family, which contains a prohibitive father figure which institutes the law and authority. To continue Olson's analysis I would make the claim that the nuclear family is here used to institute Trump as the father figure. The video does not present a more advanced analysis of the Trump support within qanon than merely "authoritarianism with white nationalist aspects" or so.

I'm probably on the third or fourth time in the past week of posting it in various places: "Satan's Silence" by Debbie Nathan. It's a fantastic accounting of the satanic panic of the 70s, 80s, and 90s and should not be surprising when you get into it and read that like everything else, it was just a grift that got out of control on its own from people doing nothing. The very believable evidence presented was that Berkeley sociology department people needed something to do since they abandoned the world after '68 and went back to grad school, so they sold the idea of calling everyone no one cares about a pedophile to local cops as a grift, just like the madd mothers sold DWIs to local yokes as a similar grift. Not only was it a good source of fines (people wouldn't be seriously punished for forcing a blowjob out of their stepdaughter, they'd just charge them fees out of every paycheck and have them show up for weekend jail), but it was palatable to those Nixon conservatives who were holding the purse strings to all of the grant money.

The problem is the same problem with all grifts. Someone may have started with a grant for helping local cops bleed blue collar divorced dudes, but someone else managed to get on Oprah, and then someone else managed to get on 20/20, and then someone else managed to get on Geraldo and he wasn't going to imitate those milder pundits, he wants some blood and guts with his grift, so someone else gave him the blood and guts he wanted.

All of this stuff is nostalgia to the faithful. If they're the Clinton faithful they can have a youtube nerd explain Qanon pop psych to them, or if they're a Qanon faithful they can peruse all of the "Clinton" entries on the Epstein flight manifests. If they're a Maddow faithful they can have a diet lesbian tell them that it was perfectly okay to overthrow Libya to stop the pedophiles, who totally exist just not like the other side thinks that the totally plausible pedophiles exist.

The world is a stage show, after all, performed on TV for those who just want to watch. It's not their fault, someone else did all of the bad stuff, they shook their heads and tried to tell everyone but no one would listen, because all anyone else wanted to do was nothing too.

Edited by Over9000ft (Oct. 12, 2020 18:14:48)