If you have nothing to hide . . . nothing to worry about.

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Re: If you have nothing to hide . . . nothing to worry about

Postby BenDhyan » Wed Aug 04, 2021 8:00 pm

It is just as well that I am not worth much...

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Re: If you have nothing to hide . . . nothing to worry about

Postby conniption » Mon Sep 13, 2021 10:57 am

The first part of this essay is posted in Suppression/Propaganda in Media
conniption » Sun Sep 12, 2021 7:13 am wrote:Reading time: forever
continues at link.
John Steppling
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Fascist Baby Talk
John Steppling
August 30, 2021


>snip<

>snip<



Part two of this essay pertains to this thread in many ways.

Part Two:
John Steppling
twitter link

Fascist Baby Talk
John Steppling
August 30, 2021


>snip<

...The experience for the public is disruptive because these things can be experienced as if looking through a telephoto lens. One can focus where one likes. One can change focus. One can do this constantly.

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Marco Bigliazzi

“There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which have become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. The greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed. The notion of a problem, which we see linked to that of difference, also seems to nurture the sentiments of the beautiful soul: only problems and questions matter…Nevertheless, we believe that when these problems attain their proper degree of positivity, and when difference becomes the object of a corresponding affirmation, they release a power of aggression and selection which destroys the beautiful soul by depriving it of its very identity and breaking its good will. The problematic and the differential determine struggles or destructions in relation to which those of the negative are only appearances, and the wishes of the beautiful soul are so many mystifications trapped in appearances. The simulacrum is not just a copy, but that which overturns all copies by also overturning the models: every thought becomes an aggression.”
Gilles Deleuze (Ibid)


So, while we have discussed the collective madness around us, on the podcasts, and while others have written extensively about the virtue signalling, and class demarcations in acceptance or rejection of things such as vaccine passports, there continues to be a feeling of having missed something. And I think this is because of how global this event has become. Allow me another lengthy quote from Deleuze…

“A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate in relation to ‘dramas’ and by means of a certain ‘cruelty’. They must have a coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come from themselves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere.
This is the secret of empiricism. Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience.On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as object of an encounter, as a here-and-now, or rather as an ‘Erewhon’ from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed ‘heres’ and ‘news’.”

Gilles Deleuze (Ibid)


Image
Stephanie Schnieder, photography.

The local and the global. This is the unsettling and uncanny aspect of electronic media. The sense of scale is so deformed, so neurotically experienced today that one becomes the other, and both are the each other, and often simultaneously. The pandemic, the phantom virus (real but still phantom), the unseen catalyst for internal panic is or was something unleashed from either a mysterious Hollywood sci fi lab in China (China !!) or from a mysterious exotic land of cruelty and cunning. Unleashed and there appear an army of experts, a familiar face in Anthony Fauci, never mind his record is dotted with near criminal culpabilities and dishonesty. The marketing appears; ‘Trust the Science’. What science? Which science? What? The voices of authority, Jen Psaki, the Dick Wolfe clone, a pixie authoritarian who feels like a pocket Samantha Power, presides at the podium for White House press conferences. That podium, another bit of set decor that is marinated in decades of legitimacy and power. The podium of power. (Samantha POWER). Klaus Schwab appears on Charlie Rose. As a friend described him, a cross between Blofeld and Strangelove. But less amusing. You could not invent an accent that registers as more of a caricature of a Nazi than that of Schwab. Is that intentional, too? The cartoon Nazi? Is this another migration of anti semitism? One does often feel as if caught in a global game of three card monte. There is a quality of unfamiliarity about this narrative, however. This is the first installment of trans-national NGO authoritarianism. Health fascism.

The ruling class was never going to bring back black leather overcoats and black leather boots. And here again, it is worth remembering that the majority of people on this planet are not buying the story. It is primarily a targeted audience of the white bourgeoisie. The same audience for West Wing or HBO. The ersatz seriousness of a cartoon like Westworld was part of this decades long conditioning. This is both planned: Schwab and Prince Charles and Gates and Vanguard and Blackrock, and Avaaz and the WEF and WHO and WWF and the U.S. government, and it is an auto pilot quality of advanced capitalism. Now advanced capitalism, if we want to look at it in a certain light, is planned, too. The removal of working class voices was intentional. The consolidation of media in a few hands, the mental defoliation of the American public, the continuation of colonial policies under cover of austerity and the shock doctrine. It is all the blighted blueprint of the very wealthiest people and corporations in the world. And it has been the compliance of what amount to vassal states, now. The NATO countries, the EU at large, and pretty much any nation with an at all significant GNP. The cultural appropriation of working class style and imagination has run alongside this, too.

“There must be hierarchies, or the elimination of hierarchies.”
George Jackson (Blood in My Eye)


Image
Vladimir Birgus, photography.

“In the digital age, we are far more likely to hear about the cost of privacy, not its virtues or even its value. { } Although it is not logically necessary, the transition from humanist discourse to a rational choice framework is entirely consonant with the shift in conceptions of privacy. Whereas privacy was previously framed in humanistic terms, it is now far more likely to be thought of as a type of property, something that can be bought or sold in a market. Privacy has become a form of private property.”
Bernard E. Harcourt (Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age)


Harcourt notes that InfoUSA, a giant among data brokers has lists of people with dementia, and how to exploit them, has records on those with cancer, data on elderly gamblers, and it sells this info to corporations to profit off these people. This is the new world of business in a sense. The end of privacy as conventionally understood. Well, not new exactly, its been around for decades, Axicom is another giant.

“Alongside these brokered data, there is a whole new and emerging collection of consumer rankings and scoring—what the World Privacy Forum calls “consumer scores.” A myriad of public and private entities are now engaged in massive ranking and scoring of us all, trying to place numbers on each of us to “describe or predict [our] characteristics, habits, or predilections.” Following in the footsteps of the “credit scores” that were developed in the 1950s, we are seeing today the proliferation and extension of this scoring logic to all facets of life. There are today consumer scores including “the medication adherence score, the health risk score, the consumer profitability score, the job security score, collection and recovery scores, frailty scores, energy people meter scores, modeled credit scores, youth delinquency score, fraud scores, casino gaming propensity score, and brand name medicine propensity scores,” among others.”
Bernard E. Harcourt (Ibid)


Image
Katharina Sieverding, mixed media.

This is all well known info. But if anyone has any doubts about the targeted public in health matters, this should put that discussion to rest. The point here is that even if there are massive flaws in how such material is defined, in the epistemological calculus involved, the fact is that electronic media and internet platforms are in service to very powerful entities and people. Of course this virus is about money. That is the main thing it is about, its bottom line, so to speak. And there is another side here…

“Research suggests that online visibility and the exposure and transparency of social media may have a damping effect on our willingness to voice our opinions and express ourselves, particularly when we think that we are in the minority feeding into a “spiral of silence.”
Bernard E. Harcourt (Ibid)


So we have a society in which even the most skeptical have a hard time finding ways to express this skepticism. For there is a profound lynch mob mentality at work. This level of aggression, of vindictive and vengeful attitudes, is a product of all these many streams of influence. The securitization of culture, certainly is a huge part. That shift that began with Dirty Harry was more and more incorporated into an idea, only slightly contradictory, of obedience. The average bourgeois citizen sees him or herself as a good soldier. Knowing how to take orders, respecting authority. Hollywood so glamorized the military and police that the Harry Callahan character today would not be presented as a rebel or outsider. Callahan would answer yessir to his superior, and copy that. Understood. Outstanding. A citizen soldier in the army of virtue.

Thought experiment: Compare head shot of Anderson Cooper on evening news with head shot of Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry.

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Ivan Pinkava, photography.

It is an army of duty, and of responsibility. No punishment is too severe. And this relates, too, to the disappearance of ritual. Of magic, even. There are sanctioned, or approved outsiders. These are carefully vetted, and usually appear with or are backed by corporate forces. They are defined by eccentricities or odd habits, they wear funny glasses or look peculiar, and this has come to be how Hollywood character is defined as well. Oddities of behavior, chewing gun, wearing odd hats, or having strange compulsions or conditions. If you are ADHD, that is then your character. Full stop. The ‘family of man’ cliche looms behind all of it. These superficial markers cover over the lack of actual character. The superficiality of Hollywood writing is breathtaking.

This injection of false heterogeneity is a good example of the telescoping of registers I mentioned above. And it is Adorno’s dialectics (which is likely the reason for the endless negative critiques he gets these days) that provides a tool, or tools, for navigating the various floors of manufactured unreality.

“That in drama not the text but the performance is taken to be what matters, just as in music not the score but the living sound is so regarded, testifies to the precariousness of the thing‐character in art, which does not, however, thereby release the artwork from its participation in the world of things. For scores are not only almost always better than the performances, they are more than simply instructions for them: they are indeed the thing itself.”
Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)


Image
Miroslav Hak, photography.

Gerald Bruns, in a short piece on Adorno and dialectics writes…

“The point here is that the modernist artwork, in contrast to tradition, does not form a hermeneutical circle, a subordination of parts to a whole; this is the source of its enigmaticalness or Rätselcharakter, that is, its “fracturedness [gebrochensein]”, its repudiation of the concept of meaning , and its refusal of closure: “Art that makes the highest claim,” Adorno says, “compels itself beyond form as totality and into the fragmentary. The plight of form is most emphatically manifest in the difficulty of bringing temporal art forms to a conclusion; in music composers often speak of the problem of a finale, and in literature the problem of a denouement, which came to a head in Brecht. Once having shaken itself free of convention, no artwork was able to end convincingly.”
Gerald Bruns (On the Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism, vol.66)


Nicole Berenz, in her piece on Adorno and film, notes…“A crucial point in his analyses relates to the way the culture industry makes use of legendary criminals and asocial personalities in order to eradicate tendencies to revolt and to empty the tragic of all meaning.”
Nicole Berenz (Cinema in Spite of Itself, but Cinema all the Same)


Image
Ali Omar Ermes

This is, in one sense, the crux of this issue of aesthetics and ideology that is performed by the Pandemic cast. And it is the core of a discussion of sanctioned outsiders, today, too. The role of official eccentric, not necessarily even one connected to the arts, is that such constructions serve as stand-ins for actual radical thinkers and artists, but then by their very emptiness reclaim the terrain that allows for the truth of form (potentially, if artists were only to recognize it and perhaps some do). The faces of the pandemic, from Fauci to the various U.S. politicians, to Justin Trudeau and various vaccine exponents– even to Bill Gates, merge kitsch and authoritarianism, or perhaps more, camp and authoritarianism. Kary Mullis, Noble Prize Winner and the inventor of the PCR test did an interview before his untimely death in which he called Fauci a moron. And, added that the PCR test had no value as a diagnostic tool. That interview had no traction. Fauci continued to be fawned upon, and became ubiquitous as the face of the pandemic. For the inauthentic Dr. Fauci reads as more real to the Spectacle. The spectacle cannot abide anything but the artificial. Fauci is not exactly ‘real’, he is like that podium that Psaki stands behind. He is set decor. He is the artificially real, the screen real. Mullis had no telegenic resonance. He radiated intelligence and disdain. And impatience. And frustration. There is no emoji for intelligence and frustration. There is one for the ‘Fauci ouchi’.

“The closed artwork is bourgeois, the mechanical artwork belongs to fascism, and the fragmentary work—in its complete negativity—belongs to utopia.”
Theodor Adorno (Philosophy of New Music)


One could add, today, the technological artwork is fascist. Computer generated image is fascist. And the endless repetitions of closed melodrama, produced in a kind of short hand, are now the currency most circulated by the educated bourgeoisie. Melodrama, the form, substitutes for actual narrative. Narrative is always open ended. Plots are closed.

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Ogawa Kazumasa, photomechanical print

This leads back to the idea of the disappeared ritual. One could as well say the disappeared interior life. The colonized subjectivity. It is additionally the rabid fear of the unconscious. Which is also to say the fear of emotion. And it is also the undialectical ideas about society, about the definition of society, or public, that have gained a seemingly permanent grip on the minds of people.

“The 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of psychiatric illness has concluded that trauma is now so common that it can no longer be defined as an event “outside the range of normal human experience.”7 And whereas anxiety was not long ago the focus of distress, categories of panic attacks have moved to the forefront. Social phobia—the incapacitating fear of humiliation or embarrassment in social events, often combined with agoraphobia and panic anxiety—has become the single most frequent psychiatric problem. Some proportion of people with social phobia are—as a proportion of the readers of this essay are aware— housebound; others are unable to stand in a line or go to a store. What- ever reasons people give for not appearing at the polls, voting itself is clearly beyond the power of many. This is evidence that the public world has become so antipathetic to those who in some sense constitute it that it can no longer be approached, but this fact of social phobia is also evidence that, for many, the self is prohibited from rudimentary development so that even common events threaten regression and the eruption of needs and fears associated with intense vulnerability and shame.”
Robert Hullot-Kentor (Things Beyond Remembrance)


This essay of Hullot-Kentor (in his book, Things Beyond Remembrance) is about the idea of reclaiming a public sphere, or public world.

Image
Sylvia Gertsch

“Much contemporary critical theory seeks to escape the threat of a looming nonintegration by affirming disintegration in stylized, finicky, implausible evocations of ruins, melancholy, and fragmentation. “Difference,” apart from its philosophical reasoning—as a popular ideal that capitalizes on the rejection of all universals as illusory— – permits ignoring the idea of the whole and suppresses dynamic, complex concepts of relationship. If it has not been noticed, the concepts of antagonism, conflict, anxiety, contrast, alienation, and opposition have disappeared from much critical discussion. The slack ideal of cultural multiplicity hovers gingerly above the guilt context of the whole, preferring the neutralization of thought to any insight into that guilt context, not least because insight implies a need for change that is sensed as beyond anyone’s power. The aesthetics of this cultural moment is a postmodernism that shuns the forming of a critical microcosm by preference for a form of montage that never gets beyond juxtaposition. “
Robert Hullot-Kentor (Ibid)


The idea of reclaiming a genuine public is an illusion, really, a rationalization of sorts for a spreading sense of impotence. The non-integration is a bit like Horkheimer’s ideas in Eclipse of Reason. There are ties, too, with the occult/racism and antisemitism that found traction via Rudolph Steiner et al. (And honestly Waldorf Schools in the US are perfectly good alternatives to U.S. public education). But that strange backdrop of occult like mysticism, of anthroposophy and theosophy. This is worth an entire posting, probably. There is an interesting doctoral paper by Peter Staudenmair…

“…anthroposophy embodied a contradictory set of racial and ethnic doctrines which held the potential to develop in different directions under particular political, social, and cultural conditions. In spite of anthroposophists’ insistence that their worldview was ‘unpolitical,’ my argument will identify an implicit politics of race running throughout their public and private statements, a body of assumptions about the cosmic significance of racial and ethnic attributes that shaped their responses to fascism. { } What emerged were racial and ethnic stances that were frequently ambiguous and multivalent but that in several cases found a comfortable home in fascist contexts precisely because of their spiritual orientation, one that did not deign to concern itself directly with the distasteful realm of politics. The resulting history reveals the limits of a spiritual renewal approach to individual and social change, and of an unpolitical conception of new ways of life, even with the loftiest of aspirations. For some anthroposophists, such discourses of enlightenment and emancipation became bound up with authoritarian aims.”
Peter Staudenmaier (Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation in Germany and Italy, 1900-1945)


Image
Lothar Wolleh, photography.

There are parallels with the transhumanist and bio-tech enthusiasts today. The difference is the transference of spiritual renewal to technological renewal. And renewal is not a word transhumanists would probably use. One could also argue along the lines of computer coding, the computational as substitute for reason, and probabilities as technical solutions. And this is what Horkheimer dreaded in Russell and Whitehead and positivism altogether.

That theosophy, and its all its many branches that grew out of early 20th century Europe (Germany and Switzerland primarily) travelled forward to help destabilize the 60s radical movements for social change. Social activism became spiritual individualism. One is then seeing the fascist echoes in most new age undertakings — from whole foods to yoga classes. It has moved forward further still to the ‘science’ of transhumanism and extreme wealth that seems to reside alongside it.

“…that fascism itself can be seen as a political variant of modernism. This peculiar genus of revolutionary project for the transformation of society, it will be argued, could only emerge in the first decades of the twentieth century in a society permeated with modernist metanarratives of cultural renewal which shaped a legion of activities, initiatives, and movements ‘on the ground’. In its varied permutations fascism took it upon itself not just to change the state system, but to purge civilization of decadence, and foster the emergence of a new breed of human beings which it defined in terms not of universal categories but essentially mythic national and racial ones. Its activists set about their task in the iconoclastic spirit of ‘creative destruction’ legitimized not by divine will, reason, the laws of nature, or by socio-economic theory,but by the belief that history itself was at a turning point and could be launched on a new course through human intervention that would redeem the nation and rescue the West from imminent collapse.”
Roger Griffen (Modernism and Fascism)


Image
Mircea Suciu

Griffin quotes Frank Kermode a bit later from a book I have quoted many times here, referring to a poem of Yeats:

“Such lines have a bearing on an important distinction drawn by Frank Kermode in ‘The Sense of an Ending’.He stresses the difference between the poetic fictions used by artists to illuminate or articulate elusive aspects of contemporary reality, and politicized myths, which become incorporated into the ideological rationale for attempts to engineer radical transformations of that reality.”
Roger Griffin (Ibid)


It should not be too hard to see the echoes of the ‘spiritual science(s)’ of the early 20th century today in Klaus Schwab and his DAVOS attendees. In Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. As secular versions of this counterfeit spirituality, adherents of a toxic cult science and of scientific racism. Eugenics is certainly a part of this fabric of exclusionary white supremacism. Kermode saw in Yeats, interestingly, a close association or correlation of totalizing form and subliminal authoritarian sensibilities. It should be noted Yeats was aware of this himself. And his most famous poems are about this battle. But as Griffin notes; apocalyptic fictions in literature, and I can think of Pynchon or DeLillo off the top of my head today, and their themes of a need to correct the malaise and decadence, the wrong turns and corruption of modern society, are mirrored in certain political visions for correction and cleansing. It is the opening monologue in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (taken largely from the writings of Arthur Bremer) and it is, too, in the literal cleansing underway in the Pandemic and vaccine mandates. It is the securitized speech and authoritarian ethos of Dick Wolfe’s various franchises, and it is the language of Aaron Sorkin and it increasingly is delivered in the baby -talk of political leaders or the infantilization of government policy and language.

James Baldwin saw sentimentality as the mask of cruelty. And I would suggest an intimate relationship between the fascistic baby-talk of today and with a sentimentalizing of cruelty itself. Again so much is becoming literal that was metaphorical before this last two years

Image
Goetheanum, designed by Rudolph Steiner, Switzerland 1919.

The former Secretary of Education, under Obama, Arne Duncan, compared those refusing the Covid vaccine to the Taliban. The inherent, often latent, contempt the white bourgeoisie feels for the working class, seen as the class beneath them, is now openly expressed, but in a language fit for pre school, and in visuals borrowed from late Disney aesthetics. And the ruling class, unable to prevent their regression to cartoon-like self parody, sneer and laugh, have unmasked dinner parties where only the waiters wear masks. These people shop at exclusive health-food grocery stores (or their maids do) and they do Yoga or spinning class, and wear, often natural fiber clothing. They will walk you to the internment camp wearing Vegan shoes and signing more laws to restrict tobacco use and limit what food stamps can buy. They are only following the consensus. One manufactured by the ruling class. Soldiers of virtue. The Great Reset is only Nazi dreams (I was thinking of Hitler’s plans for Norway while writing this. A winter ski resort, essentially, for party members only) dressed in new cultic bio tech terminology. Kitsch and the sentimental are both a form of violence.

“…the sense of a new beginning cultivated by fascism itself in both its ‘movement’ and ‘regime’ aspect. In cinematic terms images from the Hollywood blockbuster evoking the Romantic, illusory ‘new beginning’ felt so passionately by the star-crossed pair on the prow of the Titanic could now dissolve into fascist ones. The sequence could start with the closing scene in Giovacchnio Forzano’s Camicia Nera [Black Shirt] (1933) which shows Mussolini inaugurating the reclamation (‘bonifi ca’) of the Pontine Marshes where a new city will soon arise, a symbol of the modernizing and modernist plans for the ‘bonifi ca’ of the whole of Italy. This could fade to the moment in Alessandro Blasetti’s Vecchia Guardia [The Old Guard] (1935) where Blackshirts set off for the March on Rome, the first steps to a New Italy, which in turn could merge into the closing moments of ‘Hitlerjunge Quex’ when serried ranks of banner-carrying Hitler Youth march heroically into the new Germany in which the ultimate sacrifice of one of their comrades in the war against Bolshevism will be redeemed. The closing shot could be the opening frames of ‘Triumph of the Will’ with their famous images of Hitler descending from the clouds like a latter-day sky-God to land at Nuremberg where he will preside over the 1934 Party Congress.”
Roger Griffin (Ibid)

https://john-steppling.com/2021/08/fascist-baby-talk/
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