Posts Tagged ‘short’
Endorsement: On second thought…
…there was a rather significant error in my last post: I forgot about Toyama Koichi.
Although the population of America is over six billion, fewer than two hundred million can vote! Our America! Wasn’t this supposed to be a democracy?
Through the organs – the press’s eye, the tongue of State, even DoD’s cold and useless fist – it is America herself, the Great Spectator, for whom all puppets dance and yell, kill and die. And not just America – for in 2011, America is bigger than America, not a continent but a planet. International public opinion! The international community! In 2011, anyone anywhere with any kind of education is an American. Race, color, language, citizenship – details, archaic details. Everyone on Twitter: American. The global hive mind is born, and born American.
They hate us for our freedoms!
Or not.
(via Gates of Vienna)
The liberal ideography is one hell of a virus, kids. Even its supposed most serious competition is getting owned.
Medicalization of dissent in neo-theocratic states
Breaking hiatus a day after I announced it is bad form, I know, but I can’t sit on this until April. Luckily for me, I don’t have to actually write anything; the articles speak for themselves.
Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia or sluggish schizophrenia (Russian: вялотекущая шизофрения; vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya) was a category of schizophrenia diagnosed by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union. At the time, Western psychiatry recognized only four types of schizophrenia: catatonic, hebephrenic, paranoid, and simple.
The diagnostic criteria for this fifth category were so vague that it could be applied to virtually any person not suffering from mental function impairment and having interests beyond survival needs. The diagnosis was sometimes applied to dissidents who were not in fact mentally ill, so that they could be forcibly hospitalized in mental institutions and subjected to treatments including powerful antipsychotics and electroconvulsive therapy.
Three tables separated Anders Behring Breivik and psychiatrists Torgeir Husby and Synne Sørheim. The killer’s left arm was constrained by a belt around his stomach, and his feet were fettered. Two prison guards watched over him as he sat for 13 sessions with the psychiatrists.
The two ultimately diagnosed Breivik with paranoid schizophrenic psychosis.
This week Korean-American KPOP songwriter Jenny Hyun had some interesting Twitter comments regarding blacks. It started when black boxer Floyd Mayweather belittled the achivemenets of Asian basketball star Jeremy Lin.
…She has been admitted to a mental hospital – seriously. (For paranoid schizophrenia, of all things. – nyd.)
One night in October 2009, a team of police officers, led by a deputy chief, raided the home of a police officer named Adrian Schoolcraft, and dragged him out of his bed and to the psychiatric emergency room at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. He was held for six days in a locked ward. No judge was involved. There was no hearing.
The decision to take him to the hospital was made solely by armed men who happened to be his superior officers in the Police Department with a vested interest in shutting him up.
For more than a year, Officer Schoolcraft had been collecting information about what appeared to be illegal arrests and manipulation of crime statistics in the 81st Precinct, in Brooklyn. Along the way, he secretly recorded orders from supervisors to lock up people without cause. He also documented cases in which armed robberies were classified as “lost property” cases. A few weeks before he was seized in his home, he met with investigators for the Internal Affairs Bureau and told them about what he had uncovered. He began recording after his bosses accused him of loafing because he was not meeting their goals for arrests and summonses.
Duocodicalism in action
Mangan provides a definition of duocodicalism in action:
those laws which hinder [the globalizing elite] go unenforced, those which serve them are enforced.
Of course, this only applies when the globalizing elite are the ones in charge, as they are in the case of the federal government. One can easily imagine duocodicalism being used to further agendas that would be distinctly distasteful to said elite. Duocodicalism is a tool in the toolbox of the ideologue; like many other tools, it can be used for almost any purpose.
Anarcho-tyranny is the endgame of duocodicalism. Those who support certain tyrants will support the instances of duocodicalism that bring those tyrants closer to power. Duocodicalism can also arise out of honest confusion over the proper role of politics, but that’s another post for another time.
On hate speech
To accept the exercise of power by a government of one’s allies, one must also accept the same exercise by a government of one’s enemies.
To accept the suppression of speech found morally objectionable by a government whose ideology one supports, one must also accept the suppression of speech found morally objectionable by a government whose ideology one does not.
The easiest way to find out which ideology holds power at any given time is to find the one whose adherents support the most suppression of speech. Consider the schoolbook fable of the Puritans: it is said that they protested the lack of religious freedom in England, but established theocracy in their colonies. Better yet, consider National Socialism: they burned books in Nazi Germany, but enlisted the legal aid of the ACLU in America.
It is now said that there is an “international consensus”, backed by the United Nations, that ‘hate speech’ is to be suppressed. What does this say about where power lies?
Connect the dots: Narcissism in America
Due to various interruptions from the strange land of real life, mostly midterms and the transformation of my sleep schedule into something not even remotely worthy of the term ‘schedule’, I have not been able to write a full post recently. Instead, take these quotes and connect the dots. There’s not much I could add here anyway; the point should be clear enough.
If I were to speechify to a conclave of Tea Partyers, “America is the free-est…the most democratic…the best educated and most dynamic country the world has ever known, an example to all mankind,” the assembled would hoot and hooroar and applaud in dizzy exaltation. Here is the soul of the American approach to existence, bottomless self-admiration devoid of knowledge or curiosity, wrapped like a psychic burrito in the patriotism of overwrought middle-schoolers. And there are many, many of them.
…
Americans believe this stuff. There is probably no one in France, and here I include asylums, drains, and morgues, who could be so narcissistically stupid.
Christopher Lasch: (quoting from the Wikipedia summary because I don’t have my copy of the book at hand)
The book proposes that post-war, late-capitalist America, through the effects of “organized kindness” on the traditional family structure, has produced a personality-type consistent with clinical definitions of “pathological narcissism”. This pathology is not akin to everyday narcissism — a hedonistic egoism — but rather a very weak sense of self requiring constant external validation.
The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.
The friend of popular Governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice [faction]. … The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular Governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.
Juggalos: a less theoretical analysis
(Note: This is essentially a more accessible tl;dr of my last post.)
The alt-right blogosphere got juggalos wrong. They are not “decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization”; they are just another subculture, a subculture that happens to be far easier to attack than others, for two reasons: natural opposition to outgroups and the demonization of the white lower class (‘rednecks’) that is pervasive in American culture.
Subcultures exist to solve the problem of alienation, a problem created by the lack of social capital in liberal society. They provide a shared identity for those who cannot acquire one from their environment. However, they are not wholly positive; their existence increases cultural diversity, a key cause of alienation.
It is possible to have the negative effects of subculture without the positive effects. This happens when subcultures fail to develop the sense of shared identity and instead remain nothing more than clusters of individual preferences. Upper- and middle-class subcultures are far more likely to do this, possibly due to the closer adherence of those classes to the ruling ideology, part of which is atomistic individualism, and part of which may be due to the tendency toward isolation caused by the neurotically self-critical and anxious tendencies (‘beta’ in PUA theory) common to those classes.
Contrary to what Mangan said, we are not doomed if our future resembles the juggalos; we are doomed if our future resembles the ultra-individualist hipster neurotics of the middle and upper classes. Juggalos have a shared identity, whereas individualist neurotics, by their very nature, do not, and it appears that that sort of alienation can survive indefinitely.
N-codicalism
After the war, the British wanted the Nazis shot, the Americans wanted them tried, and the Soviets wanted them tried and found guilty. Acodicalism, monocodicalism, duocodicalism; the series flows so smoothly that one must suspect a natural progression, a trip down the stream, cut brutally short by the leering face of an inevitable Buffalo Bill, or perhaps a circle, a Gumb-headed ouroboros eternally eating and excreting itself.
Why a circle? Why even the progression? Duocodicalism, of course, cannot arise without monocodicalism; without a lock, there is no need for a lockpick. And where there’s law, there’s lawyers—not to mention ideologues willing to take any means to their favored end—so one cannot expect a particular instance of monocodicalism to last forever.
The progression from duocodicalism to acodicalism I will admit to much more skepticism about, but duocodicalism appears to be a relatively recent development, so sufficient evidence may not yet exist. There is, however, one thing I do know for sure: when we caught our modern-day Hitler, we out-Britished the British and told ourselves that “justice had been done”.
