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kendrixtermina · 4 years ago

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(Fe3h discourse incoming) So I'm not sure if this is still around but I remember some people calling characters "racist" due to how they initially view the Almyrans and it just annoys me? If you lived in basically medieval times and all you knew about a group of people was that they invaded your homeland and are good fighters it makes sense you'd be wary about them. The fact that we see them easily discard any initial opinions to work with them in VW shows the opposite and how accepting they are

Part of this does probably come from this purity culture sentiment that there is one obvious right answer that should be apparent to anyone not evil when we’re really all to an extent limited by the knowledge we can access.

This is something I feel strongly about precisely because I know how much I don’t know and how much ppl have been wrong in the past - so much BS is still widely believed these days like Diet culture or counter-evidential beliefs about economy. So that makes me be careful to claim we have the truth now. As my grandfather used to say, “the middle ages will step on us”, that is as long as our time isn’t barbarism free it will come to be considered barbaric times eventually.

In the middle ages people used to give their children mercury and bankrupt themselves as someone might for real medicine. Emotionally to the mammal brain it’s the same. That’s why knowledge is power cause it helps you know the real consequences of your action. Otherwise you get what seems like caring parents wondering if they're harming their children by not doing barbaric stuff like physical beating or fgm. One can notice by oneself that it’s wrong and causes suffering but someone who only believes their own ideas and never takes outside data into account would be either mad or an arrogant jerk. At some point you need to consider outside data unless you can discover all of science and psychology by yourself.

So to put it short no one is immune to propaganda and the closest thing to a cure is self-awareness and self-questioning, no one is born with all the answers; instrict, thinking, emotion and intuition can all lead you astray.

Though the correct word here would be xenophobia. (generic distrust/prejudice about foreigners)

‘Racism’ is a very specific early modernity variant of it with pseudoscience mixed in, or maybe it could be thought of as an ideology meant to keep xenophobic-like distrust going in a mixed society. Normally that sort of prejudice desintegrates as people interact more (a big plot point here actually) - or rather, communication & interaction changes how people define in group and out group, which is ultimately arbitrary. A lot of what is thought of today as countries or races used to be considered wildly different peoples when the reach of communication reached further.

But if you spread some ideology that leads people to be artificially segregated, or indirectly causes that through economic disadvantages, bam, you can keep prejudice alive & well for centuries and whatever institutions you built on it, like colonial resource extraction gigs or political hegemony.

That said tho, certain lines there are definitely written to evoke rl xenophobic comments as people commonly experience them, and to tell people who recognize this & might have charged responses because of their own backstories that their lying eyes deceive them because you like those characters is not good. “Oh but they’re a good person with a bright future” is exactly how this behavior fails to get recognized in real life. So to that extent I’d disagree with you.

At least their past incarnations at the point that they said those lines they were “xenophobes”, that is, fulfilled all criteria of the definition & engaged in typical behavior as people affected by xenophobia experience it.

Hilda, for all her good qualities (and don’t get me wrong I love her to bits) is still sort of a frivolous rich girl. Sylvain for example did take the time to inform himself ‘bout the neighbors (See that lost item that’s info about sreng) though his family also holds a border territory & much depends on its defense. The system isn’t an universal brainwash, the truth is that both system and individual responses matter and dynamically influence each other.

But note that that’s all I’m talking about: Recognition, sober reasonable acknowledgement of bad behavior. You can’t talk about bad behavior if you don’t show anyone doing it and if it was only irredeemable monsters that did it, it wouldn’t make ppl question themselves.

To acknowledge that they acted xenophobically (adverb) isn’t to say that they’re an embodiment of all xenophobia ever (noun) and that you’ve got to hate them now. But as long as they don’t hate at you for liking them ppl affected by xenophobia are allowed to vent & use a story as a projection space for it because that’s how everyone uses stories - the same story can in fact mean different things to people without either being “wrong”

Also, scale. Hilda making one or two not even especially malicious comments is on a whole different level than Ingrid actually cheering for destruction. Neither of them compares to the various unrepentant antagonists who never change their views when confronted with evidence cause it benefits them.

Some of that distinction is lost if you just slap the same label on all and demand they be reacted to the same way, or that ppl add a disclaimer each time they want to talk about a character they like. We don’t make everyone who likes Jeritza say “mass murder is bad” first.

But also context: After all a big plot here is that the system these characters live in encourages and cultivates such attitudes - that’s why the various leader figures you can choose to back all want to change it it different ways.

That’s why Winston in 1984 starts the story very paranoid, repressed & full of violent fantasies, to show the effect the dystopia has on people.

(important point imho, a lot of ppl look at atrocities and judge that human nature is just bad but actually human nature is programmable. Evil can be engineered as much as civilization and education can foster good)

It’s generally the problem with Purity culture (wether it wears a right or left wing hat) that it’s more focussed on applying loaded, out of context labels (which are then treated as static) than constructive solutions focussed on promoting the desired end goals.

The labeling tactic is probably appropriate sometimes (active, unrepentant nazis, that you thereby deprive of big dollar platforms or ad revenue) but no tool/tactic is ever a silver bullet.

tl;Dr I agree with you that labeling/purity culture doesn’t have the right approach to it, but ppl should be able to call a spade a spade and say & respond to depictions of xenophobia because to say otherwise would be tantamount to saying that victims of xenophobia or racism aren’t allowed to have feelings or engage with media.

Obsly the characters can’t be reduced to that & you’re right about that & the importance of context, but if just stating/acknowledging that they at one point fulfilled the criteria for xenophobia feels like bashing to you I’d work on decoupling those emotions to see clearer.

People can have done something wrong at some point & still be interesting people - especially in a media context where they’re as imaginary as their victims, it’s not like you’re giving money to real unrepentant perps.

I’d ease up on real ppl too if they repent simply because then they stop being a problem and solving it so it stops harming RL ppl takes precedent over cathartic punishment that makes you feel good, the goal should be always to stop the harm (at the root, if possible) because it’s intolerable for ppl to be harmed

Or that’s my 2cents anyways.

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kahuladragon · 7 years ago

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Tudor, English and black – and not a slave in sight

From musicians to princes, a new book by historian Miranda Kaufmann opens a window on the hitherto unknown part played by black people in 16th-century England

Within moments of meeting historian Miranda Kaufmann, I learn not to make flippant assumptions about race and history. Here we are in Moorgate, I say. Is it called that because it was a great hub of black Tudor life? “You have to be careful with anything like that,” she winces, “because, for all you know, this was a moor. It’s the same with family names and emblems: if your name was Mr Moore, you’d have the choice between a moorhen or a blackamoor. It wouldn’t necessarily say something about your race.”

Her answer – meticulous, free of bombast, dovetailing memorable details with wider issues – is typical of her first book Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which debunks the idea that slavery was the beginning of Africans’ presence in England, and exploitation and discrimination their only experience. The book takes the form of 10 vivid and wide-ranging true-life stories, sprinkled with dramatic vignettes and nice, chewy details that bring each character to life.

Africans were already known to have likely been living in Roman Britain as soldiers, slaves or even free men and women. But Kaufmann shows that, by Tudor times, they were present at the royal courts of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I, and in the households of Sir Walter Raleigh and William Cecil. The book also shows that black Tudors lived and worked at many levels of society, often far from the sophistication and patronage of court life, from a west African man called Dederi Jaquoah, who spent two years living with an English merchant, to Diego, a sailor who was enslaved by the Spanish in Panama, came to Plymouth and died in Moluccas, having circumnavigated half the globe with Sir Francis Drake.

Kaufmann’s interest in black British history came about almost by accident: she intended to study Tudor sailors’ perceptions of Asia and America for her thesis at Oxford University, but found documents demonstrating the presence of Africans within Britain. “I’d never heard anything about it, despite having studied Tudor history at every level. When I went to the National Archive for the first time, I asked an archivist where to start looking and they were like: ‘Oh well, you won’t find anything about that here.’” Kaufmann kept digging, contacted local record offices and ultimately built up to her book. So why has the existence of black Tudors been unknown, untold and untaught? “History isn’t a solid set of facts,” she replies. “It’s very much about what questions you ask of the past. If you ask different questions, you get different answers. People weren’t asking questions about diversity. Now they are.”

Despite Kaufmann’s research, it is hard to swallow the idea that black people were not treated as extreme anomalies (or worse) in Tudor England. “We need to return to England as it was at the time,” says Kaufmann – “an island nation on the edge of Europe with not much power, a struggling Protestant nation in perpetual danger of being invaded by Spain and being wiped out. It’s about going back to before the English are slave traders, before they’ve got major colonies. The English colonial project only really gets going in the middle of the 17th century.” That said, she does leave a stark question hanging in the air: “How did we go from this period of relative acceptance to becoming the biggest slave traders out there?”

Black Tudors does not make overblown claims about ethnic diversity in England – in her wider research, Kaufmann found around 360 individuals in the period 1500-1640 – but it does weave nonwhite Britons back into the texture of Tudor life. Black Tudors came to England through English trade with Africa; from southern Europe, where there were black (slave) populations in Spain and Portugal, the nations that were then the great colonisers; in the entourages of royals such as Katherine of Aragon and Philip II (who was the husband of Mary I); as merchants or aristocrats; and as the result of English privateering and raids on the Spanish empire. “If you captured a Spanish ship, it would be likely to have some Africans on board,” says Kaufmann. “One prized ship brought in to Bristol had 135. They got shipped back to Spain after being put up in a barn for a week. The authorities didn’t know quite what to do with them.”

Although there was no legislation approving or defining slavery within England, it could hardly have been fun being “the only black person in the village” – such as Cattelena, a woman who lived independently in Almondsbury and whose “most valuable item … was her cow”. Nonetheless, Kaufmann uncovers some impressive lives, such as the sailor John Anthony, who arrived in England on a pirate’s boat; Reasonable Blackman, a Southwark silk weaver; and a salvage diver called Jacques Francis. Kaufmann points to them as “examples of people who are really being valued for their skills. In a later age, you get these portraits of Africans sitting sycophantically in the corner looking up at the main character, but they’re not just these domestic playthings for the aristocracy. They’re working as a seamstress or for a brewer. Even in aristocratic households they are performing tasks – as a porter, like Edward Swarthye, or as a cook – they are doing useful things, they get wages. John Blanke, a royal trumpeter, gets paid twice the average wage of an agricultural labourer and three times that of an average servant. They’re not being whipped or beaten or put in chains or being bought and sold.”

I balk at the names black Tudors were given – Swarthye, Blanke, Blackman, Blacke – and at the idea that trudging out an existence as a Tudor prostitute, like Anne Cobbie, a “tawny Moor” with “soft skin”, is any great win for diversity. But it does seem that black Tudors are no worse off than white ones. At a basic level, they are acknowledged as citizens rather than loathed as outcasts. “It’s enormously significant, given how important religion was, that Africans were being baptised and married and buried within church life. It’s a really significant form of acceptance, particularly the baptism ritual, which states that ‘through baptism you are grafted into the community of God’s holy church’, in which we are all one body.”

Kaufmann says she feels “anxious, because people might not like” her book. “Part of it is the surprise element: people didn’t think there were Africans in Tudor England. There’s this fantasy past where it’s all white – and it wasn’t. It’s ignorance. People just don’t know these histories. Hopefully this research will inspire producers to get multiracial stories on our screens.”

Although she is very generous with her time, Kaufmann has been uneasy, even to the point of seeming dissatisfied, throughout our conversation. She goes cautiously silent when I try to link her concerns to current issues such as Brexit, racism or the rise of populist nationalism. Part of the reason might be wariness at the vicious online treatment meted out to women of expertise when they comment on current affairs or state a fact that goes against philistine fantasies. Earlier this year, the historian Mary Beard was the target of abuse for corroborating an educational film for children which showed a well-to-do black family living under the Roman empire.

This resistance to accepting a black history is not confined to the lower reaches of Twitter. The academic and novelist Sunny Singh has written about director Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk, which erased the presence of Royal Indian Army Services Corp personnel and lascars from south Asia and east Africa working for the British and, on the French side, Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian troops from France’s colonies. The comedian Mark Gatiss was so disturbed by the presence of one black actor in the cast for a Doctor Who time travel episode he was filming that he sent a “very difficult” email to his bosses protesting that “there weren’t any black soldiers in Victoria’s army”. Rattled, he did his own research and discovered that there had indeed been one black soldier there, whereupon he relented.

Despite her work in filling in these historical blanks, Kaufmann laments the scarcity of complete evidence: “I wish they had kept diaries or preserved letters. Much as I’ve pieced together these lives, they’re not satisfying biographies where we know everything – more often, they are snapshots of moments.” Nonetheless, the tide is turning against the myth that England has always been a monoracial, monocultural, monolingual nation. Along with writers such as David Olusoga, Paul Gilroy and Sunny Singh, and institutions such as the University of York, which has launched a project investigating medieval multiculturalism, historians such as Miranda Kaufmann are bringing England to a necessary reckoning with its true history.

Extraordinary lives: some black people in Tudor England

John Blanke, the musician One of the court trumpeters, he was present in the entourage of Henry VII from at least 1507. He performed at both Henry VII’s funeral and Henry VIII’s coronation in 1509.

Jacques Francis, the salvage diver An expert swimmer and diver, he was hired to salvage guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose in 1546. When his Venetian master was accused of theft in Southampton, Francis became the first known African to give evidence in an English court of law.

Diego, the circumnavigator Diego asked to be taken aboard Sir Francis Drake’s ship in Panama in 1572. Diego and Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1577, claiming California for the crown in 1579.

Anne Cobbie, prostitute Cobbie was one of 10 women cited when the owners of the brothel where she worked were brought before the Westminster sessions court in 1626.

Reasonable Blackman, the silk weaver He lived in Southwark around 1579-1592 and had probably arrived from the Netherlands. He had at least three children, but lost two to the plague in 1592.

Mary Fillis, servant The daughter of Fillis of Morisco, a Moroccan basket weaver and shovel-maker, Mary came to London around 1583-4 and became a servant to a merchant. Later she worked for a seamstress from East Smithfield.

Dederi Jaquoah, merchant and prince Jaquoah was the son of King Caddi-biah, ruler of a kingdom in modern Liberia. He arrived in England in 1610 and was baptised in London on New Year’s Day 1611. He spent two years in England with a leading merchant.

Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Miranda Kaufmann is published by Oneworld (£18.99 rrp). To order a copy for £16.14 with free UK p&p, visitguardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

#black history month #history #books #culture #race issues

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clubofinfo · 7 years ago

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Expert: I don’t live in the U.S. any longer. I did, for over forty years, but left for good almost twenty years ago. But I return, often, and I even returned and stayed for a year. I returned again this last week as an invitee of the Buffalo/Niagara Falls Film Festival (more on that below). So, I wanted to talk about the America I found this time through. I changed planes in Washington D.C., at Dulles Airport (yes, named after cold war reactionary John Foster Dulles). I could not but think of that fascist loving arch elitist and racist as I sat there for an interminable few hours. I had a delayed connection to Buffalo. The first thing that strikes one, especially after having just left Gardermoen Airport, Oslo, and Copehagen’s Kastrup airport – both of which, along with Amsterdam’s Schipol airport, are maybe among the easiest and least stressful to use in the world – is the noise and sense of agitation. And what one notices right off, while still in Kastrup, is that the gate for the flight to Dulles is separate from the rest of the gates serving the international terminal. Flights to the U.S. have double the number of security personnel and are quite simply isolated. You are asked to submit to additional searches and are required to fill out additional forms — for what reason is anyone’s guess since as far as I can determine none of the forms are actually used for anything. Anyway, that was OK, I had my triple espresso and chocolate. Kastrup must have even better food than Schiphol. Once on the plane I had a nice young Swede in the seat next to me, a student from Ingmar Bergman’s birthplace island of Faro. The food was dreadful, of course. And I was struck, and this was to become a theme for this journey, with the insane and even delusional amount of packaging that is used. EVERYTHING is wrapped in plastic. In fact, plastic spoons and forks are wrapped in plastic. Plastic wraps plastic wraps plastic. And inside is stale preservative and sugar laden food, designed for long shelf life, and which closely resembles and tastes like…plastic. Landing means security. You must scan your own passport at Dulles. Why? I don’t know. You have to go talk to a passport control officer anyway. Then if you have connecting flights you are funneled into another line, in a hot terminal annex, and scanned again. For me it was the third scan in 12 hours — and I had never left the airports. But then they ran out of plastic tubs and asked we just shove all our iPhones and what not into our carry on bags. And shove them all through the scanner. The young woman at the monitor wasn’t looking at the screen as the bags passed so none of any of this mattered in the least. It was a strange dysfunctional bit of security kabuki. Then more waiting. Only at Dulles you can’t get good food. You can’t get good coffee. You do get a lot of noise, though. Gardermoen is tomb-like in comparison with American airports. But there is another aspect to this. It is true that those rather almost obscenely pleasant Scandinavian airports are servicing a very affluent clientele. U.S. air travel is too, really, only the U.S. today feels increasingly polarized. First class is separate. You actually never see them. They are in lounges provided by the airlines of choice. Business class seems to mean 21st century Wily Lomans. No, it is first class and the rest of us. And the rest are subjected to an increasing battery of security abuses. Take off your shoes? Why? Because one simpleminded patsy tried to ignite his Nikes? ONE GUY? That’s it?? I saw old ladies have to, with some embarrassment, take off their shoes. And then there is the increasingly visible racism of the U.S. I watched when black or Arab workers carried bags or moved carts. I saw so many of those put upon white faces tighten ever so slightly. The animosity is in the air. On the TVs, and there are TVs everywhere in the U.S. Large screens EVERYWHERE. It is the only thing more common than cops. And on TV were endless photos of North Korea and the ‘Rocket Man’, or there were football games. One or the other. Jesus, but football is popular. And there is no other sport in the U.S. as saturated in jingoistic pro war rhetoric and symbol. And I am reminded that this is a game proven to cause irreparable brain damage. That said the, perhaps, hidden dialectic in this most militaristic of sports is the Kaepernick protests, which have spread. Sports always contain within it a kind of potential for such synthesis of contradiction (see Dave Zirin’s recent writing). So mostly the comments one overheard were about football. Or about how fed up people were with that Kim Jung whatshisname…hell, get rid of that fucker. Trump speaking of Nambia. An imaginary country that exists in that private colonial map in his mind. And then, a group of young Christians sat down near me at the gate. They seemed to be focused on ‘the holy spirit’. ‘Oh man’, one girl said, loudly, ‘I felt the holy spirit today’. I could feel it all day, she said, rather too loudly. I looked at her. She was blond, refried, maybe in her late twenties, and wore spandex pants and Rebok trainers and a blue t shirt with some other athletic brand name scrawled across the front of it. She was loud. Oh, and she kept eating M&Ms. A family from maybe India or Bangladesh walked past. They were tired, and had young children. Holy Spirit’s face darkened. She kept speaking on her phone but her voice lowered. The people I saw — those Americans — were all angry, just like the holy spirit girl. Nobody seemed happy. Nobody read. I was reading …Emmanuel Carrere’s bio of Philip K. Dick. A sort of perfect book for 7 hours spent at Dulles. I sat there as Carrere described Dick’s interpretations of Master Eickert’s idios kosmos. Dick battled periods of extreme paranoia. A giant black face in the clouds that watched him. Eventually he simply stopped looking up. I knew the feeling. It was the Dulles domestic terminal. Suddenly everyone felt like an alien, a robotic imposter. A hologram. Deplanning, as they say, in Buffalo, at midnight, is an odd and slightly unsettling experience. Walking down the long corridor to baggage claim I was reading the ads on the walls. One newer one advertised “Aesthetic Vaginal Surgery”, with two Indian doctors in pastel shirts, gold watches, and oddly colored brown suits. Across from them was an ad for “Divorce Lawyer: Legal Assistance, effective and compassionate”. The woman lawyer looked neither, but then looks can be deceiving. Many advertisements for sports, football or hockey. I got to Niagara Falls late. I checked into the franchise hotel reserved for me. In the morning I had awful hotel eggs and toast. The waitress, a sort of late 40s version of the holy spirit girl, spoke in a Marlboro rasp, and asked THREE times did I want bacon or sausage. I said neither, three times. Just eggs. I was already suspect. Around me, without exception, were morbidly obese Americans. Two men wore their cowboy hats on inside while they ate. A younger guy had his hockey stick with him (in its case, mind you) and everyone ate from the all you can eat buffet. It was very popular it seemed. Most of these people came for the Indian Casino (sic) down the block, next to the falls. It is a massive casino. Everything is a franchise. And the food. Again, the food. No wonder America is so miserable. Look at how they eat. It is truly appalling. Niagara Falls, itself, is a wonder, and yet surrounding it is the usual assortment of souvenir shops and fast food vendors. There was a “Daredevil Musuem”, but it had gone out of business. Too bad, I might have enjoyed that bit of American kitsch. The tourist experience is one of absolute horror. I cannot find the words to describe just how spiritually nullifying the spectacle has become. Walk into those souvenir stores and very little is newly produced. All of it is, of course, made overseas. The faces of those working in these shops are portraits of depression. This is the white under-class, the part-time workers and long-term unemployed. They smoke and they are angry. They are ‘right-on-the-edge’. They have crawled out on that psychic ledge and there is no more space and there is no going back. Nobody even pretends to give a shit. Buy a Niagara Falls t shirt, buy a genuine Native American maple syrup figurine, or fucking don’t. We don’t care. Buffalo and Niagara Falls and Cattaraugus taken together is around a million people. The mean average income is half that of New York state overall. The house value is one fifth of New York overall. In other words if you own a home in Buffalo, you can’t give it away. Ancesteral lineage is mostly German and Polish and Irish. There is a sizable Indian and south Asian community, and quite a few recent emigres from Africa. The average age is slightly younger than NYC. There were forty murders in Buffalo last year, down slightly from the previous two years. Rape was up slightly. There is also the Niagara Falls Culinary Institute, which, judging from the photos out front, turns out steam table chefs for the big hotels. Cheerios are manufactured here. Archer Midlands Daniels runs a huge flour factory and it is home to the National Buffalo Wings festival and competition. Once upon a time, Buffalo was a reasonably rich city. And there remain a few of those great Queen Anne revival buildings that are often found in the major cities of the rust belt. The Richardson Olmstead Complex (architect Harry Hobson Richardson, who worked with famed landscape designer Frederik Olmstead, who created Central Park and Golden Gate Park) to create a still rather wonderful neo-Romaneque brick and sandstone mental hospital built in 1862. Beyond that the city is dotted with old turn of the 20th century gilded age (well, the first gilded age) houses, originally the grand homes of the leading industrialists of the time, or the homes of the managers of the factories of those industrialists. But that was all long ago. Buffalo is a microcosim. A micro-ecology, both psychologically and economically, and culturally for the entirety of the U.S. Tourism is driven by notions no longer believed in; the idea of recreation and family vacations. Nobody can afford that. Leisure was always modeled after work. An extension of work. A kind of faux work time. Adrono wrote of leisure: According to the prevailing work ethic, time free of work should be utilized for the recreation of expended labor power. For Adorno, the repetitive nature of alienated labor created a tendency to reproduce that repetitive boredom during times of leisure. And boredom, as he noted, was a sign of objective dullness. And that in turn linked to “political apathy”. Tourism is for the Japanese and the Germans today. Americans go to the Casino. I stood in line at Starbucks, across from the casino, and a young American pair came in. She was maybe thirty but dressed twenty. Halter and cleavage and long tanned legs. Very aerobasized, and he was buffed with a tight t shirt and baseball cap worn backwards. He was lean and athletic but he had that odd graceless gait of the gymnasium body. His face was handsome, chiseled and yet he looked terrified. Of what I do not know. His future or lack of it I suspect. And she radiated desperation. Both were anxious, nervous, and like the two pack a day souvenir vendors, they found themselves out on that ledge. So many white Americans, working class, have taken on a kind of furtive look. The backdrop of the Falls is pure allegory. The rising mist and the 20 bucks a pop boat rides (barely surviving one suspects) feel bereft of energy. Nobody seems to believe what is going on. The natural beauty of the Falls is now surrounded by massive tourist enterprises and commercialism. In a society of mass surveillance, knowing that you are being watched makes you reasonable AND paranoid. A society in which all movements are infiltrated to an almost impossible to imagine degree, the real becomes a fluid concept. Are my emails monitored? Does it matter? In an age when police can and do manufacture evidence, what need is there for monitoring emails or phone conversations? They can just as easily, more easily, make them up. Pilger wrote recently of his visits to the U.S. : Returning to the US, I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. There is plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious one, the “fascist”, but almost none at Trump the symptom and caricature of an enduring system of conquest and extremism. Pilger also noted…. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on 19 September – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual. His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now. The problem with the fixation on Trump, which seems intentional on the part of corporate media, is that it trivializes the crimes of previous administrations. When walking around Niagara Falls and Buffalo I sense that almost all of my fellow citizens no longer believe what they hear, but they also are so terrified of voicing any dissent that they mostly nod in mute agreement. And this is partly about education. The default position for most Americans is one that has been shaped by Hollywood. And this week Rob Reiner announced the formation of something called The Committee to Investigate Russia, on whose board sit prominent neo cons and various reactionary commentators like Max Boot and Molly McKew (former advisor to Mikheil Saakashvili). McKew is sort of the liberals answer to Nikki Haley. A sprung frothing fringe lunatic, in other words. Also David Frum, longstanding arch conservative and supporter, last election, of Hillary Clinton. The now well known Morgan Freemann video was a piece of pure calculated propaganda. And this is why so many Americans feel it best to just keep silent. They haven’t even the beginnings of basic knowledge on these topics to formulate an opinion. There has been a four decade program of keeping the populace uninformed.But Freeman’s text sounds like a Hollywood movie; hell, he even uses screenplay metaphors, so in many places it will be very effective. Cutting across this, however, are a couple of other currents. One is the deeply entrenched and internalized racism of white America. Racism is like an encrusted psychic carbuncle on the collective soul of white culture. Having Morgan Freeman take the token torch from Colin Powell is perfectly predictable. Obama had already done it anyway. The racism of white America has learned to compartmentalize certain *special* black celebrities, often sports figures, while retaining a thoroughly white supremacist belief system. Then there is the other deeply entrenched adoration of militarism. This month also saw the nakedly revisionist Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War. These are grotesque projects of disinformation. But if all you know of the world is what you glean from Hollywood, then most of this will seem quite reasonable and sincere. It is worth noting, too, that Snopes took issue with any criticism of the Committee to Investigate Russia. I digress, but its really well past time to stop referencing Snopes as an impartial observer of anything. Buffalo is like much of the U.S. today. Unemployment is acute, as is poverty. Certain stats jump out at you, like 76% of disabled people live below the Poverty line in western New York state. Numbers mean nothing in unemployment, though, because the long term unemployed are simply not counted. All you have to do is walk around. There is an overriding sense of futility in American society today. And one feels it in a visceral manner when returning here. The looks, the suspicion, the anger. Maybe it is because I live in Norway, but the sense of anger in America feels overwhelming. But so does the sense of smug entitlement. On the long plane ride from Copenhagen to Washington D.C. I read but took some time off to look at a few minutes from various films on offer. A remake of Baywatch, something or other with the insufferable Scarlett Johanson, and, well, it hardly matters because all of it is steeped in self congratulation. And it is all profoundly out of touch with American society. I often wish my remaining friends in the U.S. would just leave. I have certainly never regretted it. It is hard to really understand the ways in which privilege is expressed by mass culture when one lives inside it. The constant onslaught of propaganda, of this unreality, takes a toll. It seeps into your consciousness. It inhabits your grammar and speech and vision. The sound of U.S. society today is blatantly exceptionalist. WE are the best, the most special, unique, and the world follows our lead. People believe this. White America in particular seems to have collectively regressed. There are pockets, obviously, that are outside of this. But too few. And the cocoon of exceptionalism extends to travel, too. A vacation to some tourist resort means you haven’t really left the U.S. There is a sense, really, of a schizophrenic state existing at large. A collective shrinking of basic emotions and feeling. I met some very nice folks in Buffalo, of course. That is really not the point. Even nice (sic) people will feel they have to kill you if its for your own good. Or their own good. Philip K. Dick spent his life fixated on the details of daily life being or seeming to be slightly out of order, slightly askew. He sensed unreality where everyone said reality. He knew the man behind the curtain only hid more curtains and more men. Dick was not a political thinker. His vision of western society was instinctual, anarchic, and personal. For to him the personal was inextricably bound to the collective. He understood that fascism’s first goal is to change the past. He knew the future was not the real goal, only the past. For the past would foretell the future. This is the insight of the paranoid schizophrenic. To understand the New Cold War emerging today, it is necessary to reexamine the original conflict between the United States and the USSR. The present Russia panic follows an entire century of fearmongering and “threat inflation,” dating to the Russian Revolution, that has long served the interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex and security state. It has had little to do with either Russian or American realities, which have been consistently distorted. — Jeremy Kurzmarmov and John Marciano, “The Russians are Coming Again”, Monthly Review, 2017. It is ironic that the only actual cyber attack against a sovereign nation was one launched by the U.S. against Iran in 2008. Which fact is simply *not remembered* by media today. Instead the new security state is amping up rhetoric about Russia which they know is untrue. But what must be remembered here is firstly, the defense industry and U.S. military win even when they lose. Winning is not a hard fact. It is a loose concept. Sustaining budgets, or increasing them, is the first and only goal. And two, psychologically the ruling class is no less desperate and irrational and repressed than the underclass. It is only that Hollywood and corporate telecoms and places such as Clear Channel…that entire apparatus…they control message and they work very hard to reform the past. Jim Mattis and RC McMaster, and Stanley McChrystal…the entire cabal of white male generals were likely moved in to surround Trump once his fundamental incompetence was made clear. They are militarists, and Mattis was the architect of Falujah, and *earned* his nickname. Kelly and McMaster serve as guard dogs, and protectors of the Pentagon agenda. They seem cool, articulate, and the media adore them. Liberals fawn over them. Literally salivate and grovel in adoration. For the most pernicious and most indelible trope in contemporary America is that of military virtue and goodness. The square jawed buzz cut man of action. And in truth, compared to Trump and his family, they ARE efficient. It’s just that efficiency almost certainly serves the metasticizing of western capital to all corners of the globe, and to the protection of US global interests. If you want to know exactly how distracted from material reality most people are, ask a stranger directions somewhere. I can almost guarantee you will get wrong directions, or more likely still, get non directions. People have in general lost the capacity to organize their thoughts into sentences that convey specific material items or instructions. I had to find the theatre for this film festival. I chose to walk. A ten mile walk. Long but not crazy long. I like walking. But asking the man behind the counter at the hotel proved an exercise in futility. The walk was fine, hot, and as it turned out it took me directly through the shuttered refineries of Love Canal. I started this journey to New York by having an airport hotel not make a wake up call. I missed the flight. The young man who *didn’t* make the call had that deer in the headlights glazed look. He made little eye contact. In New York the slightly older young man simply had no words. He tried and finally printed out a google map…which turned out to be wrong…but whatever. The point is that a majority of American citizens cannot tell you how to get from here to there. Literally, I mean, literally they do not have a large enough vocabulary to explain directions nor to describe landmarks. The screen addictions of contemporary western society is related to this degrading of vocabulary and speech. On this trip, besides plastic wrap, the most significant repeated image is that of people staring down at their smart phones. Walking, not walking, wherever, whatever time, most people are addictively punching out simplistic abbreviated messages. The amount of face time today is drastically reduced. I have read no study or any figures, but again, just go outside and walk around. And people have begun to speak as they text. In short non grammatical half sentences. Texting is not really more than simple coded expressions for generic subject positions. Complex science cannot be texted, and there is no poetics associated with it. The rise, over very recent years, of emojis is another sign of how alienated the culture has become. This has been my experience in the U.S. And while its true in Europe too, it is not nearly true to the same degree. Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone wrote of Trump: Trump has not only completely lost his sense of humor, particularly about himself, but he’s a lingual mess. In his current dread of polysyllables – his favorite words include “I,” “Trump,” “very,” “money” and “China” – he makes George W. Bush sound like Vladimir Nabokov. On the page, transcripts of his speaking appearances often look like complete gibberish. “When I did this now I said, I probably, maybe will confuse people, maybe I’ll expand that,” he said to Lester Holt in May, “you know, I’ll lengthen the time because it should be over with, in my opinion.” He also can barely speak anymore, but without a close-up examination it’s impossible to say if this is a neurological problem or just being typically American. As the psychologist Michaelis puts it, one major cause for loss of cognitive function is giving up reading in favor of TV or the Internet, which is basically most people in this country these days. The multiplicity theme applied to internet users (from mainstream popular theorists like Sherry Turkle) sees social media and texting and screen usage as mostly benign if not actually positive, an enhancement of human potential. This is sort of the TED level thinking that glossy magazines promote. But I would argue that the constant fractured and incomplete language of digital communication is both a reflection of and creator of a fractured and increasingly incoherent personality. People check their phones at funerals, at marriages, at almost any public event. But what occurs to me is that people’s compulsive smart phone usage might well continue even if they were only communicating with themselves. If you eliminated a destination for texting, the text-er would continue. That is the pathological aspect of screen usage. It feels like amphetamine driven rats hitting that lever for more drug. The idea, as some have put forward, that texting has invented a new language that is actually very creative, etc., etc., etc., seems nonsense when you wander the streets or malls of America. There are no more depressing places on earth, I don’t think, than suburban America. Synonymous with White America. This is the revenge of white flight on itself. Turkle is correct, however, when she raises the fear that haunts the societies of the West today; the fear that ‘nobody is listening’. There is another aspect here, and that is that screen life, social media, in all of its formats, allows people to create an image by way of deletion and editing. It is, in a sense, a way to edit the past as well as the present. It is hard not to see the drop in literacy in the U.S. and certainly there are ample examples of misspeaking in the political class. Maxine Waters confusing Crimea with Korea (and then having the facts wrong anyway) or Bush thinking Africa was a country, or the dozen or so Trump errors. Geography is not taught in schools today. As I say, ask for directions. In the hotel in which I stayed, in the breakfast area, which serves also as a bar in the evening, there are SEVEN wide screen TVs on the walls. On one wall they are only a foot or so apart. During non sporting hours they are tuned to news channels. The sound is off, but that is no problem as there is close captioned subtitles at the bottom, as well as a constant scroll of news items. The hotel guests are then bombarded during all meals with a constant sound bite onslaught. A recent Zogby poll had 52% of Americans in favor of a preemptive strike against North Korea. Propaganda works best when it is delivered in sound bites. And when all you can understand is sound bites, you will eventually internalize purely authoritarian and fascist values. I wrote a while back on Italian cinema after WW2 and its relation to fascism. The anti fascist strategies, aesthetically and politically, of directors such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Antonioni. And I wrote this… In Italian cinema, after WW2, there were debates around the question of post synching the sound track. Elias Chaluja suggested that post-synchronization was an expression of the dominant class, of its ideology and a way to distance identification, but more, to ‘conquer the screen’. Remember that Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni and a dozen others had signed the Amalfi Manifesto in 1968, protesting government censorship, and monopoly control of distribution, but also the laws concerning post synchronization. Antonioni perhaps above all other film directors, radically reversed trends in how to score films. His films create sound-scapes, for lack of a better word. He, like Pasolini, under duress, fashioned new ways to dub and post synch their films. Which suited both their sensibilities. The anti fascism of both instinctively rejected music cues for narratives. They were out to liberate the screen, not to conquer it. Screen life is now fully conquered, as it were. And it need not be so. If digital screen technology contains any inherent addictive qualities, they could certainly be minimized if they did not exist and develop within an utterly coercive and manipulative exploitive framework. Screen addiction is Capitalist screen addiction. Aesthetic liberation is just as crucial to today’s somnambulant population as is economic liberation. Cultural liberation in other words. The soundtrack to daily life is a very specific tone of voice that is heard across all news outlets and entertainment channels. The voice of the generic talking head as he or she mouth platitudes and empty repetitive cliches in cadences that never vary. It is an endless loop and long ago the content of what is being said became irrelevant. It is ‘that’ sound. And to awaken from it means to first turn it off. The festival itself was poorly attended. They had moved it to a new venue. There was an Afghan vet injured in the war, now legless, who came in a wheelchair. A nice fellow. He joined us at dinner. The discussion turned to Vietnam and I sensed growing tension around the table — especially with the guy who orchestrates the festival. We were all at a bizarre neo-Chinese buffet restaurant (the walls painted a curious flamingo pink, but never mind). I changed the subject. Everyone involved were vets. There is that knee jerk patriotic trope that white Americans can’t escape it seems. In most of the U.S., the Military remains sacrosanct. No matter what. I met three students, all black. And each of them sensed the need for dramatic change in the way the U.S. is run. If anything like socialism is to happen, these young men (all were male and all attended local colleges) will drive that movement. They also desperately wanted to know more, about everything. They hung around after my lecture and we talked for quite a while. They also are eager to leave Buffalo — shock, I know. But their curiosity, and desire for social justice, and for a sense of culture, was genuine and substantial. It is how revolutions slowly begin to form. They asked for reading lists, too. It made the entire five days worth the effort. http://clubof.info/

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thoughtsandsensibilities · 7 years ago

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Buckle up, bitches.

Themes I plan to cover over the next couple of years, of course in addition to my regular cynical observatory posts. This is solely a quick overview of topics floating around in my head at the moment that may do a bit more good on paper. It is in no way a prescriptive list and is liable to change whenever the fuck i feel like it; interests and world outlooks may shift and suddenly I may wake up a pussy and write about increasing corporation taxes to fund welfare...pfft. Don’t worry if nothing interests you yet, as I read more and form more bullshit opinions, the list will grow. Stay tuned! (they are in no sensical order, suck it up)

hard power on the international political stage

corruption and conspiracy (within governments but a focus on supragovernmental dependencies)

religion: its formation and subsequent redundancy. why was it created? the arrogance of man? the need for an explanation? fear of the unknown, of death? to account for a sense of powerlessness?

the concept of god as well as theories on the creation of the universe

the concept of a soul, and the propect of an afterlife. Why was religion made up? (dont bs me about being anti-religious, cos they are all shots in the dark trying to placate the arrogance of man and give meaning).

the moral aspect of feeding gullible, ignorant people a string of lies about a false god (even if you have a religion the idea that millions if not billions around the world are being taught ‘blasphemy’ should piss you off, and you know you are right) vs the benefits that faith has in some peoples lives

climate change (from an environmental and economic perspective)

climate change (political perspective: disparity of impacts, lack of sufficient motivation and consequences of public goods in general),

development of societies throughout history: their cause and philosophy - what characterised success in ancient civilisation

economic and political dependency in a post-colonial world: reference to world systems theory

the occupied and downtrodden India, negative shit that remains and how it will transform

institutions in society eg marriage/family, government, the economy, education, and religion: their role and creation

terrorism in the modern world and how it can be explained by a constructivist understanding

my issue with the USA: how the world would be better off without it

US foreign policy: a monkey with rabies could do a better job

dictators through history

Cambodian genocide, the Holocaust and cases of ethnic cleansing due to a superiority complex

Rwandan and Somalian genocides - how did we fuck up so badly?

top 5 champions and cunts through history: who did the most long term good/damage to human development + what was it about them that made them so great (yes, the evil ones were great)

top 5 champions and cunts over the last 100yrs (non-dictators): how we are still cleaning up their pile of shit + what was it about them that made them so influential (have more personality info on recent individuals)

humanitarian intervention: necessary, evil or necessary evil. RoP??

China: from copper to gold then to lead... what happened here yo? (pre-1850)

China in the last century: phoenix from the ashes of famine and turmoil... what happened here yo? (post-1850)

Focus on social and economic reforms in China: Mau and the swinging 60s in China (the peak of my wit folks, if you got it then played, if not then thank fuck i am here and wait for the post you dumbass)... what happened here yo?

concepts of self and metaphysics: yes we are going to go there...

the development trap: economic stagnation causes and cures

what the fuck is happening in the middle east and why is it so?

cold war: what was going on behind the scenes? teleconnections?

residual effects of the cold war - what kind of power dynamic did it leave in its wake

analysis of global governance - polarity of power

globalisation: everything about it - I see it as the dominant force shaping the c.20th

behavioural science - the role of parenting and experiences vs the role of the genotype

free market economy ideas - why they came about, a bit on their application in a modern macroeconomic context and a contrast to Keynesian and neoliberal schools of thought

the issue with aid - reincarnation of western imperialism

the hegemony of western powers

issues with corruption in the WB, IMF, WTO, UN, OECD + national foreign aid packets (remember 90s Malaysia Dam)

the new world order: my take on the hypothesised world government, reasons for existing

control of financial markets by NWO since 500AD

control of wars and central banking by NWO

are you sure about the NWO and why if they didnt exist at some point, the need to establish such an organisation would negate any doubt.

the analysis of and comparison between economic reforms in Central and South America and the corresponding economic impacts

MI6, CIA, Mossad, KGB... hmmm somethings fishy here boss

putin, putin, putin, putin, putin. the man, the myth, the legend. his story and the story of russian oil.

the oil market since 2012, russian economic collapse as wel as OPEC struggles

medicine through time - Hypocrates, Galen, Vesuvius, Pasteur, Koch... etc.

Nazi Germany: how?!?! again specific analysis of hitler’s character

the concept of communication and globalisation when applied to ancient civilisations

sport in today's commercialised world - it has lost all its appeal for me.

British government - the horrible history! would be interesting to engage with the culture of laissez-faire in a conservative government

look at the formation of the first health service in 1948, what led to that point. universal suffrage? growth of moral responsibility? pussies.

how dumb and undemocratic American politics is - you will be shocked (gerrymandering, vote exclusion, state voting, Russian involvement). get your fat ass down from high horse you fuckup of a country. remember you are only where you are cos you were a pussy in both wars, not standing up to tyranny and then basically shorting the world economy. you were nothing until a huge influx of investment built up your tertiary and quarternary sectors... just saying.

why the fat people of America voted the cunt Trump into the Oval: right place right time? blame isis? blame terrorism? blame fear? blame bigotry?

the future of consumer tech as i see it

my opinion of Europe and the Euro - dead af.

the French revolution of 1789: why do i think it is important in the context of world history

the aftermaths and culture shocks of post-war periods

Margaret Thatcher and her glorious work moving Britain out of the evil clutches of socialism: why she was right and lefties are soft dummies

colonialism through the c.18th and c.19th

cost cutting in the public sector... just give me 25yrs and i will have costs down 50%. 5 election cycles... oh well - the issue of government inefficiency and political inertia

why an authoritarian regime may be necessary in the developmental stages of a country

terms of trade fucking the little guys: global bully tactics...

why care about animals, or the environment... can we not just adjust and figure out a solution if and when shit hits the fan?

the art of persuasion and likeability

advertising - are you selling a product or a brand? a feeling or a culture?

the law - origins? are there big disparities between countries? simple moral code

tax law? overcomplicated, how tax gets avoided

criminality across the world, who controls drugs trade

accusations of hard drug trade being facilitated by MI6 for political and monetary control - up to 60% of cocaine and opium coming into the UK during c.20th was assisted by individuals within the government through MI6. CIA and cocaine during second half of centrury.

cannabis culture and historical legal status

cannabis medical uses... you will be surprised

cannabis legalisation... 420420420420420 - why it is the way the world is moving? why the drug was illegal in the first place when it is a softer substitute to alcohol and why it has remained so? subtextual racism, corrupt political parties, big pharma lobbying, UK is governed by old money with backwards, conservative ideas.

intelligence - what causes it and can you practise to become smarter?investigation into the theory that length and number of neurones dictating intelligence

the power of the mind: the sectors of the brain, ‘mind over matter’

natural aptitude: be that physical or mental - why are you good at certain things and not others?

theory of evolution... my thoughts on the theory and its disappointing reception within the scientific community

the solar system - stars and their formation

big bang theory, string theory, n theory, relativity and special relativity

the concept of infinity and its application

the theory of multiple dimensions running on adjacent temporal pathways

ancient romans and greeks - their forms government (king, democracy, republic, empire)

the agriculturalisation of society - ancient egypt, ancient mayans - benefits but also costs

the agricultural and industrial revolutions in Britain and Europe.

the british empire at its peak

why cunt USA became dominant superpower - political hegemony

why cunt USA became economic giant after WWII

why the US is the cause of a majority of issues facing the world today

the dark ages and the black death

early transcontinental trade - silk road

ottoman empire - these guys are underrated in terms of academic and cultural interest, no longer!

moguls and Ghengis Khan - probably one of the scariest and most fearsome dudes to ever walk this earth. a born fighter. prompted the construction of the GW. kinda my hero.

the physical formation of the earth - Pangea, astroid? Yellowstone, oh shit! a few wacky theories including magnetism, the moon, Jupiter's moons

extraterrestrial life. we know it is there. no way for it not to be.

eastern religions - polytheist, emphasis on connection with supernatural, more spiritual

what made a religion popular around its inception

how does religion maintain following? what is it about feeling part of something bigger than yourself, something intangible yet set firmly in reality...

qu’ran - the most violent of all scripture or just repeated misinterpretation? it is an interesting line of enquiry, and this accumulated knowledge squashed a surprising amount of misinformed opinions i have encountered over the past few years; of particular relevance now.

the UN millennium development goals failure + general lack of altrustic tendencies as a society - why are we such dicks to our fellow human beings and strategies to reduce the level of dickishness.

#plan #buckle up

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