Sunday, January 20, 2013

rad ain't cool

Allow me to raise a toast to this blog's impotence. That's my real name up there. I made a bet that I'd be a complete non-threat to the empire and so far I'm winning. Of course, they're not always good judges of threats. Joe McCarthy, for example...

Small sample size but the dot dot dot approach works for me. I used it for the last post to help me traverse the backs and forths of a dialectic but it matched up so well with my  general tangentiality and inability to navigate the subtle differences between "(___)" and ";" and "--" and "," and "anyway" as tangent markers that I'm going with it here and maybe later...

Speaking of my lack of threateningness, the reason my devastating arguments have failed  to turn my facebook friends into weapons against the state are as follows...

There are infinitely many true facts. What matters is which ones you focus on. In a crowded enough room, the background decibel level is higher than any particular speaker's. It's what you tune in on that matters. Your brain can block out the noise and find a lecturer's relatively low decibel voice, for example. Similarly, a plumber experiences a house tour differently than a painter does. They see what they're looking for. My bulletproof arguments are blocked out similarly. What can I do with this information?, they're thinking. What use-value does it offer me? None? Ok, on to the post about what that other friend ate for breakfast...

And about that "what to do with it?" part. A person trained in the arts of rationality may well take a statement that runs counter to most of what they believe as a challenge or a problem, something that needs to be dismissed with argument or incorporated into their belief system with argument. For most, though, the ability to incorporate or synthesize or disprove or weigh competing truth claims against each other is as non-existent as my ability to crochet. They have no use for that information...

That information also runs counter to almost everything they've ever heard. Like I've said before, propaganda doesn't win on quality, it wins on quantity...

And if they believed it or entertained it for a second, they'd be castigated by the authority figures in their head and everyone they know...

The reason I can do it, the only reason, is that I know I can win the arguments. You really need to know because the price for losing is steep. I knew long before I was willing to say it. Then I did, and realized I could handle it...

The more radical the argument, the more it undercuts entire worldviews, economic-cultural systems, the more it discredits and humanizes heroes, the more certain you have to be to say it...

Do you want stand outside the rest of the humans, judging them, exposing their flaws and arousing their anger? Do you want to be judged and mischaracterized and hated and excluded from polite society? Then become a radical... 

And, flashing back to that last post, did you notice how neatly how I framed myself just now? The good people do this, the bad people do that... 

As for "that information" mentioned above, by which I implied something "radical," well,  how about argumentum ad Hitlerium?, about which I recently responded to someone on that book...

The relation between the set "dictators" and the set "presidents" is not like that between "Darth" and "Luke" or "doctor" and "drug dealer." It's more like the relation between "Hollywood actors" and "Broadway actors." The vast majority of the job is the same. And so when people who fully accept that Hollywood actors get paid to pretend they're someone they're not paint Broadway actors as belonging to a radically different category, that's when DiCaprio v. (insert Broadway actor) comps become valid, IMO. It doesn't have to mean Obama shares the same psychopathology or whatever, just that he oversees a vast state apparatus that regularly has people killed for reasons and in ways that wouldn't be considered ethically acceptable if a non-state actor did it. The state is psychopathic and Obama is the head of state. He has personally been the driving force behind lots of its death dealing, too. As opposed to those who make Hitler comps to cast Obama as un-American, impure, a blight, and that, I use it to try to cut through the above-described category denial. In his defense, though, Hitler did at least work to enhance basic social services and infrastructure. Some of those late Roman emperors whose military adventurism left the Roman economy in tatters would admittedly be more accurate.

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