A clip of Slavoj Zizek talking about the classic musical The Sound of Music. I need to see the film again but let me think about this for a moment. The film was a Broadway remake, I wonder if there was an evolution of the imagery. A classic carnival persona is Mikhail Bakhtin’s cultural mirror image. Here Zizek claims that the mirror image itself is just a metaphor, it’s a bit of a cheap shot. Because in reality Nazis were impersonating the Jews all along. Look, here is the basic Nazi idea – the Jews want to dominate the world, the are in control of the European politics, music, art, banking, culture, etc. So instead of denouncing the very idea of the cross border domination, the Nazis said that’s exactly what we Germans want to do. We want to forcibly cross-dress as the Jews and dominate all aspects of the European culture and there could not be two nations playing this role at the same time. You see how it becomes easy to reverse engineer Nazis into Jews even in the film. Except Zizek is not telling you that this was always the Nazi ethos to become the Jews and the bucolic agricultural nationalism versus the cosmopolitan industrial, rootless domination was the central stage of the horrible conflicts. And of course Hitler himself being an Austrian from a small beautiful village makes the role reversal complete. Check it out: ►►►read more
From the monthly archives:
February 2010
Evanstonjew left a profound and moving comment on Alen Brill’s blog. By the way of a response. I also think about this “post holocaust” subject a lot. It seems there was this beautifully complex but dysfunctional culture that in many ways paved the way for its own demise. And the post traumatic response was an act of supreme stubbornness (how human), to take the worst dysfunctional aspects of the annihilated culture and kick it up a notch, make it even more dark and hopeless. Except that I don’t think this is a preamble to another Holocaust, this is Holocaust. I must say that I (like Zizek) hold that Gulag was worse than Holocaust, even for the Jews. So we must speak about the Gulag-Holocaust destruction. When the Fridiker said that America is nisht anderesh, he really meant macht do another Auschwitz and Gulag (the tragic acts of his own life that he deliberately repressed).
Lately when I see the herds of the black hat yingelach, I can’t escape the thoughts that they are hopelessly destroyed. If I can borrow a cliche in the Holocaust only the bodies died but for the current generation the souls are extinguished through the crude, inescapable indoctrination. I don’t see a difference from the outright sexual abuse, it kills the souls forever. And yes it is even worse than in the prewar Europe in this respect. I feel an eternal loss about this, it is as if we are forced to relive the Kafkaesque macabre tale.
What is peculiarity mussing from this discussion is the question about God, is he still there, is it all a game? Therefore the pintelle pointillistic reference is much appreciated since it was after all the Jewish post impressionist craft.
The first word that comes to mind about the blogger know as the Rebel Jew is respect. He was a reader, correspondent and participant on my old forum and my only regret is that we never actually met, even though he lives in the neighboring Connecticut. He is also one of the bloggers who have been writing long, distinct and thoughtful posts since the early days of the craft. One of the things I learned from Jaron Lanier is that it takes at least ten years to overcome emotionally internalized ideas, in other words, one can’t speed up the process by using a rational argument. Ideas accepted as identity are not easily or hastily discarded. So its been about ten years really. Thoughts on Judaism – Why I am no longer Chabad.
I don’t do Twitter or Facebook anymore but I keep an eye on selected tweets. Here are some from Alain de Botton:
- “The dream of the modern individualist: to be famous. The dream of the pre-modern collectivist: to help sustain an institution.
- Society continuously introduces us to new works of art and in the process prevents any one of them from assuming due weight in our minds.
- A certain kind of intelligence may be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
- Office life would not be possible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
- There should be a special circle in hell reserved for ‘friends’ who from a love of ‘honesty’ report the mean words of others back to us.
- Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
- Most of ‘wisdom’ boils down to the art of not letting things get to you.
- Few architectural works would benefit most cities more than contemporary versions of the Wailing Wall – the name alone is a relief.
- The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. The issue is concentration, not royalties.
- Authors write things down so as to have to think of them less.
- Writing opens up the otherwise unusual prospect of being violently disliked by strangers & training oneself not to mind.
- Writers have to go on working despite the increasing likelihood that they have already written their most important book.
- Definition of a present: something you can’t get for yourself. As a child, that meant toys. In adulthood: reassurance, sympathy, forgiveness.
- We cannot help but exaggerate our parents: their goodness, evil, significance…
- To be flattered or insulted? ‘I enjoy your tweets much more than your books…”
And now few tweets from Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
- “You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
- Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. Rarer and rarer since middle ages.
- If we are good, it is usually more from lack of opportunity for transgression than from intrinsic virtue.
- The things people apologize to us about are almost never those that have upset us.
- The attraction of the melancholic: sadness has created the room we’re going to take up in their lives.
- Most people write so they can remember things; I write so I can forget them.
- I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
- What they call philosophy, I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; and what they call journalism I call gossip.
- Academics are only useful when they try to be useless, and dangerous when they try to be useful.
- Success is to be in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. The rest comes from loss of control.
- A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than any admirer.
- Most modern technologies are deferred punishment.
- Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a more complicated system he thinks he understands.
- They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.
- Modernity: We created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
- In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”
Those are all pretty good, I though so. But note the two quotes I highlighted, amazingly alike. There is something liberating about “the need to write”, it releases you from the ownership of an idea. A written thought becomes the foundation for the building above while it recedes underground (some call it unconscious). Contrast this with people who take copious notes. I think note taking is a tick, the condition comes from the fear that you don’t have the ownership of an idea and you must write it down to remember, to cage the fleeting bird. A writer moves in the opposite directions, his words are born to reveal the internalized expression, to un-cage the rhyme, and like a child it must find its own unattached path.
Turns out that the name Mustang comes from the Spanish mestengo, meaning stray. The Western mustangs are the wild descendents from the horses brought to America by the Spanish Conquistadors. There an article in Smithsonian describing Melissa Farlow’s work documenting the Mustang herds in the American West. She claims in the 19th century there were about two million Mustangs and just thirty-seven thousand today. Here is a photo essay narrated by Melissa Farlow.
On the subject of The Internet is off-key. The internet as we know it today works to please the advertising oligarchy. This has severe ramification on the publishing priorities. Quantity is favored over quality. The scarping and splogs dominate the internet. Point of purchase is monetized while point of information is not. The link hustlers are favored over the “creative class”. Here are the two noteworthy articles:
This disease is spreading, note what the new AOL CEO formerly of Google is doing with “journalism” – AOL Moves to Build Tech ‘Newsroom of the Future’:
“Rather than merely craft articles and passively post them on the Web, as many newspapers and magazines do, AOL is using software to determine which articles to write and then give journalists up-to-the-minute data on how much traffic those articles generate.”
I have been thinking about Jaron Lanier’s “mob switch” concept. The fundamental component of any big or small clan always includes a designated group or an individual to hate inside and outside of the clan. So any group requires the internalize hate as part of the membership package. This is a big dilemma for me because I believe that the human need to be part of a group is our prime evolutionary instinct. Can you be part of any group without the negative component, without the hate? Perhaps hate and mobs are inseparable. I can’t think of an example that goes against this theory and I am saddened by this. Here is the original quote:
“Humans, like many other species, Lanier says, have a cognitive switch that permits us to be individuals or members of a mob. Once we enter the confines of what Lanier calls a clan, even a virtual clan, it possesses dynamics that appeal to the basest instincts within us. Technology evolves but human nature remains constant. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history because human beings married the newly minted tools of efficient state bureaucracies and industrial slaughter with the dark impulses that have existed since the dawn of the human species
“You become hypersensitive to the pecking order and to your sense of social status,” Lanier said of these virtual clans. “There is almost always the designated loser in your own group and the designated external enemy. There is the enemy below and the enemy afar. There become two classes of disenfranchised people. You enter into a constant obligation to defend your status which is always being contested. It is time-consuming to become a member of one of these things. I see a lot of designs on line that bring this out. There is a recognizable sequence, whether it is pianos, poodles or jihad; you see people forming into these clans. It is playing with fire. There are plenty of examples of evil in human history that did not involve this effect, such as Jack the Ripper, who worked alone. But most of the really bad examples of human behavior in history involve invoking this clan dynamic. No particular sort of person is immune to it. Geeks are no more immune to it than Germans or Russians or Japanese or Mongolians. It is part of our nature. It can be woken up without any leadership structure or politics. It happens. It is part of us. There is a switch inside of us waiting to be turned. And people can learn to manipulate the switch in others.”
Jaron speaks about this in the video interview by Guardian.
The Internet culture is in crisis. Jewish blogs are stuck. A dignified livelihood is a challenge. Why? In one sentence, when a culture becomes derivative, it mines and depletes its own legacy. I started thinking about this topic when I read this paragraph in Jaron Lanier’s new book:
“It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
Marshall McLuhan declared that “medium is the message”. What he meant was that a new form of expression, i.e. alphabet, writing, print, TV, etc., changes our brain wiring, tastes and values so radically that medium itself is the central cultural event. Inevitably at a dawn of every novel form of expression, a new medium is awkwardly used to reprocess the old, the bleak task comparable to translating poetry into a foreign language. This is the DJ stage where the Internet finds itself at the current moment. The old tunes are remixed, republished, relinked to a new beat, literally and figuratively no new music is created. Occasionally a new app is written for the legacy proprietary code instead of a new OS.
On to the Jews cursed with the satirical task of amplifying a culture. Every potential convert to Judaism needs to be aware of these axioms:
- Marshall McLuhan spoke about the “rear view mirror” phenomena or the propensity of any culture to live in a utopia about its past. Jews amplify this tendency in the worst possible way. Most traditional Jewish communities are consumed with intense utopia and the deliberate subterfuge of history.
- A Rabbi is a DJ, never singing in its own voice and forever spinning someone else’s tracks. There is a derivative throwback tendency in every culture but again amplified by the Jews. The tribe castigated to the two thousand years of the survivalist epic. With the rare exceptions (i.e. kabbalah) the innovation is shut down, conformism is bred and encouraged. People who can’t contain or control their creative impulses are eventually expelled from the traditional Jewish communities.
- Every group on the face of the earth is defined by what this group is not. Jaron Lanier calls this the “mob switch”. Once again this is most sensitive component of the traditional Jewish culture. Although the potential converts are not specifically instructed about the importance of the boundary defining hate, eventually to successfully integrate in the communities they would have to internalize the intense feeling of hatred towards other Jewish groups and denominations, towards the declared heretics, goyim, real and imaginary antisemites, etc.
Now let’s compare the three “Jewish problems” to the Internet. The Internet is definitely not a utopian vision of the past. There is strong revolutionary current, especially in the communal rhetoric of the Open Source movement and the Web 2.0 social. Alas, after a decade, a new server side oligarchy emerged to control the scalable bits. Instead of empowering creativity, no longer under a centralized command, there is a deliberate and impoverishing push for the “free”, the collapse of the copyright boundaries, devaluation of the original unpaid authorship under the assault the ad supported aggregators. The DJ culture is absolutely the internet as we know it today. The disastrous anonymous comments culture and the combustible flame wars take the group/mob hate to the unprecedented levels on the Internet.
And what about the Wall St.? The financial services industry dominated by the derivative contracts became the most important part of the American GDP. There is an easy analogy to the Internet (or any derivatives dominated culture). People often complain that the stocks are the trading instruments removed from the real value of a company. An options contract or a credit default swap contract is like a tweet about a comment on a blog post that links to a different newspaper web site. Derivatives are comments removed from a productive culture, they don’t innovate, don’t create value and eventually pop. To slap a Dell label on a product engineered and fabricated in China is like linking to someone else’s content on a popular web site. Our religions, our ability to make a living and our “internet economy”, the trifecta, is overrun by the derivative thinking. We can no longer extract value from comments about the dried up wells and we can no longer destroy the remaining functioning artisan wells. We can no longer condemn people to the indignity of being replaced by the machines or the outsourced slaves. We can’t DJ, quote, link, mashup or re-aggregate our way from this crisis. You can quote me on that.
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This is the best quality and most complete surveillance tape montage about the Dubai assassination produced by Gulf TV.
- They rented a room opposite of the target. Can you just call to a hotel and ask for a specific room? I didn’t know that.
- There was a recorded attempt to hack “reprogram” the entrance lock from the outside. Assume it was a standard card reader.
- The murdered man officially died from blood pressure in his brain to appear as natural death. Can you induce a stroke?
- The murdered man room was locked with a dead bolt and a key chain from the inside. How would you do that?
If this was Mossad it must be considered a spectacular failure for the entire team to get highlighted like that. But this is also the sign of times when everything is recorded at all times. Mossad used the identities of seven Israeli citizens. How would like to wake up and discover that you are on the Interpol wanted list? This seems reckless and irresponsible.
I took some photos today but my heart is not in it, perhaps because I met people on the path who had their dog wearing snow boots. ►►►read more
Church of St Vladimir, Podporozhye, Arkhangelsk region (1757). Photo by Richard Davies
In 2007 Matilda Moreton and Richard Davies retraced the 1902 inspirational trip by the famous Russian artist and illustrator Ivan Bilibin. The result is this wonderful virtual exhibition.
An obviously nifty idea by the Variations on Normal. It solves the problem of hygiene and the pesky paste that never completely squeezes out from the other side of the tube.
I suggest clearly color coding different sides of the tube, i.e. “my side is red and your side is blue”, etc. Still could lead to potential conflicts, as any sharing, because eventually one would have to squeeze at the back of the tube, effectively depleting your partners side of the paste. The cost and the environmental impact of the extra cap might not be economical in the end. But what a fresh idea!
