#429

Don't know how I've suffered them this long, considering how I despise white and gray walls. The miserable--I had not realized how miserable!--gray kitchen is becoming orange. The back hall and half the living room, pale green. The other half and the stairwell, pale blue. Our bedroom and Ezra's office were already yellow and two deep tones of green, respectively. The spare room needs a color, as does my office, though the dozens of art pieces and stickers I've mounted all around are helpful. I may go with many colors. I know I will, actually. 

But that's the last priority. For now, finishing the kitchen is still the thing.

* 

Haven't talked about current events for a minute. It's a grim business, and I can do what I want, I know that--but this blog is not merely a humorist's diary or manifold spontaneous rough essay generator--and though the essays may be serious and historical, it is also not fundamentally the same as the blog's final purpose, which is to stand as something of a record of life experienced in the early blush of the twenty-first century's maturity. And that century is fucking batshit right now. The Things are Happening.

Those great, sweeping spasms history is sometimes seen to make are rippling like perhaps never before. Certainly the frequency is unprecedented, the speed of the thing.

Ok, look. Let's keep this simple. I have, in a previous post, commented on the perfect timing of the terrorist attack on Israel which has developed as it has, with every eye on the planet and the thing's gravity warping reality. The domestic side of that was the particular thrust of that comment, and that is what has played out most predictably, though Speaker Johnson's recent actions bucked the trend and are worth honorable notice. Nevertheless, the public demostrations and the reactions they have provoked at every level of our society are the crux of the matter, and that shit is spinning out of control and veering into the kind of unreason that anticipates martial law. With a dictator in the wings literally base at the ready and demonstrated influence over politics as they are happening, nothing could be more dangerous.

Basically, the soft power instruments leveled at the U.S. as early as 2009 and heavily beginning in 2012 are beginning to look as though their long-term efficacy is accomplished fact. The country may devolve and lose its standing in international affairs as well as its domestic stability and even political cohesion. Tech companies will only accelerate these multipolarizations because cooperation with competing interests will guarantee the kinds of influence and privileges they crave. This will cascade globally. Private security of every description will see booms in every sector as paranoia and uncertainty reign amidst increasingly chaotic and unchecked brigandry, governmental overreach, and prisonification. The nomad may once again rise to prominence in global affairs, realizing Deleuzian prophecy. Meanwhile the climate will collapse and the deaths of hundreds of millions will open terrain, change the tenor of migration, colonization, and land use priorities completely.

The crazy part is, some people's lives won't change at all. They'll just keep going to the store, I guess. If we survive in general, it probably won't even slow population growth that long or even noticeably.

Life do go on. No one knows what time has in store for them. All that I have said could well be baloney.

Baloney! I love that corruption.

*

All I can really do is make art and try to survive. It has worked so far. I shall stay the course. And after all, plants grow in the cracks between massive concrete slabs. Always there is hope. Always there are those hundreds and thousands of seeds spread by each step of the sower in the great field, and only one out every so many millions needs to take root and bloom.

--JL

#372

Man, not to be a downer or inflammatory, but like, it has to be said. Yeah, Israel's doing a genocide, and that's pretty difficult to swallow. Nobody likes that. Nobody wants it to be true. But that's what's happening.

Sure the main dude says it's not a genocide, and sure, the people carrying out the genocide in real time say it's not a genocide. But that's true of every genocide. Even the Nazis didn't do a press conference being all "hey, we've decided once and for all to wipe out every last Jew we can get our hands on. Our goal is the extinction of their race." No. There was a whole process. There's always the justification, and guess what: the justification is always that we have to protect ourselves because these people are a threat to us, and that threat is in the form of their very existence. 

The subject of genocide has fascinated me since I was a little kid, and how could it not. The concept of genocide flies in the face of every idea we espouse in order to justify our existence as a species, yet genocides happen all the fucking time, quiet ones and loud one, little ones and big ones. The death toll of  genocide has little to do with how big and loud it is, incidentally. The genocide happening right now in Pakistan is big and loud because of the players and particulars, not the death count or the methodology.

Typically for me when I'm fascinated by something, I read everything I can find about it. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang, is the case study par excellence in my opinion, a book so complete and unsparing that its production destroyed its author. Ordinary Men, A Long Way Gone, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Long Death, The River of Lost Footsteps, Not on Our Watch, A Human Being Died That Night, Carnage and Culture, The Femicide Machine, First They Killed My Father, Blood and Soil, and Howard Ball's Genocide are the other actual books I have around or have checked out on the subject. It's a pretty grim set of titles. But they've given me as much to think about as whole other shelves of less grim books combined.

*

The thing to remember locally is that the average person thinks there's been like, three big, or "real" genocides. Really, just one (which a lot of people say is fake? I dunno, it's getting longer and longer ago, too), and a small group of others that float around the consciousness, and stuff that shouldn't reallly count, like the kinds of genocides enacted on First Nations and other precolonial American civilizations, or Aboriginal Australians, or the Ainu, or on Māori people, or the African diaspora. I mean, how else was I supposed to have a correct life? Live with these other fuckers? I think not.

The character of a lot of early warfare was genocidal the way chimp bands are genocidal in their warfare. The wiping out of bloodlines is coded deep in our behavioral ancestry. And all warfare is inherently at risk of taking on a genocidal character at outset, no matter how virtuous and noble the principles involved might seem.

So without getting bogged down in stuff like soft or chronic or collateral genocide, let us concentrate on genocide as a corollary to warfare. We begin with the distinction between total war, which is the strategy employed by the Israeli Armed Forces at the moment, and other forms, such as hybrid warfare as employed by the Russian state, and indeed, by Hamas and similar groups. Total warfare has proved a bad matchup against hybrid warfare for the past thirty years, and there are really two main reasons it is still around: because the hardware to wage it exists and the manufacture of that hardware is a massive force in the global economy, and because you don't give much of a fuck what happens to your enemy or the ground they stand on; because all collateral is acceptable on the path to total and unconditional surrender or whatever economic or proxy issue the war was actually fought for, if not over. Military strategists will tell you that they are employing total warfare tactics with the intent of preserving innocent life in the process; this is a lie they are comfortable in telling because it salves their humanity. It is a lie, though. They will say that it ends conflicts before they can escalate; a lie. They will say that their tactical deployments minimize risk for civilians and their own personnell; a half-truth that bites like a lie. 

If you wanted to actually do that, you would employ counter-soft power tactics, make a point of visible and provably resultant humanitarian amelioration and civilian protection, and engage in precision attacks on as many hardpoints and nerve centers as you can by training a large amount of small, efficient, well-equipped surgical strike teams and providing them with next-generation up-to-the-minute communications, adaptive reconnaissance, and tactical analysis.

That would work on every axis that I can think of. That's not what the Israeli government wants, because if it wanted it that it would completely have that plus drone support and god knows what stealth shit I don't even have a clue about. I mean, that's what you'd be seeing. They have the money and the experts. Maybe I know jack-all, but that's my position.

You drop bombs because you want to fuck shit up. Because you've got them and you want to use them. Because you want to show these fuckers that they are fucked if they don't fall in line. And you do it for weeks and months because you want everyone to know that this is how shit is and can't nobody stop you.

Call me a liar.

*

As for the fact that they suffered an attack, as for the hostage component--genocide is all about overwhelming, seismic reactions to grievances invented or legitimate. The operations in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East under the banner of the so-called War on Terror after the 9/11 attacks is an excellent example. The amount of people killed in those attacks and all coalition forces over the course twenty years of war in the Middle East compared to the direct and indirect civilian casualties suffered by the populations on the ground--not to mention the material results of the conflicts vis a vis establishing stability in the region or whatever you wanted people to think you were doing out there--tells you everything you need to know about legitimately aggrieved warfare as it is waged in the modern age.

Sure, the state of Israel has excuses ready to hand, and their state history places them in a unique position re: genocide and ideas about responses to the perpetrations of genocide. The idea that this history makes them immune to genocidal ideations and genocidal intents, that any nation or people's history protects them from becoming genocidal, is nonsense. Countless nations and civilizations have risen and fallen in response to tyrannical regimes or genocidal attempts. Human cultures all around the world have flourished in soil watered with the blood of those killed and exiled. More recently, a modern nation which defined its independence from its mother empire as based on the principles of freedom and humanism enslaved human beings and and did genocide constantly, legally. It's still happening!

What we say, where we came from--it's fucking nothing. What is it that we do?

That's the key bit.

--JL

#368

We all have a reason to go to internet, or anyways, we should. Most people's reason to go online is to find a reason to be online, which many corporations and technologists motivated largely by maximizing the potential of the space to generate capital and influence in powerful, throbbing feedback loops have taken advantage of in just the way one would expect--to do landscape architecture on internet that renders the space a sterile, frictionless conveyance to impulse purchases and the ratcheting of emotionally-driven dialogue into the stratosphere. A droning, monochrome soap opera running in tandem with the purring cash engine feeding publishers of every description and giving everything to the shadow government, feeding on pain and anger and regurgitating more of both, funneling in more and more people to crowd into their immaterial coliseum to purchase ideas, opinions, bread, circuses, feuds, mindsets, a common, neutered language, whatever other fucking bullshit, including unhinged conspiratorial nonsense stitched from whole cloth and anti-semitic science fiction. 

The currency? Why, basically free. You got the juice and a portal and a way to get the signal, you might even think you get the rest for absolutely free. But there is always a charge in this world, starting with the calorie, and on internet you pay in time and attention, which the aforementioned robber barons and slaves-turned-masters realized early on is more valuable than any other resource in the world. Now that, you give away for free, although there is case to be made for the idea that you are, in fact, paying for the privilege to give it away and then have it sold back to you.

Life is rife with such comedies, and was long before internet, but it has been just a thrill ride to see the process take place so quickly, to hear about the old days and the true frontier era as I grew up, to be a part of the first large colonies and explorations in the time of the dot com boom, the puncture, the renaissance, the premodern forms of internet, and then, to have become a worthless old relic typing away into a blog--a fucking blog! lmao--the online equivalent of a typewriter in a derelict old cabin on the stony shore of a frozen lake--in this absolutely poisoned and degraded (and worse, prophecied, planned, and executed) merging of meatspace and cyberspace that even now is undergoing another seismic shift and showing new terrain, outgassing some weird shit as it plays out. 

Well, it is the Third World War. Some cracking and tearing of the norm is to be expected. More precisely, it is the latest stage and the beginning of the third peak of what could currently be termed the Global Centennial War, if one had a mind. 

*

Before Ukraine, which I wrote about and hoped would be over with quickly, I had prayed nothing would break out in Europe in the first place, because the odds were good that they would and it would seal the deal. China re: Hong Kong and Taiwan and the U.S. by proxy, Russia's perfectly effective soft power maneuvers, North Korea and South Korea, tensions sliding up in the Middle East--a broad and engaging stripe of potential energy. A ground war in Europe would close the cordon, and did, and dragged on, and subsequently (with timing so perfect vis a vis the obvious effect on the United States and its election politics that a suspicious man would, well, harbor suspicions) the most globally contentious centennial conflict pops off again, and now, today, it's all basically engaged in a perfect, classic fault line, from northern Ukraine to the South Pacific. The gravity of this line, which was potential and is now smoldering and sparking, pulls everything else in. I say not that it will; it is pulling. We are going for a ride.

*

Anyhow, back in 1996, when it could be optimistically opined that we might not have to deal with any of this kind of fucking horseshit next millenium, I started clicking around internet in order to explore more about the Animorphs books. Of course they got me with books; Scholastic knew what the fuck was up. "Vist the website at..." right on the back-page ads. And I would! Why not? It was in a book!

So I read everything on the site and downloaded and played hours of their little yet robust browser games. I read about other book series, authors, everything that drew my eye on the Scholastic website. And did I want to read more stuff? Well, yes. I'm into that. And it seemed like there was some stuff to read, there on that old internet. It seemed like there was actually more to read, then. There aren't really websites anymore, but there sure used to be. Dozens of the little guys, at least!

*

My reason for going to internet has always been simple: to satisfy my curiosity and explore culture. This very organically led me to play my small roles here and there throughout the twenty years of culture wars birthed in meatspace and tempered, perhaps perfected, in the message board of old. I have seen no real innovation in the deployment of ordinance and the specifics of that ordinance, at any rate; by and large it is the medium that has evolved, or been taken over by it like a cordyceps; the exponentially expanding factors have been area of effect and penetration. The twitterification of national television "news" outlets is a good example of the latter. I knew those Something Awful Buzzfeed motherfuckers had their proof of concept the second I saw a random tweet on a screen behind a newsanchor talking about the tweet. The facebook effect--making the first space online to truly echo in form and function the sparse, corporate, eternally-tweaking, never-changing, smooth-eyeball smooth-brain virtual reality of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash--served to pull in millions upon millions of the uninitiated, like a wave of immigrants to a new world, induced with pleasures and opportunities but in fact there to serve as a resource, to be strip-mined, to be pickpocketed, to be manipulated and tricked and herded like the cattle they regrettably are. 

The weaponization of dangerously alienated and isolated individuals (a common and natural consequence of fundamentally inhuman and hypocritical society, whose schools are the presages and pipelines to its prisons) is an example of collateral damage, fed into and further weaponized by the very systems that created these conditions. Like so much else, it predates the internet--see Richard Wright's Native Son for a compelling narrative exemplifying this--but has been accelerated by its machinations and their interbreeding with the overarching aims of mass media. Roland Barthes' Mythologies is a good book to look at too. Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, while we're listing shit that helps explain how fucked up our situation is. 

Now we have a whole nation under basically a four-point, double-blind hermenutical delusion enchantment. Not for nothing; a binary division makes both sides easy to play against the middle. A chatter war with very real, on-the-ground, in-your-face consequences, and you need look no further than the events of January 6th 2021 to see documentary-style proof. It ends in blood. Sorry to be such a downer about imminent conflict on these grand dramatic scales in this post, but them's the times*. I'm livin' through history just like you, baby. I mentioned acceleration in the last paragraph--an important theme when discussing internet and its whip-fast tentacles. Since this seems to be the post I reccommend all kinds of supplementary texts, and I mentioned documentary-style proof, Andrew Callaghan's work in This Place Rules is everything that I could have personally asked someone to make on the subject. That dude knows his shit and how to wade through it. For being one of the only journalists in America--by virtue of not really being one, plus the benefit of a solid head and a suite of personal qualities that lend themselves to the task--a natural, in other words--I would like to take this opportunity to extend formal appreciations.

*

Before wikipedia, which I look at every day, there were lots of websites just about sharing information, telling stories, making informative stuff people could access. Message boards are still the place for the deep wisdoms, if you can sift through the wreckage and ignore the limpets clinging to the hulls of those great ruined ships. There was this really great mythology website, just top-shelf that I read all the time. There was also a website where a man detailed his experiences and the ins and outs of having sex with dolphins in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a story I love to tell. Eat your heart out, Margaret Lovatt.

The first piece of video pornography on the internet that I ever saw was of what appeared to be a college girl who had a German Shepherd in her tiny dorm room. She let that dog fuck her, dear reader, and my twelve-year old mind, which thought itself hardened by its first season of education at the hands of print smut and jpegs, lay cleaved in twain. I had no concept, even less concept of filming something like that and distributing it. Who is this for? I remember thinking, over and over. Well, plenty of people; in the no-holds-barred, no-one-the-fuck-is-looking days of yore, bestiality porn was crazy prolific. 

Check this out: I had to see what some stupid fucking train tickets cost for some stupid fucking homework. I typed "amtrac" into the search bar by accident. It took me to a website that at first blush looked reasonably like the entrance site to buy tickets for a train; logo, the colors looked right, yada yada. But there were no links or text fields. At least, I thought so, until I saw a little button at the bottom, kind of popping out in yellow and green on that dark blue and white page. It said "Extra". Well, what is extra? Why not find out?

Extra is like seventy popups. Girl sucks goat penis, girl puts a fish or a snake up her vagina, girl fucks dog after dog after dog, and of course, the holy grail and crown jewels, girls take horse cocks. Girl fucks lion was probably fake, gorilla too. But like I said, I go on the internet because I'm curious. I know exactly what a goat penis looks like, and the logistics of getting one in your mouth. I don't know who gets off on seeing a girl put a fish inside her, but I've seen the thing done.

I've seen a lot of things done, on internet. It's not all just reading. And when you've seen stuff like that, you have to know what the fuck else people get up to and--for the love of god!--post where people can look at it. I was a teenager, and I did my job: I made it my business to look at every kind of pornography people made, and think about why they made it. Yes, dear reader, I am not made of stone--I looked at stuff for myself, for the purposes of ejaculation--not the stuff with animals. But that represents only the well-worn comfortable patch close to home, my humble knowings of what I want, which is straightforward and quotidian, with a high production value. Stories are good. Yet in my zeal for discovery, for novelty, for the unimaginable, the psychology and effort of it all, I roamed very far afield indeed. 

Eventually, I had to concede. It's anything. People will fuck anything and get turned on by the idea of turning into anything and fucking anything while it turns into something else. There is no limit. We'd turn into a gas and fuck other gases if we could. We'd let Pyramid Head rip off our whole skins if we were convinved it would get our rocks off like never before, one last time. Thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, have probably already masturbated to that fantasy.

Eventually, I also had to conclude that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, sex stuff is not really creepy or scary or even that strange. Our culture makes even missionary-style for the furtherance of the species a thing of deep and brutal shame, something ugly and dangerous to show and see and know about. But sex is sex. People have a drive, and it is bound up with identity and creativity and embodiment in miltitudinous ways. Mostly, we could stand to leave each other alone about it and have our shit out in the open where it can be a thing of daylight. Also the line between fantasy and reality is generally thick, and the translation from ideal to practical typically fairly modest, and if it has its risks, so does every other human behavior. Even that old missionary can result in penile breakage and vaginal tearing. It's not a safe act, and that statement is manifold--disease, unintended progeny, improbable lighntning strike.

Which brings us to the actual scary shit, which I don't really want to give any power to in this space. That stuff can stay in the dark. The dark is quite good for some things.

*

 

Look. You can't get that far into seriously discussing internet without discussing bestiality, and bestiality-adjacent phenomena. Definitely internet is basically synonymous with pornography, not to say sex crime. But I'll definitely say sex crime; there's a whole TV show been running for decades about just that.

Guess I should say that you know, the complex issue of having sex with animals, having sex with objects you've anthropomorphized, like pillows or hunting bows or the Eiffel Tower, having sex with anyone or anything--all complicated, all brutally simple--is that we are certainly animals, never more animals that around the issue of and in the throes of sex, and to humanize sex, to moralize around it, is equally complicated and can be as easily and as destructively harmful to society as not giving it any thought or effort at all. People should not be demonized no matter how outsized their proclivities, certainly not in a broad stroke based on sharing those proclivities. 

Also I would like to point out that while people wring their hands very publicly about fetishists and drag queens and trans people, hundreds of thousands of women and girls and thousands of men and boys across this continent are very quietly and matter-of-factly being sold into and existing in sexual slavery, which is not really a political hot button issue for some reason, except when it's totally fake. 

*

All that being as it is, as individuals we are the first in the line when it comes to understanding and regulating our own actions, and there is no doubt that actions in the sexual realm carry a certain existential weight. So, we must have our own rules and values. We must set boundaries that matter. Here are mine:

-Don't fuck without consent. 

-Animals basically can't really consent; if they fuck you, to my mind it's basically because you tricked them. Furries are a distinctly human-type-sentient subset of animals and are not the locus of this discussion, but it should be easy to find that if you want it.

-Don't fuck children or teenagers, their consent is not the same as your consent; curiosity, trust, and compliance are distinct from consent and are not replacements for consent. It is much worse than a trick no matter who you think you are or what you tell yourself you're actually doing.

-Don't fuck without consent, even if you need to bleed or draw blood or worse. Guess you could call yourself unlucky, but you're gotta figure out how to get what you need consensually. Hopefully safely and preventatively against infections.

-Again: don't fuck without consent, the more specific, the better, and don't abuse consent by throwing anybody any curveballs en flagrante delicto. 

-Making erotic drawings or generating overtly positive written or filmed portrayals of anything that breaks these rules is a pretty fucked up thing to do too. Using art and the position of the artist to wield power and influence over consent is not consent, and you don't fuck without consent.

Personally I think these are extremely basic and leave room for probably ninety-five percent of the crazy shit I've seen online. If you can't hang with these rules, well, it would be better that we never meet, we shall certainly not fraternize, and don't let me catch you doing your dirt, because probably what I will do is administer a forcible halt. This will very likely involve strong prejudice on my part, and that's just the breaks. 

*

We just finished rewatching the first season of True Detective, so maybe I'm a little nerve-frayed on sex violence and the fucked-up conditions we live under at the moment. 

Didn't think I'd end up talking about that stuff! Any of that stuff. I had no idea, when I fired up the text field, that this would happen. Am I really going to hit that publish button? I guess at this point it'd be dishonest not to.

--JL

*remember how wrong I was about Kanye vs Oprah 2020, though? I could be wrong like that again. We can only pray.