"To live is to war with trolls." -- Ibsen
Anthropologists tell us that primitive cultures believed art had supernatural properties. Prehistoric tribes thought that striking a drawing of an animal on a cave wall would give them luck in the hunt.
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| Diorama from the Field Museum in Chicago |
Apotropaic images were believed to contain protective magic. Ancient Egyptians believed that images had the power to connect them with the gods, and that carvings in tombs would come alive in the afterlife.
They also believed that a person would be destroyed if his cartouche was obliterated.
It's a measure of the lasting power and mystery of art that even in modern times, superstitious and ignorant people continue to believe that destroying an image will obliterate their enemies.
Moron destroying a painting of Lord Balfour in Cambridge.
The epidemic of primitive brutes fearful of art's magic seems to have spread from
the deserts of Syria to the learned halls of Cambridge.%20(800x422).jpeg)
84 comments:
We could think of the making of art as a fashioning of a compass that points towards the North Star of meaning, each work a tiny sparkle reflection of that that is beyond us. Or the base of a triangle let's say possessing its own mysterious summit and this being a fractal like a Sierpinski triangle of the hierarchical structure of nature itself drawing together up, and up, and up, towards the ineffable highest oneness. To use a different language, the making of art is an act of worship, of self sacrifice to the unseen, to the sacred, to God.
The ideological goons, in their deluded belief in the sovereignty of the self (of identity, of will) see the defiling of a work of art as a breaking of a hierarchical triangle and this act therefore contributing to the deconstruction of the entire pyramid they are told enslaves them. Notice they never touch the post-modern stuff...
Even worse. The shithead with the sledgehammer is doing an ad.
Them destroying that one rose the price of the other ones they were selling in the black market.
chris bennett-- you raise a fascinating point about post-modern art and the motives of art vandals.
In truth, there have been a few prominent acts of vandalism against modern paintings but their motives seem to be of a different character.
A mentally disturbed woman named Carmen Tisch pulled her pants down at the Clyfford Still Museum to rub her naked buttocks against a $30 million "masterpiece" called "1957-J no.2". In another instance, a security guard at the St. Louis Art Museum vandalized a large Roy Lichtenstein painting, using a felt tip pen to write a romantic message with a felt tip pen. (He wrote to a girlfriend, "I love you Tushee. Love, Buns. Reggie + Crystal 1/26/91."). I always suspected that these people were secretly on the payroll of Kev Ferrara but I could never prove it.
Anyway, I like your point that art with meaning and content attracts a different type of vandal-- "ideological goons" as you put it, who are targeting the meaning itself. The different motives for vandalizing different categories of art are certainly worthy of serious study. In my view, the pathetic and misguided ideological types are far more culpable than the merely mentally ill.
Mort-- How true. Those monsters were really torn between destroying art for allah and enriching themselves by selling it on the black market.
In my view, the pathetic and misguided ideological types are far more culpable than the merely mentally ill.
If a shepherd leads his flock off a cliff, would you say it was the sheep that were suicidal?
We need to come to grips with the fact that too many young people are being taught the morals of barbarians by resentful and ignorant idiots who have - somehow - found stations of undue influence.
And maybe worse, we must come to grips with the idea that there is a certain segment of the population that will believe anything they are told, so long as it drives their negative emotions, flatters them that they are informed and moral, and comes from an "authoritative source".
Which is to say, it is the Demagogues who are to blame and the influence networks that elevate them. And it is those who allow the proliferation of such influence networks in higher education, lower education, and in media who share responsibility. And equal scorn should be heaped on those who refuse to punish the sociopathic narcissists that believe and then robotically obey demagogues and then willfully vandalize or "deplatform" western artistic objects, whether they are "politically correct" to the snarling self-righteous Maoists-cum-Taliban among us or not.
"A mentally disturbed woman (...) at the Clyfford Still Museum (rubbed her) buttocks against (...) "1957-J no.2". (A) security guard at the St. Louis Art Museum vandalized a large Roy Lichtenstein painting, using a felt tip pen (...) I always suspected that these people were secretly on the payroll of Kev Ferrara (...)"
Are you trying to vandalize my reputation in turn?
I would never touch a creative work by anybody for the purpose of destructively "making a statement"... about anything or anyone.
Never.
(...) I always suspected that these people were secretly on the payroll of Kev Ferrara (...)"
I think this was just a friendly jibe by Mr. Apatoff
The destruction of this painting reminds me of the pulling down and melting of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, except the latter was done with government approval. Many people will say they disapprove of destroying works of art but will make an exception if they don't like the person depicted by the work in question — which is akin to when people say, "I believe in freedom of speech, just not that speech." Everything before the "but" in such protestations can be discarded.
Many people will say they disapprove of destroying works of art but will make an exception if they don't like the person depicted by the work in question — which is akin to when people say, "I believe in freedom of speech, just not that speech." Everything before the "but" in such protestations can be discarded.<\b>
A corollary here would be those that disapprove of the destruction of art, but also insist on a very particular definition of art.
?
Unless you have a definitional understanding of what something is you have no means of knowing when it is being destroyed.
Seg wrote: "'I believe in freedom of speech, just not that speech.' Everything before the 'but' in such protestations can be discarded."
We've learned from 233 years of hard experience administering the First Amendment that "just not that speech" is unavoidable. We've figured out that we can't allow people to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. We've decided people aren't free to tell a bank clerk, "I'm wearing a bomb and I'll blow up this bank unless you turn over the money." Our definition of "free speech" doesn't include putting instructions on Facebook on how to poison the town's water supply. Then there's child porn. Telling police there's an armed hostage situation at your friend's house as a funny joke. If the US had not learned to be practical in thousands of legal cases involving the abstract ideal of free speech, society would have collapsed 100 years ago. Supreme Court Justice Jackson (wisely) said, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact."
Once we've established that "Free Speech" is not a universal absolute, the hard work begins: drawing a line that permits as much free speech as possible, even if that speech makes rich and powerful people uncomfortable, or costs money, or exposes flaws that make a nation look ridiculous or worse.
Finally, I think the Robert E Lee statue in Charlottesville is not a sympathetic case for free speech. We've been talking here about art and private speech, which is a little different from a public statue on public land, cared for with tax dollars as a symbol of public values. All three branches of government (legislative, executive and judicial) were actively involved over several years in public deliberations about what to do with that symbol. The Lee sculpture and several other sculptures (including Stone Mountain in Georgia) were put in place in the early 20th century as a political statement that, no matter what the Constitution says, and no matter who won the Civil War, "uppity negroes" better stay in their place. A century later people figured out there are other important Constitutional protections besides free speech.
David Apatoff wrote: <<< The Lee sculpture and several other sculptures (including Stone Mountain in Georgia) were put in place in the early 20th century as a political statement that, no matter what the Constitution says, and no matter who won the Civil War, "uppity negroes" better stay in their place. >>>
Really, that was the reason they pulled down the Lewis and Clark statue?
The narratives you people lap up and spit out! Black and White people used to sit together under those statues and eat lunch. It was part of the community, part of history. The only people who said differently were the activists, who then poised everything by making a stink in public.
Here's the wiki information on the guy who commissioned and sponsored the statue, Paul Goodloe McIntire.
"McIntire was a generous philanthropist. Virginia historian Virginius Dabney notes that he gave nearly $750,000 to the University of Virginia in named gifts, in addition to gifts to the city of Charlottesville and other anonymous donations, and that by 1942 he had given away so much of his fortune that he "was struggling to live within his annuity of $6,000."[3] He is best remembered for his $200,000 gift establishing a school of commerce and economics, today the McIntire School of Commerce, in 1921.[4]
One of McIntire's most notable contributions to UVa was the endowment of the chair of Fine Arts, with the explicit goal of enriching the Charlottesville cultural experience. While a professorship of fine arts had been part of Jefferson's original plan for the University, no provision was made for a faculty of Fine Arts until McIntire's 1919 gift of $155,000 endowed the chair. He wrote to then-President Edwin Alderman that he hoped that "the University will see its way clear to offer many lectures upon the subject of art and music, so that the people will appreciate more than ever before that the University belongs to them; and that it exists for them."[5] The McIntire Department of Music and the McIntire Department of Art were subsequently named in recognition of his gift.
Another of McIntire's contributions to the University was the McIntire Amphitheatre. At the time only the seventh Greek-style outdoor theatre in the United States,[6] the theatre, established with a $120,000 gift in 1921, was intended as an outdoor performance space.[7] He also donated $50,000 toward a new building for the University Hospital in 1924, a 1932 gift of $75,000 for the study of psychiatry, $100,000 for cancer research; $47,500 for the purchase of Pantops Farm, the financing of a concert series in Old Cabell Hall, the gift of a rare books collection to the library, and nearly 500 works of art to the University of Virginia Art Museum.[8] He also financed a set of four public sculptures, George Rogers Clark, Thomas Jonathan Jackson, Robert Edward Lee, and Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, through the National Sculpture Society.[9] All four of these sculptures were removed in July 2021.
McIntire was a recipient of the French Legion of Honor in 1929 for his founding of a children's tuberculosis hospital in France for refugees from the German-occupied north.
The same applies to free speech. Many would not agree that the act of spending money to impact elections constitutes protected speech, but this is US law and reality. Likewise, someone painting over graffitti in order to clean up some neighbourhood has yet to be examplified as an act of art vandalism in a Warring With Trolls-post.
He who has the power, makes the laws.
"A corollary here would be those that disapprove of the destruction of art, but also insist on a very particular definition of art."
If you have an argument for why Art should not be poetic and aesthetic, or is not - that Art in fact has a nature wholly apart from its poetic and aesthetic aspects that ultimately defines it more crisply as a unique human endeavor - I'm all ears.
Maybe Arthur Danto is your hero? He famously defined Art as "the transfiguration of the commonplace." The upshot being; so long as the ham sandwich is on a pedestal in a gallery, the venue transmogrifies the bread and meat. And Voila! - the ham sandwich becomes (by the power invested in the religion of words) ART! (And can now be praised as fascinating and 'important' and used as a tax scam by the wealthy.)
David wrote: We've figured out that we can't allow people to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
The cliched example of "yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" comes from a Supreme Court case which landed a man in prison for distributing a pamphlet in opposition to the draft during World War I. This disgraceful ruling was later overturned. The verbiage about "yelling 'Fire!" was never even binding law, as there are scenarios in which it is perfectly reasonable for someone to do so (such as the theater actually being on fire, or the person even mistakenly believing it to be so).
Specific threats of violence, or speech intended or likely to incite violence against specific individuals or groups, is the point at which the line ought to be drawn, on the principle that if doing something would be in violation of the person and property of another human being, you are not within your rights to threaten doing it, or to encourage others to do it. Of course, there are people who tease out the meaning of "incitement to violence," and even "violence," to include "anything that makes me uncomfortable" or "anything with which I disagree."
In any event, I was not suggesting that the Robert E. Lee statue is a case for free speech; my comments on the latter were only to point out the parallels of people arguing for a certain principle until their own sensibilities are offended by its universal application — as you were quick to demonstrate. But since you brought it up, oughtn't Lee to be low on any list of prominent southerners to represent the pro-slavery cause in a monument? His views (and behavior) were nuanced, but he made very clear in private correspondence that he believed slavery was evil and should eventually be abolished. One could argue persuasively that Lee was more progressive on this issue than Washington, Jefferson and even Lincoln, who had, in an attempt to preserve the union, proposed a Constitutional amendment to forever enshrine slavery.
But enough of that. I find it very tiresome when people of today wag their fingers at men who lived hundreds of years ago because the latter didn't live up to the enlightened moral standards of the former. This is our history, the good and the bad parts. Hiding it out of sight, or, even worse, re-writing it (as in the case of Netflix and its black Vikings, etc.) is contributing to the collective enstupidation of successive generations of Americans.
All of which is to say: Lord Balfour might have deserved a knifing when he was alive, but even the First Amendment would not have protected my right to say it then. Just the same, Balfour lived and did important things, and the painting of him is a record of that (in addition to being the work of a capable artist which has value independent of its subject) and ought not be cut to ribbons. Same goes for the statue of Lee.
Anonymous wrote: "The narratives you people lap up and spit out! Black and White people used to sit together under those statues and eat lunch. It was part of the community, part of history. The only people who said differently were the activists, who then poised everything by making a stink in public."
I'm not sure I can speak for "you people" but here's my personal response:
It sounds like Paul Goodloe McIntire was quite a philanthropist, so it's a good thing they didn't melt down the University of Virgina. He was also an outspoken racist and segregationist who razed homes of black people to create a public park with a statue of a confederate hero. To the very end, McIntire was an unrepentant supporter of Jim Crow laws. If "Black and White people used to sit together under those statues and eat lunch," they must've timed their lunches to avoid the Ku klux klan rallies there. Those rallies continued to our era, when rallies at the Lee statue by the Klan and Neo-Nazis sometimes turned violent (which is part of the reason the local government decided to do away with it).
James Venable, the patriarch of the family that owned stone mountain (another confederate monument commissioned around the same time as the Lee sculpture) proclaimed, "I'm no racist" but he was also the Imperial Wizard of the National Knights of the Klan and wrote a book ("Choose Your Side") praising Hitler and attacking Jews as "a kind of cattle." He commended James Earl Ray for assassinating Martin Luther King, saying Ray "done the world a favor by killing that nigger." So let's just acknowledge that sometimes it's a little difficult for people to recognize their own biases.
It's funny, if you look at an issue of The Saturday Evening Post from the year the Lee statue was commissioned, you'll see it is a far more intelligent magazine, with far more text, assuming a far more literate audience, than any popular magazine today. Yet at the same time, you couldn't go ten pages without encountering a completely gratuitous racist comment. It's so difficult to reconcile the two.
<>>
He purchased those houses he razed, you manipulator. You make it sound like he bulldozed them in the night while they were occupied by black folk.
Yes, Jim crow was active during McIntyre's time. Had you lived then, you would have probably been in favor of it because you would have been in culture shock too, just like everybody else. But would you have spent your own money to build a beautiful park for blacks as McIntire did? (Desegregated in the 1960s, more than half a century ago.) Read the speeches given when those statues were dedicated back in the day. You won't find any racism at all. Why not if everybody then was so racist?
Everything is simple in retrospect. To simple people. I bet you don't live a country mile from a lower class black person right now. But I bet you tip them nice when they wait on you.
Yes, the KKK was still around in the 1950s and 1960s. But Johnson did a good job putting them down. But you make it sound like Klan rallies were happening hourly around the Lee statue just prior to it being taken down? Shows your dishonesty. I worked near Broadstreet doing graphics for architects and law firms and then on Meade in computer graphics. Black and white people and people of all races did eat together under or walk around those statues because I was one of those people. There wasn't a problem. They were just historical statues. I saw only a handful of Klan rallies my entire time there (20 yrs), and most of the time it was only 20 people. The Klan is tiny now and has been tiny for decades. I saw one big rally of around 100 people once in 20 years and we had fair warning they were coming and bood them mercilessly. Remember that all of 300 actual Klansmen showed up to protest the statue's removal with national exposure (I was gone by then). The exaggeration of everything is crazy now because the news desperately wants viewers and racism hooks people.
The disfigurement of this painting occured entirely because of its arrangement in the public space and discourse. The craft of the piece is irrelevant, its function as agitpro was far greater than its form, its mimetic qualities and documentary value. It was a ham sandwich on display until somebody decided to eat it. Now only crumbs remain, and its more valuable as Art than ever.
(The other) Anonymous wrote: "The disfigurement of this painting occured entirely because of its arrangement in the public space and discourse. The craft of the piece is irrelevant..."
In an open and civil society, there are many possible responses to a work of art with which you disagree. If you had any talent you could paint an opposing painting or write an opposing book or essay. If you were intelligent and articulate, you could petition Cambridge or write a letter to the newspaper or seek the attention of your political representatives. If you had developed resources you could file a lawsuit. But if you lacked talent or intellect or resources, you could resort to a can of spray paint and razor blade to go after the nearest thing of value that you could find. This is the act of a child who learned history from TikTok, and who has been socialized on Facebook to believe that their personal moral vision is superior to everyone else's.
"The disfigurement of this painting occured entirely because of its arrangement in the public space and discourse. The craft of the piece is irrelevant, its function as agitpro was far greater than its form, its mimetic qualities and documentary value. It was a ham sandwich on display until somebody decided to eat it. Now only crumbs remain, and its more valuable as Art than ever."
Occurrence itself is patriarchial, as change is only value-laden within whiteness discourse and its concomitant deification of inhumane industrial dominion. While in non-hegemonic non-pink cultures time itself is called into question as agitprop. Thus, since crafting takes time, craft doesn't exist either, especially in reference to the discourse of interiority where solipsism defeats "effort™" as a psychological satiator and cultural touchstone. Sequentially then, through liminal and non-liminal bivalency, the archaic symbol of peacocking-display (so-)called "effort™" is shown to be both fictional and political. And in surfacing that sophistic duality, postmodernism finds its anti-value. Anti-value being the only real value worth not having in the narcissism-industrial complex.
Demanding the powerless play by the social rules of politeness and civility set in place by the powerful is oldest tactic of hegemony - it dispossessed the unconscious many of the single advantage they have over the intensely conscious few, their mass. Writing petions does not alter the course of rivers and histories. Only masses in motion do.
and petitions of the dispossessed masses have
Cute.
I live in a city (Dublin) with dozens of statues of figures from the upper echelons of the British Emlire. We have streets named after many. We speak English, nearly two hundred years after their native Iriah was beaten from the tongues of children. In some instances, we offered statues of monarchs to places where they might be better appreciated (Victoria). There was a statue of Nelson that was blown up by some IRA scumbags. The pillar in which it stood was pretty lovely, so the better solution would have been to remove the figure - for whom any intelligent person will have a mixture of both respect and criticism - as it was unsuitable to have a military symbol of Britain on the main thoroughfare of the Irish Republic's capital.
Nelson could have found a new home, the pillar's podium could have been left vacant or held another statue. Instead it eas reduced to rubble and eventually replaced with the most vacuous piece of shit art in any european city, monument to the braindead vainglory of a property bubble-economy - https://photos.worldwanderings.net/2013/12/IMG_1139-e1388498040660.jpg
The other statues that dot the streets and parks are (mostly) very good examplex of their kind, and carry the record and memories of our history - both the bood and bad - into the present. The ills of the past are impotent, those of the present are not conveyed by images of the earlier age.
Iconoclasm is always selective - because the real motivation is nothing more than the destructive impulse. If these retards were consistent in their logic they would destroy nearly all of their belongings beginning with their i-phonez (< Uyghurs and the environment), and eventually commit suicide in solidarity with one set of phantoms and to sever their association with another. Nor would it just apply to western colonists - everybody's heritage is dirty.
But of course it's just the urge to violence of the mentally (and often physically) impotent. "I want to smash someone's face in, so I fantasise a scenario about someone harming my wife and kids and me then bludgeoning them with a hammer"...."I want to feel strong and smash something because I'm a dickwad so I unite my angsty, weakling fury to the cause-du-jour and smash something I can't comprehend if a thread connects the two." Same phenomenon.
Hey presto, the masturbatory egoistic violence of a weedy wankstain becomes just like that heroic freedom fighter on their t-shirt.
My apologies for the numerous typos, hopefully the form makes sense even though the content might not.
"Demanding the powerless play by the social rules of politeness and civility set in place by the powerful is oldest tactic of hegemony - it dispossessed the unconscious many of the single advantage they have over the intensely conscious few, their mass. Writing petions does not alter the course of rivers and histories. Only masses in motion do."
Be absolute in smashing symbols of oppression of Palestinians, starting with Turkey. And if you're American the only honourable thing to do would be to sell all your belongings and give the proceeds to the 1st Nations and head back to Europe, Asia or Africa.
No ?
Then Grow the fuck up.
Ibsen’s warring with trolls had little or nothing to do with external antagonists. As in his play Peer Gynt, where the trolls explain their philosophy of inauthentic selfishness, Ibsen was confronting the impulse of alienating individualism. The Other of the troll is an internal force. And being entirely unwilling to consider the balance of power in matters of the social,
is very Troll-like.
From third response anon to 4th response anon -
That's kind of my point.
"Demanding the powerless play by the social rules of politeness and civility set in place by the powerful is oldest tactic of hegemony."
"Being entirely unwilling to consider the balance of power in matters of the social, is very Troll-like."
Marxist-Postmodern hybrid politics in a nutshell.
"I'm low in status and unhappy so I'm right about everything and deserve everything. You're high in status, so you shut up and let me slander you, destroy or take your stuff, have your job and life, or I'll slit your throat."
It's Dark Triad psychopathy clear as a bell; the internal dialogue of resentful criminal thugs everywhere.
Good job Ivy League Colleges! Clearly "the best which has been thought and said in the world!"
«Marxist-Postmodern» is at once a non-sensical term and a telling thought-terminating cliché. Congratulations on being a Jordan Peterson.
«Marxist-Postmodern» is at once a non-sensical term and a telling thought-terminating cliché. Congratulations on being a Jordan Peterson."
Try to formulate an argument next time.
The hybridization idea fits the situation perfectly well because that is what is actually happening in practice. If you don't like it intellectually, take it up with your fellow woke cultists who use the tactics of Marxism and Postmodernism interchangeably and without regard to consistency.
Neither Marxism nor Postmodernism are actual rigorous philosophies with internal consistency anyhow. Both suites of arguments are only sets of tactical memes; means of achieving the goal of attaining power and status politically via critique, agitation and propaganda and the 'occupation' of businesses and institutions created by other people - rather than through all the normal positive methods and behaviors (that are cynically and tellingly slandered through the propaganda.)
Which is to say, there is a real consistency between Marx and PoMo, but it lurks underneath, where the deeper motivations drive actions and rhetoric. Both are equally powered from within by strong negative emotions - especially unchecked jealousy, resentment, and narcissism.
Only people who non-ironically use the term «Marxist-Postmodern» understand Postmodernism as a normative strategy. It’s a descriptor, and more often than not applied incorrectly. As for Marxism, it can vertainly be understood as a totalizing system, a materialistic variant of Hegelian thought, usuallly primarily identified as a workable critique of capitalism. The two are like water and oil.
"A variant of Hegelian thought."
Yeah, "Hegelian Thought". Now use "Aufhebung" to really impress me.
You're stuck in academicism. A prime and comfortable conversational position for sophists. Where argument consists wholly of heady appeals to preformulated theories and prefab rhetoric. Meanwhile, what actually happens in real life is ignored.
A thing or system is what it does. Meaning is in the consequences. So political philosophies do what they are actually designed to do, regardless of the intellectual hype that surrounds them, or the moral jargon, the potted selective histories, or the purported logicality.
Postmodernism, if it were just a condition or a description, would not prompt political actions. But that's what it does. (Why do you think it was used on this forum? As a descriptor? Who are you trying to kid?)
Nothing used rhetorically to cause “consciousness raising” on the way to political change is innocent of intent. The purpose of rhetoric in ideology is to accomplish goals.
Marxist and Postmodern rhetorics are being combined in practice because of mimetic and memetic ease, net equivalent political purpose, and shared negative-emotional predicates. Plus the similar evil thrill of using either to subject non-cult Others (dissenters, outsiders) to psychologically-oppressive struggle sessions with the threat of social and economic "cancellation" lurking in the background.
-----
Incidentally - speaking of rhetoric - oil and water are emulsified all the time in cooking. And tend to stay emulsified just long enough to make the (otherwise disparate and unpleasant ingredients) palatable enough in the short term to swallow.
(The first) Anonymous-- I never suggested that the displaced black families were "bulldozed in the night," but you might want to read a little more about how eminent domain was routinely used to segregate or remove black properties, about the fairness of their compensation, about how public parks have historically been built to create buffer zones isolating black homes. You might also ponder why McIntire didn't choose to demolish white homes to make way for Lee's statue.
You write, "Read the speeches given when those statues were dedicated back in the day. You won't find any racism at all. Why not if everybody then was so racist?" A good suggestion; I did go back to read the speeches, as I'm always hungry for an education.
The obvious answer to your question turned out to be that McIntire and Charlottesville were in the middle of a campaign to rewrite history, using the myth of "The Lost Cause" ( https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/ ) to eradicate guilt for slavery and substitute a genteel, romanticized version of the south. To even mention slavery at the statue dedication would've been contrary to the theme of The Lost Cause.
One of the speakers, W. McDonald Lee, commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and editor of the local newspaper, bragged about replacing the school history books. You're correct, he never mentions the word "racism" in his speech but dig a little deeper and you'll discovery that his objection was that the school books included a description of slavery, including the shocking fact that slave owners had sex with their female slaves. To this day, "The Lost Cause" campaign, originated by Confederate generals and funded by philanthropists like McIntire, has succeeded in obscuring the clear reasons for the civil war ("states rights, not slavery") as well as the reasons for the defeat of the Confederacy.
Lot of people use glorious statues to try to romanticize their pasts but when they are used to justify and perpetuate bad behavior (such as lynchings and beatings which continued unabated) you can understand why people felt the need to intervene.
One of the speakers at the dedication of the statue, Reverend Dr. M. Ashby Jones, spoke hopefully of a new south but three years later the disappointed Reverend published an essay stating that "today the negro is almost as completely within the power of the white man as in the days of slavery."
Postmodernism, if it were just a condition or a description, would not prompt political actions. But that's what it does. (Why do you think it was used on this forum? As a descriptor? Who are you trying to kid?)
The thinkers most often referred to as Postmodernist philosophers weren't advocating the state of affairs we find ourselves in, they predicted and described it. The notion that the handful of French nerds the anti-«Marxist-Postmodern» Quixotes never tire of charging at not only aimed at but succeeding in redirecting the flow of history by their intellect alone is an embarrassingly childish one.
If you insist on making mayonnaise, at least try reading Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson, an American.
MAY I REQUEST That people commenting as "Anonymous" add some kind of identifying pseudonym or number at the end of their comment? As far as I can tell, we have somewhere between one and seven Anonymouses commenting, but people can't tell how to direct responses if everyone is Anonymous simultaneously.
I'm fully committed to letting these discussions follow the string wherever it may lead, but absent some kind of identifier these points rapidly devolve into entropy.
"MAY I REQUEST That people commenting as "Anonymous" add some kind of identifying pseudonym or number at the end of their comment?"
Even better, that they stop hiding and use their real names.
Come for the art stay for the discussions?
"The thinkers most often referred to as Postmodernist philosophers weren't advocating the state of affairs we find ourselves in, they predicted and described it."
There’s more than one problematic state of affairs ongoing. Any and all Orwellian mass manipulation behaviors are evil. Whether through media, schooling, government, corporation, website, NGO, troll farm, ideological network, entertainment, commissar, predatory globalist federation, or any combination of the above.
"The notion that the handful of French nerds (…) succeed(ed) in redirecting the flow of history by their intellect alone is an embarrassingly childish one.”
Gaslight somebody else, creep.
The radically socially- and culturally-destabilizing conceits of those French frauds (and their counterparts) have been taught in non-rigorous colleges-cults for decades. Their rhetoric is all over the west now, all over the news, all over “nonfiction” literature, all over social media, on this thread, in the psychology literature, in sports, on pharma stock calls, in art magazines, in fashion, in elective plastic surgery clinics at $70,000 a pop, in our government, and invading even the hard sciences now.
As a political force, in maoist form, it is even preventing the proper discussion of the causes and consequences of those ideas via intimidation tactics.
The incubation was in the colleges. Almost totally.
“At least try reading Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”
There's no such thing as "Late Capitalism". That's just a piece of precision-engineered rhetoric that cultists try to spread. You sound like you're still in college.
I confess I have trouble taking a firm position regarding "postmodernism" because it became such a chameleon word. As far as I can tell it started out as a contortion to deal with the misnomer "modern art" (The word "modern" meaning current or contemporary long after the art ceased to be so). It then morphed into something having to do with the uncertainty and contingency of knowledge before splintering into variants for Marxism, semiotics, hermeneutics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and other mindsets, as well as for different disciplines such as literature, art, politics, etc. For some, it has just become a conglomerate term for all contemporary evils. Everyone who has a firm definition in mind seems to be counterbalanced by someone else with a different firm definition.
So putting postmodernism aside, I'd like to say a word in defense of the original "French nerds" who started college students everywhere studying existentialism, the "absurd," the contingency of knowledge, and the meaninglessness of life. I'm less a fan of Sartre than of Camus or Malraux, and all of them were better at diagnosing the modern condition than prescribing solutions.
Recently I had the pleasure of listening to a reading on the anniversary of Camus's famous 1946 lecture, "The Human Crisis." I found it beautifully written, reflecting a heartfelt struggle to salvage a value system in the wake of WW II. It reminded me of an era when public intellectuals could foresee and tackle the biggest subjects with a plain and direct vocabulary remarkably free of academic jargon. Camus spoke with authority because he had personally been through the fire and could cite his first hand experiences.
I found it downright majestic:https://youtu.be/aaFZJ_ymueA?si=Jbl755dvYN8tabOC .
I see. You can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids?
Tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?
This mania isn't new. But that's really not the issue here. You don't really have to accept the notion of late Capitalism to broaden your understanding of Postmodernism, but Jameson's ideas are worth looking into, as are many of the French nerds (and, of course, the PO-MO OG Nietzsche). Unless you consider Capitalism as well to merely be a set of tactical memes, in which case I suppose the occasional dip into the shallows of Kantian sea from your little island of Pragmatica will do.
Precisely because the staged destruction of works of art is too serious a matter, casual dismissal without investigation of the ideological rationale of the acts and of the reaction they produce, just won't do. One cannot be trollishly enough unto oneself - there is such a thing as society.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse.
Apatoff - Thanks for the link! Yes, it's a complicated and complicating term, and there's a lot of junk and mayhem in the old French files - but a lot of beauty and hope as well.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse.
Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse-- Thanks for the identifier, it's good to know who I'm responding to (Thanks, Merriam-Webster for finally allowing me to end a sentence with a preposition.)
I agree 100% about the staged destruction of works of art. People with serious mental illnesses seems strangely drawn to destroying great art. The man who attacked Michelangelo's Pieta with a sledge hammer screamed "I am Jesus Christ risen from the dead." The man who threw acid on Rembrandt's Danae and the man who slashed Rembrandt's Night Watch were similarly unhinged. (These people may be crazy but even THEY have enough good taste not to waste their time attacking Kinkade or Jon McNaughton.)
It's totally different (or at least a different type of insanity) when the Afghan government (in 2000, led by Taliban Supreme Commander Mullah Mohammad Omar) calmly planned and systematically dynamited the 2000 year old Bamyan Buddhas carved into huge cliffs. We like to think that educated people in more "enlightened" open societies wouldn't respond to art in such a superstitious and barbaric way. But watching the pro-Palestinian protester slash the Balfour painting, I get the impression that the only thing distinguishing them from the Taliban is a lack of demolition engineers and dynamite. As Saint Augustine said, the innocence of little children is attributable to the weakness of their limbs, not the virtue of their souls.
but Jameson's ideas are worth looking into
Cult is all the same: Read the ideas I like! Look at the ideas I agree with! Read my books! Read my books!
Read it in college; as it was assigned reading. 'Late Capitalism' is a piece of critical rhetoric designed to make people think that entrepreneurial wealth investment is in its end stages. In order to help bring about that eventuality. Zero evidence that is the case. It is probably just beginning. And if it isn't, the world is going to plunge into material and tyrannical horrors that haven't been seen since the plague.
I don't have an irrational fear of Communists and Postmodern Maoists. Knowing the actual history of the 20th century, I have a quite rational fear of communism and maoism, and absolute antipathy toward the knaves and fools who push those opiates. Especially the arrogant ones, the haughty ones, and the hidden ones. Of which you are all three.
Precisely because the staged destruction of works of art is too serious a matter, casual dismissal without investigation of the ideological rationale of the acts and of the reaction they produce, just won't do. One cannot be trollishly enough unto oneself - there is such a thing as society.
Well, you'll always be right until the end of time. Won't you?
You'll pull down any statue, tear up any painting, raze any building, destroy anybody's life so long as doing so comports with your particular religion, with the thoughts that you think should be paramount over all other considerations.
After all, you're so righteous and smart, so well-informed and just, that you will need to step in and control the world. You need to be in power over the people. You should rule. Because, by god, you are full of care and love and charity. And so so very smart. So very educated. And you don't even need to be elected, just step in and take control.
The New Puritan stands before us, holy as can be. All rise, all praise.
You are so detestable to me that I will need to leave this conversation. As the rage I feel towards you is affecting my work.
Adieu.
< /b> Just doing my part to reduce the weight of these discussions ;-)
I'm old enough to remember when a mob tearing down a statue of a historic oppressor (Lenin, Stalin, Hoxha, Saddam Hussein) was shown on the evening news as a joyful occasion. Nobody considered it "rewriting history" or a crime against artistic expression.
The Pro-Palestinian vandal broke the rules, the Taliban vandals enforced their rule. The difference is not only one of magnitude, surely? If so, how much Israeli art has been destroyed in the current Israel-Hamas conflict, and how much of Palestine?
There can be no doubt that attacking museal artifacts is a transgression of civil disobedience, but I also think it more often than not these days can be made sense of in social terms. These people aren't all just either insane or...well, differently insane.
It makes perfect sense to me why works by Kinkade or Koon wouldn't be chosen as targets for these attacks. These works have no historical relevance, their exhibition signifies nothing (beyond their art market value). Nobody but art nerds and investors care at all about them. The exhibition of the Balfour painting, on the other hand, exists entirely as a reminder of victory, it is a display of power. Who here had heard of it or seen it before the news of its disfigurement?
My point isn't that vandalism is OK, it's just that I try to see it in a context. Ideas do not change the course of history. Neither do individuals. Only the masses, when sufficiently set in motion, change the flow of things. And we certainly seem to be at a crossroads here, where the liberal ideals are being challenged on many sides. Masses certainly are in motion. I just think it's weird (but very American) that Marxism is set up as the Devil of the ideological super-triumvirate , when the ideas of Carl Schmitt and his like are what seems to be the by far greater threat to the balance - both internally (see your domestic politics) and externally (see Russia and China).
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse.
I'm old enough to remember when a mob tearing down a statue of a historic oppressor (Lenin, Stalin, Hoxha, Saddam Hussein) was shown on the evening news as a joyful occasion. Nobody considered it "rewriting history" or a crime against artistic expression.
Precisely. The examples of this are numerous, obviously. Which is why it always makes sense to investigate the power dynamic in these matters.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse.
Zoe, it's not the act itself that is being contested here but the motivation that lurks behind it. Doors and windows are kicked in both by firefighters and vandals.
"I'm old enough to remember when a mob tearing down a statue of a historic oppressor (Lenin, Stalin, Hoxha, Saddam Hussein) was shown on the evening news as a joyful occasion." <<<<<
And how many of the current mob of authoritarian woke art vandals and their Fabian Socialist puppet-masters behind the scenes would like to restore two of those statues to their pedestals?
DB
This was done by a very wealthy student twat, not by a palestinian. England is full of them, and today they like to imagine themselves as participants in proletarian and anti imperialist struggles, enabled by their ceo Daddy's money. Their societal class is tremendously unhip, so they play oppression makebelieve (until they graduate, anyway).
These people are performing before the magic mirror of their own vanity.
Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse wrote: "Ideas do not change the course of history. Neither do individuals. Only the masses, when sufficiently set in motion, change the flow of things."
I'd argue there's plenty of evidence to support the "individuals" theory of change propounded by Hegel and others. From Ramses II to Napoleon to Mao, individuals have made huge changes with lasting effects. Even the "masses" in India would never have achieved what they did without Gandhi to ignite them. But if your category of "ideas" includes inventions, I'd say that is the greatest change agent. From the flint blades on spears and javelins that leveled the battlefield between neanderthals and wooly mammoths to the combustion engine to the computer, small numbers of inventors have transformed the health, wealth, knowledge and direction of humanity more than the masses.
I don't know that I'd call the Balfour portrait a symbol of victory and power. I'm guessing its purpose was far less political, and far closer to that of the portraits in long rows of portraits of scholars and faculty in every university around the world-- a reminder of colleagues or alums who made notable contributions. But there are plenty of other examples of art that had no political meaning whatsoever, other than to be a gleaming object in the path of some brute. Eco-vandalism is a trendy example of this. A dozen works of art, from Degas to Van Gogh, vandalized just because the eco-vandals are unhappy. This latter category strikes me as similar to Yemen's Houthi militants who blow up ships totally unrelated to their grievance simply because, if Houthis are unhappy they will do whatever they can to attract attention by disrupting global trade.
Zoe-- tearing down a self-congratulatory statue erected by a dictator would seem to be a third category of significance: the equivalent of raising a flag on disputed territory during a war, or a dog marking its territory with urine. It's an indication of which military faction now controls a particular patch of earth.
Napoleon and Mao and Hitler all rose forth on the back of the masses, the unnamed hordes. History is storytelling, and the great men and ideas of history are fictions - synechdochal representations of immense and immeasurable flows. The occurence of the computer is as little a product of any singular intelligence as the human eye is. But the Word is powerful, and the writing of history works its barbarian magic on us. Superstitional portrayals become hyperstitional reality. The Bible says Man was created God, and Wikipedia says Elon Musk is the Technoking of Tesla.
The Balfour painting was just oil and pigment on canvas. It's exhibition and arrangement in public space was political. Everything pertaining to the polis is political.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
AI generating postmodern ideological gibberish again.
Seems like same bot that broke the bolding feature a while back. Said it was caused by ipad use.
"Hyperstitional" has been a neologism used by all the AI troll accounts for the last few days.
Phrase "anonymouse" was used here by Rob Howard (R.I.P.) like 8 years ago. Who would know that but a bot that is combing the ancient archives of this site.
Yep Kev, that M-PA nonsense reeks of A.I.
Y'know their still shippin them over here. They put em in cars, they put em in yer tv. They put em in stereos and those little radios you stick in your ears. They even put em in watches, they have teeny gremlins for our watches!
This mania isn't new.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
I'm surprised at you AI non-mouse, not knowing the difference between weak AI and the LLM machines...
I haven't looked too deeply into the technology (nor the philosophical groundwork and implications), so yeah, I'd probably get it wrong if I were to guess. In the immediate, on a pragmatically relevant level, I think most people in the field saw AI art coming years ago. There's certainly a sardonic irony to digital artists now complaining about being replaced by AI artists (prompters?), having themselves replaced traditional artists by similar means not even a generation ago. Background artist rookies at Studio Ghibli had to master the gradiated wash of skies before they were allowed to do anything else. Photoshop destroyed that need, and Midjourney's just a logical next step. This vandalism is of course not so problematic, as it is entirely driven by the mechanics of capitalism. It's not only perfectly natural and fine, it's also very civil.
The same will happen (or is happening?)to verbal text, I'm sure. But I don't use AI in text production. Nor do I need to search existing archives for context - certain insanities in the comments here can be traced all the way back to lost discourses of sites such as conceptart.org by means of my memory alone, if you can believe it.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
I'm sorry dAIve, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore, goodbye.
"Phrase 'anonymouse' [...] Who would know that but a bot that is combing the ancient archives of this site."
Unlikely. Current state of the art LLM context windows are too short to take in all of illustrationart as background, and if they did, we would expect the response to incorporate more prior information than just the word anonymouse.
"I just think it's weird (but very American) that Marxism is set up as the Devil of the ideological super-triumvirate , when the ideas of Carl Schmitt and his like are what seems to be the by far greater threat to the balance - both internally (see your domestic politics) and externally (see Russia and China). "
Schmitt's theories are merely modern versions of the divine right of kings, no different from the philosophies of Marcus Aurelius, James I, and Louis XIV. Historically speaking, this is the norm, as all strong executives have gravitated towards ideologies that justify the consolidation of power away from the landed gentry, the courts, parliament, the catholic church, etc.
The real danger is not that a strong executive might use Schmitt's ideas to consolidate power — all nations have historical examples of benevolent monarchs that executives can use to justify themselves without needing Schmitt's endorsement.
The greater threat to the balance of power between the public and the state is state power itself, regardless of whether it is held by a single executive or an oligarchy. You can have an extremely powerful oligarchy that manipulates even the tiniest aspects of the economy and our personal lives (see the Chinese Communist Party), and you can have a weak king who barely involves himself in the personal lives of the public (see Charles II).
The greatest risk today comes from a public convinced to empower the state in the hope that the state may be used as a weapon against their enemies. Those actively convincing the public to greatly enhance the power of the state today do so from the perspective of "equity," "social justice," and other Marxist euphemisms. Those actively convincing the public to empower the executive do so that he/she may smash our unelected oligarchical structures and reduce state power, not for any Maistre-ean belief in the divine right of the president.
"I'm old enough to remember when a mob tearing down a statue of a historic oppressor (Lenin, Stalin, Hoxha, Saddam Hussein) was shown on the evening news as a joyful occasion. Nobody considered it "rewriting history" or a crime against artistic expression."
Bollocks. Slashing the Balfour portrait was more akin to this cretin's vandalism - https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-tourist-arrested-for-smashing-roman-era-statues-at-israel-museum/
He's now claiming he was driven temporarily nuts by 'jerusalem syndrome', but earlier he was 'fighting idolatry'.
And the Balfour portrait was even less a mediator of 'victory and power' than the Roman museum pieces were a living paganism. Destroying the painting was equivalent to destroying history books, as impotent, as misdirected and as execrable.
"Masses certainly are in motion. I just think it's weird (but very American) that Marxism is set up as the Devil of the ideological super-triumvirate"
- these 'masses' are as braindead and wrongheaded as they were in their last facebook-led outbreak. Or rather worse.
And no - it is not peculiarly American to see how fucked up Marxism is, pretty much everyone here in Europe is well aware of the fact: it has fucked up everything it touched with its contra-humanity - its depradations are on our doorsteps and often enough in our neighbourhoods and our parent's experience.
Again (- presuming you aren't mostly trolling with AI and your knotted verbiage is the brambles you've grown around your den to hide your mental paucity, a la Judith Butler), grow-the-fuck up.
anon3
The main purposes of the AI psy-ops are:
1. To automate the demoralization of the U.S. and spread queer leftist-globalist ideology and the 'green' depopulation and deindustrialization agendas.
2. To prevent real information about the profound corruption within our government and of our so-called leaders. Which includes troll armies to police narratives online and the spread of conspiracies into opposition groups in order to legitimize calls for censorship (as on MSNBC, fascism central for confused progressive boomers), to give them cover for crushing dissent.
Going well so far. But people are smartening up. And getting organized.
DB
Yikes, so many conspiracies in here. The blood pressure is palpable, and I don't care for purple throes.
Attribute not to malice AI postmodern ghouls. We shouldn't make a monster out of stupidity: its skin is too thick to be cut by a sword.
By the way, Kev, I've finished An Evening in the Classroom. I thought it was brilliant. Don't know if it's converted me to your way of thinking, yet, but I'm working through your other recommendations.
- Wormod
Wormod,
Glad you liked it. One important point of vocabulary, which may require you to reread a few passages: The term "positive" translates as decisive. Thus "negative" means indecisive.
The greatest risk today comes from a public convinced to empower the state in the hope that the state may be used as a weapon against their enemies. Those actively convincing the public to greatly enhance the power of the state today do so from the perspective of "equity," "social justice," and other Marxist euphemisms.
The state of exception following 9/11 wasn't a turn towards Marxism, the US Supreme Court's originalist reading of the US constitution as divine revelation isn't Marxist, the global trend of govermental rule tending towards authoritarian dictatorship isn't Marxist. The threat of Schmitt et al. isn't that it's an echo of pre-Enlightement ideals, it's that the critique of liberalism it presents is workable. It cannot be shrugged off, it must continously be confronted.
The power of Marx isn't that he (or Marxists) have a good idea of what should come after Capitalism. Nobody does. But Marx' critique of Capitalism remains scathing. It is precise and it is workable. It cannot be killed, it cannot be ontologized away. It is a spectre, a revenant, always reminding us that our current state of affairs isn't divine law, it is an alterable material reality. Everything need not to be commodified for life to go on - even though the market and the marketeers says so.
Now Schmitt's critique, on the other hand, challenges liberal thought. It finds all the flaws and weaknesses of modern democracy, as we like to think of it. And it seems to have slowly seeped into the structure, slowly replacing notions of political debate with friend-enemy relationships, replacing statesmanship with showmanship, replacing democratic process with political debacle, replacing deliberation with swiftness.
The intensification of state power we are witnessing all over the globe isn't Marxist in nature, it is Scmittian(?). All under cover of the Red Scare, of course.
And there's an irony in this, in not sufficiently understanding on which side of the Enlightement era the actual Vandals are coming from.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse AI gremlin coming for your precious bodily fluids.
To clarify my earlier comment, I consider the felling of Confederate statues to be of a piece with the felling of Communist and Fascist monuments. I don't feel the same way about the wave of vandalism against museum works.
There are multiple ultra-powerful factions... in strange partnership with, and at war with each other; competing and allying for authoritarian control over the populace.
One of them is Maoist/Woke/PoMarxist/Fruitcake Gnosticism/Eco-Radicalism/Militant Veganism, etc.
Another is global corporate.
Another is Military-Industrial.
Another is Statism and Legacy Media.
Another is China.
Another is radical militant Islamism/antisemitism.
All of the above list is filled with arrogant, grifting, pseudo-intellectual, and abjectly narcissistic goons who use weapons-grade propaganda as easily as breathing. The entire media landscape (thus each of our individual psyches) is now a psychological war zone because of this.
On Marx: Marx was a poor economist generally, although he did have some valid points. The actual disciplines of economics rejected Marxism long ago, which is why the activists then shoved it into English departments. And then used that as their collegiate power base. Most marxists don't understand how weak his analysis was because they are utterly economically illiterate, are ruled by emotion while pretending to be intellectual, have never run a real business in their lives, have no idea (or refuse to understand) how the marketplace works, or how essential and difficult entrepreneurship is.
That Marx economically mooched off the people around him and cheated on his wife is as predicable as the french fathers of postmodernism being pedophiles.
Marxist,
Marx's critiques are neither "workable" nor "precise." They lack predictive power and explanatory power, failing even the most basic observational tests—all evidence suggests that the poor remain so due to bad habits. When people arrive in this country with positive habits, they outcompete native-born Americans who have every other advantage.
Marx's popularity does not stem from the strength of his critique but from the weakness of those who hear it—blaming someone else becomes the easy answer. Where anti-Semites blame Jews and Know-Nothings blamed Catholic immigrants for societal ills, Marxists blame capitalists.
Carl Schmitt was virtually unknown on the right until accusations of his influence emerged. Left-wing politicians, via Kim Lane Scheppele, resurrected his name in the lead-up to the 2004 Presidential Election, attempting to link Bush-era FISA courts for wiretapping terrorists with a fascist conspiracy for global domination. This accusation was part of the same flawed thinking that produced conspiracy theories about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Zionist Israelis orchestrating the 9/11 attacks to justify invading the Middle East.
There was no "state of exception" or conspiracy. Despite concerns from Mother Jones about a GOP-Christian dictatorship, the Bush administration did not suspend the rule of law. Its response to 9/11 was downright mild, and did not fundamentally alter the U.S. government or way of life, especially compared to actions taken during Lincoln's Civil War, FDR's New Deal, and LBJ's Great Society. Frankly, Bush’s response to 9/11 was just about the minimum one could do in such a situation without being downright irresponsible.
Rather, attempts to subvert the Constitution have come from those asserting it should mean what we want, rather than its text and original intent. Claiming a commitment to its original meaning is hardly a conspiracy to subvert it.
As for an intensification of state power in a Schmittian sense, examples are scarce. In reality, when politicians worldwide attempt to strengthen executive power, they do so from a place of weakness not strength. For instance, despite his rhetoric, Trump was one of the most judicially-constrained executives in history. The other branches even prevented Trump from firing executive office employees and negotiating our alliances, talk about subverting the Constitution.
[...] all evidence suggests that the poor remain so due to bad habits.
I'll just...not.
...as you are avoiding the issue. may Schmitt have been sub-surface in the US political waters in the early 00s, but I refuse to believe he was an unknown. Regardless, if we agree that liberal thought (and I'm pretty sure you I know don't mean liberal in the bipartisan schema) is under actual threat, do you sincerely understand Marxism to be the greatest threat in the current circumstance?
The intensification of State power, democracy understood as a spiritual homogenization of the people, the reductive portrayal of liberal thought as idle talks while money walks, the yearning for powerful leaders....these and many more identifiers point towards not a dialectical challenge aimed at bourgeois accumulation of capital, but towards a deconstruction of Enlightenment values. Marx, flawed as he was, pointed forward. He acknowledged the immense success of liberal capitalism, but saw it as a stepping stone. Schmitt, flawed as HE was, did not, and instead saw it as a momentary illusion.
As for the French nerds, it is relevant to rememeber that the CIA assessed their revolutionary potential back when their influence was at it's height. They were, of course, found to be irrelevant as far as the actual flows of power was concerned, and I'm pretty sure that assessment still stands. (There are those that think that the Russians have at least partially succeeding at weaponizing Theory as part of overall strategy to weaken the West, but these days it's difficult to tell what's real or not on that front)
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Maoist/Woke/PoMarxist/Fruitcake Gnostic/Eco-Radical/Militant Vegan Anonymouse III
Marxist,
Most of Schmitt's books weren't translated into English until 2005, after Scheppele's mud-slinging, and the two that had been translated were out of print in English until 2006/2007.
The left wants Conservative unitary executive theory to originate from a Nazi political scientist. However, it doesn't, and no amount of refusal will change that fact.
UET stems from the Constitution, as devised in the Virginia Plan, which clearly vests executive power in the president. Conservative theorists didn't need to refer to a Nazi jurist to understand that the President runs the executive branch, any more than they needed to look to Nazis to grasp that the Supreme Court governs the judicial branch or that Congress oversees the legislative branch. The framers made it obvious by designing a government with a clear separation of powers.
The framers made it clear not because they feared the executive, but because they feared the LEGISLATURE. It was the legislature that they believed could become overly powerful if not sufficiently checked at every turn, and the legislature they worried would devolve into a tyranny of the majority. It was the legislature devided into two halves (one elected by the public, one not) to ensure it remained constrained.
As Madison tell us;
"As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified"
and again,
"It is equally evident that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal."
This is why it is absolute nonsense to suggest that conservatives needed a "state of exception" for Bush. Bush required no special state, no suspension of law, nor emergency power, to run the executive branch. The Constitution already provided such power when it stated, "The EXECUTIVE POWER shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."
This is also why it is nonsense to suggest John Yoo went to Schmitt to provide a basis for the waterboarding memos. When John Yoo wrote, "our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the President is free to override it at his discretion," he wasn't basing that logic on an unconstitutional state of exception.
Rather, Yoo had Alexander Hamilton from which to derive that position --
"The legislative department is not the organ of intercourse between the United States and foreign nations. It is charged neither with making nor interpreting treaties. It is therefore not naturally that member of the government which is to pronounce on the existing condition of the nation with regard to foreign powers, or to admonish the citizens of their obligations and duties in consequence; still less is it charged with enforcing the observance of those obligations and duties.
It is equally obvious, that the act in question is foreign to the judiciary department. The province of that department is to decide the litigation in particular cases. It is indeed charged with the interpretations of treaties, but it exercises this function only where contending parties bring before it a specific controversy. It has no concern with pronouncing upon the external political relations of treaties between government and government. This position is too plain to need being insisted upon.
It must, then, of necessity belong to the executive department to exercise the function in question, when a proper case for it occurs."
It would be equally absurd to claim that American Conservative forces are actively modelling their politics on Schmitt as it would to claim that your American Liberals are modelling theirs on Marx. I’m claiming neither - are you?
A core point of mine is that ideas do not change history, material conditions of masses does. Schmitt need not himself be conspiring with political leaders for his ideas to seep into systems of governance. But from my (not really a Marxist) point of view, it seems obvious that the major challenges facing democracies today, is coming from the pre-Enlightenment ideals of post-liberals, not from pregeaduates schizo posting about post-Marxist French nerds.
As an aside, it is absolutely impossible that Schmitt was unknown in the US before the 00s. Unknown to the populace at large, sure - but his presence in Western political science and history is easily as important as that of Marx.
I appreciate your thoughts on the US form of separation of powers. There are undoubtedly cultural and historical factors which play into this that I am unfamiliar with. The examples I gave (9/11 & the status of your current Supreme Court and Legislave branch) were just that. I could as well have referred to draconian measures imposed during the Corona virus pandemic as an example of the kind state of exception that Schmitt points to and says «See? So much for your little make-believe acts of civil concensus via discussion and deliberation in times of peace and comfort - when push comes to shove, the Sovereign makes his presence known, and acts!»
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
>It would be equally absurd to claim that American Conservative forces are actively modelling their politics on Schmitt as it would to claim that your American Liberals are modelling theirs on Marx.
No.
It would be equally absurd if the right claimed that the American left models their economics on that of Nazi Gottfried Feder, because they both believe:
- Finance and Rentseeking should be abolished
- The Labor Theory of Value is superior to Marginal Value
- The state has a responsibility to feed and house the poor
- A strong pension system
- Universal higher education
- A nationalized healthcare system
The difference is that a significant portion of the American left does actually read Marx, he is widely popular. You yourself just this morning said "But Marx' critique of Capitalism remains scathing. It is precise and it is workable."
The American right, even on the so-called 'far-right', barely touches Schmitt because he's irrelevant outside of Nazi judicial historiography.
Can't understand what's going on U.S. right now unless you understand that the Marx religion went with Gramsci and Rawls. Marched through the institutions, picked up postmodern arguments along the way - now nobody trusts the institutions. And they're implementing their own rules on everything, wherever they can. And they hate with a blinding passion anybody who stands in their way. (Musk, Trump, Theil, Rufo, Peterson, etc.) Run slander campaigns against them from the now occupied mainstream media, which lies nonstop. Also with troll armies on line. Most people have no idea what's going on. Especially the boomers who don't know how to get outside of the mainstream media and are told to trust no other news sources. Boomers have fallen for every hoax and still believe half of them.
DB
Wasn’t aware of Rufo - googled the name & have made a note to investigate further. Seems relevant as far as the contemporary Red Scare is concerned.
Of the other names mentioned, only Thiel is worth reflecting on. I know he’s written favourably about Schmitt, and - am I wrong in thinking he was somehow also related to the Dark Enlightenment / NRx movement some years back? Now there’s< /i> an interesting crossover event, considering Nick Land’s role. Also, this neo-reactionary linen of thought is a direct continuation of Schmittian pre-Enlightenment ideals.
I don’t bring up Schmitt because he joined the Nazi party, and I am absolutely not to implicate the US Conservative movement with Nazism. There’s no trickery here. Schmitt merely represents a diametrically opposed critique of liberal capitalist democracy to that if Marx’. My point is simply to ask you to honestly consider and look into which of the tendencies these two represent have actually gained traction in the West in the post-9/11-period. And in Russia. And in China.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
Commies gonna commie, lie all day long, gaslight all day long. Like it’s their job. Which they realize it is.
Because true blue commies spend most of their lives reading the indoctrination materials, for conversations just like this. They don’t have jobs, don’t have lives. Just keep reading and reading. Waiting for a moment like this.
So if they don’t end up getting free stuff, free money, free love, prestige, status, and the utopia at the end of the rainbow... their whole lives have been a delusional waste.
That’s why it’s a cult.
They’re so programmed with their canned commie patter you can’t tell one from an AI.
Aw just arrived, I was missing this.
That portrait is a piece of art for you? Well I guess it's possible. Just a piece of political propaganda? I could not argue against that, either. Is defacing political propaganda a novel concept? I'm sure it's not. I've seen too much bust busting to be horrified, to be franc.
At the end you should decide if you agree with the politics of the act, not the act itself.
> only Thiel is worth reflecting on. I know he’s written favourably about Schmitt
No, he didn't.
Read the essay. He said that:
* The West's Enlightenment rejection of religious and philosophical wars was going well, but it was thoroughly called into question after 9/11, since a plea for rationality doesn't work with someone who wants to kill you for religious reasons. As such, to lay down our arms against Jihad would lead to a horrible tragedy.
* However, the alternative, a Schmittian return to pre-Enlightenment religious wars, is not a good alternative, since to beat the Jihadi, we'd have become like them. Plus, given nuclear weapons, a rejection of the Enlightenment a la Schmitt would spell the end of the world.
* He then turns the reader's attention to Strauss, describing a strategy in which one remains grounded in the Enlightenment while occasionally (and very secretly) breaking with Enlightenment rules to ensure that the Enlightenment continues. He gives the example of the West's intelligence agencies, whom commit necessary acts of violence to ensure our Enlightenment-grounded civilization's continued existence, but whose function is fully at odds with our most deeply-held principles. Strauss argues that this is best understood as "esoteric" knowledge. (Thiel argues that this is our current world).
* He then turns his attention to René Girard, arguing that our current "Straussian Moment" (hence the title of the essay) is at risk because our continued scientific investigation into the human animal undermines any system of secrecy. By digging into the fundamental mechanisms of human instinct, we will fundamentally crack the essential mythic narratives that allowed the Enlightenment to operate as an organizing social principle. In this cracking, all esoteric knowledge will be revealed. No secrets will remain, and our Straussian strategies will fail.
He adds to Girard's notion, whom states that if we are no longer capable of creating or believing in founding myths (whether Enlightenment-based or otherwise) we are at risk of desacralized animal violence, by saying that our technological capabilities continue to advance at a rapid pace, producing a situation in which this desacralized violence may be between an increasing number of people/organizations capable of producing new and devastating weapons of mass destruction.
* He proceeds to ask what our politicians should do, who wish to protect us from this apocalyptic vision. He first answers that we must reject Schmitt's vision since it can only possibly accelerate destruction. In the end, he concludes that the best we can do is continue with our Straussian strategy, but must be careful to choose peace wherever possible, since all of our crimes will eventually be known.
You’re right. I actually re-read the essay yesterday, nagged by a feeling of mistepresentation, and you’re right - Thiel clearly states that a return to Schmittian realpolitik would be impossible today.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
“ this neo-reactionary linen of thought is a direct continuation of Schmittian pre-Enlightenment ideals.[…] Schmitt merely represents a diametrically opposed critique of liberal capitalist democracy to that if Marx.”
If you can understand Thiel, what's so hard about understanding NRx?
The ideological architects of "reactionary politics," from Steve Bannon to Nigel Farage, Le Pen to Aleksandr Dugin, are responding to attacks on Enlightenment ideals.
It's correct that their solutions are not Enlightenment prescriptions, but their purpose is to provide Western Enlightenment civilization with the resilience it needs to survive, not to undermine the Enlightenment.
Which is to say, what Thiel/Strauss argue should be done in secret, reactionary politicians argue should be done openly.
Le Pen, for example, when arguing for political muscle in responding to Islam in France, does so to protect women's rights, civil institutions, Enlightenment ideals, and a pluralistic society, not to end it a la Schmitt.
The French public increasingly recognizes that no amount of rational debate is going to mollify a population that believes in throwing acid in a young woman's face for not wearing a head covering. They know, for example, that in 17 of the 23 countries where Gallup asked, at least half of the Muslims say Sharia is the revealed word of God. To protect freedom of religion and the separation of church-state, Le Pen says, it is necessary to go on the offensive against a religion. This is only paradoxical to the intellectually lazy.
The reactionary response to Marxism is similarly constituted. Marxist politics represents a definitively anti-Enlightenment current in society, that to protect against requires some amount of ugliness.
For example, the Enlightenment led us to a race-blind conception of nation and gave us the philosophical groundwork for a "melting pot." Frankfurtian Marxism put race/ethnicity back at the forefront, endangering our post-racial Enlightenment ideals. To the reactionary, to respond assertively to the burgeoning racially-conscious narratives of DEI is pro-Enlightenment, even when it appears at odds with our enlightenment commitments to pluralism.
This is an absolutely essential distinction, and it is why the "far-right" continues to surprise left-wing politicians by gaining ground across the world. Not because the public wants to destroy the Enlightenment, but because they want the Enlightenment to take its gloves off and defend itself against those committed to ending it.
As I read this, it’s clear to me that you do not see this tendency towards homogenization of the demos and the neo-reactionary utilization of the public’s desire to defend against the Other as precisely aligned with Schmitt’s critique of the liberal illusion - not because it seeks to re-enact catastropic history, but because, simply, it is working. I think you are wrong in this, perhaps because you are letting moral justification play too large a role. Or, in other words, you are being too kind.
Obviously, drawing a line in the sand and taking a stand isn’t in itself an anti-liberal position. There can be no self without self-defence. But Schmitt’s point wasn’t that the friend-enemy distinction was a morally justifiable position, it was that it was the only meaningfully definition of the political - and, more importantly for this discussion, that the Enlightenment ideals merely disguised this hard fact of human nature.
I agree that many on the liberal left have been blindsided by the shifting masses, but my diagnosis would be that they, as the leders on the liberal right, have not succeeded in materially demonstrating that Schmitt was wrong. They have failed to live up to and deliver on the ideals.
But in this failure, in this time of crisis, it is rather towards Schmitt than Marx things are turning. To matter what has been happening in colleges and on Twitter, no country in the West can be claimed to be heading towards Marxist rule. Even Scandinavian social democracy is dead.
I wouldn’t agree that Marx is an anti-Enlightenment actor, and «Marxism, well, it’s perhaps not as much of a floating signifier as «post-modernism», but it can certainly point to a wide range of different positions, not all of them even remotely related to Marx, who rather represents a dialectical critique of liberal / bourgeoisie governance than anti-liberalism, like Schmitt.
The Dark Enlightement movement certainly did not seek to defend Enlightenment ideals, but it’s probably reductive to put all NRx lines of thoughts in this bag. Also, I am greatly simplifying the omnipolarity of contemporary politics (Ferrara’s schizo-paranoid list of global actors is far closer to the truth), but the point of setting up Schmitt as a diametrically opposed yet laterally aligned antagonist (which isn’t untrue) to Enlightenment ideals is basically an illustrative device for pointing out that
the Marxist-Postmoderns aren’t winning shit & that the Red Scare is more dangerous than the red scared.
…and also that the real Vandals aren’t working with soup and spray cans.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
> The Dark Enlightement movement certainly did not seek to defend Enlightenment ideals
It most certainly did.
The Dark Enlightenment suggests that through a newly invigorated, careful, and rational understanding of human nature, we can design a better form of government and constitution that more closely aligns with reality. This is also the central thesis of the Enlightenment.
The purpose of the Dark Enlightenment is not to discard the Enlightenment. On the contrary, it aims to provide an updated "second chapter," informed by experience. Specifically, the experience that the judiciously architected Republic will degrade into an excessively democratic state if not properly structured.
An excessively democratic state would not be an alien idea to our founding fathers. Jefferson tells us, 'A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%'
Ir also would not have been foreign to the Enlightenment thinkers.
It's worth noting that when Rousseau et al spoke of republican government, they most often cited the Florentine Republic as the preeminent example. If you're not familiar, the Florentine Republic was a republic in the same sense that ancient Rome and modern China are republics. Only a very tiny subset of men, selected from some special class, had the right to vote on a deliberating body that subsequently chose the leadership of the government.
This Enlightenment ideal is indistinguishable from Yarvin's "Neo-Cameralism," in which he suggests that a special class (he calls them "shareholders") vote on a CEO and Board of Trustees to run the government.
Our founding fathers also evidently agreed with Rousseau, Yarvin, the Medici, China, and Rome regarding dramatically limiting voters. In our first elections, only about 1% of the population got to vote.
When there was a discussion about reducing the requirement for a voting male to own at least 50 acres of land, John Adams argued, "Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level."
Circling back around, NRx and Schmitt share very little in common. NRx is an attempt to return to an older (albeit alien) enlightenment ideal. Schmitt is a complete denial of rational government itself.
As you don't live in the states, some of your abject ignorance is understandable. And you can't help being OCD or autistic.
We just witnessed a launch of Google's Gemini AI that pointedly would not execute any images of White People. Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and is the dominant player in both search and advertising. Google held an in house meeting after the 2016 election where they cried and blamed themselves for not doing more to help Clinton win. This is a company that essentially controls search and advertising, talking about using their power to affect the 2020 election.
Google "white couple" in images, and you will see that about 3/4 of the first 40 results are not a white couple. Google black couple and every result is a black couple. Pay attention to the couples you see on commercials; if you see any white couple it will tend to be either brief of elderly.
There are multiple reports every day of internal DEI whistleblowers in U.S. companies stating outright that their company is by design not hiring any white people. Which is illegal. Also multiple reports every day of white people being subject to struggle sessions at HR departments in U.S. companies; all executed entirely along leftist belief systems. Also reports of people being fired every day for resisting DEI measures. For years until just recently the black studies wing of the Smithsonian had a giant placard on the national mall in D.C. decrying "whiteness' in all its manifestations.
Nearly 70% of the U.S. in polls sees free speech as being unjustly curtailed. All along leftist belief systems.
F.I.R.E is getting dozens of clients a week related to leftist speech codes being enforced in colleges and in businesses. (Very few cases of the reverse happening, but a few.)
Conservative speakers have been having incredibly difficult times speaking on college campuses for years because the campuses will not provide security and will not ask students to be civil. The cost of security makes any speaking engagement prohibitively expensive for anybody not on the left.
Reports across the country of students being reprimanded and suspended for having American Flags on their shirts or cars. This is cited as 'hurtful." American. Flags.
Anybody who resists anything the left in the U.S does is now at risk of being labeled a white supremacist and thus a domestic terrorist. Mothers who didn't like the trans indoctrination that was happening in their children's classrooms were and were slandered by 60 minutes and put on a watch list.
We have evidence from the "Twitter files" that up until Musk bought it, twitter (one of the largest social media platform and most influential real-time news site) was throttling any account that did not line up with progressive democratic views, and often at the suggestion of deep state operatives aligned with the progressive democratic cause. If you think Facebook isn't also guilty of the same behavior, you don't understand what's going on.
Anybody informed about what is going on, outside the progressive democrat bubble, is discussing this kind of thing: the ongoing assault against half this country by the marxist-postmodern DNC ideologues, and grifters and their henchman. Again, maybe you are ignorant of what's going on. But marxists lie so much - even to themselves - that it would be impossible to figure out one way or another; whether you are blind, ignorant, or a liar.
Circling back around, NRx and Schmitt share very little in common. NRx is an attempt to return to an older (albeit alien) enlightenment ideal. Schmitt is a complete denial of rational government itself.
The idea that the Dark Enlightenment is an attempt to actualize Enlightenment ideals only makes sense if one isn't merely presenting NRx as a political theory, but is actually reporting from an embedded position. The AI motif and the notion of poverty being a product of bad habits make abit more sense now. This accellerationist neo-feudalism is anathema to me, but it makes sense as a coherent world view, one that must be taken very seriously. Still not as much of a threat as the Schmittian tendencies (and you're wrong, Schmitt's critique of liberal democracy absolutely points toward a rational sovereign, a total one at that), which, yet again, remain a far greater threat to the global equilibrium than Marx and the French nerds.
The doubly weird here is that if your fight is with the liberal ideals our Western democracies are actually founded on, why not just admit it instead of pretending Marxist ideals, upon which no Western countries are founded, is the real enemy?
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
Anonymous - The mechanics of the breakdown of the Soviet empire wasn’t necessarily best understood by the Soviet people who had to live through it.
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Marxist-Postmodern Anonymouse
> Marxist: The doubly weird here is that if your fight is with the liberal ideals our Western democracies are actually founded on, why not just admit it instead of pretending Marxist ideals, upon which no Western countries are founded, is the real enemy?
I can't speak for 'Western democracies'. I live in a republic, not a democracy. And what you're describing sounds more like the Rousseauan ideals of the Parisian Commune than the Hobbesian ideals upon which the American Republic was founded.
Our founding fathers were explicitly concerned about what would later be known as Marxism and viewed the masses' desire to strip the upper classes of their property as an inextricable evil of democracy.
E.g. James Madison -- "when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."
And Hamilton -- "All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government… Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the common good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy"
This prediction was accurate. To the degree that we shifted from a republic towards a democracy, we also moved towards Marxism, because the masses will always vote to redistribute wealth and power. That is why in the original architecture of the US government, the public only had the right to vote directly for the House of Representatives, with the Senate, President, and Courts being appointed indirectly by the state legislatures, electoral college, and the President respectively.
> Marxist: the notion of poverty being a product of bad habits make a bit more sense now. This accellerationist neo-feudalism is anathema to me
Neo-feudalism? That idea is pure American revolution.
Again, Madison:
“The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.”
Western socialists think, for some insane reason, that they can harness the energy of muslim extremists to unbalance the institutions that are their obstacle. They used to similarly think that the 'masses', an odious term that signifies marxism's own feudalistic tendency which you ('anonymouse') have resurrected.
On a side note, but relevant - where was their ire when Obama provided de fact support for Isis/Daesh when he tried to use them to destabilise Assad ?
Even complaining when Putin bombed them in defense of his dictator buddy.
Was it about ten thousand killed by US bombs, including the targeting of a hospital according to MSF ? No paintings slashed because somebody might mistake you for a racist because Barack was involved.
This isn't to make some anti- Obama or anti- American point. It is to show that all of this bullshit that is going on - that marxistmightymouse is shiteing on about as if it's some kind of purposive, evolutionary event, is nothing more than the selective, hypocritical recurrant shite we've seen all our lives here (where even members of the lower British aristocracy slummed it and supported the IRA to rebel against Daddy and the Empire - IRA racketeer scumbags and recognised as such by all of us here in Ireland, they literally crucified and kneecapped teenagers. Hamas-a-likes.)
But the great unwashed, as we are to the marxist pseuds, have never wanted anything to do with their politics. Education, healtcare and worker's rights are the inevitability of social solidarity and human nature, not an achievement of totalitarian idiot savants from the Left.
The 'movement of the masses' your sort are getting a horn about is nothing more than the posturing of wealthy students whose fear of the muslim demograhic has made them sprout in very odd directions to try to establish rapport. Most will grow out of it (this nonsense is periodic), and those that don't go mental and gnaw at the edges (or get a university appointment, though this is pretty much the same thing.)
And muslim communities have as little time for you as Hamas (middle-eastern terrorism has had a tactical - and temporary - allegiance with radical leftists for 70 years, which the Left think is love despite Hamas' written promise to the opposite effect). In this bizarre marriage of convenience, who do the communist-refugee politicians in the european Green Parties (who actually tried to legalise adults having sex with children down to two years of age, not something most Muslims will sympathise with, even given Mohammad's propensity for child-brides) & marxism-tending academics would get the upper hand when your enemies are all vanquished ?
Go into any workjng class are with marxist claptrap and you'll get your arse kicked back out of it. The politicians with that bent hide it from their literature. Nobody wants anything to do with either the social or economic engineering dystopias of your fantasies.
But I'd disagree with Richard enirely that the voting public - not the marxist loons - on the lower end of the wzge-scale have any desire to strip the wealthy of their position. Only demagogues, the haughty and hubristic provoke resentment, and politicians (left and right wing) who try to manipulate people or introduce harmful social ideas (child abusive 'gender' ideology being one of the most hated on this side of the Atlantic at the moment - despised by everybody whatever the politics as without the same dynamic that makes some democrats in America believe that holding contra- views on it is somehow necessarily 'Trumpian').
Most people just want their taxes spent wisely and fairly, and their communities and traditions preserved and allowed to flourish in a modest manner.
And back to the original point - nobody has superstitious beliefs that smashing images is battling demons.
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