Sadism, Writing, and Dems

In lieu of a Twitter account I’ll just put together everything that’s on my mind together into a daily post. Unless I have nothing to say. Then I won’t.

Sadism of the Normie

I’ve been posting on Salo Forum since it has the right balance of long form and bullying. On one thread there has been speculations on what causes the average person to indulge in violent justice fantasies towards pedophiles. It should go without saying that this isn’t a defense of pedophiles. A more just society would deal with these people swiftly, unemotionally, and accurately with the meticulousness of an angel and the rigor of a devil. We do not live in a just society. I nearly brushed up against this topic in my Feasts of Shame essay, but this has something that has bothered me for as long as I have been cognizant of being an American. The performative acts of violence.

Foucault is worth reading for some insights into this. The purpose of public execution was to flex the power of the sovereign. It set the hierarchy and it sent the message that its domain over your life was absolute, and your transgressions would be met with swift justice. The move away from public executions tracks with the change in people’s sensibilities towards seeing these as barbaric acts as well as the questioning of sovereign and state power. If their power is able to be questioned on a fundamental level, then that brings into question the whole idea of the public execution. Prisons resulted from needing a place to hold people for unresolved legal and criminal manners, and in a small way for dealing with enemies of state but the general way for dealing with them was to commit them to house arrest. The prison system is actually anathema to the normie sense of justice as it evolved to keep the mechanisms of justice away from them so as not to risk offending their sensibilities and have them question the legitimacy of the power doing this, or the mechanisms of control in and of themselves.

Torture, Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish was a secret affair, until it was time for the secrets to be made public, which was a spectacle and a theatrical production that flexed the power of the sovereign and the mechanisms of control. That the normie reveals his sadism like the posts is, to me, just proof that progress is a myth. I often compare the situation of the system we live under and our role in it to medieval empires like the Ottoman Empire and call us peasants with wi-fi. The human mind has not evolved in any significant way just because Chinese slaves are making small boxes that allow you to tell Dravidians to defecate in the proper receptacle. We are the same creatures we were 600 years ago, just fatter and more narcissistic. The lizard part of the brain is still running and it’s expecting the sovereign to flex power like it’s supposed to do.

Because the normie is narcissistic to a much higher degree than his distant ancestor and because the normie is completely divorced by the mechanisms of power and the sovereign–most of them can’t even name their own government representative–they began to take on the performative and theatrical aspects of the sovereign’s public execution. In the vacuum of where they think power is supposed to be, they insert themselves in and take on the role of torturer and executioner since no one else will do it. Due to the spectacle nature of this culture, it turns into game of trying to one-up each other in potential cruelty in order to establish bona fides, credentials, and the gumption and seriousness to do the deed. This works by design for the system. They want these people looking at power and wondering why power isn’t performing its necessary functions. It’s better for them to think that power doesn’t exist the way it exists at all. That’s how post-totalitarianism works. You don’t need to have an apparatus of the state stomping its boot on you if individuals reify that bureaucratic totalitarianism and mimic the performative aspects of state power themselves. They’ll take on that role, legitimize the system, and be distracted so that the sovereign can do as they please.

It’s basically a will to power thing for the normie. They believe that they are acting as a sovereign in their common sensibility, but they’re merely just indulging in personal fantasies of power and the ability to flex it in lieu of an absent sovereign. People do not quite understanding how they are subconsciously working in the ways of power or justice, but underpinning all of this is the sense of folk justice. People know what’s right and wrong, and the common folk have an expectation that the sovereign is the final arbiter and executioner on this.

That’s why people are quite content under any kind of regime with elites, including feudalism, as long as that regime is acting in a way that is perceived as fair enough and an expression of some of their will. It’s when sovereign loses legitimacy in their eyes that things get dicey. That was what happened with the rise of the bourgeoisie and their revolutions to topple that system. The systems that they preferred (liberalism) would obfuscate that role and make it harder to identify this aspects, as well as conforming to their sensibilities where the uglier aspects of power and control would remain out of sight and out of mind.

Death of the Novel

On the thread for Twitter intellectuals, mention of the Twitter-born e-book got the noggin jogging.

This has been what I’ve been struggling with drafting my novel. I don’t want this to be a meme book so I’ve set in an America that’s still churning along 20-30 years in the future where whites are a plurality, parts of the country are falling apart but everyone just accepts that, and the country now has a social credit system that’s fully been capitalized. Dystopias are a very weak genre for someone to explore their political ideas, but I want to explore the lives of people under a system that seems likely to happen and how young men even find reasons to live under a system that has given up on the most basic infrastructure required to keep a society functioning while corporations offer privatized services that fill in some of the gaps. The problem of the novel has been something that has been discussed before–it’s effectively dead as a medium–but there doesn’t seem to be anything meaningful to replace that. And that’s the brick wall right there. What can be written that has meaning beyond the extremely online shitposters who want to disguise their art in esotericism and subtle references to memes without making an outright appeal to the popular franchise?

On The Democratic Field

Julian Castro has dropped out, prompting everyone to wonder, “wait he was still in the race?” It had been speculated before that he must have pissed someone off to get the reception that he got from the Democratic establishment throughout his entire run, but it’s hard to say. He functioned as a focus for anti-white ire and did a good job of stirring the pot for an hour or so, but he wasn’t able to do much but normalize the new normal in a field that has largely been as meandering and aimless as Joe Biden, a man whose melting brain appears to be to be trying to race him across the finish line.

The two candidates I told everyone not to write off are Biden and Bloomberg. People live too much in the immediate and too much on the internet, completely divorced from how the average “engaged” primary voter thinks and functions. If you think the average Democratic voter has even *heard* of Chapo Trap House, you’re delusional.

The only Democrat I’m still not sure how to process is Buttigieg. He has that POC problem, especially blacks. But he’s got this strange cultish following among a very particular group of people and he’s a very insisted upon candidate who has system backing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s able to hang on if he could end up serving a kind of kingmaker function, depending on how the primaries shake out.

There’s been some speculation on views toward Biden since Obama keeps him arm’s length. The Obamas have always been cool toward Biden. I’d argue it’s that he doesn’t have institutional support. Obama picked Biden in order to establish certain bona fides, but he was never supposed to be a successor. It wasn’t supposed to be necessary because Hillary was supposed to be next. There was never supposed to be a Trump. But Trump was elected as a “fuck you” to the Obama legacy, which Obama is notoriously protective of. Now you have Biden running on being part of that legacy, and that’s the last person Obama wants representing him. Swalwell’s attack on Biden in whichever debate was a message from the establishment to Biden. You’re over the hill, you need to retire. Move aside.

I think there’s been this expectation that he’d eventually flame out because the Democrats are very sensitive to an internal party war, especially when it touches on certain fracture points, and Bernie and Biden flaming out due to their age and ineptitude is something they would hope would happen, or that their support would be absorbed elsewhere (like Warren drawing from Bernie) but it just isn’t happening the way they want. I don’t think Buttigieg is capable of winning the nomination this cycle, but if he were to do so he’d aggressively court Stacey Abrams. The problem is, Biden already tried to court Abrams. Having another round of this ticks all the boxes that annoy Stacey Abrams’ constituents. The absolute weakness of the Democratic bench becomes apparent once you start thinking about who could conceivably win the nomination and who they would try to get on the VP ticket. You end up having to plumb the list of Literally Whos.

The irony of all this is that the public power is vast diminished. Anyone running is running to take orders as a bureaucrat. The real power is in finances and tech and that’s where all the smart people have gone and run.

Personal Stuff

It was auspicious that I was removed from Twitter when I was. I know there are many people who have wanted me to come back and I will in due time. There was an account given to me that has been stuck in limbo and which I cannot access due to an email verification I cannot receive. It’s just as well.

Yesterday’s post likely came off strange. I have a few New Year’s resolutions. One of them was finding better ways of managing my chronic pain that I’ve been dealing with after a motorcycle accident years ago. I’d been shaken up a month ago when I read Lewis Hyde’s phenomenal essay “Alcohol and Poetry”, which had given me a lot to think about on the nature of pain. Of pain needing to be passed through.

It’s been a strange experience, becoming re-acquainted with all of the old thoughts and feelings after being on the bubble for so long. But saying that this is going to be a better year for you doesn’t mean much if you’re even really capable of being.

It’s all good.

Borz out.