Author: Robert Mariani

Send me a tweet: @robert_mariani Email me: rjmariani0 AT gmail DOT com

No, the “real victims” of false narratives are not the ones the narratives were made to serve

Are police officers are the real victims of unarmed black men being shot dead by the police? Of course not – that would be an insane thing to believe. Even though police officers might be coming under more scrutiny as a result of recent incidents, that’s not the same thing as actually being a the victim of those incidents.

The problem is that these incidents are probably facilitated by a police narrative. In the wake of the killing of Walter Scott, a Fox legal analyst revealed that planting weapons used to be standard procedure for cops. Does this mean that cops are pure evil? No. It means that within police culture there exists have a narrative that isn’t necessarily backed up by evidence specific to the relevant incident. The argument would go that criminals exist, and sometimes criminals get lucky and can get away with it due to a lack of evidence. It’s up to the police officers to tilt the scales in the favor of justice by bending the truth. And since black men commit a disproportionate amount of the crime, there is a problem that has to be solved with evidence-agnostic action that may break a few eggs to make the omelet.

Women actually facing harassment aren’t the “real victims” of Ellen Pao’s failure to achieve her dishonest shakedown of Silicon Valley. Businesses targeted by ideological profiteers are. The ideology is based on the specious claim of the culture of Silicon Valley is a “boy’s club.” Because Silicon Valley is like this, any specific Silicon Valley company is guilty by association. This claim that Pao’s company must have been guilty of discriminating against women was made by the media before they even had the evidence. They made an evidence-agnostic claim that if Silicon Valley is sexist in general, any charge of sexism made against any tech company must true. Every narrative like this demands that we make examples of those who embody its fears.

When UVA rape story broke, the media was already waiting for it to happen. After all, fraternities as institutions of white male privilege, and therefore “rape culture,” are a mainstay of fashionable progressive demonology. When the hysteria died down and the story came under scrutiny, it unraveled. It turned out that Rolling Stone just didn’t really check their facts on the ever so narrative-friendly incident. But while the story was eventually skewered by the media, there was no real desire to adjust the narrative of a rape crisis on campus. The “real victims” of the fanciful hoax were actually women on campus, since their claims will now be more easily dismissed. It’s not the men or fraternities that were falsely accused of rape. It can’t be. When the narrative has such an embarrassing failure, the only victims of such a failure can be those who the narrative was built to serve.

Thankfully, the media doesn’t have the same narrative in favor of police officers. Just because black people are overrepresented in crime doesn’t mean that every instance of a black man being shot dead means that he deserved it. Discrimination happening doesn’t mean that any given company is guilty of it and should be made an example of. Rape being a crime that happens doesn’t mean that every overheated story about it must be taken gospel. Evidence needs to come first in these kinds of situations, and victims need to be properly identified as the villains of an agenda-driven mythology.

Advertisements

Good targets for the trolling contest

Last month we announced our trolling contest. Wondering who to skewer with satire? Here are some links to the submission section of publications:

Tech/Gaming Websites (#gamergate!)

Righty Websites

Obviously you’re going to want to be in line with the usual style and content of the websites, so do a bit of research. They’re also going to want to know about you, so either actually be someone who could reasonably believe what you’re writing, or make up a believable bio that can’t be proven fake with Google. Since a lot of them publish based on qualifications, a believable bio, pedigree and paper trail would be necessary.

If you think any other sites should be up here, let me know in a comment.

The singularity should put the fear of God in you

I’ve been having weird dreams lately. Part of my dream last night involved the singularity and a word called “ultrapunishment.” Needless to say, it was more of a nightmare.

It was pretty abstract, but the jist of the dream was that the “Mariani family secrets” were stolen by a fellow in his pre-singularity mortal life, and an apparently Mariani-related woman who looked like Camille Paglia (who is actually pretty cool) was now a powerful posthuman being who had the power to torture the thief’s consciousness.

There are no Mariani family secrets, and nobdy knows what the singularity holds for us – a fact that is baked right into the etymology of the word. Maybe perfect moral enlightenment will come with merging with a superintelligence. Maybe they will inherit their human pettiness, or maybe such pettiness will magnified yet. The point is that even a chance of the extreme disutility scenario of being punished forever is worthy of consideration.

Even someone who is originally a dick to you could be a vengeful post-human god – maybe it’s unlikely, but it’s possible. So, it’s in your interest to follow the teachings of Jesus and love your worst enemy. Any utility lost from self-denial for the good of another in this mortal life is inconsequential compared to a potential eternal punishment or reward.

This is all textbook example of imperfect contrition, where someone behaves morally out of something such as fear of punishment rather than the love of God and his laws. So my advice is to try to show charity and kindness even to the least deserving assholes on the planet, since you don’t know who is going to be in a privileged position of processing power. Maybe it’s the best reason, but if you believe in the singularity, you might as well follow God’s greatest commandments.

For reasons that should now be obvious, I don’t view the singularity as a necessarily good thing. As Zager and Evans said, “If God’s a-coming, he oughta make it by then.”

“That’s gross,” and other hedonic considerations

You may be familiar with Truffaut’s famous quote, “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film,” which captures the quandry of inadvertently glorifying war by giving it a cinematic representation. I think this is quote is better rendered the more general a “there is no such thing as an anti-hedonistic film.” Or at least it’s really hard. Cinema is an engaging sensory experience, and good and bad are most easily expressed through an engagement of appreciation or an engagement of revulsion. This convention obviously extends beyond movies and into media like books, and it was in fact a book that I read recently that got me thinking about this whole thing.

For anyone who thinks I don’t give feminism a fair shake, I will have you know that I’ve read the radical feminist sci-fi novel Woman on the Edge of Time. On a related note, I have black friends. Anyway, the short of it is that in the novel there’s two potential futures presented to the 1970’s present-day heroine. The first is a Marxist pastoral “utopia” in which gender has been essentially been abolished through Brave New World-like biotechnology. Pretty creepy, but that’s a discussion for another article.

The second future is a hellish capitalist dystopia, where most people are part of a slave-like underclass that are little more than walking organ banks for the rich elite. Women are, of course, particularly oppressed, being kept as ignoramuses who are only valued for their appearance – they are surgically modified to have grotesquely exaggerated sexual characteristics. The grotesqueness is really driven home to let the reader feel just how bad this potential future really is.

Is sickening excess the logical consequence of our unchained material appetites? Of course it isn’t – actual hedonism, by definition, always finds the sweet spot. Excess is, by definition, anti-hedonic. Intentionally eating so much cake to become nauseous isn’t something that people do. Similarly, people find cartoonishly enhanced women revolting; if they didn’t, the author wouldn’t be able to use such a thing as a cautionary tale to scare the reader straight. Showing good or bad in terms of the hedonic calculus is easy, but you can’t have it as both terrifyingly revolting and believably alluring.

Perhaps it is, then, a cautionary tale against changing social norms of the grotesque? Even so, we would need to establish a moral standard outside of “appreciation vs. revulsion” to say that this change of taste is more than merely a value neutral disjunction between our revulsion and their appreciation. After all, the supposed utopia is just as radically different from our current cultural standards as the dystopia is.

(more…)

Introducing the Mitrailleuse’s trolling contest

Let’s screw with people!

There are a lot of stupid publications out there. Some of them are so stupid that they are easy to troll. But fake articles can also speak to truths about the media, or, in the case of the Sokal affair, academic publishing. These are usually funny, and we’d like to see more of them, so we’re offering a bounty for the best trolling of media outlets. You may remember when Jordan and I made it into the news for our parody of Salon that fooled even pro-Salon Twitter users. It was a lot of fun, and now we want to give everyone the opportunity to put their satire skills on display. This is a rolling contest of trolling, where a winner is picked every four months.

The Rules

  • Get an article published. The editor can’t be in on the joke.
  • The article must be published somewhere that is a real and decently-trafficked publication. Think Wikipedia’s reliable source guidelines.
  • You can’t let it be known that the article is parody before we decide the winner.
  • While we were thinking more on the lines of trolling lefties, it by no means should be limited to that. You have free rein to screw with people across the political spectrum.
  • Winners will be chosen at the end of back-to-back six month periods. That means it will happen two times a year, with the first winner being chosen on September 1st, 2015.

The Criteria

  • It should be funny.
  • The goal here is to push it to the limits of absurdity while still being believable (and therefore publishable), which is a fine line to walk.
  • It has to somehow satirize the viewpoint of the publication that runs it. The more truth it reveals about them, the better.
  • Proportionality will be factored in. Getting a ludicrous piece published in an actually respectable publication like Jacobin or New Inquiry is different from getting it published on xoJane. We will keep that in mind when choosing the winner.

The Reward

  • 50 USD
  • Your fake name, real name, and article enshrined in a dedicated section of our website until the end of time.
  • The satisfaction of getting the last laugh on a publication that you presumably don’t like.
  • Even if you don’t win, we will link and rank all articles in order from best to worst.

Submissions may be sent to [email protected] Happy trolling.

Update: If you want some good examples of sites to submit to, we’ve compiled a list.

The radicals are the only ones we read

Remember the donkey, Benjamin, from Animal Farm? He is a dissident intellectual who sees how things really are, providing exposition to the reader about how the ridiculous, surreptitious deception defines the post-revolution farm. He’s not a resister, he’s not a rabble-rouser and he’s not counter-revolutionary. He is passive, and he passively speaks the sober truth, with neither a delusion of living under a reasonable system or delusion of being able to change that system. That’s the only reason why he can occupy his strange position — he is an utterly defeated fellow with nothing to lose and no reason to speak anything but the harsh truth. This is the mystique of the neoreactionary.

The neoreactionary is the guy at the end of the movie that tells everyone exactly how he feels about them. He’s already lost his job, or lost the battle, or he’s just had an epiphany about how he’s been full of shit the whole time (does anyone else remember Talk Radio?) That’s why people actually read neoreactionary blogs instead of those of, say, Stormfront.org buffoons, despite the two being about equal in political incorrectness. Where white nationalists might have laughable fantasies about a “white revolution” and coming neo-Nazi order, neoreactionaries are acutely aware of the insurmountable obstacles that face an anti-mass movement. Nick Land writes:

Neoreactionary realism, in contrast, is positively aligned with the recession of demotic sustenance. If this were not the case, it would exhibit its own specific mode of democratic politics — an evident absurdity. Any suggestion of frustrated rage, tilting into terroristic expressions, would immediately reveal profound confusion, or hypocrisy. Lashing the masses into ideological acquiescence, through exemplary violence, cannot imaginably be a neoreactionary objective…

“What is to be done?” is not a neutral question. The agent it invokes already strains towards progress. This suffices to suggest a horrorist response: Nothing. Do nothing. Your progressive ‘praxis’ will come to nought in any case. Despair. Subside into horror. You can pretend to prevail in antagonism against ‘us’, but reality is your true — and fatal — enemy. We have no interest in shouting at you. We whisper, gently, in your ear: “despair”. (The horror.)

Compare this to the embarrassing pretensions of power that “anti-establishment” types have: libertarians saying “smash the state,” feminists saying, “smash the patriatrchy,” and socialists saying, “smash capitalism.” There is clearly no smashing of any of these types going on and no plausibility of it happening either. It’s a game of make-believe that the neoreactionaries do not play.

Progressive intellectuals, even the Marxist ones, are toiling in the status quo. Apparently fresh academia-intelligentsia-social media trends are just new exegesis of old progressive canon. Criticism of Patricia Arquette’s progressive Oscar acceptance speech is being made from the exact same assumptions about the nature of justice human interaction that Patricia Arquette’s speech itself is built upon. Even conservatives attempting to implement conservative ideas work within the status quo by using proxy arguments: “We should cut welfare because welfare leads to bad results for the poor,” or the ever eye roll inducing, “Liberals are the real racists for supporting affirmative action!” Both of these talking points, regardless of their truth value, are ultimately competing in the rat race of finding creative ways to dignify progressive assumptions. Conservatives don’t seem to realize that their proxy arguments are always going to be inferior to the real thing. This doesn’t mean that the progressives are wrong — they are just operate in the same kind of criticism-insulated environment that the medieval scholastics existed in.

(more…)