Madness

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‘I intend to make [Gaza] howl’: Victor Davis Hanson’s thirst for ‘humiliation’

There’s that great Faulkner quote about every Southern boy being able to imagine himself at will into Pickett’s charge:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago…

By contrast a neoconservative columnist is able to, in similar fashion, imagine himself torching homes in Columbia with General Sherman.

*****

On November 9 2012, news broke of the Paula Broadwell/David Petraeus affair, ending the career of America’s top celebrity-general and immediately putting a stop to rumors regarding his plans to run for office, possibly on a presidential ticket in 2016. Our Caesar of counterinsurgency was not to be, and Victor Davis Hanson was so shocked he had trouble believing it. He wrote that Petraeus’ resignation was “bizarre” in his column that month, and asked the sort of questions that would get him called a fifth columnist or truther if he’d been asking them about 9/11 or the Iraq war: “How and why did the FBI investigate the Petraeus matter? To whom and when did it report its findings? And what was the administration reaction?”

The next month he wrote a “short history of amorous generals” to make sure we knew that it’s OK, because lots of generals do this kind of thing.

Finding out one of one’s saviors is a philanderer is understandably shocking; and as of November 8, Hanson, reportedly one of Dick Cheney’s favorite dinner guests, had already decided to include Petraeus as one of the five “Savior Generals” covered in his book by the same name, which would appear in May 2013. He first applied the term to Petraeus in 2009, calling him the “maverick savior of Iraq,” and despite the failures of his COIN strategy and the chaos engulfing the north of the benighted country today, the Petraeus myth remains key to the conservative argument that everything was going fine in Iraq until perfidious Obama withdrew. Needless to say, Sherman is another one of Hanson’s saviors (and is also treated here).

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Violence as a matter of scale

It’s interesting what happens when you see two nations, diverse and distinct as they can be, interact. A minor hostile interaction can tend to escalate very quickly if you let it. When all you have is emotions and pure instinct to go by, a slight can become a fistfight very quickly. That goes with people. Communities. Nations.

Conflict takes a lot to inspire these days, but it’s far easier to incite it as the number of people you need to provoke grows ever smaller. It’s made all the more so when you see the other as not just some other person, but as something else. If you think that Other person isn’t respecting you and your space in that moment, what do you do? Are you calm enough to let it slide? Do you run away, as some would argue here? Or do you fight?

It’s admittedly strange to compare violent conflicts of recent, especially because the reasons and methods are so diverse, and because sounds so simplistic. But applying the economics of scale, you become more appreciative of what is happening from a holistic perspective, even you don’t have a complete understanding of things. In two such conflicts, the lack of clarity makes a comparison apt. When you have two distinct groupings, clarity is beyond important when a mistake is made in interaction. Sometimes, that requires patience.

Three teenagers kidnapped and killed. Or maybe they were killed already, and the butchers had made a large mess in the clear-up. Or maybe they were kidnapped and accidentally killed. The killers are (not) state-mandated terrorists. Or they’re (not) militants associated with the government. Or they’re (not) just a bunch of morons with AK-47s and some unabashed sense of righteousness. Or the leadership admitted their (non) role in the situation.

A teenager is shot and killed. Maybe he was (not) a suspect in a robbery. Maybe he was (not) reaching for a cop’s a gun. Maybe he was (not) picking a fight. Maybe he just said (did not say) “fuck off, pig” with his hands up. The cop’s a rookie. The cop’s a veteran. The cop is (not) hiding something. The cop is (not) hiding. There are (no) death threats.

All this information is as much a jumble as the items found in a trash can. Yet we seek to answer this slight as fast we can. Why? Why bother asking? We demand justice, revenge, blood. Screw the first two words, we’ve always wanted blood. It’s one of the few things we yearn for more than sex.

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Salondotcom linkfest

A week ago, just before the account was returned to us, I went on the Rick Amato show to talk about the suppression of @salondotcom. Quite happy to be introduced as “definitely not a jagoff”:

I forgot to mention that it was probably Salon that reported us, but what can you do. Here’s a round-up of news coverage, after the jump:

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A brief programming interruption

I know, I know, this is a place for very serious discussion. But Rob and I have been busy taking the piss out of Salon the last few days:

If you’ve been on Twitter at all the last several days, you’ve likely seen some bizarre headlines coming from handle named @Salondotcom. While that seems like progressive site Salon’s real user name, it’s actually a parody account, and it’s been retweeted and praised by media folk across the spectrum.

In just four days of existence, the account has accumulated an impressive roster of fake Salon headlines, parodying the site’s infamous contrarian-at-all-costs progressive commentary on each and every issue.

Have a look here.

The Turing-Poe test

With the rise of the internet radicals and internet trolls, it would be an interesting exercise to apply the Turing test to Poe’s law. Is that person posting that stuff an idiot? Are they just pretending to be an idiot? Or is it idiots tricked into looking like even bigger idiots by a loose group of people pretending to be idiots? Because that’s exactly what happened with #EndFathersDay on twitter.

straw feminist

This prank originated on 4chan’s news and politics board, /pol/, a board known for its radicalism, offensiveness and free speech, and it’s clear that it was success. What’s more interesting is that this isn’t your typical black propaganda, because it actually fooled the people that it was satirizing into joining in. The hashtag topped twitter’s trending lists, sweeping up thousands of bona fide feminists in the apparently empowering anti-holiday frenzy. Plenty of savvier feminist tweeters pointed out that such tweets needed to stop – not because the rhetoric is fucking crazy, but because of who is originating the hashtag, since the internet is public and any group of people planning such thing will be uncovered with a little digging.

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Elliot Rodger’s OMG chronicles

We’re about two weeks out from the Isla Vista massacre, and salacious round-ups of available social media information have given way to thoughtful columns about what it all means.

One of the most striking things about Elliot Rodger’s mental state, in his manifesto and elsewhere, is his insistence that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he was “a drop-dead gorgeous, fabulous, stylish, exotic gem among thousands of rocks.”

As many have noted, this and other details seem to indicate a privileged cast of mind taken to the extreme, which is why his rampage made for the perfect ‘teachable moment’ to a media increasingly devoted to narratives about patriarchy and white supremacy — Rodger was simply a malignant version of the latent biases within all of us; his violence an individualized form of the structural oppression embedded in all corners of our society, and so on.

The truth seems somewhat more complicated — the boy really did have a pedigree; one that, like so many others, decayed. The image above is one of Elliot Rodger’s grandfather’s many famous photographs.

George Rodger’s definitive posthumous collection is called Humanity or Inhumanity, covering his many years of work, including most famously his photographs of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. If his work resides in the tension between those things, it seems to have been resolved in his grandson’s only artistic creation two generations later, with Elliot’s realization of “just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species.”

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