Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #37

This Week in Based and Cringe...

Amber Heard and the Final Nail in the Coffin of #MeToo, and Elon’s Disruption

”All the dick swagger you roll and you STILL can’t spot crazy pussy?” – Rustin Cohle to Marty Hart in True Detective season 1

I can’t stop watching clips of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s defamation trial. In fact, it’s one of the two major, productivity crushing obsessions in my life right now (more on the other later). I don’t know why exactly. I’ve never been overly engrossed in tabloid infotainment and I don’t have much respect for Johnny Depp. Sure, he’s been great in the past. I could watch his laconic and taciturn performance in Jim Jarmusch’s psychedelic western film Dead Man repeatedly. I’ve watched Donnie Brasco about 100 times since first seeing it in the theater as a boy. But after almost two decades of him playing essentially different iterations of Michael Jackson in Tim Burton films and a faggot pirate over and over, it’s a lot harder for me to think of Depp as anything other than a Hollywood hack. What the hell is he wearing? Why is a 50-year-old man wearing black nail polish? And most importantly, why do I feel nothing but love and support for Johnny Depp at this moment in time?

That’s because Amber Heard is a malevolent sociopath hellbent on the destruction of a man who loved her. Johnny Depp, however rich, off-putting and far removed from masculine normality he might appear with his bizarre hat choices and gaudy jewelry and guy-liner, has been transformed into an everyman in the wake of revelations made about his ex-wife’s sadism. Amber falsely accused him of being violent and abusive and tarnished his career and reputation the world over, with serious financial ramifications. She hurled two vodka bottles at him, one which landed upon his hand and sliced it down to the bone. She shit in his fucking bed! As we watch Captain Jack Sparrow’s trial, as we see ourselves in Johnny’s inability to refuse the charms of crazy pussy, Johnny Depp becomes all of us.

Any man who has been sexually and romantically active in the 21st Century has had at least one girlfriend who reminded them of the Amber Heard we’re now learning about. A woman seemingly devoid of love and tenderness yet replete of cruelty and passive aggressive manipulation. 75 percent of those diagnosed with BPD are, after all, women. And what few people understand about BPD is that those afflicted with the mental illness can be remarkably seductive. Borderline women are hard to resist. When coupled with immense physical beauty, their contradictory moods, boundless energy, and venomous contempt masquerading as alluring mystique can make for a most captivating of honeymoon periods. I myself lived with a bipolar woman for two years. The relationship was a constant conflict. She would throw hard objects at me only after having hurled emotional abuse so intense that it cut through to the bone of my deepest insecurities. And then, after all of that, she still managed to make me feel guilty for somehow having failed to give her the love that she deserved. To this day, I feel grateful that I got away, and found someone who loved me for who I am.

The insanity and total fucking hilarity of the Depp-Heard trial might be overshadowing its cultural significance. Make no mistake: this is the final nail in the coffin of #MeToo and the false narratives that it mainlined into the discourse. The left of liberalism will get no more propaganda benefits in espousing uncritical feminist inanities like #BelieveWomen. Amber Heard has proven beyond a shred of a doubt, just like the accusers of people like Aziz Ansari and James Franco before her, that women DO LIE. A lot. Just as much as men, in fact. Perhaps we should thank Amber, then. Perhaps now we can have a genuine reconciliation between the sexes in which all of our claims, made by either man or woman, will be evaluated based on the veracity of those claims. And veracity, as we should have known all along, cannot be taken at face value. If Johnny Depp, an insanely wealthy and powerful man, can be a victim, so can any man. If Amber Heard, a mediocre B-list and relatively forgotten actress, can be an aggressor, so can any woman. Now, let Johnny heal. And let culture heal, too. #MeToo good bye and fuck you forever…

One More Thing

I have libtards on my left and doomers on my right and they are both driving me nuts. Libtards are of course in hysterics than Elon Musk’s purchase of their favorite social media app might actually become a platform of open discourse. Doomers, on the other hand, are refusing to let us rejoice about Musk’s twitter coup because they, most likely rightly, are concerned that his ownership of the company could be used to darker ends in terms of Musk’s enthusiasm for transhumanism and engineering support for his odious Neuralink project. It’s not that the doomers are wrong to fret, it’s that for this moment in time: I do not give a fuck! Right now,, the Musk Twitter takeover feels glorious! Twitter had become all but useless to me in the last year. With 3500 followers accrued on the Safety Propaganda account, an account I only started using after my PERSONAL ACCOUNT was suspended for saying “retard” a couple times, I found myself so shadow banned that I could barely even get new eyeballs on my work. Friends that I’m in several group chats with would tell me they never even saw me on the timeline. It was a drag. It’s not that Twitter is everything, it’s that it’s a primary tool with which I can get people to look at my art and my work. And that, if not everything, is A LOT. The bonus, of course, is watching the libtards go into hysteria and all but reveal how reliant they are on the platform to control the debate and neutralize it of dissenters. Less censorship is, even if only in the short term, a win. Now, let’s get to edgeposting…

BASED SAFETY

Let’s start with the most joyous of recent online events: SPENCER PRATT CO-SIGNS PERFUME NATIONALISM! That’s right: the antagonist and greatest character on one of the few reality programs to ever blur the boundaries between its own genre limitations and something more expansive and uncanny that we could possibly even call “hyper-art” (if I was feeling pretentious) joins Jack to lament the failures of the return of The Hills, his and his wife Heidi Montag’s denial of long-lasting success due to their heinous smearing by the media, and the lunacy of political hysteria in pop culture. I usually don’t get impressed. I’m perhaps too arrogant, hateful, and (let’s face it) Jewish to acknowledge the accomplishments of others. But Jack’s reality star coup has had me “YAS KWEEN”ing for the last week. Well done, my friend.

Aside from my Depp-Heard habit, my other main addiction right now is playing the recently released video game Elden Ring, designed by the legendary From Software studio. In this new episode of The Agitator podcast, J. David and Kelby host writer David Simmons to discuss From Software director Hideteka Miyazaki’s 2015 macabre, frightening and supremely challenging game Bloodborne from 2015. Miyazaki is the Samuel Beckett of AAA game design: strange and disorienting narratives, extremely challenging yet even more rewarding gameplay, and a tonal absurdity and profound bleakness. The case against “video games as art” ends here. In a thoughtful review of Robert Eggers’ recently released The Northman, Henry Hopwood-Phillips finds a film that leaves “pagans and nihilists too much room to romanticize the violence of honor culture,” and thought it might not have been Henry’s intent – I now can’t fucking wait to see this thing. This interview with film critic extraordinaire Nick Pinkerton is a year old but I’d never read it until yesterday. It’s great: “I used to get so upset with myself when I’d doze off at a movie, or be inattentive for a second, pinching the backs of my hands until they were practically bleeding in Film Forum, things like that. There was a real grim, monastery vibe to my cinephilia for a while, and I think I was still shaking loose from that in 2004.”

I was repulsed by the vast majority of the “art” that I saw at this year’s Whitney Biennial. But how could I possibly hate the spectacular Charles Ray sculptures that are exhibited at the show’s fifth floor balcony? Here, Gabriel Almeida perfectly describes the power of Ray’s figurative sculptures, now being exhibited at a retrospective at The Met: “These works will outlast generations and their feelings will resonate through the ages, with that air suffused with the vitality of American life.” The great literary critic Steven Barber edits this collection of Artaud’s last writings for the terrific Infinity Land press and, marking the occasion, Barber discusses the book and Artaud with Infinity Land editor Karolina Urbaniak here.

My visceral hatred for the twee, hyperpop crisis actor in chief of Ukraine, Zelensky, has been burning bright since the psyop started in March. Thus, I’m utterly pleased reading Ukranian academic Olga Baysha’s Zelensky explainer, because at least now I can sound semi smart when I explain to people that Zelensky is a hallow, NATO-controlled puppet fag: “Only after Zelensky had consolidated his presidential power by establishing full control over the legislative and executive branches of power did he make it clear that the ‘normalization’ and ‘civilization’ of Ukraine meant the privatization of land and state/public property.” In Nina’s second column for Compact Mag, she chronicles what she calls a “war on the family” that she posits is being waged by both sides of liberalism.

Furthermore, my second column for Compact is also published, in which I savage the previously mentioned and dismally propagandistic Whitney Biennial, one of the museum’s worst ever bi-annual surveys of American art. Also on my front, my friend and artist Benjamin Kellogg joins SP’s audio misinformation arm System of Systems to discuss aliens, architecture, Lynch, and getting bogged down in the details. I appear on my friend Glen Rockney and Filthy Armenian’s new sports themed podcast to talk about the cultural impact of the first two videos by skateboard brand Baker and the company’s massive influence on early meme and 4Chan culture. Finally, I am on a recent episode of the excellent literary-themed Wake Island podcast discussing Communions, Burroughs, and crypto-transgression.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

Let’s start with a couple literary crimes against humanity published by the ever reliantly hilarious Jacobin. First, Ryan Napier’s laments the late David Foster Wallace’s inability to “move past neoliberalism,” the “typicalness” of his prose, and…… WHO CARES? SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU GAPING LOSER! There is absolutely nothing typical about Infinite Jest unless you think “typicality” is writing 1400 pages about spiritual alienation, addiction, and loneliness? I’m sorry Ryan: can you write something like that? NO! All you can do is write a gay essay that will be half-read by dirtbag leftists who will never read a book, anyways! Next, we have Ben Burgis explaining: “Well, ahkshuallyyyyyy…. Elon Musk can’t protect free speech online because…….. reasons.” And given that his side of the political debate has outed itself as benefactors of extreme political censorship, who is going to take him seriously?”

Speaking of political censorship, here is an amusing clip in which Ari Melber gives away the whole game. The ever dim-witted Charles Blow is sad that no one seems to care about Covid anymore, and worries aloud that it’s evidence of America’s “empathy gap,” and now evidence of the fact that two years of our lives were wasted under political control measures that never at one point seemed to even have the slightest impact in slowing the spread of what revealed itself as a relatively non-life threatening virus. Some Bezos employees report that Musk is “threatening” Twitter employees when in reality all he did was privately reprimand one of the platform’s millionaire legal advisors for meddling in users of the site’s content.

Less we forget, a propaganda model during war time necessitates the manufactured support of a society’s elite artists and public figures, so we know exactly what Artforum editor David Velasco is doing here in this interview with a Ukranian performance artist. The artist, Nikita Kadan (admittedly, not an untalented artist), claims to be “anti-nationalist” but while he seems to excoriate Putin’s alleged “far right state,” he seems to be totally unaware of the reliance that his own state places upon its supremely violent, barbaric and avowedly nationalistic fighting force the Azov Batallion. Richard Brody, the once revered Godard scholar turned laughing stock lover of Jordan Peele’s unwatchable dreck, really hates The Northman; if only The Northman was called The Blackman, or better yet – The Black WoMan, it would likely be Brody’s favorite film of the decade. Finally, Resident Advisor is still doing its damndest to “reduce electronic music’s carbon footprint” without a shred of irony and we continue laughing at and mocking them while doing MDMA at raves and polluting the field with water bottles and empty cans of Trulys.

ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Depp-Heart
2. The Northman
3. Art by Nikita Kadan