THOUGHTS
The zeroing of death amounts to the death of death. With the cult of zero there is no more death. – Gary J. Shipley
I am no pacifist. As ugly a truth as it might be to confront for the average western liberal, political change can’t transpire absent blood. Would Spartacus have inspired the Roman slaves to freedom absent the spectacle of eviscerated and beheaded Roman citizens? Would America have created democracy without the refusal of the colonists to pay their taxes to a king they no longer acknowledged as legitimate, sending a message in the image of executed tax collectors? No.
But that does little to calm the nerves or contextualize the situation in lieu of the recent high-profile acts of political violence. First, Salman Rushdie is stabbed by a jihadist on stage at a speaking engagement, decades after the Ayatollah Khomeini originally declared a Fatwa on the novelist and almost as many decades after the death of the Ayatollah himself. Meaningless. Next, Darya Dugina, the Russian anti-NATO political activist and daughter of the ever-fascinating philosopher and theorist of the Fourth Political Theory Aleksander Dugin, is blown to smithereens in a car bomb, now assumed to be committed by Ukrainian forces in collaboration with NATO intelligence services (shocker.) What might be more shocking about these crimes than the barebones violence of them is one simple truth: they are totally fucking meaningless.
The potentiality of revolution might indeed be a relic of modernism. In the hyperreality, so much politics is happening all at once that politics has effectively ceased happening at all. No one actually believes that anything CAN change, or – they don’t actually believe that they can change anything personally. It’s all operating on a logic so removed from human subjectivity that our engagement with it can’t transcend the limitations of spectatorship. Frederic Jameson held that the relative autonomy that culture held against the economic base of society eroded during postmodernism, when culture was all reduced to an undifferentiated whole. Politics is now also folded into that undifferentiated whole, and it feels like a fucking meaningless chore to engage with it at all. To consider it at all is to bury yourself in a misery of your own making.
If politics is little more than a layer of the cultural monolith, it’s not hard to see the logic in positing that political violence is just one layer folded into another. Salman Rushdie has been irrelevant for decades. No one gives a flying fuck about his work or his ideas, much less is challenged by them. Given the social patterns of our era, it’s a cruel fate that of course now would be the time that his fatwa comes home to roost – the time when said fatwa is devoid of any and all meaning. The Ukrainians, hapless mob of low IQ barbarians that they are, are operating on the same misinformation that most are: Western media. They likely assumed that Dugin and his daughter were worthy targets of their assassination simply because the Western media, and the absolute fucking moron that is Glenn Beck in particular, has long said that Dugin is “Putin’s Rasputin” (got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?) despite the philosopher having absolute zero public ties to the Kremlin. So, a young woman dies and for what? Ukraine has already lost this war. It’s over. It’s all so fraudulent, so fake, so addictive to watch and so meaningless to engage with. Fuck it.
BASED SAFETY
The motives around the murder of Dugina are confusing and this article, if nothing else, outlines all the possible reasons that have been presented by different parties for it happening. Dugin’s primary translator in the West, Michael Millerman, discusses the despicable contradiction in the same Western media that unanimously lamented the attack on Rushdie’s life then going on to downplay the heinousness of the violence targeted at Dugin’s daughter. “Threats against Rushdie’s life, like threats against Dugin’s, could be accepted far more readily than threats against the life of an impeccably progressive intellectual,” writes Millerman. “Notwithstanding the conceit of liberal neutrality, the liberal has more tolerance for some forms of political violence than others.”
Avant-garde guitar god Jim O’Rourke joins the Noisextra podcast to chronicle a career that has taken him from the Chicago no wave and free jazz underground of the 1990s to duties as the third guitar player for Sonic Youth in the early 2000s to being an indisputable institution in the global music underground (for better or worse.) Roberto Mammarella, the creative force behind Italian cult band MonumentuM, talks to Bardo Methodology. In all honestly, I haven’t listened to his band, but the interview is worth reading for when Roberto reveals that Varg sent him letters in the 1990s to ask for explosives that he could use in his church burnings. Varg, being essentially a simpleton, assumed that given that Roberto was Italian he might have connections to la costa nostra. Italian reissue label known for its gorgeous releases, each of which elevates old noise and power electronics releases to extremely desirable art objects, announces a 12-cassette box set of the late Italian PE death industrial pioneer Atrax Morgue.
My former NYU professor and fascinating center right practitioner of new journalism David Samuels writes one of the best treatises on Phillip K Dick and the role of technology in his literary philosophy that I’ve ever read: “What Dick saw, and what his fellow anti-utopians did not,” writes Samuels. “Was that human psychology and technology are not separate actors, and that whatever emerged from the other side of the future would be different to the human thing that entered it.” Aaron Rodgers continues being one of the world’s most interesting professional athletes – this time in admitting that tripping his balls off on ayahuasca changed his life. For countere, Gustavo Pierre enters the weird world of AOC deepfake porn, and questions the ethics of a world in which VR has allowed us to go balls deep inside the pussies or assholes of any celebrities we could possibly want.
Speaking of countere, writer and editor Zachary Emmanuel goes on Contain to discuss the project and what it hopes to bring to journalism (some life, some ethics, some TRUTH hopefully.) Jack goes on Red Scare finally and, to the horror of its lingering dirtbag leftoid listeners, TRIUMPHS. One more podcast: my friends at Art of Darkness Brad and Kevin wax lyrical for hours about the life and work of a Safety Propaganda godhead Ernst Junger.
In the section where I humble brad about recent achievements: I go back on Rare Candy so Glen and I can commiserate about how fucking annoying based and red pilled twitter posters are. In a column for Compact, I rejoice over the unlikely mainstream success being enjoyed by the, all things considered, extremely strange writer Otessa Mosfegh. Over at our audio misinformation arm System of Systems, we close out a trio of episodes focused on outsider music: Psyop Resistor joins to discuss black metal and Easy Listening joins to discuss the Nurse With Wound list.
Finally, I want to celebrate the vast achievements of Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, and the entire gifted cast of the Breaking Bad universe: Better Call Saul is over. The end of Saul also dawns the end of the Breaking Bad universe, and my god will television miss this world and its mythology. The final episode of Better Call Saul ranks among the greatest endings in the history of prestige TV. While it differs from the punk rock defiance of The Sopranos’ ending and is absent the high-octane thrills and action of Breaking Bad’s conclusion, Better Call Saul manages a pitch perfect conclusion to the character of Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman. Saul, who the audience has always known has had goodness in him, finally lets that goodness rise to the surface once more, confessing to all his crimes and moral failures with the audience of the one woman who ever loved him. It is beautiful. As great as everyone knows these shows are, they somehow seem even greater in retrospect – like the combination of both Saul and Breaking Bad together form a narrative universe so rich that you never want to leave it. Aside from Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament, the second half of The Sopranos, or Twin Peaks: The Return, I can’t think of a greater artistic achievement this century. Bravo, Vince Gilligan.