Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #34

This week in Based and Cringe

If Donald Trump was president, Covid would have ended a year ago. If Donald Trump was president, we would not be worrying about going to war with the world’s second largest supply of nuclear arms over a geopolitical void like Ukraine. If Donald Trump was president, we wouldn’t have to listen to Joe Biden prattling on about trans women of color while he falls asleep into his bowl of probiotic yogurt. Freedom from the ideological ghetto that is leftism requires one final realization. Terminal leftists, or leftists who have made observations about the fraudulences of their politics, won’t be unchained until they are able to stop saying, “Voting doesn’t matter.” Of course, to the possibility that we can actually radically change society, it’s true that voting doesn’t matter all that much. But at a time when the left is leading the charge for the establishment of a biomedical authoritarian regime of capital accumulation, your insistence that “voting doesn’t matter” is actually an expression of your own cowardice. It’s a declaration of your refusal to be seen as one of the “bad people” and to admit that indeed the right wing IS the lesser of two evils. When you can agree that Covidian liberalism, worshipping black people, and gender ideology are all socially corrosive forces and yet STILL refuse to concede that you need to vote for the parties that don’t support those things as harm reduction, you’re still doing leftism. Revolution is nowhere in sight, but we CAN end Covid hysteria. No one thinks you sound smart because of your refusal to vote — indeed I was one of those proud non-voters for a long time — we think you’re a fucking pussy who refuses to reckon with the reality before you.

UPDATE: It appears that Adam Kotsko, well known as a translator of Agamben, shivs the ol’ Italian philosopher in the neck with his insistence here that Agamben’s claim that Covid restrictions looked like Nazism were false, despite the fact that the restrictions failed to do anything other than RESTRICT our way of life while the pandemic raged on. Hey Adam, you really think Trudeau’s martial law declaration is just the state being a kind and caring power structure that loves us? If so, you’re either lying or a totally retarded loser who should be ridiculed ad nauseam!

BASED SAFETY

There’s going to be a lot to go through here. Let us begin with the the fourth issue of our friends at Morbid Books’s A Void magazine; with a focus on the inescapability of MASS HYSTERIA, A Void #4 features contributions by noble artists and minds like philosopher Nina Power, artist Darja Bajagic, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, transgressive fiction writer Supervert, and yours truly. I’d wager that my friend the Filthy Armenian is creating the most original and compulsively listenable podcast to emerge in a long while, and evidence of his talents is on full display here in this four hour banger with Amanda Milius giving the Armenian the rock n’ roll tour of the Sunset Strip. Author Jarret Kobek joins Bret Easton Ellis to discuss writing about the mythical Zodiac Killer.

The artist Zach Brown shows up to talk Princess Diaries and both versions of The Secret Garden with Ortant and JACK MASON. The Noisextra crew hosts Dave Phillips, an icon of the subterranean noise underground, who has a stunning body of work that dates back to his noisecore band Fear of God and has relentlessly released visceral, mind-melting noise music for decades since (forgive his climate hysteria please, he’s a liberal European of a certain age). DC Miller celebrates the Freedom Convoy in Canada and finds strength in its ideological flexibility and commitment to broad principles of freedom: “It corresponds to the force of a break with ideological principles and narrowly partisan claims in the cause of universality calling to free humanity everywhere,” he writes. A surprisingly sober and sharp piece of analysis here from Andrew J. Bacevich asks if Ukraine-Russia is Biden’s own Wag the Dog moment.

In what has to be the least surprising albeit still commendable piece of investigative journalism in a long while, Andrew Kerr finds that BLM leaders have been swindling money and that some its leaders have predictably jumped off the sinking ship. Wow, how shocking! BLM is a petty bourgeois ponzi scheme and not actually an emancipation movement! I Can’t Believe It!!!! Countere interviews Dugin who outlines the ethos of his anti-Americanist philosophical principles: “The global unipolar hegemonic order should be replaced by a more realistic multipolar world with different sets of ideologies and values,” says Dugin. Bardo Methodology shares a condensed version of an interview with the excellent Finnish black metal duo Phlegein. Zac Leslie documents the all-encompassing powers of Ivermectin, which apparently can be used to treat ailments as complicated as racism and basically everything except Covid (LOL).

Finally, Amphetamine Sulphate’s AS/SF: Human Rights anthology book is finally out, featuring fiction by Thomas Moore, Audrey Szasz, Christopher Zeischegg, Simon Morris (his final completed novella), Blake Butler, Kenji Siratori, SJXSJC, Alexandrine Ogundimu, David Cotner, Ian Haig and Philip Best, as well as my own theory fictional essay on the tendency that I have come to call Crypto-Transgression and applications of the tendency in visual art.

CRINGE PROPAGANDA

It’s nigh impossible to illustrate my disgust with all the cringe going on. While Covid seems to finally see its hysteria winding down, it looks ever more possible that our Braindead-in-Chief is hellbent on dragging us into an absolutely meaningless war with Russia over the Ukraine. I’m depressed. I can’t shake it. The reality of it all is being mainlined into my bloodstream and I can’t detox it. Can anyone out there make it stop?

The now five year old art world controversy over artist Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket that depicted the corpse of Emmett Till’s inclusion in the 2016 Whitney Biennial is the gift that keeps on giving to the race grifting libtards of contemporary art. Not only did the letter that Hannah Black wrote demanding that the piece be destroyed make the artist and writer a near overnight figure of fame in 2016, the curator and writer Kimberly Drew — who just secured what is surely a lucrative salary as a curator at PACE Gallery — is picking over the bones of the controversy with a rather useless piece in New York Magazine: “Is empathy a retweet or a signal boost? A charitable donation? Exposure? A painting in a biennial? A black square? Who feels the weight of immeasurable loss, and who benefits? Who tells us what’s real?” It’s always hilarious to me that women like Black and Drew, petty bourgeois culture industries workers from families with means, feel that they are somehow more inclined to understand the pain of Till’s mother than Schutz is. Drew and Black come from backgrounds that are infinitely more similar to Schutz’s than Till’s, so we can only assume that they seem to believe that shared skin color gives them a kind of metaphysical connection to the brutality experienced by predominantly working class black MEN in America. I’m sick to death of this shit, but at this point it’s clear that race huckstering is a trend that will not die.

Ian Kumamoto not so humbly brags about the abilities of his/their/whatever the fuck’s fellow LGBTers for navigating the murky waters of sexually tense friendships and the whole essay just seems like a really weird thing to write about. NPR, long removed from its days as a politically neutral arbiter of news, pontificates on the effectiveness of therapy as a treatment for the condition of racism and part of me wants to go to therapy just to talk about how racist I’m feeling these days – not to cure it because I’m fine with it. At a moment when its preferred political party has absolutely decimated the economy and skyrocketed inflation, who does Vox ask you to feel bad for? Your boss, of course!

Ben Burgis wants to buck break the Supreme Court, mad I’m sure that they struck down vaccine mandates and his gluten-stuffed body might still be left vulnerable to the scourge that is the Omicron cold symptoms! Josh Kline, one of the Invisible Dole artist losers that likes to gate keep the ideological window of the art world, has a new film about climate change and holy shit I’m fucking sick of caring about climate change! Finally, I’ve long left The White Pube off my radar telling myself that they weren’t worth my wrath, but I was lying to myself. I was afraid of what they’re capable of. No More! So, I’m going into the archives to remind you of this essay: “Can White People Ever Be Radical?” Is this something people actually think? So, Dostoyevsky, Lenin, Picasso, Stockhausen, and god knows who else weren’t radical because they were wypipos? Sure thing.

ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Joe
2. Zach Brown Iblis Sisyphus
3. Dana Schutz Open Casket