Context: Word on the street is
that beginning December 10th, YouTube will start deleting content
from users who refuse to or who are unable to monetize their uploads and posts.
I am one such user, and though I cannot gauge the likelihood of
this threat, a trusty friend who has been on-the-ball about this sort of stuff before
has assured me that I have nothing to fret over.
But just to play it safe,
I plan to re-upload many of my videos to a different platform, and to convert most of my Community Posts over to this blog. This will require much work on
my part, and knowing me, plus the number of videos/posts I consider worthy of
the move, along with the indexing of paragraphs and the structuring of
typological emphasis never carrying over from YouTube, what needs to be done in a
timely fashion will not be done in a timely fashion. So if my semi-legit fear
about YouTube targeting un-monetized content turns out to be grounded in
reality, some worthwhile content stands to be wiped out before I get around to giving
it a new home.
By worthwhile content, I have some
videos in mind, but mostly the community posts and comment exchanges. Here’s one post stimulating
a fruitful exchange which should be moved ASAP. The initial post by me is fine
I guess, though it’s another example of an inconsequential rando inducing ill-tempered scornfulness
in me, in lieu of well-tempered engagement. Which segues nicely into what the
comments are about!
Behold, the other outrage-culture machine at work:
And
to think, I almost decided to not bother clicking on this video and its
magnificently alluring title when I spotted it earlier in the day. Must've been
sixteen hours ago now. Never ran across this YouTuber prior to today, mind you. Despite being unaware of the channel's existence, the video came up in the
recommendations and had me instinctively go "Oh that looks like it must
be worthy of a watch" followed by "Gosh there sure are a
crapload of Joker-related videos infiltrating my YouTube page. It's gotten
worse in the last few days too. It's really bad today. The undemanded supply
never ends! What's going on?!" followed immediately by "Oh
crap, it's probably another clickbaity piece of garbage with the uploader
capitalizing on the tidal wave of publicity The Joker is receiving right now,
and wanting some for himself, aka modern YouTube in a nutshell." (yes,
that's exactly what I thought, mind-verbatim).
I'm
not done. That last thought-sentence was followed by "...but I don't
know that for sure, and there's only one way to find out, and I can't expect me
to just not find out. Not finding out would make for unhealthy levels of
self-denial and shit" which was followed by "No dumbass,
that's exactly how they get you! It's how clickbait works: You don't know, you
kinda wanna know, then you really wanna know, then you find out, but by
that point it's too late and you've already fed the beast" followed by
"Yeah, I'm/you're absolutely right, I'll avoid it. It's probably as bad
as I'm suspecting. Off I go...".
And
this was followed, a few minutes later, by the thought-sentence "Meh,
it's one extra click. Contributing an extra click won't make or
break the beast" followed by "Where have I heard that one before?"
followed by "Well, you did upload that highly informative video
back in mid 2017 about the probabilistic insignificance of each person's
individual vote, especially when the vote is being cast in national or
presidential elections, with millions of voters participating".
Part
of me wasn't about to give in, and so, that was followed by "Nah that
was a little different, even though both themes do overlap substantially with
the Sorties Paradox. And besides, subsequent exposure to some philosophical
faggots sufficed in convincing me that the anti-voting argument I relied on in
that video rested on a shaky theory of intentionality and could be dispensed
with, with relative ease". (it's a thought, you see, meaning you're
not allowed to think less of me or to give me a hard time over my use of faggot,
unless you're prepared to (1) believe that even thinking the word faggot earns
the thought-agent a hefty dose of disapprobation, (2) ask me to exclude the
word faggot and thus relay these thoughts with modest levels of inexactitude,
or (3) want me to write phaggot instead of faggot. I can certainly do that last
one, seeing as that captures the non-homophobic spirit in which I
thought-called them faggots anyway. I mean phaggots.
Okay
then, to cut a long thought-process short: turns out I failed to avoid clicking
on the embedded video, even though I knew full well that ignoring it was the
right thing to do. Had I mustered the willpower to Dare to just walk away and not watch it,
I could have spent my day more productively, by working on one or more of my
draft posts which have been in draft form for what feels like a century now. Or
I could have spent the day recording the rare video for the tube, or perhaps
learning more about financial markets so that I can invest my savings prudently
for once and shave decades off my wage-in-a-cage work-life, like a proper Jew
reliably does. Ah,
so I'm pretty sure that that wasn't a
thought-sentence, but a real sentence-sentence, and the only extant one of the
two.
If I am correct about the majority of my readers being rigid substance
monists
who ultimately endorse physicalism, that sentence-sentence is the real deal and
will surely get me in trouble. But wait a tic, it's not like I used any slurs
pertaining to Jews in that sentence, I just implied that Jews on average are
superior to non-Jews on average when it comes to investment and the intricacies
of contemporary finance, and that's a positive attribute to have! Sure, it can be argued that
non-earned income in a world where so many sweat for the bare minimums is
ethically dubious. I've argued that myself, but I've also argued that
game-theoretical obstacles to absolute moral
purity make compromisers of us all, and doubly so for those paying attention to the world at large. The more you see, the more you'll
understand that swimming with sharks is a must. At least some of the time. To advance the impartial good.
So unless you want to say that no one should
evaluate human behavior and moral agents from the standpoint of interdependent
rational choice, it totally can be ethically acceptable to sit back and
invest. Frankly, construing it as acceptable is underselling it, provided the
investor tacks on the right caveats, such as longstanding involvement with
optimally or modestly effective charities. So if anything, that was a deeply
pro-semitic remark I made, and anyone inferring something sinister from it is
way outta line.
But anyway, I could've spent my time better is the point, and I blew it. And
for what? For that stupid, irritating, hypocritical, reverse-outrage-culture
video (remember that? the embedded thing? I do!
I memba!). What's worse is that I didn't just watch it. I also
didn't just read many of the sycophantic comments thoughtlessly praising
it while condemning reviewers who belong to The Media. I went further; posting
a rather long critique of it. It's sitting on my trusty Community page, which I'll now
copy-and-paste here, because it ended up being surprisingly longer than the
regular longish write up I reserve for that page, and because I've been
wrestling with the notion that it's beyond time for me to resuscitate this
blog. Its epic 10 Year anniversary is coming up, and I sorta don't want to have
that temporally-induced landmark event be as flat as my YouTube channel was on
its 10 Year anniversary. Or do I really care about any of that? Put this way:
If a negative thought about a specific thing that bugs you pops into your head
approximately twice a month, does it constitute a thing you truly care about?
Or would it be more like, the tiniest of abstract nuisances? Probably the
latter, but who's counting.
Wait, what?! What the fuck is this?! Why in the cold hell am I writing up an off-the-cuff quicky-style post on a topic I've never contemplated blogging about (DC film, seriously?) before today?! What the shit?! Was I not supposed to bring you all the long awaited Part 3 of this masterpiece serieson meta-politics instead?! I originally planned for it to be out in May of this year. Guess I'm running a little late, so it's not going to be as smooth a sequence as the poetic "March is Part 1, April is Part 2, May is Part 3" plan I had such high hopes for.
Moreover, didn't this entire blog come to a
screeching halt due to my inability to wrap up Part 3, by which I mean: for
me to be content enough with the final version of Part 3 so as to publish it? Didn't
I mutter to myself for months "No, you're doing a three parter,
remember, and this means you don't get to publish any posts in between the
parts, got it? This ain't no fun park carnival, god damn it, it's a blog! A
blog that's visited by hundreds of unique visitors per week, on a good week.
Dozens on a not-so-good one. Some of these visitors presumably stick around to
read up to a quarter of a given post that's on display. So you better
straighten up and stay true to that 1-2-3 part formula you decided on back in
January of this year, when you began writing Part 1, dammit!"
Actually that wasn't a real mutter, it was another round of thought-sentences,
transcribed to perfection right here, right now. Welcome.
Well that was then, and this is now. I've decided to no longer care about
sullying the glorious sequence of that terribly complicated three parter on
meta-politics. I can paraphrase its impossible Part 3 here anyway: More
"yay pragmatism", more "boo structuralism". I mean
there's more to it, and it offers some pretty sharp observations, but yeah,
that's the gist. I will finish it when I finish it. In the meantime, enjoy my
criticism of the abysmal video I embedded (way) above.
If you continue reading from here, you should consider watching that video
first. Though that video by that vlogger is just a microcosm, so
you might not even need to watch it to proceed, assuming you've seen at least
one of the other hundreds of videos making similar arguments against The Media
by shamelessly using The Joker as a springboard, or have read at least
one of the thousands of comments and articles making similar arguments against
The Media by shamelessly using The Joker as a
springboard.
It really is a parrot-world out there.
Commence Community post: So the media needed this particular
undismayed film to fail, even though this wasn’t their emotive or cognitive
motto when covering countless other culturally undismayed films over the
decades, each with their own antihero protagonists and convention-abiding
antagonists. Each with their own fist-shaky messages about societal sickness,
their identifying the sources/causes of these sicknesses, and in some cases;
their offering up pet remedies (to varying degrees of specificity). All widely
discussed and reviewed; positively, negatively, indifferently, by media
figureheads and toadies, and without suspicions arising from outsiders that The
Media needed any of those films to fail, and needed it badly. So what’s different
here? Why The Joker, of all things? Having seen the film, and having suffered
through hours upon hours of coverage surrounding its release, I can say firmly
that nothing is different here. Not a thing. At least on the Dinosaur Media’s
side of things. The alarmist wings are doing their dour thing, as they do, and
it’s barely a departure from the norm. The media is often referred to as an
empire, and you'd think this framing would cause people who declare themselves
as hostile to The Media and as distrustful of The Media to analyze each wing as a distinctive unit (as with
Empires). But nope. The video I’m sharing below (to your right?) contains a
"for all intents and purposes" style admission of (minimal)
variation, but nothing that the vlogger actually incorporates into his thinking
or script-writing. Because, for the script and the video to work, and for his
massive punch to land in the humongous way he intends, there can be no alarmist
vs. non-alarmist wings, reporters, journos, etc within the media landscape. There are only alarmist wings
and their pathological contributors. In effect, there's You And Yours vs. Media Critics. And even on that front, as insufferably reductive as it is, his video is still riddled with nonsense. Recall that Gibson’s 2004 Passion was banned
in Israel, and the
over-the-top scathing treatment it received in most pockets of North America had me convinced that it was a few degrees
shy of being banned here too. That’s one example, off the top of my head, of
awful coverage fanning the flames. Could it be said, then, that everybody in
The Media, or that large swathes of The Media, felt like they neededTPOTC to
fail? Hell no. Some were plainly offended by it, because they're devoutly
religious and can't think beyond that. When those (religious) people were also
the media insiders, they capitalized on the megaphone they own, or the one they
have daily access to, and went on about the wrongness of the film from those
pulpits. And when people with this mindset were the media outsiders, the media
was there to give them a megaphone, and then to give the other side one too.
Some outlets managed to stay neutral, others not so much. Then as now. No
difference. Nay, the difference resides in alt-media’s reaction to traditional media’s predictable coverage, like
with this video. For the record, I hate the term alt-media, but screw it, using it here. Guy has an obvious axe to grind, and not grinding it to
oddball reviews of The Joker would’ve been a missed opportunity. He even outs
his motivated reasoning when he discusses how some barely known outlet tried to
do a hit piece on him a while back. So? Why is “X is not a monolith” a
perfectly fair point to make in every X vs. Y ordeal not involving The Media,
but applied to the media, it becomes inconceivable. Why are truisms treated as
anathemas, in this space? Did he get specific? He all but sees into the minds
of media insiders, so he should get narrower than he is being in his
allegations. Are there individual culprits? There must be, unless this is
intended to be another “The Flaw Is In The System, Not The People” smokescreen.
I doubt that's his conclusion, I'm sure he believes the problem can be pinned
on individual people (i.e. Media insiders). So where are the names? If you’re
going to make an allegation this damming, you need to name names. Tell viewers
something concrete about all the wretched people who apparently believe this and
feel this way. How many of them are there? Presumably a lot! Summary of his
video: “They need The Joker to fail, because they’ve profiteered from the
victims The Joker shines a light on, and they can't admit their role in
creating said victims, because they are twisted inside”. That's the pitch, I’m
not exaggerating. But if that's the complaint, flashing a few screenshots of
articles criticizing the movie will not do. Quoting nothing from the articles
beyond their title/heading will not do. Mentioning “Late Night” talk shows and
their snarky nature, will not do. Or does he earnestly believe that Kimmel,
Colbert, Fallon, Conan, et al feel that The Joker needs to fail? Like, they
feel it in their bones and are threatened by its likely success? These hosts,
who chose to have Joaquin Phoenix on for cross-promotional ends. He scratches
them, they scratch him. Showbiz 101. Then as now. But now with 100% More Fear! More hilariously, they’ve routinely
run ads for The Joker during their shows’ commercial blocks. (Not sure whether
Fallon’s show did, couldn’t even stomach the sight of it to do the tiny bit of
research on it to confirm, but I bet it did. I can confirm that the other guys
all did. Why run ads for a product you fear? Not a product you merely dislike,
not one you merely disagree with or hate... but Fear!).
As of my writing this,
over 33K people have upvoted this video. This ridiculous video. If you put a
gun to their heads, would a single one of those upvoters answer “Yes” to
questions like “Does Jimmy Kimmel, deep down, feel like The Joker needs to
fail?”. I don’t think any of them would, and this wouldn’t change if you
swapped Jimmy Kimmel's name for the name of any other late night host, or their
respective creative team and showrunners.
The point stands
when our alleger turns his attention away from TV and toward the press. Just as
the late night hosts, executives, showrunners, and creative teams have no negative
emotional investment in this, the typical op-ed columnist has no reason whatsoever
to feel that The Joker needs to fail either. Surely, indifference has to be the
rule here, and hopefulness (for success) has to be the exception. And then,
finally, a smaller exception noting a hopefulness for failure can be made. But this brand of hope represents a luxury desire, and is not a need. Nothing here can
correctly be depicted as the rule, or as the exception, if it is made out to be a need rather than a want.
The standard op-ed columnist is as
much of a media insider as the horrible panicky op-ed critics who wrote about
and overreacted to aspects of the film (just as they did 15 years ago with
TPOTC, or with The Life Of Brian, and so on). When you Nadir Fallacy the media
this persistently, you really do deserve to have your calls to the more general
Imprecision Fallacy ignored in other contexts. In a way, you've waived your
epistemic rights to cite certain things. There is no shortage of better
candidates for that, after all.
People who understand how far-reaching the
implications of the Imprecision Fallacy run seem to be rarer than four-leaf
clovers. It frustrates me to no end, because it's just so damn rampant.
By-the-numbers alt-media has nothing good to show for itself here. And sure,
I'm prepared to modify this generalization if I'm shown a few examples of
alt-media frontrunners being responsible in their fallacy-regulation. I'm not holding my
breath. Had YouTube been around and established in 2004, similar efforts
would’ve been made by YouTubers to have spacious narratives spun from the Gibson/TPOTC
controversy.
The Joker caused a slightly larger stir within traditional
outlets, and even that can be explained by the fact that big screen releases
throughout the 2010s provided moviegoers with next-to-nothing in the way of
gritty, culturally challenging material (way to not boycott shitty movies,
shitty general public) compared to previous decades. Had this decade been more
like the 1970s or 1980s in terms of big screen releases, I think many more
culture worriers would've been desensitized to these 'dark' themes, and The
Joker wouldn't have garnered even those barely higher levels of preemptive
panic. So in conclusion, the embedded video is unserious and arguably disingenuous.
Enjoy! P.S. I just have to @10:09 “…This holistic idea that the only one
responsible is the perpetrator themselves, it is wrong…” He thinks holistic is
another way of saying holier-than-thou. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be petty enough
to bring attention to something like this, but he has a massive audience, and
in my experience “holistic = holy” style confusions are a trend with tubers who
amass large followings (somehow). The word he was looking for is
‘individualistic’, which is ironically the opposite of holistic and runs
counter to the point he was making. What a clutz. So yeah, please look up
holism if you’re this eager to use it in a sentence.
P.P.S. Holism is dumb and
wrong. Its penchant for deindividuation knows no bounds. Apply its teachings to
everyday judicial contexts, and you’ll be chugging poison whether you're the
defendant or the plaintiff.
Now that you've read it, feel free to (1) commend
my patience and brilliance, (2) suggest what other Community posts, if any,
you'd like to see converted into semi-serious blog posts like this one. There
are some lengthy posts which I've considered transferring and expanding
on, but always decided against doing so at the end of the day, largely due to
my nonsensical commitment to never publish stuff I've written haphazardly,
along with my nonsensical commitment to preserve the dignity of The Sequence
and to neverendingly follow those
stubborn drafts to wherever they may lead me. But now I'm thinking fuck that.
Nothing wrong with scrapping the old, self-sabotaging method and applying a
more stream-of-consciousness friendly approach to my writing. And if I relocate
some other posts from the Community page, I'd also incorporate in the transfer
my comment exchanges with a handful of smart cookies which I've always found
to be worthy of a wider readership.
Relatedly,
I've often gone back to read my old posts on this blog (aka all my posts on
this blog) only to find myself disappointed in and irked by their overwritten
tenor. This never happens when I revisit an old-ish Community post of mine, or
a lengthy comment reply I've left to someone. And by never, I mean never; not
once. I always reread those with pleasure, unlike with previous blog posts,
which range from slightly difficult to put up with, to outright atrocious.
Seems that I've only recently come to terms with the fact that my writing is
decent, but only under the condition that I go without proofreading, or when I
only get to proofread once or twice before hitting
publish.
The
moment I embark on some misguided Sequence project wherein I allow
myself the indulgence of dozens, and at times hundreds, of proofreads a pop, I
inevitably end up ruining all that was good in the early stages of the project.
I want to change that. I need to change that, and now I've accepted that the
only way forward will see me limiting proofreads to one or two rounds a pop. I
will never be the type of person who writes readable books, for I seem
incapable of improving my nascent texts as the weeks, months and years pass.
Time only helps me worsen them.
I also enjoyed rereading the posts I published on Google Plus, back when they
were available. Still trying to find those Google archives which I apparently
downloaded somewhere prior to the nuking of Google Plus, so if you have any
write-ups of mine that you'd like to see morphed and carried over to this
medium, it sadly has to be on my Community timeline and no further back. For
now.
Oh
and if anyone would like to hear my thoughts on The Joker movie proper,
and not the silly nontroversy surrounding it, let me know and I'll go
over it in the comments or in a separate post. Hmm, guess it would've been
appropriate for me to have done some of that in this post, but I've been
writing a lot today and am too exhausted to even proofread all of this
diligently, let alone to pile on it with additional sentences reviewing a film
with the gravitas of The Joker, as that would require yet more
proofreading.
I'll say this much; this marks the best 2019 release that I've seen so far
(though that's an embarrassingly short list), and I'd prefer to not say more
about it publicly when feeling as mentally drained as I do at this moment.
You're on part two. To summarize part one, adding to it slightly:
Due to the enormity and distinctiveness of contentious issues, it is improbable that the fabric of political issues would be understood as ideologically combinational in the eyes of an omniprecipient being. Orthodox versions of political nihilism recognize this, only to posit that such a being would do away with all systems and ideologies in equal rungs and never look back.
Political pragmatism, as I have sculpted it, makes note of the same, but posits an omniprecipient being who urges political thinkers to perish the thought of doing away with all systems and ideologies in equal rungs. Instead, the kosher pragmatist pictures the masterly spectator as one who declines enough of the essential ingredients from all systems and ideologies. Pinpointing where the "enough" mark sits is an empirical question. This doesn't make it an easy one. The point is, declining enough ideologically essential ingredients leaves the kosher pragmatist appearing politically outlandish to onlookers with principled sensibilities.
Though political nihilists and political pragmatists occupy the same neighborhood, it is a spacey neighborhood. Their home streets are located on the opposite ends of the district, and are nothing alike architecturally.
Novelty
Level: Moderate. I've made noises about this before, but have never
truly expanded on my points in the glorious ways I have here.
Priority Level: High. Somewhere in the "things I'm very concerned with and you should be too" stack.
Alt-goal: Improving relations (if any) between pragmatists and pessimists.
Disclaimer: Due to the breadth of this topic and its associated drifts, I have decided to split things. This post is part one of a three part series. The split resembles my Q&A post from 2018, except this time around, the second and third installments will actually be finished and posted sooner than later (the Q&A drafts are on life support, unsure if I'll be reviving them down the road).
