The Joker And Its Discontents, And Their Discontents

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 series on 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 needed TPOTC 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.

P.P.P.S. Popper argued convincingly that it makes for political poison in the broader sense too: https://www.iep.utm.edu/popp-pol/#SH1b

/End of Community post.

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.