Monthly Archives: April 2019

TV report: Person of Interest

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I just finished Season 1 of Person of Interest, a kind of paranoid espionage/conspiracy theory action show. It sounds a bit dodgy but stars Jim Caviezel,

known to the initiated merely as Witt, and was created by Jonathan Nolan, so it’s actually surprisingly good. I found it far preferable to the similarly-themed Burn Notice, mostly because of tone and casting – Burn Notice opts for a jokey Hawaiian beach shorts atmosphere, I don’t really like Jeffrey Donovan as the lead (though he’s great, and greatly-moustachoied in Sicario), and I loathed Gabrielle Anwar as the scrawny, snide “love interest”.

The only actor I didn’t like in Person of Interest was Taraji P. Henson as the obligatory “minority” sidekick – she’s a good enough actor but unfortunately the role very often calls for her to look competent and intelligent and her vibe is more sassy black 85 IQ momma who don’t take no shit from no one and can’t read. When she’s supposed to be looking smart and analytical she just looks suspicious and bewildered, like her fried chicken just disappeared and she don’t know if Tyrone or Jamarkus done took it along with the watermelon and her credit card.

I found it a little amusing as I knew a woman of limited intelligence who tried to look smart & discerning by narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips, quite a clever mimicry but too greatly at odds with her obviously limited cognitive capacity. However, Henson grew on me as the season progressed, I think finding her feet in the role and not trying to look smarter than anyone would find plausible.

The show’s premise is quite good: a machine/software has been developed which throws up lists of people likely to be murdered, the inventor enlists Caviezel’s ex-military character to protect the potential victims. They work in the shadows and so have to avoid police and federal authorities. The basic plot device is a bit like the 90s show Quantum Leap, but as the show progresses it becomes meta-, a lot of the plot revolving around the two heroes’ attempts to avoid being detected by interested parties.

So far I’ve found it extremely rewarding; and as one might expect, given I encountered it via Anonymous Conservative, it is voller Wirklichkeiten, full of realities.

film report: Lethal Weapon (1987)

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I watched Lethal Weapon for the 30th time last week. It never fails to satisfy. It has competent direction from Richard Donner, a first-class script from Shane Black, and the ever-superb Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as the leads, with Gary Busey as the villainous Mister Joshua – and quite a few un-PC fag jokes and racial slurs, not to mention meritorious violence executed with real relish and venom.

Previous action films were of the Commando variety – infinite ammo magazines, all hand-to-hand reduced to wild haymakers between hugely-muscled men with tiny eyes. Lethal Weapon demonstrates Shane Black’s attention to minutiae, pragmatic detail, methodology. Thus, Riggs’ and Murtaugh’s second scene together,

they walk through the police underground car park and compare handguns, Riggs’ eyes flicker down and he asks: “What you got there?” – the interest of a professional.

Riggs is the centrepiece of this film, a suicidal man at his prime of life – he exists in a state of violent equilibrium, his lust for his own death projected out onto the world with equal intensity; kept just about within check with a certain wry humour at himself. Although Lethal Weapon is basically an action film, the determining subtext is that of suicide – the entire film is structured around Riggs’ desire to die. Murtaugh, the family man surrounded by life, instinctively recoils from this destructive aura; Riggs’ violence towards the bad guys is merely a modulation of the suicidal impulse – if he was not fighting them, he would kill himself (Nietzsche: Unter friedlichen Umständen fällt der kriegerische Mensch über sich selber her, that is, In times of peace he warrior makes war on himself). It is only through defeating darker versions of himself (ex-Nam mercs), the aptly-named Shadow Company, his own shadow self, that he comes to some kind of peace with himself.

The final ruck with Mr Joshua is, I think, the earliest example of fairly realistic hand-to-hand combat in cinema – lots of grappling and use of makeshift weaponry.

Los Angeles looks horrible to a European like me, a sprawling desolation of hookers & crime and straight roads to more hookers & crime, which makes Riggs’ craziness & rage perfectly reasonable.

The achievement of Lethal Weapon, like other action classics (e.g. Predator) is to do with the vital subtext. On the one hand it is a pure action film; on the other, it’s Trois Couleurs Bleu – a redemption tale of suffering, self-destruction, and arduous rebuilding and connection.

You could see Lethal Weapon as the tale of Juliet Binoche’s character Julie, having survived a car crash that took out her family, rediscovering purpose through deeds of violence against the scum of the Parisian banlieue, finally ending in a showdown against Irene Jacob from Trois Couleurs Rouge

where they roll around in a kind of mud pit, ripping each other’s clothes off as Danny Glover watches in a blood-stained Die Hard-style wifebeater vest.

the Socratic Method

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From a recent post of Anonymous Conservative’s:

Second, I get the impression the site was done more professionally, and the story was crafted far more intelligently, and far more time was devoted to generating the massive amount of content, than I think one man would be capable of. And it is done well, interspersing rambling sections to make it seem extemporaneous, and with few if any, typos. It may also have been using boredom as a trance induction in places.

I thought of Socrates, in the earlier dialogues, which mostly run as follows: he meets some aristocratic teenage boys and grooms them for sex by asking them to clarify some concept, e.g. “fairness” or “knowledge”, and launches into totally pointless and tedious digressions:

Socrates: My dear dear boys. My lovely lovely fair boys. I am struck by your beauty! I am struck dumb and can only sit here amazed at your smooth thighs, not yet graced with hair, as the poet says. Surely, as the poet says, you will “be men of renown” if you achieve wisdom and are fortunate enough to be tutored by an older man. But you were arguing just now if it was fair for Krustus to take the winnings from the knuckle-bone game. What is fair? When we say it is a fair day, can it also be a day of thunderstorms, as the poet says, “darkening the sky over the plain”?

Boy: No, Socrates, we cannot.

Socrates: Exactly, my delicious boy! Exactly! Then storms mean unfairness?

Boy: Yes, Socrates.

Socrates: I see the aura of wisdom about you, you lovely peachy boy. Then when you make an agreement with a man, the agreement will be unfair if there is a stormcloud on the horizon, as the poet says, “on the plains, auguring rain later”.

Boy: Yes, Socrates.

Socrates: But, my lovely lovely boy! Does not the poet also say, “a good agreement can be made even at night or in the thunderstorm of the all-thundering Jove”?

Boy: Yes, Socrates.

Socrates: So it seems we must look elsewhere for fairness.

Boy: By Jove, Socrates, you are right!

This goes on for hours, with Socrates playing word games and presumably pawing at the boys and gushing over their “beauty”. This kind of thing, what Vox Day calls bafflegarble, exhausts the teenage boys, and eventually they enter a kind of trance state, and numbly submit to be “tutored” (sodomized) by Socrates.

Socrates ended up being executed by Athens for corrupting the young.

humour in Plato

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I was clearing out some old posts, on an old blog, and found this amusing excerpt from Plato’s Alcibiades. It is, I think, the only funny thing I’ve come across in Plato, though I’m unsure if he intended it so:

SOCRATES: I think we can be pretty sure that someone understands something when he can show that he has made someone else understand it.

ALCIBIADES: I agree.

SOCRATES: Well then, can you tell me who Pericles has made into an expert? Shall we start with his sons?

ALCIBIADES: But Socrates, both of his sons turned out to be idiots.

SOCRATES: What about Clinias, your brother?

ALCIBIADES: There’s no point talking about him – he’s a madman.

SOCRATES: Well then, since Clinias is mad and Pericles’ sons were idiots, what shall we say is the reason that he allowed you to be in the state you’re in?

ALCIBIADES: I suppose it’s because I didn’t really pay attention.

book report: Lysis

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I read Plato’s Lysis today, as part of the heroic ordeal which is Plato’s complete works. It’s a fairly typical early dialogue, which mostly run as follows:

Socrates is wandering around Athens looking for teenage boys to groom for sex.

He finds some aristocratic teenage boys and initiates a tiresome conversation about some topic, in this case friendship.

Almost nothing he says is sincere or logical. It is mostly sophistry. His favourite technique is a bait & switch, e.g. “we agree, do we not, my lovely boys, that people drink gin because they enjoy it? And enjoyment is a good. Therefore if we want to be good we must drink gin. Whisky is not gin, and what is not good but evil? Whisky, therefore, is evil.”

As he leads his victims down rhetorical rabbit holes they are reduced to baffled assent: to conclusions which, individually, seem fair enough, but which lead to insanity.

He then somehow leads things back to The Good and Wisdom and says the boys need a tutor to teach them about such things. They then beg Socrates to become their private tutors and the dialogue ends with them all agreeing to let Socrates do what he wants to them.

Lysis follows this course up to the ending, where Socrates is interrupted by the relatives and guardians of the boys he is trying to groom, and he is forced to scurry away like a paedophile at the playground.

The older I get, the harder it is for me to stomach Socrates. His sly, predatory manner around teenage boys, referring to them as “my beautiful boy!” and so on, and telling them how only an older man’s love can help them attain Wisdom and The Good, is almost as offputting as his sophistry and utter insincerity. He comes across as something between a paedophile and a used car salesman. In Vox Day’s terms, he is a gamma.

His tiresome “explorations” of e.g. friendship, seem designed to wear his victims down, so they numbly assent to being sodomized because they can’t understand anything and lose all faith in reason or logic and thus surrender to this leering old man.

It’s not all bad, mind you. Just reading a narrative from 2500 years ago is interesting, even if all modern translations make Socrates sound like a kind of Victorian parlour paedophile, full of “my good sir” and “by Jove!” and other incongruous idioms. And there are usually interesting moments, e.g.

“Look at it this way,” I said. “If someone smeared your blonde hair with white lead, would your hair then be white or appear white?”

An interesting question – that is, is there a difference between being and appearance when it comes to colour? But I was struck mostly that Lysis, like the Egyptian Pharoahs, is blonde. I’ve met several Greeks and they all look thoroughly Mediterranean, and when one looks at their dysfunctional corrupt nation it’s hard to reconcile with the Greece of Sophocles and Homer.

Unless – they are no longer the same genetic group, as the modern Egyptians are probably very different to those of yore. And then, perhaps there is a certain civilisational order which only appears in genetic groups liable to produce blondes, and these groups have lived as far afield as Egypt, Greece, modern Turkey, and are now mostly confined to Europe and dwindling fast.

Another interesting point that made this tedious dialogue almost worth reading:

From this we may infer that those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Nor do those love it who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid man loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know.

A point Wittgenstein might have appreciated, that those who are wise don’t love wisdom, that is, they don’t do philosophy.

book report: Age of Darkness

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I just finished Age of Darkness, a collection of Horus Heresy stories. I don’t generally like short stories, and one cavil I have about the Horus Heresy novels is the difficulty of getting to know totally new characters with funny names, all of whom end up dead in the end. At least over a 300-page novel the initial investment tends to pay off; in a 30-page short story it could be an irritant.

The stories are, however, generally very good. They are all set in the war between the traitor and loyalist legions, when massive violence is simply the cosmic norm. One could see it as akin to the Peloponnesian War in space, a conflict from which no place or people is safe. Thucydides could have written an interesting Horus Heresy novel, perhaps.

book report

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Just finished re-reading The Poetic Edda, translated by Carolyne Larrington.

A rewarding but frustrating book. The texts were written in a deliberately gnomic, allusive manner, so it’s a bit like listening to old friends talking about high school, “hey remember when the Bomber did the Preston wipe out?” and so on.

However, there’s much to learn here.

the badass Madonna

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Henry Adams, in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, relates a Medieval Madonna assuming the form of a devotee-knight and jousting in his place, knocking all & sundry to the ground since he was unable to attend.

Anodyne modern Christianity is an abomination, and I’m not even a Christian.

Here is a particularly judgemental, badass Madonna, courtesy of Giotto.

She’s looking at you and thinking, “What a piece of shit you are. Sort yourself out asap or you will burn on the lake of fire for all eternity. Loser.”

the truly unwanted

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Youtube Red, I gather, is a kind of premium mode, costing 12 Euros a month. I Googled “Youtube Red benefits”:

The primary benefit seems to be “ad-free videos”. Ostensibly, adverts offer information about products, and so they could be seen as a benefit. And yet they have increasingly become a plague upon the consumer, to the point that Youtube Red is worth 12 Euros a month so you can avoid seeing adverts.

Imagine you work in Marketing for Apple. You and an ad agency develop an advert for the newest iphone. And you know that this advert will simply piss off most who see it, that you are burdening them so much they will pay money to avoid watching it. What, then, is your job?

When I was younger I felt contrary & perverse for disliking/hating adverts. Others would sit passively through the commercial breaks on TV, paying as little attention to the adverts as they did to anything else.

Adverts are not presented with an apologetic “sorry to bother you and use up your time but we have to try and implant useless/damaging ideas in your head”. They are presented with a bright happy “isn’t this fun!” vibe. Youtube Red (and bear in mind YT is owned by Google) admits that adverts are not pleasant, and probably not in the consumer’s best interests – otherwise why would they openly say, “pay us 12 Euros a month and we won’t inflict ads on you”?

Google and Facebook claim they gather data on you to “give you a better experience”; to target you with the right ads. And then they admit that adverts are a nuisance and irritation.

A similar phenomenon with migrants. When the so-called Migrant Crisis began in 2015, one of the standard globohomo lines was “we need migrants! They enrich our societies! They have valuable skills!”

Okay, let’s assume that’s true. So why should the EU be so enraged that Eastern Europe basically refused to admit any of these highly-skilled, highly-valuable, enriching and simply wonderful migrants?

Wouldn’t it make sense for Angela Merkel to try to keep all these valuable migrants? She could, after all, use them as a kind of currency, so she could offer France 10,000 migrants a year if they will make up Germany’s electricity deficit. Or she could buy Russian gas and send Putin a migrant an hour instead of bothering with money.

Adverts advertise themselves as a life-enhancing benefit, then a Google-owned company offers to turn adverts off if you pay them 12 Euros a month. Eastern European countries were denounced for refusing hundreds of thousands of supposedly valuable, enriching migrants.

More & more, talking to the globohomo masses

I feel they are somehow insane. They are often educated and consume high-level globalist propaganda (Der Spiegel, New York Times). Yet they habitually operate with cognitive dissonance of this kind: migrants enrich us, every country must be forced to accept them, Germany cannot take them all, others must help, migrants are wonderful, I live in an all-white area and feel scared if I have to take public transport and see migrants, Germany must take millions of Muslims because of our dark history with the Nazis, the Muslims hate Jews and want to kill them, what do you mean I’m contradicting myself, are you a Nazi?

But then it is a peculiarity of human beings, especially the educated and intelligent, to convince themselves of anything.