trends in violence culture

this is epiphenomenal to the events in ferguson, the (para)militarization of the police in response to that is so absurd that it suggests an entire state violence apparatus owing more to f0rum.b0dybuilding.c0m than traditional violence culture

if even national review online think the cops resemble characters from starship troopers then it suggests the high-watermark is probably being reached and some sort of scaling-back will occur, at least in very public situations like this, while zero dark thirty cosplay will continue in more clandestine minor drugs raids where they can get away with it

none of these police forces gladly receiving handmedowns from the military evidently realize how camp and risible they look, and because it is all so overcompensatory, how cowardly.....sniper rifles trained on unarmed civilians and tanks in the street are so far from the traditional methods of power projection

and it surely feeds back into situations like michael brown's killing itself.....the solitary cop with just a 9mm handgun is so conditioned to overwhelming superiority of numbers and means that he doesn't feel the power differential is great enough even when confronted with an unarmed teenager, he has no courage and no sangfroid and just lashes out at the most minor perceived threat

the cops who have themselves arrived from the military in the last decade bring forth the twitchy, paranoid mentality of assymetric warfare where the enemy never threatens to overwhelm them but exists as a latent, sporadic threat seeking to take advantage of momentary weakness

it seems to be a part of the increasingly hyperbolic and performative character of violence culture more generally, mma culture, roid culture, affliction tshirt culture whatever, everything is preening and overly demonstrative and suggestive of essential inadequacy, adherents to these cultures never realize how ludicrous they look.....america is as usual leading the field but it's far from the only place where this is happening

affliction tshirt culture

not sure what that is, everything else makes tons of sense to me - it's what I've been thinking a lot about and couldn't articulate.

is america leading the field? i feel like russia might have something to say about that...

if even national review online think the cops resemble characters from starship troopers then it suggests the high-watermark is probably being reached and some sort of scaling-back will occur, at least in very public situations like this,

i completely doubt there will be any scaling back in the future. best case scenario out of this entire ferguson nightmare is that darren wilson gets some sort of charges. given the nature of the US and white supremacy even that may be wildly optimistic. beyond that there ain't no fucking way cops are going to relinquish that gear.

funny thing too is that in boston after the marathon the entire fucking city was shut down by the police, it was full-on military style too. because tsarnaev was an islamic terrorist pretty much nobody gave a shit

Russia has a special paramilitary police (OMON) but there is a division between them and the regular police. Xp

russia is important too, but it doesn't do it as well as america, and it is too rooted in traditional violence culture

the brutalization of the russian military is of another order from that of the united states, it is not uncommon for conscripts to be effectively tortured to death, russian soldiers have likewise been able to torture to death civilians and combatants alike in chechnya etc with impunity, there are no enhanced interrogation techniques, it is much less performative than what happens in abu ghraib etc

inclined to agree re: cops relinquishing gear - you think they're all going to give that stuff back to the federal gov't? lol. It's possible that Obama/Holder makes some token gesture/executive order restricting doling out of further funds for such stuff but no way is Congress going to strike that stuff from budgets on their own.

xp

we wanted robocop, we got robocop

what do you know about Robocop?

My initial thought when this started was that they'd been drilled so long and so thoroughly on the possibility of Al Qaeda or North Korea invading small-town Missouri they were just working from a set playbook (tank here, shock troops here and here, snipers there and there, etc) but the failure to roll back, arguably willingness to double down, when it became clear the response was ludicrously over the top points to something Nakh is probably correct in identifying.

For all their faults, OMON, Berkut, CRPF, etc exist in part to manage existential threats to the apparatus of state. That seems a stretch, to some extent, when applied to the US. The fear of not being in control, or acceptance that within the framework of US civil society, control can't be imposed like it can in Kyrgyzstan, seems to come out in this kind of ridiculous paramilitary peacocking,

I feel like affliction/MMA/roid culture has been on the decline? UFC numbers are flat or down, dudes in MMA gear are jokes to everyone, even Vegas was Ed Hardy-free last time I was there.
Not to say the violence culture doesn't pervade but those seem like declining signifiers.

black people have always been viewed as an existential threat to the US

xp

what does that even mean?

I mean, to me, 'violence culture' is essentially what it has been for decades - white mostly-middle aged males feeling powerless (in part economically, in part because their social privilege is now being questioned) and scared. On a personal level the only way they feel protected is to carry a gun at all times or brag about how they'd fuck up the robber who busted into their home (etc.) and on a cultural level we need the homeland defense version of that - the biggest military and endless war to prove that we're still the baddest country.

I'm always interested in the two types of 'bad' that get talked about by a certain type of person - there's the Bad Guy you have to take down, but you are also a Bad Guy, but there is a fundamental difference which you insist on when it comes down to it

inclined to agree re: cops relinquishing gear - you think they're all going to give that stuff back to the federal gov't? lol. It's possible that Obama/Holder makes some token gesture/executive order restricting doling out of further funds for such stuff but no way is Congress going to strike that stuff from budgets on their own.

xp

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 20 August 2014 19:43 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we wanted robocop, we got robocop

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 20 August 2014 19:44 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the problem with this indiscriminate slow learner cynicism is that when foxnews.com columnists are taking umbrage to the verhoevenisation of violence culture, there is no longer a large enough gallery to be played to; the hard-right does not want its paramilitaries to look camp and paradoxically feeble

even the most vicious authoritarian recognises that the police cannot realistically have total license to inflict violence in public because then you have a france/fln sort of situation where it becomes counterproductive

the suggestion wasn't that police militarization will end, but that it will continue unseen, similar to how tianenmen square was the high-watermark for overt violence by the ccp even as its capacity for sub rosa violence continued and strengthened

I'm wondering how the London Met Police fit into this

america is the leader in terms of the proliferation and variety of nodes of "violence culture," maybe, it is embedded in every class/race/social group here but also feels hyper mobile, not dependent on traditions of brutality consistent in form, which makes it that much more confounding and difficult to address as a "trend" when its infinte number of configurations manifests in an act of violence. milo z may be at the avant garde of violence culture studies but afaic affliction/bodybuilding/mma/roids are pretty persistent and there to be replaced by more "authentic" via historical nostalgia mid to upper mid class antecedents if one is on the up and up.

the suggestion wasn't that police militarization will end, but that it will continue unseen, similar to how tianenmen square was the high-watermark for overt violence by the ccp even as its capacity for sub rosa violence continued and strengthened

xp, feel like this^ is otm as a trend, not sure about "strengthening" per se, just multiplying

or spread out and constantly retrenched which is strengthened tbf

London Met looked powerless during the riots, which led to predictable calls for more armed units, etc. Probably from the same mentality. Obviously you can't open fire on a crowd of junior reprobates trying to smash a hole in the window of JD Sports but you can certainly look more intimidating with firearms, up to the point you overdo it and just seem camp.

It's easy enough to control a crowd with clubs and shotguns, rather than a tank, as long as you are willing to crack heads and shoot people. Take that broad public acceptance of violence away and you often end up trying to compensate with the illusion of overwhelming force. When people stop buying into that illusion, you need to come up with something else. I'd imagine a much greater use of kettling in the future, which is something the Met has been doing for a while.

even the most vicious authoritarian recognises that the police cannot realistically have total license to inflict violence in public

I do not believe this is the case with the right-wing in America.

Otherwise, I find your distinguishing between the public display/appearance of militarized police forces and the actual use of power by militarized police forces perplexing; the former is not really relevant imo.

and I don't think the right-wing in America even knows what camp is - they see these goons in Ferguson and they see that they are scary and over-reacting, they don't register as "camp" or as "ridiculous" because they by and large find the fear driving the goons actions to be legitimate.

violence is most potent when it's completely camouflaged/panopticonic - these moments of visible violence from the state are generally imo more about weakness. i think it's notable that compared to countries w/ explicit + constant violence ours is very limited in the US. it's one thing to say that we're as bad as any other country but the truth is that what's going on in ferguson is far less heavy-handed than much of the world. i think it's more unusual bc of the aesthetic tactical mode + bc it's happening in a nominally western democracy. we're certainly not the only country on earth that has a hard time keeping the military and domestic police separate. i kno the reason why there's so much cynicism + anger is specifically bc we believe we're supposed to be better than this - not just in degree but the very nature of our state.

maybe body armor is about to enter its "fun shirt" phase. which reminds me, the clothing company under armour has a relation to this via the tentpole of the violence culture flea circus that is the NFL. xp

i don't recall, from my limited awareness, appeals to cops having to look out for their own personal safety in the performance of their duties being so frequent, some time back. it seems like those appeals are coincident with the phenomenon nakh describes. and if they have risen in number, their relevance to the traditional valorizatation of a cop's selfless sacrifice to duty to community seems to suggest that cops as a culture just no longer believe that the sacrifices entailed by their job (whichever sacrifices: one thing may be substituting for another in various ways) are worth it, considering that unlike some people, their jobs could regularly get them killed.

the trend across almost all western countries is a decline in private (physical) violence over the last 30 years, it doesn't matter if it was accompanied by a renewal of state violence/coercrion as in the united states, or a lessening as in some european countries

the affliction/bodybuilding/mma/roids contellation is a sort of endgame, the paradoxical overreaction to perceived feminization and pacification

this is evident in this supremely tawdry story

Duane Chapman, better known as reality TV star Dog the Bounty Hunter, has pledged to track down the fugitive mixed martial arts fighter who allegedly assaulted porn star Christy Mack on August 8, News.com.au reports.

The brutal attack left Mack with broken bones, missing teeth and a severely ruptured liver, among other injuries. Since it happened, Las Vegas police have been searching for her former boyfriend, Jon Koppenhaver, a mixed martial arts fighter who legally changed his name to War Machine.

“He has beaten me many times before, but never this badly.”

According to Mack, War Machine entered her house at 2 a.m. Friday morning and beat up a man who was with her. Then he sent the man away, forced Mack to shower in front of him, bashed her face, pushed a knife against her skin and said he was going to rape her.

every participant is simulating, mma star, reality tv star, porn star

the endgame was already apparent

After going to jail, Machine maintained his Twitter account as well as a blog documenting his time in jail. In this blog, he stated that "The oppression of MEN is worse than oppression of Jews in Nazi Germany, worse than the slavery of Blacks in early America... I'm not exaggerating either."[34]

are you saying that this implies a police perception of greater personal risk to them is false? that could easily be true while their belief that their jobs put them at unjustifiable risks could be true for reasons not having to do with a still-nonzero personal risk (i.e. it's a threshold thing given the possibility at all of risk)

some of this is surely about the way that certain institutions (the military, the police) have become so alienated from the public body - this is especially dramatic re the military which has become something of a hermetic cultural bubble but i think operates in similar ways for the police as well. a lot of ppl said about ferguson that what's important about the case isn't that the force didn't represent its community - but that feels like the most important bit. ppl behave differently when they are responsible for their family than when they're responsible for strangers. and ideally all americans are my brothers but there have been studies about how there's an empathetic cap on the # of individual humans you can personally care about. but now we have a military which comes from increasingly fewer families, and police forces that apparently don't even live in the communities they work in.

http://i.imgur.com/5it5Me5.png

what's the provenance of that graph? the title isn't inspiring a lot of confidence i have to say

Cops shooting their eye out in the US

the data is presumably this and the terribly provocative title is presumably because only the ~activist~ left has an interest in graphing it

from a high of 280 deaths in 1974 to 100 last year

I've been at that site a few times in the last couple weeks. Especially worth noting that most of those deaths are accidental (car crash, job-related illness, falls).

thx nakh

i wonder what constitutes a job-related illness for LEOs

i know after 9/11 a lot of responders had hideous respiratory ailments from breathing in powdered building materials, but that has to be a rarity

what about violence culture as a cumulative expression of shared insecurity/resistance to change. the country is liberalizing in lots of different ways. the enforcement/power structure is still primarily white and probably of a specific social stratification and that stratification is probably more or less the same as it has been for at least 100 years, perhaps longer.

there's a strong contingent of americans that longs for 'good old days' that probably never existed, and who considers the modern world an affront to an idealized way of life. package that worldview with the echo-chamber'ing of news/information, which amplifies the sense of threat, and this group ends up thinking they have something to defend. politicians or business or whomever, recognizes this insecurity and capitalizes on it for votes or profit or whatever, and the cycle perpetuates.

the problem with this indiscriminate slow learner cynicism is that when foxnews.com columnists are taking umbrage to the verhoevenisation of violence culture, there is no longer a large enough gallery to be played to; the hard-right does not want its paramilitaries to look camp and paradoxically feeble

even the most vicious authoritarian recognises that the police cannot realistically have total license to inflict violence in public because then you have a france/fln sort of situation where it becomes counterproductive

― Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (nakhchivan), Wednesday, August 20, 2014 1:25 PM (7 hours ago)

this seemed flawed in a couple ways. for one, it ignores the fundamental disconnect in the mind of the american right between convulsive fear of the nonwhite other (which demands an empowered fed and heavily armed cops) and paranoid distrust of the state itself (which demands a disempowered fed and an armed citizenry). i think a large and vocal segment of the american right really would grant the police to have "total license to inflict violence in public" - but only when that capacity is used against those who scan as "not us" in the conservative mind: mexican and south/central american immigrants, blacks, "hippies", the urban poor, etc.

also, i think this kind of hypermilitarism only scans as camp when someone is not pointing a gun in your face.

^ dangit, seems flawed, i gotta have a talk with my proofreaders

To me the particular permutation of violence culture that's on display in Ferguson has to be understood in relation to, in part a symptom of, consumerism or "gear culture" if you will. Walk into a Bass Pro Shop Shop and you'll see what I mean. The amount of technology that goes into equipping oneself to go whitetail hunting is at NASA levels. The over engineered full body suits, the polypropene base layers with their wicking properties, the arsenal of scent-based attractors, military grade weaponry, and on and on (def campy now that you mention it) and that's not even counting the sonars to locate schools of fish deep underwater or the quasi monster truck-sized pickup trucks on the parking lot... It is a whole culture devoted to being so thoroughly and meticulously equipped and prepared to overwhelm the quarry that it makes you wonder (a) has gear supplanted character as the reigning indicator of masculinity; and (b) when you spend so much money on this stuff, when you drool at it when reading the magazines, when you elevate it to talismanic status in your favorite messageboard.... isn't it a pity if you end up not using it? Is it possible that the whole process of researching the product, eroticizing it, fondling it, reading the manual, and taking it out to the practice range (or what have you) make you lean toward finding pretexts for putting it to use?

It's as though there's little interest in being David any more; the manly virtue is to be Goloath, especially if he owns a bunch of really cool shit with which to neutralize all threats or desired targets.

(Sorry about the typos, e.g. Goliath)

Searching on "bug out bag" returns 240,000 results on YouTube and 28,500,000 on Google

To me the particular permutation of violence culture that's on display in Ferguson has to be understood in relation to, in part a symptom of, consumerism or "gear culture" if you will. Walk into a Bass Pro Shop Shop and you'll see what I mean. The amount of technology that goes into equipping oneself to go whitetail hunting is at NASA levels.

yeah, okay, that's a good and interesting point. american masculinity of the rural, bass fishing, deer hunting sort seems at one time to have been idealized in the popular imagination in terms of its simplicity and rusticity, even a kind of luddism. a beat-up farm truck kept running with spit and bailing wire, daddy's rifle, hand-tied flies, improvised tools - the fetishization of gear-minimal, self-effacing frontier know how. the power of this image seemed predicated on the idea that the really important things in life were intangibles that could be handed down unchanged from generation to generation: values, skills, knowledge, culture, etc. with that came a veneration of the "old fashioned", as reflected in the minimalist olde timeyness of early 20th century country music. [none of this is factual, of course, just the impression i got growing up in the 70s & 80s of the culture that came before and still persisted to some extent.]

to the extent that those values exist anymore, they seem to have largely become the the property of the urban and suburban middle classes: artisinal food production, voluntary simplicity, retro aesthetics, "the virtue of craftsmaship", locally sourced and hand forged everything, vinyl only, shabby chic, etc. at the same time, rural american popular culture has gone completely gear crazy. crazy not just for hardware, but for hardware that looks huge, rugged, menacing and explicitly military. it makes a kind of sense. in the 60s & 70s, the fetishization of rusticity suggested a possible middle ground meeting space for rural conservatives and off-the-grid, back-to-the-land whole earth types, a place where everybody could get together and play the banjo, churn butter, have smudgy-faced babies, whatever.

but that never really happened to any significant extent, and it didn't make much sense in the first place. the quality of your mechanical gear doesn't matter much in the city. you have a nice car or a really intense coffee machine, that's great, but it doesn't improve the material quality of your life much. to the extent gear does matter for contemporary middle-class urbanites, it's mostly software and computer tech, low profile and easily taken for granted. machines really do matter on a farm or a hunt, though. better scopes, higher ground clearance, harvesting speed, mapping & tracking capacity, etc. the quality of the machinery you bring to bear has a huge impact on the outcome. controlling & owning big, serious, pro-grade machines gives you control over your own life & livelihood. or that's the fantasy being marketed, anyway.

this also ties rural conservatives (and what i'll call "rural minded" conservatives: red state suburbanites with shared values) together with a much different set of partners: cops & the military. no coincidence that those who serve so often come from rural/rural-minded backgrounds, not from top-tier league colleges, from families with "options" and well-heeled townhouses. the culture that's emerged seems in many ways far less nostalgic than either early 20th century country-style rusticity or contemporary urban-lib artisinalism. it wants the cutting edge, and it wants it to cut: big guns, big trucks, night vision, high-capacity magazines, body armor, rock & roll, shock & awe. country music has even mutated to match.

this seemed flawed in a couple ways. for one, it ignores the fundamental disconnect in the mind of the american right between convulsive fear of the nonwhite other (which demands an empowered fed and heavily armed cops) and paranoid distrust of the state itself (which demands a disempowered fed and an armed citizenry). i think a large and vocal segment of the american right really would grant the police to have "total license to inflict violence in public" - but only when that capacity is used against those who scan as "not us" in the conservative mind: mexican and south/central american immigrants, blacks, "hippies", the urban poor, etc.

Even within the American right, what constituency does rolling out like Starship Troopers knowing full well that you're not going to use tanks and snipers play to? It alienates the portion who fear the power of the militarised state and, perhaps even more, alienates the portion who would like to see a return to old-school police violence. You could give them tactical nuclear weapons and they'd still be less dangerous than a bunch of burly guys with batons and a Kent State mentality about using them.

it suggests the high-watermark is probably being reached and some sort of scaling-back will occur"

Unlike hemlines, there's no natural upper bound. What's stopping the water from rising further? It can hardly be the high-watermark when they haven't even fired into the crowd. Who's going to de-escalate, and why?

even the most vicious authoritarian recognises that the police cannot realistically have total license to inflict violence in public

Authoritarians don't imagine that they could be caught up in what (deservedly) happens to Those People. It's a worldview built on outgroup antagonism, you'll wait a long time for them to make an imaginative leap of empathy.

"tianenmen square was the high-watermark for overt violence by the ccp"

And also, not coincidentally given the way it ended, the high-watermark for overt protest against it. Until the very end.

"they'd been drilled so long and so thoroughly on the possibility of Al Qaeda or North Korea invading small-town Missouri they were just working from a set playbook"

You couldn't train people to act the way the police are acting in Ferguson unless they wanted to, unless they'd been thinking about it and dreaming about and looking for an excuse, long before opening any police training manual. The impulse was already there.

"it seems to be a part of the increasingly hyperbolic and performative character of violence culture more generally, mma culture, roid culture, affliction tshirt culture whatever, everything is preening and overly demonstrative"

You could delete "violence" and the specific examples you gave and that would be almost as true of the culture at large.

P.S. on gear fetishism

working-class white america skews conservative. thinking of contractors, plumbers, road workers, mechanics, machinists: folks who make a living with wrenches, shovels, nail guns, etc. gear-ness unifies those who "really work", whether rural or not, a truth well known to the people who market harleys & pickup trucks. the more dependent you are on heavy machinery, the more authentic your sweat-of-the-brow, honest work cred. so buying into the gear culture earns you not only man points, but conservative realness points, and that's perhaps doubly true for those who don't actually make a living off manual labor. you may sit at a desk all day, live in the sprawling suburbs of a major urban center, but you're invited to the "small town throwdown" so long as you've got a lift-kit elevated tailgate to drop.

Even within the American right, what constituency does rolling out like Starship Troopers knowing full well that you're not going to use tanks and snipers play to? It alienates the portion who fear the power of the militarised state and, perhaps even more, alienates the portion who would like to see a return to old-school police violence. You could give them tactical nuclear weapons and they'd still be less dangerous than a bunch of burly guys with batons and a Kent State mentality about using them.

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Thursday, August 21, 2014 12:02 AM (14 minutes ago)

maybe, but the big gear parade in ferguson is, i think, less a calculated show for political purposes than the predictable outcome of overmilitarized everything in the wake of 9/11 & the patriot act. conservatives wanted the police given license to shoot first without concern about possible consequences, and they wanted them armed up for terrorist bear. my whole point was the "disconnect" between this and their antigovernment paranioia, a gap thinly papered over with racist hysteria.

Yes, i don't think it's a calculated political response but the apparent unease from sections of the right - both in the sense of Fox openly questioning the OTT hardware being notionally deployed against unarmed protesters and the broader theme you see on Twitter of 'why are they sitting there in tanks and firing tear gas rather than getting stuck in with boots and fists?' means that actions like this may be failing to pick up the political support they need to sustain them in the long term. It's tough to see many on the right hailing the Ferguson response as an unqualified success. As Nakh indicates, the capacity for lower-key violence might increase while the flashy gear parades might be rolled back.

"Antigovernment" isn't (usually) a principled ideology, it's a justification for refusing to cooperate with power that is viewed as illegitimate. The police and the military don't count as "government", as long as they're targeting the right people. Put the conservatives in charge of the black helicopters and the tear gas, they're fine with that. But send federal agents to enforce the laws at Cliven Bundy's ranch, and you risk a constitutional crisis.

this seemed flawed in a couple ways. for one, it ignores the fundamental disconnect in the mind of the american right between convulsive fear of the nonwhite other (which demands an empowered fed and heavily armed cops) and paranoid distrust of the state itself (which demands a disempowered fed and an armed citizenry). i think a large and vocal segment of the american right really would grant the police to have "total license to inflict violence in public" - but only when that capacity is used against those who scan as "not us" in the conservative mind: mexican and south/central american immigrants, blacks, "hippies", the urban poor, etc.

also, i think this kind of hypermilitarism only scans as camp when someone is not pointing a gun in your face.

― Adding ease. Adding wonder. Adding (contenderizer), Thursday, 21 August 2014 05:34 (8 hours ago)

typically you aren't really understanding anything. ferguson is what happens when you have lost. tanks in the streets and sniper rifles on unarmed civilians is an endgame stategy, ceaucescu, yanukovich. since they do not have license to use them fully in situations like ferguson, absent a level of insurrectionary violence that has not and is not likely to be displayed, they look vestigial and futile. the last sentence is your usual homiletic obviousness. there is a video from ferguson of a solitary frightened fat cop hysterically swearing at protesters while gesturing with the sort of firearm that could kill an elk with a single round from a mile away. the protesters are laughing and baiting him.

i mean, nazi militarism, power-fetishism and self-importance can look rather camp from a sufficient remove, but you seem to equate violent camp with the failure of would-be-controlling power to effectively manifest itself. tbh, i'm not terribly worried about this being the harbinger of nascent fascism, but nor does it strike me as a self-popping balloon. i suppose we will see.

plus fuck you. no cause to personalize shit like that.

one difference is that the nazis, despite history whitewashing to the contrary, weren't occupying germany. things that work when done against a foreign population delegitimize itself when done to domestic population.

wasn't even considering legitimacy. i'd say the nazis pretty effectively occupied certain parts of germany; the parts the weren't inclined to get with the program.

the problem is you post prolix partially educated nonsense on every thread which by accident or design engages your calvinist lectern mentality. sometimes it is liable to get treated as the tl;dr timewasting that it usually is.

tbf contenderizer, you've been a bit insufferable as of late. lots of third-person omniscient posting.

okay, let me tighten that up for you. fuck off.

not saying i can't take a word of friendly advice, mordy, but this whole thread tends to the 3rd person omnicient. it's there in nakh's op. but then again, the tone you're objecting to (not alone, mind), is obviously invisible to me.

Personally I think "what a pompous insufferable ass" upon seconds of submitting most of my posts.

But I agree with contenderizer that third-person grand theorizing is what this thread invites. We're all throwing spaghetti at the wall.

yah but the acid test is 'would I read a book written like this'

I'm tone deaf enough to need to ask: Srsly?

i think my main objection to contenderizer is that his post is essentially accusing nakh of making light of the phenomena through his contextualization of camp - which is just the same, tho more intelligently formed, objection of anyone who says 'you're not taking this seriously enough.' true, anyone with a gun pointed at them will be frightened, and true, the police officers themselves surely don't recognize the absurdity in themselves. but that doesn't mean there isn't an element of theatricality going on. not to mention that the performance of violence is under-theorized imo, making the objection more of a derail than just throwing pasta at a wall.

and one shouldn't need to parse the differences between the Nazis and the Ferguson PD to make that point

third person omniscient is fine sometimes. if anything conty tends too much to the reflexive first person, nothing can go without comment refracted through his four hundred and eighty seven years of continuous terrerstrial existence during which he has laboriously examined everything under the sun. a lot of scientia producing not an awful lot of potentia.

yah but the acid test is 'would I read a book written like this'

surely that's gonna vary from one of us to the next. your "insightful erudition" might be my "self-indulgent preening", and vice-versa. i mean, i could fling childish shit at others' posting style for sport, but hardly see what good that might accomplish.

fwiw, i don't feel that nakh is taking anything too lightly. the performance of lethality doesn't strike me as "paradoxically feeble" in the manner he suggests, but i don't fault the perception.

xp dude, people just like tossing off ideas sometimes. like doing a crossword puzzle. nothing can go without examination when it comes to opportunities to demonstrate your brilliance. nakhchivan is a man who's traveled the desert, come down from the mountain, and blasts our minds with the terrifying light of a god's mind.

surely that's gonna vary from one of us to the next.

well exactly. and one of us and the next have spoken ;)

i'm sorry i shot your dog, nakh. okay? i'm sorry.

it goes w/out saying that the patron saint of ILAFL is ilx's finest poster

i have brown-nosed nakh enough. maybe it is time to develop some cool opinions about him

surely that's gonna vary from one of us to the next. your "insightful erudition" might be my "self-indulgent preening", and vice-versa

― Adding ease. Adding wonder. Adding (contenderizer), Thursday, 21 August 2014 17:01 (43 seconds ago)

yeah except fortunately it is possible to parse the two. if collardo worries that he is a pompous insufferable ass then that it is because he lacks confidence in his own eminent lucidity and erudition rather than because this is a relativist swamp where such discriminations are impossible.

anyway i am on record as generally being in approval of contenderizer. in this instance you are just not going for the core argument and engaging in obfuscatory asides. it's not unfair to give this short shrift else you get into a tiresome tuomasism where every irrelevant thing is queried endlessly.

pish. i won't bicker. asides are no huge threat to conversation, but i do tend to forget that disagreement rarely improves relations. on that note, i like that there's a thread specifically dedicated to the grotesque swolesomeness of contemporary american masculinity, whether or not we limited ourselves to post-9/11 violence culture bloat. i like the focus on militarized masculine power as performative.

if anything, i'd like to suggest that the risible campiness of the culture in question depends a lot on where one stands, and that in turn is often a product of class. in going on at length earlier in the thread, i was trying (if poorly) to steer the conversation that way. from within gear-dependent american working-class culture, the gun show may look a little more convincing & proportionate.

i skip every contenderizer post. who has the time to not-think along with them.

also i'm aware of my weaknesses in posting, have no problem if there are people out there who find me not worth engaging, and try to take the feedback i get implicitly or explicitly into account to "post better", not without a high failure rate.

let's not turn this into a circular firing squad; after all even the least of the ILAFL cadre is still bringing valuable content to the fore

valuable like bucketing out the contents of a stopped-up toilet

be nice. despite my complaining i've generally enjoyed contederizer's contributions to ilx.

i wrote that wrong. i meant "the bucketed-out contents of a stopped-up toilet". essential distinction.

Guys, you can't fight in here, this is the violence culture thread.

I don't think I understand why campily excessive displays of power would necessarily be self-undermining or self-limiting. Who's going to de-escalate?

only delusional fantasists think that limitless state violence is feasible.

Well, not "limitless". But they're nowhere near the upper bound yet, compared to what (other) authoritarian police states have done.

Having spent considerable time in a couple of these violence cultures myself (NFL football fandom, Evangelical eschatology and dominionism), I've not noticed too many people voicing doubts, counseling moderation or even looking sheepish about having gone too far.

ferguson is what happens when you have lost. tanks in the streets and sniper rifles on unarmed civilians is an endgame stategy

Was Tiananmen Square an endgame?

things that work when done against a foreign population delegitimize itself when done to domestic population.

Do Fox News viewers consider the people protesting in Ferguson to be a legitimate domestic population?

i think there is a way in which the state's inability to exercise restraint makes them seem, paradoxically, more powerless. the monopoly force that underwrites political authority works better when it is unseen, unspoken, and unquestioned. once it is actualized it brings questioning into play and also makes the state seem kind of pathetic, like it is insecure in its authority.

^^^ otm

yh

It makes sense in a way - you can't effectively have chaos and a strong fascist power

I've browsed through a few heavily trafficked hunting forums, checking out the "off-topic" or politics sub-forums. What's striking isn't so much the predictable identification with the white cop or the characterization of Mike Brown and protesters as thugs or animals, but something that this thread has been touching on.

What's striking throughout the discussion in those forums is how little importance (none, actually) is accorded to the values of courage and self-discipline. In other words, what surprises me is not so much the fact that Brown is assumed to be a dangerous, fearsome target (a pot smoking shoplifting black thug who may "charge" at any moment with his upraised hands), but the unembarrassed readiness of so many to announce that they too, would succumb to that fear and find no other recourse than to shower the thug with bullets. Nobody gets called out on this, either.

So yeah, it does lead me to think that we're dealing with a weird take on manhood. Consumer culture feeds into this in various ways methinks, not just the gear culture we've discussed but also the celebration of self-expression and instant gratification. I might be getting facile here, so I'll just leave it there for now. Let's just say this violence culture could not be further removed from that of the samurai.

great thread apart from the cattiness, CG killing it

thanks dp

i think this article from harpers is relevant to the thread -- it's about dan baum doing conceal-carry for the first time in his life, and the associated feelings of awareness/discipline/fear/etc it inspired: https://www.sendspace.com/file/umzust

good read so far, ty

Relevant?

One Twitter stream I came across recently was from a British radical who happily provided a running commentary, as he sat eating in a café, of the flogging he was watching take place in a nearby public square.

There are several factors to explain what drives young men raised in Britain to such cruelty.

One is the classic macho enthusiasm — characteristic of all thugs and gangsters — to revel in power. In England, Hamindur may only have been a High Street retail assistant. In Syria, he held the power of life and death in his trigger finger.

The life of the jihadist might be dangerous, but, to a twisted mind, it is also exciting. One British fighter in Syria posted on Twitter a picture of some home-made explosives with the arrogant, deadly message: ‘I hear that the British Government is worried about what skills I might be learning here.’

Was Tiananmen Square an endgame?

― Plasmon, Thursday, 21 August 2014 19:53 (Yesterday)

the difference is that there was notable violence from dissidents prior to the massacre, there are plenty of photos of lynched prc soldiers; tianenmen square was an extremely ruthless and vicious sort of instrumental response to a perceived existential threat to the state, it was not wholly performative

excellent thread, ty nakh

feel like Ferguson stirred up some cognitive dissonance going on in the American psyche between cop-as-cop (like all those TV shows and the fading McGruff image of the friendly guy on the beat) and cop-as-soldier. lotta "interesting" (in a dystopian way) & disparate elements to all this - returning vets, MMA psychology, fashion, state control, etc.

what surprises me is not so much the fact that Brown is assumed to be a dangerous, fearsome target (a pot smoking shoplifting black thug who may "charge" at any moment with his upraised hands), but the unembarrassed readiness of so many to announce that they too, would succumb to that fear and find no other recourse than to shower the thug with bullets.

I thought about this trend when Renisha McBride was killed, that it was inevitable Wafer's defense would rest on convincing everyone that he was desperately afraid of a teenage girl on the other side of a locked door. And how could that be spun as anything other than profoundly shaming/emasculating to the kind of person who cares about that kind of masculinity?

Thank everything holy for that verdict but the fact that his case wasn't widely pronounced to be more shameful by his own demographic peers can only be explained by what this thread is exploring.

Well, that plus racism.

Guys, you can't fight in here, this is the violence culture thread.

*golf clap*

ha

portentousness alert

i'm cataloging photographs taken of law students doing csi/west wing cosplay for a "counter-terror simulation" in 2012. it looks like a serial drama extension of five-years-after coed life complete with token minority. if there was a meanwhile in iraq subplot it would need a lot of curly facial hair and a playground of contemporary orientalist signifiers to go with it, ultimately making sense only as an "evil" reflection of a heartland character drama. this is our preferred reality. the ones at the top are most fluent in the sign language of the most crucial and charged simulations which are only made possible by various shifting binaries that must be whacked like moles regularly, the further down the chain the better. this is where violence culture and the men and women who carry it out reside.

thanks to Matt DC for finding this thread again.

A friend posted this on FB and I immediately thought about this discussion.

https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/

Thanks for that. Nate Powell bringing the fire.

beard is a flat circle

Quality revive