promethean75 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 3:04 pmi think veg was just making a cynical kneejerk comment as per usual. but seriously whenever you see a photo like that one, you immediately think something tragic and/or scandalous has happened. not kidding. in my own experience with the news, every time i see a picture of such composition - what looks like a yuge family mostly of young girls and somethings off about the way the two parents look - it was something about the kids being sexually abused and locked in the basement. for real man. she's (veg) not entirely wrong to have that first impression of the picture.
This incident of an FBI raid on a Catholic family man, and a man associated with the right-tending counter-movement taking shape in the US, cannot be seen or understood except in its context. There is a low-level political war on-going in which a paramilitary Federal police force has been directed to investigate and arrest -- very dramatically -- those identified as enemies. Of what? Of a current political régime. What is challenging is to identify that régime in a fair and accurate manner.
Obviously, here on this forum, populated on the whole by wingnut hysterics (I do not use this term lightly and I will back it up), there is no need or interest in 'the truth' or in seeing things clearly as they are. Those hysterics only want to assert their cockamamie opinions which, if you examine it, are not carefully thought-through ideas but emotionalized ramblings or tirades. This freakshow-on-wheels from New Zealand and Pants-on-fire from England are exemplars of a common way of seeing, relating and thinking. You find them
everywhere. They have no real structure of ideas, they do not even seem to have a structure of values. They have no mental or intellectual clarity. So the question has to be asked: What do they do? What is their purpose? What is their interest? It is not an easy question to answer
fairly.
So instead of knee-jerk I think we'd have to coin a term related to mind-jerk. Certain images invoke or stimulate reactions. Certain ideas invoke or stimulate reactions. This implies psychological content that has been stimulated. But let's examine some facts: it is literally true that *the family* as it had been understood for generations and centuries is certainly under attack. How this has come about can be examined and described. It did not pop out of nowhere. Are you aware of how this came about? Are you aware that it has a purpose?
If when you look at that photo you-Promethean see "something tragic and/or scandalous" I would suggest that your mind has been directed to see in a particular way. That is, through a
negative filter. Do I understand what you are saying? Very much so. Because I have been influenced and informed by the same cultural and sociological forces as you.
If what I suggest is true then the stated position of people like Georgia Meloni have a reasoned basis. But people who operate with
mind-jerk like
Freakshow and
HotPants have no interest in understanding why it is that people like Meloni make the statements they do. In fact they *hear* the statements and then, in their twisting and distorting manner, describe those who see things in that way as *the source of problems*. They vilify them. At the point of making those statements they have stepped out the possibility of understanding. All they do (it seems) is channel hatred & contempt.
So the issue becomes examining
what is hated and
what is held in contempt.
When it comes to Donald Trump this issue is tremendously compounded. First, Donald Trump had been the laughing stock of the NY intellectual establishment for the last 30 years (and to a degree a national laughing stock). He is, it must be stated, a really ridiculous figure. Brash, bragging, loud-mouthed, fantastically egotistical, underhanded & uncouth -- need I say more? Everyone knows this! That is what being
The Donald entails. He constructed all this.
Have you forgotten? Here is
an example.
The problem? Donald Trump, for bizarre historical and cultural reasons, has been thrust into a role for which he is
not really adequate. Steve Bannon said, and this was before Trump came on the presidential scene, that *our man will come along*. Meaning that out of the social fabric itself, out of
common America, the proper and if you will destined political actor would appear. And Bannon also said of Trump after his election that he is “a very imperfect instrument, but he’s an armor piercing shell."
And if you've ever followed Bannon you'd know what 'armor' needed to be pierced. It is all rather vague however. Bannon is involved in a war against
a general idea.
He made
this "documentary" in 2004. If you examine it as a set of assertions and a set of statements (against socialism, against globalism, against powerful elites entrenched in a 'deep state') you will better understand many of the tropes in operation today. It has to be said: this too is an example of social hysteria.
