Hollywood’s capital-democratic self-censorship…

Like any other part of the capital-democratic State and its mouthpiece, the mainstream media, Hollywood self-censors itself (and anything in its orbit) to suppress anything that expresses more than a superficial disagreement with the Establishment.

None of this, of course, was new; it was how Hollywood created the myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a Native American; and how the Second World War has been relentlessly glorified, which may be harmless enough unless you happen to be one of countless innocent human beings, from Serbia to Iraq, whose deaths or dispossession are justified by moralizing references to 1939-45. Hollywood’s gooks, its Untermenschen, are essential to this crusade – the dispatched Somalis in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and the sinister Arabs in movies like Rendition, in which the torturing CIA is absolved by Jake Gyllenhal’s good egg. As Robbie Graham and Mark Alford pointed out in their New Statesman enquiry into corporate control of the cinema (2 February), in 167 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the Palestinian cause is restricted to just two and a half minutes. “Far from being an ‘even-handed cry for peace’, as one critic claimed,” they wrote, “Munich is more easily interpreted as a corporate-backed endorsement of Israeli policy.”

With honorable exceptions, film critics rarely question this and identify the true power behind the screen. Obsessed with celebrity actors and vacuous narratives, they are the cinema’s lobby correspondents, its dutiful press corps. Emitting safe snipes and sneers, they promote a deeply political system that dominates most of what we pay to see, knowing not what we are denied.

Rise Against – Hero of War

What are games conditions?

A game is any relational mode structured by a set or sets of rules, where people are divided in factions or opposite sides and where there is some clear purpose. Someone who is in a games condition is in a state where he is obsessively or compulsively playing a game (he is not in a state of “I could take it or leave it” or “I’m just doing this as long as I need”: he needs to keep going regardless of what it does to him, unless there is a dramatic break).

The game condition is based on controlling others. All the players are being controlled by the rulers of the game, and the opposing players are trying to control each other. It should therefore be little surprise that there is no place for love in such relational modes.

For [the sociopath] the game is everything, and though he is too shrewd to say so, he thinks the rest of us are naive and stupid for not playing it his way. And this is exactly what happens to the human mind when emotional attachment and conscience are missing. Life is reduced to a contest, and other human beings seem to be nothing more than game pieces, to be moved about, used as shields, or ejected.
Martha Stout

A gun-toting uneducated criminal off the streets of Southeast Washington, D.C., and a crooked Georgetown business executive are extremely similar in their view of themselves and the world… [A]ll regard the world as a chessboard over which they have total control, and they perceive people as pawns to be pushed around at will. Trust, love, loyalty, and teamwork are incompatible with their way of life. They scorn and exploit people who are kind, trusting, hardworking, and honest. Toward a few, they are sentimental but rarely considerate. Some of their most altruistic acts have sinister motives.
Stanton E. Samenow

The way Samenow formulates this principle makes it sound like he considers at least some of the players to be dominant types. We think of high-powered crooked executives or gun-toting criminals as being dominant, and as players in general we like to think of ourselves as being dominant within the context of the game. In fact, the players, by virtue of being in the game and taking it seriously, are themselves being manipulated by those in control of the game and its rules (or in the case of a game that runs on automatic, they are being manipulated by automatisms for absolutely no one’s benefit, unless that vacuum of power becomes occupied in some area). The game always “plays you,” unless you simply refuse to play it.

The purpose of the game for its rulers (not the winners or leaders of the game, but the people who make the rules of the game) is to serve both as a way to dispose of one’s enemies, as a divide and conquer mechanism against his own subjects, and as a diversion.

Why do you need a diversion? This is something people don’t seem to understand very well about authority. Authority cannot sustain itself when there’s constant rebellion unless it expands a great deal of energy to counter that rebellion. The energy expanded is a waste that instead could be used to expand the authority’s area of power.

As a ruler, you therefore ask yourself why people are rebelling. If you’re smart, you’ll come to the conclusion that people are rebelling because they see no way to improve their condition, and they have nothing to lose. The obvious solution, therefore, is to give them ways to improve their condition, and give them something to lose, without surrendering any power. The way to do this is with a game condition.

The party system (democracy) and the middle class ideal (capitalism) have filled this role to perfection in our current societies. They are both excellent examples of games.

The party system has factions (political parties), it has rules (the election process), it has rulers (the politicians who benefit from the efforts of their partisans), it has a purpose (winning elections, becoming the ruling party), and it has methods (give money, media actions, put up signs, convert people, spectacular actions or shows of force).

The game for economic ideals has factions (corporations and, ultimately, the individual himself fighting against his fellows), it has rules (corporate rulebooks, economic laws, the stock market, monetary policies), it has rulers (the power elite), it has a purpose (for the individual: making money, owning a house, being married, owning the best toys), and it has methods (for the individual: making connections, getting good jobs, getting promoted, etc, for the corporation: production and selling, marketing, political bribes and deals, use of intellectual property, etc).

Note that the methods I have listed for the examples are all concerned with either using others, controlling others, or amassing the means to use or control others.

You may ask, isn’t there some good to having games? I agree. I do enjoy a game of Monopoly once in a while. But I am not in a game condition about Monopoly, it’s just for fun, it’s not an overly serious matter. Some people may be passionate about Monopoly and play it more seriously than I do. But those people don’t go around killing their fellow man or exploiting his labour for their benefit. So a person who is in a game condition about Monopoly would be classified, at worst, as a harmless kook.

Activism is also a game, with the ultimate objective being to change society so it conforms to one’s cause. In and of itself, it is no more meritorious or desirable than any other game.

You know a game works when it absorbs the individual (such as, in the case of capitalism, the absorption of the individual into the economic organism) and makes him identify with his role in the game, gives him some identities that dump all sorts of “I should”s and “I must”s into his mind and sink him deeper into the mire under the guise of “responsibility.” The reasoning of course is “now that you started, you’re responsible for what you’re doing, you can’t just end it all.” And boy, your values just flew out the window, they are no longer in the picture at all, even if they were still there when you started. At this point, you are strictly a pawn.

Homemade toys about to go extinct.

History always repeats itself. Legislation which is pushed to the public as being “for the public good” always, always aims to strengthen the capitalist oligopolies. They use a recent scare in order to drum up support. So it is with the Chinese toy problem and the new Orwellianly-named “Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act,” which primarily aims to shut down small toy manufacturers by imposing enormous fees for “mandatory testing.” The Handmade Toy Alliance is fighting this, but of course their solution is more legislation. As usual, no one realizes the insanity of the system they live under.

Kent McManigal says: cops cause crime.

This is an interesting hypothesis which I have also pondered. The fact that we have been indoctrinated to rely on the State for our safety means that we fail to take responsibility for our actions and for our society.

Crime thrives where people believe it is someone else’s responsibility to take action. In big cities it is easy to think someone else will get involved, so you will mind your own business. This is even more true where there are a lot of cops. If someone is supposedly being paid to stop crime, it is even easier to turn away and let them handle it. In fact, cops encourage this poor behavior by criminalizing and punishing self-defense. “Don’t be a hero. Call the professionals.” Except that cops are under no obligation to protect you from crime. Try to sue the local LEOs after they fail to protect you from crime if you doubt me.

Stop contributing to the success of crime. Ignore the cops and take responsibility for your own safety. If it is your nature, take responsibility for the safety of those around you. Don’t wait for some “professional”, whose interests are not where you may assume they are, to step up and fix it for you.

Noam Chomsky: Is Capitalism Making Life Better?