Interesting Links: Apr 8, 2015

Here are links to some interesting news articles I came across today. As you might notice, all four are about the murder of Walter Scott (a black man) by Michael Slager (a white cop).

Link 1: The Police Are America’s Terrorists

As long as there have been white people and black people and brown people in America, the slaughter of black and brown people has been used as a form of control. For centuries, on a population level, the racial majority has voted and lobbied to give agents of the state more power to act without sanction, to militarize, to kill. Functionally, this has enabled them to wage war on behalf of the majority of the public; to express hatred and fear and aspire to power through campaigns of terror and carnage.

The slaughter of black and brown people is, in this light, a political act, political violence enacted for political purpose against a civilian population to raise fear and obtain compliance. That Slager probably never thought of things in these terms doesn’t matter; what does is that he was trained and given incentives in line with the interests of a particular class intent on preserving its power. The violence he enacted is a kind that keeps one class of citizens terrorized and fearful of random violence for the benefit of another. It’s meant to keep that class in line and intact, even as the sands of time shift and racial minorities slowly crawl toward majority status.

Link 2: Broken Taillight Policing

What we can say, however, is that the shooting of Walter Scott happened in an institutional environment where police officers are encouraged to make intrusive stops against people they deem suspicious. Overwhelmingly, those people are black American men. And as we’ve seen with stop-and-frisk tactics in New York City and with the behavior of the Ferguson Police Department, these stops aren’t effective; they yield fewer suspects and less contraband than what you get from more targeted investigations. Instead, they poison the relationship between departments and communities, creating mistrust and entrenching the view—among the police, the policed, and everyone else—that blacks are lesser citizens than their peers. Whether Slager, who is white, was racially biased—there’s no evidence he was—is irrelevant. What matters is that this universal suspicion is baked into the culture of police departments across the country, such that all kinds of officers—black as well as white—engage in profiling.

Link 3: Black death has become a cultural spectacle

As long as white people remain unconvinced that policing is a fundamentally anti-Black, racist enterprise in this country, the police will keep killing unarmed Black people. As long as the ridiculous argument that this is “just an isolated incident” proceeds unchecked, Black bodies will continue to pile up. Local juries might opt to throw the book at “individual” suspects, but individual solutions will not solve the epidemic of police murder. As of February 2015, the police were killing someone every eight hours. That is simply too much killing, and it far outpaces the police murder rate in every other developed country.

To put it the way Dr. Treva Lindsey put it, “These extrajudicial killings are at the heart of U.S. democracy. At the core of our nation’s history is [Black people’s] annihilation and dehumanization- how do you ‘reform’ that? So save me the good cops argument- we are indicting the ENTIRE SYSTEM.” She’s right. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.

Link 4: The Shockingly Familiar Killing of Walter Scott

Walter Scott’s killing is unusual in several ways. It’s unusual that a traffic stop ended in death. It’s unusual—and decisive—that it was caught on film. And it’s highly unusual that it has produced a murder charge against the officer. But in other ways, the incident seems depressingly familiar. Scott was stopped for having a tail light out, the sort of minimal issue that advocates say is often used as a pretext to harass black citizens and to search for other violations. As The New York Times noted, the population of North Charleston, where Scott was shot, is 47 percent black and 37 percent white. Michael Slager, the officer who shot Scott, is white—along with 80 percent of the city’s police department, according to the most recent available figures.

Scott joins the list of unarmed black Americans whose deaths at the hands of police were recently documented on camera. In New York, bystanders filmed the death of Eric Garner, who repeatedly shouted, “I can’t breathe,” as multiple NYPD officers placed him in a chokehold during an arrest for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. Grainy footage from a nearby surveillance camera captured the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was shot by Cleveland police in November while playing with a toy gun in a local park. A Staten Island jury declined to bring charges against NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for Garner’s death in December. Rice’s death remains under investigation.

What do you think? Comments?

Willing Believers in Imaginary Entities Deserve Abuse and Destruction

I recently came across an article in ‘The Atlantic’ which tried to make an insipid case that people should not get outraged by the actions of morons who justify discrimination against other people based on their own interpretation of literary works of unclear authorship. The writer of that particular article was trying to make the case that many of those who discriminate against other groups are not “bad” people. According to him, they could even be family-minded Mormons, devout Hispanic women or Muslim immigrants.

While that line of reasoning might suffice for some idiots, it has a huge and fatal flaw. As many of you know, the vast majority of people who committed state-sanctioned genocides (including the ‘final solution’ under the Nazis) were also devout, hard-working and family-minded people who just wanted a well-paying job. It just happened to be the case that their jobs centered around systemic mass murder of people who had not personally wronged them.

The same is true of all those “good” Spanish who committed genocide in south and central america. Similarly all those whites who committed direct and indirect genocide in north america and then built their lifestyle on the backs and corpses of black slaves might also have been devout, family-minded people.

My point is that excusing the repeated intentional actions of people because they are “devout”, “hard-working” and “family-minded” displays a level of sophism and spinelessness that only a liberal could attain. This is especially so when those injured or killed by the actions of all those self-righteous people have not previously harmed them in any measurable manner. It is even more so when personal interpretations of books with unclear authorship are the justification for the such behavior and actions.

Here is another way to look at the issue..

How many of you would support the right of a person to discriminate against, or kill, other people based on the voices he heard in his (or her) head? Most religious traditions in existence today can trace their origin to some divine communication conveniently revealed only to the founder of that particular religion. So.. what is the real difference between people who hurt or kill others based on the voices in their heads and those who do so because they are allegedly following the unfaithfully transcribed beliefs of a long-dead person who supposedly heard voices in his head?

And this raises an even more troublesome question.. Why would anybody live their life according to the text of a book that makes clearly unfulfillable promises to its readers? Would you keep on voluntarily giving your time or money to any person or organisation that cannot deliver on even its most basic promises? So why is religion (traditional or secular) or an ideology any different? How many of the true believers in ideologies as diverse as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Capitalism or Communism have received any of the promised benefits of believing in them?

So why do people believe, and take pride, in advertising their strong belief in such obvious scams?

A couple of previous posts by me, Link 1 and Link 2, I have put forth the idea that belief in religion or ideology is about creating a justification for abusing, scamming, stealing, raping and murdering other people. Perhaps most humans have an insatiable need to hurt and kill other people but do not have the metaphorical balls to do so on their own account. They therefore require the external justification provided by any scrap of paper or the ravings of another person to hurt and kill other people.

Then there is the issue of reducing the chance of reprisal for carrying out such actions.

Cloaking sadistic and murderous desires in the name of religion and ideology allows it be legalized and reduces the chance of reprisal from those hurt by said actions. Killing people publicly labelled as “unbelievers”, “non-muricans”, “terrorists” makes it sound justifiable and “right”. Similarly stealing and abusing people because they are “non-whites”, “have low IQ” etc apparently sounds more reasonable than doing it because you are a piece of shit.

Nor is such solipsistic behavior restricted to whites, as it is trivial to find obvious examples of similar behavior in every group, society and race in the world. You can find desperately poor and sick people who want to hurt and kill others more vulnerable than them in the name of some leader , ideology or religion in every part of the world and at all times in human history.

That is why I do not care if the true believer of any ideology (or follower of any leader) is white, black, brown or blue. Nor do I care about the merits of their ideology, society and culture. Those who deliberately prey on more vulnerable people are extermination-worthy crap. They do not represent any hope, and are incapable of creating, a better future. Left to their own devices they will be never be able to transcend the human condition.

It is for this reason that pondering on the justness of the treatment received by those who discriminate against people who have not demonstrably injured them (be they devout mormons, catholic hispanics or muslims) is a worthless exercise. If anything, the continued existence and prosperity of eunuchoid assholes who require the cover of external ideology to justify their sadistic behavior is an indictment of humans as a species.

What do you think? Comments?

NSFW Links: Apr 3, 2015

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A Video Montage of the Wolfenstein Video Game Series from 1981-2014

I found this video clip sometime ago and wanted to write a post about it. Well.. the post might take some more time, so here is the clip.

A few important notes: 1] The quality of video gameplay has not really improved since 2001. 2] Pretty much all improvements in computational power since 2001 have been used to sex up the ‘action and explosions’ component rather than improve the depth of the storyline or quality of gameplay. 3] Since 2001, the storylines themselves have become more simplistic, unrealistic and action movie-like.

What do you think? Comments?

Cultural Cognitive Dissonance and Reactions to Games like “Hatred”

One of the more interesting and, in my opinion, innovative FPS being developed at this moment is a FPS video game known as “Hatred“. The overall story-line of this game can be best summarized as..

In Hatred, a shooter video game presented in isometric perspective, the player-character is a mass-killer who hates humanity and begins a “genocide crusade” to kill civilians and police officers. He can also use these individuals as human shields.

By now, most readers must have correctly guessed that development of this game has been more than a bit controversial. Media reactions to its development and imminent release have been rather.. diverse. Some presstitutes claim that this game showcases all that is wrong with the gaming industry. Other presstitutes claim that it has crossed a “moral boundary”. Yet others want to see it banned, something they nearly succeeded at before failing miserably.

But why are so many presstitutes getting their proverbial panties in a knot about a video game that is in many ways identical to other FPS games. I mean.. games where you can kill (usually shoot) other people have been one of the most popular and financially successful category of video games. So what makes a game like “Hatred” different from a game in the Wolfenstein, Doom, Half-Life, Call of Duty or Far Cry series? Nor is the trope of an amoral killer something new. The “Hitman” game series is centered around an amoral assassin killing people for money AND you can kill any character in that game series as long as your character can survive the consequences of his actions.

So why are all these presstitutes hating on “Hatred”? Also, more curiously, why do so many gamers find the central premise of this game somewhat disturbing?

As I will show you in the rest of this post, the public reactions to that game exposes one of the central cognitive dissonances characterizing human “civilization”. So let us start our analysis of public reactions to this game with a simple question. Why does this particular game elicit such a strong negative reaction from so many tools.. I mean.. people?

As I have mentioned before, many of later titles in the “Hitman” series are not that different from “Hatred”- in overall concept and style of gameplay. While titles in the “Hitman” series have been controversial in the past- they have never elicited the large-scale public reaction that “Hatred” has managed to elicit. But why? or to be more precise- why not?

What makes an open-ended game where an emotionally stunted guy kills for money significantly less controversial than one in which a guy kills for his own personal beliefs and views on humanity?

In a previous series of posts about what I really think about human beings as a species, I had made a number of points relevant to the current post. Two points especially relevant to this post goes something like this..

Human beings seem to be actively driven a unscratchable itch to hurt, abuse, enslave and kill others even if they stand to gain very little from it.

All religions and popular ideologies are about rationalizing and sanctifying the abuse, robbery, murder and coercion of those labelled as “others”.

Put together, they provide the first reasonable explanation as to why “Hatred” elicits so much more negative social reaction than something like “Hitman: Blood Money“. Endless acquisition of money and performing a job irrespective of the consequences of your actions are important sacraments of the secular religion of capitalism. Therefore killing other people for the sole purpose of making money, regardless of the rationale behind doing so, is perfectly acceptable to a believer in the secular religion of capitalism- especially its american variant.

A game like “Hatred” on the other hand has a protagonist who kills because he personally hates what those whom he kills represent. He is not doing it for money, love, fame, honor, fame, religion or any other stupid bullshit that most people want to believe in to justify their actions. Also, he is not taking orders from anyone else nor is he working to further the career or financial aspirations of somebody else.

His actions are an overt and obvious repudiation of the central sacraments and tenets of the dominant secular religion of our era, aka modern nation-state supported corporate capitalism.

But it gets better.. or worse, depending on how you look at it. By not invoking socially acceptable reasons for killing innocent people, such as nationalism or contrived explanations based around self-defense, the character of the protagonist exposes the emptiness of those beliefs and explanations. Take nationalism as an example. What kind of moron would go and kill people on the other side of the world when he has never met them in real life or has directly suffered because of their actions. But then again.. look at human history.

Almost every single war in history was fought by people who did not have personal enmities with those they fought against to benefit those who facilitated that confrontation. Yet, human “civilization” spends a lot of time trying to glorify the sacrifices of tools who die or get crippled to further enrich a few. Now, such glorifications and exhalations rarely include worthwhile financial compensation- but that is another story.

My point is, human “civilization” is totally OK with people killing other people in the name of personally useless concepts such religion, nation or race. It is also OK with committing genocide as long as it based on taking orders from others. It is also OK with slavery and mass incarceration of certain racial groups as long it is profitable for a few. But it is not OK with a person killing others just because he personally hates them.

So what does all of this say about the true nature of human “civilization”, “culture” or any of the other pretenses most human beings cling to? Think about it.. I have, and it is not flattering- to put it mildly. Such an analysis also exposes the complete moral relativism underlying belief systems that pretend (and advertise themselves) to be based in real or absolute truths.

What do you think? Comments?

NSFW Links: Mar 21, 2015

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NSFW Links: Mar 13, 2015

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