Persepolis, The Immutability Of War, And Blistering Cynicism

[krinndnz]

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to

Comments

Re: X's Legacy

[krinndnz]

I think we might differ on the definition "legitimate tool," but we share a bunch of these thoughts. I disagree with "violence is never a legitimate tool" and with "the State is the only entity which may legitimately enact violence," so I find that I'm almost required to admit that violence can sometimes be a legitimate tool. Perhaps the problem is not so much using violence as being able to stop using violence.

As for "refusing to play by the rules," I flashed to two things while turning that over in my head. One is the Mencken quote about every complex problem having a solution that's simple, easily implemented, and wrong. The other is an Order of the Stick strip. I read it as the short, stern advice about life as a deviant, so I'll reproduce it (more for me and for future readers than for you, because I bet you've read it):HINJO: The wisdom is this: Play the game. [...] I mean The Game, the big one. The one that each of us plays every day when we get out of bed, put on our face, and go out into the world. Some of us play

[silveradept]

The second Perseopolis is told in much the same vein.

One thought that representative democracy was supposed to help prevent people from amassing power that shields them from consequences, but that was when they assumed that both sides would have sufficient differences that compromising for them meant giving up something they held dear in exchange for being able to turn the screws on their opponents if they failed to live up to their end of the bargain. Nowadays, we have one party, the Corporatist Party, and it has two factions that want you to believe they are separate entities.

While violence won't bring about the right changes, in the United States or abroad, it certainly seems like there's no way short of violence to stop or reform the system so that the power is actually in the hands of the people instead of the boardrooms and the capitalists and the political figures they put before us and tell us to vote for or against.

[krinndnz]

An additional layer of the problem is that we're dealing with problems that are not new. They've been brewing for a long time, and are getting to the point now where there's a very high risk of overwhelming our collective "immune system" for dealing with them. At that point, things would go from "basically okay" to "absolutely everything is fucked" very quickly. So that inflection point is what I worry about. As much as I despise the Presidents of my lifetime (Obama is perhaps the closest to being a decent person; Reagan, Bush, and Bush were absolute evil scum; Clinton was a dithering centrist), the problems lie much further back than them. I'd put it at least to the 19th century, the plutocrats of that era, and the invention of corporate personhood.

So, violence, as above, is a perfect example of a Mencken solution: simple, easily implemented, and wrong.

[silveradept]

Quite. And how odd it is that the shakepoint of this, where it suddenly seems like things are flying apart at the handle, is because there's someone in power who makes it look like he might want to really change things. That angers Our Corporate Overlords and so now we're suddenly in "partisanship" and "reverse racism" and "special interests", where beforehand it was all "profits!" and "WAR!" and "All is Good!"

All in all, though, while I think Obama might intend to make some small changes to things, he's not the kind of person that would actually work toward dismantling things. If we ever elected one of those, they'd lose votes on their policies 100-0, I'm guessing.

[sabotabby]

Heh. World peace through comics.

I don't believe that violence solves problems, but neither does the avoidance of violence, necessarily. (Largely because it's usually not a matter of avoiding violence but displacing it on others.) But I couldn't agree more with the idea that removing the wrong people from power is only part of the path to liberation. It's one of the reasons I loathe the politics in so much sci-fi: Broadcasting the "truth," or killing the evil overlord is just as likely to result in a worse situation as a better one.

[krinndnz]

(Largely because it's usually not a matter of avoiding violence but displacing it on others.)

I think that that's a very important point. It's part of the mythical "away" that we First Worlders tend to send our problems to.

As for the sci-fi angle, it reminds me of Le Guin's critique of the SciFi Channel's adaptation of A Wizard Of Earthsea. Blockquotes again! The idea is taken from A Wizard of Earthsea, but in that book we know how Ged came to have a shadow following him, and we know why, and in the end, we know who that shadow is. The darkness within us can't be done away with by swinging a magic sword. But in the film, evil has been comfortably externalized in a villain, the wizard Kumo/Cob, who can simply be killed, thus solving all problems. In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic questions.

This is part of why I'm such a cranky media hermit (bossgoji

[bossgoji]

My personal opinion is that entertainment is what we MAKE of a work, not what the author/creator intends. I'm not just 'sitting through' a bad piece of media, I'm making jokes, analyzing WHY it's flawed and/or total pants, I'm ENGAGING with it. In this sense the only bad media, to me, is something so stupid or dull that you can't make your own fun with it.

The value of a work is not in execution, tone, or even message. It's in what you get out of it.

[baxil]

One of the major problems with the power/accountability vortex you describe - especially (but hardly exclusively) in the context of our modern era - is the fact that among unaccountable power's top targets are the mechanisms of accountability. So tackling unrestrained power means firing at a moving target, and one that is better equipped to game the system than you are

[krinndnz]

This is part of what I find worrisome about John Robb and similar analysts - or rather, about the possibility that they're right. They tend to posit that terrorism and similar system-disrupting measures actually are effective and rational (for certain values of, etc.) means of addressing this problem, because they acknowledge that entrenched power's goal is to stay good and entrenched, unassailable, and have decided not to fight on entrenched power's terms. I worry that entrenched power has gotten less ethical faster than white-hat folks have figured out morally acceptable ways to disrupt it. It reminds me of an alt-history story I read about Gandhi - it had India ruled by Third Reich Germans instead of Brits, and posited that Gandhi would fail in that situation because the Brits were capable of shame, whereas the Germans of the story sincerely believed that gunning down unarmed brown civilians was totally fine.

[salamandream]

"War brings bigger dividends" - Laibach

"War? What is it good for? Mobilization. Science. Religion. Domination. Communication. Industry. GM. IBM. CNN. Universal. MGM. Seagram. Sony." - Laibach

"So they hoist the kind of flag that'll make you moist, and they joust and they boast of the ghost of a host" - Senser