photography

Quickie Post — Using Images to Psychopathically Relocate Debate

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Welsh Countryside

One of the more pathologically interesting recent trends in journalism — it’s been going on for about the last 30 years — is creating new nominally ethical, but actually classic double-bind rules about what pictures, depicting people involved, that should be shown in stories. Pictures of any sort are very interesting from a neurogenic perspective, because they enter through one of most evolved pieces of hardware in the brain — the visual cortex. And because our evolutionary history is such that we “see” something, and then act on it, there are ingrained patterns in the visual cortex about risk evaluation to our persons that inherently happen there, or adjacent.

I can’t remember when it started exactly, but the shift seemed to occur with covering murders or school shootings. The ostensibly virtuous crowd said “we shouldn’t put the picture of the shooter up! We should honor the victims!” And while on the surface, that seems nice, it’s a diabolical hack on how the brain works. The brain WANTS to recognize threats. And when you put up a picture of slaughtered schoolchildren, all you do is provide traumatic pattern-matching for parents, while at the same time, avoiding any real information transmission to the larger body politic on where the problem actually is.

Certainly this is done with random murders. Like it or not, the vast majority of murders are committed by black males in their teens and twenties. But you can see how this might go against the agendas of those looking to cover up this chronic problem, which sadly affects individuals in the black community more than anyone.

Worse, you start shifting the larger meta-meaning of pictures in general. If the only pictures that are shown, over time, are victims, the brain can be trained to then believe anyone having their photo taken in a violent situation is a victim. Context is established merely through publication.

Recently, in the contested street violence in Minneapolis, MN, over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the media has been portraying various protestors, especially in static photo form, as victims. But if you watch any of the plethora of videos, you’ll not see peaceful protests, nor protestors. What you WILL see is a selection of people (primarily middle-aged white women) behaving like monkeys laced with methamphetamine, screaming at the top of their lungs, at ICE agents attempting to arrest illegal immigrants. This particular cadre of illegal immigrants is not law-abiding. There is a current amnesty policy for these immigrants that if they self-deport, they will be given a free plane ticket and $3000 for their troubles. That means you can expect the ones that refuse the deal to also be fugitives, and will run like hell when the noose closes.

And they do, which then interjects screaming meth monkey protestors in with the Running Man. The ICE agents are actually in the middle of the mess. And if you know much about any arrest scenario, it is never gentle. Chris Rock, the famous comedian, has said “if you run from the police, expect to get an ass-whooping.” The fact that the middle-aged female meth monkey contingent are surprised by any of this shows how insulated they are from reality.

Here’s where the psychopathy of the press comes in. The press is all down with Collapse Narratives — promoting stories that will generate societal collapse — so the recent inversion of photographic meaning suits their purposes to a T. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran this picture on their front page.

Now consider past programming. Your instantaneous reaction is this person must be a victim, and experiencing violence for no other reason than ICE is evil. That is the result of the endless conditioning discussed above. And here’s the ambiguity — I don’t know the exact environmental conditions at the time of this photo. But the fact that the photographer can get in so close to an arrest scenario guarantees that ICE is actually remarkably restrained. And if this guy ended up getting this treatment, I guarantee he was going full “meth monkey” before ICE tossed him to the ground and immobilized him.

Lots of psychopathic things are going on just in this scenario. Abuse of the definition of what a 1st Amendment right to protest is one of them. But the whole thing is not as emergent as it seems. Photographers AND movement activists manipulate circumstances to win public opinion. In his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell even discussed the history in the Civil Rights movement that had psychopathic staging generated by activist Wyatt Walker , which generated the famous photos of children being attacked by dogs in 1963 Birmingham.

The bottom line is the same, of course. Psychopathic manipulation using reversed core psychology is everywhere in our media markets. The goal of all of this is to make you believe that things are what you think you see, where your native instincts provide the context. But it’s that preying on your hardware that’s going on. And it’s almost always to get you to act against your interests. Like an anglerfish dangling its bait in front of your hapless face, the goal is to swallow you whole.

The Foreshadowing of Elite/Counter-elite Conflict — The Movie ‘Giant’

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Movie Poster for ‘Giant’ — starring three true icons of the Silver Screen

One of the more interesting and pleasant surprises I’ve had in the past couple of months was finally viewing the movie ‘Giant’, on a flight home from Costa Rica. I’m a huge Robert Earl Keen fan, and the movie is mentioned in Lyle Lovett’s and his song, ‘The Front Porch Song”, about rural Texas.

“This old porch is a Palace walk-in on a main street in Texas
It ain’t never seen or heard the days of G’s and R’s and X’s
With that ’62 poster that’s almost faded down
And a screen without a picture since Giant came to town, oh no
I love them junior mints and them red hots too, yes I do, oh yeah”

Songs like this are coded regional language — a Palace walk-in is a movie theatre with seats (as opposed to a drive-in) that even ChatGPT struggles with a bit. If you’re from that part of the world, Easter Eggs abound.

The movie, released in 1956, was an epic drama, in the style of ‘Gone with the Wind‘, as well as the age. It deals with large themes, but only moderate pacing. For those interested, you can read about the top level in the Wikipedia piece. It was also one of the first pieces to deal with racism in Texas against Hispanics.

But in the context of this blog, what it really did was trace the memetic timeline of Elite development in the U.S. The main character, Bick (Rock Hudson), owner of the Reata Ranch (some half million acres) on the high plains of Texas, and modeled on the historic King Ranch, travels east to buy a stallion from a rich, agricultural family in Virginia. In the process, he returns with a bride, Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), and thus the story begins. In the middle, Bick’s sister is killed by same stallion, who then leaves an inholding in the Reata Ranch to Jett (James Dean) who then turns into an oil man, and builds his own fortune. In the process, he proposes marriage to one of the daughters of Bick and Leslie.

What cannot be seen in the movie, at the time portrayed, is how after Jett persuades Bick to drill for oil, they all pack up and move to Kennebunkport, Maine, and merge into the East Coast elites, who along with families like the Rockefeller’s and the Roosevelts (even another 5 generations back) form the Neo-con side of the Republican party.

One of the big questions for me is how long does it take for a group of elites to become totally insulated (if not isolated) from the concerns of ordinary people. James Kunstler writes in his books about the modulating effects of dealing with the problems of household live-in help that helped, historically, bridge that empathy gap. But as generations wind on, locating your servants off-site and out of mind doesn’t provide the grounding validity that others might not quite see the world the way you do. And if you throw jet travel into the mix, one can draw a pretty clear line between the Reata Ranch and the WEF. One thing that is almost never discussed is how, after a certain evolution of both energy business and technical acumen, you almost have to be born into it (like farming) to stand a chance in the modern world. No Horatio Alger story is going to emerge and end up running a series of large oil platforms drilling for oil in the North Sea, or off the coast of Louisiana. We’re not talking Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage inventing the Apple Computer. So I’m totally spitballing five generations to create an insurmountable empathy gap between the Elites and the Poors. Condos at Big Sky, and membership in the Yellowstone Club will do that to you.

But there WILL be some of those truly ground-level innovations that will remain possible to create a Counter-elite caste. And that is where the Zuckerbergs, Bezos and Andreesens of the world come in. Everyone knows the story of Facebook, and more than a few know the story of Netscape. Thus a counter-elite is born, that has little connection to the endless wars of the East Coast elites. There is some fallacious thinking in that somehow this generation of counter-elites is more grounded to reality than the literal seven generations that left the high plains of Texas behind. Helicopters and meetings with Presidents, as well as security details will do that to you.

And wild cards pop up. Elon Musk is First Generation-and-a-Half when it comes to wealth. And he wants to go to Mars. The various blended elites (like Bill Gates – people forget that Bill’s dad was a member of the elite caste before Microsoft) or wishy-washy counter-elites (Mark Zuckerberg) may waffle around on Communitarian causes. But every now and then, someone shows up that isn’t interested in any of that. And is willing to push all his chips into the middle of the table. Every round. When it comes to SpaceX, it’s let-it-ride. Indeed.

What does it mean for the majority of us that are non-elite? Or actually poor? It seems like the current counter-elites understand the death of others’, as well as their own children. As opposed to the old oil/energy elites. But Peter Turchin has done some number counting (as well as Michael Lind) and show that no one really cares about the poor. If they benefit from large macro-social technology advances or trends, it’s only going to be incidental. Elon’s the closest to a large scale system architect. But the old institutions, which includes academia in whole cloth, can’t process any new thinking or motivation. Elon MUST be all about money (and it is true that rockets do cost money) but they can’t comprehend anything higher than the sky above their heads.

And so our current war between Elites and Counter-Elites is born. For sure, this piece is incomplete, and demands more thinking. But the current cycle started on the High Plains of Texas, with the elimination of the Comanche Indians, and follows through to the present day. As William Faulkner said, “the past isn’t even past.” And Giant is just the meditative piece for a summer night, to frame those thoughts.