"Passion" dialog:

---

me:
>
> another afterthought: you say
>
> > we get to stop paying attention to anything else that's coming out of
>> his mouth.
>
> my point is - you can pay no attention, but he's *dangerous* - with all
> this money and Catholic fundamentalist message ... needs to be
> isolated. Contagious ...

joe:

2 points;

A) You say this is "contagious", yet you agree that this is only a symptom - to extend the pathological metaphor - of a social malaise that has been extant at least as far back as Titanic (I think farther back -
since Star Wars, which is pretty much the same kind of mythological pornography. Ditto Lord of the Rings) . This is at least a bit schizophrenic, to my mind.

B)Granting that you correctly identify the danger, what is the proper response to it? One of the things that totalitarian regimes have taught us is that ideologies are not amenable to extripation by mechanistic and rational technologies. Having a debate with or about this stuff won't help any because it's not a rational ideology. Neither will mechanistic forms of social control like isolation or negative reinforcement via labelling as "hate speech", because it's just as likely to entrench itself against the Satanic Unbeliever Forces marshalled against it.

The only proper response, to my mind, is mockery, satire, and sarcasm. This is why these bastards find irony so dangerous - it actually forces people to think, in order to separate what is "serious" from what is "ironic". Satire is a liminal form of engagement which at the same time expresses approval for new emanations of an epiphenomenon, i.e. more grist for the mill, and disapproval, i.e. laughter and mockery. You once quite correctly remarked that russian serf "styeb" was/is congruent with american negro spiritual and blues music. This is because it allows the slave to at least temporarily redress the power differential with the master.

Briefly, my point is this; all such phenomena are at least partially democratic; that is to say, gibson is able to make this movie because some people will take his money and work for him and others will sell
tickets to their friends in church. This is an example of democracy, a twisted example, but an example nonetheless. So was the election of Hitler and the Iranian revolution. The two solutions you have offered
thus far seem to me not to take this fact into account.

  ¶ 10:20 PM