Ok

En poursuivant votre navigation sur ce site, vous acceptez l'utilisation de cookies. Ces derniers assurent le bon fonctionnement de nos services. En savoir plus.

dimanche, 05 novembre 2017

Blade Runner 2049: The Miracle of Love

bladerunner.jpg

Blade Runner 2049:
The Miracle of Love

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

The iron cage of abstract materiality threatens to suffocate Western man. In a time when his systems of government threaten to devour him; when his pride is condemned as hate; his women are cold, mocking, and infertile; and the virility of idealism is desecrated everywhere, a miracle has happened: out of the pit of Hollywood itself a film has erupted bearing witness to the mysterious and inexhaustible fertility of love.

Blade Runner: 2049 takes the symbols and ideal types of contemporary life and invests them with mythological significance, pointing a way forward out of the labyrinth of spiritual entropy that threatens to snuff out the last glimmer of our will to idealize.

In the world of 2049, a bio-engineered humanoid named “K” is manufactured and brought into a world alien to him, to be a drone for a butch queen bee, to be a scapegoat for the merely human around him as he does the work they are not capable of. He has no concept of the possibility of disobeying commands, although an early figure in the film hints that “seeing a miracle” could change that.

K is strictly controlled psychologically by the bureaucracy of his job, because his genetically modified capacities make him explosively dangerous. This official emasculation is reinforced by his interactions with female authority figures. They simultaneously humiliate him and browbeat him as they also vaguely attempt to seduce him. They refer to him as a “good boy” because he does what he is told.

blade-runner-main.jpg

The two powers we see in this world are distant and technical. A gigantic police force seems more interested in controlling and destroying people like K than creating order in the city. A titanic transhumanist genius named Wallace looms in the background, a vaguely satanic figure, blind without the aid of robotic eyes. Everything about him is inverted and mocking. He summons fallen “angels” from the ceiling of his temple-like headquarters, then condemns them for their barrenness by goring them where their fertile womb should be. He feeds the cultureless masses with food processed from grubs. He’s developed the digital escape of K’s AI holographic girlfriend, cynically naming her Joi.

In another satanic mockery, Wallace names his chief agent and assassin, his “angel” of death, “Luv.” She is everything we have come to loathe in a certain contemporary woman. She is elegant, career-focused, cunning, duplicitous, and ruthless. She hides cold violence behind a thin veneer of simulated female charm.  Her dissimulation even extends to the capacity to lie to and disobey her creator. Why, then, doesn’t she leave Wallace? Behind her polished frame, she is afraid. We know this because whenever her commands contradict her feminine nature, she sheds a tear. This makes her all the more ruthless as she despises those who aren’t enslaved as she is. She reenacts Wallace’s ritual of death on K’s boss, enraged by her devotion to K. She is an abomination of femininity, infertile, spared from Wallace’s ritual of abortion only by her deadly devotion to her master.

Set against this world which attempts to justify itself in the gigantic and the technical, we find the oddly charming simulated golden-age relationship between K and his digital girlfriend, Joi. We begin to get the sense that this ritual of love by Joi, who is programmed to please, has become something apart from mere programming. In a revelatory scene that is the key to the whole film, K and Joi are looking at DNA records. Their conversation explores how DNA and binary programming are both codes, just of a different type. K remarks that binary is even more elegant than DNA’s four possible characters, just as Joi’s disembodied devotion is more perfect than any merely biological woman’s. This suggests that it is not DNA’s organization of matter that makes us human, but the selfless devotion of love that invests our frames with spiritual significance.

This devotion is mutually reinforcing. K buys a portable projector unit for Joi so she can experience the world and accompany him everywhere. In turn, she grants him the name, “Joe,” planting the seed in him that could be more than just an obedient drone, a free moral agent. Although we are given reason to doubt the genuineness of Joi’s capacity for authentic love in a later scene which reveals that her model is programmed to call every man it meets “Joe,” this ambiguity only heightens the miracle of her last act. As Wallace’s angel of death threatens Joi out of visible spite for her devotion, instead of protesting or trying to save herself, Joi proclaims her love for K.

Having “seen a miracle,” K is freed from his programming and can become “more human than human” by devoting himself to an ideal in this fallen world, even lying and killing if necessary.

bladerunnertir.jpg

The selfless ideal of love symbolically justifies and fertilizes mere matter in a series of scenes. In the first, a prostitute merges with JOI to enable K to make physical love to her. This consummation of love is not without risk, as it ensnares us irrevocably into the materiality of women. But it is a risk we have to take in order to actualize love in our world. The film symbolizes this danger through K stumbling upon an oasis of life in the desert, a beehive, underneath twin statues of Joi, naked and sexually enticing. He braves the bees’ nest that is woman, and sticks his hand into the hive. After this scene, and after Joi’s final act of perfect love, K sees the prostitute again and she seems to have become possessed by the spirit of Joi, her face alive with love for the first time. The process of love investing the material world is realized.

It is this figure of Joi which gives the film its shockingly numinous quality, and it is no surprise that it is she been the focus of condemnation by our own angels of death. As a digital holograph, she somehow manages to be both the apotheosis of the pathetic depths we have sunk to in our thirst for the feminine, while at the same time an otherworldly revelation of the inexhaustible fertility of pure feminine love.

It is impossible to imagine a film more closely mirroring the spiritual state of current western man. Whether intentionally or as a testament to the synchronistic power of meme magic, its characters and their actions pulse with archetypal significance for us. We too are spiritual orphans corralled and degraded by gigantic bureaucracies, ugly crowds, barren women, and satanic mockeries of our most sacred inheritances at every turn.  But what this film reveals, reverently and powerfully, is that we are not irrevocably doomed by the inevitable march of cold matter to heat death. Love justifies this world, and faith in love, however mocked by our titanic overlords and their harpy slaves, prefigures the sudden irruption of the miraculous into this world of matter in the most surprising and mysterious ways.

03:34 Publié dans Cinéma, Film | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : blade runner 2049, cinéma, film | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

Public Loathing as Deification

femeneuropecrgam.jpg

Public Loathing as Deification

by Dmitry Orlov

Ex: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com

Before going on with discussing the many ways in which linguistic limitations, deficits and defects imperil our ability to think and to communicate our thoughts and cause us to obscure what is tangibly, experientially real behind a veil of artifice and nonsense, I want to focus on a certain phenomenon that has become particularly widespread lately and has been causing many of us to inadvertently become members of political hate cults.

Cults are often nasty things that subordinate the free will of their neighbors to all sorts of preposterous and outrageous notions. They are the breeding grounds of political and religious extremism and intolerance. They splinter societies and turn relatives, friends and neighbors against each other. Governments periodically find it necessary to suppress them, even resorting to violence—all the way to actually destroying them with fire, as happened with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas on 19 of April 1993. Cults that combine politics with religion, such as the Wahhabi state cult of Saudi Arabia that has been breeding extremism all over the world, are particularly nasty.

But the type of cult I want to discuss is quite different from these.

In fact, it is not even commonly perceived as a type of cult. Its main focus is the construction of Cathedrals of Hate centered on political figureheads. By means of public hate, these figureheads are transformed into deities—demons, to be exact.

Hate is one specific type of emotion; love is another. But all strong emotions are of a kind. Essentially, they are chemical imbalances within the brain that cause us to lose self-control and to act irrationally. Because they are chemically rather than electrically based, they are never fleeting, like thoughts can be, but arise over time and take time to dissipate. And they are all of a kind: we could be variously infatuated or enraged, and love can turn to hate rather suddenly, laying bare the chemical similarity between these two opposite emotions. Individually, privately experienced emotions are inevitable, spontaneous expressions of our animal natures, and the best we can do is sublimate them through art or, failing that, try to repress them. But public emotions, such as rage expressed by large groups, are far from inevitable. They are also far from spontaneous.

femen-manifestent-dans-le-bureau-de-vote-de-Donald-Trump.jpg

If we look around, we can see Cathedrals of Hate being erected all around us by those who feel that they have something to gain politically from doing so. Construction at the building sites of the Putin Hate Cult (PHC) and the Trump Hate Cult (THC) has been particularly active of late, resulting in structures so out of proportion that they seem poised to topple under their own weight and crush their followers. Historical Hate Cults, such as the Hitler Hate Cult (HHC) and the Stalin Hate Cult (SHC) are carefully maintaining their respective Cathedrals of Hate and offering their services to the others by, for instance, allowing PHC’s or THC’s Hate Idol to temporarily don the mantle and wield the scepter of HHC’s or SHC’s Hate Idol. Smaller Hate Cults are also getting quite a lot of attention, such as those of Barak Obama (OHC), Hillary Clinton (CHC), Bashar Assad of Syria (AHC), Kim Jong Un of North Korea (UHC) and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela (MHC).

Please forgive me for pointing out something glaringly obvious. None of the individuals mentioned in the preceding paragraph, whether dead or alive, is, has ever been or will ever be your girlfriend or your boyfriend. No matter what you do or don’t do, you are not going to either bed or get raped by any of them. The most you’ll ever manage, with one or two of them, is to shake his hand under the watchful eye of his bodyguards, or maybe ask him a polite question at a press conference, and even that would only be possible if you are one of the carefully screened few who are allowed near him. And whatever it is that happens to you, none of them will ever be held personally responsible because of a certain legal principle called raîson d’État that grants them dispensation from human moral norms.

But what you can do is jump up and down and shout obscenities about them with likeminded others, or stand around with signs declaring them to be criminals (or whatever else), or accessorize yourself with hate paraphernalia. Walking around St. Petersburg recently, I saw a fat slob digging around in garbage bins near Sennaya Square while sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with “ПУТИН Х**ЛО”; let a Russian friend translate that for you if you are curious. If you don’t wish to be a socially active worshiper at a Cathedral of Hate, you can stay home and seethe with hatred there, annoying your friends and relatives while marinating your brain in the vitriol of strong political sentiment. You’d think that I’ve seen just about everything by now, but even I have been amazed recently by some perfectly intelligent and otherwise clear-thinking people expressing strong emotions about political figureheads that are, by their very nature, unworthy of any emotions whatsoever—good or bad.

Let me explain why it is that political figureheads are by their nature unworthy of any emotions whatsoever.

We live in a world dominated by machines. Agricultural machines produce our food; industrial machines produce out shelter, clothing and tools; various other types of plant and equipment keep us warm or cool, watered and safe and allow us to move about the landscape (generally in triangular patterns between home, work and shopping). And keeping all of this machinery functioning are social machines. These are unlike all the other machines, which consist mostly of hardware or software, because the moving parts of social machines are composed of meatware—human meatware, to be exact. Human meatware is composed of humans that act like robots.

orlovtechn.jpg

What is a social machine? Here is how I defined it in my book Shrinking the Technosphere:

“A social machine is a form of organization that subordinates the will of the participants to an explicit, written set of rules, that is controlled based on objective, measurable criteria, and that excludes, to the largest extent possible, individual judgment, intuition and independent, spontaneous action. In the process, it becomes blind to all the things that cannot be measured, such as meaning, beauty, happiness, justice and compassion.” [p. 189]

Lest you think that social machines are some sort of pathological aberration, perish the thought! They are perfectly normal for all human societies beyond a certain scale:

“The progression from a humanistic organization that functions on the basis of common understanding, spontaneous cooperation, shared values and individual judgment and initiative to a social machine in which people behave like robots, is automatic: it is simply a question of scale.” [p. 190]

Essentially, humanistic organizations don’t scale. Thus, it is pointless to either like or dislike social machines; their existence is simply a fact that you have to accept and learn to cope with as best you can. You can perhaps opt out of them, based on your own individual likes and dislikes.

For instance, if you dislike industrial agriculture with its chemically poisoned fields, rows upon rows of plastic greenhouses, inhumane factory farms and all the rest, then you can take up homesteading. Then, instead of spending your days sitting in an air-conditioned office looking at a screen you would spend them walking slowly while looking at the rear end of a draft horse, or working a pitchfork while your children grope around in the dirt looking for potatoes to throw in a bucket (as we were doing a couple of weeks ago). But no matter what you do, there will still be social machines, and you will still have to deal with them.

Next, we have to accept that social machines are to a large extent staffed and almost exclusively run by psychopaths:

“…What to a healthy society looks like a terrible character flaw appears perfectly normal, even laudable, in the context of a social machine. Lack of empathy is seen as cool, professional detachment; a psychopath would never let emotion cloud her judgment. Sadistic tendencies (psychopaths hurt people in order to make themselves feel something) are perceived as signs of an incorruptible nature: the rules are the rules! … Because of this, social machines act as psychopath incubators. Psychopaths are not the healthiest of specimens, but because of their greater inclusive fitness within social machines, psychopaths tend to persist and thrive within them while non-psychopaths do not.” [p. 194]

The fact that within social machines psychopaths rise to the top is easy to grasp:

“If having some psychopathic tendencies is helpful for fitting in within a social machine, having more psychopathic tendencies is even more helpful. Consequently, within social machines, pure psychopaths rise through the ranks and concentrate at the top. It should be entirely unsurprising, then, that when we look at the upper echelons of business and government—the C-suite, the boards of directors, the executive branches, the legislatures and the courts—we find that they are pretty much stocked with total psychopaths.” [p. 195]

femput709.jpg

Finally, let’s draw some conclusions, which should by now be perfectly obvious. All of the Hate Cults mentioned above are focused on national leaders. Nation-states are social machines par excellence. Social machines are run by psychopaths. Whatever it is they do, you can be absolutely sure that it's nothing personal, entirely beyond your control, and nothing to get worked up about. My sincere and earnest hope is that once you digest and accept these facts, becoming emotional about some psychopathic figurehead or other will start to look silly to you, the spell will be broken, the political vitriol in your brain will eventually get metabolized to something less toxic (urine, probably) and you will stop wasting your energies and feel better. As far as all of the Cathedrals of Hate—please don’t go near any of them. Cults are bad; political hate cults doubly so.

02:57 Publié dans Actualité | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : dmitry orlov, actualité, haine, politique de la haine | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

Gert Polli: les services secrets américains dominent l’Europe

Polli_byIdealismPrevails_CC_BY_SA_4.0-1024x683.jpg

Gert Polli: les services secrets américains dominent l’Europe

par Rainer Schopf

Ex: http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/fr

gertpollibuchFRF.jpgLe livre de Gert Polli,1 ancien chef des services de renseignements autrichiens, a été déjà brièvement présenté dans «Horizons et débats» no 22/23 du 18 septembre 2017. Ici suit une évaluation de quelques aspects. Dans sa préface, Polli constate que l’UE se trouve dans une spirale descendante, qu’elle n’arrive plus à en sortir et qu’elle y est de sa propre faute. L’UE tient à l’alliance transatlantique sans aucun esprit critique et à tout prix. La National Security Agency (NSA) est le seul profiteur de cette évolution, ce que l’élite européenne ne veut jusqu’à présent pas admettre. En outre, la reprise des buts de politique étrangère des Etats-Unis, sans aucune réflexion critique, rapproche  l’UE dangereusement d’une confrontation politique et économique avec la Russie. Au niveau géopolitique, l’UE se laisse pousser dans une impasse de politique étrangère et économique, dans laquelle les Etats-Unis continuent à diaboliser la Russie. Comme exemple le plus frappant, Gert Polli désigne l’alignement factuel et le contrôle des services secrets européens sous la dominance des services américains. Sous le couvert de la lutte américaine contre le terrorisme, l’UE perd en dynamique et rejette de plus en plus ses propres valeurs: «L’Union européenne se trouve dans sa plus grande crise depuis son existence. Elle risque de se désintégrer». (p. 14)

Dans sa préface, Gert Polli résume parfaitement ce qu’il explique et justifie en détail et de manière compréhensible sur les pages suivantes. Certes Polli parle avant tout du rôle de l’UE, mais il analyse également les raisons pour lesquelles l’Allemagne a été prise entre les fronts. Cet ouvrage bien lisible et compréhensible est structuré en 17 chapitres et possède un appendice détaillé.
Par la suite, nous allons nous concentrer sur deux thèmes importants:
•    l’attaque des services secrets américains contre l’économie allemande et
•    la défaillance des services secrets allemands dans la défense.

L’espionnage industriel

Un certain nombre des toutes grandes entreprises allemandes, telles Siemens, VW, Deutsche Bank, ont été massivement affectées par des plaintes pénales de tribunaux américains au cours des dernières années. Par hasard? Polli n’est pas de cet avis. Pour lui, l’Allemagne est le pays cible préféré pour l’espionnage économique américain, parce que c’est la plus grande économie nationale de l’UE. Comme site de haute technologie, l’Allemagne dépose régulièrement le plus grand nombre de brevets – en comparaison avec les autres pays européens – auprès de l’Office européen des brevets (OEB). Suite au scandale de la NSA, il a été révélé que l’industrie allemande était et demeure sous un espionnage économique massif. La chancelière Merkel a réagi aux révélations de Snowden par la phrase connue «Organiser des écoutes téléphoniques entre amis n’est vraiment pas bien». En revanche, l’Union fédérale de l’industrie allemande (BDI) partage l’inquiétude d’être «exposé à de l’espionnage économique et industriel ciblé». (p. 58) Jusqu’à présent, toutes les enquêtes allemandes sur l’affaire de la NSA n’ont abouti à rien, parce qu’on nie l’existence de ce que l’on ne veut pas voir.


Pourquoi ces attaques américaines ont-elles été possibles? Le schéma est relativement simple. Les services secrets américains surveillent les activités internationales des entreprises allemandes dans le monde entier. Ils opèrent avec les avantages et les pots-de-vin usuels. Cela fut le cas chez Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed et d’autres, sans quoi on ne peut plus guère réaliser de gros contrats. On peut bien sûr regretter cette corruption, mais personne ne la nie, pas non plus aux Etats-Unis. On concède ouvertement que seul à l’aide de paiements illégaux, des contrats à hauteur de plusieurs dizaines de millions peuvent être conclus. C’est à ce moment là que les services secrets américains entrent dans le jeu. Par des écoutes de téléphone et des interceptions de courriels, ils démasquent exclusivement les fautes des entreprises allemandes. Leurs découvertes sont transmises aux tribunaux américains, qui inculpent ces entreprises et les condamnent à des paiements d’amendes très élevées. Pour les mêmes crimes, les entreprises américaines restent impunies, parce que les services secrets allemands n’ont simplement pas les moyens réciproques, «pour prouver que les entreprises américaines utilisent les mêmes pratiques commerciales. C’est difficile à comprendre, pourquoi les services de renseignements allemands ne sont pas plus vigilants envers ce phénomène de l’espionnage économique d’une telle envergure.» (p. 69) Cependant, les dommages pour l’économie allemande sont beaucoup plus grands que les seules pénalités financières draconiennes. La totalité de la direction supérieure a été condamnée à de hautes peines de prison, pas seulement le département de la vente. Une telle hémorragie saigne les entreprises et cela prend souvent jusqu’à dix ans pour former et intégrer une nouvelle génération de dirigeants.

Services secrets

Pendant la guerre froide, l’Allemagne est devenue un Etat au front et un des plus importants sites pour les services secrets américains en Europe et elle l’est restée jusqu’aujourd’hui. Dans les premières années de l’après-guerre, les forces alliées sous le commandement des Etats-Unis avaient déjà édifié un réseau de surveillance du trafic postal et des communications téléphoniques dans toute l’Allemagne. Elles ont aussi parrainé la mise en place des autorités sécuritaires. Celles-ci poursuivaient les intérêts américains, non pas les intérêts allemands. Les Etats-Unis exigèrent la séparation des services secrets et des autorités policières. Elles voulaient empêcher la création d’une administration allemande trop efficace, contrôlée de manière centralisée. Cela fut déjà réglé en 1949. Actuellement encore, la sécurité allemande souffre de ces décisions structurelles:
•    Les services secrets n’ont aucune compétence policière,
•    la police n’a pas le droit de faire des recherches dans le domaine du renseignement,
•    personne n’a le droit de travailler en même temps dans les services secrets et dans la police.


Une telle séparation n’existe dans aucun autre pays au monde. C’est fatal. Pour Gert Polli, ce «défaut de naissance» est la cause de nombreuses pannes survenues en Allemagne, soit avec les groupes extrémistes RAF et NSU ou dans la lutte contre le terrorisme. Dans le domaine de la protection de l’Etat, la police n’a pas le droit de faire des investigations et les services secrets n’ont pas le droit de faire des arrestations. En outre, la police n’est pas organisée à l’échelle fédérale, mais selon la structure fédéraliste des länder. Cela a déjà produit de nombreuses pannes dans la transmission et la coordination des données. Il est trop tôt pour dire si la police fédérale nouvellement créée, issue du corps des gardes-frontière fédéraux, représente une symbiose entre les services secrets et la police.

Faire la lumière dans l’obscurité des camouflages

L’Allemagne se trouve entre les fronts, écrit Polli. Il n’est guère prévisible pour les citoyens, il est impossible de reconnaître de quelle manière les services secrets sont devenus le fer de lance des changements au niveau global. L’année 2017 est une année fatidique concernant la politique de sécurité. Les drones américains utilisés dans des guerres illicites en Afghanistan, en Irak, en Syrie etc. sont pilotés depuis la base de Ramstein. La surveillance incontrôlée des téléphones et d’Internet s’effectue en Allemagne depuis Bad Aibling. Les troupes américaines sont transportées dans les régions en guerre et vers la frontière russe depuis l’aéroport de Leipzig. «L’Allemagne se prépare à une période de troubles sociaux, un scénario possible pour le gouvernement.» (p. 259) Avec son impressionnant livre, Gert Polli fait de la lumière dans l’obscurité des camouflages.
C’est à nous, les citoyens, de ne pas nous faire manipuler pour ensuite se combattre au sein de la population. Ce qui est urgent c’est d’entrer dans un dialogue ouvert pour résoudre les problèmes auxquels nous sommes confrontés pacifiquement et d’un commun accord.    •

(Traduction Horizons et débats)

1    Polli, Gert R. Deutschland zwischen den Fronten: Wie Europa zum Spielball von Politik und Geheimdiensten wird, Munich 2017 [L’Allemagne entre les frontières: Comment l’Europe devient le jouet de la politique et des services secrets].

airbus-siemens-780x439.jpg

Airbus et Siemens

rs. Le récent scandale Airbus n’est pas encore mentionné dans le livre de Gert Polli. Si les tribunaux européens déclarent le groupe aéronautique européen coupable dans l’actuelle affaire de pots-de-vin, les dégâts financiers seront immenses. Entretemps, des indices précis existent selon lesquels la CIA aurait déjà informé les tribunaux américains et qu’une mise en accusation est en préparation. Si cela se passe ainsi, il est fort probable que Boeing pourra tirer profit de nombreux contrats lucratifs d’Airbus, ce dernier risquant de perdre sa position dominante sur le marché international.
Siemens a annoncé vouloir éliminer des milliers d´emplois dans le secteur des turbines et fermer plusieurs sites allemands. Il est prévu de les délocaliser en partie dans les usines américaines d’Orlando et de Charlotte en raison de frais moins élevés qu’en Allemagne et d’une inutilité à débourser les entraves tarifaires américaines. Apparemment, l´ancien géant allemand Siemens se plie sous la pression américaine.

L´Autriche et la Suisse

rs. Attardons-nous un instant sur la neutralité garantie par la Constitution de l´Autriche et de la Suisse. Comme l´Allemagne, ces deux pays font depuis longtemps partie de l´infrastructure de surveillance américaine en Europe. Mais quel est le rôle exact des stations d’écoute en Autriche et en Suisse? Jusqu´à présent, les activités d’espionnage des services secrets américains dans ces pays neutres n´a guère provoqué de discussions publiques. En Autriche, la National Security Agency (NSA) américaine a instauré un centre de renseignement spatial dans le Burgenland très proche de Bratislava, nommé «Königswarte». En Suisse, il y a une station similaire sur le haut-plateau valaisan de Loèche. Fondée en 2012 par la Signalhorn SA, elle est gérée par Swisscom et a déjà plusieurs fois changé de nom. Selon Polli, l’existence de deux différentes stations est peu connue. La plus petite est gérée par les Suisses eux-mêmes de manière tout à fait légale et une station beaucoup plus grande est gérée par la NSA au service des Américains.