Author: Syd Fablo

Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim (2013)

Warner Bros.

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Main Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Idris Elba, Charlie Day

First, a brief summary of the plot of Pacific Rim.  Aliens have genetically engineered kaiju (Godzilla-like monsters) that they send to Earth through an intergalactic portal (the “Breach”) that opens at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, in order to destroy human civilization and eventually conquer the planet.  Humanoid robots called jaegers are built to fight the kaiju.  The kaiju become larger and appear more frequently over time.  Eventually, humans realize the aliens’ plans and figure out a way to detonate a nuclear bomb in the portal in order to collapse it, saving humans from the aliens.  Most of the film revolves around amazing special effects used to create action-packed fight scenes between robots and monsters.  But what is most interesting — to me at least — is the backdrop against which the robots and monsters fights take place.

Impotence of government – The film’s plot is heavily dependent on a view of the impotence of government.  The first kaiju attack is described (but barely shown on screen) as having taken conventional military forces six days to win, leaving extensive devastation.  The idea that the government (and its military) is unable to act to stop the kaiju is a theme carried throughout the film.  The jaegers are created as an official (multi-)government program, but after one jaeger is severely damaged in a battle with a kaiju, world governments disband the program and instead build protective walls (the jaeger program is then carried on by some sort of independent [private] organization whose funding and organizational structure is never explained).  The walls turn out to be easily breached.  In response, world governments take no action whatsoever.  In other words, governments throw up their hands and apparently decide that the kaiju should win!

Individualism – Most of the film dwells on individual action, and valorizes the motif of “great individuals”.  The jaeger pilots are all hot-shot “cowboys”, just like, say, Tom Cruise‘s “Maverick” pilot character in the film Top Gun (1986).  As governmental impotence provides no response to the kaiju threat, the fate of humanity is left in the hands of these “cowboys”.  Although there are many individuals that take part in the jaeger program, the film presents them less as a team than as an ad hoc assemblage of individuals.  This stands in marked contrast to Shin Godzilla (2016), which reacts to a similar program of governmental impotence in the face of a monster attack with an explicitly team-based response.  And, of course, the film pays almost no attention to collateral damage to civilians.  In a way, all this reflects filmmaker David Lynch‘s comments about how President Donald Trump — even if Trump fails to do a good job himself — creates an aura of disruptive greatness that reveals the ineffectual nature of opposition politicians who can’t get anything done.

Destructive industrial growth – The film never entertains any notion of peaceful negotiations with the aliens sending the kaiju through the Breach, some kind of barricade right at the outlet of the Breach, or even permanent depopulation/dispersion of large urban coastal cities.  Humanity focuses instead on building giant robots — their humanoid configuration serving no clear purpose — and a coastal wall — which is so obviously inadequate to the task and so burdensome to normal human activities.  There is a casual acceptance of industrial growth, and not any palpable concern about its consequences or any alternatives.

The film as a whole is strangely entertaining.  That is partly due to the special effects and extensive use of action scenes, but also due to the preposterously comical interactions between the characters, not a single one of which is realistic.

Erwin Chemerinsky – Arbitration Agreements Ruling Is a Significant Loss for Workers

Link to an article by Erwin Chemerinsky:

“Arbitration Agreements Ruling Is a Significant Loss for Workers”

 

Chemerinsky’s article is well-reasoned, though it should be emphasized that all judges on the U.S. supreme court are pro-capitalist and pro-business, differing only in degree about how many restrictions can be imposed on business.

 

Bonus links: “Stop Calling It an Arbitration Agreement—Employers Are Forcing Workers to Give Up Their Rights” and “Grand Theft Paycheck: The Large Corporations Shortchanging Their Workers’ Wages” and …And the Poor Get Prison

Tom Secker & Matthew Alford – Documents Expose How Hollywood Promotes War on Behalf of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA

Link to an article by Tom Secker & Matthew Alford:

“Documents Expose How Hollywood Promotes War on Behalf of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA”

Bonus links: Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies and National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood and “National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood—How the US Military and CIA Go About Their Propaganda Operations” and Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defense and Subversion and Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film and “Modern Art Was CIA ‘Weapon'” and “Washington DC’s Role Behind the Scenes in Hollywood Goes Deeper Than You Think” and “Hollywood’s Cave to China on Censorship” and “Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America” and “Theaters of War: Hollywood in Bed with the Pentagon and the CIA”

Élisabeth Roudinesco Interviewed on the 30th Anniversary of Jacques Lacan’s Death

“the idea that the unconscious expresses itself, that it is language, is a very powerful and politically subversive notion. This is one of the fundamental reasons for the hatred that Freud, Lacan and psychoanalysis in general constantly provoke. The idea that the subject is traversed by her or his unconscious and that language is of capital significance is opposed to all those theories that reduce man to his behaviour, to the sum of his bodily attitudes. This is a truly political debate. If we dwell on behaviouralism, then we abolish the freedom of the subject. Behaviouralism knows only machine-men. Conversely, Freud initiated a theory of freedom determined by the unconscious. It is, moreover, this disposition that allows for his rapprochement with Marx. Man is free to make his own history, but there are psychic and social determinations that act unbeknownst to him. This idea is still today a subversive one.”

Élisabeth Roudinesco, “Élisabeth Roudinesco Interviewed on the 30th Anniversary of Jacques Lacan’s Death”

Bonus links: “‘There Can Be No Crisis of Psychoanalysis’ Jacques Lacan Interviewed [By Emilio Granzotto] in 1974” and Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes and “Therapy Wars: The Revenge of Freud” and Enjoying What We Don’t Have: the Political Project of Psychoanalysis and “Freud and the Political”

The Idiot Pool

I have a theory I call the “Idiot Pool” theory that describes how sincere morons are used to promote insidious agendas.  I suppose this is somewhat synonymous with the term “useful idiots”, but I see this as really about its specific manifestation in the neoliberal era whereas the term “useful idiots” was a McCarthy-era anticommunist propaganda tool.

There are four basic components to the “Idiot Pool” theory:

  1. Social Darwinism – In the main, the idiot pool requires, well, a pool.  There must initially be a mass of varied and differentiated theories out there, and proponents of those theories available to expound them.  A social darwinist “winner-take-all”, market-based logic is then applicable, in the sense that a hierarchy is presumed in the face of this mass of available theories in order to foster the assumption that the theories gaining the most exposure must be “better”, “more accurate”, etc.
  2. Earnest Belief – The proponents of key theories (i.e., the ones selected, or at least capable of selection) must sincerely believe in their theories.  Ideally, the proponent of a given theory should have derived the theory herself or himself, independently.  The theory cannot have the appearance of being coerced, dictated by outside forces or actors, or, importantly, being an attempt to pander to the powerful.  Key theories must appear to be organically derived in a vacuum, by beautiful souls with good intentions.
  3. Idiocy – The theory/belief must be stupid, that is, flawed and incorrect in some significant way.  Principally, this means it must have a blind spot that removes powerful forces (including the curators, as identified below) from view or at least from critical scrutiny, and depoliticizes the interests of the powerful (curators).  Idiocy is the purpose behind this endeavor, because, when combined with earnest belief of the proponent of a theory, the proponent is believably unaware of the flaws and blind spots in her or his theory.
  4. Curation (or Selection) – There must be an entity other than the proponent of a theory to select key theories for mass distribution.  This entity basically holds the keys to mass media access.  By being a separate entity from the proponent of a theory, there arises plausible deniability as to the idiocy of the theories being promoted.  The curating entity may not be visible, and ideally is made invisible through the invocation of a meritocratic view of social darwinism.  But the curator may in many situations be prominently visible, and in such cases is usually  aware, or at least becomes aware, of the idiocy of the theory selected and promoted — this often manifests as the overt promotion of a theory with a whiff of theoretical plausibility that proves empirically false, or the self-serving promotion of idealistic possibilities in the face of a markedly different material reality.

 

I devised this little theory to try to explain what I read in Astra Taylor‘s book The People’s Platform, in which she described the (right-wing libertarian) actions of Silicon Valley software companies and their owners/executives, who loudly proclaim public benefits that never materialize in the face of rampant exploitation for their own personal/corporate enrichment that they conveniently never mention or own up to.  To quote Richard Lewontin, from Biology as Ideology, “One must distinguish between plausible stories, things that might be true, and true stories, things that actually have happened.” Or look to Lucius Cassius’ latin maxim, memorialized by Cicero, “Cui bono?” [to whose benefit?].  I see this theory manifesting itself most prominently in the neoliberal era, and as something more subtle and prone to the “proxy” tactics of such a regime — just as, say, corporations “outsource” tasks to “contractors” in order to sever the links of responsibility and liability for their objectives, while still reaping the benefits.  In this context, it just won’t do to rely only on shills.  A great example of the cynicism of shills can be found in the Monty Python comedy troupe’s routine “String,” in which a character pitches a series of contradictory marketing campaigns to try to sell a worthless inventory of short bits of string, with hypocritical enthusiasm.  Though shills still play a role too, and, indeed, the use of shills simultaneously with an “idiot pool” has the benefit of drawing attention — and criticism — away from the idiot pool.  The practice of “creating a choir” is essentially about making shills look like an idiot pool, and is a borderline case.  As an example of idiot pool theory in real-world use, I would point to someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jordan Peterson, Temple Grandin, or Alan Greenspan.  See also a discussion of “courting the compatible left”, The State in Capitalist Society (“It is in the formulation of a radicalism without teeth and in the articulation of a critique without dangerous consequences, as well as in terms of straightforward apologetics, that many intellectuals have played an exceedingly ‘functional’ role. And the fact that many of them have played that role with the utmost sincerity and without being conscious of its apologetic import has in no way detracted from its usefulness.”) (a quote from a misguided anti-Leninist), the Chomsky-Marr interview (“I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”) (quote from a misguided anarchist), “university discourse” as explained in The Lacanian Subject (“Working in the service of the master signifier, more or less any kind of argument will do, as long as it takes on the guide of reason and rationality.”), “Where Is the Rift? Marx, Lacan, Capitalism, and Ecology” (“We should draw a distinction between two levels of what makes science problematic. First, there is, at a general level, the fact that science ‘has no memory,’ which is a part of the strength, constitutive of science. Second, there is the specific conjunction of science and capitalism, where ‘having no memory’ relates to the particular blindness to its own social mediation.”), and interpassivity (explained as “Interpassivity is delegated ‘passivity’ – in the sense of delegated pleasure, or delegated consumption. Interpassive people are those who want to delegate their pleasures or their consumptions. And interpassive media are all the agents—machines, people, animals etc.—to whom interpassive people can delegate their pleasures. If, for example, you have a dog that eats your cake in your place, the dog functions as your interpassive medium”).