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breaking the glass on my pinned tweet with a red hammer like it’s meant to smash public transit windows; you’re coming off-site with me you lil shit

berryzawati

Taken for AuraApril.

Soggy reads: Slow Damage (2021/2022) - 6/5

Here are some thoughts about Slow Damage that I could not fit into the other posts or occurred to me post-game, in no particular order or claim to thematic coherence.

Family: 95% of the time, the game extols the virtue of 'found family': Think the Taku-Towa-Rei triad, Rei and the girlies, Roost, its blog and the small art scene that treat it as their third place more generally; hell, if you want to stretch the concept a little, the Takasato-gumi are a type of found family, at least for Igarashi. Sakaki tries to coax Towa into treating them as such, though he's not as successful at it as Madarame was. Kaga doesn't count since he literally is family. The remaining 5% of the time, it's weirdly insistent that you must maintain some sort of connection to your biological family, and especially your parents, at literally any cost: Taku and his mother, Rei and his father, Fujieda and his sister, hell, even Towa gets beaten over the head with his mother's diary at the very, very end. That last one in particular is patently insane: I don't care how lonely Maya felt during and after what she did and what she ordered Sakaki to do, and it's basically out-of-character that Towa seems to.

Gender: The other hard line the game draws is that you will respect the gender you were assigned at birth. Side characters get to skirt this rule a little because they're, well, on the side, but it's in full effect for Rei. I already spoke my piece about that, but then I listened to the post-game Rei drama CD, and they have Rei do to a 15 year old what Towa does to Rei, that is, to, for all intents and purposes, detransition her. This is such an odd artistic choice to me because a) it simply rehashes Rei's character arc and b) it crowds out every other potential consideration besides the two obligatory sex scenes. It's clearly very important to repeat and perpetuate this concept. But why?

Between these two points; one could level the same kind of accusation at Slow Damage that people quite regularly lob at Personas 4 and 5 - beneath the veneer of youthful radicalism and rebellion hides a surprisingly conservative world view. Slow Damage is filled to the brim with behaviors either frowned upon by society or actively corrosive to the very concept of having a society: It is incomprehensible to me that you can have a game with and in large parts about smoking, alcoholism, self-harm, unprotected casual sex on a scale that would make a committed nymphomaniac blush, organized crime, improvised explosive devices, literal human trafficking, but somebody transing their gender? That's just a step too far, man. That's probably overstating it, but when most of the dissonant moments in the text can be led back to this aspect, well ...

The Drama CDs: I think the nicest thing you can say about these is that they exist. They're there for you when you're done reading, but you're not yet quite done scratching that itch just yet. I'll go through these in the other I read the routes in:

Taku: Arguably the best one of the lot. Taku's route sort of trailed out on a minor cliffhanger as he's uncertain whether he wants to return to medicine. Luckily, Taku's version of Towa is virtually unreconstructed and manspreads, mansplains and manipulates his man into giving the right answer (yes) by means of such gambits as: Cutting his hand open in front of Taku to prove a point about Taku to Taku and pretending like he's going to go have transient, meaningless sex with some stranger after saving himself for Taku for the duration of his jail time. Mwah, bellissima. Despite everything, it's still you. Taku is the luckiest, albeit also the most indecisive, man on earth.

Rei: Pointless. Does not add anything to Rei, to Towa, to the setting, not even to the character it introduces. Huge waste of everybody's time. The only redeeming factor is that it hints in the direction of the girlies collectively adopting Igarashi (a leftover of the canned plot line in which he was meant to fall in love with Arata, I'm sure) and that Honami and Junko seriously tear into other at some point, which is fun to listen to.

Madarame: Kind of jarring in that it dispenses entirely with Shinkoumi (albeit not with all of its denizens) and changes the genre from ... what's Slow Damage's genre, anyway? Psychological horror? to a relatively straightforward story about organized crime in faraway, exotic Brazil. Has the odd distinction of being the only drama CD on which euphoria comes out to play. Great for people who are invested in the Takasato-gumi as a social group, as it provides further context and backstory, particularly into Kaga. Sadly, I'm not really one of those people. Pointlessly also gives Madarame a backstory, and then recommits to him not caring and being a committed nihilist.

Fujieda: This one's weird. Have you read the Colour of Dusk, the short story from the artbook? It turns Towa into Fujieda's neglected little housewife who cooks his meals, starches his shirts, goes almost suspiciously unsexed, tosses and turns her way through the nights because, yeah, that's certainly an interesting set of memories you dug up there, guys ... as far as the drama CD is concerned, it's like none of that stuff happened. It's almost like nothing happened at all. Towa gets kidnapped and held for ransom by a group of Fujieda's "victims" in his function as Sakaki's lawyer, and you'd think that that would severely fuck up Towa after he remembered what the first, I dunno, 10 years of his life were like, but, no, in every way, he leans right back into the nonchalant, playfully masochistic victim persona; he either does not care or will push his cheeks into his captor's blade willingly. That works for me, but how did this happen? This CD was released almost two years after the game, maybe something slipped someone's mind? Or did they realize the same thing I did at the end of Fujieda's route, namely, that the Towa it creates is not almost not really worth having anymore?

Comparing Toono and Sakaki on the basis of their guns:

Toono: Glock (21?): The Glock became the standard handgun of the 21st century by merit of having a large magazine and shooting an incredibly common caliber at just the right time for U.S. law enforcement to start prizing these qualities. It's a no-nonsense choice; light, cheap and abundant. If you need a cost-effective way to shoot somebody and you don't have to worry about something like kevlar, you can hardly do better. It suits Toono very well in that regard, given that he is presented to us as an amoral schemer who does not care for the Takasato-gumi's rules and traditions. He does whatever he thinks is practical to him at any given time with little flair or fanfare. Personally, I lowkey despise him for all of these qualities. Every single choice Toono makes, practically, economically, aesthetically, is maximally rizzless, with the sole exception of forcing Towa into drag. So it is with the Glock - its silhouette approaches a six-year old's pencil drawing of a gun.

Sakaki: Walther P.38: So, imagine my shock when Sakaki broke out the museum piece. The P.38 was originally designed to be the successor to the iconic Luger as the side arm of the German military and served in that capacity from 1939 all the way to 1992. I didn't immediately recognize it, assuming there was a Japanese pistol with a similar design, but, no. And when I realized, I got to wondering: How did this get here? Given that Slow Damage is supposed to be set slightly in the indeterminate future from time of writing, that thing is possibly decades old, but even at the very least still 20 years. However, it also makes perfect sense for Sakaki to wield it because he's everything Toono is not: He's a nostalgic, an aesthete and very self-consciously a villain. At the end of Fujieda's route, after Sakaki's reveal, Towa asks him if he's ever slept with Maya, and Sakaki doesn't just say "no", he's actually offended at the notion, as if he would have sullied Maya in doing so. These are two beautiful insights into his character: Here's a man who will sacrifice almost anything in pursuit of an aesthetic, a spiritual project.

There's going to be a post number seven out of five when that one completed Clean Dishes translation out there is returned to the internet. Really bad timing on my part, I guess.

#soggy reads #english #fiction #slow damage

venustapolis

Archangel, study for the Foundation of the Faith (Nikolaos Gyzis, 1895)

The Archangel, study for the Grounding of Faith (Nikolaos Gyzis, 1895)

Soggy watches: Borgen (2010-2013, 2022)

"Every nation gets the government it deserves." -Joseph de Maistre

birgitte nyborg: miracle worker

There are three ways to make a television show about politics. Let's call them "Yes, Minister", "House of Cards" and "The West Wing".

Yes, Minister might be an odd choice of title because I am about to suggest that it is the foundation for the whole Armando Iannucci lineage of political satires — the Thick of It, In The Loop, Veep, Death of Stalin — despite Iannucci not being credited on it, not being credited on anything for like a decade after it stopped airing still. He did champion it on a BBC programme looking for Britain's Best Sitcom, so there's that connection, at least. But it's more about outlook, anyway: Yes, Minister — famously Margaret Thatcher's favorite — took the position that politics is silly because its practitioners are silly.

Generaloberst Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp, Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord suggested military officers fall into four buckets along two axes: Smart to stupid and driven to lazy. He further suggested what to do with each combination of traits: Smart/driven? General staffer. Stupid/lazy? Routine tasks. Smart/lazy? Leadership positions. Despite having — relative to his Reichswehr peers, anyway — something resembling a conscience, he did not account for morality.

Kurt's nightmare was the man who is stupid, but driven, and Yes, Minister is full of these. Our protagonist, James "Jim" Hacker, is one. He knows he wants to climb the greasy pole, but he does not know why ("because it's there!"). He wants his time in Number Ten to be a success, but he's almost completely agnostic as to what that would entail. Hacker is surrounded by a coterie of civil servants, party men and lobbyists, most of whom are not just every bit as stupid and driven as he is, but also completely and utterly self-serving, and they all bob around like corks in champagne for a while not getting very much done and all at great expense to the British taxpayer.

Enter House of Cards. When the American, the Netflix version, the one that lent the company the iconic dun-dun noise at the start of every episode of every show they ever ran, run and presumably ever will run, the sound of Frank Underwood knocking on wood, aired, some people made hay of the perception that this was the dumbed-down, Yankee Doodle Dandy version of the more sophisticated, British original. I mean, my God, Urquhart quotes Shakespeare, how much more sophistication could you want? But don't let the anglophiles fool you: The original is every bit as sleazy, phantastical and murderous as the American adaptation.

People mistook British self-consciousness about late stage imperial decline for subtlety: American means simply exceed British means so far that whereas Francis thinks in terms of Falklandses and Cypruses, Frank can and must think in terms of cyberwarfare, anthrax, great power competition, war in the Middle East et cetera. The bombast comes with the terrain. A German equivalent would be very small potatoes indeed.

If the cast of Yes, Minister was basically too blinkered to be described as "evil", House of Cards did not impose any such limitation on itself. Its central characters are undeniably smart/driven/evil. Yes, Minister thinks politicians are stuck in a self-referential bubble only occasionally penetrated by the light of facts, rationality, reason and genuine public scrutiny. House of Cards conceives of politics as predatory, in more ways than one. It does not confine itself to thinking of politicians as merely hunting each other out of ambition, but also as a pack that makes a prey out of the body politic itself.

And then there's The West Wing. A lot of ink has been spilled about it already, so, suffice it to say, it's the antithesis to the British œuvre. It asks, simply: What if politics was serious and politicians were intelligent and well-meaning? It's a brave little theory. Unfortunately, it has been rejected at the ballot box.

Each of these approaches makes a certain amount of sense given the context. Yes, Minister was informed by public choice theory and written at the precise moment when Britain's post-war consensus fell apart for good: The Great British Public looked at its managed democracy, its managed economy and jobs for the boys! and threw them out in favor of two decades of unbroken Conservative rule, privatizing social housing, smashing the trade unions and the Single European Act. In that sense, it is actually one last look back at a way of doing politics that was about to be overcome forever.

House of Cards, the novel, was written by a dyed in the wool Thatcherite, someone who inhabited the world that was built on the ruins. Baron Dobbs was at pains to stress that it was not intended to be commentary on contemporary politics, not a "book of revenge", but also that it was, in a lot of ways, documentary of politics as he experienced it. If not revenge, then, maybe a book of reflection? Perhaps even something resembling mourning? At any rate, the American adaptation cannot claim any such thing for itself: Beau Willimon has a lifetime of experience of writing about politics, but a lot less experience of doing politics, certainly not congressional politics.

The Labour Party spent almost 20 years in the wilderness, as they say. The Democrats only suffered for 12, assuming you count from Carter and not LBJ. But the shorter interval was felt no less acutely. The reason why the third way, triangulation, "I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative" held and still kind of does hold such a stranglehold on the imagination of so many people is that politics in a two-party system is a zero-sum game, the other guy's loss is your gain, and winning is per se good. That's how you can perceive the Clinton era as a rejuvenation and engage in post-purchase rationalization: Reaching across the aisle, making compromises, getting things done, tacking to the center, persuasion over turnout strategies — this is good and proper and necessary. You make a virtue out of necessity.

The fact is that most of these shows dispensed with the personal dimension of politics in favor of a caricature of ambition, regardless of whether it was drawn in ridicule or in awe. Which is a shame, because that's the deadest of dead horses. You've heard the truisms: Bla, bla, test of character, bla, bla, give him power, bla bla, corrupts absolutely. That's so 1500 A.D., bro. It might be a liability for our conception of politics and of politicians that the overwhelming majority of the species has been, for the overwhelming majority of history, been ruled by overwhelmingly despotic regimes: Modernity, mass democracy, representative and participatory government are tiny blips at the very tail end of long lineages of oppressed dirt-farmers.

Borgen was, usually favorably, compared to the West Wing a lot in print. It's not difficult to see why: Birgitte Nyborg is the chairwoman of a party literally called "the Moderates" (Moderaterne). Its base is self-consciously centrist and intellectual. Kasper Juul, Birgitte's spin doctor, will, in a later season, say about delegates to a party congress that they don't like to clap for too long because it's pedestrian. The Moderates are a special bunch: They actually go in for good governance, evidence-based policy and proper parliamentary procedure. Their arch-nemesis is the far right, not just because the Moderates think human rights are good, actually, but because the far right is championed by country bumpkins and they don't really understand that you don't get what you want by standing outside the room shouting profanities.

For all of these reasons, Borgen was the hot shit on the European undergraduate political science circuit when it aired, which is coincidentally when I was making my rounds on that circuit. Borgen is set in a world where the right speech at the right time makes a difference. A world in which a well-researched, well-argued policy brief can actually inform a law. A world in which people think in terms of options and the trade-offs between them and lesser evils and engage in horse trading and settle for compromises and second-bests. It's my kind of world. I would, actually, also kind of like it if we could strip the personal dimension out of politics. You see, I'm a bit of a technocrat at heart. Obviously, I don't think I'm qualified myself, but society should probably be run by people who know facts and things, not people.

However, Borgen is a show that is ruthlessly committed to reminding us that politics is a thing done by people, with people, for people, to people. Birgitte is married, she has children and they are decidedly not props. When she becomes Prime Minister of Denmark via freak accident, it might be the greatest day of her life, but it's also the last unambiguously great day of her life. Her husband and her children are asked to sacrifice for their wife and mother's career. Eventually, her husband will be sick of sacrificing his time, his career, his sex life and his portfolio. Eventually, her daughter will develop an anxiety disorder requiring inpatient psychiatric care. No matter how much Birgitte struggles to separate the personal and the political dimension, they keep reverberating onto one another, with catastrophic consequences.

The cast comprises some of the most powerful people of their country, and you'll quickly notice that almost none of them are happy and well-adjusted: All of them are struggling with personal baggage. Their families are dysfunctional because they spend more time at work than they do at home. They're usually unfaithful on account of being around people at work more than they are around their actual partners. Work/life balance? Not for us, thank you. We want influence, we want power, but we kind of also want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. Tendency is, unfortunately, that you can't seem to have both. Scandal is an occupational hazard under such circumstances the same way black lung is for a coal miner.

Here's the problem: We expect politicians to be better, more moral than the average person. And yet, you can plausibly argue that our elite recruitment mechanisms select for psychopathy. We have — hey, don't abrogate responsibility, this is a democracy, you don't get to take credit for the successes and the benefits without also taking blame for the failures and the pathologies — we have built a machine that produces broken power-seekers, but still we are surprised about its outputs.

We shouldn't be. You may not think much of it, you may point at their, honestly, compared to leadership positions in the real economy, sort of piddling salaries, but we make these people work 70-hour weeks, we expect them to perform interest in our little lives, in policy fields that they are assigned not necessarily according to competence but to seat distribution and coalition arithmetic, we expect command of the brief, command of their emotions. It's a testament to human resilience that there isn't more sleaze, more scandal, more sex in broom closets.

Social media has turned a lot of us into politicians in this way, always performing one thing or the other, always pretending to be more knowledgeable about more things than we really are, "microdosing hell by staying informed and educated", or whatever passes for it, always feeling obliged to comment on what's happening in the world. "I'm not usually political ..." — maybe that's a good thing. Information by itself is not power.

Borgen aired at a peculiar time, during an an interregnum between two paradigms. Cable news and kleptocratic liberalism, the dominant political technologies of the 90s and 2000s, had hit their best before date by then: Hillary was rejected in favor of Obama, Blair in favor of Cameron, Schröder in favor of Merkel, Italy was about to exit the era of bunga bunga. But the new age had not yet fully emerged. It was brewing in the background, to be sure, in Zuccotti Park, on the Tahrir, in the shape of the Tea Party, during the European sovereign debt crisis — but the orange man had not yet descended the escalator.

Because of this, some of the show's appeals to its audience ended up lost in time: Yeah, political discourse certainly has been dumbed down by various efforts to liberalize television, but we were about to enter an era completely untethered to anything resembling physical reality or even the written word. Yeah, boiling parliamentary politics down to large, multi-party, loosely ideological blocks was not ideal, but they were about to get busted down by the only thing that might be even worse; the populist right, the arrival of which made compromise practically, almost mathematically, impossible and condemned entire continents to previously unimaginable levels of gridlock.

The attempt at humanizing politicians, at depicting them as people with families and hopes and aspirations, both personal and political, some good, some not so much, has only become more urgent since, given how fluent we've all become, been made to be, at thinking of them only as members of the political class, la casta, the Swamp, (((them))), the elites et cetera. If there's a way out of populism (big if), it probably leads through re-acknowledging that, no, ours is a species two members of which can barely agree on what to order for dinner, genuine conspiracies are probably few and far between. Most of the really bad ideas about how the world works were created, in their entirety, by a couple eccentrics: Lyndon LaRouche, William Engdahl, Andrew Wakefield, some of the most successful policy enterpreneurs of all time, and yet so oddly underappreciated and underpaid. The rest, we do to ourselves.

Borgen is a liberal series, with a small "L". It takes few hard stances. It's feminist in a "hire 👏 more 👏 women 👏 guards" sort of way. It's vaguely pro-immigration in principle. It thinks the meat industry is pretty much morally bankrupt, but it stops short of recommending universal veganism. That's fine. It's not so much about adding up individual policy stances. Borgen is committed to democracy, the open society and throughput legitimacy. It's in love with process. It doesn't harbor illusions about the inherent goodness of people, but it wears its heart on its sleeve about its faith that, as long as people engage with the political process in good faith and with a bit of a can do attitude, we can, occasionally, do some good. That might strike you as a very limited version of politics, but it's also basically the only one there is.

#soggy watches

utmbug

moar

nikanst

Deconstruction

Soggy reads: Slow Damage (2021/2022) [5/5]

oh, do not look at me so. a smile better suits a hero

I've started drafting this post in my head from basically the moment I started playing. When I first beheld Towa — all 100 pounds of scar tissue, cold blood and bones — something shook itself loose at the back of my mind. I usually keep things on a pretty even keel these days, but it wasn't and isn't always thus, and Towa really got to me.

Obviously, I realize the irony in saying this after chewing Fujieda out for it, but there's no way to talk about how I feel about Towa without talking about myself at least a little. Towa is a mirror held up to the player; do you regard this man with respect, or disgust? Don't answer "pity", it's the one thing he can't work with.

Meeting him was like meeting a dear friend from a phase of life I believed to be over for good. It was also like finally finding someone that I somehow always already knew I loved, conceptually, in the abstract. And it was like looking at a life, or at least a period of a life, that I dearly wish I could have led, and, honestly, still kind of do. I'm 34, and I'm supposed to pull a 1 Corinthians 13:11; but I can turn that on its head: I'm 34 — officially too old to keep pretending that I don't still enjoy seeing the angles and the scars and the bruises and the blood, like I don't want to stick my fingers into wounds and behind collarbones and into the spaces between plainly visible ribs and pull and see what's on the inside and bury myself in there, and to be torn to shreds in turn, like I do not want to constantly negotiate the middle ground between the highest level of emotional intensity and the lowest level of emotional numbness. I have to be deranged about this, there's no normal way to put it. I figured this would go away at some point, but maybe it never will.

I brought Dramatical Murder up in the beginning and I'm a sucker for symmetry, so let me return to it in the end: I like Aoba, I'll sing his praises, I'd be his wingman, I hope he's happy, but I didn't click with him. He doesn't trigger the traditional dilemma: I could want him, but I could never want to be him. Aoba should be the poster child for shit life syndrome: He's a part-timer living with his grandmother in a slum on an island. But he's too much of a happy-go-lucky kinda guy to let that faze him, or to let it faze him that bad things just kind of keep happening to him from entirely outside of his own control. I'm just not like that: I'm very much fazed. I seem to not so much heal as hope that eventually the world will indulge me and let me enjoy my symptom. Hence: Towa.

Towa is the polar opposite of Aoba: He causes problems on purpose. You know why: It's the only way he can get off, he needs the inspiration for his art and, when you think about it, given that he doesn't truly care whether he lives or dies, why not? The level of comfort he expects from life is not zero, but it's not far off: He's basically fine as long as he is not physically chained to a location, and even that's negotiable if you apply enough force. Towa wants to be treated as a fully autonomous, adult human being, even when he's anything but. This is a parsimonious description of a teenager. And that checks out. After all, Towa hit the pause button on life when he got shot, and that wasn't even the first time. He's boy, interrupted. And I love that for him.

Maybe I don't want Towa to get better. Or, at least, not in the way Fujieda does it. If "getting better" means stripping him of all the most interesting parts of him, if it means he stops seeing people and the world the way he did, if it means he stops creating art, if it means declawing him and turning him into a little kitten that impotently paws at a big, strong man for uppies, then, sign me up for being anti-recovery, I suppose. I first had that thought — I don't want Towa to get better — when it became obvious that that was going to be Taku's endgame, and I knew then already that it was a kind of mean-spirited thought. It only got more morally dubious after that, but I can't shake it off. I despised being made to see the wholesome 💯 domestic version of Towa, this neutered thing with all the edges filed off.

I'm instinctively suspicious of any concept of self-actualization that terminates in wood grain, pastel colors and cooking eggs just right. All that advanced cognition, such depth of experience, so much potential for pleasure and pain, just so people can spend it counting down the hours until they're off work, days to their next vacation, years to retirement. Life as merely a journey to the grave. My other beat is Final Fantasy XIV, and I'm always astonished at the sheer amount of people who think their character, their Warrior of Light, their globe-bestriding colossus' highest aspiration should be retiring to spend more time in the rose garden.

More than anything, I didn't want Slow Damage to be over. I'm too in love with its presentation, its tone, its sensibility, its vibe. Yeah, I thought it was kind of weird that they put Chapter 0, the demo, in front of Fujieda's route. That choice has no payoff down the road best as I can tell, but it's basically fine, because it meant that I got to be dragged through the byzantine maze of dimly lit alleys that is Shinkoumi one more time before Fujieda came and took Towa away from me. I'd let him drag me through this place another 100 times. Introduce me to more freaks, make them dance, make them slough their skins off their shoulders. Promise me you won't ever change.

#soggy reads #english #fiction #slow damage

Soggy reads: Slow Damage (2021/2022) [4/5]

I can tell you what the exact moment was when the thought that 'Slow Damage might not stick the landing' crept into the back of my mind and there made a nest for itself: When Towa opened that first package of artefacts from his past and therein found photographs of Ikuina, Asakura and Kirihara and it was revealed that they actually had a preëxisting connection. As it turns out, meeting them in the previous routes was not some chance encounter between spontaneously occurring, if you will, organic perverts, but they were actually connected by the red string of fate all along. This isn't stated explicitly, but at least to me it strongly implies that these were previously normal people who were bent and crooked when they first met Towa and were thus destined to bump back into him at a future point in time.

If you ask me, this cheapens them as characters, cheapens the interactions you have with them and therefore cheapens the narrative as a whole. This was a, not totally but still pretty surprising and unwelcome retreat from my conception of the ethos of this game, and as the route continued, so did that retreat, until it turned into a complete rout. I'll try to push back on that, a little: I think it would be good if we could admit to ourselves and to each other that a) we want and b) not everything we want is nice and soft and positive and virtuous and conducive to self-improvement. We can see incelism and other types of neuroticism about interpersonal connections: The sexlessness, the teetotalism, the endemic loneliness, but only phenotypically. Why they're there eludes us.

Society is individual behavior, multiplied, and while there are material factors at play, as far as I'm concerned, the basic problem is mental: A lot of people have adopted a sort of pseudobuddhist mindset within which desire itself is a toxin imposed from without that needs to be identified, isolated and extracted. You need to cultivate constant self-awareness to purge from yourself the thought of anything but furthering your education, your career, your physical and mental health; mens sana in corpore sano, so measure your being against your past and the curated social media self-portrayals of everybody else. Oops, now the 19 year olds think they're falling behind in the big rat race.

cleverly, this clock is not ticking: the hours are not going by. the past does not increase, the future does not recede. take that, murakami

Towa looks at Fujieda's scars and thinks "you're like me!", but I look at Fujieda's life trajectory and say; "you're nothing like him". Towa doesn't differentiate between means and ends; he'd prostitute himself on a street corner because he thinks the act itself is thrilling. If he gets paid, that's just a bonus. Fujieda carefully calculated how many dicks he'd have to suck to fund his education and then went and did that. He's utilitarian and self-examined, he's the anti-Madarame: Fujieda knows exactly what he wants, why he wants it, how he's going to get it and what price he is willing to pay to get it. I like contrast — size difference, age difference, different styles, power differentials, sunshine top and grumpy bottom — and Towa and Fujieda could have been perfect for one another.

Alas, Fujieda is also the mechanism by which the apparent randomness of life at the end of history is subjugated beneath the demands of characterization, narrativization and lore production. The arcana is the means by which all is revealed: Towa's every sensory experience, intrusive thought, errant impulse, every dream, every twitch and twinge explained, categorized, put in its proper context — sanitized. "At the end of this, you might be a different person", he says. To me, that's a threat, not a promise: Taku domesticated Towa, and I internally hissed and screamed my way through that. Rei adopted Towa because he thinks he doesn't deserve better. Madarame dragged Towa back down to his level. It's not nice, but I can live with that. Fujieda is going to annihilate Towa and leave standing in his place ... what, exactly? Something fit only for a coffee shop AU, maybe.

The most upsetting thing in a route full of very upsetting things, to me, is Fujieda interrupting Towa's suicide attempt. I know from personal experience that it is bad enough to be made to live for the sake of other, living people when you don't particularly care to, but I'd argue being made to live for the sake of a dead person is an order of magnitude worse still. Dying will not bring Mei back, but living won't bring her back, either. Moreover, living out of sheer spite for "Maya" is not going to do anything. Is Towa supposed to spend the rest of his life comparing everything he thinks, feels and does against the mental image of his mother and always do the opposite of what he thinks she might have done, might have wanted? He's going to need an entire, second suite of mechanisms to cope with the fact that he's been made to believe that his previous suite of coping mechanisms was him self-perpetuating her abuse. As far as I'm concerned, it would be better to burn.

But the game takes this flimsy concept and sprints off with it like it's the Olympics. Fujieda apparently fucks so good that it instantly waters Towa's crops, hydrates his skin and improves his complexion. He's so skilled at providing first aid that Taku is impressed by his work; my God, what can't he do? This already raised an eyebrow when Taku did it. It's just barely plausible that Towa could simply resolve to leave all of this behind himself and start over before he opened Pandora's Box of memories, but after? With, no, for this man? Fujieda didn't give a shit about Towa 12 hours earlier. He left him in a puddle of his own sweat and vomit in the dark on the site of Towa's traumatization because he was too dazed from realizing his own loss to care.

He shows up at Towa's atelier previously content with having the following conversation over the phone, because, yes, he would be, because all he talks about is himself, his sister, how he feels, what it means to him, not one syllable about or for the man standing in front of him who is about to not just immolate his body, but also his body of work. Is nothing sacred? I'm not going to elevate chain smoking, alcoholism, self-injury and nymphomania into virtues, at least not with my whole chest, but it actually, morally, offends me that the art must go, too, and I am not offended by much. It is fantastically narcissistic.

But that's a side aspect in the characterization of Fujieda, to me. I don't begrudge him that he has contradictory feelings about and impulses towards Towa. For the characterization of Towa, it's a declaration of bankruptcy. Towa didn't invest himself in Taku, in Rei, in any of his friends or his many, many sexual partners or the people he's gone through euphoric episodes with. When the people from his past are snuffed out by the Takasato-gumi, he thinks about it in terms of it complicating his investigation, but, having flung himself into the abyss, he's going to invest himself in this guy?

No. Pass me the lighter. Shinkoumi must burn.

#soggy reads #english #fiction #slow damage

Soggy reads: Slow Damage (2021/2022) [3/5]

I'm going to put the nicest possible gloss on Madarame's route: It's a cute little piece of meta-fiction. Like a black hole, Madarame's presence bends the world around itself, sucking it inwards. The impact can be measured before the object itself can be perceived: Ikuina's post-euphoric suicide heralds the fact that the second half of Slow Damage is going to be Darker and Edgier™️. People start tiptoeing around Towa and he starts behaving weirdly, even by his standards, as if in preparation for turning on the little life that was built for him and returning to being a feral creature.

The advantage of the first-person perspective — I'm told it's not entirely uncontroversial among the English-speaking audience that SloDa is told in first person — is fully realized here: The experience of Towa and the experience of the reader become one and the same. Life is now "nasty, brutish and short"; days full of nothing between searing bursts of abuse. None of it is titillating. It's not meant to be enjoyed, it's meant to be endured. Towa is deconditioned, and so is the reader: There's going to be a reward at the end of this. There has to be.

disregard what i write below; this is my reward

For the reader, the reward is the Towa lore. Deprived of all of his (deeply maladaptive, don't get me wrong) coping mechanisms, Towa can no longer distract himself from his past. Forced to remember and to relive, he regresses. This route is good in the sense that it's difficult to imagine a different mechanism by which this information could be delivered. To do it any other way would have unsuspended disbelief. Well, for the most part, anyway. Towa forgetting that it was Toono who shot him seems sort of implausible to me: It's a conclusion he could have independently re-arrived at at any time by applying the most basic "means, motivation, opportunity" type of thinking.

But I guess that's the point: Towa is so ruthlessly committed to not thinking that even the most glaringly obvious conclusions do not occur to him. Hence, Madarame: The unstoppable force that knocks the immovable object off course.

As you can see, it's difficult to think of Madarame as a man rather than a force of nature. At the bifurcation point of the route; you have the option to keep pressing him for his desire, and when you do, two things happen: For one, you're heading for the bad mad ending, because, two: There's nothing there, and Madarame is disappointed in Towa for trying. He's correct to be: That was not the Towa that Madarame remembers talking — that's euphoria. Taku's masterpiece, if you will.

By the way, remember when I wrote that it'd be difficult to incorporate information from latter routes into past posts? The reveal that Taku has filled Towa's head with false memories after Towa got shot is a prime example of the sort of thing that recontextualizes what happened in Taku's route. I'm not so mad about the chipping anymore because Taku delivered an even more screwed up thing he did to Towa that overwrites it. Another example is the fact that black is Towa's natural hair color and the bleached tips are a leftover from yesteryear. You can extrapolate that, when Towa grows his hair out even longer in Taku's good euphoric ending, the hair puts a physical capstone on this segment of Towa's life. That might be a stretch, though, because it'd be bad news for Rei: Towa keeps the tips in his endings. Oops.

Towa chides himself for 'screwing up' the interrogation of Madarame, but I can alleviate his concerns: You didn't fail because there was no way to succeed. Madarame is on record to want two things: Towa and the destruction of the Takasato-gumi. When he expresses these wants, Towa suggests the former sounds like a declaration of love. Madarame rejects that framing. When Towa suggests the latter sounds like an intent to get revenge, Madarame rejects that framing, too.

It's possible to imagine what Taku and Rei would be like in a world without Towa because they are fully realized, if flawed, human beings. They have proximate desires, that is, things they say they want, and ultimate desires, that is, the thing that they eventually, if you press them hard enough, confess is the driving psychological force that enshrined the proximate desire in the first place. Using the former as a stirrup to get to the latter is Towa's interrogation technique, and it doesn't work on Madarame.

What are we to conclude from this? It's not as if Madarame is free from desire. He eats, drinks, shits, fucks, fights — those are all instinctual. But he also hung on to his grudges for a long, long time. However, he doesn't conceptualize it as a grudge. He doesn't conceptualize anything. He wants things and doesn't ask himself "why?". He'll tear down the Takasato-gumi with no regard for what will happen next. This is not, "move fast and break things", either: He simply doesn't care. The past doesn't matter and neither does the future, he says. All there is, is the moment. In some sense this makes him a fascinating specimen. Genuine nihilistic hedonists are much rarer, in fiction or in real life, than the long fin d'siècle might have you believe. Fun is virtually always at least depicted to be proximate. Just look at euphoria — that guy is entirely proximate.

#soggy reads #english #fiction #slow damage

Soggy reads: Slow Damage (2021/2022) [2/5]

I'm a cautious man and I recognize that I am not as super duper equipped to talk about this as other people might be, so, if I wrote something stupid, just yell at me so I can make a correction. Changing pronouns every sentence is not an attempt at whimsy or to make light of what happened and more of a capitulation before the decisive indecisiveness of the narrative.

That could probably have been handled better. What, specifically? I don't know - take your pick. Kirihara's identity was telegraphed long in advance. Rei's father should have been scrapped for parts years ago. And then there's the Gender thing.

Look, even if I, for whatever stupid reason, wanted to take the most rigid, hung up on definitions, "well, it's a BLVN, so they should be boys, right?" stance on this, I think I'd still find it a little underwhelming that Rei yeets 15-20 years' worth of thoughts and feelings about gender out of the window just so. Even just as a lame performance critique, that just isn't a particularly satisfying payoff. It doesn't even take, apparently. Not really. When he* attains post-nut clarity and Towa asks 'well, how'd that feel?', he replies that something is still off, and, yeah, of course it is. So, no matter what happens after that, that probably wasn't the final word on the topic.

As I usually do in a situation like this, I'm thinking it might have been better to just commit a little bit more into either direction. Rei could have just been a somewhat gender non-conforming - am I even using that correctly? - guy. Believe me, you can just be a guy with a sweet tooth and a domestic side and an almost suspiciously queer social circle who hates his body, nobody is going to arrest you for that. Conversely, she* could have just been a trans woman. I guess there was an implicit, secret, hidden third option where he is, like, I dunno, an AFAB trans man who heard his father wish that he had a son and heir loud and clear but was pushed out of his life anyway because, 'no, not like that', and that could also have worked and satisfied whatever formal, 'boys only in my boys' love work, no cooties, please', criteria. Probably.

Same, Rei, same.

But, no. They chose a half measure when they should have gone all the way. Me, personally, I'd have been okay with whatever as long as it felt sufficiently ... complete. Rei had me at 'sweet tooth', an increasingly rare character trait in the orthorexic century. I don't mean; feels guilty over a Sunday slice of cake, but, like, eats a box of Ferrero Rocher and kinda wishes there were seconds. And if it hadn't been for that, they* would have had me at being a body modder, and if not that, the murderous glint in their eyes while fistfighting, utterly dysfunctional parental relationship and childhood bullying victimhood would have gotten me. Almost forgot the motorcycle. You're preaching to the choir here. I'm primed in six different ways to like this guy gal person, you just had to stumble the ball into the net somehow.

Honestly have half a mind to throw my hands in the air and just declare I prefer the bad mad ending Rei because at least some of that one's character traits come to full fruition. That guy has good taste.

It has been suggested to me that there are two ways to look at a given route: For one, in terms of what we learn about the respective love interest, and for two, in terms of what we learn about Towa while he's pursuing that love interest. I'll tell you one thing I learned on this route: I may be transforming into a corncob Towa shill, but even I can see that Rei cuts Towa a hell of a lot of slack and consistently interprets his actions in the best possible light for, kind of, no reason other than that he's there, Rei wants and needs companionship and Towa's, 'I don't really care that much either way' outlook is the closest thing Rei has found to a trustworthy relationship, one that can not collapse because it never bore loads to begin with. Not that kind of load, anyway.

That is revealingly sad in its own way, because it implies that, despite all the time Rei has spent with Arata, Junko, Honami, people Rei's literally fought side by side with, mind you, Taku, the barkeep, stop me at any time, that nagging thought at the back of the head of "yes, sure, but what if the next time I leave the house, they'll all stand there in a big circle and they'll laugh and point and spit at me" never fully left his head. That just hits a little too close to home.

I wrote most of that before the credits rolled on the good euphoric ending but saved it as a draft on the off chance that something happens in the last hour or two that'd change my mind. Rei gets an incredibly shitty, heinous, oh my God, why did you do that? Dramatical Murder never hurt me like this — haircut, but that was not what I was looking for. Never do that again.

#soggy reads #english #fiction #slow damage

Soggy reads: Slow Damage (2021/2022) [1/5]

Alternate Title: "Joe Biden voice: "SLODA!""

Apparently, it's going on three years that a friend recommended this to me. Shouldn't have been a hard sell, to be honest, given that I'm well-disposed to its predecessor. I think part of the problem is that I initially conceived of this as sort of an implicit trade where he reads one of my favorites (Umineko no Naku Koro ni [2007-2010*]) and I read this, that, for one reason or the other, didn't exactly pan out. However, for health reasons I did recently find myself in a peculiar mood and with sufficient spare free time to, very belatedly, pick it up. First (visual) novel on this blog and it's this, go figure. That's basically what my reading habits are like. Biggest influences on my, frankly, laughable prose? Kinoko Nasu and ryukishi07 by a country mile, probably.

Right now, the way I think this is going to go is that this will be the first of a five-part series of posts. The reason for this is simply that at my reading speed and enjoying the voice acting, the first playthrough clocked in at around 20 hours, and I fear the Good Doctor is going to have slipped my mind by hour 80. In this post, I'll make some general remarks including about systems and the shared first chapter before getting to Taku's route, and every subsequent co-protagonist is going to get their own, ideally. The downside of this approach is that information about Taku revealed after the credits roll on his ending can not easily be incorporated. I can already tell that I'm going to be chewing on Towa for quite a while, so, I think he's going to get his own.

Usually, the way I think about visual novels and games with a choose your own adventure quality in general is that you should play them through blind, no take-backsies, and whatever comes out at the bottom is favored to become (head)canon. Subsequent playthroughs of one of these or an open world RPG or other games with a routing system never have quite the same charm as when you blindly grope through somebody else's design on instinct and see what happens.

Slow Damage does not afford me this luxury by making it essentially a coinflip whether you crash into Taku or Rei first. That's fine. Taku is basically my, well, one of my types, anyway: A kind, older, more accomplished man with a bit of scruff and edge to him. Blame Gregory House for that. Most of it. Greg isn't that kind.

So, Shinkoumi is a shithole. That's par for the course for these - Midorijima was a shithole, Togainu no Chi is literally post-apocalyptic and sweet pool's slice of the world is anchored by a Catholic school. Brr. I kind of wonder if this says something about Japanese society Fuchii Kabura, but chances are it's for narrative convenience. A functioning society with happy, prosperous people and a justice system worth its name would just get in the way. I always have some nitpicks about these - about unemployment figures, inflation, credit, the social order - because I can not turn that part of my brain off even if I try, but I understand it.

I will say that I'm glad they dialed it back on the futuristic fashion vibe - I remember it being difficult to take Dramatical Murder seriously at times because half the cast dresses like jackasses. Kotarou and Mayu basically fill that quota here and the rest of the heavy lifting is done by the protagonist being an artist who has a similarly inclined social circle, with out and about queer people in it (mostly queer people, actually), which just plainly makes it a lot more believable that they dress the way they do.

It was a bad sign that the game tutorializes you on its conversation mechanics - and yeah, they are mechanics, we are juggling resources here - and I was proven right about that hunch later in the route. You better go through town with a fine-toothed comb to pick up every scrap of inspiration for later because if you don't have them you can totally get locked out of a particular ending. You could, of course, always use a guide, but I'm already finding that using a guide makes the exploration segments more of a chore than, well, exploration. Does make me wonder though: Maybe someone at Nitro+Chiral has aspirations of making an actual game? Something more than 'Text, yes, text, no, text, yes, yes, no, text, ending', anyway. Slow Damage is in an awkward spot where it's main (sole) gameplay feature befits a full-featured RPG.

love at first slice

One problem with rolling Taku first is that the game puts its best foot forward - I can not easily think of a better way to introduce yourself than taking me from Towa's ratty couch to Ikuina's bloodstained bed in a few, breezy hours - and it's impossible to maintain that energy for the duration. The pacing on Taku's route crashes hard once he and Towa get jailed. Most of that bit is basically redundant. Things get said, then it turns out they didn't actually matter and Towa just gets beaten into yet more of a pulp, but in, like, a not even tangentially erotic, just straight up, non-sexual violence, sort of way. It was maddening.

Taku himself isn't always necessarly helping, either. That man has a weird concept of boundaries: He's almost addicted to withholding information even from the people closest to him, but tossing a GPS tracker into Towa while he's stitching him up anyway? That's totally within his realm of possibilities and he does it long before he cracks under the pressure. Would being more forthcoming have made a big difference in his situation? Maybe, maybe not. But it would have made for a more ... economical narrative. The broad strokes of Taku's problem become legible hours before the finer points are revealed, but the finer points are not actually that important.

Should I lose a few words about Asakura? They loaded one morally dubious doctor in front of the other, in what, now that I'm on Rei's route, I understand to basically be the game's way of signposting where you're going, and if I'm going to be perfectly honest, the twin facts that a) his desire was a lot more literal than I would have guessed and b) the execution of it does unfortunately look sort of slapdash take most of the wind out of his sails. It's also pretty awkward to know that on every other route, when you don't interact with him, he will probably eventually do that to a small, already pretty unhappy child. If it isn't the consequences of my inactions.

Speaking of inappropriate relationships and not helping; if Taku didn't constantly bring up that he basically helped raise Towa, I don't think it would have occurred to me to stop and think about whether there's a problem with this picture:

this picture specifically. nobody's going to out-uke Towa anytime soon

Here's the thing about Taku: He's a very educated, yet emotionally pretty unintelligent man. I can relate to that (look forward to the Towa post!), but it means that a bunch of more deeply-seated, actually emotionally fraught issues, like whether he might actually think of Towa as a surrogate for Towa's mother, like his general possessiveness, like the goddamn chipping, sort of end up getting handwaved in favor of prolonged navel-gazing about Taku's dealings with Toono and repeated variations on 'I could be your dad'. Yeah, you could ... but you're not.

Taku's route bifurcates into a happy ending and a perfectly unhappy ending. That's basically how DMMd was structured, too. I'm not going to assume that this is the rule, though. In this sense, I appreciate the otherwise pretty much irredeemable sweet pool for allowing you to pick a particular shade of unhappiness. I have thoughts about the notion that this game should have (only) happy endings - but those are going to have to wait ...

#soggy reads #english #fiction #slow damage

Soggy watches: Better Call Saul (2015-2022) & Breaking Bad (2008-2013)

That's a joke. It's not my first time watching them. I'll cop to not sticking with BCS when it first aired because of the dour little interlude after Chicanery, but I did, somewhat recently, finally watch it all the way through. And then I rewatched BB, just to see if that did anything. It does, so I presented them in this order to some friends as a joke.

BCS recontextualizes Walter White's struggles by creating contrast with the struggles of Jimmy, Mike, Gus and Nacho. By way of comparison, Walt has it easier in some ways, thanks to their work. Generally, BB becomes the story of a neophyte expanding into a vacuum left by cartel infighting, destroying everything other people have labored for years to build because the space becomes too small for his personal ambitions.

Or does it? My model of, if you will, media literacy acquisition is that it's hating all the way down. The meta-fiction of BB goes something like this: Because Seasons 4 and 5a of BB end on relatively triumphant notes, the popular reception of BB in the early 2010s casts Heisenberg (Walter White, the man, is a distinct afterthought) as larger than life. Amidst the grinding Long Recession and the debates about the Affordable Care Act (thanks, Obama), Walt's character arc strikes millions of people as plausible and, horror of horrors, appealing. Underachieving, underemployed stoners hang "HAIL TO THE KING" posters in their college dorm rooms. Conventional wisdom among the show's fans at the time is that Skyler was a bitch for not being more enthusiastic about her husband's chosen vocation, his empire, his brilliant plans.

Against this, people staged the critical reading of Breaking Bad, the one that attempted to redeem Skyler's lost honor and cast Walt into the flames of hell once and for all for having been an empty, soulless husk all along. And this notion can be so compelling: Did not Walt immediately blackmail Jesse into cooking meth with him, thus inevitably dooming him to enslavement in the Neo-Nazis' mini-Mittelbau-Dora? Did he not immediately show his innate capacity for murder by gassing Emilio and choking Krazy-8? Is he not solely responsible for the death of 167 people in the crash of Wayfarer 515? Surely, Walt is full of shit about what really happened between him and Gretchen, too.

There is, to be extremely clear, no concept of causality within which Walt does not have at least some responsibility for these things. Obviously. And even if Walt had only cooked one batch of meth, sold the recipe and washed his hands of this entire debacle at the first opportunity, he'd probably still be, in some sense, on the hook for an overdose or some amount of drug-related crime. Legality does not perfectly overlap with morality (obviously), but I will point out that We, the People, through The Law, do recognize a difference between murder and manslaughter, between killing in cold blood, killing in self-defense, crimes of passion, deaths induced inadvertently and, of course, preventable deaths not prevented. You have a duty to rescue, but not answering the call of duty is not the same as pulling the trigger yourself. It's a spectrum. It has to be. We'd all be guilty otherwise: Some effective altruists calculate that saving a human life can cost as little as $3,400, after all.

However, this is not a defense of Walter White. Such a thing can not be mounted. Finding a way to get his fortune to his family, killing the Neo-Nazis, freeing Jesse and engineering the final collapse of his empire - that doesn't make him even steven with the universe. What it does is put a floor under the amount of harm that Walt has done to the world, the people around him and his immortal soul. I get the impression that people don't find that sort of thing as meaningful as they once might have. Harm reduction? No, thank you, I'm waiting for the revolution. Any day now.

Did you notice that Walt finally tells Skyler and Jesse what they wanted, needed to hear all along, hands them Get Out Of Jail Free cards but compels Elliott and Gretchen through fear? They're the only characters in Felina who Walt does not make amends with. Even Skinny Pete and Badger get paid extra. It's now common sense to believe "I did it for me" and "I want this" are perhaps the first true things Walt has said in a long time, so transcendently true that they become the final word on the show's events, so, since we're supposed to take him by his word again, does that mean that the Schwartzes really are guilty since they don't receive an apology? But if they are, Walt actually was wronged to the tune of billions, and if he was, then not accepting alms is not a stupid, prideful act, but …

The problem with the "he's the devil" - Jesse's words, not mine - view of Walt is that it flattens his character arc. Without that, BB becomes a show about an evil man getting away with it until he can no longer. I understand that the creators and The Culture™️ felt the need to overcorrect on the idol worship and to make sure that people "get it", but this doesn't strike me as much of an improvement. The ambiguity drives the show at least as much as the plot does. Without inviting the audience to tell itself that, "well, if I was in these circumstances, I, too, might …", there's no investment, only suffering. I also don't think it makes sense given that Gilligan, Gould et al. went on to make an entire second show about the unintended consequences of our actions.

Jimmy and Walt fundamentally have a very similar character arc, right? At the start of their respective shows, their lives are basically over, failed. Walt's about to die unfulfilled, leaving his family a mountain of debt. Jimmy wasted his youth scamming and partying, but got himself an entire second chance … only to end up practising law for nobody from the back of a nail salon. Through a mixture of wits, luck and very flexible morals, they manage to make something of themselves after all, but, bzzt, wrong answer, fucko, now you've lived long enough to become the villain. The bill is coming due. Unless you believe in the afterlife, Walt at least checks himself out, but Jimmy not only has to dull-ly live in Omaha, Nebraska, he's still looking over his shoulder for the Feds, Lalo and Chuck's ghost despite over 1,000 kilometers of physical distance.

Yet, Jimmy McGill gets to be the sad clown while Walter White needs to be torn down. But, I hear myself asking, isn't that because Jimmy makes amends, buries Saul Goodman for good in that dinky Albuquerque courtroom and fesses up to his responsibility for Walter White's drug empire and Chuck's death? Yeah, maybe. There are, after all, unbroken chains of events here. But if that actually meaningfully informs your concept of causality, then, really, every bad thing that ever happened is downstream from the first animals deciding to turn their back on our mother, the sea, 400 million years ago.

Jimmy does a good deed in that room - he turns himself into a sin-eater for Walt and Jesse, who are not present to be judged. Nothing about the sentence-minimizing story Saul Goodman tells about his participation in Walt's Empire is objectively incorrect, but for Jimmy's character growth, it's necessary for him to learn to accept guilt, even when there isn't any. Are there any other things we can load onto the shoulders of Saint James, Our Lord of Sorrows? I got the impression that Chuck implicitly blamed Jimmy for their mother's death, he explicitly blamed Jimmy for their father's - why not take him at his word for those, while we're at it?

Howard wasn't wrong to blame himself for Chuck's death - was it really necessary to force Chuck out of HHM? Maybe the firm could have eaten the higher malpractice insurance premiums for a while. Maybe Chuck's lawsuit against the insurer wasn't quite as quixotic as it first appeared. Yeah, Jimmy made Chuck look pretty bad at the bar association hearing, but he really was on the mend in spite of it, and, again, Howard Hamlin of all people should know better than to confuse the result of a legal procedure for an absolute truth. Isn't it a problem that, in the world of New Mexico law, one slip-up invalidates a storied lifetime of service? Chuck was as decorated as they come, and it bought him not one ounce of credit. Is this supposed to be karma? Jimmy being his brother barely earns him any plaudits with Chuck either, after all.

Chuck, for that matter, could have let himself be talked down, could have accepted retirement, could have kept going to therapy and written that book. His therapist, for that matter, could have understood the sudden session cancellation as a sign of a mental health crisis, given that she had previously warned Chuck not to overestimate his own progress. Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan: Gilligan and Gould just kind of decide that, no, none of those things are real, what is real is that Jimmy McGill personally marched into Chuck's home and lit him on fire and only by letting himself be nailed to the cross for that can he be redeemed and win Kim back. Martyrs get all the chicks. Wait, how did BB end again?

I fear that we accept this, demand this, because it flatters the moral instincts of the caveman within: Punishment is good, Grug gets a club to the back of the head for stealing berries, all is right with the world. It's as Hank said: You want to be a man, Walt? Then go to jail and make your family paupers as God intended. Avoiding guilt and responsibility? That's for females. Indeed, Hank pulls strings so that Marie never faces consequences for being a habitual criminal. Mostly, the reason why she enjoys moral high ground vis-à-vis Skyler and Saul is that she lacks the aptitude and constantly gets caught criming: She's morally lucky, as the philosophers say.

The manichean view collapses not just character arcs; it makes it basically impossible to talk about anything that happens in these shows. Consider that Walt was on the money when he predicted in Phoenix that if he gave Jesse his money, he'd be dead inside of a week. Jesse was, in fact, not sober in that classroom and Jane died, would have died, with or without Walt walking in, that very night. Her death allegedly causes the planes to crash into each other, so who we assign blame to in this situation carries a bunch of weight: Since he doesn't know better until Walt tells him in Ozymandias, Jesse blames himself for it. He's not fair on himself for doing so, either. Jane's father blames himself and, yeah, maybe he should not have let himself be hypnotized by his girl's puppy eyes. Walt knows he's guilty, that's why he spins up a bunch of exculpatory fictions about outdated air traffic control software and worse disasters and the indomitability of the human spirit. But those are perfectly acceptable explanations when an engineer asks "how do we prevent future air collisions?" - in the wake of a disaster, you attempt to make the affected system less prone to being affected by human caprice. We'll never get to zero risk, but getting closer is our duty.

Concurrent with the Heisenberg-as-idol view of BB was the joke that the entire plot could have been prevented if the United States had a better health care system, that this simply would not have happened in even just Canada. You don't hear that one so much anymore. It might not get the nuances 100% right, but at least it's actionable. American health care can be improved. Hell, even feminist "toxic masculinity!" narratives have the advantage of implying that maybe a future generation of men won't define itself through their ability to a) provide and b) control anymore. But if this is all down to Walt just being evil, there's nothing to be done. Coincidentally, this is the core of Chuck's world view, later adopted by Howard. Jimmy and Kim were "born that way": "soulless".

Of course, pursuing this idea led Chuck to self-immolate. He internalized the notion of the immutability of people so hard that he concluded that the only way he can truly be free of the pain that filled the holes where his marriage and his family once were is to burn himself alive. And needing to rub Jimmy and Kim's face in this drunken discovery is what led Howard to being buried beneath the Superlab™️. I take this as a sign that Gilligan and Gould do not actually want you to believe that.

And what of Mike? If there's one man perhaps even more guilty than Walter White in the Gilliverse, it's Michael Ehrmantraut. Mike avenged his son's death himself and in so doing deprived a Police Department of a much needed opportunity to improve itself as an institution. This task is left, instead, to the dubious force of generational turnover. Walt turning Hector into a willing suicide bomber to take out Gus with zero collateral damage is one of the things Hank whacks him over the head with in his garage, but Mike gets a pass because, well, we're all corrupt here, lol. The young 'uns will figure it out. The young 'uns probably knelt on somebody's neck at one point or another, but at least they don't take bribes, right?

On a sidenote - BB was lucky to air in a timeframe where it did not have to deal with this, but by the time BCS aired, the "oorah!" view of the DEA, on which the perception of Hank and Gomez hinges, aged. Way back in A No Rough Stuff Type Deal, Hank and Walt have this poolside exchange about drug legalisation and the arc of justice, if you will, definitely bent towards Walt as some States and countries actually went and did decriminalize. The, capital letters, War on Drugs, as Hank waged it, standing on that wall, as Chuck pictured himself, has, at best, nothing to show and, at worst, might actually produce and help all sorts of Walter Whites.

Anyway, Mike, right? After shooting Hoffman and Fensky, Mike becomes a small-time criminal. He gets a civilian killed trying to fuck with Hector. You have to hand it to the writers - this totally unforeseeable, inadvertent death goes on Mike's conscience the same way the plane crash goes on Walt's, so, points for consistency. After that, he becomes a big-time criminal. Jimmy thinks he built Walt's Empire? Well, Mike built two. The Superlab? Never gets finished without Mike keeping the Germans in line. Gus would have gotten killed by Lalo without Mike organizing security. He almost gets killed even with, after all. Without Gus or the lab, Blue Sky peaks as an ABQ curiosity. And even though he really wanted to leave Walt and Jesse to rot in the desert, Mike relents and makes one last deal with the devil to get his guys paid and …

Mike wants to provide. In this, he's like Walt, and they match the haircut and the body count. The circumstances are equal here, so I take it that the reason why we love pop-pop and hate Walt is that Mike has a much better rapport with, well, Kaylee and Stacey than Walt does with Flynn and Skyler, first and foremost. Mike is more likable in general, of course, a more well-rounded person. Mike acts tough and he can be tough, but on a day-to-day basis, he's a big softie. Sure, he'll give back the parking company's jacket. He tips well. He brings his subordinates coffee and makes sure they've eaten. He goes above and beyond to make sure that his guys get paid. Not just so they keep silent, but because they have families that depend on them and it's the right thing to do. Mike is the best bad guy you can hope for. But he is very much a bad guy.

When BB was still on people's minds, it was fashionable to ask what the moment when Walt became Heisenberg was. The antithesis to this question was to reject the premise and claim Walt was always Heisenberg. It has been years, one would expect a synthesis to have developed by now, but not so. We're stuck on "anti". And it was always the wrong question. BCS' creators received that signal and structured that show to provoke you into asking when Jimmy would become Saul. And the answer is pretty obviously that, for most of the show's runtime, Jimmy and Saul take turns. Saul is a persona, a mask, a performance. It's Jimmy for the seniors, but Saul for criminals. Saul takes hits that Jimmy can't bear, from Howard, from Walt, from his own conscience. Jimmy came up with the pre-paid phone hustle - but it's Saul that terrorizes the street thugs into submission. And Saul satisfies Kim in ways Jimmy fears he could not. Heisenberg works the same way. Both Walt and Jimmy eventually become the mask, but the masks are not the totalities of their beings.

They're our - yeah, I'm including you, too - capacities for bad behavior. Not to be too dramatic about it, but I'd personally find it pretty arrogant of myself to say with any degree of certainty that, given circumstances, ability and opportunity, I'd be a better human being than Walt or Jimmy. I think it keeps me grounded to remind myself, from time to time that; everyone has the capacity for evil within them, dipshit, it came free with your sapience. Ordinary men, ordinary organisations. In writing Walt off as irredeemably evil, we might seek to reassure ourselves - couldn't be me. I'm built different. I would have gone to my knees in front of my ex and the man that she married instead of me, even though he leapt off the pages of the Big Book of British Smiles. I'll send my wife back to work while pregnant, I'll send my son to work while disabled, I'll take money from my brother-in-law with no chance of ever repaying him and from random strangers who I know are pretty pressed themselves. I'll gladly demonstrate to myself, my family and the world that you can do everything right and still have your life ruined by a couple quirky coincidences. No matter how bad it gets, I'll just keep taking it.

Are you sure?

#soggy watches

Soggy reads: Ball, James - The Other Pandemic

Subtitle: How QAnon Contaminated the World

If nothing else, what this book accomplishes is a fair, short history of how the center of gravity on 4chan shifted from /b/ via /v/ to /pol/, with disastrous consequences not just for this one website but the entire world (that's the tl;dr, you could close this tab now if you wanted to).

I'm not particularly in the habit of making excuses for the old 4chan - the 4chan of the "POOL'S CLOSED DUE TO AIDS" that I first visited in 2006 (so it was already not that much of a secret club then) - but I do believe that this is and was a meaningful distinction.

At the very least, that second, final step the 'community' took over Depression Quest (2013) basically doomed every last nook and cranny of the website for good. The other day, in thinking about Grand Strategy™️ games' impact on the world, I visited the relevant thread(s) on /vg/ for the first time in many years and found that a turnaround remains elusive and 4chan is still basically just a place where you trade slurs until the thread dies. Hooray for the repoliticization of society.

Tumblr has the distinction of being the place on which the above observation was made, to say that it was "startlingly accurate" would be to bury the lede and then some. Some people go so far as to say something along the lines of "Gamergate walked so Trump could run" and while I think that overstates it a little bit, it's not by that much.

Like I said, 4chan definitionally already wasn't a secret club in 2006 anymore, but by 2015 it was in the top x-hundred of most visited websites on the planet and certainly in the United States. The IRL/URL distinction has never struck me as particularly meaningful, so while Trump did not win the 2016 election due to "meme magic", I'm confident that it had a positive, non-zero influence.

The Other Pandemic, then, basically goes a step further and contextualizes 4chan as the metaphorical and literal incubator for what would later become QAnon. It then traces QAnon's steps into the White House, onto the steps of the U.S. Capitol and Germany's Reichstag and also points out that while Q is now silent and the hard core of the idea of QAnon to the extent that one ever existed is now practically defunct, the assumptions that underpinned it and informed it and the offshoots it spawned are all very well and alive.

Even worse, while the concurrent real life pandemic bequeathed immunity and public health knowledge upon us, the other pandemic, well, did not. We're as naked in the face of - what do you even call this sort of thing? - überviral auto-mass-disinforming cults as we were six years ago, or 13 years ago if you take Ball's point that, really, this all started when Zoë Quinn made a charming little gamelet about what depression actually feels like on a day-to-day basis.

It's my subjective impression that once a cult starts it does not, barring the most extreme of organized violence, probably can not, end so much as it that peters out onto a size manageable for the society, so it couldn't really have gone any other way. We could, arguably should, have vaporized Ron Watkins, but it wouldn't have made a difference. It's in the realm of Murdering Baby Hitler now.

Therefore, a fat chunk of the society, any society, now goes about its daily business while believing on some level that it's all in service to a globe- and history-spanning, baby-sacrificing cult and perhaps worse yet, this very dumb idea served as a gateway drug to a whole bundle of adjacent, related, similar and in some cases even dumber ideas. This makes it difficult not to want to become a kind of hermit.

Basically everybody now has to contend with knowing someone who is, say, a chemtrail or a 5G truther or at least knows someone who knows someone who is. I'm not sure who coined the expression "Medieval Peasant Brain" to describe this condition but it strikes me as apt enough to be serviceable. Mind you, I'm pretty unsympathetic to recent attempts to make the Middle Ages look more attractive (including intellectually) again, I'm an unreconstructed "HOLE LEFT BY THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES" kind of guy.

Ball makes a valiant attempt to give this story a silver lining in the later chapters by pointing in the direction of a future digital public health and deradicalisation agenda. I might have said as much before but I am pretty unconfident about attempts of the society to reform itself in the face of a bloc of people anywhere between 20-40% of its members big that actively refuses to let itself be reformed, not because that would cost it a little money or be a little annoying but because the reforms are an existential threat to their entire ego, personality, social circle and Weltanschauung.

We might have better luck sending latter-day colonnes infernales through East Germany and the Deep South, but I'm literate enough yet to know that those didn't really solve the problem of ... Modern Peasant Brain so much as they made it susceptible to being negotiated down to merely getting a pretty sweet opt-out from, you know, the laws of the society for 20 years. So we might have to temper our expectations for everything a wee bit.

#soggy reads #non fiction #english

Soggy Plays: Ace Combat 3 "Electrosphere"

That's fine, I like being totally disoriented, actually

Ace Combat 8 "Wings of Theve" has been announced, so I've been replaying the series (+ Project Wingman, eventually). Some people in the community seem to believe that Project Aces will take the opportunity to decisively recanonize Electrosphere, and I never played it before, so I thought I'd tack it on. It was weird. I have thoughts.

Electrosphere was released in Japan in May 1999. Localisation was apparently impossible on the amount of time and money allotted. That's understandable: Despite having a whopping 52 missions, the game clocks in at a mere two hours of flight time and at least twice that runtime in cutscenes of every kind. It's not the wordiest game in the series by any stretch of the imagination, but it probably is the one where the gameplay-to-story ratio feels the most off. Resultingly, Electrosphere arguably mostly stands or falls on the strength of the concepts and ideas it embodies.

As such, the rest of the world got an "international" version which, as far as I can tell without playing it, is kind of like the one-cour anime adaptation of an ongoing manga in that it totally ran roughshod over the story to ship something, anything, that has the name on it.

In case you're not familiar, Ace Combat is not a flight sim, but, as Electrosphere's box tells us, a "3-Dimensional Dramatic Flight Shooting Game". Coincidentally, "ドラマティックフライトシューティング" is the terminology AC8's spec sheet uses to describe the genre, which may have started the kind of crowdsourced, speculative ARG on which people base the belief that AC8 will be a sort of Electrosphere prequel. Basically, it's as if you made a tonally sincere adaptation of the Top Gun movies. It's air combat divorced of reality's physical, technical and political constraints.

Set in the, at the time of development (about 1997-1999) distant future of 2040, Electrosphere tells the story of a war between the two megacorporations dominating the fictional continent of Usea: General Resources and Neucom. You play a pilot of the New United Nations' Universal Peace Enforcement Organisation, caught in the crossfire.

Except, it doesn't, really. The Intercorporate War is set dressing. When all is said and done, you are an AI programmed by a sad computer scientist to simulate whether the war can be used to kill precisely one man: Another pilot who has cucked your creator out of his gf. Only that that pilot has been killed a few years ago, just after his mind was digitized. He lived on, online, in the eponymous Electrosphere, and he hates it.

The fact that this is, at its core, a very tiny, personal story has not kept people from being fascinated with the set dressing. Me, I think it has mostly aged pretty poorly. Not aesthetically - we're probably due for some kind of 90s revival - but textually. We have been, for a little while, closer to 2040 than to the turn of the millenium (today in "sentences that make me feel old"), so it's a decent time to take stock of how the well of ideas that Electrosphere and its classmates were drawing from aged.

Take, for instance, the notion of the United Nations as a superpower. With this idea, Electrosphere stands next to 1995's Neon Genesis Evangelion (NERV is a U.N. agency), 1999's Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (the colony ship Unity is a project under the aegis of the U.N. and it is one of the playable factions) or 2000's Deus Ex (the U.N. is a government-of-governments with direct control over a global war on terror).

If you're familiar with all of these, you might point out that in all of them, the U.N. is nominally in charge, but in reality, it's always the plaything of a shadowy cabal pulling the strings like SEELE or the Illuminati or Majestic 12. And Electrosphere is no exception. Usea's nation-states are so vestigial that even by their powers combined, they can not stand up to even one of the megacorporations, much less both of them. Their role is simply to be a little pendulum that swings back and forth, preventing either side from becoming totally dominant.

This has aged pretty poorly. It made sense at the time of writing to assume that, with the Cold War over and the fundamental U.S.-Russia divide thus resolved, the U.N., from the Security Council down, would assume a robust and productive role in world affairs. In so doing it would gradually accumulate more responsibilites and inch humanity closer and closer to world government. Hurrah for multilateralism! It is in this context that Germany and Japan made it the white whale of their long-term foreign policies to join the ranks of the permanent members of the Security Council, that is to say, one of the members with the Veto - a great power in all but name.

Suffice it to say, none of that happened. The Bush administration fistfucked multilateralism in general and the responsibility to protect in particular with the 2003 Iraq War and the Security Council quickly returned to its original form; a forum where the Russians tell the Americans what they cannot have and the Americans tell the Russians (and, increasingly, the Chinese) what they cannot have and, as the meme goes, millions must die! as a result.

The nation-state stubbornly refuses to give way to the World Republic, it also stubbornly refuses to give way to Sovereignity, Incorporated. Corporate sovereignity is and is likely to remain an intellectual condominium of the cyberpunk aesthetic, Nick Land and a handful of Silicon Valley zillionaires who believe that special economic zones are the One Weird Trick that will allow them to be pedophilic slaveholders in peace and perpetuity.

It may not feel that way because it is the slopulist impulse to simply state that corporations are more powerful than the government, but even if they are, they are of one mind that they don't actually want to take center stage when it comes to the grubby business of governance. Companies are A-OK taking over operational, day-to-day responsibility for certain downstream functions of government like privatized prisons and obviously they lobby in their enlightened self-interest but they do not seek to become the government, issue citizenships, enumerate rights and duties, raise taxes, yada yada yada. Meanwhile, some of the largest corporations on the planet are state-owned enterprises, particularly Chinese ones, but also Saudi-Aramco.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Ace Combat as a franchise treated Electrosphere as a one-off in this regard and has, starting with Shattered Skies, instead told stories about distinctly international wars, even if those are often stated to have their roots in economic dislocation. From AC4 onward, most every problem on Strangereal, Ace Combat's fictional Earth equivalent, can be traced back to the hurt feelings of the Germans Belkans and/or to an asteroid impact. Sometimes both. Since Usea has been downstream of "both" a lot of the time, it's not entirely implausible that its nation-states might eventually buckle under the strain of almost perpetual warfare, but, having retreated from the corporatocratic theme since 1999, none of the groundwork for that shift has been laid in the meantime. Electrosphere's symbols have served exclusively as easter eggs.

And that makes sense considering Skies Unknown probably sold an order of magnitude better than Electrosphere simply on account of the market being bigger 20 years later. To be able to even play the Japanese version of Electrosphere, you must be aware of it, aware that it can be emulated, aware that there are translation patches ... and you lose people at every layer. For most fans of the franchise, it might be nothing more than something fun to read about on a wiki or TVTropes.

In 1999, it was still fashionable to think of the internet as terra incognita, as a seperate, mostly uncharted, fascinating world. Even the term had not really caught on yet. The eponymous Electrosphere is, make no mistake, an internet, and it was correctly prognosticated that by 2040, the entire society would run on it, such that, if it went down, you would not be able to as much as use an ATM. Serial Experiments Lain aired in 1998, as you probably know, it called its virtual realm The Wired. Only a fifth of Japan was estimated to be online at the time. Among G8 countries, that put it solidly in the middle of the pack. The .com bubble had not yet burst. eBay, Amazon and Paypal were in their infancies, social media was but a glimmer in the eyes of Lowtax, moot and Tom from MySpace.

This has all thoroughly fallen on our feet in the last quarter century. We're internet-fatigued. Promises of a digital global village, a cyber-Library of Alexandria, of breakneck gains in economic productivity have not been fulfilled. On the other hand, externalities have been many and heavy. The apps destroyed concepts like privacy, literacy and sexuality, ChatGPT is about to push the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment to 90% and you can't even have a wank to distract yourself from the impending end of the world because they're all rapidly locking themselves down because the Visa Corporation fears Karen from Iowa and her Evangelical congregration more than God itself.

Sicko.

Consider Cynthia here. Cynthia is a genuine transhumanist: She actually believes that the next logical step in human evolution is to be sublimated into the Electrosphere, shed the flesh and live forever. Our antagonist victim Dision, who was sublimated and fucking hates it, exploits this belief to recruit Cynthia into his personal revenge fantasy and her younger sister just kind of thinks it's stupid and dangerous because, but Cynthia is undeterred by any of this.

I'm going to postulate that Cynthias once existed in real life and that they no longer do. Remember Eva, SMAC and Deus Ex? Probably not coincidentally, all of them see Transcendence as one potential future, philosophical outcome. Third Impact, merging with the Planetmind, J.C. Denton becoming the eponymous deus ex machina - this idea was in the air in the 90s, and now it's not. Transhumanism lives on, but as a bio- rather than a cyber-punk notion, less Deus Ex, more Resident Evil. Essentially, trans people, "biohackers" and Bryan Johnson, he of the measured nocturnal penile tumescence, carry the banner now. And they don't carry it into the mindmeld, they carry it into a fractal, balkanized superindividuality. I'm not going to pass judgement about whether this is better or worse, but it is undeniably different.

You would, after all, have to be kind of crazy to be genuinely excited about the internet in the same way people were in the 1990s, and even more crazy to want to physically live on its servers. We exchanged Geocities, Webrings and phpBB forums with the 'For You' Page. Logging into anything is a chore. Everything is behind a paywall. Sharing a kind word with a friend is increasingly becoming technologically and socially impossible, but at least I can place a 72-leg parlay on the outcome of every ongoing drone strike on the frontlines in Ukraine, except I'm going to get rugpulled by Polymarket when I win.

Electrosphere is a past idea of dystopia that was completely overtaken by Actually Existing Dystopia. This is normal. The important thing is to not get stuck. There's a tendency in people to treat dystopian fiction as prophecy, as a religious text: When the prophecy fails, you retrofit your interpretation of the prophecy to fit the changing circumstances. Sorry, I got the date wrong, JFK Jr. will materialize on the Grassy Knoll in a month, actually, ha ha. I don't know if Project Aces feels obliged to its oldschool fans and to the people who worked on Electrosphere. What I do know is that I think it'd be a bad idea to shackle the franchise to this niche, obsolete little product from a past age.

#soggy plays #ace combat

Soggy reads: Küpeli, Ismail - Grey Wolves (2025)

Original German title: "Graue Wölfe - Türkischer Rechtsextremismus in Deutschland"

Contrary to its full title, this booklet only dedicates the last 26 of its 112 pages to Turkish right-wing extremism in Germany. The previous 86 pages are what strikes me as a passable introduction to the phenomenon that is Turkish nationalism in general.

It is sometimes thought of the Germans that they are an inherently fascistic nationality. That the peculiar way of their coming-about, from the moment the Grande Armée left its training grounds on the coast of the English Channel and marched east to liquidate the Holy Roman Empire at Austerlitz, Jena and Auerstadt, unavoidably led them straight to Auschwitz.

I don't think that's a pleasant thought. I like to think that I would not find it pleasant even if I was not German. It necessarily divides the world into peoples who deserve self-determination and those who can't be trusted with it and must be Morgenthau Plan´d. It's a pretty common thought, these days, at times applied, yes, to the Germans, but also the Palestinians and the Israelis and the Taiwanese or pretty much everybody between Germany and Russia.

Seeing as we can't seem to stop thinking about one another this way, I'm going to, tongue in cheek-ily, throw my hat in the ring and ask: Was Turkey a mistake? Not "the Turks" per se: I have no problem with the Ottoman Empire. Honestly, the dissolution of the defeated multinational empires after the First World War always struck me as a bit of a mistake. Given that virtually every product of that dissolution quickly descended back either into an authoritarianism of its own making or yet another bout of foreign domination, just with a different master, arguably poorer than it previously had been, it's difficult to see the upside. Sure, national sovereignity has a value of its own, but my question's always been: Sovereign to do what, exactly?

In Turkey's case, the answer is: Sovereign to immediately engage in, like, three or four separate, parallel genocides that basically have not really ended yet; on the Armenians, the Greeks, the Jews, the Kurds ... Like, yeah, I could argue that this is unfortunately what nation-building looks like in practice - bad news for the Hereditary Reactionary-ism Enjoyers among us: That means none of us deserve sovereignity! - and that Atatürk is like an Anatolian Robespierre who put down the imperial dead-enders, the foreign invading armies and their fifth columns with the zeal and brutality required for such a task.

Or, I could tell you (or let Küpeli tell you) that, having accomplished this considerable feat, him and his then turned around and indoctrinated their populace in the twin beliefs that they are the progenitors of all civilization and their language is the progenitor of all languages ever spoken, claims next to which the Cult of the Supreme Being looks like the modest proposal of a humble compromise between unreconciled catholics and rabid atheists.

Hell, if you ask me, this stuff is megalomaniacal even compared to the wacky Ancient Aryans of Tibet and the South Pole shit that Himmler and the Ahnenerbe got up to like a decade down the line. Also probably more damaging considering even other Nazis seem to have noticed that Heinrich was kind of nuts and his thought disappeared back into total obscurity, now appreciated only by Hearts of Iron IV modders, when he and it was defeated by Rokossovsky et al. in early 1945, whereas Turkish officialdom has never really recanted on any one aspect of its own theories and practices of ethnogenesis.

And that's basically all I could think of while reading this. People are acutely aware of the organisational and personnel continuities in the former Axis powers after WW2, at least this side of the former Iron Curtain: Heusinger, Gehlen, Gladio, Kishi and Abe, stop me any time, but in some small sense, this constitutes a success, because you do know and these have become teachable moments, perhaps sometimes to our detriment - deba'athification, anyone? - whereas a great many genocidaire also-rans of the 20th century continue to have adherents who can operate more or less openly.

#soggy reads #non-fiction #german

Soggy reads: Jäger, Anton - Hyperpolitics (2023) & Crouch, Colin - Post-democracy - After the Crisis (2020)

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a thumb tapping on a phone screen— forever.

I accidentally hit saturation point on these goddamn 'crisis of democracy' type pamphlets. Read one of them and you've read all of them. Hyperpolitics mostly slid off my brain pan already, except for two things;

Jäger sketched out this thing where we once had a state of affairs called "politics". Then that state of affairs ended, so we were in "post-politics". Now, post-politics is over and we are in "hyperpolitics" - formal participation is as high as it used to be in "politics" but the observed rate of political change is approaching zero. At any rate, this forces me to engage in absurd constructions like ...

Jäger describes the pre-post-political 'before' state by using the example of the milieu of the post-war parti communiste français, but honesty compels me to tell you that I don't think it sounds terribly appealing. In the beautiful corporatist-communitarian world of the trente glorieuse, what happened if I didn't feel at home in the "countervailing power of unions and parties of the working class with its own savings banks, health and pension funds, newspapers, institutions of adult education, workers' clubs, libraries, choirs, brass ensembles ..."¹ - I'm going to stop him right here.

What happens if I don't fit into any of these? Jäger does point out that this milieu was not what exactly what you would consider socially progressive in this day and age - if you were a homosexual Frenchman in the 1970s, a hefty dose of homophobia was apparently just the price to pay for enjoying the collective countervailing power.

If you were to transplant this state of affairs into the 21st century, you might land on something closely resembling centrist, Blue Labour or conservative social democracy type thought - the case of Denmark comes to mind - in which people have to subjugate their silly little identitarian struggles to the (re-)construction of unionism, worker power, the welfare state, a functioning tax system et cetera.

You'd land on what, in my impression, is the prevailing strategy of center-left parties in the developed world; to ignore a large, actually-existing working class of delivery drivers and service workers and just keep running after an aging, shrinking pool of steel and coal workers, people whose job titles and descriptions invoke the industrial labor of yore, even as their workplaces have been long been disaggregated and suburbanized, even as the actual work has become more and more technical and even as the actual workers are drifting right, far right and further right both culturally and economically, despite them being consistently pandered to for decades.

This approach doesn't strike me to have done terribly well for itself, but I'm not a consultant, so what do I know. Do we have any alternative approaches?

", et unita maneat !"

Post-democracy probably hit a little harder at the original time of writing (2000? 2004? 2005?). The, let's say, 20th anniversary remaster shows its age in the sense that; yeah, grandpa, we've heard this all before. What do we do about it? I get the vibe that Crouch is pretty skeptical about our ability to simply reproduce the communitarian utopiae past. The problem is that that leaves him on the hook for a genuine utopia. He, reasonably, refuses to offer one: We must continue to drill through the thick boards of gradual international cooperation and integration to tackle the big, global crises and democratize our institutions.

Yeah, thanks man, kinda figured that one out by myself. You and what army?

Here's the problem: These books are all aimed at relatively highly educated, concerned citoyens. They're preaching to the choir. If you pick one of these up, you're bound to already agree with what's inside. It's not because of you that things are the way they are. There's nothing more you can do to alleviate this state of affairs.

Going from a more- to a less-democratic form of society necessarily implies that The People™️ in some capacity decided to disempower themselves. Jäger just tells you, up front, that people stopped singing "the songs", reading "the novels, the philosophical treatises, the scientific journals, the polemics", they stopped voting for and looking onto the fingers of the "well secured local governments, temperance leagues", they stopped observing "their own customs, habits, their own style"¹ ...

Decline is a choice: Butskellism, dirigisme, Ordoliberalismus und die soziale Marktwirtschaft, desarrollo estabilizador - they weren't betrayed, they weren't conquered, they became victims of their own success. To lean on the tired Böckenförde-Diktum; developmental authoritarianism and social democracy live off prerequisites that they can not themselves guarantee. They were so successful at uplifting their objects that they succeeded themselves out of the majorities necessary for their maintenance. The children of the people who produced the Wirtschaftswunder asked "so, what did you do during the war?" and went on a long march through the institutions, cracked open the party-political landscape, dismantled the Volksparteien and gave just enough rights to the new social movements that we fell into the worst of all worlds: Not yet perfectly free, yet subject to self-reinforcing, reactionary backlash.

The sovereign decided that we must suffer, that he must suffer - look around you, is anybody happy with our current arranagement? Does the professional-managerial class strike you as particularly happy? - and he continues to decide that we must suffer. There are alternatives on offer, he doesn't want those. Thermostatic opinion rules: Americans voted for Trump and then became more pro-immigration because he's doing what he said he would. The British voted for Brexit and then became even more unhappy at the dysfunctionality of their state. Well, sweetie, the state was dysfunctional before accession. Its custodians knew that it was dysfunctional. They spent two decades looking for a way to make it functional other than joining the European Communities, and they failed. That's why they dragged you in. It was the last resort.

There is no understanding of causality. We've elevated conspiracy theories to the place where one might be. You can blame social media, you can blame Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok, but the fact of the matter is that people opened the bag that said dead dove inside and then stuffed it into their greedy little mouths.

That's what's pissing me off about these books now: Where is the ownership? They're all written in a populist stance: The Pure People™️ have been hoodwinked by this or that shadowy elite. It's the media wot did it, it's the bankers, the traders, talk radio hosts, opportunistic, immoral, corrupt politicans - but, Doctor, didn't you say they were embedded in a network of "special institutions"? Did not East Germans, too, enjoy over forty years of immersion in actually existing socialism? Should that not have left a mark, educated and uplifted the People, permanently?

It did. Call it revealed preference: It educated them to smash the state. They did that shit to themselves. And it's not going to get better until they're forced to admit, to themselves, that they did that shit to themselves. Going forward, any critique of our state of being must start from a critique of the Sovereign. None of this Brecht, "dissolve the people and elect another", ha-hee-ha-hee-ha, shit.

¹He's quoting one Gáspár Miklós Tamás in both cases.

#soggy reads #german #non-fiction

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