Racists and the racist idea

mircea_popescu in other news, pervyleague

Part of the numerous Blessings of Suckⁱ of postmodernism is a deluge of cultural artefacts that was purely inconceivable before we invented the electric shannonizerⁱⁱ that's sometimes also improperly called "computer". As a direct and directly unavoidable result, the space left for thought in between one production and the next is so deeply subunitary that limiting items to 140 words does not even grate.

Just like "photography", even in its "professional" senseⁱⁱⁱ has reduced to "make a bunch of snaps and sort them later" - later when ? Later is "taking ever more snaps, faster, more of them", not "switch modes to do something structurally different in that it's a lot harder than what you're doing now and you're not only not tooled for it, but actually your tools such as they are keep degrading through disuse". And so an immense thought debt keeps accumulating and accumulating, we'll make sense of these photographs later (at some point we even forgot what they were of or for, perhaps ?), we'll comment and wring out the bugs and even these days test this code later (at some point nobody's even using it anymore, perhaps). It goes on and on, unavoidably, unforgivingly. Notice that this paragraph starts with a "just as" which I'm not closing. I will never close it, which is to say I'm closing it "later". To be specific, I'm closing it five minutes after you've caught up with "contemporary culture". Aite ?

The coping strategies of they drowning in this uninvited, rigorously uninteresting and in the end meaningless sea of pompous nothings are interesting to the anthropologist, of course. One very narrowly particular such coping mechanism - the "caption" - is of particular interest to the cultural anthropologist examining the interaction between written and visual culture^iv. There are a number of uses of this strategy readily visible, of which in order the most widely seen are the "lolcat" and the "black power". The former is purely narcisiac impotence, and consists on affixing the simulated verbal dribble of the mentally retarded to pictures of neotenic animals, chiefly kittens. The latter is somewhat more interesting, and so we'll spend a little time discussing it here. As you might have intuited, the illustration above is culled from the available documentary material.^v

"Black power" captioning is a very interesting phenomena for a few reasons. One is that (like most pornography) it suffers from divergence, in that it chiefly depicts white females and black males while it is chiefly produced by white males, for the consumption of white males. This is very fundamentally cargocultism, similar to the discussion of "Jews" as imagined by people who never met any, or the discussion of the evils of "loose morals" by people who never had much sex &c.

Another is that the actual producers are very deeply ignorant of either the visual medium they cull for a basis or of the verbal medium they employ for "alterations". Specifically as to this point - pornography as a productive field^vi has, in its also desperate quest to make sense of fantasy, resorted to some very visible and not so subtle codification. It is thus trivial for the qualified observer to identify through cursory examination the "line" in which any given visual falls, and often identify the studio, the period and so on. Moreover, that qualification can be obtained by the intelligent observer cheaply and easily, it requires a few months spent methodically with source material, which means it's not even a full phd. The authors are however blessfully unaware of even the most basic conventions of their source medium, no matter how plainly apparent, and will consequently imply context or subtext that the image itself drastically and unequivocally invalidates.^vii

On the other point, of the verbal space... How to properly speak is, of course, an enduring preoccupation of human culture, arguably older and more well represented than pornography. Nevertheless the authors managed to remain blessfully ignorant of this vast array of human effort over millenia. As a result rank nonsense of all kinds and at all levels is gleefuly presented - such as for instance the naive claim that "X is a recessive gene and thus it will die out", more amply discussed in the #b-a logs recently, or statistics starkly contradictory of the intended point being presented^viii, or otherwise statements grossly ignorant of the situation in the field.

In this last line, the very often repeated proposition that the present day emigration from Africa towards Europe is indicative of some sort of "conquest". Even if you deliberately ignore the obvious point that the ~billion white people in Europe can not in any conceivable manner be demographically endangered by the ~billion black people in Africa^ix and even if you ignore the very obvious disadvantage of means, both civilisational and cultural, at the disposal of the supposed invaders, it still stands that the immigration is mostly the result of the demographic collapse of Africa itself!

This is the sad fact of that matter - at the rate things are going, should the Chinese decide to not provide demographic support for black Africans deliberately, the entire continent will disappear as a going concern within not that long a timeframe, leaving the US blacks and whatever tinier group manages to make it across the Mare Nostrum in some kind of leaky boat the only representatitives of a once... fascinating, or perhaps we should say fascinatingly sterile, human population.

So basically "black supremacy" captioning consists of images gratingly taken out of context, in a way that ridicules the producer, to which text is affixed that makes very little sense if any at all, and generally the sense it does make serves to enhance the involuntary humor. What could possibly drive this paradoxical if apparently paroxistic behaviour ?

This question has puzzled me for a while, but I am happy to announce that I have a theory! It goes like so :

• The racist idea is the proposition that one is not an individual, but merely a representative of a group. You see this at work when idiots "are happy" because "their team" won some sort of event. It has the benefits you'd expect - no longer need to figure out math, because we're already on the team that invented it in the first place! No longer need to take any sort of personal responsibility, "we did it for the team". That sort of thing.
• The racist does not in fact have the werewithal to renounce the racist idea, simply because it would require him to pay a huge pile of accumulated intellectual debt. Like you know, learn a fucking language, and things of that unpleasant nature. It is thus a very reasonable coping mechanism to invert the racist idea, rather than renounce it altogether! So, if "ra ra ra we're the greatest ever because we're in the right team" no longer cuts it, the solution will be "aww we're the lowest ever because we're on the losing team and this other [wholly imagined] team is sticking it to us through a mechanism we can't possibly control in any way!!!"^x much before it'll be "heck, I guess I gotta figure things out on my own now".

Which neatly explains why this thing is created by white males out of things they don't understand and consumed by white males undeterred by the sheer nonsensical nature of the affixation. It generates "anger", which is not wounded narcissism but mere frantic action to cover impotence, and it conveniently hides the actual problem into so many layers of obscure gunk, you actually need a few hours of actual expert meditation to even see through it - something they're certainly safe from ever encountering in their actual environment.

Win-win, as they say. I imagine it must really suck to be a malnourished immigrant from Syria (which is currently the majority), trying to escape a country ravaged by war while possessed of no 12 inch cock, no 100 meter sprinter physique (in no small part through the joint misfortune of not being 20 anymore and having been perpetually hungry throughout your childhood and puberty) and no terribly dominant personality.

Congrats to the winners!

1. Term of ars gratia artis. [↩]
2. As alf properly notices, the soviets also had a variant. It was primitive, in that it didn't include all the required components. At the base it would be "digital camera" + "WYSIWYG" processors (text and data) + internet, in the sense of "bootstrap web + social media". A rough approximation of this is the "Smartphone", which pointedly is not a computer. Nor is it a "platform" or a "revolution" or anything else. It's just an electric shannonizer for the subnormals. [↩]
3. The notion that there can exist "professional" photography in the age of point and click cameras is not unlike the idea that there can exist "professional code" or professional defecation. Get over it, everyone's doing it anyway.

   The "professional code" bit is controversial by the way. See the logs. [↩]

4. This is a term of art too, and there's a lot here I'm omitting for brevity. [↩]
5. One of the most informative sources available is perhaps swedishinterracial on tumblr, but of course there is no shortage of these, and none are really worth the mention. [↩]
6. It calls itself an "industry", of course, which is risible on the face, as there are no significant capital goods involved whatsoever, but is also illustrative of the meaning shift : they actually say "industry" because they believe that is the word that denotes any productive activity, and since their activity does in fact produce footage, it therefore follows...

   The LOC (line of code) nonsense approach to programming has resulted similarly in a wholly imagined "software industry", and similarly the bogus metrics of "engagement" and "web-*" have produced an "online advertising industry" that exists strictly in the minds of the participants, generally for as long as they're together at a con (which they call a con-ference, in spite of it being more related to a convention, where fans gather to gush over comic book heros than to an actual conference, where professionals meet to discuss actual observations of actual observable reality). [↩]

7. Such as by implying familial relations between well known, unrelated, mainstream models ; or by making specific claims as to pregnancy, paternity scl on top of random softcore images ; or through implying gender or power dynamics that are not merely unsupported by the actual image presented but outright contrary to its recognisable source and context etc etc ad nauseam & infinitum, whichever comes first. [↩]
8. Variously visible, because the captioneers clearly hated math throughout their existence. Perhaps the most egregious example was something about how 2.5% of all marriages in the US being "interracial" supposedly heralds some sort of demographic collapse of the white race. If you stop and ponder the numbers for a moment, that a ~70% majority and a ~12% minority intermarry at a rate of ~2.5% is the most plain banality, and if anything a very present danger of demographic annihilation for the minority in question. [↩]
9. The minority ~10% black population in the US has been relatively stable for two centuries now. The similarly minority gypsy population in Romania and Eastern Europe generally has been very stable over many centuries, and it even survived deliberate genocide attempts, carried out by both the nazi socialists and the soviet socialists without visible ill effect. The even tinier ~5% Hungarian minority in Romania has also been relatively stable (slowly dwindling, really - but geologically slowly).

   In point of fact demographic collapse occurs in connected communities that are well under 1% of the majority, which is relatively rare an instance. Very tiny minorities (such as say the Korean minority in the US) manage to retain demographic stability through the age old mechanisms such is attained and has always been attained, which is to say connectivity modulation. If you think about it - if the mechanisms proposed to "annihilate" a race actually worked, there'd not have been any races at any point in recorded history. In reality however the likeliness of any race (in the broad, billion-strong sense this term is commonly used these days) disappearing is pretty much nil, and in no case will it occur through simple fucking around. That latter proposition is an impossibility of the level of claiming water can be diluted into being the philosopher's stone. It apparently is also on about the same level of credibility, somehow, amusingly enough. [↩]

10. This is ever-present, under the guise of "feminism", which is to say making the white male not be the center of things anymore the situation is presented in the terms of "black males and white females are pushing through the 'soft genocide of the white race' and there's nothing to do about it". Like so :

    [↩]