Friday, October 31, 2014

Hallowe’en Horrors


Killer clowns ravage the countryside !


France on lockdown !!


Villagers flee !!!


Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Self-defeating ideas


Wonderful Wikipedia has a wonderful article about (wonderfully) the notion of ideas that, logically, self-destruct (but which may be popularly long-lived, nevertheless).  We polemicised against one of them -- eliminative materialism -- here.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-refuting_idea

To this propositional or assertoric notion of a self-refuting idea, we may add the illocutionary or pragmatic idea of a self-immolating statement.   As: 

The current issue of The New Yorker has a worthwhile demurral by John Lanchester:

Shut Up and Eat:
Down with foodism

Hear, hear.  Only -- that mini-essay appears (ausgerechnet) in the annual semi-bloated “Food Issue”, which I hurled into the trash-basket, almost unread.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Eternity in Autumn


seest thou
(ambergolden)
something whirling
from off the tree?

(!)

‘Tis Larry:
Larry the Leaf.

Larry is in the grip of gravity,
whirling to earth.

flashing now grandly
in the twilit  sunlight
dizzily dreaming
of when he was green …

           ~

Soon,  he(it) settles,
on/(in) a bank of    softly-fallen, softened
(Lisa & Lennie & Lea  the Leaf)

melding to mulch
sans name  &  sans dream …
  ………


Rest in peace,  little leaflet  leaf:
rest in sweetsome /   dreamlesssleepy   / sleep ……….

Monday, October 27, 2014

La société du spectacle


The ever-more-crucial idea of the “Society of the Spectacle” -- which dates back to the Rome of panem et circenses, passing (in our time) through Guy Debord -- is now front-and-center  in much of what we see.
E.g. this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/27/in-bizarre-new-video-islamic-state-hostage-gives-tour-of-kobane/

(I am old, and tired, and cannot comment now;  but must seek my couch, and the arms of Somnus, yea the balm of Lethe,  ere I wake …)

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Acronym of the Day: HoGeSa


A word worth knowing:  HoGeSa (pronounced HO-gay-sah).  German for: 

    “Hooligans gegen Salafisten”

(hooligans against salafists).   And you say:  Wha- ? - ?

(1) Historical semantics

The word hooligan (possibly related to the Irish surname Hoolihan) was first attested in England in the late 19th century, referring initially to Irish rowdies.   It carried no ideological connotation.
The word then took a very strange detour into Russian, as Хулига́н.  For the Soviets, it functioned as a sort of defanged continuation of the ever-useful term Lumpenproletariat, which dates back to Marx.  Again, for the Soviets, it denoted no clear political current, but was still -- class-analysis being paramount in Marxism -- more or less eingestuft into a class-struggle worldview:  Lumpen and hooligans being the dregs who, logically, should fight alongside the proletariat, but who instead engage in pointless criminality.  (The very phenomenon rather jarred with the neatness of Marxist analysis, which overestimates the purely economic.)

Later, in England, from the ‘70s on, it took on a particular coloring, being associated especially with soccer rowdies, who got quite a reputation on the Continent for acting up, and were banned from some countries.  For some reason, this phenomenon was much more characteristic of England than of any of the other soccer-mad nations of the world;  to elucidate that fact might prove quite revealing.

And now, in our own day, the word pops up  borrowed once again into a foreign language, this time German, and still with a particular association with soccer (or, in European terms, football).  Colloquial abbreviation:  die Hools.

Now:  What is quite interesting  is that this German term, Hooligans, is a self-designation, not an exogenous pejorative epithet.
But: Why would any group do that?
Well, this is not the place to delve into the psychology thereof, but it’s a plucky thing to do, and many groups have done it.  Thus, Quakers, Tories, etc. etc. : the defiant adoption by an outgroup of the ingroup’s trashtalk.   The most recent (and rather close) analogy is the word behind the “N” in NWA (which, as a non-N, I am not allowed to write out).



~
Lesen Sie die Geschichte  spesenfrei !
~
(2) Morphology

For concision, I called HoGeSa an ‘acronym’, since that is a familiar word.  It is composed, though, not of initial letters, but of initial syllables.

Again, there is a Soviet parallel.   This sort of logopoeic confection was completely characteristic of the Russian of the time, e.g. Komsomol (roughly: COMmunist /SOviet/MOLodyets (youth).)
Somewhat similarly, in German, among the opponents of the Hooligans (who are perceived as right-wing) are the Antifa  -- those who oppose what in French are called the fachos (fascists).
Most famously:  the GeStaPo (Geheime Staatspolizei). 

Contemporary bureaucratic German  is likewise given to such things.  Thus:  LaGeSo (Landesamt fuer Gesundheit und Soziales), a virtual/vocalic palindrome of HoGeSa.



For those of my generation (for you young’uns: i.e. :  Old!  Fagedabouddit !!), these syllabic abbreviations (as Wiki calls them) have a certain relent louche,  owing to their association with the whole Proletkult/Agitprop deviations of the Soviet era.  (Twenny-thirdy-fordy-somethings:  Any idea what I’m talking about?  Never mind.)  But they have much to their credit, over against “acronyms” in the narrow, initial-letter sense. 
At the time, the issue was pronounciability.  With strict-acronyms, you never know:  FBI (letter by letter) vs. NASA (like a word).  Whereas now, in addition to that (still valid), there is the matter of cross-linguistic searchability.
Thus, strict-acronyms are often translated (FMI vs IMF;  ADN vs. DNA), which makes online string-search  perilous.  But if you confect what is obviously a word -- yet a word in no obvious language -- everyone will let it be, like a proper-name (“Washington”; “Napoleon”), which no-one would dream of “translating”.

From this strictly philological standpoint, we salute the “Hooligans” for their coinage:  HoGeSa.

(Note:  Granted, as a vocable, as a hoagie-of-syllables,  it is not especially attrayant.   Cf. Gröfaz.  Ah well.)


Gratuit !
Lisez le conte entier
~
~

So much for the linguistics.  Now we get down to brass tacks.

Today in Cologne, roughly five thousand “Hooligans” answered the call to demonstrate, against the IS-leaning Islamist extremists known broadly as Salafists.  Whence:  HoGeSa.   This led to fairly violent street-confrontations.



This very significant public demonstration has so far scarcely been reported outside of Germany:  and when so, curly and dumbed-down, simply referring to “hooligans and neo-Nazis” battling police -- apparently for no reason.


To undumb you back up, consider this:

(1) Recently in the streets of Hamburg:  400 Kurdish demonstrators were attacked by 400 IS-supporters.

(2) A cri de coeur, from the Lower Depths:


Notice that the speaker invites moderate Muslims to join with them.

The speaker also seems to allude to recent beheadings in Germany.  Whether that happened, I have no idea;  if it did, it was hushed up.  But certainly it is in the offing:

German hostages of Salafists in the Phillipines



~ Sigmund Freud  und  Sherlock Holmes: ~


(3)  Overview:

Rasantes Anwachsen der deutschen Salafisten-Szene
Die Behörden sehen sie als Sammelbecken für Kämpfer der Terrorgruppe Islamischer Staat und befürchten Stellvertreterkriege mit Kurden, Hooligans und Rechtsextremen.


The fact is, Germany has long been unwisely importing problems from abroad;  and now is too frightened to do anything about it.   Like the socialos in France,  the German authorities have been dithering;  it thus falls to the wretched of the earth, at last to roar in protest.



European background:



[Mise à jour, 28 oct 2014]
A parallel in Calais:
www.nzz.ch/international/ein-neonazi-profiliert-sich-1.18412750?extcid=Newsletter_28102014_Top-News_am_Morgen



[Update 9 December 2014]  And now HoGeSa is joined by two new syllabic acronyms: 
Pegida „patriotischen Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes“
Dügida, „Düsseldorfer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes“

Pronunciation of Pegida:  peh-GEE-da  (with hard "g" -- rhymes with "Uneeda").

http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/pegida-duegida-und-hogesa-die-unerwuenschten-retter-des-abendlandes/11093158.html


Update 13 Dec 2014]  Good heavens, and now this:  äRTeäS  (sic).

[Update 14 Dec 2014]  Oof, and now this (of all things):
    "Arschhuh"


[Update 5 January 2015] The latest re Pegida, in English:


As one might expect, the New York Times turns itself into pretzels trying to minimize the march, referring instead, early in the article, to the much smaller pro-immigration march in the liberal stronghold of Berlin (a few hundred), while claiming that “No figures were immediately available for the turnout in Dresden”.   (Somehow, the BBC was able to get these, stating: “A record 18,000 people turned out” -- and this, despite a chilly rain.)

The Times interviews no-one from Pegida or, indeed, from average Germans, but recur to the usual anti-Pegida crowd: “On Monday, business leaders had joined the swelling chorus against Pegida”  (well, they would, wouldn’t they;  they want a cheap workforce, importing a Reserve Army of the Unemployed to keep the unions in line).

The Times describes Pegida as “murky” -- a purely rhetorical flourish”, and quotes this remarkable dismissal of the marchers:

“For my taste,” Mr. Schneider wrote in the newspaper Die Welt, “the crowd was too white.”

Also, far too German!

For much better coverage, from a mainstream German source, try this:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/pegida-proteste-die-trotzigen-von-dresden-a-1011394.html



Another example of the lengths to which the bien-pensants will go, to sweep the popular upswell under the rug:

Pünktlich zum Beginn der Kögida-Demonstration um 18.30 Uhr wurde wie angekündigt die Außenbeleuchtung des Kölner Doms ausgeschaltet. Dompropst Norbert Feldhoff wollte verhindern, das eines der bekanntesten deutschen Wahrzeichen den Hintergrund der rechtspopulistischen Demonstration liefern würde.



[Update Monday, 12 January 2015]  And now Legida:

In Leipzig stellten sich am Abend rund 30.000 Menschen dem Aufmarsch des Pegida-Ablegers Legida entgegen.

Likewise Kagida (Kassel), Cegida (Chemnitz).

[Update 8 March 2015]  Another HoGeSa demo in Cologne.  The march monitors wore police-style jackets labeled, amusingly,  "HOOLIZEI"  (i.e., Hooligan Polizei).


[Update 20 March 2015]  The German mania for APO-related syllabic acronyms  proceeds apace.  The latest is Blockupy : from Block (as in Black Block) plus Occupy (Wall Street).

Here they are exercising their right to free speech


They turned out to the numbers of roughly ten thousand, in the staid old banking capital of Frankfurt-am-Main, breaking and burning and sending a hundred cops to the hospital.   Nothing done by Hogesa or Pegida or Legida or any of that, approaches that level of violence, but the bien-pensant press is much more muted in criticizing Blockupy.


[Update 26 July 2015]  And now this ungainly confection:
EnDgAmE : engagierte Demokraten gegen die Amerikanisierung Europas

[Update 23 Sept 2015]
They haven't gone away:

Rund 5000 Menschen haben sich nach Polizeiangaben in Erfurt an einer Demonstration gegen die Asylpolitik von Bundes- und Landesregierung beteiligt. Sie zogen am Mittwoch durch das Zentrum der Thüringer Landeshauptstadt bis zum zentralen Platz der Stadt, dem Anger.
http://www.welt.de/regionales/thueringen/article146781556/5000-Menschen-bei-Demonstration-gegen-Asylpolitik.html#disqus_thread

A reader comments:

Bei PEGIDA waren letzten Montag in Dresden nach meiner Überschlags-Zählung auf dem youtube-Video mehr als 15.000 Menschen dabei (die Polizei gibt offenbar keine offiziellen Zahlen mehr heraus).

Warum herrscht darüber totale Stille im Blätterwald?

Word of the day: psychosis


Well I recall, from several decades ago, when a friend explained to me the difference between a schlemiehl and a schlemassel:
   The schlemiehl is a klutz who is always spilling the coffee.
   The schlemassel is the one it usually gets spilled on.

In this spirit, we proceed to differentiate the neurotic from the psychotic, and indeed from the sociopath.

  Neurotic:  Think Woody Allen.
  Sociopath:  Think Hannibal Lector or the Joker.

And psychotic?  Well, it’s harder to think of a (non-sociopathic) cinematic representative.  For the psychotic has become quite unmoored from reality, the contents of the unconscious backflushing into the ego and cognitively disabling the patient.   Not an interesting subject for art.

Neurosis is the everyday lot of all of us, to some extent.  Sociopaths are a matter for the police.  And psychotics belong in an asylum.

~

Now, if that were all there were to it, I wouldn’t have bothered to post.  But there is a linguistic subtlety, which shades into something politically crucial. 

Headline in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/world/europe/in-french-port-city-calais-a-real-psychosis.html?ref=world

The reference is to the thousands of increasingly unruly illegal aliens, most from the Horn of Africa, who have collected in the tunnel- and ferry-town of Calais, on the English Channel.   A picturesque village has become a nightmare landscape. The problem has been building for years, and is swept under the rug by the socialo French government, paralyzed by political correctness.

Indeed the Times article pulls no punches, making clear how bad things have become.  (It even mentions the very touchy subject of African intruders raping Frenchwomen, which I had not seen mention of in the French press;  too hot to handle.)  But as so often happens in the NYTimes, the headline writer tries to spin things into bien-pensant correctitude.   For:  if the attitude of the French residents of Calais is a “psychosis”, then they are psychotic, delusional, and out of touch.  And the Eingdringlinge may be as sweet and innocent as the Gentle Giant, Saint Skittles, the Sandwich Man, or suchlike paladins.

Here, however (unlike earlier cases we have reported), the after-inkslinger has not made the verbiage up out of whole cloth:  for indeed the article contains the following line:

“The discontent has turned into a real psychosis,” said Emmanuel Agius, the deputy mayor of Calais and a member of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement party. “The migrants of today no longer fear breaking the laws.”

Yet even from this very paragraph, it is clear that the deputy mayor is not dismissing the concerns of his electorate as being merely delusional (psychotic sensu stricto);  just the contrary.  So what is going on?

What is going on is that the speaker undoubtedly said, “C’est une vrai psychose.”   And the reporter, lazily or inexpertly, translated psychose as psychosis.

The French word, however, is (outside of technical psychiatric contexts) about a thousand times more common than the English cognate;  its commonest use can best be translated as ‘panic’, specifically as moral panic (for which see Wikipedia).

 

Thus, a parallel to the crisis outlined here:
Official inaction, even denial;  and a public pushback that, having no moderate outlet allowed, turns ugly.

Ask Silent Bob!


Hey kids!   Your postcards have been pouring in, with urgent questions for everybody’s favorite oracle -- Silent Bob!
We showed him some -- and here are his replies !!

Q:   What is the Meaning of Life?
A:  

Q:  Was will denn das Weib?
A: … …

A: … … …


Mum's the word


(The rest is silence.)

Friday, October 24, 2014

Silent Bob joins the Islamic State ??

U B the Judge:

ISIL instructor of "Cubs of the Caliphate"

Silent Bob


Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/inside-the-school-of-jihadisis-militants-release-shocking-videos-showing-what-education-means-for-boys-in-the-lands-it-occupies-9813525.html

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Word of the Day: “téléréalité”


An acerbic essay on ‘reality shows’ in Holland, by my favorite Franco-Morocco-Dutch audiojournalist, Fouad Laroui:


As he notes, the genre was actually launched in the Netherlands in the first place.

Monday, October 20, 2014

Decapitation Daily (updated)


In those lazy, hazy days  before the planes hit the towers,  I used to enjoy an article-and-essay aggregation site, Aldaily.   It’s still around, and would still be interesting in another, parallel, and better world;   but reality is too much with us, and for years now -- and at present especially  -- I have been obliged to concentrate on unfolding events, more closely related to my day-job.

Anyhow -- Simply glancing at a few of the stories that have surfaced -- or rather, broken beneath the surface, since most people won’t have heard of them -- it strikes me that one could actually run a “Decapitation Aggregation Site”, with something fresh almost every day.
This we shall certainly not do;  but the subject deserves a one-time alert from this site, that there is a pattern here -- there are dots that connect-up -- which won’t be apparent to most consumers of the minimizing, gaze-averting media.

(1) One story that did get some airplay  was the Oklahoma City atrocity in September;  we examine some aspects of it towards the end of the essay here.   At the time, some observers objected to the played-down, one-off way the story was being reported, maintaining that the incident was more properly seen in the perspective of terrorism.   The irony is reflected in this typical reader’s comment:

Nothing to see here people, just your regular, run-of-the-mill workplace beheading.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/09/from-going-postal-to-going-isis/#comments

The story has pretty much died down.  The latest is, um, this:

http://kfor.com/2014/10/04/oklahoma-muslims-receive-special-praise-from-white-house-officials/

What you probably have not heard is that there was, in the same month, a similar attack in London.   For a link, there is little beyond this right-wing site,

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/allah-made-me-do-it-2/

since the MSM tiptoes around it.   Thus, the original story in the Telegraph (UK) made no mention of the perpetrator’s name, or race, or national origin, and mentioned the suggestion that he was “Muslim” only to immediately cast doubt upon the idea (“could not be verified”; meaning, they would not look into it).  However, the bienpensant newspaper reassured us, any connection to terrorism had been “ruled out” (i.e., in advance, as a matter of principle, since the incident had not yet been investigated).

(2)  You perhaps have heard of the assassination and decapitation of the seven Trappist monks in Tibhirine (variant spelling Tibéhirine), Algeria, in 1996.  

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinat_des_moines_de_Tibhirine



The incident was never cleared up, owing to stonewalling by the Algerian government.  Now at last, a forensic team from France has been allowed into the country, to examine the severed heads,  this being all that is left of the monks.  (In French this operation is called, oddly, “une expertise de têtes”.)

(3)  Again in Algeria, the newspaper El Watan has announced the identity of the beheader of the French hiking guide Hervé Gourdel:  Kerza Bashir (French spelling Bachir).

(4)  In Nigeria, Boko Haram continues its depredations.  When these involve schoolgirls, and a suggestion of sex, the media gives these very great play indeed.   That Boko also relish beheadings  is less widely publicised.   Most recently, they decapitated a pilot, and made an exultant video of the event.

This kind of meme cannot be tracked by the traditional methods of counter-terrorism.  It is more like the ebola virus, that can travel thousands of miles unseen.   No appeals, no reason can oppose it, for it lies far beneath the slender outcroppings of the conscious mind.   It is like a green and glittering serpent, coiled deep within the unconscious:  across the vast abyss,  Id calls out to Id...



[Update 20 October 2014]  I probably ought to really not probably do this, lest this site start attracting the … wrong sort of traffic;  but could not resist this bit for connoisseurs.
A couple of months ago, we commented on the Sunni-on-Sunni violence of ISIL against a Syrian tribe, the Chaïtat.  Today, the Washington Post finally got around to mentioning it too:

The cost of turning against the Islamic State was made brutally apparent in the streets of a dusty backwater town in eastern Syria in early August. Over a three-day period, vengeful fighters shelled, beheaded, crucified and shot hundreds of members of the Shaitat tribe after they dared to rise up against the extremists.
By the time the killing stopped, 700 people were dead.
Just as powerful a message for those living under the militants’ iron fist was the almost complete international silence on the bloodbath.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/syria-tribal-revolt-against-islamic-state-ignored-fueling-resentment/2014/10/20/25401beb-8de8-49f2-8e64-c1cfbee45232_story.html

But the Post adds a chilling yet (in line with ISIL generally) flamboyant and theatrical detail:

A photo essay on an Islamic State blog boasted of the different ways tribesmen were killed, including beheadings, mass shootings and a crucifixion. A video shows how the militants lined up scores of captives on a road, their hands bound, then set about clumsily decapitating them, one by one. The executioners, speaking in Tunisian, Egyptian and Saudi accents, taunted those not yet dead by swinging severed heads in front of their faces and telling them, “It’s your turn next.”


[Update June 2015]  Cover-term:

During a recorded phone conversation around May 26, Mr. Rahim called David Wright, whom acquaintances identified as his nephew, and told him he had bought a knife that was “good for carving.” Later in the conversation, Mr. Wright referred to “thinking with your head on your chest,” a phrase the F.B.I. said was “a reference to the practice of some foreign terrorist organizations to behead targets and place their heads on their chests in propaganda videos.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/usaama-rahim-boston-terrorism-suspect-planned-beheading-authorities-say.html
 
 

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Les femmes aux chapelles de l’art: then and now


During the months I lived in Paris, back in the mid-late ‘60s, among of the cultural oddities that struck me  were signs on the gates of a couple of the most prestigious museums, denying entry to women (and  à l’époque, it would only have been women;  back then, people seemed to know what sex they were) tricked out in stiletto heels.   The floors were of rare and expensive wood, and would otherwise be permanently damaged.   It was impressive that these palaces of high art could be so bold as to do that,  since a stiletto-heeled woman is likely to be both self-involved and on a short fuse;  the confrontations cannot have been pleasant.

~

In the top of today’s Paris news, was an incident at the opera, in which a rich couple visiting from the Gulf, seated in the costly first row, was perceived to be wearing, not only the traditional Islamic gown and head-covering (which are legal in France) but a veil (which, by recent law, is not).   During the first act, a number of performers noticed this, and complained to their manager, the chorus even going so far as to refuse to sing in Act II, unless the law was enforced.    To the surprise and (in some quarters) delight of many Frenchmen, this was actually done:   the offender was given the alternative of obeying local law or departing;  she chose to depart.

All this caused an uproar, which reached all the way to the Minister of Culture, who issued new guidelines.


*
Travaillant au noir,
le détective  se trouve aux prises
avec le Saint-Esprit

*

Mais… Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (as someone once said -- I forget).
Just now, re-reading Proust, (A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1919), I happened upon this passage, 
as Marcel, long having dreamt of attending a performance of La Berma, now at last it on the threshold of doing so, as he stares at l’affiche outside the theatre:

je ne fis qu’un bond  jusqu’à la maison,
cinglé que j’étais  par ces mots  magiques
qui avaient remplacé  dans ma pensée
   “paleur janséniste”
et
  “mythe solaire” :
       
 Les dames ne seront pas reçues à l’orchestre en chapeau;
les portes seront fermées à deux heures …”



[NDLR:  “Found poetry”, c’est le pendant linguistique de l” objet trouvé”. 
Pour d’autres exemples -- en anglais, en français, et en allemand -- cliquez ici.]

 
Pour nos essais
en langue
la plus châtiée qui soit,
checkez-out   …..
.