Attack, attack, attack: cartoon villains, schoolyard bullies – and no strategy at all?
Attacking for trifles and attacking for gain without a plan or a fuck given
Hello all,
well the usual thing happened. I thought I could get the thought out in one <2000 word crisp post, but following this blog’s methodology means I have – to some extent – to obey the meanders of what emerges.
In what follows, I’m trying to account for some portion of the latter part of the above title: why no strategy? Obviously, Xi has strategy in spades – indeed, the Xina problem seems to be that it’s all long game, and no apparent fast-moving tactical movement.
In any case, in getting beyond the ‘close enough for jazz’ of ‘why Iran’ I introduce just below, I was brought back to Hobbes’ useful tripartite division of ‘why we attack’ – the three causes of quarrel in human ‘nature’ laid out in the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan.In this post, I’ve decided to cover the first two, in the order I take them: first glory, then competition.
This is because I think the third one, diffidence – mutual mistrust, the distrust of all by all – merits its own whole post, which I’ll follow up with as soon as I have time. Diffidence is surely the basal structure of feeling gripping the world now, regardless of whether our analysis then hews to Hobbes and talks about fear (Davies), anger and ressentiment (Mishra), or anxiety (Neumann).
In terms of the tone and style of what follows…. I really enjoyed Chris’ most recent post, especially the deliberate fragmentation of the fragments and thoughts: in the way that John Maus’ most recent album has a ‘high res low res’ sound that matches a world of 4K MAGA slop, Chris managed to create in me a readerly effect which captured something about the atmosphere of what, below, I call The Funny Zone. So in writing this piece, I also tried to let myself go with this one even more than usual, trying to privilege ‘atmospheric feel’ and ‘intuitive metaphors’ rather than try to crispen everything up. Fast and loose, rather than high and tight – but hopefully not where it counts, with the fundamental veracity I’m trying to give a crack of theoretical light to.
And the World Enters The Funny Zone: the globalisation and rationalisation of 3SD (surreal, stubborn, stupid; dangerous, destructive, dumb)
As mentioned in my gliberalism piece, big chunks of The New Yorker have become a tough hang. But I still regularly read Isaac Chotiner’s Q&As which, though hit and miss, I usually learn one or two interesting things from. In his most recent but one, the following really captured something:
“I am curious how you are thinking through these issues broadly right now, because to some degree these questions seem a little bit almost beside the point, because we essentially have this unstable guy carrying out a war for some unknown reason that no one can figure out, and it almost feels like this whole set of rules that we have from the middle of the twentieth century is absurd to talk about.”
I mean: yes.
And: what more could reasonably be said after this?
The sensible thing would have been to just publish that, wouldn’t it, as both Q and A.
Needless to say, the Q&A continued, and it continued with an ‘aboutness’: as a Q&A, and moreover one about international law and the attacks, as if the former has any bearing on the latter whatsoever. And both sides, esp. said guest, continued to play tennis with discourse by way of giving way too much credence, way too much thought, way too much explication to things which are the epitome of ‘regardless’ – and are happening regardless1.
Then, at some point in the background, Jürgen Habermas died, and the unforced force of the better argument – and the whole postwar North Atlantic idea(l)-phantasy of deliberation and reason – died with him2.
So yes, here we are in full-blown stage four 3SD 2026, in which it’s just true:
“this unstable guy (is) carrying out a war for some unknown reason that no one can figure out, and… this whole set of rules that we have from the middle of the twentieth century is absurd to talk about.”
So if we’re done with laws of war and international criminal and humanitarian law, what then? Next topic? “Here’s Tom with the weather…”
And yet… we are now – all – in The Funny Zone because of this lapsus, aren’t we: 3D’s dumb dangerous destructive ramps up, then 3S’ stubbornly stupid slides everyday life further over into the surreal.
Middle class life outside this month’s war zones continues to chug along in its involuted somehow, in a shrinking zone of coverage, with more sand in the gears, more onerous cost of living pressures, more disorientation and shrinking hope.
In middle class Melbourne – again just voted the world’s best city3 – my neighbours are experiencing the expansion of Bibi’s unchecked bloodlust and warmongering against the whole region, but only as no more than the ‘sudden’ expensive ballache of 10,000AUD p/p (7000 USD/6,000 EUR/50k RMB) economy tickets to Euroland, as they try to get their in-laws back to France. Over the road, the local petrol station is probably price gouging, there were queues for fuel over the weekend, and diesel is dollar a litre more than it was, meaning it’s now 2.70/litre4.
This does have real societal effects. For example, it will surely piss off the tradies in their Raptor Rangers (all purchased as tax write offs over the past ten years, negating any emissions gains through hybrids and EVs, who will then vote One Nation, after Murdoch’s tabloids tell them to protest at ‘Labor making fuel cost more!’, thus making imminent-future burnouts more expensive, more racist, and more populist.
Australia has 33 days’ demand, according to one report5; so there was – and is – the looming spectre of a resource-rich country ‘running out’ of what it has ample supplies of, because it was-is still operating under the brainbendingly complacent assumptions of the postwar and neoliberal era, where the US could be counted on as a good actor, and GDP growth would just keep trucking and tracking in the smooth, uninterrupted direction of gain.
So yes, the bare majority feels the effects of Bibi’s dirty regional wars here in the Antipodes, but they still feel them like the OECD middle class of the late 20C – they’re expensive annoyances, structural nuisances. We don’t have Israeli jets dropping American ordinance on the world’s most livable city yet, so we’re luckier than the ordinary people of Tehran and Beirut, with their less livable warmongered lives.
Back to the Q&A. Chotiner dropped the act for just a second, and ‘just said it’, didn’t he. This, for me, was the highlight of what was everywhere elsewhere let down by being… the kind of Q&A that is still perplexingly committed to LARPing internationalism by way of a kind of rattled and defensive, but still self-righteous and indignant gliberal exasperation.
The Funny Zone is this weird – surreal, stubborn – realm in which words fail and words proliferate, or where the truth is spoken for a moment, like the bubble of a bath fart, then we revert to habitually telling each other lies and disavowing what’s going on. Reasons are explicated, reasoning is adduced: some kind of Papier-mâché sense of the whole is induced – maybe it’s Tooze taking it from the not quite right bits of Baudrillard; though the spectacle of bombardment perforce unfolds, real people do get bombed in their thousands, and Bibi continues to dom the region via his unchecked schoolyard bully routine, instead of standing trial on his criminal charges. Bibi: he is very much ‘at large’, isn’t he. But in the Funny Zone, ‘we’ still don’t think these could be our kids getting bombed by US ordinance, we still think it’s out of reach of us and the people we love, don’t we.
This is another aspect of pervasive, population-level stupidity that Musil raises in passing that I haven’t yet addressed: the idea that ‘playing dumb’ somehow protects us all, that stupidity, a kind of bimbo pretence, has some kind of prophylactic value for all of us. In this global ostriching, as long as we know as little as possible about Hormuz, and Caracas, and the acceleration of the land grab in the West Bank, if we just ignore it or diminish it or make it clear it’s ‘not chill’ when someone raises the topic, then we’re safe, and we can go back to blathering about our real estate, long haul travel, fine dining, home renovations, and the manosphere’s entrée into Married at First Sight (way to make a dire thing even worse).
Moreover,
– it’s a Debordian spectacle, Guy…
so
in this structure of relations, the idea at least is that the spectators remain at a ‘safe distance’, secured in our relation of separation, still able to offer a hot take, grab some popcorn, post some more.
But in the mi(d)st of The Funny Zone, we also know very well, don’t we? Chotiner knows, and so does his gliberal guest. For just a moment, Chotiner reached across and did the Jonathan Franzen title thing and said, hey, ‘what if we just stopped pretending?’
So then, what if we *did* stop pretending … what would we know very well?
We know very well that Iran isn’t really about Iran – and yet we have Iran.
We know very well that Venezuela wasn’t about Venezuela, and yet6, that happened…
and it disappeared down the memory hole: barely remembered, although it was six weeks ago.
We know very well that Greenland (remember Greenland?; you will!) is not really to do with Greenland – and yet we will have Greenland, or Trump will have Greenland, at some point, and then Greenland will have Trump and his entourage of cartoon villains and schoolyard bullies kicking its prone and rubbery head and body, just as we will have Cuba getting stomped in the guts while down (its people already starving), at some time later this year.
‘Stay tuned…’ Monitor the situation… &c
We know very well that, on the hegemon’s side, this resplendent stupidity is completely unchecked and uncontrollable, for the moment. We know this. Planet Earth is blue – and there’s nothing we can do. And we also know that the Trump regime is basically running around looking for unsympathetic regimes who on their knees that they can just kick and kick and kick.
We know this because Hegseth just said it directly:
“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it isn’t… We are punching them while they are down.”
Yes, it’s a funny zone, The Funny Zone. Full of cartoon villains and schoolyard bullies.
At home, I’m resigned to my relatively safe distance inside The Funny Zone, and I find myself complaining to my friends that I’m so embroiled in my life I’m at saturation point. Yet I’ve read enough Hartmut Rosa to also know that social acceleration continues to accelerate, and the curve to the horizon is nonlinear from here, keeps curving inward like a fern’s fiddlehead.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now witnessing the banal phenomena of circinate vernation as social acceleration unfurls through the croziers of our quotidian lives.
(stay tuned, because this is the curvature this whole long post will bend towards by the end of the second post on diffidence, and knowing this will give you something predictable to expect and look forward to, ha ha)
On one such day, maybe it was yesterday, a friend reached out online, on a chat thread, a very old one we still have going, one that’s been ‘on again and on again’ since the middle of last decade or so. Beside A Trump-is-a-paedo meme and two screen dumps showing the stock price of Lockheed and Chevron (rising, and rising), the friend asked:
‘Anyone got a more sophisticated analysis of the Iran attacks than can be provided in these three images?’
I wrote:
Schoolyard bullies
Cartoon villains
Yawning gaping absence of strategy
Bibi played Trump
I think Chotiner’s ‘come off it, lady’, and the above comments, address the bullies and the villains, and frames it well enough by way of Musil’s Principle of Insufficient Cause (ie, for no good [enough] reason). But looking back above at my chat thread ‘analysis’, I’d like to use my small place on this dirty platform to address the yawning gaping absence of strategy part, which also, obliquely, points at Bibi (and Trump, and Hegseth, and all of us who subsist in The Funny Zone).
Why is there such a conspicuous absence of strategy in play right now?
When we tell the grandkids about 2026 (if we get to), we’ll have to explain this cavernous flapping instance, the lapse that has fallen fully out of its clench into a full and final prolapse. With Iran, it’s less ‘Pandora’s box’, and more as if someone had somehow managed to goatse the sarlacc of geopolitics. You don’t get the impression that things can now pop back into their nice tight clench, hey. There’s no plastic surgery for a burst Hormuz, although apparently the new Ayatollah already needs his face re-done.
In The Funny Zone, we are subsisting in a moral and existential voidtime of strategic prolapse, a global spectacle whose main event is a simulated gigantomachy between petty, vengeful, emotionally immature egotists who have no regard for the world or other people, cannot care for people or institutions, cannot think, never move outside their own reactivity – and don’t have a plan.
Funny old world, isn’t it.
As Chris picked up in his most recent post from our earlier thinking together, to me this is most notable as a particularly American style of heedless stupidity – one that plunges headlong, reckless as to causes and consequences, a grand fuck you to natural causation’s neat and ceaseless demand for tight and cogent relations of cause and effect, and complexity’s fragile reminder of nonlinearity and interdependence.
And these domineering styles of stupidity, as I’ve been trying to track, are stupefying when weaponised and deployed against the whole world in bad faith: opponents’ words fail, we get pipiked, then we are confounded, deprived of moral seriousness and good reasons – the gentle, subtle and substantive is relegated to NPC, the shallow, unconvincing, and grotesque are globo-goatsemaxxed to Main Character Energy.
As I suggested in a recent post, where domination co-mingles with domineering stupidity this *is* the big chunky ‘bombing you now’ part of the point; it was-and-is always how schoolyard bully domination works. The point is just to dominate, to punch people in the guts and steal their lunch money, to be a mean, cruel asshole knowing the person you’re victimising can’t hurt you back the way you keep hurting them, and enjoy continuing to hurt and terrorise them. Once you add in Bibi’s unchecked warmongering and bloodlust, you probably have enough of a read on ‘why Iran is happening’.
But there’s more to the attacks, I think; not just these attacks, but the attacks before (Caracas) and the attacks to come (Grreenland), the ‘attack attack attack’ aspect of The Funny Zone in 2026.
In thinking about attacks in all this, I’m convinced we can get a little something from Hobbes that points toward the yawning-gaping absence of strategy that is so apparent and so alarming in all this, in the midst of so much attacking: attack, attack, attack, no plan – why?
In this famous passage from the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes adduces three basic causes of quarrel in human nature:
“So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel.
First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first makes men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.
The first use violence to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name”.
Stirring my friend’s chat thread question, Chotiner’s ‘what if we stopped pretending?’, and my basic ‘analysis’ (cartoon villains, schoolyard bullies) through Hobbes, I think we can usefully divide those ‘involved’ in all the attacking attacking into three categories, each of which has a fairly distinct (yet fuzzily overlapping) modus operandi.
Importantly, as I’ll try to lay out below, the groups have very different relations to size, scale, and agency. My hope is that, once I explicate this (and I’m thinking by writing here, so this may or may not come together), it might become clearer why there is a void where strategy is supposed to be. NB as I mentioned in the preamble, in what follows, I scrambled Hobbes’ order of the ‘causes of quarrel’ to suit my purposes (and because his chosen order never quite read well to me). So I’ll start with glory, then look at competition, before reflecting on diffidence.
Glory, or: attacking ‘for trifles’: Rise of the global Glory Clown
As intimated and Chotinered above, we are in this Funny Zone where there’s this orange guy who can do all kinds of things. Most of them are unlawful, immoral, unconscionable, stupid, and very consequential – you may have heard of him, and have thoughts and feelings of your own. He grabs the whole world by the pussy, like he warned us he was gonna, yet nobody does anything, none of our leaders (except Pedro from Spain) say fuck all about it.
In line with Don Moynihan’s viral piece that Wired picked up, I think it suffices to frame this as a kind of clicktatorship, ‘a LOLviathan in which everything is content’.
Herein, attacking Iran, or attacking anyone anywhere for any apparently stupid/insufficient reason, is about clicks and likes and shits and giggles, it’s the involution of our infinite jest, as we amuse ourselves to death. This is spectacle (Debord), this is simulation (Baudrillard), this is deadly entertaining (Postman). And what do we do? We like and follow, we are ‘monitoring the situation’.
As Moynihan clocks with clicks, this whole clicktatorship lolviathan assemblage is doxically-toxically dopaminergic; it is dopamaxxing:
“It’s worth remembering that social media operates like a drug, feeding us dopamine and rewiring our brains’ reward pathways. The fundamentally unhealthy dynamics are worsened by the fact that standing out online often demands being awful – channelling negative emotions like anger and outrage, usually based on misinformation or conspiracy theories”.
I’ll touch on conspiracy theories in the second post on diffidence, but sticking with the clicktatorship and its relation to glory, in such a milieu, everything substantive and prudent can be chucked out, nothing careful or subtle survives, and above all, the most angering, outrageous, dickhead behaviour ‘wins’. The clicktatorship is a dicktatorship, which is why Trump and Hegseth and Rubio &c &c are all such dicks7. And we love it. Trump is more entertaining than Biden was; you could tell how ‘relieved’ news media was when the T bag one again.
Bringing Hobbes’ causes of quarrel into focus here, we can think of this mob as ‘Glory Clowns’ – and this speaks to their cartoon villain aspects. Whenever they have the joker, the play the joker; they method act the Joker. We then move from the street parade scene in Burton’s Batman to a world afflicted as The Dark Knight put it: ‘welcome to a world without rules’.
In the hands of a Eurovision entrant, ‘no rules’ makes a funny Finnish song. In the case of Hegseth, it makes for the spectacle a vapid and vacuous news anchor8 adding sleeve tattoos and emojis to Strangelove’s General Turgidson.
In the case of a veritable Trump, a true world historical Glory Clown, the real danger here is closer to Fromm’s idea of the ‘marketing orientation’: a person who is entirely transactional, always peddling, wheeling and dealing and grabbing pussy as he can, because everything and everyone (including and above all ‘personal brand’) is just-only a commodity to be snatched and exploited.
Glory Clowns subsisting in the marketing orientation have no relation to truth or morality. This makes Trump (and his ilk) the kind of haute charlatan who don’t understand (or have any care about) what’s wrong with how they operate. This means they are (thus) capable of doing things that most people would balk at as unconscionable. Ordinary guilt-and-shame riddled people, from our cage of inhibitions, call such people ‘brazen’ and ‘shameless’, but these words contain moral condemnations of states of being that are foreign to the marketing orientation’s fundamental mode of relatedness.
The grand irony of ‘all of the above’ is that a specific – and uncontrollable – agency emerges from this: uninhibited by ordinary compunctions, they are very capable of unhesitatingly ‘doing’ a bunch of stuff that you or I just would never dream of doing to other people. Attacking Iran for no substantive reason is the least of it; it’s just one transaction of many to come.
Dangerously for all of us, Glory Clowns get ahead. all the more so in conditions of involution where people crave the clear voice of a ‘strong leader’. Berlusconi was the ultimate proto Trump Glory Clown; Bolsonaro, and especially Milei, are regionally significant Glory Clowns. This is also because not only are they disinhibited by viewing the world-and-people as commodity objects to get pimped and pumped, they also tend to be ego maniacs, so profoundly centred around an – always inflated and endangered – self, that they will say and do anything to achieve their glory. They’re the ultimate ‘front’, ‘eyes without a face’, the faceless face that wears no mask.
As Hobbes noticed, this means that they attack ‘for trifles’: any perceived slight, any endangerment of rep, anything that can be perceived as a diss, no matter how petty (especially if petty), activates a boundless wish for Attack, for limitless revenge.
In such a mode, it’s also that everything is personal, because every moment is comprised in relation to the defence and entrenchement of one’s huge ego, continually exposed to the massive threat of endangerment. The Glory Clown who attacks for trifles reads the world as either a commodity-object to be totally exploited, or a potential imminent total threat. Thus every entity is either a potential total donor to the ego, or it is a looming total threat that can and must – ‘regardless’ – be pre-emptively annihilated.
Tragically for anyone within his radius of stupidity (which is by now global) this means that Glory Clowns can be very easily manipulated behind the scenes – by a Bannon, or an assiduous lobby group, or by the cannier among their backroom tactician handlers.
I think this speaks directly to why there’s no strategy.
We can zoom in on this by looking at what Marco Rubio said about the Iran attacks. (As with Chotiner, there’s a real flatness to the truth in 2026):
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action… We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces … And we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
This on its own is ridiculous in its implicit profession of moral hazard: ‘the Israelis told us they were going to bomb Iran9, and if they did, Iran would attack us, so we had to attack them first’. Wow, so if you’re Israel, all you have to do is fly to Washington and warmonger with a convincing PowerPoint, and your schoolyard bully will rush in with you as you kick the hornet’s nest. Nice.
But then, once we add in the Glory Clown, Rubio’s further comment leads it all to make its own sense:
“If you tell the president of the United States that if we don’t go first, we’re going to have more people killed and more people injured, the president’s going to go first. That’s what he did.”
Ie: ‘Mr President, you might look bad – if you don’t attack Iran.’
Truly, yet another country is being bombed for trifles, because of the egoic vanity of an a very insecure, emotionally immature, narcissistic Glory Clown, forever just pimping his own personal brand and business interest, all for clicks and likes and shits and giggles.
It’s yucky to realise this is the state of the world from this perspective, yet here we are.
—-
Competition, or: attacking ‘for gain’. The entrenchment of the nihilistic master tactician.
But there aren’t too many Glory Clowns: not many of us get to scale the empyrean heights and achieve such clowning glory10. So, sadly, living through the Funny Zone means we have Glory Clowns in High Places, and, as I’ve just explored, this does amount to meaning that Trump can very easily be pulled right down into Bibi’s dirty little regional war in a way that is destablising the whole global economy – over trifles.
However, just below the Glory Clowns, and feeding them all kinds of glory offers and ‘rumours of being slighted’ that can goad them into attacking for trifles, there’s a venerable intra-institutional dynamic in the mix that is fundamentally about ruthless competition.
In these realms, groups of people you’ve never heard of are scheming away in the background, on the downlow, jockeying for suction, traction, faction and position, in ways that lead to the kind of dominance that will play well in the division of spoils.
In these realms, it’s not as if we leave ego and vanity behind, but the game is more about expediency, pragmatic flexibility, the ruthless running of the numbers, the pitiless seeking of advantage11.
We can also see competition ‘in’ all of us (as an introjected subjectivation12), in the prevalent culture, in the predilection for games and gaming and everything governed by points systems: check out m/any of C Thi Nguyen’s podcast appearances or his book if you’re interested in this.
Although there’s a Highlander dynamic at the heart of all such competitive individualism13, it’s strikingly notable that, in contemporary society, most of these fields or realms are undertaken in groups, as groups, by groups, deploying different kinds of group agency and resonating in sympathy with group identities.
Group chat – which I’ve posted about before – is a paradigm in a point here, and its centrality to how everything actually runs (or gets run) shows us toward who we actually are when we are ‘together’. On this I am strictly Luhmannian: this is how society operates now.
And it operates like this for good reason: one must communicate directly and frankly with one’s co- people, whether collaborators, co-religionists, or co-conspirators.
In instituted politics, we can see the cumulative-collective effects of this most of all in the group chats of staffers around ministers, those hyperactive hive minds that – dangerously – are both hall of mirrors and pinball machine around the Glory Clowns (or pusimaxxing beanbags) they serve. I feel like the proto or Ur Figure portrait-avatar of all of this is either Jonah or Kent Davison from Veep (or Sir Arnold Robinson, if your memory extends back to Yes Minister). However, the Andreessen Signal groups reported on last year bring us closer into the political present’s tone, atmosphere and style. Sufficed to say, one is in the realm of Ianucci-style ‘satire’, filled with ruthless manipulation, zero sum hardball, and pointy stabby Machiavellianism. In the back end, competitive individuals are stabbing each other in the back end, in a world of knifey discourse, where Glory Clowns come and go.
(Enter conspiracy theories here [for just a moment, I won’t let this pull focus until the next section]: we suspect manipulation because, indeed, there are groups conspiring. Less to do with ‘nefarious control’ and more to do with stitching things up. More like Cambridge Analytica and the Andreesen groups than Epstein – though latter also exists, doesn’t it, as did PC Houthi Small Group.)
Most of those who thrive in these groups work 80-100 hours a week, they have no hobbies, are usually divorced, have terrible boundaries, and would kill you, or have you killed, to get ahead in their game. Among their kind are (Glory Clowns and beanbags notwithstanding) the worst bosses many of us have had: taking breaks is a sign of weakness, showing feeling is a sign of weakness, caring for someone or something is a sign of weakness. Even your mum’s cancer was a sign of weakness; ‘that’s why you were sacked – because you were weak and didn’t take this seriously enough’. In other words, the people who thrive in these ruthless intragroup fields of competition succumb to a loss of perspective that leads to the loss of basic humanity for which they’re perennially famous – with the collateral damage of their sense of humour, proportion, and spacious appreciation for a broader context in which ‘none of this matters’.
In the course of becoming hardbitten playaz, the world and other people disappear, and only the game and its tactics and state of play exist. Ball don’t lie, ball don’t bawl, ball only balls.
To bring in Hobbes’ ‘reasons for attack’ here, those driven by competition attack for gain. They’re there to grab an advantage. So, if they think it is in their interest (or their group’s interest), they’ll nab your job, your “wives, children, and cattle”, just as they’ll bomb your institutions, your desal plant, or whatever.
For such groups, every Glory Clown is something between a Trojan Horse and a puppet, and the front of house is just a spectacle who can be ‘puppeted’. The point is to stitch it all up in favour of your faction, hog tie ‘the competition’, and…. Well, what exactly? What then; now what?
This speaks – again – to the absence of strategy.
As I get older and I see more people who become successful in institutional life by operating in this way, the more I notice that they seldom actually ‘win’. In chess terms, they’re all mid game, and no end game. Ruthless playaz are masterful tacticians within strict game logics. To this extent, they are perennially embroiled in ‘moves’, so there never comes a point where things are clinched, let alone is there ever an ‘off season’ where a glorious victory could be enjoyed in voluptuous peace. Above all, I think this is because operating so ruthlessly deep inside a game logic not only means losing your basic regard for other people14, it also perforce means seeing the world with a wide aperture: context and background is a big blur, so you never see the horizon, never notice the sun rising or setting, don’t see the missile heading toward your generic climate-controlled office building. This means everything is just tactics, ‘next move’ – and thus both the victory and any point it could have had is completely lost.
The grand irony of a group of people for whom the means justifies the ends is that they completely lose track of the ends, and are all means (and very mean).
Ultimately, the individual-in-competition might become a playa, and be a masterful tactician within the bounded space of the game (they take to be the totality), but as such, they no longer really know why they’re playing, what they’re playing for, what it means, or why (or indeed, if at all) any of it matters.
At its now necessarily blurred horizon, ‘playing to win’, or being the ‘last man standing’ in an ‘only one can live’ dynamic is fundamentally amoral and even nihilistic.
Once we become absorbed by the game of competition, once we become ‘operators’, once we only ever ruthlessly seek our advantage on the next move, every tactical victory brings us closer to strategic annihilation.
~
Stay tuned for: diffidence.
The gliberals seem to have no regard for the fact that the ‘opponent’ has no regard, and then something psychologically complicated happens inside them, and they carry on regardless, ‘as if’ their jurisdictions had jurisdiction.
As a friend said: well, at least he died without trashing his reputation further.
As someone living through its post covid involution, this is so much more a case of ‘everywhere else is going to shit harder and faster, and this seems like a pretty good wicket in global-relative terms’, which it is.
…meaning that what was a 100AUD fill will now cost 30-50 dollars more.
IEA mandates 90 days’ demand be held in reserve. We don’t have it, haven’t for decades just like we don’t have a functioning fleet of submarines, although the previous previous assclown govermnet committed half a trillion dollars to buying some from the Mad Hegemon. Lol. To me this speaks to the ‘Sydney 2000 4eva’ heart of Australian late neoliberal complacency; but that’s another post.
So it matches Zizek’s structure of fetishist disavowal, doesn’t it: ‘I know very well… …and yet… ‘
We can extend this to the manosphere: Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, they’re dicks, they’re assholes – and this is a huge part of why they’re so popular. There’s some grand irony (or just obviousness) in the manosphere being ‘all about dicks’; Chris Kraus’ title FTW.
Essentially a MAGA DEI hire who has been failing up for 25 years, past his alcoholism and #metoo vibes, since he was a screw at GITMO.
Apparently: flew to DC with a compelling PowerPoint.
It’s true, mostly clowning is an individual(ist) enterprise. Another interesting thing is that there aren’t really ‘groups’ of Glory Clowns; there really is only one Insane Clown ‘Posse’ (juggalos notwithstanding).
In a deeper sense, we can follow Rollo May’s good chapter on this in The Meaning of Anxiety and trace a lot of this stuff back to the Renaissance; Empoli is reminding us of the revivified value of this in The Hour of the Predator.
Mixing Foucault and psychoanalysis: something we have ‘taken on’ by having ‘taken in’, something which we reproduce, entrench and act out because we’ve internalised it as a value ‘of our own’.
Jessica Benjamin talks about it as ‘only one can live’, and reads the ‘survivalism’ prevalent in Israel-Palestine in this way, from ‘inside’ the state of Israel’s side.
We can see this very clearly in The Wire with Stringer Bell or Marlo, (but not Prop Joe or Omar): in taking ‘the game’ for a totality, they lose something existentially fundamental, and this is (badabing badaboom) what leads them to their tragic fate. It changes ‘it’s all in the game’ to ‘it’s all game’ – then it’s game over for the rest of existence.