On this day, the anniversary of D-Day (when the Allied forces landed at Omaha Beach in France, in the Second World War) I would like to share the following. It is a video entitled "They Honk Episode 2: No Independent Thought." The significance is explained below.
For quite some time, our society has tolerated the packaging and sale of "edgy" and "controversial" and sanctioned the critique and defilement of traditional mores and culture to that extent. The result has been twofold; on the one hand, many people have become desensitized to the assault on traditional mores and culture, which has incidentally been accepted as American speech freedom. On the other - and because of the desensitization that results - the boundaries of what is considered "edgy" and "controversial" when attacking traditional mores and culture have had to be pushed back further and further - to the point where there are simply few frontiers left to push against in that respect (look at the Piss Christ; how does one "out-edgy" that?).
I accepted, and still accept, critique and defilement along those lines due to my own respect for American speech freedom and faith in open discourse. But sometimes I wonder whether my faith is misplaced; I see now that all the critique and defilement has slowly carved out a new culture to replace the traditional mores and old culture, and the replacement is just as full of dysfunction, inconsistent dogma and ignorance as that which came before it - and perceptibly worse because of the severity of the problems that arise due to the dogma (ex: imported terror, gender conflict, societal disintegration and atomization, etc). Furthermore, as I quickly discovered, the pushers of this new culture want to take away our ability to present any criticism towards this new culture.
A key development in my understanding about the reality of this new age came when, as an art student, I grumbled that everybody's art seemed to comment on the same core things and ignored that the world was increasingly shaped by the problems of the new dogma, not the old one. My insight was met with resistance; it met resistance because I was supposed to embrace the new age like some kind of utopia - and to continue the cultural impetus of mocking and defiling that which was being replaced. That all happened years ago; I wonder if, today, there would be more severe repercussions when classmates or colleagues notice that your fake-smile makeup is coming off.
Anyway, this whole sequence led to my inspiration, at a later date, to mock - and perhaps even test - the attitude of critique and defilement by extending it to whatever was at the root of what I was not supposed to criticize; to find my target, I began looking for the source from which the rationale of the modern socio-political-economic system and its censorship was derived; I began looking to find what pushes us to cherish and censor what we do, to find the focal point from which everything about the world is understood and supposedly gains meaning. It was not long until I found the subject and target I was looking for: the legacy built from the Second World War.
Then came the "aha" moment.
At that point, I realized I had stumbled upon a frontier that had not been part of the new culture's barrage of critique and defilement. I decided to give it the treatment everything else had received and knock down its sacrosanctity. The result was an exercise in absurdity: a film about the Allied landings on Omaha Beach during World War II, using material from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, edited to clown music - a juxtaposition that, intentionally or not, parodied the prevailing narrative about the war.
It should be noted that, at the time, perhaps more than my disillusion with the mentality of the new culture era, I was motivated to do something unquestionably new and intrigued by the consequences of bringing two completely different worlds and moods together into one work. But certain events continued to pull me further away from embracing the narrative tied to the war and the conclusions I was supposed to draw from it. I began to understand what the war really meant, specifically for the future of Western civilization, and became increasingly more familiar with the facts that had been conveniently left out of the war narrative that seemed to be all around me and part of the everyday news cycle. My cognitive dissonance grew as I gained a better understanding about America's ally, the Soviet Union, what its goals were, as well as what it had done to its people and in terms of foreign policy up to the time the U.S. took its hand as an ally. And I saw the irony here, too: whereas it is a daily occurrence for the media to talk about what one side (Germany) did, nobody ever talks about what the other side (Soviet Union) did, especially when it challenges the sanctity of the whole narrative about the war. How often do we hear, for example, the reality that Poland ended up in the hands of this murderous, expansionist Soviet regime after it had already invaded Poland twice (1920 and 1939) - although the war was supposed to have been initiated over freeing Poland from Germany?
Amidst these observations, I decided to add more information to the film to represent my growing understanding and, even more than before, challenge the public to think about the narrative that the film had originally attempted to portray . I decided to add in a They Live movie theme to my film, where the character came to see the reality of the war by putting on a special pair of glasses. But, when I posted the final product to YouTube, the video was stripped of nearly all the features behind its sharability and discoverability. Furthermore, thanks to a fraudulent music copyright claim stating that my open-source clown music belonged to some rap artist (Lil Uzi Vert), my work was blocked around the world:
Of course, there is a certain irony to YouTube mistaking Lil Uzi Vert's work for clown music..
...after all, that would suggest something about the people who listen to that kind of music and are inspired by such clownery:
But that is not the point.
The point is, after my correspondence with YouTube, my channel was terminated - which is something that "Video unavailable" (the message on my channel video) certainly does not convey:
And the whole experience - from the frivolous copyright claim to the boilerplate-only correspondence to the deceptive grave-marker left at my channel - was a taste of how the new culture-controllers plan to circumvent the open democratic forum and American speech freedom: with lies, despotic authoritarianism and deceit.
Another sample came yesterday, interestingly enough, on the 5th of June, one day before the anniversary of the Normandy landings on D-Day. Stepping up in its regulation of published content in a very draconian way, YouTube unveiled a completely new content and comment policy. One reason could be to avoid the backlash if the victim of some future hate crime starts pointing at YouTube for hosting material argued to have influenced the perpetrator. But another reason is that a Jew named Susan Wojcicki, who lent YouTube some garage space back in the day, is somehow now head of the company and, under her reign, YouTube has been absolutely slaying American speech freedom.
YouTube's new policy prohibits anything that could make anyone angry at anyone because of age, caste, disability, ethnicity gender identity, nationality, race, immigration status, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, their connection to a major violent event or veteran status:
Basically, the entire standard was plagiarized from the protected classes idea under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - only now the issue is not discrimination in employment or treatment before the law concerning a protected class, but whether you have criticized or hurt the feelings of someone in a protected class. Not that they have also expanded the idea slightly with the last two entries, to prevent anyone from talking about a historic event or anyone who fought.
How ominous; if this is the future of life under all of big tech, a critique challenging a war might never see the light of day if big tech supports the war, because big tech controls the primary valves to the online public forum and may simply allege that a critique generates hatred of those serve in the war (veterans) or did not survive it, etc. (victims and their kin). Already, we see that YouTube will censor you for mocking Steven Spielberg's work on D-Day if you point out that European-descended people were slaughtering each other, since your work, obviously changing the mood and spin that has become synonymous with D-Day, can thus be argued to be "hateful" towards those who served there (veterans) or did not survive, etc. (victims and their kin) by questioning whether their sacrifice was worth it.
And why is this important?
First of all, through its censorship, YouTube is also preserving a narrative that just so happens to maintain an impression of the Second World War that is used to motivate people to go fight the following: nativists and nationalists, opponents of labor insourcing and outsourcing, states where governments control all industry or limit foreign investment, states where traditions are preserved that limit the reach of mass culture, and so on. See the common thread? It's everyone who just so happens to derail global corporatism.
Second of all, let us have a quick think about what big tech's censorship program means for the future; if a conflict emerges that helps global corporatism overcome any of the above "opponents", policy mechanisms (for AI?) are in place where, unbeknownst to the public, criticism of that conflict may be flushed away before people can even hear about it, under the pretext of what it does to the way people think about veterans or victims. And what we are really talking about here is the wet dream of a military industrial complex corporate state: its interests, its wars - and its control over the means to reach the public, preventing criticism from being seen by the masses.
For quite some time, our society has tolerated the packaging and sale of "edgy" and "controversial" and sanctioned the critique and defilement of traditional mores and culture to that extent. The result has been twofold; on the one hand, many people have become desensitized to the assault on traditional mores and culture, which has incidentally been accepted as American speech freedom. On the other - and because of the desensitization that results - the boundaries of what is considered "edgy" and "controversial" when attacking traditional mores and culture have had to be pushed back further and further - to the point where there are simply few frontiers left to push against in that respect (look at the Piss Christ; how does one "out-edgy" that?).
I accepted, and still accept, critique and defilement along those lines due to my own respect for American speech freedom and faith in open discourse. But sometimes I wonder whether my faith is misplaced; I see now that all the critique and defilement has slowly carved out a new culture to replace the traditional mores and old culture, and the replacement is just as full of dysfunction, inconsistent dogma and ignorance as that which came before it - and perceptibly worse because of the severity of the problems that arise due to the dogma (ex: imported terror, gender conflict, societal disintegration and atomization, etc). Furthermore, as I quickly discovered, the pushers of this new culture want to take away our ability to present any criticism towards this new culture.
A key development in my understanding about the reality of this new age came when, as an art student, I grumbled that everybody's art seemed to comment on the same core things and ignored that the world was increasingly shaped by the problems of the new dogma, not the old one. My insight was met with resistance; it met resistance because I was supposed to embrace the new age like some kind of utopia - and to continue the cultural impetus of mocking and defiling that which was being replaced. That all happened years ago; I wonder if, today, there would be more severe repercussions when classmates or colleagues notice that your fake-smile makeup is coming off.
Anyway, this whole sequence led to my inspiration, at a later date, to mock - and perhaps even test - the attitude of critique and defilement by extending it to whatever was at the root of what I was not supposed to criticize; to find my target, I began looking for the source from which the rationale of the modern socio-political-economic system and its censorship was derived; I began looking to find what pushes us to cherish and censor what we do, to find the focal point from which everything about the world is understood and supposedly gains meaning. It was not long until I found the subject and target I was looking for: the legacy built from the Second World War.
Then came the "aha" moment.
At that point, I realized I had stumbled upon a frontier that had not been part of the new culture's barrage of critique and defilement. I decided to give it the treatment everything else had received and knock down its sacrosanctity. The result was an exercise in absurdity: a film about the Allied landings on Omaha Beach during World War II, using material from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, edited to clown music - a juxtaposition that, intentionally or not, parodied the prevailing narrative about the war.
It should be noted that, at the time, perhaps more than my disillusion with the mentality of the new culture era, I was motivated to do something unquestionably new and intrigued by the consequences of bringing two completely different worlds and moods together into one work. But certain events continued to pull me further away from embracing the narrative tied to the war and the conclusions I was supposed to draw from it. I began to understand what the war really meant, specifically for the future of Western civilization, and became increasingly more familiar with the facts that had been conveniently left out of the war narrative that seemed to be all around me and part of the everyday news cycle. My cognitive dissonance grew as I gained a better understanding about America's ally, the Soviet Union, what its goals were, as well as what it had done to its people and in terms of foreign policy up to the time the U.S. took its hand as an ally. And I saw the irony here, too: whereas it is a daily occurrence for the media to talk about what one side (Germany) did, nobody ever talks about what the other side (Soviet Union) did, especially when it challenges the sanctity of the whole narrative about the war. How often do we hear, for example, the reality that Poland ended up in the hands of this murderous, expansionist Soviet regime after it had already invaded Poland twice (1920 and 1939) - although the war was supposed to have been initiated over freeing Poland from Germany?
Amidst these observations, I decided to add more information to the film to represent my growing understanding and, even more than before, challenge the public to think about the narrative that the film had originally attempted to portray . I decided to add in a They Live movie theme to my film, where the character came to see the reality of the war by putting on a special pair of glasses. But, when I posted the final product to YouTube, the video was stripped of nearly all the features behind its sharability and discoverability. Furthermore, thanks to a fraudulent music copyright claim stating that my open-source clown music belonged to some rap artist (Lil Uzi Vert), my work was blocked around the world:
Of course, there is a certain irony to YouTube mistaking Lil Uzi Vert's work for clown music..
...after all, that would suggest something about the people who listen to that kind of music and are inspired by such clownery:
But that is not the point.
The point is, after my correspondence with YouTube, my channel was terminated - which is something that "Video unavailable" (the message on my channel video) certainly does not convey:
And the whole experience - from the frivolous copyright claim to the boilerplate-only correspondence to the deceptive grave-marker left at my channel - was a taste of how the new culture-controllers plan to circumvent the open democratic forum and American speech freedom: with lies, despotic authoritarianism and deceit.
Another sample came yesterday, interestingly enough, on the 5th of June, one day before the anniversary of the Normandy landings on D-Day. Stepping up in its regulation of published content in a very draconian way, YouTube unveiled a completely new content and comment policy. One reason could be to avoid the backlash if the victim of some future hate crime starts pointing at YouTube for hosting material argued to have influenced the perpetrator. But another reason is that a Jew named Susan Wojcicki, who lent YouTube some garage space back in the day, is somehow now head of the company and, under her reign, YouTube has been absolutely slaying American speech freedom.
YouTube's new policy prohibits anything that could make anyone angry at anyone because of age, caste, disability, ethnicity gender identity, nationality, race, immigration status, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, their connection to a major violent event or veteran status:
Basically, the entire standard was plagiarized from the protected classes idea under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - only now the issue is not discrimination in employment or treatment before the law concerning a protected class, but whether you have criticized or hurt the feelings of someone in a protected class. Not that they have also expanded the idea slightly with the last two entries, to prevent anyone from talking about a historic event or anyone who fought.
How ominous; if this is the future of life under all of big tech, a critique challenging a war might never see the light of day if big tech supports the war, because big tech controls the primary valves to the online public forum and may simply allege that a critique generates hatred of those serve in the war (veterans) or did not survive it, etc. (victims and their kin). Already, we see that YouTube will censor you for mocking Steven Spielberg's work on D-Day if you point out that European-descended people were slaughtering each other, since your work, obviously changing the mood and spin that has become synonymous with D-Day, can thus be argued to be "hateful" towards those who served there (veterans) or did not survive, etc. (victims and their kin) by questioning whether their sacrifice was worth it.
And why is this important?
First of all, through its censorship, YouTube is also preserving a narrative that just so happens to maintain an impression of the Second World War that is used to motivate people to go fight the following: nativists and nationalists, opponents of labor insourcing and outsourcing, states where governments control all industry or limit foreign investment, states where traditions are preserved that limit the reach of mass culture, and so on. See the common thread? It's everyone who just so happens to derail global corporatism.
Second of all, let us have a quick think about what big tech's censorship program means for the future; if a conflict emerges that helps global corporatism overcome any of the above "opponents", policy mechanisms (for AI?) are in place where, unbeknownst to the public, criticism of that conflict may be flushed away before people can even hear about it, under the pretext of what it does to the way people think about veterans or victims. And what we are really talking about here is the wet dream of a military industrial complex corporate state: its interests, its wars - and its control over the means to reach the public, preventing criticism from being seen by the masses.
