Rajneeshis backgrounding the Incels — for JM
[ by Charles Cameron — opposite extremists at opposite extremes — for JM, if he ever gets time to read / view / hear it — with a personal note to cleanse the palate at the end ]
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An essay, expressed in musics.
Indeed, a Janis Joplin-driven explanation of the bookRajneeshi and Incel passions, offered to JM Berger as he’s publishing what will no doubt be a powerfully argued and fascinating account of a wide range of extremisms, Extremism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series):
Quote:
extremism arises from a perception of “us versus them,” intensified by the conviction that the success of “us” is inseparable from hostile acts against “them.”
Buy this book, okay?
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Sexuality, pure & full-throated.
First, her voice torn raw:
“Move Over” is the only song on the 1971 album “Pearl” that Janis wrote on her own. If the lyric doesn’t strike you as particularly suggestive, just listen to the way she sings it and you’ll see what we mean.
Now multiply by this, drawn from Janis‘ letters:
She fell in love at a heartbeat; her sexual appetites are perhaps best described as ravenous (she had female as well as male lovers), her judgment frequently awry.
Sex, plenty of it — you’d think she’d move from jaggering via satisfaction to satiated.
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And sex, the absence, the vacuum, the abyss,
Second, her heart torn, shredded:
This line is all I need:
Well, the fevers of the night, they burn an unloved woman:
and this brilliant comment I overheard:
she would make love to 25,000 on stage, then go home alone..
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Janis is a Rajneeshi at heart and in behavior, an Incel in blues and loneliness..
Given that, that strength, that compulsive pull, that driven drive —
Zero Sex, the absence, involuntary
The Incels — those who are involuntarily celibate — can’t get none — perceiving themselves shunned by those who attract them __
final lyrics, one version:James Brown, It’s a Man’s World..:
Oh how, how man needs a woman
I sympathize with the man that don’t have a woman
He’s lost in the wilderness
He’s lost in bitterness
He’s lost in loneliness
That last stanza, with that line in it, could be an incel anthem.
I sympathize with the man that don’t have a woman.. Well, the fevers of the night, they burn an unloved woman..
The raw reality of it: a child’s wail — see how much you can bear to see —
That’s the involuntary celibate, Incel, pieced together out of Janis and James Brown, the extreme in inward-twisting, self-pitying, child’s wail version of the blues ..
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This boy, this young man, a day or so after making this video, went out and killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in an attempt as “the prefect gentleman” to get his revenge on the hottest blondes in UC Santa Barbara. And became, for some, a hero to be emulated.. And emulated he was.
Readings follow suit:
Forbes, The Disturbing Internet Footprint Of Santa Barbara Shooter Elliot Rodger Clarion Project, What is the ‘Incel Revolution’ and Why Should I Care? NYTimes, Toronto Van Attack Suspect Expressed Anger at Women NYTimes, What Is an Incel? A Term Used by the Toronto Van Attack Suspect, Explained WaPo, Inside the online world of ‘incels,’ LRB, Does anyone have the right to sex?
It is this extreme I have greater difficuty understanding.
This most recently, btw:
LATimes, Killer who committed massacre in Isla Vista was part of alt-righ
The SPLC report counts Rodger among 13 alleged alt-right killers whose actions left 43 people dead and more than 60 injured since 2014.
Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who killed six students in the college town of Isla Vista in 2014, was the first “alt-right killer” to strike in recent years..
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Sex raised hopefully to the power of the infinite:
And then I hear that howl against the backdrop of the recent documentary about the Rajneeshis, encouraged by their guru to explore their sexuality to the sacred, to satiation..:
Wide-open their hope, shut-down their finale.
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And finally, JM, Something Other and more personal
A martini to cleanse the palate..
Now I want to watch, intend to binge-watch Brideshead Revisited, the Jeremy Irons version, for some very un-American, upper-class-snobbish, public-school-boy, Roman-Catholic-gay historical-throwback art-level Britishness:
Dropping you in at an odd, a very strange, indeed extreme in a dozen ways from Sunday, luncheon:
I who have been beaten — four, with a bamboo cane, at Wellington College, (a sort of military academy slash prep school) — for doing the Times crossword in place of my math moework. Ah yes, and when I came up to Christ Church, Oxford, dunked in Mercury, that college’s Tom Quad pool, after exacting the price of a glass of port from my tormentors, almost twenty years before the film from which this excerpt was taken, was filmed.
For I too am Anglo and Roman Catholic and Buddhist and Taoist and a snob — at least until I meet you or you, and humanity breaks in.
And a creature of sexuality, defeated by sickness and old age..
August 11th, 2018 at 2:45 pm
Fascinating, Charles. I love the way you are able to find connections that so few other people are able to see.
August 12th, 2018 at 12:45 pm
A relative of mine lives outside Pittsburgh. He used to work out at the LA Fitness club where an incel-motivated mass shooting occurred in 2009.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Collier_Township_shooting
Ironically, my cousin met his wife there. They now have three kids.
Fortunately, they weren’t present that night. They were both into weightlifting, not the fitness classes.
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Janis once famously said,
“I don’t understand why half the world is still crying when the other half of the world is still crying too, and it can’t get it together…
(paraphrasing colloquialisms & filtering obscenities)
if you find love for one day, that day better be your whole life. If you find love today, don’t worry about tomorrow. The illusion of time is a misinterpretation of the indivisible whole of reality. In the words of Bergson, ‘inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity.'”
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That last bit is a slight embellishment, but Janis was on to something. The future doesn’t exist and it never will. There is only the inexpressible unity of reality.
This is the real dagger at the root of the frustration felt by these incel lunatics. They are estranged not from sexual gratification, but from transcendance of temporal perception and reunion with the whole of existence. Condemned to watch the clock, forever missing what another recent female pop star Taylor Swift sings about. The feeling that ‘time slows down whenever you’re around.’
August 12th, 2018 at 2:49 pm
“The illusion of time is a misinterpretation of the indivisible whole of reality” — yes. And there are areas of life where both, individle and illusion) present themselves in counterpoint, synchronically (grin). MayI quote you on what incels are estranged from? And Taylor Swift — where do I find ‘time slows down whenever you’re around’? Thanks.
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As you may recall, I had an earlier encounter here with Taylor Swift videos being repurposed for Bach, and also (as memory serves), bin Laden videos.
August 13th, 2018 at 10:32 am
Hey, the Jordan Peterson intersection:
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Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy
Jordan Peterson Comes to Aspen
August 13th, 2018 at 4:19 pm
Charles, please feel free to quote anything you like. I do remember your post on Taylor Swift. In fact, before I read that I had never listened to any of her songs, nor really ever gave her much thought. I have since gained an appreciation for her talent and what she represents. Here is the song https://youtu.be/Sq83xrbEJag
the hero’s reward comes in many forms.
August 13th, 2018 at 5:04 pm
Eminently kissable!
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Sadly, the original post’a extraordinary videos have mostly been wiped from the web. If my questionable HD can be restored, I’d still have my copies..