It's funny, I just rescued part of this thread from my spam folder which had ballooned over the last month.
So I just read this, which Eric wrote back in October: One of the good things that Paxton emphasizes about what drives fascist > movements from the ground up is the determined rejection of thought in > favor of feeling. Hannah Arendt goes on at length to get the same thing > across. I envision it (with some discomfort about misfits of the metaphor) as being > like a social counterpart to berserking, or (even less apt) elephants going > into musth. It’s not even “rage” per se, but something about as > destructive, only chosen. I see the various repubs that make communities with the dems, and speak as > if they hope this will “accomplish” some “change”. For the > Bannon-followers, I feel like I know exactly what this looks like. It is > the various subcategories of hated ones self-identifying, and sewing on > their sleeves a marker of “establishment characters”. Bannon preaches to > the mob: “You see; they’re scared! We have them on the run. If you’ll > just push a little harder we can corner them, and we’ll give them the > beating of their lives. Imagine how powerful you will feel. They’ll want > you to stop, and they won’t be faking it, but they won’t be able to make > you stop. Won’t that be the best feeling you ever had? You’ll be able to > feel, finally, that you actually exist.” (Bannon doesn’t put in the final > line; I put that in.) And it reminded me of things I've been thinking about while watching ads for sports betting during NFL games. There's this recent group of ads about "feeding your hunches", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA6gw3Lxjjg, which end with "make every moment more." It's an appeal to make your actions significant, for a particularly cheap form of significance. Googling around this turned up a lot of slick tech for personalising sports betting ads, too. -- rec --
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