#when we have this totally totally mismatched worldview

[countess-of-edessa]

the thing about taking advice from anyone on tiktok or instagram including catholic and christian type influencers, parenting advice, relationship advice, etc, or internalizing any stories of horrible relationships and betrayal people tell on those platforms, or reading about all the ways interpersonal relationships can end horribly and be cycled through extremely quickly on those platforms is that you are necessarily then consuming the thoughts and experiences of someone who is willing to put their face and name on a public social media platform to talk at you. and like 1% of those people have a good reason for doing so and the other 99% are completely unhinged. so everything you’re consuming has first gone through the filter of "is this person weird and insane enough to make Instagram reels of themselves crying?" and if the answer is yes maybe their advice doesn’t apply to your life because you’re a normal person who would not do that.

#i don’t know if this makes sense but it’s something i was thinking about today #not that i really live my life according to Instagram reel advice but as a human being when i see something stated as fact i naturally seek #out the parts of it I believe or compare it to my current worldview #and when that person seems to have a lot of “clout” for discussing spiritual things….idk sometimes I’m like wait is this true? should i #believe this? and other times I’m like well is this a real pattern of behavior that can be observed in many people from different walks of #life including my own? this thing that all men do or all women do or the way all couples will eventually behave #this makes it sound like i am constantly on social media consuming hours of content which im really not #I’ll be on a train and scroll a little bit and something gets stuck in my craw #but with me I’m always like am i rationalizing this away because i don’t want it to resonate? #and I think in the case of anything on social media the answer can almost always be no #because im like wait. why would i take advice from someone who has a public Instagram account #im not saying a stopped clock isn’t right twice a day but really how much of my perspective and life experiences can they share in #when we have this totally totally mismatched worldview #(i mean this also applies to basically anyone offering any type of life advice who isn’t catholic about that) #(but when they are Catholics doing this that gives me slightly more pause for obvious reasons I’m like we are on the same team though?) #(and we are but only kind of and i do not have to listen to you because being an Instagram influencer is still cringe in 99% of cases.)

[latenightcinephile]

#703: 'Marketa Lazarová', dir. František Vláčil, 1967.

Marketa Lazarová is a slightly unusual film for me, because its effects go slightly beyond my ability to articulate or explain them. I originally saw it at a Film Society screening in 2015 or 2016, back when I was able to go to movies at 6 p.m. on a Monday evening, and it enthralled me then, splayed wide across the screen at the Paramount in crisp black and white. I knew very little of Czech cinema at the time and, embarrassingly, still haven't seen very much. Coming back to it five years later, it still holds a lot of that arcane power that it had. Marketa Lazarová is simultaneously a meditative experience and a gut punch.

František Vláčil was one of the Czech filmmakers who was originally trained with the Army Film Division, which surprisingly became a breeding ground for avant-garde filmmaking styles. Vláčil became disillusioned with the types of historical films that were being produced at the time, which seemed to him to feature contemporary people pretending to be characters from the past. What was needed instead, he argued, was a more immediate form of historical cinema that made audiences feel like they were witnessing history rather than a lacklustre interpretation of it. In order to achieve this, he frequently joined his cast and crew on long-term shoots where they lived in the types of conditions that the characters would. Sets were built using traditional methods, and scripts were written using archaic dialects to avoid that common experience of characters speaking in a recognisably modern way. The shoot for Marketa Lazarová lasted almost two years in these conditions.

The film's plot concerns three groups. The Kozlík clan, a family under the helm of a robber baron, robs a noble entourage and takes Kristian, the son of the bishop, hostage. Before Kozlík's sons can return to claim their loot, a neighbouring clan led by Lazar steals the spoils. Lazar is saved from being killed when a vision of a nunnery on a hillside appears. One of the chief themes of this film, alluded to early on, is the conflict between paganism and early Christianity. The two worldviews are muddy and indistinct, but the difference between them is what drives a lot of the retribution in the film. Kristian falls in love with one of Kozlík's daughters, Alexandra, while Kozlík's son, Mikoláš, falls in love with Lazar's daughter, Marketa, whom he has taken as a hostage in retaliation for Lazar refusing to side with Kozlík against the king and the bishop. In addition to the religious dimension, then, there is also an ongoing theme of where one's loyalties lie - with existing morals (family, God) or with the person you love. Over the course of this epic, the fates of all three groups trend downhill: members of each of these bands are slaughtered and betrayed; Kozlík and Alexandra are imprisoned; Marketa is released by Mikoláš but rejected by Lazar. The film's conclusion seems to suggest that it is Marketa, and the future generations she helps to bring into the world, that will be able to overcome the divisions that affected the clans so catastrophically, but also acknowledges that these types of conflicts are part of the human experience.

As vast and interwoven the plot of the film is, it's not what makes the experience of watching quite so transcendent. What makes this film feel like an out-of-body experience is Vláčil's use of non-linear and non-realistic techniques. Parts of the film's story are told in flashback, but without any explicit indication that this is happening. At times we see disconnected, hallucinatory images that only make sense when they are contextualised later on. One example of this is an erotic scene between Alexandra (Pavla Polášková) and a young man, who we assume to be Kristian (Vlastimil Harapes). It's only later that we discover that this is a flashback to an abortive romance between Alexandra and her brother Adam (Ivan Palúch) - a man I had initially disqualified from appearing here because Adam only has one arm in the current scenes. Revealing that it is Adam propels the story forward in traditionally linear fashion, but also causes the viewer to reassess the film's earlier scene to determine why these images are included there. These images are made further alien by their unexpected visual qualities: the sex scene takes place in a field of summer grain, but most of the film's 'present day' takes place in winter and early spring. Rather than ascribe them to an unmotivated flashback, it seems easier to read them as a poetic hallucination, and then Vláčil returns to reorganise what we had previously believed of the narrative.

As well as the narrative structure, Vláčil frequently employs long periods of silence and a seeming mismatch of cinematography, where figures are either oddly close to the camera or absurdly far away. On a deep level, it feels like nobody, even the director, has total control over what is being portrayed - like we've entered a kind of fugue state in which cinema just happens regardless of how legible its results are. Although its filming process was so long, the resulting scenes feel accidental or improvisational, culled down from a vast amount of footage.

While many of these techniques give us the experience of watching a dream of an imagined past, these techniques are also quite violent and confrontational. Even when the shots are distant or filmed in long takes, they're cut together in a jarring way, and the lack of a straightforward narrative makes it difficult on the viewer too. The activity implied in this method of editing, a complicated soundscape and opaque narrative combine to make Marketa Lazarová a film that feels very immediate and present. As Tom Gunning put it, writing for Criterion about his early encounters with the film, "an energized mobile camera and abrasive editing peers into a primitive era of human history." Just as the characters of the film are quick to anger and quick to act, the film also lacks temperance. This is a film of life and death in its most vital forms, and so it makes a certain kind of sense that Vláčil would, in defiance of the typical historical film, try and remove any layer of modern logic or reason that would prevent us from experiencing the film's events in a visceral way. This is also why the myth of the werewolf hangs so heavily over the film - invoked a few times by Kozlík's wife, and present in the appearance of his children and their uncanny survival abilities - it both defies modern logic and refers to a particularly corporeal type of monster.

Vláčil structures Marketa Lazarová with sudden intertitles that refer to the events and themes that we are about to see, in a poetic way that recalls the chapter titles of a 19th-century novel. 'On the Lot of Widows' and 'Who in the Past Brewed with Hops' provide the vantage point of someone placed about the action, narrating it to us in a distant sort of way. The music is similar: both ancient and modern, it frequently uses atonal incantations. Taken together, it feels like this story is being shouted at us from a distant time when things were more tactile. "The presence of animals and plants, the textures of stone and tree bark, of snow and marsh water," Gunning writes, "cling to us as we watch, often overriding the narrative."

The grand experience of watching this film is partly contradictory, then: this is a film that feels very modern, tells a story from the past, alludes to contemporary struggles, and when situated in Czech film history is wildly experimental. Gunning sees this film as being, in some respects, a statement about what Vláčil thought cinema could be, in those days of the 1960s where most national cinemas were experiencing their own variations on the New Wave that had developed in France. The experimental aspects of the films of Godard and Varda would be subsumed into the traditional toolbox of cinema and lose some of their vibrancy as a result - either directors would use them for blockbuster films or extend them into a new type of experimental film that was sterile and aloof.Considering this, it's worth appreciating exactly how daring Vláčil was being here: under a Communist regime, making a film about paganism, bestiality, sadism, incest, and torture. With all this darkness, Marketa Lazarová is a bright film, even funny at times. Humanity is a fallen, self-destructive thing, but there is something about this way of life, before it was layered deep underneath civilisation, reason and enlightenment, that was exciting and vibrant.

Does civilisation mean we lose something of our potential? The final narration of Marketa Lazarová tells us that these cycles of mistrust and anger are likely to repeat through the generations, but is that a price Vláčil thinks is worth paying? The urgency and difficulty of life in the distant past was inseparable from the superstitions of the time, but the urges were easier to sate, at least temporarily. The taming of these clans, like the taming of the avant-garde techniques Vláčil employs here, might have been inevitable, but this film shows that there is something valuable there nonetheless.

#1001 movies #František Vláčil #Marketa Lazarová #Czech film #epic

[scarletwitching]

(sorry it's about the mcu) It's always interesting to me that in the beginning of the films, the twins were not just eastern european but also heavily coded as romani, but as the movies went on, wanda became less and less "eastern european" and more americanized to the point that her next appearance is slated in a classic staple of american pop culture (a fifties tv show). it's been said before but wanda is like a new character each time she appears, and that's not said in a kind manner.

I feel like the MCU is about to become an unavoidable subject because… well, not to stomp on anyone’s fun, but I heard the Jaws theme song when I saw this. I have stuff to say about this subject that I don’t think anyone else has touched on yet and it’s the middle of the night and my sleep pattern is ruined.

There seems to be two things going on with MCU Wanda’s ever-changing everything: 1) No one was especially on-board with Whedon’s ideas and more broadly, no one can agree on who this character is supposed to be. 2) The post-Ultron movies have tried to mold the character to fit the actress better.

The latter is easy enough to explain. The very dark hair in Ultron didn’t suit her, and red is a better fit for her natural coloring. There’s a reason red hair and green eyes is such an iconique combination. They ditched the accent because, well, she’s no good at it. I think the changing wardrobe is partly this and partly an attempt to show character evolution.

The former reason, though, is where we can get into the weeds. Age of Ultron was a troubled production. One of the sticking points between Whedon and the studio was the dream/nightmare/mind control sequences, which the writer-director was attached to and which executives hated. Not a shock that they haven’t reappeared since. That the telepathic powers as a whole vanished is more curious, but I feel like the Russos, Markus, and McFeely don’t care about Whedon’s version of Wanda. They weren’t involved, and they don’t like it.

There was more back and forth with the accents than people remember. In 2013, The Wrap reiterated an earlier rumor that the twins would have British accents in the MCU. At first glance, that’s jarring, but sometimes, people who aren’t from Britain have British accents. It’s not my favorite choice for these characters, but it happens. Aaron Taylor-Johnson said he was the one who pushed for the Eastern European accents and for Pietro to have his white/silver hair (originally it was supposed to be brown). But he wasn’t sure, even while filming, if they were going to leave the accents in or ADR over all their dialogue. Once he was gone, there was no one to advocate for the inclusion of the accents, so everyone said, “Fuck it. She learned to talk with a US accent.”

There’s also the parts of their backstory that were cut, supposedly for time. Namely their Romani background (which seems to have been in the script) and any specific references to the US military being the ones to bomb their apartment building (something we can figure out from interviews and from context). Both things that were either already causing controversy or could have caused controversy, which were cut “for time” and for no other reason. Totally. Definitely. I suspect the later movies don’t pick up those threads for the same reason they drop the telepathy stuff. They’re not anything M&M and the Russos care about, and their stance is, “We don’t want to get into that.”

And then... there’s the Hydra backstory, which fits into the same category of “a thing that was dropped and it’s not hard to figure out why.” I have no clue what Whedon was thinking when he did that, and I don’t know how any future writer could incorporate it without doing an outright retcon. That wouldn’t be hard since there’s a reason most people thought those characters were held captive. The cinematic language in the Cap 2 end credits scene is at odds with what Whedon was trying to convey. When you have characters in cages looking drugged (complete with injection sites), what am I supposed to think?* “Wow, spooky”?Probably. Whatever he was going for, it didn’t work, and who is surprised that it was ignored? They should have fixed it, but this is another case of the later writers and directors looking at what Whedon did and not even caring enough to either acknowledge or contradict it.

That’s the theme here. That Markus, McFeely, and the Russos didn’t care about what Whedon did, but that they also didn’t replace it with anything. The stuff they did with Wanda was all plot-essential. Somebody’s gotta cause the superhero civil war, and guess who’s the easy choice. Somebody’s gotta care when Vision dies, and guess who’s the easy choice. You get where they’re coming from. They have 375 characters to worry about, and she’s not one of the popular ones. The end result is a character who isn’t really anything.

Even within his own movies, the characters Whedon was allowed to introduce into the MCU are half-baked. What if Vision was Adam Warlock? What if The Colonel meets Jean Grey? What if Quicksilver only existed to die? It’s a lot of stealing from various sources without thinking through the meaning and significance of what you’re stealing. James Gunn gives zero fucks about adhering to comics canon, but at least, he has concrete notions of who his versions of the characters are. They may not be what I wanted (#JusticeForMantis), but they’re cohesive entities on their own. Can you say that for Ms. “Let’s join Hydra and kill random South Africans and oh no, I’m scared of fighting”?

Lastly, the 1950’s housewife thing is more about the extremes of character interpretation. Whedon focused on Wanda’s past as part of the Brotherhood and used Ultron and – for fuck’s sake – Hydra as stand-ins for that (while ignoring that Wanda’s time in the Brotherhood was defined by the abuse she suffered and not by random murders she committed by mind controlling the Hulk). To quoth the man himself, “They’re interesting to me because they sort of represent the part of the world that wouldn’t necessarily agree with The Avengers.” He envisioned them as the kind of Radicals With a Point that superhero films love, but his execution didn’t match his vision. (Maybe it was better in the script, idk.)

In creating that godforsaken tv show, Feige is leaning on the perception of Wanda as a conservative figure. That idea comes from the fact that so much of her story is wrapped up in family and babies and sexist stereotypes. It feels mismatched with the former. (Not denying the realities of human complexity, just saying you should have a clearer vision for a made up person.) We’ll have to see how it plays out, but it seems like a case of no one agreeing on what this character believes or how she views the world. Or maybe it was Nightmare/Chthon/Mojo all along. Lotta maybes going on.

Anyway, the Americanization issue comes down to treating your own culture and worldview as default and trying to work around miscasting, and the overall issue is that you shouldn’t make characters who only exist to be sites of tragedy.

*They also look drugged at the beginning of Age of Ultron, when they’re with Hydra, and at no other point. Does Whedon associate that aesthetic with menace/villainy? (If so, yikes!!) Additionally, I’m gonna leave this here with the reminder that it is from the same movie.

#anonymous #answered #mcu #movie wanda tag #long post #listen... all my posts are long #but this one especially so

[armsinthewronghands]

Ron Edwards Making No Sense

https://plus.google.com/u/0/110790893064742233179/posts/JJj6ow3fEX5

Wayne Snyder Shared privately  -  Aug 18, 2015

Simon Bisley, 1997

(NOTE FOR THE TRANSCRIPT: The post consisted of a Simon Bisley painting)

43 Ron Edwards's profile photoMike Evans's profile photoMichael Moscrip's profile photoRichard Grenville's profile photo 84 comments

Richard GrenvilleAug 18, 2015+4 5 4

If I were in my bikini and bird mask ensemble I would not like to be in that position under all those razor-sharp spider parts, is all I'm saying. 

Richard GrenvilleAug 18, 2015

+Jeremy Duncan #startingequipment for Oriax?

Asia PickleAug 18, 2015

I do like his stuff. You ever seen that TV show Spaced?

Ron EdwardsAug 18, 2015

plus for audacity, but yeesh, Simon, you get the big bucks, try some figure drawing

Zak SmithAug 18, 2015+5 6 5

That is a baffling comment +Ron Edwards. I don't know if you mean to have a conversation about art here but techmastery snark against Simon Bisley is about as misplaced as taking Aretha Franklin to task for not knowing how to sing. Any distortions of naturalistic anatomy in Bisley are chosen stylistic effects.

Rafael ChandlerAug 18, 2015+3 4 3

Sweet. Love the bird-girl. Thinking she might not be human -- look at them fingers.

Ron EdwardsAug 18, 2015+3 4 3

+Zak Smith Ohhhh, I have been schooled now. I'm saying this as someone who likes you: fuck off, Zak. Can't a person post anything without you comin' in as Master Scold? Do you own art? All of it, or just Bisley? Can you not face being baffled, as you call it? Or that a person can post something wrong, like really wrong horribly OMG wrong, and the world won't collapse if you don't correct it?

And no, this isn't a debate. I don't like Bisley so much, so what, it's not going to change the world.

People knuckle under to you for one reason: because they're scared of being vilified Limbaugh-wise. You've got the moral high ground, the professional success, the accolades, and a life you can be proud of. Any reason you have to be a bully?

Answer me that before you crack down on me again.

Zak SmithAug 18, 2015+1 2 1

1. There's a difference between "I don't like Bisley" (statement of opinion, unarguable) And "Bisley lacks technical ability" (assertion of fact, arguable) and the second is so far as I can tell, simply misinformation. I have a moral obligation to correct it if I see it because you don't want people acting on bad information. 2.How are the rest of us supposed to know which of your many public opinions you want to discuss and which one we'll be attacked for discussing? You snarked at Simon Bisley (he didn't attack you), I neutrally commented that I don't think that was warranted, now you're biting my head off? 3. If you didn't want to talk about your opinion, why'd you say it where other people could read it? 4. How can a person with no coercive power over you be "bullying"? +Ron Edwards +Mike Davison 

David BaityAug 18, 2015

+Zak Smith lmfao

Victor Garrison (headspice)Aug 18, 2015+1 2 1

+Rafael Chandler​, Dude, what are you? A "fingers man"?

Ron EdwardsAug 18, 2015+1 2 1

+Zak Smith You hold and openly wield immense coercive power. You are a master of single-messaging people about whom they plus or not-plus, of posting public messages to shame, and of leveraging your deserved reputation as a great artist and contributor to the hobby for weight in conversations. You are widely feared and operate as a chilling agent throughout many discussions in which your tangible interests are not involved. You may intend this or you may not; I am not speaking to that. But either way, do not play "Li'l ol' me."

I won't be looking at this thread again until tomorrow, in case that interests anyone.

Zak SmithAug 18, 2015+1 2 1

Which one of these "powers" is forbidden from Mere Normal Men? "A master of single-messaging"? That isn't a magic spell, Ron, you can do that, too. +Ron Edwards You just type. As for "leveraging my reputation"--you can't simultaneously claim someone has a deserved reputation for contributions in a field and then claim that their influence is unfair . Either the reputation is deserved and so they should be influential. Or it isn't and they shouldn't.

Tony DemetriouAug 18, 2015+2 3 2

I love Bisley, and his style. This is pretty representative of my ideal goal, if I could magically make art in any style I choose.

The distorted anatomy is perfect, in the same way that I enjoy Disney animation - the choices of how to stylize or not to stylize it gives so much character to the piece. And I'm lucky that the choices Bisley makes are the ones I find appealing.

And those colours!

+Ron Edwards Um, not intending to dogpile or anything. I totally get why you might not like this :) - But I can't agree with the "figure drawing" comment, to my eye he clearly has mastered figure drawing, and now is deciding which rules to break. That's what I love most about this piece!

So when I see you criticize his anatomy, I assume that we've got a mismatch when it comes to what we enjoy about the stylizations.

I say this because in other posts you've made, you've linked to comics and referenced art with much weaker figure drawing than this without commenting on the lack of technical skills. While that might not mean anything, is it just that you find these particular ones to be ugly?

Joshua BlackketterAug 18, 2015

.

David Lewis JohnsonAug 18, 2015

.

Ron EdwardsAug 19, 2015

A new day, and two fallacies await.

1. The "magic spell" is classic deflection. I said nothing of who can and cannot do those things. Single-messaging is obviously available to everyone; . The question is why you do them, which you are failing to answer.

2. Deserved reputation in doing a thing, in this case art, is not a moral obligation (your term) to do some other thing. Especially if that other thing is itself morally unsound.

These were also posted as provocation: I said I wouldn't be looking at the thread again until today, which I didn't. You posted immediately with fallacy statements, which you're not dumb enough to believe are valid. I think you know well a person can barely if ever resist replying to such things. Then you can play "ah ha you were too looking." You caught me with that once, and that dog hunts no more.

I don't think you are posting in good social or intellectual faith. What frustrates me is that you usually do post in good faith, and with points I generally value - until someone flips your Scold Switch, and you launch into these modes of attack which have long passed their high-school sell-date. They're beneath you. Yes, anyone can do them, and again: why would you?

One more check-in tomorrow to see if you answer this time. Then I'm done.

Zak SmithAug 19, 2015+1 2 1

+Ron Edwards *People don't have ideas different than yours just to piss you off, Ron* You assume bad faith: this is not good. - 1. It isn't "Deflection"--Bullying by definition requires the bully have abilities the target does not. I cannot bully you as I possess no such powers. - 1b.  As for why I'd single-message someone: Because sometimes going "Dude do you know what's going on in that thread?" would derail a public thread so you send them a private message. Right now I genuinely don't know why you're attacking me or why anyone of good conscience would join in with you. I need facts. So I asked. - 2. Everybody has a moral obligation to fact-check stuff that's discussed. Period. You (or anyone else) say an inaccurate thing, it needs to get fact-checked. "I don't like Simon Bisley" requires no comment. "Simon Bisley lacks technical ability" requires a fact-check, just like "girls don't play D&D" or "game have to look like textbooks" or any other incorrect fact I come on here and check. - 2b. I say and believe things you disagree with  because I believe they're true, not out of a sadistic desire to upset you. (This probably goes for a lot of people.) I, of course, never post fallacies and don't do so in order to "provoke" people. Provoking you achieves nothing. It is a bizarre and paranoid conspiracy theory to assume I someone get some special cookie for making you (or anyone else) mad. Like what's my supposed motive in your worldview? I didn't wake up hating Simon Bisley just as much as you yesterday and suddenly pretend to think he had technical skill just because I thought it would upset Ron Edwards! And what a joy upsetting Ron Edwards is? Right? Oh I am so glad I got to do this! What glee  I have reaped from manufacturing this false opinion about my own profession simply in order to upset one random man! That would be like you pretending bats are made of goat cheese in order to piss off a biologist you don't like. Evidence I liked Bisley before today is not thin on the ground, nor is evidence that I fact-check people when they get things wrong. I would hope, as a biologist, you'd think fact-checking bullshit about your area of study is an end in itself . I feel the same way about art. When you make false  accusations and I counter them you are not the only audience for fact-checks I may do to those false accusations. Every single person who might ever read since the beginning of time needs to know you aren't telling the truth, not just you. Now:  The person making a claim has the burden of proof--if you are claiming I am lying prove that now.

Wayne SnyderAug 19, 2015+3 4 3

That's some pretty funny shit right there. This could have been one of those art posts where folks comment, "Cool." Or "Awesome!" But ya'll have brought the comments bar up a notch to down right entertaining. To bad you can't hear me slow clapping.

Wayne SnyderAug 19, 2015+2 3 2

But I must admit, I'm a bit sad it turned out to be an argument about arguing instead of an art criticism debate.

Tony DemetriouAug 19, 2015

Alas - the internet!

Zak SmithAug 19, 2015+2 3 2

+Wayne Snyder Would be happy to have the art criticism debate if there was someone who wanted to throw down on the other side. But that never really does happen.

Tony DemetriouAug 19, 2015

I don't know if anyone here has the technical chops to have that debate, +Zak Smith ?

Zak SmithAug 19, 2015+1 2 1

The whole talkin'-RPGs business relies on articulate amateurism +Tony Demetriou, if everybody here can say why they don't like Palladium or Pathfinder or Prometheus, they can, in theory, say why they think a painting fails. They may not be able to refer to personal experience painting, but I am not going to pull rank here and claim you need an MFA to critique a picture.

Tony DemetriouYesterday 12:22 AM

I kinda feel that, having played 2-10 hours of RPGs per week for a couple of decades now, I can speak as an expert on the topic (while recognizing there are many other experts)

With pictures, I can talk about what I like. But I don't really know how to engage in a criticism debate. Willing to try, of course! Especially since I learn so much by a good debate :)

Soooo....

What's with Bisley's neon colours? I love them, but my first impression when looking at this picture is a mess of brightness. That seems to be the opposite of when I look at, say, Franzetta who tends to use one dominant colour for the whole picture.

Is that a failing on Bisley's part, or just a stylistic preference? I love the colours, but could it have been possible to have made a picture like this, without the first impression being such a mess? Maybe better separation of them, rather than similar tones on overlapping objects?

I also find he often muddies the picture with unnecessary detail - like this picture has a great silhouette, and he pulls the two humans out of the background by making them brighter than the background. But the spider seems like it's a mess. What's with those skulls beneath its legs, that are the same colour as the legs, and the same brightness and contrast? It forces my eye to do work to figure out what I'm looking at. It doesn't "lead the eye" around the picture very well.

I'm a fan of both headdresses, but the material on the guy's one seems off - it looks like it's meant to be feathers, but to me it looks like some sort of white cardboard. The girl's headdress feathers look soft, which is what I'd expect from the guy's headdress too.

And the spider's abdomen kinda looks half finished? It looks like there's the brown from the background drawn over it. Or is that some sort of green in the background and not an abdomen? I dunno. I don't like it!

... but these are my nitpicks - as a whole image, I adore it!

Zak SmithYesterday 2:21 AM

I don't understand +Tony Demetriou , you have looked at far more pictures in your life than played games, why aren't you an expert on that, too?

Tony DemetriouYesterday 3:16 AM

Because of my nature.

I've mentally broken down and analysed what makes RPGs "work" and created my own, which tests my theories.

I've looked at many pictures, but until relatively recently (maybe 5 years ago?) I haven't been engaging with it in the same way. I'm trying to learn to draw, and it's given me a new perspective on art - I'm noticing things that I was never aware of before. My understanding of form and structure and linework is so much advanced just from this hobbyist learning - and I'm sure that once I go further I'll have similar gains with my understanding of tone, colour etc. once I start learning how to apply that too. So I "know how much I don't know" if that makes sense?

Maybe it's just how I learn - I very much "learn by doing", which explains why I'm more comfortable considering myself an expert on things that I make or do, rather than things I mostly observed.

That said - in the post above, I've given my criticisms of this picture. Do you agree or disagree with them, or have any comments of your own?

Zak SmithYesterday 3:26 AM+1 2 1

It can't be just you, as nearly every single intelligent person not trained inthe field is terrified of rendering an attempt at an intelligent opinion of a piece of art. As if it were somehow 1000 times more complex than a movie (which every person has opinions on). As for your criticisms: perhaps what they lack is a sufficient counterexample--like who does right the things you guess possibly he did wrong ? 

Tony DemetriouYesterday 3:39 AM

Good point. I have no problem at all discussing movies, and the artistry involved. Maybe it's some sort of assumed-complexity due to art criticism being viewed as some elite field?

Hmm, a counterexample - I can absolutely give examples of people who do it differently but I don't know if that means they're doing it right.

- For the bright colours, a lot of cartoons and 3D animation uses bright colours without the first impression being so confused. The artwork isn't nearly as good (in my opinion), but this picture is also brightly coloured, while still "reading" easily at first glance: http://www.wisdomswebzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tangled.jpg

I suspect it's because, although there are bright colours, it's still a pretty limited palette - mostly blue and purple. It also keeps the characters silhouetted by dressing Flynn in darker colours and with dark hair against the white horse, and putting the darker blue behind the horse.

Rembrant's The Night Watchman is a great example of a very busy picture with a lot of detail, where the detail doesn't muddy the picture (although it makes me feel like I've forgotten my glasses...) https://catholicismpure.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/the-night-watchman/

If Bisley had done something similar around the spider & figures it might have helped give it a clearer shape, and stopped the spider being such a mess?

For the headdress - I think Bisley's own picture is the best example of doing it "right" - the woman's headdress feathers look great, the man's looks like cardboard. I think he should have softened the edges of the man's feathers.

For the spider's abdomen... uh, it just looks half finished to me. I don't think that needs a comparison? Although there certainly are other pictures that use that same effect.

Zak SmithYesterday 3:46 AM

+Tony Demetriou "I can absolutely give examples of people who do it differently but I don't know if that means they're doing it right." Well if you like it they're doing it right and if you don't they' aren't

Wayne SnyderYesterday 3:55 AM+2 3 2

Bisley is known for his bizarre pallette choices. I know he often used automotive paint in his illustrations. He's riffing off Frazettas choices, but taking it up a notch. Bisley is a heavy metal painter. He is painting visual representations of heavy metal music for the covers of a magazine called heavy metal. So the subject matter is over the top brutality and horror and sexuality. If you removed the spider and the warhammer from this piece it would just be pornography. The beef cake warrior's bulging junk is aimed directly at the sorceress's bulging junk and the course of image is obvious. But it is both, it is sex and violence in a pure cartoon proportioned form. It is the teenage mind and that is who is supposed to buy the magazine this is a cover for. I don't know why he put that skull mess in the center. I suspect without it the composition would be lopsided. Maybe it just wasn't "metal" enough for the Biz, so he added the skulls. It may have even been the choice of a art director and the Biz just wanted to get it out the door and get paid. But I doubt that. 

Zak SmithYesterday 4:05 AM+3 4 3

I think "when in doubt skulls" is a pretty good creative default

Richard GrenvilleYesterday 5:37 AM+3 4 3

Regarding people's reticence about art crit, I guess I'll state the obvious to get it out there: there is a whole industry of art critics, which was at some stage dedicated to placing painting and sculpture (although not really printmaking) in a special separate category elevated above the vulgar horde - to promoting the value of art as a vital endeavour in which humans aspired to the level of gods. And even if critics haven't done much of this in the past couple of generations, some of those old attitudes still linger on, especially in primary schools which tend to be the last refuge of ancient pedagogical ideas.* And those old values still inform the economics of the art market (the aura of the art object, the figure of the artist as a conduit into some extraordinary other world). So I suspect people might be reticent to talk about paintings partly because they're haunted by the snooty ghost of e.g. Vasari or Jacob Burckhardt, refracted through a thousand indirect sources, telling them there is something spiritual and ineffable in there which is not for the likes of them. The fact that this picture in particular is not in the (socioeconomic) category elevated by Vasari or Burkhardt but makes use of its gestures probably makes things worse, not better.

In contrast, AIUI in the early days of film there were conscious efforts made by auteur directors on one hand and populist producers on the other either to place the medium firmly in the elevated sphere of Art or to rescue it from that ivory tower and make it democratic, for the people. Perhaps the economic possibilities of mass-market film just blew away the arguments on the high art side. Perhaps the costs of commercial film production spiraled out of the hands of individual directors making their individual artistic statements and left only oligarchical demagogues, reliant on sometimes-subversive film-making experts.

* and some innovative ones too, I'm not dissing early education here.

Ron EdwardsYesterday 8:38 AM

+Zak Smith You're not hitting anything with that reply. I never said you were doing this vindictively to upset me personally as me. I'm saying you use rhetorical and social tricks to marginalize people when they post things that .. whatever it is those things do that prompts it. It fits into your own definition of bullying - because using techniques not only that others don't have, but that they won't use, counts in that definition. You said my post "baffled" you, yeah, well it baffles me that a person of your qualities and insights would do these things.

You're saying Bisley's distortions serve his (an) artistic purpose. You can just say so. You don't have to pursue anyone who plusses me saying something else. You don't have to claim "moral obligation" to put me or anyone else down, with chilling and silencing techniques. It's this pious scolding and shaming I'm talking about. Not difference of views about the artist - in fact, if you'd asked in a real way, you'd have found that I like the way Bisley does it most of the time, not so much in this picture this time. I did not say "Bisley can't draw bodies and can never draw bodies and never did." That is your trip, you brought it in, and all your high-minded fact-checking claim to being the intellectual in the room is based on that alone. You revved up your moral fires for nothing.

All of the potential for easy contrast of posts, no status issues, open to the reader to evaluate or ignore, is gone when you descend with your blazing moral obligation in play. You talk about assuming things? You assumed vast tracts of attitude, position, and intention in my post, so hard you "saw" them. You've created an entertainment environment where people can enjoy you putting someone down. That's bullying.

Daily check-in tomorrow. It is remotely possible that this could be a worthwhile conversation.

Zak SmithYesterday 9:04 AM

+Richard Grenville Sure, but just because someone is telling you to stay in your class and let them handle the heavy lifting, why would you let them?

Zak SmithYesterday 9:18 AM

+Ron Edwards 1. Why would I want to marginalize you? Your claim has no motive. 2. Asking people why their friends or allies are being dicks isn't a "trick". It's a straightforward way of dealing with bad behavior. 3. No definition (including mine) of bullying includes "don't use techniques that are totally legit and make sense and that are designed to make the person making a false accusation stop" which is what these "techniques" were doing. 4. You're using a begging-the-question argument "What you did is obviously motivated by badness because it uses techniques that are bad and those techniques are bad because they are motivated by bad" 5. "You're saying Bisley's distortions serve his (an) artistic purpose. You can just say so. You don't have to pursue anyone who plusses me saying something else." I didn't do that. I only talked toone other person--Mike Davison--once you called me "bullying" because that is an insane charge. If you call me bullying--you are lying. If someone I consider a friend plusses that lie--I must address that with my friend. Period. Anything else would be irresponsible on my part. Also, in my original comments to you I didn't say the distortions "served an artistic purpose" I said he wanted them to serve an artistic purpose , which is different, in case you didn't know that, which your joke (implying the distortions were mistakes) seemed to indicate. 5. "You don't have to claim "moral obligation" to put me or anyone else down," I didn't "put you down" I fact-checked you. You asserted Bisley's distortions were down to not knowing how to draw accurately (rather than choice).This is not subjective--his distortions may be (subjectively) undesirable but they are (objectively) not "because he doesn't know any better". Therefore you said something objectively inaccurate in a semi-public space . Anyone who knew you had said this and knew the truth would have an obligation to point out the fact-checking error. 6. "in fact, if you'd asked in a real way,..." Once you express yourself in the form of a snarky attack, you don't then get to demand benefit-of-the-doubt from someone defending your target. Bisley did not begin a conversation by making fun of you . You attacked Bisley. I defended him. You then attacked me. 7. ". I did not say "Bisley can't draw bodies and can never draw bodies and never did."" No, you just made a joke to that effect at his expense and then accused me of bullying instead of going "Oh, sorry, that's not what I meant, let's sort this out" 8. "You assumed vast tracts of..." I assumed nothing. I interpreted that you made a snarky joke at Bisley's expense.  *I can only be accused of assuming if you are claiming your comment was not a snarky joke at Bisley's expense.* You got a reasonable response to that directed not just at you, but to any naive 3rd party who doesn't knowmuch about art who might be reading (naive viewers might take your joke at face value and they need to be disabused of that and know the artist you're attacking can actually identify body parts and where they go). 9. " You've created an entertainment environment where people can enjoy you putting someone down. " I wasn't putting you down, I was fact-checking you. If someone enjoys that outside of some pre-existing reasont o dislike you, they are a total asshole. If someone sees that as important and necessary, they are correct.

Richard GrenvilleYesterday 9:48 AM+2 3 2

just because someone is telling you to stay in your class and let them handle the heavy lifting, why would you let them?

this seems like it might also have some bearing on your conversation with Ron - my guess is that a lot of people feel discouraged in talking about art the same way they would feel discouraged in discussing engineering, only even more so. On one hand, they feel ignorant about what they imagine is a specialized field of knowledge (like engineering). But also they have a sense that they might trip off some kind of lurking art trap and get laughed at by the cognoscenti for their ignorance or something, as if they'd used the wrong fork at a gala dinner.

Class anxiety may be silly and useless but it's real for lots of people and harder to negotiate than ever now that it no longer runs in simple hegemonic directions. 

...I'm not saying that Ron is suffering from class anxiety. Just realised I didn't leave that clear. 

Zak SmithYesterday 9:53 AM+1 2 1

Use whatever fork. Know why you made that decision. Speak with the courage of your convictions if someone gives you static about it.

Victor Garrison (headspice)Yesterday 9:54 AM+2 3 2

My only criticism of this piece is: why did he paint such awesomely proportioned derriere and legs and stick those spooky, fucking spindly assed fingers on her hand?!?!?

I mean as far as drawing in your gaze, it's obvious Biz intentionally wanted her ass to be seen first. I say this not because I'm a perv (tho I won't deny that charge) but because it's pretty much center and hi-lighted more brightly than anything else. Your gaze moves from there over to his crotch, up his breast plate, to his face and then -- OH SHIT!-- to the monster. I like how he lures you in with submissive sexuality, brings you further along with brute sexuality, then BAM knocks you in the head with a hideous creature. Nice work, nice work.

Rafael ChandlerYesterday 9:55 AM

+Victor Garrison He gave her fingers like that so you could tell your friends, "Hey, man, she gave me her digits." <rimshot>

Richard GrenvilleYesterday 10:12 AM+1 2 1

for me it's a tangle of long golden-brown forms that could be a tree root or something, and then I see a butt, and then the rest kinda unmasks slowly. 

Zak SmithYesterday 10:16 AM+1 2 1

The greens of the spider come on before anything else for me

Victor Garrison (headspice)Yesterday 10:28 AM+1 2 1

+S Robertson , If you're telling a linear story, yeah, that's the route to take. But it seems to me that Bisley is going for a visceral "EWWW" reaction. It's a dark piece, so much so, that IMO, it almost looks like a black velvet painting technique was used. The bird woman's butt is the brightest spot in the painting, which is a signal to start viewing there. Especially since that spot seems to be the counterbalance to the large, dark negative space at the top of the painting. The next closest bright spot is the cod piece, then the breast plate, then the helmet, and that's when I made out the spider creature. IDK, that's just the way I encountered it, not as a story, but as an....oh shit, MONSTER! kinda thing.

Victor Garrison (headspice)Yesterday 10:32 AM

+Zak Smith  Damn, I didn't realize that green was the spider. Seriously, I thought it was shrubbery and had no clue wtf he stuck that in a dungeon.

Justice PlattYesterday 10:45 AM+1 2 1

Good to see that Zak knows what Ron said better than Ron does.  There is absolutely no contradiction between the belief that Bisley chose not to do good figure drawing for whatever reason and RE's comment.

Victor Garrison (headspice)Yesterday 10:57 AM+1 2 1

+Rafael Chandler​​, I wanna say I "dig it", but I'm reaching, yet I can't grasp it.... :)

Zak SmithYesterday 2:06 PM

+Justice Platt How do you interpret: "yeesh, Simon, you get the big bucks, try some figure drawing" ?

Justice PlattYesterday 2:14 PM+1 2 1

+Zak Smith , three points:

1)There is no logical contradiction between saying that and believing the artist capable of figure drawing.

2)The guy who said it says that' he did not in fact assert that Bisley cannot draw bodies.

3)It is entirely plausible that he meant to point to the lack of use of figure drawing skills.  Example: The Packers go 3 & out on consecutive off-tackle runs.  I say "Yeesh, Rodgers, you get the big bucks, try some passing" in whatever tone of voice you like.  I clearly mean, as a reasonably informed football fan, that the Packers are making a strategic blunder by not using Rodgers' passing skills.  I think the situation is exactly analogous for RE as a comic fan.

So, yeah, you seem to have jumped to conclusions about his asserting Bisley's lack of skill.

Zak SmithYesterday 2:23 PM

+Justice Platt Are you saying you think the comment was intended to be a responsible and constructive comment rather than (at best) vague snark?

Justice PlattYesterday 2:28 PM+1 2 1

I make no claims to being able to read RE's mind. He speaks for himself well.   I'm saying that your blanket statement that RE asserted that Bisley has no skill is false on logical grounds, on the grounds of the testimony of the author, and on the grounds that there exists a strongly plausible alternate interpretation.  Is any of this not true?

Zak SmithYesterday 2:30 PM

+Justice Platt I suggest only that RE;s comment was snarky and negative enough that my initial comment was necessary to clarify the facts. His subsequent comments could have been "Oh, that's not what I mean" and I'd go "Oh, ok" But instead he went "YOU CLARIFIED AFTER MY SNARKY COMMENT! YOU ARE BULLYING ME!" at which point he passed from "requiring clarification" to simply "wrong and insane"

Justice PlattYesterday 2:36 PM+1 2 1

+Zak Smith , bullshit.  You have repeated a false thing-that RE asserted that Bisley has no skill in figure drawing-multiple times, even after clarification from the author.  In no way did RE's reaction force you to do that, and blaming him for it is ridiculous.

Zak SmithYesterday 2:41 PM

+Justice Platt If he disagrees with that assertion, then he may say that and I will have no choice but to take him at his word. It does't retroactively mean: -My initial clarifying comment was in any way insulting or unnecessary (as his  initial comment was, at best, ambiguous and, at best, still insulting snark) and -any of his later statements were in any way ok, since they contain crazy false accusations

Justice PlattYesterday 2:53 PM

+Zak Smith ,  the issue is not RE and the terrible things he allegedly  forced you to do.  You are not telling the truth about what he said. My 1st & 3rd points from my comment above at 4:14 applied before you replied, and you jumped to the conclusion that he must be asserting that Bisley had no skill.  Further, it is a rather insulting assumption that a lifelong, voracious comics reader like RE has no awareness of Bisley's work & skill.

Zak SmithYesterday 2:56 PM

+Justice Platt If Ron feels that I have misrepresented his position, he can say so. My first comment is wholly justified because it was there to clarify the situation after his snark. My subsequent comments were necessary to to establish that he was not telling the truth about bullying.

Justice PlattYesterday 3:09 PM

+Zak Smith , textual evidence is what it is.  Did you in fact jump to conclusions and make false statements about what RE asserted or not?  Were those conclusions based on the insulting assumption that RE was unaware of Bisley's skill or not?  If the answer to any of these is no, which of my three points is untrue?

Zak SmithYesterday 3:48 PM

+Justice Platt I already spoke to this: " If Ron feels that I have misrepresented his position, he can say so. (Neither of us know what he meant.) My first comment is wholly justified because it was there to clarify the situation after his snark. My subsequent comments were necessary to to establish that he was not telling the truth about bullying. "

Justice PlattYesterday 4:12 PM

More bullshit.  Your entire justification for ongoing intervention has been that you need (in fact have a moral obligation) to correct RE's error of fact-an error of fact that you made up.  RE points out to you that you did so, and you repeat it yet again!  In bold even!    

As far as your subsequent statements go, this is more "Ron made me do it" nonsense.  Simply put, you can take issue with someone's tone, or with someone's attribution to you of bullying behavior, without insisting that your tendentious interpretation of his statement is utterly correct. You are perfectly aware of this.

So, do you believe that RE's statement must and can only mean that Bisley lacks technical skill or not?  If not, will you retract those parts of your statements in which you definitively, unambiguously assert that this is the case? .   And, yes, this is important.  There is at least one person on the internet with a strong propensity to twist any statements by RE that can be twisted and attack RE with them.   The person I have in mind also clearly values your opinion, and would be happy to have fodder for his horseshit that he can present as approved by you.  Whether or not there is an analogy to your own situation is up to you.

Zak SmithYesterday 4:21 PM+1 2 1

+Justice Platt " do you believe that RE's statement must and can only mean that Bisley lacks technical skill or not? " I do not know what it means, I only know what: -I think it implied and -that Ron, instead of clarifying, chose to attack me " If not, will you retract those parts of your statements in which you definitively, unambiguously assert that this is the case?" If Ron says this isn't what he meant, then he can say that, at which point I will go "ok, then that's clear now" but all of my actions remained justified: His first statement morally required that I (or someone) clarify--as it strongly implied Bisley didn't know how to draw. My later statements were likewise, *morally required* because Ron falsely claimed he was being bullied.

Justice PlattYesterday 4:35 PM

+Zak Smith , a man who does not know what a statement means does not repeatedly, confidently, unambiguously, in bold offer an interpretation of that statement, nor does he present it as a definite error of fact someone made, nor does he assert that he has a "moral obligation" to correct it.   Why are you so reluctant to admit that you jumped to conclusions?

And again, this "If Ron chooses to correct me" horseshit doesn't wash.  Either you parsed his statement right, in which case I owe you an apology, or you did not, in which case you owe him an apology.

Zak SmithYesterday 4:38 PM

+Justice Platt How, pray tell, do we know if I correctly interpreted Ron's statement, psychopath?

Justice PlattYesterday 4:56 PM

+Zak Smith, either the author agrees with your interpretation or there is no plausible alternate interpretation.  Pretty simple.  Neither is the case here.  You can answer my questions whenever you like.

Does you calling me a psychopath mean I'm officially on some list of trolls or RPG drama club members or whatever?  Can I have a membership card?

Zak SmithYesterday 5:03 PM

+Justice Platt "either the author agrees with your interpretation or there is no plausible alternate interpretation" YES. That's why we have to wait for Ron to get past addressing: -1. The minor moral crime of responding to a work of art by an artist who'd done nothing wrong with a snarky attack and -2. The major moral crime of accusing me of being a bully and then move on to -3. The minor and arguable possible crime of ignorance or incompetence of attempting to express a possibly-believed inaccurate view of Mr Bisley's working process ....before we can answer the question of just what interior mental space Ron's absolutely totally objectively shitty comment was meant to reflect. When and if he finally gets around to clarifying that, I'll address it. As for you: you are simply obviously a psychopath for being so worried about 3 after all the 1 and 2 going on and doing so with so much pointless swearing. It would be remiss if I didn't point it out, for the benefit of anyone who hadn't noticed and might considering collaborating with you on any projects or discussing anything with you.

Justice PlattYesterday 5:53 PM

+Zak Smith , how on earth can a comment that you admit you don't know the meaning of be "absolutely totally objectively shitty?"  And before you go to the "it was snarky" well, remember that my alternate interpretation turns the comment from "Hurr hurr Bisley can't draw" to "Bisley would have done well to exercise more figure drawing skills."  You appear to have admitted that my interpretation is at least plausible, so you;ll be wanting to make an actual argument about why that's "objectively shitty." Otherwise,  all you're really doing is tone policing RE, since, agree or disagree, that's a reasonably productive thing to say.

Also, we have both essentially been ignoring RE's 10:38 AM comment, in which he both specifically points out that he did not explicitly say that Bisley cannot draw, points out that you made assumptions (one of which I pointed out above as an insulting assumption) to get to that interpretation, and states that he generally likes Mr. Bisley's work.  All of this makes my interpretation substantially more plausible.

As to my concern with 3-I was under the impression that you agreed with me that smaller falsehoods in the service of "larger truths" was a bad thing.

Unnecessary swearing?  Never thought I'd see the day when you'd blanch at bad words explicitly directed at your ideas, but times do change.

Last, on the psychopath thing,  I look forward to seeing your compendium of "dumb things Justice has said."  Maybe you'll find some stuff I don't remember or whatever.  Little trip down Memory Lane.  I am disappointed by no membership card.

I don't, however, expect to see it soon.  Unlike RE, I have no real reputation in RPGs to lose, and my name, to the best of my knowledge, has never been mentioned in a thread I am not in.  That's not the case for RE. Agree or disagree with him, like his stuff or don't, he's been working very hard to write good games and think clearly about RPGs for quite a while.  This is a good & worthy thing.  Allowing distortions of his remarks to stand just gives him more nonsense to contend with, especially at the hands of the individual I referred to earlier, who clearly values your opinion, covets your influence, and craves your approval.

Zak SmithYesterday 5:56 PM

+Justice Platt "my alternate interpretation turns the comment from "Hurr hurr Bisley can't draw" to "Bisley would have done well to exercise more figure drawing skills."" Your translation inaccurately removes the snark, which is there regardless of whether you want to acknowledge it or not. And is still opinion expressed as if it were fact or advice expressed to someone who clearly chose otherwise, which is also inexcusable and does not lead to a good discussion. The helpful or informative form of the remark would be something like "I wish he showed off more of his figure drawing skill here". Most of your comments are unnecessary, you just need to wait for Ron to respond rather thant repeatedly trying to find new interpretations of his objectively dumb remark " Agree or disagree with him, like his stuff or don't, he's been working very hard..." Calling me a bully torpedoes any and all good intentions on his part and means his alleged accomplishments don't matter. He ceases to be a reliable voice immediately at that point and becomes a chew toy for the rest of his life unless he manages to apologize and there can be no real defense of him. Even if my interpretation of his remark in my first response was inaccurate, nothing licenses him to say that--it is evil.

Justice PlattYesterday 6:13 PM+1 2 1

+Zak Smith , you can do better than that.  One man's hateful snark is another's witty tone.  I found your initial response nastily condescending, but that's not an argument against you. It's just straightforward tone policing either way.

And, as far as opinion expressed as fact goes, come on.  Just silly.  



Zak SmithYesterday 6:21 PM

+Justice Platt "Witty snark" or "hateful snark" are still just snark at the artist, which makes you not A Respectable Helpful Voice In The RPG Scene it makes you The Comments. And the way you build a decent RPG community is not be ok with people acting like The Comments. The Tone was snark (not ok to make a negative comment without facts to back it up). The Content was implying inaccurate facts (likewise not ok). "Tone policing" is when you make an accurate criticism and get attacked for your tone. Ron made either: -an inaccurate criticism (which is wrong, regardless of tone) or -an opinion-as-fact criticism (which is wrong, regardless of tone) The internet SO doesn't need more opinion-as-fact or baseless snark.

Justice PlattYesterday 7:44 PM

+Zak Smith , my alternate interpretation, whether or not it is particularly incisive, is substantive.  Which, frankly, is the better standard-"accurate" kinda sucks, since how could we possibly ' whether or not a counterfactual criticism, like my reinterpretation, is accurate?  Do we have access to all the pictures Bisley could have drawn?

The opinion as fact thing is still silly.  Work harder.

I agree about elevating the tone of internet discussion to at least some degree.But notice, you've gone from a duty to correct any & all errors of fact to a duty to elevate the the tone, as judged & enforced by you.  

Which, given your earlier name-calling and ridiculous blue-stockingness about swearing, allows me only to say "Be the change," y'know?

Zak SmithYesterday 7:59 PM+1 2 1

+Justice Platt "The opinion as fact thing is still silly.  Work harder." This alone makes you wrong. The rest is icing after that. If you think the internet needs more "Kirk is just better than Picard" then you're not a person anybody else need to listen to. As for "being the change" you don't stop someone from robbing banks by quietly not robbing banks. You have to call out bad behavior or it will continue, as the entire RPG internet proves every day.

Justice PlattYesterday 8:03 PM

+Zak Smith , would repeatedly, unambiguously asserting that your somewhat implausible interpretation of someone's statement was absolutely true count as OAF?

Zak SmithYesterday 8:09 PM

+Justice Platt Only if they contest it. If I think a house is on fire that isn't because of taste it's because of what i thought was a true fact about the world (which is all any of us can do: draw conclusions from sensory data). A grown-up like Ron needs to know the difference between taste and fact right off, but everyone can take the facts in front of them and make an incorrect inference--there's no shame in that so long as it is investigated if it was insulting to the target. Since Ron's comment was a bad thing to say because represents all bad options: -"Bisley lacks technical facility (incorrect) -"Bisley doesn't lack tech facility but it's good to express personal distaste by pretending it does" (counterproductive and trolling) -"Bisley made a choice I don't like and I'm going to both obscure that it's a choice and obscure that it;s just a taste thing" (counterproductive and trolling) -"I'm gonna snark for mystery reasons" (counterproductive and trolling) ...my inference was not particularly insulting since all the options make Ron's statement bad

Tony DemetriouYesterday 8:19 PM

I also interpreted Ron's comment as implying Bisley can't draw figures well.

I can absolutely see how the comment could have been intended to imply that Bisley can draw figures well, and chose not to in this picture - but even so it was clearly snarky. By saying "try some figure drawing", in either interpretation, it's saying that he didn't do figure drawing in this image.

To me, the implication that he didn't do figure drawing in this image is objectively wrong - there are two figures in the picture with (although stylized) relatively realistic proportions, musculature, etc. - there is clearly figure drawing there, whether it's good or bad.

So, using your football metaphor, it'd be more akin to Rodgers regularly passing the ball, but failing to do it to your satisfaction. And then you make the comment about "Yeesh, Rodgers, you get the big bucks, try some passing"

So clearly snarky.

(But it doesn't bother me if Ron is snarky or not. Bisley isn't here on this thread, and isn't having his feelings hurt, so we don't need to defend him unless we believe that some tangible harm will come to him or others from this snark.)

I'm not convinced that Ron's comment was shitty or bad - but it was inaccurate, and I don't have a problem with someone disagreeing with a comment they believe to be inaccurate.

I was quite surprised by Ron's response - although Zak's comment can be read as condascending, the reply was more vitriolic than I expected. Especially as I've seen Ron handle other, more direct attacks, with grace. I'm assuming that is due to their history, rather than this thread itself. As such, hanging this disagreement on Ron's originating comment feels like everyone is talking around the actual issue*.

* Whatever that actual issue might be.

+Zak Smith - Although I recognize that you were using the word in a non-medical sense, if we're being technically correct, +Justice Platt is only a psychopath if he scores above 30 on the PCL-R checklist. http://www.minddisorders.com/Flu-Inv/Hare-Psychopathy-Checklist.html

I dunno if he's likely to show up as a psychopath, as one of the primary traits is a lack of empathy, and Justice seems to be showing a lot of empathy towards Ron. (Although a psychopath might attempt to simulate that empathy as an excuse to exert their dominance in a conversation.)

Tony DemetriouYesterday 8:22 PM+1 2 1

+Zak Smith As a matter of taste, I don't know if this house is on fire, but it certainly is flaming

http://www.cynical-c.com/2015/06/19/relentlessly-gay-yard/

Zak SmithYesterday 8:25 PM

+Tony Demetriou the fact that Bisley isn't present is not the issue. Nor are his feelings. The point is a snarky negative comment does 3 things: -makes the conversation worse (because it is vague but contestable) and -(in this case) implies incorrect information. and -Violates the golden rule You don't avoid snark to spare peoples' feelings (surely thousands of people have snarked at Bisley before--he is an artist, this is a consequence of making art, it would be bad to let it affect your feelings), you avoid it because it makes the resulting conversation worse or (at best) does nothing but take up space. And, further, everyone must be subjected to the same standard whether they are present or not because they could easily see the comment in the future, and--MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY--uninformed 3rd parties, new to the situation might see it in the future.

Tony DemetriouYesterday 8:29 PM

+Zak Smith Out of context, I have zero problem with snark. I've got a friend that communicates almost entirely via sarcasm. I'm also Australian, where we'll use insults as everyday conversation tools. To me, this doesn't muddy the conversation.

In context, if snark is used as an attack, then I've got a problem with it. If it's used to express an opinion, but not specifically as an attack, then I don't. In this particular case, I couldn't say which is true.

I do think whether Ron believes Bisley is going to see his comment makes a difference on my interpretation of whether it was an attack or not.

If you feel that snark makes the conversation worse, regardless of whether it's an attack or not, then it doesn't matter whether Bisley is present or not.

I absolutely agree with you that Ron's comment implies incorrect information, and that incorrect information is bad (which is why I also disagreed with it.)

Justice Platt12:25 AM

+Zak Smith , RE did contest your interpretation.  I've pointed this out a few times. So yeah, OAF, by the standard you explicitly set out.  Really makes the rest of your post moot.  Snark always and everywhere bad might be defensible, but it is not the argument you were making in your posts to RE.

What I do want to address is your take on my opinion of OAF.  You immediately ascribed to me a complete straw man-that I want the internet to have more "Kirk is objectively better than Picard."  You had no warrant for saying so, and before you say that I should have clarified, does that justify the insulting  ascription of the most ridiculous position I could possibly hold?

It's of a piece with your professing to find four uses of a rather mild expletive "pointless swearing" and offering that as a reason people should avoid me.  In both cases, I cannot imagine that you did not recognize what you were doing and go on to do it anyway.  You are vigilant for strawmanning where you are concerned, and your body of work (to put it mildly) shows little concern about cussing.

These are the kinds of things that concern me in argument.  Your sanctimony about snark and OAF is sadly misplaced and rather grotesque when it occurs almost literally in the same breath with these other tactics.  You admit that snark can be harmless, OAF is pretty well understood as a statement of opinion by the vast majority of English speakers.  Faux outrage and strawmanning are always harmful.  So, yeah, be the change.

Zak Smith12:58 AM

+Justice Platt You ignored this: " If I think a house is on fire that isn't because of taste it's because of what i thought was a true fact about the world (which is all any of us can do: draw conclusions from sensory data). " You also ignored the fact that while Ron has repeatedly said pieces of what he thinks Ron has NEVER claimed his original snarky comment could not imply to a good-faith, educated reader that Ron thought Bisley lacked technical skill Until he: - does so, - does so convincingly and -then I deny him and can give no counterevidence ...then I am plausibly in the realm of fact. Right now I have an interpretation of his words "He implied Bisley lacked technical ability, despite possibly not meaning it" and my responsibilities "Therefore someone needed to establish this was not a true thing to imply". Nothing that has happened has changed any of that, and none of that is me taking something I know to be an opinion and claiming it's fact. So far as I can tell (and this is a guess),, from what he's saying, Ron agrees with this: "Ron implied Bisley lacked technical ability, despite possibly not meaning it" and his take is "Who the fuck cares? I get to just say random shit on the internet because who cares if anyone believes it? The important thing is nobody should ever clean up after the mess I make." As for the rest: OAF always leads to "Kirk is better than Picard" arguments, so you are totally defending that practice. On swearing: you're doing it against a target that's done nothing wrong in defense of a target that objectively has (he said I "bullied" which is objectively incorrect), that's the disturbing bit. ' OAF is pretty well understood as a statement of opinion by the vast majority of English speakers.' Incorrect: the whole reason for edition wars and other shitty internet phenomena is that nobody clearly draws lines between what's fact and what's opinion. Like it's a fact that people I know grasp percentile systems easily. But if I go "percentile systems are easy to grasp" then we don't know whether I mean that fact I just reported or whether I am just saying they are having done no research. Same with 90% of RPG arguments, treating claims you've researched the same as info you haven't ("This is "unworkable" "--well is it literally unworkable as in the math can't ever work because of a literal error or is it just you don't like it? "You can't satisfy both this and that at once!" Well are you sayng you tested it or are you saying you guess that?  "This drives most women away?" Well are you saying you checked or you're just guessing because you don't like it?) leads to nearly all the pointless fighting on the internet about games. So, just because you aren't smart enough to see why doing bad things causes problems doesn't mean they don't cause problems. Also, because you're not smart enough to see the reasons I call out bad behavior while at the same time engaging in behavior you think is the same, doesn't mean it's the same.

Justice Platt2:03 AM

+Zak Smith , you wanna get some sleep?  Rethink that post?  It's pretty feeble,

Zak Smith2:12 AM+1 2 1

+Justice Platt Again, the fact that you even posted that, resorting to just straight trolling and attempting to sort of wish away clear objections to your mistaken argument, suggests further that you have no value as a person to talk to. If you have an argument: make it. If you don't: apologize for wasting everyone's time.

Justice Platt3:06 AM+1 2 1

+Zak Smith OK. In order then:

I have no idea what you're talking about with the house on fire thing.  Hence ignoring it.

You're shifting goalposts again.  The idea that RE clarifying his position requires proof to the good faith etc etc is ludicrous.  It's also an entirely new standard.  My position has been consistently that your repeated, unambiguous statements that RE asserted (Not "implied"-another goalpost shift,.  "Asserted" is your multiple repeated original word choice) Bisley had no skill were not warranted, given that you don't know what RE means, and plausible alternate explanations exist.  "Plausibly in the realm of fact" is a ridiculous standard for big bold text this is true statements.  It is "plausibly in the realm of fact" that you're going to the bank tomorrow morning, but I'm still not going to claim that you definitely are, especially if you say you aren't..

You again change the claim you make-your original straw-manning is that I want more KP arguments, not that I'm ok with them.  

You,  a grown-up with some experience of the world, find it "disturbing" that someone called your argument "bullshit" in a cause you think bad?  What exactly does "disturbing" mean here, anyway?  Ooh-a vague insinuation!

Last, I can summarize your claims about OAF as: 1)Leads to unclear/confusing claims that sometimes require requesting warrants.  2)Abolition of this form of statement abolishes, or at least greatly diminishes, 1.    1 is not unique to OAF statements, and it is frankly risible to imagine that unclear claims and/or the need for warrant clarification stop or greatly diminish with their elimination.  So, minimal harms and inadequate solvency.  I'm not saying the practice is laudable, but c'mon.

Zak Smith3:26 AM

+Justice Platt 1. "I have no idea what you're talking about with the house on fire thing.  " Then the decent thing to do is ask not continue to be a tremendous shithead. I will explain: A grown-up person reporting on their taste knows they're reporting a mere opinion. If they dress it up as fact, they're pulling a rhetorical maneuver. Intent to deceive or bluster past rational objections. A person who thinks a house is on fire (they see the smoke, etc) and reports that it is and turns out to be wrong, has simply made a mistake no intent to deceive there. They inaccurately reported a fact which we all do innocently from time to time because we rely on our senses. My remarks in response to Ron have been of the second kind at worst--I believe Ron's remarks to be asserting (perhaps against Ron's real beliefs, because they are jokes) a certain thing that people may believe. Just as a joke may assert that a chicken crosses the road even if the person telling the joke doesn't believe that any chickens ever cross rods. 2. "You're shifting goalposts again. " Incorrect, I never shift goalposts, that would be disgusting, and it's disgusting you'd say that. My initial comment was based on and continues to be based on (and justified by) this idea: " (a) Ron's initial comment was such that a naive viewer might believe that Ron was expressing the following idea: "Bisley lacks technical skill" WHETHER RON BELIEVES BISLEY LACKS SUCH SKILL OR NOT. (b) It is therefore the responsibility of someone to explain to such a naive viewer that Bisley does indeed have technical skill " ...this has been my contention since the beginning. We know that Bisley does not lack technical skill. If he asserted Bisley lacked technical skill despite not believing it, he is evil and negligent. If he asserted it and believed it, he is ignorant and subsequently got mad about that being exposed. Neither of these conclusions is good for Ron therefore assuming one rather than the other does nothing to harm Ron's reputation more than the other choice. But there is no evidence anywhere that he did not assert this . You don't tell someone to try figure drawing if they're trying figure drawing. (a) Is not an opinion . It is an assertion of fact, so far as I know. If Ron wishes to contest the idea that his snarky remark may be read in such a way by a third party. I am (because I am sane) willing to consider the idea that my analysis is an inaccurate statement of the facts, but thus far there is zero evidence of this. Ron's defense and yours has simply been to talk about what Ron believes not what was implied to readers by the remark  (the only relevant thing). - As for the rest: you equivocate "not all harm is caused by x" (true statement) into "therefore there is no reason to eliminate x" (not a rational conclusion. OAFs cause: -some harm and provide -zero benefit ...so there is no good argument for them. Like bedbugs.

Victor Garrison (headspice)4:03 AM+2 3 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrCPIrs90eg

Ron Edwards3:32 PM

Looks like people were busy.

+Justice Platt thanks for the input.

+Zak Smith as I've stated before, there is no connection between my initial statement and a statement that Bisley cannot draw figures. Demanding that I repeat it was unnecessary, and as this is the second time, please don't demand it again.

You also demand that this statement be assessed or discussed in terms of its impact on readers. This is not the first time you have elected yourself the Voice of the Readers - I believe we agreed that you weren't going to do that to me again.

This is the day, unfortunately, when I have decided you're not going to explain why you single-message people to criticize their plussing choices, and why you often reply to others' stated views or takes on works of art in a chilling fashion yet post very similar statements about work you don't like. These are bullying acts. Why, in the complete absence of discernible need, do you do them?

My last statement before signing off. Willing or not, knowing or not, you have cultivated an environment of fear in this subculture. You can call this crazy and talk about more and more colorful metaphors all you want. Or you can try to assess this claim in any way you want that's not your gut, and see what you see then.

Signed off now, finished with the thread.

Zak Smith3:45 PM

+Ron Edwards 1. " as I've stated before, there is no connection between my initial statement and a statement that Bisley cannot draw figures. " Then what was it meant to communicate and why should we care? What's important is what it could logically be interpreted to mean literally by third parties 2. " You also demand that this statement be assessed or discussed in terms of its impact on readers. This is not the first time you have elected yourself the Voice of the Readers - I believe we agreed that you weren't going to do that to me again. " Citation needed. Why would I ever agree that the _most important thing about a public distortion of fact not be discussed? That would be like me agreeing to let you kick readers in the balls. 3. " This is the day, unfortunately, when I have decided you're not going to explain why you single-message people to criticize their plussing choices, " I do not message people to criticize them I message them to see if they are insane or not. If they are insane, it is important to block them from my circles. You haven't even explained how that's bad . It's Good Citizenship 101 to privately contact people you have conflict with so that you don't rake each other over the coals publicly unnecessarily. You are just grabbing random acts out of the air and affixing the word "bullying" to them out of what appears to be sheer insanity. How is sending someone a message in any way a harmful act? 4. " and why you often reply to others' stated views or takes on works of art in a chilling fashion yet post very similar statements about work you don't like. " Citation Needed. Since you aren't that smart and apparently can't read very well I suspect your definition of "very similar" is the problem here. 5. " These are bullying acts. " Incorrect: a bullying act would be: -negative and -something I can do that the target cannot or refuses on moral grounds to do. ...you haven't cited any such acts. You've only cited awesome good things I did.

6. " Willing or not, knowing or not, you have cultivated an environment of fear in this subculture. " If you're trying to say "Oh no, back in my day, indie game designers used to feel totally cool about posting false allegations and now they're afraid they'll be asked for evidence" or "I can't falsely accuse someone of bullying, then run away with no calls for accountability any more" well cry me a fucking river. I don't know any good person doing good work who claims to be afraid of jack shit--in fact people seem markedly less afraid than they were a year ago when you could be publicly accused of everything from hate crimes to cattle rustling and the Oh-I-Know-That-Guy network would back the accuser up because they both had the same grudge against the same dumb game. You can allege I've had an impact--but if you do so, then you have to weigh that against the fact that the DIY RPG scene is fucking kicking ass these days, in ways it hasn't for 30 years. I am totally proud of calling out shit people for their shit behavior--it's worked and we've made things better.

Zak Smith4:28 PM

I didn't come into this assuming Ron was insane, but now, I guess, we all know he actually is.

[lodelss]

Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

  In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other.

In Western media, he’s become a dark character worthy of obsession. He quotes and upholds long-forgotten scholars with anti-Semitic leanings like Julius Evola, who critiqued Mussolini’s Fascism for being too soft. (Evola is a deep-cut favorite of Steve Bannon’s as well.) He’s been linked with ultra-right movements internationally, from supporters of Marine Le Pen in France to supporters of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Some read his writings hoping to suss out some linchpin of Russian domestic and foreign policy.

As the Russian American journalist Masha Gessen wrote in The Future Is History, her celebrated 2017 examination of modern Russia, “Dugin enjoyed a period of international fame of sorts as a Putin whisperer — some believed he was the mastermind behind Putin’s wars.” Others called him “Putin’s brain,” or even “Putin’s Rasputin.”

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He sits at a plain desk, thick texts piled up in the bookcases behind him. His hair is brown and streaked with gray and parted floppily down the middle. He wears a dark-blue suit, no tie, and a lightly pinstriped shirt. There is a mole just to the left of his nose. His lips are buried in a big, bushy gray beard that, as Bloomberg once happily noted, “gives him a passing resemblance to the Siberian mystic who bewitched the last Tsar’s family.”

As the manifesto from one of the many political organizations he’d founded over the years once put it, Dugin’s worldview is “built on the total and radical negation of the individual and his centrality.” As one of his young followers once said, “Obedience and love for one’s leaders are traits of the Russian people.” And as Dugin himself once said, “There is nothing universal about universal human rights.”

From the second I walk in the door, he is locked and ready to engage. “Western Christianity and Western modernity and Western global elites try to oppose artificial intellect over the natural human liberty — that is a kind of a doom of the West that we rejected always.” He speaks in entrancingly accented, rapid English full of strange, unlikely phrasings rooted equally in the language of academia and his own far-flung and oblique obsessions — the occult, black magic, the hidden forces of history. He’s also really hung up on the West’s promotion of artificial intelligence. (Looking back now, I like to imagine that he was trying to tell me, if I’d only listened, that Skynet — the evil sentient world-destroying computer network from the Terminator series — was real.) If I let him, he’ll go on all day.

But I’m not here to get the stump speech, the full spiel. I want to know: How has he spread his message? How has he infected President Vladimir Putin — and Russia at large — with this worldview?

*

Aleksandr Dugin believes his influence is of a divine kind. And so he happily accepts the accusation of influence.

When I first ask him the question on influence he cuts me off, brusquely. I worry at first he’s going to end this conversation prematurely. Instead, he immediately monologues on the topic; it turns out he was cutting me off so that he could get to his turn to speak faster. “I could recognize that I am responsible for imposing my world vision over others,” he tells me. “And what excuse do I have for that? My excuse precisely exists in my own philosophy. I am not creator of the thought. It is a kind of angelic or demonic dialect that I’m involved in. I am but transmitter of some objective knowledge that exists outside of myself — beyond myself.”

The arc of Dugin’s life has been unlikely. In the eighties, he was an obscure, mild anti-Soviet dissident. In 1983, USSR authorities noted the trifling incident of Dugin playing the guitar at a party and singing what were, in his own words, “mystical anti-Communist songs.” He was deemed a real threat by no one. But in the nineties, after the fall of the USSR, he became a national figure.

His writings began to gain currency, primarily his major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, which became particularly popular with military elites. In 1993, he hosted the television program The Mysticism of the Third Reich, during which, as Gessen writes, he “hinted at a Western conspiracy to conceal the true nature of Hitler’s power.”

In The Future Is History, Gessen charts the rest of Dugin’s rise. How Moscow State University’s sociology department brought Dugin on board, implicitly legitimizing his theories with an elite institution’s stamp of approval. How every one of Russia’s national and international crises seemed to bolster him further.

Dugin believes his influence is of a divine kind. And so he happily accepts the accusation of influence.

In the summer of 2008, Russia invaded neighboring Georgia. Ostensibly, they were supporting South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Russian-leaning Georgian enclaves with long-held dreams of independence. Effectively, Russia had invaded a sovereign state. For years, government officials had been issuing Russian passports to Abkhazians and South Ossetians; now Russian forces had advanced deep into Georgian territory. This was the real deal, the Dugin-encouraged expansionist destiny. Russia once again had its guns cocked.

Dugin shined. Photos of him in South Ossetia circled. He stood in front of a tank, an AK-47 in his hands. As Gessen writes, that summer also “marked the first time he had seen one of his slogans catch on and go entirely mainstream, repeated on television and reproduced on bumper stickers. The slogan was Tanks to Tbilisi,” the Georgian capital. “Dugin had written ‘those who do not support the slogan are not Russians. Tanks to Tbilisi should be written on every Russian’s forehead.’”

From 2011 to 2013, the “snow revolution” — a series of peaceful protests against Russian election fraud — burbled in Moscow. The Russian government’s position was that the activists were paid agitators being supported by the US State Department. (As Putin declared in the early stages of the protests, “We are all grownups here. We all understand the organisers are acting according to a well-known scenario and in their own mercenary political interests.”) In the winter of 2013, Dugin spoke at a massive government-organized counter-protest in front of a crowd of tens of thousands.

“Dear Russian people! The global American empire strives to bring all countries of the world under its control,” he bellowed. “To resist this most serious threat, we must be united and mobilized! We must remember that we are Russian! That for thousands of years we protected our freedom and independence. We have spilled seas of blood, our own and other peoples, to make Russia great. And Russia will be great! Otherwise it will not exist at all. Russia is everything! All else is nothing!”

Internally, Putin answered the snow revolution with a crackdown. Externally, he answered with a show of force.

In 2014, again ostensibly answering the call of popular will, so-called “little green men” — Russian soldiers with no identifying insignias — took over the Crimean peninsula in the name of the Russian government. Crimea was a quasi-independent entity of Ukraine with a prominent ethnically Russian population. In the eyes of the international community, it was a brazenly illegal act. Once again, Russia was practicing expansionism.

Dugin was overjoyed. He had been pushing for a Crimean takeover since the nineties. He believed that it was just the beginning. Russia should go further and co-opt Eastern Ukraine (the traditionally Russian-speaking half of the country) as well. But for now, it augured great things. He saw it as a bolstering of the Russian sphere of influence. Eternal Rome was again strengthening itself.

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During one major televised interview, Putin explained the Crimean invasion by saying “a Russian person — or to speak more broadly, a person of the Russian World — thinks about the fact that man has a moral purpose. These are the deep roots of our patriotism. This is where mass heroism comes from in war.”

Now even Dugin’s literal phrasings were being echoed back to him. As Gessen writes, “The phrase ‘Russian World’ — the vision of a civilization led by Russia — was Dugin’s.” This was, effectively, the real-life execution of Dugin’s worldview.

Dugin did not talk to Gessen for her book. Possibly, he was familiar with Gessen’s place as an outspoken Putin critic and decided to stay away. I can only assume that Dugin agreed to an interview with me because he’d never heard of me before. I assume that he felt comfortable he would dominate the interaction.

*

“I believe in ideas that could well exist without man,” Dugin tells me. “Angels are ideas without bodies. I’m a believer. I believe in angels. I believe in God. I believe in Revelation. I’m Christian Orthodox. And for me, the existence of angels, as well as the existence of ideas, is the fact of experience — not only narrative.”

As Dugin sees it, he has stayed put, espousing these ideas that were given to him by the Lord. It’s the world that has moved around him. Sometimes it’s drawn to him. Sometimes it’s repulsed. “I put myself in the center of all the society of history. It’s not egocentric. It’s completely opposed to egocentrism. I put myself in the center of the world by precisely liberating myself from the individual. It is some other in myself that is the center.”

Are you following? He is at the center because his truth is the true truth. But he is also opposite the mainstream. He stands, alone, against a great force. “Mass media, education, politics, social relations, class, economy — that is society,” he says. “It is mechanicalized. A kind of social mechanics.”

Dugin, however, is part of something else — the “revolutionary elite that is coming to replace the elite.” He is counter-elite. And not only in Russia, but “on a global scale — I awaken these peoples. I’m awakening these collective consciousnesses. Using the term of Carl Gustav Jung, I transform these peoples from the sleeping mode to the waking mode. From the drunken mode to the sober mode.”

(He really does say the whole name: “Carl Gustav Jung.” In the course of our conversation, he also name-checks Vilfredo Pareto, Louis Dumont, Hegel, Heidegger, and Charles Krauthammer, almost always quoting them directly, almost always prefacing said quote with some variation of the phrase “In the words of . . .”)

He goes on: “That is the operation that I am leading. My influence is very special. I would say, a revolutionary kind. That is why I am called, by some American figures, the most dangerous man in the world. I would gladly accept that as labeled. I hope that it is true.”

His power and influence, he says, are of a slippery kind. “We could not measure for example, who is more popular, Michael Jackson or myself,” he says, chuckling softly.

I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.

Because Michael Jackson, or pop music as a whole, exists in the mainstream — inside the traditional flow of information. And despite his history of television appearances, Dugin claims that “the traditional ways to promote ideas are completely closed” to him “and were closed from the very beginning.” Therefore, “in order to exercise, to fulfill this influence, I am obliged to seek, to search new ways. So I’m a kind of a, mmmm, metaphysical hacker. I try to find the backdoors of the program of globalization in order to make it explode.” His work, he says proudly, is a “a kind of terrorism.”

And despite this self-perceived singular place in the center of history, he says, “I’m not lonely Russian stranger. I am the most Russian man that we could imagine. I am Russia spirit. I am Russia!”

In conversation, as he makes his points, Dugin’s hands move constantly. Not just one or two swipes; it’s a wild, unceasing symphony of gestures. He swings an open palm, slams fingertips straight down on the tabletop, points an index finger in the air and his other hand’s middle finger straight down. The fingers and palms move in synchronicity and also alone, every single one on a mission. He interlocks and breaks apart and throws out his hands and brings them back together. Some of the moves he repeats. Some come just once. I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.

His is a kind of intimate, anti-charisma. I realize that it’s the surety of his purpose that compels. As in so many other situations, pure, unadulterated bluster is carrying the day for Dugin.

“People like myself reflect the liberty of mankind. Man is an entity that always can choose. It can say yes to globalization and to this artificial intelligence, to the so-called progress, to the individualization — yes to the global agenda. But the man can say, ‘No, no! It’s not me!’ And that is the salvation of mankind. We need to liberate everybody. We need a global revolution. And I am conscious that I am fulfilling this role.”

*

I ask Dugin about a man he’s friendly with, to whom he’s often been compared: Steve Bannon. Is it correct? Are they some kind of analogs?

“As long as I understand Bannon, I think that the comparison could be legitimate,” he says. “Bannon suggested to Trump how to find the backdoor in the system. Absolutely, to be a kind of revolutionary — not from the right or the left, but a revolutionary against this world.” But “Bannon is a PR specialist dealing in ideology. I am a philosopher, trying to transmit through art, special art, my historical mission in front of Russian people.

“Maybe the difference exists precisely in the different nature of our societies. American society is much more based on public relations. Pragmatism. If something works, it is already accepted. Technical efficacy is much more appreciated than, for example, ideological coherence or truthfulness. In the political public relations, the propaganda is a means to trick people. I am not using ideology. I am used by ideology.”

Dugin is skeptical that Bannon ever had the mandate to be a true, pure ideologue. He recalls Trump once, way back on the campaign trail, skewering Bannon for reading too much. “I think that you cannot read too much. If you understand the weight of ideas, this accusation is a proof of some limited mind.”

Arguing his point, Dugin falls into a minor reverie. “So many beautiful texts!” he says. “So many profound authors and philosophers . . . so many languages! The real richness, the real treasury of human wisdom amassed is infinite. The only blame should be, you are reading not enough. If you always, reading, reading, reading, it’s nothing at all. Everybody of us should read more. More and more! If you think you read enough, you’re wrong! You don’t read nothing!” Before his fall from relevance, Bannon and Dugin did have interesting parallels. Like Bannon’s now-squandered power, Dugin’s lies in his ability to portray all world events as part of a plot he’s already seen. The sheer grandiosity of his speech is calculated to overwhelm. I know it all, he insists again and again, until the listener either accepts him as ridiculous or sublime.

But Bannon never had Dugin’s air of historicity. Intentionally or otherwise, Dugin has been able to cloak himself in dark mystery. Perhaps Dugin would prefer an example closer to home, then — Grigori Rasputin?

He’s not offended. Not in the slightest. Soberly, he analyzes the pairing.

“So. The figure of Rasputin is misunderstood. He had influence over our tsar, personal influence. He was against the modernization and Westernization. He was in favor of Russian people instead of the corrupted Russian elite.” So far, more than a few points of overlap between Aleksandr and Grigori. Certainly, Dugin is Rasputinesque.

But! “Rasputin wasn’t philosopher. He didn’t conceptualize anything. He’s a kind of hypnotizer, a kind of a trickster, something like that. So the comparison is a little bit limited. He built his influence on the personal charm and on his individual influence on the tsar. That was a very special case. This was person-to-person, without some ideology. Some philosophy.”

Who, then, is a closer peer or antecedent? For an answer, Dugin has to go beyond contemporary politics, beyond Russian history — and into the realm of the fantastic. “I compare myself much more to Merlin.” The great wizard Merlin, the mythical one, the son of an incubus. King Arthur’s advisor. “The image of the intellectual that is engaged in supra-human contemplation, in the secrets, that tries to clear the way for the secular ruler to create the great empire. “Merlin. The founder of King Arthur’s empire. That is my archetype, I would say.”

*

I ask Dugin, “What comes next?”

“Some of the ideas that I defended from the ages — they have won. They are accepted by the government and realized in the Eurasian union and Russian foreign policy and military strategy. The anti-modern, anti-Western, anti-liberal shift of Russian politics and ideology has been realized.”

But “the other half is not yet fulfilled. That is the problem. The second part of my ideas, of my projects, of my visions of the Russian future is still waiting. It is suspended, I would say. It waits it’s own time.”

The problem, says Dugin, is that Putin has not institutionalized the bits of Dugin that he’s borrowed. The Dugin worldview has not reached the point of “irreversibility.” Here, Dugin is critical of Putin: “He pretend to be the ruler, pragmatic and not controlled by nothing, including ideology. He pretend to be the absolute sovereign instead of being the sovereign fighting for the mission.

“It is a kind of simulacrum,” he says. “It is a kind of imitation. It seems more and more that it is a kind of very dirty play. A game they try to hijack. The real tradition, the real conservatism — they try to use that as tools and means for their rule.”

Where does the Rasputin end and the Rasputin’s subject begin?

He’s careful not to point fingers too directly. This is modern Russia, after all. “Maybe not Putin himself,” he says, “but the people around Putin.”

Fundamentally, Dugin’s disappointment is that Putin did not go far enough. That he did not push past Crimea and into Ukraine with the Russian Army. That he is not creating a “Russian world” beyond the borders of modern Russia — that he’s not birthing a new Russian empire. In Gessen’s analysis, this revealed the true nature of Dugin’s influence. Putin wasn’t being manipulated by Dugin’s ideology; Putin was borrowing it, for his own ends.

So was Dugin influential? Or was he a stooge? Again, that old question: Where does the Rasputin end and the Rasputin’s subject begin? Where do Putin’s own volitions end and where do Dugin’s prophecies begin?

One neutral observer might observe that Dugin’s dark influence was great once, but has waned now. Yet another might observe that it was always transactional.

But Dugin doesn’t have to control Putin, only and directly, to have influence on the culture. Igor Vinogradov, the editor of the magazine Kontinent, once said of Dugin and his disciples, “They are undertaking a noisy galvanization of a reactionary utopia that failed long ago — for all their ineptitude, they are very dangerous. After all, the temptation of religious fundamentalism . . . is attractive to many desperate people who have lost their way in this chaos.” That was in 1992. Since, Dugin has published endlessly and spread his missives incessantly. Both in English and in Russian, the Internet is rife with his manifestos.

Andreas Umlaund is a Ukrainian political scientist who has studied Dugin at length. Perhaps inevitably, Umlaund’s research into Dugin made Umlaund a target. As he explained to me in an interview from his home in Ukraine, Dugin’s minions write articles that allege that he is “an anti-Russian agent paid by the [US] State Department” and that he’s been “kicked out of universities for [sexual] harassment.” According to these reports, Umlaund says, “German officials were looking for me because I was involved in child pornography. Allegedly, I’m a pedophile!”

Umlaund’s greatest sin, in Dugin’s supporters eyes, was exposing Dugin’s explicit Nazi leanings. “I digged out these old quotes where he praises the SS and Reinhard Heydrich, the original SS officer responsible for the organization of the Holocaust. And they didn’t like that, because by that time Dugin had already become part of the Russian establishment. And these old quotes, from when he was still a lunatic fringe actor, were an embarrassment.”

I ask Umlaund what it’s like, being targeted as the number one nemesis of a man like Dugin. With historically informed equanimity, he shrugs it off. “This is not an unusual campaign,” he says. “Also in Soviet times, they were using pedophilia allegations against dissidents and of political enemies. It’s from the KGB playbook.”

Umlaund has continued his work, writing that the explosion of Dugin content, which begins around 2001, “has become difficult to follow. The number of Dugin’s appearances in the press, television, radio, World Wide Web, and various academic and political conferences has multiplied.” Dugin’s aim, Umlaund argues, is to “radically transform basic criteria of what constitutes science, what scholarly research is about, and to permit bodies of thought such as occultism, mysticism, esotericism, conspirology, etc. into higher education and scholarship that would bring down the borders between science and fiction.”

There’s a classic Simpsons episode that I love, “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment.” It’s from 1990, the early golden era of the show. It starts off with Homer spotting Flanders fussily rejecting a cable guy’s illegal, tantalizing offer: fifty dollars for bootleg cable. Sensibly, immediately, Homer drags the cable guy over to his own home and readily accepts. But as the man is finishing up his installation, Homer has a twinge of morality.

“So . . . this is OK, isn’t it?” he asks. “I mean everybody does it, right?” Coolly, the cable man hands him a pamphlet full of justifications for his actions (“Fact: Cable companies are big faceless corporations”). The evocative title: “So You’ve Decided to Steal Cable.”

It’s a wild oversimplification, to be sure, but the danger of someone like Dugin (and Bannon before him) is wrapped up in that pamphlet. You can make someone hate. But it’s easier to find someone who already hates, and to give them justification — historical, epic justification — for their hate. People naturally drift toward doing bad things. But they’d also love a pamphlet explaining why it’s all OK.

*

As Bloomberg has pointed out, in 2014, Dugin lost his place at the Moscow State University “after activists accused him of encouraging genocide. Thousands of people signed a petition calling for his removal after a rant in support of separatists in Ukraine in which he said, ‘kill, kill, kill.’” But he no longer needed an institution like Moscow State to have influence — he’d already become a prominent enough member of the establishment on his own.

During his time in the center of Russian politics, while the vagaries of the real world turned, Dugin tended to the ur-mission. Now, perhaps, he’s back on the outs of his country’s mainstream political thought. But his words have left his mouth and have been received. And he will continue talking and talking because he is playing a long, long game. “Some things are being realized that I have foreseen and foretold thirty years ago,” he tells me. “Now I am foretelling and foreseeing what should come in the future.”

As Dugin sees it, “The most highest point of American influence as universal power is behind us. Because America tries to go beyond the normal and the natural borders and tries to influence Middle East, Africa, Eurasia — and fails everywhere. America export chaos, bloody chaos. Everywhere America is, there is corpses. They have turned into a nihilistic force. The real greatness of America is not in continuation of this exporting of this bloody chaos.”

Dugin suggests that America ask itself some hard questions. Like “What is victory? What is glory? What is real highest position in history?”

Dugin’s vision is clear: America for Americans, Russia for Russians. And while Russia builds itself back up, it stays a closed society. “Being weak, we should stay closed from any influence,” he says. “From the West, from the East, from China or Islam or Europe or America or Africa, we should stay closed” — he bangs a fist on the table — “in order to return to our force.”

Through an open window, gray daylight pours in. Behind us, two women walk back and forth, mugs of coffee in hand, consulting texts and each other. They, presumably, are in the “field of geopolitics” as well. Here, in this room, in this massive building, Dugin quietly plots Russia’s revival and sends out his warnings to Russia’s enemies. The grand project rolls on.

America, declares Dugin, must follow the way of Trump into cynical and callow isolationism and avoid its once-upon-a-time fate as a shining beacon on a hill. Otherwise, Carthage and Rome will do battle. “When the United States tries to be unique, to be universal, a norm for all humanity — that creates the basis for inevitable conflict,” Dugin says. “Then the final war is inevitable.”

* * *

No One Should Have All That Power by Amos Barshad. Copyright © 2019 by Amos Barshad. Used by permission of Abrams Press, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Amos Barshad was raised in Israel, the Netherlands, and Massachusetts. He’s a former staff writer at The FADER and Grantland and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Arkansas Times. This is his first book.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

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[lodelss]

Putin’s Rasputin

Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

  In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other.

In Western media, he’s become a dark character worthy of obsession. He quotes and upholds long-forgotten scholars with anti-Semitic leanings like Julius Evola, who critiqued Mussolini’s Fascism for being too soft. (Evola is a deep-cut favorite of Steve Bannon’s as well.) He’s been linked with ultra-right movements internationally, from supporters of Marine Le Pen in France to supporters of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Some read his writings hoping to suss out some linchpin of Russian domestic and foreign policy.

As the Russian American journalist Masha Gessen wrote in The Future Is History, her celebrated 2017 examination of modern Russia, “Dugin enjoyed a period of international fame of sorts as a Putin whisperer — some believed he was the mastermind behind Putin’s wars.” Others called him “Putin’s brain,” or even “Putin’s Rasputin.”

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He sits at a plain desk, thick texts piled up in the bookcases behind him. His hair is brown and streaked with gray and parted floppily down the middle. He wears a dark-blue suit, no tie, and a lightly pinstriped shirt. There is a mole just to the left of his nose. His lips are buried in a big, bushy gray beard that, as Bloomberg once happily noted, “gives him a passing resemblance to the Siberian mystic who bewitched the last Tsar’s family.”

As the manifesto from one of the many political organizations he’d founded over the years once put it, Dugin’s worldview is “built on the total and radical negation of the individual and his centrality.” As one of his young followers once said, “Obedience and love for one’s leaders are traits of the Russian people.” And as Dugin himself once said, “There is nothing universal about universal human rights.”

From the second I walk in the door, he is locked and ready to engage. “Western Christianity and Western modernity and Western global elites try to oppose artificial intellect over the natural human liberty — that is a kind of a doom of the West that we rejected always.” He speaks in entrancingly accented, rapid English full of strange, unlikely phrasings rooted equally in the language of academia and his own far-flung and oblique obsessions — the occult, black magic, the hidden forces of history. He’s also really hung up on the West’s promotion of artificial intelligence. (Looking back now, I like to imagine that he was trying to tell me, if I’d only listened, that Skynet — the evil sentient world-destroying computer network from the Terminator series — was real.) If I let him, he’ll go on all day.

But I’m not here to get the stump speech, the full spiel. I want to know: How has he spread his message? How has he infected President Vladimir Putin — and Russia at large — with this worldview?

*

Aleksandr Dugin believes his influence is of a divine kind. And so he happily accepts the accusation of influence.

When I first ask him the question on influence he cuts me off, brusquely. I worry at first he’s going to end this conversation prematurely. Instead, he immediately monologues on the topic; it turns out he was cutting me off so that he could get to his turn to speak faster. “I could recognize that I am responsible for imposing my world vision over others,” he tells me. “And what excuse do I have for that? My excuse precisely exists in my own philosophy. I am not creator of the thought. It is a kind of angelic or demonic dialect that I’m involved in. I am but transmitter of some objective knowledge that exists outside of myself — beyond myself.”

The arc of Dugin’s life has been unlikely. In the eighties, he was an obscure, mild anti-Soviet dissident. In 1983, USSR authorities noted the trifling incident of Dugin playing the guitar at a party and singing what were, in his own words, “mystical anti-Communist songs.” He was deemed a real threat by no one. But in the nineties, after the fall of the USSR, he became a national figure.

His writings began to gain currency, primarily his major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, which became particularly popular with military elites. In 1993, he hosted the television program The Mysticism of the Third Reich, during which, as Gessen writes, he “hinted at a Western conspiracy to conceal the true nature of Hitler’s power.”

In The Future Is History, Gessen charts the rest of Dugin’s rise. How Moscow State University’s sociology department brought Dugin on board, implicitly legitimizing his theories with an elite institution’s stamp of approval. How every one of Russia’s national and international crises seemed to bolster him further.

Dugin believes his influence is of a divine kind. And so he happily accepts the accusation of influence.

In the summer of 2008, Russia invaded neighboring Georgia. Ostensibly, they were supporting South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Russian-leaning Georgian enclaves with long-held dreams of independence. Effectively, Russia had invaded a sovereign state. For years, government officials had been issuing Russian passports to Abkhazians and South Ossetians; now Russian forces had advanced deep into Georgian territory. This was the real deal, the Dugin-encouraged expansionist destiny. Russia once again had its guns cocked.

Dugin shined. Photos of him in South Ossetia circled. He stood in front of a tank, an AK-47 in his hands. As Gessen writes, that summer also “marked the first time he had seen one of his slogans catch on and go entirely mainstream, repeated on television and reproduced on bumper stickers. The slogan was Tanks to Tbilisi,” the Georgian capital. “Dugin had written ‘those who do not support the slogan are not Russians. Tanks to Tbilisi should be written on every Russian’s forehead.’”

From 2011 to 2013, the “snow revolution” — a series of peaceful protests against Russian election fraud — burbled in Moscow. The Russian government’s position was that the activists were paid agitators being supported by the US State Department. (As Putin declared in the early stages of the protests, “We are all grownups here. We all understand the organisers are acting according to a well-known scenario and in their own mercenary political interests.”) In the winter of 2013, Dugin spoke at a massive government-organized counter-protest in front of a crowd of tens of thousands.

“Dear Russian people! The global American empire strives to bring all countries of the world under its control,” he bellowed. “To resist this most serious threat, we must be united and mobilized! We must remember that we are Russian! That for thousands of years we protected our freedom and independence. We have spilled seas of blood, our own and other peoples, to make Russia great. And Russia will be great! Otherwise it will not exist at all. Russia is everything! All else is nothing!”

Internally, Putin answered the snow revolution with a crackdown. Externally, he answered with a show of force.

In 2014, again ostensibly answering the call of popular will, so-called “little green men” — Russian soldiers with no identifying insignias — took over the Crimean peninsula in the name of the Russian government. Crimea was a quasi-independent entity of Ukraine with a prominent ethnically Russian population. In the eyes of the international community, it was a brazenly illegal act. Once again, Russia was practicing expansionism.

Dugin was overjoyed. He had been pushing for a Crimean takeover since the nineties. He believed that it was just the beginning. Russia should go further and co-opt Eastern Ukraine (the traditionally Russian-speaking half of the country) as well. But for now, it augured great things. He saw it as a bolstering of the Russian sphere of influence. Eternal Rome was again strengthening itself.

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During one major televised interview, Putin explained the Crimean invasion by saying “a Russian person — or to speak more broadly, a person of the Russian World — thinks about the fact that man has a moral purpose. These are the deep roots of our patriotism. This is where mass heroism comes from in war.”

Now even Dugin’s literal phrasings were being echoed back to him. As Gessen writes, “The phrase ‘Russian World’ — the vision of a civilization led by Russia — was Dugin’s.” This was, effectively, the real-life execution of Dugin’s worldview.

Dugin did not talk to Gessen for her book. Possibly, he was familiar with Gessen’s place as an outspoken Putin critic and decided to stay away. I can only assume that Dugin agreed to an interview with me because he’d never heard of me before. I assume that he felt comfortable he would dominate the interaction.

*

“I believe in ideas that could well exist without man,” Dugin tells me. “Angels are ideas without bodies. I’m a believer. I believe in angels. I believe in God. I believe in Revelation. I’m Christian Orthodox. And for me, the existence of angels, as well as the existence of ideas, is the fact of experience — not only narrative.”

As Dugin sees it, he has stayed put, espousing these ideas that were given to him by the Lord. It’s the world that has moved around him. Sometimes it’s drawn to him. Sometimes it’s repulsed. “I put myself in the center of all the society of history. It’s not egocentric. It’s completely opposed to egocentrism. I put myself in the center of the world by precisely liberating myself from the individual. It is some other in myself that is the center.”

Are you following? He is at the center because his truth is the true truth. But he is also opposite the mainstream. He stands, alone, against a great force. “Mass media, education, politics, social relations, class, economy — that is society,” he says. “It is mechanicalized. A kind of social mechanics.”

Dugin, however, is part of something else — the “revolutionary elite that is coming to replace the elite.” He is counter-elite. And not only in Russia, but “on a global scale — I awaken these peoples. I’m awakening these collective consciousnesses. Using the term of Carl Gustav Jung, I transform these peoples from the sleeping mode to the waking mode. From the drunken mode to the sober mode.”

(He really does say the whole name: “Carl Gustav Jung.” In the course of our conversation, he also name-checks Vilfredo Pareto, Louis Dumont, Hegel, Heidegger, and Charles Krauthammer, almost always quoting them directly, almost always prefacing said quote with some variation of the phrase “In the words of . . .”)

He goes on: “That is the operation that I am leading. My influence is very special. I would say, a revolutionary kind. That is why I am called, by some American figures, the most dangerous man in the world. I would gladly accept that as labeled. I hope that it is true.”

His power and influence, he says, are of a slippery kind. “We could not measure for example, who is more popular, Michael Jackson or myself,” he says, chuckling softly.

I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.

Because Michael Jackson, or pop music as a whole, exists in the mainstream — inside the traditional flow of information. And despite his history of television appearances, Dugin claims that “the traditional ways to promote ideas are completely closed” to him “and were closed from the very beginning.” Therefore, “in order to exercise, to fulfill this influence, I am obliged to seek, to search new ways. So I’m a kind of a, mmmm, metaphysical hacker. I try to find the backdoors of the program of globalization in order to make it explode.” His work, he says proudly, is a “a kind of terrorism.”

And despite this self-perceived singular place in the center of history, he says, “I’m not lonely Russian stranger. I am the most Russian man that we could imagine. I am Russia spirit. I am Russia!”

In conversation, as he makes his points, Dugin’s hands move constantly. Not just one or two swipes; it’s a wild, unceasing symphony of gestures. He swings an open palm, slams fingertips straight down on the tabletop, points an index finger in the air and his other hand’s middle finger straight down. The fingers and palms move in synchronicity and also alone, every single one on a mission. He interlocks and breaks apart and throws out his hands and brings them back together. Some of the moves he repeats. Some come just once. I begin to believe that if I stay here long enough, he’ll keep inventing ways to emphatically gesticulate forever.

His is a kind of intimate, anti-charisma. I realize that it’s the surety of his purpose that compels. As in so many other situations, pure, unadulterated bluster is carrying the day for Dugin.

“People like myself reflect the liberty of mankind. Man is an entity that always can choose. It can say yes to globalization and to this artificial intelligence, to the so-called progress, to the individualization — yes to the global agenda. But the man can say, ‘No, no! It’s not me!’ And that is the salvation of mankind. We need to liberate everybody. We need a global revolution. And I am conscious that I am fulfilling this role.”

*

I ask Dugin about a man he’s friendly with, to whom he’s often been compared: Steve Bannon. Is it correct? Are they some kind of analogs?

“As long as I understand Bannon, I think that the comparison could be legitimate,” he says. “Bannon suggested to Trump how to find the backdoor in the system. Absolutely, to be a kind of revolutionary — not from the right or the left, but a revolutionary against this world.” But “Bannon is a PR specialist dealing in ideology. I am a philosopher, trying to transmit through art, special art, my historical mission in front of Russian people.

“Maybe the difference exists precisely in the different nature of our societies. American society is much more based on public relations. Pragmatism. If something works, it is already accepted. Technical efficacy is much more appreciated than, for example, ideological coherence or truthfulness. In the political public relations, the propaganda is a means to trick people. I am not using ideology. I am used by ideology.”

Dugin is skeptical that Bannon ever had the mandate to be a true, pure ideologue. He recalls Trump once, way back on the campaign trail, skewering Bannon for reading too much. “I think that you cannot read too much. If you understand the weight of ideas, this accusation is a proof of some limited mind.”

Arguing his point, Dugin falls into a minor reverie. “So many beautiful texts!” he says. “So many profound authors and philosophers . . . so many languages! The real richness, the real treasury of human wisdom amassed is infinite. The only blame should be, you are reading not enough. If you always, reading, reading, reading, it’s nothing at all. Everybody of us should read more. More and more! If you think you read enough, you’re wrong! You don’t read nothing!” Before his fall from relevance, Bannon and Dugin did have interesting parallels. Like Bannon’s now-squandered power, Dugin’s lies in his ability to portray all world events as part of a plot he’s already seen. The sheer grandiosity of his speech is calculated to overwhelm. I know it all, he insists again and again, until the listener either accepts him as ridiculous or sublime.

But Bannon never had Dugin’s air of historicity. Intentionally or otherwise, Dugin has been able to cloak himself in dark mystery. Perhaps Dugin would prefer an example closer to home, then — Grigori Rasputin?

He’s not offended. Not in the slightest. Soberly, he analyzes the pairing.

“So. The figure of Rasputin is misunderstood. He had influence over our tsar, personal influence. He was against the modernization and Westernization. He was in favor of Russian people instead of the corrupted Russian elite.” So far, more than a few points of overlap between Aleksandr and Grigori. Certainly, Dugin is Rasputinesque.

But! “Rasputin wasn’t philosopher. He didn’t conceptualize anything. He’s a kind of hypnotizer, a kind of a trickster, something like that. So the comparison is a little bit limited. He built his influence on the personal charm and on his individual influence on the tsar. That was a very special case. This was person-to-person, without some ideology. Some philosophy.”

Who, then, is a closer peer or antecedent? For an answer, Dugin has to go beyond contemporary politics, beyond Russian history — and into the realm of the fantastic. “I compare myself much more to Merlin.” The great wizard Merlin, the mythical one, the son of an incubus. King Arthur’s advisor. “The image of the intellectual that is engaged in supra-human contemplation, in the secrets, that tries to clear the way for the secular ruler to create the great empire. “Merlin. The founder of King Arthur’s empire. That is my archetype, I would say.”

*

I ask Dugin, “What comes next?”

“Some of the ideas that I defended from the ages — they have won. They are accepted by the government and realized in the Eurasian union and Russian foreign policy and military strategy. The anti-modern, anti-Western, anti-liberal shift of Russian politics and ideology has been realized.”

But “the other half is not yet fulfilled. That is the problem. The second part of my ideas, of my projects, of my visions of the Russian future is still waiting. It is suspended, I would say. It waits it’s own time.”

The problem, says Dugin, is that Putin has not institutionalized the bits of Dugin that he’s borrowed. The Dugin worldview has not reached the point of “irreversibility.” Here, Dugin is critical of Putin: “He pretend to be the ruler, pragmatic and not controlled by nothing, including ideology. He pretend to be the absolute sovereign instead of being the sovereign fighting for the mission.

“It is a kind of simulacrum,” he says. “It is a kind of imitation. It seems more and more that it is a kind of very dirty play. A game they try to hijack. The real tradition, the real conservatism — they try to use that as tools and means for their rule.”

Where does the Rasputin end and the Rasputin’s subject begin?

He’s careful not to point fingers too directly. This is modern Russia, after all. “Maybe not Putin himself,” he says, “but the people around Putin.”

Fundamentally, Dugin’s disappointment is that Putin did not go far enough. That he did not push past Crimea and into Ukraine with the Russian Army. That he is not creating a “Russian world” beyond the borders of modern Russia — that he’s not birthing a new Russian empire. In Gessen’s analysis, this revealed the true nature of Dugin’s influence. Putin wasn’t being manipulated by Dugin’s ideology; Putin was borrowing it, for his own ends.

So was Dugin influential? Or was he a stooge? Again, that old question: Where does the Rasputin end and the Rasputin’s subject begin? Where do Putin’s own volitions end and where do Dugin’s prophecies begin?

One neutral observer might observe that Dugin’s dark influence was great once, but has waned now. Yet another might observe that it was always transactional.

But Dugin doesn’t have to control Putin, only and directly, to have influence on the culture. Igor Vinogradov, the editor of the magazine Kontinent, once said of Dugin and his disciples, “They are undertaking a noisy galvanization of a reactionary utopia that failed long ago — for all their ineptitude, they are very dangerous. After all, the temptation of religious fundamentalism . . . is attractive to many desperate people who have lost their way in this chaos.” That was in 1992. Since, Dugin has published endlessly and spread his missives incessantly. Both in English and in Russian, the Internet is rife with his manifestos.

Andreas Umlaund is a Ukrainian political scientist who has studied Dugin at length. Perhaps inevitably, Umlaund’s research into Dugin made Umlaund a target. As he explained to me in an interview from his home in Ukraine, Dugin’s minions write articles that allege that he is “an anti-Russian agent paid by the [US] State Department” and that he’s been “kicked out of universities for [sexual] harassment.” According to these reports, Umlaund says, “German officials were looking for me because I was involved in child pornography. Allegedly, I’m a pedophile!”

Umlaund’s greatest sin, in Dugin’s supporters eyes, was exposing Dugin’s explicit Nazi leanings. “I digged out these old quotes where he praises the SS and Reinhard Heydrich, the original SS officer responsible for the organization of the Holocaust. And they didn’t like that, because by that time Dugin had already become part of the Russian establishment. And these old quotes, from when he was still a lunatic fringe actor, were an embarrassment.”

I ask Umlaund what it’s like, being targeted as the number one nemesis of a man like Dugin. With historically informed equanimity, he shrugs it off. “This is not an unusual campaign,” he says. “Also in Soviet times, they were using pedophilia allegations against dissidents and of political enemies. It’s from the KGB playbook.”

Umlaund has continued his work, writing that the explosion of Dugin content, which begins around 2001, “has become difficult to follow. The number of Dugin’s appearances in the press, television, radio, World Wide Web, and various academic and political conferences has multiplied.” Dugin’s aim, Umlaund argues, is to “radically transform basic criteria of what constitutes science, what scholarly research is about, and to permit bodies of thought such as occultism, mysticism, esotericism, conspirology, etc. into higher education and scholarship that would bring down the borders between science and fiction.”

There’s a classic Simpsons episode that I love, “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment.” It’s from 1990, the early golden era of the show. It starts off with Homer spotting Flanders fussily rejecting a cable guy’s illegal, tantalizing offer: fifty dollars for bootleg cable. Sensibly, immediately, Homer drags the cable guy over to his own home and readily accepts. But as the man is finishing up his installation, Homer has a twinge of morality.

“So . . . this is OK, isn’t it?” he asks. “I mean everybody does it, right?” Coolly, the cable man hands him a pamphlet full of justifications for his actions (“Fact: Cable companies are big faceless corporations”). The evocative title: “So You’ve Decided to Steal Cable.”

It’s a wild oversimplification, to be sure, but the danger of someone like Dugin (and Bannon before him) is wrapped up in that pamphlet. You can make someone hate. But it’s easier to find someone who already hates, and to give them justification — historical, epic justification — for their hate. People naturally drift toward doing bad things. But they’d also love a pamphlet explaining why it’s all OK.

*

As Bloomberg has pointed out, in 2014, Dugin lost his place at the Moscow State University “after activists accused him of encouraging genocide. Thousands of people signed a petition calling for his removal after a rant in support of separatists in Ukraine in which he said, ‘kill, kill, kill.’” But he no longer needed an institution like Moscow State to have influence — he’d already become a prominent enough member of the establishment on his own.

During his time in the center of Russian politics, while the vagaries of the real world turned, Dugin tended to the ur-mission. Now, perhaps, he’s back on the outs of his country’s mainstream political thought. But his words have left his mouth and have been received. And he will continue talking and talking because he is playing a long, long game. “Some things are being realized that I have foreseen and foretold thirty years ago,” he tells me. “Now I am foretelling and foreseeing what should come in the future.”

As Dugin sees it, “The most highest point of American influence as universal power is behind us. Because America tries to go beyond the normal and the natural borders and tries to influence Middle East, Africa, Eurasia — and fails everywhere. America export chaos, bloody chaos. Everywhere America is, there is corpses. They have turned into a nihilistic force. The real greatness of America is not in continuation of this exporting of this bloody chaos.”

Dugin suggests that America ask itself some hard questions. Like “What is victory? What is glory? What is real highest position in history?”

Dugin’s vision is clear: America for Americans, Russia for Russians. And while Russia builds itself back up, it stays a closed society. “Being weak, we should stay closed from any influence,” he says. “From the West, from the East, from China or Islam or Europe or America or Africa, we should stay closed” — he bangs a fist on the table — “in order to return to our force.”

Through an open window, gray daylight pours in. Behind us, two women walk back and forth, mugs of coffee in hand, consulting texts and each other. They, presumably, are in the “field of geopolitics” as well. Here, in this room, in this massive building, Dugin quietly plots Russia’s revival and sends out his warnings to Russia’s enemies. The grand project rolls on.

America, declares Dugin, must follow the way of Trump into cynical and callow isolationism and avoid its once-upon-a-time fate as a shining beacon on a hill. Otherwise, Carthage and Rome will do battle. “When the United States tries to be unique, to be universal, a norm for all humanity — that creates the basis for inevitable conflict,” Dugin says. “Then the final war is inevitable.”

* * *

No One Should Have All That Power by Amos Barshad. Copyright © 2019 by Amos Barshad. Used by permission of Abrams Press, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Amos Barshad was raised in Israel, the Netherlands, and Massachusetts. He’s a former staff writer at The FADER and Grantland and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Arkansas Times. This is his first book.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

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