Merry belated Christmas from Caligula’s Council!
In which we are joined by special guest AntiDem. Here we discuss usury, California’s disgraceful public transportation system, My Little Pony, oh yeah and Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol.
Enjoy!
“I refused to acknowledge the idea of suffering inflicted by a God, I deluded myself that pessimism could be a solace of superior minds. What stupidity! That certainly was not confirmed by experience, that had nothing of the ‘human document’–to use an expression dear to Naturalism–about it. Never has pessimism consoled those who are sick in body or in soul!” — Joris-Karl Huysmans
“Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!”– Ernst Junger, On Pain
I have long contended that antinatalism is the logical extreme of modern life. Whether they reprimand others for having children or simply declare that they themselves would never have children themselves, progressives mock the very nature of procreation. Though few will go so far as Schopenhauer who declared that having children is a net negative due to the suffering inherent in life, at least not explicitly.
Under the veneer of puritanical self righteousness lies a hidden depression for the childfree. Life is not for the faint at heart, and it’s even harder to deal with when one isn’t equipped with a sense of meaning. Considering life as it is, one would be cruel to throw an unsuspecting person into this mess.
Antinatalists come in two forms. One is the optimistic “childfree” type mentioned above who you may read about in the Huffington Post. This variant virtue-signals how much the life they lead without children is better for the environment and better for themselves.
Children ruin your sex life, say the child free advocates. As if your life is supposed to be dictated by the base pleasures of your genitals. Certainly pleasure serves a function in sexual congress, but you would have to be deluded into thinking it’s the sole function. Indeed, in order for pleasure to be the function of sex, it must be made so by artificial means. You can take a pill, put on a rubber, or even interrupt coitus, but none of this can nullify the procreative purpose of sex.
The other is the more philosophical variant: the pessimistic antinatalist. The pessimists have realized that life itself is a slow and painful spiral into nothingness, and have decided the best course of action is to continue the spiral but remove the pain. Whether the optimists realize it or not, they functionally do not differ from the pessimists in spite of their joyful veneer. Each of their sentiments defending their choice not to have children betrays a sense of bitterness.
The Childfree may be happy without kids. Many of them report immense satisfaction with life after becoming sterilized. When they reveal their reasons for not having children, however, more often than not they sound quite pessimistic. They often say, “I would be a terrible mother and I would resent my children for putting my career on hold because of them. They don’t deserve that.” These sentiments contain many features of the psychology associated with modern man: a lack of self confidence, the need to put career before family, and a fear of risk.
Herein lies the biggest problem with antinatalism: it stems from a complete aversion to pain. We’ve been conditioned to believe that pain is something to be avoided and serves no useful function. In this Current Year of Our Lord, any experience short of unrelenting pleasure isn’t meant to be suffered. It’s easy to embrace antinatalism when one accepts the hedonistic lifestyle of modern life where pain is to be avoided and pleasure maximized.
But the notion that pain has no instrumental value does not bear out in everyday experience. Certainly pain is unpleasant, and at times agonizing. But again, as with all things with a telos, the negative aspects of pain do not negate pain’s function. From a biological perspective, pain serves as a signal that helps diagnose a problem with the body. Following the principle of hormesis, in order to build muscle strength, you must put your body through pain when working out at the gym.
Pain can have a punitive function as well. Whether you agree with retributive justice or utilitarianism, all punishment involves some degree of pain in order to serve a good. We can debate the merits of physical punishment, prisons, or execution and we may have differing views of what constitutes proper justice. But the fact remains that most of these forms of punishment inevitably involve inflicting pain on a wrongdoer.
From a theological perspective, pain is an opportunity for redemption. Within the context of Original Sin, Adam must labor in the field to provide for his family. Eve likewise endures pain in childbirth. Christ in turn offers the hope of everlasting life by offering himself as the final sacrifice on the cross. It is when man and woman embrace their pain and follow Christ’s example that they can become redeemed.
Understand that I do not intend to imply that parenthood is the only way for one to find meaning in life. I recognize, like Carlyle and St. Josemaria Escriva, that personal meaning can be found in one’s labor. Work can give us a purpose, and those who aren’t called to have children shouldn’t despair. Their lives have no less meaning than those who become parents.
My purpose here is not to refute antinatalism nor to encourage people to procreate, but to simply provide a diagnosis. In the current age of comfort and security, we have become weak and idle. We’re unwilling to take risks that could help us flourish in the long term because we are hung up on the suffering that occurs in the interim. Ernst Junger makes a similar point about the life of comfort in his essay On Pain, which he wrote in response to the decadent Weimar Republic. We’re in a similar position today. We suffer from a crippling hedonism, brought on by the comforts of modern life.
As Evolutionist X once said, “Modernity is selecting for those who resist modernity.”
Death Crowning Innocence – George Frederick Watts
Meghan Murphy is angry. Mind you, she’s a feminist so she’s perpetually angry. I can understand. If I were in a constant war with the unstoppable might of hetero-capitalist patriarchy, I’d be pretty angry too.
I can also relate to her recent article criticizing her fellow progressives’ response to Pamela Anderson’s recent anti-porn op-ed. Sandwiched within her invective against patriarchy, racism, misogyny, and other feminist spooks, there are some choice cuts of anti-porn vitriol.
Are you really going to tell me that watching a grown man jack off onto the face of a supposed teenage girl has no impact on men’s sexualities and the way they treat women?
Whether or not you wish or believe that in some alternate universe there could exist some form of something called “pornography” that could maaaaybe “occupy a space in healthy sexuality” (and I’d argue that a thing that literally means “the graphic depiction of vile whores” cannot, in fact, be redeemed), the reality is that it does not.
I’d say those are the only two points on which I could agree with anti-porn feminists like Murphy. The left can call porn sexist, misogynist, or racist, but we on the right have our own word for porn: degenerate. Indeed, how could anything defined as “the graphic depiction of vile whores,” be anything but degenerate?
So Meghan Murphy is angry. Rightly so. She has to listen to her fellow progressives dole out sex positive feminist platitudes defending a man’s right to jack off to whores. She rightly takes issue with “the graphic depiction of vile whores,” being pushed as an acceptable source of entertainment. It’s worth noting though that Murphy’s point of contention is that she is against the treatment of women as if they were whores, without considering the fact that female porn stars are by definition whores.
What is a whore? A prostitute. What is a prostitute? Someone who engages in sexual activity for money. What does a porn star do? I think we can connect the dots here.
Sex has a function, a telos, and that function is both unitive and procreative. It’s purpose is to unite a man and a woman for the sake of building a family and contributing to their community. The pimp, the whore, the pornographer, and others one might sportively refer to as “sex workers” violate this function by reducing sex to a base transaction. As such, they have taken something sacred and made it profane. You would be hard-pressed to find a feminist, even one stridently opposed to pornography, willing to defend this conception of sex.
Meghan Murphy and other anti-porn feminists have their hearts in the right place in the sense that they see how profane porn is and refuse to tolerate it. However, they lack the language to describe porn as profane, or degenerate, and can only call it misogynistic. Anti-porn feminists betray this tendency by emphasizing how women are exploited and objectified by men instead of emphasizing how porn sullies the act of sex itself.
Granted, I’m not disputing that women in porn or prostitution are exploited or objectified. Many women around the world are forced into sex slavery. Many women who go into porn wind up doing things that they didn’t explicitly agree to do before the cameras started rolling. And I relish the thought of sentencing to firing squad the pimps and pornographers who force women into these situations. That said, is it really so hard to believe that there are women who freely choose to be whores? Are they blameless for choosing to be whores?
Where Meghan Murphy sees sex-positive feminists enabling men to exploit women, I see whores enabling other women to be whores. Sex-positive feminism seeks to de-stigmatize features of sex that include porn and prostitution. They want the freedom to be whores without the stigma of being called whores. Sex-positive feminism is the quintessential byproduct of neoliberalism where all problems are solved through free exchange in the marketplace and everyone is equal in the democratic process. No wonder they fetishize consent.
Homage to Pan – Felicien Rops
Where does this leave Meghan Murphy? Angry, to say the least. She closes with the following words:
My interest, with regard to rejecting pornography, is rooted in a desire to restore women’s humanity and to end male power and violence. I have no interest in protecting the feelings of men who are opposed to that project.
The restoration of women’s humanity. We all know what she means by this; women are exploited and objectified by men thereby denying their humanity. She wants to create a world where pornography, which is inherently exploitative in her view, is no longer tolerable. Sex-positive feminists don’t share her vision of the future of pornography and try to maintain a more optimistic view: making porn less exploitative thereby allowing women to freely choose a degrading practice. To the anti-porn feminist, this is truly a nightmare.
But this is the neoliberal world in which we live. Where sex can be so easily commodified, words like “exploitation” and “objectification” no longer hold the same weight that they used to. All it takes is a little regulation to make something less exploitative. Pass some laws, raise awareness, sprinkle a little Enlightenment empiricism around and voila! No more exploitation. Ladies, you’re free to swallow seven loads at once another day. Sex is no longer procreative, unitive, exploitative, or anything for that matter. Feminism set you free.
Caligula’s Council Episode 5 is on the air!
In which we discuss Parasyte -the maxim-: Environmentalism, Sociopathy, Altruism, and Bow Ties.
Watch Parasyte: http://www.crunchyroll.com/parasyte-the-maxim-
Studio Ghibli’s Parasyte that never was: http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2015/04/20-1/studio-ghibli-plans-for-parasyte-anime-revealed
Robinson Jeffers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Jeffers
Ladies and Gentlemen, Caligula’s Council Episode 4 is on the air!
In which we interview Nick B. Steves and Anthony DeMarco from Ascending the Tower.
We deeply apologize for our audio quality causing our guests to sound like robots. We swear they sound better on their podcast Ascending the Tower. Go check them out on Social Matter!
Edit: All of our episodes are now on YouTube! Feel free to subscribe to our channel
Caligula’s Council Episode 3 is finally here everyone!
In which Obergruppenführer Nothingface and Irradiated Inspector Watt discuss Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle and compare it to Amazon Prime’s TV Series The Man in the High Castle now streaming free for Amazon Prime members. How do they compare? Listen and find out!
In other news, you may have noticed that our two previous episodes are no longer available on SoundCloud. Please bear with us as we are in the process of transitioning to another platform that won’t charge us extra shekels to host our 2 hour podcasts. I will post an update as soon as all of our episodes are available again.
That said, please enjoy the new episode!
After reading Philip K. Dick’s alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle, I was inspired to obtain a copy of the I Ching also known as The Book of Changes. The I Ching is an ancient Chinese fortune telling book meant to provide guidance when you ask it a question. It answers your question in a sequence of broken and solid lines known as hexagrams, which you obtain through a series of coin tosses. Throughout The Man in the High Castle, certain characters consult the I Ching whenever they approach a personal crossroads or seek spiritual guidance.
In Dick’s novel, the trade minister of the Japanese Pacific States, Nobosuke Tagomi describes the I Ching as follows:
“We are absurd,” Mr. Tagomi said, “because we live by a five-thousand-year-old book. We set it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in a metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it.”
In the Brian Browne Walker translation of the I Ching, the introduction suggests that the I Ching is just a book. But at the same time, it is more than just a book. In Walker’s words, “It is a living, breathing oracle, a patient and all-seeing teacher who can be relied upon for flawless advice at every turning point in our lives.”
Call me superstitious. Call me spiritual. Call me whatever you want, but the I Ching has intrigued me and it’s now lying on my dresser next to a rosary.
When I first obtained my copy of the I Ching, I asked it the following question: “Will Donald Trump make America great again?” I took three pennies and tossed them onto the floor six times to get my hexagrams. The first hexagram I received was “Ta Chuang” meaning, The Power of the Great. There was one “changing” line in my first hexagram, which means it will form a second hexagram. The second hexagram said “Heng” meaning Duration.
Seems promising, doesn’t it? Judging by these hexagrams one might think the I Ching is saying that Donald Trump is great and powerful and his legacy will endure. But the I Ching offers a more complex answer than what you might think. In the explanation of The Power of the Great, the I Ching says, “False power and false greatness can be seen all around us in the world. Through egotistical and aggressive manipulations many people obtain a temporary position of influence. The I Ching teaches us a different way of acquiring and using power, one that leads to true greatness and enduring influence.”
Egotistical and aggressive manipulations are all too common in American politics. Is Trump an exception to the manipulative egotists plaguing the US government? He could be. But who is to say he isn’t? He’s a shrewd businessman, he knows how to manipulate the media, and he has expertly rallied masses of people around his candidacy. Democracy in general tends to select for characters like this, both right and left. Rarely are they ever trustworthy.
Does this mean the I Ching is saying that Donald Trump is a liar and a charlatan? I don’t think so. After all, that isn’t what I asked it. What the I Ching is really telling us is what true greatness is and how we can become great. Donald Trump could very well be a great man, but that doesn’t make us great by proxy. It may be tempting to feel empowered by a Trump candidacy, but that doesn’t mean that Trump supporters themselves have any degree of power.
The I Ching explicates further, “Through contemplation of higher principles you have begun to open doors for yourself; through alignment with what is true and good you gain insight into situations and the power to resolve them in your favor.” In other words, Ta Chuang indicates that greatness comes with the cultivation of virtue and character. Furthermore it suggests that “the truly superior person relies on stillness and nonaction, allowing inner truth to penetrate gently to the heart of difficulties.”
Recall Moldbug’s notion of passivism. Stillness and nonaction are the very principles passivism advocates. The idea behind passivism is that power comes to those who are worthy of it. Are you worthy of power? That depends. How have you cultivated your character? Do you adhere to good principles? Do you live a life of virtue? This is the first step in passivism, and it’s also what the I Ching says is the path to lasting greatness.
To acquire power you must first renounce it. This idea seems impractical on its face, but when you compare it to many right-wing activist strategies it’s the most practical thing you could possibly do. Activism exposes you to the cross-hairs of those who oppose your cause; the ones who wield the real power in this country: The Cathedral. As Spandrell pointed out recently, Roosh V publicly announced meetups around the world which led to his family getting doxxed by Anonymous. And after being silent on the subject for so long, feminist activists now have a convenient scapegoat, Roosh, to blame for the rape crisis in Cologne rather than hoards of virile Arabs. Renouncing the desire for power and disavowing activist causes prevents this sort of thing from happening to you because your political enemies aren’t paying much attention to you.
The second hexagram I received, Heng, further reinforces the importance of passivism. In this section, the I Ching states, “It is likely that a change has occurred, or is about to. It is your responsibility to hold to your course and go on without regarding this change.” (67) The change the I Ching refers to is most likely the presidential election. Donald Trump might very well be the next president of the United States. Hillary Clinton could also be the next president of the United States. Either of these outcomes will signify a great change for America, but regardless of the election’s outcome it is important to remain passive to this change. It’s not that the election is not important at all, but your individual influence on this election is negligible. To paraphrase Moldbug, voting makes you feel powerful in the same sense that playing the lottery makes you feel rich. Again, power flows to those who are worthy. Cultivate virtue in your own life and make yourself worthy of power.
It is the byproduct of a modernist mindset that we believe that we should stand up and be heard in order to change the world for the better. Rightists have fallen into the activist trap for years and have not managed to shift the Overton Window rightward in any significant way. This is the case because we have no significant power backing us while leftist movements have backing from the Cathedral which gives them legitimacy. So long as we lack power, all attempts at rightward activism will be a waste of time. While there’s no denying that Trump has done great work, and that he has been influential in his own right, it’s important to understand that he obtained power by cultivating his own virtues. As president Donald Trump can do many great things for America, but for America to become great, more and more of her subjects need to become worthy.
If you find it difficult to resist the temptation to act, or you have trouble conducting yourself as a passivist should, then consult the I Ching. It doesn’t matter what question you ask it; the answer it gives will always be a passivist one.
The following is a guest post from a radiated light bulb.
It’s hard to visualize a distributed blind conspiracy. A trend pushing throughout a culture, waves pouring forth from occulted powers. Let’s take a look at a snapshot of power. Three events that took place in 1965 all connected, but more importantly three events which were attended by people with real influence. As you examine the diagrams below, understand their scope, breadth and variety. These people whether guilty outright or by association permeated the fabric of America. Sure few occupied positions of power outright, but still these people had influence. They might have been someone’s professor, radio host, journalist or influenced some professional organization.
The events in question are the planning meeting which sparked the idea for the teach in, the first teach in at Ann Arbor Michigan in 1965 and the biggest teach in at Berkeley later that year. As you can see in the further reading these were coordinated efforts between professors to create the appearance of a grass roots movement.
Further Reading from a participant:
Commitment and Agency in Social Movements
Author(s): William A. Gamson
Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 27-50
Published by: Springer
Click to access Gamson%20on%20commitment%20and%20agnecy.pdf
“Some members of the group agreed to call colleagues at other universities,
describing what we were doing, and asking them to hold a teach-in
on their campus. From this small organizing effort, teach-ins against the
Vietnam War were held on more than 50 campuses in the weeks that followed.
We did nothing to discourage the belief that these arose spontaneously
in response to the people’s outrage; nor was this completely false,
since it typically takes more than a phone call or two to generate activity
of this sort in the absence of a highly conducive climate.”
“Ann Arbor was home base, in those days, for many of the talented
national leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the
postmidnight sessions, some of them led workshops on such topics as the
military-industrial complex, the cold war, U.S. intervention in the Third
World, and mechanisms for changing U.S. foreign policy. The report of
the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee on Internal Security made much of the
fact that among the films shown during the night, we included one made
by the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam that had been smuggled
into the country. Boundary lines between young faculty, SDS activists, and
undergraduates were blurry and difficult to discern as one wandered from
one intense discussion to another during the night.”
“What can we learn about these collective identity processes from the
two cases considered in this paper? The teach-in depended and built on a
preexisting movement identity. First, there were close relationships among
many faculty members and the new left activists who made Ann Arbor
their base. When I began teaching at Michigan in 1962, it was only a few
months after student activists had met at Port Huron and formulated a
statement that became, in effect, the charter for SDS. Port Huron participants
began showing up regularly in my classes. ”
“We had further contact at a movement halfway house within the
university, the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution. The center,
with its Journal of Conflict Resolution, extended the peace movement of
the late 1950s and early 1960s into the academy. I was part of this interdisciplinary
peace research movement, carrying out my research on the cold
war through the center. ”
“Two SDS projects-the Peace Research and Education Project and
the Education Research and Action Project-became a quasi-official part
of the center’s activities, with offices there as well. New left students and
faculty interacted in the hallways and meeting spaces, discussing what was
happening in the world, and what we and others were doing about it.
Furthermore, several members of the teach-in group had been involved
earlier in the civil rights movement. Some of us had picketed
Woolworth’s in support of the sit-in movement in the South and been involved
in the testing of antidiscrimination housing ordinances. Many of the
New Left students had gone south to participate in voter registration efforts
such as Mississippi Freedom Summer.”
If you must watch anything on TV, the BBC series Black Mirror is the show. It’s a science fiction anthology series in a similar vein to The Twilight Zone that raises questions about the implications of new technologies and whether or not new social changes are moving in a desirable direction.
The show is not for the faint at heart, as many episodes can be disturbing in both their themes and subject matter. One stand-out episode for yours truly was “White Bear,” involving a woman named Victoria who wakes up with no recollection of who she is and finds herself being hunted down by psychopaths in masks. She seeks help from bystanders, but they do nothing but silently film her with their cell phones.
Victoria later finds two other people who engage with her like normal human beings. They reveal that there was a weird television transmission called the “White Bear” that turned the vast majority of the population into voyeurs who stand idly around and film everything they see. It turns out they and Victoria were not affected by this broadcast. Neither were the psychopaths hunting them down, taking advantage of the fact that they can now get away with violent crimes without consequence.
Victoria and her new companions make for the White Bear transmitter to destroy it. When they arrive, they wind up facing down some psychopaths who followed them there. Victoria manages to wrestle a shotgun away from one psychopath only to discover that the gun is fake. The walls around her open up to reveal a stage, television cameras, and an applauding audience. Victoria’s apparent companions and enemies strap her to a chair where a TV show host explains to her who she really is and why this has happened to her.
The host reveals that Victoria had been tried and convicted for the murder of a little girl, Jemimah Sykes, whom she and her boyfriend had kidnapped. Victoria’s boyfriend killed Jemimah by lighting her on fire while Victoria filmed it. Everything Victoria went through up to this point was in retribution for her crime. Her memory was erased so that she was just as confused and helpless as the little girl she watched her boyfriend murder. All of the bystanders she encountered are meant to parallel her own complacence when she filmed Jemimah’s death. The name “White Bear” is a reference to Jemimah’s teddy bear. Everything that Victoria goes through in the course of her punishment is meant to mirror everything she and her boyfriend put Jemimah through.
But the punishment doesn’t end there. Victoria is wheeled away into a trailer made of plexiglass where the audience can yell obscenities at her and pelt her with fruit. They take her to the house where the episode began, strap her to a chair, and erase her memory of the day’s events so that they can administer the same punishment on her the next day.
This episode of Black Mirror, as you might guess, is not meant to be interpreted as an argument for retributive justice but as a critique of it. The audience of bystanders filming Victoria’s torment and pelting her with rotten fruit and insults is meant to illuminate the hypocrisy of the “eye for an eye” intuition.
But being the illiberal shitlord that I am, I couldn’t help but wonder to what extent this punishment depicted in “White Bear” was truly unjust. As I watched it I had no trouble believing that something about the punishment was wrong, but I doubt most viewers (or the episode’s writers for that matter) would agree with me for the same reasons.
In the book Just and Painful, Graeme Newman makes a case for why corporal punishment of criminals is morally permissible using a retributive model of punishment as justification. Chapter 4 of his book lays out 3 criteria for why a punishment would be considered barbaric and not civilized: mutilation, excess, and violence. These are the criteria we shall use in our moral assessment of Victoria’s punishment.
We can quickly eliminate mutilation as one of the problems with Victoria’s punishment, as nothing that happens to her as she’s punished violates her bodily integrity in any significant way. Indeed, for her to suffer physical injury would defeat the purpose of her punishment since not only does it not fit her crime, but it would also break the illusion of her believing that she is being hunted. Likewise, we can eliminate violence in our moral assessment since all of the violence is staged. The imposing psychopaths seemingly threatening to kill Victoria only serve to instill fear in her and they never actually inflict pain on her.
One can, however, make the case that Victoria’s punishment is excessive. Newman lays out the model for what he calls the punishment by “analogy to the body” which in his view inevitably became punishment for the sake of deterrence. One example of this punishment by analogy was a punishment for traitors in which the traitor’s heart was cut out and held in front of him with the words “Here is your heart.” These punishments were performed in front of an audience as well so that they would serve an educative function to the masses. Victoria’s punishment almost fits this model perfectly: her punishment is analogous to what she and her boyfriend did to Jemimah, and at the end she is placed in front of an audience in which the host declares: “Here is a child murderer.”
However, there are differences between Victoria’s punishment and the educative function of the punishments by analogy. First and foremost, the show host plays up the entertainment value that the audience is deriving from watching Victoria’s punishment. He riles up the crowd and encourages them to treat her with contempt. As such, Victoria’s punishment appears to serve a cathartic release instead of an educative function.
Furthermore, the fact that Victoria’s memory is erased at the end of the day so that she can suffer the punishment again reveals that her punishment is meant to entertain the audience more so than it is for her own retribution. A criminal who is punished multiple times for the same offense, but never remembers the previous times she was punished has only been punished once as far as her personal psychology is concerned. Presumably when she’s finally released, Victoria isn’t going to have any recollection of all of the previous times she was punished except the final day of her punishment. The only reason they continue to erase Victoria’s memory is so that they can entertain new audiences who come to watch her receive her comeuppance.
The fact that Victoria’s punishment exists primarily for entertainment reveals a utilitarian component to her punishment that makes it unjust. What good does it do for her to endure extended torment for the entertainment of thousands of people? A common critique of utilitarianism is that it suggests that it’s morally permissible to treat an individual as a mere means. Tormenting a criminal to entertain the masses seems like a textbook definition of using someone as a mere means.
At first glance, many viewers would be inclined to say that Victoria’s punishment is a case of retributive justice gone too far. But it’s specifically utilitarianism, rather than retributivism that pushes this punishment too far. While it’s true that retributive justice conforms to the intuitions that the ideal punishment should fit the crime and serve an educative purpose, the retributive intuition also tells us that excessive punishment is not just at all. Once a punishment goes beyond what a criminal deserves, it is no longer just.
As such I cannot find much at fault with Victoria’s punishment other than the fact it is a retributive punishment elevated to a spectacle. We do not punish criminals because of some kind of utility to be gained from doing so. We punish criminals because there is a logic inherent to retribution. The logic of retribution dictates that a criminal deserves punishment for their offense against society. They deserve nothing more and nothing less.
It’s important to understand the logic of retribution when watching this episode of Black Mirror. It may be obvious to us that something about Victoria’s punishment is wrong, but it may not be obvious why it is wrong. It isn’t wrong because she suffers. A child murderer deserves to suffer. The problem is that her suffering extends beyond the scope of retribution and into the realm of entertainment. Remember this as you watch the episode.
Ladies and gentlemen, goys and goyls, dindus and dindettes of all ages, Caligula’s Council Episode 2 is on the air!
In which we discuss the final issue of the San Francisco Guardian, racial segregation, homeless people defecating in a river, wizards, melons, and how we should stop transphobia NOW!
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