CRACKPOTS #35: A GRAMMAR OF VIOLENCE (Patreon)

Liz on potential war with Iran, the destruction of Gaza, US intervention in Ukraine and state sanctioned ultraviolence

Good evening — it's Liz. Just some quick thoughts as things are unfolding. You know the game.

It's been impossible to ignore for some time now. The signs have been there — accumulating, circling, tightening. Slow at first, then rhythmic, now deafening. Beneath press briefings and market chatter, under the euphemisms of ‘security partnerships’ and ‘regional deterrence,’ something elemental has returned. What we are witnessing — from Gaza to Ukraine, and now Iran, not so much on the horizon as already underway just offstage — is the normalization of hysteria as governance logic, the official adoption of recursive violence as mode of temporal management — not to win anything, but to defer everything.

There is something unmistakably erotic about it, in the psychoanalytic sense: the compulsion to re-stage the primal scene, as if within its violence something structuring had once been glimpsed, and then withdrawn. The West, such as it remains, no longer administers power through victory but through optics: image loops, narrative control cycles, ambient threat. And when the image begins to fray — when the contradictions mount beyond the range of plausible deniability — a new conflict must be arranged, or more accurately, permitted. Acknowledgement, in the current phase of imperial decline, is unthinkable. Better to kill than to confess.

Gaza is the most obscene version of this cycle, in part because of its clarity. There are no complexities to invoke, no plausible cover of humanitarian fog. The horror is total: not just mass death but mass dismemberment, displacement, annihilation — all of it conducted in full view and with impunity. The destruction is targeted but indiscriminate, systematic but erratic — a logic of extermination in which civilian life is not collateral but irrelevant. Children pulled from rubble, their skin fused to rebar and glass; bodies decomposing in hospital corridors without light, without ceremony; limbs stacked in plastic bags like inventory. Entire families erased in the time it takes to upload the proof. It is hell.

And still, the institutions speak in the only tongue they remember: guidelines, frameworks, calibrated response. The language is procedural, serene, eerily undisturbed by the magnitude of the destruction it accompanies. The machinery of liberal consensus — legal frameworks, NGO language, the ethics of proportionality — has not merely failed; it has been absorbed, re-coded, and turned back outward as justification. There is no neutral language left in the Western lexicon to describe what is unfolding. This is not a loss of innocence; it is the loss of coherence.

But Gaza is not an exception but the continuation of the same logic made intolerably visible. Ukraine was meant to be the masterstroke — the proof that Western coordination, economic pressure and soft power could still stabilize a global order increasingly disinterested in being stabilized. The war was framed as moral, its stakes existential, its logic universal. The slogans came pre-printed: sovereignty, territorial integrity, democracy versus autocracy. But beneath the choreography was an obvious strategic fact: NATO never had the manpower, political will or — crucially — the industrial base for a ground war against a near-peer adversary on its own border. The plan, if it ever existed, was not to win militarily but to collapse Russia economically — to re-run, at scale, the logic of late Cold War sanctions with the added benefit of social media distribution and real-time analytics. In other words, the goal was performance: impose mass suffering and expect structural failure. When that failed to materialize, the language shifted. Retreat got renamed: repositioning, delay, everyone simply agreed to pretend the line had moved.

Russia, for its part, never made any secret of its aims: secure the Donbas, establish a buffer, neutralize Ukraine as a launchpad for NATO logistics and sabotage. These are not the objectives of a revanchist empire but of a paranoid and increasingly pragmatic state, seeking insulation rather than expansion. It may be difficult for us Western observers — conditioned by decades of Washington doctrine and think-tank abstraction — to register the significance of restraint as strategy. But that is what is unfolding. Russia wants not Europe, but distance from it: it does not seek to conquer the West, it seeks to survive its decline.

That this war has continued for over three years is not evidence of strategy but of addiction. Every failed offensive, every repackaged aid bill, every desperate new slogan like “new phases” or “counteroffensives” or “decolonial solidarity” only underscores the hollowness of the project. The longer it runs, the more obvious the disjuncture becomes between the language used to justify the war and the outcomes now intractable. But again: the point is not to win. It is to maintain narrative possession. To admit failure would be to relinquish the narrative — and for a hegemon whose last export is credibility, narrative is all that remains.

This is why Trump — who is in so many ways the perfect expression of the moment, not despite but because of his grotesque ineptitude — now reads less like a political actor and more like a structuring symptom. It would be a mistake to think of his rhetorical style — the all-caps proclamations, the inane slogans, the erratic modality of “SURRENDER!” and “STRONG DEAL!” and “PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!” — as outside the tradition of statecraft. On the contrary: Trump is the distilled form of the regime itself, stripped of coherence, grammar and memory. He is the empire speaking plainly.

What is so jarring — and perhaps clarifying — about Trump’s communication style is, funny enough, its precision. It does not veil the crisis; it broadcasts it in a register the old state could never permit. They are incoherent, sure, but more than that, they are emptied, gutted of syntax, sequenced without logic or anything that connects — not the noise of an undisciplined mind, but the desperate rattlings of a terminal state. He does not speak policy because there is no policy left to speak. It’s all mood and motion: the impression of command in the absence of direction. And it resonates — not in spite of its incoherence, but because coherence now reads as affectation, as a lie too big to believe.

If earlier presidencies performed the fantasy of governance — Obama with his architect’s aloofness, Biden with his demented appeals to restoration — Trump performs the vacuum left in its wake. His eruptions don’t break the order; they keep time, simulating motion long after direction has vanished. What moves through him is not decision but delay, and in that sense, his message is perfectly suited to a state apparatus that can no longer govern but still needs to generate signals: Trump is not saying anything, but something is being said through him, and what’s being said is that there is nothing left to say.

When a state loses the capacity to speak, it does not fall silent. It lashes out. Deprived of strategy or vocabulary, violence becomes its only remaining mode of articulation — not as means to an end, but as an end in itself. It behaves like a terrorist: ideologically hollow, structurally incoherent, violently erratic, animated less by goals than by grievance. There are no demands, only threats. The same is true of Israel, which openly functions as a terror regime — a state whose self-conception depends on the permanent subjugation of a racialized underclass and the periodic exhibition of its mass death. What binds these two states isn’t just weapons or funding, but the collapse of any distinction between strategy and spectacle. It’s violence as sacrament — less a tactic than a rite of identity.

Which is why when former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee texted Trump, “You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU!” and Trump posted it without comment, it didn’t read as flattery. It read like an ISIS dispatch — a missive of eschatological reward for the faithful, saturated in blood and longing for cosmic revenge. That it came not from a fringe pastor but the U.S. ambassador to Israel only confirms what is already obvious: the line between American statecraft and spiritual warfare has collapsed. What remains is not governance but invocation — a machinery of speech severed from consequence, mouthing old incantations in the absence of belief.

And so war with Iran will arrive without staging. No inspectors, no R2P resolutions, no Colin Powell testimony. None of the procedural theater that once wrapped U.S. intervention in the language of law or democratic virtue. The rituals that once lent imperial violence its soft edges have been discarded. What follows is pure performance: unprompted declarations, erratic bombardments, a saturation of images designed to overwhelm and humiliate. With no need for justification, the machinery now governs through forced visibility, exposure as domination.

This is ultraviolence as state form: unstructured, continuous, no longer constrained by the need to persuade. The United States, along with its proxies — Israel and Ukraine — has stopped seeking legitimacy altogether. What remains is a performative id: emptied, spasmodically expressive, governed by grievance, panic, and spectacle. Violence becomes the medium through which the state locates itself — power as repetition compulsion, punishing only to prove it still can.

An Experience for Me: On Nathan Fielder and the rise of auto-performance, Alexandra Tanner, The Point Mag

There might not be a self, and yet we can be nothing but it. If only the circumstances were perfect, we think wishfully—if only we had access to certain resources—we could become anyone; when Fielder dispatches those resources in service of others’ becomings (to say nothing of his own), this wish reveals its childishness. We are assemblages of traits and tics that we did not choose for ourselves; we are, nonetheless, responsible for all of it. “Self-criticism,” writes Phillips, “can be our most unpleasant—our most sadomasochistic—way of loving ourselves.”

Toward a Unified Theory of Uncool: Considering the NBA's swag crisis, Zyn, and the West Village Girls, Ock Sportello

I don't agree with everything here — I think there's something puckish about Haliburton, a little Ferris Bueller maybe — but still it's good to see people wrestling with What's Wrong With the NBA

That the budding faces of the league are profoundly uncool is relatively uncontroversial, notwithstanding Anthony Edwards as the exception that proves the rule. Jalen Brunson nods impishly as Josh Hart wins the internet; Tyrese Haliburton spits out strings of mimetic signifiers like a large language model trained on House of Highlights clips; Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drolls on as his Rosencrantz clip-farms with a Gatorade bottle; Donovan Mitchell’s messianic meat has been exposed as an exaggerated, angle-assisted bulge; Jayson Tatum’s Kobe Bryant cosplay led him to an achilles tear in a Day-Lewisian bit of method acting; Jalen Green is bad at basketball; Zion Williamson’s anime-inspired bellybutton tattoo is but a footnote in his series of aesthetic mishaps; for Ja Morant, I can only wish well. Around every corner, the European slob menace lurks with what a perceptive reader of the blog has aptly named “unconditioned Slavic indifference.” At the risk of sounding alarmist: the sky is falling.

Google Search is Fading. The Whole Internet is At Risk, Adam Levine, Barrons

Add it to the growing list of subtle but deeply consequential ways AI is reshaping daily life. Try thinking through this: "Based on SimilarWeb's U.S. estimates, Expedia got 88,000 referrals from AI search engines in May. It got 34 million referrals from search." I don't care about Expedia but you can play out a little bit what this might look like: ad revenue models get reworked, business marketing spend dries up, e-commerce forced to survive on social media alone, further concentration and consolidation, etc. I mean who knows, but probably a good mental exercise to game it out.

Agit-Slop: The White House's Numbing Aesthetic, Mitch Therieau, The Drift

The surrender today’s fascist culture celebrates often looks less like capitulation before an overwhelming power and more like a slow downward droop, a backward list. Its vision of mindlessness looks less like lockstep conformity and more like dissociative vibing. It looks at turns like self-infantilization — the lobotomized prose of today’s right-wing alt-lit, a general fixation on childhood and grade-school gender roles, a need for safe spaces insulated from liberalism particles — and like K-holed apathy: both the lowest A.I. slop and the most aspirationally avant-garde works collapse into brain-dead détournement, far-flung images and quotations drained of life and ground into a soylent-like slurry to be shoveled indifferently into the gaping maw of the viewer, reader, absorber.

and finally some really good 90s R&B courtesy of Brazil — FAT FAMILY (!) Jeito Sexy (Shy Guy)

Just trying to lighten the mood a bit.

See you next time.

Yours,

Liz