Mastodawn

Rachel Greenham Mar 10

Zen fascists will control you: https://www.ianbetteridge.com/zen-fascist-wi/

In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity at a moment when America was in no mood for either.

Zen fascists will control you...

In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity at a moment when America was in no mood for either.

Ian Betteridge

Frank’s Ting Mar 10

@ianbetteridge the Yoga/Covid analogy is especially true in my experience. The number of people I saw go down that route 5/6 years ago was terrifying

World Basement Classic Mar 10

@franksting @ianbetteridge Yep. As somebody trying to encourage ventilation / filtration at tech conferences, I am constantly flabbergasted by the outright denialism of highly-paid knowledge workers whose brains would be destroyed by Long Covid.

DeanFarrell Mar 10

@ianbetteridge In 1981, they re-recorded it as the anti-Reagan song, "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now."

Quinn Norton Mar 10

@ianbetteridge have you heard the covers done for other Cali govs? They're all amazing, but disposable heroes of hiphopracy was my favorite https://youtu.be/cBAkOifDeSw?si=MnZE3129ymBI8HPk

California Uber Alles - The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy

YouTube

Ian Betteridge Mar 10

@quinn Oh god that Disposible Heroes one is EPIC. Somewhere I still have the Virus 100 CD (Kramer’s version of “Insight” is glorious too)

Quinn Norton Mar 10

@ianbetteridge yessss I'm pretty sure I have that physical CD, but no clue where it is 😂

Ian Betteridge Mar 10

@quinn The answer is almost certainly either “in a box somewhere" or “in that friend's house where you went to that really weird party in 1993”

spiegelmama Mar 10

@ianbetteridge @[email protected] I am Governor Pete Wilson, you know / The baddest governor to ever grab the mic and go BOOM!

Bruce B (he/him)Mar 10

@quinn @ianbetteridge I had the Beatnigs album on tape cassette a looong time ago. Always liked Michael Franti.

@bbsmooth @quinn @ianbetteridge Just don't look up what he's been accused of lately. 😬

(Deeply disappointing to me as well, as I thought he was a pretty good guy and had interviewed him multiple times over the years.)

Quinn Norton Mar 12

@laze @bbsmooth @ianbetteridge

never set up news alerts for your heroes.

Matt Godden Mar 10

@ianbetteridge "We are stardust, we are golden. This is the counterculture's central claim about human nature, compressed into eight words."

Six words, surely?

Ian Betteridge Mar 10

@metaning Counting: never my strong point

John Leonard Mar 10

@ianbetteridge One of my all time faves. No-one does psychotic quite like Jello. Early proponent of the wellness-fascism link.

@ianbetteridge As you mentioned them, there was strong interest in incorporating yoga into the Third Reich ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Wilhelm_Hauer

Jakob Wilhelm Hauer - Wikipedia

Ian Betteridge Mar 10

@regards Yikes!

☢️ Waschbär ☢️Mar 10

Thank you for this extensive article. It does really fit together a few loose ends of annoyance that I have been gathering it seems.

Especially the connection between the yoga counter culture and esoteric cults merging with the desire for purity same as the (tech) fascists.

Already the third Reich used this connection. Esoteric cults and strengthen you people with shamanism and history etc.

@ianbetteridge this was *so good*. Reading it made me want to get drunk in my underpants. What will you do with it next? A TV special?

It chimes with "Goop and Infowars selling the same supplements", with the self-development material the kid imbibed from TikTok in their mid-teens, with older friends who went woo to antivax to worse

Implication that there's an offramp too - route Reform-joiners to organic farms?

Anyway, i'll bear it all in mind when i next start an esoteric cult

Ian Betteridge Mar 10

@ultrazool I would join your cult in a heartbeat.

@ianbetteridge well, i'm planning a trial run esoteric cult for this year's #emfcamp, constructing the Oracle Temple of H.A.C.K. out of cut-up duvet covers, the programme of activity is really open, Harmonic Ancient Cosmic Kinetics is heavy on improvisation

But after reading your purity post and the thread responses, it'll now have to include at least one session of Drunken Yoga, it's yoga but you have to do the whole thing while holding a pint, drinking it optional. Maybe see you there? :)

Ian Betteridge Mar 10

@ultrazool I'm in.

Documentally Mar 12

@ultrazool @ianbetteridge Are hipflasks allowed?

@Documentally @ianbetteridge full pints only

Documentally Mar 13

@ultrazool @ianbetteridge sounds messy :-)

thomas yager-madden Mar 10

@ianbetteridge I don’t know, this could be that I didn’t get acquainted with her work until she was older and more overtly jaded, but I’ve always felt like I hear a deep irony and disappointment in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” that the CSNY version seems designed to try to suppress, doing violence to the ambivalence of the original. The “we” she calls golden includes everyone, and if we’ve got to get “back to the garden” I don’t think she is claiming that the Woodstock festival itself was necessarily a successful move in that direction in her view

Ian Betteridge Mar 10

@tym It's a *really* good point and I’d love to write something exploring it. There's a lot of “the hippy dream is over" that emerges around that period - I'm thinking of the line from "Blue” ("acid booze and ass/needles guns and grass... lots of laughs”) and I think some of that starts with Woodstock (the event and the song)

thomas yager-madden Mar 10

@ianbetteridge I think you are right that she went through a period of disillusionment that turns up in her songs. I also see her as having always just had that restless schizoid creative individual streak, where she can never wholeheartedly embrace a scene or a movement or even a musical style, keeps herself always a step apart, because as a matter of personality she’s more interested in questions than answers

withoutclass Mar 10

@ianbetteridge all of the most heinous deeds have been committed from a place of virtuousness.

Thank you for the post.

eclectech Mar 10

@ianbetteridge Excellent article, with a side benefit of giving me a California Über Alles earworm which is pretty good as earworms go.

edsanders2 Mar 10

I'm just not buying this. It's a version of. "Both sides" that doesn't acknowledge that the counterculture (his stand in for the left) never achieves power.

The simple reason for that is, if it ever does, it stops being the counterculture and becomes the culture.

That's theoretically possible, but while bits and pieces get picked up, it has never really happened.

(1/2)

edsanders2 Mar 10

(2/2)
I think Biafra is joking (in reference to Brown, not so much Reagan). Mitchell is an outside observer regarding Woodstock, though clearly a sympathetic one.

As an artist and activist, she is certainly on the left.

I'll accept the far left & far right have a similar fault line, but in reality, the far right is extremely dangerous & has adversely affected society broadly while the far left, due in part to it's much more limited reach has much more limited negative affects

I mean, the use of "über" is probably best explained by the first line of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandlied, but perhaps you knew this and just wanted to explore the Übermensch connection?

Deutschlandlied - Wikipedia

jimmynohands Mar 10

@ianbetteridge Re. the Icke footnote: it may have happened twice or you may be misremembering Jon Ronson's encounter with him, documented in "Them: Adventures with Extremists"?
IIRC in the book Ronson made the point Icke may not be but that says nothing about his followers...
(And I agree with your final sentence: whether or not he was then, 15 years of both 'normal' crank magnetism and seepage from the antisemitic conspiracists yes-and-ing his lizard stuff are going to have had an effect.)

Ian Betteridge Mar 11

@jimmynohands I think you're right - my memory was playing up!

jimmynohands Mar 11

@ianbetteridge As happens the best of us!