Not the best Japanese gore porn film (who would want to be the best?) but one of the most famous. A man abducts a woman and dismembers her with a camera rolling. It doesn’t sound like much when I describe it, but it won’t seem like much when you watch it, either.

Apparently Charlie Sheen thought it was real (no doubt while tooting more than just his flute) and called the FBI. That seems to be the time-honored route of fame in the gore porn film industry – try to hint that it might be real. Eventually an actual snuff film will make it to market, and we’ll all call it a boring publicity stunt.

Supposed horror legend Hideshi Hino both directs and plays the killer. He’s more often associated with manga, which are a different beast entirely. His manga efforts (Hell Baby, and so forth) resemble a Japanese Goosebumps, complete with fill-in-the-blanks storylines and a cast of characters that you wonder even he doesn’t forget. The gore is offset by a cartoonish, exaggerated art style – you can imagine children reading Hino’s manga, but this, not so much.

Viewers will find two possible routes of enjoyment: first, the gore, and second, analysing the special effects. It’s a low budget film, and a lot of it isn’t very well done. The woman’s flesh has a rubbery quality. The blood seems like copiously squirted cherry juice. Much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, focused on a single body part that’s an obvious prosthetic. The production quality can be described as “muddy, dark, and distressed” – adding a gritty grindhouse quality at the expense of us actually being able tos ee see what’s going on. You’ve heard of Hollywood’s famous L-shaped bedsheets? Where the male lead has his chest exposed and the female lead has her chest covered? Here the woman’s body spends so much time covered up, she’s practically a goddamn Quaker. The movie takes a lot of care to hide bad special effects, but it’s all in vain.

The admin of the legendary shock site rotten.com was once asked how he knows the gruesome pictures on his site are real. He said something to effect of “I just do”, which is pat, but also probably accurate. He also mentioned that they received large volumes of fake pictures, and that they were usually quite easy to spot.

Little tells always gave the fake pictures away – tricky camera angles, harsh lighting, conveniently poor photo quality. It’s pretty obvious: if a murderer really did dismember someone and make a snuff film, he’d capture it in the best quality possible. Remember the Mitch Hedberg gag about Bigfoot being a blurry, pixelated monster roaming the landscape? It’s the same for gore porn. If the real stuff ever appears, we can assume it will be in 1080p. Fuck this dark, murky crap. It’s for wannabe auteurs and professional fakes.

I like extreme art, but for something like this you really need…more. Of what? Almost anything. Some individuality. Some personality. Something that would separate it from a film generated at random by a sophisticated computer. There’s exactly one interesting angle (Hino wears a samurai outfit), and a lot of fake WWE blood. Apparently, some of the other Guinea Pigs are more story focused. I’ll probably never know. The sad truth is that a perfect gore porn film will probably never be made: anyone ready to outlay the necessary money will want it to be marketable enough to sell. Flower of Flesh and Blood is an interesting historical curiosity, but those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Why is propaganda stupid – almost by definition?

I don’t mean it’s wrong, or evil. Like the Human Centipede, propaganda exists in a space where concepts like that don’t even seem to apply. What I mean is that it’s dumb. Cartoony. WW2 propaganda posters (for any side) look like bad science fiction movies made by Ed Wood.

Where’s the intellectual propaganda? Where are the Cold War posters that outline the intellectual and moral case against communism, rather than characterising it as a creed of the inhuman Ivan out to sap our bodily fluids?

If your first thought is “well, Joe and Jane Sixpack are dumb and they won’t understand smart stuff, so you have to speak their language” then I hope you have a second, because I’m not satisfied. Common folk have a lot of respect for their intellectual betters, so long as they don’t feel patronised or bullshitted. An easy influence technique is to convince someone that something’s over their head, and that they’d better just leave it in your hands. That’s the basis of the Stanley Milgram experiments. “I have a lab coat, and I know better than you, so just shut up and press the button, faggot.”

I think that we’re looking at the wrong side of the black box. Dumb propaganda isn’t popular because it’s easy to consume. It’s popular because it’s easy to spread.

There is a man called Mike Huben, who has produced a large body of material (of varying quality) arguing against libertarianism. Probably his best insight is this: libertarianism’s success (beyond a heavy PR campaign by the Koch Brothers) is that it breaks down to a few concepts that 1), sound good, and b) are easily spammable, even by stupid people. It doesn’t take a smart guy to shout “FREEDOM” like Mel Gibson, and if you can emotionally identify libertarianism with that simple, idealistic concept, you can turn any moron into an evangelist. You don’t make people argue for consequentialism or minarchism or fewer tariffs. You make them argue for freedom itself.

According to Huben, the philosophy’s success is based, not on being especially intellectually compelling, but by being really good at creating new followers. Hence, you get stuff like /r/EnoughLibertarianSpam. It’s one of those philosophies that has an incredible ability to turn people into characters from Snow Crash, their brains overwritten by a hyper-catching mental virus.

For years, we’ve tried to make spambots sound like humans. Libertarianism achieves the opposite, it makes humans sound like spambots.

Some religions could be described along similar lines. I’ve heard many atheists complain about “Godbotting”, where believers don’t actually engage in discussion or debate, but just repeat simple, canned messages (“God loves you!”, “I’m praying for you!”, etc). Without taking a position on either libertarianism or religion, it seems like a big part of surviving in a memeplex is that you have lots of short, mantra-like messages for quick and efficient spamming. In-depth arguing is a waste of time. It’s better to take that same effort and blast a thousand strangers with ads for intellectual V1AGR4 and C14L1S.

It seems things are still a volume game: quantity trumps quality, the effective positions are the ones that are quickly able to deploy lots of shock troops. They say nations are often still mentally fighting the last war. In the case of the internet, it that war is the American Civil War.

Regarding the ACW, historians often say that the Confederate cause was a Lost one before it even began. The North held all the cards. To quote Rhett Butler, “I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who’d be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines–all the things we haven’t got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They’d lick us in a month.”

But on the other hand, remember that the Union had a much more difficult strategic goal. They had to impress the rogue states back into the Union, while the Confederacy only had to continue existing. And various dominos fell in the Union’s favor. The Confederacy never thought they’d be fighting a war alone, they counted on support from sovereign nations like Great Britain and France (who needed cheap cotton). When that didn’t come, the Confederacy found themselves outnumbered, outgunned, and staring down the barrel of a blockade. But even then, the Confederates held out for nearly fifty times Rhett’s pronouncement. Why?

In large part, because footsoldiers were cheap. All you needed was a musket, and a bandolier with 40 rounds. At no other time was the role of huge numbers of men so evident. Cavalry was losing prominence, artillery had yet to come into its own, and the chief way to fight wars was via a numbers game.

If the Confederates had invested in a small number of elite, well-trained troops, they’d have been horsefucked. As it was, they eventually lost the war, but their ethos lives on in propaganda. Spam your way to success. We are Civil War Re-Enactors, all of us. Did I mention that one of the reasons they failed was because they finally ran out of manpower? A problem that will never occur in an intellectual arena where keyboards can copy and paste?

Ecclesiastes 9-11 has the following quote: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

That might have been true in Ecclesiastes’ time, but in the 21st century we have a more idoneous answer: the race is to the dumb.

Have you ever listened to a conversation in a foreign language? That’s what sexual fetishes are like. They’re exciting if you speak the language. If you don’t, you’re left watching two people make noises with your mouth, your brain struggling to pattern-match their syllables against some meaning until eventually you give up.

I don’t find BDSM interesting, so much of Venus in Furs is a conversation in Putonghua or Sundanese. After I gave up trying to follow the conversation, I looked for a story, and there wasn’t much of one.

It’s a book within a book. A man reads a text about a “supersensual” man, Severin von Kusiemski, who falls under the spell of a woman with the South Park-sounding name Wanda von Dunajew. She wears furs. She captivates him – literally. He wants to be her slave. They go away on adventures together. The tone of the book feels like cordial that’s on the verge of fermenting into poison: a fantasy pushed as far as it can go.

Venus in Furs contains frank descriptions of a lot of things that would not have names for decades to come. It’s also unfocused, and suffers from the curious comorbidity of too much and not enough. The plot’s repetitive, with events looping around like a 12 inch record caught in a groove. But von Sacher-Masoch keeps adding in all these asides about metaphysics and gender roles and paganism, throwing the novel’s forward momentum into a talespin.

Sacher-Masoch likes to set up bowling pins and then forget to knock them down. Partway through the story, a few black female slaves assist Wanda in humiliating Severin. Could that have led to a reflection on real bondage? And the shallowness of what he experiences with Wanda? After all, Severin can reclaim his freedom and dignity whenever he wants, whereas some people can’t. BDSM’s just a fantasy, which is good in real life, but in a fictional book, why couldn’t he have gone beyond fantasy? Why not talk about real bondage? Venus in Furs dwells obsessively on saccharine instead of real sugar.

Apparently in BDSM there is a concept called “topping from the bottom”, where the submissive person uses the fact of their submission as collateral to manipulate or control the dominant. “I gave up my freedom for you. You really owe me, so let’s run this relationship on my terms.”

I’m the furthest thing from an expert, but Severin seemed like he was topping from the bottom a lot. One of his first acts is to make Wanda sign a contract of his servitude, stating among other things that she must always wear her furs. This adds a false, insincere dynamic to their relationship: like putting someone in chains and giving them the key. It’s like von Sacher-Masoch was topping me from the bottom. The book lures you in with the promise of revelation, intimacy, and one man exposing his secret heart. He immediately starts offloading mountains of ruminations on gender roles and metaphysics and paganism. This book could be subtitled “Dear Diary.”

The fetish-as-language metaphor breaks down. When you hear an unfamiliar language, the problem is that you don’t understand it. With a sexual fetish, you understand it perfectly well, it just has no meaning. After it’s possible to learn a new language, but I don’t know that it’s possible to learn a new fetish. If you can, Venus in Furs is no Berlitz Easy Language course.