Deep Fake World: The Slap

Reality Show Politics Episode 3

Mar 30, 2022

∙ Paid

It was the slap heard 'round the Earth.

I've seen comedy roasts that would make the meanest of mean girls blush.

A little G.I. Jane hair joke (about an objectively beautiful woman whom Cersei Lannister would have schemed about 14 seconds after meeting) is what you prepare for when a comedian takes the stage. Actually, you prepare for a whole lot worse, usually. Celebrities routinely let far worse go before hugging and moving on to the afterorgy, or whatever it's called in Hollywood. That's part of what makes this all seem…a bit melodramatic?

https://www.sis2sis.com/jada-pinkett-smith-goes-bald-and-beautiful/

I grew up in a rough family. I know what it means to take a punch. Anyone who takes a punch (or even a slap) in the face from an even basically fit grown man, without defense, gets destroyed. Sure, the slap is milder, but if you get to step forward into a defenseless face, it's going to be brutal.

Sure, those are some big people. But teenagers are capable of the one-hitter-quitter. Do not watch this video if you are squeamish watching violence. Some of these punches resulted in murder charges.

I took a few thousand punches from a much larger older brother, and there is a sporting game to it most of the time. Nobody has to teach you MMA for you to figure out that every preparation you take to dodge, perry, make leverage out of terrain, or force contact where you'd rather take it is the difference between feeling it for days and walking away just fine ten seconds after it's over. Even people who have given up in a fight protect their face and head when possible.

But don't worry, Chris Rock just laughed—which is exactly what Will did when Will first heard the joke. Then suddenly he's risking a lawsuit and his reputation because the joke that he himself laughed at threatened his wife's honor, or something like that? Or is it possible that in the moment, he forgot that the joke was the cue?

This doesn't tell us everything, but it tells us a lot. What else do we have to go on?

Chris Rock is a wealthy man. He's had some historically funny moments. His image is worth a lot. He has reportedly made (at least) $60 million in a year off his talents, and apparently his ex-wife wanted to veto a $70 million prenuptial agreement. Being made to look worthy of a violent public shaming in front of a large audience generally comes with consequences. And most everyone—even those of us tired of the mean-spirited Ellen's of the world—know that slapping a man like that is a bad, bad thing.

Will Smith is worth several times more after making $45 million while "socially distancing" in 2021. It is rumored that after the slap, 43,000 ambulance chasers cheered like it was the Super Bowl. A day later, many were back in therapy…

The LAPD confirmed that Chris won't be pressing charges (that was decided quickly), and apparently they aren't interested in arresting Will for anything like aggravated assault charges, either. Why would the police arrest a man for a violent act when there are people walking maskless into restaurants?

Who knew that Oscar rules were like ice hockey?

It Was an Oscar-Worthy Performance

I almost gave the slap no thought because I give the Oscars no thought. I hadn't watched in years. I guess I know that people still care about celebrity stuff, but I can't think of many good reasons why, except perhaps as some variant of learned helplessness. I briefly formed an opinion about the slap after watching a quick video the following morning in my social media feed, and found myself not feeling too much sympathy for Chris. I think that was a combination of seeing that he was far from destroyed by the slap, and because Ellen-level mean-spiritness behind a faux-positive veneer is one version of everything that I see wrong with the world, and that I hope collapses as a pillar of social control during my lifetime.

I worry greatly, however, that my momentary lack of sympathy was a sign that society is being trained to ignore violence against people who "deserve" it. I'm fairly immediate in my re-evaluation of such moments, and I'm a strong proponent of keeping the sword sheathed unless necessary, and even I gave myself the excuse for not caring much about Chris because it did not appear that he was seriously hurt. I self-corrected that thought later in the day, but it wasn't until I got back on social media that I wondered if I might have had a subtle instinct that it was all a show at a show. That's when I found out that,

Jada (Will's wife) is bald due to alopecia (which the legacy media has apparently been talking about for several months in advance of the Oscars).
Chris said he did not know about Jada's condition. (But the joke was so…ordinary for a celebrity roasting either way.)
Will delivered a heartfelt apology.
Some women were happy to see a man stand up for his wife.
This is a sad moment of black-on-black violence.

The back-and-forth of facts happened so rapidly that it occurred to me that I've seen this game of Hegelian pinball many times before. Get the people talking and fighting amongst themselves, and they're easier to govern. Also, they'll remember that night and all its details. Details like…the sponsors?

This program was brought to you by the world's greatest product pfakers.

And I'm going to let you in on a big little secret: nearly all of the C Suite finance and corporate class, and the world's intelligence communities, get it. And they know that most of the rest of everyone else doesn't. Not yet, at least.

Check out the way this sponsorship gets described in Fierce Pharma:

Oscar-winning actor Will Smith slapping comedian Chris Rock made the biggest headlines out of the Oscars Sunday night. But the sponsorship from Pfizer and COVID shot partner BioNTech was for the pharma marketing world a bigger moment.
The vaccine-making pair, which teamed up two years ago and produced the world’s biggest-selling product last year in Comirnaty, their COVID-19 shot, joined forces again to sponsor the biggest night in Hollywood.

Let's be clear: Comirnaty is still not even available much of anywhere in the world. Catch the part where they just elbowed J&J out of the picture. I love self-aware dismissiveness.

I have confirmed with unnamed sources that "main vaccines" are defined by the same people who are responsible for the "safe and effective" standards.

Strangely, the media world seemed ready to answer "conspiracy theorists" before that ball even got rolling (outside of Twitter QAnon accounts that mostly don't appear to be real people, and which I only just learned about from the article below). When you can lead with a straw man before anyone opens their mouth, and you already have pretty low ethical qualms to begin with…

I'm not sure why Jake Silbert would think he knows the truth of the matter (if you can solve this puzzle to certainty in 24 hours, you're a wealthy securities trader, not a writer for yet another celebrity-pfucker site with ads for $265 t-shirts and $400 Reeboks that look just like $60 Reeboks). But it's perfectly possible that Hollywooders know what to sell Pharma without Pharma participating in the event planning. In wartime, you don't tell your soldiers how to solve every problem. You give them the mission and trust that you've trained them to figure it out. I'm not saying that's how it happened, necessarily. I'm just saying that Silbert's headline could be correct even if he's a complete tool.

According to some utter BS tweeted and TikTok'd by conspiratorial anti-vaxxers on March 27, Smith's slap was a secret plan by Oscars sponsor Pfizer to drum up widespread interest in alopecia before it submitted its latest chemical cocktail for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
This is, of course, insanely dumb.

Unfortunately, it's not much more or less dumb that much of anything that I saw on a routine basis on Wall Street. The only difference over the past decade is the level and velocity of boundary creep. And by coming out and stating the connection, the author grabs the appearance of neutrally forming their conclusion that any belief in the link is total madness. Because nothing like that has ever happened in the history of the world, right?

It's a Deep Fake World After All

"Keep my wife's name out of your pfucking mouth." -Will Smith

Prepare yourself. You're going to have to figure out how to navigate.

While you're being told daily about the elegant CGI that we already know about from years of Hollywood film development, it's about the behavioral psychology, too. Actually, it's about everything since birth, pretty much. And it always has been. But the tech is better now, and asymmetrically developed.

Even worse—many of us will have to figure out how to help our loved ones navigate. And some of them are still hypnotized, or trapped in jobs that require them to pretend to be. That's where we are.

I'll transcribe from around 7:20:

You think it's smart while wearing a tuxedo to walk onto a stage in front of the world…like literally the world—one of the biggest awards shows on Earth, if not the biggest—and smack a comedian for the most mild joke, and then sit there quivering, saying, "Keep my wife's name out of your pfucking mouth," and everybody's gonna just sit there in this shit that you just took on the table. You just pulled your pants down…took a shit on the dinner table. And they all just sit there and look at that. That's what it's like…

The whole idea behind it is completely irrational. What I'm saying is like these people live in this pfake world of, you know, you're protected by guards, you're driven by limos, you're on the red carpet. All of it is crazy-like…

Two points:

Listening to Joe Rogan on 0.5x (my transcribing speed) is absolutely hilarious. He goes from sounding like an ordinary dude to sounding like a back alley drunk. Try it. The kicker is that most conversations about shitting on the table happen among back alley drunks, so it's kind of funny to think about whether or not it's still funny.
Joe sets us up to understand how pfake all this looks without the need to make up our minds for us.

Oh, and here's Will Smith aiming a joke about baldness at somebody else.

https://www.indy100.com/viral/will-smith-mocks-bald-man-resurfaced-footage-oscars

If you aren't yet sure, I get it. I get it, but I've lived through a lot crazier—just not everywhere and all at once. We're living in a firehose of Deep Fake Imagery, now. Here are some data points. Connect the dots as you like: