Bang bang, you shot me down...

The art of indiscriminate killing

Aug 05, 2025

I took the picture above in one of the Buddhist temples (WATs) of Luang Prabang. The pictures were numbered, clearly to tell a story, but without any means for me, a tourist, to decipher it. There was no translation of the captions or somebody there to explain the history. I am puzzled by it to this day. What precipitated this event of extreme, sadistic violence? Who are the two people? Who are the killed and who is doing the killing? What’s the meaning of the depiction of Buddha in many of the pictures?

Just yesterday, my Syrian guest was telling me about the horrors she was witnessing on some videos of the former terrorists, now US designated freedom fighters, executing their captives. The Druze, the Christians, the Alawites. They take them to the roof of a building and tell them to jump. If they don’t the captors shoot one. When the rest realizes that there is no way out and start jumping, then shoot them in the air. Just in case….. It’s a sport.

My other guest, a competitive gamer, was telling me about an acquaintance who was banned from competing for saying after a match: “Good game, dude!” to a player identifying as a woman.

A few weeks ago I was stunned by a post of Yuri Bezmenov, introducing me to some ‘modern’ art in How To Create Stunning and Brave Art:

There are actual examples of this highly technical new artistic style in the post)

Like with the Buddhist paintings, I must wonder: what is the message?
There is help! This is how Grok describes it:

Core Themes in Cleon Peterson’s Work:
Power Struggles: His figures clash in primal battles, symbolizing the eternal tension between oppressor and oppressed.
Civilizational Decay: Peterson portrays a world where ethics are abandoned, and personal entitlement reigns—a reflection of modern alienation and moral erosion.
Violence as a Mirror: Rather than glorifying violence, his work exposes it as a fundamental part of human nature and societal structure.
Critique of Modern Systems: He challenges the idea that technology or compassion will save us, suggesting instead that we’re trapped in a cycle of consumption, manipulation, and false promises.

…. Which begs for the questions:
When AI presents us with some pretentious, phony, woke BS, can we call it AB, as in Artificial Bullsh*t?
Does it excuse the imagery and the obviously suggestive message?

All of this is happening in front of a background of ever-growing level of intolerance and normalization of violence.

In the quaint innocence of early Hollywood, ‘violence’ meant a bar-fight or a fisticuff ending with a black eye.
Sure, there were cowboy shootouts and Injun wars around the circled wagons, but nothing compared to the meticulously choreographed, precision murders of today’s action movies. Kill-counts per movie run in the dozens or even hundreds.
According to the LLMs, the yearly average kill-count of Hollywood movies is about 6,000. Add to it another 6,000 in the TV series for a total of 12K fictional killings that are also becoming increasingly gruesome.

The kill-count of True lies is ~50, and that is just an action comedy. The total kill-count of the four John Wick movies is 439.

The most important message of True Lies is in these few seconds:

“yeah, but they were all bad”

…. and this supposed to make them all OK. There are movies and TV series, like Dexter and The Blacklist justifying extrajudicial killing. Estimates for the Dexter kill-count are ~200-250, for Reddington (Blacklist) it is ~20-50.

It is inevitable with such large numbers for the justifications to get increasingly spurious, and even collateral damage to be made excusable.

The only apparent criteria is for the acting character to self-identify as one of the good guys, and anyone opposed to his goals as the bad ones. Just being in his way on his righteous quest justifies murder. It does not matter how ridiculous the goal is. The ‘goodness’ of the act is in the virtue of the intent.
In a perverted way, the greater the collateral damage is, the nobler the sacrifice. The heroes of our movies are getting more merciless and nonchalant at the same time.
The message we are getting in the past few decades is that you can be a cold blooded killer and a very nice guy at the same time.

Why is it happening? I don’t have an answer. Is it a dark conspiracy softening us up for the mass violence? Is it just a slippery slope that we, the consumers, encouraged by our demonstrated liking of moral ambiguities? In other words: did we ask for it or was it foisted on us? Is it just another symptom of our moral decline, or is it nefarious by design?

What is NOT a question is its effect. It makes political extremes justified. Callings for the assassination of Trump/Putin/Netanyahu (take your pick), cheering for undeclared wars, celebrating regime change operations, treating riots and looting as justified, bullying friend and foe as a legitimate replacement for actual diplomacy.

All you need to do is declare yourself the good guy and any opposition to your virtuous aims as evil, which is, of course, a perfect manifestation of postmodernist relativism.
(Hence my questions above…)

The problem goes much further than violence. The relativization of ‘moral’ justifications, their subordination to our will have far reaching consequences. It will, eventually, turn everything relative. If it is OK to kill (as long as your aim is righteous) then why not cheat, lie and steal?

If you fight for the noble goal of saving the planet, shouldn’t it be OK to hide the decline?
If a populist, deranged fascist is bound to win an election, shouldn’t it be a moral duty to rig the election to protect democracy?
If you failed the above, shouldn’t it be your sacred duty to destroy him by any means possible?
If you are a drug researcher working on saving humanity with a wonderful new drug, shouldn’t it be OK to burry the evidence of its side effects that would slow down its adaptation? To keep that information from those who cannot understand the greater good and the noble sacrifices needed to attain it?
If you are a champion of some global kumbaya, DEI and a globalist future, shouldn’t it be OK to use any tool possible to keep any nationalist party out of power?
If you truly believe that criminals are victims of society, shouldn’t it be ok to shield them from justice?
If you know that some people with evil intent are spreading dangerous propaganda, shouldn’t you do everything in your power to silence them?
If you think that your feelings and delusions are more important than reality, shouldn’t you have the right to demand that others should respect them and punish them if they refuse?

It all depends on how you see yourself and the goal. Almost anything can be justified by self-defined moral superiority.

This was the same sentiment that drove the Cheka and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
This is the sentiment behind all moral relativism.

It starts with culture, entertainment and the arts that we use as models of our reality.
Then it goes all the way down to language, the way we choose our words to distort reality. Immorality shouldn’t be trivial.