[Paracelsus]

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock…
--George Orwell, 1984

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/style...-club.html

Fuck the New Dork Times, here's the whole article:

Quote:

Smashing things may not seem at first blush to be a winning idea to wrap a business around. Since March, however, nearly 1,500 people have shown up to break housewares, electronics and furniture at the Wrecking Club, two reinforced rooms in the basement of a building in the garment district of Manhattan.

Many of this number are couples looking for something more piquant than the usual date-night fare, said Tom Daly, the Wrecking Club’s proprietor. But rage is not confined to matrimony and other romantic unions, as Mr. Daly has also found.

“That’s the cool thing about addressing an instinct,” he said on a recent steamy afternoon. “Everyone’s got it.”

The Wrecking Club is not the first rage-based enterprise. Last fall, politics drove the business at the Anger Room, which opened in Dallas in 2008. Clients showed up by the hundreds to batter human effigies of Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Three Trump mannequins and two Clintons were utterly destroyed, according to the owner, Donna Alexander, and had to be replaced.

The Rage Room, which first opened in Toronto in 2015, now has licensees in Budapest, Singapore, Australia and Britain. “We’ve helped a lot of angry couples,” said Stephen Shew, the owner. (His date-night package, $70 for two electronic devices and 20 items of crockery, from lawn gnomes to ceramic vases, is wildly popular on Valentine’s Day.)

For those who would rather act out at home, the online marketplace presents an armory’s worth of what are known as therapy tools. Foam anger bats, for example, start at about $10. At the high end, a pair of well-padded, cherry-red canvas, German-made, jumbo encounter bats cost about $210 and look like something the performance artist Leigh Bowery might have designed as a special kind of evening wear.

There is no such cosseting at the Wrecking Club. The bats and crowbars are solid metal. A starter session costs $30 for 30 minutes with two or three electronic devices and a bucket of dishes. A menu of add-ons — advertised on a white board like daily specials at a restaurant — includes boxes of dishes ($20 for one box; two for $35); laptops ($15); computer monitors ($20); cellphones ($5); and large-screen TVs ($25). The most requested items are laptops, monitors, printers and extra dishes. (Mr. Daly estimates he runs through about 60 to 70 electronic devices each week.)

Finding these materials is one of his biggest challenges. Companies going out of business are an irregular source. Sometimes people donate things, Mr. Daly said, adding that everything smashed at the Wrecking Club is properly recycled.

A year or so ago, Mr. Daly, 29, was bored with his finance job in Stamford, Conn. He quit before it was too late, he said, “to do something really cool.” A cheerful, fresh-faced guy wearing a backward black baseball cap, blue polo shirt and blue linen pants, Mr. Daly has happy memories of demolishing a swing set in his parents’ backyard, at their request, after he and his siblings had left home, and these sparked his imagination. “It was more fun than playing on the swing set,” he said. “The memory stayed with me and that’s what made me think about breaking things.”

The vibe and aesthetic of the Wrecking Club is part CBGB’s basement circa 1977, part Stasi interrogation room. Each room is clad in pocked cement and plywood for maximum “smash effect,” as Mr. Daly put it. Drywall, he pointed out, wouldn’t be hard enough to break stuff against. Hanging on an entry wall is a still photograph from the cult turn-of-the-millennium movie “Office Space”: the beloved printer-smashing scene. The rooms have been lightly embellished in black and orange spray paint by Derrick Gutierrez, a graffiti artist who is also Mr. Daly’s FedEx delivery guy. “He tagged the place as if it were a bridge,” Mr. Daly said admiringly. “I wanted it to have a Brooklyn-in-the-1990s vibe. I think he crushed it.”

There were some early setbacks, like the time a couple destroyed Mr. Daly’s laptop. He had left it in the room after showing the two a safety video and did not think to tell them it wasn’t part of their package. “All I can say is, ‘Thank God for the Cloud,’” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t tell the customers what they’d done, because I didn’t want them to feel bad.” But new customers will see that some areas and objects in the rooms are now marked with an X for “Please don’t smash.”

Mr. Daly is keeping the building’s location a secret (after you sign up for a session online, your confirmation email contains the address): not to protect his landlords, but to maintain the atmosphere of a speakeasy.

Close-toed shoes are required, and long pants and long sleeves suggested. Customers who are visibly drunk or stoned will be turned away and their deposit forfeited. Mr. Daly provides safety goggles, hard hats, work gloves and black nylon smocks.

He seemed surprised when this reporter arrived alone. “It’s just more fun with two,” he said. But inviting a new boyfriend to what surely constitutes end-stage relationship behavior did not appeal (I was not eager to fast-track into Martha and George territory). And breaking crockery seemed too intimate an activity to share with even an old friend.

Indeed, there are two things that propel people into the Wrecking Club, Mr. Daly said. “One is to have some fun, and the other is to work something out.”

I ordered a monitor, a large flat-screen TV, a chair and a box of dishes. Mr. Daly said that most customers play music, and I looked to Dina Litovsky, the photographer who had accompanied me to document the proceedings, for assistance. “Metallica, obviously,” she said, and cued up the thrash anthem “Battery” on her phone.

In a corner were a metal bat and a long crowbar. Dina and I were stymied by the heat — the air-conditioning wasn’t working — and our goggles kept fogging up as our eyes stung with sweat. I picked up a bat, approached the TV, and, then, I am ashamed to say, I hit the thing like a girl. Minor crack. James Hetfield of Metallica barked and howled: “Hungry violence seeker, feeding off the weaker.” Really, it was embarrassing. I pined for something more jolly; Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” say, or that very satisfying Carrie Underwood song in which she crows about demolishing her cheating ex’s car with a bat and a set of keys.

“Most people are hesitant at first,” Mr. Daly said. “They’re a little timid. They say, ‘Can I break that?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, you can break that.’ Usually after the first hit, they go crazy.”

Here’s what I have to report: Hastening an object toward entropy isn’t as easy as you might think. Televisions are extremely hard to destroy, even with a metal bat. Apple monitors are even more durable. Chairs are impossible. And unlike David Bowie, I don’t like the sound of breaking glass; it makes my teeth hurt. And it’s scary as hell when a mist of tiny shards sprays back at you. The deep reservoir of rage I was hoping to tap turned out to be a dry creek, drained by time — who can remember the hurts of yore? — and self-consciousness. There would be no primal screaming on West 38th Street that hot summer day. Two people breaking things seems festive; a solo smasher is just weird.

I found a bit of a rhythm, finally, with my bat, and systematically worked my way over the TV screen — pop, pop, pop — until the floor sparkled with black glass. I stifled an urge to ask for a dustpan and broom.

Mr. Daly has learned a thing or two about human nature in the last few months.

“From my very humble and limited education, I think that part of what’s going on here is that breaking stuff gives people back their edge,” he said. “It lets people take their power back. Imagine getting fired. It sucks. It’s defeating. Or you got dumped, or you didn’t get into the college you wanted, or imagine whatever it is that makes you feel weak. This is a place where you can get back your power.”

Comments to follow.

[Paracelsus]

(1) Those of you who are in martial arts or MMA regularly will, I assume, immediately be on edge if I say I'm about to make a comparison between this concept and your discipline. Rest assured, I only do that to illustrate the monumental differences here.

The moment someone gets into a rage in martial arts or MMA, they are going to get put down, and put down hard. There's no room for safely getting physical with somebody who's right out of control. In addition, the moment you let the rage go, let it control you, then your technique is out the window and you're going to be a lot easier to beat by a guy who keeps his cool. Half the idea of martial arts is not just giving you the tools to defend yourself, it's to teach you the cold mindset required to keep your head (as Kipling put) while everyone around you is losing theirs, because that mindset is going to keep you alive and less injured when it really matters.

A more significant difference is that to contend with someone else in a ring, in a combat art, requires discipline. You don't generally get to spar with other people until you've practiced at least to some extent the accepted techniques and you know what blows are permitted and what are not. You must show some apprenticeship, and the very point of sparring is to teach you something more than you already knew; you should be learning as much in the ring as you should be outside it drilling.

But perhaps the most important difference between people who would equate a martial art "getting your anger out in the ring" with these anger rooms is that in the ring you are facing another human being, another person just like yourself with dreams, desires, fears, secret anxieties, strengths, and weaknesses. I've often wondered whether a good cure for narcissistic symptoms is to get in a ring. Not only does someone's fist serve you a good dose of reality to your self-image, but (with time) you'll get to realise, understand, anticipate, get inside another person's head. You will realise -- or one would hope, anyway -- that the other person is a complete individual entirely separated from yourself, not just your opponent, but another mind, another heart, another soul. I hope that this instinct is at the heart of the embrace between boxers that seems to happen at the end of many hard-fought matches.

An aside: I did a beginner's course in kendo recently, 12 weeks introductory. Did not continue at that point as I have issues with my fitness that I'm trying to address, but two things struck me about the experience. (I hope Dalaran1991 stops by here to talk about this for confirmation or contrasts.)

The first was the strong sense I was given that all the ritual which surrounds kendo in particular -- bowing in and out of the dojo, mokuso at the beginning and end of a session, ritual forms of address to masters, making kiai during a strike, certain ways to place one's sword -- are there as reins on individual aggression, channels for it. They are not empty rituals or traditions, they have an important role in keeping men from opening each other's bodies up with weapons, they have a role in the flow from violence to peacefulness that is every bout, in the balance between peace and war.

The second -- and it was just an impression, a fleeting one -- was even while drilling with a partner, performing Kote, Men, Do while shouting at the top of my voice, I felt this sudden surge of compassion, even affection, for the other person in front of me, even in the midst of preparing to make strikes that are intended as lethal in the right context. I cannot explain this. It was certainly not pity; I was only learning, but I wondered what it might feel like to have that sort of surge in an actual bout.

Anger rooms seem the opposite of all of this. There's no other person to strike at, no discipline, no control required, you can simply smash objects like the narcissistic child that you are. It would be easy to be contemptuous of the whole concept, but it seems simpler to regard it as symptomatic of a culture that has dispensed with masculinity and doing so has also dispensed with masculine controls on aggression.

(2) Rage (along with denial) is the general response to a narcissistic injury.

(3) The most laughable concept is the one at the end of the article: that people feel like they've "gotten their power back" after smashing a few objects. I think the reality is that their endorphins are flowing because of the physicality of what they're doing. I think it was weambulance out here who says he feels a lot more on point on his laptop after mowing the lawn or working out; similar concept applies here without the need to smash stuff against walls like a child. That's the benefit of physical exercise: it gets you back in touch with your body, and the body and mind are connected, like it or not. Some of our greatest thinkers were also superb athletes and warriors. Socrates fought in the Peloppenesian War. Wittgenstein served in World War 1. Some of the physicists who went on to found the field of quantum mechanics were supremely physically fit.

Smashing shit doesn't give you power, it gives you a few endorphins. I think Gerry Spence is right when he points out that nobody has power over us except what we give them in our own minds, hence why he says the most potent tool you can use when setting out to win a trial is to give yourself permission to win, and resolve to keep your power with you. Notice the behaviour the guy selling this shit describes to the journalist: people are timid at first, but after the first hit, they turn on the anger - because they give themselves permission.

(4) I actually don't think the concept of the Anger Room is much different to the concept of the Fight Club.

Remember, the whole idea of "meet up, beat another guy up or get beaten up" from that film is coming from a guy who's sleep-deprived, narcissistic, and mentally ill to boot. Tyler Durden is not the full expression of the Narrator's personality, he's the half that refuses to accept he essentially has no purpose in life. It is this half of the Narrator that comes up with the idea of the Fight Club, who initially starts the club by beating himself up in a parking lot, and then asking someone to hit him. The bruises he first gets? Self-inflicted. The whole acid burn scene? Self-inflicted. We normally would look down on a girl who self-harms as seriously troubled, the Narrator actually is no different on that score.

Pulling out the primal well of aggression that lies within us might be better than repressing it to the point where it springs out uncontrolled, but it's not a solution in itself. The solution lies in overcoming narcissism.

(5) Again, question the agenda of the piece, less so than the concept it's reporting on. The overall tone of the piece seems to try to walk the balance between Apollonian interest and Dionysian satisfaction, but overall it comes out somewhat mocking. When he has a go at it, he fails at smashing a lot, and pretends to retain his Apollonian control. The journalist wants to be true that the Anger Room changes nothing, that people remain powerless whether they are enraged or not. Never mind the journalist wants to mock the Anger Room, the journalist really wants to maintain the status quo: that people are powerless, that they can't really come on up to Fifth Avenue and turn the Times' readers out of their rent-controlled, ludicrously wealthy apartments, that they're just following fads. The NYT wants it that way, which is why this article got published.

[Elster]

And so the marketing to childhood regression continues: safe spaces with coloring books, imaginary personas (I'm not Timmy, I'm captain galactic!/I'm not CIS, I'm gender fluid). Etc
And now we have the addition of the child outburst room for smashing things!
Who would have thought immaturity issues could be such a great biz?

Quote:


Here’s what I have to report: Hastening an object toward entropy isn’t as easy as you might think. Televisions are extremely hard to destroy, even with a metal bat. Apple monitors are even more durable. Chairs are impossible. And unlike David Bowie, I don’t like the sound of breaking glass; it makes my teeth hurt. And it’s scary as hell when a mist of tiny shards sprays back at you. The deep reservoir of rage I was hoping to tap turned out to be a dry creek, drained by time — who can remember the hurts of yore? — and self-consciousness. There would be no primal screaming on West 38th Street that hot summer day. Two people breaking things seems festive; a solo smasher is just weird.

In one paragraph you have a window into the inner workings of the mentality of this lot.
Individually weak and fearful ("breaking glass makes scary sound") and a pile driver mentality ("two is festive one is weird because I could be identified and singled out").
Does this sound like a certain type of activist archetype you know?

[Suits]

Maybe it's an instinctive desire to pushback against the electronic world that rules us now, full of fragile items that we must treat with the utmost care to avoid being out a few hundred bucks or more.

[Paracelsus]

(08-10-2017 01:39 AM)Suits Wrote:  

Maybe it's an instinctive desire to pushback against the electronic world that rules us now, full of fragile items that we must treat with the utmost care to avoid being out a few hundred bucks or more.

I say it's an instinctive desire to push back, period, which they have never used before and, more importantly, never been taught to use constructively.

The first question most people have is "Can I break that?" They're asking for permission to break shit. When they've already paid for the privilege of doing so.

It's like asking a hooker politely whether you can bang her in the butt after you've paid the extra $200 tariff or whatever for anal (as opposed to asking if you can now bang her ass).

The only guy who does it is one who's had it all but beaten into him that respect for women is paramount.

[ivansirko]

I see this more "Hostel" than "Fight Club". Hostel is a childish reaction to whatever decadent life is led (because the object that will die cannot fight back) while Fight Club is a way to release primal instincts (2 men fight on equal ground).

What if instead of beating on TVs it was 2 teams beating on each other for 5 minutes?

[Super_Fire]

(08-10-2017 02:30 AM)ivansirko Wrote:  

What if instead of beating on TVs it was 2 teams beating on each other for 5 minutes?

I don't think the snowflakes would be able to handle that:

[Zep]

I had this idea over ten years ago, a place where you pay to smash shit up.

Smashing shit is fucking satisfying.

[monster]

(08-10-2017 03:47 PM)Zep Wrote:  

I had this idea over ten years ago, a place where you pay to smash shit up.

Smashing shit is fucking satisfying.

^this.

Half of Dan Bilzerian's instagram is blowing and smashing shit up.

The other half is pussy.

Unbridled id. Hahah

[Chunnel]

First thing I thought of after reading. Its good to burn steam, but an anger room seems like mental regression.

[PapayaTapper]

The modern worlds comforts have insulated primal man from many if not most tactile visceralities we're still wired to respond to. This activity simply appeals to those deficits.

[armenia4ever]

(08-10-2017 03:48 AM)Super_Fire Wrote:  

(08-10-2017 02:30 AM)ivansirko Wrote:  

What if instead of beating on TVs it was 2 teams beating on each other for 5 minutes?

I don't think the snowflakes would be able to handle that:

Larping or not, that looks like a blast. These guys should reclaim Constantinople.

Also when did the Mountain from GOT get in on this?

[Foolsgo1d]

A team from the USA has a video on those medieval fights. USA has some nice colours and styles for old world banners. Doesn't mean you'll win though.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

The author is a woman, so of course she did not like it and she was timid doing it. When women smash things, then they usually lose complete control and are emotionally worse off than before.



While it is not comparable to 1984 Hate Minutes it does not foster anything healthy. Though to be honest sometimes it is fun to break things, but as an adult it is more interesting to shoot things or blow them up with weapons.

Promoting this to women or god forbid couples with marital problems is utterly deluded.

By the way - the Hate Minutes of 1984 have more in common with public executions of old where a poor sop/witch/heretic was chosen for the peasants to unload their anger on him or her. That is why public executions are frankly not useful for a society - it truly fosters hate and anger.

And you have pointed out correctly that the best way for the release of aggression is to channel it into something useful like martial arts, lifting or even other sports activities. Women have far less need of that than men - this is not their forte and they should not foster those instincts in them. It is as strained as a man who tries to like dancing in a tutu or going shoe shopping with his wife. There is no need for this gender-swapping.

But still - Paracelsus - you may be on to something akin to the Hate Minute since the business was especially booming during election. My guess is that most hate was ushered against Trump as New York is a liberal hellhole. All the anger that was stoked by the media against it had to go somewhere.

The globalists wish for the peasants to hate the right kind of people and accept foolishly the traitors and medieval psychopaths as their new friends.

Stoking hate is usually wrong - even if you have an enemy that you know that you need to defeat, you can always feel compassion for him as you slaughter him. That is the Zen way and it is far purer and more healthy for your inner being. That is what sane men should do - not lash out in blind anger or hate.

[sterling_archer]

(08-10-2017 05:07 PM)armenia4ever Wrote:  

(08-10-2017 03:48 AM)Super_Fire Wrote:  

(08-10-2017 02:30 AM)ivansirko Wrote:  

What if instead of beating on TVs it was 2 teams beating on each other for 5 minutes?

I don't think the snowflakes would be able to handle that:

Larping or not, that looks like a blast. These guys should reclaim Constantinople.

Also when did the Mountain from GOT get in on this?

Would be interesting to partake in this once or twice as a way to blow off "steam", but aside from that I don't like it.

[Fortis]

Hilarious, about 7 years ago I had this same idea. Fuck.

[Disco_Volante]

It is a brilliant business idea, especially in cities.

[rapaz12]

Did these exist before the rage cage on delocated?

I don't think there's anything deeper happening here though. Everyone loves to smash stuff up.

[WilliamDoor]

Looks like more than one of us here had the same idea.

Look at the world. ID a need. Sate that need. Get money.

How many of us have heard men and women say they wish they could break or beat some shit up? If you can make a way for some SJW slug to do that while you take their cash, very good.

My idea was more small - a sound proof head cover that would allow them to yell and shout as loud as the can and not annoy their peers. A box with a cute cat logo on it, maybe.