Coca_Cola_but_Commie

joined 4 years ago

I feel like, roughly coinciding with Mamdani's win last week, my For You page on Twitter is just crawling with reactionary slop. I mean, Twitter always has been, and there was a noticeable uptick when Elon first took over of overtly fash accounts, who neither I nor anyone I follow seemed to interact with in any way, showing up in my feed. But the last week or so I've gotten just a ton of like goofy racist stuff. Maybe I interacted with a few bad posts and the Twitter algo has decided I should be served this content. Or it's possible that when Tucker Carlson was running rings around Ted Cruz that a few of the accounts I liked making fun of Cruz were these right-wingers. Whatever.

In the last half hour I've seen a video where the post said "beware where you get your takeout" and you could see the video was in a kitchen. I figured it was going to be some slighly slop-like content where inspectors go into a kitchen and find roaches or something so I click the video. And it's some British guy who barges into a kitchen and is mad that migrants work there. There was another one of a guy walking through some sort of market in Rome, and he was the only white around, and he was bemoaning the fall of the West. I saw a post from a veteran claiming that Muslims are evil savages, and we can't let Mamdani take New York.

I spend a lot of time doomscrolling Twitter and the sudden proliferation of this stuff (and I'm getting a lot of slop and video content that isn't relevant to me in my feed generally, not just this shit) might be what finally gets me to quit Twitter.

https://yewtu.be/playlist?list=PLuKg-WhduhkkEZNV0-1ToOAi_x8pltE22

playlist of all of these bits from Dropout. They're all pretty fun, but this Oreo one is probably my favorite. The hardware store one, where a grandfather is radicalized into anti-capitalism by his annoying crypto-bro grandson is also good.

Zeus expressing his assent for Mamdani?”

Binged the show for the first time a few weeks ago. It's a much better, funnier, and more thoughtful show than its online fanbase led me to expect. It's not a GOOD show, exactly, but it's decent for what it is.

But I feel the show wearing thin in spots. Rick can't change, can't show weakness, can't ever face real consequences because then the show itself would change. He's smarter than everyone, including Q-esque godlike beings. But Morty has come to the realization that Rick is an irredeemable asshole multiple times now. And while Morty has changed, he can't reject Rick fully because then the show would change. They've got to do something to keep this act from getting stale but they also can't do anything.

Similar to House M.D. in some ways, but I'm struck by how that show's various answers to it's unchanging asshole protagonist (his whole staff leaves, he loses both of the best relationships he's ever had, the only person he really cares about hates him for much of the last run of the show, he gets shot, and at least once he does change and isn't such an asshole anymore (but it can't stick)) wouldn't work for Rick & Morty.

In preparation for 28 Years Later I decided to rewatch Days. It’s been probably 15 years since I last saw the film, mostly I remembered Brendan Gleeson and that bit at the beginning of the movie where Cillian Murphy is walking around a deserted London.

I forgot that Christopher Eccleston is in it, and also that in the last act Cillian Murphy, who was just a normal man thrust into the apocalypse, turns into a damn operator. Like fucking Solid Snake. Or if that’s not right (I’ve never played a MGS game) then like Corvo from Dishonored.

[–] Coca_Cola_but_Commie@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Standing up and screaming “Kim Jong Un wife guy!” as loudly as I can in celebratory triumph in the break room.

I’d swear my home town’s homecoming parade gets a better turnout than this.

[–] Coca_Cola_but_Commie@hexbear.net 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Can we agree that your most important advisor is indispensable to the realm? That their honor is unimpeachable? That you have the utmost faith in them and their abilities and you know they'd never betray you and seize the crown for themselves?

If you, like me, were confused why you've seen this image before, this is why:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/guy-pointing-a-gun-at-elon-musk

I watched that clip on CNN and after saying that Trump accused Elon of having Trump Derangement Syndrome. Extremely funny stuff.

CW: liberal zionism, genocide apologia

https://www.vox.com/politics/414049/reading-books-decline-tiktok-oral-culture

I was reading this article, which is interesting but flawed, about how a group of thinkers believe that society is devolving from a literate culture back into an oral culture (and how that will spell the doom of Liberalism, and herald the return of tyrant kings). The author is ambivalent about that premise while maintaining that the overall decline in literacy is not good and probably a sign of bad things to come. I was even thinking of making a post out of it. But then I got to this bit:

[T]here are several reasons to question the broader premise that declining deep literacy is the driving force behind illiberal politics in America today.

...

Likewise, illiberal leftists — such as those who authored apologias for the October 7 massacre — are not typically distinguished by their lack of literary erudition (and much the same can be said of liberal intellectuals who’ve rationalized Israeli war crimes in Gaza). Nor were the Stalinists of yesteryear especially unacquainted with libraries.

Maybe it's just my personal hatred of the word 'illiberal', but I can't bring myself to engage more with the article, which kind of peters out at the end anyway. The author seems unclear where to point the blame for America's illiberal turn. Is it that nativist hicks are forcing the educated elite out of power? Is it that phones are bad? But what about these stats that indicate phones are good and made us woke about the gays? But how does that fit with the existence of Andrew Tate, the evil man who lives in the phone of every teenage boy? Socrates once condemned writing, so maybe if I say AI is bad somebody will think that makes me look a fucking idiot so I won't say that even though I believe it.

I really was thinking about how I suspect the idea that America was once shaped by an engaged and literate electorate (as was theorized earlier in the article) is misguided, that the US has long taken its cultural cues from the elites, that those elites were once well-educated people engaged in the project of Liberalism, and then once education became for the hoi polloi and Liberalism lost its moral standing to Socialism the elites gave up all pretense of giving a shit sometime around when JFK took one to the dome. I mean there's more to it than that because obviously the views of the masses have mattered and had an effect on things (largely in how the bourgeois respond to those views) but not in the orderly-and-learned-citizens-engaging-in-(non-disruptive)-civic-duty way I feel was implied early on in the article. You could also make an argument that the elites never gave a shit at all, that it was always a farce, that all this is business as usual and the only difference is that now even VOX writers can see that. But the whole thing ends on such a disappointing note and I've got better things to do with my time (I should have been asleep two hours ago), so I'm not going to think any more about this.

 

https://xcancel.com/BretDevereaux/status/1896592119093240204

What's that famous quote about statistics? Oh, yeah I think it's "statistics are completely truthful measures of objective reality and can't be easily warped to suit a narrative."

I'm a fan of Devereaux's ancient history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. But any time he comments on contemporary history and events its always stuff like this. It always leads to the conclusion that the post-WWII US-led liberal world order is the best thing to ever happen.

Also I'm pretty sure he is about 40, which means he was born a mere forty years removed from the most destructive conflict in human history. Even if this graph, and the statement that he is replying to, are correct and the last 80 years are the safest years in human history I think it's a little early to be counting your chickens.

Does it really count as a long peace just because post-WWII conflicts haven't had a comparable death toll? What about the various campaigns of ethnic cleansing and displacement and other assorted horrors that this graph conveniently doesn't include? Also fails to account for the fact that at no other time in history has the very real possibility of nuclear apocalypse hung over all our heads. Is that peace?

 

Post I saw about this.

I couldn't think of a meme template to do this with. Also I won't watch another movie etc.

 

Don't know if this site or its analysis of this study are reliable, this is just something I saw on Twitter. In fact I don't know if the study itself is reliable. I just think it would be morbidly funny if human driven climate changed wiped out enough of the major oxygen producing organisms to cause a reverse Great Oxidation Event.

God talking to humankind:"Heyy you loving that oxygen? Pretty sweet isn't it? Wanna know how I did it? It's really clever, you're going to love this. See, at the beginning I crafted the rules that underpin everything, yadda yadda yadda, some bacteria in an anaerobic world gain crude photosynthesis and BAM, complex multicellular life is possible. Those godless scientists call it the G-O-E, it even kinda sounds like my name. You must be pretty grateful. I mean, without, you wouldn't exist or be around to ponder the nature of the universe and we wouldn't be talking. Ha ha—

Hey, what the fuck? Don't do that. Do not do that. No. You can't kill those. You cannot kill- well there they fucking go. Now I have to wait another six billion years for complex life to evolve somewhere else. This game sucks. It should be way more hands on. Can we re-enable divine intervention?"

 

Obviously I’m not a fan of Dawkins. I haven’t read any of his work, but from the various clips and quotes of his I’ve seen over the years he strikes me as an incurious bigot with a blinkered worldview. But I have no reason to doubt that he is a smart man.

So it’s very funny to see him realize that he’s debating a genuinely delusional person, as Peterson makes some bizarre epistemological argument that dragons are literally real because we use the concept of predator as a shorthand for animals that kill other animals. Except Peterson seems to expand the definition of predator to “anything that can kill a person” when he argues that fire is a predator.

 

that Obama wouldn't have included the novel Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel in his 2024 Summer Reading List?

lol at Ganz being on Obama's list.

Also see: https://twitter.com/PetreRaleigh/status/1823107090035925472

 

The Asiatic Mind: How Ancient Babylon Took the Holy Land from the Globalists by Larry McFuckface New York Times bestseller and soon to be major motion picture

vs

The Ace of Spades: Syncretism in the Neo-Babylonian Empire c. 1300 BC by Dr. Robin Dozois and William Harrington (University of Sydney Press Books) Has never been scanned and uploaded online. The only surviving copy is in the stacks of a private research university.

 

The fuck? I've been holding down a finger and trying to scroll to the right spot (which usually fucks up when I release the hold) for years.

 

Link to parent tweet

Text of the NYT Article:

By Timothy Aubry

Nov. 25, 2015

Less than a lifetime ago, reputable American writers would occasionally start fistfights, sleep in ditches and even espouse Communist doctrines. Such were the prerogatives and exigencies of the artist’s existence, until M.F.A. programs arrived to impose discipline and provide livelihoods. Whether the professionalization of creative writing has been good for American literature has set off a lot of elegantly worded soul-searching and well-mannered debate recently, much of it in response to Mark McGurl’s seminal study, “The Program Era.” What Eric ­Bennett’s “Workshops of Empire” contributes is an understanding of how Cold War politics helped to create the aesthetic standards that continue to rule over writing workshops today.

Sponsored by foundations dedicated to defeating Communism, creative-­writing programs during the postwar period taught aspiring authors certain rules of propriety. Good literature, students learned, contains “sensations, not doctrines; ­experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.” The goal, according to Bennett, was to discourage the abstract theorizing and systematic social critiques to which the radical literature of the 1930s had been prone, in favor of a focus on the personal, the concrete and the individual. While workshop administrators like Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner wanted to spread American values, they did not want to be caught imposing a particular ideology on their students, for fear of appearing to use the same tactics as the communists. Thus they presented their aesthetic principles as a non­political, universally valid means of cultivating writerly craft. The continued status of “show, don’t tell” as a self-evident truth, dutifully dispensed to anyone who ventures into a creative-­writing class, is one proof of their success.

Bennett’s argument is a persuasive reminder that certain seemingly timeless criteria of good writing are actually the product of historically bound political agendas, and it will be especially useful to anyone seeking to expand the repertoire of stylistic strategies taught within creative-writing programs. That said, some sections are better researched than others. His chapters on Stegner, Hemingway and Henry James lack the detailed ­institutional machinations that make his account of Engle’s career so compelling. Moreover, he uses the early history to support his claim that creative-writing programs continue to bolster a pro-­capitalist worldview today. But a chess move made to solve specific problems can serve unexpected purposes when the situation on the board has changed. Whether or not the aesthetic doctrines currently championed by writing workshops perform the same political function they once did, now that the very conflict responsible for their emergence has ended, is a question that requires further study.

Finally, despite Bennett’s misgivings about creative-writing workshops, his book is itself a convincing argument in their favor. A graduate of the Iowa M.F.A. program, Bennett has produced a literary history far more enjoyable than the typical academic monograph, for all the reasons one might guess. It features a winning protagonist, Engle, the ebullient poet-huckster and early director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who, according to Bennett, “moved too quickly through the airports and boardroom offices to bother with the baggage of complex beliefs.” Here and elsewhere, Bennett never tells when he can show. The 1920s, under his scrutiny, consists not of trends, but of “racy advertisements, voting mothers, unruly daughters, smoking debutants, migrating Negroes, Marx, Marxists, Freud, Freudians and the unsettling monstrosity of canvasses and symphonies from Europe.” Wallace Stegner, he observes, “wrote at length about not sleeping with people.” Whether novelists and poets should make room in their work for the intellectual abstractions that prevail within academic scholarship, the academy would be better off if more of its members could attend to concrete particulars with the precision and wit that Bennett brings to his subject. Indeed, they might even benefit from taking a creative-writing class or two.

WORKSHOPS OF EMPIRE

Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War

Link to the article

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