Aaah, god, dumb roommate shit

I dunno one of the things about coming to Portland is that I experience living with people who aren’t from my narrow background

but you have a bad match with a professional class roommate, like oh no there’s passive aggression and shit talking you at bars to the friends they eventually move in with for real and maybe webcomics that unflatter you

I’m a light sleeper and a good fighter so I’m not too worried, but jeez.

bloodandhedonism:

Eurasia hasn’t had any good steppe hordes in a while.

Hmm.

As in a power that manages to unite the disparate tribes of the Eurasian plains, allowing it to field enough forces to conquer and extract tribute from central-eastern Europe through sheer weight of massed cavalry, inspiring credible fear among the western Mediterranean and Atlantic powers?

How about the Red Army?

Back in Cornell we had to take two phys ed courses (and pass a swimming test) to graduate. For my first one I took a weekend massage seminar, so I could get it over with without interfering with the scheduling of my “real” classes, which in retrospect was the exact opposite attitude I should have taken towards these things.

There were a lot of couples taking it together - boy/girl romantic ones, also a few sorority sisters and a pair of sports bros. I went into it alone and so for applied exercises got paired with a 300+ pound black dude I’d never met, which sounds like a setup for a gay panic joke or an ‘80s buddy comedy; in practice he was a decent and competent enough guy but we didn’t really bond or anything and it was hard to get a feel for the landmarks of bone and muscle under all that flesh.

Towards the end of the second day the instructor, a long white-haired old hippie woman with - reasonably enough - strikingly well-muscled hands, asked if anyone had any questions or specific techniques they wanted to explore. One guy (in one of the boy/girl pairs) asked if she had any recommendations for massage as a mood-setting activity with your romantic partner and she went off on him being, like, actively offended that anyone would think to sully the dignity of massage by using it for sensual purposes.

That year I was formally webmaster for the campus branch of NORML, on account of I was the only freshman to show up at the orientation week recruiting meeting. The only thing that came of it really was I got invited to a house party and who should I see there but the massage instructor, magnum of white wine in one hand, hugest cone spliff I’ve ever seen in the other, hitting on this Swedish freshman girl by massaging her hands.

My second phys ed class was an introduction to handgunning. The instructor was the coach for I think the women’s crew team. He was a gun guy, had a .50 deagle and a .44 magnum he let us fire as a reward in one of the last weeks, and the only practical use for such ridiculous hand cannons I’ve ever heard - in summers he guided canoe expeditions up the rivers of Alaska and needed guns small enough to wear while paddling but strong enough to stop a charging bear.

Anyway, the first two range days we did flinch drills - we’d take a .22 revolver, load two chambers, leave one empty, one full, two empty, and then spin the cylinder before locking it, so it wasn’t until the third or fourth trigger pull that you could be certain whether the hammer would fall on a live round or not.

The idea was that if you fired an empty chamber but the gun still jerked, you’d realize you were doing something wrong - nominally, “pulling” the trigger with your whole hand rather than squeezing with just the finger, or alternatively flinching in anticipation of the recoil. In actuality, it was hilarious how many of us, growing up with toy guns, simply hadn’t internalized that we didn’t need to mime the recoil or say “bang”, since a real one does that for you.

I’ve mentioned before, the doctrine of “fringe” groups like Posse Comitatus, sovereign citizens, free men on the land, etc., that the county is properly the preeminent level of government, the elected sheriff the proper authority and repository of civic legitimacy - that’s not coming from nowhere, for most American history and territory (say, everything more than one county away from the big capital or mercantile cities, up until the Civil War, New Deal, or 1970s, depending) that’s a pretty accurate descriptive account of the lived experience of government.

But not a normative account, right? That doesn’t exist as actual American mythology, right? Well then what the fuck do you think is in all those books at the weird booth at the gun show? (“the”, pf). It’s no less American and no less a mythology than the one in your 9th grade social studies textbook.

But throw enough researchers at the issue, you say, and you’ll find most of those ideas date to the 1950s at earliest. (Actually you say “O great Kontextmaschine, if you throw enough researchers at the issue…”, because the fun part of Socratic dialogue is making you look like a huge ass-kisser.)

Well how do you think mythologies, ideologies get established in the first place? Someone, at some specific time, up and decides them.

“But they aren’t the ones to decide!”

What the hell did I just say? Ideologies are established by up and deciding on them, and the first up and decision the up and deciders make is that they’re the ones that get to up and decide.

The “official” American constitutional order as it now stands comes from the Supreme Court, through “Incorporation” doctrine, up and deciding that it had supremacy over the states

Which comes after the FDR-era executive/legislative machine up and decided that it had supremacy over the judiciary

Which comes after the Lincoln-era federal executive up and deciding that it had supremacy over the states

Which comes after Madison v. Marbury where the Supreme Court up and decided that it had supremacy over the legislature*

Which comes after the Constitutional Convention up and decided it had the authority to throw out the Articles of Confederation and write a new Constitution

Which comes after the Continental Congress up and decided it had the authority to kick out the British governors and establish the Articles of Confederation

Which comes after the British governors up and decided to be the authority of the North American Atlantic seaboard

Which comes after the Glorious Revolution when the Parliament up and decided to have supremacy over the throne

Which comes after the Magna Carta when the English lords up and decided that the King didn’t have supremacy over them

Which comes after William the Conqueror up and decided to be the King of England

etc., etc.

Of course, they all had enough power, in various forms - loyalty, ideology, economic power, military power, control over media channels, leverage over other actors with these various things, what the Soviets called the “correlation of forces”, to make their decisions stick. That’s the difference, that’s all the difference, that’s the only difference.




* this is of course nowhere explicitly stated in the Constitution, and as long as we’re freestyling it’s only in retrospective apologetics obvious that the judicial branch should have the power to overturn “wrong” laws, but NOT to depose “wrong” governments or nullify “wrong” elections (a power the judiciaries of countries like Turkey, Thailand, Germany, and Egypt do claim and wield, often in class-based coalition with the military officer corps)

By the time I read A People’s History of the United States I was in the senior year of an undergraduate American Studies major, which made me the exact opposite of the intended audience. It was all “hey, I bet you didn’t know this stuff was part of American history”, but yes, yes I did. More than that, I knew the stuff Zinn didn’t see fit to mention, the context and linkages and contradictions.

So when he tried to build these anecdotes into an indictment of America, in that register of white American post-New Left Zack de la Rocha cod-radicalism that tries to reinvent the wheel of Marxism without the baggage of dusty old discredited notions such as the circle, I noticed that while this conceit rested on a continuity and coherency between the respective “winners” and “losers” of each vignette, in actuality some of the “winners” had actually been the “losers” of other situations, or their (literal or figurative) heirs.

(If your interpretive categories are winners and losers, you can read any and all of history as a conspiracy to valorize the former at the expense of the latter, which as a reading is not so much wrong as so thoroughly, question-beggingly correct as to be worthless.)

I mean hell, the 2nd (okay, 3rd) American nation, that is to say black slaves and their descendants - those guys definitely get the short end of the stick, over and over. But even they occasionally win one. Briefly. In the early ‘70ses, mostly.

teachorg:

Land your dream job.

Teach. 

are you kidding me

So what power shifts have we had lately in the American government?

Well, what with routinizing the 3/5 majority requirement in the Senate, House obstructionism, stonewalling judicial appointments, etc., Congress (at least Republican ones) are clearly trying to establish legislative supremacy over the executive.

The government shutdowns of the Gingrich and modern era, and the impeachments of 1998 and (possibly) 2015 can be read as attempts to bootstrap into existence a vote of no confidence and establish a Parliamentary system.

Clever of them and godspeed, but they’re going to have to routinize it enough to the point where they can drop the figleaf of legitimating impeachments as a response to “high crimes and misdemeanors” by puffing up garden-variety scandals because it’s going to be too hard to nail the president and veep at the same time.

Either that or change the line of succession to skip straight from POTUS to Speaker of the House, formalizing the role of VP as a figurehead of state akin to European presidents and monarchs.

Uhh, what else. There’s the gay marriage thing, where various state executives realized they can nullify plebiscites or the legislature’s laws by inviting a friendly challenge and then declining to defend them, though if that keeps up I’d give it maybe 15 years before the judiciary jury-rigs standing doctrine to give *someone* the ability to defend them.

The Roberts Court’s been doing interesting stuff in rolling back campaign finance law to the 1970 status quo and giving states more latitude to massage voter eligibility but I don’t know if that counts. If they undercut Smith v. Allwright and give parties more latitude to set their own eligibility systems for membership and thus primaries, that might shake things up.

Probably something I forgot.

You know you don’t see the pardon power used much anymore. That’s something that’s been striking to me reading up on 19th century European history, how often you’d see general amnesties, that were kind of used for reconciliation after the suppression of an uprising but also seemed to free people jailed for unrelated criminal matters.

One of my favorite toy ideas is for the executive to totally undercut the judiciary by waking up each morning and pardoning everyone charged with contempt of court. People will moot the idea of the legislature end-running the judiciary by jurisdiction stripping, but no one seems to mention my possibility, even though the idea’s been discussed before

glaciersofice:

what’s this movie the fault in our stars supposed to be about and what’s that thing in that girl’s nose

Adaptation of a famous 2012 “young adult” novel. As far as I can tell from secondhand media it seems like kind of a bridge between two subgenres of YA, the old Newbery-bait “problem novel” (“I’m just a teenager, but oh no, abuse/cancer/racism/eugenics/the fucking Holocaust”) and the ‘00s Teen Paranormal Romance (“we’re just teenagers, but I found a perfect boyfriend, also he’s a vampire/werewolf/gypsy mystic/fucking literal angel”), melding them into some sort of “I’m just a teenager, but oh no, cancer, but I found a perfect boyfriend, but oh no, cancer” Frankenstein.

And it’s a nasal cannula.

“culture jamming”

I guess it lost prestige when everyone got Photoshop, because Adbusters was glossy but 4chan is… yeah

“Man-crazy”, “Nympho”, “Nymphomaniac” and “Sexual Dependency” redirect here. For the 1997 American novel, see Man Crazy. For the Armand Van Helden album, see Nympho (album). For the 2013 film, see Nymphomaniac (film). For the 2003 film, see Sexual Dependency (film).

Now I’m not entirely on board with monetizeyourcat’s transmarxist project - a fellow traveler at best - but there’s one thing she said a bit ago that’s really stuck with me and I’ve found invaluable in understanding things. And that’s that there exists a dynamic whereby while women’s love is commonly expressed as labor - to serve, comfort, and pleasure their friends/lovers/family, men’s love is often expressed as management - in efforts to judge, discipline, lead the people they care for.

Another thing that’s stuck with me is the PUA trope that the best strategy to pique romantic interest in a woman is by immediately establishing and subsequently maintaining a pose of authority over her - passing judgement (as “negging”), making decisions without seeking input (while “behind the scenes” actually devoting quite a bit of attention to their sensibility), etc. If this isn’t true, well, it does seem to deliver results as if.

And, you know, you’d think the two ideologies were in opposition - the people who subscribe to each certainly define themselves against each other - but they aren’t incompatible at all, are they? Bang them together and the result is “the best strategy to pique romantic interest in a (straight) woman is by expressing your love for her in a masculine register”. Which really is what a lot of the PUA audience seems to have wanted, and as “nice guys” thought they were doing, all along.

So, uh, I suppose I just reinvented patriarchy there.

If we call the oratorical genre “motivational speaking”, how come we call the book genre “self-help” and not “motivational writing”?

perchu:

strikeupthebandom:

what the hell is going on

come find out

kontextmaschine:

If we call the oratorical genre “motivational speaking”, how come we call the book genre “self-help” and not “motivational writing”?

(bcuz reading is thought to involve agency in a way listening doesn’t, bcuz literacy is high-class)

At The Standard and “Discipline Daddy” has most of the Big Buck HD local top scores