secondbalcony:

1. The biggest straight-up error made in the activist left, I think, is the belief that nobody of any consequence changes her or his mind about policy or social practices by looking at which side has better epistemic hygiene. The formalist nerds are many, they are influential, and they hop real far across the spectrum case-by-case based on their judgements about which side is more intellectually honest, well-informed, and searching. (Which is partly their best heuristic for first-order empirically informed decision-making, partly an aesthetic-social preference about whose side they want to be on, but that’s like anything else). And if these formalists are easily prey to false positives, biasing their conception of epistemic hygiene to the tactics of the libertarian right, they are also irreproachably reliable in recognizing a good argument, including a good refutation of a meretricious argument, biasing them all the way back to the tactics of a left that’s doing its damn job.

2. Not so damn obviously wrong, but probably wrong, and accepted as a given, is the theory that anything proffered as leftist thought should only ever be critiqued for propagating failures of solidarity or failures of intersectionality, and every other way in which a text or theory or programme might be normatively or methodologically or empirically messed up, on one’s best judgement, should be passed upon in silence cause these other modes of failure don’t have consequences worth the social price of a critique.

3. Both of these theories are weird artifacts of being a community that operates by putting pressure on institutional policy-making on a case by case basis, but lives off a theoretical folklore evolved for literally revolutionary politics – like, the lead-up to the Russian revolution – wherein the consolidation and mobilization of a vanguard could be separated from, and chronologically prioritized over, the deliberation over policy, and where convincing the ideologically uncommitted of the value of an individual policy is basically worthless cause you’re only ever looking to recruit, not looking to negotiate. This theoretical folklore makes zero sense when what you actually do when you do radical left activism is pick a policy decision you want made or changed and try to get a lot of people to agree with you out loud. 

tombomp:

i hate whoever started calling “making people take responsibility for their actions” “the neoliberal security state manifesting within activism”

Stop consequencing yourself! Stop consequencing yourself!

Man, if people get outraged when someone releases one person’s address and contact info to the public, wait until they learn about the fucking phone book.

secretlyterezi:

tfw no gf (good field) to sow your seeds upon

scavengedluxury:

New Walk Centre. Leicester, October 2014.

owls-n-elderberries:

Drumeag by heticobai on Flickr.

rosemarys-baby-daddy:

Rinko Kikuchi

avialum:

anime trope episodes: the beach episode, the festival episode, the episode where someone doesn’t know how to cook
western cartoon trope episodes: the episode where someone has several copies of themselves made, the episode where inanimate objects come to life, the episode that is a homage to a movie from the 1950s, the episode where someone is shrunk down to microscopic levels and placed inside the body of another person

The Partisan Leader; A Tale of The Future is a political novel by the antebellum Virginia author and jurist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. A two-volume work published in 1836 in New York City and in 1837 in Washington, D.C. under the pen-name “Edward William Sydney,”^[1] the novel is set thirteen years into the future, in 1849, and imagines a world where the American states south of Virginia have seceded from the Union. The story traces the formation of a band of Virginia insurgents who seek to free their state from federal control and adjoin it to the independent Southern Confederacy.

pureamericanism:

MATTOON, Ill., Sept 9. - Groggy as Londoners under protracted aerial blitzing, this town’s bewildered citizens reeled today under the repeated attacks of a mad anesthetist who has sprayed a deadly nerve gas into 13 homes and has knocked out 27 known victims.

Seventy others dashing to the area in response to the alarm, fell under the influence of the gas last night.

All skepticism has vanished and Mattoon grimly concedes it must fight haphazardly against a demented phantom adversary who has been seen only fleetingly and who so far has evaded traps laid by city and state police and posts of townsmen.

tastefullyoffensive:

[stackola]

hallowmeme-url:

kadathinthecoldwaste:

spacetwinks:

i cannot imagine caring about corruption in game reviews

The global video game industry was valued at around $65 billion in 2011, and has likely grown since then. I don’t have figures on exactly how much reviews change sales figures, but it seems prima facie that they would make a non-trivial difference. If that assumption is true, a pattern of consistent corruption in reviews could easily change sales figures by hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a well-known reviewer’s career. Entirely aside from feelings about the video games themselves, that seems significant from a purely economic standpoint? I can easily imagine myself caring about, say, publishing fraud, misappropriation of government funds, or cheating in sports, and I can’t really see what the difference is besides the fact that sports and video games are “low culture” and there’s a certain social cachet involved in trumpeting one’s lack of interest in such.

(None of this is meant to defend the accusations of review-related corruption various segments of the internet have made against Zoe Quinn, which as far as I can tell are wholly trumped up, and would not merit the firestorm of abuse she’s received even if they were true.)

The more obvious comparison is to movie and music reviews, where both the “corruption” that gamer gaters complain about (reviewers making political judgements) and the actual corruption (publishers forming closer relationships with journalists, buttering them up and withdrawing access if they don’t like their attitude) have been present since the start, without this being a scandal per se.

Have you never heard someone decide a film must be crap because the “work of genius five stars” quotes on the poster are from minor (and thus more easily pressured) publications, or because the producers have limited previews to soft critics (Harry Knowles was particularly infamous for this). Have you never heard a critic referred to as “rentaquote”. Wouldn’t you think the world had gone a little crazy if a scandal started over this well existence of these phenomenon? 

The two major ethics-in-entertainment hoohas of the late 1950s, over radio payola and rigged TV quiz shows, were subjects of widely covered Congressional investigations, with honest-to-god laws passed in response.

A better parallel to the whole #GamerGate thing might be film criticism. The 1960s saw a crop of high-profile critics working in a distinctly literary style - Sontag, Kael, Sarris, and their imitators.

On the one hand they elevated the field, introducing auteur theory and promoting the creatively visionary “New Hollywood”, and the best critical pieces of the era were and still are worth reading in their own right.

On the other hand a lot of that New Hollywood stuff they were boosters for was indulgent crap, and under their influence film reviews started following book reviews in treating the work at hand as a jumping-off point for whatever tangential, often political, subject the critic felt like writing an essay about.

The subsequent rise of Siskel and Ebert and their consumer-oriented reviewing (reducible to a simple thumb-based watch/don’t watch binary) can be read as a backlash against these trends. Roll in their format change (from print to TV) and the ability this granted them to augment their reviews with excerpts from the work, and there’s a clear precedent here for a shift to Let’s Plays and YouTube reviews.

That Eva’s been canonized on tumblr is Correct and unsurprising, that Utena’s been canonized is Correct but surprising, that Gunsmith Cats hasn’t is unfortunately Correct and unsurprising, but that Cowboy Bebop mostly just comes up in the context of mocking an enthusiast is some fucked up shit.

And even if it’s hate, it’s weird to see Creed come up semiregularly but Smashing Pumpkins never.

You know something I just picked up on? (about Taylor Swift, obviously)

“Welcome to New York” is a “moving to New York” song, in 2014, that invokes Manhattan at least once (“the Village is aglow”) but Brooklyn never. Now that might speak to her actual experience, but it’s kind of at odds with her populist pose, and she’s usually really good about aligning those two.

(Possible excuses are the “1989” theme or playing to a core audience of high school theater kids with a dated, second- or third-hand sense of what “New York” means, I guess)

Honestly, I think she heard Empire State of Mind and was like “oh, huh, New York anthems, that’s a thing isn’t it, I should do one of those”. Like I’ve mentioned, she is very very good at mimicry and matching affect. I complained that Shake it Off was really a Max Martin song, but hell, maybe she just wanted to prove that she could do a Max Martin song. I mean, Out of the Woods (put together with Jack Antonoff) is a fun. song, The Lucky One, off of Red, was a Jenny Lewis song and I hear one of the other 1989 tracks is basically a Lana Del Rey song.

I mean hell, her earlier, more country albums, where she wrote songs about dating a guy your dad didn’t approve of, or watching your daughter grow up, or being 32 and feeling shame about your slutty younger days, those are not experiences she ever actually had. She reverse engineered them from existing country songs and red state culture and repackaged them better than the originals. (Plus, you notice her accent on those albums? She grew up in Pennsylvania, in the county catercorner to mine, and we do not talk like that.)

Like, I love and respect the hell out of the girl, but at the same time I’m a little afraid of her, for real. She’s a supergenius shapeshifter who’s made it her life’s mission to absorb the entirety of American culture and reflect a perfectly polished version of it back at the country. And she’s really good at it!

Something to consider is the treatment of God in her work, only glancing references in the earlier albums - “the man with the reasons why”/“the man who put you here” on Come In With The Rain, “And when I got home, before I said amen/Asking God if He could play it again” from Our Song, just enough to signal not so much Christianity as Christian…ness, as a component of Real Murcanism (hell, she wrote a song called “Sweet Tea and God’s Graces”, unreleased and suppressed on YouTube, which is probably Correct).

The only explicit reference to Jesus in her released original material is in Christmas Must Be Something More, off her Christmas LP, which manages to be a War On Christmas song without any villains. And if, in 2007, you were buying Christmas music, you were enough of a Taylor Swift fan after just the first album to want Taylor Swift Christmas music, and you did your music shopping at Target, you were probably cool with that.

And now in homonationalist 2014 there’s songs with equally glancing references to gayness, and it just… happens to be possible to squint at her style and personal relationships (which have always been a conscious part of her performance) hard enough to read lesbian subtext, if you’re the kind of person who would want to.

When I say she’s gunning to become the Queen of America I mean it.

In 1903, a newspaper editor, Addison Bennett, renamed the community Irrigon, a portmanteau assembled from Irrigation and Oregon. Bennett, who saw irrigation as important to business in the city, published its first newspaper, the Oregon Irrigator, later renamed the Irrigon Irrigator.

slatestarscratchpad:

multiheaded1793:

Right now, in fact.

I didn’t realize this was a problem for other people.

“Okay no does this sleepaway camp run a month or all summer, because if it’s a month she’d just be trying to have fun but all summer she’d want a relationship and pine after a crush for two weeks and then hook up with an opportunist for one and *then* she’d have the right combination of self-doubting vulnerability and desire to compensate by ‘owning her sexuality'…”