slartibartfastibast:

kontextmaschine:

No. Immortality has been “just a few improvements on the current state of the art” away for approximately ever.

Don’t tell the most recent immortality cult about this. It would break their clichéd little hearts.

Yeah the funny thing is how the “state of the art” consistently refers to whatever field’s particularly prominent and cutting-edge at the time.

It’s been alchemy in medieval Europe and ancient China, electricity in Revolutionary France, extremely low-temperature liquid circulation in the rocket age, data storage in the computer age, now it’s biotech because of course it is.

In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography.

I mean most flattering interpretation, whenever people figure something new out, some of them go “well, can we use this to defeat death?”, which no but noble thought and you might discover something useful on the way, while some other people go “well, can we use this to scam some money from rubes?”, which ignoble thought but can end up funding the first guys.

Come on, that’s way too broad, come back when you pose it in the form of a question.

nostalgebraist:

veronicastraszh:

nostalgebraist:

[…snip, snip, snip…]

I mean.  On the one hand I agree Freddie deBoer has all of these problems.  On the other hand I get this special sort of frustration when people point out these problems, in this kind of blog post, in this writing style, using these sorts of rhetorical techniques, etc. etc. – because it seems to exemplify the thing that I think deBoer is rightfully criticizing?

i think a lot of what deBoer is saying is basically:

The average piece of cultural criticism on the internet is very bad, and otherwise smart people are strangely tolerant of this state of affairs, and the reason probably has something to do with a stock of cached responses that prevent them from realizing some article is bad.  (That “Books All White Men Own” article basically has no good qualities, but by framing it as “all white men” it set up this situation where a bunch of people wanted to circlejerk about how they were sufficiently sophisticated not to make the “not all men!” response.)

And that seems both eminently true and important to me.  When I read deBoer’s posts about this stuff I had this very relieving “my god, exactly” response – this was a problem I’d felt on some level, with all of this progressive clickbait and mediocre blogging I’d seen circled around endlessly on social media, and I’d just assumed no one else saw this problem and so it was probably a non-problem (i.e. a problem with me) but here is a person saying it, in a way that rings very true to me.

And I’d be perfectly open to attacks on deBoer’s position that engage with the actual position – attacks that explain why this kind of material is not as bad as he says, or why it’s bad but that doesn’t matter, or whatever.

But focusing on how deBoer as a person is obnoxious, or humorless, or pretentious, or self-parodically bombastic (I mean, my god, look at this) – all of which is true – is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to shout “for once, do I get to not care?!”  deBoer is saying: everyone has been celebrating bad, uninsightful writing because it pats them on the back about how they don’t have certain character flaws.  (Ha ha, I own lots of these books and am laughing at myself for it!  I’m one of the self-aware white men!)  And it’d be nice for once to focus on the quality of the content, to say, yeah, this writer is kind of messed-up as a person, maybe, they’re a little bombastic and grating, sure, but do they have insights?

So, to get to the point: the Belle Waring post does not have insights.  it does not say that deBoer is wrong.  What is says is that he is annoying, possibly sexist, that he has character flaws, that he “lectures,” that his “pose” is grating.  And what deBoer is saying, which I think is an insight, is that the progressive blogosphere / clickbait-osphere has been churning out precisely these kinds of critiques well beyond the point of diminishing returns.  Versions of points like “Freddie deBoer has character flaws, owned, Q.E.D. motherfucker” are the sort of thing I feel like I’ve seen 10^9 times in my life and would like to go, I dunno, a week without seeing?  Can I please not care for once?

So, like, if you come in agreeing with deBoer, then Waring’s post is just going to make you say “look, see, this is the kind of shit he’s talking about!“  If you come in disagreeing with deBoer, then, well, I guess Waring’s post probably comes off as like a pretty good series of dunks aimed at an obnoxious prick.  But either way, no one’s mind changes, so … 

(I realize this is not maximally clear, temperate, or sensible.  Sorry.  I’m more worked up about this than I am in possession of clear thoughts about it)

Yeah, I can’t take his critiques so seriously, cuz a lot of this stuff is maybe meant to be a bit shallow. Not everything is high minded all the time, nor do I want someone who expects us to be.

Which, I didn’t really like that one terrible Toast article, but so what?

And on that, from that Kang-DeBoer debate I posted earlier:

DeBoer is arguing with himself. After reading through the list and through the hundreds of comments, I saw scant evidence of the “white male tears” response. What I saw instead, were hundreds of readers who were gleefully trying to add to the joke. It was what The Toast generally has been — a place where the readers can thumb their nose at the establishment, whatever that may be. And while I might agree with deBoer that the joke certainly could have been more subversive and accurate, I also know from years of online content creation that sometimes these sorts of posts are more so that your audience can chum around in the comment section.

And that is what DeBoer doesn’t get.

There are real criticisms to make about how the left has jumped into Twitter rage culture and Internet pile-ons and all of that. So fine. But the left is not alone in that space (she says while #gamergate still lingers on).

Which, this happened. It ain’t just we lefties who cannot handle The Power of Interwebz!

But if a bunch of women get together in a comments section and make jokes about dude-culture –

This is no cultural high point, but it serves a purpose, one that I sense DeBoar is both excluded from and oblivious to – and one wonders if those two facts are causally linked?

Anyway, if you want some better critiques of “outrage culture” and how it hurts the left, I suggest Katherine Cross:

http://quinnae.com/2014/01/03/words-words-words-on-toxicity-and-abuse-in-online-activism/

http://quinnae.com/2014/02/06/the-chapel-perilous-on-the-quiet-narratives-in-the-shadows/

http://feministing.com/2015/04/23/words-for-cutting-why-we-need-to-stop-abusing-the-tone-argument/

In my view, she nails it.

Thanks for the links.

The part of deBoer’s critique that resonates with me isn’t so much the stuff about internet pile-ons per se, it’s about a lack of analysis, particularly analysis of big features of society that go beyond inter-left disputes, particularly analysis drawing on facts the reader might not already know (or “know”).

It seems like the kinds of articles that are getting celebrated (or, at least, talked about) are less and less made up of arguments about that sort of thing, and more and more this sort of hall-of-mirrors stuff where there is no argument, just assertion of stuff the reader probably already agrees with (or is willing to immediately agree with), or sort of … posing in psychological space rather than arguing.

What do I mean by “posing in psychological space”?  Well, consider something like this article.  It’s an all-right article as far as it goes, I guess.  It originally included a link to a tweet which started a long internet argument called “Jacobinghazi.”  Jacobinghazi itself was an argument about the conduct of certain leftist twitter users, started by an offhand remark in an article criticizing a tweet by Aaron Bady in which he referred to Thomas Piketty, among others, as “broconomists.”  In the article itself Amber A'Lee Frost criticizes this sort of use of the “bro” trope.  And, okay, let’s take a step back … 

None of the this has to do with anything concrete.  I mean, you can feel however you wish about how leftists use the word “bro,” but that dispute doesn’t connect in any way to the sorts of things that started all this.  The “bro issue” has nothing to do with the economic issues that Piketty’s book were about.

So what I’m saying is: increasingly, it seems like the things that get passed around, talked about, celebrated, written, flame warred over, etc. are these things that are sufficiently removed from the original political issue that they have no implications whatsoever for that issue.  It may or may not matter for Piketty’s analysis of inequality that is he is or is not a “broconomist” (whatever that is), but it certainly doesn’t matter for Piketty’s analysis of inequality whether it is correct leftist practice or not to criticize people in bro-themed terms; by that point we’ve gone meta enough that the original topic (inequality) is completely unconnected to what we’re talking about.

I want more Piketty, or more “why Piketty is wrong,” and less “should we approve of referring to Piketty as a ‘bro’?”  (Note: this point is about distance, not gender.  If someone were to make an actual feminist critique of Piketty that would fall safely under my “why Piketty is wrong” category.  Instead, what we saw was a single, unexplained tweet about “broconomists” followed by wankery at higher meta-levels.)

It’s not always about this kind of distance; sometimes it’s just a lack of argument, full stop.  Progressive clickbait is full of this.  Everyday Feminism has a worldview, but it won’t explain to you why you should buy that worldview.  It’s hawking a specific, increasingly (!) odd version of feminism (cf.), but it won’t make a case for this, or even admit that it is taking a specific position that not all feminists would agree with.  It just lectures you.

To get around to the point: I think aiming at The Toast was about the worst possible choice deBoer could have made, because yeah, it’s a comedy website, and saying it’s just an excuse for wanky banter invites the response “what did you expect”?  But Jacobin is serious; Everyday Feminism is serious (I think?); and these kinds of things get shared and flame warred over endlessly.  There’s a relevance vacuum and an argument vacuum here.

The problem for me here isn’t tone or anger, it’s the lack of a full connection between the reader, the writer, and the real world.  One gets lectured at with no arguments, or argued at about inside baseball meta-issues that only ~100 people have ever heard of, or whatever.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the guy since before clickbait was even a thing, back when Salon was only as far gone as Slate is now and Slate was still actually trying.

First encountered him through… Dreher? Poulos? Then completely unrelated saw him crossing swords with Sady Doyle back when she was still ENDING SENTENCES IN ALL CAPS.

So if he thought the same writers were worth paying attention to that I did, I thought maybe he was worth keeping an eye on. And his point has been the same, and correct, all this time, that from the irony era to the snark era, no one is actually being earnest about things and it’s a problem.

But, and this is why his style is relevant, the guy’s writing *is the worst goddamn argument* for earnestness I can imagine, implicitly setting up an opposition between taking things seriously and having any sense of playfulness whatsoever. For a guy who studies rhetoric… I’m not saying he has to start imitating *me*, but a little fucking deadpan here and there wouldn’t kill you.

Honestly I think his recent, more hitpiecy stuff is a little better in this regard, maybe venom becomes him. But then you see that post slagging Grantland, all “look at these would-be writers, narcissistically trying to *coin a memorable phrase*” and it’s like dude, COME ON.

Summarized, I guess my complaint about Freddie deBoer is

“He values substance in writing, and believes that too much writing today substitutes style in its place, and that’s true and important. But while he *says* he values style, and thinks it has a place, you sure wouldn’t guess it from reading him.”

(You could say he substitutes substance ABOUT style in its place.)

kontextmaschine:

Dashiell Hammett was one of the only pulp detective authors to have actually worked as a detective, with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, back when it was basically a countrywide mercenary police organization. The Pinkertons were actually closer to modern police than their official contemporaries in the machine politics era, who tended to fall somewhere between patronage-hire watchmen and the mayor (or sheriff)’s sanctioned gang. The establishment of the FBI was in many ways a nationalization of the Pinkertons, with key figures brought on as advisors, replicating the network of local bureaus with focuses on both investigation and the infiltration and undermining of labor radicalism. Big city police forces then remodeled themselves after the FBI - famously the LAPD under William Parker (the NYPD had professionalized already under Teddy Roosevelt, and Chicago managed to preserve its machine structure).

This process continued into the early 1970s, as the RFK/FBI-led attempt to shatter the Mafia shook out. This was part of the mid-20th century American centralization of power. If you’re ever tempted to look with contempt upon modern African states, or pre-Mao China, or pre-unification Germany, keep in mind that America was largely structured as a loose coalition of local bandit-warlords until the 1960s. At the national level, civil rights laws and the attempt to merge the two (black/white) American nations were as much a cynical front for advancing this centralization as they were an honest idealism. And not without cost - organized crime, and the permeable borders between that and urban politics, were one of the major mechanisms by which immigrant groups were integrated to and advanced within the American system, a way to translate sheer numbers and cultural affinity into structural power. American blacks largely fit the immigrant pattern, if you date “arrival” to the Great Migration, but then stall out in the ‘70s-‘80s, and a lot of that has to do with RICO laws, post-60s reformist idealism, and the nationally-sponsored “war on crime” blocking this path. In an earlier world, black local politicians and street gangs would form alliances, eventually using patronage to co-opt and take over police forces, and extract rents that would be partially redistributed down the machine ladder. As is, you still have corruption, but it accrues to politicians, pastors and other organizers, and white property developers, without trickling down to street level.

You can quote me on that - the sorry state of American blacks is because criminal gangs are too weak and police aren’t corrupt and brutally extralegal enough.

What was I saying? Dashiell Hammett. Lived in San Francisco and set his fiction there. Was an actual private investigator, and accordingly has a strong focus on tradecraft, especially with the nameless “Continental Op”, employee of a fictionalized Pinkerton, protagonist of some of his books and most of his stories. Though the climaxes could get colorful, the Op’s assignments - quietly track down a runaway heiress, locate a fled embezzler - and methods - use 3-man teams to tail people on the street, question and dig up background on the target’s acquaintances, sit around and eavesdrop on conversations - were true to actual practice. (Hammett said the major difference is that what his characters accomplished in a week would in reality take several months, while they worked multiple cases in between).

While the Op was proudly professional (a recurring theme being his contempt for hotel staff “detectives”) but otherwise opaque, Hammett pioneered detective characterization with other characters. Where the Op was based on actual detectives he worked with, Sam Spade (protagonist of The Maltese Falcon) was based on those detectives’ romantic self-image, and his stoic facade, cynical chivalry, and romantic entanglements were a *huge* influence on later writers. Nick and Nora Charles, based on Hammet and his beloved, playwright Lillian Hellman, mixed investigation with screwball banter in a more lighthearted tone, and can be considered the predecessor of Maddie and David (of Moonlighting), Mulder & Scully, and even non-(explicitly-)romantic buddy partnerships like Crockett & Tubbs.

Hammett’s real-life experience exposed him to less picturesque aspects of the private investigator’s role in society as well. He complained that employers doing background checks were interested in issues of moral character that, gambling debts aside, had no correlation to trustworthiness, and he especially disliked working to suppress labor agitation. Starting as a Pinkerton agent, Hammett ended up being blacklisted and imprisoned as an enthusiastic communist activist.


Next is Raymond Chandler, the most literary of the detective greats. Where Hammett had been an actual PI, and reflected it in his writing, Chandler was a cuttingly observant man who retreated into drink because he was way too intelligent and cynical for Los Angeles, and reflected it in his. His Phillip Marlowe inhabited a thinly-to-the-point-of-pointlessly veiled LA, and passes through it with gimlet eye and poison tongue, all backhanded compliments and sideways insults. Hard-boiled fiction’s love of brilliant turns of phrase, of meandering digressions that end with a surprise punch to the gut, largely comes from him.

While at first glance Marlowe might seem to perform the duties of a detective same as the Op, on close examination you realize that none of what transpires has anything to do with his intentions, and that the plot is moved along by coincidences he encounters while out on assignment, with the ultimate plot of a tale usually about as unrelated to the inciting incident as in golden age Simpsons. This is equally true of The Big Lebowski, which is a loving Chandler tribute, and Chandler himself parodies this (and his/Marlowe’s booziness) in one of his later stories in which the plot is advanced by the things his protagonist literally runs into while drunk driving around LA.

Chandler’s novels are usually composed of the plots of 3 or 4 of his short stories banged together, but that’s fine, because the plot was never the thing, the meat being the wonderful language, setting, and characterizations, which were crafted anew. You can still to this day drive around LA and discover most of the places he described, looking exactly as stated. And while I can’t speak to his period accuracy, I was myself once a too intelligent, cynical Angelino writer for a while, to the point I avoided leaving home sober, and I can confirm that the kind of person who inhabits LA, their nature and motivations, are exactly as he laid out back then.

Chandler’s output eventually trailed off. One story, appearing years after any others, reads like absolutely terrible Chandler pastiche. Scholars disagree whether this was the product of an alcoholic wreck of a man who had known better than to try to publish anything for years but needed the money, or his wife pretending to be him because he was an alcoholic wreck of a man incapable of even writing anymore but needed the money.

If you’re only going to read one of these three, read Chandler.


Finally, a bit of a contrast in Mickey Spillane. Spillane’s famous recurring detective character was Mike Hammer. Given the name, you might not be surprised to learn he spent less time in cautiously piecing together mysteries than punching communists in the jaw, in much the same way Captain America spent a lot of time punching Nazis in the jaw. Actually, Spillane had been a writer for Captain America in the ‘40s. Actually, the character was originally written as a comic book protagonist named “Mike Danger”. Beyond communism, Hammer often found himself arrayed against such other corrupt and corrupting trappings of the decadent elite as drugs, psychotherapy, and trial by jury.

Spillane’s writing was, I’ll say, not up to the level of Hammett or Chandler, though he has been favorably cited by prominent writers like Ayn Rand and Frank Miller. If you look at pulp of the time though, he’s appreciably above average. Pulp… basically the closest parallel we have to pulp today is fanfiction, in terms of its average quality, low cost of production and consumption, sheer volume, and the rate at which it produces critical and commercial successes. And dear god, the smuttiness. Mike Hammer banged a lot of the broads he ran into. Before barefacedly honest pornography became as ubiquitous as it is, pulp filled the role of mainstream erotic product, with much detective pulp serving the same “drugstore-available erotica” role for men that romance pulp did for women. (Appreciating this makes the “Seduction of the Innocent” comic book scare about drugstore-available pulp for kids a bit more comprehensible).

This crossed over into other formats like cinema - Deep Throat, Beyond the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones were all received as at least in the same ballpark as mainstream releases, and up into the ’80s, pornographic movies had plots and runtimes that roughly approximated Hollywood product, and even in the ‘90s, softcore product at least had narrative framing devices. Between gonzo and DVD nonlinearity and the internet and the collapse of obscenity prosecution against which to offer artistic content as defense that’s faded, though as the Valley studio system’s share of the industry shrinks you’re seeing them play to their strengths in production values and plot (particularly with parody content, Tijuana Bible/H-Doujinshi-style).

On the other hand you had whole parapornographic mainstream subgenres as the erotic thriller, the rape-revenge drama, the teen sex comedy - American Pie was released in 1999, which was really pushing the limit at which it was worth it to watch 90 minutes of material for the chance to briefly see a bare-chested girl masturbating. (It’s still worth it to hear Alyson Hannigan talking dirty, though.)

The one thing that pulp still has a hold on is violence. (In addition to the jaw, there are many loving passages of Hammer battering guys in the crotch.) While splatter-horror may be a flourishing niche genre, with regular DVD releases, it’s still that, a niche genre, and not the mega-industry of pornography. Video games yes, but detective pulp and “true crime” genres have mostly just migrated to another medium and become hourlong police procedurals like CSI or Law & Order, offering the same thrills of vicarious brutality masked by the fig leaf of nominal identification with the forces of law and order. (Though cable antihero dramas and serial killer procedurals like Dexter and Hannibal seem to be moving a half- to full step beyond that.)

Mickey Spillane. Ah, fuck it, I don’t have anything else to say about Mickey Spillane.

This one’s a classic. Reblogging for the newer readers.

Stuart Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class - never actually read it but I probably picked most of it up (and a lot of these books, and a lot of everything I say) from his classes.

Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm and Nixonland - treatments of two Republican presidential candidates, one successful and one not (which one depending on your notion of “success”) that end up being used as a prism on the politics and culture of their times. Relies a bit much on period newspaper articles without making much effort to revise the “first draft of history”, but at least it’s not Foucault-level “this anecdote, and then this one from another country centuries later, therefore the true nature of power and sex” stuff. Can’t recommend The Invisible Bridge, I think Reagan’s still too close for him to get in perspective.

William Cronon, Changes in the Land - an enthralling history of Colonial America through the framework of ecology and land use.

Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat - shifts in courtship in 20th Century America, ends up touching on shifts in everything in 20th Century America

Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier and Sam Warner, Streetcar Suburbs - together a comprehensive treatment of the development of American suburbs since the 19th century (including a lot of stuff that would be recognized as “city” today).

Robert Caro, The Power Broker - a biography about a master of governance and city politics that touches on everything related to politics, cities, and governance. A goddamn brick, and when Caro traces everything back to Moses’ overbearing mother you realize they weren’t lying about midcentury pop-Freudianism, you can skip those parts.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class - another brick, and a lot of it framed as an argument against works it’s long since displaced, but so good it’s influenced damn near everything to come after it.

What’s that “that”? Music? Politics? Rebellion as marketed product? When you’re trying to get specific maybe switch your pronouns for nouns. Noun phrases, even.

I’ve talked some about The Nation here that might touch on some of that. If your subject is just “the ‘90s, eh?” just wait around or check my archives (Do! There’s good stuff in there!) and you’ll see some stuff eventually.

(Oh and for the checking archives, consider siikr, The Tumblr Search That Actually Works. Made by Eron Gjoni, in case you were deciding who between him and the maker of maybe the fourth best twine by a depressivepunk social media star you wanted to feel welcome in tech.)

spacetwinks:

one of my fave things when i’m out like grocery shopping is noticing the difference between big corporations doing (fairly convincing!) “down home, old fashioned, just plain simple” packaging and marketing and making everything have a ‘feel’ of being real down to earth… and the stuff that’s actually made by like one family out in the middle of nowhere, which looks like a fucking goddamn mess, because they sure as hell aren’t going to pay for a graphic design expert

sibyl-of-space:

lardypoison:

do you think in the 1700s there were people who were like nah man Mozart’s a total sellout I only listen to peasants beating things with sticks it’s way more authentic

I know this is a joke post but as a music major I can actually answer this with a resounding YES THIS HAS LITERALLY ALWAYS BEEN THE CASE

When the violin was invented people were pissing on its tone for being too loud and it lacking the ‘authenticity’ of the viola da gamba. People (especially French people) reacted to new Italian technologies like the freaking violin like Vivaldi was part of a heavy metal band– which would have been awesome, by the way.

Also, in the romantic period, literally every single symphony ever had a “pastoral” section where the strings are supposed to sound like bagpipes to imitate the pure, rural peasant life and reject the upper class for being too materialistic.

The long and short of it is music listeners have always been assholes and humanity is exactly the same way it was in the 1600s. Hell, when the REALLLY early French composers first heard the interval of a third (brought over from England) they were like “WHAT IS THIS DEVILRY, THE ONLY PURE INTERVALS ARE THE FOURTH AND FIFTH.” That’s right. The interval “do”-“mi” was too new age shit for them to handle.

Music history is amazing

vjeranski:

Matt Wisniewski

screenshotsofdespair:

via nauticalkoala

jacobvanloon:

Jacob van Loon
de Tonti
Watercolor and graphite on wood
35x35″

Stuart Murdoch has actually been doing a *great* job of being Morrissey, I hope he gets a promotion

woo, Inventors’ Day (Hungary), show us your tits!

Been playing the new Witcher.

Mechanically, it hits the sweet spot between Dark Souls and Dragon Age.

Thematically, it is Polish as hell, holy shit. Most of our RPGs derive their worldbuilding from a British tradition, we actually get a bit of German by way of Japan (lancers, dragoons, 2h knights, one-city realms and threatening emperors and conniving chancellors), Dragon Age was bidding for novelty by doing French.

But this is definitely Eastern European. It’s not just the questlines and bestiary out of Grimm’s and Slavic legend. Part of it is the peasant’s-eye view. There may be great wars and cosmic forces at play but to a significant extent they just account for why a questgiver is in a particular location.

The more common viewpoint expressed is of a peasant - not even in a castle keep! in scattered villages and hamlets! varying from squalor to bucolic! according to their economic position! as you can tell from the actual productive activity the environment and animation design dramatizes! - who just desires that as few of his fellows suffer and die as possible.

Witcher got some knocks for having such a monoethnic world, especially by comparison to DA, because of course it did. But I think both routes *work*, creatively - DA only showed you a thimbleful of villages and two blocks of a capital city and called it a great civilization, venue for ageless deeds, and the range of accents and skin tones and styles helped sell that.

In contrast, just the *sameness* of Witcher, these dirty poor farmers and THESE dirty poor farmers, you can have a much bigger world but it still leaves the machinations of kings coming off as detached and pompous, and the dirt where you work as the *real* world.

And you want to talk races, human/nonhuman racism is the in thematic in “gritty” fantasy these days, but a lot of games play that as a supercharged version of the refugee/immigrant experience - you live in the REALLY bad quarter of town, and people stand around in public having conversations about how TERRIBLE you are, or walk through your streets for the SOLE purpose of calling you names.

Because I suppose even the most branched multi-release choice-consequence tree has a hard time making a dramatic antagonist out of a guy being polite and charming in working with you and then going home and spending three decades NOT spending energy on your behalf to upset a settled order that has already been mythologized as proper and on which he and worthy institutions he values materially depend.

But the Witcher, yeah, this clearly comes from a culture that KNOWS a thing or two about how ethnic conflict in a feudal society works. There’s a bit in the playroom zone with a dwarven blacksmith that does it great. People will know you’re different, but they’ll accept you as part of the community. But know you’re different.

And when things get stressful they might link you to the stresses. And want to take it out on you. And convince other people they gain from your loss.

But wait, there WILL be people that value you. Authorities that will protect you, put your contribution to the community above petty bigotry.

But authority - whether established or upstart-aspirant - has enemies, and if those enemies either win, or the authority ever needs to buy their favor cheap…

Other than that, I like the pulpiness of it all - it clearly comes from the kind of book that could be described as “rollicking”. A ridiculously OP protagonist - magical Han Solo Batman, basically - threading a plot advanced by femme fatale teases, with eventual consummation… James Bond was pulp.

Pulp - stories that just exist as off-the-shelf daydreams, no higher pretensions - I dig pulp.

The weirdest thing wasn’t the guy on Alberta with the EX-GAY smock and SIN = DEATH sign, it was wondering “hey, wasn’t that the guy on 92nd with the neon shorts and ‘I’M GAY’ sandwich board a few months back?”

If it is, he’s either a compulsive over-sharer with a big recent change in his life, or a humiliation fetishist whose mistress gives him assignments covering all the bases.

an-animal-imagined-by-poe:

I decided to look at some PUA blogs recently, out of morbid curiosity, and theunitofcaring was not kidding when she said that that’s where the useful advice for socially awkward men is. Yes, it’s steeped in misogyny, and yes, a lot of what’s presented as advanced…

Yeah, like I’ve said, if you want to give PUA sites shit for something, give them shit for being Cosmo for Men.

(“Confident seductress career girl” Cosmo is really for insecure high school and college students, just like “cool high schooler” Seventeen is for twelve-year olds trying to wash the dork off. For the same reason bridal and interior decoration magazines are for people planning a wedding or remodel, not people who enjoy them. They’re instruction manuals, not enthusiast journals. Which is why they repackage the same material constantly. And why a guy whose identity is wrapped up in being a “veteran” PUA is still creepy, just like a high school Jezebel commenter who’s pushing 30 and only graduated to *making* the gifsets about how Beyoncé Means Nothing Is Ever Your Fault)

It was kind of like when MLP:FiM came out and the first bronies were like “man, I wish I got *these* friendship messages as a kid”, and got shit for that like ha how socially incompetent do you have to be to be impressed by these basics? Well they’d (“we’d”, I’d) figured that by *now* (this was after the first season, later bronies I’ll not be so charitable). But growing up as an only child in a neighborhood with no kids my age, a school with few kids intelligent enough for me to level with or want to do group activities with, parents who were young enough to *have* friends but too old to *make* many, at least in any part of their lives I saw…

well, so I got a lot of my ideas about How To Social from the Official Channels that were actively making a show of Instructing How To Social, and was too naive to see the official line of “Be Yourself, anyone who tries to get you to do things you don’t want to do is Not Your Friend” was *terrible* advice.

(Though maybe in the Just Say No era it made more sense as “bourgie child! give in not to the fleshy temptations of your superficial peers the non-college-bound, lest ye be dragged back into the working class your yuppie parents have defined their lives on forgetting they ever were!”)

And I think I would have been a lot better served by the pony message of “okay, try putting up with it occasionally for your friend’s sake if it’s not too ridiculous, and don’t bitch and moan, but don’t feign enthusiasm lest they think you really like it and try to make it an everyday thing, also maintain other friends you can spend time with when your one friend gets too far gone, and harmlessly complain about her, and accept that if she likes that activity she’ll find friends who *do* like it *through* it, and can do it with them, and if she really liked you before this she still will without it, but if she spends all her time with these new friends you might drift apart so if you really value her as a friend maybe consider going along more than you’d like to for the sake of servicing the relationship”.

and I think how that got through so well was that the world of these neon pastel girlponies was so aesthetically distinct that not only was there no way to confuse it with grimdark “realism” and judge it for adherence to the Trenchcoat M. Gruffstubble ideal self (the M stands for McKatana, it’s a family name), but it was so far out of that universe it couldn’t even be mistaken as an *antonym* to that and read as a volley from the types of people who mock that ideal, and could be judged on its own merits.

Profits are a particularly critical indicator of the state of a capitalist economy because they are generally understood to drive investment. Investment in turn has a determining effect on jobs, wages (to the extent that an increase in jobs increases workers’ bargaining power), and a growing tax base that can support social programs.

Why hoard money? Because the ‘80s. They’re building walls against takeover. In a flat market you not only need to scrape the barrel looking for profit opportunities you have to take care to not be cannibalized as an opportunity yourself.

That was the lesson of the ‘80s, that a privately held company might do better playing long ball than one chasing risky peaks, but publicly traded, it’d just get bought out by the whippersnappers with bubble money from a peak. Junk bonds, takeover sharks, “murders and executions”, etc.

Now traditionally the way to stop that was regulation, antitrust, etc, keep any entity from being too big itself. But the problem there was Japan. Japan was not only recovered from WWII and emerging as an export power, it was buying up big properties and assets in the U.S. and Europe. That’s the subtext behind Die Hard being set in “Nakatomi Plaza”. That’s the subtext behind a LOT of '80s-'90s pop culture: Japan Is Coming To Eat Us.

And part of that was they were in a ridiculous bubble themselves, and their economy was built around keiretsu, which… imagine a world with serious antitrust enforcement, then imagine the opposite. Like, active government trust enforcement.

And the regulated old money Postwar Consensus slow-n-steady US was vulnerable to that.

Now the countermove woulda been protectionism. People project all modern conservatism back onto Reagan but he was in big protectionist trade wars with Japan.

But the thing was that we were competing for the loyalty of the “developing world”. With the Soviets, with China, with South American “third way” socialism.

(Which potential depended on seizing and redistributing US capital’s assets, which is why we kept up the Cuba embargo so long, to make the point that even if cooling-off, acceptance and trade might be the best outcome of a non-iterated game, We Will Not Allow This To Be A Viable Option)

And our offer was “hey, do the democratic-capitalist industrialization thing and you can join us in Coca-Cola and Disney Present: Bluejeans World, it’ll be *great*.” But keiretsu-dominated Japan in the '80s was really the first non-Western country to pull it off, with chaebol-dominated Korea and similar Asian tigers waiting in the wings, and to slap them down too hard for uppity presumption would’ve been… awkward.

There’s a lot of stuff that made sense because Cold War and stuck around on inertia. And there were attempts to challenge that in the '90s!

Iraq War I was Saddam being all “Cold War’s over, now we can stop holding off WWIII with this outdated Yalta Conference balance of power and make borders make sense the old-fashioned way, with the strong eating the weak!”

(and Bush the Elder retorting “NATO Is Its Own Purpose”)

Ross Perot was “the Cold War is over, we can stop pretending to believe in free trade”. Pat Buchanan’s “culture war” intervention into the 1992 election was “the Cold War is over, we can stop pretending to believe in free trade AND multiculturalism”.

Now some of that’s finally crumbling. Cuba finally got regular, with TPP free trade’s lost its sheen, Bush the Younger - history is going to reevaluate that guy WAY upwards, and part will be the Bush Doctrine, finally biting the bullet and giving up on organizing the Islamic world around a plan for keeping British allies in ex-Ottoman lands.

Multiculturalism, eh.

Sooooo. Protectionism was out. So the defenses that evolved were, on the national level, allowing the consolidation of industry and finance into “national champions”, and trying to keep a low-level bubble going at all times. Greenspanism.

(Also keeping substantial portions of the economy shielded as “national defense”. If you look askance at China or Turkey’s military for being so involved in their national economies, consider

1. How much of the U.S. economy, particularly manufacturing and design, is arms exports or internal military spending

2. The margins on some of these contracts

3. The security clearances on some of these contracts

4. The wait time on non-military applications for clearance screening, especially in relation to the bidding, staffing, and subcontracting cycles on these contracts.

BONUS 5. The way American tribute from vassal states is funneled through these industries as exports and particularly continuing services and parts contracts.

[which are also a planned obsolescence killswitch when allies go rogue - why the Taliban still had their RPGs but not our Stingers]

THAT’S why Australia is spending so many billions on our jets now, why it was important that the UK buy Trident from us, because that’s how vassal/lord relations work - they kick in coin and a share of fighting men, we pledge protection.)

Where was I? On the firm level. On the firm level the big defense against takeover was to take on debt. Ideally, take on debt for stock buybacks that raise your valuation out of shark range, but importantly debt just dangerous enough that a steady workaday company could manage but these mayflies would face too much downside risk in a downswing.

So that kinda worked, I guess. The big thing now is that the financial regulations after the '07 crash actually worked, but their big moving part is “having promoted national champions, we will now make the holding of large amounts of risky debt by sizeable corporations as bothersome and expensive - in money and several colors of influence - as possible”.

Meanwhile junk bond raiders have grown up into private equity and hedge funds, and every one’s competing with sovereign wealth funds. Which at that point you are not only trying to outbid a guy who buys thousands of slaves to construct a palace for his harem, you are trying to outbid *all* those guys, while they are your government’s closest allies in their single biggest region of interest.