kontextmaschine:

People loved their work once, and it didn’t matter if they worked in the public sector or in the private one. The men who worked in the CCC would take their grandchildren to see the forests they planted, while the men from the auto plants would point out the cars they’d built as they passed them on the new interstate highway system. The women who fastened the engines on the wings would watch the B-17’s fly off to make a liar out of Goering, and the women who taught in the public schools would point with pride when one of their old students got elected mayor. Work was about making money, certainly. It was about feeding the family and keeping the roof where it was, and maybe having a little left over at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, for some amusement. Maybe a trip to Lincoln Park or White City or a hundred other places, where you could take a moment and enjoy the cool of the evening, music riding the nightwind from a dance pavilion down along the lake.

But it was also about Doing A Job, and doing it well, which was different than simply Having A Job. It was about making good cars and strong steel and sturdy furniture. It was about learning a craft, even if what you were doing wasn’t recognized as one. There was a craft in tightening rivets, or feeding the open-hearth furnace, or planing the wood just so. You had your craft, and the person next to you had theirs, and, when all the work was done, and all the craft was practiced, and practiced well, there was something you could look at with pride and say, that is something I have given to the world. Job well done, as they used to say. You could teach seventh grade civics and then, one day, you’re on a podium outside of City Hall. That kid right there, you could say. That kid is something I have helped give to the world. Job well done, as they used to say.

Unions were greatly responsible for the pride that people took in the work they did, especially in the middle of the last century, when unions helped build the most formidable middle class in human history.

There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who wrote a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, which was the alt-weekly Michael Moore first made his name by running. A lot of his columns got collected and repackaged in an excellent book, Rivethead that I read in college.

I read it in a class by Stuart Blumin, who was my favorite professor and de facto advisor. He was an American historian, focused on labor and class and the development of capitalism, you could tell he was heavily influenced by EP Thompson and the Communist Party Historians Group over in the UK.

He was quite open that he had expected Communism to ultimately triumph, and that he had been wrong about that, and in subtext that he had wanted it to ultimately triumph, and didn’t think he had been wrong about that.

Anyway, Rivethead. The story is that Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism, where everyone’s dad worked for GM.

And he could have gone to college but he gets some girl pregnant and so he goes to work on the assembly line not even really out of obligation or Catholic guilt or whatever but because that seems as good a life course as any, it’s what every man he’s known does, under the mighty UAW the pay’s on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway, why not.

And so he goes to work on the line and eventually he ends up writing a column about it, and he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, the absurd fursuited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” that GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours, being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, training into a rhythm so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock, the dignity and solidarity of the American worker.

And time goes on and eventually his marriage fails but he takes it in stride, and his column gets recognized and he takes pride in that and then eventually he has an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. And the inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice this and he realizes the guy hadn’t been a Zen master, he’d just been checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day.

And he realizes that the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and that it’s doing the same to all his co-workers, and looks back and realizes it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew, his father and uncles that growing up he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude really had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them long before, and whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them.

When Marx talked about “alienation”, well.

And he went crazy, and couldn’t bear to work on the line anymore, and there’s no redemption, that’s where the book ends.

And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were

1) avoiding work
and
2) drinking

Back in the premechanized age of small-group workshop manufacturing, workers would celebrate “Saint Monday”, which was to say just not showing up for work, hung over after the weekend.

(This was riffing off of Catholic feast days, or holy days, from which we take the word “holiday”, and as time went on counted an increasing share of the days of the year. There was a reason that poor workers were aligned with the Church, and nobility, in “Altar and Throne” coalitions resisting the development of industrial capitalist liberal democracy.)

In the ‘80s, the crap time of American auto manufacturing, one trick that was passed around (pre-internet, so by word of mouth largely) was to look at the codes stamped on car bodies, which would tell you what day of the week they were manufactured, and to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Because those days had the highest defect rates, because the workers tended to be drunk, or hungover, or absent.

And back in the workshop days, you’d drink at work. Apprentices would be sent out for growlers or buckets of beer, there were elaborate rules of who in the hierarchy of workers was expected to buy rounds for who and when. And there was hellacious resistance to attempts to get them to knock this off, as the industrial era kicked into swing.

Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.

And I mean, this maybe sounds like an argument for socialism. Though not of any actually-existing- variety, as capitalist propaganda will be glad to tell you, Soviet work culture, at least when the morale thrills of the Revolution and Great Patriotic War faded from personal to institutional memory, was all about shirking and vodka.

So those complaints about how America celebrates Labor Day instead of May Day, ignoring the true meaning of labor - solidarity - in favor of mindless distraction? Psssh. Labor Day is a celebration of the truest, most ancient, most fundamental traditions of labor: not working (especially on Mondays), and getting drunk.

Happy Labor Day!

laserfree:

laserfree:

laserfree:

so anyway i found my moms xfiles fanfiction from the 90′s

CONFIRMED

can’t wait for when this exact thing will happen to current fanfic writers

But you could get a huge mass of people to participate in a reactionary endeavour if you dressed it up in nice, twee, cupcakey imagery, and persuaded everyone that the brutality of your ideology was in fact a form of niceness.

Tom Whyman, Beware of Cupcake Fascism

(click through and maybe consider why a Swedish nativist movement even has an English campaign)

nightpool42:

argumate:

honestly you could probably kidnap half of Tumblr if you sent them an owl carrying a Hogwarts acceptance letter directing them to a sketchy location

reblogged because endorsed

So is Breitbart aiming for like, right-Salon? Because that’s probably a viable niche tbh.

nostalgebraist:

I may have mentioned this before, but did you know that someone wrote a history of the “Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers” fandom in the style of the Silmarillion?  Because someone did.

Some samples:

The Telling of the story of the Rangerphiles must ‘er begin where any telling of a Disney World has its start, that of course being with birth of Lord Disney himself. In the year of Mortal Man that they have numbered Nineteen Hundred and One did Walt make his first appearance upon the Mortal Sphere. For Walt, whom was accounted among the tribes a member of the Clan of Disney, was born in the Windy City, a great metropolis of alabaster and marble.

The Nine did witness this, and sang out in chorus. “Lord Disney,” they cried in harmony, “These small ones now possess powers beyond their size! Is it not possible to make other like them? Other creatures whose power lies in determination beyond their strength? Shall we not have more like them, more like the Lesser Mouse Timothy in whom you showed much pleasure in your creation Dumbo?”

Thus was David the Walker able to see what he had set in motion, but he knew then also that not long could he stay ever in Fanon. He had seen the light flowing out at once from Canon, and beholding the light he was now unable to stay for all time in Fanon, and he retreated from that place before the Second Age had ended. Always after though was he remembered, and the Sacred Blueprints of the Rangerdom know his contribution.

Now at the same time that David the Walker was telling his tale of the Rangers it was that odd birds began to fly over Fanon, and many were there then gathered who looked up and spied them, and they made note of them. For in their beaks were Letters of List, for not so great was the Web of Use in those days that all could make use of it. Many were there who could only be made aware of Fanon from these letters, for they made their progress in the Mortal Lands.

You can read the whole thing in three parts here, here, and here.

raggedjackscarlet:

I remember once reading a critic say that movie heroes can be roughly divided into three eras: The Moral Hero, The Cool Hero, and the Superhero.

The Moral Hero is a person you might one day be, like Yul Brynner’s character at the beginning of the Magnificent Seven– no special abilities, no special history, just a strong sense of justice, and a gun.

The Cool Hero is a person you will probably never be, like Indiana Jones or MacGuyver. You could develop their outlandish skill sets, but its highly highly unlikely.

The Superhero is a person you will NEVER be. self-explanatory. superpowers don’t exist in the real world.

In the olden days of the Moral Hero, the audience was meant to admire the Hero for his remarkable goodness. In the days of the Cool Hero, we’re meant to admire his competence and charisma. But the Superhero….

The Superhero isn’t… virtuous. The Superhero represents an attempt to replicate the feeling of admiration for virtue by stitching together utilitarian good and power fantasies. Hero as ubermensch who conveniently only hurts bad people.

The Superhero’s virtue is weirdly fake, like Sherlock Holmes’ intelligence.

I wont spoil anything, but the sacrifice that James Cagney’s character makes at the end of Angles With Dirty Faces puts Tony Stark flying into the chitauri portal to shame.

EDIT:

I think this issue is part of what motivates the “Remember when Superman was a lovable all-american goofball??” sentiment

lunaticobscurity:

some gifs from an amazing 1990 promo video for the tabletop rpg shadowrun

Saw a meme being all “ha ha, those kids who made fun of us for playing D&D in high school are playing fantasy football now, and it’s the same thing”.

And I don’t think that’s true, I think the distinction is in narrativization. Even a party of minmaxers on the most perfunctory Monty Haul dungeon crawl experience it as a narrative, if only as “you open the door to the next room, there’s a chest, guarded by a monster, you kill it and loot the chest, repeat”.

Some schmuck might have won the game of the week because Tom Brady’s passing and A.J. Green’s receiving stats put them over even in the face of their opponent getting a lot of points on sacks, but I’ve never seen (admittedly I haven’t looked too hard) that schmuck posting an after-action report where he tells the story of the critical plays where Brady, under pressure in the pocket, was able to connect with Green near the goal-line.

And it’s not like it would be impossible to narrativize things like that - I just did! Hell, actual, honest-to-god sportswriting narrativizes random noise all the time. So the fact that that’s not a draw, or even an expected feature, to fantasy football players strikes me as a significant distinction.

Back in the ‘90s when I was on AOL, I remember for some reason or another coming across a message board full of Microsoft Flight Simulator fans that liked to play “Airline”.

They’d form up into companies (=teams), download their company’s livery, start the game as a passenger jet at a major airport, taxi to the right runway, take off at the rotation speed and flap settings indicated in real-life manuals for that model of plane at an airport of that altitude and temperature, spend hours flying across the country at cruising speed and altitude along designated flight paths, land properly, taxi to the gate, and upload the playback log to be scored for their company.

And the really serious guys would download mods to turn the 737 model into specifically a 737-700 or something like that, and replicate specific cockpit setups with actual physical peripherals at home, and have sound clips ready to trigger in flight for, say, turning the fasten seatbelts light on and off, or declaring yourself upon passing into a new air traffic control zone.

All of this struck me somehow creepier than other fandoms that played with replicating meatspace in games - the people who’d make famous cities in SimCity2000, or their high schools as Doom .WADs. A decade or more before “gamification” - fitting productive capitalist activity to a recreational ruleset - turned into a big thing, it was the exact opposite - playing games according to a model of capitalist productivity.

This is one of the best and most fairminded treatments of the subject I’ve seen.

Of all the “Juicebox Mafia” first wave of big-name bloggers I thought Matt Yglesias was the best writer but recently I’m almost thinking that was a bit of a handicap because it left him stuck as just a writer.

I think he FINALLY realized that the “sharing the consensus wisdom of 2002 Harvard with 2006 Internet” shtick was played out as that stuff filtered into the general population (under his influence, among others), which was nice but going on to the density stuff seemed bizarre - drilling down on one “wonk” topic and writing a fucking *book* struck me as a career step down from where he was (though maybe understandable given influence from the familymembers who made their name as writers back when books were a thing).

(Also he had a kid and that might have slowed him some - it’s always a shame and a waste when writers start treating their families as more important than their writing and their audience. The correct role model is Rousseau.)

And contrasted to, say, Ezra Klein working his way up the value ladder and building his empire at the Post and then Vox, it was a little underwhelming.

But for all that, looking at this you remember he’s still got it, his voice is the house style of Vox, only he can actually do it well.

Australians: “oh, those crazy fuckers”

Russians: “oh, those crazy fuckers”

Americans: “oh, those crazy fuckers”

pablostanley:

Never Forget #neverforget #911 #newyork

Happy Patriot Day!

My first year at Cornell I wasn’t in Risley but rather in Mews, which had just been constructed the previous summer. I woke up, rolled out of my bed, and woke up my computer. It was a Tuesday or a Thursday, because I had Chemistry.

Waiting for me was an IM from my first girlfriend, who I hadn’t spoken to in years, telling me to turn on the TV. I told her my TV (for vidya) didn’t get reception, she said to find one that does.

There was a TV in the kitchen/lounge, which was where I was going anyway to make breakfast ramen. It was on news, of course. Both towers were burning but still standing. Three or so other students were in the room, I wouldn’t say “enthralled”, but definitely interested.

I had a sturdy metal bowl that I would heat directly on the burner. While the noodles were cooking, the TV replayed shots of the plane strikes.

“Huh. That’s clever,” I thought. “That’s really, really clever.”

I took the bowl off the stove, stirred the flavor packet in, picked it up (using a sock as a heat mitten), and padded back to my room.

“UGH, though. I bet people won’t shut up about this for months.”

It was my mom’s birthday, which at least now I remember every year, and when I tried to call her later it was the only time I’ve ever got an “all circuits are busy” message.

Alberta Street, Portland, OR

waytoomuchportland:

What’s the next step after jumping the shark? An airport carpet ottoman.

Alberta Street, Portland, OR

raggedjackscarlet:

In all seriousness, “Reactionary Fairytales” seems like the next logical permutation of the genre. Reasserting the grain of truth in the original story to an audience that had been raised solely on reversals of the original stories.

SYMPOSIUM: What if Atlantis sank?

ATLAS SHRUGGED [eagerly]: What if Atlantis stayed afloat while the rest of the world sank?

BIOSHOCK [angrily]: Okay but WHAT IF ATLANTIS SANK.