You know, roadblock checkpoints don’t seem to play a big part in many secessionary fictions, given how they seem to play a huge part in most any actual contemporary secession or civil war I’ve heard of.

A vision of “war” that skips over “extracting resources and controlling movement in controlled territories“, or even just thinks of that in terms of its contribution to the winning of battles rather than vice versa…

logistics, logistics, logistics.

officialcrow:

remember when aa showed us all raw asshole to sell us some white tees

Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government – Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself – thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement – and will be content with nothing short of permanent power [struck: and] in his own hands – No compact, that he should make with any [struck: other] passion in his [struck: own] breast except [struck: his] Ambition, could be relied upon by himself – How then should we be able to rely upon any agreement with him? Mr. Jefferson, I suspect will not dare much Mr. Burr will [inserted in margin: dare every thing in the sanguine hope of effecting every thing –]

Alexander Hamilton - When the election of 1800 resulted in a tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton conducted a letter-writing campaign to urge fellow Federalists to vote for Jefferson. his particular letter was sent to Harrison Gray Otis, and is on view now at the NY-Historical Society.

Courtesy of  The Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History

(via michaelblume)

————————————————————————

You can’t bring this up without mentioning how Hamilton’s opinion was 100% vindicated a few years later.

Aaron Burr was charged with treason in 1807 for a bizarre conspiracy to take over the Midwest. The plan was for a small militia he had gathered in Ohio to join forces with Mexican discontents and maybe the British, launch a sneak attack on New Orleans, then use it as the nucleus for a new nation centered around the Mississippi River and parts of Texas and Mexico, then maybe conquer the United States. Keep in mind that he was still the vice president when he started working on this.

Anyway, he got a US army general on board, but the general got cold feet and told Jefferson. Burr was arrested, but the prosecution dropped the ball at his trial and he was acquitted. He fled to England, where he moved in with Jeremy Bentham (!) and they became best friends (!!), then visited Napoleon asking him for military support for some cryptic project (likely invasion of the US); when Napoleon said no Burr returned to the US under a fake identity and went back to practicing law as if nothing had happened.

So “dare every thing in the sanguine hope of effecting every thing“ was pretty much exactly on the mark.

(via slatestarscratchpad)

spacetwinks:

tbh i’m kind of surprised that Monster Energy doesn’t have its own pinball table that’s just an update of this

ghostof:

Zuiiiii by tokyo.natural on Flickr.

nirvanasoul785:

by Angela Moulton

Girl on Tinder describes herself as “really good at dating” and that’s efficient

windandsails:

Statue of Roman emperor Constantine The Great, by sculptor Philip Jackson, outside York Minster church in York, North Yorkshire, England. Constantine had been serving alongside his father Flavius Constantius (Constantius Chlorus), in AD 305, in Roman Britain, in military campaigns against the Picts. When Constantius, who was Caesar of the western provinces of Rome, took ill in 306, he named his son his successor, and after his death the Roman army in Britain, in the town of Eboracum, modern York, proclaimed Constantine Emperor of Rome.

Image Sources: X, X, X, X, X, X, X

mapfail:

The world according to Home Depot.

leviathan-supersystem:

hey, gonna be real here, that symbol is the most evil thing i’ve ever seen in my entire fucking life, and I Am Filled With Dread

Buying a house. Closing on a real fixer - the foundation and structure are solid, but it needs a new roof, electrical system and wiring, plumbing, sewer line, furnace, water heater, and to be honest walls. Nothing that professionals don’t do every day though, and for total cost of ownership I’ll get better value than I would buying fresh, with chances to get everything set to my specific taste.

Anyway that’s got me reminded how curious it is that while most American consumer transactions are conducted on a fixed-price basis, the largest ones - homes and personal vehicles - still involve haggling. There’s bids exchanged and even after you agree on a price there’s chances to change it through extras and inspections and repair negotiations.

But we haggle like that nowhere else in life, in fact it’s considered a little strange and even barbaric to do.

I started being like “even black market drug deals, it’s considered kinda uncouth to haggle”, then I noticed another difference: in that field, bulk pricing - the per-unit price decreases as number purchased grows - is expected as standard. To sell someone half an ounce of marijuana at the price of four eighths would be borderline obnoxious.

But over in white-market equivalents - buying 4 hammers from a family-owned hardware shop, or a 4 popsicles from an ice cream truck, you’d expect the total to come back as 4 times list price, and it would be a bit forward to even ask for a discount.

(Maybe has to do with how the drug economy end-user sales and purchase for resale blend together at the margins)

Then there’s what you see out in the sticks, where a lot of significant purchases are conducted by barter, with trucks and motorsports “toys” as large bills, guns and power tools as small bills, and ammunition as change.

(Remember that while the tax that provoked the Whiskey Rebellion was seen in urban areas as a sin tax, in cash-short rural areas where liquor was a medium of exchange, it was a severe disruption to the economy. Keep that in mind when you hear about proposals to regulate gun transfers between private owners.)

What else.. oh, eBay. Is that still that much of a thing? I remember when it was the biggest thing on the Internet. But it’s got its own norms and procedures.

In conclusion, we’ve got a lot of distinct cultures of commercial transaction in this country, but we code-switch between them pretty smoothly without noticing.

severnayazemlya:

funereal-disease:

dagny-hashtaggart:

funereal-disease:

wanderingwhore:

funereal-disease:

wanderingwhore:

fnord888:

funereal-disease:

A lot of “feminist porn” & associated rhetoric seems like a really good example of abuse of emotional labor. 

Recently I’ve been reading a few things by and about Erika Lust:

Lust wants to show “real sex” and tells her actors to “take the porn” out of on-screen intercourse. She demonstrates the ludicrous poses people pull in porn: arched back, stuck-out chest, pursed lips. “I tell them ‘don’t have sex like a porn star, have sex as a person, as you do in your home’.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I would be really put off if an employer asked that of me. The part of my sexuality that I sell on camera is not the part that exists for me and my partners. They inform each other, yes, but ultimately the former is work, it’s a job, it’s art. It’s not my life. Not any more than any other theatrical production would be. 

Almost all porn sells the “she’s thrilled to do this; she’s begging for it; she’d do it for free!” myth. But “feminist porn” seems uniquely intrusive in that it doesn’t just peddle the fantasy - it insists that it’s not a fantasy, that its performers aren’t truly enlightened or empowered if they admit that it’s just an acting gig to them.

It’s like…the difference between making sure your cashiers are smiling and bubbly and acting happy and insisting that they’d better actually be happy. The former I can ape, no problem. But the latter? No. I’ll act for you. That had better be enough, because you don’t get to demand access to my actual emotional state. I can pretend for you, but don’t fool yourself: it’s still a performance. 

You have a point that that’s a thing that can happen, but I’m not sure that’s what she’s going for. I don’t think she’s necessarily saying it has to be YOUR authentic sexuality, just that it has to look like someone’s authentic sexuality.

Yes, there’s still an emotional labor component (as there is in all acting), but I do think it’s still expected to be acting (see the next paragraph down referencing characters). 

I’ve never worked for Erika Lust, specifically, but that is absolutely what every “feminist porn” company I’ve ever shot for has wanted. Emotional, soul-baring authenticity. When workers speak up about this, or about how the director’s demands to perform a certain way are incompatible with their request for authentic sex, they get fired. 

also i had to sign a form saying i wasn’t doing it for the money

“This McDonald’s job is yours…if you can prove you don’t actually need money and just really really love flipping burgers.”

the director’s demands to perform a certain way are incompatible with their request for authentic sex

Tell me more about this? I think I know what you mean, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

To give an example: I was given the directions “masturbate like you do at home, to a real orgasm” and also “lie on your back”. These things cannot possibly be accomplished simultaneously. And yet. Similarly, I was given the instruction to wear clothes that “expressed my personality and made me feel comfortable/relaxed”. I did - incidentally, an outfit I’ve worn both on camera and escorting. Upon arrival the same person who said that told me my attire was unacceptable and to change into an outfit from wardrobe which he picked out. It was not comfortable and the situation made me nervous, and a worse performer, and also less ~authentic. I think they would make better porn, and a better working environment, by just admitting it’s a fiction an optimizing for that.

Have you read Mikey Way’s article “Fuck Your Feminist Porn”? It gets at what we’re talking about here, and does it excellently to boot.

They had me sign a form in which I promised that filming for them was just a hobby, not my job. … [T]his company gets everyone so worked up about them supposedly being an ethical alternative to mainstream porn that nobody notices that they’re an international corporation paying next to nothing for people to style, shoot, produce, edit, and perform in their own work. It’s okay, though—it’s just a hobby!

tl;dr feminist porn is predicated on drawing lines between “regular women’s sexuality” and “pornified sexbots” (to quote Twisty Faster). It profits off sex workers’ labor while being terrified to admit that its employees are, in fact, sex workers. Because that would be gross and terrible.

Interesting. It’s curious how much the porn you describe echoes the ideas of anti-porn feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon (particularly that sex for pay is inherently and obviously degrading) despite being nominally sex-positive, and clearly not anti-porn in the strict sense of the term.

This seems like a ‘serving two masters’ problem. A lot of amateur porn already fills one of the niches described above. Many people post naked pictures and video of themselves masturbating/having sex as a hobby, and they don’t need to sign a contract to know that’s what they’re doing. Presumably what the feminist porn offers above and beyond this is a level of professional polish (in terms of cinematic production values and actors/outfits/scenarios that the audience is more likely to see as attractive), but the thing is that “professional” by definition means it’s someone’s job. And while people enjoy their jobs to greatly varying extents, that’s at least as much a matter of remuneration and treatment by coworkers and bosses (as wanderingwhore and the Mikey Way article allude to) as it is of the quality of the work itself, let alone whether the work appears enjoyable to an outside observer.

In conclusion, a lot of this reminds me of the forms of internal discipline and panopticism described in Discipline and Punish, and that’s kind of creeping me out.

I think I know what you mean by your last bit, but can you elaborate?

This passage from traditional authoritarian power to modern totalitarianism can be precisely rendered through superego in an old joke of mine. Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? “I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty.” A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: “You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to.” Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say “I have a choice, I will not do it.” I promise your father will say “What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how she loves you? How could you do this to her?”

– zizek

Is this necessarily about “feminist porn”, or even an ideologically-driven issue? It seems to be the adult industry as a whole that’s placing more emphasis on, I guess, the performance of enjoyment.

And on a scene-by-scene basis, did this trend ever present as feminist, in the sense of serving a cause? I don’t think the big pioneers - Beautiful Agony, Met-Art and the other ex-Warsaw ops, even fucking ALS - ever presented as such. At the most, Abby Winters was “we love women loving themselves a/o each other: so let’s monetize it!”

On a broader “who is a star” basis, again more character work - compared to Jenna Jameson, Sasha Grey had much more of an “average” body but was much better at performing enthusiasm, that’s a common theme of stardom these days. With the meteoric rise of James Deen and the fall of steroid woodsmen, even the men.

But what if that’s just a function of supply and demand? In the ‘70s and ‘80s “being willing to do porn” was a saleable attribute; as more people became open “willingness plus hotness” was the thing. Competing on that axis gave us plastic monsters - the pompadour of humans - and by this point where hot people are willing for free, talented sexual performance is the differentiating factor.

Also with the expansion of the industry with so much free content, from an economic perspective a lot of modern stars are effectively elite courtesans that use films as demo reels for escort bookings arranged over social media, that probably selects for skilled charismatics.

You know, if you make things fair and only consider the first X years since birth, The Beatles have been <em>far</em> more important and influential than Jesus Christ.

cerastes:

Mother: “What do you even do in the internet that you dedicate so much time to it?”

Me:

Tinder has added college and employment tags to profiles, which mostly just confirms that you were correctly judging class status by the pictures all along.

okay