kontextmaschine

archatlas:

The Art of Hiroshi Yoshida

Hiroshi Yoshida was a 20th-century Japanese painter and woodblock print-maker. He is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga style, and is noted especially for his excellent landscape prints. Yoshida travelled widely, and was particularly known for his images of non-Japanese subjects done in traditional Japanese woodblock style.

davidsevera:

veronicastraszh:

marcusseldon:

veronicastraszh:

davidsevera:

collapsedsquid:

davidsevera:

Thinking again about this Tyler Cowen quote on Brexit:

Quite simply, the English want England to stay relatively English, and voting Leave was the instrument they were given.  That specific cultural attachment is not for Irish-American me, no, I feel no sentiment, other than perhaps good humor, when someone offers me “a lovely biscuit,” or when a small book shop devotes an entire section to gardening, but yes I do get it at some level.  And some parts of the older England I do truly love and I am talking the Beatles and Monty Python and James Bond here, not just the ancients like Trollope or Edmund Spenser.

Much has been made of the supposed paradox that opposition to immigration is highest where the number of immigrants is lowest. Yes, some of that is the racism and xenophobia of less cosmopolitan areas, but it would be a big mistake to dismiss it as such or even to mainly frame it as such.  Most of all it is an endowment effect. Those are the regions which best remember — and indeed still live — some earlier notion of what England was like.  And they wish to hold on to that, albeit with the possibility of continuing evolution along mostly English lines.

To the extent that the “endowment effect” is real, it makes me wonder what drives younger alt-right types, or more broadly people of that ilk. (Taking the alt-right as the people on the extreme end, basically.) It seems pretty clear that the driving force of a young Trump voter is pretty different in some ways than the driving force of an older Trump voter. There’s less panicky loss/anger and more… dickishness that I’m not sure can just be chalked up to youth. Some of it is no doubt just recrudescence of typical nativist sentiment with the internet letting people express those sentiments without sanction. But something other than memory is the motivation. Maybe there’s more to it than has been articulated.

It seems clear that pseudo-ironic Trump worship is basically akin to Sanders’ youth support: kids latching onto an old outsider who’s not actually a natural fit for their support/”one of them” in the absence of a better alternative. If you were creating a candidate to appeal to them, you’d come up with someone substantially different. So what is it that younger rightists might want? I’m not sure. “The same policies with a different tone” seems too simple.

Will the new right be as successful as the old? I have some doubts. If part of the appeal of ethnocentrism is the remembrance of things past, what happens when multicultural atomization (?) is the norm rather than something that appeared within living memory? Will there be other sentiments for ethnocentrism to ally with? A permanent weakening seems at least plausible. There’s a lot of talk about rising right wing populism, but perhaps it’s an odd Indian summer. A too little, too late last gasp reaction without much of a plan and without much chance of perpetuating itself in its current form.

Which isn’t to say that either the right or nativism are going away, just that there may be some sort of reconfiguration the nature of which I can’t mentally bring into focus.

I think you’re sorting brushing up on the War Nerd’s theory there.  When discussing ISIS, he talks about how there is nothing for young not-particularly bright men to believe in nowadays, that in modern western society we’ve taken away all the ideas and institutions that give people meaning, and so they find it in weird places.

Taking ISIS and the alt right as an extreme end of a bigger complex of ideas, you can see how they both might appeal (with obvious differences) to bored, washed up dipshits. But I’m not sure I understand that bigger complex of ideas that (presumably???) draws a bigger crowd than just the hardcore. I mean, I assume that that penumbra exists, but I guess I’m not totally sure. It would be weird if it didn’t.

I guess Straight White Male Resentment At The SJWs!!!!!! (or something similar) could be another sentiment that fits nicely with ethnocentrism. Not a feeling of loss, but a feeling of denigration. I’m skeptical that that’s really an important motivation in the culture at large though. And there’s no reason that those feelings need be limited to the younger cohort, so it’s perhaps not something new.

I dunno. The folks I encounter [1] who are all “pro-Trump” are pretty unambiguously resentful. One guy is a “white working class” type who frequently rants about how “HSLs (high status liberals) look down on people like him.” (Which, they do. So yeah. He isn’t wrong about that. He’s wrong about Trump, tho.) I dunno. I see a lot of folks who feel hella disrespected. It seems a big part of it.

Go back and look at any of the big-dumb-gender-fights on SCC. If you scroll through, see how many posts are tedious analyses of “status,” how much is about feeling “put upon” and “bullied” by the popular crowd.

I dunno. It seems like “a real thing” to me.

[1] yeah, selection bias, but I do “get around” a fair amount.

I think young Trump supporters are a mix of what Veronica describes (though I think most of these sorts of people wouldn’t use the LW/SSC commenter terminology), but also white male backlash to SJWs/political correctness/etc. I think this is much more common than David thinks. Sure, most aren’t reading the internet feminists we think about, but more they’re responding to the more vague but more widespread increase in “political correctness” and social justice themes in media and the culture and college campuses and workplaces and so on. I feel like a lot of young white people, especially young white men with a more conservative temperament, feel like they can’t say things that they feel are reasonable or express themselves because it might offend people, and they support Trump as a sort of rebellion against this. I know of a young Trump supporter IRL (a brother of somebody I know) who is like this for instance.

It’s a dumb reason to vote for somebody for President, but yeah.

Right. For the record,  I don’t mean to imply SCC is a nest of Trump supporters, only that it is a culture space that we’re all familiar with that reflects a similar facet of the zeitgeist.

Hmm, I rigorously avoid that sort of attitude online as tedious & worthless, so perhaps I’m significantly underestimating its prevalence.

Jeunesse dorée. It’s usually the scions of the displaced elite that power a reaction.

sevzem:

bloodandhedonism:

mtvnews:

Wait, were we just rickrolled?

judging from the rumors on how it was done on purpose for publicity, i wouldn’t put it past trump and his team, tbh

@kontextmaschine

this and we have an official spinner analogizing her to Twilight Sparkle. Meme magic.

I like to keep ragging on this one point about how John Kerry chose Amanda Marcotte as his internet outreach specialist in 2004 not because the tactics of it matter anymore but to choose Amanda Marcotte, fucking 2004 Amanda Marcotte, as OUTreach specialist meant that at that late date you

1) Knew the internet was Important

so to deal with that

2) Had heard of A Young on the Internet

2004! Christ.

2008 Obama was with the curve (which was something given national campaigns were traditionally run by elder lions), honestly these guys might even be ahead of it, completely yielding TV for memes

But more than anything, to be a success a Trump presidency would have to bury its charisma in institution for successors to draw on, and they’re already doing it without even having won and that’s impressive. Like, quick, what was Kerry’s slogan? McCain’s? Romney’s?

Shoulda put it on a hat

evilelitest2:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

twoheartsneverlie:

dorksidefiker:

abotl:

txwatson:

severusluver:

gulag-nietzschean:

I LEARNED RECENTLY THAT PLATO WON THE GOLD MEDAL IN THE OLYMPICS FOR WRESTLING THREE TIMES. THIS PUTS A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THINGS. I ALWAYS IMAGINED PLATO TO BE FRAIL AND MISSHAPEN BUT HE MUST HAVE BEEN FRICKEN RIPPED. I WONDER IF ARISTOTLE EVER FELT ANXIETY ABOUT GETTING PHYSICALLY (I.E. NOT JUST METAPHYSICALLY) DISMANTLED BY PLATO. PLATO WAS PROBABLY PISSED OFF BY AT LEAST A HANDFUL OF QUESTIONS ARISTOTLE ASKED HIM. ARISTOTLE WAS A LITERAL GENIUS TOO. IMAGINE PLATO LECTURING AND WRITING ON A BLACKBOARD AND ARISTOTLE THROWING A COMMENT OUT THERE ABOUT SOME COMPLEX MISSTEP IN PLATO’S LOGIC AND PLATO’S CHALK JUST SNAPS AND ARISTOTLE’S TESTICLES SUCK WAY BACK UP TO WHERE THEY DROPPED FROM, THEN PLATO IN A BLUR APPEARS BESIDE ARISTOTLE SITTING AT HIS DESK AND HE PICKS HIM UP AND SUPLEXES HIS MACEDONIAN ASS.

This needs to be a comic.

louisrzurn

given the content of a lot of Plato’s conclusions I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Plato responded to a lot of reasonable criticisms with “Fight me” and that was the end of it.

We’re not actually sure whether Plato is his real name! Some people speculate that, because Platon means “broad” in Greek, this was actually his wrestling nick name. Basically, it’s like Dwayne Johnson became a famous philosopher and everyone still called him “The Rock”.

Can we have a movie about Plato starring Dwayne Johnson?

You can’t convince me that wouldn’t be the best thing ever.

I didn’t know I needed this until now. If someone can write a decent screenplay, and we get enough people to talk about it, maybe he’ll actually see it and we can kickstart the shit out of it

Plato’s name is literally just the Ancient Greek for ‘Swol’ how is this the real life

Plato actually was mocked for being too muscled, because the Greeks had very exacting standards for male beauty, and he was seen as ugly for being too muscled and having a “rough face”

>tfw you wake up halfway but the asleep half’s still dreaming so you’re turning over and flipping your pillow as part of your mission to safely distribute farts around town and defend them from the Yakuza

prozdvoices:

A world where all talking to pets voices and regular speaking voices are switched

mapsontheweb:

Wyoming vs Colorado.

More size comparison maps >>

Ugh, trying to get directions for making soup from scratch using bones and I have to wade through all this, uh, new New Age woo-woo Goop shit about stock bone broth

Like, where’s the babushka recipe site, that’s what I need

padnote:

OH GOD I WASN’T READY FOR WHAT CONTENT AWARE SCALING DOES TO MY CAT

nostalgebraist:

I’ve spent the last 20 minutes reading about “Aristasia,” which seems to be a sort of steampunk lesbian separatist version of the Gorean subculture

Beginning roughly in the late 1960s at Oxford, Aristasia began (as far as anyone around today can tell) with a group of young women disillusioned by the cultural changes of that decade. They saw the cultural upheaval of the 1960s as the end of civilization, and responded by seceding from mainstream society to form a culture, and, ultimately, a country of their own.

The Empire of Aristasia exists on another world (usually called Herthe) where there are no men. Everyone is feminine. Nevertheless, there are two sexes: blondes and brunettes.   Brunettes are the stronger, more dominant sex, and hold most of the positions in the military, while blondes are frailer but are regarded with reverence due to their higher morality and spirituality. One Aristasian publication describes brunettes as “twice as feminine” as contemporary earth women, and blondes as “ultra-feminine.” Needless to say, blondes and brunettes in Aristasia can reproduce with each other, though the exact method remains undescribed.  […]

Where does all this come from? A book series? A graphic novel? No – while a few books have been written taking place in Aristasia, the largest part of the Aristasian community is centered around living the life. Aristasians seek to live as though Aristasia existed here and now. They form communities – both virtual and physical – where women take on the roles of either blondes or brunettes from the Aristasian provinces, dress in vintage garments, and act out schools, coffee shops, and movie theaters. […]

Another aspect of Aristasia often seen in the old media is discipline. Apparently, the Empire of Aristasia employs corporal punishment to keep maids from straying, ranging from light spankings to canings. Of course, this is purely for disciplinary purposes. […]

Aristasia has changed a lot since its inception. In 2006, the core group of Aristasians started a movement called Operation Bridgehead which posited a real, actual Aristasia and reincarnated Aristasians in human bodies, making them a sort of Otherkin. It also resulted in Aristasians invading Second Life and setting up an Embassy and college there. This movement also tried to distance itself from the discipline aspect of Aristasia, and eventually entirely did away with it. As of 2013, the Bridgehead movement has abandoned the name “Aristasia” entirely, and now calls itself the “Herthelan Protectorate of Chelouranya.”

(This is from TV Tropes, which for some reason seems to contain the only clear and straightforward summary of the thing on the internet; this appears to be a more in-depth, controversy-focused insider’s history; there are various news stories about the founder, “Miss Martindale,” which seem to confirm that this is a real subculture and not the whole cloth invention of internet fetishists)

So I’d been trying to clean up the tree waste in the yard with a plastic leaf rake, which got caught in the undergrowth and broke in half. I took that as a sign that even the grass needed some attention after the lot was left to seed - it’s patchy, with a bunch of detritus and moss in there - so when I was going to replace it I got a dethatching rake.

Man, it is really satisfying to like, “comb” a section of yard and come back with these huge piles of dead and yellow grass, leaving the target area looking both a little beat up but more verdant.

Anyway yesterday I met up with some people at 7 to take care of something and had the chance to hang out and play pinball afterwards which I usually jump at but blew it off to get back to the house and do some more raking before it got dark, since waste pickup is Thursday mornings.

As I was riding my motorcycle back I realized “Holy shit, I’m going to make hay while the sun shines.”

Reducing fascism to some vague idea of extreme conservatism, which in its American context essentially means angry old white people, misses the sense in which fascism prospered because it was something young, cool, transgressive, and new. For fascist intellectuals, at least, the liberal bourgeoisie was their enemy as much as were communists or Jews, and it was precisely because the bourgeois were old, self-righteous, and boring. Fascism was sexy and fun.

Milo gets this… Milo exploits to great effect the perception among his disaffected, youthful fan base that liberal pieties about diversity and anti-racism are just the moralistic droning of an elite losing its grip on power.

Trump’s success has raised among liberals a fear that the far right has made itself respectable. Milo’s success at creating a following for a figure like himself — limited as it might be — suggests that the bigger fear should be that the far right might make itself cool.

One of my many excuses to think highly of myself despite being an untested shit is that I always deliver in my dreams, sally forth to charge the dragon &tc

(and those chances in life been calm in crisis - broadsided that SUV got practical focused calming her and the EMTs and only next day indulged myself for hitting a wall)

It was always this trope, this highly #relatable midcentury trope, you saw it all the time, I don’t know if it died with Freudianism or what, haven’t noticed it recently now that I think of it, no one thinks dreams matter anymore

anyway it was this trope, that you were having a dream, a nightmare, and something horrible was chasing you and you ran away but you couldn’t escape it

never had that dream because I fight it

not bad, Saints Row deserves respect as comedy AAA. actually the only representation of Hell I’ve seen in a while now that I think of it

thegestianpoet:

fishbone76:

In case you wanna know why so many porn blogs follow you.

absolutely the most riveting part of this is that the person writing this response opens with “I post one picture a day of my goats” 

surprisingly engrossing

When Brody compares the phenomenon of “independent” wealthy film producers to the way that opera and classical music are funded, he touches on exactly the point — the increasingly aristocratic nature of pop-cultural production. Turning from a more chaotic, arbitrary, and of-the-moment mass market-driven production method, we’ve entered an era where one side of the market, namely, Hollywood, is driven by five-year plans and endless franchise sequels, while the other relies on the whims of benevolent aristocrats.

This is hardly a death sentence for art: Much of the history of Western art is merely the reflection of the whims of benevolent aristocrats. But it does mean the end of “mass market” cultural production.

frankfurtschooldropout:

Milo peddles a pageant of insincerity that is immediately legible to fellow Brits. Americans understand irony differently, and sometimes not at all. The crowd of excitable young and young-ish people gathered to hear him pontificate believe what he’s saying, even if he doesn’t. Which he doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t mean it. It doesn’t matter that he’s secretly quite a sweet, vulnerable person who is gracious to those he considers friends. It doesn’t matter that somewhere in the rhinestone-rimmed hamster wheel of his mind is a conscience. It doesn’t matter because the harm he does is real.

Yeah, I saw this. Told you the British thing was key to Milo. Interesting Penny’s take on it tho

A certain school of spiteful camaraderie, of bloodless political jousting before dinner, has long been the form of political discourse in Britain, where the mainstream media is dominated by private school graduates who were trained to debate as if it were a bloodsport in which empathy is a handicap. London media wonks routinely treat one another as sparring partners and drinking buddies despite their political differences: after all aren’t we on the same team really? Aren’t we playing the same game?

She seems to be saying that a flaw of the US relative to the UK is that we treat ideas in popular media circulation seriously, rather than as a forum for the elite educated to play larkish status games.

That’s an odd thing for a self-proclaimed socialist to say, but hey, Laurie Penny*. Might not be wrong.

*did anyone else notice that time a few years ago she and Richard Seymour and China Meiville (the “Sino-Seymourists”, rimshot) tried to schism the Socialist Workers Party away from its fuddy-duddy elders? They used “rape culture” hysteria which was clever - British student governments are aligned with real parties and control real funding flows, a major base for leftists making undergrad silliness a vulnerability. Anyway they kicked up a big stink in public AND THEN WENT QUIET WHEN PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY SCHISMED THEIR FACTION OUT FROM THEM THE SAME WAY. It was kinda obscure which is a shame, wish more people knew cuz it’s a great fucking microcosm of something