Here’s an appetizer - the thing that really got me into him, after a few sideways wikipedia references like what - I went to the library and got Michael Ledeen’s 1977 English-language biography of him, The First Duce.
Michael Ledeen! The… oh shit, I’m old aren’t I*, he was big as a neocon in the runup to the Second Iraq War and was all “Ba’athism is Fascism!” (not wrong!) but how does he know Fascism ‘cuz he was this guy who in the ‘70s was rediscovering the potential of ~tru~ fascism in Rome
back when that might have made a comeback!, people forget fascism had a mini-boom in the ‘70s-80s, not just punks and skinheads and Aryan Nations and Strategy of Tension and The Turner Diaries but Judge Dredd and Mount Perelin and Chile and all the British comics you look back like “woah, buddy, why is your communist ass getting all burnt on Reagan and Thatcher, they’re the heroes doncha know”
and looking back on that and getting more information and reading The Perch and some other biographies that were allusively but unhelpfully about period literary trends you really realize Ledeen was trying to rehabilitate the guy, in the mid-70s he was on a project to build up this story about a whimsical celebrity counter-imperial anti-Hitler sex-positive military prophet protofascist pirate
and he wasn’t wrong!
* what did you think this was going to be? tell me in my asks!
the failure of the 20th century was the notion it is all correct or even acceptable to be human and thus imperfect; the Christians were correct that your beast-nature is inherently wrong but fixated on a false promise of salvation; the answer is to abhor and suppress and punish yourself for weakness and imperfection unto death, when with you your failure is annihilated eternally
Remember to like, comment, and subscribe for more charismatic exhortations
I never expected this headphone jack issue would be the hill to die on, but Apple has so many easier targets that it boggles the mind that this is what gets people so irate.
No problem with saying you like the old headphone jack and would prefer to keep it, but sheesh it’s not a conspiracy folks, sometimes the straightforward answer is the correct answer.
You don’t even need to switch to Android, there are other iPhone models on the market for the foreseeable future, and if no one buys an iPhone 7 then perhaps the beloved jack will return for the iPhone 8.
(They even added better speakers if you’re so desperate to listen to music while charging your damn phone!)
“Telephone company in market-dominant position suppresses cheap a/o third-party accessories in service of business model” isn’t an absurd subject for consumer resistance, that’s the exact story behind mid-century America’s most celebrated pro-consumer bit of regulation, the FCC’s 1968 Carterphone decision.
I never expected this headphone jack issue would be the hill to die on, but Apple has so many easier targets that it boggles the mind that this is what gets people so irate.
No problem with saying you like the old headphone jack and would prefer to keep it, but sheesh it’s not a conspiracy folks, sometimes the straightforward answer is the correct answer.
You don’t even need to switch to Android, there are other iPhone models on the market for the foreseeable future, and if no one buys an iPhone 7 then perhaps the beloved jack will return for the iPhone 8.
(They even added better speakers if you’re so desperate to listen to music while charging your damn phone!)
“Telephone company in market-dominant position suppresses cheap a/o third-party accessories in service of business model” isn’t an absurd subject for consumer resistance, that’s the exact story behind mid-century America’s most celebrated pro-consumer bit of regulation, the FCC’s 1968 Carterphone decision.
Two things, looking back on this:
- Haha, this reads like a parody of a kontextmaschine post, almost more than that time I parodied myself. A one sentence paragraph starting off with a phrase itself composed of noun phrases with no single nouns until the next level down, a negated adjective (“isn’t absurd”), and then obscure but relevant American history.
- When weighing the ominousness of the situation remember 2 years ago Apple paid $3 billion from its extraterritorial dragon’s horde for the leading headphone maker and no one could really offer a good explanation why.
A Silicon Valley titan is putting money
behind an unofficial Donald Trump group dedicated to “shitposting” and
circulating Internet memes maligning Hillary Clinton.
Luckey sold his virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, and Forbesestimates his current net worth to be $700 million.
The 24-year-old told The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym
“NimbleRichMan” on Reddit with a password given him to by the
organization’s founders.
Nimble America says it’s dedicated to proving that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real,”
according to the company’s introductory statement, and has taken credit
for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a
cartoonishly large image of Clinton’s face alongside the words “Too Big
to Jail.”
Flashback to those innocent times four months ago when the notion that frog memes would play a part in this election was a lighthearted jest.
Sometimes I wonder why I punish myself by still reading Slate, the answer is occasionally you come across buried nuggets like this:
Sometimes the election’s psychic fallout takes less obvious forms.
Silvestri, for example, has noticed a curious phenomenon among some of
the millennial women in her practice: The rise of Trump has made them
wonder how much they can reasonably expect from romantic relationships…
It’s not just that Trump reminds them of their exes. It’s that
Trump’s success seems to validate the men’s behavior. “They had gotten
themselves to a place of, This is not what I deserve, I deserve better, I can do better,”
Silvestri says. But watching dutiful, responsible Clinton struggle to
best Trump, “people are really backtracking and saying, ‘I made this
move to be more empowered and be who I am based on my values, but now I
see my ex writ large on the national stage, and everyone’s following
him,’ ” Silvestri says. They start thinking that, for a woman, maybe
being beautiful really is more important than being smart, assertive,
and authentic.
The quote comes from a psychologist who, if you do some digging, has offices by NYU.
So, straight from the horse’s mouth: the mere nomination of Donald Trump is inspiring urban millennial elite women to give up on confrontational feminism in favor of charming femininity as a source of self-identity and -value.
yeah that too (James Blaine against Grover Cleveland, 1884)
That was the “rum, romanism, and rebellion” election too - which like Romney’s “47 percent” came out in a privateish setting (tho from a surrogate) and was picked up by an opposition tracker who used it to hype his base
I don’t think it’s appreciated enough that the “acid, amnesty, and abortion” line against George McGovern in ‘72 was an echo of this, only with the Catholic valence reversed
and… HOLY SHIT, apparently that line came anonymously from Thomas fucking Eagleton, McGovern’s later fucking ticketmate, the one who dropped out after it came out he’d been electroshocked for being crazy, holy shit.
My insecurity: if you were a REAL Machiavelli, you'd be running things and not just sitting in obscurity tossing off pseudo-profound insights.
Me: that is canonically untrue
