kontextmaschine

at what point did people start taking Donald Trump’s hair as a given? I remember that still being a thing at least early on

What is Quartz even supposed to be? I see stuff linked there off twitter sometimes and it’s like “kinda what you’d expect from being linked to medium off a 300ish reblog tweet only better, also with a graphic design sensibility that reminds you of when Vice was Vice and not “Time-Life with a 2007 style because 2007 is 4eva” or whatever the fuck it is now

But then I go to their front page and it’s like “What does the slowdown in Foo’s heavy industrial sector mean for Bar’s resource exports?”

Is this like, woke The Economist

fuck us, that could work, couldn’t it

I just got that

one of the points of bars and tea houses and beer halls and cafes is to (by disinhibition or mania) break through the barriers and start talking about religion and politics

and one of the points of that point is specifically that people would overhear and contradict

fight me

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

one of the points of bars and tea houses and beer halls and cafes is to (by disinhibition or mania) break through the barriers and start talking about religion and politics

and one of the points of that point is specifically that people would overhear and contradict

fight me

*nods in agreement*

wait, shit. uh, actually the apparent ‘contradictions’ remained within a narrow window of acceptable views, and anyone that ventured seriously beyond the local Overton window still faced ostracism or even physical violence, such as being ejected from the bar / tea house / beer hall / cafe.

no, *fight* me

the worst feeling is noticing a new anime icon aesthetic and being like “fuck, I’m gonna have to know the ideological valence of this”

After all it WAS the Republicans who propped up victim culture as a counter to the passionate vitalism of the New Left. Ideas have consequences.

neither Jesus or Buddha was trained as a priest or theologian, and they each lived in a time and place where people were trained as priests and theologians

reactionaryhistorian:

kontextmaschine:

neither Jesus or Buddha was trained as a priest or theologian, and they each lived in a time and place where people were trained as priests and theologians

Buddha was in fact a trained theologian according to the stories. Before his enlightenment he spent years being initiated into the various monastic orders of the time and gaining the very highest level of proficiency in their teachings before growing dissatisfied with each one in turn.

 As for Jesus he was God so theology would just be the study of himself.

Well fair, when challenged I notice this is me projecting backwards my particularistic sense of what a “priest” or “theologian” or even “training” is, and just how much that depends on institutionalization, that’s worth exploring.

Like, yeah Buddha moved among a circle of sages who knew Vedic texts and pitched their own ideas by reference to them.

And Jesus too showed not only awareness of Hebrew scriptures and priestly practices but of his contemporaries in the local indie spiritual scene - John the Baptist most famously.

I do think of “priest” as fundamentally connected to the notion of “ritual officiant” and of clerical status though, and the fact that both figures made a point of not performing rituals and of not being born or inducted into a priestly class is too big a strike against that

Theology… that’s tougher and now that I think about this I’m not sure I can defend it. It’s like, are people just thinking about the nature of the world doing philosophy? If they’re drawing on something they were taught that wasn’t labeled Philosophy, are they trained philosophers? If you add divinity does it work the same as theology?

Because yeah they hung with gurus, but Life of Brian had a point with the marketplace, if people are people then “independent spiritual figures” covers street preachers or just crazies yelling about God about the same as the street preachers and crazies we have today. Are those guys theologians?

Maybe at the higher end it includes weirdo geniuses who offer cutting insights and critiques about social systems too degraded for them to tolerate and thrive within. I’m one of those guys. I even talk about and critique and reinvent religion sometimes. Am I a theologian? If you took something you read from me and worked it into a worldview would that mean you’d been trained in theology? I don’t see it.

I admit I’m not sure about how to understand transmission of Vedic ideas - even if I’m trying to impose models from my own home culture, there’s precedent for apprenticeship models of professional (in the traditional sense) education - I suppose I would consider someone who started out as a law clerk and then “read for the bar” in the 19th century to have been trained as a lawyer, and the unlettered preachers of American low church Protestantism… well they boast of being untrained, that’s the point.

So I guess Buddha counts as theologically trained but in a tradition neither he nor the theologians who explicate his own tradition preached.

I think the important thing is I think of theologians interpreting a corpus of some sort, texts or stories or traditions, and their basic function as articulating things with that corpus. And of priests as practicing rituals of some sort.

And I guess the point is that’s a thing that was already being done when these guys showed up, a route they could have taken but didn’t in favor of being I guess the role I’d define against “priests” or “theologians” is prophets, who establish the traditions theologians explicate, in the name of whose charisma rituals are conducted.

Because that was kind of the point of that post, to remind my fellow weirdo geniuses (incl. myself) to buck up, the world is young still and they’re really not that far off from the greats. Same as that Machiavelli post.

Was also thinking of pointing out that Karl Marx was an obscure essayist who hung out in the Victorian equivalent of Wikipedia reading and making epistolary blog posts when he wasn’t working on his opuses about how when you apply his interpretation of his influences (Hegel’s well known, but I also vibe a lot of the physiocrats in his attempt to quantify the immaterial aspects of political economy) to the things he’s noticed in industrializing London and the Rhine valley it actually explained the whole of history.

Also I do wonder if Buddha’s teachers would have been considered particularly relevant or wise if they hadn’t led to him. Honestly, we only know of John the Baptist at all, let alone as a worthy figure because he influenced Jesus, if not he’d have been some forgotten weirdo dunking people in a river. (Would we think Socrates mattered if not for Plato if not for Aristotle?)

So we’ve already done memes and twitter pile-ons and now we’re into callout wars over rape culture. In the 30 days remaining before the vote, how else is social media going to fuck up our elections?

kontextmaschine:

So we’ve already done memes and twitter pile-ons and now we’re into callout wars over rape culture. In the 30 days remaining before the vote, how else is social media going to fuck up our elections?

One thing I want to point out, Trump really is the first social media native candidate, and this IS how you win a callout fight, on the counterattack. You acknowledge whatever of the accusation is true, especially provably, compartmentalize it as peripheral rather than defend it, and then call them out even harder with pure righteous confidence, and rally the followers you got by charismatic means to signal boost you.

If I wanted to be cute I’d reference how the main lines of justification behind democratic centralism and fuhrerprinzip is that they worked.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

So we’ve already done memes and twitter pile-ons and now we’re into callout wars over rape culture. In the 30 days remaining before the vote, how else is social media going to fuck up our elections?

One thing I want to point out, Trump really is the first social media native candidate, and this IS how you win a callout fight, on the counterattack. You acknowledge whatever of the accusation is true, especially provably, compartmentalize it as peripheral rather than defend it, and then call them out even harder with pure righteous confidence, and rally the followers you got by charismatic means to signal boost you.

If I wanted to be cute I’d reference how the main lines of justification behind democratic centralism and fuhrerprinzip is that they worked.

WOOF on this friggin’ delivery though, that ISIS redirect was very politiciany and poorly done, and Hill actually can pull extemporaneous decently here

kontextmaschine:

So back when blogs were blogs and had comments (with decent signal:noise ratio, even), I’d be in the comments at Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein’s sites (hey wonklife, I was Senescent).

Fun times, fun times. No better way to hone your theory of mind than spending all day watching people describing what they thought other people would think about what they thought about those other people’s public personas.

That’s where I first came across Steve Sailer, who would show up day after day, ignore whatever shit he got, and have something cheerfully novel to say about the topic of the post as a leadin to linking two essays on tangential subjects. Good strategy.

Anyway that was the setting for one of the most interesting things I ever noticed. There was this commenter on Yglesias’ blog named Petey, who was actually really clever, subtle, worthwhile.

And then in the middle of the 2008 presidential primary, John Edwards said something about a plan to make something - healthcare? I forget - available to everyone by letting people sign up from computers at public libraries.

And it was like a throwaway moment, not fleshed out at all, but this guy Petey went all in on it, praising it to the heavens in comments. And people would be like “but Petey, how’s that supposed to work?”

And he’d just insult the questioner and restate the premise, like “What are you, a moron? You go to the library. You sign up. That’s it.” And people would be like “no, you misunderstand me, (informed question about backends and regulation and &tc)” and he’d just insult them, and restate the premise.

And this was completely at odds with his whole persona for years up to this point, and he just kept it up. He’d praise Edwards to the heavens and just repeat slogan-level statements as if they were glorious wisdom, and when questioned just insult the questioner and repeat them harder.

And then Edwards dropped out and he switched to Hillary as if nothing had happened and kept doing it. (Even though he had previously been seriously shit-talking her, for example.)

And one of the things he did was whenever he referred to Yglesias he’d call him “trust fund scumbag Matt Yglesias”, by way of accounting for why Matt failed to get on board and push the same line, the line that he should obviously be pushing and had no reasonable excuse not to.

And one of the things I respect Yglesias for most, he had a comments section that would regularly reach the mid-100s, which was a lot back then, and he almost never made any signs of acknowledging that the comments even existed. Once in a blue moon of blue moons, he’d post a comment of his own.

And this is the only time I ever remember him actually making a post(!) that acknowledged a comment. Not because something had caught on - all the other commenters thought Petey was being ridiculous. Not because anyone had actually said something worthwhile, quite the opposite! People said worthwhile things all the time. Rather, specifically because someone had thrown the steering wheel out the window and implacably committed to repeating the same idiocy (“forcing a meme”, if you will) over and over forever.

And that is the power of message discipline.

dagwolf:

chicanochamberofcommerce:

asgardreid:

cardozzza:

ghettablasta:

Read code of silence here.

#StayWoke

A criminal gang operating inside another criminal gang… wild

Wheels within wheels

when even american cities have their own deep states

highly recommended.

I’ve been following this blog on the Chicago police for some time, called Second City Cop.

It’s a cop blog, which is about what you’d expect, but it’s also basically a labor blog, so it’s got the angles you’d expect on that, about how the fucking idiots running things are fucking idiots trying to screw us, so there’s some interesting laundry aired.

One thing I’ve picked up from there is that Chicago is a little unique - like I once said, the Machine never fully lost control of the police and one of the fundamental anti-corruption measures: hiring and promotion by neutral ranked civil service examinations (rather than at-will by management that might seek or reward allies) was never fully implemented. For one, there’s a really halfassed scandal going on just recently where some lucky duckies including IIRC the girlfriend of someone important was just given a test, or the answers to look at, ahead of time. For two, past that there are apparently straight-out “Merit” slots in each promotion class for people with clout (the longstanding Chicago term for political pull) so they don’t even have to bother.

So keep that in mind, but even then there are some things worth highlighting about the incentives facing police applicable and important even beyond Chicago as the country ponders police reform.

First, “they promote you for your silence”, but more especially the bit about how they were given unpleasant graveyard shifts with no overtime and take-home cars.

Overtime is a huge part of a lot of police take-home pay, often half or more (and can affect things like pensions if they’re say based on the highest-paying year or years reached in a career). So the ability to approve overtime on shifts, or eligibility for special assignments (sports games, parades, filming locations, holiday events that can be worth double time or more, as per contract) is a big lever of control over police.

(Also, this means though people fume about police under investigation being on paid leave, the pay doesn’t include overtime which can be a hardship felt as a punishment for people who i.e. have planned for it against fixed expenses like mortgages.)

The take-home car, well, in addition to being a perk in its own right, that helps gate access to external sources of support - “courtesy” rental rates at apartments that want a visible police presence, in-uniform security at private events - where cruisers are a big part of the “showing the flag” effect sought.

(If you’re like “where do they find the time for these side jobs?” keep in mind a lot of police are on particular schedules with a lot of days off - 4 10 hour days followed by 3 off, or 12 hour shifts with 15 days off of every 30.)

SO, basically there are some pretty big carrots and sticks that are completely off the civilian radar. And what do you do about that? The more levels of monitoring and review you put on scheduling and overtime decisions the less quick-response flexibility (the mantra of the CompStat age) you have.

(This could be eased a bit by hiring up a buffer of new recruits… who draw salaries… and benefits… and incur training costs… and insurance… and pensions, which are a huge looming problem in a lot of places. Not to mention giving the union more foot soldiers.)

But going hands-off allows supervisors to wildly increase or cut individual officers’ income and quality of life at will. You give someone that lever, they’ll find things to do with it.

The second focus worth noting here is the way police can inflict retribution against each other indirectly by doing nothing, just not backing each other up, and expecting the nature of the job to eventually throw some blows that land unblocked.

One variant being to leave them to go on dangerous assignments and then not offer backup if they encountered violence. That’s a classic, here’s Joe Serpico talking about being left to get shot in the face and bleed out in the ‘70s.

Another variant being that public complaints or lawsuits that a department would normally and successfully defend against would go uncountered and yield judgments that the officer involved be fired, fined, demoted - all difficult or impossible to do directly due to civil service protections and powerful unions - or in the case of criminal charges, even imprisoned.

And okay let’s set aside the median cop who as far as I can tell in calm moments has a notion that there is a thing as “too far” but any non-police agent is likely to set that bar too low to practically achieve things the public and political actors demand just as vehemently. Past him, even the ones in the more anti-abuse end of things seem convinced that gratuitous accusations are par for the course, given that people are frequently upset at police who take even by-the-books police action against them and that’s the official venue to seek redress.

So that sets up a problem for today’s movement against police abuses, which is if you build political pressure to show results - as measured by police officers convicted or subjected to discipline, how do you prevent this from empowering police corruption to clean house of dissidents, to support and approval from the very media and nonprofit watchdogs who take it as their duty to fight corruption? (God knows pressuring the police to show numbers has yielded less than stellar outcomes before.)

Because honestly, that strikes me as the path of least resistance. Crackdowns can be and are co-opted. (When California decided to build more prisons and send more people there for longer, the Mexican Mafia co-opted it to dominate the street drug trade by first establishing domination within the prison population [well, the Hispanic part] and issuing orders to gangbangers on the outside with threats of retribution or reward if and when they’re imprisoned in turn.)

So how do you prevent that? Putting the decision how and which cases to pursue out of department hands, that’s coherent, but how and which cases to defend? How would that work? What else?

(As far as I can tell the cop answer to both these questions is “Unions.” Which, that’s a point! The things cop unions do that reformers don’t like - reflexively defend all officers in all situations, fund legal defenses and media campaigns more full-throated and perp-smearing than a body subject to official pressure and using public funds might? Appeal to notions of solidarity to get other officers to use their positions and expertise to support the defense even in the face of management directives? Negotiate contracts that include high baseline pay and benefits, and provisions that make it difficult to establish cases against officers? Those are all felt, by cops, as safeguards against police corruption, and as much as that’s used as a convenient stalking horse there is something there. So what do you do about that?)

Huh.

“I’m a pro-labor Republican,” he said. “I think the record is clear in history that the best jobs are union jobs with higher wages and benefits.”

When asked whether or not he would, as a state legislator, support a “Right-to-Work” (RTW) law which would allow workers in unionized industries to choose for themselves whether or not to join the union, Rose said that he goes “back and forth” on that issue, saying that he understands the desire to give workers the right to choose membership, though he say he worries that RTW laws only serve to “empower corporate elites.”

“I lean ‘no’ on Right-to-Work,” he said. “However, I can’t make a commitment yet, because every Right-to-Work bill is different.”

Huh.

The realignment proceeds apace.

That’s just outside of Whitefish. I wonder if Richard Spencer’s got a hand in this. Of all alt-right types he always seemed the most likely to found a caucus and not just a mutual jerkoff society.

Course not sure I have the causalty right there. Could just be Montana. America still has a frontier and it is fucking wild.

Was in Missoula for a cousin’s wedding one summer. The college, “blue” town of Montana. Honest to god grizzled prospector-looking guys in the bars getting into fights over real-money card games, people passing out drunk on the sidewalk in mid-stride, proud celebration of the town’s founding bordellos. Wild west.

My Sandpoint story - it’s good and telling but I’m starting to get attached to it as my Noodle Incident. That was the Idaho panhandle but it was in coming back from Montana, the motorcycle fan/aircraft builder/missionary who really saved my bacon (and served great witness) was a Pacific Islander and at one point he mentioned in passing, with an eye roll, how sometimes when he’d go into town those Aryan Nations guys come down from the hills would think he was Mexican and give him shit.

Like, boom, the fuckin’ backstory you had to imagine to that.

Next day on my way west, passing through the farms with all the giant Ten Commandments signs that guy paid for, stopped in Post Falls to get some food. Some sort of festival in the parking lot across the way, I’m like holy shit, are they doing a Jars of Clay cover?

Go inside, it’s like a Denny’s specializing in wild game almost. All sorts of homey signs, and taxidermied animals, and I’m like “yes, yes, the outdoors and Christianity, I get the concept by now” Then… I forget if this was a sign like right behind the welcome counter or prominently on the menu, but I remember a line proudly being like “God may not be welcome in the SCHOOLS, but he sure has a place HERE”

Like, boom.

At any given time about one in every 6000 Montana residents is a state legislator, term limited to a maximum of 8 years in each chamber. Standard sessions are a maximum of 90 days every other year and are paid $82.64/day, the equivalent of a daily worker making $10.33/hr. Per diems on top of this are $112.85, making the total payout just short of $17,600 per semiannual session.

The most prominent item on the front page of the Montana legislature’s website is a link to this form soliciting Helena-area homeowners looking to rent rooms to legislators.

theonlylivingboyinnewyork:

997:

i hate this website

This is perfect

I think I’d have enjoyed being a US Army officer back in the post-Vietnam fuckup Stripes era, posted to some base in Germany or Korea or Japan.

Like, at 23, “Here’s three dozen non-college bros having their dorm life experience, it’s your job to tell them what to do. Here’s where you’ll practice blowing stuff up and play laser tag with real tanks all day, here’s the bars and brothels at night. Try to keep the guys from getting picked up by the MPs drunk and fighty too much. Even if they drug test dirty, not like we’d have someone to replace them with.”

“Here’s base pay at a solid conversion rate, here’s enough to get a nice apartment, here’s a bonus for going skydiving with your friends every few months. Have a great time, we’ll call you up for a victory lap in the Gulf War and send you home to parades.”

“Oh, and if Reagan ever gets frisky, we’re sending you straight into a solid wall of tanks and shells. Don’t worry, we’ll nuke it for you first.”

I could dig that.

Yes, I do think Russia is behind these hack leaks - it makes too much sense that way and too little any way else - so the question is, does it stop when the election ends, or are we going to be getting little Zimmerman Telegrams all through the HRC administration?

I’ve speculated if NATO goes in on Syria Putin might try to open a second front or distract the US by stirring up political unrest stateside, and honestly how tough is that gonna be at this point?

(The American Revolution was supported by France to wrongfoot the UK)

phantogram:

Sarah Barthel & Josh Carter here…we play in a band called Phantogram.

Our new album “Three” just came out. If some of the songs seem very dark…it’s because they are. They’re highly-personal portraits from our past; snapshots of tragedy, loss, and all the emotions that follow. For those of you who don’t know, we did actually suffer a great loss this past year, when we lost our sister Becky (Sarah’s sister) to suicide.

It crushed us.

We went through a wide range of emotions…loneliness, depression, desperation. And it was hard to find focus. The biggest support we had was each other, and of course, our close friends and family. We talked, we hurt, and we’re still talking. Still keeping on. But it wasn’t easy getting to this point.

We thought about how tragic life can be at times, how the world can bring you down…and we ended up learning that you have to try to find the beauty in it. It’s okay to not feel okay, and it’s okay to ask for help. We even thought about you guys (our fans & friends), and what you’d think about when listening to this album. And if you or someone you know is experiencing any issues with mental health - please don’t be afraid to get help.

Communication was our way of dealing with it…and we think it can help you too. Find love & support in each other, and don’t stop talking. Don’t stop sharing your stories or your advice.

#postitforward
#bestfriendshit

Check out Tumblr’s @postitforward campaign to help continue to counter the stigmas around mental and emotional health.

This is an advertisement on Tumblr dot com.

cairawr:

radioforyoureyes:

4lung:

itchycoil:

h-e-r-s-t-o-r-y:

A New Sexual Identity Emerges…👤👥1995 @newsweek (rg @ray.chandler) #bi #biguy #biculture #blazer #1995

They look so sneaky … Me

1995 - bisexuality discovered 

Bisexuality turned 21 this year

someone tell me all about the cappuccino vs cowboys dilemma