Anonymous asked: How is Forrest Gump fucked up for real?
The transition between ping-pong triumph and Lieutenant Dan introducing the tragedy that was the 70s was a comic relief scene where he skids his wheelchair down an icy ramp
just dozed and had a microdream the message was like “you’d NEVER commit suicide because you’d do it gun-to-temple (true) but you’d drift into romantic reverie first (true) and you’d wander so far you’d lose the plot every time”
So as blue America stumbles its way into an oppositional position, one interesting fight on the horizon is over “sanctuary cities”.
Now obviously that’s relevant to the first-order concern of what effective immigration regime we’ll end up with, and if I wanted to talk historical parallels I’d reference deprecated notions of state (as vs. federal) citizenship, and northern resistance to slavecatchers.
That’s not that important though. What piques my interest is the rumbles are that Team Red will try to undercut sanctuaries not by law and lawsuit but by conditioning federal grants to cities and their agencies on cooperation. (Such “greenmail” using federal highway money was how Congress, under influence of the necrophile lobby MADD, pressured states to standardize and tighten alcohol regulations.)
That’s an important distinction. I think a legal strategy would further reinforce the Democratic coalition, lending it purpose and urgency. The elites doing the legal and ideological lifting would have a chance to relegitimate themselves to their base, make a show of resisting in the courts, maybe even win. Maybe lose with political coalition intact and satisfied they did all they could. (Realistically, maybe drag the case out until a friendly administration can come in and throw it.)
On the other hand, under a greenmail strategy every blue city, and every blue political actor therein, could face a PICK 2 OF (save the DREAMers/don’t raise taxes a bunch/don’t cut budgets a bunch) choice, a golden apple thrown into the Democrats’ high/low urban coalition of comfortable professionals, social service beneficiaries, and marginal identities.
Beyond that, if this infrastructure package I hear about comes with similar conditions that’s some leverage. California’s trying to build a high speed rail backbone and a new Delta water project and even the official estimates have them at eleven digits each, the question is what’re your principles valued at?
They spent like two weeks worth of fifth grade science class teaching us about all sorts of clouds and what they mean
Today I realized I can give a pretty detailed barstool account of several Southern California microclimactic patterns - June Gloom, the Santa Ana winds, the LA basin inversion layer - but I can’t identify cirrus from cumulonimbus
I’m not sure. Hey lovely people who have taken me over half way to a cool million! If you’d like to reblog again, I’d love that, if not, I still love you, and hope you’re having a great day. I’m gonna go do some stand up tonight.
god come on we’re so close. this is like the only meaningful thing that this website could ever achieve
If this can make it before December is over something nice will have happened in 2016.
I’ve said “I hate this” so many times on this website, and never actually meant it, because “I hate this” is just shorthand for ‘this is an example of a meme given a twist I wasn’t expecting with intent to surprise’. Which is, in of itself, a meme on this site. God damn it.
But this… This is something else.
The rapidity of a meme’s introduction to its zenith to its decline is so rapid that in ten years, you’ll need a damn twenty-page manual to explain this. It’ll be as unfunny and hard to explain as jokes in Shakespeare plays, except even more inexplicable because fuck, at least Shakespeare’s jokes are usually about anal or fucking your mother, good wholesome sex jokes we can all get behind.
For the love of fuck, how do you explain loss.jpg? How do you explain gun?
….I THOUGHT THIS WAS A YMCA REFERENCE
it is a YMCA reference - that’s one of the 6 memes being represented here
ok let me see if i can break this down easily. YMCA is the easiest place to start - the song itself has become a meme over time with people changing the lyrics to reference other pop cultural events. so YMCA is meme one (1)
this first lyric replacement (”take the breadsticks and run”) is a reference to the tumblr meme ‘stuffing breadsticks into my purse’. i think everyone remembers that one so i wont bother to explain it. that’s meme two (2)
“man door hand hook car door” is a meme of its own, a creepypasta from i dont remember when. it was a terrible stupid retelling of the generic ‘stuck in a car while hook handed man tries to kill us’ story so the stupid title caught on for memorability. that in and of itself is meme three (3)
‘gun’ is… yeah i dont know how to explain gun. long story short you add gun to the end of a phrase instead of what you expect the last word to be. its shock funny. its everywhere but its popular to add to “man door hand hook car door” for.. some reason? gun is meme four (4)
and the thing is, this four meme combo is something thats gone around before. meme combos are, itself, a meme. which means taking this meme combo and mixing in another meme actually becomes meme five (5)
which leaves us at loss.jpg. loss.jpg was a terrible bad comic supposed to be about some tragic event, but it was presented so poorly literally no one takes it seriously, and for some reason recreating the four-panel setup has become popular. so thats meme six (6)
(but i need to add that this is the greatest version of loss.jpg i think i’ve ever seen. the initial ‘young man’ lines up with the guy bursting through the door, and the shock meme ‘gun’ matches the shock scene of the woman in the hospital and idk if OP even thought about that but it makes this just so much better)
I wasn’t going to reblog this, but @pagesofkenna‘s comprehensive meme-by-meme annotation is a thing of beauty and should be shared.
average tumblr post contains one meme, this post, which contains six, is an outlier and should not be counted
it might also just be a coincidence due to loss.jpg’s format but the whole white minimalist four-panel setup is also suspiciously reminiscent of those early 2000’s rage comics
humanities me: the rise of the modern state is imbricated with the violent imposition of a kind of instrumental rationality favorable to capitalist development, which seeks to transform local knowledge into bureaucratically-legible and controllable forms; which blithely and zoologically enumerates juridical units together by their numbers of Jews with and without civil rights, cattle, unmarried women, etc, and this is bad because
quantitative social science me: holy shit check out this bomb ass dataset of Prussian counties (1812) by Jews with and without civil rights, cattle, unmarried women,
With its Axon unit, Taser controls roughly three-quarters of the police body camera market… .
The real profitability for Taser, moreover, lies not in its cameras but
in the cloud. Its Evidence.com service, providing cloud video storage
and support software, is far more profitable than the cameras
themselves.
This reads like a dispatch from the prime timeline where 2016 is merely a cyberpunk dystopia and not a batshit maelstrom
If you think the CIA is omniscient just remember it took them 11 years to piece together that there might be a connection between how double-agents working for them were suddenly dropping like flies and the fact that one of the CIA agents in charge of “protecting” double-agents suddenly showed up wearing designer clothes and driving a fucking Jaguar
Michael Tracey can get a little ridiculous, but if you told me in 2005 that VICE would form a news bureau he’s a lot closer to the ‘70s Rolling Stone I’d’ve expected than the millennial Time-Life it turned out to be.
