The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous startups in Silicon Valley, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five startups?” // “If I find forty-five there,” God said, “I will not destroy it.”
… The two venture capitalists arrived at Palo Alto in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. … They did go with him and entered his $0.9m one-bedroom home. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without gluten, and they ate. Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of Silicon Valley—both young and old—surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can pitch our startups to them.”
I mean hashtag everyone I know on tumblr and especially all the atheists I respect have started casually/competitively invoking Christian and Jewish mythology like the Renaissance did Greek and Roman, that’s interesting
I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU
This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.
Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.
When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.
So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.
The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.
Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, ‘60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.
If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.
Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.
I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.
If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy”
was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.
Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.
If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.
The 90s were a wonderful liberal interlude between the positive faction winning the feminist sex wars, and the start of the social justice movement. I remember reading Camille Paglia essays and thinking “glad that’s sorted”…
same tbh. Remember when Paglia essays ran in fucking Salon, before it was Bush-era Salon, before Slate was Bush-era Salon, when it was blue skies forever and our job was gonna be to just sit on green hillsides drinking mild poppy tea and maybe know how WINSOCK.DLL worked?
I have a theory that every social group has two sets of values: Mythic Values, and Folk Values.
The Mythic Values are the qualities of that group’s exceptional members, its heroes, the semi-mythical figures that everyone in the group more or less aspires to emulate.
For example, the Mythic values of Catholicism are about emulating Christ and the Saints, their self-sacrifice, their faith, their not-of-this-world-ness. The Mythic values of nerd culture center around figures like Nikola Tesla and Steve Jobs, the archetype of a Mad Scientist/Captain of Industry hybrid. Scientific knowledge, inventiveness, not giving a fuck about what the muggles think. The Mythic values of movement Conservatism are embodied in the archetypal cowboy and archetypal soldier. The physical strength, the physical courage, the combat ability, the sheer animal dominance.
Folk Values, on the other hand, are the qualities of that group’s average members.
Nerd culture’s folk values center less on scientific knowledge, more on nerd trivia. The key question is “how devoted a fan are you?” Are you an Old School D&D player? are you a Hardcore Gamer? Have you memorized the entire screenplay of Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Conservative folk values are about liking country music and spaghetti westerns, and complaining about hippies, reciting the republican talking points. I haven’t spent enough time in Catholic communities to know what Catholic folk values are, but i suspect is has something to do with celibacy and Chesterton quotes.
In a sane world, we’d recognize folk values and mythic values as two separate things, and use them to differentiate the members of a community from the leadership of a community. But we don’t.
Instead…. we invest the practice of Folk Values with a… talismanic property. a kind of sympathetic magic, where the symbolic qualities of one thing are supernaturally transferred from one entity to another. Do you think wearing that ten gallon hat means you’d survive a day on the Frontier?
I am not a man of singular integrity. I didn’t realize any of this until circumstance forced me to.
It was kind of like… dreaming. like in some superstitious way I thought I was laying the foundation for something real. All I had to do was hold on to the Folk Values hard enough, and for long enough, and one day the Mythic Values would simply pop into existence within me. When the time came, I would suddenly transform into the man I wanted to be.
But of course the time never did come.
Once you understand on a visceral level that mourning John Wayne doesn’t make you John Wayne, you can’t really be a conservative.
You’re either a Soldier or a Civilian. A Cowboy or a Tenderfoot. A Hero or a Bystander. there’s nothing in between.
Once you understand on a visceral level that Fucking Loving Science has nothing to do with possessing scientific knowledge, you can’t really be a science nerd.
You’re either a Scientist, or a Layman. A Morlock, or an Eloi. there’s nothing in between.
Once you realize that there is no connection whatsoever between the folk values and the mythic values, so many cultural milieus become off-limits to you. But what’s more, you realize that… everyone around you is holding themselves to despicably low standards. Every subculture– or at least the ones with a lot of subcultural pride– starts to look like a bunch of puffed-up chest-beating macho bullshitters who’ve made a secret pact to never call each other out on their bullshit.
(“I’ll pretend that you posting all those Neil DeGrasse Tyson memes means you actually possess scientific knowledge if you do the same for me.” “I’ll pretend that you owning every Rage Against the Machine album means you’ve actually contributed to Anarchist politics if you do the same for me” “I’ll pretend that your encyclopedic knowledge of Clint Eastwood films means you’d survive a real world shootout if you do the same for me.” )
You start to realize that the act of sympathetic magic that makes participation trophies work is the same magic act that holds society together. The magic that says “You can be one of the Good Guys even if you’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
i’m trying not to post every single article off this website but this one is too good… these seem super cool and easy to build (and, if we’re being honest, #aesthetic)
i feel like people in rural armenia would immediately find uses for them given how badly the road system has gone to shit (there’s roads you can’t even tell were paved 20 years ago) and the prevalence of cars for short-distance transport
for instance, a common problem here is that disabled and elderly people can’t get around their villages easily. if you can’t walk, you have to ride in a car, because even if you had a wheelchair (which most don’t) it might be difficult or impossible to use on the rocky, pothole-filled village roads. a chinese wheelbarrow could get people to school, church, etc. with no problem
Yo if you are scouring history for low-tech adaptations to shitty road conditions might I suggest the King (“split-log”) Road Drag - it’s an absurdly simple and effective regrading tool for loose-surfaced roads (i.e. dirt and gravel, maybe not potholed pavement), it can be built by hand tools from scrap wood and towed by consumer car (so no issues like “where will you source or manufacture an appropriately-dimensioned tire”).
Invented in America at the turn of the 20th century but mostly overlooked as it came after authorities started to pave roads.
More political streetfighting in Berkeley today, I’m hearing the rightists got reinforcements from all over the country, broke antifa lines, and routed them. Based Stickman has an army.
Kuli the one-eyed cat started surfing when he was 6 months old after being rescued from the streets of Honolulu. He has no fear of water because he was bathed a lot while recovering from eye surgery.
As far as surfing cats go, Kuli is a pro - although he does wear a teeny-tiny-yet-functional life preserver on occasion.
He seems pretty content with life, even immediately following surgery.
I just want to point out that you may never again see another photo that includes a one-eyed cat, drenched in water, floating on a surfboard, perfectly chill, in front of a double rainbow.
