On Thursday, April 4th, 1985, a blast of dystopian satire hit the UK airwaves. Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future was a snarky take on media and corporate greed, told through the eyes of investigative journalist Edison Carter (Matt Frewer) and his computer-generated alter-ego: an artificial intelligence named Max Headroom. Max became a singular ‘80s pop culture phenomenon that represented everything wonderful and horrible about the decade. Max hosted music video shows; Max interviewed celebrities; Max hawked New Coke; Max Headroom became US network television’s very first cyberpunk series. Max was inescapable — and then almost just as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone. Thirty years after the premiere, I spoke with the writers, directors, producers, actors, make-up artists, and network executives that helped bring Max Headroom to life. And it all began, like so many things in the ‘80s, with music videos.
salafis on facebook in the year 2100 getting into heated and doctrinaire arguments over whether al-qaeda or the islamic state had the more correct approach to revolution, the phrase ‘actually existing caliphate’ gets thrown around repeatedly, everyone makes jokes about the thousand different campus-based muslim brotherhood splinter groups even though everyone was in one of them at one point
Just had occasion to see Amélie again, haha remember when we were that generation, our challenge was to be twee enough to get away with being bourgie without selling out?
In 1852, Spear broke all ties with the Universalist church, and instead turned to Spiritualism. He claimed that he was in contact with ‘‘The Association of Electrizers’’, a group of spirits including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Benjamin Rush, as well as Spear’s namesake John Murray. Evidence indicates he occasionally faked signatures as a way to gain authority from a “guide from the past;” however, these signatures were dated beyond the lifetimes of the deceased.[3] Spear believed that the purpose of this group was to bring new technology to mankind, so that greater levels of personal and spiritual freedom could be achieved.[1] The following year, Spear and a handful of followers retreated to a wooden shed at the top of High Rock hill in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they set to work creating the ‘‘New Motive Power’’, a mechanical Messiah which was intended to herald a new era of Utopia. The New Motive Power was constructed of copper, zinc and magnets, all carefully machined, as well as a dining room table. At the end of nine months, Spear and the ‘‘New Mary’’, an unnamed woman, ritualistically birthed the contraption in an attempt to give it life. Unfortunately for Spear, this failed to have the desired effect, and the machine was later dismantled.
I call dibs on “The Association of Electrizers” and “New Motive Power” as band names.
me: hey so remember how you spent the last few years, and kinda your life, thinking about what if things really didn't stay the same
also me: in case
me: yeah in case you ever *really* had to think about it
also me: yeah
me: when's the last time you thought about the egg speech from utena?
also me: oh fuck.
me: …
also me: …
me: …
also me: i mean it was weird enough people were still watching utena
me: yeah, but gender roles, when it was still "roles"
also me: I *know*!
me: but we forgot about the black rose arc, the mikage seminar, didn't we?
also me: we did!
me: because it's not like decadently aestheticized academic dueling means anything in Japanese history
also me: because Germany-sempai, I get it
me: you remember the speech?
me: Herman Hesse!
me: you remember the speech?
also me: if... if it cannot
me: you remember it
also me: if it cannot break the egg's shell, the chick will die without being born
me: we are the chick, the world is our egg
also me: unless we crack the world's shell, we will die without being born
me: smash the world's shell
us: sekai wo kakumei suru tame ni!
: ::elevator stops::
once every few weeks i remember exactly how bad the narrator of fight club wanted tyler durden to raw him and wake up in a cold sweat haunted by the hordes of straight dudes who thought that this character was heterosexual
straight dudes: boy, fight club sure does speak to our specific, heterosexual form of masculinity! what a classic!
fight club’s actual narrator: i am in love with a man
Slammed In the Ass By The Alternate Personality I Created to Vent My Frustration With Consumer Culture and My Confused Sense of Masculinity by Chuck Tingle
The big religious freedom reveal is about… the Johnson amendment? That’s not gonna pay off the promise.
I can’t imagine who even stands to benefit from weakening wards against direct congregational participation in electoral politics. The Scientologists? The Kiryas Joel Satmar and FLDS compounds that were already buying their autonomy by organizing their congregations as a transactional voting bloc?
Maaaaybe the Roman Catholic Church, they’ve got a big pro-life infrastructure in the rust belt states Trump flipped to red, that could help keep them. TBH more likely someone new who figures out how to use it, like the televangelists who figured out broadcasting.
At least Bush the Younger’s “Faith-Based Initiatives” thing had political logic, a pivot to Christian Democracy - soften the GOP image by identifying it with social programs, while redirecting social spending from (liberal) public agencies and NGOs to (conservative) churches, meanwhile get politically influential black churches on board and dependent on GOP-protected revenue streams.
The big religious freedom reveal is about… the Johnson amendment? That’s not gonna pay off the promise.
I can’t imagine who even stands to benefit from weakening wards against direct congregational participation in electoral politics. The Scientologists? The Kiryas Joel Satmar and FLDS compounds that were already buying their autonomy by organizing their congregations as a transactional voting bloc?
Maaaaybe the Roman Catholic Church, they’ve got a big pro-life infrastructure in the rust belt states Trump flipped to red, that could help keep them. TBH more likely someone new who figures out how to use it, like the televangelists who figured out broadcasting.
At least Bush the Younger’s “Faith-Based Initiatives” thing had political logic , a pivot to Christian Democracy - soften the GOP image by identifying it with social programs, while redirecting social spending from (liberal) public agencies and NGOs to (conservative) churches, meanwhile get politically influential black churches on board and dependent on GOP-protected revenue streams.
I think you are missing the potential for a-religious interest groups and individuals to evade campaign contribution restrictions by laundering the money through either existing or new churches.
Badger finds lightning fascinating, it’s the kind of thing he stops tearing ass across the room for, but that’s only cuz he hasn’t heard the thunder yet
two things monetizeyourcat (PBUH) said that really stuck in my head are
1) a good way to tease out the political commitments underlying various comfort-loving centrisms is to ask the (historically accurate) question of whether you would support a communist revolution in order to preempt a fascist revolution, and vice versa
2) that men judging, instructing, correcting others, esp. women and children on how to think, feel, and be is in fact a genuine expression of care for others parallel to women’s acts of comforting; that men, as an owning class in patriarchy express as management what the laboring class of women express by emotional labor
