Office Space and Friends were such perfect suburban/urban versions of the 90s promise - by maintaining self-awareness and resolutely refusing to sell out, a stable and fulfilling life are yours, young white college-educated man, complete with a similarly young Jennifer Aniston type (or in less polished versions of the legend Janeane Garofalo) to be better than other people with, not only a reward but an assurance after the 70s-80s divorce era.
Because given a fair chance who could outcompete you, someone who DID sell out, someone who indulged their neuroses and flawed personalities without any buffering self-awareness? (And thus lacked the distance to properly appreciate and accommodate hers?) C'mon.
Anonymous asked: jeff kaplan overwatch converts to back to africa movement. all work is scrapped and new character slaate emerges. hero of his time marcus garvey, prophet haile selassie, scientist richard dawkins, and newly elected mayor of oakland jerry seinfeld are included. orisa converted to black star liner vehicle. "my primary function is to ensure your trip to africa". but who is calling the shots? where does the game plan come from? is kaplan truly the third coming of jah? the answer lies in nigeria
In which I mumble about wanting to smush more people I like closer together.
yes! let’s make a little rationalist community where families can live and everyone’s not all crammed into the same single house! let’s buy out an apartment building and move everyone in!
Things I Think Would Be Nice To Have:
basic units of 3ish bedrooms clustered around smallish living areas w/ basic kitchen + bathroom
larger communal area for hosting Events
larger fancy communal kitchen for cooking large group meals
communal outdoor area w/ firepit and garden (particularly an edible garden with herbs, veggies, fruit trees, etc)
dedicated co-working area (with a library!)
guest rooms or units where visitors can stay
bike/carshares
It would be cool to do it as a co-op situation and maybe rent out the guest units/event space (on AirBnb?) for extra income, to help bolster those who can’t afford as much rent?
This is basically my ideal living situation that you’re describing. I would like to add exercise equipment to the list of things it would be nice to have. (Only slightly related: if we got some kind of big building I doubt anyone would stop you from riding a bike in the halls)
Also, my mom suggests coming to Utah and buying an old mormon church. Of course that plan would require moving to Utah, so…
hey yo please read up on the history of communal living before you do this, there are best practices and known failure modes and subtle differences in founding design can matter a lot
American communalism comes in waves, the 1960s was the last, there was a big one in the 1840s. Tend to be thinky types into human perfectibility and complex sexual geometry, you guys fit in
Any recommended materials or examples of success?
This isn’t my specialty and I’ve forgotten a bunch of what I ever knew but like, look up the Oneida Community, and the Shakers, maybe ask a research librarian about “American communes” or such
Consider that you are building a micromicrostate for your subsubculture and act accordingly
Formalize your economic/sexual/other repressive structures or they will be a free field of social play
If this is communally funded, the difference in people’s economic situations is a real killer. Not just like coder/app-academy student but guy who gets raises every year/guy in a dead end, girl who just got laid off, think a decade out
People who make more money are not only going to resent paying to subsidize others, they’re going to expect better conditions and more status. They have the option of exit. Which means they have the *threat* of exit.
In cultures that make a point of material egalitarianism but also sexual openness, status and economic struggles can get shunted to sexual access
Honestly work offsite/contribute a high share (or all) of income is best suited to heirarchical or authoritarian communalism, if you want a stable quasi-egalitarianism you’re best if the residential collective participates in a high-skill, high-value added collective industry - look to the Shakers and their chairs, or the longer-surviving kibbutzes in Israel, maybe?
So I get the impression there’s a sudden rationalist(-adjacent) demand for caution w/r/t purposeful group living structures that acknowledged there are failure modes but the concept isn’t inherently a valueless, unsalvageable failure?
In retrospect it was a problem my generation grew up with the 70s memory holed as “oh god embarrassing let’s not talk about it” and interpolated that as “the aesthetics were bad” when it was “we tried to live up to our highest ideals and they shattered us”
Im watching some History Channel conspiracy thing and this dude was like “Look at the back of the dollar bill and see how the number 13 is everywhere. There are 13 stars, 13 pearls, 13 arrows, 13 leaves on the olive branch, 13 stripes on the shield. Why is the number 13 so important? Because of the secret marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene”
White people see white nationalist violence and decide white people are under attack. Cool beans.
Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal, however, told the Guardian that recent street protests had prompted Portland Republicans to consider alternatives to “abandoning the public square”.
“I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” he said. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.”
Asked if this meant Republicans making their own security arrangements rather than relying on city or state police, Buchal said: “Yeah. And there are these people arising, like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.”
Asked if he was considering such groups as security providers, Buchal said: “Yeah. We’re thinking about that. Because there are now belligerent, unstable people who are convinced that Republicans are like Nazis.”
Can’t make this shit up. Like this is a public call for armed white supremacists to show up to protests, rallies, marches and to “protect” Republicans from us. These white men cannot help but support racist violence even when confronted with its abject harm to all.
Alright, I see this close up and I got sympathy for the Multnomah Republicans.
A thing to address the underlying “how can they do X, and expect Y?” is the people doing X and expecting Y here don’t see themselves as the same. The MultCo Republican Party aren’t behind the free speech-branded events designed to pit based stickmen v. antifa - that’s a YouTuber from Vancouver WA.
(And BOTH these social media alt-righters AND the Republicans had independently told the slasher off when he’d showed up to events, on the grounds he wasn’t an ally, just a fighty weirdo asshole looking for a pretense. The Portlanders I know most involved in left protest have been trying to push back on blaming even alt-righters, cause they know that “that guy showed up, I hope no one holds him against us” feel. Also they point out he’s rootless and unstable, been shot in the face by cops and spent years in prison, maybe where he learned that deadly but unsexy down-the-jugular slash, and had the habit of latching on to any cause that lets him antagonize people.)
What the actual Multnomah Republicans have been up to lately is:
A “March 4 Trump” in a park in the country clubby suburb of Lake Oswego - that drew Good Night White Pride types but cops kept the peace. That’s where the slasher-to-be showed up and they told him off.
The 82nd Street Rose Parade in Portland. The Republicans had a section, some SJNGO resume-polisher said he’d rally to resist it and separately some riseup email threatened to physically disrupt it. The organizers asked for more police, the city said no, so they called the whole thing off rather than give in to demands to exclude the Republicans. (The neighborhood fixtures are SE Asian immigrant neighborhood businessmen with all the anticommunist rightism that implies, the county party holds meetings at one of their restaurants, so.)
As far as the party’s concerned, they’re doing anodyne Norman Rockwell stuff - a picnic rally in a friendly neighborhood, marching in a civic parade - long accepted as perfectly proper. That at least violence-avowing skirmishers are harrying them isn’t ideal, but when the authorities bother to keep the peace (as in Lake Oswego) things work. But when they don’t, as in Portland, they don’t. And so they’re acting in reaction to that right now.
And yeah, if your major party can’t even hold Norman Rockwell events because your rivals in city administration won’t bother to defend them from political paramilitaries, cause maybe #resistance, that’s a problem, and I sympathize with the notion that it’s those guys’ duty to address it completely at their own expense.
And the slashings aren’t something that would make the GOP accept this, and they take claims that that makes it ok, or even necessary, as further provocation, an insulting non sequitur. The recent killer voting Bernie and Stein is way too thin a reed to pin it on leftism, but I’ll say it’s reasonable grounds for the Republican Party to not feel on the hook for a guy they specifically ran off on their own initiative long before.
If there’s a lesson, as far as the Republicans are concerned, it’s that heated tensions attract and empower hotheads, and that tensions should be calmed. And that while “one major party, the currently ruling one, accepts that they cannot hold Norman Rockwell-type events in rival-administered cities” might calm tensions on this subject, it is a wrong answer, un-American, and that “political and civic society institutions reaffirm and enforce that Norman Rockwell-type electioneering, even that which empowers rival forces, should be respected, even when disliked”, which would also calm tensions, is right.
Liberalism! It has its charms. And yes, this particular communique is a threat, and the threat is “if you abrogate liberalism, and backstop your rule with political paramilitaries it doesn’t mean we roll over and you just win, jfc.”
It’s a Weimar escalation cycle all over again, for all that leftists fault the SPD for trying to reign in left-streetfighters, mainline rightists faulted it for not crossing their base to discipline the ruffians enough, “what choice did you leave us but those who would?”
For a while worried I was missing out on not having any tattoos but seeing people my age with legs like your binder on the last week of school… I realize I was right to be better than everyone else, as always.
