I just learned that you can buy your message’s way into a full okcupid mailbox for $1
and the friendly-seedy tone - the offer is a popup saying “with a little bribery we’ll let it slide”
OKCupid is SO GOOD at correctly humanizing life-by-profitseeking-algorithm
has anyone else here read John Varley?
“Thrift Shop” is like “YMCA” there’s subaltern subtext if you want, there’s also an honest celebration of a taken-for-granted populist institution, there’s also woah dude fun song
PS. the precedent for Macklemore isn’t Vanilla Ice, it’s Everlast
Ever since leaving behind the “good war” of WWII, the CoD series has loved its moral ambiguity. No Russian yeah, but the very first mission of MWI was this tutorial stage where you’re incentivized to keep running through this plywood mockup killing pop-up Bad Guy With A Gun targets until you’re doing it perfectly on autopilot. And then, those muscle-memories fresh, you’re dumped on the mocked-up freighter and use them on innocent sailors, men in their bunks, and stumbling drunks.
I mean I guess more than anything the ideology of the modern CoD games is that all heroes are someone else’s villain, and so to really Be A Hero you need not just boldness and unparalleled skill but, like with undercover narratives, you have to Know Which Side You’re On, and fully commit to it even in the knowledge that it’s a fundamentally arbitrary distinction and…
Wait, yeah, I guess that is really fascist. It’s also more honest as a power fantasy than games that make of you an unstoppable battalion- if not division-level killing machine and then narratively present you as the underdog protector. Usually of humanity, from ugly alien invasion waves, or zombies. Or Nazis, who we use in the same capacity (see the “Nazi zombie” endless horde modes that come right along with the CoD single player stories). I mean jesus, what must you look like from their side?
I mean I guess that is blops2 right there - Menendez might be a fully justified freedom fighter, but What Must He Look Like From Our Side?
I guess, might be, can see, maybe
I speciailze in qualifiers, they create distance between me and things that are real
So when I was noticeably more new to Portland I heard people saying of Mississippi Street “oh, that’s the hipster district”
And I was thinking “wait, there’s a non-hipster district?” (ok yes, but I never go east of 60th and only make it south of Powell or up to North for a few pinball bars).
So I went and I realized what they were getting at - it was a “New Brooklyn” theme park.
The condominiums, the halfway-there construction sites stalled by the downturn, older properties a great deal if you can actually finance the rehab.
The stores were so twee, so full of bicycle-commuting, stroller-pushing urban planners even by Portland standards, which holy shit.
The gay bankers and other new money with a “suave and restrained” (which is to say upmarketed) take on the lifestyle branding of 10 years ago, who are just sooooooo haughtily proud that THEIR 10 years ago was 2002.
The well-imagineered bars where you overhear the new generation of old money comparing their European vacations.
Oh shit it’s
NEOCOLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG
man I’m going to be proud of that for weeks.
Molly McAleer once told me I wasn’t a hipster, she had a really detailed and correct taxonomy and I was actually an indie kid. Which, yes. On the other hand, there used to be freaks and beatniks and jesus freaks and SDSers and new agers and all that but in the end they turned out to all be hippies, you know?
Sliced bread is a loaf of bread which has been pre-sliced with a machine and packaged for convenience. It was first sold in 1928, advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped”.[1] This led to the popular phrase, “the greatest thing since sliced bread”.so i guess thats where it came from i guess (via avrillavigneamvs240p)
So the “Cultural Marxism” meme.
Which, for those of you that have the misfortune to follow this tumblr because you know me personally or like happy hardcore, is an idea lately growing in prominence though still largely confined to the rightist alt-media. It’s the idea that “political correctness”, the collapse of self-assured WASP cultural supremacy, the destabilization of gender roles, and so on and so on are actually continuous with the Marxist project of world revolution in general and the destruction of America in particular.
And that this is all traceable to a group of German Jewish refugee academics known as the Frankfurt School, who in the shadow of WWII took Marxism (which traditionally viewed itself as the science of history, and was most likely to be classified by outsiders as economics or political philosophy), married it to Freudian psychology and literary criticism, and birthed of that unholy union a revolutionary monster. (Actually more recently I see Frank Boas and cultural anthropology getting tossed in, though he’s a generation earlier - but still German Marxist Jewish.)
I see people wonder Where This All Came From All Of A Sudden, and there’s a simple answer, and it’s American Studies.
Andrew Brietbart, who did more than anyone to get the idea circulating, was American Studies at Tulane. William S. Lind, who basically originated the meme in the ‘90s at the Free Congress Foundation, was History - specifically American - at Dartmouth and then Princeton, but then I don’t think they give American Studies degrees at the corresponding levels. (I know when I was doing American Studies at Cornell, most of my classes were cross-listed history.)
And the thing about American Studies is - well, university departments are fiefdoms more than anything else. I’m not sure how it works in the STEM fields, but in the social sciences and humanities, just like nations are languages with an army, departments are canons with tenure lines. When you think about it that way all the departmental politics make more sense. The canonical example of stakes so low, but the thing is even in miniature, they’re still full-blown feudal succession crises, with usurpations and splits and takeovers attendant.
Boasians pretty much stole anthropology from the skull-measurers, economics departments are split into freshwater and saltwater, philosophy’s got continental/analytic (in America, mostly analytic). Sociology claims to be the study of society, and you’d think that would be covered by history, or anthropology, or hell maybe philosophy, but none of those disciplines worshipped statistics like they did in Chicago so.
Women’s Studies departments were formed to give feminist canon a home, then Gender Studies for queer theory canon, and recently there were a bunch of mergers between the two that got really hostile because even if they’d seem to cover the same topics THEY’RE DIFFERENT CANONS with different theoretical bases and policy biases and that’s what counts.
English departments in America were always struggling to put together a native canon, after WWII they kind of settled on Thoreau and Melville through to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and the theoretical approach of close reading. (That’s where secondary education last dipped into the well, which is why high school still has you sniffing out symbolism in an American literary tradition that ends in the '30s, plus maybe Amy Tan and Toni Morrison and The Crucible.)
Then the Canon Wars of the '70s blew that all away, and in the aftermath you ended up with English taking in refugees from canons too unhegemonic to get recognized as their own discipline. “Theory” was big for a while, and it was largely continental philosophy’s outpost in America, though I hear it’s been pushed back to redoubts in Cornell and Irvine. Elsewhere you’ve got visual studies and film studies and material culture and post-colonialism and I hear evo-psych’s preparing to storm a few.
But I digress. The thing is that the Frankfurt School is the canon that American Studies coalesced around, and so it’s unsurprising that people who came up in that tradition would hold them up as The Key To Understanding America, because in that tradition that’s exactly what they are. The right-blogosphere take on them isn’t even a mirror image of the American Studies view, it’s the very same view. Tenured academics would be much more positive (and jaded) about the long march through the institutions - obv - and the Scheming Jew subtext gets played as Cultured European instead, but the idea that the Frankfurt School represents a successful attempt to destabilize and revolutionize America’s understanding of itself, and successive cultural developments can be laid at their feet fundamentally IS the American Studies idea.
I’ll say that from my experience in American Studies there definitely were other currents going on.
Some came from history, which like I said was my focus. My advisor was technically Michael Kammen, but he was on half-time getting ready to retire and had a really easy signature to forge for add/drop forms, a MK with the right stroke of the M serving as the left of the K, so Stuart Blumin ended up being my major influence in the department. That side of things was social/cultural history drawing on Hobsbawm and the Communist Party Historians Group - to my shame, it’s only now that I’m getting around to reading Making of the English Working Class.
That helps account for my Marxian sympathies even though if you’ve been reading my essays lately my history isn’t very materialist at all and I came up through the apparatus of institutional libertarianism. (Back in the ‘90s before blogs and aggregators were a thing, I’d go to free-market.net’s daily link roundup and enter their contest. I finally won in college once - the months ahead of and behind me got I think $50 in gold, I got a paperback copy of L. Neil Smith’s Pallas, a CD of the most atrocious folk music ever recorded and a steady stream of direct-mail appeals from Jews for the Protection of Firearms Ownership.)
The third tendency, which I don’t even think recognized itself as a tendency, was Badass Big Swinging Dick Truth-Telling Journalists/Social Novelists. Mark Twain, Horatio Alger (yes, Horatio Alger, if you know him secondhand then you don’t know him) Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Mencken, Pietro di Donato, Phillip Roth. For some reason not the New Journalism, though jfc, HST and double jfc, Tom Wolfe (an American Studies man himself) would fit right in. That might’ve come after the average professor got tenure, though. (Starting today they’d probably get at least a chubby for Sailer and all of Grantland, too.) That’s got a pretty good socialist streak itself but there’s room for reactionaries and above all Clever White Guys Who Are Really Good At Describing Things so
So that thing that keeps recurring, where the honor of an unmarried woman inhered in her virginity and the honor of a man in his unmarried female relatives’ virginity?
That’s often presented as a religious thing but it’s really more a rural thing and it’s maybe the only way to organize a small isolated society that’s not full of incest?
Like, the Amish don’t really have that and well
The word “taboo” comes from the Polynesian “tabu” which were these extensive systems of cultural restrictions that all these small island cultures had and at the center of them was like “jfc, don’t fuck your relatives”
and it cuts both ways, because Freud was maybe onto things when he saw so much neurosis originating in Not Fucking Your Relatives, and it is not a mistake that the Great Liberation of The Sixties was so tied up in the public recognition of youngsters as sexual beings and in rendering them available, unintentionally or otherwise, to their elders
(like, dating from that era NAMBLA has the same stab-in-the-back narrative about gradualist sexual minority activism that trans groups do, and they don’t even get spotted a letter in the acronym)
I’ve been in Portland for a year and change now and I love it to death, before I first showed up I thought “pinch me I must be dreaming” or “I’ve died and gone to heaven” were stock phrases, but no I really find it so perfect in every way that it’s hard to imagine it exists in the same world that I lived the rest of my life in
But you know occasionally I get the uncanny and fleeting impression that “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” wasn’t so much a metaphor as a feminist response to “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”
2013 is getting really weird..
god fucking bless
we sure have defined ‘robot’ down
Middle-aged American uses robots to build furniture.
All you commies are aware that “robot” basically means “serf labor” in Czech and it comes from a play that’s literally Socialist Reverse Frankenstein? Like, at the end the robots are the mob at the castle gates killing the industrialist humans who lament not giving the robots national identities to divide them. Metropolis had precedent.
There was a book called Sewer, Gas & Electric by Matt Ruff that was among other things a ‘90s update kinda. Only there had been a white supremacist engineered virus that as far as anyone knew killed all the black people, and it sorta came about that after that people wildly preferred these cyborg servants in black which was awkward, but for whose benefit are you really feeling guilty at that point, you know?
And that’s kind of interesting, because Atomic Age robofetishism really was a lot about giving the New Middle Class all the advantages of the old, narrow middle class (i.e. mansions and servants) without maintaining a servant class (i.e. blacks). The postwar right defined itself so hard against the New Deal that it kind of obscures that the New Deal was an entirely functional, entirely achievable populist nationalism where the nation was defined as white, or, you know, “white nationalism”.
Ruff’s book though kind of skirts that in favor of comedy wackiness. Like, there’s a Nazi cargo cult submarine base under the Statue of Liberty, and comedic relief from the Angry Spirit of Ayn Rand trapped in a hurricane lamp, a lot of Randian pastiche actually.
I get my insurance through USAA, it’s a great deal, member-owned, if you’re eligible (current or former military in good standing, immediate family of an existing member) you should look into it.
The only weird bit is the solicitations for new services and products tend to go for this Capitalism As Extension Of Soldiering aesthetic, so every now and then I open up my mailbox and get something like this.
I’ve put out some of the most and best writing I’ve done in years this week. This was actually how I originally figured this blog to be - the name being like a source of historical context for shit going by, and because a machine dedicated to historiography was obviously German.
It’s honestly been inspired by a bunch of neocommunists, mostly the desire to impress monetizeyourcat, who impresses me.
One of you texted to compliment me on my tumblr feed, which he admitted was kind of a ridiculous thing to do. I explained the situation and he said that well, communists man, but if they’re inspiring me to produce like this without use of the profit motive, maybe they got something
Stakhanovitebloggin’
Amazon Trail, Second Voyage of the Mimi, Captain Planet - there was this kind of mini-boom in specifically Central/Southern American edutainment product around 1990. I wonder how much of that was young idealistic creatives finally getting a chance to produce these ideas they came up with as Sandalistas.
Oh man of course all the hits on that are designer-print sandals.
I don’t think American trans activists recognize how poorly the attempt to find a history in the “third-sex” traditions of various cultures sits alongside their rejection of sex reassignment surgery (as “sterilization”) as fundamental to transition
Like, you realize the third-sex tradition of our culture is castrati?
Well, someone just checked the #castration tag.
Step 1: Go someplace public with your laptop.
Step 2: Click HERE
Step 3: Press f11
Step 4: Start typing frantically.
Step 5: Make sure other people see your screen.
Step 6: ???????
Step 7: Profit
