kontextmaschine:

Innovate - Innovate

Another entry in my “happycore is distilled ’90s” argument. Seriously, try to tell me these lyrics aren’t a straight paean to neoliberal creative-class enthusiasm:

innovate, redefine
recreate what’s in your mind
it isn’t fate
you decide
only you can cross that line
innovate, redefine
change is what will come in time
make or break, redesign
what it takes, you will find
innovate, redefine
innovate, redesign
innovate, redefine
innovate, redesign

like, seriously, listen to this.

One of the things I really liked about L.A. Noire was its exploration of the mostly overlooked period of the late-40s, and how that set the stage for the more familiar 50s-60s-70s cycle that followed. That America as a country was at the top of the world but the experience of living through the Roaring 20s-Great Depression/Dust Bowl-mobilization and participation in the last Napoleonic total war* cycle left individual Americans immensely traumatized on a personal level, and that if the domestic consumerist fantasia of the Atomic Age ’50s was just escapism, well it was at least viable escapism, and Americans had some serious shit to escape.

* Napoleonic in the sense of being ultimately decided by huge massed formations of ground troops. The Korean War was really the last Napoleonic war albeit not total, and it was so “forgotten” largely because no one really knew how to conceptualize a Napoleonic war that didn’t ultimately resolve with a clear hegemony-producing victory for one side and collapse and liquidation of the other.

Like, that’s an important point w/r/t the ’50s (supposed) social conservatism it wasn’t a point on the straight- line continuum from Then to Now. The Sexual Revolution, if you count it as the spread of nonmarital sex, didn’t start in the ’60s with college and the Pill, it started in the 1910s with IUDs, diaphragms, and single girls living alone in the big cities doing clerical work.

National magazines , the equivalent of today’s Salon or Slate or Gawker or The Atlantic (maybe The Atlantic itself) wrote articles in the late 40s/early 50s worrying that contemporary teens were starting sexually exclusive relationships too young without playing the field for a while, and that this would stunt their personal development.

And think about it, the imagery of “going steady”, a boy giving a girl his class ring/letterman jacket/fraternity pin to signal they had exclusive claims on each other, a sort of Marriage Junior. But that’s something over and above “dating”, right? Today we think of two people dating as being exclusive, but if you look at what it meant back then - call a girl up on Wednesday to go out on Friday, more a verb than a relationship state, popular guys dating different girls each week, popular girls fielding multiple offers. And then going to drive-ins, to dark movie theaters, “parking” on Lover’s Lane.

“Going steady” was what we’d call dating now because “dating” was what we’d call “hooking up” - going out with someone you didn’t necessarily love but could get along with and looked good, having fun, trading orgasms. Might develop into something more, might not.

You can pick up on this if you listen to goofy ’50s rock and roll, or movies about teens, and appreciate that “and we’re having sex” is the subtext. When Runaround Sue was running around, that’s to say she was sleeping around. That’s one of the reasons I dislike euphemisms - once the euphemism treadmill goes through a few cycles it can become difficult for different generations to properly understand history.

(and on that note I should specify that by “sleeping around” I mean having penetrative sexual intercourse with multiple nonexclusive partners)

wigglytuffitout:

the-strangest-sea:

i don’t understand people who don’t think that greek plays are interesting like

hello friends have you ever read about oedipus

‘course i read about that motherfucker

That’s another thing - the post-WWII push of women into the home, out of factories, female labor participation back down below even prewar levels. That was an intentional attempt to pacify the returning soldiers, both by giving them the satisfying experience of someone to rule over (formal mechanisms of white supremacy also ramped up) and by freeing up jobs to keep “the boys” busy. Same with the GI bill and the expansion of college.

It wasn’t obvious that the Great Drpression wouldn’t return after the wartime economy ramped down (indeed, that’s part of why it was never fully ramped down) and the prospect of returning to that state after huge segments of the populace had been trained for and hardened by combat, had been explicitly propagandized to look kindly on the USSR, and the Second Red Scare had yet to purge major pockets of communist sentiment from the media, state apparatus, labor movement, and 1880s-on “white ethnic” immigrant communities SCARED THE EVERLOVING SHIT out of the powers that be.

War veterans with a dissatisfaction with things and time on their hands are dangerous , dude. That’s why Rome settled them in conquered territories, so they wouldn’t come back across the Rubicon. The Bonus Army had marched on Washington and had to be beaten back with force in living memory.

Returning soldiers from ‘Nam were a big part of both violent black and white nationalist movements in the ’70s and ’80s. Really, the pullout from Vietnam and the transition to an all-volunteer military afterwards was in part because the command structure was disintegrating with insubordination bordering on insurrection with the “fragging” execution of officers by enlisted in a way that was highly racialized, and even if losing South Vietnam to the communists looked like it could be the first domino, losing the US Army to race war looked even worse.

Reaganite escalation in South America, in addition to keeping the Western Hemisphere an American preserve in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, was partly an attempt to keep those quality officers that remained happy by giving them a chance to play with all the toys they’d finally developed to win Vietnam - the teen series fighters, look-down radar and aerial SIGINT to interdict jungle supply routes, SOCOM teams traipsing through the jungle and setting up local militia fiefdoms.

The Drug War under Reagan was largely cover for this, like Iran-Contra an attempt to endrun Watergate class congressmen controlling funding. Under Clinton it was maintained in part to keep the deep state occupied after the Cold War. Bush the elder came from the deep state, and had more leverage, but with BRAC and drawdowns and “streamlining government”, there was a real danger that the people who had been trained to infiltrate and destabilize governments would turn inwards to protect their funding streams.

Vince Foster DID commit suicide, but I guarantee you that he was being blackmailed as part of interdepartmental scraps. Waco happened because the BATF tried to tap into the same zeitgeist that gave us “cult deprogramming” and satanic abuse witch hunts and add anti-heresy inquisition to their portfolio, because the FBI was muscling in on their territory, because the CIA was muscling in on *their* counterespionage/counterterrorist territory, because without the Reds they needed a mission to preserve their funding and institutional structure.

And as a reminder, SOCOM was first established as part of the Army’s bid to steal Vietnam from the CIA’s portfolio, given that the ambiguous end of Korea created a perceived danger that the Kennedy administration would favor the nuclear triad (USAF w /2 legs, USN with 1), three-letter agencies in contested territories, USMC with its established Pacific mini-empire, and leave them to fiddle with their dicks in charge of a conscript army of fuckup PR hostage/meatshields in Germany and the DMZ

All this being part of why Clinton gave up on gays in the military - in trying to keep the deep state from tearing itself apart in the Cold War aftermath, that was a cheap sop to keep one faction pacified and try to just wait for everyone to retire and drawdown by attrition. But then Bush the Younger and 9/11 and the buildup and fuck, man. National security expenditures are being maintained because if not then on the inside the deep state will go for each other’s throats and on the outside all the veterans with their shit together in contractor jobs they got off their security clearances will have to look around and find something to do and… fuck, man.

At least someone had the sense to castrate the PMCs in time.

And meanwhile, all the shit bubbling up from the folks who don’t notice any of this, no longer being pacified with consumer surpluses, or by social liberties and positional prestige that can be extracted from populations pacified by consumer surplus, deciding to make their own destinies without a goddamn clue what they’re doing…

I mean, the anime Marxists talking themselves into violent transwomen’s socialist vanguardism, what the actual fuck people. Here in the PNW with the strongest remaining organized left-revolutionary and street combat traditions in the US that’s managed to do what? Put up graffiti in the parts of Oakland you’re going to be gentrified out of anyway? Throw a rock through Mars Hill’s window and inspire the Q Center to build ties to a church whose entire charisma is a social gospel of sexual complementarianism? Throw an unlit Molotov into a bank down the block from the precinct house on MLK at 2 am and leave graffiti about CeCe fucking McDonald?

Even as propaganda of the deed - which never fucking works - I can’t figure out what that was supposed to be about. Entering a time of social instability okay, I can see that being a time to move, but in the face of growing reactionary sentiment whose most powerful weapon is the imagery of female beauty and male access under threat, applying incompetent violence to try to make late transitioning Marxist revolutionary misandrist transwomen with a fucking cod-satanist aesthetic the standard bearers of the left? Hoooooooooly fucking shit.

I dunno, there’s a lotta fucking ruin in a nation. We’ve come through shit. Mostly. If you define getting to this point as coming through. And understanding other people haven’t.

The way by which I react to unpleasant stimulus in life is mostly to distract myself from my own pathos and misery by focusing on others’ and retreating to my self-image as the one who uniquely and tragically understands the grand pageantry of life so.

garbidge:

Additional Tags: Non-Consensual Drug Use, Psychotropic Drugs, Hallucinogens, Hallucinations, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rape, Dubious Consent, Mind Manipulation, Blood, Canonical Character Death, Violence, Abuse, Sexual Assault, Assault, Broken Bones, Mutilation, Murder, Temporary Amnesia, Memory Alteration, Gore, Vomit, Masturbation, Hand Jobs, Male Slash, Manipulation, Brainwashing, Masochism, Character Death, Graphic Description, Fear, Cannibalism, Past Relationship(s), Restraints, Sexual Coercion, Mental Coercion, Mental Breakdown, Insanity, Delusions, Established Relationship, Forced Cannibalism, Asphyxiation, breath play, Hanging, Whipping, Emotional Manipulation, Physical Abuse, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Unethical Experimentation, Medical Procedures, Vore, Non-Consensual Blood Drinking, Blood and Gore, Angst, Sexual Content, Oral Sex, Piss Play, Pet Play, Master/Slave, Sexual Slavery, Extreme Humiliation, extreme domination, Mental Domination, Gunplay, Improvised Sex Toys, Death Threats, Face Slapping, Forced Orgasm, Forcerd Submission

I dunno, this fanfiction sounds a little boring

well I couldn’t sleep at all last night, but on the plus side I’ve been on fire writing-wise so hey

The resistance of sheriffs in Colorado to enforcing certain gun laws is raising questions about whether tougher rules passed since Newtown have a muted effect in parts of the nation where gun ownership is common.

As I was saying, county nullification is a longstanding tradition in rural America, and is the answer to “why do we elect our sheriffs and judges, anyway?”

I made some homemade mayonnaise again on Thanksgiving for a pasta salad. If you’ve never had fresh mayo you should - in contrast to commercial stuff that’s used as a synonym for “blandness”, it’s a collection of shockingly strong and complex tastes.

The reason you probably haven’t, though, is that it requires at least 15 solid minutes of increasingly strenuous manual labor that if you fuck up makes the whole thing drop out of suspension, compelling you to start over again; there’s a pretty tedious process of microwave-pasteurizing the yolk enough to kill e.coli without cooking it, and then even if you refrigerate the end product you have maybe 24 hours before it spoils and gives you food poisoning.

she’s right - in general the credentialed professions are in for a big decline relative to the skilled trades.

Riffing off that Sady post from a while ago, yeah, you really get an appreciation of fiction when you try to write it. When I was in LA I was trying to be a TV screenwriter. Wrote some amazing stuff, but didn’t work because I don’t have connections to get anyone to read my stuff and had too much contempt for the people I’d have to schmooze to make them.

Anyway writing spec scripts really gets you a feel for the medium in general, and your selected show in particular. I ended up doing a Veronica Mars (amazing, available on request), and a pilot (ditto) but before that I started a Firefly. I abandoned it halfway through because it was really too  out of date, but one of the things I realized that’s a real problem with the show is that given that so many episodes are about the gang getting together for some heist, it’s damn-near impossible to work up an explanation for why and how Inara would join in.

You realize the actual staff - which is to say, people on the Minear, Espenson, Whedon level - couldn’t really figure this out either. In Jaynestown she kind of got a side mission that looped in at the end, but most of the episodes she’s kind of given an excuse to stay away. The only episodes where Inara had an organic part of the mechanical plot were the Saffron episodes, because Saffron was goatee-universe Inara, but there’s limits to that. (Remember how Vampire Willow episodes of Buffy were amazing, but the actual Willow Goes Evil plotline of the pentultimate season was such a mess?)

That’s a shame because for how hard she is for the mechanical plot, she’s got great potential for push/pull dynamics with each character to power the equally important emotional arc:

Mal (basic love/hate)

Simon (shared appreciation/longing for the finer things in life in the harsh emptiness of frontier space, bonding over their identity as professionals, resentment that he takes his professional status from the settled straight world as equivalent to her status from the demimonde they now inhabit)

Kaylee (shared appreciation of an unapologetic girlishness that can cut both lacy and innocent or leathery and promiscuous, conflict over the fact that their skill sets are so far apart that if they’re ever under pressure together one’s always acting the ignorant amateur to the other’s polished master)

River (motherliness towards someone who’s earned her respect but still exhibits vulnerable neediness, especially on the grounds of a ‘still waters run deep’ weaponized femininity; wary that she can’t even conceive River’s interiority well enough to manipulate her at all)

Jayne (the same direct brutishness/elegant intrigue contrast that makes for great personality conflict also makes them a pretty balanced team in pursuit of a goal, plus the Whedonian play against TV convention with the complete impossibility of romantic subtext given that Inara would never and Jayne doesn’t do subtext)

Shepherd (the shared experience of secret-keeping vs. the fact that Shepherd intentionally presents to avoid his mystique while Inara presents to enhance hers)

Zoe (envious of her easy and uncomplicated relationship with Mal/cautious that it relies on the exact kind of unquestioning deference she avoids; cautious about her role as the crew’s female icon of settled monogamy/envious that it’s the exact model of egalitarian relationship she wants.)

Wash (Actually, I don’t know how you’d write an Inara/Wash plot. Wait no, I got it. She’d depend on him for something and he’d fuck it up in a dumb way and try to joke her temper down and she’d call him on his bullshit then be catty about him to the rest of the crew. Then he’d pull a totally amazing save and she’d look like the jerk. She’d do fish-out-of-water dealing with being the least liked person around, and appreciate the way that he’s really the one holding the crew in balance, performing the same kind of emotional labor she does.)

@kontextmaschine: she’s right - in general the credentialed professions are in for a big decline relative to the skilled trades.

Okay, let’s do this here. You know that vegan strip club in Portland, Casa Diablo? I know a girl who dances there. Well, danced, back when she lived in the polyamorous dancer commune in that big Victorian off North Killingsworth. (Now she tends at the Dr. Who themed bar) Portland has more strip clubs than anywhere, mostly cause OR has free speech protections so strong that we effectively have a constitutional right to brothels staffed by high schoolers. So they compete on stage shows. A lot of it is basically very good naked acrobatics, but CD’s known for multi-girl performances with penetration.

That’s all true but I phrased it to push your buttons cause here’s the kicker - Greater Cascadia in general, and Portland in particular, is the most consciously thedish part of America. I have never seen somewhere so committed to the primacy of male Scando-Germanic small business owners who read books, work with their hands, create for fun, and fuck women. Even if you’re a few of those things it’s great, and if you’re none you’re welcomed as a courtesy by a hegemony under no existential threat.

Everything works like it’s supposed to only better, under a weirdly functional libertarian technocratic social democracy. The polity is aggressively reasonable - sure the last mayor had a gay relationship with a high school intern (and a previous one turned governor with his junior high babysitter) but the REAL scandal is how he overprioritized worthy capital improvements in the face of an expenses crunch.

Not everyone’s totally satisfied - the socialists and tea partiers frown, the anarchist antifa and WN fa fume, the official history has it that the city ended segregation by asking the landlords and realtors to stop in the mid-1990s, the unofficial history is no, that’s just when the ghetto was gentrified. The system listens politely to challenges and ignores them. More exit than voice - under state land regs you can’t turn farmland into subdivisions but you can build your freehold or commune in the woods on the condition that you declare independence from government services like utilities, roads, fire, and police.

High income tax, capped property, no sales, state gets most of its money from drinking and gambling, and most people are mid-functioning addicts of something and there are 3 bars on each commercial block. If they run out of money they just stop - school let out months early one year. Love learning but skeptical of education, which tends adult and vocational. Lot of autodidacts.

Few national chains, most stuff is made and sold by local farmers, artisans, artists, and shopkeepers. What isn’t is often bought used and repaired for decades. Lot of skilled and semiskilled labor.

There is a social justice tint but less tumblr than communitarian, partly an artifact of so many of the women working in caring or charming professions that can schedule around childraising. People pair and breed early, but usually only 1-3 and they still sleep around with their friends.

The sticks are surprisingly cosmopolitan, the core pretty redneck, people like to drink, fuck, fight, hike, and read. It’s like if Germany won the World War — the first one. Watching people get that wrong from afar makes me really eyebrow at /pol/ types going off on Sweden. Think you’d like it. Even if none of us go to church. LOL.
 

kontextmaschine:

I’ve been in Portland for two years almost to the day now, so in honor of the occasion I’ll share with you the two most Portland experiences I’ve ever had. That’s actually quite a high bar, as Portland is very dedicated to being Portland.

2. The first time I came to Alberta street I parked my…

Oh as long as I’m on this kick you know what I should’ve mentioned? Going to New Seasons and seeing a guy with a Whole Foods tote and a Resistance Records t-shirt.

The Roissy-originating “manjaw” meme is basically a knock on assertive ethnic NW Europeans and sits poorly with his neoaryanism.

It started with Amanda Marcotte and it’s not like there’s nothing there - she made her name on insult style despite insulting at a 7th grade level (but grew more polished, as one does); the 2004 Kerry thing was funny not because Bill Donohue is worthy of respect (like Abe Foxman, he’s a clown trying to outlast the collapse of “white ethnic” identity through Sharptonesque bluster) but because 2004 Marcotte was an inreach specialist if ever there was one and naming her outreach specialist marked a hilariously fogeyish internet ignorance.

But seriously.

when I was young I used to quite reliably get stomach sicknesses in mid-late December and now I just get huge manic/depressive swings and I wonder if those (and the commonly reported “holiday stress”) weren’t the same things under different idiomatic understandings.