this is the guy terfs idolize and is best friends with jkr btw
Genuinely why do so many innocent people get murdered in random shootings but nobody has ever just run up and stabbed this guy in the eye socket? Yeah I know chuds will try to martyr him but that’s still worth a world where he’s a corpse.
Would you? Why or why not? Other people also face those constraints, though they may not highlight them in their online presence.
Would be fucking hilarious if the mental-health, self-care, intervention-before-crisis thing was what doomed you in the end.
Personally I don’t see much utility in killing a boogeyman. It’s great having this guy be a face of modern conservatism, it’s good for reducing voter turnout and shrinking the base. Doesn’t seem worth the effort to be mad at; there’s some kind of moron who believes anything, better to have a really creepy moron creating guilt by association for your political enemies.
Yeah I’m with Yglesias in saying “don’t you realize having this shit in wide circulation on Twitter makes people notice and react against them?”
this is the guy terfs idolize and is best friends with jkr btw
Genuinely why do so many innocent people get murdered in random shootings but nobody has ever just run up and stabbed this guy in the eye socket? Yeah I know chuds will try to martyr him but that’s still worth a world where he’s a corpse.
Would you? Why or why not? Other people also face those constraints, though they may not highlight them in their online presence.
Would be fucking hilarious if the mental-health, self-care, intervention-before-crisis thing was what doomed you in the end.
this is the guy terfs idolize and is best friends with jkr btw
Genuinely why do so many innocent people get murdered in random shootings but nobody has ever just run up and stabbed this guy in the eye socket? Yeah I know chuds will try to martyr him but that’s still worth a world where he’s a corpse.
Would you? Why or why not? Other people also face those constraints, though they may not highlight them in their online presence.
Increasingly admiring Elon Musk not for being some genius visionary but for realizing that there’s a lot of stuff constrained by situations where there’s a gap even high-fliers can’t span with money or hostile forces who can buy the pot against them that he can just steamroll through
"Groupchat told me Tucker Carlson would come after me" - Did you tell them you were on a sex tape at the Bahamas Cryptocurrency Scandal Polycule House or something? I'm trying to imagine what Tucker's motive is supposed to be in this scenario.
It is in fact probably a result of the personality change anxiety zeroing that when I see a possible issue coming I prophylactically address it when the downside is just that some idiot anon might cringe about it.
It is funny how Jay-Z or Frank Sinatra doing a song about New York becomes this treasured piece of civic identity but RHCP largely being a band about Los Angeles just rolls off
(Because Los Angeles has never had a unitary civic identity)
(Something maybe not obvious if you’ve never lived in LA is that due to the layout of the freeways and surface streets, travel time from the westside to Angels Stadium in Anaheim is competitive with Dodgers Stadium just north of downtown. At least in the 60s when that solidified as the important-people part of town and the team moved in.)
It is funny how Jay-Z or Frank Sinatra doing a song about New York becomes this treasured piece of civic identity but RHCP largely being a band about Los Angeles just rolls off
(Because Los Angeles has never had a unitary civic identity)
So wait did trepanning actually open the brain cavity, or just the sinuses? I could absolutely see how you would hit on “opening the sinuses to relieve pressure” as a primitive treatment
My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word “the” used in phrases like: “the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall”. This “the” is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English “þā”, pronounced “tha” which means either “when” or “then”. Back in early Middle English the structure “if - then” had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said “þā whatever, þā whatever”, meaning “when such-and- such, then such-and-such”. “þā” sounds almost the same as “the” and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. “the more, the merrier” literally means “when more, then merrier” or “if more, then merrier’; same as centuries ago.
unpopular opinion: the general public has gotten significantly better at lit crit in general and understanding complex narratives in particular over the last 40-odd years
and things like TVTropes and r/nosleep directly contributed to that.
Like. In the original Back To The Future, Doc Brown has to sit down and spell out what time travel even is and exactly how it works. It’s a very simple time travel narrative by modern standards, but the writers did not trust a general audience to understand the concept of “going back and forward in time”. and time travel had been A Thing in fiction since the 1800s! it wasn’t like it was a brand new concept or anything.
the MCU casually dropped a time travel plot in Avengers: Endgame. they assume the characters- and the audience- have an idea of the basics of how A Time Travel Story works (and namedrop a bunch of them!) and all they feel like they have to explain is how their time travel differs from the standard narrative.
Back to the Future and Avengers: Endgame are aimed at the exact same general-if-slightly-geeky audience. But the writers’ level of trust in what the audience can understand has changed. Even writing for the lowest common denominator– the thirteen-year-old boy who hates reading!!!1!!!! and just wants to watch things explode– assumes that the audience can understand a plot with time travel, flashbacks that aren’t clearly marked with a sound effect and a fade, a narrative that branches depending on choices the characters make, and the like.
writers have also come to trust that the audience can understand- and tolerate- a certain amount of postmodernism. it’s more common in indie writing, dgmw- but like, look at anything out of the SCP universe, half of the fun of SCPs is the intertextuality and the meta wankery. House of Leaves is a common enough cultural touchstone that a meme about a pizza box looking like it gets spread all over the internet. The Southern Reach books got a film adaptation. (A dumbed-down one, but STILL.) and uh. the giant super-pomo injoke that was Goncharov (1973)took down Tumblr for three days and made it into the New York Times.
And I genuinely think that stuff like TVtropes, the vast accessible horror playgrounds of /nosleep and the SCP foundation, and even bullshit like CinemaSins has helped people get here. It’s common knowledge now that stories are made of tropes, that you can subvert and deconstruct tropes, and that stories can talk to other stories.
The DieHard trailer in particular is sort of wild in this regard.
Literally narrating what is going to happen as its happening for two minutes.
It boggles my mind that right-wing intellectuals went “the radical Left up in their ivory tower is forcing an unpopular agenda on Americans!”– which is not even completely wrong; I think they take it way too far but there is a weak version of that claim which is definitely true– and decided to respond by making an even more insular, elitist, unpopular, and just generally deranged ideology, that you could only understand or agree with if you are just as Twitter brain-poisoned as the bluechecks you despise. Like, my guys, my dudes: Joe Sixpack, the stalwart Republican voter from North Carolina, wants lower taxes and to not need a hunting permit. He does not want Catholic sharia, and you all are in for a world of hurt if you insist that this is the future of conservatism.
To steal from @discoursedrome this is less a beta edition thought and more an alpha, but this seems key to me:
“The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—”
Yes, nothing says “traditional Catholicism” like denying the authority of the Pope.
Now, historical jokes aside, that’s pretty damn odd, isn’t it? Converting to a new religion and demanding deference to it from everyone while also immediately denying its actually existing structure of authority?
One thing that’s really hard to get your head around about certain kinds of extremism is that they seem to be poses, or jokes, or affectations, and yet simultaneously are used to legitimate incredibly extreme behavior.
The part of Catholicism where we repeal women’s suffrage is much more appealing than, like, the part where you defer to Papal authority.
If you listen to conspiracy theorists, and here I’m talking about, like, “The Jews are lizard men from the core of the hollow earth” conspiracists, they have a recognition between each other that they all belong to the same club.
Often, as an outsider it’s shocking how two people with conspiracies that are absolutely mutually exclusive and cannot both be true will have these shockingly civil conversations where each promotes the other.
Rather than dissolving because of small differences within the same doctrine, people of what would seem to be radically different doctrines often recognize each other as allies due to something beneath the explicit content of what they say.
Nazism was of course famous for having all kinds of batshit mysticism which the ordinary person would scratch his head at.
I think there’s a tendency to analyze the weird right as being ideological in a way that I’m not sure that they are.
Now, historical jokes aside, that’s pretty damn odd, isn’t it? Converting to a new religion and demanding deference to it from everyone while also immediately denying its actually existing structure of authority?
i mean. you could say the same thing about someone converting from being nonchristian to protestantism.
i am even less a fan of sedevacantism that i am of mainline catholicism but seems weird to say that that a conversion to specifically sedevacantist catholicism is less legitimate than another kind of catholic conversion
It’s not weird to deny the authority of the Pope in general, lots of people do that.
It’s weird to go from not acknowledging the Pope as authority at all, to demanding that the law enforce deference to the Catholic hierarchy AND announcing that you yourself won’t defer to it because it’s illegitimate.
put that way, it strikes me as peak entitlement—
—everyone should have to obey these strict laws except me…
I agree, but that’s not my main point.
Rather, I think that for the kind of weird right Catholic type in this article Catholic doctrine is downstream of a certain set of priorities, rather than vice versa.
Like, rather than, “Catholicism is very important, therefore I follow the rules of Catholicism” instead you have, “I have an emotional desire to move society in a certain way, and crazy Catholic theocracy expresses those emotions.”
And what I think happens is that other people who are having the same emotional understanding of the world come to a sort of unspoken understanding that rival doctrines to that kind of Catholicism will be tolerated to the extent that those rival doctrines express a similar emotional response to the world.
And of course it’s easier to make that room if you just bypass the Pope.
I’ll try to explain better later.
Sedevacantism like professionals, petit bourgeois, gentry, and dissident scholars going “the Pope’s entanglements with politics and power in the secular world have led him to stray from the proper Godly path as we know and reaffirm to each other in in our small journals, we should not take him as the final word!” is retro-proto-Protestantism though, that’s the weird thing
“Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling”
—Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde WAS gay and he DID suck dicks but “love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling” is not about oral sex. It is not even erotic.
Here’s the rest of the quote. It’s from De Profundis:
“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live. If any love is shown us we should recognise that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine, non sum dignus should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.”
actually gay people can write about gay sex and other things! oscar wilde did mean sucking dick! he also meant love and devotion and religion and guilt and worship! it’s called a double entendre! he was pretty famous for them!
I had a new flag made for Barntopia, because it’s the truth:
To those who have asked if they can use this phrase for their own purposes, yes, feel free to do what you will with it, but I warn you against starting what seems like a simple project. Welcome to Team Idiot.
(ID: A red flag hanging horizontally on a corrugated steel wall. The flag reads: “We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”)
