kontextmaschine

yuri-alexseygaybitch:

redshifting:

dirt-creature:

apas-95:

Blowback moment: Italian police busted a neo-Nazi terrorist cell planning attacks, and discovered that the members had been trained by, and gotten fighting experience from, the Azov Battalion.

Sorry, is this pro-invasion propaganda? I’m all for bashing fascists, but I need to be sure I understand the implication here. Can you explain?

Apologies if I’m misunderstanding.

The “implication” here is “those people are Nazis”. Because that’s what they are.

You guys are honestly so fucked if you’re unwilling to acknowledge the simply and widely documented (including by Western MSM pre-2022) reality that there’s far right nationalist/neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine with links to other far right groups throughout Europe and beyond who go there for training and war tourism for fear of appearing “pro-Russian.” Literally the most uncontroversial and simple opinion you should have on Ukraine is Nazis are bad and your government should stop giving them guns and money.

Oh yeah on here the old “zentropista” account of the Italian Casa Pound fascists would pump up Azov around the Crimea crisis; the “Ciao Dmitri” thing when someone died falling off an overpass during a banner drop and they kicked off a big campaign they’d clearly had as a contingency plan for building up a martyr – Dmitri had been a Ukrainian performing allyship at home

That said, it is not remotely uncontroversial and simple to refuse anti-Russian Nazis. That’s post-term antifascism. Remember “premature antifascists”, people rallying against the Nazis in the decades before they were built up as enemies of America in the runup to WWII? When they were just against Communist Russia, or at least Russia, or communists? And if you couldn’t bear that then uhhhhh… not to be trusted, there.

And flip side after the war Eastern European (and even marginally onsides First World like Italy) fascists were aligned with us, against the Russians. Remember like, the The Nazis Nazis? Those guys were against the Russians! And then we were. And are! And Azov’s not about to try to dismantle Western European capitalist empires sooooo…

Always funny watching anyone – Libs of TikTok, anti-racist activists – be like “Success! We ginned up enough outrage that that teacher from our viral post was FIRED by the school board!”, knowing there is no way they have the attention span to follow the next 3 years where the teachers’ union grieves them back reinstated with pay, seniority, and pension contributions backfilled with penalties on top, while they give her a job at HQ or help set up and promote his side business, either way getting facetime and burrowing deeper into real power structures.

Like, I grew up with a lawyer dad who was the school district solicitor, remember? I assure you, this doesn’t work like you think.

You know maybe I haven’t appreciated enough that until 1994, there were still Boomers in their twenties

kontextmaschine:

The west side of the river is the “nice” one in Portland, and old money in the West Hills aside, the wealthy suburb on this side of the hills is Lake Oswego, around an artificial and still access-restricted-in-defiance-of-state-law lake. Locals my age say that since at least elementary school it was called “Lake No Negro”, and I can only imagine what it took to get a reputation as monoethnically white in 1980s Portland.

Honestly maybe it’s cause it was so close to the 1980s inner city that was noticeable. Our MLK Boulevard was the first north-south artery just across the river (it had originally been “Union”, early Portland was “Free State, Free Labor” Republicans that appreciated “freeing the slaves” as something akin to “deporting the illegals”).

In Along Martin Luther King, the 2003 coffee table book about America’s MLK Boulevards to get your Afrocentric dad for Christmas, it’s mentioned as the only one where the author saw white people living by choice, but then again I remember people challenging the official civic history of “we stopped residential segregation by asking realtors not to in the 1990s” by saying that no, that was just when the ghetto started to gentrify, reducing our official segregation metric of people who had no one of a different race on their block.

The west side of the river is the “nice” one in Portland, and old money in the West Hills aside, the wealthy suburb on this side of the hills is Lake Oswego, around an artificial and still access-restricted-in-defiance-of-state-law lake. Locals my age say that since at least elementary school it was called “Lake No Negro”, and I can only imagine what it took to get a reputation as monoethnically white in 1980s Portland.

Thought all the latest round of “echo” effects was over but I’m noticing some hyperactivity of digestive smooth muscle (that builds my urge to poop in a distinct rapid way) and sleep anomalies – always irreversibly wake at a certain time no matter when I set down even if I’m still tired – that showed up in the first few months of my first case, before I totally lost my body & mind

theresponseblog:

kontextmaschine:

So something I have realized is Roissy/PUA-style “game” does not work as a normative guide to how you, a man who does not get pussy, can get pussy, but it is a 100% accurate descriptive account of how the guys who do get pussy get pussy, and anxiety is the mediating factor

they get pussy because they recognize that there’s plenty of pussy that just wants a cock that leaves in the morning, and the PUA stuff is signaling “hey, I am a cock that will leave in the morning”

i guess you’re right that “anxiety” is a part of the thing but the anxiety is him looking ahead to the next morning, where he wants to make her breakfast and she is wondering whether she should call the cops or her boyfriend

I really think you’re misreading anxiety as mere nervous uncertainty here, like before the 90s depression got misread as mere sadness.

A clerisy (incl. a bureaucratic technocracy, think of the midcentury US order, the USSR, the Third or Second Reichs) could swing the first one, and you can see something like that forming, but it doesn’t have any resource base it can extract from without the aid of other factions it would make enemies with this way, and it might be strong enough to administer but not to strip for parts. And if they attempt to ally with the lower orders to this end, off of memories of the 20th century where administrative classes had more of an advantage, they’ll get eaten alive before they manage to swallow anything else.

Zizek and the Dirtbag Left… I mean yes, a red-brown Back to the 90s is the other possibility for how the administrative middle classes go, ha ha dirtbag is the new PMC, but both of these possibilities are for the layer under the aristocrats or bourgeois (midcentury America was bourgeois/clerisy, “creative class” America was bourgeois/dirtbag, the Second Reich was clerisy with bourgeois displacing aristocratic, the Third Reich was clerisy with aristo displacing bourgeois, and I’m not really sure what aristo/dirtbag would be, Renaissance Italy?)

Oh I tried it. I remember first thinking it would be nice and trying to bihack myself starting in 7th grade. In LA I followed a girl/boy couple home from a bar once and played fucking what, spin the bottle? strip poker? after her girlfriend came over and we ended up as parallel gay hookup pairs (I didn’t fucking pick up on the original girl’s signals and I had horrible luck at the game). Him sucking my dick didn’t do anything for me a golf ball washer wouldn’t and in reverse I remember thinking “this is like giving someone a massage with your mouth while they choke you”.

So I was like “welp guess I’m straight”. Though I haven’t sucked any dick since the personality change I can see the erotic appeal enough to jerk off to it in fantasies, not even gay porn (which I also could never stay hard for)

So I don’t think that’s it!

Since the personality change and bisexuality I have noticed that teenage boys don’t really have any particular charge for me like girls did, I think it’s that when I was a horny adolescent first developing any sense of sexual taste, I was only into girls and in school fellow adolescents were the ones around to impress on, so to the extent I picked up tastes they were the ones it was of.

I assume that’s fairly typical and a big reason why teenage girls were a central focus of postwar popular culture through the rise of secondary schooling!

In contrast when I first developed interest in men I was not only not around schoolboys (I was mostly alone in my room during the pandemic unable to stably stand!) but didn’t have that horny urgency to seek sexual experience out, which is why I’m still not sure I have tastes in men past like, “men”.

Also, fuck you too, buddy!

kontextmaschine:

was AI “rampancy” anyone’s idea but Bungie?

@theresponseblog: From reading the lore, it’s basically “what if AI Foom but they didn’t necessarily want to Kill All Humans”, so yeah I feel like lots of people have had that idea before and since.

It’s kinda Foom as the cancer AIs die of, though

centrally-unplanned:

centrally-unplanned:

centrally-unplanned:

eightyonekilograms:

Motherfucker why are you DMing Kelsey Piper get a lawyer Jesus Christ

Holy shit

Me, under investigation by the SEC for the largest financial fraud in human history: “Fuck regulators”

New EA Cause Area: Assassinate SBF to shut his fucking mouth.

“Woke Westerners” bro you RAN A PONZI SCHEME this isn’t because you didn’t hit your DEI targets. Vladimir Putin-level of bitter ideological overreach.

Well obviously as far as millennials who leveraged themselves up from merely UUMC families into positions of world-striding, financially staggering prominence off of performances of personality they dramatically proclaim were never natural but purely artifice, I prefer Taylor Swift.

But I don’t think you should read him as blaming the collapse on wokeness – it’s just that you’re looking for him to take and assign moral responsibility and so if that’s what he talks about you get the sense he’s assigning it to, it’s an amoral account of

W H A T H A P P E N E D

, maybe demonstratively so to illustrate that he’s working – you know, having spent the last however long as head of an 11-figure court/harem in royal gardens in island paradise – from an aristocratic morality, not a bourgeois one. And, implicitly, that he is herald of the transition from a long 20th century postwar bourgeois order to an aristocratic one.

I’m not sure this’ll net help, awake this awareness in other Masters of the Universe to come together and claim their domain. I think he might’ve been oversampling cultural sense from the crypto crowd that’re largely in crypto for the goal of reaching this potential and then this state, rather than independently having the potential. (And the fallout from this shit sure won’t get them there)

Like, to return to the top there is a reason my money’s on Taylor Swift as the American empress. Her shit’s just as much artifice but there’s enough authenticity – and authenticity about artifice – mixed in to establish a royal bond with the people at scale and bring them onside.

Can she reach normies as the middle layers of society can she ever. Can she reach the white working class, you realize she was a country star? Can she reach the UMC have you seen the strange new respect for her in their writing lately? Can she reach the would-be aristocrats literally Caroline and me have talked about orienting ourselves with respect to Taylor Swift.

(Can she reach the Black community? No, Reputation was terrible.)

Whereas SBF just generates conflicts, with institutional capital, with the crypto base that you’d want to co-opt at scale, with attempts to congeal a left-populist base that’ll splinter if they can’t find targets to rally against

But like, yeah, that is the shift we’re headed towards, kontextmaschine sees it – remember how I talk about the boarding school as basis for an estate and domain? – Taylor Swift sees it, SBF sees it

kontextmaschine:

So, I think I have my bearings again post-election.

• In the culture arena, the 2010s-born commanding heights snot-left is shattered and turns on each other, Twitter as on-sides platform being disrupted is a big part
• They might be able to wring some backup there from DC, maybe 2 or 3 years from corporate America before they read the writing on the wall
• The Dems’ midterm Win! leaves them more or less where they were, getting a 51st senate seat gives them committee majorities so stuff comes to the floor quicker & easier, by itself the Senate confirms judges and like the GOP under Trump they do that singlemindedly, getting nearly as many in as Trump, albeit with the very best seats no longer open for filling
• The legislative uppity Dems either settle in for more service to the oldsters or mount an insurgency that either just gets slapped down or gets a few token wins to mask being slapped down
• The GOP in Congress is the same unstable mess it was, just now an unstably infighting one
• In particular they won’t manage to get out of the Dems’ way as they fight amongst themselves, and will give them things to unite against
• Biden pushes some economic stuff which fair, Reagan–Trump kept moving right even under Clinton and at least hardly left under Obama
• DeSantis displaces Trump before the primaries start
• The Supremes start to dismantle workplace/civil rights/(overlap) law
• Russia’s pullback from Ukrainian territory just conserves lives and materiel as it switches focus to “break NATO”. It at least chips it. Putin’s cultivated a militant “civil society” that pushes right as third parties, it gets a bit out of his control but the CIA can’t well build them up to take over
• States are firmly red or blue, and the blue ones get used as the best vehicle for liberalism just like the red ones. This makes life a bit insufferable with the cultural tide holding 3-5 years longer there, the bond market gets them in the end tho

I’ll come back to this tomorrow

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

deepfriedanon:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

deepfriedanon:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

I’ve done something heretical. I’m writing to you from a world with no more problems – because I killed them all the last time I was there.

You what?

#now you know as well as me that nothing can possibly go wrong

My hands are stained red with the blood of my problems. They are no more. I have undone them all. Now nothing can go wrong. No new problem can exist. For I killed them all. From now. Until end of existence.

There will be no more problems.

And nothing can go possibly wrong.

…

I am filled with great hope. Not to be killed again – but to kill all others who would kill me. To live forever, beyond the stars, as an immortal demigod, an omniscient, all-powerful, eternally youthful hero, unaging, and free from sin and suffering, the hero’s pathos in its most sublime form, for eternity.

…

…

O, to be free.

You know it is a great treatment for imposter syndrome to see how in Cats 2019, Taylor Swift, master lyricist Americana storyteller, is just not that good at writing in the post-Sondheim singing-about-yourself Broadway musical tradition, that her performances are highly based on mimicry but her sense of the stuff to be mimicked is still at a band-geek-in-YBWM’s level of Cats fan, that her sense of role is clearly leaning on Grizabella – a character already in this exact musical! – and wherever the scene is not specifically catering to her, her sense of stage is that of a freshman that doesn’t get a part

So, I think I have my bearings again post-election.

• In the culture arena, the 2010s-born commanding heights snot-left is shattered and turns on each other, Twitter as on-sides platform being disrupted is a big part
• They might be able to wring some backup there from DC, maybe 2 or 3 years from corporate America before they read the writing on the wall
• The Dems’ midterm Win! leaves them more or less where they were, getting a 51st senate seat gives them committee majorities so stuff comes to the floor quicker & easier, by itself the Senate confirms judges and like the GOP under Trump they do that singlemindedly, getting nearly as many in as Trump, albeit with the very best seats no longer open for filling
• The legislative uppity Dems either settle in for more service to the oldsters or mount an insurgency that either just gets slapped down or gets a few token wins to mask being slapped down
• The GOP in Congress is the same unstable mess it was, just now an unstably infighting one
• In particular they won’t manage to get out of the Dems’ way as they fight amongst themselves, and will give them things to unite against
• Biden pushes some economic stuff which fair, Reagan–Trump kept moving right even under Clinton and at least hardly left under Obama
• DeSantis displaces Trump before the primaries start
• The Supremes start to dismantle workplace/civil rights/(overlap) law
• Russia’s pullback from Ukrainian territory just conserves lives and materiel as it switches focus to “break NATO”. It at least chips it. Putin’s cultivated a militant “civil society” that pushes right as third parties, it gets a bit out of his control but the CIA can’t well build them up to take over
• States are firmly red or blue, and the blue ones get used as the best vehicle for liberalism just like the red ones. This makes life a bit insufferable with the cultural tide holding 3-5 years longer there, the bond market gets them in the end tho

I’ll come back to this tomorrow

mapsontheweb:

Busiest Airline Routes in 2022

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

triangle-inequality:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

Here you go:

ALT

Hope that’s alright?

LOVE this

#wait i am bi btw #this is cool but i would need to be on a website that lets me draw a background

Good news! Here you go:

(This uses a modified version of the new, non-rectangular bi flag)

This is a pansexual flag, Frank

Re:Mastodon, wasn’t really expecting “content warnings and not appreciating me burping up every last impulse that crosses my mind into your lap is some white bullshit” to become a thing, but I was more generically expecting it to take everyone who would performatively reject Elon Musk’s vision of Twitter and put them at each other’s throats, and I guess that had to happen some ways in particular

morlock-holmes:

morlock-holmes:

kontextmaschine:

athingbynatureprodigal:

kontextmaschine:

athingbynatureprodigal:

the-grey-tribe:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

So something I have realized is Roissy/PUA-style “game” does not work as a normative guide to how you, a man who does not get pussy, can get pussy, but it is a 100% accurate descriptive account of how the guys who do get pussy get pussy, and anxiety is the mediating factor

Also “anxiety” is not something caused by the situations you’re in that conscious changes in will change but rather a permanent variable, per-person and biochemical, like “depression”

epiphenomenalism except the mind is real and getting physical is the epiphenomenon

wasn’t it, like, entirely about training yourself to not feel anxiety about talking to women? Ancient third-hand knowledge informs me that they had a whole Thing about it, “your first thousand rejections don’t count”

Expecting someone with an anxiety disorder to voluntarily go through a thousand rejections is not practical, the anxiety is what makes the weight of a single rejection crushing.

People with anxiety disorders aren’t the only people who experience anxiety, though.

the point was that a whole lot of people experience anxiety about this, and shouldn’t, because the horrible consequences they’re imagining mostly aren’t going to happen and trying it a few times will show them that.

Hm. Well, I suppose the old personality had an anxiety disorder then, it was not something situations caused, it was something I had that affected my experience of situations. And now the new personality is apparently incapable of anxiety, so the concept of it as a contingent thing is forever foreign.

One thing deeply buried in the American philosophy of the last, say… 40 years or so is that one doesn’t learn things, one is simply already predisposed to be good or bad at them, and this comes out equally in all possible situations, so therefore there’s not much sense in attempting to change, and one can neither teach nor learn.

It’s weird how often I talk to people and ask, “Have you ever had a situation where you were trying something, and getting nowhere, and you just got more and more frustrated and then someone said, ‘have you tried doing it this way’ and suddenly it clicked and you started getting a lot better at it” and they react as though I had asked, “Have you ever had tea with a purple unicorn on the moon?”

No, now I think about it, not just American, some significant portion of the English-speaking world has internalized this position as the obvious one for reasons I don’t really understand.

You can’t really ask because this “People don’t change, water just finds its level” philosophy is understood as self-evident on such a deep level that people have trouble even understanding what an alternative could be, let alone articulate their reasons for believing it.

This is really verging on “have you tried not being depressed?” ::stage whisper:: “of course they haven’t, lazy self-obsessed gits” territory here, and my hackles are raising.

ukulelekatie:

buttchan:

starrylysaa:

girlbi-deactivated20220618:

im not immune to how corsets make breasts look