This is the Gin and Tacos guy, I’d started to write him off over too many years of sad essays about working at the University of Buttfuck, Sattelite Campus, but like Jacob “IOZ” Bacharach he’s one of my old regular reads who started getting commissioned this election cycle and seems to be freshening up a bit, tho I do expect a relatively low ceiling.
A thing here is that even in pushing-back, he accepts the “racialist” frame. That’s not “race realist”, but it’s something.
In the “commanding heights” of society, which is to say mostly on social media, the left is on the defensive right now, fighting over how much ground they’re gonna lose. They maybe won on Williamson at The Atlantic but that was a holding action, they maintained the status quo ante, for now, and at expense - Williamson’s cachet is up, those of his enemies are down, institutions are coming to bear to impose costs on surrender.
None of the social media fights are about establishing new left positions, which is the opposite of what I remember 2010-2016, getting ridiculously accellerated towards the end - like when I first showed up on tumblr the local avant-garde trans narrative was “we need more sensitive gatekeepers”, year by year working through “maybe SRS” (then ooga-boogaed as “sterilization”) “isn’t necessary”, “maybe the concept of dysphoria isn’t itself necessary”, and then they just dumped it all the normies in a bundle.
I didn’t expect “the return of race science” this week, even as a regular Sailer reader, that came outta nowhere. I remember him talking about the ‘90s as an “interglacial” when this stuff last got entertained, or rather a high point of right-culture, and did not expect it until after another 4 years of consolidation at least.
lmfao @ “potential psyops tag” on my post about the parkland kids and @ the person who tried to tag staff to report me as a disinformation blog.
pseudo-progressive liberals and social democrats, and not the rightists currently in power, are spearheading the forces of reaction. incredible really.
Guy in here with a Good Night White Pride shirt on a date with a girl in a faux native-print top who’s talking about how much the music of Sheryl Crow means to her
Possible consumer applications for deepfake technology, an insurance company showing you footage of your entire family dying horribly, but don’t worry, soon that will seem normal
you just speak things into existence now and they come true through the power of like (metal gear rising voice) memes or the cybernetic basilisk or whatever. it is indistinguishable from magic and people are not respecting this power. this, this, the florida arming teachers thing
i know you all wanted shadowrun magic where you get to like shoot energy bolts or do clairvoyance or whatever but this is the shitty cyberpunk future so these are the inscrutable powers we have to work with
Today I walked into the technology repair shopfront that has a beton brut/raw wood esthetic with 80s computers in the waiting area and while the guy replaced my iPhone screen I watched these two guys
Bellied Slav in a neo-tracksuit and balding Korean in floppy Nike style, jeans too long and turned up to show a different color inside
talk with the neo-tinker repair bro, them both Amazon contract workers talking about how now Amazon wouldn’t recognize their lazily jailbroken phones, about all the tricks warehouse and delivery people use to steal packages
on Facebook I just saw this video of firefighters giving oxygen and chest-massaging a splayed-out cat outside an apartment fire while its owner cried and sad music played and then they revived it and is this
A) a PR gimmick drawing on the goodwill of communal lifesavers to ultimately be transferred to more repressive uniformed “first responders”
The next step was to "increase the intensity of joint rewards and
punishments so that dishonest people will be punished and the faithful
will be motivated". Local governments and work units - grass-root level
managers - were particularly active participants in the system. A Credit
China website that had been visited by 500 million people was publicly
shaming “lao lai” or deadbeats who don’t pay their bills. But some
provinces are reported to have also taken to broadcasting photographs of
those blacklisted on large screens in public places.Human Rights Watch
is concerned that individuals who find themselves incorrectly listed
have experienced difficulty in getting their names removed. Human Rights
Watch has highlighted the case of lawyer Li Xiaolin who was stranded
1900 kilometres from home, unable to catch a plane, after a court listed
him for “insincere apology” without his knowledge.
We need a name for the kinda channel drift where niche brands with existing name recognition end up degenerating to general-interest content farms
Like, Cracked, I remember that as Mad Magazine’s Pepsi, full of black-and-white puerile humor for 7-14 year old boys. And I guess making a comedy writing website from that makes sense, and I guess making individual voice central to that made sense, that was how the Something Awful frontpage went…
SparkNotes, the online competitor to Cliffs Notes, the condensed summaries and thematic analysis of literary works to fake your way through common English class assignments. It’s halfway down this road, on the one hand its content nuggets keep themed around “books you read in 11th grade” on the other hand I only realized this because I clicked through someone’s Twitter bio had her as their advice columnist
VICE, man, I’ve never really known what’s up with that, even before Disney sunk half a billion trying to make it Time-Life for the hipster generation, in the mid-’00s when it already had a reputation on paper and McInnes was like “wait it’s NOT cool to be a junkie, what’s COOL is being a RESPONSIBLE SKATEBOARD DAD” and the whole rest of the magazine was like “what’s COOL is being 23 and discovering cocaine 6 months ago”
(and then they sold their name as a symbol of “hip parties” to some iffy NY/LA DJ nights promoting Colt 45 malt liquor)
These days I don’t hear what narratives are being pushed in the media, I just hear counter-narratives from people on social media and have to piece together the first-order narratives they’re responding to from there.
