So much of America rn is just

“the white race are the time-hallowed people of the United States, to maintain legitimacy systems must be rigged to ensure they prevail!”

vs.

“liberal internationalism is the time-hallowed ideology of the United States, to maintain legitimacy systems must be rigged to ensure it prevails!”

I have never seen this before

One underdiscussed possible factor behind Stephen Breyer pooh-poohing timed resignations is he saw up close Ginsberg trying to hold on through Trump and found it unseemly

“An end to exploitative beauty culture” really just means you can tell who the bisexual girls under 24 on Tinder are cause they’re the only ones who know how to compose a sexually appealing picture of a girl

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is now buying targeted Facebook ads to get me in the loop about woke stuff coming before the Cornell Faculty Senate

drafthearse:

drafthearse:

the US army is posting on Instagram telling you what your zodiac sign says about what kind of soldier you’ll be. this is not a joke.

we live in hell.

northshorewave:

kontextmaschine:

I mean, at this point St. Patrick’s Day is barely about the Irish, Christmas is barely about Jesus and Halloween isn’t about the dead at all, if Pride becomes a whole month on the civic festival calendar where we get drunk and try to scandalize the public with our sexuality while Chase Bank runs a street fair selling rainbow churros like, okay?

And you can’t even respond that Christmas and Halloween don’t last a whole month. Because they last two.

This logic would also imply that ‘Pride’ as a concept will eventually loop back around to pride in one’s heterosexuality.

I mentioned before that time earlier this year I saw the oh-so-NOW zoomer trends of

1. Understanding life’s major narrative arc as finding your identity group, banding together, fighting for and achieving legitimacy through recognition, and
2. Being weird and mechanical at trying to use what were designed as disciplinary mechanisms around sex as some actual ethic

Collide with some kid going in on “Minor-Attracted Person” pride cause he had turned 18 but his girlfriend was still a year younger

Like, I was just on the 2nd floor of the Fred Meyers at 39th and Hawthorne just looking down at the traffic and happy crying while Coldplay’s “Clocks” played in an appropriately normie-deep touch, because it’s really hitting me this week, it’s over

Like, the entire trend I noticed starting with “feminist blogging” in the mid-2000s, up through all whatever SJW, crybully, woke stuff last decade that’s over now. Maybe not surrendered and off the field yet, but they’ll never take any more ground, they don’t even have a path to stalemate, they’re in zugwang.

I don’t even know they could theoretically pull it together for a counteroffensive, all the intersectional all-for-one, always advance thing was great at channeling different energies together but there’s no hierarchy to coordinate a retreat and no expectation such diversity would have the same sense of where to fall back to and regroup, they’ll be routed

I trust some of you will be wary, I couldn’t convince you anyway, at best point you to things to help you convince yourself. (Does anyone have an unpaywalled version of that interview at the Silicon Valley substack last week where founders try to show off how best their practices are and they’re talking about actively cultivating a culture to weed out goodnice crusaders? It’s different from that one where guys said they don’t actually care about recruiting a diverse workforce.)

But to the extent my sensibility counts for something – I’m kontextmaschine, I have to assume some of you are here to watch me see things a few years ahead – and my confidence here reminds me of a handful of times before. Once in the mid-2000s when I started thinking the next step was a Republican pivot to white racial identity (by 2014 it was even clear how you’d do it, but on the brink of the Dems fully securing a corporatist-identitarian regime who could?); when at the turn of the 2010s I suddenly latched on to accounts of second-wave radical feminism and struggles over gender definition within fully post-Sixties culture; and back in the late ‘90s when I got fixated on the idea the next American war would rely on mercenaries. So.

ponyboyfaceshopping:

losing it

Yeah, it looked real bad for like a decade, but that’s the thing, they’re gonna be paying for that until we’re old now

Like, I have not been kidding about how big this backlash is gonna be, we’re going to have to wrap our minds around the fact that as ::gestures:: as he was, “elect Donald Trump to fight back and win the culture war” was a critical success

Like, I continue to be startled by the ferocity of “kink at pride” 2021 discourse, all the people I’ve come to think of on the 2010s “SJW” side all “Oh, shut up, kids are fine with sexuality if not actively thrilled, and you’re just using 'consent’ ideology to get in the way of a sexy fun time for everyone, worthless loser!”

I don’t think they even realize they’re buying absolution by pivoting back to Something for Everyone-ism, but the more they go in on that, the more they orient their public position around it, the more they pick allies off of it (and that includes just “oh, this person reblogged my tweets! they’re my friend, on my side”) the deeper they’re embedded

Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

I was wondering when this shoe would drop. With the new Supremes, a realigned GOP and more wealth held and applied through “closely held” corporations where the boss is the actual princely power and not a disposable, replaceable mercenary, expect a legal assault on “hostile environment” and other liberalgenic employment regulation.

As a bonus, it’ll position the GOP as the ones defending workers from employers trying to control their lives even as they move to weaken union and laborite power.

So yeah, I’m able to see with both eyes at once again totally fine now at any distance, by looking beyond what feels to me as the right distance, whereas looking at it had been giving me radially tilted double vision.

Increasingly suspicious that this is true binocular 3D vision for the first time whereas I was knitting together 2D pictures before. When I close one eye things seem suddenly flatter now in a way they didn’t before.

When this started two weeks ago I noticed myself looking through a door, lining up another door down the hall with its edge and kinda twitching my head back and forth, I realized oh my God I’m trying to check parallax – see how my visual picture changes when I move my head a little, to determine how far away objects are. At my last eye exam the doctor pointed out I was subtly tilting my head to do that.

I mean I always thought I was focusing my eyes together, closer or further away, and the rest was blurrier, but I guess even monocular cameras do that.

That would explain why at first I had a hard time parsing information from peripheral vision and had a weird tilt-shift sense, why the “focusing my eyes through and past the double vision” reminds me of Magic Eye books, why my vision is bobbing as I walk (but less and less now, as I learn how to stabilize it)

Like, all the “personality change” stuff showed up by a peak of April 2020, but guys, this is still going on. Like all of the leg clumsiness I’ve had lately? Well I think part of it was just adjusting inputs on where my feet were (peripheral vision, remember?) but like, the hitch in my step I’d been talking about? Receding. And, after a life of low arches I notice I’m raising up on the edge of my feet and adjusting my balance with my ankles not my calves.

Just like the personality change, none of this was willed, it’s just… happening? It’s like my systems are getting a live patch upgrade. The only possible agent I can think of is if that time in March 2020 I was fatigued for a week really was COVID and these are those lingering nervous/psych effects I hear about. But if it manifested like this you’d think you’d have heard about it.

But like, “how was your plague, kontextmaschine?” Well, I watched from home as everything I was worried about in terms of the future collided with each other and wiped out, and meanwhile I used the downtime to install some major updates, apparently.

soloontherocks:

sjw-bot:

right: bring back the racism

left: can sonic be trans?

centrist: sit on me

the tumblr bots are passing the turing test now

Yeah I am immensely optimistic right now, I don’t think we’re in the sun-dappled clearing yet (and the borders of “we” are maybe the arena of contestation!) but we’re clear of the storm and on course, I don’t think any already acknowledged force is in a position to disrupt that and it might be time to start optimizing for reentry

antoine-roquentin:

Brazil was born modern. It came into existence as a colony, a site for resource extraction, already linked into an emerging world market. Brazil may have been the last country to abolish slavery in the West­ern Hemisphere, but its chattel slavery was a product of early moder­nity. Brazil was never premodern or feudal. By the same measure, Brazilianization does not mean a simple return to semifeudal rela­tions.

What then explains the persistence of unfree labor, the latifundia system, and its cultural and political effects, well into the twentieth century—in sum, all the “backward” elements of Brazil? Precisely that, in Brazil, the modern fed off the old and in turn reinforced and recreated it. In rural areas, an elastic supply of labor and land repro­duced “primitive accumulation” in agriculture, holding back improvements in agricultural techniques. With industrialization from the 1930s onwards, this pool of rural poor came to serve as a reserve army of cheap urban labor.

What made Brazil’s process distinct is that the country’s industrialization and modernization during the populist period, from the mid‑1930s to the mid-’60s, did not require a rupture of the system, as bourgeois revolutions in Europe had a century earlier.⁸ Instead, the rural propertied classes remained in power and continued to gain through capitalist expansion. As the sociologist Francisco de Oliveira put it in his 1972 Critique of Dualist Reason, the “expansion of capitalism in Brazil happens through the introduction of new rela­tions into archaic ones and the reproduction of archaic relations in the new.” This was reinforced politically through President Getúlio Vargas’s corporatist labor legislation, modeled on Mussolini’s as a means of formalizing and disciplining an urban proletariat. Crucially, it exempted labor relations in the countryside, preserving rural pov­erty and unfreedom.

For de Oliveira, the new world thus preserved earlier class rela­tions. Consider, for example, that the new urban poor would build their own homes, thus reducing the cost of reproduction of this class: employers would not have to pay wages high enough to pay for rent. Favelas, then, are not an index of backwardness but something produced by the new.

Or consider how personal services rendered in the domestic sphere reinforce this model of accumulation. Upper-middle-class households in Brazil have maids or drivers that service them—an economic relationship that could only be replaced by costly investment in public services and infrastructure (for example, industrial cleaning services or public transport). As a consequence, the Brazilian middle class has a higher standard of living in this respect than its equivalents in the United States or Europe. The exploitation of cheap labor in the domestic sphere also impedes any political drive for improvement in public services.

Are we not faced with precisely such a Brazilianization of the world today—with a growing array of “concierge services,” where­by the professional class and elite alike hire private yoga teachers, private chefs, and private security? An upper-middle-class household in San Francisco comes to replicate an aristocratic manor with a whole economy of services rendered in the domestic sphere, but now every­thing is outsourced: digital platforms intermediate between private “contractors” (formerly employees) and the new elite. Brazil’s social structure showed us our future.

Reflecting on Brazil’s social formation once again in 2003, de Oliveira classed Brazil as a duck-billed platypus: a misshapen mon­ster, neither any longer underdeveloped (“primitive accumulation” in the countryside having been displaced by a powerful agribusiness sector), nor yet having the conditions to complete its modernization—that is, to truly incorporate the masses into the nation.⁹ Crucially, this was not a foregone conclusion. Growing workers’ power in the lead-up to the 1964 coup could have led to a new settlement and an end to the high exploitation rate, while agrarian reform could have liquidated the source of the “reserve army of labor” that flooded into the cities in the 1970s, as well as finally destroying patrimonial power in the countryside.

Such a modernization project, however, would have required the participation of the national bourgeoisie in alliance with workers. The bourgeoisie backed the right-wing coup instead. In a great historical irony, noted by Roberto Schwarz in his introduction to de Oliveira’s platypus essay, it was Fernando Henrique Cardoso—the neoliberal president in the 1990s—who had observed, as a left-wing sociologist back in the 1960s, that the national bourgeoisie did not want development. Cardoso argued, in opposition to prevailing Left opinion of the time, that the bourgeoisie would prefer being a junior partner to Western capitalism than to risk seeing their domestic hegemony over the subaltern classes challenged in the future.¹⁰ Brazil’s elite chose not to develop.

According to de Oliveira, Brazil’s promised but endlessly frus­trated future is visible in the fact that it is “one of the most unequal societies in the world … despite having had one of the strongest rates of growth over a long period… . The most evident determinations of this condition reside in the combination of the low standing of the workforce and external dependency.”¹¹ Brazil thus could be a sort of utopia, given its natural blessings, fast growth, and enviable culture. The reality, in Caux and Catalani’s words, is that it is a country “whose essence consists in not being able to realize its essence.” It is not backwardness that prevents Brazil from claiming its destiny; its destiny is endless frustration.

Moreover, the social exclusion that seems so essential to Brazil’s social formation is not an accident, but a produced duality. In Brazil, this has been known as Belíndia, a term coined in 1974 by the economist Edmar Lisboa Bacha: Brazil is a rich, urban Belgium perched atop a poor, rural India, all in one country. Those in the Brazilian “Belgium” inhabit a country that is ostensibly modern and well-functioning, but is held back by those “outside,” in the backwards, semifeudal India. Yet as de Oliveira showed, the “inside” is dependent on the exploitation of the “outside” for its progress. Not only that, but the dualism shapes the inside of the “Belgium” itself; it creates a corrupt, patrimonial, and selfish elite, only too happy to wash its hands of the conditions found in its own “India.”

Unfortunately, rather than the Belíndia metaphor becoming less relevant in recent decades, it has only become more so. Consider what each component country represents in our times: Belgium may still be wealthy, but it is bureaucratized, fragmented, and immobile; India may still be poor, but it is now also high-tech and governed by reactionary populism. This could just as easily be a picture of Italy, the United States, or the United Kingdom, with their deep regional inequalities, sclerotic politics, and spectacular populism.

is “queer woman participates in atrocities” really that big of a SF subgenre right now, or are my mutuals all just weirdos?

Dianne Morales and the Implosion of the Left in NYC’s Mayoral Race

The Zeitgeist: hmm, we need some sort of ready-at-hand example of how tapping into fussy progressivism backfires on the Democratic Party

The NYC Young Left: God knows we don’t have anything better to do

“Well okay why is lab-leak stuff important?”

Mostly as a coordination point for the media people with a 90s sensibility to mount an offensive against post-2010s stuff on good ground, that’s worthy.

Talking with my mom about redoing the house and realizing some of the gap between us is I have since childhood played video games where “maximizing efficiency of build order” is a key mechanic, ultimately dating to WWII planning exercises

Talked to my dad today, he had been texting for a while and saying that he had important information about my future as scion of the dynasty and then rescheduling like that time my mom kept putting “watch cheesy PBS sex special w/Kontextmaschine” on her calendar when I hit puberty

Which was like he said one thing about how co-trusteeship works and then he drifted off into broad advice

Which was clearly an old guy’s sense of investing*, like dividends dividends dividends and a sense of index funds as wrong as compared to like, personally picking stocks off the Wall Street Journal?

Which hoo boy, made me look back and think, “you know the whole time I was on the floor while we watched Lou Dobbs Moneyline, you knew Bloomberg terminals existed, right?”

And I asked him about land and he talked about rates of return and generic chaff and I was like “yeah, you moved to land in the 70s hyperinflation, tell me about that” And he just had no idea what I was talking about

So two possibilities, one of which is as I’d experienced from his driving back from airports, he’s kind of old and senile now and remembers things more in terms of the people who were there “Bob and Jerry and Bill Wester, etc”, though I did manage to extract that speculatively buying parcels you expected to soon connect to utilities based on local knowledge was particularly an angle for lease to national chains who had no local knowledge to begin with and are planned for standardized prebuilds

The other being the possibility that the whole time he was really the classic Boomer right place/right time position and had little particular input on that and if now he realizes it’s time to pass the baton and does it by refusing to hand over the reins until he’s dead and giving me some incoherent half-remembered advice about how to succeed in 1975, how Boomer is that?

* I mean this not like “his risk/return ratio is calculated as for a retiree” but like “he internalized this stuff in the LBJ administration at latest”