I recall @kontextmaschine getting into it a while back with Anon over “you keep saying that Woke is gonna roll back but you don’t give examples”, and it occurs to me that the recent Target Pride thing is exactly an example of how it’s gonna go. Company brings out a Liggibettequeue-theme thing, Yay We Love Queers, and then Oh No There’s Complaints And Protests (which there’s precious little public evidence of, but, y'know, protests) and where in previous times the company would’ve kept going now they have Safety Concerns and the whole thing gets shoved to the back of the store and deleted from the website and never spoken of again.
And I just read a story about some kids putting on a play where Robin Hood is actually Maid Marian, and they had to do it in a garage because the school nixed the idea, and the interesting thing to me was that the school shut it down not after lengthy and vitriolic demonstration from angry adults threatening violence but after a couple parents phoned the school and complained. And sure, you can interpret that as “oh, the Right Wing is Ascendant and people don’t want to buck them”, but as late as 2020 I would have expected at least a little pushback from the school authorities, and from the language in the story it was less “someone has made credible threats” and more “we don’t want a bunch of people showing up and making a scene because we consider avoiding scenes more important than supporting queer stuff.”
“Somehow rebounding into a cockeyed reaffirmation of gender roles via rejecting 90s Strong Female Characters” is the kinda bullshit way these things do tend to resolve.
The irony of people complaining that since being normalized, everywhere in cities smells like weed, is that before, public places in Portland – crowds, streets like Hawthorne, bars where people ducked out to have a bowl – smelled like that regularly (I am convinced that local author Ursula LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is based on Portland, and that would be the drooz perfuming the city). But now not, because everyone’s switched to vaping, which doesn’t leave a smell. So we’re smoking weed in the mall, the restaurant, at work, etc.…
the funniest fucking thing about how AI has overtaken the internet as a form of cheaply produced SEO-friendly fodder is that when i google “drinking a fifth of vodka in one night” all the top google results link to articles that say things like this
Rest of World reviewed Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, and Douyin — TikTok’s sister app in China — and found hundreds of users with profile pictures of uniformed American cops or American-sounding usernames such as “Sheriff Roberson,” “Captain America,” and “Florida Jack, No. 5314.” Others have changed their names to “Abraham Lincoln”, noting in parentheses that they “regret liberating Black slaves.” These accounts post racist remarks, harassing Black influencers and users with slang such as “emptying the magazine,” referring to how some U.S. police officers have fired multiple rounds at suspects.
Question: Whyyy didn’t Democrats repeal the debt limit when they had 60 Senators in 2009?
Answer: There exist figures closely involved in or exposed to financial markets whose favor and support is necessary to the institutional structure and continuation of the party as constituted since the collapse of labor unions who very strongly prefer that the amount of government debt issuance be held to caps known well in advance and requiring approval of some portion of the Republican Party even in periods of Democratic trifecta.
I used to be a big city intellectual- but after seeing me and my ilk portrayed as the Soy Wojak one too many times I finally decided to become an incredibly based guy
You know what no I like this Japanese food subscription box, it’s not going for solid everyday stuff, it’s once a month and with this one it was like “…and this talked-about ramen from Chicago!” And like, their spin was roasted garlic and this one base. Which I didn’t love but I was like “hm interesting I see what they’re doing here, this makes me think about other flavor combinations that could work!”
I will say the preparation instructions kind of imply there are producers offering these packages to an intermediate market of redistributors, like someone’s getting that ramen in their “Taste of Chicago” boxes and someone else from their “Garlic Wonderland” subscription
I want to remind people that it being this normal for people to live into their 70s and 80s specifically postdates the postwar medical “War on Cancer” and the 1990s development of statins.
The media is still grappling with what Jezebel’s creators helped unleash, for good and ill. The era opened opportunities for journalists and creative people who, by instinct or practice, could blend their identities with the stories they told. The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally deceitful institutions that deserved challenging, but it also lacked, in retrospect, a sense of the value of having trusted institutions at all.
And those of us who came up in the internet media may have missed the biggest story of all. We took it for granted that this was a progressive medium, populated by young people who loved Barack Obama and culminating in some way in his election in 2008. We didn’t expect the true apogee of the new media to come with the election of Donald Trump eight years later.
Taylor Lorenz pivoting to Covid hawkery in a ridiculous Taylor Lorenz fashion seems more likely to set up her haters to link that to everything else she represents in getting it all read out of the media mainstream than advance any of her own interests, but girl can’t help herself.
And it’s like she’s on a mission. “Insisting that people never breathe the same air again is just a natural extension of harm sensitivity norms in queer communities! You should apply your feelings re: one to the other!”
I will say though that yeah, maybe what we’re seeing now suggests that queer community norms around AIDS reflected that its harms were primarily to the small, embattled, and strongly distinct queer community itself, if having unprotected gay sex killed off random elderly people in 1987 you’d probably have seen bareback circuit parties for the purpose
Taylor Lorenz pivoting to Covid hawkery in a ridiculous Taylor Lorenz fashion seems more likely to set up her haters to link that to everything else she represents in getting it all read out of the media mainstream than advance any of her own interests, but girl can’t help herself.
