kontextmaschine:

Like, everyone does realize that when the Republicans take the House back they’ll use the precedents of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar to normalize stripping minority committee assignments as a standard tool of the majority?

We have basically been reinventing a parliamentary legislature backwards ever since the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 made the GOP relevant in Congress again (after the thumbs FDR put on the scale to create a permanent Democratic majority finally fell off)

mr-elementle:

dancinbutterfly:

nianeyna:

soupwife:

nianeyna:

rhea314:

gingerhaze:

memewhore:

pricklylegs:

mudwerks:

klappersacks:

(via File Photo)

WTF are those obelisks on the right?…

Tasty obelisk fries..

“It’s digestible” has got to be the laziest goal I’ve ever seen achieved by a food product.

“It’s digestible”

“It’s digestible” is pertinent!! Okay, for those of you who haven’t researched Crisco for writing fic about gay sex in the mid-late 60s:

The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.”  Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index.  Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5]  In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s.  Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco.  Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20^th century.

from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html

The more you know! :D

I have learned a new thing today.

Love this post for so many reasons but most especially because this is from all the way back in 2012 and and yet not a single blog in this thread is deactivated

I enjoy that not only does this have a link to an actual source, but the link still fucking works.

but @rhea314 you didnt include a picture of the crisco disco! AND MY GOD THE DJ BOOTH WAS A GIANT CRISCO CAN!

Go dance and get fisted. Fucking iconic.

Love the gay history, but i just wanna correct that the “it’s digestible” in the gay stuff was a reference to crisco’s tagline it had been using since 1911, the actual meaning of its digestible is because it’s main competition came from “enhanced” lards which were rendered pig fat mixed with non food thickeners that literally did not digest and caused people to basically just shit out pig cream, since crisco was veggie based the body digested it along with the food

formal-leatherjacket:

larkandkatydid:

larkandkatydid:

One thing that helps me calm down about intra-left-wing sniping and the reality that the big center-left coalition inevitably includes a lot of ridiculous nonsense, is to remember how ubiquitous seances were to progressive politics in the 19th century.  Like, e.g., Frederick Douglas had to go to so many seances. Many, many political strategy sessions around the country had to include feedback from the ghost of Moses who spoke to us via morse code.  

Was thinking again today about Frederick Douglas, intellectual giant, having to sit through so many seances without complaint because he believed in coalition building.

#this seance could have been an email (@marnz)

kontext’s back

Been feeling up and down and unsteady in a foundational way lately but distinct from either the post-April 2020 crazy or classic bipolar stuff

But I keep connecting it to trends and I realized it’s my reverse pathetic fallacy returning, after like 2 years of putting in the clutch and peacing out, a little rough like jumping off a running treadmill and then jumping back on while it’s still going

For one it makes me realize that my connection to like, “American culture” and my physical neighborhood are of a kind, maybe that’s not that uncommon. And that maybe I should reevaluate NIMBY politics and white “there goes the neighborhood” post-segregation experiences in that light

For two, I may have been saying we’d already passed the tipping point, but I went clutch-in before the election. In my own city mobs roamed the streets and the mayor’s hamhanded #Resistance-fanning not only made it worse it left him politically constrained amidst a runoff with this smug professional glib shitlib problem glasses tweeter I had had my worried eye on for years

In the big important cities, a decade of troubling rumbles come to a head in something of a selective-college NCOs’ coup with the university students on-side

Like, you remember fluff at the New York Times over running a Tom Cotton editorial laying down the foundation that if unruly mobs take the streets of major cities and demand the suspension of the democratically legitimate force of law the government can suppress them with direct force, that apparently came from pressure from the technical staff

And like, “production staff of major newspaper use labor power to try to control editorial line” is well precedented! A lot of Warsaw Pact regimes bootstrapped that way, the LA Times had a guns-and-bombs war with its printing staff over this once. For it to happen at America’s major newspaper in support of challenges to government control of the streets was really a big deal!

The most irritating SJW I knew personally was like, a Drupal programmer who played pinball. And Drupal was apparently something for running web pages, except more than utility at some function “Drupal programming” seemed to be defined as a culture, a kind of tediously shitlib one, maybe in part because their employers seemed to regularly pay to fly them out to these conferences that weren’t even about programming, just shitlib stuff, and that was a foundation of the culture

And I heard at one point they all scorned and ran some guy off (from like, his career) for being a Gorean, and were rumbling about how they could use their ideological solidarity and upstream role in web hosting to control content using their webdev tools

And I mean Goreans lol, but if you weren’t paying attention in the 90s “we must use our technical knowledge of internet infrastructure to constrain human communication to facile mainstream morality while rigorously patrolling the subculture to keep out dorky SFF fetishes” was… pretty much the opposite of the promise of tech culture, to the point this was really kinda worrying.

And now I wake up and look out of my burrow again in November 2021 and that’s in the rearview mirror, on the national and civic levels alike, politics and media, the spirit is “2011 as if we hadn’t lost the spirit of 1995 (which was an embrace of 1969 but rejection of 1978)”.

Biden’s doing “What If Clinton But Also Maybe Turn Presidentialism Down A Notch And Let The Senate Be A Steering Force Of The Republic In Its Own Right”, there’s a tangible desire to go back to the 90s and a dawning realization that yes, that involves punching hippies, at least enough that you can ignore the rest.

For structural vulnerabilities well – not much has changed in public. It doesn’t usually, that’s what happens when capital wakes up, it works behind the scenes. I will say that from history this no longer looks like you’d expect from a narrative that ends with sleepwalking into disaster or ineffectually flailing, it looks like one you expect is going to have a crisis point in a few years that the insurgents are going to be completely unprepared for capital to be prepared for and fall on their faces after having exhausted themselves for maximum visibility

There’s that one CEO who was like “yeah, this company is for achieving our business purpose, if you want to leverage it for some shitlib stuff please find another” and a chunk of the staff left and the Medium huffers huffed but the company went on to sparkle at the metrics VCs love, adding to the question of why companies staff hufferchum in the first place

Substack is hardened two ways, one thing is they have a solid enough understanding with their VC that nothing Anil fucking Dash says could ever matter; the second is like everyone I mostly read free ones online but being e-mailed to subscribers means writing is shielded against any technical or political interference with webhosting, that archived copies survive any attack on or rejection from the platform and that it can be forwarded and shared with contacts discreetly for samizdat or paywall-gatecrashing purposes

It’s morning in America. And they’re playing The Tick on FOX. Spoon!

rendakuenthusiast:

fuckin’ SJWs

c86:

The Forestry Building, constructed as part of Portland’s Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905. It was destroyed by fire on 17 August 1964

Oh huh, never heard of this. You would be surprised what a shadow the 1904 St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (“World’s Fair”) casts on American cultural history.

femmenietzsche:

Like the Supreme Court, art has had a largely reactionary impact throughout history, but thanks to a handful of progressive wins in the mid 20th century everyone’s somehow convinced themselves otherwise

Back when the government was “just the military and the post office” they actually managed to fit a lot of stuff under that aegis

rednines:

papasmoke:

papasmoke:

This strike wave is going to generate some fascinating democrat-sponsored anti union laws

Do I need to start plastering all my posts with communist flags to stop these morons from bothering me?

There’s only two things in the entire universe and nothing else exists, has existed ever, or will exist

The 1860s, it was quite important

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

If conservatives get a lock on the Supreme Court it would represent the culmination of multi-generational movements to undo its capture by progressivism since either 1937 (for the economic conservatives, the “switch in time that saved nine”) or the 1960s (for the sociocultural conservatives, the Warren Court)

But that does set it apart from other 2020 narratives of bills coming due or corruption through decay – the oil companies didn’t particularly want harsher weather, the law-and-order types didn’t want a backlash.

Social media companies wanted engagement thus ad revenue, not this public sphere. Unitary executive supporters wanted a civil service that acts like presidential elections mean something, not this pandemic.

But the Court, a lot of people for a long time wanted exactly this and put a lot of effort into it. Same as conservative media cultivating a more rightist electorate.

I mean, they wanted a more conservative Court, they put effort into building a judicial apparatus, they got it.

They wanted a more conservative electorate, they put effort into convincing them and they got it.

They wanted a more conservative legislature so they consolidated in the Republican Party, converted Southern Democrats, built up in statehouses, Newt Gingrich in the 80s, a Republican majority under Clinton, something like a conservative one under Obama…

Like all along, the “the current year” stuff, it’s now “it’s 2020, we can’t have a reactionary moment now!” And the response is “yeah, it’s 2020, we just finished our long march through the institutions, capturing them according to established procedures (as modified by established meta-procedures), this is exactly when we earned a reactionary moment!”

I’m still curious exactly what happens when the dog catches the car though, because either they stall and it turns out they were bluffing this whole time or they enact the Conservative Program and then what, blue states start going their own way?

The American left made a lot of policy gains through the Supreme Court in the “Warren Court” of the 1950s-60s that the right resented the hell out of and fulminated about upsetting the established order over, and a lot of that later got caveated or walked back somehow, but the country held together.

I was a kid before the WB and UPN (later merged as The CW) followed Fox, America’s 4th broadcast television network established in the 1980s, to become the 5th and 6th, so I remember unaffiliated local channels that would air stuff that was bid out to individual channels market by market in syndication (Xena was syndicated! Star Trek: The Next Generation was syndicated!) or like reruns from a generation previous like Small Wonder or What’s Happening.

And this was before the internet, this would be one of like eight things you could passively watch in realtime (like 60 if you had cable) if you felt like having some contact with the wilder world from a chair. A huge share of ‘90s and '00s culture was basically in reaction to everyone having had this as their main cultural context for decades.

cop-disliker69:

the–anarchists:

argumate:

is there one thing about American politics that isn’t irritating, just one

*sobbing* i-i dont-i dont-understand

So lower-case f ‘federalism’ is basically the ideology of “states rights”. Of decentralizing power away from the central government (the federal government) and investing it mostly in the regional governments (the states). Officially, federalism means the central government and the regional governments should be about equal in power, neither being superior to the other.

But in the early republic, the Federalist Party were mainly the enemy of the ‘states rights’ faction. The Federalist Party wanted a little more power in the hands of the central government vis-a-vis the states. The Anti-Federalists, which became the Democratic-Republican Party, were more in favor of federalism (states rights) than the Federalist Party.

So the Federalists were anti-federalist, and the Anti-Federalists were federalist.

If you wanna get more confused, we should also talk about the Democratic-Republicans. The Democratic-Republican Party would eventually evolve by the 1830s into what we now know as the Democratic Party. In it’s time though, it was usually referred to informally as ‘the Republicans.’ But it had nothing to do with the modern Republicans. As I said, this was the party that evolved into the Democrats. It’s enemy was first the Federalists, and then later the Whigs. The party we know as the Republican Party was started entirely independently, in the 1850s, these Republicans having no relationship to the Democrats, which were originally the Democratic-Republicans, known as Republicans for short.

Basically the Federalists were champions of the federation, against the individual states.

Lowercase federalists are champions OF a federation of individual states, as opposed to a unitary national state.

nightpool:

baeddel:

i think one thing about the ‘maybe the curtians were just blue’ issue is that the kind of education that post is responding to is actually a strange, outmoded form of literary criticism known as the ‘close reading’ which has long since faded into obscurity for being, essentially, a psuedoscience with unrealizable pretensions to positivism, but which continues to be taught in English classes in America and the UK because it produces readings which are homogenous and, for this reason, gradable (the questions will actually have correct answers on the grading sheet which is an approach to reading we would consider highly unusual). it doesn’t need your defense; it probably bears a lot of responsibility for the incurious attitude towards literature that we’re worried about. in highschool i was able to get my classmates interested in medieval Germanic poetry by producing dramatic renditions every time we had a public speaking assignment (no matter what the topic was), enough that my boyfriend stole my copy of the Edda, and these were cynical proletarian students who under normal conditions were bored to tears by Macbeth!

I don’t think this is accurate, or at least it’s not true to my experience in the mediocre end of the American public education system. Maybe at one point close reading was taught in public school, but I never saw it. Instead, I think “the curtains are just blue” acts more often as a strawman argument where literary criticism of any stripe is substituted for the obvious bullshit of close reading in an attempt to discard the entire concept, or a guilt-by-association where just because somebody did close reading once, all literary criticism has been revealed to be bunk through and through. In thinking about the popularity of the “curtains” meme (which was certainly the dominant memeplex among e.g. people I went to college with), I think that you’re confusing cause and effect—it’s popular less because people need a way to resist the overly broad application of close reading, but instead because close reading is so widely derided that it’s seen as a knock-down argument against any type of literary criticism, no matter how distant.

This is absolutely correct, “close reading” was a signal technique of the “New Criticism” about after WWII and suitable to rapidly expanding educational offerings (G.I. Bill-swollen colleges and an aspiration of universal high school graduation). American high schools largely drew from that at the time and then never really updated, which is why high school still treats the then-recent Hemingway and The Great Gatsby as particularly relevant. It’s also that this was really the first successful attempt to create a purely American canon of English literature.

George W. Bush was, in retrospect, very much a continuation of his father as President. Domestically, a continuation of an attempted Christian Democratic turn that harnessed religious enthusiasm to a pre-conservative tradition fundamentally okay with social spending.

Internationally, a continuation of post-Cold War cleanup. The lands of the Ottoman Empire fell largely under British and French influence after WWI and America succeeded as their patron after WWII, ending up supporting local autocrats as a guard against the Soviets. By the 2000s, a decade after the Cold War and two after a significant shift from pan-Arabism to political Islam, this system had outlived its purpose and was showing strain.

This played out as a conflict with local regimes as in Iraq, which had been one of the first to be reined in the “hyperpower”, "global cop" moment after the superpower conflict, but the overall story was an attempt to shift from American-backed autocracy to American-backed democracy. (Afghanistan was mostly one more installment of failed effort to integrate remote Afghanistan into any broad order of sovereignty)

This continued into the Obama era with Robert Gates and the “Arab Spring”, a major issue was that with ISIS and even more moderate jihadists, we grew more convinced that these autocrats really were far more compatible with US interests than any forces likely to hold power in their absence – the abandonment of regime change in Egypt and the inability to generate any enthusiasm for war with Russian proxy in Syria seems to have marked the end of this. The Arab world might require proper modern national institutions, but no one really wants to reenact the French Revolution and the 19th century to get there.

In domestic affairs, the “No Child Left Behind” national education framework was largely abandoned, and Medicare prescription drug coverage probably does something in the background to shore Republicans up with the elderly.

Barack Obama’s task was to take Bill Clinton’s relegitimating the Democrats as a governing party and do something with it. National health care had been a dream since the 50s at least, failed under Clinton, and with Obamacare it is an established thing now, as much as Social Security or Medicare of food stamps. DACA obviously failed to resolve illegal immigration as an issue, though it presumably benefited its beneficiaries a bit for a while.

The New Democratic relegitimation had largely been about gathering politicians, media, activists, and funding streams together and uniting them around fairly moderate messages. It was really organized for a cable TV media ecosystem. The late blog era could kinda work by analogy (the Nation and National Review had definitely been part of the 90s) but social media was another beast entirely.

Obama’s praised “cool” relationship with the media was largely oriented around impressing gatekeepers who then relayed his mythos. Though an impressive orator, the President making a speech about something no longer was necessarily the defining thing about it. In contrast, Trump’s McLuhanite “hotter” social media style, if you were aware of some national political issue, first off you were on Twitter, second off so was the President, he was aware of it, and you were aware that he was aware of it. He was in your head, more precisely he was in all your narratives.

By the end of Obama’s term, the Democratic Party was significantly delegitimized again. Tellingly, his largest accomplishment – being the fabled First Black President – was not one that particularly involved actively doing much of anything. I think it is still an open question whether we can consider his presidency or Bush’s as more successful.

Thinking about how “after World War II, the First World recognized the unique moral horror of the Holocaust, while the Warsaw Pact understood the war as a universal anti-fascist action” gets passed as some knock on the communists when the thing is postwar America played up anti-Semitism as the defining thing about the Nazis because the thing their contemporaries would have mostly seen them as, anticommunist, was the mantle we took over.

I guess Blockbuster Video totally reclaimed “blockbust*” from “act as agent in a shift in the character of a residential neighborhood from middle class single-family white to (denser, subdivided, poorer) black, a ‘filtering’ process that had once been typical but 30-year mortgage standards and zoning had been specifically crafted to prevent; a process which might be profitable for brokers but could represent a substantial decline in quality of life a/o net worth for existing residents; implicitly as a Jewish realtor ignoring the professional practices developed to restrain individual gain in favor of collective or community gain, as even as 'white ethnic’ folds into 'white’ you don’t appreciate or respect what you’re inheriting or see yourself as part of those collectives and communities”

Thinking about how none of the planners (except like one, who they rolled their eyes at) of that “levitate the Pentagon” protest in the 60s thought they might actually levitate it, the point – this sort of thing was Abbie Hoffman’s specialty – was to signal to both sides that this was not actually going to be conducted as a violent assault, while taking none of the morale or ideological hit of stepping back from a pose of total hostility

kontextmaschine:

so gold works as an universal trade medium because anyone you trade with knows they are in network with someone who is in a network with someone who wants to do a trade in a way finite national-specific mediums don’t work for

so color works as an organizing principle of society cause even if “race isn’t real”, if you can get any given bunch of illiterate randoms and ask “hey, that guy over there in the medium distance, in low light and regardless of how he’s attired - is he white or black?” and have them all reliably come to the same answer, you can do things with that classification

When the NAACP was founded few of the founders would meet a brown paper bag test, they were “black” under the “One Drop Rule” but not visually distinguished, a common literary figure was the “tragic mulatta” who “passed” as white until her heritage was discovered or revealed

The American Legion verged on a freikorps and were the ones actively promoting the veterans-as-a-favored-class system (and ideology!) of backloaded benefits. Which after another mass-conscription world war and a Cold War of large standing armies was kind of what America built instead of a welfare state to distribute prosperity among the citizens. Which actually gets pretty iffy in an era of narrow, “all-volunteer” and thus self-selecting militaries.

Also, where’s Black Rifle Coffee fit in?

Ah, I pick up a certain self-recognizing fondness about the “general intellectuals”, “secondhand dealers of ideas” whose adoption and promotion of ideas to the broad symbolic-manipulation class is planting 20-year seeds. That’s okay, me too.

Not to be too Marxian base-determines-superstructure but this cohort replacement model doesn’t seem to have a place for material forces at all.

It also doesn’t account for failed succession and counterrevolution. You want to talk American culture war? “The Sixties”, significantly in the 1970s really, was acknowledged as a case of cohort succession at the time. “Generation gap”, remember?

And okay maybe that could explain the shift from flag-waving pro-military patriotism to wariness, John Wayne macho to Alan Alda sensitivity, happy housewifery to strident feminism, Rotary small business to Great Society civil servants as the overseers of society.

Okay. But then the ‘80s happened. America-Fuck-Yeah, Bruce Willis, Andrew Dice Clay misogyny. WWF and porn stars (AND the Moral Majority), Wall Street takeovers the new hot scene. And it was not powered by a new generation of Alex P. Keaton teenagers. (Really, he was a viewpoint character for Boomers who parsed cultural change through youth culture.)

“America’s most popular party will be openly run by socialists” was a real belief in the Ford-Carter era and since then has been laughable. How’d that happen? It wasn’t because conservatives started pushing back on the 70s in the 40s!