argumate:

it’s amusing how much of popular culture in the past was elaborate references to sex that must not be named, aka doing the frickle frackle.

once it becomes acceptable to say “you are attractive and I hope we can bang” directly in a mainstream pop song then it seems necessary to find some other mysterious taboo topic that can only be alluded to; perhaps My Little Pony mods for Minecraft or something like that.

uh I’m a little curious what’s going to happen to the entire history of rock and roll that’s about the musician stand-ins having sex with teenagers

2 hilarious active culture war battle scenes today

The NYC black strip club war between lightskin Instagram celebrity bartenders and darkskin sex worker dancers

ESPN trying to renew its connection with the common man through a Barstool Sports linkup and their Proud Professional Woman staffers not letting them

in a bar, just glimpsed my first “privileged white techbros be treating the workplace like a playground and taking credit for WOC’s srs bzns contributions”-themed commercial

for Verizon

it had a Segway!

Mike Cernovich acquired a copy of that “Shitty Men in Media” list (he was offering $10,000) and is using it to run hit pieces

says he’s going to give the accused a chance to reply, I suspect that’s an excuse to sequence them strung out for maximum news impact, in priority as culture war enemies

Honestly the Rick and Morty thing, “don’t you get that this tortured asshole master of the universe is supposed to be read as pathetic”

Like they didn’t “get” that about Gordon Gekko, or Tony Montana, or First Blood PTSD longhair John Rambo…

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.

argumate:

utnapishtim89:

As the U.S. population expands, the number of undergraduates expands. Given roughly constant productivity in teaching, this means that the number of professors must expand. Which means there is an ever-increasing army of people out there trying to find and report interesting results. 

But there’s no guarantee that the supply of interesting results is infinite. In some fields (currently, materials science and neuroscience), there might be plenty to find, but elsewhere (particle physics, monetary theory) the low-hanging fruit might be picked for now. If there are diminishing returns to overall research labor input at any point in time - and history suggests there are - then this means the standards for publishable results must fall, or America will be unable to provide research professors to teach all of its undergrads.

This might be why we have a replication crisis in psychology (and a quieter replication crisis in medicine, and a replication crisis in empirical economics that no one has even noticed yet). It might be why nutrition science changes its recommendations every few months. It might be a big reason for p-hacking, data mining, and specification search. It might be a reason for the proliferation of untestable theories in high-energy physics, finance, macroeconomics, and elsewhere. And it might be a reason for the flood of banal, jargon-drenched unoriginal work in the humanities.

the humanities folk should be writing fanfiction and the technical people making video games, BAM once again I’ve solved all the problems of humanity

isn’t this where GamerGate and Rabid Puppies came from? a Too Many Chiefs crisis diverted from academia into vidya and genre fiction, setting off a Völkerwanderung-style displacement cascade?

“[Peter] Kim said audiences have gotten more abusive in the past year and has heard people use the ‘f’ word, alluding to a slur against gays.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was a man was sitting next to a Hispanic couple,” Kim said. “We asked a question to another lady, completely different lady, we said, ‘Hey, ma’am, what is something small that pisses you off, like getting stuck in traffic.‘”

The man, unsolicited, screamed out, ‘Sitting too close to a Mexican,’ while sitting next to a Hispanic couple.“

“In 44 years of this work, I’ve never seen anything like it. The audience seems to feel like they have license in very unpleasant ways,” he added. “Ninety-nine percent of people are cool. But the jerk who used to keep his mouth shut now feels like he has the right to say something.”

Second City’s longtime owner Andrew Alexander said he has noticed a spike in inappropriate audience behavior in the last six or seven months, which was not common before now. He said he “absolutely” blames such a rise in racist attitudes to the recent political climate that encourages “certain demographics on the Trump side” to voice their opinions.

So under the influence of Donald Trump the comedy world is getting cruder, with more aggression and racial humor, driving out SJWs.

Recently, we heard how Donald Trump was driving urban millennial women to be less assertive and feminist and more pretty and feminine

Right now he’s indoctrinating people that sexual assault is a joke charge that unworthy women - who should be mocked and punished - use to take down great men.

I’ll be damned, but dude’s actually delivering on the shitlord issues.

Kim Jayeon — who had been providing a voice for the popular video game Closers — was out of her job.

Part of the problem was the source of the shirt. It’s put out by Megalia4, a South Korean feminist group.

When Kim’s tweet surfaced on July 18, scores of male gamers demanded that she apologize for supporting what they call a “anti-man hate group.”

…alright, sure, I suppo…

A major divisive issue for the movement was whether gay men married to women were dishonest and deserved to be publicly shamed. The more aggressive Megalians went on to do just that, outing a number of South Korean gay men.

huh

The controversy over the T-shirt has galvanized the critics of Megalia itself, sparking a fast-spreading campaign against people whose views appear to align with the movement’s.

“Over 80 people were badgered into issuing public apologies,” says Lee Junhaeng, a South Korean computer programmer and columnist.

Park Inha, a professor at Chungkang College of Cultural Industries southeast of Seoul, wrote in a Facebook post on July 24 that many people are accusing him and his institution for being “Megalia sympathizers” for his previous social media posts in support of feminism.

huh

pyramidenpapist:

Sexmission (Polish: Seksmisja) is a 1984 Polish cult comedy science fiction action film. It also contains a hidden political satirelayer specific to the time and place of its production.

The two protagonists, Max and Albert, played by Jerzy Stuhr and Olgierd Łukaszewicz, respectively, submit themselves in 1991 to the first human hibernation experiment. Instead of being awakened a few years later as planned, they wake up in the year 2044, in a post-nuclear world. By then, humans have retreated to underground living facilities, and, as a result of subjection to a specific kind of radiation, all males have died out. Women reproduce through parthenogenesis, living in an oppressive feminist society, where theapparatchiks teach that women suffered under males until males were removed from the world.

The cold-shoulder treatment Max and Albert receive from the women, their character differences and specific realities of future life serve as background of many humorous encounters. The plot thickens when it turns out that the females have no interest in the rebirth of men, and that for the good of society, the two males are to be killed or “naturalised”, i.e. undergo a sex-change. While trying to break away, Max and Albert find out the impact of their masculinity on women. With one of the scientists on their side, the men choose freedom and prefer to escape and die outside. In doing so, they discover the truth: radiation was just a feminist lie to keep women underground and the surviving male population were “naturalised” into women by the feminists when they took power in the post-war period. As a result of discovering the truth, both Max and Albert begin thinking of bringing the world back to normal.

Oh my lord this is interesting. It starts out like you’d expect - more PC generation wars, this time in a punk context, and then you visit the callout/boycott site they mention, @boycott924gilmanstreet, and even when you read the callout post it starts out like you expect like

- this place books bands with lyrics that valorize rape culture and don’t support our mission of providing a safer space

- and they didn’t really care about bathrooms and trans-frendliness

and then it takes a jag and for a while it’s like

- AND THOSE FUCKERS BOOKED GREEN DAY, THE MAJOR LABEL SELLOUTS!

and fucking record scratch and that is ~*~AMAZING~*~

not least because it’s the first attempt I’ve seen by censorious-liberationist forces to lay their own claim to legitimacy as heirs of the ‘90s. And it’s not a bad one!

also, also, “forced fingerbanging”. That’s this amazing wreck of a phrase that’s a synecdoche of this whole generation gap, the “forced” starting out in the modern harm/consent idiom but then realizing midair that no one’s going to go for what, the clinico-punitive “digital penetration”? and they’ll have to use the earthy Dirt Punk “fingerbang”

oligopsony:

dimitriarkady:

wirehead-wannabe:

oligopsony:

I must reluctantly admit that Vox Day’s influence on the world has not been ENTIRELY negative

“When Tuck Bingle receives and email explaining that he’s been nominated for science fiction literature’s most prestigious award, he’s left utterly confused. On one hand, Tuck is a successful writer of gay, science fiction erotic, but on the other, this email is addressed to someone by the name of Chuck Tingle.

Tuck replies, but his message is not delivered because the recipient exists in another layer of The Tingleverse, a revelation that will take Tuck on a journey into the deepest realms of his butt’s heart.

Soon, Tuck is breaking fourth-walls and anal limits, pounded hard by a handsome sentient Hugo Award nomination named Kelpo and learning the true meaning of homoerotic love!”

I don’t know who writes these, but they’re amazing and I wish them the best of luck in their weird homoerotic endeavors.

Tingle’s schtick is that he writes high modernist gay porn. The weird thing about his getting a Puppy nomination is that this is simultaneously exactly the sort of the thing the Puppies were (originally) complaining about with “politically correct degenerate art house nonsense” and a refutation of the supposed dichotomy between that and “rollicking good fun.” Vox’s other choices, and the fact that he didn’t go for (say) “Pounded in the Butt by my own Book, ‘Pounded in the Butt by my own Butt’” shows that he’s just including it as another throwaway joke at the expense of the process rather than putting much thought in at this level. (And of course Tingle IS a writer of throwaway jokes, just like say dril or Mallory Ortberg are. They’re still influential and justifiably so.) (Tagging @prokopetz because he’s the person I most trust to have something interesting to say about the intersection of nerd cultural politics, SFF history, and high modernist gay porn.)

The Space Raptor Butt Invasion nomination is making fun of “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”, which won the ‘13 Nebula for short story and was nominated for the ‘14 Hugo. A lot of the Puppies are of the opinion that it wasn’t even a story, let alone an SF one, let alone a good one, and that it was so accorded for Correct ideological box-checking. It’s the distilled symbol of what they stand against.

The joke is “Oh, you like dinosaurs-and-gayness themed crap? Well, this one’s at least got fucking space in it.”

See the real issue is that the pragmatic salt-of-the earthiness that looks at outfits and says “that emperor’s naked!” is the exact same one that says “that girl’s asking for it!”

kontextmaschine:

I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU

This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.

Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.

When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.

So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.

The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.

Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, '60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.

And it’s not like oooo, this was acceptable once upon a time, it’s that when I was growing up, this was the official line of media social liberalism. Who was that anon asking about the '90s? In the '90s, liberal Hollywood was putting out “message movies” the messages of which were America Is Finally Free, Thanks To Brave Heroes Like Larry Flynt Depicting Women As Violently Degraded Sex Objects, And Thank God For His Heirs Like Howard Stern, Still Fighting The Good Fight.

If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.

Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.

I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.

If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy” was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.

Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.

If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.

Something for Everyone

You know, I think a lot of modern internet culture war shit goes back to the ‘60s-‘70s (counter)cultural refoundation that both sides claim lineage from. ‘cause there’s a sense it was sold as something for everyone - women, racial, and gender/sexual minorities would get their civil rights and inclusionary movements recognized, in return straight white guys got the consensus that Cool People agree: sexualization is Correct, being offended is Incorrect. And there’s a growing sense (from all sides) that the terms have not been upheld.

Sad Puppies and the Hugos. Because that’s what we’re talking about now, apparently.

Both sides claim to be the true heirs of SFF. The antis sniff that it’s obviously them because the genre has always been committed to a progressive vision, especially starting with the '60s-'70s and the New Wave.

And that’s not wrong, but there’s a lot of stuff under that aegis. You have Left Hand of Darkness, with LeGuin all “gender fluidity would be great; we could experience our true selves independent of mutilatory social structures, and it would give rise to meaningful new cultural practices oriented around the beauty of self-discovery and self-crafting”.

And then there’s Varley’s Eight Worlds, which is like “Just imagine, if perfect sex changes were consumer services like haircuts, you could experience banging-hot hetero sex from both sides!”

Or Marion Zimmer Bradley all “adding strong female characters to fantasy allows us to escape tedious military epics towards an exploration of the importance of emotional labor, correctly identifying life-creation, not -destruction as the fundamental force of history”.

And meanwhile, “Red Sonja, DAAAAMN. She could force herself on you, how hot is that?”

(Joss Whedon postures like he’s from the Bradley tradition, but he’s toooootaly from the Red Sonja tradition.)

And then you have stuff like Stranger in a Strange Land, which is about interspecies tolerance, peace, love, and understanding, as enabled by author-insert dirty old man Jubal, attended poolside by his harem of buxom secretaries, including the one trained to totally suppress her personality so to better serve.

Like I said, something for everyone.

(Modern equivalent being Kim Stanley Robinson, recurring theme being “If scientists ran the world, there would be peaceful, multicultural, inclusionary socialism. And also collective nude bathing, where young female students seduce their mentors.”)

And you know, I’m still waiting on the WisCon panel on “Recovering the Promise of Teenage Groupies”.

Honestly I’m not much in the fandom these days but I do get Gardner Dozois’ “World’s Best” anthology every year, and I have noticed an increase in stories where nothing happens, but at least it’s brown and queer folks it’s not happening to.

One story a bit back that stuck with me, the message seemed to be “working in a Foxconn plant would suck”, which okay but I couldn’t even tell what was SF about it. Another that started promising - in an Islamic country (bcuz good point, the future won’t just come for white Anglophones), polygamy and semi-arranged marriage coexist with social media (ditto), and men hire Cyranos to polish their appeal, under the pressure that not every man can win even one wife. That’s a solid premise! But once this is established, the protagonist just throws up his hands and experiences a wave of relief as he realizes he could just be gay instead.

And it’s like… wut.jpg

In a proper world an editor would’ve returned that with a note saying “great story, can’t wait to see it when it’s done”. But that’s exactly the issue, isn’t it, that box-ticking and message Correctness are being accepted in lieu of quality.

Actually, you know what that really reminds me of? Christian rock.

The Nation (or at least Michelle Goldberg) has been staking out a decent claim on the “last generation’s left-media stars tell the kids their leftism is mewling, toxic, illiberal shit” beat. (See for example) I won’t say it’s the last place I expected that from but it’s not the first. An open niche, I suppose. Before and into the dawn of the Internet I tried to live up to my pretensions of worldly knowledge by going to the library to read a “balanced diet” of The Nation and National Review. (I was, like, twelve, so this was a precocious pretension.) So my image of The Nation comes from its post-Cold War stumblings, all “Fuck, socialism isn’t even a *dream* anymore? Well I, uh… hm. Well how about – no. Hm. Fuck. Look, Adbusters!” The Zack de la Rocha era of American left media, before George W. Bush came along to rescue it. (My memory of ‘90s National Review was a bunch of indistinguishable columnists trying too hard at second-rate Buckley impersonations with the result that they all sounded like poncey British twits. The exception was John Derbyshire, who secure in the knowledge that he *was* a poncey British twit allowed himself a personality.) Anyway, it’s a noble fight, or at least an interesting one. Has me actually paying attention to The Nation for the first time in a while.