quoms:

you: our lack of a truly universal healthcare system is directly contributing to the spread of the coronavirus, which in the worst-case scenario could produce an italy-type situation where demand outstrips available resources and critically ill patients are triaged out of care

me: so what you’re saying is obamacare death panels real

chris-evans:

resinsculpture-deactivated20221:

resinsculpture-deactivated20221:

People on twitter call everyone they dislike a “grifter”, but this insult has not migrated to tumblr because no one here is making any money

Which is good, by the way. There’s nothing more degrading than watching grown adults act like pissy teenagers on twitter for clicks and tv appearances. Like, writing a callout over someone clicking “like” on the wrong post is dumb; but doing that on purpose, as a calculated machiavellian career move when you’re an adult who wears a suit to work and has a child… there’s something deeply pathetic, not to mention grotesque about it.

Here we can watch the pest in its natural habitat, and pretend we don’t know that it’s spreading, rotting apart the whole adult world.

swampgallows:

normal-horoscopes:

beckitty:

normal-horoscopes:

OH LIKE THE END OF EVANGELION

Oh gods above and below, this is right!

MY THIRD EYE IS LOCKED OPEN AND I AM STARING INTO THE SUN

@kontextmaschine

swampgallows:

swampgallows:

a foray into bootleg happy hardcore

composition: pulsing beat, strong momentum, catchy hook, cheesy sample about raving, cutesy vocalist

lyrics: a nursery rhyme about getting an erection

kaleidoscopicbullettrain:

y'all want goth partners but can’t handle when content is aimed at them

“edge lord” this “edgy” that

y'all don’t deserve the goths that you pine for

memecucker:

memecucker:

I think it’s funny how there’s memes about millenials being downer depressed while gen z nihilism is more wild and bright revelry because I am very certain that like 10 years ago talk about millenials was about their boundless drive and optimism lmao

The only interesting aspect of generation discourse is how the shift in what “millenial culture” means is a real time depiction of people just breaking

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

“the point of governments is to stop other people from making governments”

— @razyrs

swampgallows:

kontextmaschine:

do you wanna

are you gonna

do you wanna go?

kontextmaschine:

see me climb as high as I can go

looking down on people far below

you can live a secret fantasy

take a magic carpet ride with me

falling over the moon

and i’m drifting round the planets

floating down through a million stars

it would be nice to stay here together

ethnianmandarin:

quoms:

gowns:

i had a depressing thought last night when we were flipping through the channels and saw a rerun of seinfeld….. do you think that like 400 years from now people will think of seinfeld as this era’s shakespeare? because they like invented certain terms and had observations about the times, comedy of errors, etc? a woefully mixed up interpretation, but that’s how it could seem to future humans who would be totally media-and-pop-culture-addled. 

[i guess the really depressing thought here is, what if shakespeare was actually his era’s jerry seinfeld. like, what if he spent the latter half of his life just ripping into sensitive snowflakes and talking about horse and carriage models with whoever would listen.]

Playwrights in Passenger-Carriages Getting Profiteroles

for anyone to Be Shakespeare there would have to be a future polity (whether national or organised on some futuristic world system on another basis) who needs to come up with a dramatist from history from whom they can reasonably descent, take as their totem, and who is similar to other dramatists. the actual circumstances of Shakespeare do not really matter

transhumanesque:

was worrying about how sapiosexuals can’t have bimbos but actually it’s okay cause the classic spacy, head-in-the-clouds scientist figure is exactly this

tsutsifrutsi:

(Required reading: Siderea on Class)

It’s interesting to think about the (many) ways in which the modern “bay-area rationalist techno-libertarian” culture (i.e. Scott Alexander’s Grey Tribe, and to a lesser extent all of STEM academia) is effectively an outgrowth not of the bourgeoisie “entrepreneurial” class identified with the American upper-middle, but rather of the historical-and-present military officer class. Examples:

• seeing things in terms of game-theory, negotiations, and logistics—in est, in terms of strategy;
• breaking debates down into positive vs. normative subcomponents, and then setting out to solve the positive subcomponent; thus, technocratic politics;
• the default assumption of meritocracy, and the belief (against evidence) that organizations with many members from this class will naturally end up meritocratic;
• thinking in terms of capability rather than intent or policy, e.g. “the only thing stopping the state from seeing your data is encryption”, or “the only thing stopping nuclear war is MAD”;
• the whole notion that while the world is suboptimal on a macro-political level, this is fixable through strength of arms: directly through war, or indirectly through technological innovation. Culture is the thing presumed to be immutable and worked around—an attitude foreign to most every other class, who think of culture as the first and only viable battleground for macro-political change;
• an enjoyment of futurism (i.e. speculative fiction, X-risk debates) but also Futurism (the aesthetic of early speculative fiction, of games like Portal and Bioshock, of clean elegant spaceships and “fixed” transhuman genomes.) This is the only class that sees nothing wrong with the concept of a “supersoldier.” (It assumes the advances will turn the crank of genomics tech, which will result in the positive macro-political shifts mentioned above);
• the ideal of Heinlein’s competent man, completely autonomous, able to restart civilization from its bootstraps—not quite a Nietzschean übermensch, since the philosophy and beliefs of the “competent man” are mostly irrelevant—it is instead the skill-set that matters, and its concentration all in one (or rather, every) individual;
• the drawing of a sharp division between “officer-quality” and “enlisted-quality” people, where the distinction comes down not to acculturation into this officer class, but to potential: raw intelligence and willingness to learn, but not to labor (i.e. the ability to be the “competent man”, and then—having gained the knowledge to do so—the desire and analytical capacity to properly delegate to others who have a comparative advantage in those skills, rather than to do them oneself);
• for the above reason reason, the highest likelihood of any class to hire skilled laborers and tradesmen or pay for services, instead of attempting to do “amateur” work themselves. The numerous profitable startups serving exclusively the “rich SV engineer who wants to automate something” crowd can attest to this. (Though, as above, this class first seeks to understand the work that will be done, such that they can then observe and evaluate the performance of the contractor or service. This leads to many a tradesman being “told how to do their job” by members of this class whenever they do something nonstandard);
• the scouting for un-acculturated members, with an explicit path to acculturate them, vis. officer training schools, or coding bootcamps. This is one of the few classes (the only?) that almost universally encourages, and attempts to facilitate entry into it. This class doesn’t see people in the other classes as doing something inherently “bad” that must be corrected. Instead, it sees most people as being in their “proper” class, the one that fits them—but sees the “officer-quality” people who are in some other class as being in the “wrong” class, and assumes they will feel much better when “rescued” by this class. (Which is at least sometimes true; many who were bullied in a differently-classed public school do feel “rescued” when they enter a STEM program in university.)

Remember, Silicon Valley was a DARPA project center first, and the startups there are the diaspora. SV and Bay-area culture is military-officer culture.

If you identify strongly with characters like Miles Vorkosigan and Ender Wiggin, it might do to ask yourself how much of that is a feeling of identification with a member of a class you didn’t realize you were in.

like-pancake-deactivated2019101:

instead of online and become worldmind schizophrenic I should embody book culture’s radical individualism by simply, cracking open one of those good ole’ novels

argumate:

the Internet of Things is just an attempt to make animism real again by imbuing all the objects around us with wilful trickster spirits that attempt to trap us into misleading bargains and waylay us with petty inconveniences.

discoursedrome:

transgenderer:

i dont have that much of a yearning to be immortal but i do want to know how history turns out

based on how it’s gone so far I don’t think it’ll be possible for it to come to a satisfying conclusion. as long as it’s popular it won’t be allowed to conclude and then once it becomes unsustainably unpopular it’ll just sort of stop

it’s happening