Poptimism finished its course correction . We know innovative art can be made in the pop genre and the pop industry machine. You can also make a transcendent blockbuster. but now it’s just an excuse to kiss corporate ass and suffocate stuff outside the attention economy and that’s the truth
twitch streamers acknowledging what you type in chat is the modern day equivalent of knights giving flowers to young women who have come to watch them joust
Anonymous asked: Love it or hate, The New South is laybe the biggest erging story in America the past 35 years or so. Sad to me as a yankee that they're what the Midwest and then west coast used to be.
It might well turn out, for example, that U.S. decision makers would be willing, among other things, to accept the high risk of an additional 1 per cent of our children being born deformed if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet Russia. Or it might be that under certain circumstances the Russians would be willing to accept even higher risks than this, if by doing so they could eliminate the United States.
At this point in the lecture a lady in the audience got up and said in a very accusing voice, “I don’t want to live in your world in which 1 per cent of the children are born defective.” My answer was rather brutal, I fear. “It is not my world,” I observed, and I then pointed out that if she did not want to live in a world in which 1 per cent of the children were born defective she had a real problem, since 4 per cent of the children are born defective now. …
I can easily imagine that if we lived in a world in which no children had ever been born defective and we were told that as a result of some new contingencies 4 per cent of the children would be born seriously defective we would consider such a world to
be intolerable. We might not believe that people would be willing to bear and raise children if the risk were about 1 in 25 that these children would have a serious congenital defect. However, we live in that world now. We not only bear this relatively high rate of tragedy; we come close to ignoring it. While some women are greatly concerned about such possibilities during their pregnancy, it is only in such critical periods or when they are touched personally that most people think about this continuing burden of life. To add a further 1 per cent to the burden would be a terrible thing to do, but this additional burden is clearly comparable to the kinds of risks to which we have become accustomed in the peacetime world. Most people will be able to live with such increased risks.
The funny thing is Gritty is one of the most cop-like figures because people understand him as one united, omnipresent being when he’s really just a bunch of different jabronis wearing the same costume and performing the same broad character
amusing, but surely the same analysis applies to Robin Hood and every comic book character
Also by this logic Anonymous are cop-like.
“You know who’s just like a cop? The dude in the Goofy suit at Disneyland.”
“You know who are cops? Literally any group of people with some kind of cohesion and similar outfits.”
It used to be that when people got upwardly mobile and like settled down they would just drop out of subcultural scenes but like now since that’s like the main form of interaction they have to like make these grand arguments for how the status quo or their conventional and stable existences are actually *The Most* radical and transgressive thing and lecture everyone abt how all the things that we were told we should aspire to in the normal world are actually super punk and queer or whatever
hot take: the problem isnt the manic pixie dream girl. its the boring ass moody emotional leech guy she always gets paired with. we need more manic pixie dream characters. just give them partners who are as great as them or let them be happy alone! no more smart, beautiful, optimistic, kind girls getting paired with actual mosquitoes of men!
Also: make some manic pixie dream boys. If I wanna see romance maybe I wanna see a giddy boy full of positive energy who tells you fun facts about the constellations. Stop teaching boys they have to be moody and sad and they have to find salvation in a dream girl, this is how you breed Bad Men.
the memetic evolution of modern beliefs may seem capricious and arbitrary but gosh have you looked at the twisted random walk taken by any major religion lately or the way that imperial and national ideologies were batted about like beach balls in the wind of economic change.
every system that actually functions in practice is a hodgepodge of pragmatic compromises and weird hacks that were adopted for circumstantial reasons way back when and are now considered a load-bearing part of the infrastructure.
evolution looks about the same whether it’s biological, mechanical, or ideological
So paradigm shifts are the punctuation in punctuated equilibrium then
