kontextmaschine:

Meditating on that line that American atheism is markedly post-Christian

You see a lot of liberal stuff like “sure this violates conservative ~pRiNcIpLes~ but my god can’t they see real human lives are at stake?”

And approvingly cite the Jewish principle of pikuach nefesh – survival as overriding other divine commandments, or even taqiya, which ‘00s anti-Islamists saw as Muslim duplicity but can be glossed as “privately keep the faith, but publicly go along with whatever in the name of pluralist civic order”

But Christianity doesn’t have those, it has instead the ideal of martyrdom – that given a choice between accommodating wrongfulness and the certain destruction of your self and all you value, the latter is the righteous, correct, and even enviable one.

And even American Enlightenment tolerance is fundamentally post-Christian? What are the tales of the persecution of Galileo, the Inquisition, but foundational martyrs’ tales? (They used to be stories British Protestants told about how Catholics were bad)

And the tolerance ideal was that you’d accept that other groups were living in wrong ways but you had the option of keeping faith and being accepted in turn, anyway, is that still on offer?

(In fairness, the US once changed Mormon doctrine with an army, and in my life alone I’ve seen government power wielded against “cults”, “Satanists”, and Islam)

Shows that modern liberalism is, like we were warned in the 90s, increasingly secular humanist, that holds mortal human life as its highest value because… because… uh, ~HyOoMaN~! Hooooooooly

Which is dumb, because “life” is flopped to mean “willed satisfaction of desire” or “bare animal survival” there even where they’re directly opposed. And doomed, because human value and meaning arises from existential conflict.

gayasscommie:

So a friend of mine made this based off a fb status I made and now it’s *everywhere*

kontextmaschine:

“The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight! The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s. You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK. Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics. Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool.”

— kontextmaschine, 12/2/2014

kontextmaschine:

Yeah, you know what, why not post this. Even at the time it was goofy and kumbaya, but that was necessary to make the form work, and matching modern ritualized forms to incongruous content is my speciality.

*  *  *

Keep reading

kontextmaschine:

So a rivalry of /pol/ vs. Shia LeBouef is gonna be hilarious from the concept alone.

But the fact that /pol/ can go from analysis to infiltration operations to counting coup anywhere in the Anglosphere within 48 hours… and remember those times they were comparing subtle background details with satellite maps to target airstrikes in Syria? Plus their workaday schtick IS “conducting propaganda and provocation campaigns to increase unrest, influence elections, and congeal scattered resentments into an insurrectionary force”.

I mean, insert banepost here, but we should acknowledge they’re organically developing as a 3-letter intelligence agency.

RELATED:

Goofy fraternal societies as revolutionary agents (Oct 2014)

/pol/ as catalyst of transnational white-Anglophone ethnogenesis (May 2014)

Friendly reminder “underemployed, undersexed, disillusioned young men drawing unified reactionary identity from social media” is the most successful revolutionary model of the 21st century (Aug 2015)

kontextmaschine:

Your Granddad On The Internet

I’ve been thinking, as I always am, about the 90s and how we got here from there

And one thing I thought about was the figure we used to have of Your Granddad On The Internet - who would include you and all your brothers and sisters and parents on long e-mail FWD: chains about things that were transparently false on their face, frequently conservative-themed, frequently in ALL CAPS

Because apparently such a critical mass of people on the internet had that exact experience with their exact grandfather that it was a trope. Which brings up two points:

1) “People circulating viral conservative misinformation to their family and friends on the internet” is not a phenomenon of social media, it was there well before

2) Though these people were on the internet, ubiquitous on the internet even, they weren’t of the internet. Little or none of it was made for them and there was a hegemonic Internet Culture that recognized them as outside it.

So what was really going on? Well, let’s try to define the issue by subtraction.

It wasn’t just that he was a granddad - there were STEM professor wizards who’d been on USENET since the early ‘80s, or grey ponytail hippies from The WELL or whatever, and not only were they part of The True Internet, they were its founders.

It wasn’t just that he was out of it, on a tech or social level. Maybe your dad was wasting your inheritance chasing his brilliant day trading hunches, maybe your mom was going on Focus on the Family forums to complain about TV shows treating homosexuality as just another way to live. Probably they were both Eternal September AOLers who would ask you troubleshooting questions revealing an astounding ignorance of how computers work and somehow expect a useful answer that respected that absurd model.

But if they weren’t part of The True Internet they weren’t really rogues against it, at some level they got how you were supposed to interact with the internet - you found the site or community that corresponded to your interest and pursued it there. If anything their posts and e-mails too formally followed letter-writing structure, and they may have made dumb or tautological arguments in support of their points but they had the sense they were supposed to make arguments.

It wasn’t just that he was obnoxious - the notion of the “troll” dates to USENET at least, as someone who says things to get a rise out of people, or to bait them into wasting time rebutting something. To “own” them, basically. And annoying or not, this was accepted as part of what the Internet is, one of the signal features of its culture, really. But even when you weren’t sure if Your Granddad On The Internet actually believed something he sent you or just passed it on to signal what side he was on and how fiercely, he wasn’t trying to “own” you, he REALLY WAS on that side, he wanted you to associate him with that position, and ideally join him.

It was probably at least in part being retired and having spare time and no other social outlet, back in the day going online meant going to a specific piece of furniture in a specific room of your home when no one else was using the computer and spending maybe 3 minutes just getting online, it was something you blocked off time to do. The young generation could just come home from school to the cul-de-sac and get online for lack of anything else to do, the parents’ generation was too busy to have enough uninterrupted time to become Extremely Online?

The thing I’m really wondering about is class. What was the cost of being Online back then? Say a new computer and modem every 4 years at around $2400 (Grandpa sure wasn’t building his own, but then he didn’t have to keep upgrading video cards either), $40 for an ISP, ideally $10 for another phone line? That’s $100/month, or alternately $50/mo and the ability to make $2.5k purchases on demand. And the kind of senior citizen who, in 1998, lived separately from his children, could swing this, would think to swing this, has multiple agemate peers and children’s households who did swing this, was a particular group. “Middle-middle” class AT LEAST and probably higher, probably went to college back when only 10% of people did.

BUT that doesn’t make sense. My theory is that this used to be a more marginal behavior on the internet, but if it’s gotten more common since the late ‘90s I don’t think it’s because the Internet has grown more full of wealthy old patriarchs since.

So instead how about this theory: the internet in general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than we realized, with our American mythology of universal white suburban middle-classness and “global village” Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-class practices were the grandfathers from the “Silent” or “Greatest” generations before the postwar “mass middle class”. Our parents were beavery professionals who settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall, street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where boldness of assertion counted more than patient derivation from shared principles.

And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.

That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”

Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.

kontextmaschine:

you reap what you sow

kontextmaschine:

Reminded how for the 1996 election, the ABC network version of hip libertarian rebel cynic Bill Maher’s political humor variety show “Politically Incorrect” did a recurring skit called “Strange Bedfellows”, where Al Franken (for the Democrats) and Arianna Huffington (for the Republicans) would playfully trade barbs while sharing an oversize prop bed. Which was kind of riffing on the way that two of the parties’ highest-profile strategists, the Dems’ James Carville and the GOP’s Mary Matalin, were married to each other

kontextmaschine:

watching ‘80s movies in a bar and all those chopper pilots we trained for ‘Nam really left a mark on our credits sequences

hbshizzle:

check it out, it’s the three flavours of Republican

kontextmaschine:

Man you *hear* about Oregon having this nativist tradition, the Governor in ‘71 (a Mark Twain type who refounded the state as weirdo nature utopia after the mob got cleared out) riffing on the border signs to tell people not to move here…

This ‘80 commercial really makes you feel it, tho

(Just like I’d *heard* about the State of Jefferson but it still weirded me out to see the double-X on flags outside civic buildings and on gas pump weights & measures stamps)

kontextmaschine:

I was just listening to the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, and thinking of the image of the Taos crystal mystic hippie and the “tinfoil hat” paranoid

And like, we look down on them but come to think of it the theme of the 20th century was totally “invisible, penetrating, omnipresent waves of mysterious power you can tap into with crystals”

Like in the 19th century there was already woo-woo stuff like hypnotism, animal magnetism, psychics and mediums using crystal balls to reach out through the ectoplasm/astral plane, and then people invented wireless telegraphy, like “yeah, you hook up the still kinda mystic power of electricity up to specially proportioned focus objects and then you can send invisible energy waves that you can hear with the right magic crystal”

And from then until the microchip revolution that was like the cutting edge technology, invisible omnipresent power waves – radio, radar, X-rays, microwave, infrared, magnetic resonance…

Honestly if all we as a culture picked up from that was a sense of giving/receiving “vibes” and a ‘70s ESP thing that’s pretty underwhelming. Though probably for the best - we still have people trying to work “invisible omnipresent power waves” into deep culture, they’re the people who think wi-fi gives you cancer or 5G cell towers are for mind control or something

kontextmaschine:

So, more than 15 years before the hedgehog mascot made his debut, Sega was making Spanish pinball games under the name “SONIC”. That’s a cute little quirk.

SEGA actually made pinball games for a while in the ‘90s too, after it absorbed the pinball arm of Data East, which it had previously distributed abroad. The Japanese tables aren’t well respected by competitive players - though the playfields were often pretty interesting and they introduced some major technical breakthroughs, the tendency was to have poorly designed rulesets.

Sometimes this meant the “best” move was to ignore all the interesting stuff in favor of doing one boring thing with an unbalanced risk/reward ratio over and over; often it meant that scoring didn’t scale with difficulty of starting features, such that a player that completed numerous intricate maneuvers to start advanced modes would be outscored by someone that started a trivially easy mode and got a few lucky bounces.

This was during the golden age of arcades, though, you could make an argument that the extensive (if competitively worthless) novelty and the front-loaded scoring were reasonably aimed not at the narrow market of pinball theorycrafters but at the broader “children who like flashing lights”. Also helping to draw eyeballs, SEGA/Data East were pioneers in theming their games around big-name licensed properties.

Now, American manufacturers had done licensed tables for a while, and off-brand and ersatz themes were a tradition - Hollywood Heat was really Miami Vice, Black Belt was kinda Karate Kid, No Good Gofers and Teed Off were more or less a competition to pull off a better take on Caddyshack, F-14 Tomcat was Top Gun. The licensed Space Invaders was actually Alien, oddly enough.

(and the Spanish and Italian ones seemed to have the same relationship to IP as t-shirt manufacturers - SONIC [by then independent of SEGA] did a Star Wars that I’m not sure is any more legitimate than Turkish Star Wars)

But those had traditionally been mixed in with original properties or generic themes. Popular subjects were various sports, pool or casino gambling - which were the themes of “last man standing” manufacturer STERN’s last three non-licensed games, complete turds largely dumped on the European market in 2000.

Now that pinball’s in a renaissance new manufacturers are showing up but it’s not clear that’ll break the trend. Jersey Jack, the first people to actually deliver on their “let’s make a pinball game, gang!” mission (this usually goes the same way as “let’s make a retro JRPG, gang!”, there was an Arkh Project thing with a Big Lebowski table last year) are polishing a Hobbit table now, after making their debut in 2013 with, of all things, The Wizard of Oz.

I was going to say that the very newest underdog startup, Spooky Pinball, finally broke the trend with their America’s Most Haunted table. But on further investigation that’s not true - of all things, it’s based on an independent film that’s parodying basic cable “paranormal investigator” docu-reality shows, apparently playing up the fact that they’re a bunch of grown-ass adults running around playing Scooby Doo.

So.

kontextmaschine:

so when I was in LA I knew people in the porn industry, this was back in the mid-late 00s when the industry was still a valley thing you could make money off shoots, before it became a loss-leader for escorts and then dispersed to so many semipro bedrooms

anyway one of the guys was a casting agent, which I got to talking about what that involved, which totally he admitted that it was the Backroom Casting Couch thing where he’d take the 19-year-old UNLV girls coming in and fuck them on camera and it was a dream job

(the actual Backroom Casting Couch is totally set-up, which means it’s a fantasy that only someone already in the industry would know to think up. it also means it’s a premise that’s not much of an acting stretch for any given girl)

and it’s not even that that was a corruption per se because “how you look and act while having sex in a variety of positions” really was the basis on which you were being evaluated for roles

but the thing that threw me was he was like “honestly, my biggest value-add was giving her a chance to say no”, like he’d do the preliminaries and get the camera and drop trou and be like “time to put you through your paces”

and she’d freak out or hesitate like “well, I wanted to be a porn star, not have unprompted sex with someone I just met, filmed for people to see”, this was like the 2000s height of “raunch culture”, Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey and Stoya as mainstream C-list

and he’d be like “honey, if you have something to realize, this is the time to realize it rather than the first day on set when we’ve got a house rental and a permit and a director and equipment rental and makeup people and male talent waiting on you”

which is to say as skeezy as it sounds “the guy you have to fuck in his office” was a replacement for “the producer there to abuse/manipulate/coke you up with $20,000 on the line” and I think it might have been an improvement

kontextmaschine:

So with the DeVos nomination hearings people are talking about public education mandates regarding disabled kids, which has gotta be the best news hook I’m ever gonna get for this, so let’s go.

My lawyer father did work for the local school district. A lot of that was labor stuff, or land acquisition, or construction contracting, but special education stuff was big in there too, and I picked a bit of it up, from overhearing him with his dictaphone, or reading the little yellow “recent developments in Pennsylvania education law” pamphlets, because the internet wasn’t a thing yet and I had to read something.

Anyway, there’s a shit-ton of details and they vary from place to place, but since the 1970s the dominant national legal framework has revolved around the “Individualized Education Program”. Notion being that schools should evaluate students! Determine what program would best fit their needs! Provide them with that program! At no expense to them!

Like so much American policy of the 1970s, this was the result of looking at some field of government endeavor, declaring “this doesn’t even seem to be trying to live up to our nominal highest ideals”, solving the problem by mandating that the system in fact implement said nominal highest ideals, and then once the ideals prove ruinously unworkable, going through a tortuous decades-long process of kludging and caveating your way back towards the previous system which at least did do whatever it was that it did.

In practice things would work out like this: our district, which was one of the larger and better-resourced in the state, would be able to handle say Downs or MS kids on-site, with educational aides and special classes, past that there was the “intermediate unit” where a bunch of regional districts pooled resources for things like this. There’d be some kid everyone agreed wouldn’t work in the mainstream, so the district would work up an IEP that would have him using some IU program, and then the parents would be like “oh, but there’s this special program I heard of for blind synaesthetic autists*, that’s the best option for my child, he would thrive most there, it is, to use the magic words, most ‘appropriate to his needs’!”

And honestly, that was maybe even true, but the program charged $250k/year and it was down by Princeton so she was demanding the district provide a driver and an aide every day from 5-7AM and 4-6PM and the total cost was like 50 times average per-pupil spending while the intermediate unit was maybe 5. So the district’s role was to say “lady, no”, and then go to lawfare - lining up motions, experts, evaluators that could be trusted to affirm the district’s position to counter the plaintiff’s experts chosen for reliably affirming hers - to make it stick.

So that’s a dramatic example, though the stuff worth enough and with good enough prospects to fight through to the end tended to be. I’m sure more common were cases of holding the line at a lower level against more sympathetic claims, stuff where the district looks more like the baddies and the cost of resisting starts to approach the cost of giving in if you judged on a case-by-case basis.

Which you couldn’t, because you had to factor in that if your district got a reputation as a pushover word would get out, through whatever listservs or nonprofits or network of professional providers, and you’d start to attract more supplicants.

If you put together an A-1 no-expenses-spared autism program, the whole puzzle piece bumper sticker set from your entire metropolitan commuting zone just ~happens~ to make their next move into your district. Or maybe you shell out for a local kid with a rare condition because you want to do right by your community, be nice, and three families in the same position up sticks and move across the country to your town - what’s the cost of a move compared to millions in effective subsidies - and use the precedent to demand the same. And congratulations, you just niced $12 million of your community’s money away - out of taxes or classrooms - for the benefit of people they don’t know from Adam.

And that’s a thing - these cases that districts really worry about, we’re talking about upper-middle class families. They’re the people that can move at will, they’re the people who even think to wield administrative law against the government, they’re the ones that can match the districts at lawfare, the ones who can afford evaluations by independent experts, lawyers - these things don’t resolve as monetary awards and it’s not like they’re taking cases on contingency and accepting two years of speech pathology sessions in payment, so we’re talking cash-on-the-barrelhead here, lawyer cash.

(Oh, that reminds me of something. “Gifted” programs? Are special education operating under the same IEP framework. Which means they often represent the success of the professional class at extracting resources from the general population and dedicating them towards preparing their scions for the elite.

I remember in 1st and 2nd grade our program was… me, cause they didn’t know what else to do with me [dead certain my dad knowing the system helped tho, for sure], by 6th grade it was maybe 1/5 our year and included a bunch of guys who were above average sure, but mostly their dad owned a dealership.

Actually I’d say the ability to fit into the IEP framework has something to do with the success of the notion of the “gifted child” [which when it caught on in the crystal-dippy New Age ‘70s had elements of the contemporary woo-woo “indigo child”] - not just smart as an adjective, like tall, but a type, with needs who could suffer if they go unmet.)

So that’s something to keep in mind, maybe when you, or the general public, thinks of “disabled student seeking public education services” you’re picturing sympathetic little Tiny Tims. But when actual institutions of public education - and we’re not talking ogrish conservatives, school districts like education spending, they hold this stance lest they be shaken down and shattered - do the same they’re picturing an attacking wave of vampiric Can-I-Speak-To-The-Manager-Moms from hell who have to be fought off lest they suck millions from taxpayer pockets, lest they suck whole classes worth of resources from the schools - and our suburban district could bear this fine, it’s the poor rural “tsk, don’t they know they need education for the future” districts where this can really fuck stuff up - and pour it straight down a hole with a gold-plated nameplate reading “My Wittle Snookums”.

I don’t have a solution. (Wellll, maybe reencoding the disabled as shameful and disposable and consigning whole swaths to low-cost warehousing in accordance with their instrumental potential, because I’m one of those coldly logical male types who prefers solving things to wallowing in ~feelings~ and ~care of persons~.)

To the extent we’re going to ration resources here, and we are, rationing-by-ability-to-work-the-system is a perverse way to do it that routes resources to the already resourced, but under the current system of due process in administrative law (more curse of the 70s) it’s hard to do otherwise.

* this was a throwaway example but now I notice there are some amazing “on the spectrum” jokes here

kontextmaschine:

This is a jaunty French Revolutionary filk song about the Day of the Rope that riffs off a Benjamin Franklin line, for example

The fuck does that mean today?

kontextmaschine:

slartibartfastibast:

https://twitter.com/TheFaction1776/status/1085293090288558081

At this distance all the street art I hear about in Shepard Fairey’s old Hollywood stomping grounds these days is right-wing, either The Faction or SABO.

(Hollywood the neighborhood hasn’t equaled “Hollywood” the industry since the 1940s)

There is a tradition of Gen X West Coast counter/subcultural right-cynicism though, expressed through humor and cartooning – Jim Goad and Nick “A. Wyatt Mann” Bougas at Answer Me!, Suck.com (large portions of which was absorbed by Reason magazine), Peter Bagge and Hate, John Swartzwelter writing for Army Man and The Simpsons

Really it was part of the same cultural ecosystem as Fairey and Adbusters, honestly as Spy and Vice and Bloom County and Life In Hell and Calvin & Hobbes tbh, even Beavis & Butthead/Daria, a Gen X disillusionment with/loathing of the normie world

But then that became the culture and got its edges softened and everyone forgot how to operate as a counterculture

(I was lately like “wow, Hard Times and Reductress AND Babylon Bee are all really good rn, why is all the good satire subculture-specific?” Then I realized The Onion’s “overeducated college town slacker with Thoughts about pop culture” was subculture at debut)

But now we’re cycling back out and it’s been rediscovered

kontextmaschine:

Proposed: the 1980s farm crisis (which was where family farming finally died in America) at some level fed into the development of anti-abortion activity and identity in the same period, by way of agrarian-magical fertility rites.

It’s a recurring notion among human agricultural societies that the health of the land, and of the crop, rely, through sympathetic magic, on the enactment of human fertility, in ritual or actual childbearing

These fertility cults constitute a folk religion symbiotic with any variety of nominal official religions, if not actively parasitic and tending to supplant

At some fundamental level the failure of the agrarian economy is understood or at least felt as a result of the failure of women to bear children, and for them to return to fertility will renew the golden age

To perform abortions is, essentially, to perform black witchcraft, cursing the crop and ruining the harvest; if a witch has cursed your crop the solution is to kill the witch.

This would explain the origin of Operation Rescue in the mid-1980s, and why it would choose Wichita of all places for its Summer of Mercy, this would explain the geographic distribution of the most intense anti-abortion sentiment and violence, this would explain why if you drive too far into farm country the cultural footprint consists of decaying human settlements and roadside signs condemning abortion or beseeching women to give birth

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

spacedkey:

you may suffer the consequences of your actions

the consequences of my actions are that i am here, i have a roof over my head, and no one is going to eat my face

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

freeze to death, likely