kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

alienpapacy:

oh hey reminder that AT (“Absolute Terror”) fields are themed from the same source as “terror management theory”

reminder that that concept is about the defenses we erect to protect us from awareness of our own inevitable mortality

so the Unit-02/Mass Production Unit fight in End of Evangelion where Asuka goes balls out and channels all her perfectionist neurosis into beating them all before her power supply ends, but then they just rise up again and break through her AT field and impale her mother/avatar/self through the face to be cannibalized

the very moment where their spears, forcing their way through the field, turn into a Lance of Longinus - the very tool by which his inferiors killed God - and she exclaims in astonishment, that second when she realizes that no matter how perfect she is she’ll die anyway

that’s also a metaphor for realizing that no matter how perfect you are you’ll die anyway

kontextmaschine:

You know what my favorite piece of reactionary media is?

Ghostbusters.

Hear me out, I’ve mentioned this before, but forever ago. It’s a movie about a bunch of guys who, in the go-go ’80s, give up on academia to found a startup based on cutting edge technology. They settle in gritty New York City, specifically rehabilitating decaying public safety infrastructure, and their job description is literally “drive around town with the siren on, rehabilitating once-glorious locations by imprisoning vandalous spooks”.

They clean the city up, create jobs for the black and white ethnic working class, but face resistance from pointy-headed bureaucrats. (The dickless EPA guy manages to represent both “overregulation” and “safety-threatening prisoner releases” with admirable efficiency.) Ultimately though, the meddlers have to relent in the face of their success at making the city safe for innocents, as represented by yuppie singles in their 30s.

(Ghostbusters II is about the guys making the city a safe place for those yuppies to raise kids by cleansing cultural institutions of evil influence using the power of American patriotism, while the judiciary and mayor come to accept that whatever the law or political elites might say, busting is both necessary and popular.)

Meanwhile, it’s fucking Ghostbusters.

kontextmaschine:

Starting to read the first (training) half of the 1987 Full Metal Jacket of a critique of the co-option of revolutionary energy into Generation X

The point of Joker is he’s the post-60s mentality so we identify with him and that means he’s a challenge to the system, man. But the thing about the Virgin Mary sequence is the system doesn’t really care if he’ll stand up for pre- or post-60s as long as he stands up, and will openly reject others to induct him, if that’s the way the wind’s blowing

Meanwhile the actual threat to the system is Pyle not for having a worked-out ideology but just not fitting to the needs of the state and the arc up to the blanket party is about Joker coming to identify against him and not against Gunnery Sergeant Hartman

And at the end of it all he does his mission and comes back but his men are ironically identifying with mass-market culture like the Mickey Mouse Show, that’ll show ‘em

kontextmaschine:

When Mental-Health Experts, Not Police, Are the First Responders

Reminder that America used to have dedicated professionals with mental health training as frontline “first responders”. Those were the “men in white coats” (the ones coming to take you away, haha).

And I’ve seen this play before, next thing supporters will say “oh, for this program to really work we need the field agents backed by dedicated facilities adequately funded to have open beds for crisis admissions”

And we used to have those, too, that’s what sanitariums and insane asylums were!

(You can read the full article from clicking through at this tweet. idk)

kontextmaschine:

Empty Realm

This is an interesting article presenting the (rightist-marked) “NPC” meme as the natural heir to the Frankfurt School critical theory critique of mass culture as a dehumanizing force of control

One more point in favor of “current dynamics are not aberrant but rather return to the norm after the aberrant postwar Golden Age” – go back before WWII and America was ABSOLUTELY a country of overcrowded cities full of hobo jungles and pompous elites and henpecking scolds and hordes of ethnicized poor and nervous young college graduates scrambling to hold on and taking their nervous energy out on sex with a demimonde of lipstick and dresses and testicles and dicks, all surrounded by a sea of rural tedium and despair.

So maybe all that was just a Boomer bubble. One that started before The Sixties, though. The postwar right realized that kinda society was a breeding ground of communism though and the first step was throwing off the Popular Front culture.

“Stifling mass culture of the 50s” gets coded right these days, but remember that Ayn Rand (who’d lived through a national culture going commie and stifling before) had big counterculture (yes!) hits in the 40s and 50s with books where a pompous, clucking clique of “progressive” mediocrities dripping syrupy moralism dominated popular media and used it to suppress the liberatory potential of superior individuals and their ideas.

The scene in Atlas Shrugged where the protagonists blow up a bridge and send a trainful of them plunging to their firey comeuppance was the Day of the Rope of its day; in reality the payoff was the McCarthyite Second Red Scare cleansing them from positions of cultural influence, clearing the way for the Counterculture

Which rose, struggled, got overconfident, got knocked back, but returned in the 90s to devour Square Culture for once and all, and dissipated as people no longer realized it needed investment in maintaining

Or were devoured by, “selling out” was really a much higher-profile concept before say 2005. Why’s Gavin McInnes scrambling to build an apparatus of cultural influence? He already built one, with VICE! And sold it out. (For like a billion dollars split a few ways, and it’s not like “magazine from 2008 with a website and publishing arm and events w/ party photographers” is a powerful form rn)

Also, recent revelations are implying that many major figures stopped pushing boundaries in public too hard in return for a lifetime supply of 19±5 year olds soooo

But ANYWAY, does show that the theoretical energy is more on the upstart right these days. Maybe that’s ‘cause theory is what you do out of power – at the same time last decade’s efflorescence of left theory, Jacobin to n+1 to Rhizzome, is being increasingly discarded by a renascent left infatuated with its own dynamic action.

yieldsfalsehoodwhenquined:

fluffshy:

itsbenedict:

defectivealtruist:

anime girls generated by a neural network

ARE YOU SERIOUS

Now websites could auto-generate anime avatars for their users.

I wouldn’t have thought that anime would be the the forefront of AI research.

i reblogged this as a shitpost originally but that’s a good idea actually

relishboi:

kontextmaschine:

Oh man that reminds me of the most meta- thing I’ve ever seen.

0) World War II happened.

1) In postwar Japanese pop culture, “thinly or completely unveiled reference to nuclear explosion” is rivaled in thematic popularity only by “thinly or completely unveiled alternate-WWII in which Japan wins and is totally the good guys”.

Actually I’m almost afraid they finally got over this in the late-90s with the passing of a generation. I liked that, something somber and elegaic in the culture that wasn’t pure fanservice or third-generation commercial ripoffs. Anno and Miyazaki and remember when Final Fantasy had Cyan and the ghost train instead of a bunch of fucking EZ-Bake popstars?

2) Okay so there was this recent trend, they call “moe anthropomorphism” to represent things and concepts as cute girls, because obviously, Japan. It was particularly popular in terms of military hardware, because obviously, Japan.

3) Manga, etc., etc., so comics are a big thing in Japan, and part of the farm team for that is working on basically fanfic of established properties, they call it doujin, and like all fanfic, like most pulp, a lot of time it’s only good for the sex. Which is often violent and involves 13 year old girls, because obviously, humanity.

OKAY

4) So 1) and 2) combine to create Strike Witches - it was this series about a school/force of teenage girls representing various planes from all the nations of WWII, like they strap on these leg-things to fly around, and because they’re all allied together against an alien force literally representing militarism and war descending on the world even though no one particularly wants this militarism and war oh no, they’re just all brave and innocent warriors, and they might have to put on these leg things and fight the aliens at any time, they never wear pants so you can see their panties all the time, because obviously, Japan.

5) so 4) and 3)  combine to make a hentai (“pervy”) doujin of Strike Witches. Which I read, to masturbate to. The first twenty pages of this doujin is mostly lesbian dominance, all of the girls breaking down and raping one of the more innocent characters, who was the Japanese one and I think a Mitsubishi Zero?

6) and then 5) combines with 1) again, which was already baked in, and the last 8 or so pages are the apocalyptic showdown with the aliens as seen from the Zero’s eyes. The American and British girls are out of the picture, dismissed in one panel. The French and Italian girls have surrendered and slunk away because they’re pussies.

The French and Italian girls have surrendered and slunk away because they’re pussies, but the two German girls went boldly into battle and lie bloodied and dying on the ground, this is the thing.

And so finally, the Japanese girl is fighting alone. She’s scared, she’s meek - she was the natural submissive for the first 20 pages, getting hazed by all the older nations^H^H^H^H^H^H^H girls but now it’s just her, now it’s her turn to prove her honor, and she jets out shrieking her vengeance, dodging alien missiles, coming straight out of the page…

And the next page is imitation newsprint, with a period photo-offset litho as the header. It’s an alien aircraft carrier, obviously American in design, with an exhaust trail streaking into one side of the island and a giant explosion blossoming out of the other.

And THAT is the most meta- thing I’ve ever seen.

(UPDATE for incoming 9/15/16: Takotsuboya’s “Witch-tachi no No-Pantsu”

)

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

this tweet became 250% funnier when I learned she was Matt Yglesias’ ex from Harvard

kontextmaschine:

I mean, youth soccer and little league and a year of Pop Warner, but I think you’re onto something there, that I never really mixed serious competition with long-term socialization, such that my “in-game” activities were tied to any social matrix

And that, instead, my experience of group competition comes from computer simulations in a coach/general/chessmaster role, from which I get a sense that the role of a unit is to frictionlessly be expended by a higher will

Or from online matchmaking, where teams are assembled fresh for each event and the emphasis is on interchangeably performing your modular role and syncing with teammates as an emergent property of understanding the dynamics at play without any exposure before or after

That’s obviously a background becoming more common these days and I wonder how it affects actual military culture

pigeoncomics:

Pigeon Comic 52 - Mr. Brightside

birlinterrupted:

Manyvids: Misogyny Kink - Twitter Feminist HUMILIATED and FORCED to Campaign for Joe BIDEN

kontextmaschine:

I’ve mentioned I’ve wanted to write about historical travel/communication routes:

Roads - the organic growth of local roads, the tendency to form road districts, corvee labor as a support mechanism, the iffy history of medium-distance private roads (profitable mostly in support of land development w/ poor long-term income streams); above all the historical novelty of roads as city-to-city transit modes, previously a thing of railroads or

Coastal and Inland Shipping - historically the fastest, most efficient method of transit; the significance of the Appalachians and the East Coast’s lack of lengthy rivers; the way command of New Orleans (and thus the Mississippi system) and the St. Lawrence (and thus the Great Lakes) played into trade empire strategies and how that interacted with US settler colonialism (, how this experience played into the Chinese Exclusion Act as a defense of the American Pacific presence focused on the trade city of San Francisco); the way Philadelphia came to early prominence due to the Delaware Water Gap offering a rare route to the interior and how New York stole her thunder with the Erie Canal offering an alternate route to the Great Lakes, with a potential portage to the Mississippi system at a site we now call “Chicago”

The Post Office - overlapping a lot with the above two on modalities; how post-carrying contracts promoted, structured, and regulated American shipping and railroads before the dawn of the modern regulatory state; how the era where the federal government was “just the Army & Post Office” actually meant a lot of recognizably contemporary programs got shoehorned in (compare the Army Corps of Engineers, Lewis & Clark Expedition, various imperial overseas administrations). The Post Office as a domestic spy and countersubversive agency - against abolitionists, Confederates, anarchists, antinatalist feminist race-suiciders. The Post Office as the major source of federal patronage, and the reason the same parties operate at federal and local levels where issues and pressures are otherwise perpendicular

kontextmaschine:

So the “government-issued gfs” thing going around got me thinking about Billy Joel’s Allentown again.

Like, the whole conceit of the song is “Our fathers went off to WWII and in return the country moved heaven and earth to make them patriarch-princes, we went off to Vietnam and now we’re treated as disposable.”

(He’s forgetting Korea in between, but that’s OK, everyone does.)

And given the title the focus is on the fall of the unionized Rust Belt heavy industry, but look at this line

met our mothers in the USO
asked them to dance
danced with them slow

this is literally, 100%, a lament for when we had government-provided gfs

The morale-boosting USO, now best known for in-theatre concerts and airport lounges, ran homefront clubs and canteens near soldiers’ postings, and a major role was providing the troops with female attention, recruiting girls from the area to free dances with regularly paid soldiers, hiring staff hostesses whose job was to flirt.

(This in a period where “courtesan” jobs like taxi dancer or cocktail waitress, with a career path culminating in marriage, were more of a thing)

And it wasn’t just the USO. Part of the point of the WAC was to match the supply of single women to the demand of support roles, freeing men for front-line service, part of it was just to have some young women on base. (Here I vaguely gesture at Miss Buxley, General Halftrack’s buxom secretary in Beetle Bailey)

Then there were nurses. Male military nurses in the war had a reputation as twinkle-toes homosexuals, drawn by the constant flow of strong yet vulnerable young men in uniform far from home to comfort. The male ones, of course. (Florence Nightingale’s innovation wasn’t young women going abroad to tend to soldiers – field armies ALWAYS drew trains of camp followers to attend to the men’s needs – but rather an idiom to do it compatible with Victorian sensibilities)

Like, guys, the government very much did try to provide gfs. And it didn’t stop with the war.

There’s this Rosie the Riveter impression that women streamed into factories in WWII but faded at its end, in fact post-war female factory employment was lower than before the buildup. (If women in factories started with WWII, how would you explain the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911?)

And this came amidst government pressure (from an extensive wartime central planning system) to clear out women and make way for returning men. There was a fear the Depression would return (this is why the war economy was never unwound) to a country of battle-hardened men and provoke Communist revolution; it was a high priority to keep men occupied, loyal, and rewarded as patriarchs.

Daniel Moynihan took shit over his famous report for suggesting the solution to the black community’s ills was government-backed patriarchy, Earl Butz took more shit for putting it thus:

“I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.“

For how colorful the language might be, though, that formula – “rising standards of living through improved access to consumer goods and women” was the exact same deal the United States made with its whites, as the basis of the postwar golden age.

I could talk about the postwar expansion of high schools and the creation of the “teenager” and all the courtship stuff there, hosting proms and football games and teaching how to dance in gym and how to wife in Home Ec and showing film strips and Coronet 16mms on how to get a date, but that’s a bit of a stretch. The point remains, though, under the New Deal social compact, from the Depression into the 1970s, the government was ABSOLUTELY in the gf-providing business.

kontextmaschine:

hey remember the 90s when the Æ character was making a comeback?

hey remember the 90s with its Wicca boom and its ridiculous “burning times” myth that was kind of appropriating the whole “R2P” thing that genocide was now our master narrative for legitimizing geopolitics

BUT ALSO clearly a sublimation of the way the ‘80s backlash cut off the ‘70s liberatory momentum?

good times, good times

kontextmaschine:

Underexplored tension that the patron saint of the dirtbag left’s “drop the woke, hammer on economics” is… neoliberal sellout Bill Clinton

That’s what “it’s the economy, stupid” was about – reminding him that Dems still had an edge on economic issues, especially after the Volcker shock, Reaganomics, the rusting of the Rust Belt, the S&L crash, the early 90s recession…

But that voters had decisively renounced them for 3 presidential elections over existential but not narrowly economic subjects – visions and policies around the basic structure and purpose of government, of crime, and the social and sexual and racial order.

And that Democratic positioning on the latter corresponded to a hegemony among a left-of-center “leadership class” and intensely engaged but narrow pressure groups but NOT among even regular Democratic voters as a whole. So by shedding (or at least “triangulating against”) the latter, he could ride the former to victory.

(And then rig a national machine where left donors gave directly to the party and party-approved NGOs rather than funding rabble-rousers. In exchange for… benefits. My thinking on Epstein stuff is “if they were sweeping this under the rug, imagine what they were doing on building permits”)

And it worked, and he was able to raise taxes, and the minimum wage, and at least try for nationalized healthcare (and, uh, NAFTA). And then the Republicans took both houses of Congress, which no Dem president had faced since Truman (who still had more New Deal/WWII authorities to employ). And even then you had things like the now-vilified crime bill, where both the “more cops on the street” and “midnight basketball” provisions were a return of federal grants to big cities, after they had been allowed to starve under Republicans.

Even in less “economic” more “identity”, or at least minority rights areas, he saved Roe! Casey v. Planned Parenthood was expected to be the awaited repeal but it was just a narrowing, because Justices knew a 5-4 majority could revert back quickly and if constitutional law turned over with administrations like the Mexico City policy it would undermine Court legitimacy. Clinton shored up the court’s left wing and held the line here. (Admittedly, replacing 2 retirements, though a Republican administration through 1999 would’ve outlived Blackmun) Effectively saved Affirmative Action too. DADT, the infrastructure for civil unions, more AIDS research funding might have been less than sought, but they were forward steps at all for a movement that was arguably politically further back on its heels in 1992 than 1978.

And this was all stuff that would not have happened during a Republican administration (well, the minimum wage and research funding I could see in a second term of Bush the Elder), such as if a Democrat did not win the 1992 election, as Clinton did on “it’s the economy, stupid”.

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

me, smoking weed: it is sooooo convenient that our organ capable of generating vacuum also has a fractal surface permeable to the bloodstream

teens, in unison: today we will smoke at weed

kontextmaschine:

micdotcom:

— Mikki Kendall, Neo-Nazis have threatened CNN employees’ families. Many writers already know what that’s like. (Opinion)

During the American Revolution, printer James Rivington’s Gazette was something of a proto-NY Times: Manhattan-based, but with a broad circulation and the most international coverage in the colonies. It was also the biggest newspaper not to tilt to the rebels, first offering a platform to all factions and then increasingly Loyalist.

This was not universally well-received. Isaac Sears, the privateer-trader who organized the merchants of New York into the Sons of Liberty, pushing back against British regulation which cut into their profits and backed by the threat of mob violence, described Rivington thus:

He would appear as a leading man amongst us, without perceiving that he is enlisted under a party as a tool of the lowest order; a political cracker, sent abroad to alarm and terrify, sure to do mischief to the cause he means to support, and generally finishing his career in an explosion that often bespatters his friends.

I have known a Statute of Lunacy taken out, upon a degree of conduct less exceptionable than this I have described: If the relations of our politician, should find his estate wasted by means of his patriotism, and they choose to improve upon this hint, I assure them, it is heartily at their service.

They did not. (A “Statute of Lunacy” was the period version of involuntary psychiatric commitment)

The Sons of Liberty arranged a series of hanging-in-effigies of Rivington, complete with a poem by revolutionary poet Philip Freneau framed as a satisfying confession before the gallows, and he was arrested by the New York Provincial Congress.

This not availing, an angry mob besieged Rivington and his family, driving them to the safety of a British warship, sacked his office and press, and seized his lead type to be melted down and cast into bullets.

They then faced and wheeled to the left, and marched out of town to the tune of Yankee Doodle. A vast concourse of people assembled at the Coffee House, on their leaving the ground, and gave them three very hearty cheers.

- Connecticut Journal, Nov. 20, 1775

kontextmaschine:

@wirehead-wannabe said What’s the deal with L.A. then?

LA has no natural harbor, it started out as an inland nowheresville, founded as a feudal agricultural settlement by the seasonal Los Angeles River feeding the San Fernando Mission at the northern mouth of the valley. San Diego was the major city of the region.

Eventually it came time to build a southern transcontinental (“Southern Pacific”) railroad route, with San Diego as the obvious western terminus but San Francisco had issues.

San Francisco, swollen by the Gold Rush, terminus of the first transcontinental route, was the dominant power in California and didn’t want a rival, pulled enough strings to redirect to LA.

LA built an artificial breakwater and a port down by San Pedro several miles south of the city, before that they used absurdly long-ass piers off the western coast around Malibu and Santa Monica.

Then narratively unrelated to any of this there was oil discovered in the hills, which generated capital and drew Eastern money, Pasadena became the west coast WASP capital, or at least Palm Beach-equivalent. LA became self-sustaining.

Then the movie industry moved there for the weather and distance from Thomas Edison’s IP-enforcing goons

Then during WWI the aircraft industry got big because there was infrastructure and a population of workers in coastal shipping range of the NorCal/Oregon lumber industry, but WITHOUT SF/Seattle-style labor radical tendencies

Then during WWII that got even bigger and the US realized it needed to build up its Pacific (Japan- and Russia-facing) coast, which was honestly still frontier at that point

And the rest is history

kontextmaschine:

“you’re the right size to acknowledge everything, aren’t you!”