kontextmaschine:

(one-off ruptures, as distinct from bottom-turtle “power flows from the barrel of a gun” stuff or norm changes like the regularization of the filibuster, the end of earmarks or the decline of deference in Supreme Court confirmations from Bork on.)

Hinckley Shooting (1981)

69 days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan is shot in the lung. The shooting is seen in the lineage of “national hero” assassinations from Kennedy (1963) to King (1968) to Lennon (1980) which contributed to the sense of no “successful” presidency since Eisenhower

Taken to a public ER, prompt medical attention saves the jocular Reagan, breaking the streak in a visceral display of his “Morning in America” pledge to remoralize the country through sunny optimism.

Iran-Contra Affair (1985-1987)

Following Watergate, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and the “Watergate babies” wave election of 1974, Congress moved to limit the power and autonomy of the executive, particularly over military and security services.

High-profile actions included the Church Committee and passage of the War Powers Act as legitimating rituals, but much leverage was made of Congress’ “power of the purse”, with a legitimating tradition back to the Magna Carta. The Impoundment Control Act removed Presidential volition in spending appropriated funds, which allowed the President to tack into the wind of Congressional opinion and was a major source of leverage over individual legislators.

(there were unsuccessful attempts to restore an equivalent in the 90s as the “line-item veto”)

More specific acts like the Boland and Clark Amendments, which prohibited aid to resistance groups in Angola and Nicaragua, moved to undercut executive desires to pursue Cold War proxy wars. During this period the Democrats were considered to have a lock on Congress while Republican strength was in the presidency and right-aligned theorists considered these Congressional acts improper trespasses on the President’s sovereign power over foreign policy.

The administration of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) is remembered for a foreign policy that upheld not only the letter but the spirit of this new constraint and was considered a failure by anti-communists and large branches of the deep state for it.

In this climate, elements of the Reagan administration with at least the noninterference of POTUS himself end-ran the laws, supporting a forceful anti-communist posture. Figures up to the SecDef were indicted (and later pardoned by George H W Bush), but Congress could not generate the political will for impeachment and lacked any further enforcement mechanism. Congressional checks on the President became increasingly vestigial, retained as the pro forma AUMF.

Base Realignment and Closure (1988-)

Victorious in the Cold War, the United States was left with an unnecessarily large military footprint.

Military units, installations and the programs that supplied them had long been the subject of Congressional pork and logrolling at the margins, in a power politics system ill-suited to executing major shifts in a coherent way.

Accordingly, the regular process of appropriation-by-negotiation was circumvented in favor of appointing a commission of experts to make en bloc recommendations for the drawdown then ratified by legislators.

Ross Perot (1992)

A third-party Presidential candidate takes almost 19% of votes, the strongest ever third-party showing not by an ex-President.

Federal government shutdown (1995-6)

A power struggle between Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Congress under unified Republican control for the first time since the 1950s, the two sides could not agree to a budget and the federal government suspended “non-essential” operations for 4 total weeks. With the executive more united than a Congress still developing “responsible party government” parliamentary discipline, the Republicans yielded, though similar actions were attempted under the Obama administration with greater party coherence.

Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (1998)

a nationwide parategulatory regime over tobacco is established through settlement between leading companies and 46 state attorneys general.

The regime, which in ways resembled irregular-but-precedented systems like utility franchising and workman’s comp, was constructed this way rather than through Congress, the formally legitimate venue for interstate compacts, to circumvent friendly legislators from tobacco-growing constituencies or elected in open elections with industry support who might be expected to defend industry interests.

Bill Clinton impeachment (1999)

After recapturing both chambers of Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1996, the GOP was eager to assert its power against the Democratic executive (see shutdown, above).

A series of investigations were launched into President Bill Clinton, originally focusing on ethics in the operation of his political machine as Arkansas governor, expanding into any area thought to be a political vulnerability.

Eventually the second-ever impeachment of a US President was launched over the proximate issue of perjury under law regarding a sexual affair with a petty staffer, a matter that had come collateral to prior investigations.

The impeachment ended, like that of Andrew Johnson, in acquittal. (Nixon resigned in anticipation of a successful impeachment).

The act of Republicans to issue impeachment over matters tangential to government and of Democrats to vote for acquittal in the face of evidence were reciprocally considered norm-breaking in pursuit of power.

Bush v. Gore (2000)

coming down to a close and ambiguous result in Florida, the victor of the Presidential election of 2000 remained unclear for weeks after the vote and it became apparent that contested interpretations of election law would decide the winner.

In an unprecedented and non-precedent decision, the Supreme Court usurped the issue from lower courts and election boards to effectively decide the election in favor of Republican George W Bush, on a 5-4 court split that closely tracked the parties responsible for Justices’ appointments.

kontextmaschine:

So I hear you guys like musical theater about American political history. Here’s an emo-rock opera about Old Hickory, the President of the Common Man.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
Populism Yea Yea

So I hear you guys like musical theater about American political history. Here’s an emo-rock opera about Old Hickory, the…

kontextmaschine:

So back when blogs were blogs and had comments (with decent signal:noise ratio, even), I’d be in the comments at Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein’s sites (hey wonklife, I was Senescent).

Fun times, fun times. No better way to hone your theory of mind than spending all day watching people describing what they thought other people would think about what they thought about those other people’s public personas.

That’s where I first came across Steve Sailer, who would show up day after day, ignore whatever shit he got, and have something cheerfully novel to say about the topic of the post as a leadin to linking two essays on tangential subjects. Good strategy.

Anyway that was the setting for one of the most interesting things I ever noticed. There was this commenter on Yglesias’ blog named Petey, who was actually really clever, subtle, worthwhile.

And then in the middle of the 2008 presidential primary, John Edwards said something about a plan to make something - healthcare? I forget - available to everyone by letting people sign up from computers at public libraries.

And it was like a throwaway moment, not fleshed out at all, but this guy Petey went all in on it, praising it to the heavens in comments. And people would be like “but Petey, how’s that supposed to work?”

And he’d just insult the questioner and restate the premise, like “What are you, a moron? You go to the library. You sign up. That’s it.” And people would be like “no, you misunderstand me, (informed question about backends and regulation and &tc)” and he’d just insult them, and restate the premise.

And this was completely at odds with his whole persona for years up to this point, and he just kept it up. He’d praise Edwards to the heavens and just repeat slogan-level statements as if they were glorious wisdom, and when questioned just insult the questioner and repeat them harder.

And then Edwards dropped out and he switched to Hillary as if nothing had happened and kept doing it. (Even though he had previously been seriously shit-talking her, for example.)

And one of the things he did was whenever he referred to Yglesias he’d call him “trust fund scumbag Matt Yglesias”, by way of accounting for why Matt failed to get on board and push the same line, the line that he should obviously be pushing and had no reasonable excuse not to.

And one of the things I respect Yglesias for most, he had a comments section that would regularly reach the mid-100s, which was a lot back then, and he almost never made any signs of acknowledging that the comments even existed. Once in a blue moon of blue moons, he’d post a comment of his own.

And this is the only time I ever remember him actually making a post(!) that acknowledged a comment. Not because something had caught on - all the other commenters thought Petey was being ridiculous. Not because anyone had actually said something worthwhile, quite the opposite! People said worthwhile things all the time. Rather, specifically because someone had thrown the steering wheel out the window and implacably committed to repeating the same idiocy (“forcing a meme”, if you will) over and over forever.

And that is the power of message discipline.

kontextmaschine:

People loved their work once, and it didn’t matter if they worked in the public sector or in the private one. The men who worked in the CCC would take their grandchildren to see the forests they planted, while the men from the auto plants would point out the cars they’d built as they passed them on the new interstate highway system. The women who fastened the engines on the wings would watch the B-17’s fly off to make a liar out of Goering, and the women who taught in the public schools would point with pride when one of their old students got elected mayor. Work was about making money, certainly. It was about feeding the family and keeping the roof where it was, and maybe having a little left over at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, for some amusement. Maybe a trip to Lincoln Park or White City or a hundred other places, where you could take a moment and enjoy the cool of the evening, music riding the nightwind from a dance pavilion down along the lake.

But it was also about Doing A Job, and doing it well, which was different than simply Having A Job. It was about making good cars and strong steel and sturdy furniture. It was about learning a craft, even if what you were doing wasn’t recognized as one. There was a craft in tightening rivets, or feeding the open-hearth furnace, or planing the wood just so. You had your craft, and the person next to you had theirs, and, when all the work was done, and all the craft was practiced, and practiced well, there was something you could look at with pride and say, that is something I have given to the world. Job well done, as they used to say. You could teach seventh grade civics and then, one day, you’re on a podium outside of City Hall. That kid right there, you could say. That kid is something I have helped give to the world. Job well done, as they used to say.

Unions were greatly responsible for the pride that people took in the work they did, especially in the middle of the last century, when unions helped build the most formidable middle class in human history.

There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who wrote a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, which was the alt-weekly Michael Moore first made his name by running. A lot of his columns got collected and repackaged in an excellent book, Rivethead that I read in college.

I read it in a class by Stuart Blumin, who was my favorite professor and de facto advisor. He was an American historian, focused on labor and class and the development of capitalism, you could tell he was heavily influenced by EP Thompson and the Communist Party Historians Group over in the UK.

He was quite open that he had expected Communism to ultimately triumph, and that he had been wrong about that, and in subtext that he had wanted it to ultimately triumph, and didn’t think he had been wrong about that.

Anyway, Rivethead. The story is that Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism, where everyone’s dad worked for GM.

And he could have gone to college but he gets some girl pregnant and so he goes to work on the assembly line not even really out of obligation or Catholic guilt or whatever but because that seems as good a life course as any, it’s what every man he’s known does, under the mighty UAW the pay’s on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway, why not.

And so he goes to work on the line and eventually he ends up writing a column about it, and he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, the absurd fursuited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” that GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours, being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, training into a rhythm so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock, the dignity and solidarity of the American worker.

And time goes on and eventually his marriage fails but he takes it in stride, and his column gets recognized and he takes pride in that and then eventually he has an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. And the inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice this and he realizes the guy hadn’t been a Zen master, he’d just been checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day.

And he realizes that the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and that it’s doing the same to all his co-workers, and looks back and realizes it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew, his father and uncles that growing up he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude really had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them long before, and whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them.

When Marx talked about “alienation”, well.

And he went crazy, and couldn’t bear to work on the line anymore, and there’s no redemption, that’s where the book ends.

And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were

1) avoiding work
and
2) drinking

Back in the premechanized age of small-group workshop manufacturing, workers would celebrate “Saint Monday”, which was to say just not showing up for work, hung over after the weekend.

(This was riffing off of Catholic feast days, or holy days, from which we take the word “holiday”, and as time went on counted an increasing share of the days of the year. There was a reason that poor workers were aligned with the Church, and nobility, in “Altar and Throne” coalitions resisting the development of industrial capitalist liberal democracy.)

In the ‘80s, the crap time of American auto manufacturing, one trick that was passed around (pre-internet, so by word of mouth largely) was to look at the codes stamped on car bodies, which would tell you what day of the week they were manufactured, and to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Because those days had the highest defect rates, because the workers tended to be drunk, or hungover, or absent.

And back in the workshop days, you’d drink at work. Apprentices would be sent out for growlers or buckets of beer, there were elaborate rules of who in the hierarchy of workers was expected to buy rounds for who and when. And there was hellacious resistance to attempts to get them to knock this off, as the industrial era kicked into swing.

Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.

And I mean, this maybe sounds like an argument for socialism. Though not of any actually-existing- variety, as capitalist propaganda will be glad to tell you, Soviet work culture, at least when the morale thrills of the Revolution and Great Patriotic War faded from personal to institutional memory, was all about shirking and vodka.

So those complaints about how America celebrates Labor Day instead of May Day, ignoring the true meaning of labor - solidarity - in favor of mindless distraction? Psssh. Labor Day is a celebration of the truest, most ancient, most fundamental traditions of labor: not working (especially on Mondays), and getting drunk.

Happy Labor Day!

monetizeyourcat:

miricham:

the plural of anecdote is not “data”

the plural of anecdote is “lore”

kontextmaschine:

oh fuck

this election’s going down with the safety off

6/24/15

kontextmaschine:

4chan accidentally the discourse, didn’t it?

joshistheworst:

yachtfriday:

i’m all for making america great again. boo-yah, let’s do that exact thing.

my question is, when exactly is the chronological reference point for “again”? because i’m looking through our yearbook pictures, and none of them are very flattering.

kontextmaschine:

FOR
NUCLEAR
WEAPONS
THAT CAN
DESTROY ALL LIFE

(photo by M. Scott Brauer)

kontextmaschine:

Soap was the Arrested Development of the ‘70s.

kontextmaschine:

Dashiell Hammett was one of the only pulp detective authors to have actually worked as a detective, with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, back when it was basically a countrywide mercenary police organization. The Pinkertons were actually closer to modern police than their official contemporaries in the machine politics era, who tended to fall somewhere between patronage-hire watchmen and the mayor (or sheriff)’s sanctioned gang. The establishment of the FBI was in many ways a nationalization of the Pinkertons, with key figures brought on as advisors, replicating the network of local bureaus with focuses on both investigation and the infiltration and undermining of labor radicalism. Big city police forces then remodeled themselves after the FBI - famously the LAPD under William Parker (the NYPD had professionalized already under Teddy Roosevelt, and Chicago managed to preserve its machine structure).

This process continued into the early 1970s, as the RFK/FBI-led attempt to shatter the Mafia shook out. This was part of the mid-20th century American centralization of power. If you’re ever tempted to look with contempt upon modern African states, or pre-Mao China, or pre-unification Germany, keep in mind that America was largely structured as a loose coalition of local bandit-warlords until the 1960s. At the national level, civil rights laws and the attempt to merge the two (black/white) American nations were as much a cynical front for advancing this centralization as they were an honest idealism. And not without cost - organized crime, and the permeable borders between that and urban politics, were one of the major mechanisms by which immigrant groups were integrated to and advanced within the American system, a way to translate sheer numbers and cultural affinity into structural power. American blacks largely fit the immigrant pattern, if you date “arrival” to the Great Migration, but then stall out in the ‘70s-‘80s, and a lot of that has to do with RICO laws, post-60s reformist idealism, and the nationally-sponsored “war on crime” blocking this path. In an earlier world, black local politicians and street gangs would form alliances, eventually using patronage to co-opt and take over police forces, and extract rents that would be partially redistributed down the machine ladder. As is, you still have corruption, but it accrues to politicians, pastors and other organizers, and white property developers, without trickling down to street level.

You can quote me on that - the sorry state of American blacks is because criminal gangs are too weak and police aren’t corrupt and brutally extralegal enough.

What was I saying? Dashiell Hammett. Lived in San Francisco and set his fiction there. Was an actual private investigator, and accordingly has a strong focus on tradecraft, especially with the nameless “Continental Op”, employee of a fictionalized Pinkerton, protagonist of some of his books and most of his stories. Though the climaxes could get colorful, the Op’s assignments - quietly track down a runaway heiress, locate a fled embezzler - and methods - use 3-man teams to tail people on the street, question and dig up background on the target’s acquaintances, sit around and eavesdrop on conversations - were true to actual practice. (Hammett said the major difference is that what his characters accomplished in a week would in reality take several months, while they worked multiple cases in between).

While the Op was proudly professional (a recurring theme being his contempt for hotel staff “detectives”) but otherwise opaque, Hammett pioneered detective characterization with other characters. Where the Op was based on actual detectives he worked with, Sam Spade (protagonist of The Maltese Falcon) was based on those detectives’ romantic self-image, and his stoic facade, cynical chivalry, and romantic entanglements were a *huge* influence on later writers. Nick and Nora Charles, based on Hammet and his beloved, playwright Lillian Hellman, mixed investigation with screwball banter in a more lighthearted tone, and can be considered the predecessor of Maddie and David (of Moonlighting), Mulder & Scully, and even non-(explicitly-)romantic buddy partnerships like Crockett & Tubbs.

Hammett’s real-life experience exposed him to less picturesque aspects of the private investigator’s role in society as well. He complained that employers doing background checks were interested in issues of moral character that, gambling debts aside, had no correlation to trustworthiness, and he especially disliked working to suppress labor agitation. Starting as a Pinkerton agent, Hammett ended up being blacklisted and imprisoned as an enthusiastic communist activist.


Next is Raymond Chandler, the most literary of the detective greats. Where Hammett had been an actual PI, and reflected it in his writing, Chandler was a cuttingly observant man who retreated into drink because he was way too intelligent and cynical for Los Angeles, and reflected it in his. His Phillip Marlowe inhabited a thinly-to-the-point-of-pointlessly veiled LA, and passes through it with gimlet eye and poison tongue, all backhanded compliments and sideways insults. Hard-boiled fiction’s love of brilliant turns of phrase, of meandering digressions that end with a surprise punch to the gut, largely comes from him.

While at first glance Marlowe might seem to perform the duties of a detective same as the Op, on close examination you realize that none of what transpires has anything to do with his intentions, and that the plot is moved along by coincidences he encounters while out on assignment, with the ultimate plot of a tale usually about as unrelated to the inciting incident as in golden age Simpsons. This is equally true of The Big Lebowski, which is a loving Chandler tribute, and Chandler himself parodies this (and his/Marlowe’s booziness) in one of his later stories in which the plot is advanced by the things his protagonist literally runs into while drunk driving around LA.

Chandler’s novels are usually composed of the plots of 3 or 4 of his short stories banged together, but that’s fine, because the plot was never the thing, the meat being the wonderful language, setting, and characterizations, which were crafted anew. You can still to this day drive around LA and discover most of the places he described, looking exactly as stated. And while I can’t speak to his period accuracy, I was myself once a too intelligent, cynical Angelino writer for a while, to the point I avoided leaving home sober, and I can confirm that the kind of person who inhabits LA, their nature and motivations, are exactly as he laid out back then.

Chandler’s output eventually trailed off. One story, appearing years after any others, reads like absolutely terrible Chandler pastiche. Scholars disagree whether this was the product of an alcoholic wreck of a man who had known better than to try to publish anything for years but needed the money, or his wife pretending to be him because he was an alcoholic wreck of a man incapable of even writing anymore but needed the money.

If you’re only going to read one of these three, read Chandler.


Finally, a bit of a contrast in Mickey Spillane. Spillane’s famous recurring detective character was Mike Hammer. Given the name, you might not be surprised to learn he spent less time in cautiously piecing together mysteries than punching communists in the jaw, in much the same way Captain America spent a lot of time punching Nazis in the jaw. Actually, Spillane had been a writer for Captain America in the ‘40s. Actually, the character was originally written as a comic book protagonist named “Mike Danger”. Beyond communism, Hammer often found himself arrayed against such other corrupt and corrupting trappings of the decadent elite as drugs, psychotherapy, and trial by jury.

Spillane’s writing was, I’ll say, not up to the level of Hammett or Chandler, though he has been favorably cited by prominent writers like Ayn Rand and Frank Miller. If you look at pulp of the time though, he’s appreciably above average. Pulp… basically the closest parallel we have to pulp today is fanfiction, in terms of its average quality, low cost of production and consumption, sheer volume, and the rate at which it produces critical and commercial successes. And dear god, the smuttiness. Mike Hammer banged a lot of the broads he ran into. Before barefacedly honest pornography became as ubiquitous as it is, pulp filled the role of mainstream erotic product, with much detective pulp serving the same “drugstore-available erotica” role for men that romance pulp did for women. (Appreciating this makes the “Seduction of the Innocent” comic book scare about drugstore-available pulp for kids a bit more comprehensible).

This crossed over into other formats like cinema - Deep Throat, Beyond the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones were all received as at least in the same ballpark as mainstream releases, and up into the ’80s, pornographic movies had plots and runtimes that roughly approximated Hollywood product, and even in the ‘90s, softcore product at least had narrative framing devices. Between gonzo and DVD nonlinearity and the internet and the collapse of obscenity prosecution against which to offer artistic content as defense that’s faded, though as the Valley studio system’s share of the industry shrinks you’re seeing them play to their strengths in production values and plot (particularly with parody content, Tijuana Bible/H-Doujinshi-style).

On the other hand you had whole parapornographic mainstream subgenres as the erotic thriller, the rape-revenge drama, the teen sex comedy - American Pie was released in 1999, which was really pushing the limit at which it was worth it to watch 90 minutes of material for the chance to briefly see a bare-chested girl masturbating. (It’s still worth it to hear Alyson Hannigan talking dirty, though.)

The one thing that pulp still has a hold on is violence. (In addition to the jaw, there are many loving passages of Hammer battering guys in the crotch.) While splatter-horror may be a flourishing niche genre, with regular DVD releases, it’s still that, a niche genre, and not the mega-industry of pornography. Video games yes, but detective pulp and “true crime” genres have mostly just migrated to another medium and become hourlong police procedurals like CSI or Law & Order, offering the same thrills of vicarious brutality masked by the fig leaf of nominal identification with the forces of law and order. (Though cable antihero dramas and serial killer procedurals like Dexter and Hannibal seem to be moving a half- to full step beyond that.)

Mickey Spillane. Ah, fuck it, I don’t have anything else to say about Mickey Spillane.

kontextmaschine:

You know, CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver are pretty cool.

It’s like at several different points during my youth people would set aside an hour or so to tell me all about them and that seemed weird at the time but a decade plus on I feel like I still remember enough to be helpful.

“Save people from dying with one weird trick discovered by a dad”

kontextmaschine:

19thperson:

This is a trainwreck on so many levels

OH SHIT

IT’S BEEN A PUTIN CONSPIRACY ALL ALONG

ALL OF IT

kontextmaschine:

That post about fibers got some attention - well, 2 likes and 2 reblogs, which is 2/2 more than I expected, so not being one to pass up an opportunity to draw structural connections between things in the format of a story that makes my life sound more interesting than spending so much time on the internet would imply, let’s expand on it.

I went to Maui a few years back to celebrate my mom’s not, after years of treatment, having cancer anymore. She was born on the Big Island as a Navy brat, went back after college as a secretary in a TV station for a few years, so she’s got some history in the area. She was even given a Hawaiian name, which was kind of funny because then she couldn’t find any of those “if this is your real name, this would be your Hawaiian name” keychains at the souvenier stores.

Maui was kind of the boring island; my dad booked the trip (through an honest to god travel agent) and only seems to know how to book golf vacations. I hear it’s a nice golf island.

Things about Hawaii I noticed: even the Haole use native Hawaiian words a lot - not just “aloha” but the top 40 radio in talking about some community event would mention “…and plenty of games and rides for the keiki”, men’s/women’s bathroom signs would be “kane/wahine”. For a while I wondered if this was actual culture or just a schtick everyone agreed to pull, but on thinking of it I guess actual culture is a schtick everyone agrees to pull.

There was plenty of constant road repair and resurfacing, with larger work crews than I’ve ever seen, even though the roads were by any standard perfectly fine to begin with - I guess that’s what happens when you hardly have any roads but still have two senators to claim your share of highway appropriations.

Bunch of Samoans on the island. I’d heard those guys were built big and solid, but holy shit.

Lot of hitchhikers. Apparently land prices and rents are insane anywhere near the centers of the tourist trade, so people commute from hella far out, and car/gas prices are absurd too. Not many bikes though, which is maybe because “hella far out” tends to mean “halfway up a mountain”.

A lot of native/secessionary flags, handpainted signs, etc. in front yards.

A lot of rocks - like, maybe half a car-sized rocks but not otherwise very distinguished - roped off in the middle of, like, someone’s yard with a plaque being all “this is a sacred rock with a proper name, people might come around to hold cultural events here every now and then, but otherwise don’t mess with the rock”.

OK, so this tour. It was an ecotourism/ziplining thing, because why not, because I was getting kind of tired of sitting around on the beach with my parents. We went up a hill and the guides, natives all, pointed out things about the region. Saw a pineapple farm, they talked about how you’d have to harvest them in like, multiple layers of heavy clothing in the hot as fuck sun, because a pineapple farm is basically a field of goddamn razors with fruit in the middle.

I could see why people would grow marijuana on Hawaii, because the whole place was verdant as fuck, full of ridges and hollows, full of native plants that didn’t really look that far off from cannabis from the air, or even up close, to begin with.

Oh and also the plant I mentioned, which grew near the base of these trees near the top of the mountain, had these brown, downy fibers, softest thing I’ve ever felt, the guides said that the locals used to use them to stuff pillows with, but that the government protected them and kept people from exporting or farming them. Which, on the way out of the airport, yeah you passed through 3 different inspections checking your stuff for native plants.

Now that’s nominally about environmental contamination and invasive species, but I was sure there was an economic protection angle and on looking it up, apparently yes, there’s a big thing of industrial espionage agents sneaking into forests and smuggling plants out. But that’s how it’s always been in the tropics - spices, rubber, tea in China, whatever. You want to keep a monopoly on that shit.

I mean it’s not like the Americans are developing that industry, but I guess the idea is to prevent anyone else from developing it instead. Like, we don’t think about it much now but economically speaking fiber is fucking critical. Making clothing is the most fundamental thing distinguishing humans from other animals, textile production has always been the first step of industrialization, and development of a new and better fiber source will FUCK SHIT UP.

Like, China figured out silk production, and it was like “oh, great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a millennia or two”, just the act of moving it from place to place completely dominates the history of western Asia.

Like the British developed a wool industry and it was like “oh great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a few centuries, first we just need to take all these people in Scotland and northern England, kick them off their farmholds, and turn them into a pathetic wreck of a population working in hellish conditions 14 hours a day, wracked by disease, homelesness, addiction, and violence”.

Like, the Americans figured out the cotton gin and were like “oh great, now we can establish a massive feudal slave empire, and kickstart a development process that will end up with us dominating half the fucking world for a century at least”.

And then the British, in order to hold on to their existing half-the-world empire were like “oh fuck, better conquer Egypt and India and place a few hundred million people under the lash to compete”.

Fiber will FUCK SHIT UP, don’t you forget that.

adactivity:

monetizeyourcat:

pretty much everything we know about Jesus’s appearance comes from the fairly reasonable argument “if he looked different from the expected appearance of a religious leader or messiah in some way it would have been remarked on”

Isaiah remarks that he (the messiah) would be “No beauty that we should desire him” but that’s classic PUA strategy of “negging” the messiah through reverse psychology to make him so love the world etc.

The author is cheating the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money [is], at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly [whenever] he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay.

Hello, Buzzfeed… 

19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer presages the economics of the web and modern publishing – linkbait, content farming, unnecessary pagination, endless slideshows, and other moral failures of publishing, examined in a whole new-old light.

(via explore-blog)

kontextmaschine:

Also, ICP are America’s leading clowns. I’ve heard people say they “dress up as” clowns.

Even beyond the facepaint, they put on performances of musical comedy with elements of violent spectacle and folk spirituality, they emcee festivals where the adventurous young poor from farming regions gather, get intoxicated and enjoy a state of suspension of everyday society.

And if that doesn’t fit your understanding of “clown”, like, what?