kontextmaschine:

Sometimes I wonder why I punish myself by still reading Slate, the answer is occasionally you come across buried nuggets like this:

Sometimes the election’s psychic fallout takes less obvious forms. Silvestri, for example, has noticed a curious phenomenon among some of the millennial women in her practice: The rise of Trump has made them wonder how much they can reasonably expect from romantic relationships…

It’s not just that Trump reminds them of their exes. It’s that Trump’s success seems to validate the men’s behavior. “They had gotten themselves to a place of, This is not what I deserve, I deserve better, I can do better,” Silvestri says. But watching dutiful, responsible Clinton struggle to best Trump, “people are really backtracking and saying, ‘I made this move to be more empowered and be who I am based on my values, but now I see my ex writ large on the national stage, and everyone’s following him,’ ” Silvestri says. They start thinking that, for a woman, maybe being beautiful really is more important than being smart, assertive, and authentic.

The quote comes from a psychologist who, if you do some digging, has offices by NYU.

So, straight from the horse’s mouth: the mere nomination of Donald Trump is inspiring urban millennial elite women to give up on confrontational feminism in favor of charming femininity as a source of self-identity and -value.

kontextmaschine:

You know, tumblr is awfully into catgirls and -boys to be making fun of thecybersmith as “human pet guy”

pureamericanism:

kontextmaschine:

I myself think that Batman is the flip side of Santa Claus, who - as I’ve said - in turn is the modern vision of the Christian God.

The lineage follows that in the age of desert nomadism, God was a force that created water and food in the desert and rearranged inconvenient geography - mountains, seas; that in the age of early settlement and tribal war he demanded ethnic solidarity, granting in return victory in war; that in the era where settled tribes were subsumed into Mediterranean empire, he was a fisherman/shepherd who unified mankind and ended war; that in the era of courtly feudalism he was at the head of heirarchies of angels, saints rewarded with face time to press their clients’ claims; and so obviously in the age of bourgeois democracy he’s an industrialist who rewards socially approved behavior with consumer goods and punishes its opposite with violence.

“Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators’ society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption?”

—From “Nackles”, by Donald Westlake

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:

prudencepaccard:

kontextmaschine:

slartibartfastibast:

kontextmaschine:

No. Immortality has been “just a few improvements on the current state of the art” away for approximately ever.

Don’t tell the most recent immortality cult about this. It would break their clichéd little hearts.

Yeah the funny thing is how the “state of the art” consistently refers to whatever field’s particularly prominent and cutting-edge at the time.

It’s been alchemy in medieval Europe and ancient China, electricity in Revolutionary France, extremely low-temperature liquid circulation in the rocket age, data storage in the computer age, now it’s biotech because of course it is.

In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography.

“In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography” holy shit this is 100% right

This post was one of the ones that “made me” early on

obscuritory:

Collecting games is expensive and impractical, so I’ve cut back on it, except when it’s something with strong personal value that I could donate to a museum collection later on.

…which is to say that now I have a copy of the enigmatic Knights of the Crystallion. 🦄

Look at that box! The crystal stallion hatching from the egg! And it comes with a poetry book!

If you haven’t heard of Knights of the Crystallion, please see my post! It’s a mysterious, bizarre game meant to simulate the life and spiritual practices of a druid-like culture that worships a massive skeleton. It asks you to invest in a new way of life. Baffling and immense. There’s nothing else like it.

kontextmaschine:

the Rush catalog spans the whole spectrum from “songs about bourgeois rebellion” to “songs about revolutionary bourgeois” to “songs about bourgeois revolutions”, huh

xhxhxhx:

youzicha:

There’s a talking point that “if you want higher taxes, why don’t you just write a check to the government, huh?”. In 1912 Sweden, they actually did.

In 1911 the government decided to defer the planned construction of a coastal battleship for budget reasons, and in January 1912, a group of individuals responded by founding the “Swedish Coastal Battleship Association” to raise money for it by “voluntary taxation”. Members pledged to donate, over three years, the same amount they paid in taxes in 1911. By May 1912, there were enough pledges to cover the planned budget for the ship, which was indeed ordered in November. The association raised enough money to cover the entire cost of the ship, with a little bit left over which was spent on other military improvements. There were 112,792 individual donors (2% of the Swedish population).

This reminds me of a section in James Sparrow’s Warfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011):

The Treasury accordingly worked the theme of equipment into as many promotions as possible. Bond drives and special promotions featured an ingenious array of equipment “sales” in which bond buyers could attach their purchases to a specific piece of matériel. Indeed, promotions featuring equipment were such a regular feature of the War Savings Staff’s activities that it maintained an accurate price list of munitions, vehicles, vessels, and other matériel as a reference for the Special Events Division and the state committees. Large items, such as a bomber, could serve as a tangible quota that a war plant or community could try to “buy” over the course of a drive. The small town of Windsor Locks, Connecticut, population 4,300, “bought” its own bomber during a forty-seven-day drive in early 1943 that netted more than $175,000. It was unusual for such a small town to make such a large “purchase,” which was a more plausible goal for cities the size of El Paso, Texas, or Napa, California. Students at Union Endicott High School were electrified in December 1943 when school officials received an official press service wire describing how the “Endicott Special,” an Airacobra fighter they had sponsored through bond purchases in the Schools at War program, had “bagged three bombers and a fighter on its maiden combat flight in the South Pacific.” After praising the “grand little ship” the students had paid for, the captain proceeded to describe in satisfying detail the fighting that had downed the four “Jap planes.” The news inspired the students to buy yet another fighter—their fourth—during a special holiday bond drive.

The Treasury’s strategy of tying bond sales to particular items needed for combat allowed bondholders to “buy” military equipment in place of the consumer durables on which they spent their disposable income in peacetime. (Courtesy of the National Archives Still Picture Records Section, ARC #513992)

This approach to setting drive quotas became quite popular, stoking competition between rival towns, local organizations, and even different shifts working in war plants. In May 1942, the Treasury found itself in the difficult position of having to explain an unfortunate navy policy to state sales organizations wanting to have their names affixed to large ships they had “bought” with bonds. Even if they could raise the bond sales commensurate with a $6.5 million submarine or a $65 million aircraft carrier, the navy would not release the name of a vessel until twenty-four hours prior to its launch. The Treasury devised a solution that allowed organizations to hang a plaque on the bow. Army policy likewise allowed “decalcomanias” to be affixed to mobile equipment such as tanks and jeeps that schools, towns, and organizations had “bought” with bonds. Treasury research found that stoking competition through such concrete goals was an extremely effective sales technique employed in the war plants attaining the highest quotas.

Individual bond buyers enjoyed an abundance of opportunities to “buy” equipment in a more personal fashion. Students could “adopt” a soldier by saving stamps toward bonds in amounts that would pay for his food, clothing, ammunition, or rifle, each of which could be displayed along with its price on a wall chart that fit nicely on a bulletin board. For those adults who wanted their bonds literally to outfit a friend or relative in the service, the V-mail Christmas bond letter was a perfect opportunity. It proved so popular during the 1944 holiday season that Morgenthau ordered it to be made available year-round as a “V-mail gift certificate.”

President Roosevelt, once again showing his finely tuned understanding of popular sensibilities, forwarded to Morgenthau a promotional idea to help civilians identify more directly with the machinery of war in April 1943. Why not follow the example of the British, the letter asked, and allow citizens to paste their war savings stamps directly onto bombs that would be dropped over Germany?

kontextmaschine:

>  [same “less anger toward the left” anon] Even more speculatively, it seems like you’re less sympathetic toward the Right than you were, set, a year or so ago, less in the sense that you now back the actual agenda of the Left than that you briefly expected that the Right’s pushback would take a form more compatible with your own preferences than it has. Any of this onto something? [2/2]

You’re seeing something real but you’re not seeing it right.

If I’m more sanguine about the culture wars lately it’s because the wave already broke. In 2015 I was saying the other side walked off a cliff and just hadn’t looked down yet, well by now they’ve looked down.

And on the one hand meep meep, motherfucker, on the other hand this means the dumbest and gone-too-far stuff is gonna be coming in the other direction now as the backlash sets in.

Like, what’s the last time the cultural “left” tried to sieze new territory, and not just struggle to hold the line? MeToo? At the time I called it as feminism biting the hand that fed/off more than it could chew, and yeah, by all reports the “targets” there are being welcomed back and people notice that they were still viable all along, meanwhile the supporters are getting blackballed as risks.

(Meanwhile, the Republican supremes are expected to rule that no, protections against sex discrimination do not just imply protections for sexual/gender minorities, and wouldn’t you know it most “sexual harassment” law is leveraged out from similar implications.)

The next step in the culture war is just to make people realize this is already happening, the woke order’s plummeting, and all the stuff that’s been growing underground poised to benefit from their fall is going the other way.

I point out Stupidpol stuff to draw attention to how the new young avant garde in pretty much every subculture - even explicitly leftist ones - is increasingly anti-woke, and the invention of a typology - “radlib”, “wokescold” – by which their rivals don’t even have to be refuted, just identified, mocked, and dismissed.

I point out how all the woke take factories are exhausting their funders’ patience, pivoting to video and selling out to Bryan Goldberg (who made his name by founding a women’s vertical that wasn’t shrill feminist, an online Cosmo when everyone was trying to build an online Sassy), and how meanwhile the hot rising thing is a bro site with an editorial line somewhere between rape culture-tolerant and -positive.

I point out how not so much opposed but underneath consent culture there’s a flourishing ecosystem of Fsub kink as lifestyle (which was the other side in the ‘80s feminist sex wars, after all) and the rising smartphone generation grew up with “catering to the male pornographic gaze” as a popular hobby.

And I’m not just wishcasting here, even the perceptive people on the “other side” have noticed this – Sady Doyle’s looking back over ’00-’10s internet feminism and wondering if it even changed anything deeper than superficial fashion that will cycle back before too long (subtext here is she was a half-step behind the Marcotte/Valenti/McEwan coterie and tbh a better writer/thinker/intersectionalist but now she’s in upstate New York scrambling for enough child care to crank out work for lower-and-lower-profile outlets; if you’ve read her work long enough you know she’s acutely aware of how in the 80s second-wave feminism and radical feminists weren’t so much defeated as just… gave up on and left to wither.)

Like, “this too shall pass”, y’know? It’s passing. Which doesn’t mean the stuff that takes it down or replaces it won’t be dumb and fucked up. To the extent I had identified with the “cultural left” to begin with it was cause I came of age in the 90s after the ‘80s backlash had run through and the reigning “cultural right” was pretty dumb and fucked up. Weirdly sour in a sunny time, in retrospect I realize they were trying to drive a stake through the ‘70s so hard it never got up again and that excess probably did buy me some more time of comfort, but could get counterproductive too, you know if these are the guys trying to maintain their hegemony through suppressing left voices…

Plus honestly yeah I was invested in the fun-for-all ideal of Horny 90s Secular Culture as it portrayed itself, and if more modern revelations are that it was premised on hierarchies of power… Well, at some level I’m “ohhh, hierarchies of power, so THAT’S how you create the good times, they should’ve told us, no wonder we’ve been fucking it up”. But I’m still eagerly receptive to plans to bring things closer to the ideal, or at least avoid some of the worst failure modes and rig the hierarchies right by going in eyes-open.

5/22/19

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.

(1/5/2019)

kontextmaschine:

All the dumb like, decorative skeleton spiders with rib cages and that…

A spider IS a creepy ambulatory skeleton already, that’s the concept!

kontextmaschine:

America happened because the king made tea and paper expensive and the Important Young Men who spent all day taking stimulants and writing down their Important Thoughts were PISSED

England happened ‘cause some Vikings stole it on a raid

kontextmaschine:

Taylor Swift – Umbrella

2008

kontextmaschine:

I think one of my biggest realizations out of our country’s latter-day tensions is there’s a black nation in the United States, amalgamated from separate origins like the American/white one was assembled from Scottish, French, English, later Italian etc.

Which is a change from my 90s End of History model of like, an ill-treated subculture within the same people as me, or even my later one as the latest wave of immigrants from rural feudalism, dating to the Great Migration

That makes some things make sense - MLK as the consensus like, president of the black nation, and that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson’s occasionally farcical insertion of themselves into every “black issue”, everywhere, was a competition to succeed him

Segregation, the whole water fountains thing, goes from a blatant insult to a surreal China Mieville attempt to maintain two states for the nations - a white bourgeois metropole and a South American extractive colony - in the same place, which is destabilizing because I was never trained into a moral sense that Havana should by right have as nice facilities as Boston or anything

It explains a lot of what’s happened since Obama got elected. I see a lot of black writers now gawping that white people (like me) expected the Obama election to be a final resolution of racial tensions and not like, the opening of some sort of settlement process. Because they saw it as the black nation getting its deserved seat at the table of US government, AT LAST

But yeah, speaking for myself and the other whites, yeah, we saw it on the model of (Catholic) JFK being elected as a sign of a new golden age where the “white ethnics” became white together, and black people would be White now - maybe we’d make something up like “Judeo-Christian” or “Abrahamic”, maybe we’d just leave it there for comics to get easy dunks on.

That’s what all those well-meaning years were for, right? Of giving to the United Negro College Fund ads on football, and euphemizing inner-city crime as multicultural graffiti gangs on the shows you train your kids on, or ESPN commercials where multicultural office friends come together around The Game, or the reconciliation ministries at megachurches that are ESPN At Prayer

(huh, broadcast sports. that’s why the NFL stung and Huffy Young Man Journalism swapping MLB for NBA matters)

so what was it for, then?

(4/30/18)

kontextmaschine:

They: Borderline Personality Disorder is a Cluster B personality disorder characterized by dramatic and unpredictable shifts in self-image, emotions, and interpersonal relationships, with no apparent external cause.

Me: Uh, I’m sure I’m not the first to notice this, but that sounds an awful lot like a description of “women” as by Shakespeare. Or Roissy.

Me: So what’s the treatment?

They: You have a figure of intimate authority explain that their emotions are illogical and wrong.

Me: …are you fucking shitting me.

They: No, no, that’s trivial, the real problem is finding a figure they’re willing to submit to, that’s a total crapshoot.

Me: …

kontextmaschine:

“When Stravinsky wrote “The Rite of Spring,” he was so consumed by its lustful, primordial power that he mailed nude photos of himself to friends.”

— great fact from the Pitchfork article about which classical composer Kanye most resembles (via grimelords)

kontextmaschine:

Listening again to Taylor Swift’s Red, picked up something I hadn’t - “memorize” used in two different songs

In Stay Stay Stay,

you took the time to memorize me
my fears my hopes and dreams
I just like hanging out with you
all the time

and then in Red,

memorizing him was as easy as knowing all the words to your old favorite song

and I thought on it and realize this downright sapiosexual knowledge-as-intimacy theme is pretty important in Tayswift, it’s the load-bearing element of YBWM

I’m the one who makes you laugh
when you know you’re ‘bout to cry
I know your favorite songs
and you tell me bout your dreams
think I know where you belong
think I know it’s with me
can’t you see I’m the one who understands you
been here all along so why can’t you see
you belong with me

it’s even important in negative (which is how interrogators tease personality from pretense) in Red,

forgetting him was like trying to know somebody you never met

thinking about that, and also remembering when her transparent brand strategy was accessibility and fans chosen to meet her would gush about her casually referencing something they mentioned on their tumblr long ago, and it’s like

AWW, she really IS just like us, in that her real output is multilayered invocations of accreted culture but she charms incidental humans by studying up on whatever incidental shit they happen to be and mirroring it back at them

I just want to know you better
know you better
know you better now
I just want to know you
know you
know you

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:

The funniest thing is this isn’t even my favorite story like this from Ancient Rome.

Okay, so in the 100s B.C. there was a Sicilian slave named Eunus, who was a magician. Not like a wizard, but a stage magician, though like all proper magicians he didn’t acknowledge the distinction. A guy who performed tricks in front of an audience while keeping up a charming patter.

And his master had Eunus perform for rich audiences at parties. He wouldn’t be paid, because slave, but he solicited tips from the audience. This was pretty normal - city slaves often accepted tips or hired themselves out during their free time to build up a nest egg with which to buy their freedom.

(American slavery is best known in the context of plantation agriculture, but urban slaves working in manufacturing or the service sector were often given the same opportunities, to the point where laws were passed against the practice, for fear that it would undermine the racial castehood that had not been part of the Roman system.)

Anyway, part of Eunus’ act was that he claimed the power of prophecy, and specifically that there would be a great overturning of society, he would become king, and the slaves would kill or enslave their masters.

Presumably this was wrapped in a cheekiness that rendered it more amusing than threatening, for the act ended with a solicitation for tips, with the promise that the audiencemembers who tipped him would be spared from the purge.

From 135 to 132 B.C., there was a major slave uprising in Sicily, now known as the First Servile War. Eunus led the slaves. Those who had tipped him were spared.