Starting to suspect the best historical analogue for Joe Biden might be Dwight Eisenhower, as a moderate establishmentarian president that got in after a sharp realignment by the other party, served to provide steady leadership and rehabilitate his own party going forward, checking further radicalism, but disappointed his party’s ultras by not rolling things back to status quo ante or supporting harder-edged pushback like McCarthy
I love deconstructing ‘lifestyle’ articles like these, they are such a gold mine of biases and narrative formation by the chattering classes. Here we have a wonderful premise:
Now, Ms. Margo is living a dream of many American women who are seeking relationships abroad, some of whom cite the toxic dating scene in the United States
Well, no objection from me that the US has toxic dating norms. But, hm, idk, 'many women’ - is this a true trend amoung the American Female? Lets see who this article features:
Ms. Margo fell in love with the city (and its men). She found a gig teaching English in Paris and moved there after she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in May 2019.
Okay, not *that* crazy but I do think I know what kind of Sarah Lawrence grad gap years in Paris before her law degree;
For Cindy Sheahan…At the end of 2017, she quit her job and traveled throughout Southeast Asia for leisure, and she started using Tinder.
That isn’t…most people can’t list as their full time job “Dating in Thailand”;
For Frantzces Lys…she started a podcast called “Chronicles Abroad” with her co-host, who had met Ms. Williams, 40, in Malaysia. In 2018, Ms. Lys interviewed Ms. Williams, the founder of a consultancy, and the two kept in touch. They started dating years later.
Oh yeah the extremely relatable situation of a podcast host and boutique consultancy founder travelling to Mayalsia!!
“When you decide to just live your life for yourself, you actually end up stumbling upon people that match your energy and the same ideals and values,” said Ms. Lys, a 42-year-old founder of a wellness company.
Oh a wellness company, who hasn’t founded one of those!!! And a link to their company, wow thanks NYT, that was definitely gonna be my follow-up for Ms. Lys:
Cepee Tabibian, who moved to Madrid at 35 from Austin, Texas, felt similarly.
Okay that could be normal, what do she d-
In 2020, she met her partner, who is Spanish. Now, she is the founder of She Hit Refresh, a community that helps women over the age of 30 move to a different country.
Jesus fucking Christ none of these people are real. They are full-hog in the industry of packaging and selling their Life of Insight & Discovery for $500 an hour over zoom sessions to non profits hosting leadership seminars, their dating isn’t dating its brand management. I doubt don’t they authentically love their life but this, shockingly, is not a trend, is not a sample, is not ethnographic data, this is an ad buy by a sliver of globe-trotting wealthy woman masquerading as journalism.
Absolutely the only relatable person is:
Alexis Brown, for example, noticed a lack of “effort and intention” from the men she was dating in Atlanta, where she attended Spelman College.
When she traveled across Europe for vacation from October 2022 to January 2023, however, the people she dated made it clear that they wanted to spend time with her.
Who takes way more words than is necessary to tell me she had a polycule stretching from Paris to Prague during her study abroad, which, good for her, that is what study abroad is for. Shockingly, this is not a new development in the collegiate experience!
Buried amoung the branded bullshit is Alexis’s real gem and the only true 'thesis’ of the article:
“The dating culture in the U.S. is that it’s cool and normalized to be indifferent to someone and not really express how you genuinely feel,” Ms. Brown, 23, said.
Which is essentially that in Europe people will “express emotion” unlike the cold, busy America. I don’t doubt this, but I would hope a writer at the NYT’s could have slightly more social awareness; the 'reason’ Americans do not “express emotion” is that if they did you would dump them right on their ass on the first date.
Someone telling you, to quote Ms Margo:
“This one guy was like, ‘I ran through traffic just to look into your eyes once, and if you don’t want to go on a date with me, I can die happy knowing that I just met you,’” said Ms. Margo, a 28-year-old English teacher from Los Angeles.
As an opening line is cringe and uncomfortable, because they do not know you. They are lying and you know they are lying, it is a horrible foundation for a long term relationship. American dating norms have been hammering this lesson home on every participant (but if we are being honest, its primarily women hammering this home on men) and it is probably right to do. Anyone who does this lacks credibility.
But when you are in ~*Paris*~, you don’t care about their credibility, because you lack it yourself. You are on vacation, you have no future, just a sequential present. If the guy who tells you your eyes are his world turns out to be a clingly failson who requires at least a blowjob a day to keep his mood stable, you can just *get up and leave the country*, you cannot be trapped because nothing is keeping you there. By placing an ocean between yourself and your social standing you can radically changes your standards.
And you know what, there is something to that! Maybe the 18-point-checklist you mentally process every Tinder swipe through as you plan out your dream wedding on Cape Cod to a status-swollen ghost in a Tom Ford speckle-gray blazer while on lunch break from your quant analysis job at a digital marketing start-up in Chelsea isn’t the best baggage to bring into a first date! Through radically shifting your social context it might be possible to jar your brain out of what is holding it back. Its not what you found in Paris, but what you left behind in America, that could actually make a difference… and that reality could give this article some heft.
But then say that instead of trying to sell me on the idea that:
For Ms. Margo, a Black woman who attended predominantly white institutions throughout her school years, she felt ignored in the United States, as if she “was not an option,” she said. In Paris she felt seen.
France is less racist thanthe campus of Sarah Fucking Lawrence against black people. No wonder the humanities are dying if they are teaching this level of self awareness.
Back in the late 2000s wasn’t there a PUA type in the Roissy orbit who wrote “Bang” travel guides of Eastern and Central European countries (Baltics too) from a pulling-tail perspective, in the context of lamenting that American women were ruined?
Something about this meme is back in the 90s I remember seeing a drawing off alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cartoons.moderated of Disney’s Pocahontas using an ear of corn as a dildo beneath the legend “we call it maize” that really stuck with me, which means that for over a quarter of a century my internet experience has been haunted by some kind of cornfucking cartoon
God, musta clicked something cause suddenly all my Twitter For You is all people sharing their commune dreams
I actually learned in college about American commune moments of the Second, Third, and Fourth (the hippie Age of Aquarius) Great Awakenings, they’re remarkably similar
“What if there was a place where all you and your weirdo friends could live apart from the rest of the world in a way that supported you through common enterprise” is exactly what my small town boarding school fantasy is about and it is not conceived as a commune for good reason
In Japanese, I’m told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that— I don’t know Japanese, I’m making this up— if a syllable changes in one word, then “the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight” becomes “the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection.” I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.
does anyone know if this is a real thing UKLG is referring to? if so, word for it, examples?
which looks like is just “japanese has a lot of homophones and poets will use them for artistic effect,” more or less the same as they will in english
Yeah a lot of it is that Japanese (a non-tonal language) repeatedly borrowed words from tonal Chinese, stripping them of tone (so that several words once distinct were now identical) and then re-borrowed the same roots centuries later after meaning and pronunciation had drifted, with the result that there are a ton of words that sound the same and punning is a major feature of Japanese-language culture.
It is huge in Japanese poetry (where the regular suffixed conjugation makes end rhyme trivial), the most honored stuff – even stuff you might be familiar and impressed with – translates poorly because you can only translate one meaning at a time, lacking the centuries of cultural context that would make the others even make sense.
Often the Chinese borrowings were primarily in a literary written context and semantic drift between the borrowings, Chinese language sounds, and Japanese sounds had proceeded differently in terms of written characters and sound. Sometimes the borrowings were from dialects that used completely different sounds for the same characters.
Haiku developed from a form of battle rap where competitors alternated verses and the goal was to continue the poem while retroactively forcing reinterpretations of your opponent’s lines
i think the terfbashing on tumblr is like the “christians, such as the Westboro Baptist Church,” I used to see online in the 2000s
like my limited experience with radfems or radfem sympathetic ppl is like. Idk. Limited. But very different from what you see in tweets people share just to get mad at. Which is what you should expect in all cases
european plane crash disaster tv show where a group of teens have to learn how to survive and work together in the unforgiving wilderness of german suburbs
historically, the European version is “shipwreck in the South Pacific”.
(and the thematically central transgression is incest)
It is 2023 and I, a millennial, am 40. How is it that every time I go somewhere somewhat hip during business hours it’s still dominated by grody Gen X slackers?
Britney Spears was the Dionysian feminist sexual liberation figurehead of the postmodern matrix but now the Kardashians are wearing antlers and deer paint and banging 30 men a day to represent the divine feminine spirit as a fertile earth goddess. we must return to basics but we must not postpone dance madness to another day. the re-emergence of fakirs and snake charmers and hermits brings out the corruption of idolatry (modern idol, combo album with various music stars, brands, etc) the church will give us back the real. but did anyone think we’d ever come this far so quickly. look at the change in the world look at the rapid evolution of culture by means of technology, we need to get back to the basics. and women, i’ll tell ya. we must return to the old ways when women were bestial and flame haired and bathed in the souls of poets, i’ll say.
saw this without noticing the url and legit assumed it was a kontextmaschine post for several sentences.
me: okay I could see it but I really read it more *Camille Paglia*
also me: you mean centered on gender, feminism, and pop culture but in a really 90s Slate 1.0 way?
“Environmental degradation resulting from trade in Ezo [old name of Hokkaido] cautions against the argument that commercial growth in early-modern Japan was confined to, as some suggest, a “total environment”. In the Tokugawa years, the Japanese did not set their collective sights exclusively on resources that lay within the traditional provinces or confine themselves to a “total environment,” but rather cast their gaze widely over Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin Island, searching for new resources to fuel the flames of markget growth, to fertilize cash crops, and to feed a stable urban population. In this way, even in early-modern Japan, the environmental context was not fixed but was, as Conrad Totman insists, “shaping and beaing shaped by human activities.” Environmental changes were “crucial variables in the Tokugawa economic experience.” This economic expansion into Ezo, in addition to having implications for Ainu and other groups in the North Pacific, raises intriguing questions concerning whether Japanese colonialism in East Asia should be viewed as an exclusively post-Meiji phenomenon, or in other words, as the imperialist implications of modernization shaped predominantly by Western models. To begin with, in the realm of what Alfred Crosby calls “ecological imperialism,” the exchange of contagions in Ezo and the demographic and cultural consequences of massive epidemics introduce the horrible specter of the interactions between semi-insular populations such as the Ainu and endemic-disease carriers such as the Japanese. Of all the many facets of the Ainu-Japanese relations […] disease clearted the way for the Japanese settlement of Hokkaido possibly more than any other factor and, hence, pushes historians to confront the ecological implications of expansion in Japan’s pre-Meiji world. On a political leve, moreover, the link between the state, merchants and foreign conquest in Ezo resembles the later Japanese colonial experience in Korea, where, as Peter Duus argues, the “symbiotic ties” formed between government and business facilitated the national enterprise of the annexation of Korea. The political process of colonizing Korea, writes Duus, was associated with the “penetration of the Korean market by an anonymous army of Japanese traders, sojourners, and settlers,” resembling with important distinctions, the situation in Ezo.”
— Brett L Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion 1590-1800
A couple times a year I pick up a sociology-adjacent book and it has the obligatory page or two explaining that the population in question seems to be crazy but is actually rationally following incentives. I have little patience for this, but figured, since these books are for laypeople, that the authors are being extra careful to get their casual reader on the same page
but modern econ/sociology papers do this also? I read them less frequently, but I follow a citation from time to time, and – it’s bizarre. Your audience is mostly other econ/sociologists. Why spend a page reciting the same premises everyone else is stating? What value is there in this?
(Or am I falsely projecting a pattern that isn’t there, because I’m so annoyed every time I come across this boilerplate? That’s possible)
it really bothers me how little these authors seem to care about actually communicating their findings and opinions and reasoning. It feels like 25% of words 90% of papers exist to “do the social ritual of writing a paper”. This viscerally offends me as a member of the human species
So if we’re all doing our retrospective takes on the Iraq War, mine was… it wasn’t that big a deal? In scale, direction, and costs borne and imposed it was basically well within norms for what the country might get distracted with over a two-decade period.
Already within my lifetime the specter of the Vietnam War, once much more significant in national affairs, looms not nearly as large as I remember it doing in the ‘80s (indeed, the easy victories of the “Desert Shield/Storm” Iraq excursion of the early '90s were specifically hailed for dispelling this “Vietnam Syndrome”), as colorful but not particularly important chapter of 20th Century American history.
While the action did not serve to renew America’s post-Cold War unipolar “hyperpower” moment, I honestly don’t think it accelerated its end any, which looks to be more a product of the development of China and reassertion of Russia than any “Clash of Civilizations”.
…the Iraq War – the (cultivated) reaction to it, and then the backlash to that reaction, and then the fallout from the actual war being such a huge debacle – ended the decade-and-a-half End of History.
Even if it had no lasting geopolitical impact whatsoever (which seems like a stretch), its impact on the American psyche was quite enough to be a History-Defining Big Deal all by itself.
Which seems like it would be your jam.
I mean that was the way it happened, but if not for that then…?
Like, if it didn’t have military commitments at the time the US might’ve engaged harder in the Crimea crisis, and the Syrian civil war would have been obviated and the big refugee flow to the EU preempted. That’s the two things I can see going differently.
If the Iraq and Vietnam wars aren’t major events, what qualifies? I assume you’d say that the world wars were more important globally, and the civil war was more important nationally, but are there any non-war events that make the cut?
The World Wars were, the Civil War was, the Cold War as a whole was, Iraq’ll get put with Afghanistan and Granada, the old Desert Storm/Shield, Yugoslavia and the “R2P” era as “miscellaneous post-Cold War search for purpose”
just like the Gilded Age is “miscellaneous post-Civil War search for purpose”
So if we’re all doing our retrospective takes on the Iraq War, mine was… it wasn’t that big a deal? In scale, direction, and costs borne and imposed it was basically well within norms for what the country might get distracted with over a two-decade period.
Already within my lifetime the specter of the Vietnam War, once much more significant in national affairs, looms not nearly as large as I remember it doing in the ‘80s (indeed, the easy victories of the “Desert Shield/Storm” Iraq excursion of the early '90s were specifically hailed for dispelling this “Vietnam Syndrome”), as a colorful but not particularly important chapter of 20th Century American history.
While the action did not serve to renew America’s post-Cold War unipolar “hyperpower” moment, I honestly don’t think it accelerated its end any, which looks to be more a product of the development of China and reassertion of Russia than any “Clash of Civilizations”.
