Yeah, a lot of things recur on roughly a 35 year cycle give or take but they don’t happen as a programmatic block, and the give and take varies for each so they don’t synch up the same every time. I expect the coming decade to feature dynamics we last saw in the 70s, dynamics we last saw in the 80s, AND dynamics we last saw in the 90s.

kontextmaschine:

Kind of hoping bird flu comes up so I can talk about “the dinosaur virus”

Jurassic Park where just like War of the Worlds they all fall over from disease a few weeks later

earlgraytay:

earlgraytay:

……I got recommended a youtube video about bodybuilder drama and

tell me this doesn’t look like random discourse that fell from the DC Universe into our own

i watched the video out of morbid curiosity and thus far it seems like bog standard hobby drama

an overproduced video accusing some dude (who tbf seems like a real prize) of plagiarism, not knowing what the fuck he’s talking about, and charging way too much money for his shitty products

but because I mostly hang out in nerdy and/or femme hobby spaces these days, I’m used to seeing hobby drama from Geeky Twinks, trans folks, and/or middle aged cis women who fake their deaths to not have to make large custom yarn orders

seeing incredibly buff men pull this shit is thus really really funny to me, because they are no better and no worse than my people

Analysis of the growing share of nonacademic administrative roles in American higher education with reference to the way college towns are the only economically coherent small town experiences left in America, that providing middle-class clerkdom roles is now one of the university’s social functions

0ystercatcher:

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

nevver:

Our New Age, 1965

Never had any firsthand exposure to Andrew Tate but from what I hear regarding his popularity among today’s teen boys I’m reminded of how Andrew Dice Clay’s vulgar, misogynistic, misanthropic 1980s comedy was part of shaking off the ‘70s on the way to the '90s

Your LibsOfTikTok/Matt Walsh/even Wesley Yang types clearly operating off a memory of the “Moral Majority” 80s backlash in going after schools over trans stuff but there’s real differences.

The mainstream may have come out of the 70s practicing a “teenagers and gays should FUCK” ethic but they never really preached it as a congealed ideology, whereas there really had been a culturally conservative “sex should only be within male/female marriage” ideology the whole time.

In contrast today, as libs enjoy pointing out, the lumpen right doesn’t even practice “adolescent students shouldn’t be treated as sexual beings by adults”, but “everyone should be comfortably affirmed in their chosen gender identity” really is commonly preached as a component of middle-class morality.

Likewise I’ve seen rightists put forward some parents who understand school-pushed gender modernity as something to protect their children from, but I’ve honestly seen more parents supporting their child’s gender transition and seeking an affirming environment for them as an act of child protection.

And anyway just like “teens should FUCK”, “people born with dicks should be understood as boys, who grow into men” was always treated as implicit, while much like 80s cons with “Christian morality should be followed”, modern libs really do hold “sex and gender individuality should be respected” as something schools should teach children.

isaacsapphire:

kontextmaschine:

isaacsapphire:

thathopeyetlives:

sundazesun:

I… Don’t think this is a very good take.

Obviously it doesn’t prove you are a woman, the whole issue is a disputed definition in the first place.

But it doesn’t prove the opposite either. Honestly, the whole matter stinks of “chadwashing” which is used to justify an attitude that is sometimes indistinguishable from cruelty - why is “male power, privilege, and entitlement”, in either the individual or general case, being taken for granted here?

I love how feminism is completely unable to remember what it did a few decades back.

This could pretty much be an ‘80s second-waver take without changing a word, Transsexual Empire was published in 1979.

My point is that second wave was very industriously “getting laws changed and forcing their way into male spaces and categories”.

isaacsapphire:

thathopeyetlives:

sundazesun:

I… Don’t think this is a very good take.

Obviously it doesn’t prove you are a woman, the whole issue is a disputed definition in the first place.

But it doesn’t prove the opposite either. Honestly, the whole matter stinks of “chadwashing” which is used to justify an attitude that is sometimes indistinguishable from cruelty - why is “male power, privilege, and entitlement”, in either the individual or general case, being taken for granted here?

I love how feminism is completely unable to remember what it did a few decades back.

This could pretty much be an ‘80s second-waver take without changing a word, Transsexual Empire was published in 1979.

borkthemork:

siliquasquama:

tiktoksformyfriends:

Another example that humanity never really changed

amuseoffyre:

Raise your hand if you have a very visceral understanding of why people might have gone a bit unhinged in the 1920s after living through a succession of natural, unnatural, political and man-made disasters for several years in rapid succession

‘80s-themed sitcom doing an episode riffing off AI art catastrophizing, about desktop publishing, clip art, and those Nagel-esque hairstylist vinyl window appliqués undermining commercial artists

I’ve seen stuff around her recieved as some try-hard “pick me” (I never really parsed that phrase) thing for… cusper millennial men? And like no, the thing is the cycles line up for that

It’s like how when I went to high school in the ‘90s you saw my early '80s-born peers wearing Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin shirts

Admittedly, part of that is that their automotive-repair parents and older brothers listened to the classic rock station, but like no, the stuff that meant a lot to you at 20 is just what the next wave of 20-year-old girls are into.

Cheers!

memecucker:

According to Yossef Rapoport, in the 15th century, the rate of divorce was higher than it is today in the modern Middle East, which has generally low rates of divorce.[42] In 15th century Egypt, Al-Sakhawi recorded the marital history of 500 women, the largest sample on marriage in the Middle Ages, and found that at least a third of all women in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria married more than once, with many marrying three or more times. According to Al-Sakhawi, as many as three out of ten marriages in 15th century Cairo ended in divorce.[43]

In the early 20th century, some villages in western Java and the Malay peninsula had divorce rates as high as 70%.[42]

This is pretty interesting if you’re used to a Western perspective where higher divorce rates and lower stigmatization of divorce is seen as a progressively “modern” thing. I wanna check out the cited sources bc I hope they get into some details about these divorces and if there’s information about social class, stated reasons and which spouse tended to initiate the divorce etc

Someone needs to do an Elon!twitter update of this classic GamerGate meme of Vivian James, personification of video games, leading anons into exile, in which they’re coming back out of the desert as a conquering army, Muhammad-returns-to-Mecca style

Even the upper midwit thermostatic types on Twitter haven’t internalized or even first-order realized the vibe shift yet, all still carping over the eternal inevitability of things that’ve already had their warrants signed

Growing up, the Philly white-flighters didn’t even realize to drop their guards until the second Clinton term

kontextmaschine:

So some context on German bishops breaking with the Vatican to create validating rituals for same-sex unions:

• In recent history Germany is mixed Catholic-Protestant, both identities more a matter of regional heritage than theology
• The Protestantism is of the North Sea type that remained a matter of historic identity largely by shifting with the population over the 20th Century
• German Catholics therefore have direct experience of Christianity being made compatible with post-heteronormative norms
• The Catholic Church’s failure to keep pace is therefore understood as an unforced error embarrassing German Catholics before their Protestant compatriots
• Tension with the Vatican is not understood as undermining the bishops’ authority; Catholic Germans never considered themselves Catholic by virtue of being aligned with the Pope, but by virtue of being Bavarian, etc.

Also reminder that between Lutheranism, the Old Catholic Church (formed in response to Vatican I!), and investiture controversies, the German Catholic hierarchy has ample precedent for “cultivate local support and break from Rome” as a viable tactic

kontextmaschine:

So “Tales from the Crypt” was the respected early ‘50s horror comic from EC that got squashed in the “Seduction of the Innocent” scare

In 1989 HBO used the brand for a horror anthology series, at the same time Sandman was recasting that comics era as deep myth

It was kinda Twilight Zone in its irony but more visceral, with gore and tits. HBO’s premium cable original programming brand was always “with gore and tits”, before SatC they had an aging boomer sitcom called “Dream On” where the conceit was his retro-themed sexual fantasies were shot as part of the plot

morlock-holmes:

torschlusspanikattack:

morlock-holmes:

sigmaleph:

morlock-holmes:

eightyonekilograms:

Elite Conservatives Have Taken an Awfully Weird Turn

It boggles my mind that right-wing intellectuals went “the radical Left up in their ivory tower is forcing an unpopular agenda on Americans!”– which is not even completely wrong; I think they take it way too far but there is a weak version of that claim which is definitely true– and decided to respond by making an even more insular, elitist, unpopular, and just generally deranged ideology, that you could only understand or agree with if you are just as Twitter brain-poisoned as the bluechecks you despise. Like, my guys, my dudes: Joe Sixpack, the stalwart Republican voter from North Carolina, wants lower taxes and to not need a hunting permit. He does not want Catholic sharia, and you all are in for a world of hurt if you insist that this is the future of conservatism.

To steal from @discoursedrome this is less a beta edition thought and more an alpha, but this seems key to me:

“The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—”

Yes, nothing says “traditional Catholicism” like denying the authority of the Pope.

Now, historical jokes aside, that’s pretty damn odd, isn’t it? Converting to a new religion and demanding deference to it from everyone while also immediately denying its actually existing structure of authority?

One thing that’s really hard to get your head around about certain kinds of extremism is that they seem to be poses, or jokes, or affectations, and yet simultaneously are used to legitimate incredibly extreme behavior.

The part of Catholicism where we repeal women’s suffrage is much more appealing than, like, the part where you defer to Papal authority.

If you listen to conspiracy theorists, and here I’m talking about, like, “The Jews are lizard men from the core of the hollow earth” conspiracists, they have a recognition between each other that they all belong to the same club.

Often, as an outsider it’s shocking how two people with conspiracies that are absolutely mutually exclusive and cannot both be true will have these shockingly civil conversations where each promotes the other.

Rather than dissolving because of small differences within the same doctrine, people of what would seem to be radically different doctrines often recognize each other as allies due to something beneath the explicit content of what they say.

Nazism was of course famous for having all kinds of batshit mysticism which the ordinary person would scratch his head at.

I think there’s a tendency to analyze the weird right as being ideological in a way that I’m not sure that they are.

Now, historical jokes aside, that’s pretty damn odd, isn’t it? Converting to a new religion and demanding deference to it from everyone while also immediately denying its actually existing structure of authority?

i mean. you could say the same thing about someone converting from being nonchristian to protestantism.

i am even less a fan of sedevacantism that i am of mainline catholicism but seems weird to say that that a conversion to specifically sedevacantist catholicism is less legitimate than another kind of catholic conversion

It’s not weird to deny the authority of the Pope in general, lots of people do that.

It’s weird to go from not acknowledging the Pope as authority at all, to demanding that the law enforce deference to the Catholic hierarchy AND announcing that you yourself won’t defer to it because it’s illegitimate.

put that way, it strikes me as peak entitlement—

—everyone should have to obey these strict laws except me…

I agree, but that’s not my main point.

Rather, I think that for the kind of weird right Catholic type in this article Catholic doctrine is downstream of a certain set of priorities, rather than vice versa.

Like, rather than, “Catholicism is very important, therefore I follow the rules of Catholicism” instead you have, “I have an emotional desire to move society in a certain way, and crazy Catholic theocracy expresses those emotions.”

And what I think happens is that other people who are having the same emotional understanding of the world come to a sort of unspoken understanding that rival doctrines to that kind of Catholicism will be tolerated to the extent that those rival doctrines express a similar emotional response to the world.

And of course it’s easier to make that room if you just bypass the Pope.

I’ll try to explain better later.

Sedevacantism like professionals, petit bourgeois, gentry, and dissident scholars going “the Pope’s entanglements with politics and power in the secular world have led him to stray from the proper Godly path as we know and reaffirm to each other in in our small journals, we should not take him as the final word!” is retro-proto-Protestantism though, that’s the weird thing