kontextmaschine

Matt Yglesias talking about guns and gun control again, reflecting that he is in fact a native New Yorker with personal experience of the city being better at the end than the start of the Giuliani era, attributing a lot of that to what Bloomberg distilled in “Stop & Frisk”: if people face a reasonable chance of being personally searched for guns when they leave the house, they will stop carrying guns in public

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We settled this in the ‘90s: “awareness-raising”: actions to increase your favorability with the general public, to recruit with the goal of your sizable following moving parties to co-opt your issue for electoral gain

Unmentioned is that this was effectively a way for the Democratic Party in particular to rebuild their brand and recruit a new base for the post-80 era of two-party competition in an environment of low voter loyalty, and there is no mechanism specified for groups and issues so captured to press their priority in the party

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

afloweroutofstone:

Maybe you’ve had success starting drama this way before, but I generally regard anonymous messages making extremely inflammatory allegations with zero supporting evidence of any kind as a sign that you are making things up

Is this me? This vibes like one of my haters.

I mean it’s not even wrong, I do think that those are coherent extrapolations of the ethics our society is actually structured by and that that coherent attempts to follow through the logic of reversing that end up undermining everything (the whole of society) based on it, and that this is the issue that the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek or the Stoic one of just sucking it up addresses, and we should appreciate that

Like, the Christian angle isn’t just excuse-making for edginess, I’m not Christian but growing up being taken to weekly Masses to hear stories of the weird child prodigy who taught the temple elders how they were wrong and realized that if you just abandon your family and don’t mind death that no one has power over you was a huge influence

At the same time I’m definitely also heir to the ‘80s-born “aw why’d they go and ban lawn darts just cause some stupid kids couldn’t handle and got themselves killed?” sense and that’s part of it too, the sense that not only do attempts to shield everyone from harm reduce quality of life but that ungating life from these kinda penalty-of-suffering skill checks benefits those who would reduce the average quality of the population who make it in

Like, into at least the mid-90s there was a sense of culture/counterculture, that there were the cool cynical edgy young types who still lived in the crime-filled cities, and did drugs, and were relevant, and then there were the churchgoing suburban normies

And we in the cool counterculture dismissed that as bullshit but the content of their issues isn’t too far off from today…

Like, when they saw Hollywood as a sin-filled and degrading place it was very much run by people who weren’t even hiding MeToo-ass stuff. When they demanded various codes of propriety and deference to motherhood it was very much so women who understood care of others as the highest calling had affirming life experiences. They fretted about children being abused and the moral content of children’s entertainment…

Like, that was very much the message of PCU (1994) – These Proto-SJWs And Take Back The Night-Era “Rape Crisis” Feminists And The Cultural Codes They Desire Are Fundamentally Identical With What The Counterculture Rejected, And Would Degrade The Chill Life We Have Finally Normalized

But the counterculture won, and hegemonized America, but forgot that now that they were in charge they needed to keep that stuff out

Which does make me wonder how much the 90s Democratic Party replacing union money with urban business executives and Hollywood types was enabled by the Republican “chasing the Clenis” investigations into Bubba Clinton’s misuse of government authority for extracting pussy from his environment, making it clear that he was safely on their side against that stuff, to the point they didn’t need to make stuff like Disclosure (1994) anymore

kontextmaschine:

Also same anon as last I never ever get hard at all in public or anywhere, almost no sex drive response except when really working hard to elicit it, and like I said even thats not doing much lately.

That some combination of normal aging and issues for medical professionals

I mean arguably the introduction of Viagra in the ‘90s was about making the effects of normal aging an issue for medical professionals

So in high school in the late 90s we had these “ZapMe” computers in the library, which some corporation offered, crippled to a few programs and showing ads in the browser

We also had the Channel 1 TVs and Taco Bell in the cafeteria

Anyway some student eventually realized you could open the file directory and other apps from PowerPoint or something so for my last two years we essentially had a bank of Zombies Ate My Neighbors emulators in the middle of the library

“Velma is canonically a lesbian now” is probably one of the best ways you could explain 2022 to 1992, honestly.

Appreciating how “a wandering band of two queers and a weirdo” was probably how a lot of the Xena audience had experienced high school

nonasuch:

alltangledupinblue:

sandmandaddy69:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone…

kontextmaschine:

fruityyamenrunner:

the-grey-tribe:

dovv:

Good Morning 🤍

Like I said: We need to normalise interracial porn that isn’t all… weird about it.

the only reason “interracial porn” works is by being weird about it. the conceit is there are two people of different races fucking and this is worth taking note of

I will say they’ve been drawing more attention to the guy fucking the asian girl being white these days

I mean maybe the ‘90s boom of Asian girl stuff was implicitly for-white-use interracial but now they have to be more explicit plus make it appeal to Asian men who are into the same kinda racial cucking thing as white guys into Blacked?

Something Zoomers might not appreciate is that the thing about culture staying obsessed with Boomers’ childhood stuff for so long was it had pretty much reset at that point and everything subsequently stayed in that tradition iterating and elaborating on it with the result by the ‘90s stuff was very meta and enriched, I’m thinking of the late-90s VH1 “Pop-Up Video” episode annotating the music video for Bryan Adams’ 1984 single “Summer of '69” here

The 1998 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film is going to be closer to its 1971 source than the present day before too long

That was an important part of the ‘90s rediscovery of the psychedelic era

At a pinball tournament, heard a song through a screen of noise and was like “wait, how the hell is there an early Garbage track I don’t know?” before realizing that in the ‘90s things just sounded like Butch Vig sometimes

Remember the early 90s when “dry” beer was a thing, like beer brands would have “dry” lines same as “light” versions? Now Asahi is the only one I can think of that even mentions it.

Scholars still debating what tome of ancient wisdom Seal’s Kiss From a Rose (1994) off the Batman Forever (1995) soundtrack was supposed to unlock

garmbreak1:

somebody in my ttrpg group’s Discord server was asking why there’s a disclaimer in VTM about how the subjects depicted are not real and you are not a vampire in real life

o! to be blessedly innocent!

tototavros:

the-grey-tribe:

tototavros:

finished cruel intentions and it still remains a mediocre movie aside from the wonderful layered cruelty to it

the acting is incredibly wooden, and it’s hard to not believe it’s just a play shot as a movie, but the writing actually works well as an adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses in the american idiom

I wonder what people think about it if they don’t know what it is. Imagine watching this, or Romeo Must Die, or 10 Things I Hate About You, without knowing the source material, or that it is supposed to be an adaptation. Would it hold up?

when i first saw it, i thought it was a bret easton ellis movie: everyone was awful, except for the decent people who suffered the most, the acting was incredibly wooden and in general it seemed like it was made as a favor to someone

only then i realized that he’d probably be working on rules of attraction, so i looked up what was going on

still, it reads pretty much like some poorly written but heartfelt fanfiction of awful charmers being awful to each other

The influence you are missing that makes this all make sense is Melrose Place (1992-1999)

soulspark:

And Moby? You can get smoked by Opie!

Downstream of how the one Blockbuster Video store left in the world is in Oregon, our local retro gaming expo’s tournament is now officially the Blockbuster World Video Game Championship III