Thought Dump

Maybe one of these kinda deals. Somehow not "technically" gay?

Roger Stone wrote:Roy [Cohn, the pixie/fairy himself] was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn't discussed. He was interested in power and access.

Republicans could enjoy permanent control of all branches of government if they just dropped the overt racism. (They would still be free to enact systematically racist policies, though.)

I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

I honestly think that's a large part of the appeal at this point.

Hot take: the most important lesson to be learned from the movie Idiocracy is not that people are getting dumber and will continue to do so. It is that despite our own idiocy, we are still capable of making rational and intelligent choices.

By pretty much any scientific metric, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho was not a smart person. But, realizing this, he had the strategic intuition to reach out and find somebody much smarter than him. By getting this guy "Not Sure" with a higher IQ than anybody alive and tasking him with fixing all the problems, Camacho was actually making a much better strategic decision than any modern day leader who gives important jobs to talentless sycophants or celebrity supporters. It's like, the inverse of the Death of Expertise phenomenon, and President Camacho should be held up as a model of good leadership and strategic decision making.

On a scale of 10 to WTF, how weird is it that I own a Bible that was issued to me when I joined the US Navy?

Burn it like the decent human being that you are.

This post probably belongs in one of the music threads but I couldn't decide which one of them was appropriate and nobody will really be interested in engaging with this post anyway so I am just gonna throw it in here.

I spent the entire day just listening to Chicago house and footwork albums. Mostly Frankie Knuckles, DJ Rashad, and other Teklife projects. The speed of modern information technology and social media has made the idea of spatially-grounded, localized music scenes totally anachronistic. They've basically been replaced by subreddits and niche online cultures. Perhaps this board is one of them. It isn't entirely negative either. My own relationship with music listening was a very cynical process of identity formation. It was/is very Bourdieusian. But it doesn't have to be that way. As I have gotten older and less interested in music, I have actually been able to cultivate more engaged listening behaviors and have started to really enjoy music with new ears. It is nice.

That said, I think Chicago footwork is probably the sole exception to that. Obviously I had no active role in the scene but it was something that I at least witnessed. I still think about how shocking and tragic Rashad's death was. I felt a little bit of pride when Rashad started to break into the international music scene, was signed to a major British label, and gained the recognition of the kind of snooty and self-obsessed European dance scene. It was really exciting to see a group so grounded in their own community and the particularity of their art form get such significant international exposure.

Some of my favorite concert footage is that Pitchfork set that DJ Spinn and Teklife did in memory of Rashad:

There is a joy that I experience watching them break into that synchronized dance about halfway through the video that is kind of hard for me to explain. It's actually very touching. For a Pitchfork audience, it is surprisingly multi-racial as well.

Anyways, I don't have anything profound to say about it. Rashad was a genius and that video is very good vibes.

Back then, I thought that Chrissy Murderbot and Chrissy Murderbot-types would thoroughly exploit and overexpose footwork, turn it into a fad/meme and ruin it to the extent that the places it came from would no longer feel a sense of ownership of it and would move on to other things.

And move on to other things they did! But not because too many white people liked footwork or even because footwork is "dead" or whatever because I really don't think it is (it's not, right?). And they didn't move on completely but you can't expect these scenes to just stay frozen in time forever. I've just kind of grown to accept that things change and subcultures don't necessarily need to be invaded and broken by interlopers to die. They usually do on their own, and any exception to the rule is just living on borrowed time. Punk is dead, okay sure, and after 45 years it better be!

Growing up, the idea of the canon of rock and pop music (extending out into rap and hip-hop and all forms of dance and electronic music, i.e. all music that white people like me think they own), which started at some nebulous point in time in the 1950s, would just keep on going forever and there would always be a path you could follow forward and backward to understand how everything was related and how A influenced B who influenced C and so forth. There is probably no truth to this and it's just a convenient framework for people who like history or who love categorizing shit, but that doesn't really mean that it's going to mean anything to people in a hundred years or even twenty years from now.

I mean yeah, people will be listening to music twenty years from now. Will they still be listening to The Beatles? I really don't know. Maybe YOU will, why not? But they are going to sound so boring and quaint to people in ways we can't even imagine, no one will have the patience for it and the murder/sex/social validation simulators are going to be so advanced that just listening to music on its own will be an activity that's almost unthinkable to most people.

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

People used to write songs about feeling bored. It was a universal experience that everyone could relate to, being alone and not having anything to do and just staring off into space. No one and I mean NO ONE would write a song like this anymore because it's an unthinkable experience that no one under 30 can even comprehend.

I had a point to this but I can't really remember what it was now, anyway Go Bears!

Shit man, when this stupid apocalypse finally ends let’s have some cocktails together.

undo wrote:

WP64 wrote:So on a completely unrelated note, what is your relationship with porn? :

You didn't make this post hoping that someone would reply to it multiple times but there's something that's been bothering me.

Why is Pornhub legal?

Sure, there are models who use the site to host their videos and make money for themselves.

But the vast majority of the clips on the site are uploaded by people who don't own the rights to the clips they're posting, and the people who produced or appeared in those clips are getting $0.00 for their work. It's impossible to argue that this in any way gives the performer or the bedroom producer good "exposure," there's a button right there to actually download the clip (as if just putting it in one's bookmarks/favorites list wasn't already making it easy enough for viewers to "build a collection" or what have you). This is directly stealing from people and exposing sensitive materials to a HUGE audience that was never meant to see it.

In addition, there are thousands (?) of videos that are obviously recordings of webcam footage, ranging from models who use webcams to chat with fans/earn tips (again, NOT to be recorded and uploaded to a public website) to recordings that were supposed to be private interactions where the woman on camera never consented to be recorded and certainly never agreed to have those recordings uploaded to a free website. There are thousands of voyeuristic videos recording women in public who have no idea that they're part of someone's video gallery on Pornhub.

Like, the onus is on these people to (A) find out that they're in videos on Pornhub that they never gave consent to upload to the site, (B) request that the material be removed, and probably (C) come forward with some kind of proof that they have a legal right to make such a request. Meanwhile, this doesn't stop anyone else from reposting the same video later on.

Not gonna say I've never used this site but it's kind of fucked up when you think about it!

I think they just deleted like 80-90% of all their videos? It was a big deal in the news a couple days ago.

I actually deleted my account there a couple of weeks ago but naturally I kept a bookmark to a couple of playlists that I loved. Now I'm checking those playlists and they're just positively gutted, there's almost nothing left of them. Almost everything amateur, foreign, slightly niche, it's all been bulldozed and what seems to be left is just a really boring reflection of modern society and its resistance to seek out joy outside of the status quo. I worded that horribly but maybe you get the picture.

I should never have made the playlists or consumed that content in the first place because it was all stolen and uploaded without the knowledge of the people who recorded it or the people who were in front of the camera. They made this content believing they would always have control over it, and this site took a completely hands-off approach and allowed random people put this work on display for free for anyone and everyone to see. Really goes against everything I claim to believe! Now that all videos on every unauthorized account have been taken down, there's really no one-stop shop for anything I want to watch. This is good for the people who deserve to have ownership and control of their works and it is "good" for people like me who really need to cool it and need some outside force to intervene and take actions that I've never had the willpower/resolve to do on my own.

Really weird to think that there's tons of A+ clips I will never see again but will probably still have abnormally clear memories of deep into my twilight dementia years.

The Charade is really the best song of the past ten years.

Link?

I have no idea who that is by, here are my guesses

D’Angelo
Destroyer
Bob Dylan

Yeah, sorry. You got it.

I think I might even own a D’Angelo album but it’s an early one that people don’t seem to like as much as the others. I should listen to it again.

https://www.workers.org/2020/12/53391/

undo wrote:I think I might even own a D’Angelo album but it’s an early one that people don’t seem to like as much as the others. I should listen to it again.

Every D’Angelo album is a 10, so I would absolutely recommend listening to Brown Sugar a lot more.

Yeah, been meaning to do an "Albums of Note" post about it for a few months now. But also yes "The Charade" is awesome.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/28/lori-loughlin-college-bribery-scheme-prison-release

I mean yeah, fuck these people.

And yet, why are they the target of so much public outrage and on the receiving end of actual punishment? What about USC and every other school that accepts bribes and other favors for deals? Did anything even happen to any of those institutions or the administrators there that participated in these deals?

This has been a big story for almost two years and it's always been framed as evil rich parents being the problem but I think that's only one side of the coin here. And you might be like "no shit, undo!" but the bigger conversation that I always thought this was going to lead to just never happened. A few "bad apples" or whatever get fired but you know this always went all the way to the top, how could it not have?

undo wrote:Republicans could enjoy permanent control of all branches of government if they just dropped the overt racism. (They would still be free to enact systematically racist policies, though.)

I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

If Trump would have worn a mask, he'd be getting sworn in tomorrow.

Been listening to a series of podcasts lately about Murray Bookchin and Social Ecology and it's made me, for real, feel the lightest and most hopeful I've felt in months. It's a gorgeous philosophy anchored to real world action that emanates outward from the idea that climate justice is social justice. Here's the first one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

For years this was a go-to rhetorical device for IAmSoSmart proto-fascist Redditor-types to shut down any conversation any time when comparisons to fascism were invoked. This both gave people cover from having to think about it in the modern era (especially when any argument about someone's opinions/positions would appear to put them on the wrong side of history) and framed these kind of ideologies as being completely dead relics of the past that had no meaningful relationship to the present.

As a result, denying fascism or refusing to take it seriously in a modern context became a shorthand tool for publicly displaying how intelligent, even-keeled and "logical" a person you were. This helped groom a sympathetic base of extremely online people for card-carrying fascists to recruit from and nudged lots of people in said direction on their own.

I remember lots of discussions online throughout the '00s and '10s I had with people or witnessed secondhand where invoking this easy to Google concept (with or without the Newt Gingrich-flavored "as a student of history I know that..."-prelude) was used to belittle anyone who gave a shit about power, racism, the mere existence of social hierarchies or their inevitable consequences.

I had never heard of Godwin's Law but then I never spend anytime on Reddit. Personally, I am pretty embarrassed by how I used to deploy the term 'fascist' to label anyone who disagreed with my social views as a teenager. It's a bit like 'neoliberal' today. These terms are so overused that they have become almost completely detached from any meaningful historical referent.

Frankly, I am still discovering things about Classical Fascism.

Nobody fucking cares what I have to say about Italian Fascism:

I mean, obviously it is fucking bad. But I also don't think Newt Gingrich should be equated with Giovanni Gentile. In the American content, I don't really know what an 'anti-Fascist politics' really means. I think it makes more sense to think in terms of abolitionism. When I was in high school, it was really easy to caricature European Fascists as barbaric and evil (which they were) but that same level of moral abhorrence was not extended to the leaders of the Confederacy...

A lot of hardcore leftists on the Internet these days basically subscribe to left-wing fascism. They're vaguely populist, but also don't really trust the working class to do the things they want. So they believe in a powerful state, run by a party, that has lots of economic controls to enact a progressive agenda while using the police state to crush right-wing reactionary violence. I don't think most people who think along those lines see any chance of that actually occurring because of the right-wing nature of police/military institutions in this country, but I've seen it discussed a lot as an antidote to neoliberal incrementalism.

Yeah, I am seeing some of that as well. I think the impulse comes from a few different places. It is mostly due to our collective inability to imagine any sort of emancipatory future or common narrative of social struggle. More importantly though, there is a lack of any trustworthy agent of historical change. The labor movement in this country is incredibly weak and we lack the political legacies of West European socialist (and Communist) parties or British Commonwealth Labour parties to fall back on. We also don't have mass political parties with rank-and-file membership that control aspects of decision-making and agenda. The New Left of the 60s and 70s was basically a frenzied attempt to discover some new revolutionary historical agent (women, the colonized wretched of the earth, Black Power, queer and non-gender conforming, etc). They all either burnt themselves out or were integrated into the representational politics of contemporary liberalism (tokenism).

My feeling is that the Bernie movement was always more of a generational revolt than it was a class-based movement. He was strongest amongst millennial voters, across race and gender. For a lot of millennials, we don't really experience oppression at the workplace. We don't necessarily think about building political power at the point of economic production. It is more common to feel frustrated by an inability to accumulate capital through assets, which isn't a very revolutionary grievance. Partially that is a consequence of decades of wage suppression but it is also caused by asset inflation.

I am convinced that we are still living in the aftermath of the housing crisis. A principal problem is that  the American state is committed to underwriting the continual appreciation of housing assets because the whole political compromise, basically since the New Deal, was founded on an increasingly affluent middle strata of property owners with a material stake in the circuits of capital accumulation. They do not want to deflate those assets because it would be political suicide and it would also reveal the last several decades of financialized capital formation to have basically been fictitious. But their inability to address these structural problems in our political economy is fanning the flames of populist reaction amongst younger middle classes.

My fear is that millennial socialism is basically incoherent. They don't really have any desire to fundamentally transform our society but are just aggrieved by the fact that they live in a capitalist society without any access to capital of their own. Obviously, that level of inequality is the condition of possibility for new forms of class association and political consciousness but I don't see that happening right now. Instead, people are just really frustrated, alienated, and increasingly open to more statist approaches to address their immediate political concerns and material necessities. I don't always blame them either. The patchwork nature of social safety net is horrible and more state management and centralized planning over certain aspects of our lives would be an improvement. Of course, liberation will never come through improved technical administration, no matter how sophisticated the modeling.