Thought Dump

When I hear Marxism I LOLz.

Stray thought from Godwin's law conversation on the last page...

I really enjoyed Godwin himself coming out and basically saying, "yeah, compare trump to hitler. The comparison makes sense" back round the time of that Charlottesville horror show.

John Boy Walton wrote:When I hear Marxism I LOLz.

Also, jesus christ.

John Boy Walton wrote:When I hear Marxism I LOLz.

Any particular reason why?

By asking this I don't mean to imply that I'm the only person who's ever asked this question or that anyone here has not heard it before or considered it themselves.

And I'm sure there's there's a more tactful or thoughtful way to put this into words, and I don't say that implying that this is too crass to even utter, I'm just trying to head off some of the inevitable replies (that I don't really expect to get here but are not entirely out of the question) that questions like this tend to get these days, in good faith or not in good faith.

Is it fucked up (and if so, how much?) that one of my/your favorite bands is named Joy Division?

We certainly wouldn't stand for this from a hot new buzz band, but we refuse to implicate ourselves in not denouncing them ___ years ago when we first heard (of) them. Wouldn't that be pointless, you're probably saying. Will this madness ever end, you ask.

I don't go around asking people questions like this, I have never invited a critique of "cancel culture" (a completely made up agenda that doesn't exist) with anyone outside of this post, this is a very dangerous game but obviously I trust you

I got no joy out of making that post but there it is

I was never a big Joy Division fan actually, which is lame of me. I got into Unknown Pleasures pretty late. I think this band has been appropriated really poorly within popular culture and it has become entirely detached from the actual scene that give birth to it, which is unfortunate.

Anyways, I know that it is a reference to the Holocaust and the medical torture and experimental procedures visited upon the internees. They were not using the name cheekily though. I have more of a problem with Clapton's positive endorsement of Enoch Powell or the weird proto-Fasc phase that Bowie went through in the mid-70s, tbh.

I don't really know what people mean by cancel culture anymore but I really do find the sanitization of everything to be culturally problematic. A lot of it stopped being productive along time ago. That is kind of vague and reductive but that is my stance, if I am forced to take one.

https://i.servimg.com/u/f21/14/51/92/04/tttttt10.png


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Thank you for reading my rant about this.

I was feeling that post tbph.
Screenshot is fucking infuriating.

I'll be honest. What is it about that screenshot that is particularly infuriating. I'm just looking at a bunch of obnoxious and clickbait-y headlines.

Just the idea of a generation growing up to think that that is what “The News” looks like.
The state of mainstream media is infuriating. The photo just takes that fact and dials it up to 11. I just...
I know this isn’t new... but it sorta hit the bad spot just right. Like... I got personally angry at every one of those click-baity headlines.

That is pretty much exactly how I feel.

culture has devolved

music
- nowhere near anything that came out in the 20th century.
- even the sound quality and the medium have both devolved.
- 4 track recordings sound better than anything recorded today.
- the guitar is endless, but people aren't creative enough to write good riffs anymore.
- the best we have is Greta Van Fleet: a cheap imitation of RUSH, Yes and Zep.
- all of the best musicians alive are elderly

cinema
- nowhere near anything that came out in the 20th century.
- the movies back then, like Conan the Barbarian, totally blow away anything created today without the use of a single computer or smart phone.
- all of our best actors are getting elderly.
- the industry has spent that last 21 years regurgitating 20th century story lines from Halloween, to Star Wars and old comics.
- people can't even come up with a single super hero in 21 years that is anywhere near what people came up with in 1950.

journalism
- nowhere near anything that came out in the 20th century: just a totally lost art from Time magazine to the Tribune

radio
- does it even exist anymore beyond the horrid?
- Rush was OK. At times enjoyable. Hannity is literal feces.
- there will never be another Stern, Mancow.
- it's a dead art.

comedy
- take a look at youtube comedy from the Rodney Dangerfield era.
- stand up comedy is a lost art.
- being a good comic takes heightened self awareness, a power that this generation doesn't possess. narcissism is not self awareness.

sports
- all sports are less fun, while being wimpier, yet people get injured more and the leaders in the sports blindly follow statistics and have lost the ability to reason in the physical space.
- baseball games were 2 hours in the 1930s and 3 hours now.
- the only sport that is actually still fun to watch is the NFL, but only because the analytics actually makes that sport (the ONLY one) more fun to watch because the QBs air it out so much.
- everything is pale in comparison to last century.
- even the Olympic suck compared to the 80s

politics
- politicians have lost all ability to reason or compromise and leaders are frightened of their own shadows.
- their only answer now, because they can't play the game: is to change it. all common sense is gone.

the internet
- do you all remember the days of SOMB?
- do you remember how awesome the internet was when it was all HTML?
- you could find endless interesting topics.
- that is all gone now.
- the internet has become a cheap replica of what it once was.
- the only thing the internet is really good for now is for professionals in tech fields to gather information.
- pornography is atrocious for our society and fed daily to children.

we all know this can't continue. mankind evolves. so, the big question is:

- What comes next?
- Are these mediums literally going to all be out-dated by 2121? If so, what will they be replace with?

I think people are so vapid and stupid that they will probably come up with an immersion technology of some kind. I could see a future of sedentary people plugging in nightly to alter worlds.

WP64 wrote:I was never a big Joy Division fan actually, which is lame of me.

No, ur spot on. Not half as interesting as Bauhaus visually, musically or in concept. It's good, but it's over rated.\

New Order was better.

undo wrote:

John Boy Walton wrote:When I hear Marxism I LOLz.

Any particular reason why?

Because I know a bit about him and he's just totally hijacked by dickheads.

i'm just forever astonished at how bad your takes are

are you like 76?

that's because you guys only see things from one side

JBW, did you watch any movies from 2020?

I regularly go through episodes where I feel like everything on god's green earth at the moment absolutely sucks.

But any time I manage to snap out if that feeling, it occurs to me that that's the height of absolute narcissism and that I'm probably not the enlightened judge of all art, politics and culture that I often think I am.

This does not hold back the sense that everything is sick and dying and an insultingly disappointing replacement for everything I grew up with and love and have always used to make sense of this world and myself, not for long anyway. But this was always going to be the way of things, old people have always griped and groused about young people and vice versa, kids have always have been dumb as shit and old folks have always attached way too much importance to how they're not doing adolescence the right way or something. You can stew in that or break the cycle!

The cosmic ballet goes on...

Does anyone wanna switch seats?

Yeah, I think Undo basically summed my thoughts. The issue is the framing, JBW. You are painting with really wide brushstrokes without really developing any kind of analysis of the culture itself. That list just starts to read like the grumblings an aging man.

Personally, I actually agree with a lot of the normative assessments you are making about music, sport, film, etc. How are we to diagnose these problems though? Interestingly, conservative intellectuals are starting to engage with these cultural questions in a pretty serious manner. According to Ross Douthat, our societies are a victim of their own success. Our societies have become decadent and stale. There are elements of that thesis that are actually pretty compelling. He also really grapples with the implications of a low-growth (secular stagnation) capitalist economy.

It is interesting to think about how austerity actually impacts cultural production. Think about something like Impulse Records, which produced so many avant-garde classics in the 60s and 70s. It was an imprint of Universal Music Group. The major labels were making so much money in those days that they were willing to hand pioneering artists blank checks and grant them a free creative license to produce experimental music. Of course, they were still producing art for market consumption. It was not utopian. But it is certainly preferable to the way that streaming platforms have revolutionized the music industry by playing the lowest common denominator of listeners. There are similar dynamics in the film industry. Making blockbuster films is incredibly expensive. Hollywood is financed by foreign capital, including Gulf petrol states, and attracts a global audience. Disney, Marvel, and Avenger movies are safe because they don't offend the sensibilities or create any possible censorship censors for autocratic regimes.

I think the primary issue is that our economies are less and less responsive to collective demands and less and less reliant on actual human inputs. Automation is only going to exasperate these frustrations. Surplus-value can be expropriated without really having to appease any countervailing interests. This is why I am really heartened by the response of local fans to the proposed European Super League. They demonstrated, quite powerfully, that popular mobilizations can actually disrupt the private planning of global elites. In the post-pandemic world, you just have to hope that more of that will happen across almost every sphere of human life.

JBW, try thinking more about how power is implicated in cultural production. Otherwise you just end up blaming the consumer for having regressive and shit taste, which is too easy. My two cents, anyways.

John Boy Walton wrote:
- the best we have is Greta Van Fleet

I mean, this whole post, obviously, but Greta Van Fleet is absolutely not the best we have.

John Boy Walton wrote:that's because you guys only see things from one side

real truth only has one side. your personal consumption preferences don't have anything to say about society writ large. it sounds like you are set in what you like and you should consume what you like. the media conversation in society is dominated by brands trying to win the favor of 15-25 year olds and no shit that doesn't appeal to you.

nearly everything placed in front of us is the fiction of the oligarchs trying to keep this damn treadmill running. the left and the right both have their own versions of this fiction because it appeals to different people. everyone is peddling fiction for dollars all the time. doesn't mean there isn't a universal humanist truth behind all that. and "universal" does not mean "uncomplicated".

John Boy Walton wrote:
the internet
- do you all remember the days of SOMB?
- do you remember how awesome the internet was when it was all HTML?
- you could find endless interesting topics.
- that is all gone now.
- the internet has become a cheap replica of what it once was.
- the only thing the internet is really good for now is for professionals in tech fields to gather information.
- pornography is atrocious for our society and fed daily to children.

I don't necessarily disagree with this.

But that's going to be a LONG post that I don't have it in me to try to make this evening.