#all entertainment is political. all of it. because politics is the models we use to describe how we interact as a community

[thedreadvampy]

I mean sure, I can understand this perspective, but I'm not sure whether most people feel less shaken to be thrust into conversations about "self-unaliving" than conversations about "suicide"

and I for one as a survivor would much rather unexpectedly encounter somebody talking about "rape" than somebody talking about how funny it is to have sex with somebody when they don't want to, a normal thing that doesn't need to be named because it's So Normal.

which is to say. this is a post about words. the words are not the distressing thing about the discussion. the distressing thing is the distressing thing about the discussion. sugarcoating, dodging or renaming the distressing thing doesn't make it less distressing but it DOES often make it harder to have a frank discussion about it or address it in serious terms.

[pinch of salt: solid probability from their blog that this person is a Literal 14 Year Old and the perspective from 30 and 14 are very different. I do stand by all the points I'm making but I think this conversation lands a lot different for people at different life stages - there is something to be said for the general issue that the internet has flattened social groups to the degree that I as a 30 year old can make a post to my audience of largely adult millennials that immediately enters the same conversational space as people half my age and still in school. that seems. ungreat. as the primary way we engage in conversation. but I don't have solutions to offer.]

you gotta be able to say "die"

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that's hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.

[marlynnofmany]

Paws in a Circle

There’s a poster I saw once, back on Earth, that had a silhouette of a bear with deer antlers, and it was labeled “Beer.” I had forgotten about it completely until I met our newest client, who by that logic was definitely a beer.

I’d already done my part of the interaction by carrying out one of the heavier boxes, so while the captain went over the delivery fees with her, I was free to stare politely and decide which other Earth animals she resembled. (Fur coloring more like a red fox, and semi-upright posture that was less bear and more extinct giant ground sloth.)

I was so focused on watching the client handle the datapad with her giant paws that I completely missed it when the hovercar behind her sprung a fuel leak.

Paint saw it, though. “Oh! Your car!” she yelped, pointing. “I’ll get Mimi!” She was off in a flash of orange scales, back into the ship in search of our mechanic.

The client growled a swear word that didn’t translate, shoved the datapad back at Captain Sunlight, then galloped over to her car. While I expected her to throw open the hood in search of the part that was leaking, she instead made a beeline for the back seat.

When she threw open that door, I saw why.

“Kids! Out of the car! It’s not safe!”

A half dozen bundles of spotted yellow fur tumbled out, making distressed noises that didn’t need translating. They had tiny little antler buds and very big eyes.

Captain Sunlight was busy talking to someone through her communicator, probably Mimi. I stood there uselessly by the packages. What did I know about fuel leaks? Nothing helpful. I knew the puddle was growing by the second, and was probably flammable, but that was about it. And this backwater spaceport barely had an information booth, much less a local response team.

The client ushered her cubs over to where we stood just as Mimi and Paint returned. Blip and Blop followed with a big toolbox carried between them. Mimi was already taking charge and waving tentacles about, talking to the captain about the lack of reliable repair shops this far in the boonies, telling Blip and Blop how best to use their muscles in opening up the engine, and reassuring the customer that this was fine, actually, that model hovercar had a known issue with the fuel lines.

When the client dithered over minding her cubs and being present for the repairs, Captain Sunlight pointed a scaly yellow hand at me. “Our human can keep your little ones entertained. Bring them over here.”

“Uh,” I said.

Captain Sunlight looked up at me, still talking to the client. “She has extensive experience in tending to small furry creatures.”

I wanted to say that veterinarian training and childcare were two very different things, but I wasn’t about to make the captain look bad. And knowing Mimi, this would be quick.

The client said, “Thank you. Kids, you need to stay over here, okay? Next to these boxes, but don’t touch. Listen to the tall one. I’ll be right there helping fix the car.”

The tiny-voiced replies were recognizable words in the most common trade language, though their pronunciation made me clock them at around three or four years old in human years. They were very cute.

And they were suddenly my responsibility, all looking up at me like spotted teddy bears while the rest of the adults fretted about the car.

The questions were immediate.

“What are you?”

“Where’s your fur?”

“Did you lose it because you ate the wrong thing? Mommy says we have to eat our vi’mins so our fur doesn’t fall out.”

“Is this instead of fur?”

I freed the tiny paws tugging at my pants. “I’m not supposed to have fur. I’m a human. And yes, I wear clothes to keep me warm instead.”

“It looks funny.”

“Do you have to brush it?”

“Do you know any games?”

I brightened at that. “Games! Sure, I know some games.” I wracked my brain for something that would keep them entertained without causing new problems. “What kind of games do you like to play?”

They all answered at once in an avalanche of words, bouncing around in excitement, with a couple grabbing each other’s fur to keep from falling over. I couldn’t make out a thing they were saying. But I had the beginning of an idea.

“Do you like dancing in a circle?” I asked.

They had no idea what I was talking about, and possibly no understanding of basic shapes yet. Three of them spun in place while the others waved their arms.

“First you stand in a circle, like this,” I said, sketching out the shape in midair. “Here. You stand here, then you there…” With some gentle nudging — they were so soft — I soon had them arranged in something like a circle. “Now hold hands with the person next to you.”

I was a little concerned that their paws weren’t suited to this, since they had long blunt claws already and didn’t look very dexterous, but they managed. With lots of giggling and hopping in place.

“Now everybody step to the side, in this direction.” I ushered them into a clockwise rotation, nice and slow (and giggling), with no risk of any little fluffy heads bonking onto the spaceship landing pad. It took them a second, then they got the rhythm without tripping over their own feet.

Then they unanimously spun faster, hopping and laughing with squeals and barks that were probably making more than one adult turn to stare. I don’t know; I kept my eyes on the littles. My arms were out and ready in case somebody stumbled and brought the whole circle crashing down.

But no one did. The half dozen youngsters wheeled and spun, bouncing with glee and showing no sign of stopping.

“That’s new,” rumbled a voice behind me. I tried not to flinch when I looked up at the mama bear. Beer. Whatever. She asked, “Is that an activity from your planet?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty basic, and it seemed good for kids.”

The antlered head nodded. “Looks like valuable practice at coordination, as well as teamwork. There are a few adults I know who could benefit from that.”

Images flashed through my head of huge antlered bear aliens doing ring-around-the-rosie as a corporate teambuilding exercise. And professional athletes trying to improve their footwork. “Yeah, they probably could. And it’s a fun bit of community bonding time.”

Mama Bear nodded. “Okay children, the car is fixed,” she announced. “Time to go home.”

The cubs made the exact same disappointed noises as human kids. Even when their mother waded in and picked them up one by one to urge them towards the car, they didn’t want to stop playing. They grabbed hands in pairs and spun off that way, even faster than before. I did have to catch one fuzzy little teddy toddler, who just laughed about it and hopped around some more.

Peripheral vision told me the rest of the crew was helping move the packages into the hovercar’s storage space and mop up the last of the fuel. Overheard conversation told me that the good captain had tactfully gotten us a bonus payment for the mechanical assistance. I couldn’t tell if childcare was part of that, and I didn’t ask. I just focused on herding the excitable youngsters back to their car, where thankfully they all knew how to get into the safety harnesses without help.

Mama Bear closed the door. “Thank you for everything,” she said, directing that at me as well as Captain Sunlight. “I will recommend your services highly to anyone who asks. And we will probably need more deliveries soon, once we get the new house set up, so perhaps we will see you again!”

Captain Sunlight nodded. “Perhaps so. It was a pleasure doing business with you.”

I waved goodbye to the kids, who had found the button to open the window and were just as excitable as ever. “See you later! Maybe next time I can teach you the Hokey Pokey. That’s big on my planet.”

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

[feroluce]

Oh my gosh the way the Pop-Up Shop event ended and what it hinted at that's going on rn, and what it might imply about what's in store for the next time we see Sampo, I'm so excited AAAAAAA

Because it seems it really IS our Sampo, and whereas before I was absolutely delighted by the thought that he was possibly getting fucked with by some outside influence, and that was why he was saying such strange things... There's nothing quite like that going on here. There's no memetic virus messing with his head. There's no imposter, no possession, no nothing.

Just Sampo, and the ominous, all-consuming dread that hangs over his head like a guillotine, as he willingly walks right into what he is sure is a trap. ♡

Because this event was weird right off the bat, yeah? Sampo invites us in on a business deal that won't make him any money? The hell???

And I was just waiting on pins and needles for it to make sense, and oh, I was not disappointed at all. Because I've got a nice meta post about it over here, but Sampo actually DOESN'T make a lot of money most of the time- but he does always get something out of his dealings. He works for favors and good will and networking, but never for nothing. And it was the same here!

Sampo didn't make any money with this little business venture because that wasn't what he needed from it. That was never his goal to begin with. He just needed something entertaining.

Sampo has the key to get into the tavern's basement where Sparkle has been keeping his mask for him, but he still needs to be let into the front door of the tavern itself. The fun stories he got from this event were his entry fee. He leaves at the end because he's probably already on his way to Epsilon, where the World's End Tavern should be.

So that explains part of what was so strange this event. It's the rest of his ooc tendencies that have me like foaming at the mouth though because AAAAAAAAAA

There's long been hints of...some? kind of strain between Sampo and the rest of the Masked Fools. Like it starts all the way back in Belobog's main quest with the big infamous fourth-wall breaking sequence, where Sampo talks some shit.

And it continues in the Aetherium Wars event, where we finally get the confirmation that Sampo is a Masked Fool and even get to see him interact with Giovanni, one of his brethren! And where Sampo talks more shit. He also leaves the trailblazer a warning against Sparkle, who they hadn't met yet, and probably the Masked Fools in general.

And for some strange reason, it seems to be popular fanon that Sampo like. Talks a lot of shit? Or is rude in general? Like I feel like I see a lot of jokes about if Hook says a cuss word, it was probably his fault. But Sampo is actually pretty polite with everyone. I think the only time we really see him be harsh is when he has to set some hard boundaries in the museum event. Otherwise, he conducts himself like a model friendly businessman. Like he IS super shady and slimy, but he's still polite about it. I'm pretty sure the only time he actually talks any shit, and so bluntly, is about the Masked Fools or Epsilon as a whole. He really seems to have some sort of beef with them.

There's also his hilarious relationship with Sparkle, which I'm including for consideration because we don't know how common people like her are in the Masked Fools, so she might represent how Sampo interacts with a lot of them. ...But I'm pretty sure Sampo's grudge with her runs deeper than that anyway jdksajfdkljas

She's so funny I hope she fucks with him more FJDKSJAKD

Anyway, the point is, Sampo doesn't seem to see eye-to-eye with a lot of the rest of Aha's followers. And it was never hinted at before the pop-up shop event, but now I'm wondering if it might be like. An actual dangerous sort of situation.

Because during those brief packaging sequences, you get some. Pretty wild text dropped on you. There was actually a really cool explanation for it by another user already! But basically, all of the phrases are more fourth-wall breakage. They're mostly in-game achievements...except for one.

"This must be a trap create"

We never get to see the rest of the phrase. Just "This must be a trap create."

That is the only one we don't have an explanation for yet, at least as far as I know.

AN EDIT: Thank you to @/kittaykattz for this one, because it looks like someone DID find the source of this line. Unfortunately, it only came up in my search after I looked for the full phrase. I couldn't find it on the wiki before orz And yet this somehow does NOT make it any less ominous ajfdklsjkl The full phrase is "This must be a trap created by a Masked Fool!" and it comes from another in-game achievement, "Boxes and Ladders." Which is really cool, because I had figured the last line must be something from Penacony, since it was the only area not represented so far. So in that way, it fits perfectly with the rest of the text. Now we have one achievement from every area of the game, which fits with the theme that Sampo has been following the Astral Express, the trailblazer specifically. It's the way that it doesn't fit that's the weird part though. Because the rest of the lines that come from in-game achievements are all titles; that's why they were so much easier to find. For some reason, Hoyo saw fit to single this one out. They didn't use a title. They specifically chose the line about falling into a trap set by a Masked Fool, a trap with seemingly no way out, where one's only choice is to take a leap of faith and pray to make it out ok in the end.

Love that. Absolutely love that. That's so fucking tasty, I will be daydreaming for days on end now about Sampo finding himself in a horrible situation with no way out where all he can do is make a desperate attempt and pray to whatever might listen (probably not Aha fjaksljdk) that he'll survive it WHEEEEEE

Because Sampo talks so strangely throughout the whole event, but it gets worse day by day, morose and morbid and dreading and sometimes even almost like he's warning the trailblazer against something about to happen.

I've already lovingly discussed it in an analysis about Sampo's name (alias included) but like. There certainly are some fun connections there. The Sampo of myth was smashed and lost to the sea. Poisson was flooded. Brueghel died suddenly and left a final painting of a storm at sea unfinished.

The Masked Fools are referred to with imagery of water and the sea. And frequently so.

And so I do wonder what Sampo knows, and what he's expecting to happen when he gets to that tavern at the end of the world. If maybe he thinks he's walking right into a trap, and is doing it willingly, doing it anyway, because, well.

Belobog is on the line.

And Sampo has already proven he seems so ready to do whatever it takes to protect it.

[st-just]

Even though we are most conscious of the big, widely spoken languages like English and Chinese, most languages are spoken by a much smaller number of people. Because of the sheer number of languages in the world, something like Estonian is much more typical. To a first approximation, nobody in the world ever learns Estonian. If an Estonian person wants to talk to someone who’s not Estonian, they speak English. In the past, they might have spoken Russian. But nobody is learning Estonian. And Estonian is very complicated, with 14 noun cases and all kinds of other trouble. But as Trudgill points out, even Estonian �� with its ~1 million speakers and solid K-12 education system and some broadcast media — is much more widely spoken than most historical languages. The vast bulk of human history consists of language communities that had no television or radio or even writing, speaking face-to-face mostly to other people they actually know. Communities like that are Petri dishes of linguistic innovation. When I used to host “The Weeds,” Dara Lind liked to jokingly say things like “Teds Cruz” to mean “people like Ted Cruz” modeled on the pluralization of attorneys-general. That became an inside joke that Sarah Kliff and Jane Coaston and I picked up. And Trudgill says this is how language change works in small oral communities — someone makes something up because he or she thinks it’s clever, and if other people like it, they copy it. There aren’t a lot of entertainment options, language play is fun, and there’s no influx of foreigners learning your language and needing to simplify it. So you end up developing a kind of anti-creole, with lots of weird flourishes.

-Matthew Yglesias, Political lessons from Jamaican Patois

[chromaticleaf]

Can't get Murder Drones out of my head. Almost like some eldritch code has taken root inside my brain. It's probably fine.

Anyway, headcanons for what the murder trio were before Tessa got them:

J was almost certainly in some corporate position. I like to think she was involved in marketing, since she has all those buzzwords ingrained in her lexicon. Maybe they even had her working with graphic design with her art skills. I also imagine she kinda hates corporate structure. "Bootlicker J" jokes aside, I can't imagine even she would have fun as a (literal) corporate slave, and she definitely enjoys freely speaking her mind: not something that flies very well in corporate and marketing contexts. Maybe she got dumped during some convoluted office politics, maybe she was dumped due to random downsizing, who knows.

N's a bit trickier. We see a lot of dexterity and showmanship from him in the manor. He's quite flashy with the glassware at a few points. He also likes drawing, but is lacking in technical skill, especially compared to J. He's also quite personable and friendly, and also seems to truly admire J in some capacity. As a bonus, Cyn mimics a lot of N's mannerisms, and one of her defining traits is her acting, even specifically playing at "improv" while rebuilding J. Therefore, I think N was in theater/entertainment.

He wasn't necessarily an actor himself: still a robot slave after all. But he likely assisted with a lot of setup. Rehearsals, testing stunts, watching over pets/kids (whether those of actors or actors themselves), etc. He enjoys fancy costumes as well, and he's pretty genre aware. He's probably had his fair share of experience with horror movies/stories. Maybe he got dumped pissing off the wrong famous person, maybe some stunt went wrong and they didn't want to bother repairing him, maybe they just wanted the newest model.

V is tough to decide. She seems to enjoy fighting the most out of all of them, but none of them are really slouches in combat, so I don't think that says much about her past. We don't see much of her in the manor, but the impression she gives is a bit more shy and demure. We see her playing chess in the credits, but one hobby doesn't mean much on its own, especially since chess is a common game to put on computers: probably all of them have chess programs built-in.

With that little to go off of, and her tendency to both act out in outrageous ways and keep herself closed-off, I'm thinking she was probably a menial worker beforehand. Minimal freedom, in a position where she'd best keep her head down. Follow the rules closely in order to keep what little she has. "Do your job and I leave you and N alone" was probably a pretty good deal to V because it was as good or better than her previous work arrangements.

Could be a lot of jobs like that for a robo-slave. But let's have fun with it and extrapolate from her usage of "narc" and her apparent desensitization to violence: she was used by a criminal organization for clean-up duty, and got dumped after being confiscated by authorities.

[communistkenobi]

in Whipping Girl, Serano grapples with "nature vs nurture" "biology vs society" and so on, and she seems to fall into a sort of centrism where both models are wrong (or rather, only partially correct). her argument is that on the one hand, gender is very obviously socially mediated and (re)produced, and on the other, there is something within people that precedes the social and determines our comfort level with the gender roles we must perform in our lives - she calls this subconscious sex, this thing that everyone has, including cis people, but in trans people it produces this feeling that we are not living our gendered life correctly, that there is some disconnect deep down, that our assigned gender is dissatisfying in some intangible way that can only be resolved via transition. and this subconscious sex is maybe biological or maybe psychological, but it's something that can remain unmoved by the gendered social pressures we are forced to navigate, and therefore there is something "true," or at least compelling, about a partially biological conception of gender. It's not classical gender essentialism but rather a retraction of the essential element of gender away from our genitals and into our brains.

and i find this nature vs nurture dichotomy she explores extremely frustrating. first, for the obvious fact that it assumes a very limited experience set for trans people (a lifelong struggle with gender dysphoria that begins in childhood and culminates in a binarist transition from "one sex to the other"). this model is correct for some people, but it is also the model that medical and psychiatric institutions rely on when "diagnosing" us as "real" transgender people, excluding the possibility of exiting the binary altogether, of rejecting it outright, or of even experiencing the binary in different ways.

two, I don't actually think gender essentialists are making biological claims about sex and gender when they talk about the inherent differences between men and women, because the scientific consensus on the biological components of sex are far more complex than genitals = gender, a fact that has no bearing on reactionary beliefs about gender and sex. Gender essentialists are making political claims using the rhetoric of the biological, the natural. These people have political platforms and goals that are not even remotely restricted to the realm of biology - gender segregated bathrooms and change rooms as well as sports and competitive games, banning transition care for trans people, the violent enforcement of patriarchal & white supremacist western gender norms, the attendant political beliefs about the criminalization of sex work, and frequently, the banning of abortion - these are claims about the built environment, about entertainment & play, about medical care, about labour, about law and the role of the state in producing gender. What is "biological" to transphobes & homophobes is what is natural and unchanging, but paradoxically must also be violently imposed upon people in every sphere of their life in order to be maintained. You see conservatives do this all the time - they talk about natural law, about the rule of man, "survival of the fittest" being used to gleefully explain social murder, "natural differences in men and women", biological claims about racial superiority, and so on. These are not biological claims because these claims do not bear out empirically, they are claims using the authority of tradition cloaked in the authority of biology. "It's always been this way" is not about biology, it is a call to return to a mythical past, a past closer to the imagined "natural state" of human beings prior to the intrusion of "society" and its attendant degenerate tendencies that corrupt "pure" human beings (almost invariably articulated as antisemitic conspiracies about who "orchestrates" this societal degeneracy). They use biological rhetoric because of the supposed apolitical, objective, empirical nature of the natural sciences - they refer not to the epistemic discipline of biology but to the claim of objective authority conferred upon biology. biology cannot be countered with the social because it is outside the social. "facts don't care about your feelings" is a dead meme phrase by this point, but it is probably the perfect distillation of these peoples' worldviews. They are correct not because their beliefs are empirically proven, but because their beliefs provide a rationalisation for the world they want to build. It is the modern version of the divine right of kings. There is nothing "biological" about any of these discussions other than the fact that they argue about how human bodies can or should be used - which, if that's our standard for biological, then everything is biological.

Are trans people biologically their gender? I think we need to reject the premise of this question. It is conceding too much ground; it pivots the discussion to "proving" transness in laboratories, to arguing about our genitals or our chromosomes instead of health care or housing or labour or public space. It accepts as valid the rhetorical sleight of hand that bigots do where they mean "unchangeable" when they say "biological" - something that nobody believes anyway unless you want to also object to like, the sterilization of medical equipment or heart surgery. We circumvent and alter biology every day. Reactionaries do not care about biology even a little bit and we do not need to humour them by pretending otherwise. We have scientific understandings of gender that do not adopt a biological lens because that lens is unequipped to deal with what is going on in front of us.

I'm sympathetic to Serano's desire to locate an origin for the dysphoria a lot of trans people feel, particularly because it allows us to more easily justify our existence. I'm also sympathetic to the fact that when she wrote this book, the public discourse on trans people was very different from what it is today; she's not even close to the first person to engage with this nature v nurture debate because it's the debate all trans people are at some point forced to reckon with. but ultimately I think this conception of transness is both politically a non-starter and a concession to our enemies that we do not need to give

[mygwenchan]

Is Playboyy really that messy?

If you look at the quick succession of scenes, some barely reaching the 2 minutes mark, the changes in mood and style - here a romantic kiss, there a dramatic reveal with the occasional social criticism thrown into the mix - the answer would probably be: Yes, it's very messy. The characters and the plot lines are plenty. You've got tons of imagery from other media as well - ep11 was especially rich in movie references. It's all over the place and it's a lot!

But I wonder, what if the series works similar to a pointillism painting?

It's one brightly colored dot right to the next, but the image itself will only be revealed when you take a few steps back. Only then can you see the figures and the landscapes immerging from the chaos.

If you ask me, Playboyy is like a collage of queer life. It takes the pop culture, the Greek statues, the (sometimes failed) romance, the sex and kink, the drama, the music, the clothes, the activism, the conflicts with older generations, the experimental styles, the references... The series takes all these things and sticks them together to create something new: They put Michelangelo's David next to a pair of rainbow angel wings, next to an article about murdered prostitutes, next to the cut out of an underwear fashion model, next to a cheesy quote from Notting Hill.

So Playboyy can't be only a series that discusses sex or offers criticism towards problems in our modern societies. You've got those things in there, mind you: Look at the upper right corner of the artwork and you'll find discussions about kink and consent or look down and you'll have your critique towards a government that can't even acknowledge prostitution is real. But as a whole, Playboyy is a collection of different experiences, things that happend and things that are only imagination.

The series itself tells us repeatedly that it's neither a thriller nor an action movie or an 80's romcom. Playboyy can't be just one thing, one genre, because it encompasses everything (everything that is queer that is).

It is up to us viewers what we want to take from this piece of art. You can watch it as a silly and entertaining flick (equivalent to: Yay~ Lots of bright colors and glitter :D) or go for the cinematography and the references (how did they even build this thing? o.O) or discuss political issues (let me read that news article again...), talk about sex and kink (is that a naked guy with a dog mask over there? omg!) and so on and so forth. I think in the end Playboyy the Series is meant to be a vehicle for us, to get the discussions going and to show us the many different facets of queer life in Thailand.

[statementlou]

I feel like when people ask famous personalities to participate in activism, they may be influenced by the parasocial relationships they have formed with these celebrities and not that they really care about what is going on. They expect famous individuals to act as role models or representatives of their beliefs. That's why I think, it is crucial to maintain a critical perspective and not depend solely on celebrities for activism. This can result in a passive approach to social change and disregard the significance of collaborative action and personal engagement. The majority of celebrities don't care lol even who speak up about it publicly. Their reality is different from ours, like Gigi Hadid also drank Starbucks the other day, Bella Hadid worked with a lot of Zionist brands and did a photo shoot with them recently, etc etc. And let me not start on stans culture... the worst thing ever

Okay this is fascinating because yes! I agree with you so much! But then I was completely floored by the choice of the HADIDS (literal Palestinians who never shut up about the cause) as examples- but actually I love it because I think it opens up two really really important points that maybe get to the heart of the whole issue. Gigi and Bella Hadid are, as I said, literally Palestinian, and have throughout their public lives (not just recently) never been silent or backed down in defense of Palestine even when it has very publicly lost them (Bella primarily) jobs and opportunities, and they both continue to be outspoken even while literally targeted and threatened by zionists. Pretty much everything anyone has wanted or asked for from any celebrity, right?! But here we have, first of all, Gigi having all of that discounted because she bought Starbucks, a brand that is not even an official boycott! I feel like this is a perfect example of prioritizing performative and symbolic activism over actions with material impact, if someone who has been so consistent and stalwart can see all that dismissed because they spent $5 on a coffee (that, again, has no material financial relationship to Israel). I personally think that on a scale of good done vs harm, Gigi can afford a lot of problematic coffees, and this is not even getting into the Hadid families finances which involve huge amounts of money being used and moved around in ways that do more to help the cause than any image choice can unbalance. And then you say that Bella has worked with zionist brands- I don't know anything about this so I can't speak to it. Given that we are also apparently considering starbucks a zionist brand despite the company not operating in or having any ties to Israel, I would question what this means. But it doesn't matter- I think the point is that consumer/ individual purity isn't possible! No one is making pure consumer choices, no matter how many brands they boycott, and certainly no celebrity can continue to be one without having unsavory connections. I think that BY DEFINITION no celebrity is politically pure because if they cut all those ties, THEY WOULD NO LONGER BE A CELEBRITY. Whether the pursuit of purity is realistic or desirable is a much bigger issue, but the point is that as you say, looking to celebrities to be activists will end only in disappointment. Their job is to entertain in specific ways and they do that; if that's not working for you, then consume some other celebrity's product (persona). As I have said from the start, if you want to stan Louis because he is talented and hot and kind and smart and fun then you are in luck! But if you are looking for an activist spokesperson, he is not going to be that, and yelling at him (or people who don't consider that a deal breaker) isn't going to change that.

[jazzhandsmcleg]

how to deal with door-to-door canvassers during political campaign season (and any other time of year)

hello, fellow USAmericans. as you may know (mild sarcasm), the presidential election is now slightly over one month away. political canvassers of all stripes began ramping up their campaigns last month, and this month things will get even more hectic.

I worked as a door-to-door canvasser for a political nonprofit for a few weeks last month! while that certainly doesn't make me an expert, I haven't seen anyone more knowledgeable about how canvassing works make a post like this, so...I'm here to do what I can.

bear in mind that this is mostly geared toward nonprofit and political door-to-door canvassing in the USA, but some of it applies to general canvassers and probably to some other countries too.

before we get into it: for those who just want to know the fastest way to get rid of a canvasser at your door without going into a readmore: it's either a) don't answer your door (even if we can see you through your window! you are under no obligation) or b) say "no thank you" and then close your door. we don't consider it rude and will in fact thank you for saving us both time and energy. that being said, please be polite!

and now, the full guide, beginning with:

the walkup.

first of all, be aware that canvassing can happen across a wide range of days and times. where I live, canvassing is allowed until 9pm if you can believe that. we only went til 8pm, but that's still very late in this part of the country. usually we were a M-F enterprise, but weekends are now on the table as the election nears, and of course religious canvassers and business canvassers will have their own models for when they come to your place.

canvassers will assess your house for loose dogs in the yard, "no trespassing" signs, "no soliciting" signs, locked gates, and the like.

generally canvassers will open simple latches. canvassers generally-to-always will NOT remove locks even if they are not fastened.

non-profit, political, and religious canvassers are allowed to ignore "no soliciting" signs because they are not asking for your money (assuming the political canvassers aren't fundraising, anyhow); people who want you to pay them to trim your trees or mow your lawn or whatever are not allowed to ignore these.

"no trespassing" signs are a little tougher. I made another post about it here.

that post also covers more ornate signs that say things like "no charities, no religion, no sales, no nothing. go away, my dog hates you and so do I", though those are a bit more of a grey area. suffice to say the more of them there are, the less likely we are to knock on your door.

however, the bottom line is that all of this varies slightly by jurisdiction so be sure to check your local bylaws. canvassers must go by the letter of the law so make sure that what you're putting on your front door will get you the intended effect. yes, this sometimes means ignoring your two dozen "no soliciting" signs.

the knock/the ring.

most canvassers only try a door twice. that can be one doorbell ring and one knock, two knocks, whatever. some try it three times. no one I worked with wanted to waste their time any more than that. we have quotas to hit and if you're not answering, you're not answering.

that being said, sometimes the same canvasser or a different canvasser from the same organization will come back around a few hours or even days later. if we come back on the same day, it's probably because our numbers are low or we finished early and we want to keep trying. if we come back on a different day, it might be a follow-up to the original visit or it might be a completely new topic they want to talk to you about. we always appreciate it a lot when people are willing to entertain repeat visits.

remember that you are under no obligation to answer the door. in fact, if you're just going to be nasty to us because we ignored your "no soliciting" sign, we prefer that you don't open the door. it saves all of us time and energy.

this includes if we made eye contact through the window, if you were actually in your garage or yard or car and you saw us as we walked up, anything like that. some canvassers are going to be more proactive than others in trying to engage with you in these cases. walk deeper into the house; close the garage door; pretend you don't see or hear us; whatever. canvassers don't care and won't hold it against you even if they are one of the more proactive types!

the contact: part 1 (intro).

often canvassers have a little mini speech they have to get through to introduce themselves and what they're doing on your doorstep before they'll actually get around to asking you their questions/offering to sell you whatever/handing you a pamphlet.

we try to keep this as short as possible because we know no one wants to be stuck on a doorstep forever, feel free to ask us to get to the chase if you're busy or what have you. we will usually oblige.

similarly, we try to keep it short because we know that other people from other organizations might have been here recently to ask you the exact same things and you're tired of it. if this is the case, we appreciate your patience and willingness to engage with us even if you've already done this rigmarole three times this week.

don't be surprised if people know your name and some of your information. for example, because they were a nonprofit, the canvassing company I worked for had access to the voter rolls. also don't be surprised if they have the information for the previous resident, especially if you live in an apartment. our information was often out of date by a couple of years.

the contact: part 2 (the sell).

if you don't want to answer the questionnaire, talk religion, or have your gutters cleaned, a polite "no thank you" and the immediate closing of your door will get rid of all but the sleaziest of canvassers.

you don't owe us anything more than that, and we will thank you for not wasting our time!

when I was canvassing, I was instructed to keep talking until I hear three hard "no"s or until I hear the click of a latch, so closing the door on us really is the fastest and easiest way to get rid of us. otherwise we will take your objections seriously (i.e. we will assume you are not lying to us to try and get away) and do our best to overcome them, thus wasting your time and ours.

whether or not you want to engage with the canvasser and whatever they're talking about, please bear in mind that a lot of us have quotas to hit if we want to keep our jobs. your taking two minutes out of your day to answer three questions or hear our our sales pitch or whatever will help us with that, and we appreciate it even if you're brusque or in a hurry or we don't personally agree with your opinions. we're really not there to judge you or throw your day out of whack. we're just there to do our jobs and get paid.

if you really want to go above and beyond for the canvasser and their job, we may have bonuses attached to optional-but-preferred things like signing up a newsletter or what have you. giving out your email address, even if it's a fake one or you unsubscribe immediately upon receiving your first letter, can be very helpful.

granted, there's less at stake for volunteer (some political and most religious) canvassers, but there's not always an easy way to tell those apart. do what you gotta do, really, but be aware that it may matter quite a bit to us.

and that's it! I understand that there can be a lot of distrust for door-to-door salespeople and canvassers, and I also definitely understand why, but it really doesn't have to be painful. again, even if you absolutely hate whatever it is they're trying to get you to do, a simple "no thank you" and closing your door will solve the problem 95% of the time. (2.5% of the rest of the time it may be a predatory canvasser who will continue to bother you, and 2.5% of the time it's a targeted campaign and the canvasser has to confirm your identity before they'll take no as an answer, so they'll be back to try again later.)

other do's and don't's:

do consider offering canvassers something to drink or a snack if you have any to spare, or the use of your bathroom if you really hit it off with someone. canvassing is often hot and sweaty/cold and damp work with unpleasant hours, and individual canvassers aren't always well looked-after (especially if they're volunteers)!

similarly, do consider offering to let a canvasser wait out a storm on your porch.

do remember that canvassers are people just like you, and that you live in a society that requires you to put up with behavior from other people that you don't like from time to time.

if you have a barking dog, do consider stepping outside of your house to speak with us. it'll be faster and easier.

don't ask us to touch or interact with your mailbox for any reason. it's a federal offense.

don't be an ass!

Thanks for reading. :)

[frasier-crane-style]

I guess the problem with The Boys is that it's trying to be a superhero story and a political satire (satire should probably be in scare quotes, but oh well) and those two things are diametrically opposed, resulting in both goals The Boys is trying ending up as total shit.

For instance, The Boys wants to make fun of conspiracy theorists. But in the world of The Boys, what conspiracy theory isn't true? Vought is an evil multinational corporations that conducts unethical experiments, has vast influence with the US government, owns the media and uses that power to cover up various crimes... the list goes on.

Now, obviously we can distinguish fiction from reality and say that The Boys isn't saying real-world conspiracy theories are true, just because they're depicting a world of huge conspiracies and lying governments. Now what they should do is just say "conspiracy theories are true in this fictional world" and leave it at that, the same way it's okay for James Bond to solve all his problems by shooting people and having promiscuous sex, because he's a made-up man in a pulp story meant for entertainment, not a role model to emulate.

But they just have to have their evil conspiracy theorists, complete with wrongheaded complaints about the mainstream media. Even though in this universe, they are completely right. The mainstream media is corrupt and covering up the facts.

If Seth Rogen wanted to tell a story about how bad conspiracy theorists are, he should've created a world where conspiracy theorists are wrong. That's Worldbuilding 101. But he wants to Brundlefly this evil superhero story together with whatever Trump owns send tweet he and Eric Kripke come up with, so we get a 'plot' that contradicts itself enough to be completely nonsensical.

[concerningwolves]

today's disconnected but related Thoughts are about how stories should exist within "containers", and how problems in long-running TV series are typically introduced when the writers don't use those containers properly. I'm struggling to articulate it in a coherent order, but:

● an audience needs to be able to see some kind of boundary enclosing the story, otherwise it doesn't feel satisfying. This is why we have set plot structures like Freytag's Pyramid and Fichtean Curve which so many stories follow. Most storytelling formats lend themselves to this – novels, certain comic books and graphic novels, plays, and films all have a beginning and an end. You open the book or enter a theatre or switch on the telly, and you experience the story, and then it ends. The story might live with you afterwards, if it affected or resonated with you or made you want to analyse it, but if the creator did their job well you'll at least feel closure with it on a mechanical level (i.e., plot and character arcs have conclusions that you can see fit within the framework of the story, even if personally you didn't like or agree with something). The Good Place is an example of a TV series that did this very well, because the writers had a set vision for the series and they executed it.

● A lot of TV dramas and serials operate on the premise of being ongoing – a story that stretches on without any defined end in sight. This can be done well, but sometimes the story gets bloated and stale, or it ends up like separate swatches of cloth instead of an interwoven tapestry. I'm not saying this means every TV series automatically fails to tell a story in a satisfying way, or even that the series that don't are inherently bad. It works differently from books or films, and therein lie its strengths as a storytelling medium! For one thing, TV is excellent for character-focused stories, and these can go on and on for ages and still be enjoyable and entertaining (even if not "good" by critical artistic standards). There's also more flexibility in TV than in a film; the ongoing format lets writers string out rising and falling tension, and focus in and out on different plots/subplots across a far larger scope.

● The way these shows work is the overarching medium of the series contains smaller stories in the form of plots. The boundaries between one plot and the next usually need to be permeable, too – a plot arc should conclude satisfactorily, yes, but the things that happen in it ought to resonate with the larger narrative afterwards, otherwise it'll feel pointless to the audience. Ghost Whisperer is an example where the creators failed to do this, repeatedly: each of the five seasons introduces a new concept which seems to be building towards some kind of climax, and then... doesn't. Characters vanish from the story never to be mentioned again. Huge events that ought to have life-altering consequences for the characters only have consequences for a few episodes, and then it's swept under the rug. The series had its appeal in a fun concept and lovable characters, but was let down by the execution. By contrast, medical drama Grey's Anatomy has been going successfully since 2005. It has some continuity issues (like interns vanishing without explanation) and some plots are better than others, but on the whole it takes its status as a long-running story seriously and does it quite well.

● The streaming model and the way TV writers are treated is a factor, too. Even where the boundaries of a story have been pre-defined and could be executed well, the creators often don't have the chance. (and I'm sure the same is true of long-running manga/comic books/graphic novels, although I'm focusing mostly on TV here). Ratings, network politics and actors' personal lives/ambitions have a huge impact on what happens to a TV series, and the popularity or apparent success of a series doesn't always guarantee its continuation. Just look at Netflix's habit of axing series after 2 seasons! Or at Good Omens, which despite being written by Neil Gaiman, having a huge fanbase, and a pre-set story which would be concluded in three seasons, hasn't yet been officially greenlit for season 3 (afaik). The industry has created an environment where stories are commodified, and that's not an environment in which stories can flourish.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Do not misinterpret the Paradox of Intolerance to give yourself license to make trolling the sum total of your politics.

The Paradox of (In)Tolerance describes PHYSICAL safety. It is not a prescription to use the tools of the enemy to create change. That is foolish and its never been clearer to me than after this election why its a snake eating its own tail.

If you need more evidence than 2015 - 2024 why using the Paradox of Intolerance as an excuse to never educate, to never attempt persuasion, to ONLY meet ignorance with withering scorn, then let me ask you a hypothetical:

There is a Muslim with whom you have a close, personal relationship: a friend, a coworker, an in-law etc. They are very warm and courteous to you but sometimes they say things that hint at a worldview you don't quite grok or feels like they are a bit too credulous when it comes to rumors. At some point after election day they confess to you that they 1. didn't vote, 2. voted third party, or 3. voted for Trump: would you engage them in dialogue to try to understand why and try to persuade them why this was an error without intentionally insulting them? Or would you disavow them and never speak to them again to the fullest extent possible within the limits of your common ties? Would you encourage people you know in common to disavow them or would you engage these people in conversation about how best to reach your Muslim friend?

Now what I am getting at is not the same as asking you to do emotional and intellectual labor when you're burnt out and the other party is overtly abusive and clearly acting in bad faith or to show up, in person, in spaces where you feel like you may be physically in danger.

What I am saying is that the Paradox of Intolerance or self care should not become an excuse to abdicate any responsibility for doing any amount of outreach and education. To advocate for ourselves and for our values.

Kamala Harris going on Joe Rogan would not have changed the outcome of this election, but the growing tendency of people with liberal and leftist values to ignore these increasingly important venues in favor of only ever doing interviews inside the hug box is poison. We are losing the culture war and its not because we don't have the best, most witty entertainers to sell our ideas its because our avatars are not pitching their ideas to audiences they assume are unreachable or irrelevant.

Late Night monologues and leftist podcasts are an echo chamber. I love QAA, Behind the Bastards, and other "dirt bag left" forums but the model of deradicalization where you passively wait for the most open minded red pills and "enlightened centrists" to stumble upon something that might tilt their worldview ever so slightly has DEMONSTRABLY failed.

Those with silver tongues need to follow the example of Mayor Pete and Bernie Sanders and take the fight for real equality and humanism to the lion's den, or at least the boorish stoner gym bro's den. Rogan is a prime example of someone who has become stupider and meaner the more he is surrounded by people who nurture these instincts. He is a cautionary tale.

We should contemplate how this applies to our own lives and our own dealings.

No one should tolerate physical threats or emotional abuse.

But also we should not mislabel stupidity and ignorance as emotional abuse because our labor is not free.

And I've got news for people who themselves are marginalized: you're going to have to advocate for yourself.

We who are not marginalized can do our best to prepare the soil, to combat misinformation and prejudices, but if there is one thing to be learned from Trump's multiracial coalition its that experience reduces prejudice more than rhetoric. A few Latino and Asian men were Trump curious, tested the waters, and over time they've become more accepted. It ain't all sunshine and roses: Ramaswamy still has to deal with the likes of Anne Coulter, but he's benefited enormously from his willingness to tolerate a few bigoted morons in order to sell himself and his interests directly.

Coalition politics are messy, but you have to be seen in order to be seen as fully human. It just doesn't work any other way and I'm sorry for that. The rest of us can do our best to set an expectation that persons X,Y,&Z are chill and should be protected from morons but that will only achieve so much without some people willing to represent themselves: if they can without compromising safety. I'm under no illusions that for some populations, like trans people and undocumented immigrants, things might be headed to somewhere even bleaker and unsafe than it already is.

And again, louder for the people in the back, if you cannot be PHYSICALLY safe or you cannot be your best self at the moment, then you are not obligated to attempt outreach; but we are screwed if everyone abdicates all of the time forever.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What comes after neoliberalism?

In his American Prospect editorial, “What Comes After Neoliberalism?”, Robert Kuttner declares “we’ve just about won the battle of ideas. Reality has been a helpful ally…Neoliberalism has been a splendid success for the top 1 percent, and an abject failure for everyone else”:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-28-what-comes-after-neoliberalism/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Kuttner’s op-ed is a report on the Hewlett Foundation’s recent “New Common Sense” event, where Kuttner was relieved to learn that the idea that “the economy would thrive if government just got out of the way has been demolished by the events of the past three decades.”

We can call this neoliberalism, but another word for it is economism: the belief that politics are a messy, irrational business that should be sidelined in favor of a technocratic management by a certain kind of economist — the kind of economist who uses mathematical models to demonstrate the best way to do anything:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

These are the economists whose process Ely Devons famously described thus: “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Those economists — or, if you prefer, economismists — are still around, of course, pronouncing that the “new common sense” is nonsense, and they have the models to prove it. For example, if you’re cheering on the idea of “reshoring” key industries like semiconductors and solar panels, these economismists want you to know that you’ve been sadly misled:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/24/economy-trade-united-states-china-industry-manufacturing-supply-chains-biden/

Indeed, you’re “doomed to fail”:

https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/high-taxpayer-cost-saving-us-jobs-through-made-america

Why? Because onshoring is “inefficient.” Other countries, you see, have cheaper labor, weaker environmental controls, lower taxes, and the other necessities of “innovation,” and so onshored goods will be more expensive and thus worse.

Parts of this position are indeed inarguable. If you define “efficiency” as “lower prices,” then it doesn’t make sense to produce anything in America, or, indeed, any country where there are taxes, environmental regulations or labor protections. Greater efficiencies are to be had in places where children can be maimed in heavy machinery and the water and land poisoned for a millions years.

In economism, this line of reasoning is a cardinal sin — the sin of caring about distributional outcomes. According to economism, the most important factor isn’t how much of the pie you’re getting, but how big the pie is.

That’s the kind of reasoning that allows economismists to declare the entertainment industry of the past 40 years to be a success. We increased the individual property rights of creators by expanding copyright law so it lasts longer, covers more works, has higher statutory damages and requires less evidence to get a payout:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

At the same time, we weakened antitrust law and stripped away limits on abusive contractual clauses, which let (for example) three companies acquire 70% of all the sound recording copyrights in existence, whose duration is effectively infinite (the market for sound recordings older than 90 is immeasurably small).

This allowed the Big Three labels to force Spotify to take them on as co-owners, whereupon they demanded lower royalties for the artists in their catalog, to reduce Spotify’s costs and make it more valuable, which meant more billions when it IPOed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Monopoly also means that all those expanded copyrights we gave to creators are immediately bargained away as a condition of passing through Big Content’s chokepoints — giving artists the right to control sampling is just a slightly delayed way of giving labels the right to control sampling, and charge artists for the samples they use:

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

(In the same way that giving creators the right to decide who can train a “Generative AI” with their work will simply transfer that right to the oligopolists who have the means, motive and opportunity to stop paying artists by training models on their output:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

After 40 years of deregulation, union busting, and consolidation, the entertainment industry as a whole is larger and more profitable than ever — and the share of those profits accruing to creative workers is smaller, both in real terms and proportionally, and it’s continuing to fall.

Economismists think that you’re stupid if you care about this, though. If you’re keeping score on “free markets” based on who gets how much money, or how much inequality they produce, you’re committing the sin of caring about “distributional effects.”

Smart economismists care about the size of the pie, not who gets which slice. Unsurprisingly, the greatest advocates for economism are the people to whom this philosophy allocates the biggest slices. It’s easy not to care about distributional effects when your slice of the pie is growing.

Economism is a philosophy grounded in “efficiency” — and in the philosophical sleight-of-hand that pretends that there is an objective metric called “efficiency” that everyone can agree with. If you disagree with economismists about their definition of “efficiency” then you’re doing “politics” and can be safely ignored.

The “efficiency” of economism is defined by very simple metrics, like whether prices are going down. If Walmart can force wage-cuts on its suppliers to bring you cheaper food, that’s “efficient.” It works well.

But it fails very, very badly. The high cost of low prices includes the political dislocation of downwardly mobile farmers and ag workers, which is a classic precursor to fascist uprisings. More prosaically, if your wages fall faster than prices, then you are experiencing a net price increase.

The failure modes of this efficiency are endless, and we keep smashing into them in ghastly and brutal ways, which goes a long way to explaining the “new commons sense” Kuttner mentions (“Reality has been a helpful ally.”) For example, offshoring high-tech manufacturing to distant lands works well, but fails in the face of covid lockdowns:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

Allowing all the world’s shipping to be gathered into the hands of three cartels is “efficient” right up to the point where they self-regulate their way into “efficient” ships that get stuck in the Suez canal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#too-big-to-sail

It’s easy to improve efficiency if you don’t care about how a system fails. I can improve the fuel-efficiency of every airplane in the sky right now: just have them drop their landing gear. It’ll work brilliantly, but you don’t want to be around when it starts to fail, brother.

The most glaring failure of “efficiency” is the climate emergency, where the relative ease of extracting and burning hydrocarbons was pursued irrespective of the incredible costs this imposes on the world and our species. For years, economism’s position was that we shouldn’t worry about the fact that we were all trapped in a bus barreling full speed for a cliff, because technology would inevitably figure out how to build wings for the bus before we reached the cliff’s edge:

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

Today, many economismists will grudgingly admit that putting wings on the bus isn’t quite a solved problem, but they still firmly reject the idea of directly regulating the bus, because a swerve might cause it to roll and someone (in the first class seats) might break a leg.

Instead, they insist that the problem is that markets “mispriced” carbon. But as Kuttner points out: “It wasn’t just impersonal markets that priced carbon wrong. It was politically powerful executives who further enriched themselves by blocking a green transition decades ago when climate risks and self-reinforcing negative externalities were already well known.”

If you do economics without doing politics, you’re just imagining a perfectly spherical cow on a frictionless plane — it’s a cute way to model things, but it’s got limited real-world applicability. Yes, politics are squishy and hard to model, but that doesn’t mean you can just incinerate them and do math on the dubious quantitative residue:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

As Kuttner writes, the problem of ignoring “distributional” questions in the fossil fuel market is how “financial executives who further enriched themselves by creating toxic securities [used] political allies in both parties to block salutary regulation.”

Deep down, economismists know that “neoliberalism is not about impersonal market forces. It’s about power.” That’s why they’re so invested in the idea that — as Margaret Thatcher endlessly repeated — “there is no alternative”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass

Inevitabilism is a cheap rhetorical trick. “There is no alternative” is a demand disguised as a truth. It really means “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”

But the human race is blessed with a boundless imagination, one that can escape the prison of economism and its insistence that we only care about how things work and ignore how they fail. Today, the world is turning towards electrification, a project of unimaginable ambition and scale that, nevertheless, we are actively imagining.

As Robin Sloan put it, “Skeptics of solar feasi­bility pantomime a kind of technical realism, but I think the really technical people are like, oh, we’re going to rip out and replace the plumbing of human life on this planet? Right, I remember that from last time. Let’s gooo!”

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/

Sloan is citing Deb Chachra, “Every place in the world has sun, wind, waves, flowing water, and warmth or coolness below ground, in some combination. Renewable energy sources are a step up, not a step down; instead of scarce, expensive, and polluting, they have the potential to be abundant, cheap, and globally distributed”:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

The new common sense is, at core, a profound liberation of the imagination. It rejects the dogma that says that building public goods is a mystic art lost along with the secrets of the pyramids. We built national parks, Medicare, Medicaid, the public education system, public libraries — bold and ambitious national infrastructure programs.

We did that through democratically accountable, muscular states that weren’t afraid to act. These states understood that the more national capacity the state produced, the more things it could do, by directing that national capacity in times of great urgency. Self-sufficiency isn’t a mere fearful retreat from the world stage — it’s an insurance policy for an uncertain future.

Kuttner closes his editorial by asking what we call whatever we do next. “Post-neoliberalism” is pretty thin gruel. Personally, I like “pluralism” (but I’m biased).

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here's how you can do that: I'm kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

http://redteamblues.com

[Image ID: Air Force One in flight; dropping away from it are a parachute and its landing gear.]

[naamahdarling]

oh my gosh PLEASE I love these!!

this is Freya! she photographs well and tends to look elegant but in this very image she has stolen my seat. she's silly and goofy and she screams until someone answers her because she loves to chat. when she plays, she's prone to falling off of her perches. she likes to roll on her back and become a circle with her limbs seemingly coming out of her body at random intervals

(artist's impression)

what could this beast's occupation possibly be

I think she would be a makeup artist, one of those really talented ones on Instagram or TikTok, who not only produces amazing works of art and teaches people how to do the same, but is also absolutely hilarious. It's not that she believes that people have to wear makeup to be beautiful, it's that as a longhair dilute calico, she was born as nature's most beautiful creature and sees no reason not to use this perfect canvas as a foundation for breathtaking art. She would also model, but not, like, in a restrictive and weird professional capacity with an agent and advertisements and all of that. She would dress however she liked and take lots of lovely pictures of herself purely for her own pleasure. I mean, look at her. I can SEE the flower crown (are we still doing those? i liked those). Cats are absolutely immune to the politics of beauty and beauty standards; as the most glamourous animals on earth, they exist on an entirely different plane. Taking joy in their appearance and being playful about it is what they do. And as cats are some of nature's finest comedians -- accidentally or on purpose -- being devastatingly entertaining while they are at it goes hand in hand. I would subscribe to her channel one thousand times. Glamorous goofball.

[irritatednick]

The Fatphobia Central to Colbert's "The Indict-Mare Before Christmas"

How is no one talking about this? I'm not being hyperbolic - I can't find anything. I don't know if it's because online leftists are no longer in Colbert's audience or if fat activists don't find this media to be important, but I have to talk about it. If you want to catch up with the state of moderate liberal politics, watch this special. And read the glowing comments. It's a mildly entertaining animation that crams in as many political references from the year as possible, but the action hinges on Trump becoming a fat monster.

With so many peppered in references to conservatives set up for ridicule like bowling pins, I feel like I'm watching FreedomToons or the Babylon Bee. The comments feel similar. "Brilliant." "Genius." "Hilarious." "A Masterpiece." Oh my goddddd. This cartoon would hardly be the first time a "children's" parable depicted greedy villains as physically grotesque -corpulent or otherwise. But like... we shouldn't do it anymore? And it's real rich seeing a fat villain opposite SANTA CLAUS. Santa is a famous example of the jolly fat man archetype. A kind of "good fatty" - what TV Tropes calls "Big Fun" - an exception to the rule that all fat people are to be maligned. Such a person is joyful or comical and exists to serve thin people. But it's a mindfuck to see Santa make a fat joke at someone else! I suppose the writers were trying to get around this by identifying the source of Santa's powers as his "belly jelly," which Elon Musk sucks out of him and transfers to Donald Trump.

But Trump doesn't just get the jelly (visibly glowing) - he becomes way fatter. And the animators did not skimp on the details!

I've complained about the overly simple "egg on two sticks" model used for fat people in cartoons, but this Trump monster comes complete with a hanging belly pouch and thighs with folds and cellulite throughout! And his breasts... ...which Santa slaps around as they're fighting. Here's some of that:

Trump belches after he absorbs Santa's jelly and in the end, eating a present meant for someone he cares about is his undoing. In this special, greed and gluttony are one, and are shown as clear vices that embody Trump's wickedness.

[fiftysevenacademics]

Television producer Norman Lear died today, which prompted me to put into words something I've had rattling around in my head for a long time now. I grew up in a very Republican family in the 70s-- communism = bad, welfare = bad, everyone but white people = lazy, hippies = bad, non-European immigrants = bad, you don't deserve anything if you can't work for it, etc. etc. I've often wondered how my sister and I turned far away from those views and became the bleeding heart liberals we are (and brought our mother along with us, thankfully). In an extended family that moved into crackpot conspiracy theory Reaganism (later, Trumpism) and/or morally bankrupt "libertarianism," we are the only ones who have moved farther to the left as they've moved farther right.

Speaking for myself (can't speak for my sis!), I can think of quite a few experiences I've had combined with a natural curiosity and sense of fairness but I've always felt like Norman Lear shows played some important, invisible part in this process.

My family watched All In The Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, the Jeffersons, and One Day At a Time religiously. Surrounded by conservative white people in the small, rural logging towns we lived in and in my own family, these shows were the main exposure I had to people who lived very different lives than my own: urban, multigenerational households, single women and single mothers, people of different races, different social classes, and so on. Just seeing someone live in an apartment in a city felt almost like seeing aliens on another planet!

On these shows I saw the kinds of people who were routinely referred to as "problems" or mentioned disparagingly in my little world, portrayed as interesting, full people with feelings and problems that from my sheltered perspective seemed strange and exotic but also, very human. They were cranky or funny or goofy or sassy, but all the characters on these shows were fun to watch and their struggles placed me in the midst of a world I knew reflected how people elsewhere must live. It allowed me to imagine myself as a person living in a world filled with racial, class, gender, and political diversity that was very different from how such a world was portrayed in my Cold War Era conservative family. 

How would I live in that kind of world? What kind of person would, or should, I be? Definitely not one like Archie Bunker.

All In The Family probably had the most influence. My grandfather adored Archie Bunker because, as the family joke went, they were basically the same person. By allowing me to see our family patriarch in this awful character who cannot accept how the world is changing, it gave me the critical distance to see myself as part of that changing world. I definitely know that this show also gave me my first inkling of what patriarchy was, though it would be a long time before I knew that word.

I was embarrassed to watch Sanford and Son with my grandpa because he watched it like he probably watched old timey minstrel shows back in the day: Sanford was an object of ridicule, entertaining because my grandpa could scorn him. Though it was obvious to everyone in my family but him, Sanford and Archie were similar characters and it was clear he loved the white one and looked down on the Black one solely because of their race. I remember him also refusing to even watch The Jeffersons, as if the existence of a Black man wealthier than him (he was a plumber) was a sheer impossibility. It's kind of funny how much he hated George Jefferson.

Then there was Maude and One Day At A Time. In my world, where women were primarily housewives, married mothers, still living a 1950s version of femininity, these shows were truly formative for me. I've always held, and still hold, Maude as a kind of role model for an older woman (even though she couldn't have been nearly as old as she seemed to me at the time). She was the only feminst I "knew!" She made feminism look so cool and I knew I was a feminist. Divorce was still kind of exotic and scary back then-- I didn't know anyone in a divorced family and certainly knew no single mothers. One Day At A Time normalized the single mom family just at a time when women were becoming more independent, and I thought about the show often, many years later, when I got divorced and became a single mom myself.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Norman Lear's shows made me turn out as I am. But they did offer a liberal interpretation of the changing world I was living in, and gave me the space to imagine possibilities, relationships, and ways of being in the world that were simply not present or actively despised in my everyday surroundings. 

Maybe these TV shows created a little empathetic space that grew as I continued to engage with new people, places, and ideas throughout adolescence until there was no room left for the stinginess, bigotry, cruelty, and paranoia of Republicans.