#legitimately dropout . oh how you do the most interesting content of ever

[inviernacular]

it’s nice to see brennan lean into his unsleeping city roots once more by making intensely region-specific jokes the heart of a ttrpg campaign

[antoine-roquentin]

i’ve noticed that my shorthand critique of the “south park caused anti-semitism” theory of media has been getting some attention, and it’s funny cause it dovetails with another round of “the youtube algorithm is responsible for turning everybody into nazis” rhetoric as well, sparked by a recent new york times article. this sort of navelgazing is pretty popular because it works nicely with beliefs that both elites and liberals in general have, namely, that public opinion needs to be managed by an enlightened few, that some people are too stupid to participate in civic life and that’s why right wing populists get elected, and that if people are educated correctly, they will simply accept that liberalism is the best model for society. in short, it’s behaviorism, namely, the hypodermic needle model of media.

the liberal elite in interwar america believed themselves to be creating a better society through management of public opinion. figures like walter lippman were committed to benevolent elite rule through the manipulation of opinion, the “manufacturing of consent”. many of them came out of the milieu of manipulating popular opinion through propaganda work in the first world war, successfully convincing americans to join and support the british side in that war. edward bernays, for instance, worked for the committee on public information, the “largest propaganda machine the world had ever seen“, before becoming the intellectual forebear of the public relations industry in america. he and other similar figures, like lippman, carl byoir, and charles merriam (who combined behaviouralism with political science), were the leading lights of the “Progressive” movement of the time. they relied on the notion that media was passively consumed by people, who simply accepted the claims made without hesitation and then acted accordingly. the psychological theories behind this found form as a body of work known as behavioralism. human beings had a set of limited or “latent” responses to stimuli. by providing the correct stimuli, human beings could be made to behave accordingly. one day, society would be governed by the truly intelligent who would suss out the correct stimuli through trial and error and then apply them to the masses, a society of pavlov’s dogs. this top-down model not coincidentally empowered liberal elites to do what they will without any input from the masses.

this was termed the “hypodermic needle” or “magic bullet” model of media. both of these are medical terms, the latter referring to a drug that treats only the disease without any side effects, and that’s quite telling. american progressives have traditionally exalted medicine as a neutral, rational way to develop a better society. many were advocates of eugenics as a form of medicine, “cleaning” the human race of its “unfit” members. recently, there’s been a strong resurgence of interest in eugenics, behavioralism, and the use of medical terminology to describe media (viral video, using the metaphor of contagion).

proponents of the model in the 1930s referred to the success of the nazis in their use of mass media (ironically, using the same propaganda techniques they’d developed. joseph goebbels was known to be a reader of bernays’ books) as well as the payne fund studies, a series of works done on the responses of children to movies with poor methodology and funded by oil magnates hoping to drive moral panics (the hays code was strongly influenced by them), and the panicked reaction to the 1938 orson welles radio production of war of the worlds in support. of course, all three of these shared very specific material conditions of the people involved that drove them to react in the manner they did apart from the media involved in persuasion. for the decade after the first world war, while germany muddled along without growth but also without significant collapse, the nazis failed to attract more than a few percentage points of electoral support, despite consistently using similar tactics. it was only after the economic collapse of germany, when the economy had shrunk by about a quarter, that the nazis gained traction. even then, this was by using the failures of a liberal constitution to turn their electoral base, only one third of voters who were largely based in rural areas and included almost nobody in the major cities, into a workable governing coalition, particularly by playing on the fact that german liberals feared communism much more than nazism. likewise, the panic over war of the worlds was largely a myth created by newspapers which feared they were losing their audience to a new, more dynamic form of media and wanted to stoke a moral panic (see a parallel with the nyt story?). those who were convinced that an invasion was occurring, according to a study done afterwards (in part by theodor adorno), for the most part had only heard a bit and were concerned about a german invasion, given the heightened geopolitical tensions at the time, or were from the town of concrete, washington, which suffered a blackout midway through the performance.

you can see the same sort of threads in the nyt story, while the important parts go ignored by twitterati eager to engage on the most superficial level. “young men discover far-right videos by accident“ thanks to “YouTube and its recommendation algorithm“, “the most frequent cause of members’ “red-pilling”“ according to a study done by the NED(ie western intelligence)-funded bellingcat, after which they fall “ down the alt-right rabbit hole” as passive subjects reacting to stimuli. clearly, these videos spread like a contagion, and it’s our job to ban them in favour of much more legitimate content that supports major western foreign policy objectives. oh wait, hold up, mr cain was a “college dropout struggling to find his place in the world“, at a time of wage stagnation and a tough job market for newer entries that’s especially pronounced as you go further down the education ladder? he “grew up in postindustrial Appalachia”, an area destroyed by rapacious neoliberalism that has increasingly seen its industries move offshore in search of lower wages, its most dynamic members leave for major cities due to a lack of jobs, and those that remain become increasingly socially isolated, prompting them to either resort to social media or kill themselves through drugs and guns in what famed economist angus deaton calls “deaths of despair” (not to mention the limiting of public spaces to those who can pay, another aspect of neoliberalism, which particularly drives teens like mr cain into "online games with his friends”)? in a world where capitalism justifies itself by telling those it fails over and over that it’s their own fault, that they need to improve themselves and that there is no such thing as structural problems because, in the words of margaret thatcher, “there is no such thing [as society]! only individual men and women”, mr cain was drawn to propaganda masquerading as a self-help grift with an emphasis on supposedly knowing more than the brainwashed masses (”To Mr. Cain, all of this felt like forbidden knowledge“)?

most of all though is the fact that most of the people cain watched are either funded directly or take most of their talking points from a network of right wing intellectuals cultivated by major dark money backers for decades. david rubin takes money from dennis prager, who in turn is funded by fracking billionaires and evangelical christians the wilks brothers, and the bradley foundation, who have funded literally every major right wing cause of note. lauren southern is only famous because she worked for rebel media, funded by much of the oil industry including the kochs as well as the bradley foundation. paul joseph watson is associated with ukip and its funder arron banks. gad saad is funded by molson coors, whose corporate heads not only once praised hitler but founded the most famous republican think tank in the country, the heritage foundation. two of the major members of the “intellectual dark web”, charles murray and christina hoff sommers, work directly for the heritage foundation. and other youtube luminaries of note, like alex jones, thunderf00t, and stefan molyneux, make their money solely by doing interviews with these people and by citing material produced from these think tanks. in a world where inequality is increasingly dividing the rich and the working class, the former spend more and more on maintaining the division, while the latter are driven into a state of fear in which absurd theories about the collapse of western civilization and their replacement with latin american and muslim people seems much more reasonable. There’s also the social isolation that makes youtube celebs and discord chat buddies seem less like distant weirdos and more like the only friends one has. 

the solution, of course, is to modify youtube’s algorithm. just a bit of top-down tweaking to educate the masses on their correct course. surely, nobody would be stupid enough to think that the material conditions created by the neoliberal elite in the past few decades has driven a complete collapse in trust in american society, to the point where only a third of americans "trust their government “to do what is right”“, compared to over 80% of chinese people. surely this breakdown in trust is due to youtube and not the complete economic decimation of the country by its elites, to the point where many rural counties have not even recovered the jobs they lost a decade ago. a redistribution of wealth should not even be on the table, because material conditions play no part in how people react to media. just accept your daily helping of bullshit from the bourgeoisie and never question them when they say certain people need to be censored, because the powers you let them have will never be abused or turned against you in any way. and hey, don’t listen to any critiques of behaviorism, because it’s not like anarchists blew that shit out of the water in the 1950s.

[subdivisi0ns]

tagged by the lovely @britneyshakespeare to answer these 10 questions & come up with 10 of my own. thank you !! 💗

psa i wrote way too much please don’t read this. just skip to the questions at the end if i tagged you

1. What are 3 songs that mean something to you, and what do they mean?

that’s hard because i don’t usually find personal meanings in songs. i’m a lot more interested in what the song means to the artist who wrote it. but let’s see if i can think of some

-um. after all by david bowie was always Highly Relatable. like. prattling on & on waxing philosophical only to suddenly realize everything i said is wrong and don’t hate me and also now i’m having an existential crisis and i shouldn’t have started talking in the first place? M e

-when i was first getting into rush i was a big fan of Self Isolating To Cope and also i had no friends and was proud of it (bc if i couldn’t find a way to take pride in my [perceivedly] unchangeable flaws my entire self image would come crashing to the ground and that just wasn’t a good time . anyway). so the lines “nothing can survive in a vacuum / no one can exist all alone” from turn the page pissed me off. but now! now i have loads of friends and i feel legitimately cared about and i feel like i can comfortably reciprocate that and now when i hear that song i think you know what neil? you’re goddamn right.

-uh i s’pose i relate to another brick in the wall pt 3 which is not a good thing but. i dunno i really love being angrily in denial of needing any help whatsoever along to this song. it’s my flaw-pride anthem (don’t worry i don’t take it literally. it’s just fun in the moment)

-shit i know this said three but the one person who i relate to EVERY FUCKING SONG he’s ever put out is bill wurtz. never have i felt so understood than when i listen to bill wurtz’s music. god it’s the most uncanny feeling, i really really understand it a lot

ok i have to stop thinking of more . turns out a lot have meaning to me ive spent like an hour on this question alone Moving On

2. What’s your ideal self like?

. this was The Worst question to ask me because i can and will ramble on for hours given the opportunity

well i’d be able to execute my ideas, for one. instead of just having a half-baked - quarter-baked - fleeting concept with no real idea of how to achieve it. more specifically i want to be able to write songs. more more specifically i want to be able to write the music aspect of songs. i can’t do it. i dont fuckin know why i just can’t. but if i could i think i just might be content with life.

but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still things to improve. i wish i was funnier. i like my weird brand of humor/abstractity online but that’s hard to replicate in real life. i wish i was better at thinking on the spot. i wish my memory didn’t only retain stuff when it feels like it. i wish i was better at putting my thoughts into words, more concisely and accurately and effectively.

um i wish i didnt have executive function issues. like i wanna just do stuff and not have it take all the energy out of me. wish i had the energy to do it to begin with. wish i could keep up with socializing and not ignore people for hours/days because i can’t get myself to maintain conversation.

ok clearly this is leading down an endless tunnel of what i’d change so . i’ll just say my ideal self is a successful musician with a good social life but also an element of mystery and intrigue. my ideal self is just david bowie

3. Who, of all your family members (immediate or extended), do you think has had the most influence on you, for better or for worse?

my mom for a lot (a looooooot) of reasons but if i go into it this is gonna push it over the line from a tag game into a therapy session (if i havent crossed that line already)

4. What’s your main outlet of expression?

writing. journalling. fuckin , social media. actually yeah that more than anything. my Self is on display here if you look at my tumblr(s) my twitter(s) and my instagram(s) you’ve got a pretty goddamn decent picture of who i am

5. What was the first album you ever bought for yourself?

uh i mean i listen to most stuff off of youtube if i don’t already have it so like,,? i dunno. does itunes count? the first vinyl i ever got was wish you were here (for forty fuckin bucks god) but i paid with my aunt’s money so does that even count. i don’t know.

6. Do you like to go shopping?

depends on a lot of things. lately i’ve been in the mood to just get out of the damn house whenever possible (love being a high school dropout !) so the answer is pretty much yes anytime. but it really depends.

7. Kind of cliche but, if you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who would you pick?

i wanna be the fourth person at the dinner with rush table. just to observe. i’d be terrified to actually have a conversation with any of my idols. okay but if i had to get over that fear i guess i’d pick..... bowie? todd? i don’t know this is hard. alex lifeson circa 197something so he can take me back to his place afterwards you pickin up what im puttin down

8. What TV show do you watch when you’re feeling stressed or low and you need a quick feel-better fix?

i don’t watch tv like ever not even in this case but i guess full house

9. What was the last intriguing conversation you had about?

everything my girlfriend said to me today (edit: yesterday but i did this last night) was great everything my girlfriend’s ever said to me was great

oh that didn’t answer the question at all i just realized. uh they were telling me about the star wars prequels (which i have not seen) and earlier we were having a very analytical conversation about a particularly interesting rush photo

also me & @swanky-trash were discussing our plans to take down trump and all the rest of those bastards while wearing jareth from labyrinth costumes and eating mushrooms. because it’s our destiny as clones separated at birth. yknow just life stuff

10. What’s something about yourself that you don’t think comes across as painfully obvious online, but is, in fact, in person?

shit are we at the end already? damn. i was enjoying this (can you tell).

okay here’s another one i could go on for 12 years about. but uh. i probably come across as way more perky irl? like my voice is all high pitched and i talk really fast and smile and laugh at everything and i have a whatever the opposite of monotone is voice. i don’t like that. i try to combat it online with the all-lowercase typing and shortening of words and omission of punctuation and that sort of thing. i think it’s worked. also i may be terrible at typing but i am WAY worse at speaking. i’m scatterbrained as hell and if i seem at all interesting or witty online that all goes to shit irl. also i can’t fucking talk to people who i only know in person? it just doesn’t work. thank god i have you guys

haaaa okay sorry for the rambling here are the questions

1. what’s the best day/one of the best days you’ve ever had?

2. how important is your social media presence to you?

3. what achievement are you proudest of?

4. describe your sense of humor.

5. is there anything you’re good at or like to do that people who don’t know you well probably wouldn’t expect?

6. what’s your most interesting family story?

7. favorite color palette?

8. what’s something that would be very “out of character” for you to do?

9. yknow that thing on twitter that’s like “pick 1 & rt for good luck” and the options are good grades, meet your idol, money, or crush texts you? which one would/did you pick and why?

10. what’s a song you either wish you’d written or feel like you could’ve written?

i tag @thetemplesofrush @thumbnailoak3 @swanky-trash @lavender-layne @realalexlifeson @davies-jones @goallines-and-musicrhymes @fruitthemed @graveyarding @cosmikdebris99 and anyone else who wants to do it and dont feel pressured to do it etc etc god i hope none of you actually read this whole thing i am so sorry

[mrmichaelchadler]

Sundance 2019: Luce, Big Time Adolescence, Them That Follow

We seem to be worried about our children. Sure, Sundance has a long history of movies about periled adolescence, but it’s been a more prominent trend here over the last couple years. “Eighth Grade” was one of last year’s biggest hits to come from the Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition slate, and this year I saw a trio of films about what could be called endangered youth. What’s most interesting is how distinctly different these three stories are even though they’re all about young people. Maybe it’s just that those years are ripe for material for indie filmmakers. Maybe it says something about where we are in 2019. Discuss among yourselves.

The best of the three and one of the best of this year’s fest is Julius Onah’s fascinating “Luce,” a deeply smart film about race and expectations. At what point do we stop categorizing people based on ethnicity and privilege? And is it doing them a disservice to completely dismiss those elements of their existence? How do you find the balance? Based on a play by J.C. Lee, “Luce” is about complex people, characters whose motives feel like they’re shifting and sliding depending on the situation. It reminded me of early Mamet work although with a commentary on race he could never attempt. All of this, and it’s got one of the best ensemble performances of Sundance 2019. This is one to watch for.

The first thing to note is that Kelvin Harrison Jr., star of “It Comes at Night” and “Monsters and Men,” is the real deal. He gives an incredible performance here as the title character, a valedictorian beloved by everyone at his elite school. He’s a star athlete, gives great speeches, and honestly looks like he could go on to be President. He’s come a long way since being a child soldier in Eritrea, from where he was adopted by Amy and Peter Edgar (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth). Although Luce may not be who everyone tells him he is. His teacher, Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer), is startled when Luce writes an essay for class that seems to be encouraging violence to overthrow power structures. She uses the essay to search his locker, in which she finds something even more unsettling.

Luce is told day in and day out who he is – he’s a great student, a great son, a great kid. In many ways, Onah’s film is about Luce questioning what this all means. Why is he given certain privileges that other black kids are not? Because he was adopted by white parents? The script by co-written by Lee and Onah is brilliant in the way it dissects coded language. In one of the first scenes, Luce calls Mrs. Wilson “stern” in front of his parents and dad jokes that he really means “bitch.” It’s a playful scene but it also fits with a movie that’s really about how labels can define people – and how they can be wrong.

Harrison is flat-out brilliant here, keeping us unsure about whether or not we can trust Luce. There’s an honest question through most of the film as to if Luce might actually be a sociopath. Mrs. Wilson becomes increasingly convinced he’s dangerous, and even his parents vacillate in their support. The three adults are also great. It’s nice to see Roth in a role that’s sometimes playful, and Spencer is possibly as good as she’s ever been. The film gets a little overwritten in the final act (as works based on plays often do) but the cast keeps it engaging on a human level. It’s a film that will have people talking. It may not be my #1 of Sundance (although it’s close), but I think it’s the movie I most want people to see just to read the essays and hear the conversations that will emerge from it.

An entirely different story of troubled youth unfolds in Jason Orley’s very funny debut, “Big Time Adolescence,” the movie that produced my biggest laughs at Sundance 2019 (sorry “Late Night” fans) and proves something that I’m pretty happy to say: Pete Davidson is a movie star. The troubled “SNL” star has always been one of my favorite parts of Lorne Michaels’ creation and makes for a great podcast/radio guest, but that’s true of plenty of people who can’t carry a movie. Unlike a lot of young comedians, he looks totally comfortable in his first leading role, taking a part that’s more challenging than it looks in the way he has to balance irresponsible behavior and not come off like a total asshole. He’s legitimately great here, and it will be fun to watch people respond to his work when the movie is released.

Davidson plays 23-year-old Zeke, a college dropout without much motivation beyond weed, sex, and booze. He hangs out with a couple of similarly unmotivated early-twentysomethings, doing a whole lot of nothing. But Zeke is funny, likable, and generally optimistic. He thinks things will work out, a worldview that has both kept him pretty happy and doing just about nothing. What Zeke does most days is hang out with a 16-year-old kid named Mo (Griffin Gluck of “American Vandal”), the younger brother of a girl that Zeke dumped six years ago. He liked hanging out with the kid.

There’s a heightened period of our lives in which being perceived as “cool” means just about everything. And it goes both ways. Mo thinks he's cool because he gets to hang out with older guys like Zeke. Zeke likes being considered cool. Mo’s one of the few people who likes him. And yet this weird friendship is believable. It doesn’t feel like a screenwriter’s construction. It’s only when Zeke starts making some truly bad decisions in what is basically his mentorship of Mo that things go awry.

The first half of “Big Time Adolescence” is better than the second. It’s a movie that I liked way more in its casual beats than in its lesson-learning ones, and it makes a few legitimately disappointing mistakes regarding its female characters, who seem strong at first but kind of become plot devices. Still, there are times when “BTA” reminded me of another great movie about teenage rebellion: “Superbad.” That’s a pretty high compliment for a debut. I’m eager to see what everyone here does next, including Orley and Gluck, but especially Pete Davidson.

The final film in this triptych of troubled youth shines a light into a rarely-seen corner of the world, capturing life in a deeply religious community – the kind that doesn’t allow for even the suggestion of sin, speaks in tongues when they’re trying to cast out the devil, and uses snakes in their ceremonies. “Them That Follow” attempts to capture turmoil in a pocket of spiritual fervor, but it’s a disappointingly flat drama. Rarely has the world of religious extremism felt so dramatically inert, as the film never feels like it’s genuinely engaging with this world as much as using it as a backdrop.

Alice Englert plays the troubled Mara, daughter of the head pastor in a group of Pentecostal snake handlers, Lemuel (Walton Goggins). Mara has recently had a fling with Augie (Thomas Mann), and she’s pregnant. This is a problem on multiple levels, not only for the sin that could lead to her being exiled from her community but because Augie has strayed from the group already. Oh, and Mara is supposed to marry one of the members, the earnest Garret (Lewis Pullman). Of course, Augie’s mother, Hope (Olivia Colman), is a crucial matriarch in the community as well.

Walton Goggins and Olivia Colman in a movie about Appalachian zealots – I can almost hear you saying, “How could that go wrong?” And, to be fair, Goggins and Colman are as good as you’d expect them to be, the former finding the absolute certainty men like Lemuel need and the latter capturing the conflict within Hope when she learns the secrets of her son’s relationship with Mara. The problem is that these two performances are lost in a film that never finds the right tone and relies too heavily on manufactured melodrama to fill in the lack of realism at its center. To be blunt, I never bought “Them That Follow,” always aware of the screenwriting strings being pulled when one needs to completely engage with this world for a movie like this to work. I felt like an observer when I needed to be a participant. Like some of Lemuel’s lost sheep, I guess I just didn’t believe.

  from All Content http://bit.ly/2Slvd3O

[inviernacular]

happy belated pride month to all who are of the "d&d persuasion"

[inviernacular]

me thinking about whatever crazy episode of fhjy we get next week

[inviernacular]

lily du absolutely SMASHED the script for this new episode of breaking news. maybe one of the highest laugh averages i've seen of any "broadcast"