i really hate expanding on twitter drama since i’m trying to get my head around some heavier stuff lately, but there are some issues from a recent episode that i think are worth expanding on.
so a few days ago, i made this tweet after i saw DeRay McKesson’s in my feed (i’ll get to the reason for my emphasis here later):
James Corbett is someone whose work i respect although his voluntaryism seems inimical to coordinated resistance en masse, and i truly don’t understand how such an educated and intellectually curious guy can develop such weird ideas on feminism. i mean i can imagine, i just find it very unfortunate for him and what he attempts to speak on. however i do think his pulling of information from various sources prevents him from falling prey to totally limiting ideological blinders, and i use his work as any critical thinker is able to do, even from those they disagree with. he does provide a type of resistance in the work he does and the thought i know he inspires in any case.
that being said, the following video is a really great exposition on Noam Chomsky’s strengths and weaknesses, even with his inclusion of Stephen Pinker’s comments, believe it or not! i find it interesting that Pinker so adeptly summarizes the definition of anarcho-syndicalism within the left spectrum for all his warping of even the existence of sociological meaning and political ideologies, which makes his work in general pretty much unreadable for me.
western mainstream comedy is shocking for the simple fact that it is so unfunny. the dancing bears propped up to entertain seem to base their entire acts on their entitlement alone. take for instance Amy Schumer’s appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show in April:
Schumer’s entire routine here revolves around being naked on the cover of a trash celeb rag covered in empty booze bottles, extra-super-awkward puberty highlighted by utterly boring animated self-deprecation, vague discussion of hosting an awards show, and of course making fun of other women who haven’t figured out how to sit, apparently, while wearing whatever the hell they feel like wearing. it is supremely unfunny, and the lack of anything resembling substance throughout juxtaposes her as one of the chicks not like all the other girls who is almost cool enough to be a guy with the guys, but with expertly styled blond locks and boobs (can’t forget the boobs that will probably sag soon by her own admission! har har), next to O’Brien and whatshisname — the real funny men after all. rather than an appearance where she demonstrates her talent, she is presented as nothing more than ornament for well-established male showmen.
this is one of the better interviews of Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. i like the way the host leads viewers to conclusions that some have told me are hard for them to grasp when reading the evidence itself. McGowan has stated many times that he thinks there was a coordinated operation to sabotage the antiwar movement although a stronger thesis in Weird Scenes can be tenuous for those who don’t follow him or his other work. he brings up some very logical questions toward the end of this that are worthwhile to consider on their own even if he doesn’t name a larger Operation Hippie or whatever to give people the ultimate “smoking gun” that they have been conditioned to ask of “conspiracy”* researchers.
i appreciate a sentiment i’ve seen here and there around the net, even if it’s not as fully explored as i would like, that on a larger scale music industry puppets influence their fans more than politicians or pundits do. and with the very obviously controlled scene of the 21st century, this seems to be the case in an even stronger sense than in decades past. of course this has always been a reality as long as record labels and their owners have been determining what the airwaves deliver so it’s not just a matter of old people complaining. in any case it’s perfectly logical that we should be able to make judgments about developments that signal shifts in societal understanding. to imagine that popularized music is just that with purely static meaning in relation to other phenomena and that simply changes as people do from generation to generation is an absurd position to take.
content/trigger warning for drug use and very graphic descriptions of child abuse and murder.
i am going to continue where i left off on my last post on programming, but feeling the need to write this has been prompted by another sort i have subjected myself to, that being the first season of True Detective. it’s become interesting to me because of what the writers have obviously pulled from real world tragedy and events. there are so many layers to the types of crimes the detectives are investigating that one needs to have read years of research to keep up with it in a way that does any amount of justice to the victims who are now being used for production value, caught in webs of criminality that explicitly work from the top of the rungs on down. so, ~spoiler alert~ too, which is the least of my concerns, but there ya go. i have waded in and out of investigating ritualistic abuse and murder for the last couple of years, but i still feel woefully undereducated to take in the full scope of what this series is putting out there.
overall i’m sick to death of news cycles, of the work it takes to pry oneself away from the quickness with which new issues and discussions are presented to us. your twitter feed, no matter how carefully curated, has also been capitalized on in this regard. it largely doesn’t matter who you follow because of how it works to enclose thought. hashtags, trends, etc. old news. we were supposed to have left the old [nightly] news behind with these developments. “i don’t even watch teevee.” it doesn’t matter; we are now TV. we exist in something called the real world, or “irl” — how else could we be algorithmically useful if such a sphere didn’t exist, after all.
as any good liberal playacting-as-leftist is to do in the states, i listened to Democracy Now broadcasts for years, after graduating from NPR of course. day after day, i received snippets, sometimes more lengthy reportage, of the world’s news as filtered through Amy Goodman’s specific sort of gravelly tone that seems to define the handwringing condition of “deep sympathy” while avoiding any of the passionate urgency that one might think their range of coverage could foster. and perhaps that dulling of the senses takes years to develop and then cast aside when one considers what “poverty of thought” means in the american progressive media environment.
what’s been marketed as Satanism ain’t nothing i fuck with, and for that matter, neither is what is known as Christianity today with its adherents bought into their own brand of fascist mysticism. without fully realizing that this sort of goosestepping thought to be guided by archangels themselves is yet another tactic to divide and conquer and create tension, young people reject the phantom of this religion in the name of toting something edgier along the lines of Satanism that is certainly not new on the scene as a ruling class marketing and propaganda tool. New Atheism works along similar lines, meant to appeal to disaffected middle class young adults perpetually stuck in adolescence who think the greatest oppression they have ever faced was their parents forcing them to sit through Sunday sermons. and they are correct to some degree — the mind is trapped in a myriad of ways under this fascist regime. people know they are missing a lot, but they are not always sure of what. the gloved hidden hand of the ruling class waves into existence alleged alternate belief systems to ease this internal tension and, again, directs this angst toward other exploited and oppressed individuals with similar class constraints.
Here come old flattop, he come grooving up slowly
He got joo-joo eyeball, he one holy roller
Admiral George Stephen Morrison, father of rock star idol Jim Morrison. He was commander of the US Naval forces during the farce known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that helped escalate the pillaging, murdering, and utter destruction in Vietnam.
pictured with the clean cut Jim, patched cardigan and all, on the Bon Homme Richard in January 1964.
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please— “Come Together”, John Lennon, released 1969
kariflack 
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