I simply do not believe it is sensible or historically grounded to assume It Can Only Bad Happen and coalitions can't shatter under the weight of their failure just because none of us have been alive to see it happen.
"Watching a movie, the title of which does not, for these purposes, concern us, one realizes that it is taking place in one’s own house"
New work today at (the brand-new) @briefincorrect.bsky.social. Thanks to @aaronboot.bsky.social for giving this one a home
Today I wrote about why you should vote for Democrats and that is not in fact an abdication of your political agency
They want you to live a small, stupid, miserable, emotionally and materially impoverished life, not only because this makes you easier to exploit but because they think that's what being a man is. They want you to die lonely.
I'll be seeing those soon! We just finished 10 in the weekly series of screenings we go to. (Two episodes per week.) I remember being completely in love with that stretch last time around.
After Episode 8, TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN opens its pacing up in a way that is both more accomplished and more deranged than the pacing of the first seven episodes. The tone also finds what seems like a strangely comfortable niche. It's like a virtuosic performance of an instrument no one else plays.
It turned out that most people didn't like our shared project, that many were furious about being asked to pitch in. But I do still remember that feeling fondly. I wish more people would remember it the way I do. We could have other shared projects too.
That sense of our collective health and safety as a shared project was meaningful. I think it's underrated the extent to which it primed people to protest the violently rioting cops; we think of that as a wild time now, but then it seemed like a natural extension of what we were already doing.
The only thing I look back on with real fondness from COVID times is the sense we shared that we were doing something together. We were having an experience together, an important one that we would talk about forever, and we were working to keep each other safe.
I am now drinking some of this tea with Tracy
Honestly it's pretty good
At least it's illegal for students to complain about bad banh mi now (or something?). It's all been so very worth it.
During my six weeks in South Korea, whenever I walked around in public, usually the only white guy in sight, all big, hairy, and muppety, I felt like Gritty Incarnate walking among the people. And more than one year later, I still kind of feel that way as I move through the world: here comes Gritty!
Last night while I was outlining, a thing I hate to do, I worked out what I think may be a genuinely novel concept of how an android might exist and work, not because I intended to but because I got there and felt that I had no alternative.
My idea for a book about a future hundreds of thousands of years from now is forced to advance well beyond where I would instinctively want it to be by things happening today. We live in SF more than I ever expected to. I don't want to attach a value judgment to that, but it's true.
Yeah, this is true. I've been outlining a science fiction thing while I work on a book that is also science fiction, but partly so it can be set back in 2001, where you can still sort of do not SF if you want. And the future SF outline is being pushed aggressively by things happening now.
There are three revolutionary areas of technology right now: biotech, energy tech, and AI.
Our shithole regime is deliberately maiming our edge in two of these fields and giving a helping hand to corrupt rent-seekers trying to monopolize the other.
Photo of a TV displaying the art for digital editions of PAPRIKA and PERFECT BLUE, but the PAPRIKA art is actually from the 1991 live action movie of the same name.
When the metadata is on point
One does have to deal with and placate these factions to some extent, but activating them is the last thing that you want to do. What you want is to mobilize the people who these poor fools rely on to make their lives possible each day.
Treatler leftism is the seed of continuing fascism; allying with people who believe their access to borger is the hinge on which history should turn is abandoning virtue in hopes that the venal consumer idiots you mobilize will allow you a functional society if only you provide them beef.
A politics of public virtue should both lead to the improvement of material outcomes—it is virtuous to be kind, nurturing, generous—and may mobilize/instantiate a different public to vote on its behalf. But disguising this virtue as pure deliverism aimed at Trump's voters will reproduce his evil.
We can and do imagine a universe where people given the right material reality might simply lose interest in seeing the enactment and performance of evil as the substance of public life. But the electorate we have has demonstrated a willingness to mobilize for evil, cruelty, avarice.
There are aspects of this thread that really fight my personal instincts regarding how I think of people, which makes the fact that it seems largely correct feel more important for me to acknowledge and think about. The fantasy of winning over Trump voters has long disgusted me, but this names why.
many americans demonstrated repeatedly that the thing that would get them to participate in politics was to be told by a television celebrity that they could be rich and it was good to abuse the weak
Trump has been around since 2015. His appeal to irregular voters is one of the most thoroughly over-analyzed aspects of US politics. Apparently the secret is to appear to them as a magical creature that will take their venal impulses and manifest them onto reality
the commonality to a lot of anti-Dem, anti-lib comments here is “ there is a great mass of untapped voters
for left of center politics — if only we did ____. “ well, there is a politician that is good at bringing out irregular voters…so good that he’s a virtuoso. his name is donald j. trump
I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.
The very specific anxiety that comes with being reskeeted by a big account or two and wondering whether they or any of their followers will scroll down a little bit and see all your opinions that would really piss them off.
You see versions of this dynamic in so many places. When you learn comfort with other people living their lives, it becomes easier to feel comfortable living yours. Knowing and loving a lot of trans people has definitely made me more confident in my own gender identity.
kind of dying that the quote toby took from our long interview was "We were right, that helps," which is possibly the most samantha quote possible
anyways
it's good reporting--about the emergence of resistance liberalism *outside* of elite liberalism, which has more or less imploded
