Category Archives: government

Everything I need to know about America I learned from YouTube

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I'll have a double chili nihilismdog to go

I'll have a double chili nihilismdog to go

It’s true, though. It’s not like America is complicated anymore.

Back in 2001 (nearly a century ago, if you don’t think about it too hard) the New Yorker published a truly ground-breaking article on the ways that Powerpoint (itself around and changing worldviews since 1987) was reducing the American capacity for original thought.

PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people… The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.

and, as anyone familiar with human interaction or communications theory could tell you, the way you get information about the world changes your concept of the world, and that in turn changes the world in which you live, if you do in fact live and not just exist. And what does this have to do with burgers, YouTube, and America? Plenty, my friends, plenty.

Think about this: the greatest technological success story of our time is Twitter, which limits what you can say to 140 characters; or we can equally say that it gives you 140 characters of void to fill with existential screaming. Some people have to pad to make the word count.

You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?

Think about the Tea Party, and think about exactly how deeply its members are thinking about the most important issues of the day. You can’t say their politics are not heartfelt, but you’d be hard-pressed to defend this particular capito-populist tribe as an intellectual movement. They make Pat Buchanan look like Bill Kristol. On the opposite side, a relatively intellectual President had to dumb down his message to single-word talking points; not much room for nuance when it has to fit on a Shepard Fairey poster.

 

Shepard Fairey Barack Obama

Shepard Fairey does Barack Obama in words of one or two syllables

And of course, popular culture is debased to the point where the Kardashians have not one but two television series among them, simply because sister Kim has a sex tape and a legendary caboose. It’s not exactly Witness to Yesterday, my friends.

So, yes, everything you need to know about the USA right at this moment, you can get from two brief YouTube videos and twenty or thirty minutes of cogitation thereon.

Here is the greatest scene from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle that does not have Neil Patrick Harris in it:

Now that immigrant can-do-ism and aspirational capitalism have been explained, it’s time to take on geopolitics, and who better to tackle that nest of vipers than Team America, World Police?

That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

Can’t we all just get along?

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STOPPIT!

ENOUGH!

Imagine there’s no humans. It’s easy if you try (or turn your back on the government for five seconds)…

Remember, Remember

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god is in the raincoaster

god is in the rainCOASTER, bitchez

Happy 5th of November.

Have some inspiration from MadV.

And here are some responses from YouTubers of things which should not be forgotten.

“We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.” – Bertrand Russell

Happy Birthday, Margaret Thatcher

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Zombies among us!

Zombies Among Us!


Width 666. I love that.
Hugh Muir here stole the words right out of my mouth:

Finally, quite a few people have been in touch to wish Margaret Hilda Thatcher a happy 85th – notwithstanding her bout of flu, from which we wish her a speedy recovery. They point out that on her birthday the news was full of stories about the courage and fortitude of miners. They seemed to enjoy the juxtaposition. Funny how things turn out.

And, of course, Elvis Costello.

I saw a newspaper picture from the political
campaign
A woman was kissing a child, who was obviously
in pain
She spills with compassion, as that young child’s
face in her hands she grips
Can you imagine all that greed and avarice
coming down on that child’s lips Well I hope I don’t die too soon
I pray the Lord my soul to save
Oh I’ll be a good boy, I’m trying so hard to behave
Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live
long enough to savour
That’s when they finally put you in the ground
I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

When England was the whore of the world
Margeret [sic] was her madam
And the future looked as bright and as clear as
the black tarmacadam
Well I hope that she sleeps well at night, isn’t
haunted by every tiny detail
‘Cos when she held that lovely face in her hands
all she thought of was betrayal

And now the cynical ones say that it all ends
the same in the long run
Try telling that to the desperate father who just
squeezed the life from his only son
And how it’s only voices in your head and
dreams you never dreamt
Try telling him the subtle difference between
justice and contempt
Try telling me she isn’t angry with this pitiful
discontent
When they flaunt it in your face as you line up
for punishment
And then expect you to say “Thank you”
straighten up, look proud and pleased
Because you’ve only got the symptoms, you
haven’t got the whole disease
Just like a schoolboy, whose head’s like a tin-can
filled up with dreams then poured down
the drain
Try telling that to the boys on both sides, being
blown to bits or beaten and maimed
Who takes all the glory and none of the shame

Well I hope you live long now, I pray the Lord
your soul to keep
I think I’ll be going before we fold our arms
and start to weep
I never thought for a moment that human life
could be so cheap
‘Cos when they finally put you in the ground
They’ll stand there laughing and tramp the
dirt down

UPDATE: Now, with extra bitterness, via Facebook:

Frankie Boyle on TV just now:

I hear there’s a debate over whether Thatcher should be given a state funeral. The only debate most people I know are having us whether she needs to be dead before we bury her. Three million quid to bury that woman? For that money we could buy everyone in the country a shovel and dig a hole deep enough to hand her over to Satan personally.

 

Flamewar of the Day: Gawkers

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Rear Window: no parking in rear

No parking in rear

This actually happened last week, which is right and natural when you consider what a shitstorm last week was: when ELSE would it have happened, right? Instead of our usual fun flamewars, toying with the early drinkers and short bus riders of the blogosphere, this one went a little bit sideways and turned into something akin to watching hara kiri right there in the comments section on Gawker. What people are willing to do in front of strangers, and blame upon those strangers, never ceases to fascinate me.

There’s no question I was guilty, but what of exactly what, nobody is quite sure, except for the victim, who is quite sure of many things despite being quite wrong.

What is pretty much certain is that some grownups still have to learn that lesson about when to keep your mouth shut, the one most of us learned around the time we first encountered those savvy genii of the interwebs, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, not to mention Socrates, who came later (what with him being an old man and all).

Judge for yourselves, as always. This is from the comments section of a Gawker post about a “Spiderman” who freeclimbed a 58-story building with suction cups and was arrested for trespassing once he got to the top.

If residents gave him water en route, he can persuasively claim to have been a guest who was there with their permission.

@raincoaster: How about the floors in which nobody gave him water? If I invite you to my apartment does that mean you get to visit all my neighbors? How about reckless endangerment of parked Dodges? How about his impending Darwin award nomination? Questions, questions for the jury..

Seriously, this will be only a misdemeanor, no? 

raincoaster promoted this comment

@lethedrinker: Presumably even if you don’t invite him in, if your neighbors are okay with him walking by, he’s allowed to walk past your door via the hallway. He didn’t invade the apartments.

@raincoaster: Well, he climbed past their windows without their permission. I’d consider that an invasion of privacy.

This happened to me a few months ago. I live in a high rise condo looking directly at a bay, so privacy is not usually a concern. It’s a 1BR with a window in the BR; the LR has floor-to-ceiling doors to the balcony.

I got a notice saying that the window washing crew would be there on a certain date, and that they did not clean the windows in the LR, so I shut the blinds to the bedroom and thought I was all set.

Imagine my surprise when I was seated in the LR wearing only panties, and the crew appeared in my LR window to clean the glass balcony! I gently sank lower in the chair and raised my kindle to try and hide the tits. Not that they are anything to look at, I just prefer that people don’t.

They took 30 minutes to clean the damn balcony, and I couldn’t move in all that time.

So, with respect, your defense fails.

raincoaster promoted this comment

@Registered: Isn’t there some merit to the argumenet that by keeping the blinds up or door open, one implicity lowers the threshold for reasonable expectation of privacy. According to my lawyer friend, cops often use this excuse (made up or otherwise) to get around fourth amendment restrictions – not directly relevant to the privacy argument..

@lethedrinker: I don’t know about open front doors – they’re against the fire code here, must close automatically – but if I live in, say, a 26th floor condo that faces directly onto the ocean (or bay, in my case; you’d need the Hubble telescope to look in unless you are on a scaffold cleaning the windows ) then I would say the police lose their case.

Also, are you suggesting that people should live in caves with the blinds shut and the doors closed, or else lose any right to privacy? Bushish. 

raincoaster promoted this comment

@Registered: I said reduced not lose any or all. Bushish? I bet such dubious arguments existed long before either Bush and will continue to be used till 2084.

Anyway, it was a generic comment not specific to the 26th floor dwelling, bay watching, automatic door closing kindle readers.

@Registered: If you got a notice that the window washing crew would be there washing your windows on a certain date and you’re sitting in your apartment topless in your panties, SOMETHING ain’t an accident. And it ain’t invasion of privacy, either.