banalityofambiguity

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. I'm not sure what we do with the thinking, but we sure have some decisions to make with it. (he/him)

[banalityofambiguity]

“You can’t make a revolution in white gloves” people always seem completely unwilling to do literally anything they’d feel bad about in the name of their politics. Like they’re fine fantasizing about just killing everyone they don’t like, but if you ever ask them to do anything actually productive in politics they’ll whine about how unfair it is that they have to go vote for someone they don’t 100% agree with.

[hyumjim]

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a fan of Chappell Roan I just think some of them need to realize and accept that they are a fan of a mainstream popular artist making popular pop music and therefore straight people are going to play it at weddings and it’s going to be in commercials for DoorDash and stuff. And that’s literally okay. It’s actually good. It’s good and normal for gay people to be making popular music. Idk if it just hasn’t sunk in for people yet that she is very popular. Ok I am telling you now. The woman is very popular

[banalityofambiguity]

A lot of people seem to not even want the art they like to be successful, because it’s not about the art, it’s about the ability to describe oneself as superior to the mainstream, a sort of elitism which disdains the popular for its popularity. The issue with this mindset is that it’s effectively an anti-art position. The one true test of whether a work of art is good or not is how it lasts in contexts removed from those of its creation. OK art can make you go “oh I’ve experienced this”, and a lot of bad art probably does this for somebody other than you. But truly great art makes you connect it to your own life, makes you think about it, moves you in some way, whether or not the literal subject is tied to you.

The fact that people complain when their opinion on artwork is ratified by the masses demonstrates that they don’t actually want good art. They would rather keep their social self-image of superiority.

[tanadrin]

Sounds like the DNC fully alienated the pro-Palestinian voting contingent. Combined with RFK jr. endorsing Trump and getting the right-wing crazies all on the same page, I imagine that's the election in the bag for him.

anon are you high

[tsarina-anadyomene]

you know in retrospect it's kind of funny to try to correct someone and imply they don't know something, only to say "wow you're so pretentious, you really love hearing yourself talk with all those big words, huh?" when they fight back. form of birthday boy argument imo

[tanadrin]

i'm not the first person to note this, but imane khelif, in addition to winning a gold in boxing, has also managed the superhuman feat of getting jk rowling to shut the fuck up. i think the ioc should give her another medal.

[tanadrin]

okay even if you're on Ukraine's side here and think Putin is a huge asshole, it's beyond cheeky to say that villages in the Kursk Oblast that Ukraine has captured have been "liberated." come on now.

[banalityofambiguity]

you clearly don’t understand the historical unity of Kursk and Ukraine, as evidenced by 1000 years of history.

[tanadrin]

people sending physical mailers to residents of minneapolis with will stancil's tweets on them to try to sabotage his campaign for the state legislature is possibly the most pathetic and online thing i have ever heard. you motherfuckers started a PAC because you don't like this one guy on Twitter

[tanadrin]

A small but very annoying class of pundit: Democrats must reach out to Midwestern and blue-collar workers if they hope to win

Kamala Harris: *picks Tim Walz as her VP*

ASBVACOP: wait no that's illegal

[jdsquared]

Walz is a former school teacher, served in the army, and was very pro-active in getting progressive stuff passed in his legislature. Besides codifying abortion/IVF rights, see this list of his accomplishments. A solid pick.

[tanadrin]

Walz apparently had the support of Ilhan Omar, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Manchin, which is nuts. Nobody dislikes this guy.

[tanadrin]

Not to mention the UAW and Nancy Pelosi.

[tsarina-anadyomene]

well now that you've told me to kill myself i guess i have no choice but to agree with your original point

[tanadrin]

jesus christ dude is trump even going to make it to the election

[tanadrin]

@femmenietzsche

Is this about anything in particular?

okay so disclaimer here trump's speech patterns have always annoyed me and so i usually kinda try to avoid listening to clips of him talk. but my impression has been that even though he's always been kind of loopy, he could, like... enunciate. and express a thought, even if not very clearly.

and he seems to be having a lot more trouble with just, like, talking. and these weird idees fixes, like constantly talking about hannibal lecter. and just in general going quickly from "not super coherent" to "completely incomprehensible."

am i just out of the loop? has he been this bad all year?

[banalityofambiguity]

He’s been clearly showing some sort of decline for at least the last several months, imo much worse than stuff Biden did (since his gaffes were consistent with a stutter in a way that Trump’s aren’t consistent with anything we know about him). He very noticeably just seems old.

[tsarina-anadyomene]

i am a little ambivalent about great books programs. The university I just finished with tried to do some great books thing but it was kind of strange because a lot of the professors involved just picked something recent that they thought was important. One selected a book from 5ish years ago. In some cases the selections were such that someone taking the class wouldn't be in a position to assess them (less so than usual, I should say). As I understand it this went rather badly. I think maybe some professors should have been bullied into giving older and more foundational books for their suggestions. Students signing up for such a class want to read stuffy old books. Let them!

At the same time, I think it's sort of unproductive to have everyone read a set "canon" of books. Perhaps it's nice to have some overlap, a few shared touchstones to get your conversations off the ground other than rolling around in our received conceptual frameworks together. Part of a robust intellectual life, it seems to me, is being able to construct your own canon, to play with your own polemical histories of ideas, to borrow from things well-known and obscure and try to draw things together.

Does this mean we should "cancel" Plato? I've met people who think we should stop talking about these old cretins. I think Plato is important to read. Reading the Republic was worth my time. Should everyone read Plato in particular? I'm not sure; maybe not. I'm glad I've read Plato in part because he's important for other people I'm interested in. But I could probably rather well off for having read the Upanishads or Abhinava instead. More generally, I think it's important to read difficult books from time periods and cultures that you are not a part of. For one thing, seeing where ideas—the ones you see around you all the time—come from can be illuminating. It also helps to shake off the calcified layers of complacency. But it only works if you take them seriously. It doesn't work if you do that undergrad thing where you act like you're too smart for Spinoza or Kant or whatever. You have to read carefully and consider each argument and how it works, the explananda the author is trying to put together, and so on.

I suppose I haven't seen how many of these work in practice, particularly at institutions that are more dedicated to this.

[caesarsaladinn]

I understand the impulse, but it cannot be a good idea for the party ostensibly supporting queer people and immigrants to be dishing out "freak" like it's a disqualifying insult. rhetorically, you're in a glass house, and they'll throw it back at you tenfold; ethically, "ostracize the strange and uncomfortable" is a terrible principle

[centrally-unplanned]

Honestly I think this is a bunch of handwringing; things don't have this oblique of a spillover effect. Republicans are weird, mainstream politicians engaging in rank conspiracy theory nonsense. They are contextually weird within the sphere of politics and governance, a place that absolutely thrives on socially enforced norms that they consistently break and twist. This isn't a free speech issue or about artistic expression, politicians are a special class. It is fine to call them out for that, and the idea that "this person thinks women who don't have kids shouldn't be able to vote" is a weirdo is going to blow back on queer people is quite baseless.

IMO have more faith in people's tribalism; in this framing the queers are the normal ones! They are Your Side. People on The Other Side were already calling you weirdos, and also corrupt degenerate pedophiles, for decades. This is a drop in the bucket, Dems are right to fight back and they should say it.

(Tactically I think it is smart enough - Dems need to be the party of normalcy in the current environment - though of course like all slogans it won't make much of a dent in comparison to more subsantiative *or* more 'structural vibes' issues)

[togglessymposium]

Hard disagree.

I mean, yes tactically it's a winning move, and all that. But hard disagree about the "we can keep this in the box" thing. It is, at best, a Faustian bargain that helps with short-term results at a cost in long-term legitimacy.

What we're seeing, in fact, are the early benefits of having selected an authoritarian-minded candidate; California's "top cop", to use her own phrase. This isn't just a random one-off tactical maneuver happening in isolation. It's a conscious choice to build a campaign on the basic narrative of "cops and robbers", with Democrats on the side of the cops. It's an obvious move, given their blatantly criminal opponent. And it comes with a whole halo of ideas and associations that are along for the ride. Order versus chaos, us versus them, and especially normal versus strange. Authoritarianism is a coherent, powerful attractor in politics! It helps you win, until you lose.

Notice how you immediately started to use the language and logic of authoritarianism. "Have more faith in tribalism," "they are on our side." Don't worry, you tell us, because it is incontrovertible that humans can be easily divided in to types, that some of these are our type and others are not our type. So long as we make sure to treat these clear divisions between different types of humans as a primary moral consideration, you tell us, there are no downsides to using this rhetoric with impunity.

And there will definitely be no spillover effects at all.

[centrally-unplanned]

Yeah see this is a great example. The poster above did not, in any way, need some politicians words to confirm their concept of the Democratic party campaign being an authoritarian grab for power because Kamala Harris served in one of the most popular stepping stones for being a politician around. Whether or not Kamala HQ tweets "weird" or not is going to have no impact on this concept of liberal America as just fascism in a globe-emoji mask. How could it, right? People don't get their ideas from that, it is not top down, it comes from far deeper stuff.

The people who hate the gays already hate gays, and the people who want their politicians to stop trying to make elections referendums on God's Plan for Our Fallen Nation already hate that, and the people who are going to see basic campaigning as a dog whistle for throwing Oberlin graduates into black bags are already seeing that. Campaigning is far less about persuasion, and far more about signalling, letting people know which already-existing camp you align with. The camp that wants "normal politics" already exists, you can appeal to them or not. Sometimes politicians certainly can create movements, but calling someone a weirdo ain't it.

(I think the past decade of politics has show the harsh limits of policy-via-linguistic-control, and those lessons will continue to apply)

[tanadrin]

"politics is the mindkiller" is a huge fucking problem if you actually, you know. care about political outcomes. in which case no amount of contrarian cleverness will save you from actually having to engage with real-world politics.

[tanadrin]

remember the trump campaign’s whole theory of victory up til now has rested on their ability to win over low propensity minority voters. his standing in the polls has been partly based on what is allegedly some of the best performance with black voters since the civil rights act. if reports are to be believed they are not spending money on traditional GOTV efforts, but on narrowly targeted online ads.

one bad interview is unlikely to alter the race, but it will be… interesting, if the campaign continues in this vein

[tanadrin]

It would be hilarious if in ten years somebody discovered that Biden really only ever intended to serve one term, and everything that's happened over the last month and change was a 6D chess move to maneuever his VP uncontested into the presidential slot of the race, avoiding a damaging primary, and causing her popularity to shoot up just in sheer relief she's not an 80-year-old man. It is very hard to imagine any Democratic candidate actually being in a *better* position right now than Harris seems to have quite abruptly found herself in.