i finished white noise, and i still can't tell if i truly hate it or just love it ironically as it probably deserves to be loved. i'm *pretty sure* it's bad, but it's bad in such aggro self-lampshading ways i can't help feeling that i'm being played somehow. it's written like a parody of pretentious litfic by an mfa student who's only ever read negative reviews and other parodies. every character talks alike, with only minor variations – a south asian doctor eschews contractions and definite articles, a german nun sprinkles in some german idioms – and no one ever talks or acts like a human being, or even like a tv archetype circa 1985. the narrator is constantly whacking the gong of some commercial phrase or infelicitous safety jargon by sticking it at the end of a chapter or set off in its own single-line paragraph, presumably to try to make us feel bad about the english language or the inadequacy of modernity or something.
there's a crucial scene toward the end where a small child on a trike breaks away from his cul-de-sac and pedals directly into the highway. in the hands of a normal bad writer, you'd still expect to be able to picture the scene and feel some suspense and horror, even as the bad writing undercuts it, just by virtue of speaking roughly the same language as the author and knowing the meaning of words like "toddler" and "highway" and so on. but delillo is able to drain the scene so completely of any feeling that it's kind of a marvel. and the whole book is like that, just a parade of scenes and situations that feel very much like they *should* be funny or affecting or both but are presented in such a stilted way that they aren't anything. it's impressive! but also very boring.
the movie this all most reminds me of, weirdly, is green book.
green book is a very fascinating movie because it's a very traditional oscars sort of movie. it's broadly liberal with a message about tolerance and equality and opposing racial discrimination. it had some big performances at the center of it. mahershala ali is very good in it and so is viggo mortensen. but there were a lot of people who didn't want that movie to win at the oscars.
"this is too old fashioned. we are in the age of moonlight, not the age of green book. this is the sort of movie that shouldn't be winning anymore." and nobody in hollywood actually cared. if hollywood likes a movie, they don't care about controversy. they don't care about nitpicky identity politics stuff. if they really like something, they will support it.
which leads me to a worst possible theory about the emilia perez noms: the industry loves it. they just love this movie. they have guys like james cameron out there saying "oh this is one of the best movies i've ever seen". guillermo del toro is out there saying similar things.
and that is possibly the scariest part of all this.
like, fine. i respect the decision to vote for this for best picture because you love it, BUT EXPLAIN TO ME WHY. i have yet to read the great convincing case for emilia perez. it is the rare movie where i'm just baffled by the idea that there could be genuine affection for it and there are few things that i find inherently meritless.
usually i dump my movie talk on the other blog, but this is part movie/oscars talk, part me responding to a weird article i saw in the wrap, and it's going to be a wall of text. so this is where i'm putting it instead.
so, the oscar nominations came out last friday. emelia perez took home 13 nominations, which ties it for the second most of all time. emelia perez. number two on that list with so many greats... uhh. the brutalist and wicked both scored 10 noms, and the other best picture noms like conclave, dune 2, and a complete unknown grabbed a few each. pretty standard mix. i'll get to emelia perez in a second. much controversy about that.
a few things that jumped out to me: sebastian stan & jeremy strong getting acting noms for the apprentice even though it kind of got buried at the box office last year. denis villeneuve & jon m chu didn't get director noms, and i know the fans of both those movies are pretty outraged about that. and really like the lack of big pictures vying for the top awards, set aside wicked and dune 2. i guess wicked could still win best picture, but i don't think it's super likely. compare this to last year, when oppenheimer had grossed almost $1bil worldwide and was heavily, heavily favored to win best picture. barbie was also in the mix for a lot of awards but didn't end up winning any.
there were certainly some movies i thought were snubbed! i don't like when my movies are snubbed! civil war was one of my favorite movies of last year. zero nominations. nonsense! furiosa i felt deserved more than zero nominations, at least in the technical categories. challengers did not deserve zero nominations. nosferatu probably should have been up for some of the bigger prizes. i think nosferatu should have been a best picture nominee. it's a relatively big movie. people like it. why not? but overall it's a pretty solid lineup in what was otherwise a weak year for movies. except for the bonkers nomination total for emelia perez. this post is going to be me spewing word vomit until i eventually galaxy brain into an explanation for how this happened.
a historical analogy worth considering momentarily before we really dive into this – in his book, "pictures at a revolution" which is about the 40th academy awards, mark harris pointed out that it was very odd to see an old fashioned movie like dr dolittle (1967) up for best picture against the likes of bonnie & clyde and the graduate. that was a big year of change. lots of new, appealing movies were coming out, and there you had this ridiculous old musical that was a huge bomb at the box office. nobody liked it. however, it was 20th century fox's Big Award Season Movie that year. the studio leaned on its massive rolodex to secure that nomination.
the oscars then, as they are now, in part about back scratching. and nobody has a bigger back to scratch than netflix. they're producing more stuff than anyone else, so any time they have their movie, it gets nominated for lots of things. it's why every year, you have some prestige-y picture like mank, or roma, or the power of the dog rack up a bunch of nominations only to lose in virtually every category before it disappears into the streaming morass and nobody ever thinks about watching them ever again. emilia perez is this year's submission for the forgettable morass. it seems to have more momentum than any of those movies, however, which is kind of interesting.
at least some of that momentum stems in part from the TOTALLY INSANE idea that voting for the french musical about the trans cartel boss is a way to surreptitiously stick it to donald trump. at least, that's the way that steve pond in the wrap decided to put it – "Oscar Nominations: Love for ‘Emilia Pérez’ and ‘The Apprentice’ Could Make Oscar Night Donald Trump’s Nightmare" the implication here kind of being that not voting for this disastrous mess of a musical signals cowardice in the face of authoritarianism or some such.
i cannot emphasize enough that this is the absolute worst way to look at emilia perez. there's nothing that could play into trump's hands more than the great satan of hollywood giving their biggest honor to a french musical about a trans cartel boss. you can imagine the truth socials he would fire off about the sicko degenerates in la la land/hollyweird who hate the good common people of america blah blah blah. now, avoiding this response is also not a good reason not to award emilia perez. we don't want to go down that road either. a good reason not to award emilia perez is that it's *checks what i wrote last time* schlocky nonsense with bad songs and a bunch of really awful performances.
the two significant performances in it (karla sofia gascon, zoe saldana) are fairly good. it's just an insane... it's insane. i'm sorry. just. the whole thing. it's bonkers but it's not transcendently bonkers and the idea that it should be adopted as any sort of symbol of resistance or even any sort of particular meaning or insight is such a wild act of projection completely unrelated to the text itself. i think it would be so radically self-discrediting to embrace it as meaningful in any way that i hope people avoid it. it has no politics. it has no psychological insight. the fact that this is one of the most oscar nominated movies of all time just makes it feel like hollywood is having an episode.
i'm someone who's inclined to say "yes, jon voight, sylvester stallone, and mel gibson should parachute into hollywood as a three-man strike thing and set things right" but this movie winning best picture would kind of sell me on that. don't go bananas for this movie! it's not worth it! it would not produce any sort of useful reaction. it is not a useful movie to promote trans rights. and most people agree with me on this!
i think part of the reason why i'm so flabbergasted about this is because if there's a strong normie lib constituency for this movie, i'm not seeing it. and if there was going to be a strong normie lib constituency for a movie, why not conclave? that movie's take on gender identity is, in a way, sort of trickier than the one in emilia perez, but it's much more a statement about inherent faith in decency and kindness and how we should support people who are victimized. it's the much more sort of normie lib movie in sensibility so i just can't get my mind around either the political or aesthetic response to emilia perez.
i mean, maybe the support for it is all happening on threads or bluesky. i don't know where the audience for that movie – which presumably exists – is hanging out and making its case. i haven't seen anyone defend it. and maybe that says something about the fragmentation of movie twitter or lib cultural discourse than it does about anything else.
and sort of tangentially related to this: how sensitive to controversy are the oscars these days anyway?
this is the sort of movie that, if it came out 10 years ago, there would have been huge viral campaigns about how this movie doesn't represent mexican people. "mexican people reject this movie. trans people reject this movie. how can the industry celebrate this movie that is nominally about this movie that the groups themselves have rejected?" and that conversation simply does not seem to exist this year.
it's hard to prove. there's not a survey number i can point to but you can see it in box office numbers there's decreasing cultural influence of hollywood proper – the big studios, big releases, award season hollywood, prestige hollywood. the expensive feature film from an auteur or a name brand actor or whatever that used to be part of water cooler conversation back when people went to offices don't enter into those conversations at nearly the same level. i'm not saying no one in the world does this, but it's much more of a niche hobby now to be a movie fan than it would have been in the 80s or 90s or even the mid 00s. this is partially a result of media fragmentation and also the collapse of theater going and other issues with hollywood that have happened because of the pandemic and the strikes. one of the reasons why this was such a weak year for movies was because there were 6 months where nothing was being produced.
all of this is happening in the context of a pretty significant cultural shift that's partly but not entirely political. if you've been reading political punditry for the past week and a half or so, there have been a half a dozen if not more prominent, widely shared columns and feature essays about the vibe shift, trump's cultural power, the rising cultural valence of the right, which is tied up with big tech, elon musk, mark zuckerberg changing his hair and wearing gold chains and going on joe rogan to talk about how companies need more masculine energy & embrace aggression & the HR-ification of everything. ezra klein wrote the most perceptive and most shared piece about this in the nyt. the thesis of the piece is that trump's victory at the polls was actually not that big – about 1.5pts – but it feels like an overwhelming cultural knockout victory. i think a lot of people are feeling that and it's not exactly clear what all that portends.
so, to see emilia perez get a nearly historic number of nominations and to see it explicitly framed by writers like the one in the wrap, it's like the vehicle that you have. it's the one button you can push. i don't even know if it's true that this is the reason why people are supporting it, but for the sake of conversation i'll assume that this is correct and a major reason driving support for that movie. but it's not a good vehicle for a sort of fuck-you politics, though i guess it makes its own sort of sense that it's this and not conclave or even wicked.
so maybe hollywood has already discredited itself over the past several years, which is unfortunate in so many ways. there are movies that could be championed here that are quite left leaning or progressive. it's possible to do this in a way that isn't just shooting yourself in the foot. but that's not what's happening. i don't know if it's a last gasp, but a sort of desperate floundering attempt to project desperate cultural political power and... they're gonna fail. it's not gonna work. the fact that the outrage is next to nothing is a sign that nobody cares anymore.
this is a doomed endavor by an industry that sees itself as an arbiter of cultural power but no longer has any itself.
the real kicker with this is that my wife & I both want a family eventually. dylan doesn’t. the other thing is that dylan’s sister’s wife had them as a donor for their kid. it’s a bit of an “uncle dad” situation. the kid looks just like them, right down to the collar bone length haircut.
you can’t tell your wife “I’m not leaving you for them! The existence of their Son Nephew would torment me until i down a bottle of bleach!” and expect that to go over well.
I’ve been trying to find my best friend, dylan, a partner for what seems like months now. I set them up on one date and i failed miserably at discerning what they wanted. same with the woman i set them up with. this was a huge failure of judgment on my part.
the thing I’m not going to talk about is how dylan has expressed sexual interest in me pretty much since we first met and my wife knows this & is chuffed about it.
dylan & i are incompatible for a variety of reasons, but good luck telling her that. the best case scenario is them being in a relationship so whatever “threat” here becomes a nonstarter.
i’ve been surprised by how sanguine i’d been during the election. i chalked it up to accepting that there are some things i simply can’t change — sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you, right? but now after watching things slowly break trump’s way, i’m wondering if maybe i just subconsciously didn’t believe that we would actually elect trump again. because now i’m feeling sick.
are you feeling like there is not enough election content out there? i kind of feel like that right now. where can i get news about the election? no one's talking about it! not on tv! not on social media! not in line at popeyes... that was awkward, btw. two people having world's dumbest political conversation right in front of me.
but that's why i want to talk less about the election and more about the experience of living through this election, which is an experience we're all having. how's it going for you? how are you feeling? because i'll tell you how i'm feeling – tired and numb.
tired and numb, granted, is my default state, but i'm feeling the "tired and numb" more intensely this time and i'm wondering why. because 100 years ago, when i was in my teens and early 20s, i used to actually enjoy politics. i used to think election season was kind of cool. but something's very different now. of course, the easy explanation to what has changed is me. i'm different now. back then i had hope and optimism – what a fucking idiot i was. a belief that things could get better! but jokes aside, i think it is actually true that our politics now are quite different. if you compare our elections now to the pre-trump and pre-social media age, i do think our conversation now is louder, dumber, and more exhausting. and i do think the nature of that conversation is shaping the outcome of this race.
obviously, i don't know who is going to win. we know who the candidates are, we know what policies they've proposed, and we know that the race is going to be close. so i'm going to, at the end of this very long winded post, explain how i think we're all experiencing the consequences of those changes and what that's going to mean on election day. but let's start by trying to figure out whether or not my premise is true – that our conversation has gotten louder, dumber and more exhausting.
like i said, when i was younger, i used to enjoy politics. when i became a proto-adult and adopted "girl who's interested in politics" as my identity – huge fucking mistake, btw – i was very passionate about presidential elections. "we can change things! we can change the world for the better!" i do still believe that the long arc of history bends towards justice and yadda yadda yadda. i also believe that the short arc of justice often bends towards the dumbest. most counterproductive unforced errors imaginable. in the short run you can step on your balls and trip over your dick or whatever genitalia-based metaphor you prefer, and that's standard procedure. in the long term, that somehow adds up to things possibly getting better. i do now know that the world does change but i don't have much power over it.
i think that largely explains the numbness i'm feeling. you've heard this before: "god, grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change the things i can, and the wisdom to know the difference". it's one of those bits of wisdom that you see cross-stitched into a throw pillow next to a crying angel that i think happens to be true. my feeling is that the category of things i can't change is a really big category, especially during election season.
look. i don't know why people like trump. i know that i don't know. i spent 2016 raging against this particular machine, mistakingly believe that any undecided voter would listen to me. i just don't know what his appeal is. i try to understand it. i try to say, okay, if you just are a republican, if you just really know where you stand politically is on the right side of the political spectrum, you oppose abortion and want less immigration and a tax cut, alright. you want the policies that tend to come with a republican president and you're just wiling to overlook the other stuff, that i get. it's not where i'm coming from, but it's rational and i understand it. i also understand the people who think he's a fascist and a racist and think that stuff is awesome. that's a person who exists, and that person doesn't need to dissemble or equivocate when explaining their love for trump because they're not disputing the worst things that people say about him. they're horny for it. i get that too.
the people i don't understand are the people who could go either way or they might not vote. people joke about how there are no more undecideds anymore, but there are. there are fewer than there used to be, but they're still out there and they matter. well, i mean if they live in one of five states that matter. it truly is the case that everything we're witnessing with this whole election is done to win over undecided voters in pennsy and michigan, even though that's a small enough group of people that they could probably fit in a booth at denny's. but they matter, and i don't know what sways them. i have intuitions but i just can't get inside their head.
to be blunt, i have no idea why this election is close, and i'm someone who's lukewarm on harris. the adjective i've attached to her more than any other is "fine". she's fine. i think she'll be fine. i think she's a pretty normal politician. i watched her convention speech and thought that was pretty damn good. her debate performance was good. then i watched her cnn town hall and thought "jesus". so i'm not exactly writing ballads to kamala's inspiring leadership, nor am i someone who's tickled pink with the american left over the past decade. if you're familiar with my opinions on that, you know that i think that some dumbass lefty stuff has been getting way too much traction. and yet for me, this decision is honestly not a tough one. have you seen the other guy?
i think whether you're talking about policies or damage to our political system, he's about the worst possible option you could put forward. the other day, he suggested that maybe the federal government should be entirely funded through tariffs. okay! that's not going to work! you can't raise enough, and the process of doing so would do enormous to our economy. if you have a generally conservative orientation towards things like economics, he fails on that score because he's such a fucking idiot. he doesn't have any sort of hayekian view of how economies work, he's just a monkey in the cockpit of an airplane pushing buttons at random.
you could argue "ah, the system will constrain him. he's not going to be able to do any of the stuff that he says." and there is some truth to that. we don't know how much. i understand that if he comes in and says "let's do away with all taxes except tariffs" everyone will say "that's not possible" and that'll be the end of that. but i still don't think that's an argument for putting the monkey in the cockpit? maybe the autopilot in this metaphor is pretty good, but wouldn't you still rather have a pilot?
so, that's the policy side. on the damage to the system side, it feels to me that if you can't agree that the person who wins our stupid system, the electoral college. but as much as i hate it, that is the system. when trump won in 2016, clinton and obama admitted trump won, because that's what you do in america. the person who wins that contest becomes the president. that doesn't seem like a difficult thing to agree to. and it never came up in american politics before trump. 2000 was an incredibly messy dispute that got into areas that nobody had thought about prior to the election. it wasn't a candidate simply saying "i'm not going to agree to the results of the election. i'm just going to yell 'fraud' and provide no evidence." that's just one of many ways that trump doesn't play by the rules of us politics. and if we just allow that, pretty soon there are going to be no rules and that's going to be a problem.
i truly don't understand how this is going to be a difficult call for some people, but i think a big part of it is due to the way that we do politics has changed. consider how that, back in the day, if you were someone who cared about the election some, meaning that you're a person who's going to vote but didn't make the mistake i made of making politics your ~thing~, you were able to take in information about the election a bit. if politics was alcohol, you could have two drinks and stop, as opposed to now where you're, like, either an alcoholic or a mormon. it was a lot less binary back then. you might watch the debates. you might watch the nightly news or read the newspaper sometimes, and that might be it. now social media is much of our communication. if you're using social media for a totally pedestrian reason, like following a sports teams or looking up a recipe or stalking your ex, you're probably going to see some political content. you can't avoid it. and that's what i mean when i say the conversation is louder. it's hard to not hear it.
maybe that would be a good thing if the conversation wasn't also dumber. we've all had many years to think about the concept of gatekeepers now, because it's been obvious for at least 10 years that social media is dramatically changing the information landscape. i've written about this both in reference to politics and entertainment media. the gatekeepers, like the an editor at a newspaper or the executive at a tv network aren't nearly as important as they used to be. the positive framing of this trend is that information has been democratized. the negative way to characterize the same phenomenon is that any fucking clown can spew bullshit and nobody can really stop them. it's not great that any fucking dumbass can write something completely untrue. back in the day, you'd hope you had an editor who would say "hey, we can't publish this". now it gets posted to social media, and because social media is basically democratic, the stuff that gets upvoted is the stuff that shows up in your feed. something may gain a lot of prominence and influence even if it's completely untrue or if it appeals to our worst impulses. honestly, if you're making social media content that's not completely untrue and doesn't appeal to our worst impulses, you're doing it wrong.
all of this has honestly made me a little bit nostalgic for the gatekeepers, which is funny because i often have a lot of negative things to say about the gatekeepers. it is weird to have your information filtered through a couple hundred newspaper editors spread across the country and like six very important people at the cbs and nbc news desks. what if they're idiots? what if they're biased in a way that shows up in their news coverage? in so many ways, that doesn't seem like a great system, and yet it's almost certainly better than the system we have now, at least in terms of keeping the conversation on the rails. this is the "dumber" in my "louder, dumber, and more exhausting" characterization because i think one thing that has definitely changed between elections a decade ago and elections now is that we can't even agree on the topics for our political discussions.
it used to be that there were a couple of big issues in the campaign. in 2000, it was what to do with the surplus, which is funny. as problems go, "how are we going to spend all this money that's burning a hole in our pocket?" is so quaint now, especially when you consider that today, the debt has grown, the deficit is in the 1-2 trillion range, and trump is proposing that we add another, oh idunno, 7.5 trillion to that. gore had his lockbox idea. bush had his tax cut. 2004 was the iraq war, stem cells, and gay marriage. 2008 was the financial crisis obviously. 2012 was obamacare and gay marriage again. we made fun of mitt romney for talking about russia, although admittedly in hindsight he was correct. we used to agree what we were talking about, and i'm not going to pretend the conversation was the socratic dialogues, but it sure seems that way compared to now. we're talking about everything and nothing all the time.
consider immigration, which is as close to the issue of this campaign that we're going to get. there is no realistic immigration proposal on the table. trump says he wants a big new effort to deport everyone who's in this country illegally. that seems like the beginning of a discussion. what would that be? how would that work. i'll be in that discussion saying "that would be the worst idea i'd ever heard if i hadn't also heard that we should fund the entire federal government through tariffs." so that seems like a discussion that we could have, except we can't have it because every time we try to have it, some republican says "he's not going to do that. calm down". that's the republican answer to all the crazy shit that trump says.
when harris talks about immigration, she only ever talks about the lankford bill – the compromise bill that would have done things like tighten the border that trump convinced republicans to turn against because he wanted immigration as a campaign issue – but we don't talk about the substance of the lankford bill anyway. how many americans could roughly describe the contents of the lankford bill to you? 1 in 500? and that person definitely knows who they're voting for. do you think james lankford himself couldrattle that off the top of his head, or would even he have to go "i uhh. i knew this a year ago. shit." there are no effective gatekeepers these days who can narrow the parameters of the debate and choose a couple key topics, which is crucial to having any sort of substantive discussion at all. we had one debate between the two candidates who are actually running. we had another debate where literally nothing was discussed because neither candidate was capable of discussion. so realistically, an hour and 45 minutes to cover literally everything happening in the world, and actually much less than that because a lot of the time was spent talking about crowd sizes and the most delicious ways to prepare a cat for consumption. it really is incredible that we've ended up in a situation where all of us have more information than ever, and yet nobody knows anything.
so. louder, dumber, and more exhausting. i think a lot of people experiencing this throw up their hands and say "fuck it. i'm out." i don't totally blame them. i mean, i do think you should be a grown up and cast an informed vote, but i do sympathize with the feeling of "i can't wade through all this shit". for me, the presidential race is an easy call, but when you have to vote for city counsel or some ballot measure, i'm sure everyone alive just goes "ugh. ok. what do i need to know about this fucking bond issue that's on the ballot." many people probably feel, rightly, that they're kind of being asked to be some kind of supercomputer capable of digesting all of this information, cross-referencing this with other sources of information so they can figure out what's true and what's not, while not knowing which sources to trust to cross-reference. how is anybody supposed to digest that? how do you take all this in, analyze it, make all the various pieces fit together, and come up with a coherent, well-considered belief as to why candidate a or b is the better choice?
we can't do that and we're not doing that, so we fall back on other things – vibes, identity, some singular experience you fall back on. "ah, i worked at a restaurant and the boss was a big time republican and he was a real dick." or "my kid went to school and the kindergarten teacher said that triangles are racist." some experience like that pushes you one way or the other, and because election season these days generates so much noise, it's extremely difficult for any message to cut through.
i think that trump greatly benefits from this. i think that if we were more able to bring things into focus, it would be more clear just how far outside the norm he is. it would be clear that his policies are not regular republican stuff. they're easy answers from the drunk guy at the end of the bar that would not do the things people think they would do, that are being defended by people who actually know what they're talking about with "yeah, he's not actually gonna do that. calm down." and it would also be clear that he doesn't accept the basic rules of american politics that honestly just about any politician you could name from either party as far back as you can remember has accepted.
do people remember how the 1960 election between kennedy and nixon was very close and some republicans wanted nixon to contest the election, and nixon said "no. i'm not gonna do that. i'm not gonna put the country through that"? AND THAT WAS NIXON!! that was the other plausible answer to the question "what major american politician within memory also kind of didn't play by the rules?" even that guy understood that the peaceful transfer of power is a sacrosanct thing and that he just needed to kind of take the L. and btw, he thought he'd be done in american politics if he contested an election and still lost. that may have been true at the time, but it's clearly, for some reason not true now. trump's delusional rhetoric about the election combined with the way he talks about his opponents, his clear desire to use the presidency for personal gain, and the way he tries to bully the media into being nice to him are not normal. and that would be more clear if not for all the noise.
as it stands, republicans have pulled out all the stops to deflect these criticisms. they'll say things like "oh, the left calls people fascists and hitler all the time." which is true, unfortunately, but you know what's different this time? it's his chief of staff calling him that. AND the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. these are not huffpo columnists or protestors at evergreen state, it's high-ranking people who worked with him closely. it's not the same.
as for trump's desire to use the presidency to punish his enemies, republicans will say "ok, well, there was that one weird ass case in colorado to try and get trump removed from the ballot. and there was that whole stormi daniels hush money case in new york." they argue that those cases were kind of bullshit, so how's this different? i happen to agree that those cases were both kind of bullshit. the colorado thing was incredibly tricky to look into because you were dealing with a vague and poorly-written part of the constitution combined with a very odd legal ruling from long ago that arguably required a super weird outcome. and in new york, trump was arguably guilty according to the letter of the law, though i agree that it shouldn't have been brought, because when you're dealing with prosecuting future candidates, you should really have a slam dunk airtight case. i do not think that describes the case that was brought. but in both cases, a) there was a defensible legal rationale for what was done. neither case was crazy. and b) what some fucking activist in colorado does is very different from what the president does. joe biden can't control what some activist in colorado or what the manhattan DA does or doesn't do. you wouldn't want a president telling a district attorney "bring this case. don't bring that case." that would be an abuse of the president's power. and biden's own son was prosecuted under his own justice department. once again, what trump says and does in this area are not within the bounds of what we have traditionally considered normal.
but because this campaign is essentially an endless roar of noise that sounds like a stadium full of people, a clear message could not break through. i know this is going to sound like i'm saying "if only voters could see the truth, they would agree with me". fair critique. i don't know how to square this circle, because i know it's obnoxious to say that. the truth is, i also think trump benefits from people not knowing shit. if it makes you feel any better, i'm not going to persuade anyone and i know that. a big part of my argument is that it's very difficult to persuade people these days. how do you reach them? what messages do they respond to? if anyone knows, it sure as fuck isn't me. this blog is just another voice added to the din. it won't matter.
at least i know that now. i'm no longer a hyper-engaged 20y/o thinking that if i could just say the right thing at the right time to the right person, people will see the world the way i do. the outcome of this election goes into the very large category of things i cannot change. i have to accept that, which is why it's maybe not a bad thing that i'm so very tired and so very numb to this whole experience.
i can't prove whether or not it was meant to be literal when it first was introduced, but when it WAS introduced it was around the time when this website had tons of pro-shoplifting posters and other literal pro-crime shit and it slotted right into that, so i'm gonna reluctantly say it was.
there's a fake definition of politics that people only ever use when discussing art: "existing in a broader cultural and historical context" is the gist of it.
"all art is political" uses this definition.
it's not what that word means and it's very annoying to see it used that way
there's a fake definition of politics that people only ever use when discussing art: "existing in a broader cultural and historical context" is the gist of it.
"all art is political" uses this definition.
it's not what that word means and it's very annoying to see it used that way
