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The 90s are marked by the same thing the 2010 are

1992 right before Bill Clinton takes office the LA riots

I could be wrong. This could’ve happened in the 80s, but the murder of homosexual designer Gianni Versace

The O.J. Simpson murder trial maybe you don’t think that’s about race

And again, the aids crisis

When you look back at the art made during that period of time what do you see?

#love notes to imaginary friends #rent #jonathan larsen #Spotify

Tick tick….boom

#love notes to imaginary friends #rent #Jonathan Larsen #Spotify

The premise for this national prayer bullshit is that prayer magically creates unity. I’m not denigrating prayer qua prayer, I’m denigrating the bullshit of official governmental recognition of prayer (prayer all alone by itself is also bullshit, but I’m not denigrating it as such except okay yeah now I am; if you accept the science on vaccines, don’t tell me you reject the science on prayer). The people who beat cops to the ground to invade the U.S. Capitol were praying to hang Vice President Mike Pence. Dems say yeah, but at least our prayer isn’t Christian nationalist. Well, it is when you slap National on your prayer breakfasts and prayer days. And your prayer is Christian nationalist when your stated goal is unity through prayer. Why? Because unity is supposed to come from the many, the pluribus, if you will.

April 28: Biden’s decency … Israel warrants warrants … Fetterman + Cruz + Johnson … Biden’s brother …

In fact, pursuing decency or unity will turn your democracy broth to shit right in the tureen. Just as hydrogen bonding to water makes sugar sticky, pursuing unity with your fellow politicians will gum up the works and lead to less unity and less decency. As I’ve noted ad nauseam, that’s what we saw when the prayer people got the run of the place in Guatemala. The prayer movement led to less unity. Less decency. Unity gave us the Iraq War. Decency gave us American torture. The Department of Homeland [sic] Security. Space fucking Force. We would have more unity today, and more people acting with decency, if our Democratic politicians for the last few decades had rejected both and fought tooth and nail against Republican encroachments on liberty, instead of collaborating on them in the name of decency.

#us politics #jonathan larsen

And, of course, to achieve safety, to guarantee safety, you must have order. Law and order. But it’s never really about law and order. Laws, in theory, constrain even the powerful. “Order,” in theory, means keeping sea levels where they are. Means not destroying a third of the buildings in Gaza. “Order” is the marketing team’s branding for “control.” Is Columbia University really devoted to law and order? As the American Association of University Presidents (AAUP) pointed out, according to its own bylaws, Columbia cannot call for a mass deployment of the New York Police Department on campus without approval by a majority of the faculty. That didn’t happen. So Columbia is breaking the rules. So where, then, are the truncheons with which police will beat the disorderly Columbia administrators? It’s not about order, it’s about control. Police were called to UCLA last night, presumably to preserve order. And yet, those police didn’t protect the protesters when counter-protesters showed up to confront them, and violence broke out. Because the police weren’t there to protect everyone. It’s not about order, it’s about control.

President Biden responded to students at a single college taking over a single building. It did not go well.

Whatever useful truth can be found is exaggerated and hyped and conflated and bullshitified with half-truths and untruths until it’s been Frankensteined into something sufficiently approaching a casus belli. The hoary myth of the “outside agitator” — It’s not REALLY our (wealthy) kids at good schools doing this, “outsiders” are responsible. Who these outsiders are, and why they’re not entitled to the same deference our kids are, goes said. They’re the unknown stranger, star most recently of the long-running Stranger Danger. Presumably they’re antifa, whose outlaw leaders still remain at large after they burned down most of America’s cities after police preserved order control by killing George Floyd. And then there’s the bullshit that gets thrown at even real college protesters: That they’re only doing it because they’re kids and it’s fun and it gets them out of class. Well, they do it for several reasons. One, that’s the age when your perspective expands and you question why everything is everything. It’s also the age when you learn that some of the answers to that question are shitty fucking answers. As a guy long removed from that time of his own life, I can tell you that one reason old people are seen as and sometimes are more selfish is that they’ve spent their lifetimes getting beaten down and beaten back every time they pursued positive change on a big scale. So their aperture narrows: What can I do about my life? My circumstances. Not because old people are bad or selfish, but because the self is literally the last circle of territory in which they retain some modicum of control and influence.

President Biden responded to students at a single college taking over a single building. It did not go well.

And there’s another dynamic, which I saw well articulated on Twitter. College kids understand that our society doesn’t actually love kids. Doesn’t actually care about them, let alone the Palestinians trapped in a giant box of war and death and starvation. Kids grew up with active-shooter drills because the government valued the freedom of gun ownership over the freedom of not being killed by guns at your desk in kindergarten. As the Tweet in question said, “a generation who watched as leadership stood by and did nothing while their peers were routinely killed inside k-12 schools with automatic weapons does not believe that anybody in power has their best interests at heart.” And it wasn’t just guns that illuminated our collective priorities for these kids. Corporations actively, successfully pushed to get workers — disproportionately young, poor, and non-white — back into the viral workplace meatgrinder to protect the bottom line with their bodies. We responded to Wall Street crashing the entire world’s economy by bailing out Wall Street. We’ve let Big Oil continue to both Big and, worse, to Oil. The U.S. doesn’t just write checks to arms dealers for Israel, it also writes checks to the rich people destroying our climate. It hands over land — this land is our land! — to oil companies and tells them that, for the purpose of drilling climate-destroying oil, this land is their land. The same Democratic Party leaders who cannot countenance peaceful protesters occupying buildings and campus quads until the semester runs out actively abetted the illegal invasion of another country. And the response to the protests itself also reveals where kids stand on the priority list. All that college administrators had to do was wait a few weeks. All they had to do was not call the cops.

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And it should be easy to tolerate this flagrant lawlessness, because are practiced in it. We do it every minute of every day. Has anyone sent in the cops to stop the unlawful transfer of U.S. weapons to Israel without legally required guarantees that the weapons won’t be used against civilians? Did anyone storm Bush Hall or the Cheney Academic Center for violation of due process? Do we not let oil executives walk free among us and attend parties and accept awards while breaking international treaties on emissions? Tolerating lawlessness, it turns out, is really fucking easy.

#us politics #jonathan larsen #campus protests

When Jonathan Larsen wrote "I don't own emotion, I rent," he absolutely couldn't have foreseen the fact that consumers pretty much own nothing anymore and everything is subscription based but damn

#Jonathan Larsen #z''l #rent