#matt christman

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sobering how cyclical history is and things said 8 years ago can define the present again accurately.

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[laces-and-jasmine]

Matt Christman has said on a few recent Chapo episodes that the hot, buxom blonde and big hunk are archetypes that are disappearing from the pop culture landscape but I disagree – Sydney Sweeney and Noah Centineo are right there! But then I was thinking about it more and it’s not a bad thing that a podcast host who’s pushing 40 is unaware of today’s baby babes who are in their early-20s.

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Matt Christman, large adult son.

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Matt Christman on pseudo-experience and the ‘Uncut Gems’ death drive

Excerpted from Friday Vibestream: Alpha Sanction, Feb. 5, 2021.

Someone had a long thing in chat just now saying that we're a schizophrenic society because of the divide between our digital and real selves. And I think that's true, but I think it even goes deeper than that, because that is only a proxy for the greater, the deeper divide in the modern self between the chronologically grounded self—i.e., the body in space—and the mental, mind self that is unbounded by space or time. And the Internet is, more than anything, a tool to allow us to spend time in our bodies that is not processed chronologically, and therefore cannot accrue meaning because meaning must adhere to experience. And there is no experience to online. It is a pseudo-experience.

You get mad, and you get angry, and you get horny, and you get scared, but it's essentially your brain tricking you into feeling those feelings. And so what you assign the cause of those feelings is also made up by your brain, which is harder to do when the source of your emotional responses is a material interaction that occurs in a chronological space-time.

I was pretty old when I really got into the Internet and I think that's one of the reasons it wore off for me, because it was never as satisfying as it is for younger people because the contrast between a life that I had had or I imagine I could've had instead of it was greater. Whereas I think for younger people, the internet is taken for granted.

But that doesn't mean that a crack-up is not inevitable. We're in the process of a full social breakdown. But that doesn't necessarily mean the apocalypse or the end of anything. It means people are getting to the end of their particular ropes. The coping mechanisms we've created, they have a fuse. They don't last forever. There's only so much dopamine you can get from a pseudo-existence. And it's different for people, like some people it's longer than others. But everybody gets to a point, and I think we're all getting there.

And I think one of the big reasons that we've had this big explosion in political hysteria in the last year is 'cause of fucking COVID. And it's weird how we've normalized COVID so much that we forget that there's no way that I, anyway, can imagine things like QAnon occurring, the fucking Capitol breach occurring, without a context where our coping mechanisms have been radically reduced. The things we have had historically to allow us to vent, to compensate for the lack within our lives, are sucked in. And if that persists, it's only going to get weirder. I think we're in for weird, weird, weird times. But weird times are when new things emerge, by definition.

And that's something that—it's obviously scary but to me, it's less scary than the narrative that a lot of people have internalized of total social fixedness; of the idea that these categories are unchallengeable. And people have said that I say that, but I just mean that looking through the current structures, that is the conclusion to draw—but that doesn't mean that it's the correct conclusion. ...

The last movie I saw in a theater was Uncut Gems, which we talked about a little bit on the last episode about Trump movies, but I'd like to end here talking about how I couldn't really have picked a more perfect film becuase that movie is about the death drive of American society. I mean, I know it's specifically about, you know, Judaism and stuff and the Jewish experience, but it's part of a broader analysis of a people—Americans—who believe themselves to be eternal beings, but have physical bodies, and who can't reconcile those two things other than by subconsciously seeking death on their preferred terms.

Like the beginning of the movie he's getting the rectal exam and it's actually kind of up in the air, and I actually thought he was going to get a call halfway through that he had cancer. And then he gets the call, "Oh, I don't have cancer." Yet! Oh he doesn't have it now. That doesn't mean in five years he's not going to have it. That doesn't mean in ten he's not going to get it, and he even talks about his family history. He's probably going to get it. Does he want that? Does he want to wait around to fucking get chemo and get sick, the thing that everybody watches their family members go through with horror? Or, do you die on your own terms going out on top. And that is why that movie has a happy ending. He got what he wanted.

But in real life, you can't do that. And one of the reasons we're cracking up is that it's a society of Howie Ratners trying to dictate their end, but you can't know. You can't do it. Because you set it up and it doesn't come because you don't want to die in your conscious mind, and then it doesn't happen, and then you have to keep doing it, you keep doing the same thing, and it drives you into madness. And it's driving us all into madness.

It's especially funny seeing that movie right at the moment where Bernie looked like he might win, you know, before COVID happened. It's like oh, if you could pick a moment, wouldn't that have been the moment? But you don't get to pick the moment. You don't get to be Howie Ratner. He is a classic hero in the sense that he saw the moment, even though he didn't know he was seeking it, and he got his end. He got an end on his own terms.

[alanshemper]

The Politics of a Second Gilded Age

BY MATT KARP, 2/8/21

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Why the Bernie Sanders Campaign Matters

“One of the things you all know in your bones, and certainly something we've talked about a lot on our show, is just how shitty it feels to be alive right now. We all have stuff, we're not, you know, in the worst physical circumstances, but everything just feels hollow, and cynical, and empty. And I really do think that one of the big reasons for that is we all know, deep down inside, there's something wrong with this country, this world...with this fucking social order. We know, deep down, that no humane society would be organized this way. This stuff is just not...if good people of good faith like the people you know in your life got together to create a society right now, they wouldn't make this one.

But, that knowledge sits right next to the message we get every day from our parents, our fucking bosses, from the media, that this devil's bargain we've struck—where you get creature comforts and you get convenience in exchange for precarity, and alienation, and fucking despair, and the steady erosion of the fucking living environment we need to survive—is some sort of choice that we all made, and we all opted for this option; we all opted for the 30 brands of tooth paste that Bernie talked about when he was debating Hillary in 2016.

But we know in our hearts that that's not fucking true. We know that we never asked for this, we never wanted this. But the problem is is that we're all fucking powerless against it. As an individual, what are you supposed to do? Against these massive, world-spanning powers that determine the world you live in. 

And so, you're left in this position of being hyper-aware of the awfulness and the rot of the world around you, coupled with the complete and hyper-specific knowledge of your own inability to do anything about it. And what that does, over time, is that it starts to eat away at you. And honestly—I'm speaking for myself anyway—it makes you start to hate yourself a little bit. You hate yourself for how fucking powerless you are. And more importantly, and even worse, and more insidiously than that, you start to feel complicit in your own misery. You start to feel complicit in the misery of others. You start to blame yourself because why aren't you doing anything, but what's to be done?

And this campaign, and the Bernie Sanders campaign, I swear to god, guys, it's the first moment, this is the first movement that any of us have seen in our living lives that has the promise of bringing a mass—a critical mass—of people to the realization that they aren't alone. That there's such a thing as a common—that there is a common dream of a more humane world that we can fucking make. But, it's because, yes: none of us, by ourselves, can do anything. That's what they tell you every day to keep you where you are. But what the Bernie campaign can tell you—what the Bernie campaign is telling you, and what we're all telling ourselves, what we're all telling each other, what all you fucking canvassers are saying, what people are saying at dinner tables, what people are talking about, what people are saying more and more—they're saying it more and more, folks —is that all of us, together, can do anything.” 

Matt Christman

Chapo Trap House Live From Iowa City: 2/03/20 

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