La Necia.

“...and either I'm nobody or I'm a nation.” -Derek Walcott, The Schooner Flight | Marxista | Always reading something | Indifference is the deadweight of history.

[thecrownedgoddess]

I welcome every opinion based on scientific criticism. As to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine; 'Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti [Go on your way, and let the people talk].'

Karl Marx, Preface to the First Edition of Capital Volume 1 (p. 93)

[classicfilmblr]

To Have and Have Not (1944) dir. Howard Hawks

[wexler]

saw this clip on twitter and girl i miss you so much

[tcmparty]

Claude Rains observes Christmas baby Humphrey Bogart playing chess with Paul Henreid on the set of Casablanca

[lostfunzones]

Vintage photo: Rose bush.

[thecrownedgoddess]

Was listening to those gorgeous old-timey love songs like My Girl and I Only Have Eyes For You and was wondering where the leading lady-leading man dynamic – the Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, the "here's looking at you kid," the double entendres and witty banter of it all – has gone. And then I realised...most men can't do that anymore because they don't read. Even beyond the men, it's because as a society we no longer read, isn't it...it's all leading back to the literacy crisis...

[kosmogrl]

going to scotland would fix me I know it

[thecrownedgoddess]

When Tinashe said

"I don't wanna be humble I don't wanna be sweet no more I don't wanna be a good girl I don't wanna be nice, fuck being polite I'm just being real, everybody uptight Don't need validation but it would be nice"

I, as the resident Cassandra, felt that.

[thecrownedgoddess]

Love Island UK fans talking about which couples should or should not win based on whether or not they think they are going to last in earnest is quite funny. After 13 seasons, surely we all know that almost none of them last past 2 months? It's like still believing in Santa after a certain age.

[thecrownedgoddess]

I am the first one to love cancelled plans but there are few things I find worse than being fully dressed and ready and having an appointment cancelled last minute. Now I have to go and do something, even if it's inconsequential, because I'm in that state now lol.

[thecrownedgoddess]

The attempt to merge the proxy war in Ukraine and the US-Israeli war on Iran is incredibly dangerous and cynical but at the same time it would take away all pretence of these “conflicts” being separate entities. It’s been a world war in all but name for a very long time now.

[thecrownedgoddess]

I think a lot of the major tech companies and our fascist tech overlords, bank on the mystification surrounding technology like AI (LLMs) and what these companies like OpenAI and Palantir really do. We are mostly splintering into different factions that are sharply polarised into either unbridled AI/tech optimism and cheerleading, an obvious outgrowth of the Silicon Valley deification since the late 2000s/2010s, or either complete AI rejection which has the better arguments morally which often ends up shutting down any understanding on how the technology works, what these companies do and what they're aiming to achieve, and kind of promotes the opposite of AI-literacy (which would aid in fighting the mass proliferation of it more effectively) to the point where even looking at the word marks you with a kind of moral stain.

The mystification causes both fear and optimism, both of which aid in the capital accumulation and power increase of these companies. They want to be seen as some kind of Lex Luthor character. The reality of the software as is, or the fact that AI sentience/AGI or "the singularity" is not something that is going to be achieved – certainly not in the way they present it with their fearmongering – is a lot more prosaic, but the prosaic reality is in many ways much more terrifying than the obscurantist version they prefer to sell you.

For instance, many American companies have ended up going for Chinese AI tech because it's more intuitive, open access, and cheaper to use. The fearmongering surrounding Deepseek and other Chinese tech like it, and the push for legislation to ban it for 'privacy and security concerns' has great support – in fact, it's pushed hardest – by your Anthropic and OpenAI? This has nothing to do with privacy and security; it's geopolitics and capital accumulation. The concerns surrounding data centres being placed in underserved communities (this goes especially for American companies), the use of these companies' software in imperial wars (it was Palantir's software that apparently targeted the Minab school in the opening salvo of the US-Israel War on Iran), surveillance, and worker exploitation both of content moderators and those mining the raw materials (we mustn't forget that AI isn't magic, it's material and based on extraction and labour) in the global periphery, and the argument becomes less about whether or not writing an email with ChatGPT makes you a bad person, and more about actual material reality and the interaction between the state and industry in expanding the imperialist war machine and its effects on the global working class. It opens up space for a more nuanced discussion that allows us to ask if we can and need to stop AI altogether, if there are alternative uses for it that would benefit the workers in a different mode of production, and how to effectively fight back against the horrors inflicted upon us but most importantly the people of the periphery who are the first to bear the brunt of the genocidal military-industrial complex, and so on.

[thecrownedgoddess]

The point he's making towards the latter part of this video reminds me of the César Vallejo passage I just posted:

"They can all, however, be linked by one common trait: the depletion of the social content of words. The verb is empty. It suffers from an acute and incurable social consumption. Nobody says anything to anybody. The relationship of man to men finds itself interrupted. The vocabulary with which the individual refers to the collective finds itself truncated and mushed before it leaves the mouth of the individual. We are mute, even while mired in incomprehensible verbosity. It’s the confusion of language, arising from the exalted individualism at the base of bourgeois politics and economics. The desires of the untrammeled individual — becoming the richest, the happiest, the dictator of a nation, or the kingpin of oil — have suffused everything in egoism, even words themselves. Our vocabulary drowns in individualism. The word — the most human of all social relations — has thus lost all of its essence and collective attributes."

[thecrownedgoddess]

What are the most striking features of decadence in bourgeois literature? These features have been exposed too exhaustingly to relitigate them here. They can all, however, be linked by one common trait: the depletion of the social content of words. The verb is empty. It suffers from an acute and incurable social consumption. Nobody says anything to anybody. The relationship of man to men finds itself interrupted. The vocabulary with which the individual refers to the collective finds itself truncated and mushed before it leaves the mouth of the individual. We are mute, even while mired in incomprehensible verbosity. It’s the confusion of language, arising from the exalted individualism at the base of bourgeois politics and economics. The desires of the untrammeled individual — becoming the richest, the happiest, the dictator of a nation, or the kingpin of oil — have suffused everything in egoism, even words themselves. Our vocabulary drowns in individualism. The word — the most human of all social relations — has thus lost all of its essence and collective attributes. There is an unexpressed awareness, in everyday life, that we all notice and feel; a social drama of sheer confusion. Nobody understands anybody else. The interests of one speak in a tongue that the interests of another cannot understand. How can the buyer and the seller, the ruler and the subject, the rich and the poor, understand each other? We all also realize that this confusion of language isn’t, and cannot be, a permanent thing, that it must end as soon as possible. We know that in order for it to end, there is but one common solution: justice, the great equalizer, the great coordinator of interests.

César Vallejo, Duel Between Two Literatures

[thecrownedgoddess]

I'm not even deeply against the 'death of the author' or the idea that the artist and the art can somewhat be separated, but the idea that the work of art exists completely independently of the artist – or indeed from the social totality – is really quite a revealingly ideological statement and I think it's untenable when you consider that really nothing can be analysed outside of the social totality and if anything, we are constantly in dialogue and understand our conditions and contexts inform the art that exists, the artist's ideology, and how we interpret it.

[thecrownedgoddess]

They should make a kind of doctor – particularly a GP – who is not a condescending fucking prick to their patients.

[thecrownedgoddess]

I’ve not been watching this season of Love Island UK except through clips, but there’s a Polish girl on there named Julia and watching her is giving me war flashbacks to when I lived in the UK and spent my days navigating (particularly) English people’s group dynamics. What Julia is going through is like a blunt-continental European canon event lmao.

It took a year past being in that environment and one of the only people I was close to (Croatian girl who shared the office but was part of the other lab, which matters cause it proves my point) to straight up tell me it was cause they thought I was too Dutch/blunt/arrogant and direct that they kept finding an issue with me. Not unlike Julia though, I also was the type to rather take the backlash than sit and pretend and not call things out when I saw it. 🤷🏽‍♀️ canon event!!