Pongalh
8hr ago
So very sorry to veer off topic but I didn't want to make a top post with this mere inquiry:
So I'm writing a piece on the right and AI art. The Trump administration really seems to love it. (See the Alligator Alcatraz tweets etc.) Does anyone have any information on partisanship, ideology and AI art adoption? Much appreciated!
Pongalh
13hr ago
But complaining that black RAF pilots are "historically inaccurate" makes about as much sense as complaining that if Kermit is supposed to be a frog, he shouldn't look like he's made out of felt.
So there is no distinction between fantasy and a straightforward historical drama for which factual depictions are expected? You don't think an East Asian Cleopatra would be massively distracting and rightly so? Or that a morbidly obese Marilyn Monroe would be a non-starter?
James Bond and LOTR. Both are fantasy.
Pongalh
1d ago
even the racists don't complain about them.
Hm, dunno about that. Not if they're spotted in some street snapshot of an English town posted on X and accompanied by the complaint, "this is not the country I grew up in"
Pongalh
1d ago
Those who have been left behind by the media are not going to be easy to convince that modern TV shows are now worth watching.
The problem is that if you care about production chops and are not content to rewatch stuff you ALREADY like over and over again, what's the alternative? (Apart from the taking high road and just reading and doing carpentry or something instead)
Pongalh
1d ago
The reason is that most woke stuff kills verisimilitude (think fantasy filled with black people in clearly Northern Europe).
I give fantasy stuff huge leeway, because it's fantasy you can do whatever, though a specific trope's repetition (black people lopsidedly in everything) is bad. The real bullshit is something like the London blitz containing black characters.
Pongalh
1d ago
I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit.
Yea, covid and Trust the Science came from people both critical of capitalism and institutional racism but trusting of the combination's experts. One comes to the conclusion that socialism or capitalism, white supremacy and its overcoming, Pfizer would do things the same way. A scientist is a scientist, in Oklahoma or Cuba.
Pongalh
1d ago
There's a shown on Apple TV called Berlin ER or something with a similar hospital context. But that's foreign, so.
It's a weird new problem for those who thought the primary issue with media companies was fealty to big corporate advertising dollars. But that's so twenty years ago. The left's priorities advanced significantly throughout the culture since then. We're in a situation now where the left is far less critical of Big Advertising and its employees because their concerns mirror their own.
Comprehensive, ground-up free speech IS right-wing in that sense. People Power wasn't mean to go that way, though.
Pongalh
1d ago
"libs are right"
The things he agrees with them on don't even need to be stated. It's so baked in we take it for granted now, e.g. moving away from fossil fuels and making electric vehicles in the first place
Pongalh
8d ago
"mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts..."
Do you think DeRemer sees MAGA voters as a mass of white unemployed drug addicts?
You do seem to nail it on the sewing bras etc...
Pongalh
1mo ago
Definitely messier, but that's what happens when you relax rules of expression. I for one like the democratization of ads. So random now, showing Americans' quirky idiosyncrasies in all their guy-or-girl-next-door glory.
Disclosure: I'm a proud producer of what is arguably definitely AI slop. (Check out my cheeky YT shorts channel, in fact: https://youtube.com/@ShockJonesy/shorts)
Pongalh
1mo ago
Part of the problem is that so many of us are former libertarians, who see rent-seeking aka banal corruption everywhere already. So Trump just seems a more blustery iteration of something already underway.
Or, ideology-free corruption > bad ideology operating transparently and on-schedule
Pongalh
1mo ago
Wow, didn't know all that! Thanks.
I actually wrote one piece for Takimag 15 years ago. Just one, after 5 failed submissions to his daughter who managed the site at the time. Something about BART lunacy in SF.
Pongalh
8mo ago
I think it's part of the optimization of everything. Increasingly, if you're about X, you need to have been about X for as long as possible. People who are constantly going from one line of work or lifestyle to another are slipping through the cracks and becoming sort of invisible, on the outside of success looking in. It's associated with being kind of a loser, relative to decades past. Indeed it's kind of a Boomerism, to have worked in e.g. a department store and then one day a guy comes in who makes movies, you hit it off, and a few years later you're firmly ensconced in the movie industry with some success.
Pongalh
9mo ago
A hereditary union (not officially) segregated along racial lines. Sounds right up the alley of some of the folks here, interestingly.
In what ways could these unions be considered EHC? I mean they've clearly managed to get one over on all of us. That takes skill.
I love that the Motte has broached this subject. If you're not familiar with comedian Justin Whitehead, his whole shtick is essentially watching My 600 Pound Life and tearing into the people who appear on it. Not a particularly admirable way to get laughs, but it's a guilty pleasure: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4GLent9Zk6E
He went viral a while ago when a big guy started following him through a Walmart, knew who he was, ending in a confrontation in the parking lot.
Pongalh
10mo ago
My sister likewise has no intention of having kids. She just recently got to the other side of 40, so I'm extremely certain it's a permanent decision.
And indeed she moved to England years ago, has a great job in the arts, married to a great guy. Loves to travel as well.
(I feel like for women, if you don't have a great career, have a family. Men have to have a good career to have a family, otoh.)
Pongalh
11mo ago
Really? The biggest relationship of my life was with a black woman. Reasons to get an "ick" vibe from RH #398
Pongalh
1yr ago
I pulled an Altman with Anna Khachiyan's voice, incidentally: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/1791195409383292992
Pongalh
1yr ago
On the other hand he's anti-Christian, anti-populist and pro-euthanasia.
(His dismissal of the Palestinian cause stems from lacking any bleeding heart Abrahamic universalism.)
Pongalh
1yr ago
Indeed. The movie Blown Away with Jeff Bridges covers some of this territory actually (lol, I know)
Pongalh
1yr ago
I alluded to that same point regarding Israel vs. US interests/American people with a conservative on Twitter named Katya Sedgwick (who I interviewed a while back partially in the topic of the Ukraine proxy war, which we were both against, but October 7th has put us at odds).
The argument of cultural affinity and geopolitical good sense was the answer I got, to differentiate Israel/Jews vs. Somalia/Muslims. Highly questionable in my opinion, both as far as blowback and a Jewish ethnostate not particularly resonating with Americans on the ground nor their interests.
Pongalh
1yr ago
Are Davos people jealous? Are they the 1% or the 10%?
I'm probing as I'm curious how this reconfigures political understanding. So, a right-populism that hates the top 10% virtue-signallers - but only superficially for class-based reasons, as it's really cultural and psychological - and is joined by the top 1% the loser top 10% are jealous of. Which raises the question, why are the top 1% not also virtue signalers? Do you really stop seeing successor ideology antics at that strata?
good idea thank you
More options
Context Copy link