sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Contrapoints is an odd example for trying to paint online left content creators as mainly serving vacant, vibes-based parasocialism. There's a lot of argument construction in her vids, and she posts far too infrequently compared to the people you usually think of as living or dying off of relationship simulacra.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I don't think it is necessarily one or the other. There are still anti-vax rallies every now and then here despite many of us now going months at a time without thinking of COVID any more. It may be conspiratorial, catastrophising, and paranoid, sure, but also a lot these people just like being a part of something, formed a bit of a social group they find meaningful and just want to keep the vibe going (even if it seems a bit anachronistic to the rest of us). The protest is less about the protest qua policy influence than the chance to see all your like-minded friends.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
what do you have with a glass of wine with friends over while dinner finishes cooking? Olives have a pretty indispensable niche as ready-to-go antipasti, regardless of their utility as a briny ingredient.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'd agree just going off the father-by-proxy stuff
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I think she's been building an interesting thesis with Envy/Opulence about the difficult relationship the left has with material success -- both on the aesthetics of wealth and how social mores may have developed around flaunting (and then how those aesthetics are reappropriated and recontextualised). Confronting the extent to which snark about McMansions or Fyre Festival or Trump or what have you is some Nietzschean cope (I may not have wealth, but at least I have taste) among the intellectually left/online is imo a pretty interesting observation, as is extending that to a critique as to how our current online moment is so toxic in general. Someone needed to update Distinction for the very online era and she's well-placed to do so, even if her take is a tad nihilistic.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The NFT hype bubble has seemed like its followed a similar trajectory, just that it's the crypto VCs and devs doing the fleecing rather than the hedge funds. It seems like both prey on a similar kind of conspiratorial young male too (the GME/IMX crossover into the NFT space was pretty much inevitable in this light).
My wife and I watched that LulaRoe MLM documentary a little while back, and, as a part of it was observing that MLMs were overwhelmingly joined by lower-to-middle class women looking for a ticket out of drudgery, she noted that the flip side of that coin was probably all the dodgy investments men go in for. I have to agree, and it's not hard to see parallels there either, especially with the kind of forced, paranoid positivity of the HODLers.
I can't say I'm all that sympathetic. Everyone is a cynical investor making trades on the way up, hyping it up to service their portfolio/downline. Then when it collapses and they're in the red, suddenly everyone is just someone who had a dream whose pure innocence was abused by the real cynical actors somewhere else.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I don't think Ringo or Weber are particularly popular? The current bestselling sci-fi book published in the last year is Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith, per Publishers Weekly (Adam Christopher). Behind that, Becky Chambers and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are shipping the most volume for non-star wars sci-fi properties published in the last year. This hardly seems like there is a lot of volume on new books from 'politically incorrect' white male authors. Closest thing is maybe Ernest Cline with Ready Player Two last year?
As most producers and consumers of fiction now are women, by a fair margin, I don't find this too surprising.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I'm not making any contention about the past demographics of the industry. Tired claims of entryism or institutional capture depend on there being a mismatch against revealed consumer preferences. Said mismatch does not exist.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Here it is copied from the PW letter, units are for the four-week period ending 22-7-30 (I have removed titles not published in the last 12 months):
| Title | Author | Publication Date | Units |
|-------------------------------|----------------------|------------------|--------|
| Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith | Adam Christopher | Jun 2022 | 11,409 |
| A Prayer for the Crown-Shy | Becky Chambers | Jul 2022 | 6,009 |
| Star Wars: Brotherhood | Mike Chen | May 2022 | 5,747 |
| The Daughter of Doctor Moreau | Silvia Moreno-Garcia | Jul 2022 | 5,731 |
PW would be pulling from NPD Bookscan like everyone else, but unfortunately I don't have access to them
I've always found these kind of myth inversions (with respect to the traditional Christian Eden myth) compelling, particularly when they tie a liberatory progressiveness to the gain of knowledge. Stealing forbidden knowledge from the gods and paying an inordinate price for doing so -- that is real sacrifice. The self-sacrifice at the core of the Christian tradition has always felt a little insincere by comparison -- as if one is not really sacrificing, just placing downpayment on their eternal reward. What kind of real sacrifice is positive sum for the sacrificed?
Eve's choice to steal knowledge from the gods can easily be recast as a Promethean act along these lines -- to make away with the fire and to bear whatever punishment comes. To take pride in what could be built with one's own hands, instead of resigning oneself to an easy half-life of providence. The Romanticists felt this keenly (though they often cast Satan as the Promethean rebel instead). Goethe:
Cover thy spacious heavens, Zeus,
With clouds of mist,
And like the boy who lops
The thistles' heads,
Disport with oaks and mountain-peaks;
Yet thou must leave
My earth still standing;
My cottage, too, which was not raised by thee;
Leave me my hearth,
Whose kindly glow
By thee is envied.
It's fairly natural for feminists to pick up the thread of this kind of myth revisionism, which I find similarly compelling, e.g. Vashti or Jezebel, or the Atwood or Emily Wilson take on the Odyssey.
Despite its overwhelming pessimism in other respects, I thought the lone triumphant spark flickering in the heart of Three-Body Problem trilogy was similar -- humanity is comically outmatched by the Gods, but we're stupid or naive or brave enough to spit in their face anyway and to hell with the consequences. I have a lot more respect for an Abraham, who, knowing that God is real and all-powerful, and against whom resistance is truly utterly futile, refuses to kill his son.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
/u/orthoxerox conflates the Campbell monomyth with the originally Aristotle-inspired idea of a flawed character arc (particularly for tragedies, cf. hamartia).
There is something of a "Heroine's Journey" per Murdock (one of Campbell's students) which mainly differs in the emphasis of returning balance and harmony rather than manichean domination. Leaving that aside, the myths Campbell cites in Hero with a Thousand Faces are, well, the myths: Osiris, the Gautama Buddha, Jesus, etc. The Aztec's Tezcatlipoca, Prince Kamar al-Zaman, Jason, Herakles, and so on. The hero is heroic, if they even have flaws they are not particularly relevant to the plot. Similarly, Campbell-inspired fiction hardly has the character flaw as a central pivot. Luke Skywalker doesn't have any plot-relevant character flaws -- he's a bit whiny and grows up, but he doesn't suffer because of his immaturity. It's only until later in the series that an added dimension about overcoming cyclic revenge is thrown in.
The idea that compelling protagonists absolutely must overcome a personal flaw to succeed in their larger struggle (i.e. have a 'character arc') is a more modern thing. It is particularly ironic to criticise contemporary media for having insufficiently flawed protagonists compared to monomythic heroes, accordingly. Overpowered, morally simple protagonists are hardly a new invention. Stuff like the "hero must have a tragic backstory" is not monomythic or Campbellian.
With that out of the way, it's not clear to me that many of the new female-led disney/pixar princess fare (e.g. Frozen, Inside Out) lacks this typical character arc:
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Frozen has a strong character arc for Anna, whose childish infatuations sets up the nation for betrayal. Elsa's 'let it go' moment isn't emancipatory an exhibition of selfishness, and her abdication damns her nation to endless winter. The resolution of the plot is tied to overcoming these flaws.
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In Inside Out, Riley isn't the protagonist. Joy is, and she's an insecure control freak whose insistence that everything reflects her preferences precipitates the slide into depression.
But even if they lack plot-relevant flaws, then that doesn't necessarily mean they are narratively not worthwhile. Moana is much more of a Campbell hero because she isn't really that flawed. Would the Lord of the Rings be better if Frodo's struggle with the influence of the ring was intertwined with being bullied or something, and his narrative success was dependent on reconciling himself with that?
sansampersamp
1yr ago
The perennial failure mode of outgroup criticism is that outgroup homogeneity biases paint internal variation in views as a source of self-contradiction (or, ironically, motte/bailey). This is made easier with handwavey terms like 'critical theory' -- whose theory? The Freud-obsessed and Nazi-fleeing Frankfurt school? Habermas, who railed against postmodernity saying “Whoever transposes the radical critique of reason into the domain of rhetoric in order to blunt the paradox of self-referentiality, also dulls the sword of the critique of reason itself”? Or does critical theory here denote Foucault or Derrida or D&G that were fully on the deconstruction train? Bourdieu (a notably politically active sociologist) commonly gets looped in a kind of 'critical sociologist' but regards the school as out of touch at best:
I've always had a pretty ambivalent relationship with the Frankfurt School: the affinities between us are clear, and yet I felt a certain irritation when faced with the aristocratic demeanor of that totalizing critique which retained all the features of grand theory, doubtless so as not to get its hands dirty in the kitchens of empirical research.
Or oneiric adolescents at worst. Or is critical theory that of people like bell hooks or Kimberle Crenshaw, who both obviously make no bones about their work having emancipatory intent while embracing the postmodern label? Is their embrace of deconstruction taken to the conclusion of abandoning empiric truth altogether, or is theorising the construction of certain social views more important to those who regard those views as morally suspect?
While it is fun to see Chomsky flounder before Foucault (who apocryphally was paid in weed for this engagement), this should hardly be taken as evidence for a reflexive "blind spot" in whatever critical theory denotes. Quite the opposite, the is no end to this particular, acrimonious ouroboros.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
If I were writing a LOTR prequel show and had "don't upset the fans" sticky-noted to my monitor, delving into what Tolkien actually had planned for is probably going to be my bible (over fealty to "are we correctly preserving the divine feminine" etc).
Funnily, the Sarah Connors and Ellen Ripleys [1] are more of an 80s-90s picture of "strong female characters", though that view gets regurgitated by the (mostly male) reddit/IMDb film culture -- usually to put down a female lead lauded as strong that may come off as too vulnerable or indirect or reliant on others. There is certainly a painful way to write these characters, most commonly seen in Disney's attempts to discharge its guilt in its live-action remakes [2], but most prestige screenwriting has much better developed and complex view of what strong female characters can be now, particularly in TV and four-quad, family media.
Yeoh's leading role in Everything Everywhere All at Once is probably one of the best characters and is interesting as a direct subversion of the strong female action star. She is given the capability for extreme violence, to shed the family she resents for true independence, and to live a thousand lives where she is successful in all the ways she wished for -- but it doesn't bring any success. She succeeds when she fully embraces the typically feminine virtue of kindness that she finally recognises as expressed, purely, vulnerably, bravely in her husband.
[1] For Alien, at least. In Aliens Ripley's character is more genuinely feminine-coded with both her and the big bad xeno cast as conflicting mother roles.
[2] An issue more of competing interests between fidelity and addressing problematic elements than anything -- either shrug and replicate it or go full on with the inversion. If Cinderella is criticised for being a bit flat and without agency, it'd be a more fun movie to make her and the prince a bit dim but destined for happiness if the godmother can only pull it all off against the odds.
Art and artists went through a similar crisis with the advent of photography -- what does it mean for technical skill when you can replicate a master's work with the click of a button. Art evolved, new categories developed and so on. The role of the artisan in art has been a bit contingent for ages, accordingly. It's not like Ai Weiwei welded all those bikes together himself, or that the interesting bit about Comedian was the subtle technique in its execution. Artists will come out the other side of this as they came out from photography -- much changed, and with new debates and reflexivity. (One interesting example is to compare paintings of water, ripples on streams etc, before and after photography revealed exactly how light played on and through the ever-changing surfaces).
I, for one am keenly anticipating the advent of the AI equivalent of photorealism -- replicating AI-generated aesthetic tells in the manual medium.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Straightforwardly expressed by Weber, a basic necessity for a state:
A compulsory political association with continuous operations (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb) will be called a ‘state’ insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force [Zwanges] in the enforcement of its order. Social action, especially the actions of an association [organized action; Verbandshandeln], will be spoken of as ‘politically oriented’ to the extent in which [if; dann und insoweit] it aims at exerting influence on the leadership [government; Leitung] of a political association [organization; Verbandes]; especially at the appropriation, expropriation, redistribution or allocation of the powers of government [Regierungsgewalten].
sansampersamp
1yr ago
We had photographers, and then later we had photorealistic painters. Photorealism is an artistic reaction to photography.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
"Technology displaces workers" is not a new thing or a very controversial prediction that I am aware of anyone on the other side of. The contentious prediction is that AI would create structural persistent unemployment effects across the entire economy which every prior technological paradigm shift has yet failed to do. A few commission artists having to find jobs elsewhere in the service sector won't be evidence for that, nor would they really be the first to be impacted by AI in general (most translation work is now done by deep learning models, for example -- similar to AI art, a human in the loop is only necessary when the requirements are particularly complex or the quality demanded exceeds some nominal bar).
sansampersamp
1yr ago
It's a bit weird tbh to mention US aid to Israel without mentioning the Camp David Accords, since the ongoing aid was essentially the cost of brokering peace between Israel and Egypt (who similarly is the recipient of 1.3B in military subsidies a year). The Accords were a massive, historic achievement, fracturing the Arab bloc and bringing Egypt back into an uneasy harmony with the West, after Suez threatened them being a fixture of the Soviet sphere. The aid sent to Israel and Egypt is of little consequence for what it has bought. Mearsheimer, of course, is too much of a natural contrarian to recognise that though, as we can also see in his dim opposition to Western involvement in the Ukraine crisis (despite it being a course of action that is almost expressly prescribed by the offensive realism he put his name to).
It was a very well-executed movie, probably the best action movie (in a platonic sense) since Fury Road, notably another 80s revival. The plot is straightforward and functional, yes, but complex, political plots with twists and turns and grey villains and sociopolitical commentary have been in vogue over the last 20 years. A reaction against that towards simple plots that uses a strong emotional core and characters to hang the action is unsurprising, as is that being tied up in our current nostalgia moment. This is a subset of, but not strictly equivalent to the IP mining that is also going -- Star Wars reboots are part of this nostalgia moment, the Marvel empire is not, while Stranger Things is an (early) part of the former but not the latter. Within these 80s nostalgia plays, much of it has been pretty terrible (Ghostbusters, Star Wars, etc) but a few have been quite good (Maverick, Mad Max, Karate Kid). The lack of a political context or complex villain (the enemy given as minimal detail as possible) is a deliberate choice to not detract from the emotional conflicts in the film and the characters' struggles.
With the success of Maverick, I'd expect to see more minimal, character-centric action movies, and dogfighting films in particular (shown to be very underserved). More scenes where the hero returns victorious to cheering crowds, more nondescript villains.
I think a potentially unremarked-upon aspect of the film I appreciate is the tone it's saturated with -- it's more mature than the original without thinking that mature necessarily means dark, or tortured, or politically intricate. Where the former was testosterone and surface-level id played for face value, there's a world-weariness to the sequel. Maverick's tentatively rekindled relationship with Jennifer Connolly's character plays out the same kind of nostalgia -- real, bittersweet wistfulness nostalgia, not 'remember AT-STs' -- that suffuses the whole film. The characters feel deeply bound by their history in a way many other reboots completely fail to emulate. What cockiness was just a sharp expression of young competition is now just a wry, self-aware habit. Maverick can't be anything else, the only difference is now he knows it.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
It's difficult for me to think of a lower status take than consternation about, say, the casting decisions in the Little Mermaid remake. There's a few layers to that -- the content is for children, and these live action remakes are kind of shameful to have any investment in even before getting to the politics that is easily read as a kind of adolescent, race-fragile myopia.
With low-status, I mean something a little more subtle than just oppositional to the general social mores that might define my own social circle (or how I might ascribe that to a kind of cosmopolitan hegemony writ large). There are plenty of subcultures which define themselves oppositional to the dominant culture without degrading themselves in the process. There are orthogonal axes here that signal a kind of noble worthwhileness outside simple questions of alignment, and these takes seem to me to naturally occupy whatever the distal pole of magnanimity and taste is.
The ensuing conversations can accordingly be less of a debate and more of a slightly embarrassing condescension as if one is explaining social niceties to a child -- not a particularly productive frame for bringing others to one's worldview. What can be read as conciliation or reluctance to gore sacred cows, from one side, may simply be efforts to find tactful ways to bring an embarrassing conversation back to a kind of civility.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Honestly thinking you can opt out of status games, or that obstinate refusal to 'play' doesn't impact how you and your arguments are perceived, is just cope. There's an autistic tendency to conflate a social illiteracy with the kind of practiced sprezzatura that seems effortless on the surface level, or writing off deviations from the norm (a real and valuable thing -- see the 'basic' sneer) as essentially the same.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I think the worst attempts to 'write to the fans' with these resurrections assume that the in-universe attitudes about the characters need to sync up with the idolatrous attitudes of the worst elements of the fan culture. Cobra Kai did a good job of running against this, where the plucky kid who overcame the odds to win the Karate competition grows up to be a card dealer that won some high-school karate competitions and still kind of runs off that high. Have the courage to let beloved characters be a bit pathetic.
In the interest of not over-indexing on Hitler's downfall, what are some other slow but inexorable military defeats that failed to pierce the epistemic closure of leadership until the very end?
I think partially complicating the narrative is that the Russian fantasy of a well-equipped and organised military, of a fractured and compromised Ukraine that would welcome them as liberators and turn against Zelenskyy, and of a weak Western alliance, has already been incontrovertibly destroyed. There are certainly bad ways to react to that which would retain a kind of disconnect -- and the purges of the Siloviki may well result in more fear than more clarity -- but the knowledge that you have already got it very wrong once still remains. What would really be that different about Ukraine liberating Kherson or Lysychansk or Donetsk compared to that first disastrous collision with reality?
I'm not convinced Putin does have a particularly sunny outlook, accordingly, though I'm sure significant issues with carrying bad news accurately and objectively up the C2 chain remain. Instead of one big epistemic collapse, where eschatological hopes pinned on a coup de main get transferred to gradual territory gains, to hopes of European collapse of resolve in the winter (while weaning off looks more and more realistic) until no more transference is possible, an alternative and perhaps more likely view is that however bleak the coming year is for Russia, leaving humiliated with nothing is a far bleaker alternative to Putin. The looming collapse of CSTO as a bloc orbiting Russia shows how dire Russia's credibility is. Hence the current moves to consolidate notional gains -- not militarily, but within his own domestic political sphere. It's unlikely to work, but sometimes there are just no better options.
I wouldn't think either of those books are really that suitable. Dune is a bit pulpy and is on the fantasy side of sci-fi that uses technological premises to justify cool fights and exotic intrigues. Sci-fi that is more rewarding for in-class exploration focuses more on the social and philosophical aspects, imo. Blood Meridian is just far too bloodthirsty.
An English curriculum's canon wants do a few things (ideally all in the same book):
Introduce readers to culturally 'important' texts without which they would lack important context for a lot of other media
Exhibit technical expression in plot, prose style, tone, characterisation, and other unique devices, etc. that is legible enough to be useful as a tool to discuss these elements and their execution
Provoke the reader to consider broader ideas they may not have considered before
Actually hold a student's interest
Some texts hit on all of these points very well, which is why they're a mainstay in schools: Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Steinbeck's stuff, for example. You can also see the failure modes of some curriculums in trying to pursue one point at the expense of all others (it is easy to imagine someone fixated on the first point wanting to teach 12-year-olds Chaucer or the second point wanting to teach Joyce or Calvino without care for student interest, or conversely erring in the other direction and serving up the shallow YA lit of the day).
I think showing a range of techniques and big ideas is more important in the limited time you have, so my ideal English Curriculum would be heavily weighted towards shorter stories that could be consumed and dissected in a week or even a single lesson. Calvino is a lot more palatable when writing his cosmicomics, for example (the Distance of the Moon is keenly stylistic, heartbreaking, and poses interesting questions about sci-fi as a genre). DFW's Incarnations of Dead Children has a frenetic, heart-in-mouth pacing that deserves close attention (and god forbid you propose 8th graders read Infinite Jest). The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is both an important cultural touchstone and provokes questions that young readers latch onto hard, and it can be consumed in a half-hour. The Yellow Wallpaper, Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, maybe some of Saramago's absurdist stuff would also be on my ideal list.
(The other nice thing about short stories is that I can link to most of these online, and the short length is less intimidating for even adult readers to dive in and get something out of them)
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