Not a new observation by any means, but people on Reddit are so mean for no reason. Sometimes, I ask questions about various hobbies because you can’t always google everything and I inevitably get rebuked for having the temerity to not already know the answer. Sure, I’m also frequently upset about people online, but I don’t go and let them know about it – that’s just rude.
I need some geopolitical information on Western Sahara. From a quick read, it seems like a simple colonial situation where Morocco acts as a Western proxy against the nationalist Polisario Front. But there’s obviously some other complex factors, like the ambiguous position of the non-Western superpowers. Any informed opinions?
Once again reminding everyone that Politico was bought by Axel Springer three years ago, a German right-wing tabloid company that has support for the USA and Israel as its stated core values. Even if they have nominal editorial independence, they know what their employer wants to hear.
Content warning: Physical health (negative)
I’m undergoing a root canal treatment at the moment and it’s really painful, all in all. I’ve had the 3rd of 5 appointments today, my painkiller has worn off and I can only take one more today, so I’m just suffering mild, but absolutely constant and insistent pain. The worst is when I get a sort of nauseating flashback to the moment when the dentist bored into my nerve. Like, that’s not just a feeling of pain, there’s also the deep discomfort of getting a hole made in your skull. And I’ve never been good at distracting myself, so I’m really hoping everything just clears up by tomorrow.
I’ve got a question for all of you: What’s the best way to run a leftist reading group? And where to start? For context, this is going to be a small number of young people who do not habitually read, so my academic instincts are useless here. Someone suggested reading during the meeting, which is maybe more approachable but I don’t see how would this work logistically (do we read out loud? Do we wait for the slowest reader to finish and then talk?). And I need to suggest a text. Presumably, people would get intimated by Capital, so something introductory with short chapters might be better. Any ideas?
I’ve always wondered why people were so ready to convert. Like, if I was some ancient Roman and some guy came up to me offering a new god that’s even better than the old ones and much easier to worship, I wouldn’t just immediately fall for it. It just seems like a scam.
My favorite memory of the two Pathfinder games, and I mean this unironically, is doing that infamous quest in Kingmaker right near the start where you have to fight swarms. Level 1 combat against enemies immune to weapon damage – you have to actually consider your options and possibly accept turning down the difficulty. That interplay of character options and enemy immunities is, in my opinion, the core gameplay of CRPGs.
I miss him. We could all do with some more hatred for mainstream popular culture. Otherwise, what’s even the point of being a communist?
If I had some time, I’d try and find out where our “common sense” notions of art come from. Like art being subjective, which is taken to mean that it is something like a kaleidoscope where no two people can be sure to see the same thing in it and every statement about it is just based on fleeting, un-shareable impressions. Obviously that’s nonsense, but if you try debating people on the internet over whether something is well-written or if it negotiates a certain theme, they bring out clichés like this. Or the idea that art is produced by an individual in a semi-mystic, almost unconscious act which broods no further analysis or introspection – though just as often you see this as a strawman attributed to an author’s opponents. In any case, I assure you that no notable Romantic ever believed this and that the concept of “genius” has never meant this in any serious author. These are just common sense clichés that come from nowhere and are seemingly everywhere.
I was about to say that this account cannot be real, it’s obviously fake for hitting so many stereotypes and controversies at once, and then I saw that she’s posting videos and everything. Sometimes reality is crueler than our imagination.
I hate you for showing this to me
Yeah, Malcolm Harris is correct that both of these “sides” are terribly unconvincing and unhelpful, while Marxism provides resources for thinking about art as a commodity and as something that resists commodification (dialectics!). I just think that one could press Lorentzen harder on the disparity between the ideals he espouses and his lack of literary and theoretical sophistication.
This is maybe a bit inside baseball, but Christian Lorentzen’s review essay about some recent sociological books about literature production is upsetting me. This is because he’s aiming at the right issue, which is that these books follow a reductive, cynical and capitalist theory of literature under the guise of empiricism, but what he puts up against that is just nostalgia for mediocre post-war “intellectuals” and second-rate romanticism. Like, he states that publishers consume literature instead of producing it (because novels apparently just spring fully-formed from the secret source of writers) – how naive is that! And his whole pose of defending intellectualism from the cynical rationality of career academics rings hollow to me when he’s putting CIA-funded antisemites on a pedestal while writing a Substack on the side. You can’t act like you’re defending literature from the vagaries of our times when your political analysis is that blind. Basically, he’s a smug git and I never want to hear from him again.
There’s a new essay of literary criticism making the rounds. I’m upset about it because I think it’s very bad and I don’t know what to do about that
Once again Substack provides space and publicity for the meanest kind of Internet bigotry. I don’t know why anyone would want their writings to appear next to this trash.
New rule: You don’t get to talk about the deleterious impact of Calvinism if you can’t explain what “sola gratia” means. We’ve got to take at least this one word away from the Internet atheists
Incredible. The future. I will pay 10 billion dollars to replace my company with this picture.
12 o’clock is not early. Check your watch
I wish I loved anything as much as the writer loves quotation marks. So the “anti-imperialists” oppose the “Western world”, namely the “US”, due to “Marcyist” “Campism”. Wow, you really wouldn’t want to write this sentence without those scare quotes!