Sunday!
I brought one book with me. It’s a CISSP book.
It’s a little dry.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
by Jaybird · October 20, 2013
I brought one book with me. It’s a CISSP book.
It’s a little dry.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
Jaybird
Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com
February 16, 2012
May 24, 2020
November 16, 2012
Erik Kain has started his own Substack:
diabolicalΒ is a newsletter/blog hybrid about entertainment and culture with devilishly brilliant commentary by Erik Kain. Itβs also a conversation! Weβll discuss movies, TV shows, music, video games, politics and art and whatever else we fancy.
Freddie deBoer has started his own Substack:
Comment βIβm Freddie deBoer, and if youβre reading this you likely already have an idea of whether you like me and my work or not. Iβm a blogger who has always tried to remain at a distance from the cultures of the internet, media, and politics. Iβd like to think I've mostly succeeded.
I am an overeducated Xennial who started a peculiar kind of media career when I launched a Blogspot blog at the public library in 2008. From there I built up a cult following and a reputation as something of an asshole. I switched to a Wordpress at my own URL in (I think) 2012, then flamed out in spectacular fashion in 2017. Now Iβm trying paid blogging for the first time thanks to Substack reaching out. Along the way I started producing freelance pieces for various publications, eventually writing for some of the bigger newspapers and magazines in the world. You can check out some highlightsΒ here. In 2020 St. Martinβs Press put out my first book,Β The Cult of Smart.Β New YorkΒ magazine named it one of theΒ 10 best books of 2020.
Thomas Frank (author of What's the Matter with Kansas?) writes in Le Monde diplomatique:
It is the βdutyβ of American citizens, President Joe Biden announced in his inaugural address last week, to βdefend the truth and to defeat the liesβ. Much of Bidenβs speech was an unremarkable stringing-together of patriotic platitudes, but this call for a great truth crusade stood out for its audacity. America is, after all, the homeland of the public relations industry, of televangelism, of Madison Avenue, of PT Barnum. Our leading scholars worship at the shrine of post-structuralism; our brightest college graduates go on to work for the CIA; our best newspapers dynamite the barrier between reporting and opinion; our greatest political practitioners are consultants who βspinβ the facts this way or that.
In declaring a national quest for truth, of course, Biden was referring to none of these things. His target was a single man: Donald Trump, the most energetic shit-shoveler ever to occupy the Oval Office.
==============
This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable. A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional elites.
Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and justifies their privilege ... when they say we are in a new cold war against falsehood ... when the news media dumps its neutrality and likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to truth and legitimacy ... when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.
===================
But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the great economic and cultural powers of our time β the masters of Silicon Valley β to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU chief, relates how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they βimagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used againstβ. What these well-meaning liberals didnβt understand, he continued, was that βspeech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like itβs a great weapon to have when youβve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting β especially politically β and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.β
As Glasserβs metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship (via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the authority of the respected... but βliberalβ isnβt one of them.
Read the whole thing.
Comment βThe Rock The Bells family is heartbroken to learn of the passing of Mark βPrince Markie Deeβ Morales earlier today. That voice and his presence can never be replaced. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his loved ones. ππΎπ pic.twitter.com/Tn6wSJ6soq
— Rock The Bells (@RockTheBells) February 18, 2021
PRINCE MARKIE DEE GOD BLESS YOU FOREVER YOU WERE THE REAL BUBBA
— The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) February 19, 2021
Requiescat in pace.
Comment βWhoβs Afraid of Cancel Culture?
February 8, 2021
Citizenship at Leisure In The Ball Pit Republic
February 24, 2021
Thursday Throughput: Texas Power Outages Edition
February 18, 2021
Trump, CPAC, and The Elephant In The Room
March 1, 2021
Why Doesn’t the US Get to Have High Speed Rail?
February 15, 2021
And Thus, The Hydrogen Economy Is (Probably) Born
February 3, 2021
All should be well. Please report any problems you might see.
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, 1913: The World Before the Great War.
Plus I should get my copy of The Goldfinch by the end of next week.Report
I can’t wait to hear what you think of Dissident Gardens!
I’m in the middle, and at one point this week I actually found myself thinking, “I bet New Dealer would like this.”Report
It will probably win out over Bleeding Edge so I will let you know.Report
I read and watched basically nothing this week (save the Duck game) due to my having to build half a keynote workshop from scratch (while I made up the other half on the fly). Looking forward to getting back into Dissident Gardens and Soon I Will Be Invincible this week.
Also hope to finish the first season of Evolution, so I can get back to trying to convince WIll the Evolution is to the Tea Party what Firefly is to libertarians. After that, going to need a new show on On Demand or Netflix to watch when I’m needing to binge.Report
Wait, I thought your stance was that Firefly (which I literally finished watching today) wasn’t to libertarians?Report
My stance was that Firefly wasn’t meant to be a promotion of libertarianism, and that it takes selective cherry picking to see it as a such.
That libertarians can find truths in it is another matter altogether.Report
Yeah, finished Serenity.
Huh. I took libertarian claims to actually be more of the latter than the former. I didn’t take them to be saying that the show as a deliberate promotion of it.Report
Also, though I may have gotten dragged into a Firefly in Vikram’s post, the argument I usually bristle against on this site is the one that Whedon’s body of work is pro-libertarian, as opposed to pro-underdog. (Arguments in the past that I recall include not just Firefly, but Buffy, Angel and Dollhouse.)
He’s just as likely to have a captain of industry or a rich, successful entrepreneur be the heavy as he is a government employee.Report
I agree Tod, especially considering other things I have heard from him. He does not strike me as particularly libertarian. Firefly does appeal to libertarian sentiments, but I do not think it was an attempt to promote the philosophy.Report
The argument that Whedon himself is deliberately libertarian is weak and contradicted by actual evidence. Which, among other reasons, is kind of why I assumed that they were speaking more towards the product having a libertarian bent, rather than libertarianism being the mission.
Libertarians and conservatives don’t, generally speaking, get much art that is deliberately meant to advance their worldview. So they pretty much have to latch on to the Whedons who tell stories that are friendlier to their worldview than others.Report
So I finished watching Firefly today. I am also caught up to season 3 on Homeland. Next up: Burn Notice!Report
Have you seen Serenity yet?Report
Is Firefly good enough to be worth buying ($40 in iTunes in HD, $30 in standard definition)? I’m trying to pick out some things to download before I go in case I get bored some evenings in Haiti. $40 for a half-season of TV is ridiculous, but $30 is teetering on the edge of reasonable.Report
I’d probably get it for $30, but probably not for $40. The special effects are less-than-spectacular (they’re good, but a bit dated) so you wouldn’t be missing too terribly much by going SD.Report
I got the two latest Carl Hiaasens: Chomp, which is a juvenile, and Bad Monkey, which isn’t called that.Report
Read the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy by David Mack.
One of those things that surpasses tie-in fiction and takes on a life of its own.Report
Yeah, I’m watching a bad TV show.
You know you’re watching a bad TV show when the actors start reading the stage directions, instead of the dialogue.
… it’s still nine times better than Enterprise!Report
Finished S1 of The Wire, through some marathon watching over the weekend. Such an entirely, and intentionally, unsatisfying season finale. Abguvat punatrf.
V jnf fher Ohooyrf jnf tbvat gb raq hc qrnq ol gur raq bs gur frnfba, rfcrpvnyyl nsgre ur qrpvqrq gb tb pyrna.
I also watched GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. I am fairly certain I saw an episode or two of GLOW as a kid, but my dad was not an avid follower. I do not remember it in much detail. The documentary paints an interesting picture, and it does not seem overly sensationalized.Report
More Karen Healey, more Elizabeth Knox. Comics (Buffy, Willow, Unwritten). A book by Todd Rose called Square Peg that was great. Bits and pieces. Honestly I’m kind of in a fugue so it’s hard to remember.
Been watching mostly Bab5, but also Rickman and Thompson in some weird poem/play/lunch thing and I just started the venerable (2000) feature Groove.Report