Opinions, art, debate
The moment Trump found the energy to say something half-tough in the direction of Russians, they immediately started weaseling and explaining themselves:
Will any lesson finally be learned from this?
Absolutely not because it never is.
Isn’t this curious? It’s the white people in NYC who want Mamdani. Blacks and Hispanics clearly don’t:
The guy is a prattling, clinical moron. People of NYC are so incomprehensible to me it’s like they are aliens.
This is a pretty standard women’s mystery, and as all novels in the genre, this book aims at looking at some anxiety-inducing issue that matters to women. The mystery itself is of middling quality but that’s beyond the point. Such books are playpens of sorts where women can explore things that worry them.
Beautiful Ugly explores one of the most worrisome concerns for women, which is what happens if they are prevented from having children. Most crucially, what if they are prevented from it by their husbands? The husband is a figure that provides income and the sense of being desired. This makes him centrally important. But what if he at the same time won’t let you have children? Beautiful Ugly imaginatively punishes such a husband and tries to offer a scenario where his good qualities can be retained and the bad ones are exorcised.
This is a British novel, and these days it means that there will be two kinds of scarcity dominating such a book. A scarcity of housing and a scarcity of children. This novel has both. It’s entertaining and it makes an unwitting mockery of what feminism has become.
I understand that Cuomo is repulsive, but this dude? Seriously? A chirping, prattling airhead bimbo guy?
I need to remember that when people ask, “so what are your plans?”, the answer they expect does not begin with, “I’m working on a book titled Neoliberal Love and I’m currently on the last novel I’m analyzing…”
What are you going to do with these people?
We watched the kids’ Pixar movie Elio, and among the human characters almost nobody is white. There’s one white boy who is a bully and one disheveled mad scientist. Everybody else, including at the airspace base, is non-white.
Where did all the white people go? There’s no explanation. This is something that simply is.
The dumbing down of the SAT proceeds apace:
They shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage.
This resulted in the elimination of significant portions of SAT’s previously used reading material, including “passages in the U.S. founding documents/Great Global Conversation subject area,” because of their “extended length.” Nevertheless, the College Board takes the view that the rigor of the Reading and Writing segment is unchanged. They claim in the assessment framework that the eliminated reading passages are “not an essential prerequisite for college” and that the new, shorter content helps “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”The SAT’s Trust Fall
Please look at the preceding post and tell me what other consequences of what we saw in that video there could be. The children of the people in that video won’t have a native language. They will not be able to read texts of any complexity. They will not be able to understand figurative language and read fiction.
Remember the student who couldn’t understand a short story title? The story began with the words “Carlitos loved the United States and had a huge American flag in his room.” The story was titled “Stars and Stripes.” The student kept insisting that the story title was about nature because she sincerely couldn’t connect the title and the first sentence. Even after prompts such as, “what does the American flag look like? How can you connect this to the story title?” she couldn’t answer.
Many people look at the watermelon video and see convenient devices that efficiently move the watermelons and can be shelved until next time when all watermelons are moved. But these are human beings with all the human complexities and needs. You tear them out of their cultural, familial, linguistic, and geographic context at a great and terrible cost.
And please, please don’t adduce arguments about mass migration a hundred years ago. It’s embarrassing to say such things. Human subjectivity changed dramatically since then. We now live in a world that demands enormously more from us cognitively than at any previous time. And we respond to this challenge by destroying the capacity of millions of people to develop the cognition that can grapple with this growing complexity.
We are crippling these people and their children because it’s convenient to have them cheaply move watermelons. How can this possibly be a good thing?
It’s 2025. There are self-driving cars. This all was automated a long time ago everywhere where slave labor was not allowed.
What’s happening in this video is deeply immoral. The people in it have abandoned their families, friends, communities, their culture and their language because some absolute dick prefers to exploit them rather than automate. Let’s not be on the side of the exploitative dick.
The erosion of shared culture – religion, ritual, myth – has left the modern subject increasingly alone with their mortality. In the absence of shared symbolic containers, death anxiety becomes unmediated. Without cultural meaning systems to metabolise death anxiety, we see a rise in pseudo-substitutes: performative identity, health obsession, productivity as virtue. These offer no real containment – just distraction.
@BrightonPsych
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