announcing i’m up for doing crime so I can make some new friends

I remember reading about an outbreak of cholera in the 1800s caused by contaminated water, and the only people in the area that didn’t get sick were the workers at the local brewery because they were getting trashed on alcohol instead of drinking the water.

So beer > water.

This sort of attitude toward art is really common, and I’ve thought about a few different things that might be contributing to it.

For one, in the US at least, basically all of our education in literature prior to college is geared around standardized tests, and these tests need to have straightforward, objective answers (generally multiple choice!). So the questions end up being like, what is the author’s purpose in writing X, or what is the attitude the author has toward issue Y, or what is the contradiction been the author’s points in paragraphs G and H, etc.

I think if this is how you’re taught to think about all literature, it’s not surprising that so many people think about art as a kind of puzzle to decode with a single, objective, correct answer, and that bringing in cultural or political context is somehow cheating.

It’s great that he failed so hard, but it’s worth remembering that lots of conservatives and even a few liberals were willing to go to bat to defend him and his freeze peach only a few years ago. And more than a few prominent conservatives even voiced agreement with his shitty politics and aligned themselves with his ideological project, only to back away later when it was clear the “alt-right” label had become toxic.

At least during the end of the Bush years we got some movies actually willing to say he was bad. How fucked is it that a movie ostensibly critical of Bush-era torture programs goes out of it’s way to absolve Bush?

Let me guess, no mention of John Yoo and the Torture Memos either?

Making excuses for him is somehow even worse than just not mentioning him.

There’s a small but loud subset of the left that’s just like that (see: Jimmy Dore going on Joe Rogan to hype up Ivermectin, or any weirdo on Twitter with a 🌺 in their name).

I guess everyone else moved on and they took over the sub.

it must be so depressing to work in advertising and have to come up with shit like “the delicious power of mayo infinity” all day

either they know how stupid this sounds and they have to do it anyway, which is a normal kind of depressing, or they’ve been poisoned so severely that they actually think it sounds cool, which is way worse

If you’re outside the bubble of lefty Twitter programmers that regularly dunk on our friend Uncle Bob here, you might not know who he is. Here’s a decent explainer.

TLDR; he wrote a book of bad programming advice, loves police, is racist.

Shitty corporate self-help speak. Like, thinking you gotta ‘be a killer’ in your job where you sit in a cubicle and send emails all day.