#1841
[account deactivated]
#1842
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: ~

cars posted:

Deadwood is by far the best TV show ever to revitalize a confessed child molester's career
#1843
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
im not going to watch the deadwood movie because i suspect it is an conspiratorial effort to get me to enjoy it. not falling for that
#1844
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I was watching a bit of Chernobyl which is a harrowing but interesting look at the orderly and rapid Soviet response to a major disaster in stark contrast to the neglectful American regime after recent disasters, including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and hurricanes Katrina, Irma and Maria.
#1845
Post rating: ~

cars posted:

Deadwood is by far the best TV show ever to revitalize a confessed child molester's career



wait who are you talking about

#1846
UNUSUALY COOL
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sovnarkoman posted:

cars posted:

Deadwood is by far the best TV show ever to revitalize a confessed child molester's career

wait who are you talking about



#1847
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I couldn't remember his name so I went to the Wikipedia entry for Beetlejuice, found him, clicked on his entry and then saw "legal troubles" listed in the table of contents. Oh dear. I will now scroll down
#1848
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Update: It's true
#1849
[account deactivated]
#1850
Post rating: +

Fayafi posted:

wait Deadwood is a real place and the characters were real people lol


Yeah it's a tourist trap now, they reenact famous shootings. It's very amerikkkan.

#1851
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#1852
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New black mirror sucked. They need to go back to making episodes featuring actors looking like irl politicians being forced to fuck pigs.
#1853
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i briefly overheard some of the episode where the pop star is an alarm clock or something, really twisted through the looking glass stuff
#1854
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tWiSTeD just like the rhizzone
#1855
UNUSUALY COOL
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I haven't seen the new Black Mirror but I bet it's actually good.
#1856
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last night i rewatched the 1974 british television play pendas fen and its a curious drama in which a snotty young tory comes of age as a result of a sort of vision quest in which he encounters an angel, a demon, penda the last pagan king of england, sir edward elgar and also manicheanism, i am always weary of anything that claims the english nation is actually woke and radical when you scratch beneath the surface but its still an interesting thing to watch with your eyes
#1857
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toutvabien posted:

My Brothers and Sisters in the North was a heartwarming doc



finally got around to watching this.

while it's cool to see how well Pyongyang is doing due to so many resources being poured into it i can't help but feel other regions of the country are being neglected to some degree.

obviously basic needs like food, healthcare, housing, education, employment, etc. come first (which the DPRK seems to be doing) but you'd think quality infrastructure would be pretty high up there too.



is this a sanctions issue or misaligned priorities?

#1858
Post rating: ~

Synergy posted:

toutvabien posted:

My Brothers and Sisters in the North was a heartwarming doc

finally got around to watching this.

while it's cool to see how well Pyongyang is doing due to so many resources being poured into it i can't help but feel other regions of the country are being neglected to some degree.

obviously basic needs like food, healthcare, housing, education, employment, etc. come first (which the DPRK seems to be doing) but you'd think quality infrastructure would be pretty high up there too.



is this a sanctions issue or misaligned priorities?



maybe citizens in the dprk are just rad bikers, i'd like to think so

#1859
Post rating: +
concerning chernobyl

#1860
Post rating: +

Synergy posted:

while it's cool to see how well Pyongyang is doing due to so many resources being poured into it i can't help but feel other regions of the country are being neglected to some degree.

obviously basic needs like food, healthcare, housing, education, employment, etc. come first (which the DPRK seems to be doing) but you'd think quality infrastructure would be pretty high up there too.

is this a sanctions issue or misaligned priorities?


my personal impression is that there are some seriously questionable priorities, yeah, but the sanctions are inexcusable and demonic and undeniably the root of the country's problems

#1861
UNUSUALY COOL
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There's a special moment in Brass Eye's life where David Cann is counseling a girl to sleep with her geography teacher for drug money, and there's a lot of creepy silence and close ups on her fidgeting nervously and that's where black mirrors come from.
#1862
Post rating: +
i genuinely don't think black mirror is any worse than it ever was i just think people are tired of its shit like they got with banksy
#1863
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
i think Stewart Lee could appreciate that when you scroll down his Wikipedia page, you might pause accidentally over the term "ulcerative colitis" so that Wikipedia automatically displays a preview image of an ulcerated colon
#1864
Post rating: ~
i am very jealous of anyone going to the date on his upcoming tour when they're also screening the brass eye outtakes compilation 'oxide ghosts' (stew is working on a postpunk documentary with the brass eye director and it's a fundraiser for that i think). that thing is only ever screened live and i doubt it will ever leave the UK. neither does stew and im kind of sore about that too
#1865
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cars posted:

I haven't seen the new Black Mirror but I bet it's actually good.


it was okay. not the best season but it had its moments.

#1866
[account deactivated]
#1867
Post rating: +
#1868
UNUSUALY COOL
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raptornomics posted:


#1869
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
I watched Quatermass and the Pit, a thing that Charlie Brooker likes a lot, and when I read about it I thought it would be bad anyway but it was good.



Quatermass and the Pit is about the LTE finding fossils of human ancestors in the 1950s while digging for a new station, then a buried rocket nearby. Everyone's afraid it's an unexploded Nazi bomb like in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Quatermass checks it out and learns that people in the area have reported seeing weird phantoms for centuries, and they match the appearance of the remains near the rocket. The government tries to drill into the rocket and people around the drill start going crazy and seeing things that aren't there. When they finally open it up, there are bizarre alien-looking corpses inside. Quatermass uses a science-fiction device and a medium to view the hallucinations and decides that the aliens are Martians, that Mars supported intelligent life five million years ago and that its natives came to the ancient British Isles to mess with human evolution and make people into psychological & ideological clones of themselves.

At this point in the series there are two experts with different theories. There's Breen, a troop who recently became Quatermass's boss over Quatermass's objections (Quatermass is a rocket scientist); he says the whole thing is some sort of leftover German weapon designed to mess with virtuous British resolve. Then there's Quatermass, the hero; he reports that the visions show the Martians to have been genocidal racist eugenicists, and says they've imprinted that into the origin of Europeans, including supposedly good upstanding native British people, and now that the truth has been dug up again, the alien device is probably going to switch-on the ur-Nazis hidden inside British brains and begin ethnically cleansing everyone who's too foreign or impure to be part of the Nazi group mind.

Again, Charlie Brooker likes this series so you can guess who ends up being right about the relationship between Nazi ideology and British minds.

An interesting thing I found out while reading about it is that Nigel Kneale, the guy who came up with Quatermass and wrote Quatermass and the Pit about the Notting Hill riots, wanted to go back and do a follow-up series in the 1990s called Quatermass and the Third Reich. It would show that Quatermass became a rocket scientist because as a young man, Quatermass's drive to be on the cutting edge of aerospace ended up with him working with Wernher von Braun in 1930s Germany. Eventually Quatermass would realize how badly he'd fucked up, and he'd Schindler's List someone out of the Reich with him when he flipped back to try and atone for his crimes in some small way. Unsurprisingly, to me, Kneale didn't succeed at getting Quatermass and the Third Reich made by the British public broadcasters he'd worked with before.

Regardless, Kneale felt compelled to explain how the very British science-hero of his serials could have been a rocket scientist in his home country in the 1950s without being complicit in Operation Paperclip and London's own Operation Surgeon, which had become big news in the 1990s as the Cold War drew to a close. And Kneale decided, Well, Quatermass was British, and he was already a rocket scientist at the dawn of the Space Age, so he probably was pals with Nazis, wasn't he? And more than...? I kind of admire that⁠—not just the decision, but that Kneale asked himself the question in the first place.

There's an almost compulsive tendency among a certain school of science-fiction writer, people like Kim Stanley Robinson, Gene Wolfe or James Blish, to subject their work to scrutiny that hews as close to the realities of history as they can manage. It doesn't line up 1-to-1 with "hard" science fiction writers, in the sense of science fiction that tries to derive its fantastic elements directly from real-world bourgeois science in believable ways. Plenty of "hard" sci-fi writers don't even try to get the rest of their history correct, while on the other hand, you have someone like Kneale, who does seem to be part of that school of historically-based self-critique, even though Quatermass and the Pit involves a paleontologist casually inventing a telepathic movie projector.

I'm not sure if the tension in Quatermass and the Pit, between Breen as a missile troop put in charge of the British "space" program and Quatermass as a scientist who did shit he won't talk about during WWII but now hates Breen and everything he stands for, represents anything substantial in Great Britain's history beyond the sort of liberal-intellectual guilt Sartre lampooned in Critique of Dialectical Reason. But it's kind of neat that the guy who came up with the conflict between those two characters spent some time over the years thinking about where it might have come from within the story, and his conclusion was, Quatermass knows there's a Nazi inside every limey better than anyone, because at one point, Quatermass was both.
#1870
Post rating: +
I read a book instead of watching the dem debates
#1871
[account deactivated]
#1872
Poronto
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there were some dem debates and i also ignored them. the butt mam and the beat man and the prada wearing devil and the other 17 NPCs are as nothing to me
#1873
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from the fifteen minutes I watched I can say that the only thing you missed was beto o'rourke speaking spanish, unprompted, for half of his opening statement. that was funny
#1874
Poronto
Post rating: +
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jyGsKOzEVE
#1875
Poronto
Post rating: ~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jyGsKOzEVE
#1876
Post rating: +
I was unlucky enough to watch the debate for social reasons. The only notable thing is that people watch it in the way they watch wrestling: they know it's fake but they enjoy being part of the production. Policy doesn't matter, only the effort that went into the illusion, metadiscussion of who came off better/who won to the imaginary masses not in the know (the subject supposed to believe in psychoanalytic terms), and the pleasure of the technical aspects of the illusion: who spoke the most, who manipulated the format to get the best soundclips/memes/gifs, who spooked the fivethirtyeight market, etc. None of this is new, it was the same with Hillary.

Liberals will learn the same lesson again which is that while they wish politics was like wrestling, completely metafuctional and hyperreal without any reference to actual life which is the business of technocrats and the whims of the market, what they are playing is closer to fantasy football. Being shocked Trump won is like being shocked the Patriots won even though in my fantasy football statistical model it was mathematically impossible. We're not just dealing with delusion but a fundamentally different concept of reality; if only most people would read Baudrillard and stop thinking politics is supposed to have referent to some signified we could have the best Wrestlemania ever.

E: it's also notable that this is how we interact with all media today, wrestling was the model for the "cinematic universes" which are entirely self-referential and rise or fall based on their affective resonance with the "fans." supermechagodzilla has years of fucking with people over on SA about this, I defer to him about cinema.

EE: though the only relationship left to the Real left is impotent negation, such as conservatives who attempted to engage with the Real of the NFL through a failed boycott or the various social media amplified prayers to Disney over Star Wars, cultural relatives of Brexit and Trump.

Edited by babyhueypnewton ()

#1877
Post rating: +
Though there is no such thing as pure ideology, if pushed on this point liberals will claim that policy would matter of not for Trump, and that we must support the candidate who can deal with Trump's non-substantive attacks and media manipulation with our own media savvy candidate. Trump is obviously the big Other who gives the entire system of self-refentiality grounding and avoids the existential terror of the Real that lies behind the structure of the liberal unconscious: the Real of political economy which Trump cannot solve but he brings up, like the joke in Freud which accidentally speaks the truth against itself and must be repressed at all costs.
#1878
[account deactivated]
#1879
Post rating: +
Yeah the psychoanalysis stuff is mostly for fun, your explanation is obviously the one that matters. Good post. btw dunno if people are subscribed to "imperialism today" on facebook which is Tony Norfield's group but there was a good discussion of Britain between John Smith and others based on his latest from mronline

https://mronline.org/2019/06/24/brexit-imperialist-britain-faces-existential-crisis/

I'd link the discussion but I don't know how sorry. Though it's pretty much what you'd expect, nothing we haven't discussed here.

E: no I liked it 😥
#1880
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toyotathon posted:

nvm this wasn't really thought thru



it was a good post toyotathon!