Ironicwarcriminal posted:
Los Angeles has earnt it’s own self-obsession because it truly, genuinely is one of the engines of the world’s mass psychosis

yeah this city is a black hole of artifice & simulacrum, a void of the spectacle, a gaping sore of violence and meaninglessness and joyless mechanical sex performed under the camera's stern eye, a howling emptiness that is slowly sucking in the rest of the planet, a place that pretends to be everything and itself is nothing, and it owns

stegosaurus posted:

deadken posted:

getfiscal posted:

deadken posted:
for spring break im taking a road trip through mexico, im going to die lol

yeah probably safer to stay in a low-crime area like los fucking angeles *rolling eyes so hard*

in westwood it makes local news if someone uses a counterfeit note, the reason its so hard to go anywhere from here is ecause it also keeps the rest of los angeles from getting in

my new bike route to work takes me through the Rough Part of Town and its funny, they adopt the exact opposite approach here. the entire area is surrounded by huge freeways and there are maybe eight road exits total. some of them are pretty large but still.

isnt it detroit where they have massive fortified freeways going from the cbd to the wealthy suburbs with concrete walls so nobody has to look at the ghettoes inbetween. lol. a friend studying geography at ucla told me that the department faculty is almost uniformly marxist, it makes sense because these guys build their career on studying the actual effects of capitalist economics.

deadken posted:

cities are fascinating because humans are the only organisms to consciously and deliberately create their own environments, and then we struggle to adapt to them. the rats, the foxes, the coyotes... they are perfectly at ease in cities, only we are alienated by them, we built them but they are not really ours

deadken posted:

stegosaurus posted:

deadken posted:

getfiscal posted:

deadken posted:
for spring break im taking a road trip through mexico, im going to die lol

yeah probably safer to stay in a low-crime area like los fucking angeles *rolling eyes so hard*

in westwood it makes local news if someone uses a counterfeit note, the reason its so hard to go anywhere from here is ecause it also keeps the rest of los angeles from getting in

my new bike route to work takes me through the Rough Part of Town and its funny, they adopt the exact opposite approach here. the entire area is surrounded by huge freeways and there are maybe eight road exits total. some of them are pretty large but still.

isnt it detroit where they have massive fortified freeways going from the cbd to the wealthy suburbs with concrete walls so nobody has to look at the ghettoes inbetween. lol. a friend studying geography at ucla told me that the department faculty is almost uniformly marxist, it makes sense because these guys build their career on studying the actual effects of capitalist economics.

lots of freeways and commuter rail lines are basically aboveground tunnels, but the freeways out here (everywhere I've seen, not just utah, dc was the fucking worst for this) are really over the top, there's a 20-30 foot sheer wall and then the freeway which has a two-foot-thick sound barrier that goes up another twelve or so feet. freeway underpasses, incidentally, are much wider and better-lit out where my parents live.... which of course is in an area over-served by exits and train stops to begin with.

I dont know anything about other cities but it seems like salt lake has a lot of freeways for how small it is, the long fifteen, the belt route, i-80, and a couple other state routes like 201 that were turned into 4-lane expressways on the interstate model. also there's a freight train yard conveniently between the hip districts and the other 'rough' side of town, with one overpass, and the trains are a mile long and since it's a switching yard, the train will sometimes chug out at 5mph, slow to a stop, chug back (taking like twenty minutes), blocking like four major roads into and out of the neighborhood at once lmbo. meanwhile the commuter trains that ocassionally slow down traffic on the east side take fifteen seconds on a slow day.

mistersix posted:
ken you should read hollow land if you havent yet

Been meanin to grab this for a while. Plz recommend anything geography/political related because i'll buy it.

cleanhands posted:

deadken posted:
zizek is ok when he's talking about philosophy and psychoanalysis but he should be forced at gunpoint to sign a statement promising to Never Talk About Actual Politics Again. i dont really mind the film reviews, theyre silly but gotta get dem papes son

what the fuck stop posting stuff i agree with

uh stop agreeing with the stuff i post i guess?

cleanhands posted:
NO

you really should

babyfinland posted:

cleanhands posted:
NO

you really should

im right p much 100% of the time

deadken posted:

mistersix posted:
ken you should read hollow land if you havent yet

ive been meaning to! conflict analysis needs more deleuze imo (unironic). like w/ unrestricted drone warfare, which ive been doing thinks about recently... nomads have always operated according to smooth space but now the us military is doing the same, while nato strategy in afghanistan is still based on the idea of taking and holding physical space and popular consent along the afpak border the cia is scrubbing out all the striations of national demarcations, distinctions between war and peace, even homeland and overseas.... the final victory of the war machine over the state. we live in a world of flows and intensities now but the old problems still persist, its not because of knots of arborescence but something intrinsic to rhizomaticity & i think this is something d&g failed to anticipate

i'm picturing you reading off this post while emerging from a cloud of weed smoke and foul miasma, cat on a leash in tow