24
Sep
Following a typical HBD Bibliography twitter intervention (paraphrased: “educate yourself”), a professor of Global Liberal Studies turned up to engage in activity that can be technically described as “hooting”. The pattern of symbolic behavior that then manifested cannot, of course, be reduced to the expectations of primatology. If it seems like an entirely predictable assertion of dominance, as found among all the great apes, something is surely being missed. That at least is the claim now being made (decorated by a little immediate status signaling):
The error of mistaking this expert hooting for the first step in an argument was too tempting to resist. After all, if a professor of Global Liberal Studies deigns to teach you about the limits of possible biological understanding, it is only polite to listen attentively. Unfortunately, certain monkey juices were triggered by the chest-thumping of GLS-prof., and I descended quickly into obstreperousness:
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22
Sep
This has to be enemy micro-media action (but it’s pretty damn funny nonetheless).
ADDED: Don’t miss the additional Sam Hyde (video) links in the comment thread.
ADDED: Racial healing.
14
Aug
Distracted by the Twitter TL-clogging Ferguson craziness, without finding anything much to say about it (there are a few comments over here). So how about a Scott Alexander joke, of at least arguable relevance?
It goes:
I’ve been using IQ as an example recently, and I feel bad about it because it’s so controversial and politicized. So let’s switch about something else instead.
How about race?
(As usual with SA, I’m a terrible reader, because my prejudices make it almost impossible to understand the necessity of needing persuasion. There’s always a ‘duh!’ resounding in my head. Still, on the basis of a bad reading, I think he ends up on the dark side — i.e. stark common sense — but he does so with such politeness that it’s hard to be entirely sure.)
ADDED: This made me smile too —
22
Jul
The psychotic leftism is strong with this one (to a degree that almost makes me suspect AAA). Thomas the Tank Engine, it turns out, was literally worse than Hitler. To take an example, roughly at random:
For the record, all the “villains” on Thomas and Friends are the dirty diesel engines. I’d like to think there was a good environmental message in there, but when the good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke – and they are all pumping out smoke – it’s not hard to make the leap into the race territory.
Pluto-capitalist, white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal — the horrors of this children’s TV show run deep.
Well guess what? It’s not OK.
Progress.
ADDED: SoBL on the case.
18
Jul
Only a few months ago, I had never heard of Poe’s Law. Now it’s a rare day in which it doesn’t crop up several times. Invocations of the Zeitgeist are inherently improbable, but if there were to be a persuasive illustration of the phenomenon, it would be something like this.
According to the succinct Wikipedia entry (already linked), Poe’s Law is less than a decade old. Among it’s precursors, also relatively recent, a 2001 Usenet comment by Alan Morgan most closely anticipates it: “Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.” In other words, between a sincere intellectual position and its satirization, no secure distinction can be made. (There is nothing about this thesis that restricts it to ‘extreme’ opinion, although that is how it is usually understood.)
The latest opportunity for raising this topic is, of course, @Salondotcom. (There’s an entertaining interview with the pranksters behind it here.) The offense of this account, which led to it being suspended by Twitter last week, was clear beyond any reasonable doubt. Quite simply, it was nearly indistinguishable from the original, a fact that has itself been explicitly noted (and tweeted about) innumerable times. Parody Salon slugs, so ludicrously over-the-top that they had @Salondotcom readers in stitches, were funny precisely because they were such plausible mimics of Salon‘s own. Readers were laughing through @Salondotcom, at Salon. This is almost certainly why the account was suspended.
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21
Jun
@RadishMag has found the troll-meme of the decade:
The Zeitgeist demands that Cathedral Central be called #ObamagradDC #DistrictOfChavez (HT @williamsbk).
ADDED: Gregory Hood is in the zone. (This is where it began. See Karl’s comment below.)
13
Jun
Insanity night continues here in Shanghai with this perfected distillation of Leftist delirium:
Spoiler: He actually believes the initial hypothetical is true.
28
May
The Less-Evil Twin hasn’t been on its best behavior recently. Discussing the prospects for Accelerationism (following this negative prognosis), it quite innocently suggested:
… and it was already over the line.
[‘bet’ should be ‘best’ (not ‘better’)]
That’s where things paused for a while.
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19
May
Among all the attractive features of liberalism, there’s nothing quite so adorable as the shredded, bleeding schizophrenia:
As Miriam Greenberg wrote in her 2008 book Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World, in order to combat the growing loss of film production to Hollywood, in 1966, then-Mayor John Lindsay overhauled the city’s film agency in 1966, and streamlined the permit process for major motion pictures to be shot in New York. This brought much-needed revenues into the city, but the arrival of all of those additional film shoots, thanks to the change in policy by the perilously liberal Mayor Lindsay, documented the effects of all of the other changes in policy the Lindsay era was ushering in. The inadvertent result was a series of films documenting the horrors of the last years of Lindsay’s administration and its successors, Abe Beame and Ed Koch: The Panic in Needle Park, The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, Taxi Driver, and Death Wish among them.
12
May
Since consensus is the motor of degeneration, it’s delightful to see this kind of thing happening:
[Twitteritis trivia warning]
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