So, Fight Club is about how masculinity within patriarchy destroys men. A man who is an isolated consumer isn’t allowed to cry because he’s confirming to masculinity, he has a mental breakdown and turns to expresses his sadness as violence. At the end of the book he gets in to every fight until his cheeks wear away and he’s described as looking like a jack-o’-lantern. After he confronts Tyler and shoots himself, he becomes catatonic and lives in a mental hospital.
The fact that the plans wouldn’t actually do anything are part of the point. It’s just an unfocused attack on a system that dehumanizes. In the end, it just becomes part of the system he attacked. Which is also his critique of what became ecofascism.
The author is gay. A big element of masculinity is cisgendered heterosexual, as least in the US context and especially in the late 90’s when he was writing. He was excluded in some ways from masculinity at that time, while socialized in it. So he has a lot of reasons to explore and decompose masculinity.
Brad Pitt, when playing Tyler, understood the critique as well and continued to push on the what masculinity means. While regularly playing an architypical man, he’s often worn dresses. The fact that he can do both demonstrantes the malleability of the definition of masculinity (this is also called “queering” masculinity).
I know all this because that’s one of my favorite movies/books. I was in highschool when it came out. I was studying AP English, so I decided to my final paper on absurdism and antiheroes in Fight Club, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Good Soldier Ŝvejk. But even after reading it and having a ton of context, I actually didn’t really understand it. It wasn’t until years later that I was able to revisit it through the lense of feminism that I understood how much of Fight Club is actually feminist.
Even though all the information was available to me, I still didn’t get it. Fight Club, Starship Troopers, Rick and Morty, and other films and media that criticize masculinity, violence, and authoritarianism are so often misunderstood by their fans… Like the point of Nirvana’s In Bloom. Could the fact that the majority of people who watch these movies completely miss the point make them, by definition, bad art? They fail, fundamentally, to relate their ideas. Isn’t that a problem?
I don’t think the fact that people don’t understand a piece of art makes it bad, and I’m really careful about criticizing art without having context… especially if I’m not the audience.
Context is super important. For example, a lot of people don’t realize that the whole “modern art is shit” meme was super important to Hitler. He claimed that Jews were creating “degenerate art” that degraded German culture. They did art shows that were compilations of things they didn’t like or didn’t understand before burning them… Kind of like this compilation. So things like criticizing the concept of modern art (especially out of context) or taking about sterilizing people with disabilities that I always push back on. A lot of people don’t know the connections with those.
I work in computer security now, and have for like 15 years or so. Almost every vulnerability is someone trying to solve a problem they don’t fully understand. Occasionally someone will try to solve a problem that isn’t a problem at all and make a problem in the process. Some problems people keep trying to solve when they really need to step away and let a professional handle it, like cryptography.
I’ve seen too many people make a huge mess trying to solve a problem they didn’t totally understand or didn’t comprehend the impact of a solution.I always ask myself if a problem needs to be solved before trying to solve it. In a world where people are making money off genocide, starving people, inciting terrorist attacks, and making life unlivable on the planet, is some people acting silly really a thing worth fighting against? It just feels a bit like punching down.
No, the civil war 2 looks like mass shootings and terrorists attacks. It started with the Oklahoma City Bombing. Liberals just refuse to acknowledge it’s existence.
There’s an argument to be made, though, tha the US has always been in a state of civil war. The Spartans would symbolically declare war on their slaves every year. That’s kind of what slavery is: a constant war on a portion of the population. That’s aside from the whole genocide of native folks. Since the 13th amendment didn’t actually ban slavery, it never ended and if you look at standing rock, you know that whole native genocide thing never ended either.
Then when you contextualize all this with stuff like the Red Summer, you realize the recent violence is just the normal terrorism that white supremacists do every now and then to get control back. There probably won’t be a war with two side, more just escalation violence from one side leading to the systematic murder a huge chunk of the population. The question is if it will be officially sanctioned like the Holocaust, or continue with the ad-hoc stochastic terrorism like the Rwandan genocide and the Serbian ethnic cleansing.
I expected more snipers, bombings, and attacks on infrastructure but if Trump wins it’s definitely gas chambers.
Democrats are too afraid of “real war” to actually do something about this. If they did they might have to deal with the mess for real and open themselves up to political challengers from the left.
Some of it forces you to think about what you’re doing with your life. That alone is a redeeming value. Most of that means nothing to me or is funny out of context, but the context could make everything. Or it could be bad. I’m not sure that it matters, but it’s really difficult to impossible without knowing the context (like, who’s the audience).
If I made a joke about tech, I’m guessing you might get it but most folks wouldn’t. Does that mean the joke isn’t funny or that the other people just aren’t in on it?
Some are saying things, some are just doing stuff because they can. I’m not convinced it’s any less sane than, say, working in finance. It’s definitely less harmful.
The thing about art is that it’s whatever you can get away with. Sometimes that leaves room for powerful critiques of the system, sometimes it’s just random stuff. In order to survive in capitalism, artists have to keep producing art. This means that they’re incentiveized to produce things that are meaningless… Which is what most people in society do most of the time.
So these folks take some drugs and externalize the absurdity rather than fume in an office for decades before snapping and shooting a bunch of people or just offing themselves. Is it crazier to throw the absurdity of society back in it’s face, or pretend that any of this is OK?
Edit: How many people reading this are pretending to work? You could be outside touching grass. You could be inside by a fire. Every minute you spend pretending to work is a waste of your life. Imagine if you threw your computer against the wall, walked out of the office, covered yourself in paint, and started flopping against a canvas like a fish. Would you experience more joy than you are experiencing right now, trapped at work pretending to do something meaningful? Yeah, I’m gonna go back to work but I’m also not gonna judge.
IMHO, It makes sense though. Piracy and open source are two approaches to attacking the enclosure of public (intellectual) space. Roads for cars are literally an enclosure of public space. The subscription model just extends from this logic.
Edit: These are also things that make sense because the car has to have cell service via a provider.
They aren’t two completely different problems, they’re in direct opposition. Making cars more tolerable increases demand for cars. Improving mass transit and bike infrastructure decreases demand. One is sustainable, the other is not.
If you are stuck in a place that actually requires a car then this makes sense. Between the two you’ll save a ton of money.
In the long term though vehicle to vehicle communication will be required for all cars on the road. You will have (probably property) computer in your car controlling it. Unless you go back to like the 80’s or something you’ll still have a proprietary computer in your car that will need to be replaced.
But even getting a bike for occasional trips prepares you for gas prices spiking or your car breaking down.
Don’t you think it’s interesting that even though the vast majority of car trips are a single person going less than a mile, every time someone brings up bikes the rebuttal is always “what if I need to move my family of 16 and their refrigerator 800 miles in freezing rain!?”
The US was built on rail. The infrastructure could be fixed. It’s a choice not to fix it. It would be better to put in energy to fixing this than creating an open source way to access a proprietary transit system. Infrastructure is the problem, car vendors are just exploiting it.
Edit: correction, 52% of trips in the US in 2021 were under 3 miles and 28% are under a mile according to US DoE (energy.gov/…/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-al…). 2% we’re over 50 miles. Over 60% were under 5 miles, which is still pretty easy with an eBike given functional infrastructure.
Yeah, I have two kids. We used an eBike in the US. The Dutch would find your comment absolutely hilarious. We do not own a car and haven’t needed one since we moved to the Netherlands. The problem is that you have a proprietary transit infrastructure that forces you to use property cars. Infrastructure is your vendor lock in.
The majority of car trips are under one mile and have one passenger. In the vast majority of cases you can replace a car with an eBike.
This just reminds me of someone else saying something like every time you suggest a car replacement suddenly everyone needs to carry a couch 300 miles in the snow.
It is not possible to be free while you have a car. But yeah, some times your forced in to that by the complete failure of American infrastructure. Cars continue to be your worst option, even if you’re forced to use them.
Edit: Correction, over 60% are under 5 miles, 28% are under a mile. Only 2% are over 50 miles. 69% of the total annual vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. occur in urban areas. In 2019, average car occupancy was 1.5 persons per vehicle.chart showing 75% of trips driving alone
If you can, get an eBike. Cars need a ton of expensive resources. No matter what car you get, you’re basically renting it for $10k/yr anyway. Bikes can be fixed with a small set of tools in a living room without thousands of dollars of diagnostic equipment.
If you can’t do a bike because of distance, consider a motorcycle. That’s at least a little more free than a car. Cars are the worst.