Long [-ish] reads

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  • Khurram0

    [h1]Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek[/h1]

    https://www.counterpunch.org/202…

    One of the most prominent intellectuals in the contemporary world was named to the list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012.[1] He shares this distinction with the likes of Dick Cheney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Mossad director Meir Dagan. The theorist’s best idea—according to this well-known publication that is a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department—is that “the big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.”[2]

    Other ideas were surely strong contenders, and we could add to the list more recent positions. To select but a few examples, this top global thinker has described 20th-century communism, and more specifically Stalinism, as “maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity.”[3] As a matter of fact, he adds for emphasis that “if you measure at some abstract level of suffering, Stalinism was worse than Nazism,” apparently regretting that the Red Army under Stalin defeated the Nazi war machine.[4] The Third Reich was not as “radical” in its violence as communism, he insists, and “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough.”[5] Perhaps he could have taken some tips from Mao Zedong who, according to this theoretical grandee, made a “ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death.”[6] This undocumented assertion positions its author well to the right of the anti-communist Black Book of Communism, which recognized that Mao did not intend to kill his compatriots.[7] Such information is of no import, however, to this theorist since he operates on the assumption that the worst ‘crime against humanity’ in the modern world was not Nazism or fascism, but rather communism.

    The thinker in question is also a self-declared Eurocentric who intimates that Europe is politically, morally, and intellectually superior to all other regions of planet Earth.[8] When the European refugee crisis was intensified due to brutal Western military interventions around the wider Mediterranean region, he parroted Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ credo by declaring that “it is a simple fact that most of the refugees come from a culture that is incompatible with Western European notions of human rights.”[9] This top-tier pundit also endorsed Donald Trump for president in the 2016 election.[10] More recently, he explicitly positioned himself to the right of the notorious warmonger Henry Kissinger by accusing the latter of “pacifism” and expressing his “full support” for the U.S. proxy war in the Ukraine, claiming that “we need a stronger NATO” to defend “European unity.”[11]

    Being fêted by the preeminent journal co-founded by the arch-conservative national security state operative Huntington is only the tip of the iceberg for this global superstar, who has achieved a level of international fame rarely accorded to professional intellectuals.[12] In addition to being an academic celebrity with prestigious appointments at leading institutions in the capitalist world and innumerable international junkets, he has consolidated an enormous media platform. This includes publishing books and articles at a dizzying speed for some of the most prominent outlets, serving as the subject of multiple films, and regularly appearing on television and in major media spectacles.

    Given the nature of these political positions and their amplification by the bourgeois cultural apparatus, one might assume that the thinker in question is a rightwing ideologue promoted by imperialist think tanks and the U.S. national security state. On the contrary, however, this is a commentator that anyone perusing online for radical theory or even Marxism is likely to encounter almost immediately, because he is one of the most visible intellectuals taken to represent the Left: Slavoj Žižek.

    Donald Trump expressed his belief in the power of the U.S. propaganda machine by infamously claiming that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing a single voter.[13] In our perverse and decadent society of the spectacle within the imperialist core, much the same applies to the poster child for the global theory industry. Žižek could take the most reactionary political positions imaginable, have them broadcast around the world by the capitalist cultural apparatus, and still be presented as a towering intellectual of the Left. As a matter of fact, he has done precisely that.

    [b]Discursive Sausage for the Uneducated[/b]...

  • Nairn0

    https://longreads.com/2017/09/12…

    I want to eat here. I don't even much like lamb.

    • Lambs that lives outside eating grass = far cleaner + healthier meat than beef/chicken/pork.shapesalad
  • imbecile0

    (U//FOUO) Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment

    This product is one of a series of intelligence assessments published by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch to facilitate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States. The information is provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks against the United States. Federal efforts to influence domestic public opinion must be conducted in an overt and transparent manner, clearly identifying United States Government sponsorship.

    https://irp.fas.org/eprint/right…

    • Is a 13yr old document really current?Morning_star
    • It’s a long-ish read. Maybe try reading it?imbecile
  • imbecile0

    He Planned a Treasure Hunt for the Ages — Until He Went Missing

    Hunter Lewis was an adventure-lover who spent two years devising an elaborate outdoor quest for his friends and family, only to see it end in tragedy

    https://www.rollingstone.com/cul…

    Let’s start at journey’s end. Some adventures exact a terrible cost.

    It’s the last Sunday in January. More than 300 guests walk single file into the Arcata Community Center in far North California. Some wear blazers with sneakers, and some wear gingham dresses with muddy hiking boots. They patiently wait their turn and then sign their names into the guest book.

    They are here to celebrate an extraordinary young man. His achievements are perfectly organized and displayed chronologically on a series of tables. There he is as a little boy with his father and grandfather preparing to launch a rocket into the Colorado sky. There are snapshots of a handsome kid with lank hair climbing on rocks, and another where he is playing his guitar. Then a pair of blue canvas shoes with sand still clinging to shredded soles.

    You glance up and see someone who resembles the young man. It’s his brother. He’s a different kind of free spirit, with glasses and blond-green hair, his skinny body clad in Doc Martens, a Phish hoodie, and a Bikini Kill T-shirt. He stops for a moment and looks at the different stages of his brother’s travels, and then moves on alone.

    ...

  • Khurram0

    "A striking feature of these well-worn arguments over Nato is that they all assume a high degree of familiarity with the thing itself. For all that it is central to a certain conception of Europe – or even the west – few can say what, exactly, it is. Crammed into a four-letter acronym is something more than a simple military alliance. Nato is no longer particularly “Northern”, nor “Atlantic”, nor bound to a “Treaty”, while calling it an “organisation” almost makes it sound like a charitable enterprise. Part of the reason Nato’s shape can be difficult to discern is that the alliance has, at least in the west, won a long war of public relations. In the 50s, Nato sent travelling “caravans” – mass exhibitions and outdoor movie theatres – into the hinterlands of Europe to explain the benefits of the alliance to sceptical populations. Such a strenuous case for Nato no longer needs to be made, and opposition to it has vastly diminished since the 1980s. What was once presumed to be an artefact of the cold war order sits so comfortably at the heart of the west’s military-political-economic system that it is frequently mistaken for a natural feature in the European landscape."

    https://www.theguardian.com/news…

    • "Khurram Aziz
      Montreal, Canada"

      Bruh gtfo
      grafician
    • We have people in Moldova rn freaking out over the war next door - they are not under NATO

      and you have the guts to post this shit?

      fucking idiot
      grafician
    • And you have the guts to insult me on the internet. Touché!Khurram
    • An insult is an insult only if the party addressed is actually aware of the insult - thus you're a proper idiotgrafician
    • You momma. In the ass! fUKKHOLEKhurram
  • Gnash0

    The Nature of Art

    https://inference-review.com/art…

    ex nihilo nihil fit—nothing comes from nothing

    • 69th post. nicepango
    • Interesting piece. Yes, Owen Jones will be a common ancestor of so much decorative art. Including the humble Custard Cream even!Brabo_Brabo
  • Fax_Benson1

    The dying art of the hatchet job

    https://unherd.com/2021/09/the-d…

  • Bennn2

    The ballad of the Chowchilla bus kidnapping

    In 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver disappeared from a small California town, capturing the world’s attention. Forty-five years later, we revisit the story.

    https://www.vox.com/the-highligh…

  • renderedred2

    Web Design History Timeline

    https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/…

  • grafician-2

    "The most popular series of NFT collectibles are algorithmically generated. And what they reveal, compared to the rest of culture, is a broader and more prevalent trend of art and entertainment that has the uncanny feeling of having been made by algorithm, even though it wasn’t.

    A painter and performance artist once told me, in the brutalist basement of the old Met Breuer, that Future had destroyed the future.

    Trap music has taken over the world, and it all sounds more or less the same now. It might be amazing, but it sounds the same. It’s supposed to sound the same. That’s the idea, what makes it so powerful. A talented producer can make a song in ten minutes on a live stream. A talented producer can make a song in less time than it takes to listen to. It’s never been quicker to write a song than now. Songs keep getting shorter and shorter. Records keep getting shorter and shorter. It’s a numbers game. I can write these columns pretty quickly now.

    This is an age of great speed and competition. We’re all looking for more popularity, new ways to find an edge; and yet, all this competition only seems to lead to blandness and mediocrity, rather than breakthroughs. Nor does it lead to collapse; even accelerationism doesn’t work. We want too much content, too fast, and it just leads to this endless algorithmic churning, this paint-by-numbers effect.

    You see it in art. In Netflix documentaries. Spotify playlists. Op-ed pages. The news. The latest manufactured outrage. Well-reviewed first-person novels about nothing. All so dreadfully banal and repetitive. This is what results when everything is forged in economies of dollars, of ether, of attention.

    Most culture now has the feeling of having been made by algorithm; and the reason for this, is that humans have begun to act like algorithms."

    https://www.spikeartmagazine.com…

    • "Ever look in the mirror for too long and start thinking like, Damn I’m really a human being. I’m really in this bitch.
      KAWS, BFF (2020)"
      grafician
    • “Don’t speak to me about ‘Claude Monet,’ worm, I’m a graduated art teacher. I’m not saying the jpegs or videos aren’t art, I’m saying your whole system is a...grafician
    • ...mere pretence of an art scene for profiteering by platforms and crypto moguls.”
      Art Tyom Trakhanov
      grafician
  • Nairn1

    One of the richest people across history was a smart Fucker.

    https://notesonliberty.com/2021/…

    • Great read, thanks! Venice is fascinating in so many waysGnash
  • renderedred0

    Gulf slave society
    The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies

    https://aeon.co/essays/are-the-p…

    • Do you read HackerNews, rendererered?Nairn
    • sometimes, yes.renderedred
    • but i do follow a few fairly obscure link-longs for interesting articlesrenderedred
  • fadein110

    The Epic Saga of The Well
    The World's Most Influential Online Community (And It's Not AOL)

    https://www.wired.com/1997/05/ff…

    • actually worried I've shared this before now, but love this article, remember reading it back then.fadein11
  • Nairn1

    ^
    Great wee tale - in a slightly similar vein (in that it's not at all), The Star by Arthur C Clarke:

    https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/as…

  • grafician0

    "The Greatest Privilege We Never Talk About: Beauty"

    "The benefits of being attractive are exorbitant. Beauty might be the single greatest physical advantage you can have in life*. And yet compared to other other privileges that may arise from race, gender, or sexuality, we don’t talk much about it."

    https://medium.com/@sfard/the-gr…

    "Attractive people are more likely to be seen as competent and be hired for a job (Busetta, 2013). They are perceived as smarter and having more social grace (Kanasawa, 2010). They are perceived to have better personality qualities like trustworthiness (Dewolf 2014). They are perceived as kinder (Snyder, Tanke and Berscheid 1977). They are more persuasive. They are more likely to benefit from acts of kindness from a stranger. They have greater self esteem (Thornton, 1991)."

  • Nairn1

    'I see pitchforks'
    — Nick Hanauer (early Amazon investor, part of the 0.1%)

    https://www.politico.com/magazin… (2014)

    'You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising.'

    • good read. so simple but so far from realityFax_Benson
  • hans_glib0

    td:dr

  • grafician0

    Unexpected but this was good:

    https://trends.uxdesign.cc/

    "We have seen a lot this year. After curating and sharing 2,411 links with 358,917 designers all around the world, we have identified a few of the trends our industry has been writing, talking, and thinking about. Here’s what to expect for UX in 2020."

  • Bennn0

    dont know where to post this one:

    ''The Unsolved Case of the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet''

    L: https://getpocket.com/explore/it…

  • grafician0

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazi…

    THE CHAOS OF THE DICE
    A backgammon hustler’s quest to gain an edge.

    By Raffi Khatchadourian