Platystemon posted:

Bzzzt

273.15

and they’re not called “degrees”.

Ugato posted:

I just have to say I feel like CircumCrippled is not getting the attention it deserves here

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Was an article somewhere that 'cancelled' was originally something in minority spaces to shut out predators and bad faith actors but has pretty much been completely destroyed by the internet and, like everything else under capitalism, perverted into yet another tool most useful for well-off white people to feed their narcissism and eliminate competition through reframing targeting the vulnerable in a way that can't be called 'punching down' while they themselves can easily shrug it off.

Al! posted:

"calling out predators is cultural appropraition" is a pretty hot take but i cant actually remember a specific time when a powerful person called out a powerful one for sexual assault and destroyed their career that way

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

What Seinfeld is afraid of is everyone realizing he was never funny, and he only got popular because the late 80s & 90s were a cultural death rattle.

Tulip posted:

Here's my hot take: most of what Mel Brooks did is still acceptable and doable today. The people who think we're too prudish for Blazing Saddles think the punchline was "the n word" and not "white racists are buffoons."

Tastes have become more realist and subdued so the pacing and flat absurdity aren't likely to sell as well but that's a very different thing.


I'm not online enough to really speak with authority on the history, but the last part seems like a pretty accurate description of the present state.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

His observational comedy was loving dire. drat dude, you're right. Dads do go crazy over the thermostat. And how about that airplane food.

Jonathan Fisk posted:

Larry David is funny

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

What Seinfeld is afraid of is everyone realizing he was never funny, and he only got popular because the late 80s & 90s were a cultural death rattle.

Ugato posted:

I just have to say I feel like CircumCrippled is not getting the attention it deserves here

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/libcomorg/status/981520015018156033

The Little Kielbasa posted:

Anti-circumcision people have this amazing combination of being (a) pretty obviously right and (b) so loving weird that I'm tempted to think they're wrong anyway.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Was an article somewhere that 'cancelled' was originally something in minority spaces to shut out predators and bad faith actors but has pretty much been completely destroyed by the internet and, like everything else under capitalism, perverted into yet another tool most useful for well-off white people to feed their narcissism and eliminate competition through reframing targeting the vulnerable in a way that can't be called 'punching down' while they themselves can easily shrug it off.

Victory Position posted:

all I can think of is a Planescape: Torment mod where someone has the entirety of Bee Movie tattooed across their body as some sort of penance for comedy never performed

Victory Position posted:

all I can think of is a Planescape: Torment mod where someone has the entirety of Bee Movie tattooed across their body as some sort of penance for comedy never performed

Victory Position posted:

all I can think of is a Planescape: Torment mod where someone has the entirety of Bee Movie tattooed across their body as some sort of penance for comedy never performed

Victory Position posted:

all I can think of is a Planescape: Torment mod where someone has the entirety of Bee Movie tattooed across their body as some sort of penance for comedy never performed

Pirate Radar posted:

Atrocious Joe posted:

lol who wants to pick their own insurance plan

quote:

*** A friend pointed out that I was able to choose to step away from the Media Lab because of my privilege: I’ve got money in the bank, I’ve got a supportive partner, I am at a stage of my career where I can reasonably believe I’ll find another high prestige job, I’m a cis-gendered straight white dude. She wanted me to be clearer about the fact that not everyone is going to be able to make the same decision I did.

She’s right. There are people who are going to remain working at the Media Lab because they sincerely believe that we finally have the opportunity to fix some of the deep structural problems of the place — I respect them and I will work hard to support them. But there’s also people who are going to continue at the lab because it’s the best opportunity they have to develop their own careers and reach a point where they’ve got more flexibility to make decisions like the one I made. I respect them too — they are the people doing the work that makes institutions work, but they rarely have the power to make decisions that steer an institution towards its values.

So thank you for all the kind words about bravery. Truth is I’m privileged enough to afford to be brave. For those of you who love the Media Lab and want to see it sail through these rough waters, please take time to reach out to people who may not be able to be as visible in their next steps. Make sure they’re doing okay. Support them whether their decision is to leave or to stay. So many of my colleagues at the Media Lab right now are hurting, and they need your support and love too. Hope we can redirect some of that love folks are sharing with me to them too.

get that OUT of my face posted:

you just know that when Mel Brooks dies, an infantry corps of checkmark scolds are going to call him out for the out-of-context "up yours" scene in Blazing Saddles and his entire career of joking about Nazis. the state of comedy is so, so, so bad right now

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

His observational comedy was loving dire. drat dude, you're right. Dads do go crazy over the thermostat. And how about that airplane food.

quote:

Money is just a medium of exchange. A capitalistic country with only money and no production will not ever exist. In a capitalistic system, the sweat of your labor or business is tokenized, these tokens you can use to buy stuff. The more tokens you have, the more you can acquire goods and services and the more you are taxed. The tokens therefore kinda act like free-flowing proof of everyone's labor and business.

In a communistic system the proof of one's labor is largely categorical in nature. You get assigned to farm, you get assigned to mine coal, you get assigned to do very particular jobs. It's a manager's job to keep everyone working. The state defines the multitudes of categories of jobs there should be. But everyone receives the same amount of rations, at least if we're aiming for a truly perfect communism. There's no free-flowing medium of exchange here. Exchange of products and services are slow, very slow. Invention of new categories of jobs is also slow. And since there is no additional economic benefit to anyone to do better in their job, or to improve the various processes of production, innovations are also slow. There would generally be less ambitious people in a truly communistic society.

We should really look at capitalism as a spectrum rather than a fixed point idea. It can have variants. Laissez faire capitalism is what the Left really opposes. But actually no country in the world right now is fully-blown laissez faire. Government regulations, progressive taxation, minimum wage, welfare benefits, and even corporate social responsibility all run contrary to laissez-faire. Most countries in the world right now practices a capitalistic mode of production, with money as medium of exchange, but with various protections for the citizenry. That's where the discussion should be. On how those protections can be amplified.

The real problem with our time's capitalism right now is oligarchy. Oligarchs influence governments around the world to hinder the growth of those protections. And as I personally see it, there's a 50/50 chance it may become worse, or less severe in the next 100 years. My only reason for optimism is that corporations were actually more powerful in the past. The British and Dutch East India Companies and the corporations that dominated the Industrial Revolution, they were far more powerful in terms of how they can bend governments into their will. Yes, today, there are lobbysts and wealthy folks who donate money politically, and we should advocate to end them, but corporations in the past were way worse. They had armies. There were no anti-trust legislations against them unlike now. They had no securities regulator. They had spies. They could spend any amount of money doing some secret undertaking and they can do that because there was no rigorous financial accounting regulations at the time. They became less powerful come 20th century. It's up to us to make them even less powerful this century.

The far future lies in plentiful of cheap energy (fusion energy or whatever) and efficient automation. By that time there should be a Universal Basic Income (UBI). And the future's monetary system may be different. Government prints money for UBI, government unprints money through energy taxation for example. Or something like that. A similar system is said to be already hapenning right now in fact in the form of Modern Monetary Theory. But essentially, such a system will still be capitalism. Money will remain circulating, serving as everyone's free-flowing proof of labor, business and/or universal basic income. Everyone will still have rights to their chosen labor and trade or the lack thereof. Adam Smith's invisible hand will remain observable in every trade of products and services. Technological innovations will keep happening, innovations that may not happen at all in a communistic system.

Capitalism is a spectrum. It's up to us to force our governments to steer it to the side that is good for everyone.

Samovar posted:

For ages I didn't get Seinfeld, until I watched one of the stand-up sessions and I thought 'Oh, this guy is supposed to be a terrible comedian! Oh, they're all terrible people!' and then I got it.

And now it turns out he was actually supposed to be funny in the show?

quote:

The real problem with our time's capitalism right now is oligarchy. Oligarchs influence governments around the world to hinder the growth of those protections. And as I personally see it, there's a 50/50 chance it may become worse, or less severe in the next 100 years.

gradenko_2000 posted:

do the takes need to be from twitter?