What book is this image from? It definitely speaks to the massive problem with fragile masculinity in American media - it would be interesting to see what else is said about it.

Bill Clinton statue in Kosovo

Needs more superlatives, that’s what makes writing good.

Oh yeah, in the US they’re still using paper signatures and click-clack machines from 1982.

Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.

Right now the policies most of the NATO-aligned powers have towards boats full of people fleeing war zones to claim asylum is to ram the boats and shove the survivors in prison camps.

I think the Maoists and the Anarchists both have some very good ideas. The Maoists seem pretty serious about doing important reforms, but I think the anarchists would be more fun to have a beer with.

The US anthem can’t be sung well by the average person (especially towards the end), hence why in stadiums the crowd doesn’t even try to sing along and just cheers and whoops. The UK is about the monarch at the level of the text. But the US anthem is about the same thing in how it functions as a piece of music to create a social situation where the crowd remains passive in its adoration of a single person. There is no collective experience of doing and participatory togetherness. There is only the admiration of the celebrity pop singer as an emblem of the American aristocracy.

But yes the UK anthem is an awful dirge.

Or to put it the other way around: what much of the world considers a warship, the hyper-militarized US uses as a speedboat for lake cops.

Yes, the drone pilots double-tapping weddings sure are heroes.

Hang on, how did a US soldier give Donald Trump the freedom to say stupid shit? Who was going to take that freedom away, and perhaps the most bizarre part of all: why did the soldier stop them from taking that freedom away?

There was a GSM version of that Nokia phone from the original Matrix film sold around the world. Are GSM radio bands from the late ‘90s/early 2000s still in use? If so it would presumably still work for calls and texts in some countries.

The spring activated thing in The Matrix was only in the movie though. On the real phone you had to actually pull that plate down yourself, which made the phone seem like a complete disappointment back in the day when I once met someone who actually had one. This person could sort of fiddle it with their hand to kinda push it out one smooth motion, but it just wasn’t quite right.

I think it’s in the book “Games of Empire” where the argument is made that the worlds in fantasy games are usually just recreations of our modern capitalist world, aforementioned financial shenanigans very much included. These games often have the aesthetics of a kind of mediaeval feudalism, but in-game economies feature very modern things like decimalised currency, auction houses, arbitrage, consumerist alienation, instant payments, and so on, all of which would be very out of place in a feudal world. Fantasy RPGs show us worlds that appear radically different from our own at first glance, but upon deeper examination they are another example of the social imaginary restrained by capitalist realism.

It’s like the money in a fantasy RPG: 100 bronze or copper equals 1 silver, and 100 silver equals 1 gold.

You generally need to go to a bookshop that stocks academic books to find proper lefty stuff.

Hexbear is deeply unserious, but that’s the point, right?

Axis of Authoritarians

Axis of Evil

Perhaps the complexity of a clear example suggests problems with the rather broad claims in the original post. I’m not sure if the typical response to a telling-off is to always shut down.

To follow your example, if your grandma tells you off for not bringing something you’re probably going to bring something next time

This is an interesting argument, but is it really true? People actively do stuff to avoid creating a situation where they feel guilty all the time. For example, if a person invites you over for dinner and says you don’t need to bring anything, but you still bring something anyway because you know you would feel guilty otherwise.

I am picturing the effort put into set-dressing and posing by this man as he took this photo. The delicate balancing of the gun, the careful perspective on the knife-wielding porno-vacuum, selecting the right room in the suburban McMansion with the faux-wood flooring as a backdrop (no effeminate carpet here!), the careful coordination of the olive drab canvas watchstrap with the olive drab plastic gun and its canvas strap, a very carefully placed weight on the edge of frame (must be careful not to dent the extremely fragile faux-wood flooring), and the overwrought placement of a gold bar peering out of the gun like it’s a phone propped up for a video call.

But most of all: the overly-exaggerated tension in the left hand furiously clutching an empty bottle of mid-range mass-market Canadian larger favoured by accountants and middle managers in the 1990s. Moosehead: the Heineken of the north, at least according to your dad. There’s so much detail, so much going on, it’s very hard to pick a favourite.