Sunday, October 28, 2018
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Monday, October 15, 2018
Negation Aspiration vol. 124
"The point, anyway, isn’t that Kanye’s seeming manic episodes are “actually” publicity stunts — or, for that matter, that his publicity stunts are “actually” manic episodes. The point is that, on Twitter, it was impossible for people to distinguish between the two. The connection between eccentricity, erratic behavior, celebrity, and attention is not, obviously, a new dynamic — think of Tom Cruise or Charlie Sheen. But social media, and the news its dominance incentivizes, has created an environment in which the quickest and surest way toward blanket coverage of you and your output is acting in a way consistent with mental illness, regardless of whether or not you would be diagnosed as ill in a clinical setting. This is as true in business, where erratic behavior and market manipulation are two sides of the same coin — just ask Elon Musk — or in politics, where a particularly obsessive set of theories about Donald Trump can net you tens of thousands of followers, as it is in entertainment. What’s necessary to succeed in an economy where attention is the reserve currency is a set of attributes that appear with no small frequency in the DSM."
Kanye West, Donald Trump, and the Reign of Human Clickbait
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Monday, October 8, 2018
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Thursday, October 4, 2018
U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 143
All of this is part and parcel of Trump’s doomsday message. He’s been a textbook example of Richard Hofstadter’s famed theory of paranoid politics. See if any of this (especially the line about “barricades”) sounds familiar:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization… Like religious millennialists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days…
From Day One of Trump’s campaign, pundits have reached for traditional political explanations to describe both his behavior and his appeal. Because we’re trained to talk in terms of left and right, progress and reaction, we tried to understand him in those terms.
Obese and rotting, close enough to the physical end himself (and long ago spiritually dead), Trump essentially told his frustrated, pessimistic crowds that America was doomed anyway, so we might as well stop worrying and floor it to the end.
The broader electoral pitch is just an evil version of every nuclear-age dance tune ever, “99 Luftballoons” or “1999.” The world is ending, so fuck it, let’s party. As crazy as it is, it’s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don’t understand it. Trump’s turning America into a death cult, with us as involuntary members.
Taibbi: Why Aren’t We Talking
More About Trump’s Nihilism?
The White House now says we might as well pollute because
global catastrophe is inevitable
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
NERRRRD! vol. 72
Judge Dredd co-creator Carlos Ezquerra dies aged 70
The Spanish comic book artist, who illustrated many 2000AD comics and designed the iconic lawman Dredd, has died after a lung cancer diagnosis
Monday, October 1, 2018
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