Reheated (54)
For newcomers, more items from the archives.
You Look Like You Need Some Art.
In which we thrill to the creative eruptions of Ms Sandrine Schaefer.
The pretence of intellectual heft and critical discernment is quite funny, given the unspoken rules of pretend artists and their pretend art. Like practically all of her fellow hustlers, Ms Schaefer tells us that she “investigates” and “questions” things, and presumably interrogates them; but despite this allegedly relentless curiosity, I doubt that any specific insight or profundity is ever conveyed to her audience, such as it is, via the art, such as it is. And of course, we’re not supposed to notice this, or notice the comical mismatch of arch rhetoric and inept flummery. And so, in order to feign discernment, one has to not discern any number of really obvious things.
Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings.
On the woes of radical accessorising at Pitzer College, Claremont, California.
It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed - by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.
Woke educators attempt to inculcate dishonesty, bemoan pockets of resistance.
“White fragility” is the unremarkable fact that people by and large don’t like being slandered as racists and then assigned with some pretentious collective guilt, the supposed atonement for which requires deference to actual racists and predatory hokum merchants.
But Not All Feminists, Apparently.
Feminists gather to discuss The Accursed Male and his many, many faults.
“Cis-masculinity is fundamentally oppressive and violent” says Mr Utt. Apparently, a single incident of exasperated table-slamming is damning evidence of patriarchal brainwashing, proof that the author has been “socialised to be abusive,” along with all other men. However, the gender-damning meaning of female table-slamming, or door-slamming, or general fits of irritation, or any number of aggressive and passive-aggressive displays indulged in by women, remain oddly unexplored. Instead, Mr Utt equates this apparently all-pervasive patriarchy with “related systems of oppression like white supremacy.” Adding, “It’s important that I situate myself within my positionality.”
There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits.
Also, open thread.
I’ll put you down for the “over”
Heh. Cool.
—I Am looking the first two and very much projecting, didn’t bother with the most recent.
As far as movies—and then sequels—what I’m particularly noting is that there are the movies where there was Movie, followed by Movie 2, Movie 3, Movie 4, and when the trailer arrives for Movie 5, the audience screams Oh, Ghod, Not Again!!!!
And then there is, oh, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and, a bit later, Smiley’s People. There certainly are other example, those titles being the handiest that come to mind.
Ah, yes, the Leone/Eastwood No Name movies are all also definitely their own movies, their own stories.
Sorry, that last is part of the fantasy universe and not strictly scifi.
You are aware that Star Trek is not and has never been science fiction by any literary definition, yes? It’s Greek morality play and 60’s political agitprop tarted up in pulp SF dress. And the thing is, the show never tried to claim it was. That’s why people complaining that Star Trek isn’t hard SF are missing the point by a mile.
To those scientific high points LOS ’18 added natural character development, good acting and story-telling, and believable predicaments.
I don’t think you and I are using the same meanings for those words.
The least scientific person in my likes-the-same-entertainment circle did a year of electrical engineering before switching to accounting. Every one of us was howling at the pretentious casting, the pandering to the female demographic, and the “ijflscience” levels of misunderstanding of the real thing.
It’s just not a good show. It’s trying to be clever and “sciencey” but it’s like watching a 5 year old kid stumble out of the closet wearing his Dad’s suit. Adorable, but you don’t take it seriously.