: Shit's kinda rough
World is a FUCK nowadays, not a lot of great news out there AT ALL folks. Wee gratitude exercise—3 things I’m grateful for:
- Pretty damn good cup of coffee about five minutes ago
- Family drama BUT at a resort where a guy can swim
- And the air is very fresh and clean
: Gender moment at the civic center
I just overheard some girl telling a guy “your feelings matter” and realized nobody besides my therapist has ever said that to me in my entire goddamn life haha
: Why do we resist psychosexual explanations for bad politics?
(Writing this post in msedit because why not, lol.)
I sent some crazy texts out this week and the cold reception reminded me that I might be the only one who thinks like this—and now I’m wondering if I’m crazy, but it seems to me self-evident that lots of politicians (and their supporters) are making their decisions on the basis of crude power fantasies rather than some specific policy objective. And if this is true, then it has pretty big implications for how we engage in political discourse, because there is no hope in getting through to a Trump supporter with arguments about how tariffs are bad for the economy if the Trump guy supports tariffs not out of concern for the economy at all but, basically, because he thinks that the steel industry is hot and that’s a thing we should be doing more of.
Well, that’s the second example I could think of, because I wanted to put the first example in this paragraph: It’s that stupid visa social media screening thing. There is no justification for asking student visa applicants to provide their social media handles as part of their visa application. Even if you accept the flawed premise that it’s “bad” to admit people to the US if they have political beliefs that do not align with US foreign policy objectives (we have those?), this particular way of screening for it is laughably gameable. If you are applying for a student visa, all you have to do is scrub your account of anything but innocuous restaurant pictures, maybe a few token MAGA takes for good measure, and the embassy will have nothing on you.
This, of course, is the real point of the social media handle requirement: It’s a sexual fantasy; the whole point is to make the visa applicants kneel and beg, say “please let me study in the One Great Country,” fork over their phone to the consular officer and let them scroll their vacation pictures, participate in this spectacle of American Greatness™ and provide further fodder for the “best president ever” narrative.
I think many people’s reaction to this framing is that it’s hyperbolic, exaggerating to make a point, being edgy on purpose. And maybe it is, but also maybe: What if what I’m saying here is just literally, factually true? Do we have a better explanation for this kind of megalomanical power moves than that Marco Rubio gets off on it? Recall that this is “little Marco,” the guy whom Trump literally teased about having a small penis … it just makes too much sense that this is all a dominance fantasy of his; for the life of me, I can’t come up with a better explanation—can you? But even my friends to the left of me think I’m way out of left field saying shit like this.
(Msedit review: It’s actually … kind of good? Very responsive, has word wrap, has functional keybindings. I tried using Find and Replace and it said This operation requires the ICU library whatever TF that is but I’ve had worse Linux problems.)
: “Can we have a problem without a villain?”
I think/hope I have written before here about how much I adore Richard Reeves, who seems to be one of the only sane voices in the “crisis of masculinity” discourse. He has a great interview here in The Sun this month. Most if it is similar points to what he’s said in other places: that we need to be able to recognize that both boys and girls are struggling in different ways, that we need messaging targeted at men on the left or else they will vote for Joe Rogan, that family courts kinda suck.
But what makes me hopeful about Richard (we are on a first-name basis now) is that he is good at marketing. He always comes up with clever new phrases and anecdotes to illustrate the same basic points, which is critical if you want your social movement to get anywhere.
I really like this quote about “a problem without a villain,” because it tells you something not just about the masculinity crisis, but offers a kind of meta-insight about our larger discourse, and there’s a little something in the paragraph for everyone to relate to, which makes it feel much less condescending than what you often here from enthusiastic activist types:
Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues. For example, the school system doesn’t work quite as well for boys. It’s not intentional; there’s no feminist plot here. I have never argued that men are being intentionally excluded. Those are all myths—and dangerous ones at that. But that doesn’t mean that boys and men aren’t struggling in systems that are difficult for them to navigate. Can we have a problem without a villain? I think so, but that’s an unfashionable view right now.
Richard says he is planning to work with his local Big Brothers Big Sisters group, which made me think I should do the same, but unfortunately my city’s chapter closed down :(.
: Dear Vox, please don't fall for PR hits
I used to work at my college newspaper. We (yes, even we, a shitty
student paper) used to constantly get emails from local music venues and
restaurants soliciting coverage. If you haven’t seen one of these press
release type things before, the trick they use is to write it in the exact
format of a news article, e.g. this random Apple press release that begins CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA –.
We all sucked ass at our jobs, but a core part of educating the freshmen was instructing them not to just copy the press release word for word, even though it was the perfect length to fit in our newspaper, because that’s exactly the temptation that the press release is trying to trap you with. Don’t do it! First of all it’s plagiarism, second of all it’s lazy as fuck, and third of all we are supposed to be objective and provide a perspective on the art gallery or whatever that isn’t, you know, the perspective of the guy who is trying to sell the art in the art gallery.
Anyway, it seems like Vox didn’t really get this lesson. A recent episode of their daily news podcast is called The big business of small streamers and literally the whole episode is about this TV reality show thing called Dropout and how popular it is, how the CEO is an ultra homie and very down to earth, how his whole motivation in life is profit sharing and being the most ethical, and how their audience—who are also Queer btw :)—loves the show so much that they complained when the show grandfathered existing subscribers in at the old price when they increased the subscription cost because they wanted to “support the actors.” Give me a fucking break, nobody is falling for that shit! Dropout was created by College Humor—you know, the massive media platform from 2010. It is not small, it is not some random “streamer,” it is a business with a marketing department and corporate credit cards.
OK, purpose of this post was so I could do something with this word art generator. Dear Vox,
