contrapoints, shaun and philosophy tube all posted a new video in the span of 7 days AND james somerton crawled out of his hole, giving plenty of people plenty of reasons to respond (and some already have!), including potentially hbomb himself? what the fuck is going on, the stars have literally aligned

random and unnecessary bloodshed towards minorities is good when its my side advocating for it

-tankies

The hard truth is that “deradicalization” is a Sisyphean task with no end point (which suits “leftist” streamers and YouTubers just fine because it means that they can keep the grift going indefinitely). You may win over a handful of reactionaries to the cause, but the left will never be able to re-educate a critical mass of the right without seizing state power and mandating such re-education. The Content Creator griftosphere will never admit this though because that would make them Authoritarian Tankies and their brand of half-baked liberal pseudo-anarchism demands that they never recognize that any socialist state might have had the right idea about something

getting annoyed with leftist vs leftist callout essays on youtube. can we stop all the maliciously editing each other out of context and bad faith arguments? can we have a truce just for a moment? cause this is why we never win man

A.I. FILMMAKING IS NOT THE FUTURE. IT'S A GRIFT. By Patrick H Williams. The video is long on time but also high levels of nerdiness. Can be especially instructive if you are into Wes Anderson, whose work Williams shows in comparison to the recent crop of parodies. Williams himself also made a Wes Anderson years ago, which he shows. There are bits of Spiderverse and Secret Invasion, and different A.I. software.

Also, he's pretty nice not to totally call out that innocuous website suddenly releasing A.I. films as a publicity stunt. I'm not. Again, it's long, but he makes a lot of good points, including this:

"..The ones most interested in A.I. are not artists, but Tech Bros, with blue checks on Twitter, who'd consider it a WIN to get rid of those 'pretentious' actors, tailor every film to their own specifications...who see A.I. as a sort of Cheat Code, without talent or skill, they can make anything they want without an artist..."

And there you have it. Now we know who's after Hollywood artists' jobs and based on recent behavior by certain artists sinking projects, bashing Hollywood loudly, maybe definitely screwing up film scripts...maybe making narratives extra obnoxious.

Too much, altogether, at once. That certainly is the cottage industry of 24/7 Hollywood bashers Silicon Valley has going on YouTube. AND THE NEPO BABY! ! Yep. The Leftists are all in.

About yesterday's cry for connection, several things happened at once, as they do. On top of the seasonal despresh hitting it's lows and teasing brief moments of clarity.

Small on the richter scale: The gmail app once again failed to block dad's email which was a seemingly anodyne "happy birthday did you get my ecard (i did and promptly put my emails on their 'do not send' list) , did you do anything special with your friends for the big 4.0?" 1- He's acting like we're buddies, I haven't spoken to him in a decade 2- He's either forgotten or in denial about his complete failure at being a decent human being in November which led to sis finally giving up on him. 3- One of his fave digs was my lack of solid friends (he moved us every three years so that's partly on him) and inability to do milestone stuff like an 18th or 21st birthday bash. It's very on brand to be able to break me in two nice sentences. But it's not so much him per se but the friends who turned out to be anti vaxx or anti mask so I expressed sadness and haven't tried to rebuild. I'm not sure there is any thing to rebuild when folks are explicit their beliefs exclude you.

Bigger on the richter scale: I've injured my pectorals several times in march doing abdominal building exercises and having to catch myself when my hip give out from pain. It's very painful and sets me right back. I need to work on all the muscles around the hips before I can start work on my atrophied lower back. It's at least 3 more months added to the rehabilitation process. Realistically I don't think I'll be rerooting or doing any handicrafts over 40 minutes long per week until 2024. And then it won't be commissions.

It's been 3 full months of rehab work, there is real visible progress but it's very slow and disappointingly small.

I also have to whittle down the project dolls I've kept and get it all out of the house even at a loss (oof) along with a serious re-evaluation of what I buy (double oof). Project dolls are only fun if you can actually *do* the project not just know the exact steps you *would* do. That means other types of treats and finding other things to do when I've got some free time and am itching to make something. The ones that will stay need hairstyles, maybe quick decoden hair and wigs so I won't be reminded until I'm ready, plastic is patient but I am not! (That'll actually be fun to do)

In good news, the anemia has improved and my eyebrows are growing back brown (4mm of brown, 6 of white lol) , I'm on a more solid treatment for GI candida and hope to heal my sore half taste-broken tongue.

I've resolved to purchase anti-mosquito summer clothes for walks if needed as a necessary health expense. Ties into the money insecurities mentioned before with a mental 'fix'.

Tiny on the richter scale but these things add up :

The whiplash of seeing dolltwt acting like they're the nice place for nice people or "it's only funny when it's us, it's malicious if you're someone who can't sit with us". Can't believe I got sucked into that nonsense. Stupid rabbithole to go down.

A youtuber getting too parasocially needy and setting off all my alarm bells.

Way more youtubers who *were* interesting and educational on certain subjects but lately have got lost in navel gazing about whether they're making the mind changing art/activism they dreamed of. It's part film grad, part evangelical need to have convert notches on your belt instead seeing the value in rebuilding broken things, paying someone's bills, prevention not miracles.

You could be educating for education's sake (teacher isn't a lesser job) and doing art for art's sake. I can handle a certain amount of self indulgence and there is always a place for self congratulation on a hard job but the performative is winning out over the active work and I just don't have much grace left to spare right now. I'd rather hear a well made liberal journalistic podcast on a subject than watch a radical leftist who'll derail the point with the implication that it's a sacrifice to be talking about this subject instead of being a 'proper' film maker.

Doesn’t sound like much but when you've carved out your hour of listening and that's not happening because it's become messy then there's a hole and it's really hard to find the right balance of interesting but no cliffhangers or nihilism, no toxic positivity no false promises. With my current desperation for routines and extreme pickyness: You see the problem right?

So, in a nutshell I need to find new treats, new entertainment, more courage to get rid of items I'm attached to, find rerooters in the EU so I can just refer all queries without having to explain that my back is rekt and the rest of me is rekt so healing will be stupid long, set a goal of acceptable hip pain while exercising and a goal of how much hip pain to aim for that won't mess with ab and dorsal work. Wait til enough emotional balance to donate recycle clothes that look rough. Dare to open up and make new friends knowing that heartbreak is inevitable. Cool cool cool. We'll start small.

❤️❤️❤️

Ben Shapiro sits down at his computer, and practically rubs his hands together in glee. This is it. He pauses to look at his old youtube thumbnails and headlines. Liberals destroyed. Leftists owned. Facts and logic. Those were the glory days, when he could capture the internet by its balls, when people unironically held him as a champion, and dunks were so deliciously easy to pull off. What happened? What happened to me, he asks himself, running his hands over his thin and greasy beard he hastily grew to cover up a botched lip job. It used to be so EASY! But no matter how many times he "owned" the feminists, they never seemed to actually stop advancing, and cultural trends never seemed to halt. He had been getting clowned on since his debacle with WAP, and his being on the other end of dunks and takedowns had become a meme unto itself. How had it all gone so wrong? How had he become a joke?

Well no longer, he says. No more, because this time he has a guaranteed home run. He sat through Barbie with stars in his eyes and a tent in his briefs, because this was something familiar. No nuance or complicated rhetoric which muddied his black-and-white debate style, no terms he didn't fully understand and would get clowned on later for whiffing his rebuttal of them, this was something he knew the shape of— something he knew how to Destroy. Women talking about Patriarchy, All-men-are-bad themes, victim culture, yeah this was feminism CLASSIC, baby, this is what he THRIVED on back in the day. The glory days were not beyond reach, he could pull off an easy dunk like he used to, and he'd be back on top of the game. He cracks his knuckles...

And nothing comes out. He stares at the blank screen, wondering where to even start. Where to start picking apart the movie, what angle to approach from, what to own first with his mighty facts and logic. But he can't. He gets up and slouches his way to the dark kitchen to eat some of the cold leftovers from his lunch with Desantes. His daughter's homework is on the table and he scans it. Was it woke? He could get at least a youtube short out of something he would find in there. But he can't focus.

Something about Barbie has lodged in his mind like a splinter made of frozen windex. He KNOWS it's wrong, it has to be, he's based his entire living on it being wrong, but he can't formulate a debunking. But it has to be bad. Feminism is bad. Patriarchy is a word made up by feminists to get mad at. Feminists are supposed to be irrational, juvenile, screeching harpies that he can look comparatively mature standing next to. It was his whole brand. But the movie is a fun, lighthearted romp with rudimentary points presented plainly and matter-of-factly. It presents itself and its message so plainly that there are no finnicky technicalities he can wield to destroy it. It leans into its presentation and own over-the-top tone hard enough that his usual "debate" style of simply pointing and going "that's cringe and I'm calm and in control therefor I'm right" would bounce right off. And as a movie, it's good. It's a well put-together film with an engaging story and funny writing and a creative visual style. No matter where he tries to start taking it apart from, he can't find a foothold.

His brow furrows. No. No, it won't end like this. Barbie is bad. Barbie is bad. Barbie HAS TO BE BAD. He has to dunk on it, win the cultural battle that it doesn't even know or care that it's fighting. He starts to seethe. It's bad. How? He sits down, opens his laptop, and begins to type up a script. Without any genuine analysis or critiques he can mount, he starts venting his raw emotion. A garbage fire. A shitshow. He keeps going, channeling the ghost of James Rolf's last shred of integrity. "A flaming piece of dog shit piled atop an entire dumpster on fire piled atop a landfill filled with dogshit," he types. It feels GOOD to get mad, to unload his pent up and confused frustrations at the object of his ire. He's doing it. He's owning it SO hard! He continues uninterrupted, going on and on about the fact that it sucks, with no elaboration or meaningful point. He loses composure. He clings to any thread of respectability while shedding any pretense of intellectualism. He must show that the movie is bad, even though his only evidence is his feelings, which don't care about your facts!

Ben Shapiro has been thoroughly and irrevocably Triggered.

Leftists shouldn’t view sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit as implacable strongholds for the Right. Social media and online platforms need to be viewed as battlegrounds. Leftists can win on them.

I Fell Down the Alt-Right Rabbit Hole. Eventually, I Climbed My Way Out.

Brace yourself for a coup in Brazil

‘Jail, death or victory.’ These are the three alternatives Brazil’s incumbent leader says await him. It is an unusual rallying call for an election campaign, but this is Jair Bolsonaro, the ‘Trump of the Tropics’, and he may well be right. Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 when his initial rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the country’s former president, was jailed midway through the campaign on corruption charges. Bolsonaro, a relative unknown, beat the replacement Workers party candidate by a ten percentage point margin.

His formula was to focus on anti-corruption and conduct his campaign predominantly via social media. The use of YouTube, Facebook and, most importantly, the gargantuan WhatsApp groups that are part of daily life here enabled Bolsonaro to project different images to discrete sectors of society. Evangelical churchgoers got the faithful family man; gym bros and sertanejo country music fans were introduced to the gun-loving former military captain; the business world was presented with an anti-communist crusader.

Now, however, with spiralling inflation and a disastrous handling of the pandemic – some 685,000 Brazilians died – the President is finding it harder for his anti-politics message to cut through to all but hardened Bolsonaristas. Thirty-three million people face daily hunger. A senate inquiry into his failure to buy vaccines, in a country with almost no anti-vax movement, recommended criminal charges against him. Moreover, his old rival Lula is back in the running having been released from prison in 2019, corruption charges quashed. All polls are predicting the leftist, with his right-of-centre running partner, will win in the second-round run-off.

Drama enough? Not for Brazil. Bolsonaro has long been casting doubt over the integrity of the country’s electronic voting system, suggesting he will not recognise a vote that goes against him. Brazil, the fourth-largest democracy in the world, has had completely paperless elections since the new millennium, with almost no recorded cases of fraud. At one of a series of rallies across the country’s major cities last year, Bolsonaro said of the forthcoming fight: ‘I can’t participate in a farce like the one being sponsored by the Superior Electoral Tribunal.’ Calling a meeting of foreign diplomats in July, he repeated his claims concerning the electronic ballot system: ‘We still have time to solve the problem, with the participation of the armed forces.’ He says repeatedly: ‘Only God will oust me.’

Continue reading.

I meet Malcolm Harris, voice of millennials and anti-capitalist crusader, at a Brooklyn coffee shop, suggested by his publicist for a book-tour interview. He goes for a guava croissant along with his $3.75 drip. He hints this is not an endorsement of a bourgeoisie micro-luxury, but an ironic jab at the media tycoons of Condé Nast who are picking up the tab.

Harris, a spry 34, is generating considerable buzz with his book, Palo Alto. He knows the town and the tech industry it sits at the heart of well. He grew up there, was schooled there, and even learned journalism at Palo Alto High School under Esther Wojcicki, mother of the (recently retired) YouTube CEO Susan and former mother-in-law of Sergey Brin. His antitrust lawyer father took on Microsoft in a major trademark case in the mid-aughts. But as an author, Harris is less into forging a first draft of history than using research to promote his preexisting point of view. “It’s not a work of journalism,” he says of his book. “It's a Marxist history.” 

Whatever you call it, Palo Alto is epic—an unrelenting 700-page indictment of capitalism, California, and the town that railroad baron Leland Stanford named in 1876 to honor a tall tree that still stands, and soon after made the home of his new university, which still dominates the region. Some might view Harris’ book as a companion piece to another doorstop-sized chunk of tech rejection, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. But Harris thinks Zuboff’s book overemphasized the surveillance part and went too easy on the capitalism. “It doesn’t really get to the global political economy,” he says. 

Harris’s book gets there, in spades. In his sprawling, colloquial narrative, history isn’t a sloppy progression but a nefarious plot serving capitalism’s theft of people’s labor and dignity. His touchstone is the system by which Leland Stanford bred racehorses, which combined genetics with a novel emphasis on pushing horses to run faster at an earlier age than was the custom. (Kind of like Move Fast and Take Things.) Harris applies this “Palo Alto System” as a metaphor throughout, branding everything from venture capital to Tiger Woods’ training methods as inhumane descendents of Stanford’s original sin. Of course, one might argue that, having been nurtured in the town’s famed school system and its tech community, Harris—a deft wordsmith and an effective marketer—is himself a product of the Palo Alto System.

Harris has no problems digging up more villains than a thousand Marvel-verses. There’s Stanford, of course, and the first president of the university he founded, David Starr Jordan, who allegedly murdered Stanford’s widow. (At least that’s what Harris thinks.) The university’s early psychology pioneer Lewis Terman not only promoted eugenics-based IQ tests, we learn, but also slept with his students. Harris even attacks well-meaning leftists like congressman/activist Allard Lowenstein for working too deeply inside the system. (Harris heaps scorn on the Grateful Dead wing of the protest movement; he’s the guy at the SDS meeting who screams at the stoners in the back of the room.) More recent scoundrels include Silicon Valley’s vaunted founders. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are smelly “jerks,” he says, but “more meaningful as personifications of impersonal social forces.”

Harris has a genuine supervillain, though, in William Shockley, the Nobel-winning physicist. Shockley, father of the transistor, Stanford professor, and founder of a Silicon Valley semiconductor company, was a racist bully who fully deserves Harris’ one-word summation: asshole. 

Hold on, I say to Harris, wasn’t Shockley such an outlier that his nastiness led eight of his brilliant engineers to abandon him and start their own company, Fairchild, and from there populate the Valley with other upstarts like Intel? Wouldn’t that mean that the modern system of VCs funding startups—and ultimately, companies like Apple and Google— was based on a counterreaction to the white-supremecist ethos that Harris finds tucked away in every corner of his hometown? Harris pushes back on that theory. “They made chips for bombs!” he says of the “traitorous eight.” 

But for all his verbiage, Harris falls short when it comes to proposing remedies for the wage exploitation, racism, ecological carnage, and suicides he sees rippling outward from Palo Alto. He doesn’t provide a prescription for ending capitalism, short of waiting for its horrors to reach a point when ragtag survivors will finally pull the plug on it. He does have an idea how to fix Palo Alto, though.

Brightening as he speaks of the concept, he wants Stanford to return its 8,000-acre campus to the 614 people recognized as remaining members of the Ohlone, which once indigenously prowled that very turf. It’s a tall order, he admits. But giving back the campus, all of it—the football stadium, the Hoover Tower, the palm trees, the hospital, the Memorial Church, the classrooms, the buildings named after Gates and other capitalists who donated some of their ill-gotten gains to the university—is “low hanging fruit,” he tells me. I opined that this was fruit even higher than the tallest branch of the Palo Alto tree. Even Harris admits that the university is unlikely to embrace his idea.

I’m actually in agreement with a lot of Harris’ critiques of systems that reward harmful market power (and of course I am with him in condemning shameful behavior toward people who are from indigenous communities, Black, or Asian). While proponents of the status quo claim that Silicon Valley is the engine of wealth creation, income inequality is worse than ever, with the Bay Area a case in point. But my preferred solution is to constrain capitalism rather than employ Karl Marx’s playbook. I realize that significant change is difficult when the most destructive forces have the money and power to thwart reform.

But while we struggle to improve conditions for those not lucky enough to afford Palo Alto’s Craftsman homes, can’t we at least acknowledge that some of the technological benefits that have sprung from the system, tainted as it is by over-rewarded founders and exploited workers, have made our lives easier and richer? Even the scary technology of the moment, generative AI, has potential to perform amazing services for all walks of life.

Harris will have none of this. In a typical passage in Palo Alto he writes, “There’s no emerging artificial superintelligence that will automatically arbitrate the thoughts and claims of people. There is just capitalism, an impersonal system that acts through people toward the increasing accumulation of capital, the amassing of exploiting value.” Iconic words from the guy whose previous book was called Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit. 

Before we break, I ask Harris if he has a favorite gadget or service. Is there something that has emerged from the evil Palo Alto System that has brought him joy? He sheepishly pulls out his Android phone and shows me Recorder, a Google app for capturing and transcribing conversations in real time. He shows me how it captures a dialog and even identifies different speakers.

My first impulse is to agree that this is an unalloyed marvel. But then I recall a Google gambit of some years ago. In 2007, the company released a service whereby dialing 1-800-GOOG-411 from a cell phone or even a landline would connect you to free voice-based directory assistance that helped you find local businesses. While this ad-free service seemed like a miraculous freebie, it was actually a way for Google to capture millions of human voice interactions to train its algorithms. Users weren’t getting something from Google—they were giving something to Google. Once the company had what it needed, it discontinued the service. I imagine that the Recorder transcription app might be doing the same kind of thing for Google right now—exploiting our labors in the guise of helping us out. Still, despite its agenda, the service seems damn useful. So much so that it’s impressed even the most unforgiving of anti-capitalists. As does the guava croissant. “Pretty good!” says the Marxist.

Time Travel

Harris rejects the popular narrative that the hippies started a computer revolution. But as he knows from reading my book Hackers (which he generously cites in Palo Alto), some pioneers of the personal computer had their roots firmly embedded in the anti-war movement. I wrote extensively about one of them, Homebrew Computer Club moderator Lee Felsenstein, who also designed the famous Osborne computer, the first portable.

Lee dropped out of Berkeley in 1967, and began alternating between electronics jobs and work in the movement. In 1968, he joined the underground Berkeley Barb as the newspaper’s “military editor.” Joining the company of such other writers as Sergeant Pepper and Jefferson Fuck Poland, Lee wrote a series of articles evaluating demonstrations—not on the basis of issues, but on organization, structure, confirmation to an elegant system …

He insisted that demonstrations should be executed as cleanly as logic circuits defined by the precise schematics he still revered. He praised demonstrators when they smashed “the right windows” (banks, not small businesses). He advocated attack only to draw the enemy out. He called the bombing of a draft board “refreshing.” His column called “Military Editor’s Household Hints” advised: “Remember to turn your stored dynamite every two weeks in hot weather. This will prevent the nitroglycerin from sticking …”

Felsenstein had his effect. During the trial of the Oakland Seven, defense attorney Malcolm Burnstein said, “We shouldn’t have these defendants here … it should have been Lee Felsenstein.”

Ask Me One Thing

Simon asks, “Which of the FAANG companies do you think is most at risk of being caught on the back foot by new and emerging tech?”

Great question, Simon. A lot has been made of Google being jarred by Microsoft’s quick embrace of OpenAI’s technology. (And by the way, the FAANG acronym needs an M in there—Microsoft’s market cap trails only Apple’s among tech firms.) But Google has been working on these and other exotic technologies for years. Speaking of Apple, one may question why its Siri assistant can’t converse as eloquently as those new chatbots from OpenAI and others. But I don’t think that will affect the company’s business much. The long-term threat to Apple is that augmented reality devices will replace the need for screens, like the ones in iPhones and Macs—and that’s exactly why Tim Cook and company are exploring AR glasses.

Meta, though it does have a considerable investment in AI, has a unique problem among the tech elite: No matter how good generative AI is, the company’s core mission is to connect people, not to connect people to well-versed robots. So that’s a problem. 

But since you use the “N” in your grouping, let me throw out this curveball. Maybe the entire entertainment industry will be disrupted when AI makes it possible for anyone to generate things like fantastic movie-length videos from prompts or an engine that translates words to visual scenes. Google already has an experiment along these lines. In the long term, one might even imagine that you could cast these productions with representations of living human actors (assuming they will license their images). This might be bad news for Netflix, unless the company gets ahead of that curve.

yu just can't win on here. everyone is constantly posting stressful shit that i can do nothing about. if you lean into the gay hornyposting circles for some excitement, you will be bombarded with people who cant take a hint and dudes who slowly reveal to you that 90% of the time they operate from a place of pure childish fear and/or think they know everything.. if you move over to the girlblogging sectors you will have to dodge terfs and fatphobes left and right.. the leftists are aggressive and offputting.. the liberals are cringy and ridiculous.. the humor blogs are barely ever funny.. the LGBT blogs are constantly bickering about words.. do I collapse back into an art blog or do i just delete? i dont consider this social media but if i did it would be my literal only social media account so if i left it would literally just be. youtube videos, texting friends, learning crafts.. i gues that aint so bad lol

One of my guilty/not guilty pleasures is watching leftist youtubers talk about "alpha male podcasts' and those things. I will never get why women go on the Fresh and Fit podcast like???? Why lmao

Like if they think they are gonna debate them. Like even the women are right, they hosts are never gonna "let them win" cause they'll cut them off, say they're getting emotional, etc. And they hate women so they would never take them seriously in the first place ?

A little personal vent I’m so tired of corporate made content that’s why I want to make my own fan base content but tumblr and YouTube r still a bum ass Corporation 2 really hope one day I can contribute to an open source software invention where Leftists creators can just put their art they’ve made there and share it with the masses for free. Maybe send resources back to back from one Leftist community to the other. If sites like this exist please send it to my dumbass. I want to work with people I just want someone to do this. Maybe I’m not the one to do it but this is my fuel and passion. Saying fuck the way u told us how to do it. We’re gonna do it a different way. I still have a lot I need to learn if my dream is even possible.

Honestly this is my biggest fucking dream in the world. After solar punk communism. I have no aspirations of being rich. Being rich looks like the most miserable thing on the earth I don’t care if I’m picking the losing side I don’t want to pledge my allegiance to any capitalist who wins with blood money. Do I expect my bullshit to succeed absolutely not but that’s not the point in trying. I’m just a small little one off thing in this cruel universe but I want to prove all humans are complex and have stories that are fucking interesting. Fuck these weird ass corporations. Stay organized in the motherfucking street, be cautious with those u trust, and stick to upholding the marginalized poor and unhoused. I’m too much of a dreamer that’s bound to be my down fall but I’ve come to terms with it and I’d much rather allow myself to dream.

It took generations to build not just one great man it took generations to get to what we have.

Right-wing media freak out over Scrabble

Always the important issues over at FOX news (source: FOX News on YouTube)

This has got to be one of the most hilariously stupid non-issues in right-wing media that I have ever had the (dis)pleasure of witnessing. Apparently we are now mad about *checks notes* Scrabble. Lets get into it.

The Five

00:00, Jeanine Pirro: "Scrabble is dumbing itself down for the woke. The board game is getting updated to be more inclusive and less competitive."

This is why you need to fact-check your "news story" before barging in on live TV. Or at least before you barge in on live TV you should look at the image that you're running with. FOX News didn't do that because if they did they'd see that the box says "2 games in 1" with Classic Scrabble as one of the options.

Anyway, this is about a newer version of Scrabble being released in Europe that contains both classic Scrabble and a more collaborative version that is focused on completing set goals using things like hint cards. This is meant to introduce more audiences to the game. Naturally this is the literal end of the world. Woke Scrabble is going to lead to the beginning of Revelations itself, in fact I'm pretty sure it was designed by the antichrist. At least according to these idiots who unironically use the word woke to describe a board game being released in a continent that they don't even live in.

00:08, Jeanine Pirro: "So, instead of competing players collaborate, games are shorter, there are clue cards and a no more scoring option so no ones feelings get hurt."

It's still scored, I don't know what she's talking about. Want to know how I know that? Because there are still numbers on the chips. Again, look at the photo that you guys are running with, you're supposed to be a news channel guys. Man, this is my first time (I'm sure of many) covering FOX News and my god they have not evolved from the Obama's tan suit days at all.

00:25, Jeanine Pirro: "What I think is interesting about this, uh Jessica is that they've removed certain words. They banned racist LBGTQ (her words not mine) slurs from the tournament but there are also new words that are -- you know that the woke generation would be very comfortable with."

"Oh, I guess we just live in a world where language....evolves or something. Ha! That's woke."

Look, as a leftist I can imagine that I'd be one of the people that these guys would call a "snowflake" but at least I've never been triggered by the dictionary before. Also, what exactly is Jeanines problem with removing slurs from Scrabble? Was she winning Scrabble games with the n-word in the past?

Jeanine Pirro's ideal version of Scrabble is Scrabble but only with the slurs.

01:27, Jeanine Pirro: "Ok Greg, the squares have been cream colored for decades. Do you think they're going to make squares of different colors not to offend people?"

Greg Gutfeld: "I hope so. I have never played Scrabble in my life."

And yet here you are talking about this.

01:58, Greg Gutfeld: "Playing a game without scoring, even if you suck at something, is so anti-human. It's like, scoring is part of your DNA."

Scrabble....is anti-human. You know, just when I start to think that I've heard the stupidest possible things for this blog they somehow manage to top themselves. No, scoring things is not an integral part of the human experience and even if it was it still doesn't matter because this version of Scrabble is still scored.

02:32, Jeanine Pirro: "I'm surprised that this new Scrabble didn't come with like, four trophies so that everyone feels they won."

At this point I was beginning to ask myself questions like "how is this a news show?" and "how on Earth did everybody at this table graduate high school". I hereby propose that we create a socialist version of Monopoly to really freak out FOX News.

Alright, I'm fed up with FOX News. Lets see what another one of these idiots is saying about Scrabble.

Matt Walsh/The Daily Wire:

I kind of figured that out of all these Daily Wire morons, Michael Knowles was most likely to cover "woke Scrabble" since it kind of feels like they throw him all the stories that nobody else wants to cover. Nope, Matt Walsh finally managed to stop thinking about trans people for enough time to complain about this as well.

46:02, Matt Walsh: "Daily Wire has this, classic board game dumbed down to be more inclusive and less intimidating to young people. One of the worlds most popular board games is being altered to be less competitive and more inclusive to appeal to young people. Scrabbles parent company Mattel announced the move on Tuesday, the first major change in 75 years."

Shockingly enough, Matt Walsh seems somewhat more aware than FOX News and at least briefly provides lip-service to the fact that this is only one of the possible ways to play Scrabble on this board. He still thinks it's "woke" though.

By the way, have we even figured out what on earth woke even means? Because the way it's being applied here doesn't make any sense. I guess it just means "stuff we don't like".

47:00, Matt Walsh: "I take board games very seriously. Way too seriously. I take them so seriously in fact that most members of my family refuse to play board games with me anymore."

Matt Walsh being a dick at family board game night is probably one of the least surprising things that I've found out while writing this blog. We all have one relative like this who is utterly obnoxious and being that relative isn't the flex that Matt thinks that it is.

The Matt Walsh method of playing board games is as follows:

Step One: Gloat about how you're going to beat everyone before the game even starts.

Step Two: Play the game extremely smugly until you start losing

Step Three: Flip the table over, game and all.

Step Four: Call everybody "groomers"

Step Five: Storm off muttering slurs under your breath.

If you win you gloat like an asshole until everbody is fed up with you by the way.

We all know a Matt Walsh, don't be like Matt Walsh.

48:48, Matt Walsh: "The whole point is to be competitive. It is to win. It is to destroy your enemies by any means necessary."

See Matt, that there is why people don't like playing board games with you.

Conclusion:

Well, this was more of a fun episode because man, it is really really easy to trigger these guys. If that Matt Walsh segment didn't make it clear, I come from a pretty serious board game family so I was assessing how likely I would be to play board games with all of these guys. Jeanine's probably the one I'd play a game with most likely since I'm pretty sure that she's consistently wine drunk when she's on camera. Anyway, cheers and I'll see you in the next one.

Original Videos:

“The Five”: Scrabble Dumbs Itself down for the “Woke.” Www.youtube.com.

“Ep. 1345 - the Media Nominates Their New George Floyd.” The Daily Wire.

Sources (do I even need sources for this stupidity?!):

“Fox News Is Mad That Scrabble Has Gone “Woke.”” Kotaku, 11 Apr. 2024.

to return to this thought and keep it relatively brief, tumblr 2011-2014 wasn't what most people outside tumblr thought it was. The popular perception outside here was that it was some sort of sjw hellhole, when in reality, it's better thought of at the time as a warzone, with no particular side really having total control of the site. i would say that until 2014, in general, the anti-sjw side was winning, and of course the "hipster side of tumblr" (read: normal people who use instagram now) was always the biggest, and the "fandom side" could go either way depending on which part of the fandom you walked into.

within the sjw side of tumblr, you had a lot of different factions, which more or less unified into one unruly chaotic blob sometime around 2017-ish. but in 2014, the anime communists were still a relatively small faction on the site, and the bigger names on the sjw side were people like medievalpoc, who was notoriously exposed as lying about their ethnicity and for getting a significant amount of the history wrong or oversimplified (the blog's theme in case you forgot, was to point out non-white people existing in european history). other things are a lot like how people might imagine – great focus placed on offensive jokes, on particular approaches to social issues, things like that. but what might surprise people who didn't use tumblr at the time, is that a lot of the people who were in that sjw side were very different to the outside perception of tumblr as being soft and sad about having ~le fee fees hurt~, but were actually extremely aggressive people, o, were just people who held a real life ideology that basically matched the people who say, comment on youtube and say that huey's ronald reagan speech in the boondocks represents them perfectly.

something changed around 2015-ish. whereas before, most people would respond to someone saying "cisheteropatriarchy sounds weird lol" or "these critical theory texts sound a little goofy" with defensive and earnest explanations of why you only think this because of a particular bias society has inspired in you, the freedom to actually be able to make fun of this stuff developed. I remember distinctly posts about bikini bottom written in the style of critical theory discourse at the time, and in fact, this is the year that gave us the actual term discourse as it's used on the internet now! it comes from here, of this era! it was a term that was used by tumblr leftists to make fun of what tumblr leftism was like, primarily arguments after argument after argument over the most inane shit (yes, even to us) with no resolution in sight, but also over things you were convinced had to be important, melded together with the inane shit in a way where nobody could cleanly separate the two. hence, why it just got reduced to the discourse chef meme image, to sort of sum up a general frustration with what existed at the time.

this transition from the earnest white feminist posting to aggressive irony leftism never actually stopped, it just kept going and going and going, until now on you can use homophobic slurs and tell people to kill themselves and it's generally socially acceptable. not to say current tumblr is good or a haven of epistemic perfection, but it's stupid in different ways than most people imagine because almost nobody has actually ever used tumblr, and so most people can't imagine what it was actually like.

it's quite bizarre that this is one of the most influential websites and subcultures of all time, but also is barely actually known and understood by nearly anyone, and almost all of this is because this website has like the worst fucking SEO ever, and whenever I want to find an old, famous post, no I can't lol, I feel very very lucky whenever I manage to locate a post from the old days that sums everything up for me (I have a particular favorite about discourse flip flopping). it's not documented well. there are popular tumblr posts out there – in fact, I can even think of ones that I wrote and are spread around in screenshots – that only make true sense in the context of what other posts were popular on different dashboards at the time, and that's knowledge that's almost completely lost to time and that you had to be there for. everything else important about tumblr is even more poorly documented. i think the internet would be a very different place if tumblr had had good SEO all along.

Exploring Left-wing Racism

Goal: Why did breadtubers Kat Blaque, Professor Flowers, and Angie Speak, say that white conservatives treat them much better than white leftists?

Purpose: What is the purpose of creating new terms? To quickly convey an idea, instead of writing a 5,000-page essay or making a 2-hour-long video. The goal is also to reduce miscommunication. Let's have new terms to describe things. Surreptitious Racism. The word "surreptitious," it means, "kept secret because it would not be approved of." Here's how we should view Surreptitious Racism. Question: What do you do when you're very racist, but you're trying to hide it out of fear or shame? What is the best way to hide your racism? You vote Democrat and you talk about black issues, but you're NOT doing it out of love or concern for black people. You don't even have any black friends. You do it to hide the fact that you're racist. Benevolent Racism is a good term, I think the left tries to be the benevolent racist and I think there are black people who love benevolent racism. But I would argue that benevolent racism is equally as harmful as overt racism. In fact, it probably helps lead white people to overt racism, eventually. There are Libertarian youtube videos about the dangers of affirmative action WITH sources at the bottom. Where research does say that when you lower the standards for black people to attend classes, that black people can't kept up with the classes, and are likely to drop out of college. Whatever score white people get, is the score you actually need. What's the point of getting into Harvard if you can't understand any of the classes? You'd be stuck with classes too hard for you and drop out. Obligated Anti-Racism: Definition. An Obligated Anti-racist is a person who learns about black people, NOT out of love or compassion for black people, BUT only learned about black struggles just to pass a class for college, which could lead to Suppressed Racism. Suppressed Racism. Because they're proactively suppressing their emotions. You might think it's a good thing, but it solves the riddle of why conservatives and even some members of the far-right treat minorities better. Like Kat Blaque and Professor Flowers claim to receive better treatment from conservatives. I think it's because of catharsis. Being honest about your feelings helps you purge it out of your system. I also think that when the left speaks on the behalf of black issues, it has more to do with some type of superiority complex, whether it's a moral superiority complex OR an intellectual superiority complex. It goes back to, you learn a lot of things "woke" things in college. Where colleges enlighten you of so many black issues. So, you could've passed classes that you either found boring or that you don't give a shit about. Maybe you thought learning these things are needless and unnecessary. But when you see an ignorant conservative on Twitter, you want to weaponize your logic to win an argument. In other words, you're not mentioning black issues because you give a shit about black people. You're mentioning black issues because you want to win an argument against conservatives. From my experience, when conservatives got purged off Twitter, progressives became significantly nastiest to me. Wokeformance: When you make a performative or theatrical show of how much you care about minorities that you secretively don't give a shit about.