Long form recommendations.

[lisarea]

Neil Postman, Revisited: Are We Having Too Much Fun? - The Atlantic

This article is great, and it's not really all that long, but I also strongly recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death to anyone who hasn't read it. It's a little dated, but as the article says, its general arguments are even more applicable now than they were at the time. (That argument, and that book in particular, played a big part in why I didn't have a TV for a long time.)

[specious_reasons]

Shudder has a new docuseries called "Cursed Films" which covers five classically "cursed" movie productions. They have been releasing them over this month, and the final 2 dropped not that long ago.

They cover "The Exorcist", "The Omen", "Poltergeist", "The Crow", and "Twilight Zone: The Movie". Each episode covers one movie, and there is a slightly different take to each film. For example, "The Exorcist" implies that the difficulty on set and other coincidences surrounding the film did a lot to promote the film. "The Crow" talks about the Lee family curse, but they also have a weapons expert demonstrate exactly what happened to allow a gun with blanks to kill Brandon Lee.

What pleased me were the voices of reason - there was quite a bit of balanced storytelling. The most surprising was Michael Berryman (the pointy-headed guy from "The Hills Have Eyes") waxing philosophically and basically blaming union busting productions for Brandon Lee's death.

They had actual skeptics on film. Unfortunately, one of the skeptics who got the most time was rumored creep Michael Shermer. At least his performance wasn't too embarrassing.

[SR71]

Couple of humdingers from Salon. One guy about how things are coming apart at the seams and surplus labor and duopoly and oligarchs and how corporate Biden is and what have you.

Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges: These "are the good times compared to what's coming next" | Salon.com

Another one about AOC and Warren wanting to block mergers and so forth for the duration of the catastrophe. There's an AOC tweet about something I've been meaning to mention but somehow keeps slipping my mind. We all have some idea what went on with stimulus 3 & 4 but I heard barely a thing about 1 & 2. My impression was that they were 4 trillion to prop up the bond market or some shit.

Warren and Ocasio-Cortez demand halt of corporate mergers during pandemic to protect workers | Salon.com

[Crumb]

Why Do Republican Leaders Continue to Enable Trump? - The Atlantic

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.

At the bottom paragraphs are links to a couple other brutal and frank essays by a Sri Lankan.

[viscousmemories]

The Literature of White Liberalism

I don't agree with everything this author says, but it is a fantastic overview of the topic and chock full of links to other interesting materials.

[fragment]

Interesting talk that covers looks at open source communities through a lens of cultural histories of public relations and hacker ideology, if you have 47 minutes.

"The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki...

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Sri Lankan guy on Selflessness:

https://indica.medium.com/collapse-l...ed-aae9c4b1427

[mickthinks]

Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman's lifelong crusade against Hitler's favourite film-maker | | The Guardian


Is it about Riefenstahl? Yes, and it's revelatory.
Is it about Gladitz? Yes, and it's wonderful and beautiful and ... well, read it and see what I mean.

From the link

There was a strange kind of camaraderie that came from having known this singular woman. Her fury, often hard to bear, was her fuel. For most people, “pursuing the truth” or “confronting the past” are just platitudes or abstractions. For Gladitz, nothing was more important. Every lie or error that Riefenstahl had introduced into the public record, no matter how tiny, was an abomination to her. Attempts to rehabilitate Riefenstahl, by ignoring or failing to properly investigate her crimes, were the sign of a moral rot that needed to be cut out. “Take it to its logical conclusion and one day people might think Hitler was a second-rate landscape painter,” she once told me, her voice filled with anger. During the years she spent consumed by her book, fearing that it would never find a publisher, this is what kept her going. “I have achieved my life’s purpose,” she told me the last time I saw her. “I am my book.”

[JoeP]

‘What times we live in that nobody missed her’: the tragedy of Sheila Seleoane | Loneliness | The Guardian

This might also go in whichever thread we were discussing the show Only Deaths in the Building.

[specious_reasons]

I have a qualified recommendation for "This is Gwar" - a recent documentary about the band/art collective known as Gwar.

I have known about GWAR for quite a long time. I was first exposed sometime in the late 80s/early 90s, and was always amused enough by their public antics, but never bothered to see a show. Frankly, I never bought an album or video - I borrowed a friend's if I wanted to listen, and the music is - fine and sometimes amusing. I probably haven't listened to a GWAR song in a decade.

So, this is way for me to go deeper into GWAR than I've ever bothered. The story isn't too surprising - frontman and leader David Brockie (Oderus Urungus) was a talented, charismatic, energetic, fun, and funny *complete asshole*. He was both an amazing friend to so many of the people and also a figurative slave driver at the same time. Members burn out from time to time from the lifestyle and get replaced, GWAR never entirely find success, but it also never completely fails. There's a heartwarming story near the end when Brockie dies and GWAR goes on.

So, if you're a fan or just curious about this weird horror/metal act, this is a pretty good overview.

[viscousmemories]

This is a very good critique of ‘effective altruism’ and ‘longtermism’.

Defective Altruism � Current Affairs

[mickthinks]

Why Kundera Never Went Home | Compact Mag

tl:dr Václav Havel and Milan Kundera, though both dissidents in Soviet era Czechoslovakia, differed enough in political outlook to find themselves on different sides in the post-Soviet settlement, and Kundera became hated and villified in his homeland.

“From the link”

Their exchange reflected the fault line between democratic-socialist and liberal intellectuals: Kundera argued for a new model of society that would be free and fair, avoiding the vices of both Western capitalism and Eastern European authoritarianism; Havel defended Western capitalism as the only desirable model, needing fine tuning, but no major revision.
[...]
After his 1969 polemic, he didn’t engage in any personal attacks against Kundera, but he did nothing to discourage such attacks by his friends and admirers. The last and most vicious of these came in 2008, when the Czech weekly Respekt published an article accusing Kundera of informing the police about a Western agent when he was a student in the 1950s. The article didn’t produce any evidence apart from hearsay and a police protocol mentioning that Kundera was the source of the information. ... Kundera denied any involvement, and no further evidence was produced, but the affair sullied his name, harmed his and his wife’s health, and ended their visits to Czechia.

Petr Drulák obviously has a Kundera-promoting agenda and so this account and the unflattering picture it paints of Havel is perhaps not to be taken unguardedly. But with that caveat, I recommend reading the whole thing.

Insights galore!

[mickthinks]

This is good.

Wrestling With Zion: Re-thinking Jewish Tradition and the Ongoing Crisis in the Middle East | American Council for Judaism

From the link

“The founding of the State of Israel required the dispossession of an indigenous group, the Palestinians. This is unignorable reality, obscured by but not dissolved in preexisting and subsequent claims made by, or acts of inhumanity committed by, both sides, long before and long after Israel’s formal declaration as a state. Tracking through a forest of competing identities and histories of persecution and oppression, one must adhere to this simple fact or else one’s moral compass loses its true north and ceases to function. The founding of the State of Israel required the dispossession of a sizable indigenous population. This is only to say that the violence inherent in the building of any nation-state was present at the creation of Israel. Scholars, historians and human rights workers and peace activists in Israel join with much of the rest of the planet in a near-universal recognition of Palestinian dispossession and dislocation, the subsequent gruesome reality of the Palestinian people, the insurmountable obstacle posed to any peace process by the existence of Israeli settlements in and around every West Bank town and in the Gaza Strip, and the fatal illogic of a policy that makes the peace process hostage to suicide bombers.”

.. and ...

In his resignation from the Editorial Advisory Board of the Jewish magazine Sh’ma, Schwartzschild declared: “... the war on Lebanon has now made clear to me that the resumption of political power by the Jewish people after two thousand years of diaspora has been a tragedy of historical dimensions. The State of Israel has demanded recognition as the modern political incarnation of the Jewish people. To grant this is to betray the Jewish tradition. ... I now conclude and avow that the price of a Jewish state is, to me, Jewishly unacceptable and the existence of this (or any similar) Jewish ethnic-religious nation state is a Jewish, i.e. a human and moral disaster and violates every remaining value for which Judaism and Jews might exist in history.

[mickthinks]

This is certainly long but is it useful? I think it might be useful.
An anatomy of the British war on woke

“From the link”

The anti-woke routinely quote Martin Luther King’s famous ‘dream of a future in which people will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’ as evidence of their commitment to anti-racism, as Doyle does in the Daily Mail.

[specious_reasons]

RiffTrax was having their Memorial Day sale this weekend. The code to get 15% off is MEMORIAL24. If you miss it, that's OK, because they have sales and deals for every holiday and then some.

In case you don't know, RiffTrax was formed not long after MST3K ended its first run. It mostly features Mike Nelson, Bill Corbitt, and Kevin Murphy (host, Crow, and Tom Servo from the Mike years) as the commentators making jokes about movies. It originally started by selling MP3s that you could listen to along with recent movies. This was nice because they could riff on any film, not just ones they could get rights to.

I liked the idea, but I found it inconvenient. I'm not sure I bought any MP3s. They started licensing old and crappy movies and started releasing them. Also, like MST3K, they found old shorts to riff as well, which are generally a gold mine for humor.

It's been a consistently good deal, especially the shorts. They usually sell for $1-2 and they're pretty consistently funny. They are also very good for in flight entertainment. They Kickstart their live shows, in order to get the money to produce it. As an incentive to donate, they often have a lower tier that offers the ability to access presales but more importantly offer 2 shorts initially, and can go up to 10 if they meet certain stretch goals.

The rewards for the current Kickstarter campaign was delivered this weekend, and there were 10 short offered. However, I had already purchased 2, so they gave me a $2 coupon for my next purchase. This is beyond what I expected. Yes, it's self-serving, but also more generous than they needed to be.

There's also a RiffTrax channel on a lot of the free streaming services, if you want to dip your toe in without paying anything.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by specious_reasons

RiffTrax


There's also a RiffTrax channel on a lot of the free streaming services, if you want to dip your toe in without paying anything.

Indeed, this is the default channel that our TV is set to, so that's what's playing whenever we first turn it on. Unless we turned it on to watch something specific, we usually let it play until it gets to the first ad and we remember it's playing on an app that doesn't have fast-forward.