"To my knowledge, nobody has ever listened to the whole thing.
Of the six attempts I'm aware of, four were called off when the death threats started, one due to the near-breakup of the couple making the attempt, and one person drinking themselves to unconsciousness at about the 90 minute mark."
I am watching something right now so I would like it described to me so I can decide if it is something I want to take part in.
Okay, so
Basically, at some point in 2007, Mattel had this thing where parents could pay for either Barbie or Dora to give their girl a cool personalized phone call. Because big companies are bad at internet security, they saved the recordings of Barbie saying the names on one online drive, and this guy downloaded all 17,000 names and put them in alphabetical order. That's that music video up there
Steppling is a great American playwright, period. He is also a great teacher. He has protean interests–political, personal, epochal, mystical and dreamlike all at once. Saul Bellow said that a writer is a reader moved to emulation. Any serious playwright would gain far more by emulating Steppling and participating in his workshop than by surrendering to any American MFA program. He is utterly without a scintilla of bullshit
Steppling is a great American playwright, period. He is also a great teacher. He has protean interests–political, personal, epochal, mystical and dreamlike all at once. Saul Bellow said that a writer is a reader moved to emulation. Any serious playwright would gain far more by emulating Steppling and participating in his workshop than by surrendering to any American MFA program. He is utterly without a scintilla of bullshit
That last line is the real problem. It's entirely possible that he is a skilled playwright and educator, but asserting that that man is without pretence, baggage, or disingenuous puffery is absurd.
The Alex Jones conspiracy fringe also borrows heavily from Lyndon LaRouche and his group. LaRouche is, in one sense, the ‘reactionary racist’ link to the left, for LaRouche was active with both the Spartacists and Gerry Healy, and various Trotskyist organizations in his early days. But LaRouche also exemplifies that certain white American male of the mid 20th century. He is not all that different in the end from L.Ron Hubbard, if for no other reason than cultic personality traits and personal delusions. They are anti institutional, except when it is useful, anti government, anti communist (mostly), and with barely camouflaged racist beliefs. LaRouche at bottom, though, is a fascist. He and his followers hate banks (Jews), environmentalists and leftists (notwithstanding his early years with Trotskysts), and organized labor. There are dog whistle attacks on queer culture, and a clear set of symbols and rhetoric that sounds curiously like the Freemasons, which is also what much of Alex Jones sounds like. In the case of LaRouche it is often hard to know exactly where he stands, I suspect, because opportunism has been the overriding ideological imperative. What is most unsettling in all this, from Jones to Zizek to LaRouche to publications such as Pulse (Pulse media) or organizations like MoveOn, is that even a blind squirrel gathers some nuts. A broke watch is right twice a day, etc. So, even Jones is right about certain things, and those things are often stuff that is covered up by mainstream media. The fact that his conclusions are ALWAYS wrong soon ceases to be the point to many of his followers. For the same reason many Scientologists continue on with the Church (sic) even though, really, they know its a lot of sci-fi mumbo jumbo quack technological nonsense. Across all of this is a strange confluence of the half educated, the electronically literate, but sub literate in all other things, and the paranoid. One does not subscribe to Alex Jones or LaRouche if one is not paranoid.
In the new pseudo left, from the likes of Charles Davis (shockingly published byCounterpunch this last month) or Idrees Ahmad, or Molly Crabapple, Laurie Penny, or Zizek, there is, lurking right beneath the surface, a kind of hostility to the masses. A subtle elitism, and white privilege. It consciously looks to sound populist and brands itself with an aesthetics of *unpretension*, even while promoting with the other hand a very clear aura of cool (more later on this specific sub phylum of cool). Cool but not pretentious. That is the semiotic register for all this. But this targets the University educated, who, even if some of them think Jones is onto something, will still not take him completely seriously. They ‘will’ take Zizek or Charles Davis seriously, though, and Crabapple. For they represent the correct class. It is a sort of fraternity boy real-politik; meaning they are leveraging that posture of instrumental no-nonsense rationality. This also includes TV personalities like Bill Maher. But I will come back to this…
That last line is the real problem. It's entirely possible that he is a skilled playwright and educator, but asserting that that man is without pretence, baggage, or disingenuous puffery is absurd.
You know, it would be less obnoxious if he didn't proudly display it on his blog.
Comments
Of the six attempts I'm aware of, four were called off when the death threats started, one due to the near-breakup of the couple making the attempt, and one person drinking themselves to unconsciousness at about the 90 minute mark."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
that was a sign to quit
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
In the new pseudo left, from the likes of Charles Davis (shockingly published byCounterpunch this last month) or Idrees Ahmad, or Molly Crabapple, Laurie Penny, or Zizek, there is, lurking right beneath the surface, a kind of hostility to the masses. A subtle elitism, and white privilege. It consciously looks to sound populist and brands itself with an aesthetics of *unpretension*, even while promoting with the other hand a very clear aura of cool (more later on this specific sub phylum of cool). Cool but not pretentious. That is the semiotic register for all this. But this targets the University educated, who, even if some of them think Jones is onto something, will still not take him completely seriously. They ‘will’ take Zizek or Charles Davis seriously, though, and Crabapple. For they represent the correct class. It is a sort of fraternity boy real-politik; meaning they are leveraging that posture of instrumental no-nonsense rationality. This also includes TV personalities like Bill Maher. But I will come back to this…