Joker 2019 perfectly captured the cultural moment because it perfectly understood the vibe of the country, viz, that we all wanted to go crazy and kill ourselves and everyone around us, however precise or imprecise our understanding of why SOCIETY made us feel that way. The cultural moment of 2024 is so much different because the Biden era has seemingly foreclosed all possibility of that kind of antisocial rebellion. The national mood is not one of unfocused violent passions, but rather of being asleep at the wheel as we drift into inevitable crisis. When we fantasize of adventurism, we cannot bring ourselves to imagine a crowd of Sickos cheering us on, as at the end of the first Joker - instead there is only the crowd of mindless sheep, as at the end of Nashville. Capturing that vibe shift would be an incredibly difficult pivot for the coming second Joker film to make, even putting aside the creative exhaustion that almost invariably accompanies sequel films. So as much as I loved the first film, I will enter the second with low expectations.
Every number in this article reads like somebody accidentally typed an extra zero
Jacobin is by and large good. As another commenter pointed out, they give space to all kinds of lefties. That leads to some pretty lib takes now and then, especially in the online edition. If tendencial purity or hard-line anti-electoralism is your chief desire then sure, not for you. But I think generally it’s good for promoting left unity, discussing historical and current events, propagating trade union news &c. It’s probably the closest we’ve got to a mass left publication in the US.
It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to shit ourself. And to agree that there are things and tools available to us to get shit out our doodoo ass into our pants.
honey can you please stop dreaming the garage door open at 3am
seems like 3 different rules but ok
every time you complain, the president gets 10 years older
Bowing to mounting media and intra-party pressure, Joe Biden suspends campaign; Trump to be Democratic nominee
nah this one is all czolgosz. his aim aint what it used to be tho
I think RN/Ensemble coalition is unworkable, at least right now. Macron’s brand is staked too much in being the safeguard against the fascists, and I don’t see RN having any reason to hitch themselves to what has been a very unpopular administration. At the very least, these results mean that if either Macron or RN wants a functional right-wing government, the political costs are going to be severe.
It’s true, we fan’t beat them
I didn’t know who Alfred E Neuman was until the Buttigieg thing. Not sure i knew what Mad Magazine was either. Am 25
Heartbreaking, &c.
Pretty much feel the same looking back on that show as I do looking back on my anarchist phase in general. Cringe, with some real problematic blind spots, but nevertheless kinda good at heart with some cool ideas.
I work in manufacturing as well, and what strikes me is about this is that Marx seems to have talked to actual, real business owners about how they think about and account of the running costs of doing business. Marx is of course presenting as a model built from first principles, but it’s clear that it does actually fit with the way capitalists actually do capitalism.
Yeah, it really struck me in volume 1 that the notion of socially necessary labor time maps really well onto the Lean manufacturing notions of value-added and non-value added labor (Marx’s explanation is of course more flexible and has more explanatory power, thus clearing up some of the misconceptions that are likely to arise, but there is clearly a common idea-seed.) Similarly many of the principles of the social productive powers of labor arising from co-operation. Here in the beginning of Volume II we even begin to understand the Lean obsession with inventory minimization and just-in-time manufacturing, which initially appears to many of us on the left as ridiculous if not outright delusional, as stemming from capital’s drive towards constant, unimpeded progress of its various forms through the circuit as the means of generating as much return on investment as quickly as possible.
I mean it kinda is under their bed, if they look down at a bit of an angle
This post almost got Trump killed. So much for the tolerant left