Hey Hooks

Politics and other such topical creams.
Dr. Medulla
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Re: Hey Hooks

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tepista wrote:
Rat Patrol wrote:Wow...who would've suspected a bumped year-old Medullamaas nerd-thinker snoozer would roar back to life so suddenly as a scat thread.
When hooks announced his life-long obsession with anal trauma. I was gonna put it right where he told the rectum joke, but that was in a food thread. That woulda been wrong.
If this isn't the best fucking board around, I don't think I could handle a better one.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Dr. Medulla
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Re: Hey Hooks

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This piece on Michele Bachmann caught my eye re. generational behaviour:
Aaron Astor, an associate professor of history at Maryville College, has seen a major shift in how generations communicate — which does not bode well for Bachmann or the Tea Party-flavored Republican Party.

"People under the age of 40 thrive on irony," he told me. "That's why Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show are so popular. The Fox News/talk show world is decidedly un-ironic. Once upon a time it had a certain mocking humor and edge to it — mostly in the late 1980s when conservative comedy was still somewhat edgy. But Hannity is pure smarm and has zero appeal to younger people, regardless of ideology. Preachy, soap-box hollering is the stuff of baby boomer politics."

Andrew Sullivan also once asserted that "the bitter, brutal tone of American politics comes from... the baby boomers. The divide is still — amazingly — between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn't, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought but never dissented at all."

Many baby boomer media figures and politicos remain hopelessly mired in those 1960s and 1970s resentments. And Bachmann, born in 1956, is most decidedly a baby boomer — and perhaps even a caricature of one. She speaks in apocalyptic terms about President Obama and Democrats. She has never met an inaccuracy or exaggeration she didn't like in her thirst to negatively define the other side. (Fact-checkers following her speeches may soon have to seek workmen's compensation.) Even her way of speaking seems to resemble the late Gilda Radner playing Rosanne Rosannadanna on Saturday Night Live.
http://theweek.com/article/index/242081 ... ng-the-gop#
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

JennyB
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Re: Hey Hooks

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Can someone give me an example of edgy conservative comedy?
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Re: Hey Hooks

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PJ O'Rourke was capable of being funny. Dennis Miller, before he got really terrible.
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Hey Hooks

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Silent Majority wrote:PJ O'Rourke was capable of being funny. Dennis Miller, before he got really terrible.
Definitely O'Rourke. Norm Macdonald identifies as conservative/libertarian, as well.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Rat Patrol
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Re: Hey Hooks

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Silent Majority wrote:PJ O'Rourke was capable of being funny.
Emphasis on the was. He's pretty awful nowadays.

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Re: Hey Hooks

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Dr. Medulla wrote:
Silent Majority wrote:PJ O'Rourke was capable of being funny. Dennis Miller, before he got really terrible.
Definitely O'Rourke. Norm Macdonald identifies as conservative/libertarian, as well.
Huh, didn't realise he leaned that way. It fits, though, I can see it in retrospect.
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Flex
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Re: Hey Hooks

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O'Rourke is probably the only one who is (was) both funny and where his humor was actually conservative. Macdonald is freakin' hilarious, but the comedy I've seen/heard from him is pretty apolitical.

Dennis Miller stopped being funny back when he was a liberal, he got even worse as a conservative.
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Hey Hooks

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Flex wrote:Dennis Miller stopped being funny back when he was a liberal, he got even worse as a conservative.
Your assessment is like Caesar crossing the rubicon and realizing that he left the dry cleaning claim for his toga back in Carthage.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Flex
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Re: Hey Hooks

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Dr. Medulla wrote:Your assessment is like Caesar crossing the rubicon and realizing that he left the dry cleaning claim for his toga back in Carthage.
I hate you so much.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

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JennyB
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Re: Hey Hooks

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Flex wrote:O'Rourke is probably the only one who is (was) both funny and where his humor was actually conservative. Macdonald is freakin' hilarious, but the comedy I've seen/heard from him is pretty apolitical.

Dennis Miller stopped being funny back when he was a liberal, he got even worse as a conservative.
Yeah, forgot about PJ.
Got a Rake? Sure!

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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Hey Hooks

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I'll give Millennials some credit here: both Bradley Manning and Ed Snowden, who blew the whistle on NSA surveillance, are part of your generation. That partially makes up for Hoy and Chuck. You're still on the cannon fodder list, tho.

edit: Tho it should be stated that if S & H's theory is right, both those guys are contrary to the Hero profile (team-oriented types).
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

eumaas
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Re: Hey Hooks

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Anybody send you this yet?
http://community.good.is/link/reasonabl ... generation

There's a pretty good comment made on it:
It seems to me that the term "millennial" was originally meant to describe people like me (born 1983) as well as people born in the 90's, but that 9/11 and the Great Recession changed the landscape so much that we (those born around 1980-1989) don't fit in with the selfie-obsessed narcissists who have come to define the term "millennial."

We were treated very differently by history, even if birth rates indicate that we are a single, cohesive group. I don't think the pop culture identifiers are as significant in this instance as the broader metaphysical drama of unrequited hope and expectations. Not owning a house or being able to afford a kid before I turn 40 hurts me in ways it won't hurt my 18 year-old students who simply grew to expect fewer opportunities (they are still stupidly confident, despite being impossibly incompetent compared to older generations at their age).

I was in law school when the recession hit. Now, instead of making $100k+ per year as an attorney like I had planned, I teach high school and earn under $50k/yr. The kids who spent that time in college and are now pursuing their dreams in grad school had their eyes opened before they committed to a career path. Those who were 5-10 years into the workforce were relatively unscathed by the new new economy.

And still, there are people my age who were luckier, harder-working, or less ambitious than I was. They probably don't relate to these articles in the same way I do. We may not be a "generation" in the traditional sense, but damn it if there isn't something different about those of us who lost vs. those who lived the good life and lost it vs those cell phone addicts who never had it in the first place. But maybe the boom years are coming and we'll all be where we expected to be, after all. Isn't it pretty to think so?
I think that's a good distinction to make as well--stopping it at 82-84 is a little too early, honestly. There are lots of people who like me were sold the idea of college -> career success, who weren't beholden to technology growing up, and for whom the Great Recession was a major blow. The kids I'm going to school with now never had those illusions about success, and are able to navigate it better--perhaps some kind of different expectations.

After 2008, I felt my awareness of my class was acute. I felt utterly hopeless and without opportunity, damned by birth not to rise out of my circumstances. I think today's youth, the ones getting called Millennial, are very different to people of my little half-generation. I was also strongly influenced by Gen-Xers and still have more friends in the 30s-early 40s age range than any other group. I am almost completely alienated from the world of those younger than I am--my friends out of that group are generally outliers, people who have adopted a cultural position outside the norm. Even then, they're a lot more like the iPhone people than I am.

My idea of social media growing up was the message board, shit like that. I got on Myspace and Facebook in college (2005!), mostly as a way to connect with classmates. Instagram--a photographic documentation of every part of one's life, shared socially--is completely foreign to me. I missed that boat. It never occurs to me to take a photograph of my meal, and I only take photos with people at big social occasions like birthdays or meaningful concerts (album releases, etc). I am a twitter user (I joined in 2008 because a story on NPR made it sound interesting) but I only became active on it after I entered the Doctor Who blogging and podcast world, but twitter is actually considered kind of old fashioned by some younger people I meet.

Some of it is my peculiarity. I think not having a smartphone is a huge part of why I'm different. I still use a flip phone! Even though I can text, I am away from the internet for large portions of the day. I am also a big snob and have esoteric cultural and intellectual interests that would put me outside of any mainstream whatever the generation.

Anyway, just wanted to write a bit on this shit as I feel my difference acutely now that I'm at university again.
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Hey Hooks

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Relying on Strauss and Howe for this, they made a point of saying that there is no clean line between generations, either demarcated by birth year or character, but more like looking at a spectrum, how purple becomes red. There's no point where you can say, "There—it's changed," but taking a longer view you can tell. So there are going to be people born in those kind of cusp zones that will feel neither wholly one generation or the other, seeing elements of both in their experiences. It seems reasonable to expect that me, born in '69 and so smack dab in the middle of the Xer period, will recognize the Xer stereotype more than, say, Wolter, who was born closer to that grey zone.

What I like about that comment is that it places popular culture behind more important social experiences like employment, home ownership, education, etc. Those are the things that really shape generations—their degree of optimism, attitudes toward the common good, individuality, and authority figures. Popular culture stuff is more how we express those experiences. I was talking about this a bit with my sister, w/r/t Trudeau's victory. I said that he needs to learn from Obama's mistake: he needs to look to Millennials and what their needs are. Boomers and Xers are part of the problem or hopelessly jaded, but Millennials may still be receptive to ideas of the common good. I'm not conservative (save for a lot of personal habits) but my outlook was framed by the 80s and 90s as much as diehard conservatives. Jaundiced towards government but in very different ways and for very different reasons.

As for your sense of difference with others in your cohort, I think it's a good reminder that generation is a significant social category, but it's not the only one. Other traditional divisions such as race, class, gender/sex, and nationality/regionality are still important and how they affect us and in what combination may well be an entirely individual thing. But I don't think anyone is wholly immune to the effects of any single category. You may have a heightened sense of class and less of generation, but that doesn't mean generation doesn't impact your outlook. It's really tempting to put up firm divisions around ourselves and others to demonstrate that we/they are proof of this or that, or to deny the same, but it's really more of a continuum thing built on so many axes.*

*When David Riesman published The Lonely Crowd in the early 50s, it became a surprising bestseller. The gist of the book is that America was evolving from an individualist and productive society—inner directed—to one more group oriented and built on service and consumption—other directed. The book was popular but most misinterpreted for the same kinds of reasons I mention above. Riesman saw inner directedness and other directedness as ideals on a continuum and indicative of larger trends, but many chose to see them as firm categories and declared various people inner or other. Riesman certainly didn't see his model as the be-all of social analysis.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

eumaas
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Re: Hey Hooks

Post by eumaas »

More griping about being considered a millennial:


I agree with a lot of it--my experience is definitely not like that of the bulk of what gets called millennials.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman

I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy

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