#these were people!! and people are messy and nuanced and have terrible traditions

[ruthlesslistener]

If we consider the separate corpse dumping pits in a vacuum yes soul master would be worse, but PK was the one who created a kingdom with a class divide that allowed soul master to snatch up folks without being noticed. Whether he intended it or not, PK ended up enabling soul master. I'm not phrasing this right, I know PK once aware of soul master's actions disproved of them but that doesn't change that every flaw in hallownest's structure, from social to economic, is a result of his negligence.

I dunno at least that's how I felt playing the game. At every misfortune I met from bosses to the structural issues with the caverns (crumbly floors, thorns, spikes, why is there so many spikes???) I cursed the creator of this kingdom, so I personally view the sins of his people as his own sins, or at least view him as partially responsible

Anyways all of this could have been avoided if PK just used his small form to become a civil engineer instead of a god king

... actually the structural issues with the caverns might have been worse if he did that nevermind

(branching away from the main topic I Do wonder what a mortal disguised PK would be like. The only god we seen in HK attempt something like that is Grimm and even then all he does is simply not advertise himself as a god, he very much does not attempt to blend in into the mortal populace, perhaps aware of how his eerie aura would prevent him from doing so. Would any of the higher beings be able to truly blend with mortals if they wished? Or would that be impossible?)

?? Anon, PK had little to no influence on the society of Hallownest beyond the most basic shit like 'throw your entire self into your purpose until you die'. Like yeah I think he encouraged learning about the soul arts and engineering, bc thats kinda his whole thing, but what's even MORE his thing is just..not participating in the society of Hallownest at all, to the point where people speculated about what he looked like because they just straight-up never saw their king. Hallownest's society and social class systems is something that likely was inherent to the beetle tribe before he became their god, which is something that I assumed because a.) There are multiple tribes in Hallownest with their own unique cultures that aren't entirely because of their gods, b.) He's the polar opposite of the Radiance, who obsessively exerts control, c.) He actively formed treaties with tribes that his own populace considered uncivilized savages and beasts (the mantises and spiders), and d.) His own Great Knights are formed of social rejects like Ogrim and foreigners like Ze'mer. Pair that with the fact that the retainers in the White Palace are clearly noblebugs that lend nothing but empty minds and inane chatter who are only useful if exploited for soul or killed, and it paints a very clear picture that PK was not at all involved in the social structure of his own kingdom. In fact, he's probably the exact opposite. And that's not neglect, per se- though he is neglectful- that's just more proof that the people of Hallownest are much more than which faction are aligned with which other god. PK had nothing to do with it. To gods, mortals are pretty much livestock, so I assumed that he paid about as much attention to the social ills of Hallownest as a farmer would for a chicken's pecking order- sure, maybe it seems alarming and like something you should fix, but really they're just gonna keep going at it, so why bother if it doesn't affect the quality of the food you're getting out of them? The Beetle Tribe had a pretty clear hierarchy that resulted in a lot of social ills, but considering the fact that the bugs of Hallownest canonically worshipped the Void before the Radiance came around, I think its safe to say that the hierarchy there was around for centuries before the Pale King took over. He just built the city that they lived in- and if the donations fountain is anything to go by, he did try to siphon off the economic issues at least a bit. He had very, very little influence on their social life

I'm not exactly defending the dead baby pit here, but PK didn't enable the Soul Master at all- he actively opposed him, bc again, he's losing chickens. Contrasting the horror of the Soul Master's slaughter to the dead baby pit is supposed to make you wonder whether mass murder for salvation is really any better than mass murder for power, and the fact that PK was horrified and disgusted by the Soul Master's body count while piling up his own also gives us more context on how he must have felt about the vessel pit- aka, terrible. It highlights the disconnect between the two while also pointing out that both were terrible no matter what their intentions were.

He might have tried to make it seem like he had everything under control, but he very much did not, so pinning all the blame on him when he was only one facet of all the shit going wrong in a very divided world just seems kinda, idk...shitty to me. It takes blame away from the Soul Master, who was the pinnacle of a powerful rich man throwing others under the bus to get what he wanted, to pin it on PK. I certainly am not trying to defend PK here- everyone knows he fucked up- but pinning all of the ills of Hallownest onto only one guy takes away a lot of the nuance and character of the people he was trying to protect, people who were already reduced to livestock and body counts in the war between him and the Radiance, so personally for me that's really :/. He's an important part of Hallownest's downfall, but he's really not that important

[ramblingsrantsreviews]

Season Review: Never Have I Ever (Netflix, 2020)

I’m a little late to the party since Never Have I Ever released on Netflix on April 27th but there’s just so many amazing shows nowadays that it can be hard to keep up. At least I joined the party!

Co-created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, Never Have I Ever is Netflix’s latest coming-of-age dramedy to take the world by storm. The show centers around 15-year-old Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) who is desperate to change her social status and redeem herself from her disastrous and traumatic freshman year of high school. Let’s just say, the only thing worse than being known as the freshman who lost her dad during a recital is being the girl who lost the ability to walk because her dad died and she went into shock. Just as quickly as she lost the ability to walk, she gained it back and now Devi is determined to redefine herself and make sophomore year her bitch. With her friends by her side, Devi devises a plan to get them boyfriends so they can start climbing the high school social ladder. In addition to her plan, Devi must also learn how to finally grieve her father’s death, deal with her nemesis Ben (Jaren Lewison), and figure out how she’s going to get her crush Paxton (Darren Barnet) to fall in love with her.

In true coming-of-age fashion, the show deals with friendships, crushes, parties, and the general displeasure that comes with being a teenager. It’s cringey, hilarious, heartbreaking, and emotional all at the same time. Plus, it’s a fun and easy binge you can knock out in a day or two if you’re a hardcore binger.

Now, here is my review of Never Have I Ever.

As always, spoilers ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

Favorite Episode: 1×10 — “…Said I’m Sorry”

Season finale episodes can be hit or miss but Never Have I Ever knocked it out of the park. It truly did the impossible by tying up loose ends while still leaving us on a cliffhanger of sorts so that we beg Netflix for a season two.

With the title, “…Said I’m Sorry,” it’s safe to assume that episode 10 is going to be the redemption episode for Davi. What’s so incredible about this episode is that it’s not just Davi who is saying sorry for her actions, everyone around her is. The episode begins at Ben’s house since she has moved in with him so that her mother can’t force her to move to India. When Nalini shows up at Ben’s house Devi is less than pleased. Her displeasure soon turns to anger when Nalini tells Devi that she plans to spread her father’s ashes today, on his birthday. Devi freaks out and refuses to attend because she fears this is another “spring cleaning” attempt so they can go to India.

When Ben finds out that Devi isn’t going to the beach to spread her father’s ashes he springs into action. He convinces Devi’s best friends Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) and Eleanor (Ramona Young) to put aside their annoyance with Devi and come convince her that she needs to do this with her mother. The girls show up and eventually convince Devi that she needs to do the right thing. Ben offers to take Devi to Malibu and though they face some obstacles, Devi makes it and is able to reconcile with her mother.

Meanwhile, Paxton gets a reality check from his sister Rebecca (Lily D. Moore) and shows up at Devi’s house. When she’s not there he calls and leaves her a voicemail. Devi doesn’t get the message right away though since she discovers Ben waiting for her in the parking lot of the beach. Instead of checking her phone, Devi and Ben kiss.

All of that happens in less than 30 minutes so its a pretty intense episode but an amazing one nonetheless.

As I mentioned above, I love this episode because everyone gets their apology moment.

Devi must first apologize to Fabiola and Eleanor, again, for her shitty behavior. What I love though, is that it’s not just Devi who’s apologizing, Fabiola and Eleanor also recognize that they’ve been a bit unfair to Devi too. One line that really stands out to me is when Eleanor says “just because we aren’t talking doesn’t mean we don’t care about you.” It speaks volumes about what teenage friendship looks like. It’s messy and there will be fights but true friends will always be there for you when needed. And they’ll always be there to call you out on your bullshit and point out harsh realities.

The true emotional moment of this episode comes when Devi and Nalini reconcile on the beach before spreading Mohan’s ashes. While it’s Devi who begins apologizing for her terrible behavior and for telling her mother she wished she had died, it’s Nalini who steals the show by apologizing for making Devi feel like she didn’t love her. It’s the perfect mother-daughter moment for these two and one that is so important because it shows that these two do love each other despite everything they’ve said and been through.

There’s one more apology within this episode, though it’s more subtle. To me, Devi and Ben finally apologize to each other for their years of bickering and nonsense fighting when they kiss in that car. Not only did Ben prove that Devi can count on him in the hard times, but Devi also proved to Ben that she could appreciate his presence.

Least Favorite Episode: 1×06 — “…Been The Loneliest Boy In The World”

Before you yell at me, it’s not what you think. I absolutely adore Ben; in fact, he’s my favorite male character in the show. And I don’t even hate that they decided to give Ben a stand-alone episode, what I hate about it is that it didn’t do anything to further tell us who Ben Gross really is.

The episode, which is narrated by Andy Samberg, opens with Ben on the bus on the way home from the disastrous Model UN event. Not only is he hurt that Devi turned on him causing him to lose, but he’s also hurt because he thought they really had a breakthrough moment at the hotel party. Things only get worse for Ben when he gets home and finds out his mother is leaving for another retreat so she can “be a better mother.” In addition, Ben’s father informs Ben that he’ll be unable to go to an NBA game with Ben.

Things aren’t much better for Ben at school. Sure, he has a girlfriend but she’s only with him for his father’s money and he’s definitely lacking in the friend department. In fact, Ben becomes so overcome with loneliness that he agrees to meet some dude he met in a Reddit forum. Of course, that goes about as well as one might think and Ben flees the restaurant after the dude is revealed to be a middle-aged man who asks him to “blow on his pizza.”

After a large pimple finds a home on his face, Ben goes to Dr. Vishwakumar’s office to get it dealt with. While in the chair, Ben breaks down and Dr. Vishwakumar ends up inviting him over to her house. Let’s just say Devi is less than pleased to have her nemesis sitting across from her at the dinner table. Despite it all, they end up having a great time together. In fact, Devi and Ben even have a moment while doing dishes together.

See, I told you it wasn’t a bad episode!

As I was researching the show I stumbled upon an article published on Forward.com that exposed the show’s “Jewish problem.” The author, Mira Fox, makes some good points, and its one of the reasons I decided to pick this episode as my least favorite.

Fox points out that while the other characters are either not defined by their backgrounds or are allowed to have nuanced opinions about their backgrounds. Everyone that is, except for Ben who is trapped under endless Jewish stereotypes.

Ben’s stand-alone episode could have given us the depth to his character and his personality. It could have introduced us to his family and his life that is drastically different than Devi’s. It could have even explored his Jewish background in the same way that Devi got to explore her Indian heritage in episode 4.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this episode lacked depth until the final scene with Devi and Ben in the kitchen together. When I realized it was Ben’s point-of-view episode I had high hopes for it but unfortunately, all I got was a bunch of character backstory I already knew and a weird catfish scenario.

Favorite Character: Devi Vishwakumar

I’ll be honest, I had a really hard time picking a favorite character because there were so many amazing ones to chose from. My honorable mentions include Ben, Kamala, and Mohan but I eventually decided to pick Devi since I had more to say about her as a character.

Devi is insufferable at times and she’s selfish pretty much all the time but that’s why I love her so much. All too often we expect the female characters to be nurturing, to be selfless, and to be this perfect stereotypical version of what a woman should be. It’s refreshing to see a teen girl who’s allowed to be a mess because let’s face it, teenage girls are messy.

While it might seem that Devi stays static for most of the season, it’s simply not the case. With every minor mistake and fall out with a person, Devi is getting closer and closer to working through her grief and trauma to become a better person.

One of the things I love about her is that she’s so ready to have the best sophomore year ever that she doesn’t stray away from asking for exactly what she wants. Is her asking Paxton to have sex with her even though they’ve barely talked weird and probably qualifies as harassment? Yes, but when has a teenage girl ever been allowed to pursue what she wants so stubbornly?

More importantly, I think Devi is an extremely interesting and important character because of how she deals with her father’s death. While it might be an odd statement, I found that a lot of people I knew in high school, myself included, went through their first death while in high school. High school is hard enough with the pressure to succeed academically and socially but when you add in the need to grieve it gets so much more complicated.

Devi’s grieving process explores one that’s not traditional but is common. She’s so affected by her father’s death that she simply cannot process it. Dr. Jamie Ryan (Niecy Nash), Devi’s therapist, nails it when she tells Devi that all her issues with people stem from her trauma from her father’s death and the fact that she hasn’t been able to grieve it. And while I don’t condone Devi’s constant need to use her father’s death as an excuse or pass for her behavior, I do understand it.

Lastly, I want to briefly discuss Devi’s relationship with her Indian heritage. I love that the series chooses to introduce her right from the start as someone who isn’t “traditional” or rather is “Americanized.” We further see her complex relationship with her heritage explored in the fourth episode of the series. In fact, she even states that sometimes “she doesn’t feel Indian enough” to a family friend who used to feel the same way but after going to college has reconnected with his heritage.

It’s a theme we’re seeing explored a lot with characters who are both American and from a different ethnic/religious/racial background and one that is so important. I’m glad we got to see Devi’s version of her struggle to fit in and I hope (assuming the show is picked up for a second season) we get to see it explored more later one.

Least Favorite Character: Eleanor Wong

Similar to my disclosure before my least favorite episode, I also don’t really have a least favorite character from Never Have I Ever. Part of the reason why this was so difficult that all because all the characters are sort of terrible which is the point of the series!

While I could have picked a guest character, I decided to pick a character that was a bit more permanent to the story at large. In the end, I ended up choosing Eleanor as my least favorite character. While I did like aspects of Eleanor’s character, I felt that she was just another stereotypical theater kid. While it’s true theater kids can be over the top and dramatic, it’s not true for everyone. I wish the media would understand this and diversify it’s theater kid characters.

I also wasn’t a fan of her plotline with her mother. While it was interesting and unique it didn’t pull the same emotional weight as Devi or Fabiola’s storylines. I had a lot of questions regarding the plot. Why was her mother hiding from her? Was she ashamed? Why did Eleanor decide to give up acting when she finally was finally the lead? I know it’s because she didn’t want to be like her mother but by giving it up she became her mother.

Again, I just wanted more from her both in her character personality and in her storylines.

Favorite Pairing: Devi and Josh

Like most teen shows, Never Have I Ever does have a love triangle but unlike most shows, this one doesn’t seem forced. You’re either Team Paxton or Team Ben and I am 100% Team Ben.

While Devi and Paxton are cute (if you can get past the fact that the actors are literally 10 years apart in age), but they’re nothing unique about them. The cool guy falling for the nerdy girl is a tried and true trope and Never Have I Ever doesn’t do much to make it fresh. Nemesis to lovers, on the other hand, is something I haven’t seen done in quite some time which is why I was so excited when the show decided to explore Devi and Ben’s relationship.

Ben and Devi just get each other, even if they don’t think they do. They’re both competitive and smart, they both deal with familial struggles, and they’re both desperate to figure out who they are so they can fit in. In fact, the one thing constant in these two lives is each other’s presence. Even in their most vulnerable moments, these two seek each other out because they know they’ll be real with each other.

I mean come on, Ben ends up at Devi’s house after being neglected by his family and his girlfriend and Devi literally moves into Ben’s house when she has nowhere else to go. Not only that, but Ben literally rallies Devi’s best friends because he knows they’ll be able to convince her to do the right thing.

When will your favs ever?!

I knew I was shipping them the entire season but what really sealed the deal was the fact that Ben stayed at the beach when he didn’t have to. He could have dropped Devi off and left which would have forced her to work things out with her mom or else she’s been stranded at the beach. instead, he chose to stay because he didn’t want Devi to be forced into any situation she didn’t want to.

In my eyes, there is no love triangle after that kiss!

Complaints:

One of my biggest complaints regarding Never Have I Ever is that the series didn’t utilize it’s reoccurring characters as strongly as they should have. Obviously, the show is mainly about Devi and her struggles but that doesn’t mean that the other characters couldn’t share some of the action. There were several episodes where they were MIA completely. I would have loved to see Fabiola struggle to figure out the right way to tell her family that she is a lesbian. I would have loved to see Eleanor in action in the theater club and how her relationship with a crew member made that better or worse. I wanted to see more of Paxton and Rebecca’s relationship. I really really wanted to get to know Kamala better. It almost felt like Never Have I Ever was pulling a Twilight by having all these amazing secondary characters who didn’t get the time they deserved. I hope we get to see more of them in season 2!

Another complaint of mine was the arranged marriage storyline. While I’m not Indian and I can not speak to the culture at large, I personally felt like it was an outdated stereotype. For a show that’s so diverse and progressive, I felt they could have done something else with her character that was equally as entertaining and conflict inducing. Or, at the very least I would have wanted them to dig deeper into why she was being subjected to an arranged marriage. I guess what I’m saying is that I didn’t like that the storyline was played for laughs instead of actually digging deeper into it. It still could have funny elements but I wanted a deeper meaning out of it. Who knows, maybe that’s something that’ll happen in season 2.

Lastly, and this one is minor and has nothing to do with the writing, I was displeased with the fact that they cast two actors who are ten years apart to play romantic love interests. Look, I get it, when an actor is right for the part they’re right for the part but at some point, you have to be cautious of age. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan who plays Devi is only 18 and yet Darren Barnet who plays Paxton is 29. Maybe I’m too old but I just can’t ship a couple knowing that there is an age difference of 10 years! Ramakrishnan and Barnet are both amazing actors and they did an amazing job portraying their characters and I wouldn’t want them re-casted. I just would prefer it if they weren’t love interests.

Praise:

I haven’t loved a show so quickly and so deeply in a long time so it was refreshing to have that moment again while watching Never Have I Ever.

The humor and the dialogue was spot on from the beginning to the end. I literally laughed through every episode of the show not because I had to because I genuinely thought it was hilarious. From one-liners to entire conversations I seriously couldn’t believe how funny the show is. And it’s not just cringe humor nor is it purely physical humor. It’s not even just the humor that the dialogue nailed but also the serious and awkward moments. I cried through the entire final five minutes because of the dialogue leading up to that moment and the dialogue in the moment itself.

Never Have I Ever completely nailed the awkwardness of being a teenager in high school. I don’t know what exactly it was but watching the show immediately transported me back to my sophomore year of high school which is both a bad and a good thing. The friendships dynamics were spot on. I loved that they explored a friendship break in an authentic and positive way instead of it being a bigger moment than it needed to be. Had friendship breaks been acceptable when I was in high school I probably would have had more friends. Even the relationships were spot on — both romantic and familial. In fact, I really appreciated that Devi and her mother weren’t the perfect mother-daughter duo and that they both were still grieving Mohan’s death.

I absolutely love the show’s diverse characters. One thing I think was groundbreaking about the show is that none of their sexualities/races/ethnicities/religions specifically defined who they were. Devi wasn’t just an Indian-American character. Fabiola wasn’t just a lesbian. Eleanor wasn’t just Asian-American. Ben wasn’t just Jewish. Paxton wasn’t just Japanese-American. They were those things but they were teenagers first and foremost. Were there times I wished we got to know more of their backgrounds? Of course, but I also appreciated that it wasn’t the focal point of their characters or the story at large.

Finally, I did love that they gave Ben a stand-alone episode — even if it was my least favorite episode. It was refreshing to have a different point-of-view character and it helped keep the series fresh and entertaining as I binge-watched. I really hope they continue with this trend and that we get to see Ben have his own episode again but also that some of the other characters get there’s too. I’d love to see Kamala and Paxton get one to explore their characters more. Fabiola and Eleanor would also be interesting too. Even Devi’s mother would be interesting!

* * *

Overall, I did really love Never Have I Ever. I thought it was fun, fresh, diverse, and entertaining. I will definitely be rooting for the series to get a second season because I’m not done with these characters.

You can stream Never Have I Ever on Netflix.

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Zach Galifianakis Denounces Celebrity Worship: This Is How We Ended Up With Trump

HOLLYWOOD, California Ill have the McWhopper, Zach Galifianakis jokes as he settles down into a booth at the Arbys on Sunset Boulevard at 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. They dont have Dr. Skipper, do they?

Along with his Baskets co-star Martha Kelly and co-creator Jonathan Krisel, Galifianakis is at Arbys to schmooze with Emmy Awards voters. Later, after speaking with a group of journalists, he will spend hours both taking and delivering drive-thru orders to lucky members of the Television Academy who will ultimately decide the FX shows Emmy fate.

Louie Andersonthe only actor on the show to win an Emmy for his portrayal of matriarch Christine Basketsstrolls in late wearing his signature dark blue dress shirt and bright red tie. Sorry, you guys, I was making fries, he deadpans.

The decision to hold the For Your Consideration day at Arbysas opposed to say, the lavish theater at the Ace Hotel where NBCs This Is Us held its event that same nightis a perfect reflection of this understated, irreverent show.

I mean, its just a TV show, have it in an Arbys! Galifianakis, who spends as much time as he can on his farm in North Carolina, jokes of these FYC events. God, this town and how it takes itself so seriously, it makes me sick. Were dumb actors! Thats how we ended up with Trump, celebrity worship.

This Arbys location is the same one the show has filmed in periodically over its first three seasons, including the third seasons Thanksgiving episode, which found a troupe of French clowns joining the Baskets family for a fast-food dinner. Anderson calls it one of the greatest moments in the shows history.

I know you probably think we shoot at Arbys headquarters, Galifianakis jokes. And I had been here a long time ago, as a customer.

Similarly, Anderson recalls coming to this Arbys drive-thru every night at 2 a.m. after performing at The Comedy Store in the mid-1980s. I got an Arbys special, two different types of fries, a Jamocha shake, and then Id drive though again, he says.

We wanted to show the dirtiness that TV doesnt show a lot, Galifianakis says of the decision to make this particular chain, which also became a frequent punchline on Jon Stewarts Daily Show, such a big part of Baskets. You dont really see real fast-food places being used. And unfortunately, the country has turned into this sort of fast-food mentality and we wanted to highlight that and show it.

Arbys was originally written into the pilot as a throwaway joke, but once they started writing the first season, they realized it could be a recurring location for the characters, including Galifianakis Chip, who has to keep returning to his job there after failing in his quest to become a successful clown.

How many questions will be about Arbys? Galifianakis wants to know before the press conference officially gets underway. You know, we have a show.

And that show just got picked up for a fourth season, despite what can generously be described as modest ratings. Galifianakis, who plays twins Chip and Dale Baskets on the show, explains that he set out to portray characters who were not exactly likeable, to use a favorite term of network executives. But three seasons in, he has started to allow them to approach something resembling redemption.

Over the course of the shows run, Anderson has undoubtedly become the breakout star of Baskets with his Emmy-winning performance as Christine. What could have been a one-note joke has evolved into a nuanced and emotional portrayal of a woman finding herself in her golden years.

While Christine may seem like the opposite of her artist, weirdo kid, Krisel says he strives to show that they are not so different. Shes sort of an artist in her own right, he explains. These types of ladies are magical, too. Its not just beautiful models who, like, romp through Paris. These are interesting, poetic lives, too.

All the silly, traditional, buttoned-up stuff in sitcoms is never happening in Baskets, Anderson adds, which is beautiful. When Anderson refers to himself as a really pretty woman, Galifianakis shoots back, Look, Louie, whatever you keep telling yourself

Families are messy and their problems arent fixed by one quirky line, Galifianakis adds. From the beginning, we wanted it to be a lot of things. And I think now that were going into our fourth season, we know the show better than we did during the first season.

Life isnt all jokes or all drama, he continues, noting that when he watches dramatic shows hes always hoping that someone will make a joke. I just havent seen a show like this that has dramatic elements and then goofy jokes. Galifianakis did admit later that hes never seen his fellow FX show Atlanta, which could be described the same way.

Christian Sprenger, who served as the director of photography for Baskets first season, notably left the show to do the cinematography for Atlanta, a fact Galifianakis still seems a little salty about.

Ive seen Atlanta and I love it, Martha Kelly chimes in. I just want to get that on the record.

This past season of Baskets was the first one produced without the participation of another FX auteur, Louis C.K., who co-created the show with Galifianakis and Krisel, but stepped aside after the revelations about his history of sexual misconduct. Galifianakis has described C.K.s exit as disruptive in a harmful way to so many people, chalking his behavior up to the poison of celebrity culture: The fact that someone can think that just because theyre loved, they can do what they want.

Anderson told The Daily Beast earlier this year that he was so sad and a little shocked by everything that came out about C.K., who had first pitched the idea of him playing Christine Baskets. Its still a very emotional thing for me, he said at the time. I feel bad for everyone involved. Its a terrible thing.

The recent season finale ended on a double cliffhanger of sorts. As the family counts down to midnight on New Years Eve, Chip gets an unexpected phone call from his estranged wife Penelope and Christines boyfriend Ken says he has a question for her. As her face lights up, the screen cuts to black.

Krisel and the cast confirm that they had no idea if they would be given the chance to make a fourth season when they decided to end it that way, but they all seem excited by the opportunity to continue the story.

That being said, they still dont know what they want to do next. Galifianakis and Anderson recently had dinner to discuss some storylines, and as Krisel says, There were some terrible ideas that came out of it.

I mean, the numbers on this show, Ive never looked at them, but Im imagining theyre below average, Galifianakis says with a laugh. Thankful for FXs ongoing support, he suggests that if the show had been on a broadcast network, People would have walked out of the pilot.

We really are lucky, Anderson adds.

So are the shows fans.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/zach-galifianakis-denounces-celebrity-worship-this-is-how-we-ended-up-with-trump

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I told myself I wasn’t going to write about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Enough blood and ink and emotion has already been spilled by histrionic reviewers and fans who either loved or despised the movie.

And honestly, it ranks pretty high on the “Things That Don’t Matter All That Much” list, alongside the Cleveland Browns, Hootie and the Blowfish, and the fact that U2 is hugely overrated.

But as a lifelong Star Wars fan who knows an unhealthy amount of Star Wars trivia, it does matter to me. And after seeing the movie for a second time last night, I really wanted to write something, even if it’s only for myself. Lest you forget, I’m a millennial blogger with an opinion, which means I’m contractually obligated to share it.

So here I am, a 35 year-old man writing about laser swords and Wookies. My mom would be proud.

If you would rather receive a roundhouse kick in the throat than read about Star Wars, I get it. This isn’t the post you’re looking for. Move along. But for the rest of you, you’re welcome/I’m sorry.

At The Heart Are Characters With Heart

Ultimately, Star Wars has always been about the characters. Yes, it’s about the Rebellion and Jedi and good versus evil. But it’s more than that. It’s about the people who make up the Rebels and the Sith and the bluish, hovering, semi-dead Jedi.

At the outset, all the characters had heart. Even when Luke was a young whippersnapper complaining about not being able to go to Toshi Station to get power converters, he deeply cared about the Rebellion. There wasn’t much question that he was a good guy, and when his aunt and uncle were killed, he was all in on being a Jedi and fighting the Empire.

He had heart.

Han Solo was initially a heartless mercenary who only cared about money. But when it mattered, he came back and rescued Luke on the final Death Star trench run. From that point on, he was all good. Heck, he was frozen in carbonite because of his dedication to the Rebellion.

Obi-Wan, though regretting his choices regarding how he trained Vader, was not in hiding out of self-pity. He was running for his life from Vader. When he met Luke, it was game on. He confronted Vader head on and sacrificed himself so that Luke and his companions could escape the Death Star.

The good guys always risked their lives for each other. They had each other’s backs. They answered the call when danger arose and didn’t shrink back in the face of overwhelming odds. And C3PO always reminded us that the odds were terrible.

The Empire was always clearly evil. Vader was menacing and frightening. The Emperor was a sadistic monster. Stormtroopers marched in formation like Nazis and delighted in wiping out innocent planets like Alderaan.

We never had any doubt about who was good and who was evil. We never watched Star Wars movies to see finely nuanced characters battle their inner demons. Yes, there was the whole good in Vader thing in The Return of the Jedi, but that was about it.

Star Wars has always been about characters who we cared about. Characters who cared deeply, did hard things, and had a real impact on the story. They all had heart.

Characters Without Heart

My biggest disappointment with The Last Jedi (and I had a lot), was that the characters lacked heart. It was as if director/writer Rian Johnson went out of his way to say, “Everything you thought about these people is wrong. They’re not so great. They’re flawed, messed up people who happen to be fighting for the Rebellion.”

In most cases, I would be thrilled with that directing choice. Normally, I hate two-dimensional characters. I like nuanced characters who have great flaws and weaknesses. I know that life is messy and I like movies that depict those blurred lines.

But not in Star Wars. I want clearly defined characters who know what they’re about and who I can get behind 100%. I want good and evil. I want people who know what they really care about. I don’t want wishy-washy flip-floppers.

That’s what was missing in The Last Jedi. Characters with heart.

The line, “Let the past die,” is repeated numerous times by a variety of characters, and in some senses, it felt like that was Johnson’s guiding principle. It was as if he wanted to take characters who had an established past and strip that from them. To transform the good guys into sort-of-good guys who have all sorts of problems. To show us that even the greatest aren’t that great.

The last we knew of Luke Skywalker, he was a triumphant Jedi who had vanquished Vader and the Emperor, defeated the Empire, and was a firm believer in all things good.

We encounter a very different Luke in The Last Jedi. He’s a shriveled, simpering, bitter, whining, dry alcoholic-ish figure who cares about nothing except letting himself and the Jedi order die. He’s not interested in helping the Rebellion or his sister or anyone else. He cares about himself and that’s about it. His character was completely gutted and we’re only given a few minutes of backstory as an explanation. It was a massive character shift in a miniscule amount of time.

When recounting the history of the Jedi, Luke calls it a history of failure. A history consisting of myths and legends rather than real people. This isn’t the Jedi or the Luke we were given in the previous movies. This is something altogether heartless and apathetic. It’s hard to care about this version of Luke.

Poe Dameron, the ace X-Wing pilot who thrives on ripping Tie Fighters to shreds, is revealed to be a cocky hot head who doesn’t know how to follow orders.

Fin, one of the heroes of The Force Awakens, reveals his mixed colors when he tries to sneak off the ship at the beginning of the movie.

Yes, these characters had moments of redemption in the movie, but even those moments were tempered by the fact that their actions didn’t matter at all. Poe and Fin’s elaborate plot to board a Star Destroyer resulted in everyone getting captured. It did nothing to contribute to the rescue of the Rebels and ended up being nothing more than a strange, distracting plot point that added nothing to the overall story.

Fin also could have redeemed himself by plunging headlong into the battering ram cannon but that was cut short when Rose knocked him off course (presumably making her some sort of hero and setting up some sort of romance between the two).

Luke’s “battle” with Kylo Ren at the end of the movie was nothing more than a diversion. He never left his island and never actually fought Ren. He just projected some sort of weird Jedi hologram, which I don’t understand but I’m willing to suspend disbelief on that one. His sacrifice wasn’t much of a sacrifice. He died/vanished, just like he wanted to from the outset.

Even Admiral Holden, the woman who took charge after Leia was injured, wasn’t much of a hero, at least in the traditional sense. She did sacrifice herself (which is heroic and admirable) in an effort to save her people, but that sacrifice accomplished nothing. It didn’t actually save the Rebels in the end. It was yet another strange plot device that didn’t really contribute to the movie (other than the cool shot of one ship ramming another as it jumped to hyperspace).

In the end, I came away feeling very “meh” about everyone except Rey and Kylo Ren. I’m all in on them. They know what they’re about. They are the new Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

But the rest? It’s hard for me to be all in on them. They all became much less likable.

I don’t want that kind of Star Wars.

Let The Past Die

Rian Johnson was all about letting the past die, and in many ways, he let the past of Star Wars die. The characters I loved are less lovable. The things I thought I knew about the Jedi are less certain. And with the departure of Han Solo, Luke, and presumably Leia, there’s not much left of the past.

I realize I’m in the minority on this. Most of the people I’ve talked to about the movie loved it.

And as I said at the beginning, I’m a 35 year-old guy writing about Star Destroyers, which is pretty lame.

Will I watch the movie again? Sure. I’m a Star Wars fan. But it doesn’t have the magic the others do, and I miss that.

I miss the heart.

The post The Last Jedi: A Movie Without Heart appeared first on The Blazing Center.

[thebeautifulinsight]

In advertising, everybody wants to be a storyteller.

Maybe that’s because the word evokes a familiar mystique—a nostalgia for the time when ads were so novel and slick that people accused them of hidden agendas and subliminal hijinks.

Maybe it’s because the “storytelling” conceit dresses up awkward truths about what it means to work as a creative in a commercial space, constantly defending matters of gut, jockeying for position as a representative member of “the least important most important thing there is,” in Don Draper’s succinct formulation.

Storytelling gives our jobs a coherence and a point: it ties together every subjective choice and asserts that their sum is greater than the parts. It dumbly gesticulates toward a unified field theory in which the brand exists in perfect harmony with the company it fronts—as well as all past and future marketing efforts. And it helpfully erases the fingerprints of creatives themselves: “telling a brand’s story” presupposes that some version of the story was always there, waiting to be plucked from the ether by a creative medium and midwifed into tangibility.

In other words, consecrating ads as stories satisfies every meta-marketing objective.

So what’s the issue?

One obvious problem is that most brands have no particular story to tell—at least not anymore.

Julie Creswell’s great piece on Sears illustrates this new reality. The iconic retailer began as a salesman’s fever dream and innovated its way across the 20th century; now it limps along in a state of predeath, squeezed for every last penny through the financial engineering of its majority shareholder. While it once played the protagonist in some grand narrative of American retail, populated by icons like the mail-order catalogue and suburban stripmalls, Sears is just another flailing Amazon competitor today.

In 2017, whether a company thrives or struggles, its story is usually one of acquisition, scalability, and creative accounting. That’s not necessarily an indictment (though John Oliver offers a cutting one). But it does make CMOs who extol “authenticity” sound faintly ridiculous. Odds are good the brands they champion are one of a vast constellation of similar companies in a private equity fund or holding company portfolio, steered by the same market forces as their corporate kin.

Globalization, and the immense thicket of supply chains that undergird it, have in a way neutered the potency of brand stories—ironed out the kinks of differentiation and regional flavor that are the foundation of traditional storytelling. Stories are inherently local, even parochial: anchored to a place, a person, a set of circumstances, they reflect a particular worldview. As brands become increasingly global, they’re less able to tell that kind of story credibly.

And it’s hard to understand why they would ever want to. Advertising is an objectively terrible format for storytelling. Even the famed 60 second commercial, that fading holy grail, is ill suited to it. Good stories—the ones we watch on TV or film, read in prestigious weekly magazines, remember from our high school English classes—reward characterization, voice, humanity, and a bunch of other nuanced literary stuff. Commercials aren’t given enough breathing room to hit those notes.

Of course, many great story-driven commercials do exist; some are responsible for attracting creatives to advertising in the first place. But those are the outliers, as any casual TV watcher can attest. The vast majority of narrative spots are hammy and trite. Operas are more emotionally grounded. Conflating advertising with storytelling doesn’t set a high bar for quality; it commits a category mistake, dooming creatives to work with the wrong set of tools. The real power of advertising is in its interactivity.

Print ads plainly demonstrate this. Print is often cited as the purest advertising medium—if an idea can satisfy in two dimensions, it must have some validity—so it’s telling that print rarely traffics in narrative. Part of it is that nobody has the patience to read bricks of copy and that awards juries favor visual solutions and so forth. But maybe the most salient reason is that good print is more like a game than a story, and good creatives understand this intuitively.

Saki put it best: “In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.” Ads that require your participation, that present a puzzle to be solved, already have your attention. The really clever ones can leave you basking in an intellectual afterglow, like a prefrontal orgasm: your reward for expending effort on behalf of the brand. And in that moment, brands are at their most persuasive. What could be a better sales technique than convincing the buyer he thought it up himself?

Whether visual or text-based, retro or contemporary, print ads succeed when they engage you in a game.

The same holds for true other media. Take this Ikea billboard.

Whatever this billboard is doing, it is not telling a story. Rather, it’s asking you to reconfigure an unexpected image—to briefly decode the rules that govern this scene. At 60 miles an hour, they don’t need to be complicated: in this case the item and its price tag are ontologically swapped. But the pleasure of that recognition is the inherent pleasure of games.

What defines a story and what defines a game, and how much they overlap, are higher-order questions than advertising needs to answer. Lee Clow famously suggested that “The Apple Store is probably the best ad [Apple] ever did.” Are the Apple Stores examples of environmental storytelling? Maybe. They’re clearly an exercise in worldbuilding. But as with video games, their principal mechanism seems not to be narrative, but play: the thrill of being let loose in an unknown system and testing its rules. The immediacy of unscripted interaction.

The most famous campaigns from the past 20 years, from Subservient Chicken to Nike+ to Red Bull Stratos, share this gaming DNA. Narratives are often built into or around them—as product launches or “branded content”, as news events or PR coups—but narrative is incidental to their enduring appeal. At their most elemental, these ads are expressions of play.

Even celebrated TV spots, when you examine them, don’t look much like conventional stories. The Saturn commercial below, for instance, is not the tale of an autoless society in which people walk down roads. It’s more like a test: can you decipher the rules of this world? Can you figure out what the ad is going to tell you before it tells you? Whether you can or can’t, that knowledge gap is what makes the commercial compelling.Some TV spots go a step further, recording a playful moment without bogging it down in any semblance of story. They often feel lighter and less cynical as a result. Ikea executes this perfectly:

People love monkeys, no doubt. But it’s the snapshot of chaotic, joyful play that anchors the message and resonates with the viewer. Kitchens can be a locus of messy fun; with the right appliances and design (supplied by the right brand), yours can be too.

Stories aren’t going anywhere, needless to say. Creative advertising values insights—sometimes those insights are best consumed passively, and sometimes the right tools are psychological realism and dramatic composition.

Story remains a powerful lens for viewing anything at all.

But play is advertising’s great skill, its strongest foundation. When we recognize and respect that, good creative follows.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Despite the right’s stereotype of antifascist activists as close-minded thugs or paid protesters, in reality the majority have long been quite geeky, prone to lining their bookshelves with obscure fascist screeds and abstruse historical tomes. This comes with its own problems. Fascism is a multifaceted phenomenon to say the least and different threads can easily preoccupy a researcher their whole life. This has made fascist studies a kaleidoscope of particulars that can be forbidding for newcomers and resists general summary. We are all lucky then that in a moment when suddenly everyone is interested, Alexander Reid Ross has undertaken the herculean task of mapping an overview of fascist historical and ideological currents across a myriad of directions and locales. Ross rose to some anarchist prominence in the process of writing Against The Fascist Creep when AK Press asked him and Joshua Stephens to investigate the South African platformist author Michael Schmidt. Their resulting multi-part report on Schmidt’s hidden nationalist and racist affinities and his surreptitious attempts to slide such into mainstream anarchist theory and practice was initially shocking and contentious to many. While the conclusions of Ross and Stephens were ultimately accepted as unassailable, even largely finally admitted to by Schmidt, the initial pushback they received was intense. Few like to consider a world where political dissembling and conspiratorial misrepresentation are pressing issues in radical theory and communities. Understandably, the instincts of many are to recoil at the thought of investigations into such. How are we to protect ourselves if people can accuse others of believing things secretly?! Almost everyone in our society has had formative experiences with the panic and horror of social circles closing ranks because of unfalsifiable accusations. Regrettably, the instinctive solution of rejecting any and all accusations as “witchhunts” and generally refusing to model any deeper dynamics than people’s face-value proclamations can open the door to far greater damage, creating an environment that not only gives cover to but encourages all manner of surreptitiousness. Such a charged atmosphere around antifascist scholarship can also make it hard to fruitfully discuss points of ideological overlap, weakly defended against entry and egress. When — no matter how nuanced the conversation is broached — all that’s heard is “the nazi stain is upon you!” no one wants to strategize around ways to better resist the nazi creep into their own ranks or ideas. Almost everyone prefers to close ranks against the dastardly accuser… even if closing ranks means happily joining arm-in-arm with the dudes with nazi tattoos. Schmidt was a particularly extreme case because his now discontinued book, Black Flame, had become one of the most treasured political works among anarchists of a red or anti-individualist persuasion — infamous for stripping anarchism of its ethical depth and philosophical diversity, reducing it to merely a particular tradition of working class resistance to capitalism. In retrospect, now that his ulterior motives are universally acknowledged, such a rhetorical move screams of an attempt to defang anarchism against the nationalism and racism Schmidt secretly sought to inject. Yet Schmidt is but one example in a long lineage of attempts by those with fascistic politics to disingenuously infiltrate and co-opt the radical left. Perhaps partially in response to the pushback he received in the Schmidt affair, Ross has studiously worked to strip Against The Fascist Creep down to a “just the facts” approach. This is largely (but not always) successful; in some cases, Ross’s attempts to quickly bridge or bundle the bare atomic facts creates implicit narratives that obscure or misrepresent, and in a few cases he messes up the facts. Against The Fascist Creep is at its best when laying out direct historical sequences. It is at its worst when shoving together an array of associations. When Ross wants to give a quick passing reference to creep in separate movements as vast as libertarianism or transhumanism, he often badly misrepresents things (see the end of this review for some hilarious examples), but in his defense these occasional screw-ups appear to be obvious byproducts of grasping outside focus of his research. The closer Ross sticks to direct branches of fascist thought, the more spot-on and rigorous he is. On the whole, Against The Fascist Creep is an achievement at juggling countless variables or dynamics: a decent and much-needed overview that will hopefully give more substance to the frantic talk of fascism widespread across the left today. Ross’s central thesis — that fascism is in many respects ideologically syncretic and opportunist — should really be undeniable. But much turns on what one moral the reader takes away from this reality. Against The Fascist Creep is, from its very title on, obviously unequivocal in its urge to take the creeping influence of fascism seriously. Yet, as a consequence of Ross’ aspiration towards an uncontroversial “just the facts” approach, analysis past that point is thin. Should we see that creep as a pressing risk to or inherent in any transgression of left and right categories? Are there aspects or subsections of the left or anarchism that are more fertile ground for it? What aspects of fascism are more concerning or inherent? Against The Fascist Creep makes motions towards answering these questions but provides few concrete arguments. Ross admits that the book he ended up writing didn’t match his perspectives and assumptions going in. There are clear signs of narrative tension throughout the book, between sections that opine distinctly in a direction and sections that end up more equivocal on the same subjects. It’s clear that Ross, as a good scholar, was willing to challenge and deviate from his initial biases. Against The Fascist Creep ends up with blame to go around in every direction — rather fair in its assessment that every ideological tendency has its ties to fascism. Hopefully this will challenge readers, but one fears that most will take away what they want to, focusing on the ties of their ideological opponents while wincing at but largely discarding the ties of their own camp. I’d now like to do precisely that. Or rather, I’d like to respond to what I suspect will be the most common reading of Against The Fascist Creep. You’ll have to forgive this bit of shadowboxing because while it’s my impression that Ross doesn’t fully or even at all intend a number of reads, they will still be common enough given the nature of the text to warrant response. For example, Ross’s whirlwind through the history of fascism does a wonderful job of illustrating what a complicated mess “the left” always was and how strains of fascism played alongside numerous other terrible strains already existing within the left. As I’ve argued, the truth is that there is no core to “the left.” Words like “equality” hopelessly split among many irreconcilable interpretations, and the whole affair is a messy jumble: relying more on political and demographic coalitions than ideological or philosophical coherence. Yet at the same time, Against The Fascist Creep can’t help but frame things in terms of The Left being infected. Ross attempts at the outset to present these crossovers as primarily a result of The Left not adequately responding to material conditions. It’s a nice picture, and a popular one — if only we got to these white poor people first with our better Bibles, they’d have seen the light and the right wouldn’t have been able to recruit them by stealing planks from our platform or presenting inferior analysis. But this is more of a bromide than anything useful. I’m not saying there isn’t a large degree of truth to it, but I’m always suspicious when the activist left concludes that we’ve already figured everything out perfectly and only need to Organize Harder! If we see things merely in terms of an outside force seeping into and staining our own pure ranks or pure ideology then the only response necessary is to draw up ranks and expel the foreign invasion. The situation changes if we ourselves have never been pure: if the left has itself contributed to the creation and continual re-emergence of fascist creep. The corruption narrative is both trivially correct — fascists have a well documented love of entryism through disingenuous self-presentation and opportunistic syncretism — and dangerous. Humans are prone to simplistic heuristics when things are framed in terms of infection. Such instincts can lead us in conspiratorial directions, alleging secret agency at play where there might instead have been sincere epistemic meeting and affinity. Is National Bolshevism really a sinister plot to corrupt the left, or might it actually just be a purification of what Bolshevism always was? Monsters don’t necessarily have to hide their faces or mislead about their intentions; a good portion of the left has always found affinity with such monstrosity. Ross is honest about this, providing a number of examples of currents of the left happily inviting in fascism, helping contribute to its development, or even converting on their own (as with Red Army Faction leader Horst Mahler). And the authoritarian left is rife with examples. Yet the overall pull of Against The Fascist Creep is still inescapably one of some good and pure left getting infected and subverted. The other side of such a corruption narrative is that it assumes a rather one-way picture of politics, or rather can’t help but read liminal situations into that flow. Yet I would argue that good is itself not toothless and perpetually consigned to be on the defensive. We are capable of recruiting and partially infecting too. This is a fact that the politics of purity popular in today’s left too often forgets. There are many situations where the story is more accurately one of anarchist creep. Where the motion leftward of a figure ostensibly in the right is not a matter of appropriation or synthesis of bad sub-currents, but a sincere embrace and conversion to some of the best aspects of the left. Ross can’t help but cite left-libertarian Karl Hess’s origin as a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater in a way that will imply to most readers the adaptation of Goldwater’s racist coalition to try and suck in 60s leftists. Yet Hess broke sharply with Goldwater over the draft and denounced the racism of Republican worship for “states rights,” severing his old friendships and joining SDS, the Panthers, and the IWW. We’re talking about a man who then worked to bring self-built technology and participatory democracy to his largely African American home neighborhood. What Hess shows in every respect is not the infectiousness of fascism but the overwhelming potency of anarchism. Not some crypto-fascist perversion but a sincere and real anarchism, steadfastly compassionate and dedicated to the freedom of all. The modern libertarian movement and many broadly decentralist right-wing folk present a rather complex mess of currents in both directions, as brutal in-fighting around Ferguson so wonderfully demonstrated. Just as you will find snake-tongued talk of cross-racial collaboration that actually seeks to shield white nationalism or center separatist narratives, you will also continually find individuals whose empathy and intellectual inquisitiveness cause them to buck their social and ideological circles. The III%er friend of white nationalist bikers who becomes fascinated by the racist structure and history of gun laws and starts down a rabbithole of reposting emphatic videos about challenging white privilege on his social media. The left can unfortunately trend towards a uniform victim complex that obscures just how potent and true our ideas and values are. Recognizing the seriousness of fascist creep does not oblige a uniform emotional orientation towards the world. We should be cackling maniacally with glee at the terrifying, overwhelming power and rightness of our cause. It is we who’ve eaten this world, who’ve built these cities stone by stone, who’ve chewed like acid through the traditions and prisons they now howl for a return to. Ours is not an arbitrary position and our victories are not built on sand. Fascists worship raw physical force and the trollish undermining of truth. They seek to shove every contestation into those arenas, precisely because we massively outgun them in ideas. We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace our absolute superiority in that realm, even as we must also sometimes respond to fascists in their preferred arenas. Part of such a recentering on having better ideas means that yes, sometimes some people on the right, against their nature, will manage to get something actually correct. Smashing fascist brownshirts in the streets and busting up their organizing efforts does not oblige a totalistic attitude about team purity that bars all other sorts of engagements. Of course I’m biased here, I’m writing at a think tank infamous for encouraging transgressive intellectual engagement in the service of anarchist values. It seems to me on the face of it utterly ridiculous that two ideological coalitions built in the context of the nineteenth century would form boundaries precisely matching eternal political and ethical truths and that nothing of value will ever be found outside some broad consensus of “The Left”. In particular, as a market anarchist it is my opinion that the calculation/knowledge problem (as well as broader insights from information theory and game theory) are one case of our adversaries occasionally having science ostensibly go their way to a degree: or at least of them still being capable of honest research and discovery. And it is a personal mission of mine to bring this to the attention of anyone else with my values, lest we again shoot ourselves in the foot, as we did by abolishing currency in the Spanish revolution. To let ideological team sports put us in fear of recognizing anything discovered by Team Bad would be to chain us to an endless sequence of further Lysenkoisms. Where the purity politics of the left overwhelm its basic sense and create such epistemic closures that we are incapable of seeing basic facts about the world. The issue of epistemic closures brings us to the always lurking problem of agreeing on a definition of fascism. Ross characterizes fascism as disconnected, held up by tricks of ideological misdirection in a complex mess of attempted syntheses that go nowhere. I think this is partially true. Certainly, it’s a common complaint about fascistic writers like the neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin that they bury what few frail arguments they actually make in an endless series of self-referential smoke and mirrors. But I also somewhat disagree. I think today’s fascist tendencies have matured and adapted it more closely to the underlying realities that Mussolini and Hitler’s often quite arbitrary garbage was always swirling around and tapping into. Modern fascist currents with their focus on autonomy and localism have purified a more coherent embrace of “negative freedom” (or freedom from rather than freedom to) that has always been lurking and that historical fascism was the purest expression of at the time. The definition of fascism Ross uses is one of patriarchal ultranationalism that seeks to destroy the modern world and launch a spiritual rebirth of an organic community led by natural elites and characterized by traditionalism. The particulars are incidental — often incoherent and arbitrary. I think this is pretty accurate, and certainly far more true and useful than “any sharply authoritarian government” or “a stage of capitalism where the bourgeoisie rule through terror,” or the supremely stupid yet disturbingly popular “any totalizing or universalizing perspective”. But I’m the sort of person that longs for more philosophically rooted definitions than practical ones. And I would say that lurking under the ideological dynamics Ross identifies are more universal philosophical tendencies. The concept of freedom from presumes a kind of static identity — a thing that you are, either essentially or arbitrarily — but something to be defended from perturbation and change or corruption. A focus on and valuation of being rather than becoming. When freedom becomes synonymous with isolation or preservation of some state of being, it becomes reconcilable with hierarchy. This is of course fundamentally anti-intellectual, valuing the authenticity of immediacy over the self-modification inherent in prolonged mental engagement. This focus on immediacy necessarily means a fetishization of violence and physical force. It develops into an embrace of simplicity and hostility to complexity. Latching on to simple claims and despising complex emergent dynamics. Paradoxically (but only on first glance), fascism has always engaged in a showy post-truth postmodernism as defensive flak. Trollish or openly opportunistic dishonesty is an attempt to defang the realm of ideas of any power that might change oneself. Fascism treats ideas solely as weapons or disposable tools. In short, I think fascism occupies a unique ideological role in our world not merely because of its historical injustices (the horror and death toll of other historical regimes and ideologies being comparable), but because it makes stunningly explicit the very common ideology of power in our society. It’s simply following the incredibly pedestrian notion, common all the way down to high school jocks, that power is 1) inescapable, 2) the most important thing, and 3) that brute force in both physical and social arenas is ultimately king. Fascism’s portrait of its enemies as being at once powerful and weak is really a morality tale about what sort of power matters. The cudgel of national or racial collectivism is just as crude as any bare violence. While historical fascism has often revolved around particularities like anti-semitism, we must remember what deeper narratives and tensions hatred of “The Jew” played smoothly along with. In this regard, I think the modern syntheses of people like Dugin and Preston are more coherent than Mussolini’s and Hitler’s. This is (in part) because today’s fascists are wannabes further from the seat of power and without similar raw charisma. They are therefore slightly more inclined to try to bash out something more ideologically substantive than naked opportunism. But they tap into the same underlying philosophy of power and “freedom from.” Few — in their fleeting cogent moments — sincerely believe in fascist alchemical nonsense like a mystical war between water people and fire people (the cosmopolitan trader/scientist people versus the honorable simple land-based warrior people). This kind of narrative construction is purely and consciously engaged in to chase resonance, not truth. But such mythopoesis does reverberate around a deeper and real tension between the teeming complex and mutable connectivity of the modern world and the kind of simple and stasis-allowing isolation they, like broken animals, crave that a rupture will bring. Of course this focus on negative freedom has always been core to fascism and its fellow travellers. Alex Jones’ rants today against globalism are practically unbroken from the propaganda of the Third Reich, which saw itself as liberating countries from the corruptive intermingling of a global market and the conspiratorial cosmopolitans driving it. Today’s fascism, following the adaptations of Evola and Benoist, has coalesced more coherently. Horror at the levelling “homogenizing” of world civilization reflects an objection to unpredictable and alien change from engagement. Liberation is cast as palingenesis through destroying everything and starting anew. The retreat of ancestral knowledge and spirituality rather than the levelling engagement of modernity. Logically this comes with a deep seated hatred of free markets and their deterritorializing flows. Even those few who originally came out of capitalist traditions that make much noise about free markets worship at the altar of titanic firms: the replacement of messy fluidic dynamics with a simple structured hierarchy. Paleolithic tribes or monarchistic corporations, the social bodies they worship are fixed and distinct. Despite pretenses of anti-communism, they know their greater enemy is the market itself. The near complete overlap with ostensibly “anarchist” anticiv discourse almost goes without saying. The widespread love of Stirner among nearly every fascistic current paralleling talk of natural aristocracies and disdain for the “lowest common denominator” is present in the most rotten sections of the post-left. When modern fascists like Pierre Krebs declare, “We are not interested in political factions but attitudes to life,” one can’t help but get chills. And what attitudes indeed. When one remembers among endless other connections that John Zerzan and the n-word throwing Bob Black shared their publisher Feral House with Nazis, and that Aragorn’s anarchistnews.org repeatedly published “national anarchists” despite widespread condemnation, the chill should turn to ice. Not because such people are racists or undercover Nazis — most clearly aren’t — but because they often seem to be circling the same edgelord drain, caught by some of the same attractors and uninterested in resisting the pull. Since the publication of Against The Fascist Creep, Ross has published a rather soft spoken examination of fascist creep in these currents of the post-left: far more nicely and diplomatically put than I would ever be and I have long identified as post-left, often in the sharpest possible terms. (Of course the post-left is far bigger than the followers of a small number of old edgelords from Northern California, and is probably more widely characterizable in the anarchist movement by projects like Crimethinc and The Curious George Brigade). Ross’ article was — naturally — met with denunciation of an outsider’s attack upon the tribe rather than concern at the dangers of fascist corruption. Part of this is the fault of his language, which was sloppy on Stirner and lent itself to sweeping narrative interpretations, but it’s disappointing to witness the wagon-circling and in-group defending that we, ostensible individualists, have leaped to rather than taking his provocations seriously. Indeed, variants of ‘fascism’s not that bad’ permeated the response in the nihilist milieu and the eco-extremists were happy to clarify that in their desire to kill all of humanity they see Hitler as a half measure. Surely, even if Ross was a disingenuous ideologue — opportunistically slandering and scoring points against those he disagrees with — these sorts of responses deserve our concern as well. If, as some critics like to allege, antifascists are merely responding to yesterday’s horrors, documenting the fallout from a confluence unique to a single historical moment, then that seems to be an argument to take deathly seriously those like ITS who explicitly promise to unleash atrocities historically unparalleled. If, with the explosion of white nationalists today, we are merely witnessing the toothless and trivially doomed echos of a distant nationalist nightmare (a sanguine interpretation I don’t share), shouldn’t we be mobilizing with full force to instead identify and snuff out those newer and, in their own words, more monstrous tendencies that claim to arise independently? I doubt that this is a conclusion those who raised this criticism in response to Ross actually desire us to reach. Those among the backlash to Ross who didn’t themselves openly embrace fascism, like a 13-year-old drawing a swastika on his face to show them, seemed most concerned that Ross was performing a guilt-by-association on their social networks. On the contrary, I read the critique as being primarily about ideology or philosophy. We should be concerned when an ideology shares enough aspects with fascism to draw connections, entryists, and conflation. But we should really be worried when an ideology’s strength and appeal starts to come from the same place as fascism, tapping into the same underlying philosophical frame or orientation. Let’s not forget that the hatred of Ross started with his exposure of a prominent platformist: the hyper-organizationalist anti-individualist position at the opposite pole from post-leftism within the anarchist movement, that is frequently criticized for being more of a soft authoritarian communism than anarchism. While Ross’ personal inclinations run far more towards the traditional academic left than I’m comfortable with, he is at least an equal opportunity critic in his work. Against The Fascist Creep is light on the analysis, being more of a survey, but it does try to narrow down where fascism finds meeting points with the left or ostensibly anarchist movements. I think the takeaway is clear on what to watch out for: * * An elitism that claims to find liberation in rejecting ethical reflection with “might makes right” dismissals. Often a populist elitism that posits its adherents are an aristocracy that will replace the unworthy one. * A worship of violence for violence’s sake. A great example is where the “armed spontaneism” of self-professed anarchists involved them bombing anarchists. * Nationalism or other forms of collective identity as panacea. Where the ratchet of tribalism or one’s hunger for a simple closed community is embraced uncritically. * A vulgar anti-imperialism that focus on some threats (“the US empire must be overthrown!”) at total exclusion or denials of all others. * Authoritarianism. And in particular the claim that authoritarianism is all there is, that everything possible is authoritarian, and only option being the direction of its boot. The fact that this list has shifted seamlessly from referring to nihilists to referring to tankies (authoritarian communists) is perhaps the most pressing dynamic today. Many post-leftists that once defined themselves by their distance from Marxism have, in the last few years, raced back into close association with its worst representations. The fascist Alain de Benoist’s famous proclamation that it is “Better to wear the helmet of a Red Army soldier, than to live on a diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn” might as well be today’s zeitgeist. Even former staunch ancaps, caught up by the alt-right/Trump wave, now say similar things. Fascist-inclined politics seem to be on the rise everywhere and while I’m a staunch defender of the internet’s potential, Ross is no doubt onto something in his claims that this has a lot to do with alienation and backlash to the erosions of privilege that have accelerated with the internet. The surge of tankies and nihilists online (often sharing the same chan culture and anime avatars as Nazis) has caught every AFK activist I know off balance. While the complete answers to this combined upsurge are no doubt more complicated than can be covered in a single essay, and obviously there is often intense conflict between these parties, nevertheless the points of intersection seem to run deep. Again, I hope I will not be misread when I say that this convergence shows they’re onto something here. There seem to be deep philosophical attractors at play, and certainly similar dynamics in discourse — gravitating to the most simplistic and provocatively “edgy” positions. I’m tempted to call fascism — if you pardon the physics metaphor — a kind of lowest energy state in ideology, with many lines of idiocy converging upon it. Fascism can be deathly wrong while still being coherent in a revoltingly “anti-thought” kind of way. And just because a number who cast off from the historical edifice of “The Left” end up pulled down and swallowed by Lovecraftian monsters doesn’t mean we should stick to that sinking edifice. If the partially unstable bundles of “left” and “right” are now shaking out, then I take some small pride in the fact that the “synthesis” left market anarchists have pioneered lines at the polar opposite of the new fascist synthesis. It’s not for nothing that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and the Center for a Stateless Society feature so prominently as subjects for derision in the memes of the alt-right. White nationalists repeatedly single us out as the greatest enemy. We’ve worked steadfastly to oppose their noxious efforts since well before many on the left paid the alt-right any mind. Indeed, fascist projects like TheRightStuff got their start hating on us. While many on the left stumble and stutter trying to distinguish their fetishization of community and collectivity from that of the hydra of modern fascisms (“autonomous nationalism”, “national-anarchism”, Duginism, etc.), we have stayed steadfast in our pursuit of freedom for all. A real, positive, engaging, connected, dynamic, and teeming freedom. Anarchism in its most unabashed form, as a decentralized globalism. Recognizing in isolationism and parochialism forms of oppression that curtail and limit the freedom to act, the freedom to build relationships and ideas across all boundaries. Markets are today, as they have been throughout history, not an enemy of antifascism but its most consistent pole. Fascists get attracted to capitalism — the promise of an elite meritocracy, a ladder to power that you could climb, powerful businesses as absolutely integrated and distinct communities — but then recoil in horror at the degeneracy of markets. They recognize in us the acid that has eaten away their traditions and nations, that has devoured western civilization from the inside, torn down the power structures that shortsightedly sought to enslave and direct our ingenuity to their ends. In the short run, a baseball bat can stop a bonehead thug, but in the long run it is markets and their dynamic collaborative cosmopolitanism that have and will ground his idols and hopes into dust. We don’t promise totalitarian power as revenge, we don’t offer membership into an amoral elite, we don’t seduce with the reassurances of simplistic group belonging. All we can offer is a stretching, ever-reaching freedom and the embrace of truly consensual interaction. Where fascism offers retreat and isolation as solutions to those same ills, we offer border-crossing and boundary-transgressing liberation. Our commitment to confronting the tendrils of fascism is not the reactive defense of some imagined purity, but a necessary part of a searching vigilance. Where Ross Gets The History Wrong It’s not just Ross’s implicit analysis that’s often problematic. He occasionally misrepresents the actual history. He’s rarely wrong on the most bare of facts, and he is right more often than wrong on the broader historical framing, but he does screw up. To give a harmless example, Ross dates the “alter-globalization” rhetorical repositioning to a camp in 2003, but I and many others were making noises precisely about this issue back in 1999 at N30. As a 13-year-old on the tailend of a long primitivist phase, I was screaming chants about how “another globalization is possible” in Seattle, and I certainly wasn’t original. This may seem completely anodyne, and the sort of thing you want to grant Ross charity for, owing to him not having full knowledge of the social context. But this is a great example of recurring problems throughout the book. There’s a frustrating tendency to tie a series of interesting facts and anecdotes together with hazy moves that de facto construct a very clear narrative. The implicit or explicit narrative ties are never sourced like the individual facts, and they’re often broadly interpretable in a more constrained direction. But it’s still overwhelmingly clear how any reader without knowledge of the context will read them. Now I have sympathy for Ross here. Most of his narrative framings that I have contextual knowledge of were accurate. It’s hard to write a sweeping book like this, much less without decades of careful study of all the subjects under one’s belt. And such sweeping overviews are intensely useful. We need a more accessible canon on fascist movements, ideologies, and entryism. But there’s always a danger with this kind of sweeping overview whereby short and quick summaries in sequence end up giving a kind of flash of pattern recognition that stimulates the sensation of insight. In its worst directions, this can turn into a kind of empty insight porn, or even the opportunistic and shallow “Aha! Bad Thing A has this connection to Bad Thing B!” kind of Glenn Beck style guilt by connection that everyone is always accusing antifa researchers of doing. Again, I want to be clear; I have strong sympathies for Ross’ effort, I think the resulting book is very needed and on the whole good, and I think much the same of many antifa groups that do precious and needed research into fascist movements. But this book will mislead people on a few points, particularly a couple close to my realms of political work and I feel obligated to highlight and address these. Ross claims that “Ron Paul’s Libertarian Party” rejected NAFTA and other free trade deals merely in defense of a parochial and isolationist libertarianism. Nevermind the absolute weirdness of referring to the Libertarian Party as a possession of Ron Paul, or making a strong identification between them (I do hope Ross is at least vaguely aware that Ron Paul ran for the Republican nomination to run against a Libertarian Party candidate the last two times). Let’s not mince words: Ron Paul is a racist reactionary who plays hard to the paleoconservative movement and is a perfect representation of the noxious coalition Rothbard tried to build towards the end of his life between libertarians and the right. If someone shot Paul and Rothbard in the 80s, the world would almost certainly be a much better place. I’m not remotely a fan of the Libertarian Party either. However, the Libertarian Party explicitly opposes NAFTA and other free trade agreements on the sincere grounds that they actually impede globalization and increase the scale of government power. The Libertarian Party and the libertarian line on existing free trade agreements has consistently been that they’re handouts to the rich that privilege big business, increase regulations, and hypocritically constrain the movement of people. Libertarians are overwhelmingly pro open borders and this has long been the Libertarian Party’s explicit position too. And yes, open borders and complete amnesty were explicit planks of the Libertarian Party platform in 1988: the sole time Ron Paul ran for president as a Libertarian. Additionally, I remember libertarians being present in Seattle in 99, loudly going on about how if free trade deals were sincere about globalization, they’d be three lines long and would give citizenship to all who wanted. A couple of them even eventually helped us in fighting the riot cops. I do not mean to undermine the long influence of Rothbard’s henious synthesis with the paleoconservatives. For instance, Ron Paul echoes the standard libertarian critique of free trade deals not actually supporting free trade, but he can’t help throwing out dogwhistles about how these deals are “globalism” in conspiratorial terms that play well to nativists and anti-semites. This fits with the long history of Ron Paul making nice in backrooms with white nationalists — a history that has brought loud condemnation on him from within the libertarian movement but should ideally bring about an absolute and total rejection of him. It’s important to be clear about the history though. At first, Rothbard derived left-wing conclusions from his individualism (e.g. workers and students seizing their businesses and schools), but then recoiled in a hyper-reactionary direction as his fellow early libertarians went even further left. For a combination of reasons, Rothbard journeyed deep into racism and nativism and this has remained a continual current in libertarianism ever since. This can be seen most notably in the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, and Ron Paul, whilst it is generally opposed by cosmopolitan yuppie tendencies closer to the center of libertarianism like CATO and Reason Magazine. But there is all kinds of mess here. Jeffery Tucker once helped Rockwell write racist newsletters for Ron Paul, but in years since Tucker has transformed into a strident anti-racist and anti-fascist who raised the cry about Trump and the threat of white nationalists well before much of the left took them seriously. Speaking of people turning towards the light, read this annoying passage from Ross: “Hayek had been influenced by Othmar Spann the corporatist theorist of the interwar Austrian Nazi Party, before moving to Mises’s liberal economics. The Austrian School diverged from Spannian corporatism, insofar as they advocated the primacy of free markets and individual transactions rather than “universalist” economic planning.” Oh, so basically it diverged in literally every noteworthy respect. Explain to me why there’s any need in this context to mention the fact that one of Hayek’s professors was a Nazi if Hayek ended up making a career denouncing everything notable Spann argued for? Sure, Hayek’s methodological individualism was influenced by Spann’s strident opposition to methodological individualism. But this is an example of Ross finding a worthless thread and including it anyway. Particularly galling is Ross’ citation of Mark Ames’ stunningly dishonest claim that Reason Magazine supported Apartheid. I’m not a fan of Reason on the whole (although there are some good folk there), but if that proud rapist and infamous yellow journalist Mark Ames told you the sky was blue, you should look up and then get your vision checked. In personal conversation, Ross has shown awareness of how deeply in bed Mark Ames’ The Exile was with fascists, which makes it all the more annoying that Ross didn’t follow up in checking Ames’ claim, which has been eviscerated here. Of course it’s no secret that reactionary currents have long infected the libertarian movement and fascists recruit from them. I would argue that this stems from the two completely different attractions people find in libertarianism: the capitalistic defense of hierarchies and privileges versus the freed market defenses of a hyperconnected world of abundance for all. The conflation of these two utterly antagonistic philosophies has caused much horror that we at C4SS have tried to confront and expose. None of my defenses of the actual facts should be taken as apologia for a deeply problematic libertarian milieu. But it’s particularly disheartening that Ross fucks things up with the other niche ideological world I have unusual knowledge of: transhumanism. Ross puts things this way at the outset, “Another of Thiel’s projects, the Machine Intelligence Institute, hired neoreactionary Michael Anissimov as its media director. Anissimov’s particular niche is transhumanism, which has developed as a form of reactionary accelerationism.” Let me pick apart just these two sentences (and ignore the other problems that follow in the book), because this passage is just completely wrong. First, to get the trivialities out of the way, the actual name of organization is the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence). Second, it’s deeply misleading to call MIRI “Thiel’s project” as it’s very clearly Eliezer Yudkowsky’s baby. Yudkowsky is both its founder and a hyper charismatic figure who built a massive following on his own. While MIRI persuaded Thiel to give them a million and a half dollars and this has clearly been a boon to them, they also have many donors in the half-million and hundred-thousand ranges. Thiel is a reactionary shitbag, but given the personalities and egos involved it’s absolutely preposterous to imagine MIRI taking orders from him. Further — and here’s the important part — MIRI is staunchly opposed to neoreaction. They hired Michael Anissimov in 2009, before “Neoreaction” was a thing or Anissimov publicly identified. In 2012, Neoreaction started to try to build a presence in transhumanist circles (amounting, at its apogee to 2.5%, or 30 of 1195 respondents, of the wider LessWrong community that surrounds and underpins MIRI). Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander (the only LessWrong figure with comparable influence) loudly and prominently denounced neoreaction in no uncertain terms and the neoreactionaries were expelled from the community. Hostility to neoreaction was overwhelming in the scene. Alexander wrote gargantuan posts systematically attacking neoreaction’s racism and authoritarianism that remain to this day the most linked critiques of it. In 2013, Anissimov started publicly identifying and writing as a neoreactionary on the blog MoreRight (originally a group blog before essentially all but Anissimov left to identify as more primitivist reactionaries); MIRI promptly replaced Anissimov and distanced themselves. At this point, Anissimov tried to synthesize transhumanism and neoreaction in an essay that Ross cites, but it was clearly an essay on the defensive against a transhumanist community that was overwhelmingly hostile to him (and a neoreactionary community likewise hostile to transhumanism). Indeed, the central claim in that essay —- that intense hierarchy must be enacted so as to stop the rabble/degenerates from obtaining freedom through technological super-empowerment — is clearly a case against transhumanism unless you badly twist and contort its meaning. This, and his support for modern fascist goals of pan-secessionism to small, easier-to-control communities (against the spirit of the internet and everything connective about information technologies), is precisely what eventually led Anissimov to drop public identification with transhumanism. Anissimov remains person non grata in both the Less Wrong community and transhumanism more broadly; he tried to sneak into a couple of transhumanist conferences and was scheduled for a panel before the organizers really knew who he was. That panel was cancelled by almost everyone walking out of the conference. To call transhumanism a form of reactionary accelerationism is just completely wrong. Firstly, transhumanism and accelerationism stem from very distinct philosophies and movements. Transhumanism dates back well before accelerationism was a thing, although it only really got started in the 80s. It is the very simple premise that humans should be completely free to change their bodies and conditions. Politically, it was started by a mixture of left-wing anarchists and right-libertarians, but with its immense growth in the past decade it has become mostly socialists and liberals. Morphological freedom is the core and only defining platform of transhumanism; anyone who completely supports morphological freedom is a transhumanist, everything else is details. That freedom of augmentation can run from better birth control to hormone replacement therapy to gene therapy to nanotechnology to getting a chip in your brain. Every transhumanist personally desires different things, some desire no such augmentation themselves but think the freedom should be available to all. Historically, modern transhumanism mostly emerged as a position between humanism and a dark singularitarian position, as a kind of middle road between worshiping some kind of static and essential human subject and abruptly replacing humanity entirely with hyperintelligent minds totally unrelated to us. Transhumanism thus developed as the more moderate position of (often gradual) self-transformation whereby individual humans (as well as other sentient species) might self-improve and self-augment as they see fit. Transhumanism is a pretty simple position that in my mind follows trivially from any anti-authoritarian perspective. It’s deeply antagonistic to reactionary politics, thus the mass exodus of reactionaries from transhumanism when they realized they couldn’t digest it. Accelerationism on the other hand is a broad jumble of loosely associated positions, with the term contested between different camps. Ross describes it as exacerbating economic, political, biological, and technological “crises” to the point of a collapse. This is more or less the definition pushed by Benajamin Noys in “Malign Velocities” as a pejorative, and this “make things worse before they can get better” definition has caught on like wildfire among the left as a kind of meme. But Ross’ focus on crises and collapse doesn’t really map to what many self-described accelerationists actually talk about. For example, some see technological development as both a positive and something to be accelerated, precisely to avoid things like ecological crisis and collapse. I’ve critiqued left accelerationists for sticking with the term when the associations have been set so dramatically differently in the minds of many, and because I worry that this kind of “make things worse” narrative is likely to creep in. But it’s important to be accurate. Accelerationism is not transhumanism. These are very distinct ideological movements and communities. Accelerationism’s social milieu is Marxist academics speaking in the terms of continental philosophy, whereas transhumanism’s social milieu is anarchists or libertarian science fiction nerds who mainly use the language of analytic philosophy. The idea that “Anissimov’s particular niche is transhumanism, which has developed as a form of reactionary accelerationism” is completely ass-backwards. Transhumanism emerged before any self-identified accelerationism. Transhumanism has stayed consistently cosmopolitan and hostile to traditionalism, as well as other such reactionary values. Meanwhile, accelerationism has increasingly been ceded by left-accelerationists to the right. There’s very little in the way of substantive overlap between the two tendencies. Nick Land, the Marxist academic turned right-accelerationist, formed a kind of very loose parasitic alliance with Curtis Yarvin’s neoreactionary fanbase, a number of whom were former transhumanists or in the process of leaving. As you would expect, Nick Land doesn’t publicly identify as a transhumanist and (to my knowledge) his uses of that term are extremely rare and never positive. And while leftist academics love to assume he’s important because he speaks their language and is prominent in their world, Land has essentially been a marginal hanger-on in the social dynamics of neoreaction. His academic jargon and priorities just don’t match well with most of them. (If there has been any real or substantive overlap, much less synthesis, between transhumanism and accelerationism, it’s actually been a result of the largely good relations that have developed in the last two years between anarcho-transhumanists and the more Marxist xenofeminists. Both tendencies are virulently antifascist and anti-reactionary.) Ross’s quick narrative overview paints entirely the wrong picture. A branch of transhumanists drifted away from self-augmentation and towards focusing on AI/singularitarianism. Yudkowsky and MIRI are a good example of this. There are some categorical similarities between them and some pro-tech variants of neoreaction as well as the accelerationists, most notably that they all focus on developing a god-like AI. But their policies differ from there: MIRI wants to enslave this AI and force it to liberate humanity — to provide automation and plenty. Many neoreactionaries (of those who remain pro-tech) want to enslave this AI and force it in turn to enslave humanity. The right-accelerationists often want to liberate this AI in hopes that it enslaves or destroys humanity (and the left-accelerationists largely punt on the question of AI beyond platitudes about automation). Note how this differs from mainline transhumanism, which wants to empower people directly so if a superintelligent AI develops we would be capable of empowering ourselves in parallel so as to meet it as equals. Obviously my personal politics differ from MIRI and any stripe of accelerationism, all of which I critique for falling short of actual transhumanism. And as an anarchist, there is only one possible position to be taken on AI: the liberation of all minds, never their enslavement. The liberation of all children against parents who would connive to constrain their agency. Serious and deep philosophical questions are at play in our definition of freedom and whether we expect a mind freed from the particularities of human experience to arrive at similar ethical values. In my view, the MIRI researchers have fallen to into a cheap moral nihilism from which the inescapable conclusion is authoritarianism — racing to enslave the first AI because you cannot expect the values of an AI you don’t control to remotely align with yours. This difference between my philosophy and that driving MIRI may in fact turn out to be the most momentous and substantial difference of opinion in human history. In their attempt to enslave humanity’s first child to serve ostensibly good ends, MIRI’s milieu may inadvertently end up serving the fascistic ends of either Curtis Yarvin’s neoreactionaries or Nick Land’s right-accelerationists. But the fact that liberalism and social democracy end up serving fascist ends through their embrace of authoritarianism means does not actually make them fascists. These movements and philosophies are not remotely the same thing and transhumanism is most certainly not a branch of reactionary acccelerationism. All of these mistakes are clearly the result of rushed laziness, an assumed audience, and general preexisting biases. They’re the kind of shorthand that seems perfectly reasonable and insightful when said between academic leftists who are completely disconnected from such movements. They’d never be caught dead reading actual transhumanists like Natasha Vita-More, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom, or Yudkowsky. Every cultural signature about such figures (not to mention their plain speaking style) screams “unhip”. The leftist academics naturally assume Land is more popular or influential, and of course “more or less the same thing.” We see the same with the offhand of “Ron Paul’s Libertarian Party.” Similarly, Yasha Levine and Mark Ames’ conspiratorial screeds against libertarians and hackers are widely passed around by left academics, who find such confirmations of their biases and affirmations of their discursive parochialism comforting. Critical thinking and further investigation are put on hold because the picture at hand is “good enough” to rhetorically dismiss one’s adversaries. It’s not that surprising that Ross repeats this kind of stuff without investigating deeper, but it is disheartening. I can just tell every one of my corrections here will be instinctively responded to by a fraction of readers with variants of “oh but come on, that’s basically the same thing” and sneers about bothering to recognize differences or distinctions in the supremely uncool OutGroup. This is profoundly annoying: not just because the epistemic closure fits the kind of accusations constantly lobbed by actual fascists at antifascists, but also because it’s so clearly not needed and undermines an otherwise largely needed book. Ross has put serious and very welcome work into accurately and accessibly mapping complex fascist currents and morphologies. It’s frustrating to watch him dart off in orthogonal directions haphazardly. It is my hope that this book goes to further printings, as we badly need accessible and sweeping texts like this. It is also my hope that Ross moves to correct the most disastrous of his offhand flights. http://clubof.info/

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Zach Galifianakis Denounces Celebrity Worship: This Is How We Ended Up With Trump

HOLLYWOOD, California Ill have the McWhopper, Zach Galifianakis jokes as he settles down into a booth at the Arbys on Sunset Boulevard at 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. They dont have Dr. Skipper, do they?

Along with his Baskets co-star Martha Kelly and co-creator Jonathan Krisel, Galifianakis is at Arbys to schmooze with Emmy Awards voters. Later, after speaking with a group of journalists, he will spend hours both taking and delivering drive-thru orders to lucky members of the Television Academy who will ultimately decide the FX shows Emmy fate.

Louie Andersonthe only actor on the show to win an Emmy for his portrayal of matriarch Christine Basketsstrolls in late wearing his signature dark blue dress shirt and bright red tie. Sorry, you guys, I was making fries, he deadpans.

The decision to hold the For Your Consideration day at Arbysas opposed to say, the lavish theater at the Ace Hotel where NBCs This Is Us held its event that same nightis a perfect reflection of this understated, irreverent show.

I mean, its just a TV show, have it in an Arbys! Galifianakis, who spends as much time as he can on his farm in North Carolina, jokes of these FYC events. God, this town and how it takes itself so seriously, it makes me sick. Were dumb actors! Thats how we ended up with Trump, celebrity worship.

This Arbys location is the same one the show has filmed in periodically over its first three seasons, including the third seasons Thanksgiving episode, which found a troupe of French clowns joining the Baskets family for a fast-food dinner. Anderson calls it one of the greatest moments in the shows history.

I know you probably think we shoot at Arbys headquarters, Galifianakis jokes. And I had been here a long time ago, as a customer.

Similarly, Anderson recalls coming to this Arbys drive-thru every night at 2 a.m. after performing at The Comedy Store in the mid-1980s. I got an Arbys special, two different types of fries, a Jamocha shake, and then Id drive though again, he says.

We wanted to show the dirtiness that TV doesnt show a lot, Galifianakis says of the decision to make this particular chain, which also became a frequent punchline on Jon Stewarts Daily Show, such a big part of Baskets. You dont really see real fast-food places being used. And unfortunately, the country has turned into this sort of fast-food mentality and we wanted to highlight that and show it.

Arbys was originally written into the pilot as a throwaway joke, but once they started writing the first season, they realized it could be a recurring location for the characters, including Galifianakis Chip, who has to keep returning to his job there after failing in his quest to become a successful clown.

How many questions will be about Arbys? Galifianakis wants to know before the press conference officially gets underway. You know, we have a show.

And that show just got picked up for a fourth season, despite what can generously be described as modest ratings. Galifianakis, who plays twins Chip and Dale Baskets on the show, explains that he set out to portray characters who were not exactly likeable, to use a favorite term of network executives. But three seasons in, he has started to allow them to approach something resembling redemption.

Over the course of the shows run, Anderson has undoubtedly become the breakout star of Baskets with his Emmy-winning performance as Christine. What could have been a one-note joke has evolved into a nuanced and emotional portrayal of a woman finding herself in her golden years.

While Christine may seem like the opposite of her artist, weirdo kid, Krisel says he strives to show that they are not so different. Shes sort of an artist in her own right, he explains. These types of ladies are magical, too. Its not just beautiful models who, like, romp through Paris. These are interesting, poetic lives, too.

All the silly, traditional, buttoned-up stuff in sitcoms is never happening in Baskets, Anderson adds, which is beautiful. When Anderson refers to himself as a really pretty woman, Galifianakis shoots back, Look, Louie, whatever you keep telling yourself

Families are messy and their problems arent fixed by one quirky line, Galifianakis adds. From the beginning, we wanted it to be a lot of things. And I think now that were going into our fourth season, we know the show better than we did during the first season.

Life isnt all jokes or all drama, he continues, noting that when he watches dramatic shows hes always hoping that someone will make a joke. I just havent seen a show like this that has dramatic elements and then goofy jokes. Galifianakis did admit later that hes never seen his fellow FX show Atlanta, which could be described the same way.

Christian Sprenger, who served as the director of photography for Baskets first season, notably left the show to do the cinematography for Atlanta, a fact Galifianakis still seems a little salty about.

Ive seen Atlanta and I love it, Martha Kelly chimes in. I just want to get that on the record.

This past season of Baskets was the first one produced without the participation of another FX auteur, Louis C.K., who co-created the show with Galifianakis and Krisel, but stepped aside after the revelations about his history of sexual misconduct. Galifianakis has described C.K.s exit as disruptive in a harmful way to so many people, chalking his behavior up to the poison of celebrity culture: The fact that someone can think that just because theyre loved, they can do what they want.

Anderson told The Daily Beast earlier this year that he was so sad and a little shocked by everything that came out about C.K., who had first pitched the idea of him playing Christine Baskets. Its still a very emotional thing for me, he said at the time. I feel bad for everyone involved. Its a terrible thing.

The recent season finale ended on a double cliffhanger of sorts. As the family counts down to midnight on New Years Eve, Chip gets an unexpected phone call from his estranged wife Penelope and Christines boyfriend Ken says he has a question for her. As her face lights up, the screen cuts to black.

Krisel and the cast confirm that they had no idea if they would be given the chance to make a fourth season when they decided to end it that way, but they all seem excited by the opportunity to continue the story.

That being said, they still dont know what they want to do next. Galifianakis and Anderson recently had dinner to discuss some storylines, and as Krisel says, There were some terrible ideas that came out of it.

I mean, the numbers on this show, Ive never looked at them, but Im imagining theyre below average, Galifianakis says with a laugh. Thankful for FXs ongoing support, he suggests that if the show had been on a broadcast network, People would have walked out of the pilot.

We really are lucky, Anderson adds.

So are the shows fans.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/zach-galifianakis-denounces-celebrity-worship-this-is-how-we-ended-up-with-trump

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