He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.
What is a voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?” She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her.
In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”; “Ronan Farrow is the only person who could truly relate to him”; “No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance?”; “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now”; “Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism.” There are jokes about taking Greta Thunberg’s and Barron Trump’s virginity.
The lesser work in “My First Book” sinks to high school graduation speech level. “We are the future of the planet” and “I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going” and “Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now” and so on.
I'm sorry, "lol girls with mustache fingers" is high literature but "we are the future of the planet" is stupid? Did the author flip a coin on each of those to decide where it'd go?
Also what the fuck is this about Adderall, I don't even understand what it would mean to collectivise "the Adderall sector", but wasn't there a shortage of ADD medication not so long ago where people who needed it couldn't get it? Wouldn't we want to collectivise this??
She talks incredibly fast and doesn’t finish most of her thoughts but is a fabulous conversationalist anyway because sometimes she says something that might not make any sense if you stop to think about it, but she does it with so much manic bluster you can’t help but nod along. Like “TikTok is a psychological-warfare weapon invented by China” or “If I was a guy, I’d probably be an incel or an evil gay.”
Oh my god this is mortifying. Imagine being such a tryhard yet such a fucking bore. Congratulations you sound like a thousand fucking tweets.
I kind of wish that she and I could meet. I'd stare deep into her eyes, take her hand in mine, drop my voice into the register that Grandpa Stacey used in his decades of hosting radio, and intone, "Your brain is where insight goes to die."
also, remember that the TikTok national security scaremongering is cos a Thiel consortium wants to buy it. Levy's dogwhistle drops are carefully selected.
To be honest I'm mortified that there exists a person who interacts with that and calls her a "fabulous conversationalist". Ah yes, gish gallop personified, exactly what I want in the person I talk to. What the fuck is the purpose for which you engage with a conversation if this is the "fabulous" outcome??
@flizzo@dgerard I'm Ryan Gosling in Drive and Blue Valentine, but I'm not Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson or La La Land. I'm American Psycho, but I'm not The Rules of Attraction. I'm Taxi Driver, but I'm not Raging Bull.
Discard what's false and regard what's truest
Then render me thy answer to this:
What roles must I play when I'm Daniel Day-Lewis?
I think it was a thing before that, but just underground in the nazi/manosphere/alt right/red pill circles (As they are always looking for the next 'this is what society (parenthesis optional) took from you!' thing), it is just horrible they now have influencers. The mainstreaming of bad fringe ideas is worrying.
Dimes Square is a so-called "microneighborhood" of New York City, located between the Chinatown and Lower East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan.
Okay, sure
The term Dimes Square has become a metonym for a number of associated reactionary aesthetic movements centered in the area, particularly several events and podcasts funded by Peter Thiel.
Why do we continue on this Earth even though it's clearly a doomed endeavour?
Media associated with the area include the podcast Red Scare
click
The show has been associated with the dirtbag left and the new right,
"New right" redirects to "Right-wing populism" and I would like anyone to explain to me how is the same old reactionary nonsense "new" in any way.
In any case, how the fuck is it possible to be associated with anti-fascists and fascists at the same time?
as well as the subculture surrounding Dimes Square. It has been described in The Cut as "a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they've spawned."
"Hey, how about we pick two bad things to focus on?"
"Capitalism..."
"That's a great choice, plenty of terrible stuff there..."
"... and feminism."
"... You were doing so well."
What even is this ideology? Reactionaries but with bubble tea?
This shit is intended to be ideologically confused. Its purpose is to seduce dissatisfied progressives towards fascism. See also, Grayzone, Caleb Maupin, the history of holocaust denial on the ultra left, there's plenty of flavours.
"Antisemitism is the socialism of fools" etc. On this subject I've always been a fan of this Moishe Postone article: Anti-Semitism and National Socialism
The turn to biology and the desire for a return to “natural origins,” combined with an affirmation of technology, which appear in many forms in the early twentieth century, should be understood as expressions of the antinomic fetish that gives rise to the notion that the concrete is “natural,” and which increasingly presents the socially “natural” in such a way that it is perceived in biological terms. The hypostatization of the concrete and the identification of capital with the manifest abstract underlie a form of “anticapitalism” that seeks to overcome the existing social order from a standpoint which actually remains immanent to that order. Inasmuch as that standpoint is the concrete dimension, this ideology tends to point toward a more concrete and organized form of overt capitalist social synthesis. This form of “anticapitalism,” then, only appears to be looking backward with yearning. As an expression of the capital fetish its real thrust is forward. It emerges in the transition from liberal to bureaucratic capitalism and becomes virulent in a situation of structural crisis.
This form of “anticapitalism,” then, is based on a one-sided attack on the abstract. The abstract and concrete are not seen as constituting an antinomy where the real overcoming of the abstract—of the value dimension—involves the historical overcoming of the antinomy itself as well as each of its terms. Instead there is the one-sided attack on abstract reason, abstract law, or, at another level, money and finance capital. In this sense it is antinomically complementary to liberal thought, where the domination of the abstract remains unquestioned and the distinction between positive and critical reason is not made.
“New right” redirects to “Right-wing populism” and I would like anyone to explain to me how is the same old reactionary nonsense “new” in any way. In any case, how the fuck is it possible to be associated with anti-fascists and fascists at the same time?
I’d have gone with Neue Americanische Freundschaft but it’s both too subtle and already taken
From what I can tell, like everybody else involved, it's ego and ennui? Sad but I suppose at least it's mildly entertaining to read about gormless rich kids failing very hard to be cool.
This man's blog is intense, but I am not sure he comes off well! I clicked around and it seems like "wants to be at all the fascist parties, courts acts of violence to complain about on his blog" is, at least in 2024, a really accurate summary of his behavior.
I tell them that I’m actually pretty hated and feared by most of these people, and I can only stay around because I criticize particular influential figures in this counterculture so well that they want to fuck me, and so they keep me around to flatter them, to reflect their true hideousness back at them by elevating it to the status of myth, and then they lash out at me like the maenads devouring Orpheus.
I get the impression that like them he's bored, doesn't have much to say, and is addicted to antagonism, so they're a natural crowd for him to be around. but for whatever reasons - lacking the prerequisite passionate racial animus, getting off on playing the role of puncturing outsider, idk - this is how he socializes with them
I saw the profile/person photo used by the NYT piece, read the pull-quote that amoeba shared, and just mouseover'ed the urbit mention (and thus saw the username)
and from that I made a guess that "wow this sure does sound like someone in the TPOT sphere (and who did that thing visa keeps telling people to do)" (which is to incessantly talk about your shit)
but surely I can't just make such guesses, basis unfounded