01/13/25: Netflix is a political party and should be registered as a politcal party. Meanwhile, you'd think that the Stalinists in LACA would eventually run out of victims. But like Russia in 1935-1939, there apparently is an unlimited supply. At any rate, whatever tiny amount of compassion I had for the LACA fire victims has now been extinguished by this story. LACA, you brought this on your own heads. The karmic retribution is obvious. And the verdict is final.
Bad take, man. Don't move into the same simplistic, hive-mind bullshit zone they've been inhabiting.
Any human being losing his or her home to a fire is a terrible thing. You can disagree or even hate them; but don't wish such a level of ill upon them. It's bad for YOUR soul.
And as Norma noted below, it's not as if only wealthy, powerful, and loathsome Hollywood types are suffering. Everyone from top-to-bottom is dealing with this pain & suffering.
01/14/25: Offer your compassion elsewhere, please. I have plenty of it. It is not to be wasted on a state that has collapsed and can only be resurrected by unmitigated tragedy. Otherwise, the stealing continues unabated, and the people that you are wasting your time feeling sorry for will continue to tolerate the thieves.
January 14, 2025, 7:13, am (0713), response-to-reply-to-reply-to-reply: Don, I've wondered for a while now after reading your weird-ass, unnecessarily dated comments, if you get it all.
Except for all of the common people who have been burned out. Those housekeepers who have no bank account to sustain them and the houses that they cleaned are now burned, so they have no job. These are the people that suffer unnoticed by most.
01/13/25: The entire situation has exhausted my compassion, which was large but never unlimited. Someone else will have to look after them, and thank goodness there will be no shortage of compassionate people to do it. Count me out; they burned me out (no pun intended).
Wait until these clowns start hiring cannibals for diversity and can't figure out why the least diverse person in every organization went missing; the Chief Diversity Officer.
01/13/25: LACA vegan cannibals are looking for endorsement deals --- "We were in the best shape when the fires started and could run the fastest to get the hell out of LA county unscathed!" Gavin Newsome shows up in no time flat to extort campaign donations (he knows which ones have been sneaking T-Bone steaks at The French Laundry: https://www.exploretock.com/tfl/).
"hiring for cannibals"...Ryan, are you predicting Joe Biden's next job, after he leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? I mean, it does run in the family and all... 🧐 🤣
Solzhenitsyn pointed out in the second volume of Gulag Archipelago that the true believers had the worst time in the Gulag, they kept saying if Joe only knew. The truth is, and I tried to point this out to many people before the 2020 election, they will eventually come after you when they run out of enemies elsewhere.
That’s a Russian thing, not just a commie thing. The peasants were always like “The Czar is great, he just has no idea how his boyars are screwing us over out in the provinces”.
And why do none of my ultra-intelligent, ultra-liberal friends and colleagues ever see this obvious truth. Is it, perhaps, an an inconvenient truth? I daresay YES!
Dave has negotiated these times rather well-he isn’t MAGA, but he lives amongst them and understands them, as he has said. He is a local treasure in the Miami Valley.
So some Hollywood guy is "the left"? Perhaps append "fake" for a bit more accuracy. Somewhere in the USA there are genuine lefties, but they're a zillion miles from Democrats, their donors and their diminishing support.
My wife has sold a few screenplays and is a member of the WGA and this time of year we get all the DVDs for her consideration. They quickly go into the 3 piles on our kitchen table that represent Hollywood product: It sucks to be black; It sucks to be gay/Trans; it sucks to be a woman. (Add immigrant to any of the above). The emotional and moral manipulation even just on the packaging and PR notes radiates from a distance and after a few moments of mockery, they all go in the trash.
My wife is also a novelist so all year round we get galleys of all the latest releases from the big NYC publishers. Same themes, same victim mongering and fetishization, same weepy moral and emotional manipulation, same stale stilted academic jargon, same politicization of every aspect of existence, same blaming of "Oppression" for every hangnail, same product created by the same callow children of the Internet age, who imagine themselves an enlightened holy priesthood when their greatest moral conundrum is deciding whether to swipe right or left. And same fate: all quickly go in the trash or sometimes in the fireplace.
The progressive monoculture is a result of the stifling intellectual and creative conformity of the modern postmodern academy, where things like art, skill, esthetics, vision and beauty are all portrayed as problematic impositions of Eurocentrism and that have created a scorched-earth sterile cultural landscape where nothing exists except Power, Oppression and the sacred Self, which exists wholly and entirely to perform public acts of political "transgression".
That the children of the modern Academy have all grown up to be brittle authoritarians who cry Harm! once their ego feels threatened and who only appreciate any book or film if it provides a self-flattering reflection constructed from progressive pieties was inevitable and makes perfect sense—this is what happens when you let your cultural and educational instuitutions be conquered by dour Maoists who only experience joy when they're making someone else as miserable as they are.
They have been sucked up by a vacuum into a vortex void of free expression. Every now and then one is expelled for a real or imaginary free thought. Outside in the open air their individual identity returns. I hope they understand it was one of the most nasty cults the country has experienced.
I actually went to a postmodern art school in the early thousands. the faculty were mostly highly competent, they loved art, skill, aesthetics, vision…some even loved beauty. And i learned a lot. Postmodernism was more like a playset for making fun art rather than a wanna be red army youth movement. At least one avoided becoming ideologically possessed. But many Others went batshit totalitarian. Their art technically is good but just screams arrogance, delusion and hate.
I was over in the Lit Dept, where a "Marxist lens" is a must-have accessory for every prof and aspiring graduate student and where the entire purpose of literature is analyzing the race/gender/sexuality aspects of every book and writer in order to convict them of crimes against Equality and Justice.
I'm sure of course that there are all sorts of profs and students who still believe in L'art pour l'art, but then again every time I go to a museum or gallery there is usually some form of land acknowlegment or atonement to the indigenous or a long piece of text instructing the viewer on what to think and feel, esp after they've been informed that the artist had some vague connection to the slave trade.
The rot has seeped deeply into all aspects of our culture...
I don't even go to museums anymore, the last few times I went I was disgusted by the dumbed-down captions on science exhibits, and blaming everything on global warming. They aren't museums they are indoctrination centers.
People wonder why so many readers are reaching all the way back to the Iliad and the Odyssey for reading material. Your second paragraph provides a damn good hint!
Better make sure it's a paper copy of the Odyssey-- in case it's deemed "imperialist" or any of the other pejoratives of the day. Anything on Kindle can be deleted or edited in any way they want. God forbid you want to find any "controversial" books. You won't find them from the mega sites.
One the one hand the hypocrisy and numbed out psyche of dumbed down trolls. On the other the fact that they destroy lives, and importantly, their distortion of the healthy national conversation America deserves. Accepting that they make a living doing so helps explains the psychopathy. I always feel I'm in the the presence of a disease when I encounter them.
You're right. There is no discourse. Could you imagine these feebs trying to go on the old Dick Cavett show and sanely elaborate their positions for an hour? And have to listen to questions or counter-arguments against those positions without resorting to name calling, screaming or childish behavior? Couldn't happen. I desperately miss Christopher Hitchens, who was the most erudite defender of logic and sanity. He would be must-watch content picking these simpletons apart.
I will say that Sasha made a huge error in tweeting that. Why? Because far too many people have been dumbed down, no sense of nuance, humor or anything beyond binary thinking (i.e. swipe left, swipe right). Not bright people don't get irony. Everything is literal. Like a troop of baboons, either screeching at something strange or hooting along to something they approve of. Everything outside the troop is a danger, and all troop members stay in line or suffer being torn apart by their own.
Yes, she didn't really read the room. Her audience were not whizz kids. And many are just not nice. There is an expression about dogs and their beds and fleas. She got seduced by those parties. Hollywood is a nasty business. And Los Angeles has its own seedy history. Read "City of Quartz" as Walter suggests.
The Dick Cavett Show was so good. John and Yoko (I think). But also, near physical fights between "a person of color"* and a "segregationist."** And not for cheap visual thrills. People confronted one another about their beliefs.
While we are at it. "Late night" TV used to be full of news. Ted Koeppel, "Day ------ of hostage crisis" . . .
*I am thinking Jim Brown was the Person of Color, and Lester Maddox was the Segregationist. But I could be wrong.
The rise of independent commentary in podcastville and the do-it-yourself spirit that flows from that will be the end of this polluted Marcusian source of cultural production. I like the fact that stand-up comedians have been the pioneers of the grassroots podcasting that is becoming more popular than old media. One sinks or swims on the value of what one puts out there, no longer needing the backing of corporations or institutions that demand conformity for support. Freethinking artists leave "the creative conformity of the modern postmodern academy" as they always have, if they even enter it in the first place.
As far as the relevance of the academy goes, consider the difference between the academic poets and the popular ones. I think Allen Ginsberg's experience at Columbia U and the rise of the so-called "beats" called everyone's attention to the problem with academic art and its poisonous relationship to academic criticism.
I think T.S. Eliot was the last academic poet with any talent and the last academic critic with anything at all interesting to say about art and culture.
Couldn't agree more Bull Hubbard. Talk Radio was the lifeline for the Reagan era generation. It seeded the populism that has emerged with Andrew Breitbart growing int turn into the vast eco-system that includes Matt and others here on Substack. The worm has turned.
As for the Academy, Victor David Hanson, Naill Ferguson, and Peter Theil have been detailing the collapse of Utopian Campus life for years now. First government is targeted for massive layoffs and restructuring. Then comes the Academy.
Bidens vain attempt at Student Loan forgiveness was only partially about winning votes from indebted millennials or gen Z. IT WAS REALLY ABOUT THE CONTINUED CASH FLOW TO COLLEGES VIA GOVERNMENT - FEDERAL AND STATE.
That era is over post-covid. Not only has the credentials of a BA tanked - but the public is also wise to the utter mediocrity of these institutions - and will no longer tolerate supporting it.
🎥Hollywood is finished. I predict that many in the film industry, having witnessed their houses burn down, will see that Southern California is not worth rebuilding. They will move into a ready-made property in Texas, or Montana, or Arkansas, or Wisconsin, or North Carolina, or Maine.
For people who don’t know, Southern California is already a wasteland. High earners continue to move out of California, leaving poor people on welfare. And who pays for the welfare state? Rich Californians. So get out. And that doesn’t include how high taxes are in California: a sales tax of nearly 10%. WTF?
I wonder if the change in Hollywood involves a new breed of actors coming from a different kind of drama school background? What CP calls the progressive monoculture in the modern postmodern academy has produced actors who don't do Shakespeare anymore because he was a racist and misogynist. Actors in the 1930s went to drama schools too like AADA or Pasadena Playhouse. Bette Davis studied in NYC. Hepburn went to Bryn Mawr. But there was more of a pioneering spirit then and willingness to really work; work at your craft. The Depression unemployed came in droves to find work in LA. Stage actors came, but there weren't enough of them. So, fresh off the farms and small towns of America came young men and women to Hollywood by bus and by train or driven by their parents from Utah like “Queen of the B’s” Marie Windsor. Gary Cooper and Myrna Loy from Montana. The studios back then were workplaces. Filmmaking was an industry not a cultural experiment. It was indeed mass entertainment and not church.
“It’s a trade that has to be learned,” said Gregory Peck. Actor Norman Lloyd
said that “There was a great belief in professionalism. You got your work done.
But there was a great anti-arty feeling and no nonsense. That was true of any of
the major studios.” (From "Hollywood Remembered: An Oral History of Its Golden Age." by Paul Zollo.)
Good work is being done today, but often outside of LA. Taylor Sheridan has his own studio in Texas and he uses the same actors in different series; kind of like the old contract player days. And he takes risks. He's a white dude but writes great female characters in "Yellowstone", "Landman", "1923","Lioness"" and others. Great African American characters in "1883", "Bass Reeves", "Lioness". Latinos in "Landman"; Native Americans in "Yellowstone". The heart of film and series is good story telling. Fingers crossed that will return. Perhaps it could rise from the ashes.
"Actors in the 1930s went to drama schools too like AADA or Pasadena Playhouse."
Also, actors and most people were much more well-rounded then, had served in the military, survived the Depression, and had much more varied and interesting life stories.
I just went to Wikipedia and saw that 2 of my favorite actors had both spent time working a chain gang (!):
"[Robert] Mitchum left home at age 14 and traveled throughout the country, hopping freight cars and taking a number of jobs, including ditch digging, fruit picking, and dishwashing. In the summer of 1933, he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia and put in a local chain gang."
"At age 16, [Steve] McQueen returned to live with his mother, who had moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There he met two sailors from the Merchant Marine and decided to sign on to a ship bound for the Dominican Republic. Once there, he abandoned his new post, eventually being employed in a brothel. Later, McQueen made his way to Texas and drifted from job to job, including selling pens at a traveling carnival and working as a lumberjack in Canada. He was arrested for vagrancy in the Deep South, and served a 30-day assignment on a chain gang."
People don't live lives like this anymore, we are more house cats now than street cats, which seems to make people smaller, more brittle and more anxious.
But we'll always have the Golden Age of Hollywood!
In addition to cigars, beer and tequila, I spend my entertainment dollars on Amazon for DVDs of old movies and Abebooks for used books. As far as I can tell, there's been very little I want to read to watch produced in the last 20 years, no offense to your lovely wife.
The Criterion Channel has lots of old movies. TCM has an early Hitchcock I had never heard of "The Skin Game". Watched "Out West with the Hardys" on Christmas Day. Mickey Rooney is great. His Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is best Puck I've seen. I collect DVDs at Estate Sales. Excellent source.
I subscribe to Sasha’s substack and find it interesting because she was part of the side that felt so justified in their views for so long. Up with Sasha and let’s hope others will see the light as well!
Everybody gets there in their own time. If they're serious, we should welcome their inclusion. If they aren't serious.....I think it's pretty obvious. *cough*MarkZuckerburg*cough*
Dead on. And appropos of that...saw an interesting clip recently of Cenk Uygur visiting Turning Point USA's conference (wrap your head around that, for starters...)
And he said, "You do a couple things well. You work together well and you're more welcoming, if I'm being honest.....if you agree with MAGA 5%... welcome, come join us. On the left if you disagree 5% (with them), they go, get out of here. You're a right winger, you're a fascist."
A simple grasp of math tells you that's a really bad model for a political movement that wants to grow and gain followers.
With the left, It's "get in lockstep" or get locked out.
I’m not sure it’s a movement that is interested in growing. It seems more interested in continually moving the goalposts on how woke one must be. Which will tend to reduce overall numbers while creating even more concentrated idiocy.
Lol...true dat. Those ever-rising woke standards you discuss, by definition, narrow the range of their acceptable discourse, which in turn, makes them increasingly incapable of defending their positions. Course, they avoid any situations where they have to defend those positions. So, yes, smaller numbers of stupider people. Call it the Ever-Shrinking Circle Jerk.
Mick, I get the whole Christian-theme of this idea and I do support it...but at what point does it become enabling of the narcissistic, predatory, chameleon? Conservative values of forgiveness have been abused by the morally preening, relativistic neoMarxists for so long that, when it comes to anybody on the left of the political spectrum, I don't know that I could ever believe that what they say in any given contemporaneous moment is truly their "authentic self". They have no values. They have no bedrock principles. They have no identity beyond that which their collective defines in any given moment.
Love Sasha! Her Substack is great. Creative, funny, and a unique perspective our culture. Highly recommended for any who haven’t read/listened to her work.
I'm a subscriber too, and really enjoy her commentary. She's helped me understand the liberal mind. It's beyond shameful that any publication would intentionally ruin a person's name, and thus her livelihood, over a tweet. Why does the desire to defame and destroy run in many liberals?
In his book "Liberal Bullies, social psychologist Luke Conway reports that authoritarian leftists tended to say that dissenting and opposing people should be "crushed," "destroyed," and the like. Conway thinks this goes with the authoritarianism. They think that people who hold dissenting opinions should not exist, because they believe that they have the one and only righteous dogma.
Their dogma requires authoritarianism. Any group that believes their ideas represent the “common good”, and that people need to behave in prescribed ways to achieve that goal, will find they must resort to force to get everyone to comply. It is inevitable.
I also subscribe to her substack and I find it fascinating to hear what went on and how the thought process was over there during the first couple of years of Trump. By the way, she's a big fan of Steve Bannon, too.
But she lost me at the LA LA land thinking.. I wonder if she recognizes how much damage she has done to people… Maybe this is a bit of karma for her as penance.
You missed my point as I didn't articulate well..given how over the top she was in piling on in the past in such a silly thing as the movie, I suspect they is way more fire with that smoke..
"It would be unfair to say California set aside legitimate affairs of state (like preparing for fires) because it was consumed with turning government and public enterprises like schools into models of utopian thinking."
Uh, it's pretty clear that's EXACTLY what They did.
The Left needs to learn about a new concept called opportunity cost.
Even if the Fire Chief and Mayor were qualified for the job, they have a directive from the institutions to focus on DEI.
Attention is finite. For every second you spend on one thing, that's one less you have for other things. Same with money.
Any biz owner knows this. So do most families. It seems like the left thinks they can suborn what no other business or person can without being insolvent.
What ends up happening is Midwits will only hire dimwits. And at critical mass incompetence might as well be treachery. And, so, eventually those that serve the mission of the institution become pariah, and those that serve the interests of the institution alone get the promotions/sinecures. It is very dangerous when institutions turn into guilds. At that point they become adversarial to the mission of the institution which are foundationally there to protect We The People.
But, hey, if communists understood economics or how to run institutions, they wouldn't be communist.
For people who have the touch they cant get over “but things should be like….” And then some unachievable demand they will chase in circles forever while everything else falls apart.
Sasha is brave, honest and wise. She has publicly bared her conversion. She is now looking from the outside in and reminds us how liberating it is to leave the herd. Each post on her Substack is another peek behind the bittersweet curtain of the Hollywood left.
The only way to have any influence on these Hollywood types is to vote with your eyeballs and don't consume their products. Which I think is already happening given how many movies have bombed these last few years.
It's shitty what's happened to Sasha and others, but the real tragedy is that these fools are sacrificing art for the sake of propaganda and politics.
My god, when did progressives become such moralistic church-lady prigs?
There was a purer than thou strain of feminism during the Seventies and it seems to have recurred. It was all about dour looks, disapproval and guilt trips. A lot of it was specifically directed against individual women whose sexual preferences were deemed to be patriarchal.
I following quite a few Substack accounts, but when I see any alerts in my inbox from either yours or Sasha’s, I never delete them. I always mark it for later if I don’t have time to read it immediately. You’re both always on point.
Speaking of which, Matt mentioned Pete Seeger: whether or not blacklisting him was right, he absolutely was a shill for Stalin, and along with Woody Guthrie he did a messaging about-face whenever the USSR ordered him to. Fuck those guys (Seeger and Guthrie, not Matt).
The casting couch, destruction of child stars, pedos, backstabbing, stage mommy dearests, drugs, cover ups…thank God these people are able to spot a toxic person like Sasha when they see one!
I hope Sasha is making more money now on Substack. I subscribe to her newsletter and it’s one of my favorites.
Oh, for f*ck's sake. Let's state the obvious: the Hollywood Left represents one of the most arrogant and depraved segments of society, and Sasha is the sane one. I used to question how McCarthyism could've possibly caught fire in America, and now I have an answer. We're living it again.
According to Stanton Evans, the author of "Blacklisted by History," McCarthy's evidence was suppressed/mocked by two administrations (one D, one R) because neither wanted to be held responsible for the embarrassment of having been infiltrated.
Tom Stoned...I mean "High"...Your ideologically driven, willful ignorance of history and facts is astounding. If you hate America so much, how about if you move to whatever Marxist wonderland you wet-dream about?
Just stop with the ‘love it or leave it’ absurdity, son. I’m a 72yo vet whose knowledge of history and facts dwarfs yours, proven by simply checking out your substack reading list, you Rufo twit.
It’s in Dave’s link above. And I love the fact that he posted it thinking it proved his Manichaean point re. the relative death toll attributed to communism vs. the American Empire. Stalin was a piker compared to Kissinger.
You want a specific example, read ‘The Jakarta Method’.
Totally serious. Maybe you’re a propagandized empire simp. America’s body count, from Indonesia to Vietnam to Cambodia to Latin America to Africa, in the period you reference, was staggering.
The average American’s knowledge of history is laughable; far too many have bought into the ‘shining city on the hill’ narrative of exceptionalism.
All of those ideologies are just different flavors of collectivism.
Today's left doesn't want to nationalize the private sector; it wants to conscript it to service The Party. That makes it closer to Chinese Communism or fascism.
I'm convinced we're in a battle between those who want a collective society and those who want an individualistic society.
And just like every socialist/fascist/communists regime the collective responsibility boils down to the method and process being one in the same.
It's a very similar method and process as the "shock-workers" (a devised scheme, ostensibly, for the common good) from the Russian gulags where prisoners who attained "shock" status would get a slightly reduced sentence (the motivation) ...but refused to leave the camp because...wait for it....THE COLLECTIVE.
And that my friends was the purpose of the process and the method being the same.
What they really want is a collective organism, living, working, eating, sleeping, and suffering together in pitiless and forced symbiosis.
In other words they do not believe in the individual and that is the source of their contempt, blindness, cruelty and worldview towards us peasants.
I concluded awhile ago that traditional political labels have been rendered meaningless and the only accurate labels now are neoMarxist or Constitutionalist. In other words, collective vs individual. Every other label has been rendered an obfuscation of fundamental values behind a relativistic mask.
Can I assume you've read Solzhenitsyn? I am currently about half-way through The Gulag Archipelago (for those that do not know, it's a short story about the Soviet Gulags that runs about 1,800+ pages across three volumes). I bought Kolyma Stories by Shalamov (as well as Sketches of the Criminal World, Shalamov's follow-up book) because Solzhenitsyn referenced it. Reading Gulag Archipelago also lead me to buy One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, also by Solzhenitsyn, An Island Hell by Malsagov, Russia's Age of Serfdom by Wirtschafter, and the Abolition of Serfdom in Russia by Moon. I swear I'm not sadomasochistic. It's just that I have a hypothesis that Russia's way of adjusting over time to the evolving morality of slavery (aka serfdom) helped sustain a collective/authoritarian social structure that continues to this day, whereas America's reckoning with slavery within the parameters of the US Constitution was faster and more authentic. My reading is about investigating the validity of my hypothesis because, you know, I don't have anything better to do! 🤣 🤣 🤣
Ryan Gardener> What are the victims of Lahaina, Katrina, Paradise, Palestine, East Palestine, and LA fires doing, along with 3 job gig workers, prisoners, to high rise apartment dwellers? What does any living being do? “living, working, eating, sleeping, and suffering together” is what’s called life, in bigger or smaller groups, tribes to villages to cities, herds or anthills. No man is an island, and if that’s attempted, someone is going to come along and stuff a cork in his den’s air vent. This has nothing to do with a state, ideology, or regime. I want a tribe that learns to expel the psychopathic predatory vultures.
"I'm convinced we're in a battle between those who want a collective society and those who want an individualistic society."
We are. But it's a con -- a very long one. Collectivism implies no requirement for totalitarianism by self-appointed vanguards, which is the opposite of the assumed democracy. Possibly Marx is the one who set it off, breaking cleanly from the integrated liberté, égalité, fraternité a half-century before with henceforth intra-national wars.
Healthy societies balance individual and collective behavior. Their dual necessity is why both Rightist and Leftist movements exist perpetually. Unfortunately, our primitive side is tribal, and so whichever of these two is our greater affinity is chosen as the side for battle.
Re Bastiat, I'm not seeing how the evils of specific environments with perverse incentives, with disingenuous sophists (via "creative destruction") and other power-grabbers (corruption, in general) translates into a wholesale rejection of collective action. After all, a republic, voting in general, and a legal structure for some type of market, are just three collective exercises that are widely accepted, even by the Right.
Meanwhile there are, of course, parallel evils in unrestrained individual freedom, the worst being a runaway concentration of power, a common occurrence. That there exists a way to corrupt a system, or that it frequently occurs, does not mean it is a necessary result.
Each side has no end of brilliant arguments and defenses. That's part of how I came to recognize normative truth in both sides.
Collectivism is a good way to characterize that stuff. It’s also how racism works; everyone belonging to an identified group shares the same behavior and outlook, according to a racist.
“If she’s trying to be sarcastic,” said a high-profile Academy member, “It’s not funny.”
------------------
Today's left in one quote.
How long does it take a feminist to screw in a light bulb?
Answer, that's not funny.
What did communists use before candles?
Electricity...;]
Whoa!!
I like this variation:
Q: how many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: three…one to change the lightbulb and two to make a documentary about it.
And one to tell you how much better she does it then a man.
Heehee gets funnier every year !!
I learned this lightbulb joke in 1979 studying feminist theory in college.
There's a great meme of a feminist wearing her resting bitch face, captioned, "That's not funny."
IIRC, that's Sandra Fluke, who as a Georgetown Law student back in 2012, famously objected to being forced to pay her own birth control expenses.
Yes! That’s the one!
Thanks!
Just saying, “they” couldn’t joke back then either.
A woman named Karen (appropriate) has a Substack entitled A Feminist Screws in a Lightbulb. Predictably woke & stupid & hysterical.
Don’t mention her more than twice. Three times and she appears
She makes the aftermath of LA fires look cheery
Lol yup
So true about poor Karen… lol
"Hysterical" as in "funny"? (I'm only asking because I've yet to meet a woke person with a sense of humor).
Maybe just like Karen herself.
Woke and sarcasm are like oil and water.
Which is why mockery is the best weapon against them. They can't deal with it.
Yup. They're narcissist.
There are three things a narcissist despises:
1. To be ignored
2. To be questioned
3. To be mocked.
Fuck em', mock them until they cry...and then mock them for crying...
And they are getting a lot of all three right now! It couldn't happen to a better bunch of people.
Yeah, but they’re still in charge, and have no qualms about arbitrarily fucking someone’s life up.
They don't seem as "confident" to do that now. I think many sense the zeitgeist has changed.
Many of these dumbasses can't think for themselves and bend whichever the way the winds blow.
They just don't seem emboldened since the election. Even the "resistance" seems half-hearted this time.
But you make a very good point.
I think you're right. And even though less emboldened, they are still lashing out enough for us to conclude that they haven't learned a GD thing.
Agree. Lolol
and if you have the occasion to slap a crying leftist, take it.
Truly priceless! I salute you!
Exactly. And they've been the funny, cool ones so long they don't know what to do now that they aren't. It's pretty hilarious.
Oscar's, Pulitzer's, Medal of Freedom have all been tarnished and plastic is at it's core not true metal.
New Rules (Billy Maher style)
Sasha Stone Movie of the Year Award
Taibbi / Kirn Journo of the Year Award
DJT Fighter Fist of the Year Award
Less than a week to go. We're Going to Mars Baby !!
https://www.instagram.com/kyledunnigan1/reel/Ckq4zE7vkCE/?hl=en
They all take themselves soooo seriously, it's impossible not to laugh at them.
Exactly When humor is gone - sanity is gone too !
Abso-fucking-lutely!!!
01/13/25: Netflix is a political party and should be registered as a politcal party. Meanwhile, you'd think that the Stalinists in LACA would eventually run out of victims. But like Russia in 1935-1939, there apparently is an unlimited supply. At any rate, whatever tiny amount of compassion I had for the LACA fire victims has now been extinguished by this story. LACA, you brought this on your own heads. The karmic retribution is obvious. And the verdict is final.
Bad take, man. Don't move into the same simplistic, hive-mind bullshit zone they've been inhabiting.
Any human being losing his or her home to a fire is a terrible thing. You can disagree or even hate them; but don't wish such a level of ill upon them. It's bad for YOUR soul.
And as Norma noted below, it's not as if only wealthy, powerful, and loathsome Hollywood types are suffering. Everyone from top-to-bottom is dealing with this pain & suffering.
C'mon. We can all do better than that.
Thank you. That needed saying. I really appreciate that you did say it.
01/14/25: Offer your compassion elsewhere, please. I have plenty of it. It is not to be wasted on a state that has collapsed and can only be resurrected by unmitigated tragedy. Otherwise, the stealing continues unabated, and the people that you are wasting your time feeling sorry for will continue to tolerate the thieves.
January 14, 2025, 7:13, am (0713), response-to-reply-to-reply-to-reply: Don, I've wondered for a while now after reading your weird-ass, unnecessarily dated comments, if you get it all.
Thank you for clarifying for me that you don't.
01/14/25: Mike, you're a delight and a love. And at the tone, the time will be 7:23 a.m.
I'll accept "delight."
Save the "love" 'til we get to know each other a little better. I'm old-fashioned that way.
Except for all of the common people who have been burned out. Those housekeepers who have no bank account to sustain them and the houses that they cleaned are now burned, so they have no job. These are the people that suffer unnoticed by most.
01/13/25: The entire situation has exhausted my compassion, which was large but never unlimited. Someone else will have to look after them, and thank goodness there will be no shortage of compassionate people to do it. Count me out; they burned me out (no pun intended).
So what did you do for them when you still had compassion?
great take - large, but never unlimited.
I like that - "large but never unlimited."
ha! they'll never run out of useless idiots.
Wait until these clowns start hiring cannibals for diversity and can't figure out why the least diverse person in every organization went missing; the Chief Diversity Officer.
01/13/25: Cannibals' TV commerical, filmed at the CDO's funeral, with guest speakers: "Less filling! "Tastes great!"
geniune lolol
01/13/25: LACA vegan cannibals are looking for endorsement deals --- "We were in the best shape when the fires started and could run the fastest to get the hell out of LA county unscathed!" Gavin Newsome shows up in no time flat to extort campaign donations (he knows which ones have been sneaking T-Bone steaks at The French Laundry: https://www.exploretock.com/tfl/).
yes all cooked sous vide so they are nice and soft.. cant risk the dentures ya know
"hiring for cannibals"...Ryan, are you predicting Joe Biden's next job, after he leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? I mean, it does run in the family and all... 🧐 🤣
Lolol
😂 OMG that’s so funny … a cannibal diversity hire -what could go wrong ?
Solzhenitsyn pointed out in the second volume of Gulag Archipelago that the true believers had the worst time in the Gulag, they kept saying if Joe only knew. The truth is, and I tried to point this out to many people before the 2020 election, they will eventually come after you when they run out of enemies elsewhere.
That’s a Russian thing, not just a commie thing. The peasants were always like “The Czar is great, he just has no idea how his boyars are screwing us over out in the provinces”.
And why do none of my ultra-intelligent, ultra-liberal friends and colleagues ever see this obvious truth. Is it, perhaps, an an inconvenient truth? I daresay YES!
Netflix has Dave Chappell.
"It's not funny" because it exposes their hypocrisy, and they don't like that.
"It's not funny" usually really means "it is funny but I don't want you to acknowledge that."
Dave has negotiated these times rather well-he isn’t MAGA, but he lives amongst them and understands them, as he has said. He is a local treasure in the Miami Valley.
So some Hollywood guy is "the left"? Perhaps append "fake" for a bit more accuracy. Somewhere in the USA there are genuine lefties, but they're a zillion miles from Democrats, their donors and their diminishing support.
Every single time there's somebody who tries to say Democrats aren't on the left.
But they are.
Sorry.
They are Pol Pot without the conviction of their beliefs.
NO they are not..
Yeah it's like ok, at least recognize that it's a joke and not serious?
My wife has sold a few screenplays and is a member of the WGA and this time of year we get all the DVDs for her consideration. They quickly go into the 3 piles on our kitchen table that represent Hollywood product: It sucks to be black; It sucks to be gay/Trans; it sucks to be a woman. (Add immigrant to any of the above). The emotional and moral manipulation even just on the packaging and PR notes radiates from a distance and after a few moments of mockery, they all go in the trash.
My wife is also a novelist so all year round we get galleys of all the latest releases from the big NYC publishers. Same themes, same victim mongering and fetishization, same weepy moral and emotional manipulation, same stale stilted academic jargon, same politicization of every aspect of existence, same blaming of "Oppression" for every hangnail, same product created by the same callow children of the Internet age, who imagine themselves an enlightened holy priesthood when their greatest moral conundrum is deciding whether to swipe right or left. And same fate: all quickly go in the trash or sometimes in the fireplace.
The progressive monoculture is a result of the stifling intellectual and creative conformity of the modern postmodern academy, where things like art, skill, esthetics, vision and beauty are all portrayed as problematic impositions of Eurocentrism and that have created a scorched-earth sterile cultural landscape where nothing exists except Power, Oppression and the sacred Self, which exists wholly and entirely to perform public acts of political "transgression".
That the children of the modern Academy have all grown up to be brittle authoritarians who cry Harm! once their ego feels threatened and who only appreciate any book or film if it provides a self-flattering reflection constructed from progressive pieties was inevitable and makes perfect sense—this is what happens when you let your cultural and educational instuitutions be conquered by dour Maoists who only experience joy when they're making someone else as miserable as they are.
It seems like their ego has no center of gravity, and therefore they lack self esteem
they've handed over their ego to the "collective", and it defines them...so it becomes sort of a purity test to ideological uniformity.
I don't even think they know it.
They have been sucked up by a vacuum into a vortex void of free expression. Every now and then one is expelled for a real or imaginary free thought. Outside in the open air their individual identity returns. I hope they understand it was one of the most nasty cults the country has experienced.
Well said Shelly !!
(Free thoughts must be suppressed as they lead to Thought crimes which lead to hate speech …. It’s a slippery slope)
I actually went to a postmodern art school in the early thousands. the faculty were mostly highly competent, they loved art, skill, aesthetics, vision…some even loved beauty. And i learned a lot. Postmodernism was more like a playset for making fun art rather than a wanna be red army youth movement. At least one avoided becoming ideologically possessed. But many Others went batshit totalitarian. Their art technically is good but just screams arrogance, delusion and hate.
I was over in the Lit Dept, where a "Marxist lens" is a must-have accessory for every prof and aspiring graduate student and where the entire purpose of literature is analyzing the race/gender/sexuality aspects of every book and writer in order to convict them of crimes against Equality and Justice.
I'm sure of course that there are all sorts of profs and students who still believe in L'art pour l'art, but then again every time I go to a museum or gallery there is usually some form of land acknowlegment or atonement to the indigenous or a long piece of text instructing the viewer on what to think and feel, esp after they've been informed that the artist had some vague connection to the slave trade.
The rot has seeped deeply into all aspects of our culture...
I don't even go to museums anymore, the last few times I went I was disgusted by the dumbed-down captions on science exhibits, and blaming everything on global warming. They aren't museums they are indoctrination centers.
Heck of a good comment !!
thanks!
Yes, every time I see your crazy CP profile pic I know another banger is coming! Pa-pa-pow 😎
lol thanks
People wonder why so many readers are reaching all the way back to the Iliad and the Odyssey for reading material. Your second paragraph provides a damn good hint!
Better make sure it's a paper copy of the Odyssey-- in case it's deemed "imperialist" or any of the other pejoratives of the day. Anything on Kindle can be deleted or edited in any way they want. God forbid you want to find any "controversial" books. You won't find them from the mega sites.
One the one hand the hypocrisy and numbed out psyche of dumbed down trolls. On the other the fact that they destroy lives, and importantly, their distortion of the healthy national conversation America deserves. Accepting that they make a living doing so helps explains the psychopathy. I always feel I'm in the the presence of a disease when I encounter them.
You're right. There is no discourse. Could you imagine these feebs trying to go on the old Dick Cavett show and sanely elaborate their positions for an hour? And have to listen to questions or counter-arguments against those positions without resorting to name calling, screaming or childish behavior? Couldn't happen. I desperately miss Christopher Hitchens, who was the most erudite defender of logic and sanity. He would be must-watch content picking these simpletons apart.
I will say that Sasha made a huge error in tweeting that. Why? Because far too many people have been dumbed down, no sense of nuance, humor or anything beyond binary thinking (i.e. swipe left, swipe right). Not bright people don't get irony. Everything is literal. Like a troop of baboons, either screeching at something strange or hooting along to something they approve of. Everything outside the troop is a danger, and all troop members stay in line or suffer being torn apart by their own.
Yes, she didn't really read the room. Her audience were not whizz kids. And many are just not nice. There is an expression about dogs and their beds and fleas. She got seduced by those parties. Hollywood is a nasty business. And Los Angeles has its own seedy history. Read "City of Quartz" as Walter suggests.
The Dick Cavett Show was so good. John and Yoko (I think). But also, near physical fights between "a person of color"* and a "segregationist."** And not for cheap visual thrills. People confronted one another about their beliefs.
While we are at it. "Late night" TV used to be full of news. Ted Koeppel, "Day ------ of hostage crisis" . . .
*I am thinking Jim Brown was the Person of Color, and Lester Maddox was the Segregationist. But I could be wrong.
Well-said.
The rise of independent commentary in podcastville and the do-it-yourself spirit that flows from that will be the end of this polluted Marcusian source of cultural production. I like the fact that stand-up comedians have been the pioneers of the grassroots podcasting that is becoming more popular than old media. One sinks or swims on the value of what one puts out there, no longer needing the backing of corporations or institutions that demand conformity for support. Freethinking artists leave "the creative conformity of the modern postmodern academy" as they always have, if they even enter it in the first place.
As far as the relevance of the academy goes, consider the difference between the academic poets and the popular ones. I think Allen Ginsberg's experience at Columbia U and the rise of the so-called "beats" called everyone's attention to the problem with academic art and its poisonous relationship to academic criticism.
I think T.S. Eliot was the last academic poet with any talent and the last academic critic with anything at all interesting to say about art and culture.
Couldn't agree more Bull Hubbard. Talk Radio was the lifeline for the Reagan era generation. It seeded the populism that has emerged with Andrew Breitbart growing int turn into the vast eco-system that includes Matt and others here on Substack. The worm has turned.
As for the Academy, Victor David Hanson, Naill Ferguson, and Peter Theil have been detailing the collapse of Utopian Campus life for years now. First government is targeted for massive layoffs and restructuring. Then comes the Academy.
Bidens vain attempt at Student Loan forgiveness was only partially about winning votes from indebted millennials or gen Z. IT WAS REALLY ABOUT THE CONTINUED CASH FLOW TO COLLEGES VIA GOVERNMENT - FEDERAL AND STATE.
That era is over post-covid. Not only has the credentials of a BA tanked - but the public is also wise to the utter mediocrity of these institutions - and will no longer tolerate supporting it.
🎥Hollywood is finished. I predict that many in the film industry, having witnessed their houses burn down, will see that Southern California is not worth rebuilding. They will move into a ready-made property in Texas, or Montana, or Arkansas, or Wisconsin, or North Carolina, or Maine.
For people who don’t know, Southern California is already a wasteland. High earners continue to move out of California, leaving poor people on welfare. And who pays for the welfare state? Rich Californians. So get out. And that doesn’t include how high taxes are in California: a sales tax of nearly 10%. WTF?
I wonder if the change in Hollywood involves a new breed of actors coming from a different kind of drama school background? What CP calls the progressive monoculture in the modern postmodern academy has produced actors who don't do Shakespeare anymore because he was a racist and misogynist. Actors in the 1930s went to drama schools too like AADA or Pasadena Playhouse. Bette Davis studied in NYC. Hepburn went to Bryn Mawr. But there was more of a pioneering spirit then and willingness to really work; work at your craft. The Depression unemployed came in droves to find work in LA. Stage actors came, but there weren't enough of them. So, fresh off the farms and small towns of America came young men and women to Hollywood by bus and by train or driven by their parents from Utah like “Queen of the B’s” Marie Windsor. Gary Cooper and Myrna Loy from Montana. The studios back then were workplaces. Filmmaking was an industry not a cultural experiment. It was indeed mass entertainment and not church.
“It’s a trade that has to be learned,” said Gregory Peck. Actor Norman Lloyd
said that “There was a great belief in professionalism. You got your work done.
But there was a great anti-arty feeling and no nonsense. That was true of any of
the major studios.” (From "Hollywood Remembered: An Oral History of Its Golden Age." by Paul Zollo.)
Good work is being done today, but often outside of LA. Taylor Sheridan has his own studio in Texas and he uses the same actors in different series; kind of like the old contract player days. And he takes risks. He's a white dude but writes great female characters in "Yellowstone", "Landman", "1923","Lioness"" and others. Great African American characters in "1883", "Bass Reeves", "Lioness". Latinos in "Landman"; Native Americans in "Yellowstone". The heart of film and series is good story telling. Fingers crossed that will return. Perhaps it could rise from the ashes.
"Actors in the 1930s went to drama schools too like AADA or Pasadena Playhouse."
Also, actors and most people were much more well-rounded then, had served in the military, survived the Depression, and had much more varied and interesting life stories.
I just went to Wikipedia and saw that 2 of my favorite actors had both spent time working a chain gang (!):
"[Robert] Mitchum left home at age 14 and traveled throughout the country, hopping freight cars and taking a number of jobs, including ditch digging, fruit picking, and dishwashing. In the summer of 1933, he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia and put in a local chain gang."
"At age 16, [Steve] McQueen returned to live with his mother, who had moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There he met two sailors from the Merchant Marine and decided to sign on to a ship bound for the Dominican Republic. Once there, he abandoned his new post, eventually being employed in a brothel. Later, McQueen made his way to Texas and drifted from job to job, including selling pens at a traveling carnival and working as a lumberjack in Canada. He was arrested for vagrancy in the Deep South, and served a 30-day assignment on a chain gang."
People don't live lives like this anymore, we are more house cats now than street cats, which seems to make people smaller, more brittle and more anxious.
But we'll always have the Golden Age of Hollywood!
Well said! Absolute truth!
"Like." x a lot.
In addition to cigars, beer and tequila, I spend my entertainment dollars on Amazon for DVDs of old movies and Abebooks for used books. As far as I can tell, there's been very little I want to read to watch produced in the last 20 years, no offense to your lovely wife.
The Criterion Channel has lots of old movies. TCM has an early Hitchcock I had never heard of "The Skin Game". Watched "Out West with the Hardys" on Christmas Day. Mickey Rooney is great. His Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is best Puck I've seen. I collect DVDs at Estate Sales. Excellent source.
As is often the case CP, well said.
thanks
Wow! Well said.
thanks
This should be shared with everyone
Your last paragraph is <chef's kiss>
lol thanks
I subscribe to Sasha’s substack and find it interesting because she was part of the side that felt so justified in their views for so long. Up with Sasha and let’s hope others will see the light as well!
Everybody gets there in their own time. If they're serious, we should welcome their inclusion. If they aren't serious.....I think it's pretty obvious. *cough*MarkZuckerburg*cough*
Yes, we should welcome them and not be like the left who berate people that come over to their side.
Dead on. And appropos of that...saw an interesting clip recently of Cenk Uygur visiting Turning Point USA's conference (wrap your head around that, for starters...)
And he said, "You do a couple things well. You work together well and you're more welcoming, if I'm being honest.....if you agree with MAGA 5%... welcome, come join us. On the left if you disagree 5% (with them), they go, get out of here. You're a right winger, you're a fascist."
A simple grasp of math tells you that's a really bad model for a political movement that wants to grow and gain followers.
With the left, It's "get in lockstep" or get locked out.
Full clip: https://x.com/i/status/1870582698324230173
I’m not sure it’s a movement that is interested in growing. It seems more interested in continually moving the goalposts on how woke one must be. Which will tend to reduce overall numbers while creating even more concentrated idiocy.
Lol...true dat. Those ever-rising woke standards you discuss, by definition, narrow the range of their acceptable discourse, which in turn, makes them increasingly incapable of defending their positions. Course, they avoid any situations where they have to defend those positions. So, yes, smaller numbers of stupider people. Call it the Ever-Shrinking Circle Jerk.
I've posted this before, but it's worth repeating:
"You can't reason someone out of a position they weren't reasoned into." --Unknown
Mick, I get the whole Christian-theme of this idea and I do support it...but at what point does it become enabling of the narcissistic, predatory, chameleon? Conservative values of forgiveness have been abused by the morally preening, relativistic neoMarxists for so long that, when it comes to anybody on the left of the political spectrum, I don't know that I could ever believe that what they say in any given contemporaneous moment is truly their "authentic self". They have no values. They have no bedrock principles. They have no identity beyond that which their collective defines in any given moment.
Well, it is possible to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
Love Sasha! Her Substack is great. Creative, funny, and a unique perspective our culture. Highly recommended for any who haven’t read/listened to her work.
I'm a subscriber too, and really enjoy her commentary. She's helped me understand the liberal mind. It's beyond shameful that any publication would intentionally ruin a person's name, and thus her livelihood, over a tweet. Why does the desire to defame and destroy run in many liberals?
In his book "Liberal Bullies, social psychologist Luke Conway reports that authoritarian leftists tended to say that dissenting and opposing people should be "crushed," "destroyed," and the like. Conway thinks this goes with the authoritarianism. They think that people who hold dissenting opinions should not exist, because they believe that they have the one and only righteous dogma.
Their dogma requires authoritarianism. Any group that believes their ideas represent the “common good”, and that people need to behave in prescribed ways to achieve that goal, will find they must resort to force to get everyone to comply. It is inevitable.
this
So true!
Sasha's Substack is a personal favorite! Talented writer and story teller. Always enjoy reading her unique take on current events.
Excellent!
I also subscribe to her substack and I find it fascinating to hear what went on and how the thought process was over there during the first couple of years of Trump. By the way, she's a big fan of Steve Bannon, too.
Speaking of Bannon, how hilarious is it that he’s calling Musk a racist?
Reminds me of the red scare ladies vibe if you know them. Smart and funny to a level that exceeds most.
I’m going to subscribe to her today as a paying customer. Gotta vote with my wallet.
But she lost me at the LA LA land thinking.. I wonder if she recognizes how much damage she has done to people… Maybe this is a bit of karma for her as penance.
Is criticizing a movie the same as removing someone’s livelihood and blacklisting them?
You missed my point as I didn't articulate well..given how over the top she was in piling on in the past in such a silly thing as the movie, I suspect they is way more fire with that smoke..
By my reading she does.
"It would be unfair to say California set aside legitimate affairs of state (like preparing for fires) because it was consumed with turning government and public enterprises like schools into models of utopian thinking."
Uh, it's pretty clear that's EXACTLY what They did.
The Left needs to learn about a new concept called opportunity cost.
Even if the Fire Chief and Mayor were qualified for the job, they have a directive from the institutions to focus on DEI.
Attention is finite. For every second you spend on one thing, that's one less you have for other things. Same with money.
Any biz owner knows this. So do most families. It seems like the left thinks they can suborn what no other business or person can without being insolvent.
What ends up happening is Midwits will only hire dimwits. And at critical mass incompetence might as well be treachery. And, so, eventually those that serve the mission of the institution become pariah, and those that serve the interests of the institution alone get the promotions/sinecures. It is very dangerous when institutions turn into guilds. At that point they become adversarial to the mission of the institution which are foundationally there to protect We The People.
But, hey, if communists understood economics or how to run institutions, they wouldn't be communist.
As the great Thomas Sowell said, “there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs.”
For people who have the touch they cant get over “but things should be like….” And then some unachievable demand they will chase in circles forever while everything else falls apart.
Exactly. I think my last paragraph paraphrases Sowell. Or someone similar
I think that's why most of the engineers I know lean right, at least economically- generally engineering is also all about tradeoffs.
Indeed. Both my brothers are engineers. One mechanical and another electrical. They tell me the same thing you're saying. Makes sense.
It's basically the only science left that hasn't turned into a belief system.
This is quite astute. TY.
Think you missed Taibi’s sarcasm.
I usually get sarcasm, but if this was sarcasm, it flew right past me. And I was truly surprised because this is Matt.
Matt Taibbi and sarcasm are a bit like William Shakespeare and risque - if you think it's there, you're right. If you don't, you probably missed it.
Mad me laugh, recognition and well put!
If that was sarcasm, it was well hidden.
The attendees at that 1925 Klan rally were Democrats too.
And they hated Catholics ! Just like lots of democrats !
You just made me LOL. They don’t even realize that!!
Sasha is brave, honest and wise. She has publicly bared her conversion. She is now looking from the outside in and reminds us how liberating it is to leave the herd. Each post on her Substack is another peek behind the bittersweet curtain of the Hollywood left.
What do you expect from some perhaps most self-absorbed people on the planet?
The only way to have any influence on these Hollywood types is to vote with your eyeballs and don't consume their products. Which I think is already happening given how many movies have bombed these last few years.
It's shitty what's happened to Sasha and others, but the real tragedy is that these fools are sacrificing art for the sake of propaganda and politics.
My god, when did progressives become such moralistic church-lady prigs?
There was a purer than thou strain of feminism during the Seventies and it seems to have recurred. It was all about dour looks, disapproval and guilt trips. A lot of it was specifically directed against individual women whose sexual preferences were deemed to be patriarchal.
Excellent, simple, elegant thought—thanks. We should not buy products or services that we do not enjoy. Simple
Capitalism.
I following quite a few Substack accounts, but when I see any alerts in my inbox from either yours or Sasha’s, I never delete them. I always mark it for later if I don’t have time to read it immediately. You’re both always on point.
And Angela they both have integrity & courage to tell the TRUTH.
It’s like reading about the Soviet Union in the 1930,s
Someone made a joke about Dear Leader
didn't he win the high jump at the Olympics?...like the Red Army you have to be the last one clapping
I think Dear Leader was North Korean Kim Jong Il. Great Leader was taken by his dad.
Speaking of which, Matt mentioned Pete Seeger: whether or not blacklisting him was right, he absolutely was a shill for Stalin, and along with Woody Guthrie he did a messaging about-face whenever the USSR ordered him to. Fuck those guys (Seeger and Guthrie, not Matt).
The casting couch, destruction of child stars, pedos, backstabbing, stage mommy dearests, drugs, cover ups…thank God these people are able to spot a toxic person like Sasha when they see one!
I hope Sasha is making more money now on Substack. I subscribe to her newsletter and it’s one of my favorites.
Oh, for f*ck's sake. Let's state the obvious: the Hollywood Left represents one of the most arrogant and depraved segments of society, and Sasha is the sane one. I used to question how McCarthyism could've possibly caught fire in America, and now I have an answer. We're living it again.
"McCarthyism" was an answer to a real threat.
Cancel culture is not.
Russia/Communism was not a real threat. Get a clue.
Read the Venona and Mitrokhin releases of formerly secret information about the depth of spying in the U.S. To borrow your own phrase, “get a clue”.
Yeah, but luckily we were able to contain the commie threat when we won the Vietnam War, right?
Oh, the horror! Russia had spies in the U.S.?
I hear they still do.
According to Stanton Evans, the author of "Blacklisted by History," McCarthy's evidence was suppressed/mocked by two administrations (one D, one R) because neither wanted to be held responsible for the embarrassment of having been infiltrated.
Well Tom, Communism has actually killed over 100 million people in the last 125 years...
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/11/09/data-on-mass-murder-by-government-in-the-20th-century/
Pales in the body count America has wracked up via regime change wars, support for dictators, and hegemonic blood lust.
Tom Stoned...I mean "High"...Your ideologically driven, willful ignorance of history and facts is astounding. If you hate America so much, how about if you move to whatever Marxist wonderland you wet-dream about?
Just stop with the ‘love it or leave it’ absurdity, son. I’m a 72yo vet whose knowledge of history and facts dwarfs yours, proven by simply checking out your substack reading list, you Rufo twit.
My only ideology is truth and justice.
Tom Too High.
Try to concentrate on the subject.
Once again you don’t read your history. America has a long way to go to catch up.
I read plenty. You’re an American Empire simp.
Itemization, please.
It’s in Dave’s link above. And I love the fact that he posted it thinking it proved his Manichaean point re. the relative death toll attributed to communism vs. the American Empire. Stalin was a piker compared to Kissinger.
You want a specific example, read ‘The Jakarta Method’.
i just learned a lesson with that dude.
don't argue with stupid, they'll drag you down and beat you with their experience.
Mark Twain. Nice.
How many of those 100 million
in the US (where McCarthyism occurred)?
Tom Too High
Putin and Trump are Butt Buddies, right ?
Are you serious? Maybe you forgot about history from 1950’s to 1980’s.
Totally serious. Maybe you’re a propagandized empire simp. America’s body count, from Indonesia to Vietnam to Cambodia to Latin America to Africa, in the period you reference, was staggering.
The average American’s knowledge of history is laughable; far too many have bought into the ‘shining city on the hill’ narrative of exceptionalism.
I like to think of Sasha as the normal niece Marilyn in the Hollywood family of Munsters.
Sasha Stone's "White Power" comment on a story about white stooges for Harris sounds like something I would have posted as a troll.
Note to writers at Hollywood Reporter: "Never go full retard."
Careful B-Dub, using the term retard is looked down on by people better than us. You could get cancelled.
retards making a comeback
I ain't scared!
trying to get rid of the word retarded is retarded
Seems racist to quote a dude playing a dude playing another dude .
I used to get confused, from day to day, about how I should characterize today's left...is it fascism today or socialism or communism, etc.
I've seen enough, It's clear to me now they're all commies.
They have mastered the art of disguising ideological uniformity as cultural diversity.
If you have a home worth millions of dollars and use private jets, you can't cosplay being a socialist.
Oh yes they can. They do it all the time and have no idea the depth of their hypocrisy.
All of those ideologies are just different flavors of collectivism.
Today's left doesn't want to nationalize the private sector; it wants to conscript it to service The Party. That makes it closer to Chinese Communism or fascism.
BOOM.
I'm convinced we're in a battle between those who want a collective society and those who want an individualistic society.
And just like every socialist/fascist/communists regime the collective responsibility boils down to the method and process being one in the same.
It's a very similar method and process as the "shock-workers" (a devised scheme, ostensibly, for the common good) from the Russian gulags where prisoners who attained "shock" status would get a slightly reduced sentence (the motivation) ...but refused to leave the camp because...wait for it....THE COLLECTIVE.
And that my friends was the purpose of the process and the method being the same.
What they really want is a collective organism, living, working, eating, sleeping, and suffering together in pitiless and forced symbiosis.
In other words they do not believe in the individual and that is the source of their contempt, blindness, cruelty and worldview towards us peasants.
I concluded awhile ago that traditional political labels have been rendered meaningless and the only accurate labels now are neoMarxist or Constitutionalist. In other words, collective vs individual. Every other label has been rendered an obfuscation of fundamental values behind a relativistic mask.
Can I assume you've read Solzhenitsyn? I am currently about half-way through The Gulag Archipelago (for those that do not know, it's a short story about the Soviet Gulags that runs about 1,800+ pages across three volumes). I bought Kolyma Stories by Shalamov (as well as Sketches of the Criminal World, Shalamov's follow-up book) because Solzhenitsyn referenced it. Reading Gulag Archipelago also lead me to buy One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, also by Solzhenitsyn, An Island Hell by Malsagov, Russia's Age of Serfdom by Wirtschafter, and the Abolition of Serfdom in Russia by Moon. I swear I'm not sadomasochistic. It's just that I have a hypothesis that Russia's way of adjusting over time to the evolving morality of slavery (aka serfdom) helped sustain a collective/authoritarian social structure that continues to this day, whereas America's reckoning with slavery within the parameters of the US Constitution was faster and more authentic. My reading is about investigating the validity of my hypothesis because, you know, I don't have anything better to do! 🤣 🤣 🤣
Ryan Gardener> What are the victims of Lahaina, Katrina, Paradise, Palestine, East Palestine, and LA fires doing, along with 3 job gig workers, prisoners, to high rise apartment dwellers? What does any living being do? “living, working, eating, sleeping, and suffering together” is what’s called life, in bigger or smaller groups, tribes to villages to cities, herds or anthills. No man is an island, and if that’s attempted, someone is going to come along and stuff a cork in his den’s air vent. This has nothing to do with a state, ideology, or regime. I want a tribe that learns to expel the psychopathic predatory vultures.
"I'm convinced we're in a battle between those who want a collective society and those who want an individualistic society."
We are. But it's a con -- a very long one. Collectivism implies no requirement for totalitarianism by self-appointed vanguards, which is the opposite of the assumed democracy. Possibly Marx is the one who set it off, breaking cleanly from the integrated liberté, égalité, fraternité a half-century before with henceforth intra-national wars.
Healthy societies balance individual and collective behavior. Their dual necessity is why both Rightist and Leftist movements exist perpetually. Unfortunately, our primitive side is tribal, and so whichever of these two is our greater affinity is chosen as the side for battle.
nah. This seems like the "Fallacy of the Common Good"
have you studied Bastiat? In specific, The Parable Of The Broken Window?
For the common good is the most common excuse for uncommon evil.
there's always the seen and unseen.
Re Bastiat, I'm not seeing how the evils of specific environments with perverse incentives, with disingenuous sophists (via "creative destruction") and other power-grabbers (corruption, in general) translates into a wholesale rejection of collective action. After all, a republic, voting in general, and a legal structure for some type of market, are just three collective exercises that are widely accepted, even by the Right.
Meanwhile there are, of course, parallel evils in unrestrained individual freedom, the worst being a runaway concentration of power, a common occurrence. That there exists a way to corrupt a system, or that it frequently occurs, does not mean it is a necessary result.
Each side has no end of brilliant arguments and defenses. That's part of how I came to recognize normative truth in both sides.
"It" takes a village really means everyone must be uniformly controlled by the controllers. Hillary's idea of society, any society.
exactly.
it's real easy to test the "fallacy of the common good".
just go to any public restroom
And the source of their contempt for the US Constitution, which is a document devoted to the rights of the individual. I liken them to the Borg.
The Democrats have had a fascination with fascist policy since Woodrow Wilson and FDR. These ideas are not new for the Democrats or even Republicans.
Why socialize industry just socialize the people
Collectivism is a good way to characterize that stuff. It’s also how racism works; everyone belonging to an identified group shares the same behavior and outlook, according to a racist.
Exactly. The Achilles Heel of Collectivism is that the productive and wealthy can leave. Capital is much more mobile now than it was in 1919.
Which is why they despise Bitcoin. It is out of the reach of governments / NGOs.
It's a very diverse group of people saying uniformly terrible things.
Yeah. The least diverse person you will ever meet is the diversity director at any company or institution.
Look like America, Think like Cambridge
You’re making it really hard to have any sympathy for those who inhabit LA
Wow!!
An article with Matt Taibbi speaking to Sasha Stone.
It doesn’t get better than that.
Two journalists with tremendous courage and integrity.
Both had the guts to buck the woke corporate media complex and report truthfully and dig in and report facts like real journalists did many year ago.