The Shallow State

Quite frequently too you look back at what comprised “good taste” back in the 80s/90s/whenever he said that and it’s artifacts that are pretty lousy and not fondly remembered either

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

Sending troops from Texas to forcefully occupy and suppress cities in Illinois and Oregon IN OPPOSITION TO THOSE STATES' GOVERNORS is literally a civil war and it's cooking my brain that Democrats are simply pretending it isn't happening

Facebook violated my data privacy apparently for 16 years, but as a result of this classic action lawsuit I got $38 so I guess we're even.

Based on the initial reports and photos of the Michigan church attacker, sounds like a similar case.

If that pans out, will we get hegemonic coverage of the trend? Sun-blotting coverage of a wave of violence coming out of Trump country?

4 panel comic Panel 1: ICE “Agent” (thug) punches protester hard in the face. Agent: STOP Panel 2: ICE Agent viciously snaps protester’s arm Agent: BEING Panel 3: ICE Agent strangles protester Agent: POLITICALLY Panel 4: ICE Agent stamps on protester’s head Agent: VIOLENT

2025, So Far I wish I had a time machine so I could go back in time and talk to my dad in 1988, just before I was born, and tell him what it’s like to live in the future. I’d tell him all the amazing things that a...

This final post from Kaleb Horton is very beautiful and hits hard. This is just so sad. RIP.

Facebook post from Kaleb Horton, September 18, 2017: Toys R Us is probably going out of business this year. I'm fascinated by the collapse of retail, because what it really signifies is the collapse of the 20th century. The reason I pushed to profile guys like Harry Dean Stanton, Merle Haggard and Chuck Berry, was that writing about them is a way of writing about the 20th century, and how different it was from where we are now. How shockingly different, in retrospect. The migration out of the south, the descent of the Dust Bowl, which was a Biblical plague; the millions of people who were killed during World War Two. Monoculture, and the idea that a great episode of a television show would be seen by *half of all people.* The arrival of flight, and the end of horses. Homes without electricity. Coming of age without computers, without television. Listening to the radio for entertainment. The 20th century was a long time ago and it's a ghost now. It's a ghost you see in the places you wouldn't expect. It's seen in towns that were bypassed by the freeways, the dusty little towns out west that still have old diners and motels and payphones. It's seen in the places that we left, places where mines shut down, places where tourist attractions died off. It's seen in Bakersfield with Buck Owens' Crystal Palace and it's seen in Roswell, which stubbornly maintains the relics of the '90s UFO boom. Things like that won't be around forever. Someday owners will die and towns will burn and they won't be rebuilt. And it's difficult to suss out what those things are, because they're on roads, physical and metaphorical, that we no longer travel.

The ghost sightings happen in stupid places, unexpected places, and uncool places. A few months ago, I went with Marie to the Toys R Us on Victory Blvd. in Burbank, which still looks exactly like it did in Back to the Future in 1985 somehow. It's not nostalgia that you see there, it's just a customer base and economic model that's aging and won't be around a lot longer, and it's *boring.* There's no reason for anyone to ever go to Lancer's, the little diner by that Toys R Us. Because it's not good. People go there out of tradition, and old habits. 80 and 90 year olds go there. We were lining up for a Nintendo, which is still a hard thing to keep stocked in stores. Toys R Us was actually the best place to obtain one, because it's no longer a place children beg their parents to take them to. When we went in, wham, there it was. The ghost of 1996. I was 8 years old, for a fraction of a second. The feeling wasn't nostalgia, it was a kind of temporal dislocation. A confusion. But it wasn't an immaculate 1996, it was a fading 1996. It was lonelier than I remember it. It's time for Toys R Us to go out of business. It was time ten years ago, fifteen. There are reasons to be nostalgic about the 20th century. We weren't plugged into so many wires, so many screens. We were a little bit closer to the process of manufacturing and agriculture than we are now. We made more things by hand, and our goals as people were uniquely audacious and driven by mad, desperate power that was temporary and had to end.

But the 20th century was hopelessly cruel and soaked in blood. The 20th century gave us flight, but it also gave us bombs that can end the world and Richard Nixon and his evil sidekick Kissinger and it gave us new mutations of slavery and race and class subjugation and it gave us useless, disgusting monuments to Confederate slavers and traitors and cowards. It gave us President Trump, who wouldn't exist today without New York City's collective cocaine addiction in the 1980s. I want to find the ghosts, not because I miss the past -- the good old days can't return because they're imaginary and what you really miss is youth and if you're lucky a warm feeling of safety -- but because I don't even know what things we'll lose, or when we'll lose them, or how long we have to document them. I know ghosts when I see them. Toys R Us for the mundane side and the Salton Sea for the widescreen wasteland side. But I have absolutely no idea how many there are. I figure people go first, then places. Those are the things we have a limited time to physically document and historically examine and preserve on film. The ideas will go away much slower, and some of them may be eternal, like cold wars. But those are a lot less fun because you don't get to drive to them.

And now I'm just spelunking around and here's this Facebook post by Kaleb Horton from September 2017. It was three months after MTV dumped its freelancers. I'm sure it would have been a piece there; instead he posted this on FB just to have it written out: Toys 'R' Us as societal microcosm.

Awful news. Always enjoyed Kaleb’s writing

The real intention of government censorship is to disrupt the culture so that people are willing to withhold or censor themselves, and the government doesn’t have to do anything.

Trump makes unproven claims linking autism to Tylenol use by pregnant women Some studies have suggested an association between the two, but experts say there is no causal relationship.

Setting aside the bad science, the message here is that pregnant women should suffer--and risk harming their fetus with untreated fever--to reduce their chance of having a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Which makes clear his disdain for women *and* people with ASD.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

look at the sign. "EVERY ICE AGENT WILL BE HELD TO ACCOUNT"

Just re-upping my little song, which is truer today than when I wrote it on Monday.

big week for the return of the repressed

A list of the top stories in media on The NY Times website: Washington Post Columnist Says She Was Fired for Posts After Charlie Kirk Shooting Trump Sues The New York Times for Articles Questioning His Success Fox Host Apologizes for Suggesting Lethal Injections for Mentally Ill Homeless People

What a time to be alive.

Four arrested after Trump and Epstein images projected on Windsor Castle

Four people have been arrested for projecting images of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein onto Windsor Castle 👇

Jake Auchincloss (MA-04) Josh Harder (CA-09) Josh Riley (NY-19 ) Herb Conaway (NJ-03) Marcy Kaptur (OH-09) Pat Ryan (NY-18) Lou Correa (CA-46) Bill Keating (MA-09) Kim Schrier (WA-08) Jim Costa (CA-21) Susie Lee (NV-03) Darren Soto (FL-09) Henry Cuellar (TX-28) Stephen Lynch (MA-08) Greg Stanton (AZ-04) Sharice Davids (KS-03) John Mannion (NY-22) Norma Torres (CA-35) Don Davis (NC-01) David Min (CA-47) Derek Tran (CA-45) Laura Gillen (NY-04) Jared Moskowitz (FL-23) Eugene Vindman (VA-07) Jared Golden (ME-02) Jimmy Panetta (CA-19) Vicente Gonzalez (TX-34) Chris Pappas (NH-01) Maggie Goodlander (NH-02) Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03)

You might think it should be a non-controversial belief among Democrats that "DC should be able to self-govern.

But 31 House Democrats just voted to give Trump and Congressional Republicans full control over DC's sentencing laws.

Shameful, heinous behavior from Vichy Democrats

"Democracy dies in darkness...and we're here to help"

I hope I have given fidelity, and that everyone viscerally understands:
You will have to come through me.

repression isn't violence! only the inevitable backlash to repression is! and in fact the very backlash to repression justifies that repression retroactively!

The repeated use of this phrase seems to be intended to make one think political violence is a value-neutral term, while it’s clear that the intent is to cast “ political violence” as violence done to political figures instead of violence caused by political choices or enacted by the state

*whispering* all violence is political…

As stated earlier by others, it does not matter what you post or do not post here. The right wing has their narrative they’re going to push, because they understand they are at war with democracy and that propaganda *works.*

Sara Jacobs: "Filler is gender affirming care. Boob jobs is gender affirming care. Botox is gender affirming care. Lots of my colleagues have received gender affirming care and let me be clear, I think everyone should have access to the gender affirming care they need."

Nancy Mace: *screams*

his father was unavailable for comment

Trump’s brain is so stuck in 2004 that I’m half-convinced this Department of War thing is a hiccup aneurysm triggered by a memory of a Dennis Kucinich speech

I maintain that everything we are experiencing now is downstream from Obama running as an anti-war candidate and then doing nothing to punish those who committed atrocities in Iraq. It set a precedent that there'd never need be accountability ever again

actually Verhoeven didn't make things stupid enough