When the Chapos said we were cycling through the media of the 2000s, I didn’t think it would mean this too.
His political takes are museum pieces at this point.
His political takes are museum pieces at this point.
That’s it. I must have spent more than a minute trying to think up a joke but I couldn’t figure out how to phrase it.
I had a super-quickie look at this Wikipedia page. I’m surprised he is for a ceasefire. I expected he would have been basically silent on the Gaza war.
In January 2024, it was announced that he would return to The Daily Show for Monday episodes, as well as in the role of an executive producer.
[…]
Political views
In 2000, when he was labeled a Democrat, Stewart generally agreed, but described his political affiliation as “more socialist or independent” than Democratic. Stewart has also voted for Republicans, the last time being in the 1988 presidential election when he voted for George H. W. Bush over Michael Dukakis. He described Bush as having “an integrity about him that I respected greatly”. He has been a vocal proponent of single-payer health care system.
Stewart has spoken against Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. In 2023, Stewart, alongside other media figures, signed an open letter urging president Joe Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
I’m surprised too to hear he supports a ceasefire. At a casual glance, I had come to associate him with the kind of resistance libs that were like “Iraq was bad but, Afghanistan is the good war.” People who never have a comprehensive critique of American imperialism.
In saying the above comment about museum pieces, I was referring mostly to when he did stuff like the March to Restore Sanity. I used to hear that sort of bipartisanship fetishization during the early Obama years from mainstream liberals as a response to the Tea Party. It was so nauseating, especially as the hindsight piles on. It all just seems about preserving the status quo to me, that is not at going to get any of the reforms that he wants that we might agree with him on.
I think more people on the lib-left don’t buy into it but, it’s still the default attitude among the geriatric leadership class of the Democratic party.
March to Restore Sanity
That was on my mind too. Libs live in a fantasyland that gets more and more elaborate as they convince themselves that the old days were so much better and it would be great if we could get back to that.
The other day I heard a MNSBC talking head named Elie Mystal actually say something like “We need a strong republican party.” What made it especially galling for me is that Mystal one of their legal experts who is by far the strongest, harshest critic of GOP justices on the supreme court. If he was just a tiny bit more bitter - he’d lose his MSNBC gig forever. Yet he’s such a boneheaded institutionalist - he can’t help but defend a system and a court that’s nearly guaranteed to get more and more reactionary over time.
Mystal - like a typical lib - must make daily efforts to pretend he GOP was good before Trump showed up. Such libs must force away the reality that “good” republicans like the ex-president war criminal Dubya worked hard behind the scenes to put people like Kavanaugh on the court. And - of course - the GOP has wanted to kill Roe for decades.
Judging by clips frim his cable show, he absolutely destroys rich bastards and lays out every point case for the destruction of capitalism but always skips right past socialism as an alternative
Cold War mindset. That whole generation had it in general. I kind of feel pity for his horizons being limited in that way. The capitalists waged the Cold War mercilessly, which included producing some of the most potent propaganda in the history of mankind. He just can’t break out of it, especially when his livelihood became intimately tied to their political institutions.
The past few weeks have really made it sink in for me that we’re living through a decade with a worse cultural aura than the one where Shark Tale came out
I’ve used the aughts as a punching bag for so long to feel better about living in this era but the general feeling of malaise has gone on for too long for it to be a fluke of the transitional period from the 10s
Shark tale existed because they didn’t know how to properly design a movie by committee yet. These days they’ve cracked that formula, so there’s no crazy nonsense or bizzaro films anymore, it’s all the same generic middle of the road slop.
cracked that formula
That reminds of Frank Zappa in 1987 interview where he talked about “cigar-chomping old guys”. The quote is not verbatim and it has some paraphrases. There doesn’t seem to be a verbatim source. There’s only copypasta with editorializing that annoyed me so I edited it.
"Remember the 60s? That era that a lot of people have these glorious memories of? They really weren’t that great, those years. One thing that did happen in the 60s was some music of an unusual and experimental nature did get recorded, did get released. [The executives of the day were] cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!’ "
“We were better off with those guys. Than we are with the hip, young executives making decisions about what people should hear. The hippies are more conservative than the conservative ‘old guys’ ever were.”
Frank Zappa explains the decline of the music business - YouTube
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
are you fucking kidding me
fuck this asshole for pushing the China lab leak theory right in the middle of “Stop Asian Hate”
I’m convinced that what is happening is that on a societal scale we are all just seeing the totality of human existence flash before our eyes before we go extinct. We can’t seem to leave 2020, we can’t seem to leave 2016. We’re cycling through all the horrible pop culture from the 2000s and the 90s and the 80s. We can only make shitty remakes of movies made just 7 years ago anymore. On top of this we’re rehashing pro-slavery arguments from the 1860s, we have unironic monarchists living among us, we’re arguing about germ theory and fighting battles that should’ve been decided centuries ago. People want to return to the viking age, paganism, the Roman Empire, the crusader era, all the way to monke. We’re talking about ancestral diets, primitive living, “paleo” diets. Human civilization is in its death throes and as we lie here taking our last gasps we are just flipping through every human memory we have encoded in our genetic code from prehistory all the way up to 2020, experiencing it all at once.
People want to return to the viking age, pagnism, the Roman Empire, the crusader era, all the way to monke.
All of this is the subconscious desire for a pre-capitalist society where everything wasn’t commodified, where you could be something that wasn’t a commodity, but all of those societies are dead, murdered, butchered up, commodified, and the lifeless remains for sale to you. There is no bringing them back, they’re dead forever, which is the fate of all societies and communities that fall under capitalism, the cultural remains endlessly recycled on product boxes to evoke faint ideas of what used to be. Nothing new can grow under this superstructure, only the endless parade of the corpses of what used to be.
There’s a good essay on Marxism in Tolkiens universe that tries to understand it’s near-universal appeal. It basically comes down to nostalgia for an idealized feudal past without forced labor, poverty, famines or plagues. There’s even a section on this in the manifesto :
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society…In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history…
All of this is the subconscious desire for a pre-capitalist society where everything wasn’t commodified
I have found, through discussing politics and world events with friends and family, that most people have a similar idea of what a fair and good world looks like.
Most people want their neighborhood to look like the Hallmark cards, not asphalt carbrain dystopias.
Most people think it is wrong to live off the work of others.
Most people want their work to have meaning, to be part of a greater purpose; to advance humanity in the abstract, as one species and not as individuals.
Ironically on this latter point, the military actually sort of offers this. If you join the military you won’t be rich, but you will be taken care of in a quasi-socialist fashion. You work toward a greater common purpose. Yet most in the military do not realize this, how the “real” economy is far more precarious for most workers.
cycling through
Black Mirror needs to turn that into an episode.
We can only make shitty remakes of movies made just 7 ago years anymore.
I know many people have mentioned it before but that’s the sort of thing I can’t understand. Mining some pop culture from the 1980s, 70s, 60s? It’s sad and pathetic and I’m used to it. But going back and remaking something forgettable that doesn’t even have nostalgic value is utterly bizarre to me. And even worse - sometimes it’s crap like Very Shitty Zombie Movie (I) (2016) that nobody saw or even heard of. Yet we learn VSZM 2 is in development and there’s the possibility of a VSZM tv series. On top everything else - a massive grift and tax avoidance scheme must be involved.
This, but only for western civilization, and the reality is that civilization isn’t actually ending. We just collectively feel like it’s ending because we can feel hundreds of years of privilege slipping away. Like how people who were previously on top of a caste system feel like they’re being discriminated against when that system is abolished, as the world of unequal exchange breaks down and the ability of the so-called First World to dictate what happens in every corner of the globe diminishes the people who live in the imperial core will feel like the world is collapsing, when in fact it’s just that other countries are rising to our level for the first time.
every time i eat an overpriced steak at a steak house or a greasy hamburger from a fast food restaurant, i think of this knowing that such a thing would become a luxury that future generations will covet and put a lot of effort and time into saving enough money to indulge in something that’s an ordinary day for me.
Hate this for him, honestly. He was shrewd to bow out when he did.
Why can’t this guy go away. He said he was going away, but its like he never left. Maybe its all a just a buildup for the release of Iresistable 2: the Resistening
Irresistible 2: the Resistening
A main character, Hopelessly Lib Guy, is talking to his friend - Friend of the Hopelessly Lib Guy.
“I got something to tell you. It’s important.”
“Uh, oh.”
“Is it wrong to sleep with a republican if she’s hot?”
“How hot is she?”
“Very.”
“How Republican is she?”
“Very.”
“Uh, oh.”
“And I slept with her already.”
“…”
“Aren’t you gonna say it? You know you wanna say it.”
“Uh, oh. And she is married?”
-–
“Uh, oh,” is a running gag so in the course of the movie Friend of the Hopelessly Lib Guy uses it about 19 more times which is at least 19 too many. Reddit loves the “uh, oh” guy so it becomes a meme for a while in r/politics for the movie that doesn’t deserve it’s 4.3 rating at Imdb. It doesn’t deserve that rating. Not at all!
In any case - the scene meanders on for ~3 more minutes and they decide it’s wrong for Hopelessly Lib Guy to sleep with the recently divorced republican no matter how hot she is. But he does anyway and repeatedly so there’s a plot.
