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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It’s an interesting idea, though, that one’s preference for a particular design or aesthetic, especially when that design or aesthetic is emblematic of a particular historical or cultural moment, is never wholly isolated to its visual or material components, but also innately tied to our memory and understanding of that moment. I personally don’t think you can extricate a particular aesthetic from the psychic background noise surrounding it. Our minds don’t work that way. It’s always forming these subconscious or unconscious connections, binding events and memory to abstract signifiers.

    We don’t like the 90s aesthetic because it’s “better” or even attractive. I mean, nobody has wallpaper in their home with those pastel and neon triangles. Many of us like it because it reminds us of childhood, of not having responsibilities other than waking up early enough on Saturday to catch all your cartoons and of not complaining too much when you have to go visit your grandparents who can never remember your birthday and who always ask you how old you are this year, of finishing Super Mario on the SNES before your friend does so you can brag about being better at video games than him. It’s of a simpler time and place, because we were simpler. And it was, in retrospect, of an America briefly sandwiched between the end of the original “Forever War” that was the Cold War, and the beginning of the 20th Century’s new “Forever War,” that is the War on Terror.










  • I’m not. Universities aren’t places of open or free learning. They’re deeply invested in capitalism and benefit greatly from intellectual property laws. In fact, most universities function largely as state subsidized pipelines that take people without a viable, real world skill set and turn them into people who still don’t have a viable real world skill set, but who do have a piece of paper telling corporations that they’re able and willing to put up with complete bullshit, general mistreatment, and dull, grueling labor for years without incident. Which is good enough for your typical middle-class wage slave and whatever they might want to do.




  • The causal link is implied. When someone says “Pitbulls and certain other dog breeds do not just have a bad reputation because people irrationally fear/hate them, they actually do pose a greater risk,” this is another way of saying that a particular breed of dog is innately more dangerous than another. Not that it has the potential to be more dangerous, but objectively is. The only logical deduction from this statement is that there must be something about the animal’s breed that makes it this way. It’s literally the exact same logic used by people who cite FBI crime statistics in order to paint specific entire ethnic groups as innately “more criminal” than another ethnic group.



  • They’re statistically correlated with incidents of mauling. Nobody is denying the statistical correlation. But there is a difference between observing a statistical correlation between breed and maulings and asserting a causal relationship. My argument is that the assertion that “pit-bulls are innately, biologically predisposed towards violence against people and other animals” is not supported by meaningful evidence. If you are arguing that they are, then you’re gonna have to convince me with more than “insurance companies say they are.”