Hunger Games absolutely nails the way US entertainment and media crowd behaves.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Especially every time they talk about the millions raised by each candidate.
I wonder how effective it would be to spend the majority of the campaign budget on purchasing (and forgiving) debt instead of advertising. Medical, student, house, car, credit card - just fucking all of it.
I know that'll never happen, but man 😞 what a waste.
I miss Michael Brooks so much
Matt Lech and David Griscom have done their best to carry on in Brooks's niche, but Michael really had a unique blend of personality, knowledge and media savvy that nobody I've seen has replicated. He had a perfect understanding of "Overton window" respectability media sensibility while also being funny and scathing towards reactionary shitheads and expounding on some real materialist history and not folding to typical western anti-socialist kneejerk bullshit.
If anyone isn't familiar with his work, I'd strongly recommend going back through The Michael Brooks Show on YouTube. Imagine a mid-2010s internet version of The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight with segments with interesting journalists and authors with some solid bonafides where the host has unapologetically socialist politics and doesn't pull his punches while also being funny and charming and a talented interviewer. It always had a really great mood to the show. A lot of it probably feels dated from covering then-current events, but the fact that he's missed by everyone from Majority Report libs to Chapo guys that guested in his show to Revolutionary Left Radio says a lot I think.
Yeah, I thought I was alone in this, but I really thought he was the perfect vehicle for spreading leftist ideas.
He could give materialist analysis in a casual way without watering it down. He could deal with reactionaries in a calm way without hiding his contempt. He was funny and scathing. Incredibly well read and informed.
I really do miss him
"Be kind to people, be ruthless to systems" is such a perfectly succinct maxim of how western socialists should operate
I always envisioned him and Matt Christman as a perfect duo. Matt's heavily materialist viewpoint mixed with Michael's heavily spiritualist viewpoint and their shared ability to be a force of personality and knowledge when they spoke would have really meshed.
The CIA must have thought the same thing.
Almost exactly this could've been a throwaway gag during a debrief on Veep
I've said it before, and I'll say it again
The people in Michael Brooks' orbit have all drifted off into some wild directions since his passing, and it sucks to see
Emma Vigeland was close to becoming jokerfied but then Biden dropped out and we're back on the lib train
She's been the biggest disappointment. She can be so based, but she's just completely bought in now
Nah, her colleague, Ana Kasparian is the biggest disappointment. Ana did a "why I left the left" and went down the TERF pipeline. Being lib is cringe, but it's better than cynical, far right, grifting.
Can't wait for her to pick hawk tuah girl as her running mate
was reading freddie's blog post today (a buddy is a former colleague of his and got me a subscription as a bit of a goof; do NOT tell bmf), and he(freddie) was really making hay over the number of think pieces in serious publications which noticed the kamala meme enthusiasm, and took it to portend good things for her chances in the election. freddie's reaction of course is that she is not running for "president of online" and that real people, who don't have email jobs, won't be impressed with this, and seemed to imply, at least emotively, just as i read the tenor of this post to imply, that winning a meme war actually will result in blowback and losing the normals and election.
but, here's the thing: the "real people" that dont have email jobs also dont read New York magazine think pieces; they don't watch sam seder; no real people are actually having bouts of neurotic fits about how people are talking about how people are talking about if kamala is brat or not, just as no real people are talking about if kamala is brat or not. insofar as the dnc's only outreach would be brat memes, yes, this would be a colossal disaster. but, it's not. and, the fact is, there's really not a lost opportunity cost for making memes -- the PMC emailers who are posting coconuts and kamala as the author of the The Eighteenth Brumaire would not otherwise be out organizing the blue collar workers in the factory-- they're attention would just be on some other online trifle. this is harmless lib fun (can seder not have 10 minutes of whimsy, when he spends 2.5 hours a day on Gaza talk?).
Harris is absolutely going to win on vibes, and in no way win on policy.
