magicalconfusion [none/use name]

Party like it's 1999!

TMBG? Assuming other people even know what that shorthand means? You're old...GenX at best.

not "popular with girls’ in high school is a far cry from just making you default an incel

I didn't lose my virginity until the humiliatingly late age of 31.

Yeah but TIK's Stalingrad series is really, really good. As long as he sticks to tanks, he's fine. I spent a long time wondering what the Axis minors were doing, and lo and behold he actually answered the question! And not just the oft-told story of the collapse on the flanks, but their history during the entire operation from the beginning. :rat-salute:

You think that teenagers who voluntarily spend time in the library are popular with girls?

No. I can assure you that this is not the case.

In my 30s, due to the complete breakdown and destruction of my old life, I was able to find self-confidence in overcoming the carnage. Afterwards, rebuilding my shattered life, I was finally able to have the experiences most people have in high school. And I haven't set foot in a library since then.

That lasted until about the 60s. In the 80s grandparents and such still had family organs. They had songbooks with all these weird old songs that used to be the fabric of American life. Nobody has heard of them today.

Newspapers.

They came out fresh every day, and were a quarter. And the best part was, after someone was finished with it, someone else could read that same newspaper. And afterwards, you could use it to wrap fish or line the bottom of a birdcage.

Any time not taken up by smartphones was occupied by television.

We watched a lot of television. And it was utter crap. I remember watching The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and some other show on reruns every night. Kids watched cartoons like Transformers and He-Man which were just half-hour long commercials for lines of toys. Star Trek was great but there were only so many episodes so we watched them over and over. I used to go to the actual library and check out books, something that ensured my teens and 20s would be spent as a miserable, suicidal incel (I got better). Up until about 2004, I had a little list I kept in my wallet of people's phone numbers. If you didn't know someone's phone number, you could go to the phone book and literally look them up. That's right, there was this gigantic book printed on thin paper with everyone's name and number in it, in alphabetical order. If that sounds like a huge privacy violation, the technology to abuse it didn't exist. The movie "Terminator" (1984) has a scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger tracking down Sarah Connor by finding her name and address in the phone book.

This guy has a lot of weird takes and leaves out critical information. TIK is a weirdo but he has something like a 45 part series on Stalingrad that's not even finished, and he includes the important parts. Not just "they did this and that", but why they did. That was the real eye-opener for me, and it was very satisfying to finally understand the why.

Sophie Lewis’s 2022 “manifesto for care and liberation”

The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the crisis of care in the developed world. But the increasing popular recognition that those members of society disproportionately charged with “reproductive labor” are overburdened, isolated, underpaid, or even not paid at all, now provides a possible opening for a radical reorganization of the domestic sphere. Where can we look for inspiration? In the nineteenth century, the French feminist Charles Fourier designed blueprints for communities in which caring responsibilities were maximally shared and redistributed; in the early twentieth century, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a non-propertarian form of parenting she called “red love.” In the Sixties and Seventies, radical Black feminist, gay liberationist, and anti-capitalist militants envisioned “children's liberation” and experimented with kibbutzes and communes. Equally, in various ways throughout history, Indigenous, colonized, and enslaved populations pursued heterogeneous, anti-propertarian versions of kinship. In this talk, Sophie Lewis will present the surprising history of the often misunderstood utopian slogan “abolish the family.”

http://www.bioethics.pitt.edu/event/manifesto-care-and-liberation

We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.

Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.

Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.

https://www.amazon.com/Abolish-Family-Manifesto-Care-Liberation/dp/1839767197

What's the Matter with Kansas? (2005)

A brilliant analysis-and funny to boot-What's the Matter with Kansas? is a vivid portrait of an upside-down world where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast their votes for a Wall Street order that will eventually push them off their land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the country that it speaks on behalf of the People.

:amerikkka:

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/18/817687042/deaths-of-despair-examines-the-steady-erosion-of-u-s-working-class-life

For white Americans between 45 and 54, average life expectancy was no longer increasing; in fact, it was actually declining — in a pattern seen almost nowhere else on Earth.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691217079/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism are rising dramatically in the United States, claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives. Anne Case and Angus Deaton explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. This critically important book paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline, and provides solutions that can rein in capitalism’s excesses and make it work for everyone.

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