Say something clever

luka

Well-known member
I thought I was meeting my sister at six but apparently its 7 so I'm in the pub on my jacks entertain me impress me
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
Not so much clever as an encouraging bit of news but, Oakland, California has decriminalized ALL entheogenic plant medicines, including magic mushrooms, peyote, and Ayahuasca. Just another sign of the monstrous fork in our evolutionary trajectory lying ahead of us. What will it be? Join the "ecology" of evolved organisms in hyperspace, or regress into zombies, monsters, fascists, "goblin nonces" or whatever term synonymous with "subhuman" you prefer. Which reminds me, why am I dicking off here when there's work to be done? Apathy, lost cause, the ecology doesn't want us? From the article:

The resolution says city money will not be used "to assist in the enforcement of laws imposing criminal penalties for the use and possession of Entheogenic Plants by adults." It says that investigating people for growing, buying, distributing or possessing the substances "shall be amongst the lowest law enforcement priority for the City of Oakland."
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
OK, try this.

It struck me yesterday that fascism is Protean. It's like The Thing, in that it can absorb or at least mimic the characteristics of any other ideology, belief system or form of government it comes across. Many of which are mutually antagonistic or exclusive: conservatism, socialism, liberalism, libertarianism, industrial capitalism, finance capitalism, radical environmentalism, any of the established religions, New Age mysticism, folk beliefs... and probably others I haven't thought of.

Then it annoyed me that I couldn't remember whether I was paraphrasing something I'd read recently or had a genuine insight. Anyone come across this idea before?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
OK, try this.

It struck me yesterday that fascism is Protean. It's like The Thing, in that it can absorb or at least mimic the characteristics of any other ideology, belief system or form of government it comes across. Many of which are mutually antagonistic or exclusive: conservatism, socialism, liberalism, libertarianism, industrial capitalism, finance capitalism, radical environmentalism, any of the established religions, New Age mysticism, folk beliefs... and probably others I haven't thought of.

Then it annoyed me that I couldn't remember whether I was paraphrasing something I'd read recently or had a genuine insight. Anyone come across this idea before?

"Because antifascism is the practice of tracking and identifying fascist and fascism-enabling currents within political and cultural life, and confronting those currents wherever they manifest themselves in public, with the aim of suppressing them, it is neither tied to a specific definition of its adversary nor bounded by a fixed protocol of conduct. It is, in this regard, rather like cybersecurity. Those who guard our information infrastructure against malicious infiltration must face an obscure and protean adversary, and make use of a variety of tactics in frustrating that adversary’s advances. The usefulness of a communications technology such as email is degraded if spammers and scammers are permitted to disseminate their messages unimpeded. We track threats, filter and block, in order to maintain a usable channel for legitimate communication."

https://thelastinstance.com/posts/knots2/
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Basically all of liberal culture is an attack surface (in a cybersecurity sense) for fascism. What makes fascism fascism isn't the particular vulnerability it happens to be exploiting at any given moment, but the purposes towards which that vulnerability is being exploited.
 

luka

Well-known member
One of zhaos riffs, although he picked it up from somewhere else. Been around the block that one.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Any attempt to satisfy the demand "say something clever" will always fall immediately into stupidity, banality, cliché, repetition etc.

I have been wondering a lot about how it is possible to write poetry on demand, in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. I think it is a very admirable practice, if approached without cynicism. It could be done horribly: imagine every encounter being "tell me your name and what you do for a living, I'll think of a rhyme for each and produce you a couple of metric quatrains, like 'there was a fine chap named Adam / he was a skilful plumber / but his missus was a madam / which was a serious bummer'". That it can be done joyfully, in a spirit of invention and generosity, is a bit of a miracle. I imagine that it must involve, as a basic first step, suspension of the desire to seem clever, to say something clever, to satisfy the other. We don't know what will satisfy the other. But we can try to tickle them.
 

luka

Well-known member
Any attempt to satisfy the demand "say something clever" will always fall immediately into stupidity, banality, cliché, repetition etc.

I have been wondering a lot about how it is possible to write poetry on demand, in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. I think it is a very admirable practice, if approached without cynicism. It could be done horribly: imagine every encounter being "tell me your name and what you do for a living, I'll think of a rhyme for each and produce you a couple of metric quatrains, like 'there was a fine chap named Adam / he was a skilful plumber / but his missus was a madam / which was a serious bummer'". That it can be done joyfully, in a spirit of invention and generosity, is a bit of a miracle. I imagine that it must involve, as a basic first step, suspension of the desire to seem clever, to say something clever, to satisfy the other. We don't know what will satisfy the other. But we can try to tickle them.

You're absolutely right about this. Spot on.
 

luka

Well-known member
So you have to access the emotion direct, and accept it for what it is, and allow it it's dignity. What I always say to Edmund who is hampered by an indie kid past is, it's r&b it's not indie. You take things face on without trying to evade them with cleverness, cynicism etc. Write another love song, and mean it.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I fundamentally don't understand R&B. I used to think I just didn't like it. Now I can appreciate its qualities, but it still seems to me to be being beamed in from a parallel emotional universe. Metal makes sense to me because it's basically collective/solipsistic - you might experience it listening alone in your bedroom, or as part of a heaving mass in a moshpit, but with the exception of "metal ballads" (almost uniformly terrible) you'd never sing a metal song directly to another person. (An interesting exception here might be Deftones, which is unusually intimate - not for nothing is there a rather good Deftones Sade cover, for instance). R&B is about seduction, praise, remonstration, apology: it's a person-to-person medium. The speaker is always caught up in an intersubjective game - very often the answering voice is included in the song, offering encouragement or retort. I'm fairly terrible at all of those things in real life, and don't really understand what people who are good at them are really doing. R&B seems to me to be about imagining yourself, successfully, as a kind of intersubjective virtuoso: not just a loverman, but a really persuasive loverman, one who believes in himself and wants to be believed by the other person.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The indie-kid stance: I'm not persuaded, and if I'm persuading you it's because I'm fooling you, which is very clever of me.
 
Top