But, about the below movie, I’d forgotten how great Jamie Lee Curtis was in the film. She’s underrated, and she makes the film far better than it should’ve been.

Her monologue in the interrogation room, all alone, disheveled and bewildered, could not be more perfect.

I was watching part of the movie True Lies earlier, looking for a scene that I liked. Found the scene, but what was striking about the movie is how different its tone felt and how distant its cultural cues were from our own assumptions and certitudes.

The most noticeable difference was the constant and casual blatant misogyny. That’s rarely seen nowadays and that absence is a huge improvement. I mean, a main character actually says in the movie, “Women: can’t live with ’em. Can’t kill ’em” as a laugh line. Not only is that idiotic, it was clichéd even in 1994 — it was thus bad writing and misogynistic.

However, on the brighter side, it was taken as an absolute given that the fourteen-year-old female character (Eliza Dushku, I’d forgotten she was even in the film) in the movie should have a life of her own and not be helicopter-parented into mute obedience — that she should be able to go places and do things without adult supervision or even adult knowledge. That is extremely different than now. Also, sex is discussed more openly and obviously without the pervasive sense of shame and vague judgemental disgust that even modern liberals now seem to coat any discussion of this topic in.

Also, people had more normal relationships as portrayed in the workplace, without constant worry about offense and surveillance (thus, no self-surveillance).

True Lies was released in 1994, right in the transition period from the more freewheeling times of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and though you can see the signs of this approaching prudishness and cloistered closed-mindedness, because it was made by people mostly of the earlier era it doesn’t really impinge that much.

But oh lord, the misogyny. It makes a lot of the film nearly unwatchable.

“The danger was to the single enterprise—industrial, agricultural, or commercial insofar as it was affected by changes in the price level. For under a market system, if prices fell, business was impaired; unless all elements of cost fell proportionately, ‘going concerns’ were forced to liquidate, while the fall in prices might have been due not to a general fall in costs, but merely to the manner in which the monetary system was organized. Actually, as we shall see, such was often the case under a self-regulating market.”

-Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, on the danger of the financialization of society and the fiction of market self-regulation

I can’t believe this needs stating but actually I can: Opposing totalitarian trends on the left doesn’t make someone conservative. Huge shock, I know.

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) March 28, 2019

Yes. Being dubious of censorship, not supportive of left-sponsored oppression, being against “feminist” abuse toward and cruelty to sex workers doesn’t make me a conservative.

If it’s conservative to want billionaires to have their wealth redistributed, to support a job guarantee for everyone, to wish for reparations for slavery and Jim Crow, to mandate that corporate boards be 50% women,  to support Medicare For All effective immediately, and to end all U.S. wars and close all overseas bases, then shit yeah, I guess I am a conservative.

It’s such a different experience watching someone who actually knows a lot about music analyze something rather than the invariably-male music snobs who disdain anything made by women.

I’d forgotten Flea and Dave Navarro played on that song. Flea being there explains the great bass; always loved the bass line on that song. Les Claypool is technically more proficient but no one can lay down a groove quite like Flea, then or now.

And of course Morissette’s vocals are absolutely iconic; one of the best vocal performances ever recorded. I’m even more impressed with it after realizing how much of it is a single take — many modern pop songs are literally assembled word by word from 30+ different takes.

Nirvana’s Nevermind was not the best album of the 90s. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill is far superior and holds up a lot better. It still seems relevant today while Nevermind feels like an antique.

We’re already living in a nascent new epoch, but nearly nearly every person alive (and 99.95%+ of those over 40) is possessed of a mind that is still of the age now departed. These liminal times are very dangerous but also ripe with opportunities.

If you can’t see the growing tension of the younger generations as they start to discover the deck is stacked against them…then your eyes are closed.

— Nathan Eames (@NathanEames1) March 24, 2019

This is forging new minds by the thousands every day. The consequences will be indeterminate but vast.

In the future, by historians and interested amateurs alike, there will be no distinction made between the literal Nazis and the rest of us, due to our non-response to climate change and the likely billions of deaths it will cause.

An historian 1,000 years from now will see Nazism and the resulting mega-deaths as a minor extension and necessary prior condition preceding the cataclysm and resulting wars, slaughter and genocides that capitalism-caused climate change will inevitably spawn.

Nazism, despite its name, was after all just an intensification of capitalism and a result of following it to its natural ends — just as is climate change and its nearly-identical causes.

The rest is evident.

I took this test. Note that this isn’t actually a test of VO2 Max, but just an estimate. However, I answered accurately on all questions so it is probably pretty close.

Not bad. I am about as fit now as I was at 20, but not as fit as I was at 22.

Why are all movies about assassins about “elite assassins” and not ones who are just doing ok and sorta dreading their next assassin performance review?

— Jessica Ellis (@baddestmamajama) March 28, 2019

Because in the real world, middle-of-the-road assassins have a very short lifespan. Even “elite” ones don’t live that much longer, generally, though there are some exceptions.

Though there is a show like this already. It’s called Barry, and it wasn’t to my taste but others might find it appealing.