America was founded by the simultaneously horniest and most repressed people in history: puritans https://t.co/4O7JeF2OrX

— Misha Gurevich. Angel Investor, Photographer. (@drethelin) August 14, 2021

I think both of these explain Americans’ very bizarre attitudes towards sex and the strange ideas about “sexualization” even so-called liberals have.

Though we have a Puritan background (yes, even non-white people as it’s the overarching cultural milieu), in one area sex has been commodified and treated as yet another market transaction. At the same time in another context, the very existence of sex and human feeling at all many people are attempting to deny altogether and punish others for even acknowledging. Such cultural derangement is not healthy and in no way will result in good things.

Of course, puritanism and prudishness does not just encompass sex but that is the sole lens that many examine it through, when in reality this hesitance to engage in any normal messiness of life extends to every sensual realm there is — every relation, every interaction, every passion and every impression. Like an insidious sickness, it reduces the quality of every experience where one must engage with the world but this self-defilement only truly makes people panic and hyperventilate in an organized manner when sex qua sex is the putative subject.

So then we have a large percentage of people who spend most of their time thinking about sex because it is a commoditized marketing tool shoved in their faces while at the same time they are told they should concentrate on not thinking about sex at all where it’s inappropriate — which is becoming anywhere they are not being sold something using sex as a sales and marketing tool. Unfortunately for them and for us, concentrating on not thinking about something is the same as thinking about a thing (quick, don’t think about a pink elephant!).

Thus, the prudes and puritan types spend most of their time obsessed with sex, able to think of little else, with no normal relation possible with their own sensorium or with others because all of it is filtered through a despoiled lens that denies any possibility of a real human connection or exploration of possibilities either individually or collectively.

It’s the reprehensible Nordic model, except applied to all reality, all of the time.

I have an irrational hatred for recumbent bicycles. I don’t know why but I just despise them.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this notion.”

–Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

The colloquial choreography and storytelling is great here. Some people can’t manage to spin a coherent story worth experiencing in two hours or 800 pages, and some can do it in less than three minutes.

When the boy taps the girl on the shoulder and they begin to dance in perfect sync…that’s pretty magical. And when the door with the white light opens, I was like “Oh no!” Just such a perfect little film.

The new Twitter font is amazingly bad. Just shockingly poorly designed. How do companies with millions to spend hire UI/UX people who seem to not be able to do anything at all sensible?

What on EARTH is happening with the "z" and the "e" here? Like both the kerning and the "little z big e" effect pic.twitter.com/sYmY3yb29A

— mcc (@mcclure111) August 11, 2021

That’s a font apocalypse. Just disturbingly bad design, and yes it does matter; it makes it much harder to read.

Spread of delta variant ignites covid hot spots in highly vaccinated parts of the U.S., Post analysis finds.

Thanks, anti-vax idiots.

I really miss my German co-worker from a previous job who would always tell sex jokes and complain about how prudish Americans were when no one laughed (except me).

She was fun. She was very much not American.

‘Everyone else knew weeks before we did’: readers who fell in love with their best friend.

Liberals: this is automatic harassment and was really the pretext of friendship. And also somehow racism.