The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Zizka:

I think that Will, like a lot of the so-called rational conservatives, will end up voting for Bush and probably publicly endorsing him. Just like McCain, who's the biggest pussy in the world despite his military record and "straight talk" PR. Apparently he'll limit himself to trying to keep the Bush campaign he's part of from smearing Kerry the way the Bush people smeared him (McCain -- that's the mentally-ill Vietnam vet with the drug-addicted wife and the illegitimate black child, remember?)

Time will tell, but I think that whatever true conservatives there are are pretty much under the control of the movement conservatives. There's actually a place in the Democratic Party for them (Leiberman area), but they're not really interested.

I keep vacillating between the idea that the rational conservatives will save us (i.e., save the U.S., not the liberals) and the idea that they'll refuse to (while piously protesting that they really don't like Bush much.) Today I'm on the glum side.

I'm so old I remember when cheap novels were cheap -- 35 cents.

Movies were a dime. No kidding. Less than two years after release, too.

The actual topic of this thread might have been whether or not edgy, nihilistic youth culture is effectively ("objectively" in my preferred Stalinist dialect) right-wing or not. I agree with Patrick that it often is. It seems to team up with hedonistic, defeatist middle-aged apolitical liberalism. The right wing often seems to care more and try harder than the left, though there's a lot of money sloshing around on the right that the left doesn't have.

Tina, if you want give your dudgeon mojo a workout, come to my blog. I show no mercy on the pigfuckers there. Patrick is actually quite civil.

That Doug is a diligent one, isn't he?

One contribution to Santorum is a lot. It's sort of like fucking one pig. It gets you a reputation.

I really think that rebellion now is just an obligatory phase of normality. People who don't do some sort of rebellion ages 15-25 are not normal. And marketing is geared to figuring out / deciding what the normal form of rebellion is going to be.

I remember awhile back at a family visit when my 17-y.o. niece from Fargo was showing her CD collection to her cousin from Kansas. It was Smashing Pumpkins type alternative stuff. Over $500 / worth. My 24 year old alt-country musician son was along and he realized that he was already too old and un-fucked-up for that marketing demographic. Which is the BIG marketing demographic for music.

From a libertarian POV it's not so bad. The market works. The Beatles, Stones, Sex Pistols, Elvis, all had their money men behind them.

And Jimi Hendrix too, except that his money man basically killed him.

(I guess this is another one of my Have A Happy Day posts.)

I realize that it's my fault for using IE, but your site is displaying weird today.

"Must preview before posting": Good Idea.

In China the ball-point pen is still called the "atomic pen" because it arrived in China around 1945.

I strongly rocommend Palsts book and have 3-5 links to him, but I have lots of stuff he doesn't have.

I just read the cite and the comments and didn't go to the link.

At a more general level -- Margaret Mead was right about the long term. An extreme example would be anti-slavery advocates who saw no progress in their lifetimes, but who were vindicated a century or two later. It isn't always as fast as that, but it's not quick --in terms of major change, in either a market system or a public-opinion or voting system, major change in a ten-year span (e.g. IT changes) basically counts as instantaneous.

In terms of politics, that's a big weakness of the Dems compared to the Republicans. Dems seem to end up with a string of one-year campaigns with little party-building between elections and little thought for the long term.

I came for the promised cannibal stuff, which isn't there. The lessons I draw from that case are 1.) hard cases make bad law, b.) an awful ot of people are terminally bored for reasons I don't understand, and c.) when cooking penis, use a recipe for tongue. It's tough.

Of course, I already thought two of those things (a and b).

Apparently I'm in the Dad generation here, since I got one of the first WECs in about 1970-1. It was started by a lot of stoned techie types and was intentionally pretty sharply distinguishable from the rest of the counterculture, which was artsy/ideological. I sent a copy to my own father, b. 1914, who was a techie, but the hippyish stuff turned him off.

I got a lot of good stuff out of the WEC, but I ended up finding Stewart Brand and the publication's style manual annoying. They had this thing of personalizing all reviews, so when you read a description of a tool of some sort you'd get part of the reviewer's autobiography. The intention was probably to get away from fake objectivity and claims to expertise, but it ended up seeming narcissistic to me.

Comment statistics for Zizka on the Electrolite blog

Total: 8 comments. View all these comments on a single page.