some illusion of @RonaldReagan is still alive.

human beings maintain the illusion of "Mr. President" (and a far less convincing one than Mr. @dick_nixon's) and tweet bits of speeches that someone else wrote for him. it's evidence of the lethal *triviality* of "the West".

(1/x)
it's identical to the triviality of #marketing and #sales culture, in which there are no morals and no rules. @mtaibbi's famed "independence" weighs as much in the scales as @Sargon_of_Akkad's "centrism" or @jonkay's "heterodoxy": all of these labels are mere *brands*.

(2/x)
"independent" isn't what @mtaibbi *is*; it's what he's best practiced at selling.

deceit is omnipresent in the culture of #marketing and #BrandIdentity. your words are governed solely by what you can succeed in getting other people to swallow; loyalties turn on a dime.

(3/x)
there's a reason @mtaibbi, @mtracey, &c. blither about "identity politics" constantly; it's because they describe themselves. they spend their lives crafting a salable identity—some agglomeration of bits that they're proud of, like their ideology was a stamp collection.

(4/x)
it was inevitable that this profoundly immoral and venal #marketing culture—in which there are no lies, only expedient exaggerations—should finally infect and nearly murder American #politics. both @TheDemocrats and the @GOP treat *government* like an exercise in branding.

(5/x)
@RonaldReagan, though, was the first truly synthetic President.

JFK and Mr. @dick_nixon may have been sold like soap (Nixon no doubt hated the need for it) but Ronald Reagan *was* the box of soap. he was an inert mouthpiece for reactionary @GOP politics. he was a *brand*.

(6/x)
his installation in 1980 was terminal to the United States. from then on, this nation chose fantasy over reality. America *cannot* recover from @RonaldReagan. if the United States of America ever meant anything other than war and death—Reagan killed it dead.

~Chara of Pnictogen

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More from @KrisAtLarge

Jan 28
I've been working for several years with @Twitter, in conjunction with some other members of the Pnictogen Wing—notably @PnictogenHorses, where our engineer Mona Drafter (assisted at times by her daughter Alyx Woodward) has been providing such able and forcible commentary.

(1/x)
throughout the struggle we've had to deal with two possibilities—we needed to prepare for both of them. in the earlier years when I was guided by little more than incandescent anger and the relics of a childhood passion of justice, it was rather tough to deal with these.

(2/x)
I felt like I needed to have *good* reasons to keep going, to keep doing what I was doing, in spite of two eventualities:

A. our words would have zero effect.
B. our words would anger the wrong person, and we'd be suppressed.

I feel satisfied that (A) was a idle fear.

(3/x)
Read 15 tweets
Jan 28
I'd done my best to try to gauge and predict the #future —that may sound outlandish, but I feel like it's been forced upon me (and the whole Pnictogen Wing). the pace of human events has grown antic and absurd to a degree I never imagined possible even *ten years ago*.

(1/x)
in its characteristic doublethinkful way, Western society both *disparages* fortune-telling as complete rubbish AND makes an enormous #profit off the game of pretending to tell the #future. most of #business and #finance and #investment propaganda is about fortune-telling.

(2/x)
they call it "economic forecasting" but...it's fortune-telling. it's pretending to have a "scientific" or "objective" grasp of how the future is likely to unfold, based on sophisticated #computer models which people like @JeffDean and @fchollet believe *more than reality*.

(3/x)
Read 15 tweets
Jan 28
one of the most difficult things for Kris, having to host ME as a particularly unruly fictive introject—always running like a freight train, often running into walls or other trains—has been the fact that I'm religious.

I am religious in a very peculiar mode, too.

~Chara
I'm a little bit failed Catholic priest (Martin Scorsese and I are like kindred spirits there), a little bit chaos-mage, a little bit the wild-eyed Sibyl getting kicked in the head by Apollo (again)—I'm a lot of things in religious terms, none of them easy to live with.

~Chara
Kris has some kind of religious trauma that we've yet to unpack. those of you who know #Deltarune knows that Toriel and Kris's brother Asriel seemed to have been churchgoers, and Kris was undoubtedly dragged along, but from what they've hinted, they got little out of it.

~Chara
Read 5 tweets
Jan 28
the turgid and dreary writings of #AynRand (hi @AynRandInst, @AynRandOrg, @RandPaul) aren't worth reading exactly, but they are worth analyzing. the difficulty is that to analyze Ayn Rand's awful prose, first you have to *read* it. we've only been able to stomach "Anthem".

(1/x)
we've seen King Vidor's film of "The Fountainhead", scripted by Ayn Rand herself. Vidor's 1940s adaptation of "The Fountainhead" is a true _film maudit_, a "cursed film": right-wing Hollywood star Barbara Stanwyck (I'm still grieving, I used to love her) wanted to make it.

(2/x) publicity still photograph of Patricia Neal (standing at lef
instead we got Patricia Neal, playing off against a plank of wood named Gary Cooper—Cooper had little acting range, but he specialized in looking dour and stern on screen. he was a bit like @RonaldReagan with more panache and polish. Reagan was a lightweight in comparison.

(3/x)
Read 16 tweets
Jan 28
oh right! we were going to write something about the power of language.

hm, how to start.

let me begin with talking about a concept that I learned from classes in ancient Greek: the *grammatical particle*. it's a type of word, in linguistics.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatic…

(1/x)
I remember being impressed during @SDSU Classics classes by this entire book on ancient Greek particles: abebooks.com/book-search/ti…

*particles* are words that have no inflection or clearly defined "part of speech" in a sentence.

"um" and "er" are particles in English.

(2/x)
we could regard "um" and "er" as linguistic filler—words with no real meaning, merely taking up space—but the insertion of such particles does give us some information about the *mood* or *feeling* of the person speaking.

here, "um" and "er" convey a sense of uncertainty.

(3/x)
Read 24 tweets
Jan 28
I / we have *strabismus*. that's where your eyes don't quite line up, and you see a double image—if you're even *aware* of the double image, because usually the brain ends up picking one and passing it along through the human perceptual apparatus. it's very annoying.

(1/x)
it's taken us a long time even to be aware of it. for a while I used to think it was *caused* by drinking, but drinking turned out to be irrelevant—it was just that I was more apt to notice the strabismus when I was drunk. it leads us to make many mistakes of vision.

(2/x)
such unreliabilities of perception are not easy to talk about in Western society; bullies and abusers currently have the uppermost, in terms of popular psychological advice. in the U.S., @GOP and #Christian fascısts have infested the "soft sciences", specially #psychology.

(3/x)
Read 20 tweets

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