Quotulatiousness

March 12, 2017

Camouflage Patterns – Funerary Practices – Prisoner Exchange I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 11 Mar 2017

Is this the definitive exegesis of “woke”?

Filed under: Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., OregonMuse fishes in the comment stream and finds a question that needed to be answered. Extensively.

    13 I’m not up on the current “hip kid lingo”, so what exactly does “woke” mean?

    It sounds stupid, so I am guessing it is not something achieved by hard work and discipline.

    Posted by: moki at March 09, 2017 02:22 PM

1. “Woke” is pretty much the same as what the old-time Marxists called “class consciousness”, i.e knowing that the human race is divided by economic class and that the “proletariat” class needs to overthrow the “bourgeois” class in order to establish the epitome of human perfection, the world-wide communist state.

2. The Marxists also had a term they called “false consciousness.” I think it means something like this: you know what “class consciousness” is but you reject it, because you know it’s bullcrap.

3. I once heard erg use this term to describe ace.

4. Don’t know if there is any comparable term like “false woke”. Maybe sleepwalking?

5. Anyway, the point is, “woke” is a concept that was basically lifted from rat bastard commies.

6. Eventually, as blue vs. blue conflict increases, we’re going to start seeing “woke fights.”

7. They won’t be called that, but that’s what they are.

8. At some point, the various factions of woke will start making distinctions between “woke” and “woke woke.”

9. And these woke groups will be all “woker than thou” to each other

10. To a “woke” person, the only thing worse than not being “woke” is being “woke”, but insufficiently “woke.”

11. These blue-on-blue slap fights will be hilarious to watch.

12. Even better with popcorn

Reasons for THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 26 Feb 2015

The Industrial Revolution transformed and shaped our modern world as we know it. Why did the fundamental changes of the Industrial Revolution begin in Great Britain? In our first episode about the era of Industrial Revolution, Brett explains how the agricultural revolution, a few inventions in the textile industry, the steam machine, improving means of transport and an overall changing society created a solid basis for the coming changes of the late 18th century.

QotD: The waning influence of pop music

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Pop music’s impact on the greater culture is also largely over. There will never be another Beatles or Rolling Stones. That’s because “American culture” is over. Prior to the two great industrial wars of the 20th century, America did not have a unified national culture. It was federation of regions. New England may as well have been a different country from the Deep South or the Southwest. The South was very different from Appalachia. There was no unified “American” culture to which all the regional cultures submitted.

The great national project of conquering Europe and Asia opened the door for the flowering of an American culture after the war. Into it was drawn anything that could be sold as celebrating this new world power. It is why what we think of as American pop culture blew up after the war. In music, for example, producers scoured the land looking for authentic American sounds to package up and sell, in order to meet the demand of this new growing thing called Americana. It even went global, in search of spice to ad to the mix.

Like the music business itself, the great unifying national culture that blossomed in the 20th century has run its course. America is, to a great degree, falling back to its natural, regional state. Just look at the popularity of movies and TV shows by region and you see old weird America emerging again. Live acts now setup their tours to reflect the fact that they have greater appeal in some regions than in others. If you are a country act, for example, there’s no point in booking a lot of dates in the north, outside of the one-off festivals in the summer that feature a variety of acts.

That’s another lesson from pop music. The past is the actualized, the present is the actualizing and the future in the potential. Culture is that middle part, standing on the past in an effort to realize the potential that lies in the future. Once culture attains its natural end, it dies. What’s left is what it created. The grand unified pop culture of the Cold War era is now like an old factory building that has been renovated to be lofts, shops and boutique restaurants. It’s influence on what comes next is purely utilitarian.

The Z Man, “The Cycle of Life”, The Z Blog, 2017-03-01.

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