Stray Bullets, 9.27.2024
Some pop criticism, organized • The Kids Are Alright: The Misogyny of Gen Z Has Been Overstated • Tick-Tock: On Noir and Time • Kris Kristofferson was a good man ← I realize in our current state of reactionary recoil from the violent shock of the 2002 abuse scandal is, if not in fashion, at least having a brief moment exacerbated by people who damn well know better ironically flirting with integralism, fostering fears of the eaten cats of suburbia and lord knows what else, but O’Connor’s gesture was a response to the then-crazy idea that the Catholic Church was - get this - masking and enabling widespread child sexual abuse; and the reaction to her was as predictably emotionally violent as one would imagine from ideologues with a festering sickness to hide • This guy would definitely have a Substack today
Writing for the public today and approaching it as though it were 1997 is perhaps the last stand of the court jester1 • On some lesser-known Trolly problems ← Publisher Amos, please tell me you have seen this2 • Miles Davis is for the children ← killing me! • An essay the psychological health impacts of our contemporary devices
Narcissism • Logic • Patience
You’re welcome.
Incidentally, I have been checking in with this mirthful classic every few years, and the most fascinating thing (contra your [Amos] preposterous notion that j-t-b contra-knowledge is sufficient) is that each year some of these become every-so-slightly more philosophically interesting. The Ethics Teacher, for example, is technically an interesting question. Can we layer degrees of ethical importance and then offset them somehow by being honest about their scopes of applicability vis a vis our interests, and then god forbid be honest about it in shaping deeper social structures? Maybe fancy new projects like EA, which I know nothing about admittedly, concern themselves with this sort of thing, but from what I can tell most of the effort seems to be aimed at optimally modeling a one-size-fits-all normativity and then paying for it with crypto, somehow, championed by people who seem oddly disinclined to maintain eye contact.