by Prateado | Mar 28, 2016 | Uncategorized
Gotta love the irony in “gun-free zones” being labeled as “deadly.” This is one of the best instances of doublespeak I’ve witnessed in sometime, and it deserves noting. The petition (by some unknown soldier) named the “Hyperationalist” (yes, that can be read as either “hyper-rationalist” if one adds an extra “r” or as it stands, “hype-rationalist”) started a www.change.org petition to “Allow Open Carry of Firearms at the Quicken Loans Arena during the RNC Convention in July.” Now, this petition is remarkably like a recent South Park episode where all problems in life are solved by simply giving everyone guns. It’s a libertarian wetdream, that could only occur in a cartoon world. Of course, the notion of the 2nd Amendment was that there shouldn’t be any necessarily trumping monopoly on violence that the state has over and above its citizens–the exact opposite of how the German father of sociology Max Weber defined the state. The state, for Weber is defined by its monopoly over the (legitimate) use of violence, and hence any other use of violence is illegal and punishable. Under this notion, having guns don’t do anything unless you are a suicide bomber, because if you have guns and use them for an illegitimate reason, and most reasons that most people imagine they have guns for may or may not be legitimate, then you will be prosecuted, and in many of the states where people are most attached to their deadly weapons, they have the death penalty. As South Park insinuated, the best way to have total clusterfuck would be to have a bunch of emotionally disturbed people gathered in one...
by Prateado | Mar 11, 2016 | Uncategorized
The violence wasn’t intentional. Like most violence, it was systemic. The drunken tech bros, dilapidated streets and increased dangerously lost tourists weren’t enough. San Francisco’s rare breed of velicopedes, the dinosaurs of what SF was before it turned the tech version of the Wolf of Wallstreet, now faced the encroachment of Uber overload as well. Don’t you get it? he screamed silently. The increased Amazon Prime orders, the Uber and Lyft rides, the drunks and drugged and vapids “needing” taxis (never mind the pudge, I’ll just narcissistically go to the gym and take a spinning class)–you thought that they wouldn’t be parking in bike lanes, endangering cyclists, scuttling “late” asswholes (sic) around to the detriment and endangerment of the rest of the nonquarentined lot, he replied with disgust. Doesn’t anybody see the problem? That the more bullshit you pile into a city, the more the commons shrink, until they are as negligible as a Castro man’s gstring during Pride? What shall become of our fair city, gone to the cokeheads and self-congratulatories? Is there any more long term thinkers in this fool’s...
by Prateado | Mar 6, 2016 | Uncategorized
Every generation has its obsession. Legos for kids, Starbucks for Gen Xers. But not all obsessions are the same. Sure, obsessions with certain fetishized material goods as identifiers of social belonging are perhaps widespread across time and space, if not universals. But what these objects are, and their environmental and social impacts diverge drastically. To chalk up the latest fad to “it’s in our genes” explanations is to elide the fact that global tech culture may in fact be destroying the planet and all we hold dear. Paroxysms of enthusiasm for tech is by no means universal, but a symptom of cosmopolitan culture. What type of culture is cosmopolitan culture, looking down on the rest of the world from 30 stories? It is a classic North v. South fallacy of universalizing the local, the temporally circumscribed, and the indulgences of rich, morally self-satisfied countries and the media-entranced denizens that inhabit them. For, make no mistake about it: the widgets on offer by global capitalism currently are pay-to-play. There is no hunting skill involved, no luck of serendipity. Instead of trading cowry shells, the currency of tech has a long, long shadow–environmentally and socially. We are not the world. This should be the mantra of every overweight kid indoctrinated by virtual reality and X Box compulsion; every CEO and upstart start-up topsy-turvy progressivist who sees nothing but the myopia of angel investors’ capital; every stay-at-home dad and too-busy-to-care mom; every rosy-cheeked college student relieved to fit in. Our gadgetry, on which I write this morbid post, is an indulgence, and like all indulgences, comes with Corporate Social Responsibility guarantees and...
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