erobertlee.bsky.social
English PhD with work in American Studies and Classical Reception. African American Literature, American 19th/20th Century, Science Fiction, Du Bois.
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Unironically I think /Airheads/ is a great movie for a few different reasons
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Most definitely; I should have specified that yeah the ones that understand they're doing /I Love Lucy/ are usually the ones actually worth watching!
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Absolutely and honestly, a lot of tiktoks/Instagram reels are often just glorified sitcom cold opens. This is genuinely worth considering in terms of American art in the 20th Century and it's legacy
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Just as Jane Austen novels informed a LOT of media for centuries afterward (every romcom for a start), the logic of sitcoms honestly seems relevant to everyone trying to create the illusion that their short-form social media videos are "slices of life" despite being obviously scripted and produced
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It's like being a parent and you always have to ask yourself "is this rule making something ordinary cool and fun and guaranteeing they're going to do it." You guys are making rules that are too fun to break it will never work
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I understand that the people saying things are being obtuse on purpose, but it really was quite striking that every time conservatives tried to make an argument for the exceptionalism of Texas business and industry, they were unwittingly championing it's huge immigrant population
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Greek root for cybernetics is κυβερνήτης which is the helmsman of a ship because using an oar for a rudder was a basic control system in Norbert Wiener's /Cybernetics/. Similarly the root for economics is οἶκος, home. Systems for managing people and budgets is old, just not academic versions
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Plate tectonics? The proud continents are running away from Pangaea? Absolutely woke. Organisms changing over time? Believe or not, woke
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I feel like there's a Irigaray kind of thing here too where anything changing because we learned something is facile and weak and feminine. A linguist who taught me English grammar from a linguistics perspective got death threats because he was challenging classical English grammar rules
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Classical formulation of American racism is that Southerns hate the race, but love the person and Northerners are the opposite. This is common for a lot of people; in the abstract they are opposed to "immigrants" but they realize they care about their immigrant friend and neighbors in real life.
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Let me tell you the aforementioned Euro colleagues did NOT like it when I pointed out that northern European socialism is predicated on pretty extreme racial and ethnic homogeneity and immigration policies
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They're wearing their "slightly more liberal on some domestic policies in 1840 sash" and it turns out resting on those laurels ain't great!
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A Euro once told me that the EU had "solved racism" and a colleague asked if they meant like one solved a problem set. Yours is a delightful formulation and like so many other things it's also hard to grasp sometimes because Americans often don't realize they are unusually multicultural
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I can also show temperance posters that were about the horrors of central European immigrants. This is complex and obviously often privileges white people but it makes sense that this process also grows to include other immigrants because Americans like immigration more than most places!
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Europeans having their colonial violence external to the country itself in the 19th Century built this insane claim that their societies were liberal in so far as it was segmented and homogenous in Europe. In the abstract they can claim to be accepting but when those people show up in person oh boy
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American culture is also genuinely pretty xenophilic. Americans like foreign accents, they like international cuisine, etc. As much as there is this stereotype that Americans blow a gasket when they hear non-English spoken, there is PLENTY of hostility toward wrong language in Europe
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The problem is it's going be academics like me doing it so they will be the most dork-ass names possible like so much worse than "observational comedy"
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It's hard because most people don't really understand that government as a concept is critically technological (I start SF seminar with Republic and Utopia) but also only seems abstract to them because they don't really have living memory of reconstruction or other radically experimental moments
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It seems quaint now that Ted Kaczynski was national news when his body count was much lower than mass shooting events that started just a few years after. I think you're absolutely right that violence would feel very far away to enough Americans that it wouldn't make an impression
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Can you separate the dancer from the dance?
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I get that people don't learn things easily or well, but seeing someone say seriously "social media/web 2.0 is fundamentally democratic!" at this point after the fact is like the existence of sincere Stalinists in the 21st century which I know exist but can't wrap my head around
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You've done a good job of explaining that if someone can hold your attention on a subject for an hour, that means their actual expertise is talking, not necessarily that subject. Cable news being the version of sportcenter that makes middle class liberals feel worldly is parallel in very bad ways
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I'm not convinced that isn't simply a replacement for television (video consumption isn't new) and these same consumers want that instead of text blurbs, which was critical to the Facebook dataset. Young people are also awash in text and video is often replicating television habits of the past
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Doesn't everyone hate watching videos? Wasn't the "pivot to video" predicated on Facebook lately fabricating data about video watching habits to try to sell a video product?
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Is the bowling alley open at 2 AM or does this guy not have a normal sleep schedule?
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This deserves a stunt award that is one of the most beautiful falls I've ever seen. Chris Farley is smiling from heaven
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I really cannot understand people not being worried that they'll be loudly wrong in public. I've watched corporate speakers issue inspirational fake Einstein quotations that made my skin crawl because they were so dumb, but they were right that nobody challenged it. I guess this is why I'm not rich
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I grew up in Texas so I certainly never understood how anyone made these arguments, much less in the last decade.
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This is also kind of obviously how we got from Obama 2008 to Trump 2016. We wanted to believe that there was a significant expression of values in 2008 but it was actually just median voters swinging the pendulum away from George W Bush disasters
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I really wanted to believe Biden winning in 2020 was a sign people had learned something rather than just voters lashing out at the incumbent during a global catastrophe. It seems very clear now that this was not the case just "I'm mad, let's kick the incumbent out" explains these swings
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Of all the incredibly inappropriate decisions my parents made about television, letting me watch In Living Color in elementary school turned out pretty good
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This is an achingly beautiful sentence, reminding me of the world I was born into and which feels long long gone. I could probably whistle 2600 Hertz but who could hear it? Who would know?
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Primary and secondary schools literally right now, years after the fact, get hit by Covid waves that they don't have subs to cover so just have classes double up and spend all day doing asynchronous tasks on laptop. Pretending there was a solution in fall 2020 is just actually insane.
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People desperately seeking out binarity in public policy decisions in order to classify them as "good" or "bad" is uh not good or helpful?
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It's hard and weird too because we have data to convinces me that a lot of things were eroding before Covid, but the dam broke. I honestly buy the conspiracy theory that driving is getting less safe because people just don't care if they kill people with their car. Social contract just isn't there
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I get that I'm a broken record but people convincing themselves that they have sublimated and obviated all spiritual thoughts in technological modernity has had uh not great results. I'm not saying religion will cure people but pretending they don't have transcendental thoughts lurking isn't working
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That being said, teaching remotely in 2020 was ok because I was teaching majors or otherwise engaged people (teaching Intro to Sci Fi remote had cameras on and people talking), and because my in-person teaching is often gen-ed classes for non-majors who are completely checked out in person
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I really do think that accessibility of remote classes is important but for so long so many people really wanted to insist that there much also be some pedagogical advantage that just isn't there. I think it can be net positive, trading efficacy for accessibility, but that's got to be our baseline
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. a four minute walk and my actual work day outside of commuting is six hours rather than eight hours. You're simply right that it's obviously the case that fixing office culture, city layouts and other peripheral problems could obviate the need to abolish office buildings, we just wouldn't know!
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This is, I think, a really astute observation and just like work-at-home really requires a specific kind of person who is good at separating work and home, the office caters to people who value that separation. Similarly, my antipathy for rigid schedule have vanished now that my commute to work is..