Inventing Anna
It's like they chickened out. You're supposed to feel that everyone Anna encounters finds her just so appealing, yet they make her a huge bitch in the last episode. Treat them mean, keep them keen might be a thing with boyfriends but it isn't really how people work. If you treat them mean, they usually just fuck you off.
Until then she had some vulnerability and while that didn't really make her likeable, at least you could penetrate to a child, perhaps damaged in some way (although they robbed her of that motivation by making her dad so ordinary).
Rachel will be upset when she sees it. They made her look and seem horrible. And yeah dropping the dime was vile but she was hurt. That was real. I mean, I have an aversion to snitching but I feel like you could really understand why she snitched. We all do things that we might regret when we're hurting.
Anyway, it was all a bit slow and aimless. I don't think Shonda Rhimes is a genius in any other respect than tapping into housewives' hearts. Well, maybe that is genius. But she's not particularly artful or at least the people she hires aren't. She makes soaps and clothes them, a bit thinly, in stories. This one was a four-episode show that found itself dragged painfully out for nine. What would have made it much better was a few jokes. It should have been a satire, with some sharp humour to power it through the nine years, sorry, hours, it played for.
But it wasn't. Amazingly, despite the possibility for lots of laughs, and the possibility to position Anna as a Becky Sharp-style clever bitch, it wasn't in the least bit funny. Even the bits that were funny weren't funny, if you know what I mean.
In the end I was watching it begrudgingly. I could just as well have turned it off in episode five and not even worried about it. FWIW, the two leads did their best with a weak script, although it's just a bit hard to see why men would faint with lust for Julia Garner, the way she played it. And you can't help feeling that Anna Chlumsky would have done some humour with relish. What she was given just wasn't very funny, even when it was meant to be.
5/10 maybe? C+? Something like that.
Swipe right
Isn't it strange how when I see a person whose dating profile says they are unvaxxed, I swipe left without even thinking about it? Yet I don't feel like everyone has to be vaccinated if they don't want to be.
But I think you're a fucking idiot if you aren't and double fucking moran if you say you're "proud" of not being vaccinated.
Why be proud? Because you're a "free thinker"?
What I want to know is how come all the "free thinkers" think their way to such dumb conclusions. And how come they all think their way to the same, banal rightwing nonsense.
I say rightwing because the spectrum runs from give a fuck to only care about me and although antivaxxers don't seem to care about themselves, they certainly don't care about anyone else.
Okay, so things changed a bit with omicron, right? Yeah but the thing is, follow the science, you'll probably get a cold, nothing worse. But the small chance becomes fagpaper thick if you get jabbed.
*
I saw a guy say that he had been proved right when he posted that it was just a therapeutic of disputable value and I couldn't help thinking, how did you come to that conclusion? How?
I'm all for calling out the bullshit, although of course it gets you into trouble. And look, Mr Free Thinker, getting into trouble is not a virtue in and of itself, since your being in trouble is so ineffectual. It's not worth it for "principle" because principles are bullshit.
Yes they are. They are usually just ways people cleverer than you have invented to get you to do things you wouldn't otherwise do, like die.
I mean, I'm all for dying if you really want to but most of us don't want to.
Or do we?
Perhaps we want nothing more when it comes down to it.
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So who do I swipe right on? Mostly pretty girls who won't look twice at me. I mean, I have nothing much to offer. I am not aging well. I think I look like a pit of misery. I want to change it but I don't know how. Because my material circumstances never seem to get any better. When it looks like they will, something gets in the way and it's only rarely me, actually.
I realised, when I thought it over, that the woman at S. canned me because she knew when I edited the towage guidelines, I would see she had not done a great job. I wouldn't say anything but we'd both know. By firing me, she could remain a great editor.
It took me a month to figure it out because I like to believe people are good. But maybe that's the first principle I should jettison. How many times do you have to get bitten before you'll accept that people have teeth?
I swiped right on L. I like L a lot. She's totally unsuitable as a girlfriend, not really suitable as a friend, but she's got something going on and I like her. We'll probably drift into oblivion but it has made being lonely less lonely. Probably not as much as she could, but she has her own thing, her own reasons, her own heart.
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Fundamentally, people don't vaccinate because they want to be different. If 5% avoid it, they want to be the one in 20. But three of those percent are indigenous people who have much better reason than you to fear the government.
The government are just what they seem to be. Servants of interests that don't include yours. They don't want to "control" you or manage you. They don't need to. Most people conform. Most people think this is the best we can have.
In some ways it is.
In some ways it is so good that people feel guilty and start hating who they are. They hate their own skin.
We shouldn't do that. I mean, I could articulate why but no one who thinks it will read this and it seems boring. It's not a matter of pride, or shame, or guilt. We have what we have, and it got to be this way by a path that wasn't great. But it got to be this way and here we are.
And let me tell you, white guilt mofos. If you don't want it, I'll take it. I wouldn't mind being white privileged. I don't care. I just want some. A little bit. Much less than Oprah. Much less than Elon. Just a little bit.
What harm is done
In a world where we conform, transgressive thought is appealing to a lively mind.
Transgressive thought is appealing to a lively mind, lost because today's world does not have much use of lively minds.
Today's world does not have much use of lively minds because you might just slip down the wrong alleyway.
but if you just slip down the wrong alleyway, what harm is done?
what harm is done
You cannot have a voice because people who conform want conforming voices, and even transgression must exist within the boundaries of the allowable.
Fascism appeals to those who want to transgress for whatever reason.
But what are the reasons?
what are the reasons
Fascism says there is no value in the individual but there is value in what the individual belongs to. Fascism is belonging as a political philosophy.
The more rootless and disconnected we are, the more it appeals.
You can't convince workers they belong to a class with other workers because they believe they are on a ladder, not stuck in a pit.
The right pose the utterly conventional as transgressive. They sell myths and stories as facts. But so do the left.
So do the left when they try to sell us pictures of a utopian world that cannot exist. Not just the way things are, it cannot exit. Any conceivable way it could be, it cannot exist.
I am surrendering all that because our stories have been drained of meaning by dull pseudo-people who actually, and rightly, hate the working class and the working class know it and think they're smug knowitalls who are wrong about everything.
They're right about most things but they are smug knowitalls and I've been one too so yeah I know what I'm talking about.
You know, Jordan Peterson does not know he is a grifter but he keeps saying what works for him. Has there ever been a point where he thinks, you know, I don't believe this nonsense but if I stop saying it, I will not be Jordan Peterson any more?
If he was as smart as he thinks, there would be.
If.
