Kontextmaschine

13th March 2021

Question reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 40 notes

Anonymous asked: It's cute how you're so solipsistic you think the porn you jerk it to and the random links you find there have world-historical meaning

kontextmaschine:

rendakuenthusiast:

kontextmaschine:

In the early 2000s I encountered Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and the “juicebox mafia” through some random link, I was like “shit, these new millennial pundits are gonna be important, I need to pay attention to this” and turns out I was right

And through Yggy’s comments I found Steve Sailer and through him like Paul Kersey and Richard Spencer and this whole scene of New Internet Racists and I was like “shit, this is gonna be important, I need to pay attention to this” and turns out I was right

And then I noticed the rise of “feminist blogging” in the mid-late 2000s and I paid attention to that.

(Like DAE remember when Jezebel started with Moe Tkacik and Tracy “Slut Machine” Egan editing, and then it was a scandal when some “Thinking and Drinking” speaking series, that was an excuse for the girls-in-NYC-media guests and audience to let their wine mom out, invited them? And they showed up smashed and were like “yeah by your legalistic standards we’ve been ‘raped’ a dozen times since moving to New York but we have better shit to spend our time caring about, like getting drunk”)

But it’s not like I actually cared about what fucking Feministe or Feministing or Shakesville said, Amanda Marcotte made her name on insulting at a 7th-grade-boy level. I found Sady Doyle and Twisty “I Blame the Patriarchy” Faster through random links*

And through random links in the latter’s comments found Cathy “Bug” Brennan and the Twanzphobic blog, and they were like “we all need to prepare for this pushy new transgender movement” and I was like “this seems like it’s gonna be important”, and it was

* at some point in here I also noticed Rod Dreher and Freddie de Boer before they were things, but I forget how.

Wasn’t half a week after Trump came down that escalator that I was on the horn to everyone I know in the DC establishment that he was gonna be president.

Like, I could be wrong this time but you really want to bet against me?

How many things that you thought were important turned out not to matter?

Well in the late ‘90s I was very insistent that the next decade’s wars would rely on mercenaries, as a result of post-Cold War drawdowns, and honestly you could say the contractors of the sandbox wars and the “little green men” with Crimea

But honestly that wasn’t my vision, I was influenced more by the Hammer’s Slammers books (which were very post-Vietnam, it was like “What if mercenaries on post-colonial Africa stand-in planets? But also what if proper war, with artillery advanced to the point it fires AA and “smart” rounds, and tanks firing HEAT shells so hard they’re railguns? And also what if the gap between a romantic warrior spirit and war as an instrumental act of state keeps getting played up?)

@trickytalks said: how are you not just cherry-picking stuff you were right about?

Admittedly, I probably don’t remember shit I was wrong about as well. I mean I’ve been wrong in expecting things, but I’m blanking on shit I predicted, I preserve my reputation by not attaching it to shit I’m not sure about. Same kinda perfectionism by which I don’t hit on people I don’t already expect a positive response from, might not be the best.

But even that’s probably self flattering, so

I ANNOUNCE A CONTEST

Counting Chickens 2019

Read back through my archives, find the dumbest shit I’ve been wrong about, and send it to me by the end of September 2019 in an ask with [COUNTING CHICKENS]

(and like some sort of unique identifier, like [IMNOODLEMAN] or whatever if you want to send it anon but be recognized)

At the end of the month I’ll pick a winner and the first to send it in gets recognized as humbling me

I never delivered on this but there were only like 4 people who offered dumb things on the first day

Tagged: rerun