Minor diplomatic kerfuffle in South America. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the 35 year old son of the President of Brazil, who likes to livestream himself playing CS GO (famed team MIBR are friendly with him and his dad) and shooting at firing ranges (when he’s not crying at them) retweeted this comparison of him on the right and the 24 year old son of the Argentinean president elect Estanislao Fernandez, who works as a graphic designer and likes to crossplay (click through for some great costumes) on the left. Estanislao didn’t reply directly, but criticized Eduardo on his own twitter account for being a failson who made all his money from his father while he works for a living and had to sell his costumes to make ends meet. President Bolsonaro is currently trying to appoint Eduardo to the plum job of ambassador to the United States. When asked to defend himself, Eduardo replied “I have experience around the world. I have done a student exchange
program. I know how to fry hamburgers. … I can speak English. and I’ve
seen closely the great respect that Americans have for Brazilians.”
This goes well beyond insisting that Nick Carraway
would have posted on Reddit or that Stalin was the original gaslighter.
It is a whole style of talking now, where you just yank a whole lot of
cultural touchstones together and present the end result as a substitute
for analysis, like “Edward St. Aubyn is just Henry Green for men who
read Tatler as an ironic gesture” or “Sally Rooney is just Joan Didion
for women who can’t drive” or “The Joker movie is just The Birth of a Nation for men with sinewy arm muscles and no girlfriends.”
Sometimes
the end result is funny, and interesting, and it does function as a
substitute for analysis, sort of, if you are in a hurry. Other times it
is depressing, and for nerds — just this endless chain of references
that goes nowhere, this horrible nest of easter eggs that has no effect
other than to make you feel on top of things, and too proud of your
faculty of recognition, which is one of the less impressive ones as
orders of cognition go. “The Bible is just Harry Potter for rednecks”
looks like something, if you stand far away enough and then move on to
thinking about another subject immediately, but it doesn’t withstand a
whole lot of pressure or scrutiny.
[…]
Perhaps all this was inevitable. The dream of the internet was that each
of us would be able to access the knowledge of all of human history,
and the nightmare that resulted is that we are now expected to know so
many more things than before, such that the only way to really get a
grasp on any of it is to superficially connect them to other things you
also barely understand. The most utopian vision of it held that it would
be a place that would connect us to others, that it would help us see
and understand the world more deeply. The version of the internet we
have landed up with often feels less like a place where we can connect
to others, and more like a place where we have to learn what TikTok is
in order to understand the import of the sentence “Ted Bundy’s
granddaughter outed her entire family on TikTok,” and then later on to
connect that event to another idiotic and depressing situation by saying
“this is exactly like when Ted Bundy’s granddaughter outed her entire
family on TikTok,” and on and on like that, until the moment comes where
we all lose our grip on reality completely.
Bless the Harts seems to be aiming at the same “red state animation” target as King of the Hill
w/r/t the Shane Gillis thing, Nick Mullen broke character to say “you wokesters should be terrified, that they wanted a conservative star in the first place shows that you were a market bubble and the market’s starting to correct itself” and he’s right
