654660 a zombie movie in which there's only one zombie in the world, and it's you

[lostcosmonaut]

      Thought experiment: suppose you support slave labour. You're th captain of a trireme. Below deck, 170 oarsmen row yr boat to war. Never mind -- Wikipedia says that, contrary to popular belief, triremes' crews were composed of free men. Suppose you're th pharaoh's niece walking in th shade of a palm frond held by a nervous Israelite girl

Comments

[inertiacrept]

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Only through fictional characters are white people allowed to indulge their love affair w/ crime, their uncomfortable feeling that criminals' lives are sexier, more courageous, and more truthful than their own.I don't get to keep this, you know. I've spent six years sitting across the table from actual, non-sexy, completely non-abstracted criminals, most of whom will buck against yr grill even further by being out-and-out white, themselves racists, mebbe even thinking to themselves "Well fuck, at least this faggot DA ain't a nigger like that other one." (and there is, one.) But even a flirtation in the direction of this sentiment has to be one-hundred-and-one percent televised bullshit. The Wire spoke a few truths, sure, but Stringer probably ain't one of them, not because of the incomprehensibility of an intelligent black man but because that dude probably could've stared down the bureaucrats just fine and believing he would be so easily outflanked by white deskmonkeys is several layers of untruth

not that you were a boy scout before

[lostcosmonaut]

yes totally, I don't imagine you (or cops, judges, parents of murdered kids, etc) get to keep any romance going w/ sexy crime -- that sort of romance is just as much a commodity as a Valentine's Day card

and just like VD cards, which keep reappearing every year to satisfy an idiotic demand, sentimental crime sticks around because people have voids & dissatisfactions in their lives ...

When you say that "we actually don't have that much crime going on", are you referring to Portland, or USA generally?

Would you say you're a harder person? I notice that you curse a lot more now

--mza.

[inertiacrept]

Crime is not a good thing about which to get meta, but I'm going to do it anyhow. I'm not explicitly referencing the comment below mine (tho I'm also not ignoring it), but crime is one of those things that turns you into a liar with only a very small amount of indulgent abstraction or applied social theory. There is a crime for every word in the dictionary, as motivation, execution, evidence or whatever - there is race crime, there is poor crime, there is car crime, there is dog crime, there is food crime, there is panty crime, there is taco time crime. When I say that we don't have much crime going on, what I mean is that the actual fact of dudes robbing and raping and such cannot and will not (in the absence of a well and true social collapse) every really manage to match the thundering echoes of their misdeeds in terms of how much we spend on them and worry about them and talk about them and make shows about them

[cowboyjesus]

There is a "Taco Time" crime?

tacos al nilla

[lostcosmonaut]

my Mexican friend says that it is a crime to make a vegetarian taco

--mza.

[inertiacrept]

Do they have a cash register?

[cowboyjesus]

sorry. any ringing vowel repetitions like that are apt to carry my imagination away to visualize some employee-kid comically hauling a leaky giant box of lard or Mountain Dew out the back door. i never even thought of cash register.

thks bloomberg

[lostcosmonaut]

possessing a giant box of Mt Dew is a crime in New York City

--mza.

[cowboyjesus]

I wonder if one could get off on the technicality that it is not a true "soft drink" until carbonated water is added to it. It's just a concentrate, a syrup. I'll bet that's something akin to Speed, only fattening. Either way I wouldn't haul anything like that off without a hand truck on account of my back, and how I have to save that for work and this concrete project that seems endless.

Hey! My state just legalized Marijuana for recreational use. I wonder how soon it will be until they put that into soft drinks. What will they call it? They won't be soft anymore. Fuzzy seems like the adjective.

[cowboyjesus]

Oh, sort of on the same topic, one of my old drinking buddies from high school has a play running in NYC somewhere. It's called "Six Realms of Pizza Delivery". He also had his first novel printed, "My Apartment". I tole him the print was too small. He said it was printed in Germany...where the population doesn't suffer as much from "self-abuse". I didn't tell him it didn't seem that much a stretch from bio-fiction, as he's lived in the same apartment for what seems like 30 years. I just let that go.

god bless eagle eyed krauts

[lostcosmonaut]

self-abuse?! You mean like reading F-book for more than five minutes

--mza.

P.S. heard about th CO MJ thing but haven't looked closely @ it ...... Will continue to imagine that y'all now can buy a joint @ 7-Eleven ... behind th counter w/ th other cigarettes ...

[cowboyjesus]

I never know what he means. (*Michael K. White*) It could mean Americans are cronic masturbators in general, or maybe it was his often cryptic way of insulting me personally. But back to issue of the print itself: I could have swore that the print though double-spaced was ...like...8pt. For Crissakes! One needs a jeweler's loup to read that.

You have to be 21 to have one ounce on yer person. Any more than that and you are considered a Refer Madman suitable for incarceration, with vinyl-coated canvas straight-jacket and no fruit cup for evening chow until you are stabilized. I think it also stipulates that one may also grow up to six plants per person of this same age. They just don't want this stuff getting out of hand, the one-ounce thing...which seems laughable, considering 43 million dollars worth was seized 14 miles up Colorado Hwy 165 from my house. (High-altitude > 10,000 feet, where the UV exposure is greater does wonders for the potency in Afghani Cannibis Indicaa varieties.) Mexican nationals were growing it in the San

it loved to happen on th internet

[lostcosmonaut]

aK, if everyone has it wrong, including you, what's th point of talking about it? I know why I talked about it above: it interests me. If you're saying we understand crime less well than we understand other popular & symbol-ready topics of conversation (& filmmaking) -- death, war, suicide, sex, love -- all of which people lie about all th time -- that would be an interesting case to make; but it sounds more like you have a problem w/ th futility of abstraction generally

Yes, I get it -- to you it's a job, not a sociology class or a TV show -- but if abstraction is th problem, I'm certain that humankind has a terminal case of it

--mza.

[inertiacrept]

I think I'm saying that the consequences of our abstraction are bigger for the other things you mentioned except war. In a way, it's the same aspect of abstraction that I'm reacting against in all of the above - we are ultimately less governed by the thing than we are the concept of the thing. I'll use sex as an analogy, because it's an easy one. Much of what informs our experience of sex is not the experience of sex itself but the governing social concept. This leaves us impotent, neurotic, angry about our paunches and dicksize. That's not harmless and it is funny, but most of what informs our expectations of sex occurs completely outside of the four corners of our lives. Still, we get to have sex, so there's some real knowledge there

ps i missed you

[lostcosmonaut]

I think I'm saying that the consequences of our abstraction are bigger for the other things you mentioned except war.
there's a typo here, right? You're saying that th consequences of abstraction are bigger for crime and war than for sex. I'm inclined to agree, especially since I've never been to war or been caught committing a felony. Many of th complications that arise from abstracting "sex" are trivial. On th other hand, sexual problems tend to multiply outward and become other types of problems. @ th risk of pushing another bad button, I submit that rape is as much a "sex" problem as it is a "crime" problem, and that even wars that are fought almost entirely by men have sexual underpinnings. Yes, if I say that th wars on terror boil down to Bikinis vs Burqas, you're justified in calling that an offensive oversimplification. Likewise when I compare black crime to political activism. Mebbe ah coulda stated that differently: "Black crime has a political component, independent of individual intention." To me, my ideas on war

white noise

[hyperbole]

Do you have any stabs on the answer to that last question (besides some kind of economic, incarceration-industrial complex pathology)? What would your alternative framework or spectrum of methods be for "dealing with bad guys"? Is Swedish or Japanese or anyone else's machinery any better, or do they just have less noise to feed on?