Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

(He was supposed to have written his dissertation about Shelley, author of "Ozymandias," but got the two Romantic poets confused and considered it his gentlemanly honor to complete the project once endeavored. The unpublished manuscript occupies three feet of shelf space in the St. Hudibras College Library.)

Both Russell and Keynes recorded nightmares where G.R. Professorson reached inside their mouths and pulled their tongues out. Professorson once won an argument about inductive inference by killing a Spaniard, but also got out of service in the Great War as a conscientious objector. He received tenure during this time for his notes on a dissertation towards a Prolegomenon on the Egyptology of Keats.

G.R. Professorson -- born 1899 inside the women's waiting room of the library of St. Hudibras' College, Cambridge; died in his office as Sir Thopas Chair, Oxford, 2002; best friend of TS Eliot and JBS Haldane; first man in England to ever be found not guilty by reason of insanity for the crime of atheism; bisexual libertine and suspected father of at least 2 Fields Medalists; linguist, lawyer, geometer, alchemist; -- his only published work is *Why Are There Still Snails in My Garden?* (1953).

I love this lil video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ptFnIj71SM

WHICH WAY, NON-COMMIE?

@makeworld Hearing about this for the first time!

@taalumot Incredibly relatable. I had just gone 2 months without a drop but this week I'm guzzling multiple cups a day.

@CozyLife Fuck off

The film also does an excellent job pointing at the gap between propaganda and reality.
When the President would recite pablum over the radio about "I pledge allegiance to the American flag," I was reminded of the stupid goddamn bullshit I had to listen to about how "we're all in this together."

I just watched Civil War, and while I think that the film overall pulled a switcharoo in its marketing (selling boomer dads on a political thriller), I do think that the film resonates uniquely well with the feeling of societal breakdown in 2020-1:
- it's not full-stack collapse, but only partial-stack
- breakdown is not emancipatory, but instead turns power over to small-town big-dicks
- sites, locations, and clearings are the root of biopower

Wow. Funny example. I meant to say "temporarily unavailable" but the typo ruptured through. Thrown once again into new possibilities.

@jk
🔥💯🔥💯🔥

Big thunderstorm over my area last night. Everyone's operating with disturbed sleep. Everything about consensus reality is six inches to the left. Harmonious social collaboration is temporarily available.

In *Empire*, Niall Ferguson features a cute little recipe that was promoted by the BBC for Dominion Day that included ingredients from all of the Crown's dominions. In a world in which people like Gandhi were actively organizing anti-racist politics in EG South Africa and India, this kind of propaganda is outright denial of reality.
But PBS American Portrait is far worse because it lacks the courage to acknowledge its celebration of cultural power and domination. It launders that message!

And so my judgment of this media project is that it's a piece of propaganda for an elite project that launders the appearance of mass participation into a celebration of institutional dominance in the year 2020. I use this term carefully -- it is the most *conservative* piece of art that I think I've ever seen. It promotes and celebrates an outright denial of the radical social eruptions that happened all around it.

As such, this piece makes me think of late Victorian or Edwardian propaganda

"We're stronger together"
"We have more in common than our differences"
"Everyone has a unique and valuable story to tell"

Fucking BULLSHIT. People went fucking NUTS in 2020. The most tempered, polite people I knew were going full-fascist in 2020, and every public space became a showdown between middle-upper class anarchists and the revolutionary vanguard of biopolitics. Service workers were worked to the fucking bone.

THERE WERE RIOTS IN THE STREETS
THERE WAS A GLOBAL PANDEMIC

And the thing that grinds my gears the most about this is that the big interactive project -- which was supposed to be a PORTRAIT of AMERICA -- was being recorded in 2020, and yet all that we got was PABLUM.

I think that future generations would really benefit from understanding what 2020 was like! I think that it's going to be really hard to explain to people in the future how we were thinking and interacting in 2020! And yet all that we get from this product is heavily curated TRIPE.

Everybody got a slice of the grift -- painters got thousands to paint Corporate Memphis murals, NGOs got thousands to host community events, educational consultants got thousands to create fake and stupid lesson plan templates -- and because it had all of the clarity and direction of a feeding frenzy, none of it contributed any vision to the ultimate product. What we got was the most bland, cathedral-flavored left-of-center pablum imaginable. "We're stronger together," etc. etc.