Hotel Concierge - On The Origin of Posers

3/26/2018 Hotel Concierge — On the Origin of Posers
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Hotel Concierge
On the Origin of Posers
this town ain’t big enough for the two of us
(cw: discussion of racism, sexism, hipsters, nerds, punks, posers. Don’t read unless you’re willing
to be offended.)
(numbers surrounded by [ ] are footnotes, scroll to the bottom.)
I.
Here are some buzzwords courtesy of The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie, written by Sarah Sahim,
guest writer for Pitchfork, a subsidiary of Condé Nast:
https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/134371738229/on-the-origin-of-posers 1/23
3/26/2018In Hotelrock
indie rock, white is the norm. While indie Concierge
and — OnDIY
the the Origin of Posers
underground, historically, have
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been proud to disassociate themselves from popular culture, there is no divorcing a
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predominantly white scene from systemic ideals ingrained in white Western culture. That status
quo creates a barrier in terms of both the sanctioned participation of artists of color and the
amount of respect afforded them, all of which sets people of color up to forever be seen as
interlopers and outsiders.
Sahim, who is Indian-American, complains that she can “count on one hand the prominent
performers in the independent scene that look like me”, which isn’t that surprising, given that only
1% of the U.S. population has her ethnicity [1]. She criticizes the “blinding whiteness” of Belle and
Sebastian’s indie film, God Help The Girl, a film that is set in Scotland, which is 96% white. She
also blames the white mainstream for labeling Das Racist as “joke rap.” She has a point: how could
anyone hear “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” as anything but an urgent political statement?
But these poorly-chosen examples don’t disprove her thesis: that indie music culture, intentionally
or otherwise, excludes people of color. In which case, we (“Pitchfork readers”) should fight this
tendency and encourage minority indie rock artists. I think that everyone should have the right to
rip-off Built To Spill, but let’s be clear: Sahim is arguing in favor of cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation is when somebody adopts aspects of a culture that’s not their own.
(everdayfeminism.com)
The pioneers of indie rock (The Smiths, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, etc.) were almost exclusively
pale, skinny dudes who liked a good cry now and then; indie rock is whiter than eating sushi after
yoga and complaining about white people. You can redefine the dictionary to get around this:
A deeper understanding of cultural appropriation also refers to a particular power dynamic in

which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been
systematically oppressed by that dominant group.
3/26/2018 the definitions of dominant, systemic, Hotel
but a) Concierge —
oppressed, On are
etc, the Origin of Posers and prone to political
subjective
warping; b) the idea of a single “dominant group” is laughable, congress can’t pass a goddamn bill;
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and c) I contend that, regardless of the underlying power dynamic, all instances of “cultural
appropriation” occur for similar reasons and have similar effects. #Thesis Statement = individuals
vary, groups are pretty much the same.
So.
Sahim is far from the only liberal to be pro-appropriation. Do you remember all the articles about
how programming culture discourages women? Aghast at the lack of female TV writers? What
about the outrage at insular video gamers? “We need to get women into this culture of straight
men!” How about this article criticizing Her for giving minorities only 40 seconds of dialogue? (Note:
Her is a movie about a mustachioed hipster falling in love with an Apple product.) Heems and Kool
A.D, the two rappers in Das Racist, have Indian and Italian/Afro-Cuban heritage respectively. The
only way they aren’t appropriating is if you consider all minorities to be the same, which, um, seems
kind of racist.
At the same time, the social justice movement is vehemently against cultural appropriation when
other people do it. See, for example, this article, which criticizes Katy Perry for being “trap-
influenced”, Justin Timberlake for “ripping the style of R&B”, and unnamed “post-Disney stars”
for “copping the language of hip hop.” (It is perhaps noteworthy that these are all mainstream pop
artists that Pitchfork’s hipster audience wouldn’t like anyway.)
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the targets of FIGHT––>CULTURAL APPROPRIATION totally

deserve the hate. Miley’s twerking black back-up dancers are offensive, and I don’t condone
wearing an Indian headdress while getting wine drunk with Tri-Delta on Halloween. But the problem
isn’t that The Artist Formerly Known As Hannah is appropriating culture, the problem is that she
isn’t. Black booty dancers are not black culture, they are a white stereotype of black culture.
Minstrelsy isn’t offensive because it steals culture, it’s offensive because it’s a mockery of culture:
it’s not appropriation, it’s just racism. Compare: no cares about white people playing jazz.
And lest I come down too hard on social justice, let us note that the “other side”—say, Men’s Rights
Activists—has the same hypocrisy and 1000 times the insanity. From a review of Mad Max: Fury
Road:
The real issue is not whether feminism has infiltrated and co-opted Hollywood, ruining nearly
every potentially-good action flick with a forced female character or an unnecessary romance
sub-plot to eek out that extra 3 million in female attendees.
It has.
It’s whether men in America and around the world are going to be duped by explosions, fire
tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist
propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of
American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes.
3/26/2018
This meninist, who is going to have a strokeHotel
if heConcierge
doesn’t—get
On the
hisOrigin
blood of Posers
pressure under control, has
written a fiery polemic against cultural appropriation. I know, right? Politics is weird.
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Recently, I saw a photo of graffiti that said “RICH KIDS KIDNAPPED STREET CULTURE.” Here’s
the thing: it is impossible to kidnap culture. Culture is an idea—the set of symbols and values
shared by a group. It is as impossible to steal culture as it is to steal the number 6 or the concept of
schadenfreude. Someone can copy your culture, mock it, attack it, but they can’t steal it, because
you still have it. In Sahim’s Pitchfork essay, she digresses from her pro-appropriation argument to
say:
White art additionally dilutes and flattens aspects of other cultures’ music that it adopts in the
process of making them more “accessible” for those whose curiosity does not extend beyond
the parameters of Europe and North America.
Which, if I’m reading correctly, means: “ughhhh, white people are so basic.”
It seems to me that “appropriation” is more-or-less synonymous with “being a casual”, that most
casuals are recent, say, “cultural immigrants,” and that anger at casuals/noobs/posers/cultural
immigrants is common if not universal. And so for the next chunk of this essay I want to work on
finding a general rule: do cultural immigrants actually harm the culture they’re joining? Can we stop
cultural immigration? Should we stop cultural immigration? Why the fuck does anyone care about
posers?
II.
Left unchecked, the casuals will always win. Blame the math.
3/26/2018
Let’s Hotel Concierge
pretend the above plot describes the population — On the Origin
distribution of Posers in punk rock.” People
of “interest
around zero have average interest; the further to the right you are, the more spikes per cm^2 of
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clothing.
From this group, who is most likely to found a new culture? The 0.1%, the hardcore kids—they
spend the most time looking for novelty, they are the fringe of the culture = most isolated = most
desperate for similar minds. A culture is thus founded by a small group of individuals with high
levels of interest relative to the general population.
Who is going to join this new culture?
The most casual people that the culture’s definition allows. If the culture is defined as “people who
go to punk rock shows”, then most newcomers will be, “people who went to Warped Tour once and
moshed to Asking Alexandria.” Why? Because there are more of them. If the culture is defined as
“people who believe in the DIY aesthetic,” then most newcomers will be, “people who once pinned
an anarchy symbol to an army surplus jacket.” Why? Because there are more of them. And if the
culture is defined as “people who are straight edge anti-capitalist vegans”, then most newcomers
will be teenagers who have worn those labels for all of six months. Why? Because there are more
of them.
As the posers arrive and become a majority, the culture’s definition will change. “I’m not that
hardcore, but most of the people here listen to Green Day, so whatever.” And so the next wave will
be even more poser-ish, until New Culture is entirely swallowed by Old. Nerds used to look like
this, now nerds look like The Avengers grossing $1.5 billion, the lumberjack aesthetic has spread
like mono, and hip-hop, bad news, but you are now the soundtrack to junior high prom. No matter
how you define your culture of equals, it will return to a normal distribution of mainstream vs. fringe
[2]. The fringe kids don’t have to be disliked, they don’t have to be low-status, but they are
necessarily different, and they are aware of this. High school is a stable Nash equilibrium for
human civilization, sorry if you don’t like The Breakfast Club.
It’s understandable, then, that cultural veterans try to fight immigration. Sarah Sahim complains that
white artists “dilute and flatten” authentic brown art as they make it accessible for the mainstream;
swap a few adjectives and the people behind Gamergate are saying the same thing. These
conflicts are everywhere. Society is a collection of cultures forming, growing, budding off,
swallowing, growing, budding off, swallowing, agar.io forever.
One hundred years from now, there will still be graffiti: “DIGITAL BRAINS KIDNAPPED CYBORG
CULTURE.” It’s wrong, but you can’t blame whomever wrote it. Being a minority sucks. It sucks
because of the thousand virulent strains of racism and sexism and discrimination, yes, but it sucked
before those things existed and it will continue to suck after they are gone. Being a minority sucks
because being different—and being constantly reminded that you are different—is alienating. The
Doors, by way of Das Racist: People are strange, when you’re a stranger / faces look ugly, when
you’re alone.
III.
3/26/2018
Let’s Hotel we
switch sides: maybe casuals are bad, and Concierge
should— On the Origin
stop them. of Posers

Except—who are these fiends who dare immigrate to a new culture?
When the fringe kids leave, the label just moves down the population. The people who were once
2.5 SD above the mean become the new weirdos, and when they emigrate, they will be every bit as
genuine in their desire to find like minds and be understood.
Yes, this is simplified model. Yes, in the real world not everyone >3 SD vanishes at once. The
pattern holds true.
Imagine a suburban white kid who gets invested in hip hop culture. Is he one of the cool kids? No
way, this is a kid who feels lonely, horny, frustrated for reasons that he can’t describe, who listens to
Immortal Technique and rejects the “superficiality of the mainstream” and carves letters in the
bathroom stall with a ninja star. Think about one of the much-maligned “gamer girls” who gets into
cosplay. Is she one of the cool girls? Hell no, cosplay isn’t and never will be cool (= pretending to
be someone else = not “authentic”), in fact, that’s why she’s doing it, that’s why she has all those
kawaii verbal tics and sends text messages with :P’s, because she wants to signal that she doesn’t
fit in, that she believes in something better, something fantastical, and she wants to find people like
her. Or, if we think VERY CHARITABLY about Sarah Sahim:
It’s an ethical tragedy of the commons: if immigration is unrestricted, the culture collapses, but the
act of telling any one immigrant, “sorry, you can’t join” is hurtful and unjust [3].
So what’s the solution?
Poserification has been exacerbated by the internet age. A local punk scene/videogame club won’t
have a mass influx of immigrants, because a) not that many people will have heard of it, b) it
requires physical effort to join. There is safety in obscurity; the internet devours obscurity.
But just as importantly, the internet facilitates grouping based on shared beliefs, rather than shared
action. (Totally unrelated, but, uh, remember to like and subscribe.) Communities of musicians hold
up better than communities of music fans: pentatonic scales are objective, the best Radiohead
album is a matter of some debate (among people who don’t know that it’s OK Computer). Similarly,
skill-based video game communities tend to be quite welcoming: you can’t casual-ify the inputs for
Shoryuken. And, anecdotally, communities who act politically—right or left—have far less infighting
than those that work through reblogs and labels.
The best solution, I think, is to have borders just strong enough to keep immigration from going
neoplastic. When immigration is slow, new members have time to assimilate, to learn the jargon, to
grow into the culture rather than pulling it down. There will still be a normal distribution (see
footnote 2), but if immigration = emigration, then group size will remain small, and members will
have fairly similar levels of interest. I don’t see an easy solution, but if someone wants to play with
the details and figure out a niche differentiation model, I’m all for it.
3/26/2018
In the meantime, I’d be very skeptical of anyHotel
clubConcierge
that will— have
On the Origin
you as of Posers
a member.
IV.
Recently, a few dozen White Student Union pages sprung up on Facebook, which claimed to
present “safe spaces where students of European descent (and allies) are free to celebrate and
talk about their European heritage.” These pages may have originated as hoaxes by 4chan white
supremacists; doesn’t matter, bait was taken, it was demanded that someone these groups down,
and many of them shortly were.
This is an old, old argument. The pro-WSU argument is, “If other cultures have student unions and
‘safe spaces’, why shouldn’t white people?”, to which the counterargument is, “Most student groups
are already white; any group that defines itself by whiteness is going to attract racist people”, to
which the countercounterargument is, “Even if these groups are racist, they have a 1st Amendment
right to assemble”, to which the countercountercounterargument is, “The 1st Amendment protects
your speech from government censorship; a private university has no obligation to aid and abet
racism,” to which the countercountercountercounterargument is, “The concept of ‘free speech’ has
value outside of the legal framework, and infringements against it for the ‘public good’ should be
rare and carefully considered,” etc, etc, until all parties reach an understanding that different people
place different values on Autonomy and Beneficence and everyone goes home to read John Stuart
Mill. Just kidding! They fire off a few buzzwords and go back to their regularly scheduled feelings of
self-righteous impotence. “The world sucks, but what can you do? Some people just won’t listen.” I
know, right?
Here’s a more interesting argument: given that White Student Unions attract racist people, will
banning them make people less racist?
I doubt it. The WSU admins claim that they feel “marginalized on campus,” then say:
We stand for the right of our black brothers and sisters to create a safe space at UCSB to
celebrate and promote African cultures. All we want is to be able to do the same. Is this too
much to ask?
If a swing voter sees this post and then sees the page get promptly shut down, he has good reason
to believe that the WSU people are exactly right. “We can’t even have a Facebook page? The
liberals really do run the media.”
“It’s worth it,” you say, “if it gets rid of a racism on campus.” Sure, except that won’t happen. Having
an official presence gives the WSU an obligation to be reasonable—if you want to sit at the grown-
ups table, you have to be polite. Think about the model. Who is scarier: the Republican party, or the
individual voters? The White Student Unions may be racist and reprehensible, but they are
amateurs, and as groups they are harmless. When you split these groups up, you are going against
regression to the mean: you are turning a boring student union into a bunch of isolated,
unpredictable radicals.
3/26/2018
I’m not Hotel Concierge — On the Origin of Posers
convinced that this makes anyone safer.
V.
So far, we’ve defined cultures based on political ideology, musical taste, etc. What about the
fundamentals? What if a culture selects for “niceness”?
Nice people prefer to be around other nice people. Thing is, assholes also prefer to be around nice
people. (Why wouldn’t you want to be around people who will listen to your problems?) So if the top
0.1% of nice people split off to form a utopia, some slightly-less nice people will follow them, and
some even-less nice people will follow them, and eventually Old Culture and New Culture will have
the same level of niceness, at which point immigration will stop. Faking is easy, yes, but note that
the assholes don’t even have to fake niceness—all they have to do is wait until they’re about as
nice as everyone else.
Let’s make one last change to our model. In the real world, people have more than one community
to choose from, and they evaluate each community with regard to multiple different traits. For
example, nearly everyone would prefer that other people follow the Scout’s Law: trustworthy, loyal,
friendly, helpful, courteous…
So when Sarah Sahim tries to join a culture, she looks at each one’s average trustworthiness, and
finds that every single culture in the world has the exact same trustworthiness. If they didn’t,
someone would have already moved to take advantage.
Next, Sarah looks at loyalty, and finds that every single culture in the world is equally loyal. Equally
friendly, equally helpful, equally courteous…
And so on.
This is a simplified model, but—it is nearly impossible to select for the broad positive traits that
everyone likes. The best you can do is select for details, differences: politics, race, preference for
one type of indie rock over another.
Because you cannot select for these big positive traits, because these traits will have a normal
distribution in each group, there will be more intragroup variation than intergroup variation.
Pause before writing off all members of a group as villainous. Do not assume that all members of
your tribe are pure.
You are more than your identity.
3/26/2018
[1]. Accusations Hoteloften
of “industry X is whitewashed” Concierge
make— On the Origin
this of Posers
mistake.
Of those characters coded for race/ethnicity across 100 top films of 2014, 73.1% were White,
4.9% were Hispanic/Latino, 12.5% were Black, 5.3% were Asian, 2.9% were Middle Eastern,
<1% were American Indian/Alaskan Native or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 1.2% were
from “other” racial and/or ethnic groupings. (Source)
I am pro-diversity, but you have to consider the baseline prevalence: 63.7% of the U.S. is
Caucasian. If actors/actresses were picked from the phone book, there would still be a significant
white majority. Now, imagine that you’re a Paramount exec, trying to decide how to cast Avatar:
The Last Airbender. Your surveys tell you that moviegoers strongly prefer films in which they have
the same race as the main character—in fact, they almost exclusively go to those films. What
percentage of your movies should have white leads? Answer: 100%. If you want to target the
largest audience, you should always pander to the majority. In the real world, there are other
considerations (market saturation, etc), but the principle stands: capitalism leads to racist outcomes
with or without racist beliefs.
[2]. Of course, this happens to walled-off communities as well. Suppose that the members of a
group randomly get between -10 and 10 Interest Points each month. Over the course of a year,
some people will get only positives, some will get only negatives, and most will be in between —
> normal distribution. But immigration hastens this process + places the founder population on the
far right of the curve, and this makes immigration especially unpopular.
[3]. This is an essay about cultural immigration, not crossing-the-border immigration. Are they
analogous? Not really. (Some) conservatives argue that, say, poor Mexican immigrants will “dilute
American culture”, but this incorrectly presumes there is a single “American culture.” There is a
NRA Conservative culture, a Techie Objectivist Libertarian culture, a Middle-Aged NPR Liberal
culture, a College-Age Social Justice culture—and none of these will involve impoverished Mexican
immigrants. If they aren’t going to participate in any of these, how could they dilute them? A more
realistic concern is that Mexican immigrants will complicate Mexican-American identity; however, I
don’t think this is a problem best solved by walls and/or guns.
105 notes Dec 1st, 2015
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THE FALSE NEGATIVES
In The Company Of Men (1997) opens in an airport where two middle management guys have just
arrived: a bespectacled seborrheic named Howard, and an ex-jock good ol’ boy named…Chad.
Howard walks out of the bathroom. He’s been hit, by a woman, just for asking her the time. Like,
Mountain or Central. “Wait, wait. You’re telling me about some sort of unprovoked assault here?”
Chad says. “Did she give you the time at least?”
Howard doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even seem to recognize it as a joke. And therein lies the
problem, for him and everyone else.
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THE FALSE NEGATIVES: INTRO
If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of
God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted
truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the
POSTS idea that the image didn’t conceal anything
ARCHIVE
at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an original model would have
made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of
the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs. (Simulacra and Simulation)
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HYPOCRISY IS BAD, BUT YOU’RE WORSE
“I like the Walrus best,“ said Alice, "because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”
“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his handkerchief
in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took: contrariwise.”
“That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn’t eat so
many as the Walrus.”
“But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum.
This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, “Well! They were both very unpleasant
characters—” (Through the Looking-Glass)
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THE GENDER NULLARY
Trigger warning for everything that follows: the coddled, over-sensitive, “triggered” millennial
crybaby does not exist. Hold your applause—the COSTMC is an oxymoron because coddling does
not sensitize, it scleroses. Have you met these people? They can’t feel an emotion without an
audience and a week to rehearse. The performative offense of this group results from high
emotional tolerance, not low; sad-rage is heroin to everything else’s Motrin, and no matter how vast
the safe space, some kids are gonna hang at the outskirts hoping to score.
Of course, even the phoniest opportunist has a few real triggers—the type that precludes rage
because you’re numb in the fetal position. And of course, there are many uncoddled e.g.
traumatized people who are genuinely vulnerable to the many, many instances of genuine cruelty
and callousness.
Every community with a code of conduct is a safe space to some extent. My lawyer advises no
comment on whether safe spaces are good or bad in principle, because it depends: who is being
included, who is being excluded, where will they go, and who is enforcing the rules.
My concern is the way these debates are settled. And when the excluded protest against political
correctness—that human resources plot to merge all safe spaces under one state capitalist thumb
—they ditch culture war bushido and strike at whomever can be hurt the most.
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YOUNG ADULT FICTIONS

Slate Star Codex, “Some groups of people who may not 100% deserve our eternal scorn,”
defending Harry Potter political analogies:
Comparing politics to your favorite legends is as old as politics and legends. Herodotus used an
extended metaphor between the Persian invasions of his own time and the Trojan War. When
King Edward IV took the English throne in 1461, all anybody could talk about was how it
reminded them of King Arthur. John Dryden’s famous poem Absalom and Achitophel is a
bizarrely complicated analogy of 17th-century English politics to an obscure Biblical story.
Throughout American history people have compared King George to Pharaoh, Benedict Arnold
to Judas, Abraham Lincoln to Moses, et cetera.
Well, how many people know who Achitophel is these days? Even Achilles is kind of pushing it.
So we stick to what we know – and more important, what we expect everyone else will know
too. And so we get Harry Potter.
“But a children’s book?” Look, guys, fantasy is what the masses actually like. They liked it in
Classical Greece, where they had stories like Bellerophon riding a flying horse and fighting the
Chimera. They liked it in medieval Britain, where they would talk about the Knights of the Round
Table slaying dragons as they searched for the Holy Grail. The cultural norm where only kids
are allowed to read fantasy guilt-free and everybody else has to read James Joyce is a weird
blip in the literary record which is already being corrected. Besides, James Joyce makes for a
much less interesting source of political metaphors (“The 2016 election was a lot like Finnegan’s
Wake: I have no idea what just happened”)
Hoo boy did he walk into that one.
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THE SOUND OF MANY ONE HANDS

CLAPPING
All of the blind men trying to describe the alt-right elephant seem to agree that anti-political-
correctness is part of the picture. Maybe anti-PC isn’t the most important issue to any one alt-
righter, but it’s the stance that is most widespread among them, sensitive but not specific. Okay.
Why?
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HILLARY CLINTON, ALT-RIGHT LEADER
Who do you think is running Congress? Farmers? Engineers? Teachers? Businessmen? No,
my friends. Congress is run by lawyers. A lawyer is trained for two things and two things only.
To clarify – that’s one. And to confuse – that’s the other. He does whichever is to his client’s
advantage. (Nashville)
The motives of race-nationalism are different today than in 1939 Germany. In that time and place,
per the Nuremberg Trials, lots of people became Nazis because…that’s they were supposed to do.
When your boss is bumping the new Wagner album and all cool kids are talking eugenics, sharing
Aryan memes, getting mad retweets and faves for their Holocaust jokes—well, you can convince
yourself of just about anything. And no one wants to feel left out.
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THE HYPERREAL GRAMMARIAN

CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN
RACE
i’m trying to tell you now, it’s sabotage
Wittgenstein:
A proposition may well be an incomplete picture of a certain situation, but it is always a

complete picture of something.
Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no
questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only
where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (Tractatus Logicus-
Philosophicus)
We thus derive the first law of comedy, that which allows it to travel faster than light. By the logic of
a closed system: if the set-up exists, then so must the punchline.
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The Tower
3/26/2018
hey Hotel Concierge
man there’s a hole in my head where information — On the Origin of Posers
goes
I.
1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and
they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another: ‘Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they
had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4 And they said: 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us
make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said: 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is
what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.
7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one
another’s speech.’
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left
off to build the city.
9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the
language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of
all the earth. (Genesis 11:1–9)
In Sunday School or Illustrated Classics, we are taught that God punished humanity for hubris, for
daring to disobey Mesopotamian zoning laws. That’s not what it says here.
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95 notes
The Subprime Directive
no one likes us / i don’t know why
I.
Trying to extract useful information from the 24-hour thinkpiece cycle is like trying to learn English
by listening to low fidelity death metal: the signal to noise ratio is very, very low. (Admittedly, kind of
a silly comparison—one imbues the audience with depraved bloodlust for unspeakable atrocities,
the other is a genre of music.) The cacophony of 40,000 anhedonics exhausting every topical
combination of syllables would be enough to institutionalize the Dalai Lama; words are infectious;
once you find yourself forming political opinions about internet memes, your life is game over, A + B
+ Select + Start. I mean damn, I love pattern matching as much as the next former toy-sorter, but
sometimes it’s okay to accept that a cigar is a cigar and a butterfly in New Mexico was having a
bad day.
If you do want to stay “informed,” instead of doing something worthwhile like working at a soup
kitchen or practicing the yo-yo, my advice is that you train yourself to zoom out. No one post-
puberty will make a significant error of deductive reasoning. Nothing horrifies a teenager like
hypocrisy: the first thing we learn out of Eden is how to circle A —> B around into Z —> A. Logic is
easy, ask any expert on Aether. Nor will anyone worth rap battling commit a decisive factual error.
3/26/2018
Our Hotel Concierge
flat earth has enough case studies to support even the— Onmost
the Origin of Posersideology, ask any
whacked
schizophrenic. Further, we humans of latitude have practiced the art of the squeal since our first
Follow
lung expansion. We may be terrible at diagnosis, but we are the GOAT at identifying symptoms. So
when you roll up your sleeves to shadowbox with a Bad Argument, you are going to face an
internally consistent worldview backed by genuine hurt and fitting examples. This is why change is
so difficult, and why other people are so infuriating: the problem is not bias, it is incompleteness.
The only way out is to spot what is not included, the lie of omission, which requires perspective.
Any given data point is both true and meaningless, a straight line across points makes you
Nostradamus. Most arguments are nonsense, but when everyone chooses the same type of
nonsense, that tells you something very interesting indeed.
With this methodology in mind, it is my contention that three of the most prevalent post-election
news trends are designed with a single goal in mind: to prevent you from looking too closely at this
picture—
—while humanity gets crunched into Google AdWords and fed to Cthulhu. The end of all things will
be search engine optimized, at least we can take comfort in that.
Keep reading
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3/26/2018 Hotel Concierge — On the Origin of Posers

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On the Origin of Posers

this town ain’t big enough for the two of us

(numbers surrounded by [ ] are footnotes, scroll to the bottom.)

A deeper understanding of cultural appropriation also refers to a particular power dynamic in

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the targets of FIGHT––>CULTURAL APPROPRIATION totally

Who is going to join this new culture?

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So what’s the solution?

You are more than your identity.

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