A few good things I can think of after I posted this yesterday. This shit doesn't have to be perfect, just provide a list and some explanations on how it can be effective. This is just meant to get the ball rolling, not meant to come perfect. Just think of these as media jumping off points.

• Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
• Zinn, A People's History of the United States
• Schlosser, Fast Food Nation - a great rundown on the fucked up fast food industry
• Ehrenreich, Nickeled and Dimed - holy shit this one's depressing
• Davis, City of Quartz - basically fuck LA
• Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
• Nestle, Food Politics - for some reason when I talk about food it really messes with libs, definitely worth it
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "The Gang Goes Jihad" - shockingly pro-Palestinian take on Israel
• Adam Ruins Everything - bite-sized content that doesn't always indict capitalism, but I think it does the trick
• Philosophy Tube
• Shaun
• HBomberguy
• Snowpiercer
• Parasite

What else y'all got?

I’m even tugging to restore my foreskin but at least 90% of the movement is creepy weirdos like this

Here.

Please don't read comments until you've read this. It is very short and fast to read. It is radicalizing. It is a good short story to send to your friend who needs to understand what capitalism is. LeGuin wrote this in 1973, cementing her status as Chad Supreme of Fuck Mountain. Bow before her might.

Let's discuss in the comments below.

Because I sure as shit am, god bless our anti corporate anti syndicate friend Bill Watterson and his steadfast refusal to turn C&H into a cash cow juggernaut that would have dwarfed Garfield and been twice as syrupy in the end.

I know it can happen to anyone but Christ I'm disappointed in him and how he manages to be worse than Jon Stewart because at least Jon Stewart was funny sometimes

Smash Mouth performing at Sturgis (and their callous disregard for a deadly pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands in the US and globally) aside, I will have a soft spot in my heart for them. Their borderline trutherism over the virus has cooled my admiration for them considerably, of course. But what they did at the outset of this decade was destroy cool, cynical detachment with aggressive earnestness.

I'm an internet old timer who was on Something Awful before the diaspora triggered by effective moderation scattered the neo-dadaist posters to the four corner of the web. As such, I have always maintained a familiarity and sometime friendship with various former members. This is all to say that I know of many of the members of the awkwardly anointed Weird Twitter. They're a strange hodgepodge who invented shitposting before shitposting was shitposting, who tried to one up each other with gross out and bizarre imagery and copypastas and trolling.

I can tell you with no uncertain degree of confidence that many of them were dealing with some sort of pain. A lot of them dealt with mental illness, physical disabilities, intense loneliness, abuse, neglect, alcoholism, you name it. But it was very hard to grab a sincere moment from any of them because this was how they coped with the world. They indulged in the ego defense mechanism of simply not thinking about it to unhealthy extremes. It helped to soothe the self-loathing and self-pity.

It was out of this crucible of Schadenfreude that Weird Twitter and Something Awful contributor Jon Hedren (going by @fart on Twitter) came up with a joke. That joke was that he would pay the lead singer of Smash Mouth to eat 24 eggs. It was a comically small amount of money, $20.

But it's not that simple, is it? Hedren didn't pick someone he admired--in fact, I am loath to believe that Hedren really admires anyone. Smash Mouth, especially at the start of the 2010s, was a punchline. Even then, something of a lazy one. So in the public sphere of Twitter, Hedren thought it would be funny to target what he saw to be low-hanging fruit for a dumb, cheap joke. This joke was clearly meant to be ameliorative. After all, Hedren hadn't written the hacky Shrek anthem "All Star"! People could laugh at this and he could make a quick article, and that's that.

And this is why I admire Steve Harwell, even despite his recent idiocy.

Despite his best attempts to ignore it, a vocal contingent of Twitter folks kept reminding him about Hedren's challenge until he ended up parlaying it into a charity event hosted by his friend, Guy Fieri, at the opening of his new restaurant.

Gamely, he attempted to eat 24 eggs and failed, but others helped. Money was raised for charity. Hedren, who showed up looking very uncomfortable hiding behind his iPhone, attempted to recast the event heroically on Vice. The video speaks for itself: Harwell is surrounded by friends and fans and admirers, raises money for charity, makes people laugh, and has a good day. Hedren skulks about nervously like he's holding in hot panic diarrhea while a shark mascot dances around him.

Sincerity won the day.

Listen, I enjoy a good joke, I love a good rip on people, and cynicism is my fucking anthem. I don't trust anything that anyone says is good and popular. I'm a bone-drenched iconoclast to the core. But I need to remember to pull my head out of my ass and not be like Hedren was that day. I gotta have fun and stop mainlining irony to dull my pain. Harwell had a really good day just being a real person engaging with people genuinely, even in the face of blistering contempt masquerading as offbeat humor.

I don't wanna be like that. I wanted to be a real and genuine person too. That's why I took off the slow deadly drip of irony. I realized I was just finding a way to isolate myself from the world so I didn't get hurt by it. And it didn't do a damn bit of good anyway.

Dose makes the poison. Be careful.

I read the books this year because I wanted to feel pain, basically, and I wanted to be justified in disliking Harry Potter. I was not disappointed. However, I still don't understand how the fuck the end of the book worked. It was so harebrained and convoluted and sloppy as fuck that I don't know what actually happened. Am I stupid or was it a bad ending? And what the fuck happened? How did they actually kill Voldemort?

This week I was posting something about post World War 2 and how multiple imperialist powers gave up their overseas holdings, and I very nearly typed about how all of these countries just voluntarily did it. But I was posting about France and Algeria, so I knew that couldn't be true, so I looked up the process of decolonization and of course I had basically just about regurgitated some weak ass History Channel noble white folk nonsense about how the magnanimous West just let Asia and Africa roam free after WW2.

What stupid shit have you caught yourself doing or saying recently?

Got way too many left folks out here with a hate on for Tumblrina SJWs which is to say politically unfocused and passionate teenagers who know there is injustice in the world but lack the proper language or target to point their rage at. You can flip these folks to ML in ten minutes max. I've done it like a goddamn T'ai Chi master. I'm always shocked by the number of leftists who write them off as idpol-obsessed radlibs as if they're all arguing in bad faith. Every community has disingenuous wreckers, don't pretend like the strident Twitter activists have them in greater number than any other group.

Oh my spaghetti monster

It only sucks 99%.