Your Being Manipulated: Eddington w/ Hussein Kesvani

finally listening to this coz had to go watch Eddington first--- on a slightly random anime note: Hussein and Greg- do y'all have any thoughts abt the show Pantheon? (2022, 2 sns) God i wld love to hear u guys break that down 👾

I was about to be mad about the grammar in the title and then I watched the film so now I'm going back in my box.

RE Eddington vs One Battle after another. Gun to my head eddington is the better film, but at the end of the day both I think are the easily the two best movies that year, will be in the top 5 in the decade, and the top 50-100 of the 21st century. Though I think Eddington will age as a movie that in 30,40,50 years will be seen as an artifact and an important movie ABOUT the Covid pandemic. Both movies I think are leftist movies, intentionally or not, and if you think that their criticisms of the left are unfair I think you need to decide if you are a a liberal or a someone more concerned with material leftism.

I think, related to Hussein's point about the guy who was adamant that the film was offensive to his sensibilities, we have to consider that grief starts at denial because people don't always realise what they're suffering with is a loss. A lot of less thoughtful, more culturally go-with-the-flow soft left and libs really took a long time to reckon with the fact that Covid was an utter hammer blow to the momentum of pro-left politics. I think, as you both point out, grieving can make you incredibly humourless when other people laugh at an icon of your grief - especially if they're laughing because they've moved on quicker than you. You feel insecure, like you're not doing it properly. I remember my family grieving the loss of my grandfather, and each of his daughters went through a different phase of "She thinks she's coping better than me!" and I think that's genuinely part of the humourlessness behind some reactions to this film. It's Ari Aster. The man's misanthropic to the extreme, and finds our failings as a species to be a source of comedy. He's right, but it's rough to work through if you're not in the same headspace as him. I don't resent these humourless people, I sort of want to shake them and get them to the "you can laugh at yourself now" stage of processing pain.

interesting point on joe cross' wife - to me, the implication was extremely clear that she was molested by her father, and that she was ergo someone who was using conspiratorial thinking to read what is in effect an ineffable trauma, because the language to communicate this is systemically elided (by austin butler, by her mother, by frameworks of conspiracy.) she has an entire rant toward the middle of the film where she implies this and her mother shuts her down because of her father's memory. i think there's maybe a point about the incestual that can be made here.

Been kinda digesting this since last night, haven't seen the film, but I kinda wanna hear an episode on Cambridge Analytica, any "Old Heads" remember them? Feels like a lifetime ago but it was only 2017, how far we've come that a data firm would stochastically raise the temperature by micro-targetting select individuals, based on vast and opaque datasets with dubious connections and correlations to real life, to whatever the fuck we have now of a system of vast and opaque AI's (Google controlling search and YouTube, xAI controlling twitter, not to mention Anthropic, Anduril, Palantir vying for any number of Public/Government roll they can) shaping out own personal internet-scapes, based on another round of datasets, controlled by people with dubious connections and correlations to "Real Life". Difference this time around (I feel at least) is the people controlling the systems have very obvious goals and aims, beyond nebulous power fantasies of control over the new frontier that's opened up that is Your Own Personal Kingdom that manifests in the form of whatever data googles got on you.

SEVEN TIMES?!?!

My clearest memory of COVID was rhe first few months when essentially the official narrative was "This virus will only kill old people and the sick, thats fine"

I think Eddington not being something that's really hit culturally despite it still being talked about in certain circles is similar to how serial experiments Lain didn't really catch on until the mid to late 2010s of like, we haven't really digested and put together all that's happened yet, it still feels far away rather than the ocean we swim in

Not gonna lie, I thought the title said Paddington and the blood boiis were going to talk about the bear and his connections to shining path