August 2018

youth culture: login required

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Simon Reynolds: "Boiler Room has launched a new platform - 4:3 - dedicated to a wide range of underground film, video art, documentary, and found footage, connected by themes of 'performance, identity, youth culture and anti-establishment.'" Don your hoodie and login with Facebook, or create an account, because they, like, need your data before you can experience, like, youth culture, and be all anti-establishment and shit.

boilerroom4-3egalitarian

Update: Reader SG sent instructions on how to remove the "annoying login overlay" in Firefox and view the page normally. As SG points out, "Of course, it's hardly worth it, since all you get out of it is access to a youtube playlist.* And clicking on one of the videos will open a new page with the overlay you have to turn off again." SG also notes -- commenting on Simon Reynolds' statement that "Boiler Room has launched a new platform":

Remember when Platform launched Boiler Room? I mean, Boiler Room used to be part of a British site called Platform. [Link to web archive page from 2010]

Thanks, SG.

*with mini-commentaries from Simon Reynolds that require additional clicks or taps to expand --tm

sigh of relief

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Some on the left mourn the passing of John McCain. What are they thinking?

mccain_war_map

Salivation map from Mother Jones (not sure of the date; likely pre-Trump).
And a couple of anti-eulogies:

One Dead McCain, 2.5 Million Dead Iraqis (Nick Pemberton, Counterpunch) [not sure where that number came from]
The Other Side of John McCain (Max Blumenthal, Consortium News)

And let's not forget The Keating Five scandal, which should have brought McCain's career to a miserable conclusion. From 1989 (Phoenix New Times):

John McCain, the Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five

Some hero!

Update: A couple more:

The subtly-headlined The Manufactured McCain: Lifting Up a Bloodstained, Lying, Venal Servant of the Capitalist Empire (Black Agenda Report)

From 2008, an examination of McCain's poor record as a pilot: McCain's mishaps in the cockpit (LA Times)

a tale of two-and-a-half headlines

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In March last year Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog was ridiculed here for having the word "Trump" in 14 out of 40 headlines: "This isn't necessarily cynical but it is mindless." Cole is still at it! Consider what he did with a thought-piece today by a private investigator about what it's like to be a PI in a time of of pervasive snooping.

TomDispatch, which originally published it, titled the piece Goodbye to All That: A Private Investigator on Living in a Surveillance Culture

Naked Capitalism reblogged it under the title A Private Investigator on Living in a Surveillance Culture

Professor Cole takes the exact same article and calls it Are You Ready for the Trump Admin. to Know Everything about You? (the word "Trump" doesn't appear once in the article)

Surely if there are clickbait awards this takes the trophy. Keep pushin' those buttons, Informed Comment!

kobo's infernal bargain

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For the small minority who like reading books on e-ink readers and don't want to use Kindle, options are shrinking.
"Why buy ebooks?" a smug millennial asks. To support the authors, of course. A pittance from a publisher is more than they'll get from a torrent.
Kobo, the Canadian e-book company, has been the Kindle-alternative-of-choice for the past couple of years. They manufacture the e-reader hardware and also offer a selection of books in epub format. (Adobe DRM'd, but that can be, um, dealt with; also DRM-free, which they sell but stopped flagging in search a few years ago.)
Apparently Kobo has been struggling, though. First they merged with a Japanese company, Rakuten, and now Rakuten Kobo is "partnering" with Walmart, the Bezos of the Arkansas hills. Simply pathetic.