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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I have read Hell’s Angels, and while Hunter S. is always interesting, I wouldn’t really trust him to get his facts straight on anything except Nixon or college football. Blue collar work and trades are not necessarily what you’d call “middle class” in terms of performativity. You can have money, but middle class is about that idyllic myth being pushed. You can always have people living outside of the myth, but the Hell’s Angels lifestyle on the road is not for the 99% of people who are cultured to need the suburban 9-5er. Adorno writes extensively about the Culture Industry and being endlessly cheated out of promises that the (entertainment) media sells us, like as previously mentioned, sitcoms showing what a family ought to look like and their means. Also, fuck Reagan.


  • The middle class has always been a myth to get people to work harder and for a homogenized society where everyone’s got that “all-American” family with a white picket fence. We can once again blame fucking Henry Ford. See Ford’s sociological department for the literal enforcement of this ideal in exchange for his touted “$5 a day!” lure. Company people came around to your house to check what you were eating, how you were dressed, how your kids were doing in school, and if you were an immigrant, how assimilated you were becoming and if it was acceptably quick enough.






  • An interesting case (from a book which I unfortunately can’t remember the name of) from when Jack Benny’s career transitioned from radio to tv: he hated the laugh track, so much so that he demanded it be cut way back and lowered in volume. He also utilized it in an unexpected way: when he had a live audience in certain cases, if a joke or gag got an unexpected big laugh that he didn’t think deserved the reaction, he’d fill in a laugh track with a more muted response.



  • “Free speech” is very much misunderstood as a form of carte blanche as your example demonstrates. It’s written as “Congress shall make no law…” etc., implying you’re protected only from the federal government, but as time and court cases and legal discourse have shown, there are limits and implications for lower legislatures to model from. The classic hypothetical example is “yelling fire in a crowded theater.” Can you? Yes. Should you? Unless there’s a fire, no, then it could cause panic and injury, and you’d be responsible. That sort of thing. (The US loves a lawsuit).

    Tl;dr to answer your question: no.