Cultural/Political/Social Trends & Divergence Thread

[wasted]

I’ll go further, social media makes everyone a star, the escalation of narcissism has been rapid. Technology is a way to worship yourself so nobody wants idols. 

[Len Cnut]

Idolizing and recognising iconography is two different things, saying someone is cool ain’t to say you want to be like them, cuz that wouldn’t be cool   I need to write a rulebook for this shit, I would try if I was cool enough   

And I don’t think a youtuber or a gamer could ever be cool, you’re missing the heart and soul of the definition if you think it can be achieved staring at a screen in your bedroom.

3 hours ago, wasted said:

I’ll go further, social media makes everyone a star, the escalation of narcissism has been rapid. Technology is a way to worship yourself so nobody wants idols. 

This probably is a valid point, media presentation has a lot to do with shit, we see so much of everyone, perhaps if we had seen Bogart every hour of the day his cool would lessen and he’d’ve eventually just been some balding midget   I say 'we' like i was around at the time, you know what I mean

Edited August 31, 2018 by Len Cnut

[wasted]

1 hour ago, Len Cnut said:

Idolizing and recognising iconography is two different things, saying someone is cool ain’t to say you want to be like them, cuz that wouldn’t be cool   I need to write a rulebook for this shit, I would try if I was cool enough   

And I don’t think a youtuber or a gamer could ever be cool, you’re missing the heart and soul of the definition if you think it can be achieved staring at a screen in your bedroom.

This probably is a valid point, media presentation has a lot to do with shit, we see so much of everyone, perhaps if we had seen Bogart every hour of the day his cool would lessen and he’d’ve eventually just been some balding midget   I say 'we' like i was around at the time, you know what I mean

That’s a point too. 

But I was talking about just Facebook users promoting themselves like they are as interesting and talented as me. I mean really the world is outta control. 

[Len Cnut]

8 minutes ago, wasted said:

That’s a point too. 

But I was talking about just Facebook users promoting themselves like they are as interesting and talented as me. I mean really the world is outta control. 

No ones as interesting and talented as you luvvie   To me you're like a copywriting Hunter Thompson esconced in China waiting to blow up

[wasted]

1 minute ago, Len Cnut said:

No ones as interesting and talented as you luvvie   To me you're like a copywriting Hunter Thompson esconced in China waiting to blow up

I just need to be discovered or assassinated. Then my books would sell or give your computer a virus. 

[Len Cnut]

15 minutes ago, Oldest Goat said:

...JAAN! @janrichmond Leonard is saying someone is more interesting and talented than me!

#SmashThatLikeButton #Woke #GOAT 

Fuckin' Jan, she's had me watching Budgie all week, forgot it even existed until she bought it up.  Forgot how good it was.

[Len Cnut]

10 hours ago, J Dog said:

Idk, where I’m from you’ll still get your wig split for letting it fly. You might get away with it if you’re with your boys and kinda listening and quoting a song, but as far as just using it as normal slang and throwing it around it’s still not cool.

On an odd opposite note, I’ve actually been called it a lot. Yo this is J, he’s my hooray for tolerance!. Nah J’s cool that’s my hooray for tolerance!. J, what up my hooray for tolerance!. J you gonna that that blunt today or tomorrow hooray for tolerance! 

Over here, no one says it and if you say it to a black person you're getting fucked up.  You know what I heard about the Carolinas?  I know thats a broad statement cuz THE Carolinas is talking about a huge place, anyway it was from somebody from Tampa, saying they drove through and the first thing that struck them was like, how it felt like stepping back in time?  It felt really socially divisional, like all the blacks had their place and the whites had theirs and not just in like, a neighbourhood sense as there is everywhere in the world, felt like something more than that?  Is that true?  maybe it was just some specific area she drove through.

Its a weird thing with that word man, like you get rappers like Big Pun and a lot of the puerto rican rappers and they use that word up and down but I guess they've got a touch of black in em so thats where they get excused.  But then a year or so back I remember the boxing trainer Angel Garcia, who is Puerto Rican and is from the hood (so the vernacular suited who he was is what I mean) calling Keith Thurman (who is black, or at least part black) a 'bitch ass n!gga' and getting into a lot of shit about it.

Edited August 31, 2018 by Len Cnut

[Len Cnut]

11 minutes ago, Oldest Goat said:

Budgie?

An old TV show about a mouthy young cockney on the fringes of legality who gets it wrong everytime.  Sounds like a sitcom but its not, it was more like a...I dunno what it is actually.  I suppose you could call it drama to a point but its also quite funny too.  Something I used to watch when i was very very little.  Forgot it even existed until she bought it up randomly the other day.

[janrichmond]

9 hours ago, Len Cnut said:

Fuckin' Jan, she's had me watching Budgie all week, forgot it even existed until she bought it up.  Forgot how good it was.

how are ya watching it?? i need some Budgie 😍

[Len Cnut]

Just now, janrichmond said:

how are ya watching it?? i need some Budgie 😍

the entire first series is on youtube.  I've ended up buying the complete thingie on DVD off of ebay (its been released on DVD apparently).  It's fuckin' seriously good y'know.  I mean I sort of knew it was but i only vaguely remember enjoying it from the 80s but apparently I've had good taste from seriously formative years cuz I still really like it.  Its beautifully written.

 

To this day I'm not 100% sure where I've seen it but it was instantly familiar   You caused me to phone my Dad and go 'Dad, do you remember Budgie, TV show, from the 70s?'  and he went 'yeah, with Adam Faith!', its one of them floating round your head things that you never heard of since so you wondered if it ever existed.  Its great though, turns out its written by Keith Waterhouse...and I love his stuff, he did Billy Liar, what the fuck he was doing writing for television I'll never know.

[janrichmond]

Is it all in B&W? I mean, that's how i watched it because we didn't have colour tv until was about 12 

[Len Cnut]

4 minutes ago, janrichmond said:

Is it all in B&W? I mean, that's how i watched it because we didn't have colour tv until was about 12 

Nah the first 4 episodes are cuz there was a strike going on in 71 of some of the telly people but every other episode apart from the first 4 are colour.  And it was 13 episodes per series and they had 2 serieses, so thats 26 episodes altogether of which 22 are colour.

[janrichmond]

1 minute ago, Len Cnut said:

Nah the first 4 episodes are cuz there was a strike going on in 71 of some of the telly people but every other episode apart from the first 4 are colour.  And it was 13 episodes per series and they had 2 serieses, so thats 26 episodes altogether of which 22 are colour.

thanks hun 

[Len Cnut]

1 minute ago, janrichmond said:

thanks hun 

'we never had colour telly til i was 12', ugh, you're so working class   The stench of commoners around here, I declare!  

[janrichmond]

1 minute ago, Len Cnut said:

'we never had colour telly til i was 12', ugh, you're so working class   The stench of commoners around here, I declare!  

Only at that point did i discover that Mrs Slocome had different hair colour every week 

[Len Cnut]

Just now, janrichmond said:

Only at that point did i discover that Mrs Slocome had different hair colour every week 

I asked my Dad when TV went colour in the 70s and his reply, bless him, was 'I dunno, I was out shaggin''   And people wonder why I turned out like i did!

[janrichmond]

1 minute ago, Len Cnut said:

I asked my Dad when TV went colour in the 70s and his reply, bless him, was 'I dunno, I was out shaggin''   And people wonder why I turned out like i did!

I think i'd like your old man 

[Len Cnut]

6 minutes ago, janrichmond said:

I think i'd like your old man 

He's alright, bless him   I guess by todays standards I should be like, traumatised or whatever but I always thought he was kinda cool.  I mean he had a go at you something rotten and he might belt you one on the wrong day but, I dunno, I sometimes wonder like...what would I be like if i was raised by some caring sharing stroke your bollocks type old man, I think I might've been a right dickhead   You sort of knew what you were gettin' with my old man, he'd pay all the bills and keep a roof over your head, you just had to mind your manners and that was about it.  Nice fella overall, just offensively blunt sometimes   Took me a while to realise its offensive though cuz when you're a kid you don't know better.  I think it first struck me in my nursery when I said 'shut you old bag' to my teacher and it caused a big ruckus.  Everyone had a go except Dad, who later became the chief go-haver, only cuz he knew where I'd copied it from  She kept goin' on at me about taking my coat off and I didn't want to, I don't see what the problem was   To this day i don't! (yes i do, I'm not that thick).

Edited August 31, 2018 by Len Cnut

[Dazey]

2 hours ago, janrichmond said:

Only at that point did i discover that Mrs Slocome had different hair colour every week 

On her head or her pussy?  

[janrichmond]

50 minutes ago, Dazey said:

On her head or her pussy?  

did we ever see her pussy?

[soon]

 

Edited September 5, 2018 by soon

[soon]

It's 48 years since the October Crisis, when the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) kidnapped a British Trade Commissioner and later kidnapped and murdered a Quebec Labour Minister. They demanded the release of two dozen imprisoned FLQ militants. PM Pierre Elliot Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act which suspended many civil liberties across the board and over 400 people were arrested, many of them from the unrelated Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee who worked on Civil Rights in USA. This kind of opportunistic attacks on Progressives saw that even adult contemporary singer Rita McNeil ended up with a RCMP record and was spied on for having attended feminist lectures!!

Though the FLQ claimed ML Communism as their ideology, Quebec separatism is intended for Pure Laine or "Old Stock" Quebecers with a "pure heritage." And while they did train in Cuba and with the PLA while maintaining close ties with the Weather Underground it cant be overlooked that a better term for the Quebec that they wanted to build was National Socialism. 

Today Pure Laine Quebecers are Right Wingers. And they just elected a new Anti-Immigrant party this month.

Its crazy to think that a single belief in a "pure" Quebec can claim adherents from polar extremes of the political spectrum. Far Right is a much more honest and sensible place for Quebec separatists, imo. 

I live where a lot of the progressives were swept up under the War Measures Act. Its resulted in a group of boomer progressives fearing and distrusting the powers too much to be politically active. And we could use those thinkers today as Right Wing separatism is manifesting as EU style organized hate. 

[Ace Nova]

I'm wondering what Canada would be like if Jordan Peterson ran for PM and won?  

[wasted]

8 hours ago, Kasanova King said:

I'm wondering what Canada would be like if Jordan Peterson ran for PM and won?  

It would be like 19th century Britain?

[Sydney Fan]

On 31/08/2018 at 9:01 AM, Len Cnut said:

35.  Those friends that were bothered about pop culture would probably give similar answers, yeah, similar-ish, Clint Eastwood is one that'd be in there.  See to me cool is a very specific thing.  I mean let me be clear here, there's types of cool.  There's the cool where something is OK with you and then there's cool cool, like style icons and that.  Younger people (and people of my age group and older too come to that) would probably name football players of their generation too, George Best, again, style icon.  Some nowadays might name David Beckham but see I remember him as the gay voiced little twat from Man Utd so he doesn't carry the same currency to me as he might do to a younger person who knows him more for being a smartly dressed aftershave advert bloke.  Eminem I guess many would mention who to me, though a pretty cool character, isn't like...a style icon.  Thats what cool is to me, its a very specific thing and it would have to be explained like that, icons of style, before you could get the real answers.

It'd be an interesting idea for a thread actually, icons of cool and who your ones are.  And mine are quite typical really, someone like Steve McQueen is a great example of like...y'know, decent clothing brands like Barbour to this day release 'The Steve McQueen Collection' and it fuckin' sells, watch brands like Rolex use him, or like car companys like Ford and Mustang, or the famous Tag Monaco watch is marketed using Steve McQueens image, he must have some sort of like...appeal in real terms for him to be that sort of a functional marketing tool.  Even when you go down Portobello Road and see those poster sells more often than not he's in there, even furniture stores will have some kinda new age living room lay out and they'll be a framed poster of Bullitt, its too ubiquitous to be a niche thing.  

Perhaps its to do with star quality, X factor or whatever other buzzword there is but its something that some people have that can't be attached to just anybody.  Some of them are kinda fringe figures and counter culture icons but a lot of em are like...pretty routinely known around the world.  Marilyn Monroe is another one.  But its an interesting idea you've thrown up about kids of today and who they'd name, I'm not sure I could answer that.  I guess you kind of have to be into fashion and clothes and stuff too.  Take for example like Mod style, to this day Mod is fuckin' cool, I mean Liam Gallagher basically started a clothing line Pretty Green that is just all Mod knock offs cuz that look is just kind of timeless.  Muhammad Ali is another one, Bruce Lee is another one, they're kind of icons of cool, whatever they were doing they looked good doing it, often dressed in shit that would make me or you look stupid.  I'm sure a lot of young people today would name Muhammad Ali.

Its interesting that as a straight guy I've named only one woman   I could name tons though, Audrey Hepburn, Brigette Bardot, Winona Ryder, Drew Barrymore for a while had it, though she lost it.

A great example actually of my estimation of cool would be Guns n Roses.  Guns n Roses only really had two cool members, which is Slash and Izzy. Cuz they always looked cool whatever the fuck they were wearing, they carried it off perfectly and their personalities had that unflappable unaffected quality to them.  Axl, though he came close, was never that because Axl Rose gives the impression of someone who is the polar opposite of unflappable.  Also, dress-wise, he sometimes made some crap choices.  Don't get me wrong, he probably pulled off as many daring choices or more than bad choices he made but overall he ain't the whole package, never was.  He was way too neurotic to ever be the kind of cool I'm talking about. Any man that reactive could never be truly cool.  Not to say a lot of the aforementioned weren't also quick tempered individuals but they also had a degree of temperance or at very least the appearance of it.

For a female cool would be uma thurman especially her roles in pulp fiction and kill bill.

Not sure if the gallagher (liam and noel) would rate. I remembet when they were promting their association when tony Blair was running for prime minister. Abit of a wtf moment there.