The Consolidated "Slate Is Stupid" Thread

[dieblucasdie]

He's pretty sexist as well

[dieblucasdie]

http://www.slate.com/id/2193793/

Slate cashes in on stuff written by its readers

[C of heartbreak]

They're definitely not the first online publication to do that.

[dieblucasdie]

LOL Black people!

[FreddyKnuckles]

LOL Black people!

heheh jonah weiner.

[coldforge]

Well, I mean, there IS a pretty distinctive space/science-fiction-fixated tradition in African American pop culture. You don't think there's some thread linking Sun Ra, Parliament Funkadelic, Afrika Bambaataa, and (apparently) Lil' Wayne? To say nothing of the mothership trope's resonance with african american traditions of exodus, redemption, and a sometimes-mythologized original African civilization?

[dieblucasdie]

Oh, sure, but

1) there's a sci-fi fixated thread through rock music too, so I'm not particularly sure why it's noteworthy that's it's there in hip-hop too, especially since in both rock and hip-hop, it's about teh drugs more than anything else,

and

2)  "Afronaut"

[hannah]

Man, how fucking lazy is Ron Rosenbaum? He opens his retarded article on dead catchphrases with an appeal to Susan Sontag's take on camp. Later, he links to his 2003 article on "dude," which also opens with an appeal to Susan Sontag's take on camp! Argh!

Compare:

Back in 1964, Susan Sontag wrote an eye-opening essay in Partisan Review called "Notes on 'Camp.'" Partisan Review , alas, is gone, but camp is here to stay, and perhaps the time has come to begin to assemble some notes on a similarly recondite phenomenon: Let's call it "Notes on 'Dude.'" Because recent evidence suggests that Dude, too-Dude in its most expansive, capital-D sense-is here to stay as well.

In some ways, the impetus for studying Dude culture is dual: I feel I've grown up (or down) with "dude," having first heard it from the single surfer dude in my high school and then the single surfer dude in my class at Yale (he dropped out freshman year to party with the waves). But there's also a similar motive to that which prompted Ms. Sontag to investigate the resonances of camp. She opened her "Notes on 'Camp'" essay with these two sentences:

"Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility-unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it -that goes by the cult name of 'Camp.'" (My italics.)

Similarly, Dude has been named, but has Dude-as sensibility-been adequately described? If camp is "a variant of sophistication," Dude might be called a variant of unsophistication . And yet also "hardly identical with it." In fact, it can be, when used ironically as it often is here in New York City, a sophisticated take on unsophistication.

vs.

When Susan Sontag wrote "Notes on 'Camp' " back in 1964, she was foregrounding—to use a current catchphrase—something familiar but not yet defined.

"Many things in the world have not been named," her famous essay began, "and many things even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility—unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it—that goes by the cult name of 'Camp.' "

I would choose nearly identical words to describe the phenomenon, the linguistic sensibility, that I'd name "catch": the way our language has become increasingly dominated by rapidly cycling catchphrases. Rapidly cycling because in blogospheric time, they speed from clever witticism to tired cliché in the virtual blink of an eye.

[hannah]

GUHDAMMIT

[Andrew_TSKS]

oh wow. that guy's run out of ideas.

[dieblucasdie]

If I could go back in time and murder one person in his youth, I'd probably pass up Hitler and go for William Saletan

I mean, he was bad enough as a political reporter, but he's maybe the worst science reporter of all time.

http://www.slate.com/id/2195071/

When bandits start siphoning public toilets, maybe governments will wake up and get in on the action.

Credit where credit's due, though, since Plotz took over Slate's generally just been kinda boring, not offensively bad.

[C of heartbreak]

Why does it have to be in his youth? In fact wouldn't it be more moral to kill him now?

[YojimboMonkey]

I don't think I've ever seen a pay toilet in my life.  Though of course I am aware they exist; I still remember reading this couplet in a Mad Magazine probably 30 years ago

Here I sit, broken hearted
Paid my dime but only farted

[Andrew_TSKS]

hah, that was in a beavis and butthead episode.

i have only ever seen a pay toilet in paris.

[edison]

i have only ever seen a pay toilet in paris.

Yeah, France has pay toilets everywhere. I didn't know this was uncommon in other countries.

Woohoo!

[The_Tourist]

there's pay toilets on the street in san francisco.

a lot of fast food type places, grocery stores, etc. in the busy areas of l.a. have pay bathrooms with tokens for customers.

[Maaik]

fuck that, i'll piss in the frozen food aisle

[Andrew_TSKS]

i'm with myke on this one.

although i can't piss in front of people, so i'd probably just go outside and piss behind their dumpsters.

god, if i had a dollar for every time i've peed behind a dumpster, i could go buy all four of the nuggets box sets.

[Greg Nog]

I always assumed that pay-toilets never caught on in America because people would just break in and such.  Judging by the Wikipedia article, it seems that pay-toilets started being eliminated when they were outlawed in major cities, and continued drying up as people did indeed vandalize them.

[Andrew_TSKS]

if you ask me, they should be illegal.

[elpollodiablo]

Yeah there's something deeply troubling to me about the idea of a pay toilet. I would most certainly just break the fucker open if I possibly could. I can't believe the French don't do that.

[Greg Nog]

The idea is so offensive because the governments first set up laws to prevent you from doing in the street what every properly-functioning human is naturally designed to do, and then they sanction companies that charge you for the privilege of exercising a tiny loophole in those laws.  It's basically a small-scale version of dystopian capitalist civilization.

[YojimboMonkey]

But the thing in the article about paying people for pooping is intriguing.  On a good day I can crank out 4 or 5 big ones.  I'd be rolling in dough!

[elpollodiablo]

Dough if we're lucky!

[Greg Nog]

YOJIMBO SHITS MONEY LIKE YOU FOR BREAKFAST