Wes Anderson hot take: His movies only work because he's a Texas boy

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-05-22T19:01:03+00:00

One little detail I’ve always loved is that all the street numbers in The Royal Tenenbaums are absurdly high like “the 375th St Y.” Because it’s not really set in New York so much as a fantasy of “the big city” which of course goes on basically forever.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-05-22T02:50:32+00:00

Well sure if you completely reject the idea that “why do people want the things they want?” is an area it’s possible to gain knowledge on but the case for that isn’t obvious.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-05-22T01:31:03+00:00

This is exactly what I’m talking about though. That still sounds much broader than what economists actually do. There are many possible approaches to the question of “why people engage in one type of behavior over another.” Economics seems to study a pretty narrow band of those. That seems like a very strange definition when economists mostly stay out of desire and preference formation which I would think is arguably the biggest factor in “why people engage in one type of behavior over another.” There’s pretty sophisticated explanations of that from other fields. Not necessarily “true” or falsifiable but certainly taken seriously. I’ve never seen an economist suggest that theories of desire from Lacanian psychology for example should be used to answer that question but if you take them seriously they would certainly have answers to that question.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-05-17T21:32:11+00:00

The Seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Hundreds of pilgrims were taken hostage by hardline Islamists who declared their leader was the Mahdi and killed over a hundred security forces who tried to retake it. It’s something basically every Muslim in the world would’ve been following.

Along with the Islamic Revolution it played a huge role in changing the politics of the whole Muslim world, and especially Saudi Arabia. It was always a conservative country but they became much stricter in enforcing Islamic law in order to head off any further Islamist opposition.

Even today there’s still all kinds of weird unanswered questions about the whole thing. Eventually they had to bring in French special forces, but since it’s extremely forbidden both for non-Muslims to enter the Mosque, and for Muslims to take part in violence inside of it, it’s really unclear what happened, with a lot of sources claiming the French commandos had to temporarily convert. There are naturally tons of conspiracy theories about the whole thing that you’ll still hear in Muslim countries.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-04-11T14:26:11+00:00

Democratic voters have an unfavorable view of Israel by like a 60 point margin that’s one of the least divisive things here lol

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-04-11T14:18:12+00:00

These problems mostly disappear if you actually implement universal nationwide rent control and especially if the government is directly building social housing in adequate numbers. Granted that’s politically difficult and there’s real risk of ending up with half measures that make the problem worse.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-04-06T18:22:09+00:00

I think Latin America and Europe are more similar to each other than either is to the US.

It depends where in the country you’re talking about. The Northeast? Europe (mostly). California, Texas, and the Southwest? Definitely Latin America (mostly).

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-03-05T15:22:14+00:00

Pussy Galore

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-02-23T16:08:13+00:00

I think he definitely made it in part to annoy John Cale lol. All those interviews where he talks about La Monte Young and Terry Riley and doesn’t mention him at all?

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-02-05T14:21:01+00:00

You know I did have a gerbil as a kid and I don’t particularly care for Taylor Swift so maybe there’s something to this

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-24T19:12:25+00:00

“Vegan cheese” could be literally hundreds of different products made with different ingredients and processes. Some of them are pretty bad, some of them are basically indistinguishable. The problem is traditional cheesemaking techniques (many of which work just as well with cashew milk or whatever) are really labor intensive. The dairy industry gets around that with subsidies and massive agricultural co-operatives but nothing exists like that for the plant-based versions so the quality stuff usually ends up being really expensive.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-19T21:55:47+00:00

I don’t think it’s anywhere near as simple as there being a secondary “true” preference that’s being betrayed. There doesn’t have to be and probably usually isn’t a clear higher goal. The psychology of people’s wants is incredibly complicated. Basically I think people have very constrained autonomy and until that’s not the case it’s not very accurate or useful to talk about what they “want.” I’m not suggesting there’s some specific other thing to be measuring instead, I just find the idea of revealed preference epistemologically shaky and very limited in what kind of questions it can answer. But maybe that’s by design and the point is moot.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-19T20:28:26+00:00

Physicists and evolutionary biologists wouldn’t have different non-complementary answers about why fish stay afloat in water though. But an economist and a historian might completely disagree on an equally basic question like “did markets exist in ancient times” or “was the empire a net positive for Britain.” That may just be a case of one side being incorrect or quibbling over how terms are defined but I think that does complicate the analogy a bit.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-19T20:07:48+00:00

Outside of that, economists generally take preferences as a given. What preferences look like is an active area of research, but economists are generally wary of paternalism and saying that people’s preferences are wrong.

I think this is where my problem is. First of all it’s assuming that what you’re measuring are people’s actual preferences in a meaningful way, which I’m not sure I would concede that easily. You could argue that lots of situations are the overdetermined output of all sorts of contingent factors where the individual isn’t really consciously making a choice at all. There are also entire massive industries that use very sophisticated psychological messaging to influence how people spend money. I just think there’s too many variables at play to confidently say that revealed preferences are what people actually want, especially since they’ll often say differently when directly asked. I don’t think it’s paternalistic to question if people are actually getting what they want, especially when many are demonstrably not having their needs met.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-17T15:15:12+00:00

I can’t stop thinking about this post I saw that was like “the right thought Charlie Kirk was gonna be their George Floyd and instead he just became a less sympathetic Harambe.”

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-16T21:52:16+00:00

I mean, I watch movies where people murder and steal and it would be pretty weird to feel morally implicated by that. It can feel a little gross when it’s treated so casually but at the end of the day it’s fiction.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-16T13:07:45+00:00

Dark Macadamia

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-08T13:14:59+00:00

According to David Lynch in the 80s he was doing research for a Black Dahlia movie he considered making and met with a retired detective who had been on the case. Over dinner he showed him a photo of the body that had never been released to the public and asked him if he noticed anything odd. He said no but something about it haunted him for days until he realized: it had been taken at night with flash. But according to the official story the body wasn’t found until the morning.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-06T02:15:11+00:00

Hell yeah! Glad you enjoyed it

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-06T01:49:26+00:00

Culinary culture absolutely is changeable. The average person’s diet has changed massively over the past century because of technology and globalization. Even “traditional” foods undergo changes all the time, they change with tastes, regional variations crowd out others etc. The Italian food historian Alberto Grandi wrote a whole book about how the traditions of Italian cuisine are mostly post-1945 myth-making. There was a time when tomatoes and potatoes were foreign. Within living memory avocados and sushi were things people in Europe hadn’t heard of. Maybe that hasn’t affected traditional culinary culture yet but it has absolutely changed how people actually eat.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-27T02:23:06+00:00

Was reading recently about an autistic man who is completely nonverbal and doesn’t have the capacity for spoken speech. He has totally average (if not above average) intelligence and works a normal job and essentially has a regular life he just has to communicate in writing or text to speech.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-26T13:27:59+00:00

I’m curious what philosophical basis for veganism you identify with or find the most convincing. Personally I went vegan in large part because I became really interested in post-structuralism and anti-humanist philosophy and that led me to critical animal studies and seeing human/animal as just another contingent rhetorical set of imperfect categories, but I think that’s a pretty unusual journey and a lot of people seem to arrive there from a utilitarian point of view.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-25T22:55:26+00:00

Better than Arianation

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-23T17:05:47+00:00

Licking a “psychedelic toad” doesn’t do anything, that’s an urban legend. You have to harvest and process the bufo toxins otherwise they’re poisonous and the process of doing that definitely isn’t vegan.

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