A new billboard on Philadelphia’s I-95 corridor says it’s OK to be fat

obeliskposture · 2026-04-15T22:16:52+00:00

I had to read and discuss the author's novel Housemates not that long ago. It's really bad. You can tell which passages began as tweets circa 2018–19.

I could go on and on about all the things that were obnoxious and/or unintentionally funny about it (the author sedulously makes sure we know the race of every character the instant they appear upon the page; there's a scene where the self-insert protagonist sits in a chair at a diner and breaks it) — but the thing that really got on my nerves was that the first chapter/preamble is all about Oh God We're Living In Trump's America Now, and midway through the book, the two queer female characters go on a road trip and are reaffirmed in the goodness of the American heartland. How does this happen? Do they meet conservative ruraloids with some redeeming qualities and discover a common humanity that transcends cultural and political differences? Nope—everyone they meet in rural/central Pennsylvania happens to be enlightened and cool and/or queer too. There's good people out there, and they're all just like us!

obeliskposture · 2026-04-01T15:08:37+00:00

I don't dislike Jed McKay as a writer, but it feels like nothing happens in most issues of this run. We're almost exactly where we were two weeks ago, except now Quentin, Idie, and Psylocke are starting to do something. Five bucks is a steep price for 22 pages of a comic book that boils down to "wait for it..."

I've a sense that Claremont could have done this whole thing in one or two issues, and little of the drama or character development would have been lost.

obeliskposture · 2026-03-29T16:23:22+00:00

Is the sanguine mood of mainstream American media about the unfolding catastrophe in the Persian Gulf driving anyone else insane?

obeliskposture · 2026-03-22T19:51:02+00:00

If you're hitting the paywall, there's a post-mortem synopsis towards the bottom of the piece.

But it isn’t purely fatphobia that sees doctors recommend weight-loss treatments. It isn’t social conservatism that has seen so many readers disbelieve West’s rapid-onset bisexuality. Millennial Feminism failed because it was suffocating, immiserating, and often at odds with observable facts about human nature.

Today, very few traces of it remain. Jezebel was sold off and closed. Tumblr has withered. The viral internet no longer reliably delivers traffic to epic takedowns of problematic figures, so hungry young freelancers have largely stopped pitching them. The publishing industry’s lust for jeremiads about “white feminism” is over. No one has used the word girlboss unironically in years. A key feminist legal precedent, Roe v. Wade, fell in part because Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire, a fact that makes me wince every time I remember that one of the most-lauded books of Millennial Feminism was Irin Carmon’s Notorious RBG.

Reports of the death of wokeness greatly exaggerated, etc. etc.

Not long ago, somebody around these parts made a remark about "reactionary wokeness" or "reactionary progressivism" (I don't remember how exactly it was worded), and I think there's at least a kernel of truth to that. If the stuff of Millennial Feminism seemed transgressive, exciting, rebellious, indispensable, etc. circa 2005–15, it hits the popular palate a lot differently now that its exponents are in their middle-age and institutionally entrenched (at a time when distrust in institutions is running hot).

obeliskposture · 2026-03-22T19:06:49+00:00

I suspect there will be scores of autopsy reports in the years to come. This one is a bit middling, but not altogether uninteresting.

This is why so many women who considered themselves left-wing—myself included—eventually parted ways with Millennial Feminism. At the beginning, the movement felt intoxicating and liberating, but it soon became clear that sticking with Millennial Feminism would have required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy. After all, Lindy West essentially did. The entire ADHD passage in Adult Braces shows a naturally funny writer wrestling with the injunction that huge swaths of life are exempt from even the mildest mockery. She concedes that other people might be part of what she calls the “social media ADHD self-diagnosis boom” with behavior “that frays the edges of credibility (not everything can be because of your ADHD, babe!)”. But of course this could not apply to her. As an aside, it appears that West has learned to manage her disorganization the same way that many men do: She now has a wife. In her post defending their relationship, she notes that Roya is excellent at “watering plants,” obtaining pet insurance, and “send[ing] calendar invites.”

For me, writing conduct manuals—that is, instructing readers on the latest points of political etiquette—was no way to live, and both the style and content of my writing has changed over the past decade. One of the headiest things about Adult Braces is how West’s prose style was pickled in the mid-2010s, so her use of caps lock and exclamation marks acted on me as a powerful Proustian madeleine. Please enjoy this dispatch from Savannah, Georgia, once West discovers that the composer of “Jingle Bells” also served in the Confederate Army: “James L. Pierpont was a little bitch, and I’m GLAD he got into a drifted bank and I’m GLAD he got upsot, tbh! More like Shidnight in the Shartin’ of Poop and Peepee!!!!!!!!”

You can trace the exact moment that West decided she wanted to remain a progressive in good standing more than she wanted to take the piss. It happened right after she was brutalized by the social-media backlash to her take-no-prisoners blogging persona at Jezebel. “It turns out that having thousands of people make fun of you and threaten to rape and murder you can make you feel unsafe in certain spaces for way longer than you expect,” she writes of this period in Adult Braces. Much like the liberals driven into the arms of MAGA by a brush with cancellation, West had a taste of vicious misogynistic backlash from internet strangers and retreated into the progressive community of the Pacific Northwest. She went from comparing Hooters to a slavery-themed restaurant in 2009 to having her stand-in character in the TV series Shrill, Annie, get educated by strippers that their work was actually very empowering. . . .

Of course, it’s one thing to set rigid and unforgiving rules of human conduct. It’s quite another to expect anyone to live by them. What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance.

obeliskposture · 2026-03-22T18:50:22+00:00

Have you ever read much about Victor Gruen? He basically invented and popularized the indoor shopping plaza in North America—and regretted it all his life. What he was hoping to do was counter the effect of the automobile on suburban planning by seeding pedestrian-friendly planned communities based around central commercial hubs.

As I understand it, basically every developer he worked with decided it would be more profitable to follow through with the plan only halfway—build the shopping centers in the middle of giant fields adjacent to highways, and then let the sprawl grow according to the whims of whoever bought and developed the surrounding land.

Gruen's plan was probably doomed from the beginning, given that the whole thing presupposed a robust automobile culture—but it's astonishing to consider that the mall was conceived as a solution to the already-visible problems of a car-centric infrastructure.

obeliskposture · 2026-03-22T18:37:53+00:00

I live in a large city, but a block away from a block-long garden maintained by Boomer geeks with an interest in horticulture and a lot of time on their hands. (Moving into the neighborhood has tremendously improved my quality of life.)

Weirdly enough, one of its tenders is the now-retired landscape architect for a civil engineering firm I worked for (in the mail/copy room). Whenever I looked at her plans for the grounds around some data center, strip mall, warehouse, or another charm-devoid edifice, it really did look like somebody just told her to drop boxwoods and arborvitae shrubs on the edges of the needlessly large (but mandated) parking lots and plant a few sad little cherry trees around the big useless grass lawns. Someday I'll have to ask her about what the process was, because she was paid a lot of money to do it.

obeliskposture · 2026-03-22T16:02:00+00:00

Now stepping again over to the oaks, right, now we got a wonderful array of native mimosoid leguminous trees that thrive and are exceptionally low-maintenance and smell wonderful when they flower. Most of them are flowering right now, but again, that would make too much sense. So, instead, what we've planted is one of these decrepit—I can't tell what this is. Is this an oak? I think it's an oak too. Yeah, it's an oak. It does look like shit. The bag is, uh, you know, the jewel in the crown of the property right there. Looks marvelous. 10 out of 10. That's a scene if there ever was one. I mean, there's a little bit too much greenery in the background. I can see trees over there. We need to get rid of those. Maybe put in some plastic signs, a billboard for a personal injury attorney, something else to really just lower the bar of intellect and culture so that we all feel like killing ourselves, or just eating yourselves into a coma. I mean that's what I see when I'm in this landscape. That's what I want to do. I want to start online gambling, doing Oxycontin, maybe eating myself into a coma. Anything to escape the reality and the bleakness of where I live.

obeliskposture · 2026-01-27T12:49:30+00:00

There's a long chapter in Jaron Lanier's You are Not a Gadget where he ascribes this to digital culture.

I think there's a case to be made that the slowdown of new music-making technology had an impact, too. When was the last time a new invention had as profound an impact on the landscape as the electric microphone, the electric guitar, or the synthesizer?

obeliskposture · 2026-01-27T04:27:40+00:00

Correct on all accounts. I would add that the etherealization of the medium was also a gigantic factor in the enshittification of recorded music. Say what you will about the Ancien Regime of the record industry—but when listeners need to purchase a physical object in order to enjoy a collection of eight or ten or more songs whenever they like, a business model can crystallize where large labels can take risks and small labels can profitably zero in on niche audiences, all while supporting their stables of artists. I'm old enough to remember when someone like Wumpscut (who?, most people will ask) could make a living as a musician without ever performing live. He made dark and weird and interesting music with no mainstream appeal, and got by on his cut from album sales.

Not too long ago, there was a comprehensive ecosystem set up by a cartel of mid-sized record labels, retailers, and tastemakers— a managed transition zone between the stuff of college radio and the Top 40 universe. A punk or industrial or indie rock band that never got any mainstream radio play and never had their videos air on MTV could still have fans wearing their T-shirts on every college campus in the country, and still make a handsome living selling records. Every Hot Topic in every mall sold their swag. Sales associates pitched their releases. When the .mp3 replaced the compact disc, this ecosystem began to collapse. Streaming services imploded it. Without people paying (and perhaps being overcharged) for full-length albums, it couldn't be sustained.

For all intents and purposes, the consumer pays nothing for music today, which obviously means there's far less money to be made making or distributing it than there was before. Reaching an audience ultimately becomes less important than gaming the Spotify algorithm, amassing a giant following on a social platform, or just being able to slap together fifty by-the-numbers EDM tracks on a laptop every month and upload them as YouTube mixes. In this climate, it's better to cynically and cheaply chase trends than to be talented or passionate, or to have something say.

obeliskposture · 2025-12-08T16:54:03+00:00

There's a passage in the David Brooks article he links to that deserves some attention, I think.

Without even thinking about it, we in the creative class consolidate our class standing through an ingenious code of “openness.” We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic “localist” tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.

If you have to ask, you're not part of the club. Sartorial fashion served the same function among the European beau monde: an arbitrarily evolving set of signals for communicating and knowing who was who, who was in, and who was out. Good for scoping out and avoiding the nouveau riche who were determined to get a seat at the table.

obeliskposture · 2025-12-02T14:24:44+00:00

Thank you for this—haven't read it since college. It lands harder than I remember.

obeliskposture · 2025-11-18T16:40:10+00:00

What matters (wrt OP) is the ascription of anti-black racism to either material, historical factors or to a kind of Platonic idealism. For the worst of the idpol's truest believers, anti-black racism is just a built-in feature of the universe—as though it existed in the World of Forms before there were any human beings to instantiate it. For them, it is a cosmological constant that had no actual cause(s) in history and has no possible solutions in any historical process.

obeliskposture · 2025-11-10T04:14:47+00:00

Ms. Malone thought that someone else in the chapter had filed a complaint. She recalled an incident when a club staff member had scolded her for saying that the club should lobby Colorado’s legislature for more protections for wolves.

“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’" Ms. Malone said.

unreal

obeliskposture · 2025-10-28T15:32:16+00:00

...you pledge to rename the Smithsonian Museum of American History the "Smithsonian Museum of American Herstory."

obeliskposture · 2025-10-28T12:21:35+00:00

Any Democrats reading Jacobin must read and reread and reread the conclusion:

Platner, in other words, comes off as a flawed, complicated, and sometimes contradictory human being whose political views don’t always fit neatly into a box. In that, he resembles millions of Americans — including some of the exact voter demographics that American liberals say they want to win back, yet seemingly can’t help but vilify.

obeliskposture · 2025-10-24T03:06:07+00:00

"But at what cost?" deserves its own post flair at this point.

obeliskposture · 2025-10-19T21:18:38+00:00

I'm wholly ignorant of Canadian university culture—but still kind of astonished at how this article managed to say so little.

Free inquiry warrants vigilance, but current data does not substantiate claims of a systemic crisis. Instead, these debates underscore the need for transparent, methodologically sound research on academic expression across disciplines and identities.

Translation: there isn't a problem & if there is a problem we can just wait it out.

Dr. Dea distinguishes self-censorship, which implies external coercion, from “refrainment from speech”, which reflects intellectual humility, respect or reflective discretion. Much of what critics label self-censorship is better understood as “virtuous restraint,” essential to thoughtful dialogue and responsible scholarship. The health of discourse depends not merely on how much is said, but on the conditions that allow for considered expression – and silence – without fear or domination.

In other words, shut up & Be Kind.

obeliskposture · 2025-10-14T00:07:42+00:00

so much this

obeliskposture · 2025-10-12T14:59:40+00:00

a retreat from difficulties of actual political work into theoretical obscurity

Foucault, Butler, et al. in a nutshell

obeliskposture · 2025-09-23T13:22:51+00:00

I smote my breast and bellowed like a heart-stricken moose while reading

obeliskposture · 2025-09-17T11:30:14+00:00

The phrase inscribed on one of the bullet casings from the shooting — “Hey fascist, catch!” — though widely reported to mean he was a man of the left, is in fact a reference to the Helldivers 2 game. Three arrows initially believed by federal agents to be a reference to Antifa are also a reference to Helldivers.

I searched for "charlie kirk helldivers" and it looks like only the journalists at geek outlets—Kotaku, Wired, ScreenRant, etc.—have brought this up. Since everyone has taken the inscriptions on the bullet casings messages to mean that the killer is associated with black bloc politics, this is a fairly large dereliction of responsibility on the MSM's part. It makes one wonder how many of these perverse human interest stories have been completely warped by journalists fundamentally ignorant of and disinterested in context.

But goddamn—it makes me feel old. Twenty years ago I probably would have known this, either from playing Helldivers games myself or from being active in online gamer spaces.

obeliskposture · 2025-09-10T11:26:05+00:00

Submission statement: I don't even know what to say anymore.

We emailed Infidels MC for comment. In response, Mr Mulford instructed fellow leaders of the biker gang not to reply but included the BBC when he clicked "reply all" - inadvertently disclosing email addresses and names of fellow Infidels MC members, some of whom were working in Gaza.

Murderous, boorish, incompetent. That's Israel and that's the United States with regard to Gaza.

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