wilt | election anxiety mix, gene wilder and richard pryor, emahoy, natalie, jason
"if you’re going to rip the heart out of democracy, you get people used to lies”
one
Sharing my 2024 election anxiety mix, in case you, too, need to rage and soothe yourself at the same time.
Headbang, hold up a lighter, do child’s pose, dance, scream — just let it out.
two
Gene Wilder loves on Richard Pryor.
three
Two dreamy minutes of Emahoy on the piano. I only discovered this song, Aurora, a little over a week ago and I’m sure it’s already made my most played songs of 2024. The day before I heard it for the first time my friend Christina shared a photo of the northern lights in Iceland. Now the song and the image are linked in my head:
four
Writing this post about the four most common unconscious beliefs about money had me rewatching one of my favorite Contrapoints videos on Envy. I especially loved her analysis of SpongeBob, that millennial queen:
“Squidward aspires to artistic achievement but remains in mediocrity, partly because of his overly dry, doctrinaire attitude towards art. Spongebob is Squidward's social equal, they're literally neighbors, and they both work the same fast-food service job for the same exploitative capitalist. But Spongebob is a Mozartean intuitive genius who's able to transform the most mundane activities: blowing bubbles, flipping burgers, into a kind of aesthetic rapture. Squidward intensely envies Spongebob's uninhibited joy and intuitive creativity, but he can't admit that envy to himself. So he convinces himself that what he's really feeling is contempt, snobbish disdain for Spongebob's childish behavior.
Squidward: "What the people want is culture, not dancing bubbles."
Though deep down, Squidward really wants what Spongebob has.
Squidward: "IT’S BEAUTIFUL! 🥺 Uhhhhhh, I mean uh– 😠"
Which we see when he can't help himself from blowing bubbles, or when he trades away all of his possessions for the chewing gum wrapper that in Spongebob's hands was a source of infinite entertainment.”
five
“If someone really powerful is humiliated when they’re caught lying, that’s the core of political equality. So if you’re going to rip the heart out of democracy, you get people used to lies.”
“Here’s a fact about humans: we all pretty much suck to the same degree. One group of us is not better than another group of us. Hierarchy is central here because it’s the big lie at the center of things. What is racism but one big lie? Racism is a lie that one group is better than another…Once you convince people that they’re justifiably higher on the hierarchy, then you can tell them they’re the victims of equality.”
- “The 10 tactics of fascism” - Jason Stanley, The Big Think
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