Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"

[Dromedary]

This creature should not be a parent.

 

[CyrusKissFanClub]

It is not going too far to suggest that Dwight Schrute’s body symptomatizes the contradictory relation between proletarian and bourgeois under neoliberalism, in which the worker is forced not merely to specialize (to become ever less a person and ever more a part of a person) but to recite the corporate garbage, sing the corporate anthems, and manifest the corporate affects whose logic has been designed not to illuminate the worker’s condition but to annihilate everything but that condition.

I don't think Joe has ever visited a factory much less worked in one. In the West, the proletariat--as Marx understood it--doesn't exist. The specialization he refers to has been largely eliminated by automation and progressive HR policies where employees are regularly rotated to perform different tasks. This suits the employees--by reducing boredom--and the employer--who has gained some redundancy to deal with departures and absences.

The people that Joe is maligning by referring to them as proles have a pension/superannuation fund which usually has a component of equity in other corporations. Joe's imagined proletariat has an interest in the success of capitalism and the free market, which means they aren't members of the proletariat, i.e., they aren't in dialectical conflict with the bourgeoisie.

David Ricardo's labor theory of value--which Marx relies upon--doesn't work. This is a foundational problem in Marxian economics. Marx's ideas of exploitation are derived from a labor theory of value. If the labor theory of value fails then so too does most of Marxist theory.

This all parallels Joe's ignorance about psychiatry and psychology; Joe's ideas about economics are the same. In the same way that Joe fails psychiatry and psychology, so too he fails economics. Pretentiously referring to unmodified Freudian psychoanalysis is just as ignorant as referring to unmodified Marxist economics. Joe is like a time traveler from the 19th century who believes he has truth to deliver to the people of the 21st century.

I have tried fathoming how little intellectual curiosity someone must have if they read a book from the 19th or early 20th centuries and assumed that there has been no progress in those disciplines since that time. Economics and psychology are in stasis but literary theory is subject to change and progress. How would Joe respond to a psychologist who assumed he knew everything about literary theory because he read one (or many) 19th-century text(s) on the subject? No doubt he would call them ignorant and unqualified to hold an opinion.

 

[AMHOLIO]

I have accessed a copy of Closures. The art show does not actually feature in the book, so the goof is the reviewer’s, not Joe’s. I think I will read it, because of excellent passages like this:

I felt my brain melt. Please take breaks, I don't want you getting permanet brain damage from this.

No doubt he would call them ignorant and unqualified to hold an opinion.

To be fair, if you're not in his social circle or kissing his ass you're unqualified and ignorant.

 

[Bookwork]

The proletariat has yet to discover this fainéant's booklet about his inability to understand sitcom episodes. Amazon reports zero customer reviews for it and one rating of 4 stars. Even Mal couldn't be bovvered to leave a one-sentence rave review?

Best Sellers Rank: #2,275,514 in Kindle Store

Ye olde staggering penis is doing much better. Best Sellers Rank: #1,349,811 in Books

 

[2SLGBQTIA+ 2 Furious]

Ye olde staggering penis is doing much better

Took me a minute to parse this until I checked out the bibliography on Joe's Berkeley profile, which is a work of art. Sure it's been posted before but here's an archive.

When people refer to me, they use the pronouns "she," "her," and "hers."

 

[Trianon]

It's more broadly hilarious that anyone could think Michael Scott was the father figure of The Office.

That was his relationship with Erin and only Erin. The closest he comes to being Pam's father figure is when he fucked her mom! He's everyone's annoying little brother who cares about you but can't socialize properly.

I have accessed a copy of Closures. The art show does not actually feature in the book, so the goof is the reviewer’s, not Joe’s. I think I will read it, because of excellent passages like this:

I figured the Roy/Jim screwup was the reviewer's, but surprised they pulled the whole analysis out of their ass.

"Dwight Schrute's body"

In the intro chapter, Joe calls Dwight symbolically trans or something.

Joe's imagined proletariat has an interest in the success of capitalism and the free market, which means they aren't members of the proletariat, i.e., they aren't in dialectical conflict with the bourgeoisie.

Plus Dwight is a salesman. He literally makes crazy money on commissions, and I'm pretty sure it's canonical that he's the best salesman they have.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

Worse than any of that, it ignores Dwight's character. He wants to sing those slogans and recite that stuff. He legitimately loves the company just like Michael does. It matters to him.

The show lampshades Dwight's personal authoritarian and conservative (in many senses) virtues many times, he's not some oppressed worker molded into any of it. The show arguably goes even further than Joe does with its own self-awareness, most notably when Jim gives him a barely altered Mussolini speech and Dwight reads it to a business association to cheers and applause:

The show doesn't really praise anything about working culture, that was what it did different from all the workplace sitcoms that came before. The stuff we see in the show is presented as breaking out of the norm of boring everyday tasks. The vast majority of the antics come from Michael and Dwight's inability to recognize that the rest are just there for the paycheck. Dwight's the only one who actually wants to have Michael involved in his life. Even when it does the "Michael going away" stuff most of the characters except Jim and Pam basically don't care he's leaving. And the Jim/Pam relationship to The Office is because they're the characters that change over the series other than Michael.

 

[Autistic Nonetheless]

I though of writing a review for this but nooooo. Boring, boring, boring.
The only remotely interesting bits are when he drops the waffling deconstruction and jumps back into the familiar babble of queer theory.

Queerness, if one could risk an epigram, is the confusion be-
tween a desire and an identity; paradigmatically, the form of ob-
jective misrecognition that prompts one to wonder whether one
is treating the other as an idealized erotic object or as an alienated
ego ideal. I didn’t know if I wanted to do him or to be him. If queerness is
not the exclusive preserve of homosexuals, as queer theorists have
often insisted, that would be at least in part because heterosexuality
is powerless to resist queer anticipations: indeed, heterosexuality in
the strong sense is impossible, since in order to be recognizable as
an erotic object, an object must possess some element of relational
sameness, if only in the way that a raven is like a writing desk. Ho-
mosexuality, perhaps, would seem impossible on the same grounds,
except that the word homosexual accelerates this very contradic-
tion through a syntactic device: homo, for sameness, meet sexual,
for difference. A gun that is fired moves sharply from latency to ac-
tion, from identity to desire: it can’t bespeak a “jerk” who’s “queer
for guns” until it recedes from plot again, becoming a gun that has
been fired, ceasing to be a gun that is fired

Recklessly throwing the suggestion that queerness, as opposed to heterosexuality, is necessarily conscious of itself, and then hiding from the implications in the nonsense of a rhetorical device is at least something.
Otherwise the book is just such an odd pitch. It draws attention to Joe’s age (the most common citations being: Frasier, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and That ’70s Show) and is neither academic enough (it’s 90 pages without notes) to attract the field mice nor jokey enough to interest the X sewer rats.

The planned Amos ’n’ Andy relaunch exposes the degree to which the spa-
tial figuration of the television, the grid, arranged social contradic-
tions, making visible to audiences conflicts that might otherwise
have remained invisibly notional

That is slab of academic prose so dull I would hesitate to read it in the open air lest birds start falling frozen from the sky.

I started skipping at page 15, and did the rest over a brief lunch. No review im afraid but it is worse then Please, Miss, which, while inept, at least from the snippets I’ve read didn't feel this sluggish. Here even the deconstruction is lazy. It’s 70% description, with few attempts at style or jokes or fucking anything. The AGP bit I quoted earlier is the only time you can see him perking up.

(For a much better take on the subject ( TV taken seriously, not queerness) i recommend Play All: A Bingewatcher's Notebook by Clive James.)

 

[CyrusKissFanClub]

The philosopher Harry G Frankfurt published a booklet in 2005 entitled On Bullshit. Succinctly put, bullshit is speech and writing which shows a lack of concern for the truth, which is distinct from lies. Here are some excerpts from Frankfurt's booklet to elucidate the concept:



Joe is a virtuoso bullshitter. I've read only the preface of Closures and I am knee-deep in Frankfurtian bullshit. Consider:



Without citing a single psychology or sexology paper, Joe asserts that there is no such thing as heterosexuality. The pseudo-discipline of queer studies says so, so it must be true. What evidence of this does queer studies present? Joe doesn't tell us because no evidence for this claim is provided, it is merely asserted to be true in queer studies. This is exemplary bullshit. Joe has no regard for the truth. He could investigate his claim and substantiate it using empirical evidence. But he doesn't.

Joe proceeds to assert that heterosexuality is the product of Freudian reaction formation and that it is "unquestionably" an organ of power. More bullshit. I needn't refute these claims because they are merely assertions. Joe has presented neither the argumentation nor the required empirical evidence. He hasn't done the minimal work to determine whether reaction formation is real and not just a product of Freud's imagination. The most minimal amount of thought you could give to this matter is to consider that humans are a sexually reproducing species so heterosexuality would be the norm. But even this basic consideration has escaped Joe's feeble mind.

"I consider this work a feminist work of scholarship," writes Joe. I don't. Scholarship in the humanities requires argumentation--and when it touches material reality--empirical evidence. If Joe wants to play philosopher or psychologist it is incumbent on him to learn something about 21st-century philosophy and psychology. To do otherwise is to produce bullshit. The same for his dabbling in economics, penology, criminology, and sociology.

More broadly, there is nothing inherently wrong with analyzing fiction using psychology but it must be current social, cognitive, personality, and evolutionary psychology--not discredited Freudian nonsense and queer studies. But doing so would shift Joe from bullshitter to scholar and he seems happy to bullshit since his bullshit gets published.

 

[Bookwork]

What evidence of this does queer studies present? Joe doesn't tell us because no evidence for this claim is provided, it is merely asserted to be true in queer studies.

It's a religion.

 

[monstrous bubo]

Tard Baby reduced to tweeting out her greatest hits.


link | archive

The link is to a 2015 piece called Things I’ve Learned About Heterosexual Female Desire From Decades Of Reading. She was of course unable to write about what she’d learnt about female desire from decades of being a female.

And what of the man who is „little and sweaty and sleazy, like a sexual rat, idk”? Reader, she married him.

 

[Bookwork]

Stimulated, perhaps, by the NYT's "Who Is a 'Rodent Man'?" last Saturday?

A new term has cropped up to describe the faces of certain Hollywood actors, prompting many conversations — especially among the Styles team.

It is as inane a self-fellatio exercise as can be imagined, but a free read at least here: https://archive.ph/Sl1qt. If you make it to the end, you'll be rewarded with a link to a fresh topic Tard Waddler should def xit about immediately based on the woes of females her manly ears have heard:

The paper of record for the world's greatest power, ladies and gentlemen... and all the persons in between.

 

[cherrysour]

The philosopher Harry G Frankfurt published a booklet in 2005 entitled On Bullshit. Succinctly put, bullshit is speech and writing which shows a lack of concern for the truth, which is distinct from lies. Here are some excerpts from Frankfurt's booklet to elucidate the concept:

Just searched this thread for instances of the word “bullshit” and got 8 pages of results, which is honestly kind of impressive.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

Joe asserts that there is no such thing as heterosexuality

They say this. The same crowd asserts that homosexual behavior is normative and natural because animals engage in dominance humping and maybe in captivity do stress behaviors like getting confused and stealing a rock to nest on with another male. Natural! But then you say, if heterosexuality is not real, why does the same thing always predictably happen when you put a male and a female of the same species- cow, dog, cat, hamster, pigeon- in the same space? And they just flail their arms around and make disparaging noises like you're the retarded one.

 

[Mayhem]

Just to note: the ways that Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist theory are used in cultural studies are very different than the ways they are used in the social sciences of psychology and economics. Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in cultural studies is usually based around one of their concepts, such as the death drive, the mirror stage, or the Oedipus complex, and is more of a way of looking at the cultural role or relevance of a work rather than providing psychological insight about the artist or characters. Marxism in literary or cultural criticism, too, is based around concepts from Marx or Marxist philosophers such as materialism or class struggle. Honestly, I no longer feel qualified to discuss whether or not Joe’s analysis is good or not because I was redpilled on all of this years ago and I rarely think about it anymore (except when I’m watching a movie or TV show or it comes up on the internet somewhere). These books and articles are designed for an extremely small audience and are typically published because the professor must publish something in order to fulfill a research requirement. So, you can often see some wild bullshit; I don’t know if Joe’s particular brand of bullshit is any more or less bullshit than the rest of the bullshit that’s already out there.

ETA: There are some philosophers who will attempt to use actual scientific or economic or psychological concepts in their cultural analysis. The most famous example I can think of off the top of my head is Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, which I have seen being heavily criticized by actual biologists. I don’t doubt that D&G said a lot of erroneous things about actual rhizomes (they were druggies and master bullshitters, as continental philosophers often are), but think of these concepts as more of analogies used to help clarify points. Again, I am not defending this practice, but this is the “doctor of philosophy ” part of earning a PhD.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

He should explain this in more detail. I'd love to read a pamphlet from him about it.

It's a shame Joe doesn't read here because I'd like to challenge him to do it, and do it without citing Engels or anyone that cites Engels. (Not because it's not what Engels said, which is true, but just because.) I could do it, it would be bullshit and wrong because it's an absurd extrapolation from a single unevidenced premise, but I could do it. Could Joe do it? Could Joe do it without making it far worse?

Also, I loved the handwringing about using something from a TERF. Plus the multiple namedrops in those paragraphs with absolutely zero information about what parts of their work were being used or why or anything beyond chastising the reader if they aren't smart enough to know why Joe is clearly and obviously citing such masterworks.

 

[Dromedary]

Joe is so angry at someone called Charlotte Gill because ? and also, the disgusting scat-fuckpig culture of some depraved homosexuals is just as important as Shakespeare to teach young students. Anyone opposing this being taught is just homophobic because everyone knows all gay men love to wallow in filth and degradation. Honestly, Joe is one of the most virulently anti-gay shitbirds ever with this garbage.

 

[Treasure Champs]

Joe is so angry at someone called Charlotte Gill because ? and also, the disgusting scat-fuckpig culture of some depraved homosexuals is just as important as Shakespeare to teach young students. Anyone opposing this being taught is just homophobic because everyone knows all gay men love to wallow in filth and degradation. Honestly, Joe is one of the most virulently anti-gay shitbirds ever with this garbage.
View attachment 6083020View attachment 6083021View attachment 6083022

He needs some sort of prize for vague-posting, as no-one who does not already know what he is talking about is ever going to know what he is talking about. I can only assume 'pig subculture' is something gay, and I also assume that 'niche' is a nice way of saying, 'no-one gives a fuck what you and your five gay mates do on a Friday night, we are not giving you public money to write about it with one hand, k thanx bye'.

 

[Dromedary]

'niche' is a nice way of saying, 'no-one gives a fuck what you and your five gay mates do on a Friday night, we are not giving you public money to write about it with one hand, k thanx bye'.

I'm gay, I have long been aware by reading, of really digusting gay subcultures. Fistings and 70s depraved Mapplethorpe stuff. I'm really just sick and tired of heterosexual autogynephile dry drunk former addict Joe fucking Lavery trying to be edgy saying all gay men love the worst ugliest depravity. Or speaking of gay people at all, he's married to a testosteroned hog of a woman. Fuck him, he has no authority to speak, he is yet another heterosexual "queer" ruining the fuck out of what gay men and lesbians spent over a century to build. Just a poseur fucking loudmouth exiled to Michigan who IS NOT GAY. But definitely a cunt.

 

[everybody in Portugal]

Anyone that dismisses KiwiFarms as just a bunch of idiot cavemen simplistically laughing at autistic trannies should read the last few pages of this thread and then stfu forever. Thank you for such knowledgeable, erudite analysis, guys, I don't know of anywhere else on the internets that allows me to both say 'faggot' and be schooled on such a diverse range of subjects. I've learned more ITT in the last few days than I have anywhere else in the last few months, it's been great.

Truly, the 'Farms is a haven and Nool is doing god's work giving us all this place to come together and learn and analyse and giggle at the fat jowly man in the terrible dress. Y'all give me hope for the world