The #PremierLeagueOfBondThemes table as we enter Matchday 5. OHMSS has been treated shamefully so far, but surely it will chalk up its first win against Another Way to Die (you should have at least tried to find some rhymes for Quantum of Solace you cowards!) Vote below...

#PremierLeagueOfBondThemes Matchday 5

(Key to track titles which aren’t named after the film
Nobody Does it Better=Spy Who Loved Me
Writing’s on the Wall=Spectre
All Time High=Octopussy
We Have all the Time in the World=secondary theme OHMSS
Another Way to Die=QoS
You Know My Name=Casino Royale)

More from Culture

foone
@Foone

So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much

So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.

Jo Luehmann
@JoLuehmann

I am going to say something very uncomfortable. Read before you react please.

Purity culture encourages pedophilia, a thread:

Purity culture encourages pedophilia.

Some of the standards of purity culture are innocence (pretty much ignorance about sex), submission (for women), virginity as the ultimate standard, and “modesty” (for women that is wearing clothes that don’t reveal their adult curves)*
1/

Purity culture makes the desirable standard a child. It makes child likeness desirable in regards to sexuality. It makes virginity, and innocence, and submission; what the male brain should want most in a partner. And your brain doesn’t rewire just because you get married.
2/

This doesn’t mean every man raised in purity culture is a pedophile, that’s not what I am saying. What I am saying is that purity culture wires the brain of men to desire child likeness, which encourages pedophilia. After all desire and objectification happen in our brain.

3/

Now if you are a pedophile who wants to act on those desires, purity culture does a lot of the grooming for you. Purity culture discourages comprehensive sex education leaving children without the ability to know what’s appropriate and what’s not.

4/

$Henry George \u0646$

Henry George ن
@intothefuture45

Thread: *Post-Liberal reading list*
1/ Religion and the Rise of Capitalism - R.H. Tawney
Unto This Last - John Ruskin
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - James Fitzjames Stephen
The Great Transformation - Karl Polanyi
The Quest for Community - Robert Nisbet

2/ Family and Civilisation - Carle C. Zimmerman
Science, Politics and Gnosticism - Eric Voegelin
Liberty Before Liberalism - Quentin Skinner
The Great Debate - Yuval Levin
Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love - Grant Havers
Where We Are - Roger Scruton

3/ The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry - Various
The Unsettling of America - Wendell Berry
Moral Matters - Mark Dooley
Red Tory - Phillip Blond
Blue Labour - Eds. Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst
Together for the Common Good - Eds. Nicholas Sagovsky & Peter McGrail

4/ The Politics of Virtue - John Milbank & Adrian Pabst
Localism in a Mass Age - Eds. Mark T. Mitchell & Jason Peters
The Antimodern Condition - Peter King
The Principle of Duty - David Selbourne
Nostalgia - Anthony Esolen
A Common Human Ground - Claes G. Ryn

5/ The Politics of Gratitude - Mark T. Mitchell
A Time to Build - Yuval Levin
Remaking One Nation - Nick Timothy
Despised - Paul Embery
Defending Identity - Natan Sharansky
Between Kin and Cosmopolis - Nigel Biggar
The Virtue of Nationalism - Yoram Hazony

Dr. Leah Stokes
@leahstokes

For my book, I interviewed Texan Republicans, Democrats, oil guys + clean energy pioneers. Texas was once leading in wind energy, with GOP support. Now we get lies, from the Gov on down on renewables. What happened?

Lessons from Short Circuiting Policy https://t.co/KtxaBci5oC 🧵

Texas' challenges are not from "learning too many renewable energy lessons from California.” - Rep. Crenshaw

Texas passed its first renewable energy target in 1999, 3 years before California. The law was signed by, Gov. George W. Bush — you may recall he’s a Republican.

Gov. Bush was so proud of Texas’ leadership on wind energy, that he campaigned on it when running for President in 2000.

The "bill he signed in 1999 will make Texas the country’s largest market for renewable energy by 2009."
https://t.co/T4dKZ5qGnA

In 2005, Texas passed another big wind energy law, which included $7 billion for transmission.

It was sponsored by Republican state Senator Troy Fraser and signed by Republican Gov. Rick

With Gov. Abbott going on TV this week and lying, blaming the boogeyman “Green New Deal” and wind turbines for Texas’ current crisis, GOP leadership on renewables feels like ancient history.

What happened over the past 15

David Roberts
@drvolts

The more I think about the Bruce Springsteen Jeep ad, the more disgusted I get. It's allegedly a call for unity, but it is drenched in a very particular culture's iconography: a Christian church (that superimposes the cross on the US flag), farms, rural living, "the middle" ...

... it's all so white. This is the "America" of nationalist fairy tales: rural land, settled by self-reliant white farmers & good Christians. It's all trucks & dust & manual labor & squinting at the horizon while wiping sweat from your brow. This is the kind of "unity" ...

... designed to comfort (or at least not threaten) white people. It says, "let's unify by joining together to reaffirm America's mythical self-conception, despite the real-world violence & repression it has always entailed."

If I'm, I dunno, a latino housekeeper in Vegas or black Uber driver in Sacramento, what's in the commercial for me? What does this kind of "unity" promise me? What can I find in "the (mythical) middle"? Nothing. It's not for me.

If America ever does come together in some kind of social solidarity again (which looks pretty doubtful), it's not going to be around the myths & iconography of 20th century hegemonic white culture in the US. It's going to be around something NEW -- new stories, new icons.

Killing new-born twins was common practice in the 19th century among the Ibibio people of Nigeria, but one Scotswoman went to great lengths to put an end to this.

Aberdeen-born Mary Slessor was one of the few missionaries in Africa who learnt the local language, adapted to the native customs and environment and gained the trust of the locals in order to make a truly positive impact.

Her father, a shoe-maker from Buchan, became incapacitated by alcoholism and Mary more or less became the breadwinner for the family.

From the age of 11, she worked as a ‘half-timer’ mill girl in the Baxter Brothers and Co Ltd, spending half the day at a school provided by the mill owners and the other half working for the company

Patrick McKenzie
@patio11

So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.

If everyone was holding bitcoin on the old x86 in their parents basement, we would be finding a price bottom. The problem is the risk is all pooled at a few brokerages and a network of rotten exchanges with counter party risk that makes AIG circa 2008 look like a good credit.
— Greg Wester (@gwestr) November 25, 2018

The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.