524: Love Burn, the USA as baddies, and the first dystopic fiction
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I’m recovering from Love Burn, Miami’s regional Burning Man event.
I cannot recommend this event enough for the jaded Burners like me who love Burner culture but struggle with the harsh desert conditions. This is the closest experience I’ve experienced yet, just with all the hardship removed
My highlight was undeniably this guy flying a water jetpack while shooting flamethrowers over the beach.
A Recipe for Love Burn: Take one (1) Black Rock City.
Replace the remote desert venue with a tropical beach 20 minutes from the city.
Remove 90% of the people, but only 50% the experience (retaining sufficient theme camps, fire art, art cars, etc to get lost)
Add an Amazon and Uber delivery point just outside the gate, with ins and outs.
Sprinkle more gorgeous fashionable outrageous Miami humans in.
Keep the culture but add an 11th principle: consent. (does BM do this now?)
Burn for four days only, Thursday-Monday. Enjoy!
I finished We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, the 1921 grandfather of dystopic fiction and the first book to be banned by Soviet censors. It’s wild to read the inspiration behind so many books that color modern life, from Brave New World to 1984. And striking to see science fiction fearmongering phrased in terms of the then-fresh Taylorist principles.
Technology
https://uniquewishes.shop/ and other services like it let you order custom personalized dances from a dozen men in Africa (or other places) complete with your song of choice and a printed photo. At first I recoiled at the digital servitude, but then again, this is good easy money for them, and there’s a market of Westerners ready to pay. WDYT?
Ideologies
Socialist Youtuber Second Thought goes hard on the US with a video essay listing our nation’s worst activities over the years and claiming the US is the biggest obstacle to world progress.
Years ago I might have balked at a claim like this, but by now I’ve done enough self education to agree with the general direction and points of his argument. But I don’t buy the overarching conclusion.
Take the Korean War, which he lists here as equal in badness to the CIA’s Chile coup or the genocide of Native Americans. There’s no doubt that war was as ugly as any other, and civilians were killed unnecessarily, but look at North and South Korea now. Which one would you rather be born into? Having just visited there, I have pride in my country’s contribution to the modern South, no matter the anti-commie rationale.
And his assertion that Japan was ready to surrender and the US dropped the atomic bomb purely to intimidate the Russians is demonstrably false, as far as I can tell. Though I’m looking forward to digging into his sources, like the Blowback podcast.
That the retort that I never see from these leftists POVs - yes, the US uses the ‘big stick’ in terrible ways, but look at the non Western alternatives - China, Russia, Iran. A Pax Americana looks far more rosy than a Pax from any of those, even if a Pax Europeana is rosier, and the only way to main such a pax is with a bigger stick than the other guy. Or what am I missing?
Memes
Some friends and I covered Bo Burnham’s Bezos IV harmony, which was a blast:
The 2westerneurope4you subreddit is full of clever ironic memes like this one:
Good to know that about the Love Burn! I have been wanting to take my GF to Burning Man, but I don't think she will fare well in the conditions, so excited to hear about this.