Category web log

• What I'm reading: Mob Rule

  Mob Rule, by John Ganz

  The relatively respectable right is suddenly discovering that we are close to full employment and suggests that the angry young men take the available, well-paying—if modest—jobs. Christopher Rufo pointed out that working as a manager at Panda Express could pay well and was nothing to be ashamed of. The angry, alienated men and their tribunes aren’t having it. That’s the same “bootstraps” bullshit they’ve heard from the liberals for all these years. They don’t believe in the empty myths of honest toil and upward mobility anymore. The American dream, as far as they are concerned is, dead. In the view of the mob, undeserving women and minorities are hoarding all the treasure and it has to be ripped away from them. Every “normal” possibility open to them is humiliating. Only the massive windfalls of gambling and speculation seem like an honorable alternative.

  What we are witnessing is a faultline in the coalition the right has built up this past decade. The right is now an alliance between the remnant of the bourgeois conservatives, who still more or less believe in the old social ethic—traditional norms around work, family, personal discipline, and productive labor—and what we should call the mob.

  Posted 17 January 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Posting

  WHEN YOU’RE BLOGGING IN the era of posting (thank you, reader Matthew of Bellevue Hill) you subject yourself to a few annoying constraints, like not having an easy phone app you can tap your malformed thoughts into, like having an effectively infinite word limit instead of a crisp punchy microblog format, like the knowledge for better or worse that your blog is being archived for posterity. Most of all though when you consider the fundamental shift that happened somewhere around 2014, between writing in the different formats, you realise that microblogging, tweeting, or whatever you choose to call posting, involved a fundamental shift away from obligation.

  Posted 8 January 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Immoderation

  BLUESKY HAS BECOME THE happening place if what you want is to talk about Bluesky, as the well-trod joke goes. There's an ongoing exodus of people leaving twitter, as the result of the US Presidential election making stark, finally, what it is, to other microblog services (Bluesky, but also the fediverse), or to nothing. The experience of being part of a social network is always about the message you're receiving, by dint of membership, and sometimes, as is happening now, lots of people decide it's not very good. In 2022 I wrote that the then experience of twitter shared a lot with the 20th century experience of talkback radio, especially in the power of the choices producers made, to shape the message people heard out of the random chat:

  Posted 12 November 2024 | Author Liam Hogan

• Weird Shit

  AMERICA IS A WEIRD society, in the full sense of the notion of weirdness. It is large, diverse, dynamic, but those are just cliches that everyone from Tocqueville on has observed. What it truly is is weird, in that its society doesn’t necessarily obey sensible or regular laws. Compare: anyone who has ever gone doorknocking for a political campaign in Australia will know that the spectrum of things that people believe is extraordinary, and well, well beyond the boundaries of what’s sensible or supportable by evidence, sometimes even what’s tolerable, but mostly there’s a lot of weird shit. If you start talking to people in unstructured conversations, you’re going to get very strange ideas bubbling up. People in Australian electorates are weirder than we think, maybe weirder than we can think. As odd as Australia can be, America is magnitudes stranger.

  

  Posted 8 November 2024 | Author Liam Hogan

• Building classes

  THE BUILDING CODE OF Australia categorises all buildings into one of ten classes. The buildings mentioned in Ike and Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits can be allocated the following categorisations:

  Posted 19 October 2021 | Author Liam Hogan

• Catallaxy

  CATALLAXY FILES, THE AUSTRALIAN right-wing blog that was central to the local mid-2000s early-2010s blogging culture, and Larvatus Prodeo’s counterpart across ideology, has closed. Its domain points to its own archive held by the Commonwealth.

  Posted 2 August 2021 | Author Liam Hogan

• Cardboard record player

  THE SIMPLE CARDTALK RECORD player was developed to play phonograph records without electricity.

  (In the spirit of the web log I am going to post more things that I read)

  Posted 13 May 2021 | Author Liam Hogan

• The Manual

  IN 1988 THE KLF published The Manual, or How To Have A Number One The Easy Way. Like the band’s music, it’s both instantly dated and completely timeless. It might be one of the most significant manifestoes of the 20thC or it might be a worthless cynical PR pamphlet. A fan has transcribed it into plaintext and hosted it.

  Money is a very strange concept. There will be points in the forthcoming months when you might not have the change in your pockets to get the bus into town at the same time as you are talking to people on the telephone in terms of tens of thousands of pounds. Some of the following might seem contradictory but in matters of money they often are. We spoke earlier of how being on the dole gives you a clearer vision of how society works. What it doesn’t do is give you a clear idea of how money works…

  Posted 12 February 2021 | Author Liam Hogan

• Achewood smell jokes

  RUNNING FROM 2001 TO 2016, more or less, Chris Onstad’s webcomic Achewood was one of the more remarkable cultural artefacts of the 2000s web. While a lot of it hasn’t aged well, there are other elements to it that remain incredibly powerful (the Michael Jackson strip from 2009 manages to sit in both columns). Roast Beef’s depression and anxiety, which are played on as subjects for jokes, are also treated far more seriously and humanely than in far ‘better’ works of literature. It’s completely internally inconsistent, surreal, some of it’s over-written, and ought to sit with the greats of Americana.

  At a fundamental level I am an immature person and have always appreciated an under-recognised part of Achewood’s running humour—jokes based on the sense of smell.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  The fart joke is one of the standards of comic writing, and should be treated as fundamental to literature as a 12-bar blues riff is to music.

  Posted 3 September 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Detail accounts

  BECAUSE ONE BLOG IS never enough I started recently taking photographs of, and making commentary about, architectural vents and grilles. It's an extremely niche and (I hope) harmless thing to do with my time, and seems to fit what I realise is a broader interest I've got in other people's projects of documenting specific urban environmental characteristics.

  Posted 15 January 2019 | Author Liam Hogan