The Sorensen Monologues
Archive for August, 2023
The Labor Channel
Market hype, with its seductive appeals to dreams of getting rich, gets blasted out 24/7 on various networks, not to mention a slew of financial publications. Yet there is no corresponding entity that reports moment-to-moment on the struggles of ordinary people to get paid a living wage, or not have their bodies destroyed in a warehouse.
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Self-Parodic Sages
Last week Bill Maher posted an extended screed against the Barbie movie, calling it “preachy, man-hating, and a #ZombieLie,” the Zombie Lie being that patriarchy still exists. According to Maher, it is “something that USED to be true but no longer is, but certain people pretend it’s still true.” His cherry-picked proof of this is that the Mattel board is currently more diverse than the one depicted in the movie. Of patriarchy, he writes: “Yes, there was one, and remnants of it remain – but this movie is so 2000-LATE.”
Mind you, Maher is saying this in the wake of the Trump administration’s over-the-top misogyny, a massively toxic male supremacist movement led by the likes of Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson and others, and the Supreme Court decision ending abortion access for millions of women. Around the world, whole populations are swooning over authoritarian “strongmen.” If anything, patriarchy is becoming more entrenched than I ever expected to see in my lifetime.
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Makeover for a Takeover
It kind of blows my mind that callow internet trolls can attain public intellectual status by throwing on a sport jacket and a title at a bogus think tank. There’s an entire infrastructure on the right that funds and rewards extremist charlatans, lending them a veneer of professional respectability that dupes mainstream news outlets into platforming them as thought leaders. (For a recent example, see this article.)
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Thinking Big
The “big ideas” described in panels one and three are absolutely real. OceanGate submersibles co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein recently described his plans for a 1,000-person colony on the hot and gassy planet of Venus, noting that some parts of its toxic atmosphere have Earth-like temperatures. And disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried had been planning to buy the island nation of Nauru with his brother in order to build a doomsday bunker and laboratory to perform experiments on “human genetic enhancement.” Never mind the little detail that Nauru is not for sale.
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