Let's talk about Vice Magazine

But it also seems to me that you don't like John Ashcroft, and you don't like him because you've decided that his particular transgressions and his particular rebellions against the status quo aren't positive or productive ones.

So I absolutely cannot believe you're pretending there's some deep trick to the question I asked you earlier (and consequently skirting the entire point of it). There are a great variety of actions that violate norms in a great variety of ways. Clearly this doesn't mean that they're all good. Having people running around smeared with their own feces, for example, would be highly transgressive and would certainly get people talking, but it would also stink.

There is nothing at all antlike about pointing that out, to you or to Bob Dylan. Breaking down "the status quo" -- which let's note is a term you introduced to this discussion, so stop trying to backtrack into "there's no such thing" -- is not inherently good: it's only productive if you're breaking down a part of the status quo that for some reason needs to be broken down. What you're doing is saying "I unquestioningly support emptying the bath out the window, in all cases." And all I'm saying is you have some sort of responsibility, in each case, to think about the ratio of baby to bathwater therein.

Mein...gott...they...are...even...more...stupid...than...I...feared...or...dreamed.

and if we're reducing this argument to cliches, all i'm saying is ilx has some responsibility to think about the ratio of thrown rocks to glass houses here.

yes, i realize that message boards and magazines have different functions but a lot of the criticisms of vice here centre around it's glibness, hipness, cynicism, emotional remove, shock-for-shock's sake, ambivalence about stereotypes, etc. all of which ILx and most normal, intelligent people indulge in from time to time.

Yeah, it was a great example of how satirical intent can catastrophically backfire!

suzy criticizes momus's ideas as "so 1992" ... describes williamsburg as an "alterna-mall" for people clinging to their college days (while gavin from vice refers to wmsburg as "the big dorm" & "the flipflop capital of the world" or something) - where's the difference?

and btw I'm not citing Suzy dismissively, I love reading her stuff but she is hip and glib and sometimes cruel like it or not. It's not a crime - it can be an asset, why deny that? She also seems to have the smarts and empathy to back it up - and that's where Vice is lacking.

He's saying that its up to people to work out for themselves whether a transgression is good - eg against the status quo of British colonial rule - or bad.

Your 'Momus do you like Ashcroft?' point is silly, though. You can't be solicitor general and still be in any way 'transgressive' or 'against the status quo'. Power changes everything.

People on ILX oftentimes write in a hip, glib and cruel manner in the context of a conversation; one person writes something, someone responds (usually within minutes), someone else chimes in, the original point may be expanded upon or retracted, offensive things may be retracted or explained or pushed even further, but there is a constant back-and-forth that allows a community to form where certain turns of phrase become part of the common lexicon, usually because of a shared experience among the people using them ("grebt", "HEIN?", "U+K", "(and then they all lez up)", kitten pictures, "b*ngb*s", Ma$e vs William Henry Harrison, etc).

One is a formal mode of communication exploiting informal tropes to generate interest and controversy as a ploy to grab readers, the other is a group of people who enjoy talking (shit) to each other in a medium that happens to be viewable to a wider audience. One is a business venture that has turning a profit as its bottom-line goal, the other does not. One involves some amount of turnaround time on calling someone on saying something stupid, while on the other you can be brought to task immediately if someone disagrees with you.

These differences, particularly with respect to Vice being a captial-driven venture, make comparing the way people write for Vice to the way people write on ILX completely nonsensical and illogical to me.

As for Ashcroft, I can't think of any way in which thinking of dancing as an inherently sinful act doesn't constitute a massive break from the conventional wisdom of the vast majority of people on the planet, let alone in this country. Go ahead and remove Ashcroft from the equation -- are you any fonder of the dirt-poor Pentecostal in Missouri who believes the same thing?

'So (insert year here)' is a joke Nick and I have. To bring you up to speed, we are very good friends and to his credit, Nick doesn't call people twats, assholes or any other name if they don't agree with him or piss him off on message boards.

I don't much like the names Gavin Vice calls his 'friends' but he is spot-on about Williamsburg, if a hypocrite for living or working there. I think it perfectly creditable to criticise that place for those reasons and can remember when the only things there were Domsey's and a steak house.

OK, vice & ilx are apples and oranges, but you can compare them under the broad category of fruit... and these two don't really taste so different to me.

also, people don't get paid much to write for vice if that matters. and I think you're making a big mistake to give paid writers any more authority than unpaid ones

Hm. Well, a VERY random comparison here, but it might have something to it -- I get paid for my AMG writing, but I think it's pretty clear that you'll find a lot more of everything from the personal touch to to really in-depth discussion of music or songs or what have you on any number of blogs written sheerly for love. Certainly I think so.

Momus: "n-a" WAS the context for a good 200 years. Then something called the civil war happened. You may have heard of it.

The whole "paid vs unpaid" thing isn't so much an issue of giving paid authors more authority as much as it is a personal feeling that if you're going to be paid for something, it shuold be produced to a particular standard. This goes back to the comment I made (or intended to make) earlier about the problem not being with the writers per se as much as it was with the editors for letting them get away with writing shit.

Relevant indeed.

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one Fritz. I think instant right of reply completely changes the context of writing; you don't. I think that in the idea "bits of ILX are like Vice" the "bits of" part counterbalances the "like" part; you don't seem to. Fair enough but I can't think of anything either of us can say now to convince the other.

Jess - thanks for your contribution to the masterplan ;)

Oh, so the people who write for Vice have no power, do they? And if I'm a black person and I know what's in Vice and I see a bunch of beery loudmouths coming down the street at 3AM wearing 'Vice' t-shirts, do I offer to shake their hands in the spirit of love and multiculturalism? You're absolutely right that power changes everything, and with a large readership and a burgeoning media empire, I'd say the Vice boys have racked up a significant amount of it.

The article says 'In the old days, being on the side of nerds was subversive. Now, when Bill Gates rules the world, it isn't. So to be subversive, we need to do something else. Reset your watch, pay attention to the changed context!'

After reading the article several times, this line of thinking did occur to me. Except that it's interesting how you're deliberately vague in your categorization of the 'new way to be subversive', because the new way they're proposing in that article is to return to the violent persecution of the weak. Even if you don't take it as literally as I just did, the whole attitude still reeks of proto-fascism.

(I was going to tell Momus off for making slippery and untenable arguments, but hell, at least it keeps the conversation going. When was the last time I dropped all interest in school work to argue on ILX? Probably Spring 2001, actually.)

If....