Jesus H Christ is it a crime to be messy these days or what? Seriously, the optimisation metrics, this ideology of converting every micro-event into revenue is becoming very effing suffocating. Like seriously, is there no inch on god’s green (ish) earth safe from the parasitic reach of The Economic Incentive? In this vacuum packed cat suit of a social climate the rats wonder about the true value of performative politeness, and whether we might be better off showing each other our teeth every once in a while; especially seeing as the edicts of politeness are rooted in maintaining bourgeois orders, vertically stacked ones of the haves and have nots etcetera. This is obviously not licence to treat other people badly, but it is something of a call to consider the essential mysteries of being human and act accordingly, to treat each other as the exhaustive evolutionary miracles we are rather than a collection of standardised pathologies and KPIs, with trackable social-media interfaces. God forbid we should try to confuse the lines drawn for us by acting outside of them, however this might look . Something of a necessity, actually, when those lines are put in place by a sprawling network of genocidal imperialism.

Anyway The Devil Wears Prada 2 is out! While one rat feels meh about it the other is candidly surprised by how not shit it is. Obviously things could’ve gone either way. While Sam hasn’t seen it (on principle) Johanna breaks down all the ways it tries (we’ll assume limply) to lambast the vacuity of fashion under late stage capitalism, which is as far away from being art as Christopher Luxon is from being a competent prime minister. But just like Luxon, Prada 2s more cutting critique’s of capitalism overall are…absent. But I guess you’ve gotta give it its chops, that a film about fashion coming out in a world where luxury consumerism is provenly anything but benign (this isn’t 2006 anymore) could even attempt to have some acumen, some awareness, even though it clearly doesn’t reach Sontag levels of criticism. I guess it’s sort of like watching a criminal lawyer (maybe Epstein’s?) monologue about the evils of lying. Or watching an evangelical christian pastor with a DL Grindr account lecture a room of depressed normies about the sanctity of marriage. In a nut shell, the call is coming from inside the house.

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