r/cushvlog

I am very fascinated by the visceral hate Gen Z has for this AAA nostalgia bait video game “mixtape” that has been released. As I understand it the game is white teenagers skateboarding in their suburbia while you listen to punk rock soundtracks and it is set in the 90’s. At the end of the game you have a confrontation with the police and they stand down because “they’re not such bad guys”! I am seeing dozens of comments discuss how irrelevant coming of age nostalgia stories feel now because the actual youth has been robbed of a future and is staring down food scarcity and energy shortages. So instead they are being marketed the youths of people who comparatively made it. More fascinating is the level of antagonism I am seeing for the first time in my life towards that Gen X white slacker “rebellious” attitude in movies like clerks or the breakfast club. Nothing these characters ever do in media is actually dangerous to the status quo, it’s simply listening to nirvana and cosplaying rebellion. For the longest time I never saw people comment on how every cool Gen x hipster is now a frothing reactionary. All those guys who loved Sonic youth now complain about wokeness and love cops.

Got his ass, Felix.

I really wish this moron would just fuck off.

The only thing he contributes these days are his pointless stories about someone he knew when he was 12 who did something he didnt like.

"Moving on from the shit eating conversation." LOL. Even Will knows it's over.

Curious as to yalls thoughts. Also not sure if I’m allowed to post writing. Should be free, lmk if you have to pay

I’m interested in discussion so I’ll just kind of pose the question. If we agree that efforts are being made to reduce the availability of healthcare to working people, they’re restricting health data, hospitals are closing, no doctors available anywhere, food/environment/chemicals, are all going to undercut the gains working class and middle class people have made in living beyond 72 and there is going to be a growing class disparity in health and life expectancy…..

…and … we’re seeing a declining appreciation of science, a mystical understanding about health, a distrust of doctors, medicine, vaccines..

…and .. at the same time, the most radical things are being done with gene therapy, life extension, stem cells, adrenochrome harvesting.. whatever.. the peak life expectancy for certain people could theoretically go to 200 years old.

SO… we could see a world where the ruling class lives 200 years and the rest live 50, creating such a dynamic of complete power over information, resources, everything, it would be unbreakable.

I’m aware this is already the situation when you look at the average life span of an American vs the lifespan of a person from Afghanistan. And we see the effects of that. So the possibility of a breakaway society departing that many orders of magnitude beyond a typical american is non-zero.

I think of it as a many thousand year rule of neo-pharaohs. What do you all think?

I don't know how I followed this sub but I agree with most of what y'all post. But what is Cushvlog? It's a guy in a YouTube channel named Chapo? I'm so lost.

Can someone explain? Can someone else link his YouTube? Can a different person link a popular YouTube video of his? Sorry if this is a dumb post.

Take a look at Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov and discuss the Oblomovism that permeates our current day lifestyles. Additional analysis of the writer of the novel, Ivan Goncharov and the novel's application to modern social issues.

I'm a newer fan who discovered Chapo in December of 2024. The main show and Matt's solo stuff have quickly become my favorite podcasts. As I've been listening through all the old Chapo and Cushvlog episodes, I've been trying to catch up on the past 10 years of Chapo in-jokes.

What's the deal with "SPEED BOAT DOPE 666"? It shows up on the Chapo emblem a lot, but I cannot find a source anywhere explaining what it means or where it comes from. And why does it seem to only appear on version of the logo where the Chapo reaper's head is replaced by the "Baseball Crank" logo?

That I've seen anyway. Spoilers.

Jeremiah is a disillusioned American soldier who was traumatized by war and wanted to retreat to a peaceful, lonesome life in the mountains. But as he is initially characterized as a naive, delusional noob, he totally fails to realize that he's not leaving the war behind, he's voluntarily stepping into an even worse one. It's not just getting into life or death battles with bears, wolves, and even nature itself, he's casually walking into a post-apocalyptic hell world, a swirling vortex of genocidal hatred and conflict, where the physical beauty of the landscape conceals the unimaginable horror of mass death and complete societal collapse that happened here. Dark vibes that still linger as a creepy backdrop in any frontier story. Like the ghosts of all the people who died from smallpox and manifest destiny are still there, silently haunting the land, brutally erased from the human story. Their history, culture, bloodlines, languages, just wiped off the face of the earth like they were never even there in the first place. And here comes Robert Redford to build a log cabin :)

The remnants of the native tribes we see in this movie really communicates it. They're an emaciated husk of what they used to be, and this could be me reading into it, because I just watched Last of the Mohicans last week also, but the sense of loss is palpable. A town is a pitiful little collection of tipis on the prairie, and you never see more than a handful of Crow at once. The reason this works so well is because it's never directly stated or laid on, they just leave it for you to feel. The creepiness of the American frontier is very similar to the eerie emptiness of an abandoned mall; this is IDEAL land, absolute paradise, it's beautiful, fertile, ripe with game and resources, this is exactly the sort of place where you should find society flourishing in abundance. It's BUILT for human habitation. And yet, Jeremiah goes on MONTHS long stretches without seeing a single person except a frozen corpse. The contrast is a constant reminder of why that is, and it never lets you feel comfortable despite the rolling green plains and idyllic mountain vistas inviting you into this little window to paradise.

The kitschy music and 'golly gee my family got murdered' tone had me skeptical until I finished, but I realized by the end that it actually contributes to the genius of this movie. That's the frontier ethos, you never really see any of these guys or any of the contemporary cultural commentators fully acknowledging the sheer horror of this place and time. Because then the entire American mythos really comes crumbling down. It's a perfectly artistic way of capturing not just the frontier itself and what it really was, but how it was viewed and related to by the people IN the movie. Jeremiah's desire to be a pacifist goes out the window when the Crow murder his new family, but when he's talking to his only friend on the plains about it when they meet back up some time later, all he can really say is "They weren't no trouble at all". Whether it's the inherently numbed moral ethos of the settler, or denial and disassociation of how dark and bloody this all is, the way the frontier was received and understood in culture even up to today- but certainly a lot more so back then, is upsettingly ill-fitting to what was really happening out there. The jarring contrast between a goofy, mildly glum little gee-tar ballad and this guy turning into fucking Guts from Berserk, being hunted down every single night by Crow assassins after they got into a vicious blood feud over the murder of his family and the consequent revenge killings, is one of the most striking elements of the movie.

But I think my favorite little touch is the inciting event in the narrative that turns everything on it's head. Jeremiah was actually doing pretty well with the Crow, they were getting along fine and he went out of his way to not make trouble and they even let him make a nice little homestead on their territory. You start thinking, maybe this is going to be a nice little movie about a man finding peace after all. The narrative after this quickly descends into all out mortal combat that represents the mutual hostility of the settlers and natives, but the movie makes sure to point out that it is ultimately all the settlers fault and any 'sin' committed by the natives on their own land is downstream from the original sin of the white man, literally stomping all over their holiest of holies in the effort of forcing their way into someone else's society to build a new one in it's place. The reason the Crow kills his family, is that he reluctantly rescues a snowed in caravan of settlers bound for the West by showing them through the only viable path, their sacred burial site. Only a select few Crow are even allowed to set foot there at all, he KNEW this was a grave sin, but he was cajoled into leading these white settlers through because they'd have to go on a 20 mile detour otherwise. However he feels about the Crow, whatever kind of mutual hatred and violence they're capable of, the only reason any of this ever even happened is that a bunch of bungling angloid assholes wanted to come barging through land that they knew wasn't supposed to be touched, and they couldn't help but make excuses for why they just had to do it anyway.

This whole thing is blowing my mind, obviously some people are pedanting their way out of the thought experiment (if everyone presses the stay alive button no one dies!) but yankee individualism has cooked some people so thoroughly they can't even hypothetically countenance the thought of sacrificing themselves to save others

We would have got a banger cushvlog out of this

I just started reading about the Thirty Year War/early modern in Europe or about the emergence of trading empires.

Any recommendations?

I have found the reading list that came along with the pod.

I dont expect anyone to remember but my friends and I were laughing last night hazily remembering an episode where Will found out for the first time that Ben Shapiro was a voice on the "Arthur" PBSkids show.

His genuine confusion and initial "what?!" etc still makes me laugh even though i cant remember it well.

Anyone know what episode that may have been? Would have been years ago.

its kinda wild to see, major trend in MAGA women now supporting iran and turning on trump in massive droves!

wowah its happenign folks. US military is now banned from saudi arabian airspace and bases. So basicaly the petro dollar is being destroyed. MAGA women are turning out for it in droves cheering on iran! its happening more and more!

Hingepoints was often about moments in history that felt overdetermined, and asking if they were not. As a reversal, everyone talks about the erosion in government in America being a direct result of Nixons actions during the watergate scandal. If it wasn’t for him, were there other forces there that would have caused that same erosion without a political actor to be the catalyst?

sorry