Techne Writing - Persuasive Craft

Why do we like camping? 🏕️ Maybelle investigates the western world’s favourite paradoxical hobby: why we, blessed with running water and electricity, still choose to pack food and shelter onto our backs, go into the most remote location we can find, and live in the wild for days — at the mercy of weather, bugs, predators, and more ⛈️🦟🐻🦝

Do we go to the wild because of our desire to experience the sublime — a great and terrifying experience that we can’t comprehend 🌄, but need in order to feel alive (because modernity has made our lives mundane 🏭)? Or does camping let us cosplay homelessness… without its consequences?⛺ (Idea provided by ) Or, perhaps most likely of all, do we go because we already bought goretex jackets and shoes that signal to the world that we do indeed go, and that we are indeed putting our gear investments to use?😩🌧️

Maybelle also unpacks what it’s like to experience all of this in the rugged Hudson/James Bay lowlands, in the middle of Moose River, at Tidewater Provincial Park: a train-in and boat-in only site that luckily still had reception... so she caught a boat and made it out alive.

Is FIFA a delusion?⚽️ In our video back on June 17th, we proposed that it’s a fiction that at the same time organizes how we see the world–and how its order breaks down when scandals occur. 💔 Our comments have since shown how incredibly deluded and brainwashed people are by pro sports.

Junaid categorizes these delulu world cup fans into 2 different groups: 1) neoliberals who think the games bring everyone together on equal foot, in a happy globalism; 2) conservatives who think FIFA lets players pull themselves up by the bootstraps to escape poverty. But what if there’s 3) an aesthetic enjoyer who appreciates the games neutrally as what they are, moments that can be fun and nonsensical at the same time? 😶‍🌫️ They are just there to enjoy the sport in itself (and are also able to critique it)? Might this third type of fan offer a resistance to the ideology of liberals and conservatives?

Original vid: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZsSvTpRvxD/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

In 2024, Maybelle watched the Skibidi Toilet video that started it all. 🚽 Now, she lays out its relevance in 2026. The technocrat overlords dominate our lives even more, owning our privacy and influencing our decisions at scale. We’re even more enslaved to the forces of technofeudalism and capitalism. ⛓️‍💥📲 In this landscape, the fusion of man + toilet in the Skibidi toilet brings body humour and waste to the fore. 💩
Although Skibidi Toilet is the evil guy in that series, it’s worth rereading history: what if the humanoids with camera/ipad heads are the bad guys, and the Skibidi Toilet (which overtakes the planet) is actually enacting revolution? 💪 And if we apply a Deleuze & Guattari reading, can we view the assemblage (Man + Toilet) as a new, hybrid kind of subjectivity? Are we doomed to become Skibidi Toilets?

Junaid emerges from an odyssey over Lake Huron 🚣 to answer the question of whether actor Elliot Page can play Achilles — a question which makes right wingers go crazy due to their idea of Achilles as some kind of hyper male, super straight, super warrior guy.

The truth is, if you read the Iliad, you will see he is not the super straight guy right wingers want him to be — this is because of his relationship with Patroclus, the man who brings the most passion out of Achilles, and the man who the Ancient Greeks themselves liked to read as a potential lover of Achilles.

The poor and very disinformationy reporting of Rob Finnerty (anchor of Newsmax), of course, did not mention this. In fact, Finnerty described Achilles as a “historical” rather than mythological figure 🤦nor did he bother fact checking if Page really was playing Achilles.

We now know that the casting of Elliot Page (a trans male Canadian actor) in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film adaptation of the Odyssey, was nothing more than a fan rumour — but the craze it left among right wingers and transphobic people has revealed to us how little people know about Greek history and mythology, how ragebait triumphs over fact, as well as how eager people are to project their own self-images and delusions onto fictional characters 😮‍💨

FUN FACT: the image of Patroclus I used in this vid comes from a 5th century Athenian vase that depicts Achilles bandaging Patroclus’ wounded arm.

Thank you to friend-of-Techne Miyo 🫡 for filming and inspiring this talking head!

Maybelle addresses the question of whether literature tells the truth 😶‍🌫️😮‍💨, through a debate we might still remember–the Peterson x Žižek debate on Happiness: Capitalism 💸 vs. Marxism ☭ in Toronto in 2019 where tickets were way beyond her budget 💀.

Peterson gives a literalist / pop psychology application of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and claims that all the bad Communist regimes followed it: therefore in his view, Marx was lying about how we could achieve happiness. But Žižek acknowledges the issues of that text but shows how you can’t read books in isolation, especially if you’re analyzing an entire political perspective and looking for ways to seriously critique it.

Junaid turns to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s theory on jokes to unveil the rebellion behind the “my mayor Muslim” chant. With nothing by his side except mosquitoes 🦟 and the Relief Theory of Humour, he describes the social strictures that this jokey chant unravels: Israel’s propaganda of conflating Jewishness with supporting the state, as well as the media’s portrayal of Jews and Muslims in conflict with one another ⚔️

Before you say “New York Knicks fans aren’t that deep,” let’s remember that, according to Freud, jokes come from the unconscious, where the superego (our socially-acquired control mechanisms/conscience) is embedded. In other words, Knicks fans are that deep — we all are 😸

THE CHANTS:
My Mayor Muslim
My bagels Jewish
My Christian Dior
Knicks in four
///
My mayor’s still Muslim
My bagel’s still Jewish
The Pope’s on our side
Knicks in five

Sources:
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
Herbert Spencer, The Physiology of Laughter
John Morreall, Comic Relief
Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical thoughts on Joking Matters

Junaid breaks down the anticapitalism 🏭 that appears to be more present in Devil Wears Prada 2 than Devil Wears Prada 1. The sequel offers a greater awareness of our trash economy, the fickleness and irresponsibility of corporations doing mergers and acquisitions, and how it all trickles down to instability for everyday workers and employees 👩‍🏭👷‍♀️👨‍💼

At the same time, Devil Wears Prada 2 is not devoid of ideology; it still exists in the film in a way that the audience is… kinda cool with? 🤔

FIFA ⚽️ is happening and Maybelle is asking if it’s really a delusion machine 🪞🪩and if so, why do we keep going back to it?

She uses the theory of Jacques Lacan to understand Zinedine Zidane’s infamous headbutt in 2006—the attack that broke all the rules of the game—and which we still remember twenty years later. 

She be asking such questions as: how did the game stop making sense at that point? And why is it still lodged in our memory now? 🤔

Luckily Lacan is with us to help answer: Maybelle uses his concept of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real to argue that Zidane’s headbutt is a moment that reveals the Lacanian Real—the moment in which FIFA falls apart. Zidane’s headbutt shows how FIFA was always at the edge of this Real in the first place; the World Cup is just that great of a fantasy structure 😮‍💨

Readings:

Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” (in Écrits)
Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Slavoj Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference”