FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
User ID: 195
A lot of these comments in trying to steelman "Kissinger is Evil" are focusing on the question "Should Kissinger be hated?" I'm going to focus on what I think is your real question, the much more circumstantial "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?" To answer this I'm going to tell a couple of personal stories, passed down to me by my elders, because hatred of Kissinger among people under 50 is largely a meme passed down to us by leftist elders.
My father was raised in a deeply conservative christian community that was religiously anti-war. So while he was far from a hippy, he was against the war in Vietnam and avoided the draft. His best friend from high school joined the marines, went to Vietnam, served for years in multiple tours in combat, received a pile of medals. His friend was back in town on leave and crashed at my dad's place, he had changed from high school, told my dad that he just liked killing at this point, that he and his squadmates would shoot children and try to stand them up with machine gun fire, that they had burned villages full of women and children, that if they ended the war there was no chance he'd come back to the USA and get a factory job he'd go fight wherever anyone would hire him. He went back to Vietnam, and was one of the very last US soldiers killed, in the last months before US forces were pulled out.
What I think examining Kissinger's record on the merits ignores is a lot of context:
-- Kissinger had an outsized personality, known to cavort with blondes and flirt with women, he appeared in the news constantly, was a "public intellectual." He had much more of a public presence than, say, Blinken or Kerry. He was identified with the era's policies in a way that other SoS's weren't. His book Diplomacy is magisterial, a masterwork, but it is also massively self-glorifying, he ranks himself next to Metternich and Bismarck, and this self-perception oozes from every speech he ever gave.
-- The war in Vietnam was the defining trauma for a generation. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed, crippled, or traumatized and their families' lives were derailed by the war. Hundreds of thousands more were arrested, prosecuted, fled the country, or restructured their lives to oppose the war or to avoid the draft. Cultural conflict over the war was brutal, so much more brutal than anything we see today. There really were thousands of Americans, marching in the streets, chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!" And then, worse, it turned out the obnoxious unpatriotic faggots chanting for the VC were right, Ho Chi Minh did win. It tore America apart from 1965-1975.
-- Following the Watergate scandal, the Nixon administration was dragged into the public view in Congress. Every aspect of the operation of the administration was questioned on the news. Conveniently, Nixon had hidden voice-activated microphones in the oval office, and hours upon hours of recordings were made public. People heard how Kissinger really talked, how sanguine he was about what he was doing. The people heard how the sausage was made, and the very worst grinder was Kissinger. Neither Kissinger, nor Nixon, believed the war was winnable when they took office in 1969. Kissinger, and Nixon, were publicly exposed as absolutely believing that every bombing and every troop surge and every expansion of the war to a neighboring neutral country was not for the purpose of "saving" South Vietnam but for the purpose of putting on a diplomatic front, of showing "the world" that the USA was tough. Every kid that died in Vietnam after Nixon and Kissinger took office, like my dad's best friend, died for his country only in the most attenuated sense. Kissinger was the reason that thousands of American boys died, or were crippled, or had their souls ripped apart killing innocent Cambodians, for nothing. It was one thing to suspect that the American government was throwing lives away over nothing, or to think that they were extremist but mistaken true believers, it was quite another to hear Kissinger state frankly that Americans were dying for some vague concept of "Credibility."
-- This loss of innocence was part of the Vietnam experience for America, and that was pinned on Nixon and Kissinger. After Watergate, Nixon was in permanent exile, removed from public office, public intellectual life, public view. Kissinger hung around, advising, teaching, lecturing, consulting. So Nixon-Kissinger's mutual crimes were easy to pin on the still-present Kissinger. He never got any comeuppance, never got any public shaming. He was never punished, and the rage only grew.
TLDR: It's the combination of his crimes and his public visibility that made him a villain, and the very clear evidence of those crimes convicted him. That villainy is compounded to make him the primary bad guy behind everything the CIA every did between 1950 and last week.
One of my scoutmasters was an old timer, a Vietnam veteran who came home and became a hippie and bought a VW Minibus and lived out of it. Whenever we did the classic skit "A politician, a priest, and a boyscout are on a crashing plane," he would have us change the "politician" to "Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." The kids didn't get it, but the old scoutmasters laughed and laughed. For those unfamiliar the skit goes like this:
There's a small plane, represented by four dining hall chairs in a row. The pilot and three passengers, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an elderly priest, and a boy scout. The pilot turns to the passengers and says "We've lost our engine. There's only three parachutes. Well, I've got a family, and I need to fill out the paperwork with the FAA, so I'm taking one parachute, good luck!" He takes a parachute, and jumps out of the plane. The remaining passengers look at each other. Henry Kissinger stands up and says "I'm the smartest man in the world, I'm vital to the operation of international diplomacy, I'm important to history, I'm taking one parachute." He takes a parachute and jumps. The priest turns to the boy scout and says, "Young man, I've lived a good life, a long life, you take the last parachute, I'll pray a rosary as I go down." The boy scout says "Don't worry padre, there's two parachutes left. Henry Kissinger took my backpack."
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
One of the most striking things reading Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore, a history text on Asian immigration to the United States from the 1800s to 1980 or so, was that the first wave of Chinese immigrant laborers to the western continental US largely just...died out for lack of wives. Most of the early Chinese immigrants were men, who came over planning to earn money working on construction or mining or in service industries, earn money, and return to China or import a bride. While some brides were successfully imported through various means, the crackdown on Chinese immigration meant that vastly fewer brides ever made it over than were needed, and the realities of exploitation and debt left most Chinese laborers unable to afford to return to China successful. American women mostly disdained to marry Chinese men, for a variety of reasons, and interracial relationships were rare*.
As a result, most of these thousands of men lived out their lives in America and simply died, never having any long term romantic partners, only the occasional mining camp prostitute. An entire population and subculture, it existed and died out, failed to reproduce itself. Contemporary accounts and census figures back up that the Chinese population dipped for a period, before immigration resumed. Chinese-Americans who grew up during that period, the children of the handful of couples who successfully imported brides, report the shade-like presence of these aging men in the Chinese community, dozens of honorary uncles all childless and often filled with regret. White society barely noticed them: after all they didn't have any children or any power of money or language or politics. Politically, legally, and socially, it was possible to just eliminate these men from the "dating" pool.
Another anecdote, reading Lee Kuan Yew's From Third World to First at the moment, he talks about Singaporean students traveling overseas, and disproportionate numbers of Singaporean women bringing back foreign husbands. Talking to Singaporean friends of mine, they corroborated this: Singaporean girls who study in the US are more likely to stay in the USA, and more likely to marry an American either way. Singaporean boys are more likely to stay in Singapore or return to Singapore, because of the social privileges accorded to sons. College educated women find that Singaporean men mistreat them, they don't want a woman who is smarter than they are, they want a submissive wife; as a result women choose other options. Singapore's particularly bad gender balance, despite being a fully formed and wealthy state with sovereignty, is determined in part by this social reality. This is a problem that Singapore must combat to maintain its population. The way the country treats its women, and the way other countries treat their women, makes maintaining the culturally and intellectually open society that Singapore's success was built off of a direct trade against their gender ratio.
The striking point being that the gender balance is socially determined. Thousands of Chinese immigrant men weren't the victims of a gender imbalance per se, though at that time in the West there probably were factually too few women for the white population. Singapore's choices around foreign education weaken its gender balance because of fetishes formed ten thousand miles away. These thousands of men were marked for sad single ends because of a social construct around their race. Society chooses how to distribute women, not in a command economy sense necessarily, but in a broad preferences sense. No matter how bad the percentages are in aggregate, some men will be marked for success and others for failure.
Inasmuch as gender balance is a dial worth playing with, the obvious levers at the national level in a first world context to pull aren't killing off men. They are abortion and immigration. Sex selective abortion is a major issue among certain communities, and should be wildly illegal. In China the ratio of births is 120:100, in parts of India it is little better. While it is less common in the US as a whole, it does happen in some immigrant communities.
Open immigration policies equally lead to gender imbalances, immigrants are more likely to be men. Privilege female immigration significantly more highly, and it isn't hard to improve the balance quickly in the United States or the UK or France. Import Venezuelan or Burmese women by the boat load.
For that matter, first world men have the personal option under the current law to import wives quite easily. The fact that they don't is largely a social choice those men are making. They don't face a material gender imbalance, they choose to face one for the sake of social structures.
These social structures also probably have much more to do with your dating pool than do population level statistics. Middle class American men want equally middle class American wives, shunting aside the opportunity to date poorer or immigrant women. Men often want women less educated and successful than they are, leaving educated women on the shelf. Manage how your society treats women, and you will face fewer parents seeking to have sons instead, you will attract more women from abroad, matchmaking will be easier among your population on class/education/social bases. Social constrictions create the gender imbalance as experienced in day to day life, be ready to violate or manage them and much of the problems melt away.
So in the long run, I do not think we face terminal societal decline as a result of these problems. Historically, societies have dealt with worse, they simply sentence some men to misery, and because the kind of men who can't get a girl are disproportionately "losers" in other ways to begin with it doesn't tend to have much impact on history. The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves. The wealthy West, by comparison, is doing a great job. We don't need a war, we just need better marriage norms, and the courage to address our problems.
*Interesting contrast: Takaki talks about Filipino men being considered a crisis because they were TOO seductive, too smooth. Newspapers and politicians wrote screeds against the menace of Filipino men seducing white women. Takaki, of course, being an Asian and a liberal, is willing to say directly and quote sources that Filipino men were simply "great lovers" or "more attractive and stylish" or "more attentive" than white men; while he is totally unwilling to state that Chinese men died out because they were ugly or weren't great lovers, inasmuch as this was perceived it was the result of racism.
Relationship therapist Esther Perel has a famous line that "The victim of the affair isn't necessarily the victim of the marriage." In the same way, the person that initiates the divorce isn't necessarily the person that ended the marriage. For a variety of reasons, I speculate that is more likely for men to "quiet quit" on a marriage, in a way that is less possible/likely for a woman. The woman might be the one who files the divorce papers, but in a lot of cases the man checked out a long time ago and has been, sometimes willfully sometimes passive-aggressively, baiting her into filing.
Rarely are divorces truly "out of nowhere," more normally divorce filings formalize the death of a marriage that has already broken down completely. Long processes of fights, counseling (secular or religious), compromises, deals, fights, betrayals, and failures precede the actual legal process. The actual filing often reflects a situation where there is no marriage going.
A man will stop doing anything around the house when he checks out of his marriage. Men typically do fewer chores around the house to start with, and have a greater tolerance for mess/disorder/eating trash. Absent any care for his wife's feelings, most men will have no real interest in doing laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms. Often this extends to kids: he's not scheduling doctors appointments, buying them clothes, keeping track of their schooling.
In my own marriage (which is great and nowhere near divorce), my wife and I have a regular fight about chores that goes something like: she thinks I don't do enough chores around the house, I think that I would totally do them if she would stop doing them first. She's home more than I am for a variety of work reasons, and she has a lower tolerance for seeing dishes in the sink, for seeing a full laundry bin, etc. I'm at work later, left to my own devices I will happily spend a few hours doing all that, but I won't reflexively do it when I get home from work, while she will sit there during the day working and see the dishes and they will bug her and she'll do them.
Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.
Keep in mind that men typically control more of the finances. Both in terms of assets and income, and servicing debts and taxes. I would have vastly more ability to mess with marital assets than my wife would: I make more money, I know where the assets are, I would know how to move them around.
This is before we get into things like Exit Affairs, when an extramarital relationship is just a tripwire to make her file, or physical abuse.
So the dynamic is often that a man stops doing anything around the house, stops substantively being a husband, and then a wife files. So the decision these women are making when filing isn't "Happily Married Woman vs. Divorced Woman" it's "Abandoned, but legally married woman with no legal tools to control her spouse's use of marital assets, still expecting divorce vs. Divorced woman, with legal tools to control spouse's disposal of marital assets."
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
3mo ago
RIP
I'm going to claim the primacy of lived experience here and say that I know SI better than most of the other commenters here, who seem confused about what exactly it is/was. SI was distinctly not killed by fat girls in the swimsuit issue, at most that was a last gasp effort for a dying icon to regain relevancy. My parents first got me a subscription to SI Kids when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, and I think I had a subscription to full-fat SI by the time I was 11, definitely by the time I was 12. My parents have always been magazine people, and magazines have been in overall decline for that entire period. The magazine peaked in the 90s, and has declined pretty straightforwardly since then. What killed SI wasn't wokeness, and it wasn't GloboHomo, it was the internet, and particularly the niche sports blog, along with an overall culture of specialization, the Culture of Refinement (tm LindyMan), an increase in the niche appeal of things and an unwillingness to venture outside of one's niche. In the flood of content on the internet, people sought out only those things that perfectly met their interests, and were uninterested in paging through a news magazine with reports on sports they weren't interested in.
But man, at 12? I read SI cover to cover every week, from the letters to the editor to the off-beat Rick Reilly article on the back page. Sports Illustrated was, for men, considered one of those cultural sacraments, similar to how growing up I imbibed that one was just supposed to listen to Counting Down the Hits with Casey Kasem on the radio so as to know what was going on in pop music. The nature of the activity is that listening to the whole top-40, there would be lots of songs I didn't really like, but I would also discover songs that I did like. I might have to "endure" Can't Fight the Moonlight, but I would hear about this cool new band Linkin Park, and I knew all the lyrics to Uncle Cracker even if it wasn't my favorite song.
Growing up, I was a baseball fan and to a lesser extent a football and basketball fan, but reading SI cover to cover I also would read articles about Hockey and Boxing and Olympic sports and NASCAR. I might zero in on the baseball articles, and especially the ones about the Yankees and Phillies, but I would also read articles about the Penguins and the Avalanche and Jeff Gordon and the Klitschko brothers. My favorite issue came out in the late-winter early-spring every year, but it wasn't the swimsuit issue*, it was the MLB season preview special issue. SI would go through all 30 MLB teams, and go in depth on each team, covering their starting lineup, their depth chart, their great MiLB prospects who might come up and make a difference mid season. I would read every team, but memorize the Yankees and the Phillies. I was aware of every team, but I focused on my favorites.
I stopped subscribing to SI when I went away to college, of course. For the first few years, I would still go out and buy the MLB preview issue, but then I started reading blogs like RiverAveBlues (now defunct), which covered the Yankees specifically, and would go in depth on every aspect of the team. Where before I would only get information about up and coming minor leaguers from SI, now RAB published a list of top-30 Yankees prospects five times a year, and would update with a Down on the Farm feature several times a week. Obviously I couldn't read that level of depth about every team, and certainly not about other sports. I traded being vaguely aware of every MLB team for being extremely focused on one or two MLB teams, knowing the stars across the league to knowing which AA arm in Trenton might develop into a middle innings lefty reliever.
The death of SI reflects that loss of a broad shared mainstream culture, traded in for specificity and niches. SI, and vintage Sportscenter and all the rest, reflected an American male Sports Fan audience, a guy who would watch the NFL, MLB, Boxing, NHL, NBA, College Wrestling, Olympic Snow Sports, whatever was on TV and enjoy it. A concept of the Sports Fan as a universal fan of (male) competition, who also wouldn't mind a bikini issue every February in the dead spot between the Super Bowl and MLB Opening Day. Much more common today is the specific sport fan, the fan of Basketball who doesn't watch Football, or the fan of Baseball who doesn't know anything about Hockey. In the same way that when my parents were growing up, a Pop Music Fan was someone who liked all, or at least most, of the songs on the Top 40, today the idea of someone who enjoys both Olivia Rodrigo and Drake and Cardi B and Luke Combs is just kinda...silly? Even in the 90s one can imagine listening to a whole top 40 straight through (occasionally on long drives with my wife we'll listen to a MixCloud station that does Top 40 from [week, year, country] and laugh at how strange some of the songs are) and it kinda makes sense and is mildly coherent, but after 2010 the lists lose all coherency. Today, Olivia Rodrigo and Luke Combs and Rico Nasty fans are mostly incompatible, they would utterly refuse to listen to each other's music. Similarly you just don't see the generalist American Sports Fan as much, you see extreme football and extreme basketball and extreme MMA fans. We've lost that idea of mainstream American masculinity, the guy who would happily go to a Hockey game or a Baseball game or a Nascar race or look at some tits. Instead we're all hyper specialized, reading blogs and subscribing to Substacks and listening to podcasts about only the one thing we really like. Even the newspaper is something we've lost, a physical newspaper encourages you to page through and notice or skim articles about things you might not have looked into otherwise, in a way that digital consumption does not. SI has been replaced by subreddits, twitter circles, and a dozen specialist websites devoted to specific teams and sports.
My wife is kind of a fancy lady, she gets her hair cut at a particular salon in a small rich town about 45 minutes from us. I'll go with her if she makes the appointment on a day I'm not working too much, and we'll make a cute little day of it in town walking around to shops and coffee and lunch. But obviously when she's getting her haircut for an hour, I need to occupy myself. Last year she had a haircut appointment around when the SI MLB preview issue usually came out, and I had the vague idea that when I was a kid I remembered there being a magazine rack in the back of most grocery stores and CVS's, and I figured hey I'll go buy the MLB preview issue (stores would typically stock it additionally for a whole month, rather than just the current week of SI, I vaguely recalled from when I would hang around Borders as a teen) and take it to the coffee shop and hang out for an hour reading it. I tried six different bookstores/grocery stores/convenience stores, even a place that called itself a "news stand" and NOBODY HAD SI. The magazine racks were stocked with Special Issues of Time and Life devoted to weird niche boomer celebrity stuff. I was so frustrated and disappointed. The idea of the mainstream American Male Sports Fan had declined so far that I couldn't even buy one issue, I had to specifically subscribe to that niche if I wanted it.
*I recall the swimsuit issue as a major institution, and I remember accepting the first few years that I wouldn't be allowed to get it because my parents would grab it before I got my hands on it, then around 13-14 making extreme efforts to go get the mail every day around when it was coming out so I could slide it into an inside jacket pocket before walking down the driveway, then by 16 my dad just giving it to me in a "don't tell your mother, but we're men together and of course we like tits" kind of way. I still have a few issues floating around somewhere in old boxes.
Why did the Men of Country Music Lose their Mojo?
Epistemic Status: Elaborate inside joke with myself from spending too long riding in a truck listening to country radio.
I grew up with a certain country music cliche, that every straitlaced city girl wanted to cut loose and ride a dirt road with a country boy. Trace Adkins made it clear that Ladies Love Country Boys; Kenney Chesney’s woman [] Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy and is always staring at him when he’s chugging along; Big and Rich saddled up their horses and rode into the city, where the girls shouted Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy; Joe Diffie found that all you needed was an F150 because women loved a Pickup Man; even mr sunshine on my god damn shoulders John Denver’s the Cowboy and the Lady and country godfather Johny Cash’s If I were a Carpenter play to the same trope.
Today our swaggering country hero has been replaced at the top of the charts with soulful bittersweet songs by small town men who lost their upwardly mobile girls to the city life.
Country megastar Morgan Wallen’s More than My Hometown dominated country radio so hard it even charted on the Billboard 100. The lyrics reflect a man left behind by a woman who loved him, but had ambitions for bigger things than he could give her.
Girl, our mamas are best friends and so are we
The whole town's rooting for us like the home team
Most likely to settle down
Plant a few roots real deep and let 'em grow
**But we can't stop this real world from spinnin' us
Your bright lights called, I don't blame you for pickin’ up**
Your big dream bags are all packed up and ready to go
But I just need you to know …
I ain't the runaway kind, I can't change that
My heart's stuck in these streets like the train tracks
City sky ain't the same black …
'Cause I can't love you more than my hometown
**Yeah, you got a wild in your eyes that I just wasn't born with
I'm a same gas station cup of coffee in the mornin’**
I need a house on the hill, girl, not in 'em
So hang onto these words 'til them avenues help you forget ‘em
23 by Sam Hunt follows the same storyline a few years down the road (as does Wallen’s own Seven Summers
You can marry an architect
Build you a house out on the water
That really impresses your father, yeah
And you can find some grown-up friends
Drink some wine in California ...
No matter where I go, no matter what I do
I'll never be 23, with anyone but you
You can marry who you want
Go back to Tennessee
But you'll never be 23 with anyone but me
We'll always have Folly Beach
We'll always have Delta nights
We'll always be in between real love and real life
**You can ride the train to work
Straighten out your accent in the city
Like your folks ain't from Mississippi, yeah
You probably got an office view
Wearing those skirts you always hated
Yeah, you're so sophisticated**
But I bet you when you drink too much
I bet you think about back then
I really hope you're happy now
I'm really glad I knew you then
Looking at the lyrics, there’s a common trope of an ambitious young woman leaving her country fried boyfriend behind. He was fun while he lasted, but she wanted more from life and he didn’t, she left town he stayed, she wanted bright lights and office views and drinking wine with grown up friends while he wanted gas station coffee with the same buddies he had from high school. Note that neither singer really denies the objective superiority of the city life, or puts in much effort to defending small town worldview, they simply agree to disagree with their lost loves.
The swaggering songs I grew up with reflected a world where the working class country white man was dominant, resurgent culturally. Country music’s crossover popularity reflected it: singers like Alan Jackson and Toby Keith and Shania Twain hit it big, country dominated charts in a way it hadn’t before and wouldn’t since. The cities were hollowed out, the downtowns emptied, the exurbs were being built. The exurbs culturally identified themselves with rural, more than urban, values. Cultural creation is about distinguishing oneself from others, after White Flight they wished to distinguish themselves from the city they left, and with the rural areas they colonized. The suburban dad, the kind who buys a John Deere baseball cap to go with his lawn mower and hoped his wife thought it was sexy, that was the core country music consumer. That was the man who listened to Big and Rich and could imagine himself as “the only John Wayne left in this town;” and who wouldn’t trade his "Silverado for [the city’s] Escalade or your freak parade.” The kind of guy who bought an F-150 crew cab with a sparkling clean bed and fancied himself a “pickup man.” The music reflected a confidence, a swagger, the country man was sexually potent, a real man not like the effeminates and freaks from the city.
The dynamics of the 2020s’ give us these Sad Working Class Boy country songs. The SWCB is Nashville’s interpretation of the zeitgeist, which reflects material reality: women now hold 3% more degrees, and represent 56% of the current tertiary student population. A 56-44 gender gap of degrees means a huge percentage of men without degrees see women they should be dating, women they may have dated in their carefree teens and twenties, they see these women become upwardly mobile while they do not. This is reflected in populations. In NYC, LA, and Chicago there are 10 adult women for every 9 adult men. Those women came from somewhere, and they left men behind, they left the SWCBs behind, in their rural and exurban hometowns.
The SWCB song taps into a deep vein of truth for millions of Americans who lived that story. Women who dated men they knew in high school or still too young to worry about marriage, “in between real love and real life.” Couples that enjoyed spending time together, but ultimately were unable to bridge the gap between their competing ambitions and lifestyles. The country singer, and audience he embodies, has drifted from being the irresistible object of attraction, to being good enough to bed but not good enough to wed. The swaggering blare of Big and Rich handing out hundred dollar bills has been replaced by the lament of a himbo grisette in a cowboy hat for young female yuppies. Inevitably left behind when his novelty fades, left with memories but no ring in his small hometown.
The traditional character of the Grisette, a young working class girl that the Parisian artist or bourgeois student would have an affair with in his youth before abandoning her for a proper marriage to a woman of his class, provides the clearest parallel to the SWCB. Fontine in Les Miserables is probably the character most likely to ring a bell for the audience here. Where in 18th-19th century Paris, when men had sexual freedom and women were repressed, working class women were used for pleasure and then thrown away; today when women have sexual freedom working class boys are used and then thrown away. Good enough for now, not good enough for forever.
Maybe the transition song is Kenny Chesney’s All the Pretty Girls:
All the seventeen's said, "I'm getting outta dodge"
All the big dreams said, "I'm selling all I got"
All the high rollers busy placing their bets
Me, I'm heading south, 'cause all the pretty girls said
I'm home for the summer, shoot out the lights
Don't blow my cover, oh I'm free tonight
The questions ask themselves: the pretty girls are “home for the summer” from college while Kenny just stayed in his hometown. They still want to hang out, but eventually they won’t, the story goes from In Love with the Boy to All the Pretty Girls to 23. Kenny should have hit the books, then maybe they would have stayed together.
Ongoing controversies as Secretary of Defense Austin and DoD clique concealed the SecDef's cancer diagnosis from White House. Austin received treatment for cancer in late December just before Xmas, and then was hospitalized January 1st for complications from the treatment.
Despite the fact that he was hospitalized on Jan. 1, Austin’s top staffers didn’t learn of the problem until the next day. Biden and national security adviser Jake Sullivan were notified on Jan. 4, and the next day, the Pentagon told members of Congress and released a statement to the media.
Biden reportedly has no intention of firing Austin, with officials stating that they will "learn from the experience."
While I think the WWIII crowd in the peanut gallery are mostly exaggerating the state of the world today, I can't deny the existence of numerous crises in which the US military might need to act or react at a moment's notice. And while I have an incredible disdain for the efforts of the DoD over the past two decades, the SecDef's whole job is to be on hand for those situations, to coordinate responses to threats to the United States and its allies.
There is very little clarity on what the SecDef's capabilities were at any given time. He was under general anesthetic during his treatment in December for some period of time, and needed to be hospitalized on the 1st. DoD spokespeople claim that he has access to everything he needs to do his job, in the way of secure communications equipment. But there is no argument that 1) People going through cancer treatment are not at 100% ability, 2) 70 year old men who need to be hospitalized are not at 100% of their ability, 3) we presumably put all that money into building the Pentagon for the purpose of creating the ideal situation for him to respond to any crisis and to do his job, 4) a hospital bed will be less optimal. There is no argument that when Austin is undergoing cancer treatment in the hospital, he will be performing his duties as SecDef at a suboptimal level.
Given the possibility of a Russian push or a Ukrainian collapse, of an outbreak of Genocide in southern Israel, or of a Houthi strike on who-knows-what, to say nothing of a wild-card in Korea or Taiwan or Guyana...are we really ok with the SecDef operating at 50% and not telling the president? How clear were chains of command and authority in case of a crisis at time that Austin was incapacitated? Would Biden have been looking for Austin when he got the famous 2am phone call and been unable to find him? Who would have given orders in such a case?
This is terrible optics for the administration, and constitutes the strongest public evidence for the theory that "Joe Biden is President Grandpa, given a warm glass of milk and sent to bed before the real meetings between the bureaucrats happens." While other presidents have had conflicts with the DoD (Obama famously feuded with "The Generals" about pulling out of Afghanistan, while it appears that Trump was directly lied to about the presence of US troops in Syria to prevent them from being pulled out), this is a serious escalation. Civilian control of the military has been undermined by the appointment of former career generals to head the DoD, it is destroyed if the former generals don't even report to the president, if POTUS doesn't know who is actually giving the orders over there.
How involved can the President be in DoD decision making around NatSec if he didn't even know the SecDef was out of commission? How much interagency rivalry exists that DoD subordinates would agree to hide what was going on from the President? How low-trust is the relationship between SecDef and POTUS that he wouldn't simply disclose the diagnosis and appoint an acting interim chief, clearly Austin felt that if he stepped away for a second he would be ousted? How weak is this president if he is scared to punish Austin for his clear dereliction of duty and deceit? How much is the president kept out of things if no one else (say, the CIA or FBI?) informed him of what was going on for FOUR DAYS?
I'm left with more questions than answers.
FiveHourMarathon
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1mo ago
The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society
TLDR: We're increasingly seeing an urge to regulate media consumption, social media moderation, and public speech along the lines of an ersatz "equal time" doctrine, in which users must both view and affirm one's viewpoints. People don't just want the right to free speech, they want the right to be cool, to speak and be heard and enjoyed and honored.
A theme running through a few different recent threads on here is an urge by different societal movements to seize the mantle of “cool,” to be hip, to be fun, to be interesting.
The people trying to ban TikTok have cited over and over the differential between Israeli and Palestinian content.
Now, critics allege that TikTok is using its influence to push content that is pro-Palestinian and contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. The claims about TikTok’s promotion of pro-Palestinian content are anecdotal, and they have been bubbling up on the social media platform X, in statements to the media and on conservative media outlet. TikTok said the allegations of bias are baseless.
The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.
Meanwhile the primary effort I see in the Anti-Anti-Semitism space is the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, which is so confusingly bad I literally think it is its opposite every time I see it. I see the ads, and I read it naturally as Stand Up to Hatred (by) Jews rather than Stand Up To Hatred (of) Jews. ADL content is lame, bad, boring. Pro-Palestinian content is simply better and put together by better creators.
Just accept not being cool! Did you know: what only number one hit in the 1960s was explicitly about the Vietnam war? Ballad of the Green Berets. Go figure. You want to compete with better memes, produce your own. While we associate the 1960s music scene with the antiwar movement, there were significant patriotic songs produced too. Fighting Side of Me, Okie from Muskogee, the patriotic hits of the era were huge. You compete with memes with better memes. Banning tiktok will not save Israel.
We see the same dynamic with astroturfed “Positive” male role models. Male role models who are nothing interesting, simply because TPTB don’t like the ones that are actually current and good. We see the same dynamic with everyone claiming to be the new punk. This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written and I tend to agree, but the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater and taking antidepressants just floors me. Everyone wants to be cool and rebellious and also in power and also secretly the choice of the grill pilled normies and the proletariat and the artists and the one true source of loving families that produce children. They want to be James Dean and Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. They want to be both the enemies in the culture war at the same time.
This comes back to the debate about freedom of speech vs freedom of reach, right? How do you create the right to equal time in a world where people are picking among free choices with their eyeballs? How far does this go? If people buy books that are on one end of a conflict, must publishers and libraries fart out books for the other side? It was possible in a more centralized era for governments to force limited broadcast stations to cover sides evenly, but in the era of consumer choice, even if you force content creators to put out pro-Israel movies Netflix and Youtube customers don’t have to click on them. You can’t force eyeballs onto content anymore. To what extent is the effort to force advertising into these platforms in part an effort to force content consumers to get exposed to these messages whether they like it or not? Once people can choose their own content, they might not pick your content, and that can’t be allowed.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
This is hitting Arrested Development levels out here people.
Eggs are not $11/doz because of price gouging or bird flu or operating costs or any other reason, they just aren't $11! Go to Target.com, search for a dozen eggs. Here's the large cage free ones: $2.59. Price fairly consistent across multiple locations.
Seriously. What are we even talking about here?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
2mo ago
I've definitely heard a lot of it. "God give me the confidence of a mediocre white man" "What I could achieve if I were a white man" "It must be so easy being a white man" "I had to twice as much to get half as much recognition as I would get if I were a white man."
These are stock memes. It beggars belief that you've never heard anything like that, so I'd tend to suggest you weren't listening "right." You might have heard a more subtle variation than the rather extreme example in OP. Though I also tend to feel sometimes like I move in significantly less SJW heavy circles.
And of course I hear the inverse quite often. "I coulda been a contenda if only it hadn't been for [affirmative action/the Conspiracy/women/Jews]."
Neither Tribe has a monopoly on the external locus of control. It's a trait of identity politics, and one of the reasons I decry the rise of identity politics on the Right, it's ineffective.
FiveHourMarathon
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1mo ago
I agree with your points, and also with @2rafa about the course of the sexual revolution. But also:
-- If you're interested in the topic, I recommend the podcast You Must Remember This which did a long series on erotic films of the 80s and 90s, placing them in context and talking about the social movements around them. Karina Longworth always does a good job with the material, trigger warning for occasional performative woke acknowledgement if that kind of thing bothers you overly much. One of the things she highlights is the way that rating systems, censorship, the rise of home video, and pornography interacted to place different meanings on ratings. There was a time when X and NC-17 were legitimate ratings that indicated a real film intended for adults, both slowly succumbed to being viewed as porn. It used to be that a film (often a sexual thriller from overseas) marketed as NC17 would be a hit, all the adults would go see it. Now that is hard to imagine.
-- I theorize the rise of internet pornography has made viewing sexually arousing material outside of privately hunched over a laptop seem perverted, even homosexual, to a modern audience. Even as barely-pubescent teen I caught the tail end of the "finding a foreign movie my parent's didn't know had tits on video" cultural moment. I remember watching stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien with my buddies because there were naked girls in it, I don't think we understood anything about the movie. Once internet porn became practical with DSL, I don't think anyone did that, watching something became a purely private endeavor. Decades earlier, porn theatres existed, where men would congregate to watch porn. The idea of going to a theater to see a movie with a heavily arousing tilt strikes me as strange, if I went to the movies without my wife it might even feel kind of gay to be in a theater full of other dudes also getting aroused. Everyone is a goon-er now, but everyone hides it, that's for your home, not for the big screen, or even for watching with family.
-- Don't underestimate the degree to which one work can ruin an entire genre convention. Don Quixote killed the chivalrous romance. The Daniel Craig Bond Films were so dark and serious because Austin Powers was absolutely huge right before they were made, and everyone on set was conscious of the fact that they couldn't do a sex scene without the entire audience giggling and someone shouting "Do I make you horny baby? Yeah! Shag now or shag later?" at the screen. Today Austin Powers is almost forgotten, but in 2006 it was totally unavoidable if you were making a spy film. An effective parody can kill a genre. So can self-parody. Game of Thrones did the whole obligatory sex-scene thing to death, and then completely self-immolated in the final season. The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale. RE: Dune upthread; GRRM ripped Herbert off pretty directly in using scenes like "bring me a child prostitute to torture" as establishing bad guy credentials, but GRRM abused it and HBO beat it to death on camera, so while in the novel having Vlad torture-fuck-murder child slaves seemed edgy, in the film it would seem derivative (of the thing that was itself Derivative from the book). As with how the Bond films are still working in the shadow of Austin Powers long after we've forgotten Austin Powers, GoT has now been lame for five years, we forget just how bad the Finale was, and just how much prestige and power was lent to the show leading into the finale, how excited everyone was for what the Extended Universe would produce next, and what a complete fucking letdown the whole thing was. But in 2020 when the first Dune film came out, they had to avoid all association with GoT it was overplayed and toxic. That kind of influence can really carry, and can make a scene unshootable for decades at a time.
I think this is 80% of the way there, but doesn't properly consider the actors involved. Which isn't that surprising, neither the newlywed OP nor a devout Catholic should be expected to understand sluts.
I agree with you that the goal of Aella et al's definition is to convince people that polyamory is "nice," but the target isn't self-deception (sluts fundamentally do not care about that, making love is self-justifying), nor is it the broader public (who will never be convinced). The target of deception is the cuckolded partner at home. They are the audience, and as long as they are persuaded, the system works. One is able to be a slut in a partner-approved way. This is why Aella's definition makes a lot more sense than @ymeshkout's: the difference between polyamory and cheating is the cuckolded partner's reaction.
For reference, here is an old SA
Many of the people I know in successful polyamorous relationships are sexual, sometimes even highly sexual. But I also know a disproportionate number of asexual polyamorous people – including myself – and the combination seems to work really, really well. Part of it is the ability for asexual people to date sexual people without having to worry about the partner having no way of satisfying their higher sex drive.
[Note: I'm going to engage in some unwarranted psychoanalysis of our man Scott based on his decade old work. I don't know if SA still defines himself as Asexual, or if it was a passing-phase or a temporary side effect of pharmaceuticals. I don't recall him mentioning it recently, the article is a decade old, and more recently my man got married and has been more socially conservative in general]
Now, compare SA's writing at the time, how he situates himself. At the time, at any rate, much of his schtick was nice nerdy guy who can't talk to girls. Many of his early bangers are explicitly situated around a failure to get girls. At the same time, he defined himself as asexual, as lacking libido. Let's flatten that character into a type within the poly discourse: your nerdy, nebbish, herbivore. Not particularly libidinous, not particularly attractive. He doesn't really desire multiple partners, he barely desires one partner. But, he can be convinced to allow his partner to pursue multiple partners.
Aella, taken as a type, does not require the intellectualizing exercise of creating polyamory. She can just fuck. Fucking is self-justifying: it is pleasant and therefore it is good.
The high libido, attractive partner doesn't need a justification for having multiple partners, any more than the rich capitalist needs a justification for owning multiple large houses while the poor patch up their hovels. The capitalist doesn't need capitalism, indeed he will continue to have his beautiful mansion even if he goes to church and prays "Blessed are the poor" or even if he participates in a communist government. The person who needs to be convinced is the poor. Capitalist propaganda isn't designed to get capitalists to buy things, they will do that on their own. It is designed to get the prole to feel that it is right that the capitalist has much and he has little, it is designed to keep the proletariat from taking action to equalize things. Polyamory is the natural concomitant of Capitalism: to each according to their ability. Monogamy is the natural concomitant of Socialism and Democracy: to each according to their need.
Poly propaganda isn't designed to convince hot, horny people to have more sex, they will do that on their own. It is designed to persuade nebbish, nerdy, borderline asexuals to let them do it, without doing anything about it. Hence the naturalization (Sex at Dawn, everyone wants to do it, things can be no other way we're just being honest about it), hence the moralization, hence the justification of everything. The only party that matters is the SA's of the world, the meek partners who accept; the Aellas of the world will act on their own.
FiveHourMarathon
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5mo ago
Whether they find a torture chamber/military base combo pack, or they turn the stone over and all it says is "Peace on Earth;" I predict that IDF will claim the former while Hamas will claim the latter, no one supporting either side will care regardless.
Israel has already been caught faking evidence on official channels, repeatedly and blatantly. No one who supported Israel beforehand cared, nor should they. IDF forces will claim there were military installations under the hospital, they will fake it as aggressively as they need to. The people who want to believe the IDF will believe the IDF; and if they are presented with clear and convincing evidence that the IDF is lying they will say it doesn't matter.
Hamas' track record of honesty is...are we even going to try to address that point? No one who feels that the deaths of [x] number of innocent civilians isn't worth it is going to change their mind, regardless of what they find under there. Nothing they find under there will justify the murder of babies to get it, so therefore they probably won't find it anyway. It's a kind of ethos argumentation: any group bloodthirsty enough to kill children to achieve their military objective is untrustworthy enough to lie about why they killed the children.
It's the law of merited impossibility all the way around. One side says: it's worth killing those kids to get at that military installation, so there must be a military installation there. The other says, it's not worth killing those kids to get at any military installation, so there can't be a military installation there.
FiveHourMarathon
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9mo ago
To add complications, the 30 something millennial woman is the target audience Mattel was missing when selling Barbies, because they might refuse to buy Barbies for their daughter.
Turning Barbie into a vaguely feminist hobby horse, and neutralizing the old knocks on her, helps sell the dolls to parents who want to buy them for their kids. Barbie was in danger of becoming low status.
FiveHourMarathon
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11mo ago
I'm going to throw out a theory, which is wild speculation but I feel the need to include because it strikes me as obvious.
The fifteen minutes duration increases the odds that this is drug related. Daniel Penny almost certainly did not intend to murder Neely, from the video Neely is still struggling minutes into being choked. Instead it seems likely that Penny attempted to choke Neely unconscious so as to avoid violence, failed to properly execute the maneuver, and instead had Neely in a restricted breathe restraint for several minutes. You can tell because the hold should knock out anyone, if properly applied, within seconds; Neely continued to struggle against three men holding him down for minutes. If Neely had stopped struggling, even if Penny wanted to kill him, it seems unlikely that the other two strangers would have continued to restrain him. Under the stress of the incident, combined with likely drugs or other underlying issues and the restricted breathe, Neely had some kind of heart attack etc.
Penny was not intentionally setting out to kill Neely, instead he was negligent in applying a less-than-lethal restraint and Neely died as a result. So the legal (and moral) question becomes twofold: Was Penny entitled to use less-than-lethal restraints against Neely? And was Penny Negligent or Reckless in how he applied those restraints?
Unfortunately, every detail of this will end up in the public sphere. A few points I am very curious to see:
-- How much did Neely actually know about applying a Rear Naked Choke to a resisting opponent? Was he an active BJJ enthusiast? Was this something he learned briefly ten years ago but never really used? Or perhaps he had never received actual training, but watched MMA videos on youtube sometimes and though it looked easy enough? If he was a purple belt, it increases the probability he intentionally killed Neely because negligence is less likely; but it also makes his choice to try seem more appropriate, because it is something he knew how to do. If he saw it once on Youtube and thought he could pull it off irl, it makes negligence more likely, but also makes the decision to try it seem more reckless.
-- How long, exactly, was Neely struggling for? When did he cease to struggle? How long after he ceased to struggle was the hold released?
-- Unfortunately for Penny, if he is like 90%+ of people his age, his diary that he places in the hands of third party corporations that will hand it over at the first problem is going to come into this. As Hoffmeister noted in his post on the topic, if Penny has posts like many on here indicating that he thinks the homeless are subhuman scum that need to be cleared off the streets, we will know soon. This is quite likely where the story will hinge. Prosecution will aim to portray him as "looking for a fight" and looking for an excuse to hurt or kill someone.
-- The prosecution was smart to charge him with a lower homicide felony rather than Murder 1, that's why Rittenhouse got off. While I think Rittenhouse was more or less entirely justified in what he did, he probably could have been convicted of negligent manslaughter on the theory that he made some procedural mistake in going somewhere he shouldn't have, but he was never going to get convicted of premeditated murder. Penny's case will push the idea that he responded appropriately to what Neely did/said, and that he never intended to kill him, but other causes (drugs) lead to Neely's death.
-- Whether Neely was a capital A Addict I have no idea, but if they don't find signs of drug use in his system, I'll be shocked.
-- The various Death Wish style masturbatory fantasies that are floating around the internet are totally inappropriate to what happened. This has nothing to do with whether homeless people ought to be murdered, because that was not what anyone intended to do. It has to do with whether one has the right to use reasonable less-than-lethal force to protect oneself and others, and remain protected if the egg-shell-victim happens to die.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1mo ago
My great uncle Carl fought in Korea, came back (leaving his brother my grandfather behind in a PoW camp, but that's neither here nor there), and started working as a bricklayer for his first years back. For the first decade he was back until he married my Aunt Irma, working as a union bricklayer, he never showed up on Mondays. My grandfather came back from the camp, married my grandmother almost immediately, and had my mother (maybe a little less than) nine months later, and got a job at a factory. My mother attended Parochial school, and walking to school with my grandmother would see Uncle Carl stumbling home drunk in the morning from the Hungarian Club, and ask my grandmother what was wrong with Uncle Carl, my grandmother would tell her that Uncle Carl and his friends were up late drinking "juice" and playing polka.
One day, he used to love to tell this story, his foreman called him in to talk to him. Laid out the time cards, no show Monday, no show Monday, no show Monday...Carl if you weren't such a good worker you'd be out on your ass. YOU NEED TO SHOW UP ON MONDAY EVERY NOW AND THEN, JUST TO SEE WHAT IT'S LIKE! IT'S JUST LIKE TUESDAY!
Then, after some years of drinking so much over the weekend that he never made it to work on Monday, he married Irma. After that he straightened out, and lived a successful (if ultimately, for unrelated reasons, tragic) life, always jovial at family functions, a normal enough Republican. Maybe today we'd say he had PTSD from the war stories he used to tell about Korea, or had substance abuse issues from the alcohol, or any number of other diagnosable issues. But the thing I'm questioning is whether the life script today has room for "spent a decade fucking around at work while drinking too much on the weekends" before getting back on track. I don't know that it has that same flexibility. I think it would be tougher to pull off today. I think today the proper life path is more on rails, and if derailed is tougher to get back on, with deep ditches to either side. People need more flexibility, they are complicated.
FiveHourMarathon
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3mo ago
I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.
Conservatives are losing the "don't be weirdos” contest
I can’t resist commenting on how the ongoing freakout over the Kansas City Chiefs making the Super Bowl perfectly encapsulates everything that has gone wrong. Taylor Swift may have endorsed Biden in 2020, but as Max Meyer pointed out after attending one of her concerts, everything about her aesthetic and place in the culture is implicitly conservative. Her fans want to be attractive and meet men. They’re not interested in changing their sex or cheering for urban mobs looting the local supermarket. If you simply give them some semblance of normalcy, they’ll be on your side and vote in opposition to the left and what it has become. But instead of that, they get conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl being rigged so Swift can then endorse Biden.
We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora. People like this used to be natural conservatives, and especially given the Great Awokening, they still should today. They’re not, mostly because Republicans were able to overturn Roe and went out and created a cult of personality around perhaps the least normal politician the country has ever had.
There’s something deeply poetic about this freakout centering around football, the sport that has always served as a symbol of wholesome American normalcy. The old mantra of “the personal is political” always reflected a major electoral weakness of the left. It revealed an inability to have any thoughts or passions that aren’t part of an ideological agenda. Most people don’t care about politics all that much, and feel more positively inclined towards whichever tribe doesn’t try to make them feel guilty about that fact. If you’re watching the AFC Championship game and try to steer the conversation to which players are vaxxed, most sports fans aren’t going to want to talk to you anymore. For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.
As a Republican, I’m amused and horrified. One common reaction was summed up by a tweet reading simply “We don’t deserve to win.” Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.
Vivek, so recently a Republican candidate for President widely taken seriously, added to this genre tweeting out:
I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.
Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!
The problem is that even if you believe that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are artificially propped up, that Taylor is the result of media coverage and that the whole NFL is WWE with end zones, saying it doesn’t actually help you capture the millions of people who are fans of them. “Media Influence” is nearly always a Russell Conjugation: other people’s tastes are the result of media bias, my tastes are pure and formed entirely individually. People will almost never change their tastes as a result of being informed that they were “influenced” by the media, they will get angry. People will easily be convinced that other people are sheeple, they will almost never be convinced that they are. “Pop singers” Swifties will react angrily to this accusation, as will Chiefs fans. Neither will react kindly to the insinuation that their favorite thing is bullshit.
I can’t go through a week without hearing about Kelce from my mother or Swift from my wife. My wife is deep into the swiftie Gaylor conspiracy universe and asks my opinion on them when we’re stoned. My mother listens to every episode of the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, and gives me the highlights. Both are wealthy married white women, who own homes and cars, who value family and capitalism. My mother is not going to be convinced that she likes Travis Kelce because of the deep state and not because he is really good at getting open and he’s funny on mic. My wife is not going to be convinced that she doesn’t really like singing along to I Can See You. It’s a losing strategy to try to convince them that it’s all fake: most people start from the emotional opinion that everything is fake, they aren’t rationally convinced. Just as most atheists turn against the church for personal reasons and then become aware of all the rational arguments and contradictions involved.
The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic. Even when the inevitable Swift endorsement comes, it will feel hollow. Swift will be put in an uncomfortable position, weakened by being forced to deny being a white supremacist. Her fans will be offended by being called racists for liking the music they like, and start to turn against those calling them racists.
Of course, this isn’t happening because I doubt that Trump is declaring “Holy War” on Swift. That’s just a little unsourced TDS tidbit the liberal media couldn’t resist. This is just various hustling influencers seizing on a big name. But if you want to be an insurgent party, discipline is key, and this isn’t it.
AND YET
I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world. The captured version of the NFL that we watch every week, with “STOP RACISM” written on helmets and in the end zones, with required interviews for minority coaching candidates*, with the mildly absurd farce of wildly-celebrated female coaches in minor functionary roles buried on the staff, with every ad break featuring female athletes (and especially the hypothetical female high school football player featured over and over). Equally, I saw the Eras Tour movie with my wife, and friends of ours went to the concert. It was clear that comparing what was on camera to the crowd at the actual concerts, they went out of their way to make it seem less white than it was. Prominent romantic roles were given to Black Male dancers on stage, despite Taylor herself dating only white men historically, prominent roles were given to flamboyantly gay and trans dancers. Taylor put in the effort in advance to make it a comfortable experience for liberals.
So when Richard says:
For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.
He’s ignoring the context. Liberals were “that guy” for years, and they were loudly whiny, and they succeeded. The NFL and pop culture and ordinary speech changed to accommodate liberals. And it seems to be working, with ratings rebounding from 2016 downtrends. But Hanania is praising liberals for being able to watch a football game telecast that has been designed to soothe them, while blaming Conservatives for being unable to watch a telecast that has been designed to soothe their enemies. It’s a trap Conservatives have fallen into, and they should be shamed for it! But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.
*The Rooney Rule originally struck me as fairly decent, fairly fair: teams must interview one minority candidate for coaching positions. No requirement to hire, but you have to interview. The results have become increasingly absurd. The Eagles had black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators who had a terrible embarrassing end to the season, but had done well before. Both got a few token Head Coach interviews, to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and as a result the Eagles did not fire them, hanging onto them for way longer than anyone believed the Eagles would bring them back. Because if you get a black coach hired away, you get a compensatory draft pick for it. It was a silly spectacle to watch.
The Dawn of Everything, The Pop-Tarts Bowl Mascot, Joseph Campbell, and the Importance of Play
The Pop Tarts Bowl was played between North Carolina State and Kansas State. From my limited understanding, it is a second or third tier bowl game, well below stuff like the Orange Bowl and Rose Bowl, on the fringes of something that makes national TV. The colleges are relatively unimportant schools. But it took over my Twitter for a while, because of the edible mascot. And dammit, they delivered didn’t they Canonically (I have been informed) within the advertising universe personified Pop-Tarts want desperately to be eaten, it is their favorite thing. Tweets exploded at the sheer absurdity of the spectacle. It produced absurd quantities of earned media and was the most watched bowl game to that point. Other Mascots got in on it. There were infinite comparisons to Christ and the birth of Christianity: "This my body, that is being given up for you, and for many." And I can’t find the tweet anymore because I rarely save them, but I saw one in the midst of this onslaught of content that went something like “Archaeologists will unearth this and say that Americans engaged in mass sacrifice in college football stadiums. What if the Aztec temples and the Roman Coliseum weren’t sites of brutal slaughter, but intense silliness and play acting?” I don’t endorse those interpretations of Roman and Aztec history, and certainly not of Christianity…but let’s consider another possibility.
The Dawn of Everything (hereafter DoE) is a magisterial work. It endeavors to cover a great deal of ground, from meta-critique of European historiography and ethnography to straight historical storytelling, from absurd theorizing about Rousseau secretly plagiarizing indigenous authors to interesting interpretations of obscure cultural and historical forms.
((A brief aside on that Rousseau bit: ACX featured an extensive review of the book. The reviewer criticizes the idea of indigenous thought influencing European political thought as absurd then compares the Dawn of Everything view of power to the film Mean Girls…without realizing that he is himself participating in exactly the dynamic that the authors of DoE are talking about. Mean Girls quite explicitly compares the tribalism of High School cliques to a silly view of African wildlife and native life. The main character of the film is explicitly created as an outsider to American middle class norms, by way of making her the child of researching professors raised abroad in darkest Africa. The entire plot is, at some level, deeply influenced by and in conversation with the Western view of indigenous African cultures. To turn around and offer it as a pure and naive example of what hunter-gatherer tribal culture would have looked like is precisely what the Daves are talking about in DoE.))
But the real focus of DoE is in my view twofold. The first goal is recapturing the idea of humans as universally self-aware political actors, even in primitive societies. The second is an examination of how political forms radically different than our own interact with human freedom, and the authors view of the “Three Fundamental Freedoms” and how to measure them. I have no interest in going over the many examples offered in DoE to support the first point. They offer numerous examples of humans engaging in political thought, debate, and reorganization. They make what I find to be persuasive arguments that rather than a straight line from a pure state of nature, through intermediate steps growing progressively more complex and controlled, to the modern capitalist surveillance state, itself an intermediate step leading towards the singularity/the Federation of Planets/True Communism/Whatever. DoE makes a compelling argument that in many places over time, peoples have gotten something resembling early civilization and soundly and consciously rejected it. That through the resulting institutions and traditions primitive successor nations specifically built strategies to prevent the formation of tyrannies. This is obvious, if only by evolutionary means: only societies that have formed strong traditions against the formation of more strictly organized control and tyranny will remain free. We can examine societies that built cities and monuments in Cahokia, then abandoned them, to see how a society can be built to resist such further authoritarianism.
DoE frames this view of anti-authoritarianism in the Three Freedoms. The freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to reorganize social relationships along new lines. The first is the most fundamental, underlying such post-modern futurist visions of freedom as the Archipelago and the Patchwork. As long as people are free to flee, building a new tyranny is impossible, people will simply leave. What if they had a pogrom and nobody showed up? The second is obvious, can people disobey orders given to them? What are the consequences of doing so? Interacting with the first freedom, can you just leave town if you don’t want to listen to orders, or will you be restrained? The third is more subtle: how can people change the organization of their social relationships? Are the hierarchies handed down to me, or can I build my own? Are we allowed to form our own religion, our own secret society, our own fan club, freedom of association? Can I marry who I choose, and structure that marriage how I choose? While the other freedoms are purely the freedom to assert oneself (to move under one’s own will, to act as one chooses) this freedom also involves a strange freedom: the freedom to submit. Am I free to bind myself to religious doctrines? Am I free to structure a covenant marriage? Am I free to run my family how I choose? Am I free to sign contracts to work as I see fit? By the very act of granting rights to parties that are irrevocable, modern governments impinge on the right to transform social relations: I have the freedom of association, but not to bind myself or others to promises beyond what the government chooses to recognize. Beyond that limit, all can escape.
Much of the work is devoted to examination of different bases of power, and how they interact in primitive societies. But one of the interesting insights is how, looking at societies that are seemingly on-the-verge of developing into more complex polities, there seem to be play-powers, carnival-kings whose power is temporary or farcical, and are obeyed with a giggle but have no real power. DoE compares this to play-farming, typical of hunter-gatherer cultures, who will often cultivate a plot for fun but not as a primary means of subsistence. The authors theorize that play-kings develop into real kings over time. But they also assert the importance of play-relations as a way to model, to experiment, to grow into new forms of real relations, an assertion of the third freedom. Play can be an important means of building civil society, of creating new forms.
In talking about the first freedom, DoE talks about the Clan system of Amerindian tribes. Each tribe contained a cross cutting system of Clans, within the Algonquin there were Bear, Wolf, Hawk clans and then among the Haudenausee there would equally be Bear, Wolf, Hawk clans, and so on in tribes across the plains to the canyons. The clan members were putatively all relatives of each, clan descent was matrilineal, and clan members must marry someone from another clan. Clan members owe each other hospitality, travel was facilitated across long distances. The authors note that much of the long distance travel and trade seems to be for fairly frivolous purposes, minor luxuries or curiosities rather than necessities. Much of the long distance trade and travel was itself play, a frivolous means of achieving status. But at the same time, the preservation of these networks of trade and travel enabled the freedom to move. It was impossible to tyrannize citizens when they have the option to move from place to place easily and freely. So while the networks may be frivolous in application, they have a serious impact. It's these kinds of cross-cutting identities that can offer freedom against the polity. The combination of all identities into a single coinciding nation-state is the opposite of this, a totalizing identity: an ethnic identity that coincides with a political monopoly on violence which coincides (often) with religious identities which coincides with linguistic identities. Maybe we need to disentangle the identities from each-other.
Think of all the ways that frivolous things can become serious. Everything I learned about leadership, I learned from either youth sports or the Boy Scouts. My wife and I use joking ironic pet names for each other, that slowly become the only names we refer to each other by, the sappy irony becomes sappy reality. We have seen “meme-magic” turn an ironic joke into a president, and then into a number of people who may or may not have been in on the jokes going to prison. On this very forum, I learned about the Doge system, and I really would consider implementing it in other organizations I am a part of in the future. The Nika riots are a great example of play civil society coming to the fore, albeit to a tragic conclusion. Much of the glue of civil society is in ball leagues, in reading clubs, in sewing circles.
This all reminded me of a quote from a Joseph Campbell lecture that has stuck with me for a long time:
There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as “play language,” asobase kotoba, whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, “I see that you have come to Tokyo,” one would express the observation by saying, “I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo”— the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game, freely and with ease. And this idea is carried even so far that instead of saying to a person, “I hear that your father has died,” you would say, rather, “I hear that your father has played at dying.” And now, I submit that this is truly a noble, really glorious way to approach life…That is the attitude designated by Nietzche as Amor fati, love of one’s fate.
The field of play can encompass everything in life, all the world’s a stage and whatnot, but it is also important to create fields of play to experiment, to create spaces of mastery in which to learn.
Which brings us back to the Pop Tarts Bowl. It’s comical, it is silly, it is a corporate goofball advertisement. But it can also be the start of a tradition. Maybe this is how traditions start, with something so ridiculously stupid that it captures the imagination. These kinds of imaginary games, ceremonies, meanings, can be used to start to build to cross-cutting identities that will help us imagine and reproduce a new universe of freedom, outside the modern totalizing worldview.
It’s important not to take things so seriously. Treat life as a game, and you’ll build something real.
Note: DoE dislikes the use of terms like “primitive.” For all the typical reasons of judgment etc. I still find it a useful conceptual anchor, and for lack of a better term that isn’t dripping with euphemistic political correctness I will use it here. I do not indicate, in general, that these are not sophisticated societies, or that they are not organized. The whole point of this is that they have political thought! But they don’t have the maxim gun, as it were.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
6mo ago
It's especially insane to me in that, if one were going to be racist against any group, Aboriginal Australians have the weakest arguments to make of maybe any ethnic group in the world. They have made virtually zero scientific, economic, cultural, sporting, artistic, political, military, domestic contributions to global culture.
I literally can't think of any other ethnicity, outside of super specific small groups, that I can't make a better argument for. Gypsy culture might be made up of criminals, but Django Reinhardt. We've seen the arguments against Jews and American Blacks rehashed a million times, but vast swathes of modern physics and literature and music and sport argues in their favor. Serbians can't have an independent country for thirty years without starting a war, but there's plenty of great Serbians. Even little Arab Palestine has given us the odd poet, or emigrant businessman or model.
What have Aboriginal Australians ever contributed? The digiridoo?
My wife asked one of her typical "Long drive stuck in traffic" questions the other day, and I want to pose it to theMotte: What pop song written this century would you propose as the new national anthem for the United States of America?
I settled on Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me. It perfectly captures the modern American middle-class self-conceit. It's got a little twang to it without being Morgan Wallen, a dash of country but not too much, reflecting a people that still thinks of themselves as descendants of frontier farmers but really drive a lawn tractor around a suburban three-quarters of an acre; a driving rock beat but not heavy metal, a cultural artifact that honors rock music's past but neither pushes it forward into avant garde strangeness nor slavishly imitates what went before.
The femcel narrator's view of herself as the putative underdog ("She wears short-skirts I wear T Shirts, she's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers") is the kind of self-view every American takes of themselves. We Americans all think of ourselves like that, we're all middle-class or working class underdogs striving against the "system" and its head honchos. We think that about ourselves, even when we're billionaires who have been elected president, superstar athletes who pushed other superstar athletes out of the sport that we already dominated, or the literal richest man in the world. Americans picture themselves as the underdog when they fight wars against impoverished tribesmen across the globe, when they play sports we barely care about against tiny countries. How better to capture that than a song by a thin, young, rich blonde about how she just can't get a guy to notice her. The video presentation adds to the hilarity: she's the only one who really understands the (checks notes) star wide receiver on the football team, they're the most conventionally attractive high school couple imaginable, but they're so unique because she unlike his current girlfriend "listen[s] to the kind of music she doesn't like, And she'll never know your story like I do."
The conclusion of the song ("Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find, That what you're looking for has been here the whole time, If you could see that I'm the one, Who understands you, Been here all along, So, why can't you see?, You belong with me") reflects America's inherent hopefulness and future-orientation. We all think that one day the world will wake up and realize what we have. If we just stay in Iraq long enough, if we just really make the case for democracy in China, if we get antidiscrimination right this time, if we create a path to good jobs for the working class...Americans believe in so many impossible plans it is hard to keep track.
What's your pick and your justification?
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
11mo ago
One of my favorite hobby horses: Start the "Colonialism" clock in 1492 to claim European colonization of the Americas was wrong, but start it in 1452 and Istanbul should be part of Greece (or rather Greece should be ruled from Constantinople).
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
This whole analysis is off-base, because it fails to examine the reason why content warnings, and most other identity-based lobbying, are effective or not effective.
Thesis/TLDR: Content warnings aren't effective because they prevent exposure to a "triggering" stimulus, they are effective because by giving them society is acknowledging the power and importance of the individual/group that could be thus triggered. This is a salve to the wounds of most identity based issues, such as racism or sexual assault, because the primary harm of those issues is the feeling of the individual lacking power.
Imagine the following personal scenario by analogy. Albert has recently gone through a viciously bad breakup, his girlfriend publicly cheated on him, and has left him for the other man. Their mutual social circle is aware, his friends at work know and have probably gossiped to the rest of the office. Everywhere he goes, everyone he knows talks about it, he can't escape it, even if people don't bring it up, he suspects that they are talking behind his back. He goes fishing with his father Brian, Brian asks him how he's handling the breakup, Albert says hey dad, I'm tired of it, let's talk about literally anything else. But Brian wants to know about the breakup, he's curious, he keeps asking, says hey come on I'm your father you can talk about this with me. Albert snaps, says it is my life and I don't have to talk about it if I don't want to. Brian says you don't want to listen to me because you don't respect me. Albert says you don't respect me or else you wouldn't insist on talking about something I don't want to talk about. Both become angry, both feel that the other doesn't respect him.
Now is Albert primarily angry at the thought of talking to his father, or his he primarily angry at the loss of power, that he has been robbed of the power to choose what to talk about? Is his father primarily angry that he isn't hearing about the breakup, or is he angry that his son doesn't respect him enough to confide in him? After this struggle has become about power and respect, is Albert going to be happier to talk about the breakup, or will it feel worse than ever to talk about it?
Trigger warnings are the same. Who are the groups who advocate for trigger warnings? Subaltern ethnic groups, and rape victims. What is the psychologically harmful experience of being a member of a subaltern ethnic group or of rape? It is the experience of lacking power, the feeling that one lacks importance, that others can abuse or instrumentalize your existence towards their own ends. Trigger warnings are an effective salve, not because they prevent exposure to the bad thing, but because by giving a trigger warning society is saying to them: you matter, you are important, you have power, we will allow you to decide what we talk about. This improves things for such a person, because they feel that someone cares about their feelings, about what they think. This is a normal psychological dynamic.
At the same time, the majority or historically dominant groups will experience this loss of power and agency as a psychological harm. This is a normal psychological dynamic. Worse, they will experience the loss more keenly than they experience any gain. That's a natural flaw in human minds.
This is also why the concept of trigger warnings is such a mind-virus: the dynamic this creates makes viewing the purportedly harmful content more harmful, not less, because now being "forced" to view the content will seem like a greater loss of power than providing the trigger warning originally seemed like a gain.
So to zoom back out to the whole concept of "The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness" as you put it. The question isn't so much about unhappiness, it is about power and agency. Increasing the power and agency of subaltern groups, and concomitantly decreasing the power and agency of everyone else to determine their own lives.
I am, for the most part, the picture they put next to privilege in the SJWebster's Dictionary of Woke Terminology: blond, male, heterosexual, reasonably comfortable. Ceteris paribus, in the current system, left to my own devices I am capable of living a happy life pursuing my own interests. At some level of proximity and severity of unhappiness, that would be widely seen as inappropriate. If my mother was dying in the hospital, going on a climbing trip that weekend would widely be seen as wrong. If my sister and my nieces were out on the street, it would widely be seen as heartless for me to buy myself a new car. That balance of severity and proximity extends outward to some point, where it is inappropriate for me to do [X] while [Y] is experiencing [Z]. While someone close to me is miserable, I should not be left to my own devices to pursue my own happiness, I should be caring for them, to help them.
The argument here seems to be for a vast expansion of both the proximity at which I should be constrained in my actions, and the level of misery at which I should be constrained in my actions. To say I don't have the right to go on vacation the week my best friend's house burns down strikes me as a reasonable constraint on my freedom and agency, indeed helping him is an exercise of my agency and power as a person. Telling me that I don't have the right to have a comfortable life until everyone does, is to totally restrain my freedom and agency, it's to say I'm not allowed to do anything. Telling me I can't have an honest conversation about difficult topics in a college course until Black people are all happy, or until no one ever gets raped, is to totally restrain my ability to have a college education. At the same time, these arguments elevate the feelings of power of the powerless.
These arguments should always be about examining power and agency of the players involved.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
7mo ago
The obvious answer is religious prejudice against Scientology. Which may be justified and I may share, but it's still how this conviction was reached.
Among other things one of the women testified that her own mother (!) told her that while what happened was tragic she shouldn't report it because of the damage it would do to the faith. After the woman accused Masterson, her mother cut off all contact with her.
The jury was persuaded by a lot of testimony about the weird cult the perp was in, the way Scientologist hierarchs pressured victims not to go public at the time, the testimony about consequences women faced from the Scientologist community for going public. The jury found all that persuasive.
This is as much a MeToo case as it was a religious persecution/cult case depending on your view of scientology. There's precedent for overruling the SoL in cases of religious pressure to hide accusations... But I find the urge to eliminate procedural protections for rapists deeply fascist. We've already seen these laws used against Assange. Give the state infinite power to prosecute its enemies when accused of sex crimes and all the state needs is a woman, who can hide behind rape shield laws anyway. The urge to prosecute minority religions should be viewed similarly, even if scientology really is nutso.
Aside from this, lol@ everyone involved in the Ashton Kutcher Mila Kunis imbroglio resulting from their letter trying to offer mitigating character evidence for Masterson. They tried to write letters about what a nice guy he was, but failed to realize A) the letters would be public record, B) it's generally better to admit he did it in that kind of letter. The classic format is "I can't reconcile what he's been convicted of with the man I knew..." They failed to include that, indicating they still think he's innocent. They then issued a mealy mouthed half apology to the victims, victims they don't believe are victims. If you want to stand by your friend, regardless of circumstances I think that's admirable, but say it out loud standing up straight. He did it or he didn't. If you think he didn't there are no victims to retraumatize.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
27d ago
Is it reasonable of me to assume that any straight man who describes himself as "demisexual" is pulling exactly the same kind of long con, but more subtle?
I would say that the vast majority of people who describe themselves as Asexual but have sex/relationships have simply found an identity-based way to navigate chastity in a sexual world that frightens them (largely based on media). All personal boundaries must be identity based in liberal society, or else they are very difficult to defend. A woman who says she doesn't want to have sex right away is a prude, a woman who says she is asexual is valid. A man who says he doesn't want to have sex all the time is a lying loser, a man who says he is asexual is valid.
I'd compare it in my own life to the years I spent between 13 and 17 listening to a ton of Minor Threat and Youth of Today and Earth Crisis and claiming to be super into Straight Edge punk philosophy. I had an Out of Step poster, and scribbled "I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't fuck, at least I can fucking think!" on things in Sharpie. I think I even put X's on the back of my hands when I went to concerts a few times.
Not to invalidate anyone who really was Straight Edge, I met some of them, but as a loser teenager it was cowardice. I was afraid of girls, and couldn't get a date anyway; I was afraid of booze and drugs and breaking laws around them, and didn't get invited to parties anyway. Straight Edge was a way to claim I was making a principled stand. I doubt it achieved much, I was an apparent loser, it was mostly something I said to make myself feel better.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
4mo ago
I will take a stand here: if they are under the impression that a 1460 SAT on its own is impressive enough that it is notable that it did not get them into Cornell, they are not an ivy league caliber student. Just flatly, they do not understand the system.
-- A 1460 SAT isn't really that impressive. It's just...not that big a deal. Even looking at the medians at schools isn't enough, because most of the students at those schools will have a whole pile of other stuff in their resume. Good High School GPA, good extracurriculars, good essays. Any given student might have lacking extracurriculars, a weak GPA, or have written a meandering poorly reasoned essay about how superior he thinks he is to the hoi polloi. He might have put down Stormfront Juniors as his extracurricular and written his essay about his admiration for Rudolf Hess. You just don't know.
-- Admissions are pretty random anyway. Any individual student getting rejected from any individual school isn't notable. At all. Personal story: I applied to all the T14 law schools. I only got into one, waitlisted at the rest. That one offered me a full tuition scholarship. Which makes no sense, because I didn't even get into the schools they were trying to buy me out of. My point being not only was my admissions result random, the admissions team at my school (who presumably know a lot about that kind of thing) didn't expect that result and tried to bribe me not to go to the schools that didn't admit me. Further, HYS all waitlisted me, effectively indicating that I was marginal as a candidate but on balance I was "good enough" for HYS, I was of the caliber of student they were looking for. Georgetown flat rejected me! Georgetown! You never know where you will or won't be admitted on an individual basis, at best it's a probability.
-- Not knowing the above indicates to me that the people involved aren't plugged into the gunner universe of students who put together Ivy League resumes in high school, and therefore probably didn't put together an ivy league caliber resume, and therefore didn't "deserve" to get in. Whether that is the system we want is irrelevant, it's the system we have. It's not about being white, it's about not being a gunner.
On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity
In the past week, I took my dad to the annual Street Rod show in our hometown, where we walked around all afternoon looking at thousands of custom classics, running into a lot of the same people we’ve run into at the same show every year since I could walk. And I took him to see his all-time favorite movie, George Lucas’* American Graffiti, in theaters one night only for the 50th Anniversary of its original release.
At the film, and even more at the car show, I felt like a kid, like a teenager. Not in the sense of “Wide eyed wonder” or “remembering my own youth,” though there was plenty of that as well. It was simply that I, at thirty, was one of the younger people at both events. The people at the Street Rod show have frozen in time, always my dad’s age or older. Fewer and older every year, as they die off one after another. When I was ten they were older but still robust guys who could lift a transmission and you wouldn't mess with; when I was a teenager you started seeing canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and they’ve become more common every year since. This year, I followed two guys for hours across the show, on Rascal scooters, matching MAGA hats, chain smoking cigars. I wasn’t sure if I admired their IDGAF attitude (“I’m already on the scooter, why give up the cigars now?”) or if I was horrified at the idea. When two street rod enthusiasts see each other at the show and catch up, the conversation is all ailments and surgeries now. And then they all turn to the same question: where are all the young people? Why don’t young people care about these cars? Why don’t young people love Street Rods?
And the answer seemed blindingly obvious to me: these cars have a completely different meaning and symbolism for you than they do for me. Custom car culture still exists, but it’s not about Street Rods as defined in the show charter, not by a long shot. The National Street Rod Association describes street rods as a vehicle of 1948 or earlier that has had modernization to the engine, transmission, interior, or anything else and is a non-racing vehicle used mostly for general enjoyment. “The more family-friendly version of the hot rod.” Besides the obvious fact that cars from 1948 are less accessible to young people, it simply doesn’t make sense to modify a car for performance today.
Modifying a car for street performance purposes makes essentially zero sense in this day and age, doing so is entirely performative in nature. In 1962, the year American Graffiti is set, hot rods were fast because factory cars were slow. I’ve built and driven cars similar to John Millner’s “piss yellow deuce coupe” and while they’re fun to play with, they’re not really very fast**. It’s impossible to guess exact specs in a film that’s largely a nostalgic fantasy, but I’ve driven similar cars with more modern running gear, and it’s pretty hard to take that kind of platform and get a sub-7s 0-60 just by getting the engine running hotter. Now, in 1962, that car was fast, it was the fastest in the Valley!, because Steve’s ’58 Impala probably made 60 in something like 14 seconds, and the Edsel his girlfriend drives probably took 10 seconds or so. Even a brand-new ’62 Vette would have taken 6.9 seconds to reach 60. It really was possible to take a clapped out little old Ford that a teenager with a summer job could afford, slap a big engine sourced from a wrecked truck in it, tune it for power in your garage, and have a meaningfully fast car, a car visibly faster than other cars on the road, a car fast enough that other people would be impressed by it. You could have the bitchin’est car in the whole Valley, and the handful of mostly-foreign performance cars that could challenge you were rare as hen’s teeth in the American small town.
Today, factory speed is so widely available that not only is it impossible to hot-rod anything meaningful, it’s impossible to really street race without being more limited by balls and rationality than by the machines involved. The 2023 Vette runs a sub-3 0-60, in automatic, and costs less than $80k brand new Chevy sells 30,000 of them every year. A Tesla Model 3 Performance sedan can do 60 in 3.5 seconds, costs $55k, and is also a practical day to day car. Hell, for a little over $30k today, you can pick up a 2021 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Prime which will get you to 60 in 5.6 seconds while being among the most practical and reliable family cars on the road. There’s no logical reason to modify your car to be faster today, putting an annoying exhaust, taking out comfort features and turning it into a penalty box, will still deliver less speed-per-dollar than just saving up for a used Corvette. Even if you just want to Mod, you’re better off starting at the Vette and modding that, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. You cannot build a meaningfully fast car on a budget today, at best you might be able to keep a clapped out old M3 on the road. The budget path to a meaningfully fast car today is taking a factory fast car that has deteriorated to a budget price and managing to keep it in shape. A friend of mine has a 2012 e550, I’ve driven it and it’s a lovely and incredibly fast car with over 400hp that will happily bounce off the electronically limited top speed, he bought it for $20k a couple years back, but it’s caught a case of electrical gremlins that are causing an engine misfire that the mechanics all estimate at $15k to fix, and wholesale trade-in on it is $11k, probably sell it for $5k with the engine issues. There’s nothing you can do with $6k in parts for a $5k Honda Civic that will get you anywhere near the E550’s 4.3s 60 time.
Factory speed is the enemy of custom car culture. When any chucklehead can just pay-to-win by buying a fast car from the dealership, having a fast car has no meaning. Think of the great eras of custom racing: American Graffiti memorializes the late 50s early 60s street rod era, and the first few Fast and Furious films commemorate the late 80s-90s tuner era. But the thing is, the 80s and 90s were a nadir for cars in general in America. The 60s and 70s had the great muscle car era, that was the death of the Hot Rod era. Post Embargo, common American cars wouldn’t achieve the performance heights of the Judge and the great SS cars until the mid 2000s. The C4 Corvette is a mediocre car by today’s standards, would be a Toyota 86 competitor, but in 1984 it was such a monster it was banned from SCCA competition because Porsche and Mercedes products simply couldn’t compete, the Corvette needed its own category! This was the environment that fueled Tuner and Ricer culture: you really could take an Acura Integra and make it meaningfully faster, fast enough to compete with a C4 corvette.
The irony is that “car guys” have always slavered over factory speed! They want car companies to make great performance cars! But they also love custom culture. These two desires are in natural conflict, factory speed drives customs out of the market. Today’s custom culture is all about art cars, interesting aesthetics, or over-loud audio. The very same guys complaining that young people aren’t into cars, created the environment where custom cars don’t make sense. Our desires kill the environment that creates and fuels those desires.*** Too much of what we want kills us. It’s the inherently elegiac nature of the Western: the cowboy sheriff makes himself obsolete, by taming the West he destroys the West he knew.
The restrictive definition that the National Street Rod Association uses sentences their shows to decline and death. I look out at the show, shrinking every year, aging every year, and I know the only path forward for this subculture. If they want young people, they need cars that mean something to young people! A 75 year old man wants the cars that were cool when he was young, so does a 30 year old man, so does the 22 year old man. I look at the park and think, cut it right down the middle, this half is T-Buckets and Golden Oldies, that half is Ricers and Reggaeton booming out of trunk mounted subwoofers. You can still have the traditional street rods, but limiting the show to traditional street rods leaves it sterile, unmoving, not going anywhere. Open the show up to everyone, and maybe they’ll also learn to love the traditional street rods. Sure, have the old timers, but have the young artists too! The only way to preserve hot rod culture, to really keep the spirit of John Milner alive, is to allow it to change and grow, to bring in young people customizing the cars that mean something to young people.
But the OGs, the NSRA Golden Oldies types, they have no interest in seeing things change. They don’t want Riced out Civics, they don’t want big subwoofers and Bad Bunny, they want what they’ve always had. And maybe they deserve that! Maybe the purity of that culture is worth it! But walking through the show, I’m very aware, viscerally aware, of the choice being made: the Street Rod show has chosen death over diversity. They’d rather the car show shrink than that it feature modern customs. They’d rather see it die than see it change. That’s the tragedy, walking around the show looking at these beautiful machines, and knowing that the culture that built them has rendered itself sterile, chosen not to reproduce itself for fear of change.
*This was, coincidentally, the film Lucas made immediately before becoming “the Star Wars guy” forever. It’s a cozy little realistic slice-of-life all-rounder of a film, no special effects to speak of. It’s fascinating to consider: if Lucas hadn’t made Star Wars would he have continued making movies like this for thirty years instead? Did we miss out on unmade masterpieces consumed by the Star Wars universe? I might write a bigger comment on the film later, the way it perfectly captures the really beauty and feelings of freedom of American youth, the unique Americana teenage culture of driving around with your friends that is disappearing every year, I wanted to include more of it here but this comment is already entirely too long.
**A forum comment I found from an old timer is the best summary on the topic of how fast Hot Rods were:
***Another example from my youth: Baseball Cards were something kids were supposed to care about. My dad bought me baseball cards and sort of informed me that little boys were supposed to like them. But whenever I actually played with them, he’d yell at me for ruining their collector value. I wasn’t allowed to flip them, shuffle them, make fake lineups, trade them: they were worth something. Because from the time my dad was a kid, his generation had made them collectable, made them valuable. As a result, I have no connection with baseball cards, really. I’m aware they’re collectibles, but I have no emotional attachment to them the way his generation did. The capitalist urge to create something special and market it, to make "collectibles," erodes and destroys the human meaning behind those collectibles.
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