Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
A recent piece by Rod Dreher is the latest example I’ve seen on the Dissident Right of references to “Theater-Kid-run America” and to the dangers of giving power to “Former Theater Kids” and, well, it’s got me feeling called-out in a very uncomfortable way. Certainly this far from the first time I’ve felt conspicuously out-of-place and unwelcome on the Right; my sparring with @HlynkaCG and @FCfromSSC in this space, and with a number of users when I was an active poster in /r/CultureWarRoundup, have reinforced my acute awareness of how my upbringing and personality profile make me somewhat of an uncomfortable fit in the right-wing ecosystem. But the “Theater Kids” discourse hits me particularly hard because it touches on something over which I’ve agonized for a long time.
The question of “why are artistically-inclined people nearly universally left-wing” has occupied my thoughts extensively ever since I began my journey to the Right. As I’ve mentioned here before - probably extremely ill-advisedly, from an OpSec perspective - I have a theatre arts degree and spent over a decade heavily involved in the local theatre scene (both musicals and “straight plays”) in my city. At one point I was incredibly enthusiastic about pursuing a professional career in that field, and made my participation in it a central part of my identity. My political conversion isn’t the only reason I’ve drifted away from theatre (even my use of the British spelling gives me away as a Theater Kid), but it was by far the biggest accelerant of that decision. Another reason, though, is that even aside from their politics, theatre people can be… difficult to be around in certain ways that made me stick out like a sore thumb sometimes even without politics entering the equation.
So, when I see right-wing commentators taking potshots at “Theater Kids”, part of me wants to not only applaud, but to amplify their criticism: “Oh, you don’t even know the half of it!” I’m far more intimately aware of the particular failure modes of artists, because I saw them up-close and personal for a huge part of my life, and can recognize some of those failure modes in myself. Another part of me, though, becomes very defensive and wants to leap to the defense of the creative class; not only because, despite my current politics and estrangement from that scene, I’m still one of those people at heart, but also because I think right-wing people tread on dangerous ground when they too-eagerly dismiss and alienate artistically-/creatively-oriented people.
It is undeniably true that people involved in the arts are overwhelmingly and ostentatiously left-wing. Look at surveys of political orientation among any even remotely creative-adjacent field and you will find support for progressive parties/ideas well above 80-90%. The question of why this is the case is complicated and fascinating. Has it always been that way? It is dangerous to apply modern political categories to pre-modern societies, but if the “theater kid” personality profile existed in ancient/classical societies, would it be possible to say that those types of people would have been more “proto-woke” than the average citizen?
Remember that the great literary classics of Ancient Greece - the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Theogony - were epic poems delivered orally and accompanied by music long before they were written down and codified in literary form. The bards who would have invented, transmitted and augmented these epic poems were real people with real personalities, and I think there’s a significant likelihood that they were not too different from the actors and rockstars of today. Besides implying a degree of narcissism and superciliousness that we associate with artsy people today, does it also suggest that they would have been the “shitlibs” of their day?
There’s an interesting discourse about how the character of Odysseus is a sort of prototype for the theater kid’s idea of a hero - the idealized self-image of an artist imagining how he would be as a hero. Odysseus is a trickster and fabulist; he achieves his heroic deeds largely through craftiness, subterfuge, deception, and pretending to be anybody other than who he actually is. He can conjure whole worlds and identities at a whim through the magic of wordplay and storytelling. He is labile and mercurial, indirect and full of what we might call chutzpah. He prefigures more modern examples of the “trickster/bullshitter with a heart of gold” archetype epitomized by musical theatre characters like Harold Hill in The Music Man, J. Pierrepont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and the funhouse-mirror version of P.T. Barnum presented in the movie musical The Greatest Showman. The guys writing these musicals can’t imagine themselves as Herculean heroes of might and action, but they can imagine themselves saving the world by being so good at spinning a compelling story that they make it come true.
So, what does this imply about the self-image of artists, and what can it teach us about the likely consequences of giving the reins of power (cultural, political, or otherwise) to people who come from this milieu and/or have this personality type? Many on the Right - I’m thinking especially of the blogger The Z-Man - have noted that modern American politics are dominated by a sort of Carny (meaning a carnival performer or huckster) type of personality. There’s a persuasive case to be made that democracy inherently rewards and gives power to that exact type of person. I think we can see all around us many of the failure modes of trusting these people with the governance of our country and the production of our cultural narratives. They are fundamentally unserious people, addicted to attention and applause, attracted to head-in-the-clouds utopian nonsense because they never fully grew out of a sort of perpetual narcissistic adolescence, convinced that the key to solving hard problems is just telling a really good lie and crafting a feel-good narrative so aesthetically-pleasing that it can’t help but manifest into reality. This is a spot-on description of the personalities of many of the theatre people I know, and I wouldn’t trust them to organize a bake sale, let alone run a country.
And yet. By telegraphing its open hostility to artists and creatives - by throwing up a big sign that says, “people with liberal arts degrees, go away!” - I believe that the Right severely cripples itself. Firstly, on a practical level, it deprives the Right of its ability to mobilize individuals who can craft aesthetically-compelling narratives that will inspire and convert normal people. Right now, the only interesting art that most people in first-world countries will ever be exposed to is made by leftists. We can talk about the reasons for this; certainly some of them are structural, and are downstream of the fact that Hollywood and creative industries more generally are dominated by powerful leftists who limit the ability of right-wing content creators to access the kind of resources and backing required to produce and distribute media. But even when right-wingers get a chance to make art, it… generally doesn’t measure up.
Why is that? Is part of the reason why right-wingers (myself included) are so interested in pre-modern art is that they can keep Retvrning to it and are relieved of the burden of having to create something new? Why is it that the only people who go to classical music concerts and operas are PMC shitlibs? If the Right achieves its glorious counter-revolution, will the end product look like the town from Footloose? Distrustful of art and self-expression for fear that it breeds degeneracy? Forever fighting a battle to suppress artsy types who will corrupt the youth and bring the poison of leftism back from the dead? Should creative types who are otherwise on board with the Rightist project be concerned that we are helping to build a future that will have no place for us?
Maybe the fact that I’m asking these questions is proof that Red Tribers are right to be suspicious of people like me. If a conservative and traditional life is ideal for the vast majority of people, who cares what a tiny minority of whiny self-obsessed “artists” want? Aren’t people like me the reason we got to this point in the first place? It’s a tough subject for me to think about. To what extent can I whole-heartedly commit to a political project that will marginalize the people most similar to myself, in order to secure the greater good for the great mass of other people on earth? Am I just overthinking this entirely and letting a flippant shitposty meme trigger me into neurotic despair?
I can’t believe I of all people am going to defend progressive activists, but I think you and the author are both massively underselling how formalized and sophisticated the theoretical basis for these educators’ approach is. I’m surprised that at no point does the author mention the man whose ghost looms large over so much of modern literacy education: Paolo Freire.
Freire’s The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed, along with his somewhat lesser-known book The Politics Of Education, is one of the most influential texts in teacher education of the last century. Freire was one of the pioneers of critical education - which, like any other branch of critical theory, is explicitly Marxist, and seeks to use education as a tool to undermine and destroy the existing socio-economic system. James Lindsay, of the New Discourses website, did a series of lengthy and dense podcasts in which he went through Freire’s work in excruciating detail, explaining Freire’s theories and how they have influenced modern anglophone education. (For those of you who instinctively scoff any time a right-winger calls something Marxist, assuming that this is like when Republicans call any basic government function Communism, I encourage you to look into what Freire had to say about Maoism and Che Guevara.) Every major progressive educator and pedagogical theorist of the last few decades is using Freire’s work as a jumping-off point.
One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.” He believed that the dominant educational paradigm of the 19th and early 20th centuries was one in which students were assumed to be passive and ignorant receptacles, into which teachers can pour all of the approved knowledge that the teachers have decided the students are required to know. This model is hierarchical; the teacher is the Authority - the Knower, who has a form of cultural capital called Knowledge - and the students, who lack the fundamental skills that would allow them to exercise any agency over their own education, are expected to sit down, shut up, and let the Knower deposit Knowledge into them. Freire’s insight was that this educational model, in addition to teaching kids the actual mechanical skill of reading, also smuggles in a “hidden curriculum”: the unstated hierarchical assumption that the point of school is for Society to tell children what they are supposed to know - what information is important and what isn’t - in order to turn them into effective and productive members of the existing society.
In opposition to this model, Freire developed what he called the “generative” or “constructive” model of education. In this approach, the educator strives to minimize any sense of hierarchical relationship between herself and the students; rather than being there as an Authority, the teacher acts as a collaborator with the students. She presents them with basic concepts and resources, and then allows them the greatest possible degree of freedom in choosing which of those concepts or resources to discuss and utilize. The teacher is, in this model, merely a facilitator for the students as they exercise their own creativity and agency. In doing so, the students not only generate their own insights and absorb knowledge, but they also cultivate a sense of their own potential as Creators.
In addition - and this is centrally crucial to Freire’s model - they begin to notice things about the world. See, the teacher has pre-selected the library of works that the students have on hand to explore; if she has a bunch of, say, thinkpieces about structural oppression, or books written from the perspective of poor and marginalized people, then as the students spontaneously discover and read those works, they begin to ask questions about what they find in those materials. And that’s where the teacher comes in; she can provide some answers, or even ask other questions that inspire students to think in a particular way about the society around them. A Marxist revolutionary way, specifically. Freire is not shy about this. Neither is Lucy Calkins, the educational activist and theorist whom the author presents as the primary driver of the “whole language” model. Calkins is very vocal about the centrality of “social justice” in her pedagogy, and about her insistence on exposing children to materials about racism, structural oppression, etc. For these people, teaching your children to read is not the point. The point is to turn them into revolutionaries against the existing society. The point is to give them the tools, and then the ideological guidance, to allow them to deconstruct, criticize, and eventually dismantle the socioeconomic status quo. Again, if you read Calkins and Freire, they’re not hiding this from you.
Now, as with a lot of the larger critical theory and DEI industries, it’s never really clear how many of the ground-level employees actually have any deep understanding of, or buy-in to, the intellectual infrastructure of the work they’ve been tasked with carrying out. I find it difficult to believe that the vast majority of young women going into primary school teaching are all doctrinaire Neo-Marxists. I believe the last time I looked into it I saw that the average IQ of a public-school teacher in the United States is about 102. These are not cognitively impressive people. They’re not serious adherents of critical theory. I think that for the vast majority of them, it is indeed true that they are primarily motivated by the sorts of self-aggrandizing narratives around teaching that are presented by films like Dead Poets Society and Freedom Writers: a charismatic teacher with boundless energy and an almost gnostic ability to unlock students’ inner creativity and knowledge-generating potential becomes a sort of mentor or guru for a whole classroom of students, inspiring them to lives of greatness. This model of teaching is inherently parasocial and allows the teacher to act as a manipulator and ideological guiding light for those students, which is why it is so useful for Marxists, but it’s also an extremely emotionally-satisfying narrative for those who are going into what is otherwise a dismally underpaid and punishing career path.
In general, when you are examining the actions of progressive activists, and you are asking yourself, “Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do. The reason educators don’t seem to be doing a good job of teaching children to read is that their actual goal is something else. The reason why Black Lives Matter activism doesn’t seem to actually save any black lives - quite the opposite, in fact - is that their actual goal is something else. While the average schoolteacher is a mediocrity, in over her head and sustained only by self-serving heroic narratives about her Life’s Purpose, the people actually designing the pedagogical model she was trained on were extremely intelligent people with a strong grounding in a storied and sophisticated philosophical tradition. This is not in any sense an endorsement of these people’s methods - personally I would love to see them all in prison or worse - but they’ve got a lot more going for them than just “vibes”.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
white progressives
white progressives
privileged white progressives
Yawn. It’s really tiresome to see that even purportedly “anti-woke” people have allowed their minds to be colonized by the nakedly anti-white framing that pins the blame solely on “privileged white” progressives for spreading and enforcing the things about modern society that they don’t like.
Well, as someone who has spent the entirety of my adult life in thoroughly progressive social spheres - everything from explicit socialist activist spaces in college, to the world of musical theatre and “queer performance art” - I can tell you from direct personal experience that the people who have been the most vindictive, the most ready to pounce at the slightest hint of wrongthink, the ones who have done the most to sully my personal reputation and those of others far less off-the-progressive-reservation than I am, have been uniformly non-white.
The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white. These three individuals (and they’re far from alone) have significantly damaged the lives of a number of people whom I personally know, and they’ve successfully terrified a great many more people into staying in-line with the approved opinions. That’s the reality: most white progressives whose careers or social standing are wrapped up with their ability to stay ideologically up-to-date are terrified of stepping out of line, in a way that this simply far less true of most non-white individuals in the same milieu. Whites are far more cancellable than non-whites. Able to draw on a far smaller pool of mercy and benefit of the doubt, because they lack any sort of shield of “marginalized identity” on which they can fall back when questioned. Why do you think so many of them are socially “transitioning” to “non-binary” and other sorts of low-investment boutique identities? I’ve seen this process play out a number of times among people who, again, I personally know. If you’re a white guy in these spaces, you are literally vulnerable at all times and have to watch what you say at all moments, because you’re inherently suspect. So, you grow your hair out, maybe wear sort of ambiguous clothing, and declare yourself non-binary to give yourself some modicum of breathing room. Yes, many non-white progressives are doing the same, and I do not want to overstate the level of relative immunity from cancellation they enjoy, but the bar is undeniably set higher for them than it is for similarly situated whites. “White progressives” are not the ones primarily driving the dynamics you’re pointing at, and I think it’s a distraction tactic, or maybe part of a personal vendetta you’re prosecuting, to act as if they are.
Whenever I see posts like this, I fully admit that I get a bit self-conscious and morose. I can’t help but recognize that my worldview (specifically when it comes to race - my views on a variety of other topics are far less scandalizing), and my willingness to express it in this space, make me one of the posters to whom these people are referring when they talk about the factors that repel them from participating here.
On the one hand, I don’t feel like the ways that I express that worldview are particularly egregious; to the best of my recollection I have never received a ban, and the handful of mod warnings I’ve received have been a result of me intentionally poking at the boundaries to see what’s permissible, rather than a result of me flaming out or trolling or whatever the usual banned accounts are accused of. I endeavor to be careful about the things I say, to engage only sparingly with certain users whose posts or beliefs I find “triggering”, and to always acknowledge when my interlocutors have made good points effectively countered one of my arguments.
However, I also can’t help but acknowledge that, for certain people visiting this community to see if it’s worth sticking around, there’s no amount of polish and civility that are going to make my posts palatable. And I want to offer a guarded defense of those people. If you’re, say, a black person, and you are genuinely concerned about the rise of white supremacy and convinced that smart, normal-seeming white people around you actually harbor deep antipathy towards you, which they conceal on a day-to-day basis only because they’re biding their time until they can go mask-off, it is probably very disconcerting - even viscerally scary - to see posters like me, and to see my arguments treated seriously and not dogpiled. To watch evil be expressed openly and with genteel calm, and to see people who claim to be good-hearted and to value justice not respond to every one of my (and, to be clear, other posters of a similar bent) posts with full-throated outrage.
I have personally experienced a similar feeling of alienation and shock - that sense of “wait, are you all hearing what this person is saying - and you’re just going to sit here and take it, and *act like this is normal?!*” - during my days as a minor progressive activist in college and shortly thereafter. Hearing the vicious, seething contempt expressed for white people, and watching white individuals - and individuals “of color” from whom I would have naïvely expected some support - just nod along as if that was a normal thing for people to say - was one of the defining catalysts leading to my lurching away from the left. It really is different when someone is directly targeting you and your identity group, and when you’re silently praying that someone else - someone with clout in that community, whose voice others might take seriously - will come to your defense, and you get nothing. You feel hung out to dry, and even if you can recognize that the discourse norms were not designed to harm you, and that perhaps those norms produce overall salutary effects in the overall balance of things, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to sit there and take it. And being the lone voice pushing against it is never going to be enough, because of the inevitable social dynamics of any human space.
Now, obviously none of this should be taken as an endorsement of changing anything about the norms of this space. If anything, I’ve lobbied for looser enforcement of certain rules than what our current status quo permits. I just want to offer some pushback against what I anticipate will be the overwhelming community response to this post, which is “Leftists are just bad at arguments and don’t like losing. Sour grapes!” Yeah, that’s absolutely a thing. But I want to try and at least have the self-awareness of the ways in which I’ve contributed to the process by which these progressives have come to find this place intolerable. It probably won’t change anything about my behavior, but it will at least help me build a better model of the intellectual landscape and the dynamics at play within it.
I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert last night. For those who are unfamiliar with his work, Weird Al is an American comedy/novelty singer, known best for his parodies of popular songs, although he also has a large body of non-parody original comedy songs. I assume that there is a large overlap between the users of this sub - at least those who grew up in America or Canada - and the kinds of people who would be fans of his work. And there definitely is a specific “type” of person to whom Weird Al has always appealed, which is what this post is about.
While the concert itself was a wonderful time - on this tour, Al is only performing his non-parody songs, without the frenetic costume changes and multimedia content for which his live shows used to be known, so this was definitely a “for the hardcore fans only” kind of experience - I was taken aback by something I experienced during the opening act. A stand-up comedian named Emo Philips opened the show. Philips’ onstage persona is an oddball autistic type, and his material is generally self-deprecating, ironic, and full of absurdism and clever wordplay - very much in the same vein as the style of humor that appeals to Weird Al’s fans. The first thing Philips said that raised an eyebrow for me was the statement, “I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who wasn’t bullied.” This got a relatively positive vocal response from the crowd. Then a bit later, he started talking about COVID. “How many people in here have a vaccination card?” (Wild applause and raised hands.) “Now, be honest, how many people here have a fake vaccination card?” (Some scattered hoots and raised hands.) “See, those are great, because you get to have the vaccination card and you can still die of COVID-19!” (Raucous laughter and cheers.) My brother and I, both right-wing COVID skeptics, shared an exasperated look, but the joke sure seemed to kill with this crowd. Later in the set, Philips made some more political comments and jokes, basically along the lines of how “you Californians shouldn’t let anyone make fun of you for being from this state, because they’re just all extremely jealous and resentful.” Now, I am well-aware that comedians play to their crowd, and that this stuff all could have just been naked pandering to the local sensibilities; maybe when he does a set in Tulsa, he tells mocking jokes about COVID paranoia and the scourge of Californian transplants. Still, I found it extremely odd that he would get political at a Weird Al concert - Al’s music is decidedly non-political and infamously inoffensive - and, moreover, that he predicted (correctly) that this type of material would do so well with this crowd in this context.
However, after the show, I reflected on this, and I concluded that it’s not surprising at all. I bet if you took a poll of the political affiliation of the audience at a Weird Al concert in any venue around the country, no matter how deep-red, the results would show overwhelmingly left-of-center. You would get a lot of open SJ progressives - I certainly saw a number of individuals in the crowd whose dress, demeanor, and mask-wearing marked them as MSNBC devotees - and almost certainly the farthest-right you would get would be “both parties are crooked, throw the bums out” apathetic centrism. The demographics of this crowd were overwhelmingly - quite possibly exclusively - white, middle-class, college-educated, and above-average IQ. Even above those reliable correlates of Blue Tribe affiliation, though, there was an additional set of selection effects that would skew the politics of this particular fandom.
Al’s oeuvre - not only his music, but also his cult-classic film UHF and his various other comedic endeavors - is clever, self-deprecating, absurdist, full of obscure cultural references, and, well, weird. His parodies generally take mass-culture popular works, strip them of their cultural context, and transfigure them into absurdist comedy songs totally disconnected from - and appealing to a very different audience from - the source material; many of Al’s parodies, especially his parodies of hip-hop songs, introduced the original songs to an audience who would otherwise have had no engagement with the pop-culture apparatus that generated them.
This sense of being outside of the mainstream, and of only engaging with it in an ironic, deconstructive, and alienated way is a key element of his appeal; this phenomenon is probably best exemplified by his song “White And Nerdy”, a parody of the rapper Chamillionaire’s hit “Ridin’”, which became an anthem for his socially-awkward (and overwhelmingly white) fan-base. I would wager that nearly everyone in that concert venue last night considers himself or herself “an outsider”. Not in any concrete demographic/“identity” sense - fre if any of these people qualify as a member of a recognized “marginalized community” - but in the sense of belonging to a fictive identity centered on personality traits and aesthetic preferences outside of, or in opposition to, “normie” culture.
Decades before the Marvel ascendancy catapulted “nerd culture” into the mainstream, Al cultivated a following among genuine weirdos and the socially maladroit. Even though they’re no longer truly “outcasts” in any important material sense, their internal self-image is still tied to their sense of being simultaneously victimized by and superior to the people who comprise the “normal” or “mainstream” culture. This affective orientation is a central component of leftism in an atavistic, visceral, pre-political sense. People with that orientation, of course, also tend to gravitate strongly toward leftism in the political sense.
There is also an additional component to Weird Al’s music - a slightly “darker” side, if you will - that tends toward poking fun at certain characteristics of what might be considered natural outgroups for the people to whom he appeals. I recall, years ago, reading a thinkpiece - I believe it was in Slate, but I don’t care enough to check - in which the author argued that Al’s song “Word Crimes” (a parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, in which Al assumes the character of a pedantic grammar-Nazi taking the listener to task for making various common grammar/spelling errors) reveals the elitism and “punching down” that underlies much of his work. His popular parody song “Fat” is another great example of this; it’s the type of casual mockery of fatness which would be deeply taboo in most mainstream-media circles today. There is certainly an element of mockery in some of Al’s work, and it all tends to target people who are low-IQ, low-class, and physically unappealing.
While it is indeed odd for a fandom full of self-proclaimed weirdos and outcasts to find such enjoyment in the mockery of other ostensibly subaltern identities, I don’t actually think there’s much of a contradiction there. While being fat, poor, uneducated, and lacking in middle-class cultural capotal are all markers of an “outsider”, they’re markers of a very different kind of outsider than the modal Weird Al fan. They’re the qualities that a middle-class nerd would associate, on a conscious or subconscious level, with the Red Tribe. Never mind what any empirical data say about which identity groups are most likely to be poor, fat, and stupid; in the mind of an urban white nerd, when you say “imagine a fat and stupid person” the mental image conjured is always a conservative rural white. And if you have built your identity around finding ways to be different from, and superior to, that class of people, you will find your prejudices well-reflected in the Democratic coalition. Is it actually true that a white jock is more likely to bully you than a member of the black underclass? Certainly not - unless you don’t know any underclass blacks, and the white jock is the only thing remotely like an enemy that you have any experience with. That doesn’t matter, though; what matters is whom you identify with, or more importantly whom you identify in opposition to, that’s determinative of your political tribe.
I often ask myself, “Why were you a leftist when you were younger. What about it appealed to you?” And the inescapably obvious answer is that it provided me with an outlet to express my sense of contempt for, and superiority to, regular run-of-the-mill non-nerdy white people. It was pure atavistic chauvinism that led me to identify with the “nerd culture” of the time - which had not yet become fully commercialized at that time - and with pseudo-“outsider” figures like Weird Al Yankovic. I was lamenting to my brother that if my political views were somehow made known to those in that room, many if not nearly all of them would want to see me hounded out of the room and banned from any venue they expect to attend in the future. I might be an outsider - in a much more important material sense than whatever these people still think marks them as outsiders - but I’m an outsider of the wrong kind, and there’s probably no longer any room for me in the coalition of the fake, self-indulgent, marginalized-in-their-own-heads community that comprised the people in that room last night.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Certainly something like Trey Parker and Matt Stone wearing dresses to the Oscars is not remotely sexual. Similarly, many college fraternity houses host events where obviously-straight men dress in women’s clothing as a gag. Your question also made me think of the film Sorority Boys and the TV show Bosom Buddies, as well as a number of the films @FiveHourMarathon named already. In every one of these scenarios, the act is not transgressive of hegemonic gender norms at all; in fact, I would say that each of these instances of cross-dressing actually explicitly reinforces traditional gender roles/presentation by presenting the image of a man in women’s clothes as inherently absurd, gross, and comical. The entire joke is “isn’t it weird seeing these dudes dress like women, look how ugly they are, how hilarious to imagine that anyone could actually fall for this transparently unconvincing charade”.
I would contrast these instances of cross-dressing with drag. Drag, as a tradition, has always been aggressively sexual, involving not only bawdy jokes but also a funhouse-mirror, highly-stereotyped presentation of female sexuality. The recent attempt to whitewash drag as a harmless family-friendly form of clowning is transparently cynical. As an analogy, if I invited Mia Khalifa to come read a book to a group of kids, it would be inappropriate and inherently sexual even if she spent the entire event dressed conservatively and never mentioned her career. This is because I could have invited literally any person on Earth to come do this, but I specifically chose her. I went out of my way to put a porn actress in front of kids, instead of, I don’t know, a firefighter or a trash collector or, hell, any type of performer whose milieu is genuinely family-friendly, like a juggler.
The kids are going to be curious about what the odd-looking person reading a book to them does for a living. They’re going to have questions about why this tall and broad-shouldered individual is caked with makeup and wearing women’s nightwear. They’re going to be tempted to learn more, simply as a result of the healthy natural curiosity of children. The choice to invite a drag queen specifically is engineered to produce this result and to increase children’s curiosity toward, and openness toward, alternative gender presentation which is heavily sexualized.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
As I was reading the thread below started by @pointsandcorsi, regarding whether or not progressive women’s political values are motivated by unconscious psychological instincts which may not be legible even to those same women, I found myself reflecting on a particularly vexing conversation which I’ve had with a number of young women, and which has always perplexed me. (For the record, I believe that Points’ original comment was underdeveloped and poorly argued, even if it’s obvious that I share his essential politics and worldview.)
For some background: I’m in my thirties and have never owned a car. I live in a major U.S. city, with a (by American standards) extensive public transit network that can get me pretty much anywhere in the city with minimal difficulty. I’ve had a full-time job for over a decade, I have a number of hobbies and activities in which I participate regularly, and I have a healthy social life, all of which I’ve been able to manage without the use of a personal vehicle. Unlike in a city like, say, NYC, though, the vast majority of people living in this city own cars, and it is definitely considered very strange and eyebrow-raising for an adult to not drive. However, many people here do use public transit on occasion, especially to commute to and from sporting events or concerts. As an avid advocate of public transit during my twenties - I’ve soured on that advocacy post-COVID, as the transit network in my city has been thoroughly colonized by homeless drug addicts, and ridership has still not rebounded to pre-COVID levels - I’ve had many conversations with people in which I tried to pick their brains about why they don’t take transit more often.
When talking to men, especially non-leftist men, they have usually been very frank and unfiltered about their reasoning: transit often smells like piss, there are too many bums, it’s inconvenient and they bristle at the lack of control and autonomy which they would have if driving their own cars. All very good and understandable reasons. When talking to women, though - and I don’t think I’ve ever had this conversation with a woman (other than my mother) who wasn’t left-of-center) - one issue is nearly always brought up to justify their aversion to public transit. Nearly every young woman I’ve talked to has told me that they have been harassed, catcalled, ogled, or even stalked - literally followed! - by one or more “creepy” men when they’ve taken the trolley. (For non-Americans, when we say “trolley” in the U.S. we are generally referring to urban rail transit.)
The ubiquity of this story, told to me in nearly every conversation I’ve had with young women about this subject, has never sat right with me. I have ridden the trolley nearly every day of my adult life, normally multiple times a day. I’ve spent literally thousands of hours on public transit. I’ve taken it at every imaginable hour of the day, through every neighborhood of the city adjacent to the trolley lines. I’m a reasonably observant person, and have gotten into verbal (and in one case physical) confrontations with people acting antisocially on transit - it’s not like I usually have my eyes buried in my phone, avoiding taking in my surroundings. If anybody in this city would have a good idea of what things are like on public transit in this city, it would be me. I can count on two hands the number of times I have ever seen a man sexually harass or proposition a woman on the trolley. Supposedly it is happening to every young woman I’ve ever spoken to about public transit, yet it is so vanishingly rare in anything I’ve personally observed that I am always left absolutely baffled at how this could be happening right under my nose, all around me, escaping my notice. It strikes me as… well, frankly, as somewhat unlikely. Now, it would make sense, just as a matter of probability, for a woman who takes the trolley every day to tell me that at some point she has experienced harassment. However, these women I’m talking to usually say that they’ve taken transit maybe five to ten times in their entire lives - sometimes less! - yet every one has a harassment anecdote (usually lacking in specific details, although to be fair I haven’t generally solicited them) ready to go when asked why they don’t take transit more often, despite the fact that most of these progressive women could be expected to take seriously pro-transit arguments such as climate impact.
Since it strikes me as more than a bit implausible that every one of these women has truly experienced what they say they’re experiencing, I’ve tried to reason out what’s happening here. If my skepticism is unjustified, and sexual harassment of random women on public transit truly is this rampant despite my almost complete lack of perception of it, I’m happy to content myself with that! I don’t want to assume that all of these women are lying or otherwise telling me something untrue/exaggerated. That’s what it genuinely seems like to me, though. So, I’ve asked myself many times: Why? Why lie? Why not just say, like the men do, “I just think public transit is gross and low-status, full of misfits and losers, and honestly I’m just more comfortable driving because it’s what I’m used to and I’ve built my lifestyle around it, just like the vast majority of other normal adults that I know”? This is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. In my idealistic leftist days I used to chafe hard at the open contempt for the underclass, but that idealism has long since burned away and I’ve become acutely cognizant of just how sensible these complaints are. Why do these women feel the need to concoct a narrative of personal victimization and endangerment in order to justify their decisions? What is motivating their discomfort and deflection about discussing their true reasons - and, if those reasons are in fact different from their stated ones, what are their true reasons?
I want to throw out a theory, and I’m sincerely soliciting feedback on it, because I don’t know how plausible it is and I have a number of reservations about it. I’m cognizant of my own biases, and unlike a lot of commenters here I’m generally quite positively disposed toward women - even leftist women, a category which encompasses most of my female relatives and nearly all of my female friends. My theory is this: Riding public transit is a daily exercise in Noticing™️ the true diversity of humans, and frankly of different human groups. I don’t know how things are in Europe, but here in America it is impossible to ride public transit with any frequency without observing consistent patterns of behavior that correlate strongly with specific identity groups. The behavior of black Americans on public transit is notorious and would take willful blindness not to notice - blasting loud music from portable speakers, having boisterous and vulgar conversations with no consideration of volume, sometimes speaking/acting aggressively toward other riders (I’ve told the story here about my public assault on the trolley by a black guy) and a number of other unsavory aspects. Not all black riders are like this - in fact, probably most aren’t! - and not all the people who act like this are black. But, if we’re reasoning probabilistically about people, and noticing patterns, the correlations are unmistakable.
Similarly, you see the worst of mental illness, degenerate behavior by obvious drug addicts, and a variety of unsavory realities that threaten the liberal dream of egalitarian universalism. You see people who have no hope of ever being anything other than the underclass, and whose plight seems difficult to credibly blame entirely on external systemic factors. And I think that for a lot of young women, they just can’t handle this. It’s too much of an epistemic injury. It produces far too much cognitive dissonance. And so they can’t be honest - maybe not even to themselves - about it. Maybe they’ve truly convinced themselves that they’ve been personally harassed! Maybe they had a friend or relative who experienced this, and they incorporated that anecdote into their own internal narratives about their own lives. Human cognition is certainly malleable enough for this, and I wouldn’t even guess that this is a characteristically female phenomenon, although it’s plausible to me that it would be.
Am I missing something here? Do other people believe that all of these women (I’ve probably had this conversation with roughly two dozen of them) have been individually harassed on public transit, and I just have never noticed it? Despite being here every day of my life for over a decade? What is going on?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
To foment a Color Revolution
They’ve been decaying into a progressive mouthpiece for years now. Clare Malone has been a frothing leftist scold from the jump, and once they brought on Perry Bacon Jr. as their “here’s why anti-black racism explains every single political trend in America” guy, their analysis stopped being even remotely useful. After the 2016 election it was clear to me that everyone on that staff other than Silver was determined to atone for why they didn’t do more to stop Trump. I haven’t cared about them or paid attention to them in ages, and I’m not remotely sad to see them crumble to dust.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists.
This is an incredibly risible claim. In 2020, during a period of mass rioting and looting, the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party used her social media platform to raise money for bail for the protestors. Black Lives Matter, an explicitly Marxist police abolitionist organization, is inextricably enmeshed with the funding apparatus of the Democratic Party. The Biden administration is overseeing the largest influx of unfettered immigration to this country in over a century - something infinitely more “extreme” and widely unpopular than anything you can credibly accuse Republican “extremists” of supporting.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
The whole Dylan Mulvaney thing has been grimly amusing to me from the start, because I was familiar with Dylan during his days as a musical theatre performer here in San Diego. His Wikipedia page references that he performed in a number of musicals in San Diego, which is his hometown as well as mine; I think the first time I saw him perform was in a production of Spring Awakening at the Cygnet Theatre in 2013, although I can’t remember if that was before or after his performance in Bare: A Pop Opera. In both cases, he played the same essential character - an incredibly effeminate, fey, vulnerable gay teenager.
I believe I met him casually a couple of times since we were both in the theatre scene, though this would have been a decade ago and I don’t recall for sure. He has certainly always been extraordinarily gay - steeped in gayness! - ever since I became familiar with him, so I’m pretty confident that that part at least isn’t an act. But, being a working actor, especially in this day and age, is an incredibly cutthroat, sink-or-swim kind of life, and any edge you can give yourself - anything, genuine or fabricated, that can provide you with any sort of leverage or leg up over other actors - is a vital step toward fame and longevity. If you’re correct that he identified an untapped niche and ruthlessly pursued it, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least and would be entirely consistent with my experience of theatre people, and of late-in-life-transitioning theatre people more specifically.
The identity of the man who choked Jordan Neely on the NYC subway has been made public.
The man now gets to become the center of a media firestorm, and will certainly be subjected to credible threats, to say nothing of the likelihood that the activists in charge of Manhattan’s criminal justice system will indict him. If he ever gets to live a normal life again, it certainly won’t be in New York, and probably not in any urban blue-heavy environment in this country. Future prospective employers will know him as the guy who murdered a defenseless man and beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who was experiencing homelessness and needed help. This will be how he’ll be perceived by a substantial number of important people who will have the power to determine important things about the future of his life, regardless of any legal outcomes for him, favorable or otherwise.
I told the story previously of how I was assaulted on public transit by a mentally-ill black lowlife, and how I was very close to being severely injured and nobody in the vicinity would have been able nor willing to stop it from happening. (Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.) Since posting that story, a very similar situation happened to me yet again - with a predictably similar antagonist - and once again, I was sickened and humiliated not only by the actions of the schizophrenic loser who accosted me, and by my relative inability to effectively defend myself if the guy had started attacking me, but also by the inaction of the other grown men standing nearby. Without telling the whole story, I ended up in that position because I attempted to stop the lunatic from harassing a different guy, and then that guy stood around and watched the assailant menace me and did not intervene in any way.
I have fantasized about doing exactly what Daniel Penny - the NYC subway hero - did. Except for in my fantasies, I didn’t unintentionally end the man’s life due to a tragic and unforeseen accident; I just kicked the absolute shit out of him, taking him by surprise and beating him within an inch of his life, or stabbing him before he could get a hand in me. These fantasies are just that: unrealistic power fantasies, the stuff I would do if I were a much stronger, taller, more physically-powerful, more experienced with interpersonal violence than I actually am. I’ve never been in a proper fistfight, and even if I knew how to properly defend myself, in both this situation and the previous one, I allowed the guy to close distance on me and get into an advantageous position, such that they had me right where they wanted me.
I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.
I’ve also thought about what would have been the consequences for me if somehow I really had been able to put these guys in their place and seriously injure or kill them. I’ve imagined being at trial - a highly-publicized media shitstorm of a trial, given the demographics involved - and having to answer questions that are designed to get me to hang myself with their rope. I’ve thought about what would happen if they found my posts on The Motte. If they asked me, “Are you glad that Mr. Schizo is dead?” How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed? If they were to ask me “did you do this because Mr. Schizo is black”, no matter how sincerely I would answer “no, it’s because he was attacking me”, how can I be confident that they won’t drag up all my posts here and paint me as a “hate criminal”?
I have no idea how racially-aware Daniel Penny is. I have no clue if he has similar opinions about the scourge of worthless criminal crazies and what to do about them, and I have no reason to assume that his lawyers are lying when they say that he’s devastated that Jordan Neely died, that Mr. Penny never wanted nor foresaw this outcome, etc. It’s very easy for me to say “I’m glad Jordan Neely is dead, you did the world a favor, this was a wonderful thing you did and you shouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt or sadness about it”, but in the actual event that I did what Mr. Penny did, I probably would be pretty shaken-up about it. For most people, taking a life - especially when you hadn’t planned to - is probably pretty psychologically destabilizing, even if it was totally necessary and justified.
Still, though, what if Penny thinks the same way I do about the homeless population? What if he truly does believe, as I do, that Jordan Neely was human garbage who had no redeeming value, and that his death is a great boon to the entire population of NYC? He can’t say that in court, even if it’s true. He would be pilloried and convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. His only legal hope is to vociferously insist that Neely’s death is a tragedy, that he would never have done what he did if he could have foreseen that it would result in a death, that he is 100% innocent of the crime of racial consciousness or animus toward the experiencing-homelessness population. His future depends on his ability to persuasively perform colorblind egalitarian liberalism, regardless of whether or not he believes in it or not.
Outside of the edgy dissident-right spaces I frequent, every other commentator, even putatively conservative ones, are doing the expected throat-clearing about how Neely’s death is a tragedy, that we all wish he “could have gotten the help he needed”, etc. If anyone believes, as I do, that the first step to saving our civilization is for tens of thousands of people to pull a Daniel Penny on their local subway-screaming bum, they’re sure not saying it out loud. The veil of self-censorship and paying homage to liberal pieties will persist no matter what happens to Daniel Penny, and nobody will get the public catharsis of hearing a powerful or important person say out loud that Jordan Neely’s death was a good thing and we need more of it. Those who do say something like that out loud better hope and pray that they’re never thrust into a courtroom and asked to defend those opinions under oath; the defense stand is no place for hard-nosed honesty, and neither is our society.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
You continually vacillate about your justification, though. Sometimes you actually come out and admit that you want Europe flooded by poor third world immigrants as a punishment, because you blame them (rightly or wrongly) for the plight of the third world, or because of more petty personal vendettas. (They expect you to drink at social functions and this makes you uncomfortable, don’t they know you’re better than them, etc.) I do wish you’d at least stick with that, instead of occasionally lapsing into pretending that this is somehow for our own good, or that somehow we’ll come out of this total societal collapse with a better and more sustainable set of moral principles.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So, I’m going to offer a tepid defense of the sensitivity readers, by drawing a comparison to what’s on offer as an alternative. In short, I think this is about the search for “a usable past” as we transition into a new political/cultural paradigm.
In comparison to the world in which you and I grew up, the sensitivity readers appear very extreme. They immediately bring to mind Orwellian horror stories and… real-life Communist horror facts. But, I would argue that the people trying to publish mostly-intact versions of old classics, with only the most “problematic” parts excised or modified, are actually the squishy centrists compared to what’s coming down the pike behind them. There is a real Year Zero contingent on the left, with real intellectual heft in the circles that are driving political developments. These people really would like the works of Ian Fleming and Ronald Dahl and all the other toxic white men consigned to the dustbin of history. Compared to them, what the sensitivity readers at these publishing companies are doing is quite limited in scope and preserves infinitely more of these works than the more radical activists to their left would prefer.
I’ll draw an analogy to a couple of things. The first is the Broadway musical Hamilton. For the first few years after it came out, it was one of the most popular and culturally-relevant pieces of media among the liberal/progressive-lite PMC. While many on the far right - especially the racially-conscious right - saw the presentation of the Founding Fathers as a bunch of black rappers as a desecration (the Great Replacement not only proceeds apace in the present, it has now been able to reach into the past!) some on the right had a more nuanced and perceptive take: they realized that this was liberals trying to preserve a usable past.
For people who have one foot in the Successor Ideology and one foot in 20th-century liberalism, dealing with the past is a really difficult and fraught balancing act. If your values are sufficiently attuned to progressivism, staring straight at the reality of the American founding and the men responsible for it, shorn of all the mythologizing and contextualizing and white lies, at some point you’re going to realize you have to choose to either discard them or discard the values you hold dear. Something like Hamilton is an off-ramp from that dilemma. You can slap a fresh new coat of paint on the Founding, sand off some of its most problematic parts, selectively emphasize plausible readings of it that are most amenable to modern sensibilities, and suddenly it’s okay to love the Founders again. A new and diverse generation can hopefully see themselves in the Founding, carrying on a genuine love and admiration for a modified and sanitized version of them. Well, the real hardcore Left realized, correctly, that this was happening, and they tore Hamilton to shreds. It’s pro-Founder propaganda, trying to make us love cisheteropatriarchal slaveholders and rapists, thinking we’ll forget who they were and what they did by dressing them up as rapping POCs. They’re trying to deny liberals that off-ramp. Similarly, I can imagine one of these sensitivity readers, after chugging a pint of Truth Serum, saying to you, “You don’t like our bowdlerized version of James Bond with the yuckiest parts taken out? Okay, you know what you’re going to hate a lot more? Fifteen years from now when every last copy of a James Bond novel gets shredded and its spot on the bookshelf taken by a novel about a strong flawless black female super-scientist who kills conservative white men. We were trying to save this series and give you the best version that was political possible given the world that’s coming, and you rejected it. You let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and now you ended up with a result infinitely worse than the one we tried to offer you. Hope you’re happy.”
I also want to draw an analogy, drawing on a previous post of mine, to the Christianization of northwestern Europe. Part of the reason why the conversion of the Germanic and Celtic pagans succeeded is that missionaries found a way to adapt existing pagan festivals and cultural practices to the new Christian theological paradigm. This video demonstrates in great detail how, for example, what we now celebrate as Christmas is very obviously just a rebranding of long-existing pagan practices, with a thin paint of syncretized Christian gloss slapped on it so it didn’t have to be totally discarded. I can imagine some Christian monk telling a horrified pagan reactionary, “Look, man, do you want to be able to keep 80% of your tradition, or do you want to keep none of it? Those are the options on offer here. Is it really that massive a deal to you to let us fiddle around with certain aspects of this tradition to reconcile it with the new paradigm that’s already here whether you like it or not? Let us modify it, because there’s some hardcore dudes on the other die of me who would prefer we scrapped it entirely and started punishing you guys for celebrating it at all.” There were obviously aspects of pre-Christian society that simply could not be allowed to survive once the conversion took place. Explicit worship of idols representing pagan gods had to go; the theological proscriptions against it in Christianity are simply too clear to allow any wiggle room. Ditto for animal sacrifice, which used to be a ubiquitous part of the daily religious life of pagan cultures; Christ is supposed to have been the final sacrifice, so it would be too sacrilegious to allow people to keep doing what they had been doing. But some of the stuff that’s less problematic from the perspective of the new Christian system? Eh, let them keep it, and just call it something new and find some way to call it Christian.
Something like that is what the sensitivity readers are doing. There are certain aspects of these works that are a bridge too far, and their removal is non-negotiable. Assuming progressivism continues its ascent, there’s simply no way that kids in a hundred years will be able to read a book in which the main character insults black people or disrespects women. But there is a world in which they can still read Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, with a new coat of paint slapped on and some of the yucky parts quietly removed. The future generations won’t know the difference. It’s that or Year Zero - take your pick.
Obviously I’m not happy that the continuing ascent of progressivism makes these the only two realistic outcomes on offer. I want to believe that the backlash is still coming, and that a collapse of this system is in the cards. If it’s not, though… those sensitivity readers might be the only think standing between us and something unimaginably worse.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them? Like, have you made any attempt to actually engage with the theories underpinning this educational model? Or are you just defaulting to the lazy idea that “conspiracies don’t happen” and satisfying yourself with that? There’s nothing “bizarre” about taking the literal words of widely-taught educational theory textbooks seriously, and drawing the conclusion that the people putting those theories into practice actually mean them and believe in them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.
I knew this was coming. I have read too many “conservative” commentators who decry mass immigration to European countries but celebrate it in America (“because we’re a different sort of country, built on ideas”) to expect anything else. People are perfectly capable of looking at Syrian gang members shooting each other in a Stockholm mall (shouting in Arabic the whole time) and recognizing Those men are not Swedes. They will never be Swedes. Nothing short of a magic spell could turn them into Swedes. And yet when asked to apply the same logic to that same sort of men in America, an impenetrable mental block descends and makes it impossible for even the same commentators to reach the same conclusion.
America is not a special country that exists outside of history. It is not mysteriously immune from the realities of human biology and heredity. “American” is not a magical category that is infinitely capacious and malleable in a way that no other extant ethnicity or nationality is. It was, in fact, founded as an ethnostate, exactly the same way that Sweden was. The men who founded the country said so at the time, and the history of the demography of the country supports that reading. Syrians are no more capable of becoming Americans than they are of becoming Swedes.
There are tens of millions of Americans who can directly trace their descent to families who lived in this country 400 years ago. I am one of them! Those people were settlers and invaders who displaced the indigenous population that had previously occupied that land; that is also true of nearly every human population group on earth. The Europeans who showed up to displace the Iroquois and the Cree did not become Iroquois and Cree. They were a new people, capitalizing on the weakness and decline of the existing population. The exact same is true of the Syrians moving into Sweden.
Unlike the Iroquois, though, Swedes have the actual power and numbers to easily repel this invasion by force of arms at any moment. The Swedish military could locate and forcibly deport or eliminate nearly every Syrian in the country within a month if they desired to. If you believe it would be cruel to do so, that’s fine; I don’t even necessarily disagree! But the fact that they choose not to do so in no way means that the country is benefiting from the presence of those people. The same is largely true of the United States - only the scale of the problem is different.
Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra seems equally outlandish. Time for the flip-side I guess...
In what sense? Yes, I agree that based on contemporary reports about Cleopatra’s appearance, Elizabeth Taylor is considerably hotter than Cleopatra was, and probably a shade less swarthy, but Taylor looks far more like Cleopatra than any sub-Saharan does. It’s not even close.
@fuckduck9000 already brought the receipts regarding just how wildly miscalibrated your estimate of how many rationalists are atheists (to wit: the vast majority) so I’m not going to rehash that. I’m merely going to offer what I think is a plausible explanation for how you came to such a wildly inaccurate perception.
Many people here will be familiar with the classic essay The Asshole Filter. TLDR: a feminist complains that all men are assholes, but the actual problem is that she has made it so impossible for non-asshole men to approach her that the only remaining men who are willing to transgress against her stated wishes and approach her are, well, assholes. So her perception of the “asshole level” of the average man is wildly skewed due to a bubble that she herself is reinforcing, causing her to be blind to all the non-assholes with whom she is failing to interact, or who are avoiding interacting with her.
Similarly, if you’re a devoutly-religious person in rationalist spaces, most of us just basically don’t touch the subject with you. We understand that it’s a very important part of your life, that you do not wish to have your faith shaken, and that overall it’s just not a conversation worth having with you. Many of us recognize, on an intellectual level at least, the value that religion brings to the lives of its participants, and for my part at least I’m happy for you that it has enriched your life. We don’t actually accept any of the claims of your religion, and religion in general pretty much bounces off a lot of us - for reasons that could be aesthetic, empirical, practical, etc. - but we don’t begrudge you your faith. The only people who are willing to actively challenge your faith and engage antagonistically with it are those who either 1. have a much bigger problem with religion than the average rationalist does, or 2. lacks the social graces or sophistication to understand why that’s not generally an argument worth having, which means that the quality of discourse you’re likely to have with those people is unlikely to be very good.
I don’t think you’re intentionally projecting that asshole filter, but I also don’t think you understand the modal atheist very well at all, let alone the modal rationalist, given how inaccurate your naïve estimate of how many of them are atheists was.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
It’s just simply false that /r/nba is immune to conflict. Were you on that sub during the summer of 2020, when the Bucks refused to play a game because of the Jacob Blake thing, and the sub exploded into conflict until the mods came down like a hammer and began micro-managing all conversation involving anything race-related or political?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I’ve been mulling over a top-level post about how I expect advances in AI art and photo/video manipulation technology to make it easier for activist “historians” and media creators to comprehensively alter future generations’ perception of history, such that people in 200 years will sincerely believe that every important society in history was racially-cosmopolitan and involved numerous sub-Saharan blacks in positions of power and prestige.
What we think of as “fringe Hotep shit” will be the mainstream consensus, but turned up to 11. Maybe a small core of archaeologists and anthropologists with access to otherwise-tightly-controlled information about archaeogenetics will know “the truth”, but it will be considered uncouth - even career-killing - to mention anything in public which would threaten this consensus. This Netflix production is just one more early salvo in what could easily become a full war on the past, and I’m sadly not confident that the past will emerge victorious.
In response to my last post, @FCFromSSC hit me with his trademarked signature move - “Hlynka was right about you” and then further clarified:
The thesis I was referencing is that WNs and alt-righters are, in fact, Blues applying a fundamentally Blue worldview. You are jointly your own closest brothers and worst enemies.
If I can say to you, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing", and mean it, live by it, raise my children and build my community by it, what does any of the above or below have to entice me? The standard response is that Christianity has failed... delivered, generally, by people who willingly chose to abandon the faith of their fathers to embrace an alien and alienating worldview, and refuse to let it go.
Your post honestly deserves a more detailed response than that, but this, to me, is the core of the issue: You're looking for a banner to rally behind, but you've rejected the most proven banner known to man because it's incompatible with fundamental elements of the Blue worldview, which you still hold. Meanwhile, the Reds that comprise most of the people you're trying to rally have no interest in the alternative banners you offer, because they recognize their fundamentally Blue nature.
To which I replied:
Right, this is all well and fair, and I don’t disagree with much of it. Where I differ from you and Hlynka is that I don’t actually believe Red and Blue are true enemies. They’re two complementary halves of a syncretic whole - two equally-valuable parallel strains of the European psyche, which function best when they can strengthen each other by checking each other’s worst impulses. They’re the two components of a Babble & Prune machine, cyclically working in ostensible conflict in order to ensure long-term mutual success. The fact that Red and Blue are locked into what appears to be an existential conflict is due to a complicated mix of factors, which have been discussed to death here already, but in the long run both must succeed equally for European man to continue in the next step of his cosmic journey.
(My separate exchange with Hlynka himself on the same topic can be found here.
FC promised a more detailed rejoinder from him would be forthcoming, but while he charges up his special move, I want to get out ahead of him and open a separate conversation, since I think this line of discussion is sufficiently divergent from the thrust of my original post - and might be interesting to users who would otherwise have no reason to weigh in on an inside-baseball rumination on white identitarianism - that it’s worth its own top-level post.
First off, I want to point out that it’s very rich for you, as a Christian specifically, to impugn me for “abandoning the faith of [my] fathers”, when getting millions of people to abandon the faith of their forefathers was literally the entire way Christianity spread across Europe. Like, the conversion of the pagans is a central element of the narrative of early Christianity, and was considered - rightfully so - a spectacular win for the faith. Every one of those Germanic and Celtic converts was repudiating the entire spiritual infrastructure which had sustained his or her ancestors for millennia, and I’m pretty sure you don’t look down on them for it. On the contrary, you celebrate this act of betrayal as an unalloyed liberation - a brave and enriching act. And to be clear, while a not-insignificant number of those early conversions were sincere and entirely voluntary acts of conscience undertaken by individuals, I think the evidence strongly suggests that the lion’s share of these conversions involved, let’s say, ambiguous consent.
That’s because Christianity was the globohomo, elite-imposed ideology of its day. The story of how it spread throughout Europe is pretty well-documented. Adopting Christianity was a way for the ruling class of a given polity to integrate that polity into the vast political-financial-mercantile patronage network linking an ever-expanding patchwork of formerly-sovereign peoples with the hyper-wealthy urban centers where the power centers behind the ideology were situated. For a Germanic or Slavic or Celtic king who agreed to publicly bend the knee to his new Christian backers - sorry, to accept baptism - it was generally a calculated political move and a way to secure access to resources, influence, and patronage, for himself and his court. Generally there would be a transitional grace period in which the normie citizens of the polity would be strongly encouraged to convert voluntarily; after that - and sometimes skipping that step entirely - laws would begin being passed, formally outlawing any public practice of the old faith, any display of its symbols, etc. And if some of the folks out in the boonies or in the vassal states started to get uppity and refused to abandon the faith of their forefathers, oftentimes the Christian power centers would just openly slaughter them - the Saxon Wars and the Northern Crusades are illustrative examples - and gleefully destroy their sacred symbols and houses of worship in front of them until they understood that resistance was futile. (Look how much clout good ol’ Saint Boniface earned himself by chopping down Donar’s Oakand using the timber to build a church to the new god in town, just to flex on the poor worthless chumps and rubes he had just helped conquer.)
My ancestry is pretty much 100% Anglo-Saxon as far back as I can trace it, which is a long way back. (Shout-out to FamilySearch.org, the extensive and meticulously-documented ancestry database operated by the Mormon Church.) As you’ve probably gathered, I’m very interested in the history of pre-Christian European religion, so I’ve tried to do some research into the religious practices of the early Anglo-Saxons, before they were converted to Christianity. It is surprisingly difficult to find much reliable information about what they believed in those days - certainly nothing like the comparatively well-attested beliefs of Norse pagans. That’s because within 80 years of the first conversion of an Anglo-Saxon regional king, the entire rest of the kingdoms were ruled by Christian kings - after they fought brutally-bloody battles to slay the remaining pagan kings and replace them with pliant Christian vassal kings - and those kings set right to work outlawing the practice of the thousands-of-years-old religious traditions of their subjects. This included literally destroying their sacred objects, burning their sacred groves to the ground and dismantling their temples, and even punishing the private practice of personal veneration at trees and wells by private individuals. This was a comprehensive crushing of the native religion and ideology of the normal working people, imposed by effete aristocrats who were tired of being looked down on as backward hillbillies by their betters on the continent. (Is any of this sounding familiar to you yet?) And it wasn’t enough to just outlaw the practice for openly pragmatic reasons - to say, “I’m banning this because if I don’t, our ESG score will get downgraded and the EU will cut our funding the Pope will excommunicate me. Nope, they had to officially declare that the old gods - who, again, less than eighty years ago everyone on this fucking island, including the kings and clergy who were making and enforcing these laws, were worshipping - were actually demons. They had been demons the whole time! The agricultural/fertility goddess we all used to get together and sing songs to in hopes that she would bless our crops and keep our wombs fecund? It was a demon! The talisman you wear around your neck, depicting the minor household spirit your grandmother taught you watches over your family’s homestead? A demon! That grove of sacred trees in which you would often sit in silent contemplation, connecting with the numinous and the sublime? You guessed it: treemons!
(And as far as I’m aware, that’s still a mainstream orthodox take on pagan gods, right? That they were in fact real, disincarnate supernatural/spiritual entities - not just juvenile figments of the imagination - but that rather than gods they had actually been malevolent demonic agents the whole time, corrupting the souls of the pagans for millennia before Christ came? I know there have been other theological approaches to what exactly pre-Christian religion was and how we should feel about their gods and myths, but I’m not totally hip to where the general consensus lies at this point.)
And I say all of this without commenting at all about whether or not the truth claims of Christianity are valid or not! One’s interpretation of these events, and one’s assessment of whether or not the people’s of Europe were better off after being forcibly converted to “an alien and alienating worldview” than they were before certainly depends a lot upon one’s assessment of the relative value of the new worldview in question. I just want to point out that men like Widukind, full of piss and vinegar and unwilling to bend the knee and “abandon the faith of his forefathers” were butchered, and their children and wives forced upon penalty of death and imprisonment to enthusiastically affirm the new worldview, to get us to the point where you can claim that Christianity is the only banner worth mustering under.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think it says something incredibly dire about our civilization that we stopped publicly executing people such as this guy. I truly believe that the vast majority of people who watch this video and learn about this man’s history experience a powerful atavistic desire to see him humiliated and then hung from a tree in a public square. This is the healthy, normal human impulse that drove approaches to criminal justice in, as far as I’m aware, nearly every human society in history until practically yesterday. Maybe this is just me projecting - I’ve been the victim of a crime and very nearly the victim of several more, so my desire to see these people violently dispatched is overwhelming - but it seems to me that the level of cognitive dissonance that most people feel living in soft-hearted Western countries who treat irredeemable human detritus with kid gloves will necessary boil over in the near future, producing a law-and-order backlash like we haven’t seen in centuries.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So, I do want to make it abundantly clear that I am a genuinely passionate decades-long fan of Weird Al’s work, and if you’re accusing him specifically of lacking a sense of love and vision, I think that accusation is baseless. I’m intimately familiar with the world of pretentious, artificial status-signaling art you’re referring to, but I cannot stress enough that Weird Al’s work, like his life as a whole, has always been characterized by a palpable sense of joy and authenticity. The people in that room last night were, overwhelmingly, not there to impress anybody or signal status. Al’s work is far too lowbrow and affable to appeal to genuinely pretentious “artsy-fartsy” people, and being a Weird Al fan carries no cultural caché. He’s basically only respected by a) comedians, who largely revere him both for being a legendarily nice and wholesome human being, and b) Gen X and millennial white nerds who wouldn’t enjoy an arthouse film or post-modern novel any more than you would.
Your points as a whole are astute and absolutely well-taken, but I cherish Weird Al too much to let anything I’ve said give the false impression that he himself is a sneering progressive MAGA-hater. I’m confident that his personal politics are standard-issue Gen X California liberalism, but he’s certainly not shoving that down anybody’s throat, and he happily plays to audiences in Red states and Blue. I’m just saying that his work carries a set of implicit themes that naturally appeal to a subset of the population to whom culturally-left politics also appeal, whether or not he has any conscious intent for that to happen.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
You wrote an entire post about how he’s a hypocrite for not living the lifestyle you think he should be living, despite the fact that he does live that lifestyle. You accused him of being a Marxist who doesn’t care about pre-WWII history, when actually he’s a Rome obsessive, a monarchist, and a devotee of Ebola’s esoteric spiritualist tradition.
Just for once admit that you spoke overconfidently about something without doing any research at all to determine if your assumptions were correct. Can you do that? Even just this once? You made multiple easily-disprovable claims about this guy, and those claims are central to your argument.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother last year. She is a fairly standard-issue Gen X liberal, although somewhat open-minded about certain conservative issues, and guilty of Noticing™️ certain things about race and gender that gave me no shortage of distress back in my days as a dedicated progressive. She caught a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome after 2016, though, and began ensconcing herself ever more deeply into the MSNBC bubble. She and I hadn’t talked politics for years, until last year, when she was ranting about Trump and his voters and how stupid they are, and how she could never imagine having an intelligent conversation with one, at which point I hit her with the “you’re talking to a Trump voter right now”. This was utterly shocking and disorienting for her. She couldn’t imagine that someone well-informed, sophisticated, and obviously intelligent - her own son, no less! - could see any value in Trump. Every conversation she had ever had with a Trump voter up to that point had been like pulling teeth - nothing but Fox News talking points, uneducated ranting, shit-tier conspiracies, and an evident lack of even a basic curiosity about the world.
I brought up an article called [The Asshole Filter] (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html). This article is about how women navigate the dating world, and how for certain women, if they make it clear that any guy who approaches them in public will be rebuked, the only guys who will approach them in public are going to be uncouth assholes with no social tact. If a guy is conscientious and desires to be respectful of your boundaries, and he is aware that you will be offended by his overtures, he’s not going to commit the faux pas of transgressing your explicity- or implicitly-states wishes. An asshole, though, doesn’t care about your boundaries, or isn’t smart enough to intuit them, so he will transgress them without a second thought. Eventually, as this process is iterated, the only strange men who will ever approach you in public are going to be assholes, and you will begin to get the strong impression that all men are assholes, because the only ones you meet are assholes. You unintentionally set up a filter that has screened out all the normal nice men you would have met, and the only men who made it through the filter are the ones you wanted least to meet.
I told my mom that she had unintentionally set up a similar effect when it came to talking politics. She is a very outspoken person, and is not shy about broadcasting her liberal views. Therefore, most people in her life are well-aware of where she stands and the kinds of statements that will make her mad or will start an argument. If they value maintaining a cordial relationship with her - for example, a coworker, or an acquaintance who likes hanging out with her without needing to have a deep level of agreement with her - will be conscientious enough to avoid making those statements. They will let her spout off about her opinions, and they will not challenge her on them or bring up their own more conservative/Trump-oriented views, since it’s not worth offending her or rocking the social boat. However, if someone doesn’t care about offending her - maybe they don’t particularly like her, or maybe they’re just not smart or self-aware enough to predict the negative consequences of expressing pro-Trump opinions around her - then they’ll happily say something Trumpy around her. That means that the only pro-Trump opinions she will ever hear will come from hostile, stupid, or unsophisticated people. All the smart Trump voters are invisible to her because they know better than to say anything where she will hear it.
The vast majority of liberals and progressives have set up precisely this type of political asshole filter. When you go on Facebook and post something like “If you don’t support a woman’s right to choose, unfriend me right now,” you’re not expecting any of the people you see as your actual friends to unfriend you. Your real friends would never have such an ugly opinion; if they did, surely you would know about it. Well, no, they just know how much it would piss you off if they expressed disagreement to you, and they care about your friendship more than they care about winning an argument. So, they stay silent. However, the people who don’t actually care that much about preserving a friendship with you - or the people who are dumb enough to think they’re actually going to change your mind with a public argument on Facebook - will take the bait and argue with you. Of course those arguments will be stupid or hostile; only a stupid or hostile person would have gotten into it with you in the first place. All the smart people realized it wasn’t worth it.
Any right-winger in a heavily left-wing social context - myself, for example - has long since realized the futility of attempts to persuade, or even of publicly outing yourself as a dissenter. They’ve decided to keep their heads down, only discussing politics in (usually anonymous) forums like this where they won’t be dogpiled or doxxed. The fact that this woman was willing to publicly display her GOP allegiance in that context should have been an immediate red-flag: she is either someone with nothing to lose socially, or someone who’s not smart enough to realize she’s about to lose it. A smart conservative would have avoided the whole situation and moved on with her life.
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