“Classics are forever with a flourish or fit change” is incompatible with “fit is king” unless you really learn what you like and flatters you, and are happy being out of sync with what is currently on trend in the mind of normies. If the average Mottizen thrifts a ‘50s Brooks navy blazer he’s going to feel weird about how square and structured the shoulders are if he’s looking to fit in, even though a navy blazer is “classic”, and even if he can’t articulate it.
You mention dark-wash jeans? That’s downstream of a niche Japanese interest in ‘50s and ‘60s Americana that the fashion world brought back over to the U.S. from abroad. I know no Mottizens were buying Momotaro selvedge in the Aughts, but Todd Snyder when he was still at J. Crew was, and then the GAP, etc. picked up on it. And now a five year old MFA guide recommends it, but the tastemakers that will determine what MFA is going to recommend in a couple years from now ditched dark wash a couple years back, and that too will filter down. It’s all going to churn, and churn, and churn, even for normies. A five year old MFA guide is already long in the tooth, and was itself born of trends — it didn’t opt out of them. And they ultimately won’t stick with them, either.
Also, dark wash jeans, in terms of “classic” rules, don’t offer enough of a contrast with a navy blazer, running a foul of not clearly differentiating pants from an odd jacket, even though that was (is?) an MFA favorite. MFA didn’t come up with some classic or objective reason dark wash jeans were preferable.
My point is, if you have the time, please dig through something like Guy’s series on developing personal taste because that has a much longer shelf life than an MFA guide and you’ll honestly be happier with the results.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Could well be but that’s moot relative to the politics of this, in that there isn’t going to be a noticeable pro-affirmative action push for non-legacy, non-athletic, non-Jewish whites from any quarter.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
☝️ I’d be a little careful with a five year old guide from rMFA. Cuts and silhouettes are moving on from the #menswear era that spawned that subreddit. And watch out for the lack of a collar roll on the types of OCBDs they liked when that guide was written. Matt Walsh, as an example, dresses like a bad imitation of a gay guy from 2008. This stuff does filter downstream from the high-low world of tastemaking, even to guys who say this stuff isn’t what straight men concern themselves with.
rMFA isn’t terrible, but it’s mostly guys who reworked their closet 12 months ago giving advice to new people about to replace them on that forum.
The most salient feature of unions that I know about is that they prevent the employer from firing bad employees, or promoting good employees over ones with seniority.
They also allow people to negotiate over working conditions in a manner other than simply changing jobs. I slung cardboard in a FedEx unload bay in college where I was reduced to an hourly total, and their entire staffing model was to pay one tick above minimum wage and then burn through employees at whatever rate occurred. The management style was, whenever understaffed and for however many months, to tell the grunts to work yet harder. It’s very common for FedEx sort facilities to have over 100% turnover in a year on average. And, we didn’t have it Amazon bad.
It wasn’t horrible for someone like me because I knew I was out of there and on to better things in a short time. But if you’re a HBD, heritable-intelligence type, then there are going to be some folks for whom that’s their lot in life. And I’ve met a few of them. If they’re, say, loading four delivery vans at 300-400 boxes a van, and arranging boxes based on the seven-to-eight digit code that organizes the boxes along the delivery route, that’s more than honest work for one shift. I one-hundred percent want people for whom that’s their level in life to have a union say, “No, you can’t put someone on more than a four-truck pull during the holiday-season peak. You can adequately staff your shifts, or you can have management come in and start loading trucks for failing to do their job.”
A significant part of what is driving unionization pushes at places like Starbucks, Amazon, etc. are working conditions.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Kanye is as much a genuine Nazi as Manson was a genuine satanist.
Not everyone who is anti-semitic is a Nazi. Kanye is getting his talking points from the Nation of Islam and Black Israelites. That strain of black thought is deeply anti-semitic (and also believes some hilariously-improbable conspiracy theories). But he is also a bipolar guy off his meds, who is building conspiracies in his head surrounding his divorce, and is really mad at some Jewish lawyers that represented his wife, among a whole bunch of other things.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Maybe Netflix is more fun than in-person social activities.
I guess this is subjective, but as someone with an active, meat-space social life, it takes time, money and effort to maintain. You can substitute time and effort for money (pasta, red sauce and a screw-top Barbera can go a long way). I know we Americans tend to informally socially segregate by class, but at least my social life bridges that pretty easily. I host a large BBQ with white and blue collar guests every year. It’s amazing what breaking bread together does to bridge divides.
I haven’t found online socializing to be more than a simulacrum for meat-space socializing. Nearly all my friends are current and former teammates from rec sports leagues, current and former coworkers, people I met in young-professionals arts organizations, the bar I used to be a regular at, a book club, etc.
My GF and I are having folks over for dinner, tonight. That involved a more thorough cleaning of the house than we normally do on Saturday morning, a bigger grocery bill to account for the extra food and wine, and starting work in the kitchen at 9:00 this morning to sear the roast and get the slow cooker going.
And, it’s not that we don’t subscribe to multiple streaming services and couldn’t just pop something on tonight and put our feet up. But as others have said, here, it’s instant gratification versus long-term payoff. And, Netflix can be like weed, where you can put a pause on thinking about why you might not be satisfied with how you’re spending your evening.
But hugs, handshakes, smiles, eye contact, laughs, etc. land much differently, in person. As do frank discussions requiring sympathy or empathy.
We try, as much as our schedule, energy levels, and finances allow, to make plans, get people together, host dinner parties, etc. And, while we have not gotten a 1:1 return, the more often we make an effort to be social, the more others do in our direction, as well. And it’s encouraging, how often when we set something up, how many people say, “This was great. We need to do this more often.” You also over time figure out who will reciprocate, socially, and can prioritize spending time with them.
I think so many of us get into a rut once out of school, and there’s nothing making socializing more of a default you have to opt out of.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
I remember all the claims of Jared Lee Loughner‘s motivation being tied to Republican campaign rhetoric that turned out to be nonsense. And that hot, hot take came out first, then the dig for corroborating evidence, however tangential (did he listen to talk radio?!) served up a nothingburger.
At least in the case of Pelosi’s attacker, his Facebook history includes a lot of Mike Lindell election-truther videos. There is some basis for suspecting a political motive that could be articulated.
Now, I’m sure there will be some overreaching op-eds that follow. But that CNN piece is fairly tame.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
If Musk unbans Trump, but Trumps ignores Twitter, that will reduce Musk's and Twitter's status.
What status? What is the fallout for Elon Musk if he says, “We’ve got Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on here, I’m lifting the ban on the 45th Potus,” and then Trump just stays on Truth social?
LimesTheif
1yr ago
A sort-of mistaken costume is a now a in-joke in my family.
One year, while handing out candy, my father was dressed as Frankenstein’s monster. He and my mom had set up on the front porch.
My father asked a seemingly-shy, small child, who had approached, “Happy Halloween — would you like some candy?”
The child enthusiastically replied, “Thanks, Einstein!”
It took my parents a moment to work out the child had meant “Frankenstein”, and was not being condescending.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
One of the really nutty things about the Cotton op-ed tantrum was where some of the internal pushback came from at the Times via Slack, Twitter, etc. The op-ed page weighing the concerns of the company’s tech workers was a big departure from the past.
Marin County is an antivax stronghold, yo. There is more than one kind of Democratic voter.
It’s where RFK, Jr. holds luncheons about autism at wineries.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
That’s what I’m pointing at. Asians are firmly in the Democrat camp, but many in that camp break orthodoxy on affirmative action. It’s an issue Republicans can use as a wedge.
…we're playing this "please let the blood be on their hands" game, we're not nearly as close to civil war as some might fear. I'd worry more about that if I were hearing more of the opposite.
The ‘Radio War Nerd’ hosts have talked about this in relation to Charlottesville and street clashes in Portland. If you have a nation where firearms are prevalent and people are fighting with improvised melee weapons, what you are witnessing is political theater.
I’ll start taking Blue-Anon scaremongering over the rise of fascism in America seriously when we start seeing Weimar-era daily death counts from street violence.
In the Charlottesville case, an incel wasn’t bright enough to grok this and inspired a backlash by crossing the line to premeditated lethality.
In the latter, Proud Boy/Patriot Prayer type groups are bussing people in to Portland because that’s where they can get video squaring off with the Black Bloc folks, while the Black Bloc types hilariously claim their street violence deters the former from gathering in public.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
But perhaps such indiscretions are expected of '60s and '70s rock stars and aren't held against them.
These lists change as generations of critics do, and today’s critics would surely ding them for this, but their reputations were made prior to this stuff being a significant concern.
Bowie’s fascist-sympathizing period has not really dinged his rep. He was on heroin, then, don’t you know, and besides, he explored gender fluidity and took MTV to task for not featuring black artists.
As a tangent, the Abe assassination was really interesting in that his assassin actually achieved change in the direction of his goals, with the Japanese government becoming less friendly to the Moonies.
The electoral problem for the pro-AA side is that this doesn’t cut neatly across two-party divisions. White and Asian-Americans are both over represented relative to the general population in college admissions, and don’t want their kids’ chances dinged because of their census categorization. A lot of Asian Americans who were Clinton/Biden voters strongly oppose any quotas that will impact their kids.
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