StJohnOfPatmos
2d ago
They indicate a higher level of criminality proportional to how many visible tattoos they have, along with other negative associations like substance abuse, domestic violence, and general "roughness"
Anyone who gets a tattoo is comfortable with associating themselves in this way
Are you writing this post from within a time machine, beaming this message out to us from the 1950's? Tattoos as such haven't been signifiers of criminal association in literal decades - certain types of tattoos on certain parts of the body, sure, but just having a depiction etched onto your skin in ink doesn't say anything about your relationship to the rule of law in 2025.
Go to virtually any young, upper middle class, urban environment with connections to the arts or music, and a clear majority of women will have tattoos (as well as a plurality of the men). You can associate tattoos with a more liberal lifestyle (although soldiers and sailors might disagree with that), sure, but some 21 year old girl from a good suburban family studying at Vassar isn't suddenly a dangerous individual because she has a 1 inch wide rose motif tattooed on her forearm.
I think tattoos are trashy because the human body is a beautiful thing in its pure, unmodified state, and because I greatly appreciate our Greco-Roman heritage largely rejecting body modifications - which spared us (in Europe) from the horrors of circumcision, female genital mutilation, neck elongations, lip plates, foot bindings, head stretchings, and all the other grotesqueries the rest of the World routinely commits against their own bodies. It still doesn't mean I have to pretend tattoos mean something they simply no longer do in our current social spheres.
StJohnOfPatmos
7d ago
What's funny is that this exact series of events (male founding figure of a Green party focused on environmental policy becomes ostracised and removed from power by the next generation of overwhelmingly female party apparatchiks who want the party to revolve mainly around woke identitarian politics) is now turning into a recurring trope across Western democracies, virtually always following the same beats.
The Austrian Greens sabotaged Peter Pilz, a founding figure of the party and a star investigative journalist who uncovered (and to this day still keeps uncovering) some of the biggest political scandals in modern Austrian history. After he was denied a safe seat for an upcoming election, despite being a senior leadership figure, he left the party to found his own movement, after which the vengeful Green party leaked years-old internal party protocols that revealed he had once called his secretary "Schatzi" (essentially the German form of calling someone "honey"), she had complained, and they had resolved the issue internally without further problem. This complete nothing-story was of course blown up to the scale of serial predation (this happened in MeToo years) and Pilz was pressured to resign all political functions and retire from politics.
An almost identical scandal happened in Germany in the run-up for this years election, Stefan Gelbhaar - an established, handsome, charming, popular male Green partisan - was slated to receive a safe seat for the Greens until one of the fattest, ugliest women in the Greens party structure started spreading anonymous false accusations against him that collapsed the second anyone tried to verify their legitimacy - but by then it was too late, as the Greens had already decided to remove Gelbhaar from his seat without even sharing the nature of the allegations with him. As the head of the Young Greens said, regarding the matter - "the presumption of innocence exists in the courts, not in the Green party".
I think there's a similar story within the French Greens, but I'm not that knowledgeable about them since they're a largely irrelevant presence in French politics.
StJohnOfPatmos
15d ago
He didn't miss the shot though - Trump moved his head by happenstance at the exact same microsecond that the trigger was pulled, which I doubt even a veteran marksman can account for. But the shot itself very much did not miss its target - hence the blood on his face and all that.
StJohnOfPatmos
15d ago
Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.
This is an absolutely idiotic example - Mozart constantly needed money because he lived lavishly beyond his means and spent so much time in aristocratic circles as a commoner that he was desperate to emulate them and would bankrupt himself for expensive clothes and horse carriages. His type of financial troubles are a well documented trope of the era, induced partly by more permissive social climbing between gentry and aristocracy. Since he was undoubtedly a musical genius, obviously he used his talents to make good money fast - it doesn't mean he put no artistic or musical considerations into what he composed!
Any Austin (or rather, his father) doesn't seem to understand that a court musician in the 18th Century was not receiving a pop-star salary, but would need other sources to income his expand his fortune to the point where it could even somewhat compete with an average city-dwelling aristocrat. Mozart wanted this badly - perhaps also because he saw how financially dependent his father had been on his patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, to the point where his freedom of movement was strictly dictated to him, and wanted to avoid the same fate. The best, fastest, most respectable and well paying manner for someone with Mozarts caché and skills to make money was to take musical commissions.
And guess what? Those "non-money motivated" symphonies and operas we love and cherish Mozart for - those were commissions too! Il Seraglio, the Magic Flute, Don Giovanni were all commissions, since that was how large-scale musical arrangements were made and paid for before the rise of radio and television. The musician didn't just sit around strumming his harpsichord waiting for a hit to happen - they were subjects of courtly and church patronage and composed music in return for goods and services.
So I disagree that "Mozart was largely motivated by money" - Mozart was using his incredible talents and social reputation to leverage the best possible sources of income to finance his extravagant lifestyle. It doesn't make his melodies any less charming, nor does it dilute any kind of authentic artistic process if he received payment for having written them.
StJohnOfPatmos
22d ago
Well, isn't that part the crux though? It's not that the "art scene" that only asks for craftsmanship is good, but that the "art scene" that does not ask for craftsmanship is bad. It's the same situation as with poetry and philosophy - technical requirements, whether it's the ability to paint well, to stick to a meter and rhyme in a way that tickles the unexpectedness sense, or to write out your argument formally, are useful because they filter out the uncommitted, the generally incompetent and those whose comparative advantage lies primarily in the social game of becoming respected in a subculture.
This is completely true, and it's an argument against the point the original essay was making. The democratisation of art has diluted technical and formal criteria by dismantling traditional forms of gatekeeping - not some new-found elitism.
Poetry's downfall in particular which you mention seems to me to be suffering from a similar issue - our elites aren't reading anymore and have little meaningful exposure to the great classics of Western poetry. The Rupi Kaur-style of poetry is successful because it is extremely undemanding to read and easy to consume, perfectly fit for a society that acquired Ivy League Humanities degrees by using Sparknotes and summarized bullet points to interact with a Lord Byron poem. There is a stunning lack of snobbishness even in our most elite universities.
The golden age of art, indeed, seems to have been the period between the 17th and early 20th century, when craftsmanship was still required but no longer considered sufficient. (Some exceptions before that from good craftsmen that coincidentally also had interesting artistic visions, e.g. Bosch.)
I find the concept of a "golden age of art" overly ambitious and reductive, but it makes for a fun dinner party conversation. Your periodisation leaves out the entire Gothic period and the Renaissance, not to speak of Classical Antiquity and Ancient Rome, so I have trouble getting on board with it as the decisive high watermark of art. I also find much of the 18th Century to be a relative low point in the Western tradition of painting before 1900, but I think that's largely a matter of taste.
StJohnOfPatmos
25d ago
I have to respectfully disagree with the specific examples you chose - as someone who has worked in public facing art institutions and museums interacting with throngs of tourists and casual museum-goers, Picasso is an absolute hit with the hoi polloi and by far one of the most common name drops for people who aren't aficionados or professionally involved in the art world.
Fra Angelico on the other hand blends into almost every single other "old" painting in the general publics mind, which they can as a whole barely distinguish or situate aside from famous pop culture classics like the Mona Lisa. I tentatively agree that if you were to drill them with questions about which artist has more beautiful formal output or better technical mastery, they might begrudgingly agree to Fra Angelico - but they like Picasso because they think it has a specific coolness, edge, and doesn't leave them feeling confused and uneducated as to the subject matter (the average lowbrow museum visitor couldn't even tell you what an Annunciation Scene is, it all just melts into "old Christian art"). Picasso has also been subject to a vast marketing campaign and has become a pop icon in his own right - and the masses love a celebrity, always.
Now, if we would ask the hoi polloi to choose between any kind of Old Master painting and some overly discursive conceptual art by Joseph Kosuth or actionist performance piece by Herman Nitsch, I definitely agree they would go for the former - and it IS true that modernist art has become a hermetic, jargon-and-discourse-heavy scene that often uses very nebulous and downright non-artistic criteria to evaluate contemporary art. What I'm disagreeing with specifically is that modern art is inherently bad due to elitism and that the central focus of Western art pre-modernism was its craftsmanship.
Also, calling avant-garde artists emasculated when it was quite literally their absolute time in the sun is so pitiful - it was pretty much the apex of the Artist as a public influence on society, a historically unparalleled prestige position that was gradually lost in the post-war Era.
Also, Monet and Van Gogh are some of the biggest crowd-pleasers out there and it's not even close.
StJohnOfPatmos
25d ago
Why Modern Art is so awful
I'm not gonna engage with the other articles, but since I have a background and career in Art History, I feel compelled to comment on this essay.
In brief, I find it completely uninteresting and uneducated. He engages in the typical knee-jerk mystification of art that revolves around fixing some specific tipping point in History as the moment when things went from good to bad, and ascribes this turn to a form of malice or stupidity. Unsurprisingly, he can't really offer any concrete examples, quotes, dates, works, exhibitions or discursive shifts and needs to rely on completely nonsensical vibe-based generalisations that are by and large provably false.
There was a fairly obvious point in time, perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century when this changed for worse. Art became perceived as elite and snobbish.
This is pretty much the exact polar opposite of the development of the public reception of art in Western Society. On the contrary, the turn of the century saw the downfall of the Salon, with its highly academic selection process and extreme emphasis on complex, highbrow subject matter (being able to "read" a painting and divulge its mythological, historic or religious contents having been a key element of art discourse and prestige since the Renaissance), and the ineffable rise of the Gallery, which classed taste and value by means of the free market without institutional gatekeeping.
The Impressionists are of course the eminent example of an art movement rejected by the academic elites and their official Salons, only to be such a spectacular success among the general population that Napoleon III saw himself pressured to form an entirely separate Salon just for their work.
Of course, his claim doesn't hold for the avant-garde period either - the 20th century begins with the Fauvist and Cubist movements, both of which draw their names from extremely negative press reviews by the established art circles in Paris ("fauve" meaning savage, and "Cubist" meant to deride its lack of depth beyond its visual formula). Once again, the elite art snobs from illustrious collector families and high positions in art academies were the main push against the early modernist movement. If one has an absolute minimum background knowledge pertaining to the history of Art Academies, this is obviously unsurprising, since elite Academies historically always initially resist stylistic and thematic shifts in art - the same thing happened to David's early paintings, which were Neoclassical at a time when Rococo was still the academic style of choice. It's just the nature of institutions to become resistant to change once their power and status is entrenched.
The actual critique he could have made, but didn't, is that on the contrary, the democratisation of art and art criticism that happened in the 19th century with the proliferation of journalism and literacy, the inauguration of public museums, and the rise of a new class of bourgeois art collectors is what led to the crisis of modern art, which lost clear formal and narrative criteria necessary for its evaluation. Does he seriously believe art during the Renaissance was not an elite, snobbish affair? Pretty much every single painting you will see in a museum up until the 19th century was either commissioned by the Church or the Aristocracy, with more humble social classes contenting themselves with mediocre family portraits and decorative still lives which have largely been lost to time due to no one caring enough to preserve them. The very right to own and perpetuate figurative depictions was considered a noble duty not suited for the common rabble.
Modern art became an elitist affair the moment it became entrenched within the institutions and academies that produce and manage artworks, same as every successful art movement before them.
Years before, painters might painstakingly dedicate hours on end to producing a mural or simple portrait which could easily be appreciated for the skill of the craft.
Furthermore, he places an emphasis on craft being the guiding criteria of pre-modernist art, which is such a hilarious spit in the face of the artistic Western tradition since the Renaissance, which explicitly, insistently and desperately wanted to elevate itself about the status of craftsmanship and join the realm of "high arts" like poetry and literature, whose value is derived by ingenuity, singularity, and formal application of philosophical and intellectual pursuits. Dürer instantly comes to mind as the artist who constantly insisted that no, he was not a craftsman, but something more akin to a visual poet. If he had read some first semester Art History 101 literature like Vasari's Biographies, he would see that this division between craftsmanship and artistry was a foundational concern of Western tradition since the Renaissance and quite literally defined the process and output of many Old Masters.
This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.
I recommend anyone to take a look at André Félibiens lectures on painting, which took place during the founding days of the Royal Academy in Paris and explicitly seek to lay out a hierarchy of values and criteria for critiquing painting - unsurprisingly, complex mythological and religious scenes were considered the high watermark, with still lives and landscapes at the very bottom of the list.
The simple yet decisive invention of the color photograph served as a functional coup de grâce for the niche that the more laborious method of hand painting depictions of scenery had formerly filled.
Thus modern artists, many of which with feelings of effective emasculation, had been outdone by their craft.
This is only vaguely applicable to the highly figurative Academicist styles that emerged from David's Neoclassicism and were the elite style of choice in the mid-19th century, placing an emphasis on lifelike details well suited to recuperation by photography. Most Old Masters were obviously interested in expressive and psychological visual effects that go beyond just being lifelike - Mannerism's dreamlike serpentine, elongated bodies, Rembrandts' emotive spatial distortions, Goyas grotesque, writhing faces, the list goes on and on. Not to speak of the expressive caricatural tradition of Dutch miniature painting found in Bruegel or Bosch, nor the exaggerated and bombastic compositions of Baroque art, which was Europe's single most durable and lasting artistic tradition since the end of the Middle Ages.
To reduce Western painting to its technical ability to render figurative depictions on a flat surface is to essentially say that Western art peaked and concluded with the Ghent Altarpiece in the 15th century and had no meaningful developments since.
Now, I'm not really a defender of modernism in art, and I do think the past 100 years have been largely a period of decline and loss of previous artistic achievements - but I am a defender of serious analysis and criticism, and this essay is a complete joke on those fronts. How one can look at the extreme fervour and dynamism of the early avant-garde, its fanatical Utopianism and avowed quest to create forms of expression that resonated with normal people's lives under rapidly changing social, technological and political conditions and come away thinking it was due to the artists feeling "emasculated" is just the boring, vindictive anti-intellectualism of someone who has a bone to pick and lets his emotional resentment get the better of him.
I could go on picking apart more of this essay - he packed an impressive amount of bullshit into one single page - but I think I've largely made my point. Don't read this if you're looking for good criticism of modern art - watch the Shock Of The New by Robert Hughes or Ways Of Seeing by John Berger. They actually know what they're talking about.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
bikes should just fully share the sidewalk with pedestrians
I see where you're coming from but what you're effectively asking for is the adoption of the Third World's model for traffic, where everything flows chaotically and you're just supposed to improvise your movements without a clear structure for who can circulate where. Unsurprisingly, every single country with this kind of laissez-faire traffic mentality has horrendously high accident rates.
Here in Vienna, our main shopping street was transformed into a pedestrian zone about a decade ago - initially, the plan was for large swaths of the street to have a hybrid system where both bikers and pedestrians could share the street without any dividing markers. This had to be amended very shortly after its inauguration because it made the street experience too hectic and demanding for everyone involved, especially on a shopping street where people want to leisurely stroll and window-shop, not constantly be on the lookout for bikers trying to swerve around them. For the bikers themselves, the system sucked too, since they couldnt just bike down the street in a straight line, but had to constantly change their direction to avoid pedestrians standing in their way. It was a lose-lose situation for everyone involved and the quick addition of bike lane markers on the ground largely erased the problem overnight.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
The Netherlands would be the obvious case study. I'm not sure how exclusive their bike lanes are in relation to cars and pedestrians, but the bicycle is by far the fastest way to get around most Dutch towns and is the primary method of commuting to school or work for around a third of the population. Even the countryside has very polished and accessible lanes: since the country is geographically small, casually biking from a village to a major city is completely doable for many people.
All in all, I think bikeable cities are a no-brainer as long as there's competent central urban planning involved - its cheaper, faster, requires little space, and has health benefits. I personally hate biking in large cities, but I grew up in Vienna where bike lanes where mainly an afterthought and often set up in risky, high-traffic areas. From my visits to the Netherlands, it seems to be a totally different game there, since bike lanes dominate urban planning concerns more than cars.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I have a strange bourgeois paralysis towards these kinds of small money-saving schemes. I engage in similar lines of thought as you, reading store policies and thinking of how to game their system, but the idea of turning these thoughts into practice repels me - I picture my grandfather, neatly dressed, sitting at the head of his dark wood dining table, drinking his choice glass of wine as he always did, witnessing me run back and forth between my car and the co-op, filling 4 individual tote bags with single items in order to save maybe 20 euros once the whole deed is done. Even though he was a businessman I'm certain he would have found the whole concept utterly indecent and verging on con-man behaviour, not fit for someone from a good family whose material needs are met.
It's not even that I think these schemes are morally bankrupt. Saving money without sacrificing your consumer habits sounds smart and desirable. It's more the implied dishonesty (and I guess some sort of "loss of face" since I immediately think of my family's reaction to it?) and a certain shamelessness that stops me in my tracks every time.
Perhaps places like your local co-op have a large enough customer base with a similar class profile to mine (or one that doesn't even consider gaming the policy to begin with) that it doesn't matter if a very small minority do actually exploit their discount system.
StJohnOfPatmos
2mo ago
I don't think there's a single condensed heuristic or rule of thumb that separates good writing from the rest. Different writers seek different things, so their process and manner of attaining them is going to be different, too. Some writers are very interested in people, others in places, and others in emotional sentiments or intellectual concepts. What works for one literary pursuit doesn't need to work for another.
I think if we want to attempt to overcome this inherent ambiguity and actually try to find common ground within good writers that are good in vastly different ways, we could use Marcus Aurelius' creed of "every action receiving its proportionate worth" as a starting point. When I think of the bad writing I've read, it often comes down to the author not being able to create distinctions - all sentences are of the same length, there's a systematic insertion of adjectives before most nouns no matter how relevant the noun in question is, everything is either too descriptive or fully devoid of it, etc. In essence, there's no melody or form (in the sense of structure) to the text.
Good writers may have styles, formulas, even tropes, but can reshape them continuously to fit many different moulds - moments of levity, beauty, tension, fear, comedy, and ecstasy can all be woven into one coherent piece of writing, because the writers know which central ideas and feelings they want to determine the reading of the text, and thus calibrate each action to it's worth in reaching that end. I'm making this sound more mathematical than it is, much of it is intuitive or a matter of practice and can't be "hacked" or "figured out" through an equation.
"The first and perhaps only rule for good style is to have something to say." - Schopenhauer
This Schopenhauer quote can be horrifically misinterpreted if one assumes he's saying that writing/art only needs a "message" to be beautiful. This is obviously not true, and the measly attempts to pass off the promotion of political and activist causes as a meaningful criteria for the evaluation of art speak for themselves.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/arts/design/venice-biennale-review-art-israel.html)
What Schopenhauer is talking about is more akin to a certain cognitive clarity, i.e. "having something to say" about something that one has given considerable thought, reflection, experience, questioning, etc. This is why certain writers can extract wonderful, even lengthy pieces of writing out of the simplest topics or ideas. Herman Melville immediately comes to mind as someone who can seemingly wring every last drop of poetry and insight out of any given topic related to the sea:
"And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales."
There is a certain "knowing" at play here, which doesn't have to stem from actual experience per se (although in Melville's case, he had an extensive experience of seafaring), but can come from a directed focus of the mind towards something. There's something akin to philosophy or rational thought happening there, but there's equally a large space for reveries, poetry, and inspiration being given.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
It's a completely different ballgame when the EU attempts to intervene in member states that are net receivers of EU money, as Poland and Hungary are. Neither of those states pay for other members infrastructure development, West and North Europe pay for theirs. If you've driven around those countries before, as I have, you'll see that virtually every new highway, hospital or power plant was built with EU funding.
Germany receives nothing comparable from other member states - sure, they have downstream economic interests in developing the economy of their neighbours, but in the immediate sense, Germany cannot be blackmailed by Brussels the way Budapest can.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
I guess "petit bourgeois" is what one used to call these types of blue collar business owners.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
I don't know if it's all that dominant on the right but one does come across quite a few "man up and do whatever your wife says like a REAL ALPHA would" takes from conservative media figures - they are right about men needing to accept that they are the foundation of responsibility and economic provision within family and society at large, but fail to understand that without corresponding power and rights, this just becomes a form of indentured servitude in which you're supposed to grin and bear any humiliation.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
I wouldn't underestimate the rough parts of the white working class
Is the murderer in Adolescence supposed to be working class? I haven't watched it but the kid looks clearly middle-class coded, he doesn't have a working class affect or style of dress at all.
Regardless, it's somewhat silly to say "look, poor whites can be scum too" when that's never really been denied by anyone and when current violence increases and specific types of crime are almost exclusively linked to Peckham, Brixton and Birmingham and other areas with a specific demographic profile. Acid attacks are not being committed by white working class boys, nor is it white working class culture that promotes music and culture glorifying stabbing your rivals to death and posting it on social media to gloat about.
We also already have ample media about white working class criminality and violence - This is England, Peaky Blinders, all of Guy Ritchie's filmography, etc. so it's not like there's some kind of awareness being raised.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
Yes I agree, I was oversimplifying for sure.
It's interesting to note how since the dawn of settled civilisation, there has been a clear understanding of the reciprocal nature of rights and responsibilities - you can't vote unless you serve in the Athenian army, you can't pursue a career as a Roman magistrate without financing public infrastructure, you can't hold a title of nobility unless you also physically fight on the battlefield when the king summons you to, etc.
Liberalism's lean into universalist perspectives on societies and the nature of civic cohesion completely shattered this extremely meaningful relationship of the individual to the collective - the very last gasp of this traditional understanding of civics might have been JFK's "ask what you can do for your country". Today, one can demand all rights with zero corresponding responsibilities - like the left-wing/communist alliance here in Vienna demanding full voting rights for any adult who lives here - no matter if they are citizens, net contributors to the welfare state, or if they can even speak German. They of course don't remotely understanding how this would be the deathknell of any kind of civic mindset and would rapidly push society into the same tribal ingroupings based on family, clan, ethnicity and faith that have dominated virtually all societies on Earth outside of highly structured civilisations.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
The foundational lines of thought behind 19th century patriarchal paternalism and modern feminism are closely linked since they are both inherently bourgeois philosophies that emerged among the upper segments of wealthy, educated society as a reaction to social upheaval from the lower classes - patriarchs wanted to preserve their class standing by limiting bourgeois female interaction with the plebs, while early feminists saw early signs of social mobility and were so outraged at the thought that a man of a lower social status could have the right to vote that they concluded "we need a bourgeois chauvinism but for the girls". Look at some of the earliest suffrage posters and pamphlets - they all engage in a degree of extreme classism that we would consider almost anarcho-capitalist today.
The outcomes only differ in the sense that both have an opposing foregone conclusion - patriarchy highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, men should be in charge", while feminism highlights women's deficiencies and concludes "hence, women should be in charge". The step-by-step thought processes are remarkably similar.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
That's exactly why there is shock factor. It does happen though just infrequently.
The entire premise of the show and it's deranged state-led promotion by the UK government is specifically and explicitly axed around the depicted story being part of a "wider epidemic", at no moment whatsoever is the public treatment of it related to how "infrequent" such events are. There is no shock factor at play aside from the simulated shock of "behind every sweet white boy is a deranged sexist murderer" - which is of course demonstrably false.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
One of the unspoken pillars of feminist thought is that members of the female sex are perpetual children and members of the male sex are perpetual adults, with corresponding levels of responsibility and agency. Of course, this is systematically denied by feminists (aside from rare gems like Paglia), but is self-evident in the practical outcomes of their ideology.
The treatment we received as 10-year old boys in school after having roughhoused around a bit or done harmless pranks was always extremely stern and guilt-laden - compared to female college students have hysterical breakdowns and being coddled in manners virtually indistinguishable from how you treat crying toddlers.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
I actually think the very fact that they're brute-forcing the show into Parliamentary discussions and mandatory school screenings shows how little juice they've got left and how frightfully they are clinging on to whatever avenues of power they still have a monopoly on. The worlds of legacy entertainment and education are some of the strongest bastions of the liberal project, so they're tripling down on that power because they can feel it vanishing elsewhere.
If one has an anti-liberal stake in the culture war, one can actually only welcome this move - mandatory school screenings of anti-white male propaganda will only further alienate and enrage British boys, further teaching them that liberal project sees them as potential murderers who are guilty until proven innocent. If I were a double agent nestled within Starmer's cabinet, but secretly working for the Reform Party, this is exactly the kind of "let's pour oil onto the fire" move that I would suggest in order to guarantee that any British man under 30 feels permanently alienated from the Labour party.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
The funding comes from member states. If Germany doesn't play along with Brussels, it's Brussels that's in danger, not the other way around.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
Yes, I think EU leadership is banking on kicking the can down the road by all means in the hope that some Covid-level event will resurge and they can resurrect the police state atmosphere of the lockdowns, rallying society behind them by means of alarmism and fear. This is probably also a central function of their warmongering towards Russia - creating a siege mentality in which large swaths of the political spectrum can be labeled treasonous and banished from open discourse, probably even moving towards arrests, party bans and other forms of persecution by use of emergency powers if it really gets to the point where EU soldiers are deployed to Ukraine.
I think I'm marginally less blackpilled than you concerning demographics, the true tipping point for most Western European countries is probably still 3-4 decades away from now, which is a lot of time for upsets and shifts to happen. The EU really is a paper tiger when it comes to actually enforcing it's own internal laws, if major countries decide to opt out from certain treaties and pacts like the Dublin Agreement, there is functionally nothing Brussels can do aside from rhetorical scolding - it's not like they can send policemen to arrest Denmark's cabinet or Victor Orban. Since the Great Recession and the ensuing Eurocrisis, the EU has mainly been surviving based off of Germany's economic dominance and its internal long-lasting political dominance by status quo oriented establishment parties like the SPD and CDU. Now that these certainties are fracturing, I don't find it difficult to envision a completely neutered EU that increasingly behaves like the League of Nations, proclaiming edicts that no one feels any pressure to follow anymore since there's no actual punishment for transgressing them.
This is, of course, a cautiously optimistic view that banks on certain key elements of the democratic process being maintained and allowing for far-right victories to happen.
StJohnOfPatmos
3mo ago
EU Leadership is playing with fire and still does not want to see the writing on the wall - the genie on anti-liberal politics has been let out of the bottle and is no longer just tethered to charismatic individual politicians who can galvanise a few percent of electors at the margins of society. 3 decades ago, it needed extremely adept figures within far-right parties to elevate their results to national relevance, like Jörg Haider in Austria. Today, just being the designated "anti-system" party nets you an instant 10-20% of voters across Europe. Their support has at this point very little to do with personality cults (which was what carried figures like Haider or Jean-Marie Le Pen back in the good old days) and is almost entirely axed around concrete policy goals and fundamental mistrust towards the establishment.
While Marine Le Pen is certainly upset about the verdict essentially being a judicial coup depriving her of a very probable presidential victory, I doubt the atmosphere within the RN as a whole is beset with gloom and defeatism at the moment. They are by now the largest single political party in France both in polling and in parliamentary representation, the most popular with the working class by far, are making massive inroads into the rural vote to take advantage of a fractured and exhausted centre-right, and are competitive with the far-left for capturing the youth vote. Compared to their predicament just a decade ago (when they were already surging heavily), the Rassemblement National has become a well-oiled machine with legions of young recruits hailing from increasingly polite and respectable backgrounds - a massive long-term lifeline for parties that traditionally were forced to recruit their party apparatchiks from dubious backgrounds due to a lack of "normal" people wanting to be seen alongside neo-nazis and such. Successor figures like Jordan Bardella are the targets of unrelenting mockery and derision by the French Left, yet they underestimate that despite his relative inexperience and lack of political seasoning, he still polls considerably higher in popularity than both Macron and Mélenchon - and was able to convince 37% of voters to support his party in this past summer's parliamentary election.
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1473435/cote-taux-popularite-jordan-bardella/
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1473510/cote-taux-popularite-jean-luc-melenchon/
All in all, I doubt this verdict will have the intended result of meaningfully weakening the European far-right; rather, it will just be another stepping stone in the polarisation of our societies, yet another heightening of the liberal project's progressively undeniable internal contradictions, bringing us yet another inch closer to the precipice - when will we jump?
StJohnOfPatmos
4mo ago
"Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?" - Robert Habeck, 2025
Jokes aside, I think you're right that there will be more escalation and use of dirty tricks and institutional malpractice - Romania seems to be the EU's current testing ground for how openly they can get away with an outright, unambiguous coup d'état. It feels very Weimarian in the sense that not even the liberal order really believes in liberalism (separation of powers, due process, free and fair elections) anymore, just maintaining power by increasingly draconian means.
Whether violence will ramp up to the level you predict remains to be seen, I think the liberal establishment can influence these things semi-indirectly by just bombarding the population with alarmism and moral hysteria until some of the more deranged and disaffected listeners decide they need to get on the right side of History by stabbing an AfD politician (this is essentially already happening since a while and seems like the only logical conclusion of the "Nie wieder!" sloganeering anyway) - is the endpoint of all this civil war?
Like somewhere between 20 and 40%
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