aiislove
2yr ago
The media's attitude toward Tiger King was actually kind of a huge thing that turned me against them around 2020. I watched Tiger King and my takeaway was, honestly, that they look like they're having significantly more fun in their lives than me or anyone who was poo-pooing the show was having. It really made me realize that I don't want to live my life confined by the tastes of people who can make fun of Joe Exotic while their own lifestyle is probably a really depressing routine of uber eats and gray buildings.
Additionally, I think the time before 2016 was way friendlier to quirky white working class people. For example, indie films like Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, as well as indie folk music like Sufjan and Fleet Foxes were beloved by the NPR set until the entire indie folk quirk scene mysteriously vanished from the media's landscape in favor of queer/bipoc voices throughout the late 2010s
aiislove
2yr ago
Sorry to hear you're feeling that way. Sounds like a miserable way to live. I don't know much about you or what you're into and this might not work for you. But personally I would ask myself what I really want. And listen to yourself truthfully and honestly, write about it in a private journal where no one else will ever read it. Come up with the most outlandish things that you can think of. And then ask yourself if it's possible to do it. Or see if you can take a day pretending to do that thing and live that life you wish you were living, instead of this spectator life you're living now. I went through many years of my life feeling disgusted with myself and my situation, but finally being able to lead myself out of it by being honest with myself about what I want, and having the dignity and self respect to provide it for myself, helped me be able to feel more in control of my own life and I'm much happier now than I used to be. Have the courage to stick up for yourself and not be bullied by the way you think others want you to live your life.
aiislove
2yr ago
The media and cultural elites really revealed their hatred of poor rural white people during the Trump administration imo. I don't think most people realized what was happening during his presidency but now that it's over, it really feels like TDS was directed toward white people and especially poor white people with little to no cultural power or relevance. Before 2018 I was relatively happy or at least complacent to conform to the fashions and opinions of democratic elites, in the hopes that I could reap the benefits of being part of the ascendant class, but after experiencing the hatred this class of people spewed toward poor white people I really can't stand to associate with democrats anymore.
Circling back to your post, the point I'm trying to make is that I have much more sympathy for middle American white people after the past 6 years than I had before and I feel like white people have actually earned a huge right to feel like the underdogs at this point. I think a ton of people in the creative industry are feeling this as well FWIW, so many of us are sick of working for democrat tastemakers who constantly censor our work and ignore artists creating anything that could threaten their credibility or power. As artists/creatives we're used to rooting for the underdogs and when the legacy art media is constantly screaming at us that only BIPOC voices matter, and that poor white trash people will ruin their careers if they're associated with them, then the poor white trash people are, obviously, the underdogs.
At the end of the day, when you pick on losers, it makes you look like a bigger loser, and it grows support for the people you're picking on. The more the mass media and pop culture and everyone you meet piles on poor white people, the more it reveals how pathetic they are for doing so.
aiislove
2yr ago
Probably a long shot but I just saw an infographic that sparked an idea so I wanted to see if this already exists.
Is there a website you can go to that has like, a list of traits that are linked to specific genes, that you can check each trait that you have and then click submit and it gives you specific ethnicities or geographic locations you are probably linked to? Like a genetic profile that it can give you based on the traits that you or a specific person exhibit. For example, the website could ask you hair color, eye color, and genetically linked traits like unibrows, webbed toes, certain diseases/disorders etc. and then, based on the traits you have inherited, it would give probabilities of you being from certain regions or genetic groups?
aiislove
2yr ago
I can really relate to your post, especially the first paragraph. Throughout my 20s I would repeatedly get into relationships where I liked the guy but after a few weeks or months I would make up some excuse to end the relationship. Half the time I just didn't like the guy, but the other half of the time it was because I didn't have the confidence or self esteem to believe that the guy I liked liked me back. So basically it was a self esteem issue at the end of the day.
I have also diagnosed myself with fearful avoidant attachment style and just reading about it from reddit searches and psychology clickbait blogs was interesting and illuminating to me, but I don't have any recommendations for hard copy books or academic research or anything like that.
I found the following video pretty helpful, it was pretty game changing for me when it made me realize that I'm not single because it's other people's fault, it's really my own fault (which sounds bad but actually made me hopeful because I realized I could change myself and my relationship with others, taking back the locus of control rather than feeling like a victim which I had done before)
aiislove
2yr ago
It might sound silly but the more I think about it the more this actually kind of bugs me.
I had a similar experience when I read the ""Let's go Brandon" is code for "I think Olive Garden is a fancy restaurant"" tweet a few months ago. The smugness of people who are culturally elite attacking something that close to home as a middle class midwesterner really irritated me
Serious question, how many mottizens actually eat at the waffle house on a semi-regular basis?
I ate there one time and didn't like the food. I'm not above cheap places if it tastes good but it just didn't taste good. My dad would eat there often and would tell me about his friends he met there and ate with. I used to kind of roll my eyes and think it was trashy but now that he's passed away I feel sort of guilty for feeling this way.
aiislove
2yr ago
Waffle House is definitely bottom of the barrel in terms of price, quality and perceived brand image. Denny's is somewhat pricy and has better quality food (though still not great.) IHOP is between the two. There are probably people who would collapse the distinction and classify them all as being on the same level but I suspect most working class or middle class people in America would classify them as I have.
aiislove
2yr ago
Can you expand on what you mean in this post? You seem to be implying something but I can't read between the lines well enough to understand what you're trying to say. If I had to parse it, I think you're trying to say that more wealthy people seem to be divorced from the reality of racial differences that working class people understand intrinsically, or something to that effect.
aiislove
2yr ago
I was born in '89, so I remember my very conservative mother forbidding our family from watching The Simpsons while growing up (and she still seems to think it's terrible as of a few months ago) but I never understood what her objection was to the show specifically. Is there a primer on why the show was seen as liberal or controversial when it debuted? Was it just edgy humor or was there something more objectionable to conservatives specifically about the show?
aiislove
2yr ago
I for one would be happy to read the alternate conservative/libertarian version if you bothered to write it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one here who would be.
aiislove
2yr ago
I don't mean to attack you specifically but I find this viewpoint so degrading. I think that most people out there really can and would understand the nuances of the issue, but that it's just a very tiny minority of people who feel helpless and are seeking power who would bother to make a fuss about the advertisers associating with problematic youtubers. Indeed, to me it seems like a propensity of the executive class to protect their own interests against a vocal minority by belittling and downplaying the sophistication of the rest of the audience, at the expense of the audience.
aiislove
3yr ago
I used to be into gadgets and cool tech stuff growing up. I collected ipods and mp3 players and game systems and stuff like that but I kinda fell off around the time that the PSP came out. Now I have the budget to invest in cool stuff but all I have is a macbook pro and an iphone so I feel pretty boring. What are you guys into these days? I haven't been impressed or wowed by anything new in a long time. It just seems like electronics companies are putting out slight improvements to existing products and there's nothing cool coming out anymore. Are any of you into electronics? What have you seen lately that you're into or looking forward to coming out soon? Are there any good blogs or news sites to follow interesting tech? (especially stuff like indie development, I own Apple products but they're really rather boring and I see them more as nicely functional things than anything that excites me and mainstream Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo gaming has been pretty disappointing all around post-PS2 era imo)
Just want the excitement I used to feel when I would look at a new mp3 player back in 2003 again, haha.
aiislove
3yr ago
Copypasting a comment I made the last time someone asked for a primer on Girard, pinging @TheDag as well:
The two episodes with Rene Girard on the podcast called Entitled Opinions are really good. He goes over memetic desire as well as his concept of scapegoating. I found everything he had to say very interesting and I listened to the two episodes two years ago but still think of them often.
The first episode: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/ren-girard-why-we-want-what-we-want
The second episode: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/ren-girard-ritual-sacrifice-and-scapegoat
aiislove
3yr ago
I suspect I come across as someone trying to play up my importance or competence sometimes, and have been trying to adjust my behavior to do that less for the past few months. It seems to be helping but there are still situations where I am doing all I can to not be/act condescending or arrogant and I'm still perceived that way and I just want to stop being perceived that way when I am trying my hardest to not irritate people
aiislove
3yr ago
Why do you recommend I try not to care what service workers feel? Is that to help them feel better, because it puts less pressure on them, or is it to make me feel better so that I can stop ruminating on awkward situations? Or both?
I am a people pleaser and obsessed with how others feel and perceive me so this is really unintuitive to me and I don't know how to not care about how the person I'm interacting with is feeling or what that would even look like or how it would play out. I imagine they would get mad at me and then I would feel guilty that I didn't try my best to be a better customer.
Can someone who has worked in customer service please explain to me how to be less irritating to service workers? I am socially anxious and awkward and am repeatedly finding myself in situations where I feel like I'm making service workers uneasy and it makes me feel terrible. I have never worked a public facing job before so I don't know what to do or avoid doing to help make their jobs easier and I can tell that they get irritated with me when I do things that I have no idea are going to be irritating to them. It seems to be getting worse the older I am as well, when I was in my teens and 20s people were much more patient with me but now in my 30s I seem to be more intimidating to people and they're less forgiving toward me. Growing up I always admired my dad and grandfather for being able to talk to anyone and make them feel comfortable but this is a skill I never learned. Does anyone have advice on how to develop this skill?
Alternately, can someone give advice on how to stop ruminating about recent socially awkward situations? I can try to improve my behaviors but at the same time I can't change how other people perceive me so even if I did everything 100% right there would probably still be times where I was seen as irritating to people. I'd like to just forget these situations once they happen, if I can't stop them from happening altogether.
aiislove
3yr ago
It doesn't work with google voice, or any of the shady temporary phone number websites that I tried (and I tried a handful before giving up)
aiislove
3yr ago
Does the volunteer comment moderation feature show the comments completely out of context? I can imagine that there are situations where a comment could look like a bad comment out of context, but in context the comment is perfectly fine. I would worry that people or comments could get flagged as being bad but that are fine in context. Hopefully the human reviewing the volunteer judgment of the comment would look at the comment in context before taking action on it, but that seems like it would result in extra work, depending on how the whole thing is implemented.
aiislove
3yr ago
I've had similar thoughts regarding the UFO discourse as well. In my opinion it's not about aliens, it's all a military public opinion psyop. Copypasta'd from the old world:
Regarding the UFO discourse from the government/military lately. It seems like an intentional program to explore how information disseminates on the internet. Even coining the phrase "UAP" is exactly what you would do to track a new meme (good SEO) and getting Obama to talk about it on Jimmy Kimmel or whatever is exactly what you'd do to get people talking about it like you're marketing a new movie premiere. The government/military is testing out their propaganda powers to see how information spreads and disseminates online with a red herring like UFO's so that later they can harness this intelligence to sell their next war in the realm of public opinion the next time they need to do so (since the public seems to be taking narrative building into their own hand and crowdfunding narratives with the diminishing power of the mainstream media)
aiislove
3yr ago
I got 12 out of 20. I suspect I would do better if they were all American because I'm American, and Europeans look more blue tribe as a whole compared with Americans to me.
aiislove
3yr ago
I like to get some fresh air and a change of scenery on the weekends. Take a long walk at a park. I usually avoid shopping and restaurants on the weekends because they're always packed with people, so I like to do those things on weekdays. I prefer parks that are large enough to avoid too many people. If the weather isn't nice for walking, I'll take a long drive in my car.
aiislove
3yr ago
Interesting post. It reminds me of the concept of reaction formation.
aiislove
3yr ago
The third paragraph in my post was an attempt at pointing to some of the evidence I have seen of the rightward shift in art and culture. Others would be the podcast The Perfume Nationalist, countless tumblrs I've seen lately that glorify poor white underdog Trump's America type imagery and identity, and so on. Also the Barragan Spring 2023 fashion show, and the fashion brand called Praying. Brandy Melville. Recent Prada.
As I said in my last paragraph, most of the people in the scene are sort of doing this shift covertly and hiding behind a mirage of ambiguity as to what they are doing (for example, the Red Scare subreddits are filled with people who have no apparent awareness of the rightwing nature of most of the talking points presented on the show.) So it makes evidence difficult to point at. Indeed, much of art and fashion is based on "seeming" rather than anything overt. For example, I can look at Nicholas Ghesquiere's recent collections from Louis Vuitton and see his weird ugly belle epoque-meets-18th century panniers as a kind of rightwing trolling misogynistic hostility against modern women, while the same modern and progressive feminist women can look at the same garments and imagine them as empowering pieces to help them be single mothers with, or whatever.
I don't think that art and fashion, or the politics of people who participate in creating culture, is the sort of thing that you can study, so I don't know how I could provide sources other than by relating my personal anecdotal observations. I'm not going to dox myself but I can tell you that in the least, I'm very interested and personally invested in the creative industries and read themotte enough to be able to identify newly emerging rightwing patterns when 5 years ago you would have gotten you canceled to the ends of the earth for the same thing.
As an aside, I posted in the small scale thread because I didn't really want to attract the hostility and pedantry of the main thread but it seems I've attracted it anyway. I enjoy themotte because I think most of the posters are smart and have unique points of view but the aggression can really be a lot to take when I'm just looking for a more friendly conversation sometimes. I wish there was another thread that was more low stakes than this one, but the friday fun thread says it's not for culture war content so I don't know what to do.
I believe to steelman gilmore606's point, it would be that they are minstrel shows in the sense that the blue team viewers like to watch this media to laugh at the antics of poor white people. So this mimics the spectacle of white people watching entertainment that makes them feel superior and to be able to point and laugh at an inferior class of people (long ago it was blacks, today it's poor whites.) We have replaced acting with reality TV, so we don't need to have rich whites pretending to be poor whites (though there are plenty of examples of exactly that happening in Hollywood today.)
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