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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   33222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Are Republicans shamelessly sexually-humiliating their opponents enough to win this election?

I’ve long held the belief that the opposite of slut-shaming is incel-shaming. A woman's reputation is damaged if she sleeps around, but a man's reputation is damaged if he is deemed a weird incel who can’t get laid. Recently, the Democrats launched a “weird incel" attacking strategy against JD Vance. Tim Walz alluded to a fabricated story about JD Vance fucking a couch in his first speech as VP. This is wholly fabricated: the origin is a twitter user who made up a paragraph from Vance's book, something easily checked. But the meme was astroturfed regardless, and Walz shamelessly referenced it in his first speech. Last night, 5 of the top 10 default posts on Reddit’s /r/All were references to Waltz’s remark.

The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation. There’s talk about Trump being a “bully”, but nothing he has said has come close to the shameless slander against Vance. Calling Hillary “crooked” is par for the course of political messaging and doesn’t actually impact her reputation. Making fun of McCain for being captured as a PoW also doesn’t really affect McCain’s reputation, and if anything harms Trump’s. Trump usually exaggerates something true, but the attack against Vance is wholly false in origin.

I checked in on the incels over at 4chan to see what were saying about this. And I actually found an insightful analysis:

You can make up literally any random accusation and if enough people in the group either don't like you or just don't want to be left out, they will join in the accusation/mockery no matter how baseless the claim. It only serves to benefit them by being part of the in-group, and obviously feels good to mock someone you dislike or don't care about. You can see this in the democrat "weird" campaign or the "JD Vance fucked a couch" meme. It doesn't matter how juvenile or immaterial the accusation is. It degrades and humiliates the enemy. This effect is particularly common among women and feminine men where it pertains to humiliating enemy men sexually. This wouldn't really matter if it didn't have realized consequences in how people vote or otherwise express their desires and opinions. There are people out there that will actually change their vote or their speech because they don't want to be perceived as "weird' or "creepy", which is the whole point of this type of warfare.

It can also be noted that the attack against Vance has an element of sexual harassment. What would our “cultural elites” (D) say if Republicans went all-in on a story about Kamala Harris violating the intern’s Oval Office laundry machine? Or that she used a priceless piece of White House memorabilia as a dildo without cleaning it off after? This would just be shameless sexual harassment, right? But so is the official DNC strategy against Vance. It’s harassment for the purpose of humiliating someone sexually to change voter perception via shame response.

I meannnnn trump has a $83mm defamation judgement against him and he’s currently claiming that Harris isn’t actually black.

Politics is dirty and Trump loves it in the mud.

he’s currently claiming that Harris isn’t actually black.

If you actually watch the interview Trump's claim was 'Harris chooses whether to emphasize her Indian heritage or African heritage depending on however the IdPol winds are blowing' not that she's literally not Black.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

That’s the quote, questioning if a mixed race person is black. OP claiming Trump Is somehow above the mud of dirty politics is laughable.

Less we forget Trump was a huge pusher of the birth certificate claim against Obama. He’s been this way all along.

Is English your first language?

That very clearly reads as him attacking her for choosing what group to identify with based on convenience.

I’d consider attacking a mixed race person based on their identity well beyond the pale. However this is a forum that vigorously defended a child rapist last week so unsurprised the reaction to Trump’s racism. Lot of weird people here.

  • -27

  1. He is attacking her for being a phony (Indian when it helps, black when it helps).

  2. She is 1/4 black. Is that really black? She is more non black than black. One drop rule?

He’s claiming she’s not really African American and as far as I can tell that’s just literally true- she’s not.

child rapist

Who?

I presume he's referring to Stephen van de Welde.

Link to discussion

I’d consider attacking a mixed race person based on their identity well beyond the pale.

For a moment, I thought describing his comment like this was weird, but then it occurred to me that using particular blunt and non-descriptive categories to describe a specific event in a way that attaches negative affect is a common enough occurrence that one of Scott Alexander's more famous essays on SlateStarCodex back in the day, titled The Worst Argument in the World IIRC, was based around it. Of course, this is my subjective take, but Trump's line, on its merits, seems far more similar to his attacks on another mixed race person based on their identity, Elizabeth Warren, whom he called "Pocahontas," presumably as a way to insultingly accuse her of opportunistically abusing her claimed heritage for career advancement. Except without the schoolyard name-calling, but rather making a pretty meaningful - though unfalsifiably vague - claim, that Harris is selectively emphasizing aspects of her racial identity opportunistically to garner points depending on the context.

Honestly, pointing out Harris's or Warren's alleged cynical racial maneuvering seems rather trite considering that's pretty much expected of someone ambitious and arrogant enough to try to be the next POTUS, and Trump of all people should probably know that, but I've never clocked him as the self aware type. Still, politicians at least like to roleplay being respectable, and they do it well enough to convince a lot of people, and certainly on its merits, the kind of behavior being alleged is not respectable, so I don't find the accusation beyond the pale. Rather well within the pale, in fact, to the extent that it's actually pretty damning to US journalism that in a country whose political discourse explicitly talks so much about how race should inform how we treat individuals and enforcing that with policy, the industry doesn't spend more time questioning politicians on how they might have cynically maneuvered the racialist landscape to consolidate their power. I don't know who'd be the ones to damn, though, because the journalists are ultimately serving an audience that just doesn't care about that.

He's not attacking her identity wantonly, he's attacking the way she uses it.

Speak about individuals, don't make (inaccurate) generalizations like this. If you want to accuse the person you're talking to of defending child rapists, fine, accuse him of saying that (and be prepared to defend it), but "this forum" did not "vigorously defend a child rapist." This is the sort of straw man that gets people bounced, and then they whine that we're banning people for going against "forum culture."

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