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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   29872 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Niche Hobby Drama alert

In the sport of Brazilian Jiujitsu, there's been a recent drama in which a popular grappler called Jay Rodriguez has been kicked out of the B-Team (Most popular team in the sport despite not tending to actually win things) due to sexual impropriety. The original message said that he'd obtained illicit images of female training partners.

This was revealed a few days ago, and it has since been revealed that the alleged impropriety is that Jay Rod's Girlfriend discovered that he had been deepfaking nudes of female competitors he'd met on the mats. She then exposed this to the team upon finding out, but it's acted as a bit of a touchpoint for drama in the sport as a result. The original message made it sound like he'd been taking creepshots or sharing actual nudes. It's additionally attracted drama as the mouthpiece/defacto leader of the B Team is Craig Jones, who is by far the most charismatic person in the sport but also has a long history of putting out content which could be considered a bit sexually untowards. He had the famous intergender match last year against Gabi Garcia, has done a lot of travel blogging with ladyboys, massages and other broadly risque subjects and is generally a 'loose unit'. Now he's taking the moral high ground against Jay, which has created some controversy.

Personally I think that it's reasonable to kick Rod out once the deepfaking became public knowledge, but also the comms were handled poorly. BJJ sex scandals are more common than you'd expect, but typically tend to be more of the 'Brazilians versus the age of consent' age-old rivalry than something with such a modern tinge.

Creation/Possession of Deepfakes as a scandal is kind of interesting to me.

On a basic level, this reads to me as the epitome of a victimless crime. If the existence of the images is not revealed, then no harm can possibly result. And we can presume no rules were really breached to create them, if the guy WASN'T taking creepshots and just pulled images posted to social media to feed the generator. And there's (currently) no evidence that producing them makes it likely the 'perp' will try any further inappropriate behavior.

Its obvious that producing the deepfakes is labelled as "creepy"; but why precisely?

On the spectrum of ways to sexualize a person this seems maybe slightly 'worse' than vividly imagining them naked but on the same order of magnitude of pasting a cutout of their head onto a nudie mag or maybe doing some extra work and photoshopping their face onto an existing nude photo. Maybe also worse than finding a pornstar that is a close enough doppelganger that you can squint a bit and make it work.

Also add in the fact that he HAS (had?) a girlfriend so he's not a complete loser, even ignoring he's a talented martial artist with a decent social media following (169k instagram followers is impressive by normal standards, no?). This isn't your stereotypical incel who disgusts women by his mere presence and mannerisms.

Socially, well yeah I can understand why this hurts his status... but again, would it be 'better' if his porn habits/browser history leaked and it was just standard fare or maybe niche fetish material? Certainly embarrassing but I think most onlookers would just kind of nod and say "to each their own" and pretend they didn't see it (unless they need to roast him later). Its the deepfaking in particular that makes him mildly radioactive.

Best I can muster is that it does display some bad judgment to keep files proving you masturbate to your 'colleagues' sitting around. "We need to boot you now on the offchance there's a worse skeleton hiding in your closet, if you're stupid enough to have this one." Definitely an HR risk in that sense.

But if I were to guess as the real reason it led to immediate ostracization, its simply that its 'hoe-scaring' behavior and the other guys are unwilling to stand up for him if it will reduce their appeal to women in general, and women interested BJJ in particular. Yes, I can see it would be 'bad' to have this guy present if other women were noticeably uncomfortable with it. But its not because he actually poses any real threat to them, its more that he's breached the general rule that the one and only way its 'acceptable' to see a woman naked is with her explicit consent, and then, only WHILE that consent is being given, and not a second longer. If that's the implicit or explicit social rule, then spying/peeping tom behavior, creepshotting, aggressively soliciting nudes, AND deepfaking are all approximately the same level of bad. Oh, and defending someone who did any such behavior also tars you with the brush.

I guess I'll leave it on this question: assuming it is 'wrong' to make deepfakes of women you know, what could possibly be the proper punishment/restitution/retribution to make things right again? I'll immediately grant "delete any and all copies of the images." But if the 'damage' is all emotional/psychological there's not much one can do other than let time heal the 'wound.'

And to be clear there are certainly things one could do with deepfakes that I think unambiguously cross lines of decency and morality, such as:

  1. Sending the deepfakes to the intended subject knowing it will cause distress.

  2. Publishing or distributing them, especially if you imply that they are genuine.

  3. Attempting blackmail, whether it succeeds or not.

  4. Impersonating the subject, obviously.

  5. And hell, I'd even say accepting money to produce them at someone else's bequest is suspect, even if you don't keep them.

These are mostly covered under existing legal concepts like defamation or harassment.

vividly imagining them naked

This link is broken FYI. For some reason getting old.reddit links always links to the same /r/funny post about a nice hat. It's happened to me more than once.

I should genuinely have known better than to trust a reddit link to work as intended.

I think its a victimless crime too when undiscovered, but once the girls find out about it it will likely give them the ick/make them feel unsafe.

Guy should just make a public apology, delete everything and keep training until things blow over. In the meantime I hope he broke up with his girlfriend to make a clean start. She torpedoed his career out of jealousy even if she makes some public feminist argument about keeping the girls 'safe'.

From my experience talking with women about it, many hate men vividly imagining them naked just the same, they just can't do anything about it. If a mindreader was created tomorrow, I'm pretty sure a group would get together to lobby to outlaw sexual fantasies about a person without their consent the day after.

Add the risk of circulation (even by accident!) and the implied threat from the possibility of people mistakenly believing it to be real, it's obvious why the women react so badly.

I mean that gives the game away.

Those ones hate men perceiving them in ways they don't consent to. Across the board.

They'd object if the guy was imagining them in their underwear or a bikini. They'd object if he was imagining them wearing a sundress and looking at them with loving desire.

If its a man they DO want fantasizing about them, they'd just as soon want to project the fantasy images into his mind to get his attention.

We sort of know this because as soon as phones were able to send photos, attractive guys started getting lewd and nude photos sent to them, often unsolicited! Same deal.

So there's your question, should we be taking efforts to control men's thought processes and how they use their own computer hardware in order to accommodate/protect women's feelings?

They'd object if the guy was imagining them in their underwear or a bikini. They'd object if he was imagining them wearing a sundress and looking at them with loving desire.

They'd object if the guy simply looked at them and appreciated their appearance as it was and they found him unattractive. This is all the same kind of thing and should be given zero weight in any sort of law or rule system that isn't supposed to be dealing with relationships between men and women.

Not disagreeing, and indeed I don't think any legal processes have been invoked here.

But how much should women's feelings be accommodated in these sorts of informal social conflicts? As much as we don't want explicit written rules there's a void left when the rules are allowed to be written ad hoc as technology advances.

The situation's "severity" seems to me that if he and his organization had stood his ground, said "look I'm deleting everything and I'll take a social media hiatus, but nobody has been hurt and the team is more important" they'd probably have come through alright.

Many women have their self-worth tied up almost entirely in how other people view them. They are self-centered enough to believe that they should be in full control of how others perceive them and that anyone who is perceiving them in a way they don't approve of should be punished. They think people shouldn't be allowed to fantasize about them sexually without them being in control--and thus able to exploit--those fantasies. Men, and society in general, should ignore their whining and tell them to get over themselves.

This, additionally creating deepfakes is not the same as vividly imagining someone naked, otherwise men wouldn't take the effort to create them.

I think it's a transgression but I also feel like the consequences are a bit too hardcore for what's essentially masturbation. Dude's essentially been exiled from his life, whilst having hung out with some of the guys who are in the B Team orbit they're hardly above locker room behavior and a lot of that stuff is essentially Craig Jones' personal brand. His main media thing last year was a bunch of sexually charged stuff around Gabi Garcia/challenging her to do an Onlyfans shoot with him if he caught her in a particular submission that he actively went for and only relented when she essentially said 'I will let you break my leg instead of tapping since I don't want to play into the onlyfans thing' (https://youtube.com/watch?v=HID-Xi8hOUw&t=741) which IMO is way more of a consent issue than anything Rod did.

Ye, better known as Kanye West has released a song titled "Heil Hitler"
I have to admit, it's quite catchy, especially the unlikely refrain "nigger, Heil Hitler", which definitely has an intriguing ring to it. Whether Kanye is a truly great artist or not, he's nothing if not a skilled craftsman.
I've long since lost the ability to treat anything on the internet seriously and my reaction was limited to squeezing my eyes shut and suppressing a chuckle, but I suspect that the wider audience is also outraged only in a performative, inertial way. I doubt it will end up making any real impact on anything and waves in the social media will likely fizzle out in no more than a few weeks.
I wonder if we're seeing the first signs of postmodern corrosion eating away at the last grand unifying narrative of our age: WW2 mythos, with Adolf Hitler at its center not as mere historical figure, but as the archetypal villain and the secular devil. In many countries the taboo is backed by legal force, but legislation doesn't truly govern things of this nature. The law may end up hollowed out and irrelevant long before someone cares to remove it from the books
Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.
Should this really happen, good riddance. Though on the other hand, we might end up remembering having this kind of culture spanning, unifying narrative as kind of comfy compared to total balkanization

didn't Michael Jackson do something similar with 'they don't care about us'. i was shocked when i first heard the original words to that song and they were used as background music for a runners instagram.

It's possible you may have heard of the Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneecap_(band)), most of whose lyrics are rapped in the Irish language. They're best-known in Ireland and the UK, but recently they've begun to establish themselves in the US as well, to the point of performing in Coachella and selling out their US tour dates.

Their lyrics are often political, and they've been unabashed in their support for the Provisional IRA, their opposition to the British monarchy and government, their support for the Palestinian cause, and their concomitant opposition to Zionism. Their political lyrics have landed them in hot water with the British establishment on occasion (as they're from Northern Ireland, they're UK citizens even if they "identify as" Irish), with current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch once denying them an arts grant on their basis that the band "oppose[s] the United Kingdom itself" (a decision they successfully appealed).

Recently, the British government discovered footage of the band performing some time ago, during which the performers could be heard yelling "Up Hamas", "Up Hezbollah" and instructing the audience to assassinate their local MPs (it's unclear to me if all of these statements were made during a single gig, or individually during separate gigs). As a result of this, the band are being investigated by British police, because public expression of support for terrorist organisations is a crime in the UK (insert your own "loicense" jokes here). Their fans and many of their fellow musicians have come rushing to their defense. The band now claim that they have never supported Hamas or Hezbollah (doubt.jpeg) and their message has always been one of "love, inclusion and hope".

First things first: as a freedom-of-speech diehard, the idea of arresting and/or indicting Kneecap for yelling "up Hamas" is unconscionable to me. The fact that this "investigation" is happening at all is yet another canary in the coalmine (along with the numerous people investigated or convicted for gender-critical opinions, or the recent fellow arrested for burning a Quran) that freedom of expression no longer really exists in the UK. Probably no one will benefit from this probe more than Kneecap themselves, who made a name for themselves by cosplaying as radicals and going out of their way to be edgy and controversial. Glorifying a pogrom (albeit under the unpersuasive euphemism of "Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle" while grinning ear-to-ear) is revolting, but shouldn't be a criminal offense.

But, as noted by Brendan O'Neill, the double standard among the woke left is shocking. Because of his anti-Semitism and professed admiration for Hitler, Kanye West is now considered persona non grata among the woke left, or elsewhere. (It need hardly be said that probably the only reason he's expressing admiration for Hitler is because of his unmedicated bipolar disorder - but Mental Illness Doesn't Do That, so never mind.) Meanwhile, Kneecap (individuals, to the best of my knowledge, of sound mind untroubled by psychosis) expressed support for an organisation whose founding charter clearly and unambiguously states that its ultimate goal is the extermination of all Jews from the face of the earth - and the woke left eagerly support Kneecap, attending their gigs, joining in their juvenile football chants ("Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!"), buying their merch, and rallying to their defense at every opportunity. The rules seem so arbitrary to me: you can't express support for Hitler, but you can express support for an organisation which shares most of Hitler's defining, animating opinions (hatred of Jews and desire to exterminate them, homophobia, misogyny etc.). You can't say that the Holocaust was a good thing - but if you want to cheer on the worst antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust, go right ahead. It seems like some sort of perverse Sorites paradox, or Goldilocks effect: saying that the slaughter of 6 million Jews was a good thing will get you cancelled, saying that the slaughter of 1,200 Jews was a good thing won't get you cancelled. "Experts now believe it may be possible to express support for the murder of as many as two million Jews without suffering any reputational damage, but other sources differ."

I don't understand it one iota. I'm increasingly starting to think that the Holocaust has become completely de-Jewified (for want of a better word) and drained of its specificity, understood primarily as a grave crime because it was a mass slaughter, rather than specifically a mass slaughter primarily of Jews. I wonder if the current generation of secondary school teachers will go out of their way to "recontextualise" the Holocaust by listing off all of the more fashionable groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis: gays, disabled people, trans people (a myth; one of several, like "people have been acquitted for murdering trans people by using the 'trans panic' defense", that trans activists essentially dreamed up from whole cloth and which is now widely believed in woke circles), and then mentioning Jews at the end, as an afterthought. I wonder if the next generation, when asked why Hitler was so evil, will say that he was bad because he hated black people, he hated gay people, he started a war in Europe, and he killed lots of people - all true statements, and yet all statements which rather miss the point of why he was so evil. All of this "recontextualisation" of the Holocaust has the unnerving feeling of salami-slicing to me.

Hitler's defining, animating opinions (hatred of Jews and desire to exterminate them, homophobia, misogyny etc.)

Either the etc. is doing some dangerously heavy lifting here, or this is a really rather woke opinion of Adolf Hitler.

His defining, animating opinions other than hatred of jews were...homophobia and misogyny? Really? Nothing about the militarism, the authoritarianism, the totalitarianism, the expansionism, the sheer magnitude of out-of-his-depth the man was as dictator of Germany, the enormity of ego he acquired over the years?

No, no, he didn't like the gays and thought women should be homemakers.

I presumed it went without saying that, as an Islamofascist terrorist organisation, Hamas is just as militaristic, authoritarian, totalitarian and expansionist as Hitler was, and, in its quixotic, decades-long, suicidal battle against an obviously militarily, economically, technologically and numerically superior opponent, just as out of its depth.

Sure, but then focusing on misogyny and homophobia next to jew-hatred as his "defining, animating opinions" still seems non-central. It's not a big deal either way.

That's fair.

Isn't this stuff just reasonably common with Leftist handling of 'Oppressed groups', in which the oppression is centered and what the group actually believes/practices just doesn't really come up despite the fact they're some combination of borderline theocratic, hardline conservative and run contrary to woke culture. The point is they're the underdogs and therefore you root for them, not that the society where they hypothetically got on top would be significantly more repressive than the status quo.

Leftist handling of 'Oppressed groups', in which the oppression is centered and what the group actually believes/practices just doesn't really come up despite the fact they're some combination of borderline theocratic, hardline conservative and run contrary to woke culture.

Ironically both Israel and the Provisional IRA are good examples of this. Both are basically bog-standard 19th century ethnic nationalist movements that spent decades getting glazed by the left wing because they bothered to give the bare minimum of socialist lip-service. The difference is, the Provos never won (not completely anyway), so unlike Israel they never got the chance to reveal that their left wing commitments were a paper thin cover for their real goals. Whereas Israel has the misfortune of being a leftist bette noire due to their socialist apostasy. This apostasy is also why most of the left hates modern Russia so much.

I disagree with you - I think the Provisional IRA and related organisations are far more sincere in their socialism than you give them credit for. Sinn Féin (the political wing of the PIRA) sent a delegation to attend Maduro's inauguration in Venezuela, following an election that pretty much everyone agrees was a sham. There's little doubt in my mind that if they were ever to achieve a majority in the Republic, they'd bring Ireland a lot closer to Cuba or Venezuela than it currently is.

I wonder if the current generation of secondary school teachers will go out of their way to "recontextualise" the Holocaust by listing off all of the more fashionable groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis: gays, disabled people...

That actually was the usual didactic approach to the Holocaust in America in the late 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. Portraying it as a more general crime against humanity. The number of deaths was often described as 10-12 million and it included Soviet POWs, homosexuals, religious and political dissidents like Jehovah’s Witnesses, other miscellaneous ethnic groups like the Romani people and Polish Slavs, Rhineland Germans of African ancestry, and the disabled. I don’t know exactly what the politics behind the shift was, but that approach fell out of favor in the last half of the 2010s and it started being described again as mainly a crime against European Jews.

It's my understanding that the figure of "5 million non-Jews" was more or less invented from whole cloth by Simon Wiesenthal, and the real figure was likely as much as an order of magnitude lower. "The Holocaust was mainly a crime against European Jews" is, in my view, the only historically accurate and responsible way to describe it.

Hitler was a bad man. The Holocaust happened and was a terrible crime. But what makes it a worse crime because it was aimed at Jews? I’ll grant you that I find Jews more sympathetic than gypsies or gays, but I find them less sympathetic than the disabled, or Slavs. The Jew-targeting wasn’t what made the Holocaust evil. The mass murder was.

The argument for the Holocaust being worse than the holodomor is one of either a) Jewish lives are worth more than gentile lives(I reject this premise, and if forced to choose between saving a random kulak or random Jew would probably pick the kulak, although you could easily flip it the other way by specifying that eg the random Jew would be a child. I don’t claim the moral high ground from this; in shitty decisions you just have to make the decision and base prejudices are as good a way as any) or b) intentional mass murder is worse than negligent mass murder and the holodomor was the latter while the Holocaust was the former(to note- I reject both premises. Mass murder as a policy is mass murder as a policy; rulers have an obligation to be competent enough to avoid it and also the holodomor was intentional- getting rid of kulaks was a specific policy goal).

So, I ask- what makes the Holocaust worse than the holodomor to you?

The Jew-targeting wasn’t what made the Holocaust evil. The mass murder was.

Are you forgetting the 10+ years of worse and worse bullying, terrorizing, marginalization, robbery, deportations, starvation, pogroms, slave labor, etc - gradually worsening systematic destruction of every jew and group of jews at the level of body, mind and soul? It wasn't just killing. The sadistic, dehumanizing killing process started a very long time before their eyes closed on this world.

Alternatively, Hitler slowly escalated in a way that let at least some Jews escape before things got dire whereas Stalin went straight from business as usual to mass starvation. Not at all clear that slowly escalating is any worse than going full hog from the get go

Again, those things are bad, but what makes Jews special?

That's a different question. You asked what made the holocaust worse than the holodomor. Afaik the holocaust was more intentionally sadistic and drawn out, intended to maximize suffering for every victim.

So, I ask- what makes the Holocaust worse than the holodomor to you?

Killing all the members of a group is worse than killing a lot of people.

Genocide, in its literal sense of cide ie completely killing a genos ie an ethnicity or race, is viewed as uniquely bad because of reification of race and ethnicity as concepts. Stalin killed many millions of Slavs, but there was no possibility that he would kill all of them, that left to his own devices there would be no more Slavs remaining. Hitler killed many millions of Jews, and his intention was very much that there would be zero Jews remaining in the areas under his control at the conclusion of his process. Hitler's intention was to exterminate the Jews, Stalin's was never to exterminate the Ukrainians.

So I think the core of privileging killing millions of Jews over killing an equivalent number of Slavs is simply that there are more Slavs, while Jews were reasonably close to being, as it were, an endangered species. The number of Jews has been permanently reduced, the number of Slavs remains large. The rule would be: It's worse to kill all of some group than it is to kill 10% of a 10x larger group.

With regards to animal species, where we can say definitively that two species aren't equivalent and one can't produce the other, I agree with this concept. I'd find it much more abhorrent to kill a California Condor than to kill a Turkey Buzzard, and I'd find it almost infinitely more abhorrent to kill 500 California Condors than to kill 500 or 5,000 or even 50,000 Turkey Buzzards; regardless of the method or motive or degree of cruelty involved. Because the death of a Turkey Buzzard (1/5,600,000 in the USA) is just the death of a bird; the death of a California Condor removes a piece of genetic diversity from the world, some fraction of some utils from everyone.

With regards to humans, I'm a little more skeptical but still see the logic. This attitude reflects a reification of the idea of nationality and race as ideas more important than mere lives. If one recognizes a superhuman value attached to the idea of a nationality as a cultural project, ending that cultural project is much worse than mere murder. If one deeply believes in HBD and one values diversity, either genetic or cultural or whatever, then wiping out a branch of the tree of life is much worse than merely killing a lot of folks.

If one identifies instead by class, than one ends up at Mao's infamous remarks on the subject of nuclear war: Mao expounded at an international conference that China had (at the time) 700 million people, and that even if half of them were wiped out in Nuclear War the remaining 350 million would be able to build world socialism. An Italian communist asked how many Italians would survive. Mao replied "None, but what makes you think Italians are so important to World History?" For a Communist, whose identification is with the international proletariat rather than with race or class, killing every Italian is a small price to pay for permanent liberation from Capital.

Of course this adds obstacles to the cultural diversity arguments. Ok, you still have Ukrainians, but you killed all the Kulaks, so you lost their culture, you lost their unique class of genetics, you might still have Ukrainians but they're not the same Ukrainians. But this lapses quickly into absurdity: any cultural change reduces diversity by killing off what came before, and any lack of cultural change kills off what might have been. Humans are malleable.

So if some tiny isolated but culturally/ethnically distinct village catches smallpox before being wiped out in a raid by another tribe is that worse than the Holocaust? By this logic America is guilty of countless Holocausts and isn't in a position to lecture Hitler, a man who ultimately didn't even succeed in wiping out his targets.

Would I be right in saying Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman were not personally responsible for the genocide of any ethnically distinct Native American tribes?

By this logic America is guilty of countless Holocausts and isn't in a position to lecture Hitler, a man who ultimately didn't even succeed in wiping out his targets.

Hey, how was the guest speaker from BLM last night at Oberlin?

So if some tiny isolated but culturally/ethnically distinct village catches smallpox before being wiped out in a raid by another tribe is that worse than the Holocaust?

Presumably there's some way to weight the degree of cultural importance and the size of the group against another group's size and cultural value? Idk. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it with regards to human nations as opposed to animal species so I might be losing my steelman abilities. On balance I would guess it would be more tragic to lose a big group with a large cultural footprint than a small group with a small cultural footprint; it's how you weight a small group with a large cultural footprint against a large group with a small cultural footprint. Would losing Mormons or Jews be more tragic, per TracingWoodgrains twitter?

If you want to take the argument towards this direction, killing one person is worse than killing multiple people because one person was the only representative of their specific genotype.

It falls apart because no one cares about one person's specific genotype except possibly that person. A few more people care about a tiny no-name village's distinction. A lot more people care about the Jews as an ethnicity and culture.

Option B mostly.

I think of evils as having three axes of severity - harm, intent, and depravity. The Holocaust was worse than the Holodomor on all three axes.

The Holodomor was a half-deliberate half-targeted famine which killed 4 million. The Holocaust was an extremely deliberate and concerted effort to wipe out a particular type of person using the tools and efficiencies of the industrial revolution and the entire apparatus of the modern state, which killed 6 million

To bring it down to a more individual level, being murdered by a serial killer is worse than being murdered in a store robbery, which is worse than catching a stray bullet in a gang fight, which is worse than being mown down by a negligent driver, which is worse than dying of a preventable disease, which is worse than dying of an incurable disease. I find this pretty intuitive and I think most people would agree.

The Holodomor was a half-deliberate half-targeted famine which killed 4 million.

A quibble: some estimates put the death toll as high as 5 million.

I'm not saying the Holocaust was a particularly bad crime because it targeted Jews, and I'd be the first to argue that the Holodomor was a comparable atrocity. At the very least, the fact of the Holodomor ought to mean that wearing a hammer and sickle t-shirt on a Western university campus is as unacceptable as wearing a swastika t-shirt is. The fact that everyone in the West has heard of the Holocaust and so few have heard of the Holodomor is appalling, and didn't happen by accident.

My point is that all of this "recontextualisation" of the Holocaust, talking about how the Nazis also targeted homosexuals and Slavs, is diluting one of the most important and essential facts about a crime: who the victim was. I don't believe it is remotely historically controversial to say that the primary victims of the Holocaust were Europeans who had the poor fortune to be born Jewish, and that this was entirely by design. And yet in our modern culture, it's not remotely uncommon for people to expound at length about what a horrific crime the Holocaust was and how it shines a bright light on the depths of evil to which the human heart can sink - without once specifically mentioning the group which represented the overwhelming majority of the Holocaust's victims. I find this distressing and alarming in much the same way that everyone knows the names Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, but few can name even of one of their many victims (myself included, I'm holding my hands up here). Or, to cite an example I encountered recently, in the series The People vs. OJ Simpson there's a heartbreaking moment when Ron Goldman's outraged, teary-eyed father is being interviewed on TV and says something to the effect of "this was supposed to be the trial of 'did OJ murder my son?' and instead it's turned into the trial of 'did Mark Fuhrman say a bad word?'" Think of how suspicious you'd find it if someone did begrudgingly acknowledge that the Transatlantic slave trade happened and it was bad, but seemed to be bending over backwards to avoid mentioning who exactly was enslaved by it.

I think that acknowledging a crime took place but going out of your way to avoid mentioning who the victim of that crime was amounts to a tacit denial of that crime (or at the very least, it's one step removed), and all the more so when the victim's identity characteristics are the entire reason the crime was perpetrated in the first place.

You seem to be accepting the predominantly American framing of Hitler ("he was bad because he genocided the Jews, and then I guess there was also that whole WWII thing") as default truth, whereas in much of Europe it has been closer to "he was bad because he wanted German supremacy and started WWII, and then I guess there was also the whole Holocaust thing" all along. (The difference makes sense, since Europe bore the brunt of the WWII part of Hitler's record, while the Americans are under the heel of all various kinds of Zionists.) Where does the UK land between those poles?

Being anti-Hitler and pro-Hamas looks a lot more coherent in the latter frame. In fact, I think that, for example, in Germany, an interpretation like "Hitler would be pro-Israel in 2025" would catch on easily were it not for constant effort exerted by Transatlanticists and other establishment types to keep the blood debt alive and salient.

(See also the question whether Ukraine could be run by "Nazis" - reactions ranging from Americans seeing a Jewish-heritage president and concluding obviously no, to Russians seeing swastikas, German steel and people who want to violently move the Western European cultural sphere closer to Russia and concluding obviously yes)

I don't understand it one iota.

I think the piece by O'Neill gets close enough, though it reads like he gives too much credit to people that don't deserve it.

It confirms that what poses as an anti-war movement is, in truth, an anti-civilisational movement – an alignment with Islamist hysterics born of a blasé feeling of detachment and contempt for one’s own society.

If one wants to oppose Israel's latest foray or advocate for the dissolution of the Israeli state they can do so a number of ways. A leftist, secular academic position has built-in sympathies and perceived solidarity with the Arab world. In addition to a finite understanding of a concept called colonialism. One could also don the suit of an Islamist, or a bygone pan-Arab nationalist, or pick up a /pol/ suit and throw stone slurs to bring down the house of Global Judaism. Our reasons don't need to be. Status is enough. Status delende est.

The "middle-class ‘progressives’ who fancy themselves as anti-fascist" worldly champions of the down trodden fill the secular leftist academic's shoes, but only indirectly. The secular, leftist academic made an easy-to-use cookie cutter framework to view the world: oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. If you add a garnish of Global South to the brown, colonialism, and campism derivatives, then you've got a rich, if limited, set of ideas that nearly anyone can pick up. From broader complexified works of the humanities come ideas distilled for Popular Use.

It's a hell of a meme. Simple enough to be understood by people who never have to read a book, but truthy enough to get by as a deepity. Most importantly, the beliefs as an applied moral framework are not universal enough (or are inappropriate often enough) to be controversial. The last bit is important, because one doesn't wield youthful rebellion without spirit. Warriors don't volunteer for boring, centrist peacetime garrison duty. The white man didn't have a burden to stay home and send paper and pencil to civilize the world.

Institutions like the academy have only started to consider their incubation chambers worth a looksie. For the elite institutions, in a meek, delicate way. We are experiencing a hangover from the Cold War, with all the Soviet propaganda, ideology, and theories that came with and preceded it. That's the material we are left to work with.

The march through institutions was not a test. Coordination and intent can be debated, but, frankly, there's plenty enough people happy that the kids are Waking Up. The kids could be waking up to champion some terrible not-yet-known techno-electronica rock'n'roll to achieve peace (I suppose the Nova festival goers were trying this) or they could rebel against HFCS. They land on Palestine, they land on the West Must Be Destroyed, because those are the ideas that were left to them.

The CIA really didn't do a very good job.

I don't understand it one iota. I'm increasingly starting to think that the Holocaust has become completely de-Jewified (for want of a better word) and drained of its specificity, understood primarily as a grave crime because it was a mass slaughter, rather than specifically a mass slaughter primarily of Jews.

I don't think this is true. The Holocaust was hyper-Jewified! One can critique the motivations and actions of the ADL and the Jewish lobby, but "not Jewish enough" or "not heavy handed enough" can't possibly be true. Israel as a controversy does reduce the impact Jewish Genocide messaging though.

The woke problem with Kanye is that he doesn't want to kill jews right now. Sincerely. He wants to troll the woke.

Modern leftish associated movements analyze these cases based on who has power. The weaker party is the victim and should be supported.

A moral realist question about "how evil it is to support the murder of jews" isn't going to get a consistent answer because it's not a question the framework really answers. Also the rules are also going to seem arbitrary because you'll be talking to different people within a movement who have different fault lines they care about.

The animating question is which faction has the ability to control the other side. Oppressor/Oppressed dynamics. The history of the conflict matters less than you think.

Kanye/Kneecaps -> rich celeb supporting white supremacy or small artist supporting Brown foreign causes.

Hamas/Israel -> If Israel stopped caring about civilians casualties they could flatten Gaza with little opposition. This makes them the powerful side, and therefore actions should be more scrutinized. The retaliation violence is the voice of the unheard.

See parallels to discussions about police violence vs protesters in 2020. See parallels to USA military operations in Vietnam.

They said rap should be subversive, well what did they think subversive meant? Vibes? Essays?

Honestly it's a pretty good song, bizarre subject matter aside. This Youtube link is live as of this writing, although it seems like the platform keeps taking new uploads down.

Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.

I wonder if 'racism is the paramount evil' would still be a defining characteristic of western ethics if WW2 hadn't happened? I mean, the Transatlantic slave trade and the scramble for Africa still happened, smallpox still wiped out the American Indians. Maybe we would just find some other kind of racial guilt? My assumption is that it all stems from the fact that we're so outbred and WEIRD, not from the particular events of the early 1940s.

Not a reply to you, strictly, but man am I bothered by "the nazis are the absolute zero of morality and we must forever obsess about them".

Alexander Gauland (a senior figure of the German far-right political landscape) called the Nazi years a "bird-shit-stain on German history". I think it somewhat undersells the impact of the events, but I agree with his overall sentiment. Man, I do wish we could just collectively damnatio memoriae the entire time period. Throw it into the nearest dumpster. Burn the records. There's nothing left to be learned from it. The well of valuable experience has been poisoned by all sides that ever had a damn thing to do with it. Who still stands to gain from keeping it open? What good does it serve? People who suffered negative events can deepen and prolong their trauma by focusing on it, and even create trauma where there needn't have been any. The nazis may have killed me for a mongrel. Who cares, they're gone. Germany is doomed to lose itself in the 21th century no matter what happens, demography being destiny. What does it matter then what the Germans of 80 years ago did? You may as well believe in Nazis in Antarctica or hiding on the far side of the moon as in the continued actual relevance of the events of the mid-20th century. Wake up babe, a new millenium just dropped and we - no matter who we is - have enough on our hands without keeping them both full wringing and whinging about the antichrist of yesteryear.

So to the latter-day revisionists who decry the holocaust as false, and the propagandists who still try to make hay of the deadest horse on Earth: Yes you're perfectly right, the other guy is completely wrong, now shut the fuck up, bury your obsession and face the future.

"Racism is the paramount evil" wasn't even a major takeaway from WW2. This is just presentism. The South was run by white supremacists until the rest of the country forced them to stop some 20-25 years later (for which there is still lingering resentment). The end of the British Empire wasn't due to an outbreak of anti-racism. Likewise for the French Empire. Etc...

The elevation of racism to foremost sin is largely a phenomenon of 21st century American progressivism.

I remember conversations my parents and grandparents warned me never to repeat, about how it was the white man that built this country, that it sucked for the Cherokees at the time of course but the trail of tears was necessary and they're doing better about it now than the Navajo aren't they, about how full freedom for blacks was a failed experiment but we can't very well fix it now and anyways Jim Crow wasn't a very good system either. I think the US would have abolished Jim Crow sooner or later; my grandparents who remembered it clearly describe it as definitely on the way out and having some sort of violent struggle would have, uh, not improved race relations.

having some sort of violent struggle would have, uh, not improved race relations.

There was a violent struggle. Southern white supremacists attempted to suppress the civil rights movement by force until the federal government stepped in and made them stop.

They failed. There was the 101st airborne, yes, but the majority of the south saw no federal troops deployed. The KKK burned crosses and it didn’t work.

What you didn’t see was mass black terrorism. It wasn’t a thing.

What you didn’t see was mass black terrorism. It wasn’t a thing.

History didn’t end up going that way, partially because the federal government finally put its foot down, but the first five years of the civil rights era and the first five years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland are almost beat for beat the same. You even had American equivalents of Republican and Unionist paramilitary groups forming. The main difference is that in Ireland the military rolled in to protect the old social order, not to impose the new one.

There’s a saying in war colleges that you don’t notice the successful counter insurgencies, because the successful ones deflate the causes of the insurgency before it breaks out into mass violence. The civil rights era was a successful counter-insurgency. And I think had the situation been handled differently by the federal government it could have very well exploded into a 30 year long bleeding ulcer like Northern Ireland did.

my grandparents who remembered it clearly describe it as definitely on the way out

C'mon. It required actual military force to desegregate educational institutions in the South. That isn't a system that was petering out on its own accord.

They said rap should be subversive, well what did they think subversive meant? Vibes? Essays?

Most people are able to roll with realizing rap not a subversive genre anymore, even if they feel embarrassed enough to cope a bit when their favorite rapper is at the Super Bowl. At worst, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, people disappear for a bit to deal with the revelation "the system" actually loves or is totally fine with their content.

The best proof of Kanye's mental illness is that his reaction to this is actually trying to be subversive. Sane people worry about their bills.

I’m going to disagree here. Yes, we knew about the Indian removals of the 1800s and the slave trade and colonialism. But they weren’t things that people were supposed to feel deep guilt about. Indian removal was seen as perhaps unfortunate, but necessary to build a civilization in America. Hitler changed that because he moved at an industrial pace and we won in time to film the aftermath. He was also a gift to the Military-Industrial complex, as the specter of Hitler somewhere in the world was useful to convince tge populace that they should send their sons to some military adventure out in the world, and for that, we needed a huge military. Anti-racism is also politically useful globally because it gives those nonwhite nations a reason to choose our side — we fought genocidal racism.

Without Hitler I don’t think it happens. Without Hitler racism goes from being the evil to being on par with any number of other political evils that we knew about and don’t celebrate, but don’t punish ourselves over. And there are plenty of other evils to bring up.

Certainly there were lots of people who at the time of the Holocaust saw it as a uniquely terrible crime, even as it was ongoing. For example in July 1944, Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden (concerning the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):

There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. I cannot therefore feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the Protecting Power, as, for instance, the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners’ camp. There should therefore, in my opinion, be no negotiations of any kind on this subject. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death.

It's worth noting that Churchill does not, in this passage nor anywhere else in writing- including Churchill's six volumes of Second World War, reference Nazi gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The Holocaust is not referenced at all in any concrete terms either in Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, nor in Charles de Gaulle's memoirs.

One rule of thumb which never, ever fails is that any claim you can be arrested for questioning is false. It's been like that through recorded history. Why would gas chambers in WW2 be some singular exception to this otherwise completely reliable rule?

You can be arrested in Ukraine for questioning Holodomor. Does this falsify Holodomor?

This seems like a fairly odd rule in general. People have been arrested throughout history for advocating claims that are not true. For instance, it is literally impossible for the claims of all religions (or the central claim of atheism) to be true, and yet, throughout history, it has been typical for people to get arrested for advocating all and sundry religions or for advancing atheism.

Why do gas chambers matter?

The intentional mass killings of civilians by axis forces during WWII were a terrible crime, and many officers in axis forces deserved to be prosecuted. I don’t see why it being done with gas chambers or not(and everyone agrees that many of the killings were not done with gas chambers) is a relevant distinction.

The gas chamber narrative is epistemic violence. It uses force to stop ideas moving from my mind to my mouth. I can't express that I find it implausible. And the force is applied for two reasons, both of which I think are legitimate and fill me with rage:

  1. Allowing the public to question one aspect of the Holocaust narrative would undermine the whole premise, and since that premise is a central part of our faith, the epistemic violence is acceptable collateral damage.

  2. Point deer, make horse: forcing people to mouth absurdities in public outs people who value integrity over loyalty; these people are potential traitors to the regime, making the epistemic violence acceptance collateral damage.

(Let's assume for now that it's false but not possible in polite company to deny it. You can substitute any of the other narratives we're forced to mount (e.g. blank slate theory) in the above without changing the structure of my argument.)

For my part, I turn the whole thing around. Overturning of the structure of society is acceptable collateral damage in making the epistemic violence stop.

It doesn't seem worth noting unless you care about the history of chemical warfare and it's supporters. Churchill had a complicated political history with chemical and gas weapons.

It is worth noting in understanding the WWII mythos that is the subject of the discussion. Why was it not mentioned at all in thousands of pages of memoirs across the most important leaders? There are two theories: the mainstream theory is that this is just a testament to how much Allied leaders were ambivalent towards Jews, therefore also providing evidence they wouldn't wage a psychological warfare campaign to sacralize a Jewish victimization narrative which is the ultimate bedrock to this entire discussion- including the reason a song like this is censored so heavily. The Revisionist theory is that they knew the nonsense story about millions being tricked into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms would eventually be debunked like the very similar WWI propaganda about the Kaiser's death factories.

But @johnfabian is wrong that Churchill's writing represents the Holocaust being viewed as uniquely terrible early on, it isn't mentioned at all in many volumes of writing across thousands of pages written by the most important belligerents who otherwise have a strong incentive to feature that story to justify their own frame of the war.

The Dream, 1947 The Dream was Churchill’s fanciful short story about conversing with his long-dead father in 1947. In it he explains all that had happened since his father died in 1895. The full text is available. Referring again to the Holocaust, he spoke of the two World Wars:

“Papa,” I said, “in each of them about thirty million men were killed in battle. In the last one seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughter-pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin. Many of her cities have been blown to pieces by bombs. Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands…. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.”8

That wasn't hard to find.

So we're talking about one of the biggest events of WWII, and certainly the most unusual event, with millions of men, women and children allegedly being tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower and murdered. It's the event that forms the foundation of the contemporary anti-Christ mythos around Hitler.

And you couldn't find a single concrete reference to that in Winston Churchill's six-volume The Second World War, as I said, so you instead point to a single vague reference in a dialogue during a dream-sequence in a short story, which doesn't mention gas chambers or even Jews. Certainly my point still stands very, very tall. The fact you have to reach so hard to find a single reference of this world-changing event (which doesn't directly mention it in any case, it's just a literary allusion) from someone like Churchill proves the point very well.

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That fits the ambivalence theory. I don’t see anything in that statement that suggests he sees “the stockyards slaughter house pens” as worse than the ruin of Europe or the destruction of Eastern European capitals.

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I’m going to disagree here. Yes, we knew about the Indian removals of the 1800s and the slave trade and colonialism. But they weren’t things that people were supposed to feel deep guilt about. Indian removal was seen as perhaps unfortunate, but necessary to build a civilization in America.

I think Crowstep is right. In Canada, since they don't have nearly so much slavery to feel guilty about, they DO feel guilty about their Indian First Nations stuff, to a crazy degree, like confessing to genocide about deaths due to disease at residential schools.

It's even worse - we had our flags at half mast for like 6 months because a ground penetrating radar found "disturbances" under ground. We now know it was roots, rocks - no excavation has or will take place.

The whiplash from "celebrating canada day is evil" to "elbows up! I love Canada!" has been a lot to take in

Wait, really, everyone just changed their tune about this? When did that happen, and how?

Essentially this took place about the time Donald Trump was elected. It coincided with an inevitable election that we knew was going to be called. Trudeau (polling at catastrophically low numbers) dipped out, and Mark Carney took over the (floundering) Liberal Party. He successfully pivoted and ran on a very nationalist campaign (in opposition to USA/Trump), successfully outflanking the previously ascendant Conservative Party. Rallies were full of Canada imagery, flags (a hate symbol during the trucker protests), colors. He invoked concepts of monarchy, John A McDonald (previously, a genocider). And the NDP (our leftist party) collapsed enough to hand him the victory. (Cons only win if the left is split).

Canada exists as a nation only in opposition to what happens in the states. We have very little national identity to begin with - funny that the old rich white guy who won the election by tapping into boomer nationalist fervor was a liberal, but these are strange times.

successfully pivoted

There was no pivot; Easterners were always going to vote for themselves and were hungry for an excuse.

a hate symbol during the trucker protests

Who/whom. The flag being used to represent people it's not intended to represent, in a way it wasn't made to represent them, is powerful symbolism. Same thing with the SuperStraight flag- the Canadian flag is for Easterners, by Easterners; that tree doesn't naturally grow outside Upper/Lower Canada.

He invoked concepts of [the East has the moral right to fuck up everything]

Indeed.

Cons only win if the left is split

The West (the free, productive part of Canada) only wins when the East is split. The NDP/Western Left- what used to be our mechanism of co-operation between West and East- has collapsed in favor of Eastern imperialism (the Western Left tried to out-East the East and failed). We were on the road to reconciliation, but Easterners blew it up, and they did so deliberately because they wanted to play culture warrior.

We have very little national identity to begin with

Fortunately for the rest of us, the Easterners are hell-bent on sabotaging it every chance they get. We'd be better off on our own.

I'm fine with separation but only if we become a part of the USA. A landlocked province would be disastrous, no?

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A big chunk of the US white population just feels a lot less guilty about slavery than Canadians would.

A big chunk of the US white population just feels a lot less guilty about slavery than Canadians would.

I mean I have no slaveowner ancestors, and I have at least one ancestor that fought on the Union side of the Civil War. Why the hell would (or should) I feel any guilt over it? I imagine most white Americans that aren't direct descendants of slaveowners would feel similarly.

I mean, a pretty decent chunk of white descendants of slave owners are proud of their confederate ancestors.

It's a form of overcompensation you usually see on losing sides.

That might just be due to the US's cultural influence. They feel like their white people must have done something horrible to feel guilty about, since that's the message they're hearing pushed all the time, even if it's really about the US and not Canada.

Also not to be all 'Da Jews' but there has been a group of people with huge cultural powers who have had a particularly large grudge when it comes to pushing the moral cause of WW2 and ushering a lot of identitarian talk of reparations et Al to the forefront. Talat Pasha doesn't exactly get the same negative branding and even Stalin and Mao haven't been as effectively pariahed

even Stalin and Mao haven't been as effectively pariahed

I think those two are helped by the sheer number of intellectuals who either fell for live propaganda about how great life was in the USSR, or who are generally pro-socialist/pro-communist and would rather not draw attention to such high-profile failure states.

It's not so much intellectuals, but there are some right-wingers who believe Russia's actually a great wellspring of social conservatism. I know some of them personally. The overwhelming majority think Russia's a terrible, dictatorial place -- but there are a few who think the performative, nationalistic Orthodoxy of the government (as opposed to the quiet piety of the babushka) is an actual representation of Russian culture.

It's psychologically very hard to justify a worldview if there isn't somewhere where it's put into practice. So the deep desire to see your worldview reflected somewhere is what drives both the 20th century Soviet-boosters and the 21st century Russia-boosters. And it also drives, say, evangelicals to believe Trump is a great Christian man, despite his personal conduct and his lack of repentance!

as opposed to the quiet piety of the babushka) is an actual representation of Russian culture.

This is also, statistically, not a very good representation of Russian culture- Russia does not have a high church attendance rate, even by European standards, and the more religious former Soviet countries are the ones which like Russia less(Georgia, Ukraine, remoter ‘stans).

Very true. My point is that the idea that Russia is a highly religious country is the propaganda spin of the government -- piety in Russia is rare, and is a thing for small (quiet) numbers of old grandmas.

Continuity of their states also probably impacts it. If Chinese Communism had fallen with the death of Mao he's probably viewed a lot differently versus now where he's definitely controversial but cannot be effectively completely nuked without undermining nation building.

Seeing the recent unexpected shift in online discourse to describe Trump as being similar to Mao, I wonder as well if his crimes are soon to be spotlighted more than they used to be...

Yeah, but among who? I am skeptical the left will suddenly cancel the Maoists because of some shifting valences.

link's not working for me...

Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.

However, it's loading (cached?) on the main public Nitter instance
https [://] nitter [.] net/kanyewest/status/1920387087049572704

[EDIT: had to mangle link because The Motte worthlessly normalizes them]

https [://] nitter [.] net/kanyewest/status/1920387087049572704

it's gone now.

Though on the other hand, we might end up remembering having this kind of culture spanning, unifying narrative as kind of comfy compared to total balkanization

Since it's being used as a cudgel against anyone who isn't all on board the multiculturalism and diversity express (or a rhetorical device to back up any Israeli foreign policy strategem), then away with it!

The narrative isn't so highly energized because of objective historical reasons: the Mongols celebrate Genghis Khan as a national hero. The Turks and Algerians couldn't care less about the atrocities they committed, slave-trading, slave-raiding and genocide. Mao and Stalin have mixed but vaguely positive receptions in their countries. The Hitler narrative is there to achieve a political result in the contemporary world, to justify the high and growing costs of this system and military adventurism.

Whether Kanye is a truly great artist

He is nothing if not this. Its the one thing you can't take away from him. If he's is great NOW is a debate but overall I can't see how you would argue to the contrary.

In the acclaimedmusic.net list of most acclaimed artists by critic consensus, cataloguing and adding together by some ratio a huge number of "best albums/songs of..." critics lists, Kanye is number 13, the best result by a hip-hop artist they have. The site was last updated in 2020 as the guy running it has had a number of personal and work-related issues which have pushed the planned new update forwards to some indefinite time, I wonder how Kanye's position is going to be affected if/when the new update rolls in. Of course there's a huge amount of acclaim already grandfathered in.

Yeah this is the best song he's put out in a decade or so but prime Kanye is easily top 3 in the art form by a measure

Kanye West is like a Holocaust-denying parrot. Imagine it, a parrot squawking "six million didn't die, the Holocaust is a lie!" Funny for a few days, but then you're left with a Holocaust-denying parrot squawking and crapping all over its cage. The parrot can't vote. It can’t work for DOGE. It can’t argue cases before a judge. I get it, it's funny, I'm a 4chan troll too. But I'm also interested in actually exercising power. Fuentes, who I'm not sure if he was behind Ye's ideological evolution or was just there to cheer it on, seems to be recognizing the Right's strategy of relentlessly and exclusively appealing to low human capital is not gonna go anywhere good:

https://x.com/FuentesUpdates/status/1908187813117411525

I wonder if we're seeing the first signs of postmodern corrosion eating away at the last grand unifying narrative of our age: WW2 mythos, with Adolf Hitler at its center not as mere historical figure, but as the archetypal villain and the secular devil.

One figure replacing him as the secular devil is Jeffery Epstein.

  • -12

But he’s not just saying the words, he turned it into an incredibly catchy, well produced song/piece of subversive art. That’s not the same as a parrot.

Fuentes, who I'm not sure if he was behind Ye's ideological evolution or was just there to cheer it on, seems to be recognizing the Right's strategy of relentlessly and exclusively appealing to low human capital is not gonna go anywhere good:

Special Agent Fuentes was more than happy to pal around with Kanye when his ridiculous cringe mental illness antics were making the far right look like a bunch of unserious clowns. Now when Kanye knuckles down and independently puts out an actually effective piece of viral far right propaganda, Nick is suddenly hammering the “uhhh actually guys we have to distance ourselves from this, it’s making us look low status”. Even though Nick’s own low human capital has been making the far-right look low status for over half a decade.

an actually effective piece of viral far right propaganda

You have got to be kidding me. It's a song about how he likes to watch other people fuck his wife, how huffing nitrous oxide is one of the only things that makes him feel better, and how he (a black man) hails Hitler. It's a post-modernist half-joke meme song.

Goes great with our post modernist half joke meme president!

Seriously. Every time people think about this song they will say nigga heil hitler in their head. And when the sky doesn't fall as a result, some of those people who were told it would will realise they have been lied to. This is an effective use of outrage to send a message. It's basically the right wing version of Childish Gambino's This is America - except This is America was fuelled by the progressive zeitgeist, and thus was basically substance free, reliant on censorship to both provide substance and shield the song from critics, so my progressive friends' opinion of it was along the lines of 'we have to prop up black people so even if it's kind of empty we can praise it for what it didn't say'.

But Kanye is right (wing lol) so he can't use censorship to his advantage by leveraging silence, he has to leverage outrage. I like both Childish Gambino and Ye as artists, but I'm pretty sure I already know which of the these songs will have a bigger impact.

Childish Gambino's This is America - except This is America was fuelled by the progressive zeitgeist, and thus was basically substance free, reliant on censorship to both provide substance and shield the song from critics, so my progressive friends' opinion of it was along the lines of 'we have to prop up black people so even if it's kind of empty we can praise it for what it didn't say'.

I always did feel that the This Is America MV was shallow even compared to the visual composition of things like Gangnam Style…

The hate fuentes gets on this forum glows brighter than the existing discussion around fuentes himself.

Is the there anyone who likes him other than some autistic losers?

Yes, he’s extremely popular at Eglin Air Force Base.

effective piece of viral far right propaganda

This is quite the claim buried in there. Is I t?

It and memes using the audio / poasts discussing the phenomenon are doing massive numbers on X, the only platform it’s not actively being suppressed on.

So… yes.

Kanye West is like a Holocaust-denying parrot. Imagine it, a parrot squawking "six million didn't die, the Holocaust is a lie!" Funny for a few days, but then you're left with a Holocaust-denying parrot squawking and crapping all over its cage.

The value of calling Ye a parrot rests exclusively in the idea he is mindlessly repeating phrases, and while I think that is an odd accusation to level at a guy who just released a rap song literally nobody ever even imagined making before, it maybe fits if you uh, don't count stuff like that. What really frustrates me though is that you extended the analogy so far as to throw parrots under the bus - funny for a few days? Like they're a Yak Bak from the nineties you play with for a bit and throw in the closet? Have you never had a pet bird before?

A parrot is not just for Christmas Alex. They can be for a birthday too. In fact you can eat them all year round.

Wait, why can't he vote?

I think in sense he isn't really representative of any particular onboarded demographic.

Yeah, if West, an otherwise free man, had his franchise taken away from him, that would seem like news worth bringing up.

The actual lyrics of the song are 'I still can't see my children, niggers see my twitter but they don't see how I be feeling, so I became a nazi yay bitch I'm the villain, nigger heil Hitler, they don't understand the things I say on twitter nigger heil Hitler nigger heil Hitler they don't understand the things I say on twitter all my niggers nazis nigger heil Hitler'. This is not political commentary it's lashing out. He's still framing the nazis as villains.

I agree that the WWII taboo is fading. I don't think a mentally ill black man identifying with Hitler in an act of rebellion is the sign thereof.

I’m sitting in my office at Pierce & Pierce, the glass walls reflecting the sterile glow of Manhattan’s skyline, and I can’t help but think about Kanye West’s latest track, “Heil Hitler (Hooligan Version).” The lyrics are raw, unpolished, almost juvenile in their repetition—“I still can’t see my children, niggers see my twitter but they don’t see how I be feeling, so I became a nazi yay bitch I’m the villain, nigger heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on twitter nigger heil Hitler…” It’s crude, yes, but there’s something… deliberate about it. I adjust my Hermès tie—red, with subtle navy accents, a perfect complement to my charcoal Armani suit—and I consider the narrative being spun here. Some might call this a tantrum, a mentally ill black man identifying with Hitler in some rebellious fever dream, but that’s too simplistic. No, this is political. This is Kanye leaning into the role of the Nazi villain, a role the left, the globalists, the rootless cosmopolitans, and the neoconservatives have already cast him in, whether he likes it or not. Let’s break this down. I sip my San Pellegrino, the bubbles sharp against my tongue, and I think about Kanye’s trajectory. He’s been a lightning rod for years—his 2022 X post, where he declared he “loves Hitler” and identified as a Nazi, wasn’t a one-off. It was a gauntlet thrown down. The man’s been frozen out, his assets seized, his partnerships with Adidas and others severed like a bad merger. The American Jewish Committee’s Ted Deutch called it “blatant antisemitism,” and The Spectator’s Johnathan Sacerdoti dismissed the lyrics as a “crude litany” of Nazi slogans. But what do they expect? Kanye’s not playing their game. He’s not apologizing, not backtracking, not begging for forgiveness at some gala at the Waldorf Astoria, wearing a borrowed Brioni tuxedo while sipping Veuve Clicquot. No, he’s doubling down. And why shouldn’t he? The left, with their sanctimonious word-policing, the globalists with their borderless, homogenized agendas, the neocons with their endless wars—they’ve already labeled him a Nazi. They did it the moment he stepped out of line, the moment he supported Trump in 2020, the moment he started talking about “Zionist schools” and “financial engineering” on Tucker Carlson’s show. They don’t care about nuance. They don’t care about his custody battles or his bipolar disorder, which he’s admitted to, by the way—31 million followers on social media, and they still reduce him to a caricature. So what does he do? He gives them what they want. He becomes the villain they’ve scripted for him. “So I became a nazi yay bitch I’m the villain.” It’s almost… poetic. I flip through my Rolodex, looking for my tailor’s number—I need to schedule a fitting for a new Zegna overcoat—and I consider the political angle here. This isn’t just lashing out, some primal scream into the void. Kanye’s smarter than that. He’s always been a provocateur, a performance artist masquerading as a rapper. Look at the album this track is tied to—“Cuck,” with its Ku Klux Klan-inspired art, tracks like “Gas Chambers” and “Hitler Ye and Jesus.” He’s not shying away from the imagery, the symbolism, the history. He’s weaponizing it. The left and their allies have created a world where dissent is met with excommunication, where any deviation from the script gets you branded with the scarlet letter of “Nazi.” Kanye knows this. He’s seen the neo-Nazi Goyim Defense League banners in Los Angeles, proclaiming “Kanye is right about the Jews” over highways, giving Nazi salutes while the Anti-Defamation League scrambles to condemn them. He’s seen the protests, the outrage, the think pieces. So he leans in. “Nigger heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on twitter, all my niggas nazis.” He’s not framing the Nazis as villains here—not really. He’s framing himself as the villain, yes, but it’s a middle finger to the system that’s already judged him. If they’re going to call him a Nazi no matter what he says, he might as well own it, amplify it, make it so loud they can’t ignore it. It’s a power move, a reclamation of the narrative, even if it’s drenched in swastika-like doodles and militaristic visuals of men in animal skins, as the music video reportedly shows. I glance at my Patek Philippe watch—1:47 PM, I have a lunch reservation at Le Bernardin in 13 minutes—and I think about the broader context. The WWII taboo is fading, sure, but this isn’t about that. This isn’t some cultural shift where we’re all suddenly okay with Nazi iconography because the history feels distant. No, this is Kanye recognizing the hypocrisy of his critics. The left, the globalists, the neocons—they thrive on control, on dictating the terms of discourse. They’ve built a machine that crushes dissent, that paints anyone who questions their dogma as a monster. Kanye’s not identifying with Hitler because he’s mentally ill or because he’s rebelling against some abstract taboo. He’s doing it because he’s been backed into a corner. They’ve called him a Nazi for years—since his “Jewish bitch” lyrics, since his Burzum-inspired album art, since his rants about Zionist schools. So he’s saying, fine. You want a Nazi? I’ll give you a Nazi. “Nigger heil Hitler.” It’s a mirror held up to his detractors, a grotesque reflection of their own tactics. He’s not the villain because he wants to be. He’s the villain because they’ve made him one. And in that sense, this track, this video, this entire album—it’s political. It’s a statement. It’s Kanye West taking the label they’ve forced on him and turning it into a weapon. I grab my coat—cashmere, Tom Ford, impeccable—and head for the elevator. I can’t be late for lunch. Eric Ripert’s sea urchin dish is a revelation, and I need to be seated before the Wall Street crowd floods the place. But as I step into the lobby, I can’t shake the thought: Kanye’s not wrong to play their game. He’s just better at it than they are.

This kind of posting is AI-tier, you only know its real because its naughty.

I've never seen an AI produce a wall of text like that.

This is I think what we used to call "Posting"

“Poasting”.

Real mottezin hours up in this bitch.

There is an idea of an @AvacadoPanic, something illusory. But there is no real him.

Is this meant to be read in Patrick Bateman's voice?

edit: shows my shallow media literacy that I didn't recognize a direct reference as soon as "Pierce & Pierce"

Ideally.

This is not political commentary it's lashing out. He's still framing the nazis as villains.

A fair take, and entirely plausible given that it’s Kanye we’re talking about.

But, I think there is an alternative possible interpretation. Identifying with the villain doesn’t necessarily, in our modern age, indicate that the speaker thinks they are wrong or even the evil guy. It is entirely possible that Kanye both understands Hitler as the pre-assigned villain of the modern religion, and not only identifies with him but in some fashion views him as having done good things, or been on the right path, or something like that.

It’s sort of like how Joshua is viewed as a Biblical hero by Christians and Jews, but did quite a lot of total genocide in Canaan, of the sort that makes him very much a proto-Hitler if assessed by the dominant morality of our age. Villain to some, but an indicator to others that the dominant morality is actually wrong about quite a lot of things.

Kanye could be viewing Hitler in something like the same sort of framing.

Edit: I just realized Taylor released a song a while back about being the villain. I think there is an incipient cultural trend of “Maybe I’m the bad guy, but I’m right and I’m going to embrace it” occurring. Which is the first step on the road to the villain eventually being reinterpreted as the hero.

Given his difficult relationship with Ms. Swift I suspect that might be intentional.

WW2 mythos

WWII's monolithic cultural universality is definitely waning as we approach its centennial anniversary, but i don't think kanye's tweets are some sort of canary for us to look to for signs of danger.

The guy, and i kinda feel bad for him even though he only has a few songs i really liked, seems to have actually lost his damn mind. People speculate as to the cause of this, was it pete davidsons giant schlong, was it his mom's death, was it his divorce that broke his tenuous grasp on reality? Nah. the guy has been doing rich people levels of the wrong drugs, hes been talking a lot about inhaling nitrous. Bro has prettymuch all the symptoms of inhalant induced brain damage and his cultural relevance will quickly fade for the normies as he transforms in real time from an avant garde rapper to a terry davis-esque lolcow insane guy yelling schizo word salad about nazi's and jesus and sucking dicks.

“This Post from @kanyewest has been withheld in Germany, France, Poland based on local law(s). Learn more”

Speaking of the legal force. Maybe you will have better luck on YouTube, or failing that just use VPN.

It's banned on YouTube and every single streaming or music hosting service (Spotify etc.). X is the only place that allows hosting it.

It cannot be denied that it's a truly transgressive song, and a genuine act of rebellion, given it warrants this response. Can anyone else think of a single song that has received this treatment despite the ubiquitousness of explicit material in that genre?

Trivial to find: https://odysee.com/@LightElf:0/Kanye-West-Heil-Hitler:9

Not worth listening to, rather terrible, but such is our fallen society that some like rap.

Writing off entire major genres of art is needlessly impoverishing yourself. I'm not even a rap fan, but it is obvious that there is artistically great rap music.

As far as I can tell, the vast vast VAST majority of it is slop full of repurposed music and lyrics that get by on being offensive rather than clever. Rap artists aren't known for being intelligent, after all. I suspect most "celebrated" rap music would fail a double-blind test against some rando writing parodic lyrics and banging on an audio synthesizer for a few hours. Much like postmodern art, where the janitor can't tell it apart from trash.

There probably are some examples of the genre that I could learn to appreciate (Epic Rap Battles of History comes to mind), but it's hard to find them because of the pomo effect.

While I agree that rap music's popularity is a bad thing, rap artists pretty clearly have high verbal intelligence- they're, quite literally, poets.

From what I understand there's a rather high variance. There's Oxxxymiron and then there's rhyming "nigga" with "nigga".

there is artistically great rap music.

Link?

Check out Astronautalis. Greek mythology, historical references, etc.

This is our Science: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PbnumphZdPE

The Case of William Smith: https://youtube.com/watch?v=I20yLeuhUDs

Sike!: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eIXwRztIyqE

How narrow are your goalposts? Does it need to be on a par with Shakespeare's sonnets to qualify or is anything more intelligent than Love Me Do good enough?

There's a certain ceiling as rap is based on simple loops and unpitched AAAA BBBB rhyme schemes and the further you go beyond that the more you risk a counter of "that isn't rap".

Stan by Eminem is a fairly easy example of something that surpasses the guns, drugs, whores and gold stereotype without having to reach for a laboured meta analysis that the guns and whores are a reflection of those artists' social environment akshually and are being held up as an ironic means to confront society's hypocrisy ("I was only pretending to be a violent greedy thug!"). On the other hand a vast amount of rap genuinely is wilfully degenerate so I can understand why so many people condemn it and write it off wholesale.

Some actual literal nazis in the vein of 'gas the Jews like we actually literally mean that' have had their pro-holocaust songs banned everywhere, I think. I can't remember a case of an American being banned from literally everything though, so that might have only been after a German court order or something.

Will it be “post-modern corrosion” or will it be time? Genghis Khan Is believed to (1) have caused the deaths of enough people to slightly alter climate, and (2) have been the most-prolific rapist of which we are aware. And, currently, there are a couple of restaurant chains named after him here in America.

I once saw an inflatable, bounce-house type slide made to look like the Titanic. Kids would slide down the tilted deck, onto a landing area made to look like the sea. Fifteen hundred people died in the actual tragedy.

There is typically a loosening of taboo once knowledge of horrible events passes out of living memory. Are those around WW2 going to be different?

(West is certainly, dementedly ahead of the curve, here.)

Genghis Khan is some 800 years ago, the Nazis are 80 years ago. Perhaps in a few hundred years, there will be Nazi-themed restaurant chains called "Adolf Hitler Wirtshaus" which will serve vaguely German dishes which will be invented near the end of this century.

This matches somewhat with the outgroup/fargroup distinction. Genghis Khan is very much in the fargroup outside Asia. You can safely dress up as him for Halloween and nobody will bat an eye, he is playing in the same league as Darth Vader or Sauron.

I think that a lot of factors play a role in determining when a tragedy or atrocity loses its gravity. Raw numbers are one thing -- a single death is more easily shrugged off than a million (but I would argue that this scales only logarithmically, because humans are scope insensitive. Accidents are forgotten quicker than atrocities.

Sometimes, a traumatic event becomes almost permanently imprinted in a culture. As far as Roman occupiers go, Pontius Pilate is hardly one of the worst. Using the death penalty against some guy who has offended local religious sentiments as a favor to the local elites is just how the sausage gets made, hardly a reign of terror. But because the killing of that guy spawned one of the most successful memes of all times, dressing as him for Halloween is probably a bad idea.

For the Federal Republic of Germany, Nazism plays a central role in the founding mythology. Where before Germany had been a Great Power run on Prussian militarism and patriotic fervor, with a tenuous relationship to democracy, it basically reinvented itself after WW2, rejecting its ambitions to rule the world and fully embraced democracy. (While keeping all the Nazis around, but that problem solved itself through time.)

Of course, there is another state in whose founding Hitler inadvertently played a major role, which is modern Israel. As long as these two states are around, they will remember the Nazis as the Big Bad.

The youngest people to claim they have experienced anything from WWII are 91-2 . Doesn't help that the biggest victims are universally hated. Also doesn't help that nazism struggle was intrawhite thing, and white people are at record low share of global population.

I would not call the Jews "universally hated". For example, I don't hate Jews. More generally, while antisemitism has a long history in Christian Europe, and pogroms happened in many places over many centuries, I think "universal hatred" is a bit of an over-simplification. For one thing, Judaism was (sometimes) tolerated in a way which other religions (besides Christianity) were not tolerated. Most Christian rulers would not have suffered a temple to the Norse gods within their realm, for example. I also think that Muslims generally displayed even less of a deadly hatred against Jews pre-1900, there was the 1066 Granada pogrom, but Wikipedia lists few other pogroms.

(Also, there is an argument made that the biggest victim group of Hitler are gentile Slavs, but I concede that the one group he was really fanatic about genociding are certainly the Jews.)

And while you can describe the European theater of WW2 as an "intra-white" thing, I would argue that this is simply because Germany did not have any borders with non-White countries. Nazi ideology has a ranking of "races", with the "nordic race" being the most noble, and the Slavs being the least noble white people (apart from certain minorities), but they certainly consider Blacks to be inferior to even Slavs.

Neither the Western Allies nor the USSR had racism as a major part of their doctrine, so framing WW2 as the proud racists vs the people who reject racism is not exactly wrong.

Universal as you can find it anywhere. There are few corners of the world that haven't had or have any antisemitism.

Neither the Western Allies nor the USSR had racism as a major part of their doctrine

And the water is not major part of the fishes' doctrine. Nazis had to invent white hierarchy because almost all non white people were already ruled by other whites. And you had segregation in USA. Also the (former) USSR has always been and always will be refreshingly racist place. Which is one of the best things about Eastern Europe as a whole. And the USSR also discriminated against jews. Up to the point that I think they had separate math exams for universities.

I wouldn't call antisemitism universal, although it's certainly more common than most forms of ethnic prejudice.

wouldn't call antisemitism universal

Are there peoples or cultures where it's absent? I don't mean uncontantacted people's in remote areas.

East Asia seems not to have adopted that particular prejudice, for one.

In particular, China didn't adopt this particular vice despite being home to small but significant populations of Jews throughout history, with enclaves in many Chinese cities (with the Kaifeng Jews being the most famous of the bunch), while also hosting significant numbers of Christians and Muslims. There has been some suggestion in the official records that the earliest of them arrived mid-Han dynasty approx. two thousand years ago, and there are independent observations by e.g. Persian travellers noting established Jewish merchants operating in China by the Tang dynasty.

Interestingly I have noticed an uptick in a bizarre sort of antisemitism in some of the wackier corners of Chinese popular culture very recently -- some sort of combination of classic Da Jooz tropes imported from the West, combined with the perception that the West is trying to contain China, resulting in various syncretic conspiracy theories about how (((they))) are puppeteering Western institutions to control China (or have in some nonsensical way done so in the past). But on the whole the Chinese remain philosemitic.

Malaysia has.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahathir_Mohamad

I have seen a theory that some of it was intended to create a (nonexistent) Jewish scapegoat for Malay ethnic mobs to distract them from (very real) Chinese and Indians they were currently targeting.

Similarly, "Black americans stop beating up Asians. Your real enemy is the Uzbeks."

Does Malaysia count as East Asia rather than Southeast Asia?

If antisemitism is a response it could be there's been insufficient exposure.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2023.2287877

their number in East Asia never exceeding 36,000 (currently around 10,000), Jews there are the subject of both distinctly strong positive and negative views

in a worldwide survey across 101 countries conducted recently by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The survey, which is discussed in detail below, revealed that, among respondents in China, Japan and South Korea, no less than 20, 23 and 53 per cent, respectively, could be regarded as holding antisemitic views

Pharaoh seems not concerned with the Israelites until they've become too numerous in Exodus 1:9.

Yep, I recall reading somewhere that Asians tend to respect Jews for their disproportionate influence, the thought process going something like:

You're telling me that this tiny minority dominates your finance, media, and government? Sounds like they're doing something right, what's their secret?

They have a more diverse array of “market dominant minorities” so they’re more familiar with the concept in general and yet less familiar with the particular expression of the phenomena re: the Jews. Which explains their thoughts on the subject.

They have market dominant minorities in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia & more…

Yeah but the ones harboring the market dominant minorities tend to be anti-Chinese and, atleast in the case of Malaysia, also quite Anti-Jews

For what it's worth, there's restaurants (and people even!) in Asia and Africa named after Adolf Hitler on the same "here's a Great Man of History with an iconic aesthetic" logic.

hugo boss really gave his best.

Will it be “post-modern corrosion” or will it be time? Genghis Khan Is believed to (1) have caused the deaths of enough people to slightly alter climate, and (2) have been the most-prolific rapist of which we are aware. And, currently, there are a couple of restaurant chains named after him here in America.

I am not aware of any of these three things being true.

Looking at mass-death events from 800 to 1850 it’s within the realm of possibility the Mongol invasion killed enough people to infinitesimally lower CO2 levels. The second claim is based on genetic testing , coupled with some historical presentism regrading how consensual were the Kahn’s harems and concubines. Third claim amply addressed by other replies.

Also Japan has ジンギスカン料理 (Gengis Khan food) which is basically various forms of grilled lamb.

The restaurant thing is.

https://genghisgrill.com/

https://www.gengiskhanbbq.com/

As far as I know if you want Hitler restaurants you have to go to Asia. Evidently a Stalin-themed Middle Eastern cafe didn't go over too well in Moscow, so this is one situation where the Reds don't have a great advantage over the Heilers.

Is one example enough

https://gkmgrill.com/

Or would you like more?

I personally fear this process but for a very different reason: I think the peacekeeping effect attributed to MAD was actually mostly on the WW2 mythos. The real reason we haven't had such a terrible war since WW2 is that we have WW2 in living cultural memory, and now it's exiting living cultural memory.

The real reason we haven't had such a terrible war since WW2 is that we have WW2 in living cultural memory

I would like to put a counter argument on this, WW2 happened not long after WW1, many argued that WW2 is the extend of WW1 and it's peace deal, but a costly war in living cultural memory doesn't stop another new war entirely, although it certainly help (USA being the isolationist and UK's appeasement policy certainly trace their root back to the costly WW1)

I suppose that makes sense, given how costly WWII was, though I also thought that MAD worked because everyone understood that warfare in the atomic age would not resemble WWII.

Ye’s team says the song will be featured on his upcoming album “Cuck” (Internet slang for “cuckold,” a term for a husband whose wife is unfaithful), which also includes tracks titled “Gas Chambers,” “WW3,” and “Hitler Ye and Jesus.” The album art depicts two figures wearing hooded Ku Klux Klan-like robes in different colors, while the art for the “Heil Hitler” song shows a swastika-like doodle.

This shortly after he essentially came out (whispers of various gay relationships have been gossip fodder for years, the most widespread rumor involving the late Virgil Abloh, the fashion designer). I do feel bad for him, I don’t think going through this kind of thing in public is dignified.

Will it change the narrative? I think the narrative has already been changing for at least ten years. Given AI / AGI / ASI, and its effect on the economy, culture and politics, I think it’s impossible to say what will happen even ten years from now.

Alabama Code § 32-6-13 states:

The Director of Public Safety, with the approval of the Governor, shall establish and promulgate reasonable rules and regulations not in conflict with the laws of this state concerning … the enforcement of the provisions of [Alabama Code Chapter 6, Article 1: Drivers’ Licenses] [which includes Alabama Code § 32-6-4, on issuing driver's licenses].

The Alabama supreme court has held time and time again, most recently in State of Alabama v. Catherine Taylor, et. al., that one consequence of Alabama Code § 1-3-1 is the complete efficacy and legitimacy of so-called “common law” name changes (name changes done neither by a court action nor by any specific statutory process) in the eyes of the State:

The order entered by the trial court permanently restrained the State from refusing to allow plaintiffs … from registering to vote “under the names by which they have chosen to be known and have used subsequent to this proceeding.” … We hold that the trial court did not err.

… “Where it is not done for a fraudulent purpose and in the absence of statutory restriction, one may lawfully change his name without resort to legal proceedings, and for all purposes the name thus assumed will constitute his legal name just as much as if he had borne it from birth.”

We are not aware of any statutory restriction which requires that married women not be permitted to register to vote, if otherwise qualified, under the names by which they have chosen to be known and have used; provided, of course, it is not done for a fraudulent purpose.

… in view of the fact that the common law regarding "names" has not been altered by the legislature as far as we know, we adopt the common law of England in resolving this dispute.

… While the State suggests that allowing married women to register in their maiden surnames will create confusion, we believe that the legitimate interests of the State in preventing fraud in the election process can be satisfied without undue cost or harm.

However, the Alabama DMV has this policy currently in force for changing the name printed on Alabama ID cards:

If you have changed your name, you must…present valid name change documents (e.g., marriage certificate, divorce decree, court order or legal name change document), along with proof that your name has been changed with the Social Security Administration.

Now, being required to not just “present valid name change documents”, but have a federal agency pre-approve them, seems to be a central case (I'd argue even more central than voter rolls that no-one even sees) of requiring a person to “resort to legal proceedings” to make “the name thus assumed…constitute his legal name…for [this] purpose”, which would make it a “rule [or] regulation…in conflict with the laws of this state” and thus an illegal requirement for the Director of Public Safety to impose on petitioners seeking to update their ID card to reflect a common law name change.

This is not just a procedural nitpick, but in practice actually a blocker for any person attempting the process, because even if you could somehow generate (and were willing to generate) a paper trail for your common law name change that'd pass ALEA/DMV muster as substantiating the change, the SSA will reject it anyway.

Before I go knocking on the door of the ACLU, or spending a million dollars on a private lawyer to sue the DMV to avoid spending $50 on a court-ordered name change: does this argument seem sound?

The "absence of statutory restriction" might also involve federal laws, since as far as I know state and federal have the same voter registration.

That the federal government does not have any statutory ban on putting common law adopted names on federal voter rolls should have no bearing on whether the state has any statutory restriction barring the department of motor vehicles from accepting certain (otherwise perfectly valid) name changes.

Are you saying you've found some state law that would warrant this refusal?

Perhaps I wasn't being clear. I'm suggesting that there have been significant changes to federal law regarding name paperwork since 1982, particularly since 2001. A judge could easily decide to cite federal law changes as a statutory restriction.

Your whole argument depends on their being no statutory restriction and you're going to need to do more research to be sure that is the case.

Surely the REAL ID Act and Alabama's decision to certify its driver's licenses to comply have a lot to say about names the DMV prints on licenses.

Even if some federal law prohibits REAL IDs from being issued in the legal name of a person whose name has been validly changed under common law—which I highly doubt—the DMV policy banning common law name changes is not restricted to STAR IDs (Alabama implemntation of REAL ID) anyway; it applies to all photo IDs.

which I highly doubt

EDIT: Looks like I was right; that is instead explicitly allowed.

You don't need a driver's license to vote. Here is the list of acceptable voter ids: https://www.sos.alabama.gov/alabama-votes/voter/voter-id So as long as any of these would honor a common law name, the state potentially has a way out.

But on the other hand, I'm not even sure this sort of catch-22 would hold up in court. The court says that your common law name should be honored, but that doesn't mean that the state has to give you an id or anything else if you don't bring the prerequisite documents. A person asking for an ID under his birth name would have trouble too if he couldn't produce proof of it. So I could see potentially that the court upholds that "we agree that's your name, but you still need docs proving it to get an id or vote"

My issue here isn't about voter registration, though; it's about updating the name on your Driver's License.

Nothing in the Alabama v. Taylor court opinion that I could see relied on the fact that Taylor's issue happened to be the voter registration department and not the department of motor vehicles; the issue was the State refusing to accept a common law name change as valid per se.

court says that your common law name should be honored, but that doesn't mean that the state has to give you an id or anything else if you don't bring the prerequisite documents … So I could see potentially that the court upholds that "we agree that's your name, but you still need docs proving it to get an id or vote"

If the requirement to “bring the prerequisite documents” — when the requested documents expand way beyond what's actually required to show common use — was already deemed illegal in the latter case (to vote), since that policy infringed on established law, why would it be different for the former (to get an id)?

I suppose I have a tendency to imagine worst case scenarios, but if the DMV or wherever just accepted "Oh hi, yeah I know my birth cert says my name is Tom Smith but everybody knows me as Joey Browne - 'Joey' is my second name and 'Browne' is my mom's name which I took after she divorced my dad - so can I get new ID in my common law name?" and then it turns out oops, Joey Browne is Tom's cousin and Tom is using his name so he can avoid being held responsible for that car accident he caused... yeah, it'd be a mess.

It's not like we don't already have people giving fake names and addresses to police, or such a thing as identity theft. Or in my own country, a sub-population where traditionally people of different generations often have the same name (e.g. John Murphy grandfather, John Murphy son, John Murphy grandson and of course all the other cousins called John Murphy after grandfather) without the American frills of "Snr, Jr, III, IV etc." and not wholly surprisingly, often some of these people rely on the confusion about "so it was John Murphy of Windy Gap Road, but which John Murphy?" when the cops come calling or try to investigate crimes.

So I would tend to err on the side of "sure, everyone calls you Joey Browne, but your official paperwork says you're Tom Smith, please come back with something official to show that you're known as Joey Browne".

I have a Chesterton's Fence feeling about it:

Common Law actually seems remarkably simple to change your name, and from scratch I'd probably make it harder.

But why do we want to surrender a freedom we currently have to the government?

But why do we want to surrender a freedom we currently have to the government?

Well, voting is directly implicated, and that is your "freedom" to restrict other people's freedoms. So it isn't a black/white sort of question.

But why do we want to surrender a freedom we currently have to the government?

On a weaker but more dialed in note: if we are to get rid of that particular liberty out of arguably valid fraud and impersonation concerns, it should be done procedurally, not just by the Alabama License Director invoking the secret “Who Will Stop Me, LOL” clause of the Alabama Constitution to overturn decades of established case law.

I'm not objecting to the DMV asking for something to evidence the name change, like sworn witness statements; I'm objecting to them requiring, by policy, these particular evidence which includes getting sign-offs from a federal agency that has an axe to grind against common law name changes. That just seems to be laundering their noncompliance.

It does seem like a sound argument, but it'll probably take the ACLU or a million dollars and a private lawyer to convince them. Spending $50 on a court-ordered name change is probably the simplest way to proceed.

Spending $50 on a court-ordered name change is probably the simplest way to proceed.

Sadly, I already took this “coward's way out” cutting a check to the local probate court rather than raising the matter the hard way, and am now far too satisfied with my legal name to fuck with it any further; someone else with a similar impulse will need to tackle this.

(I wonder if we'll see the ACLU stepping up on this matter only after someone is actually refused a court order for name change... which they generally only do for sex offenders and other criminals whose “crimes involv[ed] moral turpitude”...)

Sadly, I already took this “coward's way out” cutting a check to the local probate court rather than raising the matter the hard way, and am now far too satisfied with my legal name to fuck with it any further; someone else with a similar impulse will need to tackle this.

Its hardly the coward's way out even if Catherine Taylor hasn't been superceded by legislation. Which it may well have been. Given that Alabama issues real IDs that seems likely.

In addition, even if you won, I think you still end up at square one. Now what you've done with your extensive ACLU legislation is, essentially, repealed any rulings, regulations, and indirect legislation that enable Alabama's implementation of REAL ID. Now your whole state is mad at you AND you have to pay for a passport, AND you have get the court ordered name change to do that.

Overall, the initial ruling strikes me, given the date, as an intentional giveaway to Birmingham and other machines in Alabama. Partisan and poorly reasoned.

Given that Alabama issues real IDs that seems likely.…even if you won, …what you've done…is, essentially, [destroyed] Alabama's implementation of REAL ID.…Now your whole state is mad at you

If any federal regulation actually exists which would prohibit REAL ID cards from being issued in a person's actual legal name, when that name was acquired by a common-law name change—and so far this is just speculation, no-one has found any such rule*—then

  • that would be a legitimate, statutory restriction where applicable, which is on “STAR ID” Driver's Licenses
  • that would be inapplicable to non-“STAR ID” Driver's Licenses**

AND you have to pay for a passport, AND you have get the court ordered named change to do that.

*I expect no-one will, either, considering that the passport office explicitly allows common-law name changes, Form DS-60.

**I seriously expect these will never be discontinued anyway, because discontinuing them would harm the voting block of “people who live a lifestyle rendering them incapable of fulfilling the REAL ID requirements”.

If any federal regulation actually exists which would prohibit REAL ID cards from being issued in a person's actual legal name, when that name was acquired by a common-law name change—and so far this is just speculation, no-one has found any such rule*—then

REAL ID requires you submit one of many documents with your current name, which would be your common law legal name in such a case. But to do that you need to get a passport or one of various other documents that only is issued by the US government under that name, or a birth certificate issued to your name. OR a chain of custody set of documents from your birth certificate name to your current legal name. Those are:

  1. Certified marriage certificate.
  2. Adoption documents that contain the legal name as a result of the adoption.
  3. A certified name change document that contains the legal name both before and after the name change.
  4. A certificate, declaration or registration document verifying the formation of a domestic partnership/civil union.
  5. A certified dissolution of marriage/domestic partnership/civil union document that contains the legal name as a result of the court action.

All 5 workarounds also appear to require a federal passthrough document. Basically a SSN, or the equivalent. At this point the other way to Alabama being REAL ID compliant is known as the ridiculously stubborn way.

So what I'm seeing is, there is probably an easy way to get a non-Star ID that is presumably legal under this interpretation of the law, but there is no good faith reason to challenge the Star ID reqs, but you wouldn't have standing to do that, because its cheaper to do the thing that makes you eligible.

**I seriously expect these will never be discontinued anyway, because discontinuing them would harm the voting block of “people who live a lifestyle rendering them incapable of fulfilling the REAL ID requirements”.

I disagree. If the Republican coalition continues to go more working class, maybe, but if it veers back in the 2012 direction without picking up urban blacks, any Republican state would have good reason to end this. Not only would it disenfranchise legitimate enemy voters, it would make the fraudsters that vote using the information of people who dont vote significantly harder.

REAL ID requires you submit…a chain of custody set of documents from your birth certificate name to your current legal name [when those names are different]. Those are: …

Citation needed; that may be how Alabama has chosen to implement their so-called “STAR IDs”, but it is not what “REAL ID requires”.

Even if you do come up with some argument—which would be prima facie absurd—that a State-authorized clone of the DS-60 form would not fulfill the 6 CFR § 37.11(c)(2) criterion therefore “everyone would be mad at me” if I got the ACLU to force Alabama to do that…

there is probably an easy way to get a non-Star ID that is presumably legal under this interpretation of the law

…that still wouldn't be an argument in favor of the actual status quo of the DMV (I argue, illegally) refusing to apply common law name changes to any ID, STAR or nar.

EDIT: just for the record, your statement of the situation seems to imply that a passport could be used to fill this purpose:

REAL ID requires you submit one of many documents with your current name, which would be your common law legal name in such a case. But to do that you need to get a passport or … a chain of custody set of documents from your birth certificate name to your current legal name.

however, this is false (if you mean it as a mechanistic explanation of the status quo in Alabama); nothing on the DMV website suggests that even a person who brings in all these:

  • a birth certificate reading "Joe Cool",
  • a valid Alabama ID card reading "Joe Cool" and matching his face and all other information,
  • a completed DS-60 evidencing this "Joe Cool's" social transition to "Jo Cooler" and matching all his information,
  • a valid passport reading "Jo Cooler" and matching his face and all other information,
  • a signed residential lease agreement with "Jo Cooler" current tenant at the address on his current Alabama ID card,
  • a utility bill addressed to "Jo Cooler" and matching the address on his current Alabama ID card,
  • a burning desire for an Alabama ID card to be issued reading "Jo Cooler"

would have the requirement that he still first convince the Social Security Administration of his new name waived. The DMV would still refuse Jo in this situation, and I'm just trying to figure out if he could sue for that.

EDIT2: I hate that your point here is somewhat solid...

there is no good faith reason to challenge the [current state] ID reqs, … you wouldn't have standing to do that, because its cheaper to [just get a court order].

...since this seems to imply the only action brewing is for some sex offender or fraudster to sue on the basis that he was denied a court order 😬

I mean, why else besides being one of those or married being the reason for a name change strikes me as silly

The point is, this particular flavor of “sill[iness]” is not just enshrined in law as a right, but enacting it completely, and without any discretionary approval from the gov't, is also (as far as I can tell, pending any assault on my actual motte in the OP/C,) enshrined in law.

If the law is to be changed (regardless of the reason), it should be changed through the legislature, not illegally by some administrative employee too big for his britches.

Sadly, I already took this “coward's way out” cutting a check to the local probate court rather than raising the matter the hard way, and am now far too satisfied with my legal name to fuck with it any further; someone else with a similar impulse will need to tackle this.

Why is this the coward's way out? If it's more convenient or efficacious to do an extremely minor amount of paperwork and pay a trivial filing fee, that seems totally reasonable.

[ For real law nerds, the real question is why does Alabama use - as the delimiter for their legal clauses rather than . like everyone else. ]

Not challenging illegal government authority is a slippery slope. Presumably.

If nobody does anything about undue power it becomes normal, and eventually legal.

Presumably one doesn't challenge the illegal actions of the government unless they are both illegal and have some specific articulable harm to someone.

The harm here (if there is any) seems trivial enough not to

Incidentally, one could make the inverse of a slippery slope argument -- if you cry "fascist" at every government overreach no matter how minor, it detracts from the real battles. Save your powder and so forth.

I always wondered what was actually more effective, to ruthlessly attack even the most minor of transgressions or to keep around the potential of a killing blow.

Seems to me that the logistics of maintaining power require constant use and practice. But that goes both ways. Power will learn to contain what it is confronted with.

In France we are fond of violent riots, but that means any French regime has riot police, vastly limiting the utility of direct action as a political tactic.

But then again I see the US's 2a growing ever more theoretical a right to contest the government militarily precisely because that's not a button you want to press often.

Before covid there were several cases of armed protestors getting blue states to change their legislative plans in red-friendly ways- some firearms related and some not.

I think it's both situational and tactical. Lawsuits are very expensive and you can waste 8 years only to have them thrown out because you didn't pick the right vehicle. At the same time, in a situation where one has a benefit in leverage and relative effort, it is beneficial to flood the field. I don't see a one-size-fits-all piece of advice.

Also I think the 2A is doing rather well. There will always be some gap left when imposing federal dictat on recalcitrant States (same when it was abortion from the left), but most of the US has shall-issue CCW.

There will always be some gap left when imposing federal dictat on recalcitrant States (same when it was abortion from the left), but most of the US has shall-issue CCW.

Where's the gap in gay marriage? The gap in abortion was rather smaller and always contested until Dobbs. Meanwhile, we've got multiple states (including NY, of Bruen fame) with "shall issue" CCW which have so many exceptions in places where you are allowed to carry, that you'll very likely be a felon if you attempt to take advantage of it. And I still can't buy a gun in any state (including my home state of NJ), whereas leaving the state for an abortion (or marriage) was never forbidden.

Heller and Bruen were absolutely empty victories. The case which matters is Rahimi, which says "when push comes to shove, the Court will find a reason to accept a gun restriction".

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That a high roll scenario is being required to enter your name into an overt registry of gun owners does not suggest the 2A is "doing rather well".

Heck, I'm in Alabama, which is the best-case scenario with so-called “constitutional carry”, but I still consider 2A effectively dead considering my only options to arm myself are:

  1. Submit my name and address into the federal covert gunowner registry that comprises the FBI logs of background checks submitted by FFLs;

  2. Open myself up to entrapment*, which to my knowledge is still a 100% permitted strategy when done with agency approval, by buying from a non-FFL stranger;

  3. Buy from a non-FFL non-stranger, which is logistically a massive nuisance since it requires them to have already owned the gun in question for at least a year, or since before I mentioned the topic to them, lest box 21.a of the 4473 render their involvement moot.

*I do not have the firearms knowledge to know with certainty whether a given gun secretly has some illegal modification, nor do I trust my ability to reliably identify a glowie posing an an individual at a gun show.

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most of the US

Most of the US by state, or most of the US by where the population is? The latter is much more important in this instance- sure, it's great if the flyover states have decent gun laws, but if 100 million people live in the Northeastern Megalopolis or California, where shall-issue CCW for the most part does not exist (and AWBs universal- their laws tend to be worse than Europe's are)... then that's still a significant problem.

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I'm filling out this form verbally fellating a judge “praying” that he “grant” a fucking permit for something I (should) have every right to do “without resort to regal proceedings”.

That I rolled over and complied with these (arguably) illegal demands, because it was more “convenient” to do so, is essentially a vote of support for the State to shoot down the guy who eventually tries to make the DMV actually abide by the law, on the basis that it's the "usual process" or something like that.

I mean, that's just a matter of framing. The other way of framing it is:

  • I don't have to fill out this form (with copy-pasta language) to change my name, but it's easier and clearer for everyone when (not if, because the judge never denies these) a judge issues your order. Hence for the sake of simplicity and ease, I'm going to do a thing that I'm not strictly required to do.

This is a fairly common way of approaching one's relationship with the world. Most people do not do the bare minimum of things that they are strictly required to do but the things that makes everything the most straightforwards.

It might be edgy to post online about how you have every right to do this without a legal proceeding and therefore that is somehow preferable. My view here is that it's very evidently not preferable in any actual sense that matters.

You don't have to argue practicality to me. I already did it, for all the reasons you name. I was only elaborating in reply to this comment asking why I said that what I did is “cowardly”.

Bending over and doing the wrong thing because it's “preferable” to me...

“Regardless of what the other decides, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other (‘defecting’).”
–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

...doesn't magically make it the right thing.

Most people do not do the bare minimum of things that they are strictly required to do but the things that makes everything the most straightforwards

Suing the DMV would not be "strictly required", either, but if I were to win* it would "mak[e] everything [more] straightforwards" for the next guy who would then only have to fill out an Alabama DS-60 clone instead of waiting for a court order to get approved — so by your own logic, that seems like the right thing to do?

*As a boring tactical matter, I probably wouldn't anyway; I don't have any history of crimes involving moral turpitude, I do have a reasonably well-paying job, and I think my county offers hardship fee waivers for the court order even if I were bereft, so I'd be a pretty poor candidate plaintiff due to the question of standing... but that's just contingent.

Bending over and doing the wrong thing because it's “preferable” to me...

It's not wrong in any way to do more than the absolute bare minimum in a given interaction. It is fully permitted (it's even morally exemplary) in most cases to do more than what you are strictly required.

For example, an individual might go to the DMV with 4 pieces of identification rather than the legally-required 3 simply to ensure a smooth process (and to keep the line moving). This is likewise not in any way wrong.

Suing the DMV would not be "strictly required", either, but if I were to win* it would "mak[e] everything [more] straightforwards" for the next guy who would then only have to fill out an Alabama DS-60 clone instead of waiting for a court order to get approved — so by your own logic, that seems like the right thing to do?

First off, I doubt that. The DMV would likely just grant your request which would moot the case since you had already received all the possible relief that you were asking for. So the next guy would be in exactly the same position.

Legal maneuvering aside, it's hardly the thing to stand on unless you're angling for teenaged petulance. It's unbecoming. Be better.

The DMV would likely just grant your request request which would moot the case

I find it extremely unlikely that the DMV would waive policy only for special ol' me, just because I threatened to take them to court over their illegal behavior. Are you saying that, or that they'd predictably chicken out on their half of the case only after the lawsuit is actually underway? In either case, such action seems like it'd just be begging the ACLU to throw together a form letter to get them to repeat it on cue.

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I think you're confusing the issues here. The ACLU may be interested in someone's right to change their name. I doubt they'd be interested in a procedural argument. You presented evidence that the Alabama DMV's procedure is inconsistent with Alabama law, and I have no reason to claim that it isn't. But the state legislature could change the law tomorrow and statutorily require a certain process for name changes, superseding the prior court rulings. Hell, there was a concurrence in the opinion you linked where one of the judges said that this would be a good issue for the legislature to take up.

So, if as @ulyssessword suggests, a court were to refuse a transgender person a name change, I doubt the ACLU would press the common law name change thing too hard. They'd probably raise a general civil rights argument and ask a Federal court to grant a mandamus order requiring the probate court to issue the necessary paperwork. Trying to raise the common law issue would actually be counterproductive, the likely fact pattern being that the transgender person was refused a judicial name change, then tried to get around it through common law and ran into obstacles. Arguing that the DMV and whoever else needs to accept the new name based on Alabama law concedes that the probate court was within their rights in denying the name change. This becomes problematic because if you win and the state legislature decides to formally abolish common law name changes, now they have to go back and make the civil rights argument again. They run the risk of getting a victory for one person that has no prospective effect.

Arguing that the DMV and whoever else needs to accept the new name based on Alabama law concedes that the probate court was within their rights in denying the name change.

Good point, even the ACLU may prefer to force that angle rather than making the DMV abide by the law...

I think trying to go for change in the law would work better because the DMV is not discriminating, it's not that "everyone else can get their common law name but they refused my transgender client". If you're going to work the discrimination angle, it has to be real discrimination.

trying to go for change in the law would work better

You mean getting a bill passed to solidify either “DMV respects common names” or “DMV entitled to do what they want”, so that either way we're not stuck squinting at a 1982 court case and trying to guess whether a lawsuit is warranted?

(But I do agree with @Rov_Scam: with the law as it stands, it seems more likely that the ACLU would address a case of actual anti-transgender discrimination by the judge by simply making the judge do the thing, rather than making the DMV do the thing, if only because it would be a more valuable ideological win.)

You mean getting a bill passed to solidify either “DMV respects common names” or “DMV entitled to do what they want”, so that either way we're not stuck squinting at a 1982 court case and trying to guess whether a lawsuit is warranted?

Yeah. Right now it seems to be "this section of the code says A, that section says B, who gets to juggle the hot potato?" Either go to court so a judge makes a ruling or the state legislature clears this up. What is happening right now is ripe for all kinds of problems.

Right now it seems to be "this section of the code says A, that section says B, who gets to juggle the hot potato?"

  1. I'm not aware of any code that actually says either “A” or “B”.
  2. It seems the court clearly stated that “A, unless otherwise specified” is their interpretation of § 1-3-1.
  3. I'm not aware of any court cases that either overturned that ruling, or named “B” as their interpretation of any existing piece of the code.

Either go to court so a judge makes a ruling or the state legislature clears this up. What is happening right now is ripe for all kinds of problems.

We are “ripe for” exactly 3 outcomes that I can see: (1) situation stands, sovcits suffer slightly; (2) a lawsuit is filed, probably by the ACLU; or (3) someone opens this can of worms in the legislature.

You seemingly named the latter two as desired outcomes, and I don't get the impression you consider the first outcome to be particularly problematic, so I'm interested to see what “all kinds of problems” you scry here... Am I misreading you? Do you actually sympathize with the plight of a person who wants to change their name, but isn't eligible or can't be bothered to file for a $50 name change?

Or do you just mean that the situation cannot stand, and every possible outcome is going to be slightly problematic?

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(I wonder if we'll see the ACLU stepping up on this matter only after someone is actually refused a court order for name change... which they generally only do for sex offenders and other criminals whose “crimes involv[ed] moral turpitude”...)

My bets are on a transgender name change instead of any other type. They're the only thing I can think of that are culture-war enough to make for good publicity.

Probably only if they make the claim that transgenderism constitutes fraud.


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