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The Pogroms Will Continue Until We All Get Along
This is some good old fashioned culture warring. Happy New Year, y'all.
This clip has been popping up on twitter recently, most likely because Elon Musk re-tweeted it.
It's a doozy. I'm probably in too deep in AI land, but I thought for a moment it may have been a very well done deepfake. The cliches are just too juicy:
A little Wiki background on the host here turns up the clown world dial even more. This is an atheist progressive white woman who has a podcast with a title that is synonymous with exasperation. She's been wanting to speak to the manager since before it was cool. The Wiki entry concludes with a Hasan Piker endorsement. Hashtag resistance, hashtag StayWoke.
I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy. Gen Z conservatism was figuring out how long is was going to stay in its Nick Fuentes giga-irony phase before figuring out how to TradLife it up but with good vibes. Gen Z liberalism was establishing a pansexual polycule, ordering designer embryos, microdosing, and flirting with anti-semitism. Yas Queen, Globalize the Intifada.
Turning down my own sarcasm, this appears to be like a kind of resistance-within-the-resistance of severly disaffected former Obama style liberals / progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA. It isn't the weirdo terminally online language of Gen-Z etc, but a hyper violent rhetorical style of a group that feels they are the besieged templars of the Final Stand against The Big Bad. I didn't think this was, well, real. I thought the "Karen" archetype was mostly a lot of bad looks on very bad days for otherwise milquetoast suburban ladies. Mostly, I felt sympathy.
But these folks seem serious! If this is TollBooth losing some of his childlike wonder of the world, so be it.
So first, labels.
Karens are, above all else, hyper-establishment. They tend to be the less morally developed individuals of their group with the time to take that out on everyone else. Take the perennial reasons liberals claim this about conservatives- "they're just not at the proper state of moral development, and have never been".
And I agree with this assertion- Karens tend to be Kohlberg 3 and 4s. 5s and 6s are generally too morally developed to be Karens, though they retain the ability and vocabulary to Karen out as needed.
What Karen uses to justify herself varies based on what the establishment is. When that establishment is the Christian Right, they're good Christian women; when that establishment is racist, they're protesting bussing; when that establishment is "men should beat their wives", they're the ones justifying that to their daughters; when that establishment is "spare the rod spoil the child", they're beating that evil left-handedness out of you; when that establishment is "kill the X", they're the ones telling the machetes where to go; when that establishment is "cut your daughter's clit off", they're the ones holding 'em down. But they always use the Establishment as justification [1].
They kind of are, but what the two sides are going to be is kind of indeterminate, because much as the definition of "liberal" and "conservative" are in flux, so too is the economic model of the world in transition from the mid 20th century (where physical labor was the limiting factor in economic growth) into the 21st (where time is the limiting factor- modern high tech manufacturing doesn't actually require huge amounts of capital or physical labor, but require decades to spin up, software development requires no capital and no physical labor, standard manufacturing requires some capital but little physical labor due to automation). It might legitimately not matter what they think if their ability to exercise political power is compromised so severely that the middle class is erased entirely (it won't really look like that, but elections mattering less and less, and splitting across 51/49 lines, is what this looks like- countries with a larger middle class will still feel the need to jail opponents though, which is why France and the US have done that [publicly], though that failed in the US' case).
But the important part here is that, for the most part, the Gen Zs tend to leave each other alone. Gen Z "liberalism" votes Establishment, and Gen Z "conservatism" votes Reform, mostly out of convenience- but Gen Z liberals are not natively Establishment any more than Gen Z conservatives are Reform, that's just how it shakes out right now. Gen Z UBI vs. Boomer DEI (Gen Y is split across gender and property-owning lines; women and owners want DEI, all others want UBI if they don't have a job, or are anti-DEI if they do).
This is what Caesar's assassins said to themselves. It didn't work out very well for them, and I don't expect this will. Perhaps noteworthy is that both groups were in their 40s- and if you have something to lose from the establishment turning against you, that's when you're going to act (before that, you're flexible enough to make it out OK; after that, you already have one foot in the grave).
[1] The stereotype is female for a reason- men can do this, but for evopsych reasons, men at Kohlberg 4 are typically just the executors of Karen's will. They'll knit the ghost costumes/burkas/Hugo Boss uniforms but they leave the actual enforcement of obscenity-banning, cross-burning, witch-hunting, and clit-cutting to the men. (For evopsych reasons, it's useful to humanity for women to pretend to be less blameworthy, even if they're all Greta Bösel inside.)
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