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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4009 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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New week is here, it is time for some culture war (and culture war by other means) news, news not concerning plebeian ball games, aspiring upper class winter games, or top elite human capital tropical island games.

1/ From Demography is Destiny files

It seems world's TFR as a whole is below replacement by now. It is just rough estimate from highly questionable data by anonymous xitter demography nerds, possibly the inflection point already happened few years ago.

What is certain that the exponential growth that began in early 1700's (due to potato, maize and wise leadership of European and Manchu statesmen of the time) is finally over. The line leveled up and will start going down.

Whether it is matter for mourning or celebration, is up to you.

2/ From Elite Human Capital files

Even the most elite human capital is made of flesh and blood(so far) and all flesh must perish.

How billionaires die?

TL;DR: The lessons are: if you are a billionaire, avoid choppers, it is not worth it. Also, do not be a woman.

3/ From Cold War geopolitics files

Cuba is on the ropes, strangled by intensified US blockade, and, unlike in the past, no help is coming.

It is clear now that Venezuelan operation was about regime change in Cuba.

Politically speaking, it can be Donald's crowning achievement.

Marco Rubio will have his revenge, Red tribe boomers get to enjoy one final triumph over dirty commies before they expire (imagine Donald Trump personally tearing down statues of Fidel and Che in Havana just before the midterms), the remaining old style leftists are humiliated one more time. Cuban people gain freedom and democracy (whether Mexico, Colombia or Haiti style is to be seen), ICE finally gets to round up Cubans and return them home. Everyone wins.

4/ From South Asia files

Resistance in Baluchistan embraces grandma power, and is on the roll.

One struggle against colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism and ageism.

Whether real or PR, it is interesting they think this particular PR is needed. It could be another case of provincials being slightly out of touch with Current Year(TM) zeitgeist, or it could be prescient vision that in negative population growth world, the elderly will be expendable and disposable meat (as we already see in East Europe).

5/ From Eastern European files

Most high-level assassination attempt of the current East European unpleasantness. The target was lieutenant general Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseyev

He seems to be IRL action movie hero, who successfully fought the assassin after being shot in the back twice (while the assassin seems to be boomer who was using gun for the first time in his life)

6/ Gamer affairs + more Eastern European current events files

Most oppressed people in the world, the gamers, are fighting back.

16 years old Muscovite Artem killed one Alexey Belyaev deputy head of Roskomnadzor, Russian media and internet censorship agency. There is severe media blackout about this issue, as if someone was worried.

Xitter anonymous shitposter reactions are overwhelmingly positive. Zoomer gamers are strongly Kulak pilled. As Kulak predicted.

From pure technical point of view, compared with previous event, the difference is palpable.

Lone Zoomer with knife and grudge >>>>> Boomer with gun working for big three letter organization for promise of big payoff. (only mistake Artem made was letting to be taken alive to be raped and tortured for the rest of his life, but no one is perfect)

The Age of Boomers is over. The Time of the Zoomer has come.

Most high-level assassination attempt of the current East European unpleasantness. The target was lieutenant general Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseyev

He seems to be IRL action movie hero, who successfully fought the assassin after being shot in the back twice (while the assassin seems to be boomer who was using gun for the first time in his life)

Is it possible that this is all some elaborate Russian plot? War hero gets shot 3 times in the back, but lives and fights off his assassin bare-handed. They blame it on the Ukrainians. Makes for great propaganda value. (I'm probably biased because I've been reading Tom Clancy spy novels recently so Maskirovka is on my brain. The Russians are always doing this sort of thing in his books.)

Everything is possible. Another possibility is Ukrainian infighting. There's a coalition that really wants the war to continue: groups funded by the EU, Dems and GOP neocons, armchair nationalists, Ukrainian MIC. There's a coalition that really wants the war to stop: Trumpists, regular businessmen, populist opposition, closeted pro-Russians.

If the peace talks really reached the point where the purely symbolic (but still incredibly contentious) question of the rest of Donbass was the only remaining one, then Trump successfully pressuring Zelensky to accept the loss of it would be a real possibility. Assassinating a GRU general when his superior was in charge of the talks would be a good way to sabotage them by sowing distrust. Let Budanov lose face and explain whether he's lost control over the various alphabet agencies or is just duplicitous.

What sense would that make? Russians (the ones that can be reached by staged terrorist attacks on a general, at least) don't seem to need further motivation to continue prosecuting the war; fence-sitters will surely not become more inclined to stay on the fence with further evidence that internal control is weak; everyone who is against them, meanwhile, will be cheering on the attempt and consider it absolutely justified and further proof of Ukrainian pluck and skill. Any general norms against dirty tricks played on enemy leadership were long kicked to the curb by Americans and Israelis.

You can always use further motivation to continue the war. They're relying on volunteers, not conscripts, and this will surely spark a wave of new volunteers. They'll probably play up the "IRL action movie hero" part even more in Russian media, too.

Oh, and this general was apparently from Western Ukraine, so he's practically the perfect model for their "Ukraine is Little Rus" propaganda. He can be a useful spokesman after the fighting ends.

At this point, what I expect to spark new waves of volunteers more than anything is rising compensation along with rising big expenses such as mortgages and cars, not some stale propaganda. It's been five years, infamously longer than The Most Holiest of Patriotic Wars 1941-1945.

At the very least, who's gonna be fool enough to volunteer during winter? If you're going to go to war and can pick when you go, you wait until the season of snow and mud is over.

At least as of right now, the official-line-adjacent Telegram channels I know about (anna_news, sashakots, rybar) are not really giving this any priority over their daily war reporting noise, and I'm not seeing any traces of an "IRL action movie hero" framing. They are just talking about how those perpetrators that were caught admitted to being paid money by the Ukrainian secret services and the like.

Even if you think a false flag is conceivable, why would it be more likely than that the Ukrainians indeed did it? This wouldn't be the first time, unless you claim that all the assassinations of prominent Russian figures until now, including the ones that they openly took credit for, were actually false flags, and the benefits for their side are obvious without mental gymnastics (eliminating useful individuals, encumbering Russian processes with friction and fear, signalling Russian weakness to internal doubters and external supporters). It seems like you want this to be a false flag, contra LW principles.

I just thought it's odd that the man was shot 3 times at point blank range at survived, and i'm trying to think of an explanation. But I admitted that I'm biased because I've been reading spy thrillers recently. I'm really not making a strong claim here about anything, I just thought it was an odd story. Whats the point of Ukrainian secret services shooting some random general in Moscow?

If the person who shot him had no experience with firearms, it's entirely plausible. Hit a non-lethal spot the first time because you are nervous, and two more times because you underestimated recoil and now your hands are hurt and shaking.

What do you figure was the point in the 2024 case? I think I gave a reasonable enough list of benefits. High-ranking military being scared to leave their house without a bodyguard degrades military performance: people make worse decisions under stress, and more competent candidates may not want such a job.

But maybe it was actually done by a Japanese high schooler with a magic notebook - I've been reading a lot of manga lately...

Also, do not be a woman.

Female billionaires die 4.5 years EARLIER than the leading benchmark. The usual 5-7 year female longevity advantage nearly vanishes. Male and female billionaires die at about the same age. No country on Earth shows a gap this small.

Isn't this just the effects of billionaires not being in the bottom quintile of men, who are more likely to die young? It's not some biological law that all men die younger than women do. If you're not a coal miner, drug dealer, fighter, suicidal... (these are usually men, admittedly for reasons rooted in biology) then you'll have a long lifespan.

Somewhere on the Motte we were having a discussion about male vs female life expectancies (IIRC motivated by the UN declaring men dying 5 years earlier than women "equality"), and the decrease in the gap comes in much earlier than billionaires. I think it was, once you get into the top decile, the gap drops to below two years.

It's much more accurate to say, if you're poor, don't be a man, than it is to say if you're rich, don't be a woman, unless your interest in life expectancy is just in having a big gap. Every step up the income ladder for both sexes increases life expectancy; it just does so much more for men.

It's not some biological law that all men die younger than women do.

It is, somewhat. Across the animal kingdom, the heterozygotic sex (XY, ZW) nearly always has a shorter average lifespan than the homozygotic sex (XX, ZZ).

Isn't this just the effects of billionaires not being in the bottom quintile of men, who are more likely to die young? It's not some biological law that all men die younger than women do. If you're not a coal miner, drug dealer, fighter, suicidal... (these are usually men, admittedly for reasons rooted in biology) then you'll have a long lifespan.

I would think that's a factor, but I would guess there is another issue in play: The question of when in life the person becomes a billionaire. So for a trivial example, if you look at people who become billionaires at age 85, you can bet that their average age at death is at least 85.

I think it's pretty well known that extremely wealthy women are much more likely to have inherited their money than extremely wealthy men. To put it another way, I think it's much more common for male billionaires to be self-made than it is for female billionaires. It seems to me that if this is true, it's going to have an effect on when in life the person becomes a billionaire, as well as on other aspects of the person's life. These things, in turn, are arguably likely to affect the age of the billionaire at time of death.

Edit: That being said, I recall reading research indicating that among the upper class, the life expectancy difference between men and women is much smaller than in the general population. I imagine this is due to the sorts of lifestyle difference you point out. In other words, it doesn't seem that being rich is bad for women so much as it's good for men.

What is certain that the exponential growth that began in early 1700's (due to potato, maize and wise leadership of European and Manchu statesmen of the time) is finally over. The line leveled up and will start going down.

Barring some game-changing technology or disaster, it is nearly certain that the trend will reverse again and the population will explode. Right now is analogous to when you add the anti-biotic to the petri dish and select for bacteria which are immune. Because it's reasonable to expect that some small segment of the population, due to some combination of genetics and culture, will (1) think it's a great idea to have lots of children; and (2) think it's a great idea to pass (1) and (2) on to said children. And in fact I think we are already seeing this in ultra-religious communities.

The Winter Olympics is happening right now. Is it just me, or do the Olympics feel like they are far less culturally relevant than they used to be?

Is it just me, or do the Olympics feel like they are far less culturally relevant than they used to be?

At least seems to be true in Korea:

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20260209/why-south-koreans-are-tuning-out-2026-winter-olympics

The Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games, which officially opened with preliminary events on Wednesday (local time) before the formal opening ceremony on Friday, have drawn the lowest level of Korean public interest ever recorded for a Winter Olympics. Google Trends data shows domestic searches for "Olympics" have fallen below 10 on a 100-point scale — down from 30 during the 2022 Beijing Games and a peak of 100 when Korea hosted the PyeongChang Games in 2018.

The disengagement is not uniquely Korean. U.S. broadcaster NBC's prime-time viewership for the Beijing Olympics averaged just 11.4 million — a 42 percent drop from PyeongChang. Ticket sales for Milan Cortina reached about 75 percent of capacity by early February, with nearly 1.2 million of roughly 1.5 million tickets sold, though organizers had relied on late surges and NHL star power to close the gap after a sluggish start that saw only 613,000 tickets sold through October.

"There was a time when families sat together in the living room to watch, even during hard economic times. That era is over," Yu said. "Everyone now consumes whatever content they want on their own smartphones."

Yu added that Koreans' emotional investment in national representation has weakened. "People are less inclined to feel that someone else's achievement on the international stage is somehow their own. Korea already has so much cultural content representing the nation globally that the Olympics no longer hold that singular status."

Downvoting because this should be in the small question thread.

I think numbers show it has been dropping. One as noted by others I don't think anything can meet the almost universal cultural phenomenon's of the past for myriad reasons because of modernity.

Two, demographic change. As the country gets browner we have less cold weather culture. My Scandinavian ancestors came here, settled in cold parts of the country. I love the cold and snow, the physical thing I'm the best at is snowboarding. I've got my toddler watching the Olympics and we'll be teaching him how to ski next year, but there will be proportionally less of us.

When were they culturally relevant?

I mean it might be different if you live in Canada. But I can't remember anyone caring very much about the winter olympics. Summer, yeah.

I think there used to be some level of cultural relevance for female figure skating and Ice Hockey.

The 1980 Miracle On Ice was a huge deal. My Dad can tell you what he had for breakfast that day and the day Kennedy was shot in 1963. It's that level of "seared into memory."

Figure skating, aside from the whole Tanya Harding nonsense, has been important because it holds female emotional valence and America wants to ensure that our ice dancing barbie dolls are the best ice dancing barbie dolls on earth.

I think both of these have declined in recent years because America fundamentally won hockey by having the NHL. When Aleksander Ovechkin, arguably the GOAT or Vice Goat after Gretzky, plays 20+ years in Washington and not Moscow, the jig is up. The "pro" leagues in Sweden, Finland, Czechia are all just AAAA farm leagues for the NHL.

For figuring skating, the Chinese got really fucking good and our own skaters turned, literally, fake and gay. I think the last superstar was Tara Lapinski? Or maybe that Sasha girl from like 2004 or so.

AO would maybe be the 4th best player in Pittsburgh history if he played there. Lemieux is the only one besides Gretzky with management on GOAT probably had a better peak but cancer and his back hurt his career stats. Crosby is definitely better. Jagr probably too. AO probably has the best shot of all time but not enough assists.

USA seems to be doing quite well at figure skating this year. It helps when you can poach the best figure skaters from USSR and Japan. However, that also diminishes the nationalistic hype of the Olympics... it feels like these are just globalistic sports dynasty families, spending their whole lives travelling around the world, not attached to any country in particular.

But also the death of network television, and NBC does a shitty job streaming it on the internet.

Poaching Soviet talent has been a thing forever. The Karolyis defected in 1981. I can see getting bent out of shape about someone like Gu, but Ilia was born in Virginia. Kam and O'Shea are not even in medal contention and were the weakest in the team competition. Kam being the weaker of the two.

Kam was born on 20 December 2004 in Yokota Air Base, Japan, to a Japanese mother, Mako, and an American father, Benjamin. She also has two older brothers, Zane and Kai. At the time of Kam's birth, her father had been stationed in Japan due to his work as an Air Force surgeon. Following his assignment's completion, the family moved to Alaska before eventually settling in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Sounds American to me. Born on a military base, grew up in the US, not counting early childhood.

AO isn’t even the GOAT of his generation. Crosby is better. Neither come close to the Great One or Mario. Crosby might work his way past Mr Hockey and Orr. McDavid may pass Crosby in the end.

AO was great but pretty one dimensional with limited playoff success. He is more Jagr tier.

I'll acquiesce as I am not that big of a hockey fan.

Female figure skating is irrelevent now because the Russians are essentially banned.

This is what they took from you

Good lord, she's built like a steakhouse but handles like a bistro.

I haven't actually checked but I have a sneaky suspicion a bunch of the Georgians are Russian.

Random story, I arm wrestled Tanya Harding when I was a kid. It's not like I ran into her in a restaurant, she - for some reason - was hanging out with my family for a whole weekend. I don't know why.

Well, did you win?

I did not, but my 10 y/o sister did...

Smarter to take a dive, I'd think?

It might literally be climate change. Snow and ice aren't omnipresent in most of the country during the winter months anymore.

Snow and Ice aren't omnipresent in winter because people moved south. Houston never had a snowy winter, there's just more people living there now.

  1. The Olympics viewership relies on some degree of nationalism. Nobody watches bobsledding outside of the Olympics. People only care insofar as they’re pulling for Team USA to win as many as possible. Less nationalism=less care
  2. Social media and infinite entertainment options means nothing can ever achieve the cultural omnipresence of things before social media’s explosion. I don’t think there will ever be another Harry Potter.
  3. The athletes are too transparently mercenary. Why was Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian guy playing for Team USA basketball in the Olympics? Because the NBA is in the USA so he lives here for work and would never get a gold solo-carrying Cameroon. Hard to have national pride when Team USA is just a collection of international athletes we paid for.

Because the NBA is in the USA so he lives here for work and would never get a gold solo-carrying Cameroon.

For individual sports, this sometimes goes the other way: many sports cap athletes per country, so you sometimes see athletes that would miss a big national team fly the flag of an alternate citizenship despite training elsewhere just to make it to the competition.

Social media and infinite entertainment options means nothing can ever achieve the cultural omnipresence of things before social media’s explosion. I don’t think there will ever be another Harry Potter.

Correct, and I unapologetically, nostalgically miss this.

I remember how universal things like the Super Bowl, New Year's Eve Ball Drop, State of the Union Address, certain movies (Titanic), and even big T.V. show events (Friends finale) were. It didn't matter if they were high art or "actually good" or not, it was that they acted as a sort of social-cultural barometric calibration. If you weren't talking about Britney Spear's 2001 Superbowl half time show at the water cooler (or in homeroom at school) the next day, you were an out of touch loser. You could shit on it, that was fine, but strolling in and going "Did you see that the Mongolian congress had a meeting while sitting on horses?" was a hanging offense.

Again, I'll admit nostalgia. It just seemed like for these short moments a few times a year, there was a big pause on the randomness of individual hive life and a singular orientation to whatever the "thing" was. People also consumed it fully in real time. No one would watch the State of The Union via live tweets, they'd just watch the damn speech. No live blogging, streaming, or video of people watching what everyone else was watching (watch parties).

I remember how universal things like the Super Bowl, New Year's Eve Ball Drop, State of the Union Address, certain movies (Titanic), and even big T.V. show events (Friends finale) were. It didn't matter if they were high art or "actually good" or not, it was that they acted as a sort of social-cultural barometric calibration. If you weren't talking about Britney Spear's 2001 Superbowl half time show at the water cooler (or in homeroom at school) the next day, you were an out of touch loser. You could shit on it, that was fine, but strolling in and going "Did you see that the Mongolian congress had a meeting while sitting on horses?" was a hanging offense.

Yeah, it used to be that television sets had 2 dials - the upper dial with 3-5 main channels; and the lower dial which was a sort of ghetto of alternative programming. With a setup like that it's easy to see how there were a lot of programs watched by (seemingly) nearly everyone.

From "The Refragmentation" by Paul Graham:

The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for most of the 20th. By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind writes, "the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations."

For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market there wasn't much to differentiate them.

One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists. The programs that the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive, whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.

And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync. [6]

In a way mid-century TV culture was good. The view it gave of the world was like you'd find in a children's book, and it probably had something of the effect that (parents hope) children's books have in making people behave better. But, like children's books, TV was also misleading. Dangerously misleading, for adults. In his autobiography, Robert MacNeil talks of seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can't show these to families while they're having dinner.

I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidence than any outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap, and I stopped watching it. [7] But it wasn't just TV. It seemed like everything around me was crap. The politicians all saying the same things, the consumer brands making almost identical products with different labels stuck on to indicate how prestigious they were meant to be, the balloon-frame houses with fake "colonial" skins, the cars with several feet of gratuitous metal on each end that started to fall apart after a couple years, the "red delicious" apples that were red but only nominally apples. And in retrospect, it was crap. [8]

But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I'm sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college.

[6] I wonder how much of the decline in families eating together was due to the decline in families watching TV together afterward.

[7] I know when this happened because it was the season Dallas premiered. Everyone else was talking about what was happening on Dallas, and I had no idea what they meant.

[8] I didn't realize it till I started doing research for this essay, but the meretriciousness of the products I grew up with is a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. When companies can't compete on price, they compete on tailfins.

[9] Monroeville Mall was at the time of its completion in 1969 the largest in the country. In the late 1970s the movie Dawn of the Dead was shot there. Apparently the mall was not just the location of the movie, but its inspiration; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies. My first job was scooping ice cream in the Baskin-Robbins.

Embiid was certainly aggressively recruited by USA Basketball, and likely also by other stars and coaches, to play for the US. USA Basketball was badly embarrassed by the failure of the 2004 team, which lacked star wattage and was badly constructed, and it has since prioritizes having a truly elite team, which is honestly needed amid improving international competition.

On Embiid's end, I mean, he came to the US in like 2012 at around age 18 and was drafted one year later. I dunno if he goes back to Cameroon in the offseason, but the reality of his life for a long time has been being a US NBA player. Are you mad about Hakeem Olajuwon's Dream Team medal too?

Maybe it's different in countries with much richer traditions of winter or snow sports, but from my perspective, at least, the Winter Olympics were never culturally relevant. There is usually a cursory attempt to pretend they matter, but we all know that the real Olympics are the summer games.

Again, might be different in countries that have snow, but here, you will have a very hard time finding people who care, and it has always been that way to my recollection.

I think most of the hype was always somewhat overblown, but the media got to force feed the plebs sports culture by airing sports nobody really cared about in prime time. The era is passing mostly because with infinite choices, no one is forced to watch anymore.

These sports, such as they are, were available via streaming services at any point. Europe has her own skating championships, America has skating competitions. What ratings do they get outside of the Olympics? It’s not high enough to warrent prime viewing on any major sports network. The same for skiing and curling and snowboarding. No one watches them the 3.5 years between Games. It’s just that for this one 2-week period, the mainstream TV networks are obliged by tradition to air and cover these events as if anyone was breathlessly watching for the results of Team Figure Skating or slope-style snowboarding. Not many people really do, but it was a tradition.

I think it's more that they're the kind of sports that the average person can stomach watching for a few hours once every four years. I'm watching luge right now, but I wouldn't want to watch it every week.

I come from a country that's never exactly dominating the Winter Olympics but I always felt they get a tiny fraction of the coverage of Summer.

I've previously posted on the Motte about the state-funded Swedish Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility. Recently the Committee released its second report more closely detailing the root cause of the decline – which women are not having children anymore? As before here's a link in case you know the Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-2-fran-hoga-till-sjunkande-fruktsamhetstal-hur-ser-situationen-i-sverige-ut/

The focus of this report is a lot narrower than the previous one which means there are fewer fun takeaways. Two facts stand out. There's been a lot of speculation about coupling not working, people delaying childrearing so they are unable to get that third child, et cetera, but the report doesn't bear any of these concerns out. Men and women are still moving in together, but the major driver of the decline is that there's a growing cohort in which the couple never decides to have kids. A lot of DINK-couple (Double Income, No Kids) are no longer as eager to become DICKs (Double Income, Couple o' Kids) as they used to be. This fact is concerning because I have a suspicion it has a strong potential to rapidly initiate a self-replicating demographic spiral. DINKs have more resources compared to DICKs, and if more people choose to stay DINKs then life for DICKs will probably become even harder, which in turn will lead to even fewer DICKs. I think the carrot for DICKs probably won't be enough here: society probably also needs to put a dent in the wallet of the DINKs, maybe throught some tax scheme, to encourage more childrearing.

Beyond that the report also has a few tidbits of interest here and there. The common narrative of a foreign underclass quickly and decisively outbreeding the native population isn't quite on the mark for example, as the report points out that second-generation immigrants tend to have about as many children as natives (first-generation is another story, and a large part of the very justifiable demographic anxiety in Europe). On the other hand that also means immigration cannot possibly solve the issue long term or even medium term; while many children of immigrants often learn Swedish quite poorly, commit more crimes than average and remain largely unintegrated for vast periods of time, they at least seem to take our individualistic childless culture to heart.

This is less meaty than the previous post on the subject, but I think that's enough to bring some fodder for discussion. What do you think should be done to support our DICKs? Should DINKs be made to pay to make their lives easier? Is the reports take naive on the questions of immigration and demography?

When it comes to high TFR, there are only a handful of successful interventions in the modern period:

  1. Georgia and their 'mothers blessed by the Orthodox Patriarch' thing
  2. Amish/Jewish/Islamist highly religious subpopulation
  3. Caeucescu's banning of abortion and state pro-natalism
  4. Imperial Japanese biopolitics: women have no rights

These don't seem very applicable in Sweden.

The post-WW2 Baby Boom is perhaps more plausible. But that required a cultural foundation that we don't seem to have, rising prosperity amongst the middle class... The 1950s are nearly as far away as Afghanistan or Imperial Japan.

The most realistic path is mass cloning and artificial wombs, I think. And what's even the point? Why are more people needed, from a policy point of view? A child born today will come of age in 2044. Add another 4 years of university, 2048. Is Sweden going to need infantry digging trenches? Is Sweden going to need lusty youths bringing in the harvest? Industrial proletariat in the steel mill? Is Sweden even going to need universities? No, Sweden should and will mechanize all that. Even the production of ideas will likely be mechanized by then.

For all of human history, more children in your state was usually a good thing, there was no substitute for people, especially high-quality people - Swedes have a good history of achievement and ability. I think our logic is fundamentally wrongfooted by modernity here, people will point out the high youth unemployment in China and then the low TFR... how is low TFR a problem if there aren't enough jobs for existing youth? Even if one's not a singularitarian, why are people so unwilling to look at the general trend of a declining number of legitimate jobs? We can just predict the trend will continue, right?

If Sweden really needed more children, wouldn't they have a 'firm handshake and you're in' labour market? But they don't, no Western country does, they all want a bachelor's degree minimum and plenty of interviews. There is huge demand for 140 IQ agentic innovative dynamic agile 10x engineers with great communication skills and a flourishing Linkedin... not so much for 100 IQ Sven I think.

And yet, even without all that, Sweden had nearly replacement rate fertility (both as a whole and among native Swedes, anticipating a potential objection) as recently as 2010 without any of that.

The most realistic path is mass cloning and artificial wombs, I think.

If my understanding that the real obstacle to people having children is the hedonistic opportunity cost of raising children is correct, I think there is room for a lower-tech solution: state-run nurseries/orphanages that are actually optimised for quality rather than to dump undesirables without making everyone feel too guilty about it, and a flat cash benefit on the order of 4 of the mother's yearly salaries for delivering a child to them. You could even give the biological parents dibs on adoption in the event they later change their mind.

(By not paying the same amount of upfront cash to parents who raise their own children, you (1) save money and (2) implicitly brainwash people into thinking children are valuable. Someone is willing to pay you 200k for one! Will you take the money like a poor person, or have one and keep it to broadcast to the world that you are so well-off that you don't need it?)

I read a rather persuasive essay that argued at the end that financial redistribution was largely ineffective, even counterproductive since it basically transferred money away from married men (the biggest net-taxpayers) to someone else, who might or might not have children with that money. While these men aren't raising their own families with their own money that's being taken from them...

Financial tweaks don't have a good track record, Niger and Mali or Yemen don't need these tricks to enjoy high fertility. Really, it's about culture rather than financial incentives.

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but there's a video doing the rounds of a woman who didn't want kids changing her mind after being exposed to a baby. The government may want to consider this type of exposure in any final year sex ed/home economics programs in high school.

Basically the theory is that people (women) don't want kids because they aren't exposed to babies and young children in a childcare environment. They don't really have a trigger for their childbearing instincts. Not sure if the various European governments tried this in their studies.

The government may want to consider this type of exposure in any final year sex ed/home economics programs in high school.

Yes, but if they did that then the rate of teen pregnancy would increase. Since we axiomatically believe that's bad because reasons, this would be detrimental to that and the overall graduation rate, so the notion those metrics dropping is a Bad Thing would have to go away first.

Less kids means higher taxes on working aged people to pay for retirements. All one needs to do to properly apportion the costs to those that cause them is to raise taxes and give a tax break to those with kids. If you're footing the bill to bring in someone to pay for your retirement on average then you gotta contribute enough to pay for your own. pretty simple. Someone with a TFR of 0 should be paying roughly twice the redistribution portion of the tax bill(excluding more fixed costs like military spending that don't really figure into the per capita societal upkeep). I wouldn't consider this punitive or coercive, just making people internalize their externalities.

I wouldn't consider this punitive or coercive, just making people internalize their externalities.

Sure, I'll internalize it further by voting to remove funding from Grandma because the boomer's couldn't save a 401k like the rest of the following generations and couldn't not blood-let the economy either.

Sure, that'd reduce the redistributive tax burden and proportional reduce the difference expect from those producing the next generation and they who must contribute in other ways. Still there are many other ways you implicitly free ride on the parents. Even in ancapistan where you've hoarded capital, durable goods and gold for your retirement when it comes to you needing to exchange those things for youthful labor you are depending on someone to have brought that youthful labor into existence. One could probably come up with a fancy financial product to have parents paid now as some kind of royalty for future labor of their offspring by anyone who expects to benefit from it, but that simplifies to a general transfer.

I wouldn't consider this punitive or coercive, just making people internalize their externalities.

To misquote Lincoln, you might consider a tail to be a leg, but that don't make it so.

If it's punitive or coercive it's only so in the way all taxes are, and less so because it more fittingly distributes fruits amongst those who planted fruit trees. Society needs a next generation to survive no less than it needs a military to survive. And at war if you're spared the draft you'll still need to pay for the tools our brave soldiers use to maintain your society.

Everyone claims their punitive, coercive, redistributive tax is somehow more fitting than the ones they don't like. Still doesn't make it so. You're not proposing to tax the childless to pay for their own retirements (nor even pretending to do so the way FICA does); you're straight up proposing to tax them to pay for the other people's children. Of course the effect this can have is limited; as with any sin tax, if it actually reduces the sin it also reduces the tax base.

as with any sin tax, if it actually reduces the sin it also reduces the tax base.

With this one, at least, that problem is self correcting long term, as the children had form the tax base.

Everyone claims their punitive, coercive, redistributive tax is somehow more fitting than the ones they don't like.

Is military spending punitive and coercive?

You're not proposing to tax the childless to pay for their own retirements [...] you're straight up proposing to tax them to pay for the other people's children.

These are the same thing. The parent's children are who will perform labor necessary for childless retirement. I'm not saying people should subsidize the life choices of people who selfishly want to be parents, I'm saying in your own self interest you need them to be parents, it's a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a demographically collapsed society just like funding the military is a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a conquered society.

Of course the effect this can have is limited; as with any sin tax, if it actually reduces the sin it also reduces the tax base.

I'm not framing this as a Pigouvian tax, but if you insist it is one then to the degree it shrinks the subsidy it is a pareto improvement, not a self defeat.

These are the same thing. The parent's children are who will perform labor necessary for childless retirement.

They certainly are not the same thing. The children will naturally expect to be paid for the labor they do for the retirees (childless and otherwise). You're proposing to tax childless people to pay the parents of those children, then charge them again for the labor. Two different charges.

The market wage compensates the child. It doesn't compensate the parent for the investment. It's like a communist who sees a laborer use an expensive machine to turn $1 worth of materials into $2 worth of finished goods and demands $1 is the fair compensation. Or bemoaning that when shipping a package you must pay both for the road out of your taxes and pay the delivery company to move the package over the road. They're different payments for different services rendered, both of which are necessary for the end result.

Just have most of someone's FICA be earmarked to their parents. It shifts the framing from punitive to a benefit. More or less eliminate Social Security for people who don't have kids (maybe give them a couple hundred of dollars a month or so); if you don't have kids, you have more opportunity to earn income anyway, so you don't have an excuse not to have saved for retirement.

DINKs are already made to pay for children. They are just paying in an inefficient manner.

K-12 education costs about $11,800 per child in the USA. My Googling and back-of-the-envelope calculations get $19,000 per child in Sweden, but this surprises me because I thought we Americans were particularly pathological about overspending on education, so possibly I did something wrong.

Those numbers are cost per child in the population, not cost per student, so a per child payment (much bigger than the ones claimed downthread to have had little effect) could be tried and be revenue neutral.

K-12 education costs about $11,800 [per year] per child

I thought that seemed super inexpensive

In my eyes there is a simple explanation for dropping birth rates, which all these reports fastidiously ignore: adult life without children has continuously gotten more fun, while adult life with children has at best remained about the same, and the millennial generation is the one for which the enjoyableness of the former has finally conclusively overtaken the latter. We are in fact the first generation in the West to have completely shed the taboo on adults engaging in frivolous play outside of a handful of sanctioned categories that can be seen as healthy or the like, which I am occasionally reminded of when my mother asks me on the phone what I have been up to and I slip up and mention some game I tried whereupon she inevitably switches to a tone of anger and disgust and reminds me of my age.

If you want people to have children again, you either need to find a way to feed adults with children comparable amounts of dopamine to what is available to those without, or ban the whole spectrum of international pleasure travel (outside of boring package holidays priced so you can afford them once a year), escape rooms, hip restaurants, Tiktok trends and Steam accounts for the over-25.

I do think that there are small things that could be done on the margin that are related to the above while not being quite as drastic, but these still would require sacrifices from a people very used to having its cake and eating it too: most significantly, removing most of the relatively novel legislation that is purported to enhance the safety of children but gets in the way of the parents' dopamine acquisition, such as mandatory child seats in cars, legally required supervision, or liability for harm done to or by unsupervised children. It should be permissible once again to put five year olds on the laps of their 12 year old siblings in the back of your car, and let them roam the streets freely when the parents want a break from them, as was the case for me growing up; and if they climb a tree and fall down, or get injured in a car crash, that ought to be considered tragic but not intrinsically treated as someone's legal fault.

I think what won't work is to nag or threaten people about it. Only three kinds of people care about fertility rates: people with children, politicians, and (in the West) some political thinkers largely of the highly online "save EVROPA" type.

People with children have already made their choice. It's people who have no children who need to be reached if fertility rates are to go up.

Politicians have tried to fix fertility rates and even in very authoritarian countries have failed.

The political thinkers who care about the issue are very small in number.

This is an excellent point and a specific case of a general form problem. The same could be said about sex. Porn and masturbation can be endlessly optimized, AI, VR, devices like fleshlights. Sex with your wife or girlfriend is more or less the same as it was fifty years ago for most people unless you get into things like strap-ons and such. One is much more constrained by reality and biology, the other is much freer to endlessly optimize and improve. Learning a language or a musical instrument is mostly about as hard as it was fifty years ago (yes, apps like Duolingo and Youtube can improve this somewhat) but video-games are orders of magnitude more entertaining now. I even see it a bit with children vs puppies. We aren't genetically engineering children to be extra cute, extra docile and so forth, but we have actually done that with dogs. It's unsurprising that a certain amount of people would choose to be dog moms. Generally, real life experiences like relationships, children, skills like musical instruments or woodworking, advancement at your job, doesn't really work that differently from in the past and is often limited by real-world constraints. Especially with AI I think this will be a major life problem people have to face

unless you get into things like strap-ons and such.

Or if they get into you.

Day in the life before kids

  • wake up at 10am
  • work
  • eat out after work (-$)
  • watch vtubers (2 hours) (-$)
  • play videogames (3 hours) (-$)
  • work on your hobby of the month e.g. basketweaving, guitar, origami etc. (1 hour) (-$)
  • touch grass (1 hour)
  • stay up late doomscrolling social media (2 hours)
  • sleep

Day in the life after kids:

  • wake up at 8am
  • send the kids to daycare (-$$$$)
  • work
  • pick up the kids from daycare
  • feed the kids
  • put the kids to sleep
  • eat
  • clean up the mess the kids made
  • sleep

Well you removed vtubers so overall it seems like a giant quality improvement

The "before" is probably a little tight since you're at six hours of sleep assuming it takes an hour to get dinner. You might have to cut down to an hour or two of vidya every day. Otherwise accurate.

Speedrun some counter service fast casual slop near the office or home to get that number down.

"Day in the life before kids" rather sounds like the day in the life of an unemployed trust fund kid.

The second item is literally "work"

You can totally do all those things while having an 8 hour per day wageslave job. Of course that's assuming no overtime but there's a ton of jobs that end after 8 hours.

Yea I basically lived that life for a decade:

Woke up @11 Worked 12-815 Video games / reading / movies for 2-3 hours Worked out 11-1 somewhere in there Jerked off Sleep @2-3ish

I changed the schedule up just enough here and there with real human interaction, but 5 days a week this was me.

I can kinda see how Jim Norton jerked himself off enough to marry a tranny. Two years with mostly normal sexual thoughts now.

Some interesting plums:

Sweden has long been distinguished by high birth rates, small differences between social groups, a high level of female employment and a high degree of gender equality. The Swedish family policy model, which is based on separate taxation, income-related parental insurance and well-developed childcare, has been central and has often served as an international role model.

So, the usual "women are too educated! going to college defers fertility! careers and work depress fertility!" explanations don't hold there.

However, fertility has declined significantly since 2010. This decline reflects a global pattern among high- and middle-income countries and is not unique to Sweden.

So I would ask, what generational cohort is coming of age and getting ready to have kids in 2010? Depending on cut-off points, late Gen X (those born in 1980), early Millennials (born 1981-1985). I'm using an age range of 25-30 here as "ready to marry and have kids", which is my own personal view.

Could it be people in this particular grouping (1980-85 births) have different attitudes to life, career, marriage and children? I think it very possible. Wikipedia article on the Millennials has an entire section about "they're not getting married and having sex as much as their predecessors, this might be why":

Additionally, in 2000, 43% of those aged 18–34 were married or living with a partner, with this figure dropping to 32% in 2014. High student debt is described as one reason for continuing to live with parents, but may not be the dominant factor for this shift as the data shows the trend is stronger for those without a college education. Richard Fry, a senior economist for Pew Research said of millennials, "they're the group much more likely to live with their parents," further stating that "they're concentrating more on school, careers and work and less focused on forming new families, spouses or partners and children."

2010 is also after the 2008 economic crash, which was more or less severe/prolonged depending what country you lived in, but I imagine it had a large impact on young adults about "get an education to get a good job to ensure you have enough money for a decent life, because circumstances are risky and so you need to put your future first, before dating and marriage and babies".

The research shows that the decline is almost entirely due to fewer people having their first child. The desire to have second and third children is largely unchanged. The decline is found across all socio-economic groups and geographical areas and cannot be linked to economic deterioration or a decrease in cohabitation. Instead, it is among couples who are already cohabiting that the propensity to enter into long-term commitments – such as parenthood or marriage – has decreased.

And again, if you put off having that first child to later or never, you're not going to have second or third children. Also, cohabitation is not leading to marriage (even though it started off as 'trial marriage', that is, make sure you're both compatible before getting married) since it has now become acceptable as its own thing. I think cohabitation also, because it's not marriage even though it's nearly marriage, does put a barrier to having children for a slew of reasons ranging from economic to personal decisions.

So if everyone around you is putting off serious long-term relationships, getting married later or not at all, putting off having children or not at all, and concentrating on economic security and having a good time while at the same time contrasting how much tougher it is for you than your parents' generation, it makes it easier for you to do likewise.

At least around me, there are four broad classes of people who don't have kids. Some people are in more than one group.

  • "I can't possibly afford this"
  • "We're all going to die due to global climate change and that's not fair to my children."
  • "I or my partner is either unable to have kids or has a dangerous genetic disorder that would end up with a child being at risk of a miserable life."
  • "I don't like children."

I think all four of those cases have different solutions, and to be honest, I don't know if I know what those solutions are.

For the first case, I think several Eastern European countries have tried fairly generous tax credits to have children. I'm sure there are people here who are far more interested in this topic than I am, but if memory serves, it didn't do too much to move the needle. I vaguely recall it causing people who had two kids to consider a third, but it didn't make people who had zero kids more likely to have one.

For the second case, it's going to take a lot of work. There are a lot of variations on this - I simply used AGC as a simple example that I see a lot. Trump and the fact that every C-level executive in the country seems to be all but publicly pleasuring themselves over the idea of an impending jobpocalypse ushering in a new era of feudalism fit as well. Fundamentally, it's a problem of hope. There are an increasing number of people who have essentially zero hope that tomorrow is going to be better than today. I'm not sure how you fix that when a lot of powerful people seem to have a vested interest in keeping people scared and hopeless.

The third option is difficult. As somebody in this bucket, I hope to adopt one day. Accessible CRISPR or cheap genetic screening would also be nice.

I have no idea about the fourth option.

Money seems to work in the States but at levels the government can’t fund. >750k a year seems to have a big boost in fertility. Blue cities it seems impossible to have kids below this. 50% tax rate + expensive real estate + blue states have a bad reputation on public schools.

I think you made the simple mistake of taking those arguments seriously.

I was about to post a version of this.

There are an increasing number of people who have essentially zero hope that tomorrow is going to be better than today.

This is just online dorks. They only vaguely mean it.

For the first case, I think several Eastern European countries have tried fairly generous tax credits to have children. I'm sure there are people here who are far more interested in this topic than I am, but if memory serves, it didn't do too much to move the needle. I vaguely recall it causing people who had two kids to consider a third, but it didn't make people who had zero kids more likely to have one.

From what I've learned, it makes people have their next children quicker, but doesn't make them have more of them. Basically, it makes people switch from "we want two kids, but we can't really afford two pregnancies in a row, we need a few years of double income to rebuild our savings" to "okay, we can try for the second one".

From what I've learned, it makes people have their next children quicker, but doesn't make them have more of them

Which is not to say it isn't helpful. Moving births earlier still improves a country's demographic situation, because children born earlier will come to childbearing age earlier.

For a toy example, imagine two countries with a completed fertility rate (CFR) of exactly two, but one country has the children at ages 18 and 20, and the other has them at 38 and 40. Two parents who live to 80 in country one will have 16 great great grandchildren, while their equivalents in country two will only have four grandchildren.

I think "I don't like children." is covering a lot of ground between "I dislike being around children generally" and "I yearn to be a parent but am anxious about whether I'd be bad at it and ruin their childhoods so I won't risk it" (with mid-range options being things like "I like children fine, but there's so much more to life and they're such a time-sink - I'd rather be an uncle!").

I yearn to be a parent feels to me like it fits in the lack of hope box, rather than the don't want to box.

I'll admit that the categories are imperfect, but I think they roughly capture what I've seen. For every one aspiring fun uncles, there are at least five people who disdainfully talk about "breeders".

I yearn to be a parent feels to me like it fits in the lack of hope box, rather than the don't want to box.

Perhaps, but the way you'd phrased it seemed to be focused on people who are doomers about the world as a whole, whereas I'm talking about people with self-confidence issues/therapy-culture-induced paranoia about their personal ability to do justice by a child.

I never really believe that money is the factor. Take for example if someone walked up to me and asked me "Hey Daguerrean, why don't you buy a new car?" I suppose I would answer that money was the reason. But let's say they then asked me, "So what car would you want to buy?" Suppose I answered and on-the-spot that person cut me a check for X dollars, X being exactly the price of the car I named. So am I going to go out and buy that car? Of course not! Obviously not! Only if buying a new car is top on my list of priorities of "What I would do if I had X dollars", which presumably it isn't. Maybe I would get some repair done on my house or landscaping. Maybe I would save the X dollars because "Having 10X dollars saved" is a higher priority for me than "Having the new car". In reality, even if the car costs X and money is the reason I don't buy the car, you might have to give me 20*X dollars before I actually go out and buy that new car today. I'm not lying that cost is the reason I don't buy the new car, if the car cost $1 or I had unlimited money I would go buy it today. But it's obviously not the whole story, and a check for $X won't make me buy it.And if buying the car actually were the top of my list of financial priorities I would already have bought it as I routinely make and spend $X.

I think children work the same. I don't think people are lying, and if they had unlimited time and money they probably would have children, but I don't think we can just assume money will fix it. Even if we calculated the cost of raising a child for the first 4 years of life and gave that check to every newly married couple, I imagine the effect would be minimal. It is about the priority of having children. If having children is low priority behind vacations to Europe, new cars, bigger houses, luxury goods and cosmetic surgery then the quantity of money it would take to get them to have children would be absolutely massive. You'd have to pay for the cosmetic surgeries before the dollars had anything to do with children.

It's almost certainly true that the marginal dollar of aid wouldn't go directly to having a child. But why do you think it's going to luxury consumption? How many of their higher priorities are boring, responsible things like house repairs? How many are outright virtuous? There's some number of couples out there who are prioritizing their sick or aging parents over having their own kids.

Sure, sneer at the avocado toast. That doesn't apply to everyone.

You'd have to pay for the cosmetic surgeries before the dollars had anything to do with children.

Not necessarily. If our only option was to cut people a fully fungible check then sure that wouldn't work. But we could either have accounts that you have to spend on child associated costs, like a healthcare spending account, or more straightforwardly and better give them money if and only if they have a kid. That'd be equivalent to making the car cost $0.

There's definitely a chance that what they say is not what they believe, but I can only report on what they say. It would be interesting to come up with some kind of questioning line that could tease out any discrepancies between their word and their secret heart.

This is a surprising claim since I've read many studies pointing to reduction of fertility among the parous rather than increased childlessness as the major driver of reduced TFR.

Not calling them DICKs would be a start.

Bi-Income Trusty Child Havers?

It's just a fun acronym – lighten up, I don't mean anything by it.

I have a general political theory on the current Democratic Party that no matter what gift Trump gives them they will find a way to mess it up.

ICE has had a lot of bad vibes lately. Enter the Bad Bunny Super Bowl show. I had never heard of him before Trumps rants on the Bad Bunny being in the Super Bowl. I don’t know if he was picked by the wokes or simply the NFL trying to find away to grow the game outside the US.

I think a general view of the center-left is to be nice to immigrants (empathy) even if they are closer to economic migrants than asylum/desperate. This feels like a cooking the frog too fast type moment where the message seems to be we will replace your culture and you will like it moment. The Super Bowl to me is perhaps the American Holiday most linked to Americana and they did the event completely in Spanish. The performance was trashy with some sort of sugar plantation theme (which were never in America and most of Spanish-Speaking Americans are not sugar plantation culture).

My hope is that this has gone too far and even my liberal mother will have an issue with explicit replacement.

sugar plantation sex

I was also starting to consider Americans thoughts on what is generally referred to as LATAM which is basically anything south of the Rio Grande. Most Americans probably group them into one group even though they are distinct economically and in their ethnic makeup. I don’t think the other south of the border types would be happy with their presentation when we could have found other groups with positive cultural traits if the goal was marketing to LATAM. Maybe I am missing a group but when I think of south of the border I think there are a few broad groups.

  1. Bad Bunnies Caribbean plantation culture. Cubans though seem to have classier elements.
  2. Mostly Mexico and some other Central America. A combination of conquistadors and Amerindian mostly Aztec
  3. Brazil and the Portuguese culture.
  4. Southern Cone. Least “Latino” and as much Italian as Spanish.

If the NFL goal is to grow the game I don’t see how highlighting sugar cane field sex would be viewed as a good way to reach out. Groups from these regions only have significant presence in Miami and Puerto Rico within US territories. From what I can tell southern cone twitter hates the performance.

After viewing the performance I will rate it worse than my fears. Politically I will rate it as good for my side in the category of the wokes always find a way to ruin electoral chances for the Democrats.

Edit: Empire which America is should never degrade itself especially on the big stages. It’s actually one reason the stupid amount of money we spent on the new Fed I can understand. When Milei comes to Washington (any Leader) and signs some currency swap the building he meets with Bessent or Powell needs to loudly say Empire. In Dunk and Egg show the bad Targaryen gets it right the dragon never dies even in a puppet show. The Super Bowl is one of those stages for the US.

The revealed preference of democrat aligned factions, broadly progressives and leftists and liberals of multiple stripes, is to push for maximalist idpol to punish white men and proximates (gay white men, white women, now expanding to asians) as much as possible. From elevating Jasmine Crockett to returning to DEI bullshit in pop culture, the retreat was temporary and the weakened progressives are slithering in through the cracks hoping to entrench themselves once again. The revealed preference is obvious to everyone, but democrats lose by verbalizing it and conservatives gain by staying silent to let it be obvious to all.

I had never heard of him before Trumps rants on the Bad Bunny being in the Super Bowl.

I’m going to say something that people will think isn’t true or if it is true will make them think mean things about my wonderful fiancé: she literally cried during the halftime show. With many ‘ wtfs ‘ and ‘ where the fuck are we safe ‘ etc etc

She’s been told in her industry she needs to learn Spanish to get a promotion. Shes moved to SFL from Vermont where she was, as best as I can say it, picked on by Spanish chicas for being white and called racist by the blacks, and over the last two years I’ve made her safe enough to start seriously thinking about shifting demographics changes and what they mean for the country in our lifetime.

It was just the cherry on top for the way a certain segment of the white population (that is, the majority of the white population) get treated by minorities.

This halftime show (as well as last year) is anti white propaganda and it’s starting to make normies absolutely furious.

Not sure what, if anything, will happen but history doesn’t take kindly to minorities making the majority feel unsafe and unwelcome.

This halftime show (as well as last year) is anti white propaganda and it’s starting to make normies absolutely furious.

So what? What does it matter how furious they get, as they sit and impotently stew in their fury, doing nothing?

but history doesn’t take kindly to minorities making the majority feel unsafe and unwelcome.

Assuming whites are still the majority — plenty of people in my social circles believe we're already a minority (the "official figures" being deliberate lies from a hostile government, the actual number of illegal immigrants being at least an order of magnitude higher…).

Not everything is culture war material.

NFL ownership leans Republican. They aren't culture warring against Trump. The choice of Superbowl performer is a maximally capitalistic decision meant to increase viewership. And looks like it worked. Bad Bunny garnered the highest viewership, is generating conversation the day after and caters to an audience that might not have usually tuned in for the game.

The Superbowl halftime show has never cared for Americana, as can be seen from the last 10 Superbowl performers. It's a well known strategy too. Never pander to a captured audience. What are middle-Americans going to do ? Not watch the NFL ? Ofc not. You see this happen everywhere. European football is now trying to cater non-Europeans because Europeans are a captive audience. The locals hate it, but they won't vote with their feet. They can't.

Bad Bunny isn't some DEI choice. He was the #1 streamed artist for 5 of the last 7 years. If anything, he had to wait a lot longer than the other top artists to land a Superbowl performance.

sugar plantation sex

2026 is when you decide to be mad about the values portrayed by the artist ?

Here are the last 5 performers:

  • 2020 - Shakira / Jennifer Lopez - Columbian & Puerto Rican sexy dancers
  • 2021 - The Weeknd - Canadian (this one was great NGL)
  • 2022 - Dre / Snoop Dogg / Eminem / 50 cent - Celebrating hip hop. (Gangster culture)
  • 2023 - Rihanna - From Barbados. Opened with a song promoting kidnapping and torture (bitch better have my money) and the highlight was Rude boy (song about if a dude's dick is big enough)
  • 2024 - Usher - Sings about dancing in the club and touching privates
  • 2025 - Kendrick Lamar - about Drake not being black enough and pedo allegations

So yeah, idk what you are complaining about. The half time show has always been about spectacle and popular music. Turns out, pop music is about sex & drama because people want sex and drama. For Bad bunny, his performance was about sex and drama, but with a Puerto Rican twist. In line with with people have come to expect from the Superbowl.

The Super Bowl is one of those stages for the US.

The US mastered capitalism, and the Superbowl is its biggest performance. It represents allegiance to market forces and to the over-commercialized sellout culture it creates. In that sense, Bad Bunny is a worthy representative for what the Superbowl half-time show represents.

We have low expectations on black people and policing their behavior was complete social suicide for a while.

I don’t think for Latinos we need to set the same standards for them as blacks. And I don’t think this country can have a non-assimilated Latino population and continue to function.

There is a middle ground between appealing to Latinos and what we saw. I’ve dropped brands before over there behavior. Buds still banned. Jordan’s Nike is iconic to me and I haven’t bought from them in years. I won’t go to a NFL game but I may cut back on viewership.

NFL is surviving on gambling now. That is the main thing leading to booming revenues. My gut says the main problem with the current show is RocNation.

I don’t think this country can have a non-assimilated Latino population and continue to function.

Depends on what you mean by "function." We can probably maintain Brazilian levels of "functional" under such conditions, at least for awhile. (As a South African guest on one of the podcasts I listen to put it, the US has already become Brazil, Brazil is becoming South Africa, South Africa is becoming Haiti, and the whole chain will continue down to the inevitable outcome of Global Haiti.)

There's some nuance here.

NFL ownership doesn't select the half-time show performers. Jay-Z and his production company likely do. As the article indicates, there's some contractual language wherein the NFL, meaning the NFL front office, probably has the final say technically, but the whole operation has Jay-z's company steering it.

You're right in pointing out the low likelihood of fly-over American's not watching football for six months because of one half-time show. You're also right in that the mission for the NFL, explicitly, has been to tap into new markets. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were probably somewhat "planted" by marketing to attract young, female viewers. The recent games in Mexico and Brazil try to capture those markets.

But the culture war angle is valid. It's subtle but then not. The whole thing was in Spanish. Your "sexy dancers" of Shakira and Jennifer Lopez didn't do that. Dr. Dre, Snoop et al celebrated gangster culture, but deracinated Disney gangster culture - low riders and gold chains, not actual murder and drug running. They censored their own lyrics. Rhianna and Usher sell sex and sex sells. That's been true since, at least, the Janet Jackson fake wardrobe malfunction. The normies can deal with it - my aunts cross their arms and slap on resting bitch face when the ass shaking starts, but they don't leave the room the way Grandma may have. Kendrik Lamar was somewhat a flop because the "lore" of him and Drake was too deep for easy access during the superbowl.

Not everything is culture war material.

Do you believe that the personal is not political?

NFL ownership leans Republican.

What sort of Republican? Trump has been fighting a bitter civil war within the Republican party since the 2016 primaries, and that numerous establishment Republicans have explicitly sided with Blue Tribe in opposition to him. "But these people are Republicans" is a line that's been abused for a full decade now. Sure, this person who is voting Democrat and wants me to vote democrat and agrees with the Democrats on all major issues and has nothing for scorn for me is a "republican" because he used to be high-up in the party that took my money and gave me nothing for decades. Obviously he wants to resume that occupation, and obviously democrats would prefer that my choices are to vote for them or for someone who bends the knee every time but who they still get to call names. I have zero incentive to play along with this farce.

"The only thing stronger than hate is love" is a slogan popular among people who take pleasure from publicly contemplating the violent death of my children. I do not believe anyone is actually confused about what is going on here. Some people, even here, simply find it convenient in the moment to pretend.

What sort of Republican?

(Insert Jesse Plemins gif)

One of the more effective lines in cinema history.

"The only thing stronger than hate is love" is a slogan popular among people who take pleasure from publicly contemplating the violent death of my children

Gonna go ahead and click X to doubt

Republicans as in the majority which voted Trump into power in 2024.

That majority consists of Hispanics, disgruntled centrists, pro-business capitalists, single issue Christians, conspiracy theorists and white nationalists. Most NFL owners fall into the 'pro-business capitalists' category.

Trump-2 won the election by using the standard populist playbook of big gestures, saying little and letting the opposition self-destruct (which the democrats did splendidly). The spectacle meant there was little discussion about Trump-2 being bankrolled by an unfamiliar type of Republican. In the process, the Donroe wing (you can call them white nationalists, isolationists, iconoclasts, I don't have a clean phrase, so Donroe wing it is) took control of the White house.

Now, I believe that the Donroe wing has little public support. The polls agree with me. If the aforementioned big-tent knew that electing Trump to power meant Donroe policy-making, they might not have voted for him. In contrast, the Donroe minority acts as if their are endorsed by the entire big-tent. They aren't. In fact, I believe the opinions of the Donroe wing are repulsive to many in the big-tent.

The Donroe wing complains - "Everyone in the media hates us". It's not just the media, everyone outside their small group does hate them. It isn't propaganda, it is a reflection of reality. Republicans did not vote the Donroe wing into power. They voted for Trump2 - return of Trump 1. The Donroe wing seems to hate everything about America that doesn't fit into their limited definition of America. So the rest of America reacts accordingly. It started with hating on the excesses of woke culture. It has quickly slippery-sloped into hating on everyone who doesn't agree with them. Fuck all LGBTs. Fuck all non-Heritage Americans. Fuck all academics. Fuck all American allies. It sounds more like - "We won, we deserve this power, and you will bow to us or else we will end you."

Problem is, this is a Democracy. Arrogant over-extension gets punished. Now, there is a clear way for them to grow their power to be inline with their ego, ie. the midterms. But, The midterms giveth, and the midterms taketh away. By Nov, citizens will have had 2 full years of mask-off Donroe.

If my belief is correct, November will be a washout and Trump will become a lame-duck. If I'm wrong, Trump will retain a triple majority and I'll seriously reevaluate my impression of the US. Either ways, there is a convenient date where the rubber meets the road.

Personally, I'm glad they're going mask off. The incompetent Dems will need all the help they can get for these midterms.

sugar plantation sex

Waow

I actually liked the halftime show, I enjoy bright lights and catchy music. I like the parts where the singers dance and wear costumes. I think it's fun when the team scores a touchdown and everybody cheers or boos. And the commercials are so much fun.

I also think nobody will be talking about this in about 24 hours, maybe 48, maybe 36, at best. I'm just going to keep scrolling. Maybe tomorrow we can talk about how Clavicular just got brutally frame-mogged by a frat leader at ASU.

There have been several "based" defenses of Bad Bunny's halftime show. They seem to rely on an association with the Donroe Doctrine. My contrarian defense is different: The logic of the show accepts, implicitly, that to be an American is the highest good. We aren't tearing America down with how it's an evil slavery plantation black murder genocide colonial settler great Satan. No, America is great. I'm Bad Bunny, I'm American, I'm the country of Guatemala, I'm American too. Everybody wants to be America. The cheerleaders are all shaking their fat asses because they love being American. The sugar canes and empanadas and Puerto Rican flag are all American, it's very important you see us as American, we have to be American. America, America.

And within the logic of friend-enemy obviously this is all some sort of reconquista anti-anglo anti-conservative pro-Spanish inverse morality play, and Trump and MAGA are right to perceive this as an attack. But the attack actually says "we're American too, maybe more American than you are," which is a response to MAGA, because MAGA is running the conversation now. Trump is the most important thing in the world, we have to defeat MAGA, we have to reclaim America, we have to RESPOND.

And then, also, it's just a silly dance routine where celebrities dress up in costumes and nobody will even remember this after about five o'clock and it's dinner time and it smells like meatloaf and mashed potatoes again. Kendrick Lamar, oh yeah I remember that, yeah that's what the show was last year right?Hey did you see that Mark Carney just got brutally frame-mogged by a Trump leader at G7?

I enjoy bright lights and catchy music.

What catchy music? The guy mumbled in Spanish for 14 minutes.

The 3 seconds of Gasolina and the bit of Ricky Martin was way more catchy than the whole rest of the show.

Yeah I enjoyed the previous wave of Reggaeton and struggle to find Bad Bunny to qualify as music. There's no chorus, beat or anything it's just mumbling over a generic Latino track

I thought about mentioning the Donroe Doctrine. And I do think America should improve relationship with south of the border. I think this is more of a protectorate than we should fully merge cultures. America should remove threats to stability in the region and I guess do Noblesse Oblige. Things like remove Maduro from power. Take out drug cartels. Increased trade. It would be nice to take out the Cuban regime to give them growth. I could even see making Miami an open city as the entry way to Latam. (Adding borders around Miami but liberal on visas and US law). Encourage more US tourism to LATAM.

I also would strongly encourage the NFL not to promote BB. Because he’s a cultural degenerate who make Latins look like they are constantly in heat.

I also hate the word Latin because it feels like a catch-all term for very distinct cultures. We do it with Asian too obviously. But what the word Latin usually refers to I feel like we highlighted the worst version of Latin. Things like the Tango exists if we wanted a reach out to Latam Super Bowl. Instead we got a combination of woke + degenerate Latin combination of cultural conquest. 50% English to show a partnership.

This is the show I would put on if I wanted to inflame anti-immigrant tensions. I would make Latins look like a bunch of sex craved animals on welfare.

Basically every single halftime show in recent memory has promoted "cultural degeneracy" to quote Dirtywaterhotdog's list;

2020 - Shakira / Jennifer Lopez - Columbian & Puerto Rican sexy dancers 2021 - The Weeknd - Canadian (this one was great NGL) 2022 - Dre / Snoop Dogg / Eminem / 50 cent - Celebrating hip hop. (Gangster culture) 2023 - Rihanna - From Barbados. Opened with a song promoting kidnapping and torture (bitch better have my money) and the highlight was Rude boy (song about if a dude's dick is big enough) 2024 - Usher - Sings about dancing in the club and touching privates 2025 - Kendrick Lamar - about Drake not being black enough and pedo allegations

Also I don't think it makes Latin Americans look sex crazed. That's just straight mainstream music at this point it doesn't reflect badly on Latins because everybody listens to music like that, and even our "conservative" president is thrice married famous for banging porn starts and being an icon of 80s excess. That's America baby!

We don’t need to live like this?

Who decided that you know what the Super Bowl is missing? Simulated sex acts.

Looks like ROC Nation only has one Jew of their 7 executives. So can’t blame them too much. 7 year olds have to see simulated sex.

This still doesn’t let Bad Bunny off the hook. He could have refused this part of the show. You can say No.

We don't but it's not Bad Bunnies fault we do. America has been exporting sex, drugs and rock and roll (well hip hop now) for more than 50 years this is just who we are you can't blame the Jews everybody loves American pop music and hot girls dancing.

It's not a coincidence: All those halftime shows have been produced by Beyonce's husband.

The more you know.

I agree that it's likely going to be forgotten relatively quickly, just as, say, the French Olympics Last Supper thing is not really being talked about anymore. I think I disagree that it's of no importance, though.

It seems to me that there are going to be very few people like you who are able to put the politics aside and just try to appreciate "what's there". There is a Gaza-level information war where everyone comes in with their own priors and comes away with a totally different impression. There are very good reasons to never drop the priors when consuming cultural output these days.

The way Donald Trump won the primaries was basically by outrage-baiting the liberals.

This seems like Bad Bunny adopting the same playbook. The more Trump tweets about how horrible the halftime show was, the less he spends on issues where he can actually do damage.

Edit: Empire which America is should never degrade itself especially on the big stages.

There are important differences between Westeros and the US, though. A liberal democracy will always have to tolerate that someone is degrading the country.

The US had always a bit of its own style in displaying power. Where the USSR or China would have big military parades, the US had nothing of that sort.

A basic rule of social classes is that if you need to conspicuously advertise your class, you are not very secure in your class. A well-established member of the upper class can just buy food from a hot dog stand, because he does not need to fear being mistaken for one of their usual customers by other members of his class.

The US did not have military parades because its military power was not in doubt. It did not need to bedazzle visitors with opulent presidential palaces (the White House mostly being from an earlier era).

Also, no halftime show can match the self-degradation of the US displayed during the 2025 presidential election and the presidency which followed, where any responsible top would long have used their safe word to stop the scene. Between Biden's dementia and Trump being Trump, it definitely turned the US into laughingstock. Clinton's Oral Office sounded straightforward respectable in comparison to Trump's toddler tantrums about not getting a Nobel or Greenland. He could spend half the federal budget on rebuilding the White House out of gold and it would not change a thing in the international perception of the US.

He could spend half the federal budget on rebuilding the White House out of gold and it would not change a thing in the international perception of the US.

TBF I'm reasonably sure Trump could spend half the federal budget literally curing cancer or solving fusion energy and it would not change a thing in the international perception of the US, as long as he's still otherwise Trump.

Hopefully Trump is distracted enough he doesn't go forward with the very likely and comically stupid attack on Iran (round 2).

The US doesn't have large military parades through the capital because it doesn't have a consistent history of doing large military parades, especially outside of wartime. American military power was very much in doubt during periods of the cold war at least at much in doubt as the Soviets during various periods. No one doubted Soviet Military power for larges stretches and the parades continued every year.

He could spend half the federal budget on rebuilding the White House out of gold and it would not change a thing in the international perception of the US.

I hear this a lot, but then I see the rest of the world except for a handful of countries capitulating to American demands and quickly.

Does the laughing happen after they do what they're told or before, they quickly stop, do what they're told, say 'thank you, may I have another,' and then begin again afterwards?

Clinton's Oral Office sounded straightforward respectable

I maintain that the only people who cared about Clinton's shenanigans in his office were conservative Americans and even for them much of it was just a performative way to express their existing dislike of Clinton.

I want to call it a nothingburger because what I know about football fans is that the halftime show is their chance to take a break from the TV and get more hot dogs and beer, though I may be wrong about that.

On the other hand the headlines that the fake news are putting out like "What Gringos Might Have Missed About Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show" and "Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance redefined what it means to be an American patriot" might be indicating that the enemy really wants to cope about it.

What Gringos Might Have Missed About Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show

Slate (though they seem to have changed the title)

Like the New York Times article they reference, they assiduously fail to notice that Bad Bunny is a natural born American citizen (by statute), and that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. And they imply that conservatives don't realize it either:

To conservatives in power, Puerto Ricans are no different from any other brown or Spanish-speaking people: potential criminals one and all, here to take something from good (white) Americans.

I didn't watch the show and I wouldn't have understood a word El Conjeo Malo was saying either, but certainly I can tell Slate is pissing all over white English-speaking Americans. And conservatives.

(Yes, many conservatives don't consider Puerto Ricans to be "American" in some sense -- and in some senses they clearly are not -- but I assure you Kristi Noem knows damn well she can't deport them)

I do find this amusing:

This is a world where an anime film can win the top spot at the U.S. box office, where the highest-grossing movie of the year is Chinese, where the most-watched Netflix show of all time is Squid Game, and where the longest-reigning song No. 1 song of the past year is by a group of K-Pop demon hunters

Slate, this isn't because that white American audience doesn't exist any more. It's not Koreans who pushed Squid Game to the top, nor Demon Slayer -- those were US audiences. Why did they watch that? Indirectly, because of YOU, Slate. Or rather, the progressivism Slate represents, that took over the US creative institutions and made them produce a lot more crap, leaving wide-open opportunities for foreigners.

I don't normally watch anything related to the superbowl. I've now seen this "display". It is so bad it should be a crime against good taste. That's the reason to be against it, not any "evil globohomo wants to send eleventy gorillion migrants to our country". It's not like there aren't any good Latin dances either, some proper Tango and Cha would have been much more dignified.

To be honest I don't have any higher expectations for the Trump 250 Years of the US celebration coming up. It'll likely be just as gaudy, just from the other side of the aisle.

I've tried to get Bad Bunny a few times. I generally like previous generation Latin acts, even the pure pop like Despacito. Something about Bad Bunny just strikes me as utterly beige and easy listening, instantly forgetting each verse as it passes.

This is entirely typical for a super bowl halftime show and modern American music.

Maybe I am missing a group but when I think of south of the border I think there are a few broad groups.

  1. Bad Bunnies Caribbean plantation culture. Cubans though seem to have classier elements.
  2. Mostly Mexico and some other Central America. A combination of conquistadors and Amerindian mostly Aztec
  3. Brazil and the Portuguese culture.
  4. Southern Cone. Least “Latino” and as much Italian as Spanish.

I would split #2 into four smaller lumps:

  • Nahua Mexico
  • Mayan Mexico + Central America
  • Andean South America
  • The Guianas

Colombia and Venezuela are weird, half-Caribbean and half-Andean/half-Guaianan, respectively.

Mexico is better split as north(wealthy, white, supercatholic, weak central control) and central/south(more mixed/indigenous, syncretic, much poorer, under govt control).

Geography nerd mode activated…

North: wealthy, whiter, cowboy ranchero types, eat wheat tortillas and burritos, weak central control, rampant cartel violence. Dry and hot cactus landscapes. What American media typically represents Mexico like.

Center: highest population and the core of Mexican culture, heavy Aztec and other indigenous cultural influences, core of imperial Spanish influence, more mestizo, corn tortillas, nobody eats burritos, more state capacity and presence. High elevation valleys with cool climates and dense colonial cities in between volcanos. Looks kind of like Colorado but with more agaves.

South: much more indigenous, Mayas and Zapotec, poorer, quieter village life, less violence than the north and center, lots of culinary and cultural differences from the rest of Mexico, the center’s pine forests and cactus valleys start to grade into true tropical forests. Not only eat corn tortillas but were fashioned by the gods themselves out of corn masa.

Among your broad groups, I'd add a loose grouping of southern Central America and northern South America - Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela - as a region with a lot of crime and social instability, separate from Mexico, but also a lot of US strategic interest.

The main thing I've learned from the half time show discourse is that a significant number of people still do not seem to fully comprehend that Puerto Rico is a part of the US and has been for over a hundred years.

Even your linked comment seems to fail at this. "Hispanic people should be more outraged than Americans". These Hispanic people are Americans because Puerto Ricans are American! They are not a different group.

This feels like a cooking the frog too fast type moment where the message seems to be we will replace your culture and you will like it moment. The Super Bowl to me is perhaps the American Holiday most linked to Americana and they did the event completely in Spanish.

My hope is that this has gone too far and even my liberal mother will have an issue with explicit replacement.

He is a famous Puerto Rican celebrity, Puerto Rico is a part of the US, he is an American celebrity. And they've been part of the country since 1898, if there's some "replacement" of Puerto Ricans it was planned long long ago since McKinley.

This is also of course the result of acquiring new territories and not fully incorporating them into the rest of the system. If the US wants an expansive empire that takes over parts of South America, Greenland and Canada, which Trump seems to constantly be posturing towards, then we're gonna end up with spanish speakers, greenlandic and danish speakers, French speakers, and etc etc other languages within our borders. If Puerto Rico is part of the replacement then you should be really really worried about the president's plans with Venezuela and Gaza

I don’t think I’ve seen a single person outside of D list celebrity twitter not understand Puerto Ricans are Americans.

We don’t care that they’re Americans - we care the show is anti white racism propaganda. Literally.

We literally think that.

We don’t think Kendrick Lamar isn’t American because he’s black. We think he’s a racist piece of shit American that’s a perfect signal of what’s wrong with black America.

They not like us … not at all.

“Show us anti-white racism”

Just to be clear on one thing Bad Bunny would be considered white by most people?
Trailer Park white. With proper amount of assimilation pressure his grandkids would just be white?

I do not contest he is an American citizen. I contest that he is an any sense part of the American nation.

He doesn’t share American values. He doesn’t share American traditions. He sings in Spanish.

I wouldn’t trust that he’d fight for America if push came to shove. And if the American experiment failed, he be happy to live in PR.

Right!

This. For Trump's new coalition to work, he needs to keep at least a substantial minority of well-assimilated Hispanics onboard. This should be easy - we are talking about a demographic which are default hostile to negrolatry, left-endorsed sexual deviance, and overeducated stick-up-arse-ness; and strongly in favour of big-arse trucks and other symbols of blue-collar affluence.

"Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" is the worst possible message for this group.

I agree with @Opt-out that this could have ended up with the NFL and the pro-Hispanic left beclowning themselves, particularly if Trump had shut up and let the MSM brag about how Bad Bunny was successfully shoving Spanish-speaking culture down the NFL-watching normies throats. But MAGA doubled down and beclowned themselves even harder - starting immediately after the announcement with various MAGA accounts including Trump poasting about how Bad Bunny (a natural-born US citizen with US citizen ancestors going back a century) was not American. Bad Bunny and the NFL managed to turn down the politics to the point where Trump and Kid Rock look like the people politicising the Super Bowl, not to mention demonstrating the US right's low culture rating by putting on a mediocre alternative show. It helps that (although Bad Bunny has been outspokenly anti-Trump off the stage) the inherent politics of his act is pro-Puerto Rican independence, which has no partisan valence in mainstream America, rather than being generic-left or pro-immigration. To people who understand the difference, it was very obviously a Puerto Rican show and not a generically Hispanic show.

"Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" is the worst possible message for this group.

This is actually an open question and likely a fine balancing act. The thing about the various sorts of latinos, is they hate each other as much, and often more than, they hate whites. I went to a significantly latino HS in the burbs and there were multiple cases of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans doing real violence to each other, not just fighting but stabbings and a truck homicide right after I graduated.

Is such a play far too nuanced for anyone to actually make? Likely yes, but the reality is there. Just like the play of latinos against blacks is CLEARLY there, and usually decides elections in Dem primaries in a lot of major northern cities now.

the inherent politics of his act is pro-Puerto Rican independence

doesn't' this kind of undercut the whole, he's just as American as everyone else bit from earlier in your post? I think we had a portion of our country declare independence before and I don't quite remember what happened after but I get the impression it wasn't popular amongst the rest of the country.

Yeah, but nobody ever remembers the halftime show. It doesn’t matter.

I don’t remember ALL the times my dad was an asshole - but he’s an asshole.

Except the one Janet Jackson did.

the inherent politics of his act is pro-Puerto Rican independence

Trump could do the funniest thing by coming out in favor of puerto rican independence

Trump removed support for Puerto Rican statehood from the Republican party platform, which is a step in that direction.

Bad Bunny (a natural-born US citizen with US citizen ancestors going back a century) was not American.

Well yeah that's how that works. Just because you're an American citizen on paper doesn't mean that you are American. What does it mean to be American? Apple pie and baseball? Free speech and the American flag? Reasonable minds disagree. But Bad Bunny, clearly, feels himself to be operating in some other category, which was the whole point of his show. It's not clear he considers himself American except for rhetorical purposes. That's why when he says "God Bless America" he brings out the flag of every Latin American nation, with Puerto Rico right next to the American flag. Maybe you can redefine "American" then, redefine it to mean whatever you want, but the leftover "USian" category then exists as an object without a name, and we all know what we're talking about. It's not clear Bad Bunny considers himself to be part of that tribe.

In general I think Puerto Rican exists in this "outsider-American" category in a way other latino ethnicities don't. The Cubans in Miami are all pretty red-blooded patriots. Mexicans either wave the Mexican flag or the American. But prominent Puerto Ricans often play this weird rhetorical game where they're not Americans like us, but they're also just as American as us how dare we. If we kicked Puerto Rico out tomorrow and changed their passport names would they still be American?

No but as long as they are part of America they aren't really anything else they've never even been a country. They definitely aren't Anglo and white but they are a regional minority. Are Québécois Canadian? Puerto Ricans are different compared to other Latin American ethnicities because their homeland is part of America.

Being inclusive of Puerto Ricans, which as a characteristically magnanimous white person I am more than happy to do, should not require excluding me. Since it evidently does mean that in reality, I am now shifted to kicking Puerto Rico out of the United States.

inherent politics of his act is pro-Puerto Rican independence

That's a definitionally anti-American sentiment, so "Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" sounds like an accurate summary and the intended takeaway if your statement is true.

That's a definitionally anti-American sentiment

Only if you think America owning Puerto Rico is good for America, which people who want an all-English speaking America presumably don't.

We are in the slightly odd position that Bad Bunny and the people objecting to him agree that Puerto Rico is not America, while the people who booked him, most normie Americans who have thought about the issue, and most normie Puerto Ricans think it is. "Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" is a vote-losing message to send, and the NFL and MSM covering the Super Bowl could easily have ended up embarrassing themselves by endorsing it, but MAGA shouted louder and ended up owning said losing message.

You claim that most normie Americans think of PR as American. Do you have any evidence for that claim? I highly doubt it.

Puerto Ricans aren’t culturally Americans. Hell they have their own teams in the Olympics if memory serves.

This clapback is confusing passport with culture.

They're cultural homeland is entirely contained within America. They aren't immigrants Do you think Québécois are Canadian? They are culturally, linguistically and religiously different from Anglo Canadians as well.

And they have power in Canada. Puerto Rico is a conquered controlled land. It would be more akin to Ireland under British rule compared to modern French Canadian.

As Puerto Ricans are a part of the USA, their culture is also American culture. They are a subset.

Likewise, the IRA were British.

What is this "Britain" country that you speak of?

oof

International sporting events are generally weird: the UK competes as a single "Team GB" (and I assume implicitly Northern Ireland and overseas territories) in the Olympics, but as separate "countries" (England, Scotland, Wales) in the World Cup.

American Samoa has a far weirder political status than Puerto Rico. The US Virgin Islands also have their own Olympic team (and drive on the left).

Yeah, I have issues with the (lack of) Puerto Rican assimilation, but casually disrespecting it and treating it as a foreign country looks to me like a clear case of Republicans shooting themselves in the foot. I expect that the next time Democrats get a strong trifecta and are looking for ways to lock it in - this could easily be as soon as 2029 - Puerto Rican statehood will be a high priority, and that could easily be the killshot of the Seventh Party System.

Why should they assimilate? They are a people largely living on their homeland.

They're in US territory and I don't think we ought to give them up, so they should assimilate. Ideally we would acquire even more territory and make the people there assimilate too.

Or we could do the empire thing for real, and regularize the status of the various territories/associations (Guam, Marshall Islands, Puerto Rico, USVI, Greenland, etc). Personally I think the US would be bad at empire so I don't really suggest this.

Sorry Bad Bunny is not American. He has zero American values. He does not speak English. A technicality of a treaty giving you citizenship does not make you American.

Though as Puerto Rican he has no duty to assimilate since it was acquired land.

Maybe America shouldn't have annexed Puerto Rico then? You could deport him to his homeland but his homeland has been part of American for more than 100 years.

A technicality of a treaty giving you citizenship does not make you American.

Legally, it does.

What other definition do you propose? I know one when I see one? I think most people would have problems telling apart a Canadian who has worked in the US for a decade from a US citizen.

And what are the American values, which were shared by quasi-aristocratic Chevaliers, unruly Borderers, strict Puritans, French Southerners, German and Irish immigrants, Texan Hispanics, descendants of slaves, and so forth? I mean, besides "don't have dances with copulation movements in them"?

What other definition do you propose? I know one when I see one?

That's more or less how definitions work. Or don't work. There are very few categories that don't strain at the edges. I can play word games asking, well, what is a chair? Is a tree stump a chair? Is a hammock a chair? Is the ground a chair? Sure, no, whatever, we all know what we're talking about. We know it when we see it. See also the endless water cooler banter about whether a taco is a sandwich.

If "American" is just "paper citizen" then I guess apple pie and baseball can't be American, a warm slice of pie can't participate in abstract political arrangements. I think you can call me a sophist now. We know what we're talking about, we know it when we see it.

Bad Bunny seems very low on the list of people I consider American. I’ve deportee cases I agree with doing who are more American. One in particular I can think of who (1) filled out asylum paper; which during Biden was considered the proper process (2) said he had a job as a roofer (3) took care of his family

I definitely think we need higher standards for citizenship, but he’s trying to follow legal processes and is working to raise future Americans. Decent chance he would even bleed in a foxhole with me.

He does not speak English

He does speak English.

Sorry Bad Bunny is not American

He literally is, sorry.

He has zero American values.

If American values was necessary, then the anti capitalist and anti constitution views of the modern Republican party would be immediately disqualifying.

What would be wrong in your view with stripping American citizenship from millions of people?

Sorry, he is. From the State Department website:

Puerto Rico comes within the definition of "United States" given in section 101(a)(38) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). A person born in Puerto Rico acquires U.S. citizenship in the same way as one born in any of the 50 States.

Puerto Ricans weren't granted citizenship by treaty but through the Jones Act in 1917. You can make the argument that gaining citizenship by statute isn't the same as being entitled to citizenship under the Constitution, but by that logic you'd have to concede that John McCain and Ted Cruz aren't Americans either. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was under US jurisdiction at the time but not an incorporated territory, and Cruz was born in Canada, a foreign country. Both rely on statutes outlining the circumstances under which children of US citizens born abroad can claim US citizenship.

You are reducing American Citizenship down to the equivalent of a Costco membership.

If America isn’t a people by race then we must be a people by creed. An idea. But BB rejected all that.

What’s left is just like a membership card to Costco.

I do agree we have at a minimum a few million people today where America is neither blood nor creed. I have friends in this bucket.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t think thru the argument before going legalistic. A legal argument of being American reduces American to a Costco Membership.

No, I'm reducing American citizenship to the terms outlined in the Constitution and US law, which is the only definition that matters. What you're trying to do is introduce additional criteria that doesn't come from anywhere accept your own imagination to define American as that which conforms to your own biases of what Americans are supposed to be. Well, two can play at that game; for that matter, 200 million can play at that game, and you don't have any authority to make that determination over them. The only authority that matters in this case is that of the US government, and that is who I'll defer to on definitions of who counts as an American. You can't just invent your own definitions for things that are already well-defined because the implications make you uncomfortable.

you don't have any authority to make that determination over them

Fair, and at risk of saying not much, I'd say that it's, uh, complicated. For example, I have good friends who were born and raised Canadian citizens and who later acquired US citizenship, too.1 For several of them, (not brushing with any broader of a brush), they're basically understood to be (and would describe themselves as) "Canadian, but also with US citizenship". Are they "American"? Uh... kinda yeah? Also maybe kinda no? If you just asked them if they were "American", I think they'd say, "I'm Canadian, but I have US citizenship." Does that matter? I don't particularly take a position either way.

Different individuals among them may have different senses of it, too. Some, for example, really are effectively Canadian at heart. One guy I know discovered that one of his ancestors also had US citizenship, and found that the paperwork to go the route of attaining citizenship that way was easier for him than going through spousal immigration in order to move here with his wife.2 If it had been just as easy to do it the other way, would he have bothered? I don't know; it's a counterfactual, and lots of things can come into play over time. But he might have been perfectly happy being "Canadian citizen and US Permanent Resident" indefinitely. Does this matter? I don't know. I can vaguely see both sides.

For what it's worth, my best Puerto Rican friend would say, "I'm Puerto Rican, and oh by the way, we have American citizenship." Does that matter? Hell, I don't know.

You're obviously right that the only non-squishy way to draw lines is via citizenship, but my observation is that a lot of folks view the real world as inherently squishy.

1 - I also know at least one guy born/raised in the US. He and his wife moved to Canada for work for several years. He got Canadian citizenship, she didn't. They would explicitly say that the reason he got Canadian citizenship was just because it made dealing with a certain Canadian law regarding his line of work easier. They've lived back in the US for quite a few years now. I don't think either of them would say they're "Canadian". If you just asked them, they'd probably say that he was "American", full stop. If you went on to ask him about his time in Canada, he'd add, "...and yeah, I did get Canadian citizenship."

2 - For this particular couple, they actually moved to Canada first when they got married; she went through whatever process to be able to move up there and be married to him. I don't know if she acquired Canadian citizenship at any point. Later, when they decided they wanted to live in the US (for a particular work reason), they discovered this business about his ancestor. Where they're living and what citizenship he has is just sort of an incidental and paperwork thing to them.

A country isn’t words on paper. If they were then many countries would be America.
We can debate whether America can reject someone who wants to be America. But I think a bare minimum for considering yourself an American is whether to the best of your ability and knowledge work to improve and protect America.

For someone like Trump we may debate whether his view of America is correct. But he did bleed for America. He did risks spending the rest of his life in jail for America. He’s clearly a patriot though we can disagree on whether he methods are wrong. Do I think BB would do that for America - no.

You have aptly described the definition of legal citizenship. I am not using American as “legal citizen”. I don’t believe bad bunny even describes himself as an American.

No, I'm reducing American citizenship to the terms outlined in the Constitution and US law, which is the only definition that matters.

You're the one who brought up citizenship, which is irrelevant. OP was not talking about citizenship but affinity.

He's saying that he's not culturally American in any meaningful sense: "He has zero American values. He does not speak English."

He's a very bad American; "American" is not a value judgment. Hillary Clinton, Jay Jones, and Tyler Robinson are all Americans. Roman Polanski is an American and neither resides here nor was born here. Jeffrey Epstein and Charlie Manson were Americans.

I understand your point, but I don't know how you can conclude that Roman Polanski is American. He only lived in the US for about five years.

Ah, my mistake. Half-remembering the story I thought he got citizenship.

Old men yelling at clouds again. You just happened to watch a reggaeton show for the first time probably. The US has rap music which features girls shaking their asses, that just how it is. Puerto Rico, part of the US, happens to have the world’s biggest reggaeton star, which is a musical style where people grind on each other.

Latin America has some classy as hell music and dance. Actually a lot more so than the US does. I’ve never been in the US and seen an old couple dancing salsa outside of a cafe. We could never, lol. There’s a level of classiness in that culture we’d have a really hard time replicating here, just like we’d struggle to do so you put us up against Italy or something.

But the youth tend to listen to songs about sex. Or violence. They’re just crazy fools who like to dance with their underdeveloped PFCs to stuff that shocks stuffy older people from whatever culture. You’ve got no room to talk, being from a culture that has a moral panic every decade or so about what the kids are listening to. Most of what we consider classic Americana music was considered devil worshipper music by the conservatives of that time, and people freaking out that the Super Bowl show was too sexual has been happening for decades now. Come on, you grew up here, you knew that.

In the end, the difference is that conservatives just don’t like Spanish and get frustrated by it. Their blood pressure tends to rise if they hear Spanish on the street, pobrecitos.

I listened to Marilyn Manson as a kid.

He wasn’t showing me that his people are going to replace my own.

I also listened to Lords of Acid - they said sexy things without trying to commit genocide.

Unfuck your own country or come here (or stay here in BB’s instance) and be American - and frankly show some subservience to your betters. Note: I was born in Poland - I’m culturally American and I’m embarrassed by its state.

There’s a level of classiness in that culture we’d have a really hard time replicating here

A great way to discern if someone understands "class" or not is if they use the term "class/classy." I always think of Goodfellas and The Sopranos when one of the goombah's without a High School education says something like "She's a real classy broad. No herpes or anything. Wears the good pantyhose."

I'll take my American crassness over the $30k and $45k per capita GDP of Puerto Rico and Italy, respectively.

There’s a level of classiness in that culture we’d have a really hard time replicating here

Thought about this the other day- there's an interesting historical gap in PMC/upper-middle-and-above Universal Culture that it's almost wholly absent from any form of dance. Some might claim to appreciate lower-class entertainment, but few would participate. Salsa would be one of very few exceptions that's seen a degree of adoption, but nothing homegrown from that culture (such as it is). I'm not counting modern swing or ballroom, as they're self-consciously retro more than a vibrant live tradition.

This is because formal dance is dead (aside from the retro forms you aren't counting -- those are the proper PMC+ dance forms, but the PMC+ isn't comfortable with them except as retro) and informal dance is a peasant/prole thing.

There's West Coast Swing. Very PMC / "white". It's mostly danced to contemporary pop music and the form has changed enough that grumpy old timers at least used to complain that it barely resembles what was called WCS in the 70s / 80s (ie. it's definitely not retro).

That's actually really interesting observation. And now that you mention it I'll never be able to unsee it.

What was funny to me was watching the "liberal" normie people at the football party try to reconcile their natural distates for spanish music with their need to appear to be "good people." Brain static. My wife, presumably the most conservative woman in the room, thought it was better than the past two half-time shows.

For my part I was hanging with the kids watching one of them play Farm Simulator 25, a far more interesting use of my time than anything related to the NFL or horrible Halftime shows (I hate medleys so I always hate the halftime show).

The idea that kids are interested in farming feels refreshing and wholesome in the context of this whole debate. And, I might add there were a half dozen kids or more at this party and none of them gave two shits about football. I wonder what NFL viewership will look like in 10 years. My sense is the NFL is desperate.

Kendrick wasn't a particularly high bar to clear. I do find it kind of hilarious how the modern 'popular black American intellectual auteur's main contribution to the culture in recent years is just implying a major pop star likes teenagers

Usher better since his peak output way more fun than Bad Bunny's even if he's clearly past prime now.

The idea that kids are interested in farming feels refreshing and wholesome in the context of this whole debate

Yo I bet they’d be even more interested in farming if they saw what kind of girls hang out in the sugarcane fields

Latin America has some classy as hell music and dance. Actually a lot more so than the US does.

The U.S. has extremely classy dances in swing, contra/country dance, smooth ballroom, and other styles. You are greatly misinformed my friend, our dances just aren’t as covered in the media as Latin dances.

I'm tempted to quibble around the word classy, but I'm not sure I'd disagree with them in terms of volume. Afaict, though my latam experience is limited, they really do have a more vibrant, living dance scene. Swing and ballroom have had some resurgence but they're self-consciously retro and ime 'quirky.'

Country dance still seems to do well in actual rural areas, I don't know how well it does above that though.

Around my major US metro area, there is definitely more 'non-Latin' partner dance than the other way around in terms of actual amounts of events happening for west coast/east coast swing, blues, fusion, ballroom, tango, country swing, etc etc.

You can define "vibrant, living" how you want and get to that, but Latin definitely isn't overall more popular. In terms of swing, lindy and east coast are kind of retro branded but WCS and blues are quite modern and self consciously so.

That’s probably true. But guess I don’t think it’s as big a part of our culture as what I was comparing to in the respective cultures.

Bad Bunny is an industry plant. Latin Americans don’t actually like him, on account of him being such a mariconcito. Also, Mexicans and Cubans don’t like Puerto Ricans. No one likes Puerto Ricans really.

Bad Bunny is an industry plan

True

Latin Americans don’t actually like him,

Untrue, sadly

Untrue, sadly

I don’t believe you

Well, as far as PMC people go. Everyone above the Capricorn tropic loves him, and below normies and progressives love him, and cons don't (it's a bit more complicated than that, but it's roughly accurate).

That's the real headline: Corporate plant wows corporate drones during national corporate event.

You shouldn’t make assumption about a poster. Often times the critics actually live in the epicenters. I spend most of my time in majority Spanish speaking areas. There is no fear of Spanish. I deal with it everyday. Cone of South America twitter is very critical of being associated with Latin this way.

I was talking about the conservative reaction generally. Thats why I framed it as old men yelling at clouds and called them pobrecitos plurally! Not just old man.

Idk why the southern cone is mentioned specifically as if Chilean and Argentinian kids don’t listen to reggaeton too.

I mean I do find the performance disgusting. You can do raeggeton without looking like animals in heat and stimulating sex. Children watch the Super Bowl. You can respect the host country culture.

An interesting comparison is the half time show from 2022. This was the one with Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and a variety of other Hip Hop acts. It was, in fact, the first half time show to be centered on Hip Hop (you had had hip hop artists make appearances at previous show but all of them had retain rock or pop at their core.)

2022's show had scantily clad women gyrating and being otherwise suggestive. Much of the coreography is the wildly over-the top "look at me" motions of modern Afro American "dance." I suppose I am still struggling to acquire the taste. This has been commonplace in half time shows for a long time now.

The "gangster" image of Snoop and Dre has been continually watered down over the years. Snoop, famously, co-hosted a cooking show with a post prison Martha Stewart. Your mom probably, now, thinks "Snoop is a hoot!" Perhaps the only somewhat controversial portion was when some new rapper who's name I don't know perform his set within a church-like setting. Even then, fairly light. Most of the show centered on a kind of weird "house" that allowed Snoop, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent to move between levels. The imagery was actually somewhat minimal - people dancing, some cars, whatever. It actually was "about the music." It just depended on if you liked the music.

2022's show didn't scare the hos. Many an eye was probably rolled and I can assume that the housewives of places like Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fort Collins, Topeka, Springfield (MO), Duluth, Spokane, and Provo may have used the half time show's duration to get a jumpstart on dishes or something. A gentle shrug. Those who likes 22's show loved it - it won the emmy for best live performance that year.

2026 is a different story.

Watching the damn thing provoked a totally unexpected lever of anger in me. If a dissident-right schizo blogger posted an imaginary Super Bowl half time show that was a faithful description of the Bad Bunny show, I would've thought to myself "Sure, right, sure ... they're actually going to do the whole thing in Spanish to a shitty raggaeton beat and pretend to fuck in the middle of a plantation while waving the Puerto Rican flag in conquering triumph"

Well, that's exactly what happened. They didn't just scare the hos, they made them (me) mad.

First, totally in spanish? The two quarterbacks in the game are some of the whitest white dudes ever. You're playing in San Francisco where, despite it's nomenclature, you're more likely to hear mandarin than Spanish anywhere outside of the Mission and possibly Oakland. It's February, black history month. Black Americans, generally, use English in their day-to-day. Finally, it's Football. Not Futbol, but Football, which is the game that best exemplifies American excess, hyper-competitiveness, ruthless capitalist competition, the last remnants of chauvinistic masculinity, and fetishized violence. Why the hell are you doing the whole thing in spanish? A bi-lingual "salute to unity" sure, whatever. But the monolinguistic exclusivity of the thing throughout was perhaps the intransigent signal of replacement over integration.

To drive the point home, towards the conclusion of the show, Bad Bunny pops up with the Puerto Rican flag over one shoulder. It's not that they're hoisting the flag of triumph over a deracinated, cucked, and conquered land, it's that they're celebrating their heritage on the land of a conquered, cucked, and deracinated people. There's a difference, don't you see.

But the part that actually got to me the most was the plantation imagery. Not because of any sort of recapitulation of slavery or classim, but because of the bizarre romance around manual agricultural work. Such work was the occupation of 95% of humanity for 95% of human history. And it sucked. It was indescribably awful. "Working the fields" is about as romantic as losing most of your teeth by 35 because of poor nutrition. You wouldn't finish a day in the sugar cane fields to come home and suggestively dance with your amor because you'd be too tired and, possibly, injured to do much more than eat and fall asleep. At some point you'd probably get kicked, gored, bitten, or trampled by livestock. Fingers, toes, and perhaps an eye would be cleaved from you via a sharp edged mishap. One bad season could mean permanent poverty and, perhaps, starvation deaths for the weaker in your family / community.

This is not shit we should be idealizing. None of this was fun.

Beyond the replacement theme - which was appalling apparent throughout - this was also a "show" about "degrowth" or, more accurately, a voluntary return to mass poverty and ill health. But, hey, at least I can rut in the sugar cane fields like the other animals around me.

Chhht chhhht… This just in… Getting a live report from the motte… Conservatives now hate it when people romanticize manual labor and farm life in their music. I repeat, farm labor is now backwards, cucked, and liberal. Over.

I was thinking about this for a while. The thought struck me: How the hell did Blue Tribe get control of the Super Bowl if it's boomercons who watch football? Apparently

In August 2019, it was announced Jay-Z's company Roc Nation had entered a deal with the NFL for him and his company to produce the halftime show in the wake of his and others' backlash against the previous year's musical acts Maroon 5 and Travis Scott seen as strikebreakers to the politics around Colin Kaepernick.

In a way, that's gains made from Peak Woke era that have been kept, somehow. Colin Kaepernick's activism has been rewarded handily, as well. But I suppose even before that, American pop icons all jumped at the chance to be in the Super Bowl, since it's a national icon. And American pop culture still trends pretty heavily blue, even without Jay-Z's awful influence.

How do you get boomer conservatives to do something about this? Why do they just lay down and take it?

How do you get boomer conservatives to do something about this? Why do they just lay down and take it?

The kneeling scandal showed that people generally prefer watching and complaining to not watching. I know two people who have given up on the NFL for political reasons, but I get the impression that they weren't particularly big football fans before all of that. For most people, the personal enjoyment they get out of following a team and watching them every week is greater than whatever disgust they have for the infrequent intrusions of politics into the game, and until that changes, the NFL won't change.

This kind of attrition will only happen when the on-field product is affected, and that hasn't happened thus far. Bad Bunny's performance was 15 minutes when both teams were in the locker room. The kneeling happened before the games, and would have gone unnoticed had no one reported on it (even Kaepernick only talked about it after he was asked by a reporter). For instance, I used to watch NASCAR. I used to defend NASCAR to all the unsophisticated meatheads who told me that it wasn't a real sport and that it was less entertaining than watching paint dry. I was incredibly happy when it was gaining momentum in the mid-2000s. It went from being on TNN and ESPN to getting major network coverage, and while it was never going to come close to football, rivaling the popularity of baseball seemed a distinct possibility.

Then they decided to tinker with the format. The introduction of the Chase wasn't bad, but they kept tinkering with the format tho ensure maximum drama at the end of the season. Then they tinkered with the cars. Then drivers started getting into pro wrestling-style feuds. Then they decided to run the races in stages, and eliminate finishes under caution, and by this point my interest had eroded to the point that I had no idea what was going on. My father still watches religiously and defends almost every decision NASCAR makes. Yet when I go over there on Sundays and watch the end of a race with him I comment that the leader is too far ahead to allow the race to finish, so mum better be prepared to delay dinner for the inevitable caution, to which my father responds that that won't happen, only for there to inevitable be a crash and a green-white-checker finish. Every fucking time.

But I digress. Conservatives actively hating the NFL isn't going to do anything to change the NFL, because hating the NFL requires one to actually care about the NFL. And the NFL still makes money. For conservative ire to actually hurt the NFL it would have to be so pervasive that conservatives not only give up on it, but don't even care if it comes back. What we have now is akin to performatively breaking up with your girlfriend over some minor disagreement, but still taking her calls even though nothing has changed. I watched the Super Bowl with a lot of people who complained about the Bad Bunny performance and acted like they were owed another halftime show. But if they really cared that much they would have just stayed home and watched something else.

But if they really cared that much they would have just stayed home and watched something else.

I stayed home and read a book (and I would like to go back to not knowing who Bad Bunny is). The odds are 0% of enough NFL-watchers doing something similar to make the NFL change in some way, so as you say, the complaints and the dedicated watching will both continue.

How do you get boomer conservatives to do something about this? Why do they just lay down and take it?

Laying down and taking it is kind of a distinguishing characteristic of boomercons.

How do you get boomer conservatives to do something about this? Why do they just lay down and take it?

The answer is that they've defected to college football.

While the superbowl halftime show was ... what it was ... Fernando Mendoza was THE darling of this year's College Football season. He's a devout Christian who talks like a Corporate PR executive. He has a Linkedin with the following lede for his bio (I am not making this up);

Process-driven and detail-oriented leader studying Business Administration at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business after graduating from UC Berkeley in three years. As a quarterback for Indiana Football, I apply a strong foundation in leadership, time management, and communication to excel both on and off the field.

"I apply time management principles to going 16-0 and stomping the shit out of elite CFB programs" is fucking epic hypernormie conservative slop. God bless this man.

More broadly, the centers of gravity for college football are still the deep south and the midwest. No New York team is anywhere near good. The California teams used to be much more formidable but due to cheating scandals and awful management at the conference level, they've fallen off. Thus, the "coast PMC" influence on college football is muted while the boomercon influence of the old confederacy and the corn-fed midwestern plains is boosted.

What's to stop college football from NFL-ifying? Well, sadly, less and less. Up until the last few years, you couldn't pay players. Athletes would pick schools based on the likelihood of winning a national championship and eventually getting drafted into the NFL. Since that rule has been changed, there's been quite the upheaval. You now have players transferring two, three, four or more times to various schools based on incentive packages. Recently, Duke university (as well as several other schools) have even sued some of their own players who have tried to transfer for breach of contract. It really is bad for college football. Still, college football teams aren't "owned" the way NFL teams are.

NFL teams have ownership in exactly the same way that companies have ownership. This is because every NFL team is pretty much a for profit company (the Greenbay Packers are weird but function the same out of necessity). The NFL owners absolutely control the league. Their interests are first, foremost, and final. The commissioner, currently Roger Goodell, makes far more than almost every player in the NFL because he has learned that keeping the owners happy is his best move. And the best way to keep the owners happy is to make a shit load of money for them.

In the past ten years, the average valuation of an NFL franchise has doubled. In no small part, this is because of Goodell's efforts to market and merchandise the league, length the schedule, and, importantly, have the NFL dominate viewership rankings. There is now an entire media and marketing team inside the NFL dedicated to expanding female viewership. Remember, the league has zero female players and zero female head coaches. The much covered relationship between Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chief's Tight End, Travis Kelce, was seen, by many, to be a deliberate PR orchestration to drive female viewership.

The next market frontier is with spanish speakers. There have been one or two regular season games in Mexico for many years. In fact the highest scoring regular season game in NFL history was supposed to be played in Mexico but was moved to Los Angeles after it was determined that the field had been maintained by a bunch of damn Mexicans. The NFL has now scheduled games in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

The point is that the NFL is a full fledged market and responds to incentives just like any other market. There is no loyalty, there is no tradition, there is profit and there is loss.

College football, at the FBS level (the highest), still supports 130 teams (the NFL is 32). Some of these programs have been around since the 19th century. Being - for now, at least - still associated with colleges and universities, there is a strong sense of tradition, place, and rootedness in the teams themselves if not the players. While money is absolutely a concern in college football, it is much more of an imperfect and in fact inefficient market. Will it inevitably crumble to market forces as money floods into it? Time will tell.

Sports franchise prices are skyrocketing due to the two speed economy and difficulty of large advertisers spending on any other monoculture. Most sports leagues that aren't actively hemorrhaging are getting massive appreciation of teams.

I'm not sure what your point is?

If you're saying Goodell has nothing to do with it and that the rising tide is lifting all boats, then I need you to account for why the NFL is kicking the shit out of every other major sports organization in the world in terms of valuation.

The only metric that counter this narrative is percentage (so, relative, not absolute) growth of NBA teams values over the past decade. But that counternarrative is it self countered by the fact that The NBA is seeing a decline in viewership. Tech billionaires are propping up the California Teams, but your median American sports fan is watching football, baseball, and hockey.

Fantasy Football and gambling. The once a week format and only 17 weeks a year allows Fantasy football to work really well. Probably the same for gambling. It feels too degenerate to gamble every day.

My NFL viewership would fall 75% without fantasy which is just a great way to stay in touch with old friends

There is no loyalty, there is no tradition, there is profit and there is loss.

Honestly, this seems to be the number one political realization for me lately. Everything I blame on liberals or communists or progressives or whoever can often be boiled down to simple economics, capitalism running totally out of control. Immigration is generally what I relate that with. Economic incentives for bringing in foreigners who are willing to work for pennies should be obvious, and it's a pill that almost every wealthy capitalist society with a labor differential is swallowing. So it is unsurprising to me that football is exactly the same way.

I think problems stemming from capitalism are going to be hard to solve from a conservative point of view. Admit that capitalism causes it and you're giving ground to the communists.

Everything I blame on liberals or communists or progressives or whoever can often be boiled down to simple economics, capitalism running totally out of control.

No, it's not. That's an excuse. They'll claim they're doing things for money when they're actually doing it for politics. Hard to say with Bad Bunny, but when they were making female Ghostbusters and cancelling Roseanne and Cops, it was quite clear.

I'd disagree.

Capitalism has been the most effective tool in history to make the material lives of humans - all of them - demonstrably and unequivocally better. Climate control, cheap indoor plumbing, and internal combustion engines mean that the basic standard of living in the west has outpaced that of royalty not three hundred years ago.

I'd say that most of the "problems of capitalism" are bad feedback loops from efforts to solve the "problems of capitalism." Since you brought up immigration, it makes sense to link to a previous comment.

Capitalism seeking to drive down the prices of labor isn't bad on its own. People can choose to change their skillset, their industry focus, what have you. Immigrants, even low skilled ones, can perhaps improve their lives through immigration because of disparities in national wealth. It can be a positive sum game for all involved.

But then the regulations and legislation enter the system and fuck everything up. Illegal immigrants work for under the table cash and therefore outcompete native born labor that desires to work in a pro-social and citizen-responsible manner (i.e. reporting income appropriately). If they, the natives, do that, however, they are no longer price competitive - but not because of a market mechanism! It's because of an illegal and anti-social defection from the established norms and rules of the market.

Likewise with social safety net programs. For someone who desires to be pro-social and not explot the system, they may use whatever program during periods of unemployment or if there's a serious chronic medical issue. Others will simply falsify records and enjoy free money (something something Somali daycares in minnesota). Then there's perverse incentives -- maybe I do actually have a fucked up back and can only work for 20 hours a week. But, wait, if I do, I might lose my disability. So, instead of sort of 50/50ing it, I just double down on disability payments - and "new" symptoms - to close the gap. It's a shitty existence, but the government won't allow me to supplement my benefits with honest work. People respond to incentives.

I hear you when you're saying you're mad about capitalism. The point I'm trying to make is that what we currently have is a misshapen low-fidelity imitation of capitalism that allows for social defection without punishing it, rent seeking, and regulatory capture. PMC striving and credentialism are reflections of that. Parasitic client-party relationships between illegal and legal immigrants and various democratic statist organizations are the worst reflections of that.

If you're an NFL player, however, you've seen your earnings explode over the last ten years. Owners as well. Fans have received more games with more parity between teams - gone are the days of laugher blowouts. As a football fan, if you couldn't tell, I'll stomach a Viva La Revolucion superbowl half time show because I know none of that shit is going to show up next fall during week six during an important home game. The overall product of football is better across the board; for players, owners, and customers (fans). The capitalist market is working. Does it have any cultural or traditional loyalty? No, and I'd argue that's a good thing. If we start mixing markets and culture, we start looking Chinese in a hurry.

I kind of regret that I wrote "there is no loyalty, there is no tradition, there is only profit and loss." It's way too heavy and blackpilly. An accurate reframing would be "there is no good old boys club, there is no secret handshake anymore, all that matters is how you perform." A bit brutal, sure, but that means the door is open in ways it previously wasn't.

Wall Street and Big Law are famous for mostly hiring from the "prestigious" schools. And that has made them horribly non-innovative and brittle institutions who only continue to exist because of regulatory capture. The big tech firms, although they did have preferences for Stanford/MIT CS grads, are (were?) famous for also hiring kids from weird less-than-awesome schools if they had a cool GitHub repo, or built an app with their friends. For a while there was even a hack of doing something like ycombinator, not really caring about winning the startup race, but just getting the ability to get to San Francisco, network and demonstrate competence, and then get hired. That dried up after it caused too much lack of faith in new ycombinator founders - who need to be laser focused on giga-hype, fraud, and graft building the technologies of tomorrow.

TLDR: Capitalism is as good as you long as you let it be. The more you fuck with it, the less capitalism you have and the more you prevent the fruit of it from ripening.

I don't think oats is saying he hates capitalism, more that he's saying that capitalism has seemingly learned that being partisan can also be profitable. The left is more likely to make purchasing decisions based on politics. Thus the "free market" party is ill-equipped to handle it, because the bean counters are telling everyone to charge full steam ahead.

Though as an aside, I think "What if we brought down wages and benefits so citizens can compete with immigrants" is on par with "What if we made all the farmers become factory workers?"

I'm not saying we should bring down wages. We should let the market determine the effective wage.

But we should be far, far, far more aggressive in prosecuting tax cheats and outright illegal employment. Because, right now, working a modest W-2 job (i.e. less than median household income) is literally a suckers game.

I think problems stemming from capitalism are going to be hard to solve from a conservative point of view. Admit that capitalism causes it and you're giving ground to the communists.

There's a nationalist-shaped hole in the discourse since WWII.

But the part that actually got to me the most was the plantation imagery. Not because of any sort of recapitulation of slavery or classim, but because of the bizarre romance around manual agricultural work. Such work was the occupation of 95% of humanity for 95% of human history. And it sucked. It was indescribably awful.

Agreed. I would like to add that while subsistence farming is quite bad, sugar cane is even worse from the implications. It is not a staple food, but a luxury item for trade (in the forms of sugar and rum), generally overseas. If you are searching for the perfect image of evil exploitative European colonialism, you could do worse than a cane plantation.

The chances that a manual plantation worker will make a decent fraction of the profits from these goods is basically nil. Either they are enslaved, or they are part of a large pool of unskilled labor and thus easily replaced if they get any ideas about striking, or if they hack off half their ankle by accident.

So picking that as a theme for a show seems to be in somewhat poor taste, just like 'underage slum sex work' would be a branch of Latin American economy you would not want to use to celebrate your country.

I'm also now realizing that if you transported, say, James H. Hammond to 2026, he'd view the halftime show and remark, "A-ha, just as I suspected! These mulattoes are full of whimsy and joy at their condition! Look how they dance about the cane fields, indulging their naturally libidinous inclinations. Why, in any other method of employ, they would find the routine stifling and quickly succumb to melancholy!"

EBT Sign

Yes that’s even more schizo right wing dissident blogger imagination they decided to include.

I hadn't seen that. The large bodega facade, nonetheless, did contribute to the feeling that this was "a salute to poverty!"

You wouldn't finish a day in the sugar cane fields to come home and suggestively dance with your amor because you'd be too tired and, possibly, injured to do much more than eat and fall asleep

On the other hand, the Amish fuck like rabbits.

Farming in temperate climates is dramatically different from farming in the subtropics and tropics. When you don’t have winter, your growth cycles never really end. A well-run plantation would have fields constantly ready for harvest.

A temperate farm has busy spring planting, summer is mostly tending fields waiting for growth, then harvest. Fall to prep and winterize the fields. The Amish will have two months of twelve hour days per year, For most of the year, there would be a few hours per day on field work, some on livestock and various maintenance tasks, and Winter is basically off entirely.

The Amish also have a huge variety of tasks to work on. Animal husbandry, carpentry, forestry, etc. Even the field work varies based on time of year. If you are working a cane plantation, you probably have a few tasks that you do all day every day for most of your life. If the rigors of the manual labor don’t get you, the repetitive nature of the work will.

And, at the end of the day, being Amish is voluntary. Those who don’t enjoy the life leave. Historically, that wasn’t really an option for the workers on cane plantations, either due to outright slavery or the lack of financial means to leave the islands.

Eh, having subtropical/tropical farmers in the family rather recently, theres definitely defined growing seasons and fallow fields. It’s just dictated by rainfall more than temperature. Sugar, rice, sweet potatoes and cotton grow at defined times of year and there’s still a busy and a slow season.

Would be interested if you have something unique regrading the halftime show to report from your greater Acadian networks, @hydroacetylene. If there's nothing there, no worries, but you often have perspective into a subculture that is somewhat opaque.

I didn't watch the halftime show, and nobody I know paid attention to it. Just countersignaling the idea that there's no seasonality in sugar farming.

Do they, or do they just never use contraception?

Having worked for some Amish families for a while, I'm going to say both.

You're not wrong. There was some subtext here.

The Amish, and anyone who's actually grown up in an agrarian society, are acclimated to that life. I was suggesting that the idea that your average western worker, who is used to air conditioning and seating, would, if forced to revert to agricultural work, face a horrific transition period.

Well, that's exactly what happened. They didn't just scare the hos, they made them (me) mad.

Not to be an asshole, but if you're here I'm not sure you qualify as one of the hos.

You can be a bro though.

I generally find the positioning of 'our home cultures are super cool and we love them' but 'also we need to be let in to join your non-culture of boringness' to be pretty contradictory and confusing. Nobody at ICE or in MAGA is saying that you can't go do Hispanic activities in your country of origin, that's not a way of life that needs protection against them.

Nobody at ICE or in MAGA is saying that you can't go do Hispanic activities in your country of origin

Bad Bunny's country of origin is the United States of America. Donald Trump (who I hope we can agree counts as MAGA) certainly seemed to be objecting to him doing Hispanic activities in his country of origin when he endorsed TPUSA's alternative halftime show.

The United States subsidizes Puerto Rican activities to a massive degree. What more do they want?

Stop pretending not to understand what people mean. Puerto Rico legally is an American territory but it isn’t culturally America (and they’ve had many complaints about being not their own country). Super Bowl is culturally America. Bad Bunny was representing a defiance towards America notwithstanding that technically his “country” is controlled by the U.S.

Nobody is misunderstanding you. You're just trying to argue why God says you should do X to an atheist. They reject the framework of the argument.

And for that matter, I reject it too. I think this is the right's equivalent of trans ideology. "You see, there's a literal meaning but also a spiritual meaning that involves conforming to a bunch of stereotypes."

No. Trans people took a defined word rooted in biology and tried to redefine it.

If you asked someone say 5 years to define an American how many would say:

  1. Supports PR independence

  2. Speaks Spanish, not English

  3. Routinely complains about America.

These are about the exact opposite of what most people would think of when you conjure up an American. In fact, I’d say the one claiming that the people above are American are more like trans folk claiming biological reality is immaterial.

But to really test your point, imagine two U.S. citizens have a baby and live in say Israel. And that baby grows up and married someone who similarly was born to two U.S. citizens yet lived in Israel his or her whole life. That new couple had a baby.

Legally the grandchild could be a U.S. citizen. But the child is in no way American.

This is a bit of a toy example but it is trying to separate out “Americanness” from “legal status.”

Trans people took a defined word rooted in biology and tried to redefine it.

Yes, and "American" is rooted in citizenship. Citizenship is pretty objective and unambiguous.

If you asked someone say 5 years to define an American how many would say

  1. America itself keeps PR at arm's length with a half-assed quasi-status. Adding to that, we literally had a war to force to people who didn't want to call themselves American to do so anyway.

  2. English speaking is recommended, but not a requirement.

  3. "Routinely complains about America." So literally everyone on this forum?

But to really test your point, imagine two U.S. citizens have a baby and live in say Israel. And that baby grows up and married someone who similarly was born to two U.S. citizens yet lived in Israel his or her whole life. That new couple had a baby.

Let's test the opposite. Imagine a mother has baby right before crossing the border. The baby grows up to be the most stereotypical American you can imagine. Loves hot dogs and football, and cries during the national anthem. Is that child American? Many here would say "I don't care about any of that, deport his ass immediately." Hell, even if he was born on this side of the border and legally a citizen, many here argue the law should be changed so he isn't.

This is a bit of a toy example but it is trying to separate out “Americanness” from “legal status.”

And "Americanness" is nothing but a vague and arbitrary touchy-feely crap. You're entitled to believe it, but it has no actual meaning outside your head.

What do you think the post I was responding to meant, if I didn't understand it?

Under normal circumstances, that post would mean that nobody objected to Latin Americans "doing Hispanic activities" (whatever that means, but presumably including singing Spanish-language pop music) in their own countries, which is fine, but has nothing to do with a thread about a Puerto Rican-themed Super Bowl show sung by Americans in America. Either the post I was responding to is off-topic, or it is ignorant (if the poaster was not aware that Puerto Rico is part of the US), or it is racist (if the poaster was aware that Puerto Rico is part of the US, but nevertheless thinks that a Puerto Rican has a "country of origin" elsewhere to return to). Forum rules prohibit me speculating as to which, but my response is on point in all three cases.

Perhaps people who can't say what they mean should shut up. If what aldomilyar meant is "I support Puerto Rican independence because they don't speak English" he is free to say so. For what it's worth, Bad Bunny agrees with him, although a majority of Puerto Ricans don't.

Bad Bunny was representing a defiance towards America

This is clearly false, given what happened on stage. I can absolutely imagine that the NFL intended Bad Bunny to be a celebration of a particular vision of what America should be that is widely held by the Blue Tribe and rejected by the Red Tribe, and which Reds might therefore consider "defiant towards America". But the show Bad Bunny performed was a celebration of Puerto Rican culture with as little politics as possible given the existence of a culture war that Puerto Ricans didn't start.

Do you know that Puerto Rico has their own parallel tax system? General federal income tax doesn’t apply to them. You keep harping on this concept that because PR is a territory of the U.S. it is just like any other area of the U.S.

It isn’t. It’s different. It is a possession of the U.S. And the people there have a foreign culture to the central American culture.

IIRC Bad Bunny made some comments about not touring in the US for political reasons (ICE) right before the halftime show selection was announced. I'm still not quite sure what to make of that, but the actual show didn't exactly lean strongly into the direction of those comments either.

Yes - I was surprised how well Bad Bunny and the NFL pulled off the "No politics here - this is just a celebration of Puerto Rico's glorious Puerto Riconess." I can't remember the last time the establishment left had an opportunity to go full wokestupid in public and managed to avoid taking it.

I was surprised how well Bad Bunny and the NFL pulled off the "No politics here["]

And I am surprised that you believe this.

To review;

  1. The entire performance was in Spanish.
  2. Bad Bunny's definition of "America" included nearly every country in the western hemisphere (including Canada).
  3. The headlining surprise act was Lady Gaga, an OG, before-it-was-cool wokester, and LGBTQ and trans ideologue.
  4. Sugar plantation simulated field hand sex. Including the gay sex.

No, Bad Bunny didn't say anything like "fuck ICE" at the end. But to say this wasn't overtly political is to, again, pretend like you don't understand.

White American monoculture is dead; it's split in half along partisan lines and both halves want the other slaughtered and subjugated. I have nothing in common with Bad Bunny but I hardly have more in common with the average Democrat.

I watched the game and halftime show at a local watering hole. A pale skinned, red haired young woman with a name equivalent to "Erin McHibernian" was omg-ee-ing with her friend during the halftime show and giggling, "I can't be that girl who gets up and starts dancing to Bah Bunay but I want toooo"

Indeed, I have nothing in common with these people.

My intuition is that the Internet (The Algorithm, The Feed) killed monoculture dead, and partisanship is, if anything, somewhere between a scavenger feeding on its corpse and the attempts of the cleaved pieces to cling to some minimal signs of life independently.

I see slight signs of effort to re-form the scattered pieces, but I'm not holding my breath.

It was defiantly anti assimilation and pro replacement. It is really hard to ignore the Straussian read here.

An economic union with people who at best are indifferent is one I’m not interested in especially when we don’t need the immigrants. I like America. I like Americana. I unapologetically like things like Walt Disney World, cheeseburgers, and the Fourth of July. I love our reverence for our founding fathers and considered the founding documents incredibly thought provoking re political economy (eg Federalist and Anti Federalist Papers should be read by every high school class). I always feel something when I walk through the Mall. If I’m asked to give it up, the question is why. I’m far from convinced peculiarly we are enriched by LATAM immigration and I am very convinced whatever pecuniary benefits are not worth the cost of giving up the culture I grew up with.

I feel like reading any "message" into this is kind of missing the point. It's a marketing venture by a corporation hoping to get more business in Latin America. Maybe the fact that this half-time show exists is emblematic of something, but it's not like the small number of people who ultimately made the decision that this was the show they were going with were thinking about anything besides market growth.

I find the simultaneous "wow, this brave show sends a really necessary message to the evil Trump administration!" and "message? what message? You're imaging things" on the left fascinating, but it gets pretty tiring at this point. Marketing is extremely woke overall, PMCs overall are disproportionally as well, and the small number of people who made the decision are either likely so rich and/or far removed from any potential consequences that they can easily afford to send any message they like under the thinnest of veneers. This idea that anyone working in a corporation is automatically a dispassionate stock-maxxing robot really needs to die. They are humans, and humans are tribal and emotional. Plenty have paid much more for much less.

I find the simultaneous "wow, this brave show sends a really necessary message to the evil Trump administration!" and "message? what message? You're imaging things" on the left fascinating, but it gets pretty tiring at this point

Why do people on this forum impute that I automatically hold other left-leaning positions when I express some unrelated left-leaning opinion? I have not said the first of those statements.

I don't claim that you, personally, hold those views. I'm noting that the left overall does, and that this is a frequent tension where some part, especially media people, openly admit to doing messaging that way and considering it and unalloyed good, while another part pretends this is beyond the pale, nobody would do this. Just yesterday I read multiple articles from big media corps which considered it obvious that a message was send, and that the show was important precisely because it does so.

When exactly the people who make these kinds of decisions consider it obvious, how much sense does make to deny it? Yet, it's a common refrain, especially among the moderate left. The same goes, for example, for kids movies, where some of the writers can be found on bluesky publicly talking about how stories can be used to educate kids, and explain very well what they mean with educating, but when you critisize this there will always be some people jumping in, claiming that the entire idea is stupid, nobody would ever do this.

You just saw a show where an American citizen sang about stuff like getting drunk with his cousin for the Fourth of July, and pointed at the camera and told people stuff like you can achieve anything you dream of, believe in yourself and keep working for it. He even celebrated the family unit and marriage, having a couple get married during his show! You just didn’t realize that’s what was going on.

This just seems like purposeful misreading of my comments. Yes Bad Bunny is technically an American citizen. But he isn’t American culturally. He sings in Spanish. He views America almost like a militant LATAM.

It isn’t my America (of course Bad Bunny thinks America is everything in the new world and Americans are being narcissistic to label themselves as the only Americans). It isn’t the America I grew up in.

And I’m supposed to be happy if he replaces my America with his vision because he says people can achieve their dreams?

He's an American citizen because the US Army claimed his homeland and the American security state crushed the groups in the 60s trying to make it "not America" He's obviously not an Anglo American but Puerto Rico has been part of America longer than most modern countries have existed.

If I’m asked to give it up, the question is why

I live on the fringes of an area that is best described as described "as a tiny fortress of blue beset on all sides by an encroaching jungle of red". I rub shoulders with a lot of professors, lawyers, executives, and other PMCs who either don't know about my upbringing and cultural ties, or think I'm "one of the good ones".

There's definitely a kind fetishization, or maybe more charitably, Scott's "outgroup/fargroup" distinction. They hate the people who live outside their relatively wealthy, liberal-progressive bunker. I've seen them laughing at people dying in car accidents. I've heard them wishing for mass casualty events. I've frequently heard that COVID didn't kill enough of them. They're wildly pro-immigration though, despite that the modal immigrant has more in common with the "cousin fucking rednecks" (their words, not mine) than themselves. The thing is, they never have to interact with those immigrants. There's always a clean cut, English-speaking general contractor between them and the laborers. Their grocery stores are far enough from public transit that they never see them there. Their houses aren't anywhere near public housing, so they don't have to hear breaking bottles and polka music at 3am. To them, immigration is an unalloyed good. Heck, it might actually be a good thing, since Cletus is dealing with all of that now, and his suffering is also an unalloyed good.

Trump 1 started it, and Trump 2 finished the job: the PMC wine mom class has become about 2/3 as radicalized as the average right con voter, finally reaching striking distance of rhetorical parity.

Eg, they talk like they want unlimited jihad on the rednecks, death to all MAGots, let 10000 red camellias gracefully drop from the stem, etc. , all the shit I've been hearing from every Con that listened to too much O'Reilly and Limbaugh for the past couple decades.

I don't think people really understand how much bile civility politics was holding back; how much the Obama "They go low we go high" neolib loser meme had a choke hold on the normie dems. Them shaking of the illusion that the Right side of the Cons were playing the same game can only help them, given you can still get elected twice while being as crass and declase as Trump if you style on them enough from the podium.

They still have their fancy talking schmoozers who don't believe in anything, maybe they can get some people throwing bombs into the crowd who also don't believe in anything.

Heck, it might actually be a good thing, since Cletus is dealing with all of that now, and his suffering is also an unalloyed good.

Not unknown

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s. ... He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."

a tiny fortress of blue beset on all sides by an encroaching jungle of red

I've heard that described as 'a blueberry in tomato soup'.

The performance was trashy with some sort of sugar plantation theme (which were never in America

There was (and remains) a decent amount of sugar cane production in Louisiana, as well as a smaller amount in other southern states (Florida, Texas, Georgia). Hawaii also had a sugar crop from early Polynesians until this century, but that seems culturally distinct from Latin America.

Yeah I worked on a sugarcane farm in Florida. The whole center of the Florida peninsula from lake Okechobee down to the Everglades is a massive sugarcane plantation.

That stuff is brutal to work in. Once it gets to a certain stage of maturity it develops all these glass-like spines in the leaf margins and it loads you with spines as you walk through it.

Yeah and those only survive because of the import quota on sugar (also why HFCS is ubiquitous an American thing).


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