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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   1605 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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