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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27957 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.

Adding Argentinian twitter. Debates over whiteness. Trashy Latinos. Literally no different than America. My twitter algo updated itself and is giving me a ton of Argentina twitter since Bad Bunny. Argentina twitter

And yes watching those people and you realize 10 million could come and in 3 years they would 95% assimilated.

To the people who object to Bad Bunny's raising of the Puerto Rican flag (setting the other LatAm flags aside), would you have the same objection to a country artist waving the Texan flag? I know many Texans who have a lot of pride in their home state and like its flag, and have bumper stickers of it and such. They definitely lean into the "Republic of Texas" thing a bit, and some would probably say they're Texan first before they're American. And Texas definitely has a distinct culture within the US. I only mention it because Texas, like Puerto Rico, was once a sovereign country and is now part of the US, with the difference being that Puerto Rico is of course not a state, it's a territory. Is the dividing line between the Texas flag being ok and the Puerto Rican flag not being ok that Texas the State is inhabited not by its pre-US population, but mostly now people who are closer to descendants of "heritage" Americans? Whereas that is not the case for Puerto Rico?

The other perhaps worse but comparable case is the flying of the Confederate Flag by American Southerners, which was maybe common at country events quite a number of years ago, but I won't get into that because I'm not really under any illusion that that would be allowed at a Super Bowl half-time show now, and (probably) has never been. I believe most if not all big country artists have also stopped that sort of thing at their own concerts too.

Texas actually has higher support for independence than Puerto Rico, and has for quite some time(since the Obama admin, I believe). And the population difference is mostly due to people moving to Texas and away from Puerto Rico.

In any case Bad Bunny flying the Puerto Rican flag doesn't seem like a problem, although his variety of genuinely foreign flags are.

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.

Jill Zarin has been fired from E!‘s recently greenlit reality series The Golden Life, which is set to star a few of the original Real Housewives of New York City.

Her removal from the cast comes following comments Zarin shared about Bad Bunny‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show. The former New York Housewife shared critiques for his performance in a since-deleted video, calling it “the worst halftime show ever,” continuing to slam the show for featuring mostly Spanish songs and “no white people.”

I agree with a lot of what you say, but S FL mostly for geopolitical reasons has always been heavily Latin and Democratically we mostly decided it would be. Cold War era politics plus a natural hub to attract S American elites for the Monroe Doctrine. So it’s one of the places we had agreed would be a different culture.

Oh hey! It’s the signs of snowflakery:

  • Perpetually offended
  • In need of safe spaces
  • Apt to shut down free speech
  • Embrace culture of victimhood
  • -12

Look man, you're following a trajectory similar to most anti-right posters who take on the Motte contrarian role: you are fighting uphill and getting downvoted constantly so you become increasingly snide and condescending until we have to ban you because your entire identity is wrapped around baiting and taunting. I warn and ban righties who can't stop being smarmy condescending assholes, and I will do the same to you, and it is never about your politics. So please knock it off.

Try to internalize this.

  1. People mostly prefer environments in their native tongue. For obvious reasons
  2. The performance was not just “in Spanish”. It was culturally third worldism. Excessively sexualized. Promoting welfarism.

The latter is far more of a threat to the commons than importing LATAMS best who can maintain a high end society. If you are going to go into my pocketbook then yes I care.

Also I’m very left wing.

Also you’re taking such a bad interpretation of what I wrote that I consider it lying.

I believe you. But I can see why the other commenter assumed the worst.

From here on out, I am talking about a certain type of person on theMotte. Not you or your wife. Let's call them White-Nostalgists.

The White-Nostalgist constructs a suffocatingly narrow definition of whiteness, which few can satisfy. He then complains that white people are being replaced. I'd characterize his belief as: "To be Legacy American is to be ethnically British or German, Protestant, and embody the values of those immigrant groups circa 1900. America must restore cultural and political primacy to this group".

In 2026, this belief runs up against many unresolved incompatibilities. Given these open ends, his sharp critique of every aspect of liberal culture comes across as 'isolated demands for rigor'. Ofc some commenters here get ticked off. You were caught in the crossfire.

Some unresolved incompatibilities:

  • If 'being American is being white' because of who lived here at the nation's formation, then how do Blacks, Puerto Ricans or Hawaiians fit in ?
  • How do non-Hajnali Caucasians (Southern/Eastern European) fit in ? Sicilians, Irishmen & Jews are pretty American now. To what degree do they have claim over American culture ?
  • If those aforementioned Caucasians can be accommodated, then why not the Spanish ones? SFL's Latino demographic shift happened due to Cubans, who were overwhelmingly Spanish by ethnicity and culture.
  • If he has such fondness for Northern European culture, then why does he hate the values of post-war Northern Europe ?
  • What gives someone the right to demand cultural primacy ? Should newer citizens have fewer rights than those who've been here for long ?

There is an unfortunate undercurrent of resignation that I can't help but mention. It's possible that this person knows he's one generation too late. The demographic scales have tilted. By 2024, white births (non-hispanic white mothers) were less than 50% of new Americans. He sounds stubborn because he isn't proposing a practical strategy, he's expressing anger. Democracy is 'Tyranny of the majority' and he is on the wrong side of that saying, for good.

All you have identified is that there is a sliding scale of “whiteness”. At some point people are so far away from heritage American that it’s unlikely they will ever have descendants that will be able to fit into America and reproduce American society.

On one hand you have Elon Musks who is pure heritage American stock. My last name traces to ancient Roman nobility so I am not heritage American stock though we did conquer them for a few centuries. But I do believe I am close enough to be a functioning person in America.

You are not bringing up anything novel. These things are debated online. Research on these type of questions were suppressed for a long time. Data on these questions are coming out now and we get charts like these:

Genetic Distance Score

On one hand you have Elon Musks who is pure heritage American stock.

Did you lose part of your comment here? Or is this a joke I’m not getting? Musk is a South African immigrant…

More comments

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…).

Edit: And it's not just some of us "far-right crazies" saying we're the minority now. As Democrat Gene Wu, minority leader of the Texas House of Representatives, said in an interview a couple months ago:

"The day the Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning, because we are the majority in this country now, we have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fairer."

(Emphasis added.)

The Gene Wu thing was crazy. I thought about including it in my original posts. I did see on twitter that he was adopted by white parents but I believe that is false by google and his parents are Chinese.

Where does he get these beliefs:

  1. 80% probability. He aligned himself with the ascendant power in this era - the woke - so adopted their beliefs and is now a true believer.
  2. 20% probability. He is an actual CCP agent attempting to cause social harm in America. Likely not formally but decided to align with his people.

His thesis I believe is obviously false. Balkanization is far more likely. Blacks and browns are not going to align with Asians and Indians. All those groups moved to America because they liked what white people built even if it was just economic migration. They have little common beliefs amongst them. You end up with Newsome types or a court Jew like Jacob Frey ruling over different tribes that don’t like each other.

For the HBD people this seems to be evidence that 2nd/3rd generation immigrants escaping communism etc revert to the political systems they are genetically predisposed to.

Balkanization is far more likely.

And how did things go for the minority groups in the Balkans… and how would they have probably ended up if outside powers hadn't intervened?

Blacks and browns are not going to align with Asians and Indians.

Sure they will; the same way Genghis Khan united the warring, feuding, fractious Mongol clans: by providing a common enemy to fight… and plunder.

This is a point Steve Sailer has been reiterating for a couple decades now: that "hating whitey" is the "KKKrazy glue holding together the Coalition of the Fringes." I see no reason for it to become less effective as the white demographic shrinks… and thus becomes easier to kick around and loot.

All those groups moved to America because they liked what white people built even if it was just economic migration.

Because they liked it, or because they want to loot it?

They have little common beliefs amongst them.

But they do have the common belief that the white man is evil and screwing them over, so do they need anything more?

I keep encountering this argument, that as whites become a smaller and minority, we'll never have anything to fear; that even when we're down to 10% or less of the population, we can never face any real oppression, because the majority will be too diverse, divided, and busy fighting each other to ever do anything to us. I've encountered it here more than once.

And it's nonsense. Ahistorical nonsense.

To give the most obvious example how, apply this argument to Jews in Medieval Europe. The Teutonic Knights are fighting the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Novgorod Republic — and vice versa — and they all hate each other, so the Jews are perfectly safe. Those people are all too busy warring with each other to commit any pogroms, don't you know?

Or look at diaspora Chinese in Southeast Asia. (Read Lee on what he had to deal with in Singapore.)

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And groups that hate each other have had no problems, historically, in dishing out the abuse to minorities — especially materially-successful "middleman minority" types — they both hate.

Who would rule?

  1. Vivek type
  2. Chinese
  3. African
  4. Maduro
  5. Sheinbaum/Frey

The first three I don’t believe have ever ruled over a multicultural society. The first group has mayor of London but we are talking way more fragmented. The second Singapore would be closest example. The third never. The fourth occasionally in Mexico or Venezuela but while their people are the majority. The fifth yes they could pull it off.

Who would rule?

It doesn't matter. Power can be contested and fought over and whites looted, oppressed, pogrommed, etc.

So we have a "Vivek type" in charge of the Fuck Whitey Coalition for a few years, with the property and labor of whites expropriated to the primary benefit of high-caste Indians, then an internal power struggle puts the "African" faction in the ascendancy, and we get one of them in charge of the Fuck Whitey Coalition, and the expropriated property and labor of whites goes mostly to the blacks for a bit. Then his lack of competence puts a mestizo Hispanic in place to depose him, so now whites are being oppressed for the benefit of mestizo Hispanics. Then a Chinese guy (with quiet CCP backing) tosses him out, and now whitey is looted to benefit the Chinese. Then he dies, and the Hispanics and blacks get into a low-level civil war — with plenty of street level ethnic violence — for a bit… and both sides rob Whitey for loot to fund their conflict…

Ask the Jews how power struggles over leadership in Medieval Europe worked out for them.

Edit: and it's not like you need someone to "rule" for people to deal with murderous cannibals living among them. (See also this).

You would need to assume outside intervention for any of that to occur. S Africa could be 100% white in a fortnight if they had the will to do it and there was no threat of outside intervention. Whites don’t lose in war when united.

Whites don’t lose in war when united.

Nonsense. I mean, not even most "white supremacists" of my acquaintance think that whites are so superior that they can overcome any numerical disadvantage, no matter how huge. I mean, consider a scenario where whites have shrunk to about 100 people, against 8 billion+ non-whites — including quite a few intelligent and technologically-competent people (like the East Asians). Are you saying that so long as those hundred whites are "united," they'll triumph despite the > 80-million-to-one disparity?

And besides, as the Dreaded Jim likes to say, whites are wolves to whites. We aren't united, and we won't be united. Even when we're 5% or less of the American population.

More comments

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.

Yeah funny thing about that timing:

The NFL Super Bowl halftime show selection is a collaborative process led by the league's entertainment team and Roc Nation, which has acted as the official consultant since 2019. Jay-Z holds significant influence in choosing performers, focusing on cultural relevance, genre diversity, and massive appeal to create a "cultural moment".

You keep using the word "Always" but only referencing about 5-10 years ago. Many of us old folk have a much longer memory than that.

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.)

I agree with this and it’s basically what I meant by function.

The left prefers to say that the right “hates” immigrants. If they used the term “fear” I would agree with them. It’s not fear that they are better than me etc. it’s fear that they can not reproduce the American Civic Religion.

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.

There are often attempts to emulate American half-time entertainment for European sports (like football) for the big championships, but they never really get off the ground.

And reading all this about the Superbowl half-time show, I'm rather glad they fail. People don't tune in to the Champions League final to see people simulating sex to sultry Latin rhythms (not that I'd put it past UEFA to try that, though God alone knows what FIFA have planned for the World Cup seeing as how, like the Trinity, it is going to be three locations in one contest co-hosted by the USA, Canada and Mexico).

Okay, there is always an official World Cup song but that can be good (depending on the artist) and countries may have their own song (historically, 'sung' by the representative team, though England did up their game with Three Lions in 1996 when they were hosting the UEFA European Championship).

I don't even want to imagine what kind of awful Europop plus fake gangsta rap/hiphop dancing they'd serve up as entertainment. They do have something as pre-match entertainment, but most people don't bother watching that until the game starts. Seems like it was Linkin Park last year for the Champions League? As this article tactfully puts it:

UEFA, also inspired by the NFL's Super Bowl halftime show, has had limited success with incorporating music acts into its showpiece event.

Some broadcasters have opted not to broadcast the concerts live, choosing instead to focus on the pundits discussing the upcoming match in their studio.

EDIT: Oh, God. There's an Official World Cup Theme, to be remixed by producers in the host cities. And it's as dire as you might fear. No wonder people are trying to create fan remixes and updates of Waka Waka.

We already have the Eurovision song contest. We don’t need another one.

Combine the two! Champions League plus Eurovision! Vote for your favourites after they are the half-time show for every match, until we get to the Grand Final! 😁

I think Jay-Z is the issue. NFL if they are smart should fire him tomorrow. We have done multicultural Super Bowl shows before. We have done them without simulating sex that were family friendly. They have been done in ways that were not explicit replacement politics ideology.

Super Bowl 50 was great. Coldplay, Beyoncé, Bruno Mars (Puerto Rican). That’s a unity show of one country of different people. Coldplayshow

This show feels like it came from agitators trying to tear us apart.

Bruno Mars (Puerto Rican)

Bruno is Hawaiian

Last name Hernendez

He's Filipino - Hawaiin

Wikipedia says dad’s Puerto Rican. I guess he’s just mystery meat is you want to call it that. Regardless you can find a more Latino person for the job.

Sure, mystery meat. Damn talented mystery meat though.

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.

Which movie and which line. I'm ootl

At some point, I want to write a review of that movie, having never actually seen it beyond clips. It seems extremely obvious to me that most of its target audience badly misunderstood it, which is a shame because I think it's an amazing example of explicitly Culture War film. As with Ex Machina, though, it seems like the target audience is willfully determined to miss the point.

@me and I’ll add my two cents

When I watched it my first few thoughts were: that’s awesome, people are going to misunderstand it, people are going to be upset it didn’t pick a side because they misunderstood it

From the comments I heard about it, it's a bit of a missed opportunity, specifically because it' not a culture war film. The boogaloo, happens because reasons. What could have caused such a rift that Americans would go to war with each other is left unexplored, so I'm not sure it's even making a point that could be missed, and so people are left memeing on it.

That said, I haven't watched it either.

scratches beard “OK. What kind of Republican are you?”

“Ch-Ch-Cheney …”

“Cheney? Neocon?”

gunshot

"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

The choreography was great! The themes and story telling and politics was clever as hell even if I don't agree with it.

I could barely tell that all of his stuff was supposed to be separate songs, and it didn't translate to a live performance well.

But I hear other people talk about it and I feel like I'm missing something.

Yeah I'm perfectly fine with the Gasolina/Despacito era of Reggaeton and I've literally tried listening to Bad Bunny's Spotify top 10 before to see what I'm missing. Frankly it barely even clicks as music to me. It's not abrasive or off-putting it's just kind of a light latin rhythm and a guy mumbling against it.

I couldn't even find a decent feature spot where somebody else carries him or he just comes in for a verse. Genuinely perplexed by his popularity.

I'm like do people like this stuff?

Compare Biggie to modern rap or Livin' la Vida Loca to whatever this is.... like damn we've gone down hill.

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.

And Epstein associate if you believe the files….

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?

Unless he wins round 2 with Iran. I would have been of the opinion that sending helicopters into Venezuela sounds stupid and of course 6 helicopters versus entire Venezuela army is a lost cause. Same thing with killing Soleimani or Israel’s earlier Iran attacks. But those all worked. It feels to me like Syria under Hillary or Afghanistan under Biden were losses. I don’t know what is different with military action under Trump but it seems like the execution has been good.

No, it will still be comically stupid if he "wins" in this round of doing something ridiculous and relying on the rest of the world to be reasonable because it's unnecessary, against America's interest (but in the interest of another country), and most importantly has had the effect of shredding Trump's winning political coalition while empowering people directly opposed to his supporters leading to his cratering popularity.

His cratering popularity makes his entire agenda more difficult because other parts of government and society, especially the judiciary, is far more willing to go against the Admin (and so is the awful GOP) when it is unpopular. We've seen this since June to now with increasing fervor.

Trump can look forward to approval ratings by decent pollsters in the <40s and any bump he gets which lets him briefly float above 40 will be from more educated and coastal people who will never vote for Trump or the awful GOP.

The 2nd Iran attack will put a nail in that coalition's coffin and lead to the effective end of his presidency when he and the awful GOP get obliterated in the 2026 midterms and then his administration is impeached one by one, starting off with the laughably corrupt Noam DHS and Bondi DOJ.

What are you even calling Iran2? Before getting into a political diatribe what do you mean by that? I am only saying I trust his judgement in the region. Maybe it’s Kushner making the decisions but he has played geopolitics well especially in the ME so whatever he decides I defer to the expert.

Pulling off a Maduro style partial coup in Iran isn’t going to tank his approval. Antisemitic lefties will hate it but who cares.

Trump's middle-east policy is terrible dogshit and Trump has spent about 8 months shredding American diplomatic credibility in ways which took decades to build up. His behavior is ridiculous and it "working" relies on other countries behaving eminently reasonably in response to ridiculous American behavior. This may work once every long while, but as a repeated policy which is what Trump has now done for about 8 months, it is terrible and will lead to disaster.

An example of this is when Israel assassinated the Iranian negotiation team and Trump came out and said he at the very least knew about it. This is either a lie (which I believe it was) in which case America cannot be trusted to muzzle their dog so they don't do crazy things like kill negotiators and they lose credibility both for that and for lying or it wasn't a lie in which case America has demonstrate it, at best, will allow its dog to kill negotiators and negotiating with it is dangerous and pointless. In both scenarios shredding American diplomatic credibility.

"Iran2" refers to Trump's upcoming attack on Iran which I believe is very likely going to happen. The main reason I'm describing that as "comically stupid," (and so was the first attack) is because it is hollowing out and shredding Trump's winning political coalition.

Pulling off a Maduro style partial coup in Iran isn’t going to tank his approval.

As I said in the Maduro silliness, Trump will get a bump and then his ratings will be back to where they were except lower. And that's exactly what happened. And this is the best possible case scenario.

Antisemitic lefties will hate it but who cares.

maybe this will come as a shock to you, but there are broad parts of Trump's voters and coalition who have no interest in more wars for Israel and it doesn't matter what you call them

their current lack of support cratering Trump's popularity makes his entire agenda more difficult to accomplish and in the coming elections even if they don't vote against Trump and the awful GOP (and many will at this point) they will not show up to vote at all which means Trump and the awful GOP will lose horribly (and have been)

Ok so I don’t believe you actually expressed a reason why it’s bad. I don’t know who in the coalition it is bad for? Even the GOP antisemites are usually fine with Israel being strong if it doesn’t costs US blood or money. They are fine with Jews being in Israel from what I can tell.

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.

I wanted to keep a simple model but this is more complete. Hit the biggest groups as a framework to contrast with BB’s Latino to highlight big cultural differences.

Glad you’re saying Colombia/Venezuela is weird because they are obviously a big group and I didn’t just forget them. Nothing came to me as a classification as a distinct group other than they make cocaine here. Which is not a cultural group. I guess they are a border region between more distinct LATAM cultures. Maybe like Dallas today.

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.

What part of the show exactly was "anti-white"? He didn't get on stage singing about how white people suck, or how Hispanics are better than everyone else or anything like that.

In fact the main complaint I see around the Internet that seems to be upsetting people is really just that he sang in Spanish and victimhood culture has to interpret that as "they're trying to erase white people".

Which as I've said before if we see this as some sort of conspiracy then it both goes way back to the days of McKinley and you should be freaking the fuck out about Trump's very explicit plans to make millions of Spanish, Arabic and French speakers part of the US through his expansionist goals else maybe in 2050 you'll get some American Gazan popstar singing in Arabic at the super bowl.

He sang in Spanish at the fucking Super Bowl for 15 minutes. I know we don’t officially have a language, but it’s English - which also happens to be the world’s language.

It was also devoid of white peoke completely - the last 15 years of media has been nothing but mixed couples, dopey white guys, full on minority women, rah rah everything but what actually built and continues the flow of the country.

It’s not a conspiracy - the media has turned to this because it’s wholly populated by one political side, that of the progressive.

It’s been 15 years of white degradation and it mostly stems from white progressives, and that’s broadcasted to us and normalizes it.

On top of that, minorities are just more racist than white Americans and view themselves as our betters - even tho they can not thrive without us.

Brazil is fine - Chili is fine … but they aren’t the peak of civilization.

It was also devoid of white peoke completely

Are we ignoring Bad Bunny himself? Or are Spanish people their own race which is somehow separate from all the other European ethnic groups?

America going from all white to 80% white to soon 50% white is an unprecedented issue - Spanish people (like Puerto Ricans and Brazilians and Chileans and Mexicans) are not white. They are not culturally similar to Europeans or white Americans or Canadians and they aren’t as successful as Japanese or Koreans.

The crime alone should be enough to riot - the intelligence levels alone should be enough to riot - the lack of assimilation should be enough to riot - the loss of culture should be enough to riot - there’s so much more !

Your question implying Puerto Rico is somehow akin to Eastern Europe is absurd. They’re island people - it’s fine! They’re Americans … it should be fine but they don’t wanna really and we don’t want them really … it’s about the whole of the issue - not like some weird hyper focus on this very one time specific thing.

Spanish people (like Puerto Ricans and Brazilians and Chileans and Mexicans) are not white

I assume you don't literally believe this, unless you genuinely don't class the Spanish royal family with their blonde daughters as white (or European, a much more useful term. White is a colour, not a race or ethnicity).

I can get why you wouldn't class a Spanish-speaking mestizo whose ancestry in mostly Amerindian as European, since they're mostly not European. But what about someone like Marco Rubio? Is his 100% European DNA not 'white', by your definition? What percentage of European ancestry is required for someone to be classified as white?

And if Spanish people are complely excluded, are there any other European ethnic groups that don't count? What about Italians, French, Poles? Are they 'white'?

Your question implying Puerto Rico is somehow akin to Eastern Europe is absurd.

I think you're referring to someone else's comment.

He sang in Spanish at the fucking Super Bowl for 15 minutes. I know we don’t officially have a language, but it’s English - which also happens to be the world’s language.

Yes he is Puerto Rican. They speak Spanish, and his songs are in Spanish. Again this is the inevitable result of taking ownership of land and people that are Spanish and not trying to incorporate them much into the rest of the country.

It was also devoid of white peoke completely -

There were white people there, including one of the most famous white musicians in the world. Unless Lady Gaga isn't white enough for you. Maybe you're one of the rare holdouts who still hate Italians.

“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.

Are Québécois Canadian?

"Canadian" as an identity was forged specifically to include the Quebecois, although one could argue that mainline "Canada" is Anglo and the Quebecois are outside of it.

If you removed Puerto Rico from America tomorrow America would barely notice. Maybe Puerto Rico itself would be deeply upset, although I imagine it would be a fairly mixed bag overall. The "Puerto Rican" identity would continue to develop, on its own lines, more or less as it already has.

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.

Most normie Americans who have thought about the issue - the denominator already excludes the vast majority. Unfortunately you can't poll "Americans who have thought about Puerto Rico".

Stated differently you made up a claim

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?

"Wild and weird... A homeless hulk, a derelict unsteered."

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.

No they’re not, Puerto Rico has consistently seen crazy-high levels of migration to the mainland.

Non sequitur?

They are not 'largely living in their homeland' as an ethnic group, and this isn't uncommon for ethnic groups native to the poorer parts of American territory.

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?

Considering we didn't strip American citizenship for the literal traitors of the civil war I would say one reason is that we just set a very very high bar for this already. In fact people to this day continue to openly support the traitors and we don't suppress them.

That doesn't really answer the question as I asked it but answers a different question entirely

I gave you a reason, we have a preexisting insanely high bar for stripping citizenship. What reasons do you have to tear down chesterston fence and break the precedent?

chesterton's fence refers to a fence we don't know why was put up somewhere and has existed as a tradition for a long time

we do know when and why the pre-existing fence was constructed; in order to cement recent large-scale immigration of commies and other leftists in the aftermath of WW2

it's not some long-held tradition from the days of yore constructed for mysterious purposes

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huh? most Confederate soldiers were initially disenfranchised and prohibited from holding public office during a period known as "Reconstruction" where the Union occupied the rebelling states (also, universal male suffrage was still a recent phenomenon)

in history, the US regularly stripped citizenship for naturalized citizens as a matter of course for certain behaviors, e.g., anarchist and commie silliness

it's only until very recently (like post 1960) we decided our costco-membership-style citizenship was sacrosanct and could be removed only in the most extreme circumstances

In fact people to this day continue to openly support the traitors and we don't suppress them.

you mean our greatx4 or x5 grandfathers? the civil war has a different taste to it when you're actually American because you likely have ancestors who were those traitors and at least fought in the civil war

When I look up my family names on the Civil War Registry, there are hundreds of people related to me on both sides of the war (including people in my direct lineage whose graves I've visited). How about you?

And yes, we do lots of things to suppress and socially ostracize people who "openly support the traitors" from making it very difficult to get bank accounts for their organizations to getting them fired from their jobs. If you doubt that, throw some stars and bars on your car and let me know how that works out for you.

We should bring back bloodletting too. Nothing like a good leech to help balance the humors.

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.

As I mention below, bright line rules are easy to state but are over and under inclusive. Just because a standard has fuzziness doesn’t mean it’s worse than a bright line rule which isn’t fuzzy but doesn’t get at the nature of what people are asking.

I think there might be two tests I would use.

The vacation test: if you are abroad and a non government person asks “what are you” do you respond American or something else (eg Puerto Rican)

The second is if the U.S. was in a hotly contested war would you strongly take up its defense?

I think the combo of the two are helpful.

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.

That's... a stretch, because that would disqualify about 90% of Americans.

There's nothing more American than looting the commons for your own benefit; socializing the losses and privatizing the gains. Bad Bunny is doing the most American of things; being paid to celebrate himself and perform a victory dance on a defeated people, and to make them pay for the privilege. Improve? Protect? He's getting that bread, if American society was getting worse he'd move somewhere else after getting his bag.

This is the most American of things. Men are free, and when free, this is what significant amounts of them do.

Do we live in different countries? Or are you under 25? 90% of Americans do not loot the commons. Nobody does. That’s a post 2016 commons breaking down. It’s not the America I grew up in. This is literally what we are fighting for to prevent America from going down that path.

The reason freedom worked in America is due to Americans being able to work for the collective good and not be solely self-centered. If everyone robbed from each other the entire experiment would have never worked.

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This is the most American of things. Men are free, and when free, this is what significant amounts of them do.

This is certainly a view one can hold. By all means, maintain the same perspective when it is you getting got.

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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.

When the hell did Bad Bunny do or say anything about replacing you? Is someone singing in their own language really that extreme of a threat? Get a grip, man.

I was born in Poland

Oh no I’m being replaced! Your comment is genocidal towards me, trying to replace me and speak for me as someone who was born here

It seems that you Poles need to stick to your own country and stop trying to be Americans

Right except Poles assimilated and became Americans and happily contend the greatness of what America should be and don’t wave our flags and speak in our languages so much so that everything has to be double spoken in Polish and one political party isn’t bringing us in by the millions each year and giving them our tax dollars and and and

Bad Bunny is just a dancing monkey (no racism intended by this comment, truly) for our entertainment. He gets rich and we get bedazzled.

It has NOTHING to do with him. He’s just there.

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.

Trad dances such as Irish Cèilidh also seem to be surviving

Two step is still popular in the suburbs.

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.

True, I'd agree with that. We have definitely downplayed it a lot in our culture.

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).

Well, as far as PMC people go.

And there it is. I highly doubt working class Mexican and Cuban men are going to listen to music by some guy who prances around on stage in a dress.

My understanding is that he's extremely popular among Latinas of varying classes, but often not the menfolk. We have examples of that in American pop music(Taylor Swift being perhaps the most prominent), so it's not an unusual phenomenon.

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.

Many such cases. Woke whites lump together ethnic minorities in order to manufacture a political coalition that doesn't exist on the ground, and then act all *surprised Pikachu face* when said ethnic minorities preserve their own identities. Nobody self-identifies as BAME, POC or BIPOC, and as far as I can see the only Americans who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino are the ones who are so well-assimilated that they have lost touch with the specific Latin American country their ancestors came from. The only black people who self-identify as Black first (rather than with a specific tribe or country of origin and as Black second) are ones who lost their roots due to being descended from slaves.

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.

ruthless capitalist competition

American pro sports, including the NFL, are socialist. Drafts, salary caps, revenue sharing etc. The team that finishes bottom of the league gets a participation trophy in the form of first pick in the next year's draft.

European football (soccer for Yanks) is the ultimate capitalist sport. All players not signed to long-term contracts are free agents. Teams can spend as much as they want as long as the source meets "financial fair play" rules. (Basically, there is a limit on how much a billionaire owner can subsidise a money-losing team - there is no cap on money from ticket sales, merch sales, or genuine commercial sponsorship). The team that finishes bottom of the league gets relegated.

Paul Graham once said that the Europeans know that capitalism works, because when they actually care about winning they allow winners to get rich, but the only thing the Europeans care about that much is soccer. And we do care that much - football replaced war in the European consciousness after we discovered how destructive war could be when fought with the level of skill and determination you see in the Champions' League.

Category error. I didn't mean the competition between the teams is capitalist. I mean the competition between the NFL as an entertainment product and the other sports leagues (NBA, MLB, NHL, EPL etc.) as well as different entertainment products (movies, netflix) is the capitalist competition.

Then we very much agree.

Absolutely!

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.

Ten-four. Shutting it down. 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.

The point is that the NFL is a full fledged market

It's a cartel, not a market. It participates in the spectator-sport-as-entertainment market, but the competition in that market is the FBS, the NBA, the NHL and MLB (in the US) or real football (in export markets, which do not call it soccer). Not the other teams.

One of the interesting questions in marketing spectator sport is how you handle the balance between sport as manufactured spectacle and sport as a profitable part of traditional culture. When the big team owners in European football got together to propose a US-style European super league with franchise teams protected from promotion and relegation, the hardcore fans mutinied. And the people who market European football think that the commitment of the (very local and traditional) hardcore fan base is part of the product they are selling to the Asian TV fans. Gridiron now has a market segmentation with the NFL being pure manufactured spectacle A/B tested for audience appeal by professional showmen while the FBS tries to stay true to its roots while absorbing a torrent of money.

FIFA and the IOC are as hated as they are because they are the places money is most likely to be able to break the traditional culture of sport - they have enough reach in the first world for the big money to be interested in them, but enough involvement from the third world that they can't resist the money by saying "no" the way UEFA or MLB can and do.

When the big team owners in European football got together to propose a US-style European super league with franchise teams protected from promotion and relegation, the hardcore fans mutinied

This almost certainly would not have been enough. Everyone, including the other teams and the pundit class disproportionately drawn from those top teams, absolutely revolted. The Premier League in particular was started to seize more of the money for top teams without locking out the other teams needed for an exciting league, they saw the implications.

And the people who market European football think that the commitment of the (very local and traditional) hardcore fan base is part of the product they are selling to the Asian TV fans

Derby day is a big deal across the world even if you never set foot in Manchester or London and don't really have any of the proximity that made it so exciting originally. It's quite something.

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

Fantasy football; The original social media.

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 don't hate capitalism. It's the best we've got. What I'm saying is that currently, economic forces incentivize getting cheap labor under the table. 100ProofTollBooth is saying that the table should be removed. That certainly could be a solution. A lot of our current paradigm is based around credentialism, it's true. I have long thought that making everyone waste an additional 4 years of their lives - or more, if they're bad at school or want even more credentials - on top of being schooled until 18 with labor being illegal or unfashionable til late teens is a completely pointless waste. A waste of incredible magnitude.

Other users are saying the economics argument is fake, being forwarded by people who want to genocide white people. I think it could be a case where there are multiple different factors bringing in immigrants. Small business owners and farmers and hotels generally don't want to genocide anyone, yet they still hire a lot of illegal immigrants for labor.

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!"

Every culture does "salute to rural poverty" once rural poverty is in its past. As a committed urbanite, I find it strange too.

The Little House books are the Anglo American version.

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.

And, at the end of the day, being Amish is voluntary. Those who don’t enjoy the life leave

That's omitting a lot of details that make it difficult to leave. They have to leave behind all of their friends and family. Go out into a totally different society. Probably with very little savings, and no relevant skills or education. And there isn't, as far as I know, any support network to help them transition. If they wait too long, they'll probably end up married and with children, since the Amish encourage that in all young people. It's damn difficult to escape from that sort of upbringing.

This woman did it by making a dramatic escape, getting help from a prior outside friend, working a crappy job at Burger King, and then finding her way into working as a stripper. That's not an easy path to follow!

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.

And yet the standard stereotype of climate effects on character is of hard-working Nordics and indolent tropicals. On any other board I could just say lol racism and it would end the conversation, but I actually think there is an interesting question here.

In hot climates you try to do outdoor labour in the morning and evening, with a long break in the middle of the day(la siesta). In cold climates you try to work straight through with a short lunchbreak.

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?

Mostly, Puerto Ricans want statehood - in other words formal democratic equality with the 50 states. But statehood doesn't run that far ahead of the status quo in Puerto Rican politics. Puerto Rican independence is a politically marginal cause in Puerto Rico, although Bad Bunny happens to personally support it.

What Puerto Ricans should want is repeal of the Jones Act. I don't know how much of a big deal it is in Puerto Rican politics, but a few CONUS libertarians who support this have said that they think Puerto Rican statehood would lead to repeal of the Jones Act in short order.

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 a 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.

So is citizenship. Take your example except the baby is born across the border. The baby then spends the rest of its life outside the U.S. Based on your view, the person is American despite functionally never living in the U.S. That seems absurd prima facie. Bright line rules are in fact over and under inclusive. Standards are mushy but avoid these edge cases somewhat.

For what it’s worth, I’m largely against mass immigration because they don’t assimilate. But I’m okay with immigration when they do. One of my close friends is an Eastern European immigrant. She married an American and is raising her kids American. But for an accent, you wouldn’t know she wasn’t born here. That’s a success story. Quality learing is the opposite.

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.

After some more thought I think my initial statement was too strong, surely the political views of employees do seep into these kinds of outputs to some extent.

I still think that this show was pretty clearly aimed at hispanic people, especially those in Latin America. As an anglo America any message in it is kind of besides the point as you are not the target audience.

Sorry if my post was overly abrasive, in any case. There's lots of discussion to be had about how many sub-messages are in each piece of media and their respective share of importance. There are always multiple messages being sent simultaneously, some of them even unintentionally. I just find the hard denial of political messaging quite frustrating at this point.

But even with that in mind, I can't help but think that turning the halftime show of the super bowl - to my knowledge one of the biggest public events in the US - into something where the majority of the US population is literally not the target audience is itself a message, and not a very nice one.

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.

Yeah, no, you don't get to rewrite history like this. I grew up surrounded by O'Reilly and Rush fans before moving to Blue America. Cons say libs are "dumb," "fruity," or "clueless." Libs say cons are "hateful," "evil," a "disease." Libs don't get to excuse their bloodthirst by inventing an alternate past where the cons escalated the rhetoric first.

Beg to differ (coming in late because of reports) but my experience is closer to @asdasdasdasd's. I was around Rush and O'Reilly listeners in an even earlier era (Clinton). I definitely heard a lot of "Democrats hate America, liberals are a cancer, and you should cut off any family members who voted for Clinton." The rage was palpable, especially when he was reelected.

Ann Coulter was a big name at the time, and you may or may not remember this gem from 2002:

When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.

Now, Ann Coulter was and is a massive troll and I believe a lot of her act was performative grifting, but these were not isolated sentiments.

Of course I also saw the palpable rage from liberals when Bush was elected, and then reelected. But your version that conservatives just regarded liberals with a sort of benign contempt but no real animosity, and it was liberals who first got ugly and "bloodthirsty" about it, does not match my recollection.

I'm sorry for the late response; but:

My first introduction to vulgar conservatism was setting in a work truck listing to christian radio with my boss and getting ocasional asides about how "Obama is a traitor to the country who should be shot" and also how that same logic applied to all other democrats, who were trying to kill every christian in the country by letting the terrorists win, etc etc etc.

It may not have been that bad where you were, but it was that bad where I was, and also in most other places. Why do you think the prolls chose Trump, a generational hater, over bush, a replacement level neocon?

It wasn't for the policy, it was for the venom.

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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