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An interesting comparison is the half time show from 2022. This was the one with Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and a variety of other Hip Hop acts. It was, in fact, the first half time show to be centered on Hip Hop (you had had hip hop artists make appearances at previous show but all of them had retain rock or pop at their core.)
2022's show had scantily clad women gyrating and being otherwise suggestive. Much of the coreography is the wildly over-the top "look at me" motions of modern Afro American "dance." I suppose I am still struggling to acquire the taste. This has been commonplace in half time shows for a long time now.
The "gangster" image of Snoop and Dre has been continually watered down over the years. Snoop, famously, co-hosted a cooking show with a post prison Martha Stewart. Your mom probably, now, thinks "Snoop is a hoot!" Perhaps the only somewhat controversial portion was when some new rapper who's name I don't know perform his set within a church-like setting. Even then, fairly light. Most of the show centered on a kind of weird "house" that allowed Snoop, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent to move between levels. The imagery was actually somewhat minimal - people dancing, some cars, whatever. It actually was "about the music." It just depended on if you liked the music.
2022's show didn't scare the hos. Many an eye was probably rolled and I can assume that the housewives of places like Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fort Collins, Topeka, Springfield (MO), Duluth, Spokane, and Provo may have used the half time show's duration to get a jumpstart on dishes or something. A gentle shrug. Those who likes 22's show loved it - it won the emmy for best live performance that year.
2026 is a different story.
Watching the damn thing provoked a totally unexpected lever of anger in me. If a dissident-right schizo blogger posted an imaginary Super Bowl half time show that was a faithful description of the Bad Bunny show, I would've thought to myself "Sure, right, sure ... they're actually going to do the whole thing in Spanish to a shitty raggaeton beat and pretend to fuck in the middle of a plantation while waving the Puerto Rican flag in conquering triumph"
Well, that's exactly what happened. They didn't just scare the hos, they made them (me) mad.
First, totally in spanish? The two quarterbacks in the game are some of the whitest white dudes ever. You're playing in San Francisco where, despite it's nomenclature, you're more likely to hear mandarin than Spanish anywhere outside of the Mission and possibly Oakland. It's February, black history month. Black Americans, generally, use English in their day-to-day. Finally, it's Football. Not Futbol, but Football, which is the game that best exemplifies American excess, hyper-competitiveness, ruthless capitalist competition, the last remnants of chauvinistic masculinity, and fetishized violence. Why the hell are you doing the whole thing in spanish? A bi-lingual "salute to unity" sure, whatever. But the monolinguistic exclusivity of the thing throughout was perhaps the intransigent signal of replacement over integration.
To drive the point home, towards the conclusion of the show, Bad Bunny pops up with the Puerto Rican flag over one shoulder. It's not that they're hoisting the flag of triumph over a deracinated, cucked, and conquered land, it's that they're celebrating their heritage on the land of a conquered, cucked, and deracinated people. There's a difference, don't you see.
But the part that actually got to me the most was the plantation imagery. Not because of any sort of recapitulation of slavery or classim, but because of the bizarre romance around manual agricultural work. Such work was the occupation of 95% of humanity for 95% of human history. And it sucked. It was indescribably awful. "Working the fields" is about as romantic as losing most of your teeth by 35 because of poor nutrition. You wouldn't finish a day in the sugar cane fields to come home and suggestively dance with your amor because you'd be too tired and, possibly, injured to do much more than eat and fall asleep. At some point you'd probably get kicked, gored, bitten, or trampled by livestock. Fingers, toes, and perhaps an eye would be cleaved from you via a sharp edged mishap. One bad season could mean permanent poverty and, perhaps, starvation deaths for the weaker in your family / community.
This is not shit we should be idealizing. None of this was fun.
Beyond the replacement theme - which was appalling apparent throughout - this was also a "show" about "degrowth" or, more accurately, a voluntary return to mass poverty and ill health. But, hey, at least I can rut in the sugar cane fields like the other animals around me.
Chhht chhhht… This just in… Getting a live report from the motte… Conservatives now hate it when people romanticize manual labor and farm life in their music. I repeat, farm labor is now backwards, cucked, and liberal. Over.
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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 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?
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.
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.
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Laying down and taking it is kind of a distinguishing characteristic of boomercons.
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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);
"I apply time management principles to going 16-0 and stomping the shit out of elite CFB programs" is fucking epic hypernormie conservative slop. God bless this man.
More broadly, the centers of gravity for college football are still the deep south and the midwest. No New York team is anywhere near good. The California teams used to be much more formidable but due to cheating scandals and awful management at the conference level, they've fallen off. Thus, the "coast PMC" influence on college football is muted while the boomercon influence of the old confederacy and the corn-fed midwestern plains is boosted.
What's to stop college football from NFL-ifying? Well, sadly, less and less. Up until the last few years, you couldn't pay players. Athletes would pick schools based on the likelihood of winning a national championship and eventually getting drafted into the NFL. Since that rule has been changed, there's been quite the upheaval. You now have players transferring two, three, four or more times to various schools based on incentive packages. Recently, Duke university (as well as several other schools) have even sued some of their own players who have tried to transfer for breach of contract. It really is bad for college football. Still, college football teams aren't "owned" the way NFL teams are.
NFL teams have ownership in exactly the same way that companies have ownership. This is because every NFL team is pretty much a for profit company (the Greenbay Packers are weird but function the same out of necessity). The NFL owners absolutely control the league. Their interests are first, foremost, and final. The commissioner, currently Roger Goodell, makes far more than almost every player in the NFL because he has learned that keeping the owners happy is his best move. And the best way to keep the owners happy is to make a shit load of money for them.
In the past ten years, the average valuation of an NFL franchise has doubled. In no small part, this is because of Goodell's efforts to market and merchandise the league, length the schedule, and, importantly, have the NFL dominate viewership rankings. There is now an entire media and marketing team inside the NFL dedicated to expanding female viewership. Remember, the league has zero female players and zero female head coaches. The much covered relationship between Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chief's Tight End, Travis Kelce, was seen, by many, to be a deliberate PR orchestration to drive female viewership.
The next market frontier is with spanish speakers. There have been one or two regular season games in Mexico for many years. In fact the highest scoring regular season game in NFL history was supposed to be played in Mexico but was moved to Los Angeles after it was determined that the field had been maintained by a bunch of damn Mexicans. The NFL has now scheduled games in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
The point is that the NFL is a full fledged market and responds to incentives just like any other market. There is no loyalty, there is no tradition, there is profit and there is loss.
College football, at the FBS level (the highest), still supports 130 teams (the NFL is 32). Some of these programs have been around since the 19th century. Being - for now, at least - still associated with colleges and universities, there is a strong sense of tradition, place, and rootedness in the teams themselves if not the players. While money is absolutely a concern in college football, it is much more of an imperfect and in fact inefficient market. Will it inevitably crumble to market forces as money floods into it? Time will tell.
Sports franchise prices are skyrocketing due to the two speed economy and difficulty of large advertisers spending on any other monoculture. Most sports leagues that aren't actively hemorrhaging are getting massive appreciation of teams.
I'm not sure what your point is?
If you're saying Goodell has nothing to do with it and that the rising tide is lifting all boats, then I need you to account for why the NFL is kicking the shit out of every other major sports organization in the world in terms of valuation.
The only metric that counter this narrative is percentage (so, relative, not absolute) growth of NBA teams values over the past decade. But that counternarrative is it self countered by the fact that The NBA is seeing a decline in viewership. Tech billionaires are propping up the California Teams, but your median American sports fan is watching football, baseball, and hockey.
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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.
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.
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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 graftbuilding the technologies of tomorrow.TLDR: Capitalism is as good as you long as you let it be. The more you fuck with it, the less capitalism you have and the more you prevent the fruit of it from ripening.
I don't think oats is saying he hates capitalism, more that he's saying that capitalism has seemingly learned that being partisan can also be profitable. The left is more likely to make purchasing decisions based on politics. Thus the "free market" party is ill-equipped to handle it, because the bean counters are telling everyone to charge full steam ahead.
Though as an aside, I think "What if we brought down wages and benefits so citizens can compete with immigrants" is on par with "What if we made all the farmers become factory workers?"
I'm not saying we should bring down wages. We should let the market determine the effective wage.
But we should be far, far, far more aggressive in prosecuting tax cheats and outright illegal employment. Because, right now, working a modest W-2 job (i.e. less than median household income) is literally a suckers game.
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There's a nationalist-shaped hole in the discourse since WWII.
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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!"
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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!"
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On the other hand, the Amish fuck like rabbits.
Farming in temperate climates is dramatically different from farming in the subtropics and tropics. When you don’t have winter, your growth cycles never really end. A well-run plantation would have fields constantly ready for harvest.
A temperate farm has busy spring planting, summer is mostly tending fields waiting for growth, then harvest. Fall to prep and winterize the fields. The Amish will have two months of twelve hour days per year, For most of the year, there would be a few hours per day on field work, some on livestock and various maintenance tasks, and Winter is basically off entirely.
The Amish also have a huge variety of tasks to work on. Animal husbandry, carpentry, forestry, etc. Even the field work varies based on time of year. If you are working a cane plantation, you probably have a few tasks that you do all day every day for most of your life. If the rigors of the manual labor don’t get you, the repetitive nature of the work will.
And, at the end of the day, being Amish is voluntary. Those who don’t enjoy the life leave. Historically, that wasn’t really an option for the workers on cane plantations, either due to outright slavery or the lack of financial means to leave the islands.
Eh, having subtropical/tropical farmers in the family rather recently, theres definitely defined growing seasons and fallow fields. It’s just dictated by rainfall more than temperature. Sugar, rice, sweet potatoes and cotton grow at defined times of year and there’s still a busy and a slow season.
Would be interested if you have something unique regrading the halftime show to report from your greater Acadian networks, @hydroacetylene. If there's nothing there, no worries, but you often have perspective into a subculture that is somewhat opaque.
I didn't watch the halftime show, and nobody I know paid attention to it. Just countersignaling the idea that there's no seasonality in sugar farming.
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Do they, or do they just never use contraception?
Having worked for some Amish families for a while, I'm going to say both.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Bad Bunny's country of origin is the United States of America. Donald Trump (who I hope we can agree counts as MAGA) certainly seemed to be objecting to him doing Hispanic activities in his country of origin when he endorsed TPUSA's alternative halftime show.
Stop pretending not to understand what people mean. Puerto Rico legally is an American territory but it isn’t culturally America (and they’ve had many complaints about being not their own country). Super Bowl is culturally America. Bad Bunny was representing a defiance towards America notwithstanding that technically his “country” is controlled by the U.S.
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:
Supports PR independence
Speaks Spanish, not English
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.”
Yes, and "American" is rooted in citizenship. Citizenship is pretty objective and unambiguous.
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.
English speaking is recommended, but not a requirement.
"Routinely complains about America." So literally everyone on this forum?
Let's test the opposite. Imagine a mother has baby right before crossing the border. The baby grows up to be the most stereotypical American you can imagine. Loves hot dogs and football, and cries during the national anthem. Is that child American? Many here would say "I don't care about any of that, deport his ass immediately." Hell, even if he was born on this side of the border and legally a citizen, many here argue the law should be changed so he isn't.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
And I am surprised that you believe this.
To review;
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.
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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.
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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.
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