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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4071 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Supports PR independence

  2. Speaks Spanish, not English

  3. Routinely complains about America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Bunny was representing a defiance towards America

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I am surprised that you believe this.

To review;

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

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

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

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

Indeed, I have nothing in common with these people.

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

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

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