This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
An interesting comparison is the half time show from 2022. This was the one with Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and a variety of other Hip Hop acts. It was, in fact, the first half time show to be centered on Hip Hop (you had had hip hop artists make appearances at previous show but all of them had retain rock or pop at their core.)
2022's show had scantily clad women gyrating and being otherwise suggestive. Much of the coreography is the wildly over-the top "look at me" motions of modern Afro American "dance." I suppose I am still struggling to acquire the taste. This has been commonplace in half time shows for a long time now.
The "gangster" image of Snoop and Dre has been continually watered down over the years. Snoop, famously, co-hosted a cooking show with a post prison Martha Stewart. Your mom probably, now, thinks "Snoop is a hoot!" Perhaps the only somewhat controversial portion was when some new rapper who's name I don't know perform his set within a church-like setting. Even then, fairly light. Most of the show centered on a kind of weird "house" that allowed Snoop, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent to move between levels. The imagery was actually somewhat minimal - people dancing, some cars, whatever. It actually was "about the music." It just depended on if you liked the music.
2022's show didn't scare the hos. Many an eye was probably rolled and I can assume that the housewives of places like Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fort Collins, Topeka, Springfield (MO), Duluth, Spokane, and Provo may have used the half time show's duration to get a jumpstart on dishes or something. A gentle shrug. Those who likes 22's show loved it - it won the emmy for best live performance that year.
2026 is a different story.
Watching the damn thing provoked a totally unexpected lever of anger in me. If a dissident-right schizo blogger posted an imaginary Super Bowl half time show that was a faithful description of the Bad Bunny show, I would've thought to myself "Sure, right, sure ... they're actually going to do the whole thing in Spanish to a shitty raggaeton beat and pretend to fuck in the middle of a plantation while waving the Puerto Rican flag in conquering triumph"
Well, that's exactly what happened. They didn't just scare the hos, they made them (me) mad.
First, totally in spanish? The two quarterbacks in the game are some of the whitest white dudes ever. You're playing in San Francisco where, despite it's nomenclature, you're more likely to hear mandarin than Spanish anywhere outside of the Mission and possibly Oakland. It's February, black history month. Black Americans, generally, use English in their day-to-day. Finally, it's Football. Not Futbol, but Football, which is the game that best exemplifies American excess, hyper-competitiveness, ruthless capitalist competition, the last remnants of chauvinistic masculinity, and fetishized violence. Why the hell are you doing the whole thing in spanish? A bi-lingual "salute to unity" sure, whatever. But the monolinguistic exclusivity of the thing throughout was perhaps the intransigent signal of replacement over integration.
To drive the point home, towards the conclusion of the show, Bad Bunny pops up with the Puerto Rican flag over one shoulder. It's not that they're hoisting the flag of triumph over a deracinated, cucked, and conquered land, it's that they're celebrating their heritage on the land of a conquered, cucked, and deracinated people. There's a difference, don't you see.
But the part that actually got to me the most was the plantation imagery. Not because of any sort of recapitulation of slavery or classim, but because of the bizarre romance around manual agricultural work. Such work was the occupation of 95% of humanity for 95% of human history. And it sucked. It was indescribably awful. "Working the fields" is about as romantic as losing most of your teeth by 35 because of poor nutrition. You wouldn't finish a day in the sugar cane fields to come home and suggestively dance with your amor because you'd be too tired and, possibly, injured to do much more than eat and fall asleep. At some point you'd probably get kicked, gored, bitten, or trampled by livestock. Fingers, toes, and perhaps an eye would be cleaved from you via a sharp edged mishap. One bad season could mean permanent poverty and, perhaps, starvation deaths for the weaker in your family / community.
This is not shit we should be idealizing. None of this was fun.
Beyond the replacement theme - which was appalling apparent throughout - this was also a "show" about "degrowth" or, more accurately, a voluntary return to mass poverty and ill health. But, hey, at least I can rut in the sugar cane fields like the other animals around me.
I was thinking about this for a while. The thought struck me: How the hell did Blue Tribe get control of the Super Bowl if it's boomercons who watch football? Apparently
In 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 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.
Honestly, this seems to be the number one political realization for me lately. Everything I blame on liberals or communists or progressives or whoever can often be boiled down to simple economics, capitalism running totally out of control. Immigration is generally what I relate that with. Economic incentives for bringing in foreigners who are willing to work for pennies should be obvious, and it's a pill that almost every wealthy capitalist society with a labor differential is swallowing. So it is unsurprising to me that football is exactly the same way.
I think problems stemming from capitalism are going to be hard to solve from a conservative point of view. Admit that capitalism causes it and you're giving ground to the communists.
I'd disagree.
Capitalism has been the most effective tool in history to make the material lives of humans - all of them - demonstrably and unequivocally better. Climate control, cheap indoor plumbing, and internal combustion engines mean that the basic standard of living in the west has outpaced that of royalty not three hundred years ago.
I'd say that most of the "problems of capitalism" are bad feedback loops from efforts to solve the "problems of capitalism." Since you brought up immigration, it makes sense to link to a previous comment.
Capitalism seeking to drive down the prices of labor isn't bad on its own. People can choose to change their skillset, their industry focus, what have you. Immigrants, even low skilled ones, can perhaps improve their lives through immigration because of disparities in national wealth. It can be a positive sum game for all involved.
But then the regulations and legislation enter the system and fuck everything up. Illegal immigrants work for under the table cash and therefore outcompete native born labor that desires to work in a pro-social and citizen-responsible manner (i.e. reporting income appropriately). If they, the natives, do that, however, they are no longer price competitive - but not because of a market mechanism! It's because of an illegal and anti-social defection from the established norms and rules of the market.
Likewise with social safety net programs. For someone who desires to be pro-social and not explot the system, they may use whatever program during periods of unemployment or if there's a serious chronic medical issue. Others will simply falsify records and enjoy free money (something something Somali daycares in minnesota). Then there's perverse incentives -- maybe I do actually have a fucked up back and can only work for 20 hours a week. But, wait, if I do, I might lose my disability. So, instead of sort of 50/50ing it, I just double down on disability payments - and "new" symptoms - to close the gap. It's a shitty existence, but the government won't allow me to supplement my benefits with honest work. People respond to incentives.
I hear you when you're saying you're mad about capitalism. The point I'm trying to make is that what we currently have is a misshapen low-fidelity imitation of capitalism that allows for social defection without punishing it, rent seeking, and regulatory capture. PMC striving and credentialism are reflections of that. Parasitic client-party relationships between illegal and legal immigrants and various democratic statist organizations are the worst reflections of that.
If you're an NFL player, however, you've seen your earnings explode over the last ten years. Owners as well. Fans have received more games with more parity between teams - gone are the days of laugher blowouts. As a football fan, if you couldn't tell, I'll stomach a Viva La Revolucion superbowl half time show because I know none of that shit is going to show up next fall during week six during an important home game. The overall product of football is better across the board; for players, owners, and customers (fans). The capitalist market is working. Does it have any cultural or traditional loyalty? No, and I'd argue that's a good thing. If we start mixing markets and culture, we start looking Chinese in a hurry.
I kind of regret that I wrote "there is no loyalty, there is no tradition, there is only profit and loss." It's way too heavy and blackpilly. An accurate reframing would be "there is no good old boys club, there is no secret handshake anymore, all that matters is how you perform." A bit brutal, sure, but that means the door is open in ways it previously wasn't.
Wall Street and Big Law are famous for mostly hiring from the "prestigious" schools. And that has made them horribly non-innovative and brittle institutions who only continue to exist because of regulatory capture. The big tech firms, although they did have preferences for Stanford/MIT CS grads, are (were?) famous for also hiring kids from weird less-than-awesome schools if they had a cool GitHub repo, or built an app with their friends. For a while there was even a hack of doing something like ycombinator, not really caring about winning the startup race, but just getting the ability to get to San Francisco, network and demonstrate competence, and then get hired. That dried up after it caused too much lack of faith in new ycombinator founders - who need to be laser focused on
giga-hype, fraud, and 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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link