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Notes -
Many things are habbening at once, here are for some more random culture war (and culture war by other means) news for the second part of the week.
Middle Eastern habbenings are already sufficiently covered elsewhere, things are going interesting even outside this part of the world.
1/Cancel culture files
Canceling machine is still running in overdrive mode, and it is coming for Cesar Chavez.
It turned out that "Moses of his people" routinely raped underage girls including another famous activist Dolores Huerta.
This is bad. Imagine if it came out that MLK raped Rosa Parks. That bad.
Many streets, schools, libraries, parks etc. are to be renamed soon.
It is already beginning.
2/Dukes, princes and kings of hazard files
Gambling is getting normalized and spreads all over the world.
Not only betting on sports for plebes, but betting on world habbenings for sophisticated situation monitorers.
In Washington DC, Polymarket just opened the world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation.
This sort of gambling, in addition to ruining people's finances and lives, adds another element of chaos to already spicy world's situations. With few clicks, anyone in even middling military/govt positions can personally greatly profit from insider info.
And if you are in high, decision making position ... another source of income opens, faster and more lucrative than old timey corruption and theft.
No suprise that tensions are running high.
3/US gun politics files
Illinois wants track all ammo and mandate microstamping of serial numbers to all ammunition.
Even if they could make it work, there is so much ammo already manufactured, you could say. This is no way to protect Black lives from gun violence!
This is the point. You cannot get the evil white gun hoarders for their guns (yet), but you can send them to prison for unserialized ammo.
4/Democracy files
In suprising news, Kim Jong-un wins North Korea’s parliamentary elections with 99.93% of the vote.
This was not something anyone could predict.
In 2023, Kim oversaw his party's WORST election results in 60 years, winning just 99.63% of votes.
But "to give up" is not in Kim Jong-un's dictionary.
He persisted.
He fought and regained trust of the people. May this tale of true grit and determination inspire all of us.
5/Woke culture files
You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America
TL;DR: Wokeness is not dead yet. It might be wobbling at the top, but it is marching triumphantly across America.
Dinergoth is the aesthetic of ruined suburbia and dying small towns.
They are the mainstream now, they are not weird anymore. You are the weirdo.
6/Space invader files
Third recorded interstellar object at 16th March crossed the orbit of Jupiter and is now on the way out of Solar system.
So far, three interstellar objects were detected.
Number Two looked and behaved like ordinary snowy mudball, numbers One and Three were, in comparison to Solar system objects, very strange.
Either we live on rather busy interstellar highway, or interstellar objects are not at all like Solar system ones.
Alien starship monitoring community breathed in relief (and disappointment).
Close encounter with Jupiter was the opportunity for space battleship to rev up her engines and use Jupiter's gravity for course correction straight to Earth.
Previously, we had doubt about object origin. Now, we are certain that crew of 3I/Atlas is made of highly intelligent beings who saw nothing worth conquering on this monkey planet.
7/Cryptid files
The famous Patterson–Gimlin film was, for 59 years, known as the best evidence for existence of Bigfoot/Sasquatch.
Now, new documentary shows it all as "incredible hoax". Not only straight confession of Patterson's son Clint, but another 16mm film reel showing Bigfoot costume.
More links and sources here.
But, at the end, it doesn't matter.
Real or not, Bigfoot lives in our hearts. For forever.
The dingeroth piece was bad, but it was bad in a way that all trend pieces are bad—take a fringe phenomenon and elevate it to the level of a national trend. I spend a lot of time in suburban and semi-rural Pennsylvania and I don't see any more "alternative" people now than I did 20 years ago. I couldn't tell you the last time I saw an obviously trans person in public, and I've never seen a furry despite the fact that they hold a national convention in Pittsburgh every year. The author doesn't do himself any favors when he tries to illustrate the phenomenon through a Tinder date that one would think would turn into a "first date from hell" story until you find out that he went out with this girl for some time until she ended it. If you're going to write a trend piece that's supposed to appall the reader, you're supposed to do it from a position of detachment. He'd have more credibility if he presented himself as an NPR-listening urbanite who came of age in millennial hipster culture and operated on the assumption that self-described nerds and people otherwise immersed in alternative subcultures were all similarly aspiring intellectuals who would know what Maoism is and have impeccable musical taste (my generation is superior to your generation, etc.). It would still be a dumb trend piece, but at least the author's revulsion would make sense.
But as bad as the article is, Forney's tweet is even worse. He operates on the assumption that this phenomenon is an outgrowth of "libtardization", but it's not. He makes statements like:
I don't know about Morris county, but I do know of places about as far from Pittsburgh as Morristown is from NYC where this wouldn't have been surprising 25 years ago. His concern about "degeneracy" trickling down into the lower classes, particularly people who he thinks should be conservatives, only underscores how out of touch he is. It's almost as if he's entirely unfamiliar with the concept of white trash and assumes that the rural poor are all hear-working, God-fearing, upstanding Americans. Does he not know that this is the epicenter of professional wrestling viewers and Jerry Springer guests? Has he never been to West Virginia? Does he not know where the fentanyl epidemic started?
There's two Paris Baguette locations in Morris County. It wouldn't be that surprising to find a pierced-and-tatted clerk in Morristown proper; it's the more trendy (i.e. lefty, though Morris County is in general less left than most of NJ) area, and though that particular trend is kinda dated, it's not surprising for the hinterlands to be behind the metropole.
If it was the Rockaway one it would be quite surprising.
(and yeah, piercing and tatting is a case of "degeneracy" trickling up, not down)
I think you misunderstand. You and Forney seem to be assuming that tats and piercings and the kind of persona described in the article are an extension of trendy urban liberalism. My point is that this isn't necessarily the case. I grew up in the Mon Valley, which is about as trendy as Rockaway. If I saw a girl like that in Monessen 25 years ago I wouldn't have thought that she was some emigre from the South Side of Pittsburgh (which was trendy at the time) but simply a white trash local. Girls like that in Slipknot t-shirts and cargo pants were a dime a dozen back then, and there was nothing remotely political about it. Most of those people probably couldn't tell you the difference between Democrats and republicans if you put a gun to their head.
In Morristown I would expect that tats and piercings would be an extension of trendy urban liberalism, because Morristown is a place where trendy urban liberals go if they can't live in NYC for some reason, even if that aesthetic was picked up from "white trash" some time ago.
The Rockaway location would be more likely to have "authentic" white trash pierced-and-tatted locals.
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