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Last week anime culture war news was rather unwelcome here, so it is time for another.
The topic of last week xitter storm was anime.
Is anime weird? If so, what should parents do to make sure their kids never watch anime and become normal members of the crowd?
Fitting with the crowd as end in itself was always seen as moral duty in small c conservative tradition, nothing unusual with it.
It is clear who the bad people are and why they are bad.
Nevertheless, massive arguments for and against torn xitter asunder and joined with even bigger arguments whether normie existence in 2020's North America is really something you should strive for or whether much better, happier, nobler and more fulfilling life can be found elsewhere.
If you examine all parts of normie life, from such basics as school, regular employnment, transportation or house building and find this is worthwhile prize, and then find out that your kid is not normie, you should indeed tell them:
"For your whole life, you will live as undercover agent in enemy territory. As Otto von Stierlitz had to pass as Nazi, you must learn how to pass as normie."
(using Eastern archetype here, in Western culture heroes are men of action facing adversity directly and challenging enemy in honorable combat, not sus characters skulking in shadows)
But parents are usually extremely bad judges what is "weird" and what isn't. They remember what was normal and what wasn't in high school in early 1980's, and are unable to comprehend that times are changing. And this is the problem barely noticed, the problem that makes this whole discourse waste of time.
What is normal in today's world?
That women looks like she's wearing makeup and hair dye, is that normal? Are celebrities who get lip filler surgery or anorexia normal? Is reality TV normal? Is obesity normal? Sometimes I look at my weird interests, then I look at modern trends and realize I'm not so weird after all. I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.
Maybe trad culture like the Amish is "normal" in that, out of all ways to live we've tried, it's maximizes some "ideal normal" metric like median person's happiness divided by resource usage. Unfortunately it's outcompeted, and even trad influencers tend to not practice what they preach, and/or preach "norms" that never existed.
Yes on all points, but Cops is great and it is a travesty they took it off air. There's so many great situations that keep coming up: prostitute turns out to be a guy, guy with no shirt on is drunk or high and thinks he can fight the cops, any time they get out the police dogs, etc, etc, I could go on. Did you know that a German shepherd can outswim an adult man, grab ahold of his leg and drag him back to shore where the cops are waiting for him? I do, and I've seen it on Cops.
Our culture is poorer for losing Cops.
I remember playing ”Cops” as a kid in the very early 90s. It involved one guy being designated as the bad guy and the rest being cops who would then run after him and tackle him on the ground as a group. Not surprisingly nobosy wanted to be the first to play the bad guy. Ah, to be young again…
>when no one brought a ball, but you and the bros want to play Smear the Queer anyway
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My brother, there are youtube channels that do this now. Some are just raw footage, some are trashy and will have really unpleasant stuff like seeing a recently deceased's family being informed of the death of their loved ones. My favorite is Midwest Safety; straddles the line nicely between putting enough contextual information and keeping things relatively classy for the genre.
Lost 3 hours of my life to this yesterday. I think the pattern that is emerging for me is that many peoples brain breaks when they are arrested (especially women). They just refuse to believe this could be happening to them in this moment. These are people who have been (we find at the end) arrested multiple times before! Yet the hysteria and confusion are genuine (attempts to fake a medical emergency less so).
I think for a lot of people, the thinking is that if they let the arrest happen quickly and without drama, they are accepting an L, but if they drag it on and make it as hard as possible, maybe something, anything will happen that can turn this into a W; they think maybe if they make it as excrutiating as possible the cops will in frustration do something they can spin into brutality or racism and they can use that as leverage. Usually in the end the leverage ends up going the other way, as in the description of the sentencing in the videos you often hear they end up pleading guilty at the initial charges to have the kicking and spitting and biting at the cops charges go away. You end up wondering how lenient the sentences could have been if they had just gone quietly.
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