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Notes -
Newsom basically calling for a boycot of Target.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/did-governor-newsom-spark-target-boycott-among-liberals
So he’s not too happy that red tribe has learned how to cancel something. I think we are approaching a day where you have to declare your allegiance. Red or blue.
I usually don’t like Balaji and think he’s a smarter hack who knows how to grift, but I think he’s right in this thread
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1659094966671425536?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
And Scott had a thread about how pride is just like every other cities holiday posted recently. I can’t find it.
America seems to be in a religious war between two cultures now. A couple years ago red tribe didn’t know how to wield power. Desantis has done that highlighted by his war on Disney and grassroots red tribe found their first success with Budweiser. Twitter going Musks was an obvious red tribe move. Jan 6 and Trump overall was a movement that hadn’t found their real leaders who could use power.
I don’t think religion is that strong anymore on the right. I say this because there is a lot of tolerance for Trump being not a Christian. He bangs hookers. So red tribe has an internal sub-war between their traditional alpha male and their good Christian Desantis.
I do like Scott’s metaphor of this being a time like when Christianity took over the Roman Empire. No one believed in the old pagan gods anymore. And I think blue tribe would have won this but they made two crucial mistakes:
The movement doesn’t have a great place for males. Who have always dominated every society.
The trans movement has a lot of vibes of backward religions. Getting kids to cut themselves up and change their bodies has a lot of vibes of practices we long since banished.
Gay Rites are Civil Rites.
I don't think that's totally true, but I do think the place it holds is incompatible with what Red Tribers would consider desirable.
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I don't have a great model for either the Blue or Red tribe versions, here, so this will be very much motioning in the sense of blind men and an elephant sense. And this is a sphere where there's always a bunch of exceptions and special-cases.
A lot of Red Tribers have a variety of claims that the Blue anti-'toxic' masculinity is broad enough to eliminate all masculinity, both negative and positive, and as a result that this destroys a lot of ways to be successful male. The joking-not-joking extreme tends to go to references to orchidectomy, either in the trans sense or the Lance Armstrong one or the connected eunuch ones, but the not-joking bit is kinda relevant given the aftermath of Comment 171 (especially the reactions to conversations about it, even from 'Good Feminists'). There are more serious analysis of things like heterosexual relationships and norms being constrained by a lot of Blue Tribe norms, but it goes far further than 'just' sex: they can point to everything from meeting norms to leadership styles to family rearing to financial planning to house design being framed and opposed over real or perceived chauvinistic norms or drives or expectations.
Some of this is reading intratribal social or sexual conflict as something deeper, and a lot of the proposed space doesn't actually work that way (eg, 'Livestrong' and the doping scandal, I expect that in the next ten years or so we're going to find a lot of contact sports start getting the football treatment 'absolutely by coincidence unrelated to' trans stuff). Some of it's a reaction to feminists who make a lot of hay about toxic masculinity with only fleeting and often empty references to any non-toxic variant (I will again point to Serano, but that's mostly because she's unusually disappointing rather than unusually bad), but at the same time when the progressive movement says they want to dismantle patriarchy, increasingly reframed into kyriarchy, they're not exactly lying or even necessarily wrong! There's a lot of downsides they can pretty readily point toward when talking about the 'traditional' or actual traditional frameworks for dating or leadership roles, of domination, so on. At the less steelman end, spaces where 'white cis straight guy' is a self-demonstrating proof and end of argument do exist, even if they're not actually about (and sometimes even come from!) white cis straight guys. Officially, there's no wrong way to be a man, but in practice there's actually quite a lot of wrong things to do in general that just so happen to be male-coded.
Those Non-Toxic Masculinity frameworks tend to be pretty vapid or empty, but a lot of Red Tribers find them objectionable beyond that: even people who aren't one of Ozy's "five guys in Ohio" can end up liking the 'cage' of masculinity more than the empty structurelessness, either because a lot of its fixtures are things they can strive toward, or because they like being around people who match some or more of those traits, or because they find a lot of the bits they don't match pointless and focus on those they do. There's a copypasta Zontargs had from reddit, about how this was "a crayon-colored world filled with ball pits, crying low-testosterone manchildren, ponies, furries and ugly transexuals", and it's not hard to come up with reasons why this might disappoint people who want a mancave filled with sharp power tools, stoicism, and Hooters-brand chicken wings.
But even if you deny the progressive framework and consider Masculinity the only way to be a man, it's not the only way to exist as an XY-chromosoned non-trans person. And if you actually poke too hard from inside progressive spheres, there's actually a ton of the anti-masculinity stuff where the practice ends up with a lot of not-straight, non-cis, non-white, and/or non-men on the receiving end. As I've pointed out, no matter what the claimed goals are, here, there's not a lot of places for the "crayon-colored world filled with ball pits", either The real crux is...
I dunno. I want to say something insightful about bubble wrap, or the crab-pot mentality, or the last men inventing happiness in a smaller world, or bugmen or whatever this is, but not only are these descriptions vague and contradictory and kinda a grab-bag of grab-bags of disliked traits. They are all descriptions, and that itself is kinda running headfirst into the pothole, here. The very nature of being a categorization group and focus drives objection, whether it's tabletop grognards or history nuts or My Little Pony or Rick and Morty fans or model railroad enthusiasts or pro-/anti-shippers or what have you. This is a joke or meta-commentary, but it's not exactly off, either.
But this isn't a prohibition on living, or even doing noteworthy things. Obviously there's a ton of exceptions with little more principle than 'whatever I like is ok', and a ton of other taboos and standards and rules and not-quite-explicit-or-consistent landmines, but there are people who succeed without getting milkshake duck'd. Even within the principles themselves there is an Ideal Male Form: it's just more of a humble auteur with a lot of superstitious-seeming taboos and habits.
But this is also pretty repulsive to a lot of the Red Tribe. Trivially, a ton of the actual taboos and habits and landmines are the centre of the political disagreements, and just as trivially a lot of the aesthetics are appalling, and there's a lot of arguments about what extent the practical result is good or not, but the bone of the problem far beyond any practical or pragmatic limit is that it's just not what a lot of Red Tribers want. For all a steelman of the progressive perspective might say that "destroying the kyriarchy" doesn't prohibit you from being traditionally masculine so much, in the short term tearing down a cage with the people inside it doesn't look like a great extension for the metaphor, and sometimes the metal bars end up being support beams.
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