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On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity
In the past week, I took my dad to the annual Street Rod show in our hometown, where we walked around all afternoon looking at thousands of custom classics, running into a lot of the same people we’ve run into at the same show every year since I could walk. And I took him to see his all-time favorite movie, George Lucas’* American Graffiti, in theaters one night only for the 50th Anniversary of its original release.
At the film, and even more at the car show, I felt like a kid, like a teenager. Not in the sense of “Wide eyed wonder” or “remembering my own youth,” though there was plenty of that as well. It was simply that I, at thirty, was one of the younger people at both events. The people at the Street Rod show have frozen in time, always my dad’s age or older. Fewer and older every year, as they die off one after another. When I was ten they were older but still robust guys who could lift a transmission and you wouldn't mess with; when I was a teenager you started seeing canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and they’ve become more common every year since. This year, I followed two guys for hours across the show, on Rascal scooters, matching MAGA hats, chain smoking cigars. I wasn’t sure if I admired their IDGAF attitude (“I’m already on the scooter, why give up the cigars now?”) or if I was horrified at the idea. When two street rod enthusiasts see each other at the show and catch up, the conversation is all ailments and surgeries now. And then they all turn to the same question: where are all the young people? Why don’t young people care about these cars? Why don’t young people love Street Rods?
And the answer seemed blindingly obvious to me: these cars have a completely different meaning and symbolism for you than they do for me. Custom car culture still exists, but it’s not about Street Rods as defined in the show charter, not by a long shot. The National Street Rod Association describes street rods as a vehicle of 1948 or earlier that has had modernization to the engine, transmission, interior, or anything else and is a non-racing vehicle used mostly for general enjoyment. “The more family-friendly version of the hot rod.” Besides the obvious fact that cars from 1948 are less accessible to young people, it simply doesn’t make sense to modify a car for performance today.
Modifying a car for street performance purposes makes essentially zero sense in this day and age, doing so is entirely performative in nature. In 1962, the year American Graffiti is set, hot rods were fast because factory cars were slow. I’ve built and driven cars similar to John Millner’s “piss yellow deuce coupe” and while they’re fun to play with, they’re not really very fast**. It’s impossible to guess exact specs in a film that’s largely a nostalgic fantasy, but I’ve driven similar cars with more modern running gear, and it’s pretty hard to take that kind of platform and get a sub-7s 0-60 just by getting the engine running hotter. Now, in 1962, that car was fast, it was the fastest in the Valley!, because Steve’s ’58 Impala probably made 60 in something like 14 seconds, and the Edsel his girlfriend drives probably took 10 seconds or so. Even a brand-new ’62 Vette would have taken 6.9 seconds to reach 60. It really was possible to take a clapped out little old Ford that a teenager with a summer job could afford, slap a big engine sourced from a wrecked truck in it, tune it for power in your garage, and have a meaningfully fast car, a car visibly faster than other cars on the road, a car fast enough that other people would be impressed by it. You could have the bitchin’est car in the whole Valley, and the handful of mostly-foreign performance cars that could challenge you were rare as hen’s teeth in the American small town.
Today, factory speed is so widely available that not only is it impossible to hot-rod anything meaningful, it’s impossible to really street race without being more limited by balls and rationality than by the machines involved. The 2023 Vette runs a sub-3 0-60, in automatic, and costs less than $80k brand new Chevy sells 30,000 of them every year. A Tesla Model 3 Performance sedan can do 60 in 3.5 seconds, costs $55k, and is also a practical day to day car. Hell, for a little over $30k today, you can pick up a 2021 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Prime which will get you to 60 in 5.6 seconds while being among the most practical and reliable family cars on the road. There’s no logical reason to modify your car to be faster today, putting an annoying exhaust, taking out comfort features and turning it into a penalty box, will still deliver less speed-per-dollar than just saving up for a used Corvette. Even if you just want to Mod, you’re better off starting at the Vette and modding that, on a dollar-for-dollar basis. You cannot build a meaningfully fast car on a budget today, at best you might be able to keep a clapped out old M3 on the road. The budget path to a meaningfully fast car today is taking a factory fast car that has deteriorated to a budget price and managing to keep it in shape. A friend of mine has a 2012 e550, I’ve driven it and it’s a lovely and incredibly fast car with over 400hp that will happily bounce off the electronically limited top speed, he bought it for $20k a couple years back, but it’s caught a case of electrical gremlins that are causing an engine misfire that the mechanics all estimate at $15k to fix, and wholesale trade-in on it is $11k, probably sell it for $5k with the engine issues. There’s nothing you can do with $6k in parts for a $5k Honda Civic that will get you anywhere near the E550’s 4.3s 60 time.
Factory speed is the enemy of custom car culture. When any chucklehead can just pay-to-win by buying a fast car from the dealership, having a fast car has no meaning. Think of the great eras of custom racing: American Graffiti memorializes the late 50s early 60s street rod era, and the first few Fast and Furious films commemorate the late 80s-90s tuner era. But the thing is, the 80s and 90s were a nadir for cars in general in America. The 60s and 70s had the great muscle car era, that was the death of the Hot Rod era. Post Embargo, common American cars wouldn’t achieve the performance heights of the Judge and the great SS cars until the mid 2000s. The C4 Corvette is a mediocre car by today’s standards, would be a Toyota 86 competitor, but in 1984 it was such a monster it was banned from SCCA competition because Porsche and Mercedes products simply couldn’t compete, the Corvette needed its own category! This was the environment that fueled Tuner and Ricer culture: you really could take an Acura Integra and make it meaningfully faster, fast enough to compete with a C4 corvette.
The irony is that “car guys” have always slavered over factory speed! They want car companies to make great performance cars! But they also love custom culture. These two desires are in natural conflict, factory speed drives customs out of the market. Today’s custom culture is all about art cars, interesting aesthetics, or over-loud audio. The very same guys complaining that young people aren’t into cars, created the environment where custom cars don’t make sense. Our desires kill the environment that creates and fuels those desires.*** Too much of what we want kills us. It’s the inherently elegiac nature of the Western: the cowboy sheriff makes himself obsolete, by taming the West he destroys the West he knew.
The restrictive definition that the National Street Rod Association uses sentences their shows to decline and death. I look out at the show, shrinking every year, aging every year, and I know the only path forward for this subculture. If they want young people, they need cars that mean something to young people! A 75 year old man wants the cars that were cool when he was young, so does a 30 year old man, so does the 22 year old man. I look at the park and think, cut it right down the middle, this half is T-Buckets and Golden Oldies, that half is Ricers and Reggaeton booming out of trunk mounted subwoofers. You can still have the traditional street rods, but limiting the show to traditional street rods leaves it sterile, unmoving, not going anywhere. Open the show up to everyone, and maybe they’ll also learn to love the traditional street rods. Sure, have the old timers, but have the young artists too! The only way to preserve hot rod culture, to really keep the spirit of John Milner alive, is to allow it to change and grow, to bring in young people customizing the cars that mean something to young people.
But the OGs, the NSRA Golden Oldies types, they have no interest in seeing things change. They don’t want Riced out Civics, they don’t want big subwoofers and Bad Bunny, they want what they’ve always had. And maybe they deserve that! Maybe the purity of that culture is worth it! But walking through the show, I’m very aware, viscerally aware, of the choice being made: the Street Rod show has chosen death over diversity. They’d rather the car show shrink than that it feature modern customs. They’d rather see it die than see it change. That’s the tragedy, walking around the show looking at these beautiful machines, and knowing that the culture that built them has rendered itself sterile, chosen not to reproduce itself for fear of change.
*This was, coincidentally, the film Lucas made immediately before becoming “the Star Wars guy” forever. It’s a cozy little realistic slice-of-life all-rounder of a film, no special effects to speak of. It’s fascinating to consider: if Lucas hadn’t made Star Wars would he have continued making movies like this for thirty years instead? Did we miss out on unmade masterpieces consumed by the Star Wars universe? I might write a bigger comment on the film later, the way it perfectly captures the really beauty and feelings of freedom of American youth, the unique Americana teenage culture of driving around with your friends that is disappearing every year, I wanted to include more of it here but this comment is already entirely too long.
**A forum comment I found from an old timer is the best summary on the topic of how fast Hot Rods were:
***Another example from my youth: Baseball Cards were something kids were supposed to care about. My dad bought me baseball cards and sort of informed me that little boys were supposed to like them. But whenever I actually played with them, he’d yell at me for ruining their collector value. I wasn’t allowed to flip them, shuffle them, make fake lineups, trade them: they were worth something. Because from the time my dad was a kid, his generation had made them collectable, made them valuable. As a result, I have no connection with baseball cards, really. I’m aware they’re collectibles, but I have no emotional attachment to them the way his generation did. The capitalist urge to create something special and market it, to make "collectibles," erodes and destroys the human meaning behind those collectibles.
I think you got it quite wrong. It was never about pure performance. It was always about the rush of the wins during the journey.
Do you know which is the most condescending, obnoxious thing in modern cars - the check engine light. It is the equivalent of the ban on twitter of old and Facebook - with you break our guidelines without telling you what is wrong. Not only it doesn't refuse to tell you the error - with 2 screens in my car there is not a single place, submenu or whatever where I can read the code, let alone the description of the error. You the user are unworthy of even knowing what is wrong with your property.
There is this meme/observation - in the 60s the car manuals included how to adjust the valves, Today the warning is to not drink from the washing fluid.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI - this is ad for Chevrolet from 1937 that gives the best explanation how differential works. This is a culture that creates petrolheads.
In days of old it was basic expectation of masculinity to know how a car works in detail, to be able to repair it (or at least keep it moving until you get to repairman) and maintain it. Nowadays there are guys that brag with their inability to change a flat tire (true story).
We don't live in a culture that can generate interest in cars. Or PCs for that matter. While the PC is still quite open it is too monoculturish (or oligoculturish) to actually generate deep interest in custom builds. The society tries its best to discourage the tinkerer, the inventor. Except in the confines of the big corporations. We don't want people to actually interfere with our plans for planned obsolescence I guess.
My washing machine has 12 programs. And there is absolutely nowhere info to be found about what time they take, the rpm and difference between them. Let alone regulate it or change it. My customer steam oven has all kinds of awesome fancy programs and yet not a simple way to create my custom one.
Nowadays we live in the opposite culture - knowing is discouraged. The car works by magic, the iphone works by magic, the washing machine too.
I'm actually curious, what exactly is the brag here they were making? I've encountered people who can't change their own flat tires, but I've yet to encounter one who was anything less than sheepishly ashamed of this, much less proud enough to brag about this lack of ability on their part. Is it just that they enjoy such a luxurious life that they can just throw money at people to do this for them, even in unplanned emergencies?
I'm reminded of anecdotes I've heard from teachers mentioning that their students today don't understand computer filesystems. Everything is just done via app, and the idea of using a browser to download a file to a folder on their hard drive, then navigating to that folder in an explorer program, copying the file to another folder where it needs to be, and opening it with another application or whatever is completely foreign to them. It sort of makes sense given the environment in which they grew up and learned computers, and it seems similar to my own attitude towards cars, which is that they really are just
a black boxmagic, and if something goes wrong, I go to my localmechanicmagician to get it fixed. Because learning the magic myself just seems like more trouble than it's worth. When I was learning computers, I had to learn the filesystem to actually accomplish anything. Now, kids don't have to, so they don't.I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing or either.
Imagine you grow up in an conservative area where boys & man are all interested in cars, and being able to change tires is seen as the bare minimum of manliness. You're an awkward nerd that doesn't like cars but is good with computers.
20 years later, all the kids that made fun of you in school for not caring about cars are at best suburb normies and at worst still live with their parents. You went to google and now make literally 5x as much as the majority of them, while still not being able to change a tire.
It's not about the thing itself, it's about what kind of person you are. And young people pick this up as well, they see that being able to change tires is basically meaningless and anyone being proud of it is probably a loser at everything that matters, so they countersignal how bad they're at it.
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It went something like this - I had flat tire (due to stupidity on my part), the girl I was in the car with posted some kind of story on the social media. Some fuckboy wrote something among the lines her - hey hun, do you know how to change a tire. Her answer was - no, you? . His answer was - no I have guys for that.
For the other part - it was the damned iphone. Because android was open for learning and still is. But apple are actively hostile towards viewing their device as something different than magic.
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Unsure if you are talking about the manufacturers of PCs or the enthusiast.
All the same, I do miss the days when the various manufacturers had more interoperability. Now you pick and AMD or Intel processor, and they must use a small range of AMD or Intel motherboard chipsets. It's all very homogenized.
I think the peak of enthusiast computer building was probably Socket 7. You had chipsets from Intel, ALi, SiS or VIA. You could use CPUs from Intel, AMD, Cyrix and a few other also rans. You could do all sorts of goofy stuff with clock multipliers and the front side bus. I'm still running a Pentium 233 MMX at 2.5 x 100 instead of 3.5 x 66.
You still had a plethora of motherboard chipset manufacturers for a while even after that. Nvidia got in the game for a hot minute. I'm not sure who hung on longest? Maybe VIA? I see they kept plugging along with Intel until the P4 era, and then AMD until AM2.
None the less it's all pretty boring now. You pick AMD or Intel, then throw the whole damned thing away in 3 or 4 years for a new socket. And often not because new hardware has really gotten all that better, but because Windows has gotten so shit it's slowed your PC to a crawl.
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Not to excuse the atrocious incapacity of your screens, but your car should also have an OBD2 port, right? For $20 you can plug in a handheld reader (or bluetooth dongle to use your phone as the reader) and see what internal code triggered the light.
And this is what I do. But once again - it shows the attitude towards the driver and the owner.
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I’ve often thought that the lack of such maker cultures both in STEM and in the arts hurts the ability of the next generation of people to get excited about making things themselves. Everything is left to the professional, to the pro STEM guy to make an app for that, or for the artist to create the kind of content people want. I think some of the trouble comes from the laws. If someone does something stupid with their device settings and either breaks the device or injures themselves, the company might be liable for that. In the case of the arts, most mainstream characters and concepts are copyrighted to long past the lifetime of anyone who grew up when the concept was new.
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An increasing number of new cars don't even come with a spare tire, without which the skill is not necessarily useful. On the other hand, modern tires are far more reliable than our grandparents', and run-flat tires aren't that bad, from what I hear.
And it's not like most folks can change the tire on the rim at home anyway: that's a specialized skill these days involving some specific large power tools and esoteric knowledge of installing TPMS sensors correctly. And used tires have specific proper disposal requirements too.
I'm not sure I disagree with your take completely, but it's also interesting to see the grind of reliability engineering and the division of specialized labor make observable progress within my own lifetime.
It's not that it is skill, it is the equipment for the rimjob (pun intended), but lifting a car, unscrewing 4-5 bolts, changing, putting bolts again, running till you get to the closest shop is useful. And it requires less than 60 seconds of learning.
From my experience modern cars are reliable until they aren't and they make sure that in that situation you are completely helpless.
I do my own oil changes and brake work, but I refuse to change flats on the road. Not because I don't know how to do it, but because the scissor jacks cars come with are absolute garbage and rather than dick around with one of these in the rain on the side of a busy road I'd rather just call someone to do it for me for free. At home I have a floor jack so it's not an issue, but if I didn't have a garage and instead, say, had to work on my car while it was parked on the street, I'd probably take it somewhere.
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Maybe not a full size spare, but compact spares are standard on 2023/2024 Camrys, Corollas, Accords (the one big exception of the four being hybrid models only have flat repair kits) and Civics (the 4 most popular not-SUV, not-truck cars of 2023).
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I don't think either of us is wrong, a journey needs a destination to have meaning. Performance might be more MacGuffin than goal, but you need a MacGuffin to animate the characters to pursue the actions that create the plot. Without a goal, your journey becomes a walkabout, that of a Flaneur, and few people share that temperament.
The speed might not ultimately have been the fun part, but achieving and pursuing the speed was the motivating force behind the whole culture.
I was viewing mostly your paragraph about how fast modern cars are at factory defaults hurts the hobby. It doesn't in my opinion. Sorry if I wasn't clear. The same way a sharpener takes a cheap knife for fun - he knows it won't beat the Shigefusa or Sakai Yusuke - the high come from the improvement of the original car. It is the relative not the absolute performance of the car that moves the tinkerers.
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Huh? Put in an obdii reader and check the code. Tells you exactly what's wrong.
Which is a third-party prosumer item that not everyone has.
That's the point. You shouldn't need a third-party item to understand where the fuck-up is. Even if it's a hidden option in the background, cars come natively with enough computers that you should be able to pull up an error-code read-out without spending additional money.
Instead, we get new cars and trucks with 18 different cameras built in so the software can construct a to-down view when backing up and then wonder why everything is so expensive nowadays.
Grousing about a $100 tool for a car that cost thousands doesn't really make sense. Not everyone has a wrench set either. The obdii scanner pinpoints the issues much better than a few gauges on the dash ever could - it's a huge step up from how things used to be.
Cpi for new cars was flat from the late 90s until covid, so new cars actually got cheaper in real terms. Before that, prices followed general inflation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01
Also, nobody can force you to buy a new car (it's against the law!).
It makes perfect sense. I'm already paying thousands for said car - why does it not include the necessary software already?
If I wanted to get a new car to replace the one I have(I don't), I couldn't even go with the latest make and model as they literally don't release them in America any more.
Nor am I skeptical that I could purchase one with similar performance and at a similar price. The MRSP for the model I own has gone up, not down. That's not normal.
Hopefully I won't have to find out any time soon.
Cars don't come with wrench sets either. What contempt for the user!
You indeed should not be skeptical, because until covid as I said car prices were getting cheaper in real terms for twenty years.
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Isn’t the engine light strictly more information than you’d have had in an older vehicle?
All your same diagnostics still work. You can go pop the hood and observe, shit, I’m out of blinker fluid. Time to walk to the nearest phone booth and call for a tow.
I bet it’s easier to hack new washer cycles, too. Back in my day you only had one knob and one button.
No. While the ecu has a lot more information it is hidden. In the old soviet lada and moskvich you had a oil pressure gauge. The design was a lot more in your face.
The check engine light is like your wife being angry with you. What is wrong - if you don't know, no need to tell you. But something is wrong. Give me the fucking error code in plain sight. It was the same with windows when they changed the BSOD to smiley. Why ?
I doubt it. Manufacturers go to great deal to obscure the raw parameters - like RPM, duration and so on. Why?
So…which of those raw parameters was available in the good ol’ washer? From where I’m standing, if you desperately wanted to tune your washer, too bad. Today there’s at least a chance that the OEM left an open port somewhere in the machine. It has strictly more features than its predecessor, even if it doesn’t include all the ones you want.
The loss of an oil gauge is a shame. And a surprise—my car still has one! Why do you think they took it out? My guess would be cost-saving, or maybe wanting a cleaner visual presentation. Arguing that it was a corporate plan to discourage amateur maintenance…well, I find that less likely. There are plenty of better ways to make working on your car less appealing; just ask BMW.
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Personally, I think both options are death. The fact of the matter is, as you correctly observe, Street Rods are an artifact from a very specific time and place, with conditions that are long since gone. And were they to choose "diversity", it would just lead to them getting chased out of their own hobby even sooner. Probably nearly instantly. Better to let them keep it to themselves until the last member dies, than have them suffer the heartbreak of having their hobby stolen from them, and themselves alienate from it, and then they die. Possibly sooner than they would have as a result of their devastating loss of community.
I agree wholeheartedly. I don't view it as an easy choice. I don't think the Street Rodders owe it to the universe to endure Bad Bunny blaring from trunk mounted subwoofers to keep the show going a few more years, but the way I felt extinction coming, walking around that show looking at the visceral consequences of the choices made brought that to the front of my mind.
On the flip side, look at professional sports. Obviously my generation doesn't care as much about Mantle and Dimaggio and Berra, Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada and Andy Pettite were the Yankees of my youth. But because the Yankees and MLB and older fans at the Yankees Fan Club maintained that continuity and tradition, while also respecting the new players, and passed down the stories, Mantle and Dimaggio and Berra mean a lot to me, and signed photos of all three hang over my bar in my basement. Across sports you see the same thing: football fans of historic English clubs or NBA fans or NFL fans they all love to count up championships won before they were alive and brag about their team. If you continue to bring in the new generation and teach them the tradition, there is a path toward respecting the past while continuing to incorporate the new and grow.
I'm not sure which is the right choice and which the wrong one. Whether it's better to burn out or to fade away. But the choice feels so visceral.
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The list of options that are not death, when looking beyond the short-term, is, in fact, blank.
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They should found some preservation society, possibly a museum. It might not be curated and staffed from people cut from the same cloth, but antiquarians would see value here.
I doubt it.
I visited my hometown last weekend to meet a friend at a board game tavern. Across the street was the local museum. When I was a kid, they had some arrangement where you could donate, and they'd engrave your name on a brick. There was one there with my grandfather's name on it which I had wanted to find.
Or at least there was. At some point they had renovated it into some god awful post modern monstrosity and thrown them all away.
It also used to be a civil war museum, and it's been completely repurposed away from that as well.
If they had repurposed the museum into a board game tavern, there might be a clear-cut case that progress had been made. As it is, you describe and ebb and flow of human existence that is more melancholy and bittersweet.
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I agree, and this is something I've been thinking about for a while in terms of our larger culture. In the presence of any sort of incentives for growth or change, it's not clear how anyone or anything can meaningfully survive without first paying a huge one-time cost to conquer everything around it, then kill itself to some degree by removing its own ability to grow and change.
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I think you've hit on one leg of a very important elephant.
I've noticed similar phenomena from gun clubs to veterans organizations to churches to beer-league sports. Commonly there is a life cycle, and if the initial stages are strong enough, the legacy can live on a while. But ultimately, unless external conditions are producing more of whatever fed that cause, it dies. I've noped out of a few organizations just because I didn't want to be the last guy holding the bag. When they start canvassing for board members, I'm done.
Some of it is just failing to adapt to the times, but if you adapt to the times too much, you can also crater your organization as it loses focus and splits. For example, if your Street Rod org started taking roller skates, it probably wouldn't help.
Another issue is that almost all organizations eventually end up being run by the people who can be assed to show up and do the clerical work necessary. This naturally concentrates power in the hands of a small minority who can steer the organization along their personal preferences. Occasionally this is done well, but that's a rarity.
A third is that any successful organization is going to generate good will and money, which are natural targets for idiots, grifters, con men, politicians and degenerates everywhere.
The classic formulation of your final paragraph is Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths
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I had to actually google what a 'beer-league sport' is.
I expect no less at The Motte! :P
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I love the irony that baseball cards from your father's era are valuable because kids played with them (and ruined them) and Moms threw out the collection later, while baseball cards from my era are still totally worthless because everyone from my childhood saved them in archival quality protetive materials (I still remember kids arguing about the merits of various cardboard boxes and plastic pockets sheets) for long term storage. All of our 1989 Ken Griffey Jr Upper Deck #1 were going to be worth a fortune because they were perfectly preserved.
Now I think sports collecting is driven by gamblers hoping to find ultra rare lottery prize like chase cards.
Part of this is that anything sold intended to be a collectors item is generally made in too large quantities to be really rare. Think of that Beanie Baby divorce photo from 1999. On the other hand, I've heard that those originals are actually starting to trend up in value, so who knows.
I try not to collect things without specific uses, but I appreciate that others enjoy doing so. Sometimes it's actually valuable to historians.
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They are worthless because also too many were made and there is no community around them. MTG and Pokémon have a large community/fandom and utility in that they can be played. Powerful, rare cards are valuable for their in-game utility. baseball cards and comic books are static things with a much smaller community and no utility.
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The exact same thing happened to comic books, of course. At least that has the advantage of it not being too expensive to read old (but-not-too-old) series.
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Every modern generation has to come to terms with the fact that their world gets replaced, their traditions get tossed aside, and their life's work was ultimately worth very little to anyone except themselves.
It's another trick of modernity, where the constantly evolving industrial and technological society outpaces each generation and leaves them without any heirs or students to whom they can pass the mantle. In fact, seeing someone pick up their useless hobby to carry on the tradition would make a self aware person feel guilty and sad.
Prior to such a rapidly changing world, the bond between generations was held together through tools and technology that didn't get outpaced. That could be recycled and innovated again and again. The joy of cultivating a craft and knowing it will live on.
That being said a lot of people need to take a long hard look at themselves. Most of the things people devote themselves to today are useless junk. Prior to a more civilized world, having a useless hobby could very likely lead to something very bad.
The impulse we have to devote ourselves to things that work and to grieve their loss is a small reminder of just how far we are straying away from being human. We have impulses to grieve the lost world, but not to celebrate the fact it was lost under a pile of 'better' things.
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I think the arrival of the car represented something unique and special for young people, or especially young men, in America in the middle of the last century. Having moved to the new suburbs in the 40s and 50s, the car in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s (pre oil crisis at least) was freedom and liberty, it was teenagerhood itself in many ways. Today, the car is a commodity, fuel is much more expensive, and for the middle classes and above the 'freedom' of the teen years has been replaced by test prep, extracurriculars, helicopter parents, college applications, AP class homework and 'decide what you want to do with your life'. When my Dad was 16 or 17 (on the eve of the first OPEC embargo), he worked for summer and bought an old Cadillac. Today, not only is no job you do at 17 going to pay you enough to buy a decent car, a 'decent car' (that you buy with parental support, even) is going to be a 2000s Camry or equivalent highly functional, probably Japanese or Korean vehicle designed for middle class parents like your mom and dad. The opposite of cool, in other words. And I think that filters to 'cars in general'. Teslas are cool only because they're a tech product, like the iPhone (OMG it even plays Witcher 3 on it!).
Your baseball example is a similar thing. Like most East Coast men over the age of 50, every American male in my extended family of the Gen X-or-above generation loves baseball. Most (again, stereotyically) support the Mets ("the most Jewish team in the most Jewish sport" according to Tablet). Nobody I know my age does. Young people watch the NBA, NFL or NHL, especially basketball, maybe because it's more exciting and appeals more to the zoomer or millennial mind. Young people aren't interested in baseball, so why would they collect cards?
My uncle collects old rally cars and goes on (friendly) rallies with my cousins. It seems fun, but again, the cars cost him a hundred grand a year (and countless hours of work) to maintain (and more to buy), and my cousins aren't going to have that time or money or garage space until they retire in 40 years, if ever. Maybe if automation takes our jobs this kind of hobby will make a comeback (if UBI is enough to pay for maintaining the cars), but otherwise how could the average young, working person (without making extreme sacrifices) afford cars as a hobby?
I don't think I understand this part of your comment. I think you could buy either a very functional but uncool car like you describe, or a cooler car requiring maintenance along the lines of the old Cadillac, for $5k or so, which seems pretty achievable for a conscientious teenager to earn in three months at post-pandemic entry-level wages.
What's missing is that while you can get a cool car, actually objectively a much cooler car, for summer-job wages; having that cool car isn't meaningful in the same way it once was. In the old days, according to the old timers, having the fastest hopped-up car in town was a whole thing. It was status in itself.
Now having the fastest/coolest car is pay-to-win. Having money is a kind of status, but a different kind, and it isn't practically possible to boot-strap it.
FWIW, when I give teenage boys at the gym advice about buying a first car, I tell them that if they're buying a car to impress girls, the most impressive things are to keep it clean and make sure it starts. Nothing spoils a date like when your car breaks down. After that if you still have budget left, get a 4x4 truck or an old Wrangler and take her out on a dirt road in the mountains. The event will impress her more than any turbo-6 will.
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I don't think it's that simple. A teenager could buy a very old cool car that lacks many modern safety features (etc), but that's not really the same thing as buying a 1962 Cadillac in 1972, for example. Safety features that didn't exist then are now commonplace, and mom and dad usually get a say.
The combination of recent-enough-to-be-safe by modern standards, easily-ish maintained and cool is very rare on a teenager's budget. Post some examples if you think otherwise! And there's the matter that with oil inching back to $100/bbl, it has to be affordable for a teen to drive.
And it's Mini. Worse it's BMW Mini. While the original is absolutely cool, after 2000 it is the car for Golddiggers that can't land the properly rich guys.
Please don't leave comments that are just one-line sex jokes.
ETA: Oh, wait--this is one of those sex jokes where the poster didn't know they were writing a sex joke until after they had posted it. Never mind.
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Given the area, that the cooper is automatic and its age, it's quite possible it's a unicorn listing rather than serious issues. There's probably several hundred to a couple thousand in rubber/plastic wear parts that need replacing though. Even low mileage those things are somewhat maintenance heavy just year to year.
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I'm biased because I own one, but an 8th gen Civic Si can be found in reasonably good shape for $8-10K and bad shape for about $6K. It's not a fast car unless you put money into it, but it's fun to drive (8K RPM red line and VTEC, yo!), gets reasonably good gas mileage, and is reasonably easy to maintain (There's a Youtube video that tell you how to fix almost anything on it.) while having lots of airbags unlike the Fast and the Furious era cars from the 90s and early 2000s. A 7th generation Si isn't as much fun without mods (The stock one I had felt pretty slow and I traded out of it quickly but the other one I had with a 6 speed swap was super fun and felt like you were going fast.) but is basically an uglier Mini Cooper that's way more reliable.
An NB Miata (1999-2005) can be had in decent shape for $5-6K if you're willing to be cramped and have parents who don't care about safety, and in my experience a mildly tarted up one gets more attention than much nicer cars that cost more money. Like the Civic, you can find a video that'll show you how to fix almost anything on Youtube.
The funny thing about the MX5 frames up until maybe the ND is that you can fit a small block in there only needing to slightly modify or relocate the radiator and properly mate it to the drive train. Which is not that difficult a task and the weight balance does not change by more than a few percent forward.
Yes, the LS-swapped Miata is our generation's Shelby Cobra. I'd love to drive one.
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I disagree. I recently bought a Mercedes E class from the late 00's for $4500. It runs great and didn't need any work. Oil changes are a little more expensive than they were in my camry and it takes premium gas but overall i wouldn't consider it expensive to maintain. I don't know if it's exactly what teenagers would consider "cool" these days but it's certainly cooler than my old camry. It's a luxury brand, and it rides very smooth.
Sweet car. Hope it runs well for you! That era of Mercedes just felt more special, more put together, than the new ones.
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Toyota Celica. Mazda Miata is a bit more expensive, and for some reason the US got the wrong Honda Civic, not the fighter jet-looking one.
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This is a wonderful post. Thank you for making it; it's the sorts of beauty that makes me glad to be at home in this place, no matter the other material that comes and goes.
I have no incredibly deep other thoughts. The baseball card anecdote amused me, a little; a Dutch YA book includes a similar quip. An old, old man talks about the park ranger's folly: by fencing off pretty areas, telling kids not to climb trees, and being a general menace, he kills the sorts of enjoyment that drives kids into wanting to be park rangers. It's funny how this sorts of attitude can be seen across so many years and places, genuinely.
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In summary:
The American Hot Rod Association gives an overly strict definition of hot rods which has been unwelcome to the newer generation of tuners. Due to factory cars being fast now, tuner culture has changed. The people still doing hot rods are getting old and dying off, and aren't interested in the types of things that have happened in response to this. They have chosen death over diversity.
My take:
Old hot rods are expensive AF, and like most cool things (hot rods and muscle cars are cool), the cost of them has gone to the moon. It's not that tuners are disinterested in...tuning, it's just that getting to the really high end is extremely expensive now. Still, having a car that will do 10 second quarter miles is seen as an extreme point of pride.
On top of this, most homes now either have a restrictive HOA, or an even more restrictive and powerful set of city "ordinances" which prohibit things like a teenager and his friends swapping an engine in their driveway. It's become de facto illegal in most places[1] to tune cars unless you can afford an enclosed workshop to do it in.
[1]: Obviously California is an exception to this rule where they have all but made it literally illegal to modify any aspect of you car and may or may not just impound it if you do: https://old.reddit.com/r/ElantraN/comments/11iks8c/final_most_likely_update_4_loud_exhaust_and_smog/
I took a course in speed reading, and I got so good I read War and Peace in 3 hours! It's about Russia.
A lot of mid-tier street rods are actually getting harder and harder to sell, because young people (broadly defined) don't really care for them. This is the kind of dynamic I'm talking about: if you incorporate the newer forms of the hobby, some of those same people will respect and care for the older forms.
HOAs are the fucking worst. All the downsides of government and private industry combined into one.
Lmao, sign me up.
I'm curious about the libertarian argument here. Usually when I bring up HOAs libertarians start complaining about zoning etc. Idk, I think it's a thornier problem than most give it credit for.
My vote goes to the fact that we no longer have a shared moral fabric in modern Western society. Once you lose that things that were relatively simple become hard as hell to figure out.
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I can only wish that jackbooted thugs would impound the cars that shook my windows every day when I lived on a main road in California. Unfortunately, they didn't.
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Probably not, since he couldn't continue making Star Wars for thirty years either.
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I would just point out addressing the accessibility of performance and tuneability that there are very accessible 3s 0-60, 160mph+ factory vehicles for sub 20k USD. Super impractical as daily drivers if only because of things like snow and rain as well as nearly zero cargo space with very high injury and fatality rates from a complete lack of safety features, but they are still out there. Just not on four wheels. The smaller size and weight makes them more accessible for silly things like engine swaps (outside of dropping a performance motor in a clapped out old enduro/dirt it's a rarity though) and performance mods (though for various geometry and space reasons you can't exactly bolt on a turbo) but there is a bit less of that compared to car culture.
The reason people won't buy fast motorcycles is instructive as to why street racing is less common today: lack of balls.
I'll cop to it, that's why I don't own a motorcycle. I had a Kawasaki trail bike I was learning to ride when I was 17, 18 but then I got into a horrendous car accident. When I woke up in the hospital, the doctor told me essentially that if I didn't notice any effects in a month I was probably fine, but that concussions were cumulative and that I would be more suceptible to concussions in the future and they would potentially be more harmful. Instantly sold the bike, quit boxing. The risk of an accident that killed me or physically maimed me I could handle, but one that left me retarded? Too grim, I didn't have the guts.
Street racing slow cars at low speeds feels safer. A street rod that does the quarter mile at 80mph feels like something you can handle; doing it in a Tesla at 130-140mph feels insane. The quality of equipment has outstripped the drivers' perception of their own skills. This even though the newer car is safer at 100+ than the old jalopy was at 60.
To add, in most places there is A. more traffic and with that B. more cops on the roads and insurers that are less forgiving than in the past. Even in rural areas (and most teenagers don't live in rural areas, but either in cities with heavy traffic or suburbs that are likely to have plenty of bored cops) you'll get caught eventually if you make a habit of having too much fun, and my teenage hooliganism reached a fairly quick end upon getting slapped in handcuffs for speeding.
"Slow car fast" at least means you can hit the redline in second or third without going fast enough to be in "reckless driving" ticket territory whereas pushing something mundane by performance car territory like a Mustang or Challenger will get you "license revoked" territory quickly along with really outstripping the skill of your average driver (as compilation videos of Mustangs spinning out and crashing into stuff can attest).
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I don’t know where you guys all live, but there is a near constant stream of modded cars, side by sides, and crotch rockets going by my house all the time.
It’s actually very annoying.
(I live near a university)
I live one block off a main street separating new development from an old neighbor with a history of poverty and crime so am also treated to nightly revving by people with more brake horsepower than brake performance. Modding a zero down 15% APY Charger with a fart can is not performance modding. Actual competitive performance is price prohibitive even with modern finance availability. And again, 600cc barely street legal modified track bikes are accessible, that was my main post.
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Me too. Despite living in a boring suburb, people still feel determined to flaunt their small dicks by revving down the road at 11 PM. Oh wow, son, that stock Charger is so original!
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Don't really have any feedback due to my complete lack of knowledge about the subject but I enjoyed reading your analysis and its an extremely interesting topic, and one which can be extrapolated to all kinds of divides between older and younger generations. My father is a huge fan of remote controlled airplanes and helicopters but he could never quite get me interested in them growing up. I find it difficult to enjoy something so intrinsically simple when i could just download the newest flight simulator from Microsoft and experience a superior version that is as close to a 1:1 recreation that can be achieved.
How does he feel about modern drones?
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Not sure how what this says about your overall thesis, but the "live fast, die young" car-guy/street-racing scene is still around in the Southwest at least, speaking from somewhat recent experience. They just have a basically non-existent online presence (outside of the occasional Instagram post), and are primarily made up of 14-25 year-old mostly Hispanic and black men. Heavy criminal elements, but what do you expect from a subculture whose "thing" is literally illegal. It also maintains a decent but smaller presence in some rural areas, mostly among Hispanics and Amerindians. Cars varied heavily, but each cultural group seems to have their favorite styles, whether that be speedy ricers or bouncing Caddilacs.
Just because all of us here are too internet-rotted to find them doesn't mean they aren't out there doing their thing. They don't usually show up at the car shows (even the ones that have no restrictions on the cars) because those are lame and don't tolerate the sort of insanity that the streets do. If you can't have a bunch of hot drunk women ride on top of your car while you burn donuts in a lot while 20 others do the same, is it even a car meet? If your car never leaves the ground, are you even racing?
The fact that it's mostly non-whites doing the real car-stuff is interesting to me though. The general draining of independence/gumption/wherewithal/determination/spirit inflicted by post-modernity really seems to have hit white people the worst (I mean just look at suicide rates.) At this point it's almost exclusively non-whites that I see out there doing the ballsy stuff, outside of a few old-timers that haven't lost the spark.
P.S. For anyone who gets the chance, flying down the road at 120+ MPH in the middle of the night in a shitbox knowing that you WILL die if you do the slightest thing wrong (or get unlucky) is an incredible experience and I 10/10 would recommend. This also goes for having your brakes go out on a steep downhill slope and knowing that you just have to ride your way down a mountain gradually gaining speed until you reach the bottom.
Most dangerous outdoor sports are overwhelmingly white with a few Asians. Look at mountain climbing or back country skiing or sky diving. Maybe it's not as dangerous as drunk street racing but it takes a hell of a lot more skill and physical fitness.
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They are very much online. The unofficial meetups late night in parking lots don't happen through word of mouth. The number of weird project cars that have dedicated instas. Hoon culture spreads through videos of doing stupid shit. It's much like the old days but instead of VHS tapes passed around, zines and knowing a guy, the newer online variant of tiktok microuniverses, instas and group chats.
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Yes! That's exactly my thesis! If the old timers were willing to incorporate that modern street racing culture into their existing club structure, then they have a shot at continuing the existence of the club. Some of those guys might even come to appreciate each other's cars, over time, and see them as similar expressions of the same spirit and both worthy of celebration. Today's old timers were once yesterday's wild kids, the survivors of today's wild kids will be tomorrow's old timers.
But that would represent such a change from their existing choices that it seems like an unbridgeable gap. Which sentences the old timers to watch their subculture be extinguished.
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A couple of thoughts, as a car enjoyer:
I do believe there is still a modded car culture around these days, though yes, it probably involves taking an otherwise-good-enough factory car and adding new wheels and some other mostly-cosmetic modifications, backed up with some anime decals.
Similarly, I think the younger generations are also into old cars, though, yes, this probably takes the form of low-riders and such rather than street/hot rods. I think pre-1948 cars and such are just too inaccessible by their very-finite nature.
On the topic of taking Japanese cars and modding them for speed: much like with American cars, I believe this came about because the Japanese auto industry actually limited themselves to only so much HP per car, so design focus had to go into the rest of the vehicle's aspects and any tuners could pick up the slack after it left the dealership.
A word I hear more and more among car enthusiasts is "Special." As in "This car feels special" or "this model is special" or "driving feels like a special occasion." Car enthusiasm is less and less about raw performance, and more about find something that makes you say "wow" when you look at your driveway. That can be a classic evoking a time, an art car that has a very specific aesthetic, or performance mods that you did yourself.
It's less the Gentleman's Agreement and more the emissions and fuel economy regs that all automakers hadn't yet figured out, American econo-cars of the time were equally mod-able. Although there is a big dose of the geographic determinism that produces different car company cultures. America's Big Three were all Detroit based and products of the Midwest: big, flat, empty towns where you could floor it in a straight line any time you wanted and where you had to cruise across five hours of straight flat roads to get anywhere. BMW was the product of the Alps: curvy, twisty mountain roads where cornering was king. And Japanese carmakers were products of Japanese urban environments, where compact and practical had to co-exist with fun and exciting.
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While the Kei cars are like that, the tax for cars larger than that was mostly based on displacement, hence VTEC and the widespread adoption of turbos 15-20 years before comparable American-designed cars would receive them.
He's referring I think to the Gentleman's Agreement among Japanese carmakers to limit their vehicles to 276hp, which held up to varying degrees for decades.
I for one wish it was universal that factory cars were 300hp max. Make it easy and legal to mod for more, but no warranty and no dealership. I'm vaguely shopping for a new car, and most of my picks land around there anyway.
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The pre-48 era of cars is also an era where you are pretty much doing bespoke parts and full custom builds, which hurts the wallet even more than when it spawned tuner culture.
I expect that the reprogrammed and custom ECUs that define tuners are going to have a lot more legs than you express in this post as well, particularly as modern cars get scrapped due to obscure and poorly designed CANBUS problems at higher rates.
Kustom Kulture and the "live fast, die young" mindset is also to a degree what the streetrods you visited very much were created to exclude, as expressed by an attempt to family friendly. I don't think that the aging demographic there is going to much speak to that subculture. They might more be associated with motorcycles now tho. Car meets are still fairly regular in most of the country, facilitated by social media, and I know of some deeper levels where street racing is organized.
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Lowriders and modded import cars are popular among young people. There will always be some small subset of the population interested in cars, but the type of car changes.
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Public Pretenders
The difference between a public defender and a private attorney can often be measured not in skill, but in pinstripes.
The defendant had dropped a rhetorical bomb in court. He lobbed the grenade of all insults. He called his attorney (may Allah forgive me for repeating this) a public pretender. The courtroom's sparse decorations afforded plenty of space for the silence to permeate. The room was almost empty as they were basically done with that morning's calendar. Early too, which meant the judge had some time to fuck around.
The judge adopted the familiar tenor of a police interrogation — the verbal equivalent of a slow-moving suffocation. He turned to the so-called public defender and started asking him questions.
"Mister Weber...did you even go to law school?"
"Yes Your Honor."
"Well...are you even licensed to practice in this state?"
"Yes Your Honor."
The judge was hamming it up with the weight of a Shakespearean monologue and the public defender did his best to stifle his laughter, just enough to utter out a coherently monotone answer. The judge continued, savoring every liminal pause for dramatic effect.
"Mister Weber...I need you to answer this next question truthfully...are you — are you a real lawyer?"
This was the final Yes Your Honor, what finally broke the tension. The judge's demeanor visibly relaxed and he shifted back in his dais. He turned back to the defendant and said "Thank you very much for bringing this serious accusation to my attention, but I am relieved to find out that Mr. Weber is indeed a real attorney and is not just pretending to be."
Oh yes the defendant was being blatantly fucked with, but the artificial gravitas was a sufficiently plausible deniability shield to keep him guessing. Besides, what the fuck was he going to do anyway? Pull a rhyming dictionary out of his ass and look up another entry for defender? Maybe next time he can come to court prepared with a more original barb than calling his attorney a public pretender.
Make Me Feel Mighty Real
Money is what makes it real. Which is why I, a public defender, am fake as fuck. I am free of charge. I am the budget option. I am also functionally the default.
Choosing to navigate the legal field without an attorney — also known as "rawdogging it" in the parlance[1] — doesn't usually work out very well for reasons I previously wrote about. And yet, the modern public defense system exists entirely because of a handwritten appeal to the Supreme Court scrawled out on prison stationary. Easily history's most successful pro se filing. Gideon v. Wainwright is why if the government finds itself primed to shove you through the prosecution grinder, they are at least magnanimous enough to give you an attorney. They'll even go so far as to foot the bill if your ass is broke as fuck. Noblesse oblige is not totally dead!
But how good is this default, really? It's Complicated™.
Anyone seeking to examine the criminal justice system by comparing public defenders with privately retained attorneys will find themselves stymied by the fact that public defenders basically are the system. Any poor schmuck (notice I didn't say blameless) unfortunate enough to capture the attention of our nation's indefatigable law enforcement apparatus is almost by definition financially destitute, and that's all you need to qualify for the free option. How much of a shit a jurisdiction gives about people [nose scrunched up in disgust] accused of a crime will vary, and this will be reflected in detail within boring public finance documents. But regardless of that variance, courtrooms are brimming with such a glut of indigent defendants that when the BJS looked into this decades ago, they found that roughly 80% of state felony defendants were represented by a public defender. Point at any random spec of meat pushed through the grinder and you can reasonably assume a public defender is chained along for the ride.[2]
Another confounder is that many public defenders are...private attorneys.[3] Some towns are way too small to have a dedicated agency with full-time government employees, so they farm out indigent defense to local attorneys who can periodically step in as needed on a contractual basis. Even big cities with gargantuan public defense departments rely heavily on private attorneys as gravel to fill in the gaps left by conflict of interest recusal (something like an entire agency withdrawing from a case because one of their lawyers had previously represented the victim or something) or just when they're over-capacity. At the federal level, private attorneys take up about 40% of public defense cases. Every private criminal defense attorney I know takes on public defense cases as a supplement to their paying clients. No need to advertise your services or chase after the inevitable unpaid invoice when the local government takes care of both problems.
The overwhelming majority of criminal defense is not financially sustainable, and would not exist without the constant injection of taxpayer money. The reason for this discrepancy is obvious. Rare is the criminal defendant who has enough of their shit together to afford a defense attorney at market rate. As authentic as Better Call Saul! was overall in its depiction of criminal defense life (and I can't praise the show enough on that front) the idea that Saul Goodman could financially sustain a criminal defense practice by marketing to the dregs of society was pure fantasy. I once had a client stab a dude in broad daylight, in front of a dozen witnesses, slightly fewer surveillance cameras, and screamed his own name in the process. This is not a dude with the temperament to get a regular paycheck every two weeks. Financial security (either directly or as a confounding variable) also gives you the respectability, influence, and resources to shield any potentially criminal behavior away from the prying eyes of law enforcement. Money is great, and I highly recommend having it.
All this to say that any attorney working in criminal defense is necessarily working with a skewed clientele pot. Without some adroit specialization, there is no cash to wring out of this crowd. The options are limited for carving out a private practice that doesn't feed at the public defense contract trough. Some freak attorneys do so by launching their stature to the stratosphere, high enough to sustain a steady living off big-ticket celebrity defendants. The more realistic solution is to be selective in your fishing, pursuing only the practice areas most likely to deliver on the narrow Venn diagram slice of "accused of a crime" and "has money". A reliable eddy for this approach is to be boring as fuck and dedicate yourself almost exclusively to drunk driving cases.
Sartorially Deficient Efficiency Machines
I got my start at a public defense agency and while we did indeed have caseloads stacked high to the ceiling, this doesn't tell you the full story. For one, the benefits of functionally being part of the system means you can spread some fixed costs across several clients (e.g. handling dozens of clients during a single morning calendar). The other part is that public defenders naturally become machines of raw unbridled efficiency.
You can usually easily tell them apart from their privately-funded aristocratic colleagues. One of the best public defenders I know wears the exact same cringe-inducing blazer to court, with the sleeves nearly a foot too long drooping over his hands like a monk's robe. He doesn't give a shit though as he's pared down his repertoire of tools down to the bones, leaving behind only the things that will actually make a difference for his client's cases.
The sheer volume of cases also comes with some supernatural scrying abilities. The prosecutor's office we worked with handled thousands of cases, and they used internal plea deal standards to maintain some semblance of uniformity across the thousands of cases they handled. Their (at times robotic) devotion to fairness chafed at the idea of giving two similarly situated defendants vastly different plea deals. And while they never shared those internal standards with us, all it required was churning through a few dozen cases before the standards became obvious to anyone paying attention.
For DUIs, the biggest factor was blood alcohol concentration. The scale public defenders operated at made it trivial to figure out the BAC threshold for getting a one level reduction in the charges, or even two levels if you were lucky. We also knew which factors could tip the scales for edge cases (Practice Tip: crashing into a trailer home and narrowly hitting a sleeping twelve year-old is Very Bad).
We used a checklist to quickly triage our never-ending DUI caseload. Tell me just a handful of details about a case and I can predict its ultimate conclusion with startingly accuracy. Most of our cases were obvious enough that they were on auto-pilot to a predictable plea deal conclusion, and we could then focus our attention on the edge cases that were most liable to topple over. With the volume of cases I had, the median DUI misdemeanor probably took me maybe two or three hours of work total, including all the time spent in court waiting. This was all boring, tedious, and predictable work.
Besides all that, I got to know all the player's tics. Jennifer the court clerk was a total sweetheart, and she was the one I should talk to if I need to overset on an already full morning calendar. Brett the prosecutor really did not like repeat offenders, so I continued those cases until he finished his rotation and I had to deal with someone different. And you memorize the judges especially. I had a client who was summoned to court because her drug treatment provider kicked her out for "contraband". I assumed that meant she brought drugs to rehab, but turns out the "contraband" was just a cell phone. Before the court even knew what was going on, she had re-enrolled voluntarily and completed a month of inpatient treatment. When she told me all this I figured it was a shoo-in for the judge to impose no sanctions. I said "You were proactive, which is something this judge really appreciates. Also, the judge absolutely hates the prosecutor on this morning, so this hearing should be a cakewalk." Five minutes into the hearing, the judge was yelling at the prosecutor already. My client and I exchanged knowing glances, and she marveled at my divination.
Private attorneys knew we had a finger on the pulse, and we were often asked for input. Sometimes it was something as banal as asking for a temperature check on a judge right before sentencing. By far the most jaw-droppingly alarming was when a client walked into the courtroom about to plead guilty to a DUI. His attorney paused at the door where I happened to be loitering and asked me "Hey my client is a green card holder and he's going to plead guilty to a marijuana DUI. That's not a big deal is it?" That could've been a catastrophe, to the extent you consider immediate deportation to be a big deal.
America's Universal Crime
There's a reason DUIs come up frequently in my writing — they're the bread and butter of misdemeanor criminal court and what virtually all defense attorneys cut their baby teeth on.
Americans love drinking. Americans also love driving. If you're concerned about this concatenation, worry not commie scum because the third branch in this triumvirate is another perennial American favorite: an unrelenting police force. Hands wiped, problem solved.
You have not experienced the unique essence of America until you are drunk as hell at a strip mall parking lot at 2AM, locked out of the Applebee's that just closed for the night, your designated driver friend nowhere to be seen, and with the only legal option to get to your house in the suburbs being a $70 Uber ride. Prime setting to chance it. No surprise then that out of the ten million or so criminal arrests that happen every year in this country, 10% are just DUIs, more than all violent crimes combined. Drunk driving is one of the most intersectional of crimes. Rich and poor alike, this is the universal criminal temptation.
When someone is arrested for drunk driving, they get handcuffed, their vehicle is towed away into the abyss, and they might spend a few hours in jail if they're particularly unruly or the cop is in a shitty mood. When they're released from the precinct into the cold morning hours, they're handed a gift bag with some terrifying paperwork informing them DUIs are punishable by up to three hundred and sixty four days in jail. That's just the statutory maximum that never (almost, we'll get to that) gets imposed, but they don't know that, so naturally they panic. They panic and google.
I've written before about how useless I am, and I am especially useless with DUI cases. DUI cases are so boring because of how straightforward they usually are. They were drunk. They were driving. And more often than not, they admitted their drinking to the cop that saw them using their car to recreate a crochet weaving pattern across multiple lanes of traffic. Despite these lopsided conditions, establishing someone's guilt through the constitutionally-mandated public jury trial avenue remains a pain in the ass for the system — way too expensive, takes way too long, and [gasp] might not actually work if the jury doesn't buy the government's story. The prosecutor takes the tack of "it sure would be super if you saved us the hassle and just admitted you're guilty." (No, history doesn't repeat itself, why do you ask?) and they incentive this outcome with plea deal offers that are entirely within their discretion. At least ninety-four percent of defendants take them up on it.
Keeping the assembly line humming was most of our job. We negotiated plea deals in whatever crevices in the courthouse building we could spare. Sometimes the prosecutors would find a spare jury room and set up shop there with their laptops, and all the defense attorneys (private and public alike) would crowd inside and wait in line to talk about the merits of their case. The open air atmosphere inside that room was chummy, but we also would witness negotiations happening transparently in real time.
One private attorney seemed particularly attentive to his appearance, and was that day glamorously adorned with a pinstripe suit and a lumbering gold watch that seemed uncomfortably heavy. When it was Pinstripes' turn in the pit, his pitch to the prosecutor was as succinct as the insider's lingo could sustain: "No priors, no aggravators, and the blow is in the low teens. Negligent amendment?" The prosecutor was nodding along and flipping through their notes and pulled out a template form to memorialize the deal. No surprise given the circumstances, I could've secured the same deal in my sleep for any of my clients.
But if you can swap in virtually any attorney into the slot without affecting the outcome, how would any individual attorney stand out from the rest? Theoretically a private attorney can devote their craft and grind away to become the best goddamn DUI lawyer to ever roam the land, but the infinitely more efficient approach to standing out is just by dialing up the marketing. They play the search engine optimization game and dump a thesaurus' worth of synonyms for the "I got a DUI and I'm not poor" query to capture those panic-stricken google searches. Their billboards are conveniently located near every major highway exit, with a photo crossing their arms to showcase how hard they'll fight the cops for you. One law firm required their attorneys to show up to court in a muscle car splattered with letters as tall as a toddler spelling out "DUI?" along with the firm's phone number. The specter of up to three hundred and sixty four days in jail ricocheting inside a client's head is all the sales closing you need to rack up a five to ten thousand dollar retainer. Three hours of my time as a public defender was a windfall to a private attorney lucky enough to snag a client with money.
Pricey Asymmetry
Outside of the courtroom and outside of the negotiation room, there were the hallways. The courthouse building was old enough to lack the luxury of private conference rooms, so every attorney would find an empty spot on the hallway pews to have a "confidential" meeting with their client. There was an unspoken code of honor not to eavesdrop, one which even the court marshals and deputies earnestly respected, but sometimes you can't help but overhear.
Pinstripes came out of the negotiation room, holding that basic bitch Negligent Amendment plea offer in his hands. His client was sitting in a pew, anxiously fidgeting.
"The prosecutors gave me hell for your case, but I put those sons-of-bitches through the ringer until they caved! They're willing to offer you that negligent reduction we talked about."
The sigh of relief from the client felt like it was forced out by bellows. He visibly relaxed, managed to crack a smile, presumably relieved he was finally allowed to drop the emotional rucksack he'd been carting around.
A necessary throat-clearing: an attorney's competence and commendability is not at all predicated on either their practice area or the source of their compensation. Pinstripes was a competent attorney. He delivered on effective representation, and his client was fully satisfied with the resolution. Pinstripes may have been exaggerating his own contributions, but he was under no formal obligation to notify his client of any cheaper competitors. All I point out here is how different circumstances can lead to different incentives. Mr. Monk Sleeves above had over the years whittled himself away into a finely-honed and effective apparatus, devoid of any extraneous adornments. It didn't matter how stupid his sleeves looked, he was still going to be appointed to clients. Privately retained attorneys face a different set of incentives. They need the hand that pays to feel good about the transaction and so have every incentive to exaggerate their efforts. The fact that their client has money to pay them very likely means they've never been in trouble before, never needed a lawyer before, and never had to face the bore end of a judge before. The paying client is unlikely to get arrested again, and even if he did he never would attain the bird's eye view of the system necessary to evaluate Pinstripe's comparative utility. Classic information asymmetry.
Can money help tip the needle? Yes, of course, sometimes, and typically only when gargantuan sums are levied. OJ Simpson had the means and motivation to throw loot at objectively hopeless needle in a haystack endeavors. For DUIs, I knew of one case where the guy blew a 0.12% BAC (not that bad by my caseload's standard) and managed to get acquitted after sinking about $20,000 to fly in three different nationally-recognized breath test experts to testify at his trial in podunk district court.
But most of the time, no. The primary benefit of money is as a paradoxical prophylactic — the fact that you have it is a very good indicator you won't need to use it.
364 Days
I'll end with one last story. If someone is still in jail by the first appearance hearing, the court assumes they are indigent and expects the public defender's office to handle it unless a private attorney told them otherwise. I scanned through the dozens of cases on my jail calendar docket and quickly triaged them based on a brief skim of the docket and police reports. One guy stood out to me as uniquely fucked. It was a DUI, of course, except he was already on probation for a third DUI with the same court. Nothing within the police report raised any evidentiary red flags, this was a plain vanilla clean case as far as I could tell. I saw through the Matrix and read the green letters directly, and they spelled Doom.
Seated on the molded plastic chairs the jail uses as he wore some ill-fitting Crocs, I delivered my grim prognosis, appropriately qualified given my limited vantage point. I advised him not to bail out, as the money would vanish within the coffers of a bail bondsman and only provide a vanishingly temporary reprieve from jail. Spending several thousand dollars to be out for a few weeks didn't seem worth it to me, but I reminded him it was his and his family's choice to make.
The next time I saw him was in court, and he was not wearing jail scrubs with Crocs. I walked up to talk to him but before I could get a word in, he cut me off brusquely and flat-out declared he didn't me because he had retained private counsel. All delivered with the haughty cadence that would make a Royalist blush. I shrugged and moved on to my next entry. With him having bailed out and hiring a private attorney, his expenses were steadily mounting.
What the judge eventually did with his case was highly unusual, but not at all surprising to me, given my scrying ability. He plead guilty, because of course, and the judge was so fed up with his repeat offenses that she didn't even bother giving him a probation period to right his wrongs, just imposed and closed. He was sentenced to the maximum three-hundred and sixty four days, to this day the only time I ever saw it happen. His lawyer could've been a pillow and nothing would have been different.
I must confess schadenfreude. Despite my own feelings about the carceral state, someone else's liberty is a small price to pay for gratifying my own ego and affirming my prognostications.
If you're in trouble with the law, do your best to qualify for a public defender. They may not always have pinstripes, but they know the system and the players inside and out. The Constitution guarantees your right to change your mind at any point after, but there's no harm in test-driving the budget option first. You might get to the same destination, just with a lot more money in your wallet.
[1] I made this up.
[2] The number of methodological issues inherent in comparing public defenders and private attorneys is way too long to get into here.
[3] For those who are curious, this is me. I got my start working for a public agency but then opened my own private practice. So I'm technically a private attorney, but one whose caseload is 100% indigent defense. It's much simpler and still accurate to just call myself a public defender, and no I will not change my Tinder bio.
Excellent post, I'll just add my 2 cents (earned from my legal career) on this question:
I have been on both sides of the equation at this point. Both a public defender and handling private crim defense for, among others, DUI cases. My experience may not be particularly applicable outside of my state or even county, but I think there's a lot of basic ideas that are near-universal.
The one factor that can actually allow you to 'stand out' is earning the reputation as the guy who absolutely can and will go to trial and give the prosecutor a run for their money regardless of the true merits of the underlying case. Who is never afraid of the hard work and showmanship required in jury trials.
Because when so much of the job of criminal defense is just keeping the client calm (and out of custody) and negotiating a plea deal, the attorneys can reliably coast for years without ever being forced to pick a jury and try a case. They get in a mode in which trials are a serious inconvenience and this effects how they handle clients, indeed they may even try to persuade them to take plea deals to AVOID trial risks, even on very winnable cases!
And those who haven't flexed that muscle in a while are generally KNOWN to be less likely to push a case all the way through to trial. Maybe it's even rumored that they're scared of actual trials, where the consequences can be unpredictable.
And I genuinely think that's the factor that makes any meaningful difference. All attorneys have access to the same legal databases, they attend the same CLE classes and seminars, and generally speaking every new development in the law is easy to locate and digest. Some attorneys may be more... creative about how they apply a new development (think Saul Goodman-esque arguments, but dialed back a bit to pass the sniff test) or be able to present their arguments in a more majestic style. Some may excel at motion practice and have top notch paralegals prepping their filings.
But end of the day, the one thing that the prosecutor doesn't want to do is work. And trials mean LOTS and LOTS of work.
And it means the possibility of a hung jury (MORE WORK) or a not guilty. So this means rather than take the first plea offer that comes along, a lawyer with established trial rep can play the game of chicken with the prosecutor as the trial date looms nearer and nearer and suddenly some truly generous offers come on the table, which might not be easily obtainable if there wasn't a credible threat of forcing a trial.
Incidentally, as a Public Defender I once took three separate cases to trial over the course of three consecutive days, mostly just to show the prosecutor that I would. I called it my 'trialathalon.' Unfortunately that reputation doesn't persist much outside of the county in which the cases occurred.
Yes I think you are correct. My comment was just about boring DUI cases, I didn't mean to imply that individual lawyers made no difference in all instances.
I myself tend to get some really generous plea offers. I have no idea exactly why that is the case, but I did have a jury trial where one of the stunts I pulled was calling the prosecutor to the stand as a witness (in front of the jury) and I somehow also convinced the judge to allow it.
Did you write about this somewhere? I'm really curious as to what sequence of events could possibly allow this to occur!
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DUI cases are still a PITA to set for trial compared to a plea. You have to get the officers in court. You have to get their breathalyzer certifications (if there was a blow) you need to prep them with their reports so they know which of the hundred DUIs this guy actually was. You might need to prep bodycam footage to play in court. Sometimes you need a nurse who did a blood draw. And states attorneys have even more cases than PDs. They are typically handling an entire courtroom either solo or as a pair. Prepping for a trial is a whole days work or more. Which means they need to magic into existence prep time for the other cases in the courtroom. Because, yeah, there are 10 duis on the docket, 10 more reckless/high speeders, 10 driving without a license and registration, and 10 more without insurance. And the state has to get all the arrest reports from the police, and crash reports, and look up the defendant's criminal record, and that's all just for the initial court date (some of that can be put off a bit longer), and whoosh, the defense gets all that for free in an email after court. Not that its hard to get (mostly) its just 3-4 forms, plus navigating several websites, but the point being that it all takes time. And records are inevitably lost and have to be re-made from time to time. The ASAs, are, of course, in such courtrooms, new. Often less than a month into their time at the office. They will have quit or been promoted within the year of first being in court for a DUI. In some your opposing counsel as a defense attorney might not have even passed the bar yet, or might even still be in law school!
Trial is, indeed a good weapon even in "boring dui" cases, because the prosecution has to get so many ducks in a row to win a trial. And, if you think they've done it for a day, defendant can simply say they are not ready, ask for another date, and all they've lost now is a bit of tolling on their speedy trial demand. But if the state isn't ready they basically automatically lose in 3-4months.
More. Definitely More.
The fact that burden of proof is on the state, and the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" means that ASAs have to bring as much evidence as they can muster (Cops at least reliably SHOW UP on given court dates) and have it all laid out so even the most brain-dead juror can follow along.
Meanwhile the Defense attorney can show up with a single legal pad and pen, no witnesses, no evidence, spend the entire case doodling drawings on the pad and never speak a word during the trial and STILL WIN (although if he does that and loses he'll catch a deserved Bar complaint).
Hence the leverage that a Defense attorney has is asymmetrical because the only thing the State can fire back is "We're going to trial and if you lose, we're asking for the Judge for the maximum sentence."
Defense attorney: "If."
(and if the defense attorney knows the Judge well, they can usually predict whether they'll actually hand down such a sentence on a guilty verdict)
And you can further leverage this power if you have MULTIPLE CASES lined up for trial with the same prosecutor (as PDs inevitably do). Forcing a prosecutor to stare down the prospect of prepping multiple cases in short succession OR start handing out plea deals like they're on clearance is like getting an armbar on your opponent in a Jiu-Jitsu match. They can try to fight it and risk breaking their arm, or they just tap and submit and give you what you're asking for.
Occasionally you get the Prosecutor who decides 'fuck it, not my money' and will throw down the gauntlet if they really want a defendant convicted, but they usually don't stick around long as they'll either leave to the private sector where they'll make more money or they get promoted up and out where their drive is more useful.
Not really in my experience. I've beaten almost 100% of my own petty traffic tickets based on this. For DUIs they show up a bit more often, but the state answers not ready due to officers not in court for the majority of cases in major cities.
Which most judges will never give, and, in fact, most places don't even ask for. In Chicago, the standard post-conviction offer for a DUI is the same as the plea deal + more community service.
Certainly on one guy. Usually because the defendant or defendant's attorney done fucked up. I've seen an ASA spend 3 days prepping and hectoring officers just to get a guy because he was drunk and shattered a person's leg. I've seen the same because the attorney was jerking them around. But a mildly competent attorney should not have such problems in their entire career.
In my County most cops are expected to take the time to testify in all cases in which they had a hand. Including traffic cases. And since most traffic cases they handed out tickets for are put on the same court dates, it is not too much hassle for them to attend the hearing. This isn't their primary duty in their line of work though, so most of them don't want the hassle of having to actually testify across multiple matters.
This has gotten easier for them when a lot of hearings moved to Zoom/Videoconferencing. I've seen them give testimony while sitting in their patrol car.
This is truer for some jurisdictions than others. This is another value of a PD/Attorney, they know which officers show up and how often.
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One last thing about this, is that from what I understand, technology has made the state's job even harder even though you'd think not. Back in the day when I was clerking for a judge, the state might just call the two POs who made an arrest. One would say, "well we saw a car crash into a parked car, the driver then slurred when we talked to him, we administered 3 field sobriety tests, he failed, then refused to blow, we arrested, blah blah." And the judge would listen to that and convict. Now, from what I understand, judges demand to see the body cam footage at trial, which does little to nothing in making the case stronger/weaker in almost all cases. Its just another nuisance for the prosecutor who has to comb through it all for the relevant timestamps blah blah.
The biggest way that body cams keep police (and other involved people) honest is that since the body cam will show what actually happened, they won't lie, or bring a case that requires lying, in the first place.
So of course in all the cases that get to a judge, and for all the evidence that the judge gets given, the body cam takes time and doesn't show anything useful. The body cam had its effect before that step.
Perhaps. From my experiences (limited to larger jurisdictions) bodycams seem to be accepted by cops as personal protection devices because false accusations were orders of magnitude higher than real ones, and railroading is just a waste of their time, outside of "getting" a known murderer with a fake non-cop "eyeball" witness. Now, out in the burbs where the cops and DAs treat minor DUIs like they are a high felony, IDK.
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Having seen DUI court myself, I have to say there is a wide variance in lawyer competence both within the PDs office and the private attorneys. The worst one I know is a private attorney who misses court dates, hopelessly failed to help his client's paperwork all the time, and generally angered judges. The best is probably a different private attorney. About 2/3 of the PDs are pretty awful, with the rest being pretty much in the top % of handling cases quickly and effectively.
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Is there any reason you need a law degree for what you do? Or is it 98% just learning the processes of how cases work?
Wish I could share my stories. I’ve got a few but not Dui’s. But don’t want to give away things that could be traced. I’ve always hired an attorney. Usually thru a friends parent who had a friend. One time I was a bit rowdy at a high profile bar but they let me in the next day so I knew no one would show up at the date but paid a lawyer 1k to show up for me. Probably get a little more service paying but I’d assume you’re correct that you get the same thing from a public defender. Everyone should honestly go to jail once or twice it’s an interesting experience if you’re the kind of person who likes getting an inside view. I’d also assume the attorney somewhat enjoyed giving me a play-by-play as a slightly more intelligent client.
I wish their was some way we could get rid of the trial penalty, but there are too many cases and it would clog the system when most of the time your guilty and we just need to do the process.
Edit: at some point I’ve seen things where people advertise themselves as former prosecutors/law enforcement. I always assume that by paying them you get a better deal because you’re paying for the current prosecutors exit strategy.
No, law degrees and law schools are practically useless in my opinion. The most they helped with is probably the writing classes that teach you the intricacies and minutiae of legal writing. I see degrees/schools as just the apparatus of the profession's cartel in restricting the supply. Specialization matters a ton, and there's no way to quickly inject the experience of knowing the difference between on paper versus in practice. All that comes with on the job experience.
One possible way we could return to the norm of jury trials could be to relax evidence standards. Something as simple as playing a video requires witness testimony to "authenticate" the recording, which means someone either present at the scene or whoever is the "custodian" of the video tapes. It feels needlessly stringent.
Advertising yourself as a former prosecutors/LEO is just a way to showcase how much respect those professions get from the public, and adds a nod about knowing how the system works. I know plenty of former prosecutors who are now defense attorneys; some immediately flame-out because they can't deal with clients, and the rest tend to be stellar at their job.
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Heh, divorced of context this could apply to many areas of legal practice.
It is probably true that you could just train somebody on a script and that would suffice for like 70% of cases, but there are always those odd/edge cases where there's no substitute for experience and knowledge + being able to think on your feet.
This is usually implying (probably correctly) that they have the inside connections to get things handled more quickly and they know exactly how the prosecutors are trained and how their internal guidelines for sentencing and such are set up so they can very accurately tell you what the prosecutor is going to offer and your odds of actually going to jail.
For the last part I was implying that there is an implicit bribe. I assume the local lawyer has those connections after doing a few hundred cases. But by hiring the former cop/prosecutor the current prosecutor knows you are paying one of their people.
They would certainly have the connections. Curious if paying into the system and the revolving door has any effect.
I've seen very little evidence to suggest that there's a 'bribery' aspect actually going on. I'm sure there's some places where there is such corruption, but it likely isn't the rule.
Its indeed very natural for someone who quits being a prosecutor for the private sector to go into criminal defense work, those skills and knowledge don't directly transfer anywhere else.
I remember one time I heard Ken Griffin use identical language as Jerome Powell introduced 2 days later. Citadel has paid Yellen etc for speeches when she was out of office.
Bribe might be too strong. But I always assumed hiring the guy just out of the prosecutors office offered a benefit more than he knows the system.
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I keep wondering if cases like the DUI wouldn't be better handled with sticking an Antabus implant into them for a period of time and being done with it.
I bet some state would try that, or something similar.
One penalty that my state applies to DUI convictions is they have to do a tour of the local hospital's Trauma ward to see how bad car crash injuries can be, and also attend a 'Victim Impact Panel' where Drunk driving victims explain how much trauma they've suffered due to the crash.
I'd say your method would be more effective overall, since it directly addresses the 'problematic' behavior and doesn't depend too much on the individuals willpower.
In driving school we were shown a montage of the typical result of the most common very fatal crashes, which in my count are early morning crashes of carloads of young people returning from discos or pubs.
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Everyone dies sometimes. And many different types of deaths cause trauma. So this seems fundamentally unfair, since the drunk drivers don't get to negative-visit traumatic deaths that don't happen because someone died from a drunk driver instead of dying from cancer or something else traumatic later on.
Decades worth of difference there.
Cancer kills old people, drunk drivers strike at random.
How's that relevant? If the person didn't live on to die of cancer, that cancer didn't cause any suffering. The total suffering caused by the drunk driver is the suffering caused by the accident minus the suffering from the cancer.
And life years lost.
Perhaps greatest is loss of potential offspring. Instead of grandchildren a parent has to bury their kid and see their line end
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House M.D. as a time capsule.
House was on the air from 2004-2012. I watched it when it came out and then almost never since. Now I'm rewatching it (or rebinging it) and House has turned out to be an amusing time capsule of some culture war drift over the past decade. I get that House (the show and Character) was supposed to be kind of edgy, and an anti-hero, and straddle the line between likable and unlikeable, but I still think there were a lot of plotlines and Gregory House behavior that wouldn't fly in a modern tv show. For instance:
Much of House's behavior was intended to be unacceptable when it was made; what's changed isn't so much that as the idea that you can portray a character with such unacceptable behavior, especially if he gets away with it (shades of the Hays Code).
Or at least that you can't depict a character behaving like this if they're intended to be a likeable anti-hero the audience can sympathise with (up to a point). Nowadays a character could only be depicted behaving like this if they were an out-and-out villain without any redeeming qualities.
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I think there are two points. Firstly, House was always written as an asshole, and secondly, yes, there was a big shift around 2013 when “punching down” became unacceptable.
You don’t even need to go back to House in 2004 to see it. Modern Family’s run is fascinating from this perspective. The first two seasons (2009-2011) have a huge number of Asian jokes, Hispanic jokes and gay jokes (the Asian woman doctor is a terrible driver which is played for stereotype laughs, the Asian child’s (adoptive) uncle asks “will she even be able to pronounce her own name?” (its ‘Lily’). The show isn’t mean spirited but sometime around Gamergate it became unacceptable to have otherwise ‘good’ characters use ethnic/gender/sexuality based humor.
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I just watched a 2008 movie called "Baby Mama" starring Tina Fey.
In the movie, Tina Fey is reading a book about childbirth and is given a "nightmare" by the possibility of her child being a hermaphrodite or, in her words, "a chick with a dick". It's clear that this is being played for laughs even though, like the rest of the movie, it wasn't really funny.
It's crazy how far things have swung in just 15 years.
Thirty years ago I flirted with a career in comedy/TV writing. One of the most reliable tropes, I was taught, dating back hundreds of years (at least), was putting a man in a dress. The evidence that this nugget was a steadfast laugh-generator was apparent in a continuous stream from Shakespeare to Doubtfire. Now, it's the one thing above all others that can never be acknowledged as out-of-the-ordinary.
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Imagine where we might go in another 15...
The more I see of the modern political landscape, the more I want to advocate for a gradualist approach. At least for social conventions and laws, if not for technology. Then again I would sacrifice the measly technological gains we've made in the past 15 years to go back to that time period from a social and legal standpoint. ChatGPT is amazing, but not worth it.
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Perhaps the most striking example is this comedy film from 2002 about a basketball player who gets suspended from the men's league and tries to pass himself off as a woman so he can compete in the women's league.
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I recently rewatched seasons 1 and 2. One that jumped out for me was a season 1 episode in which a black politician is running for President. House scoffs at the idea that a black man could ever be elected President, and by the end of the episode the man himself admits that he doesn't expect to win, but thinks it's worth it in hopes that the act of doing so might inspire change.
In the second episode of season 2, there's a nine-year-old girl with terminal cancer who asks Chase (a thirty-year-old man) to kiss her, as she doesn't want to die without having been kissed. He's reluctant, but eventually does it. His colleagues tease him about it, but it's presented as an essentially compassionate act.
In the third episode of season 2, the cause of a Mexican day labourer's illness is a disease he contracted from a rooster at the underground cockfighting ring he works in. One suspects that this plot point would be decried as promoting harmful stereotypes against Hispanic people if it happened today.
There's a season 2 episode featuring a couple who practise consensual RP and BDSM. It's eventually revealed that the wife is trying to murder the husband for undisclosed reasons. You could argue this is stigmatising people with kinks.
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I never watched the show but ye gods, there was a ton of online fannish devotion to it back in the day.
From what I gathered via osmosis, House was meant to be an asshole (with some reasons for being a dick, but still basically even in his days of full health, being an asshole). Maybe as a deliberate contrast to all the TV medical shows where the doctors are caring, devoted, wonderworkers? I think the character of Wilson was also meant to be poking slight fun at that as well, because even though he's an oncologist whose patients love him for his sympathy and caring, House needles him about his martyr complex and wanting to be seen as Saint Jimmy, while his tangled personal life does put him on the asshole end of the spectrum as well (he constantly marries, cheats on his wife, then rinse and repeat).
I think there was also backstory as to House's disdain for religion, which pretty much was the backstory for most militant atheists: raised in a strict home, with religion rammed down his throat, and he was a very smart kid who was the opposite of the kind of son his dad wanted, so he rebelled against that upbringing hard and became "2edgy4 me high school atheist".
The rest of it (including House harassing Foreman and Cuddy) was all part of the "yeah he's an asshole but he's also a genius, which is why the hospital doesn't just bounce his ass out the door; he's the only one who can diagnose what that illness is that's killing you and the lives he saves makes up for the horrible human being he is" characterisation.
It wasn't specific to medical dramas, a lot of media had that "quirky genius gets to be a dick" trope. If anything it was more popular in police procedurals (with the whole "consultant who gets to break all of the rules" gimmick). Though House itself was influenced by Sherlock and maybe the genre it spawned.
I remember reading Why We Love Sociopaths as a teen precisely because I liked shows like House. I think it captured something real, even if the specific diagnosis was wrong: House was the product of the triumph of narcissism + the Golden Age of TV and its focus on anti-social types.
House clearly fits the mold of the asshole-genius from that genre.
It's understandable: it feeds people's fantasies of being special (which we're all supposed to be) but, of course, House also has to be tortured to provide some sense of cosmic balance. Multiple times in the early series there's a legitimate discussion of "could House be as good if he wasn't miserable/a drug addict?" (this is a common talking point of extreme narcissist Kanye West, for example: "name one genius that ain't crazy")
That's the deal: we live vicariously through them, they get punished in the end and we are doubly sated.
I think David Chase was quite right in his diagnosis for why The Sopranos ending was badly received. It was blue balls for cosmic justice, he broke forming genre conventions:
Honestly, I don't think the moment for narcissists has ended. It's just that you can't have white males like House pushing unPC takes and "punching down" - his treatment of Cuddy, his boss, was funny, but, post #MeToo, it does look very different . But I think the underlying desire isn't gone.
Nowadays you'd probably be more likely to see a less overtly grandiose minority narcissist claiming the mantle of victim while behaving like an asshole (e.g. characters like She-Hulk). Or maybe a more gelded white male that has similar characteristics but stays on the right side of the "line" (which is of course less fun).
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The idea of the show was "Sherlock Holmes as a doctor". So instead of Holmes and Watson you have House and Wilson solving medical mysteries. By the time it aired Wilson ended up as his old friend and House mostly works with his team of younger doctors.
House's personality is pretty close to what we got in shows like BBC's Sherlock. It's probably true to the Holmes novels, but I haven't read them.
It's true to a version of Holmes character, but House is much more of an asshole about things. Holmes is very smart, at the start not very sympathetic to human failings, and quite prepared to break the law in some instances (that's where House's burgling and breaking into patient's houses comes from). Most of it came from the first novel, "A Study in Scarlet", and the character was softened a little as Conan Doyle developed them:
But he is also able to be polite and even sympathetic to clients, and is mostly brusque to the rich and important who think they can just order him around. He doesn't have a chip on his shoulder about the world. BBC Sherlock upped the arrogance (for the younger version of Holmes which he was) and made him a bit more of an asshole than the Conan Doyle version, and House was just out-and-out arrogant and unpleasant, even with the excuse of the constant pain he was in.
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House had two points:
House had an internal contradiction. He was very nihilistic yet believed heavily in doing whatever was possible to save his patient’s life.
House was very utilitarian. The kind of medicine he practiced was effectively take calculated risks. He didn’t get fired despite being an ass because he had more points in the hood column.
Mix that in with a somewhat charming cast and soap opera and you have somewhat interesting tv.
I think it's hard to overstate how heavily the show was driven by Hugh Laurie just being really, really good at delivering the House role. The rest of the cast does a good job too, but Laurie is perfectly cast, well written, and consistently delivers sardonic humor that keeps the whole thing running. Maybe the exact jokes don't get written that way in 2023, but the basic character would work just fine and would simply be taking shots at someone else instead.
Agreed. Laurie was by far the best part of the show. Some of the other cast members were decent. Hence the somewhat charming.
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Doyle's core characterization managed to survive into a very different adaptation.
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That is not a contradiction. Nihilism only denies objective morality, you can have your subjective one and cling on to it like a limpet, and you might as well because there isn't anything better.
I'm certainly what might be called an optimistic nihilist, but I don't let my patients die on me if I can help it, despite being no House.
My understanding is that nihlism rejects all meaning, including personal values, no?
What you're describing sounds more like existentialism.
Wiki tells me:
So that's what I'm going for. I see it as only applicable to objective morality anyway, since subjective ones seek no further justification.
Ahh interesting. My pedantry has been one-upped I see. This time.... >:)
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I like to call it functional nihilism, because it makes me look smart.
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I'm sure this was a typo but I chortled regardless.
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My wife and I recently binged this show and absolutely loved it. Hugh Laurie is a treasure.
We had similar feelings to what you have articulated here. Also: this show is where I learned that “gypped” was a derogatory reference to Gypsies. The later plots where the cop is trying to get house in trouble is very reminiscing of The Shield in that it portrays a Good Man who is willing to do Bad Things in service of Good and is surrounded by dumb fake good people trying to stop him.
Here’s some fun trivia: house’s motorcycle when first introduced is an Aprilia RSV Mille, but is later is Honda CBR 1000RR with a “repsol” graphics package. Both absolutely bad ass bikes.
Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster are strongly recommended. Just don't watch the last episode of season 4 of Blackadder. It is the best piece of television ever made.
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Um...that's not what I got from The Shield...
Lol I thought something similar - maybe firmamenti meant Forest Whittaker's IA guy? Or Dutch? Vic and the boys all struck me as close to irredeemable (except poor Lenny.)
Ah, that makes more sense. IIRC he was stopped by the "good" people. Whose ineptness led to the finale we got.
Mackey himself...the whole point of the most infamous scene in the show (in the very pilot!) was that he wasn't just another anti-hero cop. Though he tries.
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The real reason House is blatantly from 2004 and not 2023 is that there isn’t an unvaccinated dying Covid patient bearing the brunt of his rants once an episode.
Yeah it has been really strange watching all the progressive media coming out recently that ham-fistedly brings up the pandemic. Not a fan at all.
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Well there's a scene in either season 1 or 2 which consists entirely of House aggressively berating a woman for refusing to vaccinate her child, so.
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Yeah there is, there are like 4 clinic patients that fit that type of characterization. Have you even seen House? It's unabashedly Pro Doctors Know More Than You Do What They Say.
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I think there's a distinction in this list between 'wouldn't fly' and 'wouldn't make sense'.
Like, the point of House's characterization wasn't that he's a Republican, but that's all you'd be saying if you had a character do some of these things today. That's just because the culture war has currently picked them up as shibboleths; it's like if he was calling people 'feminazis' back when the show aired, it would be a clear political reference, which wasn't the point.
And yeah, culture has moved on from internet atheism and being scandalized by bisexual women... it's not like those would be 'too scandalous for tv', they'd just be boring and not consistent with the characterization of someone like House living today.
Not really. The whole "Bernie Bros"/"Dirtbag Left" thing shows that modern progressive mores are totally fine with extending the title of racist/sexist/whateverist to people who would otherwise code as being very anti-Republican (like House probably would be)
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Who thinks this represents either an improvements or degredation of cultural norms? Its pop art that served its utility at the time and might not work today, but it is an interesting cultural time capsul.
Neutral. Maybe some people are asexual. I'll never care either way. If its caused by a medical issue, it sould be treated.
Improvment. Probably best not to comment on hot kids at work. Calling someone passing and living as a gender the opposite is hugely unprofessional and a dick move.
Improvement. Casual racism at work is a terrible idea.
Improvement. Similar to above. Sexual innuendo is dubious in the workplace.
Neutral. Euphemism treadmill. Tranny was acceptable enough at the time.
Improvement. Dont mock peoples inherant differences, especially at work.
Neutral. Its neither bad nor good that society is surprised by bisexuality.
Improvement. Revenge porn and hacking are serious actions.
Improvement. No need to overly bash the beliefs of most of society.
Weird idea that not showing behavior will somehow prevent it from happening.
US TV almost never makes show about black crime, yet it keeps happening. Do you really think e.g. The Wire contributed to gang culture in Baltimore?
I didn't make any claim about causality. I'm curious if people think these changes in widely consumed popular media/art represnet an improvement or degredation of cultural mores. Feel free to opine!
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I guess it's sex crimes week on The Motte. Here is one I've been puzzling about.
How on Earth was Danny Masterson actually convicted?
This has been a slow boil for me. I'd seen headlines here and there about the slow rolling case against him. I totally missed when the first trial went to a hung jury. Then suddenly I see he was convicted on 2 out of 3 rape charges and sentenced to 30 years. Even saw some headlines about Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis getting dragged for writing a character witness letter for his sentencing. But something jumped out at me.
He was being prosecuted for crimes 17-19 years old at the time the prosecution started. Red flag number one, I don't know the specific law in CA, but surely that's pushing the statute of limitations, right? Indeed it is! Statute of Limitations for rape is 10 years. So how did they still prosecute him?
Well there are a few exceptions.. Namely
What appears to have sunk Masterson's SOL is that there are multiple accusers. Now reading the law myself, the reading seems clear to me. The exception requires a seperate conviction. But I'm no lawyer or judge, obviously.
Or
And I believe this is the part pertaining to SOL
So I donno, maybe it's not as clear cut as I think. I repeat, not a lawyer.
Moving past the SOL concerns I have, what was the evidence against Masterson? Near as I can tell none. There were 3 victim testimonies, some expert testimony, and that was it. Zero evidence corroborating the witnesses, zero physical evidence, zero circumstantial evidence. And this is why SOL is so important. It's not a get out of jail free card. It exists so the defense can practically gather some evidence to exonerate their client. After 20 years, most physical evidence will be gone, alibis will be impossible, witnesses will be difficult to find and their testimony will be even more unreliable than already notoriously unreliable witness testimony. All we're left with is he said/she said, and the biases of the jury pool.
This was an idle, principled frustration for me. I honestly could give a shit about Danny Masterson. However, now that figures more politically salient, like Russell Brand, are in the crosshairs, the precedent set by Masterson's chilling conviction are all the more frightening.
Wow, there's no way that wooziness, disorientation, and passing out could be explained by mere alcohol, these women must have been drugged!
Seriously, how the hell is anyone supposed to defend themselves from this other than simply replying, "uhhh, yeah, they might have been real drunk, we were indeed partying"? I keep looking at cases like this and trying to figure out how I could possibly exonerate myself if someone I hooked up with from a party 20 years ago claimed that I "drugged" her, and I've got absolutely nothing. In this case, one of them was evidently his girlfriend at the time; I really have no idea how I could defend myself if my wife decides a decade from now that having sex after we both got home bordering on a blackout drunk New Year's Eve was actually "rape".
Is there some steelman explanation I'm missing for how this could plausibly be a legitimate trial with legitimate evidence? It seems like it's literally some women that got drunk and had sex with Masterson that decided a decade later that they were actually drugged, without even the slightest bit of physical evidence for the claim. Never mind being sufficient for a reasonable doubt, I just flat out don't believe them at all.
Which is the whole point behind SOLs. There is no way to mount a proper defense.
Of course, if I was a jury and the defendant merely stated “I was drugged” and there was zero corroborating evidence I don’t see how I could vote to convict.
Feminism has been very successful at changing people’s default assumption (ie if there is an allegation it is probably true).
There are two or three points really. One is, as you say. That it's more or less impossible to ensure a fair trial 20 years after the crime. Another is rooted in the cultural desire for a speedy trial to prevent the process from eclipsing the punishment. And thirdly, it incentivizes law enforcement to pursue justice quickly instead of sitting on an inconvenient case.
All three are represented in the Masterson case.
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I think the problem is you're envisioning "drugging" someone as requiring use of, like, rohypnol or other illicit drugs. I would be willing to bet that, in California, "getting someone so drunk they lose consciousness" counts as "drugging."
I reject "getting someone drunk" as a framing that should apply to an adult. At a festival this summer, I wound up so inebriated that I had to go lie down in the shade and take a nap. Had I wanted to get up prior to sleeping it off a bit, I would have had a tough time doing so. Was I drugged? Did someone "get me drunk"? Was my wife, who was with me the entire time, responsible for my drunken state? I'm inclined to say that as an adult who has more than a passing familiarity with alcohol that I was solely responsible for my state of being.
Indeed, the topic of women and alcohol, especially if sex is involved, is a recurring source of horseshoe compass unity between libleft and authright when it comes to women's (lack of) agency and accountability:
Even when a woman is ascribed some semblance of agency and culpability, double standards and Russell conjugations arrive to provide mitigating and inverting factors.
You, @Walterodim, got drunk and became an embarrassing oaf and burden to deal with. What kind of man-child husband has to lie in the shade to sleep off his inebriation? In similar but reversed circumstances, your wife would had just had a bit too much to drink and it was beyond time for you two to retire for the night anyway. What kind of man-child husband would leave his wife in the shade to sleep off her inebriation?
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Not sure I agree. I can imagine a scenario where it would be sensible to describe A as having gotten B drunk, or drugged them with alcohol. An obvious example would be A adding some more potent alcohol to B's drink without B's knowledge or consent.
I can imagine edge cases where this is true, but to say that they're noncentral is putting it lightly. If we're talking about someone that's coerced in some fashion or has so little experience with alcohol that they don't know what to expect, OK, I get it, that's not literally impossible. More broadly though, I think adults can pretty well tell if a cocktail is pretty stiff and if they make a mistake and wind up drunker than they were expecting, they should take some degree of responsibility for monitoring their own intake. If someone hands you an old fashioned, you can pretty well guess that there are roughly two standard drinks worth of bourbon in there. If you get a gin and tonic, you can take a sip and have a reasonable guess at how strong you think it is. If you're at a party where you really don't know people that well, sticking with things that you can count is probably a good idea in general.
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North by Northwest features a good example of what I would describe as the minimum necessary for me to say A(really A1, A2, and A3) has gotten B drunk. I would not describe someone making strong cocktails as having gotten the other party drunk. Not when martinis are often made with often far less less than a splash of Vermouth everywhere.
I don't agree. To more fully lay out a theory of when I think it's appropriate to say something like "A got B drunk" I think of A taking some action that overcomes B's own intentions about how drunk to get to cause B to become much more intoxicated than they intended. The scene in North by Northwest you link obviously involves overcoming someone's intentions by force but I think it can also be done by fraud. Sure, if your martini has an extra shot worth of Vermouth in it or whatever I wouldn't call that enough by itself. But I think spiking an otherwise non-alcoholic drink or mixing less alcoholic drinks (like beer) with more alcoholic ones (like whiskey) without the knowledge or consent of the subject can rise to a similar level.
Not to condescend, but are you familiar with the beverages in question from firsthand experience? I ask because these couple sentences include three things that seem very odd to me:
Yes, I drink quite frequently myself. I intend them as a kind of illustrative example, not necessarily to be taken literally. They are the pointing finger, not the moon.
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That may be true once you have experience with alcohol, but I think you overestimate the ability of people with less experience to notice. Also, with strong enough alcohol it can easily be too late by the time you've actually tasted it if you don't handle liquor well. I'm quite a bit bigger than the size of the median twelve year old and a single sip of 190-proof Everclear from a flask a friend handed me with no more explanation than "Try this." was more than enough to knock me out within ten minutes. Fortunately it was in company that proved trustworthy (at least, I have no reason to suspect anything untoward happened after I passed out on the couch), but that experience was a bit of a wakeup call for the risks involved.
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I have to imagine that all but the least experienced drinker could tell a boilermaker (beer with whisky) from a beer by taste alone.
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We know the double standard on what "drugging someone" means as well as you do.
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The obvious answer is religious prejudice against Scientology. Which may be justified and I may share, but it's still how this conviction was reached.
Among other things one of the women testified that her own mother (!) told her that while what happened was tragic she shouldn't report it because of the damage it would do to the faith. After the woman accused Masterson, her mother cut off all contact with her.
The jury was persuaded by a lot of testimony about the weird cult the perp was in, the way Scientologist hierarchs pressured victims not to go public at the time, the testimony about consequences women faced from the Scientologist community for going public. The jury found all that persuasive.
This is as much a MeToo case as it was a religious persecution/cult case depending on your view of scientology. There's precedent for overruling the SoL in cases of religious pressure to hide accusations... But I find the urge to eliminate procedural protections for rapists deeply fascist. We've already seen these laws used against Assange. Give the state infinite power to prosecute its enemies when accused of sex crimes and all the state needs is a woman, who can hide behind rape shield laws anyway. The urge to prosecute minority religions should be viewed similarly, even if scientology really is nutso.
Aside from this, lol@ everyone involved in the Ashton Kutcher Mila Kunis imbroglio resulting from their letter trying to offer mitigating character evidence for Masterson. They tried to write letters about what a nice guy he was, but failed to realize A) the letters would be public record, B) it's generally better to admit he did it in that kind of letter. The classic format is "I can't reconcile what he's been convicted of with the man I knew..." They failed to include that, indicating they still think he's innocent. They then issued a mealy mouthed half apology to the victims, victims they don't believe are victims. If you want to stand by your friend, regardless of circumstances I think that's admirable, but say it out loud standing up straight. He did it or he didn't. If you think he didn't there are no victims to retraumatize.
This is the part that's very weird to me, where they seem stuck in some sort of Schrödinger's Rapist situation, where if he did it then it's very bad and they feel for the victims, but if he didn't then they have his back. Any situation is bound to have some uncertainty, but you can't live in both worlds, where you feel bad for the alleged victims, but also want to write your letter for the accused as though he's innocent. They certainly can do what you suggest and simply use "I can't reconcile blahblahblah" or they can say he did it, but that he still has redeeming qualities. But this notion that you feel bad for someone that you don't think was victimized is weird. If my best friend was accused of rape, but told me he didn't do it, and there wasn't any physical evidence, I wouldn't move even the slightest fucking bit off of, "she is a vile liar and I have his back 100%". In a character letter, I would write whatever I think would help him the most, but I would never even have the slightest inclination that I should apologize to the liar for any pain I caused.
I suppose this is just the product of sincerely internalizing "believe victims" while battling with the cognitive dissonance that you're pretty sure this one is actually lying.
I don't think it's the product of anything sincere. It's the product of fear and cowardice, of wanting to mouth the socially appropriate lies when it isn't your ox being gored. I'd even posit a third darker view: they think/know he did in fact do the things he was accused of (Masterson was, after all, a man who DJed under the alias DJ Donkey Punch and was disciplined for on set behavior in the past) but don't think it was a "real" crime. That brandishing a gun at a woman after sex is normal behavior or that the Church was justified to poison the accuser's dogs because Scientologists gotta stick together.
I think this is another needle you can thread rhetorically and philosophically quite deftly. It's perfectly possible for the sex to have been bad, even traumatizingly bad, for her without him committing any crimes. I can feel bad for her that she thinks she experienced something unfortunate, even though she wasn't the victim of a crime.
But this isn't what the Kutchers did. They flailed about aimlessly managing to look both guilty and wrong at the same time. Just goes to show in any controversy DADD: Don't Apologize Double Down.
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Of course you can. One obvious scenario would be if some dirtbag looked kind of like Hyde (it helps that the character kind of looks like a dirtbag), and got close to several women by convincing them he was famous. Then he raped them. This presents us with a situation where Danny Masterson is completely innocent, and yet leave the women with the internal experience of having been raped by Danny Masterson.
I'm not saying the above happened, or that I even believe the above happened. But it's a very easy position to take if you want to defend your friend and you're also a celebrity that needs to be careful not to get torn apart by the me too crowd. You just start the letter like: "I feel for these women, and I believe their trauma is real, but this has to be a case of mistaken identity because {insert character witness and trauma memory formation points here}"
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It’s pretty simple. Rule of evidence 413. This is an exception to the general principle (rule 404) that prior bad acts are inadmissible to prove propensity in court. If you were charging someone with robbing a bank, you wouldn’t be able to put a witness on the stand who says they were robbed by the defendant at a CVS in a completely separate incident years prior. That’s prejudicial and against rule 404. Rule 413 let’s you do that in sexual assault cases.
The analogous CA provision is Evidence Code section 1108
And note that a prior robbery might indeed be admissible under certain circumstances, if admitted to prove something other than propensity, such as motive, intent, identity. or common plan (i.e, M.O.). At least that is the law in California:
People v. Ewoldt, 7 Cal.4th 380 (1994)
But do we know for sure that past assaults were used against him?
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That provision has nothing to do with the statute of limitations. CA Penal Code sec 1385 simply permits the court to dismiss charges or enhancement allegations "in the interests of justice." The relevant CA penal code section re statutes of limitations is Section 799, which states that prosecution for rape "may be commenced at any time."
That is enough, if the jury believes them.
That is very common in criminal trials (as well as civil trials). And determining who is lying and who is telling the truth is what juries do. The unanimity requirement (and CA uses 12 jurors, unlike some states) and beyond a reasonable doubt standard of proof hopefully provides some protection for defendants; that being said, I share your criticism of lengthy or nonexistent statutes of limitations. I am merely describing the law and explaining how the conviction happened, not defending it.
Except?
Which is consistent with what I read about how murky the decision about SOL of limitations in the Masterson case were. This enhanced SOL statute had a grandfather clause. The article I read state the only way around the grandfather clause were the aggravating circumstances outlined in CA's "One Strike Law". My reading of those circumstances is that they don't apply to Masterson since there was no prior conviction. Just... stories.
It is not that murky, and it isn't really a grandfather clause. It is there to make sure that the extension of the statute of limitations does not run afoul of the ex post facto clause, which invalidates extensions which apply to crimes on which the SOL has already run
So, whether his prosecution was barred by the SOL depends on what the SOL was when the crime was committed, and when the SOL was extended. Note also that the SOL can be tolled, including when the defendant is out of state.
I don't understand the reference to prior convictions; what does that have to do with the SOL? Edit: Ok I looked at the one-strike statute and looked around, and apparently the issue is not that he had prior convictions (sec 667.61(d)(1)) but rather that "The defendant has been convicted in the present case or cases of committing an offense specified in subdivision (c) against more than one victim." (sec 667.61(d)(4)). That seems to be consistent with established CA law. Eg People v. Stewart (2004) 119 Cal.App.4th 163. Again, this is not meant to be a defense of the law, but merely a description.
Anyhow, if there are SOL issues, they will be raised on appeal and will be pretty easily resolved. Both the facts and law re pretty clear.
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Paging @2rafa, but I share a similar meta-hurdle with her that prevents me from getting too worked up about these cases, or at least tempers my emotional reaction to this kind of injustice.
I can objectively agree with you about the apparent stretching of judicial reasonability, the fear of impossible to defend against, the growing assumption of guilt until proven innocent, and the clear threat of these ideological kangaroocifixions creeping into other aspects of crime-and-justice that might actually threaten me. And I can agree about the campus-rape crisis from a few years back, and more recently Me-Too, etc.
Nothing that follows, dismisses the abstract principled disagreement with these judicial outcomes.
However, I can only laugh at the ideological blindspot from the 'liberal' crowd at these kinds of outrage-at-sex-scandal-outrage. The Motte is the same population, intimately familiar with the I never thought the leopard would eat my face meme, no?
These solution here is not to hook-up, not to have causal sex, not to get drunk and fuck people you're not married to. This is all a bunch of liberals pissed that we couldn't stop the ride somewhere between 1/2 and 9/10ths down the slope. Boo-hoo.
Maybe the progressive's impulse that there's something wrong with a lecherous 31 year old celebrity fucking a 16 year old, their inclination to beleive the legitimacy of her later feelings that she was prey-on and harmed, or their belief that going to a party and fucking drunk people, whether or not you are drunk is an excerise in poor judgement, aren't wrong. Maybe the progressive's judicial response is warped and fucked up, but maybe it's because the people who came before them tore down all the scaffolding and vandalized all the blueprints for a functional paradigm, and those same people are all outraged that those who came after aren't happy standing exposed shivering in the wreckage and be told all about their fReEdOm.
From where I stand, everything MeToo is people trying to put a roof back over their head, while the same people who tore down their original house criticise them for not enjoying the fresh air, and the people who built the original house are too busy tell them they're rebuilding it wrong, instead of telling the wreckers to fuck off.
Eh, I don't find this argument persuasive. I highly doubt the vast majority of supporters of the MeToo movement would be caught dead agreeing with any sort of 'sex negativity.' It's really about women wanting to have their cake and eat it to.
The way these sexual assault and rape proceedings are going, we are hurtling towards a world where young women get to become intoxicated at parties and fuck around as much as they want. But then if a man they slept with (or presumably could've slept with) ever does something they don't like, they can bring the full force of the law against them. Even 20 years later.
Yes conservative courting norms and laws were created to prevent this exact thing, but I'm not sure most mainstream progressives are able to think of anything labeled 'conservative' in a positive light. It's quite strange but the modern media landscape really has made a world where people see a group labeled 'enemy' enough times and they get to a point where they just literally cannot fathom that that group has anything beneficial going on.
The point is that MeToo represents an organic rebellion by a lot of women against the excesses of the sexual revolution, whether they consciously realise it or not (and most, as you suggest, do not). Is it often misguided, does it often harm innocents, does it broadly fail to present viable alternatives, is it still trapped inside liberal ideology? Of course - it represents a dynamic rage, it is largely impotent, those supporting it have little understanding of the real material causes of their suffering.
But, as @iprayiam3 says, that does not mean it is insincere. And so-called conservatives who spend their time defending lotharios and cads are essentially liberals on this issue, no different to those defending ‘drag queen story hour’ or teenage transition. No, some things are bad. Young women raised in a climate of total sexual liberalism are rebelling with the only words they have, in the only way they can. They’re not going to become “trad” overnight, they have no understanding of what that is, they were raised without religion, they are surrounded by a media environment that means they don’t have any real understanding of what reversing it would mean. Still, they know the present situation is untenable.
I can agree with this point, that broadly the MeToo movement exists due to sexual excesses of the sexual revolution. I can even agree that it's due to rage. But I still find it extremely troubling. I suppose it depends on where you see society heading due to the current proceedings.
I absolutely disagree with this characterization. It has long been a staple of archetypal stories that heroic men with high status can sleep around with pretty much whoever they want, get applauded for it, and fail to have any consequences. It was even common in Christian societies, although the Catholics did tend to have a dimmer view of lotharios. They were anomalous in quite a few respects. (Nowadays they've lost their distinctness because their peculiar outlook has become the mainstream view, imo)
Now I still think that heroes sleeping around with virgins all across society can be bad, unless you have very few heroes who unambiguously do good things. These frail half-men 'pseuds' we have nowadays that have usurped the place and status the hero used to occupy are far from any sort of moral ideal, however.
If a man truly does beat back the chaotic flood, saves society, and pushes us forward into a golden age - he can sleep around as much as he wants, as far as I'm concerned. If Elon Musk wants to sow his wild oats, well, I don't see much wrong with that.
But the Russell Brands of the world are one of the most telling signs that the way our society doles out status is sick. Absolutely rotten.
With your daughter?
…Yes? Perhaps I’d feel different if I actually had a daughter and had watched her grow up, but this doesn’t feel like that big of a dilemma. If you don’t want Elon Musk solving the fertility crisis with your daughter, then you don’t want to win. Your reproductive fitness incentives are aligned with hers.
Now, with my wife/gf? Absolutely not. He can get fucked
I don’t think the opposition in this hypothetical case is to Elon Musk being your son in law and father of your grandchild(ren), it’s to Elon Musk using your daughter as a whore, which is what @TheDag seemed to imply was acceptable to him.
I'll preface this with the fact that I don't have any children either. I'm sure that would affect things.
That being said, from an objective standpoint I think that I could stomach a suitable hero (i.e. Elon Musk) coupling with my daughter if the right story were told about it. If he launched the first rocket into orbit that prevented his company from bankruptcy, and my daughter was at the afterparty, and one thing led to another, et cetera...
This poor rendition of a hero's journey highlights the problem we have in modern times. Even the most credulous and serious depiction of a hero's journey struggles to recapture the gravitas of a story told over a campfire many nights between a group of individuals that have known each other most of their lives. We humans were built to tell stories around campfires, that's where so much of our modern culture evolved from.
Clearly with the pace of modern times, we can't create stories with the same weight, or at least we haven't figured out the trick yet.
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Just how deep does that lack of understanding run? Do these women actually still not realize that trying to outdo one another in pandering to the short-term sexual proclivities of the top 5% of men will never get them the one thing they really crave, which is the attention and devotion of a worthy man?
Have you met people of average intelligence, let alone the half who fall below the midpoint? The people we most often make fun of here are midwits already in the 90th+ percentile. Expecting average people, especially average young people, to accurately diagnose the complexities of the sexual marketplace is overambitious. They may be aware of their place relative to others, but their collective role in the machine isn’t going to be derived by the average 17 year old.
And in any case, there’s a defection issue here. The average 18 year old boy in modern secular France (for example) isn’t going to wait until marriage to have sex. A girl his age has no power over him, if she tells him she wants to wait, he’ll go fuck someone else who has not fully considered the reality of gender relations and concluded that promiscuity is counterproductive for women. She is left with two choices if she commits to this path. First, she could become a tradcath (or maybe Muslim), which presumably as say a secular Parisian (maybe not even of Catholic background) would involve abandoning the culture in which she was raised and wholesale LARPing to join a completely different largely rural subculture and belief system that will be suspicious of a young single person without a family history in the SSPX or whatever. Secondly, she could find a secular French boy so romantically unsuccessful or unconfident that he is willing to agree to the terms despite living in a promiscuous society. Of course, that young man is likely so shy that he’ll never even make a move, and may otherwise be extremely awkward, stunted or ugly (by which I don’t mean “not the top 5%”, but “in the bottom 10%”).
So in reality, the girl usually has to put out if she wants a relationship [that may lead to marriage] with an average young man in her league of class/education/looks.
I appreciate you always giving a rigorous defense of women when these sexual marketplace topics get brought up. I may not always agree, but it's a needed service! I rarely see these arguments being made anywhere, unfortunately.
Don't you think the argument that the average 18-yr-old girl in modern secular France has no power over the average boy his age is so obviously far-fetched that it basically belongs to fantasy land?
I'd say @2rafa was arguing that she doesn't have power over the situation. Yes a girl has some power over the average boy, but not enough power to get him to commit to her if she won't put out.
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I mean, yes, within the narrow window of said average girl asking said average boy to not have sex. All the power such a girl has over such a boy is because she gatekeeps sex. He'll move heaven and earth if he thinks he has a shot. If the singular ask of that girl is to not do the one thing he'll do anything to do... yeah, she has no power over that.
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Hold up. These are completely different scenarios. Why did you just move the goalposts?
I’m saying that defection from modern sexual culture isn’t a viable solution for most young women in the West even if they thought of it, which they probably wouldn’t. How is that not relevant?
They’re not pandering to the “top 5%” but to the average young man their age, who grew up in the same post-sexual-revolution culture and so is not usually going to accept a single young woman telling him to wait for her.
Again, hold up.
You and @iprayiam3 are specifically discussing the reactions of women supposedly used and abused by Danny Masterson and Russell Brand and, I presume, similar male celebrities and lotharios, i.e. the top 5% of men, not by average young man their age. You're claiming this is the understandable and sincere female reaction to the undesired consequences of the sexual revolution.
In your comment above, you seem to be implying that a modern Western woman putting out in the framework of a long-term relationship on the path to marriage is somehow also an example of promiscuity. I think even on this forum most people would find that interpretation highly dubious.
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They can't get what they want by any means, because there aren't nearly enough "worthy" men by their own standards. Feminists will of course argue this is due to the degeneracy of men, but since this isn't the case, winning that argument doesn't gain them anything.
There aren't nearly enough worthy women either. I'd say the mating marketplace is in balance in that sense.
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You don't think men have degenerated? Why not?
You see the cohorts of NEETs and don't think that means degeneration? I'm surprised at this coming from you Nybbler.
There aren't that many NEETs, they're just horrendously overrepresented on places like Reddit. They used to just commit minor crimes and/or hang out somewhere and smoke weed.
Interesting. I know several in my personal life. I don't know the stats off the top of my head, but it seems to me that the modal young man in America is far less outgoing and just generally capable than in the last few generations.
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Hah, I continue to find it fascinating how so many folks in the Motte/rationalist sphere underestimate the intelligence of the average person, or hell even the above average person.
The people that are capable of having conversations like these on sensitive topics without foaming at the mouth rabidly are a few percentage points, at most.
Lord, selection effects are terrifyingly powerful things.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12530981/Russell-Brands-management-told-wasnt-good-look-date-16-year-old-girl-told-pretend-goddaughter-niece-alleged-accuser-Alice-claims.html
That article is quite something!
I feel for her I do, she was used by him and a 30 year old runs circles in mind game powers around a 16 year old, but I don’t simply understand her logic. „Brand was sleazy, and I hated it, so I chose other sleazy guys“? If she chose bad boys in her life so far, she has a type and he was just the first.
No dad expressing deep concerns or simply beating Brand up? The only fatherly person is a random taxi driver. This is just sad.
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There's no point in that. The ruins of the demolished walls and foundation are already overgrown with weeds, and the wreckers are long dead and forgotten. And the house was built from materials that no longer exist.
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But there is another solution - desacralization of sex and all the things that it entails. There was some movement in that direction with Sexual revolution but it stopped at current feminist puritanism. Without psychological significance given to it by ourselfs rape is no worse than being beaten up.
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Are you saying we shouldn't get too upset about an innocent man going to prison for thirty years because he didn't follow, what are now quite rare, sexual norms that you think are better?
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There is a second reason for SOL besides fuzzy memories.
I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago. Honestly I’m relatively stupid compared to that person. But biologically it’s not anything close to the same molecules. I have different experiences. I’ve grown and in some ways gotten worse as a person. To prosecute someone for crimes they did 20 years ago is literally punishing a completely different person.
Maybe he did rape these people. His 20 something self deserved the punishment.
Eh, I'm less persuaded by that argument. It's just a bit too galaxy brained for me. A bit too "The Ship of Theseus has a definite answer". And presenting evidence that you've grown and changed and regret who you once were could be presented at sentencing.
I mean, that is an area probably ripe for some sort of codified reform. Sentencing is notoriously all over the place.
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The problem with this argument in this case, as in my conversation with Walter below, is that Masterson doesn't admit his sins and offers no evidence of change.
The first step in the argument that "Well I'm a different person now..." is to say "Yeah, wow, can't believe I did that when I was younger, I'm horrified I did that, I'd never do that now!" Masterson has not offered anything like that. If he did, there's a good chance it would mitigate his sentence significantly.
Hell, I never raped anyone, and I can think of a dozen times I did something ten years ago that horrifies me today. I'm horrified at how I treated my girlfriends at 18, hell at how I treated my friends.
But I do see your point, inasmuch as the thirty year sentence is life-ending. Which is why I think we need to bring back punishments like public horse-whippings or locking men in the stockade in the middle of Los Angeles for a day and a night. A basic sense of justice rejects the idea that 40 year old criminal gets to walk free unpunished a public symbol that you can commit crimes and get away with it, a basic sense of justice rejects the idea of locking him away for the rest of his life at the taxpayer's expense. But seeing him publicly degraded, beaten? That satisfies all. It won't ruin his life or the lives of others, it will satisfy the victims that justice has been done. It will be a permanent embarrassing stain on his life.
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