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Cocacolonisation at work?
Or, why what happens in America is (unhappily) a big deal globally
This is Black History Month. How do I know this, since I'm not an American and this is very much an American, indeed a North American, indeed a USA American invention?
Because the classical music station of our state broadcaster is currently celebrating it, for the second year in a row.
What does Black history have to do with Ireland, given our demographics (data from the 2016 census as the ethnicity report from the 2022 census isn't out yet)?
But hold hard there, the Republic of Ireland is no longer nearly 100% milk-bottle white! We have Actual Real Black People living in our cities and towns now! So why shouldn't the state broadcaster recognise our diverse citizenry?
No problem there - except that the black people in Ireland are from Africa (mainly Nigeria), black British, Afro-Latinos, etc.
But the musicians, singers, composers being celebrated for Black History Month are North American; today, for instance, the clip was about Robert McFerrin (father of Bobby).
I'm happy to learn about African-American musicians, but uhhhhh.... why are we learning about North American and not, say, Malian griots or Malagasy valiha players, since those are much more relevant to the black people living in Ireland? Part of it is probably that the snippets are shared from American sources, and that for mixed race Irish people they would more naturally look to Britain and the USA. So we get Aretha Franklin and Scott Joplin, not Rakotozafy.
But it's a great (or terrible) example of America being the cultural 800 lb gorilla. Our betters have decided that now we are a socially liberal multicultural modern economy country, we must celebrate diversity and inclusiveness. Which means the American version of same. Why aren't we getting Asian History Month, Polish History Month, etc. programmes? Well, I'd love to know the answer to that one myself.
Huge pet peeve of mine. I've written about it here, here and here.
RTÉ delenda est.
Short answer: the Irish PMC consumes so much American news and entertainment media, and spends so much time on American social media, that they have come to believe that, on some level, they actually live in the US, and any issues which are assumed to be important in the US must be equally important in Ireland.
What's RTE?
Raidío Teilifís Éireann ("Radio Television Ireland"), the state broadcaster.
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Black history month is not for black people, it's for white people. It's for whites to celebrate non-whiteness. What matters is how whites see non-whites, and they see them mostly through American media. By "whites', I don't mean people with light skin, but rather a certain class of people--mostly light-skinned--who are very profoundly conscious of "race". Black history month exists because white people demand it, but this weird fact is just more obvious in Ireland than in the US.
If we use SWPL as a working definition of who is white, then the biggest beneficiaries of Black History Month are black-skinned white people. I am half-serious about this.
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I would be interested to know the actual reason for why things like this happen - like, for instance, is your local radio station copying content from some American station, and doesn't have the infrastructure to come up with their own content that month? Is the person in charge of programming at your local station just so culturally Americanized that this seems natural to them and they can't think of why it shouldn't be this way? Do they think that their audience is sufficiently Americanized that they'll be interested in this content?
Because yeah, this does seem pretty silly, but as an American I really have no idea how or why these things happen in other countries. I don't actually really want American culture to have this much influence around the world, including the cultural and political elements I like and agree with, a lot of it is so specific to our history or politics or other contingent factors that I wouldn't expect it to be useful elsewhere unchanged.
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Whilst I profoundly hate that the West has taken to celebrating a racist holiday -- And specifically hate how easy it has been to convince people to do it -- it still seems a bit silly to criticize people for worshiping the holy ethnos wrong.
Aren't they more right to worship the mythical American negro instead of whatever sort of real people exist in the actual country they live in? After all this is a holy celebration of the former, not the latter. The sort of people who are in position to celebrate black history month do not give a slightest fuck about Africans qua Africans. Most likely they don't even know anything about them. But they do care a lot about having those fancy values from America about being antiracist and intersectional and inclusive and progressive.
This was never for or about anybody from or living in Ireland. You are specifically worshiping Americans and the glory of their current empire. Trying to spin it off to your local real people is a futile attempt at subversion. At best you're just signalling you're not on board with the program completely. Which is the most dangerous place to be, ideologically speaking.
Are the people erecting statues of George Floyd in Afghanistan actually more clear minded than people like you who notice that it doesn't make any sense? I'm not even sure at this point.
I would have said it's typical college student white liberal activism, though some of the people involved appear to be mixed race. But it makes no sense to celebrate black Americans, for 'now that we have our own black population', given that most of the black people here are now coming from Nigeria.
It makes no sense except as copying the Yanks, which makes the entire bit about "black people living in Ireland" nonsensical, as it's got nothing to do with the black people living here who come from Brazil and Nigeria, not the USA.
Let's be blunt, that's it in a nutshell. But objecting to that would be racist, because we're celebrating Black people, so how dare you point out the contradictions?
I still find this criticism very weak. The few black people I've interacted with have all, without exception, been Americanized just as much as our white liberal activists are. Even more so, to some extent, since they are actively looking for black American culture. There is no hint or trace of them being from Ghana or Kenya, despite some of those guys having lived there for 10+ years before coming to my country.
Why wouldn't black history month in Ireland or wherever else celebrate the biggest cultural icons that actually resonate culturally with black immigrants? They don't consume media from Africa. They consume black media from America just like everyone else.
Beyond all of that the key line to point out here is that ingroups and outgroups always come first. Black people living among white people see themselves as different. The lives of blacks in Ireland have much more in common with blacks in America than blacks in Africa since blacks in Ireland are dealing with the same outgroup in similar conditions. That struggle resonates and relates both emotionally and physically.
If you in any way cared about privileging the position of blacks in any country you should immediately go to the winning formula. Which is the US one.
A quibble, but many young black people in Ireland have great admiration for black British rappers like Stormzy or Dave. Ireland even has a thriving drill scene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A92_(group)) which draws as much, if not more, influence from UK drill as from Chicago (which is even mentioned on the Wikipedia page for UK drill).
And where do black British rappers get their ideas from? The idea of 'British rap' is inane. The poetry and rhymes can be British. Or stuff like Cockney. 'British rap' is American. From the song structure, lyrics and style to everything else.
That seems awfully pedantic. Hip hop may have originated in the US but that doesn't mean it can't be reinterpreted in other cultural contexts to the point of becoming a distinct genre/cultural form.
No one would say that anime is an American artistic medium just because many of the earliest anime artists were inspired by Disney. No one would say the French nouvelle vague is really an Anglo-American movement because many of the directors were inspired by Hitchcock, Welles and Jerry Lewis. If you want to claim there's literally zero musical difference between Dizzee Rascal and Snoop Dogg, well, I don't know what to tell you.
Thank god no one said that.
No one is saying that and you are being a little shit throwing these irrelevant arguments at me. There are 'differences' between American rappers in the US that dwarf whatever differences there are between most UK and US rappers. That doesn't change the fact that 'British rap' is completely derivative of US rap. From being a thug to singing a sob song about being black and oppressed.
Maybe instead of bringing up a bunch of irrelevant things that would make your point if they were similar to what is actually being talked about you should look at the thing actually being talked about and recognize just how derivative black 'British rap' is from US rap.
You are banned. Based on past warnings and bannings, let's go with 14 days this time.
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Fuck off and don't call me a little shit
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No it's not. Black history month in America is February. Look it up
Seemingly we adopted it in October. Why? I have no idea. Some bunch in Cork back in 2010 for some reason, seems to be as far as it goes:
That makes even less sense for a Famine museum (or whatever it is) to go jumping on the bandwagon, but I think the clue there is UCC: college students copying American radicalism.
Why October instead of February? Not a clue.
It's part of the same grift, just a step further along than the Americans. If they did black history month in February everyone would say 'haha barmy americanised amadans, they're just copying the yanks the eejits*!' But since they did it in October, they generate interest, people bitch about it on social media and argue about it, and say 'hey dummies, black history month is supposed to be in February!', legitimising black history month as a concept.
*to be sure, to be sure.
Also there is the long running joke that the American black history month is in February, the shortest month of the year. The Irish are giving it a month with the full 31.
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Was this whole thing just a marketing campaign by the Cork Tourism Board that got out of hand?
That makes about as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.
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Why does a country which doesn't have a significant black population and no colonial history whatsoever dedicate a month to celebrating the achievements of people who have more melanin than the average? What could be behind this particularly strange new custom?
Maybe if we unlock the key to this mystery, we can then explain why the Japanese love baseball. I always felt the two questions intimately related somehow.
But as you soundly point out Japanese teams don't play in MLB, so we'll probably never figure it out.
I always thought the Japanese love of baseball was a holdover from the post-war American occupation. But Ireland was never formally colonised or occupied by the US, so the influence of American culture on Irish society has always been faintly baffling to me in a way that the historical influence of British culture certainly isn't.
My own idea is that it's our history of emigration. The "American parcels" from family members in the USA sending home second-hand clothes etc. for the family at home. The remittances. The 'returned Yank'. American politicians doing trips back to The Ould Sod (Biden was the most recent). The people going to the US for summer jobs (and maybe overstaying the visa). Britain is closer, sure, but there's not the same historical resentment of 'former colonial power' for the USA. All this on top of consuming exported American culture the same as the rest of the world.
Not to mention the J1 visas. I'd never thought of that angle.
But it's not just that - I've met my fair share of housebound autistic neurotic woke shut-ins who seem to have never ventured beyond the Pale and who speak in a manner indistinguishable from their housebound autistic etc. equivalents on the other side of the Atlantic.
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People expect that, but it isn't actually, predates it by a century. And there were professional leagues in the 20s long before the second world war.
You had people saying "the game spread, like a fire in a dry field, in summer, all over the country, and some months afterwards, even in children in primary schools in the country far away from Tōkyō were to be seen playing with bats and balls." as far back as 1907
We had a big presence in Japan for a while after they opened up to us:
Ironically, while we already had pro teams, it sounds like the American org that became the MLB was only established in 1871, so our love of the sport really doesn't predate theirs by all that much.
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Another interesting thing is that baseball was quite popular in England for a time before it faded away.
Rounders (the version of base ball that was codified in Ireland in 1884, so well after the Kinckerbockers codified American baseball and around the same time that the NL was formed) was one of the big team sports for schoolgirls in the UK (alongside netball and field hockey) and Ireland. It only went into decline in the 21st century once there was a serious attempt to push women's cricket.
TIL that the claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball was a myth created to refute the idea that baseball was derived from rounders. Unsurprisingly, the truth is that both games derived from informal "base ball" games with uncodified rules that originated in England and were played across the English-speaking world - similarly to how Rugby, association football, and gridiron all developed independently from uncodified proto-football.
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You're right, it's absolutely fascinating that baseball was ever popular anywhere.
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Wow, I had no idea, that's really interesting!
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Hey, Scott Joplin is great, argreed the rest of it is Americanised BS, but I guess colonies of the Empire must suffer the mandatory public venerations of IVPITER and JUNO...
IVNO
My bad, don't know how I missed that.
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IVPPITER
Romanes eunt domus!
People called 'Romanes', they go the house?
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When I was looking at schools for my son in the UK, one of the easiest tests was looking at the Black History Month displays. If more than half the historical black people in the displays were American, I could cross the school off the list. (We cross-checked with other criteria - I was actually surprised just how perfect the negative correlation was between having posters of Rosa Parks and MLK and being an appropriate learning environment for a high-functioning autistic boy).
It is bananas when you consider who the actual black population of the UK and Ireland are. I'd really like to learn more about African music, and any continental African composers/musicians/singers in the Western classical tradition, but nope - you'll get Scott Joplin and like it!
And okay, Scott Joplin is fine, but for somebody from Nigeria, what has a black American to do with their history?
In all fairness, black American cultural exports are highly popular and influential in Africa.
And even more so in the Caribbean. Even in the 1980's, the dream of a sporty boy in the English-speaking Caribbean would have been to get picked for West Indies and beat England in a cricket Test match. Now he would want to play in the NBA, and unsurprisingly Windies suck at cricket.
When Black Panther came out in the UK, I found the racial politics of it to be cringe - Africa is a country and the global centre of Black culture is South Central LA. But based on who was whooping loudest in the cinema, black Caribbean Londoners loved it.
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A healthy addition to their family's endowment.
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Alabama - Tennessee: Spending an afternoon with 100,000 members of the "grill" crowd.
I have been to several football games at "tier-2" SEC and Big 10 teams. This was my first visit to one of the college football elite. This was a fanbase that has exacting expectations for their team. It was also one with a nervous edge: Alabama had suffered a home loss to Texas and had looked vulnerable in several other games. Like most SEC fanbases, several hours of lubrication had preceded the kick-off. It was a loud, rowdy, yet very focused crowd. Even in the interior areas, the fans would yell "Roll Tide"; the large concrete hallways providing amplification and echo.
Unsolicited, a mostly-sober Alabama fan engaged me in single-sentence conversation: "Our girls are so much hotter than theirs". When I declared my neutrality in the upcoming showdown, he said "oh, you're unbiased then. Aren't our girls so much hotter than theirs?"
In the SEC, people dress up for games. The sorority girls especially dress for display, revealing and augmenting what is typically already top-tier aesthetic qualities. As one large banner hung on a House, re-affirming my previous encounter, "our girls are hotter than UT's!". Several of the sorority members gyrated on the porch as living proof. These girls are secure in their identity: in their looks, their social networks, and their sorority (and these three are all heavily correlated).
In five years, these girls will be wives. They will be more mature and less wild; dressed to the nines but more modestly. In ten years they will have two or three kids. Their beauty will be diminished but they will have found new identity in their children, husbands, and school social networks. They will still faithfully attend games, raising up the next generation of die-hard Alabama fans.
During the game, a particularly enthusiastic fan behind me shouted encouragement and tirades in full volume and with little let-up. Somewhat ironically, his pejoratives for the UT fanbase centered particularly on their inadequate cultural sophistication, with "podunk" and "redneck" frequent descriptors. To one slightly effeminate student he yelled "you should get a Bud-light". With his accent, appearance, and bearing he was almost a perfect Hollywood caricature of an Alabamian. During a momentary lull in the action he let me know he was pursuing his master's degree.
Most of the fanbase was well educated and well-off. While there is a joke that only 10% of Alabama fans actually attended the university, the majority of those in attendance had certainly had a college degree and beyond. The cost of a game is prohibitive to all but the most connected or wealthy. While I didn't pay for my ticket, parking, or the tailgate activities rumor had it that the per-person cost was well into the 4 figures. No one even blinked at the 15 dollar stadium beer.
When Alabama scooped a fumble for a score to clinch the game, the crowd went berserk and the stands turned into a party. After the extra point, the loudspeakers played Garth Brook's "Friends in low places" and the entire crowd sang along, locking arms and swaying back and forth. Cigars starting being lit, and soon the stadium was filled with haze.
I was swept up in the post game excitement. The student body was crowding into the bars and restaurants to continue the celebration. Those of us who had driven to the game meandered back to our cars, knowing that traffic was going to be a disaster regardless of when we left. Along the way, I passed Greek houses where the real parties were at, though even the standard student housing appeared to be holding impromptu parties in the stairwells. Somehow a female Tennessee student made it into an Alabama dorm and yelled "Go Vols" at passing pedestrians. One incredulous fan yelled back "you lost!".
As Scott Greer would say, these fans are economically upper-class economically but who enjoy low-class activities (at least, as defined by our cultural elites). Yet is the tailgating culture truly low-class? The catered food at many tailgates is provided by top restaurants, there is typically at least one very nice liquor, and the cigars were ubiquitous following the victory. I saw an Audi R8, tricked-out trucks costing upwards of six figures, and campers that cost the equivalent of a small lakehouse. In addition, these are people who simply know how to have fun, and do so with enthusiasm and no excuses. There is self-awareness but no navel-gazing. These are people who know who they are and take pride in it.
There's an element of the old classlessness to American culture that haunts some places still. Especially places where the local whites have roots stretching into the antebellum era, there is a cultural memory of a time when people at least took the idea that America shouldn't have social classes seriously, even it wasn't an idea that entirely panned out in practice. If you're middle class, you enjoy low class entertainment as almost a point of pride.
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As a person who generally cheers for Alabama because my sister went there and she loves it, and I want her to be happy, I think this is a good post. I think what it encompasses is that going to an SEC football game is a genuinely amazing experience, and just objectively fun (for most people). And people who look down on such things are just playing into their own prejudices. If you think Bama football tailgating is low class, but enjoy a tv show like Scandal, Rue Paul's Drag Race, etc you are just a person who doesn't know thyself. Indeed, the tailgate is superior, because it involves social activity and has an appropriate level of music volume (contrasted with a modern bar, club, etc).
I've never gotten to go to the Iron Bowl (my sister has), but I like that video because it shows that people are just having absolute fun, which is the heart and soul of college football. The host is doing a bit of fish out of water thing, but it is not nearly as condescending as you will often see. It is genuine and embracing of the fun. I think a lot of anti-college football sentiment is just culture war. 99% of people don't know the skill difference between CFB and NFL anyways. But the fun is the point. Some people hate the fact that other people are having fun they haven't sanctioned.
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I was raised, and still live in, this culture, and I appreciate your write up.
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Question from someone who doesn't understand US College football culture - you write about Alabama fandom being passed down families, but if you come from a family of diehard Alabama fans and end up attending some other school for academic or personal reasons, does your sporting allegiance change? And is it supposed to?
The only UK university sporting events with this level of interest are the (Rugby) Varsity Match and the Boat Race, and in both cases the partisan fans are alumni of the universities or residents of the relevant cities. I supported Oxford as a kid because both of my parents were Oxonians, but there was no question that as soon as I matriculated I would be rooting for Cambridge. (Not that it mattered much - my family are not really into spectator sport and we only watched the Boat Race because my dad was a rower in his youth.)
My mom's side of the family are all hardcore University of Iowa fans. Not a single one of them went to the University of Iowa.
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If you grow up rooting for Alabama and go to a different school which is actually good at football, you become a fan of the new school. If you go to, say, a basketball school(American colleges which are particularly good at basketball and those which are particularly good at football rarely overlap, and it’s odd for fans of a football school to care overmuch about its basketball team and vice versa), then no, you don’t, at least as far as football is concerned. If your new school is a football school that isn’t a rival of Alabama, you root for your new team first, but you’re still expected to cheer on Alabama if you see them.
Now it’s worth noting that 1) all of this is specific to undergrad, if you grow up rooting for alabama, go to Alabama for undergrad, and the take law school at university of Texas your loyalty stays with alabama and 2) nearly all schools that are football powerhouses are regional generalist schools, although a few of them have better programs than others(like the aforementioned university of Texas at petroleum geology, for obvious reasons) they’re generally going to offer most majors.
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If you grew up an Alabama fan and wind up attending an SEC rival like Auburn, your fandom is expected to change to your new school. If you grew up an Alabama fan and wind up attending a school like UAB, who's football tram is irrelevant, you are expected to remain an Alabama fan.
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I've seen the same but with
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Coming from the Southwest, my mother was complaining about Californians with their pushy driving and their big houses fifteen years ago.
But, still, my home culture is closer to LA than it is to Luisiana, not only geographically, but more deeply. The same Spanish Colonial influences, of course. No influential schools specifically for boys, or Blacks, or Catholics. Sprawling cities that expanded in the era of the automobile, with huge grids and wide lanes.
I'm unsure how to classify the apology and trust issue, but I'm not sure "California" is the right category. We don't like our new neighbor, who has been building a house next to ours, because he does things like helping himself to other people's stuff without asking, and embedding it in his fence. When confronted with this, he always deflects, never apologizes. He seems to have learned everyone's names and has been occasionally using them as a kind of weapon. We always feel extra angry with him after he uses especially our children's names. My husband is considering installing a camera just for him, because he seems untrustworthy. He has painted his new house primer gray over stucco, in a land of clay colored pinks and tans, with matching grey stonework (suggesting this isn't an oversight, it really will stay that color), and bulldozed all the shrubs in his yard. We call this behavior "car salesman," but it's not exactly that, either. I don't know if he's from California, but if so, it was a long time ago. I would like it if there were an accepted term for this, like "premium mediocre" for many things also popular in California.
Back when I was in youth group at a California feeling Evangelical church, some church members once recommended a book called TrueFaced (https://www.amazon.com/TrueFaced-Bill-Thrall/dp/1576836932), and talked about how it had been important and meaningful to them, as they realized that they had been living a lie all this time. They did not seem especially disoriented by that realization. My family was intensely puzzled by this (along with the popularity of things like Wild at Heart and The Purpose Driven Life, also out of California). I think this is related to the "privacy settings" issue, and also to pressure from many social groups to perform things like enthusiasm or conversion in order to experience belonging and acceptance. We once went on a youth group outing to a California theme park, where after riding roller coasters all day, we went to hear a sermon about "recommitting our lives to Christ" or some such thing. At one point, the speaker demanded that we should get up and go over to another area, so I did, and then got me to fill something out saying that I had pledged recommitment or something. Afterwards, I felt confused and ashamed. I got up because a leader told me to, and now it was supposed to be something deeply meaningful and personal? People with a deeper need for belonging and greater focus on adherence to social norms probably do bend their entire personalities around the expectation that they be in some constant state of Revival (or, now, of finding themselves, or therapy, of being Out, whatever their social group calls for)
Some years later, I was volunteering for a month at a youth camp in California. This time it was Eastern Orthodox, which even in California is more stately and solemn than frenetic and enthusiastic. And yet. They wore me out with constant demands to be more extroverted, more enthusiastic, to Experience Revival, to sing louder, with more energy, with frenzy, to compete for attention at each meal, for Fun. Californians, and California adjacent youth cultures, I think, do worship a minor deity of Fun, to which they make sacrifices.
I think there's something to this. Movies and TV used to portray California (or LA specifically) as this little paradise of Cool Times, of good burgers and parties and going down to the mall with friends.
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That doesn't sound realistic or like something to take seriously.
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Re. the apology thing:
I've noticed that an apology is an admission that doesn't guarantee forgiveness; so forgiveness has to be given before the apology or the apology is pointless.
This is similar to how it was in my small jungle town in the middle of nowhere; where you needed an intermediary to be sure the beef was crushed before anyone tried to do any actual working it out so you didn't eg get beat with some horseshoes on the end of a chain.
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When California sends it's people, they're not sending their best.
You're experiencing blue tribe whites from LA. Native Angelenos are actually 2/3 non-white and 40% immigrant, and have the same complaints you do. They enthusiastically barge into Mexican and Korean neighborhoods with the same smug, passive-aggressive, arrogance they do in your neighborhood. The appropriate Vietnamese culture without any desire to be part of the Vietnamese community.
New Orleans has a greater cultural depth than any other city in this country, as it has been an outpost of one empire after another, wealthy enough to bring adventurers, but humid and distant enough that it doesn't become overwhelmed. Los Angeles isn't the cultureless wasteland you think it is though, due to another quirk: Prop 13. The East Coasters (black and white) that moved to LA for the post-war aerospace boom? They're still there, living in their 50s houses. They're paying $100/year in property tax because of Prop 13, and they'll stay there forever. The Persians, Armenians, and Koreans have been in LA for three generations now, as have the Vietnamese. They're still in their little houses that they can't extend because that would trigger a ruinous property tax increase.
That's real LA - a city built to 1950s row-house density, accidentally multi-generational and thus continuous due to Prop 13 keeping grandparents around, with thriving ethnic neighborhoods. The people that built the hot rods or fled the Shah (and possibly both!) are still there!
The same smug cultural vampires that have floated over to your culture have been sticking their fangs into LA for decades now. I assure you real LA hates them as much as you do.
California's native stock is highly white. Its nonwhite % is increasing more than basically any other state, but California of 1980 was super white.
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Prop 13 is also strangling the city and makes it impossible to enter the real estate market if you're not earning huge amounts of money. If you're a middle class Angeleno, resign yourself to living with your parents until they keel over and inherit the house (I hope you don't have siblings!), move out to bumfuck nowhere on the edge of town, or rent forever.
The eldest son inherits the title, and the younger sons go abroad in search of adventure. It has always been like that.
Not always. The Romans did not have a law of primogeniture for property.
In the modern era people usually expect to have their own place before getting married and having children. Good luck getting a wife when you live in your childhood bedroom.
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LA was a majority white city until fairly recently. Whites were ethnically cleansed from LA by mass 3rd world immigration after WW2. These nonwhite people are a big reason for the way CA is. They certainly aren't voting for any Republicans.
This is hilarious . Whites are supposed to integrate into parallel immigrant communities who arrived 2 generations ago?
No, but if white liberals are going to go around sticking their nose into these communities and meddling, they ought to treat people in those communities as equals.
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In the US "White" includes most Hispanics (besides Arabs). Every branch of my family's been in California since the 1920s, when they came from New Mexico. They spoke English and Spanish for 4 generations before the move, and more since. If you look at the employee roaster for Hughes Aircraft Company's engineers in 1959, half the names are Alvarez, Vasquez etc. The same for a high school marching band in 1942...
While the 80s and 90s saw a massive influx of Mexicans, the "Whites" in the bullet belt aren't who you're thinking of. I have a few generations of family in aerospace and their work photos aren't super white. By the late 70s, you get the children and wives of executed Vietnamese judges, many doctors, electrical engineers etc. coming. Within a few years, they appear on department pictures and cards.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Porcentage_de_hispanos_por_condado_de_Estados_Unidos%2C_1960.jpg Note that LA county is the unclear 25%+.
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Do you even read what you’re typing before posting it?
Everything important and valuable in Los Angeles was built by Americans from other parts of the country. The Tongva Indians who lived there before the Spanish arrived were hunter-gatherers and built no advanced settlements. Once the Spaniards showed up, they established a small mission, which had a few hundred people living in it at its peak. Later under Mexican sovereignty it grew to a small city of less than 2,000 people, which was still the population when Americans conquered it during the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. Even in 1870 its population was only about 5,000. By the year 1900 it was over 100,000 people - the overwhelming majority of them Americans from different parts of the country. It was those people that built Los Angeles as you know it: Anglos from the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast. You are merely a squatter on their patrimony. The “native” brown Angelenos you want to pretend are the “real” founding stock of the country were an afterthought to the people who actually built everything around you.
I know you've got some ideological commitments that cause you to overreact to this topic.
I don't think the brown Angelenos are the founding stock of LA. Without doxxing myself, I'm actually pretty close to white LA. I love that culture, and I alluded to them. They built JPL and the hot rods, they gave us surf culture and fighter jets, they gave American culture everything from astronaut buzzcuts to Hollywood.
They voted for Ronald Reagan and Howard Jarvis. If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name Southern California in the 80s.
They're also gone. LA county is about 1/4 non-Hispanic white, and that population is overwhelmingly older, almost retired. LAUSD is 10% non-Hispanic white, and they're not the type to vote for Ronald Reagan, to put it mildly.
All the sane white people left LA, and the only people with roots are the ones that stuck around in their ethnic enclaves. Today's LA is immigrant enclaves and white liberals.
You love to talk about patrimony, and America and Southern California does have a culture worth passing down. Based on rates of everything from military service to patriotism to car ownership, the people of the ethnic enclaves are a lot closer to my Red Tribe culture than the white liberals.
All you are saying is that there is no longer a native population of LA. Its all thieves. To make your point a bit more concisely.
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Again, the question is “why?” What caused that change?
White (and black) normies could and did flee when California went crazy. Many immigrants in enclaves could not, since they didn't speak the language. Their relatives needed to be near those non-English speakers, and that created a core community that was hard to leave.
The result is all the English-speaking normies left, leaving immigrant enclaves and crazy white liberals.
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This was unnecessary.
As for your post, I find it funny how everyone from wignat Americans to defenders of Jewish ethnostates to Palestinian sympathizers wants to start history at whatever point is convenient for their argument. Sure, the people who first built the city of Los Angeles were white, but if a fourth-generation Mexican-American isn't a "native Angeleno," then you might as well acknowledge that the Tongva Indians have an equally valid claim to the "patrimony" of their land. Oh, are you actually arguing that the people who built things you value are the ones who get to claim the land? Well, guess you're ready to cede much of California to China, then. (Back in the 80s, it was Japan.)
Right, yes, human history is one long story of one group taking things - usually by force - from another group of people. I am very happy to be a direct descendant of a group which was extremely successful at taking things from other groups, and then using the newly-acquired land and resources to build something vastly better and of more importance to the future than anything the dispossessed group would or could have built using the same land and resources. If, some day, some even more advanced group conquers the territory currently occupied by my group, this will be very bad for my descendants, and it is a fate which obviously I am keen to try and prevent. If it happens, though, at least I can hope that they use their conquered territory and resources to build something glorious and important, as opposed to simply squandering and uglifying it.
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Who do you think built El Pueblo de la Reyna de Los Angeles?
Going by Spanish law at the time, white people.
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The people who were later replaced by a new group of people who vastly expanded the original settlement into something incalculably larger, more valuable, and more important. AKA nearly every existing structure in the city today, and the infrastructure needed to support those things.
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Can you please explain what exactly "patrimony" is and why anyone should care who's "patrimony" something may or may not be part of? As far as I see it used here, it just seems to be a pretty word constantly constantly used to defend extremely anti-egalitarian and anti-meritocratic policies.
A patrimony is any thing of value which is passed down from person or family to the direct descendants of that person or family. Used more broadly, it can mean a thing of value that is passed down within members of a particular society or group of people to those whom they’ve designated as the inheritors of that thing.
If your complaint is that the fact that families can own things of value and that a father can choose to exclusively transfer ownership of that thing to his children, rather than to the stranger whom you deem most “deserving” of it, then I simply say that you and I have wildly different moral foundations. It’s okay for parents to favor their own children, rather than the children who are “objectively the most meritorious”. When my grandfather died, he transferred ownership of his home to his daughter - not to the person whom he thought would “do the best job” of cultivating its value or improving it aesthetically or whatever you think his criteria should have been.
I am simply extending the principle of family inheritance to societies and ethnic groups as a whole. People for most of history did their part to improve their local polity not simply for the benefit of their own individual children and grandchildren, but also the other future inhabitants of that same polity. If that polity were then, say, conquered or abandoned, and then some new group of people were to inhabit the same place and appropriate the existing things of value for themselves, such a state of affairs would obviously be contrary to the wishes of the previous inhabitants. (The new inhabitants would not be morally wrong in having taken something from someone else - the history of humanity is one long story of groups taking things by force from other groups - but it is clearly desirable and of vital importance for one group of people to endeavor to not suffer the fate of having its valuable things taken by another group of people.)
This is much bigger complaint than your second paragraph. Why is ethnicity the right way to group people and why don't you like extending the principle to groups that share the same values and culture instead? I normally see "patrimony" used here to poetically sneak in this connotation of hereditary descent when it's never justified.
To some extent, I do! As I laid out in this thread back on Reddit, I see whiteness as a category which is at least partially constructed, despite having a mostly-biological substrate. East Asians, for example, are not even remotely related to Europeans (unless one accepts deeply esoteric theories about the contribution of Tocharian/Indo-European-descended people to the genetic ancestry of the Yamato people from whom modern Japanese are mostly descended - a topic about which I’m totally unqualified to even offer speculation) yet since the end of World War II certain Asian countries have been some of the most productive and important contributors to first-world industrialized society of any peoples on earth. Personally, I’m happy to welcome Japanese and Koreans into the fold of people with whom I see myself as sharing a common destiny and at least some level of common patrimony, as long as they continue to seem willing to behave similarly toward me and mine.
However, the vast majority of people in the world do seem to achieve the highest degree of fulfillment and self-satisfaction when living among people with whom they share a common ancestry and deep history. Now, perhaps that’s simply an incidental consequence of the fact that in such parts of the world, genetic kinship tends to have a nearly one-to-one correspondence with cultural/linguistic/political similarity.
Maybe in a hypothetical world in which “values” were randomly distributed among people, such that it would be impossible to draw any sort of reliable inference about a person’s “values” or personality based on observing that person’s outwardly-apparent racial/ethnic background, it really would make no sense to place any value whatsoever on racial/ethnic similarity when deciding whom to associate with and share political sovereignty and resources with.
All available evidence, though, would seem to indicate that we do not, in fact, live in that hypothetical world. In the world in which we do live, cultures and “values” did not fall from the sky and pick ethnic groups at random. Things like personality are, in fact, heritable to a great degree. Consequently, people who are closely related genetically/ancestrally do in fact have a greater likelihood of having similar “values” than do people who are not related genetically/ancestrally. To the extent that this is true, it actually does make complete sense to see people with whom I share genuine documentable kinship to have a greater claim to my “patrimony” than do those with whom I share no kinship.
As a White South African who lives in America this isn’t true at all lol
Besides stuff like what television shows you grew up watching or sports you enjoy who h are very superficial things in the grand scheme of things, the cultural norms are similar enough between all Western European settler cultures.
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I don’t think he’s talking about simply handing the land over, but instead the right of conquest, which is and always has been how things work without a powerful overseeing government to enforce other rules and rights. Absent a power willing to enforce your right to a patrimony, the only other option is to be strong enough to enforce your claims. I don’t think that’s a moral claim in either direction, it’s simply a statement of fact that there’s not really a way to prevent a stronger group from taking your land, your stuff or anything else they want without someone strong enough to stop them.
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Thanks! Well, it's only that heinous if it's about things like ethnicity that no one gets to choose for themselves---in the previous comment and I think most of the time it's used here, it's seems to just be based on who you're parents were instead of the alternative of which values and culture you choose to follow.
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I also did a double take. California is the land of the great white hope, which makes the browning of the imminent horde that much worse.
It was 90+% white as late as the 70s.
This says that California was only 76% non-Hispanic white in 1970. It is wrong?
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Duplicating a comment (how do you tag users?):
@veqq
(u/veqq
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It is a question for open border advocates. One argument against immigration is that it imports voters who will vote in a way that leads to bad government.
Isn’t California a real world example of that change?
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I used the website below, which gets data from the census bureau, to see how much of California was white in 1975. 87.6%--because the 1975 data does not include Hispanic as a category.
https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/california/?endDate=2021-01-01&startDate=1975-01-01
One of the major problems of the whole categorization system (as documented by David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy) is that Hispanic is basically a non-category. Hispanic just means, "sort of associated with Spanish" in practice, and most "Hispanic" Californians and Texans were European genetically for the vast majority of US history.
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Am I going mad? Because it looks like the 2021 data doesn't distinguish hispanic from white either, so in 2021 the state was 71.1% white.
That seems strange, I'd expect the census bureau to want more information than "black, white or other?" But on the other hand, if hispanics are white enough for the census bureau, why do they need to be distinguished?
Try narrowing the years to something like 2010—2023 and Hispanic will populate. I don't know what year the census bureau started asking people if they were Hispanic (I'm pretty sure the US Census is actually where the word "Hispanic" was invented) but the charts on that website will stop showing that data as soon as you include any years where the question wasn't asked.
I hope that makes you feel less crazy—although many people go mad for reasons that have nothing to do with the Census Bureau. I'm not qualified to rule those out for you.
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The Census Bureau considered Hispanic to be an ethnicity, not a race. Hence, one can be white and Hispanic (Ted Cruz) as well as black and Hispanic (eg many Cuban-American baseball players).
Hence, the Census Bureau reports that California is currently almost 71% "white alone" but only 34% "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino."
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I guess Im from the west coast. I actually live thousands of miles away.
I feel the exact same quirk about small city people but inverted.
They take themselves too seriously cant take a joke. Too submissive to arbitrary authority, etc.
I think the principle components are big city vs small city people. Or somewhere vs anywhere people.
You think people from the outskirts have trouble adapting to city life? IMO that is pretty much the norm. The reverse is almost always the issue.
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Yep, I think this hits the nail on the head. One of the defining features of liquid modernity, to me, is a total disregard for place. Physical locations aren't what matters at all. In fact it's seen as uncouth and ridiculous to care about the place you were born and grew up in rather than somewhere else.
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For context, I'm a Southerner who moved to the Bay Area for school and has stayed here (mostly) since.
One interesting wrinkle is that I increasingly find transplants to California insufferable, despite being one myself. With a native San Franciscan, I can shoot the shit and be genuine; with a transplant, be they from NYC or Des Moines, it's this constant thinly veiled status game, which I'd link with many of the behaviors you'd mention.
I'd be curious if most of the California transplants you encounter were born in CA, or people who made a pit stop there to make bank before colonizing peripheral areas.
Also, Chick-fil-A is infinitely superior to Popeyes and it's one of the things I miss most here, Waffle House edging it out.
Ah, Waffle House. It's Denny's for people who can actually win a bar fight.
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With all due respect, Bojangles is clearly superior, even when i was visiting Kentucky itself, the locals encouraged me to go there and not KFC. Also Popeyes here in the North-East at least is not great. Maybe I'll try it next time I am down New Orleans way and see if it is better down south. Chik-fil-A seems to be reliably good no matter where I get it from though.
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I tried going to Raising Cain's in Chicago once, and I don't get it.
It seemed like perfectly acceptable chicken fingers, served in individual or party sized portions only, with no family sized portions on offer, and boring sides. Which seemed like it defeated the purpose of getting fried chicken, from my perspective. We stood there confused for a while, then ordered something, I think, but I don't remember if we actually ate it as a meal or not, and I don't think we ended up with the right amount of food. This is in contrast to, say, Cheddar's, which also has perfectly acceptable chicken tenders (possibly the problem is that I can't tell one acceptable boneless fried chicken item from another) in a bundle with better sides and croissants.
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I suspect it's one part trying to build an connection to the community (which anyone would want to do) and one part the type of person who is willing to move being more grounded in cosmopolitan values than local (including where they grew up) ones.
Wasn't big where I grew up, but there's apparently one in Oakland. I'll have to try it out!
They’re everywhere now!
It was an exciting and terrifying day when the announcement was made that, in the next year, they would be opening one less than twenty minutes away.
I remember when their initial expansion in BR was a big deal. They took over the building of a Fast Track my dad would often take me to. Now it’ll be dangerously within easy reach at an age when I should probably stop eating it.
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What are the odds Waffle House lands in California this decade?
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Actually, when I moved to a midsize southern Californian port city in 2018, it was explained to me that the punishment for mendacity and social friction would be a one-way ticket to ... well, let's just say that the VHS tape I was given was of a once-great local news anchor named after a wine explaining that Californians accused of things like financial crimes, harassment, or petty theft might well be offered plea deals that include "a one-way ticket to Cajun country in lieu of jail time."
Don't forget the workers they brought with them: criminals who chose to labor as their farmhands over the noose; and others, in harder-to-fill positions, filled only after the "no thanks, I'll hang," phase of the recruitment flow was removed.
Also don't forget the religious whackjobs who just refused to let the King tell them who to burn at the stake.
Oh, and don't forget the squatters who broke into William Penn's summer estate.
Who would have ever thought that those three groups had enough in common to actually team up against their Monarch--let alone that they'd get help from Manhattan. You'd think people would be grateful to be liberated from being Dutch!
Oh, and Maine. Have I forgotten why the people in Maine joined the other twelve colonies--or did they keep their reasons to themselves?
Maine was not one the original thirteen colonies as it was part of Massachussetts at the time.
Oh, goodness, I was so busy trying to being clever I forgot to be smart.
I am honestly embarrassed about this. Mea Maxima Culpa.
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I know you probably meant this faux anonymity as a joke, but it made me feel like I was watching the old SNL skit, Maine Justice while reading this post.
New Orleans is eccentric, even among mid-size Southern port cities. I suspect that many of these habits and mannerisms are widespread throughout upper-middle class rootless American white people.
The curious thing about Maine is that its most popular language after English is French. It makes sense being adjacent to Quebec but it's not a popular fact. (I remember reading this factoid about 10 years ago so maybe Spanish has now edged it out.)
That Walking Dead spin-off Daryl Dixon depicts this actually.
That's interesting. I've always thought Quebecois French was a more "open-mouth" dialect that Metropolitain French.
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WTF? People actually do this?
In any case, Californians are annoying, yes, and ‘Texan or Californian’ is a major division in my corner of Texas, it doesn’t seem quite as different- most Californians here are openly critical of California even if they have some difficulty assimilating. I’ve heard in Austin they’re worse than in DFW. Had no idea they were moving to New Orleans in any quantity- then again anyone I talk to from Louisiana is mostly rural(living in a place that can attract migration only from Mississippi).
My guess is, as Frequent_anybody refers to, that there’s both liberal California migrants seeking higher purchasing power, who head to Austin or New Orleans, and conservative Californians seeking less progressive atmospheres who are willing to assimilate and that this latter group tends to head to DFW and Houston.
I am from Chicago and don't know anything about boils. How should I do it if I want to replicate the deliciousness I experienced on the Gulf?
How to explain to a Yankee…
In normal cooking, you season the food and then cook it so that the seasoning on the surface seeps into the food. But crawfish and crabs have shells, so doing that would be like smearing ketchup over the wrapper on your McDonald’s hamburger. I’m sure it’s distinguishable somehow from not doing that, but it probably doesn’t have the effect you’re going for. Instead you season the water, then let the water season the food. To do that, you steep the seasonings in hot water, bring it all the way to a boil, and then add the food- crawfish and corn cobs and potatoes and sausage.
And obviously there’s ‘seafood boil’ mixes at the grocery store, but most people who learned from their grandpas don’t go strictly off of old bay even when it’s the base of the ingredients list. A ham bone, a few slices of lemon, some bay leaves, onion quarters, smashed garlic cloves, jalapeño slices- some things of that nature can go a long way. It seems like northern whites are usually too leery of spice when a bit of kick can really bring it together, and this is probably the root of the ‘white people don’t season their food’ stereotype.
Also, know your seafood. Shrimp cook dead but crawfish cook live, and crawfish that died en route to the water need to be thrown out(their tails are straight- the ones good to eat will have curled tails). Some things cook faster than others, too- alligator needs to be added well ahead of shrimp, for example. Your cooking temperature is 212 degrees(duh, it’s a boil) so times go off of that. The basic crawfish-precooked andouille or kielbasa-corn on the cob-potatoes mix is popular because it’s cheap, but also because the cooking times are similar(and the sausage won’t be damaged by reheating).
So, the theory seems relatively similar to pasta. There you have boiling saltwater that is disgustingly oversalted as your medium for cooking the pasta, and a bit of that penetrates when you cook with the salt water and you end up with properly salted pasta. The boil just takes this a step further by adding more flavors than just salt, because while with a pasta you usually are going to be mixing it into a sauce after its cooked to almost al-dente (and you finish in the sauce) you don't make a sauce at the end. I presume you just add butter?
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As someone who has done this before, here's the logic: Once they're on your plate, and you realize they're underspiced, pouring seasoning on the outside of the shells is the only thing you can do. The seasoning gets on your fingers and is transferred to the meat as you are peeling them. It's better than nothing.
That logic seems about as suspect as the story of a civil war soldier who was hit in the testicle by a bullet, which kept traveling, impacted a teenaged girl in the uterus, and then they married after she had a baby from it.
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I think there are 3 types of California transplants. There's the libs who are leaving because it's too expensive and they try to turn their new place into CA. There's the opposite of this which are conservatives leaving CA who are very critical of CA and happy to be in a Red State. Then there's people like me who moved for a job and don't really care about the local politics because we don't plan on staying long (this is me).
I thing there's also a post apocalyptic Baudrillard type scenario for the libs in these scenarios where they want to be authentic and fit in but they end up creating a simulacra of the tradition without any of the gross and icky historical baggage. It's very off putting for anyone who remembers what it was actually like.
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Sounds like your city is finally becoming (college) white. Of course, many white people aren't white, which is confusing, but they are easily identified.
https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/
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Third vote for Speaker of the United States House of Representatives set to start shortly.
What I'm hearing is the plan now is to do marathon votes, potentially through the weekend, as a strategy to wear down the holdouts and elect Jordan. I'm skeptical this will be successful. Allegedly some Republicans are saying they will go home for the weekend, Speaker vote or no. That is a bit of a sketchy place to be in because if enough go home (10) that means Hakeem Jeffries will be elected Speaker rather than Jordan. I imagine there would be some immediate votes to vacate the chair if that occurred but not sure how they would turn out. Also some Republicans have apparently been pressuring McHenry to bring legislation to the floor without a bill empowering him and he threatened to resign rather than do so.
ETA:
At the end of the third ballot results stand at:
210 - Jeffries
194 - Jordan
25 - Other
4 - NV
Jordan losing ground from the second vote as expected.
ETA2:
Reporting coming out of Republicans closed conference following the vote indicates the holdouts have no demands and want no concessions, they just don't want Jordan to be Speaker. If 8 people will never vote for McCarthy, 20 people will never vote for Scalise, and 25 will never vote for Jordan I'm not sure how this ends. One Rep was pictured carrying a resolution to oust McHenry as Speaker Pro Tempore. Maybe his replacement will be more amenable to doing legislative business without an empowering resolution? Apparently Jordan's latest vote total is the tied for the lowest in a vote for candidate for Speaker by a majority party since 1911 when the House was set at 435 members.
ETA3:
Jim Jordan has reportedly lost an internal ballot (88-112) and is out as Speaker Designate for the Republicans. As an amusing aside the 8 Republicans who ousted McCarthy have apparently circulated a letter claiming to be willing to accept some punishment like censure or expulsion from the Conference if it helped get Jordan elected. One problem? Rep Ken Buck has voted against Jordan all three times and apparently did not sign off on being included in the letter.
Apparently House is now going home for the weekend, lots more people expected to put their hats in the ring this next round.
Can anyone explain to me why this particular House speaker election is so contentious?
US political parties are really coalitions of factions and the Republican majority in the house is smaller than the smallest coalition. This makes each coalition is effectively the marginal vote required to elect a speaker and they're all trying to elect a speaker they perceive to be maximally friendly to their faction interests or extract maximum concessions from an unfriendly faction's choices.
Normally the way this is handled is back-room dealing where concessions are offered. Thing is, either the Freedom Coalition is intransigent, the mainstream isn't willing to offer them enough, or there's too much bad blood over the last time they got a deal which was then violated. Or all three.
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because a few conflicts are coming to a head right now
there is a very slim majority in the House due to laughably idiotic behavior by Party leadership and the NRCC and a small group of representatives see this as an opening to attack two fundamental pillars of Congressional business over the last few decades+
Dictator Speakership Era is in jeopardy - for the last few decades, the speaker of the house has had a shocking amount of power over the business of the house which almost entirely excludes the vast majority of the conference from decision-making and legislating.
Appropriations going through non-Normal process - Appropriations bills haven't gone through the legislatively designated normal process of how they are supposed to be drafted and modified and on what schedule for decades. Instead, they're clusterfucked through another process which is likely illegal but which no court is going to stop it which ends in giant omnibus bills and other sorts of christmas tree bills. Instead of just passing the appropriations bills required by law through the normal process also required by law, they appropriations are done by Continuing Resolutions and giant omnibus bills.
The small group of GOP representatives were able to get concessions which should end the Dictator Speaker Era as well as the Omnibus/Continuing Resolution Era from McCarthy in exchange for McCarthy getting the gavel. Appropriations must be passed through the normal process which means 12 appropriations bills produced by the 12 committees through the normal process and are brought to the floor before the statutory deadline which means no more omnibus bills and no more continuing resolutions. And there were many other smaller concessions. McCarthy broke his promises and used Democrats to do it. The small group revolted and that was the end of McCarthy's speakership.
This presents a big problem for many of the GOP blob who no one has ever heard of; McCarthy brought in A LOT of money and he used control of that money to fund many GOP people to win their seats which they otherwise never would have won. These people are duds, they can't fundraise, and their voters do not particularly like them. Without McCarthy protecting their seats and attacking their primary opponents, their seats are toast. This is A LOT of the caucus. These people are very upset that the smaller group of GOP rocked the boat because they have been living large with McCarthy doing all the work and getting the flack to deliver to donors who keep the gravy-train rolling. Many in the caucus feel ousting McCarthy was a stab in the back of leadership who had worked for decades raising billions and taking flak to do things the vast majority of them wanted anyway.
Some other conflicts which exacerbate the issue is the large and growing divide between the GOP and their voters as well as MAGA vs Establishment GOP; the harder and harder to hide secret of the caucus is that a large portion, maybe even a majority, and definitely party leadership actually really dislike their own voters and MAGA is making it increasingly difficult to maintain the scam of lying to their voters while delivering to their donors which keeps the moneytrain, status, etc., rolling in.
tl;dr: a small group of reps attempting to use their negotiating power given a slim minority to bring down two fundamental pillars for how the House works and has for decades which slammed directly into a large group of their own caucus who rely on the scheming and fundraising to maintain their seats and owe those seats to leadership they feel was backstabbed
It's important to note that this small group was intentionally making it impossible for McCarthy to keep his promise. He was going forward with regular order, the Appropriations committee and relevant subcommittees had reported their bills already by mid-July, but Freedom Caucus holdouts spiked rules votes to begin floor debate on those bills time and time again.
The whole situation was engineered by a group that got to get their names in the headlines off of it. They wanted him to break his promises because then they got to fundraise off of being the scrappy freedom fighters against the duplicitous Establishment. But, by forcing a delay, they put McCarthy in a situation where he had to choose between a shutdown and a CR.
Just like the Left, the Recalcitrants in Congress depend on people being underinformed about how a complex process works so they gin up a self serving narrative.
All twelve bills could have been passed by early August and a unified Republican Conference could have fought a very public and very righteous fiscally conservative battle against Democrats in the Senate and White House through the end of September, boosting their credibility as a serious party of responsible government without risking a shutdown. Instead, they're embarrassing the party and all but guaranteeing the Democrats regain the House next year, all so Matt Gaetz can send out fundraising emails while he votes to kick his own party out of power.