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"Cringe" is a super useful word, IMO. So is "creep". These words occupy the space that "gay" and "lame" used to occupy before they were cancelled.
The best way to defeat a label, of course, is to own it. You want to call me a Yankee Doodle Dandy? That's cool. I'm the gayest, lamest, Yankee Doodle Dandy you ever saw.
Still, in 2023, no one wants to be cringe or creepy. These words still have power.
You know what was cringe? Alt-right people dressing up in Hawaiian shirts and carrying Tiki torches. You know what's not cringe? Bill Ackman waging a crusade against Harvard wokists.
Wait a second, you say. Who gets to decide what is cringe, and what isn't?
Answer: The Elite. The elite gets to decide who is
lame and gaycringe and creepy and who is not. Control of the narrative is what defines the elite.Do you see where I'm going with this? Richard Hanania does. In one of his less annoying pieces he makes a great point about the possibility of a Jewish realignment.
When you correct for IQ, when you correct for tribalism, Jews are something like 30-50% of the elite population in the US. Look at university presidents, look at cabinet members, look at Nobel Prize winners. You're bound to notice something.
Jews are under attack in the Western World right now. We are seeing the largest outbreak of anti-semitism since WWII. And it's the far left that is responsible. If, and it's a big if, this results in American Jews abandoning the left, it could end with the biggest political realignment since the 1970s. Already we see the the strands of a nascent movement among the cognescenti. Is an intellectual, philo-Semitic conservative movement possible? I think, surprisingly, the answer is yes.
Populists are cringe and creepy. Elite realignments are cool and edgy. The fashion barber pole has made another rotation and the mustaches are slightly less ironic.
This was cringe because of the selectively-edited presentation of the event by journalists, some of whom are Jewish but most of whom are not. “Elites” factor in only insofar as the elites influence the biases of journalists. There’s actually nothing aesthetically unpleasing about your typical yard torch (2), but the journalists focused on “tiki torch” because it has feminine diminutive alliteration, and a connotation of out-of-fashion Hawaiian parties (which obviously conflicts with the European-centered aesthetic). This focus was so strong that you believed they all wore Hawaiian shirts. Then the journalists chose the ugliest photos of the ugliest people there. We pretty much expect them to do this for negative-valence events, but imagine them doing this at an Obama rally and you immediately see that it’s rooted in bias (they would do the opposite, usually panning to the most attractive young people, and the smartest interviewed people, and so on).
The “elites” theory, by the way, totally conflicts with the black culture currently in vogue among white people, unless you think that black criminals who rap about robbing Versace are the elites.
Yes, that is why the elite are elite. They get to decide what's cringe and then selectively edit to share their viewpoint. The first step of any successful protest march is to have sympathetic media on hand. Not doing so is, dare I say, cringe.
That's a good point and not totally solvable, IMO. To steelman the elites theory:
Blacks are two levels down the status pole from elite whites. No one's ever going to confuse a high-status white with a ghetto black guy. But they might confuse the high status white for a low-status white. Therefore, high status whites must signal constantly to avoid that confusion. Me? I'm not a Republican, scoff. But liking black people is okay because there's no confusion.
But it could also be that blacks are just legitimately cooler in many ways.
It could, but they are not. The "black culture" being shilled to the mainstream is a choice being made by people with a fetish for it.
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