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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25171 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Freddie De Boer and the Limits of Anti-Classificationist Discourse

Typically in my life my views on racial law have tended towards the Anti-Classificationist rather than the Anti-Subordinationist school, or I suppose to represent all sides on the Motte to the Hierarchical or Purity schools of thought. In my mind, discrimination and group conflict follow naturally once you define groups, and therefore the best thing to do if your goal is to avoid discrimination is to avoid formally classifying groups. Religious denomination used to be a very heavily classified, tracked, and studied American demographic. We used to have a Catholic Seat, and then a Jewish Seat on the SCOTUS; now we have only a single Protestant on the Court, with seven Catholics and one Jew. And forget anyone being able to tell the difference between a Presbyterian and a Babtist; I once completely tanked a job interview lunch by asking a woman who had just told me she was on the board of her local Methodist church what exactly the "method" was and she couldn't tell me. Ketanji Brown Jackson was widely celebrated for increasing the Diversity of the court, but almost no mainstream news outlet mentioned that her appointment was striking a blow against Hebrew and Papist over-representation, nor has the decline of the Jewish justices from three seats to just one sparked a series of hand-wringing op-eds about rising antisemitism. Other contrasting examples include Hutus and Tutsis, where the colonial creation of the categories cemented existing divisions and created conflict. Or how people with Norman surnames still out-earn other Englishmen. While the Norman descendants have faced group conflict on terms of social class, modern Britain did not face a large racial clash, because it was not a classification used by English law, and so you don’t have the congealing of the identity groups that creates conflict.

However, reading Freddie’s latest has me noticin’ a little. The core of the piece is asking why the liberal media tolerates Tyson while continuously reviling somebody like Woody Allen:

The question is, to whom do those rules not apply? For the record, I don’t have any particular beef with the hosts keeping Woody Allen at arm’s length. If they have moral objections to a filmmaker and want to express them when talking about his movie, that’s fine. The trouble is that this sort of moral work needs to be undertaken with the most basic requirement of morality, consistency, the understanding that moral rules must apply to everyone equally. And it’s not just the Ringer podcast network that has a problem with achieving that consistency but media writ large.

Well, I can still complain. We’re living in a landscape where Mike Tyson has not only been credibly accused of domestic violence and rape but made statements that seem clearly to admit to them, has become a folk celebrity with a jolly reputation, and nobody cares.

There will be, I hope, at least some effort to apply the old rules to him. Still, many who spent the 2010s hanging every apostate they could find will simply nod along. You can’t really call it a redemption story because people have largely avoided acknowledging that Tyson has done things which would require him to be redeemed. And I’d love to be able to ask some central authority of Yelling Social Justice why people discussing Annie Hall on a podcast feel that they have to fill painful minutes of airtime with awkward throat-clearing about Woody Allen, while Mike Tyson gets to rest comfortably in kitsch.

And the difference seems so blindingly obvious that it’s punching me in the face, and that’s sort of ruining my anti-classicationist plan. Ctrl-F-ing the article: zero hits for White, zero hits for Black, zero hits for Religion, zero hits for Jew, zero hits for Ethnic-, zero hits for African. Freddie doesn’t mention the possible role that race would seem to play, even to refute it. And in my mind this would be perceived as a failure by either side of the political spectrum.

If one views the media as broadly anti-White, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because he is white, while Tyson is forgiven because Tyson is Black, and PC society demands that we forgive the Black criminal and celebrate Black Excellence. Or, at the very least, that weenie turbolibs at TheRinger are uncomfortable criticizing Black celebrities in ways that might code as racist if taken out of context and uncharitably, and that in an abundance of caution the hosts at TheRinger choose to criticize white rather than Black celebs, softer targets.

If one views society as broadly anti-Black, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because Allen’s victims are white, while Tyson is easily forgiven because Tyson only committed violence against Black women. That the act of forgiving Black men for violence against Black women is itself Anti-Black, it is the failure to provision public goods for Black communities; the protection provided by legal and social sanction against those who commit crimes against Black Women, who if only for reasons of proximity will always be primarily Black men. Hence Bill Cosby eventually got his, he drugged and sodomized white women in between as well.

But neither side will see much logic in DeBoer’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge the obviously relevant facts around the cases he is comparing.

Personally, I find it definitely relevant. Tyson is forgiven thanks to a particularly grim version of the soft bigotry of low expectations, combined with racism against his victims by race and by class. Black celebrities are allowed to act in ways that turbolibs won’t tolerate in white men. White feminists love to start panics around college campus rape or similar problems, while ignoring that women in the college age-range who don’t attend college are more likely to be victimized. The prime targets of Feminism are men like Brett Kavanaugh, while they ignore the much more numerous and more violent men like Chris Brown, because for your average Wesleyan Critical Theorist she is under very little threat from men like Chris Brown and much more from men she actually interacts with. Your media or academia or twitterati feminist will never hang out with anyone who looks or acts like Mike Tyson, she does hang out with people who look and act like Woody Allen or Brett Kavanaugh.

It's all making me question some of my anti-classification bona fides.

This seems like a flaw with the most pure form of anti-classificationism that could be addressed by a minor adjustment to a tit-for-tat strategy, which is mostly where my position is. It would be ideal if people mostly just didn't talk about race. Other people do talk about race, and therefore it makes it very difficult to communicate or model them if you just naively pretend that race doesn't exist while everyone else does. If you just let all the racists run around being racist but don't acknowledge their motivations then you can't even talk about them coherently, let alone come up with strategies to combat them.

Instead, it seems like the best strategy is to only talk about race on the meta level. You do not define categories for people, you do not treat people differently based on what categories other people put them in. But when other people put people into categories, you acknowledge that they have done so and respond accordingly, and discuss the categories that exist in their minds. People are not forgiving Mike Tyson because he is black on the object level and his black skin causes him to emit forgiveness pheromones or something, people are forgiving Mike Tyson because they have categorized him as "black" in their minds and have allowed him to inherit all of the baggage about victims and oppressors that our society associates with that. This seems acceptable to mention and criticize.

Race does matters in the real world as a self-fulfilling prophecy because people treat it like it does. But if more people adopt this form of anti-classification then discussions about race become rarer and rarer since fewer people would bring it up in the first place on the object level, and thus the amount race matters would exponentially decay as it being discussed less would make it matter less which would make it be discussed less, back and forth.

I agree. I think hard classifications in any subject where the classes created aren’t material to the discussion tend to limit the discussion while creating very fertile ground for anti-intellectual arguments and thought terminating accusations.

The truest statement I’ve ever read about racism is that accusations of bigotry are what The Last Psychiatrist called “cognitive kill switches”. No matter what the actual conversation was about, up to and including flavors of ice cream, the minute someone accuses another person of racism, the conversation is now about defending that charge of racism. If I say that vanilla ice cream is racist because it’s white, we are not going to be discussing ice cream but rather the claim that vanilla is racist. This doesn’t generate light, just heat. And further, at least as long as the discussion is about policy issues, you can’t get to the point of actually solving the problems because quite often a proposed solution will be considered racist, or the way the conversation is had is racist, thus it goes unsolved. Police brutality was probably solvable before it got mixed up with BLM. Lots of people were talking about excessive force and looking for better solutions to those problems. But, once policing became a racial issue, simply saying something like “the police are too likely to engage in violence where none is needed” meant silencing blacks. So nothing can be done about it unless it tickles the right people’s fancy.

I think it's certainly true that white journalists and commentators are reluctant to put a spotlight on black criminality, but I also think there's an element of class-coding at play here. Tyson is of course a very rich man, but he codes as culturally lower-class. He's a boxer, he's got a tattoo on half his face, and while a lisp like his would make anyone sound dumber than they are, I doubt Tyson was ever very smart to begin with. I believe it's similar to what's going on now with Diddy, and the attendant rumors around Jay-Z - these guys may be rich, but they're rappers, which is inherently coded as culturally low-class, no matter how many times they get invited to the Met Gala. Accordingly there's an unspoken assumption that criminality is simply inherent to their milieu, and whether justified or not, they are ascribed lower moral agency when it comes to determining how bad their crimes are. "These people are just like that", etc. Whereas men like Bill Cosby (America's Dad!) and Jonathan Majors (He went to Yale! His characters are so artsy and sensitive!) come from a higher cultural standing, so they have no excuses.

I think Tyson codes as lower class black and hence lower expectations apply. He’s the type that really is different. While someone like Crosby it’s obvious he’s not that. Hence he gets boosted into white adjacent. And high standards.

Someone like OJ Simpson would be more interesting if his reputation could be repaired but murder is a bit much. He codes more of the half in half out.

Jonathan Majors was cancelled for relatively modest (by MeToo standards) allegations. It seems to me more like historic things are grandfathered in for most older actors unless (as with Allen) the accusers are both prominent and unrelenting in their desire to take the accused down.

Everyone knows that pretty much every surviving rockstar from the 1960s to 1980s fucked 13-15 year old groupies, for example. It’s essentially common knowledge. But they still do huge global tours that sell out stadiums and make hundreds of millions of dollars. They’re not cancelled for this (despite the topic being discussed in the press semi-regularly) because there’s kind of a broad social amnesty for that behaviour by those specific people.

But there have been white celebrities hit with similar charges and gotten away with it, ie. the multiple rock stars who at least have been accused with statutory rape (or have admitted it). Bowie, featured in the article, is a good example: when he died, sure, there were some stories about how Bowie was actually problematic for this, but the clear majority of things written about him were about his genius, charisma, changes in styles, trailblazer status etc. On the other hand, when Michael Jackson died, there was comparably more stuff about pedo allegations, even though the courts had found him innocent.

I think the fundamental difference here isn't race, but simply coolness. If you're a famous athlete, rock star etc. you can beat the allegations in the court of public opinion; on the other hand, dweeblord extraordinaire Woody Allen and the unmitigated weirdo that was "Wacko Jacko" era Michael Jackson had a considerably tougher time. In recent years Jackson's musical talents have once again resurfaced as his main defining factor, too, since the Wacko Jacko stuff that was omnipresent when I was a child is no longer remembered as well.

Well, the more obvious answer is that there's more money to be made from King of Pop than Wacko Jacko, since the man himself is dead, but his music lives on.

Jackson was the King of Pop and defined coolness for some years. I think he had a tougher time because the way he behaved around kids openly (e.g. the existence "Neverland Ranch") made people seriously suspect the allegations were true, and messing around with little kids is more unacceptable to a wider variety of people than screwing underage groupies.

Same sort of thing goes with Allen; once you're fucking your girlfriend's adopted daughter (even if it's 100% legal), you trigger an 'ick' reflex and lose a lot of that star immunity.

Also, in general, Jackson's weirdness had eclipsed his coolness in public perception years before the biggest pedo allegations hit, which primed people for believing them and making them a huge part of his public perception.

I just remembered a figure who was - as far as I've understood - undeniably considered very cool in his time, yet is now remembered basically for one thing only: Ike Turner, remembered now chiefly for abusing Tina.

Ike Turner's situation is unique, though. He had been out of the public spotlight for 20 years when the movie What's Love Got to Do With It came out, which portrayed him as a serial abuser. He then responded in possibly the worst way possible: He went on TV and called the movie a hack job while answering questions in such a manner as to suggest that every horrible allegation in the movie was completely true. If he'd have just kept his mouth shut it would have been forgotten about completely, but he had such an erratic personality that he became fodder for comedians and sketch comedy shows. Ike Turner impressions became a thing. It didn't help that he trashed Tina's solo career as well and held himself up as one of the true greats of rock and roll, which is technically true, but he's not exactly on the level of Little Richard or Chuck Berry. He finally offered a half-assed apology on Roseanne Barr's forgotten daytime talk show in 1999 (he only apologized under serious pressure from Roseanne), and after that point the music establishment basically forgave him and allowed him to join in on all-star specials and the like.

Sure, but this whole thread basically consists off examples of white celebrities who have got away with shit and black celebrities who haven't, followed by "Yes, sure, but that's an exception... and that... and that... and that..."

I think the fundamental difference here isn't race, but simply coolness.

Or as I put it, jocks and class clowns can get away with bad behaviour, nerds can't (even if they did nothing wrong).

Plenty of bad behavior happens among the Silicon Valley elite. And although journalists attempt to make hay of it occasionally (ew gross why is that nerd having orgies with recent high school graduates), most people shrug and look the other way.

Plenty of bad behavior happens among the Silicon Valley elite.

As much as I find the statement itself reprehensible, I think there's a kernel of truth in an infamous quote from a former president:

And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

High status lets people (almost exclusively men, in this case) get away with a lot, in part because people are willing to put up with more to be with someone high status: Christian Grey's romance plays don't work for anyone who isn't a hot, young billionaire. The quid pro quo is implicit, and rarely spoken about, although I seem to recall a few blow-ups in recent memory where it seemed part of the drama involved (by deceit or misreading) mistakes about how high-status one party was.

And nobody really complains because it's hard to declare that behavior with "groupies" (for lack of a better word) is categorically non-consensual.

And nobody really complains because it's hard to declare that behavior with "groupies" (for lack of a better word) is categorically non-consensual.

I think that one is more because "consent" (which in reality means "the prostitute gets paid for her work", which is why women who work this way push so hard for "non-consentual" to mean "I regret it because I sold at a price that was too low/the jian john could have afforded more, and State power should be used to fix my mistake") can't actually cover the cases where it's the women who are trying to put a notch in the bedpost as an end in itself (there's no real exchange of goods going on there, it's nothing but risk for the woman biologically speaking, and it devalues her product [so to speak/for those that care]- 'having fucked a rock star' must be a serious intrinsic reward, and when we consider the average groupie is more likely to try to impress female peers rather than older men at that age, it very much is).

It's hard for a lot of people to deal with that because it's (correctly?) assumed to be a malfunction; grown women seducing boys is another one (for the same reason that it runs counter to biology).

It is odd. I had a classmate (in the honors college no less) that was very open and bragged a lot about have fucked Fred Durst of all people (this was 2003 mind you). She was bragging about this mostly to men as far as I could tell. It was very off-putting and it was hard to take her (and the honors program) seriously after that.

She was bragging about this mostly to men as far as I could tell.

So basically, like any man would do if he got laid at 13?
I dunno, I have a hard time complaining about either of those, outside of those who don't ever get over the fact that happened (more difficult for younger people due to both youth and a lack of general opportunity for the sex they want); liberation is good, but sex is still protected/internal or private.

Coolness or fuckability seems like a simpler and better classification, though. Rockstars are cool/very fuckable, but generally aren't considered jocks or class clowns, see David Bowie for example.

Allen's accusers are celebrities themselves, I think it makes a massive difference given that the investigators dismissed them at the time. If Mia Farrow was nobody and her kids were nobodies too this would be a weird fact that nobody knows about Woody Allen. Though, I think his marriage makes it not just easy to believe it about him it's weird enough that he basically has to prove a negative to make himself look right. I mean, he was investigated twice for months at a time and both investigations concluded that abuse did not take place. Maybe he's good at hiding it but it's always seemed to me to be that Mia found out Woody was sleeping with Soon-Yi and either invented the abuse in her head or just lied about it for revenge. But I don't really know, that's just the reading I get from the wikipedia article about it.

Either way, Woody's a joke because he married his daughter. That's the biggest reason he's a soft target, and the reason, even if he didn't do what he's accused of, most people will believe it regardless of if there's even evidence presented.

no one's mentioned kobe bryant, so i'll throw his name in here. cultural icon who also totally got away with raping a hotel clerk. no one really wanted to bring it up when he died because of how tragic it was.

Tyson seems like a bad example.

I mean, Tyson was groomed to be a professional fighter from a young age. Who then went on to be exploited by a lot of different people. Then you have to start talking about things like CTE... To me, it makes sense that the standards are a little different for someone like Allen or even Cosby.

Plus, Tyson admits wrong doing and did the time for it... Boxers also have a short career window, Tyson doing time hurt him a lot more than someone like Cosby. Say what you will but Tyson actually paid a price for what he did.

Maybe we exist in different bubbles but most leftoids I know don't like Tyson at all. While Allen gets the 'it was a different time' treatment...

Alright, I actually am going to push back on this. (Ping @AhhhTheFrench so you don't feel like you're grumbling into the void.)

Courtesy is the first section in the rules. That's not an accident, it's literally the first goal. And yes, this sometimes - probably often - means that we tell people not to speak as if they're in a group of friends, but rather as if they're in a group of professional colleagues. The reason is that incivility gradually corrodes what we're going for here. Not all at once, but one step at a time; it gets normalized, it gets standardized, and a significant part of the possible community finds that the place is now hostile.

From the rules:

Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.

"Leftoids" is dismissive towards roughly half the population and there's just no good reason for it; you're not getting anything out of it for the argument, you're just using a slur against your outgroup.

Don't do that, please.

It's internet slang... It's how I talk and I use rightoids just as freely.

you're just using a slur against your outgroup.

Is this really where the bar of a slur is?

Edit: Do you really know what my outgroup is? (I'm a trans centrist... I guess everyone is my outgroup, lol). Are you going to apply this level of sensitivity to everyone?

This really seems like an overreach. In my opinion anyway...

Is this really where the bar of a slur is?

Yeah, frankly. We keep it pretty low.

Are you going to apply this level of sensitivity to everyone?

Yes. If you think someone's pushing the line, report it; if it gets approved and you disagree, you're welcome to ping modmail if you feel strongly about it.

Plus, Tyson admits wrong doing and did the time for it

Three years seems like a slap on the wrist for raping someone so severely they end up in the emergency room.

While Allen gets the 'it was a different time' treatment...

Really? In 2019, Amazon Studios cancelled their contract with him. In 2020, his publisher cancelled his memoir in response to public outcry. A year ago I was on a bus with my girlfriend telling her how I thought the allegations against him were unfounded (based on this article by Cathy Young), and a woman turned around in her seat and stared at me in shock. The consensus in my social circle is that he's a paedophile who escaped the long arm of the law because of his money and connections.

My point was Tyson was a poor example.

I don't understand what your social circle has to do with it (In context of the original argument)?

I just don't think your claim (that people have generally forgiven Allen and excuse his behaviour as the product of a different era) is true.

Ah, I get you now.

Maybe it's because I live in LA (around a lot of proper film buffs), that our social bubbles are completely different.

And I still say that 3 years in prison and a destroyed career is not a slap on the wrist.

But that's Freddie's entire point: Tyson's career wasn't destroyed. To quote from the original article:

Mike Tyson, Kid Dynamite, 1980s heavyweight boxing champion, has settled into a role as a beloved cultural figure. Once uniquely feared for his ferocious style (which has led to him being constantly overrated as a boxer in the all-time ranks), he’s come to be seen as a lovable, even cuddly presence. His fearsome reputation has strangely helped his new career as a wacky, “random” celebrity. At 57 years old, he’s fighting YouTube sensation Jake Paul later this year, in another sign that we’re living through the fall of Rome. He enjoyed a major career resurgence with his famous cameo in the raunchy 2009 comedy The Hangover. Since then, Tyson has appeared on talk shows, started a podcast, made comedic television commercials, and as you can see in the image at the top, starred in an animated television show for Adult Swim. Broadcast from 2014 to 2019, Mike Tyson Mysteries had that mid-period Adult Swim quality of attempting to substitute a wacky premise (ferocious-turned-adorable Mike Tyson solves crimes) for actually being funny. The show does serve, though, as a good symbol of how Tyson’s public image has become kitsch, his resurgence based on nostalgia for his boxing career and the fact that the entertainment industry loves both established names and unpredictable personalities.

To quote from his Wikipedia article:

After his release [from prison] in 1995, he engaged in a series of comeback fights, regaining the WBA and WBC titles in 1996 to join Floyd Patterson, Muhammad Ali, Tim Witherspoon, Evander Holyfield and George Foreman as the only men in boxing history to have regained a heavyweight championship after losing it.

"leftoids", come on man. Great comment, and then you just throw that in there to make sure we know what side you're on. I own some property and when I get with other landlords the most pejorative term for lease holders is "rentoids" for the real bad ones. Dehumanizing to the max. Dial it back before the Rwandan machetes come out eh?

Dial it back before the Rwandan machetes come out eh?

Good to know some people still understand humor.

My guy, this is not how you solve your downvotes problem.

If you think a comment breaks the rules then just report it.

I ain't no snitch. I tested out the report feature, it didn't take.

It's a pretty common rdrama.net term. In my experience usually people who use it on rDrama are just as happy to call people on the other side "rightoids", so even if it doesn't necessarily meet this site's rules, it's generally not a partisan statement.

On rDrama "leftoid" and "rightoid" are certainly terms of mockery, but generally the "-oid" suffix is specifically meant to single out leftists and right-wingers who are are perceived as following their ideologies in rigid, conformist, and/or unintelligent ways. They're not necessarily terms that are used to refer to all left-leaning or all right-leaning people. Although sometimes they are.

Thanks for reading my bit of cultural ambassadorship. Come to rDrama, we have fun over there.

Come to rDrama, we have fun over there.

Yeah, right now we have Donkey Kong December going on too so there's extra special flavour (yes, I know it's April, don't ask).

This forum isn't rDrama and I would hope that it doesn't turn into it.

We do owe them a debt of gratitude, since in the Great Trek Westwards Eastwards Northwards Southwards from Reddit proper, the basic template and code for this place was adapted from rDrama and built on top of its bones.

Are we not Dramatards and -oids of all descriptions ourselves?

me too thanks

Everyone you’re talking to here is already on rDrama.

  • -13

I'm not.

I definitely am not, and thats after going to take a look. The whole place looks deeply unappealing to me

I am sure lots of people enjoy it, but the overlap with here seems to much less than 100%

Least closeted rDrama user.

  1. False
  2. Part of the problem

This is racism. Reported.

  • -11

Low effort shitposting is not the sort of engagement we're looking for here. Neither is false reporting. Lots of red flags in the mod history, including a note about a previous attempt to false-report, and no QCs. Last action was a Tempban.

@jkf is correct: this is not rDrama, and we ask that you not post here as you would there. Please apply more effort to your interactions when you return.

Tempbanning for three days.

Everyone I talk to in real life regularly goes to the toilet, but that doesn't mean I want them to drop their pants and do their business as I talk to them.

You really haven’t pooed until you’ve pooed with friends.

Never setting a foot there.

No need; rDrama is gentrifying this neighborhood as we speak. Enjoy your cultural enrichment.

  • -11

-oid is the new -ist. Time is a flat circle.

Language changes, it also has meaning. If I start calling people demoRATS and repubtards etc...etc.. it very quickly makes this place pretty terrible and a lot closer to facebook boomer town. Leftoids or rightoids is in the exact same tradition as calling people NPCs.

If you seriously think that zoomers won't be calling themselves leftoids and rightoids in serious political debates when they eventually are old enough to hold office, you have a poor ability to extrapolate from the past.

For what it's worth, i think your oidophobe prejudice is still correct, it is silly and uncooth to use this verbiage at this time including around these parts, despite rDrama colonizer protestations. But it's really a question of time.

Post ironic dehumanization laughs at our silly ideas of civility and endless euphemism treadmills from its throne of hyper-reality. And all shall bow.

Oh it may happen, I mean clearly it already is happening. Just hoping to keep that kind of banter out of this particular corner of internet discourse.

Detterman, D. K. (2010). What happened to moron, idiot, imbecile, feebleminded, and retarded?

If you look into the past Japan and Scandinavia were shockingly violent. Japan was 100% Japanese in the past but was horrifically riven by civil war and strife. Same for Scandinavia.

I see most civil wars fought over small differences, it is seldom a "race war". Even our civil war was mostly fought brother against brother.

The USA has all kinds of ethnic and racial and religious differences yet it is superior in almost every way to all racially and religiously homogeneous countries, how do you account for that? My obviously very white Brazilian.

You one of those that used to chopper around with Anthony Bourdain because the traffic is too terrible in São Paulo?

Europe in general was very violent until very recently despite, demographically speaking, having been a "trad" right-winger's wet dream back then. You can barely walk a mile on that continent without walking over the site of some historical battle.

It is interesting that some people think utopia would be some kind of ethnostate, when that is what most of the world was for most of history and things were much much worse. People will always find something to fight about, a large government with a monopoly on violence is the only thing we've found that kinda works.

I've read some posters here that are champing at the bit to dole out their own justice and that the ???"police are a pact they make with the rest of us"??? and they would be happy to go back to blood feuds and vendettas and lynch mobs. It is that same kind of end of civilization power fantasy you see in so many bored people the world over. They don't realize that the odds are they are going to be the gimp on a chain, not king of the wastes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tVEh1LTWxxI

Neutral police are better than vendettas and lynch mobs.

Vendettas and lynch mobs are better than anarcho-tyranny.

Scandinavia was horrifically riven by civil war and strife? Are we talking about pre-history here or are you referring to the vikings?

I'm not saying things were completely peaceful or that the people were peaceful but Scandinavia most certainly wasn't horrifically riven by civil war and strife. It was a bit below the norm regionally and mostly engaged in military adventurism and mercenary work elsewhere.

I don't know about 'horrifically riven' but it did have plenty of civil war and strife over the years.

To be fair, at least in the case of Japan, disputes over how much influence foreigners should have in Japan was a major part of both the Sengoku Jidai and the Meiji Restoration. And Japan enjoyed relative internal peace in the ~250 years in between.

What has always frustrated me about Freddie is that he gets it, he really does, but at the last possible moment he crimestops himself and reaffirms his loyalty to the progressive agenda. It's never the fault of progressivism that it fails in practice: it's the no-good grifters who corrupt it away from Real Communism.

I used to feel the same way about Scott Alexander. Then his e-mails leaked.

To me what’s frustrating is he always has to get in a parenthetical jib at people he doesn’t like, even as he’s defending them. And that always lines up with stuff the woke people are saying. It’s not unique. Like him calling James Damore an obnoxious sexist in the linked article.

I just find it annoying that he attacks people for using social opprobrium to attack people they don’t like, and having to mention their disagreement with a cancelled person even when voicing they liked something about them (like the podcasters with Woody Allen). And then he just does the same thing just at a lower level. The difference between “James Damore is an obnoxious sexist” and “James Damore should be cancelled” is one of degree, not kind. Especially in how he does it, with no reflectivity, just mirroring what he’s heard about the guy instead of actually evaluating what he did for himself.

This is counter-signalling. He knows defending them makes him look like he is on the other side (and so his arguments will be reflexively ignored), so he must counter that signal by also making sure to point how how much he doesn't like them.

Yeah, I think that's part of it. The reflexive "We all know Republicans are the real evil monsters" dumped into the middle of that piece is as much about trying to protect himself after Let's Not Mention The War as it is that he genuinely believes it. There are a lot of people, even if he is a bit twitchy about it, who really do want any excuse to rip him to shreds and if he's perceived as even being vaguely in the neighbourhood of not in line with full-throated condemnation, that will lead to a million hit-pieces about "We all knew deBoer was really a right-wing fascist all along".

I like Freddie in that I think he gets it about education and affirmative action and the rest of it, having worked at that coalface, without needing to go full HBD Genes Are Destiny, and being a voice on the left he's doing necessary work there, so I tend to wince a little then shrug it off when he does the genuflection towards "conservatives and conservatism are wicked evil horrible, amen amen".

I don't think it's just counter-signalling. Freddie really is a dyed in the wool leftist who does have contempt for any remotely rightwing people, even principled liberals and moderates. He hopes he can win those people over to leftism by presenting a more reasonable version, but he knows which side he is on.

Just read this piece from his substack. He hates the anti-woke. Full stop. He hates James Damore and he hates Quillete and he hates Jordan Peterson. He is a leftist. He is 90% woke, he just wants to push for a less insane version.

This isn't a rhetorical tactic, it's what he really believes.

I do think that Allen gets some extra flack compared to Tyson because Allen is white whereas Tyson is black. However, I think that probably the much more significant factor is that Allen's accusers generally think of him as being the rapist of a child, whereas they think of Tyson as being "just" the rapist of an adult.

Michael Jackson was perhaps the most popular person on the planet for a few years, and black, yet the existence of credible child sex allegations against him has severely damaged his reputation. The only reason why he still has so many devoted fans is because he originally had such enormous charisma and musical talent, significantly surpassing Tyson's appeal at his peak. Jackson was perhaps the closest a musician has ever come to having a mass religious following, even more than Elvis, The Beatles, or Taylor Swift.

Likewise, Bill Cosby's blackness has not saved him from having his reputation in tatters. In his case perhaps the most damaging factor is the seemingly callous, premeditated, and repeated nature of the acts.

I doubt that the race of the victims has much to do with the reactions in these cases. I think that the majority of people who are aware of the accusations against Tyson and Cosby have no idea what race the alleged victims were. The allegations against Jackson are so prominent that probably many people are aware that he seemed to prefer white boys, but I doubt his reputation would be significantly better if it had been black boys. Likewise, I doubt Woody Allen's reputation would be significantly better if he was widely thought of as having raped a black girl instead of a white girl.

Edit: I should really have thought to add this originally, but also a big factor is that Tyson served time for the alleged rape, whereas Allen has not.

Allen's case is complicated in that he took up with, and then married, a girl who was the (1) adoptive daughter of his current partner at the time (2) adoptive sibling of his own kid(s) (3) someone he'd known since she was ten:

Soon-Yi Previn (original name Oh Soon-hee) was born in South Korea. ...The Seoul Family Court established a Family Census Register (legal birth document) on her behalf on December 28, 1976, with an official birth date of October 8, 1970.

...Farrow's marriage to André Previn ended in 1979. In 1980, Farrow began a long-term relationship with filmmaker Woody Allen. Allen later adopted two of Farrow's adopted children: Dylan Farrow and Moses Farrow. In 1987, Mia Farrow gave birth to Ronan Farrow, who is Allen's biological son.

Even without dragging in the abuse accusations by the other children, and accepting that Allen and Farrow were not co-habiting and that he was not meaningfully parenting Soon-Yi in any way, it's still a bit dicey to find out your boyfriend is (presumably) banging your daughter this way:

In January 1992, Farrow found nude photographs of Previn in Allen's home. Allen, then 56, told Farrow that he had taken the photos the day before, approximately two weeks after he and Previn first had sex. Farrow contends that she broke off her relationship with Allen in 1992 following her discovery of the affair. Previn and Allen dispute that, claiming that Allen and Farrow were no longer involved when Farrow discovered the photos.

I mean, even if I had broken up with a guy anywhere from six months to a year previously, I'd go nuclear if I found that out. So I can't blame Farrow for hitting the roof over this. Leaving out your sex photos where you know there's a good chance the ex, who is still visiting your place, will find them is... tacky, at best. At worst, it's like either Allen, Soon-Yi, or both did this intentionally to hurt Farrow.

There's a 35 year age gap between them, which is also a bit steep. When she was 21 (officially) and that's when the sexual aspect of the affair started (officially), he was 56. Even on the best reading of the entire mess, there's something trashy about it. The kind of jokes about redneck trailer trash in the Deep South scenario. "I'm fucking your momma and your sister and your sister is gonna be the momma of our babies":

Previn and Allen married in Venice on December 22, 1997; she was 27 and he was 62. They have adopted two daughters together.

If I'm being really tasteless about this, are we sure he's not going to move on to one of the adopted with Soon-Yi kids as soon as she's old enough, given his track record? No, that's not a likelihood, but it's the kind of miasma hanging over the entire relationship given how it started. He's already demonstrated that he's happy to move on to the adopted kid of a former partner. Even with regard to Ronan Farrow - your step-mom married to your biological dad is your adoptive sister? That's a messed-up family dynamic.

Yes, because their (now grown up) kids defend Allen & Soon Yi:

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/streaming/inside-the-mysterious-lives-of-woody-allen-and-soonyis-daughters/news-story/faa37730cad186c4f1b0beb7331fc5b0

Whatever one can sneer at the marriage, it held better than many others. They will stay together until Woody dies.

Even with regard to Ronan Farrow

I bet good money that Allen doesn’t have any biological children. I subscribe to the Frank Sinatra’s theory.

That's a messed-up family dynamic.

True.

Even with regard to Ronan Farrow - your step-mom married to your biological dad is your adoptive sister?

I'll never be persuaded that Allen is Farrow's biological dad and Frank Sinatra isn't.

Yeah, because your step-mom married to your step-dad is your adoptive sister is a much better look 🙄

If I'm being really tasteless about this, are we sure he's not going to move on to one of the adopted with Soon-Yi kids as soon as she's old enough, given his track record?

No, because

accepting that Allen and Farrow were not co-habiting and that he was not meaningfully parenting Soon-Yi in any way

that wouldn't be an analogous situation.

It's more about perception, though, on a subconscious level. It's the "you fuck one goat" problem. He fucked one adopted daughter, and now...

An implicitly large factor in Cosby getting cancelled was that most of his victims were white women, which is relatively uncommon for a black MeToo case.

I do think that Allen gets some extra flack compared to Tyson because Allen is white whereas Tyson is black.

An obvious possibility here (and IMO the biggest reason) is that people who care about cinema think sexual violence is a really big deal and people who care about boxing don't. Like, both will say rape is bad if you ask them "is rape bad?", but the former are much more likely believe an allegation even if the evidence is weak and act on that belief, whereas the latter are more likely to dismiss allegations (or just not care) even if the evidence is strong.

The difficulty with this question, taken more broadly, is that there's a very long list of celebrities with at least semi-credible accusations against them who beat the rap, and looking at their race is not likely to be very enlightening.

I think the most relevant factors here are a) do you give a shit b) does your audience give a shit? If the answer to both of those is no, you can get away with pretty much anything that doesn't actually land you in jail.

I think this is a big part of it. Unlike the allegations against Allen, Tyson's transgressions tend to help rather than hurt his "brand", and he knows this - as Freddie pointed out, he described beating up his ex-wife in these terms: "She really offended me and I went BAM. She flew backwards, hitting every wall in the apartment… That was the best punch I've ever thrown in my entire life."

Mike Tyson has not only been credibly accused of domestic violence and rape

Tyson wasn't credibly accused, he was convicted in a court of law! That's a much much higher standard of proof than a credible accusation.

and black

Not for lack of trying.

Likewise, Bill Cosby's blackness has not saved him from having his reputation in shatters. In his case perhaps the most damaging factor is the seemingly callous, premeditated, and repeated nature of the acts.

Insofar as blackness shields you, it's because the mainstream defers judgment to "your" community: Kanye got a pass on things like "slavery was a choice" and the Confederate flag because he was already getting criticism from black people and it was seen as an internal thing (then he crossed state lines). Same with rap's misogyny, despite this making no sense. Allen's community meanwhile is not just white, but likely to be disproportionately turbolib.

Cosby is an interesting example in that there was a simmering resentment towards him for his conservative lecturing and his attempt to act like a grandee to enforce this in the AA entertainment industry. His "pound cake speech" has a whole Wikipedia page. And the things he was saying...well:

But these people, the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, 'If you get caught with it you're going to embarrass your mother.' Not 'You're going to get your butt kicked.' No. 'You're going to embarrass your family.'

And:

We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.

Can't have made him popular.

It's pretty interesting that the first domino was Hannibal Burress getting frustrated and basically pointing out his allegations due to his behavior towards other black people.

And then we were off to the races.

she is under very little threat from men like Chris Brown

Celebrities?

I mean I know what you mean. African American culture’s poor treatment of women is, for wealthy white women, trivial to avoid. But Mike Tyson and Chris Brown never have presented themselves as progressive Allies, and they don’t have any intention of starting. Sean Connery also admits to being a woman beater unashamedly, did you know that? Most don’t. Woody Allen is a progressive heretic, that’s why he’s in such contempt, same for Harvey Weinstein, and Brett kavanaugh had an obvious culture war dimension.

Now, obviously, avoiding the depredations of Woody Allen or Harvey Weinstein is also very doable. Your mother could tell you how to avoid a casting couch.

So why the fixation on those men- the progressives- when non-outspoken progressives get ignored unless it helps politically? Because it’s the horror of falsifying the progressive project- that adopting a particular ideology can protect young women from the depredations of men in power, without those women needing to listen to their parents. There’s a sense in which this shows the failure of consent based sexual morality- when consent is the only variable, it undermines the traditional ways to protect the ability of women to consent.

Ross Douthat once ended an editorial by saying that modern progressives need an alternative to traditional sexual mores, and they do not have this alternative figured out. I’ll go further; sex is not a private matter even if you don’t let other people see you doing it. It’s a matter of concern to the entire community because it just is, and the obsession with abolishing traditional structures which both limit the sexual options available and protect against depredation in an attempt to privatize sexual decision making cannot develop a meaningful alternative to sexual norms, no matter how well developed the idea of consent becomes.

I’ll go further; sex is not a private matter even if you don’t let other people see you doing it. It’s a matter of concern to the entire community because it just is

The Christine Blasey Ford thing came up again and all I could think was "if the entire nation is going to have to relitigate decades-old teenage parties filled with drunk kids maybe people should keep a tighter handle on them, cries of tyranny or no". Because clearly it can't help but be everyone's business.

That is a particularly extreme example but still.

How about "cries of anarcho-tyranny or no"? Judging by the decline in sex zoomers seem to be having, society is keeping a tighter handle on drunk teenage parties - just through self-policing rather than the panopticon of the elders.

The elders do however have a much more comprehensive panopticon these days, through the electronic leash.

Do they? How many parents really know what their kid is up to on Discord?

Many more than read their kids’ IM chats in 2005. And it doesn’t stop there; gps tracking, for example.

Many of them know much more about what their kids do on Friday afternoons after school than they did in the 70s or even 90s, though.

Maybe not through Discord, but through text messages and physical proximity.

I read that article, and the difference in skin tone as an explanation for differential treatment was the first thing that occurred to me too. (Less directly relevant was an example I've mentioned several times, wherein Michael Richards' career was completely and irreparably destroyed after yelling some racial slurs onstage; meanwhile, ten people were killed at a Travis Scott gig in part due to his onstage behaviour and disregard for the audience's safety - and he's still touring and recording music.)

However, Freddie cited some other examples of celebrities who evaded repercussions for bad behaviour, including Michael Fassbender (which was news to me) and Bill Murray. I thought also of:

  • Charlie Sheen, who still enjoys a similar "lovable meme-y rogue" reputation despite numerous accusations of domestic abuse and almost certainly knowingly (or recklessly) infecting sexual partners with HIV
  • Conor McGregor, who is successfully transitioning from sports into star-studded movies despite numerous convictions for assault, and rape accusations
  • R. Kelly, who evaded legal and social repercussions for his crimes for decades

Also mentioned in the comments was Chris Brown.

Someone in the comments suggested a prosaic explanation: jocks (Tyson, Sheen, Scott, Fassbender, Brown, McGregor, Kelly) and class clowns (Murray) can almost always avoid consequences for their bad behaviour. Nerds (Allen, Richards, half the men on the Shitty Media Men list, that guy who killed himself after Zoe Quinn smeared him) cannot - even if, like Allen, they've never been convicted or even charged with a crime.

I'm struggling to think of counter-examples. On the "jocks who faced consequences" side, the only one that comes to mind is Armie Hammer, who's maybe a noncentral example purely because of how weird the allegations against him were (as opposed to the more prosaic accusations of domestic abuse and/or rape levelled against the other men on the list). On the "nerds who didn't face consequences" side, Freddie points to John Lasseter - unquestionably a nerd, but maybe being a director rather an actor kept him out of the limelight (and the accusations against him, while inexcusable, were small beer compared to Tyson). Rumours about Dan Schneider only finally seem to be coming to social fruition within the last ten minutes. Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris were only exposed posthumously and in their eighties respectively, despite rumours circulating about them for decades in their lifetimes. Andy Dick has been known to be a creep, sex pest and druggy for decades, but maybe he's enough of a class clown to get away with it.

Less directly relevant was an example I've mentioned several times, wherein Michael Richards' career was completely and irreparably destroyed after yelling some racial slurs onstage; meanwhile, ten people were killed at a Travis Scott gig in part due to his onstage behaviour and disregard for the audience's safety - and he's still touring and recording music.

And Morgan Wallen evaded any consequences at all for yelling nigger at a fan on stage by just not giving a shit. I think that apologizing or not is an underrated and relevant difference.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/morgan-wallen-issues-apology-tells-fans-not-defend-him-i-n1257483

Not only did he apologize, and take a hiatus from public appearances, he met with "Black leaders" and specifically told fans "not to defend me."

I'm surprised that Wallen didn't do a duet with any of the younger black country artists that Nashville is always trying to pump up, that would have seemed like the easiest and most productive way out to me at the time, give some of the star power he has to another artist.

I don’t think Andy dick has gotten away with it. A recent headline reads “comedian Andy duck arrest warrant issued after failing to register as a sex offender״

That's my point: he's been arrested, charged and convicted of numerous crimes, and yet none of them ever seem to permanently destroy his career, as happened with Michael Richards (whose career was destroyed without him even committing a crime).

I did watch a video (from a rather...polarizing YouTube channel) once that showed that, while Andy Dick does still kind of have a career, his life is practically ruined, being reduced to slumming it in a motorhome and being used for livestream views while his self-destruction is not being reversed.

Oh interesting, maybe he's not a counter-example so.

I'm struggling to think of counter-examples.

Armie Hammer looks like the jock, cancelled. Gina Carano literally used to beat people up (including Fassbender in one of her early roles), cancelled. The rapper DaBaby is black and a jock (I think - killing people in self-defense and bragging about it seems pretty masculine), also cancelled for homophobia. Johnathan Majors is black, looks like this and was cancelled (though he gives off theater-kid-narcissist energy underneath all that armor)

DaBaby's last album in 2022 debuted at #34 on the Billboard charts, he seems to be doing alright for himself.

Jonathan Majors is a good counter-example.

Regarding Carano, I think there's a different set of rules for men and for women.

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