domain:parrhesia.substack.com
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
My father-in-law was a creative director on Madison Avenue. One of the Mad Men.
We were watching a vintage Axe commercial together, slow-mo shots of a model tossing her hair over a sleek sports car, music pulsing.
I asked him, “Why can't we run campaigns like this today?"
I'll never forget his answer. He closed his eyes, took a slow drag on a cigarette (even though he didn’t smoke), and whispered: "We can’t. We don’t know how to do it.”
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc.
Stop, stop, Sidney Sweeney was already attractive enough.
My cynical view is this is probably downstream of the marketing team in question. Yes, the nuts are all there in the high positions and are sincere, but they're being fed this on purpose to stir up a frenzy to sell jeans. The chance of anyone canceling either American Eagle or Sweeney is pretty close to zero.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:
Let's look at the quote in context, shall we?
I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed.
These are all just facts about the way the world is--and the way the world has suddenly changed. Expressing concern about that is not plausibly "anti trans."
She believes that women can't have penises.
Well, adult human females don't have penises, by definition. But the actual link there is to a complaint about the language law enforcement uses in its reporting. This seems relevant to Rowling's interest in protecting women, insofar as that language resulted, in some cases, in male rapists being put into female prisons, which does seem like a pretty terrible idea to me. Does it not seem like a terrible idea to you?
She believes trans kids don't exist.
Again, let's check the context of that link....
There are no trans kids. No child is 'born in the wrong body'. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.
This gets into some complicated metaphysics, but I'm inclined to agree with Rowling, here, that it doesn't make sense to suggest that a child is ever "born in the wrong body," as if the mind at the body could be so casually separated like that. But if by "anti trans" we just mean "pro Cartesian dualism" or something, then... I'm at a loss. I don't think this is what anyone really means, outside perhaps of a small number of boring philosophers.
She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against
Yes. This seems like an open-and-shut case to me, right here: she's not plausibly "anti trans."
but that's not what anti trans means these days
Aaaaand here we get to the motte of the argument. What, then, does "anti trans" mean "these days?" Why?
I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.
Imagine claiming that someone must be anti-Semitic because they do not subscribe to the metaphysical commitments of Judaism. This would clearly be absurd, an abuse of the term in furtherance of some tribal aim. The discourse on transsexuals and the transgendered today is often exactly this absurd, approaching dissent and disagreement with reductionism and ostracism of exactly the kind deployed against Rowling.
07mk
3d ago
We wouldn't normally call that academia though. And my experience right now is that these kids are getting their ideas from their parents and from Tik-Tok. So they come in already having opinions about Palestine for example. They weren't taught that in elementary school.
This is exactly what the flow of ideas from academia to to students would look like; parents and TikTok get these ideas from academia, whether it's indirectly through their peers or other TikTokers, or directly through their own experience in academia.
But again you have it reversed. Critical theory is a creation of the Blue Tribe, it didn't create the Blue Tribe. You're again just saying Blue Tribe places do Blue Tribe things. Well yes, of course they do. If they didn't they wouldn't be Blue Tribe! All the concept of critical theory does is putting an academic skin on things Blue Tribe people already believed. They believed it, then they taught it in an academic way, but the Blue Tribe already HAD those beliefs.
This is simply false, though. The concept of "White Privilege," for instance, which is a tool that can be used as needed to explain why any white person in any situation is advantaged over any black person, isn't something Blue Tribe people believed without academia. They might have a general sense of dissatisfaction at what they perceive as society-wide injustice due to how they believe that white people are treated better than black people in society, and they might go into academia in order to research and develop this dissatisfaction into grand theories about White Supremacy and Colonialism and such. You can describe it as putting an "academic skin" over things they already believed, but that'd only make sense if we took the "skin" metaphor pretty far, with how complex and active an organ the skin is on our bodies (not just a bunch of stickers to put on your car or some textures to swap on a character model, as "skin" means in other contexts).
Academia is downstream not upstream in other words. Academics frequently overestimate their own importance. Don't fall for it.
I mean, it's both downstream and upstream. No academic endeavor happens on an island free of external influences, and the academic endeavors behind "wokeness" has clearly had extreme impact on the culture in America/the West, including the very Blue Tribe culture that had incredible input on that academia itself. That's why the chicken-and-the-egg metaphor is apt here. It's clearly both, and trying to claim that one is the actual upstream source will just lead to fallacy.
I see your point. In my defense, when I use a word like "normie", I am certainly not thinking of board game fans or hardcore Harry Potter enthusiasts. Many moons ago I was part of a friend group with whom I'd meet up and play board and TTRPG games, a group which included (pseudonyms obviously):
- Robert, a trans man
- Robert's boyfriend Jesse, a cis man who seems to exclusively date trans men (after he and Robert broke up, he explored the world of polyamory for awhile, becoming embroiled in multiple concurrent relationships with trans men or non-binary women; eventually he settled down into a monogamous relationship with one of the former, whom he married)
- Oliver, a male person who claimed to be a trans woman (despite going by his birth name, not medically transitioning and making zero effort to pass)
- Celia, a bisexual woman
- Norbert, a bisexual man
Most of whom were, if not Extremely, then certainly Very Online. If such a composition is in any way representative of the broader board game/TTRPG enthusiast community, at a glance we can see they are a highly selected subculture with values and expectations very different from the mainstream - "bisexual trans person who owns a twelve-sided die and knows what Chaotic Neutral means" is not my idea of a "normie". I've no doubt that wokeness is still ascendant therein and that one could face cancellation for neglecting to mouth woke platitudes in the board gaming community (likewise in video game design, YA literature, knitting circles etc.). But there was a period in the 2010s (peaking in summer 2020) where it really looked like the social rules governing those intensely woke subcultures had a good chance of becoming the social rules governing every Anglophone community (explicitly conservative subcultures like churches and gun clubs excepted). And based on the reaction to this ad, I do think that specific cultural moment has decisively passed. Mainstream spaces are no longer obligatorily woke; caveat emptor for subcultures, many of which are just as woke as ever (if not more so, in light of evaporative cooling).
In the Anglophone world, the "racial reckoning" of 2020 was so widespread and omnipresent that even numerous people who had been thitherto wholly ignorant of politics (esp. identity politics) got swept up in it: everyone was expected to post black squares on Instagram. I feel confident that a plurality of Americans would know who George Floyd is and what he's "famous" for; even though I'd say a plurality of Americans would know what Harry Potter is, I don't know if JK Rowling herself would have quite that level of name recognition, and even of those people who do know who she is, I assume she's known as the creator of Harry Potter first and for her political opinions a distant second, if at all. In point of fact, we already sort of knew that the "JK Rowling is a bigoted genocidal TERF, don't offer her any financial support" thing didn't really have teeth, outside of TRA and nerd circles: despite an attempted boycott mentioned prominently in its Wikipedia lede (which also goes out of its way to smear Rowling as an antisemite), Hogwarts Legacy was the best-selling video game of 2023 and has grossed over $1 billion in revenue. I very much doubt that this is a "knowingly buying Hogwarts Legacy to own the libs" situation: I suspect that the overwhelmingly majority of people who bought a copy of the game were wholly unaware that any attempted boycott even existed. If they had been told that there had been an attempted boycotting, I imagine a significant number would have assumed that it had been organised by the religious right, in protest of the Harry Potter franchise promoting witchcraft - they literally aren't aware of the "JK Rowling is a TERF" meme. When I talk about "normies", that's who I'm talking about.
pigeonburger
3d ago
Very rarely do I have to take a pause from reading something because it elicited a visceral reaction. As soon as I realized where you were going with this, I had to take a little break because my brain was just filled with "Oh no, oh hell no. Don't do it bro!"
faceh
3d ago
There was actually a really early portent of this in the Carl's Jr. Super Bowl Ad this year, clearly there's marketing departments exploring the 'sexy' style of advertising again.
pigeonburger
3d ago
With hindsight it looks easy, but to people who survived a highly repressive era, a sudden repudiation of that era would have looked like a trap to catch more dissidents.
At least at my school, the econ majors absolutely would know calculus, and more. My econ friends went well beyond it: analysis, measure theory, stochastic calculus, etc. More mathematically rigorous than the average engineering or science major.
Though I suspect there's really two econ majors, one that's kind of a business for poets version and one that's intended to prepare you for a rigorous econ PhD program.
TeknOShEeP
3d ago
Quick glance at their stock price shows a roughly 15% jump since the ad campaign started in stark contrast to what has otherwise been a crappy year for them, so I'm fairly certain their boardroom is drooling over every hit piece.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3d ago
Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve.
That's not the point, right? She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:
I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition
She believes that women can't have penises. She believes trans kids don't exist. She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against, whatever that means, but that's not what anti trans means these days.
TeknOShEeP
3d ago
Mmm, going to have to disagree. The P320 has a fairly light trigger pull compared to most DA striker fired guns, 1mm of travel is maybe 2 lbs at most? Probably less.
And no, partially engaging the sear then jostling the gun absolutely should not result in a discharge, thats the whole point behind drop and firing pin safeties. Except as newer videos reveal, the P320s firing pin safety does not actually block the firing pin, and the drop safety is easily defeated by any slide canting, which occurs even under normal trigger pulls.
It appears to be a uniquely terrible design, even compared to other Sig pistols with teething issues, and a possible exception to the "guns dont kill people, people kill people" rule.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
3d ago
Exactly. There's one for the Ford Capri I can't forget about.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
I wish that was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. That is literally what they think, and any pushback will get you banned fairly quickly.
To apply some boardgaming lingo, here, this strikes me as a good example of how the American culture wars are being waged asymmetrically. (As is so often the case, Scott Alexander noticed years ago.) Although I don't actually know of any, I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not. BoardGameGeek and NexusMods are the two hobby sites that I know technically "ban" politics, but apply that ban selectively in exactly the way "Conservative Versus Neutral" implies. Reddit has a site-wide rule against calls for violence and often bans accounts for using certain right-coded no-no words, but I don't think a day goes by that I don't see at least one comment calling for the literal extermination of Trump voters, conservatives, etc. Is that nut-picking? Maybe! But if so, there are an awful lot of nuts to pick, and no one in my outgroup suggesting they chill. (And probably some of those posters are AI/actual Chinese psyops, but still.)
Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this, though it has perhaps limited some of the more egregious examples in the federal bureaucracy, higher education, and corporate world. The "alt right" inverts left wing identitarianism and adopts some of its methods, but they don't noticeably control a bunch of putatively "neutral" spaces. Politics moves in cycles, and eventually the Republicans will be the minority party again. If Sweeney and CGE is what we get when Republicans have control of the federal government, what can we expect when that changes? I do not think "a cooling off of the culture wars" is on the Democratic agenda!
I think a lot of it comes down to people living lives with so little that's "real" in it, so little family, friends or genuine romantic loving relationships, that the comparison isn't between an illusion and real, but an illusion and nothing.
A long time ago, I read some article talking about people who found romance on Compuserve. And if you aren't as old as me, I can barely explain it. Everything I want to compare it to is also long gone, like AOL. But it was basically one of the earliest proto-internet services, with some messaging and chatrooms. I think it was even before the World Wide Web. So people would meet on there. Wives would leave their husbands, move across the country to see this guy they'd only ever spoken to over proto-email. And then it wouldn't work out. The relationship was different when it wasn't mediated by a screen.
Something strange has happened since then. People now spend more time on screens than off them, and all relationships seem to be mediated by screens. It's almost as if relationships on screens have taken primacy over relationships in real life. If you meet someone online and go to see them and it's weird, there is no longer any need to deal with it. You can sit on the couch side by side on your phones and keep having your relationship through your screen. You might even still fuck! Though I increasingly doubt it.
In this context where reality has become subordinate to the screen, it's no wonder people no longer have a sense for what's real or what's illusion.
aldomilyar
3d ago
I've always felt asses are more fundamentally meritocratic than breasts for similar reasons, though the whole 'gigantic asses' thing kinda circled back the other way.
aldomilyar
3d ago
I'm currently parenting my kids in first world Asia (which is a way better deal especially for child-rearing), partly due to my parents being in my home country's equivalent of Florida and therefore being of limited help during childrearing. So chicken and the egg I guess
Corvos
3d ago
Right? And from the sound of your other messages it sounds like you’re ready to take on Stormveil.
Good hunting!
AvocadoPanic
3d ago
No relatives really. I am only child, both my parents have passed. I'm the youngest of my cousins, and they're all 3000 miles away. Only one of my cousins would really be able / competent to help. My wife's mother and brother are in Germany. Their relationship is odd / tense.
The mother and brother are in the same Regierungsbezirk and don't see eachother that often. We traveled to Germany late last fall. We were there for 3 weeks. It was the first time she met 3 of her grandchildren and her only granddaughter and the first time she'd seen our oldest in 10 years. We saw her twice. The brother and his family we saw 4 or 5 times though 2 of those were with their mother and 2 were activity outings with the children.
We're active in our local church. I've shared all of this with the pastor and his wife. They've been incredibly supportive. I shared this yesterday with my 'work wife' he was shocked but very supportive. I've a good group of friends in my men's bible study group. I've not shared any of this with them. I feel if I were to they would be supportive but I also feel it would make church uncomfortable for my wife.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3d ago
Ah the BPD girlfriend. I'm not sure we've all been there, but I remember my turn. Two even! And it does seem to permanently fuck your scale for what a satisfying relationship can be. Leaves you chasing the highs they gave you, without the catastrophic swallow a gun barrel lows they'd inflict with their boundless histrionics.
The thing you need to keep in mind with BPD's is that none of it is real. There are only barely people in there. It's all for effect. They might as well be LLMs, making whatever mouth sounds (even with your dick in it) are required to get what they want from you. Be it attention, money or security.
It was off putting for my wife, when I first met her, to hear from my friends that my ex's were crazy. I think every woman is afraid of being pigeon holed as being "crazy". Sometimes she feels a little crazy, in that way I think most women struggle with the instability of their own emotions and the tides of hormones that batter them. And I'd tell her, back when this used to come up, "You don't understand, they were crazy". I'd tell her about the time one came at me with a knife because I was playing a violent video game with her in my apartment. Or the time one secretly started moving in, established residency, and then refused to leave when we broke up. Or the time one had a whole backup boyfriend primed and ready for her to dump her pets and her lease on, moved down south and then married a 3rd guy.
I guess my point is, detoxing from BPD highs is just like coming off any other drug. I do hope one day you can settle for "Stable but boring". Because you're entire concept of "boring" has likely been utterly destroyed. You're unlikely to find a normal girl willing to fuck you and flatter you the way she would when she was trying to pull you back in.
Then again, I mentioned BPD's are like LLMs, and once again it's thoughtless AI which brought all this up with imagined offspring in the first place. I'm not sure what the cure for illusions are. Weirdly enough, I've found 40K bullshit not terribly off the mark.
My armor is contempt. My shield is disgust. My sword is hatred.
anti_dan
3d ago
This is actually a major problem I have with Hanania. Wokes are not the Japanese holding out in 1960, they are (strategically not morally) much more like the US as MacArthur fled the Philippines. "I shall return" wasn't just a promise, it was a threat and prediction based on the reality of America's industrial might and determination. Woke has no such iconic statement and figure yet, but they do have the cultural equivalent of the 1940s American industry, that being the media, schools, civil services, NGOs, etc. This is why Hanania's "woke right" project has always been very stupid.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
I'm just so profoundly exhausted by it all. Why do these people have to make it so fucking hard to just enjoy things?
I've seen it described as gang tags, basically: if you can tag (or in this case, say) "Sharks Suck!" and make it clear it's a hostile environment to anyone saying "Jets Suck" or "Sharks Rule", well, it's demonstrably your space now.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
One question would be whether American Eagle actually considers this press coverage a negative. Edgy ads that fill opinion pages are hardly unheard of. But is it actually selling jeans?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
This seems true, but it seems a bit funny to me because in many ways it's easier to change your figure (via diet and exercise) than your face (beyond haircuts and grooming). The human figure is a very functional thing that conforms to what you do with it.
I'll note that I haven't watched every single video or read every tweet. But, it's weird to me that few of the reactions seem to be seeing it as the obvious homage to the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad campaign*. Calvin Klein was the peak of designer jeans at the time, and Brooke Shields was one of the sexiest stars on the planet, and they had this long advertisement of her slinking into her jeans while talking about the genetic science of evolution and mating. It's a direct homage
The whole thing seems so odd to me, so telling on yourself, to complain about the ad, rather than demand a parallel ad with a genetically blessed black girl, and so on and so forth. In a completely non-racial way, Sydney Sweeney has great genes. In the same way that Saquon Barkley has great genes, that Barack Obama has great genes, that Fedor has great genes, that Lucy Liu has great genes. Great genetics aren't inherently a racial question.
*To be fair, I'm only aware of this because my wife wanted to watch that documentary that weekend, so I wouldn't have gotten it either last week.
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