domain:betonit.substack.com
Travis Kelce’s manufactured rise to fame
The Chiefs have been in 4 of the last 5 Superbowls (winning 3), and 6 of the last 6 AFCCGs. Kelce has the most postseason receiving yards in NFL history. And Mahomes is famously weird and uncharismatic.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6hr ago
I love reading through these. I feel like I'm on here a lot and for a lot of time but I didn't see the vast majority of these the first time around. One of the best features of this site, I think.
Felagund
1hr ago
South Africa's Election
Since the 1994 election, the ANC (African National Congress) has been in power, and been running South Africa into the ground. Unemployment is sky-high, crime is rampant, power outages are now common (and usually scheduled), by the name of "load shedding", corruption is ubiquitous.
For the first time, in the election occurring one month from now, the ANC risks losing power. But this may not be a good thing, as more radical groups will be eager to form a coalition.
Some background on racial history may be needed.
There are four racial categories used by the government for people in South Africa:
-
White people are of European descent, of course. There are two main populations: people of British ancestry, who more frequently speak English, and Afrikaners, who are descended mostly but not entirely from a mix of Dutch, German, and French ancestry, and speak Afrikaans, a language descended from Dutch. White South Africans have a distinct group identity. They don't think of themselves as European imperialists, or something. Afrikaners in particular see the Great Trek when they traveled inland after the coming of the British as important ethnic history.
Currently, white people make up about 8% of the South African population. This is the largest population of European descent anywhere in Africa. Demographically, they are relatively older and have lower fertility rates, so expect this percentage to shrink. Per wikipedia's data, they make up about 5% of those in the 2011 census who were under 15.
Also of note is that white South Africans are disproportionately wealthy. South Africa has one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. Some portion of this is due to legacy from Apartheid, as whites were privileged economically and lived in regions closer to economic activity, by statute. And, of course, European institutions were better set up to lead to economic prosperity.
(To prevent economic competition with black workers was actually one of the driving factors behind the establishment of Apartheid.)
-
Unlike in the US, where colored is taken to be a slur of sorts, in South Africa, coloured is a distinct racial classifier. Coloured people are mixed race, descended from a variety of groups. They are the most ethnically and genetically diverse ethnic group on earth. Among the genetic influences are: the Khoekhoe pastoralists that once lived in western South Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans, white European ancestry, ancestry from the black Bantu groups, both from eastern South Africa and from slaves imported from elsewhere in Africa, and east and south asian ancestry, especially Malaysians. This population is not homogeneous; different places may have different ratios. Coloured people primarily speak Afrikaans, and make up a large portion of the population in the Northern and Western Cape, the two westernmost provinces. They make up about 8% of the population.
-
Black refers to the portion of people who have ancestry primarily from the Bantu ethnic groups of Africa. South Africa has many such groups—of the 11 official languages, 8 are Bantu. The largest and most important Bantu populations are the Xhosa and the Zulu peoples, who together are about half of the black population. (The Zulu have existed in their current form for surprisingly little time: the Zulu empire was built in the early 1800s, when the small Zulu clan, under Shaka, violently conquered and incorporated all their neighbors, before being conquered by Britain decades later.) About 81% of South Africa is black.
-
And Asians, who make up about 2% of the population.
I'm not really entirely familiar to what extent more fine-grained ethnic distinctions matter to group identity and decision-making, as I don't live in South Africa.
Some Relevant History
Apartheid (pronounced uh-par-tate, not -tide) is infamous, of course. Running up until 1994, the Afrikaner National Party was in power, and had regulations keeping racial separation and government-backed privilege of whites in place. Among the key causes in its formation was white Afrikaners wishing not to compete for employment with black people in the early 20th century.
1994, with the end of Apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela was a key moment. South Africa managed to transition relatively peacefully and democratically, as these things go, though not without incident.
The ANC, or African National Congress, was formed under Apartheid. It was communist (the Soviets trained them), and participated in violence. Nelson Mandela, though a peacemaker late in life, was much less of one earlier. And his wife, Winnie Mandela, was far more violent: she was known for necklacing, that is, drenching tires in gasoline, putting them around the necks of victims, and setting it on fire. But nevertheless, the transition in the 1990s was generally peaceful, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and so forth. Since then, the ANC has remained in power. The ANC remains economically left-leaning. It has implement several racial programs, including Black Economic Empowerment, a form of affirmative action, which pushes black ownership and management, especially, among companies. (You may think that this would lead to whites struggling to find work, but this seems not to be the case; white unemployment is far lower than the national average, though still higher than in the US). The ANC has struggled with high levels of corruption.
Under the ANC, South Africa has struggled. Among the more visible parts of this is the electricity situation. Eskom, the state utility apparatus, has had pervasive issues with corruption. Contributing further to this is issues with crime: stealing electricity (that is, illegally hooking up lines to the power grid, to get free power) is common in the slums, increasing the load on the system, and people have been known to steal the copper from the power infrastructure in order to sell it.
Further, much of South Africa is doing poorly economically more broadly. The unemployment rate is somewhere around 32%, which is the highest in the world, slums exist, roads are often poorly maintained, and overall things aren't great. There has been some inflation of the rand (their currency), though certainly nowhere near hyper-inflation levels.
Crime rates are high in South Africa. Several South African Cities are listed as among the cities with highest murder rates in the world. Of course, the same could be said of the US cities, and it requires that you have a government capable enough of tracking and releasing those statistics even to show up, so that may not be the best measure. Nevertheless, crime rates are still high by any standard. People have gates with bars in front of their doors, and often fences around their property, at least, among the well-to-do. Many live in gated communities, with private security. There is four times as much private security as police officers.
All this said, South Africa is still among the most prosperous African countries, so there is illegal immigration.
Since 1994, South Africa has had four presidents, all of the ANC. First, and most famous, Nelson Mandela. Second, was Thabo Mbeki. Under both of these people, corruption was common, but it was under the third, and most controversial, Jacob Zuma (president 2007-2017), that it became the most extensive and well known.
While most of those in leadership in the ANC were Xhosa, Jacob Zuma is Zulu, which has made him fairly popular with much of the Zulu populace. He has been known for sexual license, for more rampant and open corruption, most notably, with the India-born Gupta brothers, and pushed for left-wing economic populism and racial grievance.
Since 2017, Cyril Ramaphosa has been in power. While some were hopeful that he would be better than Zuma, South Africa has not done especially well. Controversy has continued with Zuma, with him spending some time in jail, before being released early.
The ANC is currently polling at around 40% nationally, under 50% for the first time since 1994. This makes this election a little unstable, as some coalition will have to be formed.
Enough of history of South Africa and the ANC, now to the opposition parties.
Opposition Parties and the Election
The largest such party is the Democratic Alliance (DA). The DA has long held power in the Western Cape province, where there are fewer Black Africans, and has also managed to govern some cities in the province of Gauteng, where the largest city (Johannesburg) is, and one of South Africa's three capitals. Otherwise, though, it has been the largest opposition party.
The DA is generally considered to be much more competent. The Western Cape has been doing the least badly of all the provinces. The DA is fairly centrist, economically, and opposes affirmative action and the radical redistribution programs suggested by more extreme elements within South African politics. Unfortunately, it also has something of a reputation of being the "white people's party." Its base is certainly not entirely white, as it has been getting around 20% of the vote, of late, which is more than double the entire white population, but that is not entirely unfounded. The leadership is more white, at least, and white people are disproportionately likely to vote DA. It's also relatively popular among the Coloured community. But this isn't good for getting elected. Helen Zille, the leader of the DA from 2009 to 2019, also had the scandal of saying that colonization was a net good for South Africa, which, while maybe true, is probably something you should try to avoid saying when you're a minority party trying to hold together a coalition of like-minded people. The DA would like to have more power less centralized, and more at the provincial level, presumably so that they can get to manage more of the western cape and be less hamstrung by the national government.
The EFF (Economic freedom fighters) was formed in 2013, when Julius Malema and his friends broke off from the ANC. The EFF is very far left wing: they advocate for confiscating land and wealth from white people. If you saw online the discourse about the "Kill the boer!" chants, these were those people. Malema has said that he is not calling for white people, for now. (Yes, the "for now" was part of what he said.) They are communist in ideology, like the ANC. Malema has advocated for aid to Hamas. They wish to (quoting wikipedia here), "expropriate White-owned farmland, nationalise the mining and banking sectors, double welfare grants and the minimum wage, and end the proposed toll system for highways." (Remember, South Africa is at 30% unemployment, and economically relatively stagnant.)
It would be bad if the EFF ended up in power. Because in this upcoming election, the ANC is likely to fall belower 50%, the DA has been worrying about a "doomsday coalition" between the ANC and the EFF.
The EFF has drawn most of its voting from young black men. It received about 11% of the vote in 2019, and was feared to be polling at maybe 17% of the population for this upcoming election, up until a few months ago, but is now back down to around 10%.
A few months ago, Jacob Zuma announced the formation of the MK, (uMkhonto we Sizwe), named after the old paramilitary wing of the ANC. Zuma has wished to be eligible, which is constitutionally questionable because of a 2021 conviction. Nevertheless, he still has had courts rule in his favor, though the process is ongoing.
The EFF and MK are fairly aligned, and seem to be willing to cooperate after the election. The MK supports such things as "expropriating all land without compensation and transferring ownership to the people under state and traditional leadership custodianship," change to a more African-based legal system, replacing the constitution, making college (including through post-graduate) free and compulsory, and providing permanent jobs to everyone capable and willing.
MK is most popular among Zuma's base, so it is doing best in KwaZulu Natal, the Zulu homeland. It has been polling overall at about 10%, taking votes primarily from the ANC and EFF.
The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is affiliated with the Zulu monarchy. Historically, they've done well with Zulus, though that was less the case when Zuma headed the ANC. They support power being transferred to provincial governments rather than the national government, and don't seem crazy. They are polling at only 5% or so.
ActionSA, my vague sense is, like the DA, but more black, and is polling at maybe 3% or so. They left the DA in 2020.
The VF+ (Freedom Front plus) are right leaning, and most popular with Afrikaners. They are in favor of the rights of minority groups, such as Afrikaners and Coloureds, and are against affirmative action, and in favor of free markets and small government. They are in favor of Cape Independence. I think they may have something of a reputation of right-wing racist extremists, because they're Afrikaners disproportionately, and Apartheid was a thing. This perception is funny, because they are policy-wise one of the parties least in favor of racial discrimination. I think they're currently my personal favorite, but I haven't looked excessively deep. They're only polling at 2% or so.
There are more parties.
Of course, all the parties are also gesturing at how Their One Plan Will Work to fix the electricity situation, reduce crime, lead to more jobs, etc.
The DA has organized a Multi-Party Charter to work against the ANC, EFF, and MK, including all the other parties listed above. I haven't yet worked out what exactly that's supposed to accomplish.
It is still unclear what coalition will be formed, and what policies that will result in. I could imagine the EFF or MK being in a ruling coalition could lead to many whites seeking to leave the country.
Provinces
A few provinces are also up in the air. The Western Cape, governed by the DA for the last 15 years, looks like there is a chance that it loses control of the province, or at least has to enter into coalition. This would be bad, as the Western Cape is the province doing least badly. The Referendum Party was recently formed, and is running in the Cape, in the hopes that the DA will need them to enter into coalition to run the province, in order to hold a referendum for cape independence, to get the Western Cape to secede from South Africa. The VF+ also supports cape independence. There were polls not long ago indicating that it is also relatively popular with the people of the cape, with at least a referendum agreed to be worthwhile by the majority. If any such thing happened, it would be strongly disliked by most of the country. The referendum party and VF+ support it, under the right of self-determination, and in order to stop South Africa from dragging down the Western Cape. The Western Cape is the only province that is not majority black, which means that many think cape independence is racist. Of course, even if a referendum occurs, and passes, which are both not especially likely, it's still probably unlikely South Africa just lets them go, and international politics isn't going to want to help the white-coded people by the imposition of pressure.
KwaZulu-Natal, the Zulu homeland, is also uncertain. The MK is doing well, but the ANC, DA, and IFP will all also be relevant.
Gauteng, the most populated and most urban province, containing Johannesburg, Pretoria, Soweto, etc. could also end up governed by a coalition other than the ANC. It was barely won by the ANC in 2019, so it will probably need to be some coalition after this election, but who knows the constituents.
All the others should be taken by the ANC, I imagine.
I guess I'll have to report back later (no idea how long coalitions will take to sort out) how that all turns out. It's looking like we will have a situation where the ANC, DA & co., and MK+EFF will each have enough of a block that any two of them would be able to coalition, but none on their own. I'm not sure what will be most likely to form from that.
If anything radical happens, like the Western Cape seceding, or South Africa Zimbabweing itself, that'll be sure to have an effect on the discourse around the country. (And of course, more importantly, on the people themselves.)
SlowBoy
2hr ago
A "man" obviously parses to anti-feminism. A "bear" can be anything, because it doesn't exist. That's the context in which the poll exists and is shared. You can't interpret the question facially, because it was linked to you (and you, and you, and you) as a referendum on feminism. Look, men are dangerous and bad, here's proof! Nobody voting has met a bear. Nobody in this discussion has met a bear. (I challenge anybody reading to name an occasion on which they met a bear they weren't actively going out of their way to meet. Zoos and national parks don't count! I'm sure there's somebody here, and I bet it makes for an interesting story.)
This comment is not intended as bear slander. They are fun creatures, and a few of them even parse as something magnificent. They can be dangerous, but they're really not a good avatar for the abstract platonified category of dangerous things. I've met bears, what do you want? They're not especially interested in us. They like food and protecting their children. Actually, it could be fun to meet a strange bear. I'm not especially sure I want to meet a strange man, and all the social entanglements that come with returning to baseline.
How many people will give an obviously ridiculous answer to a question when they have no skin in the game? Looks like at least 85%.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8hr ago
Sigh. I suppose I ought to pay it forward.
Please don’t insinuate that people are off their meds. It’s rather antagonistic.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
19hr ago
I think there’s probably a good amount of political manipulation just like there are accounts that give high reviews to products or to review bomb rivals.
Pushing political views online on any site has a whole host of advantages.
1). It’s cheap. If I can get a package deal for 50-100 bots for less than $500, then this is going to be much cheaper than trying to use traditional advertising in the same platform, to say nothing of traditional TV, radio, or print advertising. This means that a single person can get thousands of views and upvotes on a topic with little investment. If I wanted to promote Jill Stein (who’s running for Pres. with the Green Party) spending $500 to get 10,000 views is pretty cheap.
2). It at least looks organic. People generally scroll past advertisements or ignore them. Ad blockers are common. Very very few people see an ad and pay attention to it. But if they see a post on their social media, they might read it and the comments below and thus the owner of the accounts has some opportunity to make their case.
3). You can quite easily tailor your message to specific people and interests. If I wanted to convince Biden voters to vote Stein, I go to progressive subs. I don’t have to get into conservative and pro Trump areas at all.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23hr ago
· Edited 20hr ago
An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.
On the other hand, there's the Catalonian independence referendum that got declared illegal by Spain and people arrested for voting, while the rest of the EU gave zero fucks.
plural
3hr ago
I mean, I don't agree with the conclusions here but his fame outside of football is absolutely manufactured. Though, that doesn't mean it wasn't built on something that exists.
But I didn't know he existed until last summer when suddenly he had a documentary, started dating Taylor Swift, hosted Saturday Night Live within like six months. Not to say that most people that are famous aren't manufactured in some way as well, that's the game. It's just personal PR but it's certainly not coming organically. I had no idea who the last like (insert number) of whatever boyfriend's Taylor Swift had before this so it can't just be that. Nor were there personal stories inserted into non-gossip publications dedicated to them simply being Taylor Swift's boyfriend. Maybe it's a convergence of things and simply luck, that they decided to run more stories about this relationship than the previous ones, but it's still manufacturing fame.
YouEssAyyy
10hr ago
I think this is tying things into a conspiracy that doesn’t exist.
Bud Light had an advertising campaign aimed at growing their audience (tik tok liberal teenagers) blow up in their face. They then spent a ton of money to try to win back their core audience (young white men). Seems like normal course of business.
Brett Favre (and tons of other celebrities) has appeared in pharma ads. Kelce being in one is hardly surprising.
Neither of these seem at all conspiratorial to me and don’t relate to Trump.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10hr ago
Football has for decades been a way to stave off unrest. First, the sport attracts the attention of violent men without impressive economic prospects, as the sport itself is visibly violent and masculine. It is the closest similitude to war (armor, helmets, commands, clashes). It gives these men a castrated, impotent tribal identity in the form of regional teams, which are corporations motivated by capital without any serious tie to a region or interest. The men wear the insignia and colors of their favorite team and recite the assigned warcries. This establishes the attention of the cohort who are at most risk of unrest. Now that they have your attention, they push domestication propaganda in the form of rituals (national anthems, even the new “black” national anthem) and spectacles (ads, half time shows). After a Super Bowl there are occasional riots, but this is like when the waters of a flooded dam are redirected so as to keep the integrity of the dam — the Super Bowl brought tens of thousands of the most passionate fans, and not all of them will have their masculine energy siphoned off completely; they are allowed to expend the rest of their energy in a controlled way.
You might think, “but what about the kneeling for the flag controversy? Didn’t this create more controversy rather then unity?” No, this acted as a marketing campaign to give football more attention in the at-risk cohorts (black nationalists and MAGA guys). Both of them are now tuning in to football news, maybe they watch and want the kneeler to lose, maybe the opposite. Were they to ignore that controversy, they would not be capturing the full cohort they want and neither would they be accomplishing the sublimation ritual. Adding gambling to football culture was another way to do this (while producing an enormous profit), because gambling was already in video games but you want attention given to football as well. I think this is also why the “Sketch” streamer is being astroturfed. This is where Travis and cowboys and TSwift come in. They code right, they bring in more viewers.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
There have always been popular white people, and vaguely well-known people who can be funny and charismatic sometimes rise unusually fast. The prosaic explanation is the best one, and I’m enjoying the opportunity to refer to Taylor swift as ‘Travis Kelce’s girlfriend’ with the explanation that football is more important.
somedude
13hr ago
I think being a parent is cool too, but if you're expected to do all the house work, childcare and also work a job outside the home that is a terrible deal.
So are stay-at-home mothers mentally deficient breeding machines and house servants, like you just said they were one post prior, or did you decide during the intervening three hours that it's actually okay since they don't have to also work outside the home?
Also, can you explain what sort of virtue is conferred by... say... a job schlepping boxes at Amazon, such that it distinguishes real human women from mere broodmare house slaves? What is it you think makes schlepping so much more righteous than maintaining one's own family home? Do you think boxes are more important? Do you think Amazon appreciates it more? Please, by all means, enlighten us.
It's the "official" builtin board style forum of (like the 3rd cousin?) of themotte. I think the relationship is roughly like:
lesswrong
└─> slatestarcodex ──> astralcodexten <─> datasecretslox
└──> r/slatestarcodex ──> r/themotte ──> themotte
Obviously the full history is a bit more complicated and there is a bunch of cross mixing between the branches.
Blueberry
16hr ago
Btw: it was the right decision to flee reddit. Before their IPO recently they banned a few inconvenient subreddits. The specific case I know was that a country had two subs, a bigger progressive one and a smaller right wing one, and the latter was heavily brigaded and any small infraction was reported. It was then closed by the admins as causing too much work and being badly moderated (which it wasn’t).
non_radical_centrist
3hr ago
I think wokism as culture and wokism as law and wokism as anything else are all a positive feedback loop. There isn't a single definitive cause that, if you cut that out, all wokism is gone forever. But the book convinced me pretty well that certain executive orders and judicial decisions and bureaucratic policies played a major role in expanding wokeness.
somedude
10hr ago
Me:
So are stay-at-home mothers mentally deficient breeding machines and house servants, like you just said they were one post prior,
You, one post prior:
Well then it sucks to be the kind of person that would enjoy life as a breeding machine + house servant. Maybe some people love it, but that is pretty close to being dosed with alcohol as a fetus so you'll enjoy being a Delta in a Huxley book.
I seriously can't believe you even tried to play the "putting words in my mouth" card. Like you realize everyone can see all these posts, right?
When you give women the option not to be a stay at home mom...most take it. When they have the option to have fewer children, most take it. Hence the reduction in family formation and lack of children. Revealed preferences.
That's nice, but I didn't ask you about any of that, did I? No, I asked you what it is about a menial routine job like most people have that elevates a mother from a subhuman object of your personal contempt to, presumably, a real human being.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11hr ago
you're either a coward or a dullard
This is not allowed. Banned for three days.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
I wonder if it might be worth nuancing 'pro-Intifada', 'pro-Hamas', and so on?
It seems to me that many of these protests are, yes, genuinely opposed to the existence of the state of Israel, and supportive of 'decolonisation' interpreted to mean 'Israel should not exist and all Israeli Jews should leave and find homes in other countries, and if they refuse, they are legitimately the targets of lethal violence'. But the rhetoric and justification given for this is so radically different to the rhetoric and justification of either Hamas or any on-the-ground Palestinian resistance movements that I think the gulf is worthy of recognition. For the American campus protester, what Hamas or Palestinians actually want is close to irrelevant - their politics are not so much pro-Intifada or pro-Hamas they are anti-coloniser. Israel is a 'coloniser', which makes them the bad guys, which makes the opposite of Israel the good guys.
If nothing else, the campus protest ideology is not the ideology of the Hamas charter, or even the revised one. I don't think the protesters are reading that charter and unironically agreeing with it. (Though I grant that the revised, 2017 version seems calculated to appeal more to liberal Westerners.) Almost none of them are Muslims, for a start. It's something different, and must have its own origins and influences.
doantkq
22hr ago
In a long but interesting piece, dissident PR guru Isaac Simpson details the spectacular rise of American football star Travis Kelce and what it signifies. His thesis? The Cathedral recognizes that demonizing white people is not as fashionable as it used to be and in a desperate attempt to bring as many white people back into the fold, has unleashed a propoganda campaign on an epic scale. First up, Post Malone and the Super Bowl
The Ozempicked pop star eschewed his wiggerish priors for a clean cut cowboy rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Why was I thinking about this? Where had I seen it before? At the Grammys, Beyonce had appeared in cowboy gear wearing a bolo tie with a similar turquoise clasp to promote her “country album” with songs “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages.” Country star Luke Combs performed a healing mashup with Tracy Chapman. Back at the Super Bowl, Reba McEntire sang the national anthem.
For decades mainstream culture has ignored white music, at least those singers who don’t crossdress on command. But now right-coded whites are center stage. There’s Bud Light’s apology tour, $100 million plus to right-wing impresario Dana White and Kid Rock to beg our forgiveness for the trans can. Then the new Bud Light Super Bowl commercial combining Dana White with Peyton Manning. “Canceled” “racist” comedian Shane Gillis, who has been posting Bud Light factory tours on his Instagram, sat in a special Bud Light section at the Super Bowl. A Bud Light square appeared at the top of the replay—“this angle brought to you by Bud Light.”
Also in the Bud Light section? Post Malone. He also stars in the commercial with Dana White and Peyton Manning. And he also sang “America the Beautiful” at the Super Bowl, dressed as a cowboy. Then the “He Gets Us” Jesus ads depicting conservative Christian archetypes washing the feet of liberal archetypes—homeless person, abortion girl, illegal immigrant. Then flyover-state hero Travis Kelce advertising Pfizer shots in a commercial that ran back-to-back with the Bud Light, just after halftime, the most expensive peak media of the Super Bowl broadcast.
Without prompting, the mainstream media began predicting that MAGA may soon interpret these cues as a “country conspiracy for Biden.” How ridiculous to think that they could possibly be connected!
Sometimes the bigger the propaganda, the more complex and shadowy we make it, when the reality is very simple: the Party of Davos, the regime, the cathedral…whatever you want to call it, is buying back white people—white men in particular—so they don’t vote for Trump, don’t stop buying Bud Light, and don’t forget to sign up for the draft.
By getting out in front of claims that this rightward turn is manufactured, the regime cleverly runs interference on the truth: it actually is a conspiracy. But not the kind they mean, and not the kind the “Intellectual Right” means either. While intelligence agencies do have a history of musical warfare—The CIA conducted a “cultural Cold War” against the Soviets, influencing the writing of the Scorpions’ “Winds of Change”—I’m not so sure intelligence agencies are directly responsible for this recent white shift.
As Simpson explains, this phenomenon should be understood as "publicity" rather than "conspiracy". To understand this, he provides a summary of the work of Edward Bernays:
In both capitalism and democracy, the only way to get things done is via implementation of propaganda campaigns by non-public individuals. In order to be successful, these campaigns must:
Unite demographic subgroups around a single initiative using entities that those subgroups trust.
Benefit the shared interests of the entities in question.
Use or create a “moment in culture.”
A brief explanation of these phrases. First, all societal projects are propaganda initiatives. There is simply no other way to realistically get things done in bottom-up structures like democracy and consumer capitalism. You have to move the masses, and the only way to move the masses is through propaganda. Second, every propaganda initiative must seek to unite different subgroups around a single cause; and the best way to do that is to appeal to “leaders” (more often celebrities, brands, universities, media companies, scientists, etc.) of those subgroups. Third, in order to fully participate, these “leaders” must have skin in the game—you can’t merely appeal to these entities rationally or emotionally (e.g. “a poster”), they must have a shared economic interest in the propaganda initiative (“an economy”). One of these interested parties must be the media itself. And finally, fourth, the only way to successfully deliver the message of the propaganda initiative is by either hijacking an existing “cultural moment” (e.g. the Super Bowl) or by creating one yourself. This is how you further ensure media complicity.
There is no grand conspiracy; the system simply works exactly as designed. Then he sets the stage of how this works in the context of the Super Bowl:
First, we have invisible wirepullers, the propagandists themselves: broadly speaking, a globalist regime facing an existential threat from nationalists and their leader Donald Trump. More specifically: Bud Light’s corporate global parent ABInbev, celebrity publicity/agent teams (see below), Pfizer and its assorted propaganda agencies, the NFL and its assorted propaganda agencies, Dem patronage networks, and the music industry. This set composes essentially the same group who canceled Alex Jones, Kanye West, Andrew Tate, and their ilk. The best word for them is Globohomo.
Then, the subgroups. White people. NFL fans. Swing voters. Flyover Americans (e.g. Kansas City Chiefs fans). Beer drinkers. Super Bowl watchers. Podcast listeners. The list could go on forever. But the point is that all these subgroups need to be convinced of one thing—The Regime is Your Friend. Donald Trump is Not.
Third, “leaders” with a common denominator of interest to deliver the message in exchange for benefits. We already know the NFL easily bows to progressive pressure—they wrote “don’t be racist” on the field. For Kelce, tight end, the sky’s the limit. He and his managers/agents/publicists get paid beyond their wildest dreams. Big paydays also for Shane Gillis, Dana White, Post Malone, etc and their legions of agents and managers. For Bud Light, a pathway back into the hearts of normal Americans. Complicit press? Big clickable headlines around a celebrity couple and the last big cultural tentpole they can still control. Not Conspiracy, Publicity
Kelce arrived at the regime’s door ready to sell himself. Censorship had failed to kill nationalism, so it was time to try some celebrity propaganda. So they vetted him, and decided to make him both a “leader” of the subgroups in question and a “cultural moment” at the same time—perhaps not realizing just how many propagandists would need to use him to execute their own rightward pandering. Interestingly, Kelce owed his brother, the even less well known Eagles center Jason Kelce, some favors. Jason had helped the more erratic Travis find the straight and narrow. If you’re making me a star, Travis said, you’re bringing Jason with me.
Kelce became the global face of Pfizer. They framed the ad as an “educational campaign,” when of course it’s anything but—Pfizer doesn’t want us to know more about the vaccine, they want us to blindly take it and have our insurance companies pay the bill. Pfizer is hemorrhaging the excess profit it made off mandated vaccines to combat its plummeting revenue by any means necessary. This is not controversial.
What can the right do about this?
What do? For right wingers, the only answer is to adopt the effective propaganda tactics of Cthulhu, as painful as that may be.
Propaganda is, in a way, the opposite of censorship: adding information instead of removing it. The American Right feels comfortable identifying and critiquing censorship because it usually involves government intelligence agencies. They don’t care if it leads to them being labeled conspiracy theorists. Revelations unearthed by those rare non-complicit journalists like Matt Taibbi and Mike Benz show networks of administrative organizations like the FBI, CIA, and DHS collaborating with patronage groups like the Atlantic Group, the Aspen Institute, and the NCoC to implement initiatives with names like the Virality Project and Civic Listening Corps on media platforms like Time and Twitter. The rise of social media gave birth to a type of censorship we’re only just beginning to understand. The Right accepts and acknowledges this, although there’s little we can do about it, at least until we establish control over the intelligence agencies. We can, however, do something about propaganda.
But propaganda makes the Right squirmy. It involves just as many creepy three letter “agencies” (CAA, not CIA) and power mad globalists, yet conservatives suddenly become naive when we enter the world of marketing. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating this weakness is, as recent discourse around right wing patronage networks, or the lack thereof, has revealed. But by understanding Bernays and how propaganda economies work, propaganda itself becomes less mysterious, less amoral, less of a “conspiracy. If regarded without fear, it’s a malleable substrate that carries messages beyond the mind and into the heart, because it implicates the shared interest of its targets just as it does its promulgators. Cthulhu may be superficially turning right, but the people aren’t buying it. Only we can build the real right-coded culture monster. If we can only follow the playbook.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23hr ago
If you could also work 40 hours a week to be able to pay for my house that would be great too!
I would remind you that none of your interlocutors AFAICS are advocating that women work full-time jobs as well as do all the domestic work. They are suggesting that women be stay-at-home mums.
The motte is honestly far to serious most of the time. Lighten up people!
It's serious because jokes and sarcasm have a tendency to escalate into yelling matches. This is actually to some extent written into the rules.
SSCReader
2hr ago
Thats because for a few years she was much much more famous than who she was dating. Prior to that there were interminable articles when she was dating Tom Hiddleston, and Harry Styles and Joe Jonas and Calvin Harris etc. Kelce is significantly more famous in the US at least than Matt Healy or Joe Alwyn (accounting for about the last 6 years before Kelce).
Hard to sell a power couple most of your audience couldn't tell who one of the couple is. But a pop star and a sports star? That is simply PR gold, covering multiple demographics. I'm honestly surprised they aren't on even more.
There is a recent trend on TikTok and social media where people are asked if they would rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man. Surprisingly, (or perhaps unsurprisingly to some of you), many people, especially women, are saying they would rather be stuck with a bear than a man. When men are asked this question and the script is flipped to "would you rather your daughter be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man", a lot of men seem to respond with bear rather than a man as well.
Here is a link to a Today.com article about this topic: https://www.today.com/news/bear-or-man-woods-tiktok-trend-rcna149611
It has a live poll, and at the moment the split is 28% with a man, 65% with a bear, and 7% in between.
That's 68% of respondents that would be more comfortable being stuck with a bear than a man. 68%! Unfortunately, there is no breakdown of who the respondents are, the best I could do is look at the average demographics for people who go to Today.com, which is 61.39% female and 38.61% male. Assuming the readers of this article has a similar demographic breakdown as the average person going to the website, and that all female readers chose a bear, that means that a solid chunk of men also are more comfortable being stuck with a bear than another man in the forest.
I found another poll on a women's forum asking the same question - the split there is 15% male, 85% bear at the moment.
So all the evidence seems to point that your average woman would rather be stuck with a bear than a man.
Here are some general arguments for why women are choosing bear over men, trying to not strawman to the best of my ability:
- If a bear attacks you, people will believe you, if a man attacks you, people will not believe you.
- Many women get attacked/assaulted by men every year, bear attacks on humans are extremely rare.
- You don't know if the man will attack you or not, but a bear is predictable.
- Men are scary.
- Bears might not attack you. Bears are more afraid of you than you are of them!
- Men have said negative things to me or about me. A bear won't do that.
The way news and social media are spinning this is that this reveals just how dangerous the world is for women, that women live their day-to-day lives in constant fear of the men around them because of how dangerous the world is to them. Frankly, I cannot relate to this view, perhaps because I am a man, but I also think this view can only develop when society, social media, entertainment, and the news are constantly bombarding you with all these negative notions about men. Your average woman is safer, far more liberated, has more rights, and meets more people than at any point in history (and especially compared to the entire scope of human history), and yet fear and hatred of men are more prevalent than ever before.
If anything, what this question reveals is just how warped women's views of men are and how negatively men are depicted in society.
It also reveals how people poorly use statistics to rationalize their stances. They will look at the raw number of bear attacks to the number of assaults/rape/sexual on women and then assume the two can be directly compared without any adjustment. Oh, only 1 person dies to a black bear each year in the US but but 5000 women are murdered each year, that means I'm 5000 times more likely to be killed if I were in a forest with a man than with a bear. Nearly everyone encounters at least several if not hundreds of men per day, and most people won't even encounter a bear in their lifetime. If women encountered the same number of bears as the same number of random men they encountered in their day-to-day lives, those numbers would be very different.
In reality, women encounter hundreds of men every day and not a single one of them rapes or assaults them. I'm not saying their fears have no basis in reality, or that they don't take actions that increase their safety, but do they have any idea what percentage of men would actually attack them?
The average man is far more likely to be of help if you're stuck in a forest because they would likely help you get out of the forest. No doubt women have received plenty of help for free throughout their lives on the basis of being a woman, and yet they still fear the idea of a man more than a bear. I'm going to try to put some estimates on the likely outcome for each scenario:
- Man helps you: 50% | Bear helps you 0%
- Man attacks/rapes/assaults you: 0.1 - 5% | Bear attacks you: 25%
- If the man chooses to assault you, you die: 10-50% | If the bear chooses to assault you, you die: 95%
You may disagree on the percentage, but even if you were extremely generous to both ends for the other perspective it would be extremely difficult to justify the percent chance of the negative outcome being better for the bear instead of the man. So in all situations, you are far more likely to get a better result with a man than a bear.
It would be interesting to see how people would respond if you asked them would you rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a black man. Would the fear of being thought of as a racist overcome the fear of men?
Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners...
While I expect the answer for Hanania specifically is that he's reaching for whatever weapons are available, there are some very serious problems, here:
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Full-time workers are spending about a third of their waking lives at their workplaces, a sizable portion of their Dunbar-sphere will be made of coworkers, and under current law employers can be liable even for after-hours and off-campus behavior by employees. In many career fields, it's common to spend months with little chance for a social life outside of the office at all. Maybe the 20% of couples just meet up right outside of work, but I'd expect that we're not so lucky, and at least some aren't getting BATNAs.
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Worse, the modern rule isn't just 'don't fuck your employees/coworkers', but against wide breadths of discussion and behavior adjacent to sex or gender stuff. Enforcement is hilariously inconsistent even in places where employers care (and the number of bullshit lawsuits are Known enough that normal people are often hesitant to bring genuine ones), so people can act as though a lot of this stuff is still allowed, but once you get above a certain size of company you start getting insurers/lawyers/politicians peering in and insisting that your workplace complies so that enforcement Won't Be Necessary. As a result, a lot of spaces for vertical transmission of knowledge about matters of sex and romance no longer exist, or have been thoroughly commandeered into a state-favored presentation.
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Avoiding the appearance -- or possibility -- of impropriety has serious and significant costs. I'm not sure how much I trust the specific numbers for 'MeToo made men afraid to mentor women', but the end result of that policy ends up meaning I've got a Fun Ethics Question when my workplace has me share a hotel room with a (afaik straight, not my type) guy. This isn't taking all the fun out of workplace socialization, but it's a big and vast set of constraints, often ones heavily dependent on local social norms.
The end result of a sexless public space for men... well, we have examples from other spheres that had to move sex to fully private spaces, and the alternatives that they've developed kinda work, but they come at tremendous cost. Online dating started out rough, and it's since vanished up its own backside in a mix of borderline fraud and unrealistic standards. Bars and mixers have come coincidentally along with a hefty incidence of alcoholism and other abuses.
For Scott:
When I think of wokeness, I think of the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015... Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but The Closing Of The American Mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.
Again, Hanania might not have an answer because he doesn't care enough to think one necessary, but there's a pretty easy and obvious one.
The Civil Rights Act was intended as written under a hilariously narrow scope for all of its wide claims. That lead to hard cases, and even as late at the 1980s the courts were struggling with matters like whether it was discriminatory if an employer (allegedly) raped an employee, and into the late-90s if it would be discriminatory even if the victim was male. There weren't just hard cases in that they involved sympathetic victims and extremely bad behavior, or even whether they could be arguably within the intent or text of the Civil Rights Act, but because they were also near-universally around things that were separately violations of common state laws that had existed for quite some time, at a time where and when the public was unwilling to allow businesses to wash hands of bad acts by their employees. Government advocates and private lawyers had a pick of both clear violations of the text of this law, or arguable cases for this law that shocked the conscience.
((Scalia delivered Oncale, for example.))
But to do so, the CRA1964 had to establish an industry around fighting racism. The EEOC isn't not five commissioners at a table; it had around 350 employees in the 1960s, which grew into the thousands by the late 1990s. Nor was it alone; other offices downstream of or expanded by the CRA include the Commission on Civil Rights, the (various) Office for Civil Rights, the Office for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, DOE Civil Rights Division, so on. And then around that, built up an industry around selecting and prosecuting private lawsuits, and training people to do this, and training people to train. Now, when the law and interpretation was constrained, and overt discrimination (or bad-for-other-reasons-argued-as-discrimination) cases had the pick of both plaintiff and employer, most cases kept close to the core.
That changed. Some legislation made it easier (eg, the 1991 revision allowed some vaguely-defined set of suits with a theory of discrimination that could not identify specifically discriminatory policies or actions, or to get attorney's fees and thus cases on contingency without proving damages), but the grander problem is that you now had thousands of people who's job was to find discriminatory actors, who were trained to notice the most subtle hints of it, and in no small part who believed in the mission. An increasing number, by the close of the 1990s, had literally never known a world without an EEOC and the norms it wanted to apply across the country; many had been trained by those who worked up through the EEOC's wishcasting of policies it wanted.
That's how you get a lawsuit with an appeal's court opinion released in 2010, about a complaint first pushed in 2006, revolving around the sort of "general civility code" that Oncale specifically disavowed. It's how you get related cases that similarly emphasis a general theory of Bad Person. And it matches the timeline far closer than the standard motions around college campuses or SomethingAwful refuges.
That doesn't make Hanania right -- there's a lot of other stuff in the history, if you poke at it, and that's not to mention that just for this there's a pile of executive orders and regulatory notices and all the social junk around the 2008/2006 elections -- but there's a lot more to this stuff than just looking at the dates laws were implemented.
I do not believe for a single second that anyone in the history of the entire world has ever said "I have a great, on-topic and timely post to share with this reddit community, but my account is too new. I'm going to purchase an account with a pre-existing history so I can share this incredible post with a community that I have no pre-existing engagement with."
Spotting accounts like this harvesting karma is like spotting people who are in the middle of getting their robbery tools ready - the only purpose for what they're doing is so that someone else later on can break the rules while making them so money.
No? The Motte tried to actually avoid breaking the rules of Reddit, and we split because we knew that not actually breaking the rules wasn't going to be a defence against the eye of Sauron making sure that there weren't any visible communities of people talking about how lightning strikes seem to appear before the thunder - or at least that's how I recall it.
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