1: rural Americans are developing ceremonies around revealing the sex of unborn children
2: yeah I could see it
1: by shooting guns at things to make them cinematically explode
2: what
1: …with blue or pink powder mixed into the…
2: wait what
1: …serves to reify sex AND gender roles…
2: Americans just invented a lifestage ritual with guns
The Burger King Kids Club, representing all the ‘90s identities:
Black
Hispanic
Nerd
Tomboy
Disabled
Stacy
Geek
Dog
Technically I think the short butchy-looking guy is the nerd and the guy with the backwards cap is a “coolkid”, which is a distinct genus. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it’s important that we recognize the cultural distinctiveness of coolkids in order to honour their sacrifices during the Cola Wars.
The coolkid was a kind of cyber-Fonz, a
“women want him, men want to be him” archetype as targeted toward twelve-year-old dorks with chunky white sneakers.
It was a laboratory-designed hybrid of nerd and greaser engineered to target the market sector of the former using the charisma and popularity of the latter. Toward the late 90s there was some further crossbreeding with rappers in order to counteract the diminishing relevance of greasers, but in the early 90s that was still too threatening for mainstream white suburbanites with money.
Anyhow, I went looking for some more vintage examples but it’s surprisingly hard to find ones that aren’t later parodies so I’ll just link this fucker.
The drama climaxed with well-known unemployed anti-SJW furry “comedian” 2 Gryphon releasing a video
supporting Furry Raiders’ freedom of speech, which caused even more
drama because he’s got a decent legion of fans still somehow, even
though him and his husband/manager have been transphobic,
anti-polyamory, and tell people who are depressed or disagree with them
to kill themselves.
Some screenshots people dug up of his various comments:
“Hello! Ma Baby” is a Tin Pan Alley song written in 1899 by the songwriting team of Joseph E. Howard and Ida Emerson, known as “Howard and Emerson”.[1] Its subject is a man who has a girlfriend he knows only through the telephone. At the time, telephones were relatively novel, present in fewer than 10% of U.S. households, and this was the first well-known song to refer to the device.[2] Additionally, the word “Hello” itself was primarily associated with telephone use — “Hello Girl” was slang for a telephone operator even through the first world war — though it later became a general greeting for all situations.
When you talk about “Rockefeller Republicans”, I don’t know how many people today even have an idea of who the Rockefeller family were, I’m not sure how much information that name carries.
So, uh, think of the Wayne family. Bruce and his late parents. “Wayne Republicans”. Basically the same thing - urban-based dreams of social uplift through monumental programs overseen by men born into more money than God. Vague social liberalism that disdains bourgeois morality from an aristocratic direction, anti-corruption, pro-Establishment to the extent the Police Commissioner always takes their calls.
That was a big part of the Republicans during the post-War period - the conservatives were just one faction, and often a losing one. Wasn’t just titanic heirs but small businessmen (maybe equivalent city fathers to their small towns, though) and professionals - the Republicans were the party of the postgraduate educated.
The Republicans were opposed to national health care all along, Ronald Reagan dropped a spoken word album about it in 1961. Part of that was green eyeshade deficit hawkery (that was a big part of their brand, the later pivot away from this to tax cutting was understood through the framework of “Two Santa Claus Theory”, which is an actual and very important thing in postwar American politics, “Two Santa Claus Theory”). And part of it was “grr, socialism boo”. But really, a lot of it wasn’t in resistance to what this would mean for taxpayers, or patients, or even the country, so much as doctors, who were a big Republican constituency.
Because doctors were professionals – by guild understandings that predated the United States, they owned their own practices, regulated and judged each other, were granted a degree of authority over those who came to them needing something important they were not qualified to provide themselves. They resisted the thought of themselves as merchants, and loathed the thought of themselves as employees or civil servants.
A lot of the “disappointingly moderate” Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices over the years actually fit fine with the Wayne Republican tradition. Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman on the court, put there as a payoff from Reagan to the moderate faction - the Republicans arguably the feminist party, albeit a “Lean In” type. After all, if you saw a woman in an executive role before the ‘70s, it was probably in the Daughters of the American Revolution or some society gala-type charity NGO. And those “first woman to go to X school”, well, the families that would think to send a daughter off to law or medical school were a subset of the families that would think to send a child at all.
Hell, for a while, the Republicans were even the more abortion-friendly party. The Democrats were the Catholic party after all. The Republicans were the Protestant-as-humanistic-heritage-charity ones, the ones who eugenically spaced their three children two years apart unlike those grubby Papists, the ones with mistresses, the ones with bourgeois life courses to even be diverted from. Not to mention the doctors who cleaned up after amateur abortions or offered black-market ones themselves.
(But not like legalization was priority one, c’mon, Bruce Wayne’s dad was a surgeon, you think he doesn’t know a guy?)
Anyway this was what Goldwater (with his base of ideologues and country & western extractive industry - for most of the 20th century the white military middle-class paradise of California was an anchor of conservative Republicanism) was fighting against, what Reagan (California Über Alles) eventually defeated. The Wayne Republican tradition still stumbled along until let’s say Dole/Kemp ’96, that was the last hurrah and the ticket’s total failure to generate any enthusiasm whatsoever (two years after Newt Gingrich’s Congressional “Republican Revolution” breakthrough with conservative southern and suburban whites) heralded its end.
Well, you could maybe see the administrations of the two Bushes as an intermediate form, an attempt to graft the old money social uplift tradition to the religious base the Republicans cultivated in the 1980s in search of a sort of Christian Democracy. “Thousand Points of Light”, “Compassionate Conservatism”, New World Order and nation-building abroad, the ADA, NCLB, environmental laws and Medicare Part D at home.
But the bipartisan abandonment of Bush the Younger and the coalitional realignments through Obama and Trump seem to have rendered even this a dead end. As things stand in 2017, “progressive social programs paid for by taxation, sensitive to the economic interests of professionals and capital-holders” is thoroughly Democratic territory.
afonsoihenriques asked: There's a gigantic debate to whether Batman is High Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian or Catholic. The consensus seems to be Episcopalian Dad, Catholic Mother.
This is flatly, literally, directly untrue. Tax-funded public libraries and fire companies didn’t catch on until the late 19th century, but society had supported literacy and fire suppression long before that, through indirect subsidy.
Periodical mailing rates at or below cost propped up circulation and made a subscription model viable, and requirements to publish legal notices and records of proceedings ensured that newspapermen and printing houses were kept afloat with a regular supply of business.
Fire companies - well you do sometimes see appropriations for capital outlays like fire engines but for operating expenses many did operate as fire insurance (by government charter), fund themselves through salvage rights, or by lotteries and tontines (by special government approval, compare how many current US states restrict “games of chance” like Bingo to charitable fundraising).
About half the profiles it suggests are bi/pan dudes who are “only looking for attention from cisgendered women” or some similar painful language and I’ve gotten two messages asking me about Zionism from social justice-y dudes who seem to think that any Jew is an envoy of the Israeli government. I feel like OKCupid is a whole lot of ostentatiously making it clear how many degrees you have and how socially aware you are and I don’t really have the patience for that.
Anonymous asked: One day "cucked" will become mainstream slang for any kind of humiliating defeat. "Patriots cuck Ravens in 41-7 blowout." "Kurdish rebels were well and truly cucked by the Turkish Army in a major offensive launched yesterday evening." "We're not just going to beat the Republicans, we're going to completely cuck them."
yo I remember this early ‘90s SF short story, totally a reaction to
the Reagan years, where the President makes a simultaneous simulated
appearance in everyone’s house? And the teenage daughter gets scolded
for Reebok-style pumping up her
tits? And the son calls the President a fascist and makes fun of how
he’s actually in some kinda bacta tank with an interface rod up his ass?
