you've been predicting this cultural wave is going to break any minute for like three or four years now
Yes, three or four years ago I noticed it wasn’t gaining ground anymore, just holding it at the expense of building up liabilities, and just now as the wave breaks they’re coming due, holding actions don’t work anymore and it’s losing ground.
When the thing driving you to this is realizing that it doesn’t work anymore…
If you’d told me the whole wave since 2010 was going to finally break around now that would’ve seemed right and “the issue in question will be youth transition” is believable
Yes this is exactly what I wanted: a fucking brand account making people ask them about nfts so they can answer them in character as the fucking Boss Baby
The North Face and Columbia took technical outdoor clothing to the masses; 5.11 is attempting to do the same for tactical clothing, including products designed to help people pull out their concealed handguns with ease. The company started by focusing on pocket-laden pants, but has expanded into boots, shorts, and shirts, as well as all sorts of other clothes, along with bags, accessories, and body armor. It offers almost anything a police officer or member of the military—or someone who simply fetishizes them—could want. Its “Active Shooter Bag,” which the company bills as “a quick, convenient, and modular carryall sized for two AR magazines,” for instance, is a product that “keeps you locked and loaded in any situation.”
tiktok people decided to use the medium to pretty much just make discourse posts but in the form of videos with white text that they dance around and point to and here we have a screenshot of just the text minus the person, bringing it back around full circle to a regular post. I love it.
So, it’s looking like this trans wave might have finally peaked, stopped claiming new ground and started to get rolled back
Remember in the ‘70s you had Renee Richards and Wendy Carlos and that whole wave
And by my beloved '90s we had uh, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs and the villain in Ace Ventura and I guess “this chick’s got a dick!” moments in The Crying Game and Trainspotting? And in real life, Hugh Grant getting blown by a Thai ladyboy hooker?
In between that was the one thing the 80s radfem/socon alliance actually got, “morally mandated” transition out of the realm of possibility, unfunded elective bottom surgery gated behind an intense passing-oriented psychotherapy program
People note that pointedly anti-trans legislation is coming simultaneous with the collapse of an increasingly brittle and overstretched pro-trans consensus in “mainstream” media culture
Which yeah, that’s the risk of such a forward-leaning pose, demanding 100% or nothing, claiming new ground before you’ve secured your last gains.
In the late '70s Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who were not only the President and -to-be but also icons of Evangelicalism and Conservativism, came out against the antigay politics of the Briggs Initiative. But then the weather changed.
Going on defense you could probably secure the switch to an informed consent hormones-only model. Transing clinics (there’s one down the street!) will be around and taken somewhat more seriously than marijuana card clinics. States can make up their own gender ID rules and they’re portable. Youth stuff goes state by state, might loosen up over 15 years if it normalizes. (“But then we’d sacrifice a whole generation to—” yes. We would.)
Going on defense, of course, meaning not putting forth any new claims and allowing some of the more over-their-skis ones to lapse, leaving anyone trying to retain them to wither on the vine
But in this peer-to-peer ideological system I don’t see any supervening leadership that could make that turn, and I have a hard time picturing someone drawing enough charismatic power/clout from pitching it to implement it, at least until you’re clearly staring down the barrel of something worse
The people who tried to purge Substack, thought it was a good thing to put with-me-or-against-me stakes in the 2021 media economy, they’re not there yet
Weird seeing stuff from the Echo Park clearance from like, a block from where I used to live on Bonnie Brae to a block from where my dojo was on Sunset
Guy posting about how a police baton broke his arm and I’m thinking about how I was specifically trained to block club strikes barehanded just down the street
Portland Left Twitter is going wild because last night on local civic group public livestream press conference someone finally publicly made the point to the mayor they all wanted to, which was “we will continue this mayhem until you finally yield to what we’ve been demanding”
In a variety of cultural and social policy arenas noticing a new trifurcation of meta-types into self-enclosed Right, Liberal, and Left, and as of this week the Liberals see no need to indulge the Left and just eye-rolls at them
Which is the street action in Portland, which the good Liberals are over now. It’s Substack which is like yeah, not constrained towards Left young journalisticness these Liberals are probably gonna make us bank as the 80s TNR-equivalent that narrates and legitimates a stepback! It is Gen X looking at youth Purity/Harm culture and saying “bless your heart, that’s retarded”
Positive sign. The overall sense is “Bring Back The ‘90s” (in much the way the '80s reflected a direct attempt to bring back the '50s)
Nick Fuentes is just if Richard Spencer had a clue what to do after Trump got elected. Before Trump showed up the Spencer plan was open a DC policy shop to give reports your King/Gosar types could quote into the record, and in Montana focus on accepting unions as guardians of the white working man.
Then once Trump in his Mr. Magoo fashion made the turn and his immediate cause was obviated it was like Heil Trump, I know Tila Tequila, let’s unite the boneheads and Pepes to ???
Whereas “fully capture a party by exciting the young cadre and contesting establishment appeals” makes sense?
