Awed to see “Amanda Marcotte sucks, MTV’s Jackass rules” somehow become a universal healthcare talking point

Love to all the Bernie Bros going wild on Twitter; you’re not actually affecting the election (and ignore any concern trolls to the contrary) but your efforts have served, in the most important discursive terrain, to tie the most viable variant of the new cultural conservatism (“let’s just go back to the golden age”, which has been upgraded to a sunny retrospective take on the 90s) to the inevitable leftward economic swing.

The nation is in your debt.

Bless the Harts seems to be aiming at the same “red state animation” target as King of the Hill

w/r/t the Shane Gillis thing, Nick Mullen broke character to say “you wokesters should be terrified, that they wanted a conservative star in the first place shows that you were a market bubble and the market’s starting to correct itself” and he’s right

Shane Gillis Is Just the Beginning

Okay, Zoe Quinn trying to start a movement by encouraging people to post stories of abusers using the dev community as a mask for exploitative relationships is funny to begin with

But having it immediately blow back on her performative male feminist allies Wile E. Coyote style is just… ::chef kiss::

I’ve said this before, but what everyone misses about 4chan ideology is that all the way through - the self-conception as proper owners of the internet; the ideal of the NEET pursuing his hobbies and conferring with his peers vs. the gelded “wagecuck” unthinkingly taking cues from the prolefeed; the hatred for common vulgarity alongside open decadent depravity – it represents an aristocratic conservatism

>  [same “less anger toward the left” anon] Even more speculatively, it seems like you’re less sympathetic toward the Right than you were, set, a year or so ago, less in the sense that you now back the actual agenda of the Left than that you briefly expected that the Right’s pushback would take a form more compatible with your own preferences than it has. Any of this onto something? [2/2]

You’re seeing something real but you’re not seeing it right.

If I’m more sanguine about the culture wars lately it’s because the wave already broke. In 2015 I was saying the other side walked off a cliff and just hadn’t looked down yet, well by now they’ve looked down.

And on the one hand meep meep, motherfucker, on the other hand this means the dumbest and gone-too-far stuff is gonna be coming in the other direction now as the backlash sets in.

Like, what’s the last time the cultural “left” tried to sieze new territory, and not just struggle to hold the line? MeToo? At the time I called it as feminism biting the hand that fed/off more than it could chew, and yeah, by all reports the “targets” there are being welcomed back and people notice that they were still viable all along, meanwhile the supporters are getting blackballed as risks.

(Meanwhile, the Republican supremes are expected to rule that no, protections against sex discrimination do not just imply protections for sexual/gender minorities, and wouldn’t you know it most “sexual harassment” law is leveraged out from similar implications.)

The next step in the culture war is just to make people realize this is already happening, the woke order’s plummeting, and all the stuff that’s been growing underground poised to benefit from their fall is going the other way.

I point out Stupidpol stuff to draw attention to how the new young avant garde in pretty much every subculture - even explicitly leftist ones - is increasingly anti-woke, and the invention of a typology - “radlib”, “wokescold” – by which their rivals don’t even have to be refuted, just identified, mocked, and dismissed.

I point out how all the woke take factories are exhausting their funders’ patience, pivoting to video and selling out to Bryan Goldberg (who made his name by founding a women’s vertical that wasn’t shrill feminist, an online Cosmo when everyone was trying to build an online Sassy), and how meanwhile the hot rising thing is a bro site with an editorial line somewhere between rape culture-tolerant and -positive.

I point out how not so much opposed but underneath consent culture there’s a flourishing ecosystem of Fsub kink as lifestyle (which was the other side in the ‘80s feminist sex wars, after all) and the rising smartphone generation grew up with “catering to the male pornographic gaze” as a popular hobby.

And I’m not just wishcasting here, even the perceptive people on the “other side” have noticed this – Sady Doyle’s looking back over ’00-’10s internet feminism and wondering if it even changed anything deeper than superficial fashion that will cycle back before too long (subtext here is she was a half-step behind the Marcotte/Valenti/McEwan coterie and tbh a better writer/thinker/intersectionalist but now she’s in upstate New York scrambling for enough child care to crank out work for lower-and-lower-profile outlets; if you’ve read her work long enough you know she’s acutely aware of how in the 80s second-wave feminism and radical feminists weren’t so much defeated as just… gave up on and left to wither.)

Like, “this too shall pass”, y’know? It’s passing. Which doesn’t mean the stuff that takes it down or replaces it won’t be dumb and fucked up. To the extent I had identified with the “cultural left” to begin with it was cause I came of age in the 90s after the ‘80s backlash had run through and the reigning “cultural right” was pretty dumb and fucked up. Weirdly sour in a sunny time, in retrospect I realize they were trying to drive a stake through the ‘70s so hard it never got up again and that excess probably did buy me some more time of comfort, but could get counterproductive too, you know if these are the guys trying to maintain their hegemony through suppressing left voices…

Plus honestly yeah I was invested in the fun-for-all ideal of Horny 90s Secular Culture as it portrayed itself, and if more modern revelations are that it was premised on hierarchies of power… Well, at some level I’m “ohhh, hierarchies of power, so THAT’S how you create the good times, they should’ve told us, no wonder we’ve been fucking it up”. But I’m still eagerly receptive to plans to bring things closer to the ideal, or at least avoid some of the worst failure modes and rig the hierarchies right by going in eyes-open.

I think it’s a maneuver like “oh, you want to get away clean now *you* have to spend your energy and cultural capital to beat this”

(and no “bad faith” or “sealioning” or buzzwords that mean “nuh-UH, these rules are for you not us”)

I mean do you know how anxious we are for a chance to triangulate against fucking Mike Cernovich and be on your side again?

On the one hand I’m kind of surprised the New Yorker would run a 1984 of the viper cult

On the other hand it’s within the bounds of reason Zadie Smith would write a 1984 of the viper cult, and given that, the New Yorker is where it would run

Today, as many white millennials support the Democrats as the Republicans (each 39%). Just two years ago, Democrats still had a 14% lead over Republicans among white millennials. The trends are even more pronounced among white male millennials. Today, this group favors the Republicans over the Democrats by a staggering 11%. In 2016, Democrats led white male millennials by 12%.

Under-the-radar culture war stories these days

Barstool Sports (like, early ‘00s frontpage Something Awful as Modern Drunkard, plus RealFratMove plus Maxim plus Howard Stern plus the hockey parts of Kevin Smith movies, but with Twitter) eating ESPN’s lunch

A fight between overlooked left factions: envirohippies vs. disablity-cuddlers over plastic straws in restaurants

I’ve noticed this too. Culture war brides?

(They’re not imagining being 40, they’re imagining being 8 years on from their first kid)

first side that works up an acceptable idiom for “the thing about teenage girls is they’re fuckable” again wins the culture war

Something flipped in establishment media this week

The WHCD thing, the revelation major studios are pushing explicitly right-cultural media, NBC fighting back all “My hope is this is the moment that defuses #MeToo” over Brokaw, whatever’s up with MAGA Kanye, Douthat in the NYT saying the incels have a legitimate claim under modern rules

All of it signaling to anyone else that backlash is on the mainstream menu

NYMag/Tablet/Atlantic/NYTOpinion seem to have had a sense they need to step in to rescue the culture, this civic sense being tainted by dream of individual glory at the usual rate, more and more jumping on the bandwagon all the time

Now what I’m suspicious might be a cause, Gawker’s Children have been pushing newsmedia unionization for the last year or two, a few successes but even then the bossmen have pushed back more than you’d expect from the brands (exactly as much as you’d expect from bossmen)

But the unions of and by and for the kind of writers that write for Vox and Splinter and etc. have signaled that they want to aggressively move to control hiring and editorial lines, and also the uses to which they should be put (diversity! and fighting the patriarchy!, respectively!)

Which is to say they openly did the work of aligning the media capitalholders that’d been propping them up (since slate and Salon in the ‘90s, basically no online journalism makes money, it all runs off VC) with the reactionary grumbling audiences. In the face of industry contraction (coming after the Facebook realgorithmization, so many “pivot to video” failures, Buzzfeed missing revenue targets) they wrote their own damn Powell Memorandum, ain’t that something.

So this is something ridiculous I’m hearing: the CBS sitcom Kevin Can Wait, with Kevin “the guy from King of Queens” James?

That for Season One they had two separate writer rooms, one anti-Trump and one pro-Trump. For Season Two they fired the anti-Trumpers. Thoughts:

1) if true, that’s at least the second (Roseanne) network multi-camera sitcom explicitly crafted for Trumpist appeal

2) it’s a show about a retired cop on Long Island, how the hell would an anti-Trump version even work?

fakehistory:

Excerpt from the Disputations Against Scholastic Theology (1517)

Dave Chappelle, huh?

See, that’s why you hold the line, you gotta trust that other people also know what they’re doing and your reserves know how to counterattack

Turning “consequences”, “accountability”, and “basic human decency” into partisan clichés was a terrible idea, they all wore through within months.

quoms:

Up through yesterday, Geraldo didn’t have much to do with the #MeToo movement until he waded unwisely into the conversation with a Streisand Effect tweet that Matt Lauer’s sexual misconduct-related dismissal from NBC’s Today was “sad” because “news is a flirty business & it seems like the current epidemic of #SexHarassmentAllegations may be criminalizing courtship & conflating it w predation.”

Not satisfied with that, the Fox News host continued. “#SexHarassment,” he said, “should be confined to situations where superior imposes himself on subordinate who feels unable to complain because of power of perp or feared consequences to victim’s employment.”

Rivera later apologized, but not before drawing attention to his own past. Internet users dredged up a clip of Bette Midler describing an assault at the hand(s) of Rivera, and today, the performer tweeted the clip herself, along with the hashtag #MeToo. She publicly stated that Rivera hasn’t apologized to her for the incident.

The Midler clip led me down an internet rabbit hole that led to a 1991 Washington Post book review written by, coincidentally, my now-colleague Lloyd Grove. Grove wasn’t a fan of Rivera’s memoirs, which was unfortunately titled Exposing Myself. His review read as if Rivera had penned the definitive work on how men behave inappropriately in the workplace under the guise of courtship.

Naturally, I had to read it.

serious trigger warning for almost every possible form of sexual harassment/assault, holy shit

also @kontextmaschine​ this seems like fuel for your ‘90s tag

pretty much

kontextmaschine:

Friendly reminder that in the ‘90s when the Republicans came after President Bill Clinton over workplace sex with his just-out-of-college intern, amidst multiple accusations of pressing himself on employees and low-status women and rumors of using the Arkansas State Police to advance and cover up his sexual pursuits, the understanding from the left was these wrinkled-up prudes “chasing the Clenis” constituted an attempt to “repeal the Sexual Revolution” that the socially liberalizing post-‘60s electorate properly rejected

@dagny-hashtaggart said: “ The president should be setting some sort of example in the workplace…That’s all I’m talking about.” Should I read this as suggesting that failing to do so (in what was to all appearances a consensual relationship, albeit one with sketchy power dynamics) should be grounds for impeachment?

You should read it as suggesting that’s the hegemonic ideology of “the cultural left” as constituted today even as it more explicitly roots itself in the ‘60s revolutions, marking a departure from the previous “Something for Everyone” narrative and the coalition it serviced!