sighinastorm:

kontextmaschine:

I love that I can jerk off about guys now. That’s just so neat!

Could you not before?

No, I was straight my whole life, I actually tried “bihacking” myself as a teen but while I succeeded in dispelling any aversion to m/m sexuality I ultimately had to accept I was just not into it. But in 2020 I caught Covid before vaccines existed, it spread to my brain and caused enough damage there that my existing personality was no longer viable, and after a period of depersonalization I generated a new one that is different in some major respects, including being bisexual.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

alienpapacy:

oh hey reminder that AT (“Absolute Terror”) fields are themed from the same source as “terror management theory”

reminder that that concept is about the defenses we erect to protect us from awareness of our own inevitable mortality

so the Unit-02/Mass Production Unit fight in End of Evangelion where Asuka goes balls out and channels all her perfectionist neurosis into beating them all before her power supply ends, but then they just rise up again and break through her AT field and impale her mother/avatar/self through the face to be cannibalized

the very moment where their spears, forcing their way through the field, turn into a Lance of Longinus - the very tool by which his inferiors killed God - and she exclaims in astonishment, that second when she realizes that no matter how perfect she is she’ll die anyway

that’s also a metaphor for realizing that no matter how perfect you are you’ll die anyway

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

So anyway, my sense now (since Covid went “long” in my brain, destroyed my personality, and left me to form a new one, from perspective of which I realized the old one had been well-“masked” autistic) is that autism is a matter of the personality constructing itself such that it has no role for pre-rational, pre-human “animal instinct”, and thus must do everything (including further self-construction) by conscious logic alone

(Like, I don’t know how social species without language would organize themselves if they couldn’t parse each others’ feelings directly, and we come from a long line of such species)

This also means that autism and sexuality (the old personality was heterosexual, this one’s bi) aren’t set at birth (and thus conceivably might be externally influencable), but are set prerationally and aren’t consciously (or possibly at all) changeable within an established personality

Also another insight I’ve picked up is the reason for all the transbians and manly-men late-life transitioners and yaoi fujoshi turned trans men is it’s absolutely a Kinsey 0 thing, it’s not so much autogyne/androphilia as a fetish as you only see value in the opposite from your birth sex yet you want to see value in yourself

Since I’ve been bi I’ve absolutely had “gender euphoria” about inhabiting a male body like I didn’t before, and it makes me realize this is what I wanted identifying as a girl (a lesbian, even!) in adolescence in the 90s. If there was some treatment available that made you bi honestly I’d recommend that over gender transition but there isn’t.

prudencepaccard:

kontextmaschine:

slartibartfastibast:

kontextmaschine:

No. Immortality has been “just a few improvements on the current state of the art” away for approximately ever.

Don’t tell the most recent immortality cult about this. It would break their clichéd little hearts.

Yeah the funny thing is how the “state of the art” consistently refers to whatever field’s particularly prominent and cutting-edge at the time.

It’s been alchemy in medieval Europe and ancient China, electricity in Revolutionary France, extremely low-temperature liquid circulation in the rocket age, data storage in the computer age, now it’s biotech because of course it is.

In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography.

“In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography” holy shit this is 100% right

This post was one of the ones that “made me” early on

kontextmaschine:

Proposed: the 1980s farm crisis (which was where family farming finally died in America) at some level fed into the development of anti-abortion activity and identity in the same period, by way of agrarian-magical fertility rites.

It’s a recurring notion among human agricultural societies that the health of the land, and of the crop, rely, through sympathetic magic, on the enactment of human fertility, in ritual or actual childbearing

These fertility cults constitute a folk religion symbiotic with any variety of nominal official religions, if not actively parasitic and tending to supplant

At some fundamental level the failure of the agrarian economy is understood or at least felt as a result of the failure of women to bear children, and for them to return to fertility will renew the golden age

To perform abortions is, essentially, to perform black witchcraft, cursing the crop and ruining the harvest; if a witch has cursed your crop the solution is to kill the witch.

This would explain the origin of Operation Rescue in the mid-1980s, and why it would choose Wichita of all places for its Summer of Mercy, this would explain the geographic distribution of the most intense anti-abortion sentiment and violence, this would explain why if you drive too far into farm country the cultural footprint consists of decaying human settlements and roadside signs condemning abortion or beseeching women to give birth

kontextmaschine:

You know, I think a lot of modern internet culture war shit goes back to the ‘60s-‘70s (counter)cultural refoundation that both sides claim lineage from. ‘cause there’s a sense it was sold as something for everyone - women, racial, and gender/sexual minorities would get their civil rights and inclusionary movements recognized, in return straight white guys got the consensus that Cool People agree: sexualization is Correct, being offended is Incorrect. And there’s a growing sense (from all sides) that the terms have not been upheld.

Sad Puppies and the Hugos. Because that’s what we’re talking about now, apparently.

Both sides claim to be the true heirs of SFF. The antis sniff that it’s obviously them because the genre has always been committed to a progressive vision, especially starting with the ‘60s-'70s and the New Wave.

And that’s not wrong, but there’s a lot of stuff under that aegis. You have Left Hand of Darkness, with LeGuin all “gender fluidity would be great; we could experience our true selves independent of mutilatory social structures, and it would give rise to meaningful new cultural practices oriented around the beauty of self-discovery and self-crafting”.

And then there’s Varley’s Eight Worlds, which is like “Just imagine, if perfect sex changes were consumer services like haircuts, you could experience banging-hot hetero sex from both sides!”

Or Marion Zimmer Bradley all “adding strong female characters to fantasy allows us to escape tedious military epics towards an exploration of the importance of emotional labor, correctly identifying life-creation, not -destruction as the fundamental force of history”.

And meanwhile, “Red Sonja, DAAAAMN. She could force herself on you, how hot is that?”

(Joss Whedon postures like he’s from the Bradley tradition, but he’s toooootaly from the Red Sonja tradition.)

And then you have stuff like Stranger in a Strange Land, which is about interspecies tolerance, peace, love, and understanding, as enabled by author-insert dirty old man Jubal, attended poolside by his harem of buxom secretaries, including the one trained to totally suppress her personality so to better serve.

Like I said, something for everyone.

(Modern equivalent being Kim Stanley Robinson, recurring theme being “If scientists ran the world, there would be peaceful, multicultural, inclusionary socialism. And also collective nude bathing, where young female students seduce their mentors.”)

And you know, I’m still waiting on the WisCon panel on “Recovering the Promise of Teenage Groupies”.

Honestly I’m not much in the fandom these days but I do get Gardner Dozois’ “World’s Best” anthology every year, and I have noticed an increase in stories where nothing happens, but at least it’s brown and queer folks it’s not happening to.

One story a bit back that stuck with me, the message seemed to be “working in a Foxconn plant would suck”, which okay but I couldn’t even tell what was SF about it. Another that started promising - in an Islamic country (bcuz good point, the future won’t just come for white Anglophones), polygamy and semi-arranged marriage coexist with social media (ditto), and men hire Cyranos to polish their appeal, under the pressure that not every man can win even one wife. That’s a solid premise! But once this is established, the protagonist just throws up his hands and experiences a wave of relief as he realizes he could just be gay instead.

And it’s like… wut.jpg

In a proper world an editor would’ve returned that with a note saying “great story, can’t wait to see it when it’s done”. But that’s exactly the issue, isn’t it, that box-ticking and message Correctness are being accepted in lieu of quality.

Actually, you know what that really reminds me of? Christian rock.

I realize too late the funny thing would’ve been to push this post for the Best Related Work Hugo

kontextmaschine:

I don’t think the question of what really actually truly happened in Ferguson - at any stage - is really even all that important, the whole thing was just a pretext anyway.

- = - = -

Benghazi. I swear this loops back in in three paragraphs in a productive way, stick with me. The official Republican complaint about Benghazi - what even was it? Something about not sending backup, or a coverup? Whatever.

But fundamentally it’s a pretext. I mean some people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext. But the actual issue is about the Arab Spring, the actual issue is “Who Lost The Maghreb?”. With the implied answer “the Democrats, by doing that dumb Carter thing where you only support foreign allies who are nice and polite and democratic and don’t repress and torture and massacre their citizens, and then when the ones you abandon fall and the people who replace them - the people who had been being repressed and tortured and massacred - come to power and start doing shit that you hate, that is completely incompatible with the things you most emphatically and sincerely want, go ‘Oh shit, right, that’s why we were supporting that guy in the first place’”.

But the awkward thing, the reason they run with this pretext instead of saying it explicitly (like they did with the original “Who Lost China”), is that going Carter in the Ummah didn’t start with Obama, this started with Bush the Younger and the neoconservatives, and a lot of it that happened under Obama’s watch was under the influence of holdovers from the Bush era - Robert Gates and all that. And in any case unlike Carter, Obama had a second term in which to reverse course himself, and now the military is back running Egypt and Mubarak was just released scot-free.

- = - = -

Ferguson, Mike Brown, all that’s a pretext. And a lot of people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext, but the actual issue is that even as the civil rights movement of the 1950s-70s has been institutionalized as a sacred part of our national history, the actual gains made - “let’s flip the national switch away from repressing black people, and towards helping them” - have been allowed to gradually erode. Because white people found that completely incompatible with the things they most emphatically and sincerely wanted, and remembered why they had the switch on repress in the first place.

And the awkward thing, that makes this difficult to address head-on, is that it was “First Black President” Bill Clinton that blessed the erosion. The Democrats had, since LBJ, been the party of “let’s keep the switch in the helping position”. And between LBJ and Clinton, 1968 to 1992, 8 whole terms, the Democrats only won one term as President. Carter. With the whole Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon tailwind at his back.

And Clinton got elected, and more significantly got re-elected! By taking the Democrats’ hand off the switch. Federal funding for 100,000 more cops. Welfare reform. (Subtextually, federal funding for how many fewer black babies?) School uniforms, which was rinkydink but was the idea was “yes, we are willing to walk back ‘60s-style freedoms in order to further discipline urban black kids - you know, the gangbangers, the crack babies, the superpredators.”

Sister Souljah - I used to wonder what that was even about, I’m no rap genius but I at least recognize big names and I’ve never even heard of her in any other context. Does anyone cite Sister Souljah as a musical influence? But I’ve come to realize that was the point - deliberately picking a fight with someone who didn’t actually matter (and thus bore no cost) - just to make a point, a branding point.

“The Democratic Party: Once Again Willing To Tell Uppity Blacks To Stuff It”

“First Black President” Bill Clinton took the Democrats’ hand off the switch and at least let other hands pull it back to “repress”. And under actual first black President Barack Obama, of the Democratic Party, who owes two elections to being black, and at least one to black votes entirely, putting it back hasn’t even been on the agenda.

And I can see how you’d get upset.

-=-=-

“What we really need is for everyone - black, white, whatever - to respect each other.”

Okay, that’s correct, and that’s impossible, because here’s the thing. When people say they want “respect”, what they mean is they want other people to acknowledge their own conception of the world, where they’re the protagonist, and their story is the main plotline, and everyone else is, I guess, NPCs? Or at least, at least for those other people to not explicitly challenge that conception, to allow them to maintain that fiction to themselves.

Which doesn’t necessarily set you at odds, a good share of NPCs are allies, or questgivers, or shopkeepers, or background characters, and most people prefer the paragon path, and in the normal course of things you get along fine.

But only as long as there’s nothing important at stake that can only be resolved by conflict. If that NPC is the only source for a good drop, and you’re sure they’re not going to be critical to any of your future quests…

“He was murdered for jaywalking!” Even accepting that framing, here’s the thing. Physically being in the street is important. The inciting incident of the Hamburg Massacre, back during Reconstruction, was white guys angry about black guys standing in the road blocking traffic.

Because two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The fundamental example of something that can only be resolved by conflict.

You know, if you look in the right parts of the web, where white people complain about black people in complete, properly spelled, passive-aggressive sentences, one of the most commonly recurring stories is black guys walking, or having a conversation, in the middle of the road, and they can see I’m waiting, and they don’t get out of the way, don’t even make an effort to let me through.

(There’s a tumblr post with half a million notes on it. Right here.

i know i give white people a lot of shit but u guys are really nice. like when the light turns green and there’s a white pedestrian that’s almost across the street u guys always do that jog thing. i know it’s kind of insignificant but i appreciate it white people. u and ur half jog thing.

)

The flip side of that story of course is “what the fuck this is a public road and I’m as much the public as you are so why the hell would you think it’s my duty to stop using it how I want so you can use it how you want, Mr. King Shit of the World?”

(“Mr. King Shit of the World” is the hostile way of saying “protagonist”.)

And you know how much you fucking hate it, how much of a personal affront you take it when NPC pathfinding is so fucked up that they block a door and you can’t get through? (Alternately, when collision detection is set up so that random NPCs can force you out of the way, maybe knock you out of a dialogue tree or screw up a quest?)

Gives you the unshakeable sense that this world was not properly designed for you, for the purpose of furthering your plotline.

And if these issues came up in the last update, you’d want a patch to revert them. You’d go on the devs’ forums and bitch forever, it’s like the devs don’t even care about the players, and you’d threaten to never support anything they did again, take your money and give it to some other devs, and devs, WHERE’S THE FUCKING PATCH.

And the patch, of course, is white supremacy. (It also buffs your class so you’re not grinding for fucking ever just to spend your loot on repairs and potions, and reduces your random encounter rate in safe zones.)

“But this isn’t a game, this is REAL LIFE!”

If you ever end a sentence with “REAL LIFE” in all caps you are being an idiot, I guarantee it. Yeah, the fact that the stakes of this game are real, that’s gonna make you more willing to let things slide? That’s not how people work. Not enough of them to hold a coalition together.

- = - = -

The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight!

The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s.

You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK.

Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics.

Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool.

- = - = -

I grew up in the Huxtable ‘80s and the End of History ‘90s, I kind of expected the two classic nations of America to merge, black into white, just as the white ethnics had the generations before.

Who knows what we’d call the amalgam, maybe still “white” just to play up the ridiculousness of it all, maybe some hyphenated neologism to bridge the gap, like we played up “Anglo-Saxon” to meld the English and German populations that originally formed the white American nation, or coined “Judeo-Christian” later on.

But I’m less and less certain of that. You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they’re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing “PoC”, “Persons of Color”, the idea that there’ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers “NAM”, “Non-Asian Minorities”, suggesting a white/asian against black/brown split.

And then there’s always the possibility that things’ll go the classic American route, where there’s black on one side and everybody else eventually joins “white”, earns a spot specifically defining themselves against “black”. Given a choice between the two, it’s an awfully appealing option.

- = - = -

Race is the fundamental tragedy of American history. A tragedy being where everyone’s understandably, sympathetically human, even (especially) in their failings and shortcomings and trespasses, and the inevitable consequence is suffering.

12/2/2014

kontextmaschine:

Me: Roombas are nice but what I need is a fleet of tiny drones just constantly getting into little corners and getting all the debris. Maybe they could have stations built into the walls where they make new ones out of what they collect.

Also me: Ants. They are called ants, they show up for free, and for some reason you hate them.

Me: Huh.

Friendly reminder that the message of the Crucifixion is that Almighty God made pretense to oppose the Roman Empire, that greatest human power, at the very frontier periphery of their domain, and in response they killed God, publicly, painfully, and humiliatingly, and His followers too, for hundreds of years, until they co-opted and pressed Him into service as an imperial mascot

Cable television was perfect and we ruined it

This frames itself as “there’s so much good stuff I should waaatch! I miss vegging out on crap because it was what’s on!”

And that’s not wrong per se, but I’m thinking beyond that to the effect on the whole-culture that we shared this pre-internet experience in common, of taking in media that was not very optimized for us because it was around, and consequently having a lot of cultural background we were very lightly invested in, in common with the rest of the country, and that enabled us to build increasing elaborations on the culture while maintaining coherence

Like, there might have been a lot of webcomics, but honestly, there were a lot of newspaper comics. Like, on any given day I might read 18 of them cause they were just there. And we’d have that in common, like, not just the good stuff like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, we’d all recognize the Family Circus dotted-line meandering travel paths. And so someone could reference that and we’d all be like “ahh”. Or Dennis the Menace’s slingshot. That Liz Lemon “chocolate, chocolate, chocolate! ACK” cutaway works because everyone, including people who didn’t or still don’t care about the experience of unmarried single women approaching middle age, would have read enough Cathy to instantly place the reference and further, to process the twist, that yeah, it was awfully mannered and ritualized for a “relatable” comic. Garfield without Garfield works because we’ve all seen it with Garfield.

Part of your contemporary social/identity/representation/ownership fights is just rehashing the 80s “Canon Wars”. What is authentic American culture, these works long held up for praise but dismissible as product of an old order and old demographics? These new works by and about the non-dominant that don’t even try and engage with the first tradition?

And that never resolved so much in either direction as all High Culture was deprecated in favor of a new American Canon of Pop Culture. One that could skip normative questions of merit entirely by being a descriptive canon of what the masscult Broadcast Era left us.

Like, The Brady Bunch wasn’t in the canon because it was smart, or well-acted, or well-shot, or had something interesting to say about society in the period where blended families and domestic servants were each at the edges of “normal”. (If it was that, lesser Norman Lear like Maude would be). No, the Brady Bunch was in the canon because it was ubiquitous. Everyone had seen it at some point, if you were Generation X there was a good chance you had seen any given episode at some point.

And this still represented a diversification. This new canon had a lot more “white ethnic” and particularly Jewish pillars, and blacks certainly had more pride of place in 20th century “pop” than “high” culture.

(This leaves Jazz and Blues in the interesting position of having been significantly intellectualized to “fit” the old High Culture paradigm before the new one came in, leaving them somewhat overlooked)

And with this stuff established as the New Authentic America you could appeal to it. With Rock as the National Genre, not just kids’ stuff, you could say that thru Blues and Motown the culture owed black artists more respect. (Where no one really thinks of contemporary American pop as Swedish-indebted).

Feminist and queer scholars pored over Hollywood camp, subtext, old “Pre-Code” work aiming to prove that gender variance and homosexual desire had always been an authentic part of American culture.

(I def. remember on multiple occasions apropos of I forget what the tale of “Fatty” Arbuckle trotted out as a moral condemnation and warning of the unscrupulous young women and tabloid press that for money and attention would peddle baseless rape accusations to a public of vulgar moralists, which today hm)

And past those knock-on effects on social health, the cultural output itself was great. I think that’s the defining factor of Long 90s culture, not only that it built off a shared canon but its creators and audiences recognized it as working from a shared background with traits and forms that could be played with, the meta-awareness of it all.

Xena: Warrior Princess, a syndicated swords-and-sandals actioneer spin-off attracting an ecology of academic conferences and journals by mashing up all of ancient mythology, Mediterranean history, and knowing Hollywood encoded/subtextual queerness.

Kevin Williamson deconstructing and rebuiding the slasher genre with the Scream series. And then, honestly, doing the same with the teen relationship drama with Dawson’s Creek, where the principals were always talking through what their character developments meant, seeing them through a cinematic lens in heavily referential dialogue

Joss Whedon and Rob Thomas (of Veronica Mars) wielding their audience’s genre-savviness against them, setting up scenarios that would “have” to end some predictable way that resolved everything by the conventions of five-act episodic TV with recurring stars and plotlines, and then just not.

In comics hitting earlier in the 80s, Crisis on Infinite Earths as a recognition at the core of the capes-and-powers mainstream that these disposable entertainments had congealed into mythology, proceeding by in-metaverse acknowledgement of extranarrative structure.

In more far-out stuff Morrison, Moore, Gaiman, and Miller going meta as hell, all “what if comics were myths, what if comics were real, what if reality was comics, what if reality was myth.” DKR as “if Batman was real, he’d be pretty fucked up”. Watchmen as “if Golden/Silver/Bronze ages were real, superheroes would be just as fucked up and unmoored by the 80s as we all are”. Sandman was “what if every human story and mythology was part of the same meta shared universe”

Even Star Trek:TNG was an attempt to realize the coherent universe that the fandom had mostly projected onto an original series that were really a stock cast and setting adaptable to filming any SF short story of the week. (Lurking in the background is the 70s-80s realization from Star Wars that coherent universes increase audience stickiness, and are a well you can go back to)

Then Ron Moore took his project of trying to give Star Trek coherence and weight to an even less respectable space opera reboot, and made the fact of an IP-driven rehash (“all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again”) a load-bearing religious theme of eternal recurrence.

Family Guy, the conceit of half the jokes was they invoked 70s-80s pop culture just the right amount of obscure so you constantly surprised yourself that you even knew enough to get them.

SeaLab 2021 repurposing a piece of establishment futurism to underscore how absurd the concept seemed by then despite how nostalgic the aesthetic was, Venture Brothers pastiching postwar boys’ adventure fantasies to highlight their complete disconnect from any actual process of becoming a man.

I miss that, you know. That overlapped/kept going with the Early Internet, so I thought it would continue through and we’d just keep building on it.

I guess that’s what really sticks in the craw re: “cancel culture”, millennial insouciance, wevs. The blithe dismissal of a rich, elaborated, mutually supportive canon with nothing to replace it.

Also realizing you’re now the kind of person to levy that critique at The Youngs, I guess that sticks too.

I dunno, maybe that was because the Early Internet was full of people who got acculturated pre-Internet and carried that with.

Maybe it’s cause I’m not getting particularly acculturated anymore - I accept Pokémon and Spongebob memes and reaction images in their own right, maybe if I saw the underlying properties - or whatever comes after - I’d appreciate them more.

Maybe that shared culture was an artifact of suburban retrenchment and then the Early Internet narrowing the cultural/economic/political American subject to a narrow white UMC and adjacent band and allowing a generation of us to mistake ourselves for America entire

Maybe it was product of a bottlenecking that was still negative on net. Like, basic cable had more channels than the plain 3 network broadcast era, but in 1950 they were competing with like, the bowling league, the pool hall, the Elks club, the Masons, the ladies’ charity, the socialist meeting, the dinner show club, the Mafia nightclub, the gay Mafia nightclub, any of the 4 bars between your work and home, the “whatever’s playing this week” double-feature movie theater…

(And even then, more diversity between examples. If you started going to shows in like “the Washington punk scene” in 1989, that was probably a lot of hardcore if you meant “comma, D.C.” and twee and proto-grunge if you meant “Olympia, comma”)

I dunno. Still, I miss it.

Like, you realize that’s at the core of my thing about Taylor Swift, that she’s a female version of me as a psycho bitch.

Like, she grew up in Southeast Pennsylvania as the child of a professional father that left her as petty gentry, like she fixedly studied the flow of American culture as expressed in places like social media and genres like country. She builds a following by telling this story back to the public in densely self-referential but playful texts, while maintaining a semi-approachable persona on tumblr. She’s very intelligent and a good writer, boosted by the fact that she’s intelligent enough to productively channel a significant pool of her crazy into her work.

Like, I’m bipolar, and in hypomanic periods like now I have a lot of high-quality output at once, and that tends to be the stuff that really makes my reputation. She is clearly Cluster B, or, you know, “psycho bitch”, she has an obsessive need for attention and validation and she’s developed a personality and social skills to serve it, of being a heinous user of other people while maintaining a pose as an innocent put-upon romantic who intensely cares about your interiority.

Which, like, we all know that girl, but she does it at scale, so good at it she has succeeded in capturing a nontrivial share of the entire American culture’s libidinal economy of attention and validation. She is living the dream!

You realize the joke about You Belong With Me and Fifteen is she didn’t have the all-American high school experience of being in the marching band and losing your virginity to a dreamy upperclassman who’s really using you and going to prom with the boy next door.

She home-studied as a Nashville stage kid while plotting an ascent to celebrityhood! Where she lost her virginity to and had her puppy-love relationships with celebrities, the exact guys who are on the covers of magazines for normie all-American high school girls to fantasize about! And she was absolutely using them!

And like, she is not only one of the most famous people in the world, but the highest-paid celebrity at $200mil/yr. And like, her dad was a finance guy, her recording sessions and tours are clearly scheduled as a way to maintain legal residence in no-tax Tennessee, she clearly knows what she’s doing with the money. As you see with her feuding with Spotify and now trying to stir stuff about her master recordings, she is obsessed with maintaining 100% stem-to-stern control of her brand, her funding and publication channels, her empire. She writes and produces stuff for other people now, have you noticed that? And she’s always trying to add other celebrities to her stable. She is possibly the only fully autonomous wildcard acting within American culture.

And God help us, she’s starting to get into politics. I am not joking when I say it is entirely possible she will end up as Empress of America, at least to Eva Peron levels, God help us.

And it’s not like she was disguising the fact that she’s a shapeshifting manipulator who treats other people as things to be used and discarded to feed an obsessive need to be valued that will not be satisfied until she dominates the world while putting up a perfectly calculated facade! She has risen this far by creating and performing works of art that are directly about that in subtext, metatext, AND just straight text!

She is the only writer and public intellectual – and I do first and foremost consider Taylor Swift a writer and public intellectual – that I consider my clear superior, honestly it kind of scares me that only people at my level even seem to notice this. Sady Doyle sure fucking noticed it.

I’ve seen the psycho bitch version of me, she’s on her way to taking over the world, and it’s awesomely terrifying.

Your Granddad On The Internet

I’ve been thinking, as I always am, about the 90s and how we got here from there

And one thing I thought about was the figure we used to have of Your Granddad On The Internet - who would include you and all your brothers and sisters and parents on long e-mail FWD: chains about things that were transparently false on their face, frequently conservative-themed, frequently in ALL CAPS

Because apparently such a critical mass of people on the internet had that exact experience with their exact grandfather that it was a trope. Which brings up two points:

1) “People circulating viral conservative misinformation to their family and friends on the internet” is not a phenomenon of social media, it was there well before

2) Though these people were on the internet, ubiquitous on the internet even, they weren’t of the internet. Little or none of it was made for them and there was a hegemonic Internet Culture that recognized them as outside it.

So what was really going on? Well, let’s try to define the issue by subtraction.

It wasn’t just that he was a granddad - there were STEM professor wizards who’d been on USENET since the early ‘80s, or grey ponytail hippies from The WELL or whatever, and not only were they part of The True Internet, they were its founders.

It wasn’t just that he was out of it, on a tech or social level. Maybe your dad was wasting your inheritance chasing his brilliant day trading hunches, maybe your mom was going on Focus on the Family forums to complain about TV shows treating homosexuality as just another way to live. Probably they were both Eternal September AOLers who would ask you troubleshooting questions revealing an astounding ignorance of how computers work and somehow expect a useful answer that respected that absurd model.

But if they weren’t part of The True Internet they weren’t really rogues against it, at some level they got how you were supposed to interact with the internet - you found the site or community that corresponded to your interest and pursued it there. If anything their posts and e-mails too formally followed letter-writing structure, and they may have made dumb or tautological arguments in support of their points but they had the sense they were supposed to make arguments.

It wasn’t just that he was obnoxious - the notion of the “troll” dates to USENET at least, as someone who says things to get a rise out of people, or to bait them into wasting time rebutting something. To “own” them, basically. And annoying or not, this was accepted as part of what the Internet is, one of the signal features of its culture, really. But even when you weren’t sure if Your Granddad On The Internet actually believed something he sent you or just passed it on to signal what side he was on and how fiercely, he wasn’t trying to “own” you, he REALLY WAS on that side, he wanted you to associate him with that position, and ideally join him.

It was probably at least in part being retired and having spare time and no other social outlet, back in the day going online meant going to a specific piece of furniture in a specific room of your home when no one else was using the computer and spending maybe 3 minutes just getting online, it was something you blocked off time to do. The young generation could just come home from school to the cul-de-sac and get online for lack of anything else to do, the parents’ generation was too busy to have enough uninterrupted time to become Extremely Online?

The thing I’m really wondering about is class. What was the cost of being Online back then? Say a new computer and modem every 4 years at around $2400 (Grandpa sure wasn’t building his own, but then he didn’t have to keep upgrading video cards either), $40 for an ISP, ideally $10 for another phone line? That’s $100/month, or alternately $50/mo and the ability to make $2.5k purchases on demand. And the kind of senior citizen who, in 1998, lived separately from his children, could swing this, would think to swing this, has multiple agemate peers and children’s households who did swing this, was a particular group. “Middle-middle” class AT LEAST and probably higher, probably went to college back when only 10% of people did.

BUT that doesn’t make sense. My theory is that this used to be a more marginal behavior on the internet, but if it’s gotten more common since the late ‘90s I don’t think it’s because the Internet has grown more full of wealthy old patriarchs since.

So instead how about this theory: the internet in general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than we realized, with our American mythology of universal white suburban middle-classness and “global village” Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-class practices were the grandfathers from the “Silent” or “Greatest” generations before the postwar “mass middle class”. Our parents were beavery professionals who settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall, street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where boldness of assertion counted more than patient derivation from shared principles.

And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.

That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”

Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.

So the “government-issued gfs” thing going around got me thinking about Billy Joel’s Allentown again.

Like, the whole conceit of the song is “Our fathers went off to WWII and in return the country moved heaven and earth to make them patriarch-princes, we went off to Vietnam and now we’re treated as disposable.”

(He’s forgetting Korea in between, but that’s OK, everyone does.)

And given the title the focus is on the fall of the unionized Rust Belt heavy industry, but look at this line

met our mothers in the USO
asked them to dance
danced with them slow

this is literally, 100%, a lament for when we had government-provided gfs

The morale-boosting USO, now best known for in-theatre concerts and airport lounges, ran homefront clubs and canteens near soldiers’ postings, and a major role was providing the troops with female attention, recruiting girls from the area to free dances with regularly paid soldiers, hiring staff hostesses whose job was to flirt.

(This in a period where “courtesan” jobs like taxi dancer or cocktail waitress, with a career path culminating in marriage, were more of a thing)

And it wasn’t just the USO. Part of the point of the WAC was to match the supply of single women to the demand of support roles, freeing men for front-line service, part of it was just to have some young women on base. (Here I vaguely gesture at Miss Buxley, General Halftrack’s buxom secretary in Beetle Bailey)

Then there were nurses. Male military nurses in the war had a reputation as twinkle-toes homosexuals, drawn by the constant flow of strong yet vulnerable young men in uniform far from home to comfort. The male ones, of course. (Florence Nightingale’s innovation wasn’t young women going abroad to tend to soldiers – field armies ALWAYS drew trains of camp followers to attend to the men’s needs – but rather an idiom to do it compatible with Victorian sensibilities)

Like, guys, the government very much did try to provide gfs. And it didn’t stop with the war.

There’s this Rosie the Riveter impression that women streamed into factories in WWII but faded at its end, in fact post-war female factory employment was lower than before the buildup. (If women in factories started with WWII, how would you explain the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911?)

And this came amidst government pressure (from an extensive wartime central planning system) to clear out women and make way for returning men. There was a fear the Depression would return (this is why the war economy was never unwound) to a country of battle-hardened men and provoke Communist revolution; it was a high priority to keep men occupied, loyal, and rewarded as patriarchs.

Daniel Moynihan took shit over his famous report for suggesting the solution to the black community’s ills was government-backed patriarchy, Earl Butz took more shit for putting it thus:

“I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.“

For how colorful the language might be, though, that formula – “rising standards of living through improved access to consumer goods and women” was the exact same deal the United States made with its whites, as the basis of the postwar golden age.

I could talk about the postwar expansion of high schools and the creation of the “teenager” and all the courtship stuff there, hosting proms and football games and teaching how to dance in gym and how to wife in Home Ec and showing film strips and Coronet 16mms on how to get a date, but that’s a bit of a stretch. The point remains, though, under the New Deal social compact, from the Depression into the 1970s, the government was ABSOLUTELY in the gf-providing business.

micdotcom:

— Mikki Kendall, Neo-Nazis have threatened CNN employees’ families. Many writers already know what that’s like. (Opinion)

During the American Revolution, printer James Rivington’s Gazette was something of a proto-NY Times: Manhattan-based, but with a broad circulation and the most international coverage in the colonies. It was also the biggest newspaper not to tilt to the rebels, first offering a platform to all factions and then increasingly Loyalist.

This was not universally well-received. Isaac Sears, the privateer-trader who organized the merchants of New York into the Sons of Liberty, pushing back against British regulation which cut into their profits and backed by the threat of mob violence, described Rivington thus:

He would appear as a leading man amongst us, without perceiving that he is enlisted under a party as a tool of the lowest order; a political cracker, sent abroad to alarm and terrify, sure to do mischief to the cause he means to support, and generally finishing his career in an explosion that often bespatters his friends.

I have known a Statute of Lunacy taken out, upon a degree of conduct less exceptionable than this I have described: If the relations of our politician, should find his estate wasted by means of his patriotism, and they choose to improve upon this hint, I assure them, it is heartily at their service.

They did not. (A “Statute of Lunacy” was the period version of involuntary psychiatric commitment)

The Sons of Liberty arranged a series of hanging-in-effigies of Rivington, complete with a poem by revolutionary poet Philip Freneau framed as a satisfying confession before the gallows, and he was arrested by the New York Provincial Congress.

This not availing, an angry mob besieged Rivington and his family, driving them to the safety of a British warship, sacked his office and press, and seized his lead type to be melted down and cast into bullets.

They then faced and wheeled to the left, and marched out of town to the tune of Yankee Doodle. A vast concourse of people assembled at the Coffee House, on their leaving the ground, and gave them three very hearty cheers.

- Connecticut Journal, Nov. 20, 1775

The Wayne Republican Tradition

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.

Something I like to remind people of to highlight the fluidity of history is that well into the 20th century major Anglophone associations with Islam were “decadent sexual deviance, cosmopolitan tolerance, particularly queer-positive”.

Something similar is that if you go back to early 20th century America, stereotypes of Black manhood get a little off. You still see “bestial brute” but you also get dopey, cringing, lackadasical, henpecked, can’t get or keep a woman. (The unifying theme is lack of self-mastery) Like, a cuck. Remember, like, The Blues? And how they’re about how your woman left you, or doesn’t stay true to you, or won’t accept your love? One of the central contentions of the infamous Moynihan Report was that the reason the mid-60s black American community was unhealthy even after the 1950s civil rights movement was that repression had prevented black men from establishing *dominion* - hadn’t been able to earn a breadwinning wage, could by honest toil have less earning power than a sex worker, couldn’t offer black women enough to discipline them by threat of its withdrawal - in short, had prevented them from establishing a healthy, stable patriarchy and reaping its benefits. And one of its central recommendations was to promote this patriarchy.

A lot of 60s-70s black activism invokes “masculinity” in a way that seems incongruous to moderns because it was experienced as not only a valued but long-denied reward but a valuable resource to be deployed in service of the cause.

(Which means that the pre-X Malcolm Little strutting around Harlem in a zoot suit and a guy in a suit and a sandwich board reading “I Am A Man” and Richard Roundtree posing with a leather jacket and a gun while the soundtrack called him a sex machine to all the chicks [Shaft!] were going in on the same political project. The same one as Eldridge Cleaver reclaiming “rapist”. And, I mean, it worked. When’s the last time you associated “black man” and “harmless cuck”? [When’s the last time you did “white man”?])

In a world where Trump was competent rather than a holy fool of a d100 that got nominated because sometimes it came up “America was legitimate even before the ‘60s”, he’d take advantage of this and redo Reagan’s trick of defining himself against the “welfare queen”, updating it to be an overweight 36-something with a government/NPO social service iron triangle job she got by taking community college all through the terminal postgrad level and a sense that men are dismissably wrong for not living up to her.

(The flip side of that is the “woke bro”, the new worthy object of ridicule who tries to define his total identity, including social and sexual capital, around racism-awareness… was already comprehensively roasted 25 years ago in A Different World and School Daze, treatments of pretentious Black yuppie larva)

Of course even within whiteness this stuff’s never been as stable as either the eternal-order conservatives or the ultimate-revolution whigs would have you think. If you’ve ever harkened to the authentic masculinity of the 1950s, or Teddy Roosevelt’s kettlebell strongmen-and-Muscular Christianity, or the ruggedness of Victorian explorers, know that a lot of that stuff was considered self-conscious and borderline pretentious artifice at the time, part not of an organic maleness but deliberate initiatives to promote and assert masculine force in the face of a threateningly feminizing, white-collar, peaceful, touchy-feely world.

So if I told you someone was using century-old hand-crafted artisanal methods to adapt traditional folk tales into a quaintly obsolete art form from the American Golden Age that would sound like the most twee, precious, non-normie thing ever and I just described Disney animation.

Disney’s pretty weird like that. Like, take the parks. They’re combinations of Coney Island and World’s Fairs with this undisguisable midcentury earnestness. These are places that get seriously psyched about the potential of novel transit modalities.

And the theming - “Let’s look forward to the wonderful future of space exploration, celebrate our roots in farm towns and the frontier west, AND enjoy the exotic charm of the South Pacific and Old Dixie!”

THERE IS A PAGEANT WHERE ROBOTS PAY TRIBUTE TO EXECUTIVE-DRIVEN WHIG HISTORY.

Oh. Oh. And. “The rides aren’t very thrilling, but your kids will love the chance to explore the worlds of all their favorite authors - A.A. Milne, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Mark Twain, AND Lewis Carroll - while you’ll marvel at the exquisite background design.”

(Sun-dappled Edwardian neoteny and obsessive set decoration. Wes Anderson makes movies like Walt Disney made parks.)

And we’d recognize this all as a weird thing to exist in 2015 if we weren’t just used to it as the background noise of America. Like, I don’t really watch TV so I don’t see commercials much these days.

Oh man, they’re a trip in their own right if you’ve stopped taking them for granted. Like, “oh hey, for the next 30 seconds some of our best artists are going to use all their techniques and leverage all your emotions and desires and every social value in a masterful, unapologetic, and unforgettable bid for you to give us money, and then everyone will move on and no one will acknowledge this even happened.”

But the Disney World commercials in particular - you notice they don’t really make a case for going to Disney World, or even really explain what Disney World is. Because they’re not pitching Disney World, they’re reminding you of Disney World. It’s not “hey, Disney World is a thing you could go to”, it’s “hey, maybe it’s time for this generation’s pilgrimage”.

Disney’s weird. It’s kind of a company, but also custodian of some of the cultic functions of American culture, something like the priestly colleges of ancient Rome.

Like, they maintain sites of pilgrimage. I’m not saying that as a joke. Back of the envelope calculation, Americans go to Disney parks at a rate 7 times higher than Muslims go to Mecca. (The line between “tourist trap” and “religious site” has always been thin.)

And they’re custodians of the national narrative. Like I’ve said, they pitch “continuity with prewar small town and earlier frontier culture” as a fundamental, almost taken-for-granted aspect of Americanness with a confidence and charm you don’t often see these days. And I mean, hell, the Disney animated canon itself basically is to America what Grimm’s was to Germany.

And as custodians, they curate that narrative - like, we joke about “you know your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess”, and laugh at the people reediting Disney character designs to look like their specific subgroup, but that only works because it’s fucking true, your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess. I’ve worked with Disney Channel casting, and they mix ethnicities with the same care, precision, and scale that Pfizer mixes drugs.

And that robot pageant, the Hall of Presidents? Look at this history. It started out in the ‘70s as a celebration of consensus history and popular triumph, with character actors playing great men and Civil War tensions understood as a challenge to national unity. In 1993 it was reworked by Eric Foner to be narrated by Maya Angelou, use “regular people” unknowns to portray more vulnerable takes on historic figures and re-frame the Civil War in terms of slavery as a moral challenge. In 2009 they redid it again, mostly keeping the changes but bringing back some of the old Hollywood charm and putting Morgan Freeman as the voice of civic authority.

And like, as a representation of how America understands itself and its history, correct. That is absolutely, in every way, 100% correct.

(In the other direction, Walt Disney originally wanted to call it “One Nation Under God”, which yikes)

They say American copyright terms keep getting extended under pressure from Disney who wants to keep hold of all their founding properties, I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be less of a corruption of the civic system to just carve out special protections for Disney in recognition of their distinct role in America.

But… at the end of the day, it’s all just a strategy to maximize profits.

I used to be a lot more libertarian than I am now, and one of their tribal boogiemen, the idea of a “Ministry of Culture” - a government that sees the national culture as its domain, to shape as it will, “as it will” meaning as it always does with governments “through the instrument of bureaucracy” - that still rankles.

But what’s the alternative, though? You think about it and you realize it’s this - the national mythos rests in the hands of a publicly traded corporation.

(And then you maybe start to appreciate WHY having your king as the head of your church once made sense as a symbol of liberty and self-determination.)

((And start to recall the CIA going around giving grants to the avant-garde with a certain fondness.))

We live in the capitalpunk AU.

kontextmaschine:

I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU

This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.

Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.

When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.

So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.

The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.

Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, '60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.

And it’s not like oooo, this was acceptable once upon a time, it’s that when I was growing up, this was the official line of media social liberalism. Who was that anon asking about the '90s? In the '90s, liberal Hollywood was putting out “message movies” the messages of which were America Is Finally Free, Thanks To Brave Heroes Like Larry Flynt Depicting Women As Violently Degraded Sex Objects, And Thank God For His Heirs Like Howard Stern, Still Fighting The Good Fight.

If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.

Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.

I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.

If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy” was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.

Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.

If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.

Something for Everyone

You know, I think a lot of modern internet culture war shit goes back to the ‘60s-‘70s (counter)cultural refoundation that both sides claim lineage from. ‘cause there’s a sense it was sold as something for everyone - women, racial, and gender/sexual minorities would get their civil rights and inclusionary movements recognized, in return straight white guys got the consensus that Cool People agree: sexualization is Correct, being offended is Incorrect. And there’s a growing sense (from all sides) that the terms have not been upheld.

Sad Puppies and the Hugos. Because that’s what we’re talking about now, apparently.

Both sides claim to be the true heirs of SFF. The antis sniff that it’s obviously them because the genre has always been committed to a progressive vision, especially starting with the '60s-'70s and the New Wave.

And that’s not wrong, but there’s a lot of stuff under that aegis. You have Left Hand of Darkness, with LeGuin all “gender fluidity would be great; we could experience our true selves independent of mutilatory social structures, and it would give rise to meaningful new cultural practices oriented around the beauty of self-discovery and self-crafting”.

And then there’s Varley’s Eight Worlds, which is like “Just imagine, if perfect sex changes were consumer services like haircuts, you could experience banging-hot hetero sex from both sides!”

Or Marion Zimmer Bradley all “adding strong female characters to fantasy allows us to escape tedious military epics towards an exploration of the importance of emotional labor, correctly identifying life-creation, not -destruction as the fundamental force of history”.

And meanwhile, “Red Sonja, DAAAAMN. She could force herself on you, how hot is that?”

(Joss Whedon postures like he’s from the Bradley tradition, but he’s toooootaly from the Red Sonja tradition.)

And then you have stuff like Stranger in a Strange Land, which is about interspecies tolerance, peace, love, and understanding, as enabled by author-insert dirty old man Jubal, attended poolside by his harem of buxom secretaries, including the one trained to totally suppress her personality so to better serve.

Like I said, something for everyone.

(Modern equivalent being Kim Stanley Robinson, recurring theme being “If scientists ran the world, there would be peaceful, multicultural, inclusionary socialism. And also collective nude bathing, where young female students seduce their mentors.”)

And you know, I’m still waiting on the WisCon panel on “Recovering the Promise of Teenage Groupies”.

Honestly I’m not much in the fandom these days but I do get Gardner Dozois’ “World’s Best” anthology every year, and I have noticed an increase in stories where nothing happens, but at least it’s brown and queer folks it’s not happening to.

One story a bit back that stuck with me, the message seemed to be “working in a Foxconn plant would suck”, which okay but I couldn’t even tell what was SF about it. Another that started promising - in an Islamic country (bcuz good point, the future won’t just come for white Anglophones), polygamy and semi-arranged marriage coexist with social media (ditto), and men hire Cyranos to polish their appeal, under the pressure that not every man can win even one wife. That’s a solid premise! But once this is established, the protagonist just throws up his hands and experiences a wave of relief as he realizes he could just be gay instead.

And it’s like… wut.jpg

In a proper world an editor would’ve returned that with a note saying “great story, can’t wait to see it when it’s done”. But that’s exactly the issue, isn’t it, that box-ticking and message Correctness are being accepted in lieu of quality.

Actually, you know what that really reminds me of? Christian rock.

Fraternal organizations. The Elks, the Moose, the Oddfellows, all that. Considered kind of obsolete in modern life, right?

Used to have an economic “function” - sufficiently large risk pools for the procurement of life, health, unemployment, and disability insurance, but were later displaced in that role by governments, employers, and unions.

You don’t see much of them anymore. There’s still the American Legion and VFW, but they draft off the military services’ collective identity formation (initiation rituals, shared experiences, collectively sung songs) rather than doing their own in-house.

But, you know, there’s potential there. Fraternal organizations can pull off some serious shit. You get a bunch of guys drinking and singing songs together, throw in some woo-woo mystic aesthetics, add a hierarchy with absurdly pompous titles and you get… the Nazi Party. (Beer Hall Putsch, and all that.)

Or the Freemasons. (Who no, don’t rule the world, but have been pretty important to several national revolutions.)

Or the Ku Klux Klan.

It’s interesting to see particularly where each particular one lifts their goofy aesthetic from. College fraternities invoke Greece, or at least the platonic Greece of Platonic Greece. I guess that makes sense for the intersection of academics, drunkenness, and homoeroticism, but other than the three letters and the occasional toga party they don’t push that too hard and their everyday mytho-aesthetic is pretty much civic Americanism - leaders are called “president”, “secretary”, “treasurer”, etc.

The Nazis were all into German palingenesis so obviously they went heavy on the historic Germanicness as a theme, something I didn’t pick up on until it was explained to me was that a lot of their everyday terms - gau, gefolgschaft, etc. - would have come across as archaic and medieval even by the standards of a culture that had been a feudal monarchy in living memory. The American equivalent would be like if the government was conquered by renn faire types who started giving things goofy-ass D&D names.

EXCEPT OH FUCKING WAIT, THAT’S THE KU KLUX KLAN. Wizards and Dragons and Realms and Provinces and Giants and Cyclopses and Goblins. The Klan was also really into being 2spooky4u. Like, as I write this, it is Frightful PM on the Wailing Deadly day of the Sorrowful month, as the Kalendar reckons it. But then that was always the schtick: “We’re knights! Or are we… ghosts?! ~oooOoOoOOOOoOoOooo~”

And I mean “really, who could take this seriously?” Well, tumblr, who could take your whole Halloween spoopy Skeleton War shit seriously? The answer is no one, so you don’t, but you keep doing it anyway, and so did they.

The Freemasons were weeaboos! I mean not as we know it now, Masonry predates the opening of Japan and subsequent Japonisme, but it’s the same thing, a goofy appropriation of an idealized version of the exotic Orient, using the then furthest-east culture they were in contact with, the Ottoman empire. There was some Moorish stuff too, so maybe the theme should be “Mediterranean Islam”. Temples and fez-wearing Shriners (ahem, “the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine”) and the Moorish Rite. THE FREEMASONS WERE ISLAMABOOS.

(Actually, you know what more recent organization has combined fraternal socialization, revolutionary potential, and a cod-Islamic theme? The Nation of Islam.)

On the one hand, fraternal organizations have been able to wage campaigns of violent subversion capable of overthrowing or supplanting governments; on the other they have always been total fucking nerds getting drunk and geeking out, the two are in no way exclusive.