SSCReader
1d ago
But also did appear as Lily Savage on Breakfast programs and primetime television shows. Pantomime humor from Panto dames is built heavily on innuendo and adult jokes that go over children's heads, but can entertain their parents. Lily Savage was very close to this, just dialled up a notch. Seriously go on Youtube and pull up Blankety Blank which was a primetime show. They call it risque but it's just the same kind of innuendo you would find in panto. Now it is on a spectrum and Savage is more crude than a panto dame at his worst, but he settled into a fairly generic prime time career.
Lily Savage's prime time persona was fairly tame. Whether the actor playing the character is gay or not has no real impact on what the character said. Indeed O'Grady himself was much tamer than Savage in his TV persona once he switched out. He himself made the point he only dressed as a woman for money, just like Humphries et al.
SSCReader
1d ago
Lily Savage (Paul O'Grady) was a pretty standard Drag Queen until they broke out to become a prime time TV star with what was essentially a panto dame performance. So some crossover at least. I'd say panto dames certainly used to be what I would call a sub culture, I don't think it is as big a thing as it used to be though.
Drag brunches tend to be PG (with some light innuendo) and remind me pretty heavily of panto dame performances, which is what made me think of it.
SSCReader
1d ago
Pantomime dames in the UK/Australia, which leads into crossdressimg comedians/entertainers like Dame Edna Everage and Mrs Brown?
SSCReader
3d ago
Ahh no harm at all done, it's hard enough keeping track of peoples politics let alone their personal histories!
SSCReader
3d ago
Not unless we're counting being a senior civil servant as a disgusting job!
I have slaughtered and cleaned animals on my grandfathers farm and mucked out cowsheds and unblocked septic tanks and the like but I was never paid for that. Just part of my upbringing with a mostly rural family.
SSCReader
14d ago
After all, the first question St Peter asks you is "What was your GDP?"
Milton Friedman outcompeted St Peter in efficiency, by leveraging capitalist incentives, now like entering New Vegas you need to have proof of wealth. Turns out you CAN take it with you.
SSCReader
22d ago
We should write in ways that do not feed the wolf of anger, as the old parable goes. We should write such that others are not explicitly excluded. But there's no way to avoid all the possible tripwires.
Nope, but we can get most of them. It's not that difficult, I don't think. And the main issue that gets people banned is they don't even try as far as I can see. It's just the same repetitive reflexive boo outgroup stuff.
But I disagree above, we can in fact overcome those gulfs. And in fact if you find it makes you resentful that is (in my opinion) part of the problem. It doesn't make me resentful when I have to rephrase something so I don't offend a Christian or a white nationalist. Why should it? I WANT them to read and engage. I want to hear from them, so spending a bit of time to hopefully increase their engagement is a positive thing in my mind.
Letting go of all of the emotional baggage of what people do outside of this space, is I think key. Treat it as its own world. Even if 99.9% of gay librarians or white nationalists would just yell or seethe, we are writing for those who come here and want to engage. Don't resent rewriting your words, that's the whole point of the space. See how well you can predict those you disagree with, if you have a good understanding of them, then you should be able to do well in reducing heat, if you don't, then that's the other thing this space is for!
I've been here and back when we were on Reddit for years, and I don't think I have ever even picked up a mod warning let alone a ban. I am sure I will at some point, but avoiding the most obvious boo outgroup stuff, and wording that is likely to enrage or annoy your opponents is fairly easy. You just have to want to spend the time and energy to do it. Regardless of (to go back to my original point) how much you hate or despise or think they will be ungrateful, or wouldn't do the same in reverse. Do it for you, not for them. Because you want the conversation that might result. Those moments when you can for a second connect with someone you think is entirely wrong about the world and might even be harming it, when you can see through their eyes for just a second. Even if they never see through yours.
What we do here has no impact on the outcome of the culture war, there are no stakes. It's just for the love of the game.
SSCReader
23d ago
Several years experience and the fact we're on our... third? fourth? retreat location is indicative that there are, in fact, absolutely zero ways to write complaints in a way a progressive gay librarian would want to engage with.
That does not follow. Just because there would not be many doesn't mean there are none. We are all unusual here in one way or another. After all I consider myself on the left and I am here. And we have had people farther to the left of me. Most white nationalists probably don't want to post here either. And very few Red Tribe normie conservatives. But we should want them as well.
And if that means hewing close to our mission statement and "writing as if everyone else is reading and we want them to be included." then I am more than happy to do it.
Otherwise we aren't doing anything here we couldn't do on Red State or Truth Social.
SSCReader
27d ago
Yeah, and it is a useful distinction, even if its not a perfect set of descriptors. Which is why I often try and oush back towards Scott's formulation. Even if that is a losing battle.
And there's nothing wrong with being a Blue Tribe conservative, but in general that conservatism is not exactky like Red Tribe conservatism so we're missing a pretty important part of America's "voice".
SSCReader
27d ago
Right, one of the issues with keeping the Red Tribe going is they are (or were) supporters of their kids going to college. I've mentioned before how miners and steel workers in small town America don't necessarily want their kids to do those jobs because they know how dangerous and back breaking they can be. Now I think they're more interested in the perceived benefits of getting a degree (better, easier, less body destroying jobs) but they are to sn extent the architect of their own destruction, by buying into that part of the American dream. If you send your kids off to college in bigger towns and cities, some of them will get assimilated, and stay and some will choose to stay for those better jobs. So even before neoliberalism crushed the steel and mining sectors, they were on a slow steady road to decline.
SSCReader
28d ago
Your corner (and in fact many or most corners) may be reasonable but a large enough chunk of it is not reasonable that it causes real problems and for those of us who have seen it - .....well burning everything to the ground doesn't sound terribly unreasonable.
That's fair! But if it is many or most corners that are reasonable, then presumably it makes sense for people in those corners to oppose you burning down the whole thing, even if they don't think you should be treated the way you are.
If it's 80% bad and 20% good that is one thing overall but if it is 20% bad and 80% good then that is entirely another. Whether you're in the bad or good part it's hard to tell which overall world we are actually living in.
SSCReader
28d ago
If we're going by this analogy, I'd say it's far more accurate to say that wokeness is a sort of autoimmune disease on the antibody
Sure I can see that as being a workable analogy. We could probably argue about how much is positive or negative, but I can absolutely see there are at least some negative parts. A mutation of the antibodies which means it attacks not only what it is supposed to attack but also other parts of the body maybe.
Like, even if you have an auto-immune disease, your immune system is still doing some useful things, it's just also attacking your gut or brain or whatever.
SSCReader
28d ago
Over the last several thousand years society has developed an insufficient but ultimately extant immune system for dealing with overreach by religions. That's an infectious memeplex that leads to lack of introspection and hypocrisy and all kinds of bad outcomes. We are reasonably good at dealing with that.
I don't think this is exactly true really. There are still large swathes of America who haven't rejected the older infectious memeplexes in your terminology. Wokeness is a reaction to that memeplex and is part of the antibody response to further your analogy, it's actually part of the dealing with the overreach. That those antibodies continue to attack the infection is exactly what they should do (from the point of view of the antibody). The infection is perhaps contained somewhat but it isn't from the point of view of an immune response actually eradicated. It's not even really like shingles in that is dormant. It's still actively influencing the host.
And this is where the analogy breaks I think, because it's not possible for wokeness to "win" completely. At some point it will push too far and ebb. That may or may not be already starting to happen. And whatever immune response forms to fight that, will rise and then push too far, then ebb and so on and so forth.
Would it be better to have a kind of symbiosis instead of this push and pull mechanic? Probably, but I don't really see a path to that.
SSCReader
28d ago
guess what I'm getting at is that there seems to be an assumption that certain good attributes are definitionally associated with woke politics and the greater left as far as some are concerned, and some of that drifts into beliefs of competence and descriptions of such. Likewise bad attributes can never apply to team blue.
I think that is just a failure state of all belief systems, like when I came "out" as an atheist, I heard a lot of "but you're a good person, how can you want to be an atheist" and the like, and many Christians say they don't think atheists can be moral people at all. That is basically the same argument you are getting.
If I think my values are good (and I must otherwise I would not hold them) then someone holding different, especially opposite values must be bad, otherwise they would hold my values instead. It's a failure state, I would agree, but a very common one. I elected not to reveal I was an atheist when I moved to a small Red town to avoid that exact scenario.
It's more of a problem for you because your industry is by the sound of it very Blue and one where we expect people to actually care. If you are pattern matched to a group that is seen to care about (for example) gay people less, then it doesn't take much of a push to expect you to treat some people worse than others. Because historically some people in your grouping have treated gay people badly. Even if of course, you personally would not.
Everyone wants to think they are good, therefore anyone who disagrees is at that the very least not good and at the worst actually bad. This is exacerbated by tribal politics and can grow from even small disagreements. See my own homeland where even two sects of Christians ended up murdering and discriminating against each other, even though to any outside view their differences in religion are much smaller than their similarities. Even though both their faiths say do not murder. They can rationalize it away, because they're bad Fenians or bad Prods.
SSCReader
28d ago
What appearance and demographics if you would you mind sharing? I'm a straight white, relatively tall, big blonde/red bearded white man and I've never perceived anything like that. The default assumption is anyone here is Blue as far as I can tell. (Which is an issue but a slightly different one, I think)
Now as soon as I open my mouth its clear I'm British not American and that often surprises people. And when I do talk about my history and my family being essentially rednecks it surprises them more because they seem to have the idea all Europeans are quasi-communists.
SSCReader
28d ago
Hmm, No, as I don't think he was a perfect exemplar, just the closest we have here in a specifically online unusual space. Just because most Blues don't want to farm, doesn't mean none of them do, they are still Blues even if unusual.
None of my neighbors have ever mentioned Hobbes for example. But their fundamental ideas seem to match his reasonably well even if he backs his up with more of a philosophical bent.
You don't have to know anything about Hobbes to have ideas that match. Whether it's because you worked it out yourself or the culture you were brought up in taught you something similar without ever talking about Enlightenment philosophy specifically. I don't know that many Blues outside of academia would know much about Mill either.
My grandfather didn't know Hobbes from Paine from Locke but his thoughts on human nature and people being selfish and violent if not restrained mesh pretty well.
Philosophers do not have exclusivity on making observations about people. They just write about it more. As opposed to my grandfather who kept a shotgun under his bed and wrote very little that wasn't accounting for his farm.
He'd probably have thought Hobbes should have got a real job, and that he was making basic observations sound fancier than they were. But he would roughly have agreed about the fundamental nature of men.
Having said that, he wasn't against learning. He asked my father who was a maths teacher to help him with his books and towards the end of his life, investments because he said an educated man doesn't have to break his back. He left money to help pay for my kids to go to university. He valued useful knowledge.
I don't know if I would call it anti-intellectual as much as pro-practical. And of course generalizing elides that people are varied even between cultures or tribes.
Does that make more sense?
SSCReader
28d ago
The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here.
Because most people here are not actually Red Tribe conservatives. We're mostly Blue Tribers and Blue Tribe dissidents (or Grey Tribe). Hlynka's conservatism was closer to the Red Tribe people I know in person than to most of the conservatives we have here I think, (particularly in being hostile to HBD), but he was pretty unusual compared to the median Motte poster.
Not really, I'm from Northern Ireland, and I lived in England for a long while, so those are the places I know best. My insight into the South of Ireland is likely to be slightly superficial. I was raised Protestant so I don't have a lot of close links south of the border.
Dublin, I know is expensive and its likely immigration is contributing to that, and I think the Irish government much like the English has been reasonably pro-immigration for some time, so I'd imagine its the same pressures driving resentment as elsewhere. The Gardai don't to my knowledge have much of a reputation for unnecessary brutality, but they are part of the establishment and its very easy for an us vs them mentality to result in overreaction. To see the mass of people not the individuals.
@FtttG may have more local knowledge.
I appreciate your kind words by the way.
SSCReader
28d ago
I think you explained better here and in other posts, what you meant, but I think using resentful and ignorant was probably a poor choice, because it's not exactly what you seem to be saying.
I think we are largely on the same page aside from that. Given the ideological skew of this place, Making sure you are signaling that you do indeed know what you are talking about is going to be useful, for example when talking about atheism, I now make a point to say that I was in fact raised in a Christian household and was Christian until I became an atheist, which is helpful in that it means we can skip the "Do you really know what Christianity is" and similar tangents. So probably making sure to highlight your direct experience with the Red Tribe (as I did also) up front will be helpful here.
SSCReader
28d ago
means changing to the Blue Tribe side so you are no longer counted as Red Tribe (so people like you can then go on to sneer about the ignorant Reds because look, all the educated people are Blues in thought and behaviour).
It's a lot harder to switch than this though. If you grew up rurally with a family with a pick up truck watching NASCAR then you are almost certainly Red Tribe and will remain so even if you change political views. Becoming Blue Tribe would mean rewriting not just your political views (there are after all Red Tribe Democrats and Blue Tribe Republicans) but also your preferences for food and entertainment and dress. And not just at the surface level (that would just be "passing") but at the level where you actually preferred football ("soccer") to NASCAR and a hybrid compact to a truck and avocado toast to a steak and so on and so forth.
Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are cultural groups that overlap heavily with political groups but the Tribal markers remain, absent significant effort to remove them.
SSCReader
28d ago
and the way they are treated is about even with how old school racists treated Blacks.
I've never seen anything similar to that at all. Heck when I lived in a small Red town, I had my Blue colleagues over for bbqs alongside my Red neighbors and there was never any kind of problem.
I will say students seem to be more performatively anti-conservative than the faculty by a long way. So while I haven't seen them socially censuring conservative students, that wouldn't exactly surprise me. Our faculty is (or at least appears to be) more politically diverse than our students I would say. But it is a very Blue city.
SSCReader
28d ago
And yes, I was there in the 80s and 90s, and local governments were absolutely running cover just as much back then.
Beat bobbies in the 80's were calling Pakistanis Paki scum and much worse things. They were not running cover for them. That didn't start until it got up to the political levels (as you point out). "Paki-bashing" was still common through the 1980s. The "anti-racism" of not wanting to incriminate Pakistani communities was a direct reaction to that behavior. I was in the Midlands in the 80s working with the police (albeit in adult social care not children's). My first wife is from that working class background. I saw exactly the treatment those girls got from their own families and communities, let alone anyone else.
There is simply no widespread movement (even now!) to help these girls. Whether it is to protect them from prostitution gangs, to protect them from county line gangs or often their own families.
I'm not covering for anyone. I am telling you WHY even after all the revelations the reaction from Brits is still pretty muted. If they wanted to protest over it in numbers they could. If they wanted to make it a huge deal they could, just like Brexit. For Brexit, Labour strongholds who hated the Tories with the burning passion of a million flaming Maggie Thatcher's torching mining unions with a flamethrower were willing to flip. But for these girls? Barely a peep.
The average middle class liberal will talk about how its just awful, but will they actually be willing to pay more taxes to help these girls? No. Will they adopt troubled young "chav" girls in care homes? No. Actions speak louder than words, and the actions of the Great British public shows us exactly where these girls come in the hierarchy of care.
Believe me I have my own issues with Pakistani communities particularly in the Midlands, and I have no love for them. But we cannot ignore our own failings to protect these vulnerable girls and how that is even more widespread, simply due to demographics. If we do, we are failing these girls even harder than we already did and are.
By all means lock up every Pakistani grooming gang member and throw away the key. I won't shed a tear. Want to zero immigration from Pakistan? I'm all on board. In fact, I recommended that in the 1990s, when I joined central government. Condemn anti-racists for running cover? Go off King! (or whatever the kids of today say).
But if we do not pair that with staring into the face of own monsters, with our own biases and apathy, well the men grooming and drugging and raping these girls might then be white, but I don't think that is much comfort personally.
The demand for underage kids is ubiquitous whether we are talking Rotherham, Glasgow, Belfast, Epstein Island or Diddy parties. There will always be predators. Protecting the prey better, protects them against all predators whether wolves, foxes or coyotes. Otherwise you'll come back from hunting the wolves to discover the foxes ate your chickens.
I am not saying not to hunt the wolves. I am saying putting up a chicken coop is part of the solution. And observing people don't care about doing that, gives us information about what those people actually care about.
SSCReader
28d ago
The problem is there can be no permanent victory. For you or for them. You tried, they tried, there is no reason to think it will work better than last time. And I agree there is no reason for either you or them to concede defeat and see your values lose.
So now we've agreed on that, and setting aside heat if we can, what does that tell us? If neither of you should surrender, and neither can win, are there any other options?
And the answer may be no! An ongoing pendulum swinging so we kind of average out over time to moderation may be the best we can hope for. But we can at least think around the topic, without committing to unilateral disarmament.
SSCReader
28d ago
To be clear the anti-racist stuff was certainly the reason those particular gangs were able to last longer than they should.
Though I'll note cops in the 80s and 90s were not running cover and it still happened thats why it isn't the whole picture.
The problem is no-one actually wants to hang around the schools these girls go to and protect them from Pakistanis or anyone else. Are you going to hang out in schools and care homes in Stoke on Trent? In run down city centres with drug addicts shooting up around the corner and breaking into your car? And the local alkies shambling around? You're going to be there all day everyday? You won't and nor will anyone else, is the point. Regardless of Pakistani grooming gangs, no-one cares enough to start vigilante gangs. The odd attempt to burn down a mosque is the best you're going to get.
I want to be really clear, I worked in city government in the Midlands and large numbers of Pakistani immigrants are a huge problem for multiple reasons, over-representation in child prostiution gangs being one among many. But class attitudes towards lower and underclass girls are a huge part of why they are victims all across the country and people don't care.
You ask why the average Brit won't riot to protect these girls? Because to most of them they are just as much the outgroup as Pakistanis. Worse even because they should know better. Even with the cops blessing there aren't going to be lynch mobs over this. Not until most of the victims are nice middle class girls.
I have not watched all their output, but I would say Humphries was the least risque, Mrs Browns Boys does have a lot of adult humor and vulgarity and the like and may be more of a match for O'Grady's non-primetime stuff. Some say: "With its emphasis on profanity, drag, vulgar sexual humour, physical clowning and sentimental family values, Mrs Brown’s Boys is a show that unashamedly taps into an end-of-the-pier comedy tradition"
Mrs Brown: I remember one night, me and Redser, walking along the beach at Portmarnock. He started chasing me into the sand dunes…so I was lying there, I said (flirtatious, sexy voice), ‘What do you want?’ (laughs remembering). He said I want your knickers around your ankles (flirtatious laugh). I had to get my feckin’ handbag and put them on!"
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