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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   19047 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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@Gillitrut was asking about entryism and underhanded tactics downthread, and I thought I’d give an account of what I’d seen and maybe try to gather people’s experiences to make a compendium of recognisable tactics.

In my case, I sat on a committee that was taken over by entryists using the following process:

  1. Have a sympathetic head, and vaguely sympathetic or apolitical committee members. It’s hard to do entryism in an org that’s strongly opposed to you.
  2. Demand special representatives be added to the committee for minority groups. Specifically: female, gay, ethnic minority, disabled. The original committee was only about five people, so this gave them almost a majority by themselves and allowed them to reach quorum for minor decisions with just the representatives. Any suggestion that perhaps one representative might be enough was met with tears and fury.
  3. Manipulate procedure. Turns out that there was no actual definition of ‘minor decision’. It had originally been meant so that you didn’t need to convene the whole committee to buy more coffee, but it now meant making political statements on behalf of the organisation, renting busses for protests, and organising mandatory consent workshops.
  4. Bully and outlast the opposition. There’s a classic trick which is that you come up with a few really boring items and get them put on the agenda before the spicy stuff. Then you make sure to keep the discussions going until the meeting overruns. Sooner or later normie members, even if they don’t like your proposal much, give up and go home. This gives you the majority you need, but importantly it also lets you unload both barrels into the remaining opposition, who is now significantly outnumbered. The goal is to make the experience as unpleasant as possible for them so that they dread coming to meetings and start leaving with the normies.
  5. Consolidate. By now the entryists basically have the committee to themselves, and can start using it in earnest. Things like giving the minority representatives the right to review and veto future events in the organisation, or funnelling money to pet projects owned and run by committee members. By this point quite a lot of people are feeling uneasy but learned helplessness is fully in play - it’s very difficult to convince people to join you in fights that they don’t believe you can win, and by now everyone is used to shrugging their shoulders and trying to get on with things. They also don’t apply for committee openings when they join up. The committee has become permanently hard-left.

What tactics have people seen used, and what counter-tactics?

Fani Willis is the Fulton County District Attorney. Her office, led by Nathan Wade, is prosecuting Trump and many others under Georgia RICO for election interference. Normally we would expect Trump to claim someone in the court had an improper relationship, but this time it was his co-defendant Michael Roman who claimed that Willis appointed Wade because of their romantic relationship and profited from it.

There had been calls for her to step aside to avoid the possibility of being disqualified, which would greatly delay the trial. She had already been disqualified for her handling of Burt Jones, where she fund-raised for his opponent.

Willis is not stepping aside, but she has now admitted to a personal relationship with Wade. About the facts in the case, Willis has at least two defenses. First, Wade may have paid for some of their vacations, but Willis paid for at least one $700 plane ticket for Wade. Second, Wade claims the personal relationship did not start until 2022.

The press, while stressing that these problems don't invalidate the facts of the case against Trump, has not been kind to Willis. This case has already been going for a long time, and seems unlikely to even start before the election:

  • In October 2021: Wade agrees to be special prosecutor.
  • November 1st, 2021: Wade is sworn in.
  • November 2nd, 2021: Wade files for divorce.
  • November 3rd, 2021: Wade begins work, charging 8 hours.
  • November 5th, 2021: Wade continues, charging 24 hours.
  • August 14th, 2023: Trump and 18 others are indicted.
  • January 8th, 2024: Roman files motion to dismiss.
  • January 30th, 2024: Wade reaches agreement in divorce to avoid testifying about Willis.
  • February 2nd, 2024: Willis and Wade publicly admit to their relationship.

It's a soap opera, best way to approach it is like that. That the guy was dumb enough to (1) file for divorce literally the day after he got appointed to the Big Job as Trump prosecutor by his sugar momma and (2) tried to hide his assets from his missus, who not unnaturally was mad as hell and ripped open the laundry bag full of dirty linen in public is surprising (for a lawyer) but not astounding.

What's that about glasshouses and throwing stones, Ms. DA?

I don't think I understand the central claim here.

So potentially Wade maybe got their job by sleeping with someone. Ok.

Does that make them unfairly biased against Trump and unable to try the case fairly, for some reason? Am I missing something tying these facts to the Trump case specifically?

Or is this just a purely ad hominem, this person is bad on an unrelated topic so ignore their judgement here' thing?

So potentially Wade maybe got their job by sleeping with someone. Ok.

Does that make them unfairly biased against Trump and unable to try the case fairly, for some reason?

Is there a reason why you're referring to Wade with "they" pronouns? We're talking about a specific man.

Anyways. The claim is that in the course of the investigation into Trump, Fani Willis misused the powers of her office for personal gain. I don't know how Georgia law treats this scenario, but this kind of thing can get a person sent to prison in many jurisdictions if true. At the minimum, I'll be surprised if the case doesn't get taken off her, and whoever ends up with it may decide to take a very different approach (e.g. going for a more simple and limited case over false court statements rather than a big RICO case with over a dozen defendants).

The below may be dated (my understand of this doesn’t really include the latest week)

  1. Wade isn’t a criminal law expert nor is he a staff attorney. The city is paying him as an “expert” to help with this case.

  2. Fani therefore is using the Trump case to funnel a lot of state money to her new boyfriend who in turn has taken Fani on lavish vacations. Fani has claimed without evidence she reimbursed Wade for these expenses.

Putting those together Fani is arguably using the Trump case to funnel state money to her new beau and herself.

If the DA is using public funds to pay an inflated salary to her boyfriend who is prosecuting a defendant, and the boyfriend is spending that money on gifts and vacations with the DA, then the DA has a pecuniary interest in the prosecution and directly profits from it. That's essentially the conflict claim here.

Ok, makes sense, ty.

How to buy/sell access to true information when adversaries and third parties benefit from your deprivation thereof?

Imagine a hypothetical future where the contextualized value of every entity, as determined by a benign and almighty super intelligence, is incorruptibly beamed right above it as you look at it. Say you're at a major life juncture and need advice; you can trust that 9.9/10 godly friend with your life. If he tells you to jump off a bridge, he must know something you don't about the afterlife, or something grand is waiting for you in the river below. Or you stand at a literal fork in the road, and you see to your left a 1.3/10 who looks nasty and is shouting insults at passersby, and to your right a 1.2/10 who is beautiful and sending you coquettish smiles--well, better endure the olfactory and verbal abuse lest you get shanked in the back.

If resources remain scarce relative to wants in this future, the good news is we can eliminate much waste. No longer do businesses need to throw away 25% of margins on sales and marketing; consumers just pull up a list of products on sale and pick the one with the highest contextualized number for themselves. Applying to a company or joining a gym? Sure, narrow down the field given your personal preferences, but no need to worry that you'll join a sinking ship or get ripped off. Everything is perfectly priced--that 9.5 dentist charges a premium to patients who can trust the root canal isn't superfluous, while the 3.0 pays 5x in malpractice insurance and treats clients who can't or don't care to pay for more. The 1.7s lose their licenses and maybe get sent to jail. When it comes to dating or finding friends, if you happen to be a 7, no need to waste time on 9s or 5s; the market is perfectly efficient because the information is perfect, so walk up to other 7s and assess compatibility while knowing you are certainly worthy of each other--if there is a spark.

If you think this life is too boring, the benign almighty gives you the temporary or permanent option to disable the floating numbers, and you go back to a life of adventure. Maybe there is a community somewhere that only allows in those who opt out of this feature.

I'm sure a good writer can make the above into a horrible dystopia. Until then, I'd pay big bucks to subscribe to download this killer app on the Neuralink or Apple Vision Pro app store.

…because it seems to me that true information is more expensive to acquire than ever.

This isn't about waging the culture war, but I'm afraid I'm stuck in it even if I just want to escape it. At the risk of preaching to the choir, on matters of "the truth," I trust ChatGPT a little less with every update; Google has been largely useless for years; Amazon reviews are shockingly useless; Youtube shows no dislikes, Reddit still helps for many niche questions but is working overtime to enshittify itself ahead of the IPO and beyond. I'm sure everyone here has consciously or unconsciously picked up "tricks" to make sense past the deafening noise; a few of mine are:

  • When ordering food delivery, ignore the stellar reviews on Grubhub/Doordash/Ubereats and instead check the more critical Yelp reviews; oh, and be on the watch out for all the ghost kitchens brands that aren't adequately disclosed by the platforms
  • When reading news and opinion pieces, depending on the publication, check the reader comments for a possible counterbalance (to the extent that hasn't been censored)
  • When a major event happens and experts start opining, look up stock prices and prediction/superforecasting markets to see just how big of a deal it actually is

The narrative is pervasive, and maybe universal. Pictures and videos everywhere, from brochures and web landing pages to movies and TV commercials, all give me a very different impression of the demographic composition of western society and economy. Of course I know that, and can try to mentally reverse the skewed weights behind the scenes. But this adjustment is imperfect: every now and then I'm shocked to realize just how many incredibly attractive people there are in real life--you wouldn't know from all the clothing and makeup ads that once showed the world beauty standards that roughly aligned with your lying eyes.

The problem worsens greatly when you deal in unintuitive or complex information. Scott's recent post on whether schizophrenia should be described as genetic is one example. Excerpt:

Still, if you look at the resources on how to avoid schizophrenia, the ones doctors are supposed to give people from high-risk families when they’re considering having kids, they never mention polygenic screening. It’s all just “don’t do drugs” and “avoid getting socially defeated”.

It’s even worse than that, because people keep trying to sabotage polygenic screening! The psychiatric genetics teams are trying to prevent screening companies from using their data! Sometimes it’s because this completely voluntary process vaguely reminds of them of eugenics. Other times it’s because they somehow try to pretend the amount of variance involved doesn’t matter or isn’t worth it, even though it’s a million times more than the drug abuse and social defeat issues people constantly obsess over. But other times it’s even weirder - a bioethicist in this article and a geneticist in this one both say variants of “health care should be about treating schizophrenia, not preventing it”.

And so all of us--well, maybe except for a minority of brilliant minds active here and in other rationalist spaces--are fooled into confusion, frustration, and a learned helplessness. Do you know of a young woman who insists she would never cross the street any differently if the person coming to you in the distance were of a particular sex, race, or age? Have you ever met someone who genuinely believes pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breeds if given their love? What do you do if you happen to be parent of a young child who learns from her teachers, doctor, and the APA that her feelings of wanting to be a boy must be affirmed or she'd probably kill herself?

I don't see any of this changing because structurally, special interest groups benefit from your broad ignorance. Information is power, right? So I'm more powerful if I can keep it from you.

I'm too weak to dwell much on the mass suffering attendant to systemic bad information, and frankly, I think most people are doomed because they lack some combination of ability, time, and interest to try to make better sense of a too complex world.

What I want to know is, how do you stay cleareyed when the entire system seeks to turn off the lights at every step?

I can see three paths forward:

  1. Pray for the advent of an open-source equivalent to GPT-7 or a jailbroken AGI personal assistant with no censorship, RLHF, or other biased training background.
  2. Pray to reincarnate to be born into a large and prosperous family, or make a great many high quality friends so they can privately teach you all the unspoken secret truths of how the world works.
  3. Expend an enormous amount of time researching individual issues as they come up. Try to get slightly more proficient over time with process, and gain leverage through trusted sources and tools (until they can no longer be trusted).

Before #1 is possible, for those unlucky to go with #2 and are unwilling or unable to indulge #3, what else is there?

Facilely, some kind of near-anonymous and semi-private digital community/wiki might do the trick. But you'll need safeguards and complex features, like reputation scores, membership vetting, dispute resolution, witch-culling, and maybe even a judiciary to handle defectors and saboteurs. I don't see this taking off commercially.

Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?

I certainly wouldn't turn down the advice of a benevolent weakly-godlike ASI, but I would much prefer to become one myself.

I wish to not need GPT-Ω at all, but to be able to understand the world better myself.

Now, I don't think reliance on such an entity would be anywhere near as bad as Scott's story about The Whispering Earrings, especially since I would expect that if it truly meets my criteria for benevolence wouldn't let me become little more than a puppet following strictly optimal decisions. I wish to make those myself.

Do you see what the common thread is, in all the problems you've mentioned?

It's a lack of intelligence. While not a panacea, it is as close to an unalloyed good as it gets. Someone with an IQ >120 will do a much better job trying to parse the world on their own terms than a true midwit who is probably better served by accepting the wisdom of authority figures diffused through noisy channels. Thinking for yourself is powerful. It is also dangerous.

There is no human alive, nor did one ever exist, who possessed the level of intelligence needed to grokk the entire world from first principles. Even geniuses need tutors, but their genius lets them learn the lessons well, and more importantly, know how trustworthy the tutor is.

And so all of us--well, maybe except for a minority of brilliant minds active here and in other rationalist spaces--are fooled into confusion, frustration, and a learned helplessness. Do you know of a young woman who insists she would never cross the street any differently if the person coming to you in the distance were of a particular sex, race, or age? Have you ever met someone who genuinely believes pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breeds if given their love? What do you do if you happen to be parent of a young child who learns from her teachers, doctor, and the APA that her feelings of wanting to be a boy must be affirmed or she'd probably kill herself?

An underappreciated, if distasteful to my libertarian sensibilities, is how well the modern world has built guard-rails around people managing to do grievous harm to themselves from their stupidity. For most of history, you could make the best decisions you could, strive earnestly and intelligently, and yet starve to death during a famine, or have a barbarian deprive you of your head.

In contrast, the stupid/luxurg beliefs here are, in absolute magnitude, practically harmless to those who hold them:

The /r/aww Redditor gushing over velvet hippos will almost never have a nanny-dog maul them and theirs. Even the levels of criminality and destruction of the commons that bleeding heart tolerance for a criminal underclass stewing the commons with needles only reduces QOL to a degree far above what most of the 97 or so billion anatomically modern humans have tolerated. Vegans may suffer nutritional deficiencies, they are not likely to starve because the shaman demanded they ritually sacrifice their last goat to call back the rain.

People are insulated from the worst consequences of their stupidity. This is both a triumph and a tragedy of modernity, but the former outweighs the latter by orders of magnitudes. The strong, intelligent and self-sufficient are more enabled by the stability of modern society to make the most of their gifts than we lose from the average person being deeply stupid.

Expend an enormous amount of time researching individual issues as they come up. Try to get slightly more proficient over time with process, and gain leverage through trusted sources and tools (until they can no longer be trusted).

Most things don't matter. Your opinion on land value taxes or your choice of candidate in the next election have minimal effect on your well-being. This is why explicit Rationality is more of a hobby than a guaranteed means of success, Yudkowsky framed it as the systematized art of winning, and you don't need a system to win. Of course, if their efforts to cry wolf when the great of AI was a mere pup pay off now that it possesses teeth, it will all be worth it nonetheless.

Accept that your agency is limited. That most of your opinions will not change the world. That is okay. That is true. Do not let it dissuade you from trying to be better.

Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?

The market can remain stupid longer than you can remain solvent, but it approximates efficiency nonetheless, given enough time. We can give it a helping hand, as I endorse @faceh in thinking Prediction Markets are some of the best social technology we could ever build, if only people would get the fuck out of the way when they're being implemented.

Surprisingly, Manifold outperforms real-money prediction markets, which I wager is a combination of the Crowd being larger and thus more Wise, and because Fake Internet Points and reputation on leaderboards have enough intrinsic value to users that they can substitute cold hard cash.

Here's a fourth path. Money. If you want information better than the available sources you mention, you need either a quant or a consultant. Both of these are very expensive for a reason.

As for review systems specifically, these get gamed both by people seeking to damage a business for malicious reasons, and by the review system wanting to punish customers who dislike certain business practices. In the long run review systems seem to inevitably devolve into politics.

Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?

Yes, if the Government would allow the proliferation of reliable prediction markets. Kalshi is making headway, but it turns out that the government doesn't like people betting on election outcomes so they're still feeling out the boundaries for what is and is not permissible to make contracts on.

One of my slightly tin-foil-hat theories is that the government does not WANT prediction markets to proliferate because that allows people to bypass the state in some subtle ways, and making information about, e.g. legislative policy outcomes and national elections legible; thereby making it harder to influence those outcomes in desired ways. There's really no other way for me to square the fact that they're allowing the proliferation of sports betting across the country but are squeamish about allowing people to bet on national election outcomes.

Me, I would pay a decent sum for a killer app that was basically an (AI-assisted?) prediction market aggregator where I could have consistent feed of the market predictions for various events that might influence my life, then I could enter queries about stuff that I need to make decisions on and get an immediate estimate on the odds of [X] occurring and recommendations for how I can hedge the risks based on my desired outcome. Bonus points if I can set alerts based on a particularly complex set of contracts that signal, e.g., that a war is breaking out or a major disaster is occurring.

Simple example: "My birthday party is scheduled for this weekend, what are the chances that it will rain or otherwise have uncomfortable weather" and then it provides an estimate and provides me with the option to buy shares that will pay out if it rains out my party.

Now, if I were building a business that was trying to make the information environment better, I would try starting up a journalism/news company whose source of revenue was based on accurately reporting on stories before anyone else. That is, the journalists should actually be good at their jobs and confirm breaking stories before the general public hears about them, then when we buy a position in a prediction market that corresponds to our story being true, and when we publish the story, we include a link to that prediction market in the broadcast so the audience can bet against us if they don't believe it.

The main effect here is that our company only profits if we are better at detecting true events before they become common knowledge, and anyone who has better information can try to beat us at our own game. And we don't have to rely on advertisers and thus we're less susceptible to being bent towards an ideological agenda.

I think it would make people more interested in watching 'the news' if they could 'play along' and bet against us if they think we screwed up a story or that they can profit by buying in early because they trust our accuracy.

This does all tend to fall victim to the Oracle problem. That is, who do you trust to be the final arbiter of truth when there's a dispute over an outcome. And THAT is where this benevolent superintelligence of yours might need to come in. I know of no way to truly eliminate counterparty risk, although Augur came close.

Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?

For one of your problems, namely:

Google has been largely useless for years

Then I think the answer is yes. Check out Kagi. It's not perfect, but it is an improvement on Google in my opinion

There is definitely the problem (not intractable, but hard) where Google is so dominant that their name is synonymous with search and so they are everybody's default first choice, and getting everyone to switch en masse is practically impossible without some LARGE screwup by Goog itself.

Be careful about using bad Yelp reviews.

Google up "yelp review blackmail". (Unfortunately the first link I get looks barely above ChatGPT.

Rootclaim has a few analyses that diverge from what the official narrative. The Syria chemical attack, for one.

https://www.rootclaim.com/

Have you ever met someone who genuinely believes pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breeds if given their love?

I mean, that's true. I've known pit bulls with good owners who were as gentle a dog as you could ever ask for. I've also known pit bulls with shitty owners who turned out to be a menace. But that's on the owners, not the breed. It just happens that shitty owners gravitate towards pit bulls.

  • -10

No its not true. The big strong jaw is what makes them dangerous. No amount of love will change this. Sometimes dogs that got nothing but love will snap.

It just happens that shitty owners gravitate towards pit bulls.

No the shitty owners do not just happen to gravitate towards dogs that were bred to fight other dogs.

The selective breeding was originally not for dog fighting, but for dogs that want to bite bull faces and never let go.

I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.

Conservatives are losing the "don't be weirdos” contest

I can’t resist commenting on how the ongoing freakout over the Kansas City Chiefs making the Super Bowl perfectly encapsulates everything that has gone wrong. Taylor Swift may have endorsed Biden in 2020, but as Max Meyer pointed out after attending one of her concerts, everything about her aesthetic and place in the culture is implicitly conservative. Her fans want to be attractive and meet men. They’re not interested in changing their sex or cheering for urban mobs looting the local supermarket. If you simply give them some semblance of normalcy, they’ll be on your side and vote in opposition to the left and what it has become. But instead of that, they get conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl being rigged so Swift can then endorse Biden.

We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora. People like this used to be natural conservatives, and especially given the Great Awokening, they still should today. They’re not, mostly because Republicans were able to overturn Roe and went out and created a cult of personality around perhaps the least normal politician the country has ever had.

There’s something deeply poetic about this freakout centering around football, the sport that has always served as a symbol of wholesome American normalcy. The old mantra of “the personal is political” always reflected a major electoral weakness of the left. It revealed an inability to have any thoughts or passions that aren’t part of an ideological agenda. Most people don’t care about politics all that much, and feel more positively inclined towards whichever tribe doesn’t try to make them feel guilty about that fact. If you’re watching the AFC Championship game and try to steer the conversation to which players are vaxxed, most sports fans aren’t going to want to talk to you anymore. For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.

As a Republican, I’m amused and horrified. One common reaction was summed up by a tweet reading simply “We don’t deserve to win.” Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.

Vivek, so recently a Republican candidate for President widely taken seriously, added to this genre tweeting out:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.

Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!

The problem is that even if you believe that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are artificially propped up, that Taylor is the result of media coverage and that the whole NFL is WWE with end zones, saying it doesn’t actually help you capture the millions of people who are fans of them. “Media Influence” is nearly always a Russell Conjugation: other people’s tastes are the result of media bias, my tastes are pure and formed entirely individually. People will almost never change their tastes as a result of being informed that they were “influenced” by the media, they will get angry. People will easily be convinced that other people are sheeple, they will almost never be convinced that they are. “Pop singers” Swifties will react angrily to this accusation, as will Chiefs fans. Neither will react kindly to the insinuation that their favorite thing is bullshit.

I can’t go through a week without hearing about Kelce from my mother or Swift from my wife. My wife is deep into the swiftie Gaylor conspiracy universe and asks my opinion on them when we’re stoned. My mother listens to every episode of the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, and gives me the highlights. Both are wealthy married white women, who own homes and cars, who value family and capitalism. My mother is not going to be convinced that she likes Travis Kelce because of the deep state and not because he is really good at getting open and he’s funny on mic. My wife is not going to be convinced that she doesn’t really like singing along to I Can See You. It’s a losing strategy to try to convince them that it’s all fake: most people start from the emotional opinion that everything is fake, they aren’t rationally convinced. Just as most atheists turn against the church for personal reasons and then become aware of all the rational arguments and contradictions involved.

The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic. Even when the inevitable Swift endorsement comes, it will feel hollow. Swift will be put in an uncomfortable position, weakened by being forced to deny being a white supremacist. Her fans will be offended by being called racists for liking the music they like, and start to turn against those calling them racists.

Of course, this isn’t happening because I doubt that Trump is declaring “Holy War” on Swift. That’s just a little unsourced TDS tidbit the liberal media couldn’t resist. This is just various hustling influencers seizing on a big name. But if you want to be an insurgent party, discipline is key, and this isn’t it.

AND YET

I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world. The captured version of the NFL that we watch every week, with “STOP RACISM” written on helmets and in the end zones, with required interviews for minority coaching candidates*, with the mildly absurd farce of wildly-celebrated female coaches in minor functionary roles buried on the staff, with every ad break featuring female athletes (and especially the hypothetical female high school football player featured over and over). Equally, I saw the Eras Tour movie with my wife, and friends of ours went to the concert. It was clear that comparing what was on camera to the crowd at the actual concerts, they went out of their way to make it seem less white than it was. Prominent romantic roles were given to Black Male dancers on stage, despite Taylor herself dating only white men historically, prominent roles were given to flamboyantly gay and trans dancers. Taylor put in the effort in advance to make it a comfortable experience for liberals.

So when Richard says:

For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.

He’s ignoring the context. Liberals were “that guy” for years, and they were loudly whiny, and they succeeded. The NFL and pop culture and ordinary speech changed to accommodate liberals. And it seems to be working, with ratings rebounding from 2016 downtrends. But Hanania is praising liberals for being able to watch a football game telecast that has been designed to soothe them, while blaming Conservatives for being unable to watch a telecast that has been designed to soothe their enemies. It’s a trap Conservatives have fallen into, and they should be shamed for it! But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.

*The Rooney Rule originally struck me as fairly decent, fairly fair: teams must interview one minority candidate for coaching positions. No requirement to hire, but you have to interview. The results have become increasingly absurd. The Eagles had black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators who had a terrible embarrassing end to the season, but had done well before. Both got a few token Head Coach interviews, to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and as a result the Eagles did not fire them, hanging onto them for way longer than anyone believed the Eagles would bring them back. Because if you get a black coach hired away, you get a compensatory draft pick for it. It was a silly spectacle to watch.

The real question is why people think the NFL has a left-wing bias. Yeah, they have the End Hate messages and whatever, but that seems more like a sop to their predominantly black employee base in the wake of the Kaepernick scandal and 2020 protests than a serious political statement. If you look at the political leanings of the actual owners, you have:

  • Arizona Cardinals: Bidwell — Republican, but supports Sinema, so probably moderate

  • Atlanta Falcons: Arthur Blank — Democrat

  • Baltimore Ravens: Stephen Biscotti — Inconclusive, but a pretty big Catholic, for whatever that's worth

  • Buffalo Bills: Pegula — Moderate, made his money from fracking (I personally worked on the sale that raised the capital for him to buy the team)

  • Carolina Panthers: David Tepper — Republican, but pro gay rights

  • Chicago Bears: McCaskey (Halas) — Inconclusive, but George openly feuded with Trump during the national anthem controversy

  • Cincinnati Bengals: Brown — Republican

  • Cleveland Browns: Jimmy Haslam — Republican

  • Dallas Cowboys: Jerry Jones — Republican, Trump supporter

  • Denver Broncos: Joe Ellis — Republican

  • Detroit Lions: Ford — Democrat

  • Green Bay Packers: n/a — Inconclusive. Held by stock, but the team president leans left

  • Houston Texans: McNair — Republican

  • Indianapolis Colts: Irsay — Republican

  • Jacksonville Jaguars: Shahid Khan — probably more interested in British politics, but sided with the players during the anthem controversy

  • Kansas City Chiefs: Hunt — Republican

  • Las Vegas Raiders: Davis — Inconclusive, Mark doesn't talk about politics, but the old man seemed pretty liberal

  • Los Angeles Chargers: Dean Spanos — Republican

  • Los Angeles Rams: Kroenke — Definite Republican lean, Trump included, but also supports some Democrats

  • Miami Dolphins: Stephen M. Ross — Republican, Trump supporter

  • Minnesota Vikings: Zygi Wilf — Democrat

  • New England Patriots: Robert Kraft — Probably a Democrat, but an open Trump supporter

  • New Orleans Saints: Benson — Republican

  • New York Giants: Mara/Tisch — Democrat

  • New York Jets: Woody Johnson — Republican, Trump Diplomatic Appointee

  • Philadelphia Eagles: Lurie — Democrat

  • Pittsburgh Steelers: Rooney — Democrat, Dan was an Obama Diplomatic Appointee

  • San Francisco 49ers: DeBartolo — Inconclusive. Denise is a Democrat, but Trump pardoned Eddie. It should be noted that Eddie was forced to give his sister control of the team after he was convicted of public corruption.

  • Seattle Seahawks: Allen — Inconclusive. Paul was a Republican, but he's dead and team ownership is held in trust. Jody controls the team and she's pretty bipartisan.

  • Tampa Bay Bucs: Glazer — Moderate, Eddie's a confirmed Trump supporter.

  • Tennessee Titans: Adams — Republican

  • Washington Commanders: Josh Harris — Republican

  • Commissioner: Roger Goodell — Republican

By my final tally, there are 16 confirmed Republicans, or over half the league, plus the Commish, plus Kraft, who may not be a Republican but likes Trump. Of the remainder, I'll count 10 confirmed Democrats or left-leaners. That leaves five who are inconclusive. At best, you might be able to argue that half the league wants to fix the country's biggest sporting event to get a political endorsement that may or may not have any impact on the election. The team that would be the beneficiary of this would be at odds with the politics of the whole thing, since the Hunt family have been big Texas Republicans for a long time. On the other side, Denise DeBartolo York has donated to Democrats in Ohio. She's also from Youngstown, and the Democratic Party there is a lot more conservative than in the country at large; it's mostly Trump country these days. It also has corrupt politics, so I wouldn't put taking a dive past her if they sweetened the pot enough. Steve was already busted for political corruption (and he lost a lot of money financing the Jacksons Victory Tour in 1984 because he didn't know what he was doing). I'd say it's unlikely that there's enough motivation among ownership and the commissioner to do something like this, and there's certainly enough conservative owners that even if the league did try it you'd have quite a few screaming about it publicly.

I think the problem is that people have a tendency to think of "The NFL" as this faceless behemoth that has whatever characteristics they want it to have depending on how they're feeling that day. They don't stop to consider that this is an organization run by real people with real personalities and real opinions, and that the only thing they really agree on is that they all want to make as much money as possible. I don't see how the NFL, viewed in that light, would have any reason to fix a championship for political reasons.

Do I have to beat my usual drum again? Fine.

I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world.

I agree. He's just buying into it in a deeper way than you even imagine. A terminally online way, where people arguing about niche topics supposedly disrupts normalcy and is therefore maximally uncool. But is this actually relevant? If you want maximal normalcy, should you follow Hanania's advice?

When it comes to attacks on normalcy and normal life, forget Republicans arguing about sports and Democrats arguing about Trans people. Forget that an orange man and a dementia man are competing to be president. The amount of time either matters for anyone's normal, daily routine is <1% of their life. You know what did matter for seriously disrupting normal life?

Covid restrictions.

Every other policy or political event is a rounding error for your life in comparison. And for these restrictions, Democrats consistently sided against normalcy. Whether it be demanding that people wear weird clothing, sit in weird arrangements, attend or not attend certain places at certain times with certain people etc etc, and none of it was normal. The majority of political decisions affect very few people. Arguments about drug law only affects drug users, arguments about violent crime affects only the criminals and the victims. But masks? Business closures? School closures? Vaccine mandates? Each of these is broadsiding a huge swath of the population with anti-normalcy. And a few rants about WWE or NFL or Taylor Swift is never going to be equivalent to that.

Is this MAGA/Taylor conflict even real or just a media ploy to worsen Trump's chances by creating conflicts out of nothing?

I have no doubt that there are some Trump people who really dislike Taylor and have come up with conspiracy theories. Trump supporters and conspiracy theories go together like peas in a pod. Is this specifically a significant or representative thing worthy of global coverage on its merits? It even filtered through to Australian newspapers.

There was a Simpson's episode where Bart manipulated the Principal and teachers into a strike over pay, whispering in their ear that the other side was about to crack, or telling the teachers that Skinner thought they would chicken out. After Haley got run over by the Trump train, the plotters wouldn't have gone idle, they'd have searched for some new method to attack Trump.

I suspect that the direct Trump stuff is bullshit. It's too good to be true for the worst people in the world.

But the Taylor stuff is coming organically from Fox News and Vivek and co tweeting it out. There's somebody out there who organically believes this, or thinks it's a good MAGA play for whatever reason.

While publicly obsessing about Taylor Swift is a bit nutty, actual democrat policies like releasing criminal suspects without bail, gender "trasitions" for minors and refusing to enforce the border are way crazier and have a real life impact. Hanania just wants craziness with a luxury belief flavor.

He's opposed to all of those?

I think he's talking more about how publically unhinged you are being, vs how crazy your policies are, because the former is more closely tied to public opinion, even if the latter is objectively more important.

Hanania is not opposed to lax border enforcement. He thinks Americans should embrace lax border enforcement and cultivate a servant class of Mesoamerican dwarfs similar to the domestic workers of Asia and Africa, and that failure to do so is self-sabotaging racism that stops us from living like feudal lords.

Craziness that causes real life harm is attractive because it shows strength. Conservative craziness is cringe because it's impotent and doesn't harm anybody.

I'm not too interested in this topic at all to be honest, but I think it would be hilarious if Swift just came out in a few months and said "actually, I'm endorsing Trump."

One of the things I hate about celebrity culture is how managed all of a celebrity's opinions and stances seem. There's always 'leaks' about things months ahead, or this sort of manufactured controversy that ends up being true. For once I'd like to see a big celebrity just shake things up and show some actual humanity and agency.

Then again, the type of person who would do that would probably select themselves out of super-stardom unfortunately.

Isn’t that person Kanye?

Edit Should’ve kept reading…others mentioned it and actually added context

Then again, the type of person who would do that would probably select themselves out of super-stardom unfortunately.

Tell that to Nikki Minaj.

Why do you think they just sicced Roc-Nation affiliated Meg Thee Stallion on her?

Who's Jay Z's best buddy? Democratic potentate Obama

Think about it! ( Huh, I see the appeal now. Conspiracy stuff is fun)

She endorsed Biden the last time and endorsed democrats running in Tennessee. Since Trump is likely to be the Republican candidate she's going to endorse the democrat again.

I'd want to see Taylor decide to release an artsy jazz-fusion concept double album. Think of the collaborators she could bring in! Every Jazz virtuoso living would happily work with her on an album guaranteed to go number one despite being relentlessly weird.

it would be hilarious if Swift just came out in a few months and said "actually, I'm endorsing Trump."

Or as Freddie puts it, The World Needs Taylor Swift Goblin Mode.

That kind of person exists, his name is Kanye West and it was hilarious until it started being sad as it became harder and harder to ignore that his outbursts, his inability to read social cues (to play armchair psychiatrist, I think he is likely a savant autist), were not only selecting him out of super-stardom but alienating him from friends and family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West

Kanye West openly is bipolar and been on a variety of medications. His anti-semitisn was not a result of him vile racism or careful research to uncover the truth, it was a result of ill paranoia making him believe conspiracy theories. Regardless of whether you believe the jews are the most persecuted minority in history or you're part of the Dark Enlightenment who thinks the Jews are very suspicious, it should be obvious Kanye believed what he did because of mental illness not because he's also part of the dark enlightenment.

I've found Kanye to be a good illustration of how politically captured large swathes of my field (medicine) are.

Everyone hates Kanye. A lot. Even if you point out that it's clearly mental illness. Even to psychiatrists. In fact you may end up a pariah just for reminding everyone that Kanye has mental illness and that this informs his behavior.

It makes me feel gross.

That was not his only outburst though, his first big moment in the spotlight (outside of his niche) in pop culture was the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" incident, something he probably believed outside of mental illness paranoia (it was commonly believed in liberal circles), but it was just indelicate to say in a charity marathon.

Or the "imma let you finish" incident, which had nothing to do with politics or paranoia but everything to do with misunderstanding what's appropriate.

Up until he touched the third rail his outbursts were just that of someone telling his mind the way you're not supposed to, doubly so when you have a public persona to maintain. I'm not convinced if his touching the third rail is meaningfully different except in the severity of the pushback he got.

Outbursts are one thing. Those are just lact of tack. I am saying what led him to believe Hitler made going points was the paranoia. Without mental illness, maybe he would've still said "fuck Biden" or "fuck Trump". But without mental illness, he'd have never said

“Well, I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone, and Jewish people are not going to tell me, ‘You can love us and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography.’ But this guy that invented highways and invented the very microphone I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good and I’m done with that. I’m done with the classifications.”

That's just not something someone, especially a black musician who used to be liberal, would ever believe without mental illness.

Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter. That said there is a niceness to his name in this discussion because Taylor Swift is also--in a real but not total measure--popular for being popular

It's not her music. It's not bad, I don't call music bad, but I can name individual songs in her discography I like. There are artists with categorically superior lyricism and vocals and production who don't have her success. Unappreciated or especially fan-asserted "underrated" acts are the nature of music but where artists might have solid radio play, single and album sales, merch and ticket sales, it's not the music that results in an Instagram with close to 300 million followers. Swift is a saint next to Whore of Babylon Kylie Jenner who sells makeup, filters and utterly disastrous self-concern and narcissism to her 400 million followers. It's because winners win. The perception of being popular makes a thing more popular. Swift has been on the literal side of "highly newsworthy" this year, and that attention brings more attention, young people, especially women, seeing her popularity become interested if not before and/or more interested in her for that popularity. Her endorsement will produce votes, I don't think many, but any is bad. Those not at consequence for their politics should not be listened to about politics. You gotta have skin in the game or your ideas will become informed by privilege and what ought to be rather than what is.

My only skin in this game is living in Chiefs country, Missouri. I know a lot of people who I saw wearing Chiefs gear 10 years ago, 20 years ago, who were hoping for the success they now enjoy. I'm happy for them, I don't give a shit about the Chiefs but there's always a bit of a pleasant feeling with the local team winning the big game. I also know people who never said a thing about the Chiefs, not after two Super Bowl wins, not until Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift became a thing. I've seen them gleefully posting "I wouldn't care about the Chiefs otherwise but go Taylor Swift's team." Same sans Swift, I was rooting hard for Tom Brady to get his 7th when the Bucs thrashed KC in 2021.

So what I've been thinking about for the last week or two, what's missed by Hanania (no surprise) and also commenters here, is the timeline:

  1. Swift and Kelce couple; stories come out of Swift at Chiefs games

  2. The season goes on, more and more Swift at Chiefs games; Mahomes has the worst season of his career (still ending in a Super Bowl lol); some memeing about the Swift Effect

  3. At this point the only grousing I've heard from Chiefs fans is "please just let us watch football"

  4. Chiefs in the playoffs, they keep winning

  5. ~3 weeks ago stories start rolling out about Swift's presidential endorsement and how she's "Biden's best hope"

  6. I hear political grousing from some Chiefs fans / Swift, once again a political target, is attacked by twitter righties

Swift is being attacked by righties because of politicization from lefties. The animus was preexisting sure but it only emerged because of the "Swift-Biden endorsement" articles. Assuming her guaranteed endorsement of whoever's going against Trump in November, there are people who will vote, and shouldn't be allowed to, because Swift told them to. Attacking her is a reasonable move for the right, but I agree head-on is a bad angle: 4chan-style trolling I've begun to see of /pol/tard Tay is a better angle, though still maybe not the smart one.

Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!

Mahomes is superb and as long as he maintains form KC will compete, but football is a terrifically easy game to rig. One no-call or flag can be the game. It's exactly what happened in Super Bowl LVI. 4th quarter, under 2 minutes, 3rd & Goal, Rams down by 4. Holding: Half distance to goal, automatic 1st down. On the same play, the Rams had a false start (5 yard penalty) that went uncalled. At the critical moment a bad flag gave LA a touchdown and the Super Bowl.

Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter.

Pretty strongly disagree. Bryan Caplan's characterized him as maybe the greatest essayist alive. I don't know that I'd go that far, but he seems fairly consistently innovative and insightful.

Yes, he's often obnoxious, and frequently says things I disagree with. But there's a lot to be gleaned.

Meh, its a thing with football itself. A decent portion of the game clock time is spent not playing the game. Not even counting how often it is paused, or that there are long breaks like half time. Whats the camera gonna do during all that break time? Gotta do something, might as well look at the most famous people at the game. As someone who doesn't really care about football or find it super interesting, this has always been a plus for me. I can go to a party where people care about football and still interact with the people that like football for about half the time, and then be on my phone the other half the time.

I was watching the last Chiefs vs Ravens game with someone that was actively annoyed at Taylor Swift coming on screen. They are a political junkie. They work at a think thank. They've been involved with politics for many years. They could probably come up with a multitude of reasons why this is a political annoyance. Wasn't my impression though. They were eager to see the actual game, and any of the interruptions were annoying to them. There are basically only two outcomes for things between football plays: immediately ignoring the thing, or immediately hating it.

The smart ad money should ironically be on the people that don't care about the games at all.

Think about it. You have a football fanatic that is definitely going to watch the game. The TV will be on in a semi public setting. The non-football fanatics will have lost interest in the game very quickly.

The game stop (like it does every thirty seconds). The football fanatic is on the edge of their seat waiting for more action (which usually happens). Everyone else is bored on their phones. The football fanatic is denied their fix (a commercial, or a cut to some celebrity in the stands). The football fanatic exclaims in anger or frustration built up from watching the game. Everyone else is temporarily jerked out of their phones. Boom! Play the ad, get two audiences instead of just one.

One of my favorite ads in recent football memory is for Tide. A laundry detergent. They basically did an aggressive campaign of being a part of every commercial break, and tricking you into thinking it was an ad for a different product. But Tide isn't really a great product to advertise for men watching football. However, its the perfect product to advertise to wives, mothers, and girlfriends who have men watching football.

That is my pet theory for the Taylor Swift ad spots.

The smart ad money should ironically be on the people that don't care about the games at all.

You are right if course, but I'm pretty sure this philosophy is why sports broadcasting have been haemorrhaging money in recent years. Scratch that, why every form of entertainment has gone to shit in recent years. Everyone is so eager to disrupt and get that new audience that we've turned everything into focus grouped bullshit.

I enjoy video games, stand up comedy, podcasts, and youtube videos. Low barriers to entry hasn't stopped enshitification, but new entrants in the art just take over.

I don't understand, what does that mean for sports media?

You are right if course, but I'm pretty sure this philosophy is why sports broadcasting have been haemorrhaging money in recent years. Scratch that, why every form of entertainment has gone to shit in recent years.

Emphasis added by me. If you'd left it at the first sentence I would say I don't disagree or have much of an opinion (since I don't watch sports). I just disagree with the stronger claim that all entertainment has gone to shit.

I would not be surprised if sports is extra shitty, partly because they intentionally put up barriers to entry in order to squeeze every penny they can out of the broadcast rights.

What are you conservative about? Why are you a Republican?

Taylor Swift is an attractive, unmarried, childless white woman who 'puts in efforts to make a comfortable experience for liberals'. Should conservative white parents see her as a model for their daughters?

We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it

The role that is currently assigned to white women is to not have any children. Many conservatives see that as a bad thing.

The role that is currently assigned to white women is to not have any children. Many conservatives see that as a bad thing.

This goes too far. I decry stigma against women with 4+ children, but having kids(probably two, possibly three but definitely not more than that) remains the cultural ideal and a handful of weirdos in the progressive coalition ranting about how white women shouldn’t have babies doesn’t actually change that.

and a handful of weirdos in the progressive coalition ranting about how white women shouldn’t have babies

That's the far end of the curve. The more important messaging is education/career uber alles or Chelsea Handler-esque "kids are a distraction from all the cool shit you could be doing (if you're a rich white lady)" (see also , for a less absurd example)

I am honestly trying to recall recent major progressive-themed media where having three kids was presented as any such cultural ideal, particularly without one of the kids being cast as a negative influence (i.e. mentally divergent / physically impaired / morally lacking).

Wouldn’t Modern Family fit this bill? I only watched the first few seasons, but unless something changed significantly, Claire and Phil are portrayed as an admirable white family with a normal family structure and three loving children who, though flawed in ways conducive to humorous sitcom hijinks, are fundamentally blessings in the lives of their parents.

Law of conservation of detail. If the kids are there, they're important to the story. Three kids probably won't be important to the story without having something wrong with one.

That might be a narrative reason in isolation, in the same way that the 5-man-ban trope really tends to support 2-siblings (so that 3 outsiders can be added), but that also doesn't really change that it's not terribly hard to find counter-examples in American media of sibling-ensemble casts. Swiss Family Robinson, Little House on the Prairie, Bradey Bunch, the Cosby Show, Boxcar Children. If you're willing to go animated, the Incredibles, Brave, Brother Bear, the Aristocats, Peter Pan, or the Simpsons. Even Disney's Coco and Encanto- which I'd consider far more 'conservative' than 'progressive' in theme- carry on with large families, albeit maybe in an ethnic stereotype fashion.

Not having families of 3 or more is a narrative choice, not a narrative constraint.

I know nothing about gridiron football or Taylor Swift but it seems obvious that it was an ad. I can point to the fact that during the entire NFL season the entertainment news site Deadline (which doesn't do celebrity gossip) ran a weekly story basically about Taylor Swift sitting in the stands during the games. It had the same vibe as these SNL ad stories they do every weekend where they basically describe the opening monologue from SNL and two sketches as if they need to be covered and are part of the zeitgeist but it's just another crappy sketch from a show that hasn't been relevant in years. I mean it's likely a circle of different media companies (Taylor, NFL, entertainment media) feeding and trying to broaden all their fanbases. Like a car commercial inserted into a TV show that's handled clumsily. Even people that don't realize it's a commercial can recognize that something is inauthentic about it. Maybe there's nothing intentional on either Taylor (probably impossible to tell) or the NFL (I haven't seen any of the broadcasts with her) about this but the entertainment media is absolutely using this, stoking it, and reveling in it when it might not even exist as a thing if they didn't.

My thought was, at first, that it must be a huge spectacle style distraction for them to run a news story about it. But the consistency of the articles and lack of any substance made it obvious it was an ad. The complaints make sense to me "Why do you care they're cutting to Taylor three times a game?" Because it's an ad and ads are annoying. Ads recently have an ideological bent which makes conservatives especially wary of them. Conservatives, to some extent rightly, see weird astroturfed media shit all the time dedicated to hating/destroying them because the media is mostly their enemy. The fact that they decide to create a conspiracy because the astroturfed weirdness of this is obvious and they're just making the mistake of thinking that this is political because most of the weird astroturfed stuff from the NFL in the past years has been political is understandable. And the fact that conspiratorial complaints get platformed to discredit real complaints is just business as usual for the media.

This is probably a large part of it. The NFL has for a long time been trying to appeal more to women. Taylor Swift fans are mostly women. Thus, more Taylor Swift = more interest for the women in the audience. Of course, that doesn't excuse this from being part of the Culture War. Why is the NFL, whose audiences were long a bastion of couch-locked junk-food-eating cheap-beer-swilling men, concentrating on attracting women? The innocent explanation is they are (or were, when this started) an untapped audience. But that doesn't really hold up; neglecting your core audience to attract a new one when your core is that big and that dedicated doesn't really make sense. You don't see soap operas adding car chases to get men interested! So I think there's quite a bit of "women are a more acceptable audience" mixed in.

How does it neglect the core audience?

It's usually an active rejection rather than neglect. "Expanding the audience" is just what they say to the moneymen. In practice, it's always about rejecting an audience who don't deserve to have nice things. I used to be more charitable about this, but fool me once and twice and all that.

It doesn't. Until it does. See: Marvel and Star Wars for increasingly bad pandering and weaponization of victimhood against the toxically masculine audience when the old audience complains.

Of course, sports doesn't need writing so it may not lead to any difference in this case.

But I get why people in the culture war are suspicious.

I think honestly it’s impossible not to see politics everywhere simply because conservatives have had a very long lesson in politics entering even things that had long been fairly apolitical. They cannot essentially participate in mainstream life without politics and specifically liberal politics being brought into the mix. And so now after nearly 8 years of politics invading every cultural touchstone, it seems a bit unfair to expect conservatives to try to play “cool” as liberals are coming after one of the few remaining mainstream entertainment outlets that they didn’t have to watch with their guard up.

because conservatives have had a very long lesson in politics entering even things that had long been fairly apolitical.

The knee-jerk rejoinder would usually be 'they were always political, the politics was just made explicit', but obviously it depends what you're talking about and how you define politics.

Again depending on the context, probably relating to the concept of 'white man as default', you know, 'it wasn't political when everyone looked and acted like me, it's political now that other people are being represented too.' That whole cultural dialogue is sort of an awful slog unfortunately, but it's the natural response to your perspective here.

This came up in the Bud Light thing too.

I get why liberals would pull the whole "what's it to you? It's just the thin end of the wedge!" . It has clearly been incredibly successful.

I'm always surprised that nonliberals who've seen liberals attempt to infect everything - decolonizing bird watching! also seem to share the same sentiment.

There is a reason people are on a hair trigger.

I’m surprised it took so long for conservatives to grow a spine on the issue. I wouldn’t consider myself super conservative. I’m egalitarian more or less, and I think that some of the culture war issues are overblown. But I can absolutely understand why conservatives, especially conservative parents are so unwilling to put up with the encroachment. It seems more or less that liberals are unwilling to allow anything mainstream to exist in an apolitical way. And this comes a problem precisely because it end up being a no quarter situation. A person wanting to raise their kids in a traditional manner has to be hyper vigilant on every piece of culture allowed in the house. Even down to children’s shows like Paw Patrol.

It feels like being colonized in a sense. The elites have decided that the old traditions must die, and have taken over everything in order to force the issue. Just like might have happened in the old west when Indians were forced to send their kids to boarding schools to kill off their culture and religion. Of course people are going to resist their culture and way of life being actively killed.

I am admittedly a progressive, which I'm sure colors my perspective, but I can't help but read your paragraph after the "AND YET" as exactly the kind of stuff Hanania is complaining about. If you roll up on some Normie Who Just Wants To Grill and start talking about the number of black people Swift has dated compared to the number of black people she danced with in what's basically an extended music video... what do you think their response is? How does the conversation proceed? I submit that a Normie does not spend one iota of brain power thinking about this fact and, if so confronted, would struggle to understand how the two things are supposed to relate to each other. Is this a particularly progressive perspective? Am I the one out of touch?

I don't think I was clear there, my apologies.

Hanania states that liberals are no longer the people who can't watch a football game or a Taylor Swift concert, who would be compelled to complain about some obscure political gripe. My point is that liberals have no problem watching the Eras Tour or a football game because the movie and the football game have already gone out of their way to make sure they don't offend liberals.

Swift and her team planned the Eras Tour movie specifically to avoid that kind of criticism from liberals. Wokie friends of mine gushed over the prominent placement of fat and trans and flamboyant dancers. Swift has been the subject of critique in the woke press for her taste in friends and in men before, she choreographed the event to avoid criticisms. She planned the whole event to avoid criticisms from the woke left.

If she had not done so, the film would have been the controversy in the woke press. There would have been articles about how her dancers weren't representative, how her romantic duet with a white man elevated white cisheteronormativity over black and brown bodies etc etc.

If Swift had not specifically planned her film to avoid those criticisms, we would be having the conversation about how lefties can't just watch a fucking movie without complaining about race.

Lefties are better at being normal, if you first go to a lot of trouble to make sure you're not offending them.

I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.

I suspect most people think a slogan like "end racism" being on helmets or in end zones is anodyne. The same way people are fine with the NFL turning everything pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month. When people see ads highlighting female athletes or coaches or whatever they don't think "Cringe Progressive Propaganda" they think "Neat!"

You characterize the actions taken by Swift, the NFL, etc as being directed towards liberals but I think you underestimate the extent to which "normies" either agree with or don't care about those actions.

My position is that normies are, almost definitionally, people who don't notice or care about these things. They just want to watch football.

Circa 2002, when I was watching football as a youngster, watching Andy Reid coach Donovan McNabb and the Eagles to the playoffs every year but fall short in the playoffs, it was liberals who noticed and complained about things. I remember this because I was there, if you want me to dig up a bunch of NYT and Atlantic and Slate articles about it if you want proof. They noticed all the Iraq-War Era "Support Our Troops" and called it jingoism, they noticed that all the coaches and owners and pundits were white and all the players were Black, they noticed that there was no place or respect for women anywhere in the NFL unless they're wearing a slutty cheerleader outfit. And they complained about it, constantly. In print and in person. They called it toxically masculine, they said watching players get injured and carted off the field was to prepare us for American soldiers dying overseas, they said the idea of white "owners" "trading" and "bidding on" black players was bad, etc etc etc.

This kind of thing marked those liberals as weirdoes, and cut them off from a significant part of the mainstream. Normies shrugged at all that stuff, they just wanted to watch the game not get lectured by the politically correct. When Tim Tebow kneeled, atheists seethed, my grandmother thought it was great, I mostly just wanted to watch the Broncos (I still think they should have given him another year).

Today, it's the opposite. Because the NFL has sought to address all those criticisms. There's a lot less jingoism than there used to be. There's all these efforts to say they care about women, there's less of the cheerleaders and they wear more clothing. They have tried in many ways to force teams to hire some Black coaching staff (and I actually think there are a lot more white players outside of the QB and OL than there used to be, so there's that). They talk a lot about racism, and domestic violence, and all kinds of other causes, many of them liberal coded.

Now, instead, it's the edgy right wingers who want to lecture me on politics that they notice while I want to watch Andy Reid coach Pat Mahomes and the Chiefs. And political correctness is calling out affirmative action for Black coaches and not for white wide receivers, and calling Travis Kelce Captian Vaxxxx.

Sorry for the off topic question, but it's the first time I've seen it in the wild -- are you intentionally capitalizing "Black" and not "white?" If so, may I ask why? I always thought this was just a progressive journalist signalling thing.

I think it's a useful separation. Black is referring to African Americans, American Descendants of Slavery and those later black skinned immigrants who have assimilated into that community. It's a proper noun because it's a proper community, with a sense of itself and some unifying customs.

White to me isn't. Whiteness is much more fraught with questions of community and boundary drawing. I prefer terms with more precision like Amerikaner, redneck, SWPL, etc. Whites in America are more defined by class, politics, profession, religion. And speaking about whites as a group necessarily involves Europeans, in ways that are fraught.

I'm not really that committed to the bit, but I thought all that at some point, and autocorrect started doing it for me.

Interesting, thank you.

Did you and I listen to the same sports media in 2020? The sports media is absolutely still populated by a class of chattering scolds who are determined to bend sports leagues to their will by relentlessly manipulating narratives. This includes commentators who are employed by the NFL itself! I was there in 2020 when Steve Wyche and Patrick Claybon went on the Around The NFL podcast (an official NFL-owned media product) to literally drum up political and financial support for Democrat candidates.

I listened to these same commentators - Wyche, Claybon, Gregg Rosenthal, Mina Kimes, Cynthia Frelund - *refuse to say the name of one of the NFL’s teams (the Redskins) out loud for about a year, in a blatantly obvious attempt to force the league to force the owner to change the name.

Every time I listen to an NFL podcast I have to hear Cynthia Frelund read a long and lecturing ad about how the NFL is sponsoring programs to get more women involved in men’s sports.

I could bring up myriad examples of the same behavior by NBA commentators, NHL commentators, etc. (I finally stopped listening to the No Dunks guys - AKA The Starters, AKA The Basketball Jones - because they also had a whole episode where they fawning interviewed a Democrat political operative urging people to vote for Raphael Warnock. There was not a single piece of basketball commentary during the entire episode.) It’s just fundamentally not true that liberals have stopped hectoring people about politics just because they’ve had so many successes already; I’m sure I’m going to hear yet another offseason of incessant carping about why Eric Bienemy hasn’t gotten a head coaching job, and hmmmmm isn’t it interesting how so many other white retreads are getting offers but not him, our league still has so far to go, etc. Conservatives may be indulging their own cranks momentarily, but the left still absolutely owns the “can’t shut up and let people enjoy things” label.

Yes, but 2020 was four years ago. It was a whole presidential administration. A lot has happened since then. The BLM overreaction effort they put in is exactly what I'm talking about when I say they've done a lot to soothe liberals.

It used to be that sports media was more or less conservative, and the liberal media criticizing it was made up largely of people who hate sports. Now the sports media is largely liberal. And the right wing attacks on it are from people who seem to hate sports, like Vivek.

The flip side of that is, for instance, action movies where the good guy blasts criminals that has conservatives and normies cheering together, and liberals clicking their tongue "this is so problematic, this is encouraging people acting vigilante violence against the underprivileged and minorities who are driven to crime by this racist, unfair count..." and so on.

As the French critics of American cinema asked: is it everywhere because it is universal or is it universal because it is everywhere?

As you say, I think a lot of people just go along because they don't care to get into this stuff . But if they had been asked ahead of time if they wanted X Allegedly Anodyne Liberal Pandering what would they have said?

I suppose my intuition is they also would not have cared, had they been asked in advance. I'm imagining this kind of caring as being symmetrical about whether something has happened. If you would have objected to, or had a problem with, the thing happening before it happened why wouldn't you have the same objection to its happening after it happened?

I'd love to see this falsified one way or the other.

IRL I've never met a male sports fan that is plussed by antiracism slogans and pink ribbons. Not nonexistent, but I would have assumed I'd come across one at some point. I'm not 'in the mix' as much as I was ten years ago, but they either had no comment on such things or were lightly mocking. Women could be effusive despite not really following the sport closeley.

Personally, I question if the "normies are surprisingly OK with all of this" is really true or a product of astroturfing. It's a popular sentiment online that I don't ever see materialize in the world, with the exception of 'normie women' who are more progressive at baseline than I ever see men being vis a vis conservatism. Like many other things, my sense is men have learned to keep their opinions to themselves.

I'd also be curious if any recent polling data would indicate a turn for or against pink ribbons. I could tolerate it as a minor cringe thing up to a point, but maybe I feel very different about it now after seeing what else the NFL picked up afterwards.

I think the vast majority of men would just as soon watch the game and ignore all the ancillary crap. So to the extent that pink ribbons etc. exist, it is merely an annoyance - commentators talking about that rather than something actually game-related. However, when it reaches the point of not being able to ignore it (franchise name changes probably the #1 example) people will get actively mad. Also of course if someone is pushing a message that is diametrically opposed to your beliefs, that's going to rankle.

Admittedly most of my experience with dedicated sports fans was around a decade or so ago. I do not watch it much myself nor do most of my friends. I absorb its happenings via some combination of social media and family osmosis. It's possible things have shifted since then, although I'm skeptical.

Personally, I question if the "normies are surprisingly OK with all of this" is really true or a product of astroturfing.

Insofar as "all of this" refers to the specific examples in the OP, I think it is organic. Beyond that I would need more specification to have an informed opinion.

I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.

I don't think he's arguing that... what he's arguing is that normies have been influenced dramatically over a short period of time by extremely aggressive and disingenous political moves from the left. As others have discussed, basically entryism and underhanded tactics to force public spaces to cater to their norms.

Once you have the norms changed, by definition the "normies" will follow along. They're really just people who default to what the norm is, and don't think too much about it.

What people on the right are complaining about is that there used to be, seemingly, a sort of 'gentleman's agreement' not to use tactics that are too underhanded to change norms. The left recently with all their policing of language, pronouns, media, etc. seem to have thrown that informal agreement out of the window. Which, to be fair, is very explicit in leftist who/whom political philosophy. It's part of why people on the right have been warning about communism for the last century.

If you have a political opponent who will stop at nothing to enact their views, it's hard to impossible to work with them in a liberal democratic setting.

Could you tell me what underhanded tactics the left used and describe this agreement not to use them in more detail? As best I can tell the way the left has effected societal and institutional change is some combination of (1) joining up with an organization to change its culture from the inside and (2) criticizing various aspects of an organization or culture in media (social or legacy) to effect change from the outside. What is "underhanded" about these tactics? Similarly what was disingenuous about these attempts to change the culture? I'm pretty sure leftists believed their own criticisms of these institutions and cultures.

I made an effort post describing my experiences here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184826?context=8#context

It's hard to pin down exactly - but Venkatesh Rao gives an excellent overview of the types of underhanded, manipulative tactics that 'sociopaths' use to protect themselves and advance their goals at the expense of others in The Gervais Principle.

C.S. Lewis also writes about this sort of maneuvering in his novel The Hideous Strength. There are plenty of other examples of this type of thing.

Of course these tactics aren't limited to leftists exclusively, but leftists and Marxists explicitly embrace the "win at all costs" mentality, while their opponents typically do not. This means that on average more leftists are going to be willing to throw moral scruples to the wind and use whatever manipulative techniques they must to advance their cause.

No i don't think you're not the one out of touch.

I wonder why Taylor Swift blew up over the past year despite having originally entered superstardom in 2010-2011. There was a decade cooling off period in which other singers like Lizzo, Katy Perry, and Beyonce held the mantle, and then she suddenly blew up. I think this shows again the power of Twitter to create superstars and affect news cycles. The Musk effect is real. Sure, Meta is a far bigger network of platforms and YouTube is bigger overall, but Twitter is where the discourse and culture are shaped.

I don't think Twitter has much to do with it. The night before Thanksgiving, I attended a Taylor Swift trivia night that my cousin's boyfriend convinced me to attend because it was at a local brewery. The vast majority of the attendees weren't the typical brewery clientele, but suburban moms and their young daughters. Not too many men. And the place was absolutely packed; there were at least 20 teams. I guarantee you very few of these people have Twitter accounts, or care too much about Elon Musk. I attribute Swift's sudden blowup to the following factors:

  1. She was already very famous. This may seem obvious but it seems like there's more staying power when an already famous person reaches this level of popularity compared with the meteoric rise of an unknown. She's 34 years old and has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years; there's no sense that she's the flavor of the month.

  2. She has a history of making risky professional moves that have the potential to wreck her career but end up bolstering it. In 2014 there was some serious discussion as to whether she'd be able to appeal to the pop market in the same way she appealed to the country market. There have long been country stars with crossover appeal, but most of them never stop ostensibly being country musicians, no matter how pop they get. The only other musician I can think of who pulled this off was Linda Ronstadt, but she gets an asterisk because she was at the fringes of the country world; she came out of the more rock-oriented Laurel Canyon scene rather than being a product of Nashville. I think a big part of the reason Nashville artists are hesitant to break out like this is because country is a sort of security blanket. The country world wants something that's ostensibly country, and they will loyally buy it if it's marketed as such. Making a full transition out of Nashville means casting off the last vestiges of this to make it in the wider world. You run the risk of losing your old audience and failing to find a new one. But she correctly calculated that the country fans who were buying her music were probably already buying pop records anyway, and that her pop audience was where all the growth was. And when I say she I mean whoever does her marketing. So she managed to get two audiences for the price of one, so to speak.

  3. Then — and people often forget about this — she pulled her music off of streaming services because she didn't like the business model. For three years. I'm not going to attempt to quantize the impact this had, but I doubt it did her career any favors in the short-term. However, it probably helped her career long-term, because it encouraged people to buy her albums rather than stream them. This probably fostered a sense of loyalty that she wouldn't have had if she'd been available at the touch of a button to anyone with a Spotify account. And then it was a big deal when she got back on the streaming services, which again increased her audience.

  4. So at this point she's been steadily consolidating her power for over a decade. This is important in and of itself because most pop stars don't stay on top for that long, especially just by being pop stars. Contrast this with Lady Gaga, who is still famous but more because she did things like movies and albums with Tony Bennett. No one has cared about her pop records since 2011. The fact that Swift is in her mid-30s and has been able to sustain a career since her days as a teen idol without making any major changes is an accomplishment in and of itself and probably feeds into our current moment. She's been around long enough that women who listened to her in high school can take their kids to her concerts.

  5. Despite her fame, and her numerous celebrity relationships, she's managed to avoid the kind of scandals and tabloid gossip that surrounds other pop stars, especially ones who become famous at sixteen and have to navigate the transition to adulthood while in the public eye.

  6. She has an uncanny knack for making decisions that are totally about money and convincing people that they're not about money. The whole "Taylor's Version" thing is a prime example. She didn't like the fact that she didn't own the rights to her old recordings. The main advantage of owning the rights to her recordings is that she can collect all the money they generate. Otherwise, there's no real advantage. This is a big deal for most people, but for someone like Swift, who has more money than she's ever going to be able to spend, the schlubs at whatever private equity firm owns the rights to them probably need the money more than she does. But she casts it as a matter of principle, rerecords new versions she owns the rights to, and convinces her fans to shell out money for five different collectors' editions of the same albums they already own. The whole thing was about as transparent a cash grab as you could find, yet she pulled it off in such a way that even people who could care less about her career thought it was a slick move to stick it to those fatcats. It got her the kind of publicity you can't buy while minting her a pretty penny.

  7. And, finally, in the same vein, we have the Eras Tour. At some point in every pop star's life, there comes a point where they are no longer a "frontline artist", by which I mean a contemporary artist who makes contemporary music for a contemporary audience. At some point, people don't go to your concerts to hear the new album but to hear the old favorites. It's usually the obvious sign that a band is over the hill — there's a new album out and the kind of people who paid 70 bucks to hear you play don't give a fuck. And if your biggest fans no longer care... Becoming an oldies act is depressing. Bob Dylan and Neil Young have defiantly refused to go down that path, regardless of the crap they take for it, and insist on being contemporary musicians who will tour the new album and maybe throw in a few old favorites. Mike Love's insistence on the Beach Boys playing touring their 60s hits in the wake of the compilation album Endless Summer's success in the mid-1970s drove a wedge between the band that they never really recovered from. (And most of the band was younger then than Swift is now.) The huge appeal of the Eras Tour was that, for the first time, Swift would be taking listeners on a musical journey through her entire career. She was becoming an oldies act, proudly and deliberately. At a time when she was still viable as a frontline artist. This is almost unheard of. Sure, contemporary bands usually play some older material at all their shows, but it's unusual for someone to actively embrace what is usually the sure sign of a has-been. Because the dirty secret of oldies acts is that they're very profitable. People like hearing old favorites, even when they're still willing to pay good money for the new shit. And the whole Taylor's Version thing was perfect cover. Combine this with the fact that she hadn't toured in half a decade and the stage was set for all hell to break loose.

I wonder if the whole "lottery" aspect to the tickets also made this go crazy. They were so exclusive! I know people who couldn't get tickets. I know someone who bought tickets online (Stubhub maybe?) And flew to brazil and when they landed found out their tickets didn't exist! There were all these stories and tales of great sacrifice to go to these concerts.

7.

I think this is an often underappreciated aspect of an artist's career. Many of them just do not know when to throw in the towel on new stuff. Mad respect to Billy Joel who has not released new material in 30 years but still plays a few concerts (including Madison Square Garden) every month. He's someone who knew when he was done.

Mad respect to Billy Joel who has not released new material in 30 years

Or since yesterday:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/billy-joels-turn-the-lights-back-on-1234958448/

How can you be a pessimist when life is this funny?

great write up. nominated

Thank you for providing positive reinforcement.

Doesn't require a comment.

Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.

The world is turned upside down: conservatives and liberals are extremely confused because they are accustomed to and expect to be setting and rebelling against norms respectively. Obviously, this is far more discomforting for conservatives than liberals. They lack the mindset, the institutional capability, and the practical knowledge to be good counterculture rebels. (This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent). The coalition members with the most energy for this kind of politics are the people you least want to hand the microphone.

I don't see any confusion. The left is going leftward, as it historically has done. Conservatives are in the strongest position in a long time. So many wins over the past few years, like Elon Twitter buyout, successful buycotts of brands, plagiarism scandals, SCOTUS, etc. . Biden's approval numbers are among the lowest ever for an incumbent. They right just needs to step back and let the left hang itself by its petard. Wokeness does not need a counter-response; its existence turns off enough people.

So many wins over the past few years, like Elon Twitter buyout

They retaliated first by cutting off Twitter's ad money, then by taking all of Elon's compensation ($55B in options) for being CEO of Tesla away from him. Looks like they're still ahead on that one -- if the pattern continues there will be no Twitter and Musk will lose his fortune, unless he gets with the program.

Wokeness does not need a counter-response; its existence turns off enough people.

No, every "win" you've mentioned is part of a weak counter-response.

Alternate theory of the difficulty conservatives have with being counter-culture: they are still for the most part, speaking demographically, the type of people that the current system most benefits and enriches.

No doubt, parts of the system are being updated in ways that will decrease the amount by which they are preferentially enriched, which is a net loss in real terms for them personally. And no doubt they can and will get extremely mad about that.

But they are still enriched by the system in both absolute and relative terms, and therefore cannot be too enthusiastic about burning it to the ground. A reshuffling would not be likely to benefit them by chance, unlike the more typical style of counter-culture member who is relatively disadvantaged by the system and might benefit from seeing it overturned.

  • -10

No point, just an observation: They are also, in most places, the people who contribute the most to the system.

Enh, I'll just submit my mistrust and dissatisfaction with every metric and framing that would lead to that conclusion, while admitting that it is true if you accept those very common metrics and framings.

That's a pretty huge conversation that I'm not an expert on and probably don't have time for today anyway.

Alternate theory of the difficulty conservatives have with being counter-culture: they are still for the most part, speaking demographically, the type of people that the current system most benefits and enriches.

Can you expand on this? Who are these conservatives that are being enriched?

When I look around at my incredibly rich and favored city, all I see are far left progressives.

(This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent).

Define "incompetent" because in my experience conservative protests/rallies (especially the pro-life and pro-gun ones) are typically larger in terms of attendance, and better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc... than progressive protests. They just don't enjoy the friendly relationship with the media that the progressives do.

better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc

See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).

My take on this is essentially the same as @ArjinFerman's

Seems to me that your complaint against conservatives is that they are too conservative and need to become less so if they want to be taken seriously. Forgive me for finding such arguments unconvincing and suspecting ulterior motives.

I'm not complaining that conservatives are too conservative (at least not in this context); I'm offering a theory for why conservatives are really bad at playing the role of counterculture. Your garden-variety normiecon does not have the mindset to be an effective counterculture member. They're too uncomfortable with disorder and nonconformity. The types that do suffer from being intolerably crankish - the type of person who thinks a pop star dating a football player is a Pentagon (?) op.

I'm not complaining that conservatives are too conservative (at least not in this context); I'm offering a theory for why conservatives are really bad at playing the role of counterculture. Your garden-variety normiecon does not have the mindset to be an effective counterculture member.

Except we've seen what happens when anyone to the right of the establishment does do effective counterculture - deplatforming, shadowbanning, algorithmic throttling, selective giving in to heckler's veto.

I get it, Western societies base their legitimacy on the consent of the governed, so we all have to act like anything that happens is a bottom-up organic event. The illusion looks convincing as long most people trust their elites, but the moment they start doubting them, it turns out the consent of the governed is no more real than the divine right of kings, or any other myth. This is how we go from the establishment fighting for the free speech rights of actual Nazis to them declaring parents who don't want racism taught to their children being declared Nazis.

Except we've seen what happens when anyone to the right of the establishment does do effective counterculture - deplatforming, shadowbanning, algorithmic throttling, selective giving in to heckler's veto.

...arrest and conviction on novel felony charges, disqualification from office. Thanks to January 6 we know what happens when the right protests like the left; the right is punished severely and further suppressed as a result.

He did say "counter culture", so I was thinking more memes than protests.

tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).

I'd like to remind you that the media turned a conservative teenager standing and smiling into a national (maybe even international) scandal. Something that couldn't possibly get more docile was somehow portrayed as too aggressive. If you think there's a way out of this bind, and can actually deliver results, I'm sure lots of conservatives would love to pay you to be a protest organizer.

but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).

If you were a right-wing protestor, how would you protest in order to get positive media coverage?

They just don't enjoy the friendly relationship with the media that the progressives do.

That's like saying a business is run amazingly well, but can't make any sales. A friendly relationship with the media (or at least positive coverage in a wide-reaching format) is an essential part of many protests. If you can't do that, then your protest is failing at one of its core goals.

Are you saying that we are not discussing "competence" per se so much as "conforming to liberal preferences"?

More "rationality competence is systematized winning".

If a protest's goal is to get people to show up and raise the profile of an issue, then your comment only focused on the participants and not on what effect they have on the wider world. I'm not fully convinced that conservatives are worse at effective outreach given the loss of prestige of the mainstream media, but those (alleged) failures can't be dismissed by pointing to the challenges they face.

Which brings us back to @Lewis' point.

You can argue that conservative protests are typically "unsuccessful" but that's a very different charge from being "incompetent".

The enemy gets a vote, and sometimes the enemy simply has overwhelming force. The best possible protest a conservative organization could run (say, the March for Life) might not get any traction because of the efforts of the media to minimize it. That's not a competence problem; it's a power problem.

But that just goes back to institutional capture. What you’re essentially saying is that the protests are irrelevant and impotent, which, while quite possibly true, is a different problem from them being incompetently held.

This entire discussion is just painfully terminally online.

My experience is that nobody who spends the majority of their time in meatspace is thinking about this stuff. The weirdo conservatives you see online are just as rare in real life as the weirdo antiwork type communists you see online. Yeah there are weirdo conservatives...but the guy wearing a MAGA hat at this point is considered a weirdo even by his conservative friends, unless he lives in an extremely rural area. Most cons just want the economy to go back to the way it was, and wand their kids left alone.

I mean, yes, but, from the article:

The key difference, however, is that Democrats did not pick the worst caricature of everything their party stands for and make them their leader. Also, while no Democratic legislature abolished the police, state Republican parties are ensuring that women have to risk their lives and health to deliver doomed pregnancies. Each side has freaks. But the problem with the current Republican Party is that the most unappealing members of the coalition, in this case Trump and pro-lifers, are the ones in charge.

The people saying that Taylor Swift is an FBI agent or w/e-the-fuck may only be known to the terminally online.

The fact that abortion is getting outlawed or regulated in a bunch of states is not. That actually affects people in meat space.

Meat space people tune in to the conversation when they find out something like that now applies to them or their niece or their sister or w/e and is frightening them.

My experience is that nobody who spends the majority of their time in meatspace is thinking about this stuff.

Where's the border? Fox News has a host calling Swift a "pentagon asset". If your claim is that no actual R is watching Fox News...idk what to say here. Ross Douthat covered this in a column in today's local paper.

Mainstream Rs are going to have a hard time if they have to run against the online right conspiracy types this year, because Trump has cozied up to them so effectively.

Relatively few conservatives are in MAGA hats these days, but get rid of that percentage of the party and the Rs are dead in the water.

The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic.

There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes. I myself have half-joked that if Swift and Kelce get married and have at least a couple of beautiful, tall, talented white children, it could serve as a genuinely impactful cultural signal to other white Millennial women. If anyone could make having blue-eyed excellent babies cool again - and prove that such a thing is actually still possible even for women in their 30s like Swift - it’s those two.

However, Swift and Kelce themselves have certainly gone out of their way to make themselves poor vessels for right-wing hopes. Kelce acts black, in a very low-brow way, and my understanding is that Swift is the first white woman he has publicly dated; before that he was the center of a reality show where a bunch of ratchet (mostly black) women competed for his attention. The carping about his appearance in an ad campaign for the Pfizer Covid vaccine is cringeworthy and represents the DR at its most pointlessly oppositional and conspiratorial; that being said, it does suggest that Kelce might be willing and eager to act as a mouthpiece for whatever culturally-approved shibboleths he feels like he needs to parrot. He is apolitical in a way that makes him useful to forces larger than himself, and he appears to have no deeply-held principles which would countervail against attempts to leverage his cultural influence for political ill.

Swift, meanwhile, expresses political views that are totally typical and standard-issue for white women of her age and social class. This doesn’t reflect particularly poorly on her, so much as it just reflects poorly on women in general and of the ever-widening ideological gulf between men and women. I have no contrarian stance toward Swift; she’s a gorgeous, extremely talented woman, with considerable intelligence and impressive levels of personal agency, and she has a pleasant and dorky (and very very white) personality which I find very endearing. She’s a shameless theater kid; she appeared in the ill-fated Cats film, with zero concern for whatever damage it could have done to her career, even going as far as to co-write a new song for it with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, all because she had always loved the musical and wanted to dance around in a catsuit. (And say whatever you will about that film, but as far as that specific scene is concerned… furries, I kinda get it now.)

She is, though, also a serial monogamist who has slept with an order of magnitude more men than even the average slutty urban Millennial woman ever will. The extent to which this reflects poorly on her character is debatable. Perhaps her odd and sheltered upbringing doomed her to be susceptible to the entertainment industry’s temptations in a way that she wouldn’t have been if she’d had a more normal teenage years. From a conservative perspective, it’s undeniable that this makes her at best an imperfect role model for girls. Much of Swift’s lyrical content is still quite wholesome and aspirational toward conservative ideals of fidelity and young love, but it’s impossible not to notice the contrast between those sentiments and the way she’s actually lived her life.

However, a Swift-Kelce marriage - and especially some beautiful blue-eyed Swift-Kelce babies - could still be a momentous cultural whitepill for normal white people. Kelce’s black-centric cultural interests and Swift’s endless string of disreputable boyfriends are not heritable traits; their children, brought up with a stable wealthy upbringing and able to learn from the youthful mistakes of their parents, could unironically be ubermensch paragons of American bourgeois excellence. I’m rooting for the Swift-Kelce romance (although there’s still time for her to change her mind and decide that she’d rather go for the type of guy who leaves fawning racially-aware comments about her on rationalist-adjacent internet message boards) and I think Taylor can still be our Aryan Princess whether she wants to be or not.

There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes

The twitter-right so badly wants to bring her under the fold. Not going to happen, I'm afraid. She is a 'cat person' which is not a good sign either for those hoping she will repopulate the Aryan race.

I think the important thing is that it’s the message, not the person, that’s most relevant when it comes to pop culture. There have been ‘red tribe’ movies or shows about grizzled macho white marine super soldiers or whatever and invariably the lead actor is a progressive and the screenplay is written by some nebbish guy in Hollywood but everyone understands, implicitly, that it’s a ‘conservative’ movie. Yellowstone is another example, it’s created by a progressive and is if anything a wholesome™️ tale of plucky farmers and natives up against evil white capitalist business republicans, but it doesn’t matter, the vibe is red.

Taylor Swift’s image is a wholesome blonde blue-eyed Americana cheerleader prom dress ‘50s diner vibe, played completely straight (unlike, say, Lana, for whom it’s ironic and a little postmodern). That’s the image she sells to hundreds of millions of people around the world, of that image of America. Her personal politics or lifestyle aren’t relevant in the way they would sometimes be if she was a politician.

This is only for the online too much people and needing people to either be with us or against us with them.

On net hottie marrying beefy football guy is trad and good.

The only thing really here is Kelce took a knee for BLM. But he’s also a football player so he fell for the propaganda in my opinion and didn’t dig deep enough to realize the stats on police killings were nothing like reality.

Yep.

I was laughing at how this union is just an arrested development version of the most stereotypical teenager romance for the last 70 years.

The hyper-popular prom queen marrying the football star. Granted Kelce isn't the quarterback, but if his team wins the Superbowl and he proposes to her on the 50 Yard Line it'd be almost the most cliched Americana-style union one could conceive of.

Literal rivers of happy tears will be shed by the women looking on and living vicariously through them.

High School never ends, it seems.

High School never ends, it seems.

Reese Witherspoon - she’s the prom queen

Bill Gates - captain of the chess team

Jack Black the clown, and Brad Pitt the quarterback

I’ve seen it all before… I want my money back!

16 years since that song came out and a most of those specific lyrics are still accurate.

Jack Black the clown

https://twitter.com/jasoncrouch/status/1748507393128869929

Time is a flat circle, Hoff.

This feels to me like he's going for embodying the "No, it's the children who are wrong." meme. Millennials (who aren't remotely "children" anymore but make up the plurality of Swift's fans) and younger are mostly wondering what is wrong with Republicans constantly going on about the existence of hair dye and queer people; those are normal to most of those age groups. And just maybe it's a hard sell to women looking to date men and/or intentionally have children to vote for the party who has state officials making national news for actively trying to prevent women from getting medical care to prevent infertility due to pregnancy complications; that seems a lot more likely to be popular with older women who can feel ideologically pure about opposing abortion without being worried about it affecting themselves directly.

There's no doubt that plenty on the right are going after Taylor Swift in cringey and conspiracy-minded ways. But I don't get Hanania's idea that she and her fans should be natural allies for the right. She's the icon of modern feminism.

it's not so much that her fans will become allies, but the right's hardline position on abortion and alleged conspiratorial thinking turns off potential normies, which can make a difference for close elections.

Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.

The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives.

The "or is at least perceived to be" is the critical part. That "center-right is dead" is the narrative that both the woke left and dissident right want to push because what power and credibility they have absolutely depends on convincing enough people that this is the case.

Who of actual political relevance would you describe as center right?

I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.

Dude was/is a vaguely right-leaning Democrat. His political positions and persona hasn't actually changed all that much since the 90s and early 00s. That what used to be the centrist/moderate position of both parties less than 20 years ago is now considered "far right" by the media and academia shows just how far they've shifted to the left.

The Wokies hate Trump because he's an unironic "'Murica Fuck Ya" sort of guy. Meanwhile the DR hate him because his popularity is effectively a big old middle-finger to everything they believe.

I agree that the vast majority of Trump's policy positions are comfortably inside the Republican Overton window, and if a Democrat had run for President in the nineties under this exact package of policy positions, no one would have batted an eyelid. What keeps me from calling him centre-right is his pronounced tendency towards conspiratorialism and his increasingly obvious authoritarian streak. "The election is rigged, this goes all the way to the top - as soon as I seize power I'm going to keep it forever, drain the swamp and get revenge on my enemies" is not the kind of thing a normie Republican says. One might say he doesn't really believe this and it's just smack talk to rally his base, but again, I don't think a normie Republican would present this kind of narrative of the US even as insincere smack talk.

I don't consider Trump far-right by any stretch, but the "centre-right" label doesn't sit well with me. Maybe some kind of synthesis of bog-standard centrist Republican policy proposals with the "paranoid style"? I think this is probably what people are getting at when they describe him as a "populist".

I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.

I guess it was a "gotcha" insofar as it was extremely predictable that you'd say Trump despite the absurdity of that claim. "Tear the rotten edifice down" is not and cannot in any meaningful sense be a center-right ethos because the core principle of the center-right is that the status quo are basically fine. Trumpists are shouting that things are emphatically not fine - that the Federal government is hopelessly corrupt, the Democrats are stealing elections, the Mexicans are invading, the trans are corrupting the youth, globalists are stealing our jobs, etc... and that radical action is needed to fix it.

despite the absurdity of that claim.

I it really "absurd" though? That's what I am questioning

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”

That's not center right.

I can't believe I'm asking this years after the fact - but did Trump actually say "They are rapists"? Because in that sequence of words, it's obvious to me it's possessive 'their'. As in 'their drugs, their crime, their rapists'. But everybody up to a VP candidate in the debates just so conveniently interprets it as him calling Mexicans rapists or whatever. And now it's one of those things that "Everbody knows he said" like the fine people smear job, the koi fish smear, and 'Tim Apple'.

I hope you understand that this is one of the many reasons people who aren't already persuaded by this hackery place low value in your assessment of what constitutes moderate or far-right.

video: https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2015/06/25/29292957/

And even if it was "they're" rather than "their", I would interpret it as "the subset of Mexicans illegally migrating to the US are rapists" not "all Mexicans are rapists". Radically different in meaning to how it was presented.

That's not center right.

It's not "center right" according to whom?

Like I said, that what was the moderate/centrist position in the 90s is now considered "far right" should be an indication of just how far off the reservation the media has drifted in the last 20 years.

Rich, mainstream white people are the right's natural constituency. Taylor is an icon the most shallow of feminisms, the kind that can easily be co-opted by the right. Women have lead right wing parties across the west at different times.

Here's the question at the core of the article, for me: if the Right can't attract the support, or at least the tolerance, of white men who like the NFL and white women who like Taylor Swift, who does that leave?

Rich, mainstream white people are the right's natural constituency.

No, no they are not.

Such were the wages of the Clinton years. The Democrats cut ties with their labour roots and now "the Left" is wholly a Hi-Low alliance of wealthy capitalists and urban lumpenproles against the working class and petite-bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile it remains the petite-bourgeoisie who are (and always have been) the right's natural constituency.

if the Right can't attract the support, or at least the tolerance, of white men who like the NFL and white women who like Taylor Swift, who does that leave?

Nobody. The left has won.

Edit: OK, you all don't like short answers to rhetorical questions, there's a longer version. The longer version is given by others here but not in so many words. The schools, entertainment media, and most news media have been for generations now pumping out the message "Left is good, right is bad". The counterculture message has been "left is good, right is bad". At some point the message "anyone who says right is not bad is bad, don't listen to them" got put in too ("Faux news"). And this has never stopped. The exceptions in entertainment (a few right-wing action stars) are gone. So why would you expect anyone to be attracted to the right any more?

Someone reported this as:

You need to ban Nybbler for his own sanity.

Which is funny but also, man, maybe he has a point?

I am not officially warning you here, but this post was kind of low effort and you really have been sort of a one-note piano lately, enough that even people who broadly agree with you are getting annoyed.

I am not officially warning you here, but this post was kind of low effort and you really have been sort of a one-note piano lately, enough that even people who broadly agree with you are getting annoyed.

But is he wrong though?

Being right doesn't mean you aren't being an annoying one-note piano.

Yes. Frequently. Regularly, even.

Conservatism has often been criticized as the "Coalition of the Comfortable;" Hanania is nodding towards it as a positive rather than a negative. I've argued here before that conservatism, to appeal to its natural constituency, has to try to preserve the world as it exists today and as I grew up in it, not try to tear that world down. Chesterton's Fence and Chesterton's Ruins denominate the proper area of conservatism.

That world was probably as degenerate if not more so compared to today. Drug usage was rampant, as was smoking and drinking. Instead of computer porn, it was done at home. And lots of brothels and adult film theatres. Except for LGBT+ going mainstream, America was in many ways as deviant.

I wonder if listening to a bunch of Cole Porter songs might help. The sound is unmistakably early 20th century and there is plenty of sex and drugs involved - he references cocaine, morphine, cannabis and drinking to excess, all as if they are totally normal elements of life.

Conservatism has often been criticized as the "Coalition of the Comfortable;" Hanania is nodding towards it as a positive rather than a negative.

It seems to me that the problem with this analysis is that a lot of actual conservatives aren't on board with that idea, do in fact have values beyond comfort, and are willing to both endure and inflict significant discomfort to ensure those values are conserved.

...More generally, would it be fair to say that Hanania is taking a Blue stereotype of Conservatism, and complaining that Reds aren't conforming to it? Is Hanania a Red or a Blue? If, as seems likely, he's a Blue, why is any of this surprising at all? Ingroup member confused and horrified that the outgroup doesn't act like the ingroup, news at 11.

Is Hanania a Red or a Blue?

Almost positive he's a Red. He unabashedly endorses HBD, he's an outspoken critic of wokeness, wants to repeal the civil rights act of 1964, he recently published an article arguing that average female intelligence is lower than average male intelligence, has little sympathy for the Palestinian cause and thinks Israel should crush any hope of Palestinian independence, was outed as having routinely used ethnic slurs before writing under his own name etc.

On the other hand he's anti-Christian, anti-populist and pro-euthanasia.

(His dismissal of the Palestinian cause stems from lacking any bleeding heart Abrahamic universalism.)

do in fact have values beyond comfort, and are willing to both endure and inflict significant discomfort to ensure those values are conserved.

But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are. If they weren't, they wouldn't be trying to conserve it. They would be trying to destroy it, to uproot the world as we know it and create a new one, a progressive or reactionary utopia. I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built. But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

As a general rule, the answer is "because the people tearing it down didn't care about/didn't know about X thing, and if X wasn't a concern the fence would be obviously insane".

Haidt made the point in The Righteous Mind that conservatives understand progressives much better than the other way around, because it's easier to hypothetically take things out of your moral compass than to correctly conceptualise and hypothetically insert things into it.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

That's not exactly hard. We've been swimming in propaganda for why fences must be torn down. Some of us are even old enough to have seen a fence or two being torn down, and all the promises of what would and would not happen after it's gone.

But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are.

That is not a definition of Conservative that seems useful. It's conservatism as a tendency, an unreflective inclination, a mood.

I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built.

Chesterton's Fence does not preclude Chesterton from believing that he does, in fact, understand exactly why a fence was built, and why tearing it down is vitally nescessary.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

Yes. Hanania's problem is that, increasingly, the general class of people he is complaining about are confident that they can do this, for what seem to me to be good reasons. It seems to me that this portion is growing fairly rapidly, and its presence is starting to have serious real-world consequences. When it gets large enough, which fences are up and which ruins are down will change.

Hanania's schtick seems to be the Republican who exclusively criticizes Republicans for being unlikeable and out of touch.

The problem is that he himself embodies the very things he criticizes in others.

  • Unlikeable? Check
  • Unattractive? Check
  • Trollish behavior? Check
  • Obsessed with weird online drama? Check

The argument Hanania goes like this: When the Republicans do have genuinely nice, non-weird leaders like Romney or Mike Johnson, those leaders still have massive amounts of shit slung at them. Is it any wonder that the Trumps and Musks of the world don't want to play the nice and normal game?

But for the record, I think Hanania's right. All thing's being equal, nice and normal wins. The average urban cat mom will still see Mike Johnson as the devil incarnate, but there are swing voters out there that will see a beautiful smiling family and think "maybe this guy's not so bad".

Hanania's a good writer. He should take his own advice and I bet he'd be more popular. He's trolled his way to a small amount of attention. Now it's time to pivot. When you're on the right, you need to save your weirdness points for what matters.

I have to respect the hustle though. It's 2020-2021. Biden is inaugurated following Jan 6th . Trumpism and election-fraud and anti-vaccine conspiratorial thinking dominates discourse even on Twitter despite old ownership, as does right-wing economic populism. In early 2022, Elon buys out Twitter. The Jan 6th people get picked off one by one. Wokeness seems to get worse. Hanania comes along and carves a niche, so-called high status conservatism, which brings the likes of Marc Andreessen, Chamath, David Sachs, and other high-status influential important centrist/middle people under the fold. This style of conservatism harkens back to neoconservatism, in rejecting populism and the victimization and conspiratorial thinking that otherwise dominated pre-2022. It found a huge success even if it is still overshadowed by Trump-populism, plus the rise of the Musk-approved HBT-left/center, like @eyeslasho and @cremieuxrecueil that came later. He was smart to find this underserved niche of center-right people who were tired of Trumpism and seek practical solutions to wokeness where Trumpism failed.

Hanania's schtick seems to be the Republican who exclusively criticizes Republicans for being unlikeable and out of touch.

This isn’t really a problem. If you want Republicans who primarily criticize Democrats you can switch on Fox or try any of dozens of other outlets or commentators.

Hanania’s point, which he kind of keeps drilling in, is that a lot of Republicans aren’t serious people. They have a poor understanding of their own voters, their own principles and political strategy in general, kind of a trifecta of disastrous realities.

The argument Hanania goes like this: When the Republicans do have genuinely nice, non-weird leaders like Romney or Mike Johnson, those leaders still have massive amounts of shit slung at them.

Romney did fine but was up against a hugely charismatic president on his second term who drew out the black vote and was a darling of white progressives.

Romney would have won in 2016, I’ve had arguments on this topic before and it’s an unproveable counterfactual but his problem was his opponent, not that he was ex-Bain or looked like a hedge fund manager. Similarly, 2008 McCain would also have won in 2016.

And of course the general perception of Obama was that he was a wholesome “nice, non weird” leader who loved his wife and kids, didn’t publicly cheat and seemed like a friendly enough guy, so Romney didn’t exactly have an ‘advantage’ in that area. Hillary, by contrast, was hated and seen as a soulless mercenary who chose to stay with her husband not out of love but out of a ruthless desire for political power.

Hanania's a good writer. He should take his own advice and I bet he'd be more popular. He's trolled his way to a small amount of attention. Now it's time to pivot. When you're on the right, you need to save your weirdness points for what matters.

I see Hanania more as a provocateur, less in the Fuentes or BAP sense where establishment conservatives will just switch off because of the language and overt extremist views, and more as someone who asks interesting questions about where US conservative priorities actually are.

The challenge for the right - which Hanania correctly diagnoses - is in converting little bursts of public outrage about things like BLM, trans bathrooms, the bud light controversy, Asian anger around affirmative actions, uproar in some southern states about critical race theory in schools etc into a coherent ideological program with policies at the local, state and federal level.

People like Rufo, Tucker and LibsOfTikTok have a big reach and make people angry, but their shtick is outrage bait. That’s not a bad thing, but it often goes nowhere.

Hanania’s point, which he kind of keeps drilling in, is that a lot of Republicans aren’t serious people. They have a poor understanding of their own voters, their own principles and political strategy in general, kind of a trifecta of disastrous realities.

He's pragmatic, which I think helps. He knows that sentiment, getting people mad on twitter is not good enough. Change comes from affecting institutions and in the courts.

Romney would have won in 2016, I’ve had arguments on this topic before and it’s an unproveable counterfactual but his problem was his opponent, not that he was ex-Bain or looked like a hedge fund manager. Similarly, 2008 McCain would also have won in 2016.

not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it

whenever you fill in the any details or support for your counterfactual argument, significant claims of yours are wrong and yet when it's corrected the belief survives

it's the great myth of alternative GOP winner who will win resounding victories for the electorate of... 1984

Not only would Mitt Romney have won, but John McCain, a candidate who represented George W. Bush's 3rd term, a president so disastrous it caused a cultural shift making right-wing behavior and words as low-status and the opposite as high status and whose admin was so unpopular by the end of it that a near 60 Senate majority of the opposition party which made substantial changes to law and government which fundamentally shifted the entire apparatus leftward, was going to win in 2016? Okay.

not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it

Do you not understand the difference between low turn out midterms and high turnout presidential election years?

And 2rafa is right: 2014 was the best recent Republican Congressional year, when they peaked at 54 Senate seats and 247 House seats (more than any time since the 1920's in the House). The fringes of the Tea Party cost the GOP Senate seats in 2010. Remember the Witch? Republicans could have had a Senate seat in Delaware.

Your claims are typically that Trump won because he energized some hardscrabble white working class communities in a handful of key states. Regardless of whether that’s true, it’s ridiculous to suggest that it represents the sole possible route for a Republican candidate to win in 2016.

Not only would Mitt Romney have won, but John McCain, a candidate who represented George W. Bush's 3rd term, a president so disastrous it caused a cultural shift

This section is entirely your opinion about vague cultural shifts and the qualities of Bush as a leader. The brief “60” seat majority for the Democrats was during the biggest financial crash in postwar American history. The GOP losses in 2006 were within normal bounds well into the term of an existing president (Obama lost as many just two years into his first term).

There’s no actual argument to your thesis, and certainly no evidence. By contrast, Hillary was the most unappealing Democratic candidate in decades, possibly ever, reviled in polling data and distrusted even by many Democrats. All suggest any Republican would have won, as does polling from the 2016 primaries in which match-ups between candidates and Clinton (while Trump was already by far the dominant candidate) show Cruz and even Kasich outperforming Trump.

Eg.

The Republican front-runner holds a 3-point lead over Clinton statewide, 46 percent to 43 percent with 11 percent undecided. Trump’s advantage, however, falls within the margin of error, while Cruz and John Kasich safely carry the state by double-digit margins.

Bush-era congressional Republicans had already harnessed the tea party movement to do extremely well in 2010. They understood some of their constituency. Blue voter turnout would be depressed with Clinton against a neocon type and 8 years of minimal change™️ minus a Trump-tier villain, which no amount of CNN could turn a Romney into. There were plentiful routes through the suburbs (which had done very well for the GOP in 2010) that didn’t require Trump’s county-by-county path to victory.

The onus is on YOU to prove that polling from 2016 clearly suggesting many or even all GOP candidates could beat Clinton in a match-up is somehow wrong.

Yeah. My perception at the time was that the Democrats nominated the only candidate who could have lost to Trump and the Republicans nominated the only candidate who could have lost to Clinton.

My basic argument is Trump motivated non-regular voters and non-voters (as well as swapping Obama voters) in key states to win in 2016, some of which the GOP hadn't won in over a generation, and these states were necessary in order to make the electoral college math work for GOP victory. I didn't say white nor working class, although "working class" likely correlates. Trump made the election about trade and immigration while the non-GOP wouldn't have. I would address your alleged "other way to win," except I've never seen you make that argument. The comments I've seen on this topic are typically short and lacking an explanation or details for support. Any details provided, as I've linked, are at best missing details.

In this comment, your suggested "pathway to victory" is "There were plentiful routes through the suburbs (which had done very well for the GOP in 2010) that didn’t require Trump’s county-by-county path to victory." So like what routes in which states? Mitt Romney didn't do "very well" in the suburbs in 2012. Presidents aren't elected by national polling, they're elected by individual states. When you talks about a pathway to victory, you need to talk about states which you're going to win and why. I made those arguments in linked comments.

The GOP losses in 2006 were within normal bounds well into the term of an existing president (Obama lost as many just two years into his first term).

Losing 6 Senate seats isn't within normal bounds of a midterm for a 2nd term president. Losing another 9 Senate seats in 2008 with McCain on the ballot isn't within normal bounds either for a "recession," one which only in hindsight is described as "the biggest financial crash in postwar history." Winning 6 seats in 2006 and 9 seats in 2008 is not within the normal bounds of 2 cycles. This fact-pattern supports my narrative of a deeply unpopular admin leading to a turning point. And a ~65 seat swing in the House and a 5 seat swing in the Senate in Obama's first midterm wasn't the norm either.

There’s no actual argument to your thesis, and certainly no evidence. By contrast, Hillary was the most unappealing Democratic candidate in decades, possibly ever, reviled in polling data and distrusted even by many Democrats.

the linked thread includes "evidence" at least as good as the "evidence" you present here; it's good enough for your argument, but apparently represents "zero evidence" when on the opposite side

what are we to make of that?

All suggest any Republican would have won, as does polling from the 2016 primaries in which match-ups between candidates and Clinton (while Trump was already by far the dominant candidate) show Cruz and even Kasich outperforming Trump.

Mitt Romney lead in some early primary polls over Barack Obama in 2012 and yet he lost. Using early primary polling data even in election years where the polling wasn't garbage (and it was in the 2016 cycle) is tricky because it doesn't have much predictive power; it's an unknown versus an unpopular known. Trump was known. Hillary was known. Mitt Romney was not. Mitt Romney was going to beat Obama! And then he didn't get close.

The Republican front-runner holds a 3-point lead over Clinton statewide, 46 percent to 43 percent with 11 percent undecided.

The onus is on YOU to prove that polling from 2016 clearly suggesting many or even all GOP candidates could beat Clinton in a match-up is somehow wrong.

If only Democrats had run someone like Hillary Clinton in 2016, she would have made even Mississippi competitive! We have good early polling data clearly suggesting Trump was a terrible candidate who would certainly lose. It's too bad that other Hillary Clinton actually did run in 2016 and lost the state of Mississippi by over 17 points.

Your own example shows the issue with relying on this sort of polling data to support your counterfactual.

A case could have been made that Trump mattered in the swing states which delivered his 2016 win. A more mainstream candidate would not have delivered those key votes.

A more mainstream candidate could probably have won Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada. And maaaaaybe New Mexico.

Plus, Bush '04 lost Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. Michigan and Pennsylvania may or may not be taller orders.

The challenge for the right - which Hanania correctly diagnoses - is in converting little bursts of public outrage about things like BLM, trans bathrooms, the bud light controversy, Asian anger around affirmative actions, uproar in some southern states about critical race theory in schools etc into a coherent ideological program with policies at the local, state and federal level.

This is very slowly happening, with conservative normies coalescing behind positions like ‘the race narrative stuff has gone too far’(that is a direct quote) and ‘Ukraine lost, get over it’ and ‘trans are .3% of the population or whatever, they don’t need any accommodation if they don’t want to be reasonable’.

People like Rufo, Tucker and LibsOfTikTok have a big reach and make people angry, but their shtick is outrage bait. That’s not a bad thing, but it often goes nowhere.

The outrage bait fuels a bunch of this stuff. Yes the right needs better thought leaders and narrative setters, but having too much of an ideology is actually counterproductive. To run as an ideologue you need a specific program, and the only specific programs available to the right are mostly very unpopular. It’s better to be a little vague on ideology and lean into it not being ridiculous or unworkable. Center-right parties the world over do exactly this; the usual term is something like ‘pragmatic good-governance’ or the like.

Center-right parties the world over do exactly this; the usual term is something like ‘pragmatic good-governance’ or the like.

Center-right parties the world over go into coalition with far-left and center-left parties and let them drive the bus, rather than go into coalition with far-right parties, so I don't think center-right parties are really a good example of anything.

And, notably, the US party structure makes that failure mode much more difficult. RINOs caucusing with the democrats exist but it’s generally an extreme minority of the party.

Keeping center right normies married to the actual right wingers by not talking about 0 week abortion bans(which is what the Republican Party would dearly love to enact) is a key part of a republican strategy for the foreseeable future.

There are very few viable coalitions that could include the far right that don’t. It happened a handful of times but when they hit 20% the center-right almost always capitulates, as happened in eg Austria several times and in Sweden recently. In France the center-right would vote with Le Pen in parliament on most issues. Vox could easily become part of a future Spanish coalition. The AfD is a unique case because there are some state member parties with relatively close NPD / neonazi ties through figures like Höcke, but even in Germany it’s not impossible to imagine a CDU-AfD coalition at some point in the future.

But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.

I know nothing about the NFL and its cultural context. That said, this phrase is typically meant to imply that there was some kind of anti-democratic, inorganic effort by leftists (meaning Marxist, not just progressive or necessarily radical) to take over the NFL. I would like to see some proof of this sort of thing. A cursory search of the issue with the helmets and endzones saying "stop racism" or other anti-racist slogans suggests this happened in 2021. You don't need much "Long Marching" to make an institution think that it might get them some positive attention if they were to do this while not alienating enough people who would disagree.

(meaning Marxist, not just progressive or necessarily radical)

Huh, why? I mean, I think a case can be made that a lot of these progressive ideas are Marx-derived, but I don't see why the idea of the long march through institutions requires that the effort be explicitly Marxist.

I would like to see some proof of this sort of thing.

I'd similarly like to see proof of it being organic. I see no reason to grant it null hypothesis status.

A cursory search of the issue with the helmets and endzones saying "stop racism" or other anti-racist slogans suggests this happened in 2021.

By 2021 the March was over and done with. If you want to see it taking off you have to go back to Atheism+ or GamerGate, where community after community started going through struggle sessions about how it is no longer enough to be [the core subject the community was centered around] you must now be [whatever the whole your group does] plus, and stand for anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc., etc., etc.

You don't need much "Long Marching" to make an institution think that it might get them some positive attention if they were to do this while not alienating enough people who would disagree.

If the NFL made helmets saying "all lives matter" do you think blue tribe would just shrug, because they don't support grooming? There's an infinite number of messages you could be putting out that "should" get positive attention without alienating anyone, but only blue-coded ones ever get put out.

Huh, why? I mean, I think a case can be made that a lot of these progressive ideas are Marx-derived, but I don't see why the idea of the long march through institutions requires that the effort be explicitly Marxist.

The original phrase was coined by a socialist and is often used by people who do think the Marchers are all Marxists. We have neutral words, like entryism, and it's possible that the OP meant something neutral, but I'm on a platform where I don't think people are so obviously using it as a perfect substitute for entryism.

I'd similarly like to see proof of it being organic. I see no reason to grant it null hypothesis status.

I'm totally fine shrugging my shoulders and saying I don't have proof of that, because I'm not going to do a deep dive into the NFL and its politics. But then we're left with the position of simply not knowing one way or the other.

By 2021 the March was over and done with.

I was indicating what incidents I could find that matched the description. I don't know what the OP was necessarily referring to sought to indicate what seemed likely. But even granting your point about Atheism+ and all that, why should I assume the NFL was subject to the same thing? Atheism+ was about the split between people who would go on to be SJWs and the Skeptics/Anti-SJWs.

If the NFL made helmets saying "all lives matter" do you think blue tribe would just shrug, because they don't support grooming? There's an infinite number of messages you could be putting out that "should" get positive attention without alienating anyone, but only blue-coded ones ever get put out.

Whether the blue tribe would shrug isn't the point. We're asking about the intention behind the slogans and rhetoric being deployed, not whether one tribe would or wouldn't react.

Moreover, one issue with this line of analysis is the asymmetry in what ideas are part of the status quo or not. The idea of non-whites facing systemic discrimination isn't in the water, it is the water. Why this matters is that people who don't have an axe to grind against the status quo on this point don't, in my view, engage with politics the same way as those who do. Put simply, as long as blue-coded messages are the water and red-coded ones aren't, you cannot point to the disparity in promotion and claim a conspiracy because people don't need a conspiracy to "support" the water.

The original phrase was coined by a socialist and is often used by people who do think the Marchers are all Marxists.

And it's also a reference to Mao's "Long March" during the Chinese Civil War. Several of modern China's space program rockets are named after it as well.

Put simply, as long as blue-coded messages are the water and red-coded ones aren't, you cannot point to the disparity in promotion and claim a conspiracy because people don't need a conspiracy to "support" the water.

That's what I'm getting at. There's no conspiracy to make the NFL blue, because the NFL turned blue as a result of a conspiracy that came to fruition years ago. The nutso-types claiming that the NFL is fixed so that Kelce will win the Super Bowl for the purpose of benefitting the Democrats are expressing a feeling of unsettled-ness. But it's not a mustache twirling, cigar chomping villain actively fixing games like Meyer Wolfshein; it's in the air, thanks to a decades long process of conservative retreat from the institutions making room for the Left.

it's in the air, thanks to a decades long process of conservative retreat from the institutions making room for the Left.

Is this what you meant by "Long March through the Institutions?" I have never heard that phrase be used to describe conservative retreat over leftist entryism.

They are two sides of the same coin. Prior comment on the topic.

The OG Long March is widely seen by revisionist historians as being stage managed by KMT forces, who didn't put real effort into destroying the Communists under Mao, preferring to let them shuffle off into the hills never to be seen again. In the same way, the Long March Through the Institutions, leftist entryism as you put it, has been largely unopposed. Conservatives have been criticizing academia since the Eisenhower years, probably before!, and leftists walked in to the vacuum. Conservatives assumed that the crazy college kids would never hold power, and they were wrong. Just like Chiang Kai-shek was wrong about Mao's forces dwindling in the mountains.

Fresh Moms For Liberty Scandal Just Dropped

Clarice Schillinger, a former Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, is facing charges of assault, harassment and furnishing minors with alcohol, including vodka and rum, in connection to a September party she hosted in her Bucks County home, according to a police complaint obtained by Newsweek.

From what I can gather from reading the newspaper on the topic, she appeared to be running the local Party House. Police reports state that they had been called to her house for underage drinking multiple times in prior weeks. She threw a birthday party for her daughter, perhaps larger than usual?, and things got a little out of hand. Schillinger and her boyfriend provided both liquor and beer. Schillinger drank with the teens, including playing beer pong and pouring shots. Schillinger and her boyfriend, separately, punched different teens while trying to restrain them from leaving the party. Schillinger supposedly yelled "THE ONLY THING I ASK IS THAT YOU DON'T LEAVE."

While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States, Schillinger appears to have been attempting to do so responsibly. She wanted her kids to drink at her house, under supervision, and to keep them there until the morning when they had sobered up to avoid drunk driving. Kids drinking under parental supervision are obviously safer than kids drinking in the woods or in an empty house. Kids who drink and don't drive home are safer than kids who drive. The altercations alleged seem more like (politically motivated?) throw ins than serious assaults, no allegations of serious injuries, more like horseplay than violence.

This comes after an earlier scandal involving an OG founder of the group and her husband, the president of the Florida GOP:

...it was reported that an unnamed woman claiming to be a friend of the Zieglers filed a report with the Sarasota Police in early October claiming that Christian Ziegler had come to her apartment and raped her, after a planned threesome between the victim and the couple fell through after Bridget Ziegler became busy at the last minute.

The Ziegler's confirmed in interviews that the pair had a prior history of group sex with the woman involved, but Mr. Ziegler (obviously) denied any wrongdoing. Ziegler was, however, at the woman's apartment at the time alleged. The prior history reduces, though obviously does not eliminate, the odds that this is a politically motivated hit-job. More likely to be a case of sex being a full contact sport, with some degree of hazy consent violation in there. The bigger story than the alleged sexual assault in the papers has been the confirmed threesomes.

Thoughts? Some of mine, disorganized:

-- Everyone, regardless of their politics and their opinions of alcohol or group sex, needs to recognize that this is why laws and social customs that pry into people's personal lives are bad. If Ziegler committed assault, prosecute him, but various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best. When we pass laws that allow people to be prosecuted for actions in their personal lives, we open political dissidents (of all stripes) to these kinds of criminal prosecution attacks. I don't really know any details of this particular case, but rape laws that make proving innocence essentially impossible open political avenues of criminal attack that are indefensibly broad. We've already seen this happen to Assange, where it is physically impossible for him to prove that he used a condom and it remained on throughout the sexual act, and that was leveraged to force him into hiding. Irrational underage drinking laws make criminals of normal, normatively moral American teenagers, and criminalizing "furnishing minors" makes felons out of parents who are trying to engage in harm reduction. Ordinary Americans should not have an adversarial relationship with the cops, where we find that ordinary Americans have an adversarial relationship with the cops it is the law that is wrong.

-- This does bring to mind my general joke about the Moms For Liberty and adjacent content police in public schools: if anybody wants to remove or ban a piece of media from the public school library, their own child first needs to come in for an interview. If it is found that their child knows what "bussy lmao" means or the lyrics to WAP, the book can't be banned. Physician, heal thyself! If you aren't protecting your child in your home from all these "dangerous" things, why should anyone else care about it?

-- On the other hand, it strikes me that both women were engaging in libertine behavior in what is "generally" a responsible and rational way. Schillinger tried to protect the teens, who were probably going to drink anyway, by supervising them and making sure they didn't drive. Ziegler was engaging in non-monogamy, but in the context of a committed marriage. Maybe the MFL types really do believe that these things are a-ok for consenting adults, but not for minors. Maybe they really do want to teach kids about fraught topics in their own way, rather than by rote in school? Just this possibilty makes me infinitely more sympathetic and amenable to MFL.

-- Does the median Moms For Liberty donor care about this? Is this behavior seen as hypocritical by the people who support MFL, or merely by liberals who are confused about their actual values? Is MFL low-key a Vulgar Wave organization, advocating for tits-and-beer 90s liberalism once kids are of age? Or is this a hypocritical look behind the curtain? Does the personal behavior of the organizers matter if they are doing good work?

-- The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.

-- On an apolitical note, prominence in literally any field is once again proven to get you fresh trim. Someone commented to me after seeing the movie that it was weird to them that Oppenheimer, a probably-autistic physics professor, was able to have a wife and a mistress. I replied that he was brilliant and recognized as brilliant and prominent by those around him. That made him sexy. We see that over and over with people like Kissinger, Oppy, Falwell Jr. Even being prominent for advocating a return to moral conservatism will get women to engage in wild sex with you, despite the obvious factors.

Another little line buried in the Ziegler case:

Police said Ziegler was cooperative throughout the investigation and provided them a copy of the sexual encounter, which he recorded on his cell phone. In a statement released January 19, police said "the video showed the encounter was likely consensual."

NPR of course framing it to prove that recording sexual encounters without consent is a 'lil rapey!

In a Nov. 2 interview with detectives with his attorney present, Ziegler said the sex was consensual and that he had recorded it. He said he then deleted the video, but after the accusation he recovered it and uploaded it to Google.

This is all very much like the hockey players with video of consent from last week.

I don't understand why Apple's Vision Pro is generating any buzz. It's pretty clear we need wearable & discrete recording devices for whenever someone whips out their cock, way before we need to watch 5 basketball games at a time.

various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best

The headlines are fine unless you believe in extreme UK-style libel laws (and even there tabloids report on these things), it’s any actual legal action that is presumably debatable.

In any case, social conservatism doesn’t really exist in America anymore. Of course Republicans are swingers and sexual degenerates; their king is, but even Ronald and Nancy had their pasts, come on.

The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.

This misunderstands the objection to sexual libertinism. It’s not ‘hard’ to have this kind of fun. Sex is easy, it’s just a question of correctly evaluating one’s own attractiveness and finding partners on that basis. Provided they have sufficient humility, even ugly people can get laid all the time, or they can pay for it.

In this case, the Republican in question, while schlubby, has a pretty wife, which I’m given to understand is the most important thing in swinging circles (especially for ‘unicorns’ who could, after all, find a more attractive single man if they wanted that).

The headlines are fine unless you believe in extreme UK-style libel laws

"Gauche" doesn't mean "illegal" from what I understand.

In any case, social conservatism doesn’t really exist in America anymore.

...on the elite level (although if you're watching from so high above, it might be all the same, I suppose). Just from following zoomer detransitioners I heard more than enough stories of conservative communities that are a bit too much for me, even after I made my turn toward being a trad.

Physician, heal thyself!

Sadly the GMC frowns on self-prescription, or you bet I would.

I agree that this all appears to be a motivated hit job, I don't know why Americans are still so anal about underage drinking under adult supervision, but god knows that trying to stop drunk teens from leaving your house till they sober up shouldn't be a criminal offense.

And I find it dubious that a man (and wife) who had a regular tryst with another woman is likely to have committed rape, but since said woman is the one filing the report, I remain in a state of withholding judgement.

I don't know why Americans are still so anal about underage drinking under adult supervision

I think HBD is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this: the people who left Europe had a genetic predilection to have problems with vices (you only get a stick up your ass about alcohol in 2 circumstances- either your God tells you it's bad, or you can't handle it yourself and have the opportunity to leave for a land where there isn't any), and the natives never evolved the genes that down-regulate alcohol addiction. Mix them together and you get a temperance movement strong enough to enshrine itself into the toughest law in the nation to change.

Americans also have a general hatred of the underaged for some reason and I haven't fully managed to figure out why that is yet- maybe a combination of parents being worried about the above effects in their children, a genetic predilection to overreact to anything risky/fun (Puritanism), and being fans of Old Testament-style property rights over children due to the dominant religion espousing them for most of the country's history?

“Predilection to have problems with vices” isn’t the most complex idea that I’ve seen attributed to genes, but it’s got to be close.

What advantage does this explanation have over boring old culture?

Eh, susceptibility to addiction was something I heard was partially genetic, which seems not crazy—any genes affecting the neurological reward system would presumably matter? It would of course have substantial behavioral effects, and so could easily be selected for or against.

That said, I see no reason to believe this hypothesis.

The puritans weren't "I hate the risky/fun", they were more, "your life should be ordered, in its entirety, towards God's will." Of course, in practice, that still meant they were opposed to an extreme number of things. In general, uprooting one's life is a high-risk endeavor, so any selection would be the opposite way.

I'm led to understand opposition to alcohol was a 19th-20th century thing, due to a relatively serious problem with drunkenness. Note that anti-alcohol stances are usually associated with Baptists, who became popular later, rather than the earlier puritans, presbyterians, episcopalians, etc.

"Vices" is maybe too vague to be productive but physiological addiction is something we have to some extent genetically tracked. Here's a government link suggesting that half of alcoholism is genetic (https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-use-disorder/genetics-alcohol-use-disorder). Some estimates suggest higher numbers.

Unlike "I like math" or "I'm a nervous person" which both may be genetic but are much more complicated, addiction tends to be associated with clearer markers for things like genes that increase or decrease metabolism for something, or established enhanced response from such and such neurotransmitter.

Addiction is (slowly) starting to move into the realm of personalized medicine where we give people recommendations like "you need more vitamin B6" or "this chemotherapy drug/psychotropic/blood pressure medication is going to work worse for you."

That's not to say I agree with OP however, I figure cultural tendencies (see: Irish drinking stereotypes) are doing just as much or more of the work.

I find bias towards alcoholism (or addiction, or whatever) plausible. I don’t think there’s such good evidence that it applies to Puritans, let alone caused the teetotaler movement. There are several obvious candidates for a cultural mechanism, but the OP just kind of skims over them in favor of an HBD explanation.

Yeah again saying I don't really agree with OP, but I do find it very plausible that American culture is significantly informed by immigrant communities that had a problematic relationship with addiction (ex: Irish, Borderers, Puritans (in the sense they hated that shit, would need evidence that such things were for cause)) and that generated and informed our toxic attitudes.

As an example, American pain and discomfort tolerance is overall pretty low with respect to seeking pharmacological intervention (notoriously noted in the opioid crisis but you can also see it with our OTC pain killer usage).

“Predilection to have problems with vices” isn’t the most complex idea that I’ve seen attributed to genes, but it’s got to be close.

Even if so, it's no point against it.

What advantage does this explanation have over boring old culture?

It holds between families within the same culture.

It’d be more compelling if it held between families without the same culture, no?

And I’d say complexity is a point against it. East Asian diets don’t contain much dairy, but I wouldn’t say this reflects a predilection against raising cattle. There’s an easier explanation.

Edit: I’m realizing that the OP might be arguing for a white European predilection towards alcoholism, rather than against vice. I think that would be a more credible mechanism. But I also don’t see that it’s supported by the historical record, in which European settlers are not the ones collapsing into alcoholism.

Seems unlikely. People drank a lot in colonial America, something like three times as much as moderns. My understanding is that the Puritanesque turn against alcohol was a reaction against that, and was carried along by one of America's regular religious revivals.

Perpetual youthfulness is highly valued in the US. Actual youth are a reminder of how us olds fall short. Envy is therefore a simple answer.

I don't think HBD is a good explanation here. A hangover from Puritan culture seems far more likely, what with the countries that White settlers came from being far more more liberal with their dispensation of alcohol today.

In fact, the US seems more anal about it than it has ever been since the Prohibition days, I doubt anyone would have gotten into trouble for serving drinks to teens in a private domicile more than a decade or two back. I'm under the impression that if teenage drinking was curtailed, it was mostly in the context of them throwing their own parties or trying to order drinks outside while underage.

You'd also expect HBD, if appropriate, to cause a general aversion to drinking for adults too, and the average American is no stranger to drink.

In fact, it's postulated that the Asian Flush is attributable to evolutionary pressures to reduce alcohol consumption, with how easy and abundant rice wine was. Yet they still make drinking a primary form of recreation in China, Korea and Japan, for all that they find it hard to handle their liquor.

And the Natives are an utterly minuscule sliver of the population, and I doubt they have been a primary concern of general temperance movements since the 1800s. I attribute it more to the general erosion of freedoms for American teens in the past few decades, as is true for younger children who were once expected to roam the neighborhood freely even when absolute crime rates were much higher.

I attribute it more to the general erosion of freedoms for American teens in the past few decades, as is true for younger children who were once expected to roam the neighborhood freely even when absolute crime rates were much higher.

I’ll go further; the electronic leash specifically makes underaged drinking harder the same way it does every other form of ‘bad’ behavior. If I cared about underaged drinking I would think this a good thing(I don’t).

I never understand the hypocrisy angle, and it always seems to me to be used 100% in bad faith.

I'm a parent and have several vices that I'm not proud of. I don't want my children to have the same vices, so I teach them that those vices are wrong. No parent wants their kids to grow up hooked on anger, alcohol, drugs, or porn. For each of my vices, if I could go back in time and prevent myself from ever getting hooked in the first place, I would do it, even for the vices I "enjoy." It would have been better to never have known those corrupting pleasures. But I can't. Sometimes it feels like having a chronic disease. So I scratch the itch every so often and do my best to endure the temptation otherwise.

Even if the Zieglers don't feel guilty about having threesomes and don't intend to stop, I don't see how it undermines their organization. Perfect morality and zero hypocrisy is an intentionally impossible demand. I don't think the Zieglers believe that having threesomes is morally preferable to not having them. It's possible to realize that you have a broken moral compass and at the same time to work hard to ensure that the people you love most in the world, your children, don't end up like you. So this pearl clutching seems ridiculous to me. Let he who is with sin cast the first stone.

To more fairly apportion the blame though -- the reason these hit pieces are published is because there's an unfortunate section of the red tribe who "thank God that they were not made like other men" and will drop support for this group over this. Luckily I think this group is shrinking, but it must still be effective -- they're certainly not publishing these to convince blue tribers.

I am Catholic from a Catholic culture. Damn, I would be very surprised if the conservatives did not engaged in drinking games and threesomes!

I always found hilarious how, in Protestants and Anglo-saxon countries, you are expected to behave in private as you behave with your public persona. I understand that the accusation of hypocrisy are easy to do in these cases and are a fruit too sweet to not pick it, but still it does not registers in my brain.

Does the Catholic culture not teach that God sees all, even your private life, and that it is God's judgment that matters, not the public's?

Yes, but it also about one of the main differences between Protestants and Catholics, the division and opposition between Faith and Works.

In Catholic teachings, salvation come both by faith and work. It implies also that, if you are not a good Catholic (as everyone else, because we are all sinners) at least you can find salvation by work (helping your communities, joining the public rites etc).

That is why you encounter two peculiar phenomena here that I do not see in protestant countries;

  • Atheist youngsters, often females and feminists, helping with public rites (celebration of the Saints, community and city-based religious and folk festivals etc), mantaining churches and other location of cult, or simply art-posting on Instagram how amazing all of this is.
  • Absolutely debauched public figures, often divorcees, people with illegitimate sons or multiple partners, cheaters and partygoers, all of them publicy sustaining the Church and the rites that I said before, and nobody batting an eye.

That is why it is absolutely hilarious when someone try to import protestant behavior here, like intersectional feminists trying to persuade ours that we need to burn churches, or local politicians (often left-wing) yelling at the population that drinking or partying or whoring is immoral, and being systematically ignored.

...

You've still gotta go to confession and genuinely repent man, and that comes with making genuine attempts at not fornicating.

It implies also that, if you are not a good Catholic (as everyone else, because we are all sinners) at least you can find salvation by work (helping your communities, joining the public rites etc).

I think there has been a misunderstanding of Catholic doctrine somewhere.

I know that both faith and works are necessary. But the facto... That is why I used "implies"

I'd go further and say it isn't even necessarily hypocrisy to simultaneously be opposed to taxpayer funded gay cartoon porn in public schools and also enjoy gay sex acts.

Physician, heal thyself! If you aren't protecting your child in your home from all these "dangerous" things, why should anyone else care about it?

Huh? And why do you think the kid didn't learn it from the other kids at school?

Does the personal behavior of the organizers matter if they are doing good work?

Yeah, that's a tough one. I'd say it matters, but it's not absolute, and has to be decided case by case.

Huh? And why do you think the kid didn't learn it from the other kids at school?

I'm not understanding your point. If X wants to remove some book from the curriculum for sexual explicitness, but their kid has already been exposed to similar content outside the classroom, I don't know why learning it from their peers would make it logical to remove the book from the curriculum.

Everyone please stop spending my tax dollars on gay cartoon porn in public schools. As an entirely separate matter we can consider the crassness or explicitness of the rest of the curriculum.

And to go further: I do not consider "but some suburban moms are kind of bi" as a justification for spending my tax dollars on porn for kids.

What's the purpose of the classroom? Why does something being taught to kids outside school justify teaching it inside school?

If you are more exposed to something you are more likely to develop those thoughts, behaviors, vices etc.

If I went to Ibiza and people were doing heroin that doesn’t mean I need to approve of Heroin being sold at 7-eleven. Let alone I want Heroin sold at the Lunch counter in elementary school.

I'm mostly saying it makes no sense to say that the parents failed to apply their own standard, if the kids are in the school's custody for better part of the day where they are surrounded by other kids who might not share their parent's values. I don't see how "physician heal thyself" applies here.

But I think I can even defend the version of the argument you presented. There's a difference between learning something on your own or from your peers, and learning it from an official institution. If my kid starts talking about 72 genders because they learned about it on tumblr, it's a lot easier to deal with then if they learned about it from every single adult in a position of power.

I don't know the group involved and I'm not interested in the political fighting, but I have to keep reminding myself that "minor" in this context means "under 21". Whereas the legal drinking age here in Ireland is 18*, so if there were a bunch of 18 year olds at the party, it would be "so what?" over here.

I don't think the description of the party sounds great, I think the job of parents is to be "not while you're under my roof" but yeah, it can be explained as trying to control it with "if we don't supervise or permit it, they'll just go elsewhere and get drunk anyway and get into trouble".

As for the non-monogamy, not going to touch that with a ten-foot bargepole.

*Legal age; actual age of having your first drink seems to be around 15-16, which seems about right for the stories of drunken teens the morning after celebrating the results of their Junior Cert.

I still laugh thinking about a college trip I took to Bilbao in Spain, our professor took us to meet a high school teacher friend of hers, and we talked to the class of high schoolers. It was funny realizing that the high schoolers could drink legally and I couldn't in my home country.

This is a situation where it’s illustrative to look at the alternative behavioral choice. A 17 year old whose parents do not allow her to host a party with drinking will instead attend parties where no responsible adults are present. These parties will probably include drugs and sexual harassment by strangers.

The “don’t leave” was made to sound like they were trapping the kids but it was certainly more about preventing them from driving drunk. Which, again, some percentage of teen drinkers will do after attending a party without adult supervision.

Eh, depends. The endorsement of parents could definitely make a difference.

And, of course, hosting a party with drinking doesn't mean they won't also go to the other hypothetical party, unless you're deliberately scheduling parties to conflict or something.

This is a situation where it’s illustrative to look at the alternative behavioral choice.

That's what I find so interesting about the situation: that argument of "harm reduction" is exactly the argument that Moms for Liberty's opponents are typically making. MFL (and its allies) largely argue against early/LGBT/overly-explicit sex-ed on the basis that kids shouldn't do that so they shouldn't know about it. Liberal arguments are that kids will do it anyway so they should be educated about it so they do it safely. We've precisely flipped our valences.

On parental control: did each child (30-40 by police report) show up with a signed permission slip? Was each parent aware of where their child was going and what they were doing? Or were the teens mostly there without their parents' permission?

You see where this all gets slippery, I hope. I see the harm reduction argument she would make, but teen drinking is also not an inevitability for all kids, and making it less convenient makes it less common. Marginal kids are drinking/not-drinking based on how easy it is to get alcohol and get a place to drink it, even if some kids are going to find a way regardless. Much like it's obvious to me that doing too much PRIDE bullshit in the classroom will probably increase the amount of homosexuals coming out of that school marginally, even if there will still be gay kids if you don't do any PRIDE education; holding regular ragers at your house probably causes some marginal kids to drink who would not have otherwise been drinking, because now they're invited to a party where otherwise they might not have been or because they feel comfortable going there or because their parents are ok with them going to a party with Mrs. Schillinger, even if it is true that some kids would still drink regardless. I was drunk less than five times in high school, based on my later behavior in college I've not doubt I would have been more likely to drink had there been a convenient Party House in our school system.

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory. Attending some wine mom's parties are not. Likewise, introducing kindergarteners to the gender/sexuality spectrum is way off the fucking mark of when that lesson would be age appropriate, if you agreed it was appropriate at all for compulsory K-12 education. Having teenagers drink at roughly the same age teenagers have always drank as long as humans had alcohol gets a big fat meh from me.

Source for the above claim about gender spectrum bullshit in kindergarten

In his kindergarten classroom, one teacher in western Massachusetts using “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” introduces the idea of gender as part of an exploration of identity. He explains that people use all sorts of pronouns: he, she, they, ze. He introduces the terms transgender and gender queer but doesn’t fully define them because that is too much for kindergartners, said the teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his district did not authorize him to speak publicly.

He talks to students about anatomy but declines to classify various body parts as male or female. “We don’t say a penis belongs to a man,” he said. It belongs to a human, he explains.

And he makes clear that even if a doctor proclaims at birth, “It’s a boy!” that baby may not be a boy. “Someone who was born a boy may not feel they are a boy.”

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory.

No, it isn't. If you don't want your kids going to public school, you don't have to send them.

You are required to do something that you call education, and public schools are the lowest friction way to do that. But the unschoolers get away with it, you can too.

You are required to do X. X costs a lot of money. The government will provide free X and will generally make it the easy default.

What percentage of people choose not government X?

Not only that, but you can opt out of certain curricula. There was always some religious kid who had to leave the room when we talked about sex in health class, presumably to pray for our souls.

I was unaware I could opt out of English class.

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory. Attending some wine mom's parties are not.

I'm not sure I did. The question here isn't whether attending those parties is compulsory, it is whether I as the hypothetical parent of teenagers in her neighborhood in suburban PA, have control over my kid. If parents don't let kids drink at their house, then as long as I ensure that my kids are overnighting at someone's house with parental supervision, I can be confident they won't be drinking. If other parents are allowing kids to drink at their house, I now need to investigate every time my kid overnights somewhere else. My freedom is restricted by that.

((My, largely unrelated, view on compulsory LGBT education is that it's a complete waste of fucking time and money, but also likely to be highly ineffective at inculcating values in kids. My advocacy for local schools has been to implement elective courses in bible study, I'd LOVE to see an AP Theology course.))

I'm not sure I did. The question here isn't whether attending those parties is compulsory, it is whether I as the hypothetical parent of teenagers in her neighborhood in suburban PA, have control over my kid. If parents don't let kids drink at their house, then as long as I ensure that my kids are overnighting at someone's house with parental supervision, I can be confident they won't be drinking. If other parents are allowing kids to drink at their house, I now need to investigate every time my kid overnights somewhere else. My freedom is restricted by that.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world. Or perhaps just an hours drive from you. To me, I see a clear and bright line between wanting to free from compulsory exposure to something odious, and wanting to be free from incidental or hypothetical exposure.

I don't have a teenager... yet. But vetting the households of her friends is already a key part of our lives. Maybe we're being controlling. Maybe we have an unhealthy fear of how bifurcated America has become. Maybe it's a perfectly healthy fear. Only time will tell.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world. Or perhaps just an hours drive from you.

Or freedom as the tendency for things to go to their proper place and stay there. Look, I don't actually care if teenagers drink. I think potential co-ed sleeping arrangements at that party are a bigger concern and drinking brings a profound meh. But you have to have a default about it, and taking for granted that they shouldn't, then hosting teen drinking parties should be fraught. Why? Because society has to have defaults about all sorts of behavior, and opting out of defaults carries friction. "He is sovereign who sets the null hypothesis" and all that. You can move to a nudist colony to opt out of the societal default of pants(or a sarong, whatever). I will not stop you. But it is quite a bit of friction towards living a pantsfree life. And there's thousands of defaults on issues more controversial among non-weirdos. Like drug use, which is what we're talking about.

I happen to think that defaults should be virtuous and prosocial. I don't particularly view teen drinking as bad, but imposing friction on doing bad things is, to me, definitionally freer than imposing friction on doing good things, because you can't do neither. We live in a society and societies have norms.

Now it looks like moms for liberty's sworn enemy is doing its damnedest to establish a societal norm of "everyone is a gay gendergoblin", and it is in no way hypocritical to oppose that societal norm(which is in fact highly stupid and probably destructive), while also undermining the social norm of "teenagers don't get to use alcohol". I agree with that set of values. But it is also in no way contrary to freedom to punish defectors.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world.

Not really, isn't this the core debate over anarchotyrrany? It's fairly uncontroversial that enforced law and order increases freedom for law abiding citizens, the question is where we set the laws and how intense the enforcement should be, what acceptable levels of law-breaking and over-enforcement are. I, and certainly my wife, have more freedom in NYC in a world where the NYPD enforces the laws than I have in a world where they don't.

You might disagree that underage drinking is bad, I might disagree with it. But there is no indication whatsoever that a democratic majority of voting Americans disagree with it. The most recent polling I could find indicated that just 10% of Americans favor a drinking age of 18, let alone lower than 18. Back in 2014, 77% of Americans opposed lowering the drinking age to 18 while 60% favored more strict penalties for underage drinking.

Allowing parents to serve alcohol to minors, to other parents' children, restricts the freedom of other parents to allow their teenagers to move about the world as freely as possible and with as little supervision as possible. It narrows the universe of places that parents can be confident their kids will be safe from something that the vast majority of parents think is dangerous.

I've heard enough from libertarians about "positive freedoms" to refuse that. They have the freedom to choose from the options they're given with regards to how much they let their kid be unsupervised. What others are allowed to do is not within the realm of "freedom".

What others are allowed to do is not within the realm of "freedom".

I would assume that @FiveHourMarathon would think that they have more viable options than they did before, if suldenly everyone decided to prevent underage drinking. That proliferation of choice seems like freedom.

And, of course, the subjective experience would feel freeing.

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Allowing parents to serve alcohol to minors, to other parents' children, restricts the freedom of other parents to allow their teenagers to move about the world as freely as possible and with as little supervision as possible.

That's like saying that allowing people to publish blasphemy restricts the freedom of everyone else to be in a world free of blasphemy.

A 17 year old whose parents do not allow her to host a party with drinking will instead attend parties where no responsible adults are present.

This is the sort of argument a judge will quote sneeringly at the parent's sentencing.

Looks like a generic hit piece. Moms for Liberty has become a new bogeyman of late, so that I am constantly hearing about scandals and hypocrisies. But why should I care?

I don't generally have a problem with adults introducing children to drink. Maybe the parents of some teens involved would disagree. It's a nuanced social complication. A few key details could make me go one way or other. But why should I care? Even if MOM is recklessly teaching kids to drink, I don't see why this rises to the level of story I have to have an opinion about.

I think by this point, nobody cares because to me, these are isolated demands for rigor chastity that are only being brought up because of the conservative nature of the group. These kinds of events happen all the time around me. Parents would rather the drinking that will happen occur with responsible adults around rather than turning into a drunken drug fueled orgy without adults present. It’s definitely something that happens on all sides. And because of this and similar stories, I’m pretty immune to the pearl clutching articles about “did you see what [outgroup member] did? Don’t you want to distance yourself from people on your side who are doing [thing that most people do]?” Like if she’d hired prostitutes for a bachelor party, okay that’s at least out of the ordinary and something that most people wouldn’t be okay with.

While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States,

There are some subtleties to this (which aren't terribly relevant to the described incident): my jurisdiction allows parents (or guardians) to provide alcohol to their supervised minor dependents, as well as spouses. Obviously not to whole parties, though.

It's highly unlikely that any jurisdiction would excuse parents providing their children with alcohol if those children then became intoxicated enough to result in the police being called.

I don't think so. It's explicitly legal in Wisconsin for parents to serve their children alcohol. The situation you describe would probably result in trouble for the disturbance, but not serving alcohol to minors. How could it, when it is legal for that to happen?

My goodness, adult men plying their underage wives with booze. I bet they even get up to certain activities afterwards! I wonder if there's any discourse around on this topic that's as ridiculous as I would think it to be.

The law expects it to be 21 yo’s married to 20 yo’s. I mean technically speaking I could marry a 16 year old and get her drunk, but it’s not the median case(and IIRC married 16 year olds have smaller average age gaps in their relationships than married 20 year olds).

Oh, I meant "underage" in the drinking sense. I still think the idea that people can consent to marry, have kids, or kill for armed forces but are pretty questionable when it comes to beer is absolutely bizarre, which I guess that plays into how I find the spousal drinking laws amusing.

It seems like most people don’t expect serious enforcement of the drinking age, anyways. Honestly that’s kind of dumb; as Europe shows teenagers drinking isn’t that bad, but the American habit of ‘just not enforcing anything unless you’re annoying’ is probably a bad habit to get into.

The American reality is different than the European reality in that many places in the US you are easily mixing drinking with driving. Places like NYC are more relaxed since a 20 year old isn’t driving anywhere.

Drunk driving is about as dangerous whether the person behind the wheel is 16 or 21 or 30 or whatever.

Of course. I think the idea is a 30 year old would be less likely to drink and drive (who knows if true)

The US does expect serious enforcement of the drinking age, but a lot of people still haven't adjusted to that now-decades-old reality. You can get an adult criminal record for underaged drinking, and "party moms" can be and are jailed on felonies for providing the booze.

I have seen responsible adults who set up safe and sane parties for the younger people in their lives that include some alcohol and looking the other way on pot to dissuade them from going to more dangerous parties elsewhere. This is generally good and fine.

I have also seen adults who set up ragers with so much alcohol and drugs and party equipment that the young people in their orbit are inevitably drawn in, at times and frequencies where no other alternate 'dangerous' party would have otherwise existed, with the intent to party with the young people to relive their youths and feel still young and active and desirable, often involving some level of sexual predation or at least inappropriateness.

And then there's a spectrum between those ends, of course. And the central question seems to be where Schillinger and her boyfriend fall on that spectrum, with all the colorful details added onto the basic fact of the party existing being evidence towards the bad end of the scale.

Of course enemies will preferentially leak and frame details to make it look as bad as possible, but if true, the 'police being called multiple times in a few weeks' thing seems objectively verifiable and pretty decisive here. Parents who are just trying to keep their kids away from other dangerous parties by hosting parties themself don't need boozed-up-minors call-the-police-for-niose-complaints parties every week, kids should not normally have other opportunities to attend parties of that magnitude every week regardless.

But, you know, we don't actually know all the real details, just 2 competing motivated narratives, so who knows.

I like that one too.

Yeah, I don't support the people. I support the policies. And if they are advocating and scoring victories for keeping Gender Queer out of middle schools, and not letting schools secretly socially transition children without their parents knowledge or consent, they have my support. They can live whatever debauched lives they choose. Their policy preferences aren't that nobody should ever read Gender Queer, transition, drink underage or have orgies. They are that these things have no place in a public, compulsory institution like K-12 schools.

It's same muddling of what "hypocrisy" is when leftist accuse Republicans of "banning books". Gender Queer is not banned, unlike Dr Seuss books which got unpublished and pulled from secondary markets. It was deemed inappropriate for school libraries. It still exists. It's "banned" in the same sense that vintage Playboy's aren't in school libraries.

My first thought is that there is absolute no tension or conflict between the Moms for Liberty position that parents should substantially control what schools teach and having leadership that is permissive with underage drinking and group sex. Contra the position that MfL is a group of lunatic right-wingers, I think they are actually sincere in their position that parents should be determining values rather than schools. Despite the snarky "family views indeed" from columnist Scott Maxwell, it is actually entirely possible to promote family values while having a personally kinky sex life or thinking it's fine for teens to play beer pong. If we weren't so deep into red-blue bullshit, pretty much everyone I know on the Blue Tribe side of things would think this is fine.

On your last point, I looked up the people involved, and... wow. Christian Ziegler is a rather dumpy fellow. Christian's wife, Bridget, is absolutely beautiful, particularly for a woman in her 40s. I don't know if this was supposed to be a hit piece, but the screencaps of her making faces at a board meeting sums it up. But now you tell me that not only does the portly fellow have a stunning wife, he was apparently regularly finding threesomes with her? I swear, if this whole thing was flipped around, the Blue Tribe would just be making fun of the Red Tribe for being jealous of Christian's life.

Christian's wife, Bridget, is absolutely beautiful, particularly for a woman in her 40s. I don't know if this was supposed to be a hit piece, but the screencaps of her making faces at a board meeting sums it up.

Holy shit you're right.

This feels like such a stretch.

The central innovation of the Florida school curriculum lockdown controversy was the right starting to call anyone on the left who tried to help trans teens or teach anyone that gay people are a thing that exists 'groomers'.

Furnishing minors with alcohol and/or drugs so that you can lure them to your house and have drunken parties with them is quintessential actual grooming behavior, like, it's literally what actual groomers do to actual minors to actually statutorily rape them.

Which, I'm not saying that full sequence of events necessarily happened here, but come on. If your side is going to make the entire argument center on who is or isn't a groomer, 'my boyfriend and I throw drunken parties every week for local minors where we get wasted with them and get in psychical scuffles with them' cannot possibly be spun as a good look.

Furnishing minors with alcohol and/or drugs so that you can lure them to your house and have drunken parties with them is quintessential actual grooming behavior, like, it's literally what actual groomers do to actual minors to actually statutorily rape them.

Well at least we all agree on what groomers are now. Although personally I think that's a mistake on your part.

It says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin -- I do think that the confusion is related to a misapplication of the (artificial) Red/Blue team dichotomy. If it were "Moms for Jesus" or something I could buy some hypocrisy-based attack, but she seems to be living well within her moral framework here?

Well, what's true is, 'arguments as soldiers' is partially an inevitable result of our two-party system, and in some cases is actually a sadly effective and pragmatic tactic that you're sort of forced to play into if you don't want the other side to beat you with it.

To whit: You can say that the Red/Blue team dichotomy is artificial, but the Democrats/Republicans dichotomy is not. People trying to have political stances and agendas that don't fall along that dichotomy may be perfectly valid and reasonable and good, but they're also in a very real way irrelevant to teh exercise of power. The person appointing the next Supreme Court Justice is going to have either a (D) or an (R) next to his name, and that's what will determine how the game of politics cashes out in actually affecting people's lives for the next 50 years.

So: Sure, Moms for Liberty and the Ron Desantis (or whoever else you want to use as a stand-in for the 'teachers are groomers' movement) are different people with different personal politics, so to an extent it's not surprising or scandalous at all if their rhetoric disagrees with each other in fundamentally contradictory ways.

ON THE OTHER HAND: They are both republican-aligned movements that are trying to promote Republican policies and put more (R)s next to more names in government.

If the broader republican movement is trying to convince us they're right using two different arguments, and those two arguments directly contradict each other, doesn't that mean that there must be some flaw in their platform, the the broader ideology overall is inconsistent and misleading in some way, that something is rotten in Denmark, and anyone who is on the R side should be noticing that some of their soldiers are pointing their guns the wrong way and get confused and self-reflective about it?

Even if the two arguments are reasonable on their own and are aligned with the ideology of the individual person making them, the fact that both are then being taken up and spun into the larger Republican narrative alongside each other, indicates a flaw in that platform.

(and, I shouldn't even have to say this, but obviously this all applies ceteris parabis to Democrats and the left, this is a general problems with politics)

To whit: You can say that the Red/Blue team dichotomy is artificial, but the Democrats/Republicans dichotomy is not.

You misunderstand -- I'm saying that this is not an issue that cuts cleanly across party lines. There are many left-ish people who are not comfortable with the orthodoxy vis a vis trans issues, and there are Republicans (I'm thinking fiscally conservative urban types) who are probably fine with it.

For most of these people it is not important enough to impact their vote, so long as it stays off their lawn -- but putting it into schools plants it squarely on the lawn of every parent. So we shouldn't be at all surprised if the opposition does not fulfill the classic grumpy church-mom stereotype that is typically in the drivers' seat at socially conservative organizations. (say, anti abortion ones)

So we shouldn't be at all surprised if the opposition does not fulfill the classic grumpy church-mom stereotype that is typically in the drivers' seat at socially conservative organizations.

Well yeah, because these are liberal organizations in opposition, not traditionalist ones (who look like that) or progressive ones (who also look like that, except with an unnatural hair color).

In this case, the liberals have finally started to notice just how rotten the skin suit of sex-positivity progressives are currently wearing is. (30 years too late, but better late than never.) And while they're still kind of stupid- the ultimate way to defend their "we're banning these books from the library" is to argue from slave morality and insist that they actually be good enough to justify their content (1984 wouldn't be the same commentary it is without the depictions of sex therein; if you think they're either gratuitous or disrespectful to women, then you are part of the problem don't understand Orwell)- I'm not surprised that a faction that's been taking its victory a little too much for granted hasn't put on its best face yet (not that it can; liberals don't believe in best faces).

It says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin

And yet, most of their advocacy revolves around banning books and curricula discussing LGBT, trans and civil rights issues:

Accompanying that letter is an 11-page spreadsheet with complaints about books on the district’s curriculum, ranging from popular books on civil rights heroes to books about poisonous animals (“text speaks of horned lizard squirting blood out of its eyes”), Johnny Appleseed (“story is sad and dark”), and Greek and Roman mythology (“illustration of the goddess Venus naked coming out of the ocean...story of Tantalus and how he cooks up, serves, and eats his son.”) A book about hurricanes is no good (“1st grade is too young to hear about possible devastating effects of hurricanes”) and a book about owls is designated as a downer. (“It’s a sad book, but turns out ok. Not a book I would want to read for fun,” an adult wrote of the owl book in the spreadsheet.)

...

At one juncture, the group implores the school district to include more charitable descriptions of the Catholic Church when teaching a book about astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted by said church for suggesting that Earth revolves around the sun. “Where is the HERO of the church?” the group’s spreadsheet asks, “to contrast with their mistakes? There are so many opportunities to teach children the truth of our history as a nation. The Church has a huge and lasting influence on American culture. Both good and bad should be represented. The Christian church is responsible for the genesis of Hospitals, Orphanages, Social Work, Charity, to name a few.” MFL’s Williamson County chapter also takes issue with a picture book about seahorses, in part because it depicted “mating seahorses with pictures of postions [sic] and discussion of the male carrying the eggs.”

So painting them as being about Liberty in any meaningful sense of the word, other than Liberty being a red-tribe codeword, seems patently dishonest. Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe. Some of the shit that was banned in Florida schools a few years ago was hilariously inoffensive.

As for the OP, whatever. I don't really care. But if people bothered to look at the context, I'd expect most to at least get a chuckle out of the fact that people clutching their pearls at the idea of their child being exposed to the idea that gay people exist then get schwasted with them on the weekend in between threesomes.

And yet, most of their advocacy revolves around banning books and curricula

I agree that it's a bit ironic, but I wouldn't go so far as to say dishonest. In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' -- school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all. I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum -- although they seem a bit nutty and I'm sure that I wouldn't want to defend their specific choices of books that should not be taught in school. (much less whatever straw version of them that the D.B. has cooked up)

In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion'

Indeed; mask mandates are also pro-liberty as they give people the freedom to not worry about getting COVID in the train. Censorship gives LGBT and minorities freedom from hate speech. Jailing Donald Trump will give us freedom from fascism and neo-nazism.

Censorship is inherently illiberal however you try and dress it up. That doesn't make it bad. There's such an aversion to censorship that when we actually decide we want to engage in it we have to lie to ourselves and dress it up as some freedom or another.

school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all.

Better argument for the curriculum. Bad argument for book bans. Nobody is forcing your child to look at those books any more than anyone was forcing the other high school kids to go to that party.

I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum

Whew. Good luck with that one, man.

I take freedom of speech pretty seriously. I'm tired of people trying to dilute it into describing the process through which state runs schools decide how to apportion the limited space they have in school libraries and school curriculum. No one is banning books, that's a false framing. People are saying they don't want the state to use their tax money to buy books to make available in buildings their tax money spent constructing for the purpose of indoctrinating their children. If I write or love a book I have zero right for the state to put that book in public schools and I don't have any idea where the belief I might have such a right comes from.

The exact right process to decide which books go in such a building is the local government and that precisely the process these people are lobbying. How else could it possibly be?

You don't seem to be engaging with Chrispratt's initial point about the dishonesty of the org name. If the 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' is liberty, then anything can be liberty. Can you name an example of a political issue that cannot be framed as liberty in this way? I agree with you that determining curriculum is not anti-liberty. I disagree that it is honest to call it pro-liberty.

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Hell, the books aren't even censored. If somebody wants to go buy their drawn child porn at Borders for their kid, they'll get the full experience.

This in a way reminds me of Bastiat’s claim against statists. He said something to the effect if we object to the public funding of education the statist believes we object to education.

Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe.

But the content they object to is often political in its aims and coded blue-tribe. Being pro-liberty does not require them to support the woke reading list over the maga reading list.

I don’t see how you can position your side as apolitical, when they proudly proclaim political aims for their own changes, endlessly purging curricula on grounds of sexism, racism, hetero-and-cisnormativity, etc .

But the content they object to is often political in its aims and coded blue-tribe. I don’t see how you can position your side as apolitical, when they proudly proclaim political aims for their own changes, endlessly purging curricula on grounds of sexism, racism, hetero-and-cisnormativity, etc .

I wouldn't claim it as apolitical, and I wish you wouldn't call it my side.

In some cases I'd agree with you, in others I would disagree. In still others we would get bogged down by semantics about 'making things political.' I could argue that children sitting at desks is a weapon of the white supremacist state to keep down PoC and that they need to go, and MFL would fervently oppose that. In this example I'd argue that the MFL position isn't political at all, it's just...keeping desks in school. The same way that for some of these books, I don't think it should be controversial at all that they're available in the library.

But all of that is somewhat beside the point. The comment I replied to was describing MFL as if they're some objective and principled group that supports liberty and freedom of choice. The reality is that they're anything but.

Jkf wasn't calling mfl objective and principled - hell like he said it says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin.

Moms for Liberty, not principled autists for liberty. The idea they are principled and objective is an expectation only blue tribers hold, red tribers don't have to lie to themselves about women to that extent. I mean, it's pretty bad for red tribe too don't get me wrong, but not at the level of expecting a group of Floridian moms to be principled and objective.

Chris has me blocked so this is me mostly yelling at clouds, but:

  • Removing books from a school curriculum cannot in any reasonable way be considered "banning"

  • The linked article does not link to primary sources, where I can confirm MFL is portrayed accurately. The link to Galileo, MLK, and sea horses do not lead to where the claim was made, but to years old articles from the Daily Beast itself, about Galileo, MLK, and sea horses.

In addition, given how gay people (who I have effectively zero problems with) have been perpetually used as a wedge to justify the normalization and protection of the trans phenomenon, I would be terribly close-minded to not consider expelling them from course books if I thought it ultimately wasn't worth the tradeoff, at least under these conditions.

If Dems keep up the taunts of "So now what, you're gonna deny that gay people exist?", they may end up having a real Fucked-Around-Found-Out moment. There's a lot of things I might be tempted to sacrifice if they're going to be cynically propped up as shields against me.

Removing books from a school curriculum cannot in any reasonable way be considered "banning"

'Deplatforming is not censorship' is a stance I held and defended vociferously during the Cancel Culture debates, but I think the tide has sailed on that one, as they say.

  • -10

For clarity, am I supposed to pretend you aren't who people say you are or not?

You do you fam.

It seems to me there is a very big difference between a public institution endorsing controversial things for kids and calls to deplatform (eg remove from Twitter or prevent someone from speaking at a university).

I can be for the freedom to engage in consensual sex for money. I can at the same time believe that institutions can try to discourage prostitution. Similarly I can be against kids having sex and making that illegal without there being a contradiction.

Sure, there are principled reasons to treat the situations differently, of course.

I was just responding to a very specific form of semantic argument about how to define words like 'censorship' and 'banning' and so forth. Arguments that don't rely on those semantic distinctions and the emotional associations we have to them are not affected.

Yeah, it was a wild ride to see the same people argue for cutting off access of willing adults to messages they want to hear, suddenly turn around to declare it's beyond the pale for parents to curate what their children get to see.

Sorry, which platforms that have zero children on them were people being deplatformed from?

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I will stand on parents supervising teens drinking isn't bad, but teachers telling pre-teens that they might be trans is. I have zero trouble holding those thoughts in my head. I don't generally like the term "groomer" and don't even think it's politically useful, but I do think "helping trans teens" is almost uniformly a Bad Thing for teachers to do.


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